It's time for Mac Geek Cab, and listener Bill brings us our quick tip of the week.
He says there was a discussion recently about whether or not PDF documents would
open in a separate tab or a separate window in the Preview app.
Being on Mac OS 26 alone does not determine this behavior.
The behavior is controlled by system settings, desktop and dock,
Windows, and then the option prefer tabs when opening documents.
There are then three options for this setting.
Never, always, and in full screen.
The default appears to be full screen. He says, I have changed mine to always
because in most circumstances, I prefer to keep the number of windows open to a minimum.
If I want a separate window, I just drag a tab out and of course, a new window will form.
Note that this setting is system wide so that it impacts most apps,
not just preview. This includes Safari pages, numbers, and a host of others.
Although Safari has its own little setting that sometimes can override this.
More quick tips like this, plus your questions answered today on MacGeekUp 1135
for Monday, March 30th, National Pencil Day, 2026.
Greetings, folks, and welcome to Matt Geekgab, the show where you send in tips
like that, we share. You send in cool stuff found, we share.
You send in questions, we share them, we talk about answers.
The goal being every single one of us gets to learn at least five new things
every single time we get together.
Our sponsors for this episode include BB Edit from Barebones Software at barebones.com
and Stamps.com, where you can use code MGG to get 60 days risk-free.
No long lines no supplies open anytime we'll talk more about both of those in
a little bit for now here in Durham New Hampshire I'm Dave Hamilton
And here in South Dakota, I'm Adam Christensen.
And here also in New Hampshire, it's Pilot Pete back from Texas after a four,
count them, four-hour wait in the security line in Houston.
Oh, you were flying out of Houston, that's right.
Yeah, I got the short end of that long line.
Yeah, it seems like there's, because people were asking me when I traveled back
from South by, they're like, oh my gosh, the security lines.
I'm like, no, I think this is one of those things where it's happening at just
enough airports that it gets national attention, but really it's limited to
a select few airports because Logan and Austin,
which is, I mean, Austin's not that far from Houston of a drive.
In fact, it's less than a four hour drive from Houston, Pete.
Right. But the day prior, they were counting three hour lines.
I'm like, well, by the time I drive there and have to wait.
It's about right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
So it's always something. You know, we breezed right through in Dallas.
We breezed right through in Logan.
But Houston closed, pre-check, and four hours of pain.
It was special fun. I don't think I've ever stood in line for anything for four hours of my life.
Yeah, I don't think I've done a four-hour roller coaster line. That's not.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Did the pilot at least make the plane ride fun like a roller coaster for you?
Oh, yeah, absolutely. Okay, great. You know, some loops and rolls. Okay.
Well, then, I mean, you know, then that's worth it. That's great.
Everyone was screaming.
Go ahead, Adam.
I was going to say, I am always ready for National Pencil Day.
I use mechanical pencil almost exclusively as my writing instrument.
That's...
This is my favorite, the Pentel Twister Ace.
And I have to use a 0.9 lead because otherwise I'd break the leads.
Huh.
Pentel Twister Race.
And then Zoe said, Zoe Brings Bacon said, Apple Pencil Day?
And it's funny because I actually have Apple pencils from the Cupertino Apple store.
So I have read actual wood and graphite pencils with Apple logos on them.
Oh, like Apple pencils, not pencils, lowercase P. Yes.
Yes.
Nice. Huh.
Interesting. All right. I like it.
That's good. Well, now you can use your pencils tomorrow on National Backup
Day to write down everything that's on your hard drive.
It's World Backup Day, Pete. World Backup Day. There's no borders on backups.
No, right.
No borders on backups.
So break out your pencils and write down everything on your computer.
Uh that's the way to do it if you get started today you could finish by tomorrow
or a year from tomorrow maybe there
Might be there's that whole linear timeline.
Thing there might be better there might be better ways of uh of backing up i
i know we've talked about our backup strategies
many times over the years has any
is there anything new that any of us are doing in terms of our backups now than
the versus a year ago and i realize i'm putting us all on the spot i did not
prep anything with this question in mind either but i just hope yeah i add a
lot more hope to it okay um
No actually one of the things i did recently do because i've got the two nas
drives running i i do mirror now i don't it's not really a backup but i do mirror
one of the folders on my nas drives so that.
Um
Not ideal, because if you delete something on one, it's going to delete it on the other.
Yes, right.
But I have it in two places. So it's more of if two drives fail,
then I'm not going to lose it.
So for different scenarios. Yeah, yeah. Back up in layers.
Yep.
I'm not really doing anything different, I don't think.
I almost did because of our conversation about when my chatbot ate my inbox.
Uh-huh. i thought well i need to
be more intentional about backing up my
email it just so happened that that same
week i had a conference like just a phone
conversation scheduled with the cto of fast mail uh because we had mentioned
him on the show a couple times and they're like oh we'd like to make sure you're
like up to speed on things and it was smart you know and i i mentioned i'm like
hey look just so you know you're going to get a notification that you know my
chatbot ate my inbox and FastMail is mentioned there,
but it wasn't your fault. Like this is, you know, self-inflicted wound.
No one's to blame except Dave. And I said, but it is interesting because it
highlights the fact that email is not,
you know, it is sync only with a server and there are no like,
it's not like Dropbox where you can go and see the 30 days of history or what have you.
And he said, well, that's true about many email providers. He says,
but that's not true about fast mail.
And I said, oh, and he says, yes.
He says, if you go into your fast mail interface and go to options,
restore from backup, they take
a daily incremental snapshot of all emails and keep them for one week.
And in addition to that, like I could have, I went in and for like the previous,
for the six days prior to today, that is true. I think it's one backup per day.
For today, I can go back 30 minutes, an hour, two hours, four hours, six hours.
I may be off on the increments, but there are increments that are much more
granular than just one day.
So you can easily go back in time on your Fastmail, which I thought was really interesting.
And it just brings back the things that have been deleted. It doesn't change
anything else. So I thought that was really interesting.
So i didn't have to change my backup routine about my email so there you go but that's why
anyway fantastic i know oh yeah yeah yeah
but we all need to be aware of what's happening to our email we have some we
have some email tips to get to should we get back to our uh our quick tips oh
um last day of the or last two days of the sound source giveaway from rogue
amoeba at macgeekup.com slash giveaway.
So make sure you sign up for that before it ends. Got to be in it to win it,
Folks.
Yep.
Yeah.
All right. What? All right. We're good, right? Back to Quick Tips.
We are. In fact, I'm going to do one now.
And this one's mine. I forget from whence I was inspired it,
but I frequently go around with one AirPod in.
And for the longest time, you couldn't do this.
And it made it more difficult to hear, but now you can do this.
Use noise cancellation with an AirPod in only one ear.
You go to settings, you have to have your AirPod in and on in order to get it
at the top of settings. But in iOS, go to Settings, AirPods,
and then Accessibility.
