 It's time for Mack Geekab and listener Bob brings brings brings us our quick tip of the week By saying I think I tripped over something that I never knew might benefit others If you swipe up from the lower left corner of an iPad screen He says I'm not sure if it's directly upper towards the center. He says as I'm still discovering it It's more towards the center Bob. I think it's the right way to describe that. Yep You do that swipe up from the lower left corner of the iPad screen. It takes a screenshot Bob says he never knew this And figured he'd share. Thank you for sharing Bob More tips like this plus your questions answered today on Mack Geekab 970 for monday february 27th 2023 Greetings folks and welcome indeed to Mack Geekab the show where we share tips just like that your questions your cool stuff found We try to answer your questions These are questions that you yes you can send into us at feedback at Mack Geekab dot com We try to share your questions answer your questions share your tips share your cool stuff found the we put it together into an agenda We try to have some fun with it. The goal is Every single one of us learns at least five new things every week when we get together There it is and sometimes pete will even play that sound which clearly he still has some echo cancellation on because it sounded pretty wonky Sponsors for this episode include collide. We're at collide.com slash mg g. You get a device security solution That uses slack and educates to your users. It's now tailor made for okta We'll talk more about that in depth in a minute as well rocketmoney.com Slash mg g they will cancel your subscriptions for you They'll help you monitor your spending it can save you hundreds per year again rocket money.com slash mg g We'll talk about that in a little bit too for now Here in Durham, New Hampshire at least while we're recording this i'm dave hamilton And here in tripple connecticut. This is jonathan brun In here at an undisclosed bunker somewhere in the united states I have no idea where I am today Welcome everybody. It's pilot pete and let me say to the people That are listening live today right now as we record happy mardi gras and all of you listening on the show I hope you're well into your lint and self deprivation because it's there you go now lint That's right. We are recording early. I said i'm in i'm in durham while we record this i'm going to be in cancun We're going to to stand barefoot in the sand and and watch fish on the beach for For a few days, so that's where we will be lint. Are you dave? It turns out I am giving up snow for lens. Yes We're we're getting we actually we got a little bit of snow the morning that we recorded this But we're supposed to get like another eight inches or something over the next couple of days So hopefully if the power does go out my my standby generator the the silly Fixed that they were supposed to have done to that actually works I can't control that though. So we're just going to do the show and uh hope and you know, we'll figure it out Todd has our Todd has our next tip our our next quick tip He says I use the macOS calendar And I you and I used to use the go-to-date Screen keyboard shortcut command shift t to go to a date that same keyboard shortcut works in busy cal by the way But back to apple calendar. Todd takes us Lately he says I have found it easier to click on the year button at top center Now I have the entire year in front of me and I can simply simply quick click quick I can easy for me to say I can simply need to get some new lips, man. This is you're having a rough day Clearly I already have mexico on the brain and I could simply click on the day I want need a different year click on the left right arrows in the upper right to move years He says somehow I find this easier than the go-to-date Shortcut then typing the month tab type the day tab type the year says you can use the arrow keys to change those numbers Up and down as well, but the year view works fine for me. No, I can I get this especially And I we all visualize things differently um, you know, for example time I visualize on an on an analog watch right even if I'm reading digital time my brain translates it the calendar I think of is like this Uh, you know the and I can't remember the the name of the the ride But it's it's the the thing where it goes fast enough that it sticks you the round up exactly That's how I think of a calendar, but I think about it um Like in in almost a 3d view it's it's bizarre, right? So Maybe it's bizarre. Maybe it's how everybody's I don't know, but it's what works for me So I can totally see where for at least some of us Clicking and seeing the year view to then navigate lets your brain stay in whatever visual mode Your brain is in as opposed to having to translate it to yeah, I want to see July 27th Now I need to think about that that's actually July the number 27 in the year, you know by typing it in I can totally see how that that makes sense and if this was far too much of a glimpse into my uh My ready for cancun brain. Well, sorry Well, thanks, Todd. That's a good one. I like these tips I like I like I like workflow tips that that you know can make things more efficient. It's good stuff I don't know. I how do you navigate around the calendar, Pete? Uh, I generally just go to date. I like the month view Um, and you know, I've never given it much thought when I need to go to a year I I seem or you know to a previous year or something. I'll go to the year view and then scroll up or down I'm yeah, he's using the year view for like this year That's the part like just to get to a date even if it's you know in two months or something so I find myself working in this month and next month so often that That I generally just look at month view. In fact, I get a little screwed up If I if I get down into the week view, I feel like I'm looking at my data through a straw You know the whole iPhone screen is too small. Yeah the week view is too small on the phone. Yeah I use busy cow on both and I'm both mac os and ios the the week view on busy cow even in portrait mode Is is right for me. I can see I think I've got it set to see three or four days at a time Which the way I work my life Is is is right, but on my desktop I see 14 days at a time in week view in busy cow And and that really lets me have a picture Of what's going on and if I need to change time zones, I can change time zones in busy cow And it obviously shifts things around and I can see two time zones at once if I want it so Um, I will say this to take a time zone. So I anchor my my laptop never leaves eastern time You said that yeah, it makes sense in the world. I leave that on eastern time I watch and my phone or local time and that sort of thing, but I always know what time it is at home And then I never have to worry about Did my calendar alert or alarm? Cue me at the right time. So if I'm out on the west coast And I have a recording at 1 p.m Eastern time Then it you know at 9 30 pacific time. I get hey 30 minutes to recording. Oh, yeah. Yeah, there we go Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, okay. I mean it would do that even a nice job I will say the phone comes up with hey, you know, it's 9 30 local and and you've got a recording in half an hour Okay, yeah, so it does a nice job of Anchoring but that way I was gonna say I change I let my time zones change in my calendar and I never Well, I shouldn't say never I almost never have an issue with uh With with it, you know, because it just adapts it knows Where I have an issue is when people I I've got mindset so I don't create events like this I don't mean to say that I'm like perfect and somehow it can never make a mistake But this mistake I have engineered against I've protected myself against However, if I get an event from someone else that is in What my calendar refers to as floating time zone aka no time zone That screws me up because if I'm home Let's say when I put that in it now is in eastern time If I then and my calendar will now make it eastern