It's time for Mac Geek Cab, and listener Tom brings us our quick tip of the week.
He says, I found out by chance that when you long press on the uppercase,
lowercase A in notes, like when you're typing, you see at the bottom there's
a little bar with all your tools, and you can hit the A1 to get all the things.
But if you long press that one, it presents a quick access menu to the most
common text style, so you can change it to heading or dashed list or bulleted list or numbers list.
Super helpful when you want to quickly switch between different styles.
I can't believe I was literally looking for this for years, and I can't believe
I never thought to long press that. Tom, you are a lifesaver.
More quick tips like this, plus your questions answered today on MacGeekCab
1130 for Monday, February 23rd, Pinocchio Day.
But we promise not to let our noses grow. 2026.
And welcome to Matt Geek of the Show, where we share quick tips like that.
No quick tips. I had enough with ticks this summer.
Done with those. Quick tips like that.
We share cool stuff found. We share questions, hopefully answers to the questions.
The goal is that each and every single one of us will learn at least five new
things every single time we get together.
I certainly have already learned one, and it's going to be hard to top the value
for that for me. but we're going to try over the next 70 to 90 minutes here.
Make sure you go to macgeekup.com slash giveaway to enter our giveaway for co-pilot money this month.
And congrats to January's winner of our CES sponsorship software grab bag to Amanda Collier.
You can be that winner for February. Just go to macgeekup.com slash giveaway.
And thanks to our sponsors for this episode.
Templemeals.com slash mgg is offering all
of you and me six and adam 60 off
your first box uh of of
these great meals that we've been trying here shopify.com slash
mgg you can sign up for your one dollar per month trial and start selling today
i also use that and this one i use too i've even eaten it sundays for dogs.com
slash mgg 50 gets you 50 off your first order of uh dog food made from like
real meat and fruits and veggies. We'll talk more about all of that. I have, I've eaten it.
You know, it's fine. It's not meant for humans, but it's okay.
We'll talk about all that in a little bit. For now, here in Durham,
New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.
And here in South Dakota, I'm Adam Christensen.
How goes today, Adam?
Good. Now, I'm not sure about that nose thing, though, because maybe this is
something I just always heard, and I've never done the research on it,
but isn't your nose the only part of your body that continues to grow for your entire life? Oh.
Huh.
That's why old men have very large proboscuses.
Interesting.
I've been told that I don't I don't know if that's like a I don't know old wives
tale urban myth I don't know.
I mean it it it might I think you might be right like I'm just thinking anecdotally uh yeah sure
I know my nose has gotten bigger over the years.
Yeah but I thought that was just from all the stories you like to tell
maybe uh maybe there's maybe there
is something to this pinocchio thing i don't know let's find
someone who has legitimately never told never
uh led someone to believe something that's not necessarily true let's call it
that uh right it's never done that and let's let's measure their nose from from
the time they reached sort of you know let's say the age of 25 to the age of i don't know, 65.
Measure the nose over. We've got to find that group of people.
I don't know where they are. I don't think I'm friends with any of them.
One person who might be in that club is not here today, though.
And that's Pilot Pete. He is flying, but I don't think he's in the,
I don't think he has the front seat with the window. I think he's somewhere in the back flying.
Traveling somewhere.
Traveling somewhere. Yeah, exactly.
So my AI agent definitely will grow its nose over time.
Oh, yeah? Well, yeah. I mean, they, they, you know, they make stuff up. It's fine.
I just have to, like I always say, treat them like moronic interns and,
and they will do your job.
We'll have, we'll have things to share about that. We have more quick tips to
share though, I think. Yeah.
Let's take us to one from Avram says, Hey guys, I don't think I've heard you
mention this tip before.
Although to be perfectly honest, I don't remember all 68,943 quick tips that
you've mentioned since you started the show. I wonder if he had AI count those
up. I wonder if that's accurate.
Probably. It's actually might even be larger.
But anyway, he says, but in Google Sheets, if you want to quickly enter the
current date, you can hold down command and press the colon,
semi-colon, and that'll just drop in a date stamp, I guess, or a date.
So hope this helps someone who needs to enter today's date lots of times.
Huh. I like that. That's pretty good. I had no idea. See, we're learning things. It's just how it goes.
I just always, you know, I've gotten so used to having,
Text Expander. I think I have a timestamp.
Oh, that's, yeah.
For me, it's comma DT. I think it's the shortcut that I have.
That makes sense.
Huh, cool.
At least in Excel, you can do that. I wonder if it's the same.
Google Sheets. I always wonder if it's, or Google Sheets.
But I wonder if it's the same in Excel, it would be the same in Excel and Numbers.
Probably not, but it would be nice. Sometimes that stuff's consistent across apps.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I don't know. It's a good question.
We'll have to, well, much testing will ensue. Yeah, that's right.
Uh, and Russell taught us about, it's a command I knew existed,
but I didn't know you could use it this way.
Russell said, um, there are several gigabit sized updates to Mac OS 26.3 that
we're downloading or the several gigabyte update to Mac OS 26.3 was downloading very slowly for me.
And I wasn't sure if my connection was bad or was a cable loose somewhere.
And I needed a quick and lightweight speed test to verify that it was just the
Apple connection and not my connection.
Good thought process. I love that.
He said speedtest.net is bloated with trackers and advertising and is not my favorite.
And thing, he says, seems to have lost focus and is not really usable anymore
as it auto installs launch it login every time.
So once again, he says, I asked Brave Browser's AI for a suggestion,
and it told me about the network quality command that is built in to the terminal
on Mac OS 12 and later and measures network performance and quality.
It tests upload and download capacity, responsiveness, et cetera.
Yes, he says it needs the terminal, but it's literally a one word command.
It is network quality. And the only capital letter is the Q.
He says it doesn't need to be run as root, you don't need sudo,
and it has no essential parameters or settings, although you can do lots of
different things with it.
And I've used it for the lots of different things.
Adam, I didn't realize if you just type network quality and hit return,
it does a speed test to somewhere on the Internet.
And what I found really interesting about this, I've long installed via Homebrew the speed test dash CLI.
You type brew install speed test CLI. And then when you run it,
you just type speed test.
But I've always found that way slower, like slower in its upstream capacity
to deliver a good speed test than even if I visit speedtest.net on the web.
So it's helpful to know, like, am I at one megabit or am I over 100 megabits?
But it won't test the caps, right?
Network quality, I ran it on my machine. I don't know who it's using for a speed
test, but it showed me at, you know, it was about 840 megabits per second,
which is about 100 lower than what I usually get.
But I don't know if other things were running or whatever, but it seemed better.
So I don't know what it's using, but it works. Do you know about this command?
Probably a long time ago. Yeah. I've probably long forgotten about it.
Yeah. As often I do with terminal commands that I don't use frequently.
Exactly. Yep. Yeah. I wonder if I want to uninstall speed test and then alias
speed test to network quality, or maybe even better alias speed test to a,
uh, to echo to me, Hey, dum, dum,
don't run speed test, run network quality just to, well, to train myself.
Cause otherwise like, you know, I don't know.
So let's see. I probably shouldn't be running speed tests while I'm podcasting,
but, um, it, it does it, uh, it does it.
Simultaneously it does up and down at the same time and so i'm seeing my uplink is
200 something and or sorry 900 something and my downlink is like 840 so i don't
know what used but yeah it's pretty good fun love this yeah what do you got
Uh i got another quick one from uh from rob it seems like we got a lot of quick
little shortcut ones that this week which is kind of nice i like these uh rob
says uh paste clipboard into preview with command n and preview the Command-N
shortcut is new from Clipboard.
