 Hey everybody, it is time for MacGeek and listener Richard A. from our Discord brings us our opening quick tip where he says most people know about spring-loaded folders in Finder where you can drag a file or a folder over a folder in a Finder window or in the sidebar and then if you wait a second that folder opens up for you to drop the file or even navigate further and do it again but he says what you may not know is that you can also drag files over the back arrow in the Finder window and wait to move the file into the folder that you were previously in as a bonus tip I know twice two tips right here in the intro maybe even three if you didn't know that you could drag on to a file or folder the bonus tip if you have the path bar showing at the bottom of Finder windows which you would do with view show path bar in the Finder you can drag files into the folders listed in the path hierarchy there although they don't seem to do the spring-loaded opening of the folders in that case Richard you have you have hit the trifecta my friend more tips like this plus your questions answered today on MacGeek of 973 for Monday March 20th 2023 and welcome to MacGeek of the show where we share quick tips like that we share cool stuff found we share your questions we try to share answers to your questions how do you get all this stuff to us feedback at MacGeek of comm you send it in we do what we can we string it together into an agenda that hopefully has some flow to it such that each and every one of us will learn at least five new things today and every episode sponsors for this episode include linkedin.com MGG where you can go and post your first job for free be the edit from bare bones at bare bones comm one of my favorite apps as listeners know and collide we're at kolide.com MGG you can sign up you can get a free demo of this fantastic device security solution fantastic you got to check it out we'll talk more in depth about each and every one of those shortly for now here in rainy at least this morning Austin Texas for South by Southwest I'm Dave Hamilton and here still in Fairfield, Connecticut this is Jonathan I think Pete's muted himself folks but pilot Pete is here I'm here and I'm still missing things because I having slingshot of myself three quarters the way around of the world and back I am in Lee New Hampshire it's pilot Pete and I met myself coming and going so it's I feel like the Dunkin Donuts man you know I make the doughnuts I make the doughnuts it is time to make the doughnuts I'm glad we're all here time to make the podcast yeah let's make some podcast yeah yep I do want to remind us all that a the hangout will be this coming Sunday March 26th at 4 p.m. Eastern time if you sign up for the Mackie cab calendar at Mackie cab comm slash calendar that and our live recordings will be there if you go and there's the link to the zoom including the password for the zoom is also in our calendar I will also post it in our discord at Mackie cab comm slash discord join our discord and you can help decide what we're actually going to talk about this weekend but really it's just great to get the group together and we do a little hang we answer some questions and we'll have a topic I think we'll come up with something but join the discord to to participate in that it's a it's a great way to it's a great way to do it alright Pete you want to take us to our next quick tip here from Mark M I can do it I stumbled across this is we were prepping the show very this very morning and this has happened to me and it drives me nuts and this is a good one so here's a quick tip mark rates that you all may be aware of but I just discovered it by accident in safari if you have sound playing from any tab you know that little blue speaker with the sound waves to the right of it shows up in the URL bar I've seen that before and then I use it to go to the right tab and shut everything down but no wait there's more all you have to do is click on the speaker icon on any tab and it will mute that playing sound you don't have to open it and search for the stop or the mute or any touch a little speaker and it needs it beautiful thank you mark nice nice nice I like it yeah it's I this is like to me that is the epitome of a quick tip because if you know it you've already done it and you probably haven't even thought to tell your friends or family members or clients about it however when someone sees you do it they stop you and ask what magic is this so what did you just do what did you just do so if you have a quick tip like that send it into us feedback at Mackie cab calm feedback the Mackie cab calm that's the one I'm sure he said feedback at Mackie cab calm while we are and you can send your questions there too of course I just you know we're in the quick tips segment of the show PC Unix while we're on the the safari track here PC Unix in our also in our discord shares and his comment was how come I never noticed this before and he he is talking about in safari on the iPhone if you go to your history if you tap the clear button you get an option of one of well you get a choice of one of four options you can clear your entire history you can clear just today and yesterday just today and just the last hour and you can also do this on your Mac if you go in safari to view sorry history and then at the bottom of the history menu in safari is clear history dot dot dot that ellipses is important it why is it important Pete because it tells you you're not going to clear your history as soon as you click this there's more wait there's more you're right yeah so when you hit that in safari on the Mac you get exactly the same four options to choose from so you can you can do that yeah it's great great tip to you know if there's a variety of reasons you might want to do this so you know I'll leave I'll leave that as an exercise to the listener years ago I learned about that ellipsis on this very podcast and it's been part of my part of my workflow ever since oh good I don't have to worry about formatting my hard drive when I click this yes yeah no that ellipsis is you're right to call that out that's super important yeah all right John take us to the next safari quick tip all right we got a safari tip and not safari tip amazing so Ed says on the iPhone in safari if you have multiple tabs open rather than clicking on the square on a square icon good name is any for it just swipe left or right in the address bar and yeah never never knew you could do that and then also we've talked about this before but on the iPhone wait just explain what happens when you swipe left or right on the address bar it goes to a different tab you can just scroll through your tabs by swiping on the address bar yes similar to how you can scroll through your apps if you swipe on the the little control bar I'll call it the home button bar because it's lack of a home button but that's how you can scroll through apps differently though safari is consistent if you swipe around the tabs stay in their order they don't magically change whereas your apps if you stay in an app long enough if you swipe left to get to an app sorry swipe right to get to an app and you're in it long enough that app will become the front most app and then you would have to swipe right again to get to the previous one it's it's like it changes behind the scenes and that can get confusing try it you'll you'll see it's easier to experience than to understand I don't know what that means I mean when you know if you know you know I don't know I I'm at a loss for how to explain this but you try it and trust me you'll see what I mean yeah all right and then secondly next one yes please thank you on the iPhone in photos but it's not just photos but um select a photo with a person or maybe a pet long press on the person and the phone will smart lasso copy the person without the background of the photo click copy