 It's time for Matt Geekab, and listener James brings us our quick tip of the week. He says, I recently found myself scratching a developer itch by spending some time in Xcode, and he says, for reasons I can't fathom, the preview side of Xcode decided to start up a whole mess of copies of my app running in the background. None of them had doc icons, there was no way to know anything, except I could see them in the finders force quit window. Find option escape brings up the finders force quit window. It was then that I noticed all of these processes started killing them off one by one. And then I thought to check, can I do multiple app selections in the finders force quit window? And you can. You can click on multiples, you can select with the shift key and then force quit them all at once. For quick tips like this, plus your questions answered today on Matt Geekab 1031 for Monday, March 32, International Fun at Work Day 2024, and welcome to Matt Geekab the show where you send in quick tips like that, you send in questions that we answer, you send in cool stuff found, we share it all loosely organized into an agenda that gives us all the best opportunity to learn at least five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include factor meals dot com slash MGG 50 with code MGG 50 to get you 50% off your first box better help dot com slash geek gab better help dot com slash geek gab a little different to give online therapy a try and express VPN dot com slash MGG where you can go and get three extra months for free. We'll talk more about those in a little bit for now here in downtown Los Angeles while attending podcast movement this week. The last week, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in South Dakota, I'm Adam Christensen. Back here in cold and reedy, New Hampshire, it's pilot Pete could be with you guys. Dave, you sound tired. I hope not not to be offensive, but oh man. This has worn you out. Yeah, this week. Well, and it's, you know, we're doing this at nine a.m. Eastern while I'm here on the West Coast, but I'm flying home today. So, you know, there you go. You should be home by midnight. Uh, I will be home before midnight. Yeah. Well, yeah, we'll do the show. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It is one of my travel tips is starting my final day of the trip on whatever time zone I will end it on. It's, you know, that's a good plan to the best you can to the best you can. Right. I mean, it, you know, like where there are things last night that we were doing that would kept kept me up later than Eastern time would have. Yes. You know, so that's why I'm a little short on sleep here. But yeah, there you go. Yeah. Yeah. And I always find it easier to go West than East. It's easier to wake up the next morning because you're sleeping late. Absolutely. Yeah, you wake up too early the next morning is the problem. Yeah, exactly. Today's the today's the only day that I did not wake up on my own before the time that I had set my alarm today. Of course, because it's my final day here. Well, that and it's March 32nd. And it's March 32nd. Things are weird today. You know, it's also a national sourdough bread day. And in addition to, so you can, if you can have fun at work cooking sourdough bread, you know, that's the thing. There you go. But it was also their kind of day, right? It is Founder's Day. Apple, Apple Founder's Day. That is correct. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yeah. Oh, when you said that pre-show, I was thinking Patriot's Day, which is usually falls around April 15th somewhere. So we occasionally in New England get an extra day from the IRS because it's a Massachusetts holiday. Yeah. That's what I was thinking. April 1st. I'm going to get a year wrong. Was it 76 or 77? Oh, man. Yes. You should know this. Yes, I should. I want to say, I want to say 77. Yeah. But it, but I could be wrong. I mean, you're asking the guy with the least amount of sleep here. Right. That's not fair. Hey, how about I take us to a follow-on quick tip? 76. Yeah, please do. It was 76. Okay. There you go. All right. Yep. Thanks. So quickly with the one you opened, Dave, you mentioned the shift key, but you could also use the controls key to skip over applications in that force quick window to select multiple yet separated applications. Yes, fair. Yes. But one of the things I noticed is that if you go into the force quit window by hitting command option escape, then it comes up with a list. If you wanted to quit Finder, why you can't? Your only option is to relaunch it. Right? That's right. Yeah. Actually, you can though. If you open the terminal and you put in the command defaults, write comm.apple.finder, quit menu item dash B-O-O-L. You don't need to spell it out. We're just going to have them copy it from the show. It's in the show. And then true, you change your relaunch option to a quit option. So you can quit Finder. And if you ever needed to change it back, you could change that. Use that same command and put the end put false and it'll put it back to relaunch Finder. I don't know why sometime years ago, I decided I would want it to be able to quit Finder. I don't know why. Yeah. Well, yeah, as you're, as you're sharing this first, this is the first I've learned of it. I had no idea that you could, that there was even that toggle built into Mac OS. But then I started thinking, well, do I want to do this? I think I kind of usually want the Finder to relaunch after I quit it. Usually, every now and then I have, and I can't give you a specific example as to when, why, or how I wanted it to quit, but I did. Yeah. Maybe it was in a shutdown and it was hung up or something. Stuck. Yeah. Yeah. Well, in that case, you could use the terminal, right, Adam? I think you could. You could use the kill command, but I think it might even be easier. I think you probably could also kill it from Activity Monitor. Oh, yes. You will need to make sure you're viewing all processes. I think, oh, that's actually a user process. Finder would be a user process, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So you could just go in there, search for Finder, find the Finder, open it up and quit it. I originally found it. Quit button. And I don't remember the app, but it was like a service at the bottom of settings. Oh, interesting. Maybe not settings. No, it preferences. It was at the bottom of system preferences. It was one of the services is when an app you could add and it had a million different things that were essentially terminal commands. Yeah, right, right, right. Okay, yeah, that makes sense. To configure your computer. Yeah. Yeah, you're right, Adam. Use Activity Monitor to kill it. It would be the easy way. I mean, you can use, there's always ways in the terminal. In the terminal, you're going to have to run the command to find the process and figure out what process ID it is and then run the kill command on the right process ID, right? Well, that's one way. So what Adam's saying is you find, you have to, to you, there's a command on the Finder, sorry, let me start from the beginning on that. There's a command in the terminal called kill. And you feed it the ID of a process and it will attempt to kill that process. But you have to know the ID. And so to your point, you got to look at the process list, find the ID, which of course you could also do an Activity Monitor, but now you're sort of, you know, you're crossing the screen. Might as well just kill it from there. Yeah, exactly. But there is a command in the terminal kill all, seven characters all right together without a space, kill all space, and then you can give the process name. And the Finder is capital F. It has to match, but, you know, kill all Finder will go and just, it'll do, you know, it goes and creates a list on its own, enumerates it and goes through it. But yeah, so. Yeah, more nerdy terminal stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, Act, what is it? Lots of ways to practice animal cruelty. Excuse the cat. This is true. This is true. Tennessee. Oh, go ahead. I was just going to say, remind people that, you know, terminal with great power comes great responsibility, too. Like, if you're messing around with commands in there, be sure you know what you're doing. Like. Yeah, don't listen to the guy that's had four hours of sleep. Oh, we could possibly go wrong. Come on. Yeah, that's right. Let's see. Our arm. No, no, we're not even going to say it. We're not even going to say it. We're not going to lead somebody down the wrong road here. Everybody knows it's format C colon. Echo. Yes. That's great. All right. Tennessee Papa will save us with the next quick tip. He says, I had an end user complain that all of his render files from Premiere that were being saved to the file server were resulting in clips that would not playback properly damaged files. We had recently upgraded the version of Premiere he was running after lots of trial and error and no positive results. I took a look at the connection from his Mac to the file server. He was on AFP, Apple file protocol. In fact, almost all of his connections to various servers were AFP. Apple deprecated AFP years ago. And while it still works, every device manufacturer that supported it had to reverse engineer their own solution. Apple never really published one of those. Everybody that supported AFP that wasn't Apple had figured it out for themselves. Somehow a brand new window just opened up on my computer, which I love. Keep reading his question. This is amazing. He says, so I changed his connection over to SMB and all of the file