 Welcome to Matt Geekab episode 922 from Monday, April 4th, 2022. Geekab, the show where we take all your questions. You send in your questions. You send in your tips. You send in your cool stuff found. We take them all. We try to answer your questions. We share your tips. We share your cool stuff found. We string it together loosely into an agenda that we can follow that might be cohesive and coherent and such that we can reach our goal for each of us to learn at least five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include LinkedIn jobs at LinkedIn.com slash MGG where you can post your first job for free. Coda.io slash MGG this new document all in one web-based thing. We're actually going to start using it here for the show. I'll tell you more about that in a little bit too. Just sleep.com slash MGG where you can save 200 bucks off your mattress and get two free pillows. And you can sign up for the free app at ZockDoc.com slash MGG and instantly book a doctor appointment with doctors that you can see reviewed. We'll talk more about all of these a little bit later in the show. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut, this is John F. Braun. And here from the Podfeat Podcast Empire, I'm Allison Sheridan. How are things in the podcast Podfeat Empire? Empirical, really. Empirical. OK, well, that's as they should be in empires these days. So that's good. Thank you so much for joining us. This is certainly the first time we've had you on for the entire show. And yes, folks, spoiler alert, she will be here for the entire show. We are lucky to have you, Allison. But I you joined us early on for like a show 100 or 200 or am I misremembering that? Well, my first memory is at Mac World where I brought pilot Pete up on stage on my MacBook Pro using tethering and stuff. And that was that was that was my big entrance. That was your first appearance on the show. That was well before episode 100, I would I think. So, yeah, that's right. I was that was awesome, too. You had and, you know, you have to kind of suspend your disbelief that this wasn't commonplace at the time, folks. If you if you can't ask your parents. But you had somehow you were streaming. I had a MyFi card. Right. And I brought him in on something, maybe Skype, Skype, I think something like that, probably. Yeah. And brought him up on stage. And I felt like the real hero that there was some reason you weren't able to get him. And I brought him in for you. So he was there on stage. So that was that was exciting. Big moment. Big moment. Yeah, that's right. That was great. Well, and here we are. Pete couldn't make it this weekend. And so you stepped right in yet again. This is history repeats itself just a little bit. A little bit more. We're a little bit more seasoned. We've gained more wisdom since then. There you go. And I think the main reason you asked me on was to actually save you time because as soon as the show airs, Dave just gets email after email after email from me asking questions, clarifying, adding information. And so if Dave just has me on the show that just clears that whole thing up. My Monday afternoon is now free and clear. It's a vacation day for me. That's right. By having you here on the show. You're just paying your pennants now. Well, yes. Well, the problem is I've now looped it in so that John and me and of course all of our listeners have to pay the same pennants that I paid over every Monday for every Monday for years. That's right. Yeah. But no, you are like, and this is true of many of you who listen to the show and offer clarification or corrections and all of that stuff. It's super helpful. You know, it makes the show better is the reality. So it does make it fun to be able to participate and help out. And I think that's part of the biggest power of the show is that it is everybody. It's not just you guys. No, no, we're just the, you know, we are. We are but the stewards of of all of this here just sometimes you're the smartest guys in the room, but very rarely. And the worst part is when we start thinking we're the smartest guys in the room. That's the problem. Today we know we're not. Well, maybe we're the smartest guys in the room. I doubt that, but we're not the smartest people in the room and that's why we have you here. Yeah, you're welcome. Not so quickly. Should we get to some quick tips and actually pretend that we've got an agenda that we're going to follow here and see what happens? All right. But but go to pod feet.com. If you haven't, I'm sure you all know about the no silicast and all that good stuff, but make sure you go if you haven't because that's what Allison. That's what Allison does. It's awesome. All right. Let's start with with Stuart who taught me a thing. And so I get to knock one of my five out right out of the gate. Stuart says by accident, I found out that, you know, if you have a lot of app screens on your iPhone and iPad two, he says you can swipe between them to access your apps. Of course, that's how it's been for a while. But you can also switch between them by holding your finger on the dots icon. So if you have multiple app screens, there will be a an icon of dots along the bottom of the screen that indicates which of those pages you are on. And you can hold your finger on that and scroll like a scroll bar. In fact, maybe that's the right way to think of it is that it's a horizontal scroll bar for your apps. Amazing. I had no idea that that was there. I I've given up on having pages of apps on my iPhone. I have I have one and then I have search. And that's the. Yeah. I only use search. They're Stuart. That's really a cool tip. And I know a lot of people don't know about it. I'm going to add to Stuart's tip. If if you're ever trying to move a an app from one screen to another and you're having to move it like 12 screens, you can pick it up, you know, press and hold till it gets the jiggly thing and then use the scroll, the three scroll dots and it stays with you and then let go of it and it drops onto the screen you moved to multi finger. Yeah. Yeah. You'll still drop it in the wrong place. Let's be honest. Right. But you'll feel cooler doing it. Exactly. Interesting. I like it. All right. Cool. Fun. I have a last minute addition to share. We started the show. You know, we've been in pre-show for longer than than usual, just getting Allison up to speed and really just catching up with Allison because it's been a little while and everything was working fine. And then we started the show and my mouse was like barely functioning. And it's weird. Yeah. I know I still use a mouse on this computer. I don't use a trackpad. I don't know why. But my mouse was barely functioning. I was like, you know, having to shove it around to get things happening. Thankfully, you took a minute to share your tip, Allison. And I had a minute to look at my mouse here while you were doing that. I had to shave the mouse. There was a hair sitting right across the optical sensor. Oh, Jesus. So shave the mouse, folks. That's my contribution today. So in case anybody was worried that I was going to be the smartest guy in the room, we have addressed that. And there's no more concern on the one that was fumbling with a hairy mouse. So there you go. Listener Chuck shares yet another one that I did not know. He says, how many times have Mac users had an App Store flag that an upgrade was available, probably substantially fewer than iPhone app updates? But he says, so there's his fish shake. Yeah, you got to hit Command R when you go into the App Store and go to the Updates tab. Hit Command R. It is a web browser. Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, bonus quick tip. Got my... Yep. You got one. That's right. Yep. Yeah. Hit Command R and it will refresh like it would on a web page. And you will see all of the ones that aren't there. So we have to credit. Someone told us about the Command R, but we wouldn't have even learned about it if I hadn't ranted about it because Mac Updater will show that there are updates that the App Store is not showing. And we talked about that on the show and then somebody was like, yeah, just hit Command R and boom, that's when they all show up. So anyway, you hit Command R and it solves that problem. I'm glad I read Chuck's rant. Otherwise, see, we wouldn't have had this extra tip to share. He says during today's GarageBand update, my cursor accidentally hovered over that little progress circle and it shows the data transfer speed in real time of the update coming down in megabytes per second. It shows how many bytes have been downloaded and the speed at which they are currently coming down. So you can see if it's stuck. Some updates are huge, right? Like Xcode or something. Right. And if you hover over that little circle, you actually get more information. Who knew? That's two. Yep, same. I'm going to be done by 8.15. Yeah, usually we finish quick tips and I'm like, I've hit my quota. Maybe. Maybe. Yeah, I noticed that too. I'm like, when did this start happening? But thanks for pointing it out, Chuck. Yeah, no, it's good. That's very cool. Yeah, maybe we'll have to raise the number from five. I mean, we started with three several years ago. Yeah. We went to four briefly and now we're at five. Quick, five things that you're going to learn. Maybe we have to raise the number. Well, you have to give us a break because those were tough years in there. The four year was tough. That was a tough year. That's right. Yeah. All right. So here's one that may make many people very happy. So if you've been paying attention, they just dropped Monterey 12.3.1. And they specifically in the release notes, which is kind of weird, but they specifically say USB-C or Thunderbolt external display does not turn on when connected to Mac Mini 2018 as a second display. Well, the good news is this update solves that problem. It solves another problem that I don't have, but with pleatooth devices. But yeah, it worked. So I'm back to my original setup. You know, John, I say you guys an experimental math I went down because I was sure I was going to be able to tell you what the problem was or give you the set of people who would be affected by that external USB-C problem. And I was completely unable to prove what I thought I was going to prove was I have a CocoaPAR 15 inch external USB-C display. And I got an email from them saying, don't upgrade to 12.3. It'll destroy everything. But they said Intel. And so I tested it on my Intel Mac and it didn't break it. And so I wasn't able to prove the point. But yeah, there definitely was something wrong in 12.3. That's cool. They fixed it in 12.3.1. I tested John on my my M1 laptop because remember when I was in Austin, I couldn't get HDMI to work with the Samsung screen in my hotel room. Before I upgraded my laptop to 12.3.1, I tested HDMI and my LG TV here at the house and it worked just fine. So I have no idea if 12.3 was the cause of the problem with that screen in Austin or if it was something completely. I will never know unless I go back there in a year and test it in the room. Maybe I will. Who knows? So, I mean, I'm