And then select Enable Noise Cancellation with One, AirPod.
It works on any AirPod that has active noise cancellation. So it's going to
be the AirPods Pro, first, second, third generation.
AirPods 4 with active noise cancellation. And that's not an all-inclusive list, I don't think.
But anything with active noise cancellation now, iOS allows you to use one ear
noise cancellation, which makes it so much nicer to be able to hear even with only one ear.
It's amazing how much louder, how much clearer it is.
I've never tried that, but I imagine, I mean, I believe what you're saying.
Like that makes a lot of sense. Yeah.
Yeah, it's fantastic. And I believe,
my recollection is, is similar to having it in both ears, you can long press
the stem to get it to go back and forth between transparency and noise cancellation.
If you have the stem set that way, you can have your right stem and left stem
set for different functions. That's true.
So I would assume that that persists.
So, yeah, but you're right. Yep.
And that's what I have mine set for. A long press takes you between transparency
mode and active noise cancellation.
Yep. Do you use adaptive mode ever, Pete?
No, I don't. I should. Yeah. I should.
Although, we saw Laney Wilson whilst at the Houston Rodeo, and I used them for
listening to the concert in transparency mode, and still limited me to 80 decibels,
and everybody around me was complaining about the noise, and I was loving it.
I'm just going, guys, I'm telling you, do this.
Do you have something to say about that, Adam?
No, it's just, I mean, I started using them for that, for concerts and loud
noise situations, and it's fabulous.
It's fabulous.
That's all I can say.
Yep. The one thing I have learned is you need to have a good seal.
I i know this will sound obvious when
i as i'm saying it but when you when you
don't have a good seal with regular passive earplugs
sound just leaks in when you don't have a good seal
with airpods these are not regular
passive earplugs they are doing active things i wind
up hearing a lot of like terrible low-end
distortion uh from like the the kick
drum or the the you know the bass guitar or whatever uh
so that's it that's my instant indicator that
my airpods are not sealed properly and then i i kind
of either take them out and reseal them or you know do something to move them
around to get them back in uh and and for me the only way i get a good seal
is uh to use the comply foam tips uh the apples i don't have airpods i don't
have the latest airpods pro Uh,
so it's possible that the, that the foam tips that come with,
with Apple stuff would be fine for me, but, uh, using, using the comply foam tips, uh, for AirPods,
it was life-changing for me.
Yeah. Let me offer this then though. I've got the latest AirPods pro and I have
found that when I go for a run and I have those in tightly,
it almost sounds like the bass kick drum, thump, thump, thump,
thump every time my foot hits.
In your head.
Yes. And it's clearly just the air is sealed in there.
And so I've got tympanic pressure happening, you know, thump, thump, thump.
And I found that if I loosen that seal a little bit and pull them out and let
them rest there more than...
Then cram them in and make that make that an airtight seal yeah i find that
that goes away for me so if you're experiencing that try loosening your airpods and.
Interesting that makes that makes really good sense um yep yep but yeah it's really
Annoying that that thump is horrible like i can't do this.
And for for using well actually
i have two things to to share about this i'm gonna find because
shocks i saw shocks at south by southwest and uh
they and and ces uh but they had something interesting at south by southwest
that i'm trying to look up here because i want to make sure i get the right
model number of this where is it why won't it find it for me um
Now I have to look online because I don't have the I don't have the video right
in front of me. But shocks are the folks that that made the bone conduction.
Love them.
Earphones. And they they have there's. OK, so there's two things from shocks
that might help for for your scenario.
I mean, it means buying something different versus loosening your AirPods, Pete.
But it at South by Southwest, I was able to test out their open dots.
One which are fascinating because they they don't go over your ear they clip
kind of on the out almost on the the like the outer ear um
Do you want me to add that to the stage Dave they're not showing.
Uh yeah please do please do thank you yeah
um so they they kind of you they clamp around your
ear but they they don't block any sound uh
they they they just so everything
from around you comes in which which is
obviously you know they kind of target people who are running
or cycling or you know amongst uh
perhaps dangerous traffic for whatever reason
right and uh and so you can hear the
music or whatever you want to listen to a podcast of course or and
still hear still have full access to
all of the sound that's around you with no filters whatsoever
and i was impressed these open dots one
which are like 160 bucks i tested them in
the conference hall at south by southwest
and they i mean they sounded
great actually they had a second booth they had they were
at some activation outside and i tested them outside
too like amongst the city street and it was like i was shocked that i heard
as much low end as i did uh but you know they're they're good at that they figured
out how to make that happen so uh so i share that for a different solution for
uh for running and that sort of thing so so yeah
So I interviewed, I reviewed some Shox OpenFit Pro from CES this year.
I don't know if they're available yet.
They are. The OpenFit Pros are also available. Yep.
They're about $100 more, and they go over the top of your ear. Right.
As someone who wears things over the top of their ear often, right?
Like in-ear monitors do that, right? They go into your ear and then come,
you know, the cord comes over the top.
Some people are fine with it. And some people that that little spot kind of
where your ear sort of rolls into the top of it can get very sensitive.
And so the I think that's we're
Not fine with it.
Well, no, I am. But like, I can see where people would would have an issue.
And that's why shocks has made both the OpenFit Pro and the Open Dots one is
like just two different ways of connecting. But yeah, the OpenFit Pros also sound great.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. My recollection on those was the, even though it's not in
your ear, the active noise cancellation on those was off the charts good.
Yep.
It was amazing.
Yep.
So, yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty good. It's pretty good. Yeah.
You know what? I had not checked, and I'm actually surprised by,
because I was wondering if you could get the Apple AirPods Pro 3 eartips for your AirPods Pro 2.
And it turns out you can't. Apple actually changed the connector.
It is a different type.
Changed the interface. Of course they did. It's like deeper or something like that.
Well, they didn't change it from.
And they sit differently.
Yeah, they didn't change it from Pro 1 to Pro 2. It's the same tips can be used
interchangeably for both.
So you can buy a set of Comply tips and use them on either one.
But the Pro 3, they're on their own.
Comply does have their own tips for the Pro 3s. So, too. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Which I love those, too. Yeah.
So I just thought oh I wonder if you could just get the new tips for your old
airpods yeah it's like nope no bummer yeah yeah because Apple does sell the
tips separately so right oh well right go with the comply ones
All right. Well, that was a nice little detour. So here we are. Yeah.
Yeah.
Yep. Shall we get back to quick tips?
Yeah. David has one about mail. He says, hey there.
Something that has always bugged me was how Apple did server-side rules.
They did client-side in the latest version, and server-side is limited to iCloud.com.
And 100, not that I need more, but okay.
This always seemed like a kludge, and Outlook has had this for decades.
