 Hi, this is Allison Sheridan with the NoCillicast podcast, hosted at podfeet.com, a technology geek podcast with an ever-so-slight Apple bias. Today is Sunday, July 2nd, 2023, and this is show number 947. Last week you may have noticed one or two different failures in the podcast, one of two different failures in the podcast. Shortly after I first published the show, Joe from the Northwoods alerted me to the fact that there were no chapter marks. I rushed back up to stairs and I verified what she said. I checked my original M4A export using Marogamiba's Fission software and determined there were definitely no chapter marks. That was an important diagnostic step because it eliminated Afonic as a possible suspect in the stripping out of the chapters because that happens after that M4A export. My first test in Hindenburg was to export it again without changing anything. I opened the file in Fission and now my carefully handcrafted chapter marks were there. I had no idea what had caused it but with no further testing I re-ran the Afonic process. The last thing Afonic does is securely FTP the file to Libsyn where the audio files live out the rest of their natural days waiting for you to download them to listen. This step failed as I expected because it was trying to push the same file name again to the same place. That meant a step over to the dreaded Libsyn interface to manually replace the file. Once I'd done battle with Libsyn just a few weeks ago, I was able to find version 4 of the interface because version 5 is stupid and I found it more quickly this time and I remembered how to replace the file. Great, it was fixed. At least for any podcatchers which hadn't too quickly downloaded the file. Then listener and friend in real life Lynn posted in our Slack that the show simply stopped right after security bits. No outro by me and no outro music. It's very funny to me that Lynn was literally the only person who pointed this out to me. Does that mean that all of the rest of you would never listen to the outro? Anyway, the only sad part was in that particular episode I made a bunch of jokes in the ending but you didn't get to hear them if you got the chapter version of the show. Now I didn't fix that truncation problem because I couldn't reproduce it. I went back to Hindenburg and I exported again and it had gone back to exporting the full-length show but without the chapter marks. I figured truncated with chapter marks was better than no chapter marks at all. After many tests I gave in and sent a desperate plea to the Hindenburg support email. Took a bit of going back and forth but they eventually figured out that it was a bug in the latest build and Previd explained that they'd fixed it in a new build. Basically was files greater than 128 megabytes would not get their chapter marks applied. While I've done some testing and in theory you should get a full show this week including the outro and you should get chapter marks. Fingers crossed everyone. If you're listening to this podcast using Stitcher you're going to need to find a new podcatcher. This week Stitcher announced that they're shutting down their service as of August 29th of this year. I don't want you to be left adrift without the no-silicast and chitchat across the pond so be sure to find the shows in your new podcatcher of choice. If you're on the iPhone a fan favorite is the app Overcast by Marco Arment. Last week I talked about the Chevy EV Bolt that Steve and I rented on a recent trip to Houston. Alert reader and known scientist Bruce also known as Use the Data let me know that I'd made a technical error in my explanation of regenerative braking on electric vehicles. He did it privately and politely as is his style. I said I checked the manual to see if the bolt had regenerative braking but Bruce explained to me that all EVs have regenerative braking which I don't think I realized that. What I should have said was that I was checking to see if the bolt had the one pedal drive method of using regenerative braking. I'd like to say I definitely didn't know all EVs had regenerative braking but back in the dusty cobwebs of my memory I'm pretty sure Bruce has corrected me on this before. Hopefully by writing it down I'll really cement that memory. Now it took me a little bit to understand the differences between one pedal driving and regenerative braking. I'm going to try to explain it but I'm going to oversimplify this for the sake of brevity and clarity so if you super really understand this, cut me some slack, okay? In an internal combustion engine or ICE vehicle when the brake pedal is applied the car slows using the friction of the brake pads against metal discs or drums. This generates heat which is wasted energy. Now we know that all electric vehicles have regenerative braking. Regenerative braking means putting energy back into the battery by allowing the electric motors to slow the vehicle. This puts energy back into the batteries rather than wasting that energy to heat. There are two different ways for regenerative braking to be applied in an electric vehicle. Some but not all EVs have a feature called one pedal driving. One pedal driving allows the driver to use just the accelerator pedal alone to accelerate and decelerate. When the driver eases off of the accelerator regenerative braking is engaged. In emergency breakings where a rapid stop is required at higher speeds the driver can use the brake pedal to engage the friction brakes. If a car doesn't have one pedal driving or the driver has chosen not to use it the vehicle is slowed by the application of the brake pedal just like an ICE vehicle. This will engage regenerative braking but will also blend in friction braking as required. This is less efficient than using only regenerative braking. Now Bruce and I have gone back and forth a little bit on this exact point and we're not exactly