 Welcome to MacGeekab, and our quick tip of the week comes from listener Rod L in our Discord who shares that iOS 17 adds a new composition setting in the camera setting. So if you go into the settings app, go to the camera section, scroll down to the composition section therein. There is a new level or as photographers seem to like to call it a spirit level setting. And if you turn that on, what it will do is put a little white line or a little line in the middle of a thin white line in the center of your picture. And as you are tilting your phone, it will go yellow when the phone is perfectly level. And that way, and this will happen in both, I believe, both portrait and landscape mode. And this way you know that your phone is shooting a level picture. You can also turn on grid here, which is really helpful for aligning things and other composition options. More quick tips like this plus your questions answered and maybe even some cool stuff found today on my easy for me to say on MacGeekab 1003 for Monday, October 9th, 2023. Thanks folks and indeed welcome to MacGeekab the show where you send in quick tips like that questions, your cool stuff found. We share your quick tips as we've done. We share cool stuff found. We share your questions. And we also try to answer them. Sometimes we even have questions of our own. We string it all together into an agenda that kind of makes sense and really is engineered to keep us all engaged so that we each learn at least five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include be the edit from barebones.com, one of my favorite apps that's always running on my Mac and private internet access VPN where at piavpn.com slash mgg. You can save like 83% off your VPN service plus four free months. You actually get a better deal than I did and it's the VPN I pay for. We'll talk more in depth about each of those in a little bit for now here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Lee, New Hampshire. It's pilot Pete and listeners. I want to tell you something that spirit level on the iPhone. I've known about it for weeks, months. However, I have no idea. You have things like that that you know about to and it just doesn't even occur to you to share them with us. You know what you should do? Share them with us. Right to us. How would they do that? Feedback at macgeekab.com. Wait, did you say feedback at macgeekab.com? That's what I said. Dave, you heard me the first time. Feedback at meekab.com. Meekekab? Easy for us both to say. New lips apparently for both of us. Feedback at macgeekab.com. Oh, dear God, help us. Oh, man. It has been a show already. We probably this might have been certainly one of if not the longest pre-show we've ever had sorting out a technical issue that was exacerbated at least on my part. It was a tech issue that neither one of us caused at least on our local computers with audio. But I had a weird audio issue happening before we even got together today, Pete. And so that was what led me down a bit of a, you know, wild goose chase of like, oh, it must be related to this. And it turns out, nope, it's totally different. Absolutely different. But all the folks that were watching on YouTube, got to discord, got to watch paint dry. I don't know. They got to see the troubleshooting process in action. They were able to tell us where they were hearing that clicking and popping that was ruining our day. Our audio. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. It's fascinating. Fascinating. So yeah, joining the, if you join the calendar at meekab.com slash calendar, because you know, that's what it is. And you'll get, you'll see in your calendar, because it's the same one we use when we're going to be recording the show and you can join our discord or watch live on YouTube or Facebook. And so, yeah, yeah. And if there's other places you'd like to watch live, tell us and we'll stream to there too. I actually, we stream to LinkedIn as well. And there's, there's a small subsection that yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Back to quick tips, Pete. You got some. Yeah. So Keith wrote in and this is the long one. Okay. I don't care if it's some, but he writes in. He said, Hey guys, I have a tail of a lost then found iPhone. Recently I was on my way to work on public transit here in Ottawa listening to podcasts on my way to work while playing some Pokemon Go on my personal phone. I got off the bus and into the LRT station. When my podcast, yes, coincidentally, it was the Mackie cab stop playing. I went to reach for my work phone and immediate really realized it had gone on the Bluetooth range and I'd left it on the bus. Uh-oh. Ouch. Right. Yeah. Since I turned on lost mode with my personal number and proceeded to call the trans transit company to see if they could help. When I got to the office, I checked, find my and discovered something. First it showed my iPhone was seeming in the downtown core, not back on the bus route. Maybe someone found it and brought it with them. I quickly changed the message to indicate that I was available to meet downtown. Tip is here. Secondly, I noticed that find my shows the route the lost device is taking from the time I turned on lost mode. And I followed anxiously and saw that it just kept going away. Then I realized that the bus driver had changed routes and the phone was still on the bus. Maybe someone had given it to him to keep. A while later, it was on the move again on a different route and eventually though it started back towards the downtown core. I once again figured out the route and determined that he would eventually stop a block away from where I was working. The bus pulled up. I saw that he had changed the sign indicating he was probably at the end of his shift. So I acted quickly and ran up and asked if if he had run my route earlier and asked if someone had turned in the phone and he stared at me oddly not wanting to let me on. I told him to wait a second. I turned off the lost mode ping my phone and he said, oh, I hear it. And he let me go get it. It had fallen between the scene and the side of the bus. So you had to be looking for it. Anyways, the useful feature was that I wasn't aware of. It appears to work with air tags as well. So once you put it in the lost mode, he could still see the route that it was taken. So I think there are like about 14 quick tips in here. But the big takeaway for me is that Keith knew about all of he didn't know the one that was new to Keith is the one he wrote us about, right? This is this is to your point before all the things that we already know about. We don't think to share, right? But so the new one to Keith was that it showed him the route. And that's cool. But what was even more important, either equally important is that Keith knew how to use all of this tech. He knew it existed. He knew that in order to show the bus driver, for example, that the phone was still on the bus that he had to turn off lost mode in order to ping the phone. If he didn't know that it was possible to ping the phone. And if he didn't know that you had to turn off lost mode because I didn't know that until now because I've never been in that scenario. Like it's the awareness of these features that made that story end in success, right? Absolutely. And there were some new things Keith learned during the process. And thank you for sharing those with us. But the entire process really speaks to a big part of what value I think this show brings certainly to me. And I think to a lot of you is hearing a story like this. My iPhone currently is not stuck on a bus somewhere, right? It's right here to have it right here in my hand. Like, you know, I shouldn't be holding it while we're doing the show, but it's here. However, this story is going to, you know, swim around in the back of my brain. And then the day that I do leave my iPhone on a bus somewhere and in a panic moment need to convince a bus driver to open the door for