 It's time for Mackie Gab and I have our quick tip of the week. I've mentioned this a few times in passing on the show. It is super valuable to I find it super valuable to store all of my screenshots from all of my Macs in a shared folder so that no matter where I took a screenshot, be it in the office, the studio or on my laptop, I can always see it on all of my Macs and I do this using Onyx the free software that you can use to do all kinds of tweaks. You can set the location of screenshots. You can change it from being on your desktop to say a Dropbox shared folder or an iCloud Drive shared folder and then you're good to go. It's synced everywhere. More quick tips like this plus your questions answered and maybe some cool stuff found today on Mackie Gab 978 for Monday, April 24th, 2023. Greetings folks and indeed welcome to Mackie Gab the show where we send where the point is that we each learn five new things. That's the point. We do that by sharing and sometimes we'll even play that sound if it's something really cool that we've learned. We do that. We learn those five new things by sharing quick tips like we just did. Sometimes they're ours. Sometimes they're yours. You send them into feedback at Mackie Gab.com and we share them. You can also send in your questions which we will answer and cool stuff found that you know it's just cool stuff that we've all found. It's a good name. It's not clever. It's just a name. We stitch that all together into the agenda. We loosely follow it and maybe hopefully we each hit our goal. Sponsors for this episode include private Internet access. PIAVPN.com MGG is where you can go to save 82% off your VPN service plus four free months. Shadyraze.com MGG because you want to be able to get two pairs of sunglasses for the price of one. You buy one pair. You get a second pair free and then honey at join honey.com MGG the tool, the free tool that scouts the Internet for promo codes and automatically applies them to your shopping cart. We'll talk more in-depth about each of those in a few minutes here for now here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in pollen infested Fairfield, Connecticut. This is John Afron. And here in late New Hampshire is Pilot Pete. Glad to be back guys. I'm glad that we're all back. I'm glad we're all here. Yeah. Good stuff. Good stuff. All right. Should we keep rocking with these quick tips here? John, you want to take us to Steve? Yeah. Here's a good one or a bad one. Hi guys. Today I learned a handy little iPhone trick. Did you know you can tap the back of your iPhone as a shortcut to a whole host of quick features? Go to settings, accessibility, touch, back tap, and then choose one of the many options. And boy, there's a ton of options. And you can have two back taps set. You can have one for two taps and one for three taps. And yeah, you're right. The options are almost endless because you can link to a shortcut. So write your shortcut or create your shortcut and then back tap can trigger it. But it can trigger all kinds of things. They've got a ton of stuff in there. Yeah. Right. You can have your camera, control center, flashlight, home, lock rotation, lock screen. I'll stop. You can see it for yourself. But a funny little story is I was experimenting with this feature once and then I forgot that I had because every now and then when I was out and about, the control center would come up on my screen and I'm like, why are you doing this? And I'm like, oh, right. I set that in the past. Yeah. John, you are smarted yourself. I love that term. And I do it to myself. I outsmart myself all the time. I had it set to do screenshots with either a double tap or a triple tap and I had to change that because it will false trigger this. So make it something that's not going to, at least be aware of that. I used flashlight and ran my battery down a couple of times. All right, done with that. That was going to be my next piece of advice was maybe don't do this with your flashlight. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. DJ Mack in our Discord at Mackiekep.com slash Discord, another place you can share tips and cool stuff found and answer questions. What's cool is it's not just us there. It's everybody there, right? I mean, we're all everywhere because we're the Mackiekep family. But it's not just us answering your questions. It's the entire community answering your questions. But DJ Mack shared a quick tip there. I had no idea. You can use on your Mac in the Messages app. You can use Control Tab to jump to the next message in line. And similarly, as you might guess, you can use Shift Control Tab. So adding Shift to that to go to the previous message, assuming you're not at the top. Which I had no idea. And it was one of those things. Like many quick tips, he mentioned it in passing while saying this was the only way he was able to find and get rid of the unread messages badge because they weren't showing up anywhere else and it was just kind of going through the whole thing. It worked. Sorry if that. Welcome to Mackiekep ASMR. Sound effects are us. Interesting. Well, I have a keyboard maestro setup, so Control Tab doesn't work for me, but Shift Control Tab does go backwards. Oh, because you're not intercepting that one. Yeah. So I got to go in and figure out how to undo that one. Yeah. Yeah, that is sort of the interesting thing about running Keyboard Maestro or anything that's, you know, triggering actions based on your keystrokes because sometimes it will get in the way of things that the OS can do. I think we ran into that with the App Switcher too, right, John? Like you, I forget. Well, maybe it was you, Pete. I guess it was you that had the Keyboard Maestro App Switcher came up and you started sharing a tip about it. It's like, Pete, I don't think it works that way. And it was like, oh, it does for you. It works for me. Yeah, exactly. It works for the rest of yous. Keyboard Maestro is awesome. I can't. Yeah, that's one of those. I did Nuke and Pave the studio iMac here. So I am still on Monterey, but I'm on a very, very fresh install of Monterey. No migration assistant, no jankiness coming from, you know, the downgrade from Ventura. It was a proof of concept and it was a good one. I did hear from Apple and they implied that this should have, this is expected behavior. The problem I was seeing is expected behavior and implied that it would have happened in Monterey and I was thankfully able to prove that was not accurate. So maybe they'll take a look. But for now I'm on Monterey, but Keyboard Maestro was one of the very first things I installed up here because, like otherwise, I wouldn't be able to do the show. It just wouldn't happen. Ah, Gary next, John. Gary says, just listen to the latest podcast and you talked about the caller who had to boot his Mac into Safe Mode to get his Apple Watch to unlock his Mac. On a somewhat related note, and I believe you may not have been aware of this at the time of the recording, but Apple released emergency updates to macOS Ventura, iOS and iPadOS. macOS Ventura 13.3.1, iOS and iPad 16.4.1 were released last Friday, April 7th, 2023. Several days ago at this point. See emails a couple of weeks old. I don't want people to think they're listening to the wrong episode, but yeah, keep going. Sorry. Besides the active exploits that were discovered and reported to Apple, the update addresses the Apple Watch not being able to unlock an iPhone running the original 16.4 or a Mac that was updated to 13.3. If anyone who has Ventura and or iPhones that suddenly lost the Apple Watch unlock, hit your software update section in system settings. Keep up the good work and don't get caught. Thanks Gary, yeah, don't get caught yourself. Yeah, good stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah, staying up to date. I'm actually afraid to update my Macs, Dave. Why? I mean, you're already on