It's time for Mac Geek Gap and listener Ben brings us our quick tip of the week with something he just discovered another efficiency when interacting with tap backs in the messages app on both Mac and iPhone and of course, iPad to see who has reacted to a message via tap back. You know, if you, especially if you're in a group, right. And you see, you know, the little thumbs up or the thumbs down or the heart sign or whatever, but you don't, it doesn't show you which person.
It just shows you that there are reactions. You tap or click, if on the Mac, the tap backs stacked in the corner of the message. You don't need to click and hold. You don't need to long press. You don't need to double tap the message itself. Just tap once on or click once on the actual little reaction in the upper left corner of the message. And it will expand the tap backs themselves and show you which person responded in which way, which is awesome.
I've been driving myself crazy to do this for a long time, so I really appreciate this tip. More quick tips like this, plus your questions answered today on MacGeekGab 997 for Monday, August 28th, 2023. 2023. Greetings folks. Music. And indeed, welcome to Matt Geekob, the show where you send in your tips, your cool stuff found your questions, and we share your tips like we just did.
We will share your cool stuff found. I don't know if we'll have time for that today, but you know, we always try to squeeze a couple in and then we answer your questions. Sometimes we even have questions of our own which we answer together. The goal being that each of us learns at least five new things every single time we get together and sometimes we'll even play that sound if it's an especially good one. I think that message is one that we open the show with deserves that.
For this episode include one of my new summer favorites. And it's only because I've only really gotten back into it this summer. It'd probably be a winter favorite too. And that's Hop Water at hopwtr.com slash mgg, where you get 20% off your first purchase. We'll talk more about that and the flavors that I'm really liking in a minute. But for now, here, back here, after being at Podcast Movement, Back here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.
And here in Lee, New Hampshire, back here after being in Daytona, where it's actually there's this thing in the sky, Dave. You might have heard of it. It's called the sun and you actually get to see it here in New Hampshire once or twice a year. Apparently, I'm told, but anyway, pilot Pete here in Lee, New Hampshire. Fun to be back. Uh, I'm sorry, I missed podcast movement. I thought I was going to have to work and then I didn't make it. Right.
No. Yeah. Podcast movement was, uh, this was the show that they did in Denver. Which is the summer show is a little bigger than the winter show. I'm not convinced we need two of these a year. I know they don't like me saying that because of course, you know, obviously they make money when they do it. Yeah. No, I get it. Now if I were them, I would do the same thing. But but it is good to go in and sort of immerse in the podcast world.
For me, it serves double duty. I get to go as a podcaster and learn about like new gear and and see people who make the gear that we use and like all of that fun stuff. And then learning also as a podcaster, learning how other people produce their shows. One of my favorite things to do, and this will probably come as no surprise to the folks listening here, because you know how much I love like learning from the quick tips and all that.
One of my favorite things to do is to go to the, you know, any session that reports to be podcasting 101, like intro to podcasting, here's how you get started. I love going to those sessions. And I know that might sound strange when you think, well, Dave, you've been podcasting for 18 and a half years. Why would you go to a podcasting one-on-one session? It's because I've been podcasting for 18 and a half years and I learned how to do things the hard way.
And people that are even, even a correctly titled expert who has been podcasting for three years, teaching people who are just getting started, that expert of three years is going, they learned at a different time than me. They, they're like. They started with all of the current tech, or at least semi-current tech. They might even be behind the game because of how quickly it changes, right? But like, I love that kind of thing.
And I always learn something from somebody who started far later than me. So, so I learn. And then also the other side of going to podcast movement is I get to meet with, you know, for the Backbeat Media side, I get to meet with all of our agency partners and sponsors and all of that stuff. So it's, it's a, it's, it's a worthwhile trip. And even if I have to do it twice a year, it's still very worthwhile.
So. No, that's, that's awesome. And, uh, what, what shocks me, Dave is that podcast has the podcast technology has been around for obviously at least 18 years. Uh, I want to say it's been about 22, 23 years now that, that someone figured out how to put it into an RSS feed.
No, it's 19, 19 years ago this month was the first, the first thing that we are calling a podcast, but like, you know, it certainly people were doing internet, but yeah, no, the, the, the, the RSS thing, that was something Dave Weiner, Dave Weiner did cook it up about 20 years ago, but the first real implementation was, I believe 19 years ago. Okay. So, but what shocks me is that look how many people you see engrossed in their phone all the time, everywhere you go.
And I'm still shocked at the number of people who have no idea what a podcast is. Yes, the numbers are going up. They are going up, thankfully, and that's cool. Yeah, you're right. It's kind of neat. You're right. It is fascinating how many people don't know. Yeah, I think it's awesome. And then there was that big lawsuit. It's four or five years ago now that, uh, there was a company that claimed they had the, the
rights to the RSS feed and the podcast. And I think it was Adam Corolla who stepped up and said, yeah, no, we're not paying you off. Funded that and fought it. Yep. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. It was a patent. Kudos to him for that. Yeah. You know, he, he helped the industry. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, I think we should do, uh, I don't know, a quick tip or two. I'm into it. Uh, Rico shares our next quick tip and says, this past week, I got caught by iOS storage.
Are you finding that your apps are not remembering where you were with the place where you were, where you left off in an app, you come back to it and it doesn't bring you back to that spot. It doesn't remember. This can be an indication that you might be short on storage. Rico says after a bit of cleanup, everything went back to working as usual. So, um, that, that can be another, another sign that your phone is getting low or your iPad is getting low on storage.
If apps are not remembering where they are. So, yeah, I like that tip that it, that any of these little indicators or litmus tests are always important. Interesting. Yeah. I always find it interesting to turn on my phone, weather wise and find me in, you, know, like I'll probably turn on the weather today on my phone and they'll say, oh, you're, you're in Daytona beach. Yeah, actually I'm not, you know, here I am. Yep. Yep.
So it does remember too much. No, no. I want my current location, please. You know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of the weather and your location, Bradley shares something he found, messing with the iOS 17 betas, but this is a, these settings are the same in iOS 16, the current release version.
And he says, I decided to jump on the beta and noticed that the weather widget I have on my lock screen was telling me that location services was off and therefore could not show me the weather on my lock screen. He says, I found a setting that I needed to change to make this work. It's in settings, privacy and security, location services, weather. There are five options there. And he says, but mine was set to only while using the app. He says, I changed it to while using the app or widgets.
Uh, and that then obviously opened it up. So yeah, there's, there's five options. Never and always are, are sort of the, the, the most extreme. And then in the middle are asked the next time, um, while using the app or while using the app or widgets. So I have mine set to always, I don't, I don't know. I, I, I, I tend to. Generally, most apps, it's only well using the app, but if it's an app that I know, like the weather,
I want it to see it. I just give it always. And then that way, you know, it's good to go. So, and then now sometimes when I do that, you, you wind up with, uh, the note that pops up every couple of days, Hey, you know, this, this has been using your location data. Do you want to keep doing that? Yeah. I said it there. Yes. I said it there. And I've answered that question for you four times already. Like, can you stop asking? I, I wish there was, I mean, Oh, that would be nice.