me or whatever my analog of that might be. Right. I know what to do because we've talked about it on the show. So yes, feedback at Mackie Keb.com. Please send in your stuff. It really, this is, this is, this is why we do what we do and the value that I think we all get out of it or at least one of the, one of the values that we get. Absolutely. Out of it. Yeah. All right. Next up is RN Doug from our Discord shares just an FYI in case anyone else runs into this after updating to Sonoma. All of the windows would go off to the sides if I left clicked the desktop. So just a normal click on the desktop would scatter all of his windows off to the side. This, the cause of this was a setting under stage manager that somehow became enabled after the update. You can find it in the settings, the system settings app, desktop and doc, and then desktop and stage manager. And then click wallpaper to reveal desktop change from always to only in stage manager. That's interesting. Yeah. And he says what it's worth. I've never used stage manager on this computer. So yeah, good tip. Yeah, that is good. I'm not a stage manager user. I guess that works. You know, obviously people have different workflows and that sort of thing works well for him. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's something important to know because that would be particularly frustrating, right? Right. I don't want my windows back. Where'd they go? Another frustrating thing and this might also fall into the PSA category comes from listener Scott who says, if anyone has iOS 17 and has custom ringtones, don't look at them or change them or do anything with them in settings as they will go away if you do. When he wrote this in earlier this week, he was on 17.0.1. No 17.0.3 just came out just before we recorded this episode. He says 17.01 doesn't or didn't recognize custom ringtones that are actually loaded on the phone. If you have one set and have not looked at it in settings, it will work just fine until you look. So this is like Schrodinger's ringtone because when you look at it, it messes up the experiment, right? Yeah. Yeah. In fact, gosh, Scott, I need to give you credit for this. Great minds think alike. His next sentence is it's Heisenberg's bug. So there you go. Yeah. It's Heisenberg's ringtone. Yeah. Sure. Either one. Once you look, it will now be set to vibrate only or default depending on where you look at it. And he found a Reddit post that talks about this and this user on Reddit tested it, that there is a way to bring them back. And it is quite an involved process. So I will leave that as an exercise for the listener. But there is a solution. Look in Mackiekeb.com for the show notes for 1003 or you can go directly to them at mgg.fm slash 1003. So thank you for that, Scott. Good, good heads up. Yep. Yeah. Don't want to break that. Let's see. You know, go ahead. Do you have something on that? I was just mentioning Schrodinger is always the one that brings me to ask the question. Did Schrodinger's cat get killed with Occam Drazer? I'm just asking for a friend. Thanks, Pete. I appreciate that. It's going to be one of these shows. Oh, it already is. Sorry, not. Yeah, it just is. Right. It's just how it is today. Yeah. You have turned into the tuned into the smart alley geek. Yeah. Well, it's been a punchy morning. That's for sure. Um, Stephen shares a sort of the the quick tip. I think the quick tip that might have started them all or at least started us calling the essential quick tip. It's an essential quick tip. It is definitely a revisited quick tip. We go through this about once or twice a year. But what Stephen shares is, uh, he says, and I'll share it as he wrote it. I know many of us know this because we've talked about it on the show. Uh, he says there is a tip that works for both iPhone and iPad to quickly move around in a text box, push down or hold down on the space bar on the virtual keyboard. And after a moment of keeping your finger down, it turns into a trackpad where you can move the cursor anywhere within that text block. He says, this is great when working on emails and other long documents. Boy, howdy. I couldn't agree more. This is that quick tip where if you show this to someone who has not seen it before, they will never forget you. Uh, and will look at you like you just made fire for the first time for them. Uh, it is, and if, and I know that there are some listeners out there who, for whom you're hearing this for the first time. So the, the, the long and short of it is in a text edit field when you have the keyboard up, hold down the space bar, just push on the space bar for half a second. Well, when all the keys go blank, yeah. Exactly. The letters will, will go blank and then you just drag around like your, your keyboard is a trackpad and watch what happens. The cursor just moves. It's amazing. Works on iPad OS too. Yeah. Awesome. Yep. So thank you for that, Stephen. It's, uh, it is, it is a good one and I am happy to revisit it as often as we do because I use it constantly and I would hate for anyone to go too long without knowing about it. Martin brings us our next one. Yeah. It says, um, you were talking recently about tags inside notes or tags in general in notes being one of the places. Take note tags can cause problems with different, especially older versions of Mac OS. If someone is using Catalina and a tag is placed in a note on something later, the Catalina machine will not see that note until the tag is removed. So syncing for these things, uh, syncing something that's using new features sometimes excludes it from appearing on the machine with old features. So yeah, thank you. Thank you for, if you're having trouble with a tag syncing to a machine that's stuck on Catalina or, or even older, check to see if it's got a tag in there. So yeah, thank you. That's just bizarre. Yep. That shouldn't happen. You know, I mean, we saw it with calendars when they changed and added features to calendar. Like it, it, I like, we say it on the show often syncing is difficult. Syncing is hard. And you have to make, at some point you've got to make it harder. Yeah. Well, you're syncing data that doesn't exist. And so here's the question, right? Like if, if the Catalina Mac has no way of accounting for these tags, then how is it if you make an edit to that? Like, so let's say the Catalina user makes an edit to that note that should then sync back to the other Macs. Well, what's going to happen to that tag? It's gone. Right. You know, it can't send it back. Or if it could, like, what would that mean? Right. And if you're using smart folders, now you've got a real mess on your hands. Yeah, exactly. Assuming you're counting on the tag to make that smart folder work. Correct. Correct. Yeah. Really good point. All right. We're plowing through these. I love it. Listener Rob brings us our next one. He looked at his iPhone recently. He says, I'd done this a while back and forgot about it until Apple showed me again in the iPhone event that the iPhone's phone supports voice isolation for phone calls. And he says this is not a new feature in iOS 17 or even for iPhone 15. But he said, so I'm not sure why they chose to highlight it or showcase it in the keynote, but thankfully as they did, it reminded me of it. The problem he says is enabling it can only be done during an active phone call. And so when you're in an active phone call, go to control center, select mic mode up in the top right and then select your option. You have options for standard voice isolation or wide spectrum, whatever you choose will be the setting for future calls until you change it. You just have to remember that you can't change it during. You can only change it during a call. You can't change it. Like now would be the time I'd want to change it, not when I'm trying to talk to somebody on the phone. Right. Wait, I can't hear you. Hang on while I'm playing with my settings. Or you're having trouble hearing