Greetings, folks, and welcome to Mac Geek Cab 993 for Monday, July 31st, 2023. This episode is a little bit different. I am actually sitting here and I was going to say alone, but not really alone because Lisa's behind me. I'm in a hotel room in New York, and we are in the aftermath of Mac Stock, which happened out in Woodstock, Illinois, this past weekend. I am here just doing a little introduction of what you're about to hear.
At MacStock, we were able to do things a little bit differently, and we were able to get decent enough audio that that audio, plus a little bit of time and logic, allows me to deliver you what you're about to hear. We held the first Mac Geek Gab Caucus live on stage on Saturday at MacStock Conference and Expo. You will hear about 10% into this that I bother to think to introduce my fellow panelists. Yes, this was an oversight, but only so much as the recording went, it really speaks to
what MaxDoc is and becomes. MaxDoc feels so much like camp. Everyone is together. Everyone is doing everything together. We eat together. We hang out together. There was no need to introduce people that had already been talking to each other all weekend long.
So, I will tell you, since you are not there with us, or at least weren't this year, maybe you'll be there with us next year, that on stage for the MacGee Cab Caucus, we had Adam Christensen, Allison Sheridan, Jeff Gamet, Pilot Pete, John F. Braun, yep, and me, Dave Hamilton, yours truly. You will hear all of us talk. I will explain in the caucus what the caucus was. Sponsors for this episode include Hopwater, where you get to go to
hopwater.com and you get 20% off your first purchase. Of course, we will talk more about all of that in the midst of the episode here. But for now, enjoy. First, though, I want. To give a huge shoutout of thanks to Mike Potter, of course, for organizing MaxTalk, to Roger Harmon, who engineered the recording of the tracks that I was then able to mix.
Thank you, Mike. Thank you, Roger. And of course, Brian Henson for being the speaker wrangler at MaxDoc, keeping the logistics moving, really just making everything possible. Thanks to certainly the three of them and everybody that made MaxDoc possible, and everybody that was there. It was really a spectacular weekend. It was nice to get back
after 2019. It was the last time I was there. Really great. Hopefully, you'll be there with us next year, but it doesn't matter right now because we've got this to share with you. Music. Protecting the microphone making sure only those with the talking stick get to talk. That's right. I, Grabbed it. No, man. I am excited about this. This is not the first time we've had Matt geek ab at,
Maxdoc, but it's the first time we've had you at maxdoc the right way you did. Yeah, you did, Yeah, we've been offstage Where we're at the Hampton like I said earlier due to some clerical error now, it's here So this is great. Dave put together just a fantastic caucus. I keep calling it around to a caucus of amazing guests from past Mac geek episodes. And you've got some great topics planned out. I was watching, I told you I was lurking. I was watching the email chain.
This is going to be a really great presentation. Everyone. I think you're going to enjoy it. Dave Hamilton, everyone. Amazing. Thanks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you. Okay. All right. So this is different, right? Because I realized as we were getting into planning all of this, that there were going to be many of us in this room, all of whom had been on MacGeekab at one time or another. And I think I got it right. I don't think I'm missing anyone from the stage,
but if I am, we're just gonna leave it. And you have my sincere apologies and I'll buy you a drink. But I thought, well, wait a minute, You know, Mac-e-cab just celebrated its 18th birthday. Woo! Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. And so that means it's old enough to vote. And being old enough to vote means it's old enough to do other things like vote in primaries and caucuses. And so why not then allow this to be our first MacGeekGab caucus and we'll do it
here at MacStock. We have uh I think I have uh yeah there's some rules that I was going to put up on the thing but it doesn't matter. So we will we have a couple of oh they're up great right so So, we have a few topics that we have bashed around and not at all agreed upon, which is perfect. And so, we will talk through these. We will give ourselves no more than eight minutes per topic.
We will speak in, we will honor the old tradition of the talking stick style, as Mike alluded, which is that the person with the talking stick, and this is the talking stick, my dear panelists. You have your own talking stick. Well, I do, I do. And I also get to decide when the talking stick moves to the next person if necessary. But otherwise, feel free to pass it around. But that way it makes the audio sound good because hopefully this becomes MacGeeKev993.
I think it would be 993. So, but if the audio, if it doesn't work and we talk all over each other and it's a disaster, then it's just for us. That's also okay. All right, so with that in mind, we will talk about these things and then we will vote and talk and decide, each of us will cast a vote as to whether we are happier with the state of whatever the topic is today or where it was, you know, 18 years ago or sometime in the past.
And our first topic is going to be automation. And before I start the clock, and by the way, because of the live stream, obviously the stream will mostly be on us, I spent creating a countdown timer and keynote is no joke. It is a very manual process using build-ins and build-outs and a lot of replication. And so there will be a timer going whether you can see it or not. I'm very proud of this. All right, so I got too many things going on here because I can't see that.
No, we don't want to start the timer yet. Okay, so the first topic will be automation. Automation on the Mac, we can say, well, it's some of the history of it. AppleScript started in 1991 with System 7. AppleScript is currently at version 2.8, which was released in October of 2014. So that's interesting. Automator though was started in April of 2005. It is six weeks older than MacGeekGab. Current version is 2.1 or 2.10, I'm sorry, from December, just this past December. And then
Shortcuts of course started as Workflow in 2014. Apple acquired it in 2017 and then it was called Shortcuts in 2018 and then in 2021 it came out for the Mac mostly, but without triggers, right?
