All right, it's time for MackieGab and listenerBarry brings us our cool stuff found of the week. And what is that you ask? If you've been doing the internet for a while, you'll know what that is. But if you want to learn details about what those noises are, then Barry sent us this article that visually explains it and tells you what all those weird sounds mean. So if you want to learn what it was like for doing the internet back in our day, BBS day, then check out this article. And we're going to get more cool stuff found like this. Plus your questions answered today on MackieGab 977 for Monday, April 17th, 2023. Thanks, folks, and welcome to MackieGab, the show where you send in your cool stuff found like that. We share it. You send in your quick tips. We sometimes share those, although I don't think we have any in the agenda today because we've got so much cool stuff found. You also send in your questions and we try to answer those. Sometimes we even have questions of our own. We put it all together into an agenda, the goal being that every single one of us, even those of us hosts here, every one of us, perhaps especially those of us hosts here, learn at least five new things every single week when we get together. Sponsors for this episode include Notion.com slash MackieGab. That's where you can go to Try Notion AI for free. Very cool thing. Also, BB Edit from Barebone Software. My favorite way to edit text. It's an app that's always open. We'll talk more in-depth about each of those a little bit later here in the show. For now, here in Balmy, Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in equally Balmy, Fairfield, Connecticut, this is John F. Brunt. And here in Lee, New Hampshire, where everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. It's pilot Pete. Yeah, we got to start doing something about the weather, Pete. That's right. Bye, Golly. You know what? Maybe we can do that at our Hangout, which is coming up on Sunday, April 23rd at 4 p.m. Eastern time. There's been some discussion in our Discord channel about what to discuss at this Hangout. And I think what we're going to do is share our and collaborate on our various use cases and failures and successes using all the various AI engines that are out there, because I think that's a great collaborative conversation to have in a group setting where it's just sort of a hangout, show up with your favorite beverage, just hang with us for an hour or so. All the details are on the calendar at macgeekup.com. They're also in our Discord channel. I'll put a link to that right here in the show notes. We can go to macgeekup.com. That'll get you started as well. And that's where the password for the Zoom meeting will be, because I can't put that out on social media. We learned that the hard way. We get lots of special friends coming in. He had lots. My favorite one, and I use the term favorite very loosely here, but like my favorite from a I want to cause problems standpoint is the people that would show up before I had the security settings locked down the right way. Obviously they taught me. So we got caught. We learned. We moved on tuition. But what they would do is they would log in and change their name to the name of someone that's currently there.  They do a bad thing. Yeah. They do a bad thing. And then they would quickly change their name. So that part's not cool. But then they would quickly change their name to someone else so that we would then go and ban a legitimate member of the chat because we thought that suddenly somebody that we'd known for a decade kind of went off the deep end and was like, yeah, this is super inappropriate to do here. So we got to put you knock it off. Exactly. I didn't want to say anything. But but like I like so I respect the like the thinking behind that the ingenuity. Yeah. Like we like to use our powers for good for the most part and not just like script kiddies and doing the thing that I'm sure they didn't come up with that. Like someone came up with that. I'm sure whoever was in our chat doing it was just doing it because they read about it somewhere else. So they heard about it on a podcast like like this one. Maybe we can share better things.  I really did. You know, I'm going to jump us back into cool stuff found. Listener Gary had sent in actually a lot of you have sent this in the the new Steve Jobs book make something wonderful. It's available as an ebook on Apple books. You can also download it. We'll put links in the show notes for all of it. But it what it is is it's a collection of Steve things that Steve said or wrote throughout his life. And like some of this stuff is just absolutely fantastic.  Obviously his his his widow and just some some fantastic stuff. So like it one of the things that I read in there this morning was how he when he was in school he and his like friend in school would would do things like that. But they actually came up with it. They there were like there was a bike rack of a hundred different bicycles, you know, like it's this elementary school or whatever the kids would ride their bikes to school one by one. He and his friend went through and traded a bike lock combinations with all the other people that locked their bikes up. Right.  And so they did make that they were honest about it. But people didn't know that these two guys, Steve and his friend were collecting everyone's bike lock combination combinations. And once they had everyone's they went down and changed locks for everyone's bikes because they had all the combinations. And it took Pete. He said people were there till like 10 p.m. Trying to like unravel this mess that they had created the principle then split the two of them into different classes going forward. But that reminds me of a famous boot camp story, Dave. Oh, is it one that we can share? Yeah, absolutely. So yeah. But yeah, so what the what the DIs would do is they'd go through and they would find the guys would be in a hurry, right?  And so the DIs would then go through and find 10 or 12 unlocked padlocks.  And then when the troops came back from Chow, they'd go, you have two minutes to get your lock undone or we're going to PT you.  Then they'd PT him again. So it was a way to PT the guys for, you know, three, four hours. PT. What is this? I'm sorry, physical training. Push physical training. Push lots, bends and thrusts. Basically run you into the dirt. See, I learned a new thing, right? I now know that PT is physical training. There you go. There you go. Have you read any of Make Something Wonderful, John? No. OK. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I haven't yet either, but it looks really good. Yeah, I woke up super early this morning. I don't know why.  Like, I don't, I just don't want to be awake yet. Like, you know, it's like, it's just how it was. Like woke up at like quarter to seven, which for me is, is, you know, that's still the middle of the night. But audio book, that's when I get a lot of my reading done. I mean, the only way you would want to hear this is if Steve was reading it. And unfortunately, that's not the case. However, there is that AI engine that people have used to make Steve say things like it. It's, it's, it's, I don't think it's the engine that I've seen was just taking like sort of samples and stitching them together. But there are AI engines out there that, that will learn the inflections of voice and then just, you know, push them out. So, again. I was going to say, there's a tourist one. And I don't know. Now I don't remember which one it was. So I'll have to go look for it. But it would learn your own voice so that you could go through with your podcast and go, oh, the sound screwed up there. So I want to go back and have it. And you type out what you want it to say and throw it in there. And it would put it right in. You didn't have to say it or re-record it or anything. Yeah. Yeah. Veritone, who does a lot of things, one of which is they're a podcast ad like buying agency, but they, you know, they've done tons and tons of things. They demoed, last year they demoed for me an engine. I can't remember the name of it. It begins with an M that would do, like they had some stock voices in it. Anyway, the name's on the tip of my tongue. But it had some stock voices in it. And, but they also for like five grand or something would sample your voice so that you could do it.  That way it's you doing it. But all you got to do is type out the script and then if you've got the same sponsor on for four shows and you're supposed to create a new script for each show, well, you don't have to go and re-record and do it. You just it flawlessly reads it. It doesn't mispronounce. Correct. There's no editing to do. Yes. Right. Yeah. Cause, cause that's how I do. I pre-record. It's actually me. It's not Faritone's engine, but I pre-record all the ads. Obviously they're, they're built to sound like they're just in the flow of the show. And we do in fact play them into the flow of the show, but I pre-record them so that I don't screw them up. And so I don't stumble over, all over myself just like I did there. Right. There's not, there's no ums and odds. Now I, when I record them, there's plenty of that in there. I chop that out so that the ad reads are tight. And, and it really, so it gives me the opportunity to sit and read the, like the talking points, the background information before I do the read, doing that live in the middle of a show while we're reading your questions and all that. I don't have 30 to 45 seconds of silence to read the thing. Like, okay, now I know what I want to say and then say it, that would be super awkward trying to do that in the show. So anyway, yeah, yeah, it's, it's fascinating tech. So we'll talk about all kinds of stuff like this on our Hangout on Sunday the 23rd. So I think it is the 23rd. I think that's the right date, but it's whatever the Sunday is after the 17th. So would that be the 23rd? Yeah, it would be. It's 23. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. That's how I did the same math. Seven to six and seven. Yeah. All right. Moving on. More cool stuff found. We swear every one of them is not going to take seven minutes. GI Touch. GI Touch? Something like that. Jam Cycler in our Discord said, you recently mentioned Smart Scroll and that reminded me of GI Touch, which adds lots of extra gestures to the trackpad and Magic Mouse. And you get it at GitHub. We'll put a link in the show notes. There is a website for it, but the version on the website for GI Touch is older than the current version, which is available on GitHub. So we'll make sure. But he said it's a multi-touch extension essentially for the Magic Mouse Magic trackpad. And if your MacBook has a trackpad on it, that's also the same kind of thing. So thanks for sharing that with us. Appreciate it. Thanks. You got stuff? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Pete, you got one, don't you? I do. You know, it's often been said that England and the United States are two countries separated by a common language. And the folks at Time Kettle have actually brought that technology to the rest of the world. So I have, I'm holding up on the video and it's difficult to see. They're about the size of the AirPods Pro case. They're little ear buds that are translators. They support up to 40 different languages. And it comes with an iOS app or an Android app, depending on your system. And of course, all of our folks are iOS users. We know. But believe it or not, there's some listeners who use it. There are. We'll educate them and get their minds right offensively. I'm sorry, just being pejorative because I can. So anyway, you put these earbuds in and there's several different modes. You can put both of them in and put your phone into the listen mode. And I can watch movies in a foreign language or listen to a brief or something along those lines. It's virtually instantaneous. It did maybe a second behind, but it's close enough to actually get it. I watched some like it hot in Spanish the other day just to see how it would do. And it did really fantastically. Really? Yeah. Really? Like it was fast enough that it wasn't distracting? It was within, yes. It was within a second. I mean, a little distracting, but if you want to see it and what's going on, it was close enough that it was good. The other option that you can do is you can put one bud in your ear and hand one to somebody else and they put it in their ear.  And then it translates virtually and instantaneously into their ear. Then they tap their ear and speak in their native language and it translates back to you. That's really cool. So you can share that way. And then the other option is that you can wear one or both and then put it in into a speaker mode so that you tap your your bud and speak in English and then whichever language you have set up to go into, it translates it both in writing and then comes out the speaker of your phone in their language so they can hear and read it both and then you just tap the phone and they speak in their language and it comes back to you in English. Assuming that's your language. It comes back to you in English. It supports up to 40 different languages and the cool thing is you can say, hey, I want Chinese to German. I want Spanish to Italian. Whatever.  But the beautiful thing about that is is you no longer need internet connectivity. So you don't have to use your data when traveling in China and Korea and Japan and Europe to get your translations done. So how does this compare? Because when I was in Italy most recently, I was using Apple Translate and Google Translate and they do have like a conversation mode in the app where you can put the phone down between you and it'll listen and sort of do some version of this. Have you spent enough time with either of those things to compare or contrast it to this? I used the Google one in the past and I found it to be close but not quite as efficient. These are really fast and it uses some AI engine and I don't know what it is which AI engine it uses but it does use an AI engine to translate and I gotta tell you I really love these things. They're not cheap they're $350 but boy if you do any amount of international travel and see if I can get it without a reflection there. It looks like a smaller version of an AirPods Pro case. Exactly. Perfectly portable. They are and the charge lasts a really long time I don't have an exact before you but the fact is they charge well they go back in the case they charge back up again so you've got days and days before you have to recharge. Amazing. If you do any amount of international travel these things are super handy and what I just found out in reading about I haven't tried yet but what will work is Bluetooth earphones to listen to music and podcasts and that sort of thing as well which I had not tried with. I assumed that they were just for translation you can take them out and use them as your earphones. Time Kettle's name of the company sorry about the tick there Time Kettle and these are the WT2 Edge keep calling them AirPods the WT2 Edge Translators Translator earbuds. Thanks man. Thanks to the folks at Time Kettle for giving me this set to work with. If you want them back you've got to find me. The good news is it doesn't matter what language they talk in they know you can understand them Pete. That's right. If they want them back I'll give them back to them but not gladly. There you go. Good product. I think you had me set up for a second one there too. We'll do that later. When I was talking about Ben's J.I.Touch I mentioned Smart Scroll and that was because Ben had seen it mentioned in the Discord chat but indeed listener Sarab mentioned a utility called Smart Scroll that lets you customize a bunch of scrolling behavior most notably so you can hold down a modifier key while scrolling on your Mac to scroll much faster. He says this is a game changer for me since I spend a lot of time scrolling through long documents and long websites. Thank you for that. Of course there's links to all of the cool stuff found in the show notes. Thanks for that Sarab. John you got another one for us with listener John? Yeah. Listener John says this afternoon I got a bundle hunt ad. Never heard of bundle hunt. One of the items in the bundle is do your clone for Mac. It is an app that clones and makes bootable an external drive for the Mac. Just like five years ago. It works perfectly. It cloned by OS and all my apps data everything and it's fully bootable in Mac Ventura 13.3. Wow. It will also clone drives create disk images and has a disk tool. It is good. That's interesting. I'm guessing that the way they would do it is you would have to install Ventura Clean and then clone one drive over to the data volume of the new install. That's the process by which we can clone a drive these days. I don't think there's any way to clone the system volume. You have to create that fresh from the installer. Again, a utility that lets you do this that automates this process for us that might be something I'll talk in a little while about this but that might be something I'm wondering why would they do this? Certainly Apple's support calls have gone up since they got rid of the ability to make a bootable clone. I don't think so. No. I was going to ask how many people would make bootable clones. Our group here lots of hands in the air. I get it like same. I absolutely would but in general I think it's a thing. Fair enough. My wife would never do it. She just turns it on and runs it and wouldn't even back up her computer if I didn't do it for her. That's where I was going to go with this is time machine is still in Ventura but it's buried. It doesn't get its own preference pane anymore. It's buried inside of general or something which is like guys but my guess is based on Apple's metrics that you know that's how it's going to be. Hi, Claude.  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Notion AI is designed to help you with your work right in the place where you're doing your work and that means it gets to leverage all of the work that you do to make the content fit. It's amazing. For a limited time, you can try Notion AI for free when you go to Notion.com slash Mac GeekGab that's all lowercase letters Notion.com slash Mac GeekGab to try out the incredible power of Notion AI today and when you use our link you're supporting our show, right? This is a limited time offer. Try Notion AI for free right now at Notion.com slash Mac GeekGab and our thanks to Notion for sponsoring this episode. Next up is BB Edit from Barebones. I love BB Edit. It's open right now on my Mac. It's actually part of my Start My Days script that automatically launches the apps that I need and BB Edit is always one of them because it does so much. I know it's crazy to say that I'm excited about a tool that manages text, especially in a world where for decades everything's a graphic but that's not really true, right? Those graphics happen because there's text underneath. All our preference pains and all that stuff are really ways of manipulating text files and sometimes you just got to get into those text files more times than not. In fact, we're always talking about using text to troubleshoot right here on the show and what better way to do that than with BB Edit when you've got the ability to really see a text file for what it is life gets so much better and there's all kinds of things we can do with text, not just troubleshooting, right? If you're a programmer, you're going to be using some sort of text editor. Well, BB Edit makes it so easy to edit code because it shows you your code and highlights things in a way on the screen that really makes it easier for me to see like where I am in a function or what is a variable