It's time for MacGeekGab and listener Todd brings us our quick tip of the week. He says, I do this at least once a month without thinking about it. Every month I get an exported file with the extension dot tab and I want to open this file in Excel, but when I drag the file over the Excel icon in the dock, the Excel icon does not highlight.
It doesn't let me drag it in, but if I drag it with the command key held down over Excel, the Finder forces Excel to open the file, and this holds true with other files and apps as well. You can force apps to open a file by Command-dragging that file onto them. The Command key says, I command you to open it. More quick tips like this, plus your questions answered today on Mac Geek Lab 1013 for Monday, December 11th, 2023. String. Music.
Greetings, folks, and welcome to Mac Geek Gab, the show where you send in quick tips like that. You send in questions that we answer. You send in cool stuff found.
We string it all together into an agenda that makes it such that we are each More than likely to learn at least five new things every single time we get together, Sponsors for this episode include incognito comm slash Mac geek out where you can go and try out incognito's, Privacy service with a 30-day money-back guarantee and barebones comm with BB edit one of my favorite apps that's always running on my Macs.
We'll talk more about each of those in a little bit. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. Here in South Dakota, I am Adam Christensen. And here, well, let me back up for just a second and say, Dave, I'm sorry. I'm busy Friday morning when we record this. I can't do it. I'll be here Saturday morning because it's Saturday morning here in Osaka, Japan. Pilot Pete, good to see you guys. So this is weird because you're, we record on Fridays, we release on Mondays.
So we're all living in the past, but you are living in a future version of the past compared to me and Adam, correct? Correct, okay. Yep. This is this is I'm just not linear time is anybody who thinks time is linear you sort that out for me. That's right Because you are listening to this at one moment in time Which is more than likely a different moment in time than when we recorded it and even than when we released it unless You're listening live on the stream at Mac e cub.
And you can find out when we are recording live by subscribing to the calendar at macgeekhub.com slash calendar. So how's that for an opening? I don't know. Beautiful. Sure. Uh, I guess it's time. I think I might've just learned something. I learned something, but I don't know what it is. Uh, Brad has our next quick tip. And he says, uh...
With option right-clicking a file or folder and selecting copy as path name, which you can do like the option click or you right-click, you can choose copy as path name. If the intent is to use this in the terminal or a script, beware that if there are any spaces in the file, they will be left or in the file name or folder names leading to that file, they will be left in there and not escaped. If you want to escape them, you have to put a backslash before every space.
Otherwise, Terminal will break. This is true. So, what Brad's talking about, and I have another solution here instead of escaping them too, but what Brad's talking about is when you choose this Copy as Path Name with the Option key down, it copies not just the name of the file, but all of the folders that lead up to it.
So it would be slash volume slash Macintosh hard drive or whatever you've named your drive slash if it's in your user folder, users slash Dave's slash documents, whatever it is, or it might be in mobile documents, wherever it might be, it's gonna copy that full path name that you would type in the terminal or paste in the terminal.
My advice, if you are gonna paste this into the terminal for some command, you type whatever the command is, you press space to get separation between the command and your file name. And then before you paste in the file name, put an open double quote character, paste it in and then put a close double quote. If you wrap this in quotes, the spaces will be read just fine by the terminal. So that's my, that's my thought. Mine is I'd use the drag and drop technique
and it escapes it. It's share that with people. So if you just open up your terminal and you open up your finder, grab any file or folder from the finder and literally drag it into the terminal and it will put in the path with it properly escaped yep because it knows where it's putting it yep. Yep. I like this. I probably knew that at some point, but regardless, I don't know. I didn't know it until you told us now.
So this is great. It's like those computer engineers think about that stuff sometimes. That's probably because they have to use it sometimes. I don't know. That is odd that the command doesn't do it, though. Maybe there's an option key for that. I might have to explore that a little bit more. Oh, like an option control or something puts it on the, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, could be, I don't know. Yeah. What, what is there a, is there a magic little, uh, little thing if I very likely
I'm sure somebody will tell us we probably don't have to go looking for it. No control. No, it doesn't. Yeah. Oh yeah. I don't know. I don't know. Somebody will tell us. Feedback at MackeyGab.com please. Hold on. What did you say? Feedback at MackeyGab.com? I think so. I think that's what I said. And then he said feedback at MacGeekApp.com. Okay. I see how it's going to be. You want to take us to Gary then, Pete, if that's how it's going to be? I can do so.
I can do so. Gary, Gary writes in a little bit of a long quick tip, but it's a good quick tip. So last week we were talking pre-show about how to get the bitter coating off of the button cell batteries. But, and I'll tell why here in a minute, that's important. I like to use a file. Dave likes to lick it off, but Gary has a better way to go here. Gary writes in, hi guys, I have the early access to the shows and purchasing a premium through, with purchasing premium through Apple Podcasts.
So I'm listening to the, there's a deck in your dongle episode and you guys were talking about air tags. I just thought, bought my first air tag and I thought I would share some tips on the subject of the bitter coating that Duracell and other battery makers are putting on the CR2032 batteries and Pete Saney files them down. Thank you. I read that there is a better way to do this. Get some rubbing alcohol and a wet paper towel and wet a paper towel with it.
Once you do lightly rub the paper towel on the battery, it will take off the better coating and make the battery work better with the AirTag. They also sell batteries that specifically say compatible with AirTag. I will definitely look at the card, uh, with fine mind, but, um, but I don't know if you guys are making aware. Oh, I'm on to the second part of it now. I was wondering where you were going with this. He's just, I'll definitely look at the card. We were talking about a air tag.
Oh, the air tag card that we mentioned in the last episode. Yeah, it's basically a credit card format of an air tag. So I'll definitely look at that, but I don't know if you guys are aware that Spigen, S-P-I-G-E-N makes an air tag wallet and the links in our show notes. The wallet is a little on the thick side and I know you guys prefer a thin wallet, but how it works is that there is a removable cover on the side of the wallet
that has a round hole for placing the air tag in. And you pop off the wallet, pop off the cover and put the air tag in and snap the cover back on. I bought one so far and I like it. I mean, I suggest share air tags. Huh. Oh, and I may suggest share air tags feature with my friends. So keep up the great work and keep the shows coming. So it's, it's thin, but it's still air tag thick is, is. Yeah, but it like folds open to put your, like it is a wallet that has a spot for an air tag in it.
That's okay. That's pretty cool. Oh yeah, so I, unfortunately I'm forced to carry a, I used to like the little clip wallet and I'm forced to carry a full-size wallet for some credentials that I carry with me and I just didn't have room. It was already, you know, twice as thick as any normal wallet and I just couldn't go any thicker. That's pretty interesting. Credit card for me, but I like that. Yeah. All right, cool. Little, a little tip with a cool stuff found.
Uh, the only problem is that rubbing alcohol doesn't taste good, Pete. So it makes me not want to lick the batteries anymore. How many licks does it take to clean an AirTag battery to make it work? I don't know. The world may never know. Let's don't lick the batteries folks. Sorry. Ask Woodsy. Ask Woodsy. I like it. All right. Uh, while we're on the subject of AirTags, Bob brought up an interesting idea that I think is a brilliant little quick tip.
He says, when replacing the battery or setting up a new AirTag, set the name to whatever you want to call it. Followed by the month and the year of the current date. This will eliminate the stress of wondering when your AirTag battery will fail when you need it most. Because you can't know anymore. You used to be able to see the actual charge level of an AirTag battery.
Now you are only able to see it when it's in like Apple telling you, hey, emergency replace it now mode, which obviously always happens the moment after you leave for an extended trip. Pete, I think you can probably confirm this for us. Yeah, absolutely. And of course, to an international location where you're not going to be near. Yeah. Any form of, of store where you can buy. Well, they have no lickable batteries. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Um, yeah. So I like that idea.
