 You know iOS 16 has focus modes that can be tied to lock screens But what I found out this week and it blew me away when my son showed me that You can have it that tie goes in both directions So when he changes his lock screen of focus mode changes and when he changes his focus mode a lock screen changes So he can know just by looking at his phone whether he's in like his work mode his school mode his do not disturb mode This is amazing stuff super powerful more tips like this plus your questions answered today on Mac Geek have 947 for Monday September 19th 2022 and indeed welcome to Mac Geek. Yeah, welcome back to Mac Geek up for those of you who have been listening along with us for a while We are the show where you send in your quick tips like that your questions your cool stuff found We try to share your cool stuff found and your quick tips We try to answer all your questions the goal being that we each learn at least five new things Every single time we get together that sound can play when we hear who we've learned a super important new thing I that the one at the intro certainly earned that for me Sponsors for this episode include coda dot IO slash MGG Where you can sign up for free. This is an amazing thing. I highly recommend you check it out It's like like all of your docs and services together in one thing. It ties it all together. It's great Collide comm slash MGG with a K device security that uses slack to message your users. It's fantastic upside dot yeah upside comm where you can use code MGG to get five dollars or more cash back on your first purchase of ten dollars or more. I did it this week. It's amazing. You got to check it out and And some more stuff that we'll talk about during the show for now here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton And here in Fairfield, Connecticut. This is John abroad In here in lead, New Hampshire It's pilot Pete and you didn't give me enough of a break in there before the music started to give you that Arcade sound. I know I should I do things found so we'll try that next time. That's fine. Yeah, I like it. That's good John let's keep going with the quick tips here You've got a good one for iOS 16 and then later in the episode We have a whole thing of iOS 16 quick tips But we can't help but get these first two out of the way because these are exciting. So here's number two All right, um, so got this off of twitter from our friend Dave mark um iOS 16 let you see and copy your wi-fi password Go to settings wi-fi tap on your network and then tap on the password field Uh, and then it'll do verification, uh, I guess face ID or touch ID and then the password is shown in clear text and If you highlight it you get two options copy and speak So that's nice and as you probably know, but if you don't if you copy it and you are using Handoff, I think it's handoff You can paste it on another nearby device or machine. You guys knew that right? Yeah, that's fair In theory it would already have been synced to your devices that can handoff to though With iCloud Unless you've just put it on and your other devices aren't on a network yet Which obviously could happen. So yeah, that's a great thing or you can message it to people I can't wait until ipad ois 16 comes out and most people have it because When I show up at gigs and I want to use my ipad to control the mixer The engineers are generally very you know amenable to this but more often than not the stumbling block is oh crap I don't know what the wi-fi password is To control the mixer and it's in their ipad right, but they can't surface it yet But soon they can't so usually you just answered my question Because yeah, you share the password with somebody on their ios device, but they can't see what it is Right, but now you can see what it is like in ios 16. Yeah, exactly Yeah, all right more ios 16 quick tips and a little bit. We uh, we have a great non Well, it's a mac quick tip from a new listener steve. He says, um I'm a mac admin at a big company and can't wait to learn more tips and tricks great It says I just listened to episode 944 and heard you guys discuss when employers monitor your status while you're working remotely It reminded me of something i've used quite a bit to keep things like teams from switching me to away status If I don't want my status to change He says I use caffeinate which is a terminal command that allows your mac to stay awake and even simulate a user activity You guys are probably very aware of it But if uh, if you're not now, you know You can also set a timer on the command with the string so for me I work out at my house when i'm remote and when I walk away. I enter sudu caffeinate dash isu Dash t 3600. Well, of course put this in the show notes. You don't need to copy it down This keeps my mac awake for an hour since 3600 is the number of seconds in an hour A handy thing to know to get through life. It's it's not uncommon Especially when watching game shows they ask people like how many seconds do you think it would you know take to do a certain thing? When you know that 3600 is is uh an hour Like things start to you get to like start putting things together. Anyway, uh He says my uh team status doesn't go to a way and everyone thinks i'm hard at work. I am just in my home gym That's awesome. Yeah, I use a uh an app called amphetamine on my mac which Uses the caffeinate command because caffeinate is built right into to mac os and it uses that but it gives me a It gives me a couple of things it gives me a graphical interface to the caffeinate command But it also lets me trigger it based on certain events So for example, I don't want to let my mac go to sleep while file maker is running We connect to remote file maker servers and it doesn't entirely recover graciously If it goes to sleep and wakes up So I use caffeinate to change or i amphetamine rather to change my mac's sort of sleep ability to nil When file maker is running and then I use marco armence quitter to quit file maker after two hours of Non-use so if i'm if i leave file maker open i'm not at my desk after two hours It quits it and then my mac can go to sleep as it uh as it desires. So there you go I don't know. How do you guys do you guys use either of these apps? And do you have any interesting use cases about them? John shaking his head. No, everybody hear that shake your head harder dr Yeah, yeah, yeah, hang on. Hang on. I have a sound for that when when you shake your head. No ready? There it is. Yeah, that's the one now. Have relaxing. Yeah. Hmm. Yeah, okay. Wait, that's a bad sound So that's not the desired effect I love you, man That's awesome. Yeah, no, I don't use that. But if you're ready to move into the next one right below that sure Yeah, yeah, yeah, I have known to use an app for my mac called fast clicker and that's an automated mouse clicker um It will advance Screens in keynote. Basically, you can tell it to do a left mouse click a right mouse click You can set the number of interval. I believe in seconds. It might it might be milliseconds You can stop after 60 clicks you can Keep it going indefinitely. You know, however you want to do it I see it as an automated thing for like a keynote presentation If you know you've got time in but you want to be away from your computer You can set it and start it and then perhaps give the presentation while the computer automatically advances Interesting Yeah, so fast clicker and the links in there in the show notes. It's a source forge.net I could see that being used for like those automated classes that you have to take after you get a speeding ticket to lower the amount and and maybe You know, you're you uh, you want to really focus on the content and not clicking on the mouse button And so this could take that alleviate that pressure for you. There you go. Exactly But perhaps at my company, there's some automated training that's done But uh, you know, I gotta tell you though, they figured that out And so there's there's quizzes in there and that's where I think Bring you back to home plate and now and then That would be my only caution with this tip is Um Actually fast clicker sounds like a better solution because if somebody has the ability to review your screen remotely to verify that You're actually doing something at least this will give the impression of that Where I'll caffeinate. They'll just see a blank screen or you know a screen and nothing's happening Yeah, I mean for like the team's away status that this caffeinate obviously works For the stuff we were talking about a couple of episodes ago where there's apps that you Permit your employer to put on your computer. Hopefully you permit your employee. I mean, hopefully it's done with consent Some of those will actually use the camera to take a picture of the the, you know The the the workspace of the computer. So just be aware of of how you're being tracked Uh speaking of something that we do not track but that we do all the time is a keens he says Do you know that if you double tap on your airpods or headphones? You can skip chapters in the apple podcast app and triple tap to go back to the beginning of a chapter I've only found this to work with podcasts that have chapters good news Mac geek ab is a podcast that has chapters And so uh, so this will work So if you weren't sure and you wanted to hear that tip again All you have to do is triple tap your airpods and it will go back to the beginning of this chapter because we put A chapter mark at the beginning of this and it will jump you back and uh, so there you go. Yeah, we uh, I We've been doing chapters for a very long time and I am it works with this