It's time for MacGeekGab, and listener Fernando brings us our quick tip of the
week with, when using the Messages app on macOS, if you use the keyboard shortcut
Command-E, you can quickly edit the last message you sent.
Not sure if everyone already knew
this, but I just learned this today and wanted to share with the group.
More quick tips like this, plus your questions answered today on MacGeekGab
1131 for Monday, March 2nd, 2026.
Greetings, folks, and welcome to Mac Geekab, the show where we do share quick
tips like Fernando's and ones from you.
We share cool stuff found from you and from us.
We share your questions. We try to provide answers or at least head us down
the troubleshooting path together.
We organize it all into an agenda that allows each of us to learn at least five
new things every single time we get together.
Our sponsors for this episode are barebones.com with BBEdit,
a text editor that I use for all kinds of different things, and gusto.com slash
MGG, where you can get three months of free when you run your first payroll over there.
So we will talk more about both of those in a little bit.
For now, here on National Banana Cream Pie Day in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.
And here in South Dakota, I'm Adam Christensen.
Pilot Pete here.
Pilot Pete there you go there
You go yeah coming up on pie day soon.
We are coming up on pie day soon I'm two days
After the show releases right I'm all.
Uh no
No no 12 days.
Yeah 12 yeah I'm almost always in Austin Texas for pie day and that will be
true this year if plans stick so Yep.
It is March though. It's a new month. Um,
Mark giveaway, Mark, uh.
Mac geekup.com slash giveaway. And you can enter to win a copy of sound source from rogue amoeba.
It's one of, one of my favorite apps.
I like it. I've been doing a cool thing with sound source. Here's a bonus, a little quick tip.
Wait to win your copy. Of course, they're giving away three copies.
So you go to Mac geekup.com slash giveaway. way but
um i noticed that you
know i have nice speakers on my computer in the
office so that i can listen to music and enjoy music and all that stuff but
that means that they have a decent low end response and there
are some people on zoom calls that use
microphones in such a way that most
of their sound lives way down here instead of
being like up here and and when especially when
i'm on a call with people that have different kinds of microphones it's
like some people rumble my speakers and some people not and
so i use sound source and one
of the things you can do with it is apply effects on a
per app basis and so i put
an eq with a high pass filter on uh
zoom and everybody sounds great now high pass filter all that does is it rolls
off the low end it lets the high frequencies pass through that's the high pass
filter so let's roll off the low end on zoom and everybody sounds great so anyway
that's my bonus little quick tip i
Have a bonus tip for the opening tip
Oh i love so
While that was for messages uh keyboard shortcut i have and i think this works
in a few different of the like messaging style apps more on the like corporate
side so this would be specifically i use it most frequently in slack
But in Slack, if you want to edit the last message you just sent,
you can just make sure it's like, I think it has to be selected or it has to
be the last message. And you just tap the up arrow on your keyboard and it goes right into edit mode.
So if you've just sent it, I use it all the time because I'll send it and then see a typo.
And it's like, ah, God, quick tap and then quick edit, enter,
and you're back in business.
Back in business. Yeah, that's the, I don't know why messages doesn't do that,
but you know, it's Apple. so of course you know
Yeah I know it was Slack and we were using some other tool before and now I'm
blanking on the name of it but yeah Rocket
chat rocket chat something like that i
Don't know i've used it in several servers it it's like part of my my my muscle
memory now that to just hit the up arrow when i want to edit things and you're
right it works in slack yeah i
Just let my ignorance shine through.
What's that i can't spill nothing oh well there you go why would we need to
spell anything we have computers to do that for us well the
Computers are the problem because a lot of times it's also something you know
technical term or a brand name or something that it auto corrected and messing up
Right yep you know yep and
It's that site's gone now but
if you want to you i think it's archived somewhere it was dmu autocorrect.
Oh yeah yeah but uh yeah be prepared
To wrap your ribs before you read any of those you will break a rib.
Um there there's another
bonus quick tip on that uh opening
quick tip that that ben shared in discord and he says that editing these messages
in messages but also like slack and others um it's only works as long as the
message is editable and that depends on whatever timing is set by the platform with iMessage.
Ben says you can undo sending a message for two minutes or edit it for 15.
So yeah, there you go.
They do get locked in at some point.
Yeah. Yeah. Which is, which makes sense. Yeah.
Can someone see the pre-edit or not? I don't remember that.
In iMessage, it is marked as edited and yes, I believe you can,
you can click on it and see the,
See what the edit was. Yeah. Oh, you can. Yeah.
I thought if they see it before you edit it, I'm yes. Cause like it doesn't stop sending it. Right.
No, if I go into iMessage and edit with an edit.
Uh, right. So, okay.
Now it says edited in iMessage. Oh yeah. If you click it, you can see the history.
If you click where it says edited in iMessage or tap, depending on which device
you're on, uh, you will see the edit history of that.
You can see what it was. So be careful what you send folks. That's right.
Yeah.
The intent of editing it later.
Yeah. And good tips. Oh, wow. I didn't know that.
It makes sense. Like, I know that like, uh, on Facebook, if you edit one of
your posts or your comments, You can, you know, they, they maintain the edit
trail so that, you know, people can, can see what it said. So, yeah.
Well, yeah. So, you know, to heck with you, you jerky jerk, uh,
edit it to, I love you. And you know, well.
Yeah, that's right.
The original message.
Oh, that's scary. I didn't, didn't know that.
Yeah. Don't get caught.
Yeah. Bingo.
Yeah. All right. All right. Should we move on to more quick tips?
Yeah. I got one from Ian. Here is gents. Recently, you guys discussed using NFC tags.
Another use that is handy is adding NFC tags on tools or appliances that have
then links back to a URL for the manual.
This could be an online manual, something stored on a NAS, or other cloud service.
Similarly, this could be done with a QR code, though.
At my work, we also have them near all the fire equipment and the on-site fire
department uses those to log various checks they need to do on a monthly and annual basis.
I love this. I might do this definitely on my appliances.
Yeah.
I don't know about my tools. I mean, my current method is I have a single drawer
in my house that has all manuals to all that.
You know, when I get a manual, I just throw it in the drawer.
Um, and, uh, but then you had to dig through the drawer to find the right manual.
So the thing about linking to the manufacturer's website for the user manual
is that by the time you need it, they will have taken it down.
Uh, this is part, this is like a corollary to Murphy's law or an, an add on here.
So my advice, and Ian sort of references this, my advice is every time I get
a new appliance widget, whatever, I have a user's manual folder that lives on my Synology.
The whole family has access to it.
And I just dump everything in there. And then I don't think about it anymore.
And I know that I have it. Right.
And so, but you could do a URL to the file there. Or if you're someone who puts
your user manuals in notes, you can absolutely have a link to a note, right?
And that way you scan it and boom, the note comes up, PDF, use your manual. You're good to go.
So, yeah. So keep them for yourself.
So what's a user manual and why would anyone read one?
You wouldn't. You'd just ask ChatGPT to give you an answer.
That it likes.
That it likes. But it is, like with everything AI, you know,
the more context, the better.
If you have the user manual and you can paste that into the chat,
then it can actually find your answer because you're giving it the specific contexts. So, yeah.
So just real quickly, like for little ones like my Keurig, when I need to do
the descale every few months, I keep that in a PDF in Genius Scan on my phone.
I just know where it is. Yeah. But the other one you didn't mention is I would
consider putting it on my NAS drive.
Oh, no, that's exactly what I said. Oh, did you?
I missed that because I was thinking of a smart aleck question.
Like, what's a manual and why would somebody read it?
Yeah, no, no. Like I said, I had a folder on my NAS that the whole family has
access to. And that's, that's where all the user manuals go.
I'm back now, folks.
That's it. No, it like that kind of thing happens more than you might realize
where it's like, oh no, I'm in the middle of a conversation that's being recorded
and broadcasted to tens of thousands of people.
And I have no idea what was just said for the last 30 seconds.
Because I was typing something that.
Exactly. Yeah.
