It's time for Matt Geek Gab and listener Sy brings us our quick tip of the week.
He says, I have a tip for anyone who needs to quickly toggle dark mode on iPhone.
For example, when a website or email isn't designed to support it properly,
swipe down to open control center.
So swiping down from the upper right of your screen, then a long press the brightness slider.
This brings up a dark mode toggle right there. So you can flip it on or off
without digging through your settings.
And of course, you can also add, he says as a bonus tip, a dedicated dark mode
toggle in control center, which is even quicker.
But yes, you can turn dark mode on and off, night shift on and off,
and true tone on and off just in by hold by long pressing on the brightness.
It brings up an extra little widget.
I love that. Thank you, Cy. More quick tips like this, plus your questions answered
today on Mac Geek Up 1133 for Monday, March 16th.
Robert Goddard Day, 2026.
Greetings, folks, and welcome to Matt Geekgab, the show where we share quick
tips like that. We share cool stuff found. We share questions.
We share answers to the questions. We share whatever we can to serve the purpose
of each and every one of us learning at least five new things every single time we get together.
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But for now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, trying desperately not to just sing
Rocketman because of you, Pete. I'm Dave Hamilton.
And here in South Dakota, I am Adam Christensen.
And here also in New Hampshire, where spring has sprung for a few more days
before it's winter again, it's Pilot Pete.
Good to be back with you. And, you know, Robert Goddard, he's the original Rocketman, right?
I thought that was Harlan Williams.
Oh, you might be right about that, Adam.
No, I'm totally wrong about that.
There's a horrible, there's a horrible Disney movie from, well,
I think it's a cult classic for a lot of people, but there's a 90s movie called
Rocket Man with the comedian Harlan William.
Yeah.
Disney movie from the 90s. It's like just one of those, you know.
Where he's just, it's like slapstick kind of comedy, you know,
fart, fart in the space suit kind of thing.
You know, one of those movies for kids.
Yeah.
I'll put a link in the show notes because how could I not? Exactly.
And you can choose with, based on Adam's review, you can choose to watch it or not.
It's got a 5.9 on IMDb and a 20% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Ooh, 20 whole percent.
You know, I often find that movies that are rated very highly on Rotten Tomatoes,
I mean, sometimes the ones that are like 99 or 100%, I might like those.
But a lot of the ones, if they're like 80% or above, I generally find they're not for me.
I often like the ones that are in the 40s to 60s.
Exactly. Rocketman, the audience score is 72.
See, I might. This is a movie I might like. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, again, I think it's kind of a cult classic for people,
especially people who grew up in the 90s. I think it's like one of those movies.
Got it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
The one I was surprised about, because based on the trailers,
I was worried it was going to just be awful.
And I was shocked. It was Hoppers, the new Pixar movie.
Okay.
It's got 93 critic score and a 94 audience score.
And just based on the trailers, it looked like to me, like it was just going
to be no story and a bunch of jokes.
Sure. Not your classic Pixar that I'm used to, but maybe I need to give it a chance.
Maybe. So if anybody's seen it and can recommend it, let me know.
Yeah. I have not seen it, so...
Uh, I, I'm, I'm remembering the movie mud, which I think was with Matthew McConaughey.
Yeah. That's a good movie.
See, that's, and I, and this is what I love about like art in general.
I mean, you can talk about music or movies or whatever.
One person can like it and the other person can't. And they're both,
or the other person doesn't. And they, they, you're both right.
You know, there's this. It's true. Yeah. It's, it's wonderful. I love that.
And I did not care for that movie. And the reason, and my whole family was like,
this movie was dumb. uh for us you know so i.
Liked it yeah right i remember liking it i don't even remember what it's about now at this point but
I don't either i i don't either but i i did not care
for it the date man you know maybe we're in the wrong headspace to watch
whatever kind of movie that was at you know at the
time but but it was like man like we got to
stop just watching these movies because they're rated highly by
other people opr other people's ratings
in our house i think i've talked about this before um we
have a 20 minute rule now uh and we
instituted this quite a while ago but the
20 minute rule is if we are 20 minutes into
a movie and we realize that
you know the majority of us are like on our
phones and completely detached from the movie we just stop
watching the movie it's okay it's allowed there
are other things to watch and the 20 minutes is a sunk cost we don't need to
continue to the end just because we started it and we we've we've we don't oh
it's not you know i would say it's maybe once a month we were like hey uh 20
minute rule on this and we'll check and be like oh we're 24 minutes in yeah let's go let's.
Let's did i did i pick a pick out of the movie uh thelma
From 2024?
I don't know.
If you've never seen that movie, it's great. And it's great for the tech audience
because the basic premise is it's about an old lady who gets scammed and then takes revenge.
And it is hilarious. And it is a great film if you haven't seen it.
And I think it's one of those more obscure ones.
So throw that out as a recommendation for folks.
Interesting.
It's from 2024.
For we are recording this before i leave
for south by southwest and uh i've watched a couple of movies ahead of time
that i've got as like press screeners or whatever but nothing that would be
relevant for this show yet but uh maybe by the time this episode comes out i
will have had you know something to talk about so maybe on the next episode i'll have all.
Right i've already derailed us when i said i wouldn't so
Yeah that's what i mean you know when you said you weren't going to derail us
i thought we meant before we started recording once we go then we're then we're in then it's.
Then it's all things yeah hopefully when you get back the one that'll be out
is uh hail project hail mary the book was fantastic
It will be out we booked our tickets already to see it right after we get back
yeah uh and we built a project hail mary lego uh this weekend that lucas bought
for the family it's it's really cool it spins and it has the whole like gravity
thing and the the you know like it's really it's actually okay very cool if.
You haven't read the book and you like science fiction at all fantastic
book folks yeah so and then just want to i just have to mention this the worst
movie i've ever seen and we've it's the first time i ever turned off a movie
came out in 1991 with none other than bobcat goldthwait forrence henderson called shakes The Clown.
Oh, why are we recommending movies we don't like? I mean, I did it too.
I'm just, you know, yeah.
Never. I'm just saying, if you ever run across that one, don't even waste your 20 minutes.
Well, I hope Project Hail Mary is cool.
And yeah, I put a visual of the Lego up on the screen for anybody watching to see.
But the link's in the show notes. You can see it.
And I'll try and find a U.S. one. You want to get us back to quick tips there, Pete?
We should probably do that. Um, I think Adam was up, but I can do it if no,
No, I think it's actually, I don't think it's, I don't think it's either one of you. I think it's me.
Uh, and, uh, I knew that. I was just seeing if you remember Dave,
That's okay. Uh, Joel says I wear Starkey hearing aids that integrate with the
iPhone through settings, accessibility, hearing devices.
I use them to stream audio, just like headphones.
So when I discovered a feature called live, listen, I started using it when
I needed to leave a room where I was watching TV with the family or in a discussion
with friends, but I needed to run into a different room where you may not hear what's going on.
It turns out it's quite sensitive. To turn on live listen, you need to drill
down to the hearing devices settings, select the hearing aids,
and scroll to the very bottom to the live listen, and then reverse that process to turn it off.
The other day I was in control center and I found I was able to add a live listen
as a button to that screen, too.
