 It is time for Mackie Gab and our opening quick tip of the week comes from me I was looking at the release notes of some of the new Rogamiba apps and I noticed them referring to something called background noise in Mac OS Ventura Well, I dug into this if you go into system settings accessibility Audio at the bottom there is background sound. So maybe it's background sounds that it alluded to what do I know? I'm just a podcaster what this is is a white noise or You know background noise rain noise ocean noise things that you can turn on in the background and they say the read This is why it's inaccessibility. It says plays background sounds to mask unwanted environmental noise These sounds can minimize distractions and help you to focus calm or rest. So The feature is there There are a bunch of different sounds that you can use some of them are like pink noise and white noise They have different names for them because those are technical terms that most people don't know But then they also have like rain and ocean. They aren't all downloaded They will download as you select them to play them. But yeah, go check it out in Ventura Go into system settings accessibility Audio and scroll to the bottom. You'll see them there More tips like this plus your questions answered today on Mac Geekgab 957 for Monday November 28th, 2022 Greetings folks and welcome to Mac Geekgab The show where you send your tips your questions your cool stuff found into feedback at MacGeekgab.com we String them together into an agenda painstakingly I might add only to usually throw the agenda away But it's a good process because it allows us to filter through things pick the best ones and the ones that are most likely to help each of us learn at least five new things every single time we get together sponsors for this episode include Masterclass.com MGG returning sponsor that's where you're gonna go for unlimited access to masterclass and some You get a deal you buy it's a buy one get one thing going on there So we'll talk more about that in a minute and also upside where promo code Mac Geekgab You download the app use promo code Mac Geekgab when you're setting up your account and you get five dollars or more Cash back on your first purchase of ten dollars or more. This is a cool thing We will talk more about both of those in-depth later here in the episode for now here in Durham, New Hampshire I'm Dave Hamilton and here in fearful Connecticut. This is John F. Brunt And here in Lee, New Hampshire's pilot Pete. Good to be here guys How goes it pilot Pete? Oh Living the dream. Oh things are good. Yeah, cool. It's fun to be back It is yes, it's good to have you back. That's right You weren't you were here in spirit for the last one because every time we learned something new I did that and I knew you were gonna be upset that we were integrating that Finally in an episode where you weren't here. So there was that I was I was down pretending I was on I was practicing bleeding as we say I was practicing you're on fire your engine quit your hydraulics Oh, I see, you know like it's off. So yeah, that's a good thing for pilots to practice So it when it when when when perhaps an emergency actually happens It's it's not the first time you've had to think through that process. It might be the first time you've experienced It's another Tuesday. There you go. Hey speaking of Tuesdays. It won't happen on a Tuesday But it will happen on a Saturday Saturday December 10th At 4 p.m. Eastern time we which is 9 p.m. UTC. We are going to host our next Hangout we'll do it as a zoom call. Yes, I will preserve the password from the public this time We will do things right so that we aren't deleting people that shouldn't be deleted But we're gonna do it on cord cutting primarily because a It's something so many of us are doing but be so many of us are doing it in our own ways Like not everyone's path is the same And I think we have a lot to learn from each other For those of you who haven't been to our hangouts in the past these are Not just you know the three of us too many of you conversations These are group conversations. My goal is to participate the least and learn the most But I'm happy to share and help and guide things and all that stuff But but yeah bring your what you're doing bring your questions. This is truly an interactive It's just a hangout. It's you know Grab your favorite beverage Chill out with us for an hour and and we're just hanging out so and that the topic will loosely at least be cord cutting Who knows what it will become? That is on fun. It will be fun. I'm gonna learn how to save some money because How many cord cutters are spending more on individual streaming services? I? There is that yeah, yes, I might I might do my it would be interesting if Some slash all but don't feel don't feel obligated to do homework for these things by by all means Do not feel that you need to do homework to show up to one of these just show up and and and talk We'll do some homework though and if you want to participate in that with us you're more than welcome. I'm gonna go through and Compare what I used to pay when I had say Comcast or whatever to what I pay now and and tell you I think I'm paying less But I don't know so we'll yeah, yeah Yeah, yeah, let's hope that is all on the Mackie kept calendar to you can go to Mackie kept comm slash calendars Just subscribe the the hangouts there, but also all of our live stream schedule is there, too That is the schedule we use so Hopefully you will You know whatever if it's on there we see it if it's not we don't so Ask a quick question before you go It's over your right shoulder and it's on the video so People that are listening can't see it is that rabbit hole I frequently take us down is that that yes There there is a rabbit hole over my shoulder. I I'm going with a theme today So it says on the thing it says follow the white rabbit. We're all mad here It says sort of around the corners of the rabbit hole and then the tea that I'm drinking today It's ginseng tea. So nothing too crazy. Although ginseng I like I like what ginseng does to me But the the tea I'm drinking today is out of my Alice in Wonderland tea party mug that I have had this mug It I think I've had it longer than I've known my wife and it is still in perfect shape I was purchased for me No, no, no, actually I I don't I haven't had it longer than I've known my wife because she bought this for me It was it was an early gift in our dating time But but she bought it at the Disney store for me like this thing lasted a long time So I have officially taken us down our first rabbit hole about rabbit Yes This is the meta rabbit hole episode. We are recording this just so everybody knows A mere Four days after we recorded the last one five days, I guess we're recording this on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving Just so that we can have a kind of a four-day, you know a gap there and not having to interrupt family time on Friday Which is when we would normally do it so I Don't know what that means, but but we're recording this in that mindset heading into Thanksgiving Not the mindset heading out of which is which is where most people will be when they listen to this You know, sorry not sorry, but yes, this is the meta rabbit hole episode. So I like it. It's good In fact, you know what? I will make that image the rabbit hole image that is over my shoulder part of the episode image so that everyone can see it All you gotta just look at your phone or your whatever, you know, whatever you're using so John Save us from the rabbit hole. Take us down a different rabbit hole. Yeah, don't we're not saving anybody from rabbit holes We are intentionally diving them in follow us down the rabbit hole. We're the white rabbits. I'm the white rabbit today We're late. We're late for a very important date The two of you can pick your