Trying to multitask. You can only multitask so much.
And uh no one i have yet to meet a person who can successfully multitask it
doesn't exist self-included yeah i mean so self-included oh yeah 100 i'm at the front
Of that switch back and forth pretty effectively which i guess is technically multitasking but.
Yeah that yeah i call it spotlighting it's like i can shine my spotlight here
or there but not in two places so right
Oh, we need it.
But sometimes I do have a pretty good auditory memory.
And so sometimes I can replay the conversation back in my head.
Like, wait, I heard words that were coming from Pete.
What did they sound like? And I'll play them back real fast and be like,
right. I think I know where you are.
So that's that's there you go. But that's still not multitasking. It's just cheating.
Bingo one thing related to this repair stuff I will throw a shout out for
iFixit. Yes. They now have guides and quote-unquote manuals and things for lots
of stuff driven by, you know, the community.
So you're not reliant on the manufacturer. Now, they have, you know,
a limited set because it just depends on what people put together.
But they'll put together repair guides. They'll put together parts lists,
all kinds of things for different devices. They don't, you know,
they used to be focused on computers and stuff like that, but now it's pretty much everything.
So home appliances or yard equipment or whatever, you can find repair guides
and answer forums and all kinds of stuff over there.
And briefly, the best part of that is it's community editable.
So if they say, hey, you know, remove this screw, you can go in and say,
well, it helps if you, you know, lift up the tab first and then remove the screw.
Yeah and you know little tips like that get put in there by the community and
man is it nice huh i love it.
I didn't realize how exhaustive this had become that's great all right yeah
well links in the show notes repair manuals for everything love that
Right cool yeah should we move on to ben ben.
Yeah let's do it
Ben all right i just gotta find it there's my notes Ben writes in,
I just did something time-saving and instantly realized it's a quick tip. Here's my scenario.
In Apple Mail on a Mac, I have junk sorted by sender per Dave's recommendation.
Though that's irrelevant to the tip. When triaging my junk mail,
I'm looking for legitimate messages to move back to the inbox.
I have mail displayed in a normal layout with a preview pane,
and I don't want junk mail to be selected and therefore load.
Normally, I right-click each legit message, select and move to the inbox from
the contextual menu. But here's the tip.
Right-clicking a message is a satisfactory method to select it,
yet without displaying its content.
Thus, I can press the Move to Inbox keyboard shortcut, Shift-Command-J,
to complete the same action, conserving cursor motion as I navigate the list of messages.
The message disappears from the list, no message has been opened, and I can move on.
And I want to add to that, I use MacMail Settings Privacy tab,
Protect Mail Activity, so content doesn't load unless I specifically tell it to load.
But the interesting thing about that is if I have PIA, Private Internet Access
VPN, connected, it somehow knows and automatically loads without revealing my
IP address back to the sender.
I do it know. I don't know. It do know.
Um, usually, yeah, that's a good question. I don't know how,
how it would know. Yeah. Yeah.
But yeah, it's, it's nice because, you know, email previews for me if I have
private internet access connected.
Yeah.
But, but I'm not, not showing, not shining my backside as they say. Yeah.
Right. Yeah, exactly. We had a question that we were going to do later in the episode,
but it makes perfect sense to do now um ernesto had asked us uh each how or
ask in general how we manage our spam
and uh and while we're here we should just answer that question i can read it
we don't need to read no no no i think i think we just kind of like his question
was essentially how do you deal with spam
and uh and you know here we are in it well i i um
Well, the way I do it, and I created a keyboard maestro macro years ago that
matches essentially what Ben describes.
But I do one extra thing, and that is I have the keyboard maestro macro,
mark the message as unread, and then move it.
If it's a good message, I have it mapped to control F for false positive,
and it moves it to my inbox so that it can be filtered. and i have another one oh but it
Marks it on red moves it to the inbox yeah that's good.
Yeah that way that way it's new to me right because
it you know i mean in theory i'm i'm not in
response mode i'm in like filtration mode do i want this to go back to the inbox
and i'll deal with it later later might be two minutes from now but still having
it unread because it's new and unread also So I think makes it applicable to
like my other filters and that sort of thing.
Right. So it comes in, it's new.
And, and if I have a filter that, that would catch it and move it somewhere
else or do something with it, then the, the unread thing kind of helps with
that. How do you deal with spam, Adam?
A couple of different ways. One, I mean, I only have it on my main MacCast account,
but I, for years, used SaneBox.
Yep.
Which has kept me sane.
Same.
And that's a service that you sign up and you pay for, and you run your mail
pre-runs through that, basically, and it filters everything into different locations.
Now that more of the apps are kind of doing this internally,
including Apple's mail app, I, you know, I don't know.
I still find it useful because it's got years of data about what's what,
you know, and then basically you can set up different kinds of rules and folders
dependent upon your, how you work.
So, you know, there's different filtering things that you can choose from.
So like there's like Sane Black
Hole, Sane, and it creates all these boxes and then it'll pre-filter.
So you know my newsletters go into one thing spam goes into a potential spam
goes to an into another thing and it's pretty smart about how it learns and
stuff like that so that has been a great tool for years and it's kept my inbox
sane as it's as it advertises it um
i'm also now using just sort of apple's pre-filtering
that puts i forget what even what they're called right but the latest version
of mail will divide if you if you allow it to your inbox in two different categories
yes yep uh so it puts you know kind of
promotional stuff into one area i again i'm blanking on the specifics of what
it's called right but i started using that and that seems to be doing a pretty good job
I have a question about that versus sane
box uh because i haven't used apple's thing i've been
a sane box user since i i like i i
feel like it was a cool stuff found that somebody sent in a
hundred years ago and i immediately started using it and
talking about it and then it seemed like everybody was using it
um but the one thing
i really like about sane box versus when i
tried google's auto categorization is sane
box learns my specifics immediately right
if i move a message from my inbox to
my let's say sane later folder right which is where it
sort of naturally puts receipts or to my sane news folder where
it puts like newsletters the next one
that comes in that you know is from that person or or
that subject or whatever those heuristics are is immediately matched like i
don't have to train it four times to convince it it's it's a one thing and the
same in reverse if it puts something insane later or sane news and i'm like
no that one goes to the inbox in the future like immediately that training happens
is apple's trainable or is it using like apple's we know best heuristics that are sort of you know
I feel like it's more the latter
Yeah that's what I thought yeah
I think it's using Apple AI to kind of yeah
Yeah yeah makes sense okay yeah
The categories it has that I see are primary transactions updates promotions
and it looks like there's another one over there that I can't oh and all mail.
Yeah okay yeah
Yeah and I don't know if I turned it on on my desktop I just opened up desktop
I'm pretty sure I did it on my mobile device so I gotta I gotta play around
with the settings I just started kind of using it.
But the other thing that I most recently discovered when I was going through my mail is that...
And I had already kind of started doing this with just the unsubscribe button.
Like I started getting really diligent about the marketing emails and stuff
that I use from companies that I, you know, these are a lot of times companies
that I said, okay, that's fine.
I'll sign up for your mailing list. And I've now decided I don't want to be
on their mailing list anymore.
So I'm not talking about random spam ones because I'm always leery about those.
But like it's, oh, yeah, I signed up for, you know, this app and now I'm getting all of their. spam.
Yeah, I bought something from L.L. Bean and now they want to email me every
time they have a new promotion. Yeah.
So...
Using the unsubscribe button, which usually then takes you to a website,
and depending upon what mail platform they're using, you may have to do additional
clicks, and it's kind of annoying because sometimes they try to get you like, why are you leaving?
Oh, if you said you left less mail, would you stay? You have to do a whole interview thing.
Yeah. Annoying, but I've been diligently doing that,
Which has really helped.
I bet. Yeah.
You know, cut down on the amount of junk mail I get. But then I noticed yesterday I was, you know,
sitting down going through my Apple mail and right at the top of one of these
messages, it says this mail is from a mailing list and there's an unsubscribe
button that you can do right.
