It's time for Mac Geek Gab and listener Joe brings us our quick tip of the week with a follow-up from last week in episode 1009, where we were talking about a cool stuff found and some other methods of pasting text without formatting. Joe says you can also accomplish this natively in macOS by using command shift V which gives you paste without formatting from the edit menu. You. Other listeners suggested this as well.
You're right, Joe. This is a great way to do it and it works in my experience about 99% of the time and that's probably why those other tools and utilities exist to do it when it doesn't. More quick tips like this plus your questions answered today on Mac Geek Hub 1010 for Monday, November 20th, 2023. Music. Greetings folks, and welcome to Mac Geek Gab, the show where you send in quick tips like that.
You send in cool stuff found, like we mentioned, you even send in your questions, which we do our level best to answer, and we stitch it all together into an agenda, loosely organized, maybe by topic or theme, such that it makes it easy for each and every one of us to learn at least five new things every single time we get together. Sometimes we even play that sound when we learn something especially notable for us.
Sponsors for this episode include linkedin.com slash MGG, where you can go and post your first job for free. 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 Haven, Mississippi, showing some love down there, Pilot Pete. Good to be here, Dave. Thanks for having me back. I mean, it's thanks for coming back. It's what we do. It's like we're here together. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. We are.
And it is the two of us today, and I believe it'll be the two of us the next time, however. It is, Dave. But here's the thing, you know. I have a day job, or a night job in some cases, and I'm sick of carrying the show on my back week after week after week, week in and week out. You know I have to answer two or three questions while you prepare and produce and answer questions and get the advertising and record the advertising and put the show together and put it out.
The burden is tough for you, Pete. We all feel for you. Do you have a solution for me, Dave? Um, you know, it's interesting. I didn't have a solution for you. I didn't know what it was going to be and then we were at Max stock and the way Max stock works is the logistics are a typical for a conference. I was going to be kind about it. But yeah, it's weird, right? Because you don't stay at the place where the conference happens.
So you have to drive to and from the other aren't good hotels right there. Right. And so this year, because of other logistics, we were about 15, maybe 20 minutes drive from the hotel where we stayed to the center and to the venue. And so I had rented a car and I said, well, you know, we can carpool a little bit. And you and I carpooled each day and there was one other person that carpooled with us and it was Adam Christensen. Adam from the Mac cast is probably where most of you know him.
And then, uh, he's also been working together with us here for well over a decade. He was on staff at Mac observer doing all kinds of, uh, backend stuff. Yeah. Yeah. He, he did all the Mac observer web development. He did the Mac e-cab site. As we split that out from Mac observer, he was like, he was, he really led that project. I was going to say he helped me with it in that he did it. Um, but yeah, so, and, and of course at backbeat media, we've repped Matt cast since the beginning.
You helped me with this show, Dave. Yeah, exactly. It was exactly that. Yeah. Right. And I noticed in the car as we were going back and forth that the three of us had a really good rapport and we tested it out a few times on the show and this was all sort of hidden in the back of my head and I wasn't even ready to think about, well, you know, do we bring Adam in?
John had just retired from podcasting and left the show and I really didn't want to make any other changes anyway, but it just sort of stuck in my head like, oh, this is a good option. And we did, in fact, have Adam on a couple of times and it worked out great. And then when Adam told me that he was, you know, he came to me because we rep the ads for his show and was like, I really think I got to like wrap this up just life-wise and all that.
And he's like, but I really miss podcasting. And I'm like, all right, I need to share an idea with you. And uh, and so for those of you who listened to Matt cast and have listened to his most recent episode, uh, that came up right before this one, uh, you will know that Adam, uh, is in fact retiring Matt cast, but he is not retiring from podcasting. He's coming over here and joining the Matt Geekab family with us. So I'm really, really stoked about this. There's a real nice organic friendship
that's here and, and, uh, Adam is a new friend. And when you mentioned it to me. And now we get to deal with Pete's hotel wifi in South Haven, Mississippi, because Pete has frozen up. So I don't know what we're going to hear from Pete here. Talking ever so briefly in case. There he is. He's back. I am back. Who left you or me? Oh, it was you. Oh, okay. I think, you know, like I, I, I assume it was you, the, the listeners will tell us.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll find out in post whether I kept talking or you kept talking. That's fair. That's fair. Yeah. Yeah. I heard myself the whole time. I bet you did. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Somebody, somebody in the chat, but, but the audio stream, which is the bulk of what this show is, will be what, what my, from my perspective. So say whatever you said, please say it again.
I was just saying there, there seemed to develop an, I consider Adam a new friend, relatively new friend, but there's an organic friendship that's grown out of this. This is great. I think the chemistry is great and, and I look forward to the, the show. Even better. Same. I think three of us will be more than one plus one plus one. I think it'll be, yes, I agree with that. Uh, big time. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. So, uh, yeah, starting in December, Adam will be, uh, a regular here.
Uh, there will be some episodes that he has to miss, just like there are some episodes that Pete has to miss and Adam and I were talking. He never seems to miss any. Well, Adam was like, you know, like between me and Pete, we, we do each produce podcasts at least currently. Uh, he's like, we know how to do this. He's like, I know how the Mac eCab backend works too. Cause I wrote it. And, uh, he's like, this could actually give you the opportunity to take a vacation.
I was like, huh? Oh, what a concept. Huh? Yeah. An episode of Mac eCab without me. I, I don't, I don't dislike this idea. It'll be a first. It could be a first. Yeah. I like I'm not I'm not ready to like do that yet, but I don't dislike the idea There is a there's a little bit of a charm here.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, this is a yeah I'm excited that that's the best I can say is I'm excited and so let me say also To all you who are Mac cast listeners coming over here for the first time, come join the party, send us your questions, send us your tips, watch us live, join us on Discord, mackgeekgab.com slash Discord. If you have a question or a comment, you could get us at feedback at mackgeekgab.com. Feedback at mackgeekgab.com, Pete, I believe that's what you said.
No, no, I said feedback at mackgeekgab.com. That is where things like this were sent in from listener Mark, which actually didn't come into feedback at Mackeycap.com, it came in in our discord, but this is how, this is what we do on the show. We don't normally talk about, you know, we don't spend the first eight minutes talking about changes of, but, but this is a big one. So, uh, Mark says, uh, laugh at me if you want, and we're never going to laugh at you for discovering things.
I, I, I almost skipped over this part of it. It's like, no, there's never anything he says, but I just discovered something that may have been common knowledge, but it's opened up the world of Sonoma desktop widgets to me. I didn't think desktop widgets would be all that helpful because I usually have two completely full 34-inch screens with windows covering everything. How would I ever conveniently see any desktop widgets?
Well, I just happened to click on a tiny sliver of open desktop space, and lo and behold, all of my windows moved off screen to display the blank desktop. Another click, and they're all back. This makes my full 68 inches of desktop widgets one click away. Another click, all my windows are back. He says, sorry to say, if any of you are saying, duh, I've been doing that for years. You haven't, none of us have been doing it for years.
It is new to macOS Sonoma. I'm sure it was put in for exactly this reason. And you can change it if it drives you crazy and this is a it's sort of a quick tip in reverse because when Sonoma first came out, We talked about how to disable this. Mark M makes us realize why we might not want to disable it and instead just adopt a new habit because he's totally right. Having those desktop widgets a click away actually makes them valuable.
But if you want to control this, you can go into system settings, go into desktop and dock, and you will see an option there called click wallpaper to reveal desktop and, uh, you can either have it set to always or only when you're in stage manager mode. So there you go. There you go. Yeah. So rest assured, Mark, we are not laughing at you. We are laughing with you. Oh, we're, we're celebrating with you.