Ventura. The Evernote bug. Oh, yeah, right. So you can't use the old version of Evernote all that well. But that part actually works fine, John. Yeah. So what happened in the latest Ventura update is it must have taken out some framework that the legacy version of Evernote relies on. Other apps might rely on it too. We're deep in the weeds here. We're probably in like 1% of the audience that cares about this. But the solution for you, John, is run two copies of Evernote. One that we use when doing the show, the very latest one, and the other one, the old one, that we use when creating the show because we like the Apple Script support in there. Really, we should probably move to Notes and share our notes that way. Probably the right way to do it. We just need to experiment with that. Feel free. Ben has a tip for us. I want to make sure I'm pulling up the right one right. Yeah, this... Another thing I just don't know. In Safari on iPhone, when the tab bar is visible, so you can see like the URL at the bottom there, a way to get to the tabs view of all of your open tabs is to swipe up on the address bar. This mimics the experience of swiping up on the home bar to reach the app switcher. So, whereas you would go all the way to the bottom of the screen to swipe up to get to the app switcher, you go not quite to the bottom of the screen, you go to Safari's address bar and swipe up from there to get to the tab switcher. This is what we love about Quick Tips. I had no idea it existed. So thanks for sharing that with us, Ben. Thanks for sharing that in our Discord chat because, well, that's where we shared it. Yeah, pretty good. Did you guys know about that one? I did not. Yeah. Our last Quick Tip this week, I believe unless one comes up later and they do, as you know, they're hidden little things. They're sneaky, these Quick Tips. They sneak out when you least expect them. Bav in Discord says, did you know, I did not, that you can hover your mouse over the download icon and see the actual download speed and progress when you're in the Mac App Store. So, and it's great. Like you see the little wheel going and you just float over it. And it'll say, you know, loading and it'll show you the progress and the speed and all that stuff. So, I don't know. It's another one of those things. Did you guys know about that one? I thought we covered that on this show at one point. Did we cover it, John? Did we cover it? Is that something we'd talked about? Did you know this one, John? We might have. For some reason, I knew it. And I thought it was the show. I think I stumbled across it accidentally one time. Yeah. Cool stuff. I love it. But it's still cool. Yeah. Ooh, there's that sound. That sound means I get to tell you about our sponsor, Shady Reyes. What's worse than buying a pair of expensive sunglasses and losing them right after you get them? Breaking them is worse. Well, not for me and not for all of you who have already gone and bought Shady Reyes. Shady Reyes makes high quality sunglasses that are just as good or even better than the expensive ones. And Shady Reyes are a fraction of the price. They're durable. 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Right now, go to PIAVPN.com slash MGG to get a whopping 83% off your VPN service plus four free months with a two-year plan. It comes out to around $2 a month. You can't beat that. And there's a 30-day money-back guarantee that's PIAVPN.com slash MGG for 83% off private internet access. PIAVPN.com slash MGG and our thanks to PIA for sponsoring this episode. And today's episode is also sponsored by Honey, the easy way to save when shopping on your iPhone or your computer. You know how much fun it is when you find a deal, right? Like there's the price. You're kind of ready to pay it, but you're like could it get better? And then it gets better. And then you feel smart. You feel lucky. You feel excited. I love that kind of stuff. Well, thanks to Honey, manually searching for coupon codes is a thing of the past. Imagine you're shopping on one of your favorite sites. When you check out, the Honey button appears. All you have to do is click Apply Coupons. You wait a few seconds as Honey processes and searches for coupons that it can find for that site. And if it finds a working coupon, you'll watch the prices drop. Just buying jeans recently. I found some online. Hit the little button. Boom. Saved a bunch of money. They make it super easy. It's cool too, watching it kind of go through and trying the different coupons as a nerd. I like that. Honey doesn't just work on desktops. It works on your iPhone too. Just activate it on Safari on your phone and save on the go. If you don't already have Honey, you could be straight up missing out. And by getting it, you'll be doing yourself a solid and you support us here at the show. Get PayPal Honey for free at JoinHoney.com-MGG. That's JoinHoney.com-MGG. And our thanks to Honey for sponsoring this episode. All right. Let's do some questions. Shall we, shall we guys? Let's go to Raymond. John, I think. Poor Raymond. I'm having a strange problem with my Apple TV HD in my family room. I bought this Apple TV in November 2015. So it's old. I have it hooked up with Ethernet direct from my files router. So this problem is new and it's just started about two months ago. When watching Apple TV Plus, the show will stop and you get the spinning beach ball icon for up to a minute or more before it plays again. It can happen several times during the show. This will happen also when watching Disney as well. I did not check Netflix. The Apple TV has worked fine for over seven years until now. Now I have two other Apple TVs in this house hooked up to Ethernet and they work fine with no problem. So what to do? I disconnected the Ethernet and connected the Wi-Fi on this Apple TV in the family room and now no more problems. Strange. It sounds like an Ethernet problem with this Apple TV. What do you think? I've had similar issues, Dave. And I hate to suggest it, but settings system reset can get things back in its own state. Yeah. I mean, that might do it. It's what he's experiencing is, you know, buffering, right? Which is when the, there is not enough bandwidth to deliver the content fast enough to keep you watching in a steady uninterrupted stream, right? So it has to stop, wait for more data to come in and then it goes. Switching to, you know, network interfaces, interesting. So, like, that's the part where I'm a little confused because I would think that in general, Ethernet's going to be more reliable than Wi-Fi. How after? Well, I mean, yeah, maybe. I don't know. Like Wi-Fi can be faster, not on a eight-year-old Apple TV, but maybe, you know, that Apple TV has 100 megabit per second. Ethernet port, not a gigabit Ethernet port. So its Wi-Fi could be faster, but like for 4K from Netflix, you need 25 megabits per second. So even 100 megabit Ethernet is way more than fast enough, right? To do that. So, and that's a 4K Atmos stream. If you're watching 1080p on Netflix, I think it's only like, you know, six megabits per second. It's like way, way, way, way less. So it's weird that you're getting that. You know, me, I like to dig into stuff. And so I would, there is a speed test app for the Apple TV from the same Oocla people that make speed tests for our phones and our Macs and all that stuff. I love to have the speed test app on my Apple TV because it helps me answer exactly these things and it tells me what my Apple TV is seeing. And now that I put Ethernet in the house, like I'm getting, I used to get like 800 megabits over the Mocha connection, which is pretty good. But, you know, the latency would be sort of variable because Mocha's a little bit weird. It's not terrible, but it's a little weird. Now that I've got Ethernet running there, I get full 940 in both directions, 940 megabits up and down, and five milliseconds solid of, you