Apple. If you're listening, put a stop asking this question. Yes, or, or don't ask me for a month and maybe it is. Don't ask me for a month. Like I, I, I, I guess next time I am asked about that. I need to log it somewhere.
Like this app asked me on Tuesday, you know, the 14th that, you know, and then notice when that same app asked me again, because maybe a question, Maybe it isn't as frequent as we think it is because maybe we have a lot of apps that are that we are allowing to see our location in the background. Seems like though. It does seem like it. Trivia question though. Yeah. Where's the default location for the weather on your iPhone when you open it?
Oh, I don't use the iPhone weather app as my primary. So I don't know. Do you know? I do. Well, would you share it with us? I will share it with you, and then I'll ask you why it is that. Okay. It's Cupertino, California. Oh, okay. Right, right. Of course. Yeah. And you know why that is, of course. Yes. Yeah. That's Apple's worldwide headquarters. That's where the phone, that's where the phone comes from. Sure. But not really. It comes from China. Where it was designed.
It was designed. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, Shenzhen, Cupertino. You know, one of these. One of the, yeah. I think they might be, if they could drill through the earth, right, like they could they could maybe make shipments happen faster. Maybe if they team up with the boring company and instead of, you know, just going under the surface, just go straight down. Just drop it in the hole and they'll come out the other side. Here comes another one.
No, unfortunately I think it would melt at the earth's core. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Get us out of here, Dave. Go to calendars, please. Dan has our next quick tip. Dan says I have many iCloud and Gmail calendars and use, The calendar app on the Mac He says I have a color for invoice issued and another color for yet to be invoiced and I sometimes want to see
Which of my customers are yet? Oh, he also It says I want to see which of my customers are yet to be invoiced to avoid plowing through hundreds of entries. And this has meant unticking the 20 or so other calendars just so I can see the relevant calendar. I found, so that's a really, really specific and perhaps unique use case, right? So there might be a quick tip baked into that. There might also be a, why are you sharing this with the audience at large question, Dave, baked into that too.
And it's because he found a tip that might work for the rest of us for our use cases. And that is, he says, I found that if you press option and command, you can solo the calendar you want and the others disappear, which is super helpful. I don't use Apple's calendar. I use a BusyCal and it is often that I want to solo. A specific calendar and BusyCal. And you can do that in BusyCal by right-clicking and choosing Just Show This Calendar.
But it is super handy if I want to see my gigs calendar, I want to see the family's calendar or whatever, just by itself, just to see, all right, what do I have coming up on this? Super handy to, um, to have those, uh, right there. So that's great. Option and command to solo a calendar. Thank you. Interesting. Well, you answered my question before I could ask it, which was, does it work in busy count? But there you go. You're right. Click and busy count.
It's a different thing in busy count, but yeah, yeah, yeah. And a similar one, I use it for notes is then I just use tags and then I can, then I look for tags, but, but you have to tag it that way, but that's, that's a brilliant way to use the calendar on invoices. Yeah, I know. Yeah. Yeah. It makes me like, it hurts my brain a little bit because I don't think that way, but I like, like, like I said, I like learning new things. So like, yeah, that's good. Yeah.
All right. Uh, another quick tip from a listener, Ben. I believe this is the same Ben that helped us open the show. Ben. So thank you twice, Ben. In addition to, we talked in the last episode about changing the cursor size, right? The map, the mouse cursor size on your Mac so that you can, uh, by shaking the mouse well, but also you can go into accessibility and literally set the pointer size to be larger than what it defaults to.
And I've done that on all of my Macs, my, like, you know, people sit down at my Mac and say, why is your mouse so big? It's like, because that way I can find it when I have three screens up. That's right. Yeah In addition to that, Ben points out that you can also change the mouse's fill and outline colors. And those are in the same place in the system preferences or system settings, accessibility. Display, pointer. And he says, I like mine to have a dark brown center with a light gray border.
And that's interesting. You know, so less contrast, right? Instead of, because normally it It is a black center with a white border. So softening that a little bit. Um, but I could see, you know, you make the border some color and you can like find it. Like that's, I, I might mess with that. I haven't done that yet, but I might, I might do that because there's a lot of things on my screen that are black and white.
Now that I'm even just like, while we're podcasting here, I'm looking at my screen. It's like, there's so much white and black. Maybe that's why the mouse gets lost. It blends straight in. Yeah. It blends just because it blends in. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I'm not seeing it in settings where to change your mouth size, but I know it's there. It's in accessibility. Accessibility, yeah. It should be there in display pointer and you see pointer size.
Pointer size accessibility. Yeah. There you go. So I'm going to, while we're doing the show, I'm going to change my pointer outline color to purple. And we will see if I like that. Um, it oddly, it did not change for me, so I don't know. Oh, there it goes. Yeah, you have to turn off the, you have to hit. Get out of there first, I guess. Yeah, I kind of needed to mess with it. All right. Well, we'll see how this goes for this, uh, this recording, but already, like
I can see where my mouse is. It, it jumps off the screen. That's I don't know if I like that, but you know, I did the same thing. We'll see if we stick with it. We'll see if we stick with it. There you go. Uh, all right. And our rounding out quick tips today comes the last one comes from Mark M. The last one comes from Mark M. It says, I thought this might be a good time to share a savings tip given that iPhone season is coming up.
Yep. It says, I use my Chase Unlimited card to get one and a half percent cash back on everything and three percent back on dining out. And these points add up over time. Essentially, I have free money in my rewards account. And now they're currently offering 10% discounts on Apple gift cards to sweeten that deal.
So you take that free money and use it to get your $1,000 iPhone for $900 of free money because if you've got your free money, you buy an Apple gift card, you get an extra 10% over what you spent. So it would really be $990 for $900 of free money because that's how the credit card companies. Make their math work. He says, I have no affiliation with Chase. Of course, he says, but now may be the time to apply for one of their cards and save your points to get your Apple product next year.
Oh, I like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Very cool. Yeah, no, that's a great idea. And then for others looking, if you're not gonna buy the new iPhone, when the new iPhones do come out, then the current ones are gonna go up on the refurb store, refurb.me. So you can get a new one or a really close to new at a good price. So I love to have something refreshing to drink all year round, but especially right now in the summer, I like carbonation.
I like the mouthfeel of carbonation. I like the taste of hops. I'd like to have something with a little bit of flavor. I don't always like to have alcohol. Sometimes I will, but not always. And if I'm not going to have alcohol, I don't want to have like any calories or sugar or anything else like that. And this is why I'm loving hop water. It is a non-alcoholic sparkling hop water created with adaptogens and nootropics for added mood boosting benefits. It's got ashwagandha in it and L-theanine.
And I love the way these things just kind of relax me and chill me out. I've been drinking these pretty regularly for, I don't know, a month plus now. I've had them before, but man, I got back into them this summer and I love it. I'm probably gonna have them when we finish the show here. You gotta try this. I've been really into the blood orange flavor right now, but when you get it, like order the sample pack so that you can try all the different flavors and really find out what you like.