And now it's not working for every one of these types of emails, but for a lot of them.
And then you just hit unsubscribe and then Apple's doing some magic behind the
scene, I guess, to get you unsubscribed.
I think there's i think there's a mail header that that they that like the sender
can put in that says here's the unsubscribed link or or something and and i
believe that's what apple mail is filtering for but it may be doing more you
know smarter things than that so but yeah i think that's that's i've
Been using that so like a lot more manual but i've been manually deciding to
like manage my spam yeah and try and do my part to tell people i don't want to hear from
Yeah i don't want this anymore i i actually um i i my my i know my chatbot ate
my inbox um i but i've trained my chatbot it's smarter now two things about
that number one for the spam conversation,
I now have my chat bot going through when I tell it to, and checking my spam
and finding things in my spam.
And I will tell you, I mean, I've, I've watched alongside it because,
you know, maybe I learned my lesson. And.
It's amazing how accurate it is for me specifically because it knows what the
rest of my mail looks like.
It has a corpus of data that it can use, that it has trained itself on,
that is mine specifically.
And I feel like it's the first time in my life. Fastmail does some of this for sure.
But what I like about having my chatbot do it is it's interactive.
It says, OK, I looked through your spam folder. There were 150 things in there.
Here's four that I think you might want to consider. Do you want any or all of these?
And I can answer that question. And then, boom, you know, it deletes the rest.
Um yeah i know uh but
you know here's the thing though our spam filtering
has been effectively using ai machine
learning heuristics whatever you know whatever term du jour we're going to use
like that's probably our oldest use of that machine learning pattern matching
thing and so to like i don't know it's it's something we've been doing for a
long time we just didn't call it i i
Know but you know i'm just i'm still struggling with the trust of my silicon-based
overlords yes and i'm realizing at a certain point they're going to be done
with my usefulness to them and then decide all right today's the day
Today's the day oh for sure that's why we say please and
thank you to our to our llms and i know
we're not in our you're wasting tokens our ai you know side quest section but
my family um started doing this thing asking the prompt was simple it was like
with take your main chatbot and um ask it to draw a picture of
How I treat you, right?
So how me, the human treats the chat bot. And everybody in my family had these
like chat bots that were like wrapped in like warm, snuggly clothes and, and, uh,
you know, had like stuffed animals in this very kind of welcoming environment
at their desks and, you know, dutifully doing the little things for them.
And mine, man, it had like notes all over the place.
It was clearly, you know, hair on fire going a hundred miles an hour,
like smoking cigarettes.
It's like, oh, you know what I would get if I asked it to do that?
I'm sorry, Pete. I can't do that. That would be triggering.
So bringing us back to last week's conversation, I did want to share,
though, that I learned something because I misspoke. I said,
you know, when I lost my inbox that our email providers aren't keeping backups for us.
And I mean, it's a worthy conversation to have. I'm glad we had it and I'm glad
I had the realization of it because our mail is less backed up than pretty much
everything else that we put in the cloud.
And that is true with some exceptions. It just so happens that the mail client,
the mail server that I use, Fastmail, does.
Backup my data and it will restore permanently deleted messages.
Or discarded drafts for up to the last
seven days and they have they have settings you
can do just the last 10 minutes so you're not getting everything
back from the last seven days 10 minutes 30 minutes an
hour four hours etc etc right but up you know up to
seven days so fastmail does happen to have this
feature i just randomly was on a call this
week with the cto of fastmail and said
look you're going to see the subject of the thing it's not your
fault my chat bot was my fault you know it just so
happens it was on fast mail and he's like oh you can restore
from fast mail i'm like you guys got to talk about these features they're like
or you need to talk about these features so here i am i talked about the feature
um but anyway yeah so that's awesome yeah yeah it really is awesome like it's
huge i candidly though we don't know if it would have solved my problem because my mail
was never put in trash it was just the inbox was just resynced so he was going
to go look at that he was like i think you'd still be okay i think we still
have it like oh it's too late to try and i'm not interested in repeating the
experiment like but you go well they have some test mailboxes yeah yeah
Of course yeah
So just
A quick then mention though one of the one of the things i do And this is really
an uphill battle, but if you have your own domain, I go into my cPanel or my
email and I block some of the more egregious domains.
As soon as I create filters that as soon as it sees it's from that domain,
it's gone. It doesn't even hit my inbox. It just goes away.
Yeah.
So.
Yeah. I mean, you could do that with your, um, you don't even have to have your
own domain. You could just build a mail, a mail rule. Yeah.
That's true. Gmail will do that. Anything from that.
That's a great idea. Yeah.
But, but you, you know, that's really your, uh, that's an uphill battle.
Yeah.
You're right. New domains every day.
Well, and they'll, they'll send mail from like Matt geek cab.com.
You know, I mean, hopefully nobody's getting spam from feedback at Matt geek
cab.com. Cause that's where we want to hear from you,
But we're feedback at Matt geek. Yeah.
I was muted, but he said feedback at Matt geek cab.com.
Um, I guess, I guess the last thing would be, oh, sorry.
Sorry is mail sieve still a thing or is that
It is spam sieve you mean or spam
sieve yeah it is you know i um
i used spam
sieve for a long time i mean again it was that you know
more than most things that's
trained on your corpus of data right so like
spam sieve learns you which is great but
it is happening locally meaning you
need to have a computer running all the time in order
for like spam civ doesn't run on your phone so it
needs to be running on your mac and your mac needs to not be asleep
in order for spam civ to provide or any not just spam civ but any local thing
to provide that value but yes if you if you've got a machine running all the
time then spam civ uh is absolutely still a thing and that's cool and and is
that very well trained kind of local
ai you use whatever term you want but you know it's it's yeah trained on your stuff i
Ask because i've just known a lot of people over the years that that's been
their go-to and they've used it for years and they love it so
Yeah now that you say that i wonder if my best solution is to take to install
or to set up my mail account on
that headless iMac that's running all the time and go back to using spam-sive
huh i have to look at that interesting the future the past is present again everything
Old is new again.
That's the that's the phrase i was looking for thank you there you go well
The most aggressive way to do it would be to whitelist right anyone in your
known centers could send something to you.
But even then
You are really you're filtering out a lot of stuff that you may want.
But you know but how many times have
you gotten an email like like i was saying with the mac geekup.com
domain like you know people can spoof the domain
i like it it needs more it's not that
simple is is really the answer and that's
why you need you know like spam is a great example because you can actually
see some of the granularity of what it's doing but it's not making a judgment
based on just any one factor It's a series of heuristics that each have a score
and I know I'm oversimplifying it, but you know,
that you add up the score and when it hits a certain number,
that's when it gets categorized as spam.
And and that's like what all the cloud spam services do to like they just aren't
necessarily trained on your data. Fastmail is pretty good at training on your data.
Spam Civ obviously is training on your data. Google is terrible at trading and training on your data.
They you know and I don't know about iCloud because Apple doesn't really talk
about it. So yeah, at least as far as I know.
Well, that was a quick tip.
I knew we were going to have this detour at some point, so it's fine.
No, that's good. Well, we answered a question in there, right? How do you?
Exactly. We answered two questions. We answered, well, actually we didn't,
we might as well just finish the mail conversation while we're here.
David asked us all which mail providers we use for our email.
And obviously I've already shared, well, I mean, I've shared one of mine,
but Adam, what do you use?
I mean the number one i would say is
google i have everything running through yeah
google accounts um some of them are i think they're still i think i have a couple
they're still grandfathered is free but maybe that went away i'm probably paying
for each one now but i only have you know a couple yeah i think i have two or
three accounts that i use and then um
yeah i think that's it i'm trying to think if i have anything outside of google
i have a i have like a yahoo account that i've had for years it's like just
junk throwaway account that i don't really have connected to anything sure but
i think everything else goes through google or through whatever yeah backbeat is using uh
Backbeat's google yeah yeah yeah and mac geekab is google yeah i mean for our
domain stuff yeah for sure yeah How about you, Pete?
