Why Don't They Tell Us That Exists?

It's time for Mac Geek Cab, and listener James brings us our quick tip of the week. He says, I recently found myself scratching a developer itch by spending some time in Xcode. And he says, for reasons I can't fathom, the preview side of Xcode decided to start up a whole mess of copies of my app running in the background. None of them had dock icons. There was no way to know anything, except I could see them in the finder's force

quit window. Command option escape brings up the finder's force quit window. It was then that I noticed all of these processes started killing them off one by one. And then I thought to check, can I do multiple app selections in the finder's force quit window? And you can. You can click on multiples. You can select with the shift key and then force quit them all at once.

More quick tips like this, plus your questions answered today on MacGeekGab 1031 for Monday, March 32nd, International Fun at Work Day 2024. Music. Greetings, folks, and welcome to MacGeekGab, the show where you send in quick tips like that, you send in questions that we answer, you send in cool stuff found, we share it all loosely organized into an agenda that gives us all the best opportunity to learn at least five new things every single time we get together.

Other sponsors for this episode include factormeals.com slash mgg50 with code mgg50 to get you 50 off your first box betterhelp.com slash geek gab betterhelp.com slash geek gab a little different uh to give online therapy a try and expressvpn.com slash mgg where you can go and get three extra months for free we'll talk more about those in a little bit for now here in In downtown Los Angeles, while attending Podcast Movement this week, or last week, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And here in South Dakota, I'm Adam Christensen. And back here in cold and rainy New Hampshire, it's Pilot Pete could be with you guys. Dave, you sound tired. I hope not to be offensive, but this is wearing you out, huh? Yeah, this week. Well, and it's, you know, we're doing this at 9 a.m. Eastern while I'm here on the West Coast. But I'm flying home today, so, you know. There you go.

You should be home by midnight. night uh i will be home before midnight yeah well yeah we'll do the show yeah yeah yeah yeah that is one of my travel tips is starting my final day of the trip on whatever time zone i will end it on um it's you know that's a good plan to the to the best you can to the best you can right i mean it you know like were there things last night that we were doing that would kept me kept me up later than eastern time would have yes you know so that's why

i'm a little short on sleep here but it yeah there you go yipper yep and i always find it easier to go west than east it's easier to wake up the next morning because you're sleeping late absolutely yeah you wake up too early the next morning is the problem yeah yeah exactly today's the today's the only day that i did not wake up on my own before uh the time that i had set my alarm today of course because it's my final day

here so that and it's march 32nd and it's march 32nd things are weird today you know it's also a National Sourdough Bread Day in addition to it. So if you can have fun at work cooking sourdough bread, you know, that's the thing. There you go. But it was some other kind of day, right, Adam? It is Founders Day. Apple Founders Day. That is correct. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yeah. When you said that pre-show, I was thinking Patriots Day, which usually falls around April 15th somewhere.

So we occasionally in New England get an extra day from the IRS because it's a massachusetts holiday yeah that's what i was thinking april 1st i'm gonna get the year wrong was it 76 or 77 oh man you should know this yes i want to say i want to say 77 but yeah i, But I could be wrong. I mean, you're asking the guy with the least amount of sleep here. That's not fair. Hey, how about I take us to a follow-on quick tip? 76. It was 76. Okay. All right. There you go. Yep.

Thanks. So quickly, with the one you opened, Dave, you mentioned the shift key, but you could also use the control key to skip over applications in that force quit window to select multiple yet separated applications. Yes. Fair. Yes. But one of the things I noticed is that if you go into the force quit window by hitting command option escape, then it comes up with a list. If you wanted to quit Finder, you can't. Your only option is to relaunch it. That's right. Yeah.

Actually, you can, though. If you open the terminal and you put in the command defaults, write com.apple.finder quit menu item dash B-O-O-L.

Spell you don't need to spell it out we're just going to copy it from the show it's in the show notes yeah and then true you change your relaunch option to a quit option so you can quit finder and if you ever needed to change it back you could change that use that same command and put the end put false and it'll put it back to relaunch finder i don't know why sometime years ago i decided i I would wanted to be able to quit finder. I don't know why. Yeah.

Well, yeah. As you're, as you're sharing this first, I'm, this is the first I've learned of it. I had no idea that you could, that there was even that, that toggle built into Mac OS. But then I started thinking, well, do I want to do this? Okay. I think I kind of usually want the finder to relaunch after I quit it. Usually every now and then I have, and I can't give you a specific example as to when, why, or how I wanted it to quit.

I did yeah maybe it was in a shutdown and it was uh hung up or something you know yeah well in that case you could use the terminal right adam i think you could you could use the kill command but i think it might even be easier i think you probably could also kill it from activity monitor oh yes you will need to make sure you're viewing like all processes i think that's actually a user process the finder would be a user process yeah yeah yeah so you could just Just go

in there, search for Finder, find the Finder, open it up, and quit it. I originally found it, and I don't remember the app, but it was like a service at the bottom of settings. Oh, interesting. Maybe not settings. No, preferences. It was at the bottom of system preferences. It was one of the services is when an app you could add, and it had a million different things that were essentially terminal commands.

Yeah, right, right, right. Okay, yeah, that makes sense. To configure your computer. Yeah. Yeah, you're right, Adam. Use Activity Monitor to kill it would be the easy way. I mean, you can use the – there's always ways in the terminal. In the terminal, you're going to have to run the –. Command to find the process and figure out what process ID it is and then run the kill command on the right process ID, right? Well, that's one way.

But so what Adam's saying is you have to, to you, there's a command on the finder. Sorry, let me start from the beginning on that. There's a command in the terminal called kill and you feed it the ID of a process and it will attempt to kill that process. But you have to know the ID. And so to your point, you got to look at the process list, find the ID, which of course you could also do an activity monitor, but now you're sort of, you know, you're crossing the stream.

Might as well just kill it from there. Right, exactly. But there is a command in the terminal, kill all, seven characters all right together without a space, kill all space, and then you can give the process name.

And the finder is capital F. It has to match. match um but you know kill all finder will go and just it'll it'll do you know it goes and creates a list on its own enumerates it and goes through it yeah so yeah more nerdy lots of tips yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah what is it lots of ways to practice animal cruelty skin the cat at this is true this is true uh yeah tennessee oh go ahead i was gonna i was just gonna say remind people that you know terminal

with great power comes great responsibility too like if you're messing around with commands in there be sure you know what you're doing like yeah don't listen to the guy that's had four hours of sleep that's what could possibly go wrong come on yeah Yeah, that's right. Let's see. R, R-M. No, no, no. We're not even going to say it. We're not even going to say it. We're not going to lead somebody down the wrong road here. Everybody knows it's format C colon echo yes. That's great.

All right. Tennessee Papa will save us with the next quick tip. He says, I had an end user complain that all of his render files from Premiere that were being saved to the file server were resulting in clips that would not play back properly. Damaged files. We had recently upgraded the version of Premiere he was running. After lots of trial and error and no positive results, I took a look at the connection from his Mac to the file server.