I hope this is useful to someone else as well. You can turn on live listen with your AirPods.
They count as a live listen capable device.
So if you want to see what this is like and experiment with it,
and you don't have a medically prescribed hearing aid, AirPods do work for live
listen as well. It's a pretty cool feature.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Uses your iPhone, right? Turns your iPhone into the listening device.
Yeah, the iPhone becomes the microphone. And then, yeah, it pipes the audio to your AirPods.
Fantastic.
Yeah, it's pretty cool. Yeah. Pretty stoked about what Apple does. Yeah.
I think it'd be good if you were at a conference or something,
too, and were further in the back or something, if you didn't mind keeping an
eye on your iPhone from afar.
Oh, that's interesting. It uses Bluetooth, I would presume.
Yeah. I can't imagine. So, yeah, it depends on what the.
Room is like.
Yeah, that's fair. Yeah, for sure.
Stay within 50 feet, you're good.
Yeah.
Yeah. Awesome. Well, I've got one.
Last week, you may remember, I talked about moving multiple app icons around.
You press and hold until it jiggles, and then you press and hold that one icon,
and then you can touch other icons and it stacks them underneath.
Well, I was playing around with it in photos. It turns out you can do it in
photos. You can do it in files. You can do it with links on a website.
So basically what you do, for instance, let's talk photos.
Let's say you want to send four or five photos to somebody, but you don't want
to select them the way you normally do. It's a quicker way of doing it.
Go into photos, press and hold one photo, and it will get a little bigger,
like you're going to drag it somewhere.
While you're holding that photo tap additional photos
with one finger it'll stack it underneath then use
your other hand again to switch apps state of messages and
then drop them into mail or messages or notes or
wherever you want to put them do the same thing with files same thing with links
off a web page just you grab the link like you're gonna copy you drag it a little
and it gives you a link card under your finger or thumb start touching other
links on the page it just stacks them underneath and you can drop them anywhere you like I
This is a cool feature that I was not aware.
How do you do that? I'm trying to follow your instructions, and the only thing I succeeded in doing—.
So open photos, and you get your photo grid.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay, so grab one photo, like you're going to take it and move it into messages.
Okay. You have to start dragging it.
Oh, you have to start dragging it first.
You start dragging it, yeah. That's the key. Once you start dragging it,
and then you touch another photo, it starts stacking them right underneath.
Yeah, no, I see it. My problem was I was following the instructions quite literally,
and it was like press and hold and then tap another one. And it's like, nope.
Okay. That'll pop it open.
You've got to start dragging.
Press and hold works on the app icons on your home screen. Once they start jiggling,
then you've got it. But on photos, you need to drag it.
And files. I don't think that's correct. I think you have to start dragging
for that to work. Well, he's technically.
Right on the home screen because you can't start dragging until you press and hold and get the jiggly.
But either way, you have to then start dragging on the home screen. You can't.
That makes sense. Yeah. Okay. So I left that out.
Yeah.
Same thing in the files too. If you just press and hold, it'll pop it open.
I think if it's a document, it might even quick view it. But yeah,
you had to kind of, there's a timing thing to it. you had to press and then
once it jumps up, start dragging. So now you've got it under your finger.
Then you can start tapping other things.
You make a little stack. You're totally right. It's the same paradigm everywhere.
If you hold for too long, you're,
And I say too long, too long for what Pete's talking about.
Then you get the contextual menu that you can do other things with.
And I wound up accidentally duplicating a photo because I was like, oh, no.
I mean, it's fine. You know, it's a little storage.
The other thing I would recommend or I guess not recommend, but a bonus tip
if you don't want to do, especially if you're trying to go between applications
or something like that, and you don't want to do the finger gymnastics of,
you know, having to like swipe up.
And remember you can use S lady to open another app or.
Oh yeah. The two for a tip there. Huh?
So you're saying Siri is good at finger gymnastics.
Saying Siri is good at doing things for you. If you know what to ask her to do.
That's it. I never would have thought like, like what a multimodal thing, right? Like.
But it's unable to show you that while you're driving
Just to be clear I have all kinds of things I could moan about Siri this week
We're going to keep it positive I say.
That now I'm actually probably never actually trying it So if I'm wrong,
I apologize But I would assume you could ask S-Lady to open the other app So
if I was going between files and pages or something like that Hey Siri, open messages
Yeah, it totally works, Adam.
Okay.
Yes.
Because everybody's messages are now open.
You know, in theory, though, no.
It's gotten better.
Yeah, it's gotten way better. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So yes, that works.
Hey, actually, now that I'm thinking about it.
It turns out I do, as I just portrayed. Yeah, yeah.
Because if you say seriously, it launches. It's like, oh, come on.
I think I may have set mine to still require the, the hay.
Oh yeah.
I think you can turn it off. I've turned it off everywhere and I just use S
it doesn't, it goes off every once in a while, but yeah, frequently.
Um, is it, where is that? Is that in.
In Siri settings,
Pretty sure. Siri settings, which is in accessibility. Interoperability,
I think, is where that lives now.
Why?
Nope, nope. We're going to keep it positive.
Why not?
But I don't know. Maybe not.
I don't see. It's under Apple Intelligence and Siri.
That's where it is. It's in two places. There are two places you can affect
Siri settings, but you're totally right.
This one is in Apple Intelligence and Siri. Thank you.
And then it's under.
Yeah, I don't know that I can turn that off.
Talk and type to talk and type to Siri.
There it is. Oh, yeah. I have mine set to Siri or hey, Siri. Okay. Yeah.
I think now she's really going off. Yeah, I know it's all freaking out. Yeah.
Actually mine didn't like it. It seemed to contextually figure that out,
which is good. Again, keeping it positive. Good job, Siri.
You know, positive reinforcement. They say it works better with dogs and negative reinforcement.
Maybe this is why Siri hasn't gotten better is that we've been so negative about it. Maybe.
Oh, I'm always extremely nice to her.
Oh, I'm nice to her, but we don't speak nicely about her here as often as we
could. you know what i'm saying like listening.
In the background
He's listening yeah.
When she starts launching the death robots we're on the top of the target list i
Will tell you this i am super pleasant to uh claude and often remind it how
grateful i am for all its assistance
It's a good thing that's a good thing i think i mentioned on the show and i
will find the prompt i mean And the prompt was basically,
you know, pick your favorite chatbot of choice and ask it,
make a picture of how you feel treated by me.
And everybody in my family had these, like, warm, snuggly, like,
environments that their chatbots built.
And mine was, like, smoking cigarettes and, like, drinking coffee and bleary-eyed
and, you know, stuff everywhere all over its desk, which all the stuff was,
like, things that I asked it to do.
So it was like oh and then it asked me I think this was ChatGPT that I did this with,
then it asked me do you want me to instead make a picture of how,
I think you think you treat me and it was like oh we're getting sassy now I
see no no no that's fine we're done with this experiment bye I.
Thought you were going to say it asked you for PTO
Yeah,
Yeah. Yeah.
Oh, I'm going to put mine in Discord. You're wrong. Hurry up.
Try again. Not good enough.
Yeah, there it is. My chat bot wants PTO. All right.
Shall we move on?
Oh, we shall. Okay. I have a question. Can we go to questions?