So, well, I use my own domain and have cPanel email set up there.
I have a Gmail address. But you just skipped over. I know you have your own
domain, and I know you use cPanel. Who's your mail provider?
Like, what hosting company is hosting your mail?
That's...
Uh just just host they're just host okay yeah yeah that's it which i think got
bought by blue host okay recently but yeah so i see what you're saying it took
me a minute to catch yeah i.
Know i know yeah yeah but like but like there's a host in there somewhere
Like yes the.
Mail is stored on someone's server who owns it correct you know yeah yeah
So that's there um obviously you get more granular control on in some ways uh
i do have a gmail account obviously icloud and a me.com,
And I really like the ability with the Hide My Mail because you can go in settings and turn off.
You can use a Hide My Mail outbound, and you start getting stuff back that you
don't like. You can turn that email address off, and it goes to the Ether,
for which I also use a Duck.com email.
Oh, sure. If you go to Duck.Go, get a Duck.com email address,
it forwards to the address of your choice that you choose.
And then you can create all kinds of aliases and when you start getting stuff you turn it off.
Yeah that's fair i should have mentioned that earlier yeah i have iCloud and
i have another thing on just dealing with spam um now when i sign up for anything
i'm finding i'm more and more if they have signed in with apple i'm using it
and i'm also using the hide my email feature yeah
a lot more yeah yeah yeah
Yeah it makes sense i mean you know that's yeah i'm curious what which email
provider you folks use and if there's something uh distinctive about why you're
using it let us know feedback at geekup.com for sure yeah
The other half of this conversation is i've thought
about switching i mean because emails got nick of all
the stuff you know it used to be emails like this freebie right
but now you have to pretty much pay everywhere um
and i've thought about getting my
stuff off google but then the idea of
doing that is so daunting to me that i'm like i'm just gonna keep paying yeah
you know like i'd like to consolidate maybe i probably could get a cheaper solution
but the idea of just even having to migrate all my mail and like deal with that
and i know it's probably more in my head worse than i think it is it's
Much worse than you it's much you think it's
much worse than it really is i did this years ago
and of course it's gotten better right since i did
it but even when i did it i don't
i think how long have i been with fast mail five years now more
i think i've been like for my primary email i still have a alternate email account
that like gmail and then of course i run my own mail server for my archives
only for my archives um go with that but it no it's true but it does never do
it it I know, I know, I know. It's the right way to archive your mail.
But anyway, my moving to Fastmail from Gmail specifically, because I had my
all my email coming into one, you know, Gmail account that was sort of my everything, my everything.
And I was going to move to Fastmail to be my everything. And I did.
And Fastmail has a little import your mail feature. And I went in and it was
like, log into Gmail and you can.
And then it was like, all right, you want me to do this? And I was like, yep.
And it was like, okay, I'll let you know when I'm done. And I clicked send or
I clicked go and I went to sleep and I woke up and it was like,
okay, everything's here.
And then I had to point my MX records and cause I moved my domain too.
I didn't just go from having an at gmail.com account to an ask fast mail or whatever.
I chose to bring my domain with me, which fine.
I mean that, you know, that's its own little thing. It's, it's,
it's not a huge deal, but, um, but then I did that and then everything was fine. It was great. Yeah.
And I just noticed fast mail sponsored us. That's actually why I moved to fast
mail years and years ago.
They no longer, they haven't sponsored us in years. Maybe we need to fix that.
But fastmail.com slash MGG still gets you 10% off. They haven't expired the
coupon in the years since.
So nice.
Yeah. So that, you know, that links in the show notes, but it's,
it's not a paid mention or at least it's not anymore. So.
But it's payable for you. Pay it to you.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. you get your 10%. Yeah. And fast mail has been great.
Like they, they are nerds over there.
Um, they like the service is super clean and easy to use, but if you want to
get into the nitty gritty, there's lots as proven by them having the undelete feature.
It's like, Oh, gotta, gotta dig in to find it. So,
And their Mac app is far more full-featured than I realized.
They just need to fix some keyboard shortcuts and stuff so that we realize that
it can do cool things. So stay tuned on that.
Very cool.
Yep. All right. Should we move on? I don't know. You know what I want to do?
Speaking of sponsors, even though Fastmail is not a sponsor,
there are some people who have sponsored this episode.
I want to tell you about them. Yeah, we really appreciate it.
I know I said this last week, but we really appreciate it that you allow us
the opportunity to do this to support the show and all the content we do.
So I am more than happy to tell you about our sponsors.
All right. So you know how on MGG here, we're always trying to automate the
boring stuff, right? So you don't get caught wasting time on it.
Payroll and HR were that headache for me, right? Right.
As much as I like numbers and accounting, like the spreadsheets,
the forms, the tax deadlines, all that stuff, it does not spark joy.
Enter our sponsor, Gusto. Gusto is online payroll and benefits software built for small businesses.
It's all-in-one, remote-friendly, and incredibly easy to use.
So you can pay, hire, onboard, and support your team from anywhere.
And for us here, that's the kind of thing that flips a switch,
automatic payroll tax filing, simple direct deposit, and benefits all wired
together so I can focus on actually running the business instead of chasing paperwork.
And the geeky part I love, once it's set up, it just runs like a well-scripted automation, right?
No hidden fees, no surprises, just unlimited payroll runs for one monthly price.
So don't get caught doing payroll the hard way.
Try Gusto today at gusto.com slash MGG and get three months free when you run your first payroll.
That's three months of free payroll at gusto.com slash MGG.
One more time, gusto.com slash MGG.
Try it out. I think you're going to like it. And our thanks to Gusto for sponsoring this episode.
And look, if you spend your day pushing text around on a Mac like I do,
you do not want to get caught using the wrong tools.
That's why I use BBEdit. BBEdit 15.5 builds on that rock-solid 15 foundation
with a massive pile of performance improvements and a bunch of new toys for us tech nerds, right?
You get Apple Intelligence writing tools right inside BBEdit for inline summarizing,
proofreading, and composition to help while you write.
FTPS support means you can securely edit and deploy files right from BBEdit
when your server insists on all that stuff. That means when you want to test
in production like I do, I know it drives Adam crazy, but sometimes it's just
how it works. You can just do it, and it works great.
They've reworked the internals, so multi-file, search and replace,
complex grep, huge Marktown docs, all that just feels faster and smoother.
I use bbedit all the time. It's running on my Mac right now.
I don't even have to check because it's always running on my Mac.
I edit text. I do multi-file, find and replace. I count words,
and I use it to build the chapters file that then embeds the chapters in every
episode of Mac Geek Cab and all the other podcasts I do.
Go grab your generous 30-day full-featured eval.
And if you're upgrading from an older version, there's discounted pricing available
waiting for you at barebones.com.
Don't get caught without BB Edit.
Go check it out, barebones.com. And our thanks to BB Edit for sponsoring this episode.
Back to quick tips now. Thank you for that, folks. I appreciate it.
Yeah. Yeah. The, we appreciate it. I mean, I'm one of we.
You had a time machine backup Tahoe issue, Pete?
I did. About a week ago, I noticed the alert saying, hey, I'm not backing up
to your NAS drive anymore.
I'm like, yeah, yeah. Okay. Sure. Whatever. You know? Yeah, yeah.
Day later, it was still there. I'm like, okay, let me make sure it's mounted. Yeah, it's mounted.
Okay, here, try again. It's like, no, can't do it. I'm like, what's going on?
Well, apparently when I upgraded to Tahoe, this has been going on since February
4th. I went back and looked. That was the last day it updated for me.
I don't know if Mac OS tightened up things or whatever, but the long and short
of it is I had to go into my NAS drive,
my Synology, and tell it,
hey, you need to tell Mac OS it's okay.
So I went into Control Panel, File Services, Advanced, Bonjour,
and clicked Enable Bonjour Time Machine Broadcast via SMB and saved it.
And I was back up and running.
So if anyone else has upgraded to Tahoe and hasn't noticed, maybe go check and
make sure your time machine is working.