So the process of converting still frames into JPEGs is easy, i.e.
Command-C to copy your image, Command-Tab to tab into preview,
and Command-N to paste that from a Clipboard into a new preview document.
Then you could do whatever you want. You could convert it, resize it,
add annotations, etc., etc.
Etc i i love this command i
use it all the time it's one
of the and i never thought to suggest it as a quick tip
right like because that's the that's the worst kind
right or it's the best kind but if you can't remember it you know
um but yeah it i
love being able to just you know if it's on the clipboard just command
n and boom there it is it's it's it's
one of those things where like command n
is supposed to start a new document from scratch right like
that is the paradigm everywhere and i love
that in preview apple detoured from that paradigm for this because what new
document would you ever start from scratch in preview it would be with something
on the clipboard that would be the only reason and so i love that they just
like pop that right in there it's perfect yeah makes sense yep
It is good. I learned a thing this week. I experimented, as I am wont to do.
And I had a subscription to some app. I can't remember what it was.
When I went to, and it was an annual subscription to the app,
and I wasn't going to renew it.
But, you know, it's useful while I have it. It was just one of those things.
And when i went to cancel it said if you cancel
this subscription um you will
also your service will end on january 5th
of 2027 great and then separately it says you
will also lose access to the following family subscription
sharing this subscription will no longer be
shared with your family now i'm not sure how to
interpret i wasn't sure how to interpret that i still am
not sure how apple wants me to interpret that because it's
like well when like it says you
your service will end on january 5th but then
it says family will no longer be shared with your family
so does that mean the family ends now but
mine was unclear to me so i threw
caution to the wind and um
i canceled it and it said i can
still share with my family until january 5th of 2027 so if you're confused by
that message like i was don't worry about it right you're good yeah so now we
know i don't know i probably should have taken that at face value and just assumed
that apple wasn't going to do that to me but you know you never know um
Do you have anything to say on that? Otherwise, I have a thing I learned this week.
Yeah, what did you learn?
Yeah, I have a couple of things. Two episodes ago,
I mentioned in passing, essentially, when talking about moving to Comet or Chrome
with Gemini, moving to one of the AI-assisted browsers, right?
Or ai integrated i should say browsers um
that one thing i noticed was how much
snappier they were how much more responsive they were than safari for
me and then overall how much faster
my computer felt and how much less my gpu
was being used and i tested it
before we talked about it on the episode i loaded safari and
watched and it was like yep this is slow even just changing
tabs was super slow quit safari went over
to one of these other browsers and it was like man my life is
so much better and several of you uh including new listener allison called me
out on this like i don't disbelieve you but you said this as though it were
universally true and i don't think it's universally true so naturally it's like
okay well let's start comparing apples to apples
and i found something out adam yep i have a lot of pinned tabs in safari 10 of them or so and i
Four, five of those 10 were either Google Sheets or Synology Sheets,
very resource intensive tabs when you're using them.
But when you have a tab and you move to another tab, the one in the background
eventually stops being like it gets put on pause, you know, the resource like
Apple's smart about this. They manage it very, very well.
That is not the that is not the same when it's a pinned tab when it's a pin
tab the assumption seems to be you're going to want immediate access to it at
all times and therefore it runs
more resources than it would if it were just a background tab and i i confirmed
this i started a new profile in safari that i called like dave basic or something
and it was like oh my gosh This is a whole different Safari experience than I had with my 10 pin tabs.
And I don't think pin tabs themselves are the issue. I think it's that five
of mine were like Google spreadsheets or Synology spreadsheets,
which are essentially the same thing.
Just, you know, I mean, from a JavaScript, like resource, RAM,
CPU standpoint, and made a huge difference.
So Safari's pin tabs can be resource hugs, which is my, my, maybe it's my don't
get caught. Maybe it's my, here's what I learned.
Don't have to learn the same lesson as me. But, yep.
So, did you run Safari as your primary browser, Adam?
Uh...
That's a great question um yes and no okay i don't know that i have a primary primary browser,
interesting i often am using chrome because i use that a lot at work yep for
my web development work and i've just gotten more used to the inspector like
that's my like when i'm in a browser that's most often what i'm doing,
More and more these days, I'm
using chat GPT if I'm looking for stuff or researching or what have you.
I use the news app to get my news. I find general browsing, I'm doing less and
less these days if I'm really thinking about how I'm using my computer and stuff like that.
That's an interesting conversation we find ourselves in here.
I don't disagree with you. i use my
web browser like it's an app
like i'm not just surfing the web right like to your point and i'm not using
it to search for things although now i am like with comet because comet a search
query immediately becomes a question that i have asked to perplexity it also
will display search results like it's kind of the best of both worlds right Right.
But my primary, God, I never thought, I haven't thought about this.
My primary use of my browser is tools.
Like my Google Sheets or, you know, we have a thing called, we call Podman,
which is our backend for the BackBeat Media podcast stuff.
But like those are the i'm in
i'm in documents or tools not search
just surfing the web that's really interesting makes
me kind of glad i don't derive my income from running a news website anymore
um huh interesting yeah i'm i'm the same way but because i use the my web browser
as the interface to all of these you know online tools if you will you know the sass kind of things
it's running all the time like it's rare that i um that i don't have a web browser
Like launched and loaded and ready to run but yeah i'm not searching in it as
much anymore it's interesting huh what do you do folks feedback at mac ecob.com i'd love to know
Did you say feedback at MacGeekGab.com?
It's easy for you to say. Yeah, I said feedback at MacGeekGab.com.
I fumbled a little there.
That's all right. We have some questions to go through, and maybe some of them
need to go into a new segment. We need to come up with a name for a new segment.
So we'll talk about that too, Adam.
Okay. We'll come up with that. But the next thing that I really want to do is
I want to tell you all about our wonderful sponsors.
And I'd love it if you'd give me that opportunity.
All right. Confession time. I've
become that person who gets excited about what's waiting in the fridge.
And recently, that's been Tempo.
We've been trying these meals and I've been loving them.
This week, Tuscan bacon mushroom chicken, creamy tomato turkey meatball panne.
And I'm staring down chimichurri grilled pork chop like it owes me money.
And here's the best part.
They're fresh, chef-crafted, dietician-approved meals that are ready in just two minutes.
Real food, real ingredients, no sad desk lunch, no drive-thru regret.
Tempo offers 20 new recipes every single week, so it never gets boring, right?
Whether you're going for protein-packed, calorie-conscious, or even GLP-1-managed
meals, you know, balanced meals. They've got options.
It's convenient, but it still feels like you're eating something intentional
If you want that fuel that just keeps up with your brain and your busy schedule
Tempo is it and for a limited time Tempo is offering you our listeners 60% off
your first box I got it. You can get it too.
Go to tempomeals.com slash mgg That's tempomeals.com slash MGG for 60% off your first box.
TempoMeals.com slash MGG. Rules and restrictions may apply.
Go check it out. I think you're going to like it. And our thanks to Tempo Meals
for sponsoring this episode.
And you know how we obsess over what we put into our Macs, right?
Clean installs, quality components, no junk software. Yeah.
Well, I started thinking, well, shouldn't we think about that way about our dog's food, too?
Sundays for Dogs, our sponsor, was founded by a veterinarian, Dr.
Tori Waxman, who wanted real food without fillers or those mystery ingredients, right?
It's air-dried. It's made from real meat, fruits, and veggies in a human-grade
kitchen. No kibble, no weird stuff, just actual, you know, food.
