It's time for Mackie Gab and listener Ufasa comes to us with our quick tip of the week saying I just found out that if I hover over a corner or edge of a window and see the little arrows the ones that would let you drag or you know to resize the window get to that point and then double click it will expand the window to the edge of the screen depending on where you click so if you click on the top edge goes to the top right edge goes to the right the top right edge goes to the top right more quick tips like this plus your questions answered today on Mackie Gab 981 for Monday May 15th wait a minute by 15 out of my brain on the 5 15 2023 greetings folks and welcome to Mackie Gab the show where we take your tips like the one that Ufasa sent in and share them we take your cool stuff out and share them we take your questions that you send in your questions and we try to answer them right here on the show we string it all together into an agenda to make a little sense of it but also to ensure that we reach our goal it's more of a system where we make sure every single one of us learns at least five new things every single week when we get together sponsors for this episode include private internet access we're at piavpn.com slash mgg you can save 82% off your VPN service plus four free months BB edit is our second sponsor for this episode my favorite text editor it's open right now on my computer because it's always open on my computer we'll talk more in depth about both of those things a little bit later here in the show for now here in Durham New Hampshire I'm Dave Hamilton and here back in Fairfield Connecticut this is John of Brom it good and talk from corn Germany it's pilot Pete great to be back with you guys and I got to say that quick tip you just shared instantly in my workflow right right yeah like I need my fingers to learn that because like I want to be able to do it all the time I tried it a couple times and now I'm doing I found myself just doing it yesterday naturally yeah yeah that's great that's great alright John you got to you got a quick tip from listener Jim I think yes we do so Jim says in your most recent episode we talked about smart folders for Apple music that got me to thinking of something I've been doing in the photos that might be helpful to others who like me insist on having albums for all of their major trips and events yeah I gotta keep up with that man same same going through going through old photos is sometimes painful because it's like which one do I get rid of yeah and if you don't get rid of it then you're gonna consume all space which is what computers do so anyways I create a smart folder for each year to identify all of the photos that are not in an album the folder parameters are that the photo is not in an album and that it falls within a year specific one January through 31 December date range one for each year in my photos library collection I then periodically review that smart folder and move the photos that should be in an album to the appropriate place that makes sure that I always have all the photos I want in a specific album in the right place that's probably an obvious thing really um but it sure saves me a lot of trouble huh yeah okay like I this solves that problem that that you just articulated John where it's like I gotta go through things by not by by showing that but that's smart album and having the key of it not being in any other album is effectively I mean it's an unfiled photos album right I love this that's actually pretty cool I hadn't thought of doing that I mine are you know our photos generally speaking are in chronological order okay yeah yeah that's where my photo albums up yes you have some that are weirdly you know 15 years out of sync it's like no wait a minute there's no you know my son was 17 at the time there's no way that you know here it is 10 years later yeah and he was five right right right 12 years later do the math but you know but yeah so but that's pretty cool I'm gonna play with that a little bit yeah I like this idea this is good yeah I so um yeah knowing the the other thing that you mentioned knowing which ones to delete I find that my iPad is the right device for me to triage photos and I have it on my calendar to do it once a month for the previous month because that way it's not too overwhelming but my iPad because the screen is it's bigger than my phone so I can actually see some detail there like like I could on my laptop or certainly on my you know desktop or whatever but being able to touch the pictures and like moving around like that user experience on a larger screen than a phone but still with the touch interface is really the right way because I can just swipe back and forth really easily and see okay I took four pictures here yeah two of them are crap two of them are great alright delete delete good to go but then once I'm done with that going through and like filing them this is the great tip I wish there were and I know apples like apples got ways and my guess is with more and more you know AI or machine learning or whatever we want to call it like it will get better at saying okay here's the 16 photos that are basically the same thing pick you know let me help you pick the ones that you should keep and we'll jettison the rest like you know get rid of the blurry ones that's got kind of I'm curious how you folks do this because I think they all they clearly all three of us like this resonated with all three of us instantly so I think this is you we always say we put things in the show that hit the 20% rule that that by and by that I mean it's relevant to at least 20% of you folks listening right I think this one probably hits the 90% rule or at least the 70% rule absolutely so I'm curious how you folks do this feedback at mackeygab.com let us know post in discord at mackeygab.com slash discord I'm certain he just said feedback at mackeygab.com no no no no no he said feedback at mackeygab.com interesting interesting now just put keyword managing on the iOS devices so we can do that with photos that's that's asking for too much I'm sure nitpicking isn't it yeah I know I know I love me some keywords yeah yeah it helps yeah for sure all right you got a quick tip from Martin Pete oh I'm coming I'm coming okay we've moved our workflow from ever ever note to notes if you hear some hiccups here that's why I'm I'm not happy about notes though because there's no obvious easy way to export notes I can export as a PDF but that's not what I would want if I want to move to a different notes app I want to be able to export in like any ex format so I need to see if there's like clearly there could be an apple script that someone's written to do that I just just briefly uh porthos john mentioned something and now I don't see it in discord I'll have to go back to it he he mentioned a notes app that he likes so okay look back at that in a second but so I found it I'm sorry I just was uh behind the obsidian he says um so no I wait wait wait we're going to we're going to have this conversation there's no way that I'm moving to some obscure note taking app I got thought a lot about this this is and I actually had a conversation with one of you a listener called me this week we have this conversation if if I am going to store just like with mail I don't but mail is a little different because mail is now all imaps so you could use some obscure mail client and not risk losing access to your stuff you just have to move to a different client right I got he what he said when he initially said is hey this stores it in markdown still custom format right like I if I'm going to use a note taking app it's either going to be the one that apple provides so that when operating system updates happen they are likely in fact almost guaranteed to be up to date unless they just jettison notes right so it's either going to be apples or it's going to be the market leader which of course is evernote and evernote doesn't work for us anymore because they don't support apple script so this is why it became notes I like I thought a lot about this I don't want to use some as good as any of these other solutions might be if it's developed by a you know solopreneur or a small development team or something you could get left hanging I left hanging the other option would be Microsoft one note although Microsoft has been known to leave people hanging to despite being a very very large company but I don't think they're going to leave one note hanging I think enough people use it so maybe one note is the the option here right yeah so anyway this is that there