It's time for Matt Geekab and listener James brings us our quick tip of the week by sharing that on our iPhones, if we're in messages in iOS 17, we have that little plus sign in the corner. You can hit that little plus sign and then you can choose things like say photos and then go select a photo and share it to messages. There is a faster way. Just press and hold on that plus sign in messages down in the lower left.
This is when you're in a message typing back and forth with someone or a group of someone's Hold down that plus sign and it will bring up photos and you can get there with one tap It is game-changing, perhaps even life-changing more quick tips like this plus your questions answered today on Mackey kept 1012 for Monday December 4th. Happy birthday kiddos 2023. Music. Greetings folks, and welcome to Mac Geek Gab, the show where we share your quick tips. Like that, we share your cool stuff found.
We share your questions. We try to answer your questions. We even sometimes ask our own questions. We string it all together loosely into an agenda of themes such that we give ourselves the best option, the best chance of learning at least five new things every single time we come together. Fastmail.com slash MGG is our sponsor for this week where you can go and get 10% off your first year of my current primary email service.
We'll talk more in depth about that a little bit here later in the show. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. Here in South Dakota, I'm Adam Christensen. And here in Lee, New Hampshire, it's Pilot Pete. Good to be with both of you guys. This is cool. Yeah. The new era has begun. I know the new era. Welcome to the welcome to the fray here, Adam. You're going to be sorry. One of us is going to be sorry. I was talking to you, Dave. That's right.
Yeah, no, good to have you here, Adam. I don't trust you with too much trouble. Oh, why, why, why wouldn't we have trouble? What are you doing here then? Oh, okay. I guess, I guess go ahead. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I said, it's going to be like that. So yeah, I'm in. Yeah, I know. I know. I know you're in it's, um, for better and for worse. It's good. I know. It's great to have you. I'm, I'm really stoked about this.
We got to figure out how to get your, your audio level to be even with us while echo cancellation is off because otherwise it'll be weird just like that conversation was but we will fix that more evolution just like that as the as things progress here in mac and gab land speaking of progressing kent has our next quick tip for us uh he says i finally bought some air tags on a pre-black, friday sale and before they arrived i started questioning my choice i wondered
if both my wife and i would be able to track our tagged items together My initial searches seem to say no, one AirTag, one owner, so to speak. However, most of those articles I found were dated a year ago. That may have been the case before, but now with iOS 17, that has changed. When setting up an AirTag, the owner can designate one or more additional users up to five. They do not have to be in one's family group, but they do need to have an Apple ID.
And it's true, yeah, being able to share AirTags really changes the nature of how these things can work. I think it's, I like it, I think it's great. That's awesome. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Are you doing any AirTag sharing? Do I have to admit that I didn't realize that until this quick tip? No, that's why we do the quick tips, Pete. Right. I mean, it's like, Oh, I'm not, but, but we're gonna, I mean, I think I'm going to start, I shouldn't be the only one that can find the remote.
Uh, yeah. Do you have an air tag on your remote? Yes. Okay. Yeah. And then yes, correct. That's yeah. That's a great, that's a great one. I'm also, we have air tags in each of our suitcases. I'm, I'm going to put, I'm going to make those shared, like, that would be a handy thing. To know where our suitcase, like it doesn't that way, if one person uses a different suitcase, it doesn't matter. It's like, oh yeah, I have, I have the, you know, the red away bag. Okay, great.
That now I know. Here's the thing. And I don't know if it's in cool stuff found or not, but we've talked about them before, so it doesn't need to be is there's, there's cards that are like, they're twice the thickness of a credit card, but they're the same size that have the air tag ability in. Yeah. Find my ability. So if I've ordered those for stocking stuffers for everybody and I, hopefully those will be shareable as well. Cause I did one of the suggestions was put them in your luggage tag.
So when people are looking through your bag for that air tag to get rid of, they aren't even thinking about the luggage tag being the air tag. Different form factor, right? Yeah. You sharing the air tags Adam? It notifies you, Hey, you know, you've stolen this suitcase, there's an air tag following you. Well, I'll go find the air tag and throw it away. So if you have an old dead AirTag, keep it in there so they can throw it away and think they've.
Well, but you know, you can change the battery on AirTags Pete. They don't this, so they shouldn't like, they shouldn't die. At least not from a, from a battery standpoint, just make sure you don't get batteries with that coating on them. So, right. Yeah. Or just don't put them in your mouth. Well, I mean, you right. Also don't put them in your mouth, but the coding makes it so that the air tag can't get a connection to the battery. Good connection to the battery. Yeah.
Yeah. I. If you scrape it a little, I've found if you scrape it a little and people say, you know, hitting a file on lithium ion battery and you know, yeah, I, I kind of get it. But if you just scrape it with a nice gentle file, like even a nail file, it'll take that bitter coating off that is meant to keep babies from swallowing your batteries.
Yeah. That's interesting because my battery just died on my first, because I got the air tags right when they came out and I just had to replace the battery and I think I just got whatever ones Duracell sells and I think they have the coating on them and I haven't had any issues. Wow. Well that's good. I mean they may not have the, or they might all have the coating and some of them are thicker than others, right?
Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I don't either. Yeah, the coding is to keep children, any humans, but predominantly children who have yet to be told to know better, From putting them in their mouths. It's a it's a bitter taste or something I don't know. I haven't actually tasted it. I should I should taste it the next time I have a Doesn't work.
I'm definitely gonna lick the thing I mean, I like batteries just that you know, I don't nine volts to make sure they're good Oh, I mean, I don't you know, I don't have coffee in the morning but I definitely put a 9-volt on my tongue to have a little pick-me-up at the beginning of the day. Pete T. Leeson, Ph.D.: Wakey, wakey. Jay Haynes, Ph.D.: Wakey, wakey. Pete T. Leeson, Ph.D.: To answer your question from a while ago,
no, I'm not sharing any air tags. I actually am the only one in my family who uses an air tag currently. My wife has lost her, misplaced her wallet, and we've recovered it luckily a couple times. I was like, oh, I have extra air tags, I should give you one. But like Pete was pointing out, to put them in a wallet, they're just, they're too thick, right? So I was considering actually getting one of those, you know, compatible, find my compatible flat ones to give her, so.
I don't know if those were shareable. I gave everybody earplugs last year for Christmas, and I got a lot of resistance from my spouse unit, and she loves it. It's saved her a couple times now. She can find her purse, you know, she can find the keys. Yeah, my wife doesn't do a purse, she just has a really, she's like me, I have to have a thin, thin wallet. So I do not like anything really thick. Like that's mine, that's what I use. It's just a little billfold. A lot of gashy showing there, folks.
That's right. That's right. The best, the best and most affordable money clip ever. It's just a binder clip. Binder clip. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have moved to using a MagSafe wallet, very specifically a MagSafe wallet with a pop socket on it. And that has been great because I don't have it here in the studio with me because it's, I leave my wallet in my car. Maybe I shouldn't announce that, but that's where I leave my wallet. But I like, I have a MagSafe pop socket on my phone all the time.
And it's really nice to just be able to take that off, put my MagSafe pop socket wallet on, and I still have a pop socket on the outside of my phone when I need to have a wallet. So, um, that I've been, that I've been happy with. Um, Pete, we need to, uh, we need to get a link in the show notes. We will have a link in the show notes for the, uh, find my compatible wallet thin thing. I'll find it right now. Yeah. Okay. Well, at some point. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
All right. You want to take us to JT here, Adam? To JT. Yeah. If I got, I'm going to try. Okay. I have JT Ray. Here he is. Oh, yeah. This is the one. This is the one where he gives me some credit. So he says, I have to credit Adam Christensen for this tip. So many episodes, I can't recall, so I'm guessing this was a while back. On your make, create a new note, press Option Shift K, and that will type the Apple symbol. I made my note the title and the body.