disappointed in that they broke something that's so fundamental in 12.3. It's not the first time, John. Yeah, it's right. This happens. This is how these updates work. This is why we do the updates and test it for people so they know. I was waiting to upgrade the studio machine which is an Intel iMac so may or may not have had this problem. I didn't want to find out. I am too reliant on this so I will upgrade it to 12.3.1 probably next week once we hear if there are no showstoppers. The good news is it's a very quick update. It's one of the and the phone updates were just there was just a little bit needed to be tweaked I think. I'm glad you said this, Allison. I did the update for my laptop this morning from 12.3 to 12.3.1 and it was bizarre. This was on my M1 Air for those of you playing along at home and I went to system preferences. It says there's an update available. I hit update. It said you know the terms and conditions whatever and then I watched it refresh that screen and the update now button reappeared for 12.3.1 and I did that like four times and then I quit system preferences and I rebooted my Mac and nothing like it was I mean it came back up it was fine but but still on 12.3 so I went back in same thing a few more times update now agree to the terms and yada yada nothing happened and then after a minute or two I get the little thing and the notification in the upper right corner the screen saying your Mac needs to restart now to do the update and I'm like okay great like apparently you did it without telling me I'll take it yeah and I hit the you know the thing like don't wait the 59 seconds hit restart now and it the notification went away and nothing happened and it was like okay that's awesome so one job you have one job exactly so I rebooted I waited a little bit to see if you know because sometimes it takes a minute and then suddenly it's like oh you're in restart mode ha ha no that didn't happen so I manually restarted again and during that restart the update happened and everything has at least thus far been fine so just like I said super smooth and quick just like I'm glad you said it was super smooth and quick because I wanted to share that I found that as well all right Peter we're spending more quick tips are not quick today but we knew that going in Peter shares a thing about tab groups and I I'm looking to get as many opinions and thoughts on these as I can so with you here Allison I definitely wanted to do this he says Dave you mentioned you haven't really figured out a good use case for Safari tab groups let me set up let me share mine I'm a university professor and currently a department chair and have many disparate things going on I teach I have things related to being chair doing research and maybe even a little coding I've set up a tab group for the common web pages for each of these which is nice because each has five to ten tabs so overall I'd have you know somewhere 30 40 50 tabs when I sit down to work on something I typically focus on one of the task groups and switch to the tab group that I need quite helpful clearly the other advantage is that these groups are available across all devices which means it's easy for me to jump around lastly he says I have a couple of tips with this and this this is interesting I usually keep two windows open in Safari with one window being the tab group and then the other one is just what I'll call my default and he says this is helpful because any link from an external program mail slack etc will open in the non tab group window if you don't have a separate window open then Safari will open a new window with the link that you clicked on so it will not open links into a tab group which that is almost a reason to want to figure out why to use tab groups because having right having one one group that's like untouchable even if it's the front most one with focus that's interesting to me and he says command shift up or down arrow switches between tab groups so here's your other tip and then number three you can easily move tabs to different groups right click or control click on a tab and select move to tab group and then you can you can send it there so I really want to like tab groups when I first looked at them in the in the beta is I think it was a beta of Safari they gave it to us we could play with that without doing the beta of the OS and I thought wow this is going to cast me out man I set up a bunch but this does make it more useful so that other apps don't don't mess with this the tab groups but the logic of tab groups being that if you change where you are while you have a tab group bump and it just changed that tab group I don't understand why they did that that makes it we have to completely relearn how to use a web browser in order to do that and boy I don't know if I can do right yeah neuroplasticity is is a big fan big fan however don't know how much I have left in the tank yeah exactly exactly and I and I'm near the end of the road than you are so I would love to be able to learn that you're probably healthier than me so maybe you're not who knows I don't know I try to remain pretty help but yeah I don't like my problem with tab groups is that I have trained myself to use bookmark groups and and so a bookmark group you can create a folder in bookmarks and open everything in that folder it doesn't do anything special with them like a tab group does of course but it does open all those links and usually I will do them for example I've mentioned you know when I do my my personal banking once a month I have a bookmark group of those but I use it as a to-do list and as I finish dealing with one account I close that tab and I know that I'm finished and by the end I have no tabs and it's like I can check it off my to-do list but if I do that in a tab group now the tab group's empty it's now it's empty right and the same is true for like WordPress updates I have several sites that you know I manage here one less now actually not one less because now I have the MackieGab.com site that I have to manage so it really is the same but you know I'll go through once a week and check to see if there are updates there and do a backup and things like that so I have you know all my things but again I use it as a to-do list and I close them when I'm when I know I'm finished with that site and then when it's empty I'm good to go so my my problem is that all of my workflows are built without the concept of tab groups thus far right like it would be weird if I had a workflow that automatically worked with tab groups because they didn't exist prior to now so that's I think that's my problem I'm just waiting like you I want to like them I do too I just I just don't think they work the way my brain can adapt and I yeah doesn't work for me KiwiGran are you sorry because it's like too confusing yeah well but I mean I felt that way about focus mode at first two and now I'm like the biggest fan of focus mode in fact you asked me when I was running the betas John like tell me about focus mode and I was like stupid I can't find it you know whatever I'm still on the stupid side I can't get it to do and I think part of the focus mode problem for me is that I use telegram and telegram is just like nope I'm gonna talk to you anyway it just doesn't obey I find it annoying because my phone will I'll get this notification saying driving on driving off and I'm like yeah I know I'm not driving why are you telling me this I gotta disable it that you you know you can disable right it's yeah yeah okay it's in settings do not it's a good thing to have on it's well I don't know I mean I don't with car play I don't like having driving focus mode on I found at least when I first maybe it's better now but at first it was it was too limiting it was like wait I'm like I'm all I see don't don't talk to me when I'm driving because I'm driving yeah right right but my car is talking to me anyway like I've got notifications coming up and oh see but that's what you wouldn't be getting those notifications right yeah but I don't know I think I do like from messages and stuff I think it would come up anyway yeah I don't know I should try it again now that you know it's had time to a little time to mature yeah yeah KiwiGram in the chat room says regarding tab groups at live.mackycup.com that's where the chat room is they could do with a freeze switch yes that's it that's brilliant the freeze switch right that's it this is what I want it to be I'm gonna go play with it and mess with it and then next time as though nothing happened bring me back yeah yeah yeah exactly that would that would change my that would be awesome because then like I love this and I didn't because I don't use tab groups I didn't realize Peter's you know the thing and the Peter pointed out until he pointed it out that new links from other apps won't open into a tab group love that you know so right yeah okay everybody Apple.com slash feedback type in tab groups could use with it could use a freeze switch I we I have one last quick tip to share we're we're running well it doesn't we're not running behind word we're learning things so there's no problems but I do have one last quick tip to to share and it's a it's a little bit of a rant for those of us that use overcast the podcatcher client evidently on March 25th or thereabouts there was a a fairly sizable update that happened on March 29th I got in my car and I launched overcast and I drove to pick up my brother and we had to go do a thing and while we were in the car and I was in the car for all of about let's say 15 minutes I noticed a text come in speaking of notifications that come in on the car play screen I noticed a text come in from Mint Mobile I couldn't see what it said there my carrier I'm like oh it's getting to be the end of the month like okay whatever and and then another text came in from it mobile well I'm still driving I'm not gonna have it read this to me it's a 15 minute drive I'll I'll deal with it when I get there so I got to where we needed to go I look and the two texts in the course of 15 minutes were that I had reached 80% of my 10 gig allotment for the month and then that I had reached 100% of my 10 gig allotment for the month now the month for me resets on the 30th so this was not a this was not a disastrous scenario and it it doesn't like stop me from using data just those things read out it's totally fine and I could have paid dad more if I really wanted to but I looked like why did I just burn like three gigs of data in 10 minutes what happened and I looked in overcast settings and it was set to download over both Wi-Fi and cellular I know that this has never been an issue before because it's never been an issue before and basically the only time I run overcast is when I'm in the car so I have to assume that this update made some change that reverted whatever I had done in the past because I know in the past I had whatever the I don't know the specific settings because I don't spend a lot of time in them but I had told it you're welcome to stream on cellular but only download on Wi-Fi right because when you're streaming