show. I am proud to do it It's it's easy and and we're happy to have them Hey, how many times a day do you have to switch tools? You know where we all used to have to jump from a document to a spreadsheet to a project management app All in the name of keeping up with our teams, right? Is it that revolutionary to believe everyone should be able to collaborate in a single tool? This is why we've become huge fans of coda If your best work is spread out across documents spreadsheets and a stack of workflow tools that you have to jump in and out of all day You need coda the one doc that brings words data and teams together Coda is endlessly customizable and connected They are copyable templates for anything and everything product roadmap remote onboarding OKR tracking meeting notes Listener question tracking you name it coda has it Coda adapts to growing teams and changing strategies too It can help change how you view information depending on what you need to do with it in that moment And perhaps most importantly coda seamlessly integrates with all the tools you need We're looking at this and like I said crafting a coda template to track listener like submissions from all of you It's amazing your team deserves a tool that adapts to your team Not the other way around so try coda and right now you can get started having your team all working together on the same page Or free It's true head over to coda dot i o slash mg g that c o d a dot i o to get started for free coda dot i o slash mg g and our thanks to coda for sponsoring this episode All right, let's do some ios 16 quick tips. Shall we gentlemen? Um, do we oh do we all have ios 16? Right on our devices. I got a stupid question. It's not stupid question corner Okay, just there are no stupid questions. Just stupid questioners. Oh, and this one's especially not stupid I like yeah, I did ask in the pre show Uh, when I thought it was supposed to be out by now when I'm gonna see ios 16 on my phone because I haven't and I did I actually did an update to 15 15.7. I believe yes Yeah, so That's that's the issue here And I was sitting on the couch the other night with my daughter Actually with my family and my daughter's like, oh, yeah, I'll update to ios 16 now And then she's like I'm like you doing it. She's like, yeah, it's all going fine. I'm like great Then she's like, oh crap. I updated to ios 15.7. Why didn't I update to ios 16? If you go into your phone Uh, you have to choose 16 separately It is on the update screen right where you would find software updates and settings Uh, I think it's so it's settings general software up to I don't have my phone in front of me right now But uh, where you would normally find them and if you haven't updated to 15.7 yet That's going to be the one that it presents to you But look further down on the screen and you'll see the little hey, you can also update to ios 16 here So Yeah, so I don't feel quite so stupid, but yeah, that's stupid not at all. No, it's it's like, you know It's one of those things coming. It's got to be there any day now And and john and I didn't see this before the last episode because we wanted to have ios 16 on our devices so we didn't We had to we put the the well, I mean we we took the beta process of putting we put the release version on our phones but But yeah, it you know, so I had no idea about this until until it was released and then people were sharing screenshots and it was like Ah, okay. This is going to be one of those things. So I should have had it in the agenda Thankfully you put it in the agenda for us Pete. So there you go. That's great And as I recall on the last show we you did say that if you have the the beta version You have to tell it now i'm on the release version so that you get updates to the release else You're stuck on the beta version. Yeah, you you would get a 16.1 beta Offered to you if you if you kept the beta profile alive in the uh in the phone. Yeah, okay. Yeah Yeah, I I deleted it and yeah same. Yeah, yeah Everything seems to be working. I agree. Yeah The one nice thing about the the 16.1 which is available in the betas john is that You can have battery percentage shown on your iphone mini Whereas on the 16.0 It only works with the larger screen iPhones. I don't know why they chose that but yes Yeah, I found that out. Yeah, I don't have that And it's because I guess they judge that my screen is too small to handle it. Yeah, but 16.1 you'll get it So you're fine. Yeah, yeah uh A couple of other things to walk through here in ios 16 Is that battery percentage? So you you do that in settings battery battery percentage? So that's that's the first little trip a little trip. That's always a little trip with us, isn't it? The second one that I have is go into settings sound and haptics Keyboard feedback and you can turn on haptic and what this will do is it will Make it so that you feel when you are typing on the keyboard. It's for me. It's a game changer I love this Because I don't have my sound on so I don't hear key clicks, but to feel that keyboard feedback Uh, you can turn on you know for sound and for haptics and then you can Choose back on the sound and haptic screen at the bottom of it. There's a little infographic that Uh shows what you've set and so you get you know, whether you're getting haptics when you're in ring mode Or in silent mode like you get to pick all of that stuff I I love it. It's been it's been a game changer for me. So I'm stoked about that one Have either of you try did you either of you know about that one? Like that was news to me, so I I didn't oh you didn't of course. Yeah, you know, obviously, but uh, yeah Yeah, I love the haptics and I can see the advantage to that that's that's going to be nice to have and you don't hear Yeah, right, but but you feel it and it it makes it feel it works. It's a very sort of uh visceral thing I I'm like I said, I'm into it. So I and I'm glad I put it on the list because I turned it on and for about the first Six hours I was totally gaga over the feature and now I don't even think about it anymore It's because it's just normal, right and that's the beauty of it. I gotta say, um, you know Gee like we're apple fanboys here or something, but boy, this is a company that really gets the human machine interface Yep, did you still? Yep I agree. Wish more airplane companies Got that car companies airplane companies Refrigerator company like everybody it would life would be better If I I'm not I don't want to say life would be better if apple made everything I'm not really into one company sort of owning apple gets gets a Large enough slice of my life as it stands and I'm okay with it like I choose it. It's not forced upon me, but Yeah, that being said someone were pretty good about that Obviously it takes a lot more to put an airplane together. You got honeywell and g and rolls and you know all those folks They have to get together and do it, but right that's yeah, that's fair. It's the apple has the one widget approach Yeah, so they're able to do it. So I I'd personally dave find that distracting because to me Haptics In my mind the way I use my phone indicates that something important may have just happened Have you used it to me? Have you haven't I I can try it, but I predict I would find it Not useful, but I'll I'll try it. Okay. I would suspend your Suspend your your uh preconceived notions because it's it's not It's not a very strong haptic response. It's just enough to know that you've typed. I mean, listen, let's put it this way your Your laptop has a haptic response on the trackpad, right? Because when you click your trackpad, there there is no click It is it is simply receiving a sensor, but you feel like you've clicked something And it like you believe that you may not even know that this was happening, right? This might be news to to you or some of you that You know apple laptops for years have not had movable trackpads because moving parts equals bad And yet that haptic makes it feel like this immersive visceral experience That's what they've approximated or that's what they put on the iphone. It's in fact quite literally the same thing Uh as what we get out of the trackpad So yeah, the first time I realized that that wasn't actually moving and it's like, oh, that's just a haptic. Oh my gosh It is so Realistic too. Yeah, but you can set the intensity of it. That's yeah On on the on the mac you can set the intensity of of how how much you feel that click On the phone With the with the key clicks you don't get to set that so it's it's just it just feels like you're typing on a keyboard Like I said it I noticed it at first and liked it and then it like it went away. So I would I would For anyone who's skeptical about it, but what but yet wants to you know experience it Try it for a day. Don't give up after five minutes, you know, try it for a day and see How immersed in it you get my guess is Many of you will will forget to turn it off It's really what it comes down to I'm pretty sure I have it Turned off on my laptop as well. Just because again, I Really so you don't feel when you click your track pad That I would find that I know you're right. Okay. Okay. If I Well, no if I tap lightly Right, I don't feel anything if I press down then yeah, I'll get a very subtle Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, so well, we're still on ios 16 I wanted to address there's a question in the comments section, which is no ios 16 for ipad yet from michael erin Oh, yeah, we talked about that. Yeah, so it's that There would never be and and now I'm being like ultra pedantic, but I'll I'll I'll take my hat to brian chaffin