know, latency, that's it. But, like, being able to know that is really handy. And sure, you could plug your computer in and do the speed test on that, but that doesn't tell you what your Apple TV sees. And so in Raymond's case, I would say do the do the speed test app on there and do it once with plugged into Ethernet and then change over to Wi-Fi and run the speed test app again and see, like, maybe there's something wrong with the Ethernet connection. It could be the port on the Apple TV. It could be the port on the Switch that you're using. It could be the cable in between the ports. So, but that's a good way to diagnose. I don't know. This is how Dave's putting it. And it could be the app. I was having issues with the CW app where when I tried to navigate and, like, go from one button to another, it would bounce back. And I'm like, no, no, go here. And it's like, no, I'm not. Yeah. So I did delete the app and reinstalled it and problem. Oh, so it has gone away. It truly was the app and not the service behind the app, right? Interesting. All right. Yeah. Yeah, that's a great thought. I hadn't even thought of that. Yep. Time for a new Apple TV. That's all. It is time for, I mean, like the new Apple TV is really nice. It's fast. New Apple TV. You can save your old ones to Pilot P. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the, yeah, the new Apple TV, it does make a difference with some apps, the faster, the faster CPU. I found it on, you know, I'm a big channels user and channels DVR user and the channels app, I think they fixed it, but there was a period of time when I first started using channels a couple of years ago, I had basically the same Apple TV that you had, I think, Raymond and or at least certainly an old one. And I was like, gosh, you know, if I'm doing it, if I set it this way, it skips frames and this, that and the other thing. And of course, the channels developers are very active in their community. And so I posted this and, you know, within about 40 seconds, I got a response. It was almost like I was texting with them and they're like, wow, we haven't tested it on that old Apple TV in a long time, but they were really interested. They're like, all right, well, let's look and let's see. And they did, they found some optimizations that they could do. They're like, oh yeah, what about that? So they rolled that in, but it's like, you know, if I'm going to be relying on my Apple TV this much, maybe it's time to upgrade to, you know, the current one. So, so I did. Unfortunately, channels NBC has made some changes recently, Pete, for us channels users that might that are at least temporarily bad, meaning that they've added DRM to their TV everywhere streams. Oh, interesting. I haven't had an NBC issue yet, but we don't yet hear in our locale. It seems like people on the West Coast, some people on the West Coast of the United States are. So I just, I share that. Yeah. Because the local Fox is difficult on, on my channel stream. Do you get, I have no problem with Fox. I have, I had TV though. You're using, I'm using Fubo. Yep. I had issues with ABC authenticating up until recently. And then that went away, but that was like a, a, it was fascinating. ABC would not, I have a Fubo account that I pay for and I have a direct TV stream account that they provide to me for free. I don't know how long they're going to provide it to me for free, which is why I continue to pay for Fubo, but every month or every quarter when it still is free, I keep thinking maybe I should just stop paying for Fubo, but I haven't yet. So I have both, but it's a, it's been a good test because my primary could not authenticate to ABC with Fubo. Direct TV stream authenticates fine with channels to, to ABC, but now Fubo does. Like there was a week, about a month ago, there was like a week period where neither would authenticate to ABC. And I was like, oh man, this sucks. And then now they both do. So, who knows? Yeah. So we, like I say, ours is the, the Fox, we don't generally, usually it's off the air, I guess I should say. Interest. Oh. But the ABC affiliate in, you know, in Manchester, New Hampshire, we don't get, we get the one out of Portland. Yes. I get, YouTube TV gets us out of Portland instead of WMUR in Manchester. I've, I've gotten, I've seen that too. Yeah. Yeah. So Deb likes to watch the, uh, local news. Sure. Before we have to switch out of channels and onto YouTube TV. And there you go. Yep. Yep. There you go. All right. Oh, just real quickly. There's some other, I was looking around for some M3U files to use with channels. Yes. And it turns out there's some IPTV services out there. They may be less than legal, it turns out, however. I didn't find that out until, well, Say it ain't so, Pete. So, well, I didn't find that out until I, until I'd started paying with, playing with it a little bit. And then I, I did some more research on it and went, oh, okay, that's why I can't get a decent guide or anything. Yes. So I immediately, within hours, I went, I want my money back. I'm done. I'm out of here. I don't need to mess with it because I'm paying for it. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yeah. Interesting. Careful out there. I get, I hear tell of people being fined for using those. Oh, that's interesting. Not just the providers, but the, and then that's overseas. It isn't here yet. Got it. Got it. Okay. Interesting. Sorry. Interesting. No, I need, yeah. It's good. All right. Phil, right? We're done with, we're done with Raymond. John, is that correct? Yeah. Okay. Cool. Phil says, asks, posits, perhaps, I might be dating myself. Oh, I, he says, I might be dating myself, but, but hearing my name in question on the podcast reminds me of hearing my name on the radio. Well, you're welcome. Welcome to K MGG I guess we're on the, the east coast. So, yeah. He says, I love it. And I'm loving the 14 inch Mac book pro. The display is amazing. Obviously the speed is awesome as well. One question I have is with these new machines, it has such great battery life. How should one care for the battery these days? I recall with earlier Apple laptops, it would be good to have something like fruit juice or coconut battery to regulate the usage and maintenance cycle. Do you know of any recommendations for the batteries with Apple silicon chips? So, um, the, the, this is what I'm about to share is not unique to Apple silicon chips. Like Apple's done great with battery management for many years. And so we can go back to, you know, some of the later year, Intel based laptops as well with this advice and the advice is, you don't really need to do anything. Like there's not much to do. The one thing I would avoid, and this is just sort of a generic thing, is I would avoid keeping a laptop plugged in 100% of the time. Because if the day ever comes where you want to not use it plugged in, that's when you may have created some battery issues. But even then, like the way Apple's battery management and battery technology, like a combination of software and hardware, the thing a.k.a. the thing Apple's really, really good at is something you just, like there's not much we can do in addition to what's already happening on the devices to manage those things. It's not bad. Fruit juice has been end of life, so that doesn't exist anymore. But coconut batteries still exist. It's not a bad tool to run. It gets you some valid data and it can log data over time so you can see how things are progressing and at what rate things might be dwindling. Your battery capacity is going to dwindle. That's just normal. So, but it's all pretty mitigated these days. So, you know. Even the phones, if you're not careful. I think you experienced the one and we talked about it where, you know, it'll wait until late in the night, early in the morning and it's charging all the way up. The interesting one I found though is that if I set my AirPods