 It's time for Mac Geekab and listener Todd brings us our quick tip of the week If you're in a folder in the finder and hit command F The default is to search this Mac. I almost always want to limit the search to the folder I am in to change the default, which I do on every Mac I use go to the finder finder preferences Advanced when performing a search and select The current folder now you can hit command F type what you want to search for and elicit this displayed for the hits in that folder More tips like this Plus your questions answered today on Mac Geekab 974 for Monday, March 27th, 2023 And welcome to Mac Geekab the show where you send in your tips Just like that one that Todd did you send in your questions you send in your cool stuff found We share your tips just like wheat John just did we share your cool stuff found we share your questions And hopefully are able to provide some answers. Of course, you send all those into feedback at Mac Geek Gab comm We take everything that you've sent in we take our answers We take some of your answers string it all together every week into an agenda with the goal being that Every single time we get together each and every one of us including me We each learn five new things Sponsors for this episode include notion at notion comm slash Mac Geek Gab where Notion has added notion AI to help you start your ideas right there in notion with help from AI. It's amazing Shady rays comm slash MGG because what's better than getting one pair of shady rays and not worrying if you break or lose them Getting to and that's what you can do with shady rays comm slash MGG and Also, honey at join honey comm slash MGG the tool that scours the internet for promo codes and then automatically applies them We'll talk more in depth about each and every one of those a little bit later in the episode here for now Here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton And here in fearful Connecticut, this is John F. Braun. How are we today? Mr. John F. Barn? Not bad. Not bad. Not bad. All right Getting by we are I'm happy to be back here in the studio man It was fun traveling. Don't get me wrong had a lot of great experiences We'll talk a lot about we've got some more stuff in fact to talk about from South by Southwest coming up if not in today's episode certainly in next week, but But it's good to be home. It's good to be back in my standard recording environment Hopefully without network issues hang on Let's knock on wood, but a network that I get to control at least far more of than I could in Hotel rooms, but I did I'm exhausted today John because I stayed up super late We had finally after 18 years I finally had ethernet run to the north side of my house Which means that I have a whole lot more options as to where and how and what I do with the various Devices so I actually moved I'm gonna move my router back over the house so that it's protected by the standby generator that we put in this summer last summer whatever but But I need to have my my fiber moved for that so that hasn't happened quite yet, but I did put a little rack together last night and Put all the disk stations and those various things over in the house moved them from the house from the office to the house it's fascinating to me that And of course I did all kinds of ping tests and speed tests to make sure that you know Everything was was working as I wanted it to and and it is but what's really interesting to me John is how little impact an extra switch in the way makes for For like ping times. I mean in fact I tested this morning from the studio here So the studio is in the same building. It's a it's on the second floor above my office Which is where things used to be and then obviously, you know, the house is across the driveway all connected via Well, the house is connected via direct burial ethernet and then and then regular ethernet throughout the house now, but I Did a ping test and I noticed that pings to like the disk station all the way You know across the driveway completely on the other side of the house We're like, you know 0.8 milliseconds or something and then I did a test to my Mac mini which is sitting in my office Right underneath me and that was like 1.2 milliseconds So I think it's more about the device that's responding than it is about the cabling in between at least when it's When it's all self-contained like this, so I'm excited to not have to worry about The network devices when if and when there's a power outage So it should be should make life a little bit easier for us all here Is it time shall we shall we get to more more quick tips and and such sure you're all right So let's start with Christopher take us. Thank you, sir Have you I had a finder tab that you wish you could just move to another finder window to have it part of that Finder window instead. I love using finder tabs But sometimes I over-organize myself and realize that I want a particular finder tab not in finder window a but in finder window B Well, believe it or not place your cursor on the tab that you wish to move in finder window a click and hold and drag it Into finder window B Okay Yeah, yeah, it's sometimes that simple the same works for Multiple safari windows you can drag tabs to them Probably anything else. I haven't tried it with mail I do use tabs and mail often, but I don't Generally have multiple windows open and mail, so I don't know but I would presume I presume it works kind of anywhere Certainly works in Safari and Chrome and edge and all that. Yeah, I like it. I love tips like this The things that we do that amaze us Well, I mean like that's the beauty of it I In line at South by Southwest for like movies or events or whatever you know, you talk to each other you find out who each other is and and Occasionally, you know, it'd be like so what do you do and why are you here? It's like, oh, I do three podcasts and the set and the other thing and Most people of course have iPhones and so I would share like a quick tip with them about their iPhone and One at one of my favorite ones to share which comes up every few years and we'll share it again here is the Spacebar turns your keyboard into a mouse trick if people don't already know that Watching the look on their faces when they see you do it for the first time is I love it I love the feeling of like that seen the light bulb go off And so if you don't know what we're talking about get out your iPhone Get into some sort of text editing scenario where you have a block of text and a keyboard up And it's better if you have multiple lines for this particular demo If you want to get to a So you've got you know three or four lines of text or or eight to twelve or forty lines of text, whatever If you want to get to a certain spot to edit You know, you can tap in on the text and hope to get your finger in exactly the right spot