and you can paste the captured image wherever you like yep and yes you can do that an apple even has a little article called lift a subject from the photo background on iPhone so I guess we can uh we can link to that okay is there any feature and and it's funny I think Pete talked about it earlier but um that's right you'll see whatever you highlight kind of shimmer to acknowledge that it thinks it's capturing a person or a bunch of people okay cool yeah any noun person place your thing any any noun that's right yeah no you're right that like that's actually what it is yeah yeah yeah cool cool stuff uh all right you get your brain lessons here too folks that's right all right uh moving from iPhone to ipad john robert has a quick tip for us uh yes uh in ipad os on the keyboard that pops up when a text field is selected um there are numbers in punctuation symbols in a light gray at the top of the keys I struggle for a long time trying to access these symbols just holding a key down brings up alternate forms the letters such as well I can't pronounce them letters with umlots and accents ox yes and I finally figured it out press and hold the key and then slide your finger down about a centimeter the key will change to the number or symbol release your finger and the number symbol will be inserted into the text field not sure how long this has been available or if it was mentioned in a past show um I think it was yeah um here's the problem Dave so I tried to verify this and I couldn't um when I brought up they when the keyboard came up it was a baby keyboard like a smaller version and I'm like huh okay um and I found a support article that told me why this was not working um and the title of the article is if your ipad keyboard is small or split in half um and mine was uh and basically how you how you fix the problem is you just um pinch on uh put your fingers on it and then grow it okay okay that's the answer but it was like why isn't this working for me it's like because at some point I must have told it make my keyboard make my ipad keyboard small actually my 97 year old mother did that she made she split hers yeah I know that on that one you grab each half with your finger and and pull them together and it comes back together yeah I don't know about small and large but yeah yeah you can also do it from the keyboard menu you can choose to split and merge but but yes yeah you're absolutely right you're absolutely right yeah all right uh Pete you had you learned a thing I did learn a thing and I'm gonna sneak the how I learned it in there I'm with a quick cool stuff found I found an app called hit them up because I had to in one word h-i-t-e-m-u-p it's an app for the Mac because I needed the text uh 1500 people but I didn't want to send it in group texts and that sort of thing so that turned out to be a really good app and I really enjoyed uh it does what it says um it's freemium I guess so you can do so much yet every month and then pay pay more but so but what I wound up with sending all those texts is at the end of the day I had a little number page on my iPad my iPhone my watch and my Mac on messages so you had an unread message out there I had one unread message and man I scrolled and I scrolled and I scrolled and I could not find that unread message no little blue dot saying here's the unread message so I started doing my google food and it's you know like I was telling the pre-show it's you know remove this com preference file and hold your tongue right and you know you may get it you may not and then I found this tip say hey s lady read my unread messages she read it to me and the badge cleared up boom done like it was buried deep in a group text I had never found it nice nice so I have another way of doing because I used to have to do this like I this is this is not unfamiliar to me there is however and I believe this is new with ios 16 but it might have been there in ios 15 I can't remember when it was introduced but if you're in messages up in the upper left hand corner on your iphone you have a little filters sort of back button if you go to that there should be an unread messages filter that you can choose and and there was my guess is your message would have shown up in that it it might not have like I did not which was weird I actually did go there you check that oh okay all right check that and it didn't go there and I think it was because it was a reply in a group message interest for some reason somehow it should have been there I agree yeah there was no blue dot next to that interesting next to that message but as soon as I said it to you know s lady she did it and it fixed it I'm like for the wind gotta share that okay so that's fascinating to me because that tells me that there are two sets of filters for uh for deciding whether there are new messages Siri has one of them that you and I can't see the badge has one of them that you and I can't see and then the filters section on the iPhone where it says unread messages is a different set of criteria yeah and that's bad yeah this this I am doing everything I can not to get back into my rant about how much I lament the fact that we choose to use SMS in the United States here we're basically the only country that uses SMS uh the this way people that that do messaging and in like in Europe and I think even Canada doesn't really use SMS I think it's but I could be wrong about that but certainly throughout Europe it's it's WhatsApp right nobody uses SMS and it's so much better because it's a it's a data it's a modern messaging protocol it uses data as opposed to the antiquated SMS system that where where things get really rough is when you've got a you know an an SMS group which really becomes an MMS group and the iPhone just doesn't deal with that well is the reality well and while you're on that I mean the what I think the reason we do that is the universality still of everybody's got text not everybody has WhatsApp in the States even though it'd be nice if they did in the state no you're you're right this is a ship that has sailed I am I am lamenting I am not uh wishing for it to change I wish that it was different but it it's not going to change no I I'm with you yeah yeah yeah but the other thing I did find out because I was trying to find out how to do this to send a bunch of people messages and I did discover that you can you can turn off group messaging so that you can still send 10 people a message I think the limit is 25 okay message and it appears to be from only you and to only you from you know and that way so if you send 10 people a message and you know one person replies all 10 people see it and eventually people are like stop please stop texting I'm trying to sleep or whatever you know but but you can set it up yeah yeah messaging so if someone replies it only goes back to the sender not to the entire group of people you just send it to that's that's an option in there I promise go into iOS turn off yeah yeah it is the problem the problem with that is it yeah the problem with that is if you do that then if someone includes you as part of a group like you can't do it on a granular basis you can't say well I want to be part of this group you have to turn it back on when you're you have to turn it back on which yeah yeah yeah yeah so it yeah it's it's all or nothing so yeah right right that's why I get them up worked for me I didn't have to go into that setting turn it off hit them up sends them all individually yeah yes ah got it got it got it that makes sense yeah that makes sense yeah cool and I was able to import a comma separated value file for 1500 numbers and what did they charge you to do that I think it was I I'm just doing it for the one month because I only need it for a couple three weeks it was sure 95 for the okay all right that's not yeah it's not terrible that their annual I think their annual is like 19 a month