It's time for Mac Geek Gab, and listener Ufasa brings us our quick tip of the week, saying, I was reading a Reddit post on my iPad when a reminder showed up near the top, as they do when you have them enabled. I accidentally swiped down on the reminder and something interesting happened. A menu popped up next to the reminder floating at the top, providing me with a few options. Mark as completed. Remind me in an hour.
Remind me in the morning. Remind me tomorrow. Just swipe down on those little notifications, and sometimes you might get a little bit of interactivity. More quick tips like this, plus your questions answered. Why isn't my computer working? There it is. Plus your questions answered today on MacGeekCab 1014 for Monday, December 18, 12th, 2023. Music. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Mac Geek Gab, the show where you send in quick tips like that.
You send in your questions, we answer them. You send in cool stuff found. And we string it all together into an agenda so that we are each both incentivized, but also very likely to learn at least five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include greenchef.com slash 60MGG. Use code 60MGG, 60MGG to get 60% off. We'll talk more about that great meal delivery service in a little bit.
For now here, as awake as I'm going to be in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in South Dakota, not snowy yet. I'm Adam Christensen. And here again in Osaka, Japan, it's Pilot Pete. I've been all over Asia, back in Osaka, headed home tomorrow for the holidays. Oh, nice. That's great. So you, cause you recorded last week show 1013 in Osaka. From this very hotel. Yep. Different, but you're in a different room, right? Because you have not been there. I'm in a different room.
You've been elsewhere for the week, gallivanting, not just chilling. Yes, I've been to Seoul twice, Shenzhen, China. Wow. I went somewhere else, but I have no recollection where. Did you take off and land the plane safely, Pete? I did. Well, that's what counts. Yeah, that's what really counts. That's what counts. Guangzhou, Guangzhou, China. That was my other location. Oh, okay. That's where it was. All right. Yeah. Cool. Fun, fun. Hopefully it was fun. Profitable perhaps, but. You know what.
It's the best part of the job. I mean, there's, there's a lot of hassle to being a commercial pilot, the recurrent training, the rules, the regulations, the security, the this, that, that moving the airplane is still fun. So as long as that's still fun, I'm going to keep doing it.
That's great, man. I feel the same thing, same way about playing the drums, you know, playing in a band, it's like, I always say, if you were to call me at three in the afternoon on the day of almost any gig that I have and tell me it was canceled, you'd be my best friend, because that's the point in the day where like the fiasco part of it settles in. I got to pack up my car. I got to make sure I have everything.
I got to drive to the gig and then deal with load in and whatever management and club owners and like all this stuff and get the sound set up and all the things. But once everything's there and on stage and set up and I'm ready to play now, you can't take me out of there, right? Like that's, that's the best. Yeah. That's the fun part. Yeah. You probably have that with theater, Adam, same kind of thing, right? Yeah. Yeah. I'll be doing that tonight. Hopefully, hopefully.
Um, yeah, I'll be, uh, you know, doing all the makeup stuff and getting there early and hanging out. Yep. Getting ready. Yep. Nice. Yeah. It's fun. So it's good. Good to have a passion. Tell us about your passions. Like we, we, you know, we talk about ours sometimes on the show.
And so like if you are, if you are, if you care to send us an email, feedback at Mac geek app.com, tell us what you love to do and probably technology gets involved in it somehow I could like we've already talked on the show about how technology is involved in the things that we each do so you know like I need the technology to come to my to my theater thing I think it's getting there you know I need that I need that face thing for like I hate the makeup part
of it just like you know if I could stick a thing on my face and it just goes zip. You know, and you're done. Does that exist? I think they're working on those sorts of things. I've seen them. I want one of those just to shave my face. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I was saying that to Lisa just last night. Actually not last night. Anybody watching knows that I'm lying about the timing of this, but it was true last week. I was saying this to Lisa.
I was like, oh yeah, I wish I could just like put my face in a thing and have it shaved. She's like, really? The three minutes it takes you to shave? She's like, that's what you want technology to solve? I'm like uh-huh. Yeah, yeah correct correct You think they could do with lasers while you sleep or something that I wanted to do it. Yeah while I sleep I don't even want to have to wait for it to do it for me I want to be asleep while it's half of course.
I want to be asleep while it's happening I also want to be asleep while I fly on airplanes Me too. Yeah Hang on okay, this is going in a bad direction Pete and I have have had eight hours of sleep Um, collectively, but you know, eight hours of sleep leading into this show. All right. Uh, Alex. Not together. But not together. No, you're on the, literally the other side of the world. Like it is 9 AM for me. What, what time is it for you?
Um, I am three minutes before midnight. It is almost Saturday morning here. So it's 9 AM Friday in, on the East coast. Yeah. Right. Midnight on the, uh, on Japan time. That's amazing. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, yeah. Long ways away tomorrow. It's almost you're in the future, Pete. Uh, okay. I think we got quick tips. We got quick tips.
Alex says, speaking of reminders, I'd like to share that in the Reminders app, it's possible to place the URL field, not place in the URL field, not just a website link, but also an email address. And after exiting the edit mode, the app will show an action button leading to a new email composing a screen in your mail app. More than this, we can even attach a phone number in this field, but it takes a little more work than normal.
In the URL field for a phone number, type T-E-L colon and then the required number, and that is the correct URL structure for a phone number. At this time, such move will lead to a nice little phone number button in the list of reminders. Sure it's possible to write either an email or phone number just in the text of the reminder or the additional notes field, and the app will highlight them with blue and make it clickable, but only the URL field method will make a dedicated button.
Quickly accessible right from the list view. Also, it's possible to fill the URL field with a link starting SMS colon. That would send a message. Yeah, he found a webpage with this info over on talk.tidbits.com. So we will put a link in the show notes, no pun intended. But yeah, this is, what's cool about it is that you just have to, if you have a link on the clipboard, you just highlight the text that you want to be linked and then just paste it and it will put a link there.
And it turns out that also works in WordPress's backend. If you use WordPress to publish your website, you don't have to open up the link editor. If you have a link on your clipboard, just highlight text, hit paste, and it will make that text into a link for you.
If you've already been doing it in WordPress is one of those things it's like yeah of course Dave and if you haven't been doing it in WordPress you're going oh my god I can't believe that works so because that's how we all felt the first time we found that yeah like I can't believe I'm doing it this the slow way for so long yeah you got the peep you you have something to to add to that, maybe oh no you have something to add to the next one you're gonna you're gonna
read us the next one Yeah. Okay, cool. You're, I love that. I love this for you, Pete, but you're, you're muted. And so, um, we we've been, we've been unable to. On the next one. Well, you know, what's funny is I said, no, I've got something to add to the next one and you went, oh, you've got something to add to the next one. I told you we had eight hours of sleep. You knew what I was going to say. Oh boy, folks, you may want to just go away now. No, don't do that.
You'll miss this next great tip and all these questions we've got coming up. Hey, James wrote in and he said, sometimes, as we all know, we move things around on our computers and we don't remember why, how, uh, either to move them back. Or in some cases, uh, we want to move them back to the original default spot. He says, I believe we've all heard this once before on the MGG, but to bring it back around for our newer listeners. Hey, and while I was reading that, that came to me, our listeners,
we're a community. That's awesome. Yep. To our listeners. So yes, so use the possessive when you write to us. We love it. You're able to move the spotlight search window wherever you want on your screen. Start by either clicking on the menu icon in the top right or use your keyboard shortcut to bring it up. The default is command in the space bar. Your spotlight window then displays before you can type in anything,
or after you start typing, it works both ways. is you can click and drag this element anywhere on the screen. Yeah, so what, you might be asking. But what happens if you move it off the screen enough to not know where it went, or better yet, enough that you can't even recognize that there is a spotlight window? It's now well out of view and you can't use it any longer. So here's the second part of the tip.