it's just that one episode not every single thing you're subscribed to not all the things that have updated since the last time I launched overcast which clearly was you know at least three gigs was all the gigs was all the gigs I had left yes so so I went obviously I made the change I reported the bug but I wanted to alert everybody if you are an overcast user to go in and check your download settings and make sure they are set the way you want them to be set and that you don't run into my issue so I got the update and mine did not change it still says Wi-Fi only interesting so something yeah right yeah yeah I didn't figure this was a widespread thing otherwise it would have blown up yeah well it would have come out in the beta right like it would have been fixed but whatever I had done was some perfect storm of an edge case I guess so is that too many mixed metaphors that's a lot that's a lot Dave that's a lot okay sometimes an app just goes wild when I got the iPhone 12 so when I got it it was like oh your your sim isn't 5G go to your local store and get one and I'm like oh cool alright and then like that day all of a sudden I got a notification from Verizon saying hey you just consumed all of your data which I have the 5G plan with the carryover and I'm like huh and I looked and it was weather.com app that for whatever stupid reason consumed 5 gigs of data it was like giving you radar data from every city in the world cities that's right I have no idea so I think it was a bug in the app the thing is I called Verizon they were cool about it and they're like oh okay we'll credit you you know for the data and stuff and everything's been fine ever since but it's good so maybe the title of the episode is spring break apps gone wild I like it I like it ah alright quick not so quick tips was fun we have some of your questions on the agenda I don't want to say some of your questions to answer because that might be setting us up for failure but we have some of your questions on the agenda and the next thing that I'd love to talk about John if it's okay with you is our first two sponsors okay alright we all know that it's great to be able to work from anywhere right just need your laptop and some Wi-Fi maybe an external screen like we've talked about here on the show and you're good to go what's not so great is being spread out across the country or the world and trying to keep your team on the same page and focused on the same tasks and this is why I'm becoming a huge fan of our next sponsor Kota here at Kota.io slash MGG in fact we're going to start using it here at MGG I'll talk about that in a second if your best work is spread out across documents and spreadsheets and your team is spread out across the country and the world and you've got this stack of workflow tools that you have to jump in and out of all day Kota is perfect for you because Kota is the single document that brings it all together it's endlessly customizable and endlessly connected with things there are templates for anything and everything and that's what we're looking at using here there's a template that we're working on customizing with them that's a Q&A template where you folks can submit your questions to this other people can see the questions you can vote on them so that we know which ones to answer in the show right you see where this is going it's a web based document creation tool but everything's in it text and spreadsheets and all of that but it's all in one which means that it can adapt to whatever you're doing it's super easy to use it can help you view information depending on what you need and everything in Kota is synced make an update in a table and it automatically shows up for everyone everywhere you don't have to rely on copy and paste it's really cool I'm excited about what we're going to be able to do with it here with Kota you can solve for just about anything and right now you can get started having your team all working together on the same page for free you got that right head over to Kota.io slash MGG that's CODA.io to get started for free CODA.io slash MGG go get started for free in our thanks to Kota for sponsoring this episode listen as a small business owner you know we're juggling hundreds of balls in the air and we don't have time to interview unqualified candidates for the roles that we need to fill well LinkedIn jobs our next sponsor here makes it easier for you to find the people you want to interview faster and for free in fact just this week Sadie celebrated her first anniversary here with Backbeat Media and Mackie Gab we found Sadie through LinkedIn jobs we would not have found her otherwise I actually got to meet her finally last week we did the whole thing remotely though that's the beauty of LinkedIn jobs she was here almost a year it was like three days two days shy of a year we finally got to meet is pretty crazy you go and you create a free job post in minutes on LinkedIn jobs at LinkedIn.com slash MGG to reach your network and beyond the world's largest professional network of over 770 million people then you add your job in their purple hiring frame to your LinkedIn profile to help spread the word that you're hiring so your network can see it and now they've got simple tools like screening questions to make it easy to focus on the candidates with just the right skills and experience so you can quickly prioritize who you'd like to interview and hire LinkedIn jobs helps you find the candidates you want to talk with faster did you know that every week nearly 40 million job seekers visit LinkedIn post your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash MGG that's LinkedIn.com slash MGG to post your job for free terms and conditions apply in our thanks to LinkedIn jobs for sponsoring this episode all right let's get to some questions Karim has a question that I think will lead to a good opportunity for conversation amongst the three of us here John you want to you want to kick this I'll start off so I gave my take so Karim says he has a colleague that runs a 2007 iMac which seems to be on its last legs yeah I'd agree with that he wants a super clean setup with no dongles other than needed wires to power the screen and wants to use it for him and his family as long as possible so some future proofing is somewhat part of his plan he doesn't do any heavy lifting in terms of video editing other than the drone shots do you have any suggestions will any of them work for him as long as he gets the largest storage option so here's my take on this Dave I think the basic Mac Studio with the N1 Max should be enough machine for basic use the only thing that I would add Dave is that the default configuration has a relatively small in my opinion SSD so I'd up it to from 512 to one gig or one terabyte sorry which will bring the cost up to 2199 and that's how I have my MacBook Pro and my Mac Mini which are both Intel currently set up though then I thought you know what of the mini you may want to consider a Mac Mini with the M1 adding RAM to 16 gigabytes and the SSD to one terabyte would run you 1299 so you can save some coin and the other thing is check the refurb store the thing is when I last look in the refurb store the the Mac Mini configurations were kind of wimpy the problem is that in the refurb store you get what you get you can't configure it or customize it so that was my spin and he actually got back to me and said okay thanks for the advice the only reason that I don't want to consider the mini which kind of surprised me is that the mini or at least the current mini doesn't have an SD card slot and apparently that's a requirement of his his colleague that's a thousand dollar slot yeah I think you could get one a lot cheaper than a grand yeah so you should be able to get a USB-C to SD card adapter thing so that's my take the studio I think though is just in general is too much machine I'm not going to consider one because again it seems to be too much machine for your average user whereas I think the mini is more mainstream for most people at least it is for me I don't know I still got the 2018 one and you know it does what I need if you're going to get a dock most docks many docks certainly many of your options will have an SD card reader in them so like you can definitely get a Mac mini and add an SD card reader if not essentially for free because you're adding a dock anyway certainly for far less than a thousand bucks and you know your comment about the refurb store not having what you wanted my advice to you is refresh that screen they change all day every day and while we're recording this which happens to be Friday April 1st which is Apple's birthday happy birthday Apple it's also Puck's birthday he's five today that's our cat you can see him at Puck the star on Instagram they have a you know the the maxed out Mac mini with an M1 it's got 16 gigs of RAM and a 2 terabyte SSD and you can get that for 1439 so yeah that would work for you if it doesn't no Mac mini it's going to work for you because this is as good as it gets so check that or use refurbtracker.com refurb-tracker.com which will alert you you can really get granular with your settings and if you understand how their lookups work you could even create a lookup for a product that is not yet in the refurb store which I've done with like the I think that's how I found this iMac in the refurb store was by setting up a thing and it was like boom they're there alright I'm in I gotta agree 100% with John and the approach he took it's almost like Kareem's buddy is asking the wrong question and so giving the answer yes the base model would be fine but that's the wrong question I think that your approach on that was exactly right John and I think this is problematic because it's Apple's fault there is no M1 studio that's an M1 pro there's the max in the ultra so there's a gap there's no M1 Mac mini that's an M1 pro so there's a hole and I don't understand why that hole's there and I bet that that's gonna I can only think that's gonna end up in the Mac mini in the end but he specifically said no dongles by saying a dock not a dongle didn't put a dongle on you right you technically answered the question right Dave right you gave not a dongle but for 300 bucks now you can get the machine that you actually need and you've pocketed $700 even if you don't go to the store right fair however you had a and I agree with both of you like the Mac studio the only box that it checks for Kareem's friend is the future proofing box because by golly what he's describing he needs is not what the Mac studio currently offers so definitely there's some future proofing there probably too much of it but you know like depending on you know how much money he has to spend maybe he needs to burn dollars to you know for tax reasons or whatever like so if so you got dollar bills to light on fire you go girl you go yeah anytime I tell me a count and I gotta figure out you know where to get some deductions he'll say would you like me to send you an invoice you can pay me you know there is mackeygov.com premium as well if if you're having any trouble