are thoughts that go through Dave's brain right there we go so all right well we're off of that detour now and then back which which I created by the way I don't know it's a good one yeah so we got a quick tip from Martin and he writes you probably already mentioned it but I thought I'd send it anyway rather than having to go to settings to connect to bluetooth devices you can go to the control center and long press on on the rectangle containing the bluetooth icon this brings the whole rectangle forward including cellular wi-fi personal hot spot etc long press the bluetooth icon and it brings up the list of bluetooth devices you've connected in the recent past touch the device you'd like to connect to like wireless earbuds and it connects the same goes for the wi-fi icon much faster than having to go find the settings icon open it scroll down to the used it that's the second one like the like the first one in the show opener I have used that all week long and I'm loving it yeah very cool Martin thank you yeah yeah pretty much anything in control center if you hold down on the icon interesting things will happen like the flashlight for example if you hold down on it you will get a selectable brightness right yep yeah I like I like this this network bluetooth thing because you can keep like you said you keep long pressing and it goes even deeper right like that's yeah drills down yeah yeah I like it yeah it's good instead of having to search for it but you could that's the other one and I thought I know I shared this a long time back if you do go into settings pull down briefly and you get a search window at the top and you can write in the search the setting you're for which you are searching and it will quickly get you rather than having to scroll down you know 50 apps looking for something yeah yeah yeah yeah fair yeah yeah sorry I had a uh I had my brain it doesn't seem to want to stop this morning we were talking about notes no and um one problem we one problem that we noticed this morning was that if one is not very aware of what the focus is in notes if you you could be in a scenario where you think you're deleting a note but instead you're actually deleting the notebook and both of them have confirmation dialogues that look very similar and that's dangerous and so I got to thinking it's like wait a minute what what if we wrote a script that only would delete the note like even if you were selected on a notebook it would go through like you could do this with user interface scripting with apple script and then what if we use something like keyboard maestro to intercept that delete keystroke when you're in the notes app and not institute the or not fire the notes delete function but to fire a different delete function right like I think there's I think there's a world here where that's doable I'm sorry evidently yeah I'm on tangent mode today I'm trying to start learning more scripting because I'm beating my head against the brick wall even with chat AI yeah but which we'll talk about more later in the show I noticed I think so yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah it's yeah well it's giving me scripts that work and it's giving me scripts that don't work no matter how many times I ask it and how many different ways fair fair yeah we've got we've got something coming up a little bit later that that I think will be good for that but yeah we will we will keep moving on here listener Tim has a quick tip for us he notes no pun intended that if you he says I found this by mistake but it's pretty cool if you're in safari on the mac and you press command I it will create a new email message with the web page you were on and a link to the web page so it actually embeds the web page in the email and puts a link to the web page that you were on this can be handy and I don't disagree like these are good quick tips yep that one I don't know I've done this accidentally too Tim I don't know that my fingers will ever remember it they might now that we've actually talked about it here but I know that it exists right so I know that I can be in safari and go to like the file menu and find you know the share email this page oh it's command I okay but I could just choose it from there like I I know that the functionality is there so I'll you know I can do it I don't know why it's command I probably because others were taken because like command M is minimized but you could change that you know right you go into settings keyboard and you can start monkeying with all that stuff per app or system-wide yawel you got you got another one from fad follow-up maybe the last week's thing Pete um I kind of do he uh he wrote and uh was it last week whichever week it was I think it was last I've lost track of the point is um we were talking about what is time anyway it's just this abstract concept for our feeble human brains right it's not linear if you know linear time is absolutely something we made up there's zero question of that well we're not smart enough like I like our brains don't have the capacity I don't want to say we're not smart enough our brains don't have the capacity to truly like see time for what it is we came up with linear time it's fine it works it's a good construct we all got here in sync with each other at the same moment in time to uh do the show and that's a wonderful thing speaking of doing the show did you have something from fad I did and uh we had talked about previously and or or in the future we're gonna talk about it depending where on the time scale you are uh why why didn't I go to I could not remember why I did not go to an e-sim in my phone right oh right yeah yeah and I was like you know I know there's a reason but it escapes me what it was and he wrote in and said yeah here's what it is and I think he was off by one number but iPhone 12 and earlier you can have a physical sim and an e-sim and that's it and if you go to an e-sim your only other option is to have a physical sim so when I travel I would no longer have the ability to use an e-sim so that was the reason thank you thad for reminding me why in fact I I didn't go to the e-sim option because I am on a 12th pro max and for those of you on 13th and 14th you I think the 13th day of you in the reply you said has both a physical sim and two e-sim slots yeah so the 13th sort of lives in both worlds right because with the 12th and and earlier but not all the way earlier I think e-sim's began with the 10 r right and and and in those scenarios up through from the 10 r up through the 12th you have the ability to simultaneously use two sims as long as one is a physical sim and one is an e-sim the iphone's 14 and further at least those released here in the united states do not have a physical sim slot so you can use two sims at a time and by nature of physical limitations they must both be e-sim's because those are the only kind of sims you're going to use the 13 lives in both worlds the 13 has a physical sim slot you can use the physical sim slot with one e-sim or you can use no physical sim slot and two active e-sim's and I insert the word active there because I think you can have it really depends and no one really has seems to have a specific answer on this but I think you can have up to about 10 e-sim's loaded on your phone at any given point in time only two can be active though two sims total can be active so with the 13 it could be two e-sim's or a physical and a regular e-sim and and then you know moving forward with the 14 so yeah we do a very simple thing and over complicated the heck out of it but you're welcome yeah right when I first got my 12 mini I called Verizon and I'm like hey can you make this an e-sim instead of a physical sim well first when I got the phone I put in a 5g sim and then it's like or I put it had my old sim and it's like no you got to get a 5g sim go to the Verizon store but then after that you know a couple years later I got curious and I'm like I wonder if they have their act together and called them up got to a certain support person and they're like what's your IE MI or something like that and it's on any sim I don't know just because I still have the old sim if I want to go back to it but no generally speaking once a sim is retired in a carrier system it is like there is no world where it can be reactivated so my guess is that sim is and should be trash yeah yeah yeah that's every carrier that I've ever been with has explained that to me they're like oh no once we deactivated in our system it's never coming back online but they could make me a new one that has my same number if I