It's time for Mac Geek Cab and listener Ian brings us our quick tip of the week
in response to a conversation we were having last week where we were talking
about Randy's iPad Pro having battery life issues.
Ian says, one thing that might be going on that took me a while to realize on
my same model iPad is that it could be the Apple Pencil draining the battery.
If you're keeping the pencil on the iPad, it is continuously wirelessly charging the pencil.
And that has seemed to tank Ian's battery life and maybe yours and Randy's and everybody else's too.
More quick tips like this, plus your questions answered today on Mac E-Cab 1137
for Monday, April 13th, National Scrabble Day 2026.
Greetings, folks, and welcome to Mac Geek at the show where we share quick tips
like that. We share cool stuff found.
We share questions and sometimes, hopefully, answers or at least interesting
thoughts that might help us troubleshoot the problem.
All in the interest of ensuring each of us learns at least five new things every
single time we get together.
Our sponsors include CleanMyMac.
I'm late, but there it is.
There it is, Pete.
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So we've got all of that in the show notes, by the way, any,
any of the stuff from our sponsors, it's always in the show notes.
You can just click from there.
And also you can get it in your email if you visit Mac geek cab.com.
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We'll talk more about our sponsors in a little bit for now here in Durham,
New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton.
And here in Torpedo Bay, no, Perdido Bay, Perdido Key, Florida, it's Pilot Peep.
We first got down here 10 years ago. My son was much younger.
Sure. Hadn't heard the word Perdido before, so he called it Torpedo, Torpedo Bay.
I think today might be my first time hearing the word Perdido, so, you know.
Yeah. It's the Spanish word for lost, lost key, Perdido Key.
Oh, yeah. Okay. All right. Yeah, maybe it's not my first time hearing it.
Yeah, but he went to torpedo and went, that's clever.
There it is. Our Torpedo Bay house.
I like it. That's cool. That's good.
Yeah.
And we are missing Adam today. He's got a scheduling issue.
So we are flying the two-man formation, as it were.
Exactly. Yep. All right. And speaking of my son, if you're hearing silverware
drop in the sink, maybe that's what's going on better.
Not quite as private a recording studio here in Florida.
In Torpedo Bay.
In Torpedo Bay. Yeah. So there we go. How about I take us to a quick tip?
Let's do it.
Well, do you know that you can put in emojis when you're sending a message?
You know, you hit the little, in my case, the little world key and the emoji
list comes up. And I was looking for Mic Drop.
And Mic Drop was, the ones that came up were horrible, horrible,
terrible. Well, you can create your own emoji.
It's called Genmoji. So with Apple Intelligence, it's all in there and all that.
You click the little face to the right of your input window,
and then that comes up, and then there's a search window above all the emojis that come up.
Oh, I see. Right. You get into emoji mode. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah.
And then you click on the little face with the plus sign next to it,
to the right of the emoji search window, and then you enter a description of what you want it to be.
In my case, mic drop. And I was getting a microphone and like a teardrop.
I'm like, that's terrible.
So the cool thing about it is you can do...
Multiple inputs if you don't like it you can put in another one you can take
out the previous input and it will keep doing it and it'll let you scroll through
till you want i like get what you want
so yeah so i i did that and i came up with an what i think is an okay mic drop
i don't know if i can put that in the yeah.
Good good luck
In the comments or not but i'll try and get it into yeah it doesn't go into
comments but yeah you're.
Right i i have my um the the one it came up with for me, for mic drop,
looks like a sweating microphone, which is just not, I have a gig tonight and
I don't like the idea of a microphone dripping sweat. That's disgusting.
It's bad enough.
That's bad. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Never want to use somebody else's microphone.
And, and chances are someone else doesn't want you using their microphone.
Let's, let's bear that in mind. Yeah. Microphones are disgusting things.
Yeah the other thing that's weird is the emojis that come up for discord are
different apparently than the one for messages because my mic drop is airing messages but not in.
