It's time for Mac Geek Cab and listener David brings us our quick tip of the week by saying I was playing around in iOS 18.3 and found that Apple has added the ability to manage, create, edit iCloud mail rules in iOS. Previously, this was only available at iCloud.com, but now is added in iOS 18.3, perhaps earlier, but certainly 18.3 and later. Would be really nice if there were on-device mail rules that we could edit, like with mail. But hey, you know, it's a step in the right direction.
More tips like this, plus your questions answered today on Mac Geek Cab 1071 for Monday, January 6th, National Take a Poet to Lunch Day 2025. Happy New Year. Greetings, folks, and welcome to MacGeekCab. Yep, we are the show where we share your quick tips and our quick tips, your cool stuff found and ours, and your questions and our answers, and sometimes our questions and hopefully our answers. Two, this is the beginning of CES week here for us.
We are, this is coming out sort of, let's say, before CES begins. That's not entirely accurate because there's some press events before Monday. But but yeah, and our CES coverage sponsors, without whom we could not do what we're doing and go to Vegas and do all the coverage and sift through everything and then have Sadie in the back room managing all the videos and producing them for us all. Couldn't do it without the following five companies. Eero at Eero.com.
Roborock at Roborock.com. Private Internet Access at PIAVPN.com. The Omni Group at Omnigroup.com. And CCC Backup from Bombich.com. B-O-M-B-I-C-H.com. So thanks to each and every one of them. You will hear more about each of them later this week with some videos that we're doing. And please do check out the Mac Geek Hub YouTube channel, especially for the CES coverage stuff, because there will be things there that do not necessarily get covered in the show here.
Some of them will, but not all of them. So check out the YouTube channel. There'll be little short videos that Pete and I are going to start to put together at CES. And then, like I said, Sadie finishes them off. So check all that out. And yeah, here on this show. Well, I said it was National Take-A-Poet to Lunch Day. It's also National Cuddle Day. So we'll all cuddle together for the next hour here, remotely cuddling from Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton.
And here also in New Hampshire, it's Pilot Pete. Dave, how many things are we going to learn? Count them, five?
Oh, yeah, I did say that we're going to learn five new things.
Yeah, so here, well, near Durham, New Hampshire, Pilot Pete. and show 1071. Police code for 1071 is a shooting. So this week we're taking aim at another great episode. We're shooting it live, and hopefully we're going to hit our target. Try to take some of the violence out of that one. And can I show up next week like this? Look who's here.
Late and hopefully sounding okay.
You sound great. That's Adam Christensen.
In South Dakota, Adam Christensen. Thank you.
Danny, you made it.
Very cool. Didn't think I was going to make it.
This is a real-time operation. This is the first time the three of us have spoken together and the first time I've spoken to Adam this year, like literally right now.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Literally right now. Yeah, no pre-show. It's a little chilly here in the studio.
Oh, yeah. Okay.
Oh, yeah. So I was gone on vacation. I turned off all the heat. Of course. I got in this morning. it was 25 it's now 35.
Oh, and you're talking Fahrenheit, aren't you? Yes. Yeah. Okay.
The water he's wearing is over your cans.
Okay. Wow. Yeah, that flannel you're wearing is not going to be enough, Adam.
I got a base layer on, too.
Okay. All right. That's right. You taught us about base layers in the last episode. Yeah, that's good. All right. Well, Happy New Year, Adam. Happy New Year, everybody.
Happy New Year to you. Indeed.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Are you prepared to do some of your quick tips that you prepped for us?
Sure. Let me, I got to get my notes up, though. I got to get a little caught up. You get caught up.
I have three cool stuffs found that I want to do pre-CES. We have more to do later in the episode. But there are going to be products at CES in these categories.
And before we start talking about those i wanted to talk about these kind of to set up the category the first one comes from uh listener barry and i am now vamping because i got to find it he says um he listens to mac geek i asked where people listen to mac get mac geek and he says i listen in the shower and i said okay well that's great but i'm curious how what yeah but how what speakers do you use in the shower and he says he has three that he uses one uh in his home in chicago
which is the Shower Power Pro from Ampere. A-M-P-E-R-E. So that's the Shower Power Pro from Ampere. This is actually something I think it is. It's part of the... Like you replace your shower head with this is what it looks like to be. Yeah. Water flows through one side of it and sound comes out another. So, uh, and I, evidently you can take it off of the, the mount in the shower head and, uh, and use it elsewhere too. So that's pretty cool because it keeps showering
You with great sound.
Oh, there it is.
So yeah, you invited me back this year, Dave. Sorry.
It's true for it.
It is true. so that's the one he uses uh in his home in chicago he has another home out in uh california and out there he uses the x finnid sorry the infinity x1 uh rechargeable speakers that are uh i believe they're waterproof because otherwise i don't think they would work for him but maybe Maybe he positions them on top of, yeah, yeah, yeah. Do I have the right ones up here, Barry?
Yeah, that was the right ones.
Yeah, the rechargeable work lights. So the Infinity X1s, and then when he's traveling, he also likes music in the shower. And for that, he uses the JBL Clip, which is a super portable, waterproof, dustproof Bluetooth speaker. So I just wanted to set up this category of waterproof speakers because I know that we get a lot of information on Embargo ahead of CES. And so I wanted to share, kind of get the category set, and then we'll kind of get into it.
To that end, I also want to talk about two different types of earbuds. We talk about earbuds on a semi-regular basis here. AirPods obviously become the default because of the community that we're in here. But there's a product category that is being called open ear earbuds. And Apple sort of plays in this realm, but not in the way that other vendors do. I mean, Apple has the AirPods Not Pro, which don't seal in your ear.
And and that's that's sort of in this category of open ear earbuds but the uh the one more open ear wireless headphones the way that these fit in your ear they don't really even they don't go in your ear canal or nor block it at all these are a um it's a and there's there's a lot of products in this category and more coming out this week, but these sit on the outside of, Of your ear and just kind of sit there and hang and I can hear that they're not even blocking my ear canal.
They're just sort of above it over my ear with nothing going on. And I'm being distracted because of course, as soon as I put these on, I started hearing a song playing from my phone. So that was fun. Heart's magic.
I've actually got a question for you about that. Are they, are they conduction or pure speakers?
No, they are speakers. They are not conduction that's a great question yeah but they are um they are pure speakers but you so
Everybody can hear
And you well yes if they're loud enough i don't know if you could hear that song coming through my my microphone right here okay uh people in the room when i was testing these could hear a little bit but not a ton and and and there are some products in this category that that utterly suck as is typical these the one more s70s are are quite good so that's that's one more and then uh because there's always got to be one more thing
earbuds that are made for sleeping um there are a lot of these coming out now too and i will definitely be bringing something to las vegas with me because it's amazing i i've had the anchor um sleep is because we're gonna have
To share a room and you're worried about my snoring
Day no we're not we have a door between us pete so we are fortunate we have five sponsors we were able to buy a door well rent one at least for the week uh but the um i like to take a power nap every now and again i find it if i can take you know 12 minutes uh in the afternoon or early evening and just let myself fall asleep, even if I'm not asleep for very long, I find that that really re-energizes me.