want oh correct right oh absolutely yes yes yes yeah it's not like you're losing your number or anything no it's just that physical sim is you know and then what I did was run the t-mobile test drive the problem is you got to manually switch between your different lines which is what I did and told the trial right now so only if you want to like your the iPhone especially now is pretty good at having two active sims like when I'm in you get to decide what sim is used for what purpose so when I'm traveling you know elsewhere that that isn't the United States or somewhere that I need to use a another sim I'll I'll put an e-sim in but I'll tell it only use the e-sim for data for phone calls and sms still use the the you know the my main sim right and not my travel sim but I can you can control it per contact too I could say when I call john because he's in the United States use my us sim but when I call you know my daughter because she's in Italy use my european sim that I'm here for right like you can you can do all that it's so it's it's fair and you can even tell it switch automatically choose for data choose the sim that is workable and doesn't force me to roam in whatever environment I'm in doesn't really help if if like your case you've got two sims that are both built for the US but you just set it and then when you when you deactivate that sim it'll say do you want me to go back to the other one it's like yeah so and the other cool thing about that is at least what I I did when I switched over to mint mobile I put an e-sim in my phone and I tried it for a week to see do I have the connectivity I want in other words I don't want to get this service if where I live it's going to be crud and so I I did that and that was that was nice so people realize if you're thinking of switching to somebody else try and e-sim in your phone yeah and and make sure you're getting the service you want once you realize you've got the it'll give you the service then you can use my reference link it's true that's fair go to um yeah we we we actually will I'll round robin I'll include you in the round robin of that we if you go mint mobile used to be a sponsor for years but it's been a number of years since they have obviously Pete and I still use it because it's the least expensive thing but they do often have like a like a you know a referral deal where the person who referred you get something but so do you right and so I have a link set up called macgeekgab.com slash mint mobile and I think that's right I'm making sure it is and it is set up on a round robin to to give those of us here that use mint mobile the referral credits when you're signing up so I will add give me your thing Pete and I'll add you to the uh so the round robin on that too yeah thanks yeah man of course um I was hoping I was getting but that's awesome no it's totally fine just to wrap that up um let me make sure I have these links right uh just to wrap all this up the advice that I would give is if you are on a 12 or earlier iPhone 12 or earlier I would generally speaking there's always going to be asterisks on it if you're on a 12 or earlier I would keep your main carrier on a physical sim and leave your e-sim available for your traveling you know for flexibility when traveling because like the e-sim when traveling is absolutely the way you want to go you don't want to have to mess with that however if you have a 13 or later I would absolutely move everything to e-sim because that way you don't have to deal with physical sims that are getting out of date or going bad or any of those issues you just get to completely walk away from that obviously if you have 14 or later you don't have a choice in this matter but 12 or earlier keep your main service on the e-sim or on the physical sim so that you have the e-sim as an option when you travel and then 13 or later just go e-sim all the way and you're good to go I'm waiting for the 15 to upgrade iPhone 15 it's coming soon five short months five yeah I think that's maybe even less maybe four short months yeah yeah uh what's next John uh Larry gives us a warning here Mark Zuckerberg warns not to screenshot your Facebook chats and why is that um what he's really saying is that they're constantly making improvements to the Facebook messenger app sure well one of the enhancements is going to be if you identify a message as um disappearing which I think other platforms can do as well if somebody takes a screenshot uh you will be notified oh sure that's actually been in Facebook that's been in Facebook messenger for years you can you can do private chats that yes or disappearing like snapchats or whatever and oh okay and so like snapchat they're going to tell people that you screenshotted their their message yep okay that makes sense yeah that's fine sure so um yeah and I actually Larry makes an interesting speculation um what if I take a picture of my iPhone screen with my iPad well that's the that's the analog attack yeah that's the workaround they're not going to know you're taking a physical picture at least I hope not yeah yeah that would be interesting no they wouldn't yeah apps can subscribe to uh an an api that essentially fires you know an event to them when a screenshot is taken when the app's in front so it's if I've seen it a lot in like beta apps that I'm using if I'm testing something for someone if we should take a screenshot it says oh do you want to submit this screenshot as a bug report it's like oh what a handy little thing like yes I do and you know off you go so yeah anyway interesting stuff yeah yeah but yes good to know that they're doing that my guess is it would tell you that you are that the other person is now knowing that but which I think snapchat does but maybe snapchat doesn't snapchat does um well it tells the other person but if like if if you and I are on snapchat and I screenshot something you sent me does it tell me that it just told you that or does it only you know what I mean I forget because I know like it it's something that I know happens so I I forget if it actually tells me yeah I don't remember because I I don't think it does because I do remember taking my daughter was sending me some stuff and I remember screenshotting it she goes why are you screenshotting that I told her I'm doing this and you know you're in trouble now and but I'm like well you know I wanted that information so thank you and I don't allow me to save it she's right okay right but I don't remember it telling me that so I I think yeah maybe not huh well interesting all right um well one last little quick tip ish we started talking about it earlier in the in the quick tip section here so I'll happily share it Patrick says he refers us to a recent episode of the accidental tech podcast where they were talking about current day AI and basically saying that it's a these chatbots are a tool that can scrub a gigantic dataset a large language model and organize that in a way that we can understand very well and it seems like it's talking to us or communicating well with us in our language of choice but that it can't actually the engine can't actually think for itself and I and there's that's a good way to think about it I've had two friends share things about along these lines recently with with AI chatbots which again I'm very bullish on we we use them constantly here to produce the show and and get stuff out and it's really helping do a lot of the grunt work if you will a good friend of mine Chuck Shotten friend of the show as well described these AI chatbots as Dunning Kruger implemented in software Dunning Kruger meaning implying that it is an entity that speaks confidently without knowing whether or not it is correct right so it doesn't have enough knowledge to to vet what it's telling you so it could be strong and right it could also be strong and wrong here it is Dave what's that show title strong and wrong often wrong but never in doubt often wrong but never in doubt yeah right yes exactly yeah strong and wrong yeah which you know is a thing another friend actually David Sparks right from all of all that he does from Mac Power users and then Mac Sparky and all that stuff described these AI chatbots as a fantastic intern right and and so I think they're both correct like these are good ways to think about it and if we combine combine those two and sort of go all old school on it I would describe these AI chatbots as fantastic temp workers right because every day someone new shows up at your office that has some skills that you can leverage but you have to give them all the instructions of what