own characters and they don't even have to be from Alice in Wonderland In fact, it could be just your own personas You could be pilot Pete and John F. Braun for all I know but today I'm the white rabbit John or whoever you are take us down the next rabbit hole Let's go to Gary Gary has a quick one here He says like John, I'm new to Apple watch and had a hard time making it work to pay in a store I solved it by slowing down the side button double click speed and Where do you set this you go to settings? accessibility side button click speed and Set it to slow. I Changed it a couple of weeks ago and since then I no longer have to pull my phone out of my pocket like a cave I love that And maybe a follow-up tip what what I found is useful is Before I have to pay for something. I'll actually go into the wallet and bring the card up on the watch so that when I walk up to the register I'm ready to go and do you get into the wallet by doing the double tap thing John? No, okay, so well sometimes yes, okay? Yeah, I'm sorry that it has worked for me So you got it you got to click it fairly quickly to get in wallet mode. Well, and that's that's his tip Right as you can slow that down. Yeah, I didn't I didn't know you could slow that down. So, you know, there you go Yep White rabbit learned something All right, so okay pizza I Allison Wonderland is one of my favorite stories and movies and the whole vibe of it I have a Cheshire cat onesie that I should have worn for the show, but I didn't Yeah, yeah, so I don't know. Yeah Pete save us Okay, when I'm saying that you know things are already off the rails. That's right. We are off the tracks like you couldn't believe so my mind is a Ancillary to the watch which is I've just done some research several episodes back I asked something about Does it does the watch last longer with with the new constant on there's a watch last longer with an honor off That's what I think. Yeah, so I did my own experiment Okay, I'm gonna find out and I will tell you that if you go in the theater mode where your watch faces black most of the time Yes, it does last longer Substantially longer. I went almost three days. I started at 93% because I didn't think to start at 100% and 64 hours later. I was at 19% which if you're doing the math quickly 74% less So it's using about 1.2% per hour when it's in theater mode and I've found that I can go It says 36 hours. I'm in the all constant on always on mode. Yep. I'm getting with the ultra I'm getting closer to 44 45 hours before I'm down below 10% But even still you you're you're adding at least 15 hours of battery life Yeah, almost doubling almost up. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you could probably go three and a half days And that's normal use, you know, it vibrates when it has an alert. That's okay. I want to see what time it is I wasn't being careful about not using the watch. It's normal use But when I want to see what time it is, you know, have to tap it instead of The watch face being always on but the vibrations came through everything else and I I got I 60 some hours almost three days with 60 or 74% Interesting. Yeah, that's fascinating. Ah, all right. Yeah. Oh, it's the it's a monster battery in the ultra Yeah, I imagine it's the same with with the watch 8, you know, it's the the batteries a little better and It you know, it has the always-on display now, right? The it does yeah, the eight and I mean always-on displays. I have it with my Yeah, yeah, but if you if you know, you're gonna be away from charging for a while Go on the theater mode. Give it a shot. Yeah, or just turn it like John You don't live in theater mode, but you turn off your always-on display, right? Yeah, you don't you don't use the always-on display of your series eight watch. Is that right? Um No, I am. Oh you do. Okay. For some reason I thought you weren't but I think you can turn that off on the watch Just like you can on the phone. Yes. So that's yeah, I think I filled with it and decided that I Brought it like be in in that mode. Yeah, right, right, right. I wonder does low power mode on the watch I think that takes you to the digital only and that then it'll go a week or more. I bet yeah It stops all notifications and vibrations and that's right kind of stuff. Yeah, that's right But the so I was confused what you're talking about this always on display or not in theater mode So you can leave the sound you can when you put it in theater mode it automatically turns the sound off You can then turn the sound back on and leave it in The masks the theater masks there so it will darken down, but you'll still get audibles. It looks like Right, okay. All right. Okay. Yeah, yeah, audible alerts even though the display is off Interesting. Yeah Interesting and I had something funny happen. I think it was Yesterday last night. So I do the sleep tracking right kind of interesting. Yeah the watch Actually notified me and it said hey by the way your battery is really low and I'm not gonna make it through the night so Huh, cool All right, so it told you to charge it but ahead of your bedtime or whatever correct Yeah, I do you set a bedtime like have you gone through that you do you so you okay? Yeah, cuz I get now this makes sense I don't do sleep tracking with mine, but often not always but often at night I get that same notification maybe an hour before bedtime where it's like hey You probably want to charge your watch before bed and I'm like, yeah, yeah, there's plenty of bad Like I got 15% left or something. I'm gonna make it the next hour I never thought about it as it was telling me so that then I would be charged up enough to Track my sleep. This makes sense now This segway is right in one more quick tip then on which is with the sleep tracking I'm pretty sure it's auto sleep. It might be sleep plus plus. I have to go back and look You can set the alarm in the morning To wake you up when you're in your lightest in your REM stage of sleep When you're in stage one sleep, so yeah, so if you set your alarm for 7 a.m. You need to get up at 7 Somewhere between 6 and 7 and the watch starts what doesn't start. I guess it's looking at y'all night It finds when you're in your lightest stage of sleep Up to and before 7 a.m. So that it let's say at 642 you're in stage one REM sleep The watch will start tapping you on the wrist Whoa, you wake up from a lighter stage of sleep instead of that stage for groggy. What's my night name? Why am I here? Yeah? Yeah Fascinating yeah Wow, okay, that's really cool. All right. Yeah, see this is good I like this rabbit hole Cheshire cat. This is good John. Who are you? Are you the mad hatter? I'm not mad We're all mad here Are you wait out? He might be the door mouse. I don't there's something to this here. I don't know Yeah, all right, I Did go to a mad hatter's tea party Where they served us the tea was mostly infused with gin Because you know, they couldn't feed us the other stuff that it should have been infused with But it was a blast. It was really fun. All right. Anyway Jim Helps to save us with a little bit of a quick tip slash PSA He says a tip that I learned after a failed lecture attempt for the macOS app zoom To be able to screen share during a meeting via airplay with an iPad. You must turn off Airplay receiver in macOS is sharing preferences the backstory This feature of zoom is great for giving lectures using an iPad connected via Wi-Fi I use notability and I'm able to write as I lecture. Oh, yeah, right. However after upgrading to Monterey This feature in sharing might be venture, but I think I think he's right I think this would have started with Monterey this feature in sharing preferences appeared and it was automatically checked It allows one to connect to the iPad screen wirelessly However, it seems incompatible with zoom screen share feature. It just thought this might be useful to anyone