And I often will do those naps in my office. I have a little couch in my office and I can do that because it's a separate building and no one is here to bother me. Our house, when people are in our house, there's just noise happening as as which is great. Like I love having a lively house, except when I want to take a little power nap. And over the sort of Christmas and New Year's break here, there were a couple of occasions where I wanted to take a little power nap.
And I knew that there were going to be people crawling around the house. And I thought, wait a minute. I have these Anchor Sleep A10 earbuds. And these things, first of all, they are super flat. And so when they fit in your ear, you can lay on them and it's not uncomfortable. And that is awesome. It gets even more awesome when you pair it with the Soundcore app because they have all kinds of different sleep, white noise, pink noise, river noise, all those things.
Delta waves. Well, yes. And you can pick one that is downloaded to the earbud so that you don't even need your phone to start playing the sound. It's baked inside the earbud. You just put them in and go into sleep mode and it works.
On top of that though to your comment earlier i have yet to test this but maybe maybe we'll maybe we will create an opportunity p uh they have snoring mitigation they call it something else i forget but where your phone listens to the ambient environment and alters the sound that is coming through the earbuds to help you not hear the disruptions from uh from someone close by snoring so yeah yeah yeah so those are my three uh cool stuffs found in this in this uh in this category here so
That's what I got. I don't know. Yeah. Should we do more quick tips here, Adam?
Very cool. Yeah. I got up quite a few. Yeah, you do. I kind of prepped up. A lot of people were sending in stuff. So first one I have is from Alex. He says, hello again, our marshals of technology. I'd like to inform you that iOS 18 Apple has stepped back from its decision in iOS 16 to banish the always displayed volume bar from the playback. Playback widget on the lock screen.
We can now have it back. It seems they would feel embarrassed to just return it, so the resurrection has been hidden into the accessibility section of settings. Under accessibility, audio and visual, always show volume. The feature may seem redundant, but as a user efficiency professional, I like it.
The always presented on-screen volume enables easier making of subtle adjustments, long bar for the same volume range, and as a reminder, we can press and slide at any position, not only at the current position. Quicker making of adjustments, bigger than one or two clicks from the hardware volume button, one device placed side to press. I'm not sure I understand that part of it, sorry. And then simpler volume adjustment in case of having hands full or especially cleaned.
I don't know. And the phone laying flat. Some interesting... Color commentary from Alex here, obviously.
Yes, that's right.
It does not fully replace the hard buttons for my usage, but that's not the aim. The feature just compliments them nicely. I'm glad it's back and can only wish it be placed right into the sound and haptic section of the settings so everyone can notice and find it. So I guess they put the volume back if you, you know, you have to go through accessibility. So then you just give it back. I don't know that I ever noticed it was gone.
I didn't.
I don't think I did.
Yeah, I didn't either. I feel like, and now I need to test this, we've been using, as always, our Apple TV, and my phone remote can control the Apple TV, and when it's in lock screen mode, I thought I saw the volume for it there, but I don't know, maybe not. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. All right. Yeah, good stuff. taking us to our next one, Adam?
Yep. Next we have Phil. Sorry, I don't normally do these back-to-backs. I know. So Phil has a mention. We were talking about, I gave my little tip about using Google search on a specific site. So in your browser, if you type site, S-I-T-E colon, and then the domain name. And then space, and then do a search, it will search Google using just that site as kind of like a filter.
So Phil had a little follow-up on that. He says, your opening tip in show 1068 told how to use Google site command to search a particular website. That reminded me of something I've been using for years and forgot that not everyone knows this, i.e. The quintessential quick tip.
There is a JavaScript command that does site search without having to head over to google and risk derailing my fragile train of thought if you book up mark out this command and we're going to have it in the show notes is basically a little piece of javascript that you can put into your into your browser or your url and then you can bookmark it he says if you bookmark out this command and put it into your favorite spar it's always available in any browser to immediately search
do a search of the site that you are on a prompt opens when it is selected and And from there, you can just type in your search term and hit return. Results are returned in a standard Google results page. So we will have that command in there. Basically, it pops up a prompt, like he said, and then whatever site you are on, you will be searching that site. Oh.
Hey, that's pretty cool.
All right. So you can create kind of a JavaScript bookmark. I think a lot of people might not know that you can run little, like, JavaScript things in the browser. They run locally, obviously. So security not being an issue.
Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And you can see the JavaScript. It's like a little JavaScript. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it will.
Run locally if you open it in an email.
And it's in the bin. Did you try this JavaScript, Adam?
I think I did.
Okay.
Is it not working?
No, no. I don't want to do it while we're recording the show here. But I did I noticed it because it to your point, you know, you want to confirm that it's running locally or that the sites it's reaching out to are the sites you want it to, a.k.a. Google. And the JavaScript is, you know, I mean, it's one line, but basically, you know, two lines worth of script if you if you let the line wrap. So it's pretty easy to kind of walk through. and the google url that it's using is http not https and
Oh i didn't i didn't validate the yeah you want it to be s.
So i'm putting it as s in the in the show notes for everybody that uh it's there so yeah
Yeah yeah sorry.
No no i
Reviewed the javascript i didn't look at the uh yeah the protocol yeah.
Yeah so yeah interesting stuff yep so All right. Yes, sir. Very cool. All right.
And then now we have Andrew, if I can stop misclicking here. Andrew has a little quick tip about weather in the menu bar. He says, I think this is new, and I didn't validate if this was newer, and I think it might be. But he says, the other day, the weather app on my Mac flashed at me saying, would you like me in the menu bar? Click here. So there was a little dialogue that popped up and mentioned about going to system settings and adding weather to the menu bar.
He said, I did, and now get to choose which Mac apps show which weather. I guess it shows you the weather up in the menu bar, so you get a little icon up there. And it's under system settings, control panels. So in your control center, it says control panel in his note. But he meant control center. Interesting. Yeah, so inside control center, you can turn on weather in your menu bar.
Well, that's a nice find.
Now these days, I have a little menu for weather. Oh, I like that.
That's interesting. I've always done that with a third-party app, like iStat Menus or something else because that's how you had to do it. So, oh, really nice find. I like that.
Yeah, so you can have Apple weather in there.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. cool very fun
And then who do we have last but not least here james james yeah james so james says remember you can move your photo library to an external drive and what he's referring to is we had a question i think i can't remember which episode it was on a recent episode where somebody was asking about um you know was saying they were running out of storage space on their mac and wanted to move things to the external drive, I think.
