It's time for MacGeekGab and listener Burn brings us our quick tip of the week with from the lock screen if you swipe up and are out of range and face ID is displayed on screen for a brief moment before being presented with the numeric keypad to type your passcode in I found that tapping the face ID on the screen immediately evokes the keypad thereby shortening the already short delay. After all, who wants to waste perfectly good microseconds?
More tips like this, plus your questions answered today on Mac Geek Gap number 1075 for Tuesday, February 4th, 2025.
Greetings, folks, and indeed, welcome to MacGeekUp, the show where you send in quick tips like that. We share them. You send in questions. We answer them. You send in cool stuff found. We share that, too. We share all kinds of things with the goal being that each of us has an excellent shot at learning at least five new things every single time we get together. Sometimes we even play that bell when we hear a new thing that really charges us up.
Factormeals.com slash MGG50OFF with code MGG50OFF as our sponsor today. And that's also what gets you 50% off your first box of these ready-to-heat-and-eat meal kits that happen in just two minutes. We'll talk more about that in a little bit. For now, finally, back here in Durham, New Hampshire on, well, it's National Stuffed Mushroom Day. But it's also Facebook's birthday and National Hemp Day. Coincidence? You decide. 2025, I'm Dave Hamilton.
Here in South Dakota, I'm Adam Christensen.
And here also in New Hampshire, recovering from the creepy crud, it's Pilot Pete. Good to have you back, guys.
Yeah, it's good to be back. A day late, but no shortage of tips or information.
No, exactly. That's good. And speaking of information, 1075 is wanted or stolen?
I found severe weather statement for police code 1075.
Yeah, it tells me each different department uses their different codes. So good luck with that.
It's crazy.
I can't imagine what it's like for an officer moving from one department to another where the different codes are different. So, yeah. Right?
I got a 1075. The whole department rushes there. You know, it was a puppy in a tree.
Yeah. Oh. Exactly. Exactly. Nope, just a snowstorm, guys.
Yeah. There you go.
All right. All right. You want to take us to Brian, Pete?
I can do that. Excuse me. I came across a cool stuff found for managing Finder tabs. If you are one to have many Finder windows, as Pilot Pete often does, open in the same time or in a single Finder window, is there an easy way to find the open one, the tab, right? You've got all these tabs in Finder. With multiple tabs open, press shift command backslash, which is also the pipe, which will open a window showing all of the finder tabs in their own space.
So it opens this window and you get each mini finder. Window in there. If you type a letter, then only the tabs that start with that letter will be shown. I don't know how many people use windows with lots of tabs, but this may well help out. And I thought it was pretty cool. I use tabs in Finder all the time. And that command shift backslash brings up all the different tabs. You can quickly see, oh, okay, that's where they are. And then that brought us into a pre-show discussion.
Yeah.
Because I was wondering, okay, this is great. Because I don't, I have to admit, I don't use tabs in Finder. I'm an old school Mac guy. Like, I never got into that. I don't know. I use them in my browser all the time. I don't know why I don't use them in Finder. I don't think I spend that much time in Finder. But regardless, it was really cool.
I was like, whoa, I didn't know it did this. You know, it turns it into that kind of spaces view right inside the Finder window, and you can see all your different open tabs. And there's the search, like you said, and all that sort of stuff. And I thought, well, you must be able to then tab through the windows. So if you could control tab, it changes your selection of windows. And I'm like, okay, enter.
Nothing happened. Enter. Nothing happened. I cannot figure out any command other than clicking like a troglodyte on the actual thing to get that tab to now come forward. So I was thinking, oh, this would be a great way to do fast switching of your tabs.
But that would be nice but being an old school mech guy now you have to use your mouse and point to it and click on it i tried the arrow keys i tried all kinds of things i can't get it to
I mean i assume when you're in the actual finder you can fast click or quick yeah you could quick scroll through the tabs using the you know control tab or control shift tab but not in that not in that zoomed in like expose view for lack of a better word yeah right.
Yeah because you got control tab or control shift tab yeah you're right
Huh so maybe a geek challenge maybe there is a maybe there is a keyboard way to do that no you okay i couldn't figure it out you.
Can do it if you use control tab or control shift tab they go through but then you you still can't choose it from there right
Yeah which is super weird that.
Is super weird feedback at macgeekapp.com if if you know how to use your keyboard to select one you
Heard absolutely get macgeekapp.com
I agree pete because i want to know this one so please whoever does feedback at macgeekapp.com we look, Your letters and your emails.
Your wisdom. Send us your wisdom.
How is this not... Like, there's got to be a way. Okay, never mind.
Move on, Dave.
Okay, okay.
Let's go, Dave. Yeah, moving on. We're going to... We don't want rage coming out now.
Yeah, I'm just back from vacation. This is not the kind of stress I need.
Right? Craig has something that might make a lot of people actually really happy. He says, Apple has finally published official documentation on how to upgrade the firmware on AirPods. It was just to be this like magical, just, uh, we'll just update the firmware for you. Don't really worry about it. He says, this, most of this is anecdotally known, but now is official.
You may already be aware, but in case you are not, if you want to update the AirPod, the firmware on your AirPods or AirPods Pro, here's what you need to do. Make sure that your AirPods are in Bluetooth range of your iPhone, iPad, Mac, and that it's connected to Wi-Fi. Put your AirPods in the charging case and close the lid. Plug the charging cable into your charging case, then plug the other end of the cable into a USB charger or port.
Keep the lid of the charging charging case closed and wait at least 30 minutes for the air pod 30 minutes for the air for the firmware to update then open the lid of the charging case to reconnect your pods to your iphone ipad or mac check the firmware version again and if you still can't update your firmware reset your air pods and then try to update the firmware again 30 minutes it's.
Bluetooth bluetooth firmware updates it's slow yeah
What if you're plugged into a USB cable into your Mac instead of a charger? They don't use the cable? They still go over Bluetooth?
I bet that's not data.
Yeah, probably not. You're probably right. All right.
No, Tom.
I don't know. I think I like the old way that it just magically updates whatever. I'm cool with that.
I could just wait.
Yeah.
But if you're in a hurry, I guess 30 minutes and you can get the latest firmware.
Yeah. All right. Okay. Fine.
At least you know how to do it.
At least we know how to do it. That's true. That's true. Yeah, yeah. All right. You taking us to Byrne's second one of the show, Pete?
I shall so do at this time. Byrne writes in. So, well, sitting near his wife, who was watching football, Byrne had his AirPods 2, Pro 2 in and wanted to be in the room with her, but wanted to do some writing on his laptop and not watch her interact with the game on television. This may lead you to think, well, why not just go into another room? And the answer is that it's too easy to get into a ship's passing in the night kind of practice.
And if you're married to someone for a long time, you'll probably recognize this drift towards the rocks. Anyway, she's watching the game and I'm working on my laptop. The AirPod Pro 2 are set to noise cancellation mode, which I have some instrumental music playing on to create my own sonic space to do my writing. So far, so good. Now, here's the cool part. During a commercial break in the game, I began sharing with her some of the writing I'm doing.
