It's time for Mac Geek Cab and listener Dave C brings us our quick tip of the week.
He says, on my lazy mornings, I want to keep my eyes closed,
but still know what time it is.
One of my favorite solutions for this is to put two fingers on my Apple Watch.
And then, like magic, the S lady announces the time.
It's a nice little trick to keep the eyes closed longer.
We will talk about what happens if this doesn't work for you.
A little bit later in the episode because it
didn't work for me at first but here today more
quick tips like this plus your questions answered on mac geek gab 11 32 for
monday march 9th national banana cream pie day 20 26 oh that's the wrong theme
song it's still 20 26 but this is the right theme.
Greetings, folks, and welcome to MacGeekCab. You're right. This is not Business Brain.
It is MacGeekCab, and that's why we played the right theme song,
the show where we share quick tips like that.
We share cool stuff found. We share your questions.
We answer your questions. We do our level best to walk all of us down the troubleshooting
process such that every time we get together, we each learn at least five new things.
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So we'll talk more about all of those in the episode here for now here in Durham,
New Hampshire on national banana cream pie day. I'm Dave Hamilton.
And here in South Dakota, I'm Adam Christensen.
And here in the snow globe that is in Newmarket, New Hampshire,
it's Pilot Pete. Good to be back with you guys.
Pilot Pete, that's the first time you've said you're new town on the show.
I wasn't sure if you were intentionally not sharing that you had moved from
the other place to that one.
So, yeah, there you go. And now I've shined a huge light on it. I guess I kind of was.
But it doesn't matter. Yeah. Spotlight.
In case you didn't dox yourself enough.
In case you didn't. Yeah, that's right. I did want to share one thing.
Well, two things. Make sure to sign up for the giveaway, macgeekup.com slash
giveaway to win one of three copies of Rogamiba's sound source.
But regarding that opening quick tip, it did not.
I bet I get it.
What's that?
I bet I guessed it.
It did not work for me the first time I tried it.
Was your watch on silent?
Yes. Well, if you go into your settings on your on your watch,
like the settings app on the watch and into the clock settings,
there is a setting for speak time and you can turn that on. But it was on for
me and it still wasn't working.
If the watch there is a toggle in there for following silent mode or always
speak in clock settings.
And so if you set it to always speak
even when your watch is in silent mode which mine is 100% of the time it will
still speak the time with two fingers on the watch but one must remember that
this will happen in movie theaters if you turn on always speak but you know
like otherwise it will follow the silent mode settings and not do it when your watch is in silent mode.
Am I wrong in remembering that that feature if you're using the Mickey Mouse face is Mickey Mouse
Oh, I don't know that you're wrong. I don't know that you're right.
My recollection is Mickey Mouse, yeah. Speaks it in this voice.
Yep. Huh.
Yeah.
Because that was part of the original Mickey Mouse watches, I think.
They had that feature on the physical watch, so it was replicated when Apple
came out with that watch face, I'm pretty sure.
That makes sense. And now I'm reminded of the movie Bad Medicine,
where the chancellor of the med school somewhere in South America says,
we are not the Mickey Mice!
So, anyway. Because somebody said, oh, is this Mickey Mouse?
I think it was Steve Guttenberg who said it was a Mickey Mouse school.
And he said, we are not the Mickey Mice. We will have weekly finals.
Or something like that. I don't know.
We've been quoting movies all morning, so you're in for it.
Can't stop ourselves.
No, no, no. But we also can't stop ourselves from sharing quick tips unless
there's anything else you guys want to do before we get back into it.
I'm going to share one right now because Todd wrote in and he says,
iOS changed the behavior of screenshots.
He said, I liked having a screenshot automatically saved if I did nothing after taking it.
Default in iOS 26 no longer does this.
To get back to that behavior, take screenshot and it auto saves to photos
Turn off the new full screen preview behavior in screen capture settings.
You go to settings, general, screen capture, toggle off full screen previews.
And an additional quick tip, I often take a screenshot of a message, email, etc.
To remind me to do something. For this to work, you have to check your photos
album during the day, which I have worked into my routine. Cheers, Todd.
That's actually not a bad way to do it. I put things in photos all the time,
and then I was looking the other day.
I've got hundreds of screenshots I need to take out of there.
Fortunately, there's a filter for that.
Yeah, you're right. But I think that's why I welcomed this change.
And my guess is there was a majority or vocal minority, which is why the behavior changed.
But that whole new interface where you can copy and delete and do the whole
thing, I like that full screen preview interface. not just for the preview but
for the for the functionality that's there so i can choose what happens.
Well sure and then if when
you taught me at ces that with continuity or however it is that i can copy something
on my phone and paste it to my mac i i then put in i've noticed take a screenshot
and you can go copy and delete yeah so i don't have to save it but i can get it over to
uh yeah to my mac makes it nice for working with with uh artificial intelligence
so i can give it a screenshot go hey this is what i'm looking at yeah oh okay i got you so
I'm pretty sure if you just like swipe down on it or swipe it away it just then
saves it like you can quickly yes
If you swipe it away, if you take a screenshot here, I throw,
let me throw my phone away. Interesting.
But yeah, if you, um, yeah, no, I don't think, I know there's a moment where
you get that Adam sometimes, but no case.
Yeah. I don't like, I, I, mine just comes up with the full screen preview.
Like there's no moment there.
If I turn that off, hang on. If I turn it off, then, yeah.
So this is a new, I don't think this is new for iOS 26. I think this might be
like a 26 point something update because I feel like this is different, but I could be wrong.
But with full screen previews off, Todd is right, of course,
that you get the old style where it goes down in the left.
And then if you tap it, it brings up the preview, at which point you can do
all the things. But otherwise, it just waits and then saves.
Or like you said, Adam, you can swipe it away.
What happens if you just hit the close button?
X, you mean? Yeah. I think X deletes it.
Yeah, I don't even think it saves it to the clipboard.
No, it's good. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah. Yep.
That's a bummer. I swear to gosh, before 26, I thought you could just swipe it away.
You can if it's in the not full screen previews mode.
Yeah. Let me test that. Let me make sure I'm not lying to everybody.
So I swiped it away. Now let me go into photos. And there it is.
Yes. So you are correct about that, Adam.
If you turn off the full screen previews, if you have it in a mode where you
can see that little thumbnail, then you can either tap the thumbnail to bring
up the full screen preview or swipe it away.
Well, isn't that special?
Buggers.
Yep.
I'm going to have to change that then.
Yeah. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. All right. Shall we move on to the next quick tip here?
Sure. I got Gary here. And Gary says, for some unknown reason,
when I got to class recently, my iPhone 17 Pro Max had been zoomed.
And I'm assuming way, way in. because he says, I was unable to get it to do anything.
I failed the up, down, volume, volume, slide button, my bad.
I drove to the Apple store, and the fellow there solved it in less than 10 seconds.
Three-finger tap, set it back to default. Wow, who knew?
So three-finger triple tap to unzoom your iPhone screen.
Three finger triple tap.
That's correct. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that's the accessibility shortcut for that. Yeah, that's good.