Yeah, let's go to questions.
Yeah, I have one here from Larry.
Larry says, hey there, geeks. This is frustrating. For years,
my TV and streaming device, Roku, were connected to the network for working out. It was flawless.
I have a panoramic whole home, panoramic whole home Wi-Fi, woo,
that's fancy, that reaches here.
When I got the latest Apple TV, I switched it to the garage because I prefer the Apple TV interface.
Everything worked fine until a couple of months ago, I couldn't connect to the
Wi-Fi, and I spent more time troubleshooting than working out. Well, that's not good.
Switching to the Roku worked, but only one device worked.
I tried resetting the settings on the Apple TV using my iPhone, but it hung.
I tried a manual setup and somehow got it to work, but the connection drops kept happening.
Cox said that the wall between the garage and the house could be an impediment
to the signal, but Eero is supposed to have a stellar signal.
I took the Apple TV to the Apple store. It worked there. I brought it home and
it worked fine, but I can't connect to the network anymore.
Roku says it's got a strong signal, but Apple TV says it can't connect.
This is an old Apple TV. Is this an old Apple TV that needs to be retired.
Who's going to answer this one? Is that you, Adam?
Oh, was I supposed to answer it?
Yeah, that's fine. Oh, that's right.
I answered it. I will read it and answer it. Sorry, I forked it up.
Go!
So I had responded to Larry, and I was like, yeah, that stinks.
And the only thing that I could think about was maybe trying some of the various
resets that you can do, that maybe there's some corruption in the settings.
And so I kind of had a set order that I would do resets in.
And the first would be to just forget all of the Wi-Fi settings.
So going in on the Apple TV into settings, network, Wi-Fi, select the current
Wi-Fi network, choose forget network, and then go back and reconnect to the
Wi-Fi and see if that does anything.
I think this is the least likely to resolve any issues, but that's where I would first start.
Um after that unfortunately for
whatever reason the apple tv doesn't have the classic forget
all network settings option that i think you get on
other ios devices but you can go in and
reset all settings so if you go into settings system
reset reset all settings uh that
will remove network settings your accounts unfortunately
configurations but keep all your applications and
data intact um and so
you're gonna have to go back and kind of reset up your apple tv reconnect
into your iCloud and all that fun stuff
um your apple store accounts and all so
that won't be fun um but that might clear things out and then if that doesn't
work then the nuclear option basically the nuke and pave restore you know do
a factory restore um go into settings system reset and do a reset update to
completely nuke it and see if any of those things resolve it.
And that's why I would do it in that order because it's progressively more and
more work to get back to where you were.
Yeah, as I'm, you may be right on all of this. Sometimes resetting those settings definitely helps.
Where my mind went was, okay, what's the difference between going with his suggestion
or Cox's suggestion that the wall between the garage and the house might be
the issue, right? Right.
So then I start thinking Wi-Fi wise, what's different about the Roku device
that seems to have no trouble in the garage and the Apple TV,
which seems to have trouble in the garage.
And while I don't know the specs of the Roku device, let's assume that maybe
the Roku device has only a 2.4 gigahertz radio in it.
And the Apple TV has both 5 gigahertz and 2.4 gigahertz.
And we know that 5 gigahertz is bad through walls. Thank you.
And maybe the Apple TV isn't making the right decision here.
And it's saying, I see a five gigahertz radio.
So by golly, I'm going to use it because I know that I want the bandwidth provided
by five gigahertz. When in fact, it should be making the decision.
No, let's choose 2.4. That's more reliable here.
And of course, Eero merges the two into one SSID. So you can't,
and with Eero, you can't tell it full time to just split them.
You can't say, you know, have my, you know, Eero 5 gigahertz and Eero 2.4 gigahertz. It's just Eero.
However, you can go into the troubleshooting
settings and turn off the 5 gigahertz radio for five minutes.
So that's what I would try to test this theory. You go into your Eero app,
you go into troubleshooting.
And I think it's like, I forget what the setting is.
It's like add a new device and it's for when it's
for when you want to add iot devices but you need to be on 2.4 gigahertz to
to pass the ssid or the mac address along uh so i would try that and see is
it better for five minutes with the apple tv if it is you know the answer now
the solution is different than the answer because the solution would be.
Find a line of sight path to get Wi-Fi in from your house to the garage.
So having an Eero in the garage might not be the best place.
What you might want is the Eero. Like, let's say you have a door from your house
to the garage, which I think is a safe assumption.
And now a less safe assumption.
Let's say you have a countertop or a table right next to that door.
Right. The door might be easier to pass Wi-Fi through than the walls.
So by putting an Eero on, say, the counter by the door, it can grab the signal
from the other Eero in the house. And now it's relaying it sort of through the
doorway into the garage.
And now you've got this relay. And while you don't have an Eero in the garage,
you've got an Eero that's sort of broadcasting to the garage.
And the things in the garage can get it. it's it when
i whenever setting up a mesh i think
more about where can the mesh point you
know you've got your main mesh point and then you have your satellites where
can any given satellite get its signal from not where do i want it to be so
that i can talk to it but where can it get its signal from and then where is
it sending that signal because oftentimes it's not that you want.
The access point the mesh point in the same room
that you want the signal you want it somewhere to relay
to that room if that makes sense so that's
kind of where my mind went with with all of this because because
that's often what happens with mesh is we we start thinking
oh i want to i need signal in the living room so i'm going to put an eero in
the living room it's like well if you can't get signal in
the living room today your eero also can't get
signal in the living room today so don't put an eero there
put an eero somewhere in between and think about line of sight or at the very
least in things that are going to get in the way like refrigerators and air
conditioning ducts and you know other things that that block radio waves and
now i've got a follow on yeah about.
What about creating a 2.4 gigahertz guest network i wound up doing that for my
bird feeder camera which only works on the 2.4
Sure you'd have to buy additional hardware to do that i.
I could have sworn i did it right on my euro
I don't believe the euro will let you create a guest network that only is 2.4
gigahertz it will let you create a guest network but not a guest network that's
only 2.4 i don't think but i i mean i haven't well mine's.
A six so
If i turn on my guest network on my eero there are no options uh so yeah no it's not just doing 2.4.
On the guest somehow i forced 2.4 to my feathers network
Probably probably temporarily while you got it set up if you're yes if you're
if you're um bird feeder only supports and now We're getting a little bit off
the reservation on this here.
If your bird feeder only supports 2.4 gigahertz, then it will only ever connect with 2.4 gigahertz.
It cannot connect five. I realize I'm stating the obvious.
But however, the software for your bird feeder, maybe, and I can't say,
but based on what you're telling me, I'm being a detective here.
I'm guessing the software for your bird feeder like your iPhone app for the
bird feeder isn't smart enough to tell the bird feeder go make your own 2.4
gigahertz connection to this SSID it relies on your iPhone to hand off the Mac
address of a 2.4 gigahertz connection,
But your iPhone can't make that connection because your iPhone's connected to
a five gigahertz network and it's handing off the Mac address of the five.
And your bird feeder is like, I don't know what to do with this.
I don't see that network because it can't see that network.
So you go into your Eero settings and these are the settings I was mentioning
for for Larry to try temporarily.
And you go in and you say, I want this to be two point four gigahertz only.