The surprising cool thing that happened is that after a few seconds of my talking, the AirPods automatically turned off the noise cancellation mode, stopped the music, and turned on the transparency mode so I could hear myself speaking to her, speaking clearly, and especially so as I have the AirPods set up as hearing aids, and then he was able to hear her back.
Then after a few seconds of not speaking, the AirPods automatically turned off the transparency mode, turned on the noise cancellation mode, and started playing the instrumental music again. That's a pretty cool bit of hard and software engineering. It's a just works, and it works as you might want it to work kind of moment. That's what makes Apple worth its price. And my reply was, that's the funny thing about us humans. We assume others know much of what we know.
And this is a great example that points out that a lot of people may not be aware that AirPods can do this. My use case is a hockey game. I listen to the radio broadcaster in the game. I like the noise cancellation. But if I want to say something to the person sitting next to me, I can do so and we can have a conversation. then when we stop talking all the noise cancellation comes back and i can hear the game so that's a wonderful feature of airpods pro
Uh it is i i wound up using them yet again in mexico we were seeing fish uh on the beach the band fish on the beach and i used my airpods pro gen 2 as my earplugs uh for the entire run of four shows and i used them for everything at nam too as i as i mentioned before and it like it really is amazing how well that works but if you are someone that likes to sing along I have some tips for you, eh? Turn off conversation awareness during the show.
Yep. And then the other thing is I set my AirPods so that my right one, when I squeeze it, rotates me between my noise canceling modes. So there's three. There's transparency, adaptive, and full noise canceling.
Audibly i did not hear much of a difference with uh between adaptive and full noise canceling uh when when doing that and even my watch shows you the you know the um the the effective db to you and i didn't really even notice the difference with that either so i set mine not to uh to skip the adaptive mode and just go full noise canceling or the other. That made my effective volume on full noise canceling.
I think it was in the high 60s when the show was happening with the DB level being like the high 90s. And then adaptive was probably the mid 80s or adaptive or full or sorry, transparency was the mid 80s.
And i found it again if i was uh if i was driven to sing along i needed to be in transparency mode because otherwise my voice was too loud in my head and it drowned out the music that the airpods were blocking down to 60 something db so so i learned that my voice in my head somewhere sits about 82 db so you
Know there you go there you go.
Yeah yeah so i
Was quickly looking up because i I couldn't remember what Apple called that feature where when you start talking, you know, it does all that magic stuff. You know, as you mentioned, Dave, that's conversational awareness is the Apple term for that. So I was looking at that and I learned a new thing. Apparently, you can also end a conversation manually by pressing and holding the AirPod stem or swiping up on the stem.
So if you want to get out of that mode a little bit faster, again, saving microseconds, you can manually return back to what you were doing. Because there is a delay. Yeah, it waits a little bit. There's the delay when it kicks in. Yeah. And then when you've ended your conversation, you're going back to your thing, there's a delay. So if you don't want that delay, it sounds like you can press and hold the stem on your iPod or swipe on it, you know, like you do the volume.
And for like that moment it'll take it back out of conversational awareness and put you back into your original.
Whatever mode yeah
You can you can get out of the conversation quicker.
Interesting oh yeah well
That that's i haven't tried it but that's what apple's support article says.
I believe them yeah huh yeah it it it was interesting doing that four days in a row kind of messing with it because i was also using it in the airport to and from and just getting used to the various i didn't know that that swipe but even getting used to the other swipes so that it just happened automatically was kind of interesting to watch over the course of several days like oh now i'm not even thinking about this anymore okay that's great yeah so huh very cool yeah yeah very cool
Uh, Alex, back in show 1062, we talked about Jose's tip of dragging and dropping text into reminders or notes on the iPhone.
Uh alex said he found a somewhat corollary to this uh of how to export your apple notes very quickly while on the go without messing with any shortcuts or scripting no third-party apps and while also keeping embedded images and more so the instructions are select several notes maybe by sliding vertically with two fingers okay press and hold at the selection and then drag it just a little bit, and it sort of becomes this picked up group. I think we, as he wrote that, I understood what he meant.
When you've got a selection and you move it, it sort of shifts a little bit. And then, with the other finger or hand, switch to the files app and release the items that are being held. The notes then become individual files of the RTFD format, which is rich text, meaning They embed hyperlinks, images, tables, lists, and such. Quote formatting is not supported, Alex points out. And checklists become circle-bulleted lists. No info about audio,
video, or voice attachments. Oh, we'll have to test that. And folders are not supported, so you would need to do this within a folder individually. So if you have multiple folders, do each folder individually and you'll be fine. That's fascinating. Thank you, Alex. I love this. Yeah.
I would add, you kind of glossed over, the way to switch, once you've grabbed that group of nodes, the way to switch is either going to be Command-Tab or... Have them have the finder kind of next to notes and drag them off of the notes and into the finder.
This is on your phone.
Oh, on the phone.
Yeah, it's on the files app. Yep. Or the iPad. But yeah, I think you can do the same thing in the finder. Let me try that on the Mac.
Okay.
Let's see. Notes test. I'm just making a little folder here. So i'm taking three notes um and then just dragging them into the finder and nothing happens so this truly does not work on anything on the mac at least not that way and
So just ios
Yeah okay yeah because on the mac you can't export as uh rtfd you can export as pdf but even dragging them does not do that so yeah it's it's it's foobard on the mac so this is one of those i
Was messing with notes i may have just done something bad.
Uh-oh all right folks undo it and we'll see what happens yeah yeah in the meantime uh in episode 1074 the most recent episode before this one we were talking about answering a listener question about managing battery life and either letting apple do it or letting an app like al dente do it and we of course we talked about how we don't really have data on this we just have anecdotal reports and allison sent in a yet another anecdotal report and said uh that using istat menus to look
back the previous seven days uh her m3 macbook pro was plugged in all day every day and in the last week it has gone no higher than 80 and no lower than 76 and it just seems to kind of range back and forth between 80 and 76 so her mac is definitely managing its battery in that way which is fascinating to me so now i need to try that with lisa's m1 macbook pro so or macbook air sorry Right? Good stuff? Yeah. Yeah.
That's fantastic that it's smart like that.
It is. Yeah. I want to know how far back it goes. So we know that it's doing it with an M3 MacBook Pro. Send in your feedback and let us know what's happening with any of the others, because we would like to create, if not a data set, an anecdote set. All right, folks. Let's talk about optimizing our nutrition the same way we optimize our Macs with our sponsor, Factor. These chef-prepared, dietician-approved meals arrive fresh and fully prepped,
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We'll put all that in the show notes at MacGeekGab.com if you can't remember it. And our thanks to Factor for sponsoring this episode. And hey, while we're here, I want to tell you about some podcasts that we are doing some promo swaps with here. If you're looking to connect with a community that's all about empowering blind and sight impaired individuals, you need to check out Unmute Presents.