for this There will never be an ios 16 for ipad, but there will be ipad os 16 and apple announced a couple of weeks ago that That that was being delayed. It seems like it's being delayed partially because of Center stage right which is also coming to the mac with ventura And so it wouldn't surprise me if the two of them are released At the same time as ipad os and mac os being released in concert with each other as opposed to ipad os and ios being released in Concert with each other. So it seems like that's where it's heading I installed ventura by the way on my laptop recently You know just a couple days ago And it's great the system settings app all the complaints that people have had about the user experience And and really just the layout of that system settings app and ventura Even in the current beta which at at the moment i'm running beta 7 It's terrible. I mean the app itself is fine And I there's like an asterisk there like it's fine And i'm it's only been a couple of days. So i'm i'm letting my change resistance sort of sit by the sidelines for two weeks before I really have judgment, but uh It like the layout of it It's just like it's it's as though a user experience designer or even just a user interface designer like forget about experience Never went in there. There's there's all kinds of like text overlapping and it looks terrible Um one thing I will share and I I hope we remember to share this when ventura comes out Time machine is now inside system settings general I never would have found it without search folks never would have found it without search Yeah, um, yeah, I got one go I haven't tried it yet, but um, so they added a feature to photos in ios 16. Okay So go into photos albums Utilities and there's something called duplicate detection Oh interesting and sure enough so I ran it or I think it ran it already Yeah, when I was I remember when I was setting up ios 16 There was at one point it said yeah photos is doing something so I can't show them to you yet Right, right. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, but yeah, so albums utilities duplicate detection I I was afraid to try it. I'll I'll make a backup first sure Because you're a smart guy right, but it looked like it got it right. I mean we show images side by side and I'm yep That's a dupe interesting Huh, that's cool. I Huh, everybody else has been doing it for years. I guess apple decided to get in the game on you know the Yeah, and I did it there wasn't a couple others Kiwi Graham in the chat asked the question He crystallizes the question that was I was trying to percolate He says does duplicate detection work on photos that aren't in full res on the iphone Meaning does it work on photos that are in your iCloud library? Even if you haven't downloaded all the photos to the phone I like I would assume I and now I am entering the land of you know pulling things out of my backside Never assume Yes Where I would assume that apple would not implement this feature without being You know full with it So i'm gonna say yes, but I also can't imagine how that could happen on device without it pulling down everything from iCloud Which would be Astronomically, you know, yeah, maybe it's using some sort of algorithm to go. Yeah, this is you know or hash, you know these Yeah, right like like is it yes, is there some Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Yeah Yeah, oddly enough. I don't see the option now But I think that's because I just recently did a restore on my phone, which maybe we'll talk about why I did that Uh, I have questions for you. So I go to photos albums Where where did uh, what would you scroll down and you'll see utilities utilities? Yes, I see duplicates Oh, it's already done it Yeah, okay. Oh, so it kind of is doing it itself I see So maybe yeah, okay, so it's not like I can trigger this it's already triggered it and now I get to just Uh, take advantage of the data that it is providing me I like this. Okay, cool. If it'll do it when you're in the low power mode You know Props not Props not or maybe it only does it when it's like I maybe it only does it when it's um on charge because I notice Photos is often the thing if I look in like battery usage or power usage or whatever on my phone When my phone is on charge photos is often using like a ton of background cpu Which makes sense like if it wants to do all its stuff do it when you've got got the juice So yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what I would choose. All right. I got uh one more That many of us will not see but some of us will If you go into settings General and about you will see all sorts of information about your phone If your phone has ever had a part replaced by apple You will see that listed in settings general about I don't think this was there in ios 15 My son noticed it because he had um part of his phone Repair repaired or replaced last year. I forget what part it was but uh, but he was like, hey, look at this And it showed the that the part was apple certified and everything was, you know Copacetic according to apple and all that good stuff. So yeah Fascinating stuff. I didn't grab my phone at the break. I'd look because I'm still on 15, but I can't help Hey, you know from cringing at the pump to getting an eye popping bill at your favorite restaurant Inflation is hitting us all where it hurts and it can really hurt and that's why I'm stoked about our new sponsor upside upside is an incredible app for anyone who buys gas Groceries or dines out and with every purchase. I'm earning cash back. Thanks to upside It's actually really easy to get started you download the free upside app And then you use our promo code mackeekab and that gets you $5 or more cash back on your first purchase of $10 or more And then you claim an offer for whatever you're buying on upside you do this thing where I open the app I check in At the like I've been using it at the gas station, right? So I check in at the gas station And then I pay as I normally would with my credit card or debit card I guess you could use I use my credit card and then you get paid and it's that simple Like it really just works. It's it's not one of these too good to be true things, right? It it actually is true In comparison to all those credit card rewards or loyalty programs You can earn three times more cash back with upside upside users are earning more than a million dollars every week and that's probably why They have a 4.8 star rating on the app store Download the free upside app and use promo code mackeekab to get $5 or more cash back on your first purchase of $10 or more That's $5 or more cash back on your first purchase of $10 or more Using promo code mackeekab and our thanks to upside for sponsoring this episode All right, let's talk about The iphone 14 migration strategy. So this is releasing on monday the 19th Which will be a few days after folks start receiving their iphone's 14 We are recording this on the friday prior. So UPS has not delivered our phones to us yet But uh, but actually that may not be true. It might may have arrived while i've been recording with you here So we have not migrated to our iphone's 14 yet But it is time to begin talking about that and i've done some pre migration things That many of us will choose to go through But john you want to start us off with gary yes Excuse me. So gary said i backed up My iphone to iCloud anticipating my 14 pro do either of you know, which path is better Populate the new one from iCloud or phone to phone um Yes, do both Uh, seriously I'd make a backup iCloud or otherwise But I kind of like the phone to phone option. I don't know if you ever tried it, dave, but You basically put your new phone next to your old phone and then This little star field pattern appears which I assume is some sort of ssid or something Uh to get the two phones talking to each other and then it just goes from one to the other i've found that that works but um If not, I mean the iCloud backup strategy As I mentioned, I just went through overstore and that works great. It just takes a while So right yeah, that that would be my feeling on it is You know, you're going to be doing this wirelessly either way because that's what your phone is a wireless network device and so I You know Going over via iCloud you've got the internet involved potentially slowing you down because of your internet connection Even wi-fi congestion In your home could slow that down whereas when it's phone to phone It's an ad hoc network between the two devices and it's as fast as it could possibly be So to get your data from one to the other and it's also the most current version of your data too, right? So you're you're not having to say oh, let me back up to iCloud first again one last final time and then Go do this thing. So yeah, I like it and the nice part is yes If you have the storage on iCloud and can do a backup there great But your old phone will be a backup for you So if you can't back up to iCloud you kind of already have a backup because you're not wiping your old phone You're just copying the data from it. So it becomes your backup. I do recommend Turning off wi-fi Uh and all networking like go airplane mode after you've done the migration Go airplane mode on your old phone So that it's not also like participating in your iCloud things Not that that would be the necessarily terrible thing But I always just try and kind of keep it on in stasis, right? So in case my new phone does something terrible and munges all my iCloud data Which I don't expect obviously, but you know, that's the point of a backup Is the scenario you don't expect