And it'll do that for five minutes. and then your iPhone does connect to the
2.4 and then your iPhone gets to hand off the 2.4 Mac address to your bird feeder
and your bird feeder is super happy because it's like, I see a network and then it connects.
And then when the Eero turns five gigahertz back on, it doesn't matter.
Your iPhone reconnects to five gigahertz, but your bird feeder already has the
information it needs and for 2.4 and it stays there.
So that's what you did. You didn't need a guest network.
I don't think you just needed the, and it's in like troubleshooting and yeah. So.
Uh, Adam, your comment made me think of something that I had not thought of
Dave, which is again, we don't, we weren't provided any specs on what these
devices were, the Apple TV or the Roku.
He says it was an old Apple TV.
How old an Apple TV? Because if it's an Apple TV, second generation, it's 802.11 N.
If it's an HD second generation, it's 802.11 AX Wi-Fi 6. Like,
so does he have a Wi-Fi 6 Roku in a, you know, 80 to 11?
Could be the opposite of what we're talking about here. That's right. Exactly.
That's what I mean. Yeah, that's fair. Maybe the Apple TV is not working because
it's like really old Wi-Fi technology.
Yeah, yeah. It's not got the bandwidth to get through that wall.
Yeah. So, you know, that could be the right answer from the genius bar.
Again, I don't know. I'm speculating. Like, it could be, yeah,
exactly the opposite of what you're talking about.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
To a certain degree so sure
All right moving on we've been here for 15 minutes so no problem,
well no it's a good discussion but but like we can there is this temptation
uh to go all day yeah well and to just start asking related questions and to
get farther and farther off the tangents and there is value to that but at some
point we just need to like come back home Yeah.
So here we go. Father John has a question.
Let's go.
Father John wrote in. Yeah. He said, I remember last summer at Mac stock,
someone asked about putting icons back in the place where they were before the Mac went to sleep.
I suggested a program called desktop icon manager, D I M.
I put it in my dock, and each time after my Mac sleeps, I have to run it to
get the icons to the proper place, the place I set them in DIM.
My question is, can there be a shortcut that automatically runs when I wake my Mac from sleep?
So really, I don't have to do anything but just wake my Mac.
Thanks, as always, for all the great help you do for all the Mac family each week.
See you in July at MacStock, Father John.
Yeah, I hope we can all make it to MacStock. I look forward to that. I enjoy that every year.
So I looked at desktop icon manager first because I thought,
well, maybe there's a feature here that we just don't know about.
And no, it does not have any like wake from sleep thing.
It has an automatically restore icon positions at start and then quit if you
want. So you could set it that way.
But again, the app has to launch in order for it to do its job.
So how do we tell it to do its job?
As Father John points out, shortcuts automation on the Mac, which I'm glad we
have, still does not have a wake trigger, right?
So there is no way that I know of using stuff built into the Mac to trigger
a shortcut on system wake. There might be.
As I'm saying those words out loud, my brain is churning.
But where my brain originally churned towards was, of course,
Keyboard Maestro. Keyboard Maestro does have a wake trigger.
And with that wake trigger, you can launch an app. And so you set Desktop Icon
Manager to automatically restore icon positions at start.
And then you check the other box that says, and then quit.
So that when your Mac wakes up, the app isn't running.
You tell it, please go do this by waking up and having Keyboard Maestro launch
the app. The app launches, does its job, and then quits.
And you're good to go. Does require you to buy Keyboard Maestro.
But I've long said that I think I used to say that keyboard maestro is the future
of automation on the Mac.
I believe that was true back then. And now I believe it's the present of automation on the Mac.
But like, yeah, like shortcuts is getting better.
The fact that shortcuts has any automations at all on the Mac is new and welcomed and wonderful.
And my guess is, you know, within a couple of iterations of Mac OS,
there will be a wake trigger, for example.
That's what I have. Adam, do you have any thoughts about a wake trigger device
that might be built into the Mac that I'm not thinking of?
Not one that's built in, but I quickly did some Googling, and I'm trying to
see if this would do it. I think it might.
It looks like there is a lightweight daemon called Advanced Sleep Watcher that
listens for sleep, wake, and idle events and can run custom scripts at each stage.
I mean, you'll have to install it with Homebrew or something like that.
Okay.
You can create triggers to run...
So scripts, command line scripts, I don't know about specifically running,
but I mean, you could write a command line script to open an application.
I believe the command is just open application name.
Yeah, open path name. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting.
I don't know if you found the link already.
I did, yeah.
But I can provide it.
It's called SleepWatcher and then Advanced SleepWatcher. It can trigger any
script or command on sleep, wake, or even idle.
So there you go. that would that would be yet another way to do it yep yep.
I mean you're gonna have to do a little programming
It's a little nerdy right yeah for sure yeah yeah.
Keyboard maestro isn't though
I mean keyboard well it's nerdy in a different way yeah way less nerdy than
this yeah okay fair enough yeah yeah because keyboard maestro you're dragging
things and and like choosing actions and all of that which is which is like
very visual this is not very visual but so yeah.
Then i mean there's a command to open an apple script so i would assume there's
a command line tool to run a shortcut at this point right is there not
Um there is yeah it's i don't know it off the top of my head but there definitely
is a command line cool tool run a shortcut but also to your point you would
just put in open and the the path name to the app and then in this case in this
case yeah Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.
But yes, there is a command line tool to run a shortcut because I remember before
Keyboard Maestro got direct access to running shortcuts, I was using that command
line thing to run a shortcut.
And I forget what it is. So I'm not even going to guess at it. But yeah.
Yeah, that's great. Yeah, that that would work. I'm trying to think if there's
like launch D can be set to trigger something on week.
I mean, I know launch D can be set to keep an app running, but we don't want
that here because then if we
did that, it would just constantly be like relaunch, relaunch, relaunch.
Hey, by the way, relaunch, you know, and so that wouldn't be so good.
I mean, you could set it on a timer
so that, you know, once an hour it relaunches this app and, you know,
like there's a hack, but, but I don't know everything there is to know about
launch D if, in case that's not obvious.
So there might be something where you could write it launch demon scripts or
description P list, uh, to definition, I guess this would be the name of it
to, uh, to, to activate on wake.
Like that seems like a thing but I don't know it so you know an exercise for
the listener ask your favorite chatbot as long as you know your chatbot knows
how to do those things I think.
What Dave's trying to say is if you know send it to us at feedback at MacGeekCab.com
Pete was that feedback at MacGeekCab.com
It was feedback at MacGeekCab.com thanks Dave yeah of course always here batting clean.
Michael has a question.
He says, hey, gang, hola from the Dominican Republic. Cool.
Whenever I travel, I always have to do some work. That's too bad.
But we all kind of have been in that position, I think, at one point or another.
I have my trusted VPN, ExpressVPN, on whenever I'm online. And when I do, I pretend I'm in the U.S.
Interestingly, I've been having issues logging into some sites.
For example, Buffer, Apple Maps, and even searching on Safari while in one U.S.
City or another, D.C. and Dallas, for example.
Then, when I flipped to Canada, no issue.
Hmm.
Maybe Pete has a thought or is in the U.S.
