 The Mac Observers, Mac Geekab episode eight seventy seven for Monday, June twenty first twenty twenty one and welcome to the Mac Observers, Mac Geekab, the show where you send in your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found. We take your questions, we take your tips, we take your cool stuff found. We share and we try to answer the questions. We try to. Well, we try to add as much information and find as much information such that each of us gets to learn at least five new things every single time we get together. That's our goal. That can be your goal to sponsors for this episode. Include a lino dot com slash M.G.G. Fastmail dot com slash M.G.G. And headspace dot com slash M.G.G. Where you get a free one month trial there for a headspace. We'll talk more about each of those. In depth in a few minutes for now here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton in here in fearful Connecticut. This is John F. Brun. How are we today, Mr. John F. Brun? Adequate. Adequate is, you know what? That that's a that's a part of it. Well, I'll take it. Yeah. After the after the last year plus whatever it's been adequate, that's, you know, it's not terrible. So there you go. I'm glad to hear you're at least adequate, my friend. I think you're more than adequate, but, you know, it's about how you feel. Peter has a quick tip for us, John. Peter says, did you know that when you are on the desktop of your Mac, so, you know, highlight an icon on your desktop or otherwise don't have a window highlighted in the finder, command plus and command minus will resize your desktop icons. I had no idea. I didn't even know that you could do this, let alone knowing that you could do it with command plus and minus. Evidently, you can do it if you go to finders, you know, view options in the menu there. If you're on the desktop and you there's a little slider and, of course, hitting command plus and minus moves that slider. But I had no idea. It's not in the shortcut. You know, it's not in the menu. There's no. Yeah. Yep. It's just one of those hidden things. Beautiful little quick tip. I love it. And we got this from somebody else. I think listener Mark sent this in this morning, too, perhaps. Yeah, it's a good one. So yeah, thanks for that, Peter. Good stuff. All right. Chris has one for you, Dave. From a past episode, we were talking about screenshots and Chris says, I'm 99.9 percent sure you know this, but didn't mention it in the last episode where you discussed where screenshots go. You said you wished instead of going to photos, you would like screenshots that go someplace else in iOS. I'm not sure about automatically, but if you open the screenshot snippet that pops up, then say done, you'll get a screen like the one below and can save the screenshot wherever you want. Or at least it gives you more than one option. So. Interesting. Right. I never thought about that, but you're right. You get the save to files option. And of course, you know, I save mine to Synology Drive. But I can, you know, Synology Drive is linked into files, so I could save it there. Yeah. All right. It's like you said, it's not automatic. It's probably easier. I wonder if there's an a hazel way to do this or some sort of automated way on my Mac to take things that fall into the screenshots category in photos and have them automatically moved or even copied, I suppose, to write into the screenshots folder that I have synced amongst my Macs. I don't know. I need to think. I don't because it's not a folder. It's just like a it's a smart album or something. So but I bet there's a way to automate something like that. I have to think about that. All right. Cool. Thank you, Chris. Thanks, John. That's screen shots. OK. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you can set the on your Mac bonus quick tip. By default, screenshots are saved to your desktop folder. But you can save them anywhere you want. And Onyx has a parameters section where you can change lots of parameters, including the destination of your screenshots on your Mac. And also you can set what format screenshots are in. You can choose like JPEG or PNG or I think you can even have them save it as a PDF if you want. I don't have it open in front of me. But but yeah, Onyx will let you sort of tweak those things. So I have on all my Macs, I have set it to a shared folder in, like I said, in Synology Drive, but you could use Dropbox or whatever. In fact, I think Dropbox used to I think it was Dropbox that inspired this because they they used to have a way to like in their app, you could check a box and say save all your screenshots to Dropbox, which is which is where this started for me because it it's awesome to have my screenshots all available on all three of the Macs that I use on a regular basis in Office Studio and laptop. So yeah, anyway. Yeah. So yeah, and you kind of suggested it. But when you do the screenshot, there's an options button and that gives you the choice of where to save it. Timer, never used that before. I'll play with that. Right. Right. And some other options. Yeah. Cool, cool. All right, let's see. Moving, moving to listener Scott, staying on the iPhone. Scott says, I often have to send someone's contact and information in an email when using one of my iOS devices. Of course, you can use the share contacts function at the bottom of the appropriate record inside the contacts app. But I've always found that to be a cumbersome process. Open contacts, find the contact, create the card, copy it to the email, et cetera, it's a nuisance, a faster way is to simply enter the email address into one of the fields like the CC or BCC field in the email. Then just drag that address down into the body of the email and it will magically form a ready made V card with all of that contacts info. Then just delete the email address that you entered into that field, presuming you don't want to send the email to that person. Then you're done. He says, this only works in iOS, not Mac OS. He says, I'm mystified as to why, because it's so handy for someone like me, whose laptop is an iPad Pro and who works on their phone a lot. This is a super shortcut. I wonder if Monterey, if Mail and Monterey would do this. That's it. That's a great little shortcut. Quick tip, man. I never like that's I am curious if you stumbled onto that Scott, or if you read it somewhere, because that's a great one. It's good. So cool. All right. Um, all right. And Steve has one for me that I'll have to try. Um, so unless in the prior show, I heard the segment where John was having problems importing pictures from his mom's camera. I had a similar problem. I have a Canon EOS 30D nice, um, that I was trying to import pictures from when I connected via the USB cable. Nothing happened. There was no device in the finder. However, like John, when I went to the photos app, my camera was showing there, but it wasn't showing any pictures. It wasn't accessing the SD card after the typical IT steps, power on off, reset, unplug, replug, nothing happened. Then I happened to look up in the upper right of the window and see a button that labeled import all when I clicked it. My Mac started importing the pictures. All right, I'll have to look for, uh, have to look for that. Huh. Yeah. Okay. That's a good tip. Like when in doubt, look for the import. I mean, usually when you click import, all it's showing you all the thumbnails, but, uh, yeah, all right. Cool. That's a good tip. Listener Matt has, uh, has something to say for us or to us. Hey, John and Dave and maybe pilot Pete. Matt from North Carolina calling in with a quick tip. I may be the only one, but I don't think so. Um, I love using sign in with Apple. So anonymously, you can, uh, start an account and then log in. In this instance, I was doing it for door dash. Um, so set up an account that was all great and then logged into the account, but I needed to get a hold of my