That you got all that all right so automation it is and if by hook or by crook who wants the mic first so I nine minutes sorry yes yes yes okay Dave to answer your question I am overall happier with automation today the state of automation today compared to where we were in 2005 and that's because in In addition to, well, the, the.
Sadly fading away apple script. We do have shortcuts and We we do have all these other little tools, They've grown in such a way that that we can now incorporate JavaScript in so that we can hook together things that we couldn't before. Also, we have automation tools like ift and zapier so we can link together and. Automate things in ways today that that we could only hope for back in 2005.
Thank you, that's Jeff Gamet. Of course, for the listening audience, everybody here knows who's on stage, but we've got Pilot Pete, Alison Sheridan, Jeff Gamet, John F. Braun, and Adam Christensen here on stage today. So, woo-hoo! Get on, Dave. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I will agree that we've come a long way. When I tried to use AppleScript, whenever I was trying to use it, I would always run into a wall.
Very quickly, I tried to do something, and figure it out. Automator got a little bit farther, got a couple of things done, and then it would go, oh, you need to put AppleScript in there. But I'm actually not going to bring up, in a nice way, shortcuts. I don't like them. Every time I try to do something, I can't get it to do what I want it to do. But I am much happier in automation because of Keyboard Maestro. I am doing so many things.
When we were on a tour of OWC, and this guy was showing us the process they do to run a certain test, the guy opened up the terminal and he put in a terminal command and he said then I capture that and I copy it and I put it into a text file and then I pull it from the text file and I put it into Excel and then we get rid of this one column and I'm like, I just turned to David and he goes, oh my hands are itching for some Keyboard Maestro right here.
So I am definitely way happier doing tons and tons of automation, but it's in Keyboard Maestro, not in shortcuts. Say I had to color within the lines did you know not at all no there's no lines, Hello, so as a former as a software engineer in another life. I suggest that you all just learn the C programming language. Just drop the mic now I just want to offer a few pointers here.
AppleScript uses something called Script Editor, which can be used to do AppleScript or JavaScript, what I understand. The thing is, it's not a very pleasant and it's a very text-based environment, which not everybody is comfortable with. I do have a couple of things here, though. I did find something called Dougscript.
That's a collection of hundreds of Apple scripts, and I found in my experience, one of the best ways to learn something is to get somebody else to do it, and then learn from that. Or copy other people's work. Oh, that's a great way to learn, yeah.
Another thing is that, yeah, again, as I mentioned, the Script Debugger is another piece of software, Is a much nicer development environment, As far as automator and shortcuts Kershon did a great job of telling us about shortcuts, So I'm very happy with that.
I'm trying to think where to go with this we have other There is no I'm sorry no no no no all right two other two other sources of information if you want to learn about programming, so one is, Apple developer site Developer dot apple.com go there they have tutorials on all of this stuff and probably sample code as well, So that's good the other thing is that there is a book called like Apple script for dummies So, if you want to learn AppleScript, that may be another source of information.
Thank you, Mr. Braun. All right. I can't believe I'm going to say this. I probably somewhat agree with Allison, but it's because of my own biases. So I really love shortcuts. I'm glad that we have it. I was very scared when Apple announced they were kind of getting rid of automator and scripting, and it was unclear if we were going to have any kind of automation. So I'm very, very happy to have it. I, too, get stuck with it. But for me, it's because I am a developer and a programmer.
So for me, AppleScript makes sense. It's just like I can I can do this. This is our JavaScript, as it were, too. And luckily, I think you can do AppleScript and JavaScript and shortcuts, and I have not played with that yet. So maybe that's that's my in there. But yeah, I often get stuck, especially with how they handle variables and some other things. And so Kirsten's advice about use variables. Very, very good one. If you will get stuck very quickly if you don't.
So yeah, but I'm probably leaning more towards the Apple script. I think interesting. Yeah, Yeah, okay, we're responsible enough to have two microphones go, okay, The right to change my mind. It's mine You fools So is Chuck alluded to earlier this morning the mic Pete don't make me edit. It was Chuck alluded to earlier this morning You could follow on or follow technology or get stuck in the past if you are a developer
then all that stuff makes great sense. If you can't figure out an if-else-then statement to save your life. Open chat GPT and go, write me a script that will do this for me and then tell me how to implement it. I'm telling you, it works. It's amazing. I've done two or three things with the website for my show, said I wanted to do this. I wanted to figure out whether you're using an iPhone or Android, I want you to then help people subscribe.
And it wrote me a script. I put it into the HTML code of the WordPress, bang, zoom, boom, I'm a programmer. What's nice with that is, if you're using it for a JavaScript. This didn't work.
This is what happened. I got oh, we'll do this. Yeah, exactly if it doesn't you get to test in real time Whether it's accurate and and then you iterate because it's actually pretty good at the whole transformative thing T and you aren't stuck with automator or Apple screw this one happened to give me JavaScript So yeah, if you want to be a real power person, and I saw this in the shortcut demo, too, There was some reg X in there, Right, I don't know no. Yeah, no, but I gotta go,
Rejects you can learn anything believe why do you have to chat GPT's there for regex you're good to go exactly yeah, Yeah, all right. Do we have a yeah, Allison? Do you have more to say on automation all right well? It's fine. We don't have to fill up all our time. We just have a limit. It's not yeah, so So is anyone happier with where automation used to be versus where it is today?