Under some, or is the U.S. rather, under some sort of cyber attack.
I don't think we are, but I mean, there is stuff happening. So in the world
where someone might want to cyber attack us.
Si. Hola, Michael. Por supuesto. Que probablemente... Oh, no, okay.
What you're probably seeing, in my humble opinion, is anyone who runs a VPN,
like ExpressVPN, PIA VPN, that
sort of thing, will occasionally go to a website and get some pushback.
And I think it's just the trust of the exit node. When there's thousands of
us on the same VPN server sharing that IP address,
you know, you got bots, normal people, and the address gets flagged.
And it starts treating it as suspicious. And I think it's just a matter of the
amount of traffic from a given server that you're on. And my first thing I would
try, if you want to stay in the U.S., is try another U.S.-located server.
And if you're continuing to get pushback on it, then you obviously found the
answer by going to a Canadian server that isn't being overwhelmed by people
abusing the system. So that's my humble opinion.
Dave, Adam, any of you guys are in there?
That's the pushback I've seen.
I would agree with that. But yeah, some outbound nodes are known to be VPN nodes
and some are not yet known to be VPN nodes.
And then sometimes you get an IP address at your house that was used to be known
as a VPN node and you can't buy concert tickets.
No tickets for you.
No tickets for me. Yeah. So yeah, like, yes, I would agree with that.
I never leave home guys. So I don't have to VPN too much other than for work.
I just have to VPN into Pete's house to buy concert tickets.
That's the only thing I need to do.
There you go.
Yep. Now I'm going to be not able to buy concert tickets. Thanks Dave.
No, you know, as we're having this conversation though, it's interesting.
Cause I, I had no trouble for years and years. And then I switched my ISP to
a breeze line, which is who I'm back with now, by the way.
But when I first switched to them, they had just bought this block of IPs we
talked about on the show.
And I started having like sinisterly weird problems.
Like they wouldn't, they weren't persistent, but every now and then it took
a couple of months for me to realize what was going on.
It was finally when I went to buy concert tickets and I got in like the queue
and it was like, all right, I'm, you know, number 13 and now you're number one and you're next.
And it was like, you're on a VPN. Like, no, I'm not on a VPN.
I know my frigging network. don't tell me what i'm doing and it took me a little
while to realize you know that oh you my new provider is new to new hampshire
and they just bought this block of ips from uh.
Formerly nefarious or maybe nefarious vpn provider i don't know if they were
formerly nefarious or not uh or if they still are nefarious still are yeah exactly
but a lot of these vpn providers realized that the most valuable item on their
balance sheet was their blocks of ipv4 addresses.
So they started selling them off, which is really smart. And.
And I worked with my ISP who confirmed it.
I worked with Ticketmaster who confirmed it. But, you know, they were slow to
like update their system, which they should because IPs move around all the time.
And eventually they did. Right. And our IP range is no longer blocked.
But I moved back to Fidium for a little while and then and then came back to BreezeLine.
But I've had problems buying tickets. And now my account is flagged.
And I wonder if my account got flagged back when I was doing all the testing
for this Breeze Line Ticketmaster issue.
And they saw like, oh, hey, this this guy with this, this account with this
email address keeps getting flagged because they're known they scammer slash bot.
But and because I was testing so frequently, I wonder if my account wound up
getting flagged for this because I now like Lisa and I will be in the same house,
same IP address, and she'll be able to get right through my tickets and I will
get to the same point. And it's like, no, you're a bad, bad man.
And I'm like, if you look at my freaking account history, but I'm thinking my
purchase history, you will see that I am a very good customer.
Like I'm the guy you want to reach out to and make sure I know.
Like I spent a lot of fricking money on concert tickets, but my guess is they
are looking at my account history.
They're just not looking at the part I thought they were looking at.
And they even told me.
I'm like, should I create a new account? And they're like, yes.
I'm like, but that goes against your terms of service.
Like, now you're telling me to violate your terms of service.
But I think I understand now why
they might have been. It was just in this moment. Like, it dawned on me.
Yeah, it makes sense, doesn't it?
Oh, they're like, don't do the thing that got you banned. And I'm like,
I don't freaking know what got me banned.
Like, you know, if I did, I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't do it. And I understand.
I don't understand this. I understand why companies think they don't want to
tell you, tell bad actors what they did because they think, well,
if I tell you what you did, then you'll know how to skirt around the problem.
It's like bad actors know exactly what they did. They're bad actors.
You're not telling them anything they don't know. but
like when you've got somebody like me who's like it's like
proven to be a good customer and knowledgeable about tech
stuff and i'm saying to you in various different
ways i don't know it's kind of okay
to tell them and i and and it's a decision i had to i had
to make recently with another company we have where we get like people
that are trying to like scam us and and there was a corporate policy that we
had where it was like we're not going to tell people what they did and like
we're definitely going to tell people what they did we're definitely going to
and it's worked out amazingly well for us because it stops them from doing it
because they know what they did and when they know that we know what they did
then it's like okay conversation the argument's over
there's nothing to argue about it's like oh but if they told me oh you kept
beating on the door it was like i did keep beating on the door so now i'm still
assuming but yeah this makes sense anyway thank you for coming to my uh what
was this geek therapy well i think that i think that's what That's what it was, nerd therapy.
But what are your thoughts adam i i'm curious as to no.
My thought is this is an industry that's ripe for disruption
Oh yeah yeah.
It's what my thought is
But it but it's not gonna be like they are working very hard to make sure it
can't be disrupted back in oh yeah back in just by.
Their prime target
Yes but like it's not to relitigate
all this but back in the fall ticketmaster closed
their trade desk platform which was very
lucrative for them and it was essentially a platform for scalpers or
ticket agents whatever you want to call them ticket
brokers uh to use to to buy and sell tickets in bulk and that was the subject
of i think a canadian um expose and they realized that ticketmaster was encouraging
people to have multiple accounts and do all this these things so that they can
make Ticketmaster more money.
And they closed without being forced to.
They closed down Trade Desk to avoid any further legal digging or action because
the last thing they want is to be broken up as a monopoly,
because they own the venues as Live Nation and they own the ticketing platform
as Ticketmaster and the venues get to pick the ticketing platform and therefore
everybody has to use Ticketmaster. And that's not true.
It's not everybody. There's an asterisk there. It's like AXS that has some stuff
on the West Coast. And now we're way deep in the weeds of the ticketing industry.
But it's, it's, um, yeah, you're right that they are ripe for disruption and
they are doing everything they can to ensure that there's no option to be disrupted. Yeah.
But that's, you know, that's how it goes. So geek therapy, ticket buyer therapy, concert goer therapy.
And now I want to change gears completely. We do have more questions.
We've got some NAS questions.
So we'll do some NAS therapy. And the next thing that I want to do is we want
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All right. We had some geek therapy. And now, what did you want to call this
segment? What time is it, Adam?
Oh, here it is.
It's time for getting nasty.
I like it. All right. Let's get nasty here. Yeah. Let's go. beat.
Oh, goodness. All right. I have it here under notes. Where's my notes? There's notes.
Guys, help! I bought a new Synology at the end of 2025.
I've been using a 416 Play for almost 10 years, and the two drives are about
seven years old, and it seemed like a good time to make the move.
But the migration to a new Synology is very, very difficult. It is indeed.
I have been driving a Mac since the Mac Plus. Use Keyboard Maestro,
Alfred, Homebridge, etc.
I'm ready to give up and get a Mac Mini and a couple of hard drives.
Thoughts? Is there an easy way to migrate that I don't know?
Should I cut my losses and move on? Thanks, Patrick.
Yeah. So I dug into this a little bit.
Synology has a migration assistant, right? And it is almost,
well, they have two things.
They have a migration path that is ridiculously easy.
What you do is you take the drives from your old Synology and in the same order,
you move them to your new Synology. And I can't stress enough how important that order is.
If you forget the order, I recommend either moving the drives one at a time.
Drive bay one to drive bay one, drive bay two to drive bay two.
But if you're going to take them out, label them when you take them out.
Either way, just make sure you don't mess up the order.
And if you do that and then you power on the new one, it'll come up.
It'll offer to upgrade the operating system on it to match whatever the new one is.
And in general, it just kind of takes your installation and is now running it on the new Synology.
If there's a capability mismatch, if you're downgrading in capabilities,
that can be a little bit of an issue. But otherwise, yes.
However, if as part, and I believe Patrick is wanting to do this,
as part of the migration to a new unit, you want to start on a fresh batch of
new drives. and there's great reason to want to do this.
But if you want to start on a fresh batch of new drives, then it is on you,
of course, to figure out how to migrate your data over.
And that's where I was going next,
is that Synology does have a migration assistant that is built to do this.
You run it on both NASes and it grabs your settings and app data and your user
data and all your configuration stuff and moves it over.
Except it doesn't run on the 4.16 play, which is his old unit.
And I don't know why this is.
I wish I had an answer to that. Seems like you just want to be able to make it run on everything.
But who knows? Maybe there was a CPU limitation of how they wrote Migration
Assistant on the Synology or whatever world that is.
He doesn't have that option. And so, yes, this is a manual process.
And I wish I could say, like, on the Mac, you know, it's not as bad as you think,
the whole nuke and pave thing.
And it might be not as bad as we think, but I've never done it.
I've always just migrated my stuff over by moving the drives and dealt with
the consequences of that for better and for worse over the years.
So um but that
i mean you know the way i would approach it is
okay i know where all my data is stored you have your
shared volumes and you have your user folders that's essentially where
your data is going to be and the good news is you have the old unit with the old drive
so if you forget something it's right there you just move it over um they
are on the network the the real trick would be apps and
configurations and that's one of
those things where i would just look and say okay what apps do i run
on my old one that i actually use because
you might have installed some things that you're not really using or whatever and and
then i would one by one install those and then go through the
settings screens and you know
have them up in two different browser windows and just
go back and forth and be like oh yep check this box uncheck that
box yada yada name it this go here do that and
like a nuke and pave that will sort of force an audit uh by you of what you're
running and you might actually make things more efficient and more reliable
so that that's my that's my thing adam.
Uh, so question, and maybe this is my naive brain, but I was a little confused
by this question when it came up because exactly what you just described.
When I did my upgrade, I did the move the drives over to the new unit and it
was like super simple and I was like done and it did its thing.
And that was the end of it.
Um, I did have new drives that I ended up not using.
My question would be and granted I think this would take a lot longer to get
the new drives migrated to but is there a world where you do the easy path to
get the Synology up and running and then
just start swapping in drives and letting it rebuild and then swap in the next
one and let it do its thing and then swap in the next and then eventually you
have all the new drives that
Also takes a few days Yeah,
But I mean, it's no big deal. You're just like, oh yeah.
You're not doing the work.
Right, you're not doing the work. Yeah, exactly. And clearly your old drives
have enough space on them for your old data to sort of, you know,
by definition of the laws of the universe.
And so, yeah, like that would be, boy, now that you say it out loud, that's the answer.
Yeah, yeah, we can just erase everything else and Patrick's becomes like a 30 second question.
The problem is that I recall, I did this recently with my 415 play.
I put in four 8-terabyte drives, and it turns out that no matter what,
the 415 doesn't go above, I want to say, 24 terabytes.
And so I got there, and I wound up having to put an entirely new volume on it
as well in order to take advantage of the fact that I had 32 terabytes worth of drives.
Yes. That would, if you're, yes.
So check ahead of time what your ceiling is.
Yeah, the limitations of the volume that you created on the original NAS would carry over.
So if for example it was you
know ext4 and you wanted btrfs as
the file system that's not going to be in that's not going to happen when you
when you do it the way you described adam when you just do the in-place replacement
if you you know you want to and i i suppose now that we're saying this there
was one time when i did this manual data move because i wanted to move from ext4 to btrfs,
and uh and that has paid off because i forgot about it and it's been it's been
basically smooth sailing ever since other than that one issue i had but we won't
go into that um self-inflicted wounds but um.
Yeah. Yeah. So, but it really, so I have done this now that I say it and it,
it wasn't, it was, you know, I budgeted a Saturday afternoon for it and, um,
it probably, you know, I don't have a recollection of it spilling into now it's
Tuesday and, you know, I haven't showered and my family's just,
you know, bringing me food.
Uh it wasn't one of those you know scenarios so
it was you know that having
two screens is is really probably the best thing and just
you know go back and forth and there is there is benefit
to getting on the latest volumes you
know file system and then also to
your point pete creating a new volume from from scratch you get all the benefits
you get the whatever the eight gig system partition size instead of the one
gig system partition size right out of the gate which is really good for all
the reasons that the self-inflicted wounds I said we weren't going to talk about so yeah,
i think i think there is benefit to that but all right a lot of options yeah
yeah we have more we said we were going to get nasty we can't just have one more question oh.
We're getting nasty yeah mike wants to get nasty he says hi i need a sonality
i need a sonality disk station so my data is redundantly saved i have about
21 terabytes of info right now i will use it for storage safe,
redundantly saved storage.
What would you recommend I buy? I would like something that is reasonably priced
and that I can grow with storage-wise.
Also, I know there are certain drives that are recommended to be used with the disk station.
What drives should I buy and how big should each drive be so that I have room to expand?
I've used Western Digital Red in the past. where should i buy everything from
i'm guessing amazon so he's got quite a few
Questions there yeah for us yeah um so
there's a couple these are great questions right he's what he said 21 terabytes
of of data that's a lot of data right but with the right size drives you could
definitely get away with a four bay synology on this a four bay nas i should
say um and so you know to me it's the,
is it the 425 plus,
the 925 plus, or maybe the 1525 plus, right?
Um, note that none of the 2025 and later Synology units support hardware transcoding,
um, on Plex because of Synology's decision not to pay the Intel licensing fees
for use of the GPU for transcoding, even though the GPU is right there.
So there's no hack around this, I suppose.
I mean, I guess if you were to compile your own kernels and do things,
maybe, but, uh, it's not going to happen. Right.
So that's something to bear in mind. but um
those are the units and i'll put a link to kind
of the synology comparison tool uh where
those units are all uh right up there so you can kind of get a sense of of how
many drive bays are in any of these and i put the 1823 xs plus up on there too
in case you want to go with like way more drive bays but it's either four or five bays um.