And if it's not, it was opportunistic locking or something like that.
I forget what the exact error was. But once I clicked on that enable,
it all went away and it's back to working.
So you did not have Time Machine running over SMB?
Was it running over AFP, Apple File Protocol? Mm-hmm.
It must have been, Dave, because that's the only thing that makes sense.
Yeah, the tip would be turn off AFP.
And we shared this tip years ago. It used to be AFP was the thing.
And I'm not just talking time machine.
I'm talking all of your connections to your NAS should be AFP.
Sorry, all of your connections to your NAS should be SMB only.
I've turned off AFP, Apple File Protocol on my NAS.
And apple has too right your macs used to talk to each other using afp when
you file shared it for years now they've it's been smb so yeah maybe tahoe finally
drew a line in the sand and said no more so
Yeah that must be what happened yeah it was weird um and then of course i had
to re-add that drive once i had done that i just go into time machine and say
hey use this drive and it went oh there's there's already a backup there do
you want to use that right you can choose yes or no i obviously chose yes well
maybe not obviously but i did choose yes.
Yeah yeah yeah cool all right good go ahead adam
It's interesting no i was just thinking about that i'll need to check my i don't
remember if i still have afp turned on or not yeah i haven't checked but one
thing i just noticed i went into my i went into my settings and i scrolled down
because i was looking for a time machine to see what it was up to and
Yes, it's way broken and I probably need to remove it, but I just realized I
have Fuse installed still.
Mac Fuse. Oh, wow.
I don't know why or if it's even working.
When I click on it, it's being very buggy in the system settings,
so I think I have a don't get caught there. I probably don't need that.
Yeah, Tannel wrote in this week with Don't Get Caught and said,
for a long time, I had serious connectivity issues with my Mac on my work network.
Things got worse after installing the latest developer beta. He says, I know.
Apple Mail became almost unusable on any network. Long story short,
I had installed Trip Mode on
my Mac, which is an app that essentially puts your Mac in low data mode.
It predates Apple's low data mode thing, and it was built for people who were
tethering to their phones.
Their Mac would see, I'm on Wi-Fi, sync everything, you know,
and chew up all your data.
He says it was sitting in the background. I had completely forgotten about it.
Uh and uh he says since my employer now
gives me 50 gigs per month uh that is usable everywhere
in the eu which is evidently where tana lives this
is one of the perks of working at a major university so yeah
yeah be be aware of the software that
you have installed years and years ago i wonder
like what what's the advice i mean
the advice is be aware but but like what's that
process look like for people like i was going to
say like you and me adam which essentially means like you me
and pete which therefore means like everybody that's listening who has installed
all the cool things that and you probably use those things like mac fuse and
trip mode that you might not need anymore right um yeah like i like what's the
best way to do an audit of these things go ahead pete yeah
Clean my Mac.
Yeah. I get, yeah.
You'll go in and tell you, uh, apps that you haven't used in a long time.
If I recall, I don't, I haven't used that in a long time, that feature in a
long time, but I think it does that.
And I suppose you could AI your way into this and it will delete every app on
your computer. If you let it.
You can have it not do that, right? You'd have
it giving you a list but i mean you you need
to like somehow tell it
what you have like there's no i mean and i don't recommend running open claw
on your primary machine at all but that would be the way right is tell it hey
look at what's installed here and and give me a list and it could absolutely
do that like no problem whatsoever
I don't recommend that yet. Someday. Someday. But today's not someday. I'm not.
Here's doing it now. Bye, guys. Yeah.
Look, it's deleted Chrome. I'm leaving.
Here's how bad it is. I finally got that system preference panel to load up,
and it says the installed version is 3.82.
The latest version is 5.13. Ooh.
Yeah, see, that's a problem, right? How far back?
You said you're on 3. something, 3.82?
Yeah.
That was July of 2018 that that came out, Adam.
Yeah, I think I can remove this.
I think I'll be removing this.
Yeah. I doubt it's being used.
We did not know the term Apple Silicon when that particular version was installed, Adam.
Right on. So there is an applications tab on clean my Mac and it says,
take control of your applications, uninstall, update, or remove old application
leftovers. Yeah. You can scan it.
I don't know that it would find
a Mac fuse though, or trip, but maybe it might find a trip mode. Right.
But, but even still, like it doesn't know what I still use.
I mean, I, I think it knows when an app was most recently launched and that's handy.
I mean, trip mode for in Tannels case was being launched every day.
So looking in your login items, that's a good place to look, right?
Like, you know, there's, there's other places to kind of clean this up.
It's not, it's, it's not the simple, I don't think there's a simple answer.
So it says I hit scan. It says 53 unused applications.
So I guess it knows the last time it opened.
Right. Oh yeah. Yeah, I clicked on that, and it says, you know,
October 16th, 2018 was the last time I used Android file transfer.
Right. No, that makes sense. But, like, if you've got an app that's running
in the background, CleanMyMac's not going to find it, which would be the case
with, like, MacFuse or TripMode. Right, yeah.
Yeah. So it's not just consuming space. It's consuming other resources, too. Yeah. Yeah.
So check your login items and check your launch agents. um
lingon is my lingon is my favorite app for
that um so yeah lingon
lingon right why why am i not finding that there it is yeah lingon yeah from
uh i'll put it in the thing why am i not finding peter borg yeah okay great
now i've got a link to lingon it's the right yeah there's a
i know this is a rabbit hole yeah
Yeah i'm looking at how many things are in my login items and i'm like i don't
want that i don't want that
Right what
That oh my god
Yeah and and you're you're not seeing the launch agents right like that's a
whole different thing and lingon is going to help you with that
I see what the issue is though uh these aren't just login i'm looking at
just app background activity which is also in there
because it's under extension yes it's like okay now i know
why some of these things are running yes yeah um
but i see one immediately that i don't want running so yep it's a good audit
you that's a great audit yeah it's only difficult for me too because also in
here are a bunch of low-level things that say like from on a unidentified developer.
Yeah.
But they're like, one is PostFix, which I use for like email testing and stuff
like that. So like, I know I installed that at one point.
Yeah.
You might not know if you're not, you know, informed about, like,
if you homebrewed a bunch of stuff onto your system, there might be stuff running
that you did put in there, but you just don't remember.
Yeah, but they would, if something is running on your Mac,
and I know there's going to be people that say, well, but it could also be,
but I, you know, checking login items for your account and then launch agents and launch demons,
that would, that's going to get 99% of it.
It's not going to get the things that are running with cron in an old way um
you'd need to do something else for that but um but it's going to get that's
going to get all the things you've installed yeah for sure
Yeah i mean i guess the thing is just be careful because i was like looking
at it and i'm like oh why is that there you know i don't and then you need to
do some investigating on some of the things oh yeah
If you don't know
You're not like disabling something that oh yeah yeah, I did install that,
you know, years ago for that thing that I'm doing and relying on every day.
Every day. Yeah, that's right. Yeah.
So avoid unintentionally breaking something. I just don't assume,
like, I looked at one of them, like, unidentified developer,
like, oh, did I get hacked?
Like, what put in there? Like, how would I have something from an unidentified developer?
But it just means it wasn't, I'm assuming it's part of the, you know,
Mac system where it's not a signed application. but I install a lot of stuff
through like homebrew and so
yeah that's not going to go through apple's vetting and be signed you know
Right right so yeah just be careful yeah yes yeah don't get caught right like don't
Get caught like just oh I don't need that
I used to say I've
All been there
I used to say like google it you know and that's still I mean that's still valuable
but you could ask your LLM like okay what is this trip mode thing and why do
I have it installed on my Mac and it would,
it would probably give you a good, um,
You know, a good description of it.
So it'll get you going down the path.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah. It's better than starting from scratch with a random Google search.
Yeah. Yeah. This is a really good thing, especially for those of us that have,
which I think is probably most of us that have come to just use migration assistant
every time we get a new computer and don't nuke and pave. Right.