Because that's just intuitive.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, presumably you'd be able to pinch back out, but I guess he got
to a point where he was so far zoomed in that it just wasn't doing anything.
I don't know that you can pinch out in that mode. And of course,
I can't get it into that mode to do this.
Oh, this is the accessibility zoom.
Correct. sorry.
Not regular zoom this is accessibility zoom yeah i think three finger toggles
it on and off if you if you have is that and that settings on by default i guess or maybe maybe
Not see uh drag three fingers to move around the screen double tap three fingers
to drag and drag to change the zoom yeah so there's it's a whole thing oh yeah look at that doesn't.
Seem to be on by default for me
Yeah i don't think it's on by default and accessibility so he must have turned it on at some point
I i think it's a double tap of three fingers not a triple tap of three fingers
because that it says yeah it says double tap three fingers to zoom if zoom is
on but if it's not you have.
To have it on
First yeah yeah but then a double tap um.
Mine is not, so I'm not going to have to make a trip to the Apple store.
Good.
My first recollection of having to do that, though, was on the iPhone 8,
when my phone froze up, and I couldn't figure it wouldn't do anything.
And I walked into the Apple store, hit power up, power down,
or volume up, volume down, and the power button, and it rebooted.
So the other thing to remember here, when you're in Zoom mode,
it's all about three fingers, right?
Right, so if you want to drag around, perhaps to get back to the zoom controls,
you drag with three fingers, and that's the thing.
Otherwise, your two fingers are just like a normal multi-touch.
You're just happening to do it on a zoomed screen.
You're not impacting the zoom. It's the three fingers that impacts the zoom.
So that's the important part to remember.
Yeah, keep in mind that zoom has to be on first. so
you'd have to go into accessibility zoom and toggle it on um for any of this
stuff to work yeah um another uh thing you can do that would be handy is add
zoom to the there's a accessibility like menu right isn't there like a menu shortcut yeah it's
Called the accessibility shortcut i think is is what we call that.
Yes and it's like you can toggle on excessive accessibility like menu yeah i
can't remember it's like triple tap on the home button you triple
Click the side button side for the accessibility menu yeah.
So another thing you could do is add zoom to that list and then you can toggle
it on off on and off from there and
How do we get to that list adam he asks.
It's in settings i would assume accessibility it
Is it's at the bottom.
The very very bottom
And it's called, like you said, Accessibility Shortcut.
Yeah, this is an interesting thing to, like, looking through this list.
Because there's things you might want to be able to do.
Oh, I have the magnifier on there. Because sometimes I'm, you know,
very small text on a menu in a dark restaurant.
Or trying to get, like, legal text on a label for medication or something like that.
Oh, yeah, for sure. I believe I have multiple things selected here.
So the accessibility shortcut for me brings up a menu. But I believe if you've
only got one thing selected here, it just becomes like you don't get an option
to choose from the one thing. It just does the one thing.
So if you wanted the side button triple click to be, say, the magnifying glass,
you would just turn only that on in this accessibility shortcut menu.
And then it just becomes the magnifier yeah huh cool yeah i don't need most
of these things on like i don't i don't care about.
That i mean i have a few in there that i rarely use but i mean they're there
if i ever need them and i hardly ever use that feature but occasionally like
i said i'll be like oh i need a magnifier or i need what else is in line let
me see what else is in line i
Want to i want to mess with music haptics and see what.
That does oh i have uh he my heat the hearing devices stuff on so i can do that
with my airpods you know toggle the hearing stuff
Yes oh yeah yeah yep.
Those are magic little devices they
Sure are yeah yeah oh.
And live speech is in there i haven't played that in a while that's the one
where you can point your phone phone at something and it'll say oh that's a
dog or that's a what have you yeah stuff like that magnifier yeah
All right cool.
All right fun moving on i've got one i'd like to share that also is an iphone
type thing. And I just discovered this the other day.
If you've ever had to move more than one app icon around on your screen,
it starts being a little tedious when you have to do it over and over and over.
Well, you can rearrange your home screen one icon at a time or all at once.
So you long press on an app until they start to jiggle and begin moving one app slightly.
And then while you're holding it with one finger
use another finger to tap other apps each
other app that you tap will stack underneath the app
that you're already holding down and you can move all of them
anywhere you want you can put them all in a folder you can move
them to another screen or if you've got room on
the same screen you can even move them down it doesn't all
snap to the top grid like it used to so huh that was really cool I never never
knew you could move more than one icon at once look at that in that slick slicker
Than a mouse's ear.
Yeah FYI
You could do the same trick in the files app
Oh really right on oh.
If you like to drag and drop in the files app on the iphone which is not always
a fun experience but you can't
No but at least this makes it slightly you know less unfun huh.
I find it much easier to just do to do the select and then you know tap copy
or move and then you know copy and then go to where you want and then do the move or yeah
Yeah yeah you know.
If you like drag and drop on a touch device which isn't always the funnest thing
to do you can't I mean because you got to do the spring loaded folder thing you know and like
We should consider like talking about this on a podcast or something so that
everybody could hear these tips.
And then if they had their own, yeah, if they had their own,
they could send them the feedback at MacGeekGab.com.
Oh, if we started a podcast called MacGeekGab, we could set up an email address
called feedback at MacGeekGab.com for people to do exactly that.
You guys want to start a podcast so people can email us with tips at feedback at MacGeekGab.com?
You know what else we could do? I do. And you know what else we could do, Adam,
is we could go and dig into the dusty, dusty folders and find the code repository
for the old Mac GeekGab app.
And we could update that so that it has the ability for you to not only listen
to the podcast in the app, but send in your feedback right there in the app.
And then we know what you're listening to when you send it in.
And we could do other things to like completely revamp the search.
So when you want to search for something that was in a recent episode or an
episode that's not so recent, you just go into the Mac Geek app iOS app,
which is freely available. it would be freely available in this future word
will be created the podcast and then oh.
There you are living in linear
Time that's right and uh and you could just do that because it's completely
revamped now which is to say that uh the mac geek new ios app has actually been
revamped and is now out in the app store with great collaboration with claude
code over the last week would.
It take eight eight minutes of review
Uh yeah it was it was in app review for 11 minutes which I love yeah yeah yeah
I mean it took about a day from when I submitted it for them to review it but
I got the notification that was in review and I'm like well here comes the rejection
and then 11 minutes later it was like you're good like amazing but yeah yes Adam.
Can I get that in the App Store on all my favorite devices, Apple devices?
You can get that in the App Store on all of your favorite devices. Yes. Yes, exactly.
Yeah. Yeah. And the nice part is now we have a great workflow for continuing
to update the app and all that. So please send in your feature requests.
The cool part about having an app for the podcast is that unlike generic,
and there are great generic podcast apps.
I mean, I love several of them. Overcast is one of my favorites.
But they have to be generic, right? They can't do things that are specific to the show.
So things like search or sending in feedback or notifications when we go live,
like those are the things that we can do in the app that enhance the experience
for this show specifically.