Anyway, I've been doing some development with Claude and was able to create
an AWS Lambda app password, S3 hosted, that's a lot of stuff,
a web page on my personal portal that uses EventBridge to pull my iCloud.com IMAP account,
apply the CRUD rules I set up, and all of this pretty much falls into the free level of usage in AWS.
I know there are other tools out there, but it bugged me having to forward or
give others access to my email, and this solves a really nagging issue that
I've had with Apple over the years.
If you want the Terraform script to recreate this yourself, I guess that's maybe
for us and maybe for the audience i don't know let me know uh thanks for the
great content and podcast discord
Is a great place to post that stuff if you're someone who wants to share with
the with the mgg community yeah yeah um yeah sorry no no i this is i well i'll
let you share your thoughts on this adam and then i have thoughts about it too
No i mean that's that's that's really cool that you could do that sort of thing
and doing claude and stuff to uh produce us um is a great way to go and i'm glad it works.
And yeah, I, you know, it's one of those things, because I think I've been pretty
open that I've been a, now I'm going to blank on their...
Email client that I've been using for years.
Spark.
Spark. Thank you. From the creators, same creators as Setapp. I've been using Spark.
No, Spark is from Riedel. Different than Setapp. Same country.
Oh yeah, I'm mixing the two. Same country. Different company.
Thank you for the correction. Yep. Yeah, no, but so I've been using Spark,
well, was using it as my exclusive email client for a long time.
And they have some of these features and stuff like that where they have
additional filtering and stuff but it does go through their server
system as far as i know um and
i know people are leery about that sometimes you know like
letting a third party or also you know dave you
and i both use same box and obviously you know that's happening on their stuff
too 100 yeah i've been okay with that but i can understand completely how people
might be uncomfortable with that sort of thing and this is seems like a great
way to go about that if you're so technically inclined.
I'm curious how involved the actual install and setup and all that stuff is, but that's great.
You know, I...
This stuff, especially anything that's using AI, obviously, is evolving at the
technical level, evolving very, very quickly.
But also at the usage and the barrier to entry level is evolving very quickly.
And as I'm reading this, I'm thinking, OK, well, there's a reason my chatbot
ate my inbox. And it's because I was doing exactly things like this with it
using OpenClaw, right? Right.
And I I mean, I I didn't realize I screwed up. It wasn't an intentional mistake.
It was a mistake. Right. I misengineered the engine and it misunderstood me.
And there was a gap. You know, it didn't read my mind. It did what I told it
to do. Right. And it whoops. Yep. Exactly.
And I had a whoopsie. Right. But it's fine. Like it happens.
Um since then though there have
in just the last month or whatever things like
uh claude co-work and dispatch
and i'll explain why and perplexity computer and open ai's got their thing coming
um there are much more robust customer friendly engines that you can run on
your computer to accomplish on your Mac to accomplish these same things.
And like Claude Cowork is one of these.
There's a connector. There's connectors for various different ways of having
it connect to your email.
There's a Gmail connector built in. There's an IMAP connector that you can install.
There's a JMAP connector and JMAP is FastMail's open source JSON-based email interaction protocol.
And once you wire up a connector to let Claude Cowork talk to your email service
of choice, then it can do all of these things for you.
And what's cool is that Claude Dispatch lets you control
Claude Co-Work runs on your Mac. You would run it on one Mac.
You would leave your Mac running all the time.
And then Claude Dispatch lets you use your phone to talk to that Mac and prompt
it to do different things.
So it's essentially like what OpenClaw is. So, like, you could set this kind
of thing up in a variety of different ways.
There's nothing wrong with the way David did it. uh if you don't want to go
get a you know a server at aws and do all those things you might be able to
do what you want to do on your mac with claude co-work and dispatch so it's it's it's an and and
you know i'm we're recording this on friday march 27th comes out on monday march
30th i'm guessing by some point in april everything i just said will have been
uh you know surpassed by something else or a new version of whatever we're talking about here.
But it's pretty cool.
Yup-er. Anyway, there we go.
Do we have more on that or shall I get us back to email with Ben?
No, I think we're good. Great.
Ben shares, he says, you had a discussion about Apple mail categories,
and you are correct that Apple's algorithm does the initial filtering to assign
categories to email messages.
However, just like SaneBox, you can then do further training.
A categorized sender action in each mail app allows you to act on a selected
message and decide which category to assign that particular sender in the future.
When issuing the command, all existing and future messages get the chosen category.
Apple's got a support document about it that instructs Mac users to reach category
sender via the contextual menu, like right-clicking. However,
there's also a button that you can add to the mail toolbar.
Oh, interesting. I did not know this. Love this. Thank you so much, Ben. That's great.
All right. Fun. Cool.
Fantastic.
Uh-huh. All right. That's really good to know. Yeah. Go ahead.
I'm going to need to play with that because I've been using their categories
so far, and it's been okay, but not great, I would say.
Yeah. Who knew? Well, I mean, Ben knew. It turns out. Yeah, yeah.
And now you know.
And now you get to know. Yeah. Interesting. Categorized sender.
Yeah, there it is. Fascinating. Love it.
Moving on.
Yeah. So John wrote in and said he needed to kill a process and terminal using
kill all and then the process name and it wasn't dying.
And then he realized that the flag dash nine makes sure it dies. Who knew?
So the bottom line is if you use kill all in the process name,
it asks the process nicely to please go away.
But if uh it is stubborn it
necessary it won't necessarily go away so if you use
kill all and then uh the
process name and the dash nine
flag it kicks down the door and kills it so the way to get the name though uh
because you have to use the exact name in terminal or it doesn't do anything
for you i use activity monitor open it up make sure i've got the name correctly
Or you can use the process ID number, which is the PID column.
You can grab that and stick that in there in the terminal to kill it.
So if you're having trouble getting terminal to kill your process that is hung, you can use killall-9.
I always use a dash kill in capital letters. It's the same as dash nine.
Oh, okay.
I don't know why I never, I never remember my fingers don't know dash nine.
Uh, but yeah, dash kill all capital letters.
If your process name has a space in it, you need to put the whole thing in quotes too.
Oh, good point. That's why I like the process.
I need the pit is better. Yeah. Well, if so, this is one of those interesting things.
Kill All lets you issue a name or a PID.
Kill lets you only issue a PID to my knowledge. I don't think that's changed
in recent builds of macOS.
So my Unix history may be betraying itself here.
And the Dash 9 and the Kill work, those switches work with either Kill or Kill All.
So, but kill all the nice part about kill all.
If you issue a PID, the process ID, it will only kill processes that match that ID.
It will kill all processes that
match that ID, but there will be only one because process IDs are unique.
However, what kill all does that's different from kill is if you have,
say, four copies of Finder running because something has gone, has run amok.
Gone on this.
Yeah. Kill all will kill all processes with that name. And so that's where that can be super valuable.
And general finders of terrible example, because I'm sure it's happened to someone,
but it's rare, but you might have some, some, you know, demon running that's,
that, that spawned extra copies and you're like, no, I want all of them done.