In addition to blood orange, they've got mango and lime and then just their classic flavor. Hop water is the healthy way to hops and I really know you'll love it. And we have a special limited time offer just for you as a Mac Geek Cab listener. Get 20% off your first purchase, plus get free shipping when you order 24 cans or more. So to get this offer, go now to our special URL, hopwater.com slash MGG. That's H-O-P-W-T-R.com slash M-G-G.
Don't wait, order today. Go now to hopwtr.com slash M-G-G. And our thanks to Hop Water for these delicious beverages I've been drinking and for sponsoring the episode. Dave, I think it's time we go to a couple of questions. I'm in. And, all right, Larry wrote to us this week and he says, my Mac laptop has been my primary computer for a long time. I started in iPhoto and then did the in-place migration to Photos. Now I want to move it all to my 27-inch iMac so I can use the screen real estate.
What's the best way to move the photos and eliminate all the iPhoto to Photos that was created over the years during the in-place migration. When I first got the iMac, I was still on iPhone on my laptop and just copied my iPhoto library to the Mac, to the iMac, and then converted to photos on my iMac. And during that conversion, it duplicated my photo library. Ouch. I now have two copies of my 800 gig photo libraries.
It is not hard links, it is duplicate files, which I didn't think was supposed to happen. But anyway, I need to get a clean copy of my photos with all the albums, keywords, et cetera, on my iMac and to make the master database going forward. I've never turned on any of the cloud photos, features, or functions. I have 1.4 terabytes free on my two gig plan. Two terabyte plan. Two terabyte plan, yeah. I meant what he knew. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I can use that path if it's the best way to go.
Does this copy over albums, keywords, tags, et cetera, Also, I also know you have talked about some great third-party apps that do wonders managing iPhoto libraries, and if that might be a better option. So yeah, this is interesting. I would start with iCloud Photos. I think this is going to be the cleanest path, but it will wind up using a lot of your home internet data.
So if you are bandwidth limited, if you have data caps for your home internet service, think about this, especially with an 800 gig library, because it's probably going to send somewhere between four and 800 gigs. And then back down if you were to do this path and and that path would be just to state it clearly you would turn on iCloud photo library on your existing computer.
Let it push everything to the cloud then you would turn on iCloud photo library on your iMac and let it pull everything back down to there it does come with albums and And, uh, you know, all of the other things that you asked for, yes. Keywords, uh, uh, tags are tags in the photos app. It's somebody, it's somebody who'll have to correct me if I'm, I think you can. Yeah. I think you can tag them. Okay. It's a different, but it's a different tag than the, yeah.
But it does like with Lisa's, you know, Lisa's Mac mini died recently that we talked about when that lightning storm. And so we migrated her to an M1 air and I realized that her photos library was pretty big. It was, I don't know, whatever it's seven, 600 megs, 500 megs, something gigs, sorry. Um, and I thought, you know, I, this has been upgraded and migrated for a very long time. And I wonder if it would be smaller if I just let it slurp everything down from iCloud sort of quote unquote fresh.
And of course we have backups and everything in case it comes down and it's not right. Well it came down and it is right. It also came down at almost exactly the same size as her prior library on the Mac mini. So it is efficient even though it's been upgraded then migrated over time from iCloud from iPhoto
to photos. So we didn't save any space. We also didn't lose any data doing this. And that is now the photos library that she is running from is the one that we pulled down, you know, quote unquote, fresh from iCloud. So that is how I would do it. But just be aware of the amount of data that that you're going to use. If you don't want to do it that way, copy the photos library over, not the iPhoto library. So assuming you are correct with the two, the duplicates, I agree that that's weird.
Normally it's supposed to be hard links, but maybe not. So just copy the photos library over to the new computer. It'll probably have less cruft than you think, given what we just learned with Lisa's experiment there. But, and, and then that should just work on your new, um, you know, on your new Mac and, and that, that would be fine. If you want to do some de-duping and some cruft cleaning, I am a big, big fan of an app called power photos from fat cat software.
It is so good at all of those things and more. So, um, yeah, I, and if you, if you feel like something didn't go right with your change from eye photos to photos, you can have it look at both of those libraries and, and, you know, merge and de-dupe between the two of them as well. So it like, it's a great utility for doing anything with, with photos.
So that sounds far more focused. The one I had always used was Gemini and Gemini dig into your photos library as well, but it sounds like power photos is more focused on the. On the photos database. Yes. More sensitive to the needs of that database than Gemini may be. That is correct. That's exactly what it is. It is really focused on cleaning them up and it will find similar photos and, and, you know, it'll tell you, oh, well, here's a duplicate, but this is the smaller version.
This is the larger version. It's fantastic. I I'm a big fan. Dave, I would wonder, would it be worth, and I would, because it's your photos, I would make two copies so that if you drop one of the discs or something like that, make two copies then of everything, then delete one of those two and see if that works. You know, delete the old iPhotos and come with photos and see if that works and then
upload. But I still agree doing it with iCloud because then the beauty is no matter what happens to those backup disks, you've got it in the cloud now. It's in the cloud. Yeah. And you're paying for the storage. Yeah. Like, yeah, to me, there's no downside to that. And we have never, I don't even think I need to knock on wood for this. I will just because it's, it's my, my superstition. Your photos. Yeah. But it's okay.
So the wood has been knocked. We have never heard about Apple losing someone's photos that they uploaded to iCloud. I mean, we've heard of people deleting photos they didn't intend to delete, like, you know, human error, but Apple has never lost that and here's the thing, they know that. The damage done to one person from Apple losing their photos pales in comparison to the damage that would be done to Apple, to everyone else's trust in Apple for their data, if Apple lost someone's photo.
So, like, they are far more incentivized to keep our photos safe than we desire them to be, right? Like, it's like... Right. I think your bigger danger with storing them in the cloud is getting hacked and having somebody, you know, steal your account, so to speak, then Apple actually losing them. Yeah. As long as you've got good two-factor authentication and everything else. Exactly. Very little chance. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Unless somebody hacks your phone and like, you know,
steals your phone and knows your passcode. And we've, you know, we've talked about that, but otherwise, yep. Yep. Shall we move on to Andrew? I think we shall. All right. We shall. Yeah. So Andrew wrote. Oh, I know. I'll read Andrew's question. I, I, you know, I, I'll get up to speed with our new little terminology and, and my little shortcuts here. Andrew says recently we were watching a TV show and a song came up. So we asked Siri to identify it and it was done quickly and accurately.
Later we realized that we do not know where the inquiries are made regarding identification. Uh, you know, where these go, do you know where we can see past requests? And he says, I don't have Shazam installed. And, and, uh, it, so it, and he, he talks about how Apple should build Shazam into the OS. Shazam is built into the OS. Apple acquired it back in 2018. So it actually is there, but, uh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, so, uh, that's, you know, that's.
So there's a twofer there. Yeah. Where, uh, where did the searches go and why didn't Apple buy Shazam? And I, I was not aware of that. So, but I wrote to him, of course, everybody knows that the government keeps all our Siri and Alexa and Google searches. That's not true, folks. Oops, okay, just kidding. I sent Dave a meme a couple of weeks ago.