Pro on a G charger, that thing gets hot and heat is the enemy of all batteries. So, I've started just using the lightning cable to charge my AirPods Pro 2, second generation. Oh, so you're not charging them wirelessly. The AirPods. I can, but yeah. It gets hot. It gets really hot. Yeah, it gets hotter than the phone does, which is much interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just thinking that maybe there's something going. There's not the battery management smarts going on in that little thing. Well, it might just be that there's more insulation between the point, especially with the case with the case. Oh, do you have a case on your AirPods Pro? I do. I have both actually. So, it's probably the case on your AirPods Pro is adding to that. I mean, it's, you know, right? Well, and also it more heat is going to be absorbed by the materials between the two cheek oils. Right. So, if you add more material, more heat gets absorbed. Yeah. That's just how it is. Yeah. Interesting. But yeah, that's been my experience. John, you've got a late model Intel laptop. Like, do you do anything? Do you find the need to do anything with your battery? No. I pretty much leave it plugged in all the time when I'm near power. And that hasn't been bad for it. Right. No. You know, I thought there were some settings. Maybe they were on the previous OS. Yeah. They seem to be gone now. Optimized battery charging. I think that was the only setting, but I think that's the Monterey thing. For your Mac, they're gone. There might be some. I think there's, with an Intel Mac, Pete, you're on an Intel Mac on Monterey right now, on Ventura right now, right? No, I'm on an M1. That's what I mean. You answered the question I asked. I still don't know why you didn't read my mind here. I'm right. What I meant, not what I said. That's right. So check in the battery preference pain. Looking at that. Do you have the option of telling it to, like, optimize charging? Optimize battery charging, yeah. So settings, battery, battery health. The third one down is optimized battery charging to reduce battery aging. Your Mac learns from your daily charging routine, so it can wait to finish charging past 80% until you need to use battery. And I do have that in fact. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But at 17 months, maybe 18 months old, my maximum capacity is 90%. This is a measure of battery capacity relative to when it was new. Lower capacity may result in fewer hours between charges. Got it. That being said, I'll go all day on this. Unless I'm really crunching video or something like that, these M1s are all-day machines. Oh, yeah. Yeah. They just, they run and they run. They just go. They energize their money. They run and run. Yeah, that's great. They keep running. That's great. All right. Speaking of things we can do to keep our Macs running well, John Steve had a tip for us all, yeah? Yeah, this one's bizarre. I've been beating my head against the ball to figure out why I ran out of storage on my Mac, but Pro M1 16-inch 2021. I ran Onyx and cleaned my Mac in its various categories and could not reduce the 890 gigabytes of data. Woo. I only have a one terabyte drive. When I ran SpaceLens, it showed the 890 gigabytes was in cores. What is cores? I found an article that said the cores folder is where OS10 stores core dumps. These are files that are intended for developers to troubleshoot and diagnose faults in their software. They are generated as software crashes. If you're not a developer or aren't testing them, then these files serve no purpose for you. The article said it was okay to delete cores and had a way to stop generating cores with the terminal commands. So I did this and now I only have 35 gigabytes in system data. I hope this helps others with similar issues. I just checked to make sure. I was not aware that my Mac even had a slash cores folder. This is literally the root of your hard drive. It is named cores, all lowercase. It is where Unix in general stores its core dumps when an app crashes. It'll put the dump of your entire memory footprint in there so that as a developer, you can go and poke through it and see what went wrong at the time that the app dumped. But I've never seen anything in that folder on my Mac. I've seen it on some of the Unix servers that we've run over the years. When there's stuff there, it's bad because it's like, why is Apache dying? I remember this when I used to have to compile my own, from hand, I would have to compile my own version of Apache. Before there were package managers on Linux and all that stuff. I definitely would cause a core dumps all the time because I didn't know what I was doing. I'd just be like, well, we need these modules, so put them in, let's go. All right, well, what did I do wrong? I've never seen that on the Mac. With all the RAM that we have now, every core dump, if you've got 16 gigs of RAM, well, it's 16 gig core dump next. I always thought there was another place where it would store core dumps, but I can't recall off the top of my head. I do have a course folder on my Mac. It is empty. Oh yeah, I did the same thing. I looked at both of my machines and there was a course directory, but no data in it. Yeah, exactly. I was going to bring up to people how to get there and see them because it is a hidden folder. I'm looking in Finder and I'm not seeing the setting where show hidden folders. Is that a terminal command? Is that how I did that? I'm just going in there in the terminal, so I open up the terminal and I type CD. Everything that I'm saying right now is, okay, CD to change directory, space slash cores, C-O-R-E-S, and that brings me there. Somehow I have my hidden files and folders displayed in Finder, and I don't know what I did. It used to be an option back in the day. It is no longer an option. No, not those folders. I think you'd have to do it with Onyx. That's where it was in Onyx. There's a checkbox in there where you can display hidden. Correct. They had them for a reason, so be very gentle. Yeah. Poking around in your hidden folders. That was an interesting thing. When I did my little temporary experiment when I rolled my data volume back from Ventura to Monterey, I had to go download the Monterey-specific version of Onyx. It is not a monolithic app. It's an operating system-specific version app, so you have to run the one that is specific to UR-O-S. I went to run it and it was like, this won't run on this wrong OS. Boy, that's an essential though right there. Yep. C-Cleaner is the other one. C-Cleaner. I forget about C-Cleaner. Yeah. C-Cleaner, which is short for Crap-Cleaner. Is that right? Yes. Interesting. I don't know that I've ever used C-Cleaner, Pete. I was poking around and there's another place you can look. It's a home folder, library, logs, diagnostic reports, or no, or just library logs is another place where Mac OS may store things that get out of control. Yeah, fair. I remember having a Skype log. I turned on Skype debug logging because we worked with it early, early on in the show and for a long time we used Skype as our VoIP engine between us and we had to work with Skype to turn off some of their Skype actually had a comfort noise generator. What a comfort noise generator was for was all of us who were used to talking on copper based landline phones because there would be noise on the line and when Skype first started out, people weren't used to hearing silence on the line and so they would think the other person hung up and they would stop talking and be like, are you there? And it would make them uncomfortable. So Skype actually added a white noise generator into Skype that they called the comfort noise generator. It's gone now, thank goodness, but when you're doing that for a podcast, adding in hiss is kind of a bad idea. So we had to work with them to turn it off and I had these debug logs on and forgot about