Both Stanley and I, now Stanley's our little chihuahua mix, he and I, we both tried it.
It's made for dogs, but you know, it's in a human-grade kitchen with real ingredients,
so I tried it too. It's fine.
It's, like, it's good. And here's the geek-approved part.
No freezer, no thawing, no mess. You just scoop and serve.
It's like the solid-state upgrade of dog food.
So make the switch to Sundays. Go right now to sundaysfordogs.com slash MGG50
and get 50% off your first order.
Or you can use code MGG50 at checkout.
So that's 50% off your first order at sundaysfordogs.com slash MGG50.
So that's Sundays, you know, like the day.
Sundaysfordogs.com slash MGG50 or use code MGG50 at checkout.
And our thanks to Sundays for Dogs for sponsoring this episode.
And I'll tell you, starting something new in tech is equal parts thrilling and terrifying.
You got the idea, you got the domain name, you maybe even got the logo.
But then comes the big question.
How do I actually sell the thing, right?
Well, that's where our sponsor Shopify comes in.
Shopify powers millions of businesses and handles 10% of all e-commerce here in the U.S.
It gives you hundreds of ready-to-use templates so your store looks as polished as your code.
It's packed with AI tools to help you write product descriptions,
generate headlines, and even enhance your product photography, right?
And everything lives in one place. All your inventory, your payments,
your analytics, no duct tape required.
You don't have to go fishing around. It's all in one place. So it's time to
turn those what-ifs into...
Ka-ching! With Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com slash mgg.
Go to shopify.com slash mgg.
That's shopify.com slash mgg. And our thanks to Shopify for sponsoring this episode.
All right. Question time, Adam?
And thank you. Thank you for that, folks. We appreciate you giving us the opportunity
to tell you about our sponsors. It really, it means a lot. Yeah.
Moving on. All right. Okay. Yeah, yeah.
So we got a question from Alan, and it's a pretty straightforward one.
I think this comes up from time to time.
It says, our family has many physical books that we want to try and keep track
of. is there any current Mac software that will allow us to scan the barcodes and add them in?
Huh. You know, I, um, I, I didn't know what the answer to this was going to
be because I don't, I never thought about doing this.
So I asked perplexity for an assist and found a couple of things.
The first, and I, I think this is probably what you're going to want to use
is called CLZ book, uh, or CLZ books.
It's a library organizer for your books. It is built to do exactly this,
and it sure seems to be the right thing to make all this happen.
And it's in the App Store. I'm looking right now.
It is available for free, and then we'll—I don't know why I can't share my screen.
I thought that that matters.
It's available for free and has some in-app purchases, but it'll keep track
of your book collection. You scan the ISBN barcodes. It does all the things.
So I think CLZ Books is going to be your option. That's one thing.
I found a couple of others, and one is called Libib.
And Libib is a web app hybrid kind of thing that scans barcodes,
and you can catalog up to 5,000 books for free.
It's all in your browser, and yes, it supports our Mac browsers.
And then another one called BookBuddy, which is a Mac app and iOS app with barcode
scanning and iCloud sync for family sharing.
I think Libib or CLZ books of the ones I found are going to be the ones to use,
but check out BookBuddy too.
How about you, Adam? Have you ever done anything like this?
Yeah, I was trying to remember. There was a great app that did this in the past,
and I can't remember the name of the app now.
But what I did want to throw out now, it doesn't have, as far as I know,
this scan the barcode feature.
But an app I've been using lately that I really, really love is called Sofa.
Okay.
And it is for organizing and collecting just about anything that is kind of
media entertainment related.
It has iCloud syncing.
So I am currently using it for movies. You can put podcasts in here.
You can put TV shows in here, albums.
I also use it for my board game collection.
Right oh so you
can add anything into this um it
has this concept called a pile so you just like add
stuff into your pile like throwing collections of
stuff onto a desk and then you can start to like organize it and you can just
search for things and it will use the internet and it'll go out and find sure
you know the information and stuff for it so it doesn't have the barcode scanning
but it's pretty good at finding finding stuff and then uh you know it has a
lot of basic features that you get for free.
And then if you want to pay, I think it's like 30 bucks a year.
Okay.
And it has advanced features. One of them is you can add your own ingredients
and ingredients are things like custom rating systems or dates for when you
want to read a book or I mean, just about anything.
So what's really nice about this one is it's really flexible.
If you get the advanced version, you can also like log, you know,
like when you've watched something and how frequently you've watched something
or read a book or played a game or whatever like that. It's got themes.
The advanced version also does that thing where it'll tell you where you,
you know, if you are collecting TV shows and movies, where can you stream them, all that kind of stuff.
But with the basic feature, yeah, I mean, you can put in just about anything
and you can customize it.
Like if you wanted to put in your collection of, I don't know,
superhero figurines or whatever you could add that.
Got it okay it's
Just like a super flexible database for stuff.
Right yeah yeah but but like with the the through the lens of um organizing
the things you're going to do in your downtime for fun for fun yes yes right yeah yeah yeah it's
Not a work database right you know it's like,
Yeah. So not only can you collect things, but, you know, you can like log information
and put notes and, you know, that kind of stuff. So, yeah.
Interesting. So I was I had no idea about Sofa and I've already texted it to
my family. Like, wait a minute.
This is something we might really appreciate.
Because so many times you go to, you know, it's like, well, we have some leisure time right now.
What's on tv right like that's the default thing
in our house and oftentimes one
of us will say let's play a game instead and it's
like great now what game right
because we're constantly buying new games because we do like to
play board games and table games i should call them i guess and uh
but you know we wind up defaulting to the the ones
that either the newest one that just arrived or you
know the ones that we have been playing for decades and then there's this middle
ground where we've played these games once or twice and liked them but they
aren't top of mind and that's what really got me about sofa here for you know for our use case
When you said generalized database, my next suggestion was going to be,
well, it seems like there's specific databases to do exactly what Alan asked.
However, Tapforms Pro, we keep talking about on the show, like that could be built to do this.
And sure enough, there are people that have done this in the community there.
And I'll link you to one of those things.
But like, yeah, all of this is great.
Soccer hallways in Discord suggest Goodreads. I think that would work for this. Yeah, why not?
Yeah, I mean, the only feature is that barcode scanning. I don't,
you know, a lot of apps had that back in the day, and I would think it'd be
easier now with iPhones because you can just scan barcode.
But I haven't seen that feature in a while, but it was always convenient for
quickly entering stuff.
Yeah, right. I'm asking the robot if Goodreads supports barcode scanning.
It's easier than trying to search around their site.
But, yep, the Goodreads mobile app on both iOS and Mac OS, or sorry,
on iOS and Android, I was switching screens, supports scanning book barcodes
and covers with your phone's camera. Yep, so there you go, Goodreads.
And that's a really purpose-built app with a lot of things in its database.
So, yep, that would be another one. Perfect. Yeah.
Love it. Love it. Cool stuff.
All right. Should we move on to Ken?
Absolutely. Okay.
So Ken asks, is there any way to slow down how long my photos appear on my Max screensaver?
At this moment in time, my photos appear for less than six seconds before they
begin their transition.
And I would prefer that they remain on the screen for let's say 10 to 15 seconds.
If I can't extend the time natively, is there a third-party app that you can recommend to do the job?
Yeah, wow. I don't think there is any way that I am aware of to do this natively,
which is interesting because I feel like back in the day, you had that ability
with the photo screensavers and stuff like that.
I may be just misremembering, not remembering it correctly.
I have the same memory if that means anything, but I don't know why.
