 It's time for Matt Geek, Gavin. I will bring us our quick tip of the week. When you are doing a screenshot, you can use Command Shift 3, but if you use Command Shift 4, Command Shift 3 gets you the whole screen. Command Shift 5 gets you the whole new interface that was brought to us recently, but Command Shift 3 still works. So does Command Shift 4. What's cool about Command Shift 4 is it brings up the crosshairs where you can draw on the screen and pick an area and that that's the area that will be screenshot. However, if you do Command Shift 4 before you start drawing, hit the spacebar. That will change it from crosshairs into a camera and that camera as you float your mouse over different windows will let you pick an entire window from which you wanna grab a screenshot. Click it, boom. You've got your screenshot of that window isolated from the rest of the system with a little bit of a drop shadow. It's perfect. More tips like this plus your questions answered today on MacGeekGab994 for Monday, August 7th, 2023. These folks and welcome to MacGeekGab, the show where we take quick tips like that from us and from you. We also take the questions you send in to feedback at macgeekgab.com plus some cool stuff found. We try to answer your questions. We share the quick tips and the cool stuff found. The goal is we put them together into an agenda such that we each have the best opportunity to learn at least five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include PIAVPN.com slash MGG where you can save 82% off your VPN service plus for free months and ZockDoc.com slash MGG where you can sign up for free and find and book a great doctor today. We'll talk more in depth about each of those for now, here, back here. Finally, in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in New Hampshire, it's Pilot Pete. Good to be back to get into the rhythm of things again after a couple of weeks off. I think this is the longest. I know we released an episode last week. Of course, it was the one that we recorded at MacStock and I'm glad that we had that and did that and it was releasable and we've heard from so many of you that it actually worked. I was worried that it was an atypical episode for us so I wasn't sure how it was going to be to listen to. Obviously, we did some quite a bit of audio processing on it and even yes, some editing. I think I spent more time putting that episode together post-producing that episode than I do recording and producing an episode like we do today and I need to knock on wood because otherwise I'll have to spend like four hours post-producing this one because of the Karmagods. I woke up early last Friday morning in my hotel room in New York and probably spent four or five hours pulling all that together but I'm glad we did it and I'm glad it paid off. So many of you have written in and said how you did enjoy listening to it which is great. We'll talk more about MacStock in a little bit but because of that, I think this is the longest break in 18 years that I've taken from doing MacGeek up. Although I know that's not true. It feels like it but I've taken more than two weeks off in the past. I don't know, it just felt like a long break. It's the longest I've done a while. You certainly paid the price for catching up. I did. Right, with all the emails and Discord and yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's fine. It's the price of time but really like I don't, I enjoy it. It was more that I paid the price with all of the work that I have to do because I was traveling and so I had, this week was just a lot of catching up with everything including our listener questions in to feedback at macgeekab.com of course. Wait, where did they send them? Feedback at macgeekab.com? That's what I've said. It's feedback at macgeekab.com yeah. Okay, if you say so. They can also get them there in Discord at macgeekab.com slash Discord. Come join us live during the show. And live in between shows too. There's a lot of help to be had in there. It's a great community. It's really and yeah, yeah. I mean, Mac stock, we get to see a slice of the macgeekab community there and it's equally as wonderful. So yeah. Really? But we do have, so we have a bunch of quick tips to go through. This is half of what was in the queue. So let's see what we can do. Donna brings us our next one and reminds us how valuable it is to long press on our iPhones. Long press on, I would say all of your apps but certainly you're frequently used apps. The ones that you're using and making use of most of the time because most apps if you long press on them will give you options to get directly to specific features and it might just be the features that you want. Donna shared examples. She has a folder of her Dine and Shop apps and she sent us screenshots of a lot of these things and it's just different apps that she uses for dining and shopping. And a lot of them when you long press, you get to jump to the rewards section or viewing nearby locations or ordering with a mail app that she uses. You can get to the inbox of things. All kinds of, but very specific to that app. It's crazy. So I was doing apps here that don't have particular functions but here's a good example. Dunkin' Rewards, press and hold that and it comes up, scan and pay. You don't have to open the app and wait for it to boot and boom. Bingo. Press and hold it, bang, zoom. Yeah, right. And that's the kind of thing that's super fast and my guess is the Starbucks app would do the same thing. I don't shop at Starbucks because yeah, it's not my thing, but... Donna. Donna. Nice. Yep. Chicago Tom tells us or reminds us and that's the beauty of Quick Tips is the things that we all do automatically that when someone else sees it that doesn't do those things goes, oh my gosh, right? And I feel like doing this show has trained me to be more aware of those things and my guess is, in fact, I know based on the fact that we have more Quick Tips than we know what to do with, it's trained all of us to be more aware of those things and you folks are sending them in too and it's great. So Chicago Tom says, I've heard a lot of hand-wringing over the organization of the new System Settings app in Ventura. I kind of laugh whenever I hear this. He says, because it's been many years since I spent much time digging through the menus in the Settings app for my Apple equipment no matter which version of the relevant OS I am using. Did you know that you can use Spotlight to search for anything in the Settings app and the entry will pop right to the top of the Spotlight list then you simply press Enter and it opens the Settings app to that preference pane. For someone like me, he says who is constantly adding keyboard shortcuts, this is a wonderful convenience. I think that even veteran Apple users who know that this is the case forget to use this feature. You are 100% right and this does work. So long as you have this selected in your Spotlight settings because you get to pick what's in Spotlight. So he's right. If you, by default, command space bar, bring up Spotlight, type in sound, you will see the sound settings pane appear, you hit Enter and boom, it brings you right to sound. Of course, we talked a few weeks ago, another way to get to sound is the option and the volume keys. But if you wanna get to, it doesn't matter, they're all there, energy saver, accessibility, notifications, network, they all will show up. So I've got a question when you're done with your thought. Okay. What I wanted to share is system preferences or system settings allows you, Spotlight allows you to configure what appears in Spotlight. By default, it's everything. However, if you go into system settings, system preferences and go into Spotlight, there is a search results column tab and you can choose which things will and won't appear, which categories will and won't appear. And one of those is your system setting. So you can make sure that that's there, but you can also turn things off. Like if you don't want your calendar events and reminders showing up in Spotlight searches, remove that and it will clean up those results for you making Spotlight even more valuable. So that's the bonus quick tip. What's your question? Okay, so for example, you talked about keyboard system settings. When I go to Spotlight and I start typing keyboard, I have keyboard clean tool app, then keyboard system settings, then keyboard maestro. Is it the frequency with which you select something that moves it to the top of that list or is there a way to get my system settings to the top of that list? I believe it is decided by the OS and we don't get to pick. Figures. Yeah, I'm looking here. I'm still, of course, on Monterey here in the studio, but in Monterey's Spotlight preference pane, you can't drag the order of categories. You can choose which ones appear and you don't. I was assuming it was the frequency with which I chose the... I believe that is correct. Yeah. If I'm all was choosing keyboard cleaner over keyboard system settings, then that's going to come to the top. Yes. I believe that is correct. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, yeah. But yeah, I have experienced that too. I don't know if it's just the frequency. I have a feeling there are multiple factors, different heuristics that Apple's using to pull it together. Yeah, whether or not it's a Tuesday, whether it's an odd month, those important things. Yes. Well, but that might actually not be so far from the truth. Too far off, yeah. If you have calendar events in there, it might prioritize those that are coming up, right? See, and a joke becomes a reality. Yeah. Yes, yes. Speaking of jokes that become reality, you had a lot of people like to make jokes about chat GPT, but you had to solve a problem for you, didn't it? I did. So everybody just sit down and relax. About 30 minutes I'll be done with this story. Just kidding. This is the quick tip. So yesterday morning, I published my show. And I noticed, oh, look, I've got two plugins that need updating. I'm like, okay, update them. And I hit the little button and they updated. And the next thing I got was, this website has experienced a critical error. So you're talking about in Wordpress. Yes, I'm in Wordpress. Yup, for you, so there I was, so there I was. Yes. Okay. So you broke your website by updating plugins. Yes, I did. And no matter what I did, now when I went to my website, there was no way to log in. No way to do anything except get this little error screen. I'm like, ah, crud. So fortunately I have FTP access. And so I'm FTP'd in there and I looked at it. And it's, I think it said go to the forums or something. So I went to the Wordpress forums and it's like there's a lot of reading to be done there. They're not good. So I went, well, what can I do? Not in this amount of time. That's right. Yes. I got stuff to do. Yup. Also your website is now down, not just for you, but for everyone. The world, yeah. Correct. And I've got a brand new show out. So there it was is, there it went. There it went. So there it went. So, so now what to do? So I went, ah, I got a brilliant idea. I'm gonna call Dave. No, it's 7.15 in the morning. Next brilliant idea. I mean, you could have called Dave. My phone would have been on do not disturb because 7.15 in the morning is the middle of the night for me. All right on. So chat GPT. Hey, I got this error when I updated some plugins. What should I do? Oh, well, you should go in via FTP, go to your plugins directory, find it this way, disable all the plugins or the plugins that you suspect. And I guessed right on the first time, which was two, I guess which one. And I renamed the directory and it allowed me to go back and log in. And then I said, okay, good. Now, how do I restore it? And it went follow these steps and restore to yesterday's good. Boom done under 10 minutes. I was back up and running. Thank you chat GPT. So you shared that story with me and even said, I don't know if we should mention this in the show. I'm like, oh my gosh. Yes, like this is exactly the benefit of chat GPT. And private tech support, baby. Here's why I know we are good to mention it in the show. Because you're right, most people aren't going to find themselves in your exact scenario. Although I would venture to say you're not the only one here that needs to do these kinds of things. But after that, I needed to go and fix the problem that many of you have noticed over the last few weeks that the ads have been super freaking loud, right? And it's because of a workflow change that I did the way we produced the show. I used to record the ads and then record like a video. Now I don't record the video. I just do the ad. I pre-record the ads. I edit them. And then I merge them in as to a movie with a single pane. And I use FFM peg to do that. And I realized, oh, okay. If those ads are coming in super loud, it's because my old workflow was helping to reduce the volume of them by about 50%. And the new one isn't doing anything with the volume. It's just taking the audio file and essentially playing it through StreamYard into the show. And so I thought, wait a minute, Pete just used chat GPT to solve his problem. Let me use chat GPT to solve mine. So I just asked chat GPT, hey, I'm using the command line FFM peg, which by the way, several weeks ago, it chat GPT helped me build to begin with because I don't have all the switches memorized. And I asked it, I'm like, hey, I wanna reduce the volume on a thing on this workflow. How do I do it? And it was like, sure. Here's how I would reduce it 50%. Of course it was like, make sure to change that number to whatever you want. I'm like, no, actually that's the number I want, believe it or not. And that was it. It just works. So hopefully today, when we talk about PIA VPN and ZockDoc, you'll hear it at an appropriate volume that matches the rest of the show. So yeah, chat GPT to the rescue. It saves, not only, you put it in the title you put in the agenda was chat GPT saves the show. Not only did it save your show, but it saved our show here too. Right, it's private tech support. And it's, the nice part about it as tech support is even when it gets it wrong, it's, you can tell it. Yeah, you tell it, here's how it didn't work or here's the error I got. It goes, oh yeah, okay, well then this is what's happening. Exactly, because it is iterative. It knows what it's doing and what it has done. So yeah, yeah, yeah. Although I do have a fist shake for them too when I haven't gotten to it just real quickly is when I was using Mac GPT, all of a sudden on August 1st, it says, hey, you used your quota, you're done. I was like, wait a minute, it just paid today. So I'm having to go back. Gotta put your API key in, yeah. Oh, maybe that's it, I need to regenerate a new one. Okay, no. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I also used it last night. I was helping the local, one of the local theaters, the Rochester Opera House with tuning the sound for their production of SpongeBob. And they use this mixer, the Midas M32. It's a pretty common mixer. It's same as the Berenger X32. And it's a fine mixer and very flexible, but that means that it's, you know, there's a lot of features and there's many things about this that I don't know and one of them was routing. And I was like, oh, let me look this up. And so I started on my phone. I was working with the house engineer and I'm like, oh, we can figure this out. So I started on my phone like typing in like to Google what I would search for. And I'm like, wait a minute, hang on. And so I just went to the chat GPT up on my phone. I typed in, how do I on the M32 do what I need to do? And it was like, oh, great. Go to this settings pane, do this, do this. And it was like, oh, holy crap. Like there it is. It's right there. So, yeah. This is like the internet all over again. You know, if we only had a way to look something up. Well, now if we only had a way to make something work that we just looked up. It's true. It's true. Yeah. Yeah. Greg, back to quick tips, reminds us as a little bit of a PSA he says I was texting in the messages app on my phone and wanted to move the, you know, you can hit the little apps icon so you can get all of the apps that you have. He says, I wanted to move the third app that I had there, which is the one I use the most often. I wanted to move that all the way to the left. And I was surprised that I could not because the photos app and the app store icon app that are in the first and second position appear to be permanently in those positions. And I had no idea that this was the case. And so when I got your email, Greg, I went to check it. And sure enough, Greg, you are correct. You cannot reorder the first two leftmost apps in the iMessage or messages app little list there. Those are permanent. The rest can be reordered. So maybe there's two quick tips here. There's Greg's PSA about the first two can't be reordered. And then there is the quick tip about, but you can reorder the rest of them. And that's a good tip to know. I didn't know that either. Right, exactly, yep. Yep. So yeah, good stuff, good stuff. Yeah, well, then Gary wrote into us. He says, hey, MGG crew. So I did my weekly restart of my iMac M1 running Ventura with Ventura 13.4.1. And I noticed that clean my Mac 10, or X, sorry, clean my Mac X, menu bar was displaying a notification with the message, time to juice up. And say, Gary's magic keyboard is running low on battery and showed I had 19% battery left. I did not even know or was aware that this feature existed. When did MacPaw add that? This is an interesting and good surprise to start my Sunday. I think Apple should have done this instead of waiting until your battery is at 2%. Fair. And saying device battery is very low, right? Just thought I'd share this interesting little find and not sure if it'd be considered