Shaving With Occam's Razor

It's time for MacGeekGab, and listener Michael brings us our quick tip of the

week with switching between app windows on the Mac.

Today, I learned that to switch between windows of the same app,

you can press Command plus Backtick.

More quick tips like this, plus your questions answered today on MacGeekGab

1129 for Monday, February 16th, 2026.

Greetings, folks, and welcome to MacGeek, the show where you share tips like that, and we share them.

You send them in, we share them. You send in your questions,

we share them. You send in your cool stuff found, we share them. We did that last week.

The goal is for each of us to learn at least five new things every single time we get together.

Our sponsor for this episode is CleanMyMac, one of my, and I think I can speak

for the group, one of our favorite utilities.

These and you can get uh you get seven days free and then you use our code mac

geek for 20 off at the url on the show notes i'm not even going to try to read

it you just go to macgeekup.com and click on it or just use code mac geek we'll

talk more about that later uh for now here in durham new hampshire i'm dave hamilton

And here in South Dakota, I'm Adam Christensen.

And here in Driggs, Idaho, Pilot Pete.

Driggs, Idaho. I bet it's better than... Driggs. Driggs. Oh,

it's better than Driggs.

Close. Right?

Yep.

It's actually a neat little town. Yeah. In the ski resort right outside of town,

there's no way... It's in Wyoming, but the only way to get to it is through Idaho.

Oh, interesting.

That's kind of like... There's no roads in or out in Wyoming.

Interesting. I know Tahoe is like that if you're in South Lake on the California-Nevada

border. That's interesting. That's cool.

Yeah.

Doing a little snowmobiling out there, huh?

Yeah. Going to get to go through Yellowstone tomorrow and spend some time on

a snowmobile and seeing all the wildlife.

One of my bucket list things, I heard about it years ago, and I thought that

would always be fun to do.

And then our friends that live out here were like, why don't you come out and

do snowmobiling this winter? We're in.

We're in. Yeah. That's a yes. Yeah, that's great.

Absolutely. Very cool.

Hey, our full first, and I can't believe I've never really done this before.

Congrats to January's winner, Amanda, for winning the giveaway in January where

we had a bunch of things to give away from our CES 2026 sponsors.

So congrats to Amanda for that. And then this month's giveaway here in February,

macgeacub.com slash giveaway, you can enter to win a copy of Co-Pilot Money.

So make sure you do that too fun

stuff do we have anything to talk about before we get back to quick tips

Anything else to talk about?

I got nothing. All right.

I got nothing too.

You've got a quick, you have a quick tip, Pete.

I do have a quick tip. So yeah, let me, I'm going to put up the banner too,

so that everyone can see it while I talk about it.

This is, I think, one of our quintessential definitions of a quick tip, right?

It's something I do all the time and just realized the other day that I don't

know that we've ever talked about it, which is you can nod or shake your head

to answer or not answer when your AirPods are in.

So if I have my AirPods Pro in, and I think it works with AirPods 2,

3, and 4 Pro in AirPods 4, when, for instance, a message gets announced, says, you know, hey,

Dave Hamilton sent a long message.

Would you like to hear it? All I have to do is nod yes if I want to hear it

or shake my head vigorously no if I don't want to hear it.

And AirPods, well, the iOS will then announce, read to me the message.

Or answer the phone. Do you want to answer the phone? I can shake my head no.

I find this particularly useful if, for instance, I have the leaf blower going

or some other loud environment where my voice saying, hey, yes, answer that is not...

It's not going to work. I use it in a lot of places, but nowhere more frequently than at concerts.

If I forget to put my phone in Do Not Disturb at a concert, and I'm wearing

my AirPods as hearing protection, then I start getting messages read to me.

Because if it's a short message, it'll just start reading it to you.

Oh, right.

Yeah. And it's like, oh, no, no, no.

And it stops that message i've had lisa look at me a couple times like she'll

see me and like we'll be listening to music or whatever and watching a show

and she'll see me shake my head vigorously she's like are you okay like yeah yeah i'm just rocking

To the beat

I'm just telling somebody not to bother me right now yeah yeah so

Yeah so that's a cool being able to nod your head or shake your head too

Yeah that's pretty good to

Make it work ingenious

It is it's it's one of those things that It took me a little bit to get into

my habits to do, but I've done it walking through the streets of a city or something.

It's like, oh yeah, something's coming. And it doesn't take much.

You don't have to be crazy about it. Just a quick little nod or a quick little

shake of the head and it's gone.

It's not really haptic. There's a little tick, tick, tick in there.

If you shake your head, you can actually hear the AirPods, understanding that

you're shaking your head.

You probably can't hear it at a concert. No.

No, no, no. Interesting. Cool.

Moving on. Excellent.

Yeah. Cliff says, August, gentlemen. I don't know what that means.

But maybe it means something.

August. Is that how you say it?

We are August.

You may have covered this in a previous tip, but I just found it.

How to quickly relocate iOS apps. When you use the iOS search to find an app

or access it from the for in the recent app bar,

you could hold and drag from the search bar and drop it right into your current

app page no hunting and dragging across multiple pages to reprioritize your

app arrangement who knew cliff.

Love that it's

One of my it's cool

One of my favorite ways of moving things around i i went a long time with only

one home screen and just searching for everything yeah and i do that yeah Yeah.

And I am I have found that maybe in the last six months I've been adding apps.

I now have a second screen of apps that I use just for things that I use frequently.

It's like, wait, why am I searching for this every morning? Like, for example,

I use a Eufy scale and it doesn't, I suppose, eventually it will,

you know, like background refresh and pull my weight in and then therefore sync

it to Apple Health or whatever.

And I use that Withing sleep pad as the monitor.

But the easiest way to make sure that that data gets into the app and then therefore

Apple Health is to just launch the app.

So having those apps right there really easy and then this summer of course

with the lawnmower and I was tweaking that pretty regularly for a little while

that was also the Eufy app so like yeah I'm finding that have

You ever thought about combining that with focus modes.

Oh, different home screens for different focus modes.

Well, yeah, I mean, that's one of focus modes features, right?

So you could have the app screen with your focus mode for morning, morning time, right?

You could create a focus mode morning time, and that's from eight to 10 or whenever

you're usually doing that stuff and have that just flip to that screen that has the Eufy app.

So when you open your phone, it's the first screen, that part of your day.

And then it could flip to the other

screen for the rest of your day or something like that i don't know i

set up one for weekends so i have one

that switches so i do have a second screen but it's my weekend screen that has

you know my music app and it has more widgets with like just photos and things

i don't like it doesn't have my calendar on it because i don't usually need

my calendar on the weekend and that sort of thing.

Interesting. I had never thought about that, but yeah, I mean,

that could be, that could be automated.

You can do timed focus modes. You can say, you know, this time of the day,

this is my focus mode. That time of the day is my focus mode. Yeah.

I wonder, well, I mean, well, it depends on how I wake up.

If I wake up ahead of my schedule, then I will manually take my phone out of sleep.

But other times, you know, at the prescribed time, it comes out of sleep. Yeah.

So if I'm manually taking out a sleep, I could just put it into morning focus mode. Yeah. Huh.

I never thought about it for that. I've only ever used focus modes for managing notifications.

That's my prime filtering notifications. Huh.

I only thought of it because, like I said, I have kind of a weekend one that

I set up a long time ago and it just does it.

But you could be a lot more nuanced.

Right. You literally could plan your whole day if, you know,

like, cause another thing I often do in the morning is I get up and then I have

my coffee and I launched the Apple news app and kind of look through news stories and stuff like that.