time Regardless of what it was supposed to be. So if somebody if I'm meeting somebody at 2 p.m. Central in austin next month Uh, and they send me a floating time zone event. I put it in as 2 p.m Uh, you know, that's gonna be a problem. So because it'll because it'll adapt to 1 p.m. Austin time Or uh, yeah, one that would be 1 p.m. Austin time central. So anyway, yeah Anything to add to that John? I got Yeah, right zulu convert. Yeah, exactly. Um When I schedule events like when we were, um in another time zone, I'll typically Schedule it while I'm here, but I'll subtract or add the hours so that when I do get into the time zone Um, everything is correct Interesting. So why do you I'm curious why you even have to bother? I mean if you put it in it at you know Like pete said 1 p.m. Eastern time if your time zone on your devices changes it will be 10 a.m Pacific time like you don't need to overthink that I don't unless unless you've experienced something that Informs you that you do need to overthink that but but that's what I'm saying is if I put stuff in As long as the time zone's not floating, which is rare That that's that's very much an asterisk scenario for the most part all events come in with a time zone assigned and then that then it's It's just converted from zulu time like like you said pete. It's it's always anchored into zulu time. Everything is yeah Right, so I mean Yeah Yeah All right, um There's more to add to that john. Do you have any context for that or? Nope, okay I was working with one of my band mates recently We with one of the bands. I I mean we use a google calendar to share dates and all of that we We recently changed the calendar that we use i'm still not sure why we we did that we had one google calendar We moved to another one not sure why but anyway, what that meant was it's a brand new calendar And one of the guys Texted me and said I can't get this to add to my iphone. It doesn't show up in the list Oh my god, it shows up fine for me and then I thought well wait. I'm using busy cal I'm just logging that into my google account its own way Let me look on my iphone You know and see and sure enough. I couldn't see it either In my iphone calendar And i'm like what's going on here it had been so long that I had forgotten About the secret google calendar iphone select screen It's ridiculous what i'm about to tell you if you if you haven't experienced this before Great, maybe you never will and if you have you're going right. I remember this When you have calendars and google calendar by default Most of them will not be exposed to your iphone when it tries to You know generate a list of calendars for you to either show or not show You have to log into google And go to a url. I'll say the url, but it's also in the show notes at mackey cub dot com You have to go to google dot com slash calendar slash iphone select And it's this horribly laid out like it looks like a very Programmer written screen that never got any styling or anything But it's this ridiculous screen And with checkboxes next to the names of your calendars and you have to check the names of your calendars that you want to appear And be exposed to your iphone and then on your phone you can choose whether to have them appear or not It's crazy It's crazy So that's that Um, so I share that yeah, yeah All right, uh, so that's what I got You want to take us to robby john? Will I will um Robbie says I don't have many shortcuts that are real beneficial to me and have not explored the shortcut app capabilities until recently I've listened to you guys talk about creating a shortcut to manipulate low power mode on the iphone and some other shortcuts people have made After exploring around on the shortcuts recently I saw you could send a text message when something happens and I thought Why would I want to send a text message when the apple display results on the screen for me to see? Now to the tip my mother is in the elderly category and a couple of days ago I was visiting her. I looked at her phone only to see it was in low power mode because the battery Battery was almost dead. She does not answer my calls when her phone is dead Um, the elderly people occasionally forget to plug in the phone to recharge then it came to me I need to make a shortcut automation on her phone that sends me a text message When it goes into low power mode or the battery drops below some Percentage so I can call her before the phone dies until I let her plug the phone in Cool I like it Doesn't work when your 97 year old mother has a flip phone Oh Right But fortunately one of those phones will last you know four days on a charge That's fair. That's a really good point. Yeah, my dad gets his iPhone to last like three or four days on a charge Um, I yeah, I don't know what the magic is. I mean I do It's that he doesn't have a ton of apps on there that he uses all the time And I bet he's got four minutes a day of screen time That's what that's really what it is. Yes. That's exactly right My dad is not glued to his screen. He's a pretty technical guy, but but yeah, he's not It's like being technical and having a screen addiction It turns out are not One in the same or you you can you can be technical and and have somehow avoided having a screen addiction I've long since deleted it but years ago I was in a restaurant in california and there was an entire family sitting that we're out out to dinner And they're all sitting there on their phones Yep, you know playing with their screens and I snapped a picture of it and put it up on twitter and wrote, you know, that the hashtag togetherness Like I say, I sense to leave that but All right Yeah, all right, uh, nick has uh the next quick tip for us This is I love that this stuff happens. Um He says you can In apple notes using an apple pencil You can write tags This is which is amazing to me. He says what you write is You know, you draw with your pencil The the hash time the sign the pound sign of whatever you want to call that and your tag word So if you you know, if you're making a note about this show, you can you can write, you know, hash mac geekyab Then So now you've got that just written scribbled in your own version of scribble Then you go back and tap on the word And a pop-up will come up and turn it into a tag So if you're listening to the show and taking notes, I know some of you do It you don't it's certainly not mandatory obviously when there's no good. There's not it's not going to be any quiz uh but but if you're doing that write it and And then just tap on it and it pops up if uh an office to turn it into a tag He's he's got some context and some tips here about this Nick says this works best if you put the tags on a new line And sometimes you have to scroll the tag off the top of the page and then scroll it back For notes to process it and recognize it as a potential tag. So thank you for that That quick tip and the context of actually getting it to work in the right way. Love it Love it. Love it. It's cool stuff Um, yes tags allow you to Then search for an item with that tag at a later time That's yes. Good question. That's exactly right. Yep, because I'm like I don't think I've ever used tags. So yeah, all right Yeah, clear that up. Yeah tags and notes. Yeah, it's it's yet another compartmentalization organizational Tool that you can use. Yeah, and and you're right. That's perhaps the buried buried lead here is Is is that yeah, you can do that. Yeah, get that into your workflow. Yeah, yeah well Which fun stuff Should help obviate the need for find any file Sorry, now you gotta put that in the show notes find any file. Oh, that's the cool stuff found. Yeah, the little freeware app Uh, sure. Will that search notes to find any file? I think it searches any you can it gets really granular you can go down into you know I want a pdf file with the word, you know, silly in it And you know, you can the contents is and it's really granular and it was it will search your network drives your attached storage Um, that is it's super powerful. I find it to be faster