It's time for Mac Geek, Gab, and listener Joe brings us our quick tip of the week. He says, I found this after being frustrated with not simply being able to paste in a phone number in the iPhone phone app in the keypad part. Normally, a data detector will detect a phone number and just offer to let me call. But that doesn't always work. What I found is that you can paste a phone number in, but it's hidden.
When you have the dial pad screen up, you simply tap and hold above the keypad in that sort of white area where the phone number would appear eventually, and you will get a paste option. And then tap paste, and boom, your number appears, and then you can hit the little green button to make the call. More tips like this, plus your questions answered today on MacGeek Hub 1062 for Monday. November 4th, Use Your Common Sense Day 2024.
Greetings, folks, and welcome to Mac Geekab, the show where you send in tips like that. We share them. You send in cool stuff found. We share that. You send in questions. We share them. And we even try to answer them. And sometimes that becomes a conversation that lasts for multiple shows because we have a great family here and all of that good stuff.
The goal with pulling all of these together for you is to ensure that each of us learns at least five new things every single time we get together. Our sponsors for this episode include Coda.io slash MGG. One doc to rule them all. You can bring all your text and tables together and you can sign up at Coda.io slash MGG for free. We'll talk more about that in a little bit. For now, back here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.
And here in South Dakota, using my common sense, I'm Adam Christensen.
Yeah when i saw that on the list i was like well this is yeah if only common sense were more common.
Right yeah like brian said in the chat common sense is not always common practice i like unfortunately yeah i often wish people had a little bit more and then i got me thinking like my parents used to say that to me when i was a kid and i don't remember i don't hear that as much anymore it's like use your common sense you know they would like oh
That's true yeah that's just not a thing welcome to two older guys doing a podcast.
Uh right i don't know it was common it was common in the vernacular when i was growing up it's like why don't you use your common sense it
Was it's true.
Yeah when i do something stupid right
Right yes yes this was not a uh a phrase of endearment let's make this clear no no no no that's right yeah it's like why didn't you use your common sense, Uh, we are yet again missing pilot Pete today. Uh, he is, he's still out flying the plane. Uh, the police code for 10 62 is subject possibly wanted. I would say it's subject. Absolutely wanted if, if we're talking about it. Yeah, exactly. So I think in a good way, right in a good way.
Yes. Yeah. I think when it's a 10 62, that's telling you that the person that you have in your, in your custody is wanted for something else. I think is what that implies. Yeah, not so good.
I think they land it Zoe occasionally and fill it back up with fuel. So yes, it could be the same plane, but probably not the same fuel.
Yeah, we'll have to ask Pete if he's ever done midair refueling. I can only imagine how stressful that could be and interesting, but maybe during his time in the Marines, perhaps. Uh it's possible in fact probably likely he if you ever get to hang out with pete uh ask him about his time on uh aircraft carriers flying the harriers yeah yeah yeah fun our giveaway here in november is with our friends at other world computing and uh they are going to give one of their new 1M2 SSD enclosures here.
So go to macgeekup.com slash giveaway, and you will be able to enter into that. I need to make the change here. So if you're listening to the live stream, you can enter. Sure, Adam, sure. I'll make sure Sadie pulls your name separate from the list so that a listener actually gets it. But, you know, sure, you can enter. It doesn't mean you'll win. All right. What else do we have here? Do we have Some tips I bet Let's do some tips Shall we? Want to take us to Todd?
Oh, am I up?
I think so. I'm not paying attention. It's okay. Okay. I mean, you would put your name on that one, so I figured maybe, you know.
This is the ellipses, right? He's for Pete, because Pete was talking about using ellipses and maybe overusing them, which is something that I'm probably also guilty of. But Todd says, for Pete, on the Mac or iOS, when you type three periods in a row, dot, dot, dot, the OS converts them to an ellipses. So that would make it an easy way to type that. I don't, that's part of the default autocorrect. And I think I have seen that come up before.
I can't remember, last time we probably talked about on iOS, the press and hold, I think you press and hold on the period key and that will bring up the ellipses option. On the Mac, my favorite thing is I just learned the keyboard shortcut, which is option semicolon. So I use that all the time.
Oh, yes. I like that. But yeah, it sometimes comes up automatically. I dug into this and I found that it worked in messages, notes.
Um it actually i guess it only worked for me on my mac and messages it did not work in notes or nor mail um and also not in slack or thunderbird on ios because of the way the keyboard works it worked in all of those apps well there's no thunderbird for ios that i know of but um but yeah it did not work in other mac apps for me but one could set up a text replacement you know in in either text expander or in the uh keyboard uh whatever they call that the system settings
is it still just system settings keyboard or is it buried one level deep is it system settings you're.
Asking the hard questions
It is just it's on the top level it's not buried yeah so if you go into system settings keyboard text replacements you could add one that is three dots It's replaced by the ellipses character, which is, as you pointed out, option, semicolon. Yeah.
And also, three dots is not an ellipses, so stop doing it. Sorry. Get on my high horse for a minute.
Would that be five spaces or a tab when you're indenting and coding, Adam? While we're on the subject of what is. Always tabs. Always tabs. Are you an always tab? I guess I knew that about you. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
All right. Tabs not spaces.
What's that?
Now the holy war starts in the chat.
That's right.
Tabs not spaces.
Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Well, and if we're going to have this holy war, we should talk about VI versus Emacs because that's the most important.
Yes, see. Paul's yelling already.
Yeah. And our Discord chat has immediately devolved into these holy wars, which I love. Lawyer Jeff says, I wanted to share a strange glitch I ran into after updating to Mac OS 15.1 on Monday, just in case anyone comes across anything similar. Right after the update, I noticed that my list of updates in the Mac App Store was showing nine apps that supposedly needed updates, except they were apps I had already uninstalled.
When I tried to click update on any of them, I got the error dialogue saying that the update couldn't be completed. To fix it, I ran a command in Terminal to reset my launch services database, and we'll put the command in the show notes, but you could also do this with Onyx if you so desire. Launch services, he continues, handles app associations and other background info about installed applications. After that, I restarted the Mac, and the list in the Mac App Store cleared up.
The nine update entries for the uninstalled apps disappeared. Appeared hopefully that's the end of it he says but let me know if you run into anything similar with mac os 15.1 i've been doing pretty well with 15.1 that's an interesting one and a great catch to uh fix that love the the reset of launch services but um yeah i feel like i haven't.
Had to do that in forever
I know i don't have to do that yeah right yeah yeah yeah it's been a while since I've had to reset launch services. I'm surprised it wasn't, maybe it was reset as part of the 15.1 update, and it just didn't, I don't know.
Something happened, yeah, it went wrong.
Yeah. Like, if the app's not there, why would launch services catch it? That's what makes me think it wasn't fully reset, but who knows?
I don't know. Yeah, maybe.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I do have an issue with the new Safari and the dock apps. You know how starting last year, you can take a web page and save it as a save to dock, I think, is the command in Safari, right? You go to the file menu and choose add to dock and then it saves it and acts like an application, which is like a web app. Yeah, which is awesome. I use it. We have our show notes doc, which if you're listening, you can follow along with us and you can even edit it.
