 Mackie cab episode 9 11 for Monday January 24th, 2022 Keek have the show where you send in your tips your questions your cool stuff found we share your tips and boy Do we have some of what I what are thus far my favorite quick tips to share with you from you today? We share your cool stuff found and we have some cool stuff found and we share your questions And we try to answer your questions the goal being That we each learn at least five new things every single time we get together Which was generally which is generally every week our sponsors this week include Take thesis comm slash mg g where you can get 10% off your first order LinkedIn comm slash mg g where you can post your first job for free kanji.io slash mg g Kandji i.io slash mg g a great MDM platform that wants to hear how you Want to use them we'll talk more about that in the show here and another new sponsor But one that I've used for a long time new relic comm slash mg g where you get a hundred gigs a day to free forever No credit card required. This is you want to listen to the spot about this if you were doing any kind of Development or server like like management or anything like that Yeah, anyway, you'll hear more about each of those later in the show for now here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton And here in chilly fearful Connecticut. This is John F. Brown. Yeah, it's chilly. We were talking about that pre-show. I I Like it's cold in my office or in my studio. It's it's like usually the heat I have a nest it's supposed to get it warm before my my tea time and it's It's still cold. I don't know but it's like 10 at 10 Fahrenheit here. So, you know, that's I guess Same here 12 12. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's cold. That's a lot As a Follow-up from last week the mgg merch store is live at Mackie cub comm slash merch That's the best way to get there. We did it all through threadless threadless Makes great t-shirts and they like their fulfillment does everything we need the one thing that a few of you have pointed out Tons of you have ordered already is that they do not yet support Apple pay. We're working with them on that but obviously we wanted to prioritize getting good shirts reliably and quality Printing and all that good stuff. So threadless checked all the primarily important boxes But we'll see if we can get them to do Apple pay to they should It's not that difficult to implement having done it on our premium site and about to do it again on the new premium site It's not that terrible, but it is far more complex than implementing any other payment processor For whatever reason I it's Apple. They I don't know why they make it difficult But you just paste some JavaScript in there. No, it's not well, it's no I mean, yes as long as everything else is exactly the way Apple wants it Yeah, so it's it's not it's not just paste some JavaScript and you're good You you need to be offering Products the right way and you need to be you know organizing things the right way and when I say right I mean Apple's way I do not mean that there is only one right way to sell things online So yeah, it's it's it was it took us a while even with the premium program to get it To a point or what maybe it was to where for Apple to get things to a point where it like was easy enough for Folks to like us to implement they didn't out of the gate. It was it was a pain in the neck, but it's getting there It's getting there. It's getting there huh All right, let's get to these quick tips Sean. I'm super super stoked about The especially these first couple really all of them, but Steve's Since I was cleaning up the file names in my photos and music folders and got tired of copy replacing every files name in that folder Then I discovered that the finder can do a bulk Name change I had no idea about this but I used it last night because I had to change some things and it worked totally fine and it worked on I Just realized now that it worked on obviously Monterey But also on Big Sur which is what I'm running here in the studio The way you do it is in the finder you highlight the files that you want to replace then you go to the file menu and Rename at that point you'll get a little dialogue up where you get to choose What part of it you want to rename and what you want to rename it to? So you get a find and replace kind of thing click rename and boom It'll do it all in a row one cool thing I noticed John is that if you do it you can also there's like an advanced button I'm pulling it up here. Just so I can make sure to get it right. Yeah, you You can you can choose replace text you can choose add text Which I'll add it either after the name or before the file name Or you can choose format where you get to choose like a counter or a name in the date and You can like have it name the files based on all kinds of different things after the name before the name It's like this is super robust functionality for something that 17 years I've never known about I don't think it was there 17 years ago, but it might have been I've never tried it It's pretty cool It and it's it's contextual right if you have only one thing highlighted in the finder and you choose file rename It just does the normal rename thing It'd be you know, you just type your you know type the new name in the finder But if you have more than one then you get this little dialogue. It's pretty good. I like it He's good. You didn't know about that either. I presume from the look on your face that I saw John. Nope Yeah, yeah, yeah, what have I done? I think what is it a better find a rename? Yeah, that's what I would have always used. Yeah But it's obviously been there for a little while at least I like Pete in the chat room is telling us that it's he thinks it was there in Catalina, so He thinks that's where it that's that's when it entered our worlds. Well, it entered my world yesterday, so It's all good Want to take us to Robin my friend? Yes, so Robin says I Knew I already knew that double clicking on the title bar of a window maximizes it But I found out that when you hover over the edge so that the mouse pointer changes to a double arrow If you double-click that if you then double-click it resizes in that direction only So you need to do that that's That's cool So if I double-click it and I'm trying to think of a window that I guess I can do it can be any window finder windows Yeah, but if I double-click the edge. Oh, it just moves that edge to the edge. Oh In yeah, yeah, I did it in the finder I grabbed a finder window and double-click the right edge and it moved that to the to the edge of the screen Or expanded that I should say not moved expanded that to the edge of the screen. Oh, yeah I was hoping you could undo it, but I don't think you can oh Right Let me try let's see if I double-click it and I do that and I go to edit undo I have undo rename because I was just in rename so yep There is no undo. All right. Well, I guess you can drag it over. That's pretty good. Thanks, Robin. Good stuff You want to why you want to take us to druski? Yes so All right, this may be a tip for anyone as absent-minded as me But it's a follow-up to an issue that even we couldn't solve a few weeks ago, Dave Okay So he was unable to empty the trash despite trying many methods He has over 25 terabytes of JBOD storage and apparently I had used one of them to help In a restore project for my brother-in-law's faltering Mac It seems that the files of it is I was unable to empty for my trash were originally located on one of my external drives and Since I had ejected that drive. I was not able to empty