Of putting that on there because they do tend to last about a year, uh, unless you're making it make noise all the time, right? That, I presume that would sort of tank a battery faster, but otherwise, it's about a year of being an air tag that the battery's like, yeah, Hey, you should replace me. So yeah. Yeah. Interesting.
Nice. I like that. Thank you. Uh, I believe listener Todd has another quick tip for For us, I'll find it as I'm vamping here, Todd says you can permanently delete text messages on macOS Sonoma by going into the Messages app. Go to View and choose Recently Deleted. Then select Messages or shift-click a range of messages. You can command-click multiples and shift-click, you do all the things that you would normally do. And then control-click the selection and select Delete in the pop-up.
This will delete them immediately as opposed to you know on whatever cycle it is that these things actually get deleted yeah yeah all right, I'm not going to make any speculation about the kinds of text messages that Todd needs to delete. I'm definitely not. I think this rolls over probably into some of the other areas where Apple, when you delete, it doesn't truly delete. Like, I'm thinking that this is a similar thing with like photos, like when you delete a photo, right?
It sits there for 30 days if you're using iCloud photo library. Yeah, and I think you can do similar type things. Yes, yeah, yeah, I think it's the it's the same kind of thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it would it would clear it's like the equivalent of emptying the trash or something.
I don't know, um, I yeah, I there's there's I suppose this is simply a fish shake because I don't think any third party could solve this problem, but maybe someone has cleverly figured out a workaround for it of which I am not aware, but I my issue with messages is that I've been using messages since the first day it came out probably like all the rest of it. us here. And I get pictures and videos and all of those things.
And as might not come as a great surprise to anybody who's listened for more than a few weeks, I'm kind of a pack rat with my data. I don't delete data. So I have set all of my devices to never delete any messages and also sync them with the cloud so that they just magically appear on all of my devices, but I don't necessarily want all of the data from my messages on all of my devices all of the time. It's in the cloud. That's fine. Pull down the recent 30 days.
And if I want more, if I want to scroll back, go and slurp that down too, but Apple seems to at least as far as I'm aware, still just push everything down to all of my devices that sync with messages in the cloud. Yep. Yeah. Have you found a workaround for this? I go in and manually manage it. Yeah. Something I would like to see happen if it would be great if they could do a VIP-like thing for messages.
Because, you know, now you get all those like, you know, confirmation codes and other kinds of marketing messages and stuff like that, right? And I'm constantly having to purge and delete that stuff because I don't want it. And it just clutters up everything. I would love it if I could say, okay, everything in this list, I want, you know, keep them for however long, have separate settings, everything else, I read it.
Kill it or kill it in seven days or it'd be really nice if you could kind of separate, you know or even if it was just one of those things they do with contacts like if they're in my contacts it's these rules if they're not in my contacts these rules that'd be nice yeah, yeah i yeah yeah i well yeah i yeah i wish there was something i had a i had an experience this week my mind is like grinding along as you're talking about
this where there was someone that I hadn't communicated with since probably pre-pandemic, well, maybe mid-pandemic, but it had been several years, right? And I wanted to reach out to him. And the best way that I had to get in touch with him was his phone number for iMessage. He's an iPhone user. And I searched for his name in messages and it didn't come up. I'm like, that's weird. Okay, well, let me just look in contacts because I know I'd put him in my contacts. Nope, wasn't in my contacts.
This has happened to me for a while. I was having an issue where the default contacts at the default contacts database, that things would be added to was not my iCloud database. Over the years, if you have multiples, it will change it. And I guarantee you, I did not manually do this but it would change to either my Google one.
Or for a short period of time I was a professor at the University of New Hampshire, and it would store it in that database I'm pretty sure it must have stored Brad's data in this database in the UNH database because I went and looked at my Google Contacts database online, and it wasn't there and I'm like crap I Remembered the things we were talking about the last time we texted and I was able to find his message that way and
there was His phone number and of course I made a new contact record for him, but Um, you know, I, like, I like having all of this data there. Obviously it's valuable to me. This is why I'm a pack rat with this stuff. But I like, I really would like to be able to manage and say, yeah, just don't fill up my phone with it. My kids' phones, my kids' phones. Absolutely. Or just like crammed full of mainly
messages, data. Yeah. Yeah. That's where the majority of her, her iCloud storage goes. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And I'm, I'm, I'm kind of okay paying for it in iCloud. Cause that's one place. I just don't need it on all of my devices all of the time. So yeah, I don't know what the answer is. I don't know. Apple figured it out. I feel like they will figure this out. Like this is becoming, it started being a problem for us, heavy users.
Eventually it's going to be a problem for everyone. Like you just give it enough time. So, yeah, one last, oh yeah, go ahead, Pete. Yeah. I was going to say, I've got a quick, uh, I've got a quick corollary to a previous quick tip, which was, uh, put the date of your battery on your air tags. Yep. Rod L in our discord chat says he puts the date that he put his AirPods in service. Oh. And when he names the AirPods. So he names the AirPods and like mine, I call them AA sucks.
I want it at the top of the list and Pete's AirPods. But if I had to put the date after that, then I will always know the date I put them in service and I'll know when the warranty is expiring. Okay. So I, you, Rod L's tip is fantastic. I like that. I also, do you think you just buried a quick tip there by putting AA. You can't, oh yeah, there you go. Cause I don't want to look down a list of 10 different Bluetooth devices.
I want my AirPods by using most often my one of them at the top of the list. So I put AA in front of my name too. Totally. Totally. Yeah. Um, we had a conversation about naming devices, Bluetooth devices, uh, probably a year and a half ago on this show. And at the time, I incorrectly, it turns out, presumed that when you change the name of a Bluetooth device on your phone, like in the Bluetooth settings, that it would only, it was only changing.
The name that that MAC address appears as on your phone. It turns out that's not true. Right, I've noticed that now that you mention it. It changes the name of the Bluetooth device in the Bluetooth device's profile on itself. And the reason I know this, Pete, is because I went to, you and I both go to the same place where we float in the flotation tanks. They also have a sauna room there, which is really, it's a nice thing.
You go spend like 30 minutes in this sauna and the sauna has a Bluetooth speaker. And there are two locations. There's one in one town called Portsmouth, another one in Hampton. And I was getting confused which one to select in my phone so I could listen to a podcast while I was in the sauna. So one day in Hampton, I renamed the Hampton tank to, you know, IR sauna Hampton or something. I'm sure they appreciated that. I bet they do.
Um, but I didn't realize that I had changed its name until I went with Lisa a few months later and she was like, Oh, we were going to listen to a podcast that was on her phone. I'm like, Oh, it's going to be called IR sauna. Well, I'll help you figure out, you know, like you should only see one cause you've never seen the other one. So your phone wouldn't get confused. And she's like, I see IR sauna Hampton. I'm like, oops.
So you actually helped them out there. I think I did. Like, I'm sure other people ran into the same problem that I did. So, yeah, yeah, but, um, but yeah, yeah. Bluetooth naming conventions. I like this. Send yours in feedback at Mackey cub.com. Like there's clearly some, like even like this just opened up a can of worms here. And I liked, I liked this particular can of worms because it, you know, it's these things that help make our lives.
All right. One last quick tip from listener, Ben, before we move on to answering your questions and Ben shares it simple and it's quick. He says, you know, you can, uh, you can select words by double-clicking on them. You can select words on your Mac by dragging across them. If you need to select a paragraph, you can triple click a paragraph and it selects or triple click a word and it will select the entire paragraph.
Something I had no idea about. I love these quick tips. All right, look, data brokers are here to collect our personal information and sell it to other companies with just a few clicks of the mouse. Our sponsor, Incogni, wants to help you take back your data just as easily. They deal with data brokers on our behalf so that we don't have to spend hundreds of hours jumping through hoops, right? Every year, the number and scope of data breaches worldwide is rising.