We trust you um it's at mac geekup.com slash show notes and and it's linked in the live chats and stuff so you can see where we're going with things and uh all that if you want to kind of watch even more about how the sausage is made um in prior in mac os 14 it works the way i want it to work and the what how i'll how i'll articulate that is by describing what now happens in mac os 15 which I have not yet updated to here in the studio, mainly because audio devices, but also this.
So I have a separate web app for each of the three podcasts that I do for the same, essentially the same agenda document, you know, get one for this, obviously one for GigGab, one for Business Brain. I noticed, and I have the same down in my office because I pull them up when I'm doing show prep and things like that. It just makes life easier and have them on my laptop too. I noticed as soon as I...
Moved to mac os 15 on my laptop and i'm a computer down in the office anytime i click a link to open a google doc like if i get an email if you were to send me an email adam linking to a google doc that we needed to like you know some spreadsheet i needed to fill out for a proposal or whatever, it will open in one of those web apps now it like it treats that app as the like the the the way all All Google Docs will open, not just that one Google Doc. And so I dug into this.
Actually, I posted about it in our Discord. And one of our listeners pointed to an Apple developer support article about how that is the default behavior now. But you can set a scope for it. And if you open up the package of that web app, you can see in there there's a scope. And so I changed the scope to not just be, you know, whatever, drive.google.com or whatever it is. I changed it to be that specific URL. So, okay, great. And then the app wouldn't launch.
Presumably because I changed something about it and the security checksum, whatever it is they're doing, the hash, the CRC, who knows when. Sure. Nope. This is different from what it was saved as.
When you saved it,
Yeah. Yeah, what's supposed to happen is web developers are supposed to put that scope in their, you know, in the web page or something so that it then gets carried down. And when Safari makes one of those web apps, it puts it there. It's something. I don't know. But I was not. No, that makes sense. Yeah. But I, but like now I have to petition Google to change for, well, wait a minute.
Yep.
Could I redirect Google... Whatever that is, you know, drive.google.com. If I went into my slash Etsy slash hosts file and.
I don't think you would
Set drive.google. No, just temporarily set it so that I could load a local file with that web page that has all of the stuff that I want on it and then save that as a web app and then go back and remove that from my Etsy hosts. And now I don't know.
I mean, how is the scope added to the page? Is it just like a, uh, HTML tag, like a regular tag?
I think, I think so.
When you first load the doc before you save it as an app, could you just edit the source and, you know, locally and then, then save it?
Oh, edit the source in the page, like in the web inspector.
Inspect, web inspector, just add it. And then I would try that.
Yeah. You're so much smarter than me. That makes perfect sense. I like this.
I don't know if it'll work, but.
Well, it's a, it's a better idea than my crazy.
I mean, you might have to do the whole, like fake it till you make it, like let it think that you're drived at google.com. But hopefully if it's just a simple tag that developers are supposed to add, like a meta tag or whatever, I don't know how it's done.
Yeah. Yeah. It says Sequoia adds support for opening links directly in web apps. Now, if a user clicks a link, if it matches the scope, it opens there. By default, this behavior applies when the link matches the host of the web page. As a developer, you can refine this experience by defining the range of URLs that should open in the web app with the scope member in the web app manifest.
Oh, you had to put a web app manifest file. That's like a, I think it's a side like JSON file for web apps.
That's what it is. Yeah.
I've never messed with that too much. Ugh. Oh, yeah. It's always great when they add more work for us developers.
Yep.
Love it.
Yep. Yep. So, I'm loving this.
Was that, so is that manifest file not coming down when you, is that what you're editing when you're going into the, like, package?
Yes. Oh. Yeah. And it doesn't like it. It doesn't, it won't launch. Now, the other thing is maybe I need to just look at the security things and find how to, like, force that. Cause I can go in and edit it. But then, like I said, the app just is like, no, this is damaged. It's like, no, it's not. It's fixed.
What a super nerdy rabbit hole. We just went down.
Mm. Yep. Yep. Uh huh. I will put a link to the, um, uh, the discord chat that we have about going about this in the show notes so that, so that if you, if you want to get in on this conversation, you are more than welcome to. But yeah, I think.
That's what it have killed them to just have put a like setting and Safari that you could just flip to change the default behavior back.
Like, or in the web app, like, like why not have a settings? And they do have a settings icon in the web app, but, like, why can't I change it there? Just, like, only open this? Like, I don't care what Google wants me to do. This is my web app, Apple. Like, can I use my computer for a little bit? Like, it's to the point where I don't have any Google Docs web apps. I had to delete the ones from my computer in the office. Well, they're functionally useless to me now.
No, yeah, yeah, totally stupid.
Anyway, sorry about that.
Maybe Alex has something to take us away from this.
That wouldn't be a bad thing, would it? Alex says, I know I'm going to find it here.
Uh hello dear mgg he calls us back to episode 354 he says uh what i'm what i'm about to talk about was introduced in mac os lion many years ago and was highlighted in episode 354 13 years ago he says but i wasn't a listener then that's probably true for many of you and that's okay uh he says i wasn't even an apple user then so maybe it's worth resurfacing uh he says using pages and numbers for several years this is a discovery for me apple's office suite has a very nice and
powerful versioning feature not to be confused with track changes that's different if you go in pages or numbers and possibly keynote he didn't say keynote and i'm not testing it here but certainly worth looking go to the file menu for any document you have open choose revert to and choose Browse All Versions. And that will give you a list of all of the versions of that document that Pages has. It says it's supported in the iWork suite preview and text edit.
And there is even a support article about it. So yeah, view and restore past versions of documents on the Mac. Love this.
You said this is different than what?
Than track changes, which is the thing where if you and I are editing a document that we're passing back and forth, you can, like, you know, if we're redlining something.
No, I think the versioning thing relies on time machine. So I think you have to have, if I'm remembering right, you have to have time machine active, right? Because I think that's where it keeps those versions. This was introduced way, way back when.
The support article that I have here. Does it not mention meeting time machine anymore? No, it says many apps automatically save versions of documents as you work on them. At any time, you can browse through document versions and go back to an older version. You can also explicitly save a version. So, yeah. And then it continues, actually. It says a version is saved automatically every
hour or more frequently when you're making many changes. a version is also saved when you open save duplicate lock rename or revert a document so no i don't so.
They're just doing some sort of get thing under the hood i guess
Yeah where are they saving all this.
I mean it would just be
The changes so.
It wouldn't be like huge amounts of storage but
That was alex's sort of follow-up question uh he says in episode 601 This is still blowing my mind that somebody knows these episode numbers. You're amazing, Alex. You shared a story with a warning that this feature might wind up occupying a lot of space eventually. And we shared the versions folder in that episode to evaluate the size occupied. But that's for the versions of files that are stored at a local drive. What about iCloud versions, like of a Pages document?
Could you, by any chance, help to answer the question, is there a possibility to see the amount of space occupied in my iCloud with versions i think you'd have to look at the local files and see them there would be but i don't know i that that leave that as a geek challenge if somebody does know yeah feedback.