me. It's not so much about them. I mean, it's not about their audience. I can't hear you because the phone is away from my ear while I play with my settings. Well, I try to make it better for you. Yeah. It's a janky user experience. I'm surprised. If someone, I was going to say I'm surprised that Apple has not given us away somewhere in settings or wherever to adjust this. Yeah. Maybe they have. Maybe in the phone app settings somewhere. Something or somewhere else. There's sound settings now. But if you, if you know of a way, of course feedback at MackieCab.com because we want to know. So Dave, forgive me if I mentioned this last week. Yeah. I may have or I may not have, but I'm old so my memory fails me. But I use the AirPods frequently for noise reduction. Yeah. But the problem that I had them set up when I try to have a conversation, it kills the noise reduction. And that's another setting that you can go into your AirPods and and turn off the it's called the transparency mode, I believe. Yes. And oh, and voice, voice sensitivity or something like that. So when you start talking, it takes down what you're listening to be it even if you're listening to nothing, it turns it into the transparency mode, which completely obliterates the or obviates the noise reduction function. Yeah. But that's not that that's not true when you're on a phone call. Correct. Only true in person. I just wanted in person. I just wanted to share because we were just talking about phone costs. I wanted to make sure we were articulating that that. Yeah. It's it it knows when you're on a phone call, not to take your act of talking as as an impact to your to your noise cancellation settings. But yes, otherwise, when you start talking, it assumes that you want to hear what other people say. I don't know why people I don't know why Apple would think that what makes them think that just because I'm talking, I want to hear what other people are interested in what anyone else has to say. That's right. I mean, they know me. Come on, Apple. Yeah. Podcasting for over 18 years about Apple. Like you'd think they would know this about me. Right on. Oh, one last one here in the quick tip section for this week. Another brilliant one. This is super brilliant. Gavin asks, Hey, you ever been trying to clean your iPhone screen but are frustrated that the screen keeps waking up, preventing you from seeing all all the dirty marks in that reflection that you get on a dark screen. He says, and you don't want to turn it. You know, he says you could go into settings and turn off the raised to wake setting or you could power off your phone. But that's annoying to just wipe down your screen. That makes it take like way longer. He says, here's the trick. Lock your phone so that it's not like awakened in an app and then turn it upside down and you can wipe the screen all you want. And it won't wake up. But if it's right side up with the screen facing up, it immediately will wake up when you start touching the screen. It's brilliant. So all you got to do is wipe your phone off with the screen facing downward and this not the screen facing upward and everything is is golden. So thanks for that one, Gavin. Thanks for everybody for all your quick tips today. This is a I love this section of the show. All right. Hey, did you know that over 30 million people have signed up for our next sponsor? Did you know who our next sponsor is? Did you guess it? It's private Internet Access or PIA. PIA is the VPN that I use here. I've paid for it. I am a happy customer and it's because PIA understands privacy and they take privacy seriously. Not only does PIA hide your IP address, it encrypts your entire connection. And this then protects my Internet activity and yours from everyone, right? Your Internet service provider either at home or when you're out and about, right? Network admins when you're out and about at like coffee shops and hotels. You don't know who has access to the stuff that's seen on those networks or really any hackers that are out there just kind of itching to steal things. PIA is also the world's transparent VPN. They never record or store user data, never record nor store user data. This is a big deal. And their no logs policy has even been verified in court. Plus, you also get endless entertainment options. Not only does PIA work with all the major streaming services, but it's one of the few VPNs that supports P2P file sharing too. I know. So you can download just about anything you want and nobody needs to know. You can connect to over 83 countries using their world-class servers and there's a server for every single U.S. state so you can kind of narrow it down and yet still be separate from where you actually are. You got to check this out. I love it. And I really think you're going to love it too. Right now, go to piavpn.com mgg to get a whopping 83% off your VPN service. You're going to get a better deal than I did. Plus, you get four free months with a two-year plan. It comes out to just over two bucks a month and there's a 30-day money back guarantee. That's piavpn.com slash mgg for 83% off private Internet access. Piavpn.com slash mgg and our thanks to Pia for sponsoring this episode. Next up is BBEdit and look, BBEdit, it's one of my favorite apps. If you've listened to this show for any length of time, you know it's running on my Mac. How do you know that? Because it's always running on my Mac. It's part of my start my day script and it's because I use it for all kinds of things. Yes, when I'm in nerdy programmer mode, I use it to do all of my coding because I love the way that it just works and gets out of my way, but it also just kind of sits there and ever so slightly highlights the code just on the screen, doesn't change the disk, highlights my code in a way that allows me to see where functions begin and end, where variables are, it just, it's so smart. And speaking of variables, when I'm going to like type of variable, it knows the names of the variables in that project and will test them for me as soon as I type like the variable delimiter like a dollar signer, you know, whatever it is in that language. It's really cool, but it does more than that too. And I use it for simple stuff all the time because it is a text editor, right? So I get to use it for text. Sometimes I'll copy text from a website and then go to paste it into an email and it's like trying to import formatting from the website and screws it all up. No, no. I paste it into BB edit. That strips out all the formatting because BB edits a text editor then I can copy from there and put it in. I can use it to count the number of words in anything, a document or whatever it is that I open up. And I can use it to compare documents, which is a really valuable thing. I'm using all kinds of things in BB edit all the time. And I think you will too. You've got to go check it out. Go to bearbones.com and you can download a 30-day eval, which you can test out all the features. And then after 30 days, some of the features are paid only and a lot of them remain free. Check it out. Figure out what features you need. Buy it if you need those features. My guess is you're probably going to want to buy it anyway because it's great software and you'll support it. Again, bearbones.com and our thanks to BB edit and the team at Bear Bones for sponsoring this episode. So Dan Thurston writes in with our next quick tip. I realized that if you double tap with two fingers on an app in the dock of a Mac and I'm assuming that's because you can't do it on the screen of most Macs, laptops, it brings up all of the available windows of that particular app or program. Probably a well-known thing, but most to most, but not to me. And that was our point earlier. A lot of things we just know and understand and assume everybody else knows it too, but that's why we share it here. So yeah, double tap on the window or on the icon in the dock and you get to see what windows are available to you. I like that one. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good one. Yeah. Nice bonus little quick tip. Let's go into questions because we've got a bunch of questions this week, Pete. So you want to take us to G. Burley? What's your question? Which one do we want to start with? You already said it. So G. G. Burley wrote in, I think, is the... Yeah. That's the one. Yeah. So this is... I purchased... G. Burley writes, I purchased a Mac Mini M2 and got the base SSD size internally. Now I need help choosing the best external SSD option. I'd like for this external SSD to be potentially my boot drive. I'm considering a 2 terabyte SSD and I want to keep my overall cost under $250. I've seen some YouTube videos where people are using SSD enclosures that paired with some SSD drive that can achieve and read and write speeds that equal or surpass the drive built into the Mac or into the Mac Mini. Any help out there on suggestions for the hardware to achieve my goal? And Dave, you answered this. Yeah. So my gut, because you're going to be booting from this, my gut would say to make this a truly Thunderbolt SSD, right? I mean, you've got Thunderbolt ports. You could go with, you know, a 10 gig USB SSD and they certainly exist and are less expensive because you're not paying the tax. But you're also not getting the speed that you can get with a Thunderbolt connected drive. And again, because it's your boot disk, it's going to be using it for swap as well. I think you're going to want Thunderbolt. That's what I would do. And so with that, I would, I would go with the OWC Envoy Pro FX, a 2 terabyte is 279, so 279.99. So, you know, a little bit on the side of your 250, but you're going to get that, you know, that Thunderbolt speed. If you don't want to go that far and you do want to keep it under, you know, under 250, for 136 bucks, you can get the Samsung T7 SSD and that one is, you know, it's USB. I think they say it's USB 3.2 is what we call that, but it's a 10 gig drive. I've got one of these 10, two terabytes in storage, 10 gigs in speed. So, you know, it's going to be it's going to be fat. You may not notice a difference between this and Thunderbolt. Again, I would go with Thunderbolt, but, you know, the difference between 136 and 279 is, well, it's, you know, it's darn near double, isn't it, Pete? It's almost exactly. It's more than double, actually, but almost exactly. Almost exactly. Yeah, exactly. So, like, yeah, that's where I would that's where I would lean for it is that, G. Burley. I think that's the I think that's the way to go. Boy, that's a nice little machine. Yeah, these these minis. Yeah. Killer machines. Yeah, yeah. I looked I looked at the mini pretty I assumed that I would be buying a mini when I when the iMac here in the studio when the screen died, you know, and it was like, well, and then as I started looking at pricing, it was like, well, I can get this M1 studio on refurb for less and it's more more juice, less money or about the same money and and then actually, you know, as I mentioned, I wanted to getting a new one for the refurb price. So that was even better. But yeah. And my mini just to share it with folks. I run it in the basement. I run it headless and it's my Plex server. I run channels DVR on it. Yeah, it's just a nice little piece of gear that I can connect to from anywhere in the world. Yep. And thank you, Tailskill. Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I know, man. Tailskill makes life way easier. Power on the subject of SSDs and all of that. Listener Dick wrote in and says, I'm struggling with cabling between Thunderbolt 4, Thunderbolt 3 and USB-C says I have the same M2 mini and I have it plugged in to my OWC Thunderbolt 3 dock after having too many problems trying to keep my external SSDs, two of them up and running using USB hubs, both powered and unpowered, says I have one SSD plugged into the empty Thunderbolt port on the dock and I would like to connect another using a Thunderbolt cable with USB to plug into one of the USB 3.1 ports, but I'm not sure if I need a different cable with the two ends or if I can use an adapter to fit the USB port and so OWC's Thunderbolt 3 dock the current iteration has two Thunderbolt ports one and he confirmed this by way of asking his question, one that goes upstream to the computer, one that goes downstream to the in his case to his SSD right and it could be a Thunderbolt capable SSD, a Thunderbolt capable SSD I'm not sure, you didn't mention Dick whether your SSDs were Thunderbolt or USB and you may not have known you may not until this moment in time realize that there was a difference it's good if you don't know by looking at them you might see the little Thunderbolt logo if you don't see that it's probably not Thunderbolt but there's no guarantee so look up the model number online to figure that out because the that Thunderbolt 3 dock that you've got from OWC has two Thunderbolt ports and six USB ports there are two types of them though there are five A ports four on the back and one on the front and each of those runs at five gigabits per second and then on the front I believe it's on the front there is also a USB-C port that runs USB 10 gigabit USB and so it would be worth looking and knowing are your SSDs what is their maximum speed because if the maximum speed of your SSD is 5 gigabits then certainly you could get a cable that connects from USB-A to USB-C make sure it is a USB 3.1 capable cable otherwise it might dumb the connection down to USB 2 which is like you know 480 megabits or about half a gigabit ish and you don't want that but if it is a 10 gigabit then you would need to plug that in to again with the USB 3.1 capable cable into the USB-C port on the front so that you get full speeds and then it would be a C to C cable but again as we talked about on the show not all cables with the same ends are the same they are not all made equal you can have a C to C cable like the one that Apple ships you with your iPhone that will only support USB 2 it will support 100 watts of charging if you want but only supports USB 2 speeds so you got to be really aware of the speeds of the cables and all that stuff so the fact that you are confused you are not alone it gets very confusing amen because you know standards and protocols who needs them who needs them exactly well we have them they are just not very good at articulating that in the cable yeah labeling like you said you may or may not have a thunderbolt icon on the cable and it is a thunderbolt cable well and as we found recently during doing all the tests that I did a cable that is USB 4 capable will work as a thunderbolt cable as well full speeds 40 gigabits a second passing 100 watts of power I have a USB 4 cable that passes 240 watts of power and does full thunderbolt capability but it doesn't say thunderbolt on it and I only paid 30 bucks for it instead of paying 60 bucks because you know that's how that works oh well you got to get a link to that up it is in there I will link to it but I will also link to the episode where we recently talked about that because that I think that conversation was important that is probably a better place you want to listen to that segment of that show and I forget what number episode it was it was sometime in the last 10 episodes but I will find it and we will I will put that link in there so that you can really not just go buy that one cable although in the end that is probably what you are going to do but you are going to know why you are going to buy it which I think is important moving on to our next question Gray writes in and says my 2017 iMac running Ventura 1352 will no longer pair with a bluetooth keyboard or trackpad both input devices are fully charged and are usable when connected with a USB cable I have tried the sophisticated troubleshooting option of turning the device off and then on but I haven't had much luck in further troubleshooting any