I made, am I reading this right? No, you know what, let me read this. Yeah, I think he dictated this, Adam. The tip, the tip is to put a, to create a text replacement with the Apple logo in it so that you can type the Apple logo quickly whenever you are doing something. Are you, yeah, now that you're here. This is something I did a while ago, yeah. So this is using the built-in text replacement.
So if you go into settings, general, keyboard text replacement, you can click the little plus symbol in the upper right hand corner, and you can add text replacements. And so if you can't remember, you know, the quick... Key options for say something like the apple symbol or anything really any symbols you can put those in there so. You can either copy and paste that in from somewhere or just you know type it in or use the text input thing up in the menu bar but once you have it in there
you can give it any shortcut you like so it looks like jt was using. comma, APL. I think I used AAPL, which is the stock symbol for Apple, which I regret, I actually need to change it. It ends up too much. But you want to find something that you're not probably going to commonly type, but that you can easily remember. Set that up in there, and then you have that good to go.
I mean, outside of that, you know, I'm a big, I use TextExpander, so I have a lot of these set up in TextExpander, rather than keyboard, you know, the built-in stuff, but the built-in stuff works. It's it's really good. So yeah, you know, I like I like the built in stuff for things like this that I'm going to want to type like in text messages and and those things because on my iPhone I don't always have the text expander keyboard up and it's just nice to have this.
But of course text expander is way more robust and full featured and so I use text expander for other things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The more advanced things and then if you need them you can switch the keyboard over there. but for simple little quickie, quickie ones like this. Another one that I do is common typos that I have. So for some reason, every time I type download, I swap the O and the A, so I put the misspelling in there as the key, and then it corrects to the right
spelling when I just fumble it. You know? I like that idea. Yeah, that's good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's cool. I was gonna say as good as Apple likes to think it's, you know, it's text auto correction is we all know it's not great all the time. Not all the time. It is better now.
Where I'm noticing it being better is when I'm not in an app that's using like not in an Apple app, like when I'm in like typing an email in Thunderbird, I miss the predictive text thing that I get when I'm in you know messages or mail if I happen to be in that on my phone or whatever so yeah it yeah it has gotten better and I am palpably aware of that on on the regular yeah yeah yeah yeah but that like this Apple thing I don't I'm sure maybe it's doable I don't know how to trigger the
Apple logo on my iPhone so I love this tip that the JT Ray conveyed of yours because it's like right put it in there and then now i can type it wherever i want so yeah does it i bet you it comes up under one of those press and hold i'm sure it does it is maybe okay if that's what the normal shortcut is oh yeah yeah so feedback at mackie cub.com, folks and uh and let us know what uh how to how to get there it's not under the k by the way but uh it'll i'm sure i'm sure it's like, I don't know.
Yeah. I don't know where it is, but if you, if you do feedback at mackeycab.com. Oh, hold on. Yeah. Where, where did you say feedback at mackeycab.com? I think I did. I think that's what I said. I Adam, could you read the banner at the bottom and tell us what it says? It's his feedback at MacGeekGab.com. Well, there you have it then. That settles it. It's on the internet, it must be true. It's on the internet, it must be true. It's time to shut down the internet, Pete.
Right on. You want to take us to Wes before we shut down the internet? Oh, I can do that, I think. Wes wrote in, and here's, this is really confusing, even listening to it, it may be a little confusing, but he writes, guys, in response to Gab about silence things, I had all my notifications turned off after a restart for the last few days. No idea why It's happened to me too Wes.
Neither do I This is I went exploring today and found in settings slash sounds and haptics, That haptics was changed to always play instead of play in silent mode This caused haptics to block all sounds this frustrated me for two days of missed calls and text my Apple watch on my wrist this morning saved me today, and that's saved me a few times too, that my Apple Watch has notified me, hey, you've got something, when my phone didn't make any sounds.
And it made me change the way my iPhone and the world is now spinning in the right direction because he went in and did this. So here's the thing, when haptics is on always play, you're thinking, well, that's great. That's what I want. I always want the haptics. Well, not when your phone isn't silenced. You want sounds. And my understanding is when you have haptics as always played, that that's what you're getting. And so you want to select play in silent mode. Oh, interesting.
You want sounds and haptics to play in silent mode. If you have always play, then even when your phone is not silenced, you're getting no rings, but you're just getting haptics. I think that's what's happening there. Because I think that's what was happening to me. I've missed a lot of calls and a lot of notifications. And I thought, well, I must've just goobered my focus. Sure, sure.
Really? So mine is set to always play, which it says haptics will play when iPhone rings or receives an alert and then play in silent mode says haptics will play when iPhone rings or receives an alert while in silent mode. And then there's don't play in silent mode, which would indicate that it's going to play it in regular mode, but not silent mode. And then there's never play.
So, I think always play, you're still going to get sound, you're just not, you're just not going to get, you would get sound and haptics in, in not silent mode. I believe. Okay. I believe. So, when your phone is silent, it's going to give you haptics, unsilenced, you're still going to get haptics, you think? I think so. Okay. Yeah. Well, then you would want it in always play because, you know, if it's in your pocket and you're in a loud environment, you want it vibrating for you.
But I'd leave my phone in silent mode almost exclusively. So I can't speak to this. I need to mess with it. And between that and the focus mode, this gets convoluted very quickly.
So, you know, I would have somebody around to text or text and to call you and to do some tests to make sure it's doing what you want in the mode you have chosen, because it's very easy to trick yourself into not being notified when there's an incoming call and if you've got an elderly parent or somebody you know needs to reach you, that's a bad way to be.
Yeah, I mean, I believe what Wes said, like, like, it's interesting that changing this from always play to play in silent mode brought his sounds back. That's, that's weird. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we weren't there and we don't know what all the other settings were interfacing. Well, and it could, it could be just this and that, you know, like, like we always say on Mac OS, but it's also true on iOS, the settings interface is really just a GUI to changing the entries in plist files, right?
Like, I mean, I may be oversimplifying it, but that's essentially what's happening, right? This is, you could make all these settings changes if you could get to a terminal, and manipulate the right files. Of course, on iPhone, that's not the easiest thing to do. Even more difficult. Right, yeah, nearly impossible, right?
But that is what's happening. So, and sometimes on the Mac, you know, we say, well just turn the setting off and then on again and that'll rewrite the preference file and and often fixes it so is that what happened on iPhone like it's it's literally the same construct is happening so he rewrote the prefs file by changing that setting and maybe that's the answer I don't know what do you think Adam? I mean, I fully agree with that theory.
I mean, that's the classic, like what we used to do in the old school days on the Mac. It's like, go delete the preferences file and relaunch the thing, right? It's basically the same thing on iOS. Yeah, sure. Yeah, okay. So at least my theory holds water, whether or not it's correct. Yeah. We'd have to be able to go in on iOS and like check the P-list file, I guess. Yeah, we can't do that. That's not how it works. Well, and my big answer to Wes was, you know, this is a dangerous setting to
not clearly understand. So I go back to my advice, make sure you've got somebody else around and have them call you, have them text you, make sure your settings are coming through as you want. Confirms. Yeah. Trust, but verify. Amen. Yep. Absolutely. Danny has our final quick tip of this week, or at least the final one that we're going to get to, because we're taking little detours, which is what we do. This is how we learn. Yeah, this is how the five new things happen.
Danny says, when I check for app updates on my phone, I often see apps that I don't use or forget I even had. I discovered that you can swipe left on an app from the update page and an option to delete it appears right there. There's no need to hunt it down elsewhere. Am I the only one that didn't know this? I'm sure you're not the only one, Danny.