out there with a similar setup Yeah, thanks for the heads up Jim. That's good. I'm sure there is someone out there who either has struggled with or will be struggling with this and That hopefully will will will lodge in their brain so that they're like wait, wait, wait There's something about this. I heard about it. I'm a geek. Yeah, and maybe that's enough to get it over the hump All right, John or Dormouse Or Matt Hatter, whatever you are whoever you are. What's up, Drew ski Drew ski We got one after years of using some rather unreliable online phone books I realized that Apple has a superior version built into iOS It's the maps app Maybe everyone else knew this but within the last year or so I found it to be the fastest and most dependable way to find Phone numbers for local businesses, but so much more There's the obvious map location and directions But other excellent and pertinent info like hours of operation website link Customer reviews ratings menus Wikipedia articles and so on. I probably use the maps app on my phone more for that Other info to then I do for directions Cool Cool as yeah, that's right never even noticed that stuff there. You know, I just want directions and then yeah, it's all It's all there. Yeah, absolutely right in front of you. You don't even see it right in front of you. All right Cheshire cat this one's you Okay, which oh, oh, yeah, so Dave's quick tip to open the show was about the the White noise or background noise for your AirPods And so I was looking I'm going that's interesting. Well, why isn't it in sounds? Okay? Well, it's an accessibility Well right above that in accessibility. I noticed a cool thing In this is in Ventura and Dave tells me it is in fact beyond Ventura It's also in iOS 16 and and a few prior versions You can tell your AirPods to give you active noise canceling when you have only one ear AirPods in instead of but and normally it requires both to be in in order to get into the active noise canceling mode Yeah, so I love active noise canceling. I use it all the time My hearing is such that it it helps me get what I'm going for And oh and then the other thing was I frequently use one ear at a time and I'll swap out when one gets low I'll put the other one in that sort of thing and this morning I noticed I had one go dead on me last night So I put it in my case charge it up and put the other one in my Other ear and went to use the first ear the red I had the right use the left went to use the right again later And it was dead so quick tip Make sure the yellow light comes on on the front of your case that you're getting a good connection in the charge to that Air pod else you'll find yourself with both AirPods dead Yeah, that's I I found that yesterday when I went to take a call It was like wait, why is this dead? It must have been the same same exact thing Yeah, I would recommend maybe a q-tip with some alcohol to clean it down. Oh, yeah, that's not a bad idea Yeah, okay. Yeah good. That's yeah, man Down into the air pod case and make sure that those contact points are clean Shockful of tips. I like it. We got two more for the watch. The first one comes from Bill This is the one I tried to play last week and failed. So you here today are the lucky ones Hey guys bill from Miller Park here Wanted to give a quick tip for Apple watch users Earlier this year. I got my first Apple watch a version 7 a few months later our two generation household became a three generation household My son and his wife brought home a granddaughter Now my granddaughter got to about four months. She started grabbing onto my watch Whenever I was holding her since the face is touch sensitive She managed to set off the find my iPhone shortcut start alarm start stop watches Starting to redesign the face etc The solution to this is not to take off your watch every time you're holding your grandchild But instead put your watch into water mode then the screen is not touch sensitive You undo it by pressing in the stem in the current version of the watch OS You can also use student mode But that removes your regular watch face and the complications you put onto it So I prefer the water mode the touch picture shows How attractive the watch is to little hands Take care. Don't get caught. Bye Thanks, Bill. I appreciate that. That's uh, yeah, I I was thinking about this tip yesterday. I spilled Tea believe it or not. Thankfully it was it had cooled down, but I spilled it on my sleeve I had it like in anyway, it doesn't matter and Then I noticed my watch reacting because I I just left my my you know, it's cold so my sleeves weren't rolled up and my wet sleeve was Having fun interacting with my watch and I'm like, oh, yeah, I gotta I gotta use Bill's tip here. So yeah, it's good stuff I like it We're spider mode Water mode so I have it in I believe you can add it to your watch's control center Yes called water lock. Yeah You swipe up from the bottom and there should be a little raindrop if you've put it in there Yep, and if you haven't keep swiping up until you get to edit and then add it there. There it is. Yeah Yeah, he he talked about pushing the stem and which I somehow he may have set that up to do that That's how I activate Siri if I don't You know her Yes, if I don't you didn't proceed her name with hay so it should trigger. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah So anyway, that's that's how I activate the s lady on my watch if I press and hold the stem so Yeah, yeah, I don't know how you set it up to do that. That's cool. But yeah, if you touch that little raindrop That that makes it less that'll get you there. Yeah for sure Uh one last quick tip will stay in Apple watch land with Steven who says I wanted to mention another great use case for pilot Pete's excellent tip on how to activate the watch's red light As soon as I turned 50 Steven says all of the restaurants started conspiring to turn down their lights When I need to read the menu using the red light from the watch is far less Distracting than the bright light from the phone or the watch great Tips Steven folks if you have quick tips send them into us feedback at mac geek gab dot com That's what we want to hear about how anything questions tips, whatever it is. We love it feedback at mac geek gab dot com I thought he said feedback at mac geek gab dot com, but I could All right, hey, I get to tell you about master class now with master class You can learn how to write anything from a book or a screenplay to just a letter Learn how to communicate with your boss or your family learn how to make a dinner worthy of a Michelin star Or just how to make really good scrambled eggs Whatever you're interested in there's a class for you with over 180 exclusive classes taught by the instructors You know and love yeah instructors. You know and love Gordon Ramsay teaches cooking That's why you're gonna learn to make those scrambled eggs. Those are delicious by the way. I've done this It's freaking amazing. You got to try this. It's awesome. Bob Iger teaches business strategy I mean he just came back to disney. I think that's a pretty good strategy right there. He figured it out John legend teaches songwriting Esther Perel teaches relational intelligence. 