Press or click and hold on the spotlight icon up in the menu bar for about two seconds and bam, it resets it back to the top center of your display. Yeah, so I went okay, and I went to do that and I noticed that I didn't have a spotlight icon in my menu bar and I went well I'll just go into settings and put it in. Not so fast, it just, I had to look around long and carefully and I finally found it. So Thank you for watching.
There is an option in Mac OS 14, Sonoma, system settings, control center. Menu bar, and then there's a little toggle, don't show in menu bar or show in menu bar, the control, the spotlight icon. Yeah. That was the case in Ventura as well. Yeah, okay. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. So, that little tip to get it back to the center doesn't work if there's no icon there. So you will need to have that icon there and that's how you go find it to get it back if you don't have the spotlight icon up there.
And then one other thing I've noticed about this though is that I tried to move the spotlight search off my screen completely and I am unable. I can only have it on the screen. Try and drag yours off the screen, see if you can. I can't, mine is somehow pasted so I can't completely hide it from myself. I can't completely hide it, but I could get it to a point where I might not see it when it comes up.
You know. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I can move it far off. But I wonder if that's an external monitor thing. Maybe if I was on my built-in screen. I'm in clamshell and it's, I can't get to that screen, but I can certainly push the spotlight dialogue way off to the edge. Yeah, I was able to get mine to the edge like that. Yeah, for sure. So I had turned sidecar off of my iPad because it wasn't playing nicely this morning before, so I didn't try to move it over there or anything, but.
Interesting. Yeah. That's a good tip. I never knew that. And yeah, that whole, just a reminder of that paradigm of things in the menu bar being controlled in the control center preferences and not in their own preferences. Is it's a good reminder that yes, go look there because you'll find.
In fact, I recommend you go look there in, uh, you had it, Pete, the, the, uh, do it system settings, control center, and, and then take a look at all the things that you can add or remove, you can customize control center and the menu bar. Right there. Yes. And, and really tweak it to your liking. Yeah. And one other point. So in here, I forgot I, that this happened to me, Dave, when I was trying to bring it back up on there. I use bartender.
Okay. So, when I put it back in the menu bar, it defaulted to the hidden menu bar. Of course. Right? Yeah. Which is fine. I can, you know, the little three dots and I can pull it up. But guess what doesn't work? If it's in the hidden menu bar. Clicking that that quick tip doesn't work. Oh. Pressing and holding it does not. It needs to be in the real. Oh, so this really is like some Mac OS intercept or something that, yeah, I can see that.
I can see where bartender wouldn't necessarily. Yeah. Get that where you wanted it. So, yeah. And we've mentioned bartender before on cool stuff found, but man, that I can't live without it. There's just way too much real estate being taken and bartender fixes that. Especially with the notch on, you know, newer. Yes. Mac books, bartend, yeah, bartender is, is an indispensable tool. Somehow mine defaulted off.
I was last, a couple of days ago, I'm looking all over going, why, you know, why can't I find where is, what's, and oh, that's why bartender is not on and running. Yep. So I had to restart that. Oh, my computer works again. My computer looks like my computer again. Yeah, exactly. Yep. Yep. Yeah. That's one of the things that I notice and it's not immediately obvious, like you, it's It's like, wait, something's wrong.
What's wrong? Oh, bartender's not running. Got it. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Speaking of things. No, go ahead. I was just gonna say, I can't live without bartender. No. And also, I hate to keep belaboring this point. Uh, I've been a bartend user for a long time, but it is part of set up. Oh yeah. And just throw another ad for set up. Yep. Right. Yep. Which is not really an ad. No, I mean, it's just, I, I, my only issue, I just wish I'd invented set up because they've figured it out.
They have figured it out. My only issue with set up, I, and I don't run into this often, but it ha it has happened more than once. Where I go to run an app that I have as part of set up and it's been more than 30 days or something and so it needs to authenticate my set up subscription with set up servers in order to do it and if I'm not online at that moment in time, which is even on an airplane that's not, it's like infrequent. I, it like it becomes an issue. Yeah.
Like there was, and there was something for, um, I use an app, we might as well, I I might as well share about this, which I've talked about before, and I guess maybe I should do it now the Sonoma way, but pre-Sonoma and still currently, because, you know, habits, I use an app called Unite from BZG Apps to create a Safari, like a bespoke application that really is just a Safari window.
And I use that when we do this show. In fact, I use it for one for each of my shows so that I can have our chapters and timestamps As a separate app even though it's just a Google Doc and it's huge because I don't have to dig through tabs and safari to find our agenda when we're doing the show I just bring that app up and it's right there I have not yet done that in in in Sonoma but the unite and coherence are the two apps from bzg that that let you do this with either unite
let you do it with a safari engine coherence let you let you do with the chrome engine They are both part of set up and there was some problem I had where I just couldn't launch either of these things even though I was on the internet because it was like oh we need To authenticate you I'm like I am authenticated so I Went and used a direct license for the app and got rid of it But have you guys done that in in Sonoma yet the the bespoke app for a safari web page.
Thing whatever knows to call that oh the built-in stuff. Yeah. Yeah, no Okay, I never used that feature before though even with any of those third-party apps, right? You know, I don't know, there's all that stuff that Apple puts together that you use, maybe try it out. You know, remember for a while when they had, last time we had widgets? Yes. They had that thing where you could take part of a webpage and make it into like a widget. You know, you would select the web clips or something,
whatever they called it. Yep. Yeah, I'll have to see how it works. But I do like the way Unite and coherent, coherence works. So like, I don't know. Well, we're quickly still on the set up thing. I want to mention that I had done the subscription and you save 10% if you pay annually. Of course. And so what I've always done, it's actually cheaper than a second subscription is you could buy additional.
Oh, for family members or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. And now, and then I just went and looked at, uh, they've got a family plan now. Jump on set up family up to three people, set up families for you and three more people. So yeah, they're making it super economical. Can't afford not to have it. Speaking of things that have been added to Mac OS, uh, 14.2 came out since the last time we recorded. And one of the things that I really like in 14.2 is how easy they now make it to add a sticker in messages.
Right? Like in the previous sort of major update to 14, I guess 14.1, if you right-clicked on a message, you got at the top of that right-click screen, you got all of your reactions, the heart, the thumbs up and down, and all those. And I, like, that I have integrated into my life, like, very completely. I use it all the time. It's so fast and so efficient to be able to do. And now they've added a an ad sticker thing right there, which makes life a
whole lot easier. So I was happy to find that. So I figured I'd bring it up. 17.2 for iOS came out this week too guys. Has anybody messed with the journal, the journaling app? No, but this would be something my daughter would probably actually love. So I'll probably be bringing it up with her. She just recently updated her iPhone finally and so yep. Let her know that this is now available. I like it.
I started, you know, playing with it and it's, I mean, listen, lots of people have been keeping a journal long before this app existed, right? I know plenty of people who keep a journal in notes, which is nice because there is a Mac equivalent of that app. So if you want to type on your Mac, you can do that. To my knowledge, there is no Mac equivalent of the journal app yet.
I'm guessing it would probably come if people start using this, but it the reminders that it does for you and kind of the prompts and that it really it makes the process very streamlined and of course it keeps all your data secure and encrypted and all those things that are important for a journal because that's the last thing you want somebody That's like your, you know, your own thoughts. So, yeah. Um, so it's, it's good. I I'm curious, you folks let us know feedback at Mackey cub.com.