in that regard we are very happy and fortunate to be able to accept your contributions there seriously though I agree the mac mini is probably the right thing for him and I also agree with your speculation Allison that I think we're gonna see a rev to the mac mini that gives it that makes the decision for those of us that think we want a mac studio but don't really need one even harder right yeah the justification is gonna roll off the justification is gonna fall off fast yeah see I'm waiting for the the mac studio is arguably perfect for me here in the studio but it's perfectly overkill for me here in the studio I'm waiting for them to hit the refurb store because I don't need a new machine here yet by the time they hit the refurb store though I might not be able to justify that mac mini you had a good point though Allison about the mac studio as you were looking at specking one out for you know for my producer for your producer there you go right and see this is what we aspire to aspire to have a producer folks but we're gonna get there do you even need a doc was the question that you started to ask yeah so my producer who happens to be named Steve Sheridan has a a 27 inch iMac and an LG 5k display hooked up together and he's got a doc from OWC everything works great I did a port map where I diagrammed out using a really cool tool called it's from a website diagrams.net it's got a downloadable application also called draw.io but anyway I diagrammed out everything that he had connected and then I looked at his new mac studio and the number of ports that were on that and realized he can plug in everything he has in his doc today he can plug in everything and still actually have a lot of extra ports he'll have six leftover ports for USBC and two Thunderbolt ports after he gets this whole thing set up and he will have no doc at all on his desk yeah see that's nice yeah I've said many times that USBC delivered on what Steve Jobs tried to over engineer of having the one cable between our mac and our monitor whatever and this is yet another one of those scenarios where it's like oh this kind of cleans it up nicely yeah oh and by the way that's six leftover that's if the he's oh I should have mentioned he's also getting the studio display if the studio display camera is not good then that's why he has only six leftover if it is good he'll actually have seven leftover and he could get rid of his Logitech C920 my guess is that he will find that Apple's webcam is better than than the Logitech webcams this is a whole different tangent and I'll try not to take us here for too long but webcams suck they there are no good webcams out there I've been trying them all you know we do this show with video as well and then Sadie takes those videos and or takes the big video and chops them up into little videos so the quality is actually important and I hate going to YouTube or Instagram or wherever and seeing our videos with us looking like blurry and crappy and so I've been really trying to figure out like what do I need to do and I know that the answer is be like all the all the real YouTubers Dave and get a you know a DSLR and spend a thousand bucks on a camera and so this week I am trying something different and we'll see how it all works out I am using not a webcam but an iPhone 10 with reincubates camo and and the problem is mounting it on the top of my Mac up we'll get into that some other day because that's a ridiculous conversation or maybe maybe we'll chop up the pre show and have Sadie share that but because that's because we did talk about it so coming to a video screen or you but like as soon as I plugged in this this iPhone and you know an iPhone 10 is not current like the image that I got was I'll say 10 times better well anything with a webcam yeah I mean it was just like quite literally night and day including the you know the way it pulls in the colors and the sharpness and the frame rate and it's just like oh why won't someone take that web that camera and put it in a webcam like like if somebody would sell me a camera for three or four hundred dollars I would buy that as opposed to spending a thousand dollars you know what I mean like there's there's a middle ground isn't the iPhone doing a lot of image processing too though it's not it's not like it's got a good lens and a good sensor that's fair you're you're actually we tiny in that yeah that's right and Logitech like this the old C920s were doing their own processing and MPEG compression right and then they made a silent switch where they removed all that and they said oh your computers are fast enough now they can do it all but things actually got worse than they were a while back and and then and then there's the whole like like the Brio or whatever you know it's a 4k camera it's like well yeah but you you have to use Logitech's app in order to get 4k and you get like two seconds of lag so you're looking at the equivalent of a Logitech Brio right now I've got the Logitech that goes on the Pro Display XDR which I believe is the same camera as the Brio okay and it looks really good as we're looking at right now you've got me dumbed down to 720 but as far as as color and clarity I really think 98% of it that was the compression caused by the stream itself because I've seen how my just wrong you may be disappointed when you see how this comes out you'll go wait it looked great when we were talking to each other I yes I I am expecting that in fact and so then it might be okay well now we need to upgrade stream yard to let us do 1080p with that and and start down that path but as I've learned from at least audio recording you got to have good source material in order to have good produced material right right right so we I do mine at 4k into MIMO live for my live stream but to tell you the truth I never go back and look at it so I should take a look at it recorded YouTube well I will go and look at yours and maybe you know MIMO live didn't work for us it was not nearly stable enough but you know there are other engines out there and we are happy to use different ones so yeah you're right though I might be disappointed but I had to solve this problem first like if it's garbage in right right if I can't get quick time or you know whatever locally I don't even know if we can make camera works with quick time so that's probably a bad example but if I if I can't get it to look good locally that it doesn't it's irrelevant so right plus it's fun to use an iPhone for it that's kind of cool you would think if there was a way to mount an iPhone on top of my IMAX monitor display thing that without a spider I have this stupid spider thing you'll see it in a thing at some point folks it's ridiculous anyway and you have any more on this one or shall we you want to take us to Ricardo and universal control there was a mystery that we were speculating about in a prior episode in that how does universal control know where my auxiliary screen is I mean it's not ultra wideband which is what the air tag does I was thinking they were doing some fancy RF thing and then he wrote in and said oh no let me explain it to you the way it works is that the first edge of your screen that you use is what universal control will pick and I'm like okay let me try that and I tried that on both between my MacBook Pro and my iPad and my Mac mini and my MacBook Pro and I was like nope that's not it dude well it kind of is and then my esteemed colleague Dave chimed in and said well what if you restart and I'm like okay let me try that that's the answer so universal control the first setting the first time you scroll to either the right or left is what it will lock in until you restart oh so I'm glad you brought that up John because I had I had it where the first time I used that whoa that's really cool and then the next time I used it it was on the wrong side but I had probably played with it somewhere after a restart not notice that that had happened I just assumed it was using ultra wideband do we know it's not my conclusion is no but how does it know the first oh it knows the first time because you pushed that direction correct it takes your your movement as a vote and then the election only happens once okay here's the question restart push your cursor to the right without your iPad open now open your iPad and try pushing to the left to get to it where is it registering that you hit the edge of a wall right that would be fun to know now you can rearrange it right in displays yes okay yeah it does have it does have a screen similar to display screen where you can move it to the right it is display screen it's the same it's a system preference pain for displays what's interesting is if you have multiple monitors going already you'll notice that the monitors that are in what I'll call extended display mode because that's what Apple calls it are touching their edges touch each other the ones that are in the you know this mode the universal control mode there is a gap between the display on that side and your iPad so you know okay this isn't in extended display mode this is in universal control mode because you can also in displays quickly change that to extended display mode and now your iPad will just be a you know another display of your Mac so you know that's interesting and I just looked at mine I've got the big screen up in front of me the MacBook Pro to my right and the iPad is down it's actually down into the left okay and it does have that gap but it's not just that it knows it's to the left somehow it registered that I went down I think okay so it's got to be using ultra wide band then you think I mean how else would it oh unless unless you make sure by going down right okay okay all right fair yeah yeah we don't know no we don't feedback at macigab.com did I hear you right Allison Dave did she say feedback at macigab.com I think she said feedback at macigab.com I also think that's the first time it was someone other than one of us John that began the shtick so lots of firsts today I like it ground breaker here groundbreaking that's right um all right let's let's do Tim this is I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this Allison I mean I want all of our thoughts on it but I selected this specifically because I knew it was going to be the three of us Tim asks he says I find myself struggling to find a way to automate the import I will share his specifics but really what we're talking about is an in general kind of thing here because because this is way too specific for any one of us to frankly care about don't take that the wrong way Tim that's just how we do things on the show so Tim says I find a way to import blood pressure data from an Omron Bluetooth monitor and nutritional data from my fitness pal and weight measurement data from my body plus scale which is Bluetooth he says I want to customize a spreadsheet that I've created to monitor all of these things together he says my wife has an implanted catheter we can't do the drainage procedure until several conditions are met on a daily basis and that's why we want to track this on a spreadsheet he says