 Greetings, folks, and welcome to MacGeekGab993 for Monday, July 31, 2023. This episode is a little bit different. I am actually sitting here in, I was going to say alone, but not really alone, because Lisa's behind me. I'm in a hotel room in New York, and we are in the aftermath of Mac Stock, which happened out in Woodstock, Illinois, this past weekend. I am here just doing a little introduction of what you're about to hear. At Mac Stock, we were able to do things a little bit differently, and we were able to get decent enough audio that that audio plus a little bit of time and logic allows me to deliver you what you're about to hear. We held the first MacGeekGab caucus live on stage on Saturday at Mac Stock Conference and Expo. You will hear about, I don't know, 10% into this that I bother to think to introduce my fellow panelists. Yes, this was an oversight, but only so much as the recording went. It really speaks to what Mac Stock is and becomes, because Mac Stock feels so much like camp. Everyone is together. Everyone is doing everything together. We eat together. We hang out together. There was no need to introduce people that had already been talking to each other all weekend long. I will tell you, since you are not there with us, or at least weren't this year, maybe you'll be there with us next year, that on stage for the MacGeekGab caucus, we had Adam Christensen, Allison Sheridan, Jeff Gamet, Pilot Pete, John F. Braun, and me, Dave Hamilton, and yours truly. You will hear all of us talk, I will explain in the caucus what the caucus was. Sponsors for this episode include Hopwater, where you get to go to Hopwater, that's hopwtr.com slash mgg, and you get 20% off your first purchase. Of course, we will talk more about all of that in the midst of the episode here. For now, enjoy. Really, first though, I want to give a huge shout out of thanks to Mike Potter, of course, for organizing Mac Stock, to Roger Harman, who engineered the recording of the tracks that I was then able to mix. Thank you, Mike. Thank you, Roger. And of course, Brian Henson for being the Speaker Wrangler at Mac Stock, keeping the logistics moving, really just making everything possible. So, thanks to certainly the three of them and everybody that made Mac Stock possible, and everybody that was there. It was really a spectacular weekend. It was nice to get back after 2019, was the last time I was there. Really great. Hopefully, you'll be there with us next year. But it doesn't matter right now, because we've got this to share with you. Protecting the microphone, making sure only those with the talking stick get to talk. That's right. I grabbed it. No, man, I am excited about this. This is not the first time we've had Mac Geekab at Mac Stock, but it's the first time we've had you at Mac Stock the right way. Yeah, you did. Yeah, we've been off stage every other time. At the Hampton. Like I said earlier, due to some clerical error, now it's here. So this is great. Dave put together just a fantastic caucus. I keep calling it around to a caucus of amazing guests from past Mac Geekab episodes. And you've got some great topics planned out. I was watching. I told you, I was lurking. I was watching the email train. This is going to be a really great presentation to everyone. I think you're going to enjoy it. Dave Hamilton, everyone. Amazing. Thanks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you. Okay. All right. So this is different, right? Because I realized as we were getting into planning all of this, that there were going to be many of us in this room, all of whom had been on Mac Geekab at one time or another. And I think I got it right. I don't think I'm missing anyone from the stage, but if I am, we're just going to leave it. And you have my sincere apologies and I'll buy you a drink. But I thought, well, wait a minute, you know, Mac Geekab just celebrated its 18th birthday. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so that means it's old enough to vote. And being old, being old enough to vote means it's old enough to do other things like vote in primaries and caucuses. And so why not then allow this to be our first Mac Geekab caucus? And we'll do it here at Mac Stock. We have, I think I have, yeah, there's some rules that I was going to put up on the thing, but it doesn't matter. So we will, we have a couple of other great, great. So we have a few topics that we have bashed around and not at all agreed upon, which is perfect. And so we will talk through these. We will give ourselves no more than eight minutes per topic. We will speak in, we will honor the the old tradition of the talking stick style, as Mike alluded, which is that the person with the talking stick and this is the talking stick, my dear panelists. Your own talking stick. Well, I do. I do. And I also get to decide when the talking stick moves to the next person if necessary, but otherwise feel free to pass it around. But that way it makes the audio sound good because hopefully this becomes Mac Geekab 993, I think it would be 993. So, but if the audio, if it doesn't work and we talk all over each other and it's a disaster, then it's just for us. That's also okay. All right. So well, with that in mind, we will talk about these things and then we will vote and talk and decide each of us will cast a vote as to whether we are happier with the state of whatever the topic is today or where it was, you know, 18 years ago or sometime in the past. And our first topic is going to be automation. And before I start the clock, and by the way, because of the live stream, obviously the camera, the stream will mostly be on us. I spent creating a countdown timer and keynote is no joke. It was, it is a very manual process using build ins and build outs and a lot of replication. And so there will be a timer going whether you can see it or not. I'm very proud of this. All right. So I got too many things going on here because I can't see that. No, we don't want to start the timer yet. Okay. So the first topic will be automation. Automation on the Mac, but we can say, well, it's some of the history of it. AppleScript started in 1991 with System 7. AppleScript is currently at version 2.8, which was released in October of 2014. So that's interesting. Automator, though, was started in April of 2005. It is six weeks older than Mac GeekGab. Current version is 2.1 or 2.10, I'm sorry, from December, just this past December. And then shortcuts of course, of course started as workflow in 2014. Apple acquired it in 2017. And then it was called shortcuts in 2018. And then in 2021, it came out for the Mac. Mostly, but without triggers. Right? You got all that. All right. So automation it is. And if by hook or by crook, who wants the mic first? So nine minutes. Sorry. Yes. Yes. Yes. Okay, Dave, to answer your question, I am overall happier with automation today, the state of automation today compared to where we were in 2005. And that's because in addition to, well, the sadly fading away AppleScript, we do have shortcuts. And we do have all these other little tools. They've grown in such a way that we can now incorporate JavaScript in so that we can hook together things that we couldn't before. Also, we have automation tools like IFTTT and Zapier. So we can link together and automate things in ways today that we could only hope for back in 2005. Thank you. That's Jeff Gamet. Of course, for the listening audience, everybody here knows who's on stage, but we've got Pilot Pete, Allison Sheridan, Jeff Gamet, John F. Braun, and Adam Christensen here on stage today. So yeah, I'm Dave. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I will agree that we've come a long way. When I tried to use AppleScript, whenever I was trying to use it, I would always run into a wall. Very quickly, I tried to do something, couldn't figure it out. Automator got a little bit farther, got a couple of things done, and then it would go, oh, you need to put AppleScript in there. But I'm actually not going to bring up, in a nice way, shortcuts. I don't like them. Every time I try to do something, I can't get it to do what I wanted to do. But I am much happier in automation because of Keyboard Maestro. So I am doing so many things. When we were on a tour of OWC, and this guy was showing us the process they do to run a certain test, the guy opened up, he opened up the terminal, and he put into terminal command, and he said, and then I captured that, and I copy it, and I put it into a text file, and then I put it from the text file, I put it into Excel, and then we get rid of this one column. I'm like, I just turned it in and goes, oh, my hands are itching for some Keyboard Maestro right here. So I am definitely way happier doing tons and tons of automation, but it's in Keyboard Maestro, not in shortcuts. Did you say I had a color within the lines, did you? No, not at all. No, there's no lines. Hello. So as a former, as a software engineer in another life, I suggest that you all just learn the C programming language. John Fruh, ladies and gentlemen. Just drop the mic now. Just want to offer a few pointers here. AppleScript uses something called Script Editor, which can be used to do AppleScript or JavaScript, what I understand. The thing is, it's not a very pleasant and it's a very text based environment, which not everybody is comfortable with. I do have a couple of things here though. I did find something called Doug Script. That's a collection of hundreds of Apple Scripts, and I found in my experience, one of the best ways to learn something is to get somebody else to do it and then learn from that or copy other people's work. Another thing is that, yeah, again, as I mentioned, the Script Debugger is another piece of software that is a much nicer development environment. As far as automator and shortcuts, Kirshen did a great job of telling us about shortcuts. So I'm very happy with that. I'm trying to think where to go with this. We have other panelists. There is. No, I'm sorry. No, no, no, no. All right. Two other sources of information if you want to learn about programming. So one is Apple Developer Site, developer.apple.com. Go there. They have tutorials on all of this stuff and probably sample code as well. So that's good. The other thing is that there is a book called Apple Script for Dummies. So if you want to learn Apple Script, that may be another source of information. Thank you, Mr. Braun. All right. I can't believe I'm going to say this. I probably somewhat agree with Allison, but it's because of my own biases. So I really love shortcuts. I'm glad that we have it. I was very scared when Apple announced they were kind of getting rid of automator and scripting and it was unclear if we were going to have any kind of automation. So I'm very, very happy to have it. I too get stuck with it. But for me, it's because I am a developer and a programmer. So for me, Apple Script makes sense. It's just like, I can do this. This is our JavaScript as it were too. And luckily, I think you can do Apple Script in JavaScript in shortcuts. And I have not played with that yet. So maybe that's my in there. But yeah, I often get stuck, especially with how they handle variables and some other things. And so Kirsten's advice about use variables, very, very good one. If you will get stuck very quickly, if you don't. So yeah, but I'm probably leaning more towards Apple Script, I think. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. We're responsible enough to have two microphones gone. Okay. I reserve the right to change my mind. It's mine. Are you fools? So as Chuck alluded to earlier this morning, Mike Pete, don't make me edit. If Chuck alluded to earlier this morning, you could follow technology or get stuck in the past. If you are a developer, then all that stuff makes great sense. If you can't figure out an if else then statement to save your life, open chat GPT and go write me a script that will do this for me. And then tell me how to implement it. I'm telling you, it works. It's amazing. I've done two or three things with the website for my show. So I wanted to do this. I wanted to figure out whether using an iPhone or Android, I want you to then help people subscribe. And it wrote me a script. I put it into the HTML code of the WordPress. Bang zone. Boom. I'm a programmer. What's nice with that is if you're using it for your JavaScript. This didn't work. This is what happened. This is the error I got. Oh, we'll do this. Yeah, exactly. If it doesn't, you get to test in real time whether it's accurate and then you iterate because it's actually pretty good at the whole transformative thing, the T. And you aren't stuck with automated or Apple script. This one happened to give me JavaScript. So yeah, if you want to be a real power person, and I saw this in the shortcut demo to, there was some regex in there. No, no, no, yeah. No, but I gotta go. You can learn regex. You can learn anything. Believe me. Why do you have to chat? GPT is there for regex. You're good to go. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Do we have, uh, yeah, Allison, did you have more to say on automation? All right. Well, it's fine. We don't have to fill up all our time. We just have a limit. It's not, yeah. So is anyone happier with where automation used to be versus where it is today? Interesting. Yeah, so we have Jeff Gamet and Adam Christensen voting in the past, John voting in the past. So half in the past, half in the future or in the present anyway. I'll take the present. Take the microphone. Take the microphone. Thank you. I'm bad at taking tests. I'm happier with where we are now. Okay. All right. Yeah. Four to two. All right. All right. Sweet. What's the temperature in the room here for automation? Are we happier for those that are happier now? Raise your hands. And those that were happier in the past? Raise your hands? Okay. So, so, yeah, it's about similar. No, I think it's what you learned first and that's your native language. So, yeah, amazing. Awesome. All right. All right. 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So in 2005, when we started Mac Geekab, we were all still using third-party software to backup. We were using Retrospect, dedicated backup media, maybe even tape drives, but certainly maybe some removable storage, maybe back then, but probably we had graduated from that. It wasn't until 2007 that Apple introduced Time Machine in Mac OS 10, 10.5 Leopard. And then the Time Capsule was a year later in 2008, and it only had a 10 year tenure. It was the end of life in 2018, which is fascinating, yeah. And then Time Capsule continued to evolve, sorry, Time Machine continued to evolve. In 2016, it got APFS, and obviously there are other third-party solutions and all of those fun things. And if I can remember what is in which hand, I will. And so, backups, are we better off where we are today versus where we were back then or at some point in the past? Who wants to, Johnny? Yeah, go. Well, two items. Carbon copy cloner and SuperDuper are probably the two major backup programs on the Mac right now. So I think we are in better shape, and especially carbon copy cloner. The other day I was doing some backup activity, and I used a charging cable, but not a high-speed cable. And it actually said, you probably don't want to do this, because it's going to take a really long time. And I'm like, wouldn't copy cloner said this? Yes. Yeah, it identified the cable speed. Yeah, that's awesome. So that was awesome. But yeah, I think we're in better shape. And there are, as David pointed out, there are online services now. There's the hybrid service from Synology, where you kind of mix the two. For backing up your Synology, not for backing up your Mac. Yet. Right. Yet. Yeah. But to that point, though, we were using third-party software 18 years ago to back up our Macs. And now here we all are cheering about the third-party software we're using to back up our Macs in 18 years later. My only gripe with Time Machine is that you and I both wrestled with this, Dave. They would get corrupted on a pretty frequent basis. Yeah. And it was very frustrating, because you either, my strategy was, unless you have snapshots, my solution was to actually take an old version from my Synology and say, restore this back to the compute, or restore an earlier version, kind of like a snapshot does. And then that solved the problem. It mostly network backups, right? Direct attached disks were not so much an issue with Time Machine. So I was going to say, as a person and anybody who's heard my show knows I am a fanatic about backup. I use multiple, multiple versions. Time Machine is the one that I tell everybody, if you're not using it, use it. Like, if you have a zero backup, I think that's the solution it brought us. It's easy to do. You get a drive. You plug it in. Do you want to use this for Time Machine? Yes. It's all you have to do. You're done. You're backing up. You definitely need to do more and should do more. So I use that. I use Backblaze online. I use Chronosync with my Drobo still to backup specific folders like my podcast, I'll get backed up by Drobo. Drobo gets backed up the Backblaze. That also gets backed up other backups. I use Carbon Copy Cloner. So there's multiple, multiple versions. And so I think having all the options is great. I'm a huge fan of Time Machine. I've not had problems with it. I actually use Time Machine with my Sonology for my family's computers because they won't plug in. I would do Direct Connect if I could get them to plug in, but they're on laptops. So they're like, no, that's too much of a hassle. So I set that up. I must be lucky because I've not had the corruption issue. I know people in my audience have and I've helped people with it, but yeah, for sure. I love that you brought up Chronosync because I did that with my Drobo's as well, but it was the excuse. You had to use a Mac in between. So I was doing Mac, Drobo to Drobo. You had to have a Mac running Chronosync was the only way we could do it. But it gave me an excuse to buy a new M1 Mac Mini to do that at the time. But I want to look back at the past because I want to talk about when it fails, what happens. And Dave brought up Retrospect. Retrospect, was it Retro Batch? No, Retrospect was the out there. It was the software, Dance was the company. And I remember I was all over that item. Man, I had that going in there. One day, I needed it and went, Oh, no, I'm sorry. I can't open any of this. I was like, wait, no, no, no, no. But I've had to go back to Carbon Copy Cloner. And I didn't realize it does versioning that I didn't. I didn't know it did. I was, oh, that saved my bacon because I don't do time machine. So I don't have any versioning in anything else. And then I've also gone back to my back plays backups and said, Oh, I want to get that. Or the fun thing about having an online backup like that is when you're away from home, you can get something from your back. Because you just log in and go, it's like you've got online file storage of everything you own. So, so you know, sorry, go ahead. No, go ahead. I was going to ask you, you, you've talked about recovering things from backups. And it sounds like this has happened to you recently in a meaningful way, not just an I did it as an experiment. Yeah, no, I needed something. I was like, Oh, no, how many has anyone else here in the last year, two years needed to recover something from what you would call a backup? Absolutely. Jeff, you want to? Oh, yeah, absolutely. So you know how we can sometimes get stupid? Oh, yeah. I'm a master of that sometimes. And, and you don't realize in time to recover gracefully with time machine. And what do you do? Now you go to your backups. And, and I'm pretty like, I don't know, someone earlier today said I'm anal with my backups. I like to think I'm paranoid about data loss. So I have superdiver backups. I have carbon copy cloner backups. I have backblaze backups. And the great thing is, I was able to go to all of those to find the file