Discord yes and
There is no genmoji available for.
Discord no it as kiwi gram points out in the in the discord chat that this is
only for iMessage and yes that is correct yes so yeah yeah although i mean you
could you could save it as an image and then you know kind of share that image
right yeah exactly yep yep yeah
fun i like it uh so
Yeah play with genmoji you can do all it's ai.
Yeah admittedly i have not played with
genmoji much at all since it came out and i that this is a good reminder to
have some fun with that that's good um ben has a good little quick tip it uses
third-party software so i was trying to decide does it belong in cool stuff
found does it belong in quick tips and And I thought, you know what?
We get to decide. It's okay.
It's good advice. He says, back to episode 1136, Dave, you recommended using
search in system settings to open
the login items pane since it's more difficult to find it by browsing.
He says, I've long used the third-party app LaunchBar as a launcher and appreciated
its ability to open preference panes directly.
You might not know, but even though Apple reorganized system preferences into
system settings, the underlying panels are still stored on your Mac as .pref pane bundles.
So, to access login items and extensions, my launch bar shortcut is Lisp,
L-I-S-P, which means to him, login item settings pane.
That's really interesting. I did not know that they were still stored as pref pane bundles.
Makes perfect sense. Why would they re-architect under the hood when all they
were looking to do was make the user interface consistent with iOS?
And I'm assuming that iOS also has PrefPain bundles under the hood.
You just don't get to dig around and see those easily.
But yeah, that's interesting, Ben.
Yeah. So really anything that could launch a prep pain bundle launch bar being
one thing, but anything could could do this because they are all just still there.
It turns out iOS doesn't have, well, if they do, they also don't let you mess
with them, is an Etsy host file.
Oh, iOS definitely has an Etsy host file, Pete.
Yeah, but you can't play with it.
No, no.
Yeah, so because I actually went in and I have a confession.
I edited my Etsy host file this week.
Oh, all right. Well, wait, wait, wait.
But I knew I was doing it.
Right, right, right, right. Right, and now we all know that you do it.
Most importantly, I know that you did it, so that when you come to me for troubleshooting,
it's like, well, let's maybe check there first instead of spending an hour spinning
our wheels and then saying, you know, on a lark, let's just check this.
But, like, what caused you to want to edit it?
I mean, we talked about the Etsy host file last week because Adobe was editing it. Yeah, yeah.
Right, and without knowledge or forethought.
Um so yeah so i'm looking for
a way to run bit warden but
host it locally and it turns out there's a docker called vault warden and i
was going to run it on my mac mini but i was having trouble accessing it i wanted
it to be accessible for the whole family and um i was able to get there through
opening ports and that sort of stuff but i wanted to do it via tail scale,
And so I went in and I'm still in the middle of messing with it because I'm
not reliably accessing my Mac mini from even my own Mac at this point,
my own Mac laptop across tail scale and that sort of thing.
And then we were traveling and so it's been put to the side for now.
But at one point I edited the Etsy host file on my Mac in order to get there.
And I was like, well, that would work.
But I still need my wife to be able to use it from her iPhone.
And, you know, is there an Etsy? So that's how I found out. You know,
is there an Etsy host file in iOS?
And basically the answer is, yeah, but you ain't going to touch it.
Yeah, it's not for you.
Thanks for asking, playing the home game.
Yeah. No, this is interesting. I have a Bitwarden server that I have been running
locally for years on my disk station.
And I think I'm running it with Docker. Candidly, I don't remember.
But I don't think there's a native Synology package for it.
I think I just installed it in, well, at the time it was called Docker Station.
Now it's called Container Station. But it's Docker containers.
I have not migrated anything to it. I don't use it for much,
if anything at all. But Bitwarden is a password manager.
And you can sign up for Bitwarden and let them host it, and you can pay them,
you know, whatever their fee is to do that.
They have free and pay.
There you go. Or you can host it locally, and then it is, you know,
available for you to do with as you like for free.