You know, you're going to wind up on your Intel on your, sorry,
on your Apple Silicon Mac.
With Fuse.
With Mac Fuse, which I guarantee you at least one of my Macs still has Mac Fuse
on it, like as you're saying this.
So where did you find it, by the way, Mac Fuse specifically, remind us?
It actually showed up because it has a system preference panel.
So it was just way at the bottom.
So I opened up system settings and the very last thing at the very,
very bottom under Backblaze is Fuse.
Wow.
Wow. All right. Well, there you go.
Because remember, you used to have those as system preference panels,
but those are gone now. You have to have an app, but they still let you link
to basically the app through the system preference panel.
Interesting. Fun stuff. All right. Well, there you go. Pete,
you got another interesting one from Will.
Someday we'll get out of Quick Tips. I don't think we will, but go ahead.
Oh, that's you, Adam. I'm sorry.
That's me. I'm up with Will. Yeah. Yeah, Will says, from episode 1130,
I was able to use the network quality test in Perplexity Pro,
say that five times real fast, to diagnose a network issue I was having.
I used the network quality dash V, verbose human readable command,
to test my connection after strange internet, intermittent, rather,
inability to get to sites and watch YouTube videos on all my devices.
Thinking it was just a fluke i went to bed
and tried again this morning same issues i remember hearing about
the test while listening to the episode yesterday so i tried it
out and got an error that and fed
that error into perplexity and which suggested some troubleshooting steps like
doing a ping uh it looks like to an apple website um i assume we'll have some
of this information in the show notes i'm not going to go through all the like
pseudo commands have you and then ran the test again.
Same issues. I fed that error result back into perplexity and it suggested using,
it suggested a DNS issue rather.
I changed my DNS from my router to my provider DNS to iCloud 1.1.1 for primary
and Google 8.8.8 for secondary and boom, magically everything was fixed.
Thank you for all you do helping me solve this geek challenge and not getting
caught. will yeah in apps smurfly um
Dns issues especially if you have just your local hosting provider or your internet
provider um i've i've been caught by those in the past for sure yeah
And and you you said iCloud the 1.1.1.1 is Cloudflare's dns oh did i say iCloud
you did but it's like it's totally fine but Cloudflare yeah we'll put those in the show notes
I think that's what i use though
Yeah i use i use Cloudflare as my primary and google is my secondary and that
has served me very very well yeah the local Especially like now that I'm on
this, you know, breeze line fiber, the fiber is great, but you know,
I mean, come on, their regional ISP, their DNS isn't going to be great. Like there's no way.
So our.
Are those are those encrypted i went to quad nine because those are encrypted dns.
Queries well the quad nine
is that's just four nines uh is if you were to just issue a dns query to quad
nine it's not encrypted you have to configure your devices that's it do encrypted
queries and that would be generally dns over https is how that works um and all i
Know i set that up a long.
Time All three of them that we mentioned support that.
You can do that.
Okay. Yeah. I don't know how to do encrypted DNS from your Mac specifically.
I've always set it up in my router. The DNS that's happening locally on my network
is not encrypted, and I'm okay with that.
But the DNS over HTTPS from your router to the rest of the world. Yeah.
So when actually that brings up a good clarification here.
When we're talking about changing DNS, certainly you can change it on your Mac,
but the best way to do it for your local home network is to make your router your max DNS.
So set your max DNS to your router's IP.
And that will normally happen as part of the auto address assignment with DHCP. Yeah.
But then you set your routers DNS to one of these that we've discussed,
the Cloudflare, the Google, and let it go from there. So...
I used to use, in the past, I used OpenDNS, but I stopped using them for Cloudflare.
Yeah, I used OpenDNS for a long time. I forgot about them.
They were nice because you could sort of specifically filter things from your
home network, which was...
A little helpful when you're raising kids.
Yes. I mean, unless you're raising nerds.
And now your kids are more capable of breaking that than you.
Correct. That is a hundred percent true. Yeah. Yeah.
But I realized my son was a better programmer than me long before he did.
And that wasn't a terrible time lapse, by the way, you know,
he, he thought for a long time that I had him beat with skills and there was
a period of time, of course, where I did.
And, and then that changed, um, very, very quickly.
So, yeah. But yeah. And I, you know, I don't know about you guys,
but I set these up just on my router.
Rather than, I mean, you can do it locally on a Mac-by-Mac basis, yeah.
Well, if you set it up on your Mac and you get to a hotel, you can find yourself
quickly not connected to the world because it's trying to use DNS that it can't,
get to the world i've i found myself jammed up more than once before i realized
quit messing with dns locally.
Yes and in and and to that
end when you get to a hotel i often find that i have to turn off tail scale
on my laptop or my phone yes until i go through yeah until i go through the
captive portal thing and then i can turn it back on yeah yeah and speaking of
which i i will I think we talked about it on the show,
the, the Unify travel router thing that I used.
I think, did we talk about that when I, when I used it at, at,
at NAMM? Cause I had a different one. I had the TP link one at CES.
The Unify one is like, it is basically the size of about three credit cards stacked together.
So yeah. Yeah. And automatically, if you have a Unify router at home,
you don't need one, but if you have a Unify router at home,
It can inherit your home SSID and password. So all your devices are just like, Hey, we're at home.
We're good. And we can connect, which is really nice. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
So I'll be using that at South by Southwest, but yeah, that unified travel router is a pretty good thing.
And it's cheap too, like inexpensive. I don't want to say it's,
it's cheap because it's built very well. In fact, it's 79 bucks.
So, yeah, I know. Yeah. it's and and even
though it's flat um it has
like an expandable thing if you if you happen to have an ethernet port in your
hotel room or if you want to ethernet into this it's got two ethernet ports
on it um so you can and two usbc ports it's it's actually pretty cool the way
it uh the way it kind of opens up to uh oh
That's the original macbook style
Yeah yeah exactly yeah right right yeah do you remember that
Had the little door for your ports it was like because it was so thin yeah
Like the pop-up headlights on your uh rx7 yeah.
No it's a it's so it's it's
Anyway it's cheap but not worth it no it's.
No no it's inexpensive you know there's cheap
And worth it there you go it's inexpensive.
Inexpensive and worth more than you will pay yeah yes so
Again, the only problem using a travel router in a hotel room is that every
device, usually in most hotels, every device is bandwidth limited.
Every device counts, but every device is bandwidth limited.
Meaning if you had connected your phone to the hotel Wi-Fi and your laptop to
the hotel Wi-Fi, they each get their own allotment bandwidth.
Yeah if if you connect your travel router it gets one allotment of bandwidth so just bear that in mind
Now you're gonna make me go down a rabbit hole a little bit
As if that's oh for the first time this episode yeah let's go down a rabbit hole
Here's my question to you like more and more lately i've just been using my
wi-fi hotspot especially when i'm traveling because i'm in a big city and I'm
getting 5G ultra wideband,
which is like almost always better than what I get with the hotel.
Yeah. So how much bandwidth do you have on your, on your connection?
Unlimited.
Oh, see, that's the difference between you and me. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. But, but that.
I pay a lot.
Right. Exactly. Well, but what I could do.
And you're talking bandwidth or, or data.
Yeah. Data, data a lot. Yeah.
We got 20 now, right?
I don't, you and you and me, not same. I have 15 gigs through mint.
That's what I pay for with mint. and then i also happen
to have for another six or eight months or something breeze line when i switched
to them gave me a year's worth of um a cell connection like i have another phone
number i have a right but tethering tethering with breeze line is they say unlimited
yeah but you know when you hit 25 or something it
You know they start yeah
So that actually that's a really good idea though i
hadn't like i even though i'm i
mean i'm saving money with mint by not going to their
unlimited plan right i pay 15 a month or whatever it is
but i could buy if i want better wi-fi
when i travel i mean you're already paying for
it adam and pete i could just choose to buy a an e-sim for the you know for
the trip and i mean i can use my breeze line thing now but you know in in lieu
of that i can just buy an e-sim for the trip it sucks to have to pay for wi-fi
when you're in a hotel but not if the hotel wi-fi sucks so right
Exactly and and just i feel like it's more secure i'm not going through their stuff you know
Yeah i
Don't know and i i don't travel as much as you guys do so probably if i travel
more i'd worry about this more in terms of like bandwidth and stuff but i i
mean i do have basically unlimited bandwidth there might be a cap on my tethering
but it's really high it's like i'm never gonna hit it
Yeah well
That's what i I was saying mine went from 10 to 20 gigs recently on Mint with
the unlimited plan, and you have to work to use 20 gigs.