Yes. Interesting. So we have Jeff Gamet and Adam Christensen voting in the past, John voting in the past, so half in the past, half in the future, or in the present anyway. I'll take the present. Take the microphone. I'm happier with where we are now. Take the microphone. Thank you. I'm bad at taking tests. I'm happier with where we are now. Okay. All right. Yeah. All right, yeah. Fortitude.
Fortitude, all right, all right, sweet. What's the temperature in the room here for automation? Are we happier? For those that are happier now, raise your hands. And those that were happier in the past? Raise your hands. Okay, so some. Yeah, yeah, it's about similar. No, I think it's what you learned first and that's your native language. So yeah, amazing. Awesome. All right. All right. Hey, look, if you're like me, you enjoy a nice cold beverage
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using like third-party software to backup. We were using Retrospect, dedicated backup media, maybe even tape drives, but certainly, you know, maybe some removable storage, maybe back then, but probably we were probably had graduated
from that. It wasn't until 2007 that Apple introduced Time Machine in OS 10.5 Mac OS 10 10.5 Leopard and then the Time Capsule was a year later in 2008 and it only had a 10 year tenure it was the end of life in 2018 which is fascinating yeah and then Time Capsule continued to evolve sorry Time Machine continued to evolve in 2016 it got APFS and obviously there are other third party solutions and all of those fun things and if I can remember what is in which hand I will.
Two items, Carbon Copy Cloner and Super Duper are probably the, yep, we're getting some cheers here, are probably the two major backup programs on the Mac right now. So I think we are in better shape, and especially Carbon Copy Cloner. The other day I was doing some backup activity, and I used a charging cable, but not a high Speed cable and it actually said you probably don't want to do this because it's gonna take a really long time
And I'm like what copy cloner said this yes. Yeah, it identified the cable speed. Yeah, that's awesome, Huh that was awesome, but um Yeah, I think I think we're in better shape and there are you know as David pointed out there are online services now, There's the hybrid service from a sonology Where were you kind of mix the two? For backing up your Synology, not for backing up your Mac. Yet. Right. Yet. Yeah.
Yeah, but to that point though, we're using, we were using third-party software 18 years ago to back up our Macs, and now here we all are cheering about the third-party software we're using to back up our Macs in 18 years later. My only gripe with Time Machine Is that you and I both wrestled with this, Dave. They would get corrupted on a pretty frequent basis. Yeah. And it was very frustrating because you either, my strategy was.
Unless you have snapshots, my solution was to actually take an old version from my Synology and say, Restore this back to the compute or restore an earlier version kind of like a snapshot does and then that, That's all the problem mostly network backups right direct attached discs were not so much an issue with time machine So I was gonna say as a person and anybody who's heard my show knows I am a fanatic about backup
I use multiple multiple versions Time machine is the one that I tell everybody if you're not using it use it like if you have a zero backup I think that's the the solution it it brought us is it's easy to do you get a drive you plug it in Do you want to use this for time machine? Yes? It's all you have to do you're done. You're backing up, You definitely need to do more and should do more so I use that I use news. Bye.
Backblaze online I use Chrono sync with my drobo still to back up, Specific to backup specific folders like my podcast I'll get backed up my drobo my drobo gets backed up the backblaze that also gets backed up other backups I use carbon copy cloner, so there's multiple multiple versions, and so I think having all the options is great But I know I'm a huge fan of time machine I've not had problems with that I actually use time machine with my son ology for my family's computers because they won't
plug in like I would do direct connected if I could get them to plug in but there are laptops so they're like no that's too much of a hassle so I set that up and I've not. I must be lucky because I've not had the corruption issue I know over the network my audience have and and I've helped people with it but yeah for sure I love that you brought up Chrono Sync because I did that with my drove us as well but it was the excuse you had to use
a Mac in between. So I was doing Mac, Drobo to Drobo. You had to have a Mac running. ChronoStick was the only way we could do it. But it gave me an excuse to buy a new M1 Mac Mini to do that at the time. But I want to look back at the past, because I want to talk about when it fails, what happens. Dave brought up Retrospect. Retrospect, was it RetroBatch? No, Retrospect was the app guy.
Gardner And I remember, I was all over that. Man, I had that going and then one day I needed it and then went, oh no, I'm sorry, I can't open any of this. I was like, wait, no, no, no, no. But I've had to go back to Carbon Copy Cloner and I didn't even realize it does versioning that I didn't, I didn't know it did. I was like, whew, that saved my bacon because I don't do Time Machine so I don't have any versioning in anything else.
And then I've also gone back to my Backblaze backups and said, oh, I want to get that. Or the fun thing about having an online backup like that is when you're away from home, you could get something from your Mac. Because you just log in and go, it's like you've got online file storage of everything you own. Sorry, go ahead. No, go ahead. I was gonna ask, you've talked about recovering things from backups, and it sounds like this has happened to you recently in a meaningful way, not just an,
I did it as an experiment. Yeah, no, I needed something. I was like, oh, no. How many, has anyone else here in the last year, two years, needed to recover something from what you would call a backup? Absolutely. You want to oh yeah, absolutely So you know how we can sometimes get stupid. Oh, yeah, I'm a master at that sometimes, and and you don't realize, in time to recover gracefully with time machine and What do you do now you go to your backups and?
And I'm pretty like I I don't know, someone earlier today said I'm anal with my backups. I like to think I'm paranoid about data loss.