versus what's a function and it's subtle. But man, trust me, it makes a difference. Plus, if I need to count the words in a document or compare two documents, BB Edit's right there for me. You've got to go check it out. Go to barebones.com they've got a generous eval model. You get 30 days of full function to try out the app. Once you're finished with the eval, then you decide to buy or you can maybe even continue using the free features, but try it out that way you'll know. Go to barebones.com and our thanks to Barebones and BB Edit for sponsoring this episode. And while we're here, listen, another show for you, right? From Max iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches and Apple TV to the ins and outs of Apple shaking things up in tech, you name it. The Mac Break Weekly podcast covers it. Join Leo Laporte with Jason Snell, Andy Inoco and Alex Lindsey on the Mac Break Weekly podcast. Sometimes I'm even on there. They dive into new products, future innovations and everything Apple related. Get a new episode of Mac Break Weekly every Tuesday by subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocketcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. And our thanks to Leo and the team for doing this swap with us. All right. So, John, you were talking about cloning our Macs. I wish that I had kept a clone of my Monterey Mac around. I've made no secret of the audio issues that I have discovered in Ventura on this show because it's usually while recording this show that they present themselves. The issues that I've seen are twofold. The main one is that when using an aggregate audio device anytime a new audio, quote-unquote, I'll call it a connection, but anytime a new app opens up a connection to core audio to play audio or to get ready to play audio there is a pause and the pause it stops everything and then the CPU spikes for like I don't know, anywhere between one and three seconds while core audio sort of like figures itself out again and then everything's fine. Obviously, that's really bad when you're doing a podcast. This only seems to only happen when using aggregate audio devices. Aggregates are, it's an Apple function it's not some third party thing where you can take multiple audio devices and sort of merge them together aggregate them together as one. And the reason you need to do this is because Apple's logic app, like many other audio apps, will only see one input audio device and one output audio device. So if you have multiple devices that logic needs to see, then you have to aggregate them. And in fact, that's Apple's instruction. It's like, yeah, don't be, just aggregate them. Well, something changed when I upgraded to Ventura and that symptom started happening. The other symptom is that logic is less stable. And so I have to increase the sample buffer from 128 to 256 to get logic to be stable, but that doesn't change this issue. And I bumped the sample buffer all the way up and it still doesn't change this issue. They're sort of related but separate. And so last Friday guys, I did what this is one of those do as I say not as I do scenarios. I rolled my Mac back from Ventura to Monterey and that's what I'm running on right now. So like we're in good shape here at least so far. I've recorded actually quite a few podcasts since doing this and it's been fine. But you're not supposed to do that, right? Like it's not going to let you do that. If you point Migration Assistant at a if you point Monterey's Migration Assistant at a Ventura volume it'll say I don't understand that volume. That's too new for me which is exactly what it should say. I didn't want to go through the trouble of like setting up an entirely new system just to confirm that Monterey was going to solve my problem. So I tried something and I made a clone of my data volume, right? Like with Carbon Copy Cloner from Ventura and tried pointing a Monterey Migration Assistant at it and it was like, no. I was like, yeah, I know. Okay, let's try though. What happens if I tell Monterey to install onto that volume, right? And no, it wouldn't do that. So then I installed Monterey and then I, oh maybe, yeah, it failed. But it did install it. Like it installed Monterey onto the system volume of that Ventura data clone volume because it didn't have a Ventura system volume because we can't do that unless we use Do Your Clone, right? But I used Carbon Copy Cloner which doesn't do that. So I had this clone of my Ventura data volume and no accompanying system volume because that's how those clones work. And so I created one with the Monterey installer and it started to reboot. I'm like, oh, I did it. I'm going to make it work. It's going to be fine. No. No, it crashed on Reboot every time and I tried like Safe Mode and Verbose Mode and yada, yada, yada. It was like super not happy for obvious reasons. So I'm like, okay, fine. I'll get a fresh volume. So I grabbed another drive, plugged it in. I did a fresh install and then Migration Assistant came up and it was like, where do you want to pull data from? And I'm like, well, I want to pull it from my Ventura volume and I was like, no, you can't do that. And then I pointed it at this Frankenstein that I had created that failed at booting and it was like, yes I can migrate from that because I see a Ventura system over there. It wasn't looking any deeper than that. That was enough to make it happily migrate the data volume. Hold on. I'm sorry. I've got to break in. Absolutely. I was hoping you would. Yeah. So you said I see a Ventura system. You meant to say I see a Monterey system over there? It sees a Monterey system but there is a Ventura data volume, right? Right. But because Monterey's Migration Assistant saw the failed installation of another Monterey associated with that data volume, I mean I have sandwiched these things together then that was the only test it needed to do. It didn't actually look at the data volume. It just looked at the system volume and said Monterey is there. I'm good to go. Gotcha. Okay. Because you said I see a Ventura system. Thank you for correcting me. Good. All right. Because I was following you right until you said that. Thank you. So I let it do it and it was like, okay this is going to take a couple hours or whatever and the whole time I'm thinking, well, what's going to happen, right? It booted up. It was fine. Now, wait not quite this is like, it's not great it's it's like there are things that I there were things that I knew would be broken photos I knew would be broken because like that app updates its library with Ventura and I now have a Ventura photos library Monterey's photos ain't going to read that and it confirmed for me it ain't going to read that, right? So I had to create a new photos that's fine I use iCloud photos I don't really need photos on this machine for this purpose anyway so no big deal but I let it create a new photos library. I also knew music would have the same exact issue for the same reasons but similarly I use iCloud music so no big deal let it create a new music library it did that no problem great I also knew mail was going to be a problem but mail doesn't have the same sort of here's an easy way to start over with your existing accounts functionality like photos and music do because I don't know why because but they just it doesn't like they don't expect you to be in this scenario understandably like I get it so mail took a little bit of and when I say a little bit I mean a couple of days of like jerking around with it deleting because I had to delete like the v10 folders in the home mail library but then there were other things there's something in home library containers that like again this is this is do as I say which is don't do this not as I do but it it was usable and even without mail photos music working I was still able to do a test the other thing that still doesn't work and I'm not sure I'm going to be able to fix it is iCloud Drive will not sync like that there's there's something and I just don't know where to look to blow a good thing though right well you don't want bad data going they don't know I mean it's just iCloud Drive it's just documents and stuff like that would be fine and I would like settings and stuff to sync around so like this is a non optimal scenario for the long term that I'm in but even with all of that before I ever tried getting photos happy mail happy music happy any of that the first thing I did was launch up the podcasting setup and see if the problem still exists because if it does then I know that it's something else right because I literally have the same data volume so it's the best way to test this despite being an awful thing to actually try to live with and the problem was instantly gone instantly so I know that the problem is with Ventura now I have had a support ticket open with Apple for about three months maybe four and they replied once and were like hey do some of these sample tests or whatever so we can see what's going on this doesn't make any sense so I did that and then nothing also while I was doing this on Friday I posted about it and it turns out when you have some friends who are Apple engineers who follow you on social media and you start saying things like Ventura broke core audio actually I was more specific about it Ventura broke aggregate devices in core audio they take that to heart and so I started hearing again from Apple support which is great like this is good and they told me that a delay of between 0.2 and 0.5 seconds when a new audio device is added or a new audio connection is opened is normal I'm like oh oh or expected like okay and then they wanted to know did you upgrade it from Monterey to Ventura because obviously it could have been something else what version of logic are you using it's got to be something else no guys I literally rolled that data volume back to Monterey so nothing is different on one