or something like that okay if you pay all up front okay but it was yeah yeah it was it was pretty slick yeah very happy with it so far yeah no that's cool well that's cool that's I that's why I wanted to share it yeah yeah cool all right um I found a thing that actually a friend was having issues with their I think it was usb but this could be usb or thunderbolt accessories not wanting to connect to their mac anymore and an article was was presented to us all from apple allow accessories to connect to your mac laptop computer with apple silicon and the trick is to go to system settings privacy and security and then scroll down and there's a little pop-up menu next to an option and allow accessories to connect and then you choose which you want you can say ask every time ask for new accessories automatically when unlocked or always and and so setting that setting may help to keep things connecting for you so I it was a setting I did not know about so I figured it was good for us to share here on the show so again system settings uh yes uh what did we call it system settings we used to call it system preferences I'm here now I'm Dave I'm in Austin uh system settings privacy and security and then scroll down towards the bottom it's it's in the security section where you choose whether you let apps only from the app store apps from the you know the identified developers it's it's it's near that so go check that out on your computer and see if it gets you what you need yes mr brawn I don't see it you're not running apple silicon this is an apple silicon only got it thing yeah evidently this is not an issue uh or an option on uh intel max just just apple silicon yeah and I don't know if it's ventura only it might very well be uh I I think it is I but I don't have a an apple silicon machine of a prior os to to check so yeah moving on here okay uh jam cycler from our discord brings us our final quick tip of the day says in episode 971 you shared mic's tip to sort a finder list by kind in order to show folders at the top I wasn't aware of this however if you want listed items sorted by name and to still show folders at the top you can do that go to finder preferences advanced and check the box keep folders on top in windows when sorting by name that's a long preference name but boy howdy is it complete and we like completeness all right so look these days every new potential hire can feel like a high stakes wager for your small business you want to be a hundred percent certain that you have access to the best qualified candidates available and that's why you've got to check out our sponsor linkedin jobs linkedin jobs helps find the right people for your team faster and for free we've used linkedin jobs here we've talked about this on the show in fact satie uh came through linkedin jobs she's been here almost two years now actually maybe a little over two years and it's been fantastic we would not have found satie without linkedin jobs both because of so how many people are out there but also because of how easy it is to create and manage your job post and really your whole job search process right there on linkedin jobs they have simple tools like screening questions that make it super easy to focus on candidates with just the right skills and experience so you can quickly prioritize who you'd like to interview and hire it's super important to have the right people on your team and that's why small businesses rate linkedin jobs number one in delivering quality hires versus leading competitors linkedin jobs helps you find the qualified candidates you want to talk with faster post your job for free at linkedin dot com slash m g g that's linkedin dot com slash m g g to post your job for free terms and conditions apply and our thanks to linkedin jobs for sponsoring this episode next up is one of my favorite apps bb edit i have bb edit open right now because it's part of my start the day script it launches because i'm using it all the time sure when i'm doing programming any kind of coding i use bb edit and it's great for html just as is good for php and c++ like it's it's great for all of that but it's also just a fantastic tool for manipulating regular text you want to count the number of words in a document boom right there done you want to compare two documents boom right there done bb edit takes care of all of this stuff and more and now they've got built-in support for additional languages r go rust toml arduino pixar's usda lisp if they use this right and it's obvious they use this because they do things that are for the users but like for the geeky users which i love they added a repeat last command command which is very convenient very convenient because you're just you know repeating things it's am i repeating myself good because that's what that's how it works you've got to go check it out they've got a generous eval model 30 days a full function to try out everything in the app then after 30 days it scales back to a free mode that takes some of those features away but you might find that that's all right but you might also just find that it's time to buy you got to check it out go to barebones.com download your eval a bb edit and our thanks to barebones for sponsoring this episode next up is collide our sponsor has some big news for you if you're an octa user they can get your entire fleet to 100 percent compliance how do they do this well if a device isn't compliant the user can't log in to your cloud apps until they've fixed the problem it's that simple collide patches one of the major holes in zero trust architecture device compliance without collide it struggles to solve basic problems like keeping everyone's os and browser up to date unsecured devices are logging into your company's apps because there's nothing there to stop them collide is the only device trust solution that enforces compliance as part of authentication and it's built to work seamlessly with octa the moment collides agent detects a problem it alerts your user and gives them instructions to fix it it also uses slack to do this it's very friendly and informative so you're educating your users not just locking them out but if they don't fix the problem within a set time they're blocked collides method means fewer support tickets less frustration and most importantly 100 fleet compliance visit collide.com slash mgg to learn more or book a demo that's kolide.com slash mgg and our thanks to collide for sponsoring this episode Pete did you like that last quick tip dude as we went in to the ads i was like yeah okay i got a second here went perfect sort get those folders on top so i'm not all interspersed with my files love it go back and listen to that last click quick tip and use it you'll love it awesome i love it with that like when that light bulb moment happens it's great right look come on man why is it you know i'm looking for that folder i know it's here somewhere why do i have to scroll to the bottom right there folders on top done love it love it love it uh so i mentioned that i'm here in austin uh and i'm here for the south by southwest conference it really it's uh it's technically four conferences might even be five now i don't know but but it's three main conferences there's one that they call as south by southwest eye or interactive that used to be focused on like technology emerging technology and it still is in some ways but it's also sort of expanded to include social issues and and kind of the the emerging ideas regardless of whether they're tech which which is great uh then there's the music festival which happens sort of at the end of things where lots of different bands will play bands you've heard of bands you haven't heard of and they come here and do showcases i think there's over a thousand bands or something that play here at south by during the music festival portion and then running the entire span of it is a film