So I have super-duper backups. I have carbon copy cloner backups. I have backblaze backups and, And the great thing is I was able to go to all of those, To find the file I wanted I was able to find what I wanted immediately But I checked the others just to see if it was there, which actually Is an important point check your backups every now and then make sure they're actually doing what what you think,
Yeah on the recovery question I can tell you that I haven't had to do it for myself personally, But I've done two full backblaze restorations for clients that I set up one was a client who. Knocked her drove off of her like desk You know and that was her local backup, but I had set her up with backblaze backup, so it's a process,
You know to pull down a lot of data. They will send you a drive You can do that option too, but it's a little more expensive if you're willing to take the time and I had another one Someone unfortunately lost their house in a fire and needed to do recovery And so I recovered back from them and that was so beautiful in all of these I'm trying to figure out if we need backups right like actively,
in all of these scenarios if if instead of all the backups that we all diligently do if all you had was was all of your documents stored in your documents folder, and let that be syncing to iCloud like Apple wants to do by default. Would that have saved, to what percentage? Zero, you know. Stop stupid, Dave. That's fair right no. I know it's all the house on fire problem It just solves the drobo fell off the desk problem, but it doesn't solve Jeff.
I'll also say that it depends on how you're doing your storage, too Because in this case like the woman with the drobo she was a photographer She can't keep everything in her local sure storage so a lot of the data was only on run that Drobo and then backed up to the cloud. So with caveats, yes. Yeah, yeah, well that's the thing, is to what percentage, go ahead. So I say backups are for people who can't remember what they wrote or don't remember what the pictures look like.
I'm just saying. No, and for travel, for travel I actually keep a little thumb drive with me. It's a little two terabyte thumb drive and I use my time machine to that on a regular basis. Now, it's in the same vicinity. I've got two bags, so if I lose both bags and I'm out of luck, but I also keep that with me. So even emergencies on the road, I'm good to go with a thumb drive. I wanna give a little hot tip here.
Steve and I went to Peru and the Galapagos. We swam with the penguins and we hiked Machu Picchu, trip of a lifetime. Steve's backpack got stolen right before we got on the plane to come back. In it was his GoPro and his camcorder and his MacBook Pro and a backup drive. But do you know whose backup drive it was? It was mine because I had swapped backup drives with him. Carry two drives, swap them, didn't lose the trip of a lifetime. That gives you chills? Yeah. Really smart.
That's really smart. Yeah, we are we are almost out of we have eight seconds I Steve wants to remind me everybody his passport was in that backpack as well We called it we called it two bonus days in Peru. I was just gonna say you got extra time. Yeah, yeah Before I keep a photocopy of my passport page so that you can go to the council it and go hey Yeah, there you go. It did help? It saved me maybe 15 minutes. Okay, well, you know, that's 15 minutes. I do want to follow up on what Jeff said.
Verification is very important. Boom. Time Machine, if you dig into TMUtil, which is the Time Machine utility, there is a way to verify it. You can stay on the mic, John, please. And also Carbon Copy Cloner has a feature where it will compare the data from your local disk to the backup disk and it will tell you. It makes it take a lot longer, but, and I'm not sure about the other products. Yeah, no, I would say, so it's time to vote.
Are we better off where we are today? And I'm curious why we're better off today or not. So we'll keep it as brief as possible. I'm going to vote yes, just because we have so many more options than we did 15 years ago, 20 years ago. Absolutely. Better options than they actually work. I'm backing up my words right now. Dave, the deal is now we can automate basically everything we need for a backup. Back when we were doing the retrospect thing, there were still things that I had to manually do.
Yeah. Now, yes, we are so much better off. Yes. Wait, wait, wait, one second. Do you have anything to add to that, John? No. No. John and Ron. Yeah, I would say we're better off now, probably even just for the pure fact that we have cloud. Because back then, it was sneaker net. You were hauling your physical media off-site somewhere if you wanted to save it. Absolutely, that's absolutely right. Maybe a fire safe if you had a really, really good one. No, I would agree we're better off now.
And cloud is one reason, but for me, the primary reason is restoration from backups is so much easier and therefore more reliable. I just remembered the reason RetroBatch was such a disaster was it was a database you couldn't get into. We just have file systems that we can see in our backups now. Correct, correct. Yeah, it makes a big difference. Well, yeah, unless it's something else, but yeah. No, you can see Time Machine. You can open up a time machine disk and then it's just a file system.
I mean, it's an oddly put together one behind the scenes, but to us, it looks like just a file system. So, that's good. Alright, good. Yeah, so media consumption. This came up from, Brian suggested this and I love this topic. So, the, and I, we have had two yes votes. I'm not sure that the answer to this one will be a majority yes.
So, the question is, our access, was it better when we only had 75-ish cable channels but at least they were all through one service and we knew what we had, or do we like the choice and countless services from which we must now choose that we have today? In 2005, we were on mostly cable and I suppose broadcast, which still exists today-ish.
One interesting thing, in 2005, American Idol held the number one and number two slots for television programs ranked because they were on two nights a week. And so it was Wednesday and Thursday or something. and so Wednesday was number one and Thursday was number two or vice versa. Starting at about 2010, that number one spot shifted and it has basically since been owned by Sunday Night Football.
But its viewer numbers have gone down. It's just that there's so much, the interpretation is there's so much more dilution that we now, you know, it's hard to own that number one spot. IPhone was announced obviously in 2007 along with Netflix, Hulu, and Roku. In 2013, House of Cards was the first original Netflix series and it won an Emmy that year. In that same year, online video was responsible for over 50% of internet traffic. So this is 2013, so 10 years ago.
