 It's time for Mackie Keb, and listener Dimitr brings us our quick tip of the week with, have you ever wanted to go back to some previous page while also staying on the one you already are on? Hold command while pressing back and the previous page will be opened in a new tab in Safari. I assume that many have tried this and already knew it, but did you know this also works if you hold the back button to reveal the menu with the tab history? As long as you hold command when you make the selection in that menu, it will be open in a new tab. I tried this and it works for both the back and forward buttons as well as the long press menus. I was also surprised to see this work on Chrome too and it works in Safari on the iPad also. More tips like this, plus your questions answered today on Mackie Keb 1034 for Monday, April 22nd, 2024. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Mackie Keb, the show where you send in tips like that. You send in your questions. We try to answer your questions. You send in cool stuff found. We share your cool stuff found in your tips. We string it all together into an agenda that hopefully the plan is that it gives us each the opportunity, opportunity, easy for me to say, to learn at least five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include ZockDoc.com slash MGG. That's where you can go and sign up for free. It's the easiest way to find a great doctor and instantly book an appointment. We'll talk more in depth about that in a little bit. For now here on National IT Service Provider Day in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. Easy for you to say. And here in South Dakota, I'm Adam Christensen. Yeah. IT Service Provider Day. I didn't even know this was a thing. It's like a mouthful. Yeah. But I figured it was appropriate for our audience here, of course. Yeah. Yeah. I appreciate the IT Service Providers. Yes. They keep you connected. They keep us. Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes we appreciate them. Sometimes we are them. That's true. Necessary either way. Yeah. All right. Well, shall we keep going? There's no pilot Pete today. Pilot Pete's out busy piloting. Actually, I think he said he's got a check ride today. So there was zero chance of him avoiding that, which makes sense. We like it when our commercial pilots have their check rides and keep everybody up to speed and all that good stuff. Yep. We miss them though. We do. Should we get to Nige here? Let's go. Nige has a tip. He says, I didn't hear it mentioned during your section on FileMaker, Standard Keyboards and the lack of an Enter Key, Episode 1030. But there's no need to involve Carabiner, KM, BTT. Oh, Carabiner Elements, Keyboard Maestro, Better Touch Tool, I think is what he's trying to say. Yeah. I don't know. I'm not up with the acronyms. Thank you for filling that in. Give me a second, too. The FN Return Key combo gets you the extended keyboards Enter, just as FN Delete gives you forward delete. So the function key, FN key, love the show, can't wait for the next. Awesome. Great, too. We love the show, too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We can't wait for the next either. It's always... I always forget about the forward delete. I see people do that and I was like, oh, that's something I never really got into or learned, not in my, like, habits. Yeah, I think it's a... My recollection is that forward delete is more a Windows thing than a Mac thing. I don't know why I believe that. Like, I don't know. I mean, we have the forward delete key on our keyboards. So... Yeah, yeah. But I don't know. I seem to remember from the early, early days, I think it was on Windows or DOS machines before, like it certainly wasn't on Apple IIs, although that's going really far back. Hey, I have a question. Has anyone ever been to Kansas Fest? I know this is a, this is a talk about tangents. Oh, no, man, I would, I, man, I should go now, I'm closer, I think. Well, here's the thing. You know, Mac stock is happening in the middle of July, whatever that weekend is. And I'm planning on being there. I noticed that Kansas Fest has moved from wherever it was, and presumably in Kansas, but it might have been in Kansas City, so which is not necessarily Kansas, but I think it was in Kansas somewhere and it has moved to Illinois. So a little bit closer to Mac stock, right? It's like a 77 hour walk, I looked, but it is only a three and a half hour drive. So an, and it is the week after Mac stock. So Dave, I know, I know. So like I'm looking at the schedule. I think I have a, I think I got a gig like that Thursday night after Mac stock or something. But even still, I was like, well, if I could just make it to Kansas Fest, for those of you who don't, I think we buried the lead on this Kansas Fest and perhaps buried the, why the tangent even arguably makes sense. Kansas Fest is a festival for Apple II users. I believe it's the only one left. So yeah. Yeah. Or fans of the Apple II. So yeah. But I have to, I have to pull out my Apple II GS system to take down there to participate. People do bring their, their Apple IIs to these things and set them up. I know, I don't, I don't expect him to be there, but I know Waz has gone in the past. So I have, I have the Waz model, you know, with his signature, it's not real signature. You know, it's like stamped on the front. Yeah. It's, I have it. It last time I brought it out, it fired up just fine. So still runs, still works. Huh. Yeah. I wanted one of those real, real, real bad. I never got a GS. I, I only ever had the 2C. So. I buried the lead on that one too, because I convinced my dad to buy that machine over a Mac and I don't think I've ever been, or ever was forgiven for it. He passed away a long time ago, but. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We went from an Apple 2C to an SE 30 was, was my evolution of that. Yeah. I was a kid. I was a kid and it's like, I can't do, I don't know how to program on that Mac. I don't know how to play games on that Mac. Like none of the games my friends play are going to be playable on that Mac. And I remember we had one friend who had a Mac and we kind of made fun of him because it was like, Mac paint was the coolest thing we thought at that age, you know, on the Macs. Like, oh, that's cool. We like Mac paint. But then the Apple 2GS had a great color, you know, version. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. We've gotten off the target. Oh, that's my fault. That's on me. All right. Let's, let's talk to Todd here. Let's hear from Todd here. He brings us back a couple of episodes to 1032. He says, Alex had sent in a tip about setting up a secondary alert to remind of important birthdays. Many, many years ago, Todd says, I created a birthdays calendar in my iCloud calendar account, a manual birthdays calendar, mind you, it took a few, I took a few weeks to add all the birthdays that I wanted to track. I standardized the title for each event birthday being first name colon actual date. So it's got like the year in which they were born as well. And he says, I set each to repeat annually and created four alerts for each, an email alert one week before, an email alert on the day of the event at 9 a.m., a calendar notification alert one day before at 9 a.m., and a notification on the day of event at 9 a.m. To add a new birthday, I now drag an existing birthday event with the option key down. So here's another quick tip to a different days, right? So he's copying this event, double click on the new event, change the title, set the correct date and add the repeat annually. All the reminders stay intact when you option drag, but the repeat annually does not. Okay, that's good to know. And that's also just good to know in general with moving calendar events around. This has served me well for years, he says, and I often also add the date to their contact as the calendar app will show me their age on their birthday as well. Thanks, Todd. Yeah, that's a good idea. I like that. I'm surprised that the birthday tracking, like this is clearly a thing. We've, Todd and Alex's comments were not the only ones that we got about this. This is a problem that like Apple's solution for tracking birthdays is not enough for many folks out there. And I would agree with that. Like I, for certain birthdays, I, like, I, I want them, I want more information. I want more notifications. Yeah. Yeah. I just care more than I do. I guess I'm just one of those people that just misses people's birthdays. Yeah. That's same. But like we have technology to keep us from doing that if, if we so choose. So, I mean, otherwise Facebook will tell you 27,000 times when it's someone's birthday. So. Oh, I never noticed that. I never, I never don't, never caught that. All right. You want to take us to Chicago, Tom? Yeah. Tom has a great tip. He says, hi guys, picked this one up from the Mac power users podcast, great podcast, David Sparks and crew. I'm a teacher and I frequently have sessions over zoom. I like to use a whiteboard, which I can draw on most of the time. I've had to do this by logging into zoom twice. I share my computer screen when I need to run a variety of programs that I need. Then I stop the share on the computer and share the screen on my iPad. But I want to use my whiteboard by drawing with my Apple pencil. However, there is a better way. If you use free form as your whiteboard program, you can call the same document up on your computer and iPad simultaneously. The iCloud sync is so fast that when you draw on the iPad, it will appear on your computer screen almost in real time. Now I can just log into zoom on my computer and when I want to use the whiteboard, I simply switch to free form on the computer and draw on the iPad. No multiple logins. That's cool. Huh. I might need to start to need to start to use free form. I haven't used, I've played with it obviously, but I have nobody to really use it with. Yeah. Same. I never thought of, I never thought of using it as a whiteboard and then sharing through zoom because in my office, we use zoom for everything. Right. Of course you do. Yeah. And not everybody's on a Mac, so you can't really do the whole free form share thing necessarily. Right. Right. Yeah. That makes sense. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. If you're not on the Mac, then the whole, yeah. Right. Then the free form share thing. Yeah. I want to create a scenario where I want to use that and yeah, interesting. All right. I got to think about this. Yeah. I'd love to hear more from how people are using free form if they are because maybe I'm just not getting the use cases. Like that's what I love about this tip is like, here's a use case for it that I did. I never thought of. Right. Right. Yeah. Exactly. All right. Well, then we know that's our first ask here. MacGyb.com, send us your free form use cases like I want to know. Yeah. What was that? Feedback at MacGyb.com. Yeah. It's feedback at MacGyb.com, Adam. All right. Rob will bring us to the next one. Although I'm still like Chicago Tom, how do you log into Zoom twice? That's the other part that I'm wondering about. Like how does that work? Well, was it once on his iPad and once on his Mac? Oh, I guess. Yeah. Right. That makes sense. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. All right. I'll buy that. Okay. Moving on. Sorry. Rob says, I'm loving Adam's addition to the show. Same. Very welcome and most excellent. I agree. Following from the discussion of QuickLook features in episode 1030, there was one thing I use often that was not mentioned. If you use QuickLook on a multi-page document, so just to catch us all up, QuickLook is the name for the thing when you're in the finder or even in like a mail message, if it works there, where you select the file, you hit the spacebar and it just shows it to you without opening it in a different app. That's QuickLook. So he says, if you use QuickLook on a multi-page document, PDFs, tech files and Word documents are obvious examples. You can then use page up and page down to scroll up and down through the document. Note that on Mac laptops and small external Apple keyboards without page up and page down, function up arrow and function down arrow are the equivalents. Also didn't know that. That's, wow. All right. This is great. Love this. Lots of tips baked in there. Yeah. That's a good one, Rob. Thanks. Dave has some other tips. Dave from Arlington. He says, I use multiple tab groups in Safari across all my devices to organize and sync all my various research and hobbies and use tabs as a to-do list of sorts. Once I no longer need a tab group, but want to keep all of the web pages handy for future reference is when things get tricky. Then on Safari in Mac OS, it's easy enough to right click on the tab group name to bookmark all the tabs. But in iOS, it's a little less intuitive. First you need to have one of the tabs of the tab group you want to bookmark be active. Then press and hold the bookmark icon at the bottom of Safari. It will then ask you if you want to bookmark all of the tabs in the group or just the current page. If you select all tabs, it will ask you to select a location and folder name to place all of the tabs from the group. Once saved, you can delete the tab group. I hope this helps others keep the clutter down and things organized. Huh. All right. I like, yeah. I like that. That's good. Nice. Fun. Are you a bookmark person? Do you fight? No. I have my favorites bar that I absolutely use as my shortcuts and things. I have some tab groups that I have set up for specific activities like reconciling all my bank accounts is a great one. Opening all of my network smart switches, right? When I need to look at something on my switches, I have a tab group for that and boom, they're all open and I can just go to them and of course I have to log in, but they're all sort of organized there. That kind of thing, I find, but it's very limited use case for me for tab groups. It's not something I'm using. I'm not in and out of tab groups all day, though I can see where that, if you are, yeah, like there's, I grok the use case. I just don't have it. Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot. I mean, there's a lot of people. I'm not a huge bookmark person either. For a while I had a bunch for programming, but what happens there is they become obsolete really fast. So I like it for different languages, I would have JavaScript ones and PHP ones and different ones for like different things that I found. And what I found works better for me now is I try to, if I find a good little snippet or something that I think I'm going to want to reuse, I have, we've talked about Dash before. I use Dash and it has a place where I can put code snippets and little shortcuts to like trigger those. So yeah, I kind of made that my code library because that's the same application that also allows you to download and offline documentations for all kinds of languages and programs and stuff like that. Yeah. So, yeah, just that became a more handy place to store that stuff because I would go to the bookmarks of it. That way I can just clean that out. But yeah. Yeah. And Kiwi Graham in the, in the live chat at mackeycup.com slash live, I guess, is live.mackeycup.com or in mackeycup.com slash discord. There's many ways of getting to us. We like to be reachable. Points out that tab groups versus profiles gets quite confusing. And I agree, I, as we, even just as we started having this conversation, I had to pause for a second and think, okay, what am I using profiles for versus what am I using tab groups for? Because I do use profiles also occasionally, not every day. But I find it really handy mainly for separating either Google logins or Facebook logins. I mean, I have one Facebook account, but it drives me crazy when I'm like in Facebook and I need to do something, say on the mackeygab page, I switch to the mackeygab page. Now I'm like in that mode and it feels like, because it sort of is a separate account, even though I'm logged in just as me, I have to switch back. And I really like having a profile that is always in that and, you know, one that's always in the giggab thing. And it's just easier for me to know, okay, I'm in this profile. I've got the Gmail account for, you know, the mackeygab. It's just compartmentalizing things is how I've been using profiles. And it really is nice because your logins and all that are kept separate, your cookies are kept separate so you can have those things, you know, so yeah. So the profiles, I'm finding more utility for the way my life works than tab groups. But I'm glad they're both there, like it's, you know, that's the beauty of it. You don't have to use it if it doesn't work for you. But it is worth trying it. Like you were saying with Freeform earlier, you know, having a, even cursory working knowledge of it, for me anyway, it allows me to start to think about, okay, is there a way to take this and actually make my workflow better, more efficient? You know, whatever that is, I, for me, I, if I don't, if I just read like somebody's review of it or look at, you know, the feature list from Apple, that's often not enough for me to, I've learned that I will often dismiss things for that. Like, like focus modes, I absolutely dismiss based on Apple's description of it and other people's descriptions. Then once I started using it, it's like, oh my gosh, like, this is the best thing ever. Yeah, I need to, I need to do more of that too. I set it up a little focus modes a little bit, but never really fully dove in. There could be super useful. I, like, I am, I am constantly switching in and out of a few focus modes. I have, there's probably four that I use routinely. There's the, well, no focus. So maybe five, do not disturb, which is sort of, you know, throwing the baby and the bathwater all out at the same time, right? It just turns off everything, but that's fine. There's times when it's like, that's what I want. Um, the sleep one, uh, I use my old series eight Apple watch to track my sleep. And so it's great to have that, but also just not having, you know, my alerts come through while I'm sleeping is good. I have a podcasting focus mode that, um, it only allows alerts from like you and Pete and Shannon over it, uh, like my family can't get through that. And then the nice part about podcasting focus mode is I have a shortcut from it that, uh, on my phone, that when I go into podcasting focus mode, it turns on the purple light that you see behind me. If you're watching the video and more importantly, turns off the air purifier here so that I don't have that noise. Um, and then the other one is my nuclear one that I've talked about here, which is my, my nuclear family. And I love that on weekends so that every, everything becomes a poll notification, except for things from my family. So I need to do that. That would, I, I just want, I need to set up. So I, uh, I guess I use them more than I thought. Cause I use, I do use do not disturb. And I use sleep mode for sure. Um, but those are kind of the main two and those aren't just the built-in bullets. So, right. Right. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. But, but they're helpful. They're, they're useful. Yep. Yep. I, um, I, I, I've, I've really, I, I keep thinking about, oh, I created a conference one. I think I talked about that here where, like, I, I, I, turned in instead of allowing things through, I blocked certain things and most of it was all my smart home stuff. Like I need my notifications when I'm at a conference for, like most of my notifications, I don't need to know when someone's in my driveway. I don't need to know when the garage door opened. I don't like these things are not relevant to my life when I am not here. So, um, that, that part has been great. I, I, I, you know, and, and just tweaking them. And yeah, I like it. So cool. Yeah. Kiwi Graham says, uh, he says, I have a, with a client focus mode, um, text-based things can get through, but no audio. Oh, I like that. Huh. Yeah. Right. Like all these, these things send in your focus modes because I, I, I feel like sharing them is how we each, again, kind of open our, our minds up. So yeah. One last quick tip from Bill, he says, I started, uh, listening to last week's 10 33 this morning and found the quick tip about scanning documents with one's iPhone directly to the files app, quite useful, much easier than firing up the scanning function on my, uh, HP all-in-one printer scanner fax machine. I knew about scanning a document into an Apple note, a hidden quick tip, uh, but hadn't known about the direct to files. It reminded me about two quick tips for the Mac that I've been meaning to share. Number one, if you want a PDF of a webpage in Safari, select the menu option, file, export as PDF, instead of going through all the printing machinations. Yeah. The nice part about that is you get the webpage as it appears as a webpage as the PDF instead of how it would appear printed as a PDF. And that can be huge. And it also gets the whole scrolling of the webpage too, which is kind of magical. So I like that. Number two, he says, when you have the print dialog box open for virtually any program, you see the little PDF, uh, icon or, you know, PDF letters and the little dropdown menu in the lower left for years, he says, I'd click the dropdown arrow and select save as PDF. Right. That's how we do it. It turns out that was a total waste of time. All you have to do is click on the word PDF to the left of the dropdown area and immediately it tries to save a PDF. All you have to do is name the file and the location and you're done, which is, you'd have to do anyway. I had no idea that this is how that worked. No idea. I used it this morning. I, I, I'm, yeah, blown away. Yep. Love these quick tips. I have, there's another quick tip that came in and I actually, I can probably credit the person because I believe I have access to it. Uh, listener, Todd shares that, uh, regarding scanning documents, you can also tell Siri scan a document or simply scan document and up comes the files app in scan mode. Had no idea. Oh, cool. Right. Yeah. I'll be using that one for sure. Yep. So thank you for that. Uh, thank you for that, Todd, for sure. I love, uh, now I gotta add that to the agenda here because that's, that's an important one and I got to take it out of next week's agenda because that's what I had prepped it for fun stuff. I love the quick tips. Uh, I also love our sponsors and I want to tell you about Zock doc. Um, are you that one friend in your friend group who loves to treat yourself? Right. It's, it's okay. Like I do it too. You know, you, maybe you refuse to make coffee at home because that fancy coffee shop, right? It's right downstairs or sometimes like me, you opt for that extra leg room seat on the plane because your vacation starts now, not when you land, right? 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Yeah, I think we should. Barb, I will find us Barb. Oh, I see where Barb is because Barb has to be down in your queue. This might be a geek challenge. Maybe you know the answer. Is there a way to remove power lines from a photo that I took on my iPhone? Is there a way that's built in? Is there an app I can use? Can I do it on my Mac? I spent three weeks with a relative who had an unspeakable brand phone and she could do it on her phone very easily. I want to be able to do it on my iPhone. How do I do this? I thought I had the answer to answer it. It might be a geek challenge. That's why I thought that way. Yeah, I found it. Yeah. I mean, one way is in photos, at least on the Mac, and I would assume this is also an iOS. OK. There is a retouch. So if you if you open the photo and you go into edit mode, there is a retouch section and you have a brush that you can adjust size. And if you just click and drag over spots, it's supposed to do like a removal. And then you can even walk me through this again. So I'm I because I got lost here. I got a lot going on when we do the show, but I'm trying to follow here. So I go into a photo, open the photo right at it. And in the adjust menu, there should be a retouch section. Got it. This is the open. It's got a little bandaid icon. This is the part that doesn't exist on the phone. I don't see like I on the Mac for sure. It's on the Mac. Yeah. So I don't I didn't know if this was available on the phone and I'm using my phone as my camera, so I couldn't check this. No problem. Yeah, there is a retouch tool. And so when you activate that, it works just like the healing brush and Photoshop or whatever. So you can go in and you can just first try just like removing it. And there's a size adjustment so you can adjust the size. And if you need to zoom in really close, you can zoom in really close. And then you can just, you know, literally draw over top of the power line and it should find the nearby pixels and erase that. Yeah. You can option click just like in Photoshop to sample an area where you want to sort of clone from as well. I had no idea that you could do that in Photoshop. Like I'm not. I don't clearly don't. Yeah. Oh, Photoshop. Oh, yeah. Photoshop. I mean, Photoshop has even better tools for that. Like, yeah, I mean Photoshop. But if you want a built in way without any extra software, photos on the Mac will let you do that. Same thing. You know, they have they've had it for years, the whole red eye thing, right? Yeah. You can do that on the Mac. Click on. Yeah. I don't know why. Literally click on the eyes of people to remove red eye. It's it's pretty cool. Yeah, it works. It works pretty well. But yeah. And I mean, to be fair, I'll tell you the thing that's in photos. I've played with it, you know, because you can also use it to like erase people in the background and stuff like that. It's not great, but it might work. You know, sometimes it does work. Other times you're like, yeah, that's not so great. But yeah, just depends on what your photo is. But I mean, it's worth a shot if it's built in. Yeah. Yeah. I am I am a huge fan of Pixelmator Pixelmator Pro on the Mac. It's actually used Pixelmator to do all the to assemble all the like episode artwork and things like that. It just makes that super easy. Now in Pixelmator, if you didn't know, don't blame yourself like it's not super obvious, but they just added again on Pixelmator on the Mac, you can now edit PDFs in Pixelmator Pro on the Mac. And it but it does. It is so great at like building photos, layering things, retouching photos, the whole. I'm guessing I could use the option click thing in their retouch tool to to choose where I want to grab things from, which is going to be hugely valuable because sometimes you use the retouch tool or the magic Band-Aid tool or whatever it is. And it grabs things and makes it look worse. You know, it's like, no, I just grabbed right from here. So that it's you get the Band-Aid open. And again, this is in Photoshop or photos, but you get the Band-Aid thing open and then you option click to tell it where to where to learn from. And then and then you go and drag is that that's the workflow for that. Say that again. So open the Band-Aid tool before you start dragging to fix anything you option click right to sample to teach it to sample. And then and then you just drag like normal, right? You'd let go of the option key and got it. Yeah. And I mean, a tip if you're doing this, too, is if you want to get a little bit better is sample sort of different close by areas. So you're because it's basically cloning from that section. Yeah. And so if you clone from the same section over and over again for like a long distance, you're going to get start to see like patterns like, oh, that looks the same. So sometimes it's helpful to, you know, sample a little area, press something out, sample another area close by, you know, but that's different sample that out. Yeah. So you can play with it. Got it. Got it. All right. Cool. Makes sense. I like it. Good. Are we I think we've I think we've covered this. OK. Yeah. Moving on to to Darren, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. Darren wants to know what's the fastest way to get Safari favorites on an iPhone? He says, is there a quick way on the iPhone to bring up the home screen showing favorites, the favorites bookmark page in Safari? For example, I almost always close out of my pages when I'm done with Safari. I click the right most icon. That pops up the