 It's time for Matt Geek, Gavin. I'll bring us our quick tip of the week. When I get text messages from brands, you know, stores I buy from companies I deal with, it just comes in as a number. I like to know who those are from, especially when I'm like in my car and all I get to see is the display. So my quick tip is go in and assign a contact to those numbers and give it a company name. Skip the first and last name. Just give it a company name. And now on all your devices, because of the magic of iCloud syncing, even though they're text messages, you'll get a contact name popping right up and you'll know who these things are from. And it kind of helps sort things out a little bit easier. More quick tips like this. Plus your questions answered some cool stuff found in a big party here today on Matt Geek. Matt Geek App 1K, 1024 for Monday, February 12th National Cleanout, your computer day 2024. Thanks, folks, and welcome to Matt Geek App. We are the show where you send in your quick tips like that one. Your cool stuff found, your questions. We try to answer your questions. We share your quick tips and your cool stuff found. The goal is for each and every one of us to learn at least five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include BB Edit at barebones.com. We will talk more about that in a little bit for now here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fairfield, Connecticut. This is John F. Broad. Woo. And here in South Dakota and in interspace. I'm Adam Christensen. And here from San Francisco, California. It's Pilot Pete. Good morning and happy 1K show day, everybody. This is cool. Yeah, it's all, everybody, the four, the four, or if you're watching the video, five of us here. Adam is here twice. We'll explain. That's because I'm so nice. You are twice as nice. And yeah, it's like everybody in the Mackie Keb family here, we made it to 1024. That's pretty, I think it's pretty exciting. So why is 1024 a significant number, Dave? Well, it there's this thing. It it's it's double 512. That's why it's a significant number, right? Oh, no. But wait, why is 512 a significant number, John? That's twice. It's 256. No, I'm not John. But No, but okay, so but John, why is 256 a significant number? Um, computers speak binary. Oh, so for example, this is the reason two to the 10th power is 1024. So this is the two to the 10th episode. It's a it's one better than two to the ninth, exponentially speaking. Yeah, I like it. I like it. Of course, it creates some confusion because this was a big controversy a while ago. Hard drives are measured in different units. Oh, give a bytes versus gigabytes? Yeah, and as you so 1000 is close enough to 1024. But as you as you start going up the scale, they deviate from each other. And at one point, people are like, Well, hard drive people, you're ripping me off, you're not giving me the space that you said I'm supposed to get. And that's oh, because we're counting differently. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. John, thank you for for joining us for this special episode. This is amazing. It's it's good to hear your dulcet tones, my friend. Thank you for the invite. Of course. Yeah, it's a special one. So I will apologize on your behalf at him because you probably don't realize how loud it is for us when you sip your coffee. And that well, yeah, no, it's okay. You're you're on a different microphone today. Do you want to explain what's on what this microphone is for people who aren't watching the video? And we'll apologize to people. No, last week, we were recording right before my vision pro delivery. So I have my vision pro on today. And you're hearing me through the vision pro microphones rather than my standard microphone. It's also why I'm sideways on the video. We didn't do some pretesting and realized that StreamYard, because I'm in a mobile app, it defaults to a landscape view and you have to set the orientation before we go live. But we were live already. So yeah, I'm sideways pseudo Adam down there in that window for people who can't see it. It's video. I mean, you know, picture portrait mode when you turn it landscape on your iPhone. And that's how you're seeing virtual me, which also looks kind of old. Another interesting thing is, you know, you can add glasses. So you do your scan without the glasses, you do your, you know, thing. Those are digital glasses. But for whatever reason, they have a ton of frame selection. But you have to do transparent glasses. I don't know why. So. Oh, you can't do. You can't do colors like I would make them black because normally my glasses are black, but at least not yet. I don't know if they'll change that. That's interesting. That was an interesting thing. Can you have your avatar wear a vision pro to be like super meta about it? No, you can't. There wasn't a vision pro glasses. What? That seems great. Okay, so I haven't gone for my vision pro demo yet. I have one scheduled. I'm going to do it this weekend. Pete or John have either of you done a vision pro demo yet or is Adam truly the only one here of us that's worn one? I think he is. Yeah. Okay. So I have questions, Adam, because you've had this thing for a week. Yep. The really, I mean, I have all kinds of questions, but the first one that I have is about one of your stated, you know, about predicted use cases for this work. Like you work as a programmer. So how, how has that gone? So I play. Yeah. So that's a that's a perfect question, because that's like my my big use case. I still have a lot of things to set up. And there were some challenges with work. So as you might imagine, I work remote. So one of the big apps we use is Slack, right? And we are not Slack. Microsoft team zoom, zoom, right? We're on zoom a lot. So there's a zoom app for for it. And it works great. I did a zoom call with some of my coworkers. But one of the features we use in zoom and rely on a lot is breakout rooms. So we have breakout rooms. And I cannot figure out how to do breakout rooms in and I have to be very, very careful using my hands because to talk as things are all over the place. But in zoom, I couldn't find breakout rooms. So I couldn't get into we break into pods. So throughout the day when I'm working, I'm sitting with my other developers that are in my pod, but they're in a breakout room. So I couldn't get into that breakout room. Now I could do it from my computer. And that worked great, like bringing up the computer display. So, you know, look at my Mac connect creates a virtual display. I can use my regular keyboard and trackpad. That works awesome. You can throw up it's it's it's a 4k screen. You are limited to one 4k screen. So if you want to do multiple screens, you can bring up other, you know, vision pro apps, basically any iOS app or any vision app, you can put up, you know, all around that Mac screen. So you have to really rely on that. So that works great because I can do email because all of the office suite is there. So like Outlook, no problem. I can throw that up there. I could throw up zoom. But all the features of zoom don't look like they're quite enabled yet. At least not in the vision pro app. I could probably also download the iPad app. I don't know if iPad app supports breakout rooms, but I would imagine that it does. So but yeah, like, you know, Visual Studio code was there on my main screen. They don't have a dedicated app for it yet that I would imagine Microsoft might change. So as more vision pro apps, you know, it's early. So one of my very first things impressions is that there's a lot of awesome stuff. The, you know, the iPad apps work okay. Vision pro apps are definitely better. They're better optimized in terms of the face and stuff like that. So I think as more apps to come available, I look at it like the original iPhone, right? When the original iPhone came out, we didn't have apps or there were even when we had apps, there was very limited app and it took a while for that to kind of get there. So I mean, but at the end of the day, it worked. And with the right strap, did I do some No, peaches peaches made me nice and big on the screen. I did. No, you did. Yeah. Somebody. So long story short, I think it's workable. There's there's a learning curve, though, because the other thing is, is you have to look, you know, you have to be actually looking at a window to interact with it or and the hardest one was typing. So yes, you can use your keyboard, but I need to be looking at the place where I need to be typing, right, right, different. I can't just like have the cursor in the window over there and type, I have to like look and type. So that's not a different. Okay. All right. But but but like for doing your coding work, like the not meeting part of it functional. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. And the other thing is when you're using the keyboard, it will also bring up a little virtual like anchor display, like when you're using your physical keyboard, above the physical keyboard, so you can see if you're looking down at your keyboard, you can see what you're typing. But again, you have to go over, insert the cursor, you know, like start, get it going, and then kind of you can, you can type away. Fascinating. I mean, like, first weekend, you're able to be productive with it and all of those things ish. Yeah, not as productive as I'm just using my dual monitor setup. But like I said, it's a learning curve. I can see getting there. It's just like, this is a whole new thing. And like even now, when I still want to talk with my hands, but if I pinch things, you know, dialogues are coming up and stuff. Yeah, I think I think careful. I blamed Pete for changing the video layer. I was doing it. It turns out I don't think it was Pete. Yeah. Did I do it? I think you Oh, the three of us, I don't think John has those controls on his screen because of the way we brought John in today. So it's us. Oh, probably if I look at those little icons down below Yeah, make a hand gesture. Yes, that was probably me. Yeah, making things go wonky. Just as long as you don't end the call to see when he does make a hand gesture, puts his hand up in front of his face and moves his hand. It it doesn't. Yeah. Yeah, your fingers are invisible when they're in front of your face. That's where they're translucent microphone, which I can't see. Hey, so somehow you just turned portrait mode, Adam, on the screen. Well done. I did. I don't know what I did. What'd you do? I just put my hand closer to the screen. I don't know. It don't. Hey, we fixed it. Yeah, we fixed it. Woo. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. All right. We're here to fix your problems, too. We're going to fall backwards into it. The other the other truly amazing thing. And we were talking about this a little bit in the pre-show when I went, you know, when we did the March back and forth thing. The space, the spatialness, the spatiality, I don't know how you would say it, like of everything is truly incredible. And this blew me away. The first day I got it, I did the setup in my kitchen. OK. And I've gone through the setup and I set up my, I set up my, you know, persona. And then, you know, I'd gone into the living room and I was watching Apple TV stuff and checking out 3D video and all that sort of thing. And the next morning I got up and, you know, I grabbed it from the living room and I'm sitting there. And I kind of turned around and back in the kitchen, I had left the persona window open and I could see my persona like sitting where I had left it in the kitchen. And not only that, you can you can see your windows through walls. So like when I got up to go get the coffee, one thing was as I walked away, the audio, I got further away from the audio and the audio went down, but I can still hear it very, very softly in the kitchen. And if I looked over towards my office, I can see the backs of all my windows. Not only that, you can you could use the controls so I could literally if I had wanted to, I could have plucked the window from my office and brought it back into the kitchen. Oh, wow. Oh, interesting. Right. And it scales everything appropriately too. So the windows were just like way, way tiny way, way back over there and I just moved my window over. Yeah. So you're we for those that either are watching the video or go back and watch the video, we have two videos of two images of Adam that your normal camera and this one, your normal video is frozen at the moment. So I know I know you're planning on switching back. So that might be a little thing. Yep. Uh, so very cool. That I I'm eager, really eager to hear how this evolves for you. Very cool. So John, what have you been up to, man? It's good to have you. Not so much buying new toys. I'll talk about some of them later. Cool. Cool. Amazing. Amazing. Amazing. Cool. Well, it's it's like I said, it's good to it's good to have you is now a decent time to enter the real world again. You can re enter the real world. I'll I'll tell everybody about our hangout that's coming up on Sunday. I know we mentioned it in the last episode, but there was some discussion. We like to have these hangouts anyway. So it doesn't really matter what we talk about. But we always like to have something that's of interest to the community. And the there were some questions in our discord about Mac web browsers. And it seemed to me that that would be a great thing to do as a collaborative hangout on Zoom, because those who wish to share and show how they're using their favorite web browser can do so. And we all get to look over each other's shoulders. So I think there's a lot to learn with with that from each other there, because even if I know we don't all use the same browser, but even if we did, seeing how other people have their browsers configured and how they use them would be is always eye opening and sometimes frustrating. Like, you know, you're seeing somebody say, oh, why do you do it that way? There's a much better way. We do that with each other in a productive sort of collaborative way. So that's this coming Sunday, the 18th of of February at 4 p.m. Eastern. If you subscribe at MacGeekGab.com calendar, you will see it already on your calendar. If you are in our discord, the there's a thread for it. And I will also post the Zoom link and password there. If you were subscribed to the Mac Geek out Mac, man, easy for me to 1024 still can't say it. If you are subscribed to the Mac Geek Gab email list, you, which you can do at MacGeekGab.com, you will get an email this coming week with all the Zoom details. We just can't post them on any social media other than Discord because of the script kitties. And that, you know, that's just no fun. So yeah. So so there we are. Is it time to continue with quick tips, Adam? Are you are you back to being Mac? I am back. I think. Oh, yeah, you got it. Yeah, that makes a little more. You got a little more tone. Yes, Richard, that's the word. Yeah, great word. Yeah. Yeah. And he changed his shirt, so to speak. Yeah, your avatar has last week's shirt on it, Adam, which which which tracks that's with careful what clothing you are wearing or not wearing when setting up your avatar. FYI, Apple says personas are beta. So it comes up. It is beta, a beta feature at the moment. So my guess is they're going to address the clothing hair thing at some point, maybe not in this version, maybe in the next version, you know, because you also get helmet hair, basically. Right. Yeah, your hair is is very, very hairsprayed. It is pasted on. Yeah, it is pasted. All right. Well, I guess we will be resuming quick tips as we did want to open the show. You want to take us to Sarab, Adam? Yeah, he's got some vision pro tips for us. He says, you know, you can use multiple hands simultaneously to move and resize two windows at once. That sounds like some ambidextrous like stuff. I don't know. I don't know if I'm ready to go there yet. I'll have to try that out. Moving one around at a time. I'm used to doing that. So that's interesting. OK, all right. You can say S lady close all apps to exit all open apps. You can bring an app really close to you and interact with it like an iPhone or iPad app. This one is actually really cool. Every all your controls are touchable, basically. And you can you can interact with any element as that. And not only that, there's a hover sort of thing. So as you your finger gets closer, you will see a little white kind of shadow. And then even with like keys, anything that's pressable, there is actually a press in. Obviously, there's no tactile feedback, but it will interact like elements will physical or virtual elements will interact with your business digits, which is amazing. I heard from a developer's perspective, there's a full skeletal system on your hands. So developers can like play with that. So it's going to be really interesting to see what they do with that. So Apple gives you a them an underlying bone structure for all your. Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah. You know, what's fascinating is you don't need hand controls, nothing in your hands to hold like the other yeah, virtual and augmented reality, you know, some some used gloves, some used just taking hand gestures. Have you played and I'm curious about the latency of the hand gestures? Have you played any games with it that were the latency or done anything with the latency would matter and how is it? Oh, yeah, yeah. They have a great version of Fruit Ninja, where you actually karate chop fruit that flies at you. And it turns your entire environment into the space that you're playing in. Like it put a little rocks and grass like all over my living room in the right places, not, you know, on the couch or the chairs, like it knows where all the objects are. Little pig walked around and like it that the again, the immersiveness of this thing is through the roof. And I played with other hands or headsets and stuff like that. And it's just it blows your mind. Like I would encourage anybody and multiple people have said this, but if you have an opportunity, go set up a demo, go do the demo. Yeah, be careful if you have extra cash, though, because I know might get sucked in. Yeah. So maybe leave your wallet wallet at home. Just bring an idea or whatever you need to like do the demo. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. I hope somebody makes a minority of report plug in for that. It's basically that it basically is that the way elements like anchor to the environment or their space is incredible. Like there's no jiggle. There's no jitter. Like if you plop an object on the on the table, it's there or if it's floating in that space, wherever you leave it, just unbelievable. Back to Serob's tips, though. If you long press on the X button below an app to you can use that to hide all other apps. You can double press the home button, which is the little. That's a physical button on the dial. The dial like the crown. Like a digital crown. Yeah, the little crown thing. That's a physical button. You also have another button, which is for like the camera features and stuff like that. It's also the button you double press to confirm like purchases and things like that. Oh, yeah. OK. Yeah. But you can double press that home button to hide all apps. You can hold that down. This is this is a really good tip. And I didn't learn this for a couple of days and it really helped. So windows can get a little adiwampus sometimes, like when you drag them over there or you like turn or again, like when I was in my kitchen and all my windows were here in the office, you can press and hold down the home button. And that will bring everything back to you and re-center it. So if anything's off. So if I look over here and I have a window over here, I can hold that down and re-center it over there. Interesting. Yeah, that that's really, really helpful one. And then finally, in the TV app, OK, you know, I was I already interrupted you. What was that word you learned from from moving to South Dakota that I've never heard you use before before? Caddywampus. Yeah, I've never I've just never heard you use. I know I know it's a word. I've just never heard you use it before. So