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That's masterclass.com slash mgg terms apply and our thanks to masterclass for sponsoring this episode Hey, we've got another podcast for you to listen to web development and web design is not easy because there's so much to Learn there's coding in multiple languages learning good ui ux practices Mastering figma and photoshop and don't forget all the server and system admin practices that keep the website online It's no wonder with all this noise that junior devs really struggle to get started and experience devs have a hard time Updating their knowledge the good news is that you don't need to go through all this alone Matt and mike from the html all the things podcast Has you covered with weekly episodes on all things web development web design and small business Each week the guys cover a new topic like coding sites with view and react Making use of popular website builders like wordpress and webflow and more work related items like dealing with clients or getting through office politics Matt and mike do their best to discuss each topic so junior devs can understand and senior devs can learn something new Search html all the things in your favorite podcast app or visit htmlallthethings.com for show notes written guides and more and hey, thanks matt and mike for doing this swap with us All right, uh, it's time to do some questions that also came into feedback at mackeekup.com John you want to take us to kevin? absolutely um Kevin says my eight gigabyte ram 2014 mac mini has suddenly started giving me out-of-memory warnings and showing the force quit list of apps I mean really suddenly just within the last week or two. It's never done it before and i'm wondering if anything else had Has had this issue the 2014 mini isn't able to run ventura So updating isn't an option and since this mac mini has sold or soldered memory. I can't upgrade the ram Any ideas And you and I both had a couple of ideas dav My idea is that you may be running low on disk space So what's happening is virtual memory is freaking out because it can't find enough disk space to swap out. So That's one guess. Uh, you also had some feedback dav Yeah, I didn't I that's a great idea I hadn't thought about that as a potential issue But of course it it very much could be my My thought process, you know, you know, well the way we approach questions here often Has to be is and and needs to be from the standpoint of well If I were there Here's what I would try next right because we're not there, right? So it we often don't get to know the results of our things so it very easily could be that My first thought was let's start with activity monitor, right go to Launch activity monitor on your mac, which I believe is in the applications folder. I keep it in my dock So I don't even know where it is, but I just search for it command space bar activity. Boom. There it is Which is another great tip because launching apps with spotlight is fantastic Anyway, launch activity monitor go to the memory tab They don't look like tabs. They look like buttons across the top They it starts with cpu on the left memory is the next one. So the memory tab button, whatever you want to call it And then sort by memory usage by clicking on the column header I like to sort in descending mode so that the thing using the most memory is at the top This lies to us. I'm just going to say that up front It's not it's an imperfect science calculating how much memory A given process is using but it is a consistent science when displayed here in activity monitors So comparing apples to apples no pun intended You'll be able to see what is consuming memory Maybe you've got some app or something that I don't who knows why Has been running rampant and consuming more memory than it used to and maybe this is part of the issue here So for example, I find uh, I mean obviously a reboot should in theory clear out any One-off apps that are misbehaving But like safari if I leave safari open for more than 24 hours It will start just eating up all my rams So I use marker armaments quitter as I've mentioned many times to automatically quit safari after three hours of non use of safari Not just three hours of non use of my mac but three hours of non use of safari Which never happens if I'm on my mac so it's not quitting randomly on me But it makes sure that it's quit when I get to my desk every morning and that is the key so I I actually have one other thing that I've noticed It took me a while to figure it out. I was getting a you're running low on memory Yeah, and it only turned out when it was a certain Uh website that I was hitting and then I was getting oh this website is using more resources Do you want me to shut it down that sort of thing? So the people developing that website need to go to hdm all things podcast and figure out Why they're chewing up my resources I'm with you on that Yeah, I right. Yeah, and what's cool is safari and this this started Certainly a number of years ago. I can't remember exactly when or what version of safari But apple started sandboxing every open tab in its own little application space in safari mostly for To keep websites from negatively impacting other websites that you're running and all that. I think it was a A security thing I could be wrong about about that But one side effect of that is that every website Individually or every tab you have open in safari individually shows up in activity monitor So that's how p was able to see that a specific website not just safari in general was causing these issues So, yeah, which is pretty cool. It's it's a nice side effect of that. Yeah Four tips today go ahead. Yeah um As a summary, um mac pa has an article What does your what does your system has run on an application memory mean? Ah, okay, and this has lots of stuff. Um Their their top reasons are what I think we've all touched on. Um, you could be running low on this space uh, you have too many apps open and Too many browser tabs. Sure as you mentioned um And an app could just have a memory leak which is activity monitor would probably let you uh Let you track that down. Let you see that. Yeah, sure And mac pa does clean my mac which has the utility to to clean up your memory And yeah, they give themselves a plug In the article I you know mac pa. I mean clearly these articles at some level are are built as promotional articles as as seo but they're they're some of the smartest seo articles i've seen because They provide really Quality relevant helpful information that doesn't start with buy our product. In fact, it almost always ends with buy our product But before you buy our product, here's how you can do this without it But if you want to make it easy and not have to like go to the terminal and do these other things Well, then we do create software for it But if you're willing to go to the terminal, you know, then here's how you do it And I I really appreciate that from them. I I think it's the right way to help people You know, I mean, we're all about helping people here with gooey, right? You know, here's your gooey But here's what we're doing when you click on that button. Yeah. Yeah, which which makes it transparent too And that isn't a terrible thing. So yeah Yeah, yeah One other thing. So you mentioned the beginning of this question that uh activity monitor is in in Applications folder. It's actually in the utilities folder, which is within applications. So thank you Not not that that matters because most people use some form to launch My personal one is command space and then I start typing the name of the app and boom, right, right? Yep. Yep. Oh, that's thank you for the correction. We'd like to get things right here We had we had uh emaran commented in discord and if you're not in our discord, please head over there mackeycup.com slash discord should get you along your way, but He commented we we were talking last week about uh ekg versus ecg and I I I linked an article It was the first one that that came up from google Explaining the differences like great perfect and he commented in discord. He's like I hate to be that that internet guy, but Here's a better article to link to and I'm like, well always please be that internet guy We want to make sure we get it right TLDR ekg and ecg are the same thing. Uh, they are just different languages Uh words ekg, I believe is the is the initials for the german words or word It might just be one word in german because you know, that's how it is, but uh, but yeah, yeah, so anyway, they're the same