OS it behaves fine on the new OS it's terrible and so we'll see what they say but I don't have a lot of hope that this is going to be fixed it's fascinating that it breaks it like that you would think that and the question of course and I don't know the answer to this is why like what changes did they make to core audio to make it better that caused this side effect right because I can't imagine that they they sat down and said is there a way we can cause a delay like I know they wouldn't do that and it's got a larger buffer and they told me what it's doing which is exactly what you can see it doing it's that any time something changes with in terms of what's touching the audio system core audio essentially reboots itself is what's happening and you can see it happening that's why the sound stops that makes perfect sense but why now is it doing that whereas previously it was never doing that what's the good reason for that and we'll see if they have an answer but I was proud that I was able to do this again don't recommend it yeah if you have any thoughts feedback at macgeekab.com if you want to tell me I'm crazy for doing that feedback at macgeekab.com so tell Dave he's crazy at feedback at macgeekab.com did I hear you right did you say feedback at macgeekab.com? that's what I said subject Dave's crazy Dave's crazy yep you can tell us on our discord channel at macgeekab.com everything's monitored these days back to cool stuff found do you guys have any other than telling me I'm crazy do you have any thoughts about this because I would have done it differently if I was at Apple yeah well again I choose to act in a way that's irrational like so the question is and I may never get an answer to this by the way but the question is why why is this changed me maybe there's a good reason for it maybe there's a world where I can rethink my audio setup I think it would be find a way to stop using aggregate devices but I don't know that that's going to be possible that would be kind of the trick you know I don't know so I did find some cool stuff found though so when we're here doing cool stuff found the folks at 12 South have long had the Airfly which is their adapter that you plug built for those scenarios where you want to use your bluetooth headphones with the airplane audio like if there's a screen on the plane that plays movies or whatever you want to use your bluetooth headphones with those the only thing that the airplane has is a line out jack and so the Airfly was built to solve that problem you plug it in it broadcast bluetooth you connect well now they have the new Airfly SE which is a little smaller and only 35 bucks now it's got a volume control with a mute on it got a little battery life indicator it's got 20 hours of battery life so if you're looking for one of these things 35 bucks or the Airfly SE from 12 South we'll put a link in the show notes it's good stuff nice you got one for us Pete? I do so listener John writes in and he said because of some of the applications I use I often switch back and forth between Mac and Windows Windows makes it easy to right click anywhere create a quick text file not so with a Mac unless you have found the and here's what I upset Dave with new file menu app to be more descriptive sorry Dave that's the name of it new file menu app I'm always I'm always asking these guys when we're building the agenda like when you put something in the agenda especially a cool stuff found like the name is the next thing because that's what y'all when you look in the thing are used to seeing and we link to that and there's a convention here we'd like to be consistent and so when I saw Pete said cool stuff down new file menu app like friggin awesome Pete but what's the name that's right there I didn't say that out loud because you are already put the name in right so it is new file menu app once installed right click will allow the creation of many different file types and you can sort through your favorites to the top of the list the program was updated seven months ago and is working with Ventura to 13.2.1 which is now 13.3.1 it works for me there I tried Automator JavaScript approach and an Apple scripts approach both required a hot key sequence to launch instead of a right click so for $1.99 on the app store I'm staying with the new file menu app there is a free version and I've installed that just to play with it you can only select one file type which is a .txt but yeah so anywhere just right click and you can create a new file right here right now and I'm gonna pull down the fact you know being a cheap airline I have to save that $1.99 for something more important right so now I'm going to download the $1.99 version and it looks like it's really handy to be able to create any new a new file from anywhere yeah why has it taken 18 years of doing almost 18 years of doing this show for this to come up because like especially when we started we had a lot of switchers listening right people that were windows folks became got a Mac for one reason or another and and like this was a topic on the show all the time was how to I know how to do this on windows how do I do this on the Mac help me and then that's you know part of where a lot of you as our audience members came from one of mine was renamed you cover and you could not rename more than one file at a time and so I created an automator script to do that and now it's in finder and now it's in finder yeah I like but I'm shocked that we like as soon as you're mentioning this I'm like yes I've done this on windows why have I never even thought to do it on the Mac and why doesn't why why did a third party need to create this why didn't Apple do it that's fascinating yeah I can charge yeah but like yeah yeah yeah it is basic functionality I wonder man Apple but Apple has moved to this whole app first paradigm right where you you don't just start with where you're going to store the file which is what this does right you start with what am I going to use to create the file and then you know I save it to wherever I want to store it so I just wondering is there any kind of a P list or any terminal come in way to make this work but no because you'd need to literally add it to the contextual menu in the finder which which can be done programmatically and that's exactly what they've done here what they've done yeah yeah so you need to go into system settings and enable extensions for that once you download the app but that's it takes you right to it you click on it hey yeah open it for me and it takes you right to where you need to go um mark m I believe it's mark m yep in the discord chat while we're recording here says there is one for 99 cents Pete called right click app so we'll put a link to that in the show notes too uh because he says it does it says right click that their description is right click is the best extension for the finder context menu it allows you to create new files quickly and easily you just right click in any finder window to create a new file yeah there you go so mark just save me a buck drinks on me boys yeah yeah right there you go all all the drinks yeah yeah save me a dollar yeah javel what's up next John uh we got something from Barry so if you want a blast from the past another blast from the past it wasn't it a listener Barry who started us with the uh modem sounds for this episode uh yes yes yeah fascinating double blasts but basically Barry tells us about something called muffin term which I guess is a terminal emulator and you can then use it to connect to old school BBS and we have an article that tells you how to find out about those but um like wait how is it connecting though I mean it's not dialing up like where where do these BBS exist it's gotta be an AI uh I think it's doing uh tell okay but like how do you find these bulletin boards over tell that like do they I'm assuming they exist so the article that we're pointing to connect to old school BBS's um explains how to find BBS's got it okay got it got it okay so we got a link in the show notes to connect to them but um got it but yeah fun yeah yeah I mean you and I you and I were like you know the kingpins in our area with our BBS's back in the day yeah yeah yeah like you're right these are these are people it like muffin term will let you use telnet I wonder if muffin term includes telnet in it because unless you have installed it with homebrew telnet does not exist on uh on ventura or monterey I believe I might have gone away even older you know longer ago than that so like I wonder if when you install muffin term does it bring along its own sort of bundled telnet thing because telnet's super insecure in that it is all plain text right so I think that's where it got deprecated from Apple's default UNIX core was because of that but you can reinstall it with homebrew if you want so yeah no that's funny because yeah at least on this machine I can run telnet you probably installed it with homebrew probably yeah I mean I use telnet all the time not to connect to telnet servers because I don't know of any although this article has some so maybe I will but uh I use it to test things like if I need to see does a web server answer on port 80 or does an SSH server answer on port 22 I'll type in telnet space server IP address space 80 and then it just connects now there's you know unless you speak HTTP you're not gonna do a whole lot but it is a nice way to see does that server answer on that port at least that's my old school way of thinking does my server answer on that port maybe maybe one of you will tell us a better way to do that with macOS built-in tools alright speaking of keeping things up to date macupdater3 is now out and it adds a few new features one of them I can't imagine ever using but they tell us people asked for so they put it in one is zero click scheduled fully automatic updates of all of your stuff I don't I