He was on AFP, Apple File Protocol. In fact, almost all of his connections to various servers were AFP. Apple deprecated AFP years ago, and while it still works, every device manufacturer that supported it had to reverse engineer their own solution. Apple never really published one of those. Everybody that supported AFP that wasn't Apple had figured it out for themselves. Somehow, a brand new window just opened up on my computer, which I love because

I can't keep reading his question. This is amazing. He says, so I changed this connection over to SMB and all of the file transfers and renders are now smooth as silk. SMB 3.X is every bit as fast as AFP was. I would argue that it's even faster than AFP was, but I could be wrong about that. AFP is a very chatty protocol and doesn't do well. Like the faster, you don't get as much of an increase as you get faster and faster.

So whereas the as the connection speed gets faster and faster and i know afp is apple file protocol what is smb oh man this is a question for john stump the dummy no no samba was was the the word they came up with to uh so that they didn't have to say smb but s and m and b each stand for something and it is we've got it here kiwi gram in the chat there you go server message block.

Lock nice so yeah thank you kiwi green yes yep here we are i'm just gonna play stomp the dummy all morning while i can all right yeah we'll just we'll just do um we'll just do it'll be the morning samba here yeah i know we'll do our things i was gonna throw it all the way back to like apple apple talk oh local talk well i guess apple talk was the protocol local talk were the connectors right yeah the little phone jack ones yeah digging way back in history there yeah but that was kind of amazing

it was awesome yeah right like when you could first connect two computers together my my roommate guys these are things you don't think about um when we were in college you know we were in freshman year in dorms cement tents you know it's like how they are we're at university of connecticut um i heard they won a basketball game the other night so go huskies um. We both had Macs and I had a printer. He did not.

And it was like, well, if we could do local talk between the two rooms, we could share the printer and this would be amazing. And of course, it's cement walls, though. So, you know, there's no drilling that's happening. But we found that they had retrofitted the rooms with Ethernet cable, even though at the time we were not there was nothing to plug into. There was no reason to use it for us. But they had retrofitted it with like Ethernet or coax or maybe both.

And where they had put the junction boxes there was a hole drilled in the wall so we we snaked a piece of phone cable through there and then had to re-splice it on the other end because it wasn't big enough to send through with the connector and then we had local talk between our two rooms it was really cool wow yeah yeah yeah i don't and now all the computers in the world are talking which is i know that was a difficult hurdle in the early days getting computers to talk

to each other was It was not a simple task. I made a lot of money helping people get their computers to talk to each other. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Adam, are you going to save us or are you going to take us on another tangent? Yeah, we'll go down a different route. We'll go down a different route. This came up in last week's show. I was working with the show notes in the notes app where we have them. And I was trying to click on something. And we had a note that had been double

quoted. so it had two greater than signs just on a line by itself and when I clicked there, a dropdown menu appeared with like the titles of other notes that were in the notes app. And I was like, that was weird. And it took me a while to figure out what was going on. And then I realized that apparently in notes, if you type two greater than symbols on a line by itself, it will pop open a list and then you can select one of those and it'll create a link to another note.

Really? And can you filter more from there? Like if you put the two greater than's in and then in seek, say keep typing does it allow you to filter that list like if i i know i want notes from adam i believe so i haven't tried that i did not try that that's the first i just thought it was weird like this menu was appearing out of nowhere yeah right right right yeah yeah yeah no i i get that that's like and if i type adam oh yeah yes sure that exactly works steve yeah yeah look at that yeah

and i don't know how it determines what shows up in the list probably the most recently edited ones or it starts with most recently edited and then when you do that thing and start typing the the options change the list filters but you also get an option to create a new note with the title of whatever text you have just typed so you can you can create the note to which you are going to link it doesn't have to previously exist yeah yeah my other favorite one just to

add on to this for notes tips is the tags so i like to use tags to organize my notes in addition to just having them in folders so if i have subjects around them like i have ones for grocery items or like i'll often put into notes like measurements for like things that i need to buy for the house or whatever like you know so i will tag those so if you just put on a line by itself usually at the bottom i throw it but i think you

can put it anywhere in the note you just put a hashtag and then a keyword or a tag that you want. And that will add it to a little tags section, and then you can filter through your tags. So you don't need to create the tag beforehand. You just, it knows on the fly if you put in, you know, the pound sign, hashtag, whatever we call it these days. Yep. Yep. Got it. Cool. Huh. Cool. I like it.

How about i take us to scott thank you please yeah so scott wrote in he says i've been using shortcuts as i have been using these shortcuts as part of other shortcuts and automations in addition to invoking them via siri oops i'm sorry via the s lady cancel that, there we go now i can continue given your comments on the most recent episode i thought you might might find them useful. And he sent me shortcuts to silence unknown callers off and silence unknown callers on.

I added them and it formatted my hard drive. No, just kidding. Right. Just install. Install first, ask questions later. Exactly. What could possibly go wrong? So I added those and of course it synced right over to my phone because they aren't compatible with Mac and it says so right in there. And then as I was playing around, I'm like, well, I've got to open shortcuts and then go to that shortcut to turn it on or turn it off.

Because when I asked the S lady to do it, she was cantankerous and wouldn't play nice. So how am I going to do this easily? So I went one step further to run the shortcut shortcut as an app. I open shortcuts. I press and hold the the that shortcut.

Shortcut and then i go to details and under details i edit the home screen add the home screen sure and now i've got a shortcut to silence unknown callers and allow unknown callers on my home screen oh and this is just a like there's it's not a custom shortcut action like this is built in it's built into it's built into the shortcuts ios or whatever yeah yeah and then but the fact that you can add a shortcut as a as an ios app essentially yeah that's what it comes down to yeah i i um you're

yes now you can quickly fill up your home screen with that sort of thing that that becomes problematic i i understand but that's something i use all the time and.

Yeah yeah we had a question that i actually didn't prep for for this show but it it's worth kind of tugging on this thread a little bit your your idea of saving a shortcut to your iphone home screen to make life easier to get to an app or to get to the shortcut you can do this with a lot of things and um this one listener was heading into the hospital for a few days and for whatever it didn't share details nor would we share them with you if they had but for

whatever reason they were not going to be able to speak for several days after whatever this procedure was And they knew this going in. Okay. And so what he did was created a bunch of like speech to text files on his shortcuts in his shortcuts app. And. Wanted to, he was like, how do I play these? Can I save them as audio files and play them? He wanted a, like a sound deck app for the, for the iPhone.

And that's a geek challenge. I don't know of any sound deck apps for the iPhone, uh, but I'm sure they exist. So if they, if they do feedback at Mac, he kept.com. Hold on where I think he said feedback at Mac, he gap.com.

Oh, feedback at Mac, he kept.com. That's the one, but like a sound deck app, meaning a place where you just put a bunch of different sound clips and you can trigger them you know as needed and i thought well if there's an if such an app exists we'll help you find it and you know go from there but in the meantime you could just create one custom home screen that home screen that has all of those.