My wife asked me why I was speaking so quietly. I said, I didn't want the A lady to hear what I had, or what's his name, Zuckerberg, to hear what I had to say. My wife laughed, I laughed, the A lady laughed, Siri laughed. So, they hear everything, but no, they're not storing it. Well, the A-lady may be, but I don't know the details on that. That. I wrote him back and said, uh. As for the history of your Siri searches, Apple, to protect you from evil, does not save your
requests. They use some de-identified database stuff to improve it. They got a long way to go there. Sorry, my editorial phase is now over. So while you'll never need to worry about hackers or private investigators or jealous spouses, you won't have the benefits of being able to go back and seeing what questions you have asked of Siri in the past. But my understanding is that the A-Lady may actually have your search history. And then, Dave, it's been some time. I don't know
if you want to briefly cover the story of how Shazam was developed. It was kind of a funny story, I thought. Oh, yeah. Well, I will say if you go into Settings, Privacy and Security. Analytics and improvements. You will see things that you can choose to or not choose to share with Apple.
And Siri and dictation are on that list. You can turn it on and then it, that says it helps improve Siri and dictation by allowing Apple to store and review audio of your Siri and dictation interactions from this device. And then there's a link to learn more about how they disassociate that from you. Right. But it is still your voice. Yeah, it was my understanding that they could, that law enforcement could never go back and go, you know, hey, yes lady, how do I get rid of a body?
Right, right. You know, they can't go back, you know. But they do, like you're right that other, um. Of the other engines, the, the A-Lady and um, Google, you can go and get that data. You can download from Amazon all of your, uh, A-Lady requests. And it's fascinating to hear yourself back. Yeah, man. Right on. Yeah. Yeah. Yep-er. A little terrifying. Yep-er. So yeah, no, so quickly, uh, that, that, that was a great story about the Shazam.
The Shazam origin story. So at WWDC, there used to be a session. It was the one session that was never recorded and, uh, was only for people in person. It has not existed for a very long time, or at least, you know, not that long, maybe eight, 10 years. But, uh, it was a session called Stump the Experts and it happened late in the day. Uh, I believe it was on, I think it was on Tuesday. Like the keynote would happen Monday. I don't think it was keynote day.
Might have been. But it always, whatever the evening's flow for the day of Stump the Experts was the Apple Design Awards would happen from like 7 to 8.30 and then Stump the Experts would start at 9 o'clock and go until 10.30 or something like that. And it was a bunch of.
Current and former Apple employees on stage and then obviously the rest of us were in the crowd, there were maybe 30 of them on stage and it was essentially a game show where the, crowd competed against the experts the experts could ask the crowd questions the crowd could ask the experts questions and There would be points and it was very, irreverently organized so that Generally the people on stage would win and it was but it you could get like a t-shirt and things like that and it was
It was a good time right fun.
So There was this half hour break between the, you know, the design of words and thing and they play some house music or whatever and then the event starts and this is, you know, the first time I went, I had no idea of this one element of it and, you know, some, at some point during the thing, an audience member will go up to a microphone and say, I'd like to earn some points for the audience by identifying a song and the host, Mark would, Mark and Fred were the two hosts,
Fred Huxham and Mark, why can't I remember Mark's name? Anyway, Mark would say, okay, great, which song? And the person would say, oh, I identified this song. And what they were talking about was the songs that played between the Apple Design Awards and the beginning of Stump the Experts was a carefully crafted playlist of very obscure music that most people have never even
heard before. And it was a nice way to sort of pad the point tally for the crowd if you happened to know one of these super obscure songs. And one year, the year that they had released the iPhone development kit, but we had not yet launched apps like the dev kit came out in like March, I think of that year, the app store was coming. So the iPhone was brand new or less than a year old, just about a year old. And the app
store was coming. And so developers had been able to start developing their apps ahead of WWDC so they could come and actually interact and ask questions and learn things. And it wasn't just all brand new at dub dub so they had had the dev kit for a few months and one guy goes up to the, microphone and says I'd like to identify a song and Mark says great which one and he says.
All of them and proceeds to list all of the songs 100% accurately in order and Mark is standing up there with his jaw on the floor and then because his personality and all that he's like you cheated How did you get a copy of your list? Right, he's like, that's, like, I'm the only one that saw that in my iTunes library up until like. You know, 20 minutes before this whole thing began. He's like, how did you get that list? Who gave it to you?
And the guy's like, I swear I didn't cheat. And he's like, how did you know all those songs? He says, oh, I didn't. I made an app. And that app was Shazam. So it was literally made to scratch this one itch for this one event. And then obviously they went on to do very well. And, and, and then in 2018, Apple acquired Shazam and now it's built into the OS.
And, um, one piece of advice you can, you can still install the app, but the functionality is there if you simply, uh, like, you know, uh, Andrew did, if you simply ask the S lady and I have to be careful now, cause I put the iOS 17 beta on my phone, so I can't, I have to do is say, yeah, I gotta go change that. Yeah. I haven't had a, I haven't had a misfire yet, but it's been not, you know, like 12 So, um, cause I didn't want to do it until I got back from my travels.
I wanted my phone to be reliable, uh, while I was traveling. So, but if you ask it, it will use the Shazam, you know, functionality to, uh, certain listen and then tell you it searches the music, uh, genome database and, and tells you, you know, what the song is. And so, uh, which was open source before like that Shazam, they did not build the database. They just built the, the, um, interface that the app to access to it, to, yeah, to link and pull it together.
So, um, all that functionality is there. You can still download the Shazam app for free from the app store and then have, you know, a search history and all of that. So if you want that, that's how you would do that. But what I did was you can add a Shazam, um, widget, if you want to call it that to the control center. And so I have it on the top row of my control center on my phone.
So if I want to know what a song is, I don't have to say anything out loud and I can quickly just swipe down, tap the Shazam logo and instantly now it's listening. And I have added no noise or really much distraction to the, you know, the room and it's just like, oh yeah, there it is. And it, you know, five seconds later, whenever it listens to enough. Yeah. That's nice. Yeah. So the, the, the Shazam widget, as it were. Yeah. The Shazam widget.
And yeah, so you can, you can customize your control center again in, uh, settings and I now it's just settings control center and you can, it's called music recognition, but it has the Shazam logo, uh, and you can add it to your control center. And then of course you can reorder things so that the, um, things are where you want them.
I have code scanner as my first widget, music recognition as my second one, Apple TV remote as my third and calculator as my fourth, because those are the widgets that I use the most. So they are across the row of the top four and I can get to those very quickly. So yeah. I've never, I use my camera as my code scanner. So it just. Oh, but see code scanner is one step better than camera because, with camera, you have to open it up and then you've got to use your finger to tap the code, right?
With code scanner, as soon as it recognizes a code, boom, it jumps to the link that the code is there. And that is built in. This is not a third-party app. This is part of the phone. So there's- Hold on, let me get the quick tip spanner back up at the bottom. Yeah, exactly. Right? Like, yep. There's another quick tip. That is awesome. Yep. So there was, there was a benefit to this Shazam origin story. It turns out there were some tips bacon baked in here. So yeah. Baked in.