a quick tip or a cool stuff found. So it's kind of both because it's quick tip with a cool stuff found which is clean my Mac 10 or X. In either case, enjoy, keep up the great work, says Gary. Thanks, Gary. Yeah, that's, I agree that Apple's battery notifications are not early enough. All right. And as a little bit of a PSA, they have changed, they have removed our ability to see the battery life left in our air tags. We used to be able to see those. We used to be able to see where it was. Was it full, was it half, was it a quarter? Now you just get a notification when it needs to be changed. I think you can ask the S lady what it is though and she'll tell you. Oh, is that right? I believe so. Oh, interesting. During the ad, I will find that. Okay, well I'm reading the ads, you do that. Yeah, okay. Because yeah, but that almost, yeah, the notification is way too late. It almost reminds me of the, for those old enough to remember the early 70s, Bill Cosby routine about driving around in the bump science. You know, he said, you wanna be helpful. You should say, put a sign up that said you just hit a bump. Yeah, right, right, yeah, exactly. Right, yeah, there's the bump sign. Yeah, yes. So my advice to all of us is to keep a stock of CR2032 lithium three volt coin batteries around because when Apple gives you the warning that your air tag battery is low, it's time to change it. They're not kidding, yeah. Yeah, quick tip on that. I got one literally like at the airport while we were, when we, like the day we were leaving for our like trip to Italy was like a 10 day trip or whatever, back in January. And it was like, are you kidding me? Like I didn't bring one of these with, okay. And it was fine. It did last the trip, but like I knew that it was time. So yeah. Quick tip on those batteries. I think it's the Ever Ready brand. Any of them, Duracell does it, they have the bitter stuff on it so that kids won't swallow them like pills. That also prevents making a good contact. So if you take a little file and file, just scratch lightly the edge of the battery where when you put it into your air tag, those little metal things touch, it will allow that battery to be a successful replacement because I put in a brand new battery and the air tag wouldn't respond. It was dead. And I went on the internet and said, oh yeah, if you gotta scrape off the bitter taste. And once that's gone, it'll make good contact. And it did, it worked like a champ. That's good. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Crazy. On the road to Macstock, and I mean literally in my rental car on the road, driving from Chicago North to Woodstock, I had the pleasure of bringing Allison and Steve Sheridan with me. And so it was about an hour drive or 50 minute drive or something like that. And we were chit chatting and we're nerdy people. And so we were having essentially this kind of discussion. And Allison of course does the no silicast over at Podfeat. And Allison said, hey, I got a question for you. She says, I was trying to sync a new book to my Kindle and I can't do it with the hotel Wi-Fi because it requires the captive portal and the Kindle doesn't do that the right way or at least she couldn't get it to do that the right way. We had already checked out of the hotel that we were in Chicago, we're moving to Macstock. So it didn't, there was no hotel Wi-Fi to try that and troubleshoot with. She's like, and I can't seem to get it to connect to my phone's hotspot. And I was like, well, that's weird. Okay. And me, of course I'm driving, right? So like, there's no looking up of things for me, at least not safely, and I chose to be safely. Give me that, let me look. Yeah, let me look at everything. Right, exactly. And so, you know, we're just chit-chatting about it. And Allison says, hey, I got it. And I was like, really? And she was like, yeah, I turned on the in, when you go into enable the hotspot on your iPhone, there is a setting there that allows you to a toggle called maximize compatibility. And this is in settings and personal hotspot on your phone. And if you talk, as soon as she toggled it on, boom, the Kindle could see it. And so we were speculating as to what that did. And my speculation, which was dead wrong, was that it changed it from ad hoc mode to infrastructure mode, which is the way a Wi-Fi access point can advertise its capabilities. I thought, well, maybe the Kindle ignores ad hoc things and only associates with infrastructure things. That would be kind of a weird choice for Amazon to make. But who knows? That's not it. What it is, is maximize compatibility shares the hotspot over both the five gigahertz and 2.4 gigahertz radios. Whereas without that on, it shares it only over the five gigahertz radio. Of course, the Kindle has a 2.4 gigahertz only radio in it. And so here was the solution. So if you wanna turn on your phone's 2.4 gigahertz radio as its hotspot, it's on for connecting to Wi-Fi networks if it has to use that, of course. But for sharing, it's only on when you turn on maximize compatibility. It will burn more battery according to Apple, which is why they default it to off. But yeah, there you go. Talk about stumbling across the right answer. Right? Oh, yeah, I love that stuff. Love, love, love that stuff. Yeah, yeah. All right, what else we got? Well, Todd wrote in and he said, my younger, this is brilliant, just brilliant. Todd writes in and says, my younger son rented this truck and he showed us a picture of his U-Haul truck and a trailer. Got it, okay. Yesterday. And he says, we had some challenges lining up the hitch in the trailer the first time. Finally, got smart and started a FaceTime call with him. I stood at the back and held my phone showing the trailer hitch and the trailer and he used his phone as a backup camera. Worked like a charm. Dude. I love this. Yeah. The only thing, if folks, if you're going to do that stuff, obviously put safety in mind. Don't stand between the trailer and the truck. Right, right. You know, that kind of stuff. But that is, Yep. I just, you know, I used it to film things, you know, like behind the boiler when I needed a serial number, you know, that kind of stuff. Yeah, yeah. As a FaceTime call to line something up. I love it. My son and I, we did that recently with something where I needed to be in one part of the house and he was in the other part and we used FaceTime. I think it was with the boiler to like, I was, you know, adjusting the water pressure in one spot and he was, you know, reading the gauge in another spot. And I'm like, wait, we can talk about this, but let's turn on our, you turn on your camera so I can see the gauge too. And maybe I can catch it before, you know, there's some, it was the same kind of thing. But I don't know that I would have thought to use it for a backup camera. That's really smart. Yeah. Also think about the fact that learn how much of a lag you have on any given FaceTime call if you're trying to time things because You just hit a bump. It's, you just hit a bump. That's really what it is. That's the title of the episode, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I thought it was gonna be so there it went, but you just hit a bump seems to be, well, it seems to be the theme. Yeah. You just hit a bump as a theme. It is a theme. All right. In our Discord, my face is too big. That's the person's name. Not, not, not. Get away from the camera, Dave. Just pick up. I don't know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I can't back up. Said, you mentioned in episode 991 about having some of your finder woes, having the finder show you exactly what you want depending on the context is super helpful. I found the keyboard shortcuts to change the finder view modes very helpful. Command one through four will switch through the view modes respectively. Says I'll generally be jumping between the list and columns mode depending on the context. A few other finder shortcuts I found helpful. Command shift period will toggle showing hidden files and command control one through seven will adjust how the finder sorts your files. So command, this is all in the finder. Command one through four changes your view mode between list and column and icons and whatever the other one is. And then command shift period shows or it toggles whether you're seeing hidden files in the finder and you can, if you're a Unix nerd, you can remember that hidden files in Unix start with a period. So that's how you remember that one. And then command control and one through seven will adjust the sort of your finder files. I stumbled on another one accidentally just the other day. I use list view most of the time in the finder. I hit command plus and my list view went from taking up one line per item to having the height of two lines, the icon on the left got bigger. There was no additional information other than a larger icon, but it just, it adjusted the line spacing if you will to