password. Uh, because I wanted to have one of my sons log in when he goes away to college and use this account, which I think is fair use, but since he doesn't have an Apple ID, the same as ours, he can't just log in automatically, which is the way it works through face ID or touch ID. So I just wanted to say that when you go to log in to such an app, there's use Apple, which is like a big black button, but below that, and you might miss it, there's also use another Apple ID. And so that's how another user can install that app and it will actually allow them to, um, be kind of a separate user. Um, but in, but also share, I've, I hope this makes sense. Also share the actual account. Yeah. So, um, good luck with that. And I hope that helps somebody out there who's looking to find out how to find the, uh, passwords when you log in through Apple sign in, you can't, it has to just be your, uh, Apple ID, but you can have different Apple ID folks sign in, just don't hit that black button, look below it and say sign in with another Apple ID. Thanks. Don't get caught guys. Uh-huh. Thanks, Matt. You too. Yeah, that's great. Uh, okay. That's good to know. And this idea, at first I was like, well, why wouldn't your son just have his own DoorDash account? Well, you may be whatever they call them DoorDash plus members or whatever it is where you pay 10 bucks a month and then you save on fees when you use it, which we are, we became DoorDash, whatever it is DoorDash plus members during, uh, you know, over the last year when we were doing a lot of DoorDash. So sharing that with our kids who are at school, I agree. That seems like fair use to me. Don't get caught. All right. Um, yeah, Ed has a quick tip. I set my iPhone to offload unused apps in order to save space. And you do that in settings app store, offload unused app on offload unused apps. It's easy for me to say folks. The problem is when I want to open an app that was offloaded, the phone tells me that it will open once installed, but then there's no progress indication. That's very annoying to me. Here comes the tip. Open the app by searching for it in the app library, which is on the last screen of the phone here in iOS 14. There it will show you the typical sweeping clock progress on the app face. You still have to wait for the download, but you can at least tell how close it is to being done. Yeah, that's right. Cause you have to try and relaunch it after it finishes downloading. So that's a great tip. Cause you could see it in it, like if in prior to having the app library, you could see it on the home screen, you know, wherever it was on your home screen. But if you've shuffled the app off of your home screen and it only exists in the library, that's where you can look for it. I find the app library is good for a lot of those things. You know, uh, deleting apps, moving things around, like you can do stuff to the apps that are in that list there. It's not just a list. So maybe that's the, the meta quick tip. So yeah. Yeah, I don't really use it. Do you have all of your apps on your home screen? Oh, yeah. No, I don't, I have one home screen now. I am, I am all in on app library. Yeah. Well, when, when my new, when I got my new phone in the fall, I decided I would start fresh. And so I did not, you know, I installed on my Apple with my Apple ID, but I didn't restore from the cloud or anything. And I only, the point was to only install apps that I, um, that I was going to use, you know, deleting apps that you think you're not going to use never happens for me because I'm like, well, I might want to use that and then I don't delete it. But then I never use it. So I just installed apps as I, you know, as I went through, I still haven't put ways on my phone. I've been using Apple Maps and it's wonderful. Oh, yeah, I know. I used to hate Apple Maps, but it's like, well, let me try it without, you know, Apple without ways. And it's been great. Uh, I also, I should go ahead. No, I should give it another go because yeah, I mean, you, the, the, uh, updated maps looks, uh, looks really slick. It's awesome. Yeah, it's been great. And it really integrates well with CarPlay. No great surprise, but so does Waze. I mean, you know, they, they do a good job of it too. I do keep Google Maps on my phone because that allows me to explicitly save offline maps. Uh, and I like to have offline maps of like my local area or areas to which I'm traveling. So I do use Google Maps for that purpose just in case I find myself in a scenario. And it's happened a few times where it's like, you know, like when we were out in Portland picking up Lucas, there was somewhere that we were, and it was like, you know, sketchy service or whatever. And I was like, I need to drive. I was like, ah, Google Maps. I pull it up and there you go. I was like, thank you prior Dave for saving future Dave's life or, you know, just saving my day. I guess I didn't really save my life. Uh, but yeah, I have everything in app library. I put very few things on the home screen, which has been fantastic. So that, you know, that whole idea of clean slate, it works for a lot of reasons or at least work for me. All right, Tim, a follow up from the last episode where we were talking about Apple Pay and the email address that is shared with people from whom you buy using Apple Pay. Tim says, I have a comment about that. You can actually set the default address for Apple Pay, the default email address in settings in iOS, go into settings, wallet and Apple Pay, transaction defaults. And that's where you set it. So thank you for that, Tim. Great little quick tip. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it. Perhaps before we move on, anything on that one, John? No, no, look at that. Yeah, I know. Look at that. Exactly. Yep. The things you didn't know were there until we looked. Uh, listener Andrew shared what is certainly my favorite quick tip of the week. It might be my favorite quick tip of all time. Uh, he shared it via or from it came via Andrew, but he heard about it on the command control power podcast, which is another great show to listen to with lots of quick tips and things like that. The tip is that you can add modifier keys to your hot corners. So, you know, when you go in and you set up a, you know, a hot corner in, uh, where is it? It's in, uh, desktop and screensaver. So you go to system preferences on your Mac desktop and screensaver, then in the lower right corner screensaver, hot corners dot, dot, dot that button. And you can pick what happens when you put your mouse in any one of the four corners of your screen real estate. But I've found that when I do that, if I have one that puts my screen to sleep, but sometimes I just move my mouse too far to the corner and it puts my screen to sleep when I don't want my screen to be put to sleep. They have a solution for this, John, and I am happy to share it. I'm happy to know it and I'm happy to share it. When you're choosing from that menu, uh, hold down a modifier key like command or option. And now your hot corner needs that modifier key in order to be a hot corner. So now I have it so that command and lower left corner of my screen puts the display to sleep and, you know, or command in the upper right corner starts my screensaver, whatever you want to choose, but just hold down the option key or the command key and you'll see it when that menu is open. It'll, you know, it'll add that to the, to the deal. Pretty cool, huh, John? Huh, right? So shift, control, option and command. You can do any one of those. You can also combine them. It's true. So I could do like control option command. I don't know why you'd want to have so many keys into an action like that, but maybe to discourage yourself from accidentally hitting it. That's it. Yeah. Now I did try, I couldn't get different things for the corner. Like you can't do command and one corner to be one thing and command or option and the same