the trash So if you're gonna empty the trash don't get caught with your external drives unmounted Interesting so that's interesting because I thought the trash was stored on a drive And when the drive was ejected it would not show that those files were in the trash But clearly at least in druski's case It was showing something in the trash that was not on an attached drive Interesting. Oh, all right. Well, that that's fine. I'm sure I'm sure. Yeah, make sure the drive you're trying to eject they're trying to empty is online. That's good All right, good. Thanks druski. That's a that's a mystery. I would not have uh Yeah Yeah, I'm not sure I would even think to try that in the future even knowing this because I it's not I'm now now. I want to test that john. That's really interesting all right, uh Tony has you know, this is one of those quick tips. I think we have talked about this on the show in the past, but It's been a long time. He says, uh He says because we shop at multiple physical stores Oh, oh, this was the um, sorry Last week we were talking about how he was scanning all of his receipts A follow-up to that is he says I've made another folder where I've scanned important pages from appliance and gadget manuals And I've scanned those into a note because scanning into notes is now so easy I can't agree more this I've been saving pdfs of user manuals on my well, I mean at first it was like in my dropbox now It's on my sonology and my cloud station drive, but User manuals for products are generally super easy to find as pdfs when the products are new But when you need them is usually about eight years later when the product's been, you know Revved three times and you cannot find them other than those shady user manual pdf sites They're a super pain to navigate through so anytime we get something new I try to remember to go in and find the user manual and just save it and name it The what I would call the appliance. So, you know, like LG washing machine or something so that I know yeah, that's my LG washing machine And I can go in and great and I've got the user manual as a pdf and it's always there We used to save them in this we had this wicker basket that we like, you know, we had overstuffed I think it actually came from the previous owners of this house With the user manuals, you know for the things that that they sold to us as part of the house Super valuable to have I mean it was valuable to have that but then we started moving it to electronic But the idea of scanning it If you can't find the pdf, if you can find the pdf, don't bother scanning it. Just grab the pdf. You're good to go It's always going to be better quality, but uh, but if you have to scan it notes makes it easy. It's good It's good. Thank you, tony. Thank you. Thank you good stuff You want to take us to the last quick tip we got here john? um I'm going to throw a tip in after this one here, but I wrote it and said He was listening to the episode where I talked about the annoying netflix autoplay trailer thing And so he sent an article It's for fire tv, but it should work for all devices and in a nutshell The option is little more hidden than the article says go to account and then scroll down to profile and parental controls Uh, then click and scroll down further to playback settings and oddly enough I didn't you know what he he did is sent a uh screenshot Uh, okay from an iOS device. It looks like an iPhone um I looked in the netflix app on my phone and I couldn't find this path. So it looks like what he was doing um It looks like what he was doing Oh So I think I think the netflix app on your phone john does not autoplay Right, I think that that's why you don't have that setting in the netflix app on your phone because it's not an issue there But it is an issue on your tv Right. Yeah, but I you know, I went to account in the app and the this choice was not here Correct, uh, and then we're in the netflix app. It said well, you got to reconfigure on on your your computer and I'm like, okay And I found it. So it's a slightly different path um, but edit profile So this is this is on the web, right? So Rewinding everything starting from scratch You want to solve your Net you want to keep netflix from autoplaying, correct? That's the that's the tip here How do people do it? They launch their web browser go to netflix and Uh account and then edit profile And at the bottom of that dialogue are two check boxes Autoplay next episode in a series on all devices and autoplay previews while browsing on the device So I didn't check both of those nice. That's great. That's a that's a quick tip right there Cool You said you had another quick tip before we move out of quick tips and talking about our sponsors and all that Yeah, so I was watching something on my apple tv and You can activate a screensaver if it's sitting there doing nothing for too long Here's what I found if you write or left swipe On the remote it will tell you what you're looking at Very cool. Yeah, I have With our new apple tv. I feel like all I've had to do is just like tap lightly on the On the the touch sensor on the remote and it comes up I don't think I've even had to swipe to do that But yes, you get to see where it is that you're watching and there was something We were watching the other day john It would like literally watching the screensaver and it was it was like a satellite view or something It was cruising around the earth really fast and it was saying, you know something about Approaching the Baltic sea or whatever and then a little later It was like approaching Moscow or something like it was it was updating as it moved across the across the globe the globe Which I think is pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah, so it was I don't think that's true of all of them because most of the screensavers that at least the ones I've seen You know, I'll stay relatively local to wherever they begin But um, but that one was not, you know, it was a satellite thing. So yeah, I like it. That's good Cool. All right, we have um We have some questions of yours to answer and share The next thing I want to do though is talk about our first couple of sponsors. If that works for you, mr Braun, okay All right, first up is kanji our new sponsor here at kanji.io Slash mgg. That's k a n d j i dot i o slash mgg. 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You got to go check this out. And like I said, they want to hear from you. So go to kanji kandji.io Slash mgg for that free demo and trial and our thanks to kanji for coming on board and sponsoring this episode Listen, these days it can be hard to find and hire the right candidates for your small business And that's why our sponsor linkedin jobs has made it easier to find the people you want to talk to faster And for free You know that we've had saty on board here at backbymedia and helping out with this show mackey keb in particular build engagement and Build our social profile better and really she's the one that helped make the t-shirts happen I say help she spearheaded that operation She really she drove it all the way from nothing to boom It's done and you know where we found saty. We found saty on linkedin jobs Yeah, it was super easy in a in a market where it was not easy otherwise Like I don't want to minimize this It was super difficult as we started heading down this path to find people And then we put the ad out on linkedin jobs and boom We had like 75 candidates and we narrowed people down. 