We said, you know, ultimately, you could probably move your whole home folder, but that gets a little dicey. I think they just wanted to move documents and stuff. But anyway, we had a conversation about that. He said, I would agree, I would not move the home directory to an external. However, Paul wasn't specific about what kind of iCloud storage data he was trying to like offload because he can easily relocate his photos library to
an external device without any complications. I've been doing this for years. Apple advises this as an, even advises this as an option. And he has a link to a support article on Apple's website that we'll link to as well.
And I actually, I've done this too recently, you know especially for my wife's computer i think we talked about this i just got her a little very very small samsung ssd uh because you know she has a macbook and it's an m1 macbook air and i think it was only 256 internal storage so um her photo library was quite large so we just moved that onto an external that's something that's been supported for a long long time and that's a great way to save additional storage space on your local drive
it's a little less convenient obviously because anytime you launch your photos, you've got to make sure you have that drive plugged in. But these days, you can get really, really tiny SSD drives that are USB-C bus powered, so it's not too bad.
No, it's not too bad. If it's a desktop or a mostly fixed-in-place machine, it kind of doesn't matter. Once you have the drive connected, just leave it connected and you're good to go. So with a laptop, that's where it can get to be a little bit different. My solution, it's not perfect for that. And, of course, if you have a perfect solution, feedback at MacGeekAb.com, please.
Hold on. Where? Feedback at MacGeekAb.com?
I heard feedback at MacGeekAb.com.
I think that's correct. is that on a laptop, what I do if I need to do this and certainly recommend is set up your main user account with store photos in the cloud, right? Because that way, when you're doing your normal daily stuff, you have access to your photos because they're in the cloud, but you have optimized storage on your Mac. You don't need to plug that extra drive in. you are using a local photos library that's in your home folder on your boot drive.
And that way you're free to move around the country however you like, or move around the world, however you like. And then also add a second user account to your Mac. And that account has a photos library connected to the same iCloud account that is stored on the external drive. And you only log into that account after you've plugged in the external drive. You do that once a week, however often you want it to sync up. Let it sync up for your photos overnight and then log out of that account.
And then you can eject that external drive. And now you keep a local copy of your photos without having to always have a drive dangling off of your Mac because the problem – well, the scenario is – whether it's a problem or not is sort of dependent on your use case. But the scenario is that once you log in, photos – iCloud photos starts syncing in the background.
You do not need to open the photos app for that to happen. So it's, you have to, it's about the account more than it is when you launch photos in terms of the iCloud photo library syncing. So that's, that's, that's my story and I'm, I'm going to, I'm going to stick to it. Hi folks. So this one's a little different because not only is private internet access or PIA VPN a sponsor of this episode, they're also one of our CES 2025 coverage sponsors.
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There's also a 30-day money-back guarantee, So it's completely risk-free. Again, that's PIAVPN.com slash MGG to get 83% off plus four free months. You're gonna love it. Thanks again to PIA for keeping us secure and supporting all the coverage we'll be bringing you from CES 2025. We have we have one in the don't get caught section here that came from listener David. And yeah, and and he's he it's an interesting thing.
This is certainly something to be aware of, but I'm not convinced that it is universal. And he says he's been doing some tech support for families during the holiday break here. And one of the issues it says I dealt with is that my dad hasn't been able to find emails that he sent on any one of his devices on any of the others. So he has an M1 MacBook Pro, an iPad Air and an iPhone 16 Pro. And he sends mail from each of them and only sees the mail sent from that device on that device.
And he poked around on the iPad and found that if you go to settings, apps, mail, go into the account in question, go to account settings, advanced, there is a section called mailbox behaviors with settings for drafts, sent, deleted, archive, all good. However, he looked and all of them were set to on my iPad. This now checks out. His iPhone was set the same way, on my iPhone. And this is why things that were sent were just being stored locally on that device.
You couldn't see things that were sent from the account wide. His Mac was set to sync the sent mailbox with the IMAP server. So all of this makes perfect sense. What he did next was he changed the setting to move from on my iPad and on my iPhone to on the mail server.
And then he could see all the mail sent from his mac but he couldn't see any of the mail sent from his ipad and he also couldn't find on his ipad the previously used on my ipad section that had all of the drafts and sent and outbox and all that stuff he switched it back to on my ipad and nothing was there except two very recent messages. So he seemingly thought that he lost all of this data. Now, that might be true.
However, I don't think it is. Because the way IMAP works is when mail is sent, the server drops a copy of the sent message in the sent folder on the IMAP server.
So once you are synced with that you in theory would be seeing all of the messages sent from that From that account regardless of what where the the device was storing them now it's possible with this particular imap server he didn't say which service provider is using for email it's not capturing that stuff but like i know that google absolutely does fast mail absolutely does it doesn't matter where my mail client decides to put it it it will you know whatever is designated it
as the sent folder is where things that are sent go uh because that's just the way the the server works so but but it seems odd that the on my ipad section simply went away that's the part that doesn't jive with me however it happened and david confirmed this so don't get caught folks Make sure that I would take this and file it away in my brain. And the next time I find this scenario, the first thing I'm going to do is take those on my iPad messages and move them to a folder, a separate folder.
Doesn't matter, you know, create or move them to the sent folder on the IMAP server if you want. But move them somewhere on the IMAP server just in case whatever happened to David's dad is about to happen to me. I don't want to get caught.
Right.
Yep. Interesting.
But all good stuff.
Yeah. Yeah. All right. Shall we, shall we jump to some questions here?
Sure. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So did you want me to do Emily first? Sure.
Yeah. Okay. That's fine.
So Emily wrote in and said, how do I see if my photos are all synced to iCloud in iOS 18? Which prompted me, once I saw your answer, Dave, with a follow-up question to that. And that's essentially, if they're not syncing, what could be the cause and a quick fix?
Yeah, Emily had moved to a new iPhone, and there was a migration assistant didn't work as well as it usually does. And so there was a question of, OK, is iCloud everything with iCloud working the right way? And. My first thought was, well, we can check a couple of things, but one of the things we want to check is photos and we want to make sure photos says that it's synced now in.
Ios 17 and prior you go into photos you go to the library tab scroll to the bottom it tells you whether it's syncing or if it is fully synced ios 18 photos no library tab so where do we go well you go into photos you tap your picture in the upper right and then it shows you the stats for your photos how many thousands of photos you have synced how many videos you have synced and whether it is still waiting to finish syncing with iCloud or if it has synced with iCloud
and uh that's that's where you go look so there's no scroll down to the bottom anymore as we know because when you scroll to the bottom of your library you start getting the other sections and collections and things because there's no there's no section like it's all just one big river some people like that i haven't met any of them uh people either have no opinion on this or hate it with the fury unmatched by most but um but yeah tap your picture in the upper right of
photos on your phone and that will show you your stats among a few other things so you had a follow-up question pete yeah
So uh they're not now they're not sinking why and how do i fix that let's let's say they're not
Well it would tell you what yeah like there would be more context to them not syncing it would say waiting to finish sync on battery right would be i mean it like that message there will give you some context to that but if it's simply not syncing the first thing i do is log out of icloud and log back in and to reset that that because that's generally, that's what we got.