than spotlight And certainly better you like I say you can get more granular you can say I want this type of file I want it has these contents Yeah, I got it. I know I have it. It's it's not in my It's not you know, it's not in my my my default like my fingers don't know to just launch it and use it when I need to Do a thing. I'll tell you Dave It's uh, we mentioned it on the show several months back when it first came up and yeah It it quit. That's one of the ones that quickly fell into my workflow find any file in I think yeah I think it was a five dollar donation is what's requested Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's like thomas templeman apps or something like that. I think he's the one that makes it Yeah, super super powerful little app cool cool all right Craig has a little something to share back in episode 967 Pete you were sharing the issue with your AirPods auto connecting to your phone when a call comes in And Craig's been through this. He says this will happen unless you configure a setting known as connect when last connected in your AirPods setup He says and that way when you need so he says you need to go to each device connect the AirPods And then enable this setting so that because that's the only time you can change those settings The default setting is automatically and that's what's driving you crazy is that it bounces things around He says the setting is device specific and does not travel with the AirPods This does defeat that auto connect feature that you that you ran into. So thank you for that Craig. Yeah Yeah, pretty good. Yep On the subject of AirPods and very specifically The second generation AirPods pro Mark in mark m. I shall say in our discord channel Says, uh, I just found out my accident and turns out necessity I forgot to bring a charger for my AirPods pro gen 2 But I did bring my apple watch puck charger Turns out you can charge your AirPods pro case Gen 2 case on the apple watch puck He says this might be old news to many, but it's news to me I I When I read this I Like I had some memory of it, but I I don't I think if somebody asked me can I do this? I would have said no Uh, so yeah I missed that it was the second generation And I'm like, yeah, I tried several times with the puck and the and the AirPods pro first generation Yeah, yeah, it did work. Here's the other cool thing about AirPods pro second generation If you have a case with an air tag Yeah to find your your AirPods you no longer need that because it makes the exact same There's an air tag built into the AirPods pro second generation case. Correct. Yeah Yeah, it works with find my Perfectly makes the same sound and now you've got an extra air tag to you know, right? Yeah, it's so smart You know I do I mean like for the people that are in in your family you get you can see where they are and you can see where You know, they're devices. I think even are They did change and I like there are times when this is frustrating to me, but I I understand and it's good and I I'm appreciative for the change It used to be that I could Set an alert to tell me when you know when alert me when my wife You know leaves the house so that I know, you know that she'll meet me at the club or whatever um Now I can still do that But it alerts my wife that I have started actively getting notifications about her her location. What up with that apple? Right. Yeah, it's good. It was supposed to be creepy apple I mean, I get it right. I'm totally with with I like I understand why it happens I just I had gotten so used to doing it like oh, okay I'm gonna you know, I'm gonna just sit at my desk and sort of plow through You know my to-do list But when my wife gets home We're gonna go out to dinner or or you know do a thing whatever, you know And so I would set an alert to tell me Oh, she she just left, you know the gym and she's on her way home Now I know I've got 20 minutes to wrap up the one thing I'm in get changed or whatever and off I go and I've stopped doing that because I because well, I I suppose because I never told her in the past that I did that Um, not that I was using it for like creepy reasons, but I realized oh if I do if now if I do this She's gonna get notifications. She's gonna think I'm stalking her which obviously I am You know, she's gonna be 100 correct about that. But but yeah, the convenient I have stopped using it for convenience Maybe that that's the way to say it and I I I don't like that Maybe I just need to just start doing it again and and tell her don't don't worry about this. Yeah And she'll understand and let me let me clarify for the pit for the listeners that don't know your setup You're in a separate building across the driveway from your home And you don't have the you have the windows blacked out for studio reasons correct So you can't see her here when she pulls up in the driveway So I I do now because she now that she drives that wrx that thing's loud So but if I have headphones in I won't hear it, right? Like yeah, so Exactly But here's the other thing that they've they've also done because this creeped my daughter out last summer. I believe it was When she went to work and she got she got home that night and then it notified her. Hey, someone's air tag is With you and she's like really is i'm pulling in the driveway. You're finally notifying me. Well, it was on my keys She had borrowed a car to go to work. That was on my keys, but now I think it says Pete's air tag is With you Yeah So it tells you who's it is Well, you know per the name that's that's stored in there. So Yep Yep, yep. Yeah, I get that too and it's weird when it decides to notify you because if I take my wife's car It you know, she often will leave her purse just in the car in in the garage And if I'm going out to you know, pick up, you know, Chinese food or something I just go take it and it's like, you know, I'm almost back home with the food and it's like You know, someone's air tag is with you. It's like, well It's a heck of a time to tell me Yeah, exactly. Yeah, thanks for yeah, exactly. Good thing. I had no opportunity to lose them Uh Pete you had uh A great little quick tip that you shared in pre-show. Would you would you share it again now for me? Yeah, so how many times have you ever said been told in your iPhone? Hey, go to settings Go to uh, but here's a classic one because it's it's nested Go to you know software update Okay. Well, you first you got to know where that is. Well, it's in general So you got to scroll down until you find general and then But here's your simple answer open settings Put your finger in the middle of the iPhone screen Touch it and pull down about a quarter inch and at the top you'll get a little search window Then you just type in update and it'll take you right to all your update settings So it's one of those things that most of us probably know But if you've ever found yourself scrolling and scrolling and hunting for a nested setting On your ios device Just pull down you got a search window at the top And it'll take you right to it Cool. I like it. No, I use it all the time. I yeah, I use it all the time All right, john you have uh speaking of finding Menus on devices you found some not quite as some even harder to find things. Didn't you? Yes, so um I have a tcl roku TV roku being the operating system. Yeah um And it's really nice, but I was having an issue with certain shows being too dark. Oh you mentioned this Okay, and I you know I searched, you know, I googled it and I'm not the only one that had this problem So I'm like Oh, is there a way to set hdr? Or other video parameters and and there is a way to set like the brightness and the contrast and stuff, but uh, I think My instincts told me it was Uh an hdr issue. Yeah, I would have agreed with you. Yeah And I know you're gonna share how you got there in the end. Was it an hdr issue? Was that it was disabling? Yes, great. Okay. Now, how'd you fix it? Um I went to the roku secret menu Oh Really? So yeah in one of the threads that I saw talking about this. They're like, hey, by