I, I, it took me a little bit, Pete, to, to, uh, like think about using desktop widgets the right way. But now that I have man, like I I'm loving it, especially, especially on my like big monitor in the office. I I'm not using it as much on my laptop, which is interesting to me. So I don't, I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. So we're recording the Friday before the Monday, when this show comes out, I will get home tomorrow and I'm actually going to pull the trigger this
weekend, I think on Sonoma. So I'm looking forward to trying this out. Great. Yeah. And I'm around if you need help with like, Oh, I'll need help with the mail. I know. Yeah. I know. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Jeepster brings us our next quick tip saying, in Apple Notes, clicking the date at the top of a note will switch between displaying the created date and the edited date. I came across this tip on a Mac Power Users podcast and wanted to share it.
It's truly remarkable how many hidden features are tucked away in Apple's various operating systems. What? Right? Look at that. Yup, which is awesome. Here's the- Created and edited. Right? Right? Let me help you with that, Pete. Thank you. You got it. Um, the... I gotta talk to Rogamiba about why all of my sounds have like a little chirp at the end of them.
I gotta figure this out. I gotta see if it's happening just because it's when I'm playing them in Farrago, but I gotta see if it's happening on all of my machines or just this one. Mine don't seem to. No, mine didn't used to. But anyway, It's special for you, Dave. I saw this tip and I did not know about it. I had the same reaction that you did, Pete, when I first learned of it. And then I thought, wait a minute, does this also work on iPhone?
And the answer is yes, but you won't see it immediately when you pull up a note on iPhone at the top of the Sort of content window is the title of the note and then the contents of the note But if you pull down you will see the date and it will be toggling between created and edited so you can You can you can you can do the same thing just by you have to pull down to expose the date and then to tap it. So, yeah. Ah, okay. It's good stuff. Nice. Yep.
Well, I've got a quick tip from Neil. Okay. And you know, when I read this, I went, well, it's brilliant. And why didn't, why didn't someone think of this a long time ago? And maybe somebody did, but for those of you that are, are terminal geeks. Using the pseudo command, what happens when you use the pseudo command? It asked me for my password. What's your password? Every time, I gotta type it in. Do you have a really long, difficult password?
I mean, obviously, at some point, mine's kind of like muscle memory, almost, more than the password. I don't, Pete. I have a very short, easy-to-type password, partially because of this. Well, what is it, Dave? Uh-huh. That's right. Maybe it is. Uh-huh. That would actually be a good password, right? That would be easy to type with one hand, two fingers, U-H-U-H. I don't know. It's not, that's not actually my password. My password isn't much better than that. Okay. But like, aha,
could be a password. Right. If you wanted something insecure. This is difficult and too hard to explain what I'm about to tell you. Okay. That you can do. It's too difficult to explain here on the show, but we're gonna put the link in the show notes and I will read the link in case you want to pause and do it that way. But here's the thing. You can use Touch ID. For your password in terminal. Well, yeah, you can and there's a tutorial it I Download blog.com.
You don't have to read the link it they'll never they'll never nobody's gonna type. Mackey cab comm Slash show notes and they come out also with the I don't think that gets anybody anywhere I think that's just go to Mackey cab comm it's episode 1010 Or you can go to mg g.fm, Slash 1010 and that will get you right to the episode 1010 show notes or if you go to Mac geek up calm You will be given the opportunity to sign up for our mailing list.
I know everybody offers this we do too, but, Ours I like to think is super valuable and we hear that from you because what we do with our list is, Send you the show notes with all of the clickable links from all of the things we talk about Automatically, every time an episode comes out, which is generally once a week, so you will automatically get all of these, you don't have to think about it.
We had, I wish I could remember the person's name, we had somebody write in who is a premium listener, meaning they support us directly with cash. And saying, I don't listen to the show anymore often, but I still support you with my premium subscription. I like the email that I get with all the links. That's enough for me. It's like, wow. Okay, sure Yeah fascinating.
It's like I I didn't know how I felt about it at first It was like I'm super like what a what a testament to you know, the value of the email. What does that say about the show? Well, people have busy lives. Yeah, I get it. Yeah, yeah. And the important thing is we hardly never sell your email address to people. Hardly if ever. That's right. Hardly never. Hardly never. That's right. Hardly never. Yep. Yep. You know, something that I thought hardly would never happen is that, but it is happening.
Apple announced it on Thursday of last week when this comes out yesterday for those of us recording today. Apple is gonna bring Google's The RCS messaging standard to iPhone in 2024.
That's awesome It really is awesome. So for those of you who don't know what RCS is, let me explain it a little bit differently You know how when you message using the messages app on your phone you message an Apple person And not only do you get blue bubbles, but you get the ability to like send pictures at and video at full resolution and have meaningful group chats. And you can like, like messages and, and, and do all of the red receipts, send red receipts, exactly.
All of those things that feel like part of a modern messaging protocol. And then you text with your green bubble Android using friends and you don't get any of those features and pictures and video come through like they were taken on the finest of all potatoes. It's just awful. And do friends really let friends use Android anyway, Dave? I'm just saying. Some of us let our friends use that, that's right.
Yeah, and so instead of having pictures and sharing pictures that look like they were taken on the finest of all potatoes, RCS is what Android phones use to send messages to each other so that they have all of these rich messaging protocol features. People have been asking Apple for years, will you please add RCS? It's a standard that way you don't have to resort to SMS, which is also a standard, but much older. And even as as recently as last year, Tim Cook said, no, we'll never add it.
Well, you know, like like many things with Apple, including my favorite, you know, we'll never run on Intel chips until they did for a long time. And then, of course, stopped running on Intel chips and now are running on Apple Silicon. Yeah. And then they didn't again. Right. But, uh, you know, Apple, Apple is, is able to change their mind, which is editorial commenter, which is a good thing. Yeah. Right. It gets good that they changed their mind. Like this is something
we love about Apple. And so they have changed their mind on this. Now. It's important to note there is one fundamental difference in today's RCS protocol versus today's iMessage protocol. Pick me, Pete, do you know what that difference is? secret. Can I send you a secret message, Dave? You can, if you, I message it to me, but it's not secret if you send it via RCS because RCS as the standard does not have end to end encryption in it.
Google has added an extension to it that is not part of the standard that supports end to end encryption. Apple has said they are not going to adopt that Instead, they are going to work with the RCS, with the GSM group, which is the one that sort of administers these standards, to get end-to-end encryption as, part of the standard, not as some add-on.
And so, like, I think this is a good thing all the way around, because, you know, Apple obviously not just talks the talk, but also walks the walk with encryption and security. And so I think this will be good for all, all phones. Like this would be great. Yeah. Yeah. No, I'm excited to see that coming to it. So green bubbles get better. Versus you can see when the other person is, you know, in theory, when they're typing, when they have their keyboard open, you can see it, I guess.
Right. You get, yeah, you get that. So, so this, instead of just getting pictures back and forth, uh, from, you know, your Android friends that were taken on the finest of all potatoes, they now will be taken on the finest of all green bubble potatoes. So there you go. Yeah. Ooh, green potatoes. Green potatoes? All right. So, no, this is a good thing. But a lot of people covering this missed the fact that Apple is not going to be supporting end-to-end encryption on day one with RCS.
That may change, though, if RCS is able to add end-to-end encryption before, Apple's day one with it, right? Like, you know. Yeah, we don't have a date yet. It's nice that it's encrypted, but you know, 99.8% of the time, I kind of don't care. I know what I get, but I get the reason for it. And I went in and it should be your communications should be private, correct. Your communications. And there's a reasonable expectation of privacy. Correct.