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Okay. Now, in our relatively new segment of Don't Get Caught, But Munish writes in, he says, hey, guys, love the show. I was listening to your show with my AirPod Pros coming back from the gym and was really engrossed in your top tips for a Mac keyboard shortcuts. I was listening so intently, I got into the shower with the AirPods still in my ears.
Oh, no. We're so sorry.
Yeah. While the water was running off my head, I realized what I'd done. I quickly took them out and thankfully managed to dry them off, and they still work. So, top tip, don't listen to Mac Geek Cab too intently while getting into the shower. Maybe one day we'll get waterproof AirPods assigned to MASH. And I said, thanks for sharing. We'll share that on the show. But I actually know somebody who put his AirPods through the washing machine and then the dryer, and they still worked.
So, I think they're a little more waterproof than we give them credit.
Didn't, correct me if I'm wrong, didn't, even with the original generation, of airpods didn't tim cook say he showered with them.
I thought so yeah way back
In the day.
Yeah yeah yeah waterproof let's see our airpods they've got
An ipx4 rating it sounds like so i don't know what that equates.
To but that is right that is water water resistance yes yeah and and apple has a support article about the sweat and water resistance of airpods pro airpods 3 and both models of AirPods 4 And they are all AirPods Pro 1 are IPX4, AirPods Pro 2 with the USB-C charging case. My gosh, there's so many freaking models. Do we have AirPods Performa models yet? Sorry, I couldn't resist.
The most business.
Yeah, and AirPods for noise-canceling are dust-resistant and sweat-and-water-resistant for non-water sports and exercise and have a rating of IP54, whatever that is.
That's pretty robust.
I don't know that it is. IP54, they're saying is sweat-and-water-resistant, so we need to figure out
What that is. So they're water-resistant.
Yeah.
You know, again, I think you could go back and find the article. I remember Tim Cook saying in an interview or something like that at one point that he was wearing his AirPods in the shower and it was fine. I personally wouldn't do it. I agree with this. Don't get caught. You probably don't want to be showering with them.
But also, yeah. And then they say they're not waterproof nor sweat proof, which is important. And they aren't designed for use for swimming or for showering. So this is AirPods Pro Gen 1. So, I mean, here's the other thing. Showering with something, if you have a health condition where you're supposed to do this, I mean, just ignore what I'm about to say.
Keep doing what you know you're supposed to do. But in general, showering with our ears exposed is really good for us because it helps rinse out our ears and all the earwax and stuff that's in there. And I can attest to this because as someone who shoves things in my ears for hours at a stretch without not doing that, I wind up with more earwax than the average bear.
And literally during the first during the quick tip segment of the show, I stopped being able to hear in my left ear because I had earwax in my ears built up from, you know, being at NAMM and having earplugs in and being in Mexico and having earplugs in and all that stuff. And I clogged up my left earbud. So I had to take a half a second and unclog that thing. And now it's all good. So, yeah, let your ears get rinsed out. Don't wear AirPods in the shower. I think would be generally good advice.
Yes. I fact-checked myself. He had told somebody that he was wearing his original Apple Watch in the shower, I think.
Ah, that makes more sense, even though the OG Apple Watch was also water-resistant.
It wasn't waterproof. It wasn't designed to be fully submerged in water.
But Craig Hockenberry swam in the Pacific Ocean with his OG Apple Watch every day and had no issues. Yeah, exactly. You know, there we go. Interesting. All right.
Yeah. Yeah. And let's go down this rabbit hole just a hair further. So, you know, the phones are pretty submersible now. I mean, I've taken underwater photos and all that kind of stuff. But I had an interesting one the other day. I don't know why I had, I don't recall why it had gotten wet. But shortly afterwards, I plugged it in and I got the alert, ah, water detected. So it knows to shut itself off rather than short itself out when there's water bridging the connections in the...
In the power, you know, had I tried to do cheat charging, it probably would have been just fine. But when I plugged in the USB-C cable, it came up with an alert that said, hey, water's detected. Unplug the phone.
Yes. I have seen that alert. And well, seemingly erroneously before. Yeah. But yeah. Interesting. Huh?
Huh? So.
Huh?
Apple's engineers have thought about this sort of stuff, it seems.
Yeah. Yeah, iterative design is alive and well over in Cupertino, for sure. For sure, which is great. I love that.
Yeah. All right. Saves us all money.
Well, I don't know about that. We pay a fortune for our iPhones and the results of that engineering, Pete.
Yeah, right. Well, let me put it. It saves us money in that we aren't having to pay a fortune again because we got it wet.
Fair point. Yep. Well stated. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Yep. All right. Let's see. Joe writes with some questions. My daughter is turning 10 next month, and I'm toying with the idea of getting her a standalone cellular Apple watch with her own phone number. I don't really want her to have a cell phone just yet, but there are times where it would be nice to be able to communicate with her and have her track her steps.
I called my cellular provider t-mobile and they said it would be 24 a month i thought that was outrageous given i can get a full cell phone plan for less than that i thought about mint mobile but it looks like they don't support apple watch do you have any suggestions or ideas
Well, you'll get in trouble with my first suggestion, which is what I wanted to do with my daughter when she was 10, which is lock her in a room until she's 30. Turns out the authorities don't think that's even a little bit funny. So I had to let her go, you know.
Yeah, I told Skylar, I failed at this, obviously, but I told Skylar that she could start dating after she was 30 or on the way home from my funeral, whichever came later. So, you know, it did not work. And I'm okay with the outcome here. So it's all good. Yeah.
Yeah. So instead, I did some research, and I found that U.S. Mobile has a standalone plan. And this appears to be the best deal. It's $6.50 a month when paid annually, so $78 a year. It has unlimited talk, text, and data, and designed for devices like the Apple Watch, and allows the watch to function independently with its own cell phone number. So that would be the way to go. I think the other one is T-Mobile has a watch line. Now it's almost twice as much. It's $12 a month.
It has unlimited talk text and 50 gigs of high-speed data in the U S good luck using 50 gigs on your watch. Um, and it says provides a cellular connection without needing your phone nearby. And I didn't notice that until after show prep had closed and I went, Hmm, does that mean you need a phone with it? So that tells me that the U S mobile standalone plan for $6 and 50 cents a month, may be the answer to your question, Joe.
Yeah.
It's own phone number.
Yeah, I think the T-Mobile watch line, I think you're right. I think that is the companion plan, if you will.
To your phone. Yeah. So, but yeah, what a great way to, you know, give a kid connectivity without giving them a full-on smartphone that ruins their lives and yours.
Yeah.
I'm sorry, did I say that out loud?
You know i would i would say i mean with my kids i can't remember when we first gave them phones but um you know we would give them an older an older iphone and we just used apple's parental controls and really locked them down you know you can really tighten up the screen time you can tighten up. You can control their contacts, you can control websites.
