Trust The Nav

It's time for Mac Key Cabin listener Ben brings us our quick tip of the week with something he says he discovered by pure inadvertent movement or acting on muscle memory says I mistyped a number on the keypad in the phone in iOS 17 and rather than tapping the delete key I reached my thumb up and swiped left across the number I'd entered just like in calculator, also a quick tip, I didn't even know you could do this in calculator,

phone supports a right or left swipe on an entered number to delete one digit at a time. Back to the left, forward delete to the right. I don't know when this was added to iOS, same, but per YouTube videos it's been around for at least three years. IOS calculator got the ability to swipe right or left to delete as of iOS 13. In iOS 12 one could swipe only left to delete. More quick tips like Make this plus your questions answered today on MacGeekGab

1011 for Monday, November 27th, 2023. Transcribed by https://otter.ai. Music. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Mac Geek Gab, the show where you send in your quick tips like that one, your cool stuff found, your questions. We try to answer your questions.

We share your quick tips and cool stuff found, and we string it all together into an agenda, that keeps everything somewhat thematically organized such that we all have the best chance of learning at least five new things every single time we get together. Our sponsor for this episode is greenchef.com slash MGG250. That's where you're going to go and enter code MGG250 to get $250 off these fantastic meal kits that we'll talk more in depth about a little later.

For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Lee, New Hampshire, it's Pilot Pete. Good to be here, Dave. It's good to be here, Pilot Pete. Yeah, man. Yeah. Ben's opening quick tip. I like I I love that that's even possible. I don't know my fingers. Certainly don't Don't know that and I don't know that my brain ever knew it either Brand new to me in as we were chatting about this in our discord at Mac keycap comm slash discord Where Ben shared the tip originally?

Ben puts out a newsletter every week that he calls Mac Mondays and he says I have coined a phrase regarding the state of being able to remember a particular gesture on a device saying that it is muscly memorable. Muscly memorable. M-U-S-C-L-Y memorable. I like this. Muscly memorable. Yeah, there you go. I know.

This is a good, uh, it's a good term. I'm still looking for the right term to describe the maneuver that we all perform when we're under the desk, hanging that cable up over the back of the desk so that we can let it go, climb around to the top, and pull it up before it falls. And I know we've worked on this. It's not that hard if you close your right eye and hold the tongue out the left side of your mouth. Yeah. It's just not as hard.

I feel like, you know, more than the maneuver name, which by golly, we need feedback at macgeekjob.com, we also need a tool to facilitate that maneuver, right? Like a hook that has like a little clip in it. So you clip the cable in the, in sort of the top of the hook, right? You know, and you clip the cable in the top and then you can hook the thing around the the desk and then you just go around and grab it and it makes that that way easier.

I don't know. There you go. But you're going to send that to feedback at macgeekapp.com. I mean, I think feedback at macgeekapp.com is a good place to send it. If you had something to share with feedback at macgeekapp.com, what would it be? Well, I would say, speaking of that maneuver you try to make, if you are a person who uses messages in Mac OS on your laptop, on your iMac, on some of us have Mac studios, some of us, not all of us. Yeah.

I might be one of the some, I had to buy it, Pete, it was, it was a, it was a, a must have thing when my iMac died. Yeah. There you go. Yeah. So if you're using Mac OS and you use messages, which many of us do, which is great. Cause man, you can type out a long message fast in that, right. Right. But every now and then there's, there used to be a site, I think the site's still there and the app has gone, it's damn you auto correct.

But, uh, cause there are some funny things there that happen in autocorrect, but if you notice you've typed a message and you want to edit it in Mac OS, sometimes you just tap on that last message with two fingers on your trackpad or right click on your mouse and you get a little menu that comes up that says reply or edit or undo or undo send or something like that. But you know what, for me, that works about 30% of the time, 70% of the time I am in a Total frustration.

I just want to edit that word before it's seen. And the other day, I could not get it to edit. I'm like, all right, I'm going to take the mouse. I'm going to go up to the edit menu in messages and see. And lo and behold, there is the ability to click on edit last message, or you could go command E, and it will automatically take you to edit last message. Now that does timeout after you've sent the message, I think more than 10 minutes ago.

Yeah, I'm looking at, I sent you a message before we started recording today, or just as we did. And, and yeah, it's, it's, or as we met today, so far more than 10 minutes ago. In fact, it was almost 30 minutes ago. So yeah, uh, it, it, I don't have the option. It is grayed out, but command E to edit last message. As I'm looking in that menu though, I see, yeah, we have command R to reply. That's the fastest reply. If you're on the keyboard already, just command R and boom, and it'll reply.

It'll start a reply thread to the last message and then command T to invoke the little tap back thing for the last message. Right. And here's the cool thing. Say you want to reply to two or three messages ago, just go up and select that and then hit command R and it will reply to two or three messages, not just the last message. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So because I'm one of those people, I can't tell you how many times I

just sat there in total frustration. Why won't my, you know, my double tap work?

Two finger click whatever. Yeah it sometimes just doesn't doesn't work out what i really want them to do is adopt the unix, you know chat bot convention of up arrow automatically editing the last thing by the way i don't believe that works in messages but it does work in things like slack so if you have typed a message and sent the message and want to edit it, hit the up arrow and it should pull that message into an editor window and let you do it.

I got it now. I got to try this here. So I'm going to, I'm going to send you a test message, Pete. Sure. And I hit the up arrow and nothing happened. Uh, but I did hit command E and let me edit that and uh. Nice. And is there an undo send in that? I don't know if there is or not. Uh, there, I mean, yes, but I don't. I think to delete the message, there is undo send in the, in the right click menu, I don't see it in the, uh, there is not a menu option for it,

so you can't do it. Yeah. There's only an undo. There's undo and it's grayed out for me. So that won't undo the send. Yeah. Yeah. So you can't command Z it. Well, maybe I don't think you can command Z it. No, you cannot. No, you can't. All right. Well, Hey, that's, that's a lot of, a lot of messages tips. Holy cow. And you know what I didn't realize. So I just clicked on it and then you edit it. Yeah. When I click on it, I can see the edits that you did. Yes.

I did not realize that someone could see what you sent, you know. Yeah. Be careful what you send and think you're going to edit. That's right. That's right. Yes. Yeah. People get to see the history there. Yeah, that's right. It's not, it's not lost. It is just, it's good for correcting things, not for redacting things. Right. Yeah. Well, I can, yeah, I imagine undo send, they can't see that though, right? That goes away.

I don't know. I do not know. Let's see, hang on. All right, send me something and then. I just, I just undid that, that send, my guess is. And it's, it's gone. So you can't like there's no indication that what you sent that you said test and testing again. Yeah, no indication. It was ever there You do you see that I deleted?

A message in our thread thread. I see that I deleted. Oh, that's interesting Okay, so so that does essentially redact it we think if you know differently feedback at mackiecab.com Or join our discord at mackiecab.com slash discord and comment there like porthos. John did with this next suite of tips This came in ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday, and Porthos John said a few things that I always remember to check when I'm about to set out in the car for my holiday travel on my iPhone.

It says, for all apps, make sure that you have location services enabled and you have your time zone set correctly or else your navigation apps will be very subpar because they can't reroute you if you hit traffic because it doesn't know where you are. Yeah, fair. Um, for Waze or Google, and this was kind of the tip that buried the lead for me and is the one that made me want to include it in the show. I did not know you could do this in Waze or Google, but not Apple Maps.