And so that's where kill all comes in.
So there is a user column in Activity Monitor.
Yep. Are there any you would avoid?
Killing? I mean, I guess if you've got to kill something, you've got to kill
it. But are there any users that you would avoid?
Well, the nice part about the command that you shared is that it would only
allow you to kill processes owned by your user.
Oh, interesting. Okay.
If you wanted to kill a process owned by another user, you would need to proceed
the command with sudo, S-U-D-O.
Right, sure. Because you need to do it as a super user, right?
So once you are issuing Sudu, all bets are off.
And so, yeah, any process that's owned by Root would be something that you'd
want to look at and ask yourself, why am I killing?
Do I know what I'm doing by killing this?
Like that would be it. I mean, you know, the thing is on your Mac,
the worst thing that happens is you wedge it and you just have to force reboot it.
Like yeah you'll you might lose some data if you've been working on something
uh but that would that would be kind of the like that's kind of worst case scenario so yeah
All right. Where are we? Are we moving on?
We're with Adam wondering about the differences between doing this in Activity
Monitor with the stop button versus the terminal command.
Well, there you go, using the simple method, Adam.
Well, it's not quite the same because apparently what Activity Monitor does
is sends a, when you hit the stop button, for example,
it sends a SIG term signal, which is not exactly the same as a kill.
You can also do a force quit, which also sends a sig kill command.
And I guess it's a little more graceful about it, not quite as abrupt in kind
of layman's terms, I guess.
Doesn't cut its throat.
Yeah, but I mean, the practical result is similar from what I understand.
Like, correct me if I'm wrong, Dave, I don't think there's huge differences.
So it behaves the same but there's a little more granularity with the kill all
commands in terms of what you can actually
Do yeah so
the it's the dash nine switch or
the dash kill switch right that that is the difference maker here because if
you issue kill or even kill all from the terminal without any switches that
is a sig term right that's your i'm telling you to shut down gracefully And
if the process can listen, it will. Right.
You know, presumably, whereas dash nine, instead of sending sig term,
it sends sig kill, which just forces the OS to kill it, not to pass along a
would you please quit yourself message.
So that's the that's the difference.
So you could effectively do the same thing from Terminal just by issuing kill
PID or kill all process name without the dash line.
But you can't do it. Can you do a force quit from Activity Monitor?
I know if you do command option escape, you can force quit applications.
But I don't know if the only way I've seen activity monitor let you do a force
or let you do a kill is when you tell it to to, you know, you say stop or whatever it is.
What's the I don't have activity monitor up, but whatever that way,
You select the process and then
there's a little stop. There's literally a stop button in the toolbar.
So that sends your sig term, no extra swishes. And then I think activity monitor
sort of monitors that for you.
No great surprise. and we'll come back and say, hey, this didn't stop.
Do you want me to force it to quit?
Right? There's a little timer that it puts on itself.
And then at that point, it will send a SIG kill. Or if a process is in red or
whatever it is, again, I don't have Activity Monitor open, but when Activity
Monitor knows that a process is hung, then it will send a SIG kill when you hit the stop button.
I think it'll ask you, but...
But so, yes,
Here's something cool that I've never seen before.
So another cool quick tip. So
an activity monitor, if you select a process and go under the view menu,
There is a, because I was trying to see if the whole option,
you know, trick would work.
So there is a quit process option, but there also is a send signal to process option.
If you click that, you get a dropdown and you get all kinds of options.
So you get hang up, interrupt, stop, continue, quit, abort, kill, alarm, info request.
And then you have some user defined options. I don't know what those are.
But yeah, you can send all kinds of processes, signals to your processes if
you want from activity monitor. I've never noticed that before.
Huh. Same. Look at that. Yeah, you can send all kinds of, and yes,
you can choose SIG kill. That's right. Huh.
Turns out there's a menu in activity monitor.
Yeah, but this shouldn't be in the view menu. Like that, like that's not,
that's just somebody was like, Hey, can we add a, a top level menu to activity monitor? No.
All right, cool. We're going to put these things in the view menu.
Fine. Like that, or
We have a weird spot.
We have put these things in the view menu. Don't tell anybody like, uh, you know, um,
I was trying to control click or right click, you know, I'd like a contextual
menu and I don't think that was working for me.
So yeah, anything, at least I don't think I saw those.
It's not, I, I don't, yeah, I don't see it there. That's really interesting.
It's under the view menu. There's a bunch of, uh, bunch of options there I'm
going to have to play with.
Wow. Nice find. Huh?
You can also run a spin dump.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, which also doesn't belong in the view menu.
But I'm glad these things are there. Like, that's really great.
Interesting. So, yeah, this is a safer way to do it. I like it. It's good.
Kiwi Graham makes me laugh.
Kiwi Graham is sending bad things that we are not going to share on the show.
Bad advice. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just bad advice.
With with his tongue firmly in his cheek we just
you know know how it's fine in the chat stream it's
all good it's fun it's great but we also
know how sound bites work and if if we say the wrong thing
and somebody slices it up and puts it out there then you're just going to get
bad advice that without context that's all yeah yeah it's funny thank you kiwi
good stuff if you want to join the discord chat go to mackie cup.com slash discord
or mackie cup.com slash live or download the newly updated Mac GeekGab iOS app.
And then that will have links to all of these things too and let you listen
to the live streams when we are live streaming.
New update for the app coming soon. It has been completely, well,
completely, 98% of it has been ported from Objective-C over to Swift and Swift
UI, which has been kind of fun.
Makes it a little smoother and fun. Anyway, that should show up maybe this week.
I haven't pushed it yet, but close.
Am I up again for our last tip?
You are. Is that where we're at? Yeah. All right.
I got Tim. He says, another quick tip reminder about reminders.
It's my birthday month. Well, happy birthday, Tim.
And I make sure to include my birthday in all the different store and restaurant
apps, because many offer some type of birthday reward. The trick is remembering
who, what, and when it expires.
Many will send an email, and I save those emails in their own birthday reward
folder, but this year I am using reminders with a birthday rewards reminder
list so that I can be reminded, hey, don't forget that reward that's about to expire.
I'm sure you and listeners have figured this out many birthdays ago.
No, I haven't. But in case someone hasn't, there you go.
Love it. I like it. Yeah, that's a good, that's good. That's good.
Well, yet again, our quick tips took us down many tangents and maybe the tips
were quick, but we weren't.
We have questions, hopefully some cool stuff found too.
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All right, question time, right?
Questions, and I think I am up first, right? I think so. With one from JP?
Let's do it.
All right.
JP says, I've been humming along with my Synology drives for over five years now without an issue.
Exos drives for all of them. do i just wait till one fails to replace or am
i supposed to put fresh drives in over the years great question
I got a simple answer for it too yes all right here's the thing uh the drives
are set up to last last long time uh you said the marine corps it lasts a long
time laminate it and take it to the field.