And that's the mindset that we're going into this sort of new world here where
we can revamp this thing and iterate pretty quickly is what features would make
sense for with that in mind.
And so, you know, send in whatever you want, but like, feel free to think out of the box, right?
Like what would be specific to Mac Geek Cab that wouldn't make sense necessarily
in a generic podcast app. So.
Are you doing apps for the other two shows you do?
You know, it's funny. Lisa asked me that question last night and I was like, you know, not yet.
Yeah, but I didn't call you dear.
No, not yet. No, I mean, the Mac Geek app has existed for a very long time.
Corey Imdick made the app for us years and years ago.
And it just, you know, kind of ran out of time to keep updating it and keep it up to date.
It would do things every few years or whatever. and i say it was 10 years
old it really wasn't i think the last update was maybe four years ago which is
still a very long time in the grand scheme
computer speak yeah yeah but um but
i did it with cloud code mainly a little
bit google anti-gravity but um but cloud
code did the the heavy lifting i mean i just pointed it at the repo
and said okay get it up to speed where
in its current form it would be accepted by app
store review because the old repo if i were to do even one
tiny update to it to submit they'd be like no you're using
old frameworks you're no no no no no right so um
first thing was to get it up to snuff and that it asked
me some questions and then it took i don't know maybe 20
30 minutes to to go through and and kind
of fix all that and and then i then i
was like off to the races it was like all right let's start iterating so i really worked
on the episode screen um and that took a lot of human collaboration with it
because i i i said to myself i wasn't going to write a single line of code and
i stayed with that kind of um all.
Right one line
It was being stupid it was like like it
wouldn't set the row height it was setting like it
wouldn't set a minimum row height on the episode list so the images which
i added new which look cool which look great uh we're getting cut off and i'm
like just here's a screenshot dude and finally i was like if you were to change
line 274 this would be fixed and so i technically didn't write the code but you know um.
But then it has dark mode support, which happened truly accidentally.
Somebody sent in, I was beta testing it with some people in our Discord,
and somebody sent in a screenshot.
And I was like, why does yours look different than mine? I was like,
ah, you're in dark mode, and the app didn't support dark mode.
So I told it, on any screen, don't react to dark mode. Just display it like
it's not in dark mode, and it should be fine.
And it crunched for a little while, and it came back, and I ran the test build,
and it was like, okay, well, now you just added dark mode support throughout the app.
Like oh sure thanks okay amazing sounds
good so happy accidents
it was a beautiful accident it was like yeah it's great it's like
oh i love that just didn't think we were going to do that for the initial
build so okay cool so anyway and the search is brand new like it was being it
was doing things with the search that to get the index built years ago that
were necessary years ago but now are not necessary and so we made it way more
efficient and way more complete so which is cool.
Oh i have to ask how how does it do the search where is all that data is it
just the show notes is that the is that what it's
Searching what it used to do was it was looking it was reading every it was
reading that the the initial.
Uh bytes of x number of bytes of
every mp3 and pulling the chapters out
of that and thankfully search was mildly broken
it in the new app and so i dug into
like why is it broken it was like well i don't know i'm looking at
the beginning like whoa whoa whoa why are we doing it
that way i'm like you already have the rss feed ingested
completely which has everything you don't
need any of that and it was like hang on oh dude
you know and then it was off to the races and i was like okay yeah yeah
yeah so um it's interesting you
know with the ai assisted coding it's like it makes some
assumptions about things and sometimes it
will it will kind of see the forest from the
trees and propose a completely different solution but
more often than not it sticks with whatever
paradigm either you've given it or that
it's given its past self has given itself right the
ai itself and sometimes you just have to
ask the like whoa wait i have a better
way of engineering this can can
you do the grunt work of implementing that and it's like oh my gosh that's so
much better it's like right um so that that's that's where like i i as i've
been going through this project and some other things that we've been doing
using a lot more of like cloud code and.
Anti-gravity and, uh, and that sort of thing.
I've realized that I'm like the perfect candidate for using this stuff because I know how to program.
I know how to think about engineering a project with the programmer who's going
to do it in mind, even if that programmer is not me. Right.
But I know how to think about that stuff, which is a double-edged sword.
Cause I won't ask for things that I believe are impossible.
And then there's benefit to asking a programmer for something that's impossible, right?
But still, with the AI, you can't do that yet. You can't ask it.
It will believe you that it's possible.
And sometimes it truly is not, right? But I have no emotional resistance to
not being the one writing the code.
And and i know a lot of like you know
career programmers and i completely understand why you have an
emotional resistance to the thing that's like put a roof over your head you know
not being the thing putting a roof over your head but if you if you look at
it differently and you say wait no my skill as a programmer is still extremely
valid and valuable here i just don't have to do all the the grunt work anymore you.
Don't have to put in every semicolon that
Is race and that's when the whole world opens up yeah yeah.
Yeah i mean to that end though p you do kind of have to
you have to be the code reviewer and you have to know what you're looking
at and you have to you know so um to
your point dave i you know what i found is you have to be basically you have
to really define for it the technical specification and you have to have the
language to be able to do that and be like this is what if you're solving a
problem okay this is what the current problem is this is how i want you to solve
it here's all the details of what i want you to do
and then kind of let it go from there and then you can kind of
peer code review what it's doing and go yeah you could either make those physical
changes like you said yourself or you could be like no like right here on this
line you're doing something really weird this is what you're doing weird i want
you to do it differently yes
And less weird less weird.
I'm being vague about it but you know it's like
no the number of times i've seen it's like hey you're doing you know in this
section that function is really inefficient i need you to go back and look at
that and yes i want you to recode it in this way this very specific way to optimize
it and it's like oh okay and
Sometimes most of my experience like again i set a parameter for myself going
into this which which was that i'm not going to write a line of code and that
was so that i wasn't hesitating to start because there's so much about how ios
apps are written that I don't have experience with.
So I just had to give myself like the mandate, AKA permission to be able to
do this without needing to write any code. And...
So, like, it would have been faster on that one thing once I saw that,
you know, two iterations had gone by and it was like not getting it.
It would have been way faster for me to go in and rewrite it and then ask its
opinion on how I wrote it.
Like, is there a better way to do this that still solves the problem?
Right. But that collaboration, it would have been faster.
It probably would have saved me, I don't know, an hour of, you know,
trying to beat the AI into submission.
Yeah, I think I think you hit the nail on the head. It's it's a collaborative process.
It's not a, you know, you're going to be much more effective and write much
better code if you're collaborating with the AI and not just letting it do its thing.
Blindly. Yeah, exactly. I mean, there's some stuff that it's going to write
blindly, especially like the whole conversion from, you know,
where it was to the new frameworks and all that.
Like I was not going my code review on that was I compiled it and ran it on my iPhone.
Like that was it. But I also know that we're going, it's mostly objective C right now.
Cause that's when the app was written and it's like, okay, let's get it out.
It, it, it like the, in, when you put it in plan mode, that Claude code and
the other ones have plan mode too.
I just happened to use Claude, but in plan mode, it came up.