corner to be a different thing. There is, as near as I can tell, one action allowed per corner. That's it. Uh, but still being able to have need to, uh, put that key in there makes is a game changer for me because now I'll actually use my hot corners again. So thank you to everybody that conspired to make that tip, uh, find its way to us. So I'm very cool stuff. Donna, John shares our last quick tip for the day here. Uh, she said, um, I opened control center and noticed that my flashlight icon was listed as unavailable, uh, not unusual. I can usually correct it by opening and then exiting the camera, but so I opened the camera and saw a scary yellow triangle con containing an exclamation point in the top left corner. When I touched the triangle, I received an important message, which I'd never seen before flash is disabled. We're not talking about Adobe flash. We're talking about your flash flash, the flash of your camera. The iPhone needs to cool down before you can use the flash. So evidently, her phone had gotten hot for whatever reason and, uh, the flash is the first thing to turn off. So she wasn't getting any other temperature related messages, just this one when trying to use the flash or flashlight. So I think that's the first thing that is sort of disabled as the phone is stepping down. It's, it's temperature threshold path, which I found fascinating, John. I don't know. I had never seen that before. Had you? Uh, yes. Really? And actually a couple of weeks ago, um, when I was taking a trip on the highway and running ways, uh, my phone gave the other one that you get, um, you know, I think it's a red triangle. And yeah, it says, you know, something similar, but it's just saying the error I got, it was just saying the phone's too hot. Here's the weird thing though. It was still running. Really? So it didn't, it didn't shut down on you. It, it, it shut off the, I guess it disabled the screen because I guess that is a source of heat. Sure. Were you also charging the phone at the same time? Like, did you have it plugged in? Yes. Okay. And it was in a case also. Okay. So case screen charging and probably warm it like baking in the sun on your, near your dashboard or whatever. Right? Oh, that too. Yeah. Yeah. So I have a dark dashboard. So yeah, the heat. Radiating off of that. There you go. Yeah. I've, I've found, I've been in those scenarios before and I've found unplugging the phone for a little while is often enough to like allow me to keep using it. Yeah. So, yeah, interesting, interesting. Fascinating, fascinating. All right, cool. Thanks for all the quick tips folks. Feedback at mackeycap.com is where you would send your quick tip in or your question or your cool stuff found. We love hearing from you. So make sure to send those into us at feedback at mackeycap.com. I said feedback at mackeycap.com. That is correct. All right. We have your questions to get to. Hopefully some cool stuff found to get to the next thing that I want to get to is our sponsors. If that works for you, Mr. Braun. Absolutely. All right. Our first sponsor today is a fastmail at fastmail.com slash MGG where you can not only try fast mail free for 30 days, but then get 10% off your first year of email at fastmail. And I just moved to fastmail not that long ago. Quite frankly, it took me too long to decide to do this. I've been wanting to move to fastmail for years for a lot of reasons. One is because they provide email for people who care about their privacy. And we've been talking a lot about that here and fastmail definitely is that in fact, they say right on their website, you don't have to trade privacy for productivity. What I didn't know, I knew that about fastmail. What I didn't know about fastmail was how easy that migration was going to be. They just slurped in all of my Google mail. Like I just let them log into my like automate, you know, in their automated system. I let them log into my Google mail account. It just slurped it all over. I went to sleep. I woke up. My mail was moved over. They made it so easy. 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All right, John let's Jeff has a question we've been talking about privacy here actually talking about it with fastmail Jeff asks he says I recently read mackerel dot com article about Apple's private relay and how it differs from a VPN the author Jason Cross came close to but didn't directly answer a question I have concerning this new service is information sent and received via iCloud private relay encrypted such that I can safely access my bank account via Safari from a public Wi-Fi hotspot okay so the very short answer and this would be my opinion because there is no definitive answer to this but the very short answer would be yes there are two things to me that matter when accessing something from a public network right now iCloud private relay is its stated purpose is more to protect you from being tracked in a variety of ways by your local network and by the places that you visit and anyone in between but there's two pieces that matter to me number one is what data am I sending across like once I'm connected to my bank can anybody see the data and then the second thing is does anyone know that I'm connecting to my bank and could they potentially redirect where I'm going a man in the middle attack those sorts of things so number one is never a problem because all of our banks require us via our browsers to use encrypted connections so the data that is being sent back and forth between me and my bank or you and your bank is encrypted and no one gets to see that except you and your bank so that's good and of course iCloud private relay added to that also no problem where iCloud private relay or a VPN would help even more is with the second thing the DNS look up the connection that's happening to see what site you're going to try and visit and with a VPN or Apple's iCloud private relay all of that information is sent across the secure tunnel so the local network at your coffee shop or whatever is not responsible for resolving that look up they don't know that you made that look up they don't know what your what site you're connecting to so yes in that sense iCloud private relay works similarly to a VPN in that it solves those two problems for you so yeah I think iCloud private relay is very safe for banking activity and lots of other things too so you know I'm I'm a big fan of what Apple's doing with iCloud private relay if that if that hasn't been obvious in the last three episodes or two episodes I suppose yeah would it may cause and a VPN would cause this as well is I've had this happen before so if I use private relay I suspect this would happen again is some sites when you come to them they're like hey I haven't seen you before you got to authenticate excuse me so that may happen more often yes if you use a VPN or something like that because as far as it knows yeah I mean you're yeah yeah it knows you you are a new computer that's right you're coming from a new IP address that's a that's a good point yeah you will be coming from one of the addresses the exit node addresses of the private relay instead of wherever you actually are so yeah I and I do I get that with some of my banks often where it's like oh you're in a different location in fact with my my IP address changes more frequently now with my fiber connection on consolidated than it ever did with with my Comcast connection I probably kept the same IP IP address for years easily months probably years and but with fiber I'm finding it changes fairly frequently I I don't obsess about it there's not too many things where I see this as a problem but I will occasionally get exactly those messages like hey you're coming from somewhere new can you do your two-factor thing for me and it's like sure I'll do the little dance it's fine so yeah yeah interesting uh more on that or time to go to Tony uh yeah I don't know about Tony