I'm currently entering the information manually I've attached a copy of his shared spreadsheet which of course we're not going to share with all of you he says I plan on adding charts and graphs and all of that good stuff do you know of a way to automate the collection of this kind of data and so like I said let's zoom out a little bit because I don't know the specifics of these individual things because I don't have these individual things but I think about how I would approach solving a problem like this and as soon as he said spreadsheet it started heading me down a path if we treat the spreadsheet as a Google sheet now that is something that can be targeted by various automation engines specifically the one I'm thinking about is APIER and I've often I think even on this show called Zapier the glue that holds the internet together meaning the automated internet or the internet of data because we have all of these places with different things right thousands of different places with you know I mean he mentioned three of them but you know you might have like we use WooCommerce for our macicab.com slash premium subscriptions and I like to have that feed into a spreadsheet so that I can read that data WooCommerce doesn't talk to a spreadsheet but WooCommerce talks to Zapier and Zapier talks to Google Sheets and so I was able to build an integration that says okay great when you know put this hook into WooCommerce when this action happens go and take this other action and feed this data that you got from here over there and that's a very simple way to use Zapier so my thought on this is see if there's a way to get your various devices data into Zapier and then you're home free. The one thing my first thought when you said a Google Sheet is do you want to be putting your medical data onto the internet? Fair question and I would start with no I don't disagree this is why I said let's zoom out a little but your advice for Tim and everyone is very sound and I'm glad you brought it up because that's yeah. Yeah so I can't really give an answer to this because it does kind of get into the specifics like how does the data get onto his computer today is he typing it looking at a little display and I think the only thing I can say is my friend Dorothy is a computer programmer retired computer programmer and recovering we call these. Yes and she has diabetes so she has all of this data and she has written these elaborate Apple scripts and importing data and she's also very very privacy oriented and she has written these elaborate scripts and basically I don't understand how anyone else stays alive with diabetes with what she has to do in order to maintain it and she has managed to narrow that band of what her blood sugar readings are which is you want to manage your spikes and the average and she has managed to get the average into the right zone and she's managed to get the spikes way down but only through like having a masters or whatever in computer science has she been able to do it so you know I mean I'm sure you could use keyboard maestro and Apple script and shell scripts and things to automate this but without knowing how that data gets in I don't know where you would start no that's a good and that's the kind of answer that I think is appropriate for this question is like that's another place to look is if this data is even available to your Mac right like it's possible these things are only available on his phone in which case you know you can't use keyboard maestro to do it but she's done stuff to get her diabetes data from her phone to her Mac too she was able to do it the other thing she does is she goes to the forums for the hardware that she has so she's got a specific monitor and she goes to their forum she goes to she actually goes to conferences about it about diabetes and sees what's out there and learns from other people about how they've automated it so maybe you want to go specific to this PlurXBD I'm sure there's a reddit right there's r slash PlurXD and ask other people how they're automating that because that's how they're staying alive right yeah no this is and be ready that there's a world where the answer is don't use that device use this one because it allows you to extract the data in the way that works for you to do what you want to then do with it etc which is hard to say when it's already implanted I got that yeah that's fair when you get your upgrade turn left turn left yeah one of the cool things that's happening now with the diabetes stuff is she's got a continuous glucose monitor and she's got the thing that injects her automatically and they're finally starting to close the loop where the one piece of machinery will tell the other piece of machinery what to do to her and that's the dream right if essentially strapped an artificial pancreas on the outside I wonder if there's a world where your iPhone could be the brains of that or your you know it could be so I'll offer this um a lot of platforms and I have two will integrate with the health app so I have a smart scale which will beam the data into the health app and then also when I get my blood tests to monitor various things there's a gateway between quest and health where you can import that data as well so perhaps find a device that advertises integration with health can you do shortcuts based on like can shortcuts see your health data right because that would be the the key here to the glue thank you yes I don't know this is why I wanted to have this conversation amongst the three of us because I figured everybody this is the right group yeah this is a case where I'm sure there's somebody listening who's yelling the answer at their phone right and where would they send that feedback that's right we got it yeah please do obviously this is you know interesting to all of us like I said you zoom out from the specifics that each one of us needs to do and then we might start to get somewhere Darren in our YouTube stream commented PowerShell might be an option depending on the devices it's a powerful automation scripting language that I've used to pass data information around various apps on macOS interesting what that PowerShell is only on Windows 5 new things there we go PowerShell for every system I found a github page that that appears it says PowerShell for every system PowerShell new to PowerShell there is macOS there's an ARM64 build of it here yeah well March 23rd 2022 installing PowerShell on macOS Microsoft Docs bingo that's new news that's news yeah wow interesting now supports macOS brilliant brilliant it might have for a while but that's a pretty up to date yeah that's like last week at least as we're recording this this is last week but last week and a half there you go fun all right we have some cool stuff found maybe even a cool stuff made to share and perhaps another question or two to get through the next thing that I would love to do Mr. Braun is talk about our next couple of sponsors if that works for you all right well you know I was traveling for like 12 days or whatever and there were a lot of things I missed some of my family was out with me was fortunate to not have to miss them at least not for the whole trip but I definitely missed sleeping in my helix bed I would say that I've said that outside of the context of them being a sponsor but they are our next sponsor here this mattress is super comfortable and it's no surprise that it's comfortable because helix sleep has a quiz that you take it just takes two minutes to complete and it matches you and your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress for you and I took the quiz together we came up with the midnight mattress and it's like it does it it's perfectly matched to us and you know helix knows that we're all unique and so they have all these different mattress models to choose from soft, medium, firm mattresses that are great for cooling you down if you sleep hot and even a helix plus mattress for plus size folks so if you're looking for a mattress you go take the quiz you order the mattress that you're matched to and then it comes right to your door it's shipped for free you don't have to go to the mattress store they've got a 10-year warranty and you get to try it out for 100 nights risk free they'll pick it up for you if you don't love it but you will and helix is now offering up to $200 off all mattress orders and two free pillows for you, our Mackie Keb listeners at helixsleep.com so go check it out, take the quiz and our thanks to helixsleep for sponsoring this episode you know finding and booking a doctor who's right for you doesn't need to be a terrible experience but it sometimes is will they take your insurance, will they understand your needs will they be available when you can see them and with our sponsor ZocDoc the answer can be a refreshingly pain free yes ZocDoc is a free app which shows you doctors who are patient reviewed who take your insurance and who are available when you need them so you get to go read up on local doctors get verified patient reviews and see what other real people have to say about their visits and experience with these doctors and their offices and all that stuff so that when you get there you're set up to see someone in your network who gets you and it's not a surprise so you go to ZocDoc.com and whether you want to see the doctor in person or do a video visit and just like that boom you're booked and you get to find a doctor that is right for you and you get to book an appointment that works for your schedule and this is why every month millions of people use ZocDoc I've used it, it really makes sense so go to ZocDoc.com MGG and download the ZocDoc app for free then start your search for a top rated doctor today many are available within 24 hours that's ZocDoc.com MGGZoc.com MGG and our thanks to ZocDoc for sponsoring this episode alright well John it's just you and me at the moment it seems Allison took a break here but that's fine we will bring Allison back in when she comes back you want to take us to Brian's cool stuff found my friend don't have Brian's okay I'll start talking about the well I had some we'll talk about Audio Hijack 4 which is the update to Audio Hijack which is the app that I use here at Mackie Keb to do all of my recordings and version 4 has been in beta tests for a while we've actually been testing it all of you listening to recordings of Mackie Keb for certainly the last month or so and occasionally before that have heard things recorded with Audio Hijack 4 but it adds some features which I have used some of them and am eager to use others the feature that I've used is what they're calling their new mixer block which is a block that if you have the idea behind Audio Hijack is that you capture different pieces of data and then or different pieces of audio manipulate them and then you can record them or output them to wherever you want and for example when I was in Austin a couple of weeks ago recording the show John I had to I don't bring a mixer with me so I have to have different volume blocks in Audio Hijack to control your level versus my level versus the