But that's often an exercise in frustration what you can do instead is Push and hold on the spacebar and now your entire keyboard turns into a trackpad and you can drive the cursor around and You're good to go. So try that out if you didn't know that you could do it and Yeah, fun stuff. So I showed that to a lot of people It's good. John. We have one more from the finder More finder. So Joe writes in and says for yours I've used color tags and macOS to help me identify types of files easily The only painful part was clicking each file one by one to set its particular color Especially when a number of these needed to be the same color Imagine my surprise today when I curiously clicked on the tags word below the tag selection window and Found I could do them all in one sweep It's also handy to clear tags from a group regardless of color or tag name Probably has been there since tags were added, but I never had seen it or heard about this before and sure enough and if you If you look in the finder window We learned this last time or even before that you'll see tags dot dot dot. What does that mean? It means that there's more to come Right. Oh, yeah, right So that's a good one. Yeah, I use tags a lot. Sometimes I'll double tag something if it's like really important Just to organize my pictures So I'll do like an orange one and a red one Okay, and you're you're tagging your pictures in the finder. Yes Okay, now I'm really curious how are you storing pictures like not in the photos app But but like do you have you have folders of pictures for for various reasons is that yes? interesting Cool what what is one of those reasons? I'm just curious why you would store pictures outside of the the photos up. That's all Yes Just because Okay, I mean is there is there a use case you can share with us just so that we can start thinking about why we might Want to do something similar in our lives. No Okay, fair enough. We will leave it at that then Great one of the quick tips that I learned recently was from Steven Robles Who does the Apple insider podcast he posted this one to Twitter and it blew me away You know when you are in messages on the iPhone We have reactions to those messages and you can press and hold on the message and it Shows you the reactions on the top of the message above the message I should say and then a menu of things below the message to you know for various things reply and that sort of thing And that that's great But you have to press and hold and wait a beat for that to all change in the user interface If you just want to pull up the reactions You can double tap the message and the reactions bubble appears immediately and you can choose one very very quickly So pretty cool. Just and this is again. It's on the iPhone I assume it would work on the iPad too. I haven't tried it there But double tap a message on the iPhone in messages and boom you'll see the list of reaction options appear magically across the top of the screen So thanks to Steven for that and we have a different Steven the listeners Steven who Who brought us our final quick tip of the week John? Yeah? Yeah, here's a sneaky one This is a follow-up to our I need to figure out how to type a lowercase I on the iPhone without turning off auto-correct. I like it So to type the letter I in lowercase just create a text replacement with the shortcut such as I I Two small eyes and replacement I You could of course do a shortcut I but then that would bypass the capitalization that you probably would normally want to happen I like it. It is sneaky. Yeah, I love these kinds of things All right, so hey look there's been a lot of buzz around AI lately But maybe you're not sure how it fits into your daily workflow or your daily life Well, our sponsor notion has just launched a new incredible tool notion AI And it's fully integrated into notion so it has the context of everything you're already working on If you don't know about notion notion combines your notes and docks into one space. That's simple Beautifully designed and now a more powerful than ever. 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That's k ol Idee comm slash mgg and our thanks to collide for sponsoring this episode All right Let's do some well some questions and some some not quite so quick tips Jeremy found a good one for us on John Yes, he did While looking for an earlier version of main stage to download because the current version is so dreadful I clicked on a wrong download button and it inadvertently allowed a virus onto my Mac I got caught a Quick Google reveals there's plenty about this particular malware which manifests itself as a frequent pop-up notification about my Mac being infected Etc. Etc. Most of the advice points towards something like malware bites to find the offending bit of code and a room of it But neither malware bites clean my Mac or onyx fail to identify and remove the malware However, I can try and triumphantly announce that for any of those who are similarly infected Here's how you get rid of it, and it's stunningly simple in Safari Go to the settings then under the websites tab scroll down and hit Notifications for me the offending malware was sitting there bold as you like at the top of the list sporting a Mac OS system Settings logo, but with no text next to it simply delete it problem solved Okay, good one What an interesting vector for For this right because we most of the time like when we think of malware We think of an application like a program that's running on our computer Even a even a browser plug-in or extension or whatever like we've certainly seen those but that's Code that's running on your computer. All this is doing is using the Safari website notifications Vector as or functionality as its vector to send you these notifications and hope that you click on one of them Which would bring you to their webpage, which I presume is supposed to look like something official And then maybe that would get you to install the next thing. Thank goodness. Listen to Jeremy didn't didn't get caught the second time, right? So That's pretty good. I like I mean I like I don't like it I don't like that people are doing this but you know, I have to appreciate the cleverness of Thinking of using that but it is good to go into your Safari notifications every now and again and just see what websites you've given permission to To give you those notifications that Because you might you might decide to remove some of them. It's also good to take a look in Safari Preferences extensions as well for the same reason just see who has access to things in Safari And do you still want it to be that? Did you intend for that? And even if you did you still want it to be that way, so That's pretty good one. Yeah, interesting All right, next up. We have a question from Xavier. He says at my school It appears I can't use IMAP