Make sure you set the reroute threshold to five minutes or greater. I wish Apple Maps had this setting, but what this means is that it won't bug you for a reroute until it calculates that you will save at least the threshold, which in his advice is five minutes. So many times he says, I've routed around traffic that actually would have been faster to just sit through. And Apple tells you there's a faster route available and how much time it saves.

But unless you have voice nav on, you might not notice. Yeah, interesting. I like that. I didn't, I had no idea that there was a reroute threshold in Waze and Google Maps. And now of course I want it in Apple Maps. He says, my experience, don't bother looking at the best departure advice in any navigation app. They're all wrong and can't predict what holiday traffic will look like 30 minutes from now. That's fair. It is good for predicting traffic during rush hour.

It does a nice job. And I think it just pulls all the cell phones and their lack of movement thereof off the cell towers. And that's how it does it. That's how it does it. Pretty amazing it's able to pull that data. Well, and also Apple Maps and Google Maps share that, you know, anonymized data with themselves, right? So that's how it's figuring out that, yeah, there's traffic here.

It's just, yeah, it's the phones are, if you've got Apple Maps running on your phone, it's, you know, it's talking to Apple or Google Maps is talking to Google. So sure. That's where that, that, uh, he said the last piece of advice is a mantra for my wife and I trust the nav too many times. We have second-guessed the nav and added 30 minutes to our trip.

For local things I override it all the time, but for long haul it's almost always best to trust the nav Yeah, I I I believe I believe in that I've outsmarted myself Several times thinking that oh, I know I can I can I know better like it turns out I don't know no because because it has access to data that I can't see is is the reality Yeah, you're, you're not in the eye in the sky traffic, uh, looking down and going, Oh, uh, the one thing that I will add to this is whichever, uh, uh,

navigation app you use, I believe you can do this in ways it's been a little while since I've used ways, but I know you can do it in both Google maps and now in iOS 17 on the iPhone, you can do it in Apple maps, download offline maps. This is perhaps one of the most valuable things you can do for yourself.

Just go in when you're on a good wifi connection, probably at home, you're relaxed, you're on the couch, you're watching a show or whatever because it's going to take a few minutes to slurp down all the data. And go download maps for any places you routinely travel. So certainly your home area, but if, you know, if there's a city that you're in frequently, go and download that. And if you know you have any road trips coming up for certain, download the offline maps for those.

That way, if you find yourself in a, you know, non coverage area for your phone, you've got map data. If you start a route in coverage area and then travel through non coverage area, usually the phone will have downloaded enough of the map to make it through that. But if you need to start a route in the middle of a non coverage area and you haven't downloaded your maps, good luck. Yeah, you've already fallen off the edge. Yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So they added that in iOS 17 for iPhone. So for sure, um, download those offline maps to your iPhone and do it now. Like, you know, if you're well, do it at home, do it before you realize you need it for obvious reasons. Yeah. Well, for what I hope are obvious reasons. Yep. Dave, I'm, I'm noticing a theme here. What's that? You know, I told, we talked last week that I was going to upgrade

to Sonoma over the weekend and then life took a hold of me and so I haven't done it yet. Yep. But again, I'm, I get a little concerned. Everybody seems to want to downgrade from Sonoma. Well, Jeepster sure did. Yeah. Jeepster shared a bit of a quick tip about downgrade, using time machine to help you downgrade from Sonoma to Ventura. He says, recently I wanted to do this and learned a few things in the process.

Although Migration Assistant allows you to restore from a time machine backup of a newer OS, it doesn't always work smoothly. And I'm a little surprised that there's no indication of the OS version on the time machine backup or a warning that you're trying to restore a newer OS to an older OS. After the downgrade and time machine restore of my latest backup, most everything worked okay, but a few things weren't working well.

I had to manually restore the messages database. Yeah, which makes sense. When I launched the music app, it complained the database was created by a newer version of music. Also correct. The main problem was that my iCloud drive was read only. I couldn't write anything to the drive nor open anything. The workaround was to copy files from iCloud drive to the desktop and then open the file.

I tried logging out of iCloud, turning the drive on and off, yada, yada, upgrading back to Sonoma fixed everything, but I wanted this machine on Ventura. I started looking into which time machine backup I used to restore via Migration Assistant. Since I don't use iCloud Drive that often, it took me a week or so to encounter any issues. Then when I was trying to fix the issue for more than a week, I wasn't sure which backup was the last Ventura backup.

I found that if I booted into Recovery and selected Restore from Time Machine, it there shows the OS version of each Time Machine backup. I couldn't do a restore here, but I could note the last backup I did on Ventura before upgrading to Sonoma. After doing a clean install via USB and Migration Assistant Restore with the correct Ventura Time Machine backup, all is now working well. Since this encounter, I ran across several other people on Reddit that experienced the same thing.

Most of them just wound up going to Sonoma to fix it. So that's really interesting. So the tip here is if you launch, Restore from Time Machine in recovery mode, you get to see the OS version of each backup, which you don't otherwise get to see that's interesting I never I don't know that I ever realized that.

Yeah, well, I haven't had to restore for a long time, but That that is interesting, but then that won't change the operating system though If you just try to if you no no no because the system volume and the data volume are you know? Nair, the two shall meet anymore, but, but at least, you know, where you're coming from. Where it is, the date and time. Yeah. Yeah. Because as Jeepster points out, you know, and I did it here too.

I, I, I did it like an over the top downgrade, which was a trick to even get done when I went from, I think I went from Ventura to Monterey when I did it over the summer, but, uh. It, it, it, I was able to get it, to do it, but all of the Apple apps had problems in one way or another. Third-party apps were mostly fine, but all of this sort of...

Well, think about it. Yeah. I was already running the latest versions, the versions of the third-party apps that I use with Ventura and Sonoma and Monterey are all the same, right? For the most part. Yeah. But the versions of the apps that come inside macOS all change with your operating system. It's not just the operating system that's there. You get mail and photos and music and iCloud drive, and those kinds of things.

And those were the apps that did not work for me when I downgraded because I was now running an older version of the app and it looks at the data store and says, I don't that like that's from a newer version of me. You have broken the space-time continuum.

It's not allowed Yeah, how did you do this? And I'm not gonna let you go any farther is it and smartly like an old version of photos trying to work with you know the newer database format Could potentially be a disaster if it could even use it. So So there you go. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so Interesting, but you beat I wanted before we move on to questions and all that I want to dig into this a little bit. Why are you hesitant now to update to Sonoma?

And I will say... Because everybody wants to go back. That's fair. That's fair. I mean, Chiefster didn't say why, but... No, yeah. And in fairness, the main thing was going to be the mail issue and to stop the scripting. So we've got to figure out how to do that.

Together because you and I obviously answer some of the same email, we answer the same email account and the other guy needs to know what's been answered, what hasn't been answered and see what the answer is so that I can come in and correct Dave when he makes a mistake, you know. That's what Pete's here for. It is. I mean, it really, like I know we have this joke and it's, it's fun and we will continue to have it, but it is true.

Like we catch each other with things that we omit or completely get wrong. Or just simply have a different perspective on it. That too. Because I've done something you've never seen or vice versa. And it's like, oh, okay. So yeah. And I'm looking forward to having Adam in the mix for all those same reasons. Like, you know, he's got a different, yet a third perspective, which is.

I gotta be frank, I'm really not looking forward to that because you guys are going to go, all right, we got to get rid of this idiot. Oh, well just be Pete then, don't be Frank, just be Pete. Where he ain't going. Okay. Ah. All right, hey look, you know, I told you recently about how we had our kitchen renovated, right? Well, Lisa and I finally cooked in it for the first time and thanks to our sponsor, Green Chef. It was an amazing, delicious, and unforgettable experience.