The CPU doesn't really, I used to lean towards the Intels because of the hardware transcoding,
but the AMD Ryzen CPUs are great, sort of this class of Synology NAS in terms of CPU horsepower.
So kind of pick the one that fits for how many drives you want to get and how
many, you know, what you want to do there.
But that that's what i would do and then also synology has
this uh this raid calculator that
allows you to see how much storage you're
going to get with the drives
that you're going to put in and it's it's
kind of fun to play with but it it will show
you okay look you know if if you're going to put in you
know three four terabyte drives and one six terabyte drive
how much storage am I going to get out of this and
how much storage am I going to be sort of
leaving for the future you know unused space if it were right and and and you
will have some unused space if you have mismatched size drives in some cases
Synology allows them with their SHR RAID type, the Synology Hybrid RAID, which is great.
But what will happen is you need to have.
Every drive needs to have at least another drive in your array that is the same
size in order for it to be protected.
And you need to be for one drive of fault tolerance. So if you have all four
terabyte drives, great.
If you have two four terabyte drives and two six terabyte drives, great.
That all works fine. You're not wasting any space, right? Because every drive
has at least another drive in there that's the same size.
But if you have three four terabyte drives and one six terabyte drive,
you're going to have about two terabytes of unused space. It's not wasted space. It's unused space.
Because if you were when you one of those four terabyte drives either fills
up or if you want more storage or it dies.
Right. And you replace it. Well, now you get to take advantage of that extra
storage that has just been sitting there when you put a six terabyte or larger drive in.
I will often upgrade you and you always one rule with Synology is you have to
when you put a new drive in on the same volume,
it has to be the same size or larger than your largest drive.
So what I often do is just keep upgrading when I have to replace a drive.
I take whatever my largest drive is and I put something in that's bigger than
that because that forces me down a path where I'm going to keep expanding my storage.
Um, it's gotten to be an expensive habit, by the way, but it,
but it, but it works, right. It keeps me moving forward.
Uh, there's always unused space, but that's okay.
Like it's, you know, it's fine. I, I, I, I'm banking on the future with that and it, and it works.
I say there's always a new space. That's not, that's not necessarily the case.
As long as my drives, you know, only when there's one drive that's larger than
the rest, But sometimes it'll be like, all right, well, there's two drives that I need to replace.
So I'll replace them both with, you know, 20 terabyte drives. And okay, fine.
But those 20 terabyte drives don't come cheap. Now I don't know what we're up to on the Macs.
So there were other questions though, right? Was there something else? Which drives to get.
Which drives to get? Yeah.
Yeah. Don't get, uh,
desktop grade drives um you want to buy nas rated drives or or at least enterprise grade drives,
because these are going to be running all the time and
your desktop i i've used a nas with desktop
grade drives it's i mean it works but they
die fast they're just not built to be
beat on like a nas is going to beat on a drive so getting
nas grade drives i think the western digital reds are
those um the seagate makes
a couple i really like the seagate exos exos drives
those are what i've kind of standardized down in mine there's the iron wolf
drives i had issues i i got a i think i got some of like the beta or you know
early release iron wolf drives i had a lot of problems with iron wolf drives
early on so much so that i just stopped buying them other people have said they
work great for them so your mileage may vary uh might be different than mine.
Um, but, uh, but I, I couldn't wait to get those iron wolf drives out of my,
out of my seat, out of my Synology and get them over to the XOS drives were great.
And you know, I, like I, I, it's been a little while since I bought a drive.
So I don't want to, uh, say, but you can find them on Amazon.
You can find them on new egg.
B and H photo sometimes has drives. Um, there are times there was a long time
where I was buying the Seagate,
like you could buy that whatever size it was you know
let's say it was 300 bucks for the the 12 terabyte exos
drive i think it was a 16 terabyte exos drive if you were buying it
bare metal which is what you need right to put in the the synology at
the same time for 210 you could
buy the 16 terabyte external seagate drive which
if you crack the case open was a 16 terabyte exos right inside and so i was
like all right well i don't mind cracking the case open and just stripping the
drive out so you shuck the case and you know put the drive in and it was okay
two hundred and ten dollars instead of 300 but i don't know if that's the case
now no pun intended so check that you know,
That's what I got.
Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, I've been buying the reds for years.
Okay. That's good to know.
And what had issues.
And, and those have worked well for you, I assume.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Good.
I, I forgot what I bought, but I bought them through Amazon.
I knew they were NAS rated.
Yeah. What do you think? Is it a beefier motor in there? You think is that the.
Um, yeah, yeah. You know, that's a really good question, Pete.
I don't know. I don't know.
I don't know. But I, I just know that it's, you know, it's built not to fail.
It's probably, I don't know. i don't want to guess but yeah.
Yeah better cooling bigger motor something
Maybe yeah engineered differently engineered differently yeah exactly we've.
Got it doesn't
Matter we've got some cool stuff found to go through and i think we've got
time to do at least a few of them right adam we got
a little bit here sure um i wanted
to mention this is like cool stuff evolved set app
now uh allows single app
purchases and single app subscription plans
uh as of a few days ago
so um or maybe a week ago now by
the time this episode comes out so uh which you
know just gives you a little bit more flexibility and uh
and all that so just wanted to share yeah
whoa okay yep very cool yep i
still well i still maintain that a setup subscription is one of
the best things you can do but um but
there there are you know setup memberships
i guess they call them which are single app memberships um and
they've they've got a whole guide on their website that explains what's what
and you know how that all works but you can buy apps in the marketplace and
uh and you can subscribe to a single app for like a month or three months or
12 months or you know whatever you want so it's interesting,
more options yep.
Yeah it's still one of the most economical
Ways as long as you're using it.
Yeah yeah yeah well there's so many apps on there how are you not using
It well obviously it's it's
easy to just to you know i will often
find myself searching for an app to
serve a purpose like like i needed a uh app
to read a markdown file and i i just am
not somebody that lives in markdown world and adam you
sent me a markdown file for instructions for a thing and
obviously you can the beauty of markdown is you can read it it's human
readable but i'm like well i want the links to be links and you
know all this stuff and i was like wait a minute let me
look and sure enough of course in setup there's there's several and i was like
oh marked that's the one i want and so i downloaded marked and good like i'm
good to go i don't have to worry about it it's a it's probably better than whatever
free app i would have found you know to it would have been maybe janky or maybe
not. I don't know. It was like, awesome. Great.
I already have it. Great. But I, like, it took me a beat to remember,
oh yeah, go search set up for that. So.
Was it you or Adam that fed all your apps into chat GPT and said,
So you could say, hey, what should I use to accomplish this?
I thought it was one of you. Maybe it was a listener.
Yeah.
They said they did that. Yeah.
All right. Moving on.
Yeah. So Mark wrote in with a cool stuff found. He says, I have been using this app and I like it.
MailBackupX at MailBackupX.com. $59. dollar and i seem to recall answering a
question to somebody about mail backup with thunderbird and yeah
Mail backup x will work for thunderbird for.
Sure yeah yeah but thunderbird already keeps everything in a way you can archive it off land use
That archive not backup like mail also keeps an archive of.
Your mail fair enough yeah okay i was thinking well i was thinking backup you
then And then you back up that folder with time machine, but that's a whole nother.