I think when they were really, really little, we literally did a whitelist of websites that they could go, blocked you can block apps so you can make sure you know certain apps aren't on there we controlled i mean it was we were pretty well able to manage their stuff and then obviously you have the parental conversations with them about all the all of the you know concerns and sure safety and all those other things and that worked pretty well pretty well for us i can certainly
understand you know because i was trying to figure out what would be really nice and i don't think you can do is, you know, lock phone numbers down to like, hey, you can only call mom's phone or dad's phone and same thing on inbound, you know? Like, I don't think you can get that granular. You can control the contacts so they can't add, you know, contacts that they can't call. But I don't think that restricts, but I don't think that would be the case with the smartwatch number either, right?
Like that number, anybody probably could still call it.
Couldn't you create a focus mode? Like, I can create a focus mode on my phone that only allows certain callers through, right? Yeah, true. So maybe there's a way to combine focus modes with parental controls that allows you to do that.
That probably would work because I think you can lock settings. So you could block them probably out of changing the focus modes, right? Right. So you could control that focus mode. And yeah, that might actually work.
This is great. We've had questions over the years before you joined the show, Adam, obviously now, about using parental controls on the iPhone and how well it worked. And we never did that because our kids were kind of they outpaced. They were ahead of the curve age wise, where the parental controls, by the time they were there, it was too late for us for it to matter for us. So we really didn't bother with it at all and just went the – well, we went two parallel paths.
One was consistently having those parent-child conversations, dinner table conversations about what the pitfalls were and all of that. And then also, I mean, I know our kids did things on their phones that we probably would not have allowed if they asked us every single time they did something on their phones. They made it through. So, you know,
It's part of growing up, right?
To a degree. Yes. Right. But this is like, I love hearing this from you about your success with parental controls. That's outstanding. That's great.
Yeah. I mean, we didn't, again, we didn't go crazy with it, but again, it was always, we always also had the conversation about like, this is why we're doing this. And when you get to this stage, we'll change these things and, you know, that sort of stuff. So it's a, it's a give and take, right? It's like you show responsibility with the thing, we'll open up some more stuff and, you know, you can have this, that, or you can come ask us for this or, yeah.
So, I mean, I think it's a great, I think it's a great way to go. And certainly we want to, you know, as much as possible, there's a lot of bad stuff out there. So I get where parents come from on this, obviously. You want to protect your kids. But yeah, I think you can do a good balance. But I like the watch idea. I mean, that's a great way to maybe start out and then move them into the next sort of step.
Yeah. Yeah.
Cool.
My favorite is still your story about Skylar Harnswoglin, her first grade teacher, looking into her backpack
Yeah yeah yeah yeah i don't know if you've heard that story adam um but we we we did get the kids we got well skylar you know she was our eldest and so when she went off to school we got her one of those um one of those phones that uh has it you know it had like a mom button a dad button and an emergency right right and so we we got her one of those and we told her like we don't know what the school's rule is for this so but you're not going to be using it
willy-nilly right you know you're you're you're only you can only call us like it really truly was only for emergencies yeah one
Of those lockdown yeah yeah like specific.
Very it was called the firefly i forget who made it but uh but it was you know it worked fine but we told her we're like just don't make a big deal out of this it's cool don't tell any it's anybody about it you have it and it's fine her second day of first grade so she had had this phone for probably a year um but her second day of first grade she came home and she's like you know mrs bradley said today we're gonna uh we're gonna make sure we're gonna go through our backpacks
to make sure we're organized first graders and uh and we were like oh and she said yep and you know she went through timmy's backpack and there was you know she helped him get everything together and she She said, mine was second, you know, and I said, okay. And she said, she went through like the big compartments and it was fine. And then she was about to open the pouch where her phone was kept and she stopped her sky said and said, Mrs. Bradley, I'm really embarrassed.
My snack yesterday kind of spilled out of its bag and I haven't cleaned it up yet. That compartment is just full of crumbs.
And i uh i just don't i you know i i'm so embarrassed but please don't open that today i promise i'll clean it out and she skipped right over that compartment and i said to her i said sky Um if i at first i was proud of course because she used the force on her teacher this isn't the pouch you're looking for you know and and then i had a thought like wait a minute this also is not the first time she's done this and so i i said to her i was like you've done
this before and it's been to me isn't it and she said oh yes daddy and that was the moment where i knew she was going to be fine like she was going to grow up and and she had figured out the world it was all good like okay we've succeeded as parents we're doomed but we've succeeded as yeah it's like so yeah
When you're uh when you're seven-year-old's outsmarting you already you're like uh-oh
Yeah yeah it's great it's all fine it's all fine and it and then so far it's you know it's worked out she's you know right doing her thing so it's all good she knows how to she knows how to she He knows how to live in the world, which is great. Yeah. Well, Dave. Yes.
Another Dave or David has a couple of CarPlay issues or questions for us, I think. Okay. He says, hi guys, I've got a couple of Bluetooth related questions to ask you. I guess they're Bluetooth related ones, CarPlay. I get frequent alerts on my iPhone because one of my family members or sometimes friends or coworkers are traveling in my vehicle, or maybe I'm in theirs and their AirTags slash AirPods are quote unquote moving with them.
I usually get the option to pause such tracking notifications for one day, but often a day or two later, the same item will trigger the same notification on my phone. Is there a simple way to tell iOS that a certain device is familiar and to stop sending me these moving with me notifications? They're driving me crazy. And then on a slightly different topic, I'm considering purchasing a car with wireless CarPlay. Is that the only option or can I still use a cable to use that feature?
All right i will i'm gonna answer in reverse um okay i with i my car does not natively have wireless carplay i have a 2018 subaru outback which has only wired carplay but adam of course a couple of years ago you convinced me to spend the money on the car link kit adapter so that i could have wireless carplay and that works great but i have rented cars that have native wireless carplay and yes you can choose to just use the wireless carplay or if you plug it in it will use wired carplay for
the most part there really aren't any differences between the two of those um because largely because carplay does not use bluetooth for its ongoing connection it uses it for its setup and discovery but once your phone and the car sort of pair with each other and sync with each other it's using wi-fi an ad hoc wi-fi connection in the car so uh it it's like it works great uh even even with the car link it adapter um and all that good stuff right
So yes get the car with wireless carplay use it or don't use it if you want i often will plug my phone in just because i want to charge like on a long trip or something but otherwise it's great to just have it in my pocket for short drives. I love it. So thank you for making me spend that money, Adam. I mean, it was 70 bucks. It wasn't really much. I'll put a link in the show notes to the one that I bought.
As far as the AirTag traveling with me alerts, I don't, I certainly have experienced this. We all have in the house as we use each other's cars. If somebody leaves, you know, like I leave an old set of AirPods in the car that has an AirTag on it. And so now it warns people that I'm tracking them and all that stuff. It's my car.
Of course I'm tracking you. uh but i think you can now share an air tag with multiple people so to me that would be the way to solve this is take those air tags that are permanently or generally in the car and just share them amongst the people that are driving the car and then it probably won't warn you because in theory you know this by having accepted the sharing i haven't tried this but that would be the first thing I would try? I don't know.