ideas I got no idea new computer gray alright just kidding so yeah I came up with a bunch of ideas actually a pretty long email detailed back to gray and I will read the highlight points here and things that you would want to do probably not likely but check for interference if you are sitting there with your keyboard next to your computer the likelihood of bluetooth frequency interference is going to be pretty low but I reference back to the fact that we had an LED light bulb interfering with the ability for your garage door open at work on a recent episode that's a whole other question we know that some USB3 hard drives will interfere with the bluetooth connections on a mac so it's possible likely but possible I think it would pair but not be as usable it would be intermittently usable but I think you would get it to pair the next suggestion I have is reset your bluetooth module hold down the shift option and click on the bluetooth icon in the macOS menu bar you should see a debug option in the drop down select that and click the reset the bluetooth module and then restart your mac this is kind of extreme but delete all your bluetooth preferences they are easy to get back so navigate to finer press command shift g type in library preferences and hit enter and find com.apple.bluetooth.plist move it to the trash and restart your mac and get them back and I think he said this was an older mac an intel mac so then try resetting the imax pram and vram and the smc oh yeah I don't have the smc no because when it sounds like hardware sometimes it's not hardware it's the smc system management controller so so try those remove and repair devices kind of sounds like you did that with the power off and power back on but removing them from your bluetooth you're doing that above with your bluetooth bluetooth preferences plist by eliminating that but that may help I got this one when I called mac over my syncing issue just update the operating system make sure you're up to date and sometimes that can fix bluetooth issues sure that's kind of a lazy one I agree he was already up to date like you know yeah so that's not likely but it's something to think about by booting your mac into the safe mode by holding down the shift key during the startup and it will only allow the essential software and such and see if you get your bluetooth issues there external interference we kind of talked about that already so let's see the next one was oh test test on another user account and again as I've stated before my machine I have my name is my one account my other account is shooter as in troubleshooter I like that that's better than test which is an obvious user name so and listen whatever you do if you create that test user make it a password you can remember but don't make it test and I swear my test user accounts passwords are not test I swear please don't check that for me though right exactly and then I would give that troubleshooting account admin privileges that's why you don't want to make it test yeah absolutely yeah yeah you want full admin privileges on that account because you may not you may need like what a lot of the things you shared recover other information and a lot of the things you shared are I mean they're good troubleshooting for this problem but they are also simply good general troubleshooting steps and there might be a time when you need to use that test user account because you can't log into your main user account that you know there might be some startup item or something getting in the way that's causing a crash and so now you need to go and like touch it from the other side and so it needs to have admin privileges but you don't want to make the password test yeah yeah gee maybe test exclamation point I don't know just sure I know make it password oh there you go or monkey yeah monkey yeah yeah yeah and finally a hardware check you know if all those other steps above that I've just talked about don't work for you then consider taking it into to the Mac genius bar and have them troubleshoot it and and see if there's something wrong with it there but um it sounds I mean so I would the things I would add to this are try the keyboard and mouse trackpad whatever it is on another Mac now the fact that it's two devices which simultaneously stopped working in this one specific way tells me it's probably not either one of the devices right but testing them on another Mac especially if it's only one if you only had say you know a bluetooth keyboard and a wired mouse or vice versa you know something you know testing on another Mac just to confirm isolate like that that's honoring the troubleshooting process so certainly doing that wouldn't be a bad thing but I think we know what you're going to find that the keyboard and the trackpad work just fine over bluetooth with any device except this one and that tells me you've got a bluetooth problem if you know the software test the SMC reset all of that doesn't solve it you know for less than 15 bucks you can buy a usb a bluetooth adapter to plug in to your Mac and I've tested these on a lot of different Macs TP-Link makes one but they are like so do brands who have names you've never even heard of look on Amazon for a bluetooth you know receiver dongle whatever you want to call it you can upgrade yourself to bluetooth 5 by doing this and more often than not you just plug it in and the Mac recognizes it as your bluetooth receiver that may be the simplest answer I had a Mac years ago where the bluetooth chip went just you know went to put and so I spent whatever 13 bucks and bought one of these things and plugged it in and never even thought about it again like oh yeah my Mac has bluetooth now you know it just worked so what about so I'm going to hit you with a stump dummy question then real quick so bluetooth 5 I didn't realize we were up to the fifth protocol do you recall some of the features that have been added is it just speed is it better encryption let's let's look here I don't know the answer to this off the top of my head yeah bluetooth 5 is faster in theory than bluetooth 4 was bluetooth 4 maxed out at either 1 megabits per second or 25 if you were using enhanced data rate bluetooth 5 doubles that to 2 on bluetooth le and 50 on enhanced data rate the range also you smokes the range correct it goes from the same county I guess but that's about 200 feet to 800 feet um again you know real best best sort of best case conditions power requirements are lower with bluetooth 5 and so I like for what you're doing it doesn't matter whether you have probably bluetooth 3 would be enough for your keyboards and all of that stuff but if you're going to bother to buy a bluetooth adapter no reason not to make it a bluetooth 5 you know so yeah yeah yeah I'll tell you what though the problem with that is um now it escapes it escapes me the gents name that we just read about the the bus excursion it's going to take them a lot longer to realize yeah yeah that's right your phone's going to make it halfway across town before you realize it's not in range that's fair well but I mean it can look at signal strength it would be interesting to see if Apple is just using a binary sort of can you see it or not versus you know something more like hey this is far away from you now because they can know those things so sure yeah that'd be interesting in fact yeah what is fascinating to me is the technology on keys yeah for automobiles like if you if you leave the key on the roof of your car it won't start right but if you bring it in the cabin it'll start how do it know I know I know it's not bluetooth that's just rf but even still how different yeah how does it fascinating I wonder if it's you know that's a really good question I wonder if there are multiple sensors in the cabin and it is triangulating to see whether the key is not just nearby but where nearby because if you put what three sensors in there I think three would be enough for