email when attempting to connect to Gmail on the web It works just fine. But when I use a program like Apple Mail to do it Doesn't work the IMAP access setting is turned on. Is there a way to make it connect to the Gmail IMAP server? I've figured out that connecting to a website at any other port than the standard port is Also forbidden. Is there anything I can do to make this happen anyway or suggest to my IT admin? Says I know it sounds off topic. Oh not at all. No, this is great Xavier So I don't know what school you go to but I experience something similar When I'm on the UNH network John nearby here You know, it's the University of New Hampshire is right next to us and we go there for hockey games all the time They have Wi-Fi throughout the arena. I've got Wi-Fi Wi-Fi, you know The campus is bathed in Wi-Fi, but I can't check IMAP email when I'm there unless Unless I'm on a VPN and once I'm on a VPN I can do whatever I want The trick for you Xavier is going to be using a VPN on one of the standard web browsing ports Because clearly they are only allowing that to go through there might be other things that they allow to go through But it's entirely likely that they are blocking the standard VPN ports thankfully most good VPNs have lots of different end points where you can hit them and Often they will also include the standard web browsing ports and I say ports because there are two there's port 80 for insecure connections for plain text connections and then Or unencrypted connections, I should say and then port 443, which is for all SSL connections The HTTPS with the little lock and the thing so I would try private internet access They are a former sponsor of this show, but are very much my current VPN PIA has been has been great. I'll put a link in the show notes to it I think there might even still be a Mackie Gab deal on that even though Even though they they aren't an active sponsor, but it's PIA VPN comm slash MGG I believe is the the link for that so but AVP and that will let you connect on though the you know the Web browsing ports would be the one to to check out but start start with you know, PIA or or Nord or something like that and See I'd most of them will if they fail on the standard ports will try on the on the next one. So Hopefully that gets you there When my kids were in school Local school here, you know at the high school They and all of their friends used VPNs all day long on the on the school's network because it it would block things like Instagram and then that and they were like why need to be on Instagram to communicate with people. So, yeah Good I did the same thing our local The grocery store that I go to the most. Yep office free Wi-Fi has there's almost everybody But this is the thing I found funny When I tried so I connected to their Wi-Fi and then I went to the Connecticut lottery page Because they sell lottery tickets Sure, I Tried to go to the page and it said blocked and I'm like why Or it gives the reason I think it was a Cisco product a Cisco firewall and it's like blocked because it's gambling and I'm like But but you guys sell lottery tickets here. So why are you prohibiting me from going to the Connecticut lottery? But yeah, I did the same thing I connected to my my VPN and Voila, I was able to get wherever I wanted to go. Yeah Yeah, yep, it's good Tien Papa in our discord chat John asks if Apple's private relay would solve this and no it would not Private relay is really only built. No, it's built for two things. It's built for websites If you are a paid iCloud subscriber and you have private relay turned on Then any websites you visit will go through Apple's relay, but it's still all gonna happen on port 443 if you are a if you are anyone Not paid iCloud subscriber or a paid iCloud subscriber with private relay turned off There are still some things that go through private relay all known trackers Any any web tracker, you know pixel tracker, whatever that Apple knows about is Shoveled through their private relay as well so that you aren't tracked by the known trackers A lot of people don't don't realize that but yeah, Craig Federighi talked about that at the One of the WWDC events that year when all this came out Um The other time that private relay is used is if an app Apple or third party attempts to connect to an HTTP resource This is not safari. This is a third-party app like on on iPhone You know the if you've got an app if it's connecting to HTTPS Apple lets it go through no problem It's connecting to HTTP Apple says it's gonna be secure and routes it securely through its private relay It's insecure from Apple's relay out to the website, but between you and the relay all secure so But for for email, it's the private relay doesn't get in the way for I especially for IMAP email, so that's not gonna solve the Issue there, but it's good question, and I'm glad you asked it I'm glad we we had a this is what I love about doing the show live There there are certain things I don't like about doing the show live But but mostly I like it because it allows for those kinds of questions to come in in real time, which is great. So Yeah, so just doesn't It just doesn't it private relay doesn't impact IMAP mail. So All right, Joe has the next question up John he asks My question is related to international travel and how you manage your iPhone when traveling I know of the eSIM database, and I'm good with the data portion of this But I recall on some fairly recent episode where there was also an aspect of voice calling mentioned I think Wi-Fi calling is active as long as I'm on Wi-Fi and all is good with no surcharges But I can't find documentation on that But what if I'm not on Wi-Fi and need voice cellular? Seems like you mentioned did database for that too and as a bonus question How do you handle handle handle international calling from home when setting up your travel? I have consumer cellular and they aren't cost-friendly on international rates seem like Wi-Fi calling might work but again can't find actual info so You're right that with most carriers When you're international, but on Wi-Fi calling then you get phone and SMS I won't say for free, but but it probably is for free. It's certainly included in your plan But by all means check with your provider before you go. Don't make this assumption I did it recently. I checked with Mint mobile, which is my provider still and and they confirmed yes, if you're on Wi-Fi calling any SMS or phone calls that you receive or make Included in your plan, which with my plan is free And when I was in Italy recently I did a lot of SMS receiving on my Mint mobile number and the ones that came in and out when I was on Wi-Fi calling We're not charged to my account balance the ones that came in and out while I was When I was off of Wi-Fi Definitely were charged and for me with my plan It's five