Yeah it just seems like a thing that's easy that would be easy to control
Yeah so i would definitely think that a third party app would be the way to go i don't have any,
experience or specific recommendations but you know doing a little research
it looks like we found one called art saver yeah that seems to be available
for free um and then there is uh,
It's like a paid app.
There's a paid version.
Art paid version. Yeah.
Yeah. Called art saver pro or something that's on the app store.
Um, I, I looked into this a little bit just as we were pulling it up for the
show and they even say on the art saver page, like don't download both.
Like there's the app and you could, but you're going to get yourself confused.
So don't do that. If all you want is the screensaver, you download ArtSaver.
If you want the app that does the screensaver and more, then there is ArtSaver app or something.
But it looks like ArtSaver is kind of the thing.
And I downloaded this, and sure enough, I mean, it's got all the things you
want, including duration for each image.
And you can point it at the right folder, and you can have it do all the things.
And you can skip small images and like it's you know it's got more settings than apple would ever
Surface because apple doesn't you know they don't
do that that's not apple's thing but that's so that's the the trick i installed
it and it was like okay it asked me do i want to install this new screensaver
and i had to you know sign away my life or whatever and i was like yes i do
right great thank you and i was like great it's installed like so where wait
where like where Where might I find this lovely tool?
And you find the new screensavers by going into your wallpaper settings in system settings.
And then click on the screensaver button. And it will just show you all of your Apple screensavers.
Way down at the bottom, there is an other list. And if you scroll way to the
right in that other list, you will find art saver if you have installed it like I did.
So it's buried, but it's there.
Wow. Yeah.
Yep so all right there.
You go yeah yeah what else do we have
Uh we have a
question from philip uh i love it today because or this today because we've
got a lot of very straightforward uh questions philip asks uh can you guys weigh
in on what your current favorite router is Most of my connections are wired,
but I do need wireless, obviously.
I'm looking for a Wi-Fi 6 and something that can provide the best throughput
as I have a one gig up down connection. Hello.
So, you know, this is always a, everything I say about routers comes with an
asterisk because I'm crazy and I test things all the time and nothing is static
in my house except some things are.
So i think
what philip is asking for is what combined router
wi-fi access point thing i mean that today's definition
of router includes not just the
gateway that does the routing but also the wi-fi in
my house that's not what i have i i mean
i kind of do i have a unified cloud
gateway pro max sorry that is
my router and it's the only that's its
only job it doesn't have any wi-fi built in it's just the
router i do have some unify wi-fi units
um and and it's surprisingly for
for stuff that appears to be like and
is super pro enterprise gear
the prices on these things are are inexpensive like when wi-fi seven first came
out unify was the least expensive way to get wi-fi seven in your house which
just astounds me because it's enterprise grade gear and all that stuff but it's
just how it was uh and that still remains fairly true
But I also generally, as many of you would know, I use Eero Pro 7 in my house.
And what I do is I turn off the routing mode.
So I put it in bridge mode. So it's not a router, but it certainly could be.
It's fully capable and very, very functional as a router.
The Eero Pro 7, and I'll price three packs here just to kind of give the general gist of things.
But you might only need a two-pack for your house. I, in my house proper,
I have a two pack and then I have, I have one on either side of the house and
it works great for coverage inside the house.
I do have an outdoor unit so that I have coverage on our patio because our house
is kind of a, our basement's like a Faraday cage. And so wifi doesn't really get out.
But otherwise, if that wasn't the case, I don't think I'd need,
if I just strategically placed it in the house, it would get the patio too,
if it weren't for all the rebar in the wall.
And then I use a third one across the driveway in the office.
So that's where I'm using a three-pack.
A three-pack of Eero Pro 7, as of this week, is $699 on Amazon,
which is way down from where it used to be. It was, you know, $1499 or something.
So that's a great place to start.
Right now, though, my house is not running on Eero. I mean, it is,
but the primary driver that I've been testing is the TP-Link Wi-Fi 7 Deco.
I'm running the BE67, which is the same as the BE68. Just depends on whether
you get it at Amazon or Best Buy.
And a three-pack of that on Amazon right now is $100 less than a three-pack
of Euro Pro 7. So that's $599.
If you don't need all the streams, if you only need six streams of Wi-Fi instead
of eight streams of Wi-Fi, TP-Link's BE63 is $419 for a three-pack.
And candidly, that would probably do you just fine.
So, yes, I know you asked about Wi-Fi 6.
I would highly recommend Wi-Fi 7.
When you can, now that you can get it for prices that are, you know,
in the sub $500 range for a three-pack, and again, you might only need a two-pack,
which saves you, you know,
generally a third, maybe slightly less than a third if there's a package discount or something.
But I highly recommend Wi-Fi 7.
Not only are your new devices going to be Wi-Fi 7, but,
you know, the backhaul between them gets to use Wi-Fi 7 and do all of the,
one of the big benefits of Wi-Fi 7 is that your client devices can use all of
the bands simultaneously.
Prior to that, it was choosing a band.
And Wi-Fi 6E added the 6 gigahertz band, which opens things up.
And I realize I'm oversimplifying things, but that was great.
But being able to use 2.4, 5 and 6 simultaneously
gives you more bandwidth and more reliability all at once and that's pretty
cool again your device has to support wi-fi 7 to do that so but you know there
is that so that's that's my piece but that's not everything what do you what
are you running these days adam i'm
Still using my um my uh net gear... Why am I blanking on the name?
Orby. Orby, yeah. Wi-Fi 6.
Okay.
Wi-Fi 6. Yeah, I have a 7, a set of 7s, but...
Seven generation i think that i have i found out that i can't get extra extenders
for i got to go to the next version so interesting.
Oh yeah we need to fix that for you huh
Well i mean you provided me the uh the sevens but i've only got two base stations
and i can't use my current ones they're not backwards compatible got it and
then i can't buy additional ones for that generation of seven for some reason.
I don't know. It's a weird thing.
Okay.
That's the dilemma with, I don't know if that's just a dilemma with Orbi Netgear specifically.
I haven't done enough research into it, but I did look because I just need one
more unit to cover this, you know, like the office and stuff.
I mean, I could cover part, but I want to have a certain number of units that
I'm covering my whole house.
Of course.
So, and the sixes have worked fine for me for years and years and years.
I mean, as you know, like that's the one thing I'll say about these Orbeez is
the setup was super simple. The app works great.
It's really been for me a set it and kind of forget it kind of thing,
which I appreciate. I don't mess around with it at all.
And there's maybe one, that one time we had the issue and then it was just repositioning,
you know, the line of sight of where I had my.
Sure.
Yeah, I don't know if you remember, because I used to have, I have a window
here that's kind of pointed at my daughter's room, and I had a base station
in my daughter's room, and then this was kind of lined up with it.
But then she moved out, and we rearranged some things, and that base station was no longer there.
And then suddenly I was having issues, and I went, oh.
And so I moved it from that window to that window, which now points at the base
station in the living room, so it was more direct line of sight in that,
That solved it.
Got it. Got it. Yeah. Yeah. You might need like the, the Orbi I'm looking online
now at the, at what, what's available from Orbi.
And do you know the newer style? Yeah. You need the, the, the seven seventies. Okay.
Yeah. All right. All right. Well, I mean, we should have you test these things.
So we'll reach out to our friends at Orbi there at Nick here and, and talk about that.
Cause it's like the problem you have, like it seems solvable and and and should
be solvable so yeah but the orby the three-pack that i found on amazon just
now while we're talking is currently 599 they say the list price is 619 but
you know like you know how those things go yeah yeah yeah i
Mean that's down from where it used to be i.
Think way down 800
800 from my original three unit uh.
The wi-fi six setup yeah exactly no this
is coming it's there i love seeing them i
would love to see a three pack below 500 bucks which of course with tp
link you can get but seeing it below 600
bucks like it's you know it's there like that's this is good that's good and
all of these the the orbi the tp link the euro they work great as routers i
know i mentioned i'm not using it that way that's just because i'm a nerd uh
and i like this stuff and i like to tinker but you can tinker with all of these
too, just in different ways.
I mean, if you really want to mess with it, I mean, it's got all the features you want.
I just, I'm the type of person, like, I don't want to mess with it too much. Right.
I mean, about the only thing I set up was my, you know, IP reservations,
which I just like for my own convenience.
But, you know, it can all be done. But you don't even have to do that.
Yeah. You know, it's just like.
Right. Yeah, you can set it and forget it. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
And I think a lot of people, that's what they want. They just want something
they can plug in and go and, you know, configure in a couple minutes and then you're up and running.
I will say, I know that with both Eero and TP-Link, you can mix and match.
I've never had an issue mixing and matching, you know, 6E units,
6 units and 7 units and even first gen, you know, Wi-Fi 5 units.
I mean, if you put a Wi-Fi 5 unit in a network that has Wi-Fi 6E,
your Wi-Fi 5 unit is only ever going to talk Wi-Fi 5.
The other ones will talk 6E. But if your device associates with the Wi-Fi 5 unit, guess what?
Obviously, it doesn't magically get a hardware upgrade just because it associated
with a network, you know.
But if you want it for like that extra range in the basement or something,
it will, at least with TP-Link and Hero. I'm surprised that Orby,
actually, no, I'm not surprised.
Orby has always been, been very, uh, engineered to be very specifically tuned
to work with it, with that model of itself, which is what you're seeing. Yeah.
Yeah.
But that's part of why you get that like Uber long range, uh,
connection across your, your driveway.
Right. Like that's, that's, so that's the trade-off there. And,
and for you, it's a hundred percent the right trade-off to make.
Absolutely.
Yep.
Yeah, no complaints.
Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. Cool. All right. Shall we move on here?
Yeah, we got a review. A review from Manhattan Glenn.
Five stars. Great show. In the early days of podcasting, when there were very
few shows focused on Apple Macs and later other Apple products,
there were pioneers like Adam Dave, John F.
Braun, Ken Ray, David Sparks, I'm sure others. uh
new listener allison yeah today with
the competitive economics of attracting advertisers and
subscribers this is not an easy business i think
it was a great decision for pilot pete and adam to join dave they've brought
a fresh energy and valuable perspective to the show producing a podcast at this
level involves significant time and expense for all three of them so here's
my quick tip support mac geek gab if you can support some of the other independent
apple focus creators out there as well.
They provide terrific coverage of Apple products.
And honestly, honestly, it's a lot more enjoyable than listening to the news. Pretty low bar.
That's a pretty low bar. Yeah. I'm glad to hear we beat that bar. Yeah, exactly.
Thank you, Manhattan Glenn. That's a great review. That's really kind.
We certainly appreciate it. Yeah.
Yeah. That means a lot. All of this means a lot. I know we say it every time,
but it really isn't. That's not, it's not just, we're not saying it for the sake of saying it.
It really does mean a lot. All of it, all your support folks.
So yes, absolutely.
Mackie cab.com slash review or reviews.
I haven't mapped a boat that will get you as close as we can to make it as easy
as possible for you to leave those, those reviews for us. So really appreciate it.
Tell some friends about the show too. That helps more than you think.
It is still one of the best ways to, to find, to, you know, expand our audience
and our audience is expanding.
We're, I'm seeing it like it's, it's on the, on the numbers it's happening, which is great. Love it.
All right. Is it we we have we've obviously we've been spending time talking
about AI in every episode lately and your questions keep coming in.
Your tips keep coming in. So it's probably going to stick.
It doesn't mean it's going to happen every single episode.
But, you know, it sure seems like we should call it something, Adam.
And oddly, I came up with two names this morning, oddly, without the assistance
of AI to help me generate them. I don't know why, but I had two,
and I'm not sure that either one of them is going to stick.
But one of them is, hey, I learned something, because that's kind of cool,
you know, the twist on, hey, I learned something.
Hey, I learned something. And then ain't it cool was another one I came up with.
But that doesn't work well, quite as well audibly.
You know, it looks good.
On Business Brain, we have a – actually, every Friday episode is dedicated to
how people are using AI in business.
And has been for a long time, and so we call them our Friday-I episodes.
That one just, like, that one worked. But obviously, you know.
So we've got to come up with some name for this segment.
All right. I don't know what it is. Same. Yeah.
Same. So let's just do it because we've got a couple of questions.
Feedback at MacGearCad.com if you've got suggestions, obviously.
Yes.
Yeah, William has a question. Dave, thanks.
I use Comet and now Claude, and this is great. I agree on Perplexity's place as the best right now.
Just as a follow-up, how did you get your agents to test code like you have
one that does one task and another for another task.
I can sort of get it to do that, but you may have some secret prompts that are
constraining the moronic intern.
That's right. Maybe that's the segment, you know, training our moronic interns.
And because I think it really is
the right mindset to have today when interfacing
with ai it you know it
because of the scope and the scope keeps changing just
this week sonnet 4.6 was announced from claude
and that has a million token scope up from like 250 000 it makes a huge difference
for conversations when you have that that extended scope i i can't it is night
and day because it stops that it stops a lot of the hallucinations that happen
in long conversations where it just forgets the beginning.
Anyway, still, they're moronic interns. So the way that I do this,
if you're using a chat interface like, you know, like ChatGPT,
if you're launching the app or Perplexity or Claude or, you know, Gemini or whatever,
there's two...
It's important to think about this, actually. There's two...
Engines at work here there is the
the controller engine and then
there is the processing engine okay
and when you launch the chat gpt app that
is the controller engine the perplexity app that's the controller engine
claude etc and then there is the
processing engine which is the large language model that's in
the cloud and depending on but actually
i guess all these apps let you see or even
pick which large language
model which llm you're going to use and if
you're using it a lot you will find that using the
simpler ones cost you less
in tokens if you're in that scenario where you're paying
by the usage and then the the more complex ones obviously cost
you more tokens and because it costs them more in compute power so
it's the every
request to the large language model is a
new request to the model so it's
the controller app that really defines how
that request is being processed every single request has the full scope sent
to it which is why those you know million token versus 250 000 token the large
language model in the cloud doesn't remember your long conversation about what
is this new little thing i found on my hand you know dr chat GPT, right?
That's all stored in the controller engine.
Now, that could also be in the cloud, but it's freshly passing everything to
the LLM every time you even ask a question, right? So...
Knowing that that's how that works, now answering William's question, how do I constrain it?
Really, the simplest way is you have two different chats going.
And you have one chat that, say, is going to write if you're using it for coding.
And you can do this with a lot of different things. One chat that's going to write the code. Great.
Literally copy that code. Or if you're using, you know, like an IDE,
a development environment, you can point it at a different chat or,
you know, whatever you want to do.
And then you create a second chat and you point it at the code file that it's saved to your disk.
And you say, hey, evaluate that code.
Here's what I want it to do. And it will evaluate it as a fresh request because
it's in a different chat.
Remember, these are different things. Now, yes, are there memories?
Will ChatGPT, the controller app, remember things from chat to chat? Yes.
But you can tell it, don't use my memories for this chat.