it and then one day it was like, oh yeah, that's 25 gigs like, oh, I should turn that off. And then but thinking of that now Allison wrote in with the name of it and I can't think of the name of it now. There was a hush. That's it. There you go. So if you do have that comfort noise and you want it out of your recordings, use hush and it removes background noise. Yes, we will put hush in the we've talked about hush on the show before, but we will put it in the link again. It's at hushaudioapp.com All right. Speaking of audio, Pete, you want to take us to Jess's question? Jess, yeah, let me pull that one up. So Jess wrote in my question is five or five days a few months ago, I really appreciate everything I've learned from it. My question is, is there a way to get the S lady to read an entire email? I have looked at settings and nothing really seems to work. I seem to remember many versions ago. She used to have that capability. Now she only reads a line or two. Well, you're doing better than me, Jess. I spend a lot of time in my vehicle and work and it sure would be useful if she could read an entire email. And so I played with it a little bit. I know John answered this question as well and played with it a little bit and we just couldn't get her to cooperate. The closest thing I could find was under settings, accessibility, spoken content, enable speak screen and speak selection. It still requires some screen touching, which is less than ideal to say the least when you're driving. So it gets the voice to read the text that's on the screen. Sorry, S-Lady continues, however, to stubbornly announce there's nothing to read on the screen when an email is open and you ask it to read it to you. I have a link in the show notes with better clarification. It's theideeksblog.com how to get Siri to read emails, articles, web pages, iPhone and iPad. It is at best frustrating. But there is, once you do those settings that I just talked about, you can swipe down from the top of the screen with two fingers and there's a play box comes up and you can hit play and change the speed and that sort of thing, and it will read it. But boy is it frustrating when you ask, you know, hey, read the screen but there's nothing on the screen to read it. Actually, there is I'm looking right at it. Stop it. Interesting. Yeah, I had the same thing. I was like, you know, I brought up an email and then I said, read this email and she's like, oh, you have 2,500 emails and I'm like, that's not what I asked you. Oh, she was going to read all of your email, not just the one. Not the one that was right in front of me. Interesting. Interesting. And if you say read the screen and it's not like the home screen, which is just the accessibility I get it for someone who's visually impaired trying to navigate around on their screen and when they touch certain parts of the screen it will read, hey, this is what's on the screen. You got an email up and say, read the screen it stubbornly comes back and says, oh, there's nothing on the screen to read. Siri's gotten dumber. We talked about this in the last episode about the when I was ranting about the elevation. No, about that. I figured out the problem in our discord chat. Okay. Somebody said, oh yeah, I ran into the same thing and so I found or created a shortcut that tells me the elevation and they said in the part that sort of caught my eye was whoever it was in our discord that said this said I named the shortcut what's the elevation and I'm like, but you can't name a shortcut something that is already a Siri function because they'll fight with each other. Before I installed the shortcut I was sitting at my desk not in my car screen on and I asked Siri what's the elevation and it said I don't understand that request. So like it's not even that it couldn't read it to me in the car is that Siri no longer has the ability to access that data natively and she used to so like so I installed the shortcut and now it reads me my elevation happily because it you know it's like the shortcut does its magic. So why is it getting dumber? This is not a good look for Apple especially in today's AI world where right like but I can only imagine I mean AI is so much more difficult than it seems intuitive to us it's what we do every day we are learning beans and it's very frustrating that these devices which are so much faster at calculating than we are and crunching that out. That's all they're good at they're not smart. They're good and they're fast. And so making them smart I think is a monumental problem obviously is evidence but I think you're right it appears that this assistant is getting much dumber while the other two a lady in Google are excelling and Apple better catch up I bet they've got a team working on it but clearly yeah they're not dumb people at Apple so yeah and they're aware of their competition. Alright John you want to take us to Debra? Sure. Now while we're on the email subject. Debra says I haven't given serious thought to archiving emails since the demise of Eudora. Oh wow. That's what we could do ago. I used to like that. I used to use that but I find for a variety of reasons that I should clear an accumulation of email out of my system folder. There's been talk over the years of Mechagab about archiving email mostly though I can recollect talked about archiving it within Apple's email lab so it's no longer on the IMAP server but not about archiving it right out of the system folder. Ideally so that it would still be accessible and searchable if needed. Any thoughts? Maybe I misunderstood this question Dave and you can help me out here but so there is with IMAP there is you'll see an archive folder which actually I should probably use at some point and put old stuff in there so that it searches in other mailboxes speed up but I don't think it removes it from the IMAP server if you do that. I verified this by checking my various email accounts on the web and sure enough the IMAP or the archive folder is there but it's probably not a bad idea to move all the emails as I said if you want to clear out your email database may I suggest mail steward this program has been around for ages and its purpose is to take your email and remove it from your main email account and then you can use their program to search which I think was indicated as the requirement here. That's one option but then Dave you came up with another very clever option. I think it's something that Debra is already doing but just while we're having the conversation I have used mail steward in the past but I've never actually moved things into it and had that as the only place they exist and it's just because I'm nervous about I have had moments where there is huge value in being able to go back to an email from ten years prior. I've had enough of these where I know that I will probably want that in the future. And relying on a single app that is developed by a single developer or a small development shop I'm not sure how big they are but you know to be around and updated in ten years for the latest version then of macOS is not something I'm comfortable with. As you said mail steward has been around for a very long time my concerns are almost certainly unfounded and I do recommend mail steward very often but I haven't been able to bring myself to use it and really maybe I should reach out to them maybe I'll share this segment with them and see if there is something about my concerns that is truly unfounded if they say okay well look if mail steward goes away here's how you would access the data in the mail steward database in sort of an open way because of that I still keep everything in mail on one computer I have you know my entire life's email archive is still there and it is the reason that I need to keep getting larger and larger boot drives on my office mac because my email archive simply cannot move off of it and what I do