thing Uh, all right Bob has our next question. He says I have two user accounts on my iMac one for me and one for my wife each logged in with our own individual iCloud accounts Okay, so separation There, okay, we each have our own iCloud photo libraries I keep both of those photo libraries stored on the same external drive so that I can save internal disk space Great. Is there any problem storing both of those libraries on the same volume? I've just started using shared photo libraries for each of these and it seems like I'm having to repair the libraries more Frequently, but it'd be better to store the libraries on separate external volumes instead It seems like my current setup should work But not sure of having the two libraries in the same place is causing problems. So, uh, my My gut here says no, it's totally fine to store your external libraries on a You know on on the same volume It let's think about it this way if you were not if you were taking the defaults They would both be stored on the same volume aka the internal drive So storing them on the same volume aka the external drive is totally fine However, I think I know what the problem is My guess is that your external drive is a rotational drive and not an ssd Photos very specifically Has been built with the presumption that the library will be stored on an ssd And not be subject to the latency of an external drive And there are some timing things with photos that really Don't that are not happy when they're not on an ssd. So it doesn't surprise me that you're getting Corruption, we were seeing the same thing when we were storing photos On network drives you used to be able to get away with this totally fine No problem whatsoever as long as you had you could maintain a consistent connection to the network drive Just like so long as you can maintain a consistent connection to your external drive. It was all totally fine and then Uh, the ssd issue, you know, or ssds became more commonplace The other thing is make sure You are using either hfs plus or a pfs for the volume that you're storing your photos library on I think that's equally as important as storing it on an ssd An external drive sometimes come windows formatted and you don't notice it You just plug it in and you start using it that could also be part of the problem here We obviously we do know from a reply that we got from bob that This is a rotational drive. So that's likely the problem but It as we were doing this here, I started thinking about the format of the drive and I think that's also important So what would you recommend at least separate folders? For the photo library? Well, not the same not in the same folder I mean, it it wouldn't matter because the each photo library Yeah, each photo library is its own folder anyway, right? I mean it appears as a package Uh, you know one self-contained package, but really it's just a bunch of subfolders So, yeah, if you write look at you can say show show contain Show contents or whatever that right? Yeah show contents. Yeah. Yeah, but as long as it's a different file name Which it would be otherwise you're pointing to the same one in which case All bets are off. Don't do that like that. My my I was going to say I don't have any advice for you I do have advice do not share photo libraries between multiple accounts. It will not end well So, uh, yeah, well, I got to say I was here we go It's rotational versus ssd had no idea that just doesn't make sense until you explained. Okay timing issues As it writes to the database and yeah Uh, Pete we need to work on your The way your audio routes because when you play a that bell sound it mutes your voice And I don't know why that you might you might have it going through some kind of Compression or limiting or something like that, but just fyi. Oh There you go Uh, all right, john, you want to take us to gary? Let's go to gary. All right gary says Hey, mechicab crew I tried to send a friend apple cash for her birthday last week and when I clicked the pay button in the text message I was sending her. I got a message saying First name last name Cannot accept apple cash the friend has an iphone 13 However, I was able to send a different friend apple cash For her birthday back in september and she has an iphone 7 Both friends are blue on my i messages so I can understand someone who isn't An iphone user not being able to receive apple cash But what prevents certain iphone users from not being able to accept it? Keep up the great work and have a great thanksgiving you too Uh A couple of things so I found two apple support articles which uh, maybe worth looking at Okay, so one Is called set up apple cash Uh, because as far as I know apple cash is not on by default, right? Oh Okay, you see a slider Well, you know if you follow the uh directions Uh, you'll see a slider for it and I don't believe it's enabled by default Interesting. Okay. Um, so that could be one reason the other reason Uh, which is another apple sport article called if you can't send or receive money with apple cash All right, it's not a good place to tell you there's steps to go through. What's interesting Is there is a step uh verify your identity Oh Interesting. Huh in another article. Um Yes, verify your identity uh jumped out that me as a something that one or the other may have to do again Interesting. Yeah, it says how to verify your identity for apple cash open the wallet app Tap your apple cash card tap the more button tap details go to settings Yeah, et cetera, et cetera. So and then verify identity and you're gonna need to take a picture of your driver license. Oh Fascinating. So people that want to try sending money should send it to box av8r At me dot com and I'll let you know if it comes through. Okay You know, I I know our audience wouldn't spam any one of us Uh, even if we shared our personal email addresses or apple id's as as as Pete just did But I know you won't I know you won't But it would be poetic justice if you did. I'm just gonna say I have to change my apple id No, the thing is we have a good audience like they they actually won't I'm the only jackass here that would do that Uh, and and I already text you all the time. Anyway, so uh, yeah, all right Please don't sign me up for anything folks. Right. Right. Exactly. No, like money you can send money Send them on. Yeah, sure. Sure. Sure Uh, speaking of one other person who might actually, uh, spam you there, p But only because you you know her Allison uh Sheridan sent from pod feet from Uh, no silicast sent in a note to us And this is really it wasn't it led down an interesting path. She said I made, uh, my steve heard her husband steve listen to I I was on chitchat across the pond with her And we talked about wi-fi 6e and backhaul and and we had a great conversation about that So she she had steve listen to that And she was with him and so she said when I re listened I heard myself say, yeah I really need to get iperf 3 running on my synology, which is something we've talked about here before Running the iperf 3 package, which is available from like seno community. I think running that on your distation means that you always have an iperf Uh server running on your network iperf is a fantastic way to do bandwidth tests And having a server always running means that you don't have to go and set up a server each time You want to do a local network bandwidth test, which is different from a speed test of your isp. So Uh, she says using my phone to tether to my mac and the net I and and my my mac and my synology are both on Tailnet using tail scale and she says I was able to open a web browser To the magic dns of my synology and I discovered that somewhere along the line. I had already installed iperf 3 And and that part of the story is relevant because of the tail scale part so she popped open a terminal and from remote ran iperf 3 to her Uh magic dns name