that, you know, I kind of put it on ice and don't let it talk to the network and And then, you know, it's golden. So yeah multiple backups. Good idea, right? I mean, that's what it is It's already right there. So yeah um So the question I had then was and I think you answered it in there So it's not doing it over bluetooth. It's actually wi-fi to wi-fi between the the tweaks of the phones Yeah, it's because I was gonna say bluetooth is really slow too slow compared. Yeah. Yeah, so yeah Yeah, I don't know if it ever uses bluetooth for the you know for finding it in the negotiations So it might use it for discovery, let's say, but it's it's definitely using wi-fi for data transfer and And the thing that you saw on the phone that you described little star field that you, you know Focus the the phone's camera on to pair them up together Same thing that you'll see when you get an apple watch john It puts that star field on your apple watch You uh, you you scan it with your phone and that magically pairs those two devices together So I think that was the first place we ever saw that was on the apple watch and then it it moved to the the phones I um I noticed this week that the iphone's 14 at least those released here in the united states are All using e-sims now there is no physical sim tray on it And I thought okay, and I've been thinking for a while That I should convert away from using a physical sim anyway My phone can store the numbers are sort of fuzzy, but iphone's can store somewhere between like four and 10 e-sims in them with two sims active at the same time and and if you have a sim tray One of those sims can of course be a physical sim But you could have two e-sims active at the same time now too, and I think that started with the 12 and later so So I I figured well I know that there's some part of the process of upgrading Or migrating to a new phone that will convert Your regular sim on your old phone to an e-sim on your new phone I was not entirely thrilled with that process happening with two different devices and so I decided I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna take matters into my own hands. I'm gonna convert now for some carriers certainly with at&t And I don't have at&t but but some of you do and you've shared this with me With at&t if you go into settings, I believe it's setting cellular You will see if you have a physical sim you will see an option in there That says convert to e-sim and that will take care of it within the settings app And I think that's just a partnership with the the carrier for my carrier with mint mobile That option wasn't there, but it was super easy. I just launched the mint mobile app I said order a new sim and at that point it asked me do you want An e-sim or a physical sim and I said e-sim and it said is this the phone you want to put the e-sim on and I said, yeah And so within about three minutes I was finished it starts the process it like authenticates your e-sim online with mint mobile It tells you make sure you're on a wi-fi network because you're going to lose connectivity in the midst of this like, okay, great And then it says and then it sort of jumped to the The standard apple you're adding an e-sim interface that happens like when you go get an e-sim when you travel or for data or whatever and I went through it and in the end I might was activated on my new sim But I had you know I had yet to remove the physical sim because it's you know, like that's the last step of the process And so my phone showed me that I had two networks One of them was was dead It had no service obviously because that my e-sim my physical sim had been deactivated And then the other one was you know on the network so I took out the old sim and when I did that it asked me It's like do you want to update your contacts? It did the thing that your phone does when you're like changing sims Is like do you want to update your contacts to use the new sim? And I said yeah, yeah, yeah because because if you use two sims You can tell your phone You know, well when I call john I want it to use sim number one when I call pete I want it to use sim number two And that would be if you have numbers in you know different locales or whatever if you get a better raid or who knows right? So it was just like you're down to one sim You want to update your contacts that everybody uses this new sim and I'm like, yeah, of course But other than that yeah, it went for me it went smoothly and took all of about three minutes unfortunately john Not all of us experienced that same thing right, um, I had to deal with tier two support which um, if you've never dealt with support Tier two are generally more skilled um People than the first person you know t i e r not t e a r Yeah, well sometimes I just just for clarity so that people aren't don't feel like they're dropped into the middle of a story You explain who your carrier is and whose t2 support you were using Was it apples or was it your carriers? All right, so Um, I was given a challenge by you dave to convert my phone from a physical sim to an e sim I have the 12 and it has both um Look at so and so i'm with verizon and I have the iphone 12 mini Which is registered with them so um I went online and searched their support forms and it's like uh You don't really get a you know that magic button to convert you're gonna have to call in so i'm like, okay No problem. So I called in got their support They escalated me when they're like, oh you want to do this when I first got the phone They were like, no, we can't do e sim for you now they can Probably forcing It probably forced their hand By having the latest phone have no physical sim So um and and we were able to do it though it got Uh The process that I went through um, and we're going to link to a nice article to talk all about e sims Is called e sim carrier activation, which basically means you got to call your carrier. I had to give them. I think it's the im e i 2 Um, which is the unique identifier for the e sim And she's like, okay Just read that number to me and then she's like, you know turn off the phone wait five minutes And then turn it back on and i'm like, okay Turn it back on and it's like, hey an e sim is on the way you want it and i'm like, yep Uh, then it got a little confused because I don't think I pulled My physical sim at the right time because then I had two lines with the same number That's what I explained. That's a normal part of this process Yeah, the thing is I probably should have pulled it because the thing is she's like, okay, well You know delete that one and i'm like, okay, and I deleted that one and i'm like Oh, no now I have no service and you can usually tell because you'll see a little s os in the menu bar Which basically means you don't have any cell service right um But yeah, then Once we we remove the sim and then she had me do a backup and restore which probably wasn't necessary but Hey, why not? Um, now I am totally on e sim on this phone Okay, so casey list posted an article about his experience going from a Verizon wireless you know a normal physical sim to an e sim with Verizon And I think he did this even before ios 16 was out so for for the for different reasons He was in the same boat as you or maybe for the same reason, but uh, you know He couldn't click the magic button, but he didn't have to talk to support. He didn't have to do any of these Things he said he just logged into his account and this is why I was sort of confused when you were saying this Because I was helping my my niece actually transition away from Verizon recently We moved her to mint as well since we're paying her bill while she's at college and uh She you know, I remember seeing in her account Order an e sim or activate an e sim or something and and that's what casey did So I'll I'll put a link to this in the show notes for anyone who is a Verizon customer Because I I think you can completely avoid support And uh and do this yeah, and casey for those of you who don't know casey list is one of the hosts of the accidental tech podcast great great human And uh and a smart smart person. So yeah converting your wireless your Verizon sim. Yeah So Okay, I probably should have gone to the site or looked in the app Yeah, yeah, the app might also do it right I it would surprise me in fact if it didn't but like I said, it's it even in like mince app It was 100 doable in the app. Like I said, it took three minutes But it wasn't there was no convert to e sim. It was order a new sim So I kind of had to sniff around a little But then once I sort of moved through the only weird question Was it asked me? Are you on your new phone? And I had to say yes to that. That was how I told it I effectively took that as a question Is this the phone on which you want to install the e sim and my answer was yes So that that's why at least on mint. I said so yeah, I think some of these apps aren't quite Like the the the verbiage in there is not entirely What we might be looking for so just kind of head down the path of ordering an e sim Once you get that and once it's on your physical sim is dead like and it will never be good again So then once it's done you just take it out. So I got a question from the peanut gallery. Yeah, man Why Why what why so why uh, okay, aside from the 14, okay Which needs an e sim because it doesn't have a physical sim card But what's the advantage of going to e sim on why why would I want to take my 12 and convert it to an e sim? Well, I so I'm gonna get all I'm gonna talk about what did I say earlier? I think it's gonna be the title of the episode episode the land of pulling things out