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Yeah, you want to get in front of them post your job for free at linkedin.com slash mgg That's linkedin.com slash mgg to post your job for free terms and conditions apply And our thanks to linkedin jobs for doing what they do for helping us find saty and for sponsoring this episode Let's let's go to ben here Ben Ben asks he says I just upgraded to an m1 iMac running monoray and app trap is no longer works Okay, he says is there a good free alternative that automatically notices when an application gets put in the trash And offers to delete its associated support files I noticed that app cleaner requires dropping an application on it to have this effect. I'm not crazy about that approach I want something automated. Is there anything out there? I know there's lots of things that do this I use hazel john Because I use it for my automation it watches folders It does all of my things and I try to limit the amount of things that I have doing duplicate Work on my mac but uh, but hazel definitely offers this functionality and works great. It's not free But when combined with everything else that it does, it's a great feature to have alongside of it So that's what I use. What what do you use? Um I like free And uh, here's a little tip. Um App cleaner Can do this. Okay. So yes, you can either Create an alias Of it and then drag your app on top of that which he says he doesn't like but sure you put something in the trash So you got to go to preferences and they have a feature called smart delete. Okay, and if you turn it on Um, it says smart delete detects when apps are trashed and will automatically find an offer to remove related files so There you go. All right, so it just it so it runs in the background somehow Um, I'm not exactly sure how it does it Okay, like but if app cleaner is not an app that you have launched since you've rebooted And you go to delete an app. Does it jump up and say hey I noticed you're deleting an app. Okay. All right. So so it's doing something in the background. Oh, that's great That's the answer then. Oh, okay. Awesome Awesome. Awesome. I like it. I like when we can give answers. Exactly. That's good You want to take us to Cindy? Oh, yeah It's gonna be a tough one. Um Do you have any clues as to how I can restore my drag and dropped folders in my sidebar? Restoring the finder preferences by a time machine didn't do the trick I keep often use client folders in both my toolbar and my sidebar. Yesterday. They suddenly disappeared I hate to recreate my somewhat tedious organization again if I don't need to um And then a tiny tip here I create folders with names such as dash dash dash dash x x x And use them as dividers. Okay. That's clever. Yeah. Um, it's a good side tip. Yeah I mean the only thing I can think of Dave Is try restoring from a local snapshot Um, I've had to do this when I've had a system updates go bad And like screw everything up Um, and apple has an article here how to restore from a time machine snapshot Okay Yeah, the the only issue With snapshot. I I think snapshots are A fantastic thing and I'm I like that we're talking about them because it's good to remind us all To use them right because they for those of us that have been doing this for a little while It it's not something we've always had so it's not in our toolbox automatically The only problem with a snapshot is that it is all or nothing, right? You don't get to pick What parts of things you're grabbing from the snapshot you are just rolling back to a point in time So if she created or changed any files or anything like that All of that work would also be lost rolling back to a prior snapshot and then depending on Well, how you have your mac configured or to do snapshots like if you're doing them with carbon copy cloner, or if you're just trusting You know time machine to do them. You may not really have snapshots at a granular level to go back to either Uh, like you said when when a mac is doing a software update it totally uh Makes a snapshot before it that happens and so that it can it's so that you can roll back Which is which I think is brilliant, but it's not always right there. I'm trying to think I would have thought the the finder preferences P list would have Had that in there. I I can't even think where else I would look Uh for that. You know, I I'm almost certain at one point. There was a sidebar P list file, but I searched on my system and it's not there anymore. It's not there. I folded it into something else huh Huh Yeah, that's interesting Yeah, I Yeah, I wish I had I would I wish I knew this is one of those needle in the haystack things, right? Like if if we It's got to be somewhere Um, if anybody knows feedback at mackeycap.com. Of course, we'd love to hear from you Feedback at mackeycap.com. Yeah feedback at mackeycap.com. We love to hear from you. It's true We mean it unless you're a premium listener uh and then Premium at mackeycap.com. It's good all right, um Let's go let's go to gary while we're on the subject of things that are done differently in mac os today gary has Gary has a path to bring us down. So gary says gentlemen um I have a 16 inch macbook pro running catalena 10 15 7 and i'm ready to make the jump to monterey I want to enter monterey as if this was brand new hardware So i'm looking for that clean install effect But the advent of science system software data volumes and such What is the best path to get the cleanest newest monterey experience once i get there For that matter, what's the best ongoing maintenance once we get to monterey to keep it Fast and agile all right, so this is interesting um The path i would take and i want you with me on this john so let's not edit show notes Let's talk because i i want to make sure i'm getting a sanity check here um The first thing i would do to get from catalena to monterey is to make a A backup or a clone of catalena and just put it on ice right like just standard practice right so we have that then I and this is get a get to a clean monterey So i realize what i'm about to suggest might not sound like the fastest path but bear with me Or correct me I would upgrade my existing macOS from catalena to monterey complete with all my stuff just an over the top normal upgrade And then i would clone that Again just for safekeeping once i've got my mac up onto monterey I would go into and i and i still decide and at this point you may say you know what it's working fine I don't want to do a clean install of monterey, but if you still do Go to system preferences and go to the system preferences menu and choose a race all contents and settings This is a monterey only feature Uh, i it is there on intel max as well as uh as well as m1 max and It happens very very quickly And then that's it now you have monterey Clean without any of your data without any of your preferences and you're good to go And you didn't have to create a usb boot disk. You didn't have to mess around with recovery mode You didn't have to deal with a failed recovery mode thing that then makes you go down the path of internet install Like all of those things have always been right around the corner doing A clean install on a mac like when you take it down to you know Almost the the bare metal of recovery mode, which I realize isn't bare metal Things can go wrong. I've had them go wrong many times And so getting it to monterey and then using this new feature of monterey, which is essentially the same as ios is uh erase all contents and settings Because it's erase all contents and settings I think that's the fastest path and the most reliable path to get there But tell me if you think i'm crazy Wait, tell me if you think this path is wrong. Don't answer the question about