I wanted. I was able to find what I wanted immediately. But I checked the others just to see if it was there, which actually is an important point. Check your backups every now and then make sure they're actually doing what you think. On the recovery question, I can tell you that I haven't had to do it for myself personally, but I've done two full backblaze restorations for clients that I set up. One was a client who knocked her Drobo off of her like desk. And that was her local backup, but I had set her up with backblaze backup. So it's a process, you know, to pull down a lot of data, they will send you a drive. You can do that option too, but it's a little more expensive if you're willing to take the time. And I had another one, someone unfortunately lost their house in a fire and needed to do recovery. And so I recovered back from them. And that was beautiful. In all of these, I'm trying to figure out if we need backups, right? Like actively, in all of these scenarios, if instead of all the backups that we all diligently do, if all you had was all of your documents stored in your documents folder and let that be syncing to iCloud like Apple wants to do by default, would that have saved? To what percentage? It doesn't stop stupid, Dave. That's fair. Right? It solves the house on fire problem. It solves the Drobo fell off the desk problem, but it doesn't solve Jeff. Well, I'll also say that it depends on how you're doing your storage too, because in this case, like the woman with the Drobo, she was a photographer. She can't keep everything in her local storage. So a lot of the data was only on that Drobo and then backed up to the cloud. So with caveats, yes. Yeah. Well, that's the thing is, to what percentage? So I see backups are for people who can't remember what they wrote or don't remember what the pictures look like. I'm just saying. No. And for travel, for travel, I actually keep a little thumb drive with me. It's a little too terribly thumb drive. And I use my time machine to that on a regular basis. Now, it's in the same vicinity. I've got two bags. So it's, you know, if I lose both bags, then I'm out of luck. But I also keep that with me. So even emergencies on the road, I'm good to go with a thumb drive. I want to give a little hot tip here. Steve and I went to Peru and the Galapagos. We swam with the penguins and we hiked Machu Picchu, trip of a lifetime. Steve's backpack got stolen right before we got on the plane to come back. In it was his GoPro and his camcorder and his MacBook Pro and a backup drive. But do you know whose backup drive it was? It was mine because I had swapped backup drives with him. Carry two drives, swap them, didn't lose the trip of a lifetime. That gives you chills? Yeah. That's really smart. That's really smart. Yeah. We are almost out of, we have eight seconds left. Sorry, Steve wants to remind everybody his passport was in that backpack as well. We called it, we called it two bonus days in Peru. I was just going to say you got extra time. Yeah, yeah. All right. I keep a photo, I keep a photocopy of my passport page so that you can go to the council and go, hey, help. Yeah. Yeah, there you go. It did help. Yeah, it did help. Okay. Well, you know, that's 15 minutes. I do want to follow up on what Jeff said. Yes. Verification is very important. Well, yeah. Time machine, if you dig into TM Util, which is the Time Machine Utility, there is a way to verify it and also- You can stay on the mic, John, please. And also, Carbon Copy Cloner has a feature where we'll compare the data from your local disk to the backup disk, and it will tell you. It makes it take a lot longer, but and I'm not sure about the other product. Yeah, no, I would say, so it's time to, time to vote. Are we better off where we are today? And I'm curious what, why we're better off today or not. So we'll keep it as brief as possible. I'm going to vote yes, just because we have so many more options than we did 15 years ago, 20 years. Absolutely. Better options than they actually work. Yes, I'm backing up my words right now. Dave, the deal is now we can automate basically everything we need for a backup back when we were doing the retrospect thing up. There were still things that I had to manually do. Yeah. But now, yes, we are so much better off. Yes. One more second. Wait, wait, wait, one second. Do you have anything to add to that, John? John and Bron. Yeah, I would say we're better off now, even probably even just for the pure fact that we have cloud. Because like back then it was SneakerNet. You were hauling your physical media offsite somewhere if you wanted to save it. Absolutely. Maybe a fire safe if you had a really, really good one. No, I would agree we're better off now. Cloud is one reason, but for me the primary reason is restoration from backups is so much easier and therefore more reliable. I just remembered the reason RetroBatch was such a disaster was it was a database you couldn't get into. We just have file systems that we can see in our backups now. Correct. Yeah, makes a big difference. Well, yeah, unless it's something else. But no, you can see Time Machine. You can open up a Time Machine disk and then it's just a file system. I mean, it's a oddly put together one behind the scenes, but to us it looks like just a file system. So that's good. All right, good. Yeah, so media consumption. This came up from Brian suggested this and I love this topic. We have had two yes votes. I'm not sure that the answer to this one will be a majority yes. The question is, our access, was it better when we only had 75-ish cable channels, but at least they were all through one service and we knew what we had? Or do we like the choice and countless services from which we must now choose that we have today? In 2005, we were on mostly cable and I suppose broadcast, which still exists today-ish. One interesting thing in 2005, American Idol held the number one and number two slots for television programs ranked because they were on two nights a week. And so it was Wednesday and Thursday or something. And so Wednesday was number one and Thursday was number two or vice-versa. Starting in about 2010, that number one spot shifted and has basically since been owned by Sunday Night Football, but its viewer numbers have gone down. It's just that there's so much the interpretation is there's so much more dilution that we now, you know, it's hard to own that number one spot. iPhone was announced obviously in 2007 along with Netflix, Hulu and Roku and 2013 House of Cards was the first original Netflix series and it won an Emmy that year. And in that same year, online video was responsible for over 50% of internet