Chat just evaluate the code based on what
you see not what you know from other
chats and so that if there's a secret prompt
it's that it's telling it you are a fresh new robot that has access to it turns
out the same llm or a different llm you might decide you know you want to write
your code in claude and have chat gpt codecs uh debug it great no problem right
you can you can do that So just telling it which one,
you know, what its instructions are and different chats.
That's how that's a way to do it. There are other ways because you can have
different controller models for the same LLM backends.
And that's endless.
But if you're using the ChatGPT app or the Perplexity app or anything,
just open a second chat. Tell it to do it.
So that's that's how I would answer that question.
Thoughts on that, Adam? Did I get that right? I know it's kind of a... Yeah.
You're far deeper into this stuff than I am at this point. I'm not doing a lot
of that sort of thing yet, but...
Yeah.
We've talked about the reasons for that. I mean, at my job, they're still trying
to figure out where and how they're going to enable these capabilities for us. Right.
Within the PCI constraints that we have.
It's tough, man. I, you know, I was talking to somebody whose company is only
doing internal stuff and they are falling so far behind that it's ridiculous.
Some companies just don't get it, you know?
Yeah. And we also have proprietary language and code base, right?
That can't just be out on the internet.
Sure. Yeah. It's tough because hosting your own large language model is very expensive at best.
I mean, yeah, we'll talk about that. It's coming up.
A whole separate set of problems.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a whole different thing. Yeah, challenges, really.
Not really problems. It's just challenges.
No. So speaking of that controller model, Todd has something that sort of shines a light on this.
He says, I have a Perplexity Pro account that I got for free thanks to the PayPal
thing you guys mentioned last year. Great.
He says, and I've been very frustrated using the macOS app.
When I asked Perplexity to build PowerPoint slides based on my criteria, it complies.
But there is no way that I can find in the app to download the file.
He says, when I click on assets, it brings up a blank window.
He says, this happens for all file types that I ask it to create.
When I ask Perplexity how I can download the file, it relays that I should click
on the file button above.
And when I relay that button doesn't exist, it goes off on how I can copy HTML code, etc.
But today, he says, I found a solution.
I logged into my Perplexity account in my web browser and found that the browser
does show the file download button. And all of the files are there and I can
download them and everything, even that I previously created is all accessible right there.
So it's just a limitation of the Mac app, at least for Todd.
I don't, I can't imagine that this is everybody, but you know,
maybe like these things are new.
So that's, that's a great example of kind of the controller versus the thing.
And this is, you know, just a different lens on that same controller.
So could that be an app permissions thing uh privacy thing on his mac like could
be sure it doesn't have access to the file system you know don't you have to
give that permission these days to your apps you.
Do but these files are stored in perplexity's cloud like they're in todd's account
in the cloud because it's created them yeah i don't but but you might be right
like it's worth checking for
Sure does it need permission to download it from the cloud into your onto your
mac i guess is my question yeah into your mac file system yeah.
You might be right i don't know yeah yeah yeah i um
The robot, my chatbot ate my inbox this week, Adam. I'm not proud of this.
You're what?
My chatbot ate my inbox.
Ooh, yum.
Well, I learned some things. And I will, yeah, yum, it says.
I'm going to explain what happened. But the first thing I want to point out
is our inboxes, our mail in general, is not as backed up as we might think.
Oh yeah well because i always think of like well it's imap so even if i lose
my phone or my computer gets destroyed well all my data i mean it's just that's
just a client to the cloud
I i and i'll explain everything about my chatbot but
i'm glossing over that for right now for this mac lesson
uh i gave my chatbot access to
my inbox to do some summaries of things
for me right and it had
a problem with how it was syncing with my inbox
and it needed to do
a refresh it had like some data corruption on on
its side like it would be like if mac mail had
some data corruption and the way that it fixed it
was it just fixed it locally and then did a fresh sync and suddenly my inbox
went from having 800 items in it i know i'm not proud down to 50 and it turns
out some of those 750 items were very very important to me and i realized oh my god
the cloud doesn't have a backup of this my
you know i use fast mail but i don't think gmail would have a backup there's
no undo in your mail client this isn't like
dropbox where you got a 30 day history of this
and it didn't put these in the trash it literally destroyed them and created
a fresh copy of my inbox locally and pushed that change as the truth back to
the cloud and the cloud was like got you no problem you do you you know i i will trust you
I started thinking very quickly on my feet. Uh-oh, what am I going to do?
My problem is I have my mail client running full-time on all of my Macs.
And so I was like, well, I have now synced this change everywhere.
Because I realized it about an hour and a half after it happened.
And I was like, crap, what's my most recent backup?
Thankfully, Time Machine was running on most of my Macs, including the one in
my office, and it was doing hourly backups and still had the hourly backups
because they were, you know, it was within the last 24 hours.
And so I found where the problem happened
and dug out that particular copy of the right inbox files that Thunderbird made
and then called those something different and put them in the right spot in
Thunderbird so that it would ingest them as local mailboxes or one local mailbox, I should say.
And then once it did that, then I just moved everything from that local mailbox back into my inbox.
But that was a very nerdy recovery.
Like this is not something that the average person who doesn't like troubleshoot
stuff and is a nerd for a living would think to do. You could do it.
It's obviously it's not rocket surgery, but like knowing which files to grab
and all of that was I mean, I was taking guesses, but they were extremely educated guesses. Right.
So think about how you have your mail backed up.
And please I need to think about how I have my mail backed up.
I need something better than
I'm going to rely on the fact that I probably can figure out how to extract
mail from a backup in a meaningful way because a file system backup is not the
right way to restore mail.
Now, Time Machine, if I were using Apple Mail, it's possible I could have just
used Time Machine there.
And like launch mail, open my inbox, hit Time Machine.
And if memory serves, I think that would bring up the mail interface in Time
Machine. I could roll back and save this copy of my inbox.
But I didn't want that copy. I wanted to merge the two because there were new
things that had come in that I didn't want to lose that were part of the most
recent 50 that my male client on my robot didn't delete.
So. Yep. Yep.
Well, I will say it again. And this goes all the way back to Tim for Borton.
Great OG Mac podcaster who's no longer with us.
Yeah.
Who I loved dearly. One of the first people I met at Podcast Expo.
And he told me decades ago now about MailSteward.
And this, in my opinion, if you're looking to do this, this is the way to do it.
It will watch your inbox. It will watch your mail accounts.
You can export your Apple Mail and your Gmail into a MySQL database.
It's MySQL Lite if you're using the Lite or standard versions.
If you have access to a MySQL server, which you could do this on your Synology,
obviously of course you could have mail steward
back all your email up into a mysql database
and then from there you can export back to inbox files you can it gives you
a local copy in a database file that you can back up you can save off to a cloud
backup you can have it locally you can have it on your synology whatever you want and then,
builds an index. It makes it extremely searchable because it makes a database
index and you can find things you can choose to have attachments saved or not
saved. Like it's super flexible.
You can point it at specific folders. So for example, you know,
I would take specific inbox folders that were important to me,
say I had ones for my client.
So you don't have to back up everything. You could just back up the important
parts of your, of your, you know, email, that sort of thing.
Yeah it's amazing okay yeah
i i need to do because this is yeah yeah i
need i need to do and i i know that
the i can't think of john what's his name that writes male steward i can't think
of his name sorry you can't think of your last name off the top of my head but
i he has given me a license to test this with and i have tested it but i need
to just like find a mac and leave it running all the time exactly it just is doing this what
Just runs on i mean it can run on yeah you whatever your main mac my main mac
just throw it on there and like i said you could i mean if you want you don't
want local storage you could buy you know a 99 bucks for the.