would certainly be enough to give you exactly like which direction is it and therefore is it in the cabin I have somebody knows let us know in the chat it you know at mackeykip.com slash discord but you're raising the level of complexity like crazy yeah but in a car you'd really want to know you don't want that key on the roof of the car no your host your host yeah that's the nice word for it yeah exactly yep yeah interesting huh so I wonder how we wanted down this rabbit hole sorry I don't know it's fine Gary brings up an interesting question he was talking about name drop which is the new feature in Iowa 17 where you can you know get your phone close to somebody else's and then it'll ask if you want to like share your contact information and that sort of thing which is great but what if you don't want to share all of the details in your contact record because you might have lots of stuff in there that you want to have for you in your contact record but are not the kinds of things you want to share and so Gary was saying maybe you need to create a minimal contact record but of course then you might not get all the benefits that you want like it's not going to see your contacts for various you know services like messages and things like that so here is the thing that many of us don't know about contacts you can do this on your iPhone you can also do it on your mac but on your iPhone if you open contacts and you go to my card which is the one listed at the very top scroll all the way to the bottom of your card and tap the share contact option it's not going to start sharing it yet the first thing it's going to do is present you with all the fields that are in your contacts record your contact record and it's going to give you checkboxes next to everyone all you need to do is make sure the checkboxes are on for the fields you want to share and off for the fields you don't want to share and then click done and then at that point it brings up the share sheet to share your contact record it'll do this every time that you share your contact on your on your iPhone but it will remember what you chose the previous time and near as I can tell name drop inherits that setting so you can be selective with what you share yeah that's nice that's a nice feature because I used to have to go I think he originally said you know do you need to do I need to create a duplicate right with less information right and it's like oh the name drop choosing fields is awesome yep yep so you get to pick and yeah you're good to go yep listener Richard has another one of these sort of curiosity questions Richard sent us a screenshot of his iPhone which had a dialogue over the top that said diagnostics are in flight perform the following send feedback ignore and he said what the heck does diagnostics in flight mean and we have an answer for you this is part of the share your share your diagnostics for lack of a better term share your app logs and activity with developers right and so that you can you can share analytics with developers when an app has a crash or at other times to help them right and Apple does confirm that that this is in fact a you know shared anonymously but you know it doesn't you may choose to turn this off and certainly you can and yeah so it's settings and privacy and then you go to diagnostics and usage and you can choose how you want to do that so yeah oh sorry not diagnostics and usage analytics or analytics and improvements I think how is it in Iowa 17 it's let's see settings privacy and security and then we scroll down to analytics and improvements and then you get to choose how you share all of this stuff with Apple and also other developers so yeah you get to share with app developers so if you turn that off then you won't then your diagnostics will never be in flight right well actually in flight but that's well that's different Pete this has nothing to do with airplane mode right yeah yeah yeah absolutely well so Barb wrote in with a crazy problem yeah she her junk mail said going into her grocery ads assuming she has a folder named grocery ads all their junk mail started going in there and she's trying to look for any suggestions why or how did my junk mail start going to the wrong folder yeah I can only guess as to why this is happening but when when you set mail up you can go in when you set an account up in mail you can go in and specify which mail boxes are used for things like the archive or the sent box or the trash or the junk mail box and you can change these if you go into mail on your Mac you go into accounts or settings first then to accounts pick the account in question and then there's three tabs across the top the middle one says mailbox behaviors that's where you set all this stuff up go and look there to see if the junk mail box is set to grocery ads if it is change it to something like the junk mail box and then hopefully that's where these things will go you can do this on your iPhone as well it's also in settings you go into settings and mail and then once you get that up in mail you go into accounts again choose the account in question and from there you can tap it's a little bizarre you tap on the account name which is usually just your name then you go to advanced and from there you get to see these same list of mail box behaviors and you can choose so hopefully as you peruse this setting on all of your devices on one of them you will find it set that it's putting junk in the grocery ads and it will change it hopefully hopefully the weird thing is is when that stuff sort of starts happening when you have no recollection going around in your mail settings but every now and then some stray tron gets swapped out you know I got that iPhone 15 pro Pete and I've been using it so did you drop it or what? what happened? so yes I did drop it because you say in the notes that the titanium is soft so I decided because this is titanium and Apple talked about how strong the titanium is and how great it feels in your hand and all that I'm like well I'll forgo a case on this phone so as soon as I got it I put a tempered glass screen protector on the front because I still feel like I need to do that I don't know if I need to do it or not but I'm fine with it so I did that the moment I took it out of the box and pulled their little protective thing off put the tempered glass on there and that was it you know I used my MagSafe accessories I popped a little MagSafe pop socket on there because I don't have a I didn't have a what should I call it the oh snap case the snap 3 pro or whatever and so it was fine like I could use my wallet I could use that great second day I had it I was walking across the driveway the phone hopped out of my hip pocket landed on the driveway man okay great so I pick it up I can tell you where it landed it landed on the corner of the phone because there's a little nick now in the titanium where it landed on my driveway from a three foot drop out of my pocket and it's like well guys WTF like it's titanium you told us not to use it with a case now since then of course Apple has said oh yeah by the way the titanium will discolor if you use it without a case the titanium will blah blah blah it's soft titanium is soft folks I wonder if it's because Apple recycled this titanium 37 times and maybe it lost some of its tensile strength oh I mean it's supposed to be a very hard metal that's why they make jet engines out of it for good to say it turns out that it's more about being lightweight which which definitely the 15 pro like I noticed that as soon as I got it but it's more about it being lightweight than it is about being strong steel is stronger than titanium based on the bits of research that I've done so so now my phone is in a clear spec case so I can you know admire the titanium color that I bought but not not risk damaging don't let that horse back in the barn Dave it's such a minor little nick but it was just like guys come on man I