festival and now a film and tv festival uh where all kinds of things get uh tested on audiences premiered all those sorts of things so as part of this i got to see i think i've gotten to see several things but two of them are coming to apple tv plus and i wanted to let everybody know the first is a movie called still a michael j fox movie it is a documentary uh about michael j fox the director the fascinating part for this is the director said he wanted to create a documentary that looked like an 80s movie and somehow somebody apple uh agreed to fund it in fact not just apple um the lorraine pal jobs foundation also uh it was involved in funding this too now michael j fox has parkinsons he's uh he's made no secret of that in fact he's been very out front about it he has his the fox foundation which i think has raised like two billion dollars but the director didn't want to make a movie about parkinsons he wanted to make a movie about michael j fox and of course parkinsons part of that because it's very much a part of who he is now the fascinating part about it was a it was one of the best documentaries i've ever seen michael hart who was the editor on this if he doesn't win all the awards for editing this film there is no justice in the universe and the reason is and i'm not going to spoil anything for you because it it's part and parcel of the way this movie is delivered and you see it almost in fact i think the opening scene is in fact done this way he went back he and his team i would presume went back and probably watched all the footage of michael j fox from all of his tv shows and movies and all the things that he's done that we all love over the years and as michael j fox today is being interviewed and telling his story he is the it is edited to cut to scenes of from his movies that show a younger michael j fox experiencing a moment very similar to the one that he is describing so you know there's scenes from secret of my success clearly uh not about michael j fox when it was filmed it was about you know the character he was playing uh at the time but as life has it certain things that he portrayed in the movie happened to him maybe even after that and and yet the editor used them uh to tell this story with michael j fox as a with a younger michael j fox doing it and the first time it happens which like i said is right at the beginning of the movie you're like oh how clever that's really brilliant it is done so seamlessly that by about the 20 minute mark you now take it for granted and you expect it and get it throughout the entirety of the movie and it's just fantastic it's not hamfisted so well done so even if documentaries are not your thing i highly recommend uh checking that one out it's it's it's it's that sounds cool it sounds like a technique to steal you know everybody stole the ken burns effect right so it sounds like another technique to steal exactly yeah yeah this one requires far more prep work than the ken burns effect because you've got to go i mean like they found all the perfect scenes like yeah yeah the director of the movie an idyllic memory did it then is something i don't know man like yeah it was really well done though as you can tell very excited about it the other movie that i'm super excited about is not a documentary it is based on truth you know true events uh but it is uh it is very much a dramatization of of this it includes taren eckerton as the star and the movie is tetris i had never known until i saw the movie two days ago and it comes out on apple tv plus march 31st so you don't you don't have to wait very long i did not know the story of international espionage and intrigue that was the backstory to tetris coming to market here in the united states and the world how this story has never been told at a grand scale before i'm sure i know in fact that it's been told before but i had never heard it my guess is most of us here have never heard it it was tetris was written by a russian programmer uh right kind of it amidst the cold war but as things were beginning to you know the cracks were beginning to appear over in russia and it is a fascinating story it's well told i'm sure they took some creative liberties uh i mean it you know first of all it happened over the course of several years and and they show it to us in two hours or less you know uh but uh so i mean so they they made some choices but it the the the uh the the after the movie here at south by southwest when they do a premiere uh often they will have the stars of the movie the director etc come and do a little q and a afterwards so there was michael j fox was here the other day we did they did a q and a with him which was great to see and then after this they did a q and a with the director taren eggerton and then also uh the original programmer of tetris was here in austin on stage as was the the kind of the the marketing guy if you will who's also a programmer a pretty decent programmer it sounds like uh who worked to make all of this sort of happen uh then they they were there and it was just fascinating to to like see them and they said the movie is emotionally accurate there there are certain moments in the movie uh there is a three-way negotiation that happens simultaneously in the movie and it seems like one of these made for film moments that actually happens so when you're watching it and wondering you know which parts did they take liberties with that's not one of them and that shocked me but there are i'm sure some other moments that they took some liberties with uh just to make it to you know pump it up a little bit for uh for for our screens but i like this movie is going to be huge i think you're gonna love it so i just wanted to share both of those they're kind of you know fit to us here with our nerdiness so how long do we have to wait for the michael j fox um i don't know when that's coming apple tv plus it is called still i'm looking um release date coming soon okay wait wait wait hang on release date may 12th 2023 so much longer that's off no yep not yeah not much longer and on apple tv i said apple tv plus yeah okay yeah yeah because they've got some good stuff shrinking is there new have you seen that one uh uh no it's uh Harrison Ford and uh yeah can't think of the end it's it's funny it's good is it huh okay yeah they're serious seem to for the most part delight and entertain some of them aren't for me but you know right well i mean if everything if we all liked everything life would be super boring so right on yeah speaking of making life interesting those of you who heard the last episode 972 know that my travels uh and and specifically the hotel wi-fi where i was in las vegas last week created some bandwidth issues uh especially toward the end of the show be that as it may i was going to say it's fine it's not fine i hate it but it is what it is earlier in the show though i had an issue where my microphone kept cutting out and pete i i know what happened now and it's actually related to a quick tip that we shared about three or four weeks ago pete you you were the the savior there because as i was sort of fumbling around trying different things you stopped me and said hey Dave i hear your power cutting on and off you heard the sound of my macbook yeah you heard the little thing and so that made me that that led to the the band-aid if you will of me just pulling power from my setup here and that got us through the rest of the show so that's quote unquote solved the problem or at least identified the problem just to explain my travel setup i have a macbook air an m1 air so it's got two ports on it that are usb you need them both or not yeah that's correct turns out i do need them uh into one of the ports i have that ky-y 4k screen the uh the uh the 15 inch portable screen that we mentioned just prior to my travels uh and that screen is amazing like it's totally worth it i'll