be double in list view. And then command, and I say it's command plus, I'm sure, excuse me, I'm sure that would work, but it really, I'm just hitting command equals without you don't need the shift key. Command equals, which has the plus above it enlarges it, command minus, shortens it. What's fascinating to me is when you do this in the finder on both Monterey and Ventura, I see the, let me make sure I'm saying this correctly. Yeah, I see the view menu flash when I hit command plus. And that tells me that it's using a command that I could choose manually from the view menu, except there is no command with plus or minus in the view menu that is visible by me. And so I have no idea what it's doing when it's flashing that view menu, but certainly it works. It seems like it's a hidden command in the view menu and even the option key doesn't make it appear. So I've got a quick question on that though. Yeah, man. Do you remember what you were trying to do when you accidentally discovered this? Yeah, I didn't have the finder, that's a great question. Wow. Yeah. I didn't realize I had the finder up front. I had it up front on one monitor, on my other monitor, I had, I believe it was a PDF up and I wanted to zoom. I was trying to zoom in on the PDF. So yes, there's the bonus quick tip that Pete you were digging for is, what else does command plus or command equals and minus do? And in, I believe it would work in preview. I'm sure I was in PDF expert, but I know that it works in preview. Command equals and minus or command plus and minus will zoom or out zoom your thing. So yes, that is what I was trying to do. Thank you for asking that. That's the hidden tip. That's the thing, that's the beauty of these quick tips. Like here I am talking about this thing, didn't even dawn on me to share that, by the way, here's a hidden quick tip. No, that's why you have the local moron on the show. Hey, what are you doing? We never say that, Pete. That's not what we say. You won't hurt my feelings. All right. Speaking of things that were accidentally discovered, listener Glenn shares with us. He says, I just accidentally discovered that on Mac OS, if you quickly move your cursor back and forth several times, the mouse pointer on the screen will grow very large temporarily. This is handy for large monitors and older eyes or multiple monitors when you can't find the tiny little mouse arrow. This reminds me of vigorously moving an old rollerball mouse around on a mouse pad and listener Ben pointed out that this has been there since 2015 when Mac OS El Capitan was released. You can disable this feature in accessibility. You can also increase the size of your mouse cursor by default, which can also be really handy if you have a large monitor setup. But yeah, go shake your mouse and you'll see it get larger. It's pretty, pretty amazing. All right, look, we all know that our ISPs know literally everything we do online, right? It's true. We might as well be handing our laptop to strangers and letting them open up our browsing history. This is why having a VPN is awesome because it protects you when you're doing all the things that you're doing. And it's also great for when you travel, all of those things that I wanna tell you about not only one of the best VPNs out there, but the one that I choose and the one that I even pay for, PIA. PIA stands for Private Internet Access and they take privacy seriously. Not only does PIA hide your IP address, it encrypts your entire connection and this protects your internet activity from everyone, your ISP if you're at home, network admins if you're at work, the folks who run the whatever network like the coffee shop or the hotel or any of that stuff. And PIA is the world's transparent VPN. They never record or store user data and their no logs policy has even been verified in court. PIA is available for all platforms across all your devices and just one membership can protect up to 10 of your devices at the same time. Right now, go to piavpn.com slash mgg to get a whopping 83% off your VPN service plus four free months with a two-year plan. It comes out to around two bucks a month. You can't beat that. 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, get the VPN that I use and our thanks to PIA for sponsoring this episode. You know that feeling you get when you finally find the thing you've been searching for on the internet after spending hours researching and reading thousands of reviews? You find it, this thing, whatever it is, maybe you need like sparkly shoes to go to a fish concert like we were just at or maybe you need some kind of hat to stand out, right? You like it, it checks all your boxes and it has five stars. Oh, it arrives in like 48 hours too. So why is it that you can get the most random, wonderfully reviewed thing from around the world in just two days? But if you wanna see a good doctor, it can take forever to get an appointment, not to mention how do you know if they're even good? Thankfully, there is a way and it's called ZockDoc, our sponsor for today, a place to find and book great doctors who actually have amazing reviews, many with appointments available within 24 hours. ZockDoc is a free app where you can find amazing doctors and book appointments online. We're talking about booking appointments with thousands of top-rated, patient-reviewed doctors and specialists. You can filter specifically for ones who take your insurance or located near you and treat almost any condition you're searching for. They all have verified reviews from actual real patients, not bots. I've used ZockDoc and you can too. It's really amazing and it works so well. So go to ZockDoc.com slash MGG and download the ZockDoc app for free. Then find and book a top-rated doctor today. That's ZocDoc.com slash MGG. And our thanks to ZockDoc for sponsoring this episode. And hey, while I've got you here, I have another podcast recommendation for you. Leo Laporte, who we all know, is the host of a show called This Week in Tech, probably one of the longest-running tech news shows in the world. They started This Week in Tech in 2005, just like we did here with Matt Geekyub. And in the 18 years since, they've covered every major tech story with some of the biggest names, the smartest people covering technology every week. It's always a different round table, a different panel of experts talking about the week's tech news, and they have a lot of fun while they're doing it, while we're doing it, because I join them sometimes. It's very informative and you'll go away after every episode knowing a lot more about what's happening in the world around you. They deal with some of the biggest issues in the world today, not just computing and Windows and Mac and Linux, but AI and Twitter and X and Search and Social and on and on and on. Of course, it's all for you every week. This Week in Tech, find out more by going to twit.tv and subscribing to This Week in Tech. If you would please, and our thanks to Leo and the team for doing this swap with us. So, Siri is a little less than co-operative. Sorry, I just might've activated a bunch of people's equipment. She will not tell me anything but the battery level on my phone. And maybe I'm just asking it wrong. I asked, you know, what's the level on my air tag for my wallet? What's the battery level for my wallet? And everything kept coming back to the same number. And I thought, oh, good, I'm at 89%. No, no, that's actually the number on my phone. So, if someone has a better way to ask her, I don't. Yeah, I don't think it's doable. So, just go to Amazon and order some CR2032 batteries. I need to order more. I just used my last one recently. So, I'll put a link in the show notes to whatever I find and order and we'll go from there. Right, and one other real thing. Quickly, Porthos John in Discord put something up about for cleaning battery terminals. He said his dad taught him to use erasers. Pencil erasers. Pencil erasers, sure. That that does a nice job of cleaning off the terminal if your terminals aren't good there. I don't think that'll take the bit or off the batteries to make them work but I don't know, I haven't. MN Searcher, also in Discord, says that rubbing alcohol will remove that bitter coating off of batteries. That's probably safer to do that than by scratching it, yeah. Yeah, I would think so. What could go wrong? You know, you see, you short-circuit the battery. I had an issue when we were in Philadelphia. So, I wanna talk about Macstock in a minute. We were at Macstock and then from there, I went to Philadelphia and actually met Lisa sort of on the way. We drove down to Philly, saw a couple of fish concerts in Philly and then went to New York and saw a few more fish concerts before we came home. And one day in Philly, we decided to do a food tour because those are fun. We like food. We like food tours in different cities. It was something to do during the day. So, we did this. It poured. I