traffic. So this is 2013, so 10 years ago. And then in 2022, so last year, the most recent data we have, Stranger Things, was the would have been the number one slot, but so much for like not live sports, but because of all the dilution of the not live sports category, Sunday Night Football still holds the top. So with that in mind, with our ability to consume and the options from which we must choose and the paths we must go through now to simply sit and watch the boob tube, are we better off now or were we better off that? Do you watch the boob tube? I sometimes watch the boob tube. No, I'm asking because this is actually, I get made fun of in my family because I am now currently the only person who watches stuff like on the big screen TV in my living room. My children and my wife prefer pains me most of the time their iPhone. Oh, yeah. And obviously, none of you people are doing this either right by that reaction. So okay, I'm not the weird one. Anyway, all the different services. And now I definitely enjoy them. I was never a big cable fan. So this one's probably going to be easy for me. But for me, probably the thing that saved it. And I don't know if this was the thing that Steve was supposedly talking about when he said he cracked television. But I mean, my Apple TV, the ability to aggregate that I go to the Apple TV app, I have all the services that I'm not so thrilled about. I wish it was not so divided up. But that's fine. It's working. But yeah, the ability to aggregate that content to just jump in and see all my shows, regardless of where they are, for the most part, Netflix, I'm looking at you. And Plex can't integrate with Apple TV despite the fact that they want to. But yeah, that I love and enjoy. And that's sort of how I consume stuff. Yeah. All right. There we go. Yeah, we are so much worse off. It hurts. And we are so much better off. It's like ecstasy. We're so we're so much worse off because our viewing options have become so fragmented. Like, you cannot keep track of where you need to go to find the shows you want to watch. Because in some cases, this is available on broadcast television. But how do you get those channels? Then for other things, it's available only on a specific service. So now you have to have Disney Plus and Netflix and Amazon Prime and Hulu and Peacock and Max. Yeah. See, we can just go on and on and on. And that is so frustrating. And we don't have a true unified interface that allows us to easily navigate all of that. Now, here's where it becomes the ecstasy part. We need all of those things because there is so much amazing content that's available now. And I believe that content is available now only because all of these networks were able to break free from broadcast television and regular cable and get away from either enforced or perceived constraints that they had to work within. Either the gatekeepers are gone or there's lots more gatekeepers. You can look at it either way you like. But there's more avenues. Yeah. Right. And now there is more good quality television that I want to watch than I am actually able to watch. Oh, same. Yeah. I mean, I think if we went around the room here and asked everybody, what is your current favorite show to watch? We would probably get 10 to 15 different answers. And more. And maybe more. But we're like a crowd of like-minded, nerdy people. And yet we would be like, we could all recommend things to each other that we have not seen. And that, and it's all good. That's the part that I question, though, is at what point does the money run out? We are only, we are the ones paying for this content in the end. I mean, there's executives and gatekeepers making the decisions. But in the end, if they can't sell it to us, they're not going to pay for it. So when does that start to- I think you're right. We are in the heyday of this now. Of course, there's a strike happening right now that may actually be the answer to my rhetorical question. I was going to go a much different direction with it. But it does have to do with the splintering is what I miss is Monday morning, going into work, and everybody just saw Dallas on Friday night. You know, who shot JR, right? Everybody was old enough for members. And now we definitely don't have that experience. But I sat down with a couple of lovely people last night at the wine stock, and they were talking about Star Trek Strange New Worlds, which is a show I love. And I went, no, no, no, I haven't seen it yet. And all of a sudden, we all just went, oh. So like, they were having fun till I sat down. But I mean, it just- That's often what happens for Allison. It wasn't about them. Fair, fair. I'll own that. But it was, but that's been lost. And I do miss that. And like, so I find that we're all evangelizing going, we go to our daughter's house, and we're like, okay, you need to watch a silo. Okay, we'll sit here and rewatch the whole series with you just so we can talk about it. And we've lost that. But it actually is all awesome. Yeah. Go ahead, Pete. Go ahead, John. Yeah. The one fear that I have is death by a thousand cuts. I have a few services that I pay for. And there are, like, for example, so I have Disney, Apple Plus. So, you know, there's a lot of content there. The one tip I want to offer is that, especially if you have an Apple TV, there are free apps. Those supported by commercials. Like, for example, I'm watching something on the CW, Graham, if you're interested. The only thing I don't like about that model is that they keep playing the same commercials over and over and over. I'm like, mix it up a bit to keep me interested. So that's my take. So I think the key point you hit on is delusion. And that's, of course, a double-edged sword. Back in the day, Carson was pulling 30, 35 million a night, and somebody's lucky to pull 3 million a night now on a given show, on network. But all the various services, I mean, the quality of the program, particularly, I think, with Apple TV, some of their original programming is just off the charts. Good. Yeah. Even the stuff that I'm not particularly, you know, I love that. I gotta admit that the quality is there. It's just not my thing. But it's the delusion. And then I know we talked about it previously on the show, and I can't think of the name of it. It's either an app or a website, and it's like, what's on? Or some... Just watch. Just watch. There you go. Just watch. Go find it. What? We never remember the name of it. Don't get old. It's bad for your memory. Yeah. It's not the one I use. I use TV time. Yeah. Okay. So TV time. So, but just watch. Just watch TV time. You put in the name of the show you want, and it tells you it's on this streaming service or that one. And so... And you can track which episodes you've watched, which is the only way I know what to watch at home. Steve and I took it up a nerd level. We created an air table database for ourselves. Your air table database is what made me seek out an app. Yeah. I saw that, and I'm like, oh, I could go... No, no, this was not... This was a reflection on me. I'm like, I could go down this path. That doesn't look healthy. Somebody else has solved this problem in a way that is acceptable to me. I just need to find it. If anybody wants it, I have a blog post about it. You can have it for yourselves. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm curious, how many... Show hands on stage and feel free to join in the crowd here too. How many people on stage have cut the cord? That's good. Okay. So yeah, certainly every... John, is that right? You're the only... You still pay for cable, right? Yes, I do. Okay. So can we put your hands back up again? I just want to see. So if you've cut the cord, put your hands up. I just... Yeah. Okay. And now if you haven't cut the cord, put your hands up. Just want to see. Okay. So it's about, I don't know, 30% haven't and 70% have by my very accurate calculations. Now you need to ask the bonus question. If you cut the cord, do you watch sports? Yeah. Well, then that's the asterisk. It's like, how do you watch sports? So how many of the people who said they still have TV is mainly because sports, I don't know. Yeah. Like most of them. Oh, yeah, if you haven't cut the cord. Yeah. And watching live sports without... After having cut the cord, you kind of have to, like, did you make your deal with your particular devil of choice that is your replacement for that? But it's half the price. So at least that, you know, with the Fubo and the YouTube TV and all that, it's half the price. Yeah. But just like having all the services is now really complicates things for you. Oh, it's way more complex having cut the cord. It's better, but it's way more complex. So I don't know if this is legit or not, but a friend of mine and I, we split the cost of YouTube TV and then I run one node off it by using channels. So I can watch YouTube TV on all my devices using channels and we split the cost to YouTube TV. As long as you're in the same general geographical area. We go down the street from each other. Yeah, you get away with it. A couple miles away, yeah. And then... Yeah, you can't watch NBC. And you can't watch NBC, which I'm fine with that, I guess. But yeah, but I can watch you anywhere in the world on any device because it shows up as my IP address at my house using channels. All right. So we're out of time on that topic, but we haven't voted yet. Therefore, it is time to vote. So what's that? It says time to vote. Yeah, I know I have these automations that do it all together. The worst was testing them and sitting there and watching it count down because it didn't work the first time. And it was like, oh, it didn't turn over. Okay, why check that, right? Okay. Back to the top. Yep. There we go. Well, but I did that. And then I needed the actual thing to know that it would work in production. See. 27 minutes, you'll never get back, Dave. That's 27 minutes. Oh, and the worst was if I got distracted or my Mac went to sleep. Which as you might guess happens to me a lot. Do you have anything to add before we vote? No, I was just getting rid of vote. Yeah, go, please. So for me, better, better now because of Apple TV. And also, I think even though all the different services, I think aggregate, I'm still paying less than I ever was with cable. Yeah, John, better now, worse. We'll just go down. So tell us, John, how do you feel about what? Just say yes. Yes. Now say no. No. Okay, so Dave. Thanks, Jeff. Sure thing. I begrudgingly say we're better off because I love all the content we have. It's just frustrating keeping track of everything. Yeah. Yeah. I vote yes, way more better. With no asterisk. No, way more better. Great. Much more variety. So you have to go yes. I would say way better. I could add an asterisk, but then I would have to go back in time and experience how I felt in 2005 because I know I felt an asterisk then too, but the gift of time sort of heals that wound. If you do that, go back and count how many shows you're really excited about then and how many are you really excited about now? I'm excited about a lot more now. That's probably true. I mean, there was friends, but that was like, okay, and then you watch some other crap afterwards that you didn't care about because you were still watching the TV. Because he was still there. What was the song? 57 channels and nothing on. Yeah. Springsteen. Yeah. That's what thank you, Dr. Dream. All right. So that's the end of the Matt Geek Gap Caucus. Now, there is more. It is far less organized. What you just heard was a fairly cohesive conversation. The more, of course, is our stumped the geek section where people from the crowd bring their questions. We discuss them. This is far less pleasant to listen to, I would think, but I didn't want to make that decision for you. There's no reason for me to make that decision for you. I have the audio. It's already mixed, at least as far as it goes. So I'm going to leave it here, but I wanted to give you the flexibility, the freedom to at least know that this part of it was over. There is more fun and I'll get out of the way. Thanks so much for listening. Thanks so much for staying subscribed. All of those things. Thanks so much for checking out our sponsors. Again, that's hotwaterhfwtr.com. And we'll see where this goes. One more thing though. Don't get caught. All right, we have a few minutes and we have an extra microphone and we have, when we have done these in the past, we have done a little bit of stumped the geeks and you've got six of us up here. So if you have a question, first come, first serve. Yep. I don't have the microphone. I can't decide. I've come up. Please talk like, okay. Sure. My name is Tom. Ladies and gentlemen, and I use the Mac. And I am a Mac user. My question is, so I have my documents folders on an external drive. Can Time Machine be configured to back that up? Yes. The answer is yes. Yeah. Yeah. If it really is about what it is configured to exclude. Yeah. So don't exclude that, right? Yeah. Typically it would include anything, including in external drives and you have to tell it, don't back that up. Typically, if it's not already doing it, you need to go into the Time Machine preferences and just add that volume and it'll back it up. Okay. I have a question. My name is Pat Focke. And I've been to six of these and I love them to