transfers and renders are now smooth as silk. SMB 3.x is every bit as fast as AFP was. I would argue that it's even faster than AFP was. But I could be wrong about that. AFP is a very chatty protocol and doesn't do well. Like the faster, you don't get as much of a increase as you get faster and faster. So as the connection speed gets faster and faster. And I know AFP is Apple file protocol. What is SMB? Oh man, this is a question for John F. Kahn. Stomp the dummy. No, no. Samba was the word they came up with to, so that they didn't have to say SMB, but SMB, each stand for something. And it is. Oh, we've got it here. KiwiGram's in the chat. There you go. Server message block. Nice. So, yeah. Thank you KiwiGram. Yes. Yep. Here we are. I'm just going to play Stomp the Dummy all morning while I can. All right. We'll just do, it'll be the morning Samba here. Yeah. You know, we'll do our things. I was going to throw it all the way back to like Apple talk. Oh, local talk. Well, I guess Apple talk was the protocol. Local talk were the connectors, right? Yeah, the little phone jack ones digging way back in history there. Yeah, but that was kind of amazing. It was awesome. Yeah. Right. Like when you could first connect two computers together, my roommate, these are things you don't think about. When we were in college, you know, we were in freshman year in dorms, cement tents. You know, it's like how they are. We're at University of Connecticut. I heard they won a basketball game the other night. So, go Huskies. We both had Max and I had a printer. He did not. And it was like, well, if we could do local talk between the two rooms, we could share the printer. And this would be amazing. And of course, it's cement walls, though. So, you know, there's no drilling that's happening. But we found that they had retrofitted the rooms with ethernet cable, even though at the time we were not, there was nothing to plug into. There was no reason to use it for us. But they had retrofitted it with like ethernet or coax or maybe both. And where they had put the junction boxes, there was a hole drilled in the wall. So, we snaked a piece of phone cable through there and they had to resplice it on the other end because it wasn't big enough to send through with the connector. And then we had local talk between our two rooms. It was really cool. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. And now all the computers in the world are talking. Which is... I know. That was a difficult hurdle in the early days. Getting computers to talk to each other was not a simple task. I made a lot of money helping people get their computers to talk to each other. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Adam, are you going to save us or are you going to take us on another tangent? Yeah. We'll go down a different route. This came up in last week's show. I was like working with the show notes in the notes app where we have them. And I was trying to like click on something and we had a note that had been like double quoted. So it had two greater than signs just on a line by itself. And when I clicked there, a drop down menu appeared with like the titles of other notes that were in the notes app. And I was like, that was weird. And it took me a while to figure out what was going on. And then I realized that apparently in notes, if you type two greater than symbols on a line by itself, it will pop open a list. And then you can select one of those and it'll create a link to another note. Really? And can you filter more from there? Like if you put the two greater thans in and then say keep typing, does it allow you to filter that list? Like if I know I want notes from Adam. I believe so. I haven't tried that. I did not try that. I just thought it was weird. Like this menu was appearing out of nowhere. Yeah, right, right, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I get that. That's like and if I type Adam. Oh yeah. Yes, for sure. That exactly works, Dave. Yeah. Look at that. Yeah, and I don't know how it determines what shows up in the list. Probably the most recently edited ones. It starts with most recently edited. And then when you do that thing and start typing, the options change. The list filters, but you also get an option to create a new note with the title of whatever text you have just typed. So you can you can create the note to which you are going to link. It doesn't have to previously exist. Yeah, yeah. My other favorite one just to add on to this for tips is the tags. So I like to use tags to organize my notes in addition to just having them in folders. So if I have subjects around them, like I have ones for grocery items or like I'll often put into notes like measurements for like things that I need to buy for the house or whatever. Yeah. So I will tag those. So if you just on a line by itself, usually at the bottom, I throw it, but I think you can put it anywhere in the note. You just put a hashtag and then a keyword or a tag that you want. And that will add it to a little tags section. And then you can filter through your tags. So you don't need to create the tag beforehand. You just what you it it knows on the fly. If you put it in, you know, the pound sign, hashtag, whatever we call it these days. Yep, got it. Cool. Cool. I like it. How about I take us to Scott. Thank you, please. Yeah. So Scott wrote in, he says, I've been using shortcuts as I have been using these shortcuts as part of other shortcuts and automations in addition to invoking them via Siri. Oops, I'm sorry. Via the s lady. Cancel that. There we go. Now I can continue. Given your comments on the most recent episode, I thought you might find them useful. And he sent me shortcuts to silence unknown callers off and silence unknown callers on. I added them and it formatted my hard drive. No, just kidding. Just install and install first, ask questions later. Exactly. What could possibly go wrong? So I added those and of course it synced right over to my phone because they aren't compatible with Mac and it says so right in there. And then as I was playing around, I'm like, well, I've got to open shortcuts and then go to that shortcut to turn it on or turn it off because when I asked the s lady to do it, she was cantankerous. It wouldn't play nice. So how am I going to do this easily? So I went one step further to run the shortcut shortcut as an app. I open shortcuts. I press and hold that shortcut and then I go to details. And under details, I edit the home screen, add the home screen. Sure. And now I've got a shortcut to silence unknown callers and allow unknown callers on my home screen. And this is just a like there's it's not a custom shortcut action like this is built in. It's built into it's built into the shortcuts to iOS or whatever. Yeah. And then but the fact that you can add a shortcut is a is an iOS app essentially. Yeah. What it comes down to. Yeah, I am your yes. Now you can quickly fill up your home screen with that sort of thing that that becomes problematic. I understand. But that's something I would use all the time. And so yeah. Yeah, we had a question that I actually didn't prep for for this show, but it's worth kind of tugging on this thread a little bit. Your idea of saving a shortcut to your iPhone home screen to make life easier to get to an app or to get to the shortcut. You can do this with a lot of things. And this one listener was heading into the hospital for a few days and for whatever we didn't share details nor would we share them with you if they had, but for whatever reason they were not going to be able to speak for several days after whatever this procedure was. And they knew this going in. OK, and so what he did was created a bunch of like speech to text files on his or shortcuts in his shortcuts app and and wanted to it was like, how do I play these? Can I save him his audio files and play them? He wanted to like a sound deck app for the for the iPhone. And that's a geek challenge. I don't know of any sound deck apps for the iPhone, but I'm sure they exist. So if they if they do feedback at MacGeekApp.com. Hold on. Where? I think it's at feedback at MacGeekApp.com. Oh, feedback at MacGeekApp.com. OK, that's the one. But like a sound deck app meaning a place where you just put a bunch of different sound clips and you can trigger them, you know, as needed. And I thought, well, if there's if such an app exists, we'll help you find it and go from there. But in the meantime, you could just create one custom home screen that home screen that has all of those shortcuts and you tap the one you want. And now your iPhone natively has become its own little sound deck app. And and that's what he did. He wound up setting that up and he's like, this works amazing. Says it works great. So now is it iOS 17? I think is where you can create your own voice, the personal voice. Yeah. Yeah. And I would imagine there'd be a way to make that integrate it. So that's that's what he was using. Like you. Yeah. Yeah. OK. That's what he was using. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Have you done that? I have. It takes some overnight time on your phone, though. Yeah. I don't. Have you done it, Adam? Yeah, I did. Yeah. It's pretty interesting. So talk about it a little bit. Like what? How are it? Does it sound like you and it like it just becomes you? Yeah. I mean, a bit. But yeah, the training is like crazy. You have I forget how many hundreds of like 150 phrases you have to say phrases you have to read to it. And then it goes off and like Pete says it'll process for however long and then that voice becomes available. I was hoping I could use it for to replace Siri just to be creepy, but you can't do that. It's just for like text to speech stuff. Okay. Okay. Huh. Oh, yeah. That would be wild. Having your own phone answer you back and you're in your own voice. I think I asked this the last time we talked about it. But, you know, I happen it just so happens I have this huge archive of thousands of hours of myself speaking. Right. Could I instead of going through the training, could I just give it a couple of files and tell it off off to the races, buddy? They want you to say very specific. Oh, that phrase is I think they're they're I think it I think they figured out exactly what they need to do to like train this thing. Right. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. When when sounds good. When it's a day come that our voices become like we find our own voice on the internet randomly because seriously like we've probably already it happens there now. We've published thousands of hours. Obviously, if you take a voice and feed it into one of these machines, you can make it something sound approximately like that. Like when is that going to happen? Yeah, you're right. It already happened. It's already happened. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, deep fakes. There are problems. I mean, oh, yeah. Figured out how to, you know, have Lucas call you and say, Dad, I've been arrested. I need you to, you know, get me some target gift cards. Yes. To get bail out. That's yeah. That's like, you know what, son, if you're using target gift cards to bail yourself out of jail, you deserve to stay the night. There you go. I'll come get you in the morning. I honestly don't think it would be too hard to build and train an AI to basically do my podcast that I used to do. Yeah. Yeah. And Allison did it. You with 11 or whatever that was. Yeah. Yeah. Allison shared in it. Yeah. It's a little cast. I think it was Kiwi Graham just pointed that out in discord. Oh, she did. She created a whole Yeah. She had learned AI. We know when she got back from Antarctica. Yeah. I think it's 11. I thought about it. I dug into it not that long ago. A couple of months ago. Sounds something 11. Yeah. But I dug into it. I'll find it. For the ad reads, right? Because the only thing that is scripted on the show other than the questions that you send us, which is your scripts, are the ad reads. And as I say, I'd let ChatGPT write them for me and then I read them because I got to a point where I was, as you all know, probably more than me, that I got newer rut. You know, if it was the same sponsor, I'd say the same thing almost exactly. And that was just boring. So I figured make it fun. But like I figured, well, if I'm writing these ad scripts, like, why not then just feed it into an AI that sounds like me? And it doesn't. I actually created like to, you know, I recorded an ad and then I played the ad via this engine. And it sounds kind of like me. But the cadence is off. Yeah. That's the same thing with the same thing with the personalized voice. That's the thing is it doesn't really learn your speaking style. It learns your inflection and tone. And, you know, so like that stuff sounds correct. But where you might naturally pause, where you might have certain idiosyncrasies or ticks or things like that, you know, it's not going to get those. Yep. Yep. Exactly. I'm going to stop editing. Yes. You're going to stop editing. We're fighting each other again. We're fighting each other again. We're fighting each other again. We're fighting each other again. We're fighting each other again. We're breaking the stream. But it's 11labs.io is what we were trying to find for them. Yep. And it's in the show notes. Speaking of chat GPT. Yes. PC Unix chimed in on our Regex conversation from, I think it was last episode or maybe the previous one. I always forget my brain. But we were talking about Regex and, you know, writing regular expressions to, you know, do string parsing and do things. And he says, I've used, I used to use rather Regex's in VI and to edit text files. But it's easier to just use chat GPT and it can do things that you'd be hard pressed to do otherwise. Consider these prompts which were followed by a text file. In this file, the second line indicates the date I wrote a post on Medium and its read length. Show me both lines where the read time is five minutes or more. From the same file, show me the stories written in the second week of the month increase prices in this file by 10 percent unless the item is gold. Increase those by 20 percent. Remove all lines that begin with published. So that would be a gnarly, gnarly Regex. Like I don't even worry to start. But apparently chat GPT can do it. Yeah. Yeah, of course. Let it write its own Regex. Solve this problem however you like. Just give me the answer, please. Of course, you'd have to spot check those answers like that. That is the thing with chat GPT that at least that I found thus far is with things like Apple scripts, it comes back. It is strong and wrong sometimes. It's like, yep, here's an Apple script that will do this. And I but the good part is you can test it like you don't you know, it is objectively correct or incorrect. And and then you tell it the error message and it's like, I'm sorry, I got that wrong. You're right. Here's the right script. And then, you know, usually a couple of it only takes an iteration or two. And it gets you there. So yeah, you turned wrong, but never in doubt. Right. You basically turned a coding task into a debugging task. Correct. Correct. Yes. Like knowing Apple script helps, right, having a functional knowledge of Apple script. But you're right. Now I'm just editing someone else's crummy code instead of writing my own crummy code. I mean, it's the same thing you would do if you were using Stack Overflow or, you know, all the other places that we use things, right? Like, yeah, you know, if you're going to pull code, what you're looking for is, hey, I don't know where to start with this thing. Give me a starting point or give me some education on I'm not sure how to do this. Show me some ways to do this. And then you suss it out from there. Yep. And a nice part about chat GBT versus Stack Overflow when you're solving exactly those coding problems, because that like prior to chat GBT it was you'd find you if you googled you were going to find yourself on Stack Overflow. So you might as well start there. Right. Right. And then you'd find but on Stack Overflow, often you would not find a code stamp sample that did exactly what you were trying to do or at least attempted to do exactly what you were trying to do. You'd find something adjacent and you'd have to massage it a little bit to, you know, begin to have it in the realm of what you might want to do. Whereas with chat GBT, oftentimes because it can synthesize all of that stuff together, it, you know, the first thing it builds you is at least aimed at doing what you want to do, not something adjacent to it. And you still might have to debug it, but it's a huge leg up. Yeah. Yeah. It gives you a starting point. Yeah. It does. Exactly. Yep. All right. We got a couple of follow up quick tips here. We'll start with Kent from referring back to episode 1030. So last week's episode says you talked about Simon's quick tip on using quick look where you can hold down the spacebar and quick look will just stay up as long as you have the spacebar down. If you're on a finder window and select multiple files or all of them using Command A and then press the spacebar, the first item will preview and then you can use the left and right arrow keys to cycle through the selected files. So this way you're not just going through the entire list of files. You're only going through the files you've selected. If you then click the maximize button in the upper left of the items window, in addition to quick look going full screen, you also get a small toolbar that allows you to play or pause a slideshow or to shrink down the images. I know to a contact sheet this works best with a folder of images but works well with other items too. He does add. There's a quirk though for at least some users. If you select all and then the spacebar, the image that pops up is the last one rather than the first as you might expect. And if you use the right arrow to move through the files, it actually moves backwards from the last one to the first one. He says this has existed through several iterations of Mac OS as far back as Big Sur and I haven't found a fix. So just bear that in mind if you're selecting all. But of course if you're selecting all, oh I guess for the full screen thing you would need that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. In order you want to go. Yeah. Yeah. I know that full full screen quick look thing like what? That was fascinating. Right? Yeah. Why does that exist? Why don't they tell us that exists? There you go. Because I'll tell you what, I mean it'd be a cool way to, you know, then screencast to your TV to share photos with somebody and not have to create a a slideshow. It creates one for you. It creates one for you. Yes, on the fly, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, it's weird that they built that and right? Like here we are almost, you know, in our 20th year. So There you go. Yeah. Yep. I don't know. Yeah, that may be a show title, huh? Yeah. Don't they tell us that exists? That's, yeah, that's, that's. Why don't they tell us? Why don't they tell us? Yeah. Ben told us some things. He did. So why don't you guys go take a break, come on back in half an