mean, like it poured like you read about. But really, it only poured while we were walking the 20 minutes from our Airbnb to the starting point of the food tour and then walking back. It rained during our food tour, but it did not pour. But it was fine. If you've never walked around in a city in a pouring rainstorm, I highly recommend it. And we had our rain codes. So, we were protected-ish. They only protect you so much, as you know. Right. I love the experience of walking through a city in the pouring rain. I don't know why. Maybe it's just, maybe I'm weird. Our whole family has come to really like it. I mean, we don't choose to do it, but you find yourself in these scenarios and then, you know, that you do it. And then it's like, actually, that was really kind of nice. So, we had that experience. It was fine. We went back to like take a nap or whatever before the fish shows. And I plugged my phone in and I woke up from my nap with an alert on my phone saying, it was like an emergency alert. And it said, cannot charge because the lightning connector got wet. You need to wait several hours in order for it to dry up. And I was like, okay, well, I mean, that holds up. Like it checks out. The way I put my phone in my pocket, it is like top down in my pocket. So, if there was water that got in, it would have been right there on the lightning connector. It would not have dripped out. So, okay, fine. So, whatever, like I had enough battery, it was fine. We went to the show, came back from the show, plugged it in, same thing. Like, okay, this is not good. So, I found, I dug in my bag and I keep a like a MagSafe battery pack in there that was fully charged. So, I used that to charge my phone overnight. Then of course, I just charged it the next day, you know, on the stand. So, I was like, that was fine. But then the next day, a full 24 hours later, no. Like still bad. And I'm like, uh-oh, this is a problem. So, the first thing I did was schedule the Genius Bar appointment for when we got to New York because I knew that I'd be able to get a Genius Bar appointment in Manhattan. Hoping that I wouldn't need to use it. And I started thinking, I'm like, okay, well, wait a minute. You know, Lint gets into my lightning connector on the regular and I will dig it out. I usually use like a little like toothpick or something to dig it out. I didn't have the right toothpicks. I had toothpicks with me, but they were too thick to like get all the way down. So, I did the thing you're not supposed to do and this is why I was reminded of this. I used a paper clip. Do not do this. My phone survived this, but you know, putting metal into your lightning connector, especially if there's water in there. Like, I don't know that this was the smartest thing for me to have done. And I dug out a ton of Lint and I was like, okay, this is gonna solve the problem. Same message. Like, okay. Well, maybe now it actually needs to dry. Like now that I've gotten the Lint out of there because the Lint was holding water, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So I got the Lint out, but it still didn't help. And then I went on YouTube. Oh my God, how do I fix this? And somebody was like, oh, take some cotton and like mash it in there and really pack it in, then dig it out. Leave it in for like a few minutes and then dig it out. I'm like, okay, I can do that. So I didn't have cotton, but I had like, you know, like toilet paper or whatever, which is really thin and I could mash it in there. Yeah, very absorbent. Exactly, right. And so I shoved, I mashed that in there. I left it in for five minutes and then I used my handy paper clip, of course, too. Actually, I didn't even use a paper clip. I think I was using a safety pin because I didn't even have a paper clip with me. Like, I was just doing all the wrong things. I already had a Janie Spar appointment. Like I had already kind of punted on this. And I still have the same phone folks because digging out that cotton, problem was solved immediately. So whatever sensor was wet needed to like dry out and maybe after pulling the lint out, it would have eventually dried but putting the dry cotton in there or the dry toilet paper in there really kind of did it. But that will teach me to make sure in my travel kit I keep a plastic something that will fit into a lightning port to clean it out because I don't wanna be in the position where I am convincing myself again that it's okay to use a safety pin to do that. What could go wrong? Actually, I would have tried another method. All right. To go into the bathroom and pull the hotel hair dryer out and blow some warm air up in there for a while. Yeah, yeah. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe, yeah, I could have tried that. There was a hair dryer in our Airbnb. But that wouldn't have gotten the lint out. So it's good that you got that out anyway, but... Correct. All right. Now take that safety pin and go for your belly button, Dave. What, what? Get all the lint out. Oh no, Pete, no. You know what? I'll do your belly button next year's max stock when we're together there. How's that sound? Hey, you're a nice looking guy, Dave, with a hard pass. Oh boy, this show just took a horrible turn. Let's get out of here. I did want to share, you know, I shared a little bit about max stock and the vibe at max stock in the intro to the episode that we recorded there when I realized I had to introduce our guests because I didn't introduce our guests on stage, at least not initially, because everybody already knew who everybody was. Max stock isn't a conference where you can get a lot of guests a conference where the attendees and the speakers are separated from each other. And the only time you see a speaker is when they are introduced on a stage that you can't be on and, you know, all of that. That is not the vibe at max stock at all. Max stock, everybody is equal. Everyone is, you know, we're all, we all eat breakfast and lunch and dinner together for the most part. We are together like all the, even as a speaker, and I spoke twice at max stock. We did our session, you know, that you heard, and then I also did a session about Synology and network storage and like fun things that you can do with that. But other than when I was on stage presenting, I was sitting in the crowd like everyone else learning from the other presenters and learning from the other attendees. They really did a great job with the schedule this year. I thought Pete where they had a 15 minute break between each session. That was nice. Yeah, it's for us to like decompress. Of course, if you needed to get water, you need to pee or whatever that was fine, but really those just became. Ask questions of the presenter and go, wait a minute. Yeah, okay. Or other people like that, you know, every sessions would, you know, sort of spur a conversation and then, you know, and then you would just chit chat. And I mentioned how I was really behind on work this week. I knew that I would have some pockets of availability to work, you know, while I was with Lisa in Philly in New York because she needed to get some work done too. And so we had a couple of mornings where I knew we were just gonna carve out and get some work done and that was fine. I had planned, I had assumed that I would also be able that by the time I got to Philly, I would be caught up on everything at that point because I'll be at Macstock, I'll be alone in a hotel room, I have plenty of time to get work done. I couldn't have been more wrong. From Thursday afternoon when I got there and went to Barry's barbecue to Monday morning when I woke up at the crack of dawn to drive us to the airport, I had zero time to myself. And that really speaks to how immersive Macstock is. I mean, we would, like I said, we did breakfast, lunch, and dinner and the conference together. The conference provided, your conference ticket included lunch, you would get breakfast, most of us would get breakfast at the hotel. Most of us would also choose to just go to the same place for dinner. And then we would go back to the hotel lobby after dinner. And tear that place up. And tear that place up until we were just utterly exhausted and I would go to my room and I'd be asleep, like barely by the time I opened my door to my room. And it was just repeat for three days, which is awesome, like I love that. Now, when I got to Philly, the first thing I said to Lisa was, I kind of already, like our first morning here, I sort of need time. She's like, actually, me too. She's like, I didn't really get anything done this weekend at home. I'm like, perfect. Because... Let's work. Yeah, let's work. And we were both so much happier to do that. And then, like I said, we did our food tour in the pouring rain. It was perfect weather in the morning while we were working in our hotel, of course. But yeah, so I don't know, this was your first Macstock pizza. It was, yeah. So I did manage to attend