 It's time for the Mac Geek Gab and I, Pilot Pete, bring you this week's quick tip. When you're looking for something that has an air tag on it, you have to go into your phone and open Find My In. Wait, you don't. You just say, hey, S-Lady. And now with the new iOS, you don't even have to say that. You just say her name. S-Lady. Find My Wallet. S-Lady. Find My Keys. And she starts pinging them without you having to do anything else. Four quick tips like this, plus your questions answered today on Mac Geek Gab 1021 for Monday, January 22nd, 2024. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Mac Geek Gab, the show where you send in quick tips like that. Sometimes we share quick tips like that. You send in cool stuff found. Sometimes we share cool stuff found. And you send in your questions. And sometimes, hopefully most of the time, we can help answer them when we get together because the goal is for each of us to learn at least five new things every single episode. Sponsors for this episode include coda.io slash mgg where you can sign up for free and get your docs all kind of on text and tables on one page. BetterHelp.com slash Geek Gab, yeah, I know the URL is a little different. It's fine. We put them in the show notes for you so that you can just go to MacGeekGab.com and click on them. You can give online therapy a try at BetterHelp.com slash GeekGab and ZockDoc.com slash mgg, which is the easiest way to find a great doctor and instantly book online. We'll talk more about all of that in a few moments here for now, here in Chile, Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. Here in even Chile or South Dakota, I'm Adam Christensen. Salutations à tous, je suis pilot Pete Depelle. That's pilot Pete in Paris for those of you who can't get my pigeon French down. Greetings, Jensen. In two Chile here, we're at least above freezing, although there is snow on the ground. It's impressive. There's snow on the ground in Paris? Oh, yeah. Wow. Is that atypical or is that sort of normal? No, it's sort of normal, but it doesn't stay below freezing long here. I've found that, you know, when it happens, it gets in the mid-thirties and stays and is windy. So if this were, say, you have an iPhone 15 Pro, right, Pete? So if this were, say, two, two and a half weeks from now, you could go outside with your iPhone 15 Pro and take one of those cool, like, not quite movies for the Vision Pro, like the whole thing, and you could send it to Adam because Adam, you ordered one of those this morning. Didn't you? I did. I had been planning for this, actually. One of the reasons why I did not get an iPhone 15 Pro, because I was going to take that money and use it for this, although I don't know how much the sting out of the 4K bill that took. Yeah, right. It was hard. 4K? OK, so how did the pricing work out for you? Yeah, it's $3,400. What do you mean 4K? Yeah, it was $3,499. And then you start adding on the stuff, right? And so you get in there and oh, guess what? There's a 256 option, which is the 3499 256 gig storage. And then, well, you want 512? That's another 200 bucks, even though I could go get that for about 50 bucks. I think just about any place else, maybe even less. I don't know. What is a 256 SSD cost these days? It's around 50 bucks. I would I'm imagining, I think. Yeah, or less. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, you know, Apple, they love to charge for that stuff. And then you could go all the way up to a terabyte. And, you know, I was originally just going to go with the base model. And I thought, you know what? I'm not going to be buying like every version of this thing. So like my option to upgrade is not going to be like, I'm not spending another four grand next year for the two or whatever, two years, whatever it is. Yeah, right. I need a little longevity. So I wanted to give myself a little headroom. So I'm like, OK, I'll take the middle tier, you know? And then you got tax. But then the super sting really was the Apple care. I didn't do my research. Had I done this ahead of time, I would have known and been prepared. But 499 for Apple care plus. Whoa, 2499 a month, which I went with the monthly option, you know, because that allows you to continue till you don't want to pay it anymore. Yeah, right. And, you know, with that. The price on that device and the amount of technology that's in there. It's like, yeah, I need to have Apple care plus on this thing, especially in a V one product, right? So if there's any kind of defects or any other things, I just don't want to deal with it. Yep. So yeah, I think you get a year on the hardware out of the box, but still it's just like I'm planning on having this thing for a long time. It's sort of like I look at it like I never bought like really high end Macs for myself. Like I always was kind of MacBook Pros, but, you know, kind of lower middle tier never went for like a Mac Pro or a Mac Studio or like anything crazy. So this is my four way into the, you know, spatial computing technology. Yeah, I'm I'm curious what like what are you? What what drove you to buy this? Like what what are you going to use it? But for like I'm just curious. Yeah. So the number one thing is, you know, I'm very interested to just use this, see if I can use it as on a daily basis for my work, for doing programming and development work, right? The idea of having basically infinite desktop is very appealing to me as a developer and a programmer. You know, I have two screens now. I've wanted bigger ones for a while. I haven't invested in those. That's another place like I have really just bare bones screens. I don't have five. I don't even have four case screens. I have just regular screens. OK, yeah, you know, I'm looking to see if that experience works out. It'll be interesting to see with the weight and all that stuff, how that how that pans out, but that and then, you know, I like I like entertainment and watching movies and stuff like that. So I think that is going to be my other use cases, just entertainment consumption. You know, I'm frankly the only person in my house. I think that actually watches TV like on the TV. Right, you've said that. Yeah, yeah, everybody else watches on their phones or whatever. They're fine. Yeah. So but I like to sit in the living room and watch a TV. So now I guess I can sit anywhere I want and watch my big giant screen. Great. And have that that experience. So I don't, you know, I really don't know. I don't know where developers are going to take it. I'm just excited to try something brand new. I think, you know, it's been years and years and years. I was going to even comment, you know, like. I'm seeing iPhone 16 pro rumors right now, right? And the iPhone has gotten, unfortunately, just kind of tired. I mean, it's where it is in the cycle. I mean, it's just through so many generations of this. But like it's a recycle of rumors. Like I think the rumor was next iPhone is going to have two terabytes of storage. Well, we've heard that rumor for like five years. You're right. Right. So what? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So just excited to try something new and be I, you know, again, I've never jumped in on the full cutting edge, even with the original iPhone. I did not buy the original iPhone. It was through the generosity of a listener that I ended up with the original iPhone. Oh, interesting. They wanted me to discuss the iPhone. And I was just like, I can't pull the trigger on what was it? It was like a big drop. Oh, yeah, it was a lot. Yeah. Hundred bucks like right after it launched and there was no subsidies. It was like eight. I can't remember the original price. I want to say it was around 800 bucks and then they dropped. But remember, you could get four, eight or 16 gigabytes if you really pulled the trigger. Yeah, it was crazy. So yeah, I'm just excited to like see what this is all about and see if Apple really pulled it off. And, you know, it's had nothing but rave reviews in the media from the people who've tried it. So I'm just very excited to kind of be on that. But really the use case is because of the battery life, it'd be, you know, I can be tethered here in my office. I can have it plugged in just right into power and use it for as long as I want to use it for as long as it's comfortable. And I'm really curious to see how long is comfortable. I've heard people say even after a couple hours, it can get a little bit heavy, but we'll see. Well, I'm glad that you've I mean, you've taken a leap here clearly, you know, and it's a leap you don't normally take. It's not just like in your wheelhouse to do this. So I'm I'm I'm stoked to hear I like I, too, have heard the opinions of folks that have used it. Most of those are, quite frankly, more like me, where they just take the leap anyway, every time, no matter what. I'm really eager to hear your take on this because because you're not like that. I did atypically, I did not order one this morning. I. I. I don't I I believe it would wind up collecting some dust for me, given how I work and what I what I do for work and what I how I engage. Like we do my wife and I do watch TV together at home. So like I'm not on the road as much as I used to be. So which is where I think I would probably get the most use out of it. I think this is perhaps the perfect hotel room computer because you can bring a big monitor with you anywhere you want to go. And it doesn't take up the space that a big monitor would. So there you go now. I've got a justification there. Yeah, sorry, Pete, I am a couple hours too late here. We are recording this on Friday the 19th, just so you know. But yeah, so I'm I'm I'm eager and I may like like many things in my life. I may realize I made the wrong decision and then I'll buy one. And then, you know, that's fine. But Pete, did you did you get one or no? Or did you order one yet? Like you said, my concern is that, you know, I was down in the basement. We're getting ready to move in the spring. And I was down in the basement cleaning out a bunch of stuff. And I've already got some very expensive dust magnets I've discovered. And and that is actually one of my concerns is the same thing, Dave, that this may not be used as much as as a thirty five hundred. No, four thousand dollar piece of gear would require so. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I I really want one. I really, really want one. I could justify maybe fifteen hundred, maybe two thousand. So hopefully, you know, like all tech, it's got to come down in price. But it will. Yeah. And this is the the the Vision Pro or as they want us to call it, the Apple Vision Pro. Somebody texted me that last night because I asked about Vision Pro. And I said, look, you know, if Apple either buys my company or or writes my paycheck, I'll call it what Apple wants me to call it. And they know how to find me. But I don't know that the price is going to be something they want to pay. But like this is the pro version of this product. Yeah, right. What's the non pro version going to look like in terms of features and price and all that stuff. So yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm concerned about it eventually becoming a you know, very expensive paperweight as well. Like that's in the back of my mind. Like this is an experiment. It could totally fail. Like it could think this could be the only one ever made. And you know, I don't think that's going to be the case. I agree. But Apple's done that before. I mean, I mean, the HomePod's back. But the original HomePod was like, oh, that didn't work. You know, yeah, they just killed it off. Or, you know, there's lots of things that have been killed off after one generation. So that was interesting. Now that you mentioned that HomePod, too. That's one that, you know, was here and went away and then they did the mini and but not very much Hurrah about it. You know, it was just all very quietly done. Yes. Yeah. So that could happen. Just real quick on the buying experience. That was smooth. I'll just tell you that. Like I had a little bit of issue just because it was early in the morning and I didn't have like all the lighting on in the house. But basically I did it through the through the app. It looks like you could do it, you know, through your Mac and then it'll go connect to your phone. I'm I'm assuming using the continuity features. But basically the first step was scan your scan your head. And that was kind of like the Siri process where you hold out your phone. In this instance, you would look left, right? Oh, the face ID process you made. Yeah. Yeah. So you didn't do the head circle thing. You just did each direction and you had to do that twice. So I had a hard time getting that registered at first, but I eventually got that through and it went fine. And then it asked all the questions about, you know, do you wear glasses? Do you wear contacts? All the prescription, you know, and I had my prescription ready. You know, so you do you do need to upload your prescription. I guess after you ordering. So they'll let you go through the ordering and then I guess you have to upload. I didn't have to go through that process because I ended up finding out that if you use contacts, one, you don't, depending on, you know, how your eyes are, this is all, but I have, you know, normal contacts, not mono vision ones or anything like that. So I just have standard contacts, no cosmetic contact stuff or whatever. So you can just use the vision pro with your regular contacts. Now I also need a little bit close up stuff for my computer stuff. So with that, I'm just getting the regular, like, reader inserts, like 1.0 power reader insert. So I went that route rather than going with the prescription lenses. I had my prescription ready in case I wanted to get the prescription lenses and not have to use contacts, but that's the route I ended up going because I think that's going to work better for me. Because that way for normal viewing, I could just wear my contacts and, you know, watch movies and see the distance stuff. And then for my computer work, I can use the reader inserts because I have computer glasses or whatever. So I went that route. So that was that was really smooth, other than the fact that I didn't, I didn't see the question that said, oh, if you're using contacts, do you want to use contacts with readers? And so there was a button for that. I missed it. So I was already down the ordering process. I'm like, wait, it never asked me asked me when I want to get the reader inserts. So I completed my order and the facial scan is so that they can get you the right light seal and all that stuff that. So it like registers your face and it sets all that stuff up. So I'll just go back and, you know, order the reader inserts separately. So unfortunately, when I went back to do that, it wanted to do a face scan again. And I guess if you have the reader lenses, there's an adjustment in terms of the light seal. They recheck the light seal. And so there's all kinds of different light seal numbers. It's like a two number plus a letter. So when I ordered it without the inserts, it was like 21W. And then when it rescan my face, it's like a 23C or something like that. So I had to get a new light seal. The light seal is 200 bucks. Oh, that stings. Yeah. So everything on this is separate. So I don't know if I'm going to really need both if I'll be able to send the one back, but it sounds like different light seal when you've got the inserts in versus when you don't, at least according to the face scan it did. So we'll see, you know, when it all comes. But yeah, just be prepared. Can't you just turn out the lights in the room? You know, or you could have just asked in in in our MaciCab discord at macicab.com slash discord because Warren said, Adam, I knew you were a 23C. So oh, boy, actually, I have a question that came up in that. So you talked about using the app in the phone and then doing the Mac and it'll it'll talk to the phone. What if you're an Android user? Can you not use the Apple Vision Pro? Is it dependent on iOS or Mac OS? Or maybe you have to go to the Apple store or you have to go to the Apple store and have them do it for you. Yeah. And I wonder how like percentage. I know there's going to be a lot of people where the process you went through this morning and just described works totally fine. And then there's going to be some people for whom they get their thing and it's completely the wrong fit. I'm wondering what the the success percentage is going to be like comparing that of people who did it at home like everyone had to this morning versus people who go into the Apple store and actually get fitted for it there. I'm curious. Like I don't really necessarily have a guess as to which one's going to be better because I'm going to guess the genius is going to take their iPhone and do the same and do the same thing. Right. That's 21C or whatever. Yeah. And that's kind of why I'm curious because I've had I've never obviously never been scanned for a Vision Pro, but I have been molded and scanned in all of any way that you could be fitted for things that go inside your ears like in ear monitors or earplugs that are custom fitted, all of those things. I've I've had every method done to me. I've had it done with an iPhone where it's using the Face ID scanner to do that. I've had it done with a you know, with the goop that they pour in your ears. And then I've also had it done with a like bespoke 3D scanner that's presumably quite similar to whatever the scanner is on the iPhone. And the success of those is equal. It's not none of them is perfect, by the way. You know, and I guess the advice that I can extrapolate from those experiences and share with everyone here is this is while not a custom fit product, it is a tailor fit product. And like my in ears and I advise people with this all the time, it's the same advice if you get it and the fit is not 100 percent absolutely perfect for you, call the manufacturer, a.k.a. Apple and have them fix it because they want you to have a good experience with this. That's the whole point of this. And also you want you to have a good experience with it. So don't be afraid, whether it's a Vision Pro or custom fit ear plugs or