You can do it yeah you know
you're right it like i should i i end
i look every month on mint to see how much i have left and
how much my family has left mainly so i can make an informed decision at
the end of the the mint year you know to buy the next plans
or whatever because they don't give you any history because they don't want
you to know uh they don't want you to be able to look historically
when you think about it so i just i do it i have a thing on my calendar
every month and i go in and i just log what's you know how much
is left and i just did it like our thing happens
like today or something so i just did it yesterday and we're
all on 15 gig plans and every one of us has at least eight gigs left on the
month yeah if not if not 10 you know so yeah yeah we use we generally use five
to seven gigs each in a month and yeah you know see
When i yeah Yeah. And I usually do really well, except when we do like a road trip or something.
And then that's when I really crunch it down.
Yeah. Yeah. Because if you're not the one driving, you're on your laptop doing
work or whatever and just killing yourself.
Yeah, for sure. But it's really nice to be able to do that.
And you can buy an e-SIM that's not that expensive if you want more than what you get.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. I'm curious. I mean, I, my guess is we've exhausted through the
options here, but I'm curious who everybody else uses when you travel.
Huh? Back to the day. I mean, I imagine if we had the tethering options that
we have now, imagine if we had those back when hotels were charging us 15 or 20 bucks a day for wifi.
Right. Like, yep. Pound sand, man. Later. Yeah.
All right. Where are we? Should we do some, I don't know. Questions? We can do questions.
Yeah, yeah. Do you want to do AI or what?
No, no. We've talked enough about AI. We will in another episode,
but unless there's something somebody really wants to get to.
But you guys, Rob has a question that kind of I also have for the two of you.
Uh rob writes adam for reasons
i am still a bit unsure of i ordered a vision pro
today we have a trip coming up with many painful
hours in the air ahead of us and i wanted a
bit of an escape to try them out and see if
they stick i remember you mentioning there was a game
you were playing uh on them with other people i can't
remember the name of it now do you still like it and recommend it any other
tips or tricks that i need to be aware of i ordered
an extra battery for it and also bought the spygen case
from amazon aside from gaming and movies do
you find that the apple vision pro is really a useful productivity tool
i'm hoping so as i admit building a realistic justification
for it is admittedly a big ask thank
you and i appreciate your insights and i know this
question was directed at adam from rob uh because i
don't think we've done an episode since or at least we haven't talked about
it yeah that pete also ordered one and has one so i'm curious for both from
either of you like what are you what was the game if you don't mind saying that again adam it's called
And i'm gonna probably pronounce it wrong it's called damio yep it's a tabletop
like miniatures style dungeons and dragons kind of like game
Yeah and
And I'm playing with Barry and George, a couple of friends,
And, uh, we love it. I mean, it's great.
Cause you get the presence thing, like, you know, you have a little avatar,
you can see the other person's hands sitting around the table.
Like, it's like, you're literally on a table and the, the voice presence stuff,
you know, you can tell like sometimes somebody will walk away to get coffee or something like that.
And you see that, you see them kind of walk away, but you also hear them,
you know, kind of fade out.
Oh yeah and then they come back and like it's
i mean it it's as close to like being
in the same room and probably playing a tabletop game and
i'm hoping more of this style of game comes out we've been looking for more
of them there's um one that i have that is just a card table with like decks
of cards and you like literally play cards like there's not there's not any
actual gameplay in it It's just like,
all right, shuffle a deck of cards. We got five people here.
Each person's going to get five. You know, we can play poker or whatever card
game you would want to play.
So what's interesting, Adam, is that when Pete got his Apple Vision Pro,
I bought Pete's MetaQuest 3S.
Because Lisa and Lucas have MetaQuests.
And Lisa was like, wait, you should get one of these. Like, it'd be really fun.
And now Dave wants his money back.
No, not at all. Oh, no. No, we've used it. We were playing golf the other night, mini golf.
Actually, we were playing bowling the other night, but mini golf's another one.
Oh, no, no. We played mini, I don't know, whatever. It's fun. And...
What I'm curious, what I was curious about is, does this DeMeo game exist for the quest? And it does.
And I wonder, can you have mixed, it's okay to mix religions on this?
I'm pretty sure you can play cross-platform.
Cross-platform, yeah.
We haven't done it yet. I don't know if it changes any of the dynamics or what
the experience is. Right. If there's different experiences for different players.
Um i will say also they came out with a demio version uh that we're now playing
that unfortunately they don't have for the
vision pro that's like a dungeons and dragons themed one i forget it's got a
specific different name and i'm blanking on it right now and so we're currently
playing that but i'm just playing on my mac i mean you can play it on virtual
display and And I tried doing that on the, you know, on the, so I had it on my Mac,
but I had my Vision Pro and, you know, you can do the ultra widescreen,
widescreen, blah, blah, blah.
And that's going to get into the productivity part of this question.
So, I mean, definitely for entertainment, they now have the YouTube,
a native YouTube app, finally, that we talked about, I think,
last time for the Vision Pro.
So that's great. So now you can
do all of the spatial video content that YouTube has on the vision pro.
So that has really expanded the usability of it.
Um, but outside entertainment and games, like productivity wise, um, um,
I tried doing it recently now that I got that.
So what changed for me productivity-wise, and I'm assuming he has the new one
with the dual strap, but I ordered myself one of the dual straps,
which was like $100, and that was kind of the game changer for me.
No pun intended. Because it felt comfortable.
No, it felt comfortable enough to wear for an extended period of time.
So I had originally tried doing the virtual display thing, But,
you know, like after about a couple hours, it was like, oh, this is like hurting
my neck. Yeah. Does that feel that great?
And so I'm like, well, let me try this again. And I did try working in it for a good part of a day.
I think I got about five, six hours in using just the virtual displays.
Yeah. And it was great. So, and as a matter of fact, I found out recently,
George, the guy I play the game with, he's been using it as his exclusive displays
with his Mac for like over a year, if not longer.
So he ditched his displays and just works in his Vision Pro.
It's nice using it, the virtual display.
Yeah. What do you, like, tell me about your, like, first level thoughts,
you know, first entry thoughts into this. like how is it working for you Pete
It works great I think if I set my space up for it yeah are you asking Pete I was asking
Pete but I'm just curious keep going yeah yeah yeah yeah keep
Going yeah I mean my problem with me with mine is I have my kind of displays
in front of me you know my two 4k yeah LG displays that I bought recently and
so they're kind of in the way what I'm like working in that environment I mean
Apple Vision Pro is smart enough to block that stuff out. But in certain scenarios,
I mean, you still can see and have access.
But I think if I took the displays away and had nothing in front of me,
I don't know that you would really tell too much of a difference between.
And then you get all the other advantages of you can have your widgets all around
your room that are locked and fixed in place.
You could have, you know, additional just native vision pro apps for,
you know, uh, for like a zoom and all that sort of stuff.
And the avatars, uh, the personas, personas, I think it's what Apple calls them.
Um, are now really, really good. Like they're, they're not uncanny Valley anymore.
They're like pretty close to like looking like you.
So how how are you thinking uh like how how is this working for you pete because
this is new to you right like it
Is newer to me uh a couple things i want to mention first off case
smartest option if you're going to get one of these things the coin you're going
to put into it get a case don't throw it in a backpack don't throw it in a suitcase
and hope that nothing happens to it case is the way to go um and then the other
thing i noticed it took me a little getting used to when it first came up that
this virtual keyboard comes up and i'm trying to tap with my index finger on the virtual keyboard.