Yeah, man. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's awesome. Yepper. Uh, Paul has our next question here, Pete and Paul asks, uh, and I will, I will bring this up, I swear. He says, I've got a MacBook pro circa 2017 that can run up to big Sur. Uh, I've decided to give it to my sister following Apple's directions. I wiped and reinstalled the OS, and I created a new Apple ID for her. Perfect. I set up iCloud and set up the App Store with that Apple ID. When I try to download pages, for example,
the App Store says that I need Mac OS 12.3. I can find no way to get an older version of pages onto this Mac, and of course, this Mac cannot run the OS required for the current version of pages. Pages. Searching the web indicates tough cookies. Is it really true that I can't set up one of my Macs for a family member with a new Apple ID and have it be able to use the old versions of Pages Keynote in numbers that I was using on this computer before I wiped it and gave it to her? Can you help?
Pete. I answered it and I think I said, sadly, Paul, this is this isn't going to be an easy or or a straightforward one, but I believe it can be done. Ideally, your sister already had an Apple ID, don't know how old she is, and had a version, And that would be the best way to go. Right. If your Apple ID was on there, Paul, you could download these because you have access to
the old versions in your account. Right? That's exactly it. Yeah. So he has access to it, but he said, you know, he did my new one for my sister and said, if she has another one, that would be the best way to go. But assuming her new Apple ID is not associated with a previous version of the OS and pages, he needs to create a user account on that machine with his Apple ID and give it admin privileges so he can affect all the accounts.
Then open the Mac Store, download the pages, go to pages and use the Get button, and it should pull up a previous version by going to the bottom. In fact, I wrote down in steps in order, so let me read them real quick. Provided you already downloaded pages from the Mac App Store in the past, open the Mac App Store, click on your account, and at the bottom, this will give you access to the Purchased Pane. Locate pages and initiate the download from there, and you'll see the message telling you
that the latest version is incompatible. So we'll download and install the previous yet compatible version. But note here that the latest version of Pages, my understanding is that it's restricted. It's not as possible to edit shared documents on the desktop app. You can open them, but you can't save the changes. So to do that, you're going to have to use Pages on iCloud. On the web. To edit and share. Yes, the iCloud.com version of Pages.
And then you can edit and share documents that way. So all that being said, I haven't tried it. This is from my search and research on how to do this, that that seems the way to do it. So I said, so in short, you're not forced to upgrade hardware and operating systems by Apple unless you don't want to go through the daily hassles. So tongue in cheek there. Yeah. So. Yeah. So I think that's the way to do it. That's brilliant though.
That's the way to do it with a separate user account that you just because once you get those on there. Then they're there for everyone. You can share them across all accounts. Yes. Yeah. They're by default, they would be shared across all accounts. Yeah. So me thinks that's how to work it. Oh dude. No, I, I, that, that's great. I that's really, it's that separate user. I don't know that I would have thought of that. I would have been like, all right, well, let's log her out of the app store.
I'll log me in, which you could do and download them and all that. But, but like it starts to convolute things. This keeps it nice and clean and yeah. Plus it gives you, it gives you, it preserves a test account on that computer that has admin access. And that's never a bad thing to have either. Right. So absolutely. Huh. I like it. Absolutely. I like it. Yeah. So, huh. Um, we got another question from, uh, I try to mispronounce the name.
So here, here, I'll try and get it right. This time. Something from this word. Jaber Lyle. All right. Sure. Yeah. Uh, through discord, Jaber Lyle wrote, is anyone used trip mode to limit data usage on the Mac will connect it to a hotspot suggestions on other or better apps to do this. And Dave, you've got it. I, yeah, way to do it in my humble opinion. Well, I mean, Trip Mode is a great app. I've used Trip Mode before, it is, I think we mentioned it as a cool stuff found years ago.
Allows you to choose which apps are able to use Wi-Fi data and which apps are not. And it stops it at the network level right there. I can see on the website that it's even fully compatible with macOS Sonoma, which isn't even released yet. So it's very up-to-date. I've used this. I did use it in the past when tethering. I've also used it when I'm on a crappy Wi-Fi network and I need to do a specific thing. So I will turn off like software updates and all the other things.
However, nowadays, I've been using for, especially for Jibril Isle's purpose, I've been using Apple's low data mode, which you find in the wifi settings. Now, this only turns on for your current session. With that wifi network. I've found that if I go, you go into, you know, system settings, you go to, you go to wifi, you hit the little I next to the network that you're on, and you have a few options.
You can, you know, automatically join, you can limit IP address tracking, and there is an option for low data mode. And this is a single setting. So you don't get the granularity that trip mode gives you. So you may still want to use trip mode, right? But, but your, this low data mode setting will stop, you know, background operations and all of that from happening.
So I've used this with great success when tethering recently, but what I notice is when I disconnect and reconnect, the low data mode setting is turned back off. So you have to think about it. And you might not even notice that you've disconnected and reconnected from a tethered network because that just happens sometimes.
So you might like trip mode, but certainly if you don't have it installed and you don't want to burn data downloading it because you're on that connection, Turn on low data mode, that will save you there. Oh, that's yeah, well, I'm glad you mentioned that it only happens for that session. It wouldn't have occurred to me. I would have thought, well, once I turned it on for that network. It's same. I don't know how I found that out. I'm sure it was the hard way, but yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I know I used nine and a half of my 10 gigs last month. Yes. Yeah, right, right. Yeah, exactly. I was on the road a lot, you know, and I'm going to use it. And boy, that's nice, though, to be able to do that. 10 gigs is very, very nice. So, hey, Dave, Sean wrote in and asked, I have a question about the Apple Watch. I'm 53 years old, and I was looking at the Series 8 as it comes with some health monitoring features. I know it's techie cool, but I'm wondering your thoughts on, is it worth it?
Basically, I'm wanting a no BS assessment on it. I don't need the latest shiny thing, but I do want something practical. I like swimming, and I see it's waterproof and water resistant for that. That. So, um, get you one, man. I yeah. Well, my, so here's my advice and I, and I will point out for those of you coming back around that we are recording this episode on the 25th of August, it'll come out on the 28th of August of 2023.
And though it has yet to be announced as far as I'm aware at this moment in time, uh, there is almost certainly an Apple event happening within the next couple of weeks where new iPhones and new watches will be announced. So I would not buy a new iPhone or a new watch today unless I absolutely had to just buy it today. If today's the correct day for me to buy, then I would buy. And if I were going to buy a watch, I would almost always buy the latest version.
And this is because unlike with iPhones, I don't always get a new watch when a new model comes out. I have only owned two Apple watches in my life I've owned the series 0 and the series 5 and I'm still using the series 5 in fact last year I bought a series 8 when we got you your ultra and all that Pete Yeah, and I and then I I you know it arrived and I was like I don't need.
Like it's not for the way. I use it. I'm not going to notice any any difference here. I have the always on screen with the the series 5 which I really like and that's it and so I I, um, so I, therefore I don't always buy the latest one.
