It's time for MacGeekGab, and listener Dustin brings us our quick tip of the week with printing a website in reader mode. He says, this is one of my favorite tricks in Safari to view a website in reader mode and then printing it to a PDF. This gets rid of all the junk and prints out the page as you see it in reader mode. More tips like this, plus your questions answered today on MacGeekGab number 1045 for Monday, day, July 8th, 2024. Music.
Greetings, folks, and welcome to MacGeekGap, the show where you send in quick tips like that. You send in questions, which hopefully we answer, or at least we discuss. Thus, you send in cool stuff found, which we share so that we can all learn at least five new things every single time we get together. Our sponsor for this episode is BB Edit from barebones.com, my text editor of choice. It's open on my Mac right now. I looked and confirmed it's always open on my Mac. We'll talk more about that
in a little bit. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in South Dakota, I'm Adam Christensen. And Pilot Pete is muted wherever in the world he is. I am. Of course I am. And here in New Hampshire is Pilot Pete. You know, I just wanted to see if I could shout out the window loud enough for everybody to hear me this morning. My microphone's pretty directional, Pete. I don't know if it would pick you up. It's kind of aiming off axis to where your house is. Okay.
My voice is not that loud, apparently. You're a loud mouth. Don't get me wrong. However, that doesn't mean what we think it means. Right. There you go. Oh, man. Yep. How about I take us to another quick tip? Yeah, let's rock and roll. Let's do this. So Dom writes in, he says, pro tip, if you turn off iCloud on your Mac and turn it back on, and there are times, especially in troubleshooting, you need to do that.
If you turn it off and turn it back on you have to turn on iCloud photos separately in the app ask me how I know he says thank you Tom when this tip came in I was like oh that explains it because I realized recently on one of my Macs that it was turned off in photos I'm like what like how did this happen I turned off my photo did that yeah who did this and it turns out it was me yeah oh Oh, I know that guy. But, like, that's super important to know.
Yes, it is. And it would be nice if maybe there was a, you know, like a little tip window or something from Apple that said, hey, by the way.
Hey dumb dumb yeah well but like it's not dumb dumb either like you turn iCloud off it turns off everything you turn it back on and it doesn't turn on everything some of the things come back on, it's just wrong are we are we sure and the only reason I ask is because remember a few weeks back when I said for my developer thing I have this developer iCloud account that I have to log in and log out of like constantly sure um and so i'm switching back and forth between
that and my own personal account and at least on my work computer every time i re-log into my account, and i i'm assuming this is because i have this setting set up on other machines.
It turns everything back on on my work mac which i don't want so i cloud documents right i cloud photo library it's all on and i mean i scramble to turn it off and i even have to do the thing with documents where it says do you want to remove the documents from this mac yes i absolutely do because i don't want these documents on this mac because that's my personal it's your personal work machine so i don't know i don't know what the triggers are what the keys are yeah but photos
is one of the things that sort of automatically re-enables it automatically comes on and i don't want my personal photos on my work mac either so i kick that off as well huh yeah and kiwi gram and contacts and and calendar and like i have to go into all the settings and toggle all of the all the things all the things and i definitely see all of those turn on and i thought icloud photos was re-enabled but certainly on my one of my macs in recent month or maybe two i noticed was not sinking my
photos down anymore uh and and so maybe it was this it certainly seems from dom's note like he found it that way kiwi graham in the chat says that he too has the habit of checking both everything in system settings and the photo settings for icloud photos but he says i don't know that this is a 100 rule so there there must be as you're saying Adam. Some criteria where this does or doesn't happen.
Checking both is a good thing to do yeah i was gonna say the takeaway is to check them yes yes even if you don't have to turn it on check it yeah yeah exactly very fair point god that's one of those to marty i mean no not yet if you don't mind indulging me well there's like those things that we do on our max on a semi-regular basis now right that i feel like this now needs It needs to be added, at least for me, to that list. And the list I'm talking about is going into system settings.
I probably do this once a month where I go into system settings. Privacy and security, and especially like full disk access, accessibility and screen sharing or screen and system audio recording or whatever it is. I go in there and make sure that all the things that I want on are on because invariably some of them are off and and I don't know that they're off and I will run into some problem down the road where it's like, oh, hey, this thing isn't working because this is off.
Like i'm looking in full disk access half the things in here are off on on this computer and i i want all of them on i i trust i'm i'm running these apps i want them to be able to open and save from anywhere without bothering me so now i have to add this other thing like go into photos and make sure that it's on there so i don't know interesting yeah yeah like like i'm looking at This is shocking to me that all of these things are just off.
And I want to turn them on right now, but I know it's going to break everything. So I have to sit on my hands for a minute. Yeah, exactly. Yes, please take us to Marty. All right. So Marty has a quick tip. He says, with all the discussion about Sequoia's iPhone mirroring, I was surprised to learn that you can mirror your Apple Watch on your iPhone. It's an accessibility feature.
Not sure there are a lot of use cases for this perhaps the posse can muse a little bit and come up with a use case cool feature though so you go into apple watch settings accessibility and just flip on apple watch mirroring turn on uh assistive touch enable assistive touch if it's not on already turn on mirror my apple watch by scrolling down and enabling the mirror my apple a watch option.
Huh. I tried this out and it totally works. I don't know what the 100% use case would be but, you know brought my iphone or my apple watch right up on my iphone screen.
Really like with without you're not running beta software this is like in the current releases it's just part of accessibility yeah it's that around it's not it's not a new accessibility, seems to be the way to do the you know if you get it's easier to touch your iphone screen than your than your watch screen is particularly if you aren't running these cool ultras that dave even i have and then uh which has that nice bigger screen but i think the other uh thing is it's demo somebody
how to you know here here's how you do this here's how you do that oh wait that's the use case let's say we were doing a podcast that had a video component and we wanted to show somebody how to do things on our apple watch there is no way to like show the apple watch on the screen But there is a way using QuickTime to show your iPhone screen or AirPlay like other like Zoom has. You can AirPlay your, you know, your phone to Zoom or whatever.
And so you could mirror your watch on your phone and then mirror your phone on your Mac. To your TV. To your TV, yeah, yeah, yeah. To your TV. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, we're heading down the inception path again. That's right. But it's one way only. You're not able to control your watch. You're just able to see it, right, Adam? No, you can fully control your watch from your iPhone screen. Oh, well, then I don't know.
Okay. You can completely interact with it, just like the new iPhone mirroring in Sequoia. Yeah. So I guess Mac gets the iPhone mirroring. Your iPhone gets your Apple Watch mirroring. And my Vision Pro gets my Mac mirroring. So I wonder if you could do all the way. Could we go all the way? Can I mirror my Apple Watch to my phone and then my phone to my computer and then my computer to my... Vision Pro. Vision Pro. 100%, yes. All these mirrors, you're going to fall down in the looking glass.
This begs another question.