is I store them on my mac so not on the imap server where I have you know limited storage or storage that I would have to pay for to increase I store it on my mac and you can create an archive folder or any folder you want I have actually a series of folders because having one folder for several decades worth of email would probably be a nightmare I don't think mail would index it very well so I have a folder per year for all my sent mail for that year and all my archived mail for that year and so I just you know have a like I just created the one for actually I actually just created the one for 2022 although I generally don't archive that recently I found some things that it's just simpler but you know I can go and look in my archive 2019 folder and see my mail from 2019 or my sent archive 2019 folder and you do this by going into mail going to mailbox and say new mailbox and you get to pick the first thing the first option it asks you for is location and you can choose your I map server or a sub mail box of your I map server and if you have multiple I map servers of course you will see them there and then you have an on my mac folder generally at the bottom and you can start adding things to to the on my mac folder and and you know so that's what I've done is I add mail boxes in the on my mac folder they're only on that Mac so you know this is where backup start to become even more important but but yeah that's that's how I do it and it works well for me that the archive by year I will share that when you're moving when I'm moving an entire years worth from say my you know fast mail my I map archive doesn't matter what the provider is my I map archive to my on my mac archive it can take a very long time like hours I generally try and leave it overnight but sometimes I will do you know three months at a time just because that way of things you know sort of hiccup or break and I need to quit mail I sort of I'm not like I'm hedging my bets so but it's it's you know it's not all that often that I do this it's maybe truly once a year so you know I'll move you know the first quarter of a year into archive and then the second quarter third quarter and that's just because mail and the whole I map thing it takes some time for it to do that if you are doing this with Gmail however moving it out of your archive folder will not delete it from Gmail it will simply remove the archive tag from that message on Gmail and it will still be in your all mail folder and will not reduce the amount of storage that you're using so you have to go into Gmail and with a very carefully crafted search find all of the messages that are only in all mail but you can't you can't do it that way so like if I just moved say 2019 into my archive my on my Mac archive folder I would go to Gmail and I would craft a search I have one I will I will share the the the the sort of the bones of this the foundation of this search and then you modify it for your own thing but it's you know messages before the beginning of 2020 right because I want everything because I presumably if I just moved 2019 I already have 2018 that that's how I do things so I would look for all messages before January 1st 2020 that aren't that don't have the label of inbox that don't have the label of archive that don't have the label of sent and I kind of have to be sort of meticulous and and a little bit obsessive about it to make sure I'm excluding everything that's not already in my archive folder on my Mac I'll put a link not a link I will put the the search query in the in the show notes I'm making a note for myself to go back I can do that later because I got to dig and find it I keep well do it and talk right yeah I keep this in my actually I keep it in Evernote which I'm again trying to move over to notes but maybe I've moved it maybe I've moved that one over but yeah that's it's one of the few times where I I sort of grumble about Gmail because it's because they don't do I map mailboxes they do labels that are mapped to mailboxes and so things can be in multiple places it's nightmare but anyway so anyway too bad it's such a good free service that's the thing well that's the thing is yeah no it's fine I mean I do use fast mail for my primary mailbox now but everything else is Gmail so I still have to live in this world it's it's not like yeah I haven't I haven't left it so I my search definitely still works properly as of a couple of months ago but but if you don't understand it ask before you rely on it we are happy to answer questions ask in our discord at mackeycap.com send us an email feedback at mackeycap.com like we're happy to help we're feedback at mackeycap.com I think he said feedback at mackeycap.com did shall we go to Jurgen yeah alright here's a good one you might remember me contacting you several times about speed problems from my Mac to my technology NAS at different time intervals the transfer speed will slow down to a crawl only rebooting the Mac will get rid of this problem I thought I should write a script to measure the speed regularly so I can be warned when problems occur Iperf came to mind and I was looking into how to use it in a script I was happy to find a python library to use Iperf so I wrote a little python program that uses Iperf every two minutes to test the speed for three seconds the results are written to a database my intention was to find out how often the problem occurred and if there are times when it fixes itself and now the miracle I've been running that program for over two months and now the problem has not occurred once it seems that testing the speed regularly prevents the problem from happening don't know why but honestly I don't care as long as it's not happening anymore sharing this hoping to inspire other troubleshooters similar problems wow and I love this Dave because I'm going to share a little term here that I learned back in my sophomore days it sounds like a hyzen bug you said hyzen bug yes and what is it a hyzen bug is a software bug that disappears or alters its behavior when one attempts to probe or isolate it I love it I love it every time in aviation 2 call the mechanic they come up to fix it and fix it itself yeah oh yeah no I experienced this at home my Lisa my wife hates, loves and hates this she will have a problem with her computer she will ask me to come over and look at it and as soon as I touch it it goes away and remains away and she's like I hate that this is how it is she's like I tried for days to fix this I'm like yeah that's just how it goes but you know it's good my consulting business supported our family for many years all you had to do was show up all you had to do was show up I'll show up and collect a check you gotta get paid if you're a consultant do not forget to bill your clients remember I talked about how I had ethernet installed in my house that was exactly a month ago today as of the day we were recording this I still have not gotten a bill from that electrician he had two guys here all day I'm kinda scared to see what the bill is to be perfectly candid I'm gonna pay it it's fine I knew what their hourly rate was coming in and I can do math so I have the money saved aside but you gotta bill your clients but yeah yeah yeah no this happens all the time so that's an expected behavior then the Heisenberg is expected behavior I like it that's our show title I like it alright so this is super freaky though because I had this almost exact thing happen two days ago my daughter who lives in Italy I mentioned I had to go over there you know Dave the nerd the business had to go and fly to Italy to help her fix her plex streaming problem she moved all of her all of the home internet over there it's all 5G or 4G but it's all nobody has cables to their house it's all just mobile data to your thing at least for her maybe people who own their own homes they live in apartments they rent so