don't want to do that on my mac I want to know when I'm updating something thankfully macupdater will can be configured and I believe by default is configured to save the old versions of things so if you have an update that fails you have a simpler path or a path to rolling back but the other thing it adds is you can install older versions with little drop down menu in there which is kind of cool if only you could do that with say an operating system if only you could do that with an operating system they do have an Apple silicon migration assistant to help people move to new max and make sure you're downloading the Apple silicon versions of your apps if you've got you know intel versions there it does some of that so yeah it's yep so macupdater is like to me an indispensable app it makes life so much easier because the one problem it solves for me because what I do is I run it occasionally probably obsessively you know I probably run it a couple times a week which is more than I need to but it goes in looks and finds all of the updates for the apps that you have installed and then you can tell it to go install them and it does which is amazing it's great where that's really handy is when I go to launch an app that I don't launch all that frequently and I go to launch it because I need to use it and it says oh hey I'm old you should update me it's like yeah but I want to just use you right now so update later and a lot of apps don't have the update later functionality right there so macupdater keeps me from running into that scenario which is great thanks yeah I like it it's a key little app alright where are we here oh I'll share one more cool stuff found here just because the timing Earth Day is later this week and anchor has their bio-based cables in honor of Earth Day well I mean really they're just bio-based cables you could use them at any time but but they they are made with things like corn plant-based materials sugarcane and 40% bio-based materials are used in the outer sheath so you can go check those out at anchor we love the stuff anchor makes so when I see new stuff from anchor I'm always kind of eager to see what they've done they're one of those companies that has yet to do wrong by me in terms of creating a device that's like not both reliable and useful big fan of the anchor stuff yeah they've got some good products they do yeah they know what they're doing over there which is which is great like it's nice to have have some of those Duke asked a question in and this is sort of like a question with a cool stuff found baked right in in discord Duke silver 192 said my MacBook Pro M1 max is discharging really quickly whilst asleep with the lid closed this is only recently started happening I saw on a thread about screen time being an issue so I turned it off and it seemed to sort it then a few days later it started again I've used activity monitor to check 12 hour power impact and I did notice that the stream deck app seems to use loads of energy even though the actual hardware isn't connected I've since quit that and tried but it continues happening any ideas would be appreciated and this was the moment at which my mind was blown because Serab answered and said a good app to help debug this is called sleep aid guys I'd never heard of sleep aid before this app is awesome it's from the folks at ohana where and it it like it's magic it pays attention to the reasons your Mac fell asleep and then offers suggestions as to how to fix what it would call like periods of extended and insomnia right I mean it's normal for a Mac to wake up Intel max will wake up once an hour to do their maintenance Apple silicon max will wake up three times an hour to do their maintenance like that parts normal but more than that and it'll tell you the reasons and certainly you can comb through the terminal and console logs to start to intuit this I'm assuming that's what they're doing but boy howdy they make it way way way easier and they display it in this calendar view it's I went immediately went downloaded and started running it and I've got to now put it on my laptop but it's fascinating like I find my my M1 mini in the office I haven't put it on this computer here yet because you know this computer's been through enough I know things aren't right with it I am going to have to wipe this and like build a from scratch Monterey like if I didn't say that earlier I'm definitely going to do that probably before we record the next episode at some point if I have the time but but certainly for my laptop having this on there to tell me is it is it doing stuff that it shouldn't be doing and if so what and what can I do about it and they have some some very specific suggestions about things that you can turn off and turn on so yeah this this was the question that turned itself into a cool stuff found thanks to our discord community so thanks for that folks this is I love learning about new stuff so I can't believe did you did John did you know had you like had you heard about sleep aid before no there it is the patented patent pending no have you I do remember the good old days pouring through the console logs to figure out sleep issues so yeah it's nice that somebody brought it together does that for us yeah well like in in Monterey we were able to like look for I forget what it's called like sleep reason or something you know you could grep the console log for that and see what it is not sleep reason but you know you could look like with PM said or something and it would show you the reasons for sleep with Ventura there's way too many things that intentionally wake our max up for like very brief periods of time that that's of fools errand unless you can apply the right filters to it which of course is exactly what what these folks are doing here so yeah and just and so for the listeners just a heads up so Dave did put the link in the show notes and it's at ohanaware.com you're not going to find it in the app store it appears unless relaxation you know I can imagine that's a fair point right yeah yeah yeah so yeah it's ohanaware.com it's in the show notes to get that exactly but if you put in sleep aid in the app store you're going to wind up with relaxation programs and such right sleep aid for yourself not for helping your matational device sleep right listener Joe and there's a again a thread and discord about this which is worth reading if what I'm about to tell you interests you but he said for anyone that travels specifically those who use macOS and iOS he says for years I traveled all over the world managing to carve out a day on a weekend or so to see new places and explore he says my biggest problem was how to keep up with all the potential places of interest that I had researched without having to tote around a tour book or having to create an elaborate text file so I took all of my interests and then sort them looking in mac and iOS app stores didn't seem to have a general solution to this either I even thought about trying to create my own app for this but that's a lot of work for an upcoming trip he says I decided to try a different set of parameters in my Google searching and came across the almost ideal solution Google Maps most folks he says I think are like me and either use Google Maps or Apple Maps to search and route to a location but there's no concept of dropping multiple applications unless they are dedicated to a specific route but it turns out that Google Maps has the solution and it's awesome he says Google Maps allows one to create custom maps which can be used for specific trips, places, etc from the main Google Maps web page you select the plus or the dot dot dot menu or something and select saved and from there you click maps and create a map at the bottom this opens a new web page where you can name your map and you can have layers so you can have a layer per city and have all the interest points for that area in that layer he says for me I used layer to capture from which resource I had gotten my interest points oh fascinating so I'll leave this out there but if the idea of solving that problem and capturing places that you want to visit and then having them sort of contextually present themselves because they're going to present themselves when you are in that locale in that map that's a great thing Pete have you traveled more than the rest of us here no I'm going to go back and play with this and see how well it works on the phone and where the iPad he says he uses the Mac or the iPad to create them but then you can see them all in the Google Maps app on your phone that's a great idea because yeah but I never thought about it I was going to ask have you solved how if at all have you solved this problem over the years yeah I just I use a lot of yelp and that sort of thing where's a good place to eat give me the map to it because you're limited to within a couple of miles of the hotel unless you're going to grab an Uber or a bus service or something but no this sounds brilliant and I bet integrates really well with the local mass transit systems right oh yeah because it's Google Maps yeah of course cool all right John what's next here now maybe some real questions yeah let's go to Larry and Larry says I have a very large hero network and I'm attaching a screen shot of my network thank you basically I have an old house with brick chimneys and all these heroes um have given me what I want which is wifi everywhere and it's quite seamless I've been very happy and none of this has been a problem lately I've had a problem with an m1 mac mini that is attached to one of the hero pros it attaches fine but it doesn't show that it can access the internet now next to the mac mini is a home pod mini that is attached to the very same hero pro and while the mini shows no internet access the home pod mini is merely playing music for me the mac mini is on 13.3.1 and all the wifi