level of the theme music and all that well I was able to rebuild that and use a mixer block to have everything kind of feeding into it and then just control all of that from one place so the mixer block is great there's also an advanced mode where you can now manually wire things together in Audio Hijacks so that if you in the past and by default even with the current version if you put two blocks next to each other it's going to connect them and pipe audio between them and have things near each other but not necessarily have the audio piped and so there is a manual mode that you can use which I'm eager to mess with and then the third thing, there are like 100 new features I'm not going to go through them all but I will share the third one and that is that it now supports scripting so you can script Audio Hijack with JavaScript and you can also script it with shortcuts if you don't want to use or learn JavaScript so in Monterey and presumably later the shortcuts are going to remain you can integrate Audio Hijack into your workflows so lots of other stuff too obviously can I get my favorites? my favorite change is not for the super advanced users it's actually for I think we'll help with onboarding is each of the blocks now has a really good graphical representation of what it's doing so for example if you put in a 10 band equalizer it actually shows you the curve that you have chosen in the 10 band equalizer on the block and you can rename the blocks to be what makes sense to you not recorder but something else I had no idea I didn't know I could rename the blocks this is the problem with being I've been using I think I might have been the first person to use Audio Hijack to record a podcast I think that it's not unlikely and certainly the advanced workflow that we have with multiple people and tying it all together if we weren't the first we were among the first yeah right at the beginning but the problem is I know how to use it it's going to be hard to go back and try to see what we don't know because we already know how to use it one of the complex ones that I really like is when I'm recording with a guest I use a duplicate left kill right set of blocks and then duplicate right kill left set of blocks and basically it says if on my side make my microphone be all on the right and the other persons all on the left and that way I get two separate audio tracks you get a split audio recording sure once somebody's done it for you you can just keep those blocks and you never have to understand this and it's you know don't worry you're pretty little head about it but now the block actually shows like the left channel being dragged into the right channel and it shows that the other ones being killed it shows a dead end on the block so it's really visual to understand what does that do that's amazing I think it's going to be easier to explain to people how to use it it doesn't change how I'm going to use it probably but it helps me be able to show somebody this is what it's doing it's much more intuitive and it's pretty it's really pretty I hadn't thought about it until we started having this conversation but when we started doing this show the name of the product that we were using was called Audio Hijack Pro they've since dropped the pro and it's just Audio Hijack but it was not built to podcast no surprise podcasting wasn't a thing you know it was built to capture audio from like real player on a schedule and record it so that you could time shift the shows that were on real play right like that that was sort of the gist but it was this idea that you could just sort of do whatever you wanted and it was like oh wait I you know I understand how I would do this with audio cables can I use this tool to do virtual cables on my Mac and it's still that tool it's just far easier to see that it's that tool I've got to tell you a story that you're going to love I've been meaning to tell you this is I was looking into how to add a peak limiter and sometimes the audio words aren't what I know like I actually did know how to do what an audio a peak limiter is but I didn't know that's what it was called I did a peak limiter so I went out and I googled peak limiter and the first hit was Dave Hamilton like 14 years ago showing it in audio hijack pro but as soon as you brought up the EU dynamics processor I was like oh that's what it is okay I know Dave thanks but it was still applicable because the tool is still doing the same things under the hood it's just you can understand it now you can see it now yeah you don't have to know that okay in order to implement peak limiter there isn't one but you can tweak a compressor to almost be a peak limiter yeah it gets you close I'm going to give one last plug the coolest thing about audio hijack is it is 100% accessible to voice over users I have taught not one but two blind people to use audio hijack and they're like oh this is awesome it's crazy good and they built it from the ground up I mean there is nothing about this tool that isn't accessible it's really it's built into the fabric of it fascinating alright well while we and I'm glad you're back with us while we are here in cool stuff found I mentioned cool stuff made you made something Allison you want to talk us through this it's a pretty cool thing in fact it might help Kareem's friend earlier in the episode too yeah so I've been like I mentioned earlier I've been kind of crazy about diagrams and I've been trying to explain all of the different models over the course of time and in the last since from October to today I think I've made four separate diagrams trying to explain how these how the different models work in the pre-M1 days we could basically go in and say I would like a MacBook Pro and you would choose whether you got an i3, i5, i7 whatever you know whether it was an iMac or a MacBook Pro and then you could choose how much RAM you wanted and how much disk you wanted and you were done but now things have gotten a lot more complicated so one of my first charts was trying to explain the M1 Max and M1 Pro on the 14 and 16 inch MacBook Pros and the diagram that I built just shows you how incredibly complex it is because now if you say I want 32 gigs of RAM well you have just defined which Mac you're gonna have to buy and from there now you've got choices of how many GPU cores or if you start with GPU cores you have now defined that you're only getting this model of M1 and I think they made that a lot more complex than it needs to be yeah yes yeah I remember when you walked through this when the MacBook Pros came out you know I bought one quickly because I wanted it quickly and I got it quickly so my goal was met however had I read your piece I would have realized that I could have gotten what I wanted slash needed although I really didn't need it in fact I've proven that because I don't even have it anymore I gave it to my son but I could have saved about 200 bucks if your chart had existed which of course it didn't because I was buying it the moment they announced it I still can't tell you which one you should buy because I still don't know how to tell how many cores a GPU I need to do what I do so I don't actually I'm not sure my chart tells you what to buy it just tells you the implications of those decisions well it also told me that it was available there was a weird path to get there because I chose whatever processor and then had you know I was already down a path into choosing more GPU cores than I realized I needed if I'd chosen the lesser version that doesn't have the processor I wanted and has less GPU cores but upgraded just the processor on the build to order screen then I could have gotten there for $200 less whatever so thank you for saving the world $200 so the next thing that I did was I looked at what's happening right now is the the entire M1 family that we've got and it's really interesting how many M1s there actually are because the iPads are M1s the 24 inch iMacs are M1s the studio is M1s we've got a plethora of M1 family devices now and so the second chart that I made really highlighted how the about that hole that we were talking about that there is no M1 pro if you don't have a laptop it doesn't exist and that's what came out of the M1 fan and I put the date on that chart because as soon as they upgrade the Mac Mini we'll know what goes in there next the date is arguably one of the biggest pieces of text on this chart and understandably so not by accident yeah on DTNS Tom Merritt was asking me he said well is it really that much more complicated than it used to be so the chart that's at the top of the post that we're talking about shows the death dates of all of the devices that were available when Steve Jobs walked back in I didn't realize it was to the day that he left he came back on the exact same day it's like January 16th got it in the article there but he left and came back on the same day and that's when he made his famous i2 chart that said we're going to have a consumer and pro and laptop and desktop and we're done we're getting rid of all these models and so I mapped out how many different variations were there at the time and I've got to give a hat tip to Adam for helping me with that because I missed a bunch of models my first time through I always have him check your stuff not only is he a smart guy and of course a nice person but he has an encyclopedic knowledge locked into the vault of his brain and a precision detailed precision that's beyond anything I'll ever be able to achieve but I can only astrive well we can just ask Adam come on don't you miss the days like remember the performer where they had like 50 different models I remember not buying I didn't buy I remember looking at go nope there's nothing I think I bought a buddy of mine's used because I literally couldn't decide people would ask me what you know which max should I buy and I'd be like I don't know they change every week and there's too many of them at any given point in time for me to effectively guide you it's Steve's speech on that he said the same thing he said my family and friends come to me and I don't know how to answer the question yeah imagine yeah Steve couldn't answer yeah that's it somebody in marketing must have been like for 50 different configurations that sounds like a great idea and somebody should my guess is it was not marketing driven I mean what Steve Jobs did was made it a marketing decision right like by doing that two by two grid this was an engineering thing like well some people are going to want this and some people are going to want that and some you know some dude over in Kaskatchewan you know asked for for this I don't even know if Kaskatchewan is a place I think I just made that up but he asked for it and I gave right though because Adam said that some of these configurations were because this one was in Costco and this one was at Walmart or something like that they were they were at specific stores I'm making up the stores but you know they were making up names of places it's all the same it was the Walmart in Kaskatchewan so yes yes they were the ones that wanted