It was like, okay, there's a three phase thing.
And somewhere in phase two or three, I can't remember. we're converting this to Swift.
I was going to say. And again, that's going to be another one of those things
where I am not going to review every line of code.
You know, sorry, if we're getting way off on a tangent, then maybe this is too technical for people.
It's about our app. It's okay, Adam.
I did this with...
Our other app that we're working on, which is a few versions back in the framework
that we're on, I just asked Claude to do a full analysis of what it would take
to convert it and get it up to the latest version.
And that was a real effective thought process. And it mapped out,
all right, here's all the things I see.
Here's where you're going to have problems. And this was something I would have to do in the past.
I'd have to go through every readme for every version between the version we
were on and the version we're trying to get to
and look for all the gotchas and then review the code and look for,
okay, where did I use that deprecated function or that piece of code that's
going to need to be changed because they changed how that's done and it just laid out everything
and there's a more modern UX framework that I should be using,
but it's like, if you're going to do that, you're going to create a lot more
work for yourself, so you're probably better off just sticking with what you have now.
Here's how you can convert it and then address that other thing later.
You're going to want to change that, but today is not the day if all you're
looking to do is get from version A to version C.
Yeah, phases. Yeah, for sure.
And it mapped out a whole plan, and it's like, do you want me to make a plan
in a reading? And I was like, yeah, do that. It's like, oh, this is perfect.
Now I have, again, it was like almost writing the functional spec, technical specs for me.
But it's collaborating with you on that. But it takes time.
I mean, for the Mac Geek app, just to get it to where it is,
I mean, I probably put 10 or 15 hours in.
Now, I mean, that's a not insignificant amount of time, but it's also way less
time than it would have taken if I had to do this on my own or even if someone
who knew what they were doing had to do this on their own. Yeah.
All right should we get back on quick packing please yeah
yeah let's do some more quick please yeah welcome to
mac developer gab yeah um gene
has what for us this is live text made better
i like mac os live text feature especially in photos where it works automatically
behind the scenes to scan text on photos but on the screen it is clunky it requires
hover to discover to see if the on-screen image is discoverable as text.
It can be slow to notice text.
Some text is never discovered and it completely fails when dealing with two-column text.
I came across a way to use live text in a recent Tidbits forum post that overcomes
all of these shortcomings.
Write a shortcut that is implemented as a quick action to assign a keyboard shortcut.
He did Shift-Command-6 and it works great. and then he goes into some of the
details of the shortcut actions, which I'm sure we'll have in the show notes at maccast.com.
But essentially, you know, touch the keyboard shortcut, select any image on
the screen, and then you can paste the OCRed text.
So it's going to take a screenshot, extract the text from the screenshot,
combine the text and image with new lines,
Combine the or copy the combined text to the clipboard, and then you can set
that with a quick action in the keyboard shortcut.
It'll do all that fancy stuff for you.
One correction.
What'd I miss?
Probably not going to be at MacGast.com. Just saying.
Oh, what did I say? Yeah.
Show notes on that GeekGab.com. Sorry, old brain.
Muscle memory, brother.
GeekGab.com is where you'll find the show notes for this show.
You're not going to find much at MacGast.com except a bunch of old episodes,
which you're more than welcome to listen to, but...
Yeah, probably the show notes at macgeekab.com slash show notes is going to
be a lot more effective for you here.
Did you just make up a URL that I have to now deal with?
Did I do that too?
I think you might have. I don't know.
Is it not macgeekab.com slash show notes?
No, it's macgeekab.com slash whatever episode number is what gets you to the
show notes. I don't think there's a slash show notes.
That's where I always go. Don't be right into the show notes.
That brings you to the live agenda for the show that we are actively recording,
which you're welcome to look at. That's part of the thing.
Just please don't change anything while we're doing it.
I mean, we've left it. That is open, and it has been for anyone to edit.
I mean, there is an edit history and an undo and all that stuff,
which has saved us a few times. but no one's ever maliciously like done anything uh that i know of.
Now you say that
Yeah to embed in the show notes well but what's really nice
is sometimes you know we'll mention something and one
of you who's listening live will go in and put it in the
live you know put a link in or some additional information that then everybody
in the community gets to benefit from so uh until until we have too high of
a frequency of like bad actor incidents and so far that frequency is zero So
if you, if you want to make your name known as the first one,
I suppose, you know, have at it, but pick me.
Yeah.
My correction will be go to Mac geek app.com.
Find the episode you're looking for and you can find the show notes there or
even better yet, download the new app and then you can get it right from there.
That's true. It's all right there.
Yeah. Yeah.
The updated app, yeah, it's not new, but it is revamped.
I already have ideas about it.
In fact, I was making some changes this morning. It was like, okay, cool.
We can now put images in the notifications, which is something I've wanted for a really long time.
Oh, and it was really actually funny.
One anecdote, and then we'll return to the quick tips.
Corey, who wrote the original app, downloaded the new thing when I pushed it
out for the beta testers.
And immediately sent in a bug report that it crashed. It turns out it was when
I dug into that, again, I say I, you know, with my assistant,
we found that it was a longstanding bug that happened with the iCloud syncing of played episodes.
So it's like, that's funny. You found your own bug. But there we are. So it's fixed.
Nice. Yeah.
All right. Moving on.
All right. Well, I've got one. I know other people out there have tried to take
a picture of a document so that they could then turn it into a PDF or something,
and you're always messing with the keystone.
And fortunately, there's editing controls in there, so you can kind of fix that.
But it turns out there's a setting now in camera.
If you go to settings, camera, level, and toggle, turn on the level.
When you hold your phone horizontally face down over
a document you'll get a visual you'll get two little plus
signs one white and one yellow and when you line
them up it turns yellow and you have
yellow crosshairs and your phone is perfectly level now
your document may not be so that could be a problem but assuming your documents
level that tells you your phone is level everyone knows if you've got the grid
on you can you have that one line telling you whether your phone is level but
that's a way to get it nice and level over a document to not have to mess with Keystone quite so much.
I've always had the level on, I've used it for, it also functions when you're
taking pictures of not documents, right?
But I never even thought to use it for, when like scanning documents or whatever.
That's interesting. Okay.
Well, I guess it's not on in the scanner.
Like if you're in the files app and using the scan this to PDF function,
like that's a different interface um which does its own leveling and.
It's not its own it's not the camera this is the camera this
Is just the camera app fair right yeah good point yep like that yeah cool cool.
Um, I have been having a problem recently where I will join a zoom call and
thankfully one of the guys, uh, Jeff on our team at backbeat is really good
at telling me when my volume is like noticeably low.
And I have zoom set not to adjust the volume of my microphone in the office
because I have things dialed in and it's all fine.
But sometimes I don't use zoom for meetings. I wind up on like Google Meet or, you know, whatever.
And that engine seems to think it's fine to adjust my level during the call, which it is.
But my wish is that anything that adjusts my level for a call puts it back where
it found it after the call is over. But they don't.
So I started actually created a couple of scripts. I created one keyboard maestro
macro that every time I launch Zoom, it sets my input volume to 100 so that that was there.