of her synology, which is magic dns as part of tail scale And she noticed that she was getting 3.3 megabits per second. That's pretty slow She ran it again when she got home with her mac on wi-fi and no more more than 10 feet from the Access point the wi-fi access point and went up to 54 megabits per second She shut off wi-fi and did it again over wired ethernet through a gigabit switch and got 270 megabits per second All of these speeds that 270 was the one that jumped out to me all the others wi-fi You never know what's causing problems, right? But when she said she got speeds of 270 megabits per second over ethernet That you want to talk about the bells went off like wait That doesn't sound right because when I do it over ethernet to my synology using iperf I get full like 940 megabit per second aka full gigabit ethernet speed So I immediately broke out my uh, my you know, I sat down at my m1 mini Which is ethernetted into my network and I ran an iperf test direct to my synology to its ip address So across the local network and I got my 940. I'm like, okay got a baseline and I tested it both directions. Everything's good. Great And then I did exactly the same test except instead of sending it to the ip address of my Synology locally. I sent it to my magic dns address which goes through tail scale And uh, I got 300 megabits per second Uh, it to my uh going from my mac to my my synology and 600 megabits per second in the other direction And it was like, okay, what's going on? So I dug in a little deeper. I had a suspicion and I my suspicion Was I that tail scale is using cpu and slowing down the connection and sure enough That's what happened. I opened up a top window which is like activity monitor for unix on my Synology disk station. I also opened it up on my mac But I knew that of the cpu's involved the one on my disk station was the slower of the of the cpu's and sure enough tail scales process usage spiked during that speed test because it was trying to like Manage all of this traffic around and and you know through its engine and for whatever reason I guess its engine is just not Tuned to be efficient enough to to do that. So tail scales. I still maintain that tail scale is awesome and amazing But uh, it it does use cpu So if you were doing bandwidth intensive stuff on your local network Where you can avoid using tail scale I would do that If you are doing Bandwidth intensive stuff over the wan over the internet Uh, and you have the ability to bypass tail scale with some other type of vpn server that doesn't have bandwidth constraints Uh, try that, you know or at least test it and see which of your paths is the least Uh, the least worst if you will I've got a question. Yeah, man. I'm sure I I'm sure I glossed over too many things that right No, you didn't but I but I and I Don't think it matters because I I think your answer about the cpu is is the crux of the whole thing When you're using tail scale and you're at home Are are you still going out over the internet and then back? No, local. Where's the pipe? So you're you're local. Okay, you're staying local. It is local in cpu It's 100 cpu. Yeah, but but it is routing through this This your tail scale engine on both devices and and to be clear I well not to be clear because I didn't say it before I also watched the tail scale process spike on my On my m1 mini and interestingly enough I didn't do enough testing with this to to say what I'm about to say for certain But I'll say it anyway I also did a test from my iMac here in the studio, which is an intel chip, right? So in terms of like Geekbench numbers my m1 mini is faster than this intel iMac cpu wise right raw cpu however I was getting I said I got and this is true. I got 300 megabits per second From my mac mini to my Synology and 800 600 megabits per second in the other direction When I did it on my intel mac those speeds were almost doubled So for whatever reason It was being slowed down on both ends like neither one of them None of those tests hit 940 right but for whatever reason In that moment and I need to do more testing to say that tail scale is slower on a I don't want to say that tail scale slower on one platform than the other but in my Brief test it was slower on m1 than it was on intel anecdotally speaking. There's your 50 cent mark of the day Thank you, sir anecdotally speaking. This is the meta rabbit hole Yeah, so there you go. So thanks for coming down that rabbit hole with us folks. 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That's probably why they have a 4.8 star rating on the app store Download the free upside app and use promo code mac geek gab to get five dollars or more cash back on your first purchase of ten dollars or more That's five dollars or more cash back on your first purchase of ten dollars or more using promo code mac geek gab And our thanks to upside for sponsoring this episode Hey, uh, john and pete or either one of you guys swifties Did you uh, did you try and get tickets for taylor swift last week? No Okay I saw that it just wasn't going to be possible unless I had 12 large burning a hole in my pocket. Is that all? Okay, yeah, I uh, I would go see taylor swift live I I've heard she's an amazing performer and and I did try to sign up for the the presales, but uh, but I didn't even get a I was I was wait listed for the presale I'm sure That if if you are interested at all and probably even if you aren't interested at all in this you've heard all of the stories about how uh, how that presale went super sideways and You know the ticket master and taylor swift and there's all that stuff going on and I say I'm sure you've heard all the stories We're not going to retell those but I think there's probably one that you didn't hear And I dug into this because as soon as I heard this story. I was like wait a minute. What happened here The whole idea behind the ticket master presale and why you have to sign up for a code in advance And all of that stuff and trust me. I'm going somewhere nerdy with this to bear with me. I know it's a rabbit hole Sorry But but we're going somewhere fun The whole idea is because they know that there's going to be huge demand for this And they want to make sure that the you know, the verified fans. That's what they call this the ticket master verified fan presale The verified fans are have a shot at getting tickets And the way this verified fan presale thing works is you buy the tickets and then you have to be the one to use them Uh, it you know, you whatever like you you can maybe you can buy four tickets You have you you know, you have to be one of the people the person that with the credit card has to be the one that shows up at the At the thing and then uh, and then you can bring you know, you're three other people with you as as you might expect So You with that in mind and I go to a lot of concerts as many of you know And I'm well aware of how this system works and how it all is and you know I like that part of the idea ticket master scammy and and and creepy and they have their own Like hidden secondary resale market, which they probably shouldn't be allowed to have but anyway, they do this which is great Uh, so you're saying you can't show up with 300 of your closest friends. Uh, uh, yeah Yeah, right nor could I buy in in a normal verified fan presale If I bought tickets, I couldn't even give all of them to you pete I would have to join you and and attend or Somehow you would have to impersonate me enough to get yourself in the door now What a lot of scalpers scalpers will do is they will buy four tickets and resell three uh, and Literally walk you into the venue and then once you're in they leave and walk the next three people for whom they bought tickets in Right like this is a known practice and as long as their markup on it is enough to Give them a profit after covering their cost of four tickets Even