Shortcuts and you tap the one you want and now your iphone natively has become its own little sound deck app and and that's what he did he wound up setting that up and he's like oh this works amazing it says it works great so uh now is it ios 17 i think is where you can create your own voice the personal voice yeah yeah and i would imagine there'd be a way to make yes that integrate it that's that even sounds a little like you yeah okay oh yeah yeah okay yeah have

you done that i have it takes some overnight time on your phone though yep have you done it adam yeah i did yeah it's pretty interesting so talk about it a little bit it like what how are you it does it sound like you and it like it just becomes you yeah i mean a bit but yeah the training is like crazy you have i i forget how many hundreds of it's like 150 phrases you have to say phrases you have to read to it and then it goes off,

and like pete says it'll process for however long and then that voice becomes available i was hoping i could use it for for to replace siri just to be creepy but you can't do that it's just for like like text-to-speech stuff. Okay, okay. Yeah, yeah. Huh? Oh, yeah. That would be wild, having your own phone answer you back in your own voice. I think I asked this the last time we talked about it. But, you know, it just so happens I have this huge archive of thousands of hours of myself speaking.

Could I, instead of going through the training, could I just give it a couple of files and tell it to go off to the races, buddy? They want you to say very specific phrases, I think.

They're they're i think it i think they figured out exactly what they need to do to like train this thing right so yeah when when when does the day come that our voices become like we find our own voice on the internet randomly and because seriously like we've published probably already it's there now we've published thousands of hours obviously if you take a voice and feed it into one of these machines you can make something sound approximately like that like like

when is that that going to happen yeah you're right it already happened it's already happening yeah i mean yeah deep fakes there are problems i mean oh yeah people have figured out how to you know have lucas call you and say dad i've been arrested i need you to you know get me some target gift cards yes yeah bail out that's yeah so you know what's like if you're using target gift cards to bail yourself out of jail you deserve to stay the night there you go i'll come get you

in the morning i honestly don't think it would be too hard to uh build and train an ai to basically do my podcast that i used to do yeah yeah well allison and allison did it you with 11 or whatever that was yeah allison sheridan at nocella cast i think it was kiwi graham just pointed that out in discord oh she did she created a whole yeah she had laryngitis ai and we know when she got back from antarctica yeah i think it's 11 i thought

about it i dug into it not that long ago a couple of months ago Sounds something 11. Yeah. But I dug into it for...

Ad reads right because i i the only thing that is scripted on the show other than the questions that you send us which is your scripts uh are the ad reads and as i say i'd let chat gpt write them for me and then i read them because it i got to a point where i was as you all know probably more than me that i got into a rut you know if it was the same sponsor i'd say the same thing almost exactly and that was just boring so i figured make it fun

but like i figured well if i'm writing these dad scripts like why not then just feed it into an ai that sounds like me and it it doesn't i i actually created like two you know i recorded an ad and then i played the the ad via this engine and it sounds kind of like me but the the the cadence is off yeah yeah yeah that's and same thing with the same thing with the personalized voice that's the thing is it doesn't really.

Learn your speaking style it learns your inflection and tone and you know so like that stuff sounds correct but yep where you might naturally pause where you might, have certain idiosyncrasies or tics or things like that you know it's not going to get those yep yep exactly i'm going to stop editing yes you're going to stop breaking the stream but it's 11 labs.io is what we were trying to find yeah and it's in the shots speaking of chat gpt yes pc unix uh chimed

in on our regex conversation from i think it was last episode or maybe the previous one i always forget my brain but um we were talking about regex and you know writing regular regular expressions to you know do string parsing and and do things and he says i've used I used to use rather regexes in VI and to edit text files but it's easier to just use chat GPT and it can do things that you'd be hard-pressed to do otherwise. Consider these prompts which were followed by a text file.

In this file the second line indicates the date I wrote a post on Medium and its read length. Show me both lines where the read time is five minutes or more. From the the same file. Show me the stories written in the second week of the month. Increase prices in this file by 10% unless the item is gold. Increase those by 20%. Remove all lines that begin with published. So that would be a gnarly, gnarly.

Regex like i don't even know where you'd start but apparently chat gpt can do it yeah yeah of course let it write its own regex solve this problem however you like just give me the answer please of course you'd have to spot check those answers like that that is the the thing with chat gpt that at least that i found thus far is with things like apple scripts it comes back it is strong and wrong sometimes it's like yep here's an apple script that will do

this and i but the And the good part is you can test it. Like you don't, you know, it is objectively correct or incorrect. And then you tell it the error message. And it's like, I'm sorry, I got that wrong. You're right. Here's the right script. And then, you know, usually it only takes an iteration or two and it gets you there. Yeah, you've turned it. Often wrong, but never in doubt. Right, right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You've basically turned a coding task into a debugging task.

Correct. In most cases. Correct. Yes. Knowing AppleScript helps, right? Having a functional knowledge of AppleScript. But you're right. Now I'm just editing someone else's crummy code instead of writing my own crummy code. I mean, it's the same thing you would do if you were using Stack Overflow or, you know, all the other places that we use things, right? Like, you know, if you're going to pull code, what you're looking for is, hey, I don't know where to start with this thing.

Give me a starting point or give me some education on I'm not sure how to do this. Show me some ways to do this. And then you suss it out from there. Yep. And the nice part about chat GPT versus stack overflow when you're solving exactly those coding problems, because that like prior to chat GPT, it was you'd find you if you Googled, you were going to find yourself on stack overflow. So you might as well start there.

Right. And then you'd find. But on stack overflow, often you would not find a code sample that did exactly what you were trying to do, or at least attempted to do exactly what you were trying to do. You'd find something adjacent and you'd have to massage it a little bit to begin to have it in the realm of what you might want to do.

Whereas with ChatGPT, oftentimes because it can synthesize all of that stuff together, the first thing it builds you is at least aimed at doing what you want to do, not something adjacent to it. And you still might have to debug it, but it's a huge leg up. Yeah, it gives you a starting point. Yeah, it does. Exactly. All right. We've got a couple of follow-up quick tips here. We'll start with Kent from referring back to episode 1030.

So last week's episode says, you talked about Simon's quick tip on using Quick Look, where you can hold down the space bar and Quick Look will just stay up as long as you have the space bar down.

If you were in a Finder window and select multiple files or all of of them using command a and then press the space bar the first item will preview and then you can use the left and right arrow keys to cycle through the selected files so this way you're not just going through the entire list of files you're only going through the files you've selected if you then click the maximize button in the upper left of the items window in addition to quick look going full screen

you also get a small toolbar that allows you to play or pause a slideshow or to shrink down the images, I know, to a contact sheet. This works best with a folder of images, but works well with other items too. He does add, there's a quirk though, for at least some users. If you select all and then the space bar, the image that pops up is the last one rather than the first, as you might expect.

And if you use the right arrow to move through the files, it actually moves backwards from the last one to the first one. He says, this has existed through several iterations of macOS.

As far back as big sir and i haven't found a fix so just bear that in mind if you're selecting all but of course if you're selecting all oh i guess for the the full screen thing you would need that yeah yeah yeah okay in the order you want to go yeah yeah i had no that full full screen quick look thing like what that was fascinating right yeah why does that exist why don't they tell us that exists that like there you go that's because i'll tell you what i mean it'd be a cool way to you know,

then screencast to your TV to share photos with somebody and not have to create a. A slideshow it creates one for you it creates one for you yes on the fly right yeah yeah it's it's um it's just it's weird that they built that and right like here we are almost you know in our 20th year so there you go yeah yep i don't know now that may be a show title huh Yeah. Why don't they tell us that exists? Yeah, that's it. Why don't they tell us? Why don't they tell us? Yeah. Ben told us some things.