to do and then you have to vet their work to make sure that it is what you wanted them to create and that it is accurate right so for example I use the these chatbots to I use chat gbt to take the agenda and I'll do it after we finish this episode you know I know what we talked about because we have the agenda items I feed that into chat gbt and I tell please make me a blog post based on this and it does it you know instantly I have a seven paragraph blog post I then read that and I tweak the things that it got incorrect it might say on this one for example it might say Patrick asked the nerd the favorite geeks or whatever to describe the current state of AI chatbots well that's not what happened Patrick definitely will because you just said that well right but no no it's not getting the transcript it's literally literally I'm just giving it the agenda so I'm not giving it very much to begin with and therefore it doesn't know if Patrick asked or Patrick shared right and and so I do or at least I will when we finish the show and I can go quickly and and you know clean that stuff up but the fact that it wrote seven paragraphs for me way easier to edit than to write from scratch as evidenced by almost 18 years of never writing these things from scratch so you know that like bingo right yeah yeah bingo all right look when we go online whoever manages the network or whoever owns the network can see what we're doing that means your ISP knows literally everything you do online it's true right it's kind of like handing your laptop to a stranger and opening up your browsing history and this is why having a VPN is essential and I want to tell you about one of the best VPNs out there and easily one of the most affordable ones I've seen and the one that I use as we've talked about here on the show PIA stands for private internet access and they take privacy seriously not only does PIA hide your IP address it encrypts your entire connection and PIA is also the world's transparent VPN they never record or store user data and their no logs policy has even been verified in court I use PIA we went through this last year we checked them all out and PIA is the one that I used primarily we were just talking about this on a recent episode listen right now go to piavpn.com slash mgg to get a whopping 83% off your VPN service plus four free months with a two-year plan it comes out to just over two bucks a month and there's a 30-day money back guarantee that's piavpn.com slash mgg for 83% off private internet access piavpn.com slash mgg and our thanks to PIA for sponsoring this episode one of my favorite apps it's installed on all of my computers is BB edit in fact it's running right now because it's part of my start the day script I know this sounds crazy that a text editor is super important but it is now obviously if I'm going to be doing some programming well BB edits where I go right that's not the only thing BB edit does in fact it does so many things with text we were recently talking about how great it is with regular expressions it's find and replace is fantastic you can do things in multiple files at the same time I use BB edit I was just using it yesterday to compare two documents there was a change to the software that builds our rss feed for this podcast and I needed to make sure that the software changed things properly with an update and so I pulled down a copy of our old rss feed and I pulled down a copy of the new one you know before and after the change and I pulled them into BB edit and had it show me not just line by line but character by character where the changes were makes it so easy all this and more you got to go check it out go to barebones.com you get a 30 day free trial that 30 day trial gives you all the features and then after 30 days some of the features go away but some of them actually stick around but you probably gonna want to support barebones unlock it and get all the features so check it out barebones.com and our thanks to BB edit for sponsoring this episode and listen while I have you here I want to tell you about a show when the New Yorker magazine asked Mark Zuckerberg how he gets his news he said the one news source he definitely follows is tech meme for four years now the tech meme 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 tech meme 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 I listened to tech meme ride home now and I love it it's fantastic it's really tight and well done guests who have come on to lend their experience and expertise include Andres and Horowitz as Chris Dixon and Bloomberg's apple rumor king Mark Gurman folks at tech meme are online all day reading everything so they can catch you up so listen to the one podcast anyone who's anyone in silicon valley listens to every single day search your podcast app now for ride home and subscribe to the tech meme ride home podcast and our thanks to them for doing this swap with us all right we had jen's 24 in discord asked I've changed hard drive icons on max before but today I used the procedure I always use which is to copy the drive icon to the clipboard and then go to get info of the the drive so highlight the drive in the finder and this is a quick tip for those of you who don't know how to do this you get a picture on your clipboard and then you go to the finder highlight the drive go to get info either with command i or file get info and then click in the upper left hand corner paste once you've highlighted that command v will paste what's on the clipboard so hopefully the image you want in and usually in the process it converts it to the drive icon and does what it needs to do and you know bobs your uncle everything's good jen's 24 says that doesn't work anymore any idea why and so my question starts with what were you copying from what was on your clipboard because i i'm guessing that there is some sort of you know data filter that says well if it's just some text obviously we don't want to put that there so it just ignores the paste and does nothing that would be my guess so i would say what's on your clipboard and you can answer this question for yourself you go to finder in the finder go to the edit menu and choose show clipboard and it will display to you the contents of the clipboard or if it can't display them to you in a like quick look type format it will at the very least describe as best it can what sort of data is there and maybe that's what i would do you know we approach a lot of these questions and with the if i was there what would i try next and that's what i would try next is okay what are you trying to paste what is it seeing when you say command v and and go from there another way to test this would be to grab a known good icon how could you find one of these you might ask well go to another folder or an application and do the reverse get info click and highlight and do command c to copy it to the clipboard then try pasting that in on your drive icon just to make sure that the functionality is still working on your computer and then then you know it's a data issue and so whatever format you have the image in try something else i know that png's have worked for me in the past so that would certainly be a way to go it could be that you might have say you know a live photo or something on your clipboard and maybe that paste functionality doesn't hasn't been updated to use that i don't know but that's you know that's where my brain goes on that stuff how about you guys you got something jen i do um i like the clipboard tip and i just looked at it so for example i have in the lower left hand corner yeah it says text because that's okay they're right now so that's neat but does it show you the actual text it should oh yeah it does okay great yeah yeah yeah okay but i think you're right if you try to paste a movie it's like i don't know what that is i don't know how you want me to convert that to to an icon file right yeah i mean i might guess would be you know just take first frame but maybe that's not a good guess i'll have to try it yeah yeah exactly we don't we don't know yep how about you p well so my my multitasking i may have missed something here and the question is you because as you started talking about it i went i didn't think so but okay so as people may know i i named my various drives after military aircraft it just helps me keep you know so my main hard drive uh as one might guess is harrier well what are the ads so is that now is that is that always the name of your main drive regardless of computer yes interesting okay so yeah when i buy a new laptop i'll i'll call it