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And boy, this is kind of a downer, but I get it. The good news is, is they, they've got some good video here. So Phil writes in, he says, hi, my wife and I have recently lost our beloved Zoe. She was a 12-year-old beagle that suffered from a heart murmur that led to congestive heart failure.

Needless to say, we are devastated. I have on my iPhone over 400 videos that range from a few seconds to a few minutes, and I'm looking for an easy way to join them in date they were taken or, duh, chronologically. They are both taken vertically and horizontally. They are all in the .mov format, and previously, for combining one or two, I have used QuickTime.

I open the first then drag whatever I wanted in next and then export it but having over 400 is quite daunting So I don't want to use iMovie because whenever I've exported it there It puts a black border around it and sometimes makes it smaller. Do you have any? Excuse me. Do you have any suggestions? Thank you in advance. And here's a clip of our Zoe signed Phil. Thanks for this, Phil. And I'm sorry that you lost Zoe that that's.

Like losing a family. Ah, it is losing a family member. Yeah. Yeah. Um, yeah, yeah, it sucks. It's, it's one of the, it's one of the things with pet ownership that you, uh, you sort of accept going in and it doesn't mean it makes it easier, but, um, but, but as, as a lifelong pet owner, I will remain a lifelong pet owner, even though I know that I'm going into this, but I feel for you, Phil.

Well, as for stitching clips together, I too would have started with iMovie, uh, it, you know, there are lots of different ways and you could try it on your phone as opposed to your Mac and see if that perhaps does it any better. Uh, I don't know. I like, you know, you gotta, you have to try it and, and see, but, uh, I hadn't even thought about doing it on the phone.

I would, the other thing I was wondering is when you share something in iMovie, I think you have the choices to what resolution you do it in. Yeah. I think if you chose the highest, it would. But, but I have seen iMovie kind of, you know, bungle things a little bit. And so I get what, what you're saying, Phil, the, the, the next app that I would try. And, and I would suggest, I suggest this, not, I would suggest this.

I do suggest this largely because it's free. Yeah, exactly is, uh, is DaVinci Resolve. It, this is a professional video editing package suite, much like Final Cut, right, like Final Cut Pro it, it is, you know, on par with that they offer. Their, their whole model is a freemium plan and you can download it and use it for free, there's no watermarks, there's no, any of that.

That there are some very slight limitations to the software that by and large would not affect those of us doing these kinds of things with it. And then if you want to remove those limitations for like, you know, teams and some, some of the more professional level features, you pay 300 bucks, 295 really. And this is their whole model, right? They want people to start using it for their personal projects.

And then those, you know, the small percentage of us that actually learn how to do this in a real way and go get jobs to do this, well then, if you get a job and to do this, you already know how to do it in DaVinci Resolve, you're just going to pay the 300 bucks. And so that's their model. And, uh, and I, I, you know, this is from the folks at black magic. So you know them from lots of other things that we've talked about, like the black magic speed test.

And I think we, we even have a black magic app and cool stuff found a little bit later, but that, that would be the place where you, where I would go. I've used it for some small projects here and it's absolutely fantastic. It is far more. Feature rich and therefore complex than iMovie, but it allows you to be very, very flexible with, with everything. And it's still fairly easy to use. Like I, you know, the first time I question, is it intuitive?

Yeah. Yeah. I think so. I mean, like any of these apps, you have to, you have to spend a little time learning how it wants you to work with it. It's, it's not, you know, iMovie is limited, but the, you know, the on-ramp is pretty short with iMovie with DaVinci Resolve, the on-ramp's a little longer. But the fact that you've already done something in iMovie will give you a framework with which to understand what DaVinci Resolve is doing.

Well, let me offer this hint as well then. Yeah? I could be wrong, I don't know. I'm just guessing here. But I imagine there are some YouTube videos that are tutorials on how to use it. And I, for instance in iMovie, I needed to help my son with a project last year. And we wanted to put a circle around a vehicle that was traveling down a track. Okay. And have it track it. Yeah, yeah. And I went and saw what, you can do that in iMovie. Really?

And it was a fairly simple process. It wasn't that hard. I was like, wow, okay, yeah. And then my other suggestion would be, you know, ask BARD, ask Bing, ask JetGPT. Hey, you know, what's the way to accomplish this? But yeah, I think it was a little more powerful than most people give it credit for. You can do some inlays and it's fair. Yeah. And, and worth asking, you know, one of the AI chat models, how to remove that border that you don't like an I movie.

I used, I used chat GBT earlier this week. I have been using QuickBooks for literally for decades. I trained on it for a long time. And there was a report that I wanted to do in QuickBooks that I have never been able to pull up in the way that I wanted to pull it up. And I was frustrated. I'm like, I know, like I know this data is there. All I wanted to see was over time, how much money... Each customer has paid the business. Like how much have we received from each customer?

Like, you know, I want to see what we receive by year by customer. That's it. This is a, like, this is data that I have. And, uh, I asked QuickBooks how to do it. And it told me how to do it. As long as you were using QuickBooks. You mean you asked GPT how to use. I asked GPT how to do it. Okay. All right. Just, just clear it up. See why we're here with each other. Yep. Okay. I would never have known that I misspoke, uh, until everybody else told me. So, thank you.

But yeah, I asked ChatGBT and it was like, well, here's how you do it. And it was like, ah, no, but that's only if I use QuickBooks' invoicing, which I didn't use for the first couple of years of this particular business. And so I was like, all right, no, I just, like based on deposits, how do I do it? And it was like, oh, do it this way. It was like, I had no idea that I could, that it was this flexible. But- It probably was really simple too. It was super simple.

It was, I spent a fraction of the time. It probably, if I were to have been able to even do this on my own, you know, with traditional methods which would include like Google searching about how to do this and finding other people that might have asked a similar question and, you know, trying to approximate my way there, you know, if that would have taken me two hours, which I really think it would have. You know, ChatGPT got me there in five minutes.

And that was including a detour into the thing that only showed me a subset of my data. So, no, that's not what I want. Yeah, it's not what I want. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Yeah, no. And then it apologizes and goes, okay, I'll do it this way. Yeah, yeah. So I've got a question then, and at the risk of it being political, and if it is, say, hey, stop, we're not going to cover that, go on.

Sure, sure. What happened with OpenAI this week? It grazed across in front of my eyes on a financial network, and I was like, yeah, okay, but I don't have time to watch. Yeah, I think this is company politics, but maybe partisan politics too. That part I don't know, but the board ousted Sam Altman, the CEO, and we're recording this on Wednesday the 22nd, by the way, so by the time this show comes out, this news is going to be old, guaranteed. Wicked old.

Yeah, wicked old, as we say north of Massachusetts here. Yeah, so they ousted him, they installed a new CEO on board, other people left along with him, including some of the higher-ups, I don't know all the names. Then a couple days there was rumors that there were in talks to bring him back as employees were revolting and this that and the other thing not employees were acting in a revolting way they were they saying that we're gonna be so we're out.

Yeah we're gonna leave to yeah and you got nothing and and then satya nadella at microsoft announced that they had brought. Sam and his team into Microsoft to work on this stuff. Now, remember, Microsoft is a major investor in OpenAI, so there's all sorts of corporate politics happening there, too. And then, hours, single-digit hours before we recorded this show, it was announced that he was back, Sam Altman was back as the CEO of OpenAI.