of my backside uh, we will revisit that land and and so Sims can like physical sims can get damaged. I've had physical sims go bad, right? They can get wet, I guess Well, I've just had them like flake out. I've also and I don't this is where I'm definitely pulling things out of my backside In that I simply don't know But there have been times in the past where I needed to go get a new sim from my carrier in order to take advantage of You know some new frequency radio that they were using it wasn't available in the in the you know, that physical sim Didn't have that radio enabled and so I needed to go literally get a new physical sim in order to to do that Where now they just push a firmware update done Exactly. It's just right there in the e sim and so for me I've been thinking about this for a while since we started talking about e sims on the show It was like, well, I really probably should just move mint to an e sim. Is there any reason not to And I mean, I I waited way too long, right? I mean, I you know, I probably fretted about this for six months But uh, but finally came to the realization though. There's no there's no reason not to now I will share something and this is the plural of anecdote is not data I can't speak to this with any authority other than sharing what I experienced for the last two weeks My neighborhood went from having sometimes 5g Mostly lte at the house and office here To having no service until I left my neighborhood I would get that little sos all the time unless I was on like wi-fi calling at home Until I was out of the neighborhood and then everything was fine and I like I don't know if they changed I clearly some changed happened because it was happening to everybody in my house And we're all on on mint which uses t-mobile's tower. So maybe t-mobile made a change here in Durham. I don't know But at some point Something changed when I moved to that e sim I now get lte and 5g at my house again now This could be completely coincidental It could be completely anecdotal or it could absolutely support my conspiracy theory that having an e sim could be updatable over the air and It and frankly is current right like I've had mint for two years now. So that is At least a two-year-old sim if not, you know, if not older. So yeah, yes um when I got my 12 And I still had a sim. I think I transitioned from an eight Okay, well, that's right. Sure As soon as I put the sim in the 12 I got a text message from Verizon and they're like dude your your sim is is Won't do 5g so come into the store. Fortunately We have a Verizon company store in town. So yeah, I went went there and you know, they popped into new sim and and every And then I got 5g slow, right Yeah, right. They're still rolling it out, but it's getting a lot better. Yeah. Yeah, yeah Yeah, so that's to me. That's why but also You know a sim can go bad the chances of it I mean, it's not like you're taking it in and out of your phone all the time But I know I you know, I keep Murphy on speed dial And uh, I know that if my sim is going to go bad It's going to be like while I'm traveling in the middle of Malaysia somewhere and I have zero plans to go to Malaysia But I know as soon as I make them my sim would have been getting ready like, okay, here we go We're here Now I'm in Malaysia I don't have wi-fi access because I haven't figured out where I am yet and now I can't use my phone, right? and so like I figured with an e-sim maybe I'm better off now There is a downside to the e-sim when I get my new iphone 14 pro I can't simply take the physical sim from my old phone and put it in the new one, right? So I have to go through this reprogramming of the phone thing which thankfully we can do on our own and hopefully Most of us don't have an experience like you had John and you know, and it's a it's a smooth experience But but there is that like there is that bit of friction That's sort of involved there And if you know if my phone gets damaged in Malaysia and stops working I can't just take the sim out of it and put it in a new phone I have to find you know, I always travel with a spare phone Well now I can't just move sims around. I have to be traveling with a phone that supports e-sim And you know is is somehow ready to be able to go through this process And I'm going to need to be able to get on wi-fi to do it. So there are downsides. Yeah, and yeah, and Go ahead. Oh, they still do lock phones Like to the to the carrier 18t horizon. I don't even know. I haven't bought a locked phone in you Verizon has not been allowed. I think it was some Deal they made with the FCC to get spectrum or something But Verizon phones are haven't been locked for a long time. Yeah, it's not mine Yeah, no, you're right that that was when they moved from like cdma to To gsm or whatever we're using now when Verizon made that move that you're right the FCC was like, okay, but You got it. You got to agree to this. Yeah, you're right. AT&T locks them. Yeah um I just want to mention the the point that mic here made to kind of follow up your point, Dave. Sure um Yeah, so we got a note here from mic and apparently the iphone 14 may not be for everybody um So with the iphone 4 so he says with the iphone 14 appears Apple has eliminated the sim in favor of using e-sims. That's true The only problem is many small resellers and providers don't currently support e-sims Uh, so his question is is the 14 for him if he's using a sim base budget carrier and I think my best answer is no Well, I mean it depends right like I would go through this process of converting your your physical sim to an e-sim on your existing phone And if that succeeds well now, you know the answer you can get a 14, right? Right. I think what he's saying though is that the the whatever carrier he has Doesn't appear to offer that option. Got it. Yeah, okay. Yeah, and if they don't then quite frankly, I'd say pick a new carrier and The easy answer if you're in the united states is to at least check out mint Because it's going to be the least expensive with great coverage And I they used to be a sponsor here. They have not been a sponsor I happily pay them all the time because I pay them so much less Then I used to pay AT&T It it's crazy It's half price. It's half price. That's right. Yeah, it's crazy It's crazy And now I get to talk about our sponsor collide Traditional endpoint security tools can make your workplace feel like a surveillance state It can turn your users and the it team into adversaries and ultimately drive your employees to work on Unsecured personal devices. Listen, it doesn't have to be this way. That's not a good way Collide is a device security solution built around honest security Their whole philosophy is that employees aren't your biggest security risk They're your biggest allies and your relationship with your employees should be based on transparency and informed consent Collide works by notifying your employees of security issues via slack And giving them step-by-step instructions on how to resolve them themselves For it and security teams collide provides the right level of visibility for mac Windows and linux devices and it can answer questions about your fleet security that traditional mdms cannot You can meet your security goals without compromising your values Visit collide.com Slash mgg to find out how if you follow that link, they'll even hook you up with a goodie bag just for activating that free trial That's k o l i d e dot com slash mgg and our thanks to collide for sponsoring this episode Hey guys, so I had that conversation. I promised I was going to try to have with sonology about the future of hardware transcoding on disc stations and for a long time Most of the disc stations, especially the plus disc stations that were coming out from sonology We're using some flavor of intel processor generally a celeron That had a gpu in it and it's the the existence of the gpu that enables what we call hardware transcoding It's still software. It's just using the gpu instead of the cpu which Generally speaking is much better suited to do transcoding of video Than a cpu is it can it's much more efficient at it and you know in like the 2020 versions of the disc stations the 1520 plus the 920 plus those sorts of things The celeron that was in there could do You know could hardware transcode a 4k video on the fly down to you know 720p or whatever Which is amazing when you're traveling And need to rely on the server aka your disk station to Send you less data, right? Like if your wi-fi in the hotel sucks Then you you can't take you know 25 megabits per second of 4k video Like you might want when you're at home And so you need it to transcode and you need it to do it there because it because of all that What I have noticed though is with the 2021 and now 2022 models of the disc stations They've moved to the amd processors the ryzen is one of them And they're much better on the cpu side, but they completely lack GPUs and I started getting worried because it meant and I have to say this You know I have to offer a bit of a rata I said that the 1522 plus was a good plex server I've decided it is not I've moved my plex server back to my 1520 plus So I have the 1522 plus running pretty much everything that doesn't have to do with media And then my 1520 plus my fifth yeah my 1520 So the two-year-old one is the one doing the heavy lifting of the transcoding I actually have it pointing to the other one the data is all stored on the 22 With and I have it pointing with nfs, which is a geeky thing if you want to know about it Ask me I'm happy to dig into it But but I asked Synology what the future looked like