What do you think? So it's my understanding that the AirTag is going to tell you it's traveling with you if that person's connected phone is not there. Correct. In other words, if I take my son's car and his keys have the AirTag on it and I use his keys, I get the notification. If he's riding in the car with me, I don't get the notification.
Correct.
So, yes, that's the way it's designed.
Right. But if he shared that AirTag with you.
Then I would never get the notification.
Then in theory, it's like it's your AirTag. Right. Yeah.
So it sounds like if it's a carpool type thing, you know, I'm going to be reluctant to share it with people not in my immediate family group and just have to put up with the notifications. I don't think there's a way to disable that notification.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, but you can at least, I mean, share it with your family members. I mean, my wife has commented on that because, you know, we'll be traveling in the car together or whatever. And I have my AirPods Pro or whatever that are being tracked. And she'll get the silly alert that like, hey, you're being tracked by some device, right? Or by AirPods Pro, I think it says.
Right, right, right. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So all kinds of fun stuff. Mace. What's that, Adam?
I said, I'm with Dave.
Yeah.
Try the sharing thing.
Try the sharing thing. Yeah, for sure. While we're talking about air tags here, Mace has a question. I just got a warning that the air tag I keep in my luggage is low on battery. I won't be traveling again until June. If I hold off on replacing the battery and the battery dies completely, do I just pop in a new battery in June? Will everything come back just like it was? or will I have to rediscover and configure everything?
So that's the cool thing about AirTags and why they're designed the way they are. You don't need to do anything. You just put the new battery in and you're good to go. And that way, someone who steals something of yours can't find the AirTag, take the battery out and put a new one in and have their own AirTag. It's tied to you forevermore unless you release it. So that's the cool thing. You don't need to do anything the danger.
I see you waiting till June is if the battery dies Unexpectedly before you travel and you forget to change the battery now. You don't have the air tag protection so The way I would handle that is take a sticky note and put it in the suitcase with the air tag So as soon as you open it up, you go. I got to replace the battery before I pack and Something along those lines, some kind of hook so that you don't forget to change that battery and you don't and you change it before you travel.
If you travel between then and now, that's my solution.
Yeah. Listen, I I traveled. It turns out, Pete, that I did this because I got I am that guy. I got this alert in, I don't know, September or something.
And was like yeah yeah okay i don't i'm not going in the attic today but sure i'll change the battery and then you and i went to ces and then i went to la for nam and on the way back from nam i'm standing there uh it boston logan waiting for my bag and i'm like i wonder where it is it's like purple suitcase why does it say it has no memory of where it was and i was like oh Did I let the battery die and forget to change it? And the answer was, yes, that is exactly what happened.
And so I'm standing there saying, you know, to whatever powers that be were controlling the fate of my luggage. I swear, if you just deliver me the bag this one time, I'll never drink again. Oh, wait, wait, that's a different thing. But it was one of those moments like I will never make this mistake again. And sure enough Thankfully I got my bag I made a note on my to-dos, on my reminders, to change that AirTag in the one day that I had home between NAM and going to Mexico.
And I changed that battery happily and will always now change it when I get the notification. Or at the very least, put a reminder on my calendar for not my next trip. Those batteries are inexpensive enough that it's worth just changing it right away. Because like you said, if I were to put it on, you know, in Mace's case, you put it on for sometime in May. Sure, great. But if you wind up having a trip in March that you aren't currently planning for, you're doomed.
And I will put a link to the set of 20 AirTag batteries, 2032. They're the CR2032 batteries. 2032s. I bought these in December most recently, which kills me because, of course, I had them sitting at home. And they are $9 on Amazon right now, and then there's a $2 coupon. So these things are inexpensive. Nice. Yep. So just buy them and keep them up to date is my – keep all of them charged all the time. It it's it's worth it and
And remember if you if you insist on buying them at right age cvs walmart whatever uh ever readies don't have the coating on them that caused them not to work without filing them down unlike the duracells duracells have that bitter pill coating on them so little babies won't swallow
The yep the
Air tag batteries but then you you have to file it off in some way with an emery board or what have you to
Get it to work the power owl ones that i buy from amazon for for you know whatever it is seven dollars for a 20 pack they do not i have not had to file these down so whether they have the coding or not it does have a picture of like an adult with a child on the on the battery at least in the in the amazon listing i don't i don't know what that's all about but um yeah that's weird it looks like an adult holding something over a child's head some kind of torture happening here i'm not sure
About this there you go
Child resistant package oh that's for sure this package needs a laser torch to open it that makes sense okay yeah yeah yeah but so yeah go ahead adam just
For the record i have these child secure duracell better coating ones.
Uh-huh.
But they also have this, which says compatible with Apple AirTag. And I've been using with my AirTag just fine.
Interesting. Maybe they changed their formulation because before you could put them in and the battery wouldn't work. And you're like, what's going on? Yeah. Why not working? And, uh,
So I have two things to add. Because these things are so cheap, I mean, I know it won't help you the first time you screw it up, but I've also had some of these where they have a little perforation and you can like peel off one battery. Maybe just keep one battery also in your luggage.
Oh my gosh, that's brilliant. Oh, oh.
Like they're so tiny, like just throw it in a little side pocket or a little extra. All right. That way if you do get to your destination.
To be clear, a small battery like that should be fine in your luggage. Don't leave your laptop batteries in your luggage.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no. You can't do that.
Yeah. Well, but you can leave it in your...
It really will bring down an airplane.
You can leave it in your carry-on. Yeah. So that it's at least with you when you travel. Yeah.
Yeah, put it in your, you know, your...
Laptop bag.
Hair. Yeah. Or just even, like, where you keep all your toiletries.
Sure. Sure. But if you don't want it.
I don't know about you. I always carry on my toiletries because if I get somewhere, I want at least those. I usually have those in my carry-on bag if I'm not carrying anything else. So I have my toothbrush and stuff with me.
I love this idea. I'm definitely going to do this. It's interesting that I haven't thought about this because the thing that I have thought about and that I do is that each of our cars has a spare battery for the key fob for that vehicle because when those batteries die they die fast at least here we often you know we'll leave the the the key in the car and it's cold and so i don't know if that i don't know why but when our when i start to get the warning that our car that the
battery in my key fob is going to die it means within about seven minutes is usually what that that warning tells me so we just keep them in the car so we can just pop a new one in to the key fob no matter where we are and
Then the other thing i thought of that you could do on your reminder is although i guess yeah you'd want to set a date on that i was like you could probably do a geofenced reminder so that like when you leave the house but i don't can you set the range on that geofence so it's like.
Oh you
Know if you know your airport is X miles away, or the airport you use, because most people use the same airport when they're leaving, at least when they're leaving home, right? What if you put a geofence reminder at that airport to say, air tag battery? Because I bet you could buy an air tag battery at the airport also.
Oh. That's not a bad idea.
Yeah.
Yeah. Or, or, again, to your point, Pete, every one of these things is the hook, right? So where are you putting the hook? Why not just put AirTag battery on your trip packing list? I assume everyone is like me, of course, and has a FileMaker-ready trip packing list that calculates the number of pairs of underwear I need based on the length of the trip and all of that stuff.