make sure the link is in in these show notes too so i have that screen and then i have my travel microphone the audio technica 2005 usb my version of it is a usb a microphone and so therefore i need a dongle but i would need a dongle anyway because i want to power it while using the microphone so i have this easy quest dongle that has you know hdmi and and power pass through it's the one we mentioned recently on the show and so i plug my usb a mic into that i also plug power into that none of the things i've mentioned yet are the problem but the signal flow is the problem uh because when the power stops flowing into the hub or the dock the dongle the hub has to reset meaning my microphone has to reset which was why my mic kept cutting it out okay so why is power fluctuating on the way in i use uh an anchor and i don't want to pull the model of it because i don't want to mess with us again but i use an an anchor portable power pack it's got like a little extension cord on it it's got three usb ports two power delivery ports for usb c and one just straight you know normal port for usb a for power and then it's also got two ac you know outlets on it which is great makes it for perfect for travel but as a listener pointed out in a previous episode that we shared many of these power delivery solutions have to temporarily pull power each time you plug a new device in because it has to renegotiate how it's going to split power between the two power delivery uh outputs on it and last week i was powering my laptop via the power one of the power delivery ports directly and also my iphone via one of the power delivery ports and that was fine for a little while wasn't it and then mid show it started not being fine and the reason it started not being fine is because my iphone decided to stop asking to be charged as iphones are want to do and and as soon as the power that the the anchor power supply saw that it was like oh that device is not asking for power that port is not asking for power anymore so i need to renegotiate everything to give more power to the other port and then the iphone would say oh i'll take a little power hey and it would right right like all this makes sense because i was like how did this thing die and of course this was just the beginning of my trip i'm like oh man what have i done to myself like this is no bueno i gotta go to an apple store i gotta buy a new power adapter you know it was just like how did i get plagued by this i didn't get plagued by anything so now for this show i have the i'm using the same power adapter however my laptop is being charged by a single power supply that's plugged into one of the ac outlets on that thing so that there is zero chance of it deciding to renegotiate during the show and i as soon as i said the words zero chance i realized that i might have just uh hit let me find some simulated woodgrain here and yeah right there right there above above in between your eyes Dave yeah exactly but but i just found it fascinating you know this is what i love about this show is i mean and this is true even for us like there are things that we share on the show that are not relevant to us at the moment and of course that's true for you as the listener right like many of the things even including this story i just told might not be relevant for you immediately today but three weeks from now just like for me three weeks ago when it wasn't relevant it stuck in my head as i was doing the troubleshooting like wait wait wait i i know this fact i think it might actually be applying to me and of course it was yeah yeah yeah now the question it begs if you go into your phone and battery settings and say just just charge at the fault you know in other words be right because there's a setting yeah errors i recall for the battery but uh when it got to a hundred percent it would start doing the same thing anyway that's what it was it actually had gotten to a hundred percent yeah yeah so so i mean turning that off might mitigate the issues somewhat but it's not gonna it's not gonna fix it yeah because it was early enough in the day that i had charged my phone overnight i mean it was so early in the day for me i think we recorded at 7 a.m uh pacific time so like my phone had not gone below you know 98 or something but i just thought well plug it in that way i'm good to go when when you're done with the show when i'm done with the show have a fully charged phone ready exactly i'm ready to rock and roll yeah exactly yep so but he's fine right but i wouldn't have been able i wouldn't i don't know how long it would have taken me to troubleshoot this if it weren't for this show right because well first of all you identified the power thing in in real time thank goodness no thank goodness getting that ding why is that ding happening it's not me right yep and i heard it too but it it felt like it was just going by it was just going by yeah yeah not important not important yeah yeah you know how it is yeah yeah so anyway i just wanted to share that because it really not only is it important for all of us to know and make sure we have in our heads but it's just one of those things like this is that this is what i love about this show one of the things so all right i got a little power story go i learned something new um so i got a um i got myself a new uh uv flashlight okay because my old one like three of the leds were shot so i'm like okay let me get a new one so i got a new one and then it listed on it the uh so it comes with a little cartridge where you put three triple a batteries sure yep and my other mini flashlights have have the same thing but i've read the documentation believe it or not and it's like oh well you know what you can use an 18650 battery and i'm like what the heck is an 18650 battery um so i learned something and it's like well you can use this other type of battery too um it's basically a replacement that gives you the equivalent power but it's only a single cell ah it's one of the am i on ones right about the size of your pink yes yes yeah yeah so it's um and i'm gonna list here so so i bought so i ordered both a charger and two batteries these particular ones are 3200 milliamp hours which i think is pretty much equivalent to what you get with the the three triple a's but okay just never heard about this type of battery before but when i searched for it there was a uh quite a few options online and i'll let me offer a hint about those batteries if you let them go all the way dead may as well just throw them away oh oh yeah yeah you want to recharge that battery you know somewhere by by five percent or so if you let it go dead you're done yeah and i don't understand that in the i don't know what it is about it maybe somebody knows could write in and tell us what it is about that lithium ion battery like that that it you know when they go dead they get they're done and that that can be true of the battery in your iphone too if you leave it you know dead yeah dead for for months now it has to be more than a month or two it's got to be several months with most iPhones because i've gotten lucky i've found them the best thing to do if you're going to put an iphone on the shelf well the first thing to do is to ask why you're doing that and if it's just because you want to have a spare phone then great you know but otherwise maybe just sell it up the second thing to do is charge it to at least 70 percent or so there are there are schools of thought that say not to to leave it on the shelf at a hundred percent so you know get it close and then power it down so that it's not draining its battery immediately down to nothing power it down and and it should last for quite a while that way right because the battery still got some juice in it yeah i've often carried those flashlights with those lithium ion cells and and on more than one occasion the battery is going all the way