harrier but like you know cobra was one of my strobe bows um uh you know i've had phantom intruder and all all the different military jet jets and helicopters and that sort of thing but yes no say i like i like this because i name i name mine after miles davis songs but miles davis is no longer with us and therefore no longer writing songs and so there is a finite list of options for me and i decided years ago that i would never name two drives the same and so i'm i'm moving on to a different oh interesting so your main laptop drive changes names every time you change correct okay and if the drive in my laptop or or my desktop were to die and i were to replace it i the new drive would have its name like i don't know you know it's just me like i mean i i'm not saying that my system is probably far more complex than it needs to be because i like yours i can't i can't migrate to yours obviously because i can't like there's no way that would work for my brain to have two drives with the same name but i love that it works for your brain because it makes your life easier than mine well you you could if if if if your main laptop is always your laptop and when you know but you know yeah anyway so and so here's where i'm not sure if i missed something or not i i hope i didn't but what i did uh as you might guess i i do have a couple of pictures of harriers on my aircraft or on my aircraft on my laptop and so i went and pulled i did a quick view and then i did a quick screenshot of it then i went to my main drive and which i hadn't done this before on on this particular machine i went to the drive i highlighted i hit command i and then in the little icon up there i i clicked it with the mouse and then or the trackpad and i hit command v and it changed so i did did i hear in the question you can't change it anymore oh you can he uh whoever it was i missed that okay yeah yeah yeah jen's 24 was just saying they can't change it and and we're asking why and so you absolutely can yeah yeah now now if the drive is mounted read only then you can't change it right if you don't have administrator rights to the drive yeah for instance yeah if you're running a uh which is a good security thing to do right have have a two accounts one's an admin account and run your life from a non admin account so that forces you to put in your password to make admin changes but you would think you would ask if you want to do this you need an admin password or not yeah right right right yeah i don't know we'll find out i got nothing else i got we got nothing else that's right john you want to take us to joe yes joe thank you uh joe says i took my first long three-week trip to europe since the early days of the pandemic and after hearing Dave's recommendation of esimdb.com bought a 10 gig e-sim for the trip using the app from the e-sim provider i was surprised at the quick rate of data usage at home i rarely go by four or five gigs per month after checking and setting cellular i realized that the culprit was photos in the u.s most of the photos i take are at home or nearby and i don't take that many uh but as a tourist i take a ton of photos and i like to take raw photos before i decided to check i used almost five gigs of data sending my pics to the cloud as you can imagine i turned off cellular data for photos and for overcast another heavy data user uh and then i sent him a follow-up so yeah setting cellular so it shows you the data consumption right um now the thing is there's something on the bottom of that screen that will show the amount of data used per period right now you may ask yourself how long is a period and i found an article that addresses this and the the answer is it depends you can either do it manually and i found it at least on my phone the last time i did it was 2020 okay probably reset it sure but they claim that certain carriers will reset that statistic as well i think they have the ability but they may not do it interesting the um it is different per sim like your your data consumption like in in joe's case because he you know he said he had his his two sims um it will show you your current currently selected data sim but it does keep track on a per sim basis so you know what you're using on on each of those sims so for him putting a new travel sim in the current period was probably days or maybe a week right because he had just added this sim to the phone however photos was still taking up all this data so it was actually photos using this not just looking at the you know grand sum total of three years worth of data or something misleading him and this brings up a a piece of advice that i'll share that i i certainly follow but have never thought to share on the show and that's when i'm try i do this for all of my sims including the one that i have in there currently is my standard sim but i make a point when i go and add a new data sim for you know for travel or whatever i go in to settings cellular cellular data option and i go into data mode and i set low data mode because that way it would keep many apps from doing this photos is certainly one of them it will not send you do your photos syncing in the background over your mobile data it would wait until you were on wifi to do that it overcast should respect that choice in the past there's been a there was a bug where it did not but i think it's back to respecting that choice now which is good and overcast also has some granular settings in the app where you can tell it what to do on cellular versus not cellular we'll call it but but yeah and i wish i wish there was a way to tell my phone to do this by default to use low data mode when i put a new sim in or something like that would be handy but there's not and there's you don't even get a warning like hey you put a new sim in would you like to enable low data mode on it you don't get that option so it's just something we all have to remember to do manually every time you add a new e-sim but and if someone commented you know with bandwidth nowadays you can go through an entire month's data in about two minutes so oh yeah especially if you're doing speed tests man like yeah yeah speed tests on 5g will chew chew chew data yep so yeah just bear that bear that in mind that's that's yeah so with with joe it was less about the the period of definition of a period it was truly that photos was just chewing up his data because it was on his his new travel sim but unfortunately that's kind of how it goes thankfully we and i i know joe's from the united states we here in the united states have one of if not the most expensive per gigabyte data rates in general uh obviously you can you know you go with the major carriers like at and t of horizon or whatever you pay a fortune for it even with the you know the discount carriers like a mint or you know xfinity mobile or any of those like they're way less less than half the price of what you're paying with the majors but they're still ridiculously more than everybody else in the world pays and that's just how it be so i i say this because i i've always thought well if i'm traveling and i screw this up and you know wind up using way more data than i anticipated and need to re-up at least i'm not re-upping at us rates i'm re-upping it you know european rates or mexico rates or mexico is actually pretty expensive at least compared to europe probably because of it's you know proximity of the border to the u.s i remember the first few months of the iphone though back in 07 wow there were people coming back from overseas with you know three thousand dollar bills oh yeah remember i justine i mean that's how i justine gained uh her like first bits of notoriety was she did a what we would now call like a youtube video might have been youtube i don't know whatever it was but she did a video she published a video showing her you know five thousand page phone bill after her first month with the iphone because they were at&t or singular at the time was detailing line by line every time you use data it was like yeah so good so good don't yeah exactly all right moving on fernando has a question and i hope maybe we have an answer fernando in discord asks in apple mail i keep seeing recovered a mailbox named recovered messages icloud in parentheses so it's recovered messages parentheses icloud and i see this on my mac uh routinely and it is completely empty when i click on it i delete it and it keeps coming back no matter how many times does anyone know what might be happening or how to fix it and there was a discussion jamcycler commented correctly at least as far as i i know and said normally