had a heartbreaker this week too I actually dropped my MacBook Pro about 3 feet it hit the corner nice big dent shaved up on the quay I actually wound up taking a it was jagged I wound up taking a hasp and filing down that corner a little bit now it's shiny but yeah it did hit the tile and it dented now the beauty is right with SSDs that doesn't seem to be an issue anymore but fortunately it didn't crack the screen or having right and it did it would have been worse I think had I not had my clear plastic protective case on it right it hit hard on the tile I go man it's heartbreaking to have a an otherwise pristine machine get it to you know it's the first scratch on your new car right oh yeah that sucks yeah yeah absolutely absolutely yep what are you gonna do I mean I'm gonna put a case on it like I always have and I'm not gonna worry about it but it's just like guys like come on come on don't tell us one thing and then like yeah it's bummer I want to take a minute Pete we have some cool stuff found to go through yeah and before we do that I want to take a minute and thank everybody who is a premium subscriber and whose contributions came in during the past week here I say it every week and I'm right at least I try to say it every week this show the way this show survives is by a mix of a lot of different revenue streams that you know our sponsors are certainly a part of it and you are premium subscribers are also a part of it this is absolutely an optional program it is here it was created 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2000 satoshis from squeegee this week so thank you for that too that was done I believe with the fountain app so if you're interested in that you can go check that out we'll put links to all this stuff that's how you do it and those are always at mackeygab.com so now it's time to talk about some cool stuff found Pete oh yeah man get your wallet out folks not too bad this week no there's some good ones this week Rod L was the MVP of cool stuff found really of other things I think we opened the episode with that spirit level tip from Rod as well you're crushing it this week man Onyx for macOS Sonoma is out and that is important Onyx is smart it won't run on an operating system it's never seen before and it will tell you this when it launches so if you had tried to launch Onyx to do some trouble shooting on macOS Sonoma prior to whatever it was I think Wednesday or Tuesday of last week you would have gotten a message you gotta go download a new version and now you can go download that version so we'll put a link in the show notes to where you can go get it but yeah Onyx for macOS Sonoma is out and I am happy about that Rod also sent in recently a cool stuff found for Revolver which is a plug-in for chromium browsers so for like Chrome of course or Edge he says we just set up 40 cameras for a manufacturing facility they wanted a couple of big like 75 inch TVs that could show all the different camera views we set up a mac mini running Edge we open the tabs that we want with all the different camera views so you're using something that puts the camera views in a browser window opening each camera up in tabs and then you run this Revolver plug-in which automatically rotates through your open tabs and we have Revolver rotate through them at whatever interval we desire it works for different kinds of real-time dashboards and that sort of thing he says and now we just have a rotating thing where you can see the cameras because we have them up in browser windows my guess is if your camera your security software allowed you to have say you know set up multiple views where you had four cameras on one tab one tab and four cameras on another and two on a third then you could rotate through that because Revolver is just rotating through the tabs so that's one of those again sticks in the back of your head until you need it and you're like wait there's a way to do this that's simple right? I like it and Rod's about to hit his three cool stuff found limit I think that's right, you're right Rod also shared with us this week Tressorit T-R-E-S-O-R-I-T and more specifically send.tressorit.com he said I was listening to Makikeb 1002 where Dave you were talking about sharing a 200 meg file with the live chat I was in the post-show but I did share a 250 meg file with the songs that you hear throughout Makikeb and he says I thought I would share something I use and have good luck with and it is this Tressorit the send functionality of Tressorit he says is a great way to send large and confidential files you can password protect them end-to-end encryption and you can send for free files up to 5 gigs in size so yeah I know so I don't know that any of the things we've talked about so far here on cool stuff found are gonna cost anybody anything Pete no coin yet no coin yet it is it's fair we were talking about mice not the bad kind of mice but the mice that you might use with your computer and Targus I recently got a chance to check out the Targus ego flip ego no not ego flip you're not gonna flip your ego around that's a different thing ergo flip eco smart mouse easy for me to say which is it's built from eco friendly materials recycled materials it is built to be ergonomic it's got like a nice curve to it so that it sits up on one side so when you put your right hand down on it your hand is at the right angle and you you're not like twisting your arm of course if you were to put your left hand on it though Pete if it was somebody say like you who's left handed or like me who often likes to use the mouse with my left hand anyway it would be awful for your hand right no this one is magic the base of the mouse is separate from the top of the mouse and you simply pull it off it's connected via magnets you pull it off you turn it around you drop it back down and now it's perfectly suited for your left hand it's amazing 60 bucks yeah that's awesome and if you buy one of these this is the one time you can honestly say you have mouse yes that's right that's right because nobody has mouse that's right that is correct but this time you do this time you might unless you bought it unless you're buying it to like replace another mouse and then you'd have to throw out the other mouse but yeah nobody has mouse that's correct that is correct I'm trying to think of other other cool stuff out yeah so we talked back in episode 994 Pete and I mentioned park wiz for you know booking parking for like airports or other things like concerts and things like that Lou in Vermont and that's actually Lou's handle that Lou goes by and I'm assuming it's true says says I checked it out with a dummy reservation and I need to tell you that on-air parking will do much better for you price wise than park wiz we've used on-air a couple of times in New York City the last two years for a one week stay and didn't pay more than $110 for the week yeah which is really good because you can find parking for 110 a night in New York oh easily oh yeah so yeah for long term stays on-air parking is a great one since this came in I was going to a concert in Boston and booked parking late I normally book parking when I buy my concert tickets because it's you know it's how I work and I did not for this one and this show sold out it was at a small theater and it was in like Brighton so there's not a ton of parking like public parking lots that you can reserve in advance there there's street parking but you know we were going to be running tight on time I think as we were getting there and I wanted to know we were going to park so I looked at park was everything was sold out other than something that was like a mile and a half away I was like yeah no on-air parking nothing and then I for whatever reason I don't know I started searching and I saw spot hero I'm like well let me try spot hero I forgot something about spot hero Pete park was an on-air parking are using parking lots that are parking lots