He did. So why don't you guys go take a break, come on back in half an hour, and we'll be done. Great. Sounds good. I'm going to take a nap. Yeah. Ben sent a plethora of quick tips and items and all that. So practically an entire show agenda and some really good stuff. First one would be preserve camera settings. In episode 1009, I recall Adam speaking about the Live Photo settings in Camera.

I wanted to make sure folks who prefer Live Photo to not be enabled by default know that iOS has some camera settings related to this. In Settings Camera Preserve Settings, it's possible to have the Camera app open with various states retained from the previous session. Most notably, you can preserve Camera Mode rather than resetting it to Photo.

You can preserve live photo rather than resetting it to on it can be difficult to interpret the ladder setting when the toggle is enabled and you switch off live photo in the camera app it will stay off until the next time you switch it on so uh and then that makes my brain hurt pete i was supposed to be taking a nap i know right sorry yeah it's it's a little counterintuitive yeah but but play with it. Right, play with it. Just play with it. No, that's... Nothing can break.

Just install it. It's going to be fine. Yeah. And then run, yes. That's right, yeah. Run and walk away. Okay, then we're also talking about minimizing windows to an application icon in 1009. Rod L. tipped about minimizing windows to app icons instead of separate dock icons. And Dave, you commented that to get the minimized windows back, you have to click on the app icon and the windows will restore.

Store and to see which windows are minimized in the app and restore a specific window right click on that app icon or command click and the minimize windows will you'll come up with a little menu and the minimize windows will be prefixed prefixed prefixed sure with a diamond in front of it and then you just select that one to restore it.

So that's how you can pull up individual ones. Because if you just click on it, he goes into the whole thing about how Mac OS chooses for you which one it's going to open. Yeah, I got it. But by command clicking it, you can select the one you want to open with a diamond in front of it saying diamond showing this is one of your minimized windows. Yeah. And then I think Adam and I will get into a discussion here on this one a little

bit. But the iOS device backups, in 1029, Andrew asked about backing up his iPhone. At some point in this, Adam commented about the backup encryption option being a benefit to making a local backup via the Finder and formerly iTunes. I think this too, I used to think this too, and I do still sometimes make a local backup before a major iOS upgrade. However, backups to the cloud are also encrypted. encrypted.

What was not always obvious to me was that the encrypt local backup setting is a subset of the option to backup all data on your iPhone to this Mac, separate from backup your most important data on your iPhone to iCloud. To be sure, the checkbox is labeled with local. All the private data types that are included in the encrypted local backup and excluded from an and unencrypted local backup are also included in the iCloud backup, which is, of course, it's self-encrypted.

And then I think later on we get into the question about encrypting stuff before it goes to the cloud, which, as I always called, was Pi, pre-internet encryption. Yeah, I don't have a lot to add on this one other than, yeah, we're going to talk a little bit later about more, I think, some of the details of iCloud encryption options. So we do have some of that coming up. Absolutely. This stuff makes my brain hurt, though. Like, these are weird.

Like, Ben found weird things to make us think about. He did, a lot of them. So thank you, Ben. But wow. What a time, dude. No, no. We love all the feedback. Yeah, we do. It's okay. Whatever pace it comes in, it's totally fine. Great. We got a lot this week, though. Like, I went to prep things, and it was like, the list is long. Like, what happened here?

Yeah. The last one, at least on the quick tips, I believe for this week, it comes from Richard, who says, as most people probably know, the position of the spotlight search overlay on Mac OS can be changed by simply dragging it to a new location when it's open. That's true. He says you can also change the vertical height of the search overlay from its bottom edge. So my tip, he says, is to combine these two.

Drag the overlay to the top of the screen, let's say top middle, run a search, and then extend the vertical height so that it takes up most of the height of your screen. MacOS will now remember this new location and size of the spotlight search overlay so that every time you search, you get a full height search results window showing as many results as possible without scrolling. rolling. I love this idea. Like why not make it a little bigger, right?

You know, this was a conversation in discord and James kind of dovetailed in and he says, if you ever move it out of the way or too much or want to reset it, press and hold on the spotlight magnifying glass icon in your menu bar and it will reset the position back to center. So that I also had no idea about. That I didn't know about, no. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Yeah, I know. Yeah, it's fun. I just did it as you were talking about it for the first time. That's brilliant. Yep. I agree. It's pretty good.

So, yeah, feedback at macgeekup.com, folks. That's where you're sending in all the quick tips, everything else as well. We love it, and we'll keep on sharing. All right, folks. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Quick question. Question, how's your social battery these days? If you're anything like me, juggling tech, life, and maybe a bit of socializing, you might find your battery somewhere between needs a charge and where's the nearest outlet?

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All right um yes yeah adam you want to take us to our first question of the week yeah we got we got kathy who has a great question about icloud encryption this is the one we were alluding to earlier she says i was a long time listener of the mac cast and started listening to mgg when adam moved over well thank you for coming along yeah i love the show although i do miss adam's apple news summary well maybe we can do something about that eventually sure um my question is related to cloud backups,

specifically iCloud, I am more aligned with Adam's philosophy of multiple backups. Good. However, I restrict cloud backups to non-personal information. In other words, I have no off-site backup for my financial documents. According to Apple's website, no one else can access your end-to-end encrypted data, not even Apple. And this data remains secure in the case of a data breach in the cloud.

My concern is that should this policy change or should there be a technical glitch, all my financial documents would be exposed. I was considering compressing my financial docs into a tar file and encrypting that before pushing to iCloud. My thoughts are at least my files would not be exposed if iCloud policies or conditions should change. So the question is, do you see any technical issues with doing this? Any encryption method recommendations? Thanks for your help and suggestions, Kathy.

That's a great question. And I'm happy that Kathy followed you over here, Adam. This is amazing. So I think the logic is sound on this, right? If you want to store something on someone else's server and be certain that they would never be able to get that data, then encrypting that data before you ever put it on their server with a key that only you have and you know that only you have makes perfect sense. And certainly, you could use tar.

I mean, that's the nerdy way to go. We love that here, right? But you could use tar to do that, and that would work fine. But I think an easier way, and one that requires less recurring maintenance, because you'd have to either script this or you'd have to tar up the file every time you made an update to it. But instead of doing all that, make an encrypted disk image. You use Disk Utility. You can do that. You make it encrypted. Give it a password.

Save that encrypted image in a folder that's automatically synced to iCloud. Inside that encrypted disk image, you put all of your financial files. When you want to edit one of your files, you open up the disk image, typing in your key to unencrypt it, and then just manipulate the files on the drive like you normally would.