If you're on your Vision Pro, right, and you get a notification on your watch and you pull your watch up does that it given that these are all apple devices i would expect if not now sometime later down the road that when you lift up your apple watch you will get in your vision pro an analog or a you know a mirror of your apple watch on the screen because you should be able to touch it yeah exactly i don't know yeah i guess you can if If you're not in full opaque mode,
you could see your Apple Watch through the Vision Pro? You can. It doesn't work that great. Same thing with your phone. I mean, it's not ideal. But you can, yeah, you can see it. And you can interact with it. But you can also do screen recording on your phone if you wanted to create a demo for somebody. Yes. Then mirror your watch there and record it that way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, this is making my brain work. That was a rabbit hole we fell down.
Yeah, exactly. All right, who's saving us? Oh, it's me. It's my fault now. Mark, this is not going to save us, by the way. It is a quick tip. I don't know what the use case is for this, but it's cool to know. Mark M. in Discord pointed out, he says, you want to tell the difference between an Intel MacBook versus an Apple Silicon MacBook? Well, if you can see the keyboard on an Apple Silicon, the function key has a globe on it, and the Intel Mac does not.
And as Mark completes his thought, useless but cool info. And I agree. It is cool. I don't know. Isn't there also the screen thing? Wait, Adam, go. Sorry. The screen thing. So Intel machines, I think, all still said MacBook underneath the screen, like on the screen. Whereas I believe M1s, it's embossed on the bottom of the case. Sure. Sure. It's not on the bottom of my screen. Oh, it's not? Yeah. Do you have an Intel? Because I have an M2 MacBook Pro.
Yeah. Got it. Yeah, so it's embossed on the bottom. Oh, on the bottom of the, on the lower case underneath the key. Bottom of the, yeah. If you open the screen, it's not on the screen. Oh. And as we, as I speculated pre-show, it just helps you to quickly identify whether or not you get to shame the person for not being up to date on a nice M1, you know. Oh, you don't shame Adam for not having an Apple Silicon computer when he's around, Pete.
That's right. Why not? He's shaming us for not having the vision. Yeah, well, there's that. That's right. That's right. We're like cavemen. We have to walk around using our eyes and see the real world. We respectfully shame each other. There you go. That's not for now because we're in quick tips, but that's a whole discussion we should have too because at some point, because I'm in a place, so it's worth having a conversation at some point.
Oh, all right. We are doing the next 1046, if all goes according to plan, and I really hope it does because otherwise, I don't know when we're going to record 1046, but 1046, we plan to record live at Maxstock on uh friday the 12th yeah okay cool yeah uh i don't know that we'll be able to live stream that recording but we will record it so maybe maybe that's a conversation to have on stage at max talk that would be an are you gonna bring your vision pro oh yeah
yeah barry's bringing his as well so i think there's going to be a few people who have not tried them out so we're gonna bring bring plenty of stuff with them so you can yeah yeah exactly all right moving okay how yeah i think i think i need to take us to uh gary he writes in hi mgg crew beware of the battery drain in the 1969 data issue is what it's about uh i wrote a while ago about the december 31 1969 issue affecting MacBook Pros issued by the company for which I work.
Even with the latest Sonoma builds, it still keeps happening. This is caused by the MacBook's main battery running at zero percent and the laptop shutting down. The problem is that when the employee attempts to gain access to the network using Cisco's secure VPN, the program will tell them that the computer does not meet Cisco's requirements for obvious reasons.
However, changing the date and time requires admin credentials since most of the organization's i.t staff including myself have windows computers using the basic windows remote assistance tool we can't help them i have a fist shake at apple as much as you charge for your computers bring back the pram cmos battery it works for windows laptops okay ran over keep up the great work team gary gary you're not wrong, Although what do you do When your CMOS battery goes dead right It takes a few
years They last a long time Yeah they do last a long time. Yeah, I don't know. Just don't run your battery to zero. That's the thing. Is there a way to teach users not to run their batteries to zero? The problem is that can happen while it's sleeping. Yeah, it's probably not intentional. If you leave it long enough, it can go to zero. So, yeah, I don't know. What do you think, Adam?
Well, this one confused me a little bit when he wrote in, because I had to think like, how long are these people leaving their machines at zero? Because Apple actually plans for this scenario. So your battery never goes completely like zero is not zero, zero, like zero. It's just kidding. Well, they leave enough for the exact scenario and your machine can sit there.
Like I, I know personally, I've gone on a vacation, left my My laptop, my Intel laptop at home, unplugged at zero, come back and it's been at zero for at least a week and I don't lose my, I've never lost my time on my machine that I'm aware of. So I've never seen this personally happen to me. So I'm just curious if these are specific machines or like it was a little baffling to me because that seems odd. But Kiwi Graham's saying he's seen it plenty of times with his clients.
So they're more out in the field than I am. So I only have one, one data point. One anecdotal case. Yeah. The one anecdotal case that I have is, and, and, and as we're talking about this and we'll see her this weekend, Again, quoting Kelly Goumont, you know, the plural of anecdote is not data. But in my case is my son's M1 Pro MacBook Pro or M1 something MacBook Pro, whatever it is.
Uh once he got a gig as a full-time software engineer for a company that uses linux or windows and they provided him with a computer he stopped using his macbook pro every day like when he was in college and all that stuff you know that was his primary machine so he was using it constantly both for work and you know entertainment and and whatever but he now a few times has had a thing where like the clock won't set right and it takes a few tries of like flipping
the date thing on and off or running the command line utility to sync up with the ntp server or whatever and get his clock going and i i think he's seeing this same thing or some version of this same thing he doesn't have to log into a vpn to get network access so he's not blocked from running the ntp client but even still like that's the thing and is that what was happening in your scenario adam like when you turned it on did it join the network and immediately sync up the clock yeah that's
what i'm thinking now yeah right i got false positive right yes so if i was locked out of any network but my vpn network by my company which it sounds like this is the case yeah yeah then. Your machine wakes up it cannot connect to a network. Because maybe it's forced to go straight to. Vpn right and now you're locked out that makes sense i yeah i think. That's i i think this happens more than any of us realize because during the boot up process the mac os runs.
The time sync demon the ntp actually the time sync client not the demon uh maybe it is a demon that runs as a client I don't know whatever it is doesn't matter it syncs the time with a network time server and my son's thing where it like half syncs is weird and it takes a few tries but he's seen it more than once on his machine but he also had like a college VPN on there so maybe there are some lingering remnants I'm
gonna this weekend I'll get with him and see if we can find something that would be getting in the way but yeah. One piece of advice. I was dealing with my daughter, working with my daughter this morning and dealing with her makes it sound like this was a chore. She was not being difficult at all. But her computer was today. They were away for a few days traveling and she had to do something which required her to like she needed to log into her bank or something.