recovered messages mailboxes are created when the process uh of you or your mac moving messages between mailboxes fails for one reason or another and uh it stashes them there it says look i i was trying to move these something happened i don't want you to lose these messages so i'm going to go put them here you figure out uh if if they wound up getting moved to where you wanted them or not um as as jamcycler points out if there were any messages in there you might be able to figure out when and where that failure happened but if there's no messages you don't get to know um he does recommend rebuilding the icloud inbox and that's an interesting piece of advice so you can do this in mail uh you go into mail highlight a mailbox go to mailbox and choose rebuild i think you can also right click on a mailbox and choose rebuild that will depending on what type of mailbox it is if it's an imap mailbox the rebuild means that it will essentially wipe out the contents the local cache of that mailbox and redownload it treating the server as truth you might need to do this for multiple uh of your mailboxes and i would also do it for if i see a recovered mail recovered messages mailbox and it's empty i would rebuild that too because that would reload it from the disk there might be an issue with your mail index that is causing it to not see things and you can you can delete your mail index too um you can onyx does this fairly well uh if you don't want to have to go into the finder but or go into you can do it in the finder too you quit mail and then go delete all the into the mail like you go to home library mail and i think it's like v10 now because that's the version we're up to and then in there might be one folder deep i'm doing this from memory there are envelope index files that store mail index you can delete those and then relaunch mail and it will rebuild them um but the good news is and the reason i don't remember it is that you don't have to onyx does this and you can choose to have onyx uh just tell those files to rebuild or to delete them and force mail to recreate them in in most scenarios i would choose to recreate because if there's a if there's damage to the database then there's no reason to to mess with that so um but yeah it seems like there's something missing out there i don't know what that is i don't know you guys have any thoughts on this it seems like nothing no nothing all right hey dave yes hey we jump ahead in time or go back in time actually go back in time so for those john ever came up with on the last topic we were discussing yeah you can create a shortcut to set low data and put it create an automation on that oh i didn't realize that was a a scriptable option yeah because not everything is right create a shortcut to set low data mode oh yeah and put it in automation and put it in automations and have it automate you know once a day yeah at four a.m every day set low data mode geolocate when i'm not home oh yeah all kinds of different options yes oh that's brilliant brilliant porthos john thank you for that oh i love that oh this is why i love doing the show live this is great it sometimes gets distracting and sometimes it means the agenda has to flow and you know it has to flow circularly but that's okay it's fine we learn things i love learning things like especially like that timeline timelines is not being linear you'll be fine you're totally fine no problem whatsoever um circling back yet again uh to using onyx to clean things up i was having an issue on my mac mini in the office which is running ventura where once let's say once an hour my cpus now this is an m1 mini so it has eight cores for efficiency cores and for you know high performance cores once an hour all eight cores would peg for 90 seconds maybe a little more and like i could do nothing if i was on a zoom call or or something i would completely go like you know all jittery like my computer was not mine to use for those 90 seconds to two minutes or whatever it was if i was fortunate enough to have launched activity monitor or something where i could see what processes were being used beforehand i would see that it was you know core spotlight or MD worker or something just going nuts and this seemed like a lot and what i also would notice was right before this happened i would see busy cal if it if it was visible even if it was in the background kind of flash and refresh and so it was clearly something about spotlight you know maybe related to the calendar i couldn't quite figure it out and i mentioned to john gotau the author of the proprietor of st claire software so the author of like default folder but also the author of app tamer we were emailing about something else and i said yeah it's ridiculous that i'm using app tamer on my m1 i shouldn't have to but i have to keep core spotlight d or whatever it is under control because otherwise i lose my computer for two minutes an hour and i don't get to pick what those two minutes are and you know like like any of us would do he starts throwing out ideas and solutions and one of the things he suggested which i had already done but not the way he suggested it was he said have you rebuilt your spotlight index and like well of course i have but it didn't help this problem but i rebuilt it using onyx so i don't actually know what command it ran it did do the whole thing where it after i chose to rebuild it it then re-index things like i saw the re-indexing happen so something happened but it did not solve this problem and john said because he was he's a helpful dude and a smart guy he uh shared the three command line commands that he would issue to fix this using the mdutil command turning off indexing on all volumes all volumes erasing indexing on all volumes and then re-indexing on all volumes and re-enabling indexing on all volumes and so you know of course being at my wits end on this i'm willing to try anything he's like yeah i'll do that so i did that and the problem i don't want to say the problem is completely gone but it is 99% gone in that i still see it once an hour do something but the spike lasts for maybe a second not 90 to 100 of these seconds so livable the other thing john said was or suggested was rebuilding the index on my time machine volume and that could be that could explain the once an hour thing and all of that right um but i thought it was interesting that whatever onyx is doing was different than these commands that john shared with me so i reshare them they will be in the show notes you just issue them one after another and they will be in the show notes for this episode at keykeb 981 which you can find at mackeykeb.com or go straight to mgg.fm slash 981 have you guys seen either of this on any of this on your ventura machines by the way i have not no okay it sounds terrifying it sucks yeah yeah it's like oh here we go again yeah yeah yeah it sucks so it's mostly better now but i'm still not real bullish on ventura for a variety of reasons this being added to that list ventura vista what's a few letters amongst dude ain't that the truth i you know i wish for the days when apple did not feel obligated to release an entirely new version of its operating systems annually and it's funny because apple bailed out of macworld expo because they didn't like one of the things i mean there were a variety of reasons that gave them the flexibility to do this the internet being one where they didn't have to go and meet their customers face to face anymore you know you go to their website and learn about the products but they didn't like being tied to the schedule of having to release products at macworld expo every year and make a big splash but all that happened was they shifted that from january to june because now they got to release new operating systems four of them or something maybe five you know every single june and then developers get to spend the summer working on it it's like could we have one like this year i would really don't have to release you know no in fact what dirty patches yeah just like stability patches just that don't worry about the new features just stability release a new operating system every couple of years every three years you know but this every year thing and look at the new bells and whistles we added well yeah you broke the stuff that actually matters to us i don't know that's i mean the nice thing is that you can specify security updates only and i think i have that on a couple of my machines well for auto updates yes yeah but if apple keeps updating the operating system there are apps and and things that like all