Right. And the other thing I was thinking, Dave, the path I was trying to lead you down, Dave, was low power mode. Oh, sure. If you're in low power mode, they won't sync. So similar.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Yep, yep. And I know a lot of people that leave their phones in low power mode full time.
Yeah, you're talking to one. Not full time. Pretty much anything below 85%. Okay which is almost full time yeah
Yeah and and wow
Yeah yeah well it just seems to slow down the degradation i can i can get a full 24 hours out of my phone if i have to if i go to low power mode
Yeah my wife does the same thing but uh the 80 the 85 thing was was what got me peed on that because i changed the setting my phone popped up for you know maintaining your battery for longevity my new iphone 16 pro right yeah and so i only charged to 80 like now i don't even go beyond 80 charge i've been doing that that's been working out for me but yeah definitely less battery life yes.
I was doing that before i switched my phone in september and it hasn't come up and asked me to do that yet But I think I may manually go to, hey, only go to 80%.
Hey, I have a piece of advice for you, Pete. Yeah, don't do that. Just a suggestion. Wait to do that until we're back from CES. Because you're going to want every drop of battery power that you can get. Fair enough. Mine advised me to set it to 85%. And for the most part, that's worked out okay for me. But we're recording this on Friday. we're flying out on Saturday, uh, last night, I was like, last night I was like, I don't want to forget to do this and then have a travel
day. Cause we're not, we're traveling late in the day. And so, you know, by that point, my phone might be at 30% just by a normal day. And so I was like, yep, nope. I set it, let it charge to a hundred, heat that battery up for the next week. And then we can go back to being responsible battery owners later.
Yeah.
Bingo. All right. All right.
Shall I read Chris?
Please.
Sure. So Chris writes in, Hi, gents. Thank you, Chris. I've been working with an iMac that recently started dropping off the network, although it appears to still be on the Wi-Fi. It's using Orbi 770 mesh system and all seems well. Works fine with other computers and iPhones and iPads. I've connected the iMac using Ethernet, but this is far from ideal. Trailing cables, et cetera. Any ideas? Chris.
Yeah, so I got this one from Chris. This is going to be a little bit of a stump the geek. I did a follow-up. I don't see that I heard back from Chris. This is obviously a really odd one, right? It's like, why the Mac? Why is that having issues with Wi-Fi specifically? And the only thing that came to mind for me was I remembered hearing a while back that USB 3 and specifically like certain cables and things like that can cause Wi-Fi interference with like external drives and things like that.
So I asked him, you know, is there anything that's been added to the environment that could cause interference? I mean, micro waves, we know, are a similar thing, I think, in the 2.4 range, if I'm being more specific. But, you know, we're talking five gigabits here. Gigahertz. Gigahertz, excuse me, yes. And then so my one thought was, you know, do you have a USB 3.0 external drive there?
Uh that might need like better shielding on the cables or something like that and one way you can test this is if you do have it move it further away because i guess it's uh what i read or what i heard is that uh usb 3.0 operates in that five gigahertz signaling rate right so it can cause interference but that's my understanding anyway yeah so maybe move it move external drives a little further away from your Mac or, uh,
double check your cables, make sure you've got, you know, well shielded cables and things like that. So, but I, you know, I don't know that this is the case cause I don't know specifically what's going on in that environment.
Yeah. When I saw this one, I, you know, I started thinking, okay, what would I do if I was there? And the first thing I would do is I'd start a ping to my router from my Mac, right? So that I can see it and that you just go into terminal, you type ping space and then the IP address of your router, which if you don't know, you can find in network settings and system settings.
And I would just start that going because all that does is it sends a little pulse out to a device, in this case, your router, and your router answers back. And it does this once per second, and it won't stop until you hit control C in the terminal. And so I would start that going because that's going to tell me A, if the connection actually has dropped or if there's something else going on that makes it seem like I don't have a connection, but I actually still do.
Right. So, like, that's a really valuable thing. And then if it drops, you can look. The other thing that pings show is the amount of time it took for that request to be processed. So what was the round trip time? And it shows it in milliseconds. And you'll get a little baseline. And Wi-Fi, the milliseconds are going to vary. It's not going to be as consistent as it would be with Ethernet. But you'll see a range.
And you get to learn what normal looks like at first so that you know when something is abnormal. And if it does, in fact, drop out, you get to see how long it drops out. And does the ping times, do they increase leading up to that dropout? Because if so, that would support potentially what you're saying, Adam, right? With the, you know, some USB or some kind of interference being introduced. And then it gets so bad that there's no connection for at least a little while.
So I would start that ping test just because that's something I do. And it's super informative about lots and lots of things that just sort of happen as a matter of course. And then I would wait for a dropout. And as soon as I see a dropout, I'd want to look in the Orbi app and see if it thinks that device is still associated with it and which access point it's associated with. Like, did it jump from one that was close to it to one that's far away?
And maybe there's something about that one that's far away or even not far away that your Mac doesn't like. Right. And so what's happening there? Just gathering the data and then maybe, you know, that percolates through your brain and you say, oh, wait, wait, wait. I know what the problem is. And it might be as simple as, well, restart the Orbeez. You know, if it's trying to roam to an Orbeez that is offline, you might not even know if one of your Orbeez is offline, right?
Like because or not answering properly because the other ones just pick up the slack. So I don't know. Like there's lots of things, but that's how I would go about troubleshooting it.
Do you restart your mesh on a regular basis, Dave?
I, no, my mesh, my default for mesh remains Eero. But I test others, but I always wind up coming back to Eero. It does restart probably once a month on average with software updates but that's a self-inflicted like the system does that behind the scenes yeah exactly yeah okay
So that was my other thought on this was i don't remember uh if it's on by default or if you need to set it or even if it has a setting for it you know i use orbeez as well um but yeah i was going to say And what you were saying, Dave, got me thinking, you know, maybe double check, one, that all your access points are there, but two, are you doing firmware updates? Like, is there a firmware update that you missed if you were not automatically applying those firmware updates?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, right. Yeah. But yeah, yeah, it's interesting. I'm trying to think of other reasons why a Mac would drop off, but my guess is it's, we've kind of, you know, danced in the realm.
Well, the Mac, obviously, in M1, the Mac shouldn't have that issue. But, Dave, you may recall we were having dinner the other night, and I had that issue with that new little IPTV box. It wouldn't join my mesh because it was not capable of doing so until I put it into the legacy mode. Oh, I do.
Yeah, we talked about a couple of different potential reasons for that. But definitely turn off WPA3, right? That's the thing we turn off on the mesh. Now I'm second guessing myself. But yeah.
That was it. Yes.