I appreciate that you posted about this in our discord at mackiecab.com, slash discord because this is something I've been doing Ever since this option came which I think was iOS 15 It might have been 14 but it's it wasn't there and then it appeared and I was super thankful for exactly the reason you articulate here and yet, Even though I do this, multiple times a week I never thought to mention it in the show. And so Danny, you get all the credit for this one. Yeah. I'm going to start
doing that. Get rid of, I got to thin my iPhone. It's a great way to thin your iPhone. So long as the developers are keeping the apps updated. If it's a, if it's an app that has gone stale, this is not a way to. That's the one I always like. I get a new phone and I go to use the app and it's like, yeah, delete it. Cause uh, it's, it's no longer available. Like, wait, what? I like that app. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It worked on my other phone.
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Fastmail.com slash mgg, where your email experience gets the upgrade It deserves and our thanks to fast mail for sponsoring this episode All right. We got a question from old guy in Discord that's not a derogatory term. I don't think it's it's it's their name what it calls. Yes, exactly Saying Santa's elves disguised as FedEx couriers delivered me a 14-inch MacBook Pro running m3.
It took a little over six hours to do a Wi-Fi migration from the Air to the Pro and all the Mac software that I tried so far has moved over seamlessly. And he says, you know, I went through a couple of other things, haven't tried to install everything yet. Is there any advice that you have from upgrading from my Intel Mac to an Apple Silicon Mac? It all seems good, but is there anything I should look deeper at now that I have made the jump using Migration Assistant?
And this is, I think there's several things here. The one that jumps to mind for me is making sure that you are running the Apple Silicon version of the apps that you just migrated over. In theory, most of them have been up to date or been updated and you're running, you know, whether what they call universal binaries now, which have Intel and Apple Silicon in them. But there are some apps for a while, Microsoft Edge was this way.
You had to either download the Intel version or or the Apple Silicon version. It wasn't just a universal thing. I don't know if they're still doing that, but that was a thing for a little while. And so what I recommend is open up activity monitor, go to view and choose all processes to make sure you're seeing everything. Then go to view columns and make sure kind is checked. And then you click on the kind column to sort it.
And when you sort it with the caret pointing down, all of the Intel stuff will appear at the top of the screen. And you get to see what apps of yours are running Intel. And then you can go and look to see if there are if there are apps that fix that. So, yeah, I don't know that. Go ahead, Adam. I was just saying I can confirm the that edge still asks you. Okay, I just downloaded it. It asked me, do I want Intel or Apple Silicon?
I don't. Yeah, it seems like a bad. Which one did they guide you towards? Did they say what what did they say was most common? No, they were both up there, both buttons, I had to, like, pick it. Yeah, let me look, download edge, because for a while it was saying that Intel was most common and I was like, well, is that true anymore? I would think your computer would report what it is and guide you to that, but that would require actual web development on their end.
Yeah, but Safari masks a lot of that now, Pete, for privacy. It has changed and the Mac with Apple Silicon is listed as the top option and it doesn't try to guide you in any other way other than that. So, that it's... Yeah, there were just the two options there. It used to say Mac with Intel processor, you know, and then in parentheses, most common. It's like, okay, sure.
But, yeah, I try that. I, I'm also a big fan before I do a migration and just even on a regular basis, I will go and run Mac updater on a Mac before I do a migration or, or an upgrade. Even if I'm not putting new hardware in place before I do an upgrade, like say on my wife's Mac or something before I upgraded her to Sonoma, I ran Mac updater to make sure that I had the up-to-date versions of all the things because. You know, you never know, you never know.
I like running that on a regular basis, but, you know, not everybody is as obsessive about upgrades. Um, yeah, I'm not as good about that as I should be. Mac updater, man, like, you know, I don't know. I love it. Makes life so easy. Right. Yeah, yeah, that's great. Do you run Mac updater? Hey, where are you trying to? Adam?
No, I mean, I have CleanMyMac X, which has a feature like that where you can go in and you can see they have a listing of what apps you have and what's up to date and what's not up to date. So I'll occasionally use that. Most apps ask you these days or tell you these days when you launch the app. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yes, but my thing is I don't like it when I go to launch an app and it's like, hey, do you want to update right now? It's like, no, I want to run the app right now.
That's why I clicked launch, you know, so that's, that's where I love Mac updater because there are some apps that I only run maybe once a month or even once every couple of months, but when I run them, I want to be running the latest version, but often I'm, you know, I always run at a pretty fast clip. If I launch the app, it's like, no, I kind of need it like right away.
Zoom is a great example. I mean, you know, I, I run zoom often enough that it's going to update itself regularly, but if you're only running zoom once a month, there's probably been four updates since the last time you ran zoom and you might want one of those. I don't know. That's so, that's my, yeah, at work, at work, we, we have to use, we use, um, this single sign on thing called duo and it gets really angry if, uh, Chrome isn't up to date. So it will tell you, you need to update your Chrome.
Like it's, it doesn't make you, but it, yeah, it makes you sorry. You haven't. Yes. Yeah. They update Chrome all the time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Other day it's like. Oh yeah. Chrome is crazy. Yeah. In terms of the updates. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. So I, I don't know. I like Mac updater. It's a, um, make, it just makes my life easy.
So, and then I, I'm also a big fan cause I have running brew upgrade from my terminal because I run brew actually even better than brew upgrade, uh, is to first type brew space install space top grade and then run top grade because top grade not only upgrades all of your brew packages, but all of your Ruby stuff. It checks for system updates. It updates like six different things all at once. So geek top grade. Yeah. Yes, Pete. Yes, I'm here. What do you need? What do you need?
All right, Adam, you want to take us to lock tutor? Yeah, LockTutor says, is it okay to upgrade to Mac OS Sonoma? I currently have a 2019 27-inch iMac with a 3.1 GHz 6-core Intel processor and 64 GB of DDR memory. I have a Ventura 13.5 installed and a 500 GB of free space on my 1 TB drive. I'm wondering if it's safe to upgrade to Sonoma 14.1.1 and if doing so has any benefits. I'm not interested in the shiny new toys like screensavers, widgets, and stickers.
I am not a gamer. However, if there are valid reasons, especially regarding enhanced security, I'm willing to do it as long as it doesn't affect my current performance. Also, any gotchas to watch out for. Your advice. So, off the top of my head, I upgraded right away. I would agree, I'm not really interested in any of the new shiny toys, widgets, things. I'm not really using those. I've played around with them. But yeah, I just did it because I just like to be on the latest thing.
And as far as my research showed, there were really no issues. And even some, I know, Dave, you'll probably talk to this, some improvements. Yeah, I mean, it's an evolution. I am loving Sonoma. And of course, you know, for anybody that's listened for more than a week, there's the asterisk of except that it broke all my mail plugins and I had to move to Thunderbird to run my mail the way that I want to run it. Be that as it may, it's been fine. I'm doing fine with that.
All the rest of the stuff, though, Sonoma has fixed a lot of things, including all the core audio stuff that Ventura broke terribly for us. So, and it's been running smooth. The only, really the only asterisk that's left is... Coincidentally with all of this, my M1 Mini in the office with 16 gigs of RAM seems to run into memory pressure far more regularly than it used to. But I know that I am unique in this. We have other 16 gig Macs in the house that don't run into this problem.