it it was the Cost Mart in Kaskatchewan says the smartest guy in the room but it's almost like it's almost like buying a car is just give me a configuration yeah Tesla for example though I haven't looked in detail but I think Tesla is pretty straightforward they're like there's this model and this model and this model yes but it's tricky you can buy that model today and tomorrow buy that same model and get different features great okay hey we talked about this a long time ago when when it was announced but Apple business essentials is now live for everyone to use so if you are needing an MDM that really also the way I think of it is it's Apple's multi-device management solution and it includes the ability to add Apple Care to devices especially devices that you don't own you can add it to the BYOD devices that your employees bring in so I I'm bullish on the future so I wanted to just make sure everybody knew that that was out thoughts on ABE Alison or John yeah John you had a question maybe a geek challenge that I wanted to make sure we got to before we say goodbye well yeah so one it's a fish shake and two it's a question so I'm getting ready to do my taxes and I print them and I do them on paper believe it or not well I use a PDF you can download from the IRS and then I print them on paper and I mail it in because I actually find it therapeutic the IRS hates you by the way yeah they do and actually the other day I actually got a bill from them because I also don't do estimated taxes and I got a bill from them from two years ago and they finally caught up in their workflow and then I got another bill like a week ago for the next year so yeah I realize that but also this is fine and we'll eventually get to John's fish shake and point but I highly recommend that at the very least you use something like TurboTax folks to do your taxes because there are what 85,000 pages to the tax code now even an automated engine will save you money over what you will be able to do on your own unless you are a highly trained CPA specific to whatever your own needs are. Last I try to free offering the number it gave me was not the same number I got doing it by hand right so so I don't necessarily trust the online offering but here's the problem so you know I went to my laser printer so I have a GCC slash 1200 printer that was manufactured in November 1999 but it still works so I find no reason to get rid of it this is just an old laser printer right post-grip laser printer post-grip or PCL the thing is I went to my print dialogue because I wanted to print out some forms and the printer got blown away I'm like what happened? I don't know it was a recent OS update that blew that printer away now I have another printer I also have a Canon inkjet which I use pretty much for printing pictures and stuff like that but I don't use it for day-to-day stuff because it's kind of expensive versus laser printer but it blew the printer away so I'm like alright well let me add it back and I use what's known as LPD as a protocol to talk to a printer I set it up that way but here's the problem is that you don't get all of the printer features versus adding a device specific driver the thing is I do have I still have the drivers now I can't find them online anymore because the company doesn't make them anymore but I do have what's called a PPD which I think is post-grip printer description but I couldn't figure how to get the current version of macOS to recognize it so I mean I mean it's fine you know I did a test print and everything's good but having the driver let's you do things like you know use the rear feeder instead of the the paper feeder and you know select DPI and stuff like that so is your fish shake that macOS isn't supporting fully 23 year old printer correct that's the fish shake or that the company doesn't make the drivers anymore or they don't make them easily available are they even still in business? I mean is GCC still if you look they make things but not laser printers what is your expectation for how long they should support a device like that on this whole run away that's right I mean I did find a site that advertised having the driver available and I downloaded it and it was a .img file but when I tried to open it it's like well there's nothing in here so the trick will be your PPD might would be the I realized I shouldn't I'm actually saying Allison that I said not to do right just avoid I will point out that a year and a half two years ago whatever it was I took a perfectly good multi function laser printer and decommissioned it from use in my office because HP was no longer making drivers for this printer for the versions of macOS that I was using and that had been the case for probably 10 years and finally I decided I want to move on so let it go actually we could turn this around let's not make it a fish shake what if it's a glorious do you realize you can still use a 23 year old laser printer in its most fundamental mode on a modern mac that's amazing that's amazing that's not a fish shake it's wow and there might be a path John to taking the PPD the printer post-printer definition file I'm pretty sure that's what PPD stands for if my lizard brain memory it was right inserting that into my mouth the trick is figuring out where on macOS Monterey to put that PPD so that it shows up for selection in the printer dialogue for the generic post-printer and I tried that and I find a reference I think it's library printers I find some I found something and put the PPD file in there but it didn't it doesn't appear okay yeah what you're really looking for you're really looking for the developer of view scan from hamrick.com to do the same thing that he does for scanners to do it for printers well he didn't need to for a while because gluten print existed right and gluten print was exactly what you what you're wanting here John right like it's that was the key to I think they called it like gimprinter gluten print it it you know it changed but I don't think gluten print exists for Monterey or perhaps even you know prior to that but it was the whole project was exactly like what what hamrick has done for scanners gluten print did for printers and and had dialogue you know had the drivers for printers that you know the manufacturers stop updating effectively but the last table release was august of 2019 that's only two years ago yeah but remember Monterey changed a lot you know and and that may be why placing the PPD where you put it John didn't result in anything because even though it looked like you put it in the right spot did you actually put it on the system volume which is where macOS looks and the answer is no because the system volume is not writable right so like they're there might be away but there probably isn't and and you know to Allison's point amazing that in its most basic form you can you know a post-credit printers a post-credit printer you know yay all hail standards right because here we are it works and my my multifunction printer worked for the same reason but not to fax and not alright well I don't know that I faxed all that much but not to scan and that was kind of the thing that I needed and so it was like it now it lives in the house as a copier and a printer and it's fine and I have a new one I bet you scan can make it scanned cannot no no I didn't think it was possible I've talked with him over there to make it to like begging him it was like no not that one he's like that one there was something specific about what HP did it was like yeah no so yeah it was and it was too old like it was you know wasn't quite as old as John's but it wasn't that much newer so yeah yeah yeah yeah but it doesn't owe you anything like you can you know go any money you spend on this is is is not like it's not a crime like that that printer is more than served it's it's useful you anything that's a good way to look at it it doesn't owe you anything that's all that's the story of my life otherwise I'd like freak out about stuff it's like I that thing doesn't owe me anything like come on again my biggest is why did macOS remove that printer for my printer dialogue well it probably was using an incompatible driver hmm maybe maybe was like up not going to do that yeah that's not going to work anymore I mean remember 12 3 made and I realize we're running long but then so my apologies I guess 12 3 made a lot of changes that that we're still finding out about I mean one was your monitor thing that was unintentional the change to removing Python that was very intentional and and still broke a lot of things we recently found out from listener mace that he found out accidentally that macOS 12 3 replaced no longer has nano text editor on the command line it replaced it with pico by doing a sim link from nano pico now on first blush nano and pico look almost identical in the editor you know in the on the screen so you might not even notice that it changed however he had alias nano to nano with lots of command line switches and his command line switches were not did not work with pico so he had to go and I told him I said well you can you can do brew install nano right with homebrew and and put nano back on your Mac if you want or you could just go through and figure out how to invoke pico with those same you know the analog of those switches and and then your future future-proofed with air quotes because you know but um yeah 12 3 made a lot of fundamental changes and that is I want to say that's unique for a point level macOS to make that many like this was like a you know a macOS 13 type release with that many under the hood changes that really screw with developers you know yeah because with if they were going from 12 to 13 then developers would say okay I really need to understand every implication of this in OS but 12 that 3 you're just like just a point release you know it's a point release yeah but no it's interesting if you type in nano space and a file name it launches but at the top of the window it says pico and that's what you're talking about the sim link yeah that's the sim link right a sim link is like an alias you know like we know of as an alias in the finder and so it's if you do a ln well let me see let me do which nano so it's user bin nano so if you do ls dash lh a t slash user slash bin slash nano you will see that it is am I not on 12 3 on this back wait a minute what's going on why do I still have nano here this is weird I am on 12 not on oh right I was saying earlier I did not yet upgrade this mac to 12 dot 3 because I didn't want it to mess up all my monitors and everything so now I will upgrade from 12 2 1 to 12 3 1 so yeah but it won't say that anymore you'll see a little pointer that says sim link so fascinating stuff anything else before we bang the gong as it were and there's a reference you can ask kids you can ask your parents about but I think I've told you everything I know this is it I've told you more than I know so there you go as a shout out to our friend John Mardell arrow he used to say that all the time actually I want to do a shout out to Dan more and and it gets back to the