So that's it. That's really what it is. Is this that, that, you know, if I text you something, I want it to be private and, and yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Dave. Yeah. I don't want people to know what, like we knew that Adam was coming on the show and I didn't want the people sniffing our messages to know that Adam was coming until Adam was ready to make that announcement. That was his news, not ours. Exactly. And now it's our collective news to share. But wait a minute.
You mean I wasn't supposed to put that out two months ago? No, you were not. It wasn't quite too much. Yeah, I was going to say this. This is it was it was brewing in my head two and a half months ago, but not not with any timing. It was just like, well, maybe someday if you know, there's a world that would this would be a good mix. That was really all I thought in the car and was like, oh, File that away. Exactly. Say nothing. So smart. I'm excited. Same.
Yeah. It all, every, everything happens for a reason, Pete. And, uh, and, and this is one of those good ones. So, yep. Yep. The reasons aren't always good. This is a good one. So next week, join me and Adam for the Mac geek gap. No, next week, it's just you and me the week after is, uh, is, uh, is when Adam, Adam joins up. So, yeah, we're going to push you out, Dave. You know, that's totally fine. Like, this is okay! Yeah, you're going, please. No, I really... You know, I will say, I don't...
When we sold the Mac Observer, Reid had many offers over the years and at many earlier points, I wasn't ready to sell and then I was ready to sell, but I wasn't sure it was going to be good for me. Like, my... I had this belief, which was true at a period of time, and clearly is no longer true, that I needed the Mac Observer to open doors for me to do other things, right? And it was true, absolutely.
Yes, there was a period of time where that was absolutely true because it opened the doors for all of the things that I even currently still do in my life, right? Right, like podcasting did not exist when you opened the Mac Observer. Correct. This is now an avenue to many of those things. It gave me an on-ramp, right. And so, and so I wasn't ready to step away from that for a long time.
And then, and then I was, uh, obviously we, we, we took the deal and, and, uh, made the deal happen really is, is a better way to say it.
I am not, but when I did that I was really adamant about keeping this, I, not only is it, is it good for me for like that purpose, it's an on ramp to other opportunities, but primarily I like doing this show, like This is fun, And I like helping people I hope it's as much fun for you still as it was on day two, day one It's I'm having more fun with the show now than I have in a long time. I really like I'm Like yeah, it's it and I think part of that is not having the additional management.
Time consumed by running the Mac Observer right like I'm able to focus on this. It's great So it was bittersweet to let that go I assume correct. Yeah, and the hardest part was the Uh, the staff, because we really were a family and, and not being able to go see my family every day for staff meetings was, that was the hardest part. The second hardest part was not saying, welcome to the back of the servers, Mac decaf, how many times did that happen?
I still sometimes go to say it, like the muscle memory is deep, man. Yeah. But, um, but I, uh, but I'm not ready to, to, to leave this show. However, the idea that this show could exist without me is something that never occurred to me until Adam mentioned it the other day. Now, I know Adam doesn't want to, like, the point is not to bring Adam in to replace me eventually, he doesn't want that. The whole point is that he doesn't want to have to produce a show, and I do, I love doing this show.
But the idea that wait could it like oh interesting so I like that you know. It's it's I'm excited about where we're taking this show really really excited. I'm also excited about Ben's quick tip which is our final quick tip of this episode as far as I know is, It says to date I knew I could specify the email address to use for each contact when sending to a group or list and this is something that you do in on the Mac in contacts with edit distribution lists.
He says, however, I never read the fine print at the bottom. And this is in contacts in the edit menu, edit distribution list. He says, I never read the fine print at the bottom that indicates the same window also offers specifying phone number and address. These additional selections are valuable when sending a group text message, printing envelopes or mailing labels or other use cases. So this is a quick tip with about 14 bonus quick tips baked into it. So number one is this in contacts.
If you've never done this before, you can create groups. First of all, that maybe that's the first one, right? The lead. Yeah. Yeah. So you can create groups in contacts. Which is huge for focus modes. Right. And then God, I didn't even think about using groups for focus modes, Pete. Oh man. Like this is, I said, it was the last quick tip. I, as far as I knew, I we've proven now that was a correct statement. There you go.
So in contacts, once you've created a distribution list or a group, you go to edit, edit distribution lists. And then as you click on each group, it'll show you the members. And as Ben articulated, it shows you all of their email addresses, all of their phone numbers, all of their physical addresses. And you get to pick one that is the primary for when you invoke this group, it sends to that address instead of a different address.
And this is super handy if you go to email a group or whatever, you know, like I have my band members each in, in separate groups and I don't want to email Aaron at work. I want to email Aaron at home, like, cause he wants me to do that. And so, but I don't want to lose his work address in case I ever need it for whatever, you know, cause it's part of his contact record so you can get to go set that.
And now ben points out something i never paid attention to either is that you can do the same thing for their phone numbers and their physical addresses which is super super handy so thank you for that amazingly dense quick tip and thank you for affording us the opportunity to unpack it.
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And then simple tools like screening questions make it super easy to focus on candidates with just the right skills and experience so you can quickly prioritize who you'd like to interview and hire. These screening tools are great. I created some very specific questions to the job that really let me find the right people to then go interview and eventually add to the team here. And this is why small businesses rate LinkedIn jobs. Number one in delivering quality hires versus leading competitors.
LinkedIn jobs helps you find the qualified candidates you want to talk with faster. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash MGG. That's linkedin.com slash MGG to post your job for free terms and conditions apply. And our thanks to LinkedIn jobs for sponsoring this episode. All right, our first question of the week comes from listener Larry, who says, I'm replacing my failing Lacie rugged USB 3.0 drive with a SanDisk, made by Western Digital, portable extreme SSD, stepping up to an SSD.
I want to make sure to get the laser fast speed that is promised. I have an anchor hub plugged into the back of my Mac studio. The drive has a USB-C cable that comes with a USB-A adapter. Is there going to be a difference in speed if I have it plugged into the hub versus plugging directly into my Mac's USB-C port? Pete, do you want to start off with this one? Yeah, I can answer that. Okay. Yes. Maybe. Next question. Sure. Great. Thanks for the one word answer,
Pete. Maybe. Thank goodness Adam's coming. Right. Carrying the show, Dave. Pete, you always carry the show with your one-word answers, but maybe just this once. I'm addicted to being a... So, what can I say? You know, it's like when I'm flying along and air traffic control says, say altitude, it takes every fiber of my being not to key the mic and go, altitude. Oh yeah, that's going to be tough. Yeah, yeah. It's how I go, you know? It's very difficult.
So, no, so Larry wants to know, is there a difference in the speed? And the answer is maybe, as I said, that's a better answer than yes. If you plug your SSD into the hub versus the USB-C port there's several factors that are going to come into play, right? It's the type and quality of the hub, the type and quality of the cable, the performance of your Mac Studio in this case.
Generally speaking, plugging your SSD directly into the C port is going to give you the best possible speed with no interference or any chance of a bottleneck for anything along the way, the hub trying to share bandwidth, those sorts of things. But with the latest protocols and cables and the hub and the computer, I don't think you're going to see a significant slowdown. So it's going to depend on how much you're willing to spend, Larry. What else is new, right? Yeah, I mean, the...
The best way to tell is to plug it in and try using, what is it, is it Blackmagic? Blackmagic, yeah, for sure. Disk speed test. Yep. And compare the results. Yep, that that would be You know certainly that would be the way to make sure that you're getting the best speed We'll put a link to black magic again in the show. So that that Me To you Dave, which was weird. I used yeah, you can stump the geek, right?