And and so she needed to appear as though she was coming from the US. So she VPN into our VPN here at home and on her Mac and did the thing and then didn't turn it off, which was fine. Didn't seem to matter. She wasn't using her laptop a ton while she was traveling wasn't an issue.
You their connection at home in Italy as is the case for many people in their area and I think throughout Europe it's not uncommon that their home Wi-Fi is 5G to Wi-Fi there is no wired connection to their apartment and that's pretty common it's it's fine but like when I'm on a Zoom call with her I will notice that she'll drop off for three seconds and come back and I've had her check in the past her IP address has changed it's you know whatever is
happening yeah yeah yeah I mean it happens right it and it happens frequently enough that this is something that somebody who's gonna head down that path might want to bear in mind that you're not gonna have this stable connection all the time like you would with wired it will jump different towers especially depending on where you live like she might be in between two towers perfectly and so you know she's jumping from one to the other whatever and it's It's fine.
But the problem she was having all day today, her first day back, was that her computer would not stay online and it would go offline for great periods of time and super frustrating. And her phone, her fiance's phone, his laptop, everything else in the house was totally fine. So it wasn't a local internet issue. It was a specific to her computer issue. And I just happened to ask her, I'm like, did you use a VPN?
And she's like oh my gosh yes how did you know but she didn't like she already knew where we were going with this and because i deal with pete all the time yeah exactly that's how right yeah exactly that might actually be true um and so but anyway like these all these experiences you know they inform us as we go forward and that's why we share these on the show so that it's in the backs of our heads right and so this was in the back of my head and she's like oh my
gosh yes and she turned she went in and turned off her vpn and she's like and then we were on a call for like an hour she's like this is the longest i've been online all day and there was a moment where she you know dropped off and came back on the the three second drop or whatever that indicated that there was you know a shift in in the connection and but she came right back she's like oh yeah no this the problem is solved she's like i'm certain of this i'm like well you better
knock on wood when you say that you've only given it, you know, 40 minutes of testing here, but, uh, but like rim it, that the, the point I'm trying to share is. Remember to turn off your VPN after you have been using it. I had an issue on my iPhone and I took my dad to have some procedure at a hospital. Right.
And I waited for him and I was there for five hours or whatever, sat in the waiting room, put all my devices on a VPN because otherwise I couldn't check my email or something and everything worked fine and it was great. And then I got in the car and I could not get directions home.
My phone was not able to get online and it wasn't until, you know, and I had to do this while I was driving and my dad helped me cause he was there in the car, but he, he'd had a thing with his eyes so he couldn't really. But you know, I, I, I had to like launch, I think it was express VPN at the time that I had to launch that and turn it off. And then things kind of opened up, but that can really kind of get in the middle of your network stack.
And then when you're changing connections rapidly, the VPN may not recover or may not join as gracefully or as quickly. And then you're left without connection. Like we were dead in the water and I didn't know how to get home from this particular medical facility because I'd never been there before. I mean, I knew generally where I was, but not not enough to be like, well, I guess we go that way.
And it was it was frustrating. so beware you know turn your vpn off yeah so i don't know that's what i got you got any any more thoughts on that. Okay. Great. I got nothing. Great. Adam, you were, oh, you were drinking water or something. That's why you were shaking your head, I think. Okay. No, no, sorry. Yeah, I was making noise back here, so I turned my mic off. Ah, I got it. Okay. Yeah, yeah. All right. Oh, Kiwi Graham just states that he had to, he said,
I love this word, fully disinfect his Mac OS of PIA VPN because it screwed his network stack. Yeah. I mean, it intentionally gets into your network stack, especially if you turn on the feature that is, I forget what the name of it is, but there's essentially a feature that protects you from that moment that you have between when your network comes alive and when your VPN can connect.
And it will you can turn this feature on in many vpns pia is one of them but but there's several others that do this too where it blocks all network traffic until the kill switch the kill switch thank you beware the kill switch yeah yeah yeah and i wonder if well no my daughter wouldn't have had that on because she's just connecting to our local vpn so there's no there's no kill switch there but i think that was my problem in the car was probably the kill switch thing and certainly it sounds
like that was v it was kiwi grams issue yeah beware the vpn kill switch or at least be aware of the vpn kill switch so yep great all right yes we good.
Good good all right great tony has our our final quick tip and he says uh his watch uh gets tapped accidentally while he's working out and this was like causing issues sometimes it would stop a workout sometimes it would you know do other things that were undesirable in the moment and so what he sorted out was that uh if he turned on water lock then those taps would not get registered during his workout.
So the quick tip is turn on water lock on your Apple watch to keep those errant taps from disturbing your workouts. And, uh, Tony wrote a piece up, uh, about this on medium that I linked to in the show notes. And I will make sure that that link works for all of you. So, yeah, thank you for that, Tony. It's a good little, good Good little tip, right? I have a similar problem, but I think the only solution for it is to do the whole flip my Apple Watch thing.
And that happened this weekend because I was working a lot in the yard and I wear gloves.
And those gloves push the crown and then my watch goes you know it starts the alarm like i'm gonna do the panic alarm thing and the screen comes up and i have to click quickly cancel it because i'm weird worried it's gonna keep showing up yeah yeah happened probably three or four times when i was working in the yard it's like okay wow because i was gonna say it'd be nice if we could temporarily disable that but i don't think you want that because
you want that safety feature So I think that solution there is, you know, do the whole upside down, flip the screen, crown backwards tip that we've covered before. Well, you mean putting the crown on the, the, away from your hand as opposed to toward your hand, which is the proper orientation of the Apple Watch crown. I don't know. Like, I'd like to have the crown scrollable with my thumb and it turns out that my thumb would be on the inside of my, oh, Pete.
Sorry for the video i'm showing that it's scroll with my thumb still on my hand side yeah it's actually closer to my thumb i don't like it i don't like it so here's the other solution for that sit on the couch until the urge to work out goes away then you don't have to worry about errant taps that is the answer that's the best answer right there but adam remind us all because I don't know that I know what the use my Apple watch to trigger an emergency is.
Can you remind us of what that is? I think it's when you press and hold the crown for a few seconds, like two or three, five seconds. I don't know. It gets pushed in by the, uh, cause I wear leather. What's the other one? The action button. Cause the crown is giving me, uh, well, the S lady. You have an ultra that you, you, you like hold it down. That's true. I. I think, I mean, I'm pretty sure that's what triggers it. I'm looking up the Apple support article on this. I just know it happens.
Yeah, it says press and hold the side button. So it's not the crown. It's the button under the crown. Yeah, it's not the action button either, right? Right, yeah, because that's right. I mislabeled what I was trying to say, but yeah, the one next to the crown is the one that brought up the... I just assumed it was the crown. And that's amazing that the gloves can push that side button, which is, yeah. Yeah. So then it'd be probably the action button on the, you know, on the ultra.