So, it's like, dude. So this will definitely the last five minutes. I'm sorry because the news has changed five times since you Are hearing this we don't normally record this early, but with Thanksgiving and all that we figured we'd give ourselves a weekend off Yeah, so all right. Sorry for that little rabbit. Oh, that's okay Just wondering if you could chat about that because I just didn't know and I knew something that big had gone on But yeah, I didn't know what it was. Yeah, it's crazy.

Yeah, so he's back. So it's uh Boy, boy if this phrase were ever more apt, meet the new boss, same as the old boss, won't get fooled again. Great. Yeah. So, we will see, yeah. But the tech all worked through all of this, so it's like, it's fine. It's going to be okay. Uh, listener John asks, I noticed Siri does not announce calls nor texts when I have my earbuds in anymore. The setting in Siri preferences is set to headphones and car.

She seems to work in the car just fine. It used to work when I was listening to overcast and a text message would come in, it would pause the podcast and she would read me the text. Now she does not. Any notions on how to nudge that lovely lady into doing her duty and reading me my text messages. I've rebooted my phone, checked and unchecked the settings. Do you think signing out of iCloud and back in would nudge her? Pete, any thoughts on this?

Yeah. So I did have some thoughts on this and, uh, and I didn't mean to insult your intelligence, John, um, when I replied. So hopefully this goes out to other people that are having problems, but I, I think I would've had more of a problem had I not gone into answering this question. So I just got the new 15 pro max. Yeah. Loving that camera, man. Let me tell you what. That's a great camera. I took a picture of the, where the heel meets the sole of the boot of Italy at night.

And it's just gorgeous. I mean, it's, it looks like it's dusk. This is from the plane, I presume. This is from the airplane. Yeah. Yeah. Of course you did. I mean, you could see, you know, across those many hundreds of miles at night. That's awesome. It's beautiful. That's awesome. So, but I digress. So, I said I noticed that Siri doesn't announce calls or text when I have my earbuds in anymore. And the setting in preferences is set to headphones and car and it seems to work in the car though.

So it used to work when I was listening to Overcast and a text would come through, it would announce it and say, you know, she'd read me the text and now she doesn't. So. So, you know, I had the same thing. But what I did is I went through there and I said, I believe there are two places you need to have enabled to make this work. One is for calls and the other is for text and other, and it says, you know, other apps and notification, apps notifications.

So, the first thing is to ensure announced notifications is toggled on. Mine was off in the picture that I sent him. And I'm really, I said, I'm not trying to insult your intelligence. Uh, is your announced calls set to headphones and car? Which he said it was. And I go, I'm assuming yes, because there's no car only option. And if you look down in the screenshot that I, you can, you can have it announced calls always, headphones in car or headphones only or never. Those are your three options.

Interestingly, you don't have car only and no headphones. Which is, which is what's happening. Yeah, no, I think he said that he's got it headphones in car. Yeah. I like the idea of signing out and back in, um. I said, I turn off, I turn off announce call. I turn calls off and say never, then reboot the phone and turn it on and select it again. Yeah. And it's, yeah, it's text messages that, that, uh, that he's having the problem with, right.

Cause calls are still coming through, I think. So. That's what he's saying. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, and I told him to try that. And he says, yeah, it's turned on and I am a Mac geek, and I'll try to turn it off in the reboot idea, thanks.

And then I wrote him back again. I said, I was about midnight when I answered him the first time, and I said, I realized I forgot to mention also that logging out and logging back into your Apple ID after about 15 minutes might also nudge the S-Lady into compliance with the settings. There's nothing more frustrating than you have a setting clearly marked and turned on and it's not working. Uh, but in this case, I guess it would.

My suspicion was that there's, there's two places, basically in settings. This convoluted. There might be a third, Pete. There may be, I mean, iOS is deeply complex. That's foreshadowing. I think I might have found the third. So I went into the settings app on iPhone and in the notification section, I went down to messages. There's some new things here that I've not seen before. Uh, of course you can allow notifications globally or not.

So with them enabled, you have critical alerts and time sensitive notifications, which can always be delivered immediately, no matter what, even if you're in a focus mode or, or things like that, where this gets interesting though, is more towards the bottom where there is a section for announce, which probably where we are. Uh, announce notifications. Uh, if you don't have it on, then maybe it won't announce any of these.

If you turn it on, you get two options, you get to announce only time sensitive and direct messages, or you get all notifications. So I would play with those settings because it's possible you have the announce turned off in messages. You'd still get a notification in notification center, but the announce of it would not happen. And this is new. I don't know if it's new in iOS 17. I haven't been here in a while. But, um, but I think if you turn them on, you're going to turn them off quickly.

You're going to get notified to death. I could be wrong. I mean, I know I would. I mean, yeah, yeah. It depends on, right. It, yeah, it depends, but, but that might be the, uh, but that, I mean, that seems to be what John's looking for. And so to, to add that in, like that's, that's where I'm currently in a chat group at work. That's pushing 800 members. And so we're getting 400 messages a day that in WhatsApp. So that's gotta, I had to turn those notifications. I was going to say,

you can mute by group in WhatsApp and in messages. So yeah, yeah. One thing about that, and I've noticed, I noticed this happen to me. I mentioned it on the show when it did. I've also noticed it. Um, my, my daughter had the same problem and I was able to solve it for her because I knew right away when it happened, she texted me and she said, uh, I'm no longer getting notifications from my fiance when, when he texts me. And it was like, okay, I think I know what's happening.

Like, is he in pinned? Shit and blocked. Well, kind of. Is he pinned in your, you know, you can pin up to nine either people or group chats in iMessage. Is he one of your pinned? And she said, of course, like, great. Here's the problem with a pinned chat. You don't get all of the icon based status symbols for a given chat.

Because if you go into messages and, you know, tell it to mute a particular chat, you will then see a little, you know, grayed out bell with a slash through it next to that chat to give you a visual indication that you've chosen to mute these. When someone is in a pinned message at the top, there is no visual indication that you have muted them. And sometimes you can accidentally mute people, like I had done with my daughter and like she had done with her fiance.

And so I said, I know the answer and told her, you know, go into the thing. And once they're there, you know, once you're in there, you have to tap on their name at the top And then you can see if the hide alerts option is, you know, is, is turned on and turn it off. And, and in both cases, you know, it was, that was the issue. Uh, so be aware of that too, if you ever run into it. So, yep. All right. Here's another one. I, I sent a guy a message yesterday and it went

through it, delivered. Blue bubble, delivered. Then I'm like, he didn't respond. And that's, you know, like, okay. He may have been out somewhere, whatever gave him many hours. Then I wrote him again last night and it's like, yeah, blocking's active. Oh, I took my wife's phone and I texted him. I'm like, dude, did I tick you off? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he's like, no, wait, what is this? You know, he's like, is this you?

Did you just, and he texted me on my phone. Did you just message me from your wife's phone? I go, yeah. Yeah. He goes, I didn't block you. Well, okay. He goes, I didn't get the message. Wow. But, but it said blocking is active. But after that, after he texted me, we were able to go back and forth.