So I tried to use black magic the other day to when I was answering this question to check one of my own USB drives And it says you don't have permission. And then I tried to check this reading rate on my own internal hard drive and it was like, yeah, you don't have permission. So is there something in Blackmagic I'm missing? Because I haven't used it in a while. Maybe you need to give it full disk access?
Maybe there you go. Maybe I mean that's what I would do in those in those circumstances be like okay Just let the thing do whatever the heck it wants. Yeah Yeah, I'm going to it, but it wouldn't let me have permission so anyway. No as far as Larry's question There's a lot to sort of unpack and and look at here. Yes your Mac studio has ports That are that with USB C connectors They're smoking.
It doesn't mean that they are USB ports though. They are, and I don't have all the Mac Studio specs in front of me, but I'm pretty sure that all of them are Thunderbolt ports. There might be a version of a Mac Studio that has some that are reserved as USB-C ports, but I don't think so, because I have the lowest model Mac Studio here and I'm pretty sure, well, no. The ports on the- He's going to look. The ports on the front.
No, the ports on the front are USB-C only and then the ports on the back are Thunderbolt. And those are wicked fast. Yeah, but depending on what kind of anchor hub you plug into this, it could be a Thunderbolt dock, and then it's going to pass data at Thunderbolt speeds, or it could be a USB-C dock, or a USB dock. I gotta make sure... When we're talking about USB, the letters describe the connectors, and the numbers describe the speed.
So letters are only about shapes of connectors. they do not indicate speed. Thankfully USB consortium is starting to change the the numbers to actual just speed numbers so you're not trying to do that translation in your head. Right, and all likely that $4 cable from Amazon ain't gonna give you your thunderbolt speeds. Well, right. As we discussed on a previous. Yeah, but I think the SanDisk Portable Xtreme comes with its own little cable. It does, but it also is a USB 3.1.
Device and it's max speed is 550 megabytes per second so my guess is it's not going to matter whether your hub is thunderbolt or your dock rather is thunderbolt or usb because this drive is likely going to be and i don't want to i don't want to use this term with any derogatory. Implication, but it will be the weakest link in the chain, so to speak, right?
It's going to be the slowest of all the devices you've mentioned, unless, like Pete said, you wind up picking up a USB 2.0 cable, like Apple's USB charging cable that's only, you know, that'll do 100 watts of charging, but only USB 2 speeds, and then it wouldn't hit this. But otherwise, yeah, this drive's going to be fine. Where you're going to see your lightning-fast speeds from this being an SSD is in terms of the latency, right?
You're, you're not using a rotational drive anymore. So I, I, I mean, I think all your advice is great and I would, I would plug it in to one of your thunderbolt ports with the included cable and run a black magic speed test. And that way you're going to know definitively what the maximum speeds you're, are, you're, you know, you're able to get out of this drive.
Then you use that as your, as your baseline and start plugging it in in other ways, and as long as you're still getting those max speeds, you know, in the most, in the way that's sort of logistically the most convenient for you to plug it in, then just do that. Or what are you willing to accept in degradation? If it goes down to 350, is that killing you, or are you good with that? Exactly. But yeah, you will know is the... I will add that we kind of buried a cool stuff
found in there. What's that? Well, that hard drive, that SSD. That's a little cool stuff found. I've got one of those and I plug that in regularly. That's my... Don't get old or tired, it's bad for your memory. Time machine, that's my time machine backup disk. Yeah, yeah. So, little SSD, plug it in, boom. There you go. Love it. There you go.
Uh, you're just so, just to acknowledge it, uh, for the listeners, but also so, you know, Pete, you, you are definitely experiencing some bandwidth, uh, constraints. So if I happen to cut you off while you're talking, it's only because you've stopped talking as far as we're concerned. Right. Uh, shall we, shall we try it? And would you like to read Mark's question? All right. Yeah, well, Mark has three terabytes of photos. Oh my. Yeah.
Now I'm really impressed. We were laughing at a few hundred gigabytes a couple of weeks ago. Three terabytes of photos stored on an external Thunderbolt drive. Because I would like to view them in photos, but do not want to add them to my photo library. I don't want to physically have them on my internal one gig hard drive. I think he means one terabyte hard drive. I could be wrong. And of course, they will not fit.
And I do not want them stored in iCloud storage. They ain't going to fit there either. Jeez, I don't think so Dave would I you know I love I love questions like this because I Started in the same spot you are with I don't think so I even type that to mark and then I started Digging in a little bit to this Pete.
I think I know you're going yep, just hit me and not only is Was I wrong saying I don't think so I mean those were literally the words that I type I'm now pretty sure that Mark can do exactly 100%, of what he wants. And that is, if you look in photos, settings, general, there is an item in there labeled copy items to the photos library. And it is under the importing section, right? It's just in photos, settings, general. And if you uncheck that, two things happen.
First is what's obvious there. It will not copy the items into your photos library. It will reference them so that you can see them and organize them and all of that when you're in photos, but the actual photos themselves will stay on your external storage. Below that though, it says only items copied to the library will be uploaded to iCloud Photos. So he actually gets both of his things with one check box. It's almost like somebody at Apple has thought about this. They thought about it. Yeah.
That's amazing. I know. I was thinking before I even read the rest of your answer, I was thinking, well, yeah, you just create a second library on that other drive and you're good to go. Yep. Yep. But yeah, don't even need to do that. Yep.
Yeah, so yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, there is there are other ways to do this and I suppose it's while we're here, it's worth talking about them in case it solves your problem because you need something slightly different than what Mark needed, which was a very specific set of criteria. ICloud Photos only syncs with one library on your Mac. However, you can have multiple Photos libraries on your Mac.
You can only open one of them at a time in Photos, but even if you open a second one, iCloud Photos won't automatically start syncing that just because it's open in Photos. ICloud Photos only syncs to the library that is blessed as your system library. And you do that in the photos preferences. It's the system photo library. In fact, it's right there in settings general. It shows you where your library is stored at the very top of that window.
And you can check a bar or click a button that says use as system photo library. If you don't push that button, then it will not make that the system photo library. And then therefore it will not upload to iCloud photos. So if you have a bunch of photos on an external drive that you want to manage separately and don't want them uploaded to iPhoto, uh, tough, uh, um, photos in the cloud, the, the, yeah, whatever we're supposed to call it or into your, into your library on your hard drive.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But, but like you can keep it separate, you can manage it. I've done this for clients before when they need me to help them, you know, sort of merge photos libraries. I do it in photos on my Mac because it takes time. And I, I, you know, if it's, it's cheaper for them for me to do it, you know, at my house, then to go to their house and they have to pay me for all the hours.
I sit there as opposed to just the hours I'm working on doing the thing and letting the photos crunch in the background. Um, it, you know, it's fine and it doesn't mess with my cloud photos or anything like that. It works really well. So yeah, you wonder you can do this. Along that line, I guess, then what, is there another option? I haven't even thought of in years using something besides photos to manage.
Photos. There's got to be other photo libraries out there that are worth managing, but I'll tell you, you know, we talked about it last week, was the whole keywords manager thing, which it helps me to quickly organize tons of photos. Yeah. I don't know if you know of any others. I don't anymore. I do. I'm looking to see if I put that in my notes for this week or for next week. You know what?
We will talk about them next week because I have a bunch of stuff that I'm putting together, I found about some other photo management apps that are very, very cool. And we'll talk about that in next week's show. If you know, I'm psychotic. I could see into the future. Psychic. That's right. That's right.