minimized page pages open and I swipe them all away and then see my home screen with all my favorites on the Mac. I can just go to the menu and select to show favorites. I'm wondering if there's a way to not have to not have to swipe closed the page to get back to the home screen. Thanks. Yeah, there totally is. So if you click that little tabs pages button in the lower right of Safari, you know, it's the it's like looks like two pages layered on top of each other. That brings up, you know, all your thumbnails, as you said, of your open tabs. You don't have to close anything. And once you're in that view, the lower left in the lower left appears a little plus icon. That opens up a new tab and the new tab is populated with all of your favorites that you can choose. You can also start typing in the URL bar to bring you somewhere else. But that's how I get my favorites up. It turns out that you can get there even faster if you're just on a web page. If you long press in the lower right on that tabs pages button, you get a little menu. And if you choose new tab from that menu, it accomplishes the same thing. There's all kinds of things. In fact, you could open a new private tab from there. You can. I don't know. I forget. It was a laundry list of things like you can. Oh, you can open your tab groups show up there, it turns out. And you can close tabs. You can move the current tab to a tab group. It's like a whole thing. So, yeah. Love it. Long press, the universal tip for iOS devices. Isn't that right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Long press is the universal tip. Like if you take one thing away from this episode, go long press everything and you'll be amazed at what shows up sometimes. Like any different options there are for different things. Yeah. Right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. It's pretty crazy. All right. We're knocking these down. I like this, Adam. We're we're being efficient. Yeah. Well, Bob has a question. All right. He says, I know winter is over, but I have a because he has a problem. I have a problem with freezing contacts and hoping your three wonderful you three wonderful guys can help. Well, two of us today. Sorry. Yeah. We don't have to do wonderful of us. That's right. Yeah. For the last three months or so, whenever I access and use the contacts app, it inevitably freezes and I get the pinwheel spinning beach ball, which usually lasts for several minutes before contacts comes back to life. However, not for long as it will happen again if I start using the app. I've called Apple support several times and had escalated to senior advisers last time. They basically said that this is unsolvable now and that Apple engineers are working on it and it should have it fixed in a future OS update. But that has been over for been over three weeks or so since the last contact with Apple support and still no answer. I use contacts heavily and I'm always accessing it and adding information on individual cards or making or deleting cards. I have over 2150 cards and most of them have a lot of notes about that contact. I love this app and I use it to make notes about friends and contacts. Some notes have several paragraphs in them with Apple support. We've done a soft reboot and even done a fresh install of Sonoma 14.4.1. I've also had activity monitor open and see that contacts is using most of the CPU and then 100% of it when it freezes. I'm using a 15 inch 2018 MacBook Pro with 16 gigabytes of RAM, 2.6 gig hertz, 6 core Intel Core i7 processor with 500 gig 500 gigabyte SSD and now using about half of that. I'm wondering if you guys have run into this problem before and can offer any solution as I don't know how long I will have to wait for Apple engineers to solve this. Just love you guys and the show. Well, thanks, Bob. That's nice. That is nice. Yeah. Have you run into this problem? Yes, I have 100%. It sucks. I don't have quite as many contacts as Bob, but I'm close like 1900 or something. Contacts is clearly not an efficiently written piece of software, right? And it appears that it chokes when the database gets beyond a certain point. The fact that you've gotten Apple engineers to acknowledge that this is a problem, first of all, you automatically qualify for Saint Hood. This is this is a very difficult thing. I think there have been more US presidents than there have been people who have gotten Apple engineers to acknowledge a bug. It's a very it's a tricky thing. When you are working with Apple engineers, you submit a bug report, they come back, they, you know, what they do is they, in my experience, 100% of the time, they try to convince you why the bug is your fault. Oh, well, you must be doing something. This is this. You have to paint them into a corner. And clearly Bob has done that. And once you do paint them into a corner, then they'll be like, oh, maybe we have a bug that we should look at that. And then they're very happy to do it, but it's just weird friction that exists. So kudos to you for getting it over that particular hump and having them like all but promise a fix. That's great. The fact that it's been three weeks, that's normal. Like you're going to there's there's a whole procedure, even if the bug was fixed three weeks ago, like even if somebody sat down and figured it out in the afternoon, like submitting it, it has to go through all kinds of code review. And even once it passes all of that, it's like, all right, we're going to slate this bug for, you know, Mac OS, you know, 14.4 point three or 14.4 point four, because point two and point three have already been feature frozen. And it's a whole thing, right? So it will take a little time. But you have given me hope. I'm hoping that it's just simply like maybe they just need to add an index to the database or something because it's it's, you know, making one chair, maybe they have too many indexes and it takes too long. I don't know. But you've made me hope full. But yes, I have experienced this. Is there any way to kind of deal with it? Deleting contacts feels like a cop out to me. But having contacts search for duplicate contacts and merging the ones that, you know, over over time, I certainly collected a lot of dupes and, you know, merging those makes me feel like it is going to be more efficient, whether it actually is or not. I don't know. But yeah, I have a couple thoughts or questions. One, one I'm wondering about is I know for a while contacts you could bring in from and I think you still can from other places like Facebook, right? It has Facebook syncing and it has Google cloud syncing. It used to have Facebook. But yeah, I mean, you can connect to card dev servers and other things. So I don't notice that I don't know if Facebook's there anymore. But yeah, go ahead because that was really annoying. I was turned off Facebook because I got a million things from Facebook that I didn't. Yeah. But yeah, I'm just wondering if that sort of thing like is this only an iCloud, you know, Apple contacts thing or are there other contacts in there that are coming from other places that make this? I'm also kind of curious what the number is. I just looked down my contacts. I have about a thousand and I have not run into this problem. About a thousand contact cards. So is there a limit or is he mentions he stores a lot of excess data in there too. So like if you have a lot of notes, like you were saying size of the database might might be a trigger here. So yeah, maybe that's why I haven't run in this problem. The only other solution maybe or work around that I might be able to offer. Unfortunately, it's a paid one, but a good one is I use card hop, oh, which is just a little. But I mean, it still taps into the database. So I don't know if they would get around this problem or not. But you know, it's a little menu bar app. I have a hotkey. It's control and you can change it. Control option D on my thing. I hit control option D and it pops up my contacts and I could just type the name of a contact really quick and find that record in card hop. So I don't know if maybe bypassing the actual cost of if this is a contact app problem, then maybe that gets around it. If it's purely a data database problem, it might not make a difference. Right. Yeah. My experience is that it's it's not the app as much as it is the, you know, the underlying database that, like you said, these things tap into. But maybe, I mean, one way to test that would be maybe there's a demo of card hop that somebody could, you know, you could download and Bob and check it out. See, see what, you know, see if it performs better because if it does, that's your answer. I have, but, you know, thinking about this, zooming out a little bit and thinking about this, we know that there's a lot of shared code between the Mac and the iPhone and the Apple Watch and, you know, all of those things. And that makes perfect sense. And while I haven't necessarily experienced this issue on my iPhone, I have run into contact problems chewing up the battery on my Apple Watch. And it's the sinking between the iPhone and the Apple Watch that sometimes causes it. And we've talked about he can go into the Apple Watch and reset sync data. And that, for me, has solved that that issue. So I think there's there's like a fundamental just like design flaw in the context architecture. But hopefully, hopefully Apple's actually looking at that now. It's amazing to me that they hadn't before. But, you know, like, I yeah, it's just