hour and we'll be done. Great. Sounds good. Ben sent. I'm going to take a nap. Yeah. Ben sent a plethora of quick tips and items and all that. So practically an entire show agenda and some really good stuff. First one would be preserve camera settings. In episode 1009, I recall Adam speaking about the live photo settings in camera. I wanted to make sure folks who prefer live photo to not be enabled by default know that iOS has some camera settings related to this in settings, camera, preserve settings. It's possible to have the camera app open with various states retained from the previous session. Most notably, you can preserve camera mode rather than resetting it to photo. You can preserve live photo rather than resetting it to on. It can be difficult to interpret the latter setting when the toggle is enabled and you switch off live photo in the camera app. It will stay off until the next time you switch it on. So and then that makes my brain hurt, Pete. I was supposed to be taking a nap. I know, right? Sorry. It's a little counterintuitive, but play with it. Right, play with it. Yeah, it's nothing can break. Just install it. It's going to be fine. Yeah. And then run. Yes. That's right. Yeah. Okay, then we're also talking about minimizing windows to an application icon in 1009. Rod L. tipped about minimizing windows to app icons instead of separate dock icons. And Dave, you commented that to get the minimize windows back you have to click on the app icon and the windows will restore. And to see which windows are minimized in the app and restore a specific window, right click on that app icon or command click. And the minimize windows will come up with a little menu and the minimize windows will be prefixed, prefixed. Prefixed? Sure. With a diamond in front of it. And then you just select that one to restore it. So that's how you can pull up individual ones. Because if you just click on it, he goes into a whole thing about how Mac OS chooses for you which window is going to open. Oh, I got it. Yeah, I got it. Okay. But by command clicking it, you can select the one you want to open with a diamond in front of it, saying diamond showing this is one of your minimized windows. Sure, sure. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then I think Adam and I all get into a discussion here on this one a little bit. The iOS device backups in 1029 Andrew asked about backing up his iPhone at some point in this. Adam commented about the backup encryption option being a benefit to making a local backup via the fighter and formerly iTunes. I think this too, I used to think this too. And I do still sometimes make a local backup before a major iOS upgrade. However, backups to the cloud are also encrypted. But what was not always obvious to me was that the encrypt local backup setting is a subset of the option to backup all data. On your iPhone to this Mac. Separate from backup your most important data on your iPhone to iCloud to be sure the checkbox is labeled with local. All the private data types that are included in the encrypted local backup and excluded from an unencrypted local backup are also included in the iCloud backup, which is of course itself encrypted. And then I think later on we get into the question about encrypting that encrypting stuff before it goes as to the to the cloud, which as I always called was pi pre-internet encryption. Yeah, yeah. I don't have a lot to add on this one. Other than yeah, we're going to talk a little bit later about more, I think some of the details of iCloud encryption. An option. Oh yeah. We do have some of that coming up. Absolutely. Yep. This stuff makes my brain hurt though. Like these are weird, like Ben found weird things to make us think about. A lot of them. So thank you Ben. But wow. One at a time dude. Oh no, we love all the feedback. Yeah we do. It's okay whatever pace it comes in. It's totally fine. Right. We did, we got a lot this week though. Like I went to prep things and it was like this, that the list is long. Like what happened here? The last one, at least on the quick tips I believe for this week it comes from Richard who says as most people probably know the position of the spotlight search overlay on macOS can be changed by simply dragging it to a new location when it's open. That's true. He says you can also change the vertical height of the search overlay from its bottom edge. So my tip he says is to combine these two. Drag the overlay to the top of the screen. Let's say top middle, run a search and then extend the vertical height to his take to so that it takes up most of the height of your screen. MacOS now remember this new location and size of the spotlight search overlay so that every time you search you get a full height search results window showing as many results as possible without scrolling. I love this idea like why not make it a little bigger, right? You know, this was a conversation in Discord and James kind of dovetailed in and he says if you ever move it out of the way or too much or want to reset it press and hold on the spotlight magnifying glass icon in your menu bar and it will reset the position back to center. So that I also had no idea about. That I didn't know about no. Yeah, yeah. Cool. Yeah, I know. Yeah, it's fun. I just did it as you were talking about it for the first time. That's brilliant. Yep. It's I agree. Yeah. So it's pretty good. So yeah, feedback at maciegov.com folks that's where you're sending in all the quick tips everything else as well. We love it and we will keep on keep on sharing. All right, folks. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Quick question. How's your social battery these days? If you're anything like me juggling tech life and maybe a bit of socializing you might find your battery somewhere between needs a charge and where's the nearest outlet? I'm drained. Being a therapy myself, I've learned it's not just about fixing something. It's about understanding your own settings. Like how many social apps can I run before I crash? Therapy has been a game changer for me. Kind of like upgrading my RAM. It just makes everything run a little smoother. And if you're thinking but where do I even start? Our sponsor BetterHelp is like the cloud storage for your mental health. It's all online, super flexible and you don't have to leave your tech cave to get help. You fill out a questionnaire and they match you with a licensed therapist. Not clicking with them? Switch with a click. No hard feelings. So don't get caught with your mental battery on 1%. Find your social sweet spot with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash geek gab today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp H-E-L-P dot com slash geek gab and check out BetterHelp. It's time to optimize your mental OS and our thanks to BetterHelp for sponsoring this episode. All right, look, have you ever felt like your streaming life is stuck on a loading loop just circling around the same old shows? Well, hold on to your keyboards because the system can work better when you use our sponsor ExpressVPN. Picture this, right? One night, I'm diving into the multiverse madness of Rick and Morty on French Netflix. Wee wee monomy. The next I'm laughing my tech savvy socks off with Always Sunny in Philadelphia via UK Netflix and it's all thanks to our sponsor ExpressVPN. All I did was fire up ExpressVPN, select the country with the shows we wanted and bam, it's like we're digital globetrotters unlocking a world of content faster than you can say buffering. It's super fast, works on all our gadgets and even shields our data from those sneaky cyber snoopers. So don't get caught in a streaming rut with ExpressVPN, your watch list goes global. It's like giving your Netflix a passport minus the photo where you look like a suspicious cartoon villain, you know. 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Filet mignon after a flight? Don't mind if I do. And for those of us who measure cooking time and browser refreshes Factor's a game changer. No chopping, no prepping and certainly no cleaning up unless you count the two minute microwave beep as effort. With Factor, it's like having your own culinary pit crew ensuring you're fueled and ready to go. Whether it's back to the tech grind or gearing up for your next adventure. So don't get caught with your tech down and your stomach empty. Head to factormeals.com slash MGG 50 and use code MGG 50 to get 50% off your first box plus 20% off your next box. That's code MGG 50 at factormeals.com slash MGG 50 to get 50% off your first box plus 20% off your next box while your subscription is active. Fuel up and get back to what you love minus the kitchen time and our thanks to Factor for sponsoring this episode. All right. Yes. Yeah, Adam, you want to take us to our first question? Yeah, we got Kathy who has a great question about iCloud encryption. This is one we were alluding to earlier. She says, I was a long time listener with the Maccast and started listening to MGG when Adam moved over. Well, thank you for coming along. I love the show, although I do miss Adam's Apple News summary. Well, maybe we can do something about that eventually. My question is related to cloud backups, specifically iCloud. I am more aligned with Adam's philosophy of multiple backups. Good. However, I restrict cloud backups to non-personal information. In other words, I have no offsite backup for my financial documents. According to Apple's website, no one else can access your end-to-end encrypted data, not even Apple. And this data remains secure in the case of a data breach in the