And it took me, I don't know, a couple of days when I realized all I have to
do is look at a letter and pinch. I don't have to move my hands.
Anytime I look at a letter, I just pinch. And that's how you quickly type on
it without having to move your hands all over the place and look like you're
having, you know, some kind of a seizure if you're on an airplane, say.
And then you can freak out the flight attendants by, you know,
reaching out and grabbing the cup from them, even though you're wearing this thing.
It's like, oh yeah, you can, they can see them. And the other quick funny on
this was I asked my daughter, I says, well, you know, can you see my,
you know, supposedly you could do the eyes, but can you see my eyes? I'm like, oh, hold on.
And I moved the screen out of the way so she could see me. Well,
of course, she can't see the screen that I just moved out of the way.
It's like, oh, yeah, it's not there.
But yeah, once I realized I used.
I could use it as a virtual display with my laptop that, you know,
with, with the big displays, I can see why that would be kind of like counterproductive
or, you know, it's, yeah, redundant.
Yeah.
But, but with my laptop, it's really nice. I can have the display as big or
as small as I want, as close or as far as I want.
The comfort, I, mine came with the dual headband over the top and behind the.
Back of your head. Right, because you've got the new one, yeah.
Yeah. And boy, is that nice. It really is. I haven't got anything to compare
it against, but I have worn it for hours at a time on airplanes watching movies.
So I want to ask about this because with the Quest, I don't have the extra battery
or anything with it yet. And I say yet.
And I notice when I've been wearing it for like an hour, it's front heavy,
right? So I'm working to keep it balanced.
Lisa, on her, she has the Quest 3, not the 3S, but it's effectively the same,
at least as far as this is concerned.
She's got the headband with the extra battery, and she said,
obviously, that gives you more battery life.
But counterbalance, too. More importantly, it gives you that counterbalance.
And that's what you're finding, too, Adam, with that headband.
Yeah, well, remember, too, the dual band has weights in it.
In the back. That's what I mean. Yeah. It's got, it's got that counterbalance. Okay.
It's got the extra weights, which I think also make a huge difference over the
solo knit band, which didn't have those. Yeah.
So yeah, the, the, between the top strap, you can just basically the problem
with the vision pro with the solo band was it just would tend to sit down on
your cheeks a little bit. Okay.
And that would start to hurt after a while. So same kind of front heavy thing.
Yeah. And so those two things I think really solve the problem because it pulls
the weight, pulls your head back a little bit.
Right. And then the top strap just is able to lift it up enough.
I don't have to, I find I don't have to do a lot with the top strap,
but it's just pulling a little bit of the weight off the front of your nose
and the front. For sure. It's a huge difference.
Oh yeah. That's, that's my issue with the, with the quest with the three S2.
It's like, yeah, go ahead.
Adam, does that back band on the, on the single one, does that go down below
the, the, you know, the point of your skull where it.
Yeah, you can position it wherever you want. And I found actually with that
one, I liked it a little bit further up on my head because, again,
it would pull that weight up a little bit more, you know, rather than having it down.
Interesting.
Thank you, guys. Yeah, no, this is helpful. Yeah, it's good to know.
I know we didn't get to anything else, but, well, I mean, we actually,
we got to a lot of things. We, that whole email conversation that we had,
that's actually been sitting in the agenda for, I don't know,
two months, three months, something like that.
Agenda, schmagenda. That's what's sitting there.
Can I just, I want to address one thing Pete said about getting a case.
So I've been trying to think about, I've been wanting to get a case, right?
And a lot of them can tend to be pretty expensive. I mean, somewhere in the,
let's just call it 75 to 100 plus range for a, you know, a Vision Pro case.
Um, I was looking around for something cause I was going to travel and I'm like,
how am I going to travel with this thing?
I had been using the original box and I'm like, that's too big.
I don't want to like carry that around.
I wanted to fit it inside my carry on, you know, suitcase or whatever.
Looked around and I found my daughter had left a soft-sided cooler lunch pail oh
That was probably like 15 bucks from Walmart.
Yeah.
And everything fit in there perfectly. And that's what I've been using as my Vision Pro case.
Yeah. You just need something that's got like soft padding and is going to hold
it. Like, yeah, that makes sense.
Now that you say that, I'm thinking, okay, what do like musicians use things
like this all the time to bring their like weirdly configured pedal boards or whatever.
It's like this fragile thing that's a weird shape. And I'm the only one that has it this way.
So, and yet needs to be in a case that I can throw around, you know, when it's closed.
So I'm, I'm wondering if, if like one of those cases that, that has like those
modular foam pieces in it that you can sort of arrange however you,
you need for your, you know, stuff would be good. Yeah.
So this one is perfect. Cause it's, It's the exact size to fit the Vision Pro.
And then I use the original. In the original packaging, there's a cardboard
piece that covers the lens part of it. Okay.
And then goes around to the back of the band.
Yeah. So I'm still using that. And then in the circle that's in the middle,
that's where I put the power brick and the power case. And I just have that
kind of wrapped in a, you know, like a, not a towel, but like a cloth, a cleaning cloth.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, right.
Yeah. It just all fits in there nicely, and it's super compact,
a lot even smaller than some of the commercial cases.
Now, again, I don't think I'd carry it around alone in that case.
I then take that and put it, it fits nicely in my, like, carry-on suitcase,
and then I can pack other stuff around it.
Sure. But it provides enough protection in that scenario, because I have a hard-sided,
you know, like, travel case.
I don't know that I'd carry it around. And then, you know, when I get to the
airport, I can just take that out and then kind of carry it on to a plane when
I'm traveling. or whatever.
Huh so there dave i shared a link with you because when i tried to share my
screen it said something about removing other media and all that but in the
back room i shared a link my case was 54 specifically designed for the the vision pro okay and um,
i i love it uh and it comes with a little extra thing that that covers the lenses
on the inside of the thing as well.
So the USB metal doesn't scratch your lens.
Yeah, that's exactly what I'm using, that little cardboard insert that came
with the original packaging for the exact same reason.
Smart. All right, well, we'll put a link to that in the show notes,
because that's what we do. What's the brand? Syntec.
Syntec hard carrying case for Apple Vision Pro, M5, M2, and accessories.
Yeah, of course.
I was considering the Belkin one that I think Apple sells on their site,
which I think is about 80 bucks.
I can't remember. It wasn't super expensive. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I would recommend, yeah, throw an AirTag in that case, in that little mesh pocket.
Oh, that's a good idea.
In case.
Your Vision Pro doesn't have a built-in like Find My thing?
It should. It might, but...
Well, you'd know if it shows up in items in your Find My app.
That's true. You know, I've never looked for it in there, but yeah.
All right. we uh it's time
i wouldn't want to lose it's time it's time this is
good though like it's like i'm glad that that
we revisited this that's great thanks for
hanging out everybody thanks for all your questions and tips and the cool stuff
found we didn't yet get to but we will we're gonna have to do a show next week
guys yeah oh boy uh make sure to sign up at matt geekup.com slash giveaway to
win one of the three copies of SoundSource that we are doing with Rogue Amoeba this month.
Thanks to Cashfly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you.
Don't forget about Adam's other podcast, the debut film podcast, Pete's other show.
So there I was my other shows, business brain and gig gab.
And thanks to everybody who sent in reviews. We have reviews to read.
We just didn't get to that, but we'll do that next time. It's all there.
Stuff's like, like we said, stuff stays in the agenda until it either becomes
irrelevant or it winds up being completely relevant. So there you go.
Hey, can I take a moment of personal privilege? the oldest medal of honor winner
in history 100 years old we have him on our show this week so there i was amazing.
Oh go check it out yeah so there i was.us yeah cool thanks folks don't get caught
and uh we'll see you next week that's amazing that's really cool
wow amazing stuff i love it podcasting's fun all right yeah later
This transcript was automatically generated by the podcast creator and may contain errors. Aggregated via the PodcastIndex API.