sure how much of the friction braking is being applied when regenerative braking is being used through the brake pedal. It may depend on which vehicle we're talking about we're really not sure but what I just said I know is true for the EV bolt because it says so in the user manual. Now I always thought that one pedal driving was synonymous with regenerative braking so I do want to thank Bruce for correcting me. Bruce sent along a link to an Engineering.com article that goes into a lot more depth on the subject. To give you an idea of how deep it goes it starts by explaining how an AC induction motor slash generator works and then it builds on that knowledge to explain how regenerative braking works. I really appreciate Bruce for giving me this new understanding and I hope I got most of it correct this time. I am on a roll with scientists on chit chat across the pond. This week my guest is Professor Jason Briner from the University of Buffalo. Dr. Briner joins us to tell us tales of adventure as he and his team go to Greenland to study the polar ice sheet. I never thought of geology as like a sexy exciting field of science but after learning about Dr. Briner's work and the incredible importance of that work to climate science my view of geology has been pretty much turned upside down. Dr. Briner is serious and funny and engaging and fascinating and I really enjoyed talking to him on the show. I'm super glad Steve and I got to know Dr. Briner on our trip to Antarctica where he was one of the very brilliant scientists lecturing on the University alumni trip. Steve listened to this interview and he said he might even like it more than the one with Andrea. I mean Andrea's got the whole Nobel Prize and all that but Dr. Briner was really really really interesting and it's a great great show. You can find videos and photos from Dr. Briner's very recent research trip to Greenland in the link in the show notes and it might be kind of fun to follow along with the images while listening to him describe the work that they do. I'm telling you it is an exciting adventure I was on the edge of my seat by the end of the interview. Anyway, of course you could find chitchat across the pond number 772 with Dr. Jason Briner in your podcatcher of choice. Well that music means it's time for a little tiny tip here. Not a little tiny tip just a tiny tip that was redundant. Anyway recently I told you about a terrific screenshot and annotation tool called Shutter. One of the really nifty features of Shutter is that you can take scrolling screenshots. This allows you to capture a long piece of content like a long web page. Recently I was working on my tutorial on screencast online about retro batch and I needed a scrolling screenshot. In retro batch you could see all possible node types but some of them are only fully functional if you have retro batch pro. It's great to have these specialty nodes available because you can see how they work and if you really need one of them you could decide to purchase the upgrade. Anyway as I was teaching the tutorial I wanted to have a cheat sheet at my fingertips so that when I got to each node I'd know whether to point out if it was a pro only node. Sam the developer of retro batch has a listing on his website of which tools are pro only but I wanted them in the order they are in the menus. It was trivial to open up all of the little chevrons to reveal all of the nodes. I took a scrolling screenshot with Shutter which even auto scrolls for you. Using the retro batch website as my guide I annotated each of the pro nodes in Shutter by drawing a box around them. Next I wanted to print out this cheat sheet so I'd have it at my fingertips while recording and not have to scroll up and down this screenshot and clutter up my computer screen when I've got all this video work going. I wanted a piece of paper on my desk or several pieces of paper as it turns out. I opened the PNG I'd created in preview and I selected print. In the preview I could see that it was going to print the PNG file on one page. This was a long list so that one page printout would have been completely unreadable. I messed around with the print settings because I was sure there had to be a way to tell it to print across multiple pages but for the life of me I couldn't find a way to do it. Here's the tiny tip. Numbers of all things can split a PNG across multiple pages. Here's how you do it. Open up numbers and create a new document. Select the empty table by clicking the little circular thingy in the upper left and hit delete. That's going to get rid of the table. Now paste your long PNG onto the page. Slide it all the way over to the left edge. It's going to be tiny on screen and fit on that one page. If you choose to print at this stage it would all be on one page which is obviously not what we want. Grab the right edge of the giant long screenshot and embig it until you can easily read it on screen. Now choose print and you'll see in print setup how the screenshot will be spread across multiple pages. You may have to go back out of print setup and shrink or enlarge this screenshot until it spreads across your desired number of pages and you know is as big as you want and not too big. It's sort of a little bit of a back and forth but it works. Now I wish I'd recorded the forum link where I found this unlikely solution but unfortunately I didn't so I can't give credit to whoever figured this out. As you probably know my 14-inch MacBook Pro has been plagued by battery life well below the advertised numbers pretty much since the day I got it in late 2020. Apple continued to work with me to try to figure out the root cause and we've yet to figure out how to fix it. In the process though Apple Engineering added a very interesting tool for my tool belt for diagnosing problems. One of the first things that's always suggested when having