whether or not you think i'm crazy. That's two different questions um It looks like it should work Um, though, I just upgraded this machine to monterey and I just installed over the old Yeah os and it went it went fine everything everything is still working as expected Yeah Yeah, right and I I think they might get there and decide to to just you know Stick with the over the top But there are times when a clean install is is a good thing. It's not you know You don't necessarily want 10 years of cruft coming with you all the time, right? Like there's moments where it's like Okay, it's time. I'm gonna start from scratch, you know um So yeah, I I love this. I was shocked. I didn't think the erase all contents and settings Worked on intel for some reason. I had it in my head that it was an m1 only feature, but We migrated lucas to that new macbook pro I'm back on the macbook air because that works fine for me. He's doing a lot of coding and stuff so we put him on the the 14 inch macbook pro and That meant that he had an intel m1 air that needed to be Wiped and so we just used I'm like wait go to system preferences and check and see if that erases all contents The settings in there. He's like, yeah, it's there. I'm like cool. Do it and he did it And now that machine is ready to go for whoever is going to use it next around here, which is great So I was shocked. Like I said, I didn't it may not work on all intel max But I I would guess it would like I can't see why it wouldn't might be a t2 Or later kind of thing Which might like I could see that if somebody knows let us know feedback at my keekub.com. I have a um A an upcoming cool stuff speaking of Lucas. He uh, he flew back to read yesterday But while he was in the airport and starting a few days prior He did some stuff for us in the mac keekub site just cleaning up the live site and then We've been enjoying wordle here in the house. So lucas wrote a python He wrote a program in python to help him solve wordle Problems so he puts in his actually it gives you a word to start with to guess and then You tell it what wordle has told you so, you know If you haven't played wordle yet It's this game where you pick five you try to guess a five letter word and it gives you some hints And so it you tell it which letters were in the word Words weren't in the word and which were either in the right place or or not And then it narrows down this list of like 5000 words It doesn't have the 2500 word list that wordle specifically uses because that's not public But there is a list of 5000 common five letter words and uh, and it narrows it down and Since he wrote it He has been using it only like he you know He might like do the the puzzle on his own too, but he has been letting the engine guide him And it like it gets no further than five steps and guarantees that he has the answer which is pretty cool Narrowing it down. So I like it. It's good. Yeah. I saw something I think Allison posted it She actually had something that I think it was using grep Okay And and apparently there's a dictionary on your Mac And so what you can do is you can grep and if you give it the right pattern It'll be like, okay, we're here all the matching here all the words that match that pattern Yeah Yep. Oh, yeah, I could see doing that. Sure. Sure. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. Yeah Yeah, Warren in the chat room says cheating at wordle is a new low That's similar to my my wife's comment which was well, you know I don't have any trouble solving wordle with my brain and Lucas's response Which I thought was appropriate was yeah, I used my brain to write this program and now I don't have to worry about it anymore Uh, so I've been encouraging him to figure out how to turn this into Uh, you know python is uh, if you were to host this for people to use in say a web browser Uh, python is server based, which means that it's you know, every user that's using it concurrently has an uh You know adds an increased load pretty significant in the grand scheme of things increased load to the server So I've been encouraging him to rewrite it Or there's some engines that will just port python to javascript either rewriting it or porting it to javascript So that it happens in the browser And now all you got to do from the server is send the javascript down and a compressed version of this Or you know in web servers would do it G zip the the dictionary file and then boom that gets cached and you're good to go And now you can run this without it causing server things and and then he can put it on a pretty low cost server Put a google ad Adwords or add sense account. Sorry up on there and make a little money and you know pay for college So that's my uh That's my thing. Yeah and um Another thing about wordl. So I actually had someone um one of my twitter followers was like i'm not interested in seeing your uh Your posts sure Um Well, here's a hint. Um, that's what the unfollow button is for. Um, no, there's a better way to do it. Um so uh In um twitter if it gives the client that I use if you hover over someone's tweet that will tell you what client they're running Okay, which is kind of a neat feature, but um twitter if it preferences muffles Oh, so it just does some some like local filtering of Well, you get it. You give it a screen name. It says here a screen name hashtag domain or phrase right, um So just add that's what i'm saying, but it's doing local filtering It's not actually filtering like this only works for that twitter client You can't do it and and have it perfect like if somebody's using the native client or whatever So, yeah, all right. There you go or just unfollow like it's super easy Yeah, but it it was only one piece of content that he didn't want to see so right And I've done that too for yet, you know certain games or you know Yeah, yeah, of course Of course, of course So I'll uh, I'll I'll be sure to keep everyone posted if lucas winds up publishing his uh his wordle Solver thing. It's been it's been fascinating looking at the code and seeing how he's solving for it. It's pretty cool It's good. Let's uh, you know A it's fun and b, you know proud papa. It's like, uh, look at that solving problems all right, uh John, there's this thing from walt out here with this office activation Can we summarize this in a way that doesn't take up everybody's time because I don't think this is relevant to everyone In fact, I think it's only relevant to walt, but it's kind of interesting in an off-the-wall way right, um Oh, basically walt tried to install microsoft office home and support Uh on his 2019 iMac running big sir Sure, um It accepted the product code, but there was an error Because most microsoft products you have to activate them with a product key, right? Sure. Yeah, um So here's the weird part the agent so we call microsoft technical support the agent looked at my computer and said it is infected with numerous foreign ip addresses Which prevent updating the microsoft software i'm like, huh? He recommended an ip firewall by sysco for 1695 Or a similar product by web root which retails for less um Yeah, I I don't get this um, and he has well malware bites, but the guy also said Oh, it's just an optimizer and will not remove any infected files, which uh, I think is wrong That's really interesting. I mean, you know, my my first thought is That he didn't talk to microsoft support, right? But it doesn't sound like this person was actually trying to sell him or scam him anything It you know, it sounds like he called microsoft support. And so what is like And if there's a scam there's there's usually a