down and i'm i'm just dead in the water it's like yeah so i've experienced that but and i will say my e-bike says store that if you're gonna go long term store it at 60 percent i don't know why okay but yeah that that that the 60 percent number is is that sounds you know that sounds familiar to me i'll say it that way yeah yeah yeah yeah so do like john did read the manual yes yes yeah yeah yeah every now and then there's good stuff in there you know sometimes they know what they're doing yeah the designers the engineers that's amazing yep all right john you want to take us to uh to denis oh why not okay denis um says i have an external disc that i've divided into partitions slash volume groups slash volumes let me list them and how they are designated in this utility and he then gives us a list of the partitions uh so he has the main one untitled and then apfs volume apfs volume group and apfs data volume okay um my problem is that clone two the data volume doesn't show up in the finder or on my desktop when i select one of the partitions volumes to be ejected it says eject all the clone uh partition never gets ejected i can tell because shutting down the computer after ejecting i get the warning that it was not ejected properly i suspect it's because it's a data volume this was an experimental drive doing an experiment with carbon copy cloner so i can delete it i just want to understand it before i do maybe you could shed some light on apfs volumes apfs data volumes core storage logical volumes and usb external physical volumes um all right so so two replies to this um one is that in the finder there were two ways uh there are a couple of places that you can go to designate what is shown uh and i've had this happen to me where i'm like yeah where is it i i don't see it even though i plugged it plugged it in and i got a message if you use hardware growler that you know something was plugged in to the computer but it never showed up there are two places you can go so in the finder settings general show these items on the desktop is one place to go um or finder settings sidebar locations and for either one specify external discs um have you tried this does this work for you no okay all right good but but i found i did find a way yeah so i have this one drive that i use from my carbon copy cloner backup and it doesn't show up in the finder on either of my machines i'm like how do i how do i see this stuff on here i found a workaround okay so here's the weird thing so even though my drive doesn't show up in the finder similar to uh what Dennis is running into um i found that going into either disutility or carbon copy cloner that shows the volume here's what you can do Dave you right click on the volume in either disutility or carbon copy cloner and it has a choice show in finder oh that's the way i can see my stuff oh nice so i don't know so i don't know if this is an apfs bug i feel like i've been seeing this in macOS for a very long time i i i think it predates apfs i think it's a i think it's a finder bug because the volume is mounted right like if you go to the terminal and you look in slash volumes you'll see it it's just not showing up in the finder so i i i i think it's i i think it's just a finder bug and i yeah i don't think it's apfs i could be wrong about that like i i can't say that you know where in time it started to happen more frequently for me but yeah i feel like it's gone back quite a bit it's crazy yeah yeah and you got to go down so the thing is if you say show in finder it's going to show the four top level directories on your data volume you know system library sure users and that's where you want to go so if you go into users and then your username that will be the content that you probably want to restore got it got it yeah that makes sense yeah yeah yeah fun all right uh we will uh we'll take craig's question this actually was a decent conversation in pre-show we'll do this while john gets the water that we uh that we all know he needs uh craig asks he says uh i suspect by now you've heard the news that t mobile has purchased mint mobile uh i know pete and dave you use it what are your thoughts on this i've seen i don't want to see history repeat itself is basically the the um the gist of his message because he's seen you know when the big guy acquires the little guy uh the benefits of the little guy go away and that may happen here i don't i don't think that's going to happen immediately here in fact i'm almost certain it's not going to happen immediately because it hasn't happened the mint mobile is still mint mobile and it's still fantastic uh but it might you never know like it could have mint mobile could have gotten worse with the the previous ownership like the good news is that in today's world changing cell carriers is as easy as changing your socks it really is just not a big deal at all and that's especially true now that we live in the world of e-sims where you don't even have to wait for them to ship you a sim you don't have to go to the store you can do it all on your phone or you know you can use your desktop if you want but really it's just a non issue to change you keep your number the porting of your number is is i mean there's certainly there's there's exceptions to this but by and large supporting your numbers these days is is fast and smooth and seamless so i would say don't worry about it but also like don't change anything until you are catalyzed to do it by some external event but i don't think i don't think they'll change because i think this is a very profitable business model mint mobile really took the idea of buying a prepaid plan and made it feel normal to those of us who are responsible with our finances have decent credit could get a postpaid plan which is what most of the plans that like the big three carriers do prior to mint mobile prepaid plans and even still today prepaid plans have that stigma of oh you buy a prepaid prepaid plan easy for you to say uh because you know you you are financially irresponsible you have no credit you know people don't trust you that's the only reason at least in the united states that most people buy that's the reason we think that people buy prepaid plans that is not the case though because mint mobile is a prepaid plan i have a fantastic credit rating i'm happy to use mint mobile right it's uh it they changed the mindset on this and then there's visible by verizon which does the same thing so yeah well mint mobile did it by cutting the price in half over the well large carriers correct more than exactly that's how they drew us in but but part of the reason for that is because mint doesn't need a collections department right if you don't pay your bill you don't have service because you pay up front and so it makes life easier for them and and obviously some of that cost savings they pass through some of it they don't they have always been on t-mobile as their carrier they're an mvno of t-mobile so it made sense for t-mobile to acquire this before somebody else did it was clearly a very profitable business so i i don't i don't think t-mobile is going to mess with it in fact i saw this news in the other direction maybe there will be things that t-mobile does that get opened up to us as mint subscribers as optional things we can add like perhaps less expensive international plans perhaps the apple watch as pete is pointing out for me right like like those sorts of things we might start to see trickle in because they've already got the the infrastructure and and a deals in place and all that so because mint doesn't get my money when i go overseas i've talked about it here i use an e-sim from some third party carrier well t-mobile might want to keep my money and offer me a more attractively priced international you know europe specific plan and kind of thing like i i so anyway we will see what the future holds but i