the way, um There there's some menus that you don't get on Normally get on the tv, but there's a whole bunch of ones that are buried in there. And maybe there's something geeky enough Um, that'll help fix your problem Um, so here are the menus that they give you Um There's a wireless menu because it has wi-fi Uh images and ads menu. Okay, that sounds interesting um All right reset the secret menu. Um another secret menu roku channel info secret menu the hdmi secret menu I think that's where I found the setting that fixed my problem. Okay Wow Yeah, so you can set the you know 4k frequency and and stuff like that huh Amazing Wow All right So you were able to turn off hdmi and and now things don't get get too dark for you Or hdr. I hdr. I didn't mean hdmi. I I'm I yes, I think I fiddled with one of the cancun mount settings Cool amazing huh I would have thought yeah, yeah, no hdr sometimes I mean it depends on the tv and how it interprets it and all that stuff, but sometimes yeah, yeah, yeah Very cool very cool Whoo, there's that sound that sound means that I get to take a minute here and tell you about our sponsor collide And collide has some big news because if you're an okta user They can get your entire fleet to a hundred percent compliance. 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That's k o l i d e dot com slash mgg And our thanks sincerely to collide for sponsoring the show and sponsoring this episode Hey, I just found out the average person has around 12 paid subscriptions. Think about that If you think you're only subscribed to a handful of services You might want to double check with our sponsor rocket money You can quickly identify and cancel all of your unwanted subscriptions Rocket money formerly known as true bill is a personal finance app that finds and cancels your unwanted subscriptions monitors your spending and helps you lower your bills all in one place Over 80 percent of us have a subscription or more than a subscription That we've forgotten about like that streaming service that you bought just to watch one show on or that free trial that you've never even used Rocket money will quickly and easily identify all of your subscriptions for you So you get to see and then you can stop paying for the ones that you don't want when you don't want one It's great. You just find the subscription you don't want in rocket money's interface and you press cancel That's it No more long hold times with customer service or tedious emailing back and forth Rocket money makes canceling subscriptions as easy as the click of a button. I've talked about it on the show I've done this. It's amazing. How simple it is The wall street journal is one of those companies that does not have a cancel button on their site And the subscription's like 450 bucks or 500 bucks even for like the the quote unquote, you know Inexpensive digital only one or whatever. No, I like I didn't want to have to call them My time is valuable. I I want to spend my time prepping mac e-cab and doing this show for you And rocket money lets me because I just click cancel and they took care of it So great stop throwing your money away cancel unwanted subscriptions and manage your expenses The easy way by going to rocket money.com Mgg that's rocket money.com slash Mgg one more time rocket money.com Mgg and our thanks to rocket money for sponsoring this episode All right, let's uh, let's take some questions here chuck sent in one that Hopefully we can at least glean we can come up with well. We'll see where we go. He says, uh My wife's new m2 mac book air Freezes every once in a while. She's using the ventura at the time. You sent the email was 13.2 My guess is he is updated to 13.2.1. In fact, I know he hasn't it hasn't fixed it. He says, uh When it locks up, I try to force quit various apps to try to isolate the application that's causing the hang up Okay, the trackpad click stops working But I can move the cursor and use the return key to quit an app once the cursor is in the right place But in that case quitting the finder doesn't cause a restart even after manually force quitting each app until there's none left running Save the finder I finally resort to a manual shutdown by holding the power button when I quit each app One at a time the lockup is not cured I haven't checked the activity monitor yet to see if there's a memory hog bogging down the system But starting application activity monitor could be complicated by these freezes because I can't click anything By the way, my m1 air also runs venture and doesn't have this problem. We've we've made sure everything's up to date um So this is an interesting one You know looking at the symptom Of it being it seems like the trackpad simply stops letting him click or her click and That's interesting because the trackpad is software based on these machines I mean it has haptic feedback. It's certainly a piece of hardware It is sensing the pressure that you put on it, but it's not actually moving Uh in any way, so it makes sense if there's some software agent that Manages the trackpad if it gets hung up. Well No clicky my my first thought Chuck is try Using an external mouse like plug one in when this is happening Can you click With that like is it something about the trackpad either the hardware or the software? My guess is it software because a reboot solves it. So it's probably not hardware Um, but you know anything's possible. It's too consistent to be hardware, right? Like when this problem happens It's that the trackpad stops. I bet a restart fixes it. That's why I'm thinking not hardware software Um, but I could be wrong feedback at mackeykeb.com. Please tell me, uh but um Feedback at mackeykeb.com Yeah, I think it was feedback at mackeykeb.com. Yeah, that's it. Thanks guys. Yeah, I've got an answer You have the answer p. Go. I'm gonna stop rambling. It's an interrupt conflict. Oh my gosh Pete get out. Sorry, dude. Get out Get out I had to do that, man. I'm sorry Right remember that was back. Oh, I remember yeah Yeah, I uh, I I can't believe you did that to me Get out. That's it. You believe me, don't you? You're uninvited Oh Well, you know what they say You can't fake stupid. Yeah, all good things must come to an end. Um Well, that's what the software people say. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah, and the hardware people say it's a software problem No, that's right. That's right. Yeah. Yeah, so I like that would be my first test Is is this something about the operating system that's not letting anything click? or is it That particular, you know that that haptically driven trackpad that's part of the the mac book air Whatever that software is and I think in fact, I know That there is also a way to trigger a click with the keyboard By leveraging accessibility. I don't know that that how to do that off the top of my head But there is a way so that would be another if you don't have a third party mouse With you and you experience this and or you know, you're going to It might not be a bad idea To set that up in advance so that at least you have a path that's better than Powered, you know just force powering down the machine Yeah, I don't know. Yeah. Oh, yeah tn papa in the chat room Yeah, yeah, he at mac geek up com slash discord shares Again using activity monitor. So launching it perhaps you'd have to just leave it launched all the time Which is not a terrible thing to do but look in there for a stalled process They generally appear in red and that might Help, you know, guide the the troubleshooting path here. Yeah I don't know anything else. Um Sometimes yeah, it hasn't happened for a while, but um Sometimes if your machine locks up and is non responsive If you now normally you shouldn't do this But I found sometimes this can help analyze the problem If you hold down the power key The machine will shut down and when you start it up sometimes it will know that something terrible happened And it's like, hey, do you want to see the crash report? I'm like, okay Yeah, I and the crash report will show you You