Unmute is also available on After Sight, along with other original podcasts such as Blindsight, the Mental Health Podcast, Blind Level Tech, and Navigating Life with Vision Loss. Check us out@www.aftersight.org. Hey everybody. Welcome back to Mac Chat for June 2025. So glad to have you here with us. And I have, of course, always with me here. Mar. How you doing, Marty? I'm doing good, thanks. How are you?
Great. I'm doing well. Yep. I'm excited about the things we're going to talk about for today's show and we always welcome feedback on what we talk about and if you'd like us to chat about anything that we haven't addressed yet. So let's get this party started. Sounds good. Let's do it.
Yeah. So this was the big WWDC week and that was Monday and I didn't get a chance to listen to it because I was working. But I did read some things afterwards and heard a lot of discussions. But one thing I thought was really helpful that people mentioned, in case you didn't know, there are audio descriptions available to you if you need them. And so if you want to make sure those are turned on for any other further opportunities or if you wanted to go back and listen to the WWDC replay, what you do to turn on audio descriptions is you would go to the system settings on your Mac and then accessibility and then in there there is audio descriptions and you want to make sure that's toggled on. Have you used audio descriptions on your Mac, Marty?
I haven't actually. Oh, okay. I should give it a try for sure. Yeah, definitely. I haven't actually either. I know I've used them on my iPhone for listening to, you know, movies and things that already are audio described, but haven't listened to things on my Mac yet with them.
I know it's kind of weird because I never think of turning it on because I'm not typically watching movies or anything like that on my Mac or if I'm going to watch something typically it's going to be a quick video that's just a few minutes long and the audio that the video provides usually is sufficient, you know, so.
Right. Yep, yep. So I know Apple has a lot of cool sort of pictures and effects and things that they run through when they're introducing something new or, or whatnot. So it, it would be cool to go and listen to that with the audio description on. So I'll have to try that. Yeah, we definitely will. And you can definitely go and Watch the keynote on Apple's website. I believe it's still up there. And you can also watch it on their YouTube channel. So either one will work for you.
Really cool. Well, that's a perfect segue, of course, into the content that was provided wwdc, especially related to the Mac. And I know you've been thinking about a lot of that stuff, Marty. So what kind of stood out to you that you wanted to make sure that we know?
Well, the first thing is, and this is across all the platforms, not just on the Mac platform, they're changing the name. So now it's going to be, for example, Mac OS 26 or iOS 26. All of the operating systems on Mac, iPhone, iPad, across all the devices, all the things are going to be called iOS 26. Right.
The only difference on the Mac is they are also going to keep the name. So the new name for the Mac operating system that is going to be coming out is called Tahoe. So it's going to be, I guess if you were to go to Settings and go to about once you have it installed, it would be. I don't know what order it'll be in, but I think it's going to be either Tahoe 26 maybe or 26 Tahoe. I don't know how they're going to do it, but that's the only one that's going to keep an actual name as well as the number. But everything else is going to just whatever the number is. So the purpose is so you can identify what year you're in, I guess, is what they're saying. So by the time we get to the end of the summer and they release the new iPhones and stuff, then that's when they usually, right around that time, release all the new operating systems. And so since it's going to be the end of 25, it'll go into 26. So basically this operating system will be for the year of 26, and then, you know, they'll do the next iteration, you know, as you move forward in every year. So what do you think about that?
I think the 26 part is kind of weird because it's coming out in 25, but they're kind of following the car models, I guess, you know. Yeah, that's what a lot of people are saying. It's kind of interesting.
Yeah, I think it's helpful though, because I have to remember what versions all my devices are on. And when I'm teaching my students, I have to remember to tell them, oh, yeah, it's really Mac, you know, 15.5 or whatever. And I don't know, it just gets confusing, all the version numbers. So I'm good with the year numbering, so.
Yeah, I am too. And it doesn't come out till the end of the year. So, you know, if they did it the other way and they named it 25, people would go, well, there's only like a month and a half or two months left in 25. Why didn't they just name it 26? So. So you're not going to make everyone happy all the time. But anyways, they want to be able to just make sure that it's easily identifiable by whatever kind of year they announced it and that they're going into.
Sure. Yep. I think that'll make it easier for most people. It will, Yep.