wouldn't i wouldn't start sweating but we'll pay attention to it of course because at least two of us here use it pete and i use it and i use it for my whole family i think you do too pete so yeah yeah so so it's my hope that they keep it the same and or offer more benefits and lower the prices because it as everybody knows first of all you know i've had a couple bad experiences with the big carriers but the other thing is as you've seen day by traveling to europe recently we pay ridiculous prices for mobile service in the united states oh my god yeah yeah my daughter pays 11 euro a month for i think 150 gigs of um of 5g data plus of course unlimited um talking and text although they don't use that over there they use whatsapp but yes they use data but they i mean she has 150 gigs or something she showed me she was like oh yeah like my favorite i've done a lot of consulting calls i've done uh consulting for people whose names you all know like i i've had a fantastic career doing that my favorite to this day and and it may never change my favorite dave the nerd call was the one i had to fly to italy to do um and and fix my daughter's wi-fi so that they could watch from our plex server reliably over there but in the interim before i got there because i had some delays you know in my schedule it took me a little while to to schedule italy in on my dave the nerd schedule and if you're from the irs ha ha yes i just justified my trip as a business expense uh the uh i you know before i went to her apartment to do this she was just tethering her her tv to her phone to stream from our plex server and she's like oh yeah i'll never hit my monthly limit doing that like oh yeah that's what you know and that's one of the things i want to do with our florida police because i pay 50 bucks a month for internet there and i'm like i know there's other cellular type options even that that are cheap even cheaper here even though it's an outrageous price if i could get some of that 11 euro a month fee oh man gosh over it i'd pay yeah i know i know i'd pay 22 euro for 150 gigs so yeah i think um verizon is advertising 5g um data i think a hotspot basically for i think like 25 bucks a month which sounds pretty good to me if you get good 5g coverage is that only in the us or is that like global no i think it's just the us oh okay well you could get and how an unlimited 5g no um pretty sure that's what they claim for 25 a month i thought it was 50 a month for verizons uh you talking about their their home the verizon home thing 5g okay let's look maybe they change their prices yeah although there's uh there's that one commercial that that really yeah poops all over the uh using the uh cellular service you know people walk by and use your bandwidth in right you know off the same towers in the neighborhood yeah yeah yeah so uh you are correct verizon 5g home internet starting at a low price guaranteed huh is there a data cap on that that's what i'm looking for no unlimited 5g data it's there you go no equipment charges or data caps uh dude no there we go you know what i solve my kax cable in florida i'm gonna change because i've still paid for comcast as a backup connection uh to my to my fiber but i want a backup connection that is wire less and i've been thinking about moving to one of the the you know the things that one of these solutions t-mobile's well t-mobile's was $50 a month let's see did they change too they're going to they are going to you're looking that up david clarkin in the uh discord says what about getting hacked off and user info thinks t-mobile got hacked yeah see 50 bucks still for t-mobile it's still 50 bucks for t-mobile's home internet wiki wiki yeah wiki wiki yeah next week this will have changed yeah yeah yeah but yeah but going to the hacker thing i think that's just a cost of cost of doing business in this world your stuff's gonna get hacked so i freeze my credit yes euros that's a really smart i do the same thing p yeah it's gonna have like people data breaches are just going to happen in that way yeah yeah yeah they're not gonna be as bad as what last pass did but you know maybe maybe some of them are yeah yeah you just the fact is we're gonna get hacked and hosed and no matter what and it's a matter of yeah staying in front of it fortunately most of the credit card companies are good now about texting you if there's a weird charge on your account totally but what do you do when someone opens an account in your name so that supposedly prevents it right you know there's nothing preventing someone from giving you you in air quotes credit right you know without checking your credit report they could do that but you know but they also can't file to it that's on them that's right yeah that's right yeah all right where are we on time here if you do want to find out if you've been hacked uh here's one service that i use and maybe you do too but um have i been owned but they replace the o with a p okay so have i been pwned.com um basically you you get your email address and it will tell you if that email has been compromised nice nice all right well that brings us into cool stuff found and uh so we will keep going with cool stuff found the the next thing and i wanted to make sure we got this into this episode just from a time perspective uh Synology released the DS 423 plus uh last week and there was a notable difference between all the things that they have released since the DS 1520 plus because we used to have to say on this show that the most recently released Synology Disk Station that had a GPU was released in 2020 the 1520 plus i can now say that is no longer the case the DS 423 plus has a Celeron J4125 CPU in it which just by its nature also includes the Intel GPU which means it will do hardware transcoding for Plex and is uh i've got one on the way i will be testing it but i just wanted to share the good news that yes Synology has listened to us they are making these they are aware that there is a segment of their customer base that wants this stuff quite frankly i did not i knew they were going i had it i knew in my heart of hearts they didn't they didn't quite share their plans with me but they sort of they made it clear they were listening let's put it that way um i knew in my heart that they would be coming out with we had not seen the last of Synology's GPU based NASs i didn't think we'd see it until late 2024 at the at the earliest so i am surprised and delighted by the timing of this couldn't be happier so just wanted to share that um what's the price on that Dave uh you know i don't Pete it's so new i don't know no no it's a fair question man like i should know the answer to this they're about four four hundred four and a half somewhere in there so let's see the Synology DS 423 plus on amazon i don't even think it's on amazon not on amazon at least i'm not saying it no it it's not it's not i don't know that you can buy it yet but it's but like they exist so yeah we will have yeah i don't like i'm sure i have pricing somewhere but it's going to be in that that three to six hundred dollar range i realize it's a huge range but um but it's coming we will have we will have details but it's here like it exists they made it and that's the good news i mean i gotta hit here um oh where'd you find it yeah bnh lists it as great uh 500 bucks okay there you go for the enclosure only yes right yeah the bare metal yep okay great amazing yep that's that's good news um andrew sent in a fantastic cool stuff found uh i think actually he shared this in our discord it's a piece of software from neat software called ping and it sits in your menu bar and shows you ping times or even just website access times uh for as many websites as you want it'll do three in the free version and then you can pay to unlock unlimited and what's cool is you can have it ping your router and then uh you know site out on the internet