Many of you have reported you have 16 gig Macs that don't run into this problem. So I think it's something about my setup. And really what I need to do is just like go through and say well What what am I what what you know maybe run Lingan and have it show me all the things that are starting up that I've forgotten about over the years or or maybe it's time for a nuke and pave But I think it's I think it's probably more that than it is You know Sonoma as the as the issue so but yeah,
I know I'm I I recommend it. Have you yet? Have you upgraded yet Pete? No You don't have to say yes, you don't have to. No, I meant to last week. I really did. And, you know, life got in the way and I just didn't. I probably will before I go on this next trip starting this week. Okay. But, you know, I need to do it. I just, I still like the way my mail works and having to give up small cube mail.
Plugins yeah yeah so there's things that smallcubed has said that um a new client is coming that that embeds that it's a it's a brand new mail client that takes all of their plugins. And and makes them part of you know first party features and works works seamlessly with their, yeah the question is what will the user experience of that client be and uh as far as i know anyone who might have had any user experience is, has been asked not to talk about it yet. That's as far as I know. Okay.
So that's all I can say, but let's just say I remain hopeful that, uh, mail Maven might well be a good option, you know, down the road, a couple of months, probably is what my guess is the release cycle. So, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, but you know, we'll get through it and the you know, yeah, I I've been okay with Thunderbird too.
Yeah, and you know the interesting thing is with all mail on IMAP and all of that now changing mail clients I don't want to say it's trivial because if you've got a lot of mail to sync it will take some time And then you got to set up all your signatures. And so there is There is time that you must invest, but it is doable. And you can run two mail clients in parallel with each other.
So Pete, like for you, you know, if your only holdup is needing to auto CC for our Mac Geek Cab stuff, you could compartmentalize that to Thunderbird and just use Apple Mail for everything else. And it's all going to be fine. That's not a bad idea. I know. I'll nod louder. Sorry. No, it's not a bad idea. And I probably should move in that direction. And then, and it would be cleaner for me as well because now I'm up to five different email accounts I'm managing in the mail client. Yep.
And as nice as it is to have it all in one place, it makes it very convoluted when I'm looking for something in the sent mailbox from this mail address and not that mail address. And yeah, I know it can do a global search, but that really kind of loots. Yeah. Sometimes you want a very specific search. Yeah. And mail can do that too, but truly compartmentalizing it by breaking it out into different clients. Like it is all doable as I've been testing different mail clients over the last
few months. It's like, oh yeah. Like if I want to go test, if I bothered to set one up, I can just, even though it's, even if it's been a month since I've launched it, I just launch it again and it syncs up and everything's there. It's like, oh yeah, it's it doesn't mess with what I'm doing elsewhere, you know, the world is different than it was when we were running Eudora a hundred years ago with pop accounts, where if it downloaded into one mail client, it didn't make it to any of the others.
And heaven forbid you wanted to run, you know, multiple instances of mail on multiple computers. That just wasn't a thing. Yeah. And my wife tried to set up a mail account. She has a mail account at work for her travel agency, and she was trying to set one up the other day as pop. And I'm like, no, no, no. Oh yeah. Don't do that. You know, you'll never find what you're looking for. Your phone will grab it and your computer will never see it.
No, iMap is the way to go. No, so yeah, I've been really happy with Sonoma. So, you too, Adam, even on Intel, Sonoma's okay? Oh yeah, it's been great. I mean, I saw basically no change at all to my daily sort of stuff. So whatever improvements I have, I guess I have, but really the only noticeable thing is like when I'm doing audio stuff, that new little, you know, icon that shows if your mic is on or up in the menu bar, that's probably the biggest visual change that I've really seen.
Yeah. Because I'm not using the widgets or anything like that. Screen savers are kind of nice. Hey, remember before the show, Adam, you couldn't get your camera to work in Chrome. Yep. And we were talking about, I wonder where the spots are to turn off camera access. And And we decided it was only in system settings privacy. There, there is one other place in Sonoma to do that. Cause when it, something's asking for the camera, the little camera icon appears
on the top of the screen. So that might have been it. I don't know. It wasn't showing up there. So it wasn't definitely not being recognized. It wasn't even, okay. So it wasn't even attempting. Gosh, that's so weird. All right. Well, at least edge worked.
Yeah, all right Andrew's got a question Pete Andrew says Last week I took two calls on my Apple powerbeats Pro I use these for exercise primarily both callers said my voice was, unintelligible so I switched to speaker I Thought I may have some Now now notes yelling at me cruft near the mic Why can't I see this is driving me crazy? I just I want to see the other It's I got to pull it down. He thought he had schmutz in the mic. It's a technical term.
Yeah, you are editing this in notes is not letting me see the second page without doing all sorts of things, but I'm doing it. I'm there now. I'm not editing. I swear. Anyway, he says, uh, he says, so I, well, but that's the thing is because you have it open. It's not, it thinks you're editing it. Yeah. Hands up. Anyway. No, it's fine. It says, uh, I thought I may have had cruft on the mic. Then I did a test on my iPhone 12 mini.
I have two lines. So I rang the line, uh, one line to the other and left a voicemail for myself. I listened back and yes, it sounded like I was head first down somewhere near the S bend. I'm not sure what that must be an Australian term or a New Zealand term. Toilet thing. Oh, all right. That's just a plumber's term that I've never heard before. Ah, heads up down near the S bend. I like this. Okay. All right. Yeah.
All right. Let's see, we learn five new things. We have no idea what those five things are going to be. Uh, I then found an app to record audio directly from the headset, Mike on my phone and the app confirmed that it was using the Bluetooth headphones and the microphone, the audio audio quality was much better on this. So I want to play these recordings that Andrew talked about here, and we can be judges for ourselves on this, and then we can have a little conversation about it.
So, oh wait, this first one is direct from the microphone. We get a background. Okay, this is a test using my Bluetooth headphones on the app rather than via the telephone network just to see what the quality of the sound is like.
All right, so that's the that's that's direct as he said and now here's the voicemail Okay, and this is a test over the telephone network to see what it's like going from one phone system, Using the Bluetooth microphone does sound like his head's down around by the s-bend doesn't it Adam a little bit? I mean like This is so even listening to the first one. I I knew that we were dealing with a mic that doesn't have the greatest quality, right? Because you can hear it warbling and such.
Yeah. Okay, this is a test using my Bluetooth headphones on the app. So it's really warbly. The phone system is, the default phone system has full 8K worth of bandwidth. uh, right? And so it has to compress the audio and we're not talking digital compression, although that also happens in today's phone system, but even just to get it down to AK, the audio needs to be compressed and limited.
And what that generally meant was just roll off all the high end and all the low end, get that mid range where the voice lives and that's all you get. But his audio wasn't great to be, there wasn't anything good there in that range and so when you chop off especially the high end, there's nothing left to, in those, you know, sibilance frequencies to be intelligible for speech. And so, like it doesn't surprise me, this is not a good headset.
Might be great for listening to, not a good headset. Yeah, that was my answer to him. And I, you know, in my perfectly tactful pilot mannerisms, I said, you know, you're... Those sound, the microphone is going to sound adequate at best and certainly over the POTS, the plain old telephone system, it's just not working for you. He says he uses them during exercise. Quit exercising, Andrew, and you'll be fine. Well, my guess is that they like the audio to them into the speakers.
I bet they sound great. Sounds great. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, Well, there are great other options out there. I've had actually fairly good luck with the AirPods Pro. Those are really nice microphones. They've got good noise canceling in them. The AirPods, all of the AirPods, including the OG AirPods, have been the best sounding telephone headsets I've ever used. Yeah, and for microphone especially. Yes. You're outbound sound.
Although I will tell you this, If you're doing any crinkling of any plastic or paper, while you're talking on the phone to somebody, it drives them nuts. It's like, what are you doing? Are you like. So you're saying if you want to get off the phone, just start crinkling plastic. Just start crinkling paper and plastic. Yeah, that's a good idea. Absolutely. That's a great idea. I wish I had some here to crinkle so that I could do that for you guys.