And I thought, well, but like what if like Zoom was already running and now
like, you know, I started overthinking it because hi, I'm Dave.
And I found with a little bit of searching that there is a setting in Chrome
that you can set. I always wind up using Chrome for my Google Meets or whatever
those different meetings are.
And it's buried in the settings. And the setting is allow WebRTC to adjust the input volume.
And you can turn that off. And then...
It doesn't turn, it doesn't adjust your input volume anymore.
You can adjust it, but it can't.
So that's my, that's my little tip. You just go into the settings and search
for, I just searched for WebRTC and then the setting popped right up.
So it, that it's, it's already saved things.
I'm well aware because it's got to be just, you know, it sucks to get to the
end of a call and have somebody tell you, hey, by the way, you,
you know, your level was like super, super different from everybody else's.
It's like okay yeah thanks much appreciated,
Anyway, what else we got?
Well, let's, there we go.
We have another quick tip from Joe who says,
guys, I was amused to hear the discussion about accessing user manuals because
I had recommended what I believe is the most effective tool for this purpose,
Notebook LM, and you had actually discussed it on episode 1071.
Joe, we have the memory of a goldfish, just so we're clear on this.
The Notebook LM method eliminates the need to physically read the manual.
You simply pose your question, whether it's about a setup or troubleshooting,
and Notebook LM provides you with the answer along with the link to the relevant
page in your user manual.
After listening to this week's show, I use Notebook LM to search iFixit.com
for supplementary information about my appliances and then uploaded the results to my notebook.
So thanks for the tip. Cheers, Joe.
Did you say that was 11 0 7 10
71 10 71 yeah
Even better yeah so pete that was over a year ago so i think it's fair to revisit
things and i wouldn't call that memory of a goldfish that was 60 episodes ago that's
A long time ago yeah yeah.
But i have the memory of a goldfish
That's why we have these devices but it yeah but.
I have the memory of a goldfish
But it brings up,
a you know we talked about okay well you just feed them into your generic llm of choice and
let it do the work and it can but these purpose-built uh um engines that leverage
an llm on the back end to do the heavy lifting but the purpose-built front end
like notebook lm is makes a big difference like and we've talked about that
on the show before uh so yeah.
You're Narrowing its search field to, I know the answer's in here.
Well, but you're narrowing the way it's searching, right?
It's notebook. LLM is not a generic LLM.
So it can be very specific and tailored to the types of things that you're going to put in there.
And like, that's, that's where the benefits come from. I, to me.
Yeah.
Yep.
Yeah. So now that's a web app, as I recall.
Yeah. It's Google's.
Yeah. Yeah. So I need to, I need to, I have not implemented that.
I need to implement that because I've got a bunch of manuals for appliances
and everything else that would be so nice.
So like how to load my nail gun and not shoot myself in the finger.
Read that first. Read that first.
Yeah, because it's hard to type with your fingernail to the wall.
Yeah.
Yeah. Just saying.
Well, Tony has one more related to this manual follow-up and says,
I utilize the Books app to organize my various manuals.
I established a category specifically for manuals and populated accordingly.
This approach proves to be both convenient and effective in maintaining a well-structured
collection. Because you can throw PDFs right into the Books app and then manage stuff there.
I think I've even done that with some of my manuals also.
Smart.
I have to go back and look.
It yeah and then it's synced too right yeah.
Exactly it's synced to all your devices
And yeah smart i like that that's good,
Fun stuff. Well, we have a lot to talk about. There's all kinds of new stuff
that was announced this week. We got some reviews. We have some questions.
And we, you know, we just keep trucking here.
The next thing that we would love to do is I want to tell you about our sponsors.
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And our thanks to Stamps.com for sponsoring this episode. And you listen to
this show, so you know how it goes, right?
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And our thanks to Shopify for sponsoring this episode.
All right, we got some reviews, so I want to share those reviews.
These all came in to MacGeekCab.com slash review.
And the first is from HappyCamper81 on Apple Podcasts.
It's what you learn after you know it all. Five stars.
The gentlemen of MacGeekCab and Pilot Pete 2 fully embrace the advice of John Wooden.
It's what you learn after you know it all that counts. Whether you think you
know it all or know very little about the Appleverse, you will likely learn
five new things each episode.
New knowledge from the MGG trio and from the wider listener community.
I've listened every week for over 15 years. Amazing.
And keep coming back for more. Thank you, Happy Camper. Beautiful. Love it.
Awesome. I have one from Digger4. This one's short and sweet. Excellent show.
Five stars. Very helpful tips and discussion.
Amazing.
Outstanding. And I've got one from Still River Editions, although I will quickly
mention that I was designated a gentleman by the Congress.
So without going political, I don't know how valuable that is.
I mean, it counts for something, Pete.
Yeah, you know, just saying. Yeah. All right.
Still River Editions rates in with five stars. He says, makes the Apple universe fun as it should be.
Sharing their knowledge? Check. learning together check keeping it fun check waiter
Please?
That's awesome. I like it. It's good. We have one last one, right, Adam?
Final one. This one from Neo Wombat all the way down under in Australia.
Still an excellent show filled with relevant content in digestible portions.
It is one Mac show that I recommend to my physics students, not just because
of the content, but because of the excellent behavior modeling that the hosts present each episode.
Particularly for the boys in my school, it is great for them to be exposed to
respectful, intelligent, technical banter that is not punctuated with swearing,
put-downs, and power games.
The ability to hold different views, present them calmly but firmly,
while respecting robust discussion is excellent.
Keep up the good work of bringing up the next generation. that is really nice
and i'm i'm glad that that is coming through because i think we do strive for that we don't always
Achieve it but.
It's definitely something we strive
For yeah it is the it is the goal yeah i i'm thank you for noticing that neil
wombat that yeah that it is yeah like you said best adam so thank you yeah it's great um,
We have like 18 new things that Apple announced this week.
It was like an Apple event that rolled out every morning for a little while.
I'm going to list all the products. And then if anybody has anything they want
to say about any one of them, let's talk about it.
And I'm sure we'll be talking about them more too. So there was,
in order of opening price, we have the iPhone 7 for $599.
We have the iphone 17e the ipad
air m4 the macbook neo then we
have at 1099 the macbook air m5 at
1599 i'm going to lump two things together
the 27 inch studio display and studio display
xdr the xdr is more and then uh for 2199 the macbook pro m5 so this is this
is interesting like there's there's a story here um and and i'm i'm curious
like what what jumps out at you adam.
The thing that jumps out at me is affordability yeah um apple really targeting
the affordability portion of the market in a place where there's a lot of reasons
why things shouldn't be affordable and why they should be able to do that, specifically for
In tech, everything is being bought up by AI companies in terms of underlying
technology, specifically RAM, which RAM prices have gone through the roof.
And so what Apple's done here is not only have they delivered low price point
entry level products for consumers at a very affordable price compared to what
else is going on in the rest of the market,
but I think every one of them increased base storage, which is unbelievable
when you consider NAND and RAM prices are going through the roof right now.