yeah. Yeah. And then finally, in the TV app, if you look at the top left corner and select your current environment again, it will auto place the video further and bigger than you could place it manually. Note, this only works in the Apple TV app, not third party streaming apps and the virtual environments don't even get me started, like that feature blows me away. Really? And there's there's a couple of things about that. Yes. So I watched Star Wars Rogue One in 3D, which the 3D video like 3D movies on this thing. I have always hated 3D, like when you go to the theater and they give you the glasses and I've tried all the different kinds of 3D. This is like immersive, incredible, and they've got tons of 3D movies. Anything that you've purchased in your a lot of things that you've purchased in your library already, if you purchased from Apple, they're auto converting to 3D. So no additional cost. You get 3D versions. They've got Marvel movies and obviously Disney's in on it. So almost anything from Disney, but a few other studios. But anyway, I watched Rogue One in 3D on basically a movie screen in a movie environment. But I chose to use they have the Tatooine environment and some of the environments are just in certain apps. So like the Disney ones are only in Disney Plus, like the Disney environments. And Apple has their own environments and HBO has their own environment. So they have Game of Thrones, like you can sit in the in the throne room and watch your movie. But it puts the screen out where like a ginormous movie screen would be. But I'm so I'm sitting in a land speeder was basically a land speeder drive in is kind of the environment. There's land speeders all around. But you look down and you're sitting in the seat and you look in front of you and you see all the controls and you look over here and you see that. And and the other really cool feature because I wondered about this was like, I want I finished my drink and I wanted to go go get a drink. And I'm like, well, I'm going to have to dial back the environment or whatever. No, stand up, start walking. It takes you out of the the full environment. It allows you to interact with your space and then you walk and you sit back down. And when you walk back into the space, it shows you where you were sitting and you sit back down and you're back in the environment. So like little stuff like that is the little Apple stuff they think about, right? They think about what if I need to get up and go get a drink? I don't want to have to turn the dial or I just stand up and it goes on moving and it goes, hey, you can go get a drink now. That's so cool. The cool. Yeah, the level of detail they've thought about. But then I sent you some video at them that I shot. And I found it interesting that the that the spatial video didn't come through when I emailed and or texted it to you. But if I sent it via iCloud link, you got the full. Well, you sent an exported version, though, Pete. Like you exported the video on your Mac and then sent the export. And I think the export process is what for lack of a better term, dumbed it down. Yeah, exactly. Well, I think I think it's similar to what you would get when you shoot live video, right? If you shoot a live video and you share it, you know, via text or whatever, it will convert it or you try it in certain platforms. So if you're not going from iCloud or from. Yeah, iCloud to iCloud. So I think there's something to that, like, too. I think it needs to be shared in an Apple way. I did tell photos, Apple photos, export the full original unedited. You know, I tried. But when it was the iCloud link, he got it. And then he also mentioned it was kind of like a few dream state feeling in there. And I was noticing yesterday when I was in the Apple store in Honolulu that the edges of the video show, you know, kind of blurs. Yeah, so what happens is it's definitely here's the thing on my opinion on the spatial video stuff. You know, it's really good. I will tell you the stuff that I shot on and I don't know if it was lighting because the room was kind of dark, but the stuff that I shot with the Vision Pro was not great, my opinion. Like it felt very grainy, very, you know, 1.0. So think if you go back and look if anybody with original iPhone, if you go back and look at your original iPhone photos that when you got the iPhone, you were like, oh, these are amazing, like digital photos. If you look at them now, they're like, yeah, those photos aren't that great. Right. Right. Spatial video shot on the on the device itself. I think the cameras are not quite up the snuff. Now, the stuff that Pete sent me from an iPhone 15 Pro looked great, but again, when it was in a window. So you know how you've seen the if you've seen the videos that Apple's put out, you'll see the spatial videos in kind of a little square where window and they look great in there. Now, there's a button to like make it immersive, right? To live in the environment. Sure. Yeah. So I called it cheaty, I think, on our text. So when I click that button, it got a little bit bigger and then it just fogged the edges white. Wait, the the edges of your reality aren't fogged all the time, Adam. No, but it's but it's not like a panorama, like I have panoramas and panoramas are amazing. Yeah, right. You know, 180 degrees and you feel like you're back in that space. That's what that's what I would have expected the video to be. That's what I would have expected the spatial video. It's not what it is. It's a little it's a little window that you look into. And it's got it. It's very impressive, like 3D. It does kind of like watching avatar with the 3D glasses on where you're looking into a world. Is that? Yeah. Yeah, you're looking into a window. And I will tell you to people might have heard that there's an issue with field of view on Apple. I don't know that it's any worse. I mean, some people will say it's worse than some other 3D headsets. But you do get a little goggle view. So you do sometimes you eventually if you're in it long enough for watching a movie, you'll get past it because you're looking past it. But it is noticeable sometimes that you have, you know, yeah, you don't get your full periphery goggles like this. Yeah, yeah, you get my point is like it's a little tunnel vision sometimes, right? Right. And that's a legitimate complaint. That makes sense. Yeah. All right, let's go. Let's continue with quick tips. And and this time I promise they're not about the Vision Pro. But there. But if you have quick tips about the Vision Pro, please send those in. I don't mean to be dismissive. I just, you know, it's been 30 minutes. Where would you send them, Dave, to feedbackandmechicab.com? I guess. OK. Asking for a friend. Yeah, I would do feedback at mechicab.com, John. Did you say feedback at mechicab.com? Yes, we did. Yes, we did. All right. Yuri wrote in with our next quick tip. Use the command key when you are command click on the title in any menu bar. Like, you know, the title of a document in a menu bar, that will open up a menu that shows the path of the file and all of the subfolders and folders leading to that file so you can navigate up to wherever you want, including, you know, if you just want to see the folder that the file is in, it's right there. It's the first one in the list. But you get to see the path and you can even navigate there. And when you choose to navigate there, let's say you're in pages, you command click on the title of a document, it drops down this menu, whatever you choose will open up in the finder so you can see that view of your stuff. And this is what I love quick tips for, because it's things I used to know and I forgot. So it's good. Here's a follow up tip. Yeah. If you open terminal, excuse me, and drag a file or folder into the terminal window, it'll give you the text path to that file. Right. If you drag it from the finder, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, right. Yeah. And if you if you put a command in ahead of it, like if you wanted to copy that or something in the terminal, you put CP space and then drag it in and yep, there you go. Yep. I find that really handy with folders. If I know I need to do something in a folder, I will just drag the folder, you know, I'll say CD space and drag the folder into the terminal. And then yeah, there it goes. Yeah, that's a good bonus tip. I like it. I love it. All right. Mike brings us to our next one. He says, in the notes app, I have a recipe, three cups of this, one tablespoon of that. When I tap on the three cups, a little sheet pops up with all sorts of conversions. Three cups is X number of pints and so many leaders and so many central leaders, et cetera. No, I'm not going to do public math for you. And it does the same. He says, if I tap on one tablespoon, of course, I had not seen this before and thought you would enjoy. We certainly do enjoy. Those are the quick tips that we love, the things we didn't know, we needed to know. But that's actually a great way that makes me think that using notes to store and manage recipes might be a pretty good idea. Said it before, I will say it again, data detectors are cool. Yep, they sure are. There they are. And that's why Spotlight, I did it with Spotlight. And I found out that three tablespoons is essentially a shot. It's an ounce of math. That's where that is, folks, is pilot math. I'm just going to say it. Everything as it relates to a shot. That's right. There you go. They don't do shots in the cockpit nor eight hours leading up to their time in the cockpit. I don't want to cast any illusions. Look, and I used to live in Louisiana, and I went to LSU, went to Bent Rouge, and people used to say, how far is New Orleans? And listen, I'm not advocating drinking and driving. People who know me personally know I'm very much against it. I was just going to say, knowing you, I know exactly how against it you are. But the question was, well, how far is New Orleans? And the answer is about a six pack. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, for Pete, if you're as old as Pete, you would know this if not ask your parents. But before drinking and driving was considered bad, it was considered normal. Like when I moved to Texas for the first year, you couldn't drive drunk, but you could drink and drive. This was in 1995. The law had been passed, but it didn't go into effect until January 1st of 1996, where you could no longer have an open container in your vehicle. Yeah. I'm glad that the societal thinking on this has evolved, but it really used to be like, oh, well, he got into an accident because he was drunk. It was an excuse, not a... Yeah, it's fascinating. But yes, pilot math, folks. All right. Ben brings us our next one. He says, I recently rediscovered that one way to close spotlight is to use the same keyboard shortcut that you use to invoke it, which, of course, by default is command space. So you use command space to invoke spotlight. A lot of times I've learned to use escape to close it. And I wind up hitting escape twice because the first time I hit escape, it clears it, and then it closes it. So what he says is if you close spotlight with command space and then reopen it, whatever query was there persists. So if you're in the middle of doing a calculation and you need to go and find the next number you wanted to add, which is something I want to do all the time, for some reason, I don't know why, but I do find myself in this position. You just command space yourself out of the spotlight window, go do whatever you need to do, come back in. And maybe there's some time period after which it wipes itself anyway, but for those quick return visits, it, yeah. It really, really works. I know, right? I had no idea about this one. Yeah, yeah. That's cool. I never thought about that. Right. I think I noticed they made a change at some point. So sometimes what I'll do is bring up spotlight and then do math in it, you know, like when I'm paying my bills on all that. So I'll do, you know, this plus this plus this. At some point it truncates it and that I'll see dot, dot, dot. The result, the proper result is still displayed, but I don't know why they. What is it truncating? Just the calculation is being truncated? Yes. Just, yeah. Okay. I've seen that too. And you're right. That's new. Yeah. Relatively new. Maybe the last OS or two. But yeah, it didn't. It used to just kind of, you know, grow with you. Yeah. That's right. That's right. Yep. Yep. Does anybody use the feature where you can like drag stuff out of it? So like if you're doing a photo or like, you can like drag and drop stuff out of like spotlight, right? Can't you? What? And then I think, I thought you could. You might, you may be right. Yes. Yes, you can. I might be crazy. It's like a clipboard thing. I just went and grabbed the three tablespoons, which equals one and a half fluid ounces, by the way. And it'll let you throw it anywhere. That's not a shot, Pete. Shots in my house are two ounces. Well, there you go. But I just thought this with this other tip now, you know, like you could leave stuff there. And if you needed to go open another window or like move something around to like bring something over, you know, that would be handy for that as well. I had no idea. But yeah, you can grab it and drag it. That's cool. It's three tablespoons, one point five fluid ounces. If I drag this, there it is. It just dragged it as text. And I just put it like in our discord. Oh, this is going to change. This actually makes my brain hurt because there's a lot of things that I do. I use the clipboard right to do that. So maybe here's another tip. If you do that calculation, right, you do three tablespoons equals. And then it'll show one point five fluid ounces. And it's highlighted. But any math equation that you do, you can just hit command C. And now the result of it is on your clipboard and you can go and do whatever you want with it. So if you're yeah, yeah, yeah, yep. So yeah, spotlight spotlight's cool. Not as cool as data detectors, Adam, of course. But can third party devs still create like the data detector plugins? I know that was a thing for a while, but I don't feel like I've seen it in a long time. Yeah, I don't. I don't know. I honestly don't know the answer to that. Yeah, same. Yeah. Well, if you do feedback at Mackie Keb.com and if you have examples of third party data detectors that you find valuable, especially feedback at Mackie Keb.com. We'd love to know. Just because we've almost done, well, we've done 1,023 and a half episodes. Just because we've done that many doesn't mean we're done learning things. In fact, every week, I feel like I come in with beginner's mind. Just blown away. Yeah, it's crazy. What do you got for us, Pete? What are you going to blow us away with? Well, I actually have two. I'm going to follow up on that last one with calculations. If you're ever at a point where you've got a lot to type in and that sort of thing, you can go S, lady. What's this number plus this number plus that number? And she'll give you the answer. Yeah, so I like to use that as well. But here's another one that I found this for years. I've been using Google Translate and there's another app called Translate and you have to give it access to your camera and then you pointed at some text in a foreign language and it will translate it for you with your data connection. And I thought, well, hey, what's this down here? Live text. So if you point your camera at any foreign text, in my case, my phone is set up for English. So if I set it to another language and then hit live text, which is that little square down in the, usually in the bottom right corner with three lines in it, you tap on that what will pop up in the bottom left corner is a little button that says translate. You tap that and it changes it to English, translates it to English. Like right on the photo itself, right there on the right on the screen, or on the screen of the camera. Yeah. So you don't need the translate app or the Google translator. And it's right there in the camera. No special app required. Really? I mean, I've done it in the Translate app and I find at least the last time I did it, which has been maybe six months, the Google Translate app, I found was more, was faster, more reliable maybe than Apple's Translate app. But that, you know, I mean, there's leapfrogging that happens all the time in text. So I, you know, try for yourself. But without having to open a separate app. Yeah, right. Just pretty nice. So right there in the camera at it, hit live text and hit translate. And you get a nice little. Interesting. So like if it sees text, oh, it would have to be a foreign language. I got it. Yeah. Yeah. Of course, that makes sense. So you could write down a phrase in another language and point it at it. And you'll be able to use it how quickly it comes right up and gives you the answer. Amazing. That's yeah. Try the, from whatever call, it also supports a limited number of foreign languages. Like I was trying it in the international section in my local grocery store. And so the kosher section has Hebrew. I think it knows Hebrew. Some stuff has Arabic. I think there's a limited number of languages that it does know and will translate for you. So have fun with that. Yeah. Cool. Cool. I think maybe that's why I use the Google app was it because it it the apples was more limited. I mean, no one has all the languages. But yeah, that's right. Yeah. Cool. Cool. Cool. All right. It's just processing here. There's so much. We're never going to get to questions. We're we're we're lucky if we get to cool stuff found but we will because we have we have some good stuff to get to. I expected that this episode would be mostly cool stuff found. I was wrong. Nick says for anyone who wants or likes to customize their Siri voice but notices that sometimes she goes all robotic and nowhere near what you expect. Check to see if her voice needs to be redownloaded. I can't tell you why this happens. But on my phone it frequently loses my Siri voice. I have seen it consistently post upgrade. Today it happened after I woke up to check go into settings. Go to Siri and search and look at Siri voice. If it says downloading stay on that page until it is finished. All right. Thanks for that Nick. Good stuff. Good stuff. Mark and oh go ahead. Yep. And along the lines I was playing with that yesterday when I was looking at that tip and I went into voices in settings and turned out I had a bunch of voices that I had downloaded. Get rid of those if you don't want them. There's if you don't want them. Many many megabytes that you can save on your phone. Like yeah voices you're not using. Yep. Yep. Mark in Florida says lots of people can't get Airprint to work when they're running the latest Mac OS Sonoma and iOS 17. I was one of them. But I solved the problem by changing one setting on my M1 iMac. That setting is the Mac OS setting for printer sharing. As soon as I turned it off I could Airprint from my iPhone 12 to my Epson ET 2650 printer. This worked with my iMac and iPhone VPNs turned on even. So it finds those local things. Bonjour style. And he says on the Mac go to system settings, appearance, accessories and internet sharing, printer sharing and turn off the slider on the iPhone. In my example printing a note from the iOS app, from the iOS notes app. From the note you want to print, tap the share icon, tap print and then the printer and off you go. Now it works perfectly by the way. He says I use printopia with sharing turned on. Printopia contain the instruction. Mac OS built-in printer sharing is active. Disable it if not required. Once I turned it off, I could use Airprint. Ah, so this is a printopia printer. Printopia is, I'll put a link to that in the show notes. That's great because that can use your Mac to share printers and do all kinds of fun things. So I will. Well that's counterintuitive. Turn off printer sharing in order to be able to print. Yep, yep, yep. Well, I guess if your Mac is getting in the way, trying to share that printer that's already sharing itself, I mean, I can see why it would be like, let's eliminate confusion. If you're doing some voodoo on your own, we'll let you. You know, it's probably. Go ahead smart guy. Yeah, right. And our last quick tip comes from Jay Jewel who says when sending an iMessage, try long pressing the send button. The blue circle with the up pointing arrow. Yeah, that's right. This, this allows you to send with an effect. The effects include bubbles slam loud gentle and invisible ink or screen echo spotlight balloons confetti love lasers fireworks and celebration. I wish my daughter a happy birthday today with balloons and was able to do it this way. Yeah, you hold down on that that little blue thing and off it goes. All right, folks, it is time to talk about our sponsor BB Edit. Imagine a tool so powerful it turns a mountain of text into a molehill. BB Edit 15 isn't just an update. 