Cause I'm really trying to get out of here, but no, it's fine. Sadly, I just don't think that, uh, there's any, like you, you already covered it, Dave. There's, I don't think there's any hope for the microphone in the Powerbeats Pro that that he's got. But I loved his troubleshooting here. Like, test it, you know, isolate, test, and it made it immediately obvious. It was like, okay, yeah, this is not, there's no there there. There's no good sound there.
You know, in audio, we always talk about, you know, there's the joke, fix it in post, fix it in post, right? You can EQ and fix. And with some of the tech that's out there now, there's a lot of amazing things. However- Tell me whoopery's got their name. However, if you can fix it at the source, it's even better. What's the fun of that? Any thoughts on this, Adam, before we, what are your favorite headsets? My only thought on this is like, oh, I like my AirPods Pro for sure.
Yeah, they're fabulous. But I mean, do we know where the mics on this are? If he's been using them for exercise and how old are they? How long has he been using them? Is it possible the mics just became, got moisture in them and it just have degraded or become damaged over time or. Oh, that's a really good question. Or yeah. Or is it obscured by some, I mean, we don't, you know, we heard audio. We don't know. Maybe Andrew has like long bushy curly hair and it's covering
over wherever the microphone is too, right? Like that. Yeah. Any of you did say he got in and made sure there wasn't any cruft down in the microphone. holes yeah I'm thinking just like the mic got physically but yeah this is damaged beyond the membrane or something. Yeah, because that was particularly bad. I'm sorry, Andrew.
Yeah, yeah, it's just, it's just bad. I, and, and this is like, it is a great way to test things whenever we're testing new, you know, earbuds here or whatever, if they are earbuds that are to be used for calls, in addition to music, we'll always make a call with them. And it's like, oh yeah, this sounds terrible.
Okay, great. Well, we'll let you know, we'll either let you know that or it doesn't make the cut for a cool stuff found segment because We don't have a lot of time, You know, we're always we have more things to tell you about than we have time to tell you so So we generally cut out the stuff. We don't like You don't want to start mediocre stuff out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah mess stuff found Next on Mac geek out. Yeah That's right.
So, so Dave, well, that goes back to something you, you covered it on cool stuff found sometime back, but it was the JBL Tour Pro 2. Yeah. Or Tour Pro 3. Yeah. I mean. Those sound great with calls. Yeah. And I believe, are they're cheaper than the AirPods? They are. And they, and what I really like about those is they have, the case has a screen on it, a touchscreen that you can change all the options with AirPods, you have to like dig into the control center on your phone and dig around.
No squeeze and hold, tap twice, hold your tongue out the right side of your mouth and close your left eye. Yeah. Oh, is that them? Ah, that's the maneuver. I keep forgetting to close my, I always close my right eye. Yeah. Dang it. Dang it. Uh, one last question Dallas had for us. He says, I play audio on my phone regularly and I often use a dongle so that I can plug it into speakers and amplify it. every time I start playing a song it fades in.
Why is that? Is there a way to get it to just start playing at the beginning of the song? And the answer Dallas is very simple. And it and it and that is the answer the reason is that there's a deck in your dongle That it's not just It's not just it's a deck a digital to analog converter. There's a deck in your dongle and The only and if that ain't a show title, I don't know what is There may be a reason that I included this in today's episode.
Yes um Yeah, no, my friend dallas asked me this yesterday we were having a rehearsal and he's like, why is this? And I like, that's exactly why. And he's like, Oh, this makes sense. So your phone doesn't have an analog audio out. It has a digital, I mean, it does have analog audio out in the speakers, right? That's fair.
So the phone has a DAC in it for sure. But your dongle that goes from your lightning or USB-C to, uh, you know, mini eighth headphone jack or whatever it is you're going out to also has a DAC in it. And that DAC powers down when it's not being used, so as not to overuse your battery. And then, when you start playing, it says, ah, gotta wake up, and it does wake up. But, it wakes up when it starts getting audio sent through it.
And so, it misses the- it doesn't miss the audio, you miss the audio, because the DAC is powering up. And that's just the way it is. I- I think, I don't- like, have- have you guys- have you guys experienced anything different? I like to live life dongle free. Well yeah, does that world even exist these days? I don't know. No, it doesn't. It really doesn't. I try to as much as possible. I'm wireless on most things these days. I think the way Steve Jobs always wanted it, you know.
Well, he wanted one wire, one wire to our Macs and it's a shame that he never got to experience what we see now with USB-C because man, like it's, it is, it's, you get one wire to your Mac and then everything else can feed off of that, including power. And it's great. And he went like, there were so many different like iterations of crazy things that Apple invented to make that work, um, in a sort of jury rigged way. But you know, Yeah, USB-C solves that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely. All right, where are we here? We've got, we've got a little time. I want to, as always, I want to take a minute and thank everybody whose contributions have come in for our Mac-eCab Premium Program in the last week or so here. I guess it's been a little over a week since we've recorded. And so just thank you so much for this, you can learn more about it at mackeycub.com slash premium.
This is a program we set up for you. When some of you asked if there was a way you could contribute to the show and support us directly. And so the, the answer is yes, it is not mandatory. It's absolutely, um, uh, optional. It is up to you. So if you can, and if you want to mackeycub.com slash premium is the way to do that.
And in the last week, we have had contributions from, $10 contributions from Jeff in Chesterton, James in Amity Harbor, Joseph in Marietta, Paul in Lawrenceville, Steven in Plainfield, Gary in Babylon, Jonathan in Plainsboro, Plainsboro, I got that right, yep. John in Vienna, Steven in Costa Mesa, James in Melbourne, and Olga in Bellevue. So thanks to and oh and Robert in Columbiana. That's $10 contributions from all of you. Thank you $25 contributions. Thanks to Monroe in Morgantown Tim in st.
Augustine Steven in column Let me try this one more time Steven in Columpton, I think that's right. I'm sure I said it with the wrong accent. My apologies Brent in Philadelphia Michael in Attleboro Peter in Oslo and And someone whose first name I don't have in Orlando. Oh, someone, Mr. or Mrs. Person X in Orlando. So thanks to all of you. And then I believe there was one $30 contribution from Rob in Sodom Sand.
And thanks to you very much for that. Mackeycup.com slash premium is where you're gonna go. And you all rock. Thank you. There are many ways to support the show. That's one of them. really listening to the show, interacting, sending in your questions, but truly listening is where it starts. And we thank all of you for, for doing that. It's absolutely amazing. All right. Uh, Pete, you want to take us to a mediocre, I mean, cool stuff found.
Yeah, mostly cool stuff. Yes. So this one, I got this for Christmas gift years ago and it's, it's one of the, I know gave it to me when she gave it to me, all that good stuff. It is a great one. It's the AirFly by 12 South. And it essentially, it allows you to take your 8th inch jack and plug it into AirFly, hence, you know, the audio jack on an airplane, so that you can watch video over Bluetooth.
So when you're sitting on the aisle and the guy in the window seat needs to get up, you don't have to unplug your cord, so he trips over it and that sort of thing. Speaking of dongle-free, sorry, there's a little dongle that you plug in and it Bluetooth Bluetooth connects to your AirPods or whatever other Bluetooth headset you have, and you can listen to audio cord free on the airplane. Careful not to donate it to the airplane seed bag gods, but yeah, AirFly by Twelve South.
I absolutely love mine. I have the original. I don't have this new one that allows you to actually share. So you and Lisa flying together can both watch the same movie and listen to the audio. That's the AirFly Duo allows for that. That's pretty cool. And then there's the AirFly Pro, which adds the ability to stream music from your phone to like an aux or something. Okay. Yep. Yep. And then there is the AirFly Pro Deluxe.