There is, I do have a morning routine and I think a lot of people do.

And I, you know, and then I go to work and I have a work routine and then I'm

off work and I have an evening routine.

Like I can have focus modes for each one of those and my home screen could just adapt.

Yeah.

To those times.

Yeah. Huh. I mean, and Siri does this, like it knows that I launched these apps in the morning.

And so if I go to my, if I pull down the search and see those four apps, and you can change that.

You can tap show more and it will show you eight apps, uh, suggestions instead

of four apps suggestions, which, so there's another quick tip in there,

but, but it, it, those are smart to a degree.

So like it, it, those are contextual, I think. So yeah.

Huh. And it does get those right sometimes. Like it, it will put them in there,

but I find I'm just going to have them on the screen, but yeah,

I like this idea of different screens.

Do I, do I like this idea? I don't know. I'm going to have to mess with this. This is good.

Well, maybe other people want to. Yes. You don't have to use it.

No, I understand.

Maybe this is going to trigger something for somebody out there.

Hey, we should record this conversation and share it with other people.

There's a thought.

Yeah.

Uh, okay. Um, all right.

I found a thing this week that evidently was introduced in Mac OS 26.2 and got a further tweak in 26.3,

which is why I found out about it because I was reading about the things that were tweaked in 26.3.

And that is a feature called edge light.

When you are using a camera, any camera, it doesn't have to be your built-in

FaceTime camera it can be in a third-party camera you see that little green

globule in the menu bar show up with the camera icon and you can click that

and you can turn on things like portrait mode or

You know the various picture effects and that

sort of thing there's a new one in there called edge light and

when you turn it on it puts a ring on your

screen around the edge kind of turning

your screen into a ring light and you can set the size

that the thickness of the light and also the

color temperature of it so more yellow more white uh to

light your face when you are on uh

when you were using your camera so video calls you're recording yourself

doing whatever you're doing i i tried it in a

couple of different environments where where i think it's really going

to shine uh accidental pun

uh acknowledged uh is in

very dark environments right where you're um

you know where you're you need more light when when there was a lot of ambient

light i didn't notice i could notice a difference but it it was a difference

without a distinction it didn't really matter so yeah i don't know but it's

cool like it's nice to know it's there you were messing with it this morning, right, Adam?

Well, I'll mess up with it right now.

Let's see if I can look at your camera here. Yeah. Okay. Is it on now?

It is on now.

Okay. And yeah.

Full maximum everything.

Okay.

Oh yeah. But I, I'm pretty well lit. You're pretty well. You can see a subtle difference.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Huh. It's, I mean, it's, you're, it's subtle when you're well lit.

What I, what I, but the, the problem is that you now have this big white ring

around the edge of your screen and, and that might be, there's a trade-off here.

So, like, as I was using this, I thought, you know, if I want my screen to light my face,

why not use the, oh, what's the name of the thing where you can control the

color temperature of the screen?

The night shift.

Yeah, we call that P mode.

What's that? What's that, Adam?

In my house, we call that P mode.

Yeah.

Because it turns the whole screen kind of a urine yellow tinge.

Yeah, that's right. But you can control it, right?

You can turn on night shift and control whether your screen is bright yellow

or... I mean, now mine is super orange or it's not really on at all.

So you could do the same thing, but you get to do it with your whole screen

and not block your view. So I...

I don't know

Wait is that screen that's behind you that's connected to your mac.

Correct did it change when i was doing that oh yeah it

Turned bright orange when you.

Yeah i have two screens i have three screens connected to my mac for those of

you that have ever watched the video of this

um two of the screens are right in front of me one is directly in front of me

one is off to my right because that's kind of how i liked it and those are 27

inch screens and and they're beautiful and then i have this really old monitor

that's hdmi only i think it might be 1080p it's square

and i put it uh with a really long

hdmi cable i put it behind me and i

show the logo of the uh show that

i'm doing so that you know you see the mac geek have logo or the

or the gig gab logo or the business brain logo it's all part of my there is

a a terminal command evidently that that you can issue to assign a background

image to a screen and i figured out what that terminal command was or i searched

it and found it and uh and now it's part of my keyboard maestro script when

i turn on a show it just pops it on the screen it's the first thing it

Was funny when you were doing that it turned bright.

Orange that's great so there you go you got to see you go yeah so so be aware

that if there's a screen behind you it too will change colors if you mess with night shift so

The problem I have with it is glasses, so I get a lot more reflection off my

screen when I do that, which is why I try to often go into dark mode when we

do the show, but today I'm not.

I find that dark mode is best for doing these things because I don't get that

bright white light on my face.

I have other lights, obviously.

I guess I have three-point lighting? Sure. Never.

There you go.

I will add a quick, I don't know, maybe it's cool stuff found almost then,

but you told me about it years ago, Dave, which is DisplayBuddy,

which also allows you to really over-control the brightness of your screen.

So if you're in a really bright environment and need more light than Apple gives

you, DisplayBuddy will go super bright.

And it allows me to control other monitors as well.

Yeah.

Multiple monitors. That's the primary purpose for it, obviously.

That's what I started using it for, but I never thought about it for,

for going sort of beyond Apple's, um, allowed limits.

Yeah. There might be good reason for those limits, Pete.

You know, I think I asked ChetGPT, which was never wrong, and it said,

no, you're good. All right. So I'm trusting it.

Okay.

You think AppleCare is going to cover that when my screen burns out?

Just asking for a friend.

Unless they listen to this episode, I don't think they're going to know.

I have to imagine there's an iOS app that will let you use your iPhone screen

as like a panel light also, I would think.

So you can do like a side light or a key light or something with your just your

iphone just you know like oh there's a color temp just turn the entire front

of it some color and then allow brightness control or.

Even better your ipad right because now that's a big panel light oh if anybody

knows feedback at macgeekab.com we definitely heard him yeah yeah

Feedback at macgeekgab.com

And if you do know send it to feedback at macgeekgab.com.

Huh seems my snippets aren't working this morning because I have a little snippet

for that puts that in the show notes and it's not working so oh no

if you

Know how to fix that send it to feedback

Did you say feedback sorry alright moving on

We're not doing that again.

Make it stop

Let's go on to Russell. He's got another little keyboard shortcut tip for us.

He says, Hey, Dave, Adam, and Pilot Pete, how did I not know about this?

It is new or hiding in plain sight. I don't know.

Or maybe I wasn't paying attention and everybody else already knows this.

Probably not everybody else, I bet.

I wanted a new shortcut for Apple Mail.

Move message to Archive, which is a default command control that I find a hard

combination to do with my left hand.

Instead of using a program like Keyboard Maestro or Carabiner,

I discovered that macOS can map, can key map on a granular basis for specific

menu items in individual programs.

System settings, keyboard, keyboard shortcuts, app shortcuts.

How to remap in your program a shortcut. You open System Preferences from the

Apple menu, go to Keyboard, Keyboard Shortcuts, App Shortcuts, click the plus button.

In the application drop down, select the application. In the menu title field,

type the exact command used on the menu.

So if you pull down the menu item, you know, note exactly how it's typed out.

And that includes like if it has an ellipses or whatever it is,

it has exactly match what's in the menu.

In his case, it was the archive in Apple Mail.

And then he said in the keyboard shortcut field, press your desired combination.

So then you can set your key combination, click add.

Another tip, avoid using reserved keys like delete or backspace as macOS may block them.

Use combinations like command plus E, command shift A, you know, those sorts of things.

And then he says he's got a bonus cool stuff found. Oh, he's got a bonus cool stuff found.

I don't know if this goes along, maybe goes along with it. That instruction

list above came from Brave Browser.

In my personal experience, the AI Browser, AI assistance in Brave is one of

the best for quick answers.

So he likes Brave Browser if you're looking for some AI I hope.

Braves Leo AI smart AI assistant built right into your browser.

Ask questions, get answers, unparalleled privacy. Huh?

I didn't realize brave was doing that. That's good to know. Great. Cool.

Yeah. That's the privacy focused browser. It is brave.

Yeah. Yeah. That's great.

Good to know. Love that.

Yeah, I did know that, but I bet you there's a lot of people that don't know

that you can app by app, you know, remap keys, change the keyboard shortcuts,

because sometimes they don't make sense.

Another thing that I run into too is sometimes I'll have, especially for like

menu bar apps that have keyboard triggers and stuff like that,

I'll want to use one that's used in other places or other apps.

And so being able to remap those things helps, especially if you know menu bar

apps kind of conflict or something like that.

Which yeah right

Sometimes those like quick quick commands quick keys yep that sort of stuff

or the other bigger one is obviously when there isn't a keyboard shortcut for

a menu item but you you want to add it.

That's that's where i've done it but i've also i i've mapped them to my preferred

well no when i say my preferred the things that my fingers already know you know yeah so yeah yeah

Yeah. Interesting. Huh?

Yeah. I, you know, as we're having this conversation, I,

I think it might be good as you do these mappings to add them to a note because

you will forget that you have changed, that you have customized these, right? Like I forget.

So chances are I'm not the only one.

And I'm thinking, oh, wouldn't it be great? And you don't have to actually,

you can just take screenshots, right?

Just put a screenshot in a note. Like, here's the thing I added.

Here's the thing I added.

So that when you set up a new Mac, like, oh yeah.

What were those things? which ones aren't actually the defaults.

So there's a quick tip that really I'm giving to myself.

And you, you get the, you get, since we decided to record this for the other

thing, then you get this as a bonus. So there you go.

Do they not come over when you do migration assistance?

It would, but if I'm setting up a new Mac or something for me,

you know, scratch or something good to know,

Like, yeah. The other one is sometimes you just forget.

Yeah.

And then something's, something's going weird. and you're like why is this doing

this and this should be working and then you're like oh yeah i.

Broke that i did that self-inflicted yeah yeah

you know this pete i'm

sorry but but like this would be good for all of us not just you having the

computer know everything right but no having the computer know everything that

we did think about how valuable troubleshooting would be oh

Absolutely because how many things do you just go oh i'm going to change that

setting because i need it that way

And it's gone.

And now you're like, wait, this doesn't

work anymore. And I didn't change anything, which is what we all say.

And we say to ourselves, like, oh, this stupid thing's broken.

It's like, well, something happened between when it worked and when it didn't work.

And so if you had a running log of everything that had happened,

you'd be like, feed that.

That is where, you know, current state of LLMs are great.

You give it all that context and say i have this problem what changed and be

like oh three days ago at 2 14 p.m you made this change oh yeah i know i did

that i did that for a reason okay great good is

That not in the console somewhere anyway

No like it i mean i

Thought all that

Probably logs for.

That's what i mean changed

Yeah i don't know about that i don't think it logs that

a setting was changed i think you might get a time stamp on a on the file with

the setting in it was is updated but there's no diff on that saying previously

it was x and now it's y i mean maybe time machine right but like maybe no

What i was thinking and i could be wrong my understanding is somewhere deep

in the logs that you could access with console is that you know if you change

the size of the window that's on top of your screen right now that somehow that

logs Probably not. No. No.

Okay. That's excess information. That's not, yeah. But I agree with you,

like, that information could be valued.

Most of the time, it's useless, right?

Yeah. And it would be data bloat. Yeah, 99.

It's a long time. 29% of the time, it's worthless. And a waste of space.

And a waste of space. Yeah, yeah. But space is cheap right now. Yeah, well.

I mean, ish, you know. It's cheaper than it was, you know. Fair enough.

And I think you hit the nail on the head, though, Dave. Like, it could be put into a...

Change log kind of repository that only tracks.

Changes yes right to apps yeah

Which would be far less frequent and then you could feed that to an on-device

llm if apple's listening and then your intelligent assistant could help you.

It would make troubleshooting so much easier i mean like that it i i always

said and we talk about it here too you know troubleshooting is detective work

something's wrong the question is is it you

know how how long is it going to take to find the needle in

the haystack and that's where that's why we

do this show right like that's sort of the cornerstone of

it so um yeah huh

you know i wonder like i i'm

i'm thinking about any the e n

e y the the mac paw sort of

always on if you run it you don't have to that you know virtual assistant kind

of thing like that could be doing this sort of thing it's not uh but like that's

the kind of thing or to your point adam you know something baked into the os so yeah uh yes

Could do it. The value of an always-on troubleshooting assistance.

Huh. All right. I like that. All right. There's something here.

Yeah. All right. Should we move on?

Yep. Keep going. Great.

Yeah. So, Duck writes in. He says, good afternoon, gentlemen,

Pilot Pete. I'll address that momentarily.

So, today I was setting up a new Mac Mini as a FileMaker server.

And as I was adding Activity Monitor to my dock, I right-clicked on the Dock

icon to add to dock, and I saw an option for Dock Icon that I've never seen before.

And when selecting the submenu, I have the option to see CPU usage,

CPU history, network usage, and disk activity all right in my dock.

Pretty cool, and not sure you've ever covered that one before,

and I don't think we have. You just simply make sure you've got activity monitor

in your dock, right-click it, and you get those options there.

And that's from Doug Johnson, phone number 504-555-1212.

Gentleman pilot, Pete, indeed.

That's not actually Doug's last name or phone number, folks,

but I really appreciated what you did there, Pete. That's good.

Just having some fun.

Oh, yeah. No, that's good. As you started to do it, I'm like,

where's he going with this?

We don't usually have to edit this show, and thankfully we won't.

I believe in order for you to see what the dock icon is, I believe Activity

Monitor has to be running.

Oh, good question. Well, I have mine in my dock. No.

Well, wait a minute. Let me see if I killed it or not. Is it running? No.

Let me kill Activity Monitor and now look-see in the dock. It does have to be running,

Yes. Okay.

Because as soon as I killed it, it went back to the launch icon.

But if you right-click it, can you set the dock icon to those options even show

up when it's not running? I don't think they do.

Let's see. Show options. Remove from back. Open it. Log in. Show in Finder.

Those are my options. Yeah. Okay. So if it ain't running.

Yeah. But once it's running, you can get all that stuff right in your dock. Yeah.

That's a great tip. I agree with you. I don't think we've ever talked about

it before. Yeah. Which amazes me.

And that being said, once it's running, you can click the red X. It doesn't close it.

It just, you know, hides that window and then it's done it there.

Oh, and because I had that clicked before, it automatically went back to show CPU history.

I didn't have to re-click it and say, show that again.

Sure.

So it's sticky.

I will share a related tip.

The dock icon thing I don't think causes any issues,

but I have seen when I've been obsessed with CPU usage,

having the activity monitor window up

and automatically refreshing itself does use

some window server processes like

it it it does sort of it's you know schradinger's problem right once you start

monitoring it you actually change the calculus of it and and that it's not it's

not a ton but it does have an impact if you're trying to do things at a critical moment with cpu so

Right. Just sharing. Simply by observing. You got it. You are changing its state.

You got it. Yeah. Is it Schrodinger or Schrodinger? I always forget.