whatever, like make sure it's perfect. And you know, you'll probably need to try it four or five times before you know that it's not perfect, because it's going to be different than the first the first time you put it on because you've never used it before. But give yourself permission, you know, a few days in a week in to say, yeah, no, I I know this was weird the first time I put it on. But now it's not weird anymore. It's just uncomfortable on hot spot on my forehead. Exactly. Yeah. So so that would that would be that would be my advice. Well, I'm eager to to hear when when you get it, Adam. And and and obviously we'll talk about it here on the. I'm sorry. It's going to be a lot of learning. Yeah. All right, folks, this episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Look, around New Year here, it's easy to get obsessed with how to change ourselves instead of just expanding on what we're already doing right. Right. About a year ago, I actually started back into therapy for the first time in several decades. And it has been fantastic for me. It's nice to really just have someone I can talk with on a regular basis, kind of process all those things that are going on in life. And it really can be helpful, at least it has been for me. So if you've been thinking about starting therapy, well, give our sponsor BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online and it's designed to be convenient, flexible and perhaps even the best part suited to your schedule. We all know how difficult it is to get things into our schedules these days. And I love it when there are services that we can use that really cater to that. All you do is just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and you can switch therapist any time for no additional charge. So you start out, you got to find the right one. It's really important to have somebody that you're comfortable talking with. And that's one of the beauties of BetterHelp is they let you switch. If you try somebody out for, you know, a week or two and realize this isn't really the right thing for me. I need somebody a little bit different. Boom, you go back and you find somebody new, right? Celebrate the progress you've already made. Visit BetterHelp.com slash GeekGab today to get 10 percent off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P.com slash GeekGab and our thanks to BetterHelp for sponsoring this episode. All right, let's I know we started the episode with quick tips. Let's let's let's resume doing quick tip, shall we? Ben shares an interesting one here for us. And it came out of a question that was posted in our discord where somebody says, once in a while, I want to open a folder in the app library, but usually I cannot do it on either my iPhone or my iPad. Once in a great while, whatever the magic tap is, I can do it and the folder opens, but most of the time either nothing happens or I unintentionally open one of the apps. And listener Ben commented in our discord, this magic way of doing it. And the trick is when you have a folder in your app library, if it has four or less in it, you can't open the folder because there's no reason to the folder is you are seeing the full contents of the folder. But a lot of times when there's more than four, what you'll see is three large icons and then a bunch of smaller icons representing the apps that are not being sort of highlighted, if you will, tap on the group of smaller apps. This causes the entire folder to open up so that you can see all of the apps on equal footing. And it's magic like I've fought with this for years. I just, I didn't think it was possible. And and then thankfully we now know that that it is. So thank you for that, Ben. Great, great stuff. Yeah. You wanna take us to Todd? Yeah, it's cool. Yeah, yeah. You wanna take us to Todd, Adam? Yeah, Todd says, hey, I use CarPlay a lot to read text messages back to me while driving. Just notice that Siri will now tell you there's an image attached and then describe what is in the image such as open refrigerator with multiple items or person holding a dog. And yeah, this is an amazing new feature in Siri. I'm assuming it uses all the, you know, image AI that is built into iOS now. And it's really, really cool. Makes it a lot safer also when you're getting a text message in the car. Very, very cool. So if you haven't experienced that, it's great. I wrote Todd back because this is also a feature in the magnifier. It has a really cool thing where you can turn on image descriptions and you can point your phone around the room and it will start describing things to you. You have to enable it, but once it's on, it's really cool. And it can do things even, it's kind of like an accessibility feature too because it can do things like detect doors and tell you where a door is and what kind of handle it is and how far away it is if you have the LiDAR features on your iPhone. So that's a lot of fun to play around with too. It's mind blowing. It is. Have you played with it yet, Pete? I have not. Dude, when I saw your- I feel like such a Luddite. Well, you're only about 24 hours behind me, Pete, because I didn't know about this until Adam mentioned it in the reply that I saw when I was prepping the show yesterday. And I was like, what? But you have to go into magnifier apps settings. There's like a little settings widget or whatever. And you've got to enable the point and speak thing and all of this, but then once you do, it is magical. Like, it lets you do all the cool things that you'd ever want to do to demo. I can see where, especially from an accessibility standpoint, there's a lot of benefits here, but it's just cool. I had no idea that you can point it at instructions and it will extrapolate things out. You can do this thing where you point your finger at, you hold your phone like, you know, arms length away-ish from whatever you're trying to read and you tap the text that you wanna read with your finger and the phone focuses in on that blob of text. Yeah, yeah, as I'm describing it, it's hard to describe. You gotta play with this. It's really, I was stoked about this. Whoa, you know, there's big brains working this stuff at Apple, it's astounding. When you think how difficult it is to get a computer to do something like that, I think. I mean- It's crazy. You know, this is a doorknob, it's a leverage doorknob, it's a round knob or here's some text I want to focus in on and it knows, you know, it's able to derive, that's what you're trying to figure out. Yeah. That's wild. It's wild. I'm stoked to try this. Yeah, yeah, you just turn it on and then once you enable the mode, there are five different things you can have it do. There's the point your finger at the deal and it'll do the thing for you and then there's text detection where it starts to just, like if you point it at text, it shows you its reading of that text on the screen just in real time as you're just kind of doing stuff. Almost like the translate app does, but this isn't translating it, it's just showing you in English and then there's image description, so I don't know what happens if I point this at the screen, it's a screenshot of a computer screen, a screenshot of a website with text and images and a group of people on it is what it's saying. As I'm showing the screen that we're recording on here. And then if you aim it at the door, let's see, can I aim it at the door here? Yeah, it says one door nine feet away and it's getting confused. Like yeah, it will tell you, like you said Adam, it'll say in the handles on the right it swings in or it swings out. Yeah. It's crazy and then there's, go ahead. My house has the lever handles versus the knob so it'll describe the type of handle even so that you know, yeah. Oh man, I gotta move to lever handles in the house. I love those. Those are much nicer than the knobs, yeah. Actually, I guess we did move to them in the house. I just need to in the office here. All right, upgrades. As if I need to do more upgrades. But I didn't spend 4K on a Vision Pro, so that's like extra money, isn't it? Extra money for handles. Is that, do we get to call that nerd math? I think we get to call that nerd math. Yeah, I didn't spend. You and I just made $4,000 each this morning. That's exactly right. Yes, yeah, I think that's nerd math. Yeah, yeah. I've heard of girl math. I've even heard some people say boy math but I'm not entirely sure on the definition of these things but this, this is nerd math. Well there's public math which pilots never try to do. Right, well, that's right. I have a feeling your day job requires more math accuracy than mine even, Pete. Yeah, often it does. Yeah. You try to never do it in your head while describing it to the guy sitting next to you unless you really do enjoy embarrassing moments. That's fair. That's fair. That's fair. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll give you that. But it's funny how you, real quickly, how everything is with the clock divisible by six and that sort of thing. So if I look at 540, I know I'm doing nine miles a minute because 54 is divided by six, nine times. Yeah. You know, that's the sort of thing. So those sorts of things you quickly get and people are always amazed by that and you're just like, no, we have 420 is seven miles a minute. Right, because you're just dividing by. By nine and six, divide by six because of the. Divide by six, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then there's the zeros that you're chopping off. But yeah. So 600 knots is 10 miles a minute. 10 miles a minute. And that's like when you're flying a plane that's important information to be able to sort of extrapolate quickly. Yes, how many minutes away from my next way point? Yeah. I'm 80 miles away. How long is it gonna take me 12 minutes and change? Right. Yeah, yeah. But there's public math in a nutshell. There's public math. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I tried this thing. I pointed the phone at myself. It says devilishly handsome pilot who knows all things Mac in there. Of course, Pete, I think there's an Apple store in Paris. You better take that thing in. There's something wrong. All right. Too shake. All right, we're having fun. You want to take us to our next quick tip, Pete? I can do so. McKen's wrote in and said, I wanted to correct something you all said about messages at the opening of 1020. Messages can in fact send audio message to anyone, including SMS, and they will receive it and be able to play it. Because we were thinking that you couldn't send it to someone with some of the low-lifes with an Android phone. Sorry, just kidding. Don't send me any email. If you got an Android phone, I get it. So you can send a voice message to somebody, and the way to do it is when you're in messages next to the text box, the text entry box, there's a little plus sign, and you tap that little plus next to the window. If you press and hold it, you're gonna get photos to select. But if you just tap it, in my phone, it's about five apps down. It says audio. When you tap audio, it starts recording right now. It doesn't bring up, you know, get ready to record or anything like that. So as you press audio, it's recording. Speak your message, and when you're done, there's a little stop button on the right. You hit stop, and then you have to send it. Once you send it, there's a little thing that says keep it underneath, a little small button underneath the voice message that you sent. I don't know how long it lasts. If you don't tap keep it, does it go away after a certain amount of time? Je ne sais quoi. But that's, I don't know why. Je ne sais pas, I do not know. So I don't know how long if you don't select keep it, but I do know that you can select keep it if you want to keep that message in latency in there. So. Nice. So that was pretty cool. Thanks for that update, McKens. We appreciate that. Yeah, that's good stuff. Good stuff. All right, one more quick tip left. Drusky. Drusky, I got Drusky. He says, for years I, or they say, for years I've suffered from an apparent birth defect known as Lazy Shift Finger, whereby my pinky finger lingers on the Shift key while my other typing fingers have moved on to the second letter of the word. Having no solution other than slowly retyping the overcapitalized word, I wrote an email pleading for an MGG intervention that right before sending, I went exploring and found that the setting has, that is also intuitively located at system settings, accessibility, keyboard, keyboard settings, input sources, edit. It's a setting called capitalize words automatically. I interpreted that as capitalize the first letter of a word in a sentence when you forget, which in fact it does, but I threw caution into the wind, clicked the switch to enable and voila. No more capitalizations, even if the word is mid-sentence, my Shift Finger is still lazy, but my typing no longer reveals it. And just as an aside, this doesn't apply to typing numbers and characters however, but as those are few, like extra, you know, you come with commas parentheses, I'm so bad at grammar. I'm, I've, you know, like extra characters there. Apostrophes. Apostrophes, yes, that's what I wanna say. He says, I will just add those as text replacements in the keyboard settings, which that's another tip I think we've discussed in the past, where if you have common misspellings that you just do, because you mistyped things, like for me, it's download, I for whatever reason, swap the A and the O. I just put that in as the bad version of it and as a text replacement in the keyboard replacements and it automatically gets fixed. So it fixes my bad typing, but he says, hope that helps someone afflicted like me. So great tip for those other characters, I'll just add something you might wanna play with, Druski, is slow keys in the accessibility settings. So if you go to system settings, accessibility keyboard, slow keys, there's a setting that adjusts the amount of time between when a key is pressed and when it's actually activated. There's a little slider. And so if you linger on keys, you could adjust that and that might help. Interesting, okay. I've got a quick question on this and I only found this out recently in a WhatsApp text group that I'm in. I was thinking that, have you guys heard of the sarcastic mode? What's this? Oh no. No, no, I swear to God, I'm being totally serious. It's when someone wants to express sarcasm, it's like every two or three letters or every other letter is capitalized in a word. And I'm going, so this guy's always being sarcastic is what it appears to be in the previous case. Have you heard of that? Apparently not. No, that's like all caps yelling? Yeah, all caps is yelling, but sarcastic mode is like T capital, H, I capital, N, K. Oh, did not, I've never heard of that. You're trying to express sarcasm, I'm like, I think this is a great idea. You know, okay. You do mixed casing in your message. Yeah, mixed case is sarcastic mode. I'd never heard of that until about two weeks ago. So I was just thinking, well, maybe, maybe Druski was almost being sarcastic. All right, look, you know how it is. You have a team of people, you're working on a thing together and you need to keep everyone on the same page. Well, our sponsor, Kota, lets us keep everything on the same page literally by bringing together the best of documents, spreadsheets and apps into one platform. Kota stops you from ping-ponging between different tabs and tools. Kota has been amazing for collaborating with some of my remote colleagues and it really helps centralize all of our processes and shared knowledge. Now is the perfect time to get started with Kota, especially its extensive planning capabilities because with Kota, you can stay aligned by managing your planning cycles and everything in one location. And then you can set and measure those objectives and key results, you know, the ochres with full visibility across teams, communicate and collaborate on documents, roadmaps and just the stuff that you need to work together with other people on instantly. You can access hundreds of templates and get inspired by what others have done in the Kota Gallery. If you want a platform that empowers your team to collaborate effectively and focus on shared goals, you can get started with Kota today for free. I know. Head over to kota.io slash mgg. That's c-o-d-a dot i-o slash mgg to get started for free. Kota.io forward slash mgg and our thanks to Kota for sponsoring this episode. All right, let's do some questions here. Ken has our first question. He says, it appears that I've gotten caught by Gmail. I had to change my Google password, which went well on my iPhone and iPad, but not on my M2 MacBook Air running Mac OS Sonoma. After changing the password on the Mac, I received an error in Apple Mail, which I use for Gmail. After consulting Google, I wound up deleting the account for mail and then attempting to re-enter it. When I did that, I encountered the error that says something to the effect of the server cannot process the request because it's malformed, it should not be retried. This is a Safari window that pops up when mail's trying to do Google's OAuth authentication. The next Google search I did showed that I was not alone. I followed some suggestions, which included clearing Safari's history and cache all to no avail. He says, I'm still in the middle of MGG 1017, where Dave mentioned, you mentioned the concept of using a third-party app for Gmail. So I downloaded Easy Mail, which seems to be working. That being said, I think I would still rather use Apple Mail. Do you have any suggestions for solving this weird login authentication problem? I'm now a bit nervous about using Gmail for my user ID on various accounts that involve two-factor authentication. I was thinking about creating my own domain and using Fastmail for these. Would you mind sharing your thoughts on that too? Adam, what do you think? Yeah, I mean, that's very frustrating. The issue he's describing, it looks like there's been instances where OAuth2 doesn't work on OlderMax. I don't think that's the case here because he has a brand new Mac. For OlderMax, the trick would be you'd have to go in to your iCloud account or your Google account, rather, and you can create what's called an app password that doesn't require two-factor authentication, the OAuth thing. But because he's on a newer Mac, what it looks like to me is that pop-up window that comes up, which is Safari, but it's in its own kind of instance. So when you're trying to log in, it tries to go to Google and do the two-factor OAuth thing. I noticed that window was a private browsing window. So one thing I thought was that maybe it's the private browsing that's getting in the way and it may be related to some of the changes Apple made to private browsing because I think now Safari, if you've had a private browsing session before and you relaunch Safari, I think it goes back into a private browsing session again. There's a setting in Safari you could do to change that, but I would make sure that launch Safari and make sure Safari is set up to open up in a non-private browser window because I'm guessing it's blocking some things and Google's like, I don't know what's going on. So that was my theory on it. That's my thing. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Well, when I saw the private browsing window, I thought that that was intentional by mail to not inherit any given, any logins and cookies that might exist and just have a sort of blank slate of Safari to take you to log in to this account for mail, but instead of it opening a window inside mail, they just invoke a private window in Safari because why reinvent the wheel? That was my interpretation of it. But I've seen this go both ways. So you might be right. We all kind of bring our own assumptions to the table when we see these things and there's no way of knowing which one of us is correct. So yeah, but my thought is if Safari, if you clear all that out and Safari still isn't the right thing, temporarily change your default browser to Chrome or something and try to let mail reauthenticate because there might be, who knows, there might be some setting in Safari that is spilling over to private mode. If my interpretation is right, that's still causing trouble. I don't know. What were you gonna say, Adam? No, I was just gonna say, yeah, that it sounds like there's another option. Just in general on this with browsers and stuff like that recently, especially Safari with the number of security, privacy things Apple has added, which I am very appreciative of. I run into this a lot more now where certain websites, certain things, like I have my, the plumbing company that I do work with has a way to pay online, but that will not work in Safari anymore because of their, whatever they're doing with privacy and stuff like that. So like I have to make sure I open that in Chrome or some other browser, again, not really happy about probably what it's doing behind the scenes, but that's just the way. But it's something for people to know, like this is just generally a good tip. If you run into a website where it's not working in Safari, try another browser. That's just a good general tip and it might work someplace else. Just be aware that you might also be having your privacy invaded on. Yeah, right. So there is a thing that's happening this year, Adam, you suggested using what Google calls their app specific passwords for less secure apps were LSA in Google parlance. I believe if you are using one of those for a Gmail account, so like an account that is at gmail.com, I believe what I'm about to share does not affect you, but I've put a link in the show notes for this just in case. But if you are using a Google workspace account and you might even have one of these as a legacy from your personal domain or something when they were free, or maybe you're paying for it, but it's where you use Google's mail services for your own domain, whether it's for work or personal, it doesn't really matter. If you're doing that, starting this fall, you will no longer be able to log in with those app specific passwords. And starting in June, you will no longer be able to create those app specific passwords. The options will go away. If you're doing this, you probably got an email from Google recently. I certainly did because I'm doing it with one of my, actually with one of my macicab.com things. So we need to, you know, those of us that are in this boat need to figure out how to get around it because there were a lot of things, especially like with mail, where life was simpler with a less specific password or less secure password or whatever it is. Well, then it becomes a problem with two-factor authentication. Do you have to turn that off just to be able to continue to use the Apple mail client and to get it together? No, no, no. This is Google enforcing the two-factor authentication is what's happening here. They are enforcing that you must log in via their Oauth system. Not with, you know, you can have right now these less specific apps mean and app or less secure apps and app specific passwords. This is like trying to do public math. The idea is you normally would log into Google with your Oauth thing and the two-factor and all of that stuff. But there's some apps like say an IMAP email client where the only thing you get to put in is a username and password. There is no opportunity to log in with Oauth. Like mail actually lets you log in with Oauth. That's what this whole problem is about here. And Adam's solution was create the app specific password and bypass Google's Oauth. If you have a Google app for domains or Google workspace or whatever, you can't do that later this year. Yeah, just that's a PSA. That's a PSA, that's right. Yeah, it's just related because you brought it up, that's all. Just on the Oauth thing to Pete, like if you have a client, like I'm gonna go check now. I didn't know this was going on Dave because I think I'm using app specific passwords for Fantastic L right now. I don't know it's still required of that. But I would encourage anybody who, if you have an app like this that's not supporting Oauth, email your developer and ask them because Oauth support can be added to an app. I wanna ask you about that. Like as a person who writes code for a living, like how good are the libraries that companies like Google offer and the corollary question is how difficult would it be for any given programmer in general to add this to their app if, say, Fantastic L doesn't already support it? My guess is it probably does. But there's a lot of libraries out there. As a matter of fact, I was going and looking, I'm actually having to do this for the one that's really difficult is sign in with Apple. Like they have Oauth plus. It's like there's all kinds of extra steps. You've got to support Mail Relay. You've got to do a bunch of extra things. But like standard Oauth 2 stuff is pretty standardized at this point. I don't know about Swift, but I would assume there's a library already there for it or somebody's written, there has to be. Because for any other programming language, PHP, JavaScript, everything has, you can find a library and it's complicated, but it's not impossible. Not it. It's been around long enough that that was my presumption to support it. Like a week's worth of work or less, maybe to implement Oauth. I think it probably depends on your app and what you're doing. Fair. But it shouldn't be super, super hard at this point. It's not a six month project for most people. Again, I don't know how everybody's asked for it. Well, of course, I'm asking you to generalize. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you got a bunch of legacy stuff you're doing weird, who knows? But yeah, for a standard like log in, it's become pretty standardized. Yeah, okay. Cool. Thank you. Yeah, yeah, fun. I was confused because that's what I use for busy cow. And I'm pretty sure my mail client on my phone still uses an app specific password. I don't think I've ever changed any of that. Yeah. And as long as it's an at gmail.com account based on the, let me read the language. Starting in fall of 2024, less secure apps, third party apps or devices which have you sign in with only your username and password will no longer be supported for Google Workspace accounts. They're not saying Google accounts, they're saying Google Workspace. And Google Workspace is when you're using your own domain. Like that effectively, you know. And I have one of those, you know, and that's the, of course my main one, my domain. When I got the email from Google yesterday or day before whatever it was, it was, hey, here's this thing that's happening. Here's the timeline, the one that I shared earlier. And here's a text file listing all of the accounts in your domain that suffer from this problem. And so like we each have email addresses at macgeekab.com, right? You know, and feedback at and premium at and all of those are considered email addresses. Of course, they listed one for me and it was mine. So, you know, and I'm the admin of the domain so that's why they sent the email to me. So like you guys don't have to worry about your macgeekab.com accounts because you're not using less specific or less secure passwords or whatever. And Pete from the FAQ at busy mac, they asked G Suite accounts will only