Oh, and that comes with the, that weird, like split it out into two, uh, mono jacks for the old style airplane. Cause some of them are still using the two, you know, left and right jacks instead of the, instead of the normal. It comes with a little case too, but, um, huh. Put it back into one jack, like God meant it to be. That's right.
Yeah. So the Airfly Pro I guess is, is bi-directional is, is, as I'm, as I'm understanding it, the, um, what I would like, and I'll make sure the folks at 12 South hear this to your point, Pete, of donating these to the airlines.
Cause I have donated at least one of these, uh, to someone on the next flight after mine, or, or perhaps to a flight attendant who are part of the cabin crew who was going through and checking for such things, but, uh, I, they come in two colors right now, black and white. I would like to have it red and white striped or something very, very obvious.
Or, what, yeah, what would be the other way to do, oh, well, maybe putting an air tag on it, but by the time you got that notification, you're off the plane. But something, yeah. I always try to find, I call it a hook, some kind of a memory hook that, and.
It's, it could be something as simple as leaving the top zipper of your backpack open so that when you pick your backpack up to leave, you go, oh, it's not been, it's not been closed or, or some other, some, some other way to remember, remember that you've got that thing plugged into the seat back, uh, and you don't want to donate a $50 item. I totally have it for you, Pete, get a red marker. Okay. Okay. Go into the, you're going to need a mirror for this.
So you're gonna have to go into the, the, the lab and right on your face, remind me to get my air, uh, my air, my air fly. And then other people on the plane will happily remind you as you're getting up to get your air fly. Perfect. That's great. I'm just follow me for more subscribe now for more helpful tips like this. All right. Uh, let's see what's next here. I know I know somebody's next Rob Rod is next Rod tells us about a very cool thing Called draftable.
I had never heard of this which is why I think it's so cool But but I think now that I'm gonna start using it. I'll think it's even cooler He says I've used draftable to compare PDF documents, and I've been using it for years He said just this week. I had a business insurance policy that was being renewed for next year I took the PDF from last year's policy and compared it to the PDF from this year's policy and found one critical difference in a 20 page PDF.
Two of the business owners reviewed the document and did not catch this change. Had we not run it through draftable, it may have gotten signed as is. That's pretty cool. Huh? Have you guys ever heard about this draftable? I, it's this, I had not, that no, that sounds awesome. I know. Yeah. Yeah, this is a, what a great little thing.
Cause I, you know, I, I talk about how I use BB edit or BB diff really from the command line, uh, often to compare like text files, but it like PDFs, no, you know, unless you copy all the text from it, but then formatting is going to make it act like there were changes that there weren't, you know what I mean? So, yeah. Yeah. And I've always used Delta Walker to compare files in a given folder or, or, you know, volumes. Yeah, yeah.
But, uh, but never, I never realized you could get as granular as. It's crazy, man. Yeah. That's good stuff. That's good stuff. Do you have any cool stuff found Adam, or should I keep trucking along with the. I do actually. All right. I do have something. I threw it in here last minute. Okay. Um. Is I mentioned earlier that I am currently doing a play. Obviously, to do that, you need to learn lines. I don't always have family members around or people to help me out with those.
I had gone looking for a relatively affordable tool to learn my lines with and I found this one from a company called Manic Pixel called Scene Study. Unfortunately, it's only an iPhone app, or maybe fortunately, I don't know. I use it on my iPhone. You can load it on an iPad, but it does that weird, you know, tiny thing.
But what's cool about it is that you can record the lines into it and you can set up a play or what you're working on and then you can break it into the individual scenes and then you basically just read the parts, it records it through the audio, you know, if you use your AirPods or whatever, You just record all the lines in there.
And then when you come back to rehearse it, it gives you the option to have that line played and then your line silenced, or you could read along with it, or whatever. And so you just put all the parts in there, get people to put the parts in there, and it just makes rehearsing super, super easy. I mean, it's really simple. It's not like a complicated app.
That was another thing I was looking for. A lot of these get, there's some higher end ones that are more expensive, but for what I need, you know, community theater, this is, this works out great. That's great. And what is it? Is it free or did it cost you something? No, I think it's like $2.99 or something like that. Huh. That's pretty cool. Yeah. Three bucks. Three bucks.
All right. That's great. Wow. Yeah. A lot of the more professional, I have more professional ones, but you know, those are either a subscription. Sure, sure. Forty, fifty bucks a year, which if you need that, those are great too. but this was I just needed something simple to help me learn my lines. That's cool. And it helped? Like you were able to? Oh yeah, it's absolutely great. Yeah, like I said, because you can silence your part.
And so, you know, a big part of learning the lines is knowing the line before yours, right? Right, right. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Because it's a right. Yeah. Yeah. I've never put myself in a position where I have to learn lines. I am in positions all the time where I have to learn Music, and I suppose it's very similar, but I've watched people, you know, they know their lines based on the lines of the person before them.
And if they don't hear that, if that line screwed up, then the next one, yeah, like with music, the best way is if you know everyone's parts. So, you know, if that guy screwed up, that's fine. They know if you screwed up, that's fine, but you know how to cover for each other when you know what each other should be doing.
Yeah, and obviously that's the goal with certainly with with stage acting too is to get to the point where everybody knows everybody's parts and can cover when there's those problems, but when you're doing your, you know, opening night by but usually by opening night, you don't have everything you don't everybody everybody else's parts memorized yet. Yeah. Another cool little tool from listener Rich this time.
Somebody was asking in our discord Todd asked if anybody knew of a good app that used AI or machine learning pattern recognition to fix slightly fuzzy photos and sure enough Rich told us about sharpen AI which is built to do exactly this. It is an AI powered image sharpener. You can try it for free on their website or you can buy it for 80 bucks.
So it's not cheap, but it's, you know, probably worth what they, uh, what, uh, rich, rich certainly confirms that it's worth what you would pay for it to really sharpen those, those images. And I wonder if it works on webcams during live streaming of a podcast. Okay. A little inside joke there. Dave was having trouble with the focus on his cam about 10 to 15 minutes ago.
It would not focus for him. No, it wouldn't. I finally had to just switch to a different lens and then come back and then it was fine. It was like, yeah, what do I do to trigger my kingdom for a button to trigger auto-focus? Yeah. Right. I thought you were looking like Lucille Ball in Mame when she was 75 years old, trying to make herself look a little younger back in the seventies. No, they didn't airbrush my face, man. It was just, uh.
30s soft focus technique. Yeah, just smear some Vaseline on the lens. That's right. Yeah Well, that's what I started wondering cuz I like as you guys were talking I'd put my hand up to the lens to try and like, you know Get it to realize that something because that's what caused it I thought was I lifted my hand up and it focused on that and then never never came back around but, I couldn't get it to do it, but it wasn't Vaseline, I didn't over Vaseline the lens.
Yeah, so sharpen AI. Sharpen AI, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I found, you know, I'm a big fan of these three-in-one chargers where you get, your phone charging magnetically, your watch charging, and then a charger in the base for, you know, for like AirPods or another phone or whatever. However, I saw a new one of these. It is truly MagSafe, which means you're paying the Apple tax. So it's 150 bucks, like they all are.
But this one's from our friends at Mophie and it is their three-in-one extendable. Stand, for iPhone. So yes, it is a three-in-one. It's got your truly MagSafe charger for your phone, your fast charger for the Apple Watch, and then a base charger for whatever you want it to be. AirPods is the general thing.
But what's cool is the top of it is extendable and you can extend it from about seven and a half inches where your phone sits from the base all the way up to 16 inches, which can be really handy if you're using your phone as like a webcam or something like that. Getting it up to face level can make a pretty big difference.