Drives do really well. And at least I don't know about the other brands,
but Synology sends you updates once a month if you set it up that way and go,
hey, all drives are healthy.
Or, you know, hey, I had an issue with this one. It may be losing a sector, that sort of thing.
And the only drives that have ever failed on me have had sectors start to go bad.
Doesn't mean you can't have a catastrophic failure of a drive here and there.
But as long as you're set up with a single
drive redundancy like shr1 or raid 5
or something you should be fine if a drive goes kaput um
that being said the other
thing i think is wise to do is to
have a spare drive handy so that if one does go kaput you've got another one
you can stick right in there it can begin rebuilding itself and and get your
repair uh underway before a second one goes kaput So I wouldn't replace one.
That seems like an unnecessary expense, but I would certainly have at least one spare on hand.
I don't know. What do you guys do?
I'm happy to chime in, Adam, unless you've got somewhere to take this.
No, I'm kind of in the same place. I was going to mention, I upgraded that Synology
that I had, and I think you had originally sent me one,
Dave, one of your old ones with the drives.
And I don't even know how old those drives are, but those are still the drives
that I have and the one that I have. Sure.
And they've been humming along, they're probably, I got to imagine,
they're 10 years old at this point? I don't even know.
Well, I have some practices that I live by whenever possible.
The first is, like you talked about,
Pete, I only use one-disc fault tolerance, which means if two drives were to
die at the exact same time in my synology, or if I had a dead drive that I did
not address and another one died, I would be in real trouble.
Um but so with one drive fault tolerance when i have a problem with the drive
i absolutely address it immediately
You mentioned having a spare. If you can work it so that you have an empty drive
bay or an unused drive bay in your NAS, you can put a hot spare in.
Right. I forgot about that.
And I have a hot spare in the two NASes that are kind of my workhorse units.
And when a drive dies, I get a notification that the drive has gone, you know, whatever.
Its error rate is beyond that which the disk station calls acceptable and it
immediately because there's a drive in the hot spare starts it the process you don't even
Have to physically.
Swap it it starts the process of decommissioning and
i i like somehow invariably drives
die when i'm traveling and i'll get i'll
get the notification on my phone and it'll be like all right yep there it
is it's like it's it's rolling over and it you know
it i have a lot of data on my on my synology so
it takes you know might take a couple of days for it
to kind of fully go through that process prepare itself
yeah and then and then um what i
do is i you know once it's finished with that process i take
the old drive out uh and i put a
new drive in that is larger than
the drives that are in there because i know
that i'm going to fill up my sonology over time and
uh and so the way that i increase
my storage capacity is every time i replace a drive i just go larger and larger
and larger and that i don't always get it quite right i have run into some problems
where it's like oh crap i need to decommission a perfectly good drive because
i don't have enough space, you know, but yeah,
so that's, that's, that's been my sort of general practice and it has served me very, very well.
I ran a hot spare for a while and forgot about that, but I changed it over just
because I wanted more space available.
So I have a cold spare now, but it requires my presence.
Yeah, or someone's presence. It really is a straightforward process to replace these drives.
And most of the NAS units that we talk about on the show here allow you to replace
a drive while the unit is up and running.
But the one thing you got to be really careful of is ensuring that you only
remove the correct drive.
Don't pull a good drive.
Don't pull a good drive, especially when you've got one, when you're one down
already, because yep. Yep.
I just shut them down anyway. Like it's not that difficult.
No, it's, you're right. It's not. And it is safer that way for sure. But, but they are.
I worry about it.
Yeah. They are built to do it. And the hot spare obviously just happens,
you know, it's kind of magically. It's just like, here we go. Off to the race.
So the question I have is about adding larger drives to an array you already have set up.
If it's just a single drive, you know,
Do you still gain the additional storage or does it need to be,
I thought it needed to be more than just a single drive that would open up your extra storage.
Yeah. If you have, if you have, if you add a drive that is larger than any other drive in your NAS,
the additional space that that
drive would bring to the table is it's
unused and it's put in what's called reserved mode because
in order for a drive in order for there to be fault tolerance you
need something at least one drive that's the same size
so that it has its you know partner in fault tolerance if you will and i'm oversimplifying
but that but that's really i'm not like that's that's generally true but what
happens is when i add let's say you know i've got a bunch of 10 terabyte drives
and i put a 12 in okay well at least now i've you know
out of 10 i put in a 12 because the 10 died or whatever okay fine
great and then when i put the 14 in i
get the extra space of the 12 right and then
when i put the 16 in i get the extra space of the 14 so it is you're right that
you are not using the space fully but that's how things go and and candidly
sometimes if i'll look and say okay what how much storage am i using do i need to go
to a 16 can i could i just put another 14 in you know would that be okay so
but yeah good question yep because
I think uh i think i i take it back i said all those drives are going fine i
do remember i think i had one fail and i just swapped it out i think for a same
size drive because i didn't need anything more and it was cheap when i bought
it so it was like oh you know just buy the same size uh and i do have some cold
spares sitting around i think that are now double the size,
but I seem to remember having a conversation with you where it's like, yeah,
I mean, if you just put one in, you're not going to, you got to kind of put
in multiple. I think I have two of them.
I think I have all fours in there and there's probably, I think I have two eight
terabyte drives sitting around. There you go. So.
Yeah, in order for that to work. But you can only replace one drive at a time.
Right. And it will take a couple of days.
But if you're saving those eights for when one of, if you don't need the eights
for the storage, you're doing the right thing, right?
Because better to like fully utilize the lifespan of the fours before beginning
the lifespan of the eights. Like drives, generally speaking,
don't die from not being used.
They die from, you know, it's the mechanical operation of running. So.
Yeah. Yep.
Yeah. Kiwi Graham says, I wouldn't want to keep a spare sitting doing nothing
for too many months. It could seize up just like an external drive that isn't used.
I suppose that's true.
I have not experienced that at all. Uh, it's not running.
It's not kept hot.
It is literally sitting there, you know, unused.
And I've never had problem with one that, you know, that's been sitting there
for a year and or more, you know, firing up when I needed it to fire up.
It's, that's never been an issue for me.
So, uh, but, but that doesn't mean it won't be.
Right now you've done it.
Yep, exactly. I'll knock on wood while you read Roger's question, Pete.
Roger. Yeah. You know, he, he wrote into feedback at Mac geek gap.com.
Feedback at Mac geek gap.com.
What was that feedback at Mac geek gap.com?
That's where he wrote to us. And he said, hi, I like to watch my movies and
TV shows when I'm traveling using the Apple TV app on either my iPhone or iPad,
which has previously stored on my Mac as home movies and uploaded to the device,
since from years ago when storing them as movies stopped working.