cloud. My concern is that should this policy change or should there be a technical glitch all my financial documents would be exposed? I was considering compressing my financial docs into a tar file and encrypting that before pushing to iCloud. My thoughts are at least my files would not be exposed if iCloud policies or conditions should change. So the question is, do you see any technical issues with doing this? Any encryption method recommendations? Thanks for your help and suggestions, Kathy. That's a great question and I'm happy that Kathy followed you over here. I don't know, this is amazing. So I think the logic is sound on this, right? If you want to store something on someone else's server and be certain that they would never be able to get at that data, then encrypting that data before you ever put it on their server with a key that only you have and you know that only you have makes perfect sense. And certainly you could use tar. I mean, that's the nerdy way to go. We love that here, right? But you could use tar to do that and that would work fine. But I think an easier way and one that requires less recurring maintenance because you'd have to be like either you'd have to either script this or you'd have to tar up the file every time you wanted to, you know, you made an update to it. Instead of doing all that, make an encrypted disk image. You use that, use disk utility, you can do that, you make it encrypted, give it a password. Save that encrypted image in a folder that's automatically synced to iCloud. Inside that encrypted disk image, you put all of your financial files. When you want to edit one of your files, you open up the disk image, typing in your key to unencrypt it, and then just manipulate the files on the drive like you normally would. And as you do that, the drive will update and the drive will sync to iCloud. And it would be worth testing this to make sure that, you know, it's okay because syncing a disk image could be weird. But that's where I would start. I would experiment with that and see how it goes. I don't know. There's a couple of discord suggestions already too. Okay. The proton drive is suggested by Kiwi Graham and Tennessee Papa suggests cryptometer to encrypt all your data to the cloud, even on iCloud. Not familiar with either one of those, but... Yep. Yep. Yep. I was going to come in on Dave's response because that's exactly what I've been doing for years. I have an encrypted disk image. I just call it secure documents. It's in my documents folder, which syncs. And even better than having to enter your password, if you save that password to your keychain, it will just mount... Like you can just mount that drive and not have to enter a password every time. You could also automate mounting of that volume. Yes. I just do it when I'm going to do that. The other thing is that I keep in there, so not only documents, but I use paperless for scanning in all my documents, so I don't have to keep them in file folders or whatever, and I organize everything in that. Great application from... Now I'm going to forget the name of the company. But I've been using that for years, and I store my paperless library because it uses a library file, kind of like iPhone or whatever, in that encrypted disk image as well. So all those documents are encrypted in there and then go up to iCloud. But I wanted to comment also on the iCloud encryption stuff, like we were talking about earlier. So iCloud has something called Advanced Data Protection. And when you turn that on, basically everything that goes to iCloud, almost everything, iCloud Mail is an exception, so you need to be aware of that. But almost everything is then end-to-end encrypted, and the keys are stored and attached to your devices locally. So when Apple says they cannot decrypt or read those files, if you're using advanced data protection, then they will not be able to do that because they don't have access to your... They literally don't have the keys. They cannot do anything. And so when you set that up, you also want to probably set up the feature like I did this with my wife. You can set up the ability for her if something happens to me to take over my devices and my keys, you can create backup keys that you can put in a safe storage location like a bank box or whatever. Yeah, and there's a list on there that shows you the differences between having this on and not having this on. So it'll show you what services are just encrypted in transit, where Apple has the keys, and then what ones when you turn this on are flipped over. So there's a... Oh, is this how to turn it on? I found an article about how to turn it on in some of that stuff. Yeah, I had some links in the note. There's a link to the advanced data protection and there is a table that shows you everything. And pretty much once you turn on advanced data encryption, everything is in encrypted, I think other than iCloud mail. Got it, got it. And that's still encrypted in transit and on Apple service. But I think in that case, the keys are still stored with Apple. With Apple, that would make sense. Yeah, exactly. And I think that's mainly so they can... You know, you can read your emails and stuff when you're logging into iCloud. Yep, yeah, this chart that they have is great. Yeah, the iCloud mail they talk about. Oh, it looks like it has keys. Mail calendars and contacts are stored with Apple. And again, I think that's so they can do iCloud functionality. Yeah, but yeah, that's... Yeah, there's just a column you write for key storage. And other than those three, everything else is the keys are on your trusted devices. You have to... You can't have a device... I think everything needs to be on iOS 13 or newer in order to turn this on. Because I have a bunch of old iPads that I use for... Like on stage or to use with a mixer or whatever because they don't need to be the latest and greatest. It works out fine. But because I have those on my Apple ID, I have not been able to enable this yet. And you have to add... There's a bunch of requirements. You have to have two-factor. You have to have... But I think Apple's pretty much forced that across the board these days. And it's getting less annoying with past keys and stuff. Yeah, it would be hard to not use two-factor authentication on my Apple account, my Apple ID. That would be difficult to do. I don't think it would be possible. Yeah, and I would presume... I didn't look into this, but I would presume that the key storage also relies on your devices having secure enclave or more modern devices. Because I think it's stored in that chip. I'm pretty sure I'm guessing there a little bit. So don't quote me on that. But I would imagine that's the case. Makes sense. Yeah, yeah. Are we moving on? Pete, do you have anything more to add to this? I'm just sitting here thinking. And it's a philosophical question, I guess, more than anything. To what degree state-level decryptors can get at this stuff anyway? Well, they'd have to first get your device. So that's the thing. Right. Fair enough. Well, if they were able to get the data off the cloud, could they ever decrypt it? Oh, just brute force or other methods without your keys, like when creating your keys. Eventually, there will be a computer fast enough to do it. Yes. The question is, will we still be using today's encryption algorithm when those computers are existing? Yeah, that's the promise of quantum computing, right? Yeah, that's exactly right. If a nation-state actor or somebody really wants my bank documents that bad, I have way bigger problems. Fair enough. Your problems are not related to what's in your bank account. That's a fair statement, Adam. Not to minimize that. I never want to be flippant about that statement, because I don't buy into the thing like no one wants access to my stuff. Oh, no, your statement didn't come across as flippant. It made perfect sense. You just, there's a bigger umbrella sort of. If it's a state that wants it, yeah, you've got problems. You've got problems. Paperless is by Mariner Software, thanks to Berry MK1 in the Discord chat. Yeah, Mariner Software, they make great Mac apps. For half a year. This might be, I don't know if paperless is the only one they have left. I haven't gone back. They had Mariner right for a long, long time. Oh, I remember that. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, shall we move on to Mark here? Yeah, yeah. So Mark has to say, Mark asks, he says, I've always avoided using Time Machine because I use other backup schemes. But something happened the other day, and I'm trying to figure out if Time Machine would have helped me from getting caught. I had a file on an external connected hard drive accidentally get deleted. I didn't notice this until a few days later. If I had Time Machine running, would it also allow me to go back a few days and retrieve this file? I am thinking the answer is no, because this external hard drive has over 28 terabytes on it. It's actually a four disk RAID that appears as one device. And unless I had a Time Machine drive set up with at least that amount of storage, it would not back it up. That's correct. In the end, I did not get caught, but it was a pain retrieving the file and re-recovering it. It says I'm using Crash Plan Pro and their UI for finding a file is not the greatest, but at least I found it. Yeah, Adam, you want to start with this one? Yeah, so are we sure that the thing I ask here is, are we sure that Time Machine has to have a one to one? Because it's my understanding, it watches for changed files, and it keeps the most recent stuff and pushes out older stuff. So my concern here would be just because of the size of that drive, if you didn't have a large Time Machine backup, you wouldn't have much history to go back, right? But if it's just a couple days and you're not changing files on that drive a lot, it might have worked. I wouldn't probably risk it. Like, I get where that statement comes from, but yeah. But yeah, no, you need to use some other sort of backup scheme. And the one I use for this is Backblaze, honestly. It creates a history and it will back up external drives and it's unlimited storage, and it has a way to go back in time and find different versions of a file. So, you know, having that multiple, that's why I have multiple backup schemes, right? Some things are good at one thing, some things are good at others. And what I love about Backblaze is unlimited storage and you can go back. I think they limit you to... If you don't continuously back up, I think they'll send you a warning unless you're on one of their pro plans that they're going to start deleting stuff. But so, like, if you take your backup offline and they can't see what's been changing, I know I've gotten warnings on that before, but as long as you're continuously using the service, the default service, I think you're fine. You can go back, you know, I think as far as you want. I know, I don't know how far back it goes, but I've used that in the past. So that's the only thing I can think of. You besides just creating an archive or whatever, I have my Chrono Sync also, which I sync to my Drobo and I... We've talked about this setting. It has a setting where you can say, you know, sync this folder over, but don't sync deletions. So anything that I delete never gets purged off of that. Oh, so the act of the deletion is not synced. Correct. Yeah. So if the copy on the Drobo will stay there forever unless I go actually delete it, even if I delete it in the local folder. That's okay. Yeah, that's a nice safety net. I mean, you need to be aware, obviously, that things might start to fill up. But yeah, the not syncing of deletions, that's... Yeah, I like that. That's good. Got anything else? Well, you do it on a folder. With Chrono Sync, I'm doing everything on a folder by folder basis. So it just depends on what folders I care about. Right? Yep. Yep. So because it's my archive, what I call my archive storage, I know I can safely do anything over here and I'm going to have a copy over there. It's your safety net. Yeah. Do you ever go through and prune things out of that archive storage? Or do you just... No, I just put in bigger drives. Yeah, that's the answer. More power. Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, the cost for a terabyte of data five years from now will almost certainly be less expensive than the cost of it today. Right? So you just keep adding storage as you create it. And... Yeah, I mean, inevitably, a drive fails. I get the light. I buy a bigger drive and I put that one in and now I have more. That's one of my favorite things. Drobo certainly were the first to bring that concept to consumers, the concept of having a multi-drive array of disks that appeared as one. That was stood failure. Well, even if it didn't withstand failure, but the idea of having multiple size drives in that, a mix of different size drives, because with traditional RAID, all the drives need to be exactly the same size. And that's fine in a corporate environment, but for those of us at home, like you just said, Adam, a drive's going to fail. I'll pull it out, replace it with a larger drive, and that's a way to grow your thing kind of very organically over time. And Drobo were the first to bring that to us. Obviously, Synology with their Synology Hybrid RAID does the same thing on many, but not all of their network storage devices. And it really, there are some companies that, like QNAP, never embraced this hybrid RAID thing, the Beyond RAID, like Drobo called it, where you can have multiple size drives. And I've tried to explain to them, for those of us that are prosumers, nerds at home, we really like this idea of it doesn't have to be, I know it sacrifices a little bit of efficiency. My drive's still reading right faster than my gigabit ethernet, so all good there. You know, like, I want this flexibility so that I can slowly just let my storage pool grow over time. And that's a powerful thing. And it's easy to overlook until you're living it. And then you realize, oh, this is super convenient to be able to just do this. Yep. So you just mentioned gigabit ethernet, your drives and all that. And I just, as I was putting together the second Synology drive last night, I noticed multiple ethernet ports in the back of it. Do I increase my speed by putting multiple ethernet cables into the switch? The answer is yes. However, there's an asterisk. Well, no, with Synologies and other things that do this too, that have multiple ethernet ports, you can plug them both into the same switch. So like, if you have two ethernet ports on your Synology, you run two ethernet cables, plug them into the same switch. There are ethernet protocols for bonding those two together if the switch and the device support it. And if there are not, if you're just using a switch that isn't quote unquote smart and you can't go tell it what to do, then the Synology will bond them together on its own. And there are some limitations that come with operating that way. But if that's the only way you can operate, it's fine. What it gets you is not two gigabytes of bandwidth, but two one gigabyte streams. And so if one of your Macs is connected to it, it will get one gig. And then another Mac connected to it, it would put that on the other one and sort of balance it, like load balance it intelligently. And so in theory, you could have two gigs worth of data if your drives can support that kind of speed, happening simultaneously, but not to the same computer. Like if you had a computer on 10 gig, that would not work, but to two separate devices, at least as I understand it. If somebody, I get out of my element in this stuff pretty quickly, but somebody knows. I was thinking more for the hyper backup program between one Synology drive to another would they? You know, that's it. Yes, I can confirm because I have two disc stations, one that hyper backups to the other, they're both Etherneted in with two cable, each Etherneted in with two cables. Okay. And I have seen hyper backup performance faster than the 108 megabytes per second that is sort of the max that you see with gigi. I've seen it at like 150, 160. So yeah, it does. Yes. Okay. Last stupid question because I'm playing stump the dummy this morning. You know it. Dude, I had four hours of sleep. So, you know. Any benefit or would Ethernet cable from one Synology drive directly to the other, vice through the switch? Skipping bypassing the switch. Yes. Yes. People have done that. Generally, the reason is to keep the Synology to Synology traffic from like cluttering up the switch or if you want to have it on its own private network or wherever, like you can do that. But I can't, like in my home or in your home, I can't think of a reason why you would want to. Right. Okay. Like neither of us is running so much data through our switches that we would actually be hitting some sorts of limits. I mean, it's like those limits are, compared to what we do, they are astronomical. Okay. Yeah, but maybe there's another reason to create like your own little land between the two distations and because that's what you would do is, you know, give them static IP addresses on those second Ethernet ports and then they know to talk to each other in secret. So, I guess there's a security thing, right? If you know somebody's not, if it's not on the switch, then somebody sniffing can't see it. Well, fair enough. Yeah. But again, like at home, to your point earlier about Adam's bank account issue, if you're worried about somebody sniffing what's happening on your switch in your house, like that, there's another thing going on, right? I was just thinking of speed, direct speed. May it help there? I don't, I mean, I think there's an, like if we get into the electrons, maybe, like clearly it's not going through the switch. So, there's no middleman. So, technically faster by, you know, a quarter of a millisecond or, I don't know. I don't think it's going to matter. Okay. Yeah. So, shall I pull us out of this rabbit hole that I dragged us down? If you want, or drag us further down it. Okay, you guys are in charge today. I don't know. Yeah, there we go. Steve wrote in with a question. And I think you have the answer to this, Dave. So, I'm going to ask you another question, Dave. Oh, man. 25 plus years of using Max and Steve is stumped. So, here we go, Dave. Well, it's not the end of the world. Why are older versions of apps showing up with the open with function? I've tried clearing out the launch services database with cocktail. What else can I do? Thoughts? Yeah, I have some thoughts. If you've cleared out, so these, when you put an app on your computer, it does get added to the launch services database, right? And that's what, when you go to like open a file, right click on a file, you say open with, it shows you all the apps that have registered themselves as being able to open that type of file, right? It's a pretty cool little thing. So, you get it filtered down by things that have at least advertised on the surface. I'll take that kind of file, sure. If that, if you've reset launch services database, you know, then in theory, nothing should be there. So, what this tells