here well um yeah I don't know if I know the answer here um apple has changed the rules for tracking and for asking to be able to track this app seems to be breaking the rules why is apple allowing this um he sends along a screenshot of words with friends right too and and yeah and it's asking the question right and I track you so I guess they're just being persistent I think I think that's that's it John yeah so the screenshot that Tony sent along and I'll he posted on medium about this too so you can see the screenshot this is a screenshot from the app itself saying hey tracking it's it's marketing it's persuasion is what this is okay so it's it's a little screen explaining why they why you want to let them track you okay and and it even has an agree button on it now it doesn't need an agree or a decline button although they can do some different functionality with your input from that button but this doesn't control whether or not the app can track all that this screen controls is whether the app then tells iOS to ask you if you want to be tracked now if you have gone in to the settings privacy and tracking and turned off the option to never allow apps to ask you to track then this screen seems weird because even if you hit agree here you won't get the apple prompt as to whether or not you want to let this app track you because if you said don't ask me so the app is asking you will you please say yes to the next prompt you're about to see that's really what they're doing and by having the agree icon there they you know they get you in the habit of saying yes and then the next thing comes up and they're even showing you a little screenshot that says slide the allow tracking to be yes you know and they say what 82 percent of players toggle allow tracking well it might be 82 percent of a group of you know 20 words with friends to employees that work on the development team so that they can track themselves I don't think it's 82 percent of words with friends to players I think it's more like about 4 percent of words with 10 friends to players based on all the metrics that we're seeing about how many people are allowing tracking on on iOS but but yeah I think this is just a persuasion technique we saw this from Facebook we saw it from Instagram what's app is getting really interesting with this right where they're going to start taking features away if you don't let them track you so there's that that gets interesting but but yeah they are this is not the it would be better if the app could pull the OS maybe the app can pull the OS and find out if you have you know the option to even allow them to ask you turned on but they don't want to do that they want to try and persuade you and to turn it on and you know like more power to them but thankfully we're here to have these conversations I don't I like I still have yet to turn on I do have the option to allow them to ask me enabled and that's simply because you know we do this show and I like to watch that stuff but I so far seven apps have asked me John Facebook Instagram speed test Ticketmaster Tripit TV time and Twitter and again this is them asking to track you when you're using other apps and websites not their own app their own app gets to track you all the time that you're using their own app because it's their own app so if you want Ticketmaster to track you inside of Ticketmaster's app well you don't you don't like you've given them permission by launching the app that's all that needs to happen there this is across apps so yeah so I haven't given permission to anything to track me amongst across other apps have you I think you said you gave like something permission right yeah who did you give permission to not like red box and right yeah because I get useful notifications yeah if an app asks me and I'm like oh yeah that's you know I've gotten a notification that I found useful but I'm like yeah sure track me like like what notification have you gotten from red box yeah no and it's like it's an eyes wide open decision I'm just now curious like what notification has red box given you that that came from them being able to track you in other apps um I think if it knows if I'm near one of their kiosks that may remind me hey you know no that's look that's location tracking that's not that's not cross at you could turn off cross app tracking to get location tracking there yeah yeah no this is this is not universal tracking this is tracking when you're using other apps so for example red box could know that you purchased a you know hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy book and then they might recommend that movie to you right like that would be potentially what they'd be able to do with cross app tracking or that you visited a hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy website or something like that that's how they would that's what that would do but location tracking that's a whole different thing you control that in in location preferences yeah yeah so like ticket master I give the option to track my location so that it can pop up my ticket when I'm outside of a concert venue for example but that that has nothing to do with cross app so yeah you could turn off cross app for red box my guess is you'd still get those notifications so all right it's fascinating you want to take us to while we're on the the privacy protection thing you want to take us to louis and uh yeah louis says I recently tried to install some adobe apps on my mac and I kept getting an error message from adobe reading the logs at halt pages I could not figure this out until I finally stumbled on a page explaining system integrity protection and how to disable it following instructions I turned it off I was able to install my apps and then turned it back on apparently this has been a problem since 2017 my question is is this a problem on adobe's side of things or is this an apple problem or is it a problem on my end with perhaps an old corrupted install file from years ago I would like to understand this for future problems I I think you had something to say about this Dave here I personally I mean I only use adobe reader I so I don't really live in the adobe world but I don't know it's it makes me nervous that you have to do this to install I'm not sure what piece of adobe software they're trying to install I I have not run into this personally no I haven't run into it either but I did a search for adobe and system integrity protection and found a help article from adobe that says when installing creative cloud desktop apps you need to give correct permissions to the slash tmp folder and they they discuss you know what the symptoms are that that this causes and they say if you can't change the permissions on the slash tmp folder then you might need to disable system integrity protection so that you can give the correct permissions to the slash tmp folder but the thing is it shouldn't be using that folder in that way no there's other temp folders that you are supposed to use and I don't know why they're they're they the installers have like a sandbox temp folder that they are permitted to write to it's not a problem I don't know why adobe is obsessing about using like what what one would call the unix standard temp folder which is it slash tmp I mean it could be argued that apple is breaking unix unix conventions by securing that but there are like if you want to look at holes in unix and how to sneak yourself root access onto a unix machine especially if you rewind like 20 years the temp folder was the place to go and do this because it's world rightable you could get the root user to execute something that was living in the temp folder that you could then write to like that it's the source of a lot of swiss cheese in uh in in unix so locking it down a little bit like I I get why this might be something that apple wanted to lock down but they created a better path adobe is just