Yeah again i wouldn't this is another one of those things where it's just like i wouldn't worry about it too much because again like it's not it's not saving the entire you know it's like not like at point in time saving the entire document it's literally just saving the little changes that you've made to that document so like it's the amount of storage the stuff eats up is just minor compared to yeah you know that sort of thing yeah fair fair All right. Well, Jose has a tip for us.
He says, I previously sent a tip about how I use Spotlight on my iPhone to quickly jot down, jot some text down and how I take a screenshot, which I review and sort at the end of my day. I found this to be quicker than opening the Reminders app or the Notes app, then tapping on the field to make it active, then finally typing the text I want.
Well, I no longer have to take the screenshot because I recently discovered that I can drag text from the Spotlight field and drop it into Reminders or Notes and even into Safari. You just have to double tap or triple tap to highlight the text, tap and hold to drag the text to the desired app, hover until that app opens, and let go. I don't know when this functionality was added, but it works in iOS 18.1.
Also, if the app you want to drop the text into is on a different page, you swipe to that page using another finger while holding onto the text. Tip within a tip, to highlight a single word, you double tap. To highlight a paragraph, you triple tap. Not sure if anyone would find this useful, since there is probably a shortcut that does a version of this. And of course, there's Quick Notes, but that is only for the Notes app, of course.
I'm just processing there's a lot of tips in there like i had forgotten about the triple tap to select a whole paragraph.
Yeah i use that all the time i use the double i use both of those all the
Time yeah that's pretty good huh interesting yeah i did not know i didn't know about the the drag to from spotlight to do your thing like that makes sense why not it's it's text so yeah huh, yeah yeah and and then the multi-finger like swiping and and you know you're holding the text with one finger and swiping with the other finger you know yay multi-touch.
But i wish apple would have adopted at one point the um the little trick that was in and i know there's i think there's third-party apps that'll do this the little trick that used to be in the like i think it was native to the newton or whatever where you could like grab some text and drag it to the side and sort of dock there and then you could just navigate around normally and then you could like pull it back out and then drop it wherever you wanted.
Yes. Yeah. I, well, that's what, I mean, we did that giveaway in October with Eternal Storms and one of the things they gave away is Yoink, which I believe is part of Setup. Don't quote me on that. You will quote me. I just quoted myself on that.
I don't know. No, I don't know if it is per Setup.
But Yoink is, Like now that I have Yoink on my Mac, it needs to be on all of my Macs because it does exactly what you described. You just take something and dock it temporarily and then, you know, bring it back in whenever you want it. It's way simpler.
Yeah.
Yep.
Zoe said she needs a tip to remember all the tips.
Oh, yeah. Well, wait. That means that what we need to start doing when we craft the agenda is organize the tips into mnemonics so that we can come up with a phrase that the first letter of each tip spells so that we can remember all the tips.
No, I just, I felt like I see it building a searchable database in my future.
Oh, that's even better. That's a much better idea.
Browsable and searchable.
Browsable and searchable, yeah. I mean, we sort of have that with the search on MacGear. But here's the thing. I know that we already, we just haven't done this. We could feed all of the audio and web pages into an LLM and just have it be our, our engine.
We have that. We have that on our corporate website. They added it. I forget which tool they used, but yeah, we now have a AI little bot and basically they just fed all of the documents and website data into it. And it now answers questions.
Yeah. Yeah. We're doing that with one of my other companies and it's like, it's been amazing. It's really, yeah, it's crazy.
It's crazy. So you could just be like, uh, can you tell me about that tip that, uh, that was sort of about this? And it would be like, here you go. Of course. Yeah. From this episode. Yeah. Yeah.
That would actually, for what we do here, that would be super handy. So, yeah. And I know OpenAI has APIs that you can just feed that into so that you get the user experience that you want with the engine that you want. So, yeah.
I'll have to find out what we're using. Maybe we can, I don't know how much it costs, but.
Yeah. It, it usually, the cost of it is for what we would want to do would probably be negligible. I would think.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yep.
Yep. Um, I was doing, I, I spent some time, I went to Pepcom, uh, well last week, uh, on October 30th.
And so I took the train down and back the Amtrak and, uh, Amtrak's wife, has gotten much better over the last year i was on both the northeast regional and the acela and uh not at the same time obviously but uh yeah wi-fi was was much better than i remembered i was able to be extremely functional and productive uh during the train rides which was kind of my point of taking the train as opposed to driving i noticed you know they have the name of the.
Amtrak Wi-Fi remains the same and I was on four different trains a train from New Hampshire to Boston and Boston New York and then the same two in reverse and I was like oh I I don't want my IP address rotating because I want to just be able to say accept to the you know terms once and then just have it sort of float with me from train to train without having to worry about it so I went into system settings network and turned uh looked at private uh wi-fi
addresses and I saw that there are three options now one is off and that turns this feature off and what this feature does is it invents and that's probably the wrong word but it creates a mac address for your wi-fi connection that is not yours and it's intended i mean when it when you have this off people can track your device and it create a fingerprint of you wherever you go when you turn this feature on it obscures that so that's the reason for this but there are three options off being one
of them the other two being fixed and rotating. And mine was set to rotating. And I thought, well, I don't want it to be rotating because I just want when I connect to Amtrak Wi-Fi, I want it to give the same MAC address for the entirety of this trip. And so I set it to fixed. And then I thought, well, wait a minute. I just made an assumption about things. Let me actually learn what these do. So off is obvious.
It's just off. fixed it comes up with one and keeps it for that wi-fi network no matter what it for eternity rotating apple says when set to rotating your device uses a private address that rotates to a different private address every two weeks ah your device chooses rotating by default when joining a new network that uses weak security or no security like an open network on the train so I set it back to rotating because two weeks is plenty and I love that they chose
two weeks because it means that when you're at your hotel your MAC address likely doesn't change unless you're staying there for more than two weeks and all of that stuff so I that this idea of the rotating address I love I just assumed it was rotating every time you know every time I reconnected it would come up with a new one no obviously not you want to kind of you want to be remembered for a little while, just not for all the while. So I wanted to share that. Yeah. Cool. Yeah.
Very, very cool. Yeah. We learn too.
Absolutely. Well, and, and, you know, like obviously doing the show, we get to learn too. I always, I always think I get to learn the most, but yeah. One other byproduct, one of the many wonderful byproducts of doing this show is it always keeps me questioning my assumptions, like in this case, like it's just part of the mindset of, well, is that true or is it not? Like, I don't need to go with my gut on this. I'm sure someone will tell me.
And sure enough, Apple has a support article that told me like, great. Now I know. Amazing. So.
Very cool.
All right. Yep.
Yeah. John's got our, I think this is a wrap us up. I think. Okay. Maybe there'll be bonus ones that we come up with. And this is for those of us with the new iPhones with the camera button. So if you have a new iPhone with a camera button, he says, I set that camera button to take a double press to activate. This is so you don't accidentally activate it. I've actually been struggling with this. I actually accidentally hit it quite frequently.