Every year i don't buy a new watch every year but whenever i buy a watch it will be the latest one like that there's there's no question in my mind that buying the latest version because they last me so long makes sense get the all the latest technology that you can have so that three years down the road you've still got hopefully what you need um so i i would you know if it were today and you needed to buy a watch today then yes the series eight but otherwise i would go for the
for the series nine, um, and I might buy the series nine next month. I we'll, we'll see what they announce with it. Um, it, you know, see, see what's new with it and all that, but man, I'll tell you what, they, they are amazing little devices. Uh, you can get the EKG, uh, the heart rate monitor, um, and I know Apple has covered these stories, but, but I actually know somebody who is, he, he's one of those guys who, if you ask him what time it is, he will tell you how to build a watch.
He's retired, but we were flying together one day and I said, you know, what's the difference between the LNAV minimums and the VNAV minimums on the approach? Because you know, they're 20 feet apart. Sure. Well, 45 minutes later, he quit telling me the difference between them. I'm like, I'm sorry I asked. Great guy. But that's just to point out how detailed it, this is a guy who would sit and read the Honeywell manual on how the computer works in the airplane on a jump seat, because that's
That's what he liked to do. That's what, that's what he's into. Sure. Yeah. So he was biking one day and he always, he rode his same bike, same path. And he knew that at this point, his heart rate was within, you know, five beats a minute. Sure. Here and there, that sort of thing. And he was biking one day and he's like, my, heart rate is off by like 30 beats a minute from where it should be. And I'm putting the same effort in. He went to the hospital and it saved his life.
Um, it, in that case, it didn't tell him. was that attuned to where his heart should be and all that sort of thing. But I know Apple has told these stories on many occasions, you know, it comes up and says, hey, we're noticing something. You may want to get checked out here. And people have gone and said, yeah, you had a Widowmaker ready to go or, you know, whatever it is. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. So, the benefits of having this thing.
There's nothing short of amazing. Even just from that standpoint, let alone the convenience of it, I will say. Your sleep monitor and. I mentioned that I put the beta on my phone. I also put the current beta on my watch last night. And I have to say the user interface changes that they've made on the watch are already, and like I am literally 12 hours out at this point in time from using, from having it on my watch. It went on my watch while I slept, so I've really only had like an hour with it.
The user interface changes that they made are spectacular. You press the digital crown and it pulls up your app list now. Okay, great. You press the side button, whatever that other button's called, the flat button on your watch. That now brings up control center on your watch, which is so much better. I can't tell you how you used to be able to bring, how I used to bring up control center. I would just swipe around from different edges until it appeared.
From the bottom up for those that are listening. There it is. Yeah. I'm still doing it. Always got that wrong. Right. Okay. Yeah. So having control center, being able to pop up with the push of a button so that I can jump into theater mode or, you know, whatever mode I need to be in. That's awesome.
And then you spin from the watch face. If you spin the crown widgets appear, and that's also what happens if you swipe up from the bottom, which is a far more intuitive thing, because they're like sort of the same thing is happening. Notification still come down from the top. It's really like, and I'm doing this off the top of my head without my watch on my wrist to confirm. And I can remember what to do. Whereas previously I've had a watch since the series zero came out,
couldn't have told you how to do any of these things. I would have just been like, oh, just swipe around until you get there. So I'm stoked about these user interface changes, the user experience changes for the watch. So, yeah, yeah, yeah, yep. That is fascinating. I, I don't think I ever knew that notifications came by swiping down from the top. See what I'm saying? There they are. Another quick tip. Yep. Hold on. I have to do it. You got to do it. Absolutely, man. Absolutely.
All right. It is. It is almost football season, American football season. In fact, I think we're in pregames now or preseason games or whatever it is. And this always seems to be the time that live TV streaming questions start coming into us. Into us. So I wanted to kind of get ahead of this this year because there there is at least one new option on the table for this. So as far as I know here in the United States, there are now four.
Options for getting your local channels with your sports, which is what a lot of people wind up paying to get this from, you know, you can, football is the one thing that we can't just pay the NFL and get a stream for it here in the United States, at least not to my knowledge. If anybody out there knows how to do that, please let me know. But I don't think it's, I don't think we can do it. Other countries can do this for U.S. football games. We don't get to.
And it's because they have long-term contracts with the networks and the networks are holding, onto them, you know, you're gonna have to pry this from their cold dead fingers because when you do pry it from their fingers, regardless of whether the networks are alive or dead, this will kill them because or it will force them to change dramatically because it's the one thing that
keeps people sort of tied to live TV or one of the big things. So there are four now. Last year, I would have talked about three that would most likely get you what you are looking for in terms of streaming live TV with sports and that those three were and and still are YouTube TV, Direct TV stream and Fubo. The Fubo is Fubo and Direct TV stream unlike YouTube TV will also get you most of your regional sports networks it's not as big of a deal for for most football games although in some
corners of the country it is, but it is a big deal for other sports stuff. YouTube TV does not let you get regional sports networks anymore. There is a new player in this realm, and it is Hulu plus live TV. Hulu plus live TV doesn't have as many of your regional sports networks, but it does have your local stations. And you can go to each of these well before you you buy and look to see what networks you would get. YouTube TV is 73 bucks. Hulu plus live TV is 70 bucks US.
Fubo is $75 US and then direct TV stream is a hundred bucks. You get more with it, but depending on whether you care about the more, you may not care. Uh, so go ahead, go ahead. Yep. YouTube TV is the one this year that has Sunday ticket. Direct TV. I think lost it. I don't think you can get Sunday ticket through direct TV stream anymore. Okay. Um, but I know YouTube TV has Sunday ticket this year. Now that's an extra that, that, that costs 300 bucks or so extra. Yep.
Um, you can get that with, I, I'm, I'm pretty sure you can get some of that with Fubo with the others as well. Oh, okay. Well, cause, um, I think it's, no NFL network has a red zone channel, which is similar, but not the same. So the red zone channel is always good. Uh, you, uh, Sunday ticket has a similar, I forget what they call it, but it's similar to the red zone channel, which anytime there's a team, there's, you know, four games, six games going on. When
a team gets into the red zone, close to scoring, they go to that game. And so they keep updating all day long. And if there's only one game on, then that's what they stay with. Right, right, right. Um, yeah, those are, uh, those are good options. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, Mark M in the chat points out that the NFL network offers NFL plus for 39.99 a year, which gets you live, local and primetime, regular and post-season games. So, live, local, not all games, but your local ones.
Only on your phone and tablet. And my guess is that they've engineered it such that it won't go over HDMI. I haven't tested this. I will. I'll, I'll, I'll, Oh yeah. I bet. Cause they can do that. However, you should be able to, uh, don't get old. It's bad for your memory. What is it when you're screen-sharing Dave airplay airplay, you should be able to airplay it to your TV. I don't know. I've I've, I haven't tried it with this, but I have seen it with other things.
We engineered it so you can't do it. Yeah, I can't watch it on my big screen in the backyard, Correct. Ah, correct. Yeah, I think we'll test this. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just finding out about this now Yeah, yeah, and they say that you know, some games are subject to blackouts and this that and the other thing. Sure. Yep.
There are two other Services that I want to make sure we get to here. These are without your local channels, so they probably won't serve the sports needs, but if that's not what you need live TV for, then Sling TV is $55 and Philo is $25 a month. So those are other options to check. We will put, I will put links to all of these of course in the show notes at MackeyCub.com.