allow access tabs with using OAuth. Does this affect busy call or busy contacts? No, it does not busy call and busy contacts already use OAuth to access your Google G Suite accounts. We don't use or store your Google account password. So you're fine on busy call. Yeah, and that's the reason. Yeah, that's the reason for this, right? Is, you know, when you log in, and when an app has you log in with the OAuth thing, it never sees your password. You authenticate with, in this case, Google and then Google shares a token with the app in question and then stores that token on their end too. So you can go and revoke that one token on the Google side and it would stop, in this case, busy call from working but busy call couldn't ever like log you in and do other things with your account because you've only given that token access to your calendars. When it requests it, it asks, and you see this come up on your screen, Google says, busy call is asking for access to your calendars, do you wanna grant that? And you say yes, but it can't see anything it hasn't asked for and that you haven't granted and it can't log in other things. So, yeah, so it is more secure. Like there's good reason for all of this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like that, okay. Yeah, yeah. All right, shall we go to Jim? We shall, we shall. Jim writes in, he says, I have a corporate issued M2 MacBook Air Managed by Jamf. After an inline upgrade from Ventura to Sonoma, everything got real buggy. Went through a number of steps but engineering gave up and told me to nuke and pave. I've been faithfully using Time Machine with an external two terabyte drive so I figured this is no big deal. In the installment iterations, Time Machine refused to restore the latest Sonoma backup before the downgrade. After getting a fresh Ventura install, Time Machine also refused to restore from any of the Ventura backups in recovery mode. It tells me I have to use migration assistant. Turns out migration assistant just hangs at the setting up spinner but never logs out. If I kill it, wind up with a cursor and desktop but no other UI elements forcing me to do a hard reboot. I have two questions. How do I get my files on the existing Time Machine backup and what other backup options should I use going forward? I'd be happy with an occasional clone that unmounts the drive after completing a daily backup. I've used CCC, carbon copy cloner before but you guys talk like it's less useful than before. Work won't buy any apps so I'd like something as close to free as possible. Yeah, so I've never had great luck restoring to a downgrade. I've done it and I talked about it on this show because I wanted to prove Apple wrong when they said they hadn't broken core audio in Ventura but they had and I proved it. They of course never acknowledged it. Good news, it was magically fixed in Sonoma and they never said anything about it. So right, you're welcome Apple. I've done it but what I will point out is like you could force your system to accept all of this if you really try hard but a lot of things namely Apple's apps like mail and photos and contacts and things like that won't work because their data stores are from like you can't run the new version of mail or photos on the old version of macOS. You might be able to run the new version of say busy Cal on the old version of macOS. So those apps work fine when you sort of downgrade but Apple's apps don't because those apps are part of the OS install. And it's for that reason that trying to do a migration assistance or really any of that from newer to older it's simply not gonna work. So you need to nuke and pave and start sort of manually bringing all of these things in. You can open up your time machine drive, right? You know, time machine backups are navigatable in the finder and they are navigatable in the finder for this exact reason so that you can just double click on them and open them up and you will see a list of all of the backup dates pick either the most recent one or maybe even one that predates your upgrade and try and pull from there if that exists. But it's gonna be a bit of a manual chore doing this. My advice is to, when I did this, I realized, okay, I can't keep my, like there's no way I'm gonna be able to recover the mail from my backup to this machine without a lot of sort of really manual, like extracting from individual folders and the same would have been true with photos. I use iCloud Photo Library, so I just start, I nuked and paved and I start, let photos start from scratch and it pulled it down. I use imap mail exclusively on this computer and so I just let it, I logged it into my mail account and let it pull everything back down from the cloud and rebuild the library with the older version of the OS. And that all worked fine. But that like, Adam or Pete have either of you, would you do anything differently, I guess is the question. Yeah, Adam. I have a question. I mean, I've never had to downgrade or I've never done downgrades like this, but would the handy dandy, hey, there's extra features when you hold down the option key trick work if you wanted to restore files the time machine way because if you go to your time machine icon and you hold down the option key, so normally you click on the icon and it says browse time machine backups. If you hold down the option key, it says browse other backup disks. So if you haven't attached backup disk, you can point time machine at that old time machine. This is a great way to, if like, we had that conversation a while back where people have said, I got a new time machine, how do I migrate my stuff over? You know, my answer is keep your old time machine disk and just set up the new one as new and then you can always plug that back in and go back and re-browse it if you need to get something off that old time machine backup. And that's how you do it. You hold down the option key, you get browse other backup disks, you can point it at another and then it gives you the time machine interface. You can go to whatever folder directory and the old time machine restore that way. So that might be a way to do it. The finder can be a little bit tricky because it's like weird how things are broken up and like finding stuff. I don't like just going and browsing my time machine disk from the finder because it feels confusing to me at least. Yeah, yeah, yeah, fair. Yeah, yeah. We always talk about that option key and how often do we not follow our own advice, I mean, right on that? No, that's why I love doing this show because yeah, we all learn. First the other cool thing about that, holding down the option key on the time machine icon, you have the option to verify backups. And isn't that one of the big complaints about time machine that the backup is corrupted? It doesn't do as much of the verification as you would want it to do. Probably not, but it does some. It's better than nothing, right? Yeah, correct, correct. Yeah, I think, somebody please correct me if I'm wrong, feedback at macecom.com. I think if you verify backups, it verifies that the backup is readable, not that the contents of the backup match what's on your disk. Okay. And you want to send that to feedback at macecom.com? I guess. Feedback at macecom.com. I guess. The other question I had is like, I love how Adam plays into the shtick but clearly doesn't like, it's not part of his deal. That's right. It's no, it's perfect. I love it. I've waited to acknowledge it for several weeks here because it's just perfect. I'm the straight man. I know. It's great. All right, you idiots. I'll play along. Okay. Feedback at macecom.com. About downgrading, especially if you nuke and pave, what, I don't, I guess I, and this may be too long. Maybe we don't have time to go into it, but feedback at macecom.com, if you know the answer to this, what about the downgrade, especially if you've nuke and paved would cause time machine not to operate normally? Like it would think you have a brand new clean system and you're just restoring from your time machine backup. Well, yeah, but you're restoring from a time machine backup that was made from a newer version of the OS, at least in Jim's case here. That's the issue. Oh, so it had our time machine had already kicked in. On the new one, correct. Okay, that's the part I missed. That's my working assumption. Again, you know, it could only go with what I've assumed or what I've interpreted. So yeah, yeah, yeah. So there may be another tip there is when you are upgrading and maybe that's why I usually do this. I don't, I disconnect my time machine backup and upgrade and make sure everything's working and then reset up time machine. You know, we're in our 19th year of the show that I believe is the first time that practice has ever been mentioned. And yet every single time I'm doing an upgrade, I do one last time machine backup. I do one last carbon copy cloner, you know, clone of the data volume, whatever's possible with that OS. And then I physically disconnect the disk to which I'm doing that. And I leave it that way, sometimes to my detriment for weeks, you know, and then finally it's