yep, it's just one of those things. But yeah, when I look in Activity Monitor, I certainly have seen contacts the app peek out. But I also see, I forget what it is, but it's like a dress book DB or I don't know, whatever, whatever that process is that's sort of underneath that also just going nuts, even when I'm in like, you know, a calendar app or something that links with it, you know, if it needs to index or look for something in context, it's just like wedges for forever. So yeah. Yeah. So I just looked at David and Flexi Betts, who makes CardHop and I've had I use both Fantastic How and CardHop because I just had their family subscription, which I think is like 90 bucks a year for both programs, premium features. Got it. It's a subscription service, but 90 bucks a year for my entire family up to five people. So I've just I've had it for years, but apparently both those apps are available in limited capacity for free. So he can try it. There you go. That would that would be the way to to test it out. Yep. Kiwi Graham has a nice I like this troubleshooting tip to disconnect from the network, either turn off Wi-Fi if that's how you're connected or unplug ethernet and troubleshoot to see if the beach ball still happens with no network connection, because sometimes it can be waiting on a network operation. So yeah, I like that. That's good. Cool. Love this stuff. Love it. Love it. Love it. You want to share Todd's tips since we're talking about syncing and reminders. It's sort of contacts that adjacent. Yeah. Plugs right in this. He's taught. Excuse me. Todd said this started a few days ago. Each time I create a reminder on my iPhone via Siri, it would not sync to my other devices. If I went to the reminder app on my iPhone and tapped the new item and created a new reminder, it would sync. But not if I used Siri to create one. I went to iCloud settings on the iPhone, turned off reminder setting, tapped delete reminders at the prompt and then turned off my iPhone for a few minutes. After I turned on my iPhone, I opened the reminders app. It popped up a notification suggesting that I go to iCloud settings and turn on syncing. I selected not now. Interesting. Lee, I guess the six reminders I had created via Siri in the last few days were there on my iPhone in the reminder app. I checked the settings for the reminders app and the default list was reminders. I went back to the reminders app. I took a screenshot of the six reminders, went back to the list of my lists and deleted the reminders list. Then I turned on iCloud syncing on reminders. All seems well now. Adding a reminder via Siri, which I can do in the which I do in the car all the time syncs to all my devices again. It appears that something happened to change the default list to a reminder list that was locally on my iPhone. Odd, but fixed before I got caught. I love this tip. I it those default list contacts on my Mac. I have had issues where you know, like you were saying you used to, you know, you can sync to Google contacts and sync to other things. I've had it where my Mac has just decided, oh, yeah, that's going to be the default now. And it just starts populating it. It's like, well, nope, I want like the one that I set previously. Let's go ahead and leave it that way. And same with reminders. That's, ah, yeah, love that. Love that. That's a great tip. So yeah, checking those default lists. That's really smart. I also have a follow on tip. If you're going to use Siri to create reminders, all the reminders that I create, I basically use busy Cal, right? I I live inside of busy Cal, but busy Cal can can read Apple's reminders database, just like anything else can. And I choose to have it do that because Siri is really good at putting reminders into Apple's database and and only Apple's database. So when I'm in the car or whatever, I have an idea. I put it on the, you know, I I say, you know, you know, hey, a slady remind me to do this. Here's the problem. If I were to say that, you know, remind me to call Adam. It will put it will put call Adam on my reminders list as an undated reminder. The way I see all my reminders, the undated stuff sits way at the bottom of a list. It's like two weeks long and I will never see it. I have had to put a reminder, a recurring reminder on my calendar once a week to go look at my undated reminders to fish out all the things that I've lost. However, if when I'm doing a reminder via Siri, if I say yes, lady, remind me to call remind me later today to call Adam or remind me tomorrow to call Adam, then it adds the date to the reminder and it's where I want to see it and all those things. So it like, I have to have the safety net of the weekly task to like go and look at the at the dregs of the list because I will lose these things. But but because I forget sometimes I'm driving in the car. It's like, Oh, it's a great idea. Siri, remind me to do this. Then it's like, oh, yeah, you know, I will I will almost never get a chance to see it, even as great as the idea is. And and it turns out, Adam, even when I have a fantastic idea, one that is like blowing my mind and it doesn't have like I don't actually come up with a lot of great ideas. I just hear good ideas and I like think about them. It's like, oh, yeah, we got to do that. But sometimes I have a good idea. But wherever the idea comes from, if I'm like so amazed about it, in that moment, I will be convinced that there is absolutely no way in the world that I won't remember this later. It's so amazing that I it's burned into my memory banks forever. That is false. I forget fantastic things all time. And so that's why I use Siri to help me remember those those inspirational moments. So yeah. Yeah. Yep. All right. Would it be easier just to have? Can't you have things put into a note? Would it be easier to have like non dated ideas and things just throw it into like a running note and then I like that. That's something you'd have to do that with a shortcut, right? Or is there a way to instruct our our voice assistants to like add to know like what would be the what would the workflow be to do that? I like this idea. I thought there I thought there was but maybe I'm maybe I'm just thinking of reminders or yeah, because you could do it to do list, right? So you can yeah, but that's just a list. That's just a reminder's list is what that is. But I mean, I know shortcuts can append to note that that is like a thing because we use that with our our our MGG stuff constantly. It's in fact, it's the fact that we hadn't that we've only started using that in the last six months sort of chafes me every time I use it. So it's like years for years I opened up a different window and pasted things in. I didn't need to do this. But yeah. Yeah, I was just thinking of that because my ideas source and it's not as good as like because I can't do it from inside the car is a markdown list in Ulysses. Sure. So I usually have my phone on me or an iPad or I'm at my Mac. So one of those ways I can like quickly throw an idea into that. But you know, that's manual. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. All right. If you folks have an idea, let us know. Join our Discord. And if it's easier to type it out, just type it out in there and the tip is shared with everybody that's part of Discord. So that's Mac ekeb.com slash Discord. Michael has a question that is a question that is asked of us here. Some version of it fairly often. And this one I think is important enough to go through. He says I am stuck and bleeding from the eyes after trying to read all the opinions on whether I should get a Synology DS423 plus or the DS923 plus says I know I've heard you talk about the 423 plus. I'm upgrading from the DS 216 and using it to back up both my Macs and PCs. I have nearly a terabyte of photos served. I use Synology Drive and another terabyte of Plex movies hoping you can restore my sanity. Well, it just so happens, Michael, that I recently built a spreadsheet that listed all of the distations that I either have kind of in my world here because I test a bunch of them and wind up with them or am considering. And what I I logged quite a few things in these spreadsheet in this spreadsheet. But the important one I think for us here is I love that the the RAM that they have, which is kind of important, it is important, but also the CPU that they have. And more importantly, the CPU mark score, which is basically the speed of that CPU to sort of homogenize everything together and then also a flag in my spreadsheet that denotes whether the CPU in question has a GPU in it, aka a hardware transcoding engine for your videos Plex and video station. And then there's some things in photos that also use GPU as well. And I happen to have these two in the list. I actually I didn't have the DS 923 plus, but I had another one with the same CPU. So the DS 423 plus is has a Celeron J4125 CPU. It maxes out at six gigs of RAM. The DS 923 plus has a Ryzen and AMD Ryzen are 1600 CPU and maxes out at 32 gigs of RAM. RAM wise, I think for most of what all of us do with our distations, I push mine pretty hard. I actually run a business on it ish. We use Synology Drive all the time and some other things. And it like the CPU never like unless I screw something up, the CPU doesn't go above about 10 percent. And the RAM RAM usage also doesn't. Six gigs max is enough. I do recommend if the things that you said you were doing, Michael, you know, spend the whatever $34 on Amazon and max out the RAM in your distation, it won't hurt and will only help. So CPUs are really the difference to talk about when we're when we're talking about the 423 versus the 923. And I like that you selected both of these units. I know there are a lot of Synologies out there. If if someone were to come to me and say, what should I be looking for? We would be talking about one perhaps both, but certainly one of these units and we'll get there. So let's talk about the CPUs. The Celeron scores 2963 on CPU mark and has a GPU. The R1600 scores 3365 on CPU mark and has no GPU. So we're talking about a 13 percent CPU speed increase raw from the 41 from the 423 to the 923 plus. I would not trade GPU for that ever. I would take the 13 percent slower CPU with a GPU 100 percent of the time and you're going to save a little bit of money doing it. So that is every single time I would choose the DS4 23 plus as the the the distation to go with if you're buying new today. Unless you need something with you know, eight bays of storage. I mean, but if you're looking for that general use distation that's going to last you a very long time, that DS4 23 plus is the one I feel good about. And actually we've got one on the way to you Adam after our conversation last week or whatever. So yep, I'm very excited to do the upgrade. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I 100 percent agree with that. Now I have a follow on question for sure because I'm curious with the 423 or the 923 or whatever how important is getting SSD cash? I write so the the the distations allow you to put in many of them. And I believe both of these fall into that. Yeah, they put it. They'll allow you to put in an m dot to N V M E cash. And the 423 plus has two slots for this. I've always put one SSD cash in there. I do not do two. And the reason is with one you can do read caching, right? Where every read operation that happens from the distation is stored in the cache and it's I don't know what their algorithm is, but they've got some algorithm to make it so that to make it the most efficient they could. Right. And I have found that to it's been so long since I've run a distation without a cache that I actually can't really speak to this, but the caches are relatively inexpensive. And back when I first had the option to do this, this wasn't always a thing. It made a huge difference in terms of the efficiency of it. And it'll even show you there's like in storage manager, there's a little graph that shows you how like, you know, what the what the percentage, what the hit rate is on the cache. And like it routinely is in the, you know, 90 plus percent range, which tells me that's great. Like that's what I want. So, yeah, I mean, it saves wear and tear on the disks at at worst and speeds up things at best. And I think it really does speed things up. So I I would put one in there for read caching. If you put two in, you have the option of doing read write caching, it will mirror the two of them together so that if one dies or something, you don't lose data. However, there have been so many posts on, you know, Synology and Synology adjacent forums about people having disasters when is with issues with the SSD write caching. If you don't turn off your Synology the right way, if you have a power flutter that your UPS doesn't do the right way and it just gets shut down, people have had, you know, crashed arrays with this. I don't know if it's still that way right now. But like when I had to make these decisions, because at first, I was like, I'll put two in and I did. And then started reading about it. I was like, nope, don't need that in my life. It's plenty fast as it is. So yeah, read caching. Yes. Write caching. I don't do it. I don't work. So cool. Yeah. Yeah. So good question, though. Yeah, I am obsessed with these things, but they're so handy to have. I don't know. Yeah, Jeff has a question that now I have, because apparently I'm I'm new around here and I don't I don't know what's going on regarding this. Jeff wants to know. How is Thunderbird has, you know, is Thunderbird working for you? Any update? I also just downloaded the latest version and was pleasantly surprised. It's pretty nice. And to be honest, I was like, Thunderbird's still a thing. We're talking about the same thing, but maybe we're not. Are we talking about Thunderbird, the mail application from Mozilla? Is it still Mozilla? Yes, yep, we are. The short answer, Jeff, is it's fine. And Adam, to catch you and and anyone who did not hear me rant about this over the summer. I. I moved my email on my Macs from Apple Mail to Thunderbird when Sonoma came out because Sonoma killed off all the mail extensions or the mail plugins. Now there's extensions, but the extensions are the framework for the extensions, the API is that the extensions can tap into. Don't let mail do anything that's valuable to me. So like I want to have it. I have all my mail come into one account, right? Basically, that's not entirely true, but let's say that that's true. And on that account, I have a bunch of different, like from addresses. I have, you know, my David Backby, my David MacIka, feedback at MacIka, you know, all that stuff, right? And when I choose a different from address, which either I choose manually or mail chooses intelligently based on, you know, replying, which it does, I want it to choose the appropriate signature for that address. That mail doesn't let you do that. Mail has one signature per account. So I would have to set up the different accounts for each of these be a whole big disaster. I don't want that. Mail. When I'm when I'm replying from the MacIka thing, I want it to auto CC the feedback at MacIka comm so that you and Pete see my answers, right? We do that so each other can see. Mail won't do that. Mail will do that. But it's it's a it's a one size fits all thing. You can say automatically CC me every time I reply to a message or never CC me, you know, but there's no way to do it granularly. There was a plugin that let me do this. There were plugins that let me do a few other things. And I tried working in Sonoma and it was like I was working in Mittens like it was awful and filing mail. I do a lot of mail filing with keystrokes that that I was able to use keyboard maestro to replace the functionality of a plugin because I just tell keyboard maestro choose this menu item and thankfully all of my mailboxes are menu items like they are for everybody in mail. So keyboard maestro fix that part of it. But the other two things I was like, I can't live like this. I got to be able to have my signatures automatically kick in and all that stuff. And so I started thinking, all right, well, what are my options here? You know, I can choose not to upgrade to Sonoma. That seems like I can I can hold off for a little while, but like this is the future now. So I got a kind of deal. I also I don't like the idea of using a mail client that is written by one person or a very, very, very small team of people for two reasons. Number one. And I know it's it's not quite the same now with IMAP. You know, it's relatively easy to move mail clients. It's not like you got to, you know, move your data around. But I I found that when I use a mail client that's written by a small software house, I need to learn to use mail the way the author of the software wants me to use mail, right? Whereas with Apple's mail, there's a lot of different ways like for like, for example, I think you and I had this conversation on the show. You know, there's Spark from from Riedel and it's a great mail client, but it forces me to see things in conversation to you. There's absolutely no way to turn it off. And I've talked to the engineers. They're like, no, you're wrong if you want to turn it off. It's like, see, this is my problem here. You're not wrong, nor am I. Like, if you want conversations on, turn them on. If I don't want them on, I'll turn them off. You know, it's fine. Like everything's good. And maybe I want conversations on in some mailboxes, but not others. That's also OK. Like it's totally fine. And so I started thinking, well, you know, here I've been for the last whatever decade plus using mail app that's written by a huge team of people for a huge number of people. It's meant to be flexible. And for a long time, it was super extensible. Now it's less than super extensible. I'm hoping that mail gets more that that the extensions functionality of mail is expanded, like the the capabilities of the things that extensions can tap into is is widened. And that's a typical Apple thing. So I like there's hope. In the meantime, though, I'm using Thunderbird because Thunderbird is, you know, I reasoned. I'm like, well, it's going to be around. Chances are Mozilla is not going away. Thunderbird hasn't gone away for a long time. There's a ton of people using it. It's super flexible. It's not built to force people to deal with their mail in a certain way that it's built for people to be able to use however they want. There's a ton of plugins. Quite frankly, it's awesome except for the part that it doesn't feel like an Apple app. That's the part that sucks and it doesn't support Apple script, which is you'd be surprised how much you use Apple script with mail, even if you've never ever launched an Apple script like dragging from the finder onto onto the mail icon so that it can open up, you know, a new message with that as an attachment. Turns out that's a scripting thing. It and yeah and you can't do that with Thunderbird. So