Since iOS 26 has come out, this has become more difficult as the titles have
now disappeared from the iPhone or iPad, leaving just the runtime and a picture of the show.
Although clicking on the show brings up the title. He says, I called Apple support,
but they were unable to help.
Is there any fix for this or perhaps better still? Is there a better way to
watch, say, movies on the iPad, which works properly?
Please love the show and always listen. Roger from the UK. Thanks for writing in, Roger.
Roger's correct that I don't watch my movies this way, so I did not notice this.
But he's right that the UX for this has changed. Right.
And so absolutely. OK. All right. Yeah. You can confirm. Yeah. Yeah.
There are many different ways of solving this. What some folks have done is
to download or even build custom poster images and then using their Macs to
add that as metadata to the movie.
And then you still can't see the title of the movie written in text.
But if it's in the poster image, it gives you, you know, that might be enough.
So maybe, you know, that would be a solution. It's not the greatest,
but potentially workable.
Other solutions just simply involved using a different app.
The three that sort of come up in this conversation are VLC, Infuse, and Plex.
VLC is free, and you can store your movies on like a shared location or even
your iCloud drive, depending on how much storage you're talking about.
And that VLC could see all of these apps will let you see the name of the file
or the movie and, you know, kind of solve that.
Infuse or Plex each operate a little bit differently.
You would run one on your Mac as sort of the server and then point it at the
same movie libraries folder that that you use with everything else.
You don't need to make copies of your movies to do this.
You can just point it right there and both Infuse and Plex display titles and
give way better sort options.
Infuse is probably the place to start playing around with this.
Maybe because it can point it can be a client to your Plex library,
too, but it can be a client to just a folder of things.
It depends on what you're doing with everything else with regards to your movies.
If if setting up a Plex server is something you've been thinking about for a
little while, then this is the perfect time to do that, because then you could
either use the Plex app or the Infuse app on your iPad and then,
you know, see things in the same on your Apple TV.
We generally use the Infuse app on our Apple TV to play stuff from our Plex
library just because I like the experience better and it does a better job pulling
in like Atmos sound at times when the Plex app isn't smart enough to do that.
So, but those would be the three, the three apps that I would recommend for solving this problem.
VLC is probably the place to start, I guess. Yep.
I guess it depends on, I mean, it depends on your specific of your use case there.
Are there any formats that VLC won't play? I mean, that's the thing about that is it's so versatile.
Well, I mean, that question is answered differently on your Mac versus your iOS devices.
But VLC will play multiple formats on your iPad that the movies app isn't smart
enough to realize it can play.
But they're all using the decoders that are built into your iPad.
Not your iPad, not really germane to this question, but, but as a tangent,
yes, VLC is very good at, at playing things that your iPad doesn't realize it can play.
Yep.
Yep.
There was another app too. And now I'm going to have to, I'll think of it.
Okay.
I know I had it on my iPad, which I haven't used in weeks, if not months. And.
You could throw anything into that too. And I suspect that it had,
you know, something like VLC in its background or something to actually do it,
but it would play anything.
I'll think of it. Get back to you. Sorry.
No, that's good.
Sorry.
Taking us, moving on, Adam.
Yeah. Mark has a question for us. He says, my good brothers. I like that.
A nod to you three as you slay our IT dragons.
A doctor, client of, I'm assuming his, is trying to access the Rhythm Express
site. So a specific website, it looks like it's maybe related to ECG stuff, being a doctor.
He says when he does this, his Nord VPN is active and he cannot log into that site.
He travels to London and this becomes a problem for him. The other sites he
needs to access work fine with the VPN running.
So
What is going on and why and how i would assume
I yeah i mean this is fix it this is similar to the
conversation we had two weeks ago in 11 33 um when
michael asked you know why p and
p you answered the question you know why does the he
have issues logging into the us vpn versus a
canadian vpn like why do some sites block me here versus there
and and the answer is is you
know coming from the same source vpn endpoints
that being the ip address that
you come from when you tunnel through a vpn right there's there's the ip address
you're actually on you tunnel into in this case nord vpn and then nord sort
of spits you out onto the internet using one of their servers and that would
that's what i mean by the endpoint well i'm not right about that right like it's yeah yeah
Spit you out
It does they spit you out onto the internet using their their thing it's it
It makes you appear as though you're coming from there.
And so the thing is...
Those endpoints in general are known VPN endpoints, right?
And there are lots of reasons why that might be something a service provider would want to block.
For example, like when my daughter's in Italy, she can't access her USA-based
checking account online from an Italian IP address.
They're like, they're blocking it. And I mean, the thought is you have no business being here.
She obviously does have business being there, but they, for their security measures,
have decided the risk of letting non-US IPs in is greater than the risk of blocking
a legitimate customer who is, you know, not in the United States.
And so she has to use a VPN to get in to her bank. Now, here's the thing.
Her bank may also be blocking VPN addresses similar to exactly what Mark is describing here.
So the way to bypass this is to use an endpoint that is unknown or not known to be a VPN address.
And one of the best ones to use.
Is your home network, if you happen to have a home network. Now,
of course, my daughter's home network is at her home in Italy.
But my home network here is in the United States.
And so we have, over the years, have had various different VPN servers set up.
You know, many routers will let you do that.
Like, there's all kinds of things that you can set up. But in today's world,
the first thing I would recommend is tail scale and using an exit node because
you can set up one of your always-on devices in your home.
It could be a Mac if you want to leave a Mac on all the time.
It could be a disk station.
We're talking about NAS in this
episode. You can set that up to be an endpoint or an exit node, sorry.
And you can also set your Apple TV to be an exit node. So that's the default
one that our family uses, is our Apple TV in the living room.
And it works great as an exit node.
And we just connect to that. over you know we're always connected to tail scale
and so just say choose that exit node and then there you are it's up here it's
as though you're coming from durham new hampshire so there you go
Yeah. So I, that, that's, that's how I would solve that problem.
And that's why that's happening, Mark. So hopefully that helps.
Shall we, uh, if there's anything, anything to add to that or shall we move
on? We still have time for another question.
Oh, so I found the app I was talking about, and it's totally counterintuitive,
but it's called Goodreader, which is more, I always used it as a PDF thing at
first, but I learned to watch movies and TV shows in it.
Goodreader is an iOS app that works fantastic for watching media.
For playing movies. All right. Good to know.
And thusly keeps it organized as well. Now, you have to have it downloaded.
It's not like, you know, it doesn't stream. All right.
Adam, I'm going to let you choose. Should we let this be our jump to Cool Stuff
founder? Should we go back to GW's question?
I'm okay with either, really. Let's do GW's real quick. I think we can maybe hit both.
Yeah, I think so too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, let's do GW's question.
GW wrote in. He says, I was at a coffee shop and saw across the room a MacBook
with the lit up Apple logo.
I still think that was the coolest part of the MacBook.
Shining for everyone to see. I wish they never phased that out.