Cool. So we got the new naming scheme. So let's talk about some of the new features. I'm not going to go into all of the things, but some of the cool new features in the new Mac operating system is Spotlight is pretty cool. They're doing a lot of upgrades now. Few episodes ago, Michael did like kind of a deep dive on all of the substitute Spotlight slash menu items that you get in a third party app. And he talked about some of those. So you can always go back and listen to that if you want to hear that. But they're going to make Spotlight like third party apps that are out there. So you can do a lot of things. There'll be some clipboard options in there. There's going to be launching apps from there, there's going to be searching. I mean, you really can do like a lot of stuff. You can customize the menu bars and do all kinds of crazy stuff. So they're really taking a page out of all these third party, you know, search slash menu apps and implementing them right into Spotlight. So that should be pretty cool. I think we'll have to see how that all goes. But what do you think about that?
Yeah, I think it's great to make it more robust. Mostly I just search for a document that I can't find, you know, and that's pretty much what I do with Spotlight. And a lot of times Internet results come up and I don't really want those. And I think there's a way to turn that off. But yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing what they have with that's more robust about using Spotlight.
Yeah, I think one of the biggest features that people will like about it is the clipboard. You will now be able to stack your items so what that means is you would be able to copy something and if you forget to paste it somewhere, it'll stay on the clipboard and then you could go copy something else and then you kind of. They stack up sort of. Which I think a lot of people have been really looking for kind of a keyboard or a, kind of a clipboard app that, you know, will sync across their devices and stuff like that. So I think this is going to be really cool to have that option.
Yeah, I hope we can append to the clipboard because I'm sure there are third party apps that do that, but with the current clipboard you just not appending, you're not adding to it. Correct.
Mm, that'd be great because, you know, perish the thought mentioning a PC on a Mac chat show, but you know, you know, with my Jaws program, I can append to the clipboard all day long, or at least for a long while. And it keeps adding things and adding things and adding things and that's really super helpful. So I hope that I get to do that soon with my Mac.
Yeah, that would be really cool. So we'll have to see. Hopefully it will work and it won't be too many issues. You know, the thing I'm always nervous about is how many bugs are we going to get, what are they going to add and what's going to be broken, what's going to be fixed and then other things will be broken. You know how that whole thing goes. I need to get out my bug spray. Maybe I do have that sound effect saved for us still.
Yeah, good. Yeah, we definitely. That would be great to have that, you know. Yeah, totally.
Now, one thing I do want to bring up is it's very early days. You know, this has only been out not even a week yet. So things to think about is things could be very, very different by the time the operating system actually comes out. Which is going to be, I think it's September sometime. September, October. Ish. So we'll have to see how a lot of this goes. And another thing, and you could chime in on this as well, is, you know, they really went all out on the keynote day and talked about all of these updates they're going to be doing across the board on all the devices. So what I hope is, is that they actually release all of these things within, even if it's not every single thing, you know, in the first go around. I hope they at least get them out in the first or second go around. I mean, some of the things they did last year, still haven't even come out yet. So I hope that they release a lot of the things that they were talking about, all these new features right out of the gate because kind of a bummer when you get all excited about a bunch of things that they're talking about implementing and then all of a sudden, you know, they don't come out or they don't come out until six, seven months later and then you're almost coming up to the next wwdc, so.
Right. We'll see how that goes, I guess. Yeah, I think they probably learned their lesson with the AI debacle last year. The, you know, all that last year. Promising sort of over promising and under delivering with that. So. Yeah. And if you actually go back to watch the WWDC keynote from this year, they really don't bring up Siri hardly at all. No.
So that's pretty interesting. So I'm gonna see, I'm curious to see, you know, how that's gonna go once the new operating system comes out and see if they're actually going to have any upgrades or any Siri kind of stuff. That'll be interesting to kind of keep an eye out and see. Yeah. If they just take the best of everybody's AI and let me use it, you know, give. Just not ask me every time, hey, do you want to use Chat GPT? Well, yeah, I guess that's, that's what I use, you know.
Yeah. And, and you know, the interesting thing is they, according to what everything else that's out right now have been really behind the curve in all of the AI stuff. So now they did talk a lot about Chat GPT kind of be implemented into. Right. All the different operating systems and kind of more of a native thing throughout again. Let's see what happens when it's actually time to get, you know, the release on that and see how much is actually there.
So yeah, why not do that? Because I mean the Google is the, is the search, you know, the automatic search, you know. So why not have Chat GPT be the automatic go to. Unless somebody doesn't want it, of course. But it's what I use and I love it. Yeah, it's great. Cool.