and they they shared something with me There are no current plans to include gpus for transcoding purposes In their devices their thought process is that the server is the least powerful place to do any transcoding And it's much better when that happens in the streaming devices Okay, but I shared with them that specifically when using mobile or traveling when transcoding Must happen on the server because of those bandwidth constraints. We just talked about They are looking at this internally and will share more as information becomes available And they were also curious to hear people's thoughts on Pretranscoding when you're traveling so as to avoid the need for this right because you can do some of that pretranscoding and Plex Synology's own video station Offers offline transcoding so that you can convert your videos to you know A smaller mp4 container that that has maybe a 720 instead of the 4k one And so you can leverage the cpu to do that in a you know non timely fashion Uh, you know, I I never know what I'm gonna want to watch when I'm on the fly And and some of the things that I want to watch from a hotel room Are things that like my channel's dvr app records And so those have to be those those can't be pretranscoded because they're recorded sort of live and so Uh, but I'm I'm curious feedback at mackeykev.com. Let us know what your what your thoughts are on this because Synology is listening. I I I can't stress that part enough They are abs. They had not thought about this until I don't I can't say they hadn't thought about it this They were very appreciative. I don't want to put words in anyone's mouth. They were very appreciative when I brought this idea to them Um, and uh, and are are very much into Considering all of this as as time marches forward as they said so Yeah So there you go. Nice. And can you said feedback at mackeykev.com? I think he said feedback at mackeykev.com I did I did I did If you look in your inbox, Dave, they're actually I think they're having an event in Manhattan Which unfortunately I have a conflict with so I can't go. Yeah, I was thinking about going. I'm not sure I that's a I may have a conflict, but it might work. I've got something the night before here in New Hampshire But I think that doesn't start till one so I could fly down like morning of and make it work Maybe yeah, but these typically have really good events and yeah And I really like them because I want stuff that like two of them. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Thank you, Synology. That's good Uh, all right, and it will this this episode will come out too late for this, but we will have had our Uh, sort of home theater hang out Uh, that the john is sort of leading us through on on sunday sunday prior So sunday the 18th So last night the day before this episode comes out, but Oh, I'm gonna be leading If anything, I think I'm trailing because they still don't work the way I want Well, you'll lead the way and everybody like that's the beauty of these hangouts So it's like everybody no one's an expert because everybody's an expert at their own little things like I You know the ones that I've led I you know I set the topic and kind of let the disc it's just a hangout everybody shares It's not this You know three to many thing that we do when we do the show It is a everybody's in it together. We're all hanging out. So Um that that's the point. Yeah, and none of us you're right. None of us know everything except the Dunning Krueger You want to take us to allen and see if we can answer his question Yeah, I hope we can all right. So allen says I have two air print printers a brother laser printer model whatever I don't think it matters. Uh and an epson, uh coloring chat Both printers are visible and function just fine our iPhones and our iPads both mine and my wife's But they simply do not show up on the mac ad printer does not see them This has been consistent for five or six months though at least through at least one max software upgrade Uh, I'm currently stolen Monterey, but the problem dates back. I think to katalina There was a period where the printers disappeared and reappeared at random on our i devices But that seems to have stopped I've gotten kind of used copying files to dropbox so I can print from my phone or ipad But i'm really tired of it. I thought upgrading the os would help, but it does not can you help I'm sure that both printers and all our apple devices are on the same local network okay, um I mean, I would say that your printing configuration on the mac is broken And uh, how do you fix that? Well, I'll tell you or apple will tell you because apple has a dandy article called reset the printing system on your mac to solve a problem And what that does for you is it it basically Gets rid of all the printers that you have and resets other things underneath the covers. I would imagine And the way you do this is you go to system preferences printers and scanners Oh, and look, I have no printers available anymore. Great. Maybe you reset your printing system Yeah, I better yeah, why did that happen? You know, I think it's because I just didn't know s upgrade I've had them trash printers before anyways, so you go to printers and scanners And right click or control click. I guess right click on the area where there should be printers And even though I don't have any you will get a dialogue saying reset printing system Yeah Somebody Yeah, somebody has a pointer. I thought I thought we addressed it are the max on the same wi-fi The the person that wrote in said he's sure they are on the same local network. So Yeah, I would obviously confirm that for anybody who's going through a problem like this I would also take a look at What sort of filters you have either on your mac or your router so firewalls, you know Make sure that I would disable all firewalls on your mac. I would also make sure Some routers allow you to isolate your networks, right? So you can You know if the max are connected via ethernet, for example, and the the printer and the iPhones are connected via wi-fi Uh, it like they should be connected together, but your router can very easily vlan those And many routers have for a long time offered the option to separate The two and so it doesn't let devices talk back and forth so I would I would check those settings or Just if your mac's not already on wi-fi move it to a wi-fi network That is the same as the one that the printer is on the same as the one that the You know just because it has an ip address in the same range does not mean that your router is going to Allow traffic across that hump because it is a bridge, right? You're even though your wi-fi and your you know, you all get the same ip range all that stuff There is a bridge in your router from the wi-fi network to the ethernet network and it can very easily be disabled via software so I that that's where I would start looking with this but resetting the printing system It's like yeah That's not going to hurt I would also try Just figuring out what the ip address of the printer is the printer might tell you maybe you can see it on your iphone I don't know but figure out maybe your router will tell you and then try pinging that from your mac and by pinging I mean you open up the terminal you type the word ping followed by a space Followed by whatever the ip address is of that device if you can't ping it Chances are you're not going to be able to talk to it to get a You know a printing message through usually Some devices block pings but not generally not printers and things like that so You know as I often say we approach all these things with the if I were there What would I do next and and so now I've thrown the next four things that I would do Not in in no particular order just to try and it's all about bullheaded persistence, right? You keep trying things until one of them works So yeah, and I'll point out kiwi grand pointed out in the chat that If you know doing the manual ip setup can avoid the whole air print discovery Fair right there might just be a discovery issue Ah great point if you know the ip just put it in there. Yeah. Yeah I like it. Yeah, that's actually how I'm set up my laser printer my ancient laser printer I actually set up using a LPD connection Yeah, and then type in the ip address and and it works fine and then it's like Oh, well, okay. Is it postscript or pcl and it's like well, yeah, but we'll go with postscript. Yeah Yeah, I like your tip about the firewall as well because Yeah, the firewall may get in the way um I mean, there's a provision for you to add processes that are allowed to talk But sure. Yeah, I couldn't find one that was you know, like a print thing right Right And this is another reason why I am absolutely not a fan of a sort of default practice of putting all my You know quote unquote iot devices on a separate guest network because it's symptom. I'm not Proposing that that's what's happening here But this is what would happen if you isolated your printer on a different wi-fi network The whole idea of isolating means your max and iphone's can't talk to it. So So, you know be be aware of how much security you're putting into place on things like this Walter brings an interesting question. I have some ideas for Walter He says, uh, I have a question is my question is related to iCloud syncing among several max My main mac is an m1 mini with a 500 gig drive. I also have an intel mini with a 1 terabyte drive I just rebuilt a 2015 macbook pro and added a 240 gig owc ssd I have Monterey once I completed the build of the macbook pro I noticed it's hard drive started downloading items from my