And that's a testament to their long tail agreements and things.
I'm sure it's got to be with suppliers.
They have long-term contracts where they've mapped out. So they're much better
able to weather the storm.
And so it's funny to be saying this when we've known for years and years and
years where, and I've been critical of this, I think other people on this show
have been critical of it, Apple has kind of really gouged us for storage and RAM in the past.
And now it's like a little flipped, especially with these new products.
So it's impressive to see, and I think these are great offerings for people
who are looking for a more affordable solution in technology right now.
I think they're going to do really well with them, especially in the current market.
That's a good, yeah.
Yeah, spot on.
I agree. I'm curious about,
so like for example, the MacBook Neo is, the base price of $599 is with 256 gigs SSD.
If you want 512, it's $100. So $699 is $699.
But it's only 8 gigs of unified memory, which with the name Mac at the front,
sounds like a limitation, right?
But you said something pre-show, Adam, that I thought was very prescient about
the right way to look at what this machine is. Do you remember what you said?
Yeah, I said, I mean, here, everybody's been asking for Mac OS on an iPad,
and this is essentially it. I mean, you don't have the touch screen,
but it's basically a notebook running Mac.
It's an iPad with a keyboard running Mac OS.
And the other thing I'll say about it, to the point you were just making,
Dave, is Apple, I don't know how much you saw in the marketing and the announcement of this, though.
They're not targeting it at people that want to do Photoshop or video editing or whatever.
They very specifically are like, this is for doing your documents.
This is for surfing the web this is for doing all the
things that most people do it's not
you know and so they've positioned it exactly right like but if you're you know
you're a student or even like they're now in the uh they're in the territory
of chromebooks and the educational price is a hundred dollars less so if your
education you can get it for under 500 bucks
There's going to be schools, I bet, looking at these things in bulk for that
because they're very capable with Mac OS and all the advantages that come with
that, and they're right at the right price point.
Yep. I agree. This is the perfect machine for most students.
I don't want to say for every student. Right.
For a lot.
For a lot.
I'd buy this for my daughters going to college.
I mean they're not doing video editing they're not doing high-end i
mean it's going to edit photos fine and you know a little bit of photo
editing is going to be fine with what he's got but you know its strength is
being ultra light ultra portable it's got great battery life you know like 16
hours or something like that it's going to get you through a day you're not
going to have problems with it um you know like it seems it seems great and
you're not shelling out you know
1,000, 1,500 bucks.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I, I, I agree.
The affordability is the kind of the, the, the mantra here, if you will,
uh, that the unspoken mantra maybe is the right way to say it.
And the other thing I'll, I'll remind folks is if you've got ID.me as a first
responder or veteran, and I think also an educator, you get 10,
well, you said it's a hundred bucks less for,
uh, for education, but that's, it's still 10% off, which is 60 bucks off for, for the others.
Um, this is, this is an interesting looking little piece of gear. Yeah.
Yep.
It's the gateway drug to Apple as they call it.
So for some people it's, it's the only drug they need. Like, right. You know? Yeah.
No, it's, it's brilliant.
Yeah. I mean, it's half, it's effectively half the price of an air
It is yeah.
You know and now you're not i think the air is coming with more is it coming
with more base storage now than this one or i don't i don't remember the configs on the
So the configs on the air yeah the configs on
the air are different and they i i will just in
in comparing the first two things we talked about the the 17e
and the iphone 17e which is
a hundred dollars more with the extra storage uh
to go from or sorry the macbook neo
is a hundred dollars more to go from 256 to
512 gig storage the iphone 17e
is 200 for the same
storage bump so just bear that in mind that which is an interesting thing it
almost makes me feel like the storage bump on this is something that apple is
treating as maybe a loss leader or a not a profit center i don't like who knows
like you know it's all it's all there but,
But yeah, yeah, yeah. And the air...
The Air is 1099 for the 13-inch to start, and that's with the 10-core CPU,
8-core GPU that's with the 10-core CPU, 8-core GPU.
$1,199. Go ahead, Adam.
What's the storage and memory on that one?
Well, let's get there because it's an interesting path on how you get to storage and memory.
So it's a $100 bump if you want to go to the 10-core GPU from the 8-core GPU.
However, you need to take that $100 bump if you want to go above 16 gigs of RAM.
Uh 16 you know you serve your 1099
you get the 13 inch with the 8 core gpu and 16 gigs
of ram if you want to bump up to 24 gigs
of ram you must jump to
the 10 core gpu but it's
only a 200 bump total to get
you from 8 core gpu 16 gigs of ram 10 core gpu 24 gigs of ram it's 1299 for
that So it's an it's an interesting I think we've always sort of understood
that these eight core GPUs are really 10 core GPUs that that weren't that didn't pass their specs.
Right. I mean, I don't want to say that's definitively true about these,
but in previous models, people have looked at them and, you know,
when the M1 first came out or whatever it was, when there was when there was
an option, people like, wait, these are the same chips.
It's just, they're just turning on two less GPUs, which probably means they
didn't spec out when they came off the assembly line.
That's very true. I mean, that's very common in the industry.
It's very common.
Binning is what they call it. Binning.
That's it. Yep. Thank you. Yeah. So $12.99 though, for a MacBook Air with 24
gigs of RAM and 512 gigs of storage.
So you're not starting with 256 gigs of storage on that.
Right if and if you want to increase your storage certainly you can uh you can
go up but your storage at the binning conversation happens again you gotta jump to to that,
that 10 core gpu machine and then
to go from 512 gigs to one terabyte it's
it's another hundred bucks that's it so they're not gouging you
for those those increases um so for example the air that i would want to get
minimally would be uh let's see it's a 2400 200 thing yada yada what What's,
what's this going to cost?
Uh, where are the prices here? Eventually they're going to tell me what I'm, what I'm going to spend.
$14.99 for a terabyte of storage and 24 gigs of RAM, which really isn't.
That's a rocking machine.
That's a rocking machine. Yes.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that obviates the need for the pro in my humble opinion
with an M5 chip. Are you kidding me?
Yeah. And if you want to do the same thing with a refurb M4, it's $1,189.
So it's a, I mean, you know, it's, you're saving what, you know, $210 or so, $310 rather.
So, yeah. Yeah.
Which is a big difference on a, you know, on a $1,500 computer to save $310
to get the, you know, the M5 versus the M4.
It might make sense for a lot of people.
Yeah, what do you need that M5 chip for? I guess you have to ask.
That's the question you'd ask yourself. Yeah.
I still go back to buying my first Apple Silicon computer because I had a 2018, I think,
MacBook Pro 16-inch with, I forget which IBM chip was in it,
but, or IBM, Intel chip was in it.
And my nephew showed up at the house with a little m1 macbook air and he smoked
me on all the benchmark tests oh my gosh oh yeah yeah so for sure yeah m4 m5 whatever it takes yeah
What was the total what was the total price on that air that you would configure
out um 1500 1499 with this is uh this is where apple gets you i
Know because you paid 200 bucks for something that you only paid $100 for the day.