the whole idea of making an application or a piece of hardware work beyond it's means he said I break up with software before it breaks up with me so you know that thing where you find out it's end of life but you keep using it because you're just hoping it'll it'll just a natural desire for it to stay and you don't want to give it up and then you end up down the road of misery he breaks up with software before it breaks up with him that's that's really good and like I love that phrase I mean it's you know but yeah like there is a power to that that's a good way to live because otherwise you find yourself in these scenarios where it's like the thing that I've used forever doesn't work and it's like well yeah but but it doesn't you knew it wasn't going to for a little while like you there's often there's usually warning signs right like I mean Dan doesn't just start using software new software for no good reason right knows okay like I'm seeing the end here I see the break lights ahead I'm gonna I'm gonna get off the exit quick yeah I even did that with my beloved clarify one of my favorite applications of all time for creating documentation with text and annotations and stuff and they did move it to 64-bit but they said this is the end of the road and I simply stopped making tutorials because there was no substitute for now there there is now a tool called folga at folga.me f-o-l-g-e dot m-e it's actually a Ukrainian developer named Alexey Sobrenny if I pronounce that correctly it's it's pretty cool and I just did a screencast online tutorial for it and you can actually watch that one for free with a free sign up to screencast online if I can advertise a little bit right there sure of course but Ukrainian developer got to love it and it's a pretty cool tool that's great cool anything else John before we bring the band in alright it was um it was an interesting it's a like today was the first day and really it was in our pre-show break I stepped outside onto the the deck because it was it's like almost 60 degrees so not cold at least not cold for those of us here in New Hampshire Allison I realized 60 degrees is when you break out the parkas and yeah yeah yeah uh but uh it was it's like 60 degrees so not cold the sun is shining bright and it was raining and it was like right this is spring in New England like ah right so I stood out and enjoyed some of the this like looking at the sun in the rain and no clouds which is it's just a weird thing that happens here in the spring so that's your version of sunshine is sunshine with rain well no that's my version of like a clue that it is spring like this is this is what happens here so alright alright I like this this I break up with software before it breaks up with me I may have to adapt a version of that for my son with what he's going through with Reed's dwindling computer science department but you know we'll see we'll see what happens uh alright anything else we got anything else I had fun thank you for having me this was a this was a real blast I had fun too thank you for coming this is this was great yeah you fit right in it's almost like we all knew each other already practically almost like we had genitonics together huh John almost yeah it's almost it's almost that time alright um I look forward to the next time we get to have genitonics together Allison yes we need to do that yeah I'm sorry we our schedules did not work to to do that when I was in the Southern California more recently the fact that you were like 12 miles away and we couldn't we couldn't make it happen couldn't make it happen yeah yeah I couldn't make it happen there was another friend that I was trying to get together with two and it was like the same thing it was like yeah okay it's just not gonna work it's fine whatever and I'm not gonna be a mech stock either because I'll be in Iceland okay so I have this I was saying to somebody the other day that I'm like I'm gonna if if max stock is offered in person and there's still no guarantee of that but you know it seems like it probably could be I'm gonna have to make Sophie's choice and I'm not I'm really not happy about this so yeah it's such a great conference anybody's listening go to it it's fantastic go even if Allison and I don't go go John you what are your thought what are your thoughts on max stock now that we're here having another conversation I have to change my hotel reservation because they shortened the time span and I haven't yet made my flight arrangements but you're gonna go but you're gonna go but I'm planning okay um jealous that's jealous I love max stock just because it's you know all my you know mac related for the most part friends are gonna be there yeah no I love it's a great conference like you said it's a it's a great opportunity to get together with all of the the kind of the you know a lot of many of the people in our community if you will it's just that it happens at the wrong time of year it's a it's a it's a chime of year where there's just so much else going on you know I've always said the conference industry is tough because unless you're going for business and and therefore business happening during the week and I would make a huge argument that max stock could happen during the week and work just fine but if you are having a conference on the weekends you're competing with people's leisure time and you're effectively competing with Disney World right and that's a that's a tough sell for individuals but then also a tough sell for you know for their extended you know whatever their their families or whatever their circles so yeah it's a tough thing if max stock happen during the week I would not have a Sophie's Choice kind of scenario so anyway you know the the fact that we are now talking about having multiple things happening that we could go and do at the same time is frankly quite useful yeah yeah yeah that is that is the good news right that is not here's two things I'll never get to do in the foreseeable future that that's worse yes it turns out we know the answer and it is worse that's right I got my second booster shot this week so did you ready to go out yeah I am I you know I had covid like eight weeks ago or something and so you're covered for a while I'm covered for a little while I actually took one of my I have these antibody tests that I sourced you know because I'm crazy and all that and I I I mean it's super unscientific but the the darkness of the the line of antibodies has definitely changed after after each shot it like it gets super dark and then it starts to wane and and that's what it is supposed to be an indicator on those yes I've been told by the oh you didn't just make that up I didn't make that up correct yeah yeah yeah but the and I watched it after my first shot like I watched it get darker and darker you know testing like every week or whatever yeah because I'm a nerd and and so I tested yesterday in fact because I'm going to get a different vaccine you know another one and I was like well maybe I'll do two at the same time it's like do I need to or should I like you know wait and I it's like the well you are a doctor we've already established that so you can make that decision with see that's right with with with wisdom yeah yeah that's right you've already told us more than you know I've told you more than I know and I've already proven I'm not the smartest guy in the room so there you go but yeah so I will wait you know a month or whatever and we've got some potentially some international travel coming up so I figure well I'll have it done ahead of that you know so alright thanks for hanging out with us folks make sure to check out our sponsors at MackieCub.com sponsors and then of course the the sponsors we mentioned in the episode which I'll talk about in a second first though Allison please tell people where they will find you the best place to go is podfeat.com everything good starts with podfeat.com where you can find the NoCillicast which is my solo show that has been going for in May it will be 17 years without missing an episode every single week and I've got chit chat across the pond light which is conversations with fun and interesting people and programming by stealth if you'd like to learn how to program in an audio podcast with Barbu shots and we also have a fairly finished podcast series called Taming the Terminal which you can get as a book in Apple iBooks for free and or it's called Apple Books now and that's also a podcast of about 40 episodes episodes learning to use the terminal it's awesome and I always am happily reminded that you started podcasting a month before we did you may have more episodes you may have more of everything that you can never start sooner than me that's correct I have a question for you did you use audio hijack pro in your first month of recording your show I don't know that I can say that I do remember learning about it at the podcast expo where I learned met Donald Burr I remember that would have been a year later right yeah yeah so no can't do that and Adam beats all of us so Adam Christensen yeah yes well Adam Curry Adam Curry you're right yeah I just wasn't sure which Adam we were talking about yeah it doesn't matter they all do all the items and and a shout out to Dave slusher he's been with us on backbeat media for you know 15 years and he just was inducted into the podcast hall of fame he he says he was podcaster number five there is an argument to be made that he was podcaster number four so wow I know yeah yeah yeah craziness August of 2004 I guess that's when Curry and Weiner started too so Doug K is definitively number three and there's some debate as to whether I think it was Gibson right number five because he was on the conversations network with Doug K like ish I don't know but that's why slusher says I'll take fifth you know I'm not here to fight and he's like that's slushes hi engineer asked when Leo Laporte started I don't know when he started all of his shows but I do know that I beat him and starting Matt Freak weekly he brings that up when I talked to him yeah no we we started this show before he started with his netcasts and that's a whole other story to tell someday actually I think his podcast network he was oh maybe not he was on TV and all that stuff too right yeah the radio out here right and the radio yeah right exactly yeah yeah yeah right John where can people find you um careful connected or at John F. Braun on Twitter ah yes and then there's you Dave Hamilton there's Mackie Gab on Twitter um Allison is pod feet on Twitter and pod feet that's right and pilot Pete he'll be back at pilot Pete thanks again for joining us Allison check out our sponsors helixleep.com Zock.com Kota.io slash mgg and LinkedIn.com slash mgg fun stuff folks thanks for hanging out a little bit extra this might be our longest episode certainly in a long time sorry not sorry this was a blast Allison I know you got us into this mess but um do you happen to have perhaps three words of wisdom to share with our friends who might still have decided to continue listening well I hope those listeners don't get caught