Barry's barbecue at his home many, many years ago. I want to say probably 20, was it the first one? Okay. Yeah, so it was like nine years ago, I think. Yeah, so I happened to be on a layover in Chicago and was literally down the street from O'Hare Airport. Got in an Uber with my first officer and we came down and I think we guested with the gas and guy and had a great time. But that was only the after hours or pre-hours social time. So I didn't get to go to Macstock itself. This was my first Macstock. I didn't know what to expect in many ways. And I got to tell you, like you put it before, it's like family and getting there, except family that treats each other nicely. And we found, or I found that the intimate environment that we were in, there were I think 75 people, certainly less than 100 at most. And I found it to be really enlightening and a warm welcome from everybody to get to meet so many people that are listeners and shows that I listened to and I actually found some new shows to listen to. I am just, I don't know what to say, except thank you to the warm welcome to everybody for the warm welcome I received being there. And it was fun making new friends and seeing old friends and being on stage with everybody. What a warm welcome we got as a Mac Geek Gap Caucus. And like you said, it was equals. People from the audience were up on stage asking questions and interacting with us. It was... Yeah, the best, one of my favorite parts about Macstock. And of course, this is true everywhere in life. But it is especially, it's true at Macstock, but it's also like welcomed at Macstock is no one is the smartest person in the room or at the very least, I am never the smartest person in the room. There is always something to learn from the people on all sides of you. Just turn to the person to your left, your right, the person in front of you, the person behind you. Doesn't matter if they're on stage or not. They have something to teach me and I love that part of Macstock. It really is part of the vibe. And let me add this, for those, and you and I both know there were a couple of people there that were clearly the smartest people in the room. Yes. But you never made to feel that way. Like, there's none of that. Yeah, yeah, there were some very smart people there. This is true. Yeah, yeah, there was no question I was not the smartest person in the room. That was the, which is, I love, like I love being able to learn from people. And especially when somebody teaches me something, I didn't expect that person to teach me. I love that especially. And one last thing, you commented on this and I had no comparison because it was my first expo, was the presentations. They were all outstanding. I was just blown away by the fact that not one of them was substandard or, okay, you know, didn't get that everyone was as good as or better than the next. It was amazing to see these presentations come off and go, I'm just going, wow. I agree. And, you know, there was a nice accident that happened. The venue that they did this at, the Wi-Fi there worked great for your iPhone and would not hand out an IP address to laptops. I don't think this was intentional, but by golly, I would make it intentional next time. And this is part of the fact that I, part of the reason why I didn't get any work done while I was there, I couldn't just sort of half check out of somebody else's presentation. There was no quote unquote multi-tasking, exactly. Because I couldn't, I mean, I could use my laptop, but not on the Wi-Fi. Certainly, if I had an emergency, I could have like connected to my phone and tethered and all of that stuff, but I didn't and so I didn't. And it meant that I had a much easier time engaging with the presenters and my guess is that was true for most of us there. And I really, what a wonderful serendipitous scenario that could easily be, and I'm sure for some was- So, Mike Potter, if you're listening, make it happen again next year. Make it happen again. Well, or just remind people, like remember how great it was when we didn't have our laptops? I mean, it's easy enough to just leave it, like my laptop was away most of the time. You know, like, yeah. Yeah, unless I was taking notes on it. I tried to take notes on it, but that's the other thing, he handed out books, little notebooks came with the package and I wound up writing a bunch of notes in that. I used it, it was great. I do have a travel related quick tip. I mentioned that I drove Allison and Steve in my rental car to Mac Stock and then of course you and I took the rental car back to the airport with Roger Harmon who did all the recording for the caucus episode. And I did not, you know, you get into the rental car and there's like the little toll thing on the windshield and you can flip that open and then by flipping it open. Yeah, you pay, but you pay a per diem that's usually like 13 bucks a day just for the privilege of using it and then whatever the tolls cost you. You don't have to do that because most of the easy pass or whatever automated tolls will do pay by plate and they will bill your rental car company and then your rental car company will bill you with their surcharge built in. But you don't have to do that because what I do is I take a picture of my rental car's license plate and I make sure I have that in my phone and then I put a reminder in my phone for the day I get back to log in to whatever state's toll system is there and most of these toll systems will allow you to register a car to your account for a period of time and it's specifically built for rental cars and of course, Illinois does this. So I registered the car I had for the period of time that I had it and put in my credit card and it was like, yeah, we don't have any tolls for you yet. I'm like, that's fine, you will because it takes their system a little time to catch up and just last night I got an email from the system it was like your card was charged and I looked and it was like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. So I paid like the $2.50 or whatever it was instead of $13 a day times four days plus $2.50 plus probably another $5 of surcharges from the rental car agency. So that's my travel quick tip for rental cars, always do that. I've been doing that for years. I did that in 2019 at Mac Stock and I've done it in other cities. So like it works every state I've tried it in in the United States over the last certainly five years and probably more would be the way to do that. You just use their pay by plate system and you should be fine. The other thing, Pete, I ran into, when we got to New York, our Wi-Fi and our Airbnb was awesome and Philly, which is great. We got to New York, we stayed at the residence in in Times Square, we checked in, what's that? I've been there. Yeah, it's fine. It's an old hotel, but it's in a great location especially for concerts at Madison Square Garden and theater shows up on Broadway. It was kind of halfway in between four blocks to either place, it was perfect. I made a rookie mistake, Pete. We got to the room, we brought all our luggage in, parked the car, unpacked everything. I'm sorry for your wallet. Yep. You parked the car in New York? Yeah, yeah. That's as much as the room. It was, yeah, it was more. But use parkways to find parking in New York ahead of time, you will save money. But so we got there and it was as a residence and it has like a fridge and a little cooktop and stuff. So we brought a lot of the groceries that we had from Philly there so that we'd have like little snacks for when we got back late after the shows and you know, those sorts of things, it was great. Had a little more room, which was nice. We unpacked everything. The last thing I did was set up my laptop and that's when I realized the Wi-Fi in our room was awful. And I got on with their tech support who was useless. They're like, oh, well, you're not connecting to the right network. I'm like, nope, this is the only network that's here. And I looked in Wi-Fi Explorer and I saw that I had a very weak connection to a 2.4 gigahertz access point. And I could see the five gigahertz access point for that network, the Marriott Bonvoy network or whatever it is. But it had like a 1% signal strength so I wasn't gonna attach to it. And I'm like, all right, so I took my laptop and I went out in the hallway and I found on the other side of the floor was the one access point they have on the floor there. And I'm like, are you freaking kidding me? This sucks. Like I need to get some work done. I needed to download, you know, all the audio from the Mac stock thing. Like there was no way this was gonna, I could like, oh my gosh, what have I done? So I go to the front desk and they were very nice. The staff at this hotel was awesome for everything, not just this. And they were like, we can move you to another room. Like, well, I'm gonna check the Wi-Fi in another room first. So meanwhile, Elise is packing