If, uh, if there are any features in 14, two or 17, two, or even in 14 in general that we haven't talked about that are your favorites that you've integrated into your life. You heard him feedback at Mackey. Get that. Come. I'm a little old school when it comes to like writing stuff and journaling. This is, I use for development, but if I was journaling, I'd probably end up being a paper journal guy. Do those, do paper and pen still work?
Is that still allowed? I take all my development notes on paper and pen. I try to do like, I have, you know, Mark Mark Doan documents and stuff like that. What do you do with the power goes out? I mean, how can you see the paper? You know, at least on your Mac, you've got a battery. Your phone, you got a battery, paper, pen. Yeah. All right. Yeah. I'm sorry. I'll stop now. Oh no, it's totally fine. It's totally fine. It's what I do. Yep. All right, we have a quick tip from Xavier here.
It says, you know how you hold down the Option key when viewing menus in the macOS menu bar? Well, what if I told you that's not the only key? For example, in the menu bar, I find if you add the Option key, you get Add to Sidebar. Hold down the Shift key and see, Add to Dock. In the File menu of TextEdit and others, word processors hold down the Shift key to turn duplicate into save as. So yeah, fun stuff. Yeah, the add to the sidebar in the finder, I like that's, yeah, handy thing.
So yeah, try things, shift key, option key, command key, like there are things that change depending on keys and even combinations of keys. There's a lot of menu bar items, like the, I think the Bluetooth one. Do I have it up on this computer? I don't know that I do but the Bluetooth one and even the Wi-Fi one change dramatically like the option key brings in some things and The option shift I think changes even some of those.
Yeah, it goes Wi-Fi settings versus network settings There's there's some things that happen. I think the Bluetooth menu. I don't know if it still does I don't have it up on on this computer, but it used to add Like an option to reset the Bluetooth system, but you had to have both keys held down.
So try those things out No, Xavier, you are my favorite one is if you're doing a copy and then you go to your destination holding down the option key when you right click, you get the move item here option which will move the item rather than paste a copy of it. And that'll move it across volumes too, won't it? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right, yep, yep. Yeah, I mean the shortcut, there is a shortcut for it. That's really what I use in which is command option. Sure.
I think it's command option V, yeah, instead of command V. Speaking of new features in our macOS Sonoma or iOS, whichever one you want. Crampy writes and says, my company has its own authenticator app that it uses. The app doesn't have an Apple Watch option, so the phone must be used to retrieve and use one-time passwords. The app, however, does have a phone widget available.
I've added the widget somewhere near the top of the widget tiles as part of a multi-widget tile, so that it appears each time I swipe right to get to widgets I've configured. The swipe right to get to the widgets can be done on the phone's lock screen, which by the time the phone has unlocked with Face ID and pressing on the widget now takes me straight to the Authenticator app where I can pick my one-time password for my relevant service.
No need to swipe between home screen pages, no need to swipe down and then search for the app by name, just tap the widget tile and it's right there in front of me. This is a great tip. It also highlights the fact that there are so many of us that use App Center, aka the thing that makes it so that new apps aren't put on our home screens. It's easy to forget that you can put an app on your home screen and accomplish the same thing.
If there's an app you need to run, you can even have a second home screen to the right, you know, if you or if you swipe left, like there can be another one, you could put the app there. Obviously, if your app has a widget like Krampy's company app does, then that's a great way to get to it. But if your app doesn't, you can just put the app on your home screen to make it easy to get there and I'm saying this like I've had this thought prior to this very moment.
No, I'm having this as I'm sharing it with you because I have for one of our banks to do a wire transfer which we do once or twice a week. I have to run their little RSA app that you know shows me the one-time password and every darn time I search for it and the app changed names and And now every time I type in the old name and nothing comes up, if you're an app developer, you can put these things like into the keywords for your app so that it comes up when people search for it.
They didn't just like Marriott, the the app itself says Bonvoy on it. And it took two years before searching for Bonvoy actually brought the app up. You had to remember no search for Marriott. Okay. Oh man. Yeah. Yeah. So, but as I'm saying this out loud, I'm realizing, you know, I should just put the app on my, on a second home screen so that I can just get there and not have to fight for it.
I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I was so happy when our, when our corporate single sign on system added support for passkeys. So now I just touch ID everything in now. Thank God I don't have to go to an authenticator app or I don't have to get a text code or whatever. RG So with, with pass keys, life-changing with pass keys used in that way, there is no second factor, right? You, once you authenticate with the past, your second factor is, is your bio is you, right? Right.
Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. CB Yeah. I made my, I made my it guy swap out my, uh, my keyboard for the one with the touch ID. I need a new keyboard now. Because I'm done with YubiKeys, I'm done with anything else, I'm only going to do this. Life changing. I gotta start using Passkeys more.
One password obviously supports them, but the one place I don't, and I keep meaning to dig into this and I only think about it when I'm in a crunch situation and I don't have time to think or while I'm doing a podcast and also don't have time to research, is Apple. Apple.com. I don't think Apple.com's passkey implementation is compatible with 1Password's passkey implementation.
It threatens to be compatible every time I go to log in, because I'll do it after we do this show, because I have to like go put the show into the Apple podcast thing, which requires me logging into my Apple ID, and it's a whole thing. I get the text on all of my devices, and you know, that, that, like, like normal, and of course, it won't leave me logged in for more than, you know, 18 seconds, and so I have to do it 14 times, but you know, it's fine.
So I have a question then. What am I doing wrong with passkeys? And then I know we want to move along, but it seems to me that I want to use a passkey, say, to log into Best Buy, or let's use that one. And it comes up with the QR code. Okay, now I've got to scan that with my phone and look at it with my face. I thought I could do it with a fingerprint on my, what am I doing wrong? Am I not putting the passkey in the right place?
Wait, wait, shouldn't I be able to, shouldn't I be able to say, use a pass key and the pass key is on my Mac and I just use my fingerprint on the power button? Yes. I think you have to set it up per device though. I don't think it syncs. Like you have to each device you have to set up. Oh, okay. Yes. Yeah. Okay. I'll do some more research on that because the way I've got it is I've got the QR code coming up. Now I've got to scan it with my phone and then look at my phone and then hit
yes, continue and look at my phone again. And it's like, it's almost worse than just giving me a six digit number. I have rants related to this. I want to go into real quickly, because as a bother doing anything else, and I'm sure there's a setting for this, I have not dug into it. But Google is driving me nuts with the login now, because the two factor, they want to force you to use some piece of Google tech. Oh, right.
So I set up QR codes or I set up one time pass codes with one password, and I want it to use Authenticator every single time. But now, recently, it's like, open the YouTube app that you're logged into on your phone to log in. It's like, no, I don't fricking wanna go to some other Google app on my phone to log into Google. Stop. What's worse is when you, like, this time of year, or really about a month ago, right, when you get your new iPhone.
And invariably you're out and about somewhere, And it's like oh, I'm not logged into YouTube or whatever so okay fine Let me log into YouTube or whatever on your whatever Google service you absolutely need and it's like oh. Go ahead and and tell me the number that just appeared on the screen on your iPad. That's oh 2,500 miles away from you right now.
Yeah, yeah, that sounds like a great idea Google I'm not there like it, and I've had it I have some Android phones that sometimes I just test like for things that we do here and other yeah I'm like I use them sometimes and I have made the critical error of logging into my, main Google account on those phones in the past and they are rarely With me when I'm anywhere and even if they're with me often the battery's dead because
I haven't used it in three weeks And then it's like oh no we're going to prefer your Android device because that's a Google device. And so you need to tell us the code that's appearing on that. And it's like, no, that device is dead. You haven't seen that device online in a month. Why do you want to go put something on that? What makes you think that's a good idea? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so people know, cause it's really easy to miss.