me is that those apps are there. They're still there on your system, somewhere, on a clone drive, right? On, you know, buried in a folder somewhere if you have, you know, applications old because there was some weird upgrade that happened. Like, I don't know. So, to slew this out, what I would do is let a file open in one of these mystery apps because then it'll appear in your doc and then you can right click on it in the doc and say reveal and find her. And then you're gonna know at least where one of these is and my guess is, you know, where there's smoke, there's fire, you're gonna find, if not all of them in one place, groups of them and you'll start to see a pattern and figure out maybe how it got this way. But, yeah. And then clean my Mac to get rid of it. Yeah, use clean my Mac to clean your LSD. That's right. Your launch services database, not the other thing. Interesting. One of the reasons why I typically exclude my applications folder from backups and clones and stuff. Yeah, that's an interesting thing. I mean, that is a much safer decision to make today than it was 10 years ago with everything, most everything being available for redownload online or even via the app stores. Right. You could get caught losing. If you have really, really old apps, yeah, yeah. Yeah, something custom that you found like in the corner of the internet somewhere and that website went down and you just installed it and ran it and didn't care that it's been siphoning off your bank accounts for the last 10 years. But our account, I don't know about the bank account thing, but you could archive those app installers too, you know. Yes. If you're worried about that, keep all your old app installers somewhere and back those up. I don't know. No, I do. I do. I have a folder on my disk station that is, you know, it's labeled installers and it's a mess. I mean, I'm sure I could go in there and be like, okay, well, I can get rid of, you know, I can clear up four terabytes of data by doing this. I still have an entire CD binder full of Mac addict. Oh, wow. Yeah. And that is a treasure trove of like old, old, old shareware apps, like just everything's on those disks. And I think somebody has a database on the line that'll tell you like what's on what disk. Oh, so you don't have to, yeah, somebody did the work. Oh, I like that. It's good. I'd have to find a DVD player to like actually hook to my Mac and get those off. Yeah, you know, a question came up. I don't think we have it in today's show because like I said, there was a ton of things that came in, but somebody was saying they were having a problem. Every DVD they were burning for like archival purposes or something was failing. You know, like, I think there was a software upgrade that like screwed this up. I said, well, maybe, but you know, you're using Apple's thing. How old's the DVD burner? Because, you know, a lot of us bought external USB DVD Blu-ray readers and burners years ago when that was a thing. And that's still what's connected to my M1 mini. Now, I don't think my M1 mini has ever read a disk that's been put in that thing. And it got me to thinking like, why would I rely on that? Like maybe I should test it. And if I haven't needed it in so long that maybe it doesn't matter, but presuming that these moving pieces of hardware are just going to work all the time. Not really. This is just not how it goes. Yeah. Guess what Apple still sells in their Apple stores? One of the oldest products that they still sell, the Apple USB Superdrive. You can still go into an Apple store today and buy one off the shelf. Well, because... And it's still like 99 bucks. Okay, that's crazy. That's wrong. That's crazy. That's not okay. For 79 bucks or something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Huh. Huh. Yeah. All right. We're going to go to Cool Stuff Found. I think it's time. Cool. Let's do it. Yeah. Let's see if we can bang out a couple of these things without... I mean, there's an argument to go into like the philosophical stuff that we've been in. But Rod will save us. He says an easy-to-use application that will help you create lists of files for any need. Perfect for archiving or making a list of all the things on your Mac Addict DVD. He says it's called the Files List Export App. And like everything, it'll be linked from the show notes at mackeycap.com. He says lists are your photos, all your videos, or all your files. If you need to create a list of files, this app is for you. It's available in the Mac App Store. And also, he sent us a link to the developer's website. So we'll put all that in the show notes. But yeah, cool. I can see where that would be a handy thing to have, to be able to just take a list of files, have it in a spreadsheet where you can now manipulate and search and sort and do all those things with it. You can turn it into HTML and index it so that Adam doesn't have to figure out what's on his Mac Addict DVDs. Right, there you go. Nice. All right. I'll take us to, for lack of a better word, I will call him Sparky because he didn't sign it. It was just sent with Spark. Oh, the email client. Oh, there you go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he writes in Sparky. Not to be confused with David Sparks, I don't think. Hey, MGG crew, I just listened to the MGG episode for Monday, March 25th, 2024. Sorry, I was getting back into my announcer mode. On the episode, the listener asked about Antivirus and security software on Macs. Another option that does what Dave likes, where it doesn't run in the background and risk your performance, MacSkin 3, which is made by the folks at securemac.com and advertised on their security-oriented podcast, The Checklist, which plays weekly. The program just sits on your Mac and, as the sponsor text says, provides a full or targeted scanning all without crowding up your hard drive or slowing down your machine. Unfortunately, it's not free, but you can set it to run on schedules. I have it set to run every day at midnight and I see the results of it. The next morning, when I wake my computer, I can actually say that my Mac doesn't suffer when it runs as I've done things at midnight occasionally and don't notice a difference. Keep up the great work, guys, and as always, don't get caught. Cool, and it's $50 for... Hang on. Yeah, $50 a year is the subscription for $80 for a two-year subscription per computer. You can go to three computers and get a little bit of a discount there. So, yeah. Cool. Yep. Cool. I agree. I agree. Nice. I have no idea where the agenda is anymore, but now that I was looking at their website. Well, we got Josh. Thanks, Josh, I think, with his Spatial Viewer for iOS and MetaQuest. So, I think this came up way back when we were doing Apple Vision Pro stuff and we had been talking about the new Spatial Videos and how cool they are and the fact that MetaQuest came out and has supported it. So, Josh from Softarino, one of the minds behind Walter, which is another app we've talked about, great app, emailed us and said, it's not about their apps. It's just a story that he thought might be useful. He said, perhaps this can be interesting for those who have an iPhone, a MetaQuest headset, but no Vision Pro headset. Here's the deal. Apple released Vision Pro and made Spatial Videos a thing. Then MetaQuest released support for Spatial Videos in their latest update, but, and I didn't know this, according to a Reddit post that he linked us to, you could only upload videos from the Quest app using an iPhone 15. So, that leaves you in the lurch. What if you want to share those videos with somebody who doesn't have an iPhone 15 and a MetaQuest? You know, what are you going to do that? What are you going to do about that? And to solve this, he says we helped VR developers create Spatial Viewer, the most straightforward and fastest solution for viewing Spatial Videos without a Vision Pro headset. Basically, you install this Spatial Viewer companion app on your iPhone. If you don't have Spatial Videos, then you can record them with your iPhone 15 Pro or Pro Max. Then in one tap, you can convert Spatial Video and send it to Google Drive. Now you simply open Spatial Viewer on your MetaQuest and the videos will be available there and they're all synced via the cloud through Google Drive. So, we'll have the links to the Spatial Viewer apps and the product page and all that stored of stuff. But there you go. Yeah, that's weird that they would make that requirement. Yeah. I don't know. Well, I think it's because the iPhone 15 can take them, right? Right, sure. And so, it has the, I don't know. I agree, this is ridiculous, but it's got to have something to do with the fact that the iPhone 15 can take them and so it can see them and process them differently. But there's no reason, obviously, that that needs to be a static truth. It's just the format, right? Yeah, it's just a format. Why can't you transfer the bits? Yep. So, Adam, what's the difference? If I send you a video that I've done in Spatial and in just a regular video, I'm assuming you can see them both on your Vision Pro. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. What's the difference? We did run into that issue where it was weird, where we had to kind of send it through iCloud, where we couldn't send it direct. Oh, right, yeah. But I think that was more a file size storage thing, maybe? I don't know. I think what it was trying to do was dumb it down so that it didn't presume you were sending it to someone with a Vision Pro, like if you texted it or something. Sure enough, yeah. I think it came through as just like a standard video without the Spatial stuff. Well, I guess what I'm asking, if you watch a regular video on the Vision Pro, vice a Spatial video that I've taken, is there a difference in what you're seeing? Oh, yeah. I mean, maybe I'm not misunderstanding the question, but obviously a Spatial video has got the Spatial stuff and regular video is just regular video. Yeah. So, you don't get the full immersive kind of thing of the Spatial video? The 3D. The 3D. The depth. Yeah. Yeah. Gotcha. Okay. Oh, because it's taking it with Parallax lenses. Correct. Yes. All right. Yeah. Correct. Yeah. No, it's like, yeah, it's good to talk about. Like it feels like I'm in that cockpit versus just seeing that cockpit duty. Nice. All right. So, I got to check this out because Lisa has a Quest 3, which she still loves. Like that thing, yep, 500 bucks, man. And you have an iPhone 15, so you can just go to rack. I could. That's true. Yeah. But yeah, that's fair. It'd be easier. My iPhone's not connected to her Quest, which you can do. I just haven't finished doing it. But I have used it. Well, this would be easier. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Convert it. This will just do it. And then I don't have to think about it. Yeah, exactly. Cool. Cool app. Listener, R&Doug in Discord pointed out Apple's new, well, it's a new knowledge base, right? Manuals, specs, and downloads all pulled into the same place. They call it, like it's at support.apple.com slash your country slash docs, right? And so it just pulls all this stuff together. We decided that this is like Apple's new John F. Braun support library, right? Like because John, I don't know if you were how aware you are of this, but John was, is the master at finding the Apple Knowledge Base article for a specific thing. Like he would come up with these perfect like gems of things. And now, because I guess because John retired from podcasting, Apple realized he was no longer going to be doing the hard work of finding these and surfacing them for people. So they had to build a better interface. And so they did. So we all thank you, Apple for that. John for the inspiration. And we will link to that from the show notes. But yeah, it's way better than it was back in the day. Do we have time for like one or one more maybe? Probably, yeah. Okay. Rod L reminds us of, I think we've talked about it before, but it bears repeating because the concept of being able to do this might blow somebody's mind. He says, I wanted to recommend an app called Gray, which allows you to use both dark and light mode themes on a per app basis on your Mac. Mac users now have the option of using it in their lighter dark mode. But normally all your apps follow whatever the system is. This allows you to choose on a per app basis to either not follow the system or stick with a fixed mode or whatever. There have been some third-party apps, and I think still are that to me just don't look right in dark mode, but I want everything else in dark mode. And so being able to say, yeah, no, take that app. The app doesn't give you the setting to do it itself. And some of them still don't. Yeah, having Gray out there. You and I are opposites. I prefer light mode most of the time. That one exception is my coding, my coder. Oh, yep. Yep, I can see that. So I don't know how different we are. I prefer dark mode in very specific environments. At my desk, like my Mac Mini with my monitors up, that is light mode 100% of the time. It never goes into dark mode. Ever, not ever once. And if I put it into dark mode, I feel like I'm, like, this is not okay. In the studio for podcasting, though, I learned to use dark mode because having all those white windows washed out my face when we started doing the, you know, the YouTube stuff. And so I was like, oh, okay, this is actually better. And then I realized it wasn't, you know, little easier on my eyes. And my laptop, I actually let follow the sun, you know. Unless I'm podcasting, and then it's just in dark mode, which is where it is now. Cool. Well, now you can. Of course, sun's barely up, but, you know, that's okay. Well, here too. It's rain and bad. Oh, no, it looks sunny here. What's that, Adam? I said, now you can app by app it. Yeah, now I can app by app it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I, yeah, there are certain things that we use StreamYard and I, gosh, you know, I gave StreamYard a list of things here at Podcast Movement this week that we want, you know, tweaked or fixed or whatever. Most of it was about sound. Because sound is very difficult to balance on StreamYard and it would be really nice to just have meters that we could see because we would know. And I never thought to like ask them about dark mode. I know everybody does ask them about dark mode, but still. Were they receptive to your sound suggestions? Oh my gosh. Like when I explained to them what we were doing, and we do things a little bit nerdy here, you know, but we're not the only nerdy people that use StreamYard. When I explained to them, like they, like their minds blew open. They were like, oh my gosh, we never thought about that. Well, I can tell you of at least three shows that are doing this. Well, three of my shows and two others, including like, you know, some fair, some shows that are larger than this one. And that also do this this way and they're like, right, we were thinking about it kind of backwards from that. I'm like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I have to use authentic to bring my levels in line, which is nice that they do that, but it'd be nice to be able to feed off on it, something more easily yield. So they didn't have to work as hard at it. Yeah. They're like, do you see this checkbox that says balance the audio? I'm like, that doesn't work. They're like, yeah, we know. I'm like, okay. Yeah. But like they knew that. So yes, they were very, very receptive to, to this, which I love. You know, that's awesome. That's one of the great things about going to conferences is, I always say the primary reason that I go to conferences, especially like, like this are to remind one another that we're all human. Because, you know, it's people you're doing business with all year. It becomes very transactional, you know, locked into email. And that's super efficient and totally okay. However, there will invariably be moments of, you know, that need softer approach. And if you can get together with somebody once a year and just see them and, you know, you remind each other that you're human, that way when the phone rings and it's like, hey, I'm having a little problem. You know, can we, can you help me with this? It's like, of course, you know, like. Nice. Yeah, yeah. So that's, that's good. Hey, one other thing I'd like to mention. Kathy earlier in the show mentioned that, you know, she came over from Adam's show and this is the news update. And I was thinking, you know, since we don't do that regularly here, there is always all things Apple news, which is Mac OS, Ken. Yes. Yes. That's true. Yes. You know, yep. Yep. Yeah, I would, would you want to do a news segment here? I, I, I'm not sure I would want it. I don't, I don't know that it would fit every week, but maybe. Yeah. I think what we discussed and I think we've done it a couple times is if there's something significant enough, like a bigger piece of news, there's always kinds of little bits of news going on. And Mac OS, Ken is a perfect place to go get your daily dose of that. He does a great job of it. And it's quick and easy, great podcast. If you're not subscribed to it, if you just want news stuff. And, you know, there's a few other shows out there that do news. So I don't think that's the realm we want to slip into. But I think again, if, if there's something big enough or significant enough going on, then, you know, we'll talk about it for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And he sure keeps it short 10 to 15 minutes a day. Yeah. Yeah. Ken is a, he is a pro man. That was my, yeah, go ahead. I was just going to say that was my original plan for the Maccast. I was doing short 15 minute news things. It was like a news summary show and it was daily. I was doing, you know, five, five days a week. Yeah. And then I realized that was just not manageable for me. That's untenable. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's no, no, no, no, that's, that's too much. So I love people who can do it. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, this show was a 30 to 45 minute show when we started it. We're at the 121 mark. Got it. So, you know, there you go. Well, it's time to ring in the band. Can we say we should wrap it up? Yep. I think it is. See if my, my little mixer will work. Okay. It's working. Love it. Love it. I'm loving Sound Desk. This is, it's game changer. Thanks for hanging out with us, everybody. Thank you to CashFly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Thanks to our sponsors, of course, that we mentioned in the episode, the expressvpn.com-mgg, betterhelp.com-geekab-and-factormeals.com-mgg50, and then also other, other sponsors at macgeekab.com-sponsors. And thanks to all our premium subscribers. We haven't thanked you by name. In a few weeks, we'll do that when I'm back in my office and I can actually have the windows where they want to be, but your support never goes unnoticed. So thank you for that. Thanks for hanging out with us, folks. Thanks for bearing with my exhaustion here. Thanks for waking up with me today. Adam, do you have anything to share for the lovely people? I would say don't get caught. Made. Later.