And then in 2022, so last year, the most recent data we have, Stranger Things would have been the number one slot, but so much for not live sports. But because of all the dilution of the not live sports category, Sunday Night Football still holds the top. So with that in mind, with our ability to consume and the options from which we must choose and the paths we must go through now to simply sit and watch the boob tube. Are we better off now or were we better off then?
Do you watch the boob tube? I sometimes watch the boob. No, I'm asking because this is actually I get made fun of in my family because I am now currently the only person who watches stuff like on the big screen TV in my living room. My children and my wife prefer. Pains me most of the time their iPhone. Oh, yeah. And I'm curious. So obviously, none of you people are doing this either, right? By that reaction, so OK, I'm not the weird one. Anyway All the different services
And and now I I definitely enjoy them. I was never a big cable fan, so this one's probably gonna be easy for me, but for me Probably the thing that saved it And I I don't know if this was the thing that Steve was supposedly talking about when he said he cracked television But I mean my Apple TV the ability to aggregate that I go to the Apple TV app. I have you know all the services
That I'm not so thrilled about I wish it was not so divided up, but that's fine. It's working But yeah the ability to aggregate that content to just jump in and see all my shows regardless of where they are, For the most part yeah, Netflix. I'm looking at you Flex can't integrate with Apple TV, They want to but yeah that I love and enjoy and that's sort of how I consume stuff. Yeah, All right there we go. Yeah, we are so much worse off it hurts And we are so much better off. It's like ecstasy.
We're so we're so much worse off because Our viewing options have become so fragmented like you cannot keep track of, Where you need to go to find the shows you want to watch? Much. Then for other things, it's available only on a specific service. So now you have to have. Disney Plus and Netflix and Amazon Prime and Hulu and Peacock and Max. Yeah, see, we can just go on and on and on. And that is so frustrating. And we don't have a true unified interface
that allows us to easily navigate all of that. Now, here's where it becomes the ecstasy part. We need all of those things because there is so much amazing content that's available now. And I believe that content is available now only because all of these networks were able to break free from broadcast television and regular cable and get away from either enforced or perceived constraints that they had to work within. Either the gatekeepers are gone or there's lots more gatekeepers.
You can look at it either way you like, right? But there's more avenues. Yeah, right and now there's more good quality television that I want to watch than I am actually able to watch. Oh same Yeah, I mean if I think if we went around the room here and asked everybody, you know, what what was what is your current? Favorite show to watch We would probably get you know, 10 to 15.
Different answers and more and maybe more but we're like a crowd of like-minded nerdy people You know and and yet we would be like we could all recommend things to each other that we have not seen And that and it's all good like that's the part that I question though is at what point does the money run out like we? Are only we are the ones paying for this content in the end I mean, there's there's you know executives and gatekeepers making the decisions, but,
You know in the end if they can't sell it to us they're not gonna pay for it. So when does that start to like do we I think You're right, we are in like... The heyday of this now. Of course, there's a strike happening right now that may actually be the answer to my rhetorical question. Maggie McNeill I was going to go a much different direction with it, but it does have to do with the splintering. What I miss is Monday morning,
going into work, and everybody just saw Dallas on Friday night. Who shot JR? Right? Everybody. Old enough for members. Now, we definitely don't have that experience, but I sat down with a couple of lovely people last night at the Weinstock, and they were talking about Star Trek Strange New Worlds, which is a show I love. And I went, no, no, no, I haven't seen it yet. And, all of a sudden we all just went, oh. They were having fun until I sat down.
Mason-That's often what happens, Alison. It wasn't about them. But it was, but that's been lost. And I do miss that. And like, so I'm, I find that we're all evangelizing going, we go to our daughter's house and we're like, okay, you need to watch a silo. Okay. We'll sit here and rewatch the whole series with you just so we can talk about it. And we've lost that, but it actually is all awesome.
Yeah. Go ahead, Pete. Go ahead, John. Yeah. The one fear that I have is death by a thousand cuts. I have a few services that I pay for, And there are, like for example, so I have Disney, Apple Plus, so, you know, there's a lot of content there. The one tip I want to offer is that, especially if you have an Apple TV, there are free apps. Those supported by commercials, like for example, I'm watching something on the CW,
Grimm, if you're interested. Um... The only thing I don't like about that model is that they keep playing the same commercials over and over and over. I'm like, mix it up a bit to keep me interested. So that's my take. So the, uh, I think the key point you hit on is dilution. And that's of course,
double-edged sword, right? Back in the day, it was, uh, you know, Carson was pulling 30, 35 million a night and somebody is lucky to pull three, 3 million a night now on a, on a given show on network, but all the various services, I mean, the quality of the program, particularly, I think with Apple TV, some of their original programming is just off the charts. Good. Yeah. Even the stuff that I'm not particularly, you know, I love that. I got
to admit that the quality is there. It's just not my thing, but it's the dilution. And then I know
we talked about it previously on the show, and I can't think of the name of it. It's either an app or a website and it's like what's on or some just watch just watch there you go just watch go find, what we never remember the name of it don't get old it's bad for your memory yeah why it's not the one i use i use tv time yeah okay so tv time so but just watch another one tv time put in the name of the show you want and it tells you it's on this streaming service or that one and so and,
you can track which episodes you've watched which is the only way i know what to watch at home steve Steve and I took it up a nerd level. We created an air table database for ourselves. Your air table database is what made me seek out an app. Yeah, I saw that and I'm like, oh, I could go down. No, no, this was not. This was a reflection on me. I'm like, I could go down this path. That doesn't look healthy. Somebody else has solved this problem in a way that is acceptable to me.