Yeah, again, don't we all? I think we really, I miss it as well.
But I'll try to add some context here because it was my understanding.
And then I, with that understanding, I went and did a little research and kind
of validated my understanding of this. But there were actual design and,
more importantly, engineering reasons why Apple had to phase out the glowing Apple logo.
And it all comes down to their ever-relentless pursuit in many ways of thinness,
along with some display technology that they wanted to go after.
So the thinner displays made it basically less practical,
less technically possible to have that glowing logo, just because I think they
found the Apple logo cutout as the displays got thinner,
Impacted more significantly the structural integrity of the actual display.
So it's not so much fitting the components in there as it is
Hey, we've got a giant hole in the back of the lid cut out, and that's like
the metal's going to flex a little more. It's going to be not quite as rigid.
So that was part of it. And then retina displays required a more opaque backing to them.
So Apple was always using the display like itself to help add that glow.
And so by putting that more opaque backing in there, that impacts that.
So now you need a separate light source to actually cause the glow,
which is fine and could be done.
But now when you're trying to maximize battery efficiency, what's more important,
having a glowing logo or a little bit extra battery?
And I think they made a lot of trade-off decisions when it came back to this.
Now, again, I think the engineering folks at Apple
are super smart and could they make this work
and figure out a solution and do all that stuff yeah uh probably
uh will they i doubt it at this
point and uh it may just be something that is lost
to time and i guess progress i don't
know if we could have a debate sure sure if the
glowing apple logo not being there is actual progress or not but i'm with you
like seeing all those going especially now that more people are buying macbooks
apparently uh tim cook came out and said that the BO has caused the largest
jump in first-time MacBook ownership that Apple has ever seen.
Uh, turns out price is important.
One, one thing I will point out and I will give a, a tip of the hat to the person
who pointed this out to me is that the MacBook Neo, uh, very relevant to this
conversation, but does not have a glowing apple on the back.
It also does not have a backlit keyboard, if that's important to you.
And I learned that on Saturday because our dear friend John Martellaro was in
the market to perhaps buy a MacBook Neo.
And then said it was off his list when he realized that it did not have a backlit keyboard.
As many of you might know, several days later, we actually lost John Martellaro.
John, he actually was in fine health, but he'd had some issues over the years,
as everybody kind of does, as we get older.
And on Wednesday of this week, he moved on. He passed on.
And John was one of the smartest people I knew. He wrote for us at Mac Observer
for a long time and was really, truly a member of our Mac Observer family there.
And he will be well-remembered and missed.
Sorry, I'm giggling because I'm picturing John up there
Hanging with Steve Jobs and like what that looks like.
Yeah.
So I'm not laughing. I'm very sad. Yeah.
John. I mean, he was a, he was a great human being and I'm glad I had a brief
opportunity to know him.
Incredibly smart and amazing. But yeah, as you were saying that,
I got this thought in my head.
I'm like, oh man, John's up there with Steve probably like either annoying him
or really like getting in a deep technical conversation. that's amazing so yeah
Probably both oh and i mean and it's so it's okay to laugh like we are we're
humans we're capable multiple emotions at the same time and like i one thing
i did not realize and i'm like i'm sad i never got to talk to john about this
or thank john for this uh he
wrote the space shuttle lander simulator for the apple 2 and that was a thing
i had played as a kid and it just never, I never realized that was him.
So yeah, I know. Yeah. It's cool. So anyway, uh, no backlight.
John, you will be missed. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. What a good, what a good dude.
So, you know, I got it. I didn't know John, but I got to say that says a lot
about him that when you hear of his passing, uh,
And one of the first things that comes to mind is something that makes you giggle
or laugh. Man, what a great legacy that is.
Yep.
Right? Yep. I mean, horrible, sad, but the first thing that comes to mind is
a great memory that makes you laugh. That's something.
Yep. That's cool.
There's lots of them, many of which will not be shared publicly.
He was a good human. Those of us around him were not as good as him.
But there were some great, he was super fun to be around. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Really great. Yeah, I'll just add something that I think Jeff,
I think Jeff Gamet commented on this somewhere.
You know, he put dents in the universe, as Steve would like to say,
you know, many, many over his lifetime, and we can only all be so lucky.
Yes. Yes. Well said. Yeah. He definitely put dents in the universe, for sure.
Yep. And yeah. Great stuff
All right, well, we've already talked about two cool stuff's found,
the Goodreader and then also John Martellaro's.
Actually, cool stuff that I've been made aware of. I don't know where to find
the Space Shuttle Simulator.
I'm sure if we can find it, we can run it in an emulator, an Apple II emulator,
but I don't know where to find it.
So if somebody knows, feedback at MacHeaker.com. I would love to find that.
First place I would check is Archive.org. They have a software archive.
Fair. I think they're trying to maintain that because that's a large concern
of losing all these games and things over time.
So it might be there. Yep. That's the first place I'd look.
Yeah. All right. I will. I'm going to. That's great. Great advice. I will look for that.
But while you're doing that or whatever, I will take us to a cool stuff found
from James. He says, hi, Mac Geek Gabbers.
James from Western Australia here.
Frustration melts away with the Elgato Apple AirTag sleeve.
So he's talking about, you know, finding your Apple remote with AirTags.
So Elgato makes a cool little sleeve for the new Apple TV 4K remote.
It's sort of a soft, tactile, resilient, non-slip case for your Apple TV 4K
remote that will stay put no matter, so there's no more frantic searching in
the depths of your furniture.
One more thing, he says, there's a dedicated recess at the back of the sleeve
for your existing AirTags.
No need to buy more. With the Salgado sleeve, your Apple TV 4K remote becomes
part of the upgraded and easy-to-find search function.
Not that you'll ever need it with this sleeve. So the sleeve makes it,
you know, a little bit easier to find, but then also with the AirTag,
you're definitely not going to lose it.
Huh.
That's pretty cool.
Yeah. Can I offer a quick correction? It's El Lago, not El Gato.
I thought it was El Gato too when I first read it, but it's El Lago.
Oh, yeah. This is El Lago. Sorry. I'm used to El Gato. I read it
As El Gato too because they've got so many cool.
I just assumed. Yes. Thank you, Pete. Sorry for that. It's El Lago.
That's a really smart design. I like it. $12.
That's gorgeous. On Amazon as of this moment that I am looking at it. But, yeah, smart.
How do I have a feeling that the brand name was somewhat deliberate? What?
You say it so.
All right. We talked in episode 1132 about some airdrop issues,
and we got several emails about this. The first was from a Keynes.
He says, listener Dan mentioned that he was trying to tame airdrop.
He says, I wanted to share a simple alternative that might be helpful.
Blip at blip.net is a free lightweight file transfer app that works as well
as an AirDrop style replacement between Apple devices.
It allows quick transfers between Macs over the local network with a simple
interface and no cloud storage involved, keeping transfers direct and private.
