Cool Stuff Found While Surfing with Agentic Browsers

It's time for MacGeekGab, and listener Bruce brings us our cool stuff of the week with,

in a recent episode, Dave and Adam talked about an app that used to be included

in the macOS utilities folder called Network Utility, which Apple has long since discontinued.

However, Devon Technologies has picked it up and continues to develop this extremely

handy utility, now called Neo Network Utility.

Bonus, it's free. And of course, we'll have the link in the show notes for you at MacGeekGab.com.

More cool stuff found like this, plus your question answered today on MacGeekGab

1128 for Monday, February 9th, 2026.

Greetings, folks, and welcome to Mac Geek Up, the show where we share cool stuff found like that.

And normally we also share quick tips and your questions and answer your questions.

And we might do a little bit of that this week. But as promised,

it is a cool stuff found focused episode.

A lot of the stuff is free, like our first one.

Some of it's not. I know some of you call these wallet buster episodes.

We try to be cognizant of that and mindful. But stuff's cool,

so it's fun to just dream a little bit, isn't it?

And that is why we do what we do so that we can each learn or learn about five

new things every single time we get together.

Our sponsors for today include Shopify.com slash MGG, where you can sign up

for your $1 per month trial period.

And a new sponsor sundays for dogs.com slash

mgg50 where you get 50 off your first order of this like dog food that's made

from like real meat and fruits and veggies i tried it so we'll talk about that

in a little bit for now here on national clean out your computer day in durham

new hampshire i'm dave hamilton and.

Here in south dakota i'm adam christensen

And here, also in New Hampshire, and I'm going to have a cool stuff found later

about cleaning out your phone, too.

It's Pilot Pete. Good to be back with you, gents.

Great to see you. Yeah. Oh, it's fun. Here we are.

No matter where we went, here we are.

Except for, oh, how about that game yesterday, huh? What a Super Bowl. Go Pats.

That's right. Yeah, we record this ahead of time.

I can't believe they won by that much.

I like this, Pete. That's good.

I'm so not a sports ball person. The only thing I care about is if I'm going

to win money in the pool, the office pool for the third year in a row.

Oh, there you go. Yeah. Well, you, you will have known by the time this episode

comes out, Adam. So. Yep.

Yep. Right. See, Adam, if you, if you wouldn't constrain yourself to the linear,

linear timeline, you could win every week in the office pool, but you know. Yeah.

If I only had a Gray's sports almanac.

Yeah, that's right. From the future. From the future. Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

I'd own a casino by now.

And you'd have a nice jacket to wear, too.

That's the only way to win at gambling.

All right. More cool stuff found or, in this instance, cool stuff made, shall we?

Yeah.

Oscar wrote in. He says, I'm the solo indie developer behind apps like Sensei

and Trim Enabler, which you've mentioned on the show.

Before he said, I just launched a new app called Backdrop 2.0,

and it is the first live wallpaper app to allow custom video wallpapers on the

Mac lock screen, a feature that users have wanted for years.

It gives users deep personalization that macOS doesn't offer.

So he sent that in, and we love when listeners create things, and it's awesome.

So yes, thank you for sending that in, Oscar. and of course links in the show

notes fun stuff live wallpaper on the uh on the on the uh on the watch screen that's good it.

Doesn't take any

cpu time does it

Takes less than you think like yeah it

it like the live wallpapers are pretty efficient uh at least on the max that

i've seen but i have some commentary not about live wallpaper but about about

tahoe and efficiency and it relates to something adam said but i stumbled onto

something this week so there there will be a a protracted tech discussion.

So we're going to need to talk maybe even soon

i've got a banner for that even yeah great okay oh

okay yeah well very cool well um we

got another one from pensacola craig this week he writes in

hi guys my apology if this has already been covered i

have a very vague recollection of pete mentioning it within the last year but

maybe another similar app but dock lock light resolves the issue of the mac

dock moving around it keeps it locked to a display and locked to a position

the small app keeps the Mac dock locked in place,

display and position included in the basic free version.

He says, I was frequently having the dock move between my displays in a dual

monitor setup, because when you move the mouse cursor straight down,

the dock will jump to the secondary display, and that was happening to me at

least once a week. Very annoying.

DockLock Lite completely resolves

this problem in the free version based upon my initial experience.

Once downloaded, it will start up in a free trial version of an enhanced feature

set, but once the free trial expires you revert to the basic free feature set

and that does include locking the dock into place cheers pensacola craig

Love that cool yeah yeah cool stuff that's why i mean you know the name wrote itself folks,

it's cool stuff found yeah all right we got another one adam am.

I i'm up with

Jim i think so.

Yeah let's see what jim has to say uh jim says on a recent episode you were

discussing bookmark sorting and

Management for many.

Years i've used book maxter by

sheep systems to edit sort and sync

bookmarks across browsers and it works

great so yeah that's

that this one's a common thing that comes up a lot

yeah i think i've commented before i'm not really a bookmark person but i know

a lot of people are and managing and syncing and you know doing all your bookmarks

especially if you're not a single browser type person is never really fun

Yeah interesting huh yeah

well i'm i'm i'm looking at this because

of what pete's about to mention next i

i and i don't see that listed here but maybe so yeah i can i can see this being

very very handy for a lot of reasons very good fun huh cool and it looks like

i think it's is it free i think it's free or at least,

how to demo or buy okay uh you can it is not free it is 25 bucks there you go

and they do have academic licensing too so which offers a 33 discount so yes yeah there you go cool.

All right, Pete. I've thought for a long time someone needs to do that, and now they have.

Yes.

In other words, I invented it. Someone else implemented it.

You know, that's – but, like, I'm excited now because on Business Brain,

I'm sure I've said it here too, but on Business Brain, I say all the time,

if you want your idea to be worth $100,

write it on the $100 bill.

Ideas aren't worth anything without execution. and and like and and you're you're

self-deprecating and and very funny commentary highlights that love it yeah.

Yeah it's you know how many good ideas you know but years and years ago i thought

man there must be a way to put something on a remote control so i don't have

to hunt in the couch cushions for the darn thing

Oh yeah and.

You know thank you apple for the ear take

Now we have it right yeah exactly i mean let's let's be perfectly candid this

show exists because i copied what other people were doing and then ran out of

ideas and we had to pivot but you know and now.

You people give us the ideas

And now right it's fair and when i say i copied what other people were doing

other people is adam there.

He is i'm pointing at him on the live

Stream Yeah, exactly. It's not nice to point. Actually, two Adams.

It was you and Adam Curry.

And you were listening to Allison. Oh, Adam Curry. That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, it was really the two of them. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, we were all just trying to find our way. I mean, my show,

if anybody listened in the early days, started out as Ken.

Ken hadn't started doing it yet, but Ken Ray's show. Because my concept was

I had a long commute at the time, and I wanted to recap the news.

Because I would drive to work for 45 minutes to an hour

And then I would get there, and the first thing I would do is sit in front of

my computer and pull up all the Apple websites and catch up on the news for

like 15 minutes while I kind of got started in the morning.

And then I realized, man, it'd be great if there was a podcast that would do

this for me, and I could just listen on my commute.

But that turned out to be a lot of work. And then I think what happened was

I got my first question and I was like, Oh wait, yeah, this is a way that I

can probably bring what I get with my user group, which was dying,

you know, even back then, uh, and share it with a lot more people and get a lot more interaction.

And so it just evolved that way.

But yeah, my first concept, my first idea was a five minute daily podcast that

would just recap the news headlines of the week for Apple.

Well, that sure snowballed fast.

It's interesting. I never had heard that story before.

And what were the interesting parallel is that we both stumbled into answering

people's questions accidentally.

You you you did it that way we did

the first episode john and i talked about

whatever the latest version of mac os or whatever

i think it was called mac os 10 was called then like in our experiences

with it was super boring but you can listen to it it's fine um and

it's out there mcky cab mgg.fm slash one

we'll get you there i'm sure uh and then i can't

remember what episode two was and i suppose you know

i can i can also do the same thing and go to mgg.fm slash

two and figure it out uh this was all about podcasting so we we taught people

about um like what apps were available to do all that like net newswire and

ipotter and like that stuff and we talked about there was one.

From germany that was good about that it did your rss feed for you automatically and

All that but that was episode two and then i'm

pretty sure episode three was when i didn't have any ideas and i called it the

mailbag uh nope so i've been lying for years episode three was wireless base

stations we talked about okay so but somewhere early on single digit episode

episodes no it wasn't episode three it wasn't episode four wasn't.

I was gonna say dave you should probably just ask perplexity or oh yeah

It was it was episode six was episode five sorry no you're right pete episode

five was when i we ran out of ideas and so i called it mailbag mayhem and i

made up a bunch of questions to answer for people,

and because i just the four listeners.

Hadn't written in

Yet no we we we were able we had about a thousand.

You did have a good listener base because of the

Website right out of the gate because of the website.

Yeah exactly yeah

And um but but so i made that up and,

Ever since, so it was episode five, I need to retrain my brain.

Ever since that, like, then that was like, same with you, Adam,

you know, people started sending in questions because, and for me,

I never thought, I never really,

back then I wasn't doing user groups much. There was a stint in the middle where I did.

But for me, it was like, oh, this is great. This can replace.

I loved one of the things I loved most about doing on-site consulting for people

was being able to help them by answering their questions.

And so it was like, great. I can replace this now because I was moving and I

wasn't planning on doing consulting up here. Of course, I do some of it, but, you know, yeah.

We all do.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Forever. Right. Forever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So.

Well. And your other problem, Adam, was macOS Adam just isn't as catchy as macOS can. That was clever.

I'll.

All right, shall we move on?

We shall. Let's do it at this time. So I got one, and then I noticed that Dave's

also using it, but I actually have a twofer here.

Okay.

The Atlas browser is associated in some ways with ChatGPT.

They promoted it to me and said, hey, use this.

They make it, Pete. It's from them.

Yeah, but go ask, do make this error. Go ask ChatGPT to summarize what the Atlas browser is.

Doesn't know.

And it gives you the I don't know salute. You know, what are you talking about?

Are you talking about this project or that project called Atlas?

No, we don't have a browser. Well, yeah, you do. And I pointed to it and it's

like, oh, yeah, never mind.

So, I mean, come on, man.

Your own product. Here's the cool thing, though. It is a browser.

It works. It's called the chatgptatlas.app.

You can import your bookmarks and profiles and all that kind of stuff.

But once you're in it, you can open the ChatGPT sidebar and ask it to summarize,

explain, handle tasks, emails, rate reviews, and all that.

But right in the sidebar of the browser, and you can ask it relevant questions

about what you're looking at on your browser.

I guess the word is agentic. It's very agentic.

But it's an experimental OpenAI browser shell. Runs locally.

Uh it navigates the sites gathers info and potentially helps complete multi-step actions

It's got it it's got chrome at its core.

Yeah yeah there you go did you say you had it for some reason i thought it was

arc but it's chrome okay well

Arc also has chrome at its core.

Well there you go so yeah so i was correct um it's separate from the chat gpt

main app so it is a browser um it's uh

I have a lot to say about this.

Okay, well, that's good. It's got some rough edges. But for those of you who

are Perplexity users and not

ChetGPT users, Perplexity has one called Comet. So there's your twofer.

Yeah. So it's interesting that we both...

Had you not put this on the list, Pete, I would have put it on the list.

Okay.

And this is...

It's it's it's interesting that we both did this this week because both of these

browsers have been out and on my computers for months.

I mean, since they came out and I test them for whatever reason,

I never quite understood until this week.

I was doing some stuff. I was messing with Claude Co-Work.

Now, Claude Code is the agentic coding system.

And when we talk about agentic, we mean you have an agent that runs locally

on your computer leveraging the LLM to perform tasks for you.

And Cloud Code, of course, was to write code.

And you would have multiple agents. You'd have one to write your code.

You'd have another to review your code.

You might have one to write the back-end code, one to write the user interface

code, and then another to oversee it, and another to bug test it,

and another to make your unit test. And it can completely level up your coding.

I'm reminded of Steve Jobs when he explained how the computer,

like the Mac, was going to be the bicycle for the mind with coding and with

the agentic stuff in general.

It's that same level up right it's

steve for those of you who don't know the reference steve said uh early

early on uh like to a graphic design

school or something where he gave a speech he said

you know you take a human and a human is capable of of getting from point a

to point b uh you know in an hour but you give a human a bicycle and it's that

same human using their same energy and they can get from point a to point d

in an hour because they're using this bicycle And so his, his, that was the metaphor.

It's a bicycle for the mind. This feels like that same kind of level up and

I'm, I'm probably understating it.

So I'd been messing with Claude Cowork.

And I was doing an experiment. Our business brain show, we have a whole Friday I segment.

And so I was like, OK, we had kind of abandoned our X account,

our Twitter account with the business brain show.

It's not entirely true. We were auto posting things to it. We weren't really doing anything.

And so I asked coworker, I said, hey, can you like come up with a plan and then

execute that plan to revive this account?

And it was amazing because what it did was it said, yeah, can you install the

Chrome connector? And I was like, sure.

And it took over my browser with my permission, of course, and went through

all the screens of our X account.

And it says like, all right, here's the thing. Here's what you're posting.

You're not replying. You're doing this.

You're in effectively algorithmic jail because you're not a good X citizen.

You're not interacting. You're not doing things. I'm like, great.

Can you come up with a plan? It's like, yes. Like, can you execute that plan?

Yes. So now every day it was going out and finding, you know,

it identified like 10 people that we should engage with and reply to because

being reply guy is like the,

for lack of a better term, is a great way to sort of show the algorithms that

you are out there and doing things and engaging. Right.

And and it'll also get you followers because you're you're exposing yourself

to other people's audiences, not just yelling into the void.

And so I was like, great, come up with the strategy. And it's like,

great, like now execute. So it goes through again, using my browser and does all this stuff.

And, you know, finds recent tweets from those people and composes replies.

And then if you're willing to violate, I believe, violate what Twitter's terms

of service are, you can even have it publish those tweets for you.

And I realized, OK, this needs to be like many separate agents,

one to respond to our tweets, one to this, one to compose and one to compose all the stuff.

And then again, if you want one to actually do the execution and you can have

the execution one be a dumb agent at the trick with agents that I've learned,

and I know I'm a little off trail here, but I'm coming back.

The trick with agents that I've learned is you have to treat them each like

moronic interns that could only ever possibly be good at one task.

Well, this is the important part. They can only ever be good at one task. Thank you.

Resist the urge to tell them

more than they need to know because up until at

least very recently with opus 4.6 the scope

of and we've all seen this we've used chat gpt the

scope of these things it gets lost right

and so you have to just keep it on track and it

will it will offer like do you want me to do that no and

you remind it you are excellent at for example composing

tweets for the business brain show

on x that's the only thing you're good at you're not good at composing

tweets for the mac geek gab show on x you are

good at composing tweets for the business brain show on x that is stay

in your lane right and once you like get that mindset

of moronic interns they can be really good at

one thing right and they're and it's and they're computers so they don't

have like human emotions they don't get bored they you know it's great um

so i was doing that but the chrome it's cool

it was having some trouble i was using google sheets as

its sort of database and storing things in there do not recommend

this for any of the things i'm about to do but it did

lead me to something because it was having trouble navigating google sheets and

i was like i wish i could do this

with like chat gpt and like wait a minute that's what the browser's for and

so i launched chat gpt atlas on wednesday afternoon at about 2 p.m and i just

took all my instructions for the for the moronic uh interns and put them into

separate sessions in Of course.

I had Claude write me the instructions for the moronic interns.

You don't have to do that yourself. The AI is there to teach you how to make

agents of the AI or even make them.

Yeah. And it's so much better because not only can, and this is true in Atlas and in Comet.

And you can sort of do the same thing with the Claude plug-in in Chrome,

but it's not quite as good.

But Atlas and Combat, certainly, they can not just tell you about the page,

but with your permission, they can take over the page and start doing things.

And this is where my life changed on Wednesday because I will never again use a non-agentic browser.

The reason is you know when

you've and this is a very like rudimentary use

case of this but it's one that i think we'll all relate

to you know when you're on a web page let's say

the web page for your router okay and

you're like i know that there's a setting here where

i can control the flow rate of

my connection and i just got a faster

connection so i want to set it from you know 500 megabits

per second to a gig per second i can't

remember where that is and you just start clicking and digging

and and trying to find it's like why am

i doing this why isn't there something that just gets

me right there that's the moment that i

now open up the side panel and i say please

go in and change uh in my router here please

go in and change things from 500 megabits per second on my connection to a gigabit

and then grant it permission to go and mess with my browser and it'll go and

like flow through the windows and find the thing and you're done about six months

ago a friend of mine uh business partner actually said to me.

In the not-too-distant future, our interface with most webpages will be just

like a chatbot interface.

That will be the primary interface because that way they have context for you.

They know what you're doing.

You don't need to click all these things. You need to be able to tell it what

you want, and it needs to be able to deliver.

And now with these agentic browsers or with these LLM-embedded browsers, we have that.

I mean, it's a layer on top of it. The websites aren't doing it,

but we're doing it to them.

And like I said, I will never use a non-agentic browser again.

I'm seriously considering swapping my iPhone for Android so that I can put Comet on my phone.

Seriously. Like once you once you really start taking advantage of this,

like, for example, we with one of my businesses, we have a trust pilot account. Right.

And our our numbers were low.

Like it's like a three point three review or whatever. And I was like, OK, OK.

Please do this for me. And I logged into our trust pilot account and I said, go.

And I said, please check out what our account, compare it to others in our industry,

figure out where we could be.

And then once you know what that gap is, take a look at our specific account,

all the replies, everything that's in there and tell me what the problem is.

And what what what low hanging fruit do we have that we can solve? And it did this.

In about three minutes. And it's like, yeah, here's your problem.

It's like, actually, you have like 76% of the people are five stars.

The problem is your one star reviews. And here's the exact reason.

All, you know, 80% of your one star reviews complain about this one thing.

And it's like, so I think your customer service responses need to be updated.

I'm like, well, we don't have to think.

I logged it into our Freshdesk account, which is our customer service engine.

And I'm like, dig through. Look at the actual trails for these people.

Figure it out. in about five minutes it came back

and it was like yep my theory was correct here's your your

sample template for this this needs to be changed because

it doesn't show empathy until the bottom you need to show empathy at the top and

and this all

happened in 10 minutes and i basically told it two things while i was on a conference

call it all happened this is where my life changed on wednesday and your life

can change too the bonus pete and this is the bonus that i promised you.

You know how I've been having problems with Tahoe on my M1 Mini?

Adam, you suggested that I turn off, that it might be GPU related.

You kind of, right. And so it was like, all right, let me target the things

that are whacking on the GPU.

And I did. I turned off transparency. I did the reduce motion thing. And it helped.

And I have iStatMenu showing me the GPU in the menu bar now.

And sure enough, when my computer is sluggish, it's the GPU that's pegged, not the CPU, right?

So you are 100% right about that. And that alone has made my life better.

But where my life got a lot better on Wednesday afternoon was when I stopped

having Safari running on my Mac.

Running Atlas. And I have moved away from ChatGPT, from Atlas to Comet,

because ChatGPT, it just...

It wants to please you,

Dave. It's the wrong engine. Yeah, I need something that's going to give it to me straight.

I'm sorry, Dave. if i can't

Do that so i've moved to perplexity's comet um which i i think is actually using

open ai's like 5.2 in the background anyway but whatever it's so much better i.

Thought it grabbed the other

It does but i think primarily yeah yeah

yeah but anyway so i'm using comet but it was

the same experience they're both chromium based browsers and um

it's night and day my computer's just

smooth everything's great like this is anecdotal it's one

person but holy crap it's

better safari in tahoe is a

disaster now i don't have tahoe on this computer uh

in the studio and so it's like it's not an issue there's something even though

i'm running whatever the the tahoe version of safari is right that's um you

know safari 26 i suppose yeah 26.2 it's not an issue here it's a it's a tahoe

thing man there's something about the way the gpu is beat on there,

um although no it is

it's safari 26 too uh i there's a web page the web page that i go to to get

all the um the the day of the week thing you know like the things if i have

that open when i'm trying to record my computer is like unusable i tried it

this morning in comet it was fine,

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

Yeah.

A little follow-up. Brian asks in the Discord chat, will Safari integrate those

features with the new Safari-Gemini partnership?

And the comment I have on that is, Dave, you're saying I'll never use a non-agentic

browser ever again. Correct.

I will postulate very, very quickly we will not be using browsers ever again

as we know them like it's you were talking about an integrated browser with the agentic ai yeah

it's what apple is doing yeah everybody's going

to be doing it's going to integrate into your operating system and you're just

going to interact with your operating system and it's going to do all this stuff

for you and i only mention that because you know like it's it's invading every

aspect of of our lives this agentic stuff oh

Yeah for sure.

You know so it's going to be all over the place but you're going to

be running agents natively and that's

why you know apple and you're going to see

all these people doing these partnerships yep that's where

my concerns come though because just like you were saying like i need to switch

to android now because this isn't available or that isn't available it's going

to get worse when we start seeing these companies partner and silo and we know

apple is historically very bad at this where

They're going to do Gemini, and if we don't like Gemini, too bad.

Right.

You know?

Right. And that's the issue, right?

Yeah, Apple needs to choose wisely here.

Yeah, fair statement.

Right? That's it.

And they've historically not been good with this AI stuff yet.

No. No, they don't.

I'm wondering if that's on purpose, though.

Well, I don't think it's on purpose. I think it's I think it's a byproduct of

a very expected byproduct of Apple's commitment to privacy.

AI is not private. Like, I mean, I know that it like it could be and people say that it is.

And there's there's the terms of service that say they don't use your data.

And I know that they don't, but by nature of using it, my data is going to someone

else's computer that I don't control.

And, and that's a choice that I make. And I, I do it eyes wide open.

And we talk about this enough on the show that hopefully everybody who listens,

it can, can make that choice in an informed way.

And I don't judge people for either side of this choice, by the way, I get it.

But I think that's why this is fundamentally incompatible with Apple Apple's

ethos and they've been trying to fit this square peg in a round hole for a little while,

And I think they need to shave down the edges of the pig and fit it in the wrong way.

I mean, maybe.

Yeah, maybe. Maybe there's another way.

Well, or maybe they just are fine again.

Historically, I mean, it's not going to be great for their shareholders and

stuff like that, potentially.

But, I mean, how many years did we live being the, you know,

two percenters or three percenters of the market?

Fair. You know, there is going to be a still a good chunk of the market that

values that kind of privacy and restrictions. And maybe they're willing for

the trade off and maybe they're willing to.

That's our that's our slice of the pie. Yeah, I don't think that's the case.

No, I'm sure, you know, they would like financially to be have a much larger chunk of the pie.

But if they make those decisions, that's the decisions they make.

Yeah. Yeah, that's fair. I'm eager. I mean, clearly already we're seeing some

of the edges of this square peg being shaved, right?

Like with this, that the, the way the questions about the way that Gemini is

going to be integrated into whatever Apple does next.

And that path apple initially implied that

this would be the gem like a white labeled version

of gemini which i think it will be running on

apple's private cloud infrastructure and now like what google is saying is it's

going to be running on our private cloud infrastructure because they don't have

the right infrastructure you know their infrastructure is not built for this

so i like i'm curious to see where it goes i can i can say that,

The best engine running or a great engine is saying which one is best right

now is really difficult because they change every day.

A great LLM running on the wrong hardware is less useful than not even using the LLM, right?

Like if it's too slow or if it can't, if the scope can't hold enough in memory

to be useful to you, then it's not going to be useful to you.

Um so yeah

it's interesting i i've been really liking claude i

i like of the of the of the four major

ones gemini claude open ai

slash chat gpt and and perplexity i really

like what claude is doing best at the

moment um i like their model i like

that it's easy if you need more credits you

can just pay for them uh you don't have to change

plans and they have opus for

programming or really anything else um opus 4.5

up at the beginning of last week was the

gold standard like three times as fast as

anything else and then on thursday night

opus 4.6 came out which has a million tokens

which i think is four times the the token memory

so that that it enhances the scope in a.

Huge huge way so anyway uh

things are changing for sure

and yep i i encourage all

of you even if you are even if you know you're

not going to to integrate ai into your lives i encourage all of you to download

you know either comet or or atlas and and just experience something we've talked

about here just so you know what you're missing you know so you make the decision eyes wide open.

I mean, Adam, you, you hit the nail on the head.

It's going to be just interacting with your operating system as opposed to the

passive reading a web page type.

Yeah.

It's in it. It's working for you. Yeah. So.

There is something right now that exists and I actually had it on the cool stuff

found list, um, from Mac paw and it's called any E N E Y.

And uh it's going to try and play a video on my computer here great love that yeah.

Let's all sit and watch yeah sit

And watch um it is part of setup but what it is is it's a little assistant that

sits on your computer and does it like integrates with your operating system

as much as an app could right you know and it it's all running locally it can do your transcriptions,

It knows about every app in Setapp.

So when you say, hey, I wanna edit a picture, it can be like, all right, great.

Here's how you're gonna do that. And it walks you through the process.

You wanna connect to your VPN, it can do things like that.

You can even do it with the setup trial. You can go get a trial for setup and try out any.

It's an interesting concept. It gives us a taste of what it could be like with

this fully integrated into the foundation of the OS.

So that's my – I snuck another cool stuff found in there, guys.

Yeah, there you go.

I tried to get us back on track. Are we back on track? Is there more to say

about this? Okay, cool. We have a ton more cool stuff found to do. Yeah, we do. Yeah.

And but I promised you that I'd tell you, you know, about my little experiment.

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All right, back to cool stuff found. Bruce has our next one for us.

And it's, we've got a few in a row here, which are sort of reactions to things

we've talked about, other conversations we've been having. And this is one of them.

He says, clipgrab.org is a wonderful and free app that will download video from

most any URL. You were talking about this in episode 1127.

And this is the app that I use, and it will download from YouTube, of course.

In addition, it can download a video as just an MP3 audio file if you want to grab just the audio.

Keep up the great work and don't get caught. Well, same to you,

Bruce. Thanks for the note. I love that.

We'll put clip grab in the show notes. Love it.

Great.

Awesome.

Yeah. So let me take us to one. We had Cheat Sheet is dying a slow and painful death.

May actually already be gone. And Kirshen wrote in with, I was checking out

the cheat sheet app you mentioned in 11.22.

On further research, I came across the original developer saying the cheat sheet is discontinued.

And other posts on Reddit, surface, she says that.

I then found KeyClue, that's K-E-Y-C-L-U.

And tried it out, works very well, and goes on to say, install it using Homebrew.

Yeah, I installed it using brew. It works great. I'm looking for the actual,

it's like brew slash, or brew space install,

And I'm not seeing it. It's on their webpage. It's on their webpage.

Brew space info, space key clue.

Nope, that's not correct. It's on their webpage. It's on their webpage.

Yeah, there you go. Yeah, it's brew install task key clue.

But here's the cool thing about it. I set mine up to you go into settings and

use a hotkey to bring it up.

In my case, if I tap option key and hold it the second time,

it comes up. And what does Key Clue give you?

Well, let's say I'm in view and I want to zoom out.

It says, well, and then hit command minus. Or I want to find something.

Find next. It's command G.

There's literally dozens. No, scores of commands that come up in the window

for what you have in front of you.

And for those of you that are mouse and trackpad users, and that's the only

way you navigate, if you start using keystrokes, they become muscle memory pretty

quick, and you'll find your productivity going way up, I promise.

But if you press and hold it, whatever key it tells you as you install it,

you can then go to the bottom right corner and open Settings,

and then you can customize it significantly from there.

So, but key clue is I, I've been using it and absolutely love it.

And yeah, I installed it using brew.

I don't remember the set command. It's in the show notes.

That's the beauty. You don't have to remember that stuff, right?

Let me manifest. I'm not going to say, wouldn't it? I'll say,

won't it be nice when we can just say, Hey, S lady, zoom that in for me.

And it doesn't matter what app you're in or where you are.

It just figures it out and does it.

Enhance that blurry picture until I can see that license plate. Or who robbed the store.

And like any can, the thing from Mac Paul can do some of that stuff.

Like it really, like it can, because it's got all those apps from Setup that

it can kind of draw on and integrates with.

So it's pretty powerful with, because of Setup.

I mean, they did a lot of hard work. And then also it leverages everything that

it knows about all the apps and Setup, which makes a difference.

So yeah it's pretty cool all right moving on awesome.

Yeah, I got one from Larry that's a little bit of a follow-up.

It says, Hi, Dave, Adam, and Pete.

I don't know how new this is, but I didn't know about it.

Several operating systems ago, when Apple separated the data from the operating

system, we lost the ability to create bootable clones.

I have been using Carbon Copy Cloner ever since then, and thought nothing had changed.

I have a license for SuperDuper and recently looked at it again because my daughter

was looking for a backup system.

When I looked at it, it said it could do bootable clones on silicone Macs. I had no idea.

I gave it a try and it worked. I now employ both Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper in my backup strategy.

Carbon Copy Cloner or CCC Backup has more bells and whistles like email notifications

after a run and SuperDuper with its ability to clone is a nice safety net thanks

for all you do love the show sweet

That's good to know i i did not realize that that was doable thanks well.

I wonder i i kind of wonder what they're doing or how they're doing it because

we're gonna ask yeah well with cc well with cc backup, you can also create a bootable backup.

And they have a really nice article that describes all the reasons or all the

ways you can do it. There's kind of multiple things you can do.

And they also go into some of the reasons why maybe you don't need to do it.

And, you know, some of the caveats and catches and stuff like that.

So you can set up your volume using, with CCC backup using something they call

like legacy, I think it's called legacy...

Legacy bootable copies of mac os.

Yeah so basically you have to do some upfront things i think you you put the

operating system on there before you create your carbon copy cloner

destination and then you use that destination but you know there's some tricks

and caveats and you know really um if you just have a you know if you just install

a fresh operating system

you know onto your thing and then run migration assistant from your carbon copy

cloner backup up you're good to go correct so and

That would be true of a super duper clone as well like even if it just cloned

the data data volume right.

Yeah so maybe maybe this is a discussion for another day but i just wanted to

point point that out that i mean there are ways around this so i don't know

if super duper is doing the same kind of thing or not it could be they're doing

something extra special but we'll like you said we'll find out yeah

I'll send this over and and they're always really good about like being super

nerdy and i love that so thank you in advance.

Yeah but i mean again like

these days i would probably just recommend if it's just for troubleshooting

and stuff like that i mean you have the recovery partition if that doesn't work

like your whole thing's totally borked i would buy i would probably just buy

a you know ssd you don't even have to probably get a big one and put an operating

system on it and just have it as your here.

Your boot. Yeah.

Recovery.

Yeah, that's right.

Your bootable drive.

That's actually a really good idea. And I'm curious to hear Dave Naney and the

author, developer of SuperDuper.

I'm curious to hear his thoughts on this, but like,

The idea of taking the current OS, and maybe you do this every six months, right?

Like your idea here, and just install it onto an external thing and stop.

Like, let it be at the point of needing migration assistant or just going in cold, right?

Because either one, like you can go in cold within about five,

you know, five, ten minutes.

You're past all the prompts and you're using a computer. it's it's a blank slate

but you know you can sync it to your iCloud and like get up and rolling but

it saves you the time of having to be like okay how do i how do i go and install

on an external drive because that's not the most obvious thing right and like

just having that done on ice,

this is not a bad idea adam yeah.

And you can pull up disk utility and you know and do all your troubleshooting

and stuff like that if you're you're your main mac has died yeah

Yeah that too but you are ready for that like alright migration assistant let's

go like yep you're at that step oh yeah.

I will add that I have used SuperDuper for a long time. Recently,

I did it. I have a little thumb drive about yay big.

It's, I don't know, an inch and a half long or so, something like that.

It's a terabyte. And I've put it on there.

And then I realized my security issue, if I use that, I've got my entire computer right there.

Even though I have FileVault on my laptop, that thing isn't protected.

So I reformatted it with a password protected, encrypted, and then put super duper on it.

I haven't tried to boot from that to see if it works with the password protection

on there. I would imagine that once you're past that, it should boot.

But yeah, I like your idea better, Dave. Just have the operating system. It's not my idea.

It's Adam's idea.

Well, I'm sorry. Somebody's idea. Yeah, having just the operating system on

one drive and then having your backed up data on another as needed,

that seems much cleaner.

Yeah, ready to rock. Yeah.

And that way you're only pulling what you need instead of the whole shooting match.

Well, you wouldn't be able to pull the whole shooting match.

What you would do, you're just doing one of the steps ahead of time.

Yeah. Right? Because if you have your data cloned, you still need to install

an operating system on a drive and get it all.

There's that process that is a process. So doing that when you're like sitting and, you know,

watching some mindless show on television is a way better time to do it than

the day that, you know, things went south. Yes.

Although, although what happens if like I did that with 26.1 and now my Mac

and backup is from 26.2, would it matter?

I don't know. It's just the data. It's just the data.

Yeah.

I don't know.

If you're booted onto that volume, you could upgrade it.

Well, that's the thing. Is it smart enough? Like the iPhone,

if I go to migrate from one iPhone to another, it'll say, oh,

hey, wait, I need to upgrade my operating system to what that iPhone has.

Hang on a second. And it does it. And then you're ready to rock.

I don't know. I haven't tried that with a Mac. I see an experiment.

In fact, I had that issue when I bought my phone because I had beta on the old

phone and didn't on the new one.

And I didn't want the beta. But it was like, okay. I was trying to get out of it,

But let us know if you know anything about this feedback at Mac geek cab.com.

We'd love to hear from you.

You heard him. Feedback at MacGeekGab.com.

That's right. Feedback at MacGeekGab.com.

Woo-hoo. All right. Back to other things that were sent in to feedback. Yeah.

So I have excuses. Everybody has excuses.

When I've been late or forgotten something or whatever, I often jokingly say

my Zulu converter was broken because especially in aviation,

we use Zulu all the time because you're all

over the world and you need to reference one common time

and so there's the uh zulu

or universal time coordinated uh utc

and that's what it is and uh um andrew

writes and he says a while back pilot pete mentioned problems with

time tracking in utc local actually it was just my memory andrew uh but uh i

did eventually show up he says but this is great you can put a widget on your

phone ipad or home uh or ipad home screen with a local UTC and your time zone

and you can have multiple widgets from one app.

It's from the makers of Cheat Sheet.

You can customize it to the nth degree and it is called World Clock Widget.

This is cool. I think it works on both the Mac and iPhone.

Oh, I haven't I'm trying it on the Mac. Yeah. Okay.

But yes, it, it, it is made for iPhone and iPad and Mac.

Yeah, there it is. Okay. Now I'm finding screenshots for the Mac. Huh? That. Okay.

So, huh. Which, and, and I'll go back to my other, uh,

Quick tip, I guess, is I always leave my laptop on Eastern time,

be it daylight or standard at the given time, because my watch,

my phone always knows the local time.

And I could always from anywhere in the world immediately look and go,

oh, probably not a good time to call home and chat with Debbie at 2.30 in the morning.

Oh, this is interesting. Okay, when you told us that, I just assumed you left

all of your devices on Eastern Time.

No, just my laptop.

Oh.

And that way I always had a reference to home without having to go,

okay, it's 1800 UTC, that means it's 1400 local or 1300 local, depending on whether.

Because here's the other cool thing how many time zones around the world shift

to daylight saving one week and then another time zone shifts the next week

So for.

About 3 or 4 weeks there the world is in a

I'm confused mess with Skylar our daughter living in Europe,

it's a mess because we'll have like meetings and she actually works for me now

so like you know it's like oh our 10 o'clock meeting she's like oh shoot can

you move that to 11 because of this And it's like, oh, yeah,

let's just punt for a couple of weeks. Like, it's fine.

Swatch Internet time, folks.

They were ahead of their time.

Right.

It was. It was Beats. It wasn't seconds. It was Beats. Yeah.

I think. That's what I remember.

No, I. Yeah. Swatch.beat. Look at that.

Internet time exists, so we don't have to. It's still there. Still pushing this.

Beal medium Beal meantime BMT is the universal reference for internet time a

day in internet time begins at midnight BMT which is central European wintertime,

okay swatch okay.

At zero zero zero at

Zero zero zero.

There were no time zones everybody just had the same number you

Know if they really wanted to do this like on their web page where they talk

about internet time i'm linking it to it from the show notes of course they

could have a ticker that showed the current time in beats but they don't so anyway let's move on.