So this is one of those interesting things that may be better on a desk than say a bedside table so that you can really take advantage of the extendable option, which is pretty cool. What impressed me about this when I first used it was I just grabbed it and like lift it up and it lifted up without the base jumping off the table, but it's not so heavy that it's ridiculous.
So they found that perfect weight balance to where it holds itself, wherever you put it and you don't have to like mess with, uh, with, you know, the thing jumping all around where you're trying to adjust it. So very well-designed, which is not a great surprise. The people at Mophie slash Zag, they know what they're doing. Yep. Yep. And Zag, speaking of, they offer you 20% off your first order. They're one of those websites where you go there and it's like,
Hey, do you like saving money? give us your email address and you get 20% off your first order. So this could be your first order and saving 20% off of the $150 price might, be the best way to get it because at least at this moment Amazon doesn't have any deals on this so you're paying 150 bucks there. Well 149.95 but you know kind of how it goes. So nice little Christmas gift for someone that might or might not need it. You got our next one up for us, Pete, here in cool stuff found.
Do, and this is for people who are trying to figure out, you know, I want to do something thoughtful for somebody for Christmas, but I, you know, they're just so hard to buy for everything they, you know, maybe they buy for themselves everything they want, or I just don't know what to get them. So, this comes from a company called Robbins birdbraineddesigns.com. And in this case, I'm holding up a, for those watching on video, but it's a little custom slate coaster.
That is, in this case, it has my, it has an airspeed indicator on it, laser engraved on a slate coaster with my tail number on it. So, but, you know, you could have a sorority or a fraternity or, you know, I don't know, Knights of Columbus or whatever group you may belong to, or your company logo. You can put the Matt Geekab logo on there.
You could put the Matt Geekab logo on those and, you know, some names and, you know, squadrons and call signs is what we're using a lot for over at my other show. So that's a way to give somebody a thoughtful gift that's personalized to them, but she doesn't only do those things. She does all kinds of laser engraved things. One of the cool things that I saw over there was a child had drawn a dinosaur. How do you say driven? Drawn a dinosaur, past tense.
And they took that design and put it in, made a digital image of it, and then put it onto a clear lucite thing that then mounted into a nightlight. So the child had his dinosaur on his nightlight in his room. That's really cool. Those are the kind of things that they'll do. So yeah, so the coasters and such are at robbinsbirdbraindesigns.com and then the other link in the show notes is bit.ly slash robbinsetsy. Got it. And bit.ly, slash robbinsetsy.
And that's, reach out to Robins Bird Brain Designs through that link. They have all kinds of cool laser etched, laser engraved items that'll help you personalize that gift for somebody this holiday season and she asks that you get your orders in by December 15th. So time's a wasting. Yeah, well you got some time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Got 11 days from the time this hits the streets to get it. Absolutely.
And I did it and then I noticed that I did it Pete and then, and then I noticed that you did it too, and I was going to correct myself, but you jumped ahead of me. Uh, I said for Christmas gifts as you did, Pete, it's really obviously holiday gifts of any kind. Yeah. Speaking gifts even, cause we have three birthdays in two weeks between Christmas and New Year's. We do too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it is. Because it wasn't busy enough with two major holidays.
That's right. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. You got anything to add to that, Adam, before we move on to the next thing? No, no, that laser engraving stuff is great. Um, I don't know if she does these or not, but it was really nice when we moved, because we moved a year ago, or almost two years ago now here to South Dakota. And our real estate agent, when we closed, gave us a laser engraved, uh, cutting board with the state of it, the shape of South Dakota on it, which was kind of nice.
That's really nice. As a little welcome. That's a great, yeah. If you're a real estate agent, something like that. I like that. So we still use it. It's in our kitchen now. Yeah. That's awesome. Personalized gifts are a great idea. Always a great idea, I think. I'm sure you've put some thought into it. Yeah. Not just gone out and bought a gift card. Here's some cash. If you want to get me cash, that's okay. But if you want to give me gift cards, that's Pilot P, the address is.
That's the thing about gift cards is like, as long as you pick a card for a place that the person will use, they are often extremely well received. Like it seems like, and it is a last minute sort of, or maybe not even last minute, like a punt on, I don't know what to get you, so here's this. Like I don't know anybody that's ever upset about getting a gift card either. So you know. That's true. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Um, speaking of holiday season and, and this show coming out December 4th, uh, we're smack dab in the, uh, in the thick of it. Now, I wanted to talk about a few different, uh, smart home things that I am having fun with this holiday season in terms of lights. Uh, the first are strip lights. I, I have strip lights from, uh, the GE. Yeah, that's right. Well, what's going on in your house? It's a family show, Dave. These are strip lights, Adam. Oh, not stripper. That's right.
Yeah. This is a strip of lights. And what's cool about it is I put them across our mantle and I started having them do holiday colors or whatever. And I got an 84 inch strip of lights. So it like fits perfectly on our mantle. And of course they're all smart home controllable and you can have it, you know, do different patterns. These GE sync lights are very cool.
And it just, I have it on the very back of our mantle, so it kind of backlights all the other like trinkets and tchotchkes and all the other things that we put on the mantle. As soon as I put it on there, Lisa was like, you know that that's gonna stay year round, we're just gonna change the colors. I'm like, absolutely had the same thought. There you go.
And for those of you watching, that have watched the video, if you're watching now, or if you have ever watched the video of this, certainly over the last year, where I have a light strip behind me. It is the, I have the Eve light strips behind me. These are the things that make the purple wall behind me even more purple. It is a purple wall, but I have the light set to purple.
And so it gives this nice sort of backlit hue to things which helps with the whole three-point lighting thing that's going on. But there's a lot of different places where you can use these light strips. Some of them are available for outdoors. Most of them, you can extend them just by buying more light strips. So you can have a lot of fun with it. And they're like super flexible. They all come with like adhesive backing so you can stick them to things.
I didn't even have to stick them to our mantle. I just kind of flattened it out and put it there and laid it across and it's fine. I did the same on the table behind me, so. So, go ahead, Pete, yeah. I'll tell you what I did with the set that I have. Yeah. I now have under cabinet lighting in the kitchen. Yeah, yeah. That makes a beautiful little nightlight. It's an accent light, but a nightlight.
And for, you know, how cheap is that? That used to cost you, you know, that's a thousand dollar option to put lights under your cabinet when you put your cabinets in. Trust me, we just did our kitchen and they were like, do you want to do this for a thousand dollars? I was like, no, no. I'll do it for $48. I'll do it for, yeah, exactly. I'll have all the colors I want forever. Yeah, but yeah, thanks for asking, but thanks for asking. Yeah, man. It's guys crazy The next thing that's really fun.
We put these on our tree is the twinkly lights These things you can put them on anything. They are just it's a strip what we have is a Double strip of these things they are Wi-Fi connected you put them anywhere I Like I said, we put them on our tree. Bob Levitas famously did this whole board that he created holes for them and put them in. The cool part about it is, put the lights on your tree, get coverage.
Then you use your phone to scan the camera in your phone with their app, scans the tree, and builds its own map of your lights. And then you can have shapes and patterns and all of that going across whatever. Shape and surface you put these on your tree your some board on a wall.
It doesn't matter and And you can have all kinds of fun effects going because it knows how to draw in different, You know portions like there's a whole thing where you can have the Batman logo on your Christmas tree and like all kinds of fun Stuff so one of the cool ones I saw was Somebody just did red and white lights and did a candy cane and then it moved absolutely yeah I have like a barber pole straight. Exactly. The barber pole on the, on the Christmas tree is, is one of the things we have.