Yeah. Interesting. Well, flipping it around would solve that problem too. Well, it would solve either problem. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It, it, yeah. It says, uh, press and keep holding the side button until your Apple watch issues a warning sound and starts a countdown. When the countdown ends, your Apple watch calls emergency services. All right.
Huh? Yeah. And I would, uh, I, you know, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, do take a fall and your watch says hey are you okay i wouldn't answer yes right away, take a minute to recage your gyros make sure you are indeed okay uh because my the story a year and a half ago almost two years ago now my mother-in-law fell and only because she couldn't figure out how to turn that off it wound up calling nine nine one one but she really tried
died she she was upset she just wanted to help to get up and go in the house she had a broken shoulder a concussion all these things and she couldn't get up and she was trying to turn it off so it wouldn't call 9-1-1 it's like no so if you fall let it call 9-1-1 they can you can always go it turns out I'm good yeah better safe than sorry I guess it's Pete's advice. All right, folks, you ever feel like your text editing is stuck in the stone age?
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and i love what you all do thanks for that scott yeah we love what you do too it's it it's it's teamwork that makes the dream work here it's awesome uh he says i need to remote into my dad's mac located in a different household i need to enter passwords for him and uh give him general help when he has issues we both have imax i have the m1 and he has the version just before the m1 came out so in intel fine i need this to be totally hands off for my dad since he is
struggling in his old age i can go to his house and set up anything i need to in his settings if i need to grant me access ahead of time so that i can do this thanks for all you do keep on keeping on thanks scott you want to uh you want to take this adam. Yeah. So it's a little bit tricky there because of the one requirement, because I think the easiest way to do this on a Mac is to use screen sharing and messages, right?
So you can go into messages and you can say, I want to share my screen or request someone share your screen. And then they have to like, say, yes, do it. So you do need that interaction. Um, and his dad would have to accept that control access, but I think that's absolutely the easiest way to get somebody who's not real technical to do a remote screen share. In this case, because he doesn't want any interaction, the next step would be to use something like Apple Remote Desktop on his machine.
And that would allow him to go in to settings, set that up and remotely control the Mac. Apple actually has a really good guide for setting it up.
And then there's even a more comprehensive user guide that covers like all of the features and setup and stuff like that they're really really good so if you're getting into this I would encourage you to read this because there still might be some challenges depending upon the network stuff so modern routers should handle the need for like opening ports on demand for this kind of feature so hopefully you don't run into that
problem with universal plug-and-play and this This technology has been around for a while. If you do run into issues, you might have to get into some networking stuff on the router or firewalls and look at ports and opening ports. I have a link to a list of all the ports that are used for Apple Remote Desktop. They're pretty much the same as for VNC, which you can also enable in Apple Remote Desktop.
So if you want to use not Apple's client, but a different VNC client to connect, you can set that up. I say all this with the caveat that if you set this all up, you need to be very careful with all this because you're opening access to these services. And essentially, by opening those up, you are opening them up to everyone. It's not just you, right? These ports and connections, the machine's going to respond on these ports, right?
So absolutely make sure you can tie the settings to a specific account on the Mac and make sure that account has a really secure password, I mean, it's locked down and all that stuff. So that's great. In reality, after having said all that, the other thing I can think of is you may want to look into setting up a personal VPN. A bit outside of my expertise, but I know Dave and Pete have experience with that.
So I know you guys use something like Tailscale, which I think can allow you to do some of this stuff. I don't know how technically difficult that is or challenging but yeah security becomes a problem right anytime you start opening up services on your mac that are allowing remote connections so i'm always a little bit hesitant to be like hey just open everything up and it'll be i'll be fine but i i think it's mostly okay if you as long as you know what you're doing.
Do you do this with anyone currently p i have some thoughts and i i have some potential answers uh I do. And again, I go back to my mother-in-law's story. I use Apple screen sharing and her Apple ID. Okay. So, but she has to be there and grant you access. She has to be there and grant access. Other than that, for my, to reach my Mac mini from around the world, which I use as a media server, I use a jump desktop, which is as close to flawless as you can be.
Now that's a paid product and to do it free i use tail scale screen sharing and tail scale yep and it's as idiot proof as it can possibly be on the proof i can get it done. Tail scale and screen sharing to get to your own computer is practically flawless uh it's just as simple as can be but if you don't even want to work that hard jump desktop, is a paid product, and I found it to be fantastic. Okay. Yeah. So that's my answers. Yeah.
No, that makes sense. Do you know approximately what the pricing is of Jump Desktop? It wasn't much. It was like $15 or $20. Okay. All right. Great. Okay. So not- I think. Let me verify that. Did you download it from the Mac App Store? Is that what you did? I don't remember. It's $15 on the Mac App Store. Yeah, there you go. There we go, yeah. All right, so that's... And Jump Desktop, essentially what he's asking here is... I want to get access to an unmanned computer that is awake.
Like that's really what we're talking about here is no user interaction. So let's just pretend there's no user there. And then we can have this conversation. Like log me in used to be the answer for this. And you could, you could do it up to like three or four computers for free. I don't, I don't think that's like still a thing. Right. I haven't, we haven't talked about it on the show for a long time, but, but maybe it still is. I don't know.
Yeah. Maybe it'll, it's go to my PC, right. Is what they, they rebranded that. But yeah, there's no free version of that anymore. There's yeah. Okay. Got it. Got it. And so you're paying, yeah, $33 a month or something, which is like more than you want to spend. Okay. So we got jump desktop. The other one is screens from Adobe, Adobe Adobe, uh. That run, you run a screens connect client on your, uh, on the Mac in, in like the head, the unmanned Mac runs screens connect.
And that then allows it, that does all the firewall traversal and all that stuff. And, and then you're good to go. And you just, and then you use screens and, uh, and get yourself in.
And that that would be the yet another path to do this too so yeah cool and that's edovia edovia yes thank you yep yep so dumb question i mean again i don't a lot of these just use all the same underlying technologies like apples is still like the standard open ports for vnc and remote desktop and like all that stuff under the hood like are any of these actually really doing anything different and are they inherently more secure because you're running
some other client you know host software on the target machine and some other client i i think where if you want to do it for for for free using apple's tools only the answer is as you said you have to poke those those holes in your firewall, which then opens you up to the world. If you use tail scale, you like that's also free, but it's not using only Apple's tools. But but it's free for, you know, the use case ish that we're talking about here.
Then there's the holes automatically. Well, it doesn't poke holes. It creates that essentially a VPN where there are no holes for the public to even attempt to get in. And if they can't log into your tail net, then there's nothing to even brute force attack other than the username and password or the authentication for your tail net. Most of us are using Google's OAuth for it anyway. So that then adds as many layers of security as you want to add to your Google account.
So that would be the difference there, Adam, is yes. Yes. And something like screens connect is doing a similar thing via different methods where it's not just opening you up to the world. It's opening you up to people who can log into your screens account. And so there's that layer of security. And with that, you get some version of security by obscurity. People don't know and they can't just find by your IP address that this is something we should attack.