But, of course, you know, your support is limited to community support.
You know, the typical things that you would get for a Docker container.
But yeah, every year I think about it, you know, I pay for 1Password for the
family membership every year. And every year I think, man...
When the payment happens i like i should i should either move everybody to bitwarden
or move everybody to apple passwords uh or some combination of the two but uh
so i don't know i haven't quite done it all yet but you know yeah like well
My reason for wanting to go there is it's most like one password in that i can
put photos of my passport or driver's license and that sort of thing in there
that you can't do yet with passwords.
And every time we talk about this, there's an app that comes up and I forget the name of it.
It used to be called access, I believe.
But now it changed its name to something else that, that I think we've agreed
is better, but it sure doesn't want to stick in my memory.
So I'm hoping that someone in the, in the live chat will remember the name of this,
but uh maybe it's maybe it wasn't access maybe
it was i think it was but anyway um and i'm
i'm searching the site to see if i can find
it no i can't uh but it it it is a third-party app that you install on your
devices and it uses iCloud to sync and it adds all of those things that you
would want from one password that Apple passwords doesn't have so it is that
sort of the missing link, if you will.
So you can do this with Apple passwords and then that app to kind of fill in the gaps. So,
But yeah, anyway, so for your for your bitboard and thing, though,
while we're I mean, we're in nerd land here, so this is fine.
I I would for a variety of reasons, none of which would be the sort of obvious one.
But for a variety of reasons, I would caution against using your Etsy hosts
file as the way to do this.
What I would do is, what I have done, in fact, is I have it set up in my Docker container, right?
And then I point, there's a port forwarding that happens from like the front
door of my Synology to the port that I want open on my Docker container.
And you set that up and you set up the Docker container. and then
you can port forward from your router to
that port if you want there's some security things that are worth having discussion
about you know port for anytime you port forward from your router to a device
internal to your network you want to start thinking about you know those implications
but that could be fine really want to do that do you really want to do it's
right but the other thing is when you do that port forwarding
You are forwarding on a, some, you know, not HTTPS port and that's all fine
and good until you're on a network that doesn't let you connect to things on weird ports. Right.
Which some hotels maybe, but other times, you know, like if you happen to find
yourself in China, they wind up, you know, blocking things like that. And so.
Even, even my work, when I was at work, our wife. Exactly. Let us do things, you know.
Right. And I get why, you know, you don't want to bring down a global airline.
Yeah, right. Exactly. So what I've used for all of that stuff,
and I know that I have set this up for my Bitwarden server, but I do it for
a lot of other things, is I use Cloudflare tunnels.
And I'll link to it. I'm going to try.
I haven't prepped this, so I'm going to try and give my concise sort of 10,000
foot view definition of what a Cloudflare tunnel does.
Uh you when once you set it up and i'll talk a little bit about how you would
how it how it's set up not how you would like do it the instructions will do
that but once it's set up what you get is let's say you have macgeekgab.com
at your domain right i could i could point
macgeekgab.com to my home network which i haven't by the way but you know for
example this is this This is the old way, the port forwarding way,
and then forward whatever port, you know, 97, 92.
I'm just making that up to, you know, that's the port I'm going to have my Bitwarden server on.
And then I forward, you know, from my router to the thing.
And, okay, now I need to go into every Bitwarden client and,
you know, macgeekup.com colon 9742.
Okay, great. No, it works. But it's open to the public and people can now kind of bang on that.
With cloudflare tunnels and there are other companies that provide tunnels but
cloudflare tunnels are free for for free accounts which is probably what you
would use for this for cloudflare
You would be able to set up bitwarden.macgeekgab.com. And that then tunnels,
that's it. You don't need to do port forwarding.
You don't need to do anything because the tunnel takes care of the port forwarding behind the scenes.
And you can just point all of your clients at bitwarden.macgeekgab.com.
And I'm really hoping that I haven't set that up because I really might have.
And now I'm like exposing a public thing. But anyway, yeