It's time for Mac geek Gab and listener Jamie brings us our quick tip of the week by sharing that we can name or rename Group chats in the messages app on the iPhone you tap the top of the group chat You'll see a contact card for the group where you can change the name You can even assign it a picture you can assign it a custom logo or one of Apple's defaults You can also do this on the Mac or the iPad these changes Flow through and are seen by all members of the group So it becomes kind of a thing where you can create one for work or you can create one for You know your family and different groups of your family and all those things More quick tips like this plus your questions answered today on Mac geek ab 10 17 from Monday, January 8th 2024 Greetings folks and welcome to Mac geek of the show where you send in Tips like that and you send in cool stuff found you send in your questions. We try to answer your questions We share your cool stuff found in your tips. We share some questions in cool stuff found of our own We mix it all together into an agenda so that each of us has a fantastic Opportunity to learn at least five new things every single time we get together This is CES week, which means our sponsors for this week are our CES 2024 coverage and travel sponsors that includes collide at KOL ID com slash MGG Mac Updater at core code dot IO is slash MGG and Carbon copy cloner comm slash MGG We can go and get 15% off CCC with code MGG CES 24 We will spend a minute For each of them a little bit later in the show talking a little bit more in-depth to thank them for their Sponsorship of the episode and CES and all that good stuff for now Before jetting off to Las Vegas In Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton In South Dakota. I'm Adam Christiansen And also in New Hampshire. It's pilot peak where it may be cold But at least it's windy greetings gents. Yeah, it's cold It's windy and we are recording this as usual on Friday before and so we're on the fifth it's the fifth for us and Pete and I are hoping that the snow that's due to hit New England hits just after we leave the ground tomorrow Evening, so exactly. I hope the same for you guys. Yeah, that's not fun No, it's and the only other easy alternative is a flight at like 7 30 a.m Which means Leaving the house at 1 a.m. Pacific time because I will be going to sleep on Pacific time on Saturday night Right, so I always think of it that way that and that's actually one of those one of my little travel hacks is The day I am leaving I wake up and think of Myself on the time that I will end the day at and I do the same Coming home if I you know like on Thursday when we fly back from CES Pete I think of that as waking, you know as waking up on eastern time that day and it it I find it helps frame my brain a little better I don't know probably yeah, probably shifts you a little bit better a little bit. Yeah, it's just like okay Well, it's much better to say that I have a 10 a.m. Eastern flight Leaving the West Coast than a 7 a.m. Pacific flight You see because I would happily take a 10 a.m. Eastern flight tomorrow morning, but taking a you know 7 a.m It just makes for I've just found it starting a trade show by waking up in the middle of the night to catch a flight. I Always kind of hurts me make for a long week. It makes for a long week. Yeah, exactly So I don't know. Yeah, I think the time it'll work out well on this one I have lost a few races against nor'easter's trying to get sure over the years and The worst one was April Fool's Day of 96. I spent 30 hours in the ramp office at work Trapped yeah Every plan I came up with fell through and I wound up starting my trip two days late Fortunately, I they had me cold dead to rights on that one and they were like yeah I get get out there to anchor to catch your trip and you can finish it So yep worse. They could have pulled me off without pay. They did. Oh, okay. All right, okay So, all right, you had to they didn't have to suffer the pain reserve when they did that So I was able to go and and fly my trip, which was good, but then continental airlines lost my luggage So I was for Asia for four days Buying skivvies at every stop Yeah Yeah, there's there was no way that continental was gonna get you your luggage after you had flown another plane out Yeah, yeah That sucks and no air tags in those days to know where your luggage no, not even close like I I Know when I share quick tips that there's it's new to someone This is one of these that I feel like every travel should be Would be evident to many travelers, but if you haven't put an air tag in your luggage I I put air tags and everything I put it even in my carry-on bag like why not, you know But certainly in your checked luggage There are just countless stories that you can read all over the internet and I can share too like when my Daughter flew back from Canada a year and a half ago She was pretty convinced like there was a quick Connection or something in Montreal that she had to do and she was pretty sure her luggage wouldn't make it And so she goes to get in line, you know to to like register a claim so that they can drive the luggage to our House the next day or that night what you know whenever it finally arrives and They were like well you have to wait until all the bags are on the carousel before you can file a claim And I said to her I'm like it's like show them your air tag thing And so she did and they're like oh you have a tracker in there and it's like yeah And they were like great we can start your claim now and by the time we had finished filling out her claim and The luggage had finished coming off the rack There was a line of 25 people at this right at the gate So it really did save us quite a bit because we were able to just well screw it get in the car go home Wait for them to show up with the luggage So yep. Yeah, it's handy to know. That's handy to know Ben has a quick tip that Bizarre in Sonoma to help with time machine not backing up Then says I use time machine editor to control the frequency of my time machine backups on my Mac So that's a cool stuff found that we've mentioned on the show many times Upon upgrading to Sonoma, I was finding that the backups Would not automatically run some of the time especially if I was away from my Mac and the screen was asleep asleep I found my way to an article on Mac observer That explains some things that can be done to fix this and The one and we'll link to this TMO article here. I assume they still call it TMO You know, it's weird for me reading the Mac observer and not recognizing the name of an author Let alone the article I mean, it's obviously it's been written in the last two years. So like it's I had nothing to do with it But it's still weird if for those of you who are wondering But one of the the bits of advice in this in this article which worked for Ben was Excluding find my data and there and there's you know it the article articulates which files to put in the time machine exclusion and that did it What a weird thing to and it must be that this file remains open By some agent on the system, I mean Adam do you have any like speculation as to why time machine would bork No, but I mean, that's that's really interesting. I know one thing that I I've Always done with my time machines is I always just exclude like all of my system files huh Yeah, that's I know I have other backups of those and plus, you know if I'm not borked I'm gonna be reinstalling the operating system anyway.  I don't I don't didn't look at this to see exactly where those are but As a rule because I have I have ccc or I have other bootable backups, you know that are gonna have all my system files So I just figure I don't need them in time machine so Yeah, these are it that the exclusion is no it's actually in Your home library containers, and then there is a com dot apple dot find my folder So that those are the things exclude live I'd have to go live to go look at my time machine settings But I might exclude my home library folder too like anything like system low-level related I think I tend to just have always excluded. So I've never run into issues But that's yeah, that's really interesting Yeah, is it is it the kind of thing where I think your theory makes sense in my opinion is if like it's got something open at that time. Maybe that's blocking the scheduled thing from running but That would seem weird a little bit. Like it seems weird intentional. It wouldn't be intentional. I don't think yeah I would be just to revisit your Blocking of the home library folder I certainly do that if if if you like folks, but take a look in there and understand what you're Excluding because I'm pretty sure apple mail still stores your mail data Not just its preferences in the home library folder. It does And I think by default like things like thunderbird and even safari have something. There's a lot of your User preferences and and even data like your mail data is stored in there So just take a look and make sure you you know what you're excluding and then and by all means if Yeah, and I don't do the live. I don't do a home library stuff. I do just System system like yeah for sure. Yes that I that I'll buy machine might not even I'm trying to remember if time machine by default backs up the like the core system stuff But yeah, you think it does selectively Selectively exclude there might be things in there. You want to selectively exclude But yeah, I would not not the whole library folder. Yeah Yeah, yeah or the whole or even definitely not your home fold and not yeah Yeah, that's the kind of what I'd lean in on that. That's right. Yeah. Yeah Our next quick tip comes from Jim who says when opening a safari or pdf expert document window The tabs from the last time I had the app open would load Not what I want Internet searching yielded nothing but poking around in system settings did under system settings desktop and dock windows I was able to check the box close windows when quitting an application and that Fixed it. I have no idea how this setting was The opposite I think the opposite is the default Of it is of this. Yeah, so that when you open a window everything just comes back I kind of like it but again Personal preference. It's just my workflow. I trust that it's going to be there and I'm actually kind of You know thrown off when it's like wait that app didn't return to its previous state. Oh, no, what did I have open? So, it's funny. I'm now I'm the exact opposite when they added this feature years and years and years ago I mean, it's been that way for yes for a while. Yeah, I immediately flipped it around because That's what I was used to like that's how my mac worked and now you've changed it And I'm also kind of I like a fresh start when I open an app You know, I don't want the thing I was working on, you know, I closed that window or I quit the app I I'm expecting it to come up. Yes fresh Clean desktop for me to start working in whatever app photoshop or Yeah, sure my code editor or whatever. Yeah, interesting. Yeah, I I remember I remember the change because bb edit had this functionality before apple added it to the system and I so I so therefore that was the first app where I came to rely on it It was like this is great because I can quit bb edit and relaunch it and it's exactly as I left it And that's what I want if I have to reboot, you know, all of those times where it was like Well, I don't want to reboot because I don't want to lose like my my the state of things, you know, and uh So when when it was an option to do that in other apps as provided by the system I embraced it but I already kind of had it in my workflow So I totally get if you didn't have that in your workflow Why you would absolutely like push it away and remember you can one off Change this on a per app basis by using your option key when you're quitting So do an option quit or option go to the menu and select quit and it will toggle So if you have it set to always keep windows open and just for that one time you want to make sure all the windows close Just hold down your option key. Oh And for like for you having this disabled or whatever you have the opposite setting for me If the quit option with the option key it toggles it back and forth between them Yeah, so if I hold down option, it'll say quit and keep windows Whereas I think if you have it the other way it'll say quit and close all windows or something That's exactly what it says here. You are correct.  This is why we do this show. Yeah, I had no idea That's great because there are times when I want to that that fresh start and Yeah, all right, and I think Now I'm now I'm Out of bounds here, but I think if you launch an app with the option key down or there's there's some way to get it to not inherit its prior state is that the shift key down Someone at feedback at mackey cub.com will let us know I know that I have recollections that there was a way to do this And just say because when apple introduced this feature There were then the scenarios where somebody would be in pages. It would crash They would relaunch pages it would open the document that caused it to crash and it would crash And so there needed to be a way of saying no no no no just open Like you were doing it fresh and so I think that's there. I can't test that right now because I got this thing I'm doing but um, yep Yeah, but I think that's a thing So hopefully somebody either in the discord chat real time while we're doing the show or Certainly feedback at mackey cub.com and that goes for anything You know, if you've got other quick tips or questions or cool stuff found that's where you send them feedback at mackey cub.com Yep feedback at mackey cub Scott says I just created a safari web app for four flight one of the apps using your plane. Pete. I watched you Yeah, that's a great. It is a great app. I agree Yeah, uh, he says unlike the rest of the apps residing in the dock I couldn't just click and grab it to move. Oh, that's interesting Instead inspired by the dialogue in a recent episode about trying various modifier keys to see what they do seems like this is a recurring theme Uh, I option clicked To grab and hold the app in the dock to move for flight to a different spot That's interesting because I have created many web apps and have had no trouble moving them But if you create one and you have trouble moving it that uh, is it Scott goes on to to share and I would agree That these web apps seem to just work They start with the site as it was when I created it and then allow me to navigate within the web is normal He says uh, and what's great is when I click a link in it It opens it in regular safari. So it doesn't try to do things. I I have found the same thing This is one of those features that the new safari web apps are save to dock or whatever the features But it's in the file. You get to a website in the file menu. You choose Add to dock and then it will put it in the dock and then you just use it as an app. It's it's great I love it. I love it. I love it Uh, thank you for that scott nice tip. Yeah, I I'm still curious as to why his wouldn't move But right. Yeah, it's odd. I wonder No, that wouldn't be it. I was thinking I saw I'll share my thought process. Sorry. Um, I I wonder if Scott uses a non admin account as his primary like daily driver user and if that's a difference I don't know But if that were the case the option but why I dismissed it before sharing it the option key wouldn't the option key Doesn't just magically make you an admin.   What were you gonna say adam? You had you were just something pithy I was gonna say remember when steve thought we only needed web apps On the iphone Yeah, I said we've really come full circle.  You're kidding. Yeah Yeah, those are good times He was wrong On that he was wrong. He was very wrong, but I see I don't a few times I don't think he believed that we didn't need web apps because if he believed that Then there would have been no native apps on the phone There would not have been mailed there would not have been safari right I mean, well, I guess you would have to have safari, but like there were native apps on the phone They or they just weren't of open for third parties to make and so I don't think he believed that we didn't need apps I think he believed he didn't trust anybody else to write them responsibly Correct Which is why we have the app store and all those other things that came afterwards right the sandboxing was the solution Correct and we're all better off for it. I mean honestly They pushed the engineering teams to figure out a way to make That stuff available and There were a lot of bumps along the road I think oh, yeah, nobody will discount that and there still are bumps. Yeah, but there's plenty ahead too with it I mean, they're a big lawsuit in in europe over third-party stores like a Third store. Yeah. Yeah, which then now the security issues all become Yeah Yeah Without apple gatekeeping and all that. Yeah. Yeah But I don't know We've been around long enough to remember the days when you know You had all kinds of conflicts and crashing things and stuff like that and you know, it still happens but In the stay in age Lot less frequent. Yes. Yes me from what I remember. I'll be curious to see Because this still happens on the android side like a few side load apps that are not, you know vetted and approved and And policed by by the google play store You can get yourself into a scenario where you're burning your battery, you know Three times as fast as you normally would with with, you know responsible apps and and you can get things to crash Just like like I could on my palm trio, right? Like so I I get where steve Steve's Logic probably be sending your data all over the planet to everybody and anybody who wants it there. Yeah, yeah Yeah It'll be interesting to see that the the nice part is even if apple and I think they will be even if they're forced to open up the You know Third-party apps sure to be installed outside of apple's app store It doesn't force users to do that. It just allows users. It doesn't shut down the app store, right? So I think the majority of people will simply Keep doing what they're currently doing Yeah, I would I guess I would like it at the jailbreaking in the early days. It is. Yeah, you know, yeah So you do it do it do it knowing the risks that uh, you have That's not you know security barriers You know apple's gonna make you just like they do on the mac you you have to go into settings and and tell it No, I'm gonna allow apps that don't come from the app store, right? Right. We've all done that. I think Uh, so it we take it for granted that we've Enabled that setting but that's not the default like you have to go and do that a good point Yeah, so I'm I guess it'll be the same on the phone and Choose whether or not you want to suffer the consequences And then we'll get a whole lot more questions about it here on the show and uh, we'll have to do this for another 20 years. So there you go. Yep It's not a bad thing. I kind of enjoy. I'll be here if you will same. Yeah, exactly. I got nothing else to do So I mean, I say that's not true. I have a million other things to do. This is one of my favorite things So so I'm gonna keep doing this Uh, one last quick tip comes from ben who reminds us that if you've scrolled up a ways in your photos library And want to jump back to the bottom aka most recent photo Simply tap The word Library a good quick tip. I love all these quick tips send them in feedback at macicab.com All right, as you know, this is ces week And I want to take a second to thank each of our ces sponsors right now I want to thank ccc backup from bombic We've known this as carbon copy cloner and that's still what ccc stands for But ccc is more than just a cloning tool. It's an advanced backup and file copying application for our max If you're looking for something better than time machine Well with just a few clicks you can set up ccc to make hourly or daily backups of your mac It can build extensive file version history that you can use to restore older versions of files And files that you might have accidentally deleted And ccc's read-only snapshots also give you excellent protection against malware and ransomware Ccc's backups are compatible with migration assistant too So you can use them to migrate data to a new mac and beyond those backup basics Ccc offers extensive auditing and verification. Have you ever wondered what all of that disk activity was? Have some application run amok? Well, the list of files that change in each backup event give you unprecedented Insight into what's changing on your mac each day You need to copy the entire content of one volume to another boom Ccc can do that in just a few clicks and that's just a little peek at what ccc can do You can go and download ccc today to start your 30-day free trial and then go to carbon copy cloner.com mgg and use code mgg CES 24 we'll put this in the show notes at mackey keb so you don't have to remember but it's mgg ces 24 to get 15% off amazing stuff and our thanks to ccc and the folks at bombics software for sponsoring All our ces coverage this week Want to take us to uh to rich there adam? Yeah rich has a travel question and he knows where to turn to he says i know pilot pete you travel quite a bit He's hoping you can help him out He says his daughter and him are going to be traveling a lot this year and he wanted to get her One of those magsafe chargers that are like the all-in-one where you can charge your watch your phone Your air pods all in a single thing with one usb cable Be great if it folded up he says and he was looking at amazon Seeing brands like mofie anchor websites. He didn't see anything with really great reviews. So he's looking for a recommendation He says should I do that or should I just get a set of extra cables like traveling cables and chargers that she can keep separate From her home cables. So she always has them for traveling um And doesn't forget to pack them. So he wants to know do you have some suggestions for him? I don't know why he thinks I travel a lot. I I haven't been anywhere this year What it is only the fifth so yeah um So well, first of all, I have to have an somewhat of an apology to everybody because I had a cool stuff found several weeks back and our tops G charger that folded and I found it I like it to charge the apple watch and I like it to charge my air pods and I found it less than 100 reliable To charge my phone. I've put it on the charger wake up in the morning and it's mag safe. So it's not like it's misaligned And the phone is up, you know, three percent, you know went went to bed with 44 wake up It's 47 going really come on Yeah, so that was a little frustrating that was the our tops charger that I mentioned is a cool stuff found several weeks back um The the quick answer to Uh to to your question rich is cables You cannot go wrong with a second set of travel cables that is always in your backpack or your suitcase I have that anyway. I just always do that because I don't never want to get caught short I the once or twice I've been out and on the road in my entire career without a charging cable for my phone It just drives you nuts Ah quick quick tip thrown in here in the answer to the question Go to the front desk of the hotel and say hey, uh Do you have a spare iphone cable more often than not they've got a drawer full of the damn things Said that they've that they've pulled out of of rooms over the years. Yeah. Yeah Oh, I left I left the charging cable here last week. Oh, here you go. That's it. Is it was it a white cable about six feet long? That's the one Right, right. I see I I bet you could even Ask for an apple watch charger and they would have one I'm sure they would there's no doubt in my mind anymore. Yeah, you know, those things are so prolifically lost and that the hotel is bound to have some Prolifically lost I don't know if that's grammatically correct, but it's oh so right in my heart I communicated the point whether or not it's grammatically correct. I communicated there Um, so yeah extra cables always a good idea to have in your bag And then I I did do some looking around on amazon again and and I agree every one of them has some Negative reviews on it. I don't think you can sell 10 000 units and not have somebody cheesed at what you've sold them But there's a license l i s e n three and one for apple devices And uh, I meant to have that link up. Sorry, davin and I got it. Oh, you've got it. I got you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so It looks like it does the job and it looks like it's uh Price, of course, it's not coming up right there. No amazon the internet's broken this morning here. So sorry didn't mean to break the internet It's okay. It it's normally uh, 65 66 dollars on sale right now as we record this for uh, 40 dollars On the plus a $10 coupon pete. So you get it for 30 bucks. Yeah, they even down to 30 So, um, it looks robust enough that that it will Probably work again. I hesitate to say cool stuff found now that Uh, it happens charger and it and it just was frustrating that uh, it wasn't and and dave You know, we talked to briefly in the pre show about well Was it the was it the o snap? But I have not had any issues with my o snap on any other g charger. Yep Now this one you found from lison lison, whatever it's called looks interesting for a travel charger And I always travel with something like this. I don't have this particular one I have this uh anchor three in one cube that I sometimes will travel with that does the same kind of thing It it you know, it'll it'll charge everything But like you man, I I make sure that I have cables to charge everything And some of that is just because I It sucks at home when I know I'm gonna spend my day on the other side of the driveway at my office It sucks at home when I wake up and my phone hasn't charged But it's certainly manageable because I can plug it in at my office waking up in a hotel Especially when I know that I'm either, you know, gonna go like next week, you know out all day the cES But or even you know on vacation or whatever like we rely on our phones so much that I just can't bring myself to risk the Waking up with an uncharged phone because it decided. Oh, I got too hot on the charger. So I'm just gonna, you know Chill out or whatever It's it the amount of convenience That I get for the four nights that I'm away With my magsafe thing like it's no I I just plug it in and I'm fine and the nice part is Cables weigh a whole lot less than magsafe travel Yeah, the charger is like so You know, I don't know I like I always bring one of these things with me because I love the idea of it Like oh, I can set up my hotel room and it's just like home and I can chill and like all that However Anytime I want to charge I want it on a cable either because of what I said I want to wake up with it fully charged or I know I've got 20 minutes While I'm in the room to like, you know chill before I got a head out for the evenings events And I'm going to use a cable there too because it's going to charge faster on a cable than it will right so You know, here's where you might be able to save some travel space. I'll add to this Um You guys have probably seen these anchor prime Gallium nitride wall chargers they have yes them up to like 67 watts So I don't know what mac he has or she has but if you have one of the newer m series, you know mac book airs or something like that You can get 67 watt charger super tiny folds up has three ports so you can charge Anything on it from a single tiny charger and then you could potentially swap that out for your big Mac wall charger because I don't know if you're like me, but like if I'm working during the day I have my mac plugged in my devices are charged I'm usually charging the devices at night and have the mac shut down, right? So you can work on on your mac during the day get 67 watts from a teeny tiny charger through your usbc and then at night Plug all three of your cables in for your iphone your apple bunch your air pots and Charge those up overnight all in the same little tiny yeah Wall charger, so you don't have to carry your big brick You don't you don't need all the things you can you can mix and match yep Yep, yeah, and actually, you know, I probably now I need to make it a cool stuff found. I bought this at bex best buy Uh last time I forgot my home charger when I before I started carrying two chargers on the road And I have this brick that I bought at best buy and it has a usbc and two usb a's And it's I want to say it's like 80 85 watts something like that and that's that stays in my bag That's my laptop charger on the road. Yeah, right Yeah, right and then I will I will say I do take an onker I don't travel as much as you guys But I take one of this just this the cheap onker. It's not foldable But it's a three in one that I have my bedside, you know it It's hard Plastic and it's at the iphone things at a specific angle can't fold it flat But what I do is when I pack I have everything stacked up and I have the the space between, you know My pants and shorts and my t-shirts and I just slide that in Diagonally and it sits flat right at the top of my bag So it doesn't fold flat, but I just use this that's okay. It's around my clothes to make it flat Oh Yep, I like it and that thing always that thing always works. It's actually really good and I think it's one of their cheaper Chargers, I think you can probably get older versions for like 20 30 bucks I like it. I get what it's called. It's like that anchor three and it's got a terrible name anchor Yeah, and one, you know, whatever charger Yeah stand for iphone Sweet and I've actually found it like I I found one on Best Buy that it's actually now it's an insignia 100 watt 4 port us usb-c and usba I'm trying to get it to the Trying to share it. I'm trying to share it Gosh, don't worry about we can share it later. We'll record the show now. That's where I need to put it in the show notes, that's right at mackeykev.com And uh, yeah, and you can find this particular episode either at mgg.fm Slash 10 17 or In your email box if you go sign up for the mailing list, which is Primarily used just to send you those the show notes every week So yeah fun All right, uh, what is now you want to take us to mark pete? Uh, I do I do but uh, I got a vamp. Well, I find mark because I was I was looking for the link instead of where I was supposed to be, you know That's okay. We're playing with chat gpt to make an image for what is obviously at least at this moment in time the Running contender for show title, which is prolifically lost. So yeah, yeah, so yeah There we are and I am prolifically lost at the moment, but I'm back. It's it's a theme It's a theme Man, uh, so mark writes in and says Po box is an email redirection service that I've been using for decades I'd not heard of this. So there's a cool stuff found while you're at it Originally because I was a postmaster for a software house that was expanding globally And I needed to be able to give people one email and then change the backend email as often as I needed for testing, etc So how do I tell mac mail to send as Send as my pull box email and the only options I can find are in the main account emails And he has a second question says my wife is happy for me to start helping her clean up her 40 000 inbox items Well, what a slacker. I gotta lease that Oh, man No, I'm not quite up there, but wow Yeah, so she's got a full I'm gonna need to breathe for a second Pete. Sorry. Yeah continue, please So said one thing she would like me to do is an auto move Incoming to incoming email to a folder all good But then she would like email or mails in that folder to auto delete after a set number of days No idea how to do that. Do you have any suggestions? And I bet we do I I would guess that we do I I will So, uh, yeah pull box or po boxes is the the name I always kind of had in my head is Yeah, one of these mail forwarding sort of services. So If you want apple mail To be able to send as that via your gmail sort of construct Uh, the first thing you need to do is go into the web interface for gmail go to settings and accounts Uh, it's actually settings and then accounts and import That's just the name of it Uh and click the button that says add another email address This will walk you through a process Which essentially asks you for the email address and then the smtp credentials to send through that email address The end result of this is that in the gmail web interface You can choose another email address that's not a gmail address As your from address and and send as that but they need to make sure it's yours first And then also they need the credentials to send through it now if po box or whatever your provider is if you're listening Has smtp credentials for you to use then you could put those in and everything's going to be fine lots of providers Forwarding only providers are just that forwarding only they don't have Outbound mail they just take inbound mail and they don't have smtp credentials So i'm going to teach you a trick that has worked for several decades With gmail and I don't think we'll ever break at least I have my fingers crossed What you do is you put in when it asks you for the smtp server you put in smtp dot gmail dot com And then when it asks you for the credentials you put in the credentials of that gmail account that you're adding this to I know it seems like a circular thing It is but it's a hack that works And it works great. So once you get that in there test it from the web interface Make sure you can choose the from address and send and all that stuff At this point you have a couple of options Number one is you could use the gmail app You know apple it turns out allows third party apps in the store now And so you can go find the gmail app in the store and run that and it will inherit all of the extra addresses that you have added to your You know to your gmail account Apple mail is capable of doing this. However It does not inherit the addresses from a gmail account. In fact It