Yeah. Yeah. WPA3 and Apple devices still don't play well together. And those settings are going to be in different spots. In Eero, I think it's in, gosh, I think it's in troubleshooting maybe, or maybe it's in Wi-Fi settings. I can't remember.
But yeah, turning off WPA3 Is something I advise As a matter of course And it's, you know, it's not just Apple devices In fact, we saw an issue With Well, your IPTV box Our skylight frames That we use, that I mentioned we have in all our homes Those don't play nice with WPA3 There's all kinds of things That don't play nice with WPA3 So, yeah, yeah, turn that off Yeah, yeah All right. Shall we? Let's keep on this question train. We will go to listener Craig.
Craig says, I just updated to the latest Mac OS Sequoia and immediately started having problems with Safari and watching certain YouTube videos. Some of the videos, when attempting to watch in a new window, come to a screen with a play button, but they do not play at all. And clicking the play button does nothing. Other videos don't have the issue. I haven't seen any patterns. I have removed all content blockers. Didn't help.
Previously, when running Sonoma, I never had any YouTube video behave like this. Is there something going on with Sequoia or Mac OS 15, or is it something else? Pete?
Right, yeah. So I wrote it back. I said, you know, it sounds like he's on the right track trying to solve it, but he only mentioned Safari and then obviously the OS. But I said, I was asking, are there any other issues with any other browser on YouTube? But the first thing I would try to do is clear the cache. And if that doesn't work, disabling the extension.
You know, I hate doing this. This is just so nuts when you have to go into your browser settings to get something that should just work working. But then disabling all your extensions and start re-enabling them until you break it again. And then you've found out what you've gotten. And then I said, finally, I assume you've already done this because you're on a just updated operating system. But are you on the latest version of Safari? So make sure you're on that as well.
And, oh, by the way, if you want to have fun with somebody, take a screenshot of a video with a play button in the middle of it and send it to them. How many times will they push it until they realize it's a photo, not a video? You know, just because that's who I am. Shake your head louder adam
Yeah i know i was i was shaking my head just like yes oh boy yeah just send him a screenshot of and messages of.
Uh video
With the play button.
Sure yeah name
Name the video um how to make a insult insert insulting term here have fun right you know yeah how to make a pilot have fun that name the video that and then they'll just
Drive a pile of nuts yeah that's
Maybe that too yeah there you go uh so
So i don't know can you think of any other things that would do i i'm clearing the cache disabling the extensions making sure you're on the latest i mean i hate doing that stuff it drives you nuts it should just work Or tell you why it's not working, but they never do that.
I mean, if you want to get really geeky, you can turn on developer mode and then do the whole right-click inspect to bring up the developer tools and then look at the console and see if there's specific JavaScript errors. Because most plugins extensions are going to be running some kind of JavaScript and you might see JavaScript conflicts or something like that that could indicate, oh, it's this plugin or this extension that's conflicting with the playback of YouTube.
What about just clearing out YouTube cookies? I mean, that would be... If there's something specific to YouTube, That's where I always start. If there's, you know, everything's working except this one website went haywire on me. It's like, all right, well, let's get rid of your local storage about that because that's also there in Safari, right? If you go into, gosh, what is it? It's not website. Is it in security? No. Privacy.
You go into Safari settings, privacy, manage website data, filter it down in this case to YouTube. You might also want to filter it down to google and just kind of pull that stuff out and then uh and then remove it and see like you know you're gonna have to log back in but i would try playing before you log back in and then if that works log in can you still play these okay if so yes if not well now i know so one step at a time test yeah yeah
Try playing before logging back in absolutely Okay. All right. Well, let me move on then to JP. He writes in, Fellers, I have two homes, one east, one west. Each home has its own network, naturally. I have many HomeKit devices in both, all using Home app by Apple. When I'm in my east home, I can access all the cameras, lights, smart plugs, et cetera, using my iOS devices and even my Apple TV.
When I'm in my West home, I can only access all these devices in the East home using iOS devices, but not my Apple TV. I'd like to be able to pull up those cameras and display them on my office Apple TV here in the West so I can watch the squirrels and deer romp around my property and the burglars leave with all my stuff. Pete added that. But I can't do this on the Apple TV. I can on my Mac, my iPhone, and iPads. This is clearly not just me, right? Is Apple not allowing it?
I've tried many third-party Apple TV apps for HomeKit cameras, and none give me access to my HomeKit devices unless I'm on the same network. Is it possible that Apple TV just cannot use the Internet to see them and can only do it locally? JP, not in Maine, but in California currently. Can't get much further apart there. Maybe Hawaii, you know.
Yeah. Well, I mean, you can go to China.
Yeah, well, I mean, I'm talking the same country.
Okay.
Wake Island, where America's Day really begins. All right.
JP started this sort of geek challenge, and we were going back and forth on email, and then we got my favorite answer to a question, which is the... Person asking the question figures it out themselves. So it does turn out actually, because I was like, my first thing was like, well, I assume you've got a home hub device set up properly in each, each location.
So you need to have an Apple TV 4k or a HomePod second generation or a HomePod mini acting as a hub to be able to access over the internet, your home kit devices. Right. So it's like, I assume that's all set up correctly.
And then I was like going through this thing like what if you go to a control center and look at this and look at that we're going back and forth and finally he says nope stop figured it out i contacted apple talked to a senior advisor and on apple tv specifically with home kit you can only see devices that are on the local network i had no idea that this was a limitation on the apple tv um he says the coding doesn't support what we can do with Macs, iPhones, and iPads.
And I like, this stumped me. And I literally started searching Apple's support site over and over. And they do specifically, there's no place specifically that says you can't do this with an Apple TV, but every reference to HomeKit and accessing devices through a Home Hub say Mac, iPad, and iPhone. None of them say Apple TV.
Your Apple TV can be your Home Hub too. correct which
Is even weirder.
Yeah yeah i i wonder i
Would love to know why.
I wonder and i i now have a way to test this well that was it is or or go one step beyond vpn and wire guard it with tail scale right so putting because there is a tail scale app for apple tv and you can use it to essentially you know vpn your apple tv to somewhere else but also a variety of other things and i wonder if you put it on your tail net if those other home devices will appear we just got uh our son an apple tv for his apartment he has a television with
with android tv built in which is fine and functional apple tv is better um in terms of the user experience and and and the user interface with the remote being able to scrub back and forth it's it's like yeah it it's there's nothing else quite like it that i've used i haven't used everything though so um so we got him an apple tv and i also told him sometimes you know we use channels dvr but there are times more and more now where there are some
things that we can't watch through channels dvr and we have to watch through fubo and we share a fubo account hey fubo how you doing uh and while fubo is generally okay with that. They don't let you use TVs in two different households. So if our son is watching a game on, you know, a football game or something on a Sunday on TV via Fubo and we start watching via Fubo, it will stop him. And then if he resumes, it'll stop us and it'll do this battle back and forth.