like as a business venture right spot hero is like the gig economy of parking spaces so it's more social engineering and social media in this yeah it's it's like you know the Airbnb of of parking spaces and sure enough I found on it was a duplex or a triplex or something an apartment building ish maybe a five minute walk from where we were going so closer than any of the lots that I would have bought through the other things and I paid $13 for my spot the other lots would have wanted $25 and they you know they were very clear about it it was like look there's six parking spaces around our building you can only use three of them the other three are used by other people so here's where you can park and they had pictures it was super clear really easy that I you know pulled up to the house and I drove behind it I'm like I hope this is right and sure enough I get back there and it all looks right and everything worked out so spot hero is probably what I'm gonna try for a lot of things I know it's the it's the Airbnb of parking spots exactly yeah someone has two spots at their house and they can give up one correct coin on it correct yeah make a little bit of coin yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah all right while we're here we've had some cool stuff found floating for a little while and listener Ben said back in 987 you were talking about different find my things to use for your wallet or whatever and he tells us about the pebble bee card which of course will link in the show notes and it has a rechargeable battery because that's what we were looking for in 987 and he says the rechargeable battery last 12 months the charger is proprietary so it's not as elegant as a cheap charger and you gotta not lose it for the 12 month period this is gonna be the key folks take a picture of what drawer you put it in and save it with the name battery charger in notes or you know pebble bee charger which was a quick tip we got a quick tip that's right and he says it's better than a card that must be disposed of every couple of years or whatever so yeah thank you for that Ben that's great I like it the question is you may or may not know is it find my yes oh no that's the whole point it's find my yeah yeah yeah absolutely yep that's that's the yep sorry I should have articulated that no no worries that was essence so it's not a separate app yep no no not a separate app and then listener Jed tells us we've been talking about a lot about shortcuts lately he says I was poking around for a way to schedule send schedule sending text messages like you can for email and although I'm not there yet it led me down a rabbit hole to a pretty geeky tool that seems perfect for cool stuff found it and it is data jar for shortcuts this provides persistent storage for shortcuts it's an app you download the app onto your phone and then you use shortcuts to populate data into it and pull data out of it it's synchronized using iCloud so it's now on all of your devices it understands JSON which is a very standard way of sending data around and if it's built for shortcuts and it works fine right inside your shortcuts it's got integration there it is free with a tip jar so if you down I would say download it mess with it and if you start using it well by all means send them some coin and it is because it syncs with iCloud it's sort of naturally built to support offline storage so you have access to your data even when you're in airplane mode or otherwise not connected and then as soon as you're connected it will sync and push what you put in there up and grab what other devices have pulled down so if you're doing stuff with shortcuts data jar may well be the magic little thing here and I can see why he would have found this looking for scheduling a send because if you have one shortcut that takes the message that you typed and says puts it in there and then you trigger another shortcut by a different means to send something well now it's got to go get the data from somewhere but it's a bit of data that the other shortcut could see shortcuts only have local storage now with data jar that first shortcut can push this into data jar the second shortcut can go and retrieve it because it knows how to do that and you coded both of them so you know what you called the variable and boom you're in good shape so yeah and it looks like it's really easy to use I mentioned that it uses JSON it does but it is really built to be used inside shortcuts and so you're going to have an easy time integrating this even if you've never even heard of jason before j-s-o-n javascript object notation I don't know something like that sounds good to me sure sounds great you know that sounds good Pete the band you got it oh how did I know I know I see jeds been struggling with what I've been struggling with for years too because it was just a throwaway line there in his email I'd love to be able to schedule text messages to go later if I'm on a jump seat at 3 o'clock in the morning I'd like to be able to send a text that arrives at 6 which is before I land but after somebody wakes up so it's not to disturb them in the middle of the night shortcuts wouldn't do it because you aren't online your phone would need to be online in order to accomplish that it needs somebody to be able to tie into all the phone network but to have a server to grab that message store it and then send it as if it were from me so you would need an account all kinds of things all kinds of hurdles to be hurtled so there are most sms addresses which would be like your phone number also have most providers offer an email address that will go to sms but if someone replies to that they would be replying to whatever email it was sent from but you could schedule an email send from an always on device somewhere and have that send and then it will send a text message but it's going to be a little people aren't going to receive it it's a little different that's all but it'll be received as a text it would be received as a text oh that's brilliant it's a workaround I could put mail butler on my server in the basement and send exactly yeah I don't know that's as close as I'm going to get man it has been a morning of troubleshooting Pete I feel good though this kind of thing energizes me even though it wears me out we've had enough troubles for one day nobody knows the troubles I've seen except everybody who was watching on youtube and discord with us because you played along so thank you for playing along whether you did it live with us or for all of you who listened we recorded it for you since we saw you weren't all here we recorded this and that's why we pushed it out thanks for hanging out with us thank you for subscribing to the show if you're not if this is just your first time listening or if you listen as a one-off please subscribe to the show that way you're always going to get it and then share the show with a friend please please please thank you to all of you who have already shared the show with your friends thank you to all of you who are a part of this MacGeekab family that we all get to be a part of in any way even if you're the only thing you do is listen you haven't yet sent in an email or anything totally fine we're happy to have you and very thankful to have you it's not even happy I mean it is happy thankfulness so thank you so much for listening and thanks to CacheFly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you thanks to our sponsors of course piavpn.com where you get all those great discounts on your VPN plan and to barebones at barebones.com of course you can learn about all our sponsors at macgeekab.com slash sponsors those guys check them out Pete you gave me a new shirt recently and it says something on the front can you read for the folks who are just listening I'm squinting didn't know there was an eye test today but I think it says don't get caught it does it does thanks for hanging out with us folks see ya later