So the only other thing I will bring up kind of real quick about the new Mac operating system and this kind of goes across the board on all the operating systems. They did do a lot of customizing and redesigning how everything looks so they're going back to this translucent kind of a background now of course, if you don't have any vision or you have a very low vision. You may not. This may not be useful to you, really. You may not be able to see what all that stuff is. But a lot of it's supposed to be translucent, you know, like the menu bars at the top. You know, people don't like the notch on the laptops, so, you know, they're trying to make it more kind of cohesive throughout the operating system. They say that you can turn some of this stuff off or down in accessibility, but you can change a lot of stuff. You can change all the icons, you can change all of the, you know, dock down at the bottom, you can do all kinds of crazy stuff and customizing how much of the new design you want to have implemented, how many custom things for icons and all the stuff that you want to change. Again, for a lot of people who are low vision or blind, this really doesn't make a difference. But it'd be interesting to get people's feedback if they can see any of that stuff at all. It'd be interesting to see and see what kind of settings you can change up, down, on, off, whatever it is.
So sure, yeah. Because we, if people need a lot of contrast and things, I think that would be probably pretty disruptive, but they have to have thought of that. And so I'll be interested to know about the people who are installing the betas and reports from them.
Yeah, definitely. Whenever you come out with a new design, you always want to. You always wonder, is this going to work with voiceover? I sure hope it does. You don't really know until you get to really try it out. So like I said, it's early days. We'll see what happens when it actually comes out where we stand, which is going to be at the end of the summer, like I said, around, you know, September, October time. Yeah. And we really appreciate the people who are beta testing.
Yes, definitely. And maybe we can get the, you know, someone who beta tests on to kind of talk about their experience with it and see how it's going for them. So that might. That'd be really neat. Yeah, definitely. Somebody from a maybe low vision perspective and somebody who doesn't need all that stuff and what are they finding useful as a person who relies exclusively on voiceover? Definitely.
Cool, that's great. Well, I was thinking about a little tip I wanted to insert here that I discovered when working with one of my students the other day. I always have lots of ideas when I'm teaching and things to bring you little tips and tricks here and There. So Voiceover Utility can be kind of a very chaotic place. Not chaotic in terms of things are not organized, but where do I find something? And so what we discovered is that when you go into Voiceover Utility to adjust the myriad of settings and things in there, you can actually, in the search box, type the first few letters of something that you're searching for, and the relevant items will come up to the right of your search. And also, if you typed an incorrect letter, you can backspace and then the results will adjust themselves. So it was really kind of cool that you can do some good searching with the Voiceover Utility, which I forget to check out the search. It's the same with the iPhone. It's the same with the Mac's regular Settings Center. And now I'm really always using that search box because to wander around and not find something where I thought it should be is just not very productive. Do you ever use that search box in the Settings either on your phone or on the Mac itself?
I don't really. You know, I always forget it's there, actually. And typically when I go into the Settings, I'm going directly to a thing or I'm looking for something and I should try to use the Settings app. I mean, the search in the Settings app more. I just, I never think about it. And it's one of those things that I just. I don't think about it enough to go, oh, I should search in the. You know. So, yeah, I got to try and remember that more because that's a really good tip to help find something a lot quicker, you know, especially if you don't know where it is.
Yeah, yeah. Because you can wander around for a while and something isn't where you thought and. And so just shift tabbing to that Settings search box and then you've. You've got it made there, which is really cool to be able to. And some things don't come up. Maybe it isn't the first, second, or third word in the actual setting itself, but it. It should give you a pretty good idea. For instance, I was needing to make sure that my Ethernet cable port, what I had connected there was in the order of services up above the WI Fi. So that my Mac would choose the Ethernet first and then go to WI Fi if. If the Ethernet wasn't plugged in. And so Allison showed me how to go to the network settings and how to find. Buried down in there, a couple different levels. How to find the order of services. Well, I think I typed in order. I think that's what word was in that settings descriptor and it didn't actually come up. So not everything with every word is going to come up. But at least it's a place to start. I mean, you could type the word network. You know, you could, you could type in something useful if you didn't want to wander down and find network. But that's just an example of not everything may come up, but it's still useful.
Yeah. And here's a creative scenario for you. And I know you've never ever had to deal with this in the past. Wink, wink. You go to look for something where you think it is and it's not there. Why? Because someone decided to move it and you don't know where they moved it to. So, yeah, it's kind of like the grocery store. You finally figure it all out and then when you go, everything is moved and I can never understand why it is. As long as it's there, leave it there. I don't know why you gotta move it all around all the time, for sure.
Or some sighted person moves your coffee cup or your something, whatever, and like, no, I wanted it there. Leave it alone. And then they go, oh, I put it over there. Oh, great, Thanks. I appreciate that. Where's over there? You know, you know, right over there. You know, just over there, right.