doesn't even let you add a new from address to a gmail account So you have to create a new mail account on your mac that is an imap mail account And log that into gmail with imap.gmail.com. So just don't click the google box You got to go through and set it up as an imap account Because then it will act the same but It allows apple mail will allow you to then go into settings and accounts And on your gmail account or your new imap account that happens to point to gmail You get to add More from addresses It will attempt to send those through your gmail account Which is why you have to do the first step to get all that set up and allow that to happen If you just randomly put an address in there and try to send it through gmail that it doesn't already know about It's going to push it away So that's that but it is yeah that adding of the the gmail smtp to itself Is The reason it dawned on me to try that is you used to just be able to choose Do you want to use external smtp or should we just send it from the google mail servers? Are you okay with that? And then they stopped allowing that on new accounts But They like they didn't change it on old ones. I'm like, well, can I just type in that that data and it's like yep No problem. All good works. It works. Yep so So That's the first part of the question is do we have anything to talk about that before we talk about auto I just want to clear something up. So I called it po box. You called it po box But I have a reason I lived in Louisiana for a lot of years and I could go for a shrimp po boy right now I understand I I knew that that's where that was coming from. That's how I read it. It didn't even occur to me as it was po box Of course It's po box just like a po boy just change the last letter. Don't know why they change the letter po boy is just fine as it is Exactly um Auto deleting messages in mail is an interesting little thing. It is doable With apple script or at least chat gpt tells me that it is I believe it largely because I know that mail is scriptable I've done things like this in mail with scripts and in reading the script that Chat gpt sort of wrote for me It it fits you might need to do a little tweaking to it as you test it But I put a link to my chat gpt session where I had it create this script for me And you can copy the script right out of there and it'll even kind of teach you how to You know how to do these things but um, but I think that would be the I would use apple script to delete the the mail. I don't what what about you guys I I'll jump in. I'm sorry. I thought that anything in your output or in your trash bin automatically deleted after a certain amount of time anyway Trash, yes, but he's talking about moving his wife's New mail into just another box not a trash box and then having that go Correct if not read in so many days. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Yep. Yeah, so I don't I don't ever delete mail. I am an inbox zero person So my inbox always has nothing in it, but I move everything two folders and just let it build up Same. Yeah, I don't I don't delete anything. I did Recently, I I don't know if I talked about this on the show. I I would always You know, I only have a certain amount of storage on my mail accounts because like on the servers and so I was archiving stuff to on my mac on my one main mac and It dawned on me that well, this is only on one computer. Is it backed up? Yes, of course But it's only on one computer and that at times is a pain in the neck Like when I'm traveling if I want to look at something that's more than like two years old Which seems to happen more often than than you would think Uh, I have to like, you know VPN into my home network and screen share my one mac that has acts, you know has that data So I set up a mail server on my Synology, which I don't recommend ever running your own mail server again But I've broken that rule Uh, and I use it. I mainly I set it up a couple years ago just to test You know to see what that was like because somebody I think one of you folks was was asking about that So I set it up and it lives and it has a domain that no one knows about and I I do get some mailing address You know mailing lists into it so I can make sure it actually works and it does Uh, but it hit me. It was like wait, I have Uh An imap account on A server that I own and I get to pay for the storage on I don't have to like rent the storage from google or fastmail or anybody And so I archive everything to that now and it works great. So I you know Interesting. I know. Yeah. Yeah when I had that thought I think I had it like while we were having a discussion on the show Last year and it was like Oh, wait a minute. There's there's an answer here. So I don't know I I used to use um mail steward Yeah, or handling my archives. This is a this is a mac app that you can buy and it basically Runs an index on your inboxes. Whatever whatever mailboxes you want to point at it um and stores everything in a SQLite or my sql database and makes it searchable indexable and also Because it's a my sqlite database. It is a file that lives on your mac and I used to just back that up Yeah, and so I would have that archive all my emails. I think Tim Fortin told me about this Decades ago and I had used it for years and years and years. I subsequently stopped. I'm not really sure why but That was a great way to have a local backup of all of my email that I knew was safe no matter what Yeah, and and and you liked the user interface of it. I I've been aware of mail steward for a long time, but I've just never It's very nerdy. Okay. Very nerdy, but it doesn't require setting up your own mail server, which is even more also nerdy. Yes Yeah, that's fair. I I wonder though. I know mail steward The the way From what I remember of it, please correct me if I'm wrong You kind of set up rules for what you want it to archive off, right? So that could solve marx wife's problem of wanting to archive off things that are of a certain age and at least get it out of her mailbox and then You know, you could go in and delete it from mail steward if you want like, you know later But at least it gets it out of there. Well, and what's nice about the mail steward again It stores it in a database and then I think it has the ability to export back out to you know Mbox file and so you could Restore stuff like it had a lot of really great features. It is not A simple interface to deal with it's not too bad, but you know, it is a little bit Techy, I will I will be honest I actually thought of a another way to do this and I I think it It may be more difficult than Or or less efficient, but using hazel And I was thinking well, you can export mail to a folder on your mac and then let the hazel kill it after a certain amount of time Yeah, so but that then allows you you could back up that mail using any number of you know carbon copy cloner or time machine or any of those would grab those emails and then the mail client isn't holding on to them, but That that may be an adding the level of complexity that's not worth it or it may work out well I don't know every other solution. We've mentioned is pretty nerdy pizza. Yeah there's a there's just Just a nerdy thing. Sorry. Yeah. Oh, you're right. Oh the database is a it's a goopy mess Yeah, yeah Yeah, yeah, all right. Well, again if you've got questions, let us know feedback at macgeekab.com Well, it's ces coverage week and I want to take a second and thank one of our ces coverage sponsors Mac updater mac updater is one of my favorite apps I have it running on my max all of my max all of the time So that I know when there's new software updates because there's nothing worse than going to launch an app that I only use Maybe once every month or two And finding at that moment the moment I launch it That it's got an update and I probably want the update, but I really don't want it in that moment I already wanted it. Well the good news That's what mac updater does for me. It scans my apps tells me when there's an update and then Really makes the process of updating so simple. I just select the apps that I want to update Or I can just tell it to quick select the ones that it thinks I should select And it's almost always right and then I tell it go and it goes And installs everything and updates it. I can see release notes in there And it maintains backup copies of a lot of the apps so that if something with an update doesn't go so well I've got the backup there. It's amazing. You got to go check this out and you can go To core code.io Slash m g g to test it all out go there core code dot i o slash m g g And our thanks to the folks at core code who make mac updater for sponsoring our ces coverage this week All right, well Yeah, we're we're gonna jump to dan here here, pete. Uh, it that's okay Dan says I currently have three ups is one on my mac One of my tivo and my cable box, which is my modem and router no idea why but we frequently get quick dips in power Which would cause these devices to restart. Yep. It happens says I've had no problems since I put the ups in great It's doing its job My issue is that I buy replacement batteries on amazon for about 37 dollars and they only last about two years I'm wondering if it's better to keep buying the batteries or if I should try another ups Yep thoughts on this adam great great question. Uh, well first I have to Throw this out and say Do as I say not as I do because I know that I should have ups is on everything and I do not have ups is I have one ups It was provided by my company for my work computer. So it does sit here and when my max connected to it It's all connected to everything. So it's kind of part of my setup now But it was provided by work and I actually had this exact situation happen where Uh, I it was an old ups when I got it and then when we went remote and I ended up moving out here It eventually the battery died, right? I don't know how old that battery was sure it happens. Yeah Um, and so I just requested a new ups from my company and they happily sent sent me one Which is great. So they sent me a brand new one and it was only when I was taking the other one down that I realized Oh, these things the batteries you can just swap them out really easy There's a little door and battery pops in there and it's like I wonder why they didn't just give me a new battery Probably cheaper, but I also did some research at that time too. And so I think just like he mentioned The big dilemma I had with and have with batteries in general. This is batteries for anything, right? Is you can find the really really cheap ones Right that don't come from the manufacturer. They're not the oem one They're coming out of some factory out of china somewhere and it seems like a really really good deal But I don't know the quality. I don't know you know These sorts of things and it's another reason why you know people complain about apple and the cost of their battery replacements That's all I got There is a difference in batteries. There is huge differences in batteries And how would you know what brand is good? What brand isn't bad isn't and If you go with the manufacturers battery a lot of times it might end up being as much or very close to just a brand new ups so I would tend to probably fall on the line of have the ups Once the battery dies get a new one It's going to have newer features. It's going to have