I found that I would, you know, activate it when I didn't mean to. Me too. and that has fixed the problem. So like that's a simple solution. If you want to do this, you go into settings, camera, and then camera control, and there's a bunch of options there. So I guess this is the other tip. I might actually just change mine from the camera, because I'm kind of okay just, you know, doing the camera controls the old way from the home screen or the lock screen.
I just noticed I can change it, and I knew you could change it to any third-party app so if you have a third-party camera app you don't you prefer to use versus apples which is really nice you can change it to that so like i have how light as an option um but i also noticed in here is code scanner for scanning qr codes oh huh yeah that
Might be a better use of that button.
Maybe huh interesting i don't know i might have to play with it but i like the double click thing because then that avoids you know accidental uh pressing yeah
Huh huh um i wonder i i don't i have not experienced this issue with accidental pressing but i use a case and you don't adam so i'm i'm curious if listener john where he falls in that yeah yeah.
Yeah that would help because you got that deeper click yeah no mine is i'll grab it at the wrong you know and steve would say i was holding it wrong the other the other thing that i've struggled with this one a little bit more is my muscle memory for uh the volume i tend to go now to the action button when i'm trying to put the volume up and down first like if i'm trying to go up i have to go it's like lower or something i don't know somehow i hit it
Well you're used to hitting the top most button for the volume and now the top most button on that side is the action button so it makes perfect sense yeah.
So i'm learning i'm learning but yeah we'll get there
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I had a, I had a, I had a, yes, it is because I got it finally fixed. Yeah. I had a good lesson in, you know, why maybe everything doesn't need to be connected to the internet. And actually I, I believe this about this product, right? But I have an Ember mug, which is great, right? It allows you to set a temperature and you say, I want my beverage to maintain
this temperature and it, and it does it right. It's like keeps your coffee warm because I'm kind of a slow coffee drinker, and I don't like cold coffee. And the problem is, it's an IoT device, and it requires an app. And I have no idea why it requires an app, because it could have a little dial on it with a display that lets you set the temperature, and you could physically lock it in. But this is the way it works.
Well, today I went, you know, and I've been using it for a while, and I really do like it overall. It's got a lot of great features. I wish the battery lasted a little longer, but I think it keeps it warm for about two hours or so. I have version one. I don't, there's a new version that might last longer.
But, and then you just set it on a little, uh charging thing and that's the other thing is i've had to replace my little charging coaster a couple times because the buttons it's got physical connection to a copper ring on the bottom so it gets crusty i don't know again why they can't do a wireless maybe it's because it's still a ceramic it's got a ceramic coating on it at least so maybe it doesn't work i don't know anyway i digress but what happened this morning was i went to go set
it and i launched the app because it normally happens automatically but every once in a while i do have to relaunch the app and kind of reconnect or whatever so i went to set the temperature and uh it popped up and i said hey we've got a brand new app for you congratulations this is going to be amazing but you have to re-sign up for your account so i don't know if they got purchased by somebody or just they moved their website i haven't
done any background research but for whatever reason they're like you have to create a new account. I'm like, oh, great. And I had originally created the account with login with Apple. And so it brought up a new screen to create the account and it had the options. Do you want to, you know, sign up for an account with email or Google or sign in with Apple? And I'm like, oh, I want sign in with Apple. I tapped it. The thing came up.
It said, do you want to use your Apple account? And I didn't really think much of it. And I said, yes, I want to use my Apple account. Hit the button. It did the whole face ID thing. And then it went right back to the login screen. And I went, huh?
Okay.
I did it again. And the same action happened again. And then so I was like, oh, I know what's going on. I had signed up with sign in with Apple for my old account. So it's trying to log into the old account, not sign up for a new account. Or this was my theory. And then I realized, I don't know how, I don't know how to get rid of my login with Apple account. Like, I don't know how to like tell it, I don't want to use this login with Apple account anymore.
Right. Yeah.
So I had to figure out that. So there's a little tip in here. So if you do need to do that, all you have to do is you go into settings, you tap on your, you know, like iCloud account or whatever, the thing at the top. I don't know. Is there an official name for that, by the way?
It's your picture. No, I don't. I'm sure there is an official name for it. I don't know what that name is. Yeah.
Yeah. You, your account at the top of your iPhone or whatever. And then there is a sign-in with Apple there. And that will show all the sign-in with Apple accounts that you have and then you can tap on them and you can remove one. Be careful with this, obviously, because if you remove it, you're not going to be able to log into your whatever account. I don't know if you can restore them. I haven't done any research on that. But anyway, I removed the account.
And then it gets really fun. So then I went back to the app. And I was logged in.
What?
Yeah. So it had logged in in the background. So I think what happened was when I hit sign in with Apple, it was just going really, really slow. So I don't know if my theory is maybe this is the morning that they activated this feature and everybody's like trying to get their coffee going in the morning and maybe the server is overlaid.
Yeah, right. Going really, really slow. So I think it actually had either logged me into my old account on the new system, like created it and logged me in or what.
It all happened in the background but now i'm like well now i just told apple i don't want to use the account so now what do i do huh and so i ended up having to delete the app and start the process all over and then waited for it to create the account which took about a minute minute and a half which was really weird but it finally did it and then i finally got my coffee reset up but i had to rename my coffee mug and like all this it was not not a great morning and probably not a great time to
do it first thing in the morning when people are trying to get their coffee warm.
But it was a whole experience. Oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah.
But I learned a few things. Yeah.
I had no idea about that list of sign in with Apple accounts. That's super handy. I love that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
I'm assuming it's on the Mac too. I mean, but I didn't like it. I would assume it's on the Mac as well.
We should never assume.
In the same area. Yeah.
But let's look. Yeah.
It's also on the Mac.
Yeah. Yeah. Wait, is it? Oh, oh, oh, yes, it is. It is. I see. You got to dig one layer there. Okay. Yeah.
And then what's nice there, too, is you can see your hide my email, like, email. So I would imagine that would come in handy if, I don't, I guess you never really have to reset anything, like, in terms of, like, reset password, because you don't technically have a password. Or do you just have your touch ID,
Face ID? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep. Yeah, interesting. Huh. Oh.
And I just saw a thing at the top of mine and now says, share your accounts. Your sign-in with Apple accounts can be shared with your family members and close friends using the password app.
Oh, yeah, of course. I mean, it's just a login, like any other, and you can share all of those. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. Cool. Cool. Fun. Um... Yeah. You like that? Yeah. I looked, uh, the Amber mug does the new one. It seems to be about the same as they say an hour and a half for the 10 ounce and 80 minutes or something for the 14 ounce. So yeah.
Yeah. I wish it was a little bit longer, but I understand you don't want a huge battery in there, I guess. So, and you know, I'm mostly near the coaster. So I, for a while I did have two, I had one in the office and one in the house that made it a little bit easier, but they kept breaking. Like I said, there's little pins. They get crud in them and then they get stuck down and then they don't work and you can't really clean them out i don't know i this is i'm on my third
Hot hot soapy water doesn't fix it.
Yeah i don't know if i want to do that
No don't don't wash your electronics in hot soapy water that was that was a joke all right uh let's see i we have some questions i okay before we do the questions i want to take a minute and thank everyone whose uh premium contributions have come in in the last couple of weeks because it's been a couple of weeks since we've thanked you folks and of course you can always learn about this at macgeekup.com slash premium that
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Let's do some questions. i have uh apple did some announcing this week by the way apple's had a whole week of releases it turns out uh and we're recording this on friday i am not sure if there has been an announcement for friday november 1st we are not seeing it uh as we're recording this but uh the fourth quarter results were Thursday prior to that were M4 MacBook pros, uh, the, uh, M4 pro and M4 max chips in the, um, lots of things,
including those, uh, the new Mac mini and, uh, the new M4 iMac as well. So it's been, and the hearing stuff is coming to, uh, uh, AirPods pro gen two.
As well yeah just lots of new things and the big focus was also apple intelligence and the only other thing i'll mention on this we don't need to spend a lot of time on it is uh i found it interesting that you know this rollout so they did individual videos throughout the week i think for each little announcement so it was sort of the apple style announcement where they're flying through apple park and doing all the things and having people talk about all the features
so you can check all those out but it was like this weekly all week rollout where each day or a couple days you got a an announcement and so it was a mini kind of little mini keynotes oh
Yeah yeah yeah yeah i like it i like it um, Joe has a question about the new Mac Mini. He says, I've ordered the new M4 Pro version of the Mac Mini with 24 gigs of RAM and a 2 terabyte SSD. Delivery is supposed to be November 8th, perhaps sooner. I have a question. He says, I'd like to, I sort of like to do a relatively new install. But with the APFS split volume approach that's been there for a while, is there any reason to do this?
The system will be new, but it will be on its own volume. And seemingly all I have to do is then copy over my data. And am I good to go? Not sure how app registrations and such might go through. I haven't done an upgrade to my existing Mac since APFS came out. So I'm a little fuzzy as to the best approach. I can reinstall the apps and such, but not really sure if there is a need with how things work now. So what would your advice be upgrading from my 2017 MacBook Pro to this new M4 Mac Mini?
Adam, if you were in that position, what would you do?
Sorry, reiterate that? What is the question here?
The question is, he's got this new M4 Mini coming. He's got a 2017 macbook pro that he's migrating from or or will be kind of moving from this too yep what what migration path should he take to get his data and apps and all that stuff on the new one which one would you take yeah.
I'm i just would do kind of the standard thing um you know i've gone over the network i mean is the question about the physicality of it or just the
I think the question is do we start fresh yeah start fresh or use migration assistant or no.
I would just use migration assistant in whatever way shape or form um you know and depending upon how fast you want it to go right you have the options but i just generally just do the default which i think is just over the network your local network these days right yep so yeah simple straightforward is the concern just the age the the gap it
Sounds like yeah that's what it sounds like he you know, he said without giving much context that he'd sort of like to do a relatively new install but isn't sure if that's necessary so I understand being on the fence about that the idea of a nuke and pave every now and again, is attractive and, But I think Migration Assistant has gotten to the point where it's not as necessary as it used to be.
Yeah, I mean, I guess there's a lot of like cruft that could be in there. You know, one of the things that if you're really concerned about the cruft and stuff like that, I think the approach I've taken more these days is to spend a little extra time with your existing system. And doing some pre-migration cleanup. So like if you know there's like, oh, I've got all these apps that I don't use anymore, right? Run those through CleanMyMac and like just get them out of there ahead of time.
Or if you know there's like maybe old preferences and data and stuff like that that you don't want or need, like clean that out.
I feel like that's better time spent than the amount of time you would spend like doing the nuke and pave thing and then having to like re-add everything from scratch like if you're willing to go through that that's great you know like but and and maybe you need that i guess it really depends on what place you're in but i've gotten more and more to the position of like if i'm not having issues with my existing system then
really what you're talking about is you're wanting to like maybe clean up old garbage so just do the house cleaning first like do your spring cleaning first and then migrate right
Huh i like i i'm i'm processing this i i like this approach i i might add one step to that um before i decommission a machine if i've if i've migrated from one to the other i trust migration assistant but you know we live in a world where we don't have to and it could possibly miss something right we don't get a manifest of what it's going to go right so before i decommission a computer i often will save an image of the hard drive to what i consider like cold storage like off
to my nas or something just sure in case so that you know six months from now it's like wait where is that file uh-oh and then i can go back and you know hopefully find it yeah so.
I guess i i have i have all those backups that i do right you know and we've talked about these things like i use chronosync on my critical folders with a one-way like sync where it doesn't sync deletions and i use backblaze which has versions that go way way back i have you know time machine and all these other things i do after i migrate tend to not immediately reconnect
every backup system. I'll usually like leave a clone, clone backup off for a few weeks or a month or so and just rely on, I mean, I have enough other backup. Like I said, like online backup, I have iCloud, I have all these other things. So I feel like generally safe in doing that. And then that's kind of my, oh my gosh, where is this thing? You know, I have like, I'll usually pick my carbon copy cloner backup is usually the one that I'm like, okay, that's the last,
That's this this.
Computer in the state the day i migrated right right and then
Yeah it's because it's it'll.
Say if i can like clean off the old computer and
So i would still have that backup if you're going to.
On the image
If yeah if you're gonna do the image path i would do that before i started my cleanup operation right and then that way you know if i over zealously cleaned Okay, fine. It's all over there. But otherwise, I kind of like that idea. The only... I have wound up doing nuke and paves in the not too distant past. And they generally go much faster than I expect them to because so much of our stuff is synced.
And so email and my documents, once I install the right apps or configure things, it just all sort of appears. It's installing apps. And how many apps do we each use? More than you think.
Way more than you think. but um you know it's it's not it's gone okay so i i think it's within the last year year and a half i've done some some nuke and paves it's been okay but usually the day i get a new computer is not necessarily the day that i have time or the week or the month that i have time to do all of that nuking and paving so yep i i like your idea of you know spend a little time doing some spring cleaning and then and then off you go i.
Mean he has a week he has till november 8th he doesn't even have to do it all in one day that's like the computer doesn't show up for a week right you could start this process now while you wait
Yeah yeah that's interesting.
The other thing that i will say about the nuke and pay thing is i mean i have gotten caught with that because i'm reinstalling apps and there's some apps that i only use quarterly or once a year and it's like Like I go to do that thing and it's like, well, where's this app? Oh, where's the data for this app? Like, oh no.
Oh no. Yep. Yep. Yep. You know, so. Yep. Yep.
Because if you just do a nuke and pave, you're probably not going through your applications folder, like checking all the apps. That's the other nice thing about the pre-cleanup is you can actually like, oh yeah, there's that app. I don't use it hardly ever, but I do use it,
Right?
I mean, I'm old. My memory's gotten bad. I forget about things like that.