issues on your Mac or imagine this would be true on a PC as well is to create a clean user account and see if the problem persists. This is a good diagnostic step because it ensures that none of your preference files that have been created for your main user account will be present in the clean account. It's a good idea to create a clean user account when nothing is wrong so you have it ready for testing when something inevitably goes belly up. While the clean user account is a great first step it doesn't eliminate all of the variables. All of the software you have installed is still available with this clean user account. Additionally if you said yes to the request on whether to install particular apps for all users they might even launch by default. For example I evidently agreed to have all users be able to run iStat menus because it comes up automatically when I log into my clean user account. In any case clean is a matter of interpretation. Another diagnostic step is to boot into Safe Mode. Apple support article about Safe Mode explains that it can help you determine whether an issue is caused by software that loads as your Mac starts up. Safe Mode doesn't run login items, it avoids system extensions not required by macOS and it doesn't install any fonts not installed by macOS. I've always been fascinated by the fact that fonts can bork an operating system but that's a discussion for another day. While Safe Mode can eliminate software factors it's virtually impossible to actually use your system in Safe Mode. The graphics are weird and you don't have access to the things you need in order to work with your Mac. If you can't use it it's kind of hard to run a test to see if many kinds of problems have gone away. Safe Mode does do a basic check of your startup disk and delete some system caches so that might actually fix the problem you've been having. I have to point out that it clears out those pesky font caches too. However, it's never fixed a problem for me. So a clean user account might help you diagnostically and booting into Safe Mode might actually fix the problem. But sometimes, as in the case with my battery drain issues you might need to do a clean install. And I mean the squeaky clean install I do where you install every app from scratch. What a lot of us like to call a nuke and pave. But obviously that's a terribly annoying step and if it doesn't solve the problem you've wasted a huge amount of time. When I got my Mac back from Apple just last August after replacing the battery they had helpfully erased my drive. I reinstalled everything from scratch and the battery drain problem came with it. And here's where Apple Engineering gave me what I think is a brilliant diagnostic idea. If you have a disk formatted as APFS you can create separate volumes on that single disk. Now these volumes act like separate drives but they're all on the same physical drive. Now unlike the old concept of creating partitions you don't have to decide ahead of time how big to make them. APS volumes automatically resize as required. Now creating a new volume is super easy. Open disk utility which is inside the utilities folder inside your applications folder. In the toolbar there's a plus button that says volume. After selecting to add a new volume you'll be prompted to name the volume and set the format to APFS. The pop-up will remind you that APFS volumes share storage space within the container. Simply hit the add button and voila! You have a new volume. Now Apple Engineering had me create this new test volume and then they had me install Mac OS Ventura onto that volume. Now it never even occurred to me before you could do this. It's a super brilliant way to do a clean install on your Mac without disrupting all your real working installation that has all your apps and settings. So I can do essentially a clean install without doing a clean install. Now inside system settings general you'll find startup disk at the bottom. In this setting you tell your Mac to boot from the test volume. When you're done playing in the test volume open startup disk again and switch to your real volume. Isn't that an awesome idea? Now you might be wondering did this cool trick help Apple diagnose my battery problems? I'll give you a recap up to date but the short version is we still have no idea what's causing my MacBook Pro's battery to drain. Everyone at Apple agrees it is not working as designed so Apple hasn't given up but the hardware people are convinced it's not that and we can't prove it's a software either. For three solid months I've been meeting with Margo from Apple on a near weekly basis as we run every test Apple Engineering asks us to run. We've become quite close. I mean I know she has a 20-something son who's adorable. Her air conditioning went out last week during a heat wave. She's barbecuing ribs this week for the 4th of July. Invite me to come over and sleep on the couch. I mean that's how close we've come. We've become because we talk all the time. Well after Apple Engineering had me create the test volume they had me run two battery tests where my Mac wasn't connected to any peripherals and the lid was closed and asleep for a full night. In the first test I was logged into iCloud and in the second I was logged out of iCloud. On the test account on the new volume while logged into iCloud the battery lost 15% overnight just like it did when logged into my real account with all of my data and apps installed. This is definitely not expected behavior. The results suggest that nothing I've done in adding third-party apps can be the root cause of the problem. Now we also thought maybe this proved it was hardware until I ran the second test. I logged out of iCloud and overnight while logged into the clean volume my MacBook Pro lost no battery charge at all. So that means it's got to be iCloud, right? Well maybe. You may recall that I bought an M2 MacBook Air recently. I was doing so many experiments for Apple that I couldn't really use my MacBook Pro. The MacBook Air has been indispensable for me and made me a lot more patient in dealing with Apple. Also, I love this machine. It occurred to me there was a third experiment I could run that could help verify whether it was iCloud chewing up my battery. I created a clean test volume on the MacBook Air, installed venture on it, logged into iCloud and put the machine to sleep overnight. And drumroll please. It did not lose any battery charge in 12 hours. So that means it's not the hardware and it's not the third-party software and it's not iCloud unless I'm on my MacBook Pro. So yeah. Now I did another experiment just recently with the MacBook Air and it lost 5% while logged into iCloud. So I don't know. We just don't know. It is incredibly frustrating and Margot and I are just at the end of our ropes. We don't know what to do and they haven't given up but the latest thing that they said was that they think I should do a full clean install as though that's any different than doing a clean install on a volume. I don't think it is. If anybody knows whether there's some technical reason why a clean install on a single volume is different than a clean install on a separate volume. It doesn't seem like it would be. Well anyway, while I haven't figured out why my $4,000 laptop gets half the battery life that Apple says I should expect, I found another cool use of the test volume idea. You can safely run a beta operating system using a separate APFS volume. Volumes don't talk to each other in any way so it's like having an external disk on which you run the betas. I'm happily running the macOS Sonoma Developer Beta on my M2 MacBook Air in its own little volume. I'm having fun with no risks. When the beta is over, I can simply delete the volume and upgrade my real volume to macOS Sonoma. The bottom line is that creating a test volume on a Mac using APFS is a great way to diagnose problems without doing a clean install. It's also a great way to test new operating system versions. In theory, it should have given us a strong indicator of my battery problems, but I wasn't that lucky. All right, let's switch gears and hear a review from the famous or infamous Stephen Getz. Allison likes to start with the problem to be solved. I was looking for a smaller, lighter camera for my trip to Walt Disney World in the summer. The camera I placed was a Canon EOS 80D. It has a 24.2 megapixels APS-C size sensor and uses an EF mount. As far as image quality features and price, it fit my needs well. It's one big drawback. It's size and weight. It's a full-sized DSLR big-boy camera. It weighs 730 grams. So I started to consider the alternatives. Mirrorless was the way to go for smaller body and it's also the future as far as big-boy cameras go with most major manufacturers announcing they weren't spending R&D money on new DSLR cameras. Sony, Canon, Olympus, and Fuji all make great options. I know Allison has enjoyed her Olympus cameras and I've read a lot of great things about the Fuji cameras. I have collected three or four Canon EF lenses so it made sense to stay in the Canon family. Currently, Canon has two lines of mirrorless cameras, the M-Series cameras and the R-Series cameras. The M-Series was Canon's first stab at mirrorless cameras with APS-C-sized sensors. They are mostly aimed at amateurs and vloggers. They are significantly cheaper than even the entry-level R-Series cameras and have been around for a few years longer and have had very little innovations in that time. I chose Canon EOS M50 to replace my big-boy camera. It has the same sensor as my ADD with more pixels dedicated to autofocus so its images are 24.1 megapixels. It also boasts the Digik 8 processor. My old camera had the Digik 6. This should improve image quality by reducing noise and enable better autofocus features. The M50 weighs 387 grams and it has a significantly smaller body. It has an amazing autofocus system with eye detection that covers 88% of the frame. Its viewfinder is OLED with 2.4 million pixels and it performs really well with little legs. There are a couple of negatives. Its small size and weight means it's got a smaller battery. It's rated for only 235 shots on a full battery. My ADD was rated for 960 shots so a second battery is a must. The smaller size also left less room for knobs and external controls. It's only got one rotary control for controlling shutter speed or aperture depending on the mode. This means when using it in full manual mode the one dial controls both adjustments via toggle. This could be a big problem for anyone who uses manual mode a lot. I mostly shoot in aperture priority so this wasn't a large concern for me. The M50 has the EF mount. I purchased an inexpensive adapter which will allow me to use my old EF lenses with this new camera. I've been very happy with this new camera and expected smaller size and mix of more modern features and great image quality will help me make great photos while on my vacation. You can purchase a new EOS M50 Mark II for $599. Thanks for listening to my review of the Canon EOS M50. You can find me on Mastodon at overstereotmastodon.social. Thanks for that great review, Stephen. I put links in Stephen's article to the Canon EOS M50 on DP review so people can learn more about it. And you might be thinking, but Allison, don't you realize that DP review is being shut down by Amazon? Why did you link to that? Well, the good news is that this week we learned that Gear Patrol had purchased DP review from Amazon so this wonderful resource to learn all about cameras is going to be sticking around. A few months ago, Sandy Foster gave us a review of the Anker Magnetic Phone Grip. This device sticks to a MagSafe phone and gives you a little ring to slip your finger through to hold the phone securely in your hand. Think like a pop socket but with a ring instead of a post sticking up. Sandy bought the Lilac one because come on, purple, why not? I was intrigued by this and I bought one for myself and after just a couple of days of use I found that I truly missed it if I forgot to stick it on in the morning after charging my phone. My phone simply doesn't feel secure in my hand without it now. I've been using it ever since Sandy recommended it. Now let's switch gears for a moment and I'll come back to why I mentioned the Anker Phone Grip. Stephen and I often record the live shows while visiting our daughter Lindsay and her family. We're constantly trying to optimize our setup so that the visual and audio experience is as good as possible for the live viewers and the normal podcast listeners. As you can imagine, we drag along a fair bit of equipment to pull this off. We both got laptops and microphones and mic interfaces and cables and dongles galore. And we used to carry along our Logitech C920 cameras on travel but the cameras in the more recent MacBook Pros are pretty decent so we took them off the packing list. A decent video was fine for a while but when continuity camera came out that feature that leads you to use the fantastic camera in your iPhone as your video source that sounded like something we'd like to use. When I first tested out continuity camera I found it to be kind of unreliable even while wired via lightning like it would show up or not show up just I couldn't figure out how to control it. In my more recent tests it seems to be much more predictable. In order to use continuity camera you need to have some sort of mount to hold up the phone at a good height to capture your beautiful face. On our most recent trip to see the kids Steve and I both used Gobi tripod stands to hold up our iPhones. The cameras worked really well and we're able to place the cameras where we wanted them. But it was one more thing on the overly crowded desk space and one more piece of gear and rather large gear that we had to carry along. Also Gobi tripods have almost infinitely flexible legs that can allow you to wrap them around I should say tree limbs around an uneven rock surface when hiking. That flexibility is a disadvantage when you just want something to stand flat on a desk like you want it to just be horizontal cause a lot of faffing about to try to get the phones horizontally level for recording. And most people use a mount to attach their phones to their displays. If you search for continuity camera mount on Amazon you'll find a plethora of options to choose from. And once most people like have a simple lip to hang over a laptop display and have a magnet on the other side for the MagSafe connector to hold the phone with the high resolution back camera facing you. If you don't have a MagSafe iPhone there are options that let you just kind of rest the phone in a little tray behind the screen. I was perusing these many options on Amazon when I noticed the iPhone mount with MagSafe for Mac notebooks by Belkin for $30. By the way, it's also available directly from Belkin. Anyway, $30 is about double the cost of most of the other MagSafe mounts but this one serves a double purpose. The Belkin MagSafe mount sticks to the back your phone is expected as a little shelf thing that pops out of the circle to let the mount rest on the top of your laptop screen so the good camera would be facing you. It's made of that nice rubberized material that's really soft to the touch. Additionally, it has a ring that rotates out just like Sandy's anchor phone grip. With this one device I get a continuity camera mount and a phone grip all in one device. Now let's kind of go back and forth on which one of these is better. I still like the anchor device so to help you decide which one you might like let me do like a little trade study here. The ring you slip your finger into on the anchor is a nice smooth surface so it feels really nice. The Belkin is a bit sharper edge not uncomfortable really but it doesn't make you think, ooh, that's smooth. I carry my phone on the top of my laptop when I move rooms in my house and I notice that the anchor feels like the metal would scratch the surface of the laptop so I have to flip the phone over so my rubber case I use is touching the laptop. On the Belkin the rubber sticks up higher than the ring so the metal never hits anything. I've noticed that the little metal piece that says anchor on that one is getting scratched up so I know it's been hitting things. Now I have long fingernails but it's still a little bit of a challenge to get my nail under the ring on the anchor to flip it out. I asked Steve to try doing it and he simply could not do it but he solved the problem pretty easily. He pulled it off, flipped the ring out and then popped it back on. That's another way to do it. The Belkin ring though flips out from the edge of the circle so you can much more easily pry it up than on the anchor. I've mentioned the nice soft rubber on the Belkin. I got to tell you with the black one it's a lint magnet. I suppose the white one might be a lint magnet too but I bet you wouldn't see it on the white one. Anyway, I find myself rubbing it to remove lint pretty often. Now the anchor is a small, flatter plastic ring and it always looks pretty in all its lilac glory. The anchor weighs one ounce even while the Belkin weighs 1.3 ounces. It's still not much but it's 30% heavier than the anchor. They're the same diameter and about the same thickness. Both the anchor and the Belkin also allow you to set your phone up at an angle which is nice for watching a video or even reading something when your hands are busy. I find this feature on both of them that I use it all the time. Since both are circular you can rotate them to I should say the mount is circular you can rotate them to watch something in either portrait or landscape mode. I have a slight preference for the Belkin because it can hold the phone up at a higher angle. Now the anchor is half the cost at $16 versus 30 for the Belkin but if you need or want to mount for continuity camera you get two devices in one. But the anchor one comes in lilac and the Belkin site they only have boring black available. They claimed the white one was an option but it only said notify me when available. Luckily Sandy pointed out to me that if you buy through Amazon you can get it in white and it's only $26. I just bought myself the white one and I'll give Steve the black Belkin. I should mention that not only does the anchor come in lilac it also comes in boring black if you like white or a lovely baby blue whichever one you choose if you're just looking for a way to securely hold your iPhone I think you'll be happy. This week Stephen Ewell joins the ranks of patrons of the PodFeed podcast. You may remember me mentioning Stephen. He works for the CTA foundation which is a national foundation affiliated with the folks who bring a CES. The foundation works to improve the lives of seniors and people with disabilities. When I go to CES you'll notice I often have interviews with people making cool assistive tech. That's because Stephen helps me find these gems amongst the vast number of booths at CES. The fact that Stephen is committed his own hard earned money to help support the work we do here warms my heart. If you'd like to warm my heart too go to podfeed.com slash patreon and pledge your support. Wait, more tiny tips? Yes, this is another episode of I in fact it's part 7 of Tiny Mac Tips. This is an ongoing series I started in order to teach Jill from the Northwoods how to go from an adequate Mac user to a proficient one. In case you missed the earlier installments I've included links to the first six installments in the blog post for this so you can get to all of them from 1 through 6 and this is bringing us part 7. Have you ever needed to look behind a computer or entertainment console to see the connectors to get the part number of a device? Of course you have. If you're like me your solution is to hold your phone back there and try to take a photo when you can't see where you're pointing it and it hardly ever helps at all. But there's a much cooler and more effective way to use your iPhone to help solve this problem. With recent versions of macOS and iOS you can now air play from your iPhone to your Mac. Now, I never thought there was any reason to do this until I found out about this tip. On iOS by the way they don't call it air play it's called screen mirroring because Apple just so dearly loved to have multiple names for the exact same thing. On the iPhone open up Control Center and tap on screen mirroring. From that menu you should be able to choose your Mac. Instantly your Mac's display will be taken over with a mirror of whatever your iPhone is screen is showing. Now I'm thinking about this and it's probably most useful if you got to do this to be if you have a laptop because if you need to look on say a stereo cabinet or something like that it'd be a little hard to drag your iMac with you. But anyway, let's assume that whatever you're needing to look at is close to the Mac that you're using. So we've engaged screen mirroring but Control Center is still up. Within Control Center you can tap the camera icon to jump right into the camera. Whatever your phone's camera sees will be displayed right on your Mac screen. If you don't see the camera app icon inside Control Center you can access it normally or you can add it to Control Center if you think you'd like to use it often. Open system settings select Control Center and then scroll down to more controls. When you find camera simply tap the green plus button to add it to Control Center. Note that you can rearrange the controls you see in Control Center using the little hamburger menus on the right. Whether you use this little trick to see behind your desk or not having quick access to the camera inside Control Center can be handy. I'm glad I'm doing this in front of a live audience. It appears that if you're using an Intel based Mac you may not see it in screen sharing or I'm sorry in screen mirroring from your iPhone. You may only see say your Apple TVs and you do have to be on the same iCloud account and same Wi-Fi network but it does appear you might need to be on an Apple Silicon Mac to be able to use this little trick. Hey, another justification to upgrade, right? Now this next tip is definitely for those who are new to the Mac platform. More than a decade ago Apple gave us automatic versioning of our files in their native apps. As you make changes to documents using say pages or keynote or text edit these changes are being recorded in separate versions of the file. If you want to get back to a previous version go to the file menu pull down to revert to and then choose browse all versions. Your entire screen will change and you'll see your document floating in space. If you're familiar with the time machine interface this will look very familiar. On the left side you'll see the current version of your document and on the right you'll see a stack of older versions going back in time. You can tap on the tops of the older versions or use the arrow keys on the right to navigate back in time. If you have a lot of versions you can actually see the date appear on the right as you go back in time. I know a lot of people really like having access to older versions of their documents and we're delighted with this change. Many third-party apps now support the native Mac OS versioning model and that's great for them but I actually never use it. Maybe never is too strong of a word. How about hardly ever or once in a blue moon? I do see the value but I'm old school I guess. I hit command S it's just so ingrained in my muscle memory that I forget that the apps are already automatically saving and keeping those versions. Now the advent of versioning came at a cost to Mac users. There is a save menu but no save as menu. When I point this out to the diehard versioning fanatics they patiently explain that there is a duplicate menu but I don't want to duplicate a file. I want to save this file under a different name. I want to save as a file and I know you can click in the menu bar in the tool bar and blah blah blah. I don't want to do that. I want save as. Well luckily the magic option key comes to our rescue. If you open a file in an app that doesn't have a save as menu under file simply hold down the option key and then it's silly duplicate menu item disappears and changes into the save as menu as nature intended. Now if you're a keyboard junkie in most apps command S is still save command shift S is that stupid duplicate thing but if you throw in the option key so command shift option S you can save as without letting your hands ever leave the keyboard. Whether you think versioning is delightful or unnecessary knowing that the option key is there to save the day or the file is a handy tip to keep in your tiny Mac tips toolbox. While we're singing the praises of our beloved option key here's a new use I only discovered recently. It might have been in the Mac keygabs so I'll throw Dave and Pete the credit just in case that's where I heard it. This tip could be illustrated in the finder but it works in lots of places. In finder one of the methods for viewing your files is the list view. I think most people love list view but I personally dislike it intensely and I prefer column view. The reason I dislike list view is that you have to open and close all of those silly chevrons to dive into folders. I see people with three or four levels deep of chevrons open and the list gets super long and messy looking. If they close the top level Chevron and then open it up later again it will open back up to those four levels deep. Now let's say you want to see everything that's in a folder. No matter how many nested folders deep it has inside here's the tip. If you hold the option key down when you select the top level Chevron the entire folder structure expands. Now the slickest part of this is that you can option click again on the Chevron for the top level folder and the entire thing folds up and disappears. You do not have to close each individual folder separately. Even if you've opened the subfolders manually you can still use the option click on the Chevron to clean the whole mess up for you. I still prefer column view but the option key to open and close entire folder structures makes me hate list view just a little bit less. I mentioned this works in other tools too. I haven't tested everything I use but I know it works with subfolders in Apple Photos. If you're not a rabbit organizer like me in photos though that might not be as big of a help to you as it is to me. However, if you've started using say folders inside Apple Notes it works there too. Look around at your apps and if you see Chevrons to expose subfolders try the magic option key to expand and contract those folders. Now this next tip is a lot nerdier. You may never need to use this tip but someday you might and hopefully you'll remember that you learned it and remember this is trying to get to a super proficient Mac user not just a regular user. So let's start with a problem this tip solves. It's not the only type of problem it solves but it's the best example I can think of that normal people might run across. If you create or receive a pages or keynote document with embedded images it's actually really hard to get the full resolution images back out. There is no way to export images directly from a pages document. If you right-click on an image in a pages or keynote document you can copy the image. If you have a clipboard manager you can insert the images into the finder. If you don't run a clipboard manager you could open the preview app and choose from the menu bar file new from clipboard. From there you can save the image. Now while that works and is probably the easiest way if you just need say one or two images it would be quite tedious to rinse and repeat this process if you needed to extract a lot of images from pages or keynote. Now the solution to this is really obscure but it will give you a valuable tool in your tool belt. The trick is to convert the document in macOS. A package is simply a file system directory that is normally displayed to the user as a single file. In other words pages and keynote those kind of documents those are actually directories of files but it's always shown to you as just a single file but if you convert it to a package you can see inside the directory. Now I'll illustrate the value of this with our example of trying to extract images from a pages or keynote document. If you right-click on a pages or keynote document at the top of the contextual menu you'll see open and open with. This is because by default those applications create just a single file or look like a single file but we're going to convert it to a package file which will give us direct access to all of the elements embedded within the document. With the document open in the file menu of say pages or keynote pull down to advanced change file type and change it from single file to package. Now go back to the finder and right-click on your document again. In addition to open and open with you'll now see open package contents. When you open the package you'll see a bunch of stuff in there but one of them is a data folder. Inside that will be all of the embedded images in the document. Now in my experiments every full-sized image also had a small version so you might want to sort or group the images by size so you can see all the big ones