though they're only selling reselling three fine, right and okay fine So that's the scalpers way around it all of this is important as background Because when I heard it was on abc start here, they they did a little dive into this which is great podcast, uh, brad melky's funny and does a good job, uh And they said Yeah, the big problem the reason people were waiting hours and hours in this verified fan presale Which should have been a managed quantity Was because it wasn't just people it was bots getting through I was like well wait a minute Wait, wait, wait the whole idea behind the verified fan presale Is that you get a code texted to your phone like it it prevents bots from getting through What do you mean bots got through it? So I dug into it and sure enough like They generally they don't they know how many verified fans they have offered tickets to And that is or offered the opportunity to purchase to right it was just an important distinction They That is how they manage how many tickets are going to be sold through the verified fan presale And and and then they have a general on sale, which should be more tickets So it's usually somewhere between 20 and maybe 40 percent of the tickets are reserved for the verified fan presale And then the rest are you know out there But they don't know a if those people that that have the verified fan are going to buy and b They don't know how many tickets they cap them at four But they know that not everybody is going to buy for and sometimes they cap them at eight Like you know, whatever the the limit for that on sale is but that's how they manage how many tickets are going to be sold They don't reserve A fixed number of tickets for the verified fan presale and that's an important another important distinction Because abc start here mentioned the bots and i'm like, okay bots That's that that's the first little flag that went up for me and the second flag was they said yeah And now they can't do the on sale because 95 percent of all the tickets have already been sold through the presale and what happened was the the bot writers we'll call them the bot makers Had figured out how to bypass the verified fan presale So not only was it the verified fans trying to get in but it was people who did not even have verified fan codes That somehow had figured out how to get past the system And this comes as absolutely no surprise to us John you and i came up in a time Where people were vendors software vendors were using copy protection on software literally using uh writing different Ways of preventing people from copying The the bits of the software to another disk, right? You would get your software on a floppy disk and and they would prevent you from copying that disk Even to make your own legitimate backup right that you might want to store at a friend's house That finally ended though Because it was just a game of cat and mouse right like the the vendors would come up with a new way of doing things The the people that were breaking the copy protection would figure that out and it would just go back and forth On this one, I think what happened is that the bot makers Suckered ticket master I think they figured out a while back how to bypass the verified fan presale And I think they waited until they knew they had A sure thing in terms of being able to sell for those prices like you mentioned p12 grand I saw some for 90 thousand dollars, right? But people are And I think if you rewind back a couple of months bruce springsteen tickets went on sale There was a minor issue with the verified fan presale. I think they used that as a test run This is all my tinfoil had rabbit hole theories here, but Like I think ticket master got baited into thinking that this Game that they had won this game their brick wall was up and impenetrable That's right. And as soon as you think that You know, you're wrong. You should know you're wrong. Yeah, right I mean, doesn't this sound like the whole copy protection days john just the the cat and mouse stuff I don't know. That's so I think they figured out the algorithm to generate of a useful code Oh, that's one way I that is not what I thought but there's I mean, I don't know. So yeah, that would make sense Um, the the way I thought was they took a look at the web page and said, okay Is the code act is entering the code? Actually relevant When you make your purchase or is it just to get you past that firewall? And into the system and once you're in it doesn't matter whether or not If like the system doesn't even check to see if you are Authenticated with a code that would have been like if I were a bot maker That's how I would approach it. It's like, okay How do I just do an end around on this and get past the gatekeeper to the normal ticket buying? You know, where how do I get to that website directly? Right, I don't but john you might be right about like that's If there's a simple algorithm, yeah Yeah Yeah, because it costs you nothing to get those codes, right? So you could do verified fan pre-sale codes for every act that that that does one And then start doing your regression analysis on okay Are these codes related to my email address or are they related to, you know, what what what how are they generating these codes? How do they know they're good? Yeah Dave how long were the codes are they four characters six characters? I think they're There's some orbit. I want to say six or eight. I just got one. Hang on. I got one for garth Brooks I didn't because the reason I'm asking is that once you know the length of the code then it's just a matter of You know almost random guessing Yeah, my my code for garth Brooks. I'm happy to share this on the show the pre-sales over is All caps except for the number which has no capital equivalent cv j m m 6 s So that is seven characters Yeah Yeah So, so yeah, then you have to go. They're all seven characters. In fact, I have them all in the same text message thread. So, yeah I don't simplify things yelp Yeah, you know and that it's not 18 or 20 characters simplifies it yeah John you might be right about this that they just You know that they they didn't create a pool of codes that they created a formula for codes Yeah, or they figured out the url that you end up at It'd be the other one is like Excellent point right that would be the simplest path of all. It's just yeah, what's that url? Yeah, get me there I'm good to go. I'm in Yeah, even if even if all you have to do is Like take your code and get in right so now you're in What url is that can I share that url with somebody right? I mean it might be that simple. Who knows like these systems Yeah, what a rookie mistake. I mean jeez But that's the thing Professional it security people need to obviously be running the big websites like that that that involved Tens of that hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars Right and and it sounds like they got ranking amateurs doing it Well, maybe you know, I could come up with a seven digit character to you know today I could figure out how to do that. Yeah, and I'd get beat down hard like like ticket master did You need trained professionals doing that stuff folks. Well, and they need to be like Always active because you know the people on the other side are always active, right? Like Complacency is the issue like Even and even then you will only develop to the point where you think you need to go, right? Like they're not they're not doing voice verification They're not doing camera verification Which they could easily do pretty much every device that's going to be online buying tickets has a camera on it, right? So you could do that take a picture of the person who bought it now You know, you know that that you can do you know photo analysis or whatever and and figure all that out I like I don't know like is there's a million ways that this could have happened, but it when you