That's yes. Then you've got to figure out how to restore that.
That was the whole conversation we had.
Archive, not backup is not equal. Those are two unequal and very different things.
What do you got, Adam?
Uh-oh.
Oh, Adam's muted. That's why we don't have anything from Adam.
Open the window and shout, Adam.
I have a recommendation from Tony. I'd like to draw attention to the discussion
surrounding cellular providers.
Please, please consider U.S. Mobile.
I've been using them for six months and find them to be a geek lover's dream.
They offer innovative and competitive cellular plans that provide users with
the flexibility to switch between the three major carriers on the fly.
Unlike many other low-cost providers, their 5G offers you access to the upper bands of 5G.
Additionally, their plans incorporate eSIM and a range of advanced features
catering to the needs of tech-savvy individuals.
Interesting. Yeah, I've always been curious about US Mobile's ability to do the transfers.
Transfers and you can depending on the account
you the account tier you pay for you either
get transfers free or you pay two dollars every
time you transfer from one you know network to another
but uh but yeah that's interesting and they've got yeah yeah thanks tony tony
um also sent along a referral code which i think gets you something and gets
him something so i put the referral code in the in the show notes for uh for
tony happy to do that yeah uh yeah yeah good stuff love it um.
B.B. Werner, I was reading threads and B.B. Werner suggested to us when we were
talking about notes and things like that, that there is a it's not an app.
It's a framework called Forever Notes that is a digital note-taking method for Apple Notes.
And, yeah, it's a note-taking framework that kind of gives clarity and all of that for you,
where you use asterisks and links in different ways to just make the best of your notes. and B.B.
Werner says it has been very valuable for them.
So we recommend, or we share. We share the recommendation. There you go.
Yeah, yeah. I like it. Just a way of thinking about your notes.
Wish there was a way to see the history of my notes, but you know, change that.
Here's one from NiceFeelSteve. He says, hey guys, I just went to the Onyx website
to download and update, And I noticed that they've added some new tools that
some folks may find useful and thought I would share it with you.
So they have additional tools and updates in Onyx, I guess.
Well, it's not just I think what he was pointing out is Titanium utilities.
Titanium software has Onyx and then also maintenance and deeper and uninstaller
and CalHash and access menu and schedulizer.
Oh, I like these titles. That's fun.
They have a bunch more utilities that you can get yeah hey there's a maintenance utility and
Deeper for personalizing and uninstaller. So, yeah.
There's Schedulizer, which is a utility for macOS that lets you schedule specific
times for your Mac to start up, shut down, or go to sleep.
I wonder if it can also schedule restarts because we lost the GUI ability.
We can do it in the terminal still.
But I'll have to look into that because that's for macOS Tahoe. Huh.
Hey, can I call an audible?
Go.
Oh, because I want to point out something that came up for me the other day,
and it may save people a lot of money if you're on the Apple Plus subscription
or whatever. What do they call Apple?
Apple One. Apple One. Apple One. If you're on the Apple One,
I don't know if it's available to all tiers, but it popped up as I was in system
preferences, and they kind of pop up ads now to a certain degree.
So it popped up an ad and it said, oh, I was looking at my AppleCare because
I was trying to figure out if I still had devices that were on AppleCare that
I don't really use or own anymore. And I was trying to save some money.
And it popped up and it said, hey, you could save money if you switch to the
new AppleCare Plus on your one subscription because it covers up to three devices for $20 a month.
Yep.
And so I was paying, I think, $10 for an iPhone and $10 for some other device.
But my Apple Vision Pro, and I thought it didn't cover Apple Vision Pro because
my Apple Vision Pro is $24.99 a month, just the Apple Vision Pro.
And so I switched, it canceled and refunded partials on my old month-to-month
subscriptions, or I think I had one that was a one-year subscription and one
that was still a month-to-month.
And I put all three on my AppleCare one subscription for $20 a month. So I went from
$44 a month, $44.99 or whatever, $44.97 it probably was, down to $20 a month for three devices.
Wow.
Covered.
And so this is the AppleCare Plus multi-device subscription.
For AppleCare, that covers up to three devices.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And it had a great interface for doing it. Like when I went through it,
it had a little wizard and it said, okay, what's the first device you want to cover?
And you pick that. It's like, what's the second device you want to cover?
And you pick that. And then what's the third device you want to cover?
You pick that. And I said, all right, switch over. And then I got emails.
It's like, well, we canceled this one. We canceled this one.
Oh, and you still had partial month on this one. So here's another $4.99 back.
And it,
And I had the same great experience because instead of putting all that money
into one policy for my Vision Pro,
I decided to go to the subscription model and it gave me a refund for what was left on my MacBook Pro.
And yeah, it
Was my MacBook Pro. Yeah, yeah. So I covered my MacBook Pro,
my iPhone and my Apple Vision for 20 bucks a month.
That's awesome.
And I think I could be wrong does it Adam do you know does it just keep going
until you stop paying for it yes
Yeah just like I've gone to month to month for the life of my device for all
my stuff I know you can still do the you know X number of years up front however
you want to do it when you buy AppleCare but I've switched to the month to month because
I'm keeping my devices for longer so I don't want my AppleCare to end after go away
After two years yeah amazing Amazing.
And yeah, they prorated my refund and everything. It was great.
Love it.
What I didn't put on there was my watch, and I'm probably going to need a new
battery within a year or so. Oh, well.
Yeah, I didn't put my AirPods Pro on there because that was like $10 a month, and I'm like,
Why am I.
Paying $10 a month for my AirPods Pro?
Yeah, exactly.
I'm just going to replace them if something happens. I'm just going to buy a new pair.
All right, I'm going to squeeze one last cool stuff found in,
and then we're going to ripcord this because it's how we're going to do it.
Wi-Fi Toolkit from TP-Link is you don't need a TP-Link router to use it,
and it lets you do speed tests, but also you can see other devices on your network.
It's a really cool thing that you can see, you know, what do you see when you're on your hotel network?
You can scan for devices. It's a really cool little utility.
You can do ping tests and it's free. So Wi-Fi toolkit.
That's awesome. It is. Like it's, it's one of those things. It's like,
okay, we need this utility. And I just happened to stumble into it when I was
testing the TP-Link Deco.
And sure enough, I was like, right, there we are.
Great. Dave, you say Wi-Fi toolkit. I say, why not Wi-Fi toolkit?
There you go. Love it. Love it. I like it. It's great.
Thanks for hanging out, everybody. Thanks for everything. Your cool stuff found,
your questions, your tips.
That's what keeps the show rocking thanks for checking out
our sponsors and seeing if they've got something for you thanks to
cashfly for all the bandwidth thanks to rogue amoeba for our giveaway this month
at macgeekgub.com slash giveaway you can win a copy of sound source so go register
for that while that's still running if you need more of adam debut film podcast more p,
so there i was more me business brain gig gab,
Go check out the Mac Geek of iOS app. Another update should be coming out.
We're just waiting on Apple.
But this is just a couple of little polish. Pete's shirt. Adam, what's it say?
Unlike me during this episode with a couple of audio things, don't get caught.
Me too. Oops. Made on the back. See you, folks.
See you, folks.
Later.
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