like, oh crap, that's right, CCC is not running. I gotta reconnect it and tell it to go again and all that, you know, like, but I do it for exactly that reason. And we've never talked about it. It's just never, I never thought about it. It's the brilliant way to operate. And I think that the price of drives, it's worth getting an external drive doing a CCC backup, getting a Sharpie pen right in on there and setting it on the shelf and go back if you need it. I was gonna say many times I have just, you know, in advance bought a new drive. Like I know the new operating systems coming out just by doing one terabyte drive that I use temporarily in that week or two for time machine backups. And the only one I don't change is I always leave my back plays running. So I, like I have back plays if nothing else. Yeah, yeah, fair. I, another way of doing this, and I don't do this as often as I probably would think I would want to, is I have a lot of storage on my NAS. I have a folder in my NAS archive folder that I call cold storage. And anytime I am decommissioning a Mac, I will make a disk image of that Mac and put it in cold storage and I never delete those. And then that way I know that like if I get a new, you know, when I got my new laptop and I was gonna give my old laptop to my wife, yeah, I migration assistant it over, but I know that it's possible something might not be copied. So I imaged it and put it in cold storage and then that way I'm free immediately after rolling to the new Mac to nuke and pave the old one and give it to Lisa, right? Like I have no concerns about, well, I probably want to leave that around for a little while just in case. Nope, there's no just in case. It's like, I already did the just in case. Easily could do that same thing before major version upgrades of Mac OS. And that way you're not dedicating an SSD to it. You don't need to figure out which SSD can I do this on. You just put it on your disk station if you've got a NAS or some big pile of data drive and just use disk, I just use disk utility to create a disk image and save it over there. That's it, so. That's like my carbon copy, not my carbon copy, but my croto sync archives that we've talked about before. I mean, that's the same piece of mind I do those for, but that's a great tip. All right, you know when you get cornered by that aunt at a family gathering and you feel like you have to bend the truth a little, you know the one who asks like when you're getting married or what's going on with that promotion at work or why you still haven't moved out of your mom's basement, like things that aren't really her business. And then after you answer, she just doesn't really listen and just judges you, right? Well, while you might have to grin and bear it with your family, there's no reason to feel that way when talking with your doctor about that rash that weirdly looks like your high school crush, you know, enter ZockDoc, the place where you can find and book doctors who will make you feel comfortable and actually listen to you. And we're not talking about a few, we're talking about tens of thousands of doctors all with verified patient reviews so you can make sure the vibes are vibing before you ever meet in real life. 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I like how he starts it. I'm a MacCast refugee and I've been perusing back episodes of your show. I like that. That's great. Thanks for coming over. In episode 110 at 1257, there was a tip to use Touch ID for Pseudo-Auth and Dave- 1010, just 1010. Oh, sorry, 1010. I didn't want to rewind us, you know, 18 years. 1010 at 1257. Dave started talking about using weak passwords to make it easier, which I realized was mostly tongue-in-cheek. However, there's an easy way to stop Pseudo from prompting you for the passwords if you're so inclined and you edit your Pseudo-er's file, you find a line that reads, you know- We'll put this in the show notes. Yeah. Percent admin, all equals all and all in parentheses, but you know, it's complicated. Basically, you go into that little command, you add after the all equals parentheses all, no P-A-S-S-W-D, no password colon, and then Pseudo will no longer prompt you or any users in the admin group for their password. He then goes on to say, he prefers VI Pseudo command for editing the Pseudo-er's file, which is VI, you need to know VI, this is all dirty Unix command line stuff, but if you- It's hard to edit the Pseudo-er's file without VI Pseudo. You can do it, but you have to be authenticated in exactly the right way. So like this, if you're using Pseudo enough that you would wanna do this, you probably either already understand enough about VI to get yourself in and out of it, or it's time to understand enough about VI to get yourself in and out of it. Yeah, and then I appreciate his last comment here. There are certain risks that come with this, but I think it's less risky than using weak passwords. You know, again, both things, like I said, I'm assuming it was tongue in cheek, Dave, when you said to use weak passwords, maybe not. Well, it may have been, but it's what I do, so. There's what we do and then what we- What we advise. Correct, yeah, yeah, yeah. I've said this many times, security comes down to a very personal thing. What are you willing to, what risks are you willing to take or not take and everybody kind of has to make their own choices about this? For me personally, like on this, I don't do either of those things. I'm happy for the few times that I need to put in the admin password or something like that to just happily do that, but that's my choice. You make your choice. Great tip and great comment nonetheless, but yeah. Yep, yep. All right, we have a question from Gary who is asking about what's happening with the Apple Watch, Ultra 2 and Apple Watch 9 and the O2 sensors that are in them. Now, they're not the only Apple Watches with O2 sensors, but they are the only currently for sale as new Apple Watches with those O2 sensors. And in the news, there's been, you know, they were taken off the shelves just before Christmas because of this lawsuit from an Italian company who's patent O2 sensors probably in some way infringes, or Apple's use of it infringes on their thing. And so Apple has announced some future plans about how they're going to disable the O2 sensors in the Ultra 2 and Series 9 Watches that are sold going forward. And Gary asks, will Apple issue a software update to remove the O2 sensors from previously sold models? Should we avoid updates on our Apple Watches? Pete? So, yeah, so I thought, wow, I'm not gonna update. And then yesterday on Mac OS Ken and you talked about Mac rumors. To be clear, everything we're sharing is what we know as of the moment we're recording this, which is January 19th. And I'm about to muddy the waters, brother, because I just, just as you were talking on the last question, I said, yeah, let me see if there's any others to back this up. And now it's saying that, so feedback at macgeekgap.com or on our Discord channel, Live Chat, if any of you have updated to 10.3, watch OS 10.3 on, can you tell us whether it killed it or not? Because I found an article that said it's gonna kill it, that was a day ago. So, we don't know whether it's gonna kill the blood oxygen sensing capability on the current watches with the new OS. Is it killing it? I know that they're selling the new watches with no ability, even though the sensor is physically in there and the app is still on the watch, if you tap it, it takes you to the health app with explanations and other avenues to go down. And then I just found out, in reading that, why my son's Apple Watch 8 was broken. He couldn't get an ECG and he couldn't get the blood sensor to work. And we thought, well, that functionality just didn't work in on the watch. If you're under 18, those apps won't work for you. They're inhibited by Apple. Yes, right? And I kind of understand that the lawyers got involved in that and said, oh, we don't want to do that. But yeah, I'd be interested to know now that my son is over 18 and he got a new watch for Christmas, does his stuff work? I bet it does. He was 18 when Christmas rolled around. So it probably worked from the beginning, but. Okay, all right. But so yeah, so like I said, I'm sorry, I just muddied the waters. I don't know. Mac rumors, Mac OS, Ken all said, look, if you've got a watch with that functionality in it, the update is not going to remove that. And then I saw a couple of articles and one is behind a paywall. It just was the teaser. They had to read further and I can't read any further. But the teaser was that the update was going to remove that functionality. So. Interesting. So Warren 10.3 is at this moment in time, still only available in beta. And Warren in our chat says in the latest beta, again, as of this moment, he still has that option. So we will stay tuned, right? Keep your eyes peeled on the news and like wait to do that update. Maybe take this moment to turn off automatic updates on your Apple watch so that you aren't one of the first testing this if you don't want to be one of the first testing