I always thought it was Schrodinger's cat.

Yeah, that's how I heard.

Maybe it's Schrodinger. I think we've had, I know we've had this discussion before.

My problem is I forget where it landed, but I think you're right.

I think it's Schrodinger.

It was Schrodinger on the Peanuts cartoon, so that's why. Well,

that's different. Yeah.

That makes it, you know, that makes it right. And as I always say,

Occam's razor killed Schrodinger's cat.

Well, there you go. I had somebody tell me once I was making something far more

complex than it needed to be.

I hear this comment out of the corner. Dave does not shave with Occam's razor.

I'm like, oh, that's funny. There you go.

There's a show title there. Yeah.

There you go. All right. Yeah, we don't shave with Occam's razor here.

Actually, we kind of do, right? And we try to. We try to. Like,

we try to get to the crux of things.

Speaking of, you've got a quick tip from Identify, don't you?

Yes, I do. He says, hi, guys. I wanted to share a quick tip that you probably

know. Again, never assume.

I discovered that when I watch YouTube videos on Apple TV and accidentally touch

my throat, so the playhead scrubs away a bit,

sometimes forwards or backwards, if i

quickly hit the menu button before pushing

play the scrub is undone see i didn't know this and this is a problem for me

all the time and the playhead jumps back to where it was before my accidental

scrub i'm sure it works in other apps but i only used it in youtube so far love

your show with a love from sweden i'm quarter swedish huh.

There you go

Half norwegian are.

You really yeah yeah i think i've got some of that in me too i need to i need to look i always forget

Uh it's my dream to go to that area someday yeah yeah sorry of the world i hear nothing but good things.

I have had the pleasure of being on a Navy ship in the fjords of Norway,

and it is some of the most stunning scenery on the planet.

Mountains come straight out of the ice blue water, 10,000 feet straight up.

You're just like, dang. So.

Someday, someday back to the homeland.

It is well worth a cruise to the fjords. Yeah.

Um i didn't know i have that sorry i was just gonna say i didn't know that tip

and i have that trouble all the time and i knew here's the thing i knew there

was a way to do it i never took the time to do the research.

To figure

It out so thank you.

Yeah that's that's a that's a good tip i need to like okay so you hit the menu

button quick before pushing play the scrub is undone i'm just saying it out

loud for myself to like say it so you've scrubbed oh crap i'm in the wrong spot

But you hit menu before you resume playing and it jumps you back.

Resets the pay head to where it was before you started scrubbing. Yeah. No.

I mean, I've even done that. You know, you scrub too far and you just want to reset or like. Yeah.

Yeah. Huh. That's good. I like that one.

I also often forget to, I also often forget to use the, you know,

where you tap the ring and then you get the ring and you can do the more fine

tuning scrub with your thumb around the.

Yeah. Wait, what's this? Hang on. Say this again.

You just buried the lead.

So if you pause, when you hit pause, if you then take your thumb and put it

on the ring or a finger and put it on the ring on your Apple remote,

you'll get a little icon that has a little circle.

And then you can, like the old iPod scroll wheel, you can scroll scrub forward

and backwards and you get the little preview.

And it's more it's kind of a more fine-tuned scrubbing what.

Yeah oh i believe you i i and and i i've stumbled into this before but i didn't

know to treat it like a scroll wheel like that's the part that yeah

Ah huh it is and i usually use my thumb because.

Sure because it's right there yeah yeah yeah

You just do this and you can go forward backwards yeah i mean i also often use

the double double tap 10 second jump forward and back i'm.

Sorry what i don't know about this one either keep

Going on the on the scroll wheel yeah if you double tap either the right side

or the left side it will jump forward 10 seconds or back i think it's 10 seconds

forward 10 seconds i think you can set it 10 seconds yeah i don't even know i think.

You go into settings and set it to go 10 20 or 30.

Okay but yeah so you can do a quick jump and i usually use that to jump backwards

when i missed something like what they say you know kind of thing and obviously

you can also use that command right the siri command yes.

Of course you can yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah right Right. I forget about that too.

Uh, this is amazing. I, I never, I,

man, this is like the Apple TV remote masterclass quick tips. Like, wow.

I have, we can sell this segment on a masterclass.

Yeah, that's right. That's right. Heard it here first.

Uh, you have another one too, Pete, that, that may or may not be doable this

has been reported to work and then not repeated so we're going to repeat it here oh

Interesting okay well because dom wrote in he says i was trying out the find

my apple tv remote tip from mgg 1123 when i accidentally tapped my phone against

the remote and it transferred the podcast audio to the home pod mini stereo

pair connected to the apple tv What?

To test this further, I started a YouTube video playing on my phone,

and again, tapped it on the remote.

And sure enough, it started up on the Apple TV, and the YouTube video started playing on the TV.

So there's a discussion in our Discord about this, and others are like,

we all said the same thing. What?

You know, and some people have been able to repeat it, but then not.

Like, even Dom is like, I can't get it to do it again. I don't know what mode

I was in, what I was doing.

So this requires further experimentation, but there's something here.

I will play with this at home. Same.

Same.

Yeah is there my immediate thought was is there newer versions of the apple

remote that uh support um nfc find my with the nfc yes.

There there are yes like not all

Of the dom had it and then didn't have it it's obviously the same

Hardware didn't.

Change yeah exactly yeah

And And then my other thought was, I don't know, how close to his actual Apple TV was he?

Because is it the actual Apple TV box you could do it with, like you do with your HomePod?

Oh, right. I forgot you can do that with a HomePod. Yeah.

Oh, you've never, you don't use...

I don't have HomePods.

Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. If you're playing something on your iPhone and you

put your iPhone near the HomePod, it will transfer the audio from your iPhone

over to your HomePod. Right. And then keep playing.

Huh. That I know works because I've used that in the past. I don't use it a lot, but occasionally.

Yeah, yeah. No, that makes that, and that's good UX. I like that. Yeah. Huh.

All right. Yeah, we're going to have to experiment with this,

guys. This is good. This is good.

Let's see. Oh, we have one more quick tip, not related to the Apple TV remote at all.

Jeepster writes in and says, for years I relied on the Amazon A-Ladies reminders.

Recently I switched over to Apple reminders and overall I'm very happy with the change.

The one feature I still miss, though, is having reminders announced house-wide.

I experimented with HomePods, but never found a reliable way to replicate that experience.

The A-Lady wasn't perfect either.

Sometimes it simply didn't understand what I said, and I'd only realize it later

when a reminder popped up that made no sense.

Then I had to try to remember what I wanted to be reminded about.

It would have been great if the A-Lady read the reminder back and asked for confirmation.

Oh, in a few extreme cases, I even dug into the privacy section to listen to

the original voice recording and try to decipher what I thought,

what it thought I said. Oh, that's a good idea. I've had those. Yeah.

Anyway, since then, Apple Reminders has grown on me.

One small but meaningful improvement I discovered recently made a big difference in how I use it.

I often have non-time sensitive reminders that I roll forward to the weekend

or push into the following week.

Until now, I was moving them one at a time. either right-clicking or relying on keyboard shortcuts.

I found that you can command-click to select multiple reminders and then drag

them all to a new date like tomorrow or right-click and assign a new date all in one shot.

Simple, but very effective.

And with that discovery, Jeepster says, procrastinating just got a whole lot easier in 2026.

Well, there you go. That's the punchline right there. That's it. yeah

What i put off today what you can put off

Tomorrow i know i know yep i

i actually have i i will i will

use reminders um so that i can like

like jeepster so that i can remind myself voice right you know like this is

the whatever you know remind me to talk about apple tv remotes on the on mac

ecab right and i'll tell you i'll tell the s lady that and then it'll be in

my reminders and then I get to go do it.