Before. And now compare that to the $1699 base model Pro.
I thought the base, oh yeah, you're right. The base model Pro,
why did I say $2199 in my initial I might have been looking at the wrong thing.
Which the base model gets you a liquid retina XDR display, 10 core,
10 core, 10 core CPU, 10 core GPU,
16 gigs unified memory, 1 terabyte of storage, correct so it's like Apple does
this thing where you start ramping up like
an air and then it kind of gets really close to the next level up and it's like
oh it's a couple hundred bucks more that's how i ended up with that's how i
ended up i was fully intended my last mac to get a to get an air yes and then
when i configured it out what got me was the display
because it was like 200 more bucks to get like the amazing display yeah the
xdr display which brings you know um so here it's refresh
Rate and comparing comparing the two models that i would buy right so the 24
gigs of ram and a one tear and one terabyte of storage the air is 1499 the 13
inch air is 1499 and the 14 inch pro is 1899 yeah.
So it gets you 400 bucks more so that is yeah
It's significant but you know there
you go so i know yeah it's
and it's the same chip right it's the same 10 10 core
yeah same core but the thermals
are different on the pro as i have learned doing
podcasts from the road on my m2 air my
m1 uh you know
desktop machine handles it better than my
m2 air with more ram
right so there's the
thermals on the air when you're doing that kind
of work do make a difference so yeah yeah yep and i don't know about i mean
we haven't tested the thermals on the new m5 air yet so like maybe not as much
of a difference but like that that would be the hesitation for me i always thought
oh i'm i'm forever an air person and And after,
you know, recent on the road experience, it's like,
well, I think it works, but there's always this weird thing happening.
So it'll be interesting. Speaking of that, it'll be interesting to see how the
Neo does because it doesn't have any.
Active cooling but remember it is an iphone chip and a much larger aluminum
chassis and also it's likely not going to
Hit that thermal.
Throttle like an air would
Right right so.
It'll be really interesting to see how the two benchmark out against
Each other oh that's true oh yeah we'll have to start looking
at geekbench numbers to see if all the reviewers are are reporting
them up upstream yet so yeah that's you're
right you're right you know interesting interesting
yeah good stuff yeah stuff to talk about here and and
i'm i'm i'm happy to see like all of this happening uh you know it's nice nice
to see the mac getting attention it's nice to see the lower end of the price
points getting meaningful attention not just checking a box to say we have it
on the skew list Like, no, you can buy an iPhone for $599.
It's like, actually, you can buy an iPhone for $599.
Like, that's different. Yeah. Yeah.
One last little quick thing, because it did come up in a question that didn't
make the show notes, but I did answer this morning from, I can't remember who sent it in.
Somebody was asking, what about the desktop Macs, the iMac and the Mac Mini,
which were updated in 2024, I believe. Yeah.
If anybody's wondering, typically Apple would update those in the fall,
and I would expect a similar kind of update from an M4 chip to an M5,
but probably not anything beyond a spec bump.
Maybe, again, more base storage, more RAM, and a chip update.
Yep.
Likely. I'm just reading the tea leaves.
Yeah, I think you're right. Yeah. Yep.
All right. We have some time here. Should we answer some questions?
Let's do it.
Go and i got dan yeah
i wasn't ready i was
muting and unmuting because of air raid
sirens oh right oh yeah first
monday or first friday rather uh dan says uh i'm collecting he says how do i
tame airdrop wonkiness i'm collecting things to try when airdrop fails the last
time I tried AirDrop with the second laptop,
both on Mac OS 18, about a foot away from my main iMac.
The laptop showed up on the iMac as an option for AirDrop.
I picked it and it never showed any notice of incoming transmission the way it should.
I had just restarted that computer. The laptop never showed up as an option
again until I restarted it.
I turned the settings AirDrop to everyone from contacts only.
I've had this help on iPhones turned off tail scale.
Someone said that turning off VPNs might help. I think this is folklore and
I didn't do anything except it didn't, it didn't do anything rather except make me reconnect to it.
I turned off Bluetooth and back on. Good thing I had a wired mouse.
This might be a good step.
Unfortunately, I did this at the same time as the restart and restarted the laptop again.
I think more than one restart and maybe both compute on, I'm assuming on maybe
both computers might be needed.
Any other things to try opinions?
So airdrop troubles for Dan and he's looking for help.
Yeah. And airdrop just gets wonky sometimes, right?
So a little education is that airdrop depends on Bluetooth for discovery and
then wifi for the transfer.
So anything that resets those layers helps.
So, obviously, the unscientific approach is power cycle both machines,
reboot the machines, and it should work.
You can also go into Finder, airdrop on both Macs, and turn it off,
turn it back on, announce itself to the world, and it should kind of reset it.
The only other thing that I would
try is the terminal command of kill all space sharing D, as in delta.
And that's it's kind of controlled by the launch d demon
so when you kill all sharing d it mac
os will see it's off and it'll return the sharing on and i think uh and i've
used it before successfully to get airdrop to play nice when it wasn't playing
nice let me put it that way so and when i saw that question i went oh i know the answer to that one
because i've had to futz with it yeah so thoughts dave you're you're looking
like you've got some other thoughts on this yeah
I was just looking at airdrop on my mac i um you're you're absolutely right
that it uses bluetooth for discovery and wi-fi for transfer but i want to make sure that we,
uh articulate that you don't have to be on the same or any wi-fi network for
that transfer to happen oh.
Right right it uses bluetooth and it then it creates maybe it
Creates an ad hoc network right you've done in the cockpit yeah right it creates.
Or i know somebody who says they did one sure uh
Who you know it it sends between the two computers so you don't need a router
or anything like that, it's all just direct between the two machines.
It's just that Wi-Fi is way faster than Bluetooth for transferring things.
So, yeah, you need to, Bluetooth needs to be on and Wi-Fi needs to be on,
but again, not necessarily associated with,
You also need to make sure that you are discoverable on airdrop on your Mac.
If you open up the, you know, you go to the finder and you go to go airdrop
on that screen, it will say at the bottom, you know, allow me to be discovered
by no one contacts only or everyone.
So that that can be a factor, though, if it's you're if you're sending from
a machine that's yours to another machine that's yours.
In theory, that should be dealt with so long as they're both logged into the same iCloud account.
That's how that authentication happens.
So that would be another thing to check. Like, is there a reason that you might
have your work machine logged into your work iCloud account and your other machine
logged into your personal account?
And if you're not in each other's address books, it ain't going to show up.
So that's just another, you know, another thing to look at.
Um firewall yeah i i've never had an issue with tail scale and airdrop but i
mean it's always worth ruling things out so um that's what i got what do you have adam.
Uh not much so much
for mac to mac other than what was already said i
do have a couple things if you're dealing with ios that ios
devices um if you have an ios
device that has nfc or two ios devices
that have nfc uh i have found using
the booping trick works now where you
kind of bring the two together and they then they'll see each other
they're like um you get that nice little haptic feedback at least on the iphone
maybe presumably also on the ipad i don't know if i've ever done it with an
ipad but then the other thing uh with ios devices and i just confirmed this
on my mac your iphone can't be locked.