cents each for SMS in and out so it could that can add up, you know As For calling intern so it so check the eSIM database they they and that's at eSIMDB calm And we'll again put a link to this in the show notes if you need a plan You know internationally that will Allow you to Have voice and or SMS on it. You can get that If eSIMDB is not just for data only Sims though, certainly there are lots of them in there. They also have You know regular like the full full full featured Sims with voice and minutes and all that good stuff So you can you can find all that at eSIMDB if you need it for travel as far as for calling internationally from home FaceTime or WhatsApp, you know some sort of data-based Communication app is the way I Ranth about how we haven't embraced WhatsApp here in the US like it is abroad But you know, that's how it just how it is But yeah any any VoIP app right and FaceTime audio is a VoIP app So like when we when we're gonna call our daughter in Italy if we're gonna do a you know with with voice We use FaceTime audio And you know, it's it's a little bit you just need to be intentional when you're making the call to choose that as opposed to just calling the number but But then then you're just using a data connection now Make sure you're either on Wi-Fi or that you have enough data as part of your plan to to cover whatever You know audio you're gonna do but yeah, that's that's the way is is make sure you do it that way And then and then you're in good shape. So Thoughts, uh, what what do you have to add to that? I'm gonna I need to learn to stop asking you yes or no questions John because I set myself up for it I will agree with you our friend Martin who is From Europe tried to communicate with me using Messages and I think what worked for him so If he tried to use his phone number my phone He couldn't reach my phone But if I think when I gave him my Apple ID that did work for him. So Interesting is your phone your phone numbers attached to iMessage though it like it should have figured that out interesting, huh? Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah You know interesting Uh Yeah, I mean and making sure that that not only you have all of the right things attached to iMessage in your Settings, but that the people that are contacting you have The right things so that they will get to you via iMessage and if they are Apple users if they're not then you've got to use You know what's app or telegram or you know signal signal or something like that And you let me know about this one time Um and that I had to do a restore my phone for some reason and all of a sudden when you and I tried to message you're like Are you sure you have that checkbox checked? Yeah, because you were a green bubble person for a little while. Yeah, and it was on On one device I was able to message or when I compared The preferences for each device They weren't the same. So that's why that didn't work for me Interesting wow really Because your devices like iMessage iMessage preferences should be the same from device to device Now, I guess not. No, you can yeah, you know, you're right You said it individually because I have some devices that have certain email addresses that come through and not others So yeah, all right Fascinating While we're on the subject of security mr. Braun uh, you want to take us to Lee has a question about Security keys and then you might have some experience with some security keys. Well, he has a rant. I think Oh, okay. All right. I can tell you right now security key security key dongle option is never going to be one I employ in the past I had To professionally rely on dongle based protection for several applications and plug them in usually very expensive applications um It's true that the dongle allows the user to move seamlessly between installations and platforms until the seams come apart Uh, there's no end to the ways dongle's vanish Uh, not just bad scenarios like death fire flood but all the things that happen to key ring a common safe place for a dongle um Like lending them to someone going on a cross country john toilets washing machines rivers lakes or just putting them down somewhere Uh bags pockets drawers usb ports and other safe places aren't much better either. Have you ever found out where those missing socks go? And where are those spare house keys? All right, so he makes You've rant taken lee right like you're when you add another physical device to your authentication path you Create a scenario where you can't lose that device. Otherwise you lose your authentication Just like losing your password, which isn't a physical device But if you lose it and that's the key to the encryption then it's lost But apple mitigates against this with uh with security keys now, correct john? correct, so um To enable a security key Um first off so security key is a physical device like a uh, uh, ubico Um device right, but I only had one of them So I ordered another one then I was able to deploy security keys On the phone Uh, now here's what apple does though. You need at least two, right? And they actually ask you and we have a dandy little article from them um They actually will let you add up to six so um So they knew enough not to let you just use one key because as Was pointed out if you lose it you're you're in big trouble. Yeah Yeah, for sure So you so you have at least two of these yuba keys now john and you were able to set up your your security key How do you like it? It didn't work as expected. I have to do more investigation here. So both of these keys So one is usb a and nfc and one is usb c and usb c Uh, wait usb c and it there's two usb c's on it No, okay, so you said it one is usb a and nfc and you said the other is usb c and usb c Oh, I'm sorry usb c and nfc got it. I understand now. Okay. I'm with you right, okay So what did what did you expect and what didn't it do? um, I got to find out why it isn't So if I use it on the phone And hold it up to the the top of the phone, which is where the nfc is Um, it will authenticate to my apple id the thing is I can't seem to get it to work on my mac Well, your mac doesn't have an nfc reader. So that would make sense But you would have to usb c So maybe make sure to stay on the mic so we can hear you so But but I got the one with the usb c port, which my mac does have okay, so why didn't that work? I guess my assumption was that the serial number of the key Is shared between the connections, but I guess that's not the case Oh, you so you think have you contacted yuba key support about this by the way No Okay, do please do that because it would be that would be helpful for this conversation. So actually i'm gonna There is a you have a theory that I don't want to put words into your mouth that us that the You would need to set the key up twice once nfc and once usb c is that what you're