Yeah 100 bucks yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah set
Up a my sql database on your on your synology and have it all piped over there.
Now this and then go ahead yeah yeah so yeah this reminds me of the day that
my And now we're going back, you know, before I even had a Mac website, let alone a podcast.
I was the people at power computing. I had an issue with my power 100 computer,
Which was one of the first Mac clones.
Like I literally, I was living in Austin. So I got one of the first off the
line of the power 100s and there were major issues with it. It was just wonky.
They finally fixed it for me, but I like literally would go to their,
their, their factory. Cause I, it was, you know, it was 20 minutes from my house or whatever.
It's first place I met Bob Levitas. He doesn't remember that,
but I do cause he was their evangelist, right?
The apple had guy kawasaki power hired bob it was
the first time we met and years later obviously it was like oh my god i
can't believe i'm playing in a band with bob lovatus uh and and
obviously we've become good friends but um they gave
me a zip drive it was as like a consolation for
all of my troubles and and something else like they
just threw a bunch of stuff at me the merchant right like they
had the zip drive so it was literally sitting there with zip
dis that they had also giving me unused and one
saturday morning i went to start up my mac
and the hard drive corruption was so bad
that it wouldn't start and i'm like
oh my god i have a backup that
i haven't been using right here i had a license to retrospect which was the
backup software we would all use back at the time you know and this is reminding
me of that moment because it was that day that i started backing up my Mac and
this is going to be the day that I start backing up my mail.
Now I will share what happened.
Uh, but yes, thank you for the reminder of using mail steward.
Yeah. I mean, when I had this installed, it was great because I, I, I,
had freedom to delete any email that
i wanted knowing that i had this
back yes of it right so let me
even it was freeing to be able to like all right you know do i really need to
keep that email so anything that was in the middle i was not afraid to delete
because i'm like well if i need it ever 10 years from now i can find it in storage
it's local you know like yeah.
It's yours right
It's mine yeah exactly yeah and it's and it's infinite like again because i
used to do this archive sense that nothing ever got deleted out of that mail
steward database that was the permanent storage for yeah all my email yeah.
Yep okay yes i am i disaster was averted and now i I'm going
To You will thank yourself, your future self will thank your past self.
And also thank you if you set it up. Yeah
So I set up OpenClaw this week OpenClaw used to be called Clawdbot,
it was called MoteBot for half a minute, but OpenClaw runs locally on a computer of your choosing
I'm running it on the old Intel iMac that used to sit right in front of me here
in the studio and And if listeners who've been with us long enough and remember,
there was a lightning strike so close to the house that it didn't matter how
well protected things were.
It literally went through the air and fried a couple of things,
including the backlight on that iMac screen.
But otherwise, it's a 2019 iMac with a core i9 8 core processor and 40 gigs
of RAM and more storage than I ever needed.
And I'd probably still be using it to do the podcast right now if it hadn't,
you know, died that kind of a death.
But I couldn't bring myself to throw it away So it's been literally sitting
on the floor of my office for like three years
And I thought, hey, I want to mess with OpenClawed. I don't want to.
I've learned, you know, it's security Swiss cheese.
So don't put it on your primary daily driver.
You know, you want to sandbox it as best you can. I'm like, okay,
well, I'll put it on this machine. And it runs great.
The one issue is that I can't run a local LLM because all of the local LLMs
that are available are tuned to work on Apple Silicon, not on the GPU.
That's, which, you know, I have a, well, at the time, great Radeon GPU in that
iMac, but like, I've wasted too much time on this.
So I pay for a $20 a month membership to Kimi, which sends all my data to Beijing,
but it's a great little LLM.
And I can, of course, I can reroute things to Claude if I want,
or OpenAI or whatever, but it's the controller engine.
And where it gets really powerful is I can and have built little agents that do things for me on this.
And they run persistently because it's my computer and I get to choose what it does.
And so I have an agent that for one of the companies, we're creating a lot of
images and we have a design language for those images.
Right. And so I have that agent. set and and i linked it up with our slack with
the company and sandboxed it as best as anyone could uh that will um generate those.
Images using uh nano banana which is google's uh
image generation which is the best but it's great
because we have everybody can just go into this one slack
channel and say hey make me an image that does this and it can
give an example or not but it already has the
the scope that we want it to use with our you
know example images and design language and everything is run through it
because the robot is built custom built for us
who custom built the robot that's the best part the robot
custom built the robot i didn't have to do any uh
messing around with any of that at all so
that that's kind of the you know what we're using open claw for another thing
that i am using open claw for is that i have it uh checking my email three times
a day it summarizes everything in my inbox for me
And flags the things that it thinks need a response and then drafts responses
for those things and puts them in my drafts folder for me to review and edit before I send.
Because obviously I don't trust the robot to answer my email, at least not yet.
And it does that three times a day, uh, seven in the morning.
It looks at my calendar for the day and tells me what, um, you know,
it sends me a little message. I use telegram.
I could use iMessage to interface with it, but I haven't set that up yet.
But I have it using Telegram because that's the easiest little thing.
And so I have my little moronic intern that's doing all of these things.
But it chose to use a thing called Mbox. No, MBSync.
I don't know why it chose to use MBSync for all my mailbox activity because
built into OpenClaw is a thing called the Himalaya, which is much more reliable and does a live sync.
It was like, well, I thought you might want local caches of your mail.
It's like, turns out that's not such a great idea, isn't it?
And, uh, and it's like, you know, Himalaya will, it'll force me to do a re-sync every time.
And I'm like, this is sounding better and better.
Yes. Like, I don't care. It's like, well, your task, instead of taking 30 seconds,
it's going to take five minutes. I'm like, cool story, bro.
Like five minutes is great. If I want the answer at 8am, maybe start at 7.50. Give yourself a buffer.
It's totally good. I don't care.
You're sitting there doing nothing. 99.9% of the time. The extra five minutes is okay by Dave.
So that's what's, uh, that's what I've got running there. And I have literally
just scratched the surface.
I will say this obviously fraught with opportunities for danger.
I've already explained one of them, but also, uh,
We are not going to become the open claw tech support show. This,
this is a super nerdy thing to do.
And like, I'm happy to have conversations with you, you know,
like send in your emails or whatever.
Like, that's fine. Cause I will learn as much as you do from our email exchanges,
but we're not going to do it in the Mac geek app show.
But, um, may, you know, if we have to start another podcast,
But, uh, but it, it is very cool.
And it is the future of this once.
Someone either OpenClaw or the guy who created OpenClaw now was hired by OpenAI,
the company that has ChatGPT.
This is the future. You will want an agent running on when they are safe and
reliable and road tested and has a good user interface and easy to use and all
the caveats that need to come with something that is less than two months old.
Don't run it on your computer that's my official recommendation uh don't do
what i've done however if you do it let me know because it's pretty cool uh but you know once
This is ready for prime time which is going to be months away not years away
guaranteed once this is ready for prime time the world changes like this is this is the future
there's no doubt about it having something that knows me
and knows everything that i'm doing and i
trust it and it's keeping it local and it's not publishing it
on the internet accidentally you know all of those
things uh this is it this is how we this is the next interface because i do
most nowadays my and i may say nowadays for the last three days my email has
been primarily managed through a telegram conversation with a robot that's running on my iMac.
And like, it's fricking amazing.
And yes, I am going into this clearly eyes wide open that I could step into danger here,
but I trust, you know, I, I, I see what it's doing.
You know, I I'm aware eyes wide open.
So yeah, it's pretty cool.
Good luck to you.