Yes, indeed. Yeah, things do move around Apple. Thank you. And so, yeah, so Voiceover utility is really awesome. Another thing, while we're talking about voiceover stuff, I just want to mention really quick. If anybody has forgotten about or doesn't sort of access this thing, it's the Voiceover help menu. So if you hold down control and option and press H twice quickly, you get all kinds of categories of keyboard commands and, you know, keyboard shortcuts and things to do and they're all separated out, you know, like navigation and text and general and you know, all the different categories. And then you VO space on that and then you can wander down through the several, many dozens of keyboard commands that you can find. And it's just a great reminder of where to find all these things on the fly if you want to.
Definitely. So that's a good menu. Yep, yep.
So I wanted to sort of transition and talking about what's new on appleviz podcast from. And it's related to Mac and they've been putting out some great content lately from some new folks and it's really great to have some new people in the mix. And there were some things that caught my attention and I don't remember who has produced or who has created these various different podcast episodes. But here are the some of the things that I found. There's a deep dive into the voiceover utility, which is what we've just been talking about. So if you want a refresher on that, that was really good recently, there is also an episode called Don't Click It, Just Press It. It's a guide to creating keyboard shortcuts. And I need to remember how to do that.
That's a good one. Yeah. Because we used to have these things called Commanders. So there was a keyboard commander, trackpad commander. I think it was a braille commander. The commanders went away and I don't know. See, that's another thing, is you move my stuff. Apple, where'd you put it? And I don't know where it is. So I have to refresh my memory on how to do that. Exactly. Have you done any keyboard shortcuts lately?
Just the kind of the same sort of system keyboard shortcuts I typically use. I haven't needed to create any new ones. But I know a lot of people really like the Commanders. I do know that what they're doing in this new operating system kind of across the board is they're adding things to the Shortcuts area and into the Shortcuts app to sort of handle some of that stuff. So it's still a little bit of jiggering around and getting in there and kind of figuring it out and all of that. But I think they're making some of those things easier for people who aren't necessarily programmers to create their own shortcuts.
Sure, sure. So, but again, we'll have to see what that looks like once we kind of get there, you know.
Right. So there's, you know, the keyboard shortcuts, which I forgot how to get there because they took the Commanders away and I haven't needed to do it. Like, for instance, my option. My right option key S takes me to Safari, my right option key E takes me to the first edit box, and so forth. And I set those up years and years ago. And they've traveled with my voiceover settings. My settings. And so that's really cool, but I can't remember how to go there. So I'm definitely going to check out that keyboard shortcuts. And then of course, there's the regular shortcut shortcuts, kind of. That's the actual app. Right. And the ways to do things. So that would be something different. So then there's a demo by someone. I think he's From India. And he does some really nice demos, Siddharth, and he has one on PDF gear and it does OCR on PDFs that are images. And so he demonstrates that it is available in the Mac App Store. I like his demos because he shows you. He tells you why something isn't going to work. But he doesn't just tell you that. He shows you, look, see, I did it this way. It really doesn't work. So if it's a button he's trying to find, or if it's a certain way he's trying to do something, he will demonstrate why that option off the starting line doesn't work. Anyway, so the PDF Gear is a fairly accessible app. It will definitely do AI, you know, OCR on an image document. The thing that was interesting that he did demo is that there are a whole lot of buttons that don't appear to have labels, but if you keep going to the right, then there's the text that is associated with that button and it will tell you. And then you have to interact with the button and then I think you have to press V of spacebar. Anyway, it's a bit of a. It's a bit of doing to kind of get this thing to work. But I'm wondering if PDF Gear, how it compares to anything that an AI might produce, like if you were to load that into, say, Chat GPT, does it do a comparable job on OCR kind of stuff, or is it ready for prime time like that with ChatGPT? Have you ever done any OCR with the ChatGPT on a PDF?
I have not actually. But, you know, that's another thing to think about. I guess you can take a PDF and you can drop it in there and maybe it'll do a pretty good job of OC ing art. And then you can save the text and either copy it to your editor somewhere or. Right. You know, and then come back to it later or whatever. So that's what he did. He did. He exported it to text and then he loaded it into like, TextEdit.
Oh, cool. And is. It's called PDF gear, right. And is that in the Mac App Store, you said? Yeah. PDF Gear, does it cost anything to. You now or is it just a free. He's. I believe he said it was free. Okay.
Yeah. So it's worth checking out his tutorial because he does a nice job of demonstrating how you navigate to things, what things you choose. And also he lives in the. He leaves in there what he chose incorrectly. So I like that it's Real time. Oops, I should have chosen this. So while the first choice was incorrect, it would have been the logical one, you know. So he leaves an oops every once in a while just to have us realize. Oh yeah, you would have thought to make that choice too. But actually it's this other thing. So in getting past the button, button, button thing and then going over to the text labels that are actually the buttons themselves apparently now, did you know you probably do, because I think I mentioned this on a previous show, but if you press VO slash on a button, you can actually label it.
Yeah, you did actually a little bit of a tutorial. I don't remember how far back, but you and it might have even been on Digital Bytes maybe. I think you did an episode on how to do that at least, you know, kind of get going doing that. So.
Right. It's really cool. As long as it's not a website with a. A dynamic button that might change its shape or appearance or look or whatever. Yeah, yeah. Because when I recently installed some software for the new Vocaster that I just bought, I labeled some buttons on that. So yeah, I did. I'm not sure I'll ever need those buttons because I got it all set up, but. And now you're good to go. Oh, wait, you know what? You know, if you need it.
Oh, wait, it wasn't the Vocaster. It was the insta360 camera I just bought that was. Oh yeah, I actually got one of those as well.
Awesome. Yeah, it's really cool. And it just plugs into the Mac and it has this really cool tracking feature. It's called AI tracking. And if I raise my right hand, not taking an oath or anything, but if I raise my right hand and I put my palm pointed to the camera, it will turn on the AI tracking feature. And so then if I shift in my chair, it follows my face and then I don't have to. I'm very still usually because I'm usually reading my braille display or, you know, I'm just a pretty still person. But I think it's really cool that it tracks. And then you can raise your palm to the camera again and turn off the tracking. It's really cool.
Yeah. If you can remember the gestures. They have a bunch of gestures that do a bunch of different things. It doesn't really help us a hugely amount, but you can put up a hand gesture and you can make the camera zoom in or out and do a bunch of other things. The thing about it tracking you, which is different than Any other camera that's out there either, a webcam kind of a thing, is that it actually has a built in gimbal which actually allows the camera itself to follow you around, which is pretty cool. Yeah, they don't all have that. They have. So this camera is called an insta360 link and some of them have certain features and some of them don't. It just depends on the model you get. But we got the same one which is called the insta360 link and that does have all the features that you would need, including the gimbal with the tracking and all of that.
And I bought a tripod with it too. And it's just perfect because I did too. Yeah, that's great.
Yeah, it's short enough to just be on my desk in case I need some extra height. And I actually went to the. The extra effort to put bump dots on my desk at the point where all three legs of the tripod would extend to so that when I sit in my chair, I put the camera with the tripod on the desk right at the bump dots, so that when I extend the legs, each leg is at a bump dot. And so then I know I'm exactly where I need to be. Now that was probably you overdoing it, but you know, I never do that.
Whatever helps, you know. Yeah, I got a tripod for it as well. You know, I think it's just better because you can get more options of how or where you want the camera, especially the height, because a lot of the cameras, they just say put it on top of your monitor. Well, if you have a laptop and you know, you always get that too low kind of, and you feel like it's looking up at you and it's kind of a weird angle. And sometimes if you're on a desktop, it could be too high, you know, and it's hard to adjust it. So being able to put it on a tripod is really awesome.
It is. And the software install, I had AIRA help me set that up because it's not a terribly accessible install. But that being said, it didn't take very long and most of the settings were default. You know, I kept the gestures on and there wasn't a lot of. There wasn't a lot to do for the setup, but you did have to be able to access it. So a little visual assistance. But basically I think it's set it and forget it. Pretty much, yeah.
And basically that means that the software that comes with it, you need to install it is not accessible. So you either need a sighted person to help you out, or you can do what Chris did and you can call aira, which when you told me that you did that, I was like, wow, they really were able to do that with you. That's amazing. So I didn't even think of even calling them because I just thought, you know. Yeah, good old team Viewer. Yeah, that's great. That's really awesome.
Yeah. Another great thing that you can utilize AIRA for. Yeah, exactly. And I. I'm always using TeamViewer with them. And then they could see if the camera was on or if the gestures are on by default or do I need to turn on the tracking by default? You know, that sort of thing. And also labeled some of those unlabeled buttons, which was really cool.
Yeah. And like Chris said, once you have it installed, you don't really need to use the software anymore. Once you plug into your computer, it recognizes it and then it. Then it kind of just works. Now, if you're using something like Zoom, for example, and you're doing a Zoom meeting and you want to use the external camera, then you have to remember to go down to the button that's right next to the microphone button and change the video camera to the insta360. Because true have an internal camera, it may default back to the internal camera. So it's an easy thing to do. But just remember to switch your camera if you're going to use an external one.
Definitely. Yeah, I'm really excited about it. When I plugged it in and I turned on the computer the other day, it made this little click sound like the camera because the camera kind of swivels and so it clicked into place like, yep, I'm ready. That was really cool. Yeah, that's super cool.