I will also put a link to an article that I found at Clark.com that compares all of these with a beautiful chart that really kind of lets you see pricing, And, uh, you know, all of the various, uh, various things you get your local channels, how many simultaneous streams, how many user profiles, how they're, all of these allow DVR in the cloud. And, you know, like some of, many of them are unlimited, uh,
sling is limited to 50 hours. So that's radically different from like YouTube TV is unlimited or even Fubo pros thousand hours. So. Go through, it'll show you the number of channels they have. They have, it's a handy little chart. Yeah, and we just moved my daughter into an apartment with three other girls. Okay. And they've got, I think, about 4,326,000 channels between, because one has Hulu and one has Netflix and one has YouTube TV and the other, it's, so they've got so much,
just by each one of them paying for one thing. Yes, yeah. You know, they've got a gazillion choices. It's just amazing. That's awesome, that's awesome. So yeah, that's the way to do it. It. So share, if you can, I know Netflix started putting the kibosh on sharing your. Yes. And, and I've found like we have Fubo. That's the one we've chosen to pay. We also have direct TV stream because as I've mentioned, they gave me a three month free account like three years ago.
Um, and they haven't turned it off. So three months is almost up Dave. My three months is any point in time, my three months might be up, which is why I've like, I'm, I'm, I'm the fool here. No, because I've continued to pay for Fubo all the way through because I know the day I choose not to let Fubo renew the quarterly rates on Fubo are way cheaper than monthly. So I pay quarterly, but I know the quarter I choose not to renew, um, will be the quarter
where my DirecTV stream like account just hits. Hey Dave, I got a question. So if you were to stop paying for Fubo and DirecTV were to cut off, how long would it take you to start paying for Fubo again? Just asking for a friend. Um, probably, probably pretty, it would probably happen pretty quickly. Uh, we do, we do use it quite a bit, mostly with the channels app.
Like it does most of it. So we aren't interacting directly with Fubo, but, but yeah, yeah, yeah, there, there are, there have been a few months where I've realized we have not watched anything on live TV though, which is why Fubo's quarterly pricing is, um, much less expensive than its monthly pricing. I'm sure.
Yeah. Um, yeah, yeah, it's I forget where I was going with this. I'm totally distracted now. I was going to bring us to cool stuff found. No, it's um, but Fubo. So, oh, I know where I was going with it. So, um, when our son was out at Reed College in Portland, before they foobar their computer science department, it's worked out for him. He's got a full time job as a software engineer now. So it like life's good.
He found a path which is great and he starts Monday, the day the show comes out so woo! When he was out in Portland using our Fubo account, it was interesting. They did let him do it. When we had a YouTube TV account, that one complained a lot that like, you're not in the right location, you shouldn't be doing this. It was very, Fubo was like, you're not in the right location and therefore, you don't get to watch live game, live football games from, uh, from home, right?
Like, like I was in Los Angeles. I couldn't watch the Patriots game. I was going to only be, but you could have watched the Patriots game after it ended. You could watch your recording of it, right. But not while it was happening live. And so he had to figure out other ways to, to watch those live. And it was fine. Actually, we set them up with channels and that was the way to do it. Cause channels doesn't, doesn't care. Yeah. Yep. So, um, yeah.
Yeah, so just bear that in mind if you're going to be doing sharing where you're not in the same general area. So but yeah, yeah, that works out. All right, let's go to some cool stuff found, shall we? But folks send in I'm curious as to how you folks are using your, you know, how you're solving for live TV and all of that stuff and what your use case is because we all have different use cases. Feedback at MacGeekGab.com is where we want to hear from you.
Well, that's where I'd send it. Feedback at MacGeekGab.com. Yeah, man. Feedback at MacGeekGab.com. All right, you want to bring us to Chris? All right. I do! Chris wrote in, he says, just a follow-up on Inoculoso, a Mac Mini from Monday's show, using, and this is important, the non-Mac App Store version of DaisyDisk. You can scan the Mac's hard drive as an administrator and see the space taken up by the system files,
snapshots, as well as other users' folders. This has been a super useful tool for me, who up until recently has shared a Mac with my partner as a separate user. And that's the one it was driving me nuts when we were talking about that. I could not remember the easy disk in the non Mac app store version is is the way to go. That thing will show you your if they have stuff on the screen, if you can watch it on video, Facebook, YouTube, go there and look at this show.
You can see what it looks like. It it has. It's cool. Yeah, it is cool. It has like a circular pie chart almost, but you just hover over that huge, large file there with your mouse and it tells you, oh, this is the file, this is the user file. This is what it is. And it shows you where it is and how many gigabytes it is. And I believe dangerously, it will allow you to go there to delete it. Oh, like that's what, to me, that's one of its best features is you can just delete right from
there. It's like, oh, I don't need that anymore. Boom, gone. Be very, very careful. You do not delete an entire user. Yes, that's right. Because you can. Yep. Yeah, you can. Yeah. As long as you're running it as an administrator, which, which as Chris points out, you can do. So yeah, that's great. Yup. So, um, I tried out a new app. Well, it's not that new, but it's seen significant updates since the last time I used it.
It's an app called flighty and it is a flight tracking app. I am a big fan of the flight aware app for, for tracking where planes are, it requires some manual... Clicking and and like you have to like to find where your plane is before it gets to the airport where you're going to get on it. Flight aware requires some sort of janky this jumping around flighty. Does this sort of automatically and for the twenty five hours before your plane takes off for you.
It starts tracking where that plane is because that is one of the biggest sources of flight delays is your equipment not being there Right your airplane. You're you're in Chicago. Your plane is on the ground in Des Moines with a mechanical That's where you're not leaving from right? You're not leaving from Chicago unless they change your equipment, which sometimes happens But sometimes but not often right because this is a very.
Choreographed dance for yeah. Yeah, we don't just have extra airplanes laying around at every airport, correct, right? Yeah, right. So there was that but the thing I really liked about flighty was how it integrated with my phone's both lock screen and the the bubble at the top What do we call that stupid thing at the top of that notch the notch thing at the top right because you can like they Can put things up there and it showed me on my lock screen. I had a fairly detailed.
Display of where my flight was was, you know, the time to, uh, to get on it, if it was going to be delayed, like all that stuff. But even as I was just using my phone, the little notch at the top showed me my gate number that I needed to get to. And this was only, you know, a couple hours before the flight, right? Like it didn't do this for days, my gate number and how much time I had until that plane took off at little countdown timer right up in the notch. So
it was super handy at the airport. It was like, wait, what's my gate? Oh, right. It's right there. I think TripIt should, um, be inspired by this, uh, this kind of lock screen integration. I would love, because I pay for TripIt.
Which is one of my favorites, Flighty is not inexpensive, it's about 50 bucks a year for a, I'm looking at their pricing here, yeah, it's 49 dollars a year for an annual subscription, 250 for a lifetime, if you want to do it for your family it's 89 dollars for the year or 449 for lifetime, so again, that's real money, It's valuable, but I, with already paying for TripIt, I'm like, ah, do I really need this? You know, how much is this extra little bit worth to me? But I really liked it.