death. Amazing. When you're writing in notes on an iPad and you're using a pencil and you run out of paper, how do you get it to move up? It sounds like Allison might have the answer. I'm pretty sure you put two fingers on the screen and pull up. No. Can't do it with the pencil because it's busy writing. I think that's the point. I got a pencil. I got a pencil too and I expected if I swipe up, it would swipe up. It doesn't. And I think that's a problem with the UI. I think it depends on the app. Some of them you can... Thank you for confirming. Oh, in notes. Yeah. Okay. You said notes. Never mind. Your solution was correct, Allison. You have to use your fingers. Because your pencil is a pencil. If you had a piece of paper on your desk and you had a pencil in your hand, you wouldn't use the pencil to pull the paper up. You would grab the paper and push it up with a couple of fingers. It is exactly the same way. Yeah. You're saying two fingers doesn't swipe up? What? Linda just did it over here. Can we have like the Battle Royale of iPad notes? Yeah. Don't start below. Start on the paper. Oh. Come on up, sir. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, we have devolved for anybody listening into something that's equally uninteresting to you as it is to us. Yeah. That's right. Stop. Is it stumped? We're stumped. Michael has a question. Michael has a question. Yeah, Michael. So I'd like to hear from the esteemed panel from individual. What is the one thing that Apple is still doing that's driving you nuts? Okay. The one thing. So I'm going to leave that like a very open question. Six fish shakes coming up. It sounds like you want to start. Fix Siri for the love of God. Fix Siri. My observation is from the hardware side. This is going to sound kind of weird coming for me because I just got a shiny new MacBook Air 15 inch. And this is a beautiful machine I get like not infinite battery life, but my old machine that was Intel based, I maybe got two hours until I had to recharge. This machine will go over 10 hours. But what do you want them to do now? What do you want them to do now? What do you want them to stop doing? I'm just going to offer an observation. I think they're moving away from... So when Steve got on board, he's like, we're going to have four quadrants. Right now, the product line, I think is getting more and more complex and it's making it difficult to make a decision. It's like, well, what's the difference between that and that? Now, sometimes they'll have a, you know, a chart that'll show, okay, this has this much and that much, but that's just my opinion. No, when I'm suggesting to people what they should buy, I tell them just how much money do you have? How much you got? How much you got? That's how you pick out which one you want. Adam, I would concur on the Siri thing. I think Siri could be a lot, lot smarter given the technologies we have, but probably the other one and this is more just, I wish it was just... Siri just answered. That's awesome. Wow. So I think Siri's cheating on you with Adam. I feel like they haven't done enough with spotlights. Hey, Siri! Well, then what? She didn't even answer, though, because I was trying to call her. Oh, no. Several phones and iPads in the room are now listening for you to follow on there. So I think it's spotlight. It doesn't drive me nuts, nuts, but I think it could do a lot more. Like, I think spotlight search could also be more intelligent and just better. And I don't think they've done much with it. Yeah. And for me, it's mail is getting worse. It's getting slower. They are taking features, they are taking the extensibility away, which was sort of the saving grace of mail and of Dave. And so, yeah, mail is not... I don't know. It's not going in a good direction. Yeah, I've always shied away from third party mail clients because I don't want to get stuck in a box where now that developer isn't making it anymore for whatever reason, because I've been in that box several times. And so that's why I went with Apple Mail and I've been happy for a long time, but it's the last year has not been good. Yeah. I'm with you on that. All right. So we've already shook our fist at Safari. No, no, no, Siri, not Safari. Freddie and slip. Siri, we've shaken our fist at mail, both of which I would shake my fist at. So I'll bring in another one that really bothers me. Apple needs to get back to consistent usable interfaces. It's a hot mess. Yes. Oh my God. And I think, well, we should probably go to system settings then if we want to discuss that issue. That's the poster child right there. Anybody got trouble with system settings? We don't have that much time, Mike. We don't have enough time for system settings. Mike says no. I don't take that one, but I don't have any trouble. I don't have much trouble. I don't think with Safari or with mail. I'm sorry, but I'm just, those aren't bothering me. Is Siri bothering you? Because we haven't talked about Safari yet, except clearly in subconsciously. Okay. But what I wanted to have Apple stop doing is having things flip that I had flipped the other way. Anybody ever had Wi-Fi calling turn off? Oh yeah. Right? Why? Why is it turning off? I would never intentionally turn off Wi-Fi calling, but it might, my uncle just posted in our Slack. He, I couldn't figure out this problem. He was having it and somebody goes, check and see if it turned off. Do you have a family Slack? No, no, no. Steve's uncle is in my Podfeat Slack. Okay. Because I know I've threatened to set up a family Slack. So I just wanted to see if I could have like a support group. Another example is I have never, ever, ever in mail. This will be a mail complaint, but it's in the turn the switch. I tell it, I want my Podfeat mail to be my default address. And a month or two will go by and I'll look down and note it's my back.com address. And why is it changing? I never said it the other way. That's my fish shake. So I will bring Safari into it because I'm a web developer and my office now, the phrase is Safari's the new IE. It really is, it's gone really bad. Its performance is down. It doesn't support a lot of the newer features. They're very slow to bring them in. So it's, it's, and so I think the broader thing that really frustrates me with Apple a lot of times is attrition. They bring out these great technologies like Siri. They pioneer this stuff. They bring it out and then it just, they let it languish. Yep. Quick time's a great example of this, right? So let me ask Adam, what do you want instead of Safari? What do you like instead of Safari? For development, Chrome. What is your daily driver browser? I still use Safari. Okay. Because I'm not that