settings are defaults to the best of my knowledge none of this makes any sense one device can't access the internet and the other does and they are on the same hero network and same desk within inches of each other I have tried rebooting both the mac and the hero to no good effect is the hero defective? any thoughts? huh, interesting I mean the only thought I have with problems like this Dave is turn it off and on again so with the hero what you can do I mean the only thing I could think of Dave and I don't think I've ever had to do this but I have the first generation heroes um but if uh in the hero app you go to home then the hero name advanced there's a restart okay I mean that's a good place to start I think there's nothing wrong with that to me assuming that doesn't work and of course it may well work but assuming it doesn't I would my thinking would jump to okay what is it about that mac and if the mac says that it's connecting to the wifi network I think we should believe it for now and we should look in the hero app and see what does hero think does hero see that mac connected and I know you've got a lot of devices and you're gonna have to scroll around and find it but what does it say about it and is it perhaps somehow blocked right because or what IP address is it assigning it is there something like is somehow that IP address being shared with another device and so your mac can't talk maybe try setting your mac manually either with a DHCP reservation or just literally on your mac to not use DHCP and connect to a different you know use a different IP address that can get super convoluted if for the same reason like you start getting things with the same IP address crashing into each other that's bad but like that would be I would look at why you know what is the what is the max IP address and one thing to test I'm just jumping all over the place here but is turn the mac off right disconnect it or just disconnect it from wifi so the mac doesn't think it's connected then go to another computer and ping the IP address of that mac right and see does it answer right because if it does that tells you something because something's answering who and why would be an interesting exercise for the for the listener and there's some good network scanners out there to tell you what fair right what that what's at that IP address right so yeah at least gives you a mac address and then you can reverse look up hey who made this right this mac address what's the yeah who who does this belong what vendor does this belong to I don't know that that's where my brain goes to troubleshoot this stuff is is get that kind of thing I don't know like now I'm with you looking at the looking at the devices in the arrow app can be helpful because yeah as you pointed out you can block right IP addresses and maybe you inadvertently did this at one point so yeah looking at the status of the devices in the arrow app and Pete I like your suggestion too I like thing for scanning a network when I can't find things yeah so it's very good thing is very good at mapping things and showing you the the status of them so that that would be another suggest yeah yep and I think you can download the thing you don't need like the hardware to do the network scanning you can you can just you know download it download the app and yeah check it out I I love the thing app I use it when I'm at like a new club where I'm playing music and most clubs these days use digital mixers which let you remote control like I get to control what what monitor mix is sent to my in-ear monitors and but a lot of times the engineer won't know the IP address of the board off the top of their head and it's it's always a negotiation with the engineer it's like hey you know I walk in I try to be helpful first I tell them things like hey here's a thing I know about our band that would be helpful for you to know as you're setting up and I stay out of their way well I'm like setting up my drums and it's like oh hey what mixer you use okay cool and we buddy buddy up and it's like hey can I use my iPad to control my ears oh sure fine great do you have the app the answer is always yes because I've always I put all the apps on my iPad but then having to ask them what's the IP address of the mixer it stops them in their tracks if they don't know it because they have to go all the way back to the mixer and like scroll through three pages and look it up and all that stuff and so I will ask them do you know the IP address of the mixer and if they say no you know I'll kind of be like okay don't worry about it and that's when I launched the thing app because I've connected to the Wi-Fi they have to give me the password for that there's no way around it but once I've connected I can scan and I mean there's usually you know one other device on the Wi-Fi or two their iPad and the mixer so easy way to find it yeah I like the thing app it is good it is good uh Phil no Jay Brinner is next up and asks the question I have an external drive on a Ventura Mac Mini and the drive is shared the drive shows normally on the Mac Mini when connecting it when connecting to it as a share from a different computer it shows normal drive name and normal drive name two and it will allow me to connect to either so this is this is one of those weird ones I'm curious if it's happening on all computers or just one usually when this happens it's because in the on the Mac that is connecting to it when you mount a drive it's important to understand how this works with Unix which the macOS is when you mount another drive it attaches that to a folder it's a blank empty folder that then that new resource is attached to right and and you can actually attach it to anywhere you want this goes back to the old Unix days where you would want a separate drive for swap and so you would mount that it slash swap or slash temp or something like that and and so the when macOS mounts a drive it doesn't want to ask you where you want to put it and so it puts it at slash volumes the capital V slash the name of the drive unless the name of the drive already has a folder there and if it does then it is slash volume slash the name of the drive two and if there's already a folder there then it's slash volume slash the name of the drive three you get my point this is why this happens even when you're just connecting an external drive to your to your mac right because that's how it works so like that's where I would look first is to make sure first on the max that it's connecting that are connecting to it I would look in the volumes folder and see are these there I would eject the drive disconnect from the drive and then go into the volumes folder and clear out check the folders to make sure they're not empty because it's possible something saved something there that thought it was saving over to the other drive but because the drive wasn't connected it saved it locally on your hard drive that could be the that could be the issue so check that out but but then go look at it even on the mac that's sharing it I would think like seems weird that it would advertise it right John is as a as a a thing like I don't know right thoughts Mr. Braun maybe John's muted oh he's back now I've been I've been having a similar issue looking on my phone right now yep and I see so I got iPhone 12 mini entertainment room entertainment room and then iPad 4 why did that happen so the name of your iPad on the network has has been incrementally or numerically increased yeah and that usually will happen when a device goes to register itself and and sees there's a device on the network already with that name so there was already an iPad mini and so it was like iPad mini 2 and then something else said there's already iPad mini 2 and so yeah I don't know yeah interesting usually you can like in order to change for you John for your scenario to change that back you would go to the iPad mini and go into like settings general and about or something in there and that's where you change that name so just for anybody who's yeah that's what I've done in the past whatever my Macs have done the same thing it's like oh well let me go and change your name yeah interesting alright we got time for one more you want to take us to Phil John since that's what's next I know I tried to jump there earlier but you know alright well I'm going to rant about something then because years ago I used to be able to in the car while driving and I have memories of this as does Lisa we drove one time from LA to Tahoe and LA is basically sea level and Tahoe is a you know 6000 feet or something and I remember driving in the car up that highway that drives in California that drives through like the land where the sun bakes you and noticing that you know our ears were popping and all that good stuff and I remember driving along and being like hey I wonder if Siri can tell me my elevation and so I asked her what's my elevation and she told me and so we did this every few minutes maybe every 10 minutes for for quite some time just you know out of curiosity like where are we what's our elevation and I've tried doing that recently and it does not work anymore it says I can't show you that information while you are driving and it's like I that's great I don't want you to show it to me I want you to tell me use your words use your words Siri that's it there's the title of the show I knew we were going to get there use your words Siri like why does it not like what why you know if Apple put half the energy into the s lady that they do into their magic behind the camera oh yeah then the Google assistant and the a lady would all be in the smoke behind us well I mean they're all going to be smoked or adapted within a year because of AI right but but Siri's definitely the worst in terms of like getting her to share information audibly she wants to share it vidibly I know I'm driving I asked