You know, you don't have that port for a VPN just wide open. So I think that's that's where this these other solutions would be more secure. Now, with each of these, you're right. You're opening yourself up to a third party's access to your network.
Work and so you know do you trust the people at jump desktop or you know go to my pc or screens or somebody else mentioned any desk in the chat i've not heard of any desk before at least if i have i've forgotten about it but um but you know that's the god i was gonna say any desk is the common one that uh. The hackers will ask you to install on your machine. And I think it requires a code. It's great software.
That's not, I'm not knocking it. Sure, sure. I use it because it works really great for remote control. And you install it. I mean, you have to convince the person to install it first, right, on their machine. And then I know it pops up a code that, you know, you then give them like, yeah, okay, here's the code, type in this code, and that'll allow me to connect. I'm pretty sure it's the way it works. But no, I mean, it is good.
Remote access software as well got it it's not to knock it but i watch i watch a lot of.
Scammer videos and they use that and a few others there's like common ones but any desk actually works with a lot of them to help thwart and stop the these people as well so all right yeah that's good to know so um go ahead sorry one more thing on the screens thing so So, yeah, I was only asking about the connectivity because I used to use the screens client to connect to VNC like totally it was a VNC client,
but I didn't know about the connect piece of it that they have now. So I think that's newer. Yes, that that's a different. It's an add on, obviously, to the screens client. But you're totally right. Right. The screens client is, you know, to say just a VNC client sort of takes away from how excellent screens is as a VNC client. But it is a VNC client. It just happens to be one that you can run on your phone and you can run on your iPad and it works really well.
And they've built it to sort of live within the limitations of the interface of the device in a very smooth way. And and that it is the vnc client that i use primarily on my phone and an ipad because of that so yeah it.
All right that was good yeah yeah good discussion and before i take us to david i will mention that because i don't think we've said it but vnc stands for virtual network computing for for the newbies out there no i i i don't know that i could have told you what it stood for i'm sure i've heard it before but it didn't it didn't register so thank you yeah yeah yeah so david writes in and he says i really like thunderbird but i started using apple mail
or using browser for emails it It seems Thunderbird running in the background takes well over 600 megabytes of memory. Wow. You know, I never even checked that. On a recent show, I heard one of you also like to use Thunderbird. So I was curious, do you leave it running or close it after each time you use it? Note, I like leaving it running due to the alerts one gets for Apple Calendar and Mail. Dave.
Yes. So I think that the way to approach this question is, should I leave my apps running all the time in general or what apps, which apps should I leave running all the time versus which app should I quit on a regular basis? Specifically with Thunderbird, because, yes, I use Thunderbird. It is my primary mail client these days, as you know, if you've listened long enough. And i so i leave it running all the time because i want it to check my mail however i do have it.
Essentially relaunch itself once per day and the reason for that is because and and this is more proactive thunderbird itself has not proven to be problematic but mail certainly proved to be problematic if i let it run for more than two or three days in a row safari the same way uh i i I have that, I use Marco Arment's Quitter, which is a free app. And man, it's awesome. You can set after X number of minutes of inactivity, not of the computer, but of the app.
So if I haven't been in an app, if I set it to 10 minutes of inactivity, I could be using a different app on my computer and it will know that I haven't touched that app in 10 minutes and it'll quit it, which is an amazing way to manage things on the Mac. Like Marco should charge for this. He doesn't. And I'm thankful for him, you know, putting this out for all of us to use. But I love quitter. And so I that's what I use. I think I have Thunderbird, Safari and mail all set to 180 minutes, maybe.
Be and then that that way it you know it won't it basically quits overnight although I think I don't think I have I know I have Safari quitting with quitter I think with Thunderbird and mail I. I have their quit and relaunch as part of my begin the day script, which is a macro that I run in Keyboard Maestro that launches all my apps. The first thing it does is it quits Thunderbird if it's running.
Then it goes and launches all my other apps. And then at the end of it, I have it wait until Thunderbird is no longer running and then relaunch it. And that way it's always running. And if I'm out, it doesn't get quit and then just stopped, you know, stop running. But in general, the apps that I need to use, I leave them running. Safari, Messages, Thunderbird certainly is one of them. If I'm in Slack all day, yes, that too.
All of those things are fine to run. things like i i use safari as my primary browser so i have chrome and edge and firefox all set to quit after 30 minutes of inactivity so that if i launch one of those and i do something in it and then i move on to something else it just wipes it away file maker i have that set to quit after like an hour or whatever so that it i don't forget quickbooks i have set to 30 minutes because if i don't remember it's great because
it quits and backs up and does all its things so quitter is is sort of a keystone of my memory management, if you will, on my Macs. But like Thunderbird on this Mac is taking up almost two gigs, as reported by Activity Monitor of RAM. But I have 32 gigs of RAM on this computer. So I think it grows and shrinks based on what can be allocated. And macOS is so good at managing RAM these days that I don't think it's a big deal.
I was going to jump in and say, like right now, I have 14 programs running, and that doesn't include all the crust and crud up in my menu bar. Right, yeah. It is so robust compared to where it used to be even 10 or 12 years ago that I just leave it running. I don't think I've ever heard of quitter before, but I'll be grabbing that. I just find Safari and Mail certainly, you know. Do better if they're relaunched. Do better if they're relaunched once a day. Yeah. That's all. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Now I got to look and see, like, when am I relaunched? I know I'm relaunching Thunderbird. I think it might be part of my begin the day script, so. Oh, okay. But I can't remember now. Yeah. So, yeah, and I said I'd never heard of Quitter, and then it was Wassup mentioned he'd never heard of any, you had never heard of any desk.
He brought it up in there and he goes ah dave you're the one i heard about it from there you go okay you forgot you forgot about it yep yep oh i think i have a scheduled thing yes i have a keyboard maestro scheduled uh uh script macro whatever that happens at like 7 a.m every day and it quits and relaunches thunderbird that's that's where that happens so yeah i knew there was something i knew i did it somewhere but yeah all right anyway you got anything on that adam thoughts
no i'm a quitter that's all i had i i quit everything all the time but that's just because that's how i am that there's no there's no rational reason for doing that in my opinion with the modern operating system like i have no problem with people leaving stuff open the the memory management resource management on the mac is good enough now that you know it'll do things in the background and very low power mode. And as long as you haven't tweaked all the settings and stuff like that.
So I think most people don't have to worry about it, but I just like having everything shut down when I leave my computer for the day. So I quit everything at the end of the day and start everything back up in the morning. Yep. Makes sense. Makes sense. All right, shall we move on to Karsten's need for speed? The big one, Karsten's need for speed. Yeah, I'm going to try and do my best to get into this one.