I am constantly frustrated. You can't have it like I can have apps sort of create emails with Thunderbird, but not always. That's the part of Thunderbird that's super frustrating to me is the interoperability with the operating system. But as a mail app, it's great. Is Thunderbird on iOS? No. No, I use mail on that would that would drive me nuts. I just use mail on iOS. I know. Yeah. So I like having the same application across all of my devices like that's why I have fantastic how that's why I have Spark. That's like I like the fact that there's that consistency in my life. I wish I wish that Spark would like give up on enforcing the use of conversations. I have tried it. It's just not for me. Like I lose track of emails. I don't want if I archive an email out of my inbox, I don't want it to magically reappear in my inbox when somebody replies to you know, to that thread. It's like, nope, I Dave's brain still works. OK. Dave, remember thread and hey, by the way, most of the time, the entire freaking thread is in the email. Like it's all right there. I don't need it to get buried. Yeah. So anyway. Yeah. Yeah. At least now I'm pretty sure it's kind of hidden. I don't really notice it so much anymore. Well, you're used to it. There's this history button though. Like it it's like collapsed. So but it is all there. Yeah. I just always got confused. It's like, I thought I archived this out. And my guess is if I forced myself to do it, if I let Spark force me to do it, I would eventually adapt. Right. But yeah. But I don't you don't have to. Right. I don't want to. But I really I like everything else about Spark. So it's like it's a yeah, it's a sad kind of it's got a lot of great features. You know, and I you mentioned you're the like, you know, use keyboard shortcuts to kind of move things in and out. I got used to the whole swipe thing. So I use the swipe gestures all over the place. Got it. Yeah. For doing similar stuff. And I grab it a batch of things and archiving and Spark has great organizational things that are things that tie well into into like organizing things automatically like into, you know, I got a place for all my newsletters. I got a place for like a bunch of things. And then there's a great swipe gesture at the bottom where you can just like grab a little thing and take an entire you know, folder of stuff ideas for like newsletters a lot. Like, you know, just swipe them all away, you know, swipe one like big choke. So little features like that I find handy. But no, it's absolutely I'm with you on opinionated apps. And you notice I use a lot of opinionated apps. Yes. Fantastic. I was very opinionated about how you do calendar, Spark and I appreciate it. And I just that's what I've learned and I'm used to now, but I can totally appreciate people who that doesn't work for them. Yeah. Like, yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. And I I'm sure that it like if I if I stopped and thought about it, that I use plenty of opinionated apps, like, you know, but they just happen to match my opinions like it's just fine. Like, you know, confirmation bias of that, like this is the right way to do things is fine when you're when it's you. It's totally OK. And I don't think I don't think it's surprising that you find more Apple developers that build opinionated apps because that's Apple. Right. Like, you want to talk about people with opinionated apps, you know, or just an opinionated like thing. And it's part of the reason a lot of us are Mac users, right, is because, you know, and you see it when people try to over the years fight the Apple way. Right. Right. Yeah. Conversations all the time. Apple devices on their own are opinionated. Right. That's correct. Very much so. Very much so. Yeah. Yeah. And that's what drives like Android people and Windows people crazy. It's like, what do you mean? You have to do it that way. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I know. I know what our episode title is going to be. Be aware of opinionated apps or perhaps beware opinionated apps. Fred, we're here in the mail thing. I know we're getting sort of to the end of the of our normal time here. But I want to I want to take a minute and answer Fred's question because we're we're in mail here. So I will I will I will read what Fred says. He says, I've enjoyed Maccast for several years and have followed Adam to Mac eCAP. Great. Awesome. My problem, Fred says, is that I use Apple Males Archive folders on my Mac as a database for my small nonprofit business. As such, I have around a thousand such folders in various hierarchies and levels. Four levels, by the way, he says, is the Macs allowed by mail. Good to know. Over the last few months, I have tried unsuccessfully to add new archive folders and found that while I can add via the new mailbox option under the mail pull down in the title bar or mailbox pull down in the title bar, when I add an email to any of these new mailbox folders, the email just disappears never to be seen again anywhere. Needless to say, this is both annoying as well as a problem. It took a while before I realized this, but my next move was to assume that I had reached some kind of application limit. So I set about deleting some folders that were no longer needed. I've deleted half dozen or so and I still get the same disappearing email messages when I attempt to add the new message into a newly added folder in the archive. What do I do? I thought about deleting unnecessary folders would work if there's an archive folder limit, but clearly it doesn't help. Are there other options? What can I do? I have thoughts on this, Adam, but do you do you have any anywhere to go for Fred here? Yeah, I had something. I don't use it anymore because I got less worried about sort of archiving and keeping mail like for forever. I'm OK with like deleting stuff. But back in the day, yeah, I used to be I used to be really worried about mail and especially like mail living off in the cloud and, you know, servers and places like that. And I like I want a local copy. I want an archive. I want to know I can say if we delete something from the cloud and still be able to find it and organize it and get at that data. And more importantly, also know that that data can be backed up to places that I control. Yeah. And so for years, I used an app called Mail Steward, which basically you can set it up and there's a bunch of ways to set it up. But it sweeps through your your mail when it's, you know, pulled in and downloaded locally and then puts it into a MySQL database basically MySQL light database. OK. And it indexes it and makes it searchable and you can store the attachments in there like you can put everything into the Mail Steward database. And it's just there and it just sits, you know, off to the side from your mail and it just you set it up to run in the background and do its archiving thing. And then you can keep it there. And it it's a local database. And so you can set that up to, you know, to have it backed up from your Mac to wherever you want to have it backed up. Sure. At the end of the day, if you need to get mail out, it's MySQL database. They also you also can obviously export out to Mbox files and bring them back into mail and all that sort of stuff. So that's what I used for three years. And then that was the sort of the thing similar to the way that I archive a lot of my folders and documents and stuff using ChronoSync. OK, sort of my ChronoSync for email, right? It was like, I know this thing is just running in the background. It's going to grab mail from the folders and you can tell it, you know, I only want stuff that's in my inbox or stuff that's in these folders that I set up, you know, ignore the junk mailbox and ignore the trash and, you know, or you can, like you can configure it however you want. But so it was super flexible, super powerful. Like I said, what was great is it builds a search index. So it's very easy to search through and find stuff. And it's pretty quick because sometimes, like if you have to go through a giant archive of mail folders in a mail app, that doesn't always work really great. So it's solved a lot of these problems for me. And it might I've we've talked about mail steward on the show before. My concern with this, which I think you sort of addressed was what happens when John Seward, the author of mail steward, stops developing mail steward does, you know, let's say there is not a version of mail steward that will run on my current Mac. There currently is. Like I'm just I'm, you know, I'm saying in the future, but if it's stored in a SQL lite database in theory, you can, you know, there is a relatively straightforward way of getting that data out of there. Yeah, you should be able to just easily. I don't think my SQLite format is going away any time soon. But I mean, that could happen, too. It could. That's fair. It's not going to. I know I'm with you. OK, so that that addresses that. I am because I, you and me are not the same, Adam. In this regard, I am still a pack rat and I have saved every email that I've ever sent or received other than like spam and and like newsletters and stuff like that. But but by and large, I err on the side of saving things and I never at least not intentionally lose any of that. But that means I got to store it somewhere and I can't leave it all on an IMAP server. I, for years, did exactly what Fred is doing, including the thousand plus archive folders. I did away with that part of