not following it evidently so yeah I'm I'm with short version I'm with you shouldn't have to do this but you might have to and I put this article that I found in the in the show notes so that okay if Luann wants it it's right there so thank you yeah man yes all right steve points out something that I had not yet seen and this is the beauty of um of you know wwc and all those developer sessions there's so much beyond the keynote there's three we you know when we talked with Dave Mark we had watched what I call parts one and two of the wwc keynote we watched the keynote and the state of the union there is then of course part three which is uh john groover's talk show where he interviews a couple of apple execs there's always good information in there like for example that even if you're not an iCloud plus subscriber you will still have all of the known trackers all the trackers that safari knows about will be run through iCloud private relay so those are running through iCloud private relay 100% of the time if if they can whether or not you are an iCloud plus subscriber and iCloud plus just means you are paying something for iCloud 99 cents a month or more for more storage is essentially what that turns into so so that was a that that was a a good little tidbit from the talk show and i will put that in the in the show notes a link to that in the show notes another thing that john groover pointed out he sent a link to my article about iCloud private relays so thank you john and he had trouble turning it on on his computer and so i will link to his little piece that explains how to enable iCloud private relay really it's it's i think it needs to just sync up with the system my guess is this is an iCloud or an iOS beta issue it's not going to happen when you you know when the release comes out but it will tell you even if you're already a subscriber it'll say you have to subscribe if you just back out of things and come back in or reboot your phone it will sync back up and you will have iCloud private relay and all that good stuff so thank you for that too john this was this next thing was not in any of the three parts of the keynote but this comes from Steve which he found i guess actually he found it over on on mac rumors but but they found it in one of in the documentation for one of the sessions at at WWDC that apple introduced a new mail kit framework for mail extensions now this is to me this was huge news because mail plugins have been one of these things that have been tolerated but really not supported by apple like all the people that make all the mail plugins that john and i talk about on the show or daymark talked about one like those people are basically on their own to figure out how to do what they do that like apple does not have a whole lot of support for them well now they do but these plugins are limited or the the frameworks are limited in macOS Monterey but they have four categories that mail extensions can use compose so things that are for when composing email actions that like custom rules for incoming mail such as color coding an email or moving it to a separate inbox or marking it as red or flagged right content blocking and message security so extensions that can sign or encrypt email so like I'm not sure if something like signature profiler could work but actually I guess it could john because that's composing an email right that's one of the ones that we use is compose I don't know if things like sending an email on a delay would work still which is something mail act on does because the rules these actions are only it says in apple's documentation only only applicable to incoming emails but the fact that apple has created these and hopefully we'll expand them to me is a really good thing but we'll we'll see what our our mail plugin developers friends think about this and we'll go from there but thank you for sending that in steve it's good good stuff so I don't know what do you think about that john any any thoughts as long as my plug-ins still work yeah that's the thing so I think I agree with you is that every time they make the slightest change to mail it always yells at you about all your plugins are not compatible anymore or you gotta install new ones sure as I understand it I did a little bit of digging as I understand it there haven't been a whole lot of framework changes about mail plugins in Monterey and it's which is good news in that it seems like any plugins that we currently use for mail will likely survive the transition to Monterey now the question is will the next version of macOS so the 2022 version of macOS presuming they do another version next year will that support mail plugins as we currently know them not the it will certainly support these new types of extensions but will it support mail plugins that we don't know so the days may be numbered on those in fact I think they probably are numbered on those but they're not you know they're more than 365 the number is greater than 365 but may not be that much greater than 365 we will find out thanks Steve want to bring us to John we got a head of scratcher from John here for any months I have noticed that the startup chime on my 2019 iMac sounds distorted I tried things like pvrim reset SMC reset but they didn't fix it from searching on Google I found a suggestion of toggling on and off the startup chime checkbox on system preferences but that didn't help I contacted Apple support and they instructed me to carry out similar things which didn't help the internal speakers let's see the internal speakers are capable of playing sound once the system is booted without any issues okay that's good this occurred before I installed big sir and the upgrade to big sir didn't make any difference in terms of audio I have loopback installed and use the apogee element 24 with its drivers installed but as far as I recall these issues existed before adding those like could be wrong it doesn't make any difference if I have my system audio set to internal speakers or the apogee interface I vaguely remember something about sound being emitted from the motherboard no it's its speakers in that machine rather than the speakers in some circumstances but maybe I dreamt that I think you dreamt that I would suggest that a corrupted firmware or something like this the Mac is under Apple care and around 12 months old can you think of anything else to try and he even has a sound clip which uh-oh I will play it great sounds distorted to me let's hear it a third time yeah that's no bueno that's no bueno it's good that his speaker works like play you know like because it sounds like a like a torn speaker cone or something you know along those lines it's definitely distorted or it's like over modulated well that's what distorted means but yes right yes absolutely another definition yeah um it almost sounds like a bad speaker it's just weird that it only handles with the startup chime right uh p-ram and smc yeah those are always good things to try you know I I think bad for it may be bad firmware or a corrupted driver so maybe reinstalling the os is the startup chime even included with the os I thought that was on the firmware I mean I suppose it it could write it to the firmware maybe but it doesn't sound like a driver or anything I mean it like the os isn't anywhere near even beginning to be loaded when we hear that sound right so it's definitely stored in the firmware that's weird so that's my thought um sometimes what you will notice is is every now and then when you do a software update you may notice the progress bar sometimes it's thick as far as I know that means that it's doing a firmware update in addition to os update sure so that's why I think trying to reinstall from recovery maybe uh that's that's that's all I got or the speaker maybe the speaker's bad I don't know or some weird resonance thing with the speaker you replace the speaker but he says if he says the