newer technology if the price isn't that different than replacing the battery So I think it for me it would come down to How much is that replacement battery from the oem versus just buying a new ups? that that that is the question I ask every time and it my my uh My rule of thumb is if the cost of the battery is more than 50 percent Of the replacement cost of the ups. I replaced the ups And the reason for that is I know that it's possible for ups is to uh For their their surge protecting capabilities To diminish over time And it's impossible at least for me at home to be able to tell Whether that has happened yet like they say that you know, they're good for x number of surges after which point They might start to not be quite as great about because they you know like they are taking Sometimes massive hits from like lightning and those sorts of things like that's that's their job And so I like I said I used the 50 percent rule I probably wind up replacing the battery once on each ups And then it seems like the replacement battery price goes up as the ups gets older Probably supply demand, you know that whole thing. So Yeah, I I I follow the same rule and I have been burned by the while that battery is, you know, uh, Super inexpensive or as I like to say cheap and worth it. So Yeah, right. Yep. Well, here's the thing my observation about ups is is People don't have them that should have them And the reason is that they're not sexy You spend a lot of money for something that that doesn't really do much for you It's doing a lot for you, but just you know, it isn't a configurable router It isn't a cool new phone. It isn't in a powerful laptop. It's a piece of gear that sits there and protects you But it's just not exciting. No, it's not you plug it in and forget about it. Yeah. Yeah And so, uh, if you don't have one, I highly recommend just For the surge protection alone on the darn things to prevent the brownout issues It's the brownouts for me. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's the backup. It's the backup thing, right? I'm a huge backup person and I'm only a huge backup person now because I had an incident where we lost a lot of valuable data And from that point forward I learned my lesson. So sometimes you just have to be taught a hard lesson and that might be the case with a ups Yeah, right. I just need to do it. I just need to bite the bullet And I just haven't wanted to spend the time or deal with it and I just haven't done it and Again, don't be like me. I know it's wrong. I know the risk I'm taking and I'm taking it Knowingly so hear that like if you want to be like me and take the risk knowingly I'm going to get burned one day and then I'm going to be really sad and then I will have a ups on everything I I learned the lesson from my clients when I was in Austin Because I watched their computers blow up like we would have a lightning storm one night and our voicemail would be full the next morning because we ran a Computer, you know on-site computer repair shop called computer nerds. Um And so I I didn't have to learn that lesson the hard way I have unfortunately learned that lesson the hard way It's since then but it but like I've had ups is now though I put them on every piece of electronic gear that I have and there's one Again, not a sexy benefit. It's the long-term benefit But there's one thing that I've noticed and that's that my electronics last longer Than most people's comparable electronics do TVs Uh, you know like audio gear that I have all of that stuff and one of the Features that most ups is have just as a matter of course is power conditioning Like they are keeping the voltage steady That you know, if there's a dip in the circuit They are the battery is there to to add it back in to compensate And of course it limits it on the top end too with electronics getting You know less and less expensive more and more bulk manufacturing those transformers in the power supplies for them Are a a point of cost savings for many manufacturers And they're cheap and so babying those transformers it turns out Has been a good thing for me in general now Do I have a control group where I can specifically say I get an extra five years or no, but It sure seems like that Um, so I'm gonna knock on some wood No, I mean that that literally that literally makes sense, right? You're protecting the circuitry in your devices from abuse and doing it constantly so Yes, I mean it's consistent logic follows the logic follows. Yeah, even if even if I might be wrong. That's right Anecdotally, you're right Dave. I feel right Pete and I I think when when when one is prolifically lost Feeling unlost is the most important thing. Absolutely. I think so you want to take us to run adam? Yeah, Ron says he has a weirdo, which is interesting But he is using busy cow and calendar and getting An odd message lately. It tells him your event couldn't be refreshed There's in insufficient storage space for a specific meeting I don't want to out him on his meeting in a specific It looks like calendar and in iCloud So it's this little dialogue that pops up and he says he sees it in busy cow And it's when he's trying to put a new event in And he's done some googling looked around Um, you know done all the usual stuff of updating and and making sure he's got adequate local storage He's got two terabytes in his iCloud with plenty of extra memory on his computer And is just baffled calendar and iCloud.com isn't any help and the iCloud app Is just showing these warnings So he wants to know about that and then he also asks about bulk deleting old events He says I can't find a way to accomplish this. I want to you know, again I think the idea is something's going on with this storage at least according to this dialogue and how do we How do we clear this up? Interesting. See we've got a theme. We want to delete old mail. We want to delete old calendar events I mean, I realize that's to deal with the symptom not necessarily the problem of this one but uh, but to answer that question I would do it the same way I would apple script calendar To delete old events and you can absolutely do that And in fact I went to chat gpt and had it mock up an apple script that certainly looks like it would work And I've linked that from the show notes for the second part of the question So if you want to bulk delete old events apple script calendar is You know apple's calendar app is scriptable And you can do that Yeah, this error message that you read He says he's getting the same thing in both busy call and calendar the screenshot he sent us is from You know apple's calendar. Yeah, and it's you know, this thing about insufficient storage space Tells me that this is more about an issue on his mac locally than it is on iCloud And in fact he confirmed that he's not running out of storage space in iCloud Cal and calendar events don't generally take up a lot of storage space. They're just usually just text You can add lots of text to them. You can also add images to calendar events I don't know if you knew that but you can and so that sometimes will get you there But uh, but I you know, I so I would look I would do the obvious thing and look and just make sure that your mac isn't Like, you know running close to its storage limits.  We're full. We're full, you know um But it's which but it you know when an app thinks it can't write to something The error message is Sometimes based upon an assumption that the developer or developers made And so when I see this there is insufficient storage space think okay, well Is it truly Looking at the amount of storage space and calculating that there isn't enough to do this or Is it trying to write to it and getting An error that says I can't write to this file and it's assuming That because it's an open calendar the only reason you could not write to that file is if there's not room to write to it But there might be other reasons you might not be able to write to that file like permissions issues or you know Is the file corrupt? So that's the the I I would first check to make sure that You aren't out of storage space and then I would start looking at permissions And one of the easiest things to do to sort of test all of these at once would be to export The events in that calendar To you can you know in calendar you can just export them to a file and then import them into a new calendar on iCloud So that you've essentially duplicated your calendar, but you've created a brand new file for that calendar Does it all just work there? If so, okay, we had some corruption whatever just delete the You know now duplicate slash original calendar and and you're good to go I don't that's that's where my brain goes in the a lot of times go In fix those permissions Would that be a path worth trying? It would yeah fair. So I believe that they are in Home library Calendars is where that stuff is stored and I feel confident saying that I'm looking on this mac In the studio in home library calendars I never use the apple calendar app. I only use busy cal However, I do sync with my iCloud calendar And I know that my mac sort of keeps that up to date regardless if I happen to launch calendar all my stuff's there and I can see that six minutes ago There were eight files in my home library calendars folder that were updated. So I feel like this might be the The right place to look yeah, yeah And then The other thing I was I was going to ask and you said, you know, right? How much does it give an event Take up the leading old events I wouldn't do it because it's a few bites at the at most on most events And I've at least for me I found it necessary for instance when I have to do my medical for the fAA I have to tell them when I went to visit a given doctor and I can always look back and see over the years when a given doctor's appointment was So I find it a great historical record to go. Oh, yeah, I was at this place on that date I I would I I mean we just said I just you know admitted that I never delete mail either but um I would I've I've never deleted a calendar event. I can go all the way back to 1993 when I first started using now up to date Um, because that was my first digital counter Yeah, I know I'm crazy though like so I don't I don't Wait, wait, say yeah, Adam. What were you saying? I said, I don't I don't delete anything in calendar either I just I've always just let it do whatever it does and don't worry. Yeah, and don't worry about it Yeah, it's not the thing that's going to eat up all your storage on iCloud on your mac on any of that If you get to that point you've It's probably time to get more storage like yeah Yeah, I mean I I realize You know, we're making some assumptions here based on our own experiences, but um I'd be curious if somebody's got like, oh no, I have to delete calendar events because you know I'd be curious, you know, because I'm just interested in uh And those kinds of things All right, as you know, it is CES weekend I want to take a minute to thank collide one of our ces sponsors for our coverage here Look when you go through airport security like we did to get to vegas There's one line where the tsa agent checks your id and another line where a machine scans your bag Right the same thing happens in enterprise security But instead of passengers and luggage it's end users and their devices These days most companies are pretty good at the first part of the equation where they check user identity But user devices can roll right through authentication without getting inspected at all in fact 47 of companies allow Unmanaged untrusted devices to access their data That means an employee can log in from a laptop that has its firewall turned off And hasn't been updated in six months or worse That laptop might belong to a bad actor using employee credentials Collide finally solves the device trust problem collide ensures that no device can log into your octa protected apps unless It passes your security checks plus you can use collide on devices without mdm like your linux fleet Contractor devices in every byod phone and laptop in your company. You got to check this out visit collide.com Slash mgg to watch a demo and see how it all works again. That's kolide.com Mgg and our thanks to collide for sponsoring all our ces coverage this week All right, let's do some cool stuff found before we come back from ces with a bunch of cool stuff found. Yep Uh, in in fact, I think we're probably going to release a couple of shorter episodes from our Uh from ces pete.  