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Next up is BBEdit, one of my favorite apps. It's running on my computer right now, and I use BBEdit for all kinds of things. One of the things I really like they introduced a few years ago is notebooks where you can store text notes in there. You can also now create multiple notebooks so that you can really organize things, kind of keep things clean as you go.
They also support shortcuts like create text document or create notes so that as part of your shortcut flow you can start creating these things. This is super handy. They've always embraced Apple tech like this and of course they'll continue to do it. Go check it out. Go to barebones.com slash store.
You get a 30-day fully functioning demo to try out every feature in the app and if you've tried it out before bbedit14 came out, well you get a fresh eval period for yourself here, you can continue running after your 30 day trial in free mode, which gives you some, but not all features, or of course, you can go to barebones.com slash store, buy your copy, and you're good to go with all the features.
Go check it out barebones.com and our thanks to bare bones and BB edit for sponsoring this episode. All right, Adam, you want to take us to Jerry got some questions, right? Yeah. Let me, if I can get there, here we go. Jerry is asking about opening Zoom links. He says, good evening. I'm wondering if there's any way possible one of you could tell me step by step instructions on how to create a shortcut that will open bookmarks like I have saved to my home screen.
These bookmarks are Zoom links and I would like the Zoom links to open directly in the Zoom app and not in Safari first. I looked up on perplexity, but I am... I am blind and find the steps a little difficult to follow, so could you help me? That would be greatly appreciated, please tell me step by step instructions, since I am legally blind and cannot see the screen, I use voice, please, thank you. Let me see if we can do this via voice here, and open that all up.
I struggle with the same thing, I don't like when I have to get the bonus screen in Safari, to open a Zoom link or a Microsoft Edge link. And really, like for Microsoft Teams meetings and Google Meet, I prefer to do those in Microsoft Edge because those engines work way better in Edge than they do in Safari. So for all of these kinds of meetings things, I want to make sure the link opens in the app, AKA Zoom or browser, AKA Edge of my choice. And I use a little tool called Velja, V-E-L-J-A.
It's from Sunday Storehouse, and we'll put a link in the show notes to it. There are many of these things. We've discussed a few of them on the show over the last year here. What this does is it intercepts all links that will go to your browser. And if you have a special rule set to open a certain URL in an app or a different browser, it will open there. Otherwise it will just seamlessly pass it through to Safari and you'll never
know that it was there in the background. Like I said, there's other apps. I wound up kind of standardizing on Velia and I forget that it's running right up until the moment that it's not running and I start getting those bonus Zoom screens or I start getting Safari telling me that it's probably not the right place to join a Microsoft Teams meeting or whatever. And then it's like, Oh, yep. I lost some for some reason Velia got was quit. Like I got to start backup again.
So yeah, do you do you use an app like that, Adam, anything? You know, I had, I think I had some sort of Safari extension, I had something at some point, but this doesn't come up too often, but I can certainly now, we use Zoom all the time at the office and I can definitely relate to this issue. It makes no sense to me that it has to do so many things and so many pop-ups. I could imagine if you're legally blind, it's just going to be even worse experience.
You know, yeah, like, it's like, click the link here, pops up over here, I already have zoom open. Why aren't you just opening zoom? Like, it's just, you know, why aren't you doing the thing I want you to do? Yeah. Zoom, are you listening? Yeah, exactly. You don't even have to be. They may be bound by, they may be bound by the technology, you know, just how it works. Because it's those, like, I forget what they call those links.
I should know as a web developer, you know, this special little, well, it's, I mean, links that you can build.
Zoom links are opening it like their HTTPS links right so your computer only knows to open links based on the beginning of the URL not the not the address of the URL right so when it sees HTTPS it opens that in your default browser whatever that might be what Velia does and I assume others of its ilk is they become your default browser user and insert themselves there and that way they can sort of get in the way and say ah this is a link
to zoom.us I know to open that in the zoom app and skip safari. Yeah that's how these work. It's a clever little hack yeah. They're not using those little special domain links or whatever like I know that apps can identify themselves to the system is saying like if I'm. I don't know, zoom colon slash slash. That means open zoom, right? And maybe zoom even has that, but all the links we get to join zoom meetings are HTTPS links, not zoom colon slash slash links, right?
So yeah, that it's, it's that, um, that, yes, that's the, that's the trick is the, um, so, and by the way, before everybody emails me, I think I may be getting that wrong. I can't remember how that works. Like I said, I should know as a web developer or as a developer, That's your homework right after the show. He's going to go look it up. Don't have to mail him in. And then, uh, uh, it is Dave.
You see, I put in the show notes, uh, free and free in set up included with the subscription price of set up is open in, which is the one I used to ask me which browser I would like to use. Excellent. I believe Velia is free, just that free for everybody, uh, if I'm not mistaken, but yeah, yeah. Open in there's another, what's the name of the website? They all do the same thing. It becomes your default browser. That's it.
They all do the same thing and hopefully stay out of your way to the point where you forget that they're even there, which is... I have a bonus setup thing. So now, Pete, I'm going to go do that because that'll help me at my work. And the reason I will go use OpenIN at work is because... I have a locked down my IT department locks down my work machine and I do not have admin rights to that system.
So normally I cannot install software, but the way that Setapp works, it actually runs under your user. So I can install anything from Setapp on my work computer because it's under my user account, not the machine. Very quick tip. So, but could you, and I realize like this, having a lockdown machine is not a universal definition.
Every company sort of does it differently, but could you download an app like Velia and put it in your users applications folder like Setapp will like, would that work or? Potentially. Yeah. Potentially. I don't, I haven't messed with it too much. I don't know how they have it totally set up, but it's pretty locked down. It's pretty annoying. Yeah. That is. For nerds like us, that's like, no. But Setapp solved that problem for me, so like I love it. I have access to all
my Setapp, you know, apps and stuff like that, and it really helps me with work. That's interesting. Oh, I guarantee you there's people out there listening going like, I never thought of being able to do that. Like, so yeah, you just made a bunch of nerds' lives better, which is really, come on, that's what we're doing. And, and now I think you have to get set up on there first. So my, I think my IT department did install set up for me. I had to prove that I had the licensing
and yeah. Okay. Then once that was blessed, it was like, all right. Yeah. That's one app. Right. Yeah. And, and I don't mean that you have to be a nerd to listen to this show by any stretch. However, if you listen long enough, that's right, you'll become one. Yep. Yep. You've been warned. You've been warned. Yeah, yeah. This isn't a mandatory thing, but it is a natural byproduct. And it's a good thing. The goal is for, like I say, it's for us, we always say five new things.
Well, you know, that adds up, man. Yep. Week after week. Pete, Chuck asks, he says, I review my cellular data use at the end of each month so that I avoid going over my five gig cell plan cap and I have avoided and also avoided roaming charges. Then I reset those stats for the next month. This month, I noticed a new listing among the many apps that I have on my iPhone running iOS 17.1, he probably is now on 0.2. I may have missed the uninstalled apps category in the past but I don't think
so, it seems new to me. And after I cleared my November cellular data usage, that category disappeared and has not come back. It wasn't a significant amount of data usage relative to everything else, but I wonder about what it refers to and why it would show up now. Yeah, well, and he actually signed it, Chuck, in Japan, so how apropos that I can say, from Osaka tonight, konnichiwa, Chuck. That's right. Yeah, you are in the future.
The uninstalled apps category refers to data that's actually used by apps that have since been uninstalled from your phone. So the feature is in iOS designed to give you a complete picture of all your data usage, including the data consumed by apps that are no longer present on your phone.