But whatever you use for a packing list, just put AirTag battery on there so that while you're packing for the trip, you check it.
Good plan.
I don't know. What's your hook, Pete? You travel a lot.
Well, see, that's it. I travel so often. I don't have a packing list anymore. I just leave. Like I have two sets of nail clippers, one at home, one in my travel kit, two razors. Because if I had to take it out and repack it, take it out and repack it, it would drive me absolutely nuts. So I have two. And then, like I say, the other thing, if I was not going to go for a while and I knew I needed to change it, I'd put a sticky note right in the suitcase. So when I opened it up, there it is.
The only thing in the suitcase is that sticky note saying, hey, get that battery.
Yeah, that makes sense. It's all right. And it makes sense that you have two of everything, obviously. I mean, you, you effectively live with a go bag. Yeah.
And, and that's the thing. And so you'll see air crew traveling with the, they're called pretty neat things. The, the crew bags. And I've wanted for years, that's a 16 pound bag empty. So yeah, it's, yeah, it's got a steel frame on it and, but it lasts 20 years. So that's the upside. The other problem is as much as I'd like to go to a much lighter bag, the reason those bags are so popular with cruise is they've got pockets all over them.
So when I wake up at three o'clock in the morning in Cologne, Germany, and I need a Tums, I don't even have to turn on the lights. I know exactly which pocket that those Tums are in. And I know where my cords are to charge devices. I know where my tie is. I know where my keys are. I know it's just, it's all there. And so that's the beauty of those bags is they've got pockets everywhere.
That makes sense. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. So as much as I'd like to get a lighter bag, I can't, I would never be able to find anything.
Yes. No, that makes sense. Are these bags from Luggage Works? Is that where you get them? Yes.
They are not cheap, but man, they're great bags.
Yeah. And it looks like they've got some now made of carbon fiber, so maybe a little lighter.
They are changing. Yeah. They are changing. But I don't know. I've got it way up in the top monitor, so I can't see the prices. But they're in the $400 range.
Oh, yeah. You could pay more than that, too, if you want. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
All right. But they're great bags. Oh, they last forever. And they've got a lifetime warranty. Like, if you manage to rip the zipper, you can send it to them. They'll resew the zipper on fire.
Got it. Got it.
So you pay the shipping.
All right.
You often get what you pay for. You know? Yeah.
Right? Yeah.
Yep. Yep. It's true.
Steve says cheap and worth it.
Cheap and worth it.
These are not cheap, but they are worth it.
Yep. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. That's great.
All right. Should I take us to Wilco? Who has a internet. question. It'd be great if his last name was Roger or vice versa. But it says, Dear Geeks, yesterday our internet connection went down and all home automation hubs also started failing.
While till yesterday I've been able to manage things without my wife being bothered too much using sensors, buttons, light switches, etc. Things started to fail and I'm having to jump through hoops to get the proper lights uh proper lights created uh it's a less optimal situation basically so house is down everything is uh not connected i have all my hubs connected with an ethernet cable although they are also wi-fi capable the wi-fi is handling handled
by a four tp deco link mesh by four tp deco link deco link excuse me mesh access points I had assumed that the Wi-Fi itself would remain up and running, keeping all internal devices connected, even if no outside connection was available. Some buttons and sensors seem to work, the ZigBee Z-Wave in most cases, but the system as a whole is unstable.
So my question is whether a Wi-Fi network can be set up in such a way that it keeps running all internal devices, although there is no outside internet connection. Really love the show, especially when your discussions go off the rails. No shortage of that happening this episode either so enjoy uh wilco in the netherlands.
So to your first comment last that you really love the show when it goes off the rails all i have to say is see how much better i make the show You know that's why i'm here it's what i do No, seriously, clearly you guys are both going to have, I think, better answers than me on this. But I was able to look and find that if you enable local mode only on some Deco models, it'll allow you to do that.
Disable cloud dependency. Check the Deco app for advanced settings and see if there's an option to local management or disable Internet check. The other is to, I would set static IPs for your devices. So that way, if the internet is down, it isn't struggling to find an IP address from the router. So assign the IPs in the Deco app itself or on your smart hub. And then DNS resolution, right?
I mean, that's the other thing. So if your Deco is set to use like Google's 8.8.8.8 or Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1, set your primary DNS to your Deco router and then set the secondary DNS to Cloudflare or Google, something along those lines. That way it's your Internet of Things within the house are kind of looking at each other and kind of looking only to the Deco instead of trying to look outward. Does that answer the question, I think, Dave?
Um, I'm a little confused by the question. I mean, if the... Home automation hub requires or if the IoT device, whether it's a hub or a light bulb or whatever, if it is cloud managed, which most things are now, then this is exactly what I would expect to happen. This really doesn't have anything to do with the internal Wi-Fi. I've set up a lot of Deco networks, and my experience with them is that they stay online regardless of whether you have an active – whether they have an
active internet connection. Your local network will stay online. There was a period of time where Eero would not stay online. Your local Wi-Fi network would stop working if the internet connection went down. Obviously, people – yeah, people complained about that. That got fixed right away.
Can't print. Can't, yeah.
Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I don't think the issue is that the local network is going down, as I'm understanding it. I think the issue is that these devices don't have local control as part of their default setup. Like, if you're going to go control your, you know, Senglid Wi-Fi light bulb, and I say that because I have one, It is using the app to talk to the cloud to talk back to the local device, right? And that's why you can also control them with the A-Lady or,
you know, Google Assistant. And sometimes the HomeKit control, although that gets a little different sometimes. But certainly A-Lady isn't doing any local discussions directly with your devices for the most part. It is going and triggering the cloud service to do whatever it's going to do, which means the cloud service is then sending it back. The whole thing doesn't work if it can't talk to the cloud. Most of these IoT devices require the cloud. Now, there are some that don't.
Matter devices don't. The things that are truly HomeKit compatible often don't, but there's lots of asterisks there. And then there's a piece of software that you can set up and run on your network called Home Assistant. And Home Assistant is one of the big benefits is that it talks directly to things and allows local control for a lot of things that via their own apps don't support local control. Home Assistant kind of just like learns how to talk to them and then just talks directly to them.
And the nice part about this is, A, it solves this problem that Wilco is discussing here. But B, it makes your devices respond so much faster because it's not going out to the cloud, waiting for the cloud service to respond. You know, there's not that whatever, you know, hundreds of milliseconds delay that normally doesn't really matter until you don't have it. We I have a home assistant instance running here. I basically have it doing
two automations for me and nothing else. I probably should do a whole lot more with it. But those automations, it's amazing how quickly they happen. And it's because it, you know, I, my, whatever it's running on, I can't remember. I think it's probably my disk station or something is just talking directly on the network to the device and, you know, boom, it's there instantly.