Uh, if you know of any though, feedback at Mackey cab.com, and we'll, we'll pull it all together and, and we'll have this conversation because there, there are some great apps out there for sort of the, The you know photos is fantastic for the beaten path of Just wanting to manage your photos in the way Apple has has decided, but there are other apps so yeah Yeah, let us know okay feedback on that kick up calm Yeah, because I found a few just the other day and had started realized
we had this episode was packed full so, Okay, so yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, all right on On to Dan's question, Dan says, I've never done anything with or tried to set up family sharing on my Apple accounts. My girlfriend who is in the US and I am in Canada mentioned that she wanted to do that. My question is, since she's in the US, would it work for me to put her on my account and treat it like a quote unquote family account? Pete, you dug into this a little bit for us, I think. Uh, no.
Oh. No? I'm here. I'm here. There was a little bit of a lag, I think, because of your connection. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, your joke actually landed probably better than you intended, so, yeah. Beautiful. Well, what can I say? So family sharing lets you share with up to, I think, five in the family group? I think I put that in my answer. Six. It shares your Apple purchases, your subscriptions, oh, with five others, six including you. So five family members plus you.
And photos, calendars, reminders, all that in the one family group. And the limitation is, that affects your situation is, you need to be in the same country because there are things that are not available in some regions or others across international borders. Oh, different app stores and such. But wait, there's a solution. Really? Yes, absolutely. Some apps are not there, and some apps are. But the solution is, one of you or the other, use a VPN, VPN into that country.
So she could VPN into Canada and create an Apple ID there, and then you can share it that way. Or you could VPN, you know, using PIA, Internet Access or ExpressNet or something like that. Create your Apple ID using that IP address I believe, and then you could share across international borders. So she would need a separate Apple ID that matches the country of the family share account. Interesting. Right. I didn't. Yeah, I have no functional working knowledge of any of this.
That makes sense though. I haven't tried it, but big tech says you can do it. Okay. I believe it. I did my research. Yeah, no. I mean, that, that makes the logistics of that makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, the only time I've run into problems where my VPN doesn't really work is like when I'm trying to watch YouTube TV from another country, even though I'm VPN into the United States, it's like, ah, I know, I know where you are. I got GPS out of your iPad. I know where you are.
YouTube for you. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. YouTube TV for you. No YouTube for you. Yeah, that's right. Yep. but interesting, no, that makes sense, that makes sense. Um, I, I, I am, I am fascinated that we have had you all over the world, literally like on the opposite side of the world and almost no connection problems. And now you're in like Mississippi and this is the worst it's been in six months. Right. I love it. Exactly. And it's fine. It's functional.
I'm in a suburb of Memphis. I mean, it's not like I'm in the backwoods in the middle of the state somewhere. That's awesome. I love it. I love that. That's what we wound up with. Yeah. Yeah. I wonder if a different room in that hotel would just, you know, have better proximity to the access point. I'm actually pretty close to the center of the hotel, but boy, let me tell you, I'm going to fling in South Haven, Mississippi. Yeah, man. Yeah.
But not to worry, I'll be gone soon. You won't be able to find me. I'll be at an undisclosed location soon, Dave. That's right. That's right. Yep. That's good. And that's as it should be. Jay Oakley says, I have been tasked with getting a laptop with a broken screen to connect to an external monitor. The internal monitor is physically cracked and only shows colored lines, but of course, nothing useful.
When I plug the external monitor in, it lights up and I see the expected wallpaper and can move the cursor over to it. But there's nothing to click on because it's in extended desktop mode. The menu bar and any windows I might happen to open and are all showing on the broken internal screen. Is there some keyboard trick to getting the menu bar to jump to the external screen? I did not know the answer to this question. And this is one of the reasons I love our Discord community.
I don't know why I tried to make that a weird word to say. It's Discord. It's really simple. Mackeycub.com slash Discord will get you there. And people are friendly and rarely even mispronounce things like I just did. Nibsuk in the discord community in our discord answered. And said, yes, when connecting an external monitor to a MacBook, the screen is extended rather than mirrored by default, making it difficult to work around broken internal monitors.
There are some keyboard shortcuts though that should switch your Mac to mirrored mode. Command F1 is one, command option F1, command function F1. Those, think about F1, right? And the command key, and then hold other keys with it until you see what you want on the external display. Or for Macs with a touch bar, it's command and dim the display brightness icon in the control strip in the touch bar is the way to do it. So, and it turns out that this is a MacBook with a touch bar.
That's what worked for Jay Oakley there and the problem was solved. But what I had no idea, of course this exists. This is yet another one of those things that Apple has been through on their own and probably has needed to walk customers through countless times. And it's a pain in the neck. I've always VP, the VNC like screen-shared into my Mac. Like when my, my iMac screen died, I, I screen-shared in. Cause I was like, I can't get to the main screen.
And I never knew about these things. I'm not going to try it right now. Cause it would, it would be a disaster if I did that mid show. I mean, I think the recording would keep going and that would be about it. Like, I wouldn't be able to see anything. It'd be a nightmare. I got three screens going here, Pete. It'd be crazy. Thank you for that, Nibsuk and Jay Oakley. Good, good stuff. Uh, where are we on time? Oh, we're doing all right. Okay.
Tony asks, Tony asks... I use a Windows computer for work during the day, and I have an M1 Mac Mini for personal use. When I'm working from home, both computers share a wireless keyboard, mouse, and dual monitors via a KVM switch. I would like to listen to music from the Mac while I am working with my Windows laptop so as to keep the music traffic off of the company VPN to avoid IT from complaining.
I'm looking for a USB volume knob that I can use with the music apps on the Mac, Spotify, five band cam series, you know, all of those things to control the volume of the music on my Mac so that I can take zoom calls on the windows computer, having to use the KVM to switch over to the Mac and log in just to turn the volume down takes too long when a critical call comes in.
Ah, so you want to be able to just turn down or mute your, your Mac without having to like see the Mac screen or control the Mac screen. Yeah. All right. To be able to goof off at work with it. I don't know that he's goofing off. I, I think listening to music is, is a valuable thing.
This is interesting because the solution he wants is the same solution I want but what happens on my Mac is when a call comes in All of my volume controls and my mute and play pause controls really what I want to do is just pause the stuff over there is They they now have the focus of the call that's coming in and so I can't mute it Right, so I love this idea Pete. Do you have any on the PC? PC and he doesn't want his personal music on his
work PC, so he keeps it on his Mac. And yes, that's great. I like this, yeah. So, there are three options, and we'll put the links into the show notes. There's a YMOO, multimedia control knob, a VDIR USB volume knob, multimedia controller, and an Amazon D-Rock lossless computer controller adjuster. All right. All real stuff. And then, I mean, every now and then there's some other cool stuff and here's one that I got for the purpose of this show and it's somebody's man. Right?
Sound effects. I use the Elgato Stream Deck and you can use, oh, okay. There we go. I'm back. I was gone, I'm back. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I use the Elgato Stream Deck and I use the 15 button one, but that, plug that into the USB on your Mac.
Oh, and you have all manner of control of things between that and keyboard maestro and the macros that that thing will run For instance when we go to do the show, I Actually have one button that I push and it calls up chrome and it moves me to stream yarn and it calls up audio hijack Pro and then Farago which I use for the sound effects and loopback in order to mix it properly and, Discord and all that stuff comes up with the push of one button so.