We digress uh david has

a a thing for us he says i would

like to endorse the well originally

he said new but it took us a while to get to this so i'll just say the fast

mail desktop app for windows mac and linux i have two macs and a linux laptop

and it works great on both operating system it syncs with my apple calendar

contacts and i forwarded my iCloud mail to my FastMail email account,

nor messing with either Outlook for Mac or Thunderbird for me.

I find it simpler. I find this simpler, cleaner, it has a simpler, cleaner interface.

I like it. I prefer the FastMail iOS app to the iOS Apple mail app.

And that's, but maybe that's just me.

This is an easy way to keep all in sync without necessarily having to use the

apple mail calendar or outlook or thunderbird etc stuff basically so he says

check out fastmail desktop app for mac

I am a fastmail uh customer i like my primary email all goes into a fastmail

account this is interesting you know um i actually this week I started thinking

I should just access my fast mail from the web because then I have my,

I can do it in the comment browser and I have my perplexity assistant that can help me manage my email.

I haven't done that yet, but like I'm going to mess with it. Um,

But along the same lines, the whole integrated operating system thing,

I've also been thinking, you know, do I want to move back to,

you know, instead of using BusyCal, do I want to move back to Calendar?

Instead of using Thunderbird or Fastmail app, do I want to move back to Mail app?

Do I want to, like, use all of Apple's apps once they have, you know,

integrated AI into the operating system because now it's going to see all of my things?

I don't, and I don't know, like Apple calendar, when I launch it,

all my stuff's there. Cause it's all synced.

Right. You know, and when I launch Apple mail, all my stuff's there because it's just IMAP.

Like it, it, I do, I could use those with no friction whatsoever or no setup friction.

So maybe it knows anyway.

So I don't know. Yeah. That's what I was going to say. I was going to say like,

to me, the opposite's true.

You're going to have a hard time wrestling me away from, uh, fantastical.

Right.

I have moved. I have moved, unfortunately, away from whatever the email client

I was using was back to Apple.

Are you back to Apple Mail? I really want to go back to Apple Mail, but it's limited.

I think we talked about this. But yeah, at least on my Mac. Am I still using?

Yes, I'm still using. Why can't I remember the name of this app?

Don't know. Spark?

Spark. yes thank you you got it i'm still using spark on

my iphone but they changed the mac app so much in a way you know with their

we've talked about how it's opinionated and i know it's opinionated and i opted

into that but sure um they changed the desktop mac app so much that i did it's

too opinionated for me yes so yes like all right exactly yeah yeah

But I do still use it on my iPhone, and I still do enjoy it there.

So it's nice to know that we have all these options. I guess that's probably

the good part of this conversation, is you are not locked in,

especially with things like contacts, calendar, mail, because they're using

open standards for how they grab stuff.

You're not really locked very much, and they all sync.

What do you use for contacts?

I just use contacts. Oh, I have Cardhop, too. Cardhop. Cardhop is great.

Okay.

Yeah. I mean, that's just menu bar and I can activate it from a quick key on the Mac, at least.

Contacts is one of those things like the Mac, not even the app is fine, actually.

It's the contacts database, the address book database on the Mac,

because it's used by everything, right?

Messages uses it. Apple Mail uses it. Even many third-party mail clients use it.

And anytime i like make an

edit to a contact my cpus no

matter what mac i'm on are at like full tilt for 10 seconds because it's got

to do who knows what like i want to get into its sql light database and add

some indexes and just like make it more efficient i've i've i've asked the the

robots about it and they're like don't mess with that database don't do that don't.

Cross those streams yeah

I'll make a backup first that's fine yeah.

I mean card hops is great because it's just a quick key it's a little window

find what you need get the information and you can even

Need to dig back into card hop yeah that that's a good idea all right yeah yeah yeah okay so.

Contacts is as bad as the notes database

Dude oh notes is worse here's here's a don't get caught for us um.

And I got caught. So when I'm, don't get caught.

The Notes app, no matter what device you're running it on, only syncs when it's running.

It, unlike all the other Apple databases that sync in the background,

you launch your Mac, you do good.

If you make a bunch of edits to Notes on your iPhone and you have your Mac running,

but Notes isn't launched, When you launch it, it will take time for those to

download and integrate.

I don't know why they do it this way, but it is. The sync engine is in the app

itself. It's not like part of like the, you know, iCloud operating system syncing.

And here's where I got burned.

Remember how my cell data had run out? Because it was the Facebook app that

just like probably uploaded every picture and video I ever took in my life.

I don't know, in the background or something. But whatever. Facebook app used all my data.

And so the notes app wouldn't always sync, but that's fine. I'm just doing it on my phone, right?

So, and I get NAMM, same as CES, I take all kinds of notes. Like when I'm having

meetings with people, it all goes into one monolithic note.

That's like my CES 2026 or NAMM 2026 note. It's where I list the people I wanna

meet with. And then when I meet with them, I go to their little line.

I use like a structured data kind of thing and put it in there and it's awesome. Love it.

And then I started thinking about, one of my sections was I'm going to do a

post-NAM write-up of, you know, not write-up, but a post-NAM episode of GigGap.

And I had an idea for that. And so I opened up my Mac on the airplane and I put the idea in.

Now, I was on JetBlue. I have good Wi-Fi.

My phone hadn't synced, though. and I lost a full day's worth of entries into notes.

And there is, to my knowledge, no undo of a sync.

There's no sync history. You

can't say, hey, no, please restore this note to where it was yesterday.

Nothing of the sort.

Well, who would ever want to undo that, Dave?

Gone. Gone. Because the Mac note was updated later than the iPhone note was.

Yeah and so that took apple decided that was the thing sync is hard i get that

but showing me a history of you know the last 10 days of things a lot of apps

do that you know if you use like google sheets or whatever like it'll show you

your edit history so don't get caught folks,

brian 8944 in our chat is asking would time machine help

bring that data back it may be if it

had been on my mac but it wasn't it never made it to my mac it was only ever

on my iphone so maybe an iphone restore like i that's a stretch because my iphone

hadn't synced notes but then again if i hadn't opened notes while i was on wi-fi

it wouldn't have synced so maybe,

maybe i don't know be careful that's all i'm saying don't get caught,

All right, moving back to Cool Stuff Found. Right, we still have some time.

We should do that, yeah. So, well, Bob wrote in with one called Shutter to Clutter.

He says, hello, gents. The latest discussion about what to do with your photos

enticed me to offer a suggestion and clean up some old useless photos.

I use an iOS app called Shutter to Clutter.

That is very helpful in reducing the clutter.

There is one caveat, however, it is a very time-consuming process.

I've got a comment on that at the end.

You allow the app to access your photos. Then you pick a date from the calendar

to show all of the photos taken on that day over the years.

You simply swipe left on a photo to delete it or right on the photo to keep it.

All deleted photos go into the recently deleted folder if you change your mind.

I've deleted a couple thousand photos so far.

I have used the app for about a month, and I still have about six months of

daily photos to go through.

I'm fortunate to be retired and have the time to delete a few days of photos each day.

Painstaking but worth it in my opinion regards bob um and in their own description

they talk about how it's a habit-based photo cleanup so and this is my thing

about taking being time consuming it may be on some days but on the other days

it won't be but instead of a painful all day

purge you're doing it one day at a time and oh by the way you get you get to

choose when you set it up hey morning noon uh evening when you want to do it

every day and it'll prompt you hey why don't you go through a few photos?

Yeah, instead of doom scrolling, dum-dum, go through some photos.

That's what I wanted to tell me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, right?