thinking? Yes, and have you tried that? Well, I can't do the Couldn't you start the process on your mac or no? I don't i'm i'm gonna try that. Okay. Great. All right. Well, so Circle back with us on that because that that would be Because they did it did list them in both locations Yeah, so when I looked so you give it a name when you add it and when I added Both of them on the phone and then I looked at the same section My macOS machine. It was like, oh, yeah, you got two security keys. Yeah Oh, okay. All right, but it but maybe it only knows them. Yeah, again, maybe it only knows them on the machine that it was Configured on I will finish that process this week and circle back because we want to we want to know great Make sure to stay on the mic as well when you talk Uh, we can't keep reminding you of this. So, um I had a weird issue about uh 15 minutes ago here with the show. In fact, we had the I had to reboot my mac Suddenly I started hearing the audio in a very crackly way So all of that uh, that that knocking on the wood knocking that I did at the beginning of the show failed Uh, clearly, but uh, I started hearing audio with with like Uh Stutters it sounded like everybody including me was talking while someone was like, you know beating on your Back, you know how it makes you sound like, you know, like stutter and weird when when someone's like, you know doing like That on your back. That's what it sounded like. I'm like, well, I can't do the show like this But john, you weren't hearing it that way. No one I knew the streams was hearing it that way The audio recording was not that way. It was literally only the audio that was making it to my ears So I did some troubleshooting. I did the normal things. I Powercycled my audio device, which is a thunderbolt quantum 2626. No I quit and relaunched logic, which is the app that I used to to sort of be my mixer. No I did play the audio through my max speakers. Yes, that was fine Including the audio coming in through my thunderbolt device So I thought well, I could move my headphones to my mac and like just deal But this seems like a problem that might not be a good idea to just ignore Uh, and I finally, you know looking at all of those signals and and And such I I reasoned I think I have a thunderbolt problem like because my audio device is thunderbolt everything else on the You know connected to the mac was working fine. So I shut down my mac I just for for to be thorough because I wasn't interested in finding out exactly what was going on I was interested in getting it fixed. I power cycled not just my mac But all of my thunderbolt devices then I brought my mac back up and you know more wood knocking uh We uh, we've been good for the last uh 15 minutes or so here since since we've been back for the show, but uh fascinating it's Uh, I just I've never experienced that particular thing before. No, I mean, I was gone for two weeks I but I have I've recorded like three shows in in the studio since I've been back So it's not like this is a a first time at it But yeah, it's just one of those weird things that it was only audio out Not audio in and not audio recorded I don't know Some weird interrupty thing and I tried like I said, I tried resetting the The the device so that it would uh, you know, re-sync itself and no didn't matter It was something something who knows something in the chain. Maybe but I'll fix now our last question comes from listener scott and uh I I if if the audio is to behave scott take it away. Hello, john davin peat scott here from palm springs have a quick question about updating my 14 inch macbook pro to uh ventura from monoray and What the process would be if I wanted to roll it back I've got two legacy apps that work great in monoray. They are no longer in development um But i'm not sure if they're going to work with ventura normally I would just roll it back to a disc image that I created in carbon copy cloner I don't think you can do that with apple silicon um Is the only way if I had to roll it back to monoray back up with time machine and then Restore the entire system and then restore from my time machine backup Seems like a bunch of steps, but didn't know if you had any other feedback. Thanks so much Yeah, unfortunately Scott that would be the the way And I don't like that would be the best case. I don't even know That monoray a prior version of mac os is going to happily read like the let me say this a better more concise way I don't know that migration assistant in a prior version is going to Read data from a time machine backup from a future version um, however kiwi graham in the Discord might have our answer for us. He says Carbon copy cloner tells you to first reinstall the old mac os and then Restore data from your carbon copy cloner backup. So that would be the way to do it is yes Shoot a carbon copy cloner backup Then if you need to roll back Do it that way and and you'll bring your you you'll bring your your data over in the right way Yeah, there's a there's a consensus forming that migration assistant probably isn't going to be too happy about What you are What you are proposing here, but carbon copy cloner would be sort of the way So john, what are your thoughts on this? would virtualizing your old environment makes sense Uh, how would you do that? I don't know that we can virtualize mac os on apple silicon these days Yeah, I was looking I thought parallels had released an m1 version, but maybe not Yeah, I don't know that it'll do it with mac os maybe Maybe Yeah, I mean, yes, I I like the I would agree that that Virtualizing it would be the answer. I just don't know that there is A way for us to do that, but otherwise that's a great idea um But because then it just compartmentalizes it and it will always be whatever you want it to be regardless of what hardware it's running on but Yeah, our virtualization options on mac os or Sadly lacking these days and and I'm not overly happy about this, but it is It is the way So what's worse than buying a pair of expensive sunglasses and losing them right after you get them? What's worse than that breaking them? 