I like these. The Stream Deck is a far more expensive option. These are, you know, the other first three I mentioned are $25 to $35 or $40. And the Stream Deck is in the $149 range when it's not on sale. Yeah. Yeah. But those are pretty good options there. Those first three that I mentioned. I like these little volume knobs. Yeah. And they, and, and like some of them have play pause controls and, and shuttle controls where you can skip to the next song or whatever.
So like this is really, uh, yeah, yeah, exactly what he's looking. It's exactly what he's looking for. I, I, yeah, there, like years ago, there was like one company that made a thing and I'm looking, cause I had it, it was like the I rig volume knob or something and shuttle control or something, but it was just a knob, like it didn't do anything else and these are, these are.
Play, pause, fast forward. and volume up, volume down, and I venture to guess they're just sending the same signal the Stream Deck is. They're pre-programmed. They're pre-programmed, yeah, but it's probably different than the Stream Deck because the Stream Deck is sending different types of things that then have to be triggered. It's more of a keyboard. It's more of a, it's like a keyboard, correct. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But yes, I mean, in a sense, it's doing the same thing.
It's sending a command that the computer then does something with. So how good finds, man. I like that. That's great. And Christmas, Hanukkah, all those seasons are coming, whereupon thou shalt exchange gifts. We are upon that. Yes. Yes. And those are good gift ideas. Yes. Yes. Yes. I like it. Any questions that turn into cool stuff found and therefore become expensive. Rich asks, I have an Apple MacBook Pro 16 inch.
I've been using it without an external display forever. I'm thinking about getting a 27 inch monitor. My problem is the MacBook Pro display is awesome. And I, and it's just an excellent display. Basically Apple has spoiled me. Yes, I feel your pain. He says, I like, I do photography and I like the color palette and the sharpness and the retina and the promotion and all of that of the MacBook Pro. Should I shell out the big bucks for an Apple Studio display?
Or do I go with the LG UltraFine 5K display? Or a BenQ display? I'm not sure the MacBook Pro supports an external monitor above 60 hertz. It depends on the model of your MacBook Pro. MacTracker will probably help you decide that. Does anyone have experience down these paths? Yeah, I do, because I've been spoiled in the same ways. And I've had to come to terms with that. when I, you know, I had a 27 inch IMAX retina, IMAX for a long time.
And the first one that I stopped using was the one in the office when I got the M1 mini. And so I was like, I've been I'm too spoiled. You know, I have a retina up in the studio. I had a retina here at my desk. I can't not retinize. And so I bought the LG ultra fine 27 inch display. Amazon, it's 5K, it's, you know, it's, it's essentially that display from the, uh, from the inside that, you know, the 27 inch iMac close enough. And you can, I bought it, uh, refurb on Amazon.
They still are available there. I mean, I bought it years ago. The price hasn't changed much, if at all. It's $988, which is a crap ton of money to spend on a 27 inch display. And it's gorgeous and it's awesome. However, I have been coming to realize that there are some really good 4K displays, not 5K, that look really good with a Mac, that even look really good right next to the Retina display in the configuration that you're talking about there.
And I found yet another one recently. There, the, um, th there's a couple of like the view Sonic, the 2768 4k is awesome. I love it. Uh, it, it, it, it looks fantastic. It's, it's got a black bezel. Uh, if that, you know, and, and a black stand and all of that stuff, but it, it, it was my primary monitor here in the studio with the, with the max studio all summer, because it was the best screen that I had that I wasn't going to take my retina screen from downstairs.
And I very quickly learned, you know what, it's fine. It looks great, in fact. And then I went to Pepcom recently, as you know, and I got to check out another display from a company called Philips, and it is their Creator Series display. It's 500 bucks for this 27-inch display. It is fantastic. It's got, first of all, the glass on it. It is what's in front of me right now. I can't compare it to the 27-inch iMac in this room because that screen died, of course.
I would say that it's very reminiscent of looking at that display. It has a fantastic glass in it, and it really is sharp and warm, and the colors are all right. In fact, we were noticing this morning that I was looking at colors of our video on this screen, and then I moved it over to the ViewSonic, and I was like, wait, what happened? Oh, different screen, okay. And it really is gorgeous. It also is rotatable, like in its stand. I could rotate it and use it in portrait mode if I so chose.
I'm not doing that right now because I prefer it in wide mode, but I'm thinking about maybe moving things around and having it in portrait mode to my right here in the studio. There's options. It's got a hub. It's got a hub in it, USB hub. It's got like three USB-C ports, USB-A, a couple of USB-A ports. And then of course, display port and HDMI and all of those things. It can be driven USB-C. It can be driven, of course, DisplayPort or HDMI or any of those. It goes full 60 Hertz.
It's gorgeous. That hub also allows it to have its own KVM in it. So like what Tony was talking about in the last question, where he has his Mac and his PC hooked up to the same monitor, he has a KVM that he bought separately to do that, right? For, you know, probably between 50 and 150 bucks, depending on the capabilities, this screen has that built into it.
So you just plug all your things in and then tell it what's where and it will share the keyboard and mouse that's also plugged into it with the computers upstream. So, it's a pretty special display, and it'll provide 96 watts of power out to your Macbook as well. Less than $500.
$499. Wow. That's amazing. Dude, when I saw this, I'd seen the press release, they'd sent me it embargoed, you know, before Pepcom or whatever, and I read about it on the train, and was like, oh, I gotta make sure I see this. Like, a lot of times when people are there with displays, it's like, eh, I don't know. And, uh, and then I went and saw it and it was like, wait a minute, this is special. And it truly is. And it's set up really fast. The stand is, is like, you know,
adjustable in every which way. So you don't need a hub anymore. Don't need to. Yeah. I mean, it depends on how you want to hook things up, but yes. Fair enough. But what is it? Four. $4.99. No, no. the, uh, the, the daisy chain and, and, and the, uh, to, to the USB-C built-in KVM height adjustable, daisy chain, powered, powered, uh, 96 Watts. Yep. And, uh, but it looks like you said four USB. Four, uh, three USB-C.
I might've said four, but I, now that I'm thinking about it, it's got three USB-C. One provides 96 Watts of power. The other provides 15 Watts of power. And then the middle one, I think it's just five Watts. And, and then there's two USB A's as well. And then, you know, all of your sort of video ports, if you, if you want to call it that. Right. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, no, it's, it's a, I'm, I'm blown away by this display. It's the Phillips creator series, 27 inch.
It's 4k UHD IPS black. It's like the color it's the colors. Yeah, man. Yeah, I know. Yeah. It's, it's, it's, it's a serious contender against the display that's double the price. Podcasting monitor at home. Yeah, man. Get one of those. Oh, beautiful. It's gorgeous. Yeah, it really is. Yeah, it really is. So, not that long ago, I managed to pull up a like a 10 or 11 year old MacBook Air.
I had given it to my sister after I was done with it, and then she brought it back and said, I'm not using it anymore, and gave it to me, and I opened it the other day, and I'm like, no, I have my glasses on. I was like, oh my God, that used to pass as standard. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's, yeah. The screen I have behind me here in the studio, all I use it for is displaying the logo of, Like the Mac geek lab logo or something interesting for you to see on camera, right?
That that's I do not use it as a display But it is the third display connected to this computer and I just set the background and I'm done, Like I use that monitor as a monitor like like staring at it all day If I look at it now, it's awful. Squinting yeah, yeah clean your eyes my eyes were better back there Speaking of eyes, I'm going to jump us to cool stuff found because I know we're going to run out of time.
I did get to check out, there was another monitor at Pepcom that I got to check out, Pete, and it's the ViewSonic. It's a portable screen, so you know how I'm into these portable screens, right? You know, when I travel I like to have a portable screen. And we have learned that you can get away with a 1080p screen as long as it's the right 1080p screen.