Active. So. So, yeah, that was. That was a long side note that I was really excited about the insta360 link. And you don't want to get the link to, apparently. So make sure if you're going to get this one. They did have it on sale on Amazon for me, but it's. It's the link, not the link. 2. So not sure. Yeah, mine came in right around $150. So. Yep, I think that's around what you got yours for. Same here. Yeah, I think the tripod was maybe like an extra $20 or something. A big deal, really.
Right. And because people really like this. So. Yeah. And this particular camera's got great video quality. It's like DL DSLR quality. So. Awesome. Pretty awesome. Yeah, yeah, that's great. It's better than the, you know, the internal camera, I think on the Mac. So. Yeah, they say it's a lot better actually.
That's really cool. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. Well, going back to these little tutorials on appleviz took a rabbit trail, but that's okay. I'm good with that. There are other tutorials up there on appleviz for the. If you subscribe to the podcast, these things come up. There's a numbers tutorial. He's given quite a few little numbers tutorial. Then there's an Alfred from Mac series and I think that's helping with shortcuts and different tasks with your computer and adjusting settings and things. I really don't know enough to really talk about it. Have you heard about that app Alfred?
Yes. It's kind of similar to all of those other third party search, slash menu bar. They all kind of have their own little thing, but at the end of the day they're all kind of similar and kind of do similar things, right? They just enhance, you know, the bar at the top of your computer. Like the screen up there. Like on the far right side you have all these apps that stack up there, you know, Clock and Dropbox and whatever else you use. So a lot of times they start just becoming a little bit ridiculous. So some of these apps, you can either show items or not show items or you can put them in a separate dropdown menu just to keep things not so crazy up there. They can be a little more organized. And then after that, you know, you're talking a lot of like a search type things and clipboard type things and all of that. And all of them kind of have their own little niche things that they do.
So you're right. That's awesome. Yeah, I'll have to look into that. But he's got it. Like I think there's four part series on that. Little sections might be like 10 minutes long or something. You know, they're not too long. And then the last thing that I learned how to do, which I wouldn't have been able to find, is how to check my battery cycle count. Like how many times have I charged my battery? Right. Yeah.
And so it's not where you think in the battery settings. And with battery health you have to go to system info. And then he describes how to go there to check and to enter the text box that has all the information about your battery. So it's not under battery health like I say, like you would normally think. And so I found out that my battery cycle count was 76 on my MacBook Air. And I don't. Do you know what a reasonable number of cycle charges is or do you know anything about that? Because I don't.
What they say is when you start paying attention to it and kind of deciding whether you're going to need to actually take it in and have it checked or replaced is 75 to 80% is kind of where they're talking about. What I understand when I first heard that, I was a little bit surprised because to me, you know, 75, 85% is. Seems like it would still have a lot of life left in it. Yeah.
But they're saying, you know, and everyone's a little bit different also. But they're saying 75 to 80% is when you want to kind of start paying attention. So. Sure. Now, a lot of this, though, you can sort of do things to make your battery not be used up so much. For example, like a really big thing that people don't really think about is turning the brightness down on your screen, especially if you don't really need it all that. Right.
A lot of times the screen, the brightness is really high on it and you don't even realize how high it is. And just by turning down the screen brightness, it really helps a lot. So, sure. I would say the other thing is, is how many apps you've got running in the background all the time. If you have things that's auto start in the background and you don't necessarily need them, you can turn some of those things off. But, you know, I would go through and just check kind of all the things and see if that changes anything on your battery. And if you do all that and it's still at 75 or 80%, I would start paying attention.
Yeah. So those are good tips. And this specifically was relating not to the battery percentage, the. The health of the battery and how much charge it can keep. Like at that 75 or 85%. Like that's the maximum it can charge. But how many times have you charged it? How many cycles have you charged it? Apparently I've charged my battery 76 times. Wow.
And so I'm wondering, are we going. Are we thinking the maximum number of charges it can sustain or 350 or what? I'd be interested to know how many charges my battery is expected. How many cycles, you know, it's expected to be able to charge before it starts degrading? Yeah, I don't know what that number. So I'd be curious to see what that Number is as well.
So, yeah, the battery health was really good. I think it was. It was near perfect. But I was just interested in how many times have I charged it. I would have thought I would have charged it more times than that, but maybe it's. I don't think it's going from. Okay, it's a 50% and I charge it to 100. Does that count as one cycle or is it a complete discharge and then back up to 100? I think it is. Every time you charge it is what I think.