And as you do that the drive will update and the drive will sync to icloud and it would be worth testing this to make sure that you know it it's okay because syncing a disk image could be weird but that's where i would start i would experiment with that and uh let's see how it goes i don't know there's a couple discord suggestions already too okay the proton drive is uh suggested by by Kiwi Graham and Tennessee Papa suggests Cryptomator to encrypt all your data to the cloud, even on iCloud.

Not familiar with either one of those, but. I was i was going to comment on dave's response because that's exactly what i've been doing for years i have an encrypted disk image i just call it secure documents it's in my documents folder. Which syncs and even better than having to enter your password if you save that password to.

Your keychain it will just mount like you can just mount that drive and not have to enter a password every time you could also automate mounting of that volume yes um i just do it when i'm gonna do that the other thing is that i keep in there so i not only documents but i use for um i use paperless for putting in all of scanning in all my, like documents so i don't have to keep them in file folders or whatever and i organize everything in that uh great application from now i'm gonna forget

the name of the company um but i've been using that for years and i store my paperless library because it uses a library file kind of of like iPhoto or whatever in that encrypted disk image as well. So all those documents are encrypted in there, and then go up to iCloud. But I wanted to comment also on the iCloud encryption stuff, like we were talking about earlier. So iCloud has something called advanced data protection.

And when you turn that on, basically everything that goes to iCloud, almost everything iCloud mail is is an exception so you need to be aware of that but almost everything is then end-to-end encrypted and the keys are stored and attached to your devices locally so when Apple says they cannot decrypt or read those files if you're using advanced uh. Data protection, then they will not be able to do that because they don't have access to your, they literally don't have the keys.

They cannot do anything. And so when you set that up, you also want to probably set up the feature. Like I did this with my wife, you can set up, you know, the ability for her, if something happens to me to take over my devices and my keys, you can, um, create backup, uh, keys that you can put in a, in a, you know, storage, Safe storage location like a bank box or whatever. Sure, yep. Yeah, and there's a list on there that shows you the differences between having this on and not having this on.

So it'll show you what services are just encrypted in transit where Apple has the keys and then what ones when you turn this on are flipped over. So there's a, oh, is this how to turn it on? I found an article about how to turn it on and some of that stuff.

Yeah, I have some links in the note. Oh, okay, great. to the advanced data protection and there is a table that shows you everything and pretty much once you turn on advanced data encryption everything is end-to-end encrypted i think other than uh icloud mail got it got it and that's still encrypted in transit and on apple servers but i think in that case the keys are still stored with apple with apple that would make sense yeah exactly yeah and i think

that's mainly so they can you know you can read your your emails and stuff when you're logging into iCloud. Yep. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, this chart that they have is great. Yeah, the iCloud mail, they talk about who has the keys. Mail calendars and contacts are stored with Apple. And again, I think that's so they can do iCloud functionality. Yeah. Yeah, there's just a column, you're right, for key storage. And other than those three, everything else is the keys are on your trusted devices.

You can't have a device, I think everything needs to be on iOS, 13 or newer in order to turn this on. Cause I have, I have a bunch of old iPads that I use for like on stage or to use with a mixer or whatever, cause they don't need to be the latest and greatest. It works out fine. But because I have those on my Apple ID, I have not been able to enable this yet. And you have to have, there's a bunch of requirements. You have to have two factor.

You have to have, you know, but I think Apple's pretty much forced that across the board these days and it's getting less annoying with past keys and stuff. Yeah. Yeah, it would be hard to not use two-factor authentication on my Apple account, my Apple ID. That would be difficult to do. I don't think it would be possible.

Yeah, and I would presume, I didn't look into this, but I would presume that the key storage also relies on your devices having secure enclave or more modern devices, because I think it's stored in that chip. I'm pretty sure. That makes sense. I'm guessing there a little bit, so don't quote me on that, but I would imagine that's the case. Makes sense. Yeah, yeah. Are we moving on? Pete, do you have anything more to add to this?

I'm just sitting here thinking, and it's a philosophical question, I guess, more than anything. To what degree state-level decryptors can get at this stuff anyway? Well, they'd have to first get your device. So that's the thing. Right. Fair enough. Well, if they were able to get the data off the cloud, could they ever decrypt it? Oh, just brute force or other methods without your keys?

Like recreating your keys eventually there will be a computer fast enough to do it yes right the question is will we still be using today's encryption algorithm when those computers are existing right yeah that's that's the promise of quantum computing right yeah that's exactly right and if a nation state actor or somebody really wants my bank documents that bad they can have it way bigger i have way bigger problems your problems fair enough your problems

are not Not related to what's in your bank account. That's a fair statement, Adam, indeed. Not to minimize that. I never want to be flippant about that statement, because I don't buy into the thing like no one wants access to my stuff. No, your statement didn't come across as flippant. It made perfect sense. There's a bigger umbrella. If it's a state that wants it, yeah, you've got problems. Yeah. You've got problems. Paperless is by Mariner Software.

Thanks to BarryMK1 in the Discord chat. Yeah, yeah, Mariner Software, they make great Mac apps, or have for years. This might be, I don't know if Paperless is the only one they have left. I haven't gone back. They had Mariner, right, for a long, long time. Oh, I remember that. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Uh, all right. Shall we move on to Mark here? Yeah.

Mark has to say, Mark asks, he says, uh, I've always avoided using time machine because I use other backup schemes, but something happened the other day. And I'm trying to figure out if time machine would have helped me from getting caught. I had a file on an external connected hard drive accidentally get deleted.

I didn't notice this until a few days later. later if i had time machine running would it also allow me to go back a few days and retrieve this file i am thinking the answer is no because this external hard drive has over 28 terabytes on it it's actually a four disk raid that appears as one device and unless i had a time machine drive set up with at least that amount of storage it would not back it up that's correct in the end i did not get caught but it

was a pain retrieving the file and re-recovering it says i'm using crash CrashPlan Pro and their UI for finding a file is not the greatest, but at least I found it. Yeah. Adam, do you want to start with this one? So are we sure that the thing I ask here is, are we sure that Time Machine has to have a one-to-one? Because it's my understanding it watches for changed files and it keeps the most recent stuff and pushes out older stuff. stuff.

So my concern here would be just because the size of that drive, if you didn't have a large time machine backup, you wouldn't have much, like history history to go back. Yeah. But if it's just a couple days, and you're not changing files on that drive a lot, it might have worked, I wouldn't probably risk it. Like I get where that statement comes from. But yeah. But yeah, no, you need to use some other sort of backup scheme.

And it creates a history and it will back up external drives and it's unlimited storage and it has a way to go back in time and find different versions of a file. So, you know, having that multiple, that's why I have multiple backup schemes, right? Some things are good at one thing, some things are good at others. And what I love about Backblaze is, you know, unlimited storage and you can go back. I think they limit you to...

If you don't continuously back up i think they'll still send you a warning unless you're on one of their pro plans that they're going to start deleting stuff but so like if you if you take your back off backup offline and they can't see what's been changing i know i've gotten warnings on that before but as long as you're continuously using this service um the default service i think, you're fine you can go back you know i think as far as you want i know i don't know how far back it goes but i've

used that in the past so that's the only thing i can think of you besides just creating an archive or whatever i have i have my chronosync also which i sync to my drobo and i we've talked about this setting it has a setting where you can say you know sync this folder over but don't sync deletions so anything that i delete never gets purged so the act of the the deletion is not synced. Correct, yeah. Got it, yeah.