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And if you have had a trial on a previous version, guess what? You get 30 days again now with BB Edit 15. Step up your text game. Head to barebones.com to see why BB Edit is the choice of Mac Geeks everywhere. Don't just edit, BB Edit. And our thanks to BB Edit for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, in the intro, you mentioned that you got some toys. It is time for cool stuff found. And where better to start than with you, my friend? All right, I have a sad story here. Some of you know I have a, or had, a GCC12-1200 laser printer that was made in 1999. I was going to say, I think it's older than my children. So, yeah, yeah. But here's the bad news is that the, and you can still get toner for it. It's a combination toner, drum assembly. And at some point I was getting streaks and all that. I'm like, okay, time to get a new one. So I got a new one. Here's some advice. Don't force it. Because what I did is I kind of forced the insertion and then I heard something snap. And then did you have, oh, did it break the printer or did you have like toner everywhere? I broke something in the toner guide assembly. So the printer broke, not the toner cartridge? Correct. Got it. Don't break the toner cartridge either. That's a disaster. You might have to just move if you did that. So I decided, well, let me look for a new laser printer. So I put out a request on my Twitter and someone got back to me with a brother unit that we'll link to. And it looked pretty good. It's, let's see, a compact mono laser single function printer with wireless and mobile device pin thing. I'm like, oh, that sounds neat. Sure. But then here's what I did that I shouldn't have done or actually I should have done. I'm like, let me scroll to the bottom of the page because Amazon typically does a comparison. Yeah. And they showed a couple of additional models and then one caught my eye. So instead of print, it does print copy and scan. I'm like, that's neat. Yes. And what else here? Duplex printing. Dave convinced me, hey, you know, there may be a time that you need to use and I'm like, okay, and it has an LCD display. Ethernet, Wi-Fi, USB and all that. And I'm like, all right, here we go. So I got the model Dave linked to a slightly different one. But basically it has a paper tray. It has a place where you put in the toner. It has a place where it ejects things. And it also has an ADF and a scanner. And it's a color scanner. You would think, well, shouldn't it be a black and white scanner? It's like, no. No, just because it can't print color, but it can scan color. Sure. Yeah. That's great. Yeah. Go ahead. But the setup was cool as well. So my old printer didn't have wireless. This has wireless and AirPrint or Bonjour, as we were talking about earlier. It was the easiest thing to set up. All I had to do, the most traumatic part was I had to enter my Wi-Fi credentials using their non-keyboard. Yeah. Yeah. But once I got that done, I went to each of my machines. On the computer, I just said add printer. And since the printer was logged in to just come up at some point saying, brother, model, whatever, here's the driver for you. It was just very, very easy to set up. Hey, I am amazed. I've had a duplex printer, meaning it can print on both sides of print double-sided. It's amazing to me that in 2024, I still print enough that I love having the duplex option. There's always little things that I need to print. And it's like, great. Yeah, print it on the back too. I don't need to waste two pieces of paper for this one thing. I'm astounded. And it was interesting when I got my duplex printer, the one I have is probably five years old, maybe, something like that. And I have a Lexmark. But again, they're all kind of the same. Just look for the features that you want and find the one that has them at the price you like and buy it. And then don't think about it until you need another printer because the models change faster than any of us change our underwear. It's crazy. Yep, same with the duplex. I've had a brother laser printer for years now. I don't have any intention of ever replacing it till it dies. I mean, they're incredible. The other feature I use a lot that I was surprised is copy. Yeah, right. Yeah, I have the printer that this one replaced is an old HP multifunction. Apple's macOS update. I mean, it doesn't owe me anything. It's not quite as old as John's printer, but it's close, like probably within five years of when you got that one, I got this one. And the scanner doesn't work anymore. It does not with any computers I own. There is no software for them. And yes, I've tried all of the other third-party things. Nobody makes it for this. But that one lives in the house. It's a fine printer. The printing still works because it's just a PostScript network printer and it's got an Ethernet port on it. And it's great. And so we use that in the house. But having a copier in the house is awesome. It's crazy how often we use it. And then the duplex one that I have in the office will also scan with current devices. And that's handy too. But I remember when I got the duplex one, I posted something again on Twitter about it. And Jason Snell replied, he was like, I know I'm the same way. It's crazy. I've lived this entirely digital life. And yet I don't, you know. That's right. Yeah, you do until you don't. You think you do. Yeah, exactly. So as part of this purchase, so the old printer, I would use an Amazon smart plug to power it up and power it down. I couldn't figure out how to do that. So I had a smart plug that I bought quite a while ago. And I tried to activate it. And it wouldn't. I got some dumb pairing error. It's like unable to configure. And I'm like, it used to work. Someone from Amazon actually reached out to me and said, yes, send us the info. And they're like, OK, we credited your account $30 because the new smart plug or your old smart plug doesn't. Wow, that's amazing. Well, yeah, I'm shocked that they're actually, you know, searching for people mentioning their products. And if they're complaining about it, they'll do what they can. Where did you complain about it? Like in an Amazon review or on Twitter or something? On Twitter. Wow, that's amazing. Yeah, customer service, man. That's the key to successful business. And they didn't even have you go to Target to buy them gift cards for that customer. Oh, there is one thing we need to get through. I will make sure because, John, I think you'll get a kick out of this. But only related tangentially to Pete's comment. But yeah, that's that's fascinating. Fascinating. That's great. But doesn't I would assume your new printer has like a dormant motor, a sleep motor, whatever, where it's using almost no power, right? So you don't need to turn it off. Yes, OK. Yeah. And here's a tip. So the thing is, you know, once I had it on and I pressed the power button, at some point I would say deep sleep. So yeah, there's a low power mode. I think it draws like four watts an hour or something. So not a biggie. But I just it was the old way of doing things that I had to eventually get over. The other thing is I found out there is a way to turn it off. You hold down the power button. In order to learn that, I had to RT FM. Well, there you go. It wasn't obvious to me. I'm like, if I press the power button, shouldn't you turn off? And it's like, well, not really. This is why, you know, almost 19 years later, the show still exists because we still have to RT FM. Just because you were doing this a long time. Read the flight manual. Read the flight manual. Flight manual. That there. Hang on. Hang on. That deserves a magical. There it is. I learned something because I thought that meant something completely different. Pete, boy, I should apologize to my mother. All right. Adam. I thought it was read the full manual. Fine. Fine manual. The fine manual. Boy, I really, I have to apologize to everybody now. Yeah, because when I tell people that, I don't use any of your adjectives. I use a different one. Every time I tried to type it out before iOS 17, it would say, read the ducking manual. And I never quite understood what that was all about. Adam, you got a cool stuff found for us. I do. And this will be a little bit limited. But it's my attempt to convince Pete that he needs a vision pro because I was playing around with it and looking for different apps. And a flight app came up called ForFlight. It's actually a Boeing company. And they have this app called Voyager. And you fire this up. They have a bunch of curated airports. It puts a terrain, like this giant table disc floating terrain on your, in your space. So you like pop it down. And it has the actual terrain, like so if there's mountains and hills and stuff like that. And it's airports. And it will show you the airport. But then not only that, it shows you the planes actually where they are on the runway, where they're doing their approach, where they're taking off from with accurate air speeds and altitudes and directions. And you can tap on the plane and it pops up the little window right above the plane. And it's not only planes. It does commercial jets, business jets, turboprops, fish thin aircraft, flying helicopters. And it does have curated airports. But you can look up any airport. And I'm in a teeny tiny town, 