they recently moved and started having plex problems but no other service was having problems Netflix Disney all totally fine streaming from our plex server here she would get buffering like terrible terrible buffering and she had to like slow it down to you know almost unwatchable in order to even be close to reliable I have gigabit fiber here so like that's not a problem like my you know like generically my speed out of the house is you know the speed of ethernet which is as we previously discussed way faster than she would need so I said alright let's carve out some time we will you know we'll test so we did a screen share like the first thing I want to do is I'm like this is happening on your TV and your computer right she's like yep same in both like okay great so we can test from your computer we don't have to try and like you know get crazy set up a zoom thing zoom is great for tech support because you can share screen you can control the screen and so we ran a speed test in the same browser that she's using to you know try and watch and I was like yep okay yeah it's speed test is totally fine like she was getting I don't know 40 megabits down or something it's like yeah way more than you would ever need and I'm like okay well I run an IPERF server on my Synology Disk Station here at home and I have it very secretly exposed to the outside world it's not on the normal port it's like very much hidden so what port is that Dave? correct and so I'm like great let's install IPERF on her mac in Italy and do an IPERF test to me like let's quit because I started doing speed test because the first one we did was like to you know it picks some server in Italy like it would normally would like all right let's pick the same one that I that I connect to when I do a speed test in Portland Maine so she connected to that and it was a little slower it was you know maybe 30 megabits a second or something I was like okay but still way faster yeah it's plenty right and that's the one that I connect to when I see full gigabit traffic I'm like so like there's no extra hops here so we did but I'm like still just test directly to the same disk station that Plex is streaming from like let's really do this and so she set up an IPERF thing and we did some IPERF test because there's publicly available IPERF servers like throughout Italy we did some there we did some in in you know the UK which is where would hop through we looked at trace routes looked at all this stuff finally had her just do IPERFs directly to my server here and same 30 megabits a second it is interesting like everywhere she would do a speed test the first two seconds would be really fast and then there would be like a second or maybe even two of no data and then it would settle in and be totally solid so there's clearly some provider created buffering or whatever that you know lets you do like a quick little burst and then it throttles you to whatever you know speed they pay for whatever which is fine okay great thank you but we could watch it was very consistent she's literally doing speed test to my house okay great and I'm like well now that we've sort of answered all these questions let's open up Plex on your computer and start to stream and I'll watch the Plex server from here and we'll you know we'll see if we can discover what's going on because nobody else has problems with the Plex server like this you know and so it's like it's just her and the problem wouldn't happen and still days later has not happened so me but it sounds like a heisen bug to me well that's the thing is like Jurgen used IPERF to solve his MAC to Synology Speed issue I used IPERF to solve an Italy to Durham, New Hampshire speed issue and I said to Sky I'm like well you know maybe I'm like you know we sort of talked about how the internet works and it's built to route around you know damage and that's the beauty of TCP and all of that stuff she's like oh I never realized I'm like yeah it's pretty cool and I'm like so maybe doing these speed tests direct between us maybe that caused some router in the middle some switch in the middle to reorient itself on our behalf like who knows like these things are constantly reevaluating themselves all the you know the BGP packets that are floating around out there they tell each the routers communicate to each other and switches communicate to each other and all this stuff like maybe we just had to like you know sort of force the pipes to clean themselves it's all black magic and BS Dave exactly Pete and but I have no other way to explain this like the day before we did this test the night before you know 12 hours before we did this things were awful for her and since we did this it's been totally fine and it's very much the same thing Juergen did that's the part that's a little bit freaky who knows somebody out there knows somebody why this worked somebody's a networking expert I understand that the plural of anecdote is not data but feedback at Mackie Kev.com because this is a little weird a little weird yep but clearly expected but clearly expected yep yep yep super weird alright Alex has a tip for us we're just gonna I think we just plow through some of these questions and I think we'll do some cool stuff found next week did that work you guys I'm having fun I needed a fun day I don't know why man for the last like couple of months I've just been like stressed but not like non-specific stress there's nothing in my life that I can point to and say like oh well you need to float Dave I need to use one I got one for Christmas I had I've been doing floats I do floats I meditate I see a therapist all the things I just can't figure out what the thing is I don't know man I don't know but I've been having fun today maybe we've maybe it was a hyzen bug and as soon as I started talking about it it went away there you go that's my hope it's your story and you're stuck with it you got it I'm stuck with it this is true alright take us to Alex John yeah and we'll look and then some of this so he was trying to solve a problem in his iPhone and Wi-Fi so what he did was which maybe I would do is that he went to reset network settings on the iPhone yeah unfortunately it removed all the Wi-Fi passwords from the phone which kind of stinks and I don't understand why this happened I mean come on you know I mean sync back with iCloud and get all that data because that's where it lives it's worse than that usually because it does sync with iCloud and wipes it out in iCloud and that's the part that sucks yeah so I'll condense this and get to the part of it but he found a way to solve the problem and it's kind of funky but hey on the Mac open the app keychain access on the left select the keychain system in the table right click on the row with the same name of the Wi-Fi network and copy that item and then then select on the left the keychain iCloud and right click paste okay okay this actually makes sense though huh yeah sometimes yeah keychain access is a good utility and it lets you do things like that and it lets you look at the state of your network and who has what so right and essentially what he's suggesting what he's telling us he did and he's not suggesting anything is there's multiple keychains on your Mac and one of them is the keychain that's synced with iCloud and he's acknowledging that these entries were no longer in the iCloud keychain and therefore not synced to all of his devices but they are still there in his Mac system keychain and so the idea is manually copy them from the system keychain to the iCloud keychain I love that what I want is a utility that goes and finds all of what they call in the keychain tool airport passwords in one keychain and copies them to another because that would be super handy to automate this that would be good you know I wish I had seen this before I wound up doing what I did you may remember a few weeks back