And I have one for business brain that is,

reminder to talk about the procrastination, getting over the procrastination hump on business brain.

And I have pushed that reminder down because we've always had better topics to talk about.

And it just, it, it, I can't help every time it's like, here we go moving this one yet again. So, yep.

Uh, yeah.

Um, is that technically procrastination though? Because you've had it on the,

I think procrastination will be not even putting it on the list. Right.

You haven't you haven't met my brand of procrastination adam

i put things on the list and then i don't get started with

them um but you know the the

thing is i probably had that on my list for a year

now and what the answer to

it would be use ai to get

over the procrastination hump right like it's it's a great thing

to get you started even if it creates something terrible now you're you're in

it you're in edit mode you're like interact engaging with whatever it is you're

trying to do and you're refining and you've started like the procrastination's

over ai is the single greatest procrastination elimination tool i have ever found for myself

So anyway, let's see. We got a bunch of stuff. I want to talk about CleanMyMac,

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see should we go to don't get caught i i have i have one in in don't get caught

maybe two steve's got our first one and uh he said um

Regarding your discussion last week about Apple Notes and syncing and overwriting

things, he says, as someone who uses notes across multiple devices daily,

that discussion got me thinking about ways to ensure that I don't lose a recently

edited note due to a sync issue.

One idea I had, he says, what if after you finish editing a note,

you duplicate it? This way, if the original note doesn't sync right away,

and a copy of that note on another device overwrites your edits,

you have a manually created backup.

And as you edit an important note, you can even duplicate it a few times if

you really need to. Once you're sure you have a copy of your edited note on

all devices, just delete the dupes.

I love this idea. I will absolutely do this.

It's those notes that I'm editing a lot, those monolithic things,

like when I go to a trade show. And I have like, that's the,

those are the ones that it really hurt to lose that data and just have no way

of going and getting it. So, yeah. Thanks, Steve.

That's, that's good advice. I like that. I like that.

The other thing that I've started doing since that issue is I put notes in my

login items on my Mac and that way it's always running and therefore always syncing.

So it i don't i have less of a chance

of editing a note before it

syncs down the changes to it and then

winds up overwriting it so that's the other

thing is notes is now notes because notes doesn't

sync in the background when it's not running uh it does sync in the background

when the app notes is running so you just need to have it running and so it's

like all right great it's fairly low impact on the system resources so i just

have it running all the time now and hopefully that'll solve the problem I don't know yeah

Uh, any thoughts on that? Are we moving on to, to Jason here?

No, it's just, I don't remember if we had this conversation last week,

but, um, you know, I think this is where this started, right?

Is that these database driven apps that use an underlying MySQL light database

don't really support well the time machine versions stuff that other document based apps support.

So it's like you wish that notes would be able to do that you know where if

i have a pages document and i want to go back in history and i'm using time

machine in pages i can use that version history to go back and get an earlier

version of that document.

Right oh my gosh yeah okay so

yes obviously like that's the

answer here why mail does

that right mail saves the every message

is an individual file for that and other reasons right

like that that's what they chose for mail mail's not some you know database

just pumping it in it used to be back in the old days right we had inbox files

that were like the entire massive yeah they were massive and then and then they

started splitting that out for for all those reasons i think they were inbox

files but whatever they were um

why doesn't notes would be so much more efficient if it just were representative

if it were individual files per note right are

You listening apple

It would be like it would be better for the backup thing for the reason you

articulated adam obviously and then also better from an efficiency standpoint

because that sqlite database once you get you know a bunch of notes in there

especially if they've got images and all that stuff it's a disaster spotlight

You have noticed

Yes we have noticed right yeah we

experience it spotlight is much i mean

spotlight has its own issues and we can complain about those but it's pretty

good at managing large amounts of indexing large amounts of data so why not

let spotlight do what spotlight do and and make notes just a collection of files

a folder of files and this

of course begs the question and i know

there's an answer to it i don't know the answer but what other

notes app exists that does

it that way with just a collection of files and allows us to have uh to sync

a one of those folders of notes with other people not just my i want it synced

with my other computers and devices obviously but i also want it synced with other people.

And then we can just replace Apple Notes. I know this app exists.

I know somebody's created it.

Yeah feedback and mackiecap.com but

we'll also search for it because i i gotta like yeah because

then that makes it super portable too right if

if that if that app that you know we're talking about

whatever it's called stops being developed okay well i

have a folder of my notes i'll just put it into another app

like it might be the most efficient process

but the data's there you're not stuck in some proprietary format

like uh you know

yeah microsoft one note

is what soccer hallways in the chat and and he's not alone in that uh i other

people have written in and request and suggested microsoft one note so that

might be the answer i'll take a look at it because i what was The

Notes app we were using before it escapes me, Dave.

We used to go Jimbo, right?

Well, there was that. But there was another one where we synced all the notes

before we moved to notes.

Oh, Evernote.

Evernote. That's what it was. Yeah. Is that do the same?

Well, so there's a third criteria here.

We moved to Apple Notes because Evernote stopped being scriptable on the Mac.

And we love our workflow. And notes is, full disclosure, notes is frigging awesome.

Awesome with with the way we need to script it it's just like i can do it from my iphone it's

fantastic i take if i have an idea or i'm on a web page and it's like oh my

gosh we got to talk about this on the show i have a shortcut i run it and it

puts it in the notes and it's done it's everywhere now

You have to share that shortcut

I have you have it

I have it. No, not with me. Oh, there are people listening, dude.

I don't know if you know, but there are other people listening to this.

You keep reminding me of that. Okay. Yeah. I'll share that shortcut. Yes. Fair.

It's, it's fantastic. Yeah. When something comes up, you go,

Oh, write it down and go click on it.

Hey, sure. It's the notes. And now, yeah, now you've got it.

It puts it as a separate note. And then we have a list of like the newest notes

that have been added and it puts it in that too and does the whole thing.

Yeah. It's great. and i don't know if i shared this one with

you pete but i built one that asks me

which show i want to do it for because of course i

do this for three shows you know so yep yep yeah

all right i gotta look and i don't think evernote

evernote they move to a an uh electrum based

app and i think electrum at least at the time electric electrum's an app i think

i have it right whatever it is it's an app design framework that lets you write

once and roll out on multiple platforms so they can have windows mac and iphone

and all those things you know kind of at the same spot and i was go ahead yeah no

Go sorry i didn't mean to cut.

You off no and and and so when they moved from the the old code base to the

new code base that framework just or that that development platform whatever

it's called i think it's electrum doesn't didn't support apple script and so

it was like, yeah, that's a non-stop. Yeah. Yeah.

On the notes thing, you know, I was just thinking...

I use Ulysses, which is a great Markdown app.

Okay.

And it has the ability to just add an external folder because it's just a bunch

of Markdown files, right? Yeah.

And so I could point that at any cloud storage service that I want. Oh.

And then anybody else, I could have a shared folder and a cloud storage,

point Ulysses at that. And for me, I can use the Ulysses and then anybody else

can use whatever else they want.

Yeah. Huh.

And Ulysses does support the versioning stuff.

Huh.

Locally on my Mac, obviously.

And does your, do your Ulysses notes and store move over to your,

your sync to your iPhone too, if you want them to? Okay.

Yeah. I figured I did. In fact, I kind of knew they did, but.

Yeah. It uses iCloud. Yeah. It uses iCloud.