So the trick is, unfortunately it's extra steps, but you know, on that dialogue that pops up that says, log into YouTube or open your YouTube app, There's usually a little tiny text link that says use other method and then you can tap that and then say authenticator in the night You might one password think. It's just annoying. I'm sure there's, I'm hoping there, maybe not. I'm saying I'm sure there's a setting to change it like Google would allow me to do that, but probably not.
Probably I have to do it manually every time. All right, hey look, the festive season is upon us and I know how easy it is to lose track of those healthy eating habits, but guess what? With our sponsor Green Chef, you don't have to. When you sign up at greenchef.com slash 60mgg, Not only do you embark on a journey towards better health, but you also get a free session with registered dieticians. They're there to guide you on making clean eating work specifically for you.
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It says, I'm looking for a way to automate a range windows based on whether my M2 MacBook 13-inch Air is using the built-in display or in clamshell mode. I use a Samsung M80C 32-inch 4K monitor. Both displays are set to more space. Yeah, there are lots of ways to do this. I absolutely need this, especially on my podcasting rig, but really on all of my computers. Even if the displays don't change, apps sometimes don't go where I wanted them to be.
Maybe I left them in the wrong spot or maybe they just decided on their own. So I use a piece of software called Stay from cordless dog. And it you you get your windows where you want them. You tell stay, stay, and it remembers. And what's cool is to your question, Surf Daddy, it will remember different configurations for different monitors. So if if If you're on your laptop with an external monitor, you can have, you can put things where you want and hit save and stay will remember that.
And then when you change, you know, disconnect your external monitor, move things around, hit save, and it will save it for that configuration. And you can have it auto switch when you plug in your external monitor, be like, ah, I know what to do. And it'll go and like run things over to the side. So yes, that's one in our discord where this question was asked, uh, Jeff answered and suggested the app called Moom, M-O-O-M, from Many Tricks, and that does a very similar thing.
It has a slightly different user experience, and you might like that better. I actually kind of like the way Moom does it, but I started with the stay and, you know, momentum is what it is. But, uh- You stayed. I stayed. Yeah, I did what it said. Yeah. Exactly. Do you do anything like this, Adam, on your various different devices? Oh, I'm in the other thal and I just move windows around like a proglodite, you know? Oh man.
Like back in the stone age. Yeah, you'd think I would. You'd think I would. Jeff also mentions that there's probably a way to automate this with something on your Mac too, like, I don't know, a workflow or an automator, who knows? People can do all kinds of amazing things. I seem to recall that David Sparks uses something with Keyboard Maestro and Stay to make a keyboard.
And I think probably even his, his stream deck, cause he's got like 117 buttons, which makes it, that's harder than your keyboard, man. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. At some point that's true. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yepper. Oh. So, but yeah, those, it, it is life changing. I, when I realized I needed that functionality, I, that I just went in search of it. This was years ago. And it was like, somebody must have, I'm not the first one.
And that's when I found Cordless Dog and it was like, woohoo, I can get to my podcasting rig, you know, five to 10 minutes later than I would normally have to every single time when I sit down and do a show. Somewhere in there, in Better Touch Tool, it has, it has snap areas and I think you can automate the snap areas. But I have not played with that, but that's my recollection that in Better Touch Tool, you can manipulate your way of positioning with Snapper.
Yeah. I mean, it's one of those things that, you know, like, like a clipboard manager, it's a fairly, uh, I don't want to say trivial cause it's, cause it's not, but it's a, a single purpose. It's a fairly, you know, like focused, focused. Thanks. That's the word. That's what I'm having trouble doing today. Uh, and so it's not unsurprising to find it in, uh, you know, various other apps.
I don't know. I don't know what I'm saying anymore. I think if someone figures it out, they could send us feedback at MattGeekGab.com and tell us how they did it. Did you say feedback at MattGeekGab.com, Pete? I think he did. He said feedback at MacGeekGap.com. Well, I don't know about that, but sure. Try it. See what happens. What's the worst that could happen? I didn't say fee. No, don't say don't say feed bag. No, we don't want to encourage people to email that bag at Mackey.
I don't know when that issue when that joke started. It was a long time ago. But yeah, well, like I emailed feedback and I don't get anything and it was like, all right, so we'll set up the forward. Oh, you know, somebody stop me. Yeah. You can't. You can't, no, no. All right. Oh goodness. Uh. You want me to take us to two short planks? Sure. Great name by the way. I agree.
He writes in and says, I often want to send a message to my wife that she'll see the next time she looks at her phone, but I don't want to interrupt her when she's in a work meeting, driving a car or having a rare lie in, for example. I made a fresh pot of coffee if you're awake. In theory, this should be solved by the Do Not Disturb and other focus modes, but that's controlled by the person to whom I'm sending the message, not me.
If I know the person I'm sending the message to is in an important meeting, is there a way to send that message that I know won't interrupt them? If not, with Apple's own message app, is there some sort of other special app that caters to this? Which goes back to my question that I've been wanting to do for years. I want to send a message to my wife at three o'clock in the morning and have it get to her, you know, after she wakes up, you know, that kind of thing.
So, yeah, I think this is a little bit of a geek challenge. I don't have an answer for this. It's like definitive Adam, like before we start into our speculation, are you sitting there with the magic answer waiting to share? I am, unfortunately not. I'm just thinking like, I'm hoping it up. Apple engineers are listening with at least messages and they can implement some sort of like whisper mode or something.
Yeah, that because like I as soon as I read this and heard this I was like, yes same there are there are times where I delay sending a message or I hem and haw about like do I trust that this person knows how to manage their do not disturb and does so actively like you know like there's that whole thing. I suppose, um, as we're sort of pondering, is there an app out there to do that? Do we call it the mail app? Like, I like maybe, but I mean, even that might
notify them, right? Depending on whether they have their notifications. Well, yeah. Right. Yeah. I've got a mother-in-law who leaves her phone on mail notifications to this day. The only thing I can think of here is you probably could write a shortcut where you could plug in a time and like delay the send maybe? So, um, this was discussed in our discord here, and I'm looking to see if I can find it and I don't know that, that I, oh yeah, yeah, here it is.
Um, listener Doug said, I tried this with a quick and dirty shortcut that would be set a timer, then send a message. And the, the, the key is, is the then right. And unfortunately that doesn't happen. It sets the timer and, and as soon as the timer is set, not when the timer finishes, it sends the message. So there, but there might be some like weight, uh, but I set your timer for you, sport command.
Yeah. In fact, in fact, Tony in this, this thread here in discord says the wait command should do it, but you need a user input that only allows predefined time. So like your only choices would be 10 minutes, half an hour, an hour. So yeah, there might, I mean, you could set, could you set an automation?
And if this starts to become a fairly arduous task for each message, but you could potentially create an automation that at a certain time, it runs this shortcut that then goes and sends someone a message. Right, Adam? Well, now you got my brain thinking. I want to go look. You might be able to trigger automations when you change your own Do Not Disturb. Oh!
And I'm wondering if you could just set up an automation where it writes to a text file what you want to say and you could even have multiple messages. And then on wake, you have that thing pick up that text file take those messages and just start sending them. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I do like this. I do like this. Yeah. Yeah. Let's play with it. I mean, I'm sure there's some magic built in trick. I'll put a link to the to the discord thread on this question.
So if you look in the show notes, it'll say it like, you know, 38 minutes. We started talking about two short planks. There's a link there that'll bring you right to the thread. So you get to see the evolution of this and anything that's been added since we recorded the episode. So yeah. Ah, okay. What were you going to say, Pete? Mine's still, I was just saying, mine's still, my issue is I want it to work when I'm off the grid, so my message needs to go to some other third party server. Right.