And we also have these devices that are perfect devices. And I say perfect replacements for our memory. Our memory is fallible, right? These devices, when used properly, have an infallible memory. So why would we want to even try to remember stuff when the device can just be that? So, yeah. All right. Eduardo has a question, also relates to Apple's week of announcements. He says, today I'm living with a 16-inch M1 MacBook Pro and a studio display.
I'm happy with this setup, but I want to add a new extra monitor. And I also want to add a headless Mac to take on my automations and act as like a Plex server, backups for me and my wife, and everything else that I can think of throwing at it. Cool. The thing to think about is, am I better off buying a studio display and a Mac Mini M4 or an iMac M4?
What are your ideas the cost difference is about the same uh or isn't too big he says the main goal is to have a machine that will last a long time so uh and then he says he's been listening since 2011 which is amazing thanks edwardo that's fantastic love that so.
There's not that big of a cost difference in with how he's specking things out he's correct right Oh, it's a tough one. I, I, I think I would, and this may be my old eighties component stereo days coming back to me, but like, I think I would go the studio display Mac mini route because now those things are independent and you can upgrade and swap them out and deal with them as separate pieces of technology.
I love the form factor of the iMac. I think it's gorgeous, but i feel like more and more these days like having that option to like swap things out swap things around he mentions he has a mac studio already right i think he said so it just it feels like that would be the better way to go if the price is not dramatically different and the fact that apple doesn't let you use an old iMac as a display just still irks me
I i am i i was all in on the iMac train right i had an iMac in my office i had an iMac up here in the studio and they had replaced iMacs before them like i was all in 27 inches of 5k goodness right you bought the display and you got a free computer uh attached to the back of it right and i loved that when my iMac, unceremoniously just stopped working the display actually is what what broke on on the iMac that i had here in the studio the 2019 27 inch
core i9 it was doing great and then suddenly the lightning that hit way too close to the house uh decided not to let that display work anymore and uh. I moved to a Mac studio at that point with a separate display. I've got the Phillips 27 inch display. I already had moved in the office. I wound up having a deal where somebody traded me a domain. I had a domain name and they had a M1 fully decked out Mac mini and they offered a trade. And I said, sure, sure.
The $8 domain that I bought that I'm not going to use paid off. Woo. You know, um, so, so I, I moved in the office too. And now I'm, I'm completely detached from any iMac dependence and it's wonderful. I mean, I still have two iMacs sitting on the floor of my office because it kills me that, you know, one of them is a fine server computer with whose display doesn't work. And the other is a fine display whose computer is, you know, too old to be functional.
And I just need to let go of that and throw the, dispose of them appropriately, whatever that path is. But it irks me that I have like that these things aren't separate. And so I am off of the iMac train now. And Apple, if Apple had continued to offer a 27 inch iMac, that's what I would have bought in the studio to replace the iMac that was here. But they don't. And I am convinced, and I might be wrong about this, but I am convinced that
for myself, the 24 inch screen would be too small. I have two, actually three screens here in the studio, although one of them just sits behind me with our logo on it when we do the show. But yeah, yeah, yeah. I feel very happy with the component stereo model again for a desktop computer.
Yeah. And the only last thing I want to say on this is I feel like we as a community, especially since Apple is always on about their environmental initiatives, we should be way more critical of them not making that a feature.
The iMac brick and old iMac can be used as a display because they have a long useful life they wouldn't have to be in landfills and in junked or recycled or whatever you do with them when they get old if apple would just i mean i i can't imagine that there's any massive technical limitation or cost to allowing that to happen it's
Fair and and as uh paul conaway in the chat per pointed out luna um luna display from astropad will turn your um your i think you can turn an imac it showed up with the ipad one.
Yeah but you
Know it's imperfect but correct it does work like yeah.
Let me plug in the thunderbolt cable and make it a thunderbolt display like it can happen. It can be a thing. It can be a physical connection without latency. That's amazing. It's a, they're gorgeous. Like you said, they're high quality, gorgeous displays and they're just being wasted.
Yeah.
Literally wasted when someone replaces it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And it does not fit with their environmental statements. Like, it's in direct, in my opinion, direct contradiction to that.
You're not wrong. I hadn't thought about it in those terms, but yeah, yeah, you're not wrong. Huh. Well, I am free from, from mostly free. I say that I'm free from it. And in the same breath, I say that I have two IMAX sitting on my floor that I'm trying to figure out how to, what to do with.
And i just yeah land from them
Great oh but like.
I know i know like that you're you're proving my point i am proving your point yes if one of those could be used as a display the one that still is working yeah you would use it as a display i'm sure you would find a place to use it as a hundred percent or give it to somebody who needs right yes
It would it would wind up having some utility i wonder all right yeah you've got me you got me thinking though.
I think somebody made a Kickstarter hack where you can like, but you have to go in and like solder stuff. Like it's not, it's not simple, but like you can do it. So I know it can be done technically.
Yeah.
Come on, Apple.
I got it. I got to dig into the Luna thing. Cause I feel like that might like for some purposes here, I might get some great utility out of, out of that. All right. Uh, let's see. Let's answer it. Terry's question. Was sort of, in fact, kind of perfect. So let's do Terry, and then I've got some cool stuff found that I saw at Pepcom, too. Okay.
Yeah, Terry says, where has all my free space gone? And I'm not going to jump into the song.
You're not going to sing for us?
Where has all my free space gone? Long time is sing. Where has all my free space gone? Can't store any stuff. All right, anyway.
You and James Dempsey need to collaborate here, I think.
We're probably going to get a copyright strike.
Oh, that's true. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Facebook and YouTube are going to yell at us now.
He says, I have an iMac that has been eating up free space and I cannot figure out where it's going. Oh, no. I had been working with about 20 plus gigs free space, which was pretty stable at that level until about two months ago. I use CleanMyMac to periodically clean up the junk, but once I get it back up to about 20 gigs free space, it quickly eats up that free space until now I only have about 4.5 gigs free.
I also did a macOS reinstall several months ago, and after that, I was back at 25 gigs of free space. Then the free space disappeared. I've looked for Time Machine backups, but didn't find any using the TM, the Time Machine utility tool, looking at the local snapshots, which that would have been one of my guesses. I've deleted unused apps, not very many, as I've got my system where I want it. I've run clean my Mac, but as of today, it only finds about 800k and my free space is 4.89 gigs.
As you can see, the storage shows apps using 495 gigs. I cannot, this cannot be correct. And the system is not showing anything but calculating while Mac hard drive window shows 4.87 gigs of free space so what can i do install a mac os again nuke and pave help
Yeah uh this is interesting and he he sent us a screenshot of uh the system settings storage window that shows this you know applications taking up 495 gigs my next step would be to go into you know the applications folder and get the size of the applications folder to confirm that it's seeing the same thing. And if you truly do have 495 gigs in your applications folder, well, let's dig in deeper to that and see where that's being used up, right?
You can, uh, you could open that folder and, uh, tell it, what is that? If you go into, I think it's show in finder show view options.