Any thoughts on that? I, that's just weird. That is weird, I mean, you know, we, we have to take him at face value that he did not block you and then unblock you, but you know, like I often do with you, obviously I have to block you. Yeah, absolutely, I don't blame you, Dave. Right. I mean, I'd block me, I block myself sometimes. I like it. You know, just. Yeah. Damn, he's annoying. Yeah. Stop. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Um, yeah, yeah, I, I, that part doesn't make sense to me, but okay. You know, who knows? Who knows? Well, you know, that's the thing. You get a strange bit in there somewhere, somehow. Yeah, exactly. Every now and then weird, weird things happen. Uh, before we leave the announcing of messages, Eric, uh, in our live chat, while we're recording, this reminds us that there is also a control center toggle for air pod to announce notifications. And that would be another place to, uh, check for John.

Who's having trouble getting those notifications in. So thank you for that, Eric. Thanks for the question, John. Yeah. That led us down a fun little tangential path, which, which is what we love to do here. This is why we love doing the show. All right. You want to take us to, uh, Steve, Pete. Steve. Yeah. I'm sorry. I wasn't fast around the draw. There it is. Free disk space. He says, hi guys. I have a puzzle for you. Oh, Or as the Brits call it, a real poser.

Really? That's what they call a puzzle, a poser. Cause we. Or a question that can't, is difficult to answer. No, I understand. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Cause we have like poser means something very different here. This is true. Yeah. Interesting. The things we learn, you know, we, uh, it's a two countries separated by a common language and we get to learn because of it. Indeed it is. There you go. All right. He says, look at the three screenshots below. All right. Everybody stop.

I'll explain the screenshots when we get there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Taken from iStat menus, system information, and get info of my primary SSD capacity. In my effort to determine exactly how much hard drive space I have remaining on my 512GB internal SSD, I just can't seem to get an accurate answer. System info shows 157GB free, iStat menus shows a whopping 351GB free, and right-clicking the desktop icon to get info. Windows shows 327 gigabytes used, but 350 gigabytes free.

Man, you're making hard drive space there, Steve. Good for you. He goes, how is that possible on a 512 gig? Yeah, because 327 and 350 is definitely more than 512. Yeah, we don't do public math here. We know that. But, but we know that. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, three and three is six, can't get it from here. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, all right. Any thoughts, where would you recommend I go for the most accurate representation of my used and free space? Thanks guys, Steve.

And. All right. Well, we'll take it from here. I don't want, I don't want to go. Yeah. Okay. I won't go to that. But I will say my opinion, first off, before you even answer this, Dave, is system info is going to be. The limiting factor. Well, because that's well, okay. Go, you go, go, man. Go. You, I, you're correct in that. That is how much actual free space is there, right?

No, I, I believe that that is an accurate number, but we can't stop there because I think what you're seeing from, uh, um, I stat menus and the get info window is more informative for you where it says there's 351 gigs free, the one 57 is correct. I believe, but the three 51 is the number that actually matters to you. And the reason is snapshots your Mac as part of time machine backups, perhaps carbon copy, cloner backups, perhaps other things, system updates, et cetera.

Is likely making snapshots on a regular basis and those snapshots can take up significant amounts of space, but they are also purgeable. And so while you have snapshots that, you know, amount to what, about 193, you know, gigabytes there, if I'm doing public math correctly, Uh, they, if you, if you were to need that space, macOS would purge them, starting with the oldest one, most likely, and, and free up that space for you to use. So the one 57 shows you the amount of free space.

That's truly free after all your snapshots are include, you know, include it with, with the snapshots being included in the used space, the three 50 would not include the snapshots in the use space. It is technically used, but it can be purged if you need to use that storage. So what you're seeing from ISTAT and the GetInfo window is correct.

Now the GetInfo window is likely also correct with the 327 because that's going to give you, you know, if you've got 512 minus 327, that gets you to about 185. So, you know, it's close. The snapshots are always kind of moving things around. There's other purgeable space that happens on APFS volumes, so it's never quite going to be, you're never quite going to get exactly there. I guarantee you, in most cases, the space is going to be used by snapshots.

You can go see this, and macOS now will show you. It used to be the only way to see it was in Carbon Copy Cloner, but now you get to see it in macOS. Go launch Disk Utility, click on the name of your drive in the left column, and then wait. At the bottom of the detail pane for that you will see APFS snapshots on name of drive. It will take a little bit for that list to populate and then it will take even longer for that list to start showing you sizes.

Once it does, you can actually sort the list by size or date created or however you want. And you could start, if you needed to, you know, free up space quickly, you could delete some of the larger snapshots to get rid of those and free up that that actual space, but the system will do this for you. So you don't really have to worry about it as much. Okay. I'm sorry. So, so in disk utility, you click on the name of the drive and then what?

And then wait, uh, you know, once you've clicked on the name of the drive on the right, you know, the right hand pane of that, that shows you the details of the drive that you've clicked on, it's going to show you the name and the, you know, the mount point and the capacity and the format type and all that. But at the bottom of that window, it should say APFS snapshots on drive name.

It's certainly on your system drive. Yeah. And like I said, that window will be empty at first, then it will fill with all of your snapshots and then it will start populating one by one the amount of storage each one of them is using. So that's where that mystery is generally solved. And it's when we first got APFS, disk utility didn't have any of this. So it was really difficult to even, even if you had a hunch that this is what it was, it was like, well, how do I prove it?

Well, good question. You know, so yeah, now at least you get to prove it. You think clean my Mac would do any of that as well? Would that help? It might, yeah, clean my Mac might, might show you some of that too. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cause I'm just interested in looking at mine. I got a one terabyte. It's just, I got 250 available and I got, or 253 and I'm like, I got a lot more than that available. Cause if I looked

at the bottom finders, it's like a 570 available. Yeah. So you have. So that's what's going on. You have a couple hundred gigs of snapshots, which is totally normal, totally normal these days. Yeah. Okay. Yep. Shall we go to Larry? Yeah, but there's nothing totally normal about me and you know that. I do. I do know that. I was just being nice. We're kind to each other. We do like each other much as we rib each other. Yes.

Yeah. All right. Larry writes in and says, hi guys, I just need an app to VNC into my Windows computer at home for my M1 MacBook Pro when I'm out of my home office. I need to control the Windows computer to get into our inventory system. It remotes into the inventory once I tell it to. Just need an easy app to access my Windows computer from my Mac. Any help would be appreciated. Maybe a link on how to do it. I couldn't find anything searching podcast notes.

Yeah. So, you know, um, VNC is very easy to do from a Mac. Apple's built in screen sharing supports VNC and it's a little, I say it's easy, it's easy like everything if you know, but if you don't know, then we'll teach you and that's why we're here.

In the Finder, you go to the Go menu, you choose Connect to Server, and then you type in VNC colon slash slash and either the IP address or network name of the computer you want to control, assuming the computer is running a VNC server, which it sounds like your Windows is, at max are running a VNC server if you turn on screen sharing or remote management, then it will ask you for your credentials and let you log in, presumably.

However, VNC is really only built to work on local networks, and you said you want to connect remotely. So you have to get there, virtually, and there's a variety of ways to do it. You could- Easiest. Go ahead, Pete. What's the easiest? Tail scale. You could tail scale, yep, if your company would let you do a tail scale thing.

Oh, there you go. I'm glad you said that you're right. Tailscale, any kind of VPN that would get you into your local network at work, your remote network in that way would, would be the step. And then from there, you would invoke that, that, you know, go find or go connect to server, type it in just like you were local. It just seems to me that tailscale ignores firewalls and all kinds of stuff. Tailscale. Yeah. It knows how to traverse all of those things. Yeah. No, you're totally right.

Yeah, tail scale is what I certainly what I would would use but I I don't I don't have to deal with a Corporate overlord that tells me what tech I can and can't install on on devices, right? But tail scale would absolutely work a VPN into your corporate network would likely Also work if your company has that already set up a lot of companies that sort of mandate this kind of thing do so that would be another way to do it.