That's great. That's fine. huh okay i've

you i used ulysses a long time ago i like those guys the the

um the the men what's the

name of the thing they had a name i can't remember it's not the the name of

their company was gosh it was something i forget anyway um yes great we'll take

a look at these things this is good yeah because if we could live with something

that's already working for you adam that's even better so yeah

I mean again then nobody's tied into anything it's right we just have to agree

on which cloud storage we're gonna that's it and then you can you can use whatever

you could just edit the files directly themselves or you could just use whatever.

Whatever lens you want on top of that folder i

Think what's the other one that um not i don't i should even go,

did a presentation at max doc on that open source, like document management

tool that a lot of people use.

That's like super powerful, super scriptable.

And I think you could set up your own server for, and I can't remember what

that, that thing is called now.

But so I soccer hallways doesn't have the answer to that.

I know what you're, I obviously know what you're talking about.

Um, but I don't know the name.

It's not Electrum. it's electron soccer hallway says is the javascript based

garbage engine um and yeah this is my there might be some editorializing there

i'm not sure and then also the idea what if y'all just went crazy and did a git

Repo of markdown notes and then we'd get change logs and everything you know

i know that we're off the rails here but i love this

Yeah um what if like Like,

what if you did a Git repo of your preferences folder on your Mac and only synced plist files to it?

And then that way you would get a change log of everything that changed anytime you did a sync.

And you could have it.

That's geeky.

I know. It's awesome. I know. Huh. Thank you.

Prefs notes yeah oh i

like this there's something here okay all right anyway look at this we're solving

all the problems i love it right uh let's get let's continue solving problems

let's let's let's answer some questions before we we can do that run out of

time shall we sure you want to go to uh steve hammond here

That's me right i'm up yeah yeah i.

Think so yeah

All right we got you here i.

Know i'm changing

Steve says trying.

To trying to keep it trying to keep it flowing yeah there you go

Yeah steve says s lady is

getting me frustrated recently oh no i bought the

car play device dave suggested and i think same one i have a few times on the

podcast in my car it works really well and it is quite an improvement in the

car because i live in quebec i put gloves on my hands and the touchscreen of

the device with them is often not working.

I really started using Siri way more than, oh, I said it, sorry, way more than usual.

And I must admit, it works well with the phone app or music app, for example.

For a podcast, I use Overcast as I've done for many years.

From the research I did recently, Overcast uses S-Lady shortcuts for voice control.

So I created a few shortcuts to play overcast, rewind it, pause it, and such.

When I tested them in my house, it looks like it works as expected.

But in the car, S-Lady is continuously telling me to...

Do it when I'm on my phone, not in the car.

That totally defies the purpose of having a shortcut to do it for me.

To make it work, I need to get my phone out of my pocket, exit from the driving concentration mode.

I thought that maybe I needed to add the shortcuts app to the list of approved

apps in that mode, but it only allows me to add people, no apps. What am I missing?

Yeah, I've run into this. I agree. Totally doesn't make any sense at all.

But in the meantime, and because I'm a nerd, many times under like the Christmas

tree, my family has gifted me several pairs of gloves that have some sort of

capacitive device, like in the thumb and index fingers.

And I those are the gloves that I leave in

my car and I can use them

they were initially sold as gloves to be able to use your phone I it kind of

works but the fine motor control you need to actually do the the gestures that

we do on our phone I've always felt it a little janky like listen when it's

two degrees outside and I don't want to take my gloves off I will make it work But it's a chore.

But in the car car plays already built for large target zones.

And so those capacitive gloves are they work flawlessly for me in the car.

And I mean, I still can't pinch and zoom because I drive a Subaru.

Turns out that that's that's the limitation of that. like pete's

truck does it but it's super head units

don't you but anyway uh i can do everything that that i can do with my fingers

with those gloves on and it's i almost don't even think about it so that that

is the answer is get those capacitive gloves and i think he could probably get

a pair for 10 bucks and just leave them in the car and that's what i wear when

i drive you know until my steering wheel hits up and then i then i take them off

That's that's the answer.

There you go.

Yeah. The right answer would be for Apple to allow S lady shortcuts to work

everywhere for voice control, especially in CarPlay.

They have made so many decisions about CarPlay that are like so frustrating that that like.

You know what I want to do.

I'm going to do this. And if you don't let me, I'm going to take my phone out of my pocket.

Do it like that's what's going to happen here right

I can't show you that in the car no that's i don't i'm not looking for a web

page screen yeah i want you to tell me the

Answer yes yeah that's one of them right right

but the other is you know when the car's rolling the list is

limited to 20 items versus when you

stop you get you know 150 it's like well i i want to listen to rush and rush

isn't alphabetically in the first 20 things on my phone so if i want to listen

to rush i mean i have to take my phone out of my pocket like this is ridiculous

didn't used to be that way it's gotten worse yeah

Anyway this lady should let you just

Do it yep all right so yeah get capacitive gloves i'll put a link to to a pair

that that is similar to something i have in uh in the show notes just so you

get an idea but uh any of them i've had like i like i said i think I have three

different pairs of them. They all work fine in the car.

All right. Should we move on to DJ Mac?

Yeah, we should. He wrote in, it looks like a Discord question.

I think that's right.

Yeah. So he says, I'm transitioning from GPT for tech.

It seems to have short-term memory issues galore.

I tried Claude for a somewhat complicated keyboard maestro macro and was pretty

pleased. I'm trying perplexity to help me resolve remote access to Synology

over tail scale issues, which I've been having.

GPT has all my setup and design constraints. I had it spit all that out,

and I had perplexity ingest it.

I'll have GPT answer all perplexity questions based on stuff we validated during

its troubleshooting work with me, and we'll see how that goes.

Yeah there's nothing more frustrating than when you're in the middle of the

chat and you know you've told it something and it's like huh

That's context rot pete like

that no that's really like that's what i know we're talking about and and there

is when you're in um claude is is pretty good at this um with claude code and

now more recently with claude co-work um of of uh condensing

your chat like it will it will do this on its own and you will lose things but

it basically decides i've hit my context window so it doesn't matter that i'm

going to lose some things and it goes and summarizes

everything that has happened before and essentially

feeds that to itself as a

new prompt it it you don't see that

happening but that's what it tells you it's like oh i am

going to condense this now and it it does that

and then you continue in the same window but it's

not the same window so you can do this manually right the the uh by telling

the thing okay hey wait i think we're hitting the context window uh please summarize

and then take its summary and

start a new chat with that summary and now you're at the beginning again

Generally if you're running into context window issues and

and this is changing every day but generally speaking chat

gbt has the smallest context window at the moment other

than chat gbt 5.2 codex which is

built for programming and therefore larger context

window right but i think it's a 250 token

context 200 250 000 token context window in chat gpt i think that's pretty common

across uh i think perplexities is about that too but of course it depends on

which engine you're using because perplexity kind of uses everybody's engines um so uh

Claude just recently announced Opus 4.6, which is freaking amazing.

It has a million token context window and is so fast.

I mean, 4.5 was fast. 4.6 is even faster, even with the extended thinking on.

I mean, it uses credits like crazy, but it's worth it.

So if you want something with a large context window, 4.6 extended is going to change your life.

And that's Claude. and then also google

and but you're gonna like you might run against claude claude has limits of

how much you can use you know we talked about that recently um google gemini

also has a million token context window in their gemini pro plan which is the

20 a month plan and that's basically what i'm talking about across the board

here is the 20 a month not the 200 a month plans um

Gemini is, it's pretty clear from what Google is doing. They also have the most

generous limits for agentic browsing and all of that.