It will not be discoverable if it's locked.
So you need to unlock it
for it to be seen huh at least that's been my experience
So what when i was looking through it in finder on my mac i noticed it allowed
to be discoverable by everyone it's interesting that the ios setting is allowed
to be discovered by everyone for 10 minutes so you don't you know leave that
on forever so that's interesting that's
New relatively new yeah yeah.
It's People
Were sending random pictures to people that weren't unsolicited pictures.
There you go. Soliciting unsolicited pictures.
And then the other one you talked about booping, I guess that's a technical term.
You start sharing by bringing devices together. It's actually a toggle you have
to put on in the iOS settings for AirDrop.
I didn't know this existed though. Use cellular data. Continue to send and receive
content when Wi-Fi is not available during airdrop.
So if you're not in a cockpit at 35,000 feet where you don't have cellular data,
that is a setting in iOS airdrop.
Use cellular data. You can toggle that on.
Huh. Yeah. Yeah.
I do need to give credit to Michael Johnston from the iOS show.
Throwback. For the booping terminology. That was his terminology.
Well, he's a rocket scientist, so that is a technical term for sure.
It started when Android had that feature. He called it booping,
booping the devices together. Okay. So.
Yeah, I like it.
Because you boop.
Yeah, you got to boop them together. Yeah.
Uh, all right, good. Moving on. Do we have time for another question? Okay.
Sure.
Uh, well then I should look and see what the next question is.
Uh, yeah, it's, uh, I'm supposed to be reading it. Um, it's,
uh, yeah, it's from Cliff, right? Yep. Yep. Let me, let me know.
I'll vamp, will I find Cliff because he's bound to be here somewhere.
I got it. Cliff asked. He says, I have a situation where I need help an elderly relative.
I need to help an elderly relative when selecting shoes, shows or YouTube on their TV.
Most smart TV apps require you to be on the same Wi-Fi to work.
Would tail scale or something be able to fool a TV so I can control my Apple TV from anywhere,
her Apple TV from anywhere without buying another kind of control box like a
Jubilee or something to be on the same network?
Um i i
tested this and i thought
it wouldn't work but i was able i just took my iphone off of wi-fi and you know
was on cellular and i was able to launch the remote app on my phone and see
my tvs i believe that's because i'm logged into the same apple id as my apple tv.
I was not within close enough proximity to Bluetooth to it.
I was in my office, which is another building, you know, opposite side of the house.
Haven't tested it because I haven't left my office. I haven't left my property
since I saw this question come in.
But I was able to control my TV while on cellular.
But again, I'm presuming it's because I was logged into.
It wasn't showing me everybody in the world's Apple TV. it was showing me mine
so that would have to be my you know iCloud account my Apple ID.
I would presume it's actually going through your home app in my assumption yes
probably using the what does Apple call that the uh the
Smart home hub home.
Hub yeah yeah Apple TV acts as a home hub that's right the home app that's how
it's registered and that's how it would get registered to
That would makes.
Sense family of uh iot devices basically yeah
But i i think to control someone else's um tv you would either need to be on
their apple id or in their apple id family right or,
you know his mention of like the the control box like a jubilee or a harmony
hub if you can still find one of those i don't even know if those are for sale
but um i think maybe they are maybe.
What might i'll need to test this
but i would hope and presume since
the facetime app is on the apple tv that
you may be able to at least share have that person share
their their tv screen with you and maybe walk them through that now if you're
like me with my mom if you're trying to get them to actually click on buttons
and do things like with the apple remote that's a whole different challenge
but at least you might be able to see see like what they're looking at yeah fair yeah
But yeah, like my mom's classic for the, okay, do you see this?
You know, and I'll mention a button or a thing and I'm like,
don't click on it. Yeah. And too late.
I'm just asking if you see it.
I've, I've learned that that has taught me, uh, when doing troubleshooting that
before I ask, do you see, I say, I'm going to ask you to look for something.
And I only want you to tell me if you see it, don't click on it.
Do you see, right? You know, you've got to preface it. She'd still do it.
Sure.
Oh, yes. I've definitely had people do that. Yeah. You could buy a finger magnet.
You could buy a Harmony Hub on Amazon for 140 bucks.
So, and, and that will do like it'll, it'll do HDMI or network control,
not HDMI control. It'll do network control of devices that support it.
And then also most of them, I don't, and it will also do infrared.
Yeah, this one will. So I'll put a link to that in the show notes too.
Yeah, that I've done that before. Like when we were, I guess we still are a Harmony household.
Although the last time I used a Harmony remote or even the Harmony remote app was a long time ago.
But, but I, I'd done that before where it was like, somebody was like, oh, this isn't working.
And it was like, let me log in and make sure it's like, oh yeah,
it doesn't see that device. Like, let's restart a thing.
And, you know, it's really hard to navigate a TV without seeing it. But, you know.
Yup.
I can't figure out why. So if I go to the remote app, I have,
I have three Apple TVs in the house, bedroom, living room, and downstairs in, in the theater.
And I accidentally turned on the theater one the other day and the laser burned
through the protective cloth for the lens because I, I heard it come on and
by the time I got down there, the laser had already burned it through and you're
like, oh, which is why you don't look into the laser projection folks.
It's bad for your eyes. Um, but right now I'm only seeing two of the TVs,
not the third one. and I know it's down there and plugged in.
And if I go to the home app, I can see that I have an Apple TV at our place
in Florida, but I have no ability whatsoever to,
To, to control it.
Touch it and control it that I can see.
So even if you switch to that home.
Maybe.
Right. Cause you can switch between homes. Like, you know, my son has our house
here and then also his apartment as two separate homes. So.
Right. Oh, there you go. Let me make sure that.
But I mean, I have seen that where I have seen that where, you know,
the, the remote app will show you not all of your TVs.
Um, but my, yeah, mine's showing me now, mine now.
And what happens if I, if I disconnect, like let's get rid of the remote app.
I'm back on 5g what happens here
choose a tv uh interesting
yeah I'm only seeing one of my tvs when I'm on on
5g not my apple tv is not both which is
kind of fascinating maybe there's a setting for and
I don't know like maybe it's an exercise
for the listener or the podcaster but maybe
there's a setting for uh for that
somewhere so thank you for hanging out with folks
it is time for us to move on here
we've we've gone over our allotted time and
we appreciate your uh everything yeah it's
fun absolutely thanks for hanging out thanks to
cashfly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you make
sure to go to macgeekup.com slash giveaway sign up for your uh chance to win
sound source one of my favorite apps check out pete's so there i was adam's
debut film podcast and my business brain and gig gab,
go download the new mac geekab the update mac geekab for ios version 3.0 runs
on your ipad too but there's some work i want to do on making that look a little
better but it does it works on.
Thanks for hanging out. We will see you next week.
Yes, we will.
Adam, you got anything to say before we leave?
I'm looking at Pete's shirt, and it says, don't get caught. Love it.
Made on a Mac.
See you next week.
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