But, yeah, it'd be interesting to really know. So maybe if anybody has good knowledge on actual battery specificity. Is that right? No, specificity. Oh, that's the word of the day. All right. Can you say that word? Let us know. Chime in. You know, you can always email us at feedbackmute show and we can get that feedback. That'd be awesome. Yeah, that's great. Yeah. Because it really is important to do things that protect your battery health and don't tax it, you know, beyond what's necessary.
Yeah. So you can keep your Mac around for a long time without getting the battery replaced. Definitely. And if it's under AppleCare, well, that's a whole nother deal. So. Yeah, definitely, for sure. So my last topic I wanted to talk about is Remote Incident Manager. I really love using it in my teaching. I do a lot of remote teaching a couple days a week, and I do have some Mac students. And you haven't used that yet, have you, Marty? Remote Incident Manager.
I have a little bit. Not a huge amount, though. Okay. Okay. So on the Mac, it's just great. And I love using it with my students who are blind or visually impaired. The thing where we've encountered a little bit of interesting snafu is if you want to remain anonymously blind. That's my new term. Yeah.
Anonymously blind. So let's say that you were working as an instructor or even a consultant or support person, and you're blind. Your person you're working with is cited. This is cool, because the person doesn't need to have voiceover running on their computer, but you also don't want to advertise, hey, guys, I'm blind. What do you know? You know. So you want to keep everybody in the dark, Right?
That's awesome. I love it. Yep. Turnabouts. Fair play. So. So what? What I didn't know is that it used to be that before Sequoia, the operating system Sequoia, I could remote into a sighted person's computer. Nothing would turn on differently on their end, they would just see me navigating around their computer. I would hear my voiceover talking to me. What would have been talking on their computer had they had voiceover on, if that makes sense. So it's verbalizing everything for me, but they have no idea. Well, something has happened in Sequoia where it's sort of half baked. Now this little accessibility caption panel comes on and it shows you what voiceover is saying to me. And so it's obvious that there's something different going on here. And two, but, but their voiceover isn't talking. It's just showing the caption of what's being said to me, which is not okay. It should. I should be able to have anonymity as a blind person. So to. So then if they turn voiceover off and back on again, then of course they would have full speech on their computer. But the point is it the ability to remove my anonymity is missing. And so there are talks going on to rectify this situation. And so the reason I'm mentioning is because I'm going to be speaking at MaxDoc in a little under a month and I'm super excited and I'm demonstrating the remote Incident Manager program via video audio video recording. And so Allison Sheridan, who is absolutely fantastic, of no silicast fame. Podfeet.com Yes, I always thought it was podfeed and I had to spell it out as feet F E t. So podfeet.com has a wonderful blog up there about all of this that I'm going to briefly mention. So Allison has been helping me with a demo because you never want to do a live demo in front of 200 people when you're new person with cruddy hotel wi fi and two computers and one screen and just forget it. Right. So we wanted to pre record this. Well, there were all kinds of challenges with it. At one point we had three Macs and a phone and we're logged into Zoom and we're doing all this stuff because we had some interesting challenges with a delay between when I would press a key on a keyboard on her, you know, to activate her computer and when I would hear what voiceover was actually saying. So there were some things to work out in terms of recording. With the video recording, she had to turn off a VPN kind of sort of thing and I had to. We had to use Remote Incident Manager as a sound source so we could capture what voiceover was saying on her computer as well as we needed to include our Microphones, because we were both. We wanted to have the folks hear what we were saying as I was navigating her computer. And we probably spent eight hours on this thing for four minutes. I don't even know. But I was getting really stressed out because I wanted to be able to deliver on what I promised for this conference. And I want people to see how wonderfully accessible this program is, to be able to allow me to teach remotely, to be able to allow me to help a sighted person with their computer. And I'm really super excited about it. And so we finally, finally, finally accomplished this goal. And we were back and forth with settings and with NUMA Solutions, who create and sell the software. And it's just been really a ride and a half. And I really appreciate Allison for helping me, but what I was able to do was to effectively demonstrate how to go to a website, to go to the toolbar, select a web address after I had gone to the website I wanted, and then create a note, create the text that I wanted in the note, highlight a piece of text, insert the link, and then show people, hey, it's clickable. And so I wanted to do something practical that would be useful to the sighted attendees, but at the same time, show them it's completely accessible for me to remote into Alison's computer. But it was a wild ride in getting there. And if you want to read all the gory details, she'll have her blog up there on podfeet.com and she really outlines everything wonderfully. And there will be a video there that people can hear the whole recording. It's. I think it's just four or five minutes long. It's not very long, but it does detail what we did, how I demonstrate that.