my iPhone would not remember my home network just my 5GIG network every time I'd leave and come back it would pick that up it wouldn't pick it up and I'm wondering if this would have fixed it of course it's too late now I already changed the name of my home network to all caps and it works fine once I changed the network name that would mean that the entries would still be in your iCloud keychain for the one with mixed case the old network name so you could at least look in your iCloud keychain and compare that to system and get a sense for what might have worked to fix it and if you see all I would have had to do is delete that I would then delete that whatever that might be copy the thing over or whatever just to clear it out in case in the future that's a great point because boy was that frustrating having to put my own home password in every daggum time I went to use it but it was not acceptable because what that will tempt you to do is to change your Wi-Fi password to something really simple and short but of course you can't do that because it breaks everything else yeah it does break everything else but the other problem was I'm not sure it would have remembered the new password so I just changed the Wi-Fi network name because it was remembering every other Wi-Fi network just not my home 5G network right son of a bad word yeah yeah but this would have been the right place to look when we were trying to figure that out comparing the two key chains on your Mac yeah interesting this explains a lot I remember coming to your house John not that long ago the first time after the COVID lockdowns had happened and my phone wouldn't join your Wi-Fi network automatically because I had in the interim there somewhere had done a reset network settings on my phone because sometimes it's just the thing you have to do to fix weird cellular problems or whatever but my Mac joined it and my Mac was also new both of these devices were new since the last time I'd been at your house M1 Air which I got obviously during 2020 and so that was after all the lockdown started and whatever iPhone I had was also new my iPhone wouldn't join my Mac wouldn't and I'm like okay why is this they're both getting this from iCloud why isn't the phone getting it from iCloud if my Mac is but my Mac wasn't my Mac was getting it from the system key chain that I had migration assisted over from my old laptop and so I could have repopulated my iCloud key chain from the Mac if I had known that this is how it worked more ASMR for you as Dave's brain thinks here on WMGG yeah all right yeah yeah yeah that was Dave's brain thinking silently but if there's if ever there was a need for the magical bell that's the magical bell I feel like we need like the achievement unlocked I don't know this seems like a big one John this solves a problem we've had for a long time because I'm always hesitant to reset network settings because of exactly this the interesting thing is not being a software engineer it somehow seems that Apple has put this in there though to protect that the way this works works well but they've put it in there to protect wiping out stuff that you don't want to be wiping out well but it does wipe out stuff you don't want to wipe out that's the thing but I think you might be onto something Pete I think they're protecting against something it's not that because they are wiping out but I think it is that they intentionally don't want this to come back if you reset network settings maybe your issue couldn't get to your Wi-Fi network you reset network settings if there's a bug in the iCloud keychain for your Wi-Fi network passwords that's going to sink right back down and you're going to be in the same spot you were so maybe this is why this happens it's just the side effect is it wipes it out of iCloud entirely so like I'm guessing this Mac doesn't have much in the way of iCloud Wi-Fi passwords because it's a fresh install that's only synced yeah I mean there's some in here but I can see that they're only the new ones like it's maybe a third of what would be on my other Macs so yes this is fascinating yeah yeah oh man alright mind-blowing I think it's just hokey design because maybe if something happens that surprises the user then you have failed well that's true right but I get where we as users would simultaneously want all our iCloud network passwords to come in but also simultaneously not want them to come in because if that's where the problem was like with Pete you don't want him back but with the rest of the time you do so I feel like there's a world where it should say hey you just reset network settings and so this password exists in iCloud do you want me to use the one in iCloud or do you want to use the one that you're about to type in manually like give the user the choice if they've just reset network settings in the last you know x number of hours or something right like we're gonna repress your iCloud passwords temporarily here for this network like it should tell the user if the user's gone through a reset network settings they're already you know there is no novice and it might be a novice that does it but there is no unintention lack of intention but there's no lack of intention in doing that like it warns you several times like this is gonna mess with things it should say like if you've done this in the last hour like maybe this is the thing you were trying to mitigate against and I'm gonna tell you that I don't know I feel like there's cause I agree with you it's hokey design it's hokey design well then software engineers are trying to read our thinking minds and that's the problem is right like we've just come up with scenarios where we want exactly what's there and exactly the opposite of what's there listen do what we want it to do not what we're telling it to do exactly read our minds right that's for hanging out with us folks what's that Pete? I was just saying in my home life I bet the music's gonna come out and it turns out you were correct I know it's amazing thanks for hanging out with us folks thanks for sending in all your questions your tips it's amazing we're so fortunate that we get to do what we get to do here and that's all because of you so thank you thank you thank you thanks to all of our premium subscribers if you want to learn more about that at matkeakub.com we would love that it is not mandatory but any support you provide us is appreciated very much makes a difference here it truly is a part of the matkeakub revenue stack and it takes the entire stack to keep the show going so it really and you do it it's amazing so matkeakub.com if you want to learn more about that thanks to CacheFly the folks, good folks at CacheFly that provide all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you make sure to check out the other podcasts that we do I do two others, I do one called GigGab for working musicians I do another called Business Brain for Entrepreneurs Pete does a show called So There I Was with some great aviation stories I don't want to say it's just for aviation enthusiasts but by listening you might become one there you go we're having a ball, we had a guy this week, 80 he's going to be 89 this week another elderly gentleman with some great memories from the 50s and 60s one previous week was actually the one that came out yesterday he's written five fun books amazing stories of the US Marine met Jack Kennedy took his lighter and never gave it back and never gave it back brilliant thanks for hanging out folks thanks for doing all that you do, thanks for checking out our sponsors piavpn.com slash mgg shadyraise.com slash mgg joinhoney.com slash mgg you can just go to MackieGab.com slash sponsors, you see all the deals that are out there even ones from noncurrent sponsors it's great, I love it John was Pete's shirt say I'm pretty sure it says don't get caught made up that's some good advice