I sit there and then go at a specific time. Oh, that's interesting. Because I'm in an airplane, you know, flying across country. Hey, I'll be home, you know, when, when you wake up, I'll be an hour out, something like that, you know, we're on time or we're delayed or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that doesn't mean that 95% of everybody else doesn't need to. To do it the other way right right you know right. I'm an interesting.
Somebody in that thread suggested the line app l i n e at line dot me. And the the listener ben says line is one app that supports silent messages so this might be the answer if there's someone or a group of people with whom you would want to do this regularly you have to set up the line app for for both of you. But, um, but yeah. Okay. And that was line.me you said? Line.me and I've got that linked in the show notes now too. Oh, good. Okay.
Did we lose Adam? Is Adam, uh. I think we may have. No, I'm here, but my camera decided to die for some reason. Oh nice, fun. It says I need to unlock my phone, which I just did. Okay. Cause it's continuity camera. So what happened, Adam crossed his eyes and he got stuck like that. And now he's out of focus. Yeah, Adam's super, Adam's super blurry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm not sure how to reset it without having to leave. Well, let me try stop camera. Yeah, okay.
Now, it's still the same. No, that's weird. All right, well, you will be Mr. Witness Protection for the remainder of this episode, for anybody who's watching on video. I did unlock my phone, maybe it'll magically come back at some point. It might. Or we just gotta get you on Camo. We'll get you a license for Camo, which is the much more controllable than continuity camera app.
So, um, if you, if you're using continuity camera a lot and you're running into issues, feel free to go get camo while we're, I'm glad that we have you audibly because that's the most important thing, uh, Adam, I, I want to jump to Dom, uh, while we're, while we're happy, while we have shortcuts on the brain. Okay. We were talking about, there was a thread about how Dom was using GoodNotes to fill out his shortcuts.
Sorry, to fill out his crossword puzzles, I'm jumping the gun here, and someone asked, wait, how do you get your crossword puzzles into to, good notes and he says oh i have a little workflow that i made up i subscribe to my local paper the boston globe i go to their site in safari i tap on the daily crossword so it comes up full screen i tell it to print i do a reverse pinch this of course is on his iphone uh to get to the print preview to make the crossword image bigger
then you tap the share icon to share the resulting pdf to good notes he says it actually goes a lot faster than it takes to read so uh using using your shortcuts and making it into an action, right? Is that what they call that? The share sheet action, when you can make a shortcut into that.
And I will tell you, that is game changing. We have, earlier this year, we moved over to using notes for Mac GeekGab, and we've created this workflow that takes a printed document or the clipboard or whatever is shared into it, uh, it makes that a. Um, uh, you know, it puts it into a certain notebook for us and does some other things. It asks us to name it and those sorts of things. And it's great. And I thought, wait a minute, I had this because it's in shortcuts.
It's automatically synced to my iPhone. What if I make it capable or addressable as a share sheet action? And as soon as I did that, now I can be on a webpage and be like, Oh, this would be cool to talk about on the show. And all I have to do is hit share and boom, it's there. I wish I could share anything because sharing from an email would be great, but instead we have to go through the PDF workflow thing. Although, Pete, I think we have a better, a better option.
We've been sharing PDFs into Notes for a long time. Right. When Adam and I were going through this earlier this week, I forget which one of us asked the obvious question, but you know, one of the problems with these PDFs is the text is really small and you hear us sometimes on the show, like fumbling to try and get it big enough to read your question.
Yeah. Well, we're about to send the email. That's the moment at like, if we respond to you, you know, we type the response and then we print it to a PDF that then with this workflow goes and shares to notes. Uh, so we're at that moment. Why not command a command C it's now on the clipboard as actual text and images and all of the things that would be in an email but not yet a PDF.
And because our workflow is built to take either what is shared to it or if nothing's shared to it, the clipboard, just invoke the workflow once you've copied the email to the clipboard and I'll tell you, believe it or not, it just works. And so I started doing that this week, Pete. Yep. Yep. Yep. Sometimes T I, you know, sometimes teaching something often, in fact, teaching something you learn. Yeah. You learn better. We learn far more teaching it. Absolutely.
Yeah. Yeah. So I, I was glad when you joined us, uh, more regularly, you know, as part of the team here, Adam, anyway, but having to go through the workflows that we have established and show them to you, of course, gives us perfect opportunity to refine them. This was what I loved about being in user groups and having that interaction.
When you would go to a meeting, because very often I was very heavily involved as you might imagine, and I would be presenting or being the person speaking or whatever. And, you know, when you have years of experience, you get set in your ways, and you think this is the way you do this and that's what you're teaching people. And inevitably, I would get, you know, the thing you don't know.
Like the person who hadn't thought about it so deeply or so much as you and they would be the, oh that's really cool, but I do this, and then you're like, oh, that's good too. That's great. That works better than mine sometimes. You can do it in seven steps, I do it in two. but you do you. I love it when the question truly comes from a place of curiosity from them. Like, you know, you're in that scenario where you are presented as the expert, right?
You're the expert in the room, there's the teacher and there's the students, right? And I've always, like, that dynamic does not... Is not conducive to group sharing, the hive mind, right? Like that's what we, and I'm really careful to avoid it as much as we can here, because I love it when the question comes in, like you explain your seven step workflow and somebody raises their hand and they're like, so I'm really curious, why do you do it this way? Like, and they're not being snarky.
They're wondering, they're like, I know I'm missing something because that guy's smarter than me. So I hear he's gonna like enlighten me as to why my way is not as good as his way. And, you know, invariably it's like, why don't you do this in two steps instead of seven? It's like, because I didn't meet you until today. I didn't know. Just like the student becomes the teacher. Absolutely. Happens all the time. It's great. And it's what we do here.
Like it's, it's an, it's absolutely what we do here. Yeah. No, I love that part of this. All right. Speaking of that part of this, you want to take us and read Porthos John's shortcut thing while we're in the shortcuts mode? Porthos John, I pulled up the wrong thing, give me two seconds. That's okay, I changed the order of the agenda. I have the wrong one ready. Oh yeah, there's two of them, yes, yes, yes. Alright, oh yeah, this one's great.
Okay, so, I've been playing around, Porthos John says, I've been playing around with so many shortcuts with iOS 17 and I just found a great automation flow for something I do a couple times a week. When my wife and I decide to get takeout, I go and pick it up. I like the kids to get everything set for when I get back. So I developed this shortcut to make use of the home pods in the house as well as texting all of them. Here is the automation steps.
In Maps, enter a street address for home. Also in Maps, get driving directions from the current location to the street address from step one. Then, put in the text, On the way with food, set the table and feed the dog. Please, I'll be home at ETA from step two. Use the intercom feature on the HomePod to announce that to home. Text from step three. Then, send a message. Text from step three to the list of all your family members.
Now, when I come through the garage door with the food, I can unpack and go right to the table. As an extra tip on step five, If you click the little disclosure triangle and turn off show when run, it won't ask you to confirm the text message every time you trigger the shortcut. That's brilliant. Oh, yeah. Yeah, there's a little note note here too. It says in shortcuts when you do the ETA step two, it needs permission to access location data.
I had trouble getting the permission pop up to come up. The link wasn't working to fix. I saved the shortcut and then force quit the shortcut and reopened it, which made the link to authorize the location services again. Didn't know why that didn't happen for him. It should happen automatically, but. Yeah, yeah, yeah, huh? I love these kinds of shortcuts and I love sharing these on the show. Some of you like this is a this is one that's fairly universally like there's a universal appeal here.