I just need to find it. If anybody wants it, I have a blog post about it. you can have it for yourselves. Okay, so yeah, certainly every John is that right? You're the only you still pay for like cable, right? Yes. Okay, so. I just want to see so if you've cut the cord put your hands up
I just yeah, okay, and now if you haven't cut the cord put your hands up. I just want to see okay So it's about I don't know 30% haven't and 70% have by my very accurate calculations No, you need to ask the bonus question, If you cut the cord, do you watch sports? Yes. Yeah. Well, then that's the asterisk is like, how do you watch sports? How many of the people who said they still have TV is mainly because sports, I don't know.
Yeah. Like most of them. Oh, yeah. If you haven't cut the cord. Yeah. And watching live sports without after having cut the cord, you kind of have to like, did you make your deal with your particular devil of choice that is your replacement for that? But it's half the price. So at least that, you know, with the Fubo and the YouTube TV and all that, it's half the price. Yeah. But just like, just like having all the services, it now really complicates things for you.
It's way more complex having cut the cord. It's better, but it's way more complex. So I don't know if this is legit or not, but a friend of mine and I, we split the cost of YouTube TV and then I run one node off it by using channels. So I can watch YouTube TV on all my devices using channels and we split the cost of YouTube TV. As long as you're in the same general geographical area. We live down the street from each other. You get away with it. A couple miles away, yeah. And then...
And you can't watch NBC, which I'm fine with that, I guess, but yeah, but I can watch anywhere in the world on any device because it shows up as my IP address at my house, using channels. All right, so we're, we're, do we, we are out of time on that topic. We haven't voted yet. It is therefore it is time to vote. So what's that? It says time to vote. Yeah, I know I have these automations that do it all together.
The worst was testing them and sitting there and watching it count down because it didn't works the first time. And it was like, Oh, it didn't turn over. Okay. Why check that? Right. Okay. Back to the top. Yep. Here we go. Well, but I did that and then I needed the actual thing to know that it would work in production. See 27 minutes. You'll never get back. 27 minutes. And the worst was if I'd like got distracted or my Mac went to sleep like oh.
Which as you might guess happens to me a lot do you have anything to add before we vote no? I was just getting ready to vote yeah Go please so for me better better now because of Apple TV and also I think even though all the different services I think aggregate. I'm still paying less than I ever was with cable. Yeah, John better now worse. We'll just go down so tell us John. How do you feel? About what? Just say yes. Yes. Now say no. No. Okay. So Dave. Thanks, Jeff. Sure thing.
Um, I begrudgingly say we're better off because I love all the content we have. It's just frustrating keeping track of everything. Yeah. Yeah. I vote. Yes. Way more better. With no asterisk. No. Way more better. Great. Much more variety, so you have to go yes. I would say way better, I could add an asterisk, but then I would have to go back in time and experience how I felt in 2005, because I know I felt an asterisk then too, but the gift of time sort of heals that wound.
If you do that, go back and count how many shows you're really excited about then, and how many are you really excited about now. I'm excited about a lot more now. That's probably true. I mean, there was Friends, but that was like, okay, and then you watched some other crap afterwards that you didn't care about, because you were still watching the TV. Because it was still, what was the song? 57 channels and nothing on? Was that it? Yeah, it was. Springsteen. Yeah, that's right.
Thank you, Dr. Dream. Dr. Dream. Dr. Dream. Dr. Dream. Dr. Dream. All right. So that's the end of the Mac Geek Gap Caucus. And now, there is more. It is far less organized. What you just heard was a fairly cohesive conversation. The more, of course, is our Stump the Geek section, where people from the crowd bring, their questions, we discuss them. This is far less pleasant to listen to, I would think. But I didn't want to make that decision for you. There's no reason for me to make that
decision for you. I have the audio. It's already mixed, at least as far as it goes. So, I'm going to leave it here. But I wanted to give you the flexibility, the freedom to at least know that this part of it was over. There is more fun. And I'll get out of the way. Thanks so much for listening. Thanks so much for staying subscribed. All of those things. Thanks so much for checking out our sponsors again. That's hot water. HOPWTR.com.
MGG and We'll see where this goes One more thing though Don't get caught. All right, We have a few minutes and we have an extra microphone and we have when we have done these in the past, We have done a little bit of stump the geeks and you've got six of us up here. So if you have a question, First come, first serve. Yep. I don't have the microphone. I can't decide. Okay. I'll come up. And talk. Please talk like, okay. Sure. Please. Thank you. Is it? My name is Tom. Ladies and gentlemen.
And I use a Mac. Tom Woodland. And I am a Mac user. Hi, Tom. Hi, Tom. Anyway, my question is, so I have my documents folders on an external drive. Can Time Machine be configured to back that up? Yes, the answer is yes. Yeah, yeah, it really is about what it is configured to exclude. Yeah, so don't exclude that, right? Yeah, typically it would include anything including external drives, and you have to tell it don't back that up.
Typically, if it's not already doing it, you need to go into the Time Machine preferences and just add that volume, and it'll back it up. Okay, I have a question. My name is Pat Fouquet, and I've been to six of these, and I love them to death. Amazing. When you're writing in notes on an iPad, and you're using a pencil, and you run out of paper, how do you get it to move up? It sounds like Allison might have the answer. I'm pretty sure you put two fingers on the screen and pull up. No?