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That's s h a d y r a y s dot com Slash mg g code mg g to get a second pair of shady rays free Shady rays dot com slash mg g code mg g and our thanks to shady rays for sponsoring this episode Hey, well, I have you here if you like tech podcasts, then you need to subscribe to software defined talk right now It's a weekly show that recaps all the news in cloud computing dev ops and enterprise software The host kote matt ray and brandon will keep you up to date on topics like dev ops kubernetes platform engineering and anything related to enterprise tech Plus, they'll weave in plenty of nonsense like how to optimize shopping at costco So, you know nerdy stuff It's a fun freewheeling conversation that'll keep you informed and entertained while doing the dishes or walking your dog What are you waiting for subscribe to the podcast today by visiting software defined talk dot com Or by searching for software defined talk in your favorite podcast app And our thanks to brandon matt ray and kote for doing this swap with us All right, let's uh, let's do some cool stuff found here john the first thing that I want to share comes from listener alex s in our Discord and it's mac whisper Which is a mac app That uses whispers ai To do transcription. So it's native mac os app leverages the whisper ai, which is one of the Sort of standard now ai transcription engines And does it right there on your mac? So yeah pretty cool stuff It's like I I am Using ai a ton here In my both work and personal life I I want to in fact, we'll we'll save this for next week when pete's here I want to I want to do a segment on how all three of us are using Ai because I I I think we can learn from each other and and and start that conversation But uh, but yeah, thank you alex for sharing mac whisper good stuff and uh While we're on the subject of audio I found a piece of software called hush john That is Sort of purpose built for removing again using ai uh to clean up recorded speech so it'll pull out like background noise and uh and like You know hums and hisses and things like that without they say without Changing the timbre of the voice quality in the original Super automated and of course, it's uh It's a native mac apps called hush So we'll put that link in the show notes But a little bit of ai for your for your audio needs, which makes things fun Yeah, i'm i'm super happy at least currently to be living in an ai ai driven world. It's good stuff You want to take us to you have a cool stuff found from listener roger, huh john a cool stuff found Uh revisited really yeah um So roger says if liby does not work liby being a service that lets you That gives you a virtual library um So he said if liby does not work this will use the hoopla app from your apple tv To view loans of music tv or movies through your local library each month you get eight loans which worked um Before a sixth episode, uh of a tv series. We recently watched the ticks a while set it up, but we got it to work well and i was like huh That sounds really familiar and so i went to um hoopla dot com day and uh, guess what i have an account So i think it's hoopla digital dot com not hoopla dot com But just just so people know the link will be in the show notes So you can click it from there and if you want the show notes in your email Go to matt geek up dot com sign up every week. We automatically send you the show notes So you get all the links But were you did you get up? Did you did you get up? Did you set up the apple tv app? Like were you able to get that rolling? No Oh, okay, right. I yeah, okay, but thanks for letting us know because yeah But you can do it through the the browser, which is what I did in the past Yeah, I um after we talked about it in show 968 I I went and looked and it's like I I went to sign up and it's like, okay Well, you need to activate your library card this way or whatever and and I was like, okay And it like my public library was on the list And so I guess I had to get a pin for my library card or something And so I called my library and they gave me the pin and then I was able to To get hoopla set up. I had I'd been using liby for years liby I know we talked about it recently, but liby is awesome for for renting books or borrowing books from the library And you can link them straight to your kindle app if you want to read In fact, you don't have to have to put them on the kindle app I read them on my kindle paperwhite, which is awesome But uh, I had not until we talked about it in in 968 I hadn't really I wasn't really aware of how hoopla worked and I haven't used it yet, but I've got it all set up. I haven't set it up on my apple tv I don't even think I knew that there was an apple tv app until this very moment, so So we will uh More more on that, but yeah, it's cool stuff fun Are there any do you use liby with your library or are there any other things you use john? No, okay Well, I actually know there is another there is Um Okay, here's another one that I think I do have the apple tv app for To be t u b i okay watch free movies and tv shows online. Okay That's cool. I like are there things that you watch in to be That like specific things that you've that you've used to be for Um I can't recall. I've stopped my head. I'm just I'm just curious Like what kind of content is is out there in to be like To whom would it be valuable? I guess is the the You know The question I'm looking they say thousands of titles browse titles. Let's browse some titles here Shattered colombo divorce court super bad. Oh, well, then it's great if it's got super bad. They've got the matrix. Okay. Yeah Huh, that's not wow. All right Oh Okay free movies and tv fewer ads than cable. Ah, that's the catch. Okay. Yeah That's pretty good All right. Yeah, there's I mean there's like you could probably find something on here to to pass some time I don't know fun Cool. All right. The next thing up is um camo Which is an app that I use every week. I've been using it since last year To allow me to use my iphone as a camera now, of course apple as a webcam apple came out with continuity camera earlier This or late last year And that's fine But it doesn't have nearly the features that camo does in terms of being able to control like how the camera looks and Like zoom or any of that stuff. It's just sort of, you know, here's your iphone. We know best And for some things like they probably do camo now Expands things so instead of just being that link between your camera and your phone and having all this great feature Or your your your phone camera and your mac and having all those great features uh camo 2 Now works with your webcam your built-in camera your Uh, your continuity camera So it all of the cool Any of the cool camo features that could be used on a given camera that you might have Can now be used on that camera doesn't mean that you get apples magic of like portrait mode On a webcam that has no smarts for portrait mode because camo isn't doing portrait mode It's simply leveraging the iphone's ability to do portrait mode. Those are two different things and it's awesome But uh, so a lot of the smarts that are built into apples cameras are only there for apples cameras But you get to leverage them in camo now Uh, regardless of how you are connecting the camera up So i i'm pretty stoked about what what camo is doing and camo works wired or wireless here in the studio I i leave my iphone 13 mini Just sitting on top of the the computer in the studio and i say sitting on top i we've talked about this i have this like