We've talked about those on the show, but stepping it up a little bit going to a 4k screen Definitely is visually noticeable even at the 15 inch size. And so the difference between like a 1080p screen is you know, maybe 120 bucks you can maybe closer to 100 if you can find the right deal the K. You you what is the screen that I really like that I the kvv screen whatever it is That is 4k is It's about 220 bucks. So you're doubling your price there, 240, depending again, depending on the day.
I'll let you double the price again for the screen that I'm about to tell you about. However, this screen is the result of iterative design and it checks all of the boxes. It is the ViewSonic VX1655 4K OLED 15.6 inch screen. This thing is gorgeous. That's like the glass on it, again, blew me away. We've been remodeling the kitchen at home. And so Lisa was sort of displaced from her normal place of work in the house.
And so instead of using her big 27 inch monitor with her MacBook Air, she was using one of my portable screens, you know, the 15 inch 4K screen with a MacBook Air. This showed up, I set it up for her to test because it was like, I gotta test this somewhere. you're, you're a perfect candidate. And it was like, she was like, what? We were both like, wait a minute. It's awesome. So, like, it looks great, and that's what's going to justify, or not, the $442 price that it's going for on Amazon.
However, the layout of this thing is fantastic. It's less than an inch thick. It's less than an inch thick. One of the things, there are two things that drive me, and several of you that have talked about this, drive us all crazy in terms of these displays. One of them is when the stand for it juts out, like if it's a fold around stand and it juts out in front of it, so you can't put something on the desk in the hotel right in front of the display, right? This does not have that.
It has a kickstand that comes out the back of it, that again is super flat when it folds in, and it's just a simple little kickstand, it kicks out. And so it takes up no room in front of it on your hotel desk. So that part's great. The second best part about this kickstand is that all of your connectors are in the kickstand and the kickstand is not as wide as the display.
This means you can plug a USB-C cable in to where, it goes on the display and still put the display right up against your MacBook Pro because you don't have the room of the cable sticking out the side of the display. Right. Like, and, and the bezel on it, uh, just to fit all the electronics in it, it, it needs to have some room in the bezel. They put all of that room at the bottom. Right. So it, it effectively lifts the display about an inch up off the desk,
which is where you would want it next to your laptop. And the bezel looks like it's smaller than a, like an eighth of an inch. Yeah. And then around the rest of it, it's an eighth of an inch. Right. Yeah, exactly. It, it like, it looks great and functionally it is designed really, really well. So what I need to figure out how to do is to wrestle this back from Lisa before I take my next trip. And so that's going to be the. And I see on Amazon, it says deliver to Dave
in Durham. You need to change that address. That's right. So, yeah, no, Pepcom, I did not go to Pepcom expecting to come back with, you know, some of my favorites being two monitors. And yet that is exactly what happened. So yeah, yeah, yeah, it's, I was impressed with these and it takes a lot, you know, monitors generally are sort of a dime a dozen. It's like, yeah, you need a 27 inch monitor, go find the right one at ViewSonic or Monoprice and you're done.
Like that's, you know, that's it. And then Phillips was like, nope, I got you. Uh, I, there's a couple more cool stuff's found. I want to, I want to get in here and I know you've got one too, Pete. Rod L tells us about, he says, you know, when you don't want to take a screenshot, just to lift the text off the page, right? Cause you can do that now.
If, if there's like an image or something that has text in it, you can take a screenshot and then, and then, you know, in preview, you can pull those photos is for a word and if there's a sign in your photo that has that word in it, it goes and finds it. Right. Wow. But he found an app called Text Sniper that does this for you without you needing to do the screenshot hokey pokey and it just extracts text from images and anywhere else instantly from YouTube videos.
If there's text in a YouTube video, it'll grab the text out of that. Online courses, screencasts, you know, photos, obviously all of those things. So yeah, I did like, as soon as I saw it, it was like, oh yeah, this is a Mac app. I'm going to wonder if there's an iOS app that is similar. I, it doesn't look, it doesn't look like it from this. I don't know. You would have to do the screenshot on iOS because apps can't. Yeah. Can't control your screen on iOS.
There's less need for it. I think in iOS then in a maybe. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, iOS sort of does it as part of iOS, so it's all sort of there. Yeah, but yeah, you're right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I hadn't thought about that. But yeah, so thank you for that, Rod. I had never heard of TechSniper. So, yeah, this is a good one. He says, we do a lot of content development, website creation, process documentation, and I'm always grabbing text from something and repurposing it somewhere else.
And if I can't simply highlight it, I fire up TextSniper. It's easier than taking a screenshot. One of the things I love about TextSniper, he says, is its accuracy. I seldom, if ever, have to correct the text it grabs. And this is especially important when I'm grabbing things like a SKU, a part number, a serial number, a VIN, you know, on your car, the vehicle identification number, that sort of thing that wouldn't get caught by spell check and fixed, you need to have accuracy.
So thank you for that, Rod. That's great. I found something, Pete, this week that might change the lives of all of us. I was looking for a backup destination for my Synology. I've been using Synology C2, you know, a cloud backup destination. I have a one terabyte plan with C2, and I'm sort of, the things I want to back up are now just inching above one terabyte. And I'm like, okay, well, you know, C2 is 60 bucks a year.
To move up to two terabytes actually more than doubles my price because I have to buy the different plan of C2 or whatever it is. Yeah. And so it's like, okay, so now it's going to be 140. I'm like, well, that's real money. Like, let's look around, let's find. And I found, I found something called iDrive E2. Now what iDrive E2 is, is it is an, oh gosh, why can't I think of the name of it? An Amazon S3 compatible storage.
Service and S3 is what Amazon started as their, you know, if you want to store things in buckets, you just use this and you're good to go and then you can buy different types of Amazon S3 storage depending on how you want to retrieve your data, if you want to retrieve your data, if it's meant for cold storage or whatever.
But Amazon Glacier, even Amazon Glacier, which is their sort of least expensive one, is still pretty expensive on par with, you know, what you would pay for, say, the Synology C2 at 60 bucks a year or anything like that. I drive E2 for one terabyte is 30 bucks a year, except my first year I get for $15. Right. I signed up for this. I, uh, actually bifurcated my Synology backups cause I'm, I'm signed up through August for, for C2. I paid my 60 bucks. I can't get that back. They won't, you know,
it's, it's how it works. They don't prorate it or anything. So. No refund. No, right. Which is fine. And so I'm like, well, I'm over anyway. So I'm going to move my biggest thing over to iDrive E2 now, leave sort of the crumbs, the things that spill over the 1TB.
I'll leave those on C2 for now. And then when next year comes around, I'll expand my iDrive to 2TB, which at worst will be 60 bucks, but I bet I can convince them to give it to me for 30 again because that's how all of these services work. Like they just, you know, it's like, is it actually ever 30 bucks or is it always 15? You know? Well, and here's the thing. Even if it is 30 bucks. It's still half the price. Right. And by, well, or even if it is 60 bucks, I'm sorry.
But still that's half the price. For two terabytes, yeah. But think about it. What does that cost if you were out buying hard drives and then having to replace those hard drives in five years because it's, you know, they're wearing out and that's, it's that time. That's awesome. And now just to help my brain get around it, Hyper, because I don't use it yet, Hyper Backup is an app in Synology, correct? Correct.
Hyper Backup is Synology's... It allows you to go back from one Synology drive to another, or in this case to your iDrive. Yeah, and all you do is... and they have instructions for how to do this specifically with Hyper Backup, but it's very straightforward. You launch Synology's Hyper Backup, you choose.