you using my words I asked using words and this is one of the things that I really like about the a lady is now there's a visual component like there's a lady devices with screens and there have been for years but it start was as an audio only device it had a microphone actually had a set of microphones on it of course and a speaker that's it so it was forced to answer audibly not vidibly this is this needs to be a word why is vidibly not a word we have audio we have video anyway I don't know like but Siri's going to need to get they're all going to need to get way better real fast and I think the tech is there for that to happen so I'm really curious to see what comes out at WWDC and like in terms of what Apple's doing with Siri in the next thing so maybe someday again Siri will be able to tell me using her words my current elevation that's all I want actually I use when I need to do that there's an app on my watch I think it's called elevation but like I just wanted to tell me I don't like this is it's a very concrete piece of information it doesn't need to interpret anything I can launch the compass app on my phone and see it I just like I know Siri can know it because she used to be able to know it it's on the watch it's called altitude it might only be for the ultra for us ultra folks oh yeah mr ultra over there and then there's GPS tracks which is on the phone and that'll also tell you yeah but like the compass app on the phone will tell you so like the phone knows natively I don't know man are you ready to tell us about Phil's question John um I guess okay so here we go okay Phil says lately on my MacBook Pro with 8 gigs of RAM whenever I play a YouTube video on safari the fans kick on and sound like they're running at max speed mm-hmm I've been there um from my i-stat toolbar the CPU seems to be running at 180 degrees okay that sounds about right um I have replaced the battery once already on this machine and I'm fascinated by the idea of an Apple silicon machine I work at a nonprofit if they they have given me to use a 2019 15 inch MacBook Pro which is nice for the bigger screen but the battery life still sucks and I hate the touch toolbar um I have seen videos lately especially from Luke Miani and everyday dad okay um about the about the value now with the base 14 inch pro for me their third party reseller or Apple cart reverb certified Apple certified reverb um I realize it will be overkill for what I use it for but I'm also considering how long I keep machines in rotation um such as mine and my wife is uh running a 2012 MacBook Pro with internal DVD drive wow I also like the idea of a bit bigger screen real state versus getting a new air 13 inch MacBook Pro also something is announced that WWDC in turn of chips or new models do you think that there would be a price drop on the refurb store of the M1 Pro 14 inch my current retina still works but getting along the tooth um I can update it to the latest and greatest battery life is getting bad again and I feel that even though the M1 is the first gen of Apple silicon it will be supported better than any Intel models would like to hear your thoughts um I've been pondering the same thing Dave honestly so I have the MacBook Pro 16 inch 2019 yep and the battery life even after repair still stinks yep yep it's only like two hours so I I feel for you um and also my chain the fans do spin up for video tasks so I mean my thought is I would get a refurb and I've been looking at them okay haven't haven't made the leap yet I haven't pulled the trigger so to speak yes yeah I did see one the other day I think it was it was ridiculously overpowered for what I need I think it was a refurb more power now I think it had um so it was an M1 um I think it had 16 gigs of RAM or no wait wait wait start from the top an M1 what kind of computer MacBook Air MacBook Pro what size screen I think it was the 14 okay I don't think you can get a 14 with an M1 though because I would I would no is that right can you get a 14 the MacBook Pro 14 inches M2 Pro or M2 Max right oh maybe you're talking about the 14 inch ones are if you want the 13 inch oh no you can yeah yeah no you're right you can get a 14 inch MacBook Pro on the refurb store with an M1 I'm just I'm looking here on the store now yeah okay alright okay and Phil actually got back to me and said I ordered the refurb M1 Pro 14 inch and it'll be here today got it there you go that's it um for those wondering if they should make the jump or not all I can say is the battery life alone is astounding am I right Dave it changes everything it'll go all day unless you're doing something really intense unless you got something wrong in which case you run sleep aid and it'll help you help you figure it out like yeah but no seriously like it's it's great I would if I I mean I'm looking here on the on the store especially in the refurbs I would I would very much lean towards the M2 based um machines I was looking bench the other day and the M2 chip is significantly faster than the M1 Pro so if you're going to bother to do it I would like that's where I lean is is the M2 which is amazing because the M1 smokes the intel chip oh leaves it in the dust like there's no tomorrow yeah yeah going from intel you're probably not going to notice a difference between the M1 pro and the M2 but um but there is a difference and if you keep your machines for a while which I know you do I would I would lean towards the M2 but you know with the MacBook Pro you're forced to go M2 pro or M2 max you can't just get like a straight up M2 like you can in the air so we're going to see an M3 in June I think they're saying the M3 is like fall um I believe that's it at WWDC though right in June um maybe maybe not it's hard to say man like because they don't need to prepare developers for that necessarily like with when Apple silicon was first announced yes they needed to sort of prep all of us including developers for hey well guess what everything just changed you know or is about to it like moving iterations of a processor there's certain developers that would be able to tweak for it and Apple would reach out to them privately generally speaking I mean I can't say what Apple is doing I can only look at what Apple has done but that would be my guess is we won't we won't see the announcement until until it's out you know until we can like order it or it's pre-order it or whatever so yeah I don't know I don't know I would say take a look at Geekbench and do some comparisons because you might find that you want to go with the you know the M2 it's browser.geekbench.com let me look so like the I was looking at the multi-core scores because that's an easier way to test but like you know you can do the M2 Max let's look at single course it's fine yeah the M2 Max comes in at the top no great surprise the M2 Pro right below that and then the M2 right and then the you know the M1 Max is maybe 15% slower than that and that's the Max so you know the M1 Pro is down another 10% from there so I'll put this link the Mac Benchmarks link from Geekbench in the show notes so that you can all make your decisions but yeah I was looking at a potentially a Mac Mini for the studio here but if I don't want to run Ventura then that might I don't know can I buy a Mac Mini like I know it used to be able to run Monterey but if I buy one today will it be able to run Monterey like there's been some weirdness with that at times I don't know so I got to figure that out I mean I can always just like you know send it back to me it's such an underrated machine I think especially the upgraded one yeah yeah it's like for me there's no reason to get a Mac studio except for the bragging rights other than that right exactly yes that's fair that's fair yeah the bragging rights for sure but otherwise no like that you know it's got the M2 chip it's like so that would be my thought would be you know M1 is what three year old technology now yeah right like I mean two and a half Mike Lerman makes the comment he says if it wasn't Apple killing support for the Intel my sixth quarter Mac Mini was fast enough for me I just got my Mac Mini Pro with 16 gigs of RAM and I guarantee that thing is smoking it that's why look I bought my MacBook Pro 13 inch with the M1 because I had the 2019 16 inch MacBook Pro with the Intel processor and my nephew came in with this little MacBook Air in the M1 and he smoked me and I went oh man I can't yeah I mean the difference you're right like I'm sure your machine is your Intel machine I mean I've got an Intel machine in front of me here you know it's powerful enough where it really makes the differences with the portable machines and battery life like there you know there's a reason there was no Intel based iPhone or iPad right like it just wouldn't have worked and so now that we have that tech available to us for our laptops like to me that's the big difference is the power consumption and that of course makes a difference in terms of the fans and all of that but the battery life is sort of the you know the leader and now it runs everything natively across all machines right translational right right as long as you're running native stuff hey speaking of parallels now runs Windows 11 and it turns out that was Apple's decision to go that route as opposed to the boot camp route so don't figure thanks for hanging out with us folks always fun good stuff good stuffs cool stuffs good questions got another hangout coming up in two weeks no hangout coming up on Sunday this show comes out on the 17th Pete correct yep yep yep yep so yeah come hang out with us on Sunday thank you for the reminder thanks for listening thanks for providing all the bandwidth folks at cash fly we appreciate that make sure to check out all the other podcasts that we do I do two others I do one called business brain for entrepreneurs gig gab for working musicians Pete does one called so there I was for aviation enthusiasts and people interested in simply good stories make sure to check out our sponsors macgeekab.com sponsors the ones we mentioned in the episode of course Notion. I want to make sure I get that thing right Notion.com slash macgeekab I knew there was something special about it and baby edit from bare bones I'm sure I did steal your shirt I'm the laundry thief man I've got a bunch of socks that you might need too well that's where they went what's it say on my shirt again don't get made sure does