15,000 people. And they have our airport in there. Any airport you can just search. All the GA airports, yeah. Yeah. And it's all with the, maybe Pete can tell me what the K codes mean. Like it has extra codes. It's not just the three digit. It's a four digit. So there's IATA. And I don't remember what that abbreviation stands for, international aviation. So BOS, Boston, JFK for New York is an IATA code. KBOS is the ICAO, ICAO, International Civil Aviation Organization. So worldwide, there are four digit codes. The United States all start with a K, except for Alaska and Hawaii, which start with P, I presume for Pacific. Much of Europe starts with any, some does not. Interesting. But that's what it is. Yeah, the ICAO. I mean, I knew BOS and KBOS were the same airport. Like, I was smart enough to intuit that, but I had no idea why. Yeah. And it will also give you the airport data you know, weather and all that sort of stuff. So it was like crazy. I sat in my living room for way too long and watching little planes. Probably not to be one flying. Although I wonder if there's a world where that becomes your cockpit glass, Pete. You know, it may be. I mean, because certainly, certainly the military is doing that. And the example is the DF-35, right? Yeah. The helmet on that thing now no one's going to go out and buy this Apple Vision Pro. The helmet on the F-35 is about, I think I heard 300,000 was the number for the helmet. But if you want to see what's flying below you, you simply look down and the cameras on the airplane that are pointed down project onto your visor. What's below you? It's truly an augmented reality situation. So you're it's like flying in a clear bubble. I mean, the latency is probably good enough. Like I can walk around in this thing, no problem. And I know Mark has Brown in his review played ping pong with it on. And I believe somebody already got pulled over wearing one of these things. Of course. Of course somebody's an idiot. Like I don't know who would do that. I thought I immediately thought of that though. I'm like, somebody's going to drive in this thing. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, because you can't. So Adam, I mean you could. Yeah. So Adam, do they offer an option to tighten the bolts on the plane before taking off? Yeah. No. Oh, that was low. No, but there is another app. And I'm going to forget the name of it. I'll have to come back to it where you can put 3D models in your space. And I think a bunch of the reviews has shown this where you put a full-size F1 race car in your living room. And it looks so incredibly real. They also have a jet engine and you can take that apart and you can see the parts moving and you can disassemble it, reassemble it. Fabulous for training. And 100% full-size. I mean, and you can walk up to it and look in and just look at all the little details like down to the tiniest level. And it's just like. I can't wait to see where we are in the environment. Yeah, I can't wait to see where we are. And I was going to say a year, but even six months as developers really start to like dig in. This is, you know, I have not yet bought one. If I were traveling as frequently as I once was, I think I would probably get one both for use on the plane so that I can just like be immersed and forget about where I am. But also, like what you're talking about with your office environment, Adam, where, you know, you can, like if I could bring my multiple monitors set up with me in a headset, that's way more efficient, right? To have everywhere. So like, yeah, yeah. Anyway, speaking of things to bring with you while you travel, Pete, you want to take us to Andrew? I can do that, I think. All right. So yeah. So Andrew writes over the years, I have used various means to watch TV while traveling using the hotel and Airbnb TV, including taking my Apple TV with me, running an HDMI cable from my iPhone, iPad or Mac. I found the Apple TV to be too bulky to travel with. Using other means, I lost use of my phone, iPad or Mac. If it was you, if it was being used as the media player in the New Year sales, Google Chromecast HD was on sale for $35, $60 Australian dollars. So I grabbed one. It's the unit with a remote control, unlike the original Chromecast. Wow. Is it impressive? It is thin and light and easily fit in my travel bag. All of the apps I need are available except Apple Music. It also runs VPN. It's easy to plug into all amount of TVs. I can control it via Google TV app on my Apple devices. The remote is both Bluetooth and infrared, meaning it controls volume on the TV or soundbar too. And as I said, wow, it's not as snappy as Apple TV, but it's 30% of the price and size. The as shipped UI or home screen is full of crap suggestions up next. Continue watching and sundry stuff. However, there is a switch that you can flick that removes everything except the apps on your home screen. This makes it an Apple TV clone. On the home screen, arrow up as high as you can. Right arrow on the settings and click arrow down to the accounts and sign in and click right arrow to your account and click and arrow down to the apps only mode and switch on by clicking. Boom. You have an Apple TV emulation mode. This thing looks sharp, Dave. I have never had a Chromecast, but I think I just got cost $35. Well, it's only $30 on Amazon today. This is the HD version, which is the one he recommended. There is a 4K version of it as well that I think is another $10, right? It's the, you know, for $39.98 today on Amazon, you can get the Google TV 4K. So if that matters to you, then you need a 4K TV in your hotel room or, you know. A lot of them are 4K in hotel rooms and Airbnbs now. And it of course will work with non 4K TVs too. So, you know, for $10 more, you kind of bought your options. I have a, I was going to say confession, but it really isn't a confession. I have not been using my Apple TV as of late and it's because I got really frustrated that the Apple TV Plex app would not play at most sound of uncompressed audio. The way Apple does its stuff on the Apple TV, it will only play at most sound if the sound is previously compressed, right? So if the Plex server has to do any transcoding, it strips out the Atmos metadata. So Atmos is 7.1, I'll say that's not entirely correct, but let's say it's 7.1 sound, right? Or 7.2 sound with extra metadata that tells you where all of those sounds should come from. That metadata gets stripped out any time there's any change or transcoding that needs to happen. And with uncompressed data, the Apple TV does not play uncompressed data. So the Plex server is forced to transcode it, which strips out the metadata. Could Plex be reprogrammed to put it back in? I believe the answer is yes. Have they done that? I am certain that the answer is no. So I started looking for other options. And if you look online and ask about what's the most powerful media streaming player, you don't have to look too far before you find the Nvidia Shield TV Pro. This thing is absolutely spectacular. It runs Android TV, just like or Google TV, whatever you want to call it, just like the Chromecast does. The interface can be tweaked, as Andrew mentioned, to make it perfectly smooth and easy to use. You can remote control it. It plays uncompressed audio and uncompressed video. It even has some AI upscaling to take things that aren't 4K and turn them into 4K for your 4K TV. If your TV doesn't already do that, if you have one of these or you get one of these, I recommend A.B. testing it, which it actually has a button that you can program a button to let you A.B. test. So you can see, all right, how good does my TV make this look when it upsamples versus how does the Nvidia Shield TV Pro make it look when it upsamples? And you can decide which one you like better and then just go with that. But it's fantastic as a streamer. It's $180, so you're paying for what you get. And we've had it running for three weeks now, I think, and have not even considered using the Apple TV. I mean, we didn't unplug the Apple TV. It's right there. I could bounce back and forth with ease. And we just use the Shield. The remote is great. We've been using it stock remote. I mean, I did configure it with my Harmony remote, but it works great. Can you remote it from your iOS device? Is there a remote app? Yeah, with the Google app. Just like Andrew mentioned. Right, you have to put that app on your device. It's not just built-in, right? So there's that. Wow, look out, Apple TV is getting some real challengers in that space. Let me ask you this. I remember when I used to do business travel, there were special models of TV that would not allow you to put video into them, like HDMI. I mean, I looked at this once, I was staying in a hotel and I tried to plug in my video and it wouldn't work. So I looked at the model number and then, you know, Google that and they're like, yeah, this is a hotel model TV because rather than you watching your stuff, they'd rather have you buy it from them or rent it from them. Yeah, I think, yeah. It still happens. It's rare, but it's rare. It's largely gone from my experience. Yeah, because so many people bring their own devices with HDMI cables. I have found- We had that issue in Vegas. Yes. But we wound up unplugging their input and putting ours into their HDMI one or something, wouldn't it? Yeah, but that wasn't because the TV was limited. It was because the suite in Vegas has a set of inputs on the wall that makes you think it's linked to the TV. So you plug your HDMI in and it's like, oh, this must be linked to the TV. No, it's lying. It's lying. It's not linked to the TV. So Pete kind of lifted the TV off the wall and I scrambled underneath and changed the HDMI cable off. I did know such a thing. Nobody saw me. You can't prove a thing. But then it worked fine. Yeah, I had one. I was down. It was actually in Connecticut last year for a quick overnight and the TV had multiple inputs on the side, but I couldn't change to them. I think it was like to your point, John, I think it was in hotel mode or whatever. And I looked online quick and sometimes