But basically, Karsten says he needs an NVMe Gen 5 SSD drive installed in an enclosure that's also a 5 Gen because he wants to maximize the speed for video editing. He does video editing for his company. He uses DaVinci Resolve, has a ton of video content from his iPhone and from 360 video sources that's super large. So he's dealing with like terabytes of video, just lots of stuff.
And he's looking for the ultimate solution that is going to give him speed when editing with his M2 Max Studio, which is fully loaded on disk size and memory. It's connected to a wired 10 gigabit network. network and he uses Synology with 10 gigabyte gigabit cards. So he's wondering, can he make it faster by moving to Thunderbolt at 40 gigabit gigabits instead of 10 gigabits on his network?
And he is thinking about, again, getting a enclosure, USB-C and NVMe Thunderbolt enclosure and directly connecting that when he's working. And then at the end, he can copy it to the Synology, I'm assuming over the network when he's done.
But basically his source editing material is going to be on this NVMe drive, presumably connected to a USB Thunderbolt enclosure, but he's having trouble finding one that's a NVMe Gen 5, which I guess is the latest generation and apparently has some speed improvements. At least that's what he says in this this question. But then where I got lost with this a little bit was he says the enclosure that he's been looking at is a Satachi hub and.
For the Mac studio, which is like a little stand and it has extra ports. And this is going to be good for him because it also has like an SD card slot. So he can transfer stuff from his SD card slot and all this stuff. And it has the NVMe slot in it. So you can install a SSD NVMe, but the problem is, and he's thinking about using the crucial T700 four terabyte.
Uh, but the issue is that uh that hub is a gen 4 not a gen 5 so he was worried about the speed um but where i got lost on this was that that hub is not thunderbolt it is usbc so the connection to the mac is still going to be restricted to 10 gigabits because it's usbc and not thunderbolt and so i don't know sometimes it gets a little bit confusing because thunderbolt goes over a usbc connector.
But not all usbc is thunderbolt so i don't know if that's coming into play here or not or maybe and also not all usbc is is the same either right like this is a 10 gigabit usbc port on this hub you can have 40 gigabit usbc with usb4 now right like it's just a connector it's it's not right transmission speed but this one you're right is limited to 10 gigs It's a 10 gig. It's a 10 gig device.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and so Getting to his question, you know, what's the fastest thing I can get and knowing that he's doing video editing I. Immediately thought well you probably want Thunderbolt SSD enclosure and, More ideally something like a raid and OWC makes a great product called the
Thunder blade that is specifically for this It's rugged. It's portable. It's small and, it's designed for like hyper performance and i know i would go with something like that it's a lot more expensive than this solution that he's looking at but yes it is but he said he wants ultimate speed money no object so you know i i think if that's really what you're going for and it's for high-end large video editing that's i mean this product's designed for that that.
So I would look at something like that. I don't know. I don't know if there's a bigger advantage with the NBME5, you'll get more performance, but I mean that, that one, I forget what they speed on it. They said was, but it like, it's, it's really fast. Um, and then he kind of had a bonus question, which I went looking for this and he, cause he said, uh i think he has an iphone pro that you can now with the usbc connection i believe.
Record video right to an external drive oh yeah and he was like asking about that because he's got to set it up and like he doesn't want a drive sort of dongling off of it and hanging off the camera when it's on a gimbal and messing things up and so that made me think i wonder if they make like mag safe SSDs now for iPhones and they, I couldn't find that, but I did find an enclosure from hyperdrive.
That is a mag safe SSD enclosure that you can basically clonk on to the back of your iPhone with mag safe, which was pretty cool. What? Oh, or you could do, you could do DIY with mag safe stickers, I guess was the other option, right? Oh, sure. By mag safe stickers. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. On like Amazon for 12 bucks. and find a small enclosure, even an NVMe one. And pop that on the back of your phone, and then you kind of got it all in one.
But that would be the way I would go with the OWC thing. But again, maybe someone knows. Maybe there is an NVMe Gen 5 enclosure out there that I didn't find one. Yeah, well, I mean, it's interesting because you brought up Hyper. They seem to live in this world. I have one of their USB 4 NVMe SSD enclosures. And it's actually, it's a cool little thing. It's got this rubberized case that sort of encloses the enclosure, if you will. And then the enclosure itself just pops open with your hand.
And you can pop the, you know, NVMe in there. And it's got sort of little gradations in there and you move a little, like a little nub to hold the different sized, you know, SSDs in there. So for 120 bucks, you can get up to 40 gigabit speeds of your, of NVMe. And so like that would be a thing I'm looking to see.
So this supports nvme pcie gen 4 and gen 3 it does not support gen 5 so i went and looked at what's the difference here and i think the first thing we should address and i'm i'm dancing on the edge of telling you more than i know uh is is what nvme is versus like versus all the other acronyms that that we use here right and so nvme is a a solution to the problem uh where ssds are super fast right we know that so fast that their limiting factor is
the bus to which they are connected and so you know you have these computers with really fast buses in them uh you know fast Like motherboard buses. And then you've got these SSDs that are super fast. And this is part of, but not the only reason that Apple does this whole unified memory thing where the SSD and the RAM are all together there because SSDs are super fast.
As long as you can get any other interface out of the way, it makes accessing the data on that SSD much more efficient than, say, if you had it connected to a SATA 3 connector, right? If you plug in a super fast SSD to a SATA 3 connector, that SATA 3 connector is the weak link in the chain, so to speak, right?
It's the thing slowing you down. enter nvme non-volatile memory express and it's this standard to allow these ssds to operate at the read write speeds that their flash memory is actually capable of and so that's where this obsession and or interest depending on your level uh comes in with with nvme so that's what nvme is and you know um sata 3 is like you know 600 megabytes per second um you know so like that's pretty that like we have ssds connected like
our thunderbolt ssds that we get from like owc go to 2800 megabytes per second well it ain't no sata 3 bus in there that's just nvme to thunderbolt right and you're you're good to go so it was a bus created four ssds gen 3 nvme goes as fast as 3500 megabytes per second gen 4 goes 7 000 megabytes per second so i don't think your that's faster than a thunderbolt interface so i you might want gen 5 because it's one notch higher I don't have the speed
of Gen 5 right in front of me here. I know I can pull it up here. Let's see. PCIe Gen 4, depending on the number of lanes that you're using with it, can either go to, yeah, two gigabytes, so 2000 megabytes.
Uh 4 000 or 8 000 so one lane is 2 000 megabytes one lane of pcie gen 5 is 4 000 megabytes so there's a world where you use a single lane pcie 5 uh nvme thing and you're maxing out your thunderbolt speeds but i think there's a less expensive way to get there i don't think you need to go gen 5 but i told you that i was telling you more than i know or i was dancing close to the edge of that and i've now like sped past it the the edge of of my knowledge is
so far back i can't even see it in the rear view mirror so feedback at mackeycap.com if you know more about this i know there's parts of this the intro to this i definitely got right the last little bit there i'm not so sure so let us know please wait wait where feedback at mackeycap.com. I believe he said feedback at mackeycap.com. It's our only help. That's right. All right. Yeah. So. Wow. That was questions answered. Cool stuff found. Quick tips all in one, brother.
