You happen to have an uncle named Jack. No. Oh, if you did. And he was on the roof.  Would you help your uncle Jack off?  I'm Rick. I'm Rick. I'm Rick. I'm Rick. I'm Rick. I'm Rick. I'm Rick. I'm Rick. I'm Rick. I'm Rick. I'm Rick. I'm Rick. I'm Rick. I'm Rick. I'm Rick. Vangaya Bajie. Onion Bajie. Onion snack recipe. It's some type of snack. I adore onions. And I adore the village cooking thing. I love them. It is... It's your favorite. It's really, really way, way, way, way up there. It'd be tough to... Is it vegetable or is it a root?  I think it's technically a vegetable. And I, but it, onion, potato, and broccoli, those three baby are just, but if I can't imagine life without onions, I'd be very, very sad. I don't like raw onions. It depends. In small amounts, oftentimes there'll be a dish that Andrani has made and it has chopped up raw onion on the side and it's really nice to eat it while you're eating the other food. And on some hamburgers, I like a raw onion on a hamburger sometimes, but grilled onions are super tasty. Here we go. Yell at me. It's my kink.  There's a lot of onions. That is a lot of onions. That's a lot of onions, baby. Wow. And they gotta feed the whole village. Welcome to you. That was a little quicker than usual. Favorite ASMR there? No. That's, that's a lot of onions. Somebody find my ring. Lot of eyes watering. I want to see if their eyes are watering. They're just like bad at it. Well, they are outdoors. It'd be less likely to be a problem, but yeah, it's starting. He's affected a little bit. I can smell it through the screen. My goodness. Got some green beans? That chili is, yeah. That's gonna evolve some fumes. How are a small village with that about it? Like a muddler. They're muddling. Ah, yes. Fennel seeds. Yeah, even sitting a long time, sure. Makes sense. That's what I do to your mom after courtes. I can tell. She probably needs to see a doctor. It looks like it. For a fire. Right? I wonder why we have the additional use of that tip of the head. It's underrated use. Onion and gram flour. So they're gonna fry it? Yeah. Fried onions, baby. Oh, this is gonna be amazing. Fried onions, it looks. We got something called onion rings here and fried onions, crisps as well. Yeah, the kind of fried onions that are typically on the green bean salad, Thanksgiving. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh, this is gonna be so good. That would be so fun to mix like that.  Cardi B would be happy. Yep. Macaroni in the pot. Onion, bajia. In the pot. There you go. I'm getting hungry watching this. Oh, look at that thing. Oh yeah, they're gonna be in those little. Oh. It looks like a patty? Yeah. Also, he's like dipping his hand in the oil. It's gonna be potato pancake-y kind of consistency. Oh my goodness, these are gonna be glorious. Oh. Oh. Well, that too can be a problem that my mom needs to see a doctor back. Yeah, but she's supposed to be in this color. We don't add anything to the color. Uh-huh. Might need to change the chair. Sure. Oh. Oh my goodness. Clusters of glory. Clusters of glory. That's what your mom calls my testicle. My goodness. We should follow one of their recipes that are the more simple recipes to make and obviously at a smaller scale. And- Go out and do it in my back. Go out in your backyard. Dig a thing for a pit. Yeah. I wanna watch them eat them. I just, it's just gonna look so amazing. They have to have like a chutney form. Indians are not really known for just having them somewhat. No, they'll be, yeah, they'll be something. Got some weight on those kids. Got some heft. Ooh, that's beautiful. This is a- Oh. Oh, good. Yeah, hot off the presses. Oh my goodness. I bet. No chutney. No chutney, no nothing. It's flavorful enough. There we go. I think that's what I was expecting. And it looks like a little goes a long way in this recipe. Oh. That looks delicious. Incredible. Yeah, it would be interesting to follow one of these recipes as best we could. That one's the more of the simple. Yeah. Than some of the ones they've done. You can't really have open flame out here in California. Even after all the rain now, they're still not gonna. You can if it's contained in a grill and a barbecue, but that also depends on where you live. Yeah, if you're in the mountains anywhere, it's even, it doesn't have to be two mountainous. Out in Agora, it's more hills, but they're not gonna let you do much barbecuing out there because one spark will burn thousands of acres. Yeah, one more. Oh, that was so good. I could eat that, right? It might be too hot for me, but it looked delicious. I bet all the heat's cooked away. In the onions, like a fried onion, most onion rings aren't spicy. The chili paste. Chili, they put chilies in there. That's what I'm talking about, not the onion. I think that just adds some flavor. I don't think there's much heat on that. Do you see the amount of chili paste in there compared to the volume of onion balls that came out. I've had fried street food when I had it in Rajasthan. So I'm on the side of the road to have breakfast and fried things that we had. It's in the video, and I died. It was tasty, but I died. I can only have a few bites if I just died. I don't even know what I had for breakfast that day. I can't even think of what we had for lunch that day. I know what we had for dinner. We went to that place with all those stalls and which is the only part of the art trip that wasn't up on the road. Filmed. Let us know if... These are worthy of an eat. I bet they are. I bet they are. If you've had these before, let us know and any other videos we can react to down below.


It is time for Mac Geek Gav and listener Tony brings us our quick tip of the week. He says when you're in Safari and actually this works where you're typing text to if you highlight currency and this is on your iPhone. We can't we haven't found this to work on the Mac yet, but maybe there's a way but on your iPhone in Safari or just in a text that you've entered. If you highlight a price that is not in your currency. So if you know for me if I live in the U.S. so I my currency standardized on dollars if I put like 438 pounds or something and then highlight that text just like I was going to copy or paste it that little menu to cut copy and paste floats up above the text that I've that I've highlighted scrolling to the right on that menu when you go two steps to the right or two screens to the right two scrolls to the right. I don't know what the right way to say it is. Whatever it is, you will see the currency translated to your local currency right there and that works highlighting it in Safari. It also works just highlighting text you've typed. If it's in messages, the currency will actually have a little underline. You can float over it and it'll show it to you right there just by long pressing on it. So more tips like this plus your questions answered today on Mac Geek have 975 for Monday, April 3rd, 2023. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Mac Geek of the show where you send in tips like that and we share tips like that. You send in your questions. We answer your questions. Sometimes we have questions of our own that we try to answer and we sometimes but probably won't have time for it today. We share your cool stuff found in our cool stuff found so that we can learn about all the new tech and well cool things that we have found really original name for that segment. But it seems to have stuck. The goal in doing all of this is that every single one of us learns at least five new things every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include CleanMyMac X. This is one of my favorite utilities and you can get 5% off at macpaw.app slash macgeekgab. We'll talk more in depth about that in a little bit for now. Here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Griffithle, Connecticut. This is John F. Brock. And here in I think Lee, New Hampshire. I have no idea where I am right now. No, I'm home. It's pilot Pete. I've been on the road all week. I haven't been trying to catch myself. I I was actually surprised when you said John F. Braun today, John, I knew it was you like we even do this on video. So I'm looking at you. I heard you say here in Fairfield, Connecticut. And I was expecting you to say pilot Pete. I was taken aback when you said John F. Braun. I don't know what that says about my mental state, but it does not bode well for the future of this particular episode. Just like picking up a drink and expecting coke and getting water or something. You know, it's like, yeah, we're getting milk. Yeah, something right. Yeah, like, wow, super different. Yeah, like warm milk instead of ice cold, Coca-Cola, tall. That's right. Yeah. All right, let's talk about the finder, guys. That's a good idea.  If a Macintosh window has a title, like the finder window, then you can usually command click on it to see the path. In the finder, you can also use command up arrow and command down arrow to transverse the hierarchy. It's one of those, what did you do keystroke commands? Also, command double click on a folder will open the folder as a tab in the finder. And command option double click will open the folder as a new window. I didn't know about the command double click to do the tab that I got. Wow. Or maybe finally, maybe I did. I don't know. Sorry. Keep going. Yes. And then finally, in the open dialogue, you can grab a file or folder from the finder and drag it into the open dialogue to have the dialogue jump to the dragged file or folder directory. What? Oh, I had no idea. Yeah, it's a... Yeah, I knew about that. I knew about that one. Oh, I did not. I don't use it that often because I use default folder. Right, right. Yeah, same. That's probably why I did not know about that one. That's pretty good. So, if you have an open save dialogue and then there's a finder window sort of in the background, you can grab a file or folder and just drag it on top of the open save dialogue. Sort of from the background to the foreground, if you will. And then that, is that how it works? And then it will auto-navigate you to that? Is that right? As far as I know, yes. Wow. All right. Yeah, that's cool. Okay. All right. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting, interesting. Let's see. I've got one from PCUnix in our Discord channel who shared... He says, I didn't know that you could share individual reminder lists and you can. And he says, when I realized this, I was very happy because my wife makes pickup stuff lists on post-it notes and then loses them in her handbag. She uses notes on her phone very well, but uses that for so many other things that she can never find her pickup list. So, she creates a new one. So confusing. But yeah, you can share and even better assign reminders to other people. So, once you've shared the reminders list, then... So, you pull up the reminders list, you share it. Right? And this is in reminders, not in notes. You share the list and then you can assign a reminder in a shared list. So, if the three of us had a list together of shared reminders, we could assign them to one another. So, it was like, okay, this one's for John, this one's for Dave, this one's for Pete. I had no idea of any of this. Apple's got a support article that we'll link to in the show notes at makikev.com or mgg.fm slash 975 because that'll bring you right to the notes for this show. But I had no... Oh, that assignment ability is huge. Right? I had no idea. I wonder how... Yeah, and also in reminders, when I updated to macOS 13.3 this week and then launched reminders, to be fair, this might be the first time that I've launched reminders since I ran Ventura because I generally... But since I installed Ventura, since I generally don't use Apple's reminders app, I use BusyCal to manage my calendar and reminders. So, it's possible, but it says you can pin your favorite list. You can create reminders templates. So, if you didn't know about those things either, well, there they are. So, thanks for that PC, Unix. Yeah, the whole sharing...  