know hang or you know some other reasons Um that the computer got upset. Yeah Yeah, Dave, what is it that uh, don't get old it's bad for your memory. There's a process you can launch And you can look through all the logs that uh, also, um Console console. Thank you. Yeah Would it be a console you think or I mean maybe Reading console logs in today's world in the last few versions of mac os got a got a few hours It sucks. No you you have to This is one of those things where it is a skill that you need to develop and trying to do it For the first time in the moment of having an issue is is just going to lead you down a path of desperation and frustration and probably smashing things. Um, but The way to read console logs is to use the live filters. So it's essentially a search box in there Well one way, I don't want to say the definitive way But one way to sort of make sense of and and start sort of sort of, you know Putting a filter on the river of of crap that just pours out into the console Yeah, is uh, the river of crap There's a there's an image here and it's it's not exactly Incorrect with what you get when you're looking because you you're about as happy seeing Seeing the river as you are seeing the console logs Without making any sense of it, but you can put a live filter on it. So it will only show you things that uh are You know that match your filter it again in real time so, uh You know, I'm I'm usually able to ignore the stuff in the chat room guys, but I can't they're not a sponsor. I'm gonna say Carnival is not as uh, you say it Pete sure Tennessee pop this in the chat rooms is I think carnival sales on that river. So you may be right Yeah, I'm usually pretty good at letting that stuff go and enjoying it without sharing it today, Dave You're punchy. I am punchy today and you're ready to go to Mexico That is funny though. Like that's really funny. I think carnival sales on that river My wife being a travel agent. I'm gonna share that with her All of you get out. Yeah, um, so Um But filtering it down the problem with filtering it down, of course is you need to know what to filter and and so You know, like that starts to get sort of interesting And also frustrating you can experiment with things, you know, you might be able to look at track bad You might look at uh, what is it hid, right? Because that's the human interface device That's the the shortcut but see these are the things you would just sort of need to know From say doing a podcast for almost 18 years where you you dive into this stuff Before that appeared in the chat room Someone Ev the nerd asked any tips on how to read a crash report So I think this is more going back to not the console but but your comment john what I do I essentially read from top To bottom now at the very top is going to be some Just set up information. Here's the version of macOS that's running. Here's the time all of this You will see and I don't have one in front of me to help you with this I I apologize. It's sort of an on-the-fly thing and and maybe we'll revisit it But in general it will tell you Somewhere in the first page maybe page and a half before it starts listing all the processes and everything that was happening on the different threads It will tell you which thread crashed or which process crashed To me that is the most important thing that as an end user I can I can use and so I will look for that and if it says it's thread 15 that crashed Then you can scroll down to thread 15 and see what that thread was doing You're going to see I mean you're going to see some things in there that are gibberish to all of us Because we're not the developer of the the software running in that thread But there should be some things that resemble English words or some process names or application names or something where you're like Oh, I see it was while it was you know indexing my photos that it crashed So okay, if this happens again, maybe I have a corrupted photo in there. Like, you know, those are the thought I mean I I realize I'm like mixing examples here, but that's the kind of thing That's how I read a crash log. I would be that this would be a great Thing to sort of crowdsource. I was going to say feedback at macgeekup.com but I would rather do this in discord because we really get like the The hive mind together there. So macgeekup.com slash discord We'll start a thread about uh, how to read crash reports and the uh in the live room because that's where it came up And uh, we'll go from there. So I don't know. Do you guys have any uh, any other thoughts? It's an interrupt conflict Yep, uh All right, um Yeah, I don't uh, yeah, I don't think I have anything more on this but hopefully it's uh, hopefully Checking the you know heading down the path of the mouse would would be the the answer there for you chuck uh last episode two episodes ago And last episode we talked about nesq next dns Uh as a solution for a few different things And listener joe asked a pretty good question. He says, um Is it safe a user on the mac power user's uh forums? Proposed using next dns to block ads on apple news Which are super annoying the same ad appears over and over again each time each screen that you scroll and the idea was using next dns to Uh, essentially make lookups to apple's ad server fail So from a you know from an engineering standpoint, I like this idea Not a huge fan of ad blocking because my life has been supported by sponsors for a long time I I think you can do better by choosing sponsors that are actually At least you're interested in that your audience therefore might be interested in you might not drive them crazy We don't talk about the same sponsor 14 times in the same show We talk about them twice once the beginning once in the middle That's my opinion on how to do sponsorship the right way. I I totally Empathize with how apple is doing it the wrong way. So I don't necessarily I'm not necessarily against this idea But what that means is you're installing next dns on your device and joe ass is this safe Are there any downsides you can think of if I try to do it on my mac or my iphone? Will it behave nicely with my xfinity modem and my hero? so I had never used next dns, but I installed it And um, it's it like it seems fine it It next dns gets to see all of your dns lookups as you might imagine because they are all of your dns Lookups are redirecting through them. That's by design. That's how the service works Um, there is one option in next dns that you would have to turn off And that is the option that allows you to skip next dns on known wi-fi networks So you can flag certain wi-fi networks and say like okay on my home network. I don't need to use next dns You know on my work networks. I don't need to use it. I want to use the local dns for for those If you want to block ads on apple news You would have to let next dns run anywhere that you might read apple news Otherwise, it's not going to work. So you'd have to turn that part off And that then might cause issues If you are doing things that rely on your device Using your local dns like custom dns names For your devices and and that sort of thing. So is it safe? I think so Is it gonna cause you any problems? Well, maybe but You know, it's one of those things we're tried out if you start having problems. Well, turn it off. Did the problems go away? Yes, okay. Well that might answer the question You know, so yeah, I think it's okay to experiment with yeah I mean as a as a company Um, it seems all right as long as you're okay with them seeing potentially seeing all of your your look-ups. So, yeah Yeah All right Any any thoughts on that, uh, mr. Actually, I'm not going to ask you a yes or no question. That's my fault What are your thoughts on that john? Give it a whirl It's it's one part of the chain that you can use to Um block certain content. So yeah, yeah, I personally don't use The third party dns Yeah, do you use apple news? Do you read a lot of stuff in apple news? Yeah, the ads don't drive you crazy No, that's good. That's good. Yeah. Yeah, I think