Well, that's the thing I had Like I had been in a suite like this before there. It's called the hospitality suite. It's it's fantastic It's it though. Here's the weird part It's the same price for this hospitality suite with two bedrooms and a living room that it is to buy two king bed rooms And so it's like, well, that's like easy match to me. I'll take the living room. Yeah, of course Well, I'd always had like a regular table with chairs This time or last year we got there and walked in the room and it was quite impressive to see There was a pool table in the middle of our room So sure we enjoyed some tequila one night and and and played some pool But it meant we didn't have a table to like record or do work at this year I uh sent our friends at the mirage a Request that they give us a table with chairs instead of a table with balls. So, you know, yep Yep, yeah, exactly. And for what it's worth folks know that tequila did not improve our pool game No, no, that is correct. Yes, that's correct. That's correct So hopefully we will be releasing the plan is to release a couple of episodes You know many episodes with things that that kind of we find If you remember back in the, you know, the the presale days when When we had tmo we would do a takeover of Daily observations one or two days of ces and and use that as our vehicle to Share our like cool stuff found of the day. We don't have that anymore a because I'm no longer involved in the mac observer and b because that show no longer exists Which is which is a shame. I think that was a fantastic show. I was really proud of what we created there But anyway, uh, not my decision to make and uh, and it's fine But uh, so but we can still do it and we just release it to this feed like it's all good Nothing really changed, right? Exactly. Yeah, we'll have some good some cool. I'm looking forward to it. Yeah For now we have matt Uh, who shares that there was actually somebody in our discord That asked i'm looking for a place to jot down information I usually default to paper and pen, but i'm wondering if there is a scratchpad type app Uh, that I can use so that I can jot down notes on my computer And matt in our discord answered this saying well without knowing more specifics I can recommend the mac app Unclutter at unclutter app dot com It's mostly invisible until you need it when you do you just swipe down using your mouse or your trackpad And a little shelf drops into view from the top of your screen ready to take your text based notes it's very straightforward And uh, additional features include clipboard history and files a shelf like the files that you can just pull down and and Get to like things that you might actually put on your desktop But you want to get too quickly or you want to drag into an app you drag it to the shelf It doesn't actually move it anywhere and then you can drag it into a mail message I actually I need to revisit on clutter. I'd forgotten about that feature of this app. That looks cool Yeah, I forgot about this. Yeah Yeah Yeah, and the praise is 20 bucks. Okay 20 bucks. Yeah, yeah, yeah Huh Yeah, I like that. Yeah, talk it way to keep your desktop clean and yet still have it all in one place And still have it all where you need it. Yeah, very cool. All right. Yeah. Thank you for that matt I'm sure we've talked about unclutter on the show before but I forgot about it So I I know we it does, you know, whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah uh The next little app in cool stuff found it comes from a pharmacist foster So we've got pilot pete and we've got pharmacist foster and I like the the the word play there the alliteration there Yeah, yeah, yeah, he doesn't spell it with an f though. That's the funny part, right? Um, the uh, it's called shortcut detective And he uses it to suss out keyboard shortcuts. He was trying to He found it when he was trying to use a keyboard shortcut that he knew existed in an app And it didn't work He could go to the menu and choose the option and that would work and it even showed the little shortcut next to it But it wouldn't work he uh shortcut detective, which is from irradiated software and I believe is I believe yep, uh Figures out which app is seeing and Intercepting if you will any given keyboard shortcut and he was able to narrow it down to you know Some third-party app that he had installed years ago that was intercepting that one keyboard shortcut So he just went in and changed it but shortcut detective allows you to know and that's pretty cool So that's why it's part of cool stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Have you ever used shortcut detective adam? Sorry, I'm trying to stay muted because it is the uh First Friday of the month and they are testing the tornado siren. So I don't know. I hear it. Oh, yeah I hear that. Oh, because it's very close to my house Yeah I've never used this app But it sounds super handy because I've run into this problem where you have a conflict with some Shortcut that you're used to using. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What were you gonna say, Pete? Sorry. Um, it it looks like it all It looks like it also has the ability to block Uh a given global keyboard shortcut. Is that what I'm reading on there in the More control checker. Oh short stop which can block global hotkeys. Yes There's all kinds of great little apps on the uh irradiated software site. So yeah, go check them out. Yeah Yeah, yeah, yeah Yes. Yeah shortstop can do that And uh, I that's not from them. I don't think I think that's from a different company. Okay called shortstop. Yeah But we'll we'll put that in the show notes too. Why not? That's that's what we do Huh, shortstop. All right cool I yeah, I love all these like these single Purpose apps are that can be so handy. So yep uh Dom has our next cool stuff found and it is related to our discussion about smart home and specifically garage doors that we had last week He says one thing worth considering to uh solve your garage door opener your smart garage door opener problems or smart that became dumb garage door opener problems Is by using a switch bot bot to use any brand of garage door opener with home kit Whether it's smart or not all you need is a garage door that has a remote control Which is likely all of them the switch bot bot can be used to physically activate the appropriate remote button Via home kit or Siri with no extra software apps home bridge or anything else It doesn't care about brands makes for models. No, that's true And if you change your garage door opener, then nothing needs to change in your home kit setup You just put the little switch bot bot on This is a push button bot is essentially what this thing does I joked a couple of weeks ago about how I think it was I was either in pre-show Maybe in pre-show or during the show that my son was home for like an extended period over maybe it was Thanksgiving and uh There was one day he works about he works and lives about two hours from here And he said yeah, I think on Monday. I'm gonna have to do a round trip Uh To work because there's this one button that needs to be pushed To reset this device that they write the software for and uh, and I'm like, you know This feels like something that could be scripted sure enough like the switch I'm gonna send him this and say look man for for 30 bucks. You could have saved yourself a round trip The probably less the to buy one of these than the fuel that it cost him to go back and forth But uh, yeah, yeah, so that's awesome. And then this was uh, That's a cool piece of gear. I mean it's uh for those not watching Looking on the screen that little button comes up and pushes the Butt pushes whatever you want pushes the button and it sticks on. Yeah, go ahead adam I was just gonna say it reminds me of the one of those things called the useless device Yes, you know that that people make work and you could probably use this to make one of those It's a box right and it has a switch on it and you flip the switch and then Another bot comes out and then flips the switch the other way, right? Yes, the use this machine Yeah, this one isn't useless. No, that's right. That's right We will put but we will put a link to the useless machine Yeah, but but this could be the ingredients in creating a useless machine. That's right. Correct. Yeah Yeah Push the buttons, but you could do some within it and at a raspberry pyre Arduino or something and this thing probably and create a wireless useless machine. Yeah. Yeah, exactly I love it. That's great. I'm gonna and it looks like it can stick onto things on the on their website They have it on like a light switch, but they've also got it on your coffee machine like so It's it's versatile. I don't even know that you would need a remote control for your garage If I was going to use one of these things and let's be very clear I may be getting one of these things to use for my garage doors This might be the simplest solution that anybody's come up with is I would just stick it on the Opener like on the wall in the garage the hardwired opener in the garage I see it seems like it would work at least for the ones I have It seems like it would work for that the geofence it to activate when you get in the area and open your door and Yeah, I I don't do that. I I didn't do the geofence We have three garage doors here. So if I'm in my wife's car I don't need it opening the garage door for my car just because I'm like and I did think about well I could do a geofence thing that only happens if I'm connected to carplay and and I approach the neighborhood like It's probably there's probably a world, you know to get a pretty granular else You know it loses briefly loses signal and then finds you at home and it opens your garage door. Oh, yeah, that's true Yeah, that'd be fun. Yeah so Yeper But then and somebody wrote in and I can't find it now But told us that all these garage door Openers are owned by the same parent company. It's all chamberlain. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah all the various brands. Yeah I'm really upset with them. I hope they're at at ces I don't generally go to ces to like meet with vendors and get tech support You know, I go to let them talk right like learn about things but if I see the chamberlain people I'm gonna ask them why they have a chat why they broke well I want to know why did they reduce the functionality of their devices like I just don't understand How I'm supposed to use this I will ask them this if I see them this week I'll ask them if I don't see them I will ask them via other channels because like I'm curious as to what their Intentions are Like why can I not use this with my smart home anymore? I bet they're gonna say security but But then but like okay. Hey, it's a bs. Excuse and they're gonna stick with it. I'm just saying yeah But but like if I can't use it with my smart home What's the point of having a smart garage door opener? Yeah I like why you why you break it like I don't know. Yeah, why you got to be like that because we're good. Yeah, exactly One last one is uh for me. I mentioned in last week's episode that I was Taking my Liberating my audiobooks and giving them their freedom so that I could put them wherever I wanted And I had an audible book and I wanted to put it in my apple books on my phone so that I could instead of using the Audible app I was using the apple app So I put it in Books on my mac and expected it to sync via iCloud And I am still expecting it to sync via iCloud in that I'm waiting But I'm really the expectation is is is less than off rapidly is yeah Because that's not how it works evidently I can put a pdf in it in in books and it syncs to all my devices, but audiobooks not so much so The point that it was I could In theory I could do it with a wired or if I had Previously set it up a wireless connection to my mac Via the finder aka the old iTunes Functionality that syncs you know over a wire or wirelessly And I tried to do that And it never started syncing the book like it it showed me the book and I could select it and say yes Please put that over there on that phone that you see But it it I don't know whatever was going on it never did And so I'm like gosh. What's going on? So I did some googling and was reminded of one of my Apps that I used a long time ago, which was a walter pro which is just built to take Media and put it on your phone Even media that apple says you can't do of course with this one apple says I could do it It just didn't do it Not only did this do it it would do all kinds of other media I I'm thinking I'm amazing may have have let me do some version of this too, but uh, but walter pro certainly did so yeah Have you ever tried this adam with iMazing? uh Maybe a long time ago. It does have some functions and features for putting them on to yeah Putting files onto your device, but I think What's great about walter pro is it kind of automates everything right and yeah encoding settings and you can say for this type of file this is how I want it going over there and On the fly encode it and it just takes care of everything and it's like drag and drop simple like You know yes. Yeah, it was forget it. I was done like once I saw It was like a youtube video that I think the title of it was use walter pro to transfer audiobooks to your iphone It was like right of course like I didn't even need to watch the video It's like ah walter pro and I I had simply had fallen off my radar for years. I'm glad it still exists and uh Yeah, it it from the moment. I saw that video title to being finished with the the project was You know probably four minutes and that included downloading walter pro So yeah, yeah, yeah, it's good stuff It is good stuff Either you guys got anything else to add or or shall we say that we're done? Uh one if we can circle back to one thing on the quick quick note thing Yeah, that one when you guys were going through that it reminded me about you know notes has A quick note feature right and it's on your ios device if you're using a pencil You can use a gesture where you swipe up from the corner to write a quick note You can enable that on your mac with hot corners So if you go into your system settings go into desktop and dock and then go down to the bottom and click on hot corners One of the hot corner options is something called quick note and once you set that up when you go to that corner A little like white thing will peek out from the corner. You click on that and it pop Pops open a sheet to make a note in notes very quickly Oh, that's I never Obviously apple thought about this because otherwise the option wouldn't be there in in hot corners But I I never even thought to look that. Oh, that's brilliant I love it. So mine's turned on somehow. I've hidden it because It it says it's there for the bottom right corner for quick note But man, I'm not I'm not getting it. I don't know what I'm doing wrong Um, can I ask if you have multiple screens on your mac p because if you do you have to go to the bottom Right corner of the virtual screen. Yep. Yeah, there you go See that's why I come here for my tech support folks. That's one of those tough things to troubleshoot Because I can't see your setup But I have I have been there before I have done exactly that and it's like why doesn't it oh, it's over there Where'd my mouse go? Right. Yeah, exactly. I still have my mouse year. It was probably a year ago We talked about on the show how you can change you can use accessibility at him to change Uh, the size of your mouse, which most of us sort of have experienced but also the color of your mouse cursor And mine is now like Hot purple and I can see it Anywhere it is on the screen. It's awesome. Yes, I my larger and I have it outlined in red. It's black But I have it outlined. Yeah, there you go. Yep. Yeah. Yeah, so yeah I just always use the the wiggle trick the wiggle trick works for sure. Yeah, and then but when I do that now I get a big hot purple mouse Oh Yeper Yeper Thanks for hanging out with us everybody Time flies when you're having fun, man It like it we're at 124 which is long for us And I feel like we could just go Longer but we have things to do and and you have things to do and we're respectful of your time as well as our own So we kind of treat you like we treat ourselves, which is you know, I feel like the the the the best Thing anybody any of us can do is is that wasn't there the golden rule about that? Yeah. Yeah Uh Yeah Thanks for hanging out with us folks Thanks to cash fly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you Thanks to all of our ces sponsors. Of course collide ccc backup Mac updater Follow us on our various socials. We put all of them in our Uh show notes so you can go there and just click click click click click and follow us and Enjoy whatever that might be I uh I feel like you know, we we we recorded this episode and before we travel with this assumption that we're going to be able to travel and I I You know the superstitious person in me says that that we've we're dancing very close to the edge of Taunting the universe. So Pete Uh Let us let us make sure that we uh make it to vegas And don't get caught Later


I minus a special kernel. Oh, sorry, I need to cut, takes a sec to write this thing. On an extended L2 space, so here we've got, chi bar A is the thing which in the x-wemph coordinate is the indicator function that the underlying variable, which I shouldn't call x, I guess I'll call it u, is less than A i. So it's a vector of indicator functions. And k two to one, x one, u one, x two, u two is gonna take me the rest of the blackboard to write. So we don't wanna see too many of these. In fact, I was foolish to start there, integral. I'm gonna write this thing, but don't take it, don't worry that it's a bit complicated. Now this is the area function. So these are like the formulas that Pierre was writing, but he sort of referred to me that I was gonna write them all down. Okay, and then there's another term which looks pretty similar. Okay, I'll write it out. I just wanna show you one so you get the idea. In this term there's a plus there. I don't wanna bore you with these things too many times in these talks, so I'm just gonna do it brutally once. Okay, any typos? I think, yeah. Oh yeah, everything else, right? Anyone in there who says a minus sign is wrong? Okay, what do you get from something like this? Well you see, okay, there's a formula, okay? These processes are specific processes whose finite dimensional distributions are given by some specific formulas, right? Number two, the formulas are quite complicated, okay? They're never much easier than this. They can be written in all sorts of forms. If you open a book for the area two to one process, you might see a different formula and you'd have to sit there for two hours maybe and just check that it's the same formula or it's even worse than that because determinants are invariant under conjugations and you might have to conjugate it to get the formula you want. So it can be kind of a nasty business and it's not too clear which formula is the same as which other, okay? One can check. So again, this formula is obtained by getting an exact expression for TASAP starting with this initial data which we'll see tomorrow how those expressions are obtained but it only works for these three data basically or I'll show you which one's exactly it worked for. And then doing a scaling limit to obtain that. So you do a scaling limit of the determinant formula you get for this with this scaling and you get this formula coming up. So and one can check this area two to one. And now you have to shift if you wanna get, goes to area two of X. So I've shortened it, I've just called A sub two of X as X goes to minus infinity and area one of X as X goes to infinity but not exactly that. Actually, if you think about it, under the scaling limit what you see when you take a limit of this under the scaling when T equals zero, there's only an epsilon one half but you're doing epsilon minus a half. So the thing converges to a wedge. That's your initial data, a wedge, okay? And from the wedge, you should see something that looks like that, okay? And so this area one to two lives there. That's what you're seeing, okay? And so here you actually have to subtract or add, sorry. The smaller of zero and X squared. That's that parabola that you're seeing. So here the initial data is H, the rescaled initial data, this guy here is H zero X minus infinity. That's the rescaled initial data. So what we have in our pockets is actually a couple of different area processes. There's this area two, area one. There was the one Pierre mentioned called area stat if you start with Brownian motion. Area stat's a funny process because area stat is just a Brownian motion in space but it's got this funny height shift of a by-grains distribution at zero which is coupled to the rest of it. And then you also see that you could start with one on one side and one on the other side and get a crossover area process. So you can kind of stop at zero, put one of them on one side so you could start on one side and a two on the other and you'd get an area two to stat process. So there's sort of six of these guys, six basic area processes.  