iCloud drive I tried to keep most items on the drive On the on iCloud. I also found my m1 mini was using more space as well And was also downloading more items from iCloud drive It appears both the macbook pro and m1 are downloading the same items As far as I can tell Do you know of a way to see the specifics of what is being downloaded? And or how I can stop the sync download the total size of the download is about 50 gigs And my full iCloud drive shows 65 gigs using get info The other intel mac mini is not showing the same iCloud sync download Which just adds to my dumb foundedness if you have any ideas or solutions I would appreciate them. We are always happy To uh to share what we know and sometimes we tell you more than we know Uh, if you go into system preferences Click on your name apple id whatever that is and then go to iCloud and then iCloud drive options Uh, you can see what is being synced there. That's one place to kind of look Also on that screen where you clicked the options button So this may be the reason that one device is getting more than the other right because if you're not syncing the same subset of iCloud drive Well, then you wouldn't be getting the same amount of data But on that main sort of apple id screen and system preferences at the towards the bottom There is a checkbox for optimize mac storage What this does is intelligently and maybe I should use air quotes, although I've seen it work fairly well intelligently Decides which things to keep on your mac and which things to free up from your mac So on especially on your you know, your your devices with limited storage, whatever those might be for you Checking this box. I turn this on on my laptops because I don't need the entire contents of my iCloud drive on all the time it you know it it I always seem to have what I need it. I think it you know, it looks at what you're using recently and make some decisions on your behalf and You know anytime I travel the things that I want seem to be there. So you know It works for me Maybe it'll work for you If you want to dig deeper, however, there are two tools that will let you see what's going on. You can't You can sort of control things With this and these are from howard oakley over at eclectic light. They are called cirrus and bailiff Cirrus takes control of iCloud as the description says investigates and diagnoses its problems What's cool is you can look at things and choose Whether or not you want to like you can say download requested and it will pull one of them down Now it doesn't keep iCloud from deciding later to change that you're not getting to like really Tell it things but you can tell it things temporarily um And so you know it says it can download and evict items from local storage so that you can manage them properly It provides full details about files and folders held in iCloud It performs a test file upload which can help unstick pending uploads And it provides specialized access to iCloud related log activity So you get quite a bit more control with this than you do with apple's interface um, and then bailiff Also does sort of the same thing But it's a menu bar item where you can do the same thing You just select an item in the finder and then you can either choose to evict it meaning Don't store it on your mac or download it do store it on your mac So these things, you know, they can't change the future, but they can change the presence So if you've got something you know, you want to download download it Uh, if you want something you have something you know, you don't want on your mac evict it, right? and so These are these are handy tools if you are in the scenario where you feel you need more control over iCloud So, uh, we'll put a link to them in the show notes because they're good tools Thoughts from this guys I got nothing I mean howard oakley like he invokes magic with this stuff. It's like yeah, like yeah, wow I've got some work to do now. I can tell you. Yeah You know I I would caution people to use these um in in a in a only for Specific scenarios. This isn't the kind of thing to To to use all the time Actually, I'd be curious if anyone is using this sort of as a As part of their workflow as a part as opposed to part of their troubleshooting flow, right like Uh, because I'm not sure that it's it's really You know apples if you've got that box the optimized mac storage box checked It's gonna it's gonna like make decisions in the future although If you are in a scenario where you don't for example, you don't have it checked right in theory You've got everything downloaded on your mac then If you've got one file that is not updating Well, then being able to evict that one file and sort of force a redownload would be a very handy thing So yeah, I like it. Yeah Yeah Cool Yeah, yeah indeed All right, moving on here. John you want to take us to joel? Yes. Um, Just talk about joel not joel. Yeah, let's talk about things people don't want, Dave Um All right, so joe says like everybody else I get a steady stream of scam calls coming from phone numbers Located all over the country with many imitating the first six numbers of my phone number I've set my phone to ignore callers not in my contact So I only see those calls were received when I look into my recents tab Previously, I religiously add these callers to my blocked callers list and delete the call from my recents tab Blocking the number requires that you press the info button on the number press block this caller and then confirm that I want to block it tedious I recently realized that since the scammers are spoofing the phone numbers that appear on my caller id There's no point in blocking those numbers now. I simply delete them from the recents tab to get rid of the visual clutter I figure that the worst thing that could happen is that the scammer uses the same spoof number twice But since I never hear those calls who cares Uh, the only time I will use block this caller feature is when it's actually somebody who I know who's become persona non grata Whoa, I've had one of those Two of them actually Uh, to the point that I don't want to jump doesn't take my calls anymore Yeah, you're still in my context. Oh, okay Um Yeah, so so he says yeah, there may be a reason to block if it's someone that you don't want to hear from but you could just Leave him from your contacts maybe Maybe that would solve it. Uh, happily this hasn't happened in many years, but imagine there are scenarios where it would be useful and um Yeah, uh, I'm with joe. I I got over blocking numbers because yeah, it was like a Typically moving target. So yeah, I just rely on the same thing and every now and then go through my list Get rid of the ones that are red, which means that I didn't answer and it rolled over um settings phone silence unknown callers uh for me reduce the number of Oh, let me fake the first six of your phone number and you'll link it somebody that you know because it that's never the case yeah And if they and if it is important business generally they will leave a voicemail and you can call them back That's been my philosophy with But I know it's not my colleagues. Um, I typically if you don't identify yourself Or leave a message then it's probably not that important Well, my philosophy is Based on experience. I have I I find that generally speaking answering every phone call is a good thing I mean, I can I can get rid of someone pretty quickly But I've also had many opportunities that In life that would not have happened if I let a phone call go I mean, I don't but that said I don't it's not like I'm answering calls in the midst of doing this show Right, like there are if it's not convenient for me to answer a call then I won't answer a call But if I'm just sitting there and I could and I'm already interrupted by the fact that You know, I have this whole idea about about like focus and spotlighting And if I'm in the middle of something and I'm interrupted It's gonna take me time to get back into it, right? So if the call has already interrupted me, it's like, all right Well, but fine, you know, they didn't know what I was doing. It's not their fault So let me answer the phone and see what it is. And like I said, there have been lots of opportunities And maybe it I'm trying to think there have been like actually one fairly significant business event Slash opportunity happened because I answered a call But also, you know with my my musical life my musical business When the phone rings or a text comes in about, you know, are you available for this gig? A lot of times man, like if you don't answer right away That opportunity has passed, right? Someone's like for example, I played last night the night before At 10 p.m. I did not I thought I was going to be on the couch on Thursday night, which was fine And then at like 10 30 someone from a club that I know Texted me and he's like I'm in a bind I you know Like my act for tomorrow night canceled or whatever Can you do it? And it was like, all right, let me text the other guys and they answered two and One of the two of them was able to do it. So we did a duo and it was a blast But uh, nice. Yeah, you know, but like that's why it's like in today's world I think you if you want to participate in today's world I think you've got to be kind of you know on top of things and so I just answer my phone It's just not a big deal. Yeah, I will say that on occasion when I've been bored. I've been known to answer And engage yeah, and I think my record is almost 51 minutes Oh man, that's not oh, let me get my credit card. You know, hey dude, if you want to keep going I'm wasting your time. You're not calling