Well, I told him I'm like, the other reason I got you an Apple TV is to save us all money because you don't need to still don't need to get your own Fubo account. You just VPN your Apple TV into our tail net and use it as the exit node. And now Fubo will know that you are coming from the same house we are. And we both have Fidium gigabit fiber connections. So I'm not really worried about the bandwidth usage. So we have yet to experiment with this, but I'm 99% certain that will work.
Yeah, that's a good idea. I just, it's just weird to me that like, why this limitation on Apple TVs?
It doesn't make sense. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't, I don't care. So, yeah. Great. Well, how about I move on to Drisky.
Yeah. He wrote in and said, my personal workstation is run by a well-peripheral M1 MacBook Pro. How can I disable the signal to an external monitor from the Mac without physically disconnecting the cable? Ideally, this would be via a shortcut or automation. For app-heavy parts of my workday, I use two displays to work efficiently. After hours, my use only necessitates the 16-inch laptop screen. No true geek would accept simply unplugging the cable from the Mac like some caveman.
Be it direct to the computer or via the one Thunderbolt cable to connect them all, connection to a hidden hub for us hyper-orderly types. I can't find anything that helps in settings or shortcuts. And, uh, this'll date this one. Happy Thanksgiving geeks.
Yes. Yes.
Maybe he means this year coming up.
Yeah. I, I, I got no problem with that. Yeah. Merry Christmas and happy Hanukkah and all that stuff. Happy new year for next year too. I'll, I'll share all the wishes.
To infinity.
Yeah. I'll give you a future full of them. Uh, and I mean every one of them, I really do. So, This sent me on a little bit of a hunt and I couldn't really find anything and I've never had need to do this. So I asked ChatGPT about it and ChatGPT got me, found me the software that I needed. It is a piece of software called Better Display and it's available on GitHub. It's actually Better Display Pro.
And it will let you do all kinds of different things to control your displays and do the native upscaling if the display has it and lots and lots of other things. But Drewski confirmed that Better Display will do exactly what he needs. A button sits in the toolbar and it's a quick two clicks to connect or disconnect a monitor. And when it is disconnected the system does not see it so he says it has a whole load of other features too but um so there you go can
I at the risk of throwing in another like like a caveman option.
Yeah is
Using a finger to reach up and push the power button on the monitor not work.
I wonder, that's a good question.
Like I have two monitors in front of me and I know if I turn one off, that kills the signal. It's just like as if I unplugged it.
I wonder if his particular setup is like a television. Well, like my TV, if I turn my TV off and then I do something with my Apple TV device, the TV comes back on. Now, I know that's because I have enabled HDMI CEC or whatever that protocol is.
Ship link.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. but um i i wonder if he's running into this too where some pulse signal is waking up the monitor and then the monitor says hey i'm here and then you know they're yeah another
Thing might be the power buttons might be in a weird spot like way behind the monitor and they're mounted on arms and they're not conveniently x but like i have two monitors and me and each have a power button right under the left or right corner so but i have old monitors so that's the other thing it's like do newer monitors like you say dave uh do they carry like a ghost power so right where the system still recognizes a mind like if i kill the power.
It basically
Was like i unplugged the cable so.
I gotta maybe that's
Not all monitors.
This better display thing better display pro i mean this looks like a real deal you get the full brightness potential of your xdr or hdr display uh native brightness upscaling for apple's displays uh you can sync brightness and other image controls among multiple displays this seems to deliver on some of the things that the apps that i've used in the past have have like those features have fallen away from huh i gotta check yeah i gotta dig into this all right go check nice tea yeah yeah yeah
love it Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll put a link in the show notes, as usual. All right. Moving on to listener David. And David asks, are you doing this one, Peter? Oh, no, I'm doing this one. Okay.
Yeah, you're reading. I'm answering. I got all the answers.
You got the answers. Okay. David says, I have an M2 Air that I have connected to a regular 24-inch ViewSonic monitor. I would like to use Safari with Private Relay, but Safari is just too bright. My eyes are sensitive to light. I find myself going back to Brave or Vivaldi as Safari is just too bright. I'm not sure if this is a resolution issue or a settings issue, but my eyes don't lie. Has anyone else had this kind of issue?
Huh. Yeah. Interesting. So we actually had a guy on our show, a Vietnam vet who had to become a Rio. He couldn't fly the airplane because his eyes were so light sensitive. Yeah. So I get this. This is a real thing.
Oh, clearly for David, it's a real thing. Yeah. And that means it's a real thing. Yes.
Yeah. Yeah, so I have a couple suggestions that I was able to come up with. Not all-encompassing, I assure you. But the first thing I ask is, have you tried enabling dark mode system-wide? I personally don't care for the dark mode, but I have played with it some, and it seems easier on the eyes. And additionally, there's all kinds of settings in system settings display that might be worth adjusting to see if you can get better results that way.
And for some websites, you can turn on reader mode in Safari to strip out unnecessary elements and customize colors, and maybe that'll help reduce your eyestrain. To get the reader mode, you click the icon in the address bar. It looks, you know, the little stacked lines. What do they call that? The hamburger menu?
I like that term.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
And in reader mode, you know, adjust the font and the size and the background color by clicking the AA icon. And this one especially, I'm not trying to insult your intelligence, just trying to be thorough. But some external monitors don't sync their brightness automatically with Mac OS settings. Like they use the few sonic monitors menu to manually reduce brightness and contrast and see if that'll help. Or see if there's a way to lower the blue light to see if that's less harsh on the eyes.
And then I also, when I answered him, I found a program that I'm not even going to mention it because I, it was a plug in. I thought, oh, this is great. And I went and found it. And then it turns out to be a rather expensive subscription.
I'm like, no, don't,
Yeah.
Yeah. Definitely, yeah. I, I, I'm, I'm. I believe, David. However, I was trying to figure out, okay, well. Why Safari and nothing else? Yeah, why Safari and nothing else? And I just loaded up an Amazon page, which even in dark mode has bright white background. And I loaded digital color meter, which is the app on your Mac. And I had Safari up on my ViewSonic screen, which I have to my right here. And I loaded the same page in Microsoft Edge, which is a Chromium-based browser,
which I think is what he was saying, Brave or Vivaldi. And so, okay, yep, also Chromium. And it is the same color white in both. So I wonder if he's got some setting in Safari. I don't think you mentioned this pete but there is a way in safari to set a default style sheet adam do you
Are you.
Aware of this but some somewhere in safari you can set a a default style sheet and maybe david's got one set that has something different i don't know
I remember they had that feature in the past i hadn't used it in a long long time wonder if yeah i don't yeah you're right i don't know where that is there where that would be these days i'm.