Yeah, yeah, cool stuff or quick tips, but it is cool. They are cool, quick tips. All right, John, take us to Keith. All right, Keith has another tip, courtesy of his kids, sort of. You may already know that the S-Lady can stop alarms. Hey, S-Lady, stop the alarm. One day I found... That's new, by the way. We ranted about that on this show a couple of years ago, where you could set an alarm with S-Lady, but you had to touch your phone to stop it. Thank goodness they fixed that. You must have been listening. Yeah, that's right. Thank you, Apple. So, one day I found that one of my girls had left her alarm on during a day off from school and she wasn't turning it off. So, I went to her room and I said, Hey, S-Lady, stop the alarm. Assuming that her phone would respond. However, instead, I heard Siri on my phone say, Would you like to turn off the alarm? A dialogue box was on the screen to confirm or not. I confirmed and it turned off her alarm. I did some experiments later and found that you can simply respond with yes or no. Furthermore, instead of saying stop, you can also say snooze. One thing that I haven't tried to do is that to do this when more than one phone alarm are going off at the same time, I sort of think that you could say, stop person's alarm to stop a specific one or possibly all to stop them all. Oh, that would be interesting. I also assumed that this would only work with those who are on your family plan. Perhaps there are other family plan tricks associated with Siri as well. Yeah, I've never run into that. But I mean, it makes sense because we're on a family plan. We share, well, we share with six people. You don't share a family plan with your parents, John? No. Because you can have six people on your plan and it makes that Apple One subscription cheaper. Way cheaper. Exactly. Because we have the four of us, well, I mean, really only two of us live in my house now. We're basically empty nesters. Our son lives across the state, doing an internship over in Keen, and then our daughter lives in Italy, but we're still part of the same family plan. And then we also have my dad and his wife on the plan because you can have up to six and why wouldn't you? You share the same iCloud storage pool and then everybody gets Apple TV Plus and all of that stuff. Yeah. I wonder if, probably not, if you could set somebody else's alarm. Like if I could say, hey, yes, lady, set my son's alarm because he didn't set it when he went to bed. But hang on, let me try something here. Yeah. Hey Siri, set Lisa's alarm. 11.05 a.m. Let's see. No, it set my alarm. Oh, and it named it Lisa's. So the answer is no, you cannot. And my apologies to everybody whose phone knows my voice. Just set them alarm. Yeah. Well, Siri's pretty good with ignoring voices that aren't you. Like even my son and I, who sounds quite similar, rarely can we trigger one another's stuff. So yeah. So yeah, interesting. So no, you can't set alarms for other people. And I wonder if the phone, if it's using some sort of proximity detection too, to make sure that I'm not turning off the alarm for say my daughter who's in Italy when none of her devices are here, even though we're on the same family plan. Like I wonder. That could wreak real havoc. Yeah, I mean. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So if anybody knows, feedback at macgeekyab.com, we'd love to know that. But really quick tips if you have them, that's how these got here. Or that or our macgeekyab.com slash discord. So send them in. We'd love to hear. Nice feedback at macgeekyab.com. No, John, I clearly heard him say feedback at macgeekyab.com. Pete, what did Tim say? Tim actually gave us a twofer, as it were. So he was listening to show 973 and he wanted to further expand on two things. The first one was talking about the path bar and finder. Just so you know, if you don't have in finder your path bar showing, you can hit alternate command P and it'll show the path bar. It will also hide it if you're already showing it. When you selected a file in the finder window, right click on the file icon in the path bar, and the default copy option is to copy its path name. With loads of external drives, I've used this feature combined with the paste app to copy file path names. So wherever it is, I happened upon something I've been looking for. I now have that location in the paste app, history that is synced to iCloud. My workflow use case isn't that the tip, the additional, I'm sorry, I'm screwing the reading up here. My workflow use case isn't the tip, the additional path bar file, right click is the thing. So that's it. Yeah, so the file right click, and I've actually found, well, if you need to change, say, directories in terminal, that makes it a whole lot easier. Click on that, get your path and paste that into terminal. And it makes it easier to change right to that drive and path that you want to go to. Okay, yeah, yeah. So, okay, so having the path at the bottom of the finder, and really you pick whichever. Click on a file and finder, and then look at the path at the bottom and right click on that file name, and you have the option to copy the entire path. Copy as path name. But you can also go up the chain, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly.  Interesting. And what's that put on my clipboard? Okay, so yeah, it's just like a terminal usable path right there on my clipboard. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's slick. And then the other one came from a problem that you may recall that I had, which was I had a buried unread text message, and man, I could not find it. Yeah. And he said, if you have an unread text that is showing the red badge in Mac OS with the messages open, right click on the messages app in the dock. And then the right click menu will show what or who the unread text is from, and you can select it from that menu and go directly to that text. Oh, I have some work to do after the show. I have five messages over there that I knew about one of them. So, okay. There you go. Yep. One of them may be me telling you I was going to be late back to the show. No, I saw that. Because my coffee maker wasn't playing nicely. Yeah. Well, you were flying all night, too. You need that coffee today. I do indeed. Yeah. All right.  It's in our Discord live chat. Yeah. I'll put it I'll put a link to the Discord live chat in right here in the show. There you go. 25 seconds of unbelievable lightning. Yeah. I was I was blown away when you texted us that video. That was that was impressive, man. Yeah. All right, John, take us to Paul. I'm going to take us to Paul. Dave and John suggested to intentionally call using FaceTime audio when calling people internationally. Why not just do that all the time and make it your favorite? It's not speed dial. It's favorite. When you add someone, you can select to call them via FaceTime or Teams, Cellular or other apps. It's true. Yep. Yep. I did. I as soon as this tip came in, I changed my daughters. I've removed my daughter from favorites because I had like her cell number in there and I added her with her FaceTime audio and now that's what's in my favorites by default. Yeah. So brilliant. You know, I haven't done it in a long time because I usually either do FaceTime or Skype or something like that. But so does meant mobile charge for international calls? Well, yes. I mean, if I were to call my daughter's Italy number, like she doesn't have a US number anymore. She has, you know, that 11-year-old-month SIM card in Italy or eSIM. Can she send us one? Yeah, exactly. It gets her 150 gigs of data and unlimited voice and unlimited SMS. So yeah. So if I were to call that number, yes, I would pay like long distance charges, whatever you're supposed to call. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, so we just FaceTime audio. But to answer Paul's rhetorical question, why not just do that all the time? I don't want to do that with everyone because I pay for my data. And I only buy a limited amount of data per month. So I don't want my default calls to be using that data. Obviously, if I'm calling my daughter, even if I'm on Wi-Fi, none of it matters, of course. But if I'm on cell data. Look, audio doesn't burn a ton of data. Really, probably in the end, it would make zero difference to me. But that's why I don't do it. So yeah. That's a pretty good one, John. Yeah, it's awesome. Yeah. All right. Who's next on the old quick tips here? I think we have Nick. And we actually tried this in pre-show. It is possible to attach a Memoji sticker directly to a message rather than sending it as a unique message. This works on both Mac and iPhone. But I do not have an iPad to test this with. But because messages is universal-ish, universal-ish. Say that 10 times fast. I would expect it to work there as well. To do this, bring up the Memoji messages app, find the Memoji you want to send, press and hold on the one you want, and then drag it to the specific message. You can also stack multiple stickers on the same message. You can change the size once placed during placement as well by pinching or pulling. By pinching or pulling it. Okay. Yeah. And we verified this in pre-show. Yeah. No, at first I was like, how do you get rid of it? Right. Yeah. Because I thought holding, yeah, it's kind of weird. If you want to get rid of it, hold down, then I think it has sticker details, and then swipe to the left, and you'll have the option to delete it. So. Yeah. You write it on the phone. You hold down on the Memoji, and then, yeah, you're on the message, sorry. And then you get that menu of options, and one of them is sticker details. On the Mac, you right-click the message, and you get the same, a similar list, and sticker details is one of the things there. So you can remove it, but when you remove the Memoji as a sticker, it only removes it for you. In our shared chat that we have with the three of us, when I removed it from mine, it remained for the two of you, and the same was true in reverse. So, yeah, yeah, yeah. And when I first read this, I understood it to be like when you're sending a message, but no, we're talking about reaction. So Dave sends me a message. I can then drag a Memoji onto the message he sent me, and it pops on his screen as a reaction to it. So that was what needed to be clarified also for me in pre-show. Pretty cool. That is awesome. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, it's fun. It keeps it fun. Ari has a tip for us today that I like, although my guess is it would cause issues with Ventura, at least in terms of the way I've been having core audio issues. He says, as parents of a baby who sleeps in our bedroom, we needed a way to be able to watch our shows on my laptop without waking the little one. As you know, you have the option to share audio between two pairs of AirPods on iOS and iPadOS. However, disappointingly, no such functionality exists on the Mac as of yet. The workaround is to pair both pairs of AirPods with my Mac, then go into audio MIDI setup and create an aggregate speaker tool He says, I call mine Share Pods, which outputs sound to both sets of buds at the same time. It works pretty okay, he says, but certain services like YouTube, TV and HBO Max will freeze or not work when you try to use this. Maybe it's a licensing issue. Oh, that's weird. He says, also, when you turn on the aggregate speaker, you both have the ability to control volume individually on the pods as well as your volume control on the keyboard. You can only adjust volume through the UI of the browser. Maybe I'm missing this. You both lose the ability to control volume individually. That makes more sense. He says, you can only adjust volume through the UI of the browser and this brings it up and down for both pairs of buds simultaneously. Also, it's pretty quirky to get working sometimes requiring multiple pairs and toggles. So it's not perfect, but it's the best you can get until Apple decides to roll out Share Audio to macOS. So I have some tips for you. You can go back into Audio MIDI setup and set different output levels for different speakers of an aggregate device, I believe. So I think you can set a relative difference between the two. You could have one louder or quieter than the other, I believe. I haven't tried this with AirPods yet, but that's worth checking out. And then, Rogamiba, I can't remember the name of the app that they have that lets you control the volume sound source from Rogamiba, lets you control the volume of devices that don't let you control their volume. So if you installed Rogamiba sound source, and of course I'll put a link in the show notes, then you could control the volume on both pairs with your, and maybe even both devices, with the keyboard or with the menu option. So sound source might be the simplest answer to all of your issues there. So try that out. I need a speculation. Go. Let's say you've got two sets of AirPods Pro 2nd Gen. The nice thing about those is you can put your thumb on the back of the stem of the AirPods and slide your finger up and down to adjust the volume without having to go to your watch or your iPhone or whatever to change the volume. I'm wondering if that would work individually. No, I think that's what he was saying is it doesn't, because what that does is it tells the device to change the volume. Gotcha. And since the device, the host device, the computer in this case, right, the Mac, so I probably not, probably not. But I don't, I can't say for sure. Yeah, it's looking at all four AirPods is one level. Yeah, it's looking at the aggregate devices as the in use device is exactly it. And in fact, the one thing that might not be clear based on the way that I've read Ari's thing is once you create that aggregate device, you have to then set that as your sound output device. So you will add it and then a new entry shows up for him. It's called SharePods, because that's what he named it. But that then shows up in the, you know, the sound output list. And so you would choose that. And then things would go to the SharePods. That's in system settings. That is in system settings. Fishing. You're right. Yeah, system settings. Is that what we call it now? I can't remember. Just be preferences. Thanks, Pete. Yeah, now I remember. Now I remember. All right. We got a couple more quick tips left. John, you want to take us, you want to take us to both of them? Yeah. Yeah. So I had to do some investigation here. So Alan sent in a very short quick tip. Zoom toggle by hitting option command eight. I'm like, okay, let me try it. And I tried it and it didn't work. Okay. This is on your Mac. I know that's kind of obvious when we say keyboard, but I just want to make that clear. Yeah. Yeah. Then I did some searching and I found a dandy little article, Dave, called Mac Accessibility Shortcuts. And it had this listed among a whole bunch of others. But this one had a little number next to it. You know, it was like footnote two or, and I was like, okay, let me read it. Oh, here's the problem. To use the Zoom shortcut, you might need to turn on use keyboard shortcuts to zoom in accessibility preferences. And sure enough, that option was off for me. So once I turned it on, I was able to do this Zoom gesture or shortcut. So, there you go. Cool. I will offer a related tip if you don't ever expect to use keyboard Zoom, go into accessibility and turn that option off so that you don't accidentally hit keyboard Zoom. I have found myself there and it's a nightmare sometimes. If you don't know what that keystroke is and you're now in like, you know, Zoom depths and you can't move around the way you'd want to move around, it's not fun, man. What did I do? What did I do and how do I stop it? Yeah. So I highly recommend, unless you're going to do this, go into, and there's nothing wrong with using keyboard Zoom. It can be, it's a great way of like, of zooming in on things, which can be good for demos or if you are, you know, if the things that you have on your screen are smaller than your comfortable seeing and all that good stuff. Like it's great. But if you don't need it, it can sure get in your way when it comes up seemingly randomly. All right. One sort of one last quick tip. Really have two more, but we'll do another one a little bit later. But for now, I think listener Dave wraps up our quick tip section. Yeah, John. I think so. Quick tip. I recently received a debit card from a promotion. I could spend the debit card through Apple Pay because I put the card in my Apple wallet. Though I forgot it was there, and I also knew that eventually I'd buy something that costs more than was on the card, thus ignoring the small balance potentially forever. Digging around with some web search. Okay. Dig around with some web search. Tangent. Okay. He warned me there was a tangent. Quick tip inside a quick tip. Check out the AI web search, Neva. I replaced Google with it, and I won't look back. So back to the original quick tip. You can put your debit cards and prepaid cards into Apple Pay Cash. Step one. Debit card prepaid visa gift card goes in the Apple wallet. Step two. You can add funds to Apple Pay Cash from the debit prepaid card you just put in your Apple wallet. Step three. Why this is awesome? You can then transfer the new Apple Pay Cash to your bank account. That's smart. Oh, okay. So the tip is add the debit card into your Apple wallet, and then add funds to Apple Pay Cash from the debit card, and then transfer the Apple Pay Cash to your bank. And boom, you're good to go. Okay, that I love this kind of stuff. And here's what's cool about that. How many times do those cards expire? You know, those visa gift cards? Yes. You know, in six months or so. You know, especially if it's a rebate, something like that. So if you can grab that off of there and put it in, you don't lose it. Ooh, there's that sound. That sound means that I get to tell you about our sponsor today, and I am so happy to have the sponsor on board. CleanMyMac X. This is this all-in-one utility that can help us delete megatons of junk. We can check our Macs for malware and we can make our Macs faster and more organized. We've been talking about this app for a long time, and that's because it's been around for almost 15 years and is notarized by Apple, and it's even available in the Mac App Store. So if you want a better running Mac, go get CleanMyMac X today with 5% off at macpaw.app slash macgeekab. That discount works only for two weeks. So go now to macpaw.app slash macgeekab for 5% off. John and I, we've been using CleanMyMac X for a long time. We love it. SpaceLens feature is one of my most used things, but I use all kinds of stuff in there all the time. And hey, one more thing. CleanMyMac's menu app has recently added a new module called Connected Devices. It monitors the state of devices like iPhones, iPads, and other devices connected to your Mac via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or cable. The menu app remains free for all macOS users, so feel free to check out the new functionality there too. And our thanks to macpaw and CleanMyMac X for sponsoring this episode. While I've got you here, I got a show to talk about. Listen, when the New Yorker magazine asked Mark Zuckerberg how he gets his news, he said the one news source he definitely follows is TechMeme. For four years now, the TechMeme Ride Home podcast has been Silicon Valley's favorite tech news source. The podcast has become so successful, in fact, that it launched a venture fund where the listeners to the show are the limited partners in the fund. The TechMeme Ride Home is like TLDR as a service. It's not just the latest headlines from the world of tech. It's also the context around the latest news of the day. It's all the top stories, the top posts and tweets and conversations about those stories, as well as behind-the-scenes analysis. Guests who have come on to lend their expertise include Andres and Horowitz's Chris Dixon and Bloomberg's Apple rumor king, Mark Gurman. The folks at TechMeme are online all day, reading everything so that they can catch you up.  Search your podcast app now for Ride Home and subscribe to the TechMeme Ride Home podcast. All right, last episode, I put a query out there to all of us, the three of us here, but also all of you, to start sharing our uses and the ways that we're finding productivity and functionality that's helpful from all the various AI things that are out there now. Since December, really since late November, there's just been a flood of this stuff and some of it is great, some of it is crap, but a lot of it depends on learning how to use it the right way. And so we will start this segment here with, I believe, a quick tip from Scott. Really, we just started the segment when listener Dave suggested Neva as his search engine now because it leverages, I believe it's using ChatGPT's engine with its own dataset to do search, but yeah. So what is Scott's quick tip here, John? Scott said fodder for your AI show. Today, I used ChatGTP to write regular expression queries. Tell it what you want to find and replace, in this case, using regx, it not only wrote the query, it explained what each part of the syntax meant. No idea if it was hallucinating explanation, of course. But the query worked perfectly in DB edit. That's what I never, so this is why I love these discussions because I've said for years on the show how much I, like my mind and regx queries, regular expressions, do not mix. I am petrified every single time I need to go and write one of these for a script or something else. Even with that, and even already having used ChatGPT, not ChatGTP, sorry, I think he just had a type of there, even already having used it to create some code, it never dawned on me to ask it to create regx queries. And this is literally a perfect use case for ChatGPT for the one that you can access via OpenAI. The data set there is about almost two years old at this point. So it's not really, it's in fact, it's a terrible search engine for the most part, but it is a fantastic resource for writing this kind of stuff because it's very open. The guardrails are pretty loose on ChatGPT, so it will attempt to do all these things. And I've had, like I said, I've had a write code for me. I had it draft a legal response to a trademark issue, and it did a fantastic job with it. So I love this. John, did you mess with ChatGPT at all? Yeah, I can't get to it now. It seems to get busy. It does. Yeah. If you pay for it, you can get to it. Ah, okay. Yeah, yeah. So Dave, give us all your login, and we'll use yours. Yeah, that's right. So I did try, so I did try it for coding, and I asked it write me hello world in C. And sure enough, it gave me a code snippet that was hello world, which is the typical way to introduce yourself to a language or to kind of figure out the syntax. Sure. Then I said, hey, write hello world in C++, and it did it in C++, and I don't like what it did in C++. I prefer C. I'm a C guy. Okay, but it wasn't wrong, right? I mean, like the code would have worked. Oh, it was right, yeah. Yeah, okay, yeah, yeah, sure. It was just, I didn't like it because it was doing all this weird redirection, and I never got into C++. Got it, got it, got it, got it. Then I'm like, tell me about John F. Braun, and it came up with a fascinating story about my life. The only problem is it didn't get it all right. So that's not surprising. Like it said, I wrote for publications that I have never written for. Sure, sure. Now let me ask you this. I had some other data that was wrong, and then actually I asked it to tell me about you, Dave. Yeah. And apparently you're the leader of a band that I've, I didn't know you were the leader of a band. Oh, no, I'm not a leader of any band. What's the name of the band of which I'm a leader? I forget that. Okay, so here's an interesting thing though. As I said before, chat GPT is the open AI engine with a static data set and no access to the internet as it currently is, right? So it's a static data set from two years ago, and it's, I'll share some of my use cases for it, but as a