there's a thing you can do with the remote to get it out of hotel mode. That wasn't the case because the only remote that was in the room was for the hotel's specific box that was plugged into the TV. So I didn't have the TV remote. So OK, fine. But the hotel's little box plugged into the TV with HDMI. So I just unplugged their box from the TV and plugged my HDMI out from I think it was my iPad in and I was able to watch the hockey game I wanted to watch or whatever. The problem was the TV's volume internal to the TV was set to full blast and the volume knob on the remote that was in the room was to control it on the little box, not on the TV itself. So I had to use my iPad's volume to not wake up my neighbors or whatever. Speaking of Plex, they now right inside the Plex app on all of your devices offer streaming movie rentals. And they have like back catalog stuff, but they also had like the Barbie movie you could rent for $5.99, $5.99 just to make it clear. So if you are a Plex user and you're looking for a movie, don't be surprised when you see Plex sourced movie rentals just show up right there in the app and these come direct from Plex or a partnership they have or whatever it is. So I don't know. Now, how is there, you know, I've noticed this. So I've been using Redbox for years and they still have kiosks where you can get a physical DVD and I think it's or Bluebray. I think it's only $2 now. Okay. My reflection though is when I look either at them on their app on Apple TV, their pricing is more than the physical media. I don't know, maybe it's your paying for the convenience of being able to stream it or rent it online. Yeah, yeah. Aquaman's $20.99 to rent on Plex. It's because they're still, I don't know if it's the case here, but I've seen this even with Apple TV now. All of these movies, a lot of them are still in the theater. So when they first hit streaming, the purchase price is usually around $25 and the rental price is usually around $20. It will eventually go down like you can see Barbie's already down to what $6 looks like there. Yeah, but it takes weeks till it's left, you know, weeks or months after it's left theater before it hits that. So I've learned like if I want to buy a film, I will usually wait till it's been out of the theater for a month or two, and then you can get it for like 10 bucks or five bucks. If you try to buy it in the first month, it's usually 20, 25 bucks. That makes sense. Yeah, so just check it out in Plex. I mean, it's just there. It's pretty impressive in the movies and shows on Plex section of your library. So I want to take us, I know we're kind of pushing our time, but I did want to share a story from listener Patrick, and I have a story of my own to share along with this. And I wanted to make sure we did this while you were here, John, because I think you would appreciate this. So Patrick shares, he says, I subscribed to Kelby One for my photography. I thought it was at Kelby Training, which I think was an old site. And when I visited that URL, I got a screen that told me I had a problem with my firewall and all of those things that come up from the scammer sites. He says, I've learned to be careful of these. Unfortunately, this also happened to my wife when I was not at home. When she saw it, she was scared and called the numbers on the screen and then proceeded to withdraw $5,000 in cash to go in place in a Bitcoin machine at some CD retail outlet. And they told her, don't answer calls from your husband while you're doing this. She would not answer my calls or texts. Luckily, the Bitcoin machine would not take her $5,000. And while she was on the phone with these hackers, they told her to go to another site and try it, blah, blah, blah. Luckily, she got frustrated and hung up on them finally. She then answered my phone call as I was tracking her on Find My, and I told her to hang up the phone. Don't answer it unless it's for me and come home with the $5,000. He says, I was worried sick, but obviously this thing happens. And he says, my son is an attorney in Denver and handles clients who have lost money due to these scams, which scare the heck out of computer illiterates. So it is a real thing. He says, of course, I reported it to the FBI cyber crime site and didn't hear anything and don't expect to. So thank you for sharing that story. I have one to share too, and hopefully Lisa doesn't mind me sharing this. She does all the accounting for our businesses, right? And a few months ago, the fall, I think this was John, she slacked me and casually said, hey, the bank said that wire transfer didn't go through and is asking if I should resend it. Do you want to reach back out to the vendor and make sure that everything's OK? And I was like, what wire transfer? And she's like, you know, the big one from a couple of days ago. And I'm like, this is in slack, right? I got a million things going on transacting me. So my frustration level is quickly rising. I'm like, treat me like I'm five and start at the beginning. I have no idea what you're talking about. And she's like, yeah, you emailed me that invoice from that consultant the other day that you needed paid immediately and you gave me all the wire information. And I was like, I know what. You had another guest? Yeah, I'm like, no. And so I went to her computer with her and she showed me the email that said it was from Dave Hamilton. But the reply address was not me, right? And and so when she replied asking, you know, a clarifying question, she got an answer from me, seemingly, and and proceeded to file and submit the wire transfer with the bank without ever talking to me because she thought we were already talking and thankful. I don't like to say anything good about the banks. I really, really don't. But Bank of America saved me 25 K last year. Like, you know, she wired it out. And and and the banks, you know, had figured out that this was a scammer and blocked the transfer. But and, you know, as soon as she was looking at it, objectively, she's like, I can't believe I fell for this. She's like, you would never have emailed me like this. You would have slacked me. She's like, we don't do email for these kinds of things. I'm like, you're exactly right. Like, yeah, but it's really and she's very literate on a computer. But it's really easy. And I see it constantly. I get, in fact, I just got an email yesterday from, you know, Lisa Hamilton, except it wasn't saying, hey, I need you to change the direct deposit details for my next paycheck before the next pay cycle. I was like, yeah. And I've gotten it from, you know, from other employees too. And I now just respond and say, yeah, I can do that. As soon as you pay back the payroll loan that you took from us, here's our PayPal account, put that $1,000 back, and then I can change your payroll things. And thus far, they haven't sent me the grant. But, you know, I'll keep trying. Have you seen anything like that, Chuck? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Now, I get phishing emails that appear to be invoices for a product or service that someone provided to me. Yeah. And although people will tell you not to click on those, sometimes I just have a little extra time and I want to mess with them. Because if they're messing with me, they're not scamming someone else. Exactly. And the typical thing is, oh gosh, your computer is infected with 100 viruses and, you know, go to the site or let us get into your computer so we can fix it for you. And I'm like, and usually the conversation ends when they try to do log me in or whatever remote service, I'll then cut them off. And I even talked to one one-time voice. Oh, yeah. And I was like, you know, you should really make better choices with your life. I'm like, it seems you know something about computers, but scamming people, I'm like, you're going to get caught. And I'm like, no, we're not. And I'm like, yeah, I think you will. Because they're using a public phone number, you know, a 1-800 number. Yeah, but that's a fake number. Well, they may be, yeah. Yeah, yeah. But I'm sure if you get the right people on the job, you can find out where they're really calling from. But often they're from a foreign, like they're not from the United States. So that, you know. Their English was good, so I suspect they were in this country. But no, you're right. A lot of times it could be. Because you hear this, you know, you'll hear they're in a call center and there's all this noise in the background and you can, you know, sometimes hear other voices and all that. So, yeah, come if you're in there. Some of them are convincing, though, is that, you know, they'll have like the logo of my bank, you know, is correct. Of course. The reply address is usually correct, though, not always. This is the big tip for me. Is if you look at the address that they're sending it to, if it says undisclosed recipient, or someone else's address, I'm like, you don't even know me. Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. I have a fun story to tell, which I will not share on the show here, A, because it would take too much time, and B, because it's probably not entirely family-friendly. What I did to one of these scammers once, I kept them on the phone for a very long time, and I made them look at something that was very upsetting to them after a while, and they were upset with me. But come to the Hangout on Sunday, and if somebody remembers to ask me, I'll wax poetic about it then. John, before we go, though, I want to, you had one more cool stuff found that you wanted to tell us about with a little bit maybe of show and tell, even on the, for those watching the video, but describe it close enough to the microphone so that all the folks on the audio can hear it too. All right, so if you're on video, you can see this. This is my iPad, Fourth Generation Air. See that thing on the bottom there? Describe it for the folks who... I got, what I got is, so someone online was like, oh, you know, I'm getting a new iPad. What case should I get? I'm like, well, you could get the Folio case, which is a very basic case. It has a tilt and stuff and magnets, so it'll turn off. And that worked for me for a while, but when this person asked me, I was like, you know what? Let me see what's out there as far as keyboards for the iPad. So I got the iPad Apple Magic Keyboard. Dude. Yeah, you like it? Remember, we were to show a while ago when I was trying to use the iPad and the pencil to take notes and all that? Yep. Pain in the neck. Not a path that I would take. I would say the only reason you want to get an Apple pencil is if you have drawing talent. But in this case, with the Backlit Keyboard and the Trackpad, I'm actually using my iPad during the day instead of my computer, because even that older iPad Air Fourth Generation, I can typically get at least a day out of it. And the other thing that's neat is that you can do split screen. So my normal operating mode is I'll have Reddit on the left and I'll have Twitter on the right. Okay. The only thing that gets kind of weird is navigating away from or navigating two different apps. And the best way that I found to do that is you do Command Tab, I think it is. Command Tab just like on the Mac? Is that, yeah, is that? Yeah, is that I'll choose Command Tab and then it'll show the icons of the apps that are running. And there's one that's kind of like the Finder. And so I'll typically switch to that if I want to run another app. That makes sense. Yeah. But it's a nice keyboard. It's Backlit and the Trackpad. Some navigating some things is kind of weird. Like sometimes it'll get the wrong focus in a text field or something like that. Yep. It doesn't have function keys. I was hoping for function keys. There is another vendor, I think Kensington or, I forget who it was, that actually have function keys. This one does not. Okay. No. Cool. I like it. I'm glad to hear that. Yeah. Yeah, what else? Adam, you have one of these? I do. I've been using mine for years with my 11-inch iPad Pro. I think I have my first gen, second gen. I don't know. It's old, but yeah, absolutely love it. I love the charging. Although I will admit the charging on the keyboard is slower than if you just plug it into the side, but you can do either, either. Not it. You can plug right into the side of the iPad. It's not blocked or anything like that. For the app thing, John, I would recommend just using your Spotlight Launcher. So all the same shortcuts work. So just hit Command Spacebar and type the name of the app and hit Enter. And boom, you can open up another app. Oh, that's good. Just like you do on your Mac, right? Yep. Yep. Oh, I like it. That's cool. I'm glad to hear that I've used them. I've tested them. I've never really lived with one. But that's fascinating. I've watched my family use the Apple Pencil and none of them use it for drawing. I mean, I suppose they have used it for drawing, but for the most part, like Lisa uses something, I think it might be good reader on the iPad with the Apple Pencil to track, like when she's knitting, making notes on the knitting pattern so that she knows where she is and all that stuff. And my kids, when they were in school, both high school and college, loved taking notes on their iPad with the Pencil because you get that tactile experience of taking the notes. And they said it really helped them with retention and things like that. So the app that you use for taking notes, I think, makes a difference. I like notability a lot. That's what they were using. Sorry, not good reader. Notability. That you're right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think there's other good ones. That's just the one I fell on. Yes, yes. Apple notes can be okay, but just some of the features with notability, it has some features where you can create kind of a larger writing area so you can put your cursor there and then just track along. And it's got shortcuts for going to the next line and doing so. Kind of really need a good note-taking app, I think, to really use the Pencil with notes. That, yeah. And my family said exactly the same thing. They tried using Apple notes, and they were like, this is untenable. But their friends or someone quickly told them, maybe I told them, because somebody on the show told me, I don't know. But they quickly moved to notability. And then that was it. They were like, oh, this is now completely functional as a note-taking device, and it's amazing. This is the way it should work. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, it's also just for better, for like managing your notes and things like that. So I'll set up different folders for work things or your personal things and kind of organize everything. And it can all sync to your other devices. And the other thing I'll say about that, the Apple Magic keyboard is it is heavy. It does add a lot of weight, but it's very easy to snap on and off. So I'll use it depending upon what I'm doing. I'll snap it on, use it as the keyboard thing during the day to work, and then snap it off at night to just sit around and lounge and browse and read stuff. Yeah, if you want to know what's going on behind the scenes on your iPad, so I'm linking to this, it's a utility about a while ago, but I never really used it that much until I got the keyboard. Then I wanted to see, how's my iPad holding up here? It's called System Status Pro Hardware Monitor, and it shows you your battery, CPU consumption, memory use, everything you ever want to know about what's happening in iOS, which kind of surprised me, because usually they kind of hide that stuff, so I don't know what these guys did to get all those graphs. I used this a while ago and removed it because it stopped being able to get data. I see the last update was in May of 23. Does it work with iPad OS 17? As far as I can tell, wait, 17? Aren't you on 17 now? Isn't that what we're all on? Right? Maybe. Yeah, if you're on the latest, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, 17.3 is what my phone's on, so I assume like, yeah, okay. Huh, that's great to know. All right, yeah, it will link to that. Obviously, yeah, because I remember buying it. We probably mentioned it on the show 10 years ago, John, like, you know, when it was a thing and then there was a period of time where it was not a thing, so. Great, cool. Apple didn't want you looking. They don't want you looking, Pete. It's just how it is. I know. It's how they are. Well, real quickly, before you go closing, jump back to the scammer's thing. Now it's the phone calls, not for an email, but, uh, Porthos John mentioned in there, a, a, p, a, p, a, t, e, dot, a, i. Has an app that will, it's a interactive chatbot that will answer phone calls and engage scammers to keep on the phone. Oh, this is why we love technology. Oh, that's outstanding. All right. Yeah, we will, uh, we'll link to this. Oh, wow. I just rely on scammer payback to do that for me. YouTube channel, I'm addicted to it. It's all right. Yeah. I don't know about this. It's called scammer payback. It's just this guy and a group of people that they just go mess with scammers all day long. And he's really good, too. They will, they will reverse the, the screen share connection, and they have relationships with, um, you know, the screen sharing that they all use. And he, they will get on the computer and start just deleting files. Like they will download and delete files. And then they, they work with the, they work with the FBI and local law enforcement to turn these guys in and shut down. Oh man. I had no idea. Shut down call centers and stuff. This is great. Yeah. So they expose these guys and shut them down. They're friends with the glitter bomb guy, too. And they actually wanted to go into India and, and putting mice and cockroaches in their building. Yeah. I heard about that. That's right. That's right. Yeah. Gamebacks of B word. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Fascinating. So. All right. Well, all good things must come to an end. We're at, we're at an old time here. We're almost a minute and a half in a minute and a half. How about an hour and a half into this, you know, time is, time is, uh, what are they here? Not a linear. You sure you don't want to go eight more minutes? Uh, why would I want to go eight more minutes, Adam? Because it's 10, 16 for me right now and then we'd be 10, 24. That's awesome. Uh, no, I think we'll bring the band in. I hear music. Uh, yeah, you know, it's time. It's time. Thank you for hanging out with us folks, not just for this episode, but for a thousand and 23 previous episodes. Yeah. And this one. So now we've, yeah, we've done it. 10, 24, uh, yeah, it's amazing. I'm stoked and having a blast. So John, it's been good to, uh, to have you here. What, uh, where can people find you these days if they, uh, if they want to hunt you down and talk about Reddit and, uh, keyboards and, um, printers? I would say Twitter is probably the, uh, the best. I'm almost always monitoring that. And that's at, uh, John F. Uh, I'm also on Facebook and Instagram, uh, senior username as far as I know. So, uh, if you're looking for me, you'll find it. Uh, thank you for joining us. Yeah, though, this was a blast to, to just hang out and have some fun. Thanks to cash fly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. I'll put links in the show notes for, of course, John on his Twitter account and the rest of us on Twitter and mastodon and, and all that stuff. And, uh, I will also put links to the podcast that Pete does called, so there I was and I'll link to my shows too, business brain and gig gap. And, uh, yeah, that's it. That's, that's, that's what we got for today. Uh, yeah. Here we are. Are you on mastodon yet, John? Messing around with that? No, I'm, I'm still wrestling with Twitter. All right. Hey, uh, do you have any advice, John? Uh, maybe Pete shirt might provide some inspiration for those watching the, the video stream. Do you have any advice for people that are wrestling with Twitter or really just doing anything? Some generic advice, maybe three solid words. I think those three words, Dave, would be don't get hot made. That's some good advice. Thanks for hanging out folks. Later.