So it's pretty clear that Google is loss-leadering their way to buy people's

business and buy customers, right?

The people that are frustrated with exactly this, Google Gemini is probably

one of the answers to consider if you want to keep that $20 a month.

So there you go. Are you talking, Adam? You're muted, Adam.

Sorry, I was going to say, you mean they haven't changed their playbook?

Exactly. Right. No, this is the Google Playbook.

We're going to be the last leader to gain market share.

That's Google's playbook.

Yeah, yeah. But, you know, Google doesn't want to give away our data.

They don't even want to sell our data. They want to sell access to us based

on what they know about us from our data.

Right. I mean, that's the thing. That's fair. Yep.

And that is the trade-off there for obvious reasons.

But yeah, no, Google is getting like they are for the general consumer.

Google is the best, the most capable LLM that exists today.

And there's an asterisk there because Claude is really close.

If you work within Claude's limits, and Claude's limits are pretty cool because

they roll over every five hours.

So you're not stuck with like monthly limits on things so if you live within

claude's limits you can do really well and and do a lot of great things and

i i use claude a lot for conversational stuff that because of opus 46 and if

you want you can get claude half price for three months

this is odd to me of all the three podcasts i do claude is sponsoring gig gab the show for musicians

That being said, Claude.ai slash GigGab gets you Claude Pro for $10 a month

for three months. I'll put the link in the show notes.

I know it's crazy that they didn't pay to sponsor this episode,

but I want to make sure you all have the right code. So there you go.

All right, Adam. Yeah.

I want to, a thing about chat GPT.

So it's interesting when you brought up this context thing, because this happened

with me or was something I did just naturally recently.

Now you said 5.2 so i pulled up my chat gpt and that's that's i'm using 5.2 yep um,

i had something where i wanted to go back to a conversation that i knew i had

had with chat gpt earlier and so i began a new conversation and i just said

hey remember Remember when we were talking about ABC?

I'd like to revisit that. And here's my new question. And it handled that beautifully.

It can reference other chats sometimes. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good.

Yeah, yeah. And I didn't go back because I have it in my history.

If I scrolled way down, I could have found it. But I'm like,

I don't want to look for it.

Just I'm going to ask you. Hey, remember when we were talking about XYZ?

Let's revisit that conversation because i have some new thoughts new ideas that

i want to like work through.

Yeah and

It was fun it worked great.

For me yes it and again it's doing its own summary of that so it might miss

a specific detail but if you're paying attention to the conversation then you'll

notice hey well i think you're missing this and then you feed it back in and

you're good to go yeah yeah yeah

Yeah, fun stuff. I know. Yeah, yeah.

The Google, and like Google's nano banana, their image generation thing is killer.

I'm pretty sure today's episode image was created with nano banana.

In that, a nano banana, sorry.

I had it create an image and I'm pretty sure that's the one we're going to use.

But, you know. Oh, there you go. Yeah, yeah.

Should I do our last?

Yeah, let's do the last question. Sure.

It's kind of related it is uh because

we're sticking with the l lm stuff uh ai

stuff dave says uh william

in episode 1128 which was awesome you mentioned creating agents that can do

certain things like your uh well i'm not going to use this word because i don't

think we have moronic interns no no no like your moronic intern it's that i said use that term Yeah.

The agents are your moronic interns.

Because you have to treat them like that.

You have to treat them like moronic interns. That's why he's saying that. Yeah, yeah.

I'm your moronic host.

Yeah, right. I remember now. They can only do one task at a time.

Don't ask them to do too much. Correct, correct.

Different agents for each kind of task. And that's the whole scope thing.

We were just like, it's related to that for sure. Yeah.

Yeah.

My son thinks that's funny. Sorry.

So the question actually is, how are you doing that? I can't seem to get perplexity

to help me figure that out. can you point me to any resources or starting places?

Thanks for keeping up the great work with Pete and Adam Dodging Getting Caught Ah.

Nice one. Yeah I'm sorry if that wasn't clear so

If you are a Perplexity subscriber, you would do this agentic browsing in Perplexity's browser called Comet.

And if you're a ChatGPT customer, you're going to use ChatGPT Atlas.

If you're a Gemini customer, which is Google, it's there in Chrome.

And if you're a Claude customer, Claude doesn't have their own browser,

but they have an extension for Chrome. and everything I've heard is use it in Chrome.

Don't use it in Edge. Don't use it in Brave. Like you can sort of make it work,

but it is built to work with that which is actually Chrome, not Chromium.

And we'll put links to all of those in the show notes for sure.

But you use it in the browser and they all basically work the same way.

You're browsing, you have a browsing window up somewhere in

the upper right area of your

browser of of these specific browsers with

those plugins is um or you know chrome with the cloud plugin is a button to

add to invoke the assistant or you know the ask the ai and when you invoke that

what happens is the right side opens up a column and so now you have two columns

one on the left which is that which you are browsing

and one on the right, which is your conversation with the AI.

And when you, you can ask it things and it can reference the page without controlling

it and you can get information from it and have it do things and all that stuff.

And then if you want it to control it, you give it permission,

tell it, I want you to control the page and do this.

Or if you're in the midst of a conversation and it seems like you want to control

the page, it will ask you permission before it jumps in and starts controlling.

Once you've given it permission a few times my experience

is that it will then just like kind of take that as yeah

this person understands what what we're doing here and i'm

going to go and do it but the first time the first few times i

found it a little frustrating that we kept asking me it's like yes you can use

the browser that's the whole point you know um but that's that's how it works

so you need the browser we'll put links to all that in the uh in the show notes

but that's how I do it. So, yeah.

So, real quick question. Is it CIDR, or as in S-C-R-I-D-E-R,

or is it chat with all AI models, Gemini, Cloud?

I'm looking in the Google store for extensions having to do with Cloud.

It is the Cloud Chrome web extension. I'll find it.

Got it. If you just type Claude Chrome, it comes up to that.

You want the one created by Claude. Yeah, not the others.

One says, hey, I can chat with all of them.

And you'll know if you have the right one because currently it is in beta.

The Claude Chrome extension, they're treating it as beta.

So choose wisely, I suppose.

It's orange and kind of a splatter, starfish.

It's the it's the Claude icon. Yeah, yep.

And I think Anthropic, I just saw they raised like $30 billion the other day.

So they may also be trying to loss leader their way to the top.

They have, I mean, you know, ChatGBT is my least favorite right now.

I just canceled mine. I'm using Perplexity. I'm not going to pay them.

You know, I'll use their free mode for now when I need.

And perplexity has become kind of my, if somebody wants something recommended,

it's either perplexity, well, I mean, it's like, it's hard to pick one because

they're all good at different things.

But Claude is like...

None of them, other than Claude, none of them have a way of if you hit the context

window or hit limits of your agentic browsing, you can't just pay a la carte.

It's like every one of them is like, great, you hit the limit.

Upgrade to our $200 a month plan. It's like, well, but I only want $5 more worth of value this month.

I don't need $180 more. Right.

Whereas Claude will absolutely let you pay for a little bit of extra credits here and there.

I think that's which is that's their whole model. Right. I mean,

their whole model is is credit based for coding and all of that stuff. And it's amazing.

So I will say one thing about ChatGPT that Sadie on our team here noticed because

she said ChatGPT was we've all been using it for a long time.