most people are are tolerant of ads that are Not obtrusive. It's the ones that block the whole middle of your screen and are continuous Like you said and over and over and over again. I don't mind. I don't mind a relevant ad Same great, you know, I they can be great stuff from sponsors It's like literally how you learn about products like there's it ads aren't inherently bad. There are just many Many new ones every day bad ways of implementing ads. Yes. Yeah, and I I don't think they're a current sponsor But I I know there's been shows that you know, I've listened to one password And listened to their ad specifically to learn about a feature in it that I may or may not be using So when it's done, right? Yeah Yeah, we try to do it right. I do like that next dns lets you do this On your iphone because you could this idea of of forcing a dns Redirect or a dns lookup to fail is a time honored practice, right? You know that whole concept of going and downloading all What we call a hosts file of all the known ad servers and installing that on your mac To cause all those redirects to or those lookups to fail Then keeps the ads from appearing. It's just sort of the way it works. If you can't do the dns lookup Can't load the content Problem is you can't implement that on an iphone The way you can on a mac you can't get to the terminal on an iphone and and edit the etsy host file And yeah and all that so like next dns It's cool that it it sort of steps in the way of that and lets you do that It's a it's a different i'd never used an app like next dns before john you should check this out Just the way you turn it on and you have to go in and like give it permission to interrupt your dns queries I didn't even know that that was a thing on the iphone. So it's it's pretty cool That's pretty cool the thing is and I think the other thing you want to do is be careful of Being too aggressive on your ad blocking because it will become a cat mouse game that Makes them so obtrusive Yeah, right. Yeah, it could get worse. Yeah pop-up blockers failed for a while. Yeah. Yeah Well, I think yeah, if you know how if you know how to code I think you can detect somebody who's blocking ads and not render the page properly because Yeah, it's it's on the web. It's super easy to do that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah people hate you when you do that By the way, we tried that at mac observer. I mean we tried a lot of things at mac observer, you know But uh, but yeah, people people were furious about that. I was like, why are you furious trying to you know The price for viewing our content is looking at our ads that we choose to show you like it's okay Anyway, uh Yeah, uh chris We let you skip what your ad the ads here. I don't know how many of you know Like in general, I don't know how many of you know about chapters here on mac ekep Uh, we chapterize everything so most podcast players now we've been doing this for you know 16 17 of our almost 18 years But now most pause pod catchers the apps that you use to play podcast support chapters So you can jump around from segment to segment like for example I just started a new chapter Uh at the 50 minute and four second mark here for this particular like side discussion So if you don't care about this you can skip it if you want to come back to it You can skip it. I put chapters around every ad So if you already know about a sponsor if you're already a customer of them You don't care to learn about any of the new tips that might be in the ad you skip it over. It's totally fine You know, people think we're crazy for letting you do that We've been letting you do that since early early on and I think it has worked out to our mutual benefit Ours here is the publishers of the show but yours as the listeners too. We're all adults here Um, you know Choose what you want to do. Does it help us when you visit the sponsors webpage and consider their product? Yes Sometimes it even helps us if you buy we don't get like a commission on it But you know, they they track that stuff and then they might renew So it is good for us if you look at the sponsors, but I'm not going to beat you over the head with it Like, you know, but yeah the chapters you use for all kinds of things. So yeah, check them out in your podcast app Yeah, it's a cool thing Chris started as a question And thankfully it ended with chris figuring out his problem because I don't know that I would have ever Thought of this So I'll share his question and then I'll just jump sort of to the answer But just so we can have some some context here. He says I have a weird safari issue. It is sinking mimicking mirroring Between my mac studio and my m2 mac book air He says I've got a And he describes his computers all running the the latest venture of 13 dot 2 dot 1 says I typically run my iMac and mac studio simultaneously with universal control To expand my screen real estate and I will tell you Him saying that was a huge red herring because it made us dive down the path of universal control and it wasn't this um He says this morning I decided to update my mac book air and play with it and instantly when opening safari I noticed that whatever was opened on my mac book air Was mirroring on my mac studio and vice versa And so it really came down to all three devices if he did something in safari on one device It would happen on the other it wasn't like he was controlling the mouse or the keyboard It was that he was controlling safari and only safari But it was near instantaneous that he would open a new tab do a thing and boom safari would mirror on all of his devices You know Couldn't figure it out for a little bit And he says uh I got caught with tab groups He says uh Turns out that using tab groups in ventura the changes Assuming you're connected to the internet and everything all else is equal the changes are near instantaneous So being inside the same tab group on all three devices caused that tab group then to you know update in real near real time And and have a a Somewhat mirrored experience if you were to type something into like a web form On one computer that wouldn't appear on the other but having those tab groups come up Does sync it up so It interesting I I'm sure there are scenarios where this could actually be leveraged in an interesting way You know some kind of kiosk type scenario. I don't know like there's something here, but Um But good to know if you start seeing safari if if there's ghosts in the safari Then uh, and maybe you'll know why so thank you for sharing that with us chris And thank you for figuring it out because I don't know if we ever would have I uh, I I don't use Tab groups. I need to dig into them though Like I think I probably could get a lot of use out of them But I that the new version the new implementation of tab groups is very different than what it you know What it was in the past so yep I don't know Thoughts anything John any what are your thoughts on that? No Get out everybody out All right, pete uh in 968 we uh talked about Photos of some sort and in digitizing them. I think right got maybe not Yeah, so, um, I don't know if it was in the show or not We got a question though from tony c who lives in thailand and he's back in the states this week But visiting to the family, but uh, he asked about digitizing photos. Um, and we had two different answers for him My answer was uh, just because my wife about Probably about two years back needed to digitize a bunch of photos and wouldn't take my suggestion Which is to use your daygum phone, you know, it works good works good lasts a long time But I get it because there's reflections and inconsistencies and keystone issues and all that if you're using your phone Unless you're using a perfect stand of some sort. So she bought a flatbed scanner a uh epson v 39 scanner And it was it's a hundred and nine dollars and it does a fabulous job of scanning your photos putting them out digitizes them all and We've had good success with that taking our old paper particularly the older paper photos that were