speaker works to play music yeah yeah yeah right I mean but it could be like excuse me I have a speaker down in my office it's a set of audio engine a2s I believe it's the a2s maybe the a2 pluses I don't know whatever one of those you know the smaller versions there's and one of the the cones on one of the speakers is like a little bit torn and there's a certain frequency where I hear it but the rest of the time it's like crystal clear and sounds fantastic so like it could be that that they're you know that it's just that that little speaker on the motherboard is is torn and whatever note in that cord that plays resonates the wrong way with that particular speaker but either way Apple care is your friend here like that's that's what I would that's where I would go with it so javel all right where are we here you want to go to Ken Ken yeah okay I've noticed on two iMacs with multiple users each iMac has only one admin account all software is updated by the user account which enters the supervisor password when required I've noticed that other users are being asked to upgrade what has already been upgraded so do I ignore the notification or do the upgrade to me it sounds like a wonky installer I haven't had something ask me you know install for all users or installs for for specific user so I'd be curious what a vendor but you maybe see if they have a newer installer yeah I I agree with you I like I agree with all of your advice yes let every user do the installation because there might be something that it's putting in the user folder that it needs access to it shouldn't be but you know you don't know and if you want the app to work properly yeah but that's that's weird I I agree contact the developer yeah yeah all right moving on okay we I asked for advice on in two episodes we've talked about advice for me for capturing notes while on the go with my watch I think this will be the last conversation about it but you know I mean the last one for a while but I did get two pieces this week John that I wanted to share Lauren wrote in Siri will let you add text to a specific note if you're really scared of filling her notes with a bunch of unrelated scraps just have her add text to a previous note and I tried this thank you Lauren it works if I'd say you know Siri add prep next week's Mac geek gap to idea capture note then it will add that as a new line to a note named idea capture so that works and thank you it's awesome makes a big difference however I was happy about that really happy and for about an hour and then I read Andre's note and Andre's note was the key he says I'm listening to the show and thinking of how I can help with your text myself idea first create a reminders list so this is outside of notes but it's fine bear with me here create a reminders list called ideas create a shortcut call it brain add a dictation step in the workflow choose add reminder to ideas with the magic variable being input from the dictation and save it then just say Siri brain dictate your idea and it will pump it into a reminder in your reminders list called ideas so this is brilliant I didn't want it in a reminders list I wanted it in a note but I know that I can put it in a note based on the last tip right so stitch it all together and I created a shortcut John and so now my shortcut is I say Siri I have an idea and from there I do the dictate text thing and then I had to put in a nothing step don't know why just to separate things out then I had to find the note called idea capture and then append the dictated text to the note that I called idea capture and boom it works perfectly so now I'm on my bike I can say Siri I have an idea and boom it says what do you want to say and I say it and it pumps it into the note and I'm good it's pretty awesome so thank you to both Lauren and Andre for forgetting us there it's good stuff I like it pretty cool huh John have you messed with shortcuts at all not really oh man I feel like these are right up your alley I think you'd I think you'd love them I really do all right where are we here on time we are at 55 we can we can do a couple more questions then we'll do some cool stuff down listener Tim asks today my USB-C charger for my MacBook Pro got stolen along with my MagSafe charger for my iPhone 12 well that sucks Tim I'm sorry to hear that he says so I need to replace them I'm looking for advice should I go through Apple for a standard replacement equipment or are there other options that come from third parties so again sorry to hear it the good news is that now that we live in the USB-C world you do not need to buy Apple specific chargers for your MacBook Pro for your MagSafe charger for your iPhone 12 I think you probably you're still in an Apple world I haven't seen any third party MagSafe clone chargers that I would trust there's plenty of Qi chargers so obviously you can go that route but if you want MagSafe I think you need to go with Apple but as far as powering your MagSafe charger that's USB-C on the other end so you can go with anything I'm a big fan of what Anker's doing there's a lot of other brands out there that are also doing great things just make sure they're a trustworthy third party not some fly-by-night company but there's plenty of them out there there's good ones just make sure that both the charger and as we've recently discussed the cable that you buy deliver enough power to charge your MacBook Pro you can look in Mac Tracker to see what your computer's original equipment charger delivered and I would suggest matching that at a minimum you know some are going to require 85 watts at a minimum some are going to require 40 watts at a minimum those minimums are not necessarily hard and fast minimums you like certainly I have charged a MacBook Pro that came with a 85 watt charger with a 60 watt and it's totally fine but there might be occasions especially if you're using the computer while it's charging where you do want that minimum level of charge to be available so so just make sure you're getting one that matches that but like you know for your for your MagSafe those tiny little things that I forget that I think it's the power port Nano 3 I want to say I'll find it and put a link in the show notes but it's that thing that Anker makes that's like the size of the original little tiny iPhone charger but it's 20 watts of USB-C power delivery which is awesome so hopefully that helps and it again that sucks that your stuff got stolen so I don't know what do you have to add I got the um yeah so so for MagSafe I have apples sure and then um yeah I'm with you Anker so I got one that I think is so it has two USB-A and two USB-C and I think it's rated at 85 watts okay and it'll split it among the the various ports sure allegedly from a church yeah yeah exactly yeah yeah I did though yeah you you want to make sure you get a a good cable because I actually found that some cables will only will limit the amount of current that they carry or power and the the reason I knew that is I went in um Icedat menus has a one of their menus will show you the various power levels on the machine including the total wattage sure so what I did is once I started charging it DC in its list that I I looked at the number and I'm like hey wait there's something wrong with this cable it's not delivering 85 watts and then you know I got a better cable and it did so um yeah Icedat menus I'm not sure if that's in system info also writes right maybe it is but um yeah his issue is he doesn't have his original one so that's why I was like yeah go ahead and you know look it up in Mac Tracker and then you'll get yourself there so the it's the anchor nano that I was thinking of not the nano three maybe the nano three is coming I don't know maybe I just made up a new product for them the original anchor nano is a 20 watt power supply again these are all pretty much the same size as the tiny little brick the nano two the base