crazy, but it frustrates me. For personal browsing, but for web development, I have to use Chrome for the dev tools and all the other things that are just better. Well, we're on the subject of another show of hands because it's so much fun to be able to do this in real time with everybody together. How many people are not using Safari as your daily driver browser? Okay. So maybe, maybe to 10%, 10. Yeah. Okay. All right. What are you using, Dave? I'm using Edge. Yeah. Okay. And what keeps me off of Safari is the fact that Apple has basically sandboxed that system so much that a lot of these other pro tools add-ons that we put in to now Chromium-based browsers, we can't do on Safari. Example, I use Workona. And without Workona, for those of you that don't know, at the very basic level, it's a tab manager, but it's way, way more. It's like full project management and we don't have time. It's like, yeah, we just don't have time. But without that tool, I can't do what I do. And Safari doesn't support it. Okay. Cool. Yeah. Interesting. I'm a little worried when the other browsers started to go Chromium that were headed back to the IE Active X days. And that made me nervous. And it, it, you're shaking your head, but that is happening, right? Is people are... No, no, no, but those browsers are supporting the new standards and staying ahead of the curve and Safari's falling behind and WebKit's falling behind. Okay. But I'm shaking my head because Michael introduced a fourth caucus topic. Very, very well, by the way, because we are here answering listener questions, and yet we are back to the caucus thing without a clock running. So, Michael did a great job. I think I see what you're saying, Adam, is it's not by an evil empire causing it, it's by, it's somebody not keeping up. It's by attrition. In the other way. Yeah. Yeah, that's an interesting way to look at it. More, yeah, more listener questions. Yeah, absolutely. Linda, yeah, stump the geek. Sorry. We'll probably want that microphone back for the answers. Go ahead, Linda. Okay. So, occasionally, once in a blue moon, I lose an email from iCloud on my iCloud address. Now, when I'm saying iCloud, I'm using actually .me that shouldn't matter. So, I sent an email to Ken Ray, who knows how to use a Mac. He responded to me twice, and I didn't get the email. So, we corresponded on chat, and I finally just gave him an off iCloud, you know, another .x. Yeah. Can I make a guess? In MacGeek, you have 992p. Now, we're talking about exactly this. Apple's iCloud spam filters are out of control. Steve is in my favorites, and he's going, his males are going into spam. Males that I send to someone and they respond, they're going into spam. This was not in spam. It never showed up. It never showed up. But that also could be spam filters. Where? No, no, no, no. There are layers of spam filters, and things that are decided to be very terrible are just not led to male server. Ken is a known spammer. Let's be fair. I mean, obviously, that's fair. Okay. I'm going to take it outside the spam world because what you're experiencing is so frustrating, and I do with it all the time. This is the most stupid thing. I will have emails that I never see, but I can go to another device that has the same email account and find it there. And then I reply to the person, and now that whole email thread shows up on the original device. What it's worth? He was responding to my email. I've had it work. Interesting. That way too. Yeah. All right. Yeah. No, you're up. Okay. I'm Steve. Talk into the microphone for me. Okay. Thank you. Bluetooth has been turned off unintentionally on a Mac. You have no control over a wireless mouse. How do you get Bluetooth enabled again? You got to buy a new Mac. I actually had this problem recently, and oh boy, was it frustrating. Cars do that problem. No one saw me. You can't prove a thing. Actually, that was a different one. I did turn it off. It turned off the Bluetooth and then went, oh yeah, and I rebooted it and then it came on. But if rebooting doesn't work, you need a wired mouse, USB mouse. There's another answer. No wired mouse is allowed. Let Adam take this. All right. Adam's got it then. That's how I got it the second time. Even though we bashed her earlier, use Siri. What if you don't have Siri enabled on your Mac? Hey, Siri, turn on Bluetooth. It's possible. I think he's actually testing this. It's possible you could do it with accessibility. But you can't get it open because you don't have a mouse or a keyboard. Yeah, if you have no I.O. What do you mean? Who said you don't have a keyboard? You have a Bluetooth. You do have a keyboard. You do have a keyboard. You do have a Bluetooth. Wait, did you have a keyboard? I think what we heard from another listener, and I could just be making this up out of sleep-deprived delirium, but it sounds really good, is reboot the Mac and wait because it will offer to turn on Bluetooth for you. If you wait after it boots, yours did not do this. What you have to do is you can highlight your account with the left or right arrow key because your Bluetooth keyboard is plugged in with your lightning cable. That's it becomes USB. You type in your password, you press return, log in, press command spacebar to get spotlight, type in Bluetooth exchange, and the default choice on Bluetooth exchange, it first of all realizes that Bluetooth exchange, that Bluetooth is turned off, and the default option is highlighted in blue, which is a return key, to turn it on, and I save my client for buying a new. Dad used to think that having a listener's talk back was bad, this is great. But hang on Steve, why couldn't you have used spotlight to open Bluetooth exchange with it plugged in via lightning cable when it was booted up? I did not consider that. They also, I turn off Siri. Yeah. Siri can be potentially. Yeah, no, Siri's the right answer if it's on. They had been on the phone with Apple support and Apple support was not able to success. We helped them because they didn't realize she had not logged into her computer. She was still at the login screen trying to do command spacebar. That we are out of time in the room here today. We're all around certainly for tonight and most of us I think through tomorrow. Come find us, say hello, ask us questions. We're going to ask you questions. That's the beauty of Mac stock is everybody is just all together and we love that. And so thank you to all of my panelists, everybody here, Pete, Allison, Jeff, John, Adam. Thank you so much to see it in two minutes. So we're going to go do the drone thing and I'm going to hope that the FAA isn't around because I don't want to get caught. There you go.