So, and it's free for cleaning with daily use. Small, consistent sessions,

reduced storage and bloat without paying extra for iCloud and stressing over

a huge cleanup and that kind of sort of thing.

And automatic grouping and memory resurfacing.

It says it clusters similar shots and highlights old memories,

making it easy to keep the best and ditch the duplicates.

And built for busy people. One-time purchase, no subscription,

and designed for quick daily use rather than overwhelming clean everything now. Utilities.

Shutter declutter i have installed it uh this is my first day so i have you

know it went pretty quickly for me today i guess i haven't taken a lot of photos

on uh february 9th i mean 6th

I mean right so this is here's here's a use case of of a a an ai integrated

browser because i brought this up in comet right and we're doing the show and

i'm trying to glance quick and see okay what what What are the in-app purchases get you?

Cause the in-app purchases are there and it's like monthly is three 69 annual

is 29, but then there's another annual that's 44, 49.

Maybe that's a family thing, but it's, it's unclear it in, at a quick glance,

I'm sure if I read the page, I would be able to, to learn this,

but we're recording a show.

I, I like, I have, I'm pretty good at this, but I, you know,

I can't just read the whole page and so 500 words now.

Yeah.

And so I popped open the sidebar and I said, what do the in-app purchases of

this app get me? And it immediately reviewed the page.

Doesn't show them, but it says from the description, the free tier gives you

daily swipe based cleanup photos from this day across years,

duplicate, similar detection, basic album organizing and favoriting video compression reminders.

It also notes that it's not a weekly subscription and one time purchase.

So the page actually doesn't list what has it, but it summarized it for me with

it's not just a summary, which is what Apple, which is what Safari sometimes does.

This is targeted questions. And I could also ask it like, okay,

go figure out from the developer what the in-app purchases do.

Oh, yeah. There you go.

Yep. And I'm going to give it permission to use my browser. You can use the browser.

And while you're doing that, my opening screen was the one that told me you

have 29,085 photos, 197 screenshots, and 2,703 videos. That's a lot.

That's a lot. it. Yep.

The screenshots is what, even 197 screenshots. It's like, really?

I should have gotten rid of probably 194 of those a long time ago.

It's now, so the engine, while we're talking, I'm not doing anything other than

asking it, hey, go find out.

It was on the app store page. It's now on the later creative page,

which is the developer's page.

And it's reading it and trying to find this information.

So it's just, it's bulldogging its way through this. And it's my bulldog. And I love it for that.

So that's just an example of this. It's like, I don't want to have to dig and dig and dig.

You dig and dig and dig. That's what computers are good at. Yeah.

Yeah. So it'll get there eventually, but it's fine. I can just leave that tab going.

And you know, it's my little, my little moronic intern doing one job that it

knows what, how to do. Right. So, yep. Oh my goodness.

Um, guys, my mail client just opened up and, um, it, it says,

uh, I just opened up your mail client with the email address of the,

the later creative people.

Here's an email to paste into them uh and that you can ask them this question,

fantastic and that's thunderbird like it wasn't even i bet i wonder if it was

apple mail which is scriptable thunderbird is not i wonder if it would have

had if it would have pasted the email right into the into.

The oh yeah

It did not send it by the way i'm just pointing it out it's a draft email sitting

there waiting for waiting to sure yeah i'm like why is thunder what's happening

why is thunderbird launching oh got that interesting interesting,

We live in the future, folks. All right. Yeah, we still have time for a couple more.

Or the past, depending on your linear timeline.

Adam?

I'm seeing how long you can stall because it's... I can do

One where it's freaking Adam.

Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll do one. I'll do R&Dog's here.

So R&Dog brought up this thing called...

And now I need to vamp because, well, Adam's alarm is going off.

He says, I've seen a couple articles about this tool called Mole,

which is the best free Mac cleanup tool I've found, according to Lifehacker,

which is great because it is a world clean up or national clean out your computer day.

So R&Dog sent this this app in called Mole.

It is a it is available.

I know I got to find the link to it. Where am I here? I'm lost. It's on GitHub. Right.

So you might be able to install it with homebrew but but

you can certainly install it from here and it i

think he said he installed it with homebrew so it's an

all-in-one kind of toolkit it says uh clean

my mac app cleaner daisy disk and istat menus combined into

a single binary it does your deep cleaning it's got a smart uninstaller disk

insights where you can visualize your usage and all of this stuff and yes brew

install mole m-o-l-e is the command to get this thing onto your computer oh

man i'm excited about this huh love.

It you've taken us down a mole hole dave

Oh i love it sorry man that's good no it's good rabbit.

Holes and mole holes

Rabbit holes and mole holes there's like a song in there i don't know anyway uh so that's the one,

he says i tried it uh and it freed up about 15 gigs for me and found a few orphaned

caches it's nice that you can do a dry run before making any changes.

As always, your mileage may vary. So thanks, Dara and Doug, for that. Great stuff.

You ready adam.

It's winding down you might still hear it but

it's on its way down it's okay all right

yeah i got one from uh dan he

has he says a fun little app for selectively redacting

part of a photo it works just like you'd expect you

pick a spot on a photo oh and the app is called pixel drop

uh you pick a spot on the photo and

it chops it into pixels so it does that little pixelation thing

on any area of your photo you can

change the size of them and some

of the effects although at a minimum size

block i'm not sure that it changes much yeah if you make your

pixels too small it's not really going to pixelate too much uh all the processing

is done on device it does take a bit the developer lists that there is no data

collected and it's a free app and it is available for i think it looked like

all platforms it's like mac ipad iphone etc

Cool yeah there it is i have to say uh i am not used to a browser responding as quickly as,

like uh as comet or alpha uh atlas dude not like i've been i've been in safari

land for too long folks it's fascinating anyway yeah there's there's a pixel drop great love it,

Where are we on time? Should we do one more?

At least.

At least. All right, cool. Let's go. Pete, you're up. Pete, you're muted. And you're also up.

I knew that, yeah. So in the word, we can do one more. I can do one more.

But just quickly, the word redacting gives me the don't get caught.

If you're using something like a PDF editor or whatever, and you decide to redact

something, you need to save it as a single layer so when you send it out and

someone doesn't remove your redaction and see what you're looking for.

So don't get caught with that.

But the cool stuff I found, I found this on Instagram. It's called Brick.

It's a little NFC dock that lets you physically lock the distracting apps on

your phone until you tap back in.

So turning your smartphone into a more focused tool instead of a doom scroll

machine and maybe even some parental things, too, you could do with this thing.

It's basically a physical off switch for apps in your phone.

It's a small device, and it works with an app. And once you set it,

you choose exactly which apps you want blocked, social media,

games, whatever tends to suck you in away from your focused work and doom scrolling.

So when you tap your phone to the brick, those apps lock, and they're just gone.

You can still use the phone for text calls, maps, calculator,

normal life stuff, but the time-wasting stuff is blocked.

And it takes a physical tap on the brick again, a conscious decision,

not just a quick software override to do something physical going,

I am making a decision. I want to do this.

So that physical piece is the trick, right, to get you to do it.

But here's where I think it could be useful for a parental control.

It's not a monitoring system. It won't read messages or track them or anything like that.

But you could take your young'un's phone and tap it to the brick,

and it turns off their games and that sort of thing. So when they go to bed

at night, they can't wake up in the middle of the night and don't scroll and do that sort of things.

And then before they leave for school in the morning, they could tap it again and get there.