this. Right, because I'll tell you what, especially those of you out there that fly late civil aircraft, this is a huge function. Oh yeah. You're up at 10, 11, 12,000 feet. You can measure your blood saturation. It would I rely on it to save my life? Probably not, but it's a good indicator that, hey, you know, I'm only reading 85%. I'm a little loopy here. I probably need to descend. Yep. So it's not, it shouldn't be your primary and sole indicator, but it's a clue. Yeah. Yeah, there you go. And in aviation, a clue bird strike will save your life, sir. There you go. All right. I know we have very limited time because of some scheduling stuff here, but I do want to share a note that, or a discord chat that happened. Darth Subulba, sorry, asked and said, I have an old Intel MacBook Pro that starts having graphics issues for a few hours after running games. Has anyone, I suspect it's a heat issue. Has anyone found a good free piece of software for showing the internal temps of the graphics and CPU? And of course, you know, I think iStat menus because that's what I use, but that's not free. It is included in set app if you have it. But the chat from this evolved and told me about some apps that I had no idea existed. The first one, if you like the way iStat menus looks, you might even like this first one better. It is available on GitHub and it's called stats. It's from Excelban, E-X-E-L-B-A-N on GitHub. And we'll of course put a link in the show notes, but it looks a lot like iStat menus and in fact is a little more compressed in its view. I'm thinking of switching to this on my laptop at least to test for a little while, but it very much inspired by iStat menus, which of course was inspired by a free app which was our very first cool stuff found years and years ago called menu meters. Remember that last from the past. So that's this one, that's Excelban's stats, which is of course linked in the show notes. And then there's one called Fanny, which is at fannywidget.com, which will show you just the temperatures of your GPU and CPU as well as the speed of your fans. So, and I think you can do some control of the fan speed, so. And then there's a third one called Hot, which is available on GitHub. We've talked about this one on the show before where it shows you, it's really focused on the temperatures and the speeds of the fans and that sort of thing, the CPU sensors. So we'll put all three of those out there, but I'm excited about this stats thing. And I never heard about that one before. Yeah, yeah. Menu meters is dead, isn't it Dave? Oh, menu meters is dead. I think when we did episode 1,000 or 999 or something, I went and looked just because I was feeling nostalgic and there was like someone that had rewritten menu meters to sort of work again. I don't know, I have some memory of that, but I don't know, my memory sucks. That's why I have computers to remember these things for me. Right. I've had iStat for so long and I wanted to go check the price just because I was curious. It is 12 bucks for a single license and 15 bucks for a family license. So if you do wanna go commercial and pay for one, it's great, I've been using it for years and that's not too bad. No. And the nice part about paying for software is that there's a greater chance of its longevity. It's really the way I'll say that. But as long as the person who's making stats still wants to use stats for themselves, then it too will continue, right? Like, if it's to scratch an itch and stats was last updated on GitHub, it looks like five days ago. So, yeah. The same is true for podcasts. That is true. I mean, you pay for podcasts by visiting our sponsors. Yeah. And we've got some amazing donors so thank you to them too. Yeah. That's how you keep this show going because if this was coming out of your pocket for 19 years, I'm thinking it may not still be here. Yes, that's fair. Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah, we love doing it. Don't get me wrong, but yeah, we need to cover our time and expenses and all of the things. Adam, we gotta figure out somehow to get Adam to be able to pay for this Apple Vision Pro, whatever the heck it is, 4K. 4K. Maybe that's why the price is what it is. It's so that you know that you're getting rich 4K value out of it. Yeah. Beautiful. Thank you for hanging out with us folks. Thank you for sending in all your tips and your questions. That is another way that you support the show for sure. You support the show by listening. You support the show by sharing it with your friends. All of these things really do help. And then, yeah, visiting our sponsors for sure. Whether you buy, that's between you and them. It's our job to convince you to go take a look. And so hopefully we've done that. And of course, you can find links to the sponsors in the show notes at macgeekup.com and you can have those delivered to your email. And of course, you get more than just the links to the sponsors. You get the link to everything, including like stats that we just talked about. So I said we weren't gonna do cool stuff found. And yet, was that the coolest stuff that we might have found this week? Maybe. Great. Thank you so much. Thanks to Cash Fly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Visit macgeekup.com slash sponsors to see all the sponsors from this episode and recent episodes. Because Adam wrote a cool thing for the website that does that. So might as well check it out. See his handiwork, folks. Thank you so much. We will see you next week. None of us have it on our t-shirts. So I'm just gonna have to guess at three words of advice to share with both of you and all of you. And that is, folks, make sure you don't get caught. Made up. Du vous laissez pas prendre. That's five words in French. Later. That's perfect. I didn't see you would put that up there. Otherwise, I would have thrown it to you for it, Pete. But that, what you did was great. No, it was great. That was perfect. That was great. Yep. I have my iPhone plugged in with continuity camera running and I just got to alert that battery's at 20%. So I don't know what that's all about. I gotta figure that out. Oh, that's fun. Yeah. Mine, same with camo cam. I'll go from 100% to the 65% over the course of the two hours we do the show. Even plugged in. And yeah. Look at this. Nuke Brewer says that menu meters is still working on the Mac. So we'll have to investigate that and share it on a new show. Yeah, I'll share it on another episode. Adam, will you do me a quick favor before you leave in your audio settings in StreamYard here? What is your microphone set to? Are you actually on the device that like the virtual device as your mic? Yeah, the M4. Okay. All right. I was just surprised that we had is, what's that? Mo2. Mo2. In StreamYard's audio settings? Yeah. That's the problem. You need to be on the virtual device that we set. That's why. That's why it's been messed up. Yes. I had this theory. Now when you talk, if you change that device, it's gonna be so loud. Yep. Oh, it must have got screwed up. It does. You gotta check every week. I've learned to do it too. There it is. Okay. Back off about 5 dB please. Yes. All right. Now we just know to check that in the future. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep. Yep. Okay. Well, at least now we know. How is that? Does it need to go down further? It's still hot. Yes, please. Much better, but hot. Bring off 2 or 3 dB. Yep. How about now? How many did you bring off there? I'm down to 12. Okay. Now I would have brought heat back off. I think we're about equal some now. I mean. It's just so much louder than the rest of the show, but. No wonder we've been having issues. Sorry, guys. Oh, hang on. Now that you've done that, I need to bring your input level back down to 100. Okay. Now talk to me for a second. Testing 1, 2, 1, 2. Check, guys. That's way better. Go ahead, Pete. Test 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. That's okay. All right. So 12 is your number. We just need to make sure we're actually using the compression. Yeah, I just noticed, as you moved away from your mic, it's like there's no compression happening. Crap. So, yep. All right. All good. It's fine. The audio version of the show is gonna be totally fine. So I'm not worried about it. Yep. All right. That'll teach us to go with our assumptions. All right. Great. Thank you. Yeah? Yep. Yeah, I had to balance it out. Wait, so it'll change even if I haven't touched audio hijack? Uh-huh. It's Chrome that Chrome like loses. It's, it forgets. Oh, okay. I have it, sometimes my camera will change, but often, I would say twice a month, I have to change my audio devices in Chrome. Okay. I will make sure to add that to my checklist. Yeah, you'll, eventually you'll just make it part of your workflow and you won't even think about it anymore. So, yep. All right. I gotta run. But thank you guys. Same. Yep. Folks, later. Thanks, Adam. I'm gonna turn off the things. So, thank you. Thanks for it. Yeah, I wish we had thought about that earlier. Later, folks. You want me to kill the stream? Please. Thanks, folks. We'll see you next week. Take care, everyone.