Can't do it with the pencil, because it's busy writing. I think that's the point. I got a pencil. I got a pencil too, and I expected if I swipe up... It would swipe up. It doesn't. And I think I think that's a problem with the U. I give them a second microphone. Yeah. Thank you. I think it depends on the app. Some of them you can thank you for confirming notes. Yeah. Okay. You said notes. Nevermind. Your solution
was correct. Allison, use your feet. You have to use your fingers because your pencil is a pencil. If you were, if you had a piece of paper on your desk and you had a pencil in your hand, you wouldn't use the pencil to pull the paper up. You would grab the paper and push it up with a couple of fingers. It is exactly the same way. Yeah. You're saying two fingers doesn't swipe up? Linda just did it over here. So, can we have like the battle royale of iPad notes?
Yeah. Don't start below, start on the paper. It's like, it's much like your school, and that's great. Oh. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we have devolved for anybody listening into something that's equally uninteresting to you as it is to us. Yeah. That's right. Is it stumped? We're stumped. Michael has a question. Michael has a question. Yeah Michael. So I'd like to hear from the esteemed panel, from individual, what is the one thing that Apple is still doing
that's driving you nuts? The one thing. So I'm gonna leave that like a very open question. Fix Siri, for the love of God, fix Siri. My observation is from the hardware side. This is. Gonna sound kind of weird coming from me because I just got a shiny new MacBook Air 15-inch and this is a beautiful machine. I get like not infinite battery life but my old machine that was Intel-based, I maybe got two hours until I had to recharge. This machine will go over 10 hours.
But what do you want them to do now? What do you want them to stop doing? I'm just going to offer an observation. I think they're moving away from... So when When Steve got on board, he's like, we're going to have four quadrants. Right now, the product line, I think, is getting more and more complex, and it's making it, difficult to make a decision. It's like, well, what's the difference between that and that?
Now, sometimes they'll have a, you know, a chart that'll show, okay, this has this much and that much, but that's just my opinion. No, I think that's valid. When I'm suggesting to people what they should buy, I tell them just, how much money do you have? How much you got. How much you got. That's how you pick out which one you want. How many...
Adam? I would I would concur on the Siri thing I think Siri could be a lot a lot smarter, given the technologies we have but, Probably the other one, and this is more just I wish it was just I think Siri's cheating on you with Adam. I feel like... Wait, wait, wait. Hey Siri! Oh. Well then what? She didn't even answer though. Because I was trying to call her. Oh no, several, several phones and iPads in the room are now listening for you to follow on there.
No, so I think it's it's Spotlight it doesn't drive me nuts nuts But I think it could do a lot more like I think spotlight search could also be more intelligent And and just better, and I don't think they've done much with it. Yeah, and for me. It's mail is, Getting worse. It's getting slower They are taking features. They are taking the extensibility away way, which was sort of the saving grace of mail and of Dave. And so, yeah, mail is not,
I don't know, it's not going in a good direction. Yeah, I've always shied away from third party mail clients because I don't want to get stuck in a box where now that developer isn't making it anymore for whatever reason, because I've been in that box several times. And so that's why I went with Apple Mail and I've been happy for a long time, but it's the last year has
Not been good. Yeah, I'm with you on that all right, so we've already shook our fist at Safari No, no, no Siri or Siri What a Freudian slip Siri we've shaken our fist at at mail both of which I would shake my fist at so I'll bring in another one that really bothers me. Apple needs to get back to consistent usable interfaces. It's a hot mess yes Oh my God. And I think, well, we should probably go to system settings then if we want to discuss
that issue. That's the poster child right there. Anybody got trouble with system settings? Yeah. We don't have that much time. Mike, help. I don't have that much time, Mike. Berries. We don't have enough time for System 7. Mike says no. I don't take that one. But I don't have any trouble, I don't have much trouble, I don't think, with Safari or with Mail. I'm sorry, but those aren't bothering me. Is Siri bothering you?
No. Because we haven't talked about Safari yet, except clearly, subconsciously. Okay. But what I wanted to have Apple stop doing is having things flip that I had flipped the other way. Anybody ever had Wi-Fi calling turn off? Oh, yeah. Why? Why is it turning off? I would never intentionally turn off Wi-Fi calling, but my uncle just posted in our Slack, he couldn't figure out this problem he was having, and somebody goes, check and see if it turned off.
Do you have a family Slack? No, no, no. Steve's uncle is in my Podfeet Slack. Okay, because I've threatened to set up a family Slack, so I just wanted to see if I could have a support group. Another example is, I have never, ever, ever, ever, in mail, this will be a mail complaint, but it's in the turn the switch, I tell it I want my Podfeet mail to be my default address and a month or two will go by and I'll look down and no, it's my Mac.com address.
And why is it changing? I've never said it the other way. That's my fish shake. So I will bring Safari into it because I'm a web developer and my office now, the phrase is Safari's the new IE. It really is, it's gone really bad. It's performance is down. It doesn't support a lot of the newer features. They're very slow to bring them in. So it's, it's, and so I think the broader thing that really frustrates me with Apple a lot of times is attrition.