next to each other so you can more easily copy them to where you need them. I know that explanation seemed complex and nerdy but I'm going to say it to you in two bullets. Number one change the file type to package. Number two right-click on the file and open package contents to look inside the data folder. The concept is nerdy but the execution is actually trivially easy. Have you ever wanted to get the icon file in full resolution for an application you're using? Perhaps you need to paste the icon into a presentation or document of some sort or maybe a web page. If you select the application in the Finder and then choose File Get Info from the menu bar or you can use Command-I to get the Get Info window you'll see that Info window for the application. In the upper left you'll see the icon for the application. It's a little tiny, tiny icon. Simply select the icon and hit Command-C to copy it. With the icon in your clipboard you can simply paste it into your document of choice. Now if you need to save the file for future use open Preview and select New File from Clipboard. You'll notice that the file is actually a series of icons which are used for the different states. So like Hover or Selected you know the icon looks a little bit different. Assume you want just the main icon save the file from Preview as a PNG and you'll have just that one. Now if you want some extra credit for this tiny tip segment try right clicking on an application icon and selecting Show Package Contents. You'll see and you'll not only see a contents folder at the top but if you drill down in there and select the Resources folder inside there you'll find a file called appicon.icns. That's the icon file you just copied from the Get Info window. Now you could copy it from there but don't go changing anything in this directory because you could really bork up your application but it's kind of cool to know you can look inside applications isn't it? Alright have you ever noticed that when you get a new computer or you do a nuke and pave if you open an mp3 file it opens in Apple Music? What if you'd prefer to have mp3 files open in say QuickTime Player? We can fix this problem with our friend Get Info. Select an mp3 file and use Command I to get info. Now this window has a lot of sections and only some of them may be unfolded so it might be hard to see the one we're looking for. Let's exercise our new trick of holding down the option key while selecting any one of the chevrons. This will fold up all of the section so it's really easy to see the names without all of that clutter. We can now easily see the section entitled Open With and we can open just that section with its chevron. You can use the drop down menu to change the default application from music.app to QuickTimePlayer.app. Note that this will only change the specific file you use to open the info pane. If you want all mp3 files to always open in QuickTime Player click the button that says change all and when Mac OS asks you if you're really sure you want to change all similar documents to open with the application QuickTimePlayer.app hit the continue button to make the change. I've been using mp3 files and music versus QuickTime Player is my example but this works with all of your files if you don't want text edit to open on .txt files you've got another text editor go ahead into the info and use get info to change the open with to the application you like. Now I highly recommend you spend a little time looking at what else the info pane shows you because it's chock full of good information I guess that's why they named it that. How many times a day do you create a file and then decide you don't need to save it? I'm not sure why this happens so often but for me it happens all the time. If you're keyboard junkie you're going to like this tip. When you use Command W to close the window you get a pop-up asking you where to save the file and under what name. Well we don't want to save it under any name but by default the save button is highlighted which means if you enter on your keyboard the file will be saved to the location shown and we don't want to do that. It seems very tedious to me to move my hands from the keyboard and drag all the way over to the window to hit the delete button instead. However if you hold down Command Delete the file will disappear unsaved. Isn't that delightful? I use that all day long. Why do I always don't create files that I don't want to save? Maybe it's only me but I love this tip. I hope you enjoyed the segment of back tiny or sorry tiny Mac tips. I see now why Bart puts of X after his installment numbers. I have no idea how many more of these there will be but more little tips keep jumping into my brain all the time and as we get new operating systems I'm hoping to learn even more cool tiny tips to tell you about for your Mac. Alright that's going to wind us up for this week Lynn since you're the only one who listens to the outro. Did you know Lynn that you can email me at Allison at podfeed.com anytime you like? If you have a question or a suggestion Lynn just send it on over. Hey Lynn did you know you could follow me on mastodon at podfeed at chaos.social and don't forget everything good starts with podfeed.com Now Lynn you know how to join our Slack community because you're already over at podfeed.com slash slack where you're already talking to me and all of the other lovely no-silla castaways. In fact I think that's where you told me that the outro was missing. Lynn you could support the show I think you do that as well at podfeed.com slash patreon or with a one-time donation at podfeed.com slash paypal. And Lynn if you want to join in the fun of the live show head on over to podfeed.com slash live on Sunday nights at 5 p.m. Pacific time and join the friendly and enthusiastic no-silla castaways. Thanks for listening Lynn and stay subscribed.