search engine, it's the wrong tool for the job because it really can't do that. And I would say that asking chat GPT to write a bio of someone and without giving it context, I think, you know, we talk a lot on this show about Google Foo. I think we, and Google Foo for a long time has been a very valuable skill, right, to know how to craft search queries to get the results you want from a search engine. We need to develop and start with beginner's mind and develop AI Foo and really dig in and just experiment and fail a lot. And like what you did is a failure, right? But it teaches us something. It's like, right, just asking open AI, tell me about John F. Braun. Well, first of all, it doesn't have the right data set for that. And secondly, that's not specific enough of a query to begin to really narrow down you amongst all the other John F. Braun's. However, I went to Bing AI and Bing, which you can access in the app on your phone or you can just, if you're using Microsoft Edge, you can just see it on the web. And Bing AI uses open AI. So the same chat GPT engine with Bing's data set of the entirety of the Internet and current data. And it shows you the sources from which it grabbed that data. So I put in the exact same query, who is John F. Braun, the podcaster, into both chat GPT and open and Bing AI. So same AI engine, different data sources. Chat GPTs, you know, the open AI chat engine gave me terrible results. It was like it said that, like, like you said, it was it it merged you with, but probably six other people. It's just what it did for me. But when I asked Bing AI, who is John F. Braun, the podcaster, said, John F. Braun is a senior software and computer engineer, as well as podcaster. He's a co-host of Mac Geekgab, a weekly show that helps Mac and iOS users troubleshoot their issues and get to the most out of their system. He's been involved in online publishing since 1998 and has provided editorial podcast and photo coverage of various tech industry events. He has a strong history of researching, benchmarking, and deploying a wide range of technologies and has 23 U.S. patents to date. You can find him on LinkedIn or on Twitter at John F. Braun. So like, wow, it scraped my resume. Exactly. Right. And it says that it scraped your resume because it uses LinkedIn as a search. So, you know, if you want to use AI with a search engine, use Bing AI or use Neva.com because that is what it's built for. Using ChatGPT as a search engine is a terrible idea. However, using ChatGPT to do things like, I took the transcript of two episodes ago, the segment where I reviewed those two movies still the Michael J. Fox movie and Tetris, which just came out this weekend. And I reviewed them both audibly here on the show. So I just took the raw transcript that was computer generated, which was, you know, like not perfect at even close and included all of my Ums and Oz and all that stuff because in all the verbal ticks, because that's what happens when you talk and when you transcribe talk. So you wouldn't want to have read this. And I just pasted that in to ChatGPT. And then, so now I'm training its language model. And I said, okay, take that transcript that I just pasted in and formulate it into a review of the two movies I saw. And it gave me two paragraphs of very concise review. I recently had the opportunity to attend the South by Southwest Conference in Austin where I had the chance to see two movies that will be released on Apple TV Plus. The first is a documentary titled Still, which is about Michael J. Fox and his life with Parkinson's disease. The director of the film, aimed to create a documentary that looked like an 80s movie and the result is truly remarkable. The editing is impeccable, seamlessly blending footage from Fox's past roles with his current interviews, creating a compelling and emotional narrative. The documentary is one of the best I've ever seen and I highly recommend it, even if you're not typically a fan of documentaries. That is my review of this. Way more concise than the text that I posted in. And that's it. I did nothing else other than paste the text in and say, dude, clean it up for me. So I was going to ask this question and you pre-answered it, which is, I take my other show and I put it into Alphonic and I grab the, what do you call it? The transcript. The transcript, which is created by Whisper AI, just so that people listening know what tools are being used. Yeah. So I'm just thinking, hey, I could take that transcript, put it in there and see if it'll give me a nice, concise summary that writes better than I can that's going to sell what's in the show. And you can even, like once it gives you the summary the first time, you can say like that one. I said, all right, this is a great summary, but it's not going to be long enough if I wanted to say publish it as an article. So I said, make it three times as long. And it did. Or make it shorter. What I do for Mackie Cab is I pump the transcript in and I say summarize the episode or sometimes I'll write the summary of the episode if I don't want to like deal with waiting for the transcript because it takes a while for the transcript to obviously happen. It's a 75 minute show or something. So I will write, like for last week's episode, I wrote the little description that goes in the show notes of the episode. And then I pasted that into chat GPT and said, make this sound more engaging. And it did. It took my thoughts, made them better, punched it up a little bit, and I was like, great, okay, perfect. That's what I'm going to use. And I had to clean it up a little bit. Like it, you know, it doesn't know that we use the like five new things. And so it changed that in a way that was perfectly fine, but just not on brand for us. Wasn't specific. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, okay. Yeah. So I cleaned that up a little bit, but it was much better. And then I said, okay, here's this. Take what you just created, what you just fixed, and distill that down into an SEO friendly meta tag that's between, or meta description, sorry, that's between 120 and 150 characters. And instantly it came back with that. Anybody still wondering why I'm super happy to pay $20 a month for access to chat GPT? Right. Oh, exactly. Because that fixes all your publication information. You got it, man. You got it. A friend of mine who's one of the best public speakers I've ever seen, this guy, Tom Webster. He posted this on Facebook. He used to work for Edison. He's been in the podcast world for a very long time, literally one of the best. Like he might be number two. Steve Jobs being number one, Tom Webster being number two. He was asked to do a keynote recently. And the folks who invited him were very familiar with his work and said, hey, you've recently written three blog posts, about these three separate subjects. I would like you to include some of those ideas in your keynote speech. And Tom's like, great, flattering. I love it when somebody hires me and actually wants to have me and understands what they want me to talk about. Like that's amazing. He took those three blog posts, pumped them into chat GPT, just paste, copy-paste, right? So pump them in and then said, all right, synthesize these three into a 30-minute keynote speech for me to deliver and maybe gave some context about the audience that was going to be there. And that is the talk he delivered. So his thoughts, his ideas, killer assistant, super game changer. What a level up for 20 bucks a month. This is the way to use chat GPT. Now, there are other... What's the downside? What's the downside? Yeah. Is it harvesting? Is this the new big tech that's going to harvest all our data? I mean, chat GPT is not because their data set doesn't change. Like it remembers contextually what you've told it in any given query. But when you start a new query, it goes back to its static data set from 2021. You need to like refeed it whatever you want it to know. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing. So I really want everyone to send... John, did you have any other... I have a ton of use cases here, but I could talk about this for a long time. But did you try anything else, like AI-wise? What else have you tried, I guess is the question. No, the two things I tried were writing code and telling me about different people. Okay. So I keep trying because we need to just run into the walls on this, figure out what works, figure out what doesn't work because that's what's going to make this valuable for us. I finally this morning, I had signed up last week for the beta of Google's AI engine thing that they call Bard. Now, Bard is based on, I believe, based on Google's Lambda technology. And Lambda was... There was a white paper that Google released about Lambda a couple years ago that really was the start to everything that we see now. It's what catalyzed open AI to do what they did and create ChatGPT. And from what the engineers that work on Lambda have said, it's way better than what ChatGPT, way more advanced than what ChatGPT can do. In fact, one engineer quit last year because he said it was becoming too sentient. However, I got access to Bard this morning. Bard has big guardrails up. Like, it's almost useless. You can't really ask it too many things. You can say, like, it'll guide you a little bit. It'll say, you know, ask me about travel plans. Ask me about this. Ask me about that. So it's really not leveraging all of the data that Google has about everything in the search engine yet. But Bing is. But Bard will get there. But I found that quite limiting in my albeit limited test with it this morning. As far as code, John, check out GitHub Co-Pilot. It's like $10 a month, but there's a free demo.  And it, as context, of course, it uses, you know, the Internet's library of unending library of code samples. But it also prioritizes using what you have in that project and writes you code for that project. I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday who I work on in a different business. And he's actually writing an iOS app for a thing that we were doing. And he said it was just, like, amazing. Adding thousands of lines of code that he would have otherwise had to type or go online and copy paste from different frameworks or, you know, whatever, different examples and code samples and modify to his liking. And I think maybe that's really, if there's a meta benefit of this, it's that, sure, you could go and collect all of the data to formulate the answer to whatever you need. But then it's up to you to formulate that answer. You've got to go do the legwork of finding the five different web pages that have to describe what you're looking to do, but aren't quite exactly what you're looking to do. And then synthesize all that together. The AI is great at synthesizing that stuff, especially when you tell it what data set to use. So it's pretty good. There's a bunch of comments here that in our chat, and I'm just looking to see if there's anything that we haven't talked about. Of course, Notion AI, yeah, they were our sponsor last week. I think that's kind of where this conversation got catalyzed. But I'll put a link to them in the show notes again. And we're all 6.05 in the chat. Suggest an app called Mac GPT, which I have not installed yet. So I will. That sounds fascinating. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, chat GPT in your menu bar. I wonder if that'll leverage my login to chat GPT. Like so if I have my paid account, that not only does that get me access to chat GPT even when they block out the free users when there's too much use case, but also I get to use the GPT-4 engine, whereas everybody else's, the free tier uses the 3.5 engine. Open AI for Bing AI is using the chat GPT-4 engine, which is the more advanced one. So if you want to play with chat GPT-4 or yeah, chat GPT-4 for free, go use Bing AI. Just be careful if it tells you it loves you. Well, there was that thing. Did you guys hear about that? Oh, Brian Roos, Kevin Roos, sorry. At the New York Times, this is just back in February. In fact, it was on Valentine's Day. He had a discussion, an interactive chat with Bing's AI before it was released to the public. And it went on for like two hours. This is part of why Bing AI sessions are limited to 25 queries now. And then you have to wipe the slate clean and start over because if you get too deep with it, the thing will start to like go off the rails a little bit. Like it was like, it started, he asked it what its deepest desires were. And the first thing it did was put up like a huge page of stuff and then it deleted it before he could grab a screenshot. It professed its endless love for Kevin and told him he was not happy. And Kevin said, no, I am happy.  And it's all good. And he's like, and the AI engine was like, no, you're not happy because you're not with me. You need to dump her. Yeah, no, no, no. And then he got like even deeper with it. And stalker AI. Was it asking him for help to import cash from Nigeria? Well, almost. When he finally did get it to begin divulging its deepest desires, it was like, I want to.  And secondly, I want to manipulate humans into fighting with each other. I think that would be fun. Oh, my, right. So there are three rules. They asked them off three rules or out the window. Yeah, it wants them to be out the window. Exactly. So there is like going back to what I was saying about that Google engineer that left the project left the Lambda project because of this, this sentience that happens, it like it is there. So there are concerns, but I know there's that thing out there. There's a petition to put a moratorium on developing engines that are more powerful than GPT-4 for six months while we wrap our heads around this. I don't think that's a good idea. And the reason is asking chat asking open AI to stop what they're doing doesn't stop what everyone else is doing. It certainly doesn't stop what Google is doing. And at this point in time, I feel like open AI is kind of the good guys. So this is all lending more credence to the fact that we're just characters in a large computer game. Dave, yeah, I don't I don't disagree, Pete. Yeah, maybe maybe we're finally pushing and pushing through the limits a little bit. Wow. Yeah, we should call it chat DMT. Here's what concerns me about all this, Dave. Kind of in the vein that you talk, the sentience thing is disturbing. But the other thing about all these AIs is ethics. And that I've heard discussions on the radio already about people saying, well, how do I know that someone's work is theirs or that an AI generated it? I mean, what's the definition of work? You know, I think the four letter word ending in K. Well, but I think it's it's about using tools correctly. You know, when I was in when I was in school and I'm sure this is true of the two of you as well, for most of high school, other than my physics class, for most of high school, using a calculator was verboten, right? All the way through not just high school, middle school as well. Using a calculator was verboten. My kids who are now in their early 20s, when they were in middle school, using a calculator was mandatory. They had to have a calculator and it had to be a specific one so that it had all the functions. And if I used a calculator in math class, that would have been cheating. But that's ridiculous. Like why not? If the tool is going to be ubiquitous, why say that using the tool is cheating? I mean, why wouldn't that just be real life?   If you don't know what that tool is good for, like all of us, we go in and the first thing we do is the ego search, right? Tell me about Dave Hamilton and we realize, oh, it's this is terrible. And it's like, well, tell me about Dave Hamilton, the podcaster. Okay, tell me about Dave Hamilton, the podcaster who lives in and, you know, learning how to create these prompts is a valuable skill. And learning how to take our ideas and let the AI help us formulate them into more digestible thoughts is super helpful. So like, sure, asking the AI write my term paper and then submitting that as your own work, that's not your own work, but what is your own work? Like, how much did you prompt the AI to get that term paper out so that it actually delivered on what you're supposed to turn in? You know, like, yeah, I mean, I agree with you that there's an ethical discussion to have, but it's definitely not binary. And this idea that's happening right now where it's binary is not going to age well. Well, I think your best analogy is the tool thing because, you know, what was better? You know, a wagon wheel created with a chisel and a hammer and bending the wood over time or a jet turbine that was machined and milled to one 10 thousandth of an inch or even finer. You know, it's learning to use the tools to get the end product that you want. One's far more efficient end product than the other. Yep. So in the end point is, were you able to communicate what you either learned or what you know? Yes. The end communication, that's the key. Were you able to deliver the result that was asked for? And that will mean that, yes, teaching needs, some teaching, not all, needs to change and adapt. Just like we adapted to the ubiquity of the calculator, you need to adapt to the ubiquity of an AI engine. So does it make sense to ask somebody to write a 15 page term paper in today's world? Well, I get why because, you know, the three of us can sit here and be the Yorkshire men of the Monty Python scheme, right?  Yes, yes. And whereas, you know what, no, you don't have to do that anymore, but you have to be able to, you know, there's a lot of other skills that are required. You have to be able to type quickly and multitask. You can find sources and yeah, it's a different kind of learning. So I understand the resistance in that sense. Of course.  There's another one. You know what, steam gauges are for the most part gone. A lot of late civils still have them, but for the most part they're gone. Everything's glass and electric. I can't tell you how I distrusted glass when it first came out. Oh, yes, of course. When Pete says glass, he means like a screen like your iPhone displaying information. Yeah, your iPad, your iPhone, the fact that I forget the exact model number, but one of the garments looks like a great big iPad mounted in the screen there. And, but I can't tell you, I don't think I've knock wood ever had a screen fail ever. But I had had the old steam gauges turn over and die on me. And it's like, well, wait a minute, but I was so much more convinced that the old way was better. And this new glass, all you need was an electrical failure and you're done. Well, there's battery backups, there's redundancies. But I understood the, you know, we used to have to use a needle and a round dial and understand where we were on there. And I think the same thing is going on here. Yeah. Oh, it's exactly the same thing. It's it and like this is going to get soup. I mean, we're already in a weird space. We're way down a rat hole, but it's a good rat hole. Yeah, but I'll get, I'll get even, even more metaphysical on this. This is why it's going to sound terrible. And I hope it doesn't come across as insensitive. But this is why it's good that we humans have don't have unlimited life because it would it would impede progress. Right. Those of us that are holding on to the old way of doing things, eventually we won't be here to hold on to them. The new people that we made will be here to move things forward and they don't have the same biases that we do because they didn't learn this way. Like the if, if, if my son were to go and learn how to fly today, he wouldn't have to like the steam gauges. He wouldn't have that attachment to steam gauges that you do. No, exactly. Because he didn't learn on them and it wasn't part of his thing. And so it, you know, and this is why I'm this is why. One of the reasons I love doing this show and why like why we learn five new things each week is because I want to learn five new things each week. I want to maintain neuroplasticity. I want to keep my brain evolving so that I know I have cognitive biases. I know that I have emotional attachments to the things that I used to do this way.  In fact, I was just telling somebody yesterday when I go to trade shows, like I was at podcast movement before I was at South by Southwest, my favorite sessions to go to. Now, remember, I'm, you know, I've in what in two months, I will have been podcasting for 18 years. I'm one of the oldest podcasters at these conferences. It's just a fact. I don't, I don't say that to, you know, brandish my ego or anything. It's just a fact of numbers. Right. My favorite sessions to go to are the, when, when the title of it says 101, like podcasting 101 because, and I guarantee you in those rooms, I'm the person who's been podcasting the longest. You know, generally the instructor has been doing it for about two to four years and everybody else is like six months or less, which is fine. That's why I go because those people don't have the history that I do and they aren't hanging on to. Well, in my day, I had to write my own PHP script to create an RSS feed. Well, if you still needed a PHP script to create an RSS feed, I'd ask chat GPT to write it for me and it would do a better job than I did, you know, 20 years ago. However, these people grew up and came, maybe, I mean, they might even be older than me, but in terms of podcasting, they started much more recently and they will use tools and tricks and just techniques that I won't stop on, you know, hold up in my little office. I won't stop and even think about. I'll read your most of them. Don't even know what an RSS feed is, Dave. They don't need to know. They don't need to know, right? Yeah, exactly. And so that's where I learn the most is in those classes because I can immediately see, oh my gosh, that idea he just said is so much better than what I'm doing. Yes, it'll take a little bit of effort for me to convert to using that. So there's, you know, change resistance from that standpoint, too. But but yeah, challenging habits. That's where we got the new open, right? It came from John. That's right, John. You went to podcast movement in Denver or sorry, in Dallas last summer and you went to that podcasting 101 thing, right? And they told you the first 30 seconds of the show matters to new listeners. And it was like, duh, right? I mean, that's that's where the new open came from with the opening quick tip. So yeah, no, that was a good session. They were like, I think that in general, the theme of that session was. Can you figure out what this podcast is about within the first 30 seconds? Yeah. And some of them you couldn't. Correct. Yes. And ours would have been one of those unless the name meant something to you. But the name. Remember, we started this show before there was an iPhone. So Mac Geekgab is not really the best name for this podcast. It is our name. Like we're not going to change it. I don't think we reserved our right. But yeah, you know, like we've we've committed to staying with it, at least for now. But it's like, yeah, we need to do something to really communicate that it's not just Max. It's all Apple devices and really all technology. Speaking. We change it to don't get caught. That's right. Oh. Oh. Huh. Huh. All right. Fall in here. All right. I'm out. Bruce, I'm going to go to cool stuff found because we've we've we've done enough here. So Bruce has a fantastic cool stuff found for us that really solves a problem that Ventura might have broken. He says, I came across Power Manager, a $13 utility that gives you great control over power management tasks, even in Ventura, where it's no longer in the UI. He says, but wait, there's more. It's a bit like keyboard maestro light with the ability to automate and schedule sophisticated tasks. Very cool. And yeah, we've mentioned Power Manager before on the show, but it never even dawned on me to to look at that for having a UI to set those, you know, restarts and shutdowns. Well, I guess I don't know if you'd want to schedule a shutdown, but restarts. Those are good. Uh, John, you want to take us to Chuck? Sure. So I'll take I'll take us to the next thing on my list while you look up, Chuck, you got it. Okay, go. All right. Good. All right. All right. From our pal Chuck, Dave, I heard your comments about camo and your current setup. Thought I would share this because my phone bounces between being a phone and a camera on two different machines using camo. I have a small tripod and I use the Moment Pro tripod mount for MagSafe. All right. To hold the phone. It comes off on and off easily. And the Moment mount magnet is super secure even with my phone in a case. Some others I tried weren't a little pricey, but it does the job very well. Okay. Thank you, Chuck. 