these features that they do add now my devices are out of sync there have been times it's not current but there have been times where you couldn't sync calendars between the old version of you know last year's mac os and this year's ios well if i buy a new iphone i'm forced to use the new software or if i buy a new mac i'm forced to use i can't roll a new mac back right you got to use the current thing but like having to keep every having i understand having to keep everything up to date and in sync i just wish the updates were a little more thoughtful instead of just based on a calendar year and apple feeling like they have to do this uh and maybe they do have to do this to remain competitive like i i don't know but mac os mac os doesn't need to be updated every year to remain competitive ios might need to be or at least having features at it you know like there's different competition markets here but mac os dude monterrey is great monterrey is great my biggest great with ventura is somebody felt the need to change the ui majorly like settings and all that the settings where's the thing that i i used to know where to go to fix or they did that though to do more coincide with ios so it was the same terminology across right yeah i mean they moved settings from they ported settings from ios to the mac right this wasn't new it was just yeah significantly different but yes it's different for sure yeah yeah monterrey's great i don't know it could love getting in on a new m2 oh you can't you won't that's the thing like if i if if apple doesn't fix the aggregate device issue that ventura has i cannot use anything newer than monterrey for the podcast without either changing the entirety of my workflow and i don't even know what that would look like in order to do the show live like i think i have to use aggregate devices but maybe not maybe maybe there's you know a way that i could engineer things and and not do that or i have to keep buying max like if i want to upgrade from intel in the studio to uh apple silicon the m series m1 series is the latest i can go none of the m2 chips run on machines that will run anything earlier than ventura and so i would need like an m1 mini or i think the max studio because that's the m1 family like the m1 pro and the m1 max that will run monterrey so okay but it's like you know that's it the list of computers that i can run monterrey on is now fixed you know it's there is not a um well now you have to go buy a studio i might i've actually thought about it just to just to buy myself time because eventually apple will change core audio again and break something different but fix this you know what i mean and so it's like okay great i can i can jump but ventura ain't it and i'm not convinced that whatever they release it you know this this year will be it so but maybe who knows right anyway john um speaking of hardware and apple and all that you want to take us to tom okay i guess we have a few minutes um you want to wait you want to save tom and just do some cool stuff found let's do that let's do yes let's save let's save tom because that's probably a longer conversation it's yes all right um i will i will share my my cool stuff found for this week which is the uh sonos era 300 i mentioned it at the end of last week's episode this is this is a fascinating speaker it's really unlike anything i've ever experienced from sonos before first of all just the way that it looks um is it's it's it's kind of like somebody took a uh an oval you know three-dimensional oval speaker and put a belt in the middle of it and cinched it up it's kind of got this hourglass kind of shape to it and what's interesting is the the it sort of sits on its side so when you're facing it you see this oval view uh you look down and you see the hourglass the front of it is a speaker grill and then the back half of the hourglass part is also a speaker grill and this thing's got a ton of different speakers inside it because as a single speaker it is built to do like multi-channel sound it will play dolby atmos music uh and it's it's fascinating i you know when i started using this i you know the first thing i played was an atmos version of um tom petty's freefall and which starts with that kind of chimie acoustic guitar and it sounded like that was coming from behind the speaker it was like oh wait this is really interesting and then when the band kicked in that was in front of the speaker and this thing's tiny it sounds way bigger than it is five free you know standing five feet away from it it sounds very deep like the depth of where the sound is coming from sounds much farther away than the speaker where i know the speaker to be and can see with my eyes 10 feet away from it it sounds like there are two speakers 10 feet apart right the way that it it sort of sends sound out to the side and you can set the height of it um out of the box the low end of this speaker wasn't huge it was it was kind of tame and almost lacking a little but sonos has this thing called true play where you tune the speaker to your room with the era that with with the initial version of true play which is what exists on most of their speakers uh you use your iphone and walk around the room like waving your phone up and down like it's some kind of divine look like a crazy person yeah yeah right like it's like i'm looking for water you know whatever with my phone up and down for for 60 seconds it's a fascinating exercise but it's in and during that time the speaker's like sending all sorts of sounds out right you know and and your phone's picking them up and it knows that it's moving around because your iphone has a gyroscope in it and so it tunes the speaker to your room and that works great it's it's amazing you can do that with the era 300 but you can also let the speaker tune itself to the room so i thought well let me just do that because it like the home pod you know it has microphones in it for sonos voice and and the a lady and all that stuff so i let it tune itself to the room it it did that and then suddenly the low end was exactly where i wanted it to be it was great um it's so like really interesting speaker and like i said it it does have voice control it can be used as your rear speakers if you have like a sonos arc or something for in your living room but by itself it is not a speaker that can be used easily with your tv you could probably route things around and force it to be but it's certainly not meant to be used that way but as i have i don't i only have one of them so i can't try it as rear speakers but um it would be cool to to to use it as rears and see how far away it makes like the the the rear sound so i might i might have to grab another one yeah but it's it's really interesting it's you know where they've got speakers sort of all around this thing it's 450 bucks for i'd have the price right on that 449 yep in the u.s and uh and you can already know my question that's awesome yeah pre answered my question that's awesome because i thought the yard about three days ago with the move and i was like yeah you know six or eight feet away from me and i'm like that is an amazing speaker the low end on that is awesome but this sounds like it's even more more technologically advanced it it is but you wouldn't you could use it outside i don't think they would say that it's waterproof i'm pretty sure they haven't uh although it might be they say it's humidity resistant which is important um the where's the move you can drop it can rain on it and all that stuff right well and the move is also a battery powered speaker this is not this needs to be plugged in so it's it's a little different where i would where i would use this is in like a bedroom or a an office or some you know some or in your kitchen right where you're going to be listening to music a lot and you want to have put one speaker in and have it sort of fill the room that's where this is is key to me is that it could go in the living room if you're using something different to watch tv you know and you want this as your you know music listening kind of you know in the study the family room that that sort of thing um it's really it's a i'm impressed with this thing yeah yeah it it i didn't know what to think about it and and then i pressed play and i was like oh okay that's pretty cool so yeah yet again sonos kind of impresses me which i i didn't know i didn't know that they could do so yeah sounds like it's uh taking the the Bose wave technology and and crushing it on top well not not taking their technology but improving upon what they were doing yes yes and