The copy on the Drobo will stay there forever unless I go actually delete it, even if I delete it in the local folder. Okay, yeah, that's a nice safety net. I mean, you need to be aware, obviously, that things might start to fill up. But yeah, the not syncing of deletions, that's, yeah, I like that. That's good.

Got anything else when you do it on a folder with with chronosync i'm doing everything on a folder by folder basis so it just depends on what folders i care about right yep so, because it's my archive what i call my archive storage like i know i can safely do anything over here and i'm gonna have a copy over there safety net yeah yeah do you ever go through and prune things out of that archive storage or do you just let it no i just put in bigger drives Yeah, that's the answer.

More power. Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, the cost for a terabyte of data five years from now will almost certainly be less expensive than the cost of it today, right? So you just keep adding storage as you create it. Yeah, I mean, inevitably a drive fails, I get the light, I buy a bigger drive, and I put that one in, and now I have more.

That's one of my favorite things. Drobo certainly were the first to bring that concept to consumers, the concept of having a multi-drive array of disks that appeared as one. That withstood failure. Yeah. Well, even if it didn't withstand failure, but like the idea of having multiple size drives. Uh, in that a mix of different size drives, because with raid you, all the drives need with traditional raid, all the drives need to be exactly the same size.

And that's fine in like a corporate environment. But, you know, for those of us at home, like you just said, Adam, like a drive's going to fail. I'll pull it out, replace it with a larger drive. And that's a way to grow your thing kind of very organically over time. And Drobo were the first to bring that to us. Obviously, you know, Synology with their Synology hybrid RAID does the same thing on many, but not all of their network storage devices.

And it really, there are some companies that like QNAP never embraced the, you know, this hybrid RAID thing, the beyond RAID, like Drobo called it, where you can have multiple size drives. And I've tried to explain to them, like, you know, there's, for those of us that are like prosumers, nerds at home, we really like this idea of it doesn't have to be, I know it sacrifices a little bit of efficiency. My drive's still reading, right? Faster than my gigabit ethernet. So all good there.

You know, like, I want this flexibility so that I can slowly just let my storage pool grow over time. Time and uh it's a powerful thing i it and it's it's easy to overlook until you're living it and and and then you realize oh this is super convenient to be able to just do this. So, you just mentioned gigabit Ethernet, your drives and all that. And I just, as I was putting together the Synology last, the second Synology drive last night, I noticed multiple Ethernet ports in the back of it.

Do I increase my speed by putting multiple Ethernet cables into the switch? The answer is yes. However, there's an asterisk. Well, no, when with Synology and other things that do this too, that have multiple Ethernet ports, you can plug them both into the same switch. So like if you have two Ethernet ports on your Synology, you run two Ethernet cables, plug them into the same switch. There are Ethernet protocols for bonding those two together if the switch and the device support it.

And if there are not, if you're just using a switch that isn't, you know, quote unquote smart and you can't go tell it what to do, then the Synology will bond them together on its own. And there are some limitations that come with operating that way. But if that's the only way you can operate, it's fine. What it gets you is not two gigabytes of bandwidth, but two one gigabyte streams. And so if one of your Macs is connected to it, it will get one gig.

And then another Mac connected to it, it would put that on the other one.

It sort of balance it like load balance it intelligently. and so in theory you could have two gigs worth of data if your drives can support that kind of speed you know happening simultaneously but not to the same computer like if you had a computer on 10 gig that would not work but to two separate devices at least as i understand it so if somebody you know i get i get out of my element in this stuff pretty quickly but uh somebody knows

i was thinking more for the hyper backup program between one synology drive to another would they.

You know that's a yes i i can confirm because i have two disk stations one that hyper backups to the other they're both etherneted in with two k each etherneted in with two cables okay and i have seen hyper backup performance faster than the 108 you know uh megabit megabytes per second that is sort of the max that you see with with gigi i've seen it at like 150 160 so yeah it does yes okay last stupid question because i'm playing stump the dummy this morning you know

it dude i had four hours of sleep so you know any benefit or would a ethernet cable from one synology drive directly to the other vice through the switch skipping bypassing the switch yes yes people People have done that. Okay. Generally, the reason is to keep the.

Synology to synology traffic from like cluttering up the switch or if you want to have it on its own private network or wherever like you can do that but i can't it like in my home or in your home i can't think of a reason why you would want to right like neither of us is running so much data through our switches that we would actually be hitting some sorts of limits i mean I mean, it's like those limits are compared to what we do. They are astronomical.

Okay. Yeah. But maybe, maybe there's another reason to create like your own little land between the two distations. And then, cause that's what you would do is, you know, give them self or give them static IP addresses on those second ethernet ports. And then they know to talk to each other in secret. So I guess there's a security thing, right? If you know, somebody is not, if it's not on the switch, then somebody sniffing can't see it.

But fair enough. off again like at home to your point earlier about adam's bank account issue if you're worried about, somebody sniffing what's happening on your switch in your house like that there's another there's another thing going on right i was just thinking of speed direct speed may it help there i don't i mean i think there's an like if we get into the electrons maybe like clearly it's not going through the switch so there's no middleman so technically faster by you know a quarter of

a a millisecond or i don't know i don't i don't think it's going to matter okay yeah so shall i pull us out of this rabbit hole that i dragged us down if you want or drag us further down it i don't care you guys are in charge today i don't know it's fine yeah there we go uh steve wrote in with a question and uh i think you have the answer to this day so i'm going to ask you another question day and 25 plus years of using max and steve is stumped so here we go dave Well.

It's not the end of the world. Why are older versions of apps showing up with the open with function? I've tried clearing out the launch services database with cocktail. What else can I do? Thoughts? Um yeah i have some thoughts i if you've cleared out so these when when you put an app on your computer it does get added to the launch services database right and uh.

So that's what, when you go to like open a file, right click on a file, you say open with, it shows you all the apps that have registered themselves as being able to open that type of file, right? It's a pretty cool little thing. So you get it filtered down by things that have at least advertised on the surface. I'll take that kind of file. Sure. Sure. If that, if you've reset launch services database, you know, then in theory, nothing should be there.

So what this tells me is that those apps are there. They're still there on your system somewhere on a clone drive, right? On, you know, buried in a folder somewhere. If you have, you know, applications old because there was some weird upgrade that happened. I don't know. So to sleuth this out, what I would do is let a file open in one of these mystery apps because then it'll appear in your doc and then you can right click on it in the doc and say reveal and finder.