Yeah. That is, that is correct. Nicely done. That is correct. Yeah. Uh, whoo. Now I need like a break in a, what's that? Yeah. Well, and I'm supposed to read the next one, but I'm sitting here just enthralled with what you're saying, that I didn't have it up and ready, but I do now. Okay, that's fine. Let's jump there. Yeah, yeah, sure. So... Those are cool. I'm going to go back and listen to that and look at that over and over again because there's stuff I want to get.
I need to learn from myself on that one too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the Thunderblade, whoa, cool, but ouch. Well, for people who need that, that is a correct answer. Fair enough. And he said money is no object. I need the equipment. Obviously, it's what he does.
He needs something to accomplish the task. and i just go back to 35 years ago i got my my first windows computer and it had a 40 megabyte spindle hard drive yeah i know and i just like i had that 40 same 40 meg drive and i thought man i will never need more than this never fill that pig up yeah and now you're writing 600 megabytes per second when you're slow when you're really slow with the slow one that's right yeah Yeah. Per second.
Wow. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, Terry writes in, he says, I have a 2017 iMac that's starting to show some age. I'm looking at a Mac mini to replace it. And I'm thinking of using the Luda display to repurpose the iMac as a monitor. What is your feeling about Apple's base gig, uh, eight gig unified Ram, an M2 mini with base eight gig Ram or jump to the 16 gigs.
The mini would be used for photo editing so how good is unified ram is apple still shortchanging us on ram where's the 8 gig unified equal to the old 16 gigs signed terry and that that nicely dovetails from the it does actually yeah i didn't quite realize how well these two paired together um, So we know what unified memory is. We know that it's efficient. We've already established that. Terry, I know that we are the right people to ask questions exactly like this.
I am also exactly the wrong person to ask because I can't bring myself to order any Mac with the base eight gigs of RAM.
However i know many people that have and do things like you know moderate photo editing and it's fine so i think for some purposes and some people and it might even be the majority currently eight gigs is enough however i like to run my max for long periods of time ram can no longer be upgraded on max we know that and so i always order with at least my my m series max my apple silicon max i've always ordered with at least 16 gigs and if i was ordering one today that would be my my floor would
be 16 gigs of ram the one here in the studio it's a max studio so So it's got 32 because this is the minimum configuration you could ever have gotten with a Mac Studio. My M2 Air that I had to buy last summer because of the lightning storms, that came with 24. And so obviously it's fine. Like, great, 24 gigs. But in my office, which is the machine that I use most, is my currently least powerful Mac.
It is an OG M1 Mini from 2020 with 16 gigs of RAM, and I don't notice any RAM starvation-style issues. So that's my answer, and I know it's a non-answer. What do you think, Adam? Like, would you buy an 8-gig Mac? I totally would. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, there you go. In a heartbeat. Pete. I have a 8 gig M1 for work and I've had that for a few years now. I think it's a 14 inch and it's great.
I've never had any issues with it. My wife has an M1 Air with 8 gigs and, It really comes down to many of those things that you're talking about, right? Like what are your use cases? Like he says, photo editing, how heavy photo editing are we talking about? Like pro level, like if you're a professional photographer and that's your bread and butter and it's your money and how you make a living and it's really important to you and you're dealing with massive files and doing a lot with Photoshop
or something like that. Yeah. And then get the extra Ram. Like I would, I would go for it. But like, if you're just a hobbyist and you're editing photos and, you know, here and there and doing some light work and stuff like that, I think eight gigs is going to be totally, totally fine. I'd almost rather at this point spend the extra money on additional storage because I don't like having to attach a bunch of external things if I don't have to.
So, you know, it's a little give and take, but like I've never noticed memory issues on my work computer and I'm doing, you know, web development and programming and not real heavy stuff though. So, you know, if I, if I had higher needs, if I was doing video editing, you know, those sorts of things, I probably would go with Moran definitely for future proofing. So if you're the type of person like, I'm going to have this machine and it sounds like maybe he is, he's got a 2017.
That's the other thing though. Part of that question was, is, is eight the new 16 and in his world coming from a 2017 iMac, the answer to that question is yes it absolutely is it's going to be 16 gigs from 2017 is going to be the eight gigs now is going to be better than that you know the unified memory like it's going to be actually better than the 16 from yes 2017 but you know again that said i'd go up if you have higher needs or again if
you're looking for future proofing you know more is always better and it'll have better resale value you. I really wonder though if for most of us, me included, and I'm playing devil's advocate against myself here, I wonder if eight is enough. You know, like, is that... With what you're doing, my guess is you're just getting your work done. You're not obsessing about how your computer is managing RAM.
So you probably don't know the answer to the question that sits in my mind, which is, OK, this is great news to hear. Like that for years you a power user you know at some level for sure has survived with eight without even thinking about it the question is how often are you you know paging into swap right how often are you using the unified memory of the ssd sitting right next to that eight gigs of ram And remember, the SSD is also kind of RAM ish.
How often is that happening? And you don't even notice nor care. And then your thought about, well, wait, if you have a limited budget, which most of us do, it's how life works. Then spending more on the storage, especially for a laptop, might be a really smart move. I got to rethink my whole world here, Adam. That's where I would put my money, only because that's going to run out on me before. Because, you know, I don't throw things away. And, you know,
like, I don't want to deal with moving stuff around if I don't have to. I mean, I do. But, you know, like, I'd rather have that be more. And I think I even did that with my daughter needed a new laptop. And I got her an M2 Air. Do we have M3 Airs now? We do. It might have been. She needed it, but right before, obviously.
So i think i got her an m2 air um and i went with more storage for her rather than i just kept the base around the same and i think i went with the 512 like great mid-tier for her because that's plenty of storage but myself i'd go a terabyte or maybe more on the storage and probably stick with the eight i'm even looking at like as i was mentioning earlier we need to get into this conversation because my intel one is getting long in the tooth i kind of don't want to spend the money.
I was trying to look at pro versus air now, you know, and I think I'm still going to land on pro more just because the new pro is actually thinner than the air and lighter than the air.
And, but rather than like maxing out air and going with kind of a middle, middle or lower tier pro, like saving some money and they start to get pretty close to each other if you depending on how you're configuring and stuff like that so but we will we won't go into that diatribe because that'll be a longer conversation that'll be longer yeah okay but remember the advice used to be get as much ram as you can afford and you can always upgrade your
hard drive later which is no longer the case so and i think yeah so i think spending the money on the storage seems to be the answer i just looked while we were you guys were chatting my My M1 Mini also is the 8-gig version that I bought about a year and a half ago now. And it runs Plex. It runs channels. All that stuff. And... So that's video intensive. I mean, it isn't processing video, but it is.