never digital of your grandparents and Sure game parents and that sort of thing. I had one of my great grandfather who was uh, A head swimming coach in pennsylvania for 40 years and wow. Yeah Those are all digitized now, but they they weren't back in the day Yeah, right, right, right No digital cameras in the 19 teens No, it turns out they weren't yeah, yeah Interesting, huh and it works well for you, huh? Yeah for 109 bucks. Yeah. Yeah, I've got it We put a link in the in the show notes for it and you had suggested a third party service Do you have any in particular? I don't have any in particular my my thought process was look You know if this is something you're going to do over and over again, then you know, certainly consider hardware um Because in the end it's going to be You're going to save money. You won't necessarily save time, but you will save money If it's a one-time thing My advice is go to the pros. You know, they They've done this many times before Uh, you you just give them your photos and and then they give you a you know a memory stick back It's usually how it works these days. It used to be a cd or you know, or maybe they're just online You download them now. I don't know but um But there there are plenty of services out there That will do this and and they'll get it right for you. Whereas You know scanning them yourself You might get halfway through and then realize oh You know If I did it this way or if I set the resolution like that I might be happier in the end in two years And so now you're going back and I mean don't get me wrong Obviously, we're all about like learning geeky skills here Right, but if it's truly a one-time thing and you you just can't imagine needing to do it again Maybe this isn't a skill you need to or want to develop if it is a skill you want to develop them by all means I will add though that uh, if if you do send them off by all means Please please please particularly if it's irreplaceable Make sure you have some sort of a copy Probably the coolest photo ever taken of me Was when I was when I landed an a4 on the deck of the uss lexington My hook was in the wire and my wheel my main mounts were smoking and somebody snapped it at that perfect instant I sent the negative off to have it blown up into a poster and never saw it again. No Yeah Yeah, it was like you gotta be kidding me. I mean if this was you know magazine covered quality photo Oh Yeah, right, right I'm sorry to hear that man. I'll suggest another one. I've used epson scanners in the past. Um If you willing to spend a little bit more money, um, they have one called the epson fast photo ff 680 w Okay Um, the thing is is that it has a tray. So you don't have to so you could you can put A whole bunch of photos in it Pretty much and and High-speed photo and document scanner Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So so quite a bit more money four five times price, but but If you're doing hundreds of these things this would perhaps save your sanity There's no hope for mine folks, but there is hope For yours that yeah, and I will add one other last thing along this line if you're going to use a scanner there and You're buried in your monthly paper and all that stuff David sparks did a field guide several years back called paperless and he talks about how to use a scanner to Digitize all your your statements as they come in though Most people will allow you to download your statements and that sort of thing anymore But there's other paper that you want to keep digitize them and then You know unless you need the originals like all the all the mortgage closing statements. Oh, yeah, digitize them shred them Yeah Yeah, and having a a sheet feeder for that kind of stuff makes a huge difference my My lexmark laser printer Has I mean I bought it this way. It wasn't like it just came by surprise But it is it is a multifunction device and it has a sheet feeder on it that will do double-sided Stuff in fact, they even prints double-sided having a double-sided printer In 2023 it's you are it sounds ridiculous for me to be excited about being able to print double-sided It is a game changer for all like there are some things for work that we just Need to have printed because we use them in a way that you know and Being able to print stuff even set lists for the band Right like I mean I print a set list before every gig because trusting an electronic device to can keep everybody on the same page No bueno, right, you know, it's gotta be but if I want to put the set list what I'll normally do for the band is You know, I print out one page that's the the set list And then a second page that is what I call my back pocket Songs that if if we don't want to play a certain song or we need extra songs It's like what's in the back pocket. Here it is. Well the back pocket was always a second piece of paper And it was you know, it start floating around the the the stage pretty quickly now It's literally on the back. You know, I just flip if I need it, you know Break glass in case of emergency flip paper in case of emergency. You're good to go. There it is There's those tunes. So having a double-sided printer. I I can't stress enough how how How much we all Appreciate that but the sheet feeder is also a double-sided sheet feeder So for things like those mortgage docks and and you know that makes a huge difference to be able to just burn our vial do that I don't have that current capability But well the next time you need to do that. Come on over Pete. You're you're welcome to use mine There you go. There you go. Yeah, and the other thing I thought about What you were talking was in that field guide That I got out of it many years ago. It was like naming conventions He talks about all that so you can go back and find your stuff Um, it does a nice job of putting those things. So he does a real good well thought out Here's how you get from paper to paperless. So Nice, I put a link to to max sparky's paperless field guide in uh in the show notes at mackeykev.com. So Uh last episode in 969 we were talking about cloud services and such and uh and listener adam asked he said uh He says About backups you were talking about iCloud drive and synology drive and it gave me an idea Would it be crazy to just migrate all my documents that I keep an iCloud drive over to synology drive? Because if I did this I could theoretically reduce my iCloud plan to a cheaper tier and save a bunch of money What would the pitfalls of this be and yeah, I I mean I I sort of glossed over this as an option when we were having that conversation It is in a sense what I do Uh that I I store my my sort of main Documents archive that goes back decades is on my synology drive and therefore sync to all of my devices For those of you that that don't yet know synology drive is Uh is an app that you I mean it's a it's a server-based thing that sits on your disk station But it's also an app that you run on your mac similar to dropbox and it just keeps things in sync And you can of course selectively sync different folders on different devices and all that fun stuff Um, and it's what I do and it allows me a to keep my data mine and b Um, it's my storage not not someone else's that I have to pay a subscription for it I choose my words carefully there because I do have to pay for the storage I had to buy the hard drives and when they die I got to replace them so Um the only pitfall that I run into with this is that The integration is non-native compared to iCloud drive, which means that Specifically on ios on the mac it's it's seamless. I don't even think about it on ios Synology drive has integration with apples files app it's like Kind of wonky in that when you bookmark something sometimes the bookmarks disappear This is not specific to Synology drive. I have the same problem with google drive and Dropbox on the You know the integration with the files app. It's just not perfect the the files app I guess maybe the apis forward or something are just not perfect, but I mean otherwise. Yeah, it's totally fine I can I can navigate to things and get there and do what I need to do So, uh, I would try it out if you've got a Synology. Yeah, try it out and see the other question is How much Data are you storing in your iCloud drive that you could move to your Synology drive? And will it make a difference? In the your storage requirements for iCloud drive It may or may not depends on what kind of data and how much you're storing on iCloud drive so Um Yes, my other thought all right. So iCloud is obviously in the cloud Yeah, and Synology drive if you Synology drive there is the potential for you to put it both on the Synology and The cloud though. I haven't played with it and I should they call it hybrid cloud So the data is in in multiple places so that that would be my only comment is uh You know, you want to consider that to get some redundancy sure sure some some storage redundancy. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah um You just increase you do I think you do similar to me john that you have you use Synology drive as well as iCloud drive And in in the last episode you said you increased your storage for iCloud drive My assumption, but I hate to just gloss over it is Not you did that not because your document storage started increasing But because your photo storage started increasing is that right? That's my suspicion. Yes. Yeah, okay I mean you can look like iCloud drive will tell you what where where your storage is being used if you um Oh, yeah, no, and that's what led me lean forward talking to the mic, please And that's what we like to hear you that was that's what led me to get more space because yeah at one point I was in the uh iCloud settings and I was like oh manage storage and I'm like, oh wow. I didn't know I was taking up that much Yeah, okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, because it'll it'll break it down too It'll show like what what percentage of it is photos and what is you know documents versus You know all the other things but you do not want your photos library On your synology correct Well, you you know except there's a backup you don't want to work off of it. I guess is what your live photos library If you are using apples photos app, right? I that is a hundred percent correct. It it like you know, you can't store apples photos on a network drive of any kind and have it be reliable It needs to be on a local drive I also And I can't caution enough would not have your photos library Set up to two-way sync Between any devices one way sync great, you know have what's on your mac sync to You know your network storage device so that you've got a backup awesome Two-way sync between two max that's not like you if you want to do that you use iCloud photos Trying to do it another way is You know Be where there may be dragons like I can't stress enough. Yeah, so there is a Synology photos app And apparently that works very well. I haven't tried that Yes, yeah, that is separate. Yes, totally separate app Correct. It's a Synology app. So it's a Synology app and you sync with that in a different way You don't sync with that from from photos on the on the phone your photos library Can populate your Synology photos app and then it syncs it differently from there forward But yes, there is that so yeah, so that's also kind of a one-way sync from photos into another app Yeah, you're doing it one way so you don't yeah, so it doesn't corrupt it That's right. Yeah, that's that's the reason I still pay for iCloud and a lot of iCloud It's just the the danger of putting it on one drive in my basement and not having a failure or the house burned down And losing everything Just isn't worth it to me. That's it's cheap insurance. Not those photos of the kids. Oh 100% Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I sync them to iCloud photos and I do the same thing I have a copy on my on my Synology and then I actually do have Synology photos feed from that copy That lives on my thing. I don't sync it from any of my devices. I just have it see it locally That's enough for lots of layers, which is a lots of layers. Yeah Yeah, yeah We got time for one more thing. I'm going to share In a recent episode John and Pete we were talking about whether it was possible to stream From our library stream video content from our libraries John You were saying you go to your library you rent Blu-rays from them You know we we have Libby for books where we can get books digitally without having to go to the library Is there a way to stream from video content from your library? and Andrew the 8,764th specifically in discord says your libraries might have digital video streaming via either canopy with a k or hoopla Libraries usually usually have a download or streaming tab on their home pages and then list one or both of those services Though sometimes they'll get buried in the list of databases. I'll put links to canopy and hoopla in the show notes But really, uh, it's you know, check with your library because that's where this starts But but that would be the the thing to ask. So thank you for for um for sharing that Andrew this 8,764th What's that background noise? That's the band man That's just how it be All good things must come to an end. I know you're having too much fun. You've got to get out. No Oh Mexico man It is almost time for me to go to Mexico. That's right I got uh, I think I have one more podcast to record this afternoon and I probably should make sure I packed enough bathing suits so Yeah, yeah, but uh A schedule won't my my travels as usual won't interrupt the show release schedule or Trucking on forward. So We'll see you next week. We had a fantastic Hangout uh for our Uh, we it was basically a home networking hangout and I missed we And pete missed it. Yeah, I've I've scheduled the next one. I don't know what the topic is It doesn't really matter what the topic is. It turns out we uh I mean, we will have one we will come up with one For the next one, but really what what's great is just Getting a bunch of us together. I think we had I don't know 30 maybe 40 people in there On on sunday. Yeah. Yeah, it's fun. Uh, the next one is at 4 p.m. Eastern time on march 26 Uh, if you subscribe to the mac geekab calendar It's already there If you subscribe to the mac geekab newsletter You will get a notification about it in your email box And of course if you join the discord at mac geekab.com slash discord We will make sure to put a reminder about it there. So, uh, so yeah, we'll do You know about one a month on these and uh, we'll have some fun with it. So march one is march 26th sunday Uh, march 26th at 4 p.m. Eastern But as we talked about at the top of the show Put this subscribe to the calendar It will put it on your calendar in your time zone so that we're all actually in sync and you'll be there At the right time Thanks for uh Thanks for hanging out with us folks. Thanks to cash fly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you Thanks, uh For checking out pilot pete's other show. So there I was dot us. Thanks for checking out my other shows too business brain dot show We have changed the format there and y'all and I mean the listeners of that show which includes some of you really seem to like it Shorter form episodes with with quick actionable sort of business tips and advice business brain dot show So check that out too. And then of course there's giggab at giggab podcast.com for musicians and people who want to sort of Hear how the sausage is made uh being in a band and playing and all that good stuff. So Thanks for hanging out with us. Thanks for checking out our sponsors Of course as we discussed in the show rocket money.com slash mgg and collide Collide dot com slash mgg Fun stuff I love it when we can get together like this Pete what's it saying on the back of your shirt there? Oh wait, john if he's turned around What's what's Pete's the back of Pete's shirt say? Or is it the front? It's the front. Nope. Nope. It's the back. What's the back say? Uh mech eke. It's the mech ekeb logo. What's the front say? Don't get caught You