it, though, about 10 years ago when I realized that male search was good enough. In fact, that I wasn't even looking in a specific folder for something anymore. I was just searching for it and finding it, right? Search has gotten way better in the last, you know, 20 plus years or whatever it is, like, you know, we've got better algorithms, the computers are faster, the disks are faster, there's SSD caching and, you know, all that stuff. And so I have one monolithic archive folder that I put everything in. And then I archive out of that into annual archives just so that if there is ever like database corruption, I'm working to fix the database corruption on one year's worth of mail, not all the years worth of mail, right? And I figured that's better. So that's what I do. I have archives for sent mail. I have archives for for received mail, right? And per year. And those were all stored in mail until recently when I think it was either me and John or me and Pete or maybe the three of us having a conversation at some point last year on the show about this. And I said, well, you know, yeah, there's this, but I just wish that there was somewhere that I could store my mail on like an IMAP server so that it was accessible everywhere. But that I it was my storage. And as I'm saying these words, I realized, ding, ding, ding, you know, you can run a mail server on your Synology disk station. And so I do. And I swore I would never run a mail server again. I've broken that. But it and it is a mail server. It it is like on the Internet. If you knew the email address that in the domain that it served, you could send me email there. I actually get email there every every day. I signed up for like two mailing lists plus ours just to make sure that like things work. But and you can sign up for the Mackie Kev mailing list. If you go to Mackie Kev dot com, we send the show notes out to you every week. I know last week show notes were a little late. There was a weird caching issue. It doesn't matter. It's problem solved. But it's otherwise just for me to use, right? Nobody actually sends me mail at this address and I don't send anybody mail from this address. But I do run a mail server on my Synology and it allows me to connect to it via IMAP from anywhere in the world. And so I can I stored. I have moved all of my archives out of mail. And that was a tedious process. But I have moved them out of mail and over to, you know, they were in the on my Mac section on mail. So it was only on one of my computers. Of course, backed it up. But still, there's points of failure there. And now they're they're on my IMAP server, which is itself backed up to the cloud and all of this because it's on my distation. But also it's synced to several of my Macs, the entirety of it and, you know, all of that. And I can access it from anywhere. I can I can access my email archives from my phone now, which was not a thing that I could do before. So I'm really loving the IMAP server as an email archive. It was slow AF to copy my mail over to this thing. Mail is faster than Thunderbird, it turns out, to do to do this kind of operations. That's fine. It doesn't matter. But yeah, it works. It's like, it's great now, now that everything's over there. It's awesome. I love it. So yeah, yeah. Yeah. So if you've got a distation, there's mail server and there's mail plus server. I just installed mail server. I didn't install mail plus. And you can migrate from one to the other if I ever want to. But for what I'm doing, mail server was great. And there's no user limit on mail server. Mail plus comes with five user licenses for free and then more. It's just me. But I figured if my family ever wanted to start doing this, why limit myself? I don't need a corporate mail server. I just need, you know, bare bones. So that's what I do. Yeah. I think it uses Dovcott is the open source. Oh, yeah, yeah. That it uses. Yeah. Yeah. So. I have another mail thing for that then later. OK. Not this time around. But yeah. And just I should probably give credit. So mail steward. Did you know Tim for port? I did. Of course, Tim was a Mac podcaster early on. Yeah. Pioneer. Yeah. Pioneer really. Yeah. At the very first podcast expo. Yeah. He was the one who turned me on to mail steward. Unfortunately, you know, Tim's not with us anymore. But yeah. Yeah. He was a great guy and a great member of the Mac community. And that's that's why I know about the mail steward. Totally. Yeah. I love that. I love that. I have. It is time for us to to to move out of the show. However, I because Pete's not here. I missed this YouTube comment earlier that T. Andrew Caddock on YouTube commented that Luminar AI from Skylum, I believe. Yeah. It has a remove power lines feature built into it. He says, I don't use the app, so I can't speak to its effectiveness. But it he's like that definitely works. So they definitely announced that as a specific feature. So I figured I would. I just wanted to share that before we. My old boss. My old boss from Nick software is at Skylum. Yeah. Right. Right. Yeah, very cool. And Adam speaking of I'll to my own horn for a moment here because I am certain in fact that when this episode releases on Monday the 22nd, it will be my one thousand nine hundred and ninety ninth podcast episode that I have produced in the last nineteen years. Yeah. So Wednesday's business brain episode I believe based on the math and all that stuff will be will be two thousand. But yeah, pretty. I don't know. I don't know what that says about it is kind of amazing. It's a lot of content. It's a lot of content. Yeah. Yeah. What I would like to do was go ahead. I was going to say what I always like to do with mine was, you know, like total up the number of hours of content that is and they convert it to like days and years. It's like crazy. Oh, yeah. Oh, I got to do that. There's like taking average, you know, like, yeah. Yeah. I just always took an average. I was like, you know, I did, you know, eight hundred and eighty one shows or whatever on average is probably about an hour over overall. So I wonder if I took if either I like I used Bing's AI and fed it the URLs of the feeds and told it. Yeah. Hey, look, count up the durations in each of these and tell me how many hours, days, you know, whatever I've I've spent like chat GBT or some AI would be very well suited to OK. I'm going to I'm going to do that experiment. That's great. I love that. That's that's good. But yeah, it's I credit the the ability to produce as many podcast episodes as I have with the one prime directive I gave myself when we started MacGicab, which of course is the first podcast I ever did. Was that I needed to create a workflow where I could publish the show. My initial like mandate to myself was that I could publish the show 15 minutes after we stopped recording. That's not in time. It's more like 25 now really. And there's some episodes where there's been like audio issues that are, you know, I'm here for hours or whatever. But basically I don't get out of this chair until the episode is either published if it's releasing immediately or in the can to, you know, scheduled to be released, you know, on whatever day it's supposed to go out. But that that workflow is is a big part of it. And I'm going to do some things this year, sort of diving in and teaching that some of the things I've learned about that workflow because I think there's some value in that for for some folks. Yeah. Now you tell me. We are very different people. We always told you I had an artisanal handcrafted cast. And it took very long. Yes. After I finished recording. That's why I gave myself that mandate. Right. We started MGG. You know, we already had Mac Observer going and that was like, you know, a lot like a really big focus for me at the time. We had Backbeat Media going. Big focus for me at the time. I had deals on the web going with Shannon Jean. Big, big focus for me. And then I was raising two kids and had a family and playing in probably three bands and I knew I know myself. If I allow myself the opportunity to edit, the perfectionist in me will come out and it will never get released on time. And somehow I knew that consistent release was going to be important for podcasts. Maybe I knew it as a listener. You know, it's like, I want to know that on Tuesday, this episode or whatever, you know, that I get to listen to the new at probably at the time, daily source code, you know. So I was like, no, I have to find a way where I don't let myself delay this. And obviously that's led to being really obsessive about audio quality and doing a ton of pre-production. But deadlines are great motivators, right? Like my pre-production must stop when we begin recording the episode. By definition, you know. So, yeah, so anyway. Yeah, that's the, yeah. Yeah. All right, folks, thanks for hanging out with us. Thanks to Cash Fly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Thanks to ZockDock.com slash MGG for sponsoring this episode. Of course, you can always go to MackieCup.com and see all of our sponsors at MackieCup.com slash sponsors. And thanks for hanging out with us, everybody. Thanks for your questions and your quick tips. You are the reason that we've been able to do so many episodes of this show. And we love that we get to do that. So thank you. Thank you. We got any advice form, Adam? Maybe advice for Pete? I don't know. Well, his shirt's not here, but I see you got to stand in. I think it says, don't get caught. Later.