model is 30 watts they have a 45 watt model and they have a 65 watt model all in that really like you know tiny form factors so again I'll I'll put a link to all of it in the show notes you can figure it out so all right where are we here you want to take us to Patricia John yeah okay friends what's going on here 10.15.7 in iMac and Safari 14.1 when I opened google maps yesterday I got a greatly magnified version that is just not workable everything is enlarged and the same goes for using google search zoom does not improve the text situation I can open the same pages in chrome and text then images are as they should be although the pages in safari load correctly is it's only google that's reacting this way I've done restarts close safari check system preferences it all comes down to google not playing nice at all in safari currently unusual is there a setting somewhere I'm missing or is google once again broken with the latest update no I don't yeah I don't think google's broken yeah now work fine for me but I'll tell you where to look because actually I was having a problem with with a financial site it just wouldn't let me log in or we keep going in circles yeah bringing me back to the the login page once I had it or last pass it under my credentials and I'm like why does it keep going in circles um I then remember that at some point I said remember me so what I think is it did it is it planted a cookie so here's what I think you I think it may be a a corrupt cookie or other piece of data stored in the browser so here's where you go safari preferences privacy manage website data you will then see a list of all the data that is stored for each of the sites that you have visited so I type in google and whack all of that data that this worked for me this solves my login problem by by whacking the uh all of the data is stored that the site had stored in the past I like it that's great one one warning I will share that page or that preference pane has two buttons at the bottom one is remove and the other is remove all even once you've filtered down I have yet to test to see if remove all only removes what your search filter is showing or if it removes everything in the list at the in its entirety so I always highlight them and click remove and I stay far away from the remove all button your mileage may vary if somebody knows the answer feedback please but I have yet to test that so I just wanted to share that and a little thought there so feedback it's feedback at mackeykev.com so that's one thing another one is our pal onyx can help clean things up and where I look there would be maintenance cleaning options internet and then choose the things within that category that could help and then finally starting up in safe mode can never hurt and sometimes gets rid of cash junk as well sure yeah or I think it rebuilds kernel extensions or something like that yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah no that's you're you're right so among those three one of them has to work I hope I hope so yeah yeah yeah you could always try in a different browser just to see I'm not sure if she said she did that but you know just to confirm that it's not some setting in your google account I think your cookie thing is the right answer but yeah cool all right yeah sure we'll do two little tips and then we'll jump to cool stuff found and see how far we get listener Steve shares a little bit more we were talking in the last episode about office 365 and the $99 per year family plan he says Dave you mentioned that you also get word excel and powerpoint in addition to those you get outlook which is surprisingly good on a mac I used to hate outlook he says but it is dramatically improved it's worth a try especially if you use the included email outlook.com with things like add an email rule and it syncs to the web client which means it essentially syncs to all of your devices why hasn't Apple done this he says I know it isn't cool to use Microsoft products and they used to be awful but they've done a really good job of improving them it's additionally it's a pretty good value for the money as you pointed out you get all the following for six devices outlook one terabyte of one drive service per user storage rather teams word excel powerpoint one note to do family safety calendar which is in outlook and then Skype so thank you for that Steve yeah it's a pretty impressive thing for 99 bucks a year for the entire family that's the price that it should be like that like there's good value there I really it's nice to see that because it used to be a lot more money than that let's just point that out all right uh any thoughts to share on that before we share Matt's tip here John no okay cool Matt was one of the ones who like me was suffering battery drain on our iPhones and Matt my issue turned out to be oh what did I say it was I can't remember anymore somebody out there will remember for me but Matt found that his issue was Wi-Fi was causing his his problems oh mine was reset network settings I reset network settings and my problems went away Matt did that they went away for a little bit and then they came back he found when he had his phone plugged in that uh you know you go to the options for it which you do in the finder now and there's the checkbox that used to be there in iTunes that says show this phone went on Wi-Fi having that box checked immediately starts his battery draining unchecking it immediately stops the excessive drain so that's another one the old the I did find that I could get mine to drain again if I turned on IMAZING's Wi-Fi backups so I turned those off too and I just let it do iCloud and it'll do IMAZING when I plug in but but not over Wi-Fi and that that has done it so reset network settings glad I remembered it turned off show this phone went on Wi-Fi in the finder and then make sure you know you're you're managing your Wi-Fi with IMAZING so thank you Matt great stuff I appreciate you sharing that it's good all right uh let's go to cool stuff found shall we John sure okay Lauren starts us off I tried using spotlight to find misplaced applications and it seems to find everything except what I want as a test I tried searching on M for mail it brought up my laser printer keyboard maestro and messages I tried expanding it to MA and it found migration assistant migration assistant user I found that if you assign launchpad to a keyboard shortcut say control space so this is built into Mac OS right this is launchpad but if you assign it to a keyboard shortcut like control space it will act exactly like spotlight but search only applications so this gets this is where it gets interesting and it will uh you know it uh without doing things like you know the documents and the folders and the web searches and dictionary searches he says spotlight is good at a great many things it's not so great as an app launcher launchpad is much better all right I gotta try this so yeah that's the really smart thing to do the keyboard shortcut for spotlight I like this this a good little hack and I'm not sure if that's a quick tip for cool stuff found but I'm glad we mentioned it thank you for that Lauren uh Michael go ahead oh sorry John did you have something to add to that well well just to point out here you can if you go to system preferences spotlight search results will dictate what is shown in the pull down so you could just uncheck everything except applications just to your to the point that you know there's all searches this is how you control what uh what stuff is seen that fair point yep that's right that's that's a and that's great advice yeah good Michael says I heard you talk about how you were have your data backed up and in a disaster you would probably build a new mac and restore your data then you mentioned that getting your app configurations back to where they were can be a time consuming process there is a free open source cool