So, when you uninstall an app from your iPhone, the iOS system keeps track of that data and all those apps used during the current billing cycle or data tracking period, and it's aggregated under uninstalled apps in that list there in the category in the cellular data usage settings. And since the uninstalled apps category represents data used by apps that are no longer on your device, there's no toggle to turn it off, to turn off cellular
data for those apps because they're already gone. You've already turned them off, yeah. Yeah, see, boy have you turned them off pretty good. So you may not have noticed this category before, it may not have shown up if there weren't any recently uninstalled apps that used any significant amount of data. And since you reset your cellular data statistics every month, say that three times fast, all accumulated data usage information is cleared, including the data recorded in the uninstalled apps.
And that's why the category disappears if you reset your data usage and haven't since uninstalled an app that's used any data. So I didn't even realize this feature existed until very recently. And so, yeah, yeah, right. Now we all know. Yeah, that, that, it makes sense. It's, um, I I'm, I'm happy that when I remember when I first saw that and I was pleased that.
Kept track of that data like it it puts it in a bucket, but it doesn't just forget that that data was used during that period, I would like it if it remembered which app had used it and maybe just marked the app in parentheses To indicate that it was uninstalled or if you could tap on uninstalled apps and see the the detail But you don't get to see that and my guess is someone at apple decided that was a privacy violation right by,
if you've deleted the app, don't show it to me anywhere else on my phone. You promised that all the data related to it was deleted. And so, yeah, like I might, that's fair enough. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. That's, that's my guess on this stuff. Well, we got another question, Dave. Yes. Mickey wrote in and he said, Dave, Pete and Adam, thanks as always for the great show and love having Adam along for the ride moving forward. And so do we Dave or Mickey.
As a long-time podcaster and podcast listener, I've been listening to Adam's show for almost as long as MGG, Mackie Kemp. However, I fell off listening to most podcasts a few years back due to shortened commute. And suffice it to say, I was so glad to hear his voice again this week as part of MGG. That said, I'm a little behind, and I imagine I'm not alone in being curious to hear a little bit more about Adam's background, what's been going on with him.
He mentioned in the last episode that he's relocated from SoCal, Southern California, to South Dakota, which came as a surprise to me. Can we get a proper Adam intro into a future show, that would be this show, present show, linear time and all, and hear more about his background and what he's currently working on? Thanks, Chet, as always, for a great show. Mickey. You want to introduce yourself, Adam? Tell us where you were born?
Yeah, what do you want to know? I apologize for not doing this in the last episode it just it, I, I, I made the incorrect assumption that everybody stays in touch and up to date and yes, but we are happy to have Mr. Adam Christensen, creator of the Mac cast, almost, in fact, happy almost anniversary. Your show was the 13th of December. December 13th. Yeah. Of 2004, right? 2004. Yeah. So exactly six months before we started Mac Geek Out.
I, I believe you will always have distinction of being the first Mac specific, you know, Apple specific podcaster. So yeah, that's that's a debatable thing. Okay. That's fair. Let me tell you why. So this actually plays really well in the background. Yeah. So I've, I've been doing an, a Mac Apple podcast for 19 years or was, and now I've migrated over here.
I'm very happy to be here, but yeah, that show, the, the back cast I started way back you know this was before even there wasn't even a way to there was no directory I think I don't think we had a directory yet it was in it was in development I think that came a little bit later and then you know you had like people were down get grabbing podcasts from feeds with like Apple scripts and stuff like that I know very few, there weren't pod catchers as we knew them back then, or really iTunes support
came years later, I think. I remember the timeline. No, iTunes support came three weeks before MacGeekGab launched. And I have a story about that. 4.9? Was that when it was out? Oh man, that part, that sounds right though. And somebody has tracked that out there. But yeah, there was an interesting story about having to like talk to Steve Jobs to get him to add us to directory Well, but I don't want to derail you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So now I lost track of where the question was. So,
What's your name? Why are you here? Oh, no, no, no. I know that question. I was trying to remember where I was going with this. Yeah, so I started that show 19 years ago. Oh, you were the first. That's what it was. Oh, the first. That's right. Yeah. So debatable first because this was back in the real audio days. And there were two Apple shows that were streaming shows. And that was Sean King's show. Your Mac life. Your Mac life. He really was the OG podcaster, I think, but again.
Yeah, and well here's why I say kind of debatable, because he was still streaming and I believe at the time they were taking that really low quality 8-bit compressed audio stream and then just grabbing that recording and then throwing it into an RSS feed. So, technically, yes, I would say that's a quote-unquote podcast, but it wasn't produced as a podcast. It was produced as a streaming radio show that was then converted into a podcast. So from a pure technical standpoint, yes.
And then there was also a show that Ken used to be on, and why is it, why am I blanking on the name of it? Oh, Scott Shepard. Scott Shepard Show, Inside Mac Radio. Inside Mac Radio, yes. Yeah, and that was another streaming show, and I don't know that he had started actually turning that into a podcast before I started, though. Definitely Sean King was doing a quote-unquote podcast, but I always kind of felt like it wasn't intentionally a podcast, it was byproduct of the past.
And I remember when Your Mac Life had been going for like years and years. They were on terrestrial radio, I think, even in some markets. And they were streaming via Audible, too. You could, like, subscribe to Audible and get them. So, like, it was experientially, once you got signed up, it was very similar to a podcast, right? But when podcasting started, I remember Sean saying.
We're not one of those new things. We're an old thing and and I and and before anybody gets on me about this I did exact Brian and I did exactly the same thing with the Mac Observer. We were a Mac News website or an Online magazine and when the term blog came out we were like we are not one of those new things We're this old thing right it you know hindsight And then at night, we all, even Sean now, and it didn't take Sean very long to say, wait a minute, actually what I'm doing is a podcast.
This new word does fit what I've always been doing. And Sean will tell you, hey, I'm, in his mind, not without merit, he says he's the first Mac podcaster. So yeah, fair. So, I mean, it doesn't really matter at the end of the day. But I was very early in the podcasting scene. and let's just say that like very much one of the first, I'll throw myself in that group. For sure. As long as at least you're in the top three, you got a middle.
Yeah, and so considering that. There's only a few million podcasts out there. Yeah. But I don't know what people want to, but yeah, sorry Pete. I don't know what people want to know outside of that.
I mean, I don't tend to share a lot of my personal stuff and some of that is by design for just privacy and stuff like that, but I'm happy to share like my career and you know, when I started I was living in California, in San Diego, and then like has been mentioned, we recently, about a year and a half ago, almost two years coming up on two years now, relocated to South Dakota. Um, and that's just because of the nature of my job.
So in terms of career, I've always been a web developer, computer programmer, uh, currently work for an e-commerce company. So I build e-commerce websites, um, do some web development and that sort of thing on the side. Done some work for Dave. I was going to say, yeah, you, you, you, you were the primary, uh, tech web person for us at MacObserver and BackBeat. And even when we launched MacGeekUp as a separate site. I mean, that was, that goes back 15 years, I think.
Yeah, we've been working together for a long, long time. So yeah, that's, that's kind of my day job now. So, you know, I'm here, I've got my little separate office here. And I, you know, walk to work every day through the backyard and sit down and build websites. And then I was doing podcasts.
And then more recently, you know, part of the genesis of the move here, you already mentioned I'm getting older, looking towards retirement, I'm looking to slow down a little bit, so just cost of living and those sorts of things. So lots of people ask why did you move to South Dakota from California, because everybody has this vision that California is beautiful and absolutely is, you know, but it's also very, very expensive.
You know, it is hard to afford for a lot of people to afford housing there and stuff like that. So, you know, the idea was, hey, I want to retire someday. I don't want to be in debt the rest of my life. And so that's what brought us here. That was one of the genesis. The other was just getting to a smaller town where I could get more involved with my community. You know, San Diego, as you might imagine, is a huge, huge place.