It's really, really cool. Yeah. It it's, it's one of the coolest things. I, we pack, we pack our twinkly lights away with the tree every year so that when we pull them out, we, we forget about them and it's like, Oh wait, the twinkly lights like, yes, we can put the twinkly lights on the tree. We can all get excited about it. You know? Yeah. So yeah, yeah, yeah. It's fun. Um, I like that. I like that shot in the, in the, with them just hanging on
the curtain rod. That would be really cool and look really great. Probably from outside. You know? Yep. Yeah. They do come in different form factors. There's like the icicle lights and all that. Yeah, that's right. They do have icicle lights too now with the Twinklies. Yeah. Yeah. They're worth checking out. It's fun. It really, you know, it's a fun way to do things. I am. What's that? They're not cheap. No, it's 128 bucks. That one's going to cost you folks. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I know.
Cool stuff found is expensive. But if you go to, yeah, you sure own it on Amazon. I know I've gone to their website and there's actually a little thing going, you know, how, how tall is your tree? Yeah. How much coverage do you want? Light, medium, thick, you know, and it recommends what their product to give you best, what you want. Yeah. On their website. Yeah, yeah. That's at twinkly.com. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's great. That's great. Yeah. They've got all kinds of cool ones.
That's fun. And you can get 10% off if you go to twinkly.com just for sharing your email address. You can share your email address with us too, folks, and it won't get you anything. You won't save anything, but you will get the show notes with links to all the things that we're mentioning delivered straight to your email every week when the episodes come out. The next fun thing that I did with lights is these lumery, they're landscape
lighting. I took these, we just did a patio last year and it sort of backs up to the woods behind our house. And I set these landscape lights up to just aim away from the patio into the woods. There's six of them and again, they're LED multicolor and ridiculously bright. 3,000 lumens, right? Like these things are like spotlights. I have them going every night now, and it's not just gonna be for Christmas time.
I like having the trees behind the house lit up with this hue while we're like while we're sitting in the hot tub or even just from in the house looking out the back window. It is so cool to see this multicolored sort of pattern just happening on the trees. but you could also aim these at like, you know, your landscaping, like if you have like shrubs next to a walk or whatever, and you want to light those up in this way. These are cool. Also not inexpensive.
They're $2.50 on Amazon for the six pack, but there's a $50 coupon on Amazon and a 10% promo code on Amazon, at least right now. So that's the link I'll put in the show notes for all of you. And, um, you know I love to do this every year, so I'm gonna do it. Um, I love a really bright- I- I was a- were you guys fans of The X-Files? Did you watch The X-Files, Adam? Oh, yeah. Okay. For sure. I haven't watched it in years, but I'd love to go back and re-watch it, for sure.
Did you watch The X-Files, Pete? I- I did, yeah. Okay. Well, it's been a long time. It- the- one of the things that impressed me in the very first episode. And it remained consistent throughout the series, was how they could be in the dark somewhere and they would turn on their flashlight and it was like they brought in, like, stadium lighting that emanated from the tip of their flashlight. Folks, you can now have this. And, uh, and my suggestion for this year comes from a company called Olight.
And they have all kinds of different lights and all of them are ridiculously bright. Like, so ridiculous, it's crazy. We had some hunters, actually, in the woods behind our house a couple of weeks ago, and it was after dark, they were being kind of sketchy, it was like, sort of weird, I was trying to talk to them, and so I just lit this light up, and it lit up not just the hunters in the woods, but, like, and they weren't, they weren't shooting, you can't shoot a gun after
dark here in, in, uh, New Hampshire for hunting. Yeah, you can. Well, not for hunting. It's against the law. Not legally. Correct. But they were they were out like finishing up or whatever but they were being kind of sketchy because they were staying in the same area and it didn't make sense. So I wanted to light them up. I use this little flashlight, it lit up like the entirety of the woods behind my house. Crazy, 4600 lumens in this tiny little flashlight.
It's going to be 140 bucks, but it's from Olight. Yeah. And it is rechargeable with USB-C, right? And it can be a little battery and all those cool things. And it doesn't have to run at 4600 lumens. It has a brightness dial on the flashlight itself, so you can set it and get it into like moonlight view where it's just giving you like a little bit of light, which is what you probably want most of the time.
You don't really need that X-Files 4600 lumens to light up the world, but if you do, when you do, it's at the tip of your finger right there. So, I'll put a link in the show notes. I've got a couple comments about this. Okay. One is, if you've got a pilot to buy for him, and this is a great item for pre, it's by law, we carry a flashlight. And so that's a great item for a pre-flight.
So that's a very specific use for it. A broader use, and I was going to say ladies, but truly anybody, I would carry this. I used to remember my mother always carried a stinking whistle on her key chain. Well, you know, if I'm attacked, I'm going to blow a whistle. Okay, so someone can hear you getting attacked, I guess, you know, and more and more these days it is, you know, people kind of stay back for their own safety.
The benefit of having this light, if you're walking at night and giving this to somebody who may find themselves in that situation is this is going to do more than a whistle. Because if you turn that light on and shine it in somebody's eyes, when they're not expecting it, you've just given yourself a few extra seconds. It's a great initial self-defense item. Yeah. In my humble opinion. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Oh no, I keep one in my car.
I, you know, it's like, yeah, I keep one in my gig bag so that I always have a flashlight at gigs, you know, like stages are dark sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. So. But yeah, but, but I'm just saying, you know, if you're walking alone at night or something and, and don't do that, one, don't do that. Yeah. Two, if you have to, this may prove the difference in your ability to, you know, create some distance between you and someone with nefarious intent. Absolutely.
Absolutely. Yeah. Good stuff. Yeah, no, the, and they've got all kinds of different form factors of lights at ohlightstore.com too. So they, it's just fascinating how bright these things are. It's amazing. I love it. Crazy. I love it. Yep. It's hard to believe until you, until you do it. Like when I lit up those, those hunters, it was like, what? Like, this is great. I think it's now like I have stadium lighting, you know?
Yeah. The battery will last, uh, between five minutes and 12 days, depending on how bright you run this thing. So, you know, choose wisely. I bet five minutes is bright. Five minutes is full brightness. It's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy. Thanks for hanging out with us, folks. I have 3,000 lumens. I thought 3,000 lumens is great, 4,600. 4,600 is crazy. That's crazy. In the palm of your hand. Yeah. Yeah. It's a lot of power to wield.
Yeah. You know, I live pretty close to an airport. I wonder if I'm violating anything if I shine that up in the air at night. Well, you get someone's attention. I guarantee that. Yeah. I don't think you're violating anything, but you can get someone's attention from a long way off. Yeah. Yeah. For sure.
You got anything to add, Adam? I know I started the band in because I I know we have a we're we're we've no no no those are all all great picks I would take us down another rabbit hole, so I'm not gonna eat, okay, all right Well, you're you're back next week right like that you're here for I will be I'm here now great Yeah, whether we like it or not here. Can't get rid of him now I'm so happy you're here Adam.
This is great, and it's cool. Yep. This is great I I you know having those conversations in the car at max stock is like oh wait a minute this dynamic is good Like, I wonder what sort of world would have to transpire for us to be able to do this on a regular basis. And then, here we are. So, it's great. Yeah, it's great. Thanks for hanging out with us, folks. Thanks for checking out Cashfly. That's the company that provides all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you.
You can check out the show notes at macgeekjob.com or is very specifically mgg.fm, slash 1012 because that is the magic, little engine that Adam set up for us years ago so I'll get you right to this you can find out all the links for everything thank you so much you can check. Music. Out our sponsors of course fastmail.com slash mgg, Adam! Yeah? What does Pete's shirt say? He has advice for night time hunters in Dave's backyard. Don't get caught. Music.