The last way of doing it, and this does require installing some software on your Windows computer, is to use a piece of software called Screens Connect. Screens is an app for the Mac and your iPhone and your iPad to VNC from those devices to connect to other computers from those devices. And this is my favorite to use on iPhone because there is no built-in VNC client. You have to use a third party and screens is awesome. It's just so good.

It works great on iPad too. And obviously it works on the Mac as well. Um, screens connect is the cool part that allows you to do this remotely without having to think about IP addresses and VPNs and tail scale or any of that. If it, you know, it is a purpose built thing. You would install this on your. Windows computer, you'd install screens, connect on your windows computer, and they do have a windows version and then you log into your screens connect account.

You then on your Mac log screens into your screens, connect account, and it will appear. Uh, you know, your windows machine will just appear there cause it knows about it and it will allow you to connect. So that, that would be probably if you're doing this on, on the regular, that would be a, a straightforward way of just getting it done. So, um, so we'll put links in the show notes to screens. Yeah, and is that freeware or is there a subscription?

Cause there's like go to my PC was one that was a commercial one years ago. Yeah, I think screens connect is a free utility. Oh, there it is. Screens connect is a free utility, complimentary to screens for iOS or Mac that makes sure. Correct. For Windows PC reachable from anywhere in the world. But you will pay for screens for iOS or for MacOS. Um, so that, that's the, the different screens for MacOS. So you pay for the software, but then it works. But then it works. A lot of subscription.

Yeah. You pay, you pay 30 bucks for screens for Mac. And, uh, I'm looking to see what they're going to charge us. Nope. Wrong one. Uh, I was looking to see what it costs currently on iPhone. Well, we're, you're looking for that. Uh, and Dave's going to link it to this. It's 20 bucks, $19.99, uh, on, on iPhone. 20 whole dollars. Okay. Yeah, I know. It's great. Like, no, it, like it, screen, I've been using screens for years. It is, I love it.

So I had never heard of it. I'm glad you said that. That's cool. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah. And Dave's putting the link in the show notes, but it's edovia.com. E-D-O-O-V-I-A. Yeah, absolutely. Are we on time? Yeah. All right. Let's, um, let's, well, I want to do some cool stuff found because I think that, uh, there's some, there's some fun things to follow up on that we, that we haven't followed up on the first thing, or rather the next thing that I want to do.

Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Go before you go. We have it, we have it on the agenda, but it's, it's parentheses out and all that. but I have an answer. Do complications increase battery usage? My friend who has an Apple Watch, his battery was dying half a day in, the latest update he said solved it. Correct. So if you've got the Apple Watch batterying down and it was the weather complications. I think we talked about it before. No, we didn't. We talked about it in pre-show.

I'm glad you brought this up. Okay. Yeah, listener Steven did some testing. You're right that I think it's 10.1.1 for watchOS solves these sort of mysterious, you know, battery drain during the day issues with Apple Watch. Listener Steven did some digging and figured out that it was weather complications on the home, you know, on your watch screen that were causing it. Maybe we did talk about it. I don't think we did. I think we were waiting to hear from Steven at the results of his test.

And he said, in fact, it, you know, it watchOS 10.1.1 does solve that specific thing with the weather complications. He was able to make the problem go away by turning off all his complications and then he added them back one by one. It was a great little troubleshooting thing. Yeah. Yeah. My friend, Brian said the same thing. He said, I'd go half a day and it just wasn't worth it. So he left it at home, updated it and it's gone away. So that's great. That's great.

Yeah. All right. Sorry for the interruption. Brief interruption. We're back to the show agenda. We are back to the show. No, it's totally fine. I just wanted to take a minute and thank all of the folks who, um. Uh, who I'm, I'm pulling things up here. You want me to dox them? No, I don't want you to dox anybody, please. Oh, all right. Uh, I want to thank everybody, uh, who has contributed to our Mac eCab premium in the last couple of weeks. This is, I always say it's not mandatory.

It is completely optional. It was created by your demand, by your request that we create a way for you to, uh, allow us to, to receive your contributions. So essentially like Patreon, except we don't use Patreon because we did this long before Patreon existed. And if I was smarter, I would have taken this engine and like marketed it to other people and then we'd run Patreon, but I'm not that smart. I built a lot of things for myself and then never think to, uh, to sell them to others.

You know, like when I built a content management system from scratch in 1999, Pete, who would have thought, I didn't think at the time that too many other people would want my content management systems. It could have been Dave press instead of WordPress. It could have been Dave press. And then I, instead of podcasting from Durham, New Hampshire, I'd be podcasting from my private island. Your yacht and your island. Yeah. Be that as it may.

I lead a charmed life nonetheless. And part of it is a big part of it is you folks listening to the show, contributing to the show with your questions and also contributing for those of you who can and would like to via premium. And so we want to give some thanks here to those of you who have contributed since the last time we did this, which is now two weeks. We didn't do it in the last show.

So we got $10 contributions from Abel in Santa Rosa, Peter in Auburn, Scott in Bourbonnaise, Neil in West Hartford, James in San Antonio. Mark in Coopersburg, Frank in Tunbridge, Timothy in West Windsor, Frank in Voorhees, Barry in Des Plaines, Warren in Gloucester, Brian in Southbury, Santiago in Palm City, John and Wake Forest, Kevin in Edison, Michael in Robbins, Matthew in Forked River, and Paul in Peabody. Thank you so much to all of you. We got a $15 contribution from Bob in La Pesce.

Thank you, Bob. And we got $25 contributions from Brian in Walton Hills, Paul in Danville, Robert in Paso Robles, Craig in New Lambton, Jim in Myrtle Beach, Thomas in Gardner, Tony in San Jose, Gary in Houston, Daniel in Levittown, Michael in Altadena, Rick in Traverse City, Harvey in Shoreham, John in Fredericton, Mark in Knoxville, Timothy in Coralville, thanks to all of you. We got a $27 contribution.

For the date of the show, maybe, I don't know, uh, for, uh, from Elliot in Lebanon, a $50 contribution from Daniel in San Diego and a $60 contribution from Steven in Granger. Thanks to all of you for your contributions, your support and your generosity. It really does make a huge, huge difference to what we can do here. Yeah. Yeah. And I want to check because we, We can take contributions via Podcasting 2.0, the value for value thing there, where you can send Bitcoin via the Lightning Network.

And indeed, we have had some. Three weeks ago, Squeegee sent us 2,000 Satoshis, and again yesterday, 2,000 Satoshis from Squeegee. Thank you so much. And three days ago, we got 6,200 sats from VMD. And I'm looking to see, will this convert that to dollars for me? No, Spotlight will not. 6,200 Satoshis. To US dollars. Let's see. That would be... No, come on. I could do this much faster. Come on, Satoshi. FTS lady. Yeah, I'm not that smart, Pete. So 6,200 Satoshis is $2.26 as of today.

So thank you very much. There you go. Yep. I mean, that is the nice thing about the, the blockchain stuff is you can send, especially the lightning network where the fees are sort of mitigated is you can send micropayments without incurring huge fees with our premium program where you're uh, sending a U S dollars via currency, uh, we incur standard processing fees for those, so several percent, you know, usually between two to 4%, depending on kind of how it all works,

plus a trip per transaction fee of about 35 cents, which is why we have a $10 minimum on your contribution size, because otherwise, you know, if you contributed two bucks. Doing that on my show too, because a $5 contribution takes 13% off the top. Exactly. Yeah, the percentage gets huge with with a small contribution. So that that's why we that's why we have that $10 minimum.