Calculate all sizes and then sort by size you know from largest to smallest and see what you've got in that applications folder like that given what you've shown us here that's the first thing i would do um i'm assuming when he says he runs clean my mac he's talking about space lens inside my mac uh which is really it's a place i would go to and i'd be curious what i know it says that it only shows 600 or 800k to free up i i would do kind of the what i call the manual mode of space lens
where i just let it show me the folders on my mac that have the most things used and i dig in and i decide what i'm going to delete and some of that comes with you know decades of making mistakes and deleting the wrong things and learning what i can and can't touch but at least getting a feel for where this space is being used uh the the command that he mentioned which i'll put in the show notes so we all have it but the the the terminal command to list yeah to list all the snapshots is fine.
I would use disk utility to see these now because it gives you a graphical view and you can delete from there. There might not be anything that might not be the issue, but, like, yeah. So I would dig deeper with both with Space Lens and just with Finder and start looking at where things are being chewed up. That's kind of my, if I were there, what would I do next thing? What would you do next, if anything?
Well, I feel like you're onto something with the, I mean, he's mentioning specifically that it's calling out applications. This is weird. And so where my brain went is there are a lot of applications, and we've talked about these, that store their data in a library file, right? Yep. Within the application. So usually like a MySQL Lite database or something like that.
I'm wondering if what's happening is he's freeing up the free space and then there's one of these apps that in the background or when you're running it is pulling down data from the cloud and like storing it within that app and it's like oh goody i have a bunch more free space let me grab more cash let me grab more stuff let me grab more you know so i'm thinking about like podcasts that have auto downloads in the podcast app right i don't know that those necessarily show up
I don't know where those show up like that would be a culprit or movies that are automatically downloaded in the background or like but it must be if it's coming out of applications my guess would be it is some app that he uses regularly I I'm thinking about like I use I mean this wouldn't eat up that much space but like for example I use reader apps and I know a lot of those store everything in a library file and they usually have a setting that says hey pull everything down in
the background so when i'm offline i can still like read all this stuff right right right um and it will just store that stuff inside a database in the app like it's within the app container it's not out there on uh you know in the finder somewhere where the finder is going to actually see it it's going to see it oh this app is you know it's like app and data stuff yeah right right
Yeah. Yeah. Dig. There's something's not, something doesn't add up. And I don't say that to be punny. Like something's not right.
Cause I would, I would assume the only thing that I would think of is, you know, like I know photos, but I mean, that would, that would show that to you. Right. Like I think photos, when you launch photos, we'll just use up whatever space, but like Apple then calls that, you know, like purgeable space.
So it's like, it's not really eaten up but it will just grab everything i wish you could kind of set some sort of limit but i know there's you know apps that sort of do that and so i don't i don't know is this actually another question i would have is is this actually causing a day-to-day problem like is he getting messages that says he can't store stuff or is again this just the system doing its system stuff and like hey i've got
extra space i'm gonna use it all until you need it and then i'll give it back to you that
Is perhaps the most valuable question of all i mean it's good to be proactive about this if you've got something that's not being managed by the system that is chewing up available storage it would be good yeah exactly and again this one doesn't smell like, an apple thing like the fact that it's showing that his applications are the thing something's not right here and it it might be the way apple is calculating this stuff it is just not is it is giving an
incorrect interpretation of it i don't know right so yeah yeah. I don't know. Interesting, though. Interesting, interesting. I have some cool stuff found. I have some show and tell if you're watching the video, but if not, that's okay. I mentioned that I went to Pepcom. There was a company there. I don't know that I had heard their name before. I-N-I-U. In you? In you? I think is how we spell it. They are making chargers and battery packs and all of this stuff.
They have been doing this for a long time outside of the United States and are a top seller on Amazon with this stuff with a ton of reviews. I love the kinds of things that they are doing and the price points that they are doing them at is kind of amazing to me. The thing I want to talk about today is this INIU. It's a three in one portable charging station that folds up kind of to the size of like a wallet and you unfold it and it's got two halves.
One half has a cheap pad on it for your like a mag safe, a magnetic pad for your phone. The other half has two pads. One is a cheap pad that's like for your AirPods. And then the other is a puck for your watch. and the puck can stand up if you've got a watch band that requires that. The foldability of this thing also allows you to stand the thing up so that your phone can be kind of in nightstand mode. And it's $30. So this is a three-in-one charger, portable, and it's $30 on Amazon right now.
And there's a 15% coupon as of the moment that we are talking about this. So the fact that there's a three-in-one thing that does your watch, does MagSafe, portable for less than... This is less than $99 is outstanding.
And i used this on wednesday night in my hotel room so that i could talk about it here on the show and and it charged all three things i had it doing my watch my airpods and my uh my obviously my phone and everything charged up like it it all just worked and i just plugged it in and good to go so yeah pretty i i'm i'm eager to see how this brand kind of makes its way into the u.s market it so yeah what's.
The uh just curious what is the wattage charging speed is it is it fast charging slow i'm assuming it's slow charging
It's 15 watts wouldn't.
Be a big deal okay yeah
Yeah so yeah so.
Yeah i mean again not a big deal if you're traveling and just plugging it overnight well isn't
Isn't 15 watts the fast charge that is fast charging i.
Thought you had to be like 29 or 30 right isn't it
No that 15 watts fast.
And fast fast right
Yeah 15 watts on the mag safe i thought was fast but i don't yeah but maybe there's maybe maybe things can go faster than that now i don't i don't know i thought the magsafe was i.
Thought they could
15 but yeah somebody will tell us and i perhaps even before the end of the show so yeah i was stoked about this and they also have charging banks they they were telling me something about how their battery technology allows them to make batteries that have for the same capacity of the battery are physically smaller and it's just something about the way their their engineering works and they did they had you know like magsafe battery packs that that at least were rated
the same as one that i had and it was you know i would say 15 smaller so it's interesting yeah.
Apple's charger is 20 watt or the recommended charger for fast charging is 20 watts again i don't know that there's a major right again like i don't i don't get caught up in this stuff to be honest with you because like
I'm sleeping i.
Throw it on the puck exactly like i don't care if it charges in 30 minutes it needs to be charged in you know six to eight hours
Right right it's gonna be okay panicking.
Over this stuff
It's gonna be all right yeah yeah yeah yeah, Um, I also saw something that's sort of disgusting to talk about, but, uh, very necessary with all of us shoving things in our ears all the time. And I am someone who I, you know, I, I joke that I spend half of my life with in-ear monitors and, but it's true. Like I've had them in for the whole show. I will take a couple hours off and then I have a rehearsal this afternoon. So they go back in, I have two gigs this weekend. So they'll be in for those
like, you know, and then sometimes my AirPods are in. And so that it shoves all that earwax in and cleaning our ears is a good thing. And I have for decades been, you know, someone who safely likes to keep my ears clean, needs to keep my ears clean. And I have tried out the the camera wand things that, you know, you pair with your phone and then you can stick a thing down in your ear and like scoop out the earwax.