Clamp arm mount thing because it's a pain in the neck to do this. It should be way easier, but it's not so Uh, maybe there's maybe there's more i've got i've got to try more More mounts, but we'll we'll get there someone i should have brought one with me when i traveled It would have been a better camera to use but anyway Camo makes life easy. I like the camo What what webcam are you using these days john? uh Get closer to the microphone Logitech There it is Dude, why is this wait wait wait? I gotta ask now because this is like the seventh time that i've mentioned it And then people in the chat have been have been screaming about it too This is different today. This is a new habit for you. Is it because After the last show There were there were some background noises that you were making like you're rubbing your hands together and stuff So we had you turn up yourself in your ears Is is the the is the reason that you're not leaning forward a byproduct of you being louder to yourself and not thinking that You need to be louder for the listeners. Uh, okay. All right, so we got to fix that Maybe maybe we need to um put uh like a lift on the back of your chair. So it's just constantly leaning you forward Yeah, yeah, um, yeah, I have the uh the brio Logitech brio. Yeah, okay. I I bet can't I I I want to hear how camo works on the logitech brio Because that would be a great little test. So you gotta test that out for us and and let us know next week. It's good fun um Oh, here's another thing that you could test out for us john the next cool stuff found comes from Listener camillian And I'll pull it up here, but I know what it is. Uh, it's fantastic He says I set up several home pod and home pod minis around my house today When setting up the home app it asked me if I wanted to turn on and use Intercom this allows you to use the home pods as intercom devices You can even send the audio to iPhones watches and AirPods Makes it even easier to tell the kids dinner is ready and it can be activated By siri That's pretty cool Huh, you've got two home pods right john Oh, you got to set this up and test this for us too. I don't have any home pods So you're you're you're the one but I'm curious how that works like setting it up and then Having it message your uh your phone or your watch. That's pretty good So you just once you set it up you say uh Siri intercom It's time to wake up Or siri ask everyone As the dog been fed or you can be specific about it. You can say siri Announce upstairs the movie is starting siri ask the kitchen. What's for breakfast? I wish my kitchen would make me breakfast Uh, and then you can use siri to reply as well. You can say siri reply, you know, I fed the dog in the morning or siri make your own breakfast Uh, that's pretty good Ah Fascinating. Uh-oh, what's going on? Is this my freaking you know, I didn't use the h word Why is the why? I didn't use the h word. I swear you heard me. I recorded it Ah Why did it listen? Man, that's weird. Like I thought we had to say Hey, and then after that say the word siri in order for her to listen but clearly She's listening more than I wanted this isn't good Ah I don't know man. I don't know Siri's listening more than I wanted More than I realized Yeah, I've noticed that as well. Is that right? Oh, yeah, I'll be watching a tv show or a movie and all of a sudden something will trigger And it's like Yeah, we get that with the amazon thing anything that has like the licks sound in it, right because that's in the a Lex uh, right, you know But if it if there's like a sound that has like a vowel and then the the the x sound That that often and what sucks is in our living room You know we use the sonos arc as our as our like sound in the living room and it has The a lady enabled on it and so it means that the Sound from our movie that just made that trigger sound Like gets reduced while it waits for the next command and it's like nope You literally made the sound yourself like it came out of you. Why don't you know this it should Anyway, yeah, we need to put a limit on John's chair lean back. I agree uh, I have a little bit of uh, A cool stuff found to share john and and perhaps even a little bit of show and tell But the next one it's a company that well, we knew about them before CES but but we ran into them at CES it's a company called rolling square And they they make a lot of cool things But they're in charge cable is my my new favorite and it comes in all different sizes I I have this really short one that if you're watching the video you'll see but i'll explain it The only reason I have the short one is because they they sent me three Three lengths this one that's like a foot long and then a two meter and a three meter And the other people in my house quickly commandeered the two and three meter versions so uh When you look at this cable one nice part is it magnetizes itself together So uh, so it it it like it fits nicely in your bag And the larger versions come with a nice little case that you can just roll them up and put it in which is great And when you first look at it, it's a usb a to lightning cable, which is cool But let's say you needed a usb c to lightning cable Well, you just pop the end off and it has this cool little hinge thing and now There's a usb c tip to lightning and what if you needed usb c to usb c Well, it'll do that too by popping off the other tip So now you got usb c to usb c and lastly if you wanted usb a to charge your usb c things Which of john as john learned doesn't really work well for your laptop, but it would work for like your Your your well your eye your next iphone certainly Or your ipad would even charge this way boom. You got it. You're good to go. So Handy little cable it's got it's perfect for travel Because and a great thing to leave in your travel case because you've always got all of the things that you would need a lightning c and c And that's the rolling square in charge cable with All self contained it doesn't have like you're not going to lose the adapter to go from c to lightning because it's built into the cable It just swings out of the way it's pretty good And uh as bryman row in the chat points out designed in switzerland, so uh, I believe him makes sense to me I know I know that they after ces they left and went back to somewhere in europe So I think that tracks, but they have they have all different sizes of these in-charge cables So you gotta go check it out as bryman row says. Oh, I like it the swiss army knife of cables. Yeah Yeah, super efficient. It's just simple and smart So I like it I like things like that Because it makes our life better uh We got a couple more cool stuffs found. Yeah, john Sure cool Alex again in discord Man showed us another cool thing using ai this time it is called warp And it is well first warp is just a A terminal app for your mac, right? So you can download that and use it as a terminal But they added warp ai to it which Includes an ai Engine right there in the terminal and what it's great for Is things like saying, uh, I need to convert Dot 7z files to dot dot chd And then boom it comes back and says you can use the chd man tool from the main project to convert these Here's an example command and it shows you the code and you can even copy the code and Paste it right into the terminal and then of course because it's using a transformative ai which means that you get to Interact with it based on previous answers. You can ask the question. Hey, can I make it recursive? And it's like sure you can here's the code to do that um I I asked it, you know, how do I convert three audio files from flak to mp3? And it's like you can use the ffm peg command line tool to convert these and it gave me a command It's like, uh, make sure you have ffm peg installed on your system before running this command You can install it using homebrew by running brew install ffm peg. So Like this is this is one of the killer use cases of ai is being able to like it's a much better search engine this funny lisa And uh, and emily our our niece who lives with us and and i were on the couch the other night and talking about ai and lisa hadn't installed, you know, um, she hadn't launched chat gpt yet. So She did and we showed her a couple things like I asked her I asked chat gpt to some to um Come up with well the first thing I did was I was like, uh, tell me Help me convince my wife that we should only have cats and not dogs, right? Like, you know fine because we were having this conversation. She's like, I don't want to have cats anymore I just want to have dogs. I'm like, well, let's go the other way. So, uh, So I did that and it was like, okay great. And then I said, well add to it, you know Something about Traveling and how cats are easier. So it rewrote it and did that and then I said, okay now write it as a limerick And it did this awesome limerick, uh for for me to read to lisa, which I did and she wasn't super happy about it But later that night I found lisa was using it like a search engine Now chat gpt isn't the best search engine because it doesn't have current data. Its data is about 18 months old but With what bing is doing with what google is doing Leveraging current data and letting an ai Like that's that's going to be another key thing. But yeah, having it I've had it write a lot of code for me I know I said we're going to do this in the next episode. So we'll we'll we'll I'll back off now, but um But if you haven't played with chat gpt, definitely Check it out. So it's it's fascinating to me And it makes life super easy Uh, you know, it takes a lot of the friction out of the creation parts of things. So we'll talk about it next episode Uh, unless you have anything to share about it now john I tried to sign up and I never got activated so All right, well sign up again and then start playing with it. Yeah, it's fun. That's good Yeah, at least I had no trouble signing up the other night So you might have just tried to hit it at a time or check your spam folder like it might have sent you your email in there So uh All right Let's see one last cool stuff found Sure, I'm not sure. I this is I'm not sure this hits our 20% rule, but it's it's a good one Uh for people who need it listener jeff Tells us about creator's best friend Which he says is uh, I struggled for a few months Trying to grab the timestamps of chapter markers for my youtube videos in final cut pro and then finally found creator's best friend Uh, I've been using it for many months now and couldn't be happier the app works in final cut pro and adobe premiere Once you have your video completely Once you have edited your video completely and before or even after you render it all you need to do is click the icon in the menu bar of final cut pro and uh Copy the clipboard and paste it into anywhere and you just boom get all of the chapters magically Through uh right from final cut pro or Or right there. So that's uh, that's pretty good. If you're if you're doing If you're doing anything in final cut pro and publishing to youtube Or any if you're publishing anything to youtube where there are segments to your video putting in the chapter timestamps in To youtube is awesome And it you don't like there's once you get the timestamps There's no magic to it You just put the timestamp in the description and you can see how it's done on our mac e-cab channel If you go to mac youtube.com slash at mac e-cab or simply mac e-cab.com slash youtube brings you to the same place If you look at our full length, you know episode videos We put the chapter timestamps in there, but when they when youtube renders them You can click them and it jumps you to that point in the chapter But it also shows the video With those chapters broken out in the timeline and it will give you the names and it's a it's a pretty cool thing. So Uh nice that they make a tool For that You got anything else for today, mr. Braun No, all right. Well, then it's time to bring the band in I don't really know where we are on time. Actually, I do have an idea. I think we're I think we're at about 110 right now Maybe 109 Ah We had to chop the recording into two because I had to reboot my computer, but it survived the rest of the show so I will chalk that up to The gremlins that lived in my studio while I was gone Even though it's been fine and even though my computer rebooted yesterday like I don't know man But whatever whatever here. We are As we often say on this show in troubleshooting if the problem only ever happens once Don't spend too much time Thinking about it because you might never be able to replicate it to know if you figured out what it was or fixed it so That's where we're at. That's where we're at yo um Our thanks to cash fly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you Make sure you check out the shows that uh that we do that isn't this one pilot pete So there I was dot us my gig gab podcast dot com and also my business brain dot show I I say my that's wrong I do a show At gig gab podcast dot com. I also do another show at business brain dot show There's no my in front of those URLs. I was I was speaking I knew what I was saying most of you probably knew what I was saying just for clarity. There's no my in front of you Thanks for hanging out with us folks. Thanks for checking out our sponsors Of course, we mentioned them in the episode, but check out collide kolide.com slash m g g Notion dot com slash mac e-cab for some ai goodness. That's really cool what they're doing with it Shady rays dot com slash mgp too. I love my shady What's up John if you would be so kind as to lean real close to the mic and tell people those three Three words in your sultriest of voice Don't get caught Later