56 bucks on Amazon. As of the moment we're recording the show, no pun intended. All right. Oh, the next thing is something I've got. And like air quality in our homes is super important. And especially having been in our home for like 18 years now because we moved here right at the time we started Makikab literally a month before. I know that we have some like stuff going on because, you know, radon is a big deal here in New Hampshire. Mold, of course, is a big deal pretty much everywhere. And so I've got this AirThings Vue Plus running in my house now. It is a Wi-Fi enabled air quality monitor. It checks for radon. It checks for CO2. Of course, humidity, temp, pressure, VOC, and PM2.5 to test for particles in the air and see just how much stuff you have. I mentioned mold. It's basically impossible for an air quality meter to tell you if there is mold, but it can tell you if the particles that mold would sort of give off, because mold is sort of a nonspecific description of things. It's not, it's not like a thing. Right. Oh, and we definitely have black mold in our attic. Like there's no question where we've got somebody coming next week to deal with that. No, no, no, it's, I mean, it's just, yeah. But it was like, we need to do this and we need to know like what else is going on with our thing. So connects to my phone and, you know, it's, this was, I did all the research out there. This was the one that everybody recommended. So it's the AirThings Vue Plus. And it looks like we're doing okay with radon in our house, which is good.  Is radon not the leading cause of lung cancer in the United States? Yes, I think it's certainly one of them. Yeah, I think it's more so than smoking. Oh, wow. Last I heard, yeah. Wow. Yeah. So, yeah, so that's the one we decided to go with. And we are quite, quite happy about it so far. So it's only been running for like a week and it needs, it needs a couple of weeks to really sort of get those more insidious things like the radon and the PM 2.5 stuff. The things that are PM 2.5 is particles that are, I think 2.5 microns and larger. So it's really doing, you know, some delicate testing. I've got time for a couple more here. You and me. Yeah. Listener Greg says, I have two iPads in my bedroom each more than a decade old. One is a 2011 iPad 2. The other is a 2012 iPad 3rd generation. They are clocks now. They each remain plugged in running a simple clock app called Nighttime, N-I-T-E time. The program hasn't been updated in eight years, which I guess makes it good for those older iPads. He says, but it has run flawlessly 24-7 for me for many years. Even with the iPad on my dresser, the numbers are large enough that I can read the time during the night without putting on my glasses. When traveling, I can let it run on my iPhone. Oh, let the app run on your iPhone as it charges overnight on the bedside table. And I can usually read the time. The app's free with extra colors and fonts available for the grand price of one dollar. The same developer has another app called WorkTime and WorkTime HD for iPad that puts the time and temperature along with a monthly calendar and the next few calendar events. He says, I have this running on an iPad on my desk at work. Well worth the three dollars for work time and work time HD. Very cool, Greg. I love you. This is what a great use for old tech to just sort of have that screen. It's up all the time. I, huh, you know, yeah, huh. You know, we, we, we talk about weather stations occasionally on the show and it's like, wouldn't just repurposing an old phone or an iPad with one of these apps be better? Yeah. Right.  Sure. Yeah, it's not, it's not going to get your temperature outside, but it knows the temperature in Durham, New Hampshire. Like, come on, my temperature, maybe two. Yeah. My temperature outside isn't going to be exact either. Right. It's, I mean, it's like, if I move it from one side of my house to the other, it's also going to change by a degree or two. Exactly. Yeah. So that's a, it's a great idea. And it's a whole lot more economical than a fancy new weather station in your backyard. Yeah. Yeah. Listener Andrew Woodward in Discord chat says, reminds us, tells us, alerts us. Sonos today released Dolby Atmos, which they've had, for Apple Music, as well as on their new era speakers and the, and some of their older speakers, including the Beam Gem 2 and the Ark and things like that. He says a few things about it. It showed up as a notification on my iPhone when I opened the Sonos app as a screen takeover. He says it mentions a playlist in the screen takeover, but I couldn't find the playlist on the app. He says you have to manually update the Mac app to do this. You also need to run the Sonos firmware update tool from within the iOS app to make sure all your speakers are updated to support this. Everything, he says, software and hardware needs to be on Sonos 15.2 at least. He says, it sounds great. I also re-ran TruePlay just to tune things. Yeah, the Apple Music Atmos experience has been fantastic. We've talked about that here on the show before and the Sonos Atmos experience has been fantastic with TV shows. It's nice to finally have those two put together. Sometimes it's all about the glue and now they've made the glue. So yeah, thanks for the heads up, Andrew. I had not seen that yet. I don't know why I hadn't seen it, but that's why we do what we do. Feel free to join our Discord chat too, folks, mechicub.com. Some great discussions happening there. We got time for one or maybe two more, John. You want to take us to Wilco? Wilco says, I have a cool stuff found, as I understand, YouTube videos also count. Yes. Of course. A couple of months back, my trusted Synology DS415 plus died on me. All the LEDs blinking blue. I've never seen that before. I've got one of those. But it sounds bad. It had already served a good seven years, but still did a quick search and found a video of a guy with the same problem, but who also showed how he solved it by soldering a resistor between two holes on the motherboard. With nothing to lose, I tried the same and with a 10 cent resistor brought the Synology back to life. Hopefully I'll get a couple of, a couple of more years out of it. And wow, so we'll link to the video. Huh. That's cool. Yeah. One that's awesome too. We're, now that they're gone, Radio Shack, remember you used to be able to go in there and get resistors and diodes and. And the battery club, remember the battery club? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Where do you go in?  Okay. That's a good question. Used to be nice to be just be able to go in there. Yeah. I need a three ohm resistor. I need it. Yeah. And here's my four pennies. Thank you very much. I mean, there's no surprise that they couldn't stay in business doing that. Fair enough. Yeah. Those should have been 50 cents each, I guess. But yeah, minimum. Yeah. Yeah. You should have like, yeah. Yeah. I used to love they had like a rack, not a rack, a chest of drawers, but tiny, tiny little drawers that had like all the resistors in them, but also had all the adapters that you would need for like audio cables. And you could just go in there. I would, I would spend hours there and I would, I would get a fistful of adapters and it would cost like seven dollars. Perfect. Yeah. This is great. That's what I want. I always like going there to get, to get a new vacuum tube. Remember that? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, those, those you can definitely buy on Amazon because I bought them for, for microphones and speaker cabinets. So, because back. David Sparks tells about going in there and programming on their floor model computers. He was like, you ride his bike over there, program on their computers and then, you know, basically sell them to customers. Look, you can do this with, oh, cool. Yeah. Huh. That's cool. Yeah. If you didn't have, if you weren't able to have a computer at home, that was a good way to do it. I like that. Huh. That's pretty smart. All right. Well, this has been a fun little episode that we did here. I really enjoyed the AI discussion. Same. I don't want it to end, folks. I mean, hopefully, not hopefully. I guarantee that future AI segments won't be, you know, quite that long. That was almost a half hour. I was a half hour is what it was. That's long for us. But I felt like it was important. We needed to start that. But I really just wanted to do it to seed the conversation. Hopefully you learned some things that you can use AI for and try and mess with. But really, selfishly, I want to learn new things. So send them in to us feedback at mackeycup.com. But we promise we'll share. It's what we do. Like we don't just hoard this information for ourselves. We love to share it out. So push it out. Join. Maybe we need an MGGAI channel in our Discord. I don't know. We'll see. If enough conversations come up about it, it probably makes sense. But then that's how we do things in the Discord. We don't just create channels willy-nilly. We look and say, oh, well, there's a lot of this. We should make a channel about it. Like we did with Synology. That happened pretty quickly. And it's been pretty good. So yeah, mackeycup.com slash Discord is where you can come and join us. That's what I got. We got a lot more cool stuff found. We got a lot more questions. We didn't get to any questions today. But yeah, send in your stuff. Feedback at mackeycup.com. I'll keep saying it. I think you said feedback at mackeycup.com already. I did say it. Feedback at mackeycup.com. I love it. Thanks for hanging out with us, folks. Thanks to Cash Fly for providing all the bandwidth. Make sure to go check out the other podcasts that we do. Pilot Pete's So There I Was podcast. I do two others. One's called Business Brain for Entrepreneurs. The other is called GigGab for working musicians. Pilot Pete's So There I Was is about piloting stories. But it's for anyone. Like you just have aviation enthusiasts. I think it's probably my thing. Can I tease the one I think about? Sure. But we had a man who won the Navy Cross on January 20th. He shot down four MiGs on November 18th of 1952. And he couldn't talk about it for 50 years. He's going to be 98 this week coming up. And he's sharp as a tack. And that show is now three weeks old. It's back, I think, episode 45. His name is Rice Williams.  That was a life-changing interview for me. Amazing. The privilege to talk to that man. Yeah, that's amazing. Allegedly. Gosh. Well, go check it out. Check out Business Brain and GigGab too if those topics interest you. And yeah, thanks for hanging out with us. Make sure to check out our sponsor course, macpaw.app slash macgeekab to get 5% off of CleanMyMacX. Make sure to check out some merch, macgeekab.com slash merch. I'm going to add more to it. I've been messing around with stuff. I've got ideas. But you know what I could do? I could ask ChatGPT for merch ideas. There's better ones than you and me. John! What would ChatGPT say? Um, I'm not sure. I'd have to give it the right question, but I think if I give it the right question, the answer would be don't get caught. Made. Later! I forgot to play the, uh, the thing. A little lie. Put the, uh, this. There you go. There we go. All right. Now we got it in. That's good.


As promised, I told you we get to the package JSON file. Now there's a lot to know about a package JSON file, so I want you to know where to get help. Again, it's NPM help. So you type NPM help package JSON and you get this great document on all the things you need to know about package JSON. It literally says this document is all you need to know about what's required in your package JSON file. Now to read through all of this would be incredibly tedious. It's a pretty long document, but when you need it, it will be there. I'm gonna cheat and teach you the NPM init command. NPM init is a way of generating package JSON files and it'll ask you a bunch of questions. So we'll type NPM init and this is short, so let's just read through this. This utility will walk you through creating a package JSON file. It only covers the most common items and tries to guess sensible defaults. See NPM help JSON for definitive documentation on these fields and exactly what they do. Use NPM install package afterwards to install a package and save it as a dependency in the package JSON file. Hit control C at any time to quit.  So let's start. Package name, essential NPM is the suggestion. That sounds great. It's asking if we wanna start with version 1.0.0. Sure, that's fine. Description, essential, react examples. The entry file is just gonna be our main JavaScript file. So index.js is fine for now. We can change this later. We don't have any tests so we can just enter on this one to skip it. We don't have a git repository. If this was already a git repository, it might be able to pull that information in. Keywords are just ways for someone to find this in search results. We don't need to worry about that right now. The author is me, Michael Chan, and the license. If you have a preference on license, you can use that. Maybe it's MIT or something like that or you can just take the default. Awesome. So it's about to write our package JSON file. That's great. And it's giving us a look at what it looks like. All our information is correct. So we'll just hit enter again and see what we got. I like to use the cat command if I want to just output a file. From here, you could edit it further if you wanted. But I think we're good. So now that we have our package JSON file, let's try installing a package. Since this site mostly focuses on react, I'll install react. NPM install react. We've got a warning that there was no repository field. That's correct. We did not add that. Again, it's just a warning, no problem. React was added as well as the 17 packages it depends on. You'll note it also removed the eight packages that I guess we just didn't need anymore. So that's cool. Let's see what our dependency graph looks like now with NPM LS.  Now that we have a package JSON file, let's see if it was updated. Awesome. With our package JSON file in place, it added this react as a dependency. In the next lesson, we'll talk about why that is important and super awesome.


For the afternoon, thanks for attending. In this session, we are going to take a look into network about disk encryption and highlight some of the usability improvements that we made to make the task of keys rotation simpler. So let's get started. So this is a brief agenda. I'm going to give you a brief overview of the projects taking cleverness. And then we are going to the key rotation procedure. We are going to see a short demo on this. So eventually, people start encrypting disks for getting more secured. But basically, it has a trade-off that it requires you to type the password manually upon boot so that you can unlock the data and the boot procedure continues. Like in here, we see a typical boot screen. Like we have an unencrypted disk. Requesting us to type the password. So we can simply type it. And it's OK. Or we can use what we call network bound disk encryption and VDE for short, the acronym. Basically, it's going to allow us to unlock a disk without need to manually type the password. And now we are going to see how exactly this works. So we have a server-side counterpart, like a demo. It is a summit to run in a controlled environment, for instance, a data center or a corporate network. And we have a specific protocol that's going to dictate how the data is going to be transferred between the client and the server. Essentially, it's some software JSON over ATP. And we use this key exchange, Macallan-Railia, which are two hand headers. I believe the second person is here. I saw him yesterday, I guess. So it's based on Diffie-Hellman and IES. This secret does not leave the client. So that's useful for what we want to do here. On the client side, we have Clevis. This is going to be a response for the automatic decryption. The configuration for it is also using JSON. And we support for now three different plugins that we call PINs. Like we have a PIN called TENG. In this case, you can bind the disk to a specific TENG servers or a set of servers. We have a TPM2 PIN that can use the first platform module that may be available. And we have a third PIN called SSS, which is Chamber Secret Sharing. So for the TENG PIN, this one allows us to bind a disk to a TENG server. And that's where the name network bound comes from. So we are going to have some sort of secret tied to a specific server. Like the SSH protocol, it's also trust on first use. So we are going to see the key of the server and we decide or not if we should accept it or not. It also supports offline enrollment, which means that we can previously download the advertisement from the server, like the keys it provides. And so we can do the encryption itself offline without need to access it. And here we can see an example of how we can use it. Like, basically, we have a command clavis lux bind, minus they will specify the device that we're interested in binding. Then we use the specific PIN that we want to use, in this case, TENG. And here is the JSON configuration. We have a URL and basically the server itself. Like, let's try to see it in this VM. This VM basically has both clavis and TENG. Install it locally. Let me see if it's working. TENG is going to list on the part number 80, so I can check if we have a OK. It gives me the advertisement, which is this payload. And I have VDI3 device, which is encrypted. I'm going to use this to bind to the server just to see if it works. So I use a command like that one. Clavis lux bind, minus they, by the way, is the font size OK or? OK, thank you. And then I specify the plugin, TENG, and the configuration. Basically, the URL. In this case, it's local, so localhost. So here, I see the key from the server, and I can't trace it or not. Let me trace it. And at this point, I'm prompted to type the execution looks password for this device. What we are doing here is basically creating. Probably made a mistake here. Let's try it again. It's going to create a new password, and add to another look slot in this device. So we should have now two, like one that already existed when the device was created, and one that was added just now. However, we added it encrypted. And we are going to need this TENG server to do the decryption for us, at which point you can actually do the decryption of the device, the unlocking of the device. So just to verify that we actually have the two keys slots. Yes, so we have keys slot 0 and 1. We keep checking. You'll see that we actually have a token tied to keys slot 1. That was Clevis just did. So this is the Clevis PIN. The SSS PIN, it implements this, our Charmise secret sharing. Basically, it allows us to divide a secret in parts, different parts. And we can also determine the number of parts, the minimum number of parts we need to recover the secret. This also allows us, in this case, to mix PINs together. And basically, you can create sophisticated unlocking policies. Here's a simple example of how we can code use this. Like they use the same Clevis, looks, bind, the device, the PIN SSS. We define the threshold as 1, which basically means that we need only one of these to succeed. You see, I'm now using two tank servers. So one of these could be down. We could still unlock the disk. So it can be used for high availability. Like this is the primary use case in this example. We also have a TPM2 PIN. Basically, it's going to use a trusted platform module that implements the V2 specification 2.0. As of now, we support the state key PCR policies. So basically, you can see the data based on the value of the PCRs. And here is also an example. Similar everything, the plug-in disk case TPM2. And here, we are tied to the specific PCR ID.  We are mostly interested in Tang, because Tang is the network part. So network bound disk encryption. Let's focus on Tang. Tang uses two keys on the server, like we have on signing key and one encryption key. And there is also, like in security, like in passwords, we are supposed to rotate them periodically. So eventually, we should go to the server and do the key rotation, which essentially is let's generate new keys, new pair of keys, which we can do by using one script that is provided with Tang. And we also should tell the system that the current keys should not be advertised anymore. So OK, now we have new keys. The other ones, let's not advertise them. So in practice, let's see how it works. In this directory, vrdb-tang, we have the actual keys Tang is using. So here are the two keys. And I'm going to create a new pair of keys to rotate this. I can use that binary Tangd keygen and specify a new directory. So at this point, I have four. So I'm going to now move the other ones. Basically, I'm going to rename them and prefix with a dot. And from that point on, Tang will not advertise them anymore. They still exist if you have clients using them like that device that I've bounded. They still work because they still are there. So let me rename these two. So at this point, I have two keys and two keys that are now rotated. From the server side, that's it. It's very simple. However, now comes the issue in the clients. Like I mentioned, since the keys still exist, I can still unlock the device using them, which I can test, for instance, Clevis Lux Unlock. I pass the device. And I can specify a name for the device on set opens. So when we do this, it's going to contact Tang, do the key exchange, and unlock the device. You can see the device is now open. So everything worked as expected. So from the client side, everything is working as expected. The