And while you can get involved in maybe your little local community at a broader perspective, it's a little bit tricky. So like I mentioned, I moved here. I've always been interested in theater. So I started doing community theater. I'm also, there's a maker space here and I've started to get into pinball and pinball machines. So I'm restoring a pinball machine, a 1976 pinball machine. So, yeah. Exciting. Oh, I want to see pictures of that. So, all right, cool.
Thank you. There's pictures on Pinside, which is a pinball forum for people who are into pinball. Pinside? P-I-N-S-I-D-E? Is that right? Yep. And I'm pretty sure I'm probably MattCast on there, so you probably can find it pretty easily. Yep. Yep. All right. I think that's what I went with there. I'll have to double check that one. Makes sense. Makes sense. And you're MattCast on most of the, all of the socials. Yeah, yeah. You can find me on all the social media places as MattCast.
And you know, the other thing we mentioned in the pre-show, you know, the reason, big reason I started doing this is I've always been involved in the Mac community through user groups and stuff like that. I was on the board for both the Portland Mac user group and also the San Diego Mac user group back in the day. So. Thank you for giving us that. I've got a quick question to follow up then, Adam. Is MacCast done or are you doing one last show on the anniversary or?
The plan is to have one more show on the 13th and that will probably be the end of it. I'm not sure what that's going to be yet. I'm still like mulling that in my mind. Cool. Yeah. Cool. Exciting. Bittersweet, I'm sure. Yeah. Yeah. End of an era, end of an era, but moving into a new era that I'm very, very excited about obviously. So glad to be here with everybody. And yeah, that was a great question. I'm glad Joe asked that. I'm so, it was Mickey, but, but yes, Joe is the next question.
And you can read Joe's question if you want. But yeah, thanks Mickey for asking the question that many people probably have. Yeah. All right. So Joe wants to know what's consuming all his Mac's disk space. I have this question a lot as well. And he says, let me see here. I need to see what's up with taking up the space on my hard drive. I use Disk Inventory X which is a great app. I tried it this time and it runs but it grinds to a halt and never gives me the results.
I guess it's just too old of an app to work with Sonoma. Do you have any alternative suggestions? Yeah, I like most of us need to do this often and so I have used many apps over the years. Omnidisc sweeper was sort of the go-to for a while and it still works but I have Really become enamored with the space lens feature inside of clean my Mac X, That it's part of setup.
So that's a bonus and It really makes it it like the way it represents it visually on the screen You see what categories or what folders you can kind of look at it either way you can dig in, you can delete things from there. It will sort of give you some context as to what you're deleting and you can have it sort by what's the biggest stuff. So, you know, it kind of does a lot of the work for you in terms of setting it all up.
So it makes it really easy to go and find the biggest offenders quickly and decide whether you want to get rid of them. And I've had it, you know, I probably run it.
I don't know, four times a year, five times a year, and it routinely finds things like, I had this one three gigabyte log file from an app for something I had turned on for, yeah, for troubleshooting with the developers or whatever, and then you forget about it, and they don't tell you, thank you so much, we've finished this, now please make sure you go through and turn off this log file generation.
It's like, oh yeah, that's actually a lot. So, um, so, but you know, things like that and things you just forget about. So I, yeah, I, I like clean my Mac X. I also like Daisy disk. Uh, if I didn't have clean my, I mean, I have both of them. I, uh, Daisy disk also has a, uh, its own sort of visual representation of this. And, and, and that kind of, they both sort of work for my brain. I don't know. Do you guys use anything different? Nope. I use the exactly those two, those two apps.
I prefer CleanMemX, DaisyDisk, I think I just have, because again, I want to say that's still part of Setapp, so I believe that's why I still have that one. I don't know if it is for me, okay. Yeah, yeah, I mean it's good. It was for a while, I think. It's only, and DaisyDisk is only $10, like, and you know, it does the same thing, it sorts by largest, and so you can really kind of see.
I was trying to pull it up, you know, again, it looks like it's a casualty potentially of the redoing of system preferences, but the built-in, you know, find large files thing that Apple used to have, I can't, I can't find it now, but it used to do a pretty good job. It must not be a big enough file. I think, I think it's. I don't know where they moved it to. It's in, you're right, it's in system settings general.
On well, but in, oh, system settings general about I think is where, yeah, system settings general about and then at the bottom of that screen is the storage settings and that's where you can go in and start to see some of that stuff. Um, two, two things I will add to this. Use disk utility and highlight your, you know, your boot disk and it will show you all of the space that's used by your snapshots that Time Machine grabs. And that can be a really easy way of reclaiming some space.
And then, and that's just like I said in Apple's disk utility. And then the other thing that I find really helpful is Hazel from, um, uh, oh, why can't I, noodle soft, uh, Hazel, I, it, Hazel is essentially for those of you that remember Apple's watched folders, Hazel does it right. It lets you do things based on what happens in a specific or many specific folders.
And I have Hazel pointed at my downloads folder and I have it remove first of all I have it remove duplicates because I don't know if you folks have this problem But I wind up downloading like the same PDF often and not and so it's nice not to have 14 copies of that But I also have it purge Anything in my downloads folder that's more than 30 days old. I know, and I used to do this, I've used the downloads folder as kind of an archive at times.
So if you're doing that, don't have Hazel do this for you, but otherwise it's a really nice thing to know that I can just let things download, go and launch them. And I don't have to go back and like prune that out. It just takes care of it for me. Actually, Dave, the hint that I have on that is what I have Hazel do. I have a folder called tidy within my download and on my desktop, and anything that's been sitting there for more than 30 days goes into the Tidy folder.
And then I regularly go through there and go, okay, I want to keep that. No, I don't want to keep that. So you have Hazel put things in the Tidy folder? Yes. Oh. And so it keeps my download folder relatively clean, and then I can go in and go, I do need to keep that. So Tidy is kind of my little archive within, but I have one in desktop and one on the downloads. Yeah.
And then you talked about duplicates. So that's a nice segue into it's not a disk storage space, space one so much, but Gemini we'll find duplicate. Oh, yeah. For you also available and set up. And the way I remember Gemini is that's the astrological sign for the twins. Yeah. I'm assuming that's why they named it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Makes sense.
Yeah. Yep. Yeah. So real quick on this storage thing, the built-in thing, it looks like where it's actually, you had it almost there, Dave, where it's moved to, so it's in storage, but then see what they did is they iOS-ified it. So it used to be it was just like one thing, and it would be like, show me all my large files. Now they've got it in categories. So I can see I have 111 gigabytes of apps, and I have 5.6 gigabytes of books, which are audio books and developer files.
And then there's documents, and then they have the little eye icon, the info icon. So if you go into documents and click on the eye icon from system general storage. There's the view that shows you the tabs with large files, downloads, unsupported app, file browser, and you can go sort by size and see your largest files and stuff like that built in. Got it. So it's like buried now. It used to be really easy to get to.
It was like... Used to be right there. Large files from like, get info or something like that. But yeah, it's... Can you... I don't want to pull this up on my computer because I know that it will be the thing that causes all of our audio to go crackly while it crunches my disc. Yeah, so I'm not going to do it, but can you either delete files from there or at the very least like right click and get to them in the finder where you could then delete them?
So when you select a file, it has a show in finder option. It also has a delete button and you can also right click and delete it from there as well. Oh, so it really, it really is like a competitor, if you will, to what like daisy disk does with its own interface. It's not as visual and it's straightforward, but it is built in. So it's like classic Apple, right? It's built in. It's very basic. It will do the thing you want to find a large file.
If you want something more visual and with more features and more functionality, I would do daisy disk or leave my Mac X. I prefer those to this, but it's worth noting. It's there. You have something built in. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Okay. All right, I got to dig into that when it's not podcasting recording live time. Yeah.