Looking and i'm not finding a style sheet yeah uh safari settings advanced and there is an option at the bottom of that screen for style sheet and i have none selected so i that would be something to check certainly yeah yeah i don't know
No you just beat me to it i almost had that yeah i almost had that menu
I'm warmed up now p
Yeah there you go have you guys used this new feature from of safari as you guys were doing this i was i was trying to remember how reader worked because i think i pete's suggested about using reader because it has like the sepia modes and stuff like that but i think it was like books so that can like reduce the brightness and stuff like that but um.
I had not tried this new feature called hide distracting items so when you click on the little have you guys used this feature no yeah so you go to a web page and you turn on you select under that you know the hamburger with the little screen now icon on it there's a high distracting items and then what happens is i thought i had accidentally turned on uh voiceover because no well like voiceover because as i once i turn that
on you hover over the elements on the page and it It puts a blue highlight around them. And then when you click on them, it blows them away. Like it's got this animation where it's like they dissolve like you're Thanos and you just like touched the element. And that element will permanently be gone from that site. So like you could like kill the navigation. You could kill the ad locations. You could kill.
And then it seems to remember that the next time you turn that feature on for that page, all those elements, those page elements go away. And then you can click it again and say show hidden items to bring them all back. But the animation was the thing that blew me away. It's like, it's really kind of, it's actually fun. You can go to your webpages and just like dissolve away all the stuff you don't want to see.
So I have played with the note in there is high distracting items will not permanently remove ads and other content that update frequently.
So, right.
Right. But yeah. Okay. So if it updates,
It just visually takes it all away. It looks like, so yeah, the animation was the thing that i thought was kind of fun i was like yes like and it's you know going into dust it just like dusts away.
I uh i like the the thanos reference that's uh that's good All right. Shall we move to cool stuff found here?
Some cool stuff? Why not? Yeah, I think we should do that.
All right, cool. You want to take us to Kieran?
Yeah, I got one from Kieran. So we had been talking about my love for Markdown and using Markdown. And we were talking about, you know, I use Ulysses as the app that I choose. But Kieran says, hi, guys. I love Markdown in your last show. I was interested. in your discussion on Markdown. I started using Markdown following the release of Max Barkey's Field Guides books a few years ago, which we had recommended those if you want to learn Markdown.
So Max Barkey, David Sparks is a friend and podcaster and he has this great series of things on how to use different technologies and his book on Markdown is excellent if you're looking to learn Markdown. Anyway, he says, my one-hundred choice back in those days was notational velocity, but sadly, I'm waiting for Notational Velocity 2, which seems to be permanently on delay. I have since gone to Obsidian.
As an app, it provides a lot of functionality, but basically it lets you take notes in Markdown, store them as text, but by inclusion on plugins and metadata provides our more useful tools. Think of it as Circus Pony's notebook type interface. Yes, I'm showing my age. We all love Circus Pony's notebook. Where all the individual notes are stored as separate Markdown files so you won't lose your data even if the Obsidian application goes away.
I think this is well worth a mention for anyone looking to use Markdown. There's plenty of support and tutorials from the Obsidian community, which means that users can pick up the basics really easily and be tempted into geekdom with more advanced functionality. Then he says, speaking of plugins, I noted the comment where one of you gents, I think it was David specifically, was having difficulty transferring Markdown to WordPress.
There is a plugin for that. I don't use WordPress, and I can't comment on the effectiveness. So apparently in the little bonus tip, there is a WordPress plugin. I think we have a different issue, as you know, Dave. Yes. But we'll get that resolved.
Yes.
I know a lot of people who use Obsidian with Markdown. It is supposed to be amazing. I haven't made the switch. Which I think, if I'm remembering right, Brett gave at Macstock a kind of talk where he went into a lot of the things regarding Obsidian. So just another plug for Macstock, which is happening again this year in July. It's a great place to go learn stuff and hang out with geeks and things like that.
Yeah.
So Obsidian.
Fun. Cool. I still need to learn Markdown. And you're right. Our WordPress issue is just something with Jetpack. We'll figure it out one of these days. All right. Byrne has a cool stuff found for us.
He says, if you are even a tiny bit of a fan of AI writing, the beta version of co-typist is being designed to augment rather than replace or do your writing for you the 1.5 gigabyte model is downloaded to your mac so your work stays local and it's free for now and i'm trying it out it might be in the goldilocks zone of adapting to you and providing a useful boost while not treading on your creativity a one-time 19 fee with your own chat gpt key yeah
that makes sense okay this is i personally like it a lot interesting that's huh i uh i'll have to mess with this because i i definitely like co-type is or i definitely like using ai to like assist me in my in my writing and i like this idea yeah you're still the author are in the driver's seat but you can write better faster everywhere huh yeah i like this Augmented brain that's that's what i need very very cool uh he also burn also shares that keep it shot is a utility
that he uses to label screenshots uh and other items so um i'll put a link to that in the show notes too yeah i know Fun thank you burn love this stuff you want to take us to seth
Yeah i have a seth gave a really cool well he recommended one product and then it went me on a it sent me on a rabbit hole down an air tag thing so he found this air tag product so as i think a lot of people know air tags apple's air tags for tracking stuff uh use the little cr232 batteries i think they are the little built-in batteries and they have like a life of, I can't remember what Apple rates them at, but they seem to last like a year or so or a couple of years, maybe.
Seth goes, well, if you want it to last 10 years, Elevation Lab makes a 10 year AirTag battery case. And so what this is, is it's like a battery.
And then you, it looks like you take the back off your AirTag and you put it in this case and it basically gives the air tag a very large lithium ion battery or no it uses, yeah yeah it allows it to use double a's excuse me um i guess you could do it somebody could make a version of this with with lithium as well as being rechargeable but yeah and then it just snaps on this little like nub and then you can seal it up in this case and he says as a bonus it basically hides the air tag because
you know you're gonna look at this thing and just think It's like some sort of battery case. And I think it seals it up. It's waterproof. So you could stick an AirTag into something or on something, you know, store this order and have it. Yeah, it's 20 bucks and you can have a 10-year battery life. Yeah. And then when that runs out, you just pop in two more double A's.
Right but then yeah but then i was like oh you know elevation lab they make a bunch of cool stuff and then i went over and i was like looking at their they have a huge collection of different air tag solutions so they have cat collars and dog collars they have magnetic mounts they have bike mounts they have uh one that's really cool is like a fabric mount that you can. Basically peel off and attach inside bags and stuff like that and basically hides the air tag.
You wouldn't necessarily know the air tag was there. I mean, it's got the little bump, but you can kind of put this in there. There's more secure ones that are locked down with odd screws and stuff like that. So the odds that somebody has a hex screw or a star screw or driver on them. There's a pin mount. that's like for like, huh? Basically like a pin to attach to your clothing temporarily. I like the wallet holders. They have like, uh, specifically air tags for your
Milwaukee power tools. Like it's.
Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We've talked about
Ever think in a million years, those are air tags in there.
Right.
I mean, now that you've heard this show, you will. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. No, that's it. We, and we've talked about their stuff. Over the years, uh, you know, for different reasons, but I had, it had been a long time since I dug into their catalog, so to speak. And yeah, that's quite something.