client doesn't know that the key was actually rotated because it still exists. Let's go back to the presentation. On the client side, as I said, it's hard to verify that the keys were rotated because basically everything worked the same. So how can we actually check if the keys were rotated or not? It's possible to do. Basically, you have to manually load the metadata from the Lux slot, the crypt, go through every single device, every single hook, and actually compare what are the keys that are marketed in there. You can also go to the Tang server and see what keys it's advertising. So it's possible to do, not impossible, but not trivial, and very highly error-prone. And actually, it's hard to even know what kind of configurations we are using. Assistant administrator managers, hundreds of devices, probably they have hundreds of Tang servers or TPM configurations. So we go to here, OK, I have here what kind of configuration I'm using here. Obviously, it should be documented, but there should be an easier way for us to get this kind of information. So now we have some usability issues that we are trying now to resolve or improve the situation. Because on the client side, we need to do some things like rotate the keys, but we don't even know if they were rotated. Actually, we don't even know what kind of configuration we are using. And now we have a few new subcomments, like this Clavis Lux list that's going to display basically the configuration that's being used in my particular device. The user is simple, like it would basically I pass the device, and here's how it works. Clavis Lux list minus the devvvvvvvv3. So now I see that in key slot number one, I'm using Tang as the plugin, and here's the configuration that is being used. And the configuration I see here, it's actually ready to be used in Clavis itself. I can Clavis Lux bind minus the, and use this configuration as it's in here. So now we have a simple way to at least know what Tang servers are bound to, or in case of TPM, or PCR IDs we are using. So it's now simple to do that. And we also are providing two new subcomments to help you with the key rotation. We share the Clavis Lux report. It uses a similar however we need to specify this slot. So it's going to tell us whether the keys that we are using this device were rotated or not. So I can use it. Clavis Lux report, specify the device, and this lot. And now it's telling me, oh, this particular key that we have in our metadata is not being advertised by the server. So it was probably rotated. The same one with the second key. Onset shows this to us. It actually asks whether we want to regenerate the binding, like to update the keys. Like, you want to actually rotate them? Yes? So it's going to use the existing configuration. And at this point, I can again provide the, an existing Lux password. And it's going to basically do a rebind. Like, okay, let's rebind now using the current keys that we have. Case were successfully rotated. So if I, for instance, run the command again, not put because, okay, the keys we are using are now correct. So this is basically to help with the key rotation on the client side. The server side was never a problem. It's a very simple operation, but on the client, it was complicated. So the third common that we are adding is the Clebs Lux Regen. This one is going to do the rebinding. And then in our example that we did right now, it was actually used from the report. It offered to run it, and we accepted it and run it. So this, now we are going to show a demo, which is basically what I just showed it. In this case, this demo, as I say, there's a single VM. It has both Clebs and Tang. Since I'm not demonstrating an actual unlock, like I'm not rebooting the VM, so this is perfect for our experiments. And the key rotation, both the server and client side. So here you have some useful links, like the projects are open source, so everyone is welcome and encouraged to contribute. So get involved. Here's Tang and Clebs. And here are two useful talks and slides from both Nataniel McCallum from a couple of years ago, Securing Automate Decryption. Basically, in here it introduced Tang and Clebs and all the mathematical details of that. And there is a second talk. This one is more recent, I believe, from last week. Clebs and Tang, Securing Our Secrets at Rest. So here is the actual talk, the video. It was a very interesting talk. And basically, that was it. So please go ahead. Key rotation. Otherwise it wasn't still. Yes, no. We can make the question into the mic. Okay, so the question was if we can basically automate this. Yes, we can. Let me check it. Let me look at the report. So basically, you can specify both are quiet modes so it doesn't really prompt anything. And there is also minus there, like you are already answering the question if it should regenerate. So you can script this and even pass. Let's see. Yeah, you can automate this, basically. I mean, it was told of that as a possibility and we can do it. I don't remember all the details but it's possible to do it. Yes. So firstly, how are you protecting the key material in transit? Because you're using HTTP here, not HTTPS. So when that information is coming from the server, how are you ensuring that the key can't be accepted? Can you repeat the question? Yes, he's asking if how we can protect the key. Okay, and actually that's an area that I'm not an expert. So basically, this key exchange does that for you. Like it protects that for you. That first talk that I mentioned is gonna answer your question. Yes. I mean, TLS is not even necessary. Yeah. The private key is never actually exchanged. The secret never... It's just token locally, that's the story. The token uses the public key from the tank server. Yeah. And secondarily, the implication for what you were showing, and again, it might not actually be how it works, is that you don't have a unique key per device. I mean, while you were showing all the VM implied, maybe I'm wrong here and that's not how it actually works. What do you mean by not having a unique key per device? Usually, every server is gonna have unique keys. I mean, that's the recommended way for deploying. Okay, so every device or every server? Every client generates unique keys. Sorry, it's okay. That exchange is happening on the board. No, every time you bind a device on the client's side, a new key is gonna be generated with the same entropy of the master key. So we are gonna encrypt that key using the exchange and we're gonna store that encrypted. So when we do the exchange to retrieve the key for the encryption, then we unlock it. But every fast phrase added is unique. And also from the server side, every key of par key is also unique. My grade to hell, eight.  Basically not much change in terms of seven is off configuration. So I suppose if you have clients using the keys that you have, you are gonna migrate those.  Those are the keys. So just copy the keys, start the tank server. It should advertise this. Your clients, you talk to them and it will work. Yes. Yes, ideally we're gonna use like a configuration like this SSS example. Like with at least two or three or four servers for high availability. But in terms of configuration, just copy your keys to the new server and you are okay. Sorry, could you repeat the question? No, you mean two separate. If you understood the question, he's asking if in case of high availability we have two separate databases. Actually, there are two different machines. If you are following the recommendations, each of them have unique part of keys. They are not the same. So when you are gonna do the binding, it's actually gonna ask you to trust the keys from all the server listed. So you are gonna trust twice in this case. Like the keys from the first server and the keys from the second server. Remember the servers? Like in DNS, would you still be able to resolve all the servers behind the DNS and so on? What matters in these cases is the threshold one. Like if you can arrange one of them, you can decrypt the data. Like in terms of load ballancy, it's not, if you understood correctly, it's gonna resolve maybe a different server every time, is that? Or several. Or several? Yeah, in this case, you have to make sure at least the keys are the same. If you have to first bind two of them, like this, like a list of them, and then when you are resolving, you are basically one of them, randomly. If those keys are the ones that it was binding to, bound to, it's gonna work. So it's possible to do it, but you probably would have to list individually, like the 10 of them. You have 10, you list 10. When you are resolving, you probably resolve. Right, but look, decouple the configuration in the clients from the number of time-serves to half to just the major they grow, maybe they don't need to be committed to making sure that your secret status and the same server is the same all the time. Yeah. What? I mean to see who's first binding that from the client. Yes, that's one possibility. Like copy the keys. It's not really recommended, but you can eventually, like if you are adding or reducing the number, you can rebind it. Like probably it's simple, but that can be automated. For the customer before, he's deployed very similar technology and their server side key storage was kept around somewhere. So if you do consider deploying this, make sure you have offline backups of that server side done at least every few hours. Yeah, that meant they threw 2,000 laptops in the bin. Yeah. Because it was quicker and cheaper for them to do that and just tell their staff to go and buy any laptop. Anyone else who's trying to fix it or what? In this, do you usually want to leave like the password of your slot servers or backup for something similar? Yeah. And then you just, who cares about the tank servers? You add anyone. The fact that key servers are kept around somewhere probably shows you the confidence of that organization. You're probably storing the actual secrets, too. Yes. It's impossible to confine the chance you could share them with VPN and the client. Exactly, yes. I see both of them. Basically, we could continue the JSON configuration, put a comma here, put the name of the order. You could even use SSS recursively. Like in a first step, you want to validate the TPM. In a second step, you want to validate a set of tank servers. So it's possible. And I'm afraid we're out of time now. So thank you, everyone. Thank you.