There's a there's enough of us that would do almost exactly this, but I also love sharing it because thinking about it. You're like, well, wait a minute. I don't necessarily need that, but I hadn't ever thought about, you know, so. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, you have stuff like, you know, it just, if you want someone to get notified, you're on your way home or something like that, you know, and you can set geofence and geofencing isn't on this, but you could probably add that to this too and do all kinds of interesting things. With, you know, when you get to a certain location, whether you're driving to work or or something like that.
Now, I haven't, Apple just, it's in the next version, right, where they're adding the stuff where you can follow your family members and you can get notified when your family members go certain places and stuff like that. I think that's not in there yet. A kid thing, right? Yeah. A kid safe thing. Yeah. So you can set up kind of that kind of stuff already using these kinds of shortcuts. I mean, very similar, right? Plug in any address. It doesn't have to be your
home address. It can be different addresses for different things. Yeah. The intercom feature is also really cool. That's the clever one, yeah. It's one that I think a lot of people don't take advantage of. The thing I was going to add here is that my family, this would not work for. They would hate this. Okay. I love automations and I love intercom and I love all that sort of stuff.
They're not big fans, I have to tell you. When I intercom them from here, it freaks them out because they're in the house. Siri starts talking you're the monster talking and i get i usually get an angry text message back because they'd rather i just text message them. Right oh yeah i understand oh we um you know we we put a hot tub in last summer two summers ago whatever and.
We have a the sonos rome speaker which is a bluetooth speaker but it because it's on us it also connects to wifi and does all the songs things and. It has the Amazon A-Lady built into it. And we have other Echo units throughout the house, because we kind of had standardized on that before Apple released HomePods. And we will routinely use the, you know, we will say, A-Lady, announce. And then, you know, it's like, oh, we're going to be in in 10 minutes.
You know, start getting dinner ready or whatever. And like, Like, the tone of annoyance that we get back from one of our kids as they're announcing back to us, of course, they don't live at home much anymore, but when they're here, we love to use it with them because they're just like clearly so annoyed that we are using this feature. And it's like, yeah, but it's really handy. Like I don't know, we're outside, you're inside, we're going to bother you.
Like, yeah, you're outside, you don't want to be bothered. We're inside, we don't want to be bothered. My message from that point would be more like bring me another beer right yeah exactly exactly Well you have kids didn't you? Why didn't I think this is this is why we included you in the show Adam.
I don't I can't believe I never thought about that there is something nice though I do like to get out of the hot tub to like get another drink or whatever, because if you're out for a few minutes, you get that sensation of getting back in and like that sort of, you know, the system shock of the heat. And that's kind of nice, especially this time of year, you get a little cold and you get back in. It's like, oh yeah, I warmed up again. Like, so it's nice.
Aaron. I want to take us to Cool Stuff Found. I also want to do a little bit of what I'll call show business here.
It's all show business. The first thing that I want to do is thank all of our upcoming thus far CES 2024 sponsors that have signed on board to help pay for our trip that Pete and I are taking to CES in a couple of weeks here to cover the show for all of you to dig into things you know when we go to these shows much like we do the rest of the time but we go to these shows, we see it as our job to curate right it's we we we go in and get the overwhelming onslaught of all the new
stuff and we sift out the few things that we think we would all care about here and that's what we share with you so we'll be out there covering things and doing all that and and we have some fantastic sponsors that have signed on to uh to help us make that trip a reality Thus far, there are three, KOLIDE.com, they have been a sponsor, like a traditional sponsor here on and off over the years, and we are stoked to have them again with us.
Their whole technology for managing all your apps and with Okta and all that stuff, it's fantastic. I guess it's Okta, that's how it's pronounced, it really, yes. And we'll talk more in depth about all of these as we get closer to CES. Carbon copy cloner is the next one on board. We love Carbon Copy Cloner here. Not only have they been a sponsor in the past, but they are an app that I certainly use all the time. And I think that's true of all three of us here. Matt O'Driscoll It's critical.
Matt O'Driscoll Anybody who's ever listened to me for a long time and I'll bring it here. Backup, backup, backup. I'm huge on it. Carbon Copy Cloner is a massive part of that strategy. Preston Pysh Yeah, exactly. And then Mac Updater, One of my favorite apps. I really like, I don't think you guys use it yet. I highly recommend it. It just makes, it's so nice to always have my apps up to date on my Macs.
So a Mac updater is one of mine. And I'm really thankful to have all three of these great companies, the great people and great services on board with us. I am also extremely thankful to all of you, So really to all of you, anybody listening, very thankful and specifically thankful, um, in this very moment, specifically for all of you premium subscribers, you can learn more about it at mackeycub.com slash premium.
And I want to take a minute and thank all of you whose, uh, subscriptions or, or, uh, contributions have come in in the last, since the last time we did this, which has been, I believe two episodes.
So we have $10 contributions from Jason in Charlestown, Nick in Mount Clemens, Jeremiah in Edgewater, Cal in Russellville, Donald in Furlong, Chris in Chorleywood, James in San Antonio, Neil in West Hartford, Scott in Bourbonaise, Mark in Coopersburg, Abel in Santa Rosa, Frank in Tunbridge, Timothy in West Windsor, Frank in Voorhees.
Thanks to all of you for your $10 contributions. We then have $25 contributions from David in Stillwater, Anthony in Chicago, Larry in Irvine, Javier in Jacksonville, John in Ypsilanti. Francis in Putney, and Stacy in Pine Valley. Thanks to all of you for your $25 contributions. A $30 contribution, thanks to Andrew in North Glen. A $50 contribution, thanks to Stanley in Catonsville, and a $100 contribution, thanks to Sandra in Merrimack.
You already know this, but you all rock and really you all rock. The premium program is voluntary. We are ever so appreciative of those of you who can and wish to participate in it because it is a huge part of what it takes to allow us to do all of this. Sponsors and you and really everything and listening to the show and contributing your questions. It's a, it's, it's a team effort here. And we are, we are thankful and fortunate, ever so fortunate to be able to do
this. And we take that really seriously. Um, I know we joke around a lot in the episodes and we have some fun together, but the goal is to learn those five new things. And, and we're, we're pretty serious about that. So thanks to everybody. Yeah. All right, shall we jump to cool stuff found? And perhaps if I'm lucky, I get to share a not cool stuff found today too. And it's only luckiest at the beginning. You promised not cool, man.
It is not cool, but we'll start with the cool ones. Ed tells us about this new thing he found called Fix, which is both an app and a website. The website has user manuals and repair videos and all of that stuff. The app, you get to create your own list of things and it's not just computers. In fact, the focus is not computers. It is all of your appliances, your dishwashers, your stove, your air conditioners.
We talk about when you get a new appliance, go and get the user manual today when the manufacturer still has it available because when you actually need it in five years, that particular model has been discontinued and the user manual is like split up into 14 different PDFs across the internet and good luck. Well, Fix aims to fix that. So thank you for sharing this Ed.
He says, I'd asked you to set up an account and then the app is free and they seem to make money from people ordering repair parts from them for their appliances, which also is a great resource to have Cause when you need that new drawer for your refrigerator or, you know, that new widget for your dishwasher, it's nice to know, yeah, this is the part that goes on that picture on the manual. Great. I think I can fix this. So thank you for that. Nice. I know. That's cool. It is another one.
Right. Well, I've been using, I fix it for this for years. So it's nice to have another resource like this because not everything is there. Yes. So between the two, hopefully you've got everything covered. That's exactly right. That's that was exactly my feeling. it, I have at least four folders on my computer with manuals and such in it, at least four. Yeah. Cause you know, oh, I need to store that manual. Let me, let me make a folder for that. Oh, wait, where is it?