S3 storage as your as your thing and then you put in the hyperdrive server and your access key You're you know essentially your username and password It's it's it's a it's an access token that it generates for you But you know you put that in there And then you just store it in a bucket and and you can have multiple buckets like I could buy, IDrive storage, and and this is where I wanted to go with this I could buy,
S3 compatible storage from I drive or from anyone and use you know one blob of storage. So I could buy two terabytes or five terabytes or whatever from iDrive E2 and then have different buckets for the different things I want to back up. I could have one bucket for one Synology, one bucket for another Synology, buckets for each of my Macs. So your cloud backups for your Macs can be done to these generic S3 storage providers like iDrive.
And the app that I would use to back up to iDrive E2 from my Mac is ARQ from Haystack Software. It is built for this. It's at ARQ, arkbackup.com and you buy the software and then you use the software. And, and, and, you know, they are not the backup service provider. They are, I mean, actually they are now they have, they have arc cloud. You can, you can pay 60 bucks a year and five computers and you get one terabyte of storage.
But you can also just buy arc seven for arc version seven for 50 bucks. And then you can back up to whatever you want. Uh, and, and, you know, however much storage you want to buy. And it's amazing how well, uh, but then the iDrive that we were talking about a minute ago, that is also much cheaper than buying a second Synology unit, filling it with drives and handing it to me and having me plug it in, in my basement and vice versa. It's offsite. It's offsite. It's way cheaper than Backblaze.
It's way cheaper than like, it's, it's the least expensive I've found. They've been around for a little while. Obviously you can, you know, have whatever your ARC or hyper backup will encrypt your data on, you know, before it sends it up there. So, you know, that's fine. That was going to be my next question. Yeah. Is it secure? And it's you, you have the keys. You have the keys. Yeah.
So yeah. And they're, you know, they're compatible with tons of things that I drive, which it, I mean, of course they are, they're just an S3 compatible, like the, anything that works with S3 works with iDrive is really how that, how that goes. Um, it's great. So think the reason I wanted to bring it up is A, because I found this pricing and I was blown away. But B, I wanted to share this idea of, you know, you don't have to buy the backup software and storage from the same vendor, right?
Like you, you can, you can sort of open source this if you will, which is really what we're talking about here and potentially save yourself some money and an offer, you know, get yourself some flexibility. Yeah. So those are my three cool stuff found for this week. Pete, you had, you had, you had something from last episode you wanted to share as we were, as we were riding out the episode here. Yes, we did. Yeah.
Here's the thing. If you haven't seen it, Dave put the link in discord, he put the link in the show notes, go back and look at the cover image for last week's show. Mattgeekgab.com slash or 1009. Yeah. Mgg.fm slash 1009. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Boom. And look at that cover image. Yeah. And Dave and I were howling with that image came up and it was AI generated using Dolly under a open AI. Yeah. GPT for what have you. It. It's amazing that that is now free with doll.
Is it that he dashed? Yeah, she whatever it's Dolly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's built within. It's not open. It's not free GPT. You have to pay your $20 a month. A month, I'm sorry, $20 a month. If you've got any kind of a workflow that Chad GPD works for you, you will find that 4 works so much better than 3.5. I think it's worth the $20 a month. I paid it for a while, then I quit, and I degraded to 3.5, and I, about six weeks later, went back to 4.0, said, quit being cheap. It's so much better.
It's so much more effective. But you created this image, And we're, I think it's in the top three of all Mackey Gap cover art. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Well, we were talking about, you know, we just kept saying in last episode, you have our permission, you have our permission. So it was obvious that was going to be the title. And I had used Dolly mid episode to create a picture of two nerds with, you know, giving you your permission. That's all I told it to do.
And then the concept of a goat rodeo came up.
And it was like oh man that should be the episode image and I'm like what about and so I did I typed to to chat GPT let me see if I can find it here the words that I type draw a wide orientation picture of a goat rodeo with two nerdy goats giving you permission this is the image that came up there was no iteration required from uh from this like this was it and and I I saw this came up on my screen mid episode like while we were talking and it was like how do I not like burst
out in tears laughing at this stupid thing because chat GBT dolly it's it's not good at spelling words correctly but that was perfect intentional almost well I don't know but it was perfect for these nerdy goats to have missed misspelled go ahead on their stupid painted signs like it Just. I wish I could say that I had this vision and iterated it with ChatGPT to realize it, and no, this is what it came up with.
So yeah, it's- The bow tie on the back of the neck. But you can play with- The people watching the goat rodeo. You can play with Dolly 3 without paying for ChatGPT. You can use, Bing AI has Dolly 3 in it now, so you gotta use Microsoft Edge, They limit you to like 10 a day though, right? Yeah, maybe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you can play with it. So yeah, go play with it. I have no idea what this episode's title is going to be at this point. We're going to have to figure that out.
Maybe it's the finest of all green bubble potatoes. I don't know. Nothing better seemed to have come up. So I think that might be it. So now I got to figure out green bubble potatoes. Yeah, exactly. Yes and no. Short answers. Yes and no. That's it. Short answer. Yep. Yep. Thanks for hanging out with us a little extra today, folks, while we talked about this. Thank you for all your quick tips and your questions and your cool stuff found. Love it. We love being able to do this.
It's a privilege to be here. Yeah. Agreed. Agreed. Yeah, I meant what I said earlier, you know about not having any plans to leave the show I think that or end the show or anything like that. I like I'm this is you know, I still have other businesses I am NOT retired But if if I ever get to a point where I I say that I am quote-unquote retired, my guess is I'll still be doing this So, you know, yep. Yep. I Get the show mm, baby.
We might we might we're definitely gonna get to 20 years Absolutely. That was a, I've never said this publicly before, but that for a while, like when we were in the 12 to 15 year range, there were some moments there where it started to feel a little bit like a grind and this, I'm like, all right, MGG 20. And I even had like a thing in my notes, like, okay, there's like, we got to make it to MGG 20. It's 20 years, not MGG 2020.
And now it's like, okay, maybe it's MGG 30. Like I don't know. Like 20 is close. Like we're 18 months away from that. I don't know. We're not stopping at MGG 20. No, no. Yeah. No, no. No, no. Well, and it can be a grind, and I didn't realize how much until I started trying to do my own show. And it's like, oh, it's a lot of work every week. This is not a, this is not something you just do. I always say that it's a labor of love. There have been times where...
That was more labor than love. But these days, I'm really back to the balance being far on the other side of that. I love doing this, so yeah. Thanks for hanging out with us, folks. And it comes through, yeah. I think it does, and I know that it came through when it was more labor than love. I remember hearing from some of you at times, you're like, oh, you're being a little short on the show.
I can tell that you're not, is everything okay? It was it was all very kind and supportive, but it was you know y'all telling me You know batting a thousand anymore like yeah, that's a great thing about this audience. It's more of a community It's way is a community. Yes community. Yeah, not an audience. No. It's not an audience No, you guys are fantastic out on discord. Yeah everywhere. Yeah, come join discord to come hang out with us That's just do that mg g.fm.
Slash discord or Mac key cab comm slash discord and we'll see you over there. And thanks to our sponsors of course, LinkedIn.com slash MGG for sponsoring, the episode. You can see about all our sponsors at MacPeakGab.com, slash sponsors. I'm looking at Pete's shirt, your camera's working. Folks, I have three words of advice for you today and make sure, please, if you're gonna do anything thing that we've talked about in this episode, make sure you don't get caught.