And then you're going to know at least where one of these is and my guess is you know where there's smoke there's fire you're going to find if not all of them in one place groups of them and you'll start to see a pattern and figure out maybe how it got this way but um yeah but always remember to get rid of it yeah use clean my mac to clean your lsd that's right your launch services database base not the other thing but yeah interesting one of the reasons why i typically exclude my applications

folder from backups and clones and stuff yeah that's right that's an interesting thing i mean it that is a. Much safer decision to make today than it was 10 years ago with you know everything most everything being available for re-download uh you know online or even via the app stores i mean you could get caught losing if you have a really really old apps yeah yeah something custom that you you know you found like in the corner of the internet somewhere and

that website went down and and you just installed it and ran it and didn't care that it's been siphoning off your bank accounts for the last 10 years but our archive i don't know about the bank account thing but you can archive those app installers too you know yes if you're worried about that keep all your old app installers somewhere and back those up i don't know no that i I do. I have a folder on my disk station that is, you know, it's labeled installers and it's a mess.

I mean, I'm sure I could go in there and be like, OK, well, I can get rid of, you know, I can clear up four terabytes of data by doing this. I still have an entire CD binder full of Mac Addict CDs. Oh, wow. Yeah. And that is a treasure trove of old, old, old shareware apps. Yeah. Just everything's on those discs. And I think somebody has a database online that'll tell you what's on what disc. Oh, so you don't have to... Yeah, somebody did the work. Ah, I like that. Yeah. It's good.

It's good. I'd have to find a DVD player to actually hook to my Mac and get those off. Yeah. You know, a question came up. I don't think we have it in today's show because, like I said, there was a ton of things that came in. But somebody was saying they were having a problem. Every DVD they were burning for archival purposes or something was failing. And they're like, I think there was a software upgrade that screwed this up. I said, well, maybe. But, you know, you're using Apple's thing.

How old's the DVD burner? Because, you know, a lot of us bought external USB, DVD, Blu-ray readers and burners years ago when that was a thing. And that's still what's connected to my M1 Mini. Now, I don't think my M1 Mini has ever read a disc that's been put in that thing. And it got me to thinking, like, why would I rely on that?

Like maybe maybe i should test it and if i i haven't needed it in so long that maybe it doesn't matter but presuming that these moving pieces of of hardware are just going to work all the time not not really it's just not how it goes yeah so guess what apple still sells in their apple stores and one of the oldest products that they still sell the apple usb super drive you can still go Go to an Apple store today and buy one off the shelf. Huh? Well, because it's still like 99 bucks.

Okay. That's crazy. That's wrong. That's crazy. That's not okay. 79 bucks or something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Huh? Huh?

Yeah. All right. Um. We're going to go to cool stuff found i think it's time let's do it yep let's uh let's see if we can bang out a couple of these things without i mean there's an argument to go into like the philosophical stuff that we've been been in but um rod will save us he says uh an easy to use application that will help you create lists of files for any need perfect for archiving or making making a list of all the things on your Mac attic DVD.

He says, uh, it's called the files list export app. And like everything, it'll be linked from the show notes at Mac, e-cap.com. Uh, he says, uh, lists all your photos, all your videos, or all your files. If you need to create a list of files, this app is for you. It's available in the Mac app store. And also he sent us a link to the developer's website. So we'll put all that in the show notes, but yeah, cool.

I, I, I can, I can see where that would be a handy thing to have to be able to just take a list of files, is have it in a spreadsheet where you can now manipulate and search and sort and you know do all those things with it you can turn it into html and index it so that adam doesn't have to figure out what's on his mac attic dvds right there you go yeah nice yep all right i'll take us to for lack of a better word i will call him sparky because he didn't sign it it was just sent with Spark.

Oh, the email client. Oh, there you go. Yeah. So he writes in Sparky. Not to be confused with David Sparks, I don't think. Hey, MGG crew, I just listened to the MGG episode for Monday, March 25th, 2024. Sorry, I was getting back into my announcer mode. On the episode, the listener asked about antivirus and security software on Macs. Another option that does what Dave likes, where it doesn't run in the background and risk your performance, MacScan 3.

Which is made by the folks at secure mac.com and advertised on their security oriented podcast the checklist which plays weekly the program just sits on your mac and as the sponsor text says provides a full or targeted scanning all without crowding up your hard drive or slowing down your machine unfortunately it's not free but you can set it to run on schedules i have it set to run every day at midnight and i see the results then of it the next morning when i wake my computer I

can actually say that my Mac doesn't suffer when it runs as I've done things at midnight occasionally and don't notice a difference. Keep up the great work guys. And as always, don't get caught. Cool. And it's a, it's, it's 50 bucks for. Uh, hang on. Yeah. 50 bucks a year is the subscription or 80 bucks for a two year subscription per computer. You can go to three computers and you get a little bit of a discount there.

Cool yep cool i agree i agree i have no idea where the agenda is anymore but now that i was looking at their website no we got we got josh thanks josh i think that'll work with his spatial viewer uh for ios and meta quest so i think this came up way back when we were doing apple vision pro stuff and i we have been talking about the new spatial videos and and how cool they are and the fact that meta quest came out and is supported so josh from soft arena uh one of the minds behind Walter,

which is another app we've talked about, great app, emailed us and said, it's not about their apps. It's just a story that he thought might be useful. He said, perhaps this can be interesting for those who have an iPhone, a MetaQuest headset, but no Vision Pro headset. Here's the deal. Apple released Vision Pro and made spatial videos a thing. Then MetaQuest released support for spatial videos in their latest update.

But, and I didn't know this, According to a Reddit post that he linked us to, you could only upload videos from the Quest app using an iPhone 15. So that leaves you in the lurch. What if you want to share those videos with somebody who doesn't have an iPhone 15 and a MetaQuest? You know, what are you going to do that? What are you going to do about that?

And to solve this, he says, we helped VR developers create Spatial Viewer, the most straightforward and fastest solution for viewing spatial videos without a Vision Pro headset. Basically, you install the Spatial Viewer companion app on your iPhone. If you don't have spatial videos, then you can record them with your iPhone 15 Pro or Pro Max. Then in one tap, you can convert the spatial video and send it to Google Drive.

Now you simply open Spatial Viewer on your MetaQuest and the videos will be available there. And they're all synced via the cloud through Google Drive. So we'll have the links to the Spatial Viewer apps and the product page and all that sort of stuff. But there you go. Yeah, that's weird that they would make that requirement. Yeah. I don't know. Well, I think it's because the iPhone 15 can take them, right? Right, sure. And so it has the, I don't know.

I agree, this is ridiculous. But it's got to have something to do with the fact that the iPhone 15 can take them. And so it can see them and process them differently. But there's no reason, obviously, that that needs to be a static truth. It's just a format, right? Yeah, it's just a format.

Right why can't you transfer the bits yep yep so adam what's the difference if i send you a video that i've done in spatial and in just a regular video you can i'm assuming you can see them both on your vision pro yeah yeah yeah what's the difference we did run into that issue where it was weird where we had to kind of send it through icloud where we couldn't send it direct correct oh right um but i think that was more a file size storage thing maybe

i don't know it it i think what it was trying to do was like dumb it down so that it didn't presume you were sending it to someone with a vision pro like if you texted it or something enough yeah i think it came through it's just like a standard video without the spatial stuff well i guess what i'm asking if you watch a regular video on the vision pro vice a spatial video that i've taken is there Is there a difference in what you're seeing?