The problem with all of those that I have tried up until the other night is that as I spin the thing around in my ear, the perspective on my phone shifts and I'm completely lost as to what I'm doing. Like I can see it in there and it's like, all right, there's that little bit of wax. I'm going to get out and then I try to move my hand in the right direction. And it always goes in some cockeyed direction. Cause I, my brain to hand connection
with my eyes just doesn't work when the view keeps rotating on me. Well. B-Bird is making their ear vision cleaner and they range from $45 would get you this thing. It pairs with your phone and it has a gyroscope in it so that when you spin it, the camera view doesn't change. It's like I knew the PR rep that was working with him. So he's like, can I see inside your ears? I'm like, yeah. Yeah.
And obviously he let me do it because you shouldn't, unless you're like a doctor, maybe have a lot of training, you shouldn't do this to other people. But so I did it to myself with a, you know, sterilized thing. And it was like, wait a minute, like I can do this standing here on a trade show floor. This is no problem. And I was able to just like scoop the stuff out. And of course there was a crowd of people that were like, now we get to see inside Dave's head,
which was fun. But, you know, it's amazing, this thing. It's the best one that I've tried. And I've tried a lot of these because I wind up shoving wax in my ears all the time. So I know you're laughing at me, Adam. And I think your siren is also going off.
That's what I'm laughing at. It's 10 a.m. on the first Friday of the month.
Of course it is. That's right. That's right. But yeah, the gyroscope in this thing makes all the difference in the world and really, truly amazing. And for $45, you can get a family kit and the whole thing, but it starts at $46 is what it is on the website, $45.99 for the one with the intelligent gyroscope, which is the way you want to go for sure. And then, like I said, there's others with more stuff and features, but this is, this is the one you'd want.
This is the one I want and I'm happy it exists.
So very cool. I'd be afraid to use it.
Honestly, I get that damaging my ears. Yeah, no, that, that is the right way to approach using these things. In my opinion, you absolutely want that very healthy fear of damaging your ears. The good news with these things is you can see how far in your ear the thing is so go slowly, be careful and if if you have if you get to a point where you're like stuck stop that's my that's my advice with this but yeah obviously please don't damage your ears please.
Be my luck that's the time the cat comes by and bumps my elbow yeah
Yeah yeah yeah, I'm eager. I have not yet tested out. Speaking of hearing health, I have not yet tested out Apple's new AirPods Pro feature that does that, but that like allows me to use them as, you know, they call it loud sound reduction or something. I call it active ear plugs, but it's my term, right?
I could use that right now, as a matter of fact.
You could, yeah. I will say that those AirPods Pro Gen 2, which I wound up buying for myself recently just because I knew all these features were coming. And also my AirPods Pro Gen 1, as we mentioned over the summer, kind of started to crap out on me.
But um those things like the tech in them is really uh it's it's amazing how fluid the experience is walking around in cities being on the train being you know the conversation of where this the adaptive noise canceling where you can put it in that mode where it sort of rides the wave of what's happening around you it it really kind of detaches me from the world while still keeping me connected where i need to be it it they do a fantastic job with it so yeah i.
Realized i get to try this out this weekend because i'm actually i i never go to a concert but i'm going to a concert this weekend and i'm like oh i should bring because i i was uh for whatever reason i think somebody went on a plane or a trip or something like that and they they gave them those soft tip ear, you know, uh, earplugs. And they were sitting on the counter when I was getting my coffee before the
show. And I'm like, Oh yeah, we should have hearing protection when we go to this concert. And I'm like, Oh, I could use my new AirPods pro and try it out. So I think I'm actually going to do that and see how it works. But yeah, um, bare naked ladies and toad the wet sprocket
Oh that's gonna be a great show that's great love that yeah those are two have you seen either of those bands live before.
I have seen Bare Naked Ladies before, yeah.
Okay, yeah, they're a fun band.
In San Diego.
Yeah. Toad is also a fun band live. I think they-
I've never seen them.
Yeah, yeah. I think they toured together a couple of years ago too, and we wound up seeing both of those bands here in New Hampshire together. Yeah, you're going to have a good time.
Yeah, I'm very excited.
Yeah, yeah. Whenever I'm, well, not whenever I'm at concerts, but all the time, I have on my watch face is a decibel meter, so it tells me what the ambient volume is. And so I'd be curious as to what the ambient volume is while the show's playing. I mean, you can do it with your phone. You can launch the app on your watch or whatever. But actually, maybe you can't do it with your phone. It's only built into the watch, I think.
I don't know. I have that stuff. I have a Series 6 Apple Watch.
Yeah, then it'll do.
I might turn that on.
Yeah, I mean, you can just launch the... There's an app, too, that'll show you the noise level. But yeah, I'm curious. Most concerts hover between 91 and 95 is kind of where you'll probably find it. But I've obviously been to some shows where it's at 105. It's like, yeah, that's way more than.
It needs to be. Well, you don't want any of those for that length of time.
Correct, any of them, right? That's right. Well, yeah, yes. However, it's not just that. It's the, you know, having two hours of 90 dB or 95 dB, not great for you. But if that's all you're getting, it is cumulative, right? So, like, because I've talked to audio engineers, like front of house engineers about this. Like, you know, do you mix a concert with earplugs in? Like, is that the right way to do your job or do you need to hear what it actually
sounds like without filters, et cetera, et cetera. Right. And I've talked to audiologists and front of house engineers. And generally speaking, a lot of these guys, including the ones that have been in the industry for decades and decades, they most of them mix without ears in, without earplugs in. However, as soon as the show is over and before the show starts, they have earplugs in to protect them from the, you know, the noise of the crowd is often going to sit well above 80 dB, sometimes 85.
And with house music on, you might even be at 90 dB without a band even playing, right? And so the idea for them is protect, protect, protect so that you can use your hearing during those moments. And, you know, a lot of them, I just had Robert Scovel, who's like, he is the, you know, sort of A-list engineer. He just finished with Kenny Chesney's tour and just did iHeartRadio and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Like, he's the first call guy for, you know, for a lot of these things.
And he obviously cares about his hearing and talk to an audiologist he sees an audiologist regularly and it's like yeah no you're you know you've lost a little bit because he's i mean we all lose it because we age it's sort of a byproduct of it but otherwise no like his hearing's pretty good but he's crazy like i went and saw him mix chesney and as soon as he had a earplugs like on the thing he even leaned over and told me he's like look
i'm not going to be offended if you wear earplugs for the show i'm like i was like robert i was definitely i don't care about offending you on this one i was definitely gonna wear your earplugs aren't you he's like no but you'll see as soon as the show ends i pop them in it's like okay all right interesting so yeah that.
Is interesting yeah
I just so it's more it's more there's more to it than just the you know limited exposure that being said, please protect your hearing anytime you are able with loud music and loud sounds. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, I already have mild hearing loss and tinnitus, so I don't, I don't need things to get worse.
Right. Yep.
Yep.
All right. We, uh, we got to get out of here, Adam. The, the, the bell already went off. All the things happen. Thanks for hanging out with us folks. Thank you for sending in all your questions. Thanks to all of, and tips and cool stuff found and all that stuff. Thanks to all of our premium listeners. Thanks to Cashfly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from the audio version of the show. Anyway, from us to you.
I don't know what else to say. Maybe we'll just have a moment of just music here. Wait.
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