benefit to the scammer And it doesn't sound like in this case there was they were telling him Yeah, go buy this thing from sysco or go buy this thing from web root. It sounds like he got Either very confused or Very incorrect Support agent, which is just fascinating to me. Maybe it was an intern or something. Yeah, I mean the interns always blame the intern Always blame the interns. I like it asock, right? Asock on uh on dilbert. That's right. Yeah. Yeah, yeah All right, fascinating. I don't know man It like just like I couldn't it didn't make any sense to include it in the show But I couldn't possibly Have let us skip it because it's just so bizarre. I mean And my advice is either call again and get a different agent that knows what they're talking about Or maybe apple care could help, but I don't think it's a os related thing. I think it's it's a problem on microsoft Yeah, I think the person Misinterpreted the either the error not the not waltz, but the the support rep misinterpreted the error message that walt read them or Doesn't understand the right solution for that because none of this Excuse me makes any sense. So anyway. Yeah, it's crazy It's crazy. I give everybody a pass these days with uh, you know, oh covet craziness I'm covet free john. I'm happy to say after a week and whatever of Testing positive and having no symptoms, but yeah, I ordered my uh, free testing kits. That's good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you might as well Yeah, it's it's uh, it's it's everywhere now, but um Yeah, thankfully I made it through without it's weird. I had symptoms and and then they went away and then I tested positive So I was like, well, did I have symptoms for covid or was it just another thing? Which is what I thought I had but Anyway, it's all good now Thank goodness. All right, uh moving on scott Has yeah poor scott Scott deals with something we all deal with here with his calendar invitations, which I don't think apple does right scott says uh As a lifelong mac user I always tell people that things just work as they are supposed to but I cannot defend the max calendar invitation process Because it simply doesn't work as it should When I send an invitation to someone from the calendar or fantastical my preferred calendar app But I've tried it both ways and they accept the invitation It hardly ever shows the acceptance check mark next to their email address It doesn't matter if they're mac or windows users android or ios They always tell me they've accepted but there's just no indication of it on my end I do see them very occasionally, but there's no pattern some have come from mac users others from windows And so this is completely unreliable and therefore useless Another dumb aspect of mac os invitation system is that I can't designate which of my email accounts the information should be sent from All informations are sent from my iCloud address and that is inappropriate for my business events Do you have any suggestions for sorting out the messy process of calendar imitations and acceptances? Well, I can I don't know that I have a magic answer But I can tell you what I've experienced and what I do because I agree With your assessment that it is inconsistent It's a mess Uh, and it is But the thing is It's a mess regardless of the calendaring system used Um, if you invite someone in the same system, so you're both iCloud you're both google you're both exchange Etc depending on what you're using That has the best chance of making the round trip But even then it's imperfect, especially if iCloud is the system In question the others are more reliable for this round trip Then and right by round trip. I mean invite like if I invite john to an event invite gets to john John accepts invite acceptance comes back to me. That's what i'm calling round trip It's Touchy at best and iCloud is the worst Here's the thing iCloud Is thinks it's smart And so when you trigger an invite to someone on An iCloud calendar and it doesn't matter with again, whether you're using apple's apps or someone else's apps that that are You know logged into iCloud calendars when you do that It sends When I say it the iCloud server Is the thing that sends the invite to people now if it's another if it's a non iCloud user The iCloud server will actually send them an email But if it is an iCloud user or It's an email address that an iCloud user has associated with their iCloud account for things like FaceTime and all that like I can I have you know my my iCloud email But then you can also get me via FaceTime and iMessage Via many other email addresses that have nothing to do with iCloud I've just added them to my to my iCloud if it's any one of those iCloud tries to be smart and doesn't Send you an email it just sort of Slides the invitation into your calendar app in theory It doesn't always make it Uh, and then the same is true in reverse. It tries to be smart about it, but it doesn't work ICS is the system Uh, is the the type the file name that is used for uh attachments when you're sending this stuff via email And that is the only reliable method that I have found Trying to do it inside the server again, especially the iCloud server is unreliable So doing it via ics files via email will work as long as you are using something that is sure to send those ics files And of course because iCloud thinks it's smart It doesn't even attempt to if there's another iCloud user there and that's the problem So what I do is I use busycal And busycal suffers from the same thing because it links with iCloud and it you know It trusts iCloud to do it But what I can do in busycal is right click on each of my attendees or invitees and Choose to email with attachment And then it that creates An a new message in mail or whatever mail client I want to use but presumably mail At least for me it's mail Addressed to that person's email with an ics attachment And then from there I can change my from address to be from you know Whatever my backbeat media account or my mac e-cam account or in the past my mac observer account like I can you know contextualize it based on the You know the nature of the meeting and then Usually that means the person's Client on their end will send back the email invite or the email acceptance that comes in via ics And everything starts to become happy The trick would be Not letting iCloud send the invites. I've talked to Fahad the developer of busycal About this and asked if there's a way we can just say please don't put these invites in iCloud Just manage them via email. He thought I was a little crazy about that He probably not wrong But for me at least and maybe also for scott that seems like the answer I don't know Do you do a lot of this john? Do you have any like experience with this or anything? Uh, not really Yeah Well, there you go Yeah, I use calendar a lot, but I usually don't invite people to things. Yeah got it. Yeah. Yeah No, it's it's a handy thing especially, you know in in today's world of I mean even with with phone calls and all that But you know with zoom links and all that it's great to be able to just put it in the calendar Send the invite out and boom, you know, everybody's got it and all that good stuff, but it's just not reliable Yeah, I hear something cool. Yes, sir. I didn't that maybe it's part of the new os So I went to spotlight and I typed in busycal Yes, sir, and it shows busycal app store productivity and how many stars it has Like that's I haven't seen that before I think I'm trying to think I mean, I know that's been there on ios for a while I I would have I would have said it was there on mac os for a