So, and here's an interesting question I was actually thinking about. So right now, in your testing, you guys are in different places. Yes. But when you actually do this presentation, you guys are going to be in the same place. And I wonder if it'll act different when both on the same network.
No, we. I don't think so. And. But because hotel WI fi is so slow, we are not even going to attempt a live demo. And there's apparently no way to show two computers on one big screen there. And so that's why I'm bringing on a thumb drive stored in a couple different places in dropboxes and things, so it won't be lost. And they'll just upload this demo and play it as we, you know, we recorded it. So it'll be shown on the Big screen that way. Cool. Yeah. But it's been quite a while.
You want to remind everyone where all this is going to be taking place.
Oh yeah. So July 11 through 13 in Crystal Lake, Illinois is the max Stock Conference and Expo. And I believe Mac stock conference and Expo.com is the website. It's a pretty lengthy website, but it'll appear in your, your favorite search engine. But it's a great, a great place for a couple hundred or more Mac users to gather. And I guess you have instant friends because they all know they have something in common and they're just a friendly group and it's really going to be a lot of fun. They have workshops that are more hands on kind of activities for how to do different things on the Mac. And then they have actual presentations like mine where I'm going to be, you know, presenting, talking through my slides, not giving anything boring, but you know, giving examples of the different things. Oh, and this is another thing. I wanted to create images, a couple images that would make sense to people. Outlining the challenge at hand was I couldn't remote into someone's computer. So I had ChatGPT create me an image and I said I want it to be two people standing with a big chasm or gulf between them and, and one I want you to, I told Chat GPT, I said label one of them computer technician and the other one computer user. And so I had Ira who suggested this and I don't know why I didn't think of it. And so when I was on the call with AIRA and they had remoted into my computer, they watched it happen and it was really cool because there was a big blur and then things started to happen and then it started coming down from the top and then the people came into view and it was this really nice scene. And now this is kind of, I feel like this is a bit sexist. But the computer technician was a guy who was dressed in blue shirt and blue pants and the, and the computer user was of course a woman who needed help and she was wearing red, a red top and dark pants. And anyway, she had a worried expression on her face, I guess. And then I said to Mr. Chatgpt, I said, so we liked that image apart from the fact that I think we should switch the roles around, but anyway, why not? So then I said, okay, create for me a an image of those same two people labeled the same way. But I want there to be a bridge between them and the bridge is going to be labeled Remote Incident Manager. So as I had pictured in my mind, it had the same two people labeled the same way. I guess they had. The woman wasn't so worried now.
Yeah.
And now there was a bridge made out of the words Remote Incident Manager, which is the way I had pictured it in my mind. And so that was really cool. And Ira really liked the images, and so we downloaded them and they inserted them. You know, the problem was I can't remote into a computer. This is an image I want to stick with people. I want those sighted people to remember, hey, inaccessibility is like a gulf. I can't get there. I can't help you. I can't do this thing. And then the bridge of Remote Incident Manager allows us to freely go back and forth. You know, the. The computer user could remote into my computer if that was appropriate. You know, we can flip the session. So.
Yeah. Anyway, it was really great to have Chat GPT create these images that are usable for me and AIRA could confirm. And then we inserted them in the slide and it was really awesome. Sounds like it. Yeah. Do you know if there's going to be any way to be able to see any of the presentations at MaxDock after it's over, or do you know?
You know, I don't know if that's available if you. If you hadn't registered, but I do know that Mac Geek Gab, one of our favorite Apple podcasts is Mac Podcast, is actually doing their show there Saturday night. They're recording live. That's going to be great.
Yeah. If you subscribe and you also subscribe to the calendar, that's the real important bit. If you subscribe to the show and then you go on the Mac Geek Gab website and you subscribe to the calendar, then you'll get notifications of when they're recording live. And so when they're doing that, you could just then tune in either on their video feed or I just do the audio feed because it works better for me. And then you could hear them record live from Mac stock. I'm. I'm really pretty sure if you subscribe to the calendar, you can do that.
Awesome. That sounds great. We'll have to track that and see if we can watch their live broadcast from MaxDock. That'd be awesome. That's great. Well, that's all I have. Anything else you want to add before we tell our great listeners how to contact us again? Nope. I think I've talked about all the things I had for today. Okay, great. So if you have any suggestions for topics or you want to comment on anything that we've talked about. You're welcome to email us at feedbackmute show.
Yeah. And if you want to check out anything else we got going on, then you can check out the website at Unmute Show. And there will be definitely some updates coming to the website as well as some announcements that will be coming up shortly. So look out for those. And awesome. Everybody have a great one and we'll see you next time. Bye. Sam.