up everything that we had just unpacked. She's packing everything up, you know, so that we can move rooms. I go to another room and the Wi-Fi there was good, but like the couch that we were gonna sit on like at night when we got back from the shows was literally falling apart. I'm like, okay, well, unless they're gonna put a new couch in here, we're not gonna take this room. And I checked another room and the Wi-Fi was like, ish. You know, I was like, okay. And I'm like, all right, well, I guess we move to that one because it's better than this one. We packed everything up and then I'm doing my dummy check, Pete. And I open the drawer next to the bedside table. There's two drawers, next to the bed, in the bedside table. The top drawer, of course, has the gift from the Gideons. And then the second drawer down has an ethernet cable in it. And I thought, wait a minute, wait a minute. There's an ethernet jack on the wall in this room. Hang on. And so I pull up my laptop and my dongle. I plug in 100 megabits bi-directional, clear as a, you know, perfect, right? Like, no, it has been so long since I've needed an ethernet port in a room and even longer since one has actually worked that it did not even dawn on me. I had an ethernet cable. I travel with an ethernet cable. But I just... I don't have an ethernet port in my computer. Well, I have one in my dongle. I have to do the, you know, the... Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I, like, it didn't even, it had been so long, it didn't even dawn on me to try this. And I'm like, we're staying here. And it was in that moment that I wasn't sure whether or not Lisa and I were gonna need to hire separate attorneys because the look on her face after packing up the room and then being told we were not going to be moving was not my favorite look to get from her. But we got through it. And everything worked out great. And so I used the internet access sharing on my Mac to share the ethernet signal over wifi to all the other devices in my room. And I just told my, oh, I gotta tell my laptop that it's okay to go to sleep now. That reminds me. But, you know, I told my laptop don't sleep when the display is asleep. That's how you tell it, don't sleep. It's a weird setting and energy saver. But I mean, I did that. And then that was our, you know, I created our wifi for the weekend. I knew I wouldn't have any interference with the wifi piece. Right. But yeah, try that ethernet port. I was just shocked in 2023 that A, I needed to augment the hotel's wifi because that just hasn't happened for me in so long. It's been so good everywhere that I stopped checking when we would check in. But clearly I've learned my lesson. And not that long ago, that was the only way to get in a hotel room. I brought along one of those little, what's it called? It's that little cube. It was an airport express. Little travel router. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So. All right, so that's what I got. We do have time for a couple of questions, Pete, unless you've got more to add to your Mac stock travel segment. No, let's do them. Let me find Chris. Chris, come in. Yeah, let's go to Christopher. Yeah, yeah. Chris wrote in, hey, a scam protection. My wife is not very tech savvy. Okay, speaking of divorce attorneys. Yeah, it occasionally winds up on strange websites that exist for nefarious reasons. Recently, while we were together in our office, a huge warning alert popped up on her screen. You know the one, threatening all sorts of harm and to call the number below. A news article today described an older couple being scammed out of 30 grand. I cannot believe what they asked these people to do, but they did it anyway. Any one of the requests to me would have sent up red flags. Where is the common sense? I got a personal story about that one too. Stay the phone with me, ask your husband to sit in front of the computer, go to your bank, yeah, yeah. My concern is how to protect her from these scams. Do you have any recommendations? I installed CleanMyMac 10, ran malware scan and nothing. Then I installed malware bites, nothing again. I considered limiting her to using the iPad only, but I've seen similarly warning message there. Any thoughts? This is definitely one for don't get caught. And Dave, before you answer, I'm gonna say this falls into our show from a few weeks ago. Beware the Conware. Beware the Conware, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, so what you're describing here, Chris, is most of it will fall into the realm of cleverly coded pop-up windows, right? With the pop-up blockers that exist in Safari get most of these, but there are definitely ways of coding things to get them through. It's a cat and mouse game, right? Apple puts up the walls, the coders get smart and figure it out. If only everybody used their powers for good, but we don't live in that world. But there are other ways. And one of the most common ones is leveraging Safari's local notifications. Websites, with permission, websites can send you notifications that appear like the native normal notifications in notification center on your Mac. And because you're used to trusting things in notification center, we are more likely to trust those things because they are in notification center. You will be asked for permission to enable these, but that permission can also be done in a misleading way where you're like, of course I want this, and then you do it. And I've seen some of these notifications where the website will use the icon of like system settings so that you are even more likely to trust the little thing coming in. To see these, to see what you've allowed on your Mac going to Safari, settings, websites, notifications. That's where you can see where these are configured. It will have a list of websites where you have either allowed or blocked for on a website by website basis. You can also set some global options. There's a checkbox, allow websites to ask for permission to send notifications. Disabling that might help. It will keep the JIT websites from asking too, but maybe that's okay. Then there is also a checkbox there for share across devices that can help to kind of share those settings amongst all of your devices. These kinds of notifications are not possible on iPhone or iPad to my knowledge, but hopefully somebody out there will tell me if I'm wrong. Another setting that, again, it's desktop only is the pop-up windows setting also in Safari settings websites. And it works similar to the notifications one where there's a list of websites that you have either allowed or disallowed specifically, and then you get some global settings as well. One of my favorite is the wrong word, but one of the most clever implementations of malware, especially in Safari, is extensions. I have seen people with extensions installed that are definitely malware. Now these are things that usually I would expect like Clean My Mac or Malware Bytes to catch, but you can look too. Again, Safari settings this time go to extensions. This will list all of the extensions you have installed and there will be checkmarks by the ones that are enabled. And this is worth looking at no matter whether you think you're having a problem or not, even if you're not having a problem and even if there's no malware installed, simply knowing what extensions you have allowed in Safari can be a really helpful thing just to see and be like, oh wait, I don't need that one anymore. Let's take that out, or oh wait, I forgot I had this one, I should re-enable it. So yeah, that's not a bad thing to take a look at every now and again. Right? Yep. I consider myself at least on the edge of being a power user. I would agree with that. I would say I have one website in Safari notifications that I allow to send me notifications and that's drive.google.com because I don't want to file changes, it goes up. And otherwise, I don't even, I don't use those notifications. Now, you may need them for your work or for whatever reason and that's okay. So as long as you know what you've got there and let that happen, that's good. There's a setting in there that if you talked about it, Dave, I missed it while I was looking this up. Yep. Under Safari settings, websites, notifications. At the bottom, there's also allow websites to ask for permission to send notifications. I did mention that one. Oh, you did? Okay, all right. So if you wanna check that, they can't even ask. Can't even ask. That's right. You can still set websites. Like if you know that you want a website to send you notifications and you would have to know that the site wants to do this because with that check bar off, you wouldn't know this. You can right click on the website in the URL bar in Safari and go to settings for that website. And then you will see whether it can, actually I guess notifications doesn't appear there. You get pop-up windows there. But no, you don't get notifications there. All right, you can control the rest. Christopher, I would go in and uncheck even allowing Safari to ask your wife for notifications. But yeah, and then the other thing, anybody at Walmart or Target or any of the big retailers, if you're listening, please don't let people buy gift cards itself, check out. That will solve 50 to 70% of it. Make that a cashier, because someone wants to buy a $400 gift card and go, okay, you're not doing this for computer support, are you? Because you do know that you can't get computer support there. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. My mother-in-law got another call from someone purporting to be Apple support. And she kept them on for, she goes, oh, I noticed a scam. So she kept them on the phone a while and dragged them along. And then she was gonna call Apple back and mess with them some more. And I'm like, you do know that wasn't Apple, you're not. Well, you know, she did the important part, Pete. Yeah, well, she did get hit once before and she did go to Target and kept them on the phone. And she didn't realize it until after she'd given them the first $300 or $400 gift card number. They said, oh, when we found another problem, you need to go back in the store and get, and that's when she realized. But the other problem they did is she allowed them, she gave them her Apple ID and she allowed them to control her computer screen. So we went, there's no telling what they've got and we went and shut down all our bank accounts, her retirement access and all that sort of stuff so that, and then re-change all those numbers and passwords because there's no telling. They could have drained her entire retirement account. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, yeah, you don't know. That's right. Once you've got access to your passwords on your computer, you could be hosed. So never give someone access that you don't trust. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And no personally, maybe. Yes, yes. Yeah. All right, we have time for, I think at least one more. Pete, Adam wrote in and asked, can I use a dock that normally supplies power to a laptop? Can that safely be used with a desktop Mac like my M1 Mini? I don't want to start pushing power into a port not meant to accept it but I do like the options for expansion. So Adam, here's what you have to do. Go get a paper clip or a safety pin and start sticking it in there and see what happens. No, no, no, do as I say, not as I do, Pete. What could go wrong? So I answered Adam in this way. And again, you know, maybe this is bad practice. I have used a powered hub slash port on both my iMac and my laptop. These things seem to be smart enough to figure out which way to send power, how much to send. I mean, it's pretty astounding that I can plug my iPhone into an 85 watt power supply or a five watt power supply and it knows not to burn it out. Yes, it does. You know, when you stop and think about it, all the different sizes cubes and USB ports and all it just works. And so Apple has done a good job in their engineering department to keep things from overvolting and over and undercurrent. So Adam, I don't know what to say except I have used without penalty of death to my computers, the various ports and hubs pushing power in both directions. Oh yeah, I have powered hubs and docks on all of my desktop computers. Yes, I wouldn't hesitate for a minute. Yeah, I agree 100% Pete. Yeah, yeah, the device's power delivery is a protocol, a negotiated protocol, right? And so that both sides of the equation talk to each other and decide whether power needs to be sent. And if so, in which direction it needs to be sent. And how much? And how much, right? Yes, that's right. That's one of the beauties of all these pieces of equipment anymore. It just works, be it your your AirPods, your phone, your whatever. So, but no, I just, it's made us lazy. I mean, even more so for me, I travel international, often I'm in, I've got 220 versus 110. I just plug that stuff in and trust that it isn't gonna burn my stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the power supplies are all adaptable, adaptive, whatever the term is. But yeah, yeah, no, it works out great. It works out great. Yeah. One last question, cause we're right here. Arthur asks, how do I permanently delete an email account from my Mac? When I go into settings and delete one from the list, from it, when I go into males settings and delete one from the list there, it magically reappears in the list. So, these do sync via iCloud. And they are also seen, and I'm using air quotes here, system-wide, the place I've had the most success with deleting them, although I've seen them sometimes come back when iCloud syncs it back down to my Mac and then you have to sort of do the dance. And I'll tell you what the dance is, but where I've done it with the most success is in system settings, or if you're not on Ventura, system preferences, and go into the internet accounts preference or settings pane, that's where I would delete these things. And that should do it. When iCloud pushes one back down, you can just try deleting it again. That might do it, right? That might, you know, by iCloud pushing it back down, now it says, okay, everything's in sync. You delete it again, and then it says it pushes that change back up instead of pulling it down. If it does push it back down, go to another device. It would be your phone, your iPad, another Mac, if you have one on there, and remove it from the internet accounts there that eventually it will, I promise you, eventually it will go away. So yeah, that's the trick there. At least as I've found. But yeah, it's weird that you get to see these in both locations. And it's because an account can be not just a mail account, but also a contact server account, or a calendar server account, or a note server account. All the iCloud stuff. Yeah, right. Well, not just the iCloud stuff, but even just like internet type stuff. Yeah, and so it's those internet accounts is where those, that's sort of the parent, the umbrella parent of that, which appears in mail and other places. Yeah, I noted one. We were just real quickly semi-related. So my son got a new iPhone. We came off his eight. Okay. And I decided, well, I could use that as a camera and that way I can check things on my phone during the show instead of having to, you know, have my phone only as a camera. And yesterday we were at dinner and I went, did you send me these? Did you take these? Got all these pictures of, he's doing some stuff at work of all these tool bins and nuts and bolts and washers. What had happened is we never reset the phone. I just logged him out and logged my Apple ID in. Well, guess whose pictures are now all on my phone, not only his phone, but mine. Because you kept a local copy of all of his pictures on his phone and then it synced that when you logged in. Oh, that sucks. Yeah, now I've got hundreds of pictures that I've got to get rid of. Yup. I wonder if you filtered down by, and I'm saying this without knowing exactly where and how to do it. But like, I wonder if power photos would do this, if photos won't, but photos might. You might be able to create a smart album of pictures only taken on like an iPhone 8, right? Yeah. And then sort that by a date range so that you're not killing your pictures from back when you had an iPhone 8. Because that used to be, well, that used to be my iPhone 8, yeah. Right, but there's a date range that became his after that. No, that's a great idea. So do that. That might do it. Folks, if you have a suggestion for Pete or a quick tip or a cool stuff found or a question of your own, please send it into us at feedback at macgeekab.com because we really want to hear it and we want to answer it or at least share it or whatever it is we're gonna do with it. We want it. Right. Yeah, you write the show. Feedback at macgeekab.com. That's what he said, feedback at macgeekab.com. Unless you're a premium subscriber in which case it's premium at macgeekab.com. That is correct. And you can learn more about macgeekab premium at macgeekab.com slash premium. 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Of course, piavpn.com slash mgg as well as azach.com slash mgg. Make sure to go check out Pete's other show we mentioned. So there I was for aviation enthusiasts. I got two other shows business brain for entrepreneurs gig gap for working musicians. And thanks for hanging out with us. You know, I didn't do this at Mac. I didn't record this when we were at Mac stock and I'm I'm sorry I didn't because back in 2019 at Mac stock, I did record this and I loved getting it when we were all together. We said this when we were outside filming your drone photo. But of course your drone only filmed video or not. No microphones. So so we did do this at Mac stock, but we didn't record it. However, in 2019 we did. And so I will share that. Don't get made out of it. So long.