while, but it's possible It's only new in monterey But it's also possible That you know, if you go into system preferences spotlight you can turn on All the different things for search results. So I'm still on big sir here in the studio. I got to upgrade And it's time. I'm comfortable with it. I just haven't done it yet. I've had a few things going on selling a business covet, you know and Is there if you go there on a monterey machine john if you go to system preferences spotlight in search results Is there an app store checkbox now? spotlight Because I don't have an app store checkbox on my big sir mac I have applications, but I always would have presumed that's local applications I don't see app store in that checkable list But I do have series suggestions. So I you know Maybe this is part of series suggestions. In fact, I think it is part of series suggestions. All right. Yeah yeah Yeah, and if you click on it it goes to the app store and shows you the page for the uh, okay Pilot pete is telling us that there is not a checkbox for that in monterey. So he's he's seeing the same thing you are john So yeah, my guess is it's part of series suggestions. In fact, you could test that right uncheck series suggestions Do the same search and see What happens because that might not not that you'd want to disable that but to just to know where it's coming from In fact, wait. Oh, I can't do it here Uh, what's an app that I don't have on this mac? So I will search for I don't think I have fantastical on this mac Uh, fantastical I search I see nothing from the app store here And I think fantastical is in the app store. So there you go. So maybe it is a monterey thing I'll have to test that later Fascinating stuff. All right We have a follow-up on our discussion from last week about scanning Photos with your phone or with anything and how people are doing it So we want to do that the next thing we want to do is tell you about our next two sponsors If that works for you mr. Braun All right All right. Hey look if you're a software engineer you've been there, right? 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That's n-e-w-r-e-l-i-c dot com slash mgg New relic dot com slash mgg and our thanks to new relic for sponsoring this episode So you've started a new routine you feel amazing But how long will those changes last before you lose your motivation our sponsor thesis Can help you follow through on all your goals and make them your new normal thesis makes personalized supplement formulas that are specifically designed to boost cognitive function And it's all based on the science of nootropics Which are natural and powerful ingredients things that I talk about here on the show If you listen you hear me talk about I'm not usually a caffeine person Although sometimes I am but not regularly But I I take things like ginseng and b12 and lion's mane mushrooms and things like that that increase productivity Focus energy and mental clarity and that's what they include too Feel energized without the crash and cut through your brain fog to think clearly or get a little help with motivation to find your flow And the way you do it is you take their three minute online quiz And then thesis will recommend high quality nootropic formulas that are unique to you and your goals So like I said, I I don't generally do caffeine and they asked me that question Like do you generally do caffeine? And so I said no and then they sent me stuff that includes All the other stuff, but not caffeine. It's amazing. And of course if you choose caffeine They put that in it to the right ones for you and you know as appropriate Right now thesis is offering you our listeners 10 percent off your first starter kit when you visit take thesis dot com Slash mg g so go to take thesis dot com slash mg g to take their quiz And discover your unique nootropic combination and save 10 percent on your first starter kit That's take thesis dot com slash mg g make sure to use our url to let them know we sent you and our thanks to thesis for sponsoring this episode All right, it's time to talk about scanning photos The first thing that I want to start with here john is something that came up from listener vegas at live dot mackeykev.com while we were Just finishing up last week's episode where we started this conversation Where someone had written in asking, you know, what's the best way to to do this and One of the things I um Noted was that when scanning photos with my iphone the the issues Are managing glare and managing, you know the keeping the pictures from becoming a skew Well, it turns out that google has something called photo scan and it's an app That takes the glare out of pictures that were scanned with glare I don't know What magic it does to do this But it's pretty cool that it that it's able to do it and you know, it makes sense, right? I mean, it's you know all kinds of I think it takes multiple pictures and and you know It figures out where the glare is and and then just gets rid of it, you know Which is great So we will put a link to a little article about photo scan, but you can download it for your phone And so that's that's a start and I think photo scans even used in in one or more of the solutions that we're about to share with you too so So that's that's a start and now Listener david. I think is the uh the next place we're gonna go here john. So um, yeah, so he gave us some tips here um The epson perfection v 39 flatbed scanner Uh as he was using it for years. He likes the quality of the scan the soft it comes with software that lets you scan multiple pictures Um and save each picture of it to its own file. Um Depending on the size of the photo you can scan up to six photos at once and the nice thing is that it's only 99 dollars Oh I found one that was 250 But yeah Um, so you can do that now another one. Um, he Uh, also found a service because we mentioned that there are people that will scan, you know, you send them your photos Yeah, I'll scan them for you and then you know, give them back to you. Um dig my picks All right Uh, and they scan a whole bunch of things uh slides negatives photos Aps, what is that? That looks like film. Oh my god. Oh, right videotape transfer and movie film transfer. So they do it all huh That's pretty cool Huh, all right if I let's say I put in I want to have them scan 100 standard printed photos 49 cents a piece. Okay, so You know and yeah, there you go. All right interesting Huh Yeah, 49 cents to scan for 600 dpi 89 cents at 1200 dpi non-standard stuff is a dollar 15 Oversize photos or five bucks to scan Scanning photos and albums is uh adds another 10 cents per image. So yeah, all right. Hey, that's pretty good Okay, that sort of puts all this in perspective. I like that. It's good uh listener will Sent me an email and talked about the epson fast photo scanner he uh, he says I this is what I used it was fast and easy You can easily set up presets for naming photos and even locations for saving I did a pile at a time like 25 ish You load a stack you hit scan and you walk away come back in five minutes or so load another stack It crops scans the back if there's anything on there to remember Does color correction and clean up as well The trick is and and this is the trick he says they go for about 450 bucks on ebay new and about 400 used So the trick is go get one do your scans and then put it back on ebay and sell it because you only need to use it Once presumably so that's not a bad path Especially considering that there's a healthy market for them So you put 400 bucks out there you go sell it for 400 bucks and you know, you're