They give you your first flight, your first one's free. So I got my first flight for free. What's really cool is that you can link it to your calendar and it will slurp in flight data from your calendar. So you don't have to manually enter flights, but of course you can. And then you can be part of other people's trippet. I'll call it your, like the family, but you can put a share group, right? Not share of trippet share group, the flighty share group where you can just automatically
share your flights with other people. So you don't have to say, Oh yeah, by the way, here's my flight for today. Here's my flight for today. You can just say, yeah, the, the, me and, and these four other people were just going to share, you know, our flight data together or whatever it is. So yeah, it's very cool. It's cool, I'm curious to see if I choose to pay for it before my next flight. There is a non-zero chance that that will happen, and it's probably a whole lot greater.
I need to look at that and play with that a little bit. I've been at the risk of bringing in another one. I've always used Flightradar24, and I'm not sure that that gives you where's my airplane ahead of time. But the cool thing about that one is you can take your iPhone and point it at an airplane flying over and see, oh, well, that's, you know, that's Delta flying to Dusseldorf. We use that at the very first, um, Midwest Mac barbecue standing in Barry's yard.
We had like four of us with, with our phones in the air. Cause we knew you were landing at O'Hare and, uh, and we found you. So it was just kind of fun. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yep, yep. You were flying very fast over us though, Pete, very fast, very fast. Well, you know, I was in a hurry. I was trying to get there. Trying to get to the barbecue. That's right. I'm going to be late. So the other cool thing about Flight Radar 24, it does have a disruption map.
So you can see, you know, where the delays are in the world, where ground stops are and that kind of thing. Oh, cool. Yeah. That's kind of neat. Yeah. Flighty has ground maps too. Like it'll show planes taxiing. And I didn't know that that data was publicly available. So like, it was interesting. Yeah. Um, yeah, FlightAware does that. I thought I could be wrong.
Maybe, maybe, and maybe the pro version of FlightAware, I use the free version of FlightAware, but it gives me my notifications that, you know, when the pilot filed the flight plan, uh, if there are delays, I get those before I get them from Tripit or even from the airlines. So yeah, FlightAware. Yeah. I think once you blocked out that all that ads B starts getting picked up from your transponder to the, to the FAA system. If there weren't enough watchwords and and acronyms in the show already.
Yeah, sorry about that. Uh, Edsby is, uh, I'm not going to try and remember the exact thing, but it's essentially, there's a transponder, which is a radio that sends a four digit code to air traffic control system, so they can identify you on the screen. And, uh, uh, Edsby allows you to, uh, see other aircraft and then to see you. It's part of the TCAS system. this I can't remember, traffic collision and avoidance system, which actually has airplanes computers talking to each other.
So if you're heading nose to nose, right at each other, my airplane will start saying, descend, descend now. And it'll, the other airplane will go, climb, climb now. Oh. So you get away from each other. It's fascinating. And that's why near hits, not near misses, because they are misses. They're real misses, near hits. Yes, they are real misses. Yeah. They are, there are more misses than hits.
With the congested air system that is out there today because these computers are talking to each other and much more efficient And it's actually our rule if air traffic control tells me. Descend now and my computer or my TCAS says climb now The rule is I listen to the computer Wow I disregard air traffic control It's faster more efficient, and it's talking to the other airplane. It's telling right right right ATC tells me to descend no
No, I'm climbing. I'm following my computer And that will fascinating. There was actually a case many years ago where an air traffic controller pulled a guy to descend. And so he did, even though his airplane was telling him to climb and there was a midair and destroyed both airplanes. Yeah, I'm not. I don't want you to change anything, but your Wi-Fi has been awful during this show. I know it times. Okay. All right. I know. Yeah, I figured you might you might have become aware of that.
Yes, it mostly fine on the audio. Mostly fine on the audio. I heard it once there, which is why I figured I'd acknowledge it. But, uh, I have one last cool stuff found before we pull the ripcord. Maybe two, um, spider medic says his router, uh, their router. I don't know if spider medics gender, uh, spider medics router recently died in spider medics. This is in discord says while shopping around online, I found that best buy is offering 15% off of a new router.
If you bring in an old router. So I brought in an old TP-Link travel router that was probably 15 years old and saved 50 bucks off of a new router. It's pretty easy to find old routers. So if you're in the market for a new one, it might be worth digging around in your closet for a piece of 2.4 gigahertz gold. I love it. Nice. Yeah. I wonder if, you know, I found that little, it's about four by four inches, that little airport express. Yeah. I used to haul around with me. That's a router.
That is a router. Absolutely. So yeah. Absolutely. Yep. So a piece of 2.4 gigahertz gold. And I got my lightning hit 1900. Yep. Yep. Nice. So I do have one more. We, we do have time for, uh, another one from Ben. We've talked a lot about eSIM DB. Ben says last weekend, I got married, uh, at a place in California, which is a Verizon dead zone, but has good AT&T reception. And of course Ben uses visible, which is a Verizon MVNO, so no service.
So in prep for that, I went looking for an eSIM that supports AT&T. He says, I started with eSIMDB because we talk about it all the time, but it does not make it easy to determine which networks are used by any given SIM. And so he found eSIMS.io. So that's eSIMS.io, of course, linked from Mackeycab.com, which does show the networks that most eSIMS use. He says that led him to discover Nomad, which sells prepaid data only SIMs.
The ones for the U S are simultaneously compatible with Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile. And he says, I paid 11 bucks for three gigs of nomad data and it served all of his needs. Thank you for that. That's great. I love finding more things to find out about e-sims because it is a thing. That we all seem to be using quite a bit these days. And with that, Pete, it's time to bring the band in. Here they come. Here they come. There they were. Here they are.
Yeah. Fun one, folks. But they're not on stage with us, though. No, they're not. They're below the stage. They're below the stage. That's right. Yeah, they can't see what we're doing. They just have to trust. Somebody told them, play. And so they played. That's right. Maybe they've been playing this whole time.
I just realized that was a behind-the-scenes thing. We had a discussion pre-show about Dave playing a gig tonight, and he's actually on the stage, and that's a good thing as opposed to being below the stage. Where you can't see the performers. Yeah, theater shows where the band can't see the performers, it's very strange for at least this particular musician.
So, thankfully, yeah, this weekend we, well, by the time the show comes out, the run is over, but doing Rocky Horror midnight performances of it, and yeah, it's nice to be able to. And you've never seen the show. That blows my mind. And I officially have never seen Rocky Horror. Of course, I've seen it from upstage center where the drums are, But I've never been an audience member for Rocky Horror. So, you know, there you go. Thanks to everybody who sent in questions. It makes a huge difference.
Obviously, it's what the show is. Really, thanks to every single one of you for listening to the show. That's what makes the show what it is. It's amazing. I've got something for you to do, though. What's that, Pete? Share the show with a friend. Please share the show with a friend. That's our only ask this week. Please share the show with a friend. Thank you for doing that, folks. Cashfly. Thanks to them for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you,
and make sure to check out our other shows. I'll put links in the show notes to Pete. So there I was in my business brain and gig gab, but yeah, please share the show. That's our, that's our ask. Thank you so much. Thanks for hanging out with us. Thanks for sharing the show and have fun this week. We'll see you. Music. P.T.F.N Later!