other people while you're trying to get a credit card number for me I'm looking for my credit card. I recommend and I don't think the guy produces content anymore But there's a guy that called himself the touch tone terrorist. I think you would love this guy Now I get to talk about one of my favorite podcasts and one of my favorite people We've mentioned allison charitans. No silicast podcast pretty much every time she writes into the show And she contributes a lot to the mac geek dev community here The no silicast is an unusual show in that you can consume it as a podcast or as a separate detailed blog post Whether it's a product review tiny tips a rant about things that don't work or a tutorial on how to do a nuke and pave with diagrams You get it all in both forms if you listen to the podcast You always have the blog post for links and refreshers on what she's explained This solo show has been running for over 17 years without missing a single weekly episode She's been doing this longer than us and I say solo show But a huge part of the no silicast is that every other week Bart Buschatz and allison do a segment called security bits Where bart explains the latest security news and tells us whether to light our hair on fire about it or not Allison has an enthusiastic community on slack and does a live show every sunday night at 5 p.m Pacific where the no silicast aways gather around to listen and chat with each other while she creates the show Look for the no silicast in your podcatcher of choice and read all the content at pod feet dot com While you're there check out our other podcasts like programming by stealth also with bart Buschatz Chit chat across the pond light and taming the terminal and our thanks to allison for well for for all of her Help with mac geek gab and everything over the years All right, I know we're running longer than normal and we started later than normal But if you guys have a couple extra minutes, I would love to share some cool stuffs found if that works All right, cool. Let's see how uh, let's see how far we can get how quickly we can do this john You want to start us with dave mark? Yeah, another another twitter jam um I've been seeing in various forms of media people are saying How do I know all the features in ios 16? Where is it? Is it on the phone somewhere? Actually sometimes i'll get random tips offering of tips So yes, and I think But you know that that's kind of touch and go I think sure what if there was a manual dave Which you could read and guess what there is So at least for ios 16 you can go to apple's books application And search for ios 16 or we're going to give a direct link to it as well Yeah So if you want to find out all the and actually I should probably read it because there's probably a lot of features I know nothing about It's true, right? Like yeah, there's the yeah fair. Yeah. Yeah all right, uh man Mike sent in this cool stuff found he says it is a very geeky but very useful command line cool stuff found called Topgrade and you install it with homebrew if you want or any other way, but it's just brew install topgrade It's in the show notes already. You don't need to worry about it Mike continues It is essentially an updater for a lot of the command line tools that we often use including homebrew itself Homebrew casks ruby gems yarn node. Oh my zsh mac app store mac system upgrades Pip antigen antibody and countless others that I do not use he says but someone else might I run it every one to two weeks and I'm sure there's a way to automate this But I just haven't delved into that rabbit hole yet. It has only one command top grade That's all you do once it's installed you type it sit back relax and let it do its thing And when it's done all of your tools have been updated to the latest stable versions Yeah, I ran it and immediately like it's it's super meta to install a tool like this with homebrew And then have it update homebrew itself like there's this this whole like I'd love it And then it upgraded oh my zsh and then for me ruby it upgraded my tldr database Which is another great command brew install tldr pip 3 like he said all that good stuff And it it and it and my macOS system I had not updated to the latest monorail on whatever machine I was on and so it was like yeah Go get this one too. So thank you for that mike. I know it's geeky, but it is good All right, you want to take us to cure it john? I feel like we've got time for one or two more here Yeah, so great. Let's go here. So carrot says There was a discussion in 946 about mail clients. I want to mention Mime stream it is still in beta, but it works great. It is what mail plane was but is no longer available It is free. Please read uh, and jason snel even wrote an article about it So I guess we can link to that um, it seems to be A g I read quickly and it looks to be a gmail only client. Yeah, it could be wrong because I haven't okay No, I think that's right I think that's what the the previous one but mail mail plane or something was gmail only Yeah, it it essentially if I haven't used mime stream But mail plane if I'm remembering correctly was just essentially a web view onto gmail that allowed you to use keyboard commands in meaningful ways is Kind of how that I don't know that that was that was my memory of it. So yeah All right one last one right we can we can do one more. Don't you think okay one more great Greg shares with us. We were talking in episode 946 about Permissions and things like that and he said that uh, john from st. Clair software sent him an article about how to reset privacy permissions In mac os monoray. This is something that has not really been doable at least not in an apple way for many os versions they took it out of disc first aid but there is a It's a whole article about how it works and then the commands to do it and the it's The beginning of the article is sort of the complex part about the behind the scenes and then towards the end are the Specifics for just using it's a command called tcc util to reset Permissions in a variety ways and you can issue if you want to reset all the permissions for all the apps You would use sudo tcc util reset all all the commands are in the article We will link to it so that you can read and uh and all that stuff. So Fascinating. I love it I love it Anything else or uh, shall we let the band keep coming in? Here comes the band. Here comes the band tcc util. That reminds me that this kind of deep challenge. I don't know Dr. Util my son has a 10 year old macbook pro and he can't get a disc out I've looked at an article. So here are the five things to do including going into assist single user mode And using dr. Util to get that thing to eject it. It's not coming out. I'm for him I have to take your the airplane thing from have to take the macbook apart Don't take your planes on my mind brother. Don't take the airplane apart piece Huh, okay, so ejecting a disc from a what what model machines pro 10 year old macbook pro There used to be it's a it's a we're talking about a cd, right? Yes. Yes, okay There used to be like a tiny little Like you you could put a pinhole on one side or the other of that drive So like shine a light in there. You might have to like Peak the the like the the little fuzzies apart or whatever But uh, you know, like yeah, like there might be a physical eject Switch in there. So yeah, I'll take a look at floppy drives had the same thing and typically it would uh It would be shaped uh About the same as a paper clip. So stuff a paper clip in there and you probably engage a mechanical eject mechanism Awesome. I'll look for it. Cool All right, that's it. That's what we got if you want if you if you haven't had enough of that guy Piley peat has his own show. So there I was and so there I was dot us Are bend with I'm sorry because let me quickly tease it if this isn't for this isn't just for pilots Our next show next week is if anybody's been in the military or knows anybody that's been in the military We have a man who did eight years as a drill instructor out of his 20 year career And fig and I could hardly bullet breathe. We were laughing so hard at the stores This man had to tell so if you know anybody even that's been in the military This this man was a drill instructor and Oh my god, is he funny and I put a glossary up for all the terms that we use that you don't understand We've put a glossary. Oh, amazing super smart. Yes. Yeah, uh, don't see us and thank you everybody our listenership is growing Thank you amazing Let's see. So who else are we thanking? Oh, yeah, no, we were cash fly, right? Who provides all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you it also gets So there I was from from them to you. That's right And mac geek ab merch is available at mac geek ab dot com slash merch Additionally, we would love your reviews. So this week that is my ask go to mac geek ab dot com slash reviews That's the closest we can get you from there You just got to click a couple more times and then you'll see it right there in apple podcast so that you can leave us a review Thank you so much everybody. We are We know how fortunate we are to get to do this show And we're thankful for your For the fact that you listen the fact that you send all this stuff in we love it Can't wait to do it again next week We're happy to Make sure to check out our sponsors as we mentioned throughout the episode collide com slash mgg upside with code mac geek ab and coda dot i o slash mgg john What do you have to share my friend? All I can say davis we made it to the end and you know what that means that means that we didn't get caught