Yeah. Now I need to go through and prune that folder cause we just redid our kitchen, which means the old cooktop, the old refrigerator. That yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Huh. I have a drawer in my house. That's the manual drawer. Like every manual goes in and it's. Back, like no one could see on the video, but it's like basically the size of my window.
Oh yeah, yeah, we had that drawer and then invariably there would be the one thing that we actually needed that, you know, you didn't find, certainly not on the first three passes through this because it's not organized in any sensible way. No, they're just thrown in there every time I buy something new, oh there's the manual. Yeah, and you wedge it in there because now it's over stuffed, that's right.
Yep, yep. And then you break the drawer, then you need to find the manual for the chest of drawers to figure out how to fix that and where to get the parts and so. Yeah, you got the dishwasher manual for the dishwasher that broke 10 years ago. Exactly, right. It's like, oh, I found the, oh no, not this. And you burn it in effigy and it's all the thing. Yep. The neighbors have to come out. It's not snuck it. Um. Horrible. Uncle Jamie tells us about it, about this site he came across.
He said it lets you create your own podcast, uh, at least in terms of a subscribed to podcast by referencing any publicly available audio files. It seems especially useful for the many audio files available from archive.org. There are hundreds of pre-made podcast feeds there at forable.co.uk that someone at some point found interesting and published the site is very low friction and it's free. Yeah.
You can, if, if there's an, if there's something, some collection at archive.org that you want to listen to as a podcast, uh, you just feed it to fourable and it will, it will make the feed for you. So I, I, I called it fourable. It's not, it's fourable. F-O-U-R-B-L-E. So I was going to say that, that that's better because the other version could be misconstrued. It almost sounded like horrible. Yeah. It's not horrible. It's not horrible. It's great.
Fourable. Fourable. There's no middle, there's no middle, middle, um, I can't even come up with the words anymore, Pete. I really haven't had enough sleep. I don't even know. I hear you. I don't know. Syllable. It's syllable. That's the word I was trying to think of. Pete. Syllable. Syllables. No, no, no. We can hold it on the rails for just a few more minutes, Pete. Okay. You want to take us to hit PAW? I do. Yeah. So I have, as many of you know, I have another show that I do.
And one of the requirements for my guests is that they send me photos of the airplane they were, they were flewing, they flew or they are flying or various aviation photos, cause I put them up on the website. Yep. In conjunction with, well, a gent we had on recently sent me some amazing photos, but. The quality, the blurry, you know, like, ah, there's, I wonder if there's any way, well, HitPaw has an AI photo enhancer. Now it ain't cheap. I think it was, I think it's like 79 a year.
I went ahead and bit the bullet and they had it on sale from 149 to 120. So 20% off. And, but that's a permanent ownership. Own it forever, including all the free upgrades. But man, you give it something to work with, it does an amazing job of clearing up blurry photos of fixing the color. As we were telling you pre-show, I had a great aunt whom I never met, who died in the 1920s and did some modeling and some old black and white photos of her that have gotten very yellow over the years.
And this thing did the scratch fixing, took the blur out and put nice colors in. And it was like, oh my goodness, this is, you know, it's like the photo was taken in the, probably in the eighties, not in the twenties. So, so yeah, HitPaw AI photo enhancer. And they also, they have some other products too, but a video, automatic video converter, that kind of stuff, which I use handbrake for, but that's a whole separate.
That's a whole different thing. I, yeah, I, I, I finally found, if you just go to hitpaw.com, it's really difficult to, well, I found it really difficult in my sleep deprived state to find the AI photo editor, but I got there. And now the link that's in the show notes for all of you, it will bring you directly there. Yeah. That's pretty cool. Yeah. I've had some real fun with it. Just going through my photos library and
looking at some old ones. Um, Then I went, oh, you know, I wonder if, what it'll do with this? And some it's really disappointing. I mean, it screws up their fate. Like a group photo that was taken in 1981. It looks clear until you zoom in on it and then you're like, oh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's not good. Yeah. But, but another one that was taken in 1984 was absolutely gorgeous. It did a really nice job of, of clearing everything up and yeah,
I was really impressed. if you have a need for photo manipulation and you've got old photos that you want to try and enhance. And I believe there's some free trial associated with it. It looks like it. Maybe they put a watermark or something like that in there, but to see if it's going to help you. And they even have, they have another one that does, we talked about it previously about removing watermarks. Oh, that's right. That's, ah, that's why this sounds familiar. Right.
I remember this now. They also, I have to share because it's clearly the most important thing on their website. There's a 30% off Christmas coupon, Pete. Like that was part of the issue is I think you can hide the Christmas coupon and then a reminder about the Christmas coupon comes up and when you hide that, the Christmas coupon comes back up. It's terrible web design because I was trying to get to a menu that was behind one of these elements.
Christmas coupon. Yeah. Oh yeah. That's really nice, really nice. But we want you to save money. I don't want to. I don't, I just, I want to get to the thing that I can save money on. No, no, save money first. Well, well, as annoying as that is, I mentioned a few weeks ago that I thought there was something going on with my system with Monterey.
Or safari where I was running out of memory and it got bad and I I I asked about it on the show like is anybody else experiencing this and the good news was any any many of you wrote in and said no it's been fine like I'm not seeing any like remarkable difference between say Ventura, and uh Sonoma I said did I say Monterey I meant Sonoma uh and so I was like okay so this is a thing got it well still to me thing and it really is only on one of my computers it's my m1 mini
in the office which is my only computer with 16 gigs of ram I would buy every computer with 16 gigs of ram but I had to buy two computers very quickly over the summer when I had that lightning strike and so I now have computers with my laptop has 24 gigs of ram because that was the one that was available and this one in the studio has 32 gigs of ram because that was the one that was available that's not a problem mind you but it did make troubleshooting.
Amongst my ecosystem a little more difficult and it made me think, gosh, do you really need more than 16 gigs to like effectively run Sonoma? At the same time, I migrated from using mail as my primary mail client to Thunderbird as my primary mail client. And I was like, okay, maybe it's a Thunderbird thing. But then again, I'm using Thunderbird on all my other Macs and it's not causing my, and it might, the symptoms were that my system would just slow to a crawl.
And I, for some reason, sorted that, well, if I quit Safari and relaunch it, it makes it better. But often only for a very short period of time. Like, there were days where I had to quit Safari more frequently than once an hour. Just to get things, like, to keep things moving and to keep my system from being sluggish. And so... I was like, okay, maybe I need to nuke and pave. Maybe is it time, as ridiculous as this is going to sound, is it time to replace my M1 Mini with something newer?
Like, I couldn't, I almost bit the bullet last week. Like, out of frustration, it was like, I need this computer to work. Like, I would be sitting there alone in my office, yelling to no one, can I use my computer now or do you need to use it? You know, yelling at my computer. And then finally, it dawned on me, I should start troubleshooting this, right? And so I was like, well, what can I do? Do I have some like virus kind of thing? So I ran, the answer is yes, I did have some kind of virus.
Malwarebytes didn't find it, because it's not something that we would typically call a virus. In fact, it's a piece of software that came from one of our sponsors. I'll get there. Not a current sponsor. Thank goodness. So I dug around and I'm like, okay, well, Malwarebytes isn't finding anything that's like known to be nefarious, but maybe, you know, extensions can get in the way. And so I started looking at my extensions.
I have one password and I'm like, oh, I really don't want to have to live without that, but okay, like, you know, turn that off. That didn't fix it. So I started turning things off. The PayPal Honey extension was one of them. And when I turned that off, man, everything changed. Like, I knew within an hour that this was certain to be the fix to my problem or the cause of my problem, depending on how you want to look at it.