Okay, now that's the story. So it's not too hard to imagine if you look at this that what's really going on, because it remembers the initial data but otherwise it's universal supposedly over all these different types of models is that really the rescaling is sending you to a universal fixed point in the space of models. So we've got all our models like Tasep, KPC or directed polymers or stochastic burgers, stochastic chemical from Jacobi equations or as Pierre was mentioning the fronts of 2D chemical reactions. So we would have stochastic reaction diffusion equations. And then there's this rescaling h epsilon equals epsilon to the one half h, epsilon to the minus three halves T perhaps minus some huge constants. And all these models under this renormalization are being sucked into some universal fixed point which has special self-similar solutions which are these area processes. And that thing is the KPC fixed point. And the KPC universality conjecture is that all the models you believe are in the KPC universality class will under this rescaling converge to this KPC fixed point. So this is a picture of the KPC universality. It's a vague conjecture because what's the definition of being in the universality class. But keep in mind that the points in this space are these dynamical objects. So they're usually Markov processes. You have some initial data and it's a Markov process telling you the mechanism of evolution. So these points are Markov process and they converge to this KPC fixed point which should itself be a Markov process. They're not all Markovian. If you look at the front synostochastic 2D reaction diffusion equation if you don't know what that is, don't worry. That's definitely not a Markov process but somehow the Markov process gets recovered in the limit. The problem with this universality conjecture is that in tell recently we didn't know what the KPC fixed point is. So the subject of this lecture is that I'm gonna basically tell you what's the KPC fixed point. And the way to get it is to solve TASAP and take a limit. So this limit now, so I should write in red or something, this is completely understood. Okay, so at least one. And then there's a couple of other models like TASAP. TASAP has some friends, like things called push TASAP, et cetera, which we won't get into. So there's a couple of other models. There's like five other models which are sort of friends of TASAP, which also work. Okay. Now in this picture, the KPC equation looks like it has no special role anything more than TASAP or all those other models and that's true. In a sense, it's not even a special model. It's just a nice one because you are allowed to do this and we all like continual models and things like that. Though it's bad on the other hand, because it's so opposed. But it does play a special role because of this fact that on small scales it just looks like this. So what happens with the KPC equation is that if you look on large scales it should go to this fixed point, but if you look on small scales it should just go to DTH equals DX squared H plus C, this linear equation. So that's another fixed point, a trivial fixed point in the universality class called the Edwards-Welkinson fixed point. This guy has this one, two, three scaling. So the KPC fixed point just by fiat if it exists is invariant under this one, two, three scaling. The Edwards-Welkinson is invariant under this one, two, four scaling. And then there's a sort of weak universality of the KPC equation that it's the only thing, it's the conjecture, unique heteroclinic orbit connecting the Edwards-Welkinson fixed point and the KPC fixed point.  And if you make the rate of jumping down close to the rate of jumping up, that's the same thing as tuning the asymmetry small. And if you tune the asymmetry small, you can see that if you tune the asymmetry small here and put an epsilon and one half here, then you would already be in the one, two, four scaling. So there's models like ASAP, which if you tune close to, with asymmetry small, will converge actually to the KPC equation under this one, two, four scaling. So I just wanna mention that because there's also that universality which remains to be proved for a lot of models, though a lot of progress has been made because Martin-Harris method actually allows you to do this in a lot of cases. But that's a very different universality than the real KPC universality conjecture, which concerns this KPC fixed point. So this is the weak universality. So I have eight minutes and I'm going to tell you what's the KPC fixed point. And I don't know if you'll be appalled or wanting to come back for more, but anyway, here it is. Okay, so the KPC fixed point is a Markov process with explicit, like that, determinant transition probabilities. It's state space is a little bit funny. Did I erase this thing? Oh shoot, okay. It's state space is a little bit funny because although you'd think that state space would just be evolving height functions, you can see that under the KPC scaling, this is just gonna converge to what? It's gonna converge to something that looks like this, right? Converges to that function. And this guy converges to that function, right? Does everyone see that? So it's state space is actually naturally consists of upper semi-continuous functions. For the KPC fixed point, upper semi-continuous functions. Upper semi-continuous functions have a natural topology because for a function to be upper semi-continuous just means that it's hypograph. That means all this stuff left in it, less than it, which I just drew there, is closed. So if the hypograph's closed, those are closed sets in the plane and so you can take a distance which is just the Hausdorff distance. But we only wanna do it locally. So the metric, the topology on these functions is local Hausdorff convergence. That's very natural because if you take this initial data here, so that's your initial function. Because of the lateral growth, of course it's gonna grow to be like that. So that's why Hausdorff is the right topology here. You start with some function F. This is the probability starting from some function F in UC. And now you ask the question, at time T later, what's the probability that H is less than or equal to some new function G? Okay, that means less everywhere. So there's some function G and you just ask, is it less than that function? And this will be given by a Fredholm determinant, I minus some operator which is constructed out of F and G which I'm gonna show you. The operators have names, they're called K, hypo, F, V over two, K, epi, G, minus G over two. And this whole determinant is being calculated on L2 of R. So the whole thing's being hidden inside these operators K, hypo and K, epi, which I'm gonna describe to you now. They're a little bit weird. Well, first of all, epi refers to the epigraph of G. And it's completely natural because if I ask for a function to be less than this thing and we were talking about upper semi-continuous, it's completely natural that G should be lower semi-continuous. So G's are just minus the F's. And in fact, the hypo operator is just the epi operator observed from above. So hypo is nothing but row. So row is the reflection operator. So row of F of X is just F of minus X. So it's nothing but row K minus T of epi minus row F, row star. So anyway, they're basically the same operator but one's being looked at from above and one's being looked at from below. Okay, I could almost have written that but I wouldn't have space. Okay, now to build K, we need to write down some operators. It's just gonna take a second. So we start with the following things. STX is the following operator. So this one, E to the X, D squared. So that's just the heat semi-group, right? D squared is just the second derivative operator. So this just means the heat semi-group except there's a bit of a twist here. You were told never to write the heat semi-group backwards in time but X is in R. But it's okay because we're gonna add on T over three of D cubed and D cubed saves you from the backwards heat equation. So believe it or not, this operator makes perfect sense and in fact it has a simple integral kernel. Well, simple enough. It's T to the minus a third, E to the two thirds. Might start seeing things which look familiar. X cubed over T squared minus ZX. If you can't read this, it's in the notes anyway. Area of minus T to the one third, minus a third, Z plus T to the minus four thirds. X squared, okay. If you can't read it, don't even worry. The point is it has a nice integral kernel and amazingly because you're solving the heat equation backwards, the kernel is explicit and nice. It actually behaves well as X goes to minus infinity if you look. As X goes to minus infinity, E to the minus X cubed is very bizarre. Okay, so now I have to tell you what the Ks are. So you'll get five minutes. One minute. I won't. Let me at least finish this. Okay, so I have my function G and G is an upper semi-continuous function so it sort of looks like, oops, not like that. Wow, okay, it could look like that. There's an upper semi-continuous function. That's G. You should think about it as being identified with its epigraph.  I'm gonna send a Brownian motion until it hits the epigraph, okay? And that's called tau. So X is a position on here. I'm gonna send a Brownian motion from position V till it hits the epigraph. Time is called tau. It's a time, it's a time, it's a position in space. We'll send a Brownian motion this way too. Maybe it'll hit the epigraph there. So we make an operator called S bar epi G. Plus X, so this side of X is called G plus X. G plus X, that just means G on this side. And the G minus X just means G on this side. It's the expectation of a Brownian motion starting at V of S, T, X minus tau, B tau. That operator is called epi. And then there's a similar one on the other side with the same definition. I'll keep that. Here, epi G. Want to think of this as a hit operator. Brownian motion hit the thing and then we evaluated S at that. So this thing, this thing's called the Brownian Scouting Operator. Take I minus S minus TX minus S. By the way, S can have minus T or T. The T here can be any sign and it makes sense as long as T is not equal to zero. For all X. So you should think of this operator saying, I don't hit on the left. X plus T, and that says I don't hit on the right. And you should read I minus that as somehow a particle gets sent in from infinity at one variable. It's an operator, but it's an operator kernel also. So it has two variables, U1 and U2. It gets sent in from infinity to U1 and has to hit G and then exit in infinity at U2. And that's the Brownian Scouting Operator. You compute that, put it in here, and that's the, this is the KBZ fixed point formula. You can do that for any function and that thing gives you exact transition probabilities of the Markov process. Unfortunately, I might have time, but although it looks like a crazy formula, in fact, if we were in this case, in five minutes, you'll get this formula out of it. All you do is just evaluate because if you're in this special case, one side is flat and the other side is like this. So hitting on one side means you don't hit at all because there's nothing to hit. Hitting on the other side means you're hitting a straight line which you can do by the reflection principle. You just compute and out pops this formula. So although the formula looks very abstract, it readily reproduces the known formulas, okay? And then, well, of course, the big question is where does this formula come from and that's gonna be the subject of the next three lectures. I think since we're running a little late, we'll save questions for during lunch and the subsequent lunch. Let's thank Jeremy again.