So nice okay yeah so i i think i my guess is that wilco's issue is simply caused by this reliance on cloud interaction of course when you don't have an internet connection you don't have cloud interaction and i also think home assistant would solve it but you are going to get nerdy if you set up home assistant there i think the venn diagram between like you know not nerd and home assistant users doesn't exist like you you are not a novice
anymore when you jump into home assistant but there's a great podcast called the home assistant podcast that you could listen to um that and they they talk about this stuff and get nerdy about it and and communities around it yeah yeah it's a it's a cool thing i probably should use it more
My assessment was going to be about the same as Dave's. And the only factor I didn't know was how much a device being HomeKit, like not just HomeKit compatible, but an actual HomeKit device made a difference on this or not.
You know, I think I have this impression that you'd be more likely, again, with all the caveats that Dave said, you'd be more likely to have local control with a HomeKit or a HomeKit compatible device versus a non-HomeKit compatible device, but I don't think it's a universal guarantee. I would not go out on a limb and say, well, if you have a HomeKit device, it'll work locally. I don't think that's true.
But I do think many HomeKit devices, at least basic functionality will work, like maybe turning on and off the light, but maybe you won't be able to dim it or change its color, some more advanced feature or something like that.
Exactly, yes. that that that's been my experience with those kinds of things yeah yeah so so but that said your advice pete of having every device on the local network look to the router for its dns and then letting the router be the thing that communicates with the outside world is is to me great advice because yeah a you you get the benefit of of everything you talked about and b often it's faster if one device does a look up for whatever you know www.macgeekgab.com and then another
device goes and does that within the time to live period which for us is an hour uh it doesn't have to go out to the internet to so it caches it caches it it's cached yeah Sorry, that's a really much better, more efficient way of saying it. Cache is DNS. It's great. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah. Nice. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, yeah, I mean, good advice. You, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm looking through the rest of the things. Setting static IPs for critical devices.
I mean, yes. Only, I would, my rule about static IPs are my general practice. It's not a rule. Is I set them for devices that act as servers for me, anything I'm going to need to connect to. And that includes all of my Macs so that if I need to remote into them, I can just do it by IP address and I don't have to hunt around. But my IoT devices, I don't know.
I know there's people like in the Sonos community forums that say, oh, if you set static IPs for your Sonos devices, the system becomes more stable and maybe they're right but I've never done that so I don't know I do miss You know, I moved from the Synology router that I used for years to the Unify Cloud Gateway Max. And there is one thing that I really miss from the Synology router, and that is the Unify Cloud Gateway Max assigns IP addresses with its DHCP server like most DHCP servers.
It just gives you addresses in order. You know, so if 192.168.1.43 was the last one at a sign, the next one is 44-ish. It might do something different, but that's effectively the logic that goes into it as far as I can tell. On the Synology, it does some kind of a hash of the device's hardware MAC address and uses that to try and give it the same IP on your network every time no matter what.
And boy was that handy i really love that so i kind of had fixed ips for everything even though i didn't i i loved that um i wish everybody would do that that was kind of a fun thing that synology did i hope yeah i hope synology comes out with a new router this year that that supports like at least two and a half gig ethernet and you know all of the things that are sort of uh table stakes for a high-end router nowadays so we'll see
Time to get past 300 bod
That's right that's right i like that that's good yeah uh should we yeah we got some time for a couple of cool stuff's found you want to kick us off adam
Yeah this is a this is a neat one and i just stumbled upon it um while i was browsing my apple tv looking for something to watch uh the other night and i didn't even know this had come out. But Apple has a new documentary series. I don't know if all the episodes are out. I think there's six now. I don't know if they're releasing them slowly or if there's only six. But it is a new documentary series on Vietnam narrated by Ethan Hawke. It's called Vietnam, The War That Changed America.
And I became enthralled by it. It even caused me to go back and watch Good Morning Vietnam, which is another great movie, right? I hadn't watched in a long time. Really, really good. But the interesting thing about this is what they're doing is the Vietnam War was apparently, at least according to the documentary, the most filmed, documented war from on the ground. They had reporters in the firefights, in the war zone. So they've got just a massive amount of footage that they've culled through.
And what's really interesting is they take a lot of the footage and they've gone back and found the people who were there in that footage on the front lines and they're having interviews with them and conversations and talking about, and it's just, it's fascinating. It is war. It's pretty brutal at times, obviously. I mean, a lot of us know the Vietnam War has, you know, all of its history associated with it and not all of it really great.
But they, they kind of walk through all those things in. Yeah, it's just, it's, you know, I, I like, War movies, I like documentaries, and this is kind of a good mashup of the two, and I've just been fascinated by it.
Yeah.
And it's really, really well done, in my opinion. So just another good thing from Apple TV+.
That's great. That's great. Mythic Quest Season 4 is out, if you missed that in the last week. I love that show. It's really well done. And in March, a four-episode miniseries, for lack of a better term called side quest a spinoff is coming out too so i love i love that that's a great show cool yeah
I started watching that again too.
But yeah yeah that very very different um vibe from your from the vietnam series obviously two very different things Yeah, a little more lighthearted. A little bit. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
Do you have anything to add to our Cool Stuff found here for today, Pete? I've got one or two other things.
No, go ahead. I'll keep out of the way on this one.
All right, great. One of my favorite apps, this is definitely a Cool Stuff found revisited, is an app called Remote from Evgeny Chirpake, Chirpake, C-H-E-R-P-A-K-E.com, and of course, links in the show notes. This was written so that he has an app on his iPhone for remote controlling anything on his Mac.
Specifically, if you're using a Mac Mini as like an Apple TV-ish kind of device or as your TV device, This allows you to use your iPhone to remote control your Apple TV, and it's got a nice interface in the app for doing all of that kind of stuff. And there's even sort of service-specific things. So there's a Netflix template. There's an Apple TV Plus template, and it's great. And you can even do like mouse control and that sort of thing. We've talked about this before. I love it.
I had an issue when I was in Mexico seeing Phish last year because the Wi-Fi network, as many are, isolates each device. So my phone was on the Wi-Fi network. My Mac was on the Wi-Fi network, but they couldn't see each other because that's how, candidly, I think that's how hotel Wi-Fi should work. I don't want people to see my device. I don't want to see other people's devices. But in this case, I wanted to see mine. And so last year in Mexico, I wrote Evgeny and said, hey, would there be a way?
I know you're doing it with Wi-Fi so that you can get all the like high bandwidth stuff. Wouldn't there be a way to do some sort of limited Bluetooth control so that I could at least play pause, you know, whatever from from my from my phone while I'm laying in bed watching, you know, whatever we're watching is as we're drifting off to sleep at night in the hotel room.
He's like, yeah, I've been thinking about this, too. I am happy to report that peer-to-peer mode in remote for Mac works as requested. So thank you, Evgeny. And if you're doing this in a hotel room, it works. It's great. Yep.
So.
Yes.
That brings me to a question because I've got some tech support I need to do. This very day, Dave, my mother-in-law lives in a place where Wi-Fi is provided in Riverwoods.