think you have gotten it right Is perhaps the only moment where it's correct, but if you stop there Someone will pass you now in the chat Brian Monroe or maybe it was uh Oh, it was mark moran And Brian rohr having a conversation at live dot macky cub dot com and One of that they the speculation there is it could be just that whoever the programmers are got paid off As you pointed out Pete, there are millions of dollars at play here You know is a programmer susceptible to the the almighty dollar Probs, I'm guessing they get paid an almighty dollars to do their job They might get paid in lots lots lots more almighty dollars to tell people how they did their job I you know, I I know I don't like I'm just I I'm not saying that ticket master programmers are are selling out the back door But if any one company's programmers were to do this poetic justice Yeah, right, I mean, yeah, this is It is just a lot of justifiable outrage over this, you know, yeah Yeah, the other things that occurred to me done the other thing that occurred to me when I looked at the uh article from ticket master they show a graph of Requests for tickets and there's this big huge spike Oh, um, it almost looks to me Like a distributed denial of service attack. So they may need to Re-architect their Well, I mean there is you're right like that is exactly but any time there is Yeah, right there any time there's a ticket on sale It is a ddos, right because there's lots of people from everywhere legitimate people of course, but Enough of them will crater the server That's also part of why they do the verified fan thing They only send out codes to a number of people that they know their servers can easily handle But when there's more than that number of people hitting their servers Many orders of magnitude more than that number of people then that ddos attack is successful but I mean, you know, we ran mac observe and we run our mac e-cab website and we anticipate The maximum number of legitimate users that we will have at any one time and we architect the site to handle more than that but You know when like it took us a long time to figure out how to architect the site to Handle like all of the traffic that would come in during uh steve jobs keynote, right like we would crater every time So it's like, oh, yeah, like we don't we don't have this kind of traffic the other 360 days of the year, but these four days You know our insanity And so how do we do this economically right because if you could I mean, you know We could we could have gone out of business by going broke early early on if we said Oh, sure. We want to architect it for you know, five million people to be on the site all the time without the the revenue to support that so yeah Yeah, I mean it reminds me of uh past apple product launches Where everybody fog piles on the server all at once and then nobody can get in That's exactly right. It's exactly right. Yeah, or or the six hour lines in front of the cell phone stores For the brick the brick and mortar version of that scene Yeah Yeah, well the brick and mortar version of that same thing. I mean it no like that's one example But if you if you if we want to stay in this world I used to camp out for tickets In front of ticketron or you'd go to the third floor the back of the third floor of sears and robuck To buy from ticketron or you know your local record store would have a ticketron terminal or whatever And you'd literally camp out all night that also a d d os attack because the one guy manning that terminal Was completely overwhelmed for the first two hours of his shift that day You know, yeah, so it's just how it is Yeah, ticketron. I know mark moran in the chat is commenting about ticketron Yeah, I know i'm old. I know I know it's fine. It's fine. I'm still rocking and rolling I'm still going to see concerts and most importantly. I'm still doing mac geek out which I love We've got a couple of minutes left. Let's let's uh, john you want to pick a cool stuff found pete I don't know if you have a cool stuff found to to share Bruce's is too good to let wait another second let alone another week Bruce says I just came across this amazing piece of free software called actions by cindre sorjas Cindre's name might be uh might be ringing a couple of bells because Uh, he's the one who writes velia the the browser picker that we talked about over the last couple episodes If you're into using shortcuts on the mac or ios even this is a very cool must have Uh, the uh what the it adds a ton of actions to shortcuts so that you can do all kinds of cool things And uh, you know, the list is the list is long. I'm not going to read it all but you know Some of these actions are add to list add apply capture date authenticate Authenticate tapping into the authenticate thing inside your own shortcut That's pretty cool to be able to do combine lists Convert date to unix time edit a url format currency Get file path get title of url like these are great a lot of these things of course you could write on your own But man, I wouldn't want to have to and thankfully I don't and neither do you so that's uh, that's my Inclusion and cool stuff found this week If if I only get one and time wise I might only get one so yeah John do you have one you want to uh, you want to share? um Let's see we have um We did get one from bob great um And basically he pointed us towards a utility called one switch um And they have a screen cleaning mode which uh, I believe it darkens the screen and it disables the input so Uh, it doesn't wake up and and blast you with with super brightness Cool Cool, um, but they have a whole bunch of other features which I think are cooler. Uh, you can hide desktop icons dark mode keep awake um Look at the battery level of your air pods do that the stirb night shift screen saver true tone So it looks pretty neat and as they point out um It's part of set up Amazing Amazing cool Cool Pete do you have one or shall I pick a third one from the list? Well, I've actually got a quick reminder. I guess it's kind of more than anything is that with uh They're cheap and get a get a Get a bunch of them and put them in your bag the little adapters to go to usb a to usb c usb c to usb a because invariably you have the wrong Male plug to the wrong female plug and And if you got a bunch of those they're they're two or three bucks a piece Get down of them and throw them in your bag and you put them everywhere, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah These are the best stocking stuffers that exist Yeah for this year. Anyway. Yeah. Yeah I agree. I agree. It's a great one. Yeah. Yeah We got lots more cool stuff found to share with you We will do uh, we will we will prioritize that next week because I because some of these things are good for the uh, You know the holiday buying season. So yeah Fun stuff. I like this this episode was uh, this was fun today. Yeah good stuff. Good show The rabbit hole Yeah, good show boys Absolutely. I I agree All right Thanks for hanging out with us everybody make sure to check out pete's uh Now being recommended on spotify podcast. So there I was I know pretty amazing. So there I was that us Thanks to cash fly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you Thanks to you for doing what you do and sending in all your questions. Thanks really for listening and thanks for sharing the show and just Being part of our mac e-cab community. It's this is amazing. It's really great. Uh Yeah, that's what we got. Thanks for hanging out. Check out our sponsors as we mentioned in the show We have uh masterclass.com slash m g g And upside Dot com where after you download the app use the code mac geek gab to uh to get your five bucks I know it's great Ah, we made it Part of our film John Can you uh, can you tell us what pete shirt says man? Um, I believe it says Don't get caught Them some good advice right there