Get their stuff back basically it's it's an

addition to screen time but but it's an actual you know

it's an actual lock whatever apps you set up not to work once you tap that brick

it it makes them unusable until you tap that little it the brick is nothing

more than an nfc chip right that works with the app to say okay uh these these

things are no longer usable right now so what yeah i'm curious

How they're doing it but um i believe them uh it's 59 bucks and you You can

use one brick with as many phones as you would like.

And it is cross-platform. It also works with Android if you are considering

making a switch. So, yeah.

Fascinating. It says screen time and Android's digital well-being limits are

easy to bypass. You tap skip and you're back in.

Brick creates physical separation requiring a rescan to exit,

which enforces intention.

Ah, okay. and keep temptation out of reach, right?

Because when you hit your time limit on screen time, assuming it's not parental

controls, assuming it's self-inflicted, right? You can just say ignore limit.

Like you get the warning, but you're just like, it's on your device.

You can just do it with the brick. You've got to go and like tap the brick.

Where I can see this being helpful for someone that might be like me is having

this, I wonder if it would work with my iPad. Does my iPad?

I'm not ADD either.

Yeah. But anyway, It would be helpful for me to have something like this on

any device that is next to my bed.

And having the brick not next to my bed, right?

And so on my way to bed, I tap the devices on the brick and I put them on a nightstand.

Down in the kitchen or something.

Yeah, or even in the bathroom. Like, I just need to have to get up out of bed

this time of year, man. It's cold. I don't want to get up.

Yeah. So, yeah, interesting. All right. Okay. Okay.

Yeah, this might actually be really good for me. Okay.

Maybe I need to try screen time and fail first, but I don't think.

I know what's going to happen.

Well, that was it, though. is it the software override is the thing it's easy

to do right then and there sitting in a warm comfy bed yeah not so easy if you

have to walk across a cold tile floor to get to yeah exactly or you know on

the other side of your office if you're trying to do something you doesn't matter right corner you

Know it this is all about intention not.

Bingo yeah yeah training yourself the good habits into yourself eventually you

wouldn't need it right we

Didn't need this we're all old enough to remember a time when this we didn't

need this because it didn't exist right so right yeah anyway.

And i really like the idea to keep kids from doing stuff in the middle of the

night should they wake up and yeah you know yeah

The bricks the bricks in in my room come get me it's in my pocket while i sleep it wouldn't be.

Yeah but you

Know whatever like you know the i.

Don't know lucas and skylar might be old enough to take their own responsibility at this point Lucas

Would read the NFC chip in the brick and program his own NFC chip to do this.

And it would take him, I think, maybe about, well, a quarter second to come up with the idea.

And then probably like maybe three to four hundred seconds to implement it. So, yeah.

So that gives me a quick question, Dave. And you and or Adam.

And I don't know if that's feasible with this particular thing.

I'm just like, yeah, spitball.

Yeah, no, but my question is along those lines of a, you know, a prox card.

Is there a way to read the code that's in that prox card and duplicate it?

I mean, there would have to be. Your computer's reading it all the time.

Yeah, because it's never a changeable code, right?

I don't know. Yeah, I don't know enough about it. Do you, Adam?

We're talking about like NFC tags?

Yeah.

Yeah. Isn't that what's in Prox Cards?

I don't know what a Prox Card is. Proximity Card. No, I know.

You know, opens the gate. I'm just asking. I'm assuming that, you know.

Proximity Cards are contactless RFID credentials. That's, I think that's different.

Okay. Regular NFC tag.

Yeah, but it's possible the brick is an NFC tag. I don't, you know.

I think it said it was.

Yeah, I think you're right.

Yeah, it's a little NFC doc.

Okay, yeah. So, and I mean, you can go buy.

I bought like 50 NFC tags from programmable NFC tags from Amazon for $4 once or something.

I've got some too. I just can't figure out what to do with them yet.

Turn on the lights, turn off the lights.

I have an idea. Lucas, and I will share an idea. Lucas put one in.

He got Lisa these things. I'm not going to, it doesn't matter what it was.

But for like a birthday gift or something, he got Lisa a bunch of these things.

And it was kind of unclear what they were used for.

And inside her birthday card, he taped an NFC tag that brought her to the web page,

but not not the company's web page,

a customized web page that Lucas had built and hosted that showed all of the

things he got and why he got them for her and how you might use each of these

things and like all this stuff.

So it was like a lot of thought went into this But the NFC tag in the card was

like And here now you can like reference this anytime you want Which was kind of cool.

That's awesome.

Just a real quick, quick tip. You can use NFC tags right with the home app and

stuff to set up automations and triggers.

That includes reusing ones that you maybe received. So I did this when you get your Apple card. Yeah.

And it has the NFC tag to activate your Apple card.

Oh.

That's just an identifier. The whole map doesn't care what it is.

But I tried it. And I was like, oh, I wonder if I could trigger an action with this NFC tag.

And sure enough, yeah, it'll do it. Of course.

Yeah.

Fantastic yeah i guess you know now that i can't reprogram it that's what i'm

saying like i don't think that the nfc tags that we bought from amazon are reprogrammable

no it's a one time it's like they have a unique id right exactly okay is that true though i.

Think maybe there might be i just have but i haven't

Written to them yet

I have programmed my wi-fi credentials into an nfc tag now apple stopped letting

that happen we talked about this on the show but yeah you definitely can program

things into it too right so yeah with.

The right software and stuff like that yeah but again the one from apple i i

think there's both the rom and ram for lack of

A term yes versions.

Of these things

Yes right like.

The apple one i know you can't reprogram like the one that came with your credit

card it's got you know the information for your you know activating your card

on it, but I don't think it will do anything other than that.

I don't think you can reprogram it.

But you can use it because it's just got an ID number as like an identifier to trigger an action.

And obviously you can change that because that connection is on your computer,

Not on the itself. Right, yeah, your device is deciding what to do after it's seizing.

I see tag ID 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, I'm going to go do this.

Yeah. Huh.

All right. Now you've got us thinking.

I think we're done.

We're definitely done. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We have to be done.

I mean, we have no surprise.

There's more. But that just means that we got to come and do this next week.

Depending on Pete's Wi-Fi situation, it may just be you and me next week, Adam.

But we'll find out. We'll all find out together.

We'll manage.

We'll all find out together. All right. It's really hard singing when there's

like other tones happening, like maintaining a pitch that I just randomly chose.

That was interesting. Anyway, thanks for hanging out.

Thanks to all of our premium listeners.

Sorry, I was distracted by all the things that we talk about here.

Thanks to all of you, our premium listeners. you are a huge part of what it

takes to make this show happen thanks to everybody who,

contributed all the cool stuff found and everything for this

week and every week it's fantastic uh our

giveaway for february is co-pilot money the

personal finance app the quicken replacement if you

will so check that out uh macgeekup.com slash

giveaway you can enter to win a free copy

of it's a very cool app so yeah go check it

out thanks to cashfly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us

to you uh make sure to check out adam's debut film podcast and pete's so there

i was podcast and i think i mentioned both of my podcasts in the show so sleep it's fine.

Buy some Mac Geek Cab merch. Or if you don't see what you like at MacGeekCab.com

slash merch, tell us about it and we will add something for you.

We've done that before. We have hats now because one of you asked me at Mac

stock. It was that simple. So let us know.

And Pete, if you got some merch, what would you want it to say on there?

Well, I'd get a shirt especially, but you could get any of it.

The tagline on those merch items should always be don't get caught.

That's amazing.

Thanks everybody. Later.