So new, new word there, by the way. And I want to, uh, make sure this gets into the, uh, next, I don't know if it's the urban dictionary or what have you, but you use the past tense of the verb to iOSify. Oh yeah. They iOSified it. He said, yeah, I think Ted Landau gets credit for coining the term iOSification.
Okay. I, I, I, like, I remember he was writing for us at Mac observer at the time and, and I really, I think he was the first, I think he was the one who coined that term out in, in, in our, you know, our little apple world here. Yeah. Well, we need to spread that word. It's so descriptive. It's yeah. And it's, and he was right. Like he was writing about it as a warning at the time. Like, I don't like this iOS-ification of Mac OS.
And now it's just like, well, you know, it's how it be. Yep. Yeah. Not always good. Sometimes it's good. It sometimes it is good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So I got a call, Ted. It's been a long time since I've talked to him. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Should I take us to Sean? In fact, I searched for iOSification to put a link in and it, it pulled up a Mac observer link. So there you go. Yes, please take us to Sean.
Yeah. Yeah. We've been, we've been too far down memory lane, Pete, the future. So Sean writes good evening gentlemen. And when we started the show, it was morning, but it may now be depending on how and when you're listening. He says, I have an issue I need help with and he then includes this. So if you're writing a question, please include this information. I'm running a 2017 iMac 27 inch on Monterey 12.7.1.
That's always helpful to have that. That is. Yeah. Fair. I seem to have two photo libraries. I'm not sure why I did not intentionally create two. I did have an issue several years ago where I accidentally deleted all my pictures. Oh, sorry to hear that. When I was deleting pictures off my iPad, I did not realize it was taking them off iCloud as well. Fortunately, I have multiple backups, so it was mostly fine. Perhaps that is how it happened. Regardless, I would like just one library.
I have looked it up on Google, but seem to find different ways of doing it. I'm not wanting to delete everything again. Good plan. And I would like some guidance please and thank you Sean. Wow. Yeah, yeah wow. So I found an article at Otherworld Computing about which has a lot of good options for merging multiple photos libraries and they they talk through doing it manually you can use the import function of photos you can export in a variety of different ways. So there are options.
One of them, which would be my favorite, is Power Photos from Fat Cat Software. It is a piece of third-party software, you will pay for this, and by golly, if you care, and you clearly do, about the integrity of your photos library in the end. Please take our advice and go this route. Also, make a backup before you head down any path because anything can happen, but I have been through It does, correct. Yeah, I have been through a ton of these and and it will it power photos is Helpful.
I don't want to use the word magic because it will require you to interact with it at some level But it really is magic. It's just not set it and forget it, because you don't want that when you're doing these merges.
You want to be able to review things, but it will crunch through both of your photos libraries, or all three of your photos libraries that you want to merge, and then it will show you the duplicates, and it will guide you and say, I think this is the one you should keep, and this is the one you should, you know, let go, and all of that stuff, and it will pull it all together, and it will maintain your albums, and all of those things. It is absolutely an essential tool if you're doing this.
I highly, like you can hear it in my voice, just go get it. That's the way to go. You can read the article at OWC if you want to know sort of the ways that you're not going to choose and then you're going to just choose this one. I don't mandate things often here and this isn't really a mandate, but man, it's as close as I'm going to get. Yeah. This is one of those tools that I don't think a competitor to it exists.
Which is weird because of how valuable it is. Like don't let the fact that this is its own thing out there in the market. Don't let that mislead you into thinking that it's not valuable. It is absolutely valuable. So. No, that's high praise. Uh, how much is it, Dave? You know? Uh, I am looking at the purchase page. It is a new license is $30. So totally worth. I'm not considering how much, you know, it's 30 bucks worth
keeping your photos, uh, integrity. And you're going to just save so much time with this too. I saw and heard you sort of acknowledging that your love for this too, Adam, did I get that right? Yeah, I was going to jump in when I had an opportunity. I have recommended this over and over and over and over again throughout the years. It is absolutely the tool to do exactly what this question is asking. With all the caveats that you already mentioned, you know, backup.
I'm, anybody who's listened to my show for years knows I am like crazy about backup. And so somewhat related to this, another feature of this that's really great from a backup perspective and just a cleaning up your library perspective is if you're like me and I think a lot of people out there, right, you have a huge library with all your photos and stuff in it, but maybe a large majority of them aren't like the greatest photos,
but they're photos that obviously you want to keep, right? And if you want some a tool to help you. Clean, and again you're gonna have to do the manual work for this, but clean your library. This tool will let you manage multiple libraries and create multiple libraries. So a great one, a great tip I've given in the past is, you know, why not just create an archive each year of the last year's photos.
And you can do it by doing a smart album, just says, you know, from January 1st to December 31st of this year. Create that and then put it into a separate library and then you can archive that, you put it in backup, put it in an online archive at multiple places. And then you know for that year you could go back and safely remove those less, you know, keep the photos you really want from that year, but you know, the ones that are kind of iffy or maybe not so great, right?
Now you've got it in a separate library and then you can use a tool like this to go back and pull that library back. Obviously you can just open the library and photos by holding, I think it's the option key, right? When you can select different libraries. Yeah. So you could keep them around, you could just have them archived, but then that way you're not you don't have your main library cluttered up with a bunch of junk.
So okay so I want to I want to restate what you just said for my own benefit to make sure I understand this because what you said or at least what I heard I really like this your idea is that you're not when you create this archive and then you save it off somewhere safe and that is a hundred percent of everything that survived the year you know you might have deleted some things that you know you took a picture of your pocket or something But right. Yeah.
Otherwise, everything goes there. And then at that moment, you don't then delete that entire year from your main library. You just then go through and prune freely knowing that you have this backup. You have a backup of that, of all that other stuff. And if you want to go access that stuff, right, you can just go back and open that library, right? And this will let you manage it. And, you know. It takes diligence, right? You have to be active. It's not an automated thing, but yeah.
Yeah, go ahead. Say that again. And then you can be more aggressive in getting rid of all, you know, if you have 10 photos, you know, you know, you're going to get rid of the ones with the eyes closed, but the mouth smiling is a lot more aggressive going. This is the one I really like. I'm going to get rid of the rest. And you've got that safety net. And you've got that. Yeah. For those of us that. Make sure you're backing up your archives to multiple
places. Just, I'm going to tell you that you should have a local copy somewhere on a hard drive. You should have something in the cloud somewhere like, yeah, yeah, no, that's fair. I don't have three copies of that, that archive library. It's not backed up in my opinion. I totally agree. Yes. A hundred percent. Yep. No, this is great because it, it relieves the, I know there's probably a term for this too.
You know, like, like I said earlier, I'm a pack rat. I save everything, but I don't always need it at my fingertips. Right. And so this caters to that whatever that version of you know data retention anxiety is That it's like okay there.
It is you've got it. You know storage is cheap Like you said put it in multiple places to however many you need to appease yourself and and then Carry on freely with a photos library that as you're scrolling through to show somebody something from your vacation Four years ago, you're not like I gotta go through this I got to, you know, that kind of thing. So, and that week between Christmas and New Year's is a fantastic week to find like a little down moment and prune through your photos.
I try to do it once a month. I generally do it once a year and it's during that week. So, yeah. And it's, it's good, especially if you use something like iCloud photo library, because the larger your library gets one, you're having to buy more storage and that's fine if you're, you're willing to buy more storage, but the other thing is just takes longer to sink everything. Fair. Yeah, fair. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right. Yeah, yeah.
One of the like, reading this article at OWC, I still recommend and think that Power Photos is going to do it the way you want to do it. However, one, the first recommendation in this article is to use iCloud photo library as your merge engine. And the way you would do it is, you know, you have your one photo library that is synced to iCloud, turn off or change libraries. And when you do tell it merge them and it will merge what's in iCloud with what's in your now new system photos library.