Right, right. And I've never noticed any hiccups from it. Are you running iStat menus on, you don't have your, you guys don't have, you're not on either of those machines. I'm just curious, like what it says for swap memory usage up there. Just again, just because I'm curious, not that it has made, if it's using it, it clearly hasn't made any performance difference for you. I'm just curious where that falls. Yeah.
Yeah. The thing that you said earlier is the exact right thing, which is I don't know. But more importantly, I haven't cared. I don't care. It doesn't matter to me if it was using swap or not. Like, I wouldn't know the difference in day-to-day use. I mean, the one... I don't see beach balls. I don't see things slowing down. I don't... If you had seen beach balls, you would know how much swap it was using because you would have troubleshot your beach balls.
Correct yeah and that just doesn't happen anymore yeah it happens on my intel machine of course that's a whole different story yeah right no that right 16 on this one when apple silicon came out i remember saying like in general and i'm sure we said it here on this show that this is a different paradigm we have to sort of let go of our our you know institutional knowledge of this because it's currently wrong and and me holding on to those 16 gigs as a minimum it sounds like it's simply wrong
like it's part of that thing and I'm aware of this like this isn't something that's shocking to me that 8 works it's just I never took the leap of faith so yeah. But if you care, if you care, you care and you should spend the money. Like that's just what it comes down to. Like you have to know yourself and you have to know your use. It's the same conversation. It's still the same conversation I've always had with people is like, you have to sit down and decide what's really important
to you. And it doesn't matter the reasons why they're important to you. Like it could just be like, I want more or I think more is better. It's like, if that makes you happy, then get that and, and go with that. Yep. You know, more feels safer to me. You can change too. It's the insurance policy of more RAM than rather than the practical reality of needing it. And who knows, you know, will Apple intelligence require more RAM? And also, will it matter if that winds up being using more swap space?
Like, my guess is my guess is no. But who knows? Yeah. Who knows? We will. Well, you know. Well, you don't know about Apple intelligence yet, but you like, you know, about everything else because you're you do more with that computer than most people do with their computers. And you're fine with eight gigs. And Pete, your Mac mini that's running as a server servers are a little different.
You know that the thing that is offensive to RAM is the launching and quitting of many or launching and not quitting, as we talked about earlier, of many different apps servers. You can kind of get up and running and then you sort of leave them alone. You know, you're not launching and quitting apps all the time. They're just staying. Right, right. But I wasn't, but I did just install iStat menus from Setapp on my Mini while we were chatting there.
So we'll see how, you know, I'll check that out occasionally and see how it's going. Yeah, just look in the memory dropdown. Like it doesn't need to collect the data. It's look, it's real time. Can you see in, if you have a memory dropdown installed yet and you might not, is there a swap memory entry? Uh, I, I might, since I just installed it, not likely, but, uh, let's see what, um, memory drop down. You know what? You can see this in activity monitor too.
Just launch, launch activity monitor and go to the. Well, I didn't, I'm already looking at the memory drop down and I just had menus cause it's that fast, but, uh, don't see, uh, wired active compressed. Um, look, look farther down. The most I'm using is 2.3 gigs. There should be one that says swap memory. Swap memory. Oh, yeah. 242 of one gigabyte. Megabytes of one gigabyte. Okay, so you're using a quarter of a gigabyte of swap on that machine. Okay, there you go. That's the answer.
But have never once noticed. Yeah, you don't have an issue with it. A hiccup.
Here's the one case you might make is if you get more and you're doing less swap, up we know there's a longevity with ssds in terms of read rights so but again i would argue with modern ssds most people are never going to at the end of life of their ssd before they have to replace their their mac yeah right that's yeah well i don't know 10 years like is the ssd gonna last 10 years because macs tend to last 10 years now like in terms of their processing usefulness
this but maybe sure yeah so yeah that would be the one thing where where yes that's a great point love that yep more wear and tear i mean if you have if you're doing more swap you're obviously doing more wear and wear and tear and totally be fair yes yeah but more storage means more, of those overflow sectors on the ssd that we talked about recently and maybe it all kind of it comes out in the wash. I don't know. I don't know. These are the things that require us to do another episode.
Plus, I want to ask you about, I want to find out about your computing decisions. Oh, the sonology. And I want to ask about your sonology, but we are long past the time where we must say goodbye for today. So we're going to say goodbye for today. But good news. We have material in the can for the next episode. And between now and then, we know that all of you are going to send those things into feedback at MacGeekGab.com and give us even more material.
And that's awesome because here's the thing. We have feedback at MacGeekGab.com. We didn't talk about premium here this episode specifically, but we also have premium at MacGeekGab.com. We do answer the stuff that comes into premium first. We tend to prioritize that. And that's how that works. However, we also endeavor to answer everything that comes into feedback at MattKeyCab.com every week. Sometimes we miss that mark, but we usually get caught up eventually, too.
So it's rare that something just lingers out there forever and never gets answered. Might not get addressed in the show because we pick things for the show that we think are going to be good for the show. So the questions that come in, the secret is, it's not so much of a secret, that we do try to answer everything that you folks send us. And so please, you know, keep them coming. It's great. And you will almost certainly get an answer from us within about a week.
Give yourself about a week. If you need or want. Answers potentially faster. Join our discord at Mac geek out.com slash discord, because not only are we there answering things and contributing and participating so much, uh, there is so much activity from so many of great people, really smart people, people smarter than us in our community here that the hive mind, that is where the Mac geek out hive mind exists is in real time.
Anyway, is, is, is the discord. so go check out discord folks in there too oh it's amazing and the conversations it is like the best of social media because i've never seen people like get like people disagree about things all the time i mean of course like you know i need i need 16 gigs i need eight and then we have a productive conversation about it those productive conversations are what happen in discord too and And so you really get that nitty gritty of why someone thinks a certain way.
And everybody's really open to other opinions. There have been no flame warmers in there. Not a one. If there have been one, it's probably me that started it or something. But that's my fault. I'm going to have to ban you, Dave. You know what? Ban me. If I break the rules. Ban yourself. I guess we do have rules there, but we've never had to enforce them. other than the very occasional drive-by spammer that joins the community or something. That happens. But even that's super rare. Knock on wood.
In the Discord, the channel to go to is MGG Help Desk if you need something right away. Thanks for hanging out, folks. Thanks to BareBones.com and BB Edit for being our sponsor. We look forward to seeing you at MacStock. I think that coupon is still good, at least as of the day this episode releases, which is MacGeekGab. That saves you $30 on your admission. It also gets us $30, which is a nice little perk. But really, it saves you, and that's the key. So we'll see you there.
We hope, if not, we'll release the episode that we record there one way or another. And any last-minute advice or thoughts or anything from you, Adam, before we head off? uh don't get caught that'll work made. Music.