Could be a useful option for listeners who like the idea of airdrop,
but want a simple third-party tool to manage file transfers between their Apple devices.
Thank you, Joaquin. And then new listener, Allison, who is recovering.
It sounds like fairly well from her recent injury.
It is said that shared the same thing and says it can act just like airdrop
between devices within your own home.
And it's cross-platform, which means that if you have an Android phone and a
Mac or an iPhone and a PC or any combination thereof, you could actually blip
between the two of them, whereas AirDrop would never work.
We've got a link to that in the show notes. Thank you to both of you for those comments.
Yeah. And when I saw Blip, I went, oh, that's cool.
And I played with it a little bit. And then I also found another one called
Local Send, which is also cross-platform when Windows and Android and iOS and
Mac OS and all that. And it's also open source.
And I play with that. And that's also slick. So nice to have something besides
airdrop, which is, I think, gotten harder to use over the years,
just in my personal experience.
Cool. What's next, Adam? I think, hey, Adam.
Oh, am I up next? I think so. Yeah. We got one from Greg. Oh,
it's the good one we were talking about earlier.
Greg says, hey, I am getting a...
2026 CRV EX soon. And I heard that car is like the gold standard for this device based on,
for this device based on asking chat GPT.
So he asked chat GPT about compatibility of the comma for AI self-driving car system.
He says that car has the best support for it and can support actually many car
manufacturers, 325 plus cars.
It looks really cool. And he's thinking about getting it
What do we think? Would you trust this?
And for anybody who doesn't know, I was, comma AI, I've been aware of them.
They've been around for a long, long time.
It's actually a company founded by George Geohatz and people from way back in
the early days of the iPhone, when jailbreaking was a thing, might know who that is.
He was a developer, well, a kid really at the time. I think he was like 15 or 16.
And he was like the number one guy doing iPhone jailbreaks.
So an iPhone would come out and he would jailbreak them and then publish that stuff.
I think he actually eventually got a job for Apple for a brief period.
Oh, that makes sense.
They hired him.
And then he started this company, which is like an aftermarket AI self-driving system.
And they've been working on it. I guess they're on version four now,
it sounds like, for decades.
And I think the reason the CR-V, and I could be wrong on this,
but I think I remember, I think the reason the CR-V is so advanced for it is
I believe that's the vehicle George had that he originally started.
Like, I forget what year model it was. It was like an old one.
And he started developing for that. So, like, just the integration systems and stuff like that.
But I think it uses a lot of the built-in stuff. And I think it uses,
you know, obviously they don't have a lot of the advanced LiDAR sensors and
stuff like that, as far as I'm aware, at least with the original development,
it was all based on the camera systems, kind of like what Tesla,
you know, the sort of the model of self-driving that Tesla has been going after
with not having a bunch of extra LiDAR stuff.
Yeah, it is. But I, I, I looked into this cause I was like, Oh,
I'm super into like my, my Subaru 2025 Outback has some like,
advanced assistance features i i
wouldn't call it self-driving but you know it
certainly does things where it drives much of
the time for me uh right and and
so i looked at this and this basically does the same
thing that my current car does so it's
worth looking at if your car doesn't do these things i highly
recommend looking into this because it is life-changing but
uh it is not doing full self-driving
it's doing right lane centering adaptive cruise
and then the kind of the one thing
that it does that my car doesn't and other cars
will do is that it will do lane changing too which
is that that's that's a little more advanced um but the lane centering and adaptive
cruise like you said these would have to tap into uh the car's existing systems
and sensors like if the car doesn't have any kind of lane uh assist so
You're saying my 92 saturn isn't going to.
Uh probably not yeah well right
but like it needs to have the capability of
of adjusting your steering this could
do more with it but it's got to be able to tap into something that
exists because it's you're not you're not attaching something
to your steering wheel you're plugging this in i think to
the obd2 connector on your car and leveraging
the car's cameras and all those things and it has its own cameras
it's a dash cam as well and all those other things um
and the adaptive cruise of course your car has to have
cruise control to begin with otherwise it's not
going to be able to there's no system for it to go and touch to do these things
but um but yeah this looks pretty cool it's about a thousand bucks uh yeah but
like versus a car that um you know i mean if you're buying a new car like like
think of the functionality
It he he slash they say that unlike what I have to deal with in my car,
which, you know, when I'm on the highway and it's it's keeping me in the lane
and adaptive cruise and doing all the things every, you know, 30 seconds.
It's like, make sure you put your hands on the wheel. It's like, yeah, I know.
I freaking know. Like, dude, a lot of times it'll tell me to put my hands on the wheel.
Like after I've changed lanes, it's like, oh, you know, your car changed lanes.
Put your hands on the wheel. It's like, how do you think the car changed lanes?
You were keeping it in the lane.
I moved it. But anyway, that's a whole other thing. But it says it can drive
for hours without driver action, which is very cool.
Right. Yeah. Yeah, that's true.
I always like it when my hands are on the steering wheel and it says,
you know, hands on wheel.
Yeah.
It's aligned. It's going right down the road with no problem. Yeah.
Yeah.
So it's not true FSD. I mean, again, I think that's the ultimate goal.
Right. Oh, it'll get there. Yeah. Yeah. it's pretty cool interesting i love
it i think it's great that this exists
yeah fun stuff uh yeah we're done we gotta be done it's just it's that time
there we go it's that time are we
Gonna get spit out onto the internet now.
Uh i think we've been spitting out onto the internet for long enough and we
need to stop pete that's what uh that's that's the whole issue i'm
Getting spit out of the internet.
Oh there you go yeah that's right you know yeah Thanks for hanging out with us, everybody.
Make sure to go to MacGeekup.com slash giveaway to register for this month's giveaway.
And then on April 1st, register for next month's giveaway. I can't.
I won't. I could. I'm sure.
It's not confidential. But I'm not going to tell you who it is.
But it is a company we have mentioned in today's episode now that I'm thinking
about it. Not unintentionally.
But it is a company that's part of the MacGeekup ecosystem. So make sure you
sign up for this month and next month because it's good.
Thanks to cash fly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to
you. If you need more of us, uh, Adam's debut film podcast, Pete.
So there I was my business brain and gig gab are all other shows that we do.
Make sure to go download the Mac geek app at, uh, I believe it's Mac geek up.com slash app.
I have set up to get us there. Yes. I, in fact, that's correct.
Thanks for hanging out fun yet again. I had enough fun to justify doing it next week. You guys?
I'm in.
I'll be here.
All right. Sounds good. Same.
Adam, what's Pete's shirt say?
Once again, Pete has sage advice on his chest. Don't get caught.
Where else do you have it, Pete?
Okay, that's enough. gotta go see you folks later bye
This transcript was automatically generated by the podcast creator and may contain errors. Aggregated via the PodcastIndex API.