And you can learn all about that at mackeycab.com slash premium. And now, We get to do some cool stuff found back in show, uh, 1,009, I believe it was, we were talking about. Mapping your home for use with net spot to see then, you know, where your wifi, um, dead zones were and all of that good stuff. And we asked you for your, um, um, thoughts and boy, did they respond? And boy, did you respond? So Ian starts us off.

He says, uh, I an option for two options for mapping your house layout one would be Wi-Fi man from, Ubiquiti And then the other is poly cam for room scans it creates 3d models with texture overlay, so we put Both of those links in the show notes for you Elliot. Said so this was show 1008 sorry not 1009. I had I had that wrong Elliot says I've used RoomScan Pro LiDAR for room mapping on my iPhone for years. It uses the LiDAR function of your phone to do its measurements.

Very efficient, dead simple operation, accurate. In fact, I've used it to generate the maps that I use for Wi-Fi mapping of my house. With NetSpot, this is the Pro version, which has a price. I don't know what that price is off the top of my head, but I am looking here, it offers in-app purchases. So I don't know if I can pull that up easily while I'm here. In-app purchases, yes, the pro version is 10 bucks. So that gets you the LIDAR subscription. So there you go. All right.

And then, oh, and if I was smart enough to look, I'd already put that in the show notes for myself. Yeah, I outsmarted myself, Pete, you know, tacos it's, it's, it's what we do here. That's what we do. This is why we take notes. Block ourselves. We outsmart ourselves. Yeah. Um, self-inflicted stupidity wounds. Yeah. Yeah. Robert, uh, at, uh, who goes by do it for me.

Because I think his company's name is Do It For Me Solutions, says that he uses MagicPlan for mapping his house to use with NetSpot. So my guess is it's not just his house that he uses that with, it's probably clients' homes as well. And then just as we were getting ready to record the show, we got a note from Case who says, "'I've used the Scan2CAD service from canvas.io. On a new two-floor house, and it produced a fairly accurate layout where the top and bottom floors were correctly aligned.

That's important for Wi-Fi stuff, since they shared an interior staircase that was captured in my interior walkthrough." Ooh. He says, "'I purchased the 3D plan option. I believe the service involves some human involvement on the back end, since it takes a couple of days to turn around. Window sizes and placement seems correct to within an eighth of an inch or less.

I don't think I had to provide actual measurements of parts of the scanned area for extra accuracy, but that is an option to increase it. The 3d sketchup plan had the various features organized into layers that can be selectively hidden, which helps when trying just to isolate the interior walls for a 2d floor plan and not include the ceiling fixtures. Wow. Interesting.

Huh? This is cool. All right. Well, I can imagine if you're getting ready to do a, uh, any kind of a remod or anything as well, that it'll help you determine what your load bearing walls, where, you know, where you're likely to have plumbing and wiring and. I, I really wish that I had done this before we did all our kitchen and bathroom remodels.

It would have made, I mean, when you order cabinets and that sort of thing, they require you to have professional measurements for obvious reasons before they start making your cabinets. Cause. It's about two feet. They don't, yeah. They don't want to be on the hook for that.

Well, we worked, we worked with two different, uh, home, like we went to, we went to Lowe's we actually, when I say we worked with two different, we worked with like 10 different places, but we started with the ones that were like. You know custom cabinets from this, you know boutique company or whatever and we had given them a budget of like.

Everything for two bathrooms and a kitchen and when we went and this happened routinely with these like You know boutique little places when we went back Every time they would say well, let's start with the kitchen now. I gotta tell you Uh what i've put together for you is about 20 over your entire budget just for the kitchen and it was like Like, why did you ask me for a budget if you were going to ignore it? If you weren't going to follow it. Yeah. Correct.

Like, I'm sure, and what they built was gorgeous, but it was also way beyond the scope of what we wanted to do. It was like, well, let's just re, let's take out some walls and let's do this. This'll be frigging amazing. It's like, yeah, but you know. It would be amazing, but if you're going to pay for it, we'll do it. Yeah, if I'm spending your money, but like, there's no world where those prices, like some of these places were like, oh yeah, it's going to be 150 grand to do this.

It's like, cool. My house isn't worth enough for that to be a wise investment. I'm never gonna, it's not gonna happen. Let's, let's just start there. This isn't, this isn't our forever home that we love and have to have. Correct. Yeah. And, uh, and so finally, you know, we were advised to go to, uh, either Lowe's or Home Depot, we started with Lowe's and we worked with a guy there that, um, no murders were committed. But it's only because that I'm willing to admit that's right.

This guy would forget things from appointment to appointment, but to our, yeah, it was like the part where we walked out and chose not to go back. And we were very polite when we walked out, but we shouldn't go back was when we had, you know, we kept going and spending hours and hours with this guy. It became date night. It was like, oh, we'll go spend two hours with Tom at Lowe's. and not,

We got to, you know, like the end of a two-hour session. He's like, Tate, so do you guys want to pick out your countertops now? And Lisa and I looked at each other and we're like, we did that last time, Tom. And he's like, oh, I don't have that in my notes. And it was like, yup, we're not doing it right now. Yeah. And so we left and it was like, no, we can't do that again. We went and worked with someone at, uh, Home Depot. We had one appointment.

The entire thing was designed. It was exactly what we wanted. It was like, wow, if only we had known this eight months ago when we started this process. So anyway, uh, well, and there were, you know, you just got the right home Depot and the wrong Lowe's and I'm sure that's correct in another town, right? I mean, there's some really talented people working at these places, correct? We just got the wrong, we got the wrong rep at one and the right rep at the other.

That's exactly what it was. Yeah. This is, this wasn't about home Depot versus Lowe's in a general sense. It was a very specific, you know, um, but, uh, but yeah.

Having and he had measurements wrong at one point where it was like, How is that all gonna fit there like this is wonderful what you've built for us But I don't understand how we can have a refrigerator a stove house is this going in two cabinets in the width where we have A refrigerator and a stove and a very thin cabinet like how did that work out and he's like oh? I think I have the wrong measurements. It's like Okay, okay anyway, so I wish we had had that to to you know.

To do this. But anyway, we didn't. And now we have a gorgeous kitchen and it's finished. As I mentioned earlier, and also last night, I walked into the kitchen and I had a vision of three more cabinets we want to add to what we've done. So we're going back to Home Depot to visit our friend there. And Karen is going to help us spend more money and add more cabinets. But it was, it was like, as soon as I walked in, I'm like, we should do this.

You could just hang them in mid-air like in the Roblox game. Yeah, that'd be cool. Anyway, Lou, normally in, I think, Canada, but writing from France, oh no, he's normally in Vermont. Lou in Vermont, currently in France, writes, he says, I found this great app called Navigate to Photo, we'll link in the show notes, I found it quite valuable during our current travels in France.

Sometimes, my brain powers down when I try to recall the name or location of that wonderful restaurant or other site we visited on a previous trip to any given location. With Nav2Photo, if I have a photo from a previous visit, it makes it easy to locate. With the photo on the screen of my iPhone, there'll be the option titled Navigate to Photo in the share sheet.

So you go through photos, you find the photo, you go to the share sheet, you click Navigate to photo once you've installed the app, tap that the navigation app that he wants to use for location comes up. So apple maps, Google maps, ways, whatever you set comes up and the location where the photo was taken, pops into the selected app and I am on my way. Nice. Right? I like. This has got to be using the Meta data though with this video.