good to go Not not too bad. I like it. That's good. Cool. And you just put the stack in to me That's that's the key is you know, having using a flatbed scanner feels a little bit Complex, but it doesn't feel nearly as complex as what we're about to hear about from listener david Right, right. Okay. So, uh, david Uh He's following up. Uh, let me share the setup. I used the scan 6000 family pictures with my phone Um So part one is a tripod Uh, we'll have to link to these things here. I'll link to them. I got it. You talk all week. You got it. Good. All right. Um, next is The joby smartphone bracket. Um, attach it to the tripod Uh, we suggested some similar in the last episode as well. Um Um And let's see. Ah, and here we go. So this is the the really cool part. Um I scanned with the unfade app which can automatically rotate crop and unfade scans Oh So like like google but not google yeah, and I think what the app does is So you put the picture and the app is smarter to know. Hey, there's a picture here And so it takes one and then you take the picture away and then sure put another one there I was thinking you could maybe Get a robot designed to you know That sounds inexpensive. Sure. Yeah I like it though. That's good. Yeah. Yeah Oh Huh, all right All right. I like it Yeah Cool cool. Yeah, we'll put links to all all those things Ah, there they are Yeah, yeah, yeah That's cool Very cool. All right. Well, we have more cool stuff found. Thanks everybody for submitting on that Super handy. Um, and and I think we've You know, if you know of a different service or something or a piece of hardware that's just like killer Please let us know. Uh feedback and make ekep.com of course Uh warren actually in the chat room says that photo mine ph o t o m y n e Is good but not free. Okay. Well, I don't think we've had um Anything overly free other than having to have an iphone and and scanning that way but photo mine is uh Interesting is it a It's an app. Okay. I see it's uh and it it does a lot of this work for you they recommend using a uh a backlight and um and they have some they have a photo tent Which isn't a bad idea. They've got all this links from their website. So that's good to check out too Thanks warren. Great stuff. Cool. All right um You want to take us to some non photo related cool stuff found uh, you want to start with steve john? Sure. Yeah, so steve um steve found this and it's actually an updated version of a product that we had reported on about two years ago It's the mophie three in one travel charger magsafe compatible So they added magsafe to it nice Okay, and what is it describe it for us? Um, there there are three pads one is for your watch um Yeah, what do they show here? One is for a watch one is for your phone and one is for I don't even know what that is air pods Oh, okay. All right. So air pods phone and uh, okay I like it the watch. Okay Hey, yeah, I like it cool I have uh, I actually have something similar sitting right next to me here john And that is the nightstand nyts tnd Is the name of the product it comes in lots of different colors and form factors I have a white one in quad orientation right now. So quad means it can charge up to four things Uh, it's got a little charger for the watch on the front Uh, if you're watching the video, of course, I do not have it plugged into power So you're not going to actually see it charge anything But it's got a thing for the watch. It's got two magsafe pads kind of similar to the the other one you were talking about john so Uh, you know it and it will hold on there, but you can put your air pods there too and then Uh, the quad part means that the back of it has a little stand and a connector You choose lightning or usbc depending on whether you're oji ipad or new g ipad And then your ipad kind of sits up on the back and charges that way So, uh, it comes like I said, I've got a full white one here that you're seeing if you're watching the video it's um It's got uh, you can get it in like wood grain and black and brown and all this stuff But it's you know, it's about um, it's about the size of like a nine inch ipad When it sits on your desk or nightstand or whatever it is and Yeah, it's it's actually kind of a nice thing This might become the thing that I use next to my bed like it's it's It's got all the things that I need in a layout that actually works for me So i'm i'm pretty stoked about it and it's nightstand nyts tnd They've got them in I think dual trio duo trio and quad And uh, you know depending on whether you want the ipad with it They've also got it with like a little tray So you can put like your keys and your other crap or whatever that you have because we all have that crap In there and you know, it's uh, yeah, I like it. It's it's these form factors are good and it it checks my box of More magsafe because that's what this you know this cycle I was going to say this year, but really it started for me with the iphone 13 So this iphone cycle i'm focused on finding where magsafe can be my friend. I have had problems john with my uh non magsafe Chee chargers next to my bed where I wake up and my phone has just stopped charging And so I'm I'm doing away with all of that. I have two I have one on top of my Like I have a I'll call it a clock radio. It's it's not really a radio. Maybe it is I don't know. I don't I certainly don't listen to the radio on it But I have one on top of the of a clock that I have next to my bed and then uh, that vent have one I don't know they they don't they don't charge me Reliably and I don't know if it's because things get shuffled around maybe the cat's nudged or I don't know But it I don't like waking up with a phone like dead or five percent or something. It's unreliable So magsafe is my friend. Yeah Now I have that happen too. I so I got a couple of the apple chargers and And I had a clear case and that worked okay, but you had to get it just right or it wouldn't charge Yeah, um Specs a magsafe case which which I got as a gift. Um, that always you know Gets it, right magsafe is good for exactly that reason. Yep. I like it So now that I've shown this thing on the show, I can go put it next to my bed And uh, I'll let you know in a couple weeks if I'm still using it. So Uh, you want to take us to Larry john? A little follow-up. Yes, uh, I think I can condense this a little bit to follow-ups even So, um, so he followed up uh to our talk about I bought up Which is an app that gives you discounts on things you scan in Your receipt you scan in the barcode and then they give you money. Okay. Um, so that's cool. So he he's got another one here Um, and I guess you could double dip here, uh called coin out Um, so I guess they do something similar and you can get you know in the order of tens of cents, uh, Maybe 30 cents. I think it's the most that he's seen Um, and so what they do is I think yeah, so they take you to the website but I Uh, you make a purchase and you get a portion back. Okay. So no, there's there's no scanning involved. It doesn't sound like It will log into your email for you I think if you let it and find your receipts there too, but it Like I looked this morning prepping the show It was like because I went I like okay Well, how's this work and then they wanted my email password and I stopped But the first thing they asked you for is your email address and so I put in my email address And it's like yeah, this only works with Gmail Yahoo hotmail and aol I was like, okay guys That sounds interesting So, you know and then so I put in my gmail account and like, oh, let's see what this is and then it's like What's your gmail