making making it more more better yeah yeah so yeah yeah yeah for sure yeah yeah john what do you got all right this is the first time i've seen this at pepcom it is the skoshy skosh so they pronounce yep sorry skosh that's her name power volt travel 30 okay 30 watt usb 2 in 1 home and car travel charger and i can show you so i'm holding it here and they also has a picture up but look at this thing it well no most people you got to describe it because most people are never going to see what what we're seeing square about two by two two inch by two inch and it's square okay and here are the two parts so this is the car part nope what's the car part john this is the car part the car part you know i put it down put it down and just describe it as though someone can't see it it's a socket that plugs into your car energy or cigarette lighter great and the other one is a two prong uh that plugs in your wall outlet oh amazing and and what is it 100 100 through 240 volts so it is truly a travel charger so if you can get the adapter uh from the flat blade to whatever the country uses um it's it's a true travel travel charger and what is it what kind of power does it output 30 watts 30 watts a single port uh yes there's one usbc port got it ah cool what's the price on that oh i see it here 44.99 you can probably yeah 45 bucks yeah no it's just always nighto i mean it's really light it's really small and i even hooked it up to my uh map book and looked in the system info power and it's like 30 watts okay so you you know so you could use it to charge your laptop oh yeah a bit longer than other devices but hey it's it's small and easy to travel with so not like well it depends on your laptop like the the macbook air is almost built to be used with a 30 watt charger so yeah interesting that's great ah i like that i like the kind of the two-in-one little deal pretty cool yeah that would be good to have like you said for for the car especially traveling because you plug it into a car and charge you know rental car or whatever ah or the only thing i can't figure out is uh no nope that's not it how do i replace the fuse is there a fuse in there well there should be i mean any any device that i know that you know has a car charging port has a fuse in there in case well is it a fuse or is it a circuit breaker like that resets when you pull power from it or something uh it could be right i mean my experience has been any of these car chargers have have a fuse of some value in there to protect you did you ask him about that last night when you saw him no all right well now you know what to ask him all right okay well let me jump in real quick then with because he was talking about the international part here and we'll put it in the show notes but i found one on walmart for 936 and it will plug into europe china uh uk universal um it and so just it's uh i found it on walmart the velatoi all-in-one travel plug adapter universal worldwide us uk australia european union and i i use something similar that i take with me huh and plug right into so i'll put the link real quickly in the show notes that i think we got it for you p okay we're we're yeah we're a real-time operation here man full service yeah so that's right because he said yeah it's international yes it is it will go international it looks light and cool yeah so interesting yeah all right well i'll put the uh velatoi in there that's great that's great um we have time for one more thing and i i i have had this on the cool stuff found list for probably weeks i should have had it on the cool stuff found list for a year and it is the um specifically the cat link robot litter box talk about a life changing piece of technology uh and we we we bought this for ourselves in fact after we bought one we very very quickly bought a second one i had reached out to the litter robot people sort of the you know the the name brand of of that world and they were like yeah we don't have any review units to send out and it's like okay no problem like you know that's fine uh they will rue the day because what we realized is that uh by having to go through the process and you know like buy it like like we all do for things we realized that the litter robot is not worth what they charge for it because you can get this cat link for probably 20 to 30 percent less than the litter robot it has an app links to your wi-fi will tell you when it needs to be uh you know emptied or whatever but it's amazing the cat goes in does its business leaves you can set the amount of time that it waits uh we have it set to three minutes three minutes later the box rotates around empties itself and it's perfectly clean for the cat or cats next visit and so we've got one upstairs and one downstairs in the house we've gone from having five litter boxes to just these two we could probably get away with just one but you know um we didn't want to test that theory when we had four cats living at the house our three plus our sons one but uh yeah this thing's amazing we have the we have a model that doesn't that they don't sell anymore they were they were selling for like 499 um that was like the cat link regular versus the cat link pro however there is the cat link light which is on indiegogo right now and you can get for less than 400 bucks uh i think 359 or 379 depending on where you go with that and it's uh they've kind of made the the thing work and a little more economically and so it's uh yeah there you go so anyway couldn't help but share because these this thing is amazing if you've got cats you i i already know that you dislike having to empty the litter box all the time and so and of course if you don't keep up with it your cats will choose to go elsewhere sometimes and that's never good this is one of the least fun parts about owning a cat and this thing takes it away entirely we maybe go and mess with the thing once a week now and yet our cats are always using perfectly clean litter boxes so unless you enjoy the smell of ammonia right yeah exactly yeah there's no more smell like it just it's you know we had our our son's cat um for whatever reason he does not feel the need he was never taught to bury uh before he leaves the box and so that was fun you know and i think that may have been sort of the straw that broke the camel's back because we've been talking about these for a while it's finally like all right well we gotta fix it like this is this this is not okay uh huh so yeah no it's it really if you've got cats get a robot litter box you know whatever one you get you're probably gonna be equally as thrilled about it is what i'm talking about here but don't discount the cat link just because they are discounted uh on the price it really is fantastic and it's been working for us for probably six months if not more yeah probably more probably more like seven or eight months so good stuff yeah who's that in the background the band it is the band i thought maybe a cat had walked in here it's like oh i've never brought my cat over to the studio i used to i used to bring one of my cats to the office nope it's just the band hanging out here in the studio with us on this 80 degree day i'm gonna go check out tide line house for lunch Pete so that's the that's the new uh food truck pod thing that opened here in in Durham so really stoked about yeah yeah yeah all right we got anything else to tell them is it time to go i think it's time to go that silent speaks volumes thanks for hanging out with us folks yep uh thanks to cash fly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you go check out our podcasts the the ones we do when we're not doing this show i do uh too i do business brain for entrepreneurs giggab for musicians Pete does so there i was for aviation enthusiasts go check it out go check out our merch at macgeekup.com slash merch and there's more coming that you can get one if you have been watching the video like Pete's t-shirt if you haven't go to macgeekup.com slash merch you can see it's right there maybe we need to get a picture of Pete put it up as the model i like it ah make sure to check out our sponsors which are always at macgeekup.com slash sponsors of course you can go to barebones.com to learn about BB edit and download your free trial you can go to piavpn.com slash mgg and sign up for that's a fantastic VPN i'm still happy with it a year plus later or whatever it is thanks for hanging out folks john what's my shirt say um if it flies it spies all right good what's Pete's shirt say don't get caught i think i had it going almost got caught on the sound maybe it's good advice folks later