Oh, yeah. I mean, maybe I'm misunderstanding the question, but obviously a spatial video has got the spatial stuff, and regular video is just regular video. Yeah. So you don't get the full immersive kind of thing of the spatial video. The 3D. The 3D. The depth. Yeah. Gotcha. Okay. Oh, because it's taking it with parallax lenses. Correct. Yes. All right. Yeah. Correct. Yeah. Yeah, it's good to talk about this. It feels like I'm in that cockpit versus just seeing that cockpit in 2D.

All right. So I got to check this out because Lisa has a quest three sheet, which she still loves like that, that thing. Yep. 500 bucks, man. And you have an iPhone 15, so you can just go direct. I could. That's true. Yeah. But yeah, that's fair. It'd be easier. My iPhone's not connected to her quest, which you can't, you can do. I just haven't finished doing it, but I have used it. It's really fun. Yeah. That's what I'm saying. Just convert it. This, this'll just do it.

And then I don't have to think about it. Yeah, exactly. Cool. Cool. That, that listener uh r and doug in discord pointed out uh apple's new well it's a new knowledge base right manuals specs and downloads all pulled into the same place they they they call it like it's at you know support.apple.com slash your country slash docs right and so it just pulls all this stuff together we decided that this is like apple's new john f braun support library Right.

Like, cause I don't know if you were how aware you are of this, but John was, is the master at finding the Apple knowledge base article for a specific thing. Like he would come up with these perfect like gems of things. And now because I guess, because John retired from podcasting, Apple realized he was no longer going to be doing the hard work of finding these and surfacing them for people. So they had to build a better interface.

And so they did. it so we all thank you apple for that and john for the inspiration so yeah uh and we will link to that from the show notes but yeah it's way better than than it was back in the uh in the day do we have time for like one or one more maybe i don't know probably yeah okay um rod l reminds us of i think we've talked about it before but it it bears repeating because the concept of If being able to do this might blow somebody's mind, he says, I wanted to recommend an app called Gray.

Which allows you to use both dark and light mode themes on a per app basis on your Mac. Mac users now have the option of using either light or dark mode, but normally all your apps follow whatever the system is. This allows you to choose on a per app basis to not follow the system or stick with a fixed mode or whatever. There have been some third-party apps, and I think still are, that to me just don't look right in dark mode, but I want everything else in dark mode.

And so being able to say, yeah, no, take that app. If the app doesn't give you the setting to do it itself, and some of them still don't, yeah, having gray out there. You and I are opposites. I prefer light mode most of the time. One exception is my coding, my coder. Oh, yep. Yep. I can see that. So I don't know how different we are. I prefer dark mode in very specific environments. At my desk on like my Mac mini with my monitors up, that is light mode 100% of the time.

It never goes into dark mode, ever, not ever once. And if I put it into dark mode, I feel like I'm like, this is not okay. In the studio for podcasting, though, I learned to use dark mode because having all those white windows washed out my face when we started doing the, you know, the YouTube stuff. And so I was like, oh, okay, this is actually better. And then I realized it

wasn't, you know, a little easier on my eyes. And my laptop, I actually let follow the, the sun, you know, um, unless I'm podcasting and then it's just in dark mode, which is where it is now. Cool. Of course, the sun's barely up, but you know, that's okay. Yeah. Well here too. It's raining bad. Oh no, it looks sunny here. What's that Adam? I said, now you can app by app it. Yeah. Now I can app by app it. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I, I, yeah, there are certain things that we use StreamYard and I, gosh, you know, I I gave StreamYard a list of things here at Podcast Movement this week that we want, you know, tweaked or fixed or whatever. Most of it was about sound because sound is very difficult to balance on StreamYard. And it would be really nice to just have meters that we could see because then we would know. There you go. I never thought to ask them about dark mode. I know everybody does ask them

about dark mode, but still. Were they receptive to your sound suggestions? Oh, my gosh. When I explained to them what we were doing, and we do things a little bit nerdy here, but we're not the only nerdy people that use StreamYard. When I explained to them, their minds blew open. They were like, oh, my gosh, we never thought about that. I can tell you of at least three shows that are doing this.

Well three of my shows and two others including like you know some fair some shows that are larger than this one and uh that also do this this way and they're like right we were thinking about it kind of backwards from that i'm like yeah yeah yep so yeah i have to use alphonic to bring my levels in line which is nice that they do that but it'd be nice to be able to feed alphonic something.

More yes evenly healed yeah so they didn't have to work as hard yeah they're like do you see this checkbox that says balance the audio i'm like it doesn't work they're like yeah we we know i'm like okay yeah but like they knew that so yes they were very very receptive uh to to this which i love you know that's awesome that's one of the great things about going to conferences is i always say the primary reason that i go to conferences especially like

like this are to remind one another that we're all human because you know it's people you're doing business with all year it becomes very transactional you know locked into email and that's super efficient and totally okay.

However there will invariably be moments of you know that need softer approach and if you can get to together with somebody once a year and just see them and you know you remind each other that you're human that way when the phone rings and it's like hey i'm having a little problem you know can we can you help me with this it's like of course you know.

Nice yeah yeah so that's that's good hey one other thing i'd like to mention uh kathy earlier in the show mentioned that you know she came over from adam's show and this is the news update and i was thinking you know since we don't do that regularly here there is always all things apple news which is mac os can uh yes yes that's true yes yeah yep yeah i i would would you want to do a news news segment here i i i'm not sure i would want it i don't

i don't know that it would fit every week but maybe yeah i think i think what we discussed and i think we've done it a couple times is if there's something significant enough like a bigger piece of news there's always kinds of little bits of news going on yeah and mac os can is a perfect place to go get your daily dose of that he does a great job of it and it's quick and easy great podcast if you're not subscribed to it if you just want new stuff

and you know there's a few other uh shows out there that do news so i don't think that's the realm we want to slip into but i think again if if there's something big enough or significant enough going on uh then you know we'll talk about it for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And he's short. It keeps it short. 10 to 15 minutes a day. Yeah. Yeah. Ken is a, he is a pro man. Yeah. That was my, yeah, go ahead. I was just going to say that was my original plan

for the Mac cast. I was doing short 15 minute news things. It was like a news summary show and it was daily. I was doing really five, five days a week. Yeah. And, uh, then I realized that was just not manageable for me. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's no, no, no, That's too much. I love people who can do it. Absolutely. This show was a 30 to 45 minute show when we started it. We're at the 121 mark, guys. It's time to bring in the band. Wrap it up. I think it is. See if my little

mixer will work. It's working. Love it. I'm loving Sound Desk. This is game changer. Thanks for hanging out with us, everybody. thank you to cash fly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Thanks to our sponsors. Of course, that we mentioned in the episode, the express VPN.com slash MGG better help.com slash geek gab and factor meals.com slash MGG 50. And then also all their other sponsors at Mac, you can have.com slash sponsors.

And thanks to all our premium subscribers. We haven't thanked you by name in a few weeks. We'll do that when I'm back in my office and I can actually have the windows where they want to be, but your support never goes unnoticed. So thank you for that. Thanks for hanging out with us, folks. Thanks for bearing with my exhaustion here. Thanks for waking up with me today. Music. Adam, do you have anything to share for the lovely people? I would say don't get caught. Music.