password? I'm like, yeah, I don't think so, but maybe maybe somebody would would want to do that not me But yeah, cool coin out we got a link for it in the show notes And then uh zack fuck right that we're good on that one and and there's another one. Sorry while we were talking while we were um But after he said this I'm like, oh, you know, there's another one that I actually utilized recently when I bought my home pod minis um Yeah, uh, it's called honey. It's a plug-in And what it does is it kind of peeks over your shoulder and if you're going to a page where you can buy something um You may get a discount and I actually got a discount. Um It brought it down from 79. I think normally they're 99 bucks I think they've brought it down to 79 and then I got a little extra beyond that So that was nice honey is a great plug-in. It it can get in the way sometimes and be a little bit You know intrusive But I I agree with you it it's a great way to just kind of have like you said somebody looking over your shoulder to find you the deals So yeah, I gotta I gotta put that back on my mac I it I had it on for a while. I turned it off because it kept getting in the way But I know i'm i'm losing the opportunity to save money. I don't want to say i'm losing money I'm losing the opportunity to save Either way i'm losing money And then zack had a follow-up when we were talking about cards He had uh, he had another card to throw into the ring, which it seems like we're all into which I like Yeah, so this is the um The Get out of the way the chase amazon rewards card. Okay Uh, so here's what they do for you um Oh, okay, they got they got two versions. So amazon rewards visa signature card You get three percent back at amazon the whole foods Uh, two percent back at restaurants gas stations and drug stores and one percent back on everything else Okay, uh, if you get the amazon prime rewards visa signature card um Same categories, but um They start off at five percent at amazon and the whole foods two percent And then the the other things are the same So yeah, so you see you bumped up from three to five if you're amazon prime and you have the prime card Yeah, that's okay. That's a pretty good deal. Uh, especially given all the stuff we buy on amazon I got a maybe I need to rethink my I have long been a travel rewards Uh collector started with the american airlines advantage card years and years ago And then I moved that over to the bond boy stuff, which I think I the marriott stuff which I talked about last week And that works out fine, but I I'm not convinced the savings Are being maximized like I might do better if I you know Do the the thing I mean, I you know, yeah, we'll see I do pretty well each year, you know with discover I use the discover quarterly bonuses you get five percent for different things each quarter or whatever and uh q4 is always amazon Because they know everybody's buying everything on amazon and I always max that out And the summer is like restaurants on the discover one Which can be super handy for like vacations because you wind up eating out a whole lot more than the normal if you go on vacations and so Anyway, this might be better. I don't know All right, cool. Hey, I have a uh, I have a card to talk about john. It's a little bit different It's called the arculus card and uh, it is indeed a card Uh, I'm showing it on the video here. It's a metal card. It's cold Both in feel because it's been sitting here in my cold office or my cold studio, but also it is cold storage for your cryptocurrency And what's cool about this this card is it's um, it it uses it appears to use nfc Whatever it's using john. It's gotta be nfc because that's what's in the iphone Needs no battery Which is super handy because a lot of these cold storage wallets if the you know, they need to be charged otherwise You know, you can't use them It stores the keys for My crypto wallets that I choose to put on here, of course, they're all recoverable with the 12 word phrase and all of that stuff that's normal, but stores the keys so I can use the app to View my balances and all of that stuff But if I want to send I need to put the card You know on the back of my iphone and do the the nfc thing So that it can authenticate the card and then it uses my pin or my face id To to go further, but um, it's 99 bucks offline cold storage You, you know, you're not trusting someone else with your wallet. This is your wallet And it's pretty cool. It it works. I was amazed at how easy they made it Going through the setup process. I just you know It launched the app and it was like, okay, put the card on the back of your iphone and I did And it was like great set up your pin set up your this and then It was like, okay, here's your 12 word phrase save that somewhere Recite it back to us so that we prove you're not an idiot and uh, which is a good thing to do And and then it was like, all right We're going to write the wallet to the back to the the card And so I put my phone back on the card for whatever 20 30 seconds while it wrote it back and that's it now. It's all right here So yeah, if you get this and my pin and Whatever else you uh, you can have access to all my crypto riches right there right there folks. That's it But it's a cool. I like it in terms of cold storage wallets, man It's the simplest one that I've seen ever so Cool stuff. I like I like the no battery Of course, it needs your phone. So, you know, there you go. But um, There you go. So All right I think that's what we got. Do you got any cool stuff found john to uh to add to the pile here my friend? Not at the moment not at the moment. All right. Well Then I think it's time to bring the band in and say thanks to the band for playing And staying out in the cold as long as we made them stay out there. It's not warm. It's not warm Uh, what else anything to uh, we told everybody about the, uh shirts we told everybody about Um, mgg or mackeek and not mgg. It's mackeekab.com slash merch. That's how we do it Uh You got anything else to tell them john? Any anywhere you can send them On the twitters. I'm jenna fran. He is dav hamilton Mac keek ab his mac keek ab and pilot heat his pilot heat That is true. Make sure to check out our sponsors. You can always go to mackeekab.com slash sponsors and that will Uh Show you all the deals that that are current whether they are current sponsors or not try to keep Things up to date for you, which is great. And then of course you can check out the sponsors from this week's episode Take thesis.com slash mg g New relic.com slash mg g linkedin.com slash mg g and kond g k and dji.io slash mg g Thanks for hanging out with us folks. It's always a blast Thanks for sending all your stuff. It's really it's amazing We'd love that we get to do this. We thank you for that John, do you have any lasting advice to send to these kind people before we uh, um, I have lots of advice, but um I'll make the shirt and sweet. Don't get caught That's good advice. All right, we're out cool Ha All right. Well, thanks for hanging out with us folks. That was fun. Is bitcoin under 40k today? That's a shame Yeah, wow 38. Holy crap. Yeah, that that dropped, didn't it? All right, I wonder what the reason was Down 10% overnight Yeah That's one of those things to sell off spreads. Oh, this is just the big. Yeah, you're right. This is the big Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay That's long leader. Oh, it's yeah. Okay Yeah Time to buy more. Yeah, man. I'm with you Pete Might as well. Nowhere else good to put your money these days It's not yeah, that makes sense brush up banning it. Oh, okay