So if you're looking for, if you want to attach an air tag to something, I would start with, with maybe their site.
Start with Elevation Lab. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
If they don't have a solution for you, I'd be surprised.
Yeah. Huh. Interesting. All right. Also on the AI front from Joe, he says, I don't think I've heard you talk about Google's relatively new free AI-based service called Notebook LM. The way it works is that you create a notebook by uploading sources, which can include documents, web links, YouTube videos, audio, etc. You can query then that notebook as if it were your private LLM, except it's been uploaded to Google.
So I just want to make sure that like privacy is in this sense, it means your own custom LLM with your data. Right. So it says, for example, I uploaded all the manuals. And I love this use case. It says I uploaded all the manuals for my home appliances. I then started asking it questions about how to use particular appliances. And it did a great job. That will be my source when I otherwise would consult the manual.
Each answer also contains a footnote that references the specific page in the source material where it got the answer. He also says, I am learning Spanish, so I uploaded a bunch of PDFs on Spanish grammar and vocabulary. I then asked Notebook LM to give me a quiz on a particular aspect of Spanish, which it did brilliantly. When I asked it to explain a complex issue in the Spanish subjective, don't ask, the answer was perfect with a reference to a relevant source, an amazing cool stuff found.
Well, thank you for that, Joe. Yeah, that the the ability to customize the LLM with specific data about me or like the things that I want to learn about and not just leaving it up to.
Well I hope you scraped the right website that has the manual for the right thing and you're going to use the right one being able to point it at that and say hey go look at this for me I like this all right I got I haven't messed with google's notebook lm I was going to ask if you have adam but I already know the answer pete have you messed with i am not
All right oh man i'm about it
Yeah i'm about it yeah yeah huh interesting interesting yeah i love that stuff uh i
Would respond but it's 10 a.m on first friday.
That it is uh i i will take one last moment here while the alarms are going off for adam and talk about a cool stuff found that sort of came from a question that one of you asked me and I started digging. And the question was, how can I play... Atmos videos on my Apple TV via Plex? And the answer is that the Plex app does not do this. If you've got an Atmos video, you know, you ripped the Blu-ray or whatever, you put it in your Plex library and it has the Atmos data in there.
When you play it through the Apple TV plex app it will send it to the apple to via the apple tv to your sound source with the atmos metadata stripped it will send it as a 7.1 sound source as opposed to an atmos sound source and this makes a big difference because at most places things in there's metadata that that describes where it should the sound should come from above behind left right those sorts of things it's not just make this sound come out of that speaker it's use
what you the sound system knows about the sound environment to make the sound come from above and move from front to back so it's it's a it's a descriptive thing not a a specific thing and when you strip that out then it defaults back to okay i'll just make it come out of the speakers so and it does make a difference I've checked this out. The Plex app for Android TV sends Atmos data fine. There's something about, and there are limitations to the way Apple TV apps can send audio.
However, it is possible to play Atmos sound via your Apple TV and your Plex library. You just have to use a third party app and it's called infuse infuse is it's been around for a long time. It's up to version eight. I've used it many times over the years and it is now going to become my default Plex app again on my Apple TV because and it'll link to any source, but you just log it into your Plex account and boom, it's there.
You don't really have to like do anything. But if you have a local library that you just want to point it at, it will index that too and do all your things. And if you, you know, or even a, you know, if you get a library on Dropbox, you can do that too. So Infuse is my cool stuff found for this. Starting with it again, because of this. Cool.
Interesting. So you go into, this is in the Plex settings. You load Infuse on your computer.
No, you load. No, no. I'm glad you asked. Infuse is an app. And you can install it.
In fact, it's much like VLC player almost, except better.
But yeah, a little more robust. Yeah, it may be a lot more robust, depending on your use case. But yeah, you download the app onto your Apple TV, and then you go into Infuse. You don't do anything different in Plex. Your Plex server stays exactly as it is. You go into Infuse, and you tell it, I want to log into Plex. And then you log into Plex, and you're done.
Beautiful. Okay, yeah, because I'm sitting here trying to figure out how many. I'll put it on the Mac Mini, sitting next to Plex, on the Apple TV.
Yeah, it's just an app on your Apple TV. and I did it last night and it was like oh I didn't realize that I had this movie in Atmos I thought it was just 5.1 because Plex also the server doesn't advertise properly right when there's Atmos sound there it could and should and the Powers that be at Plex have confirmed to me that they can do it. But that was two years ago. So I'm sick and tired of waiting.
So I'm just going to play every movie with the Infuse app. And then that way, if there's Atmos there, it will play it for me. Even if it like, even in Infuse, it said that this was like, you know, EAC 5.1 or sound or whatever. And I played it. It was like, nope, that's Atmos. Okay. Gotta go. Yeah. So. But.
Nice.
Yeah. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it. I think we've done it. I think we succeeded with this, I think. I mean, hopefully I recorded the episode.
Oh, record button.
Dang it. Did you do that checklist, Dave? Guys, do you have another hour and a half or so that we could?
Not today. You've got to leave.
Yeah, that's true. Yeah, I don't have the extra time.
You've got a plane to catch.
We do have planes to catch. I have two more podcasts to record before we leave, and I still got a pack, and I don't know, all that stuff. Yep. Then I got to pick up Pete and go to the airport and all the fun stuff.
Are we going to do a show this week in Vegas?
We might. I don't know when we're going to record the next one, but hopefully we'll record one from Vegas. And then, you know, we'll do this again this way in two weeks. Our giveaway this month, MacGear.com slash giveaway. We have moved to a new merch store. And so we are giving some things away. What are we giving away?
Something that has been asked for many many times and our old merch store could not deliver you got it folks we have mac geekab hats now available and we're going to give away a few of those this month so go to mac geekab.com slash giveaway sign up and uh and you can uh you can register to win a hat and we'll put a link to the new merch store there sadie put all kinds of fun stuff out there so i think we're i think we're gonna have a blast with this
Thanks to Cashfly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. And thanks to all of you for listening. We had a fantastic 2024 together, and I think we've hit a new stride of this show. I'm loving it, and I'm stoked to still be doing it here in 2025, and we'll keep on evolving it together. That's what we do.
Go ahead and keep it on.
Thank you. Tell somebody about the show, if you would, please. I would love that. Tell somebody about Adam's other show, the debut film podcast, right? I have that right? Yep.
Yeah, yeah. We just did Timothy Chalamet. Oh.
Huh.
That's a fun show. I've listened to a couple episodes now. Catch that.
It's getting there.
Yeah. Well, as you know, it takes a little bit of time sometimes. You just keep doing it. you keep on trucking and um god what's the other thing we say pete what's the
Thing uh i think it being a new year and all it may be different but i don't think it's changed i think it's still uh hey everybody don't get caught