and if you have a cable modem you can have it ping your cable modem too so you can do our patented mac e-cab three-way ping even with the free version of this and because it sits in your menu bar of course you can click it and see uh the specific results of each of the uh items that you've put there but if all of them are good you're the icon in your menu bar is green if any one of them is bad the icon in your menu bar turns red so you can immediately see am i having a connection issue and uh it will show right up there so this is uh a fantastic and of course you could use it for all kinds of things you could use it to test to see if your own servers are online like it's you know there's there's a variety of use cases for this of course but uh but i really appreciated that so thank you for sharing that andrew john did have uh have you messed with ping yet no yeah i i think i think you'll i think this is one of those things that you'll find that you uh that you like along those same lines grumpy from our discord uh had has written something that i did not know existed and i'm glad he shared it because it's based on our idea of the three ping uh scenario where you in order to see to troubleshoot where your connection problems are you ping from your computer to your router you ping from your computer to your cable modem and you ping from your computer to a site out on the internet like www.apple.com and then depending on which one fails at what time you know where the issue is in the network setting is it something local to use it's something out on the internet etc he wrote a home bridge plugin that he calls net nanny and uh it will you can set it to ping all of these things it shows up as co2 sensors in your home kit so you can even set to get alerts from this and all sorts of things so we'll put a link to that in the show notes too thank you for letting us know about this grumpy good stuff yeah oh and one other go um if you want to if you're thinking why can't i get to the site is it just me um here's both a site and they also have an app uh down detector okay and talk about a little talk a little bit about how it works uh i mean i look at it right now and it actually shows um on their home page the status of various services and you know if it if it's down uh it shows the graph of uptie and then oh boy you're coming to get you no no that's the fire engine i know hopefully they're not coming to get you right you don't want to see those guys i hope no um but it basically shows you a graph of uptime and and downtime so if you're like wow i can't get to and you know right now it's showing AT&T spectrum horizon disc Shopify PayPal sure all sorts of things cool so that is showing and perhaps i don't know the details behind it i was hoping you would you might um that is showing whether a site is down or up for the majority of the people not for you so that you can troubleshoot whether it's a you thing or a them thing just so people understand the context of of what what that does yeah cool all right we got a couple of follow-up cool stuffs found you want to uh take us to listener john john yes hold on all right well i'll do the one from the the previous episode uh in 972 ben uh we were talking about bandwidth limiting and throttling uh data especially on your iphone of course we also talked about doing so on your mac using low data mode and listener ben over in discord says there is an app called trip mode at trip mode.ch and uh he says that can restrict specific apps and channels from using any data while on specific wi-fi networks we've talked about trip mode before but it's absolutely worth a remention thank you for that ben uh yeah that that one really lets you get granular in an easy way like it's it's a tool that does a nerdy thing but makes it simple to do sort of in the moment for all of us so i highly recommend checking that out especially if you travel and especially if you're on like if you are doing tethering but you're not my daughter with her 150 gigs and fancy uh if you're here in the u.s and you're doing tethering to your phone low data mode might not be specific enough for you so trip mode can can really be kind of the thing there so yeah yeah yeah are we uh we ready for listener john john i think he muted himself for some reason yep so no there was another another fire engine ah okay gotcha i've learned to mute gotcha all right so john to unmute yes all right so john says um here's a plug for po box dot com it can bounce based on what spam filter hits occur not affiliated uh just a satisfied customer so this is referencing a discussion we had uh two episodes ago in 971 about mail and bouncing the mail back to the spammers we the three of us talked about a dead address so that it would appear like a dead address and i said we would have to be up to the the mail host and listener john of course highlights that that one mail host at least we'll do that for us so maybe maybe there are others yeah and they even have an article why to explain this to you uh why would i want to bounce my spam and they go through why you may want to do that i'm wondering if um like are spammers smart enough to know like okay if it's a po box dot com account that bounced it and the timing of the bounce came not immediately right then it's probably a good address that someone has manually bounced from right i don't know i i mean like like you know heuristics are a thing we you know we use them for all kinds of stuff so pulling together all of those signals you probably as a spammer could be pretty like i i don't know how much this is gonna help is is what i'm trying to say okay but it might i don't i i don't know i i i'm thinking as a spammer right i'm not a spammer i've never done any spamming problem it's just so poetic all right all right then that's enough i think that is enough i think we've done it i think we succeeded folks feedback at mackey cub dot com if you have your own uh stuff cool stuff found to share your own quick tips or of course your own questions we love hearing from you it's one of our favorite things in fact it's part of why we do what we do we wouldn't do this i mean we would if it wasn't for you right there it is yeah wait we would still have these conversations we just probably wouldn't release them maybe we would i don't know i don't know it's called echo chamber day yeah i live in an echo chamber pete but it's but the good news is we're all in the same echo chamber together folks there we go well but when there's tens of thousands of us that's a good echo chamber to be in right it's a good this is a good echo chamber to be in too like everybody's so like respectful to each other and thoughtful like i know it starts for the internet you're not wrong this you yeah this is a great group the community is amazing yeah yeah join our discord it's it's wonderful you know i'm sure we have people in there of all varying you know belief systems political and otherwise but it's not part of that our love and interest in love for and interest in technology and help and really but it's all predicated on helping each other it like that's that's the key there and and we do have a channel where we can have our fish shakes because there are things about technology in life that you know we we need to rant about like cell phone data pricing here in the united states yep yep all right folks well thanks for hanging out thanks for visiting our sponsors of course that's at mackey cab.com slash sponsors you can check out the ones that we talked about in this episode collide.com slash mgg linkedin.com slash mgg barebones.com for bb edit our thanks to cash block for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you man i i um i don't know what the answer is john do you know what the answer is uh what's the question uh what's the most important generic advice you could give to a fellow human don't get caught later