And it will do it. It will take, hours will be a pipe dream. It will take days or even weeks for this to complete depending on how large your libraries are. But that was a clever way and fairly simple and relatively safe, but not perfect. Still, you're going to want to make a backup of your photos library, regardless of the method you choose. Yeah. Yeah. So, all right, let's, uh, we got a little time left here.
Let's, let's do some cool stuff found. Shall we? Rod in our discord, Rod L in our discord, uh, said, uh, that, oh, where is it here? I know I had it. I had it. Oh, I know why I don't have it. Um, Zoom for Apple TV is now a thing. It's an app, right? And so I don't know if you guys have done this, but on Thanksgiving, I have a daughter who now lives in Northern Italy. So, you know, it's not like she lives in Chicago or something and it's easy to go visit her or vice versa.
So we did not see her for Thanksgiving, nor will we see her for Christmas this year. And on Thanksgiving, we did a FaceTime call. And we used the new continuity camera features of Apple TV where I just laid my phone on its side in front of our television. And that became our camera and we had, you know, sky on the big screen and we could just sit in the living room and chill and chat and we chatted for probably an hour, hour and a half.
It was great. And being able to do that with Zoom, even better, because I actually like Zoom better than FaceTime, even for like family calls, I don't know. So Zoom will use that continuity camera in the same way with your Apple TV now. So thank you for that, Rod. I had no idea. He said they stealth announced it, which I think is a really good way of saying it. But yeah, so it is our plan to use that on Christmas Day. You know, and we can, the nice part about it is, you know, then it's just,
it's all right there and everybody can see and hear. And yeah, it's incredible. I agree. Yeah. I'll throw in a bonus thing. I know it's not the Zoom thing, but now that you mentioned continuity camera with the Apple TV, you know, my daughter's away at college and we've been using SharePlay with Apple TV and continuity camera to watch movies together, which is amazing. Okay. I, I've never done this. I know that my, My daughter and her boyfriend did it when she was here. Daughter and fiancé.
When she was here and he was there before she moved out there with him. But um... And they did it with Plex, because it was before SharePlay, so that experience is fluid and just works, huh? Yeah, it worked great. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, you just got a little window goes down and you're watching the movie together and when you pause it pauses both sides, you know, it's just it just works Huh, and do you have it like what is the is there a collaborative experience?
Like can you chat with each other? I mean, obviously, oh, yeah, you just have a FaceTime call going. Yeah. Yeah Okay, so you see each other's faces while the movie is playing. Yeah, just a little. In a little corner. Yeah, yeah, yeah, little picture. You can move it around and you know all that stuff. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Okay, yeah, we definitely need to do this. Okay, how have we, how is this not, I mean she's lived there for over a year, how has this not happened for us as a family?
I don't know, I don't know. I mean she's living her own life, like it's great, like we gotta let her, we gotta let her out, you know, it's fine, it's good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wait, you gotta let them go? Pete, it's... Yeah, you do. It sucks. I thought they were mine. As I say, every time, you know, somebody's like, this is amazing.
Your daughter's living in Italy and it is amazing. And I am ever like, I am so proud and so thankful that she has like created this path for herself and like she, she did it like, like, and if anything, you know, I pat ourselves on the back for like, we successful launch, like, this is amazing. Um, I just wish you had to let them go before you paid for college. I'm just saying. You know, that's fair. Yeah. But it regardless, it, it, all of it is great, except for the part that really sucks.
Um, with her not being here, but you know, that's how it goes. Um, it's a good thing. It, it, I always say that, you know, the tearful goodbyes and the, the, you know, the painful distance and all that stuff is a sign that we as a family did it right. And, and I'll take it. Yeah. Because it would be, in my opinion, it would be worse if we were happy to like never see them again or whatever, like, so, yep.
I don't know, yeah, we all have our own path, and that's okay, but for us, this is a good reminder that we did it right. Anyway, all right, if we keep doing this, I'm going to start crying. So, Pete, can you take us to the next one? I can, but not in this scene. We were onto cool stuff found. We were, and you were going to tell us about Robert. Adam, you want to tell us about Chronosync? About Chronosync? Yeah, go ahead. I'll come back and I'll have Robert ready, queued up. Sorry about that.
Eric says that there's a new update for Chronosync. Chronosync now goes to 11. And it has support for Sonoma, but also adds support, apparently, for cloud services for your backup. So you can do... So people who don't know what ChronoSync is, it's a syncing and backup program. I'll kind of mention how I use it because it relates to what we were talking about earlier. But apparently now it can sync files and backups to iCloud, Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, Box, and other cloud services.
So that is a new feature that I'm going to have to check out. I didn't know that this update had come out and I'm actually a ChronoSync user. There you go. But yeah, so I've used ChronoSync in my backup strategy to be the tool that is like, I call it my selective archive backup. And so at its root level, what ChronoSync can do is all kinds of things related to backup. but the primary thing is syncing folders or volumes or directories from one location to another.
And it could be local on your Mac, it could be to a network drive, it could be however you want to set it up. It is an amazing tool and you can set up schedules and all kinds of rules. It's very, very advanced. So like, I've always used it to do the safe delete thing for files on my desktop. And I'll give you one example because I think it's the easiest to kind of grok.
So, doing my podcast, I have a Mac cast folder and all of my prep and audio files and everything go into an individual folder for each episode. So, my show notes, all that stuff. I wanna make sure that I archive that stuff. So I have Chrono Sync set up to automatically on a schedule. Sync that folder to multiple locations. I have it syncing to a local Drobo, I have it syncing to a network drive, and then those drives in turn are backed up to the cloud.
So I have multiple backups. So ChronoSync is just always running in the background, doing its thing, and so I know when I go back in, I've finished a show, it's been a week later or two weeks later, I can safely delete that entire show directory off my local drive because I know ChronoSync has already moved it off to my other storage locations, my iCard locations, and it's backed up to the cloud, so I have no anxiety about deleting that stuff.
And I have multiple things set up like that through ChronoSync. That's just one example. I have it also for movie files and my photo library and a bunch of things. And again, you can do whole volumes, you can do individual folders, you can do individual, you can set this up however you want. And it sounds like now I can go straight to the cloud, which is great. The only problem is I'm going to have to upgrade to like the 12 terabyte iCloud storage if I want to do that.
Exactly, right, right, right. But that's fine, I can. I mean, you could sync it to your own private cloud, like, you know, a Synology disk station or something like that too. Yeah. I have a, to tie it all together, you mentioned your workflow and the last step was, and then you know you can safely delete it because it is synced to all these other places. You could use Hazel to safely delete those things that are, say, a month old.
That's what I do here. In fact, I have Hazel set to move audio files and video files in the Mac Geek Hub folder to my Synology disc station after a month and then they're just gone from my drive and it's it all it's it's like it's life-changing yeah yeah yeah so yeah yeah I this the, we had a little conversation in our discord about this and.
Nibsuk said you know I asked people what do you use chronosync for because I was trying to wrap my I knew I know what it is, but I, like You need to explain what you're using it for so that it resonates with people and I'm glad you did that yeah And he said we use it for copying large amounts of data because unlike finder it can skip any bad files and carry on and then gives a report at the end of any files it skipped.
Whereas iCloud Drive kind of gets hung up on these things and you don't really know what's going on. In a sense, Khronos Sync is like iCloud Drive Pro, you know, where it adds a whole lot to it and lets you kind of do these things. So yeah, thank you. Another great feature of this, I gotta mention, is it has a checkbox that says, do not sync deleted items from your source. So if you've set up a source folder that is syncing.
Right, and you delete, and that sync is still running, it will ignore those deleted files, keeping them on your destinations, which that's another feature I love, because again, it means I can safely delete something. I think I use this for backing up, this is how I back up the movies I've downloaded from, you know, that I've purchased on the iTunes store, or whatever we call it now, the movie store the TV app from Apple.