the open source cool well it's a cool tool for backing up max mac and linux dot files speaking thing not so easy for me today it's called yadm yet another dot file manager at yadm.io it's very well supported and would likely solve your problem of getting all your configs rebuilt and it also works on linux thank you for that we will put a link to that in the show notes Michael you rock pretty cool yadm I didn't know that there were other dot file managers so this one as yet another comes as you know it's kind of new to me Craig John has found something that he calls more of a cool deal found than cool stuff on amazon for about 30 bucks I found this essentially an apple pencil we use the word clone but it's not an exact clone but it clones a lot of the functionality of an apple pencil and you can get it for about 30 bucks on amazon he said initial impression is that it is 100% feature equivalent to the apple pencil one about half price of what you pay for an apple pencil one and it is charged over usb-c which is cool it just plugs into the side of it so you're not trying to plug it into the lightning port and breaking it off your mac but it says if you're new to using the apple pencil and or just got an iPad and want something for the kids or casual use this might be the ticket so thank you pencil cola craig for sharing that with us that's pretty good we'll put a link in the show notes so you can check it out for yourself but that I like it I like it I like it pretty good this is what cool stuff found is about John Scott shares something called I think it's called Strout-O-Mater says you often talk about on the show about riding your bike he says I clock about 150 miles a week and I thought you would want to know about an app that I use call for for Strava so Strava is a a tracker for your either cycling or running and perhaps other things and it's called Strout-O-Mater Strout-O-Mater takes the data from your Strava recorded rides and puts it directly into any calendar you choose I've attached a screenshot which he showed us today's ride and it has all kinds of things it says he rode 30 miles and he had a climbing ratio of 1.04 the temperature was this it shows what bike he rode his average speed all of that is put into a calendar entry which is pretty cool he says it's become one of my favorite calendar editions I don't need to go back to Strava anymore to see historical data from my past rides very cool I stopped using Strava when Apple's health app or fitness app I should say got better in talking back and forth with Scott like it Apple's app isn't quite detailed enough for someone enjoys being obsessive about these things I am someone you've known this from knowing me and listening to me for years but you know I do enjoy obsessing about things my cycling tracking my bike rides is not one that I'm overly obsessive about but it is nice like I do like using the Apple watch to just like you know attract the ride and you get credit for it it's great it's good so I don't know but this looks this looks cool do you still use Strava you were the one that turned me on to that years ago um I haven't used it in a while but yeah I would log my bike rides and yeah or like long walks like when I used to go to Manhattan sure I would log my walk from uh Grand Central to the Jabot sure and share with people because people want to know these things right that's true Strava does have that like like it's a social network style element to it as well where you can see what your friends are riding or walking or biking or even whatever so yeah yeah yeah man cool we talked a long time ago John I have one cool stuff found in my own to add we talked a long time ago where I was asking how people are tracking what they are watching what shows they're watching because with things spread all across you know the problem that TiVo solved for me years ago is no longer solved by TiVo I don't just have one now playing list that shows me everything and so I wound up downloading a bunch of apps and I have found I gravitated towards one called TiVo time it's available for it's on the web but it's also of course on iPhone, Android all that good stuff it it just works for me it lists the shows it will tell me what I can watch next so it knows when new episodes are available of the shows that I watch it also pays attention to if I've stopped watching a show like if I haven't checked off a new episode recently it'll eventually move those into a shows you haven't watched recently category it really like it has helped us because there's shows we just forget that we're watching it's like oh right we were watching that show it just you know if it was in like Amazon Prime is one that we don't use as frequently as say you know Apple TV Plus or Netflix and so we would just forget about a show that was in there I was like oh yeah you know we can watch that show that's great so or if you know we have shows some that we you know have have ripped into plex or whatever so this this has been fantastic so it's called TV time and yours I can tell I think it's free I don't think I paid for it I might have paid for it I don't know but it it works whatever I paid for it it was worth it so there you go that's what I got you got anything else for today John is that our that our thing how do you track what you watch on TV um I don't yeah yeah right that's the problem I mean I got my shows on my Tivo so I I watch a lot of shows that I get through cable Disney you know they yeah they're pretty good about saying hey here's a new show hey here's a new show sure oh yeah each each service right each service is great about remembering what I'm watching and and show me the next episode it's just that when I sit down to watch something I don't want to have to go through four services to decide or you know launch four different apps to decide okay what do I want to watch I so this it's great I'd launch one app on my phone I look at it at least and I talk about let's watch this okay great sounds good off we go so we've been enjoying city on a hill I think it's on show time again I don't remember where these things are it might be the best role Kevin Bacon has ever played like I'm it's been fantastic so he's a he's a well it's about Boston cops but he's an FBI agent but it's still you know it's good stuff all right that's what I got it's time to bring in the band John thanks for listening everybody thanks for hanging out with us thanks for sending in your stuff to feedbackatmackycub.com Feedback at mackycub.com Feedback at mackycub.com I figure we do it three times so we did it three times of three times so we like you did three three for the third no three to the third three to the third no no I don't know it's too much it's too much this math stuff's hard John stick to the computers yeah thanks for hanging out with us thanks for thanks for it all great tips today really great tips this week folks like you're killing it killing it make sure to check out the mackycub forums we got a lot of you that are sharing some more in-depth things in the forum so make sure you go check those out at mackycub.com slash forums anywhere you want to send them my friend Twitter so he is Dave Hamilton I and John F. Braun there's there's a couple others Mac Observer MackyCab and Pilot Pete you want to find out what he's doing I think we might be able to get Pete back into a semi irregular schedule I was I was like emailing the other night so yeah it'd be good to have him back for sure all right thanks again folks fun times make sure to check out our sponsors of course the ones we mentioned here in the episode headspace.com slash mgg lino.com slash mgg of course fastmail.com slash mgg make sure you check out smilesoftware.com slash podcast maxsales.com barebones.com hero.com thanks for hanging out I don't know what else to say John do you have anything else to say I know exactly what to say Dave and that is don't get caught