So it's got a new printer printer comes on we can get that on the wi-fi network but can't get her laptop this is my wife reported i haven't gone over and tried any of this yet but my wife reports her laptop does not see her printer and i'm assuming that's because that's what they've done they don't want the devices to see each other Is this something I can put on her laptop to?
No.
How does this work?
This is just doing Bluetooth for essentially keyboard and mouse commands. I mean, that's all it's doing. In order for this to work, if we were watching, say, something on Apple TV+, I would bring the Apple TV+, app forward on my Mac, connect my Mac via HDMI to the television, of course, and then start the thing playing, and now I can use my phone to pause and skip and rewind.
But all it's sending is keyboard commands. There's a companion app that runs on the Mac that receives the signal from the app that's running on the iPhone, and that's how it all works. However, I have a thought for you.
Yes, okay, because there we go. Now we've got an impromptu stump the dummy or geek challenge.
Yeah, no, it's a good question. The way I would do this is I'm assuming, for the sake of this discussion, And let's assume that the issue is that things are isolated, like we talked about in the hotel, right? And if that's the case, these devices will never see each other. Now, there might be a way that might not be what's happening. And when you get there, you might find another solution.
If that is what's happening and you can't see devices, and the easiest way to test that would be to put two Macs on the network, turn on file sharing, and see if you can see one from the other.
And if you can't,
Now you know. right that and or ping them from each other even like you know if you can ping your max now they can talk to each other and so you can talk to the printer and if that's the case bonjour might not work but if you know the printer's ip address you can manually add an a printer by ip address in you know system settings printers on your mac i've done that with mine so that using tail scale i can print to my home printer no matter where i am and i don't have to rely on bonjour
So that might be another option. If it's not, then you need one of those barrel routers or something that will take a Wi-Fi signal and share it just like you're in a hotel room.
Make it your own.
Make it your own. Yep. That would be my answer. Sure.
Yeah. Okay.
So that's what I got.
I have a question.
Yeah, go.
Is AirPrint no longer a thing?
No, AirPrint's a thing, but it needs to be able to see it.
But AirPrint is peer-to-peer.
AirPrint from the iPhone is peer-to-peer. Is AirPrint from the Mac peer-to-peer?
Why wouldn't it be?
That is a great question. I agree with you.
I mean, I know not all printers have AirPrint, and I don't know which printers do have AirPrint anymore. That's where my question was coming from. because there's a lot of different, wireless printer technologies. You know, Google has their own. Different printer companies have their own. Like, I don't think it's a universally... Like, AirPrint is specifically an Apple Mac thing, right? So, I don't know. Anyway.
Is it peer-to-peer? I think it is.
It's my understanding that it's peer-to-peer.
Yeah. Well, if it is peer-to-peer, then that would... That would work around this for sure, because because then it's just, yeah, you're not going through the routers for AirPrint to birth to work. Both the Apple device and the AirPrint printer must be connected to the same Wi-Fi network. This is essential as AirPrint leverages local networking to initiate the printing process. So I don't think it is peer to peer.
No, I thought that was the whole point, but maybe not.
No, I think it's Bonjour-based. But I don't, I mean, yeah, I don't, I can be wrong. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can I print from an AirPrint printer, get an AirPrint-enabled printer with direct wireless printing? Oh, yeah, you can connect to the printer's Wi-Fi network. You know when you're walking around in a conference center and you're trying to get on the Wi-Fi, and you see conference Wi-Fi and then you see HP LaserJet Wi-Fi and it's like, yeah, that's going to be worthless. Unless you want to print.
Yeah. And Dan pulls this up in the comments.
And Dan Killing says that AirPrint is not peer-to-peer. Bummer. And I hope I pronounced your name correctly.
This goes over the network.
Yeah.
Okay.
Wouldn't that solve this in this day and age? Like, why don't we have peer-to-peer printing?
Like yeah we do it with carplay right like we just talked about that in the show like you know it sees the bluetooth it it connects to it even air air drop is peer-to-peer that might be what you're thinking of adam oh because air drop i
Mean i think i thought i always thought airport was peer-to-peer i thought that was the whole point is like you can get a printer with your iphone or ipad and you don't have to have a wi-fi network you could just print to the dang thing like you have a cable hooked up to it like i i don't understand why that's not a thing like it feels like this is technology that we're capable of achieving.
Yeah yes yeah we are capable of achieving this yes i agree i agree um we have not achieved it yet but but we are capable adam and that that is the important part but you know we don't always get what we want but for a subscription If we try sometimes, we get what we need. Good luck with that, Pete. I hope that works out. Thank you. I mean, one way or another, you'll get there. But it might require her own router.
Yeah.
If there's Ethernet there, I would use that with a router and not do the Wi-Fi to Wi-Fi hop.
Right. And that's actually what I did with my daughter in her apartment complex down in Florida. You know, they provide all the Wi-Fi, but they happen to have Ethernet there. So I just grabbed a $25 or $30 Linksys router, threw it on there, and now she has her own network, and everything works great.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So maybe the same thing here.
Thanks for hanging out. There's always the USB cable.
That's true. Yes, that's true.
Yep. Less convenient.
Like a caveman, you have to wire into the printer to get it to work.
Imagine. Yeah, I know.
The horror.
Yeah thanks for hanging out with us everybody check out our giveaway this month is We get ready for it. Five free licenses. Well, five licenses that we're going to give away of CCC backup from Bombik, the carbon copy cloner people. Yep. That's our giveaway for this month. It is. It will be live. We're recording this and releasing this on Tuesday, February 4th. It will be live today. I promise that. There was a hiccup with a thing.
And I didn't. I wasn't aware of it because I was quite happily detached, candidly. But yeah, so make sure to check that out at macgeekyub.com slash giveaway. And if you check it right now as I'm saying these words because you're listening live or somehow otherwise peering in on us here. I know it's not there, but check later. Just wait longer. That's all. But it is happening this month. I guarantee it. Thanks to the folks at Cashfly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you.
Make sure to check out Pete's other show, So There I Was. for Aviation Stories, Adam's debut film podcast, and then I do two others, Business Brain and Gig Gab. And I just put out an episode after being at NAMM for the first time, as I mentioned. So if you're curious about what that was like for someone like me attending for the first time, you can hear it. And if you're not, don't. That's the beauty of podcasts. You get to listen to
what you want. And we are very thankful that you want to listen to what we do here. Please keep the feedback coming. Both the questions, the comments, the suggestions, the quick tips, all of it is super welcome. And we love you for it. So thanks for everything. That's what I got for today. I'm glad we did this today. Good.
Yeah. Yeah.
I know it's a little off cycle for us. Thank you. Yeah. Crazy month of travel. In theory, I'm not going anywhere until South by Southwest in March. We'll see if that holds up.
Right on.
Pete! What's your shirt say? That's me. Yeah.
It says, because I can read it, because I don't have it mirrored. That means I didn't. Because, you know, before it was backwards. But now I can read it. It says, don't get caught.
Made on the back. That's good advice.
Yeah.
Hopefully the show recorded. Yeah. Thanks, folks. Later.