I bought movies from Apple. I want to make sure that I archive those because they can go away at any time. And I want to always make sure I have a copy, but I don't maybe always want it stored right there where I have it stored or downloaded. Yeah. So I can safely delete, knowing that sync says, even though I've deleted it here and it's still syncing the same folder, it will not delete it in my archive.
It'll keep it in the archive. Oh, so yes, so very much, you know, iCloud Drive Pro where you actually do get to like make these granular decisions about what's going to happen with your data. So I looked and in addition to the cloud services you mentioned.
Uh, ChronoSync will also sync to Amazon S3 compatible backup destinations and which we talked about last week, I talked about ARC backup syncing to S3 compatible destinations and how there were many of those, including iDrive, which is super inexpensive right now. So like go, if you need, if you were going to pay for larger iCloud storage for this Atom, you might be better off just paying for iDrive.
We mentioned Arc Backup. Wilbur mentioned in our Discord a free open source alternative to Arc's backup that also backs up to S3 stores and it's called Copia at K-O-P-I-A dot I-O. And it will, of course, because it's S3 destination compatible, it will work with iDrive E2. So we will, I'll put that link in the show notes as well. So. Nice. Yeah. Pete, you want to take us to Robert? I'm going to. And like Jeopardy, I'm going to give my answer to Robert first.
Oh, all right. I like it. Well, if this ain't cool stuff found, nothing is. Thank you, Robert. So that was my reply to him. So he writes in, he was talking about the fact that a couple of weeks back, we were talking about Adobe screens and screens connect and other ways to do essentially remote desktop computing. Yep. He says, and he mentions one other one, and I've put up the link in the show notes that I've been using for years.
There's a free Mac OS menu bar applet that'll make it easier to use built-in Mac OS VNC, and it's called screen sharing menu let. Okay. And so I put that in there, but that's not what he was really cool. That's not, it's not free. It's $1.99 for screen sharing menu let. A whole $1.99. Okay. Yeah. I'm not complaining about it. I'm just articulating it so people know when they go there. Yep. Yeah. Works great. Lasts a long time. But he goes, everyone has their favorite app free or paid.
He goes, here's my suggestion on why Jump Desktop deserves to be your first choice. It runs on Mac OS and iOS and doesn't have any monthly subscription. It's part of the Setapp Mac subscription bundle. It has its own free app, similar to Screens Connect, called Jump Desktop Connect, that you install on the remote computer so you don't have to use a VPN or VPN-like software to find networks like TailScale, ZeroTier, et cetera.
It has built-in support for three different protocols, VNC, Jump Desktop Proprietary, and Windows RDC, which is their remote desktop. So it can connect to many remote systems, Apple, Linux, Microsoft, Windows, without installing the software on the remote end if you're okay using VNC or remote desktop.
It keeps getting better, though. Their proprietary protocol called FLUID is supposed to be optimized for faster speed and work better on lower bandwidth internet connections, and he buried the lead. Jump Desktop supports audio from the remote host, PNC screens and most others do not.
Jump Desktop was widely used during COVID and ongoing for production video editors to edit TV and film commercials, the home system can be a relatively old computer that remotes back to the studio editing bay massive powerhouse. He says, I've been using it for many years because I needed access to both Mac and Windows systems and last year started dabbling with YouTube video and used Jump Desktop to easily do remote video editing himself.
Jump Desktop handles all the audio drivers so you don't have to install any special virtual device like loopback or other tricks to get streaming audio between systems. So boom. Yeah. That's cool. It's very Mac-esque in that it just works. Wow. I installed it and played with it, it, boom. I mean, it was. And it's part of setup. It was so easy, I could do it. There you go. Folks, if that's not a testimonial, I don't know what it is. Oh, that's great. That's great. Cool. Cool.
I have one last cool stuff found before we get out of here. And, uh, it is, you know, I love my robot vacuums. They, if, if, if robot overlords are going to take over, we've started in the right place, because at the very least, they'll keep our homes clean. And I mentioned I have my robot vacuum run every night while we're asleep, not on the floor in which we sleep, because they are loud. But it's so nice to wake up in the morning and have a freshly vacuumed home every day.
And the newest one that I'm testing out is from Roborock, which has quickly become my favorite robot vacuum company. They really have the tech down in terms of mapping out the house and it's just so efficient and accurate and they get stuck less than other brands I've tried. The one I'm trying now is the Roborock Q8, Q8 Max, which is both a vacuum and a mop. And you can do both on the same run where it'll vacuum things and then mop up the right floor.
And like I said, because their mapping is so, so fluid, you can really just say, okay, this is the only places I want you to mop, or these are areas I don't want you to mop. The mapping, you know, we were talking about creating 3D maps of your house for use with NetSpot and all that. I wish Roborock would let me extract the map that it has created because it's got this whole 3D map of my, you know, main floor of my house right in there. It's, it's really, really well done.
Um, and I, this thing's great. And it's, um, it's right now it's on sale for 449, super powerful vacuum. And it's got the mopping capability. So, um, you know, if you need. And that's a good price for one of those. It is. Yeah. They used to be 900 bucks like a year ago. I feel like this would have been $900. Uh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. No, this is one thing. I can't get it to figure out how to do. Yes. And I'm talking about my son, by the way, not the robot vacuum.
Is leave the shoes around with the shoelace hanging out. That's the one thing that. Yeah it will grab you stick a snake it will grab shoelaces i don't know our ours is has not been terrible with that. It will grab occasionally grab the strap of a backpack. You know if like there's a backpack on the floor one thing i will say about robo rock in particular setting this one up i ran into this and i many others have to. I could not get this thing to join my Wi-Fi.
It's one of those things where it has, you know It creates its own hotspot you connect to it. You give it the data that it needs to have and then it comes back. I went Thankfully, I only went about a half hour with it before I looked on reddit and found the post from the people that had gone You know five hours with it. The trick is to turn off cellular data during that process and then everything worked fine.
I know it seems counterintuitive. Yeah. Cause now that you mentioned it, my RoboRock, and I think I have, it's a Q5. I forget the exact model. Um, it, it would not work with, you had two possible apps and I was trying to use an app that it was not going to work. Yeah. That you can't get that old app anymore. So that problem is solved,
but yeah, just if you're having an issue. And so I would take this advice and, and zoom it out and say any of these, you know, IOT devices that you're trying to connect to your wifi. If you're going through a couple of times and you feel like you're just banging your head against the wall, try turning off cellular data. That might be the magic answer. So, yeah. Yep. And then go to Reddit. And then if not, if all else fails, yes. Let Google do the, do the searching for you. So, yep.
You got anything else, Adam, on this? Are you a robot vacuum user? I am. We have an iRobot. Yeah. We only have one. Yeah. It works fine. Yeah. Yeah. It's great. All right. Yes, Pete. Now is the time on MacGeekEv when we dance. Well, we need music in order to dance. That is true. Oh, boy, what have I done? Thanks for hanging out with us, everybody. Thank you for sending in all your questions and your tips and your cool stuff found.
We love being able to do this, and you make it possible, folks. So, thank you for that. Thanks to Cashfly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Thanks to our sponsors. Of course, you can always learn about our sponsors at matgeekab.com slash sponsors. Why? Because Adam set that magic little page up for us a while back, but you can absolutely go to incogni.com slash MacBeatGab, barebones.com as well. Music. Have a great week, folks! And, uh...
Pete! What do they say in Japan there? What's maybe three words of advice that they might say in Japan, And, but translate it to English because I don't speak Japanese. Well, I think it's the same. You know, there are some words across all languages that are the same. And if this isn't universal, I don't know what is. Don't get caught. Music.