And for her, it was getting wrong answers. her tip

was go into your chat gpt

preferences memories and read

through all of your memories it might take a while she found tons of conflicting

memories that it had saved for her and she spent an hour to clean up those things

and she said chat gpt got so much better for her so that interesting yep that because so that's

In its settings

Settings yeah and that's part of the context of every

one of your chats right is is that it's infusing these

memories in when when it believes they're important and

so if it's got conflicting stuff that could that could be

an issue so anyway that's where we're at can we

um can we quickly run through the three reviews that we have here before we

uh before we say goodbye to folks is that okay all right sweet all right yeah

we got um we got three reviews this week and we want to share them with you

at mackiekeb.com slash review is where you can go to if you want to review the

show. The reviews really do help us.

You ready, Adam?

No, because I don't think I have my prep. I can go. All right,

go, Pete. Pete can go, and then I'll be next. Okay.

So I don't see who wrote it. It's at the bottom. There it is. Okay.

A PhD, a doctorate, mind you, in troubleshooting.

Five stars, by the way. From software tips to troubleshooting strategies to extreme network nerdy.

These guys cover it all. I've been listening over the years,

and there have been countless times where some software I heard about or troubleshooting

technique I learned has gotten me out of a jam.

If you're Apple tech support for yourself or your family, MGG should be in your podcast rotation.

G-Dubs 718. Thank you, sir. Or ma'am. Yes.

Thanks, G-Dubs.

Good stuff. Yeah. Woo-hoo.

You got one up adam

Yeah uh i have

five star great podcast dave and

pilot pete are funny smart and always willing to help and they've added adam

christensen from matcast fame the trio is very good together if you like technology

and apple in particular you will love this podcast and hopefully i get this

right mashaifs i think is who wrote this or you yeah.

Micah fs i don't yeah i don't know it's it's like

Oh micah micah f's maybe yeah yeah or machafes machafes sure micah f's you're

probably right it's probably micah f's it's.

The it's the apple podcast handles that we all get assigned or choose or whatever it is so yeah yeah

Cole, our last, our third review, not our last review.

You are going to provide our next review at MacEcup.com slash review.

But our third one for today is from D32Bus on Apple Podcasts in the UK.

Five stars, excellent show. Been listening for some time now.

It's one of my favorite podcasts full of loads of tips and a good reminder of

some things I knew once but had forgotten.

A must listen for anyone who has apple products thanks rob well thank you rob

that was great love that yep and mac geekup.com slash review is where you can go to leave your

Reviews five stars count them

Five one two three just like

Five new things that's right stars

Yeah that's right it might be dangerous to say pick the number of stars based

on the number of new things because if somebody only learned one new thing, that's bad.

Right. I mean, look, if you've got to give a one-star review,

find another show, give it to them, then come tell us what we can do to improve.

We're happy to help. But don't hang a one on us.

That's fine. If you need to hang a one, I mean, you know, if that's your thing, that's your thing.

I would prefer it not to be that way. We aim for that not to happen.

But there's been some one-star reviews. I mean, we've been doing this 21 years.

There's one-star reviews out there.

Hey, the one-star reviews I often view as a way for...

Inter-reflection or like what am i doing that's not you know so long as they're

not nasty just don't do the nasty ones you know say something constructive explain

why yeah don't just like throw one star out and you you suck.

Yeah you know no and some like some of the one star reviews

were some of them were like yeah whatever i anytime

i read like a criticism or and

criticism like has a negative connotation it's

not always negative right constructive yeah it can

be constructive right but anytime i read commentary about here's something

you could do differently or whatever i i've learned to

notice my reaction to it and if

my reaction is i don't i

disagree fine if it stings right but

if it stings right then it's like okay wait a minute they might have just articulated

something that i have not formulated yet but is also important to me and there

have been changes to the show where it that have been catalyzed by a review

like that where it's like oh within

The last six months as i

Recall i i'm sure yes it's like

oh right i never thought about that but i was trying to think about it you helped

thank you very much you know great so yeah we do and i i prefer with those kinds

of things candidly a don't like the one-star reviews out there uh right but i i prefer them slash

Stars then yell

At us yeah well i prefer them or wait until the email trail is over and then

decide what your review is right but send us a send us an email to feedback

at macgeekup.com or if you're a premium listener premium at macgeekup.com

And tell us, because I like to have those conversations. We had one person recently

that wrote in, and I don't think I've heard back from her yet.

But she wrote in and said, hey, Dave, can you do something to manage your,

to make your audio levels more consistent? I'm having to adjust the volume when I'm in the car.

And I'm like, I am obsessed about making my volume.

Like, what have I done wrong? Like, and so I asked a lot of questions like,

okay, I want, like, I want to solve this.

Like if it's, if it's out there, what app are you using? How are you listening?

What, you know, like, give me some data here. Give me some. And she did.

She offered, she said, if you want to know different like segments of episodes,

I'll give them to you. I'm like a hundred percent. Yes. I want to hear this.

I want to fix this. I didn't think it was a problem, but if it is,

we want to fix it. So, yep.

Yeah. We're always looking to improve, you know, we can always improve.

There's always something we could be doing better, even after 20 years of doing this.

Yeah, for sure.

It's just like the five new things, you know, we're learning new things all

the time. And, you know, without that feedback.

How are we going to know?

How are we going to know?

We love it. Good, bad, or otherwise. Yeah, right. I just asked,

try to be kind. Don't be mean.

You don't have to be a jerk, but you can say, hey, FYI, I'm going to stop listening

because ABC, this is what I don't enjoy about the show. And that's good to hear. Yeah.

And sometimes we can adjust for it, and other times it might just be,

yeah, no, there's probably another show that's better for you.

That's sometimes the answer to it.

Oh, sometimes I'll point people to another show. It's like, oh,

you want that? Great. Go over here. You know, like they do a great job with that. Yeah.

In the early days when people would write that and there weren't a lot of other

shows, if it was like, well, either you want MacCast or the show you want doesn't exist. Right.

And so I would tell people, like, here's how to start your own show.

Right. Help them get started.

It's like, that sounds like a great idea. I'd like that show, too.

I would like that show.

Want to start it i'd probably start listening.

I mean candidly that's how mac power users got started

right katie really wanted deeper dives into

things than we were doing on this show and and

she even asked me she's like would you mind if we started our own show i'm like

mind i like go please create that show and obviously it's turned out to be a

great legacy um like they've they've been they're they're crushing it over there

and steven robles just joined Mac Power users.

And he's a perfect like, you know, addition to that show. So anyway, yeah, it's great.

And speaking of changes, Alex Lindsay left MacBreak Weekly because he got a

job at the fruit company and he can't do that anymore.

And Christina Warren is taking his spot on MacBreak Weekly, which is great.

This week, however, I'll be taking his spot on MacBreak Weekly. Just for the one-off.

I'll be over there again.

That's great. And just quick FYI, that app we were thinking about before the

Markdown app that Brett had done a piece on is called Obsidian.

And I guess it's not a server. It's actually just like an open source app with

a bunch of plugins and it has its own syncing service and stuff like that.

All right. I am putting that in the

show notes right now. I believe it's obsidian.md would be the right URL.

Thanks for listening, folks. Thanks to cash fly for providing all the bandwidth

to get the show from us to you.

Listen more to us. Adam's debut film podcast.

Pete's. So there I was my business brain and gig gab, which we've already mentioned. Merch is available.

Mackie kept.com slash merch. Send in those reviews. Five stars.

Mackie kept.com slash review.

You can also text us. We do get texts. Two, two, four, eight, eight, eight geek.

That's your thing.

Four three three

Four three three five yeah that's correct it is four three three five that part

i know yeah uh yeah thanks for hanging out and uh have fun and uh don't get caught

see you next week or i'll see you on mac break weekly tomorrow

later