I'm Joe, the Communication Officer for FEMS and I'm joined today by Professor Graham Walker from MIT and we're here in the Mediterranean Institute for Life Sciences at the FEMS summer school for postdocs and this morning you gave a lecture to the postdocs so do you mind just give me a brief overview of what you're discussing? Well since this conference is on bacterial stress and I and also my co-director Murrow Radman did a lot of the early work and what's now known as the SOS response that we call I so rather I tried to sort of tell students who didn't know everything about it something about the system but not by giving a model and telling them where it was I tried to do it in a way that was more historical as I experienced that who had done what in the early beginnings of the field and then once I got into it what I saw as key experiment that would move it forward and then a new puzzle would arise and you'd have to come at it with a different angle and you get another insight and then another puzzle and or an unexpected direction yeah so trying to hope that I could convey something about how science was actually done and how it felt at the time because I don't know there's some wonderful young scientists here and they're going to be doing things we can't predict but I'm sure they will experience all of the same things that everybody else does as they go along so I was trying to pass on some of my experience and life. Well I think it went down well so my next questions are ones I just try and ask as many microphones as possible and the first one is what's your favorite microbe and why? Well I don't mean it's the ones you work on I guess I've worked on I started with Salmonella in Bruce Ames lab that was where I went as an organic chemist basically nucleic acid or organic chemist went to learn microbiology a little bit with Salmonella initially but for the problems I was addressing with the SOS the interesting mutants were in E. coli so that's what I've worked on all my career but then while I was a postdoc in the mid 70s and I was at Berkeley recombinant DNA was developed across the bay in her boyer's lab in Stan Cohen's lab and at the same moment transposons became a thing and I could see that even organic chemists could use those tools to take any bacterium and make a system that was very much like E. coli in terms of what you could do genetically so at that point I thought well I should pick something that does something interesting and I started to work on Rhizobium because it did the symbiosis with the plant but it was for me it was it wasn't it wasn't intrinsically trying to solve some problem in nodulation I just saw that you could ask the same level of detailed genetic questions in some other organism and I've worked with Rhizobium so all kinds of bacteria. Well I love that most people are like I don't have one don't make me pick just one it's too hard. Yeah I mean it's the problem I'm interested in and then sometimes they're the same solution of the bacteria sometimes different solutions and I talk I think I was talking to some students at lunch about when I was working on I haven't talked about it here particularly but on the Rhizobium symbiosis and I found genes that were necessary for the bacterium to live inside of a eukaryotic membrane compartment inside of the plant cells inside the nodule which is where it fixes nitrogen and it's an alpha protea bacterium and it's very closely related to brucella bordus and other species that live inside of a membrane compartment inside of a eukaryotic animal or mammalian cell and I thought when we found a gene that was critically required in rhizobium maybe it was needed by brucella which might have seemed like a crazy thing but in turned out a gene needed for chronic infection by rhizobium was needed for chronic affection in brucella so there one sort of an experiment in one organism triggered an interest in another that I never worked on and I had to get a collaborator but it worked out sounds cool like a fun yeah okay um well so my second question then is you can't do science without people so what's your microbiota or who is your microbiological hero and why and they could be someone you know or don't know but anyone particular who struck you as someone you'd like to give an accolade to uh I there were a number of influences um my first powerful one was my post-doc manager Bruce Ames I was a grad student in Illinois I heard him give a seminar and I was at that point getting conversant when you click acid chemistry in a bit with the click acid biochemistry but I could see I thought when I heard him talk I said he knows how to think like a cell and I was drawn to him not only because of the science he'd done but I wanted to sort of learn if I could somehow grasp how to think physiologically and not just learn genetics and then when I came to MIT I was very powerful there were a number of excellent microbiologists from Boris MagaSanic who worked on nitrogen metabolism uh Salvador Luria my colleague Nobel Prize winner founder of our cancer center and Mori Fox who's very very thoughtful about DNA repair and David Botstein who was a huge influence on me he was a bundle of enthusiasm about all things genetics so I think those in particular and then other along the way other that I could keep going for probably an hour but the people influenced me so there's never one single person because I sort of drifted into it and yeah from a different kind of chemical training and then I I still to this day have people that I get excited by and I learn things from okay well I'm glad there's many at least oh there's many and um yeah so my final question then is uh what one piece of microbiological knowledge should the whole world know about if you could somehow make everyone understand one fact or one piece of descriptive knowledge about microbiology what would you what would you pick well I guess I've done a lot of teaching and a lot of interacting with lay folks and I I think it's probably better known now than it was a few years ago but for many people the only thing they knew was that bacteria made you sick and you took an antibiotic and killed them and they went away they had no sense of how many bacteria we have in our intestine what an astonishing number that were covered with bacteria that they're absolutely everywhere the microbiome you know is an influence on all kinds of factors of health and I think that part of it is now better understood now but I think there are many people you know the world I live in is probably heavily still populated by people who have some amount of education I think there are a lot of people don't understand there's this unseed world out there and the other thing for me that was important I think was that that's so much of evolution happened at the level of bacteria there first life 3.8 billion years ago and eukaryotes didn't come around for a long time so it's not surprising that amino acid biosynthesis and principles of DNA replication and translation and ribosomes and everything were all worked out in in bacteria and I found it fascinating that you know especially in the earlier parts of my career things like DNA repair and stuff like that that the counterparts were either there directly as homologs in mammalian eukaryotic cells or they was convergent evolution and come to the same solution but using a different protein or something that the power of the bacterium is a model for other things and both Merrow and I did work with mismatch repair I sort of got mutants and mutas and mutal which are key components of the post-replicative mismatch repair system and improves fidelity after DNA replication and when I clone them I tried to publish it back to back I contacted a group who I thought had the same gene it was called hexa but from streptococcinemoniai we could see there were homologs and I tried to publish it I think in PNAS and the reviewers said this was of absolutely no interest there should go on especially journals we published it in journal bacteriology the sequence came out and my phone started to ring by people who were calling me to tell me that mammalian cells had a mutas homolog ironically one of them was located I think on the other side right beside dihydrofolate reductase and in the old days we didn't know so much about DNA so they'd sequenced in the wrong direction initially and they had an an orph of unknown function and and since then people went on within about a year or less than two years people had understood that hereditary non-polyposis colon cancer which is now known as Lynch syndrome and the familial susceptibility to colon probably ovarian cancer comes about in some cases by defects in the mismatch repair system and you accumulate mutations at a much higher rate and that was a case where the work in bacteria directly informed the our understanding of humans so that was the other sort of aspect microbes as microbes and their role in that but also microbes as model systems to understand what happened in evolution and gain insights into humans too cool well thanks a lot for spending some time talking to me and I hope the rest of the summer school goes well and thank you I think it's terrifically exciting idea I'm spending time with the postdocs and they're they're just wonderful and well let's hope to get another one yeah yeah thanks a lot thank you