And now that it's been, you know, many days, almost a week since I've turned this off, I can say with certainty that this absolutely was the problem. And in fact, I turned it back on and the problems all came back. Um, I guess, you know, PayPal Honey is an extension that looks at the, when you're shopping for things, it will, and it's very clever about the way it does it. I really like the way it does it.
You get to the checkout page and it will offer to, uh, try all the coupons that it knows about to find you the best deal. And it scans the page, it finds where to put the coupon code in. And it finds the price, like the grand sum total price that you're already paying, and then it just iterates through. It puts a coupon code in, it says apply coupon, sees what it is, goes through all of its coupons, and then says, here's the best deal we found for you.
And sometimes it's, you know, the best, the deal that you had found. And other times, many times, it's something else. I suppose that it's integration with the DOM, the document object model, and all the JavaScript on the pages. And maybe because I always have pinned tabs for Google Docs and Synology Drive documents that are very sort of resource heavy on their own, maybe it's always paying attention to these.
I think you can, I know you can go in and tell Safari which pages to or not to allow extensions to see. So I could go in and like, you know, granularly manage it. But really what I do is I just leave it off 99% of the time and then turn it on when I'm like checking out somewhere. Cause I don't need PayPal or Honey or anybody else examining the DOM of every document that I'm in in Google Docs or any other webpage I mean, like I'm sure they're collecting that data too.
I would if I were, I mean, I wouldn't if I were them, but that's because I'm not in that business and there's a reason I'm not in that business. So anyway. Honey, killer of clients and servers. I have a great story. Have you been, have you been there before? Yeah. So I, my day job, I work for a company and we build e-commerce websites and so we're dealing with coupon codes and coupon form inputs and baskets and all that stuff all the time.
Right. And we had one client's site that kept just cratering. And we were like, what the hell is going on? There's nothing in our code. We're like looking around, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Come to find out the way couponing systems work. And this particular customer had very complex couponing rules. So things like a lot of exclusions, a lot of different codes, a lot of it's, and they had a pretty large database for all of their things.
And so the problem is, is that what Honey does is it basically DDoSes your coupon input form. Like when you're running that thing, it's basically just slamming through every coupon it can find that has ever been valid for that site. Right, yeah, some massive database. And then it has to find, like you said, it has to find the best discount out of the coupons that do work. So it's trying every coupon, right? It's brute-forcing every coupon. Yeah, I mean it's clever, don't get me wrong, but yeah.
In this case on the back end, they had so many complex exclusion rules that the database hits to check each coupon were heavier. I mean, we figured it out, but it was like, oh my God, this thing is just like... So we had to build some workarounds and stuff for it, not just Honey, for any of these coupons, there's a lot of these coupons. Yeah, they're not the only one that does this. As they became more prevalent, this became a new problem, but we were scratching our heads for a long time.
It's like, holy crud. And when they were looking at what these things were doing, these plugins were doing, when they were actually on the basket page, and it's just like a brute force.
Attack and then so we didn't want to the immediate thought was we'll put in you know we already had anti-brute force things in there right things to slow it down or whatever but you don't want to do that because you don't want to break that customer experience you want them to use the coupon so it was an interesting dilemma to have to try to solve but it's like holy crud so same thing they overwhelmed our server just the same way it was overwhelming your client yeah but it wasn't like Like,
I get, yes, this all makes sense, but the thing is, it was overwhelming my web browser, when I had no shopping websites open at all, but it's just seeing everything. I would assume your suspicions are correct, that it's just constantly checking the DOM for certain, you know, key IDs or something like that, maybe, I don't know.
I feel like a better way to code that would be to first look at the URL and compare that against the database that, you know, Honey uses and say, do we have any coupons for this URL? And if the answer is no, stop. Like, that's it. There's going to be a short list relative to the number of websites that exist out there. There's gonna be a short list of websites that Honey is gonna have coupons for. So why would it even bother?
I don't know if it's hunting for the coupon input on the page or whatever, but you're right. Yeah, like, why aren't we checking to see, is this an e-commerce website first? Well, or is Honey, and this is me in my tinfoil hat, and it's so, you know, I'm sorry. But or is Couponing and that and an affiliate stuff only one of honey's revenue streams and another one Maybe is you know data mining?
I don't know like they definitely had the ability and did know everywhere that I visited for a very long time, You know if I were I think if I were gonna use honey more, and I probably will I will put it in whatever, you know, block all and allow only on these very specific sites. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Probably a good strategy. Yeah. And that's true. Now, you know, that's not just honey that like you said, there's tons of apps like this. There's coupon. What's the other one? Coupon bird.
So I don't know. I can't even remember all of them. Yeah. Coupon birds is another one that that I've used successfully and like, but RetailMeNot is another one. RetailMeNot. I think they have it. plug-in that you can do that'll fill in coupons.
I mean it's super handy to have something instead of having to like you know do it the old way which is like visit retailme not and copy and paste and oh no that didn't work okay copy and paste no that didn't work I mean it's annoying it's nice to have a computer do the automation of that however. However, I do before we, I think we've, we've exhausted our time with my, with my little rant and hopefully valuable things before that.
Uh, do you want to share one thing for, and I'll put a link for this in the appropriate section, but rod in our discord chat mentions a service called slide dial, which he uses for delivering voice messages silently. So back to our discussion about, you know, how to, how to tell people about this slide dial, it's not text it's voice, but, um, you know, maybe ringless voicemail messaging app is what they call it.
So another, another option line seems to be the app that'll do that for text messaging slide dial for, uh, for voice, but yeah, nice to be able to leave people a message and have them check it on, on their time. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Yep. Thanks for hanging out with us, everybody. Thanks for, thanks for bearing with us. I think we did okay today, Pete. Thanks. Thankfully you were here, Adam. It's getting better. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks. I'm learning. We appreciate that.
Aside from our brief stint with our unknown co-host. Yeah, that's right. That's Adam blurred out. That's Adam blurred out. That's right. Winning the witness protection. I think what happened is I got a text from my wife and I didn't have D&D on, so I just got to remember to set D&D when I start. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have a, do you use Keyboard Maestro, Adam? I do not, but I'm, between the last show and this show, I think you're going to convince me so.
Yeah, so I have a Keyboard Maestro macro that I run that launches all the things that I need for every podcast, which is super handy. And then it runs my, uh, it, it turns on my focus mode, uh, for podcasting, which is basically do not disturb other than you guys, like your messages can get through and, and that's basically it. I'm in that mode, and yet someone got through to me, and I'm really curious how that happened. With a phone call? Or a... A text message. A text message. Huh.
Does it offer everybody the ability to break through, or only the IP people? I don't remember how that feature works. Oh, I don't know. That's a good question. Yeah. Well, but it was a text, so I know a phone call, if you call twice... No, like if I were to text you in D&D when you're in do not disturb mode All they can go notify anyway, correct Correct. Yeah, so maybe that's what happens. What happened?
Yeah, that would at least explain it Maybe best to just assume that that's what happened because if it's not Then you've got a whole mystery that you're gonna be obsessing about world is broken. Yeah, you don't need that in your life. Thank you folks this has been a blast Have a have a great week. Thanks to our sponsors green chef dot-com Slash I need to make sure I get the code right six zero m g g those meals are yummy.
It's fun stuff Thanks to cash fly before providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you, Thanks to all of you Visit Mackey cub calm sign up for the newsletter. So you get the show notes in your inbox, Pete, do you know, uh, do you know how to share any advice in Japanese? I'm putting you on the spot here. I, I, no, I don't. Okay. Adam! I could do, I could, but that being said, we'd be canceled. So I'm not going to do that.
You haven't memorized the correct advice. Because I don't want to get caught is what I'm saying. Oh, there it is. Thanks for hanging out with us.