Yes, of course it's using the Meta. You could figure this out on your own, but this makes it super easy, right? And where I thought about it, you know, we like to do when we go to cities and we love our city vacations, we like to do like food tours. It's a fun way to spend a little bit of time, learn, you know, some of the history of a city from someone that lives there and eat some good food that you might not otherwise have.

But while you're walking we take pictures of places and like oh, we should come back here that restaurant looks cool Or you know that whatever that cheese that we sampled at this place was amazing let's go back and get some for a charcuterie plate at our Airbnb or whatever and. We take pictures and then we're searching in them.

I never thought of even using the Metadata to do this we would I would literally take a picture of like the outside of a place But if I forgot to take it, it's like crap now I don't know where to go. I think it's generally in this area, but I don't know. I don't remember the name. Now you don't have to. I need to start doing that because you, especially, yeah. Well, there's one of those there's the one town that's hard to find stuff.

There's all these alleyways and all these little hole in the wall places is Osaka, Japan. It's that way in Narita as well, but Osaka is particularly, there's a lot of alleyways near our hotels. Sure. You go down and, you know, up this staircase and it's hard to find it. This looks like a great solution to that problem. Yep, it's on my phone for the next trip, absolutely. And the nice part is, all the pictures that I took of previous trips to places work with this.

It's not like you have to, you're not starting from scratch the day you download the app. Right, yeah, the data's there. The data's there? Yeah, man. Speaking of cool things, and we are because it's stuff in that sense, Patrick tells us, he says, with the release of iPadOS 17, iPads equipped with a USB-C port now support what's called UVC devices. That's USB video class devices. I was still lost at this point in the email.

Bear with us. I'll get you to where this is going to go. This means, Patrick says, that you can use external webcams in supported applications like FaceTime. Okay, that's cool, great. You can also use USB capture cards to bring in any HDMI signal. That's a convoluted way of describing and bearing the lead here, but he goes on. This means you can use your iPad as an external display for your gaming console, your Raspberry Pi, et cetera.

One of the ways I thought of using it as a camera field monitor for filming while on location or traveling. You'll need a supported application. He says, I use Cam X or Orion, makers of the Halide camera app. And we'll put links in the show notes for both of those. But what this means is that with the right USB to HDMI, capture card, so you just needed, you know, an HDMI.

Uh input to USB-C so, that's what we're calling a capture card with air quotes here because it we used to buy a card to put in our computers now you just do it with USB uh but with that and of course the right app your iPad becomes an external HDMI monitor for any kind of headless setup a Raspberry Pi or you know if you've got a Mac mini server that doesn't have a monitor but Occasionally, you need to plug one in way easier to bring your iPad and a little USB dongle that you can get for what?

30 bucks or something plug that in and now your iPad is a temporary USB or HDMI screen to use with your Mac mini get it booted up set up. Okay, great I'm on my way and then you know, you once you get it rolling you can use screen sharing or whatever. So I I I thought this this was I'm I'm super stoked about this and and I put a link in the show notes to a YouTube video That Patrick made for us well for everybody but to do this and he talks about, In there he links several.

Capture cards the Elgato Elgato Camelink 4k Which is $99 the generic capture card that he found on Amazon is $20 so again, if you're just using it for a, um, for a, you know, for just as a headless screen, you don't care so much about the resolution, there's a, there's another generic one from Guaremoc for $17. So we'll, uh, I'll, I'll put that one in the show notes. So there you go. Um, yeah, fun. That's, that's awesome. Okay. And that just, as you were started talking about that,

I went, oh yeah. Now that I've got the iPhone 15, my lightning to HDMI no longer works for... Broadcasting out broadcasting out right but this is it lets you come in as a monitor correct. Yeah. Yeah Which is cool. I can think of a lot of things where that would be super handy. So yeah, thank you for uh Thank you for that patrick really Super cool stuff. Yeah. Yep. Um, because we i'm trying to think where we are here. You know The one that fits into this, uh, very kind of more than kind of very

nicely. Very, very nicely is one from listener Ed and yup. And I think I have it up here. Yeah, I do. Yeah, we talked about the stream deck in the last episode, uh, being a little control surface, uh, external USB connected control surface.

It's got its own little screen in there. You can customize what appears on all the tiny little buttons if you are watching the show On YouTube you can see Pete and I just pulled our stream decks up, I realized as I grabbed mine that it sits way too close to it's right there Dave Yep, and and Pete hits this little ding button, right? So you can use it to trigger all these things stream decks as Pete mentioned in the last episode are not Inexpensive at about a what 150 bucks. Yeah Yeah.

However, there is an iPhone app and an iPad Stream Deck app that you can use as a Stream Deck controller. And what used to be true is no longer true because when I used this in March, I had to do it on the two-week free trial before I would have had to pay for it. But thankfully, I was only doing it for a week in my hotel room and I didn't bring my Stream Deck. So I had this when I recorded the show and it worked out fine.

But Ed says uh, the iOS app is now free with a six button app and you can control your stream deck, uh, with that. And now it's free. For six bucks. Guess who's not going to risk breaking his stream deck on the road all the time now. Oh yeah. You just need to have like an iPad or something that you can use with that. Yeah. Well, see, so I use my iPhone as my camera, but that being said, my, my daughter just came home for Thanksgiving. Yep. And so she moved into her brother's iPhone 13.

I've now got her iPhone 11 with a tiny crack in it, which I can use as a camera. Absolutely. Then I can use my iPhone as a stream deck during that. Nice. I like it. So I've got all these iPhones laying around now. Yeah. You know, I have my 13, my 13 mini is the camera that lives in the studio here and I love it.

I know it's a little bit, it seems a little bit decadent to use an iPhone for that and it is but it's also the best camera we've found for the price so yep the best webcam we found for the price. It's good stuff. Yeah. They're just so nice as cameras. Thanks for hanging out with us folks. And for those of you who are in the U.S. who are hearing this on release day, I hope you had a happy Thanksgiving. Looking forward to a fun December. Next episode, I believe, is when Adam Christensen.

Joins the team here, if I'm not mistaken. And yeah, we're looking forward to that too. looking forward to heading to CES in January, looking forward to all of 2024. Like it's, I'm stoked about where we're going with the show here. I'm stoked to have all of you as listeners. Tell somebody about the show. We would love to have your friends as listeners. We would love to help them learn like we all get to learn every single time we get together here.

Thanks to you for doing that. thanks to our sponsors, greenchef.com slash, I need to remember what the code is off the top of my head, I don't remember, it's gonna be somewhere there though. I know I got it, mgg250, green, green, eugh, easy for me to say, greenchef.com slash mgg250, just go to mattgeekup.com slash sponsors, all that stuff is always there, including some deals from people who are no longer sponsoring us when the deal is still active.

Yeah, what a banquet. I am grateful to be here, I'm grateful for this show. Music. I'm grateful for this audience. Thank you. This is so much fun. Uh, that's what I'm grateful for this year. I hope your Thanksgiving is amazing with family, friends, loved ones, or that it's just amazing anyway, regardless. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks everybody. Thanks Pete for, uh, for keeping this fun and doing it with me. And I'm so happy we get to do this together. Yup.

Ditto. Uh, Pete, your shirt has three amazing words on it. And these are perhaps some of the, uh, perhaps the best generic advice that I can give to you, my fellow human. And those words are, Pete? Especially all you tom turkeys out there. Today is the day that you don't get caught. Music.