They bring out these great technologies, like Siri, they pioneer this stuff, they bring it out, and then it just, they let it languish. QuickTime's a great example of this, right? It just slowly went away. So let me ask Adam, what do you use instead of Safari? What do you like instead of Safari? For development, Chrome. What is your daily driver browser? I still use Safari. Because I'm not that crazy, but it frustrates me.
For personal browsing, but for web development, I have to use Chrome for the dev tools and all the other things that are just better. While we're on the subject, another show of hands, because it's so much fun to be able to do this in real time with everybody together. How many people are not using Safari as your daily driver browser. Okay, so maybe maybe two ten percent Yeah, okay, all right. What are you Dave? I'm using edge, And what keeps me off of Safari is the fact that?
Apple has basically sandboxed that system so much that a lot of these other pro tools, Add-ons that we put in to to now chromium based browsers. We can't do on Safari example I use Workona and, And without Workona for those who don't know it at the very basic level It's a it's a tab manager, but it's way way more. It's like full project management and, And we don't have time. It's like it's like yeah. Yeah, we just don't have time, but without that tool I can't do what I do and.
Safari doesn't support it Oh, yeah interesting. I'm a little worried when the other browsers started to go chromium that we're headed back to the IE ActiveX days and that made me nervous and it you're shaking your head, but that is happening right is people are no, Those browsers are supporting the new standards and staying ahead of the curve, Safari's falling behind and webkits falling behind, Okay,
Do stuff fourth caucus topic. Very, very well, by the way, because we are here answering listener questions, and yet we are back to the caucus thing without a clock running. Michael did a great job. We can't help but vote. I think I see what you're saying, Adam, is it's not by an evil empire causing it, it's by somebody not keeping up. It's by attrition. way. Yeah, you know, that's an interesting way to look at it. More yeah more listener questions yeah absolutely linda yeah stump the geek.
I'm sorry we'll probably want that microphone back for answers go ahead linda okay so um, occasionally once in a blue moon i lose an email from iCloud on my iCloud address now when i'm saying iCloud i'm using actually dot me that shouldn't matter um so i sent sent an email to Ken Ray, who knows how to use a Mac. He responded to me twice, and I didn't get the email. So we corresponded on chat, and I finally just gave him an off iCloud, .x.
Can I make a guess? In MacGeek, you have 992. Pete and I were talking about exactly this. Apple's iCloud spam filters are out of control. Is in my favorites, and his mails are going into spam. Mails that I send to someone and they respond, they're going into spam. This was not in spam. It never showed up? It never showed up. But that also could be spam filters.
Where? Oh, no, no, no, no. There are layers of spam filters, and things that are decided to be very terrible are just not led to the mail server. Ken is a known spammer, let's be fair. I mean, obviously. That's fair. Okay, I'm gonna take it outside the spam world because what you're experiencing is so frustrating and I deal with it all the time. This is the most stupid thing. I will have emails that I never see but I can go to another device
that has the same email account and find it there. And then I reply to the person, and now that whole email thread shows up on the original device. So what for what it's worth he was responding to my email. Yeah I've had it work that way too. Yeah. All right. Yeah. Nope. You're up. Yup. Okay. What's your, this I'm Steve talking to the microphone for me. Okay. Thank you. I'm Steve. Bluetooth has been turned off in an unintentionally on a Mac. You have no control over a wireless mouse mouse.
How do you get Bluetooth enabled again? You got to buy a new Mac. I actually had this problem recently and oh boy was it frustrating. So what caused that problem? No one saw me. You can't prove a thing. Actually, that was a different one. I did turn it off, turned off the Bluetooth and then went, oh yeah, duh. And I rebooted it and then it came on. But if rebooting doesn't work, you need a wired mouse, USB mouse.
There's another answer no wired mouse. Okay is allowed let Adam take this all right Adams Adams got it then that's how I got it the second. Even though we bashed her earlier use Siri What if you don't have Siri enable the check your back hey Siri turn on Bluetooth I think what we heard from another listener and I could just be making this up out of like sleep-deprived delirium, but it sounds really good, is reboot the Mac and wait, because it will offer to turn on Bluetooth for you.
If you wait after it boots, yours did not do this. What you have to do is you can highlight your account with the left or right arrow key because your Bluetooth keyboard is plugged in with your lightning cable, thus it becomes USB. You type in your password, you press return, log in, press command spacebar to get spotlight.
Type in Bluetooth exchange and The default choice on Bluetooth exchange it first of all realizes that Bluetooth exchange that Bluetooth is turned off, And the default option is in highlighted in blue Which is a return key to turn it on and I saved my client for buying a new. Talk back was bad But hang on Steve, hang on Steve, why couldn't you have used Spotlight to open the Bluetooth exchange with it plugged in via a lightning cable when it was booted up?
I did not consider that. They also, I turn off Siri. Yeah. Siri can be potentially. Yeah, no, Siri's the right answer if it's on. They had been on the phone with Apple support and Apple support was not able to successfully help him because they didn't realize she had not logged into her computer. She was still at the login screen trying to do command space. OK, that's it. Got you. That we are out of time in the room here today.
We're all around, and certainly for tonight and most of us, I think, through tomorrow. Come find us. Say hello. Ask us questions. We're going to ask you questions. That's the beauty of Mac stock is everybody is just all together. And we love that. And so thank you to all of my panelists, everybody here. Pete, Allison, Jeff, John, Adam, thank you so much.
We'll see you in two minutes. So we're going to go do the drone thing, and I'm going to hope that the FAA isn't around, because I don't want to get caught. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There you go.