Thanks. Yo, I'll need it. Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like this morning, for example, it told me using this new Himalaya engine that
it couldn't, it was like, I tried to put the drafts in your drafts box, but I can't.
So I've just saved them as files. I'm like, okay, well, at least you saved them.
Like, that's cool. But why can't you? Like, isn't Himalaya an IMAP client?
Like, that's what it's for. It's like, yeah, let me try again.
Like, no, I failed. I'm like, oh, right.
You don't have access to the source of web. I'm like, but I've given you access.
I have some brave search credits that I've already, you know,
granted it access to. I'm like, why don't you use Brave, search the web,
see if others have found this problem and find a solution.
And within about, I don't know, 20 seconds, this all happened pre-show,
like while I was getting tea, I just talked to the robot.
And and it was like, oh, yep, I know exactly what to do now.
Thanks. I fixed it. Your drafts are in your folder ready for you to review.
Michael. It's cool. Yeah, it's cool. It's not Jane, though. It's Thomas Stafford.
Thomas Stafford. That's what I call it. The agent.
It's a name. I'm not sure that I remember why my brother came up with this name,
but he was the guy we blamed everything on.
And the fictitious person that we blamed everything on. And we adopted Thomas
Stafford into the Mac Observer.
Uh he was our fact checker he was on the
masthead as the fact checker and whenever we got something wrong
we blamed it on thomas uh so when
it came time to name my moronic intern it was like
well he's already been named he's already been
named yeah in fact my i don't know if i should share this um
thomas stafford attended a macworld expo we used
to get a press badge for him when when you could do that without needing a photo
id and uh so my brother attended the steve jobs keynote
note with a thomas stafford badge because he was working in
new york at the time uh the one where steve where apple had taped the new apple
mouse underneath everybody's seats so thomas stafford has an apple mouse that
he got that as steve jobs came out which is pretty cool he liked it's cool i
say he liked that story i told that story thomas like why did you name me thomas
stafford i'm like oh let me tell you like oh that's perfect i'm like yeah i know
do we have uh i think we're done right
Uh can we do a one
cool stuff found yes our sofa conversation earlier
reminded me of this and i've been lax in
uh recommending this it it is
a board game because we were talking a little bit about border well it's a card game
technically but okay this was given to me
by corky friend of the show corky
at uh max stock i think last year
and has quickly become one of our absolute favorite games
and it is perfect for this show because the
name of the game is omerta with the
subtitle of don't get caught um so
it's a fun simple little game i think it's like 20 bucks on amazon you probably
could be cheaper if you shop around yep um it is omerta is a term from the mafia
uh meaning a code of silence about criminal activity and refusal to give evidence to authorities.
So you take an oath of omerta or whatever.
Got it. And the basic concept of the game is it's set in the 30s.
You got mobsters and they're like Al Capone and Lucky Luke Janu and blah, blah, blah, blah.
And you're collecting...
Uh mostly bottle cards so you're given
a set of four cards face down you get to look at
two so you know what two of them are and the idea is
you go around and you're trying to get rid of bottles
of booze so that you get the lowest
number of bottles of booze and then when you get to seven or less you can call
omerta that ends the round and then you see how many points each person has
the person with the lowest points gets zero and you play the number of rounds
for the number of people playing. And at the end, you total the points.
During the game, there's other cards that allow you to adjust other people's
cards. So you can switch cards on people. You can add cards to people's hands.
But the idea is it's all face down. So you only know what you know at any given moment.
And then you can mess with people's cards and stuff like that. It is super
fun it's a nice light casual game um and
i am ever grateful to corky for
giving this to us because it is it's become one of our favorites every we go
uh saturdays to the local brewery and play board games and drink beer and stuff
like that and um it's we start with this game we've learned we have to start
with this game because after a few beers in the memory goes a little bit so
So it's a little bit more difficult.
Yeah, but get your chatbot helping you.
It is a memory game. Yeah, yeah. It's super fun.
Highly recommended for especially this audience. I mean, it's Don't Get Caught.
It's literally in the name of the game.
It's literally in the name of the game. Oh, man. That's, I, I, yes.
Yes, yes, yes. I love it.
I love it.
Highly recommend.
Yeah, because we're hearing cool stuff found, it's timely, and if we wait too
long, then it won't be quite as cool.
But Eekster sent in to alert us about something that's exciting for you.
Have you used the new, finally official YouTube app for the Apple Vision Pro?
Absolutely, yeah. They finally released YouTube for the Apple Vision Pro.
I immediately got my Apple Vision Pro out and update it and download this.
And it's nice. It's really, really great.
The UI to it is really well done.
When you bring up the controls, they're kind of all tilted at angles.
It's very spatial in terms of how you interact with the interface.
They've done a really nice job with it.
I mean, number one thing is you can watch YouTube videos natively on a YouTube
client for Apple Vision Pro.
Yeah. Um, the other thing is all the, all the spatial videos are now supported
and by spatial, I mean, you know,
360, 180, all that stuff that you would get on any other VR headset,
um, is now accessible to you with the, with the vision pro, which is nice. So yeah.
I mean, it's not a huge thing, but it is kind of a huge thing in terms of why this app didn't exist.
Well, that's the question. I happened to be on MacBreak Weekly again this past
week, and this came up because it was timely.
And it wasn't me, but it was either Leo, Jason, or Andy that postulated perhaps
the delay was contractual,
and YouTube had made a promise to, say, meta, but...
To be exclusive on the quest for X number of periods of time, right?
Before it was allowed to be on anybody else's platform. Like that's his,
like Occam's razor, right?
Back to that. Like that, that's as good an excuse as any.
Cause otherwise this seems like a dumb thing to have not done. So.
Well, yeah, I guess it would come down to did Apple let them in on what was
going on early or not. You would think they would, but I never put anything past Apple.
They might have not even told YouTube, and it's like, oh, now we have this thing,
and YouTube's like, well, we're not going to just throw something out there quickly.
We're going to do this right. I mean, it could be something as simple as that,
too. That's fair. Yeah, yeah. We're not going to just throw any client on there.
We're just not going to port our iOS thing onto this thing. We want to actually
create something that... Right, right. And like I said, it's got some nice elements
to how they've done the UX and the UI.
It feels very natural. So they've done a nice job with it. I was very pleased with how it came out.
So I'm just happy to have it now. It'll make the Vision Pro that much more useful.
Oh, for sure. I mean, YouTube is the...
Like somebody released a report yesterday so it must be
true uh that youtube is the
platform on which people consume the
most video more than netflix more
than right like i mean certainly not more than the
others combined but it is the single most commonly
used platform which i mean i would have been surprised if
it wasn't so right you know yeah that
makes perfect sense i like absolutely yeah that's cool
cool yeah thanks for hanging out with us folks thanks for
sending in all your tips that you you were right adam we had
like great tips this week and great questions so
yeah i like it good stuff i missed
pete but we made it through successfully so
thanks thanks for hanging out thanks for everything um
thanks to cashfly for providing all the bandwidth to get
the show from us to you if you missed pete go make sure you listen to so there
i was if you want more adam debut film podcast and i do business brain and gig
gab so lots of us to go around and we will be back back next week of course
we will we can watch uh matt geek gab
Youtube's streams and other little things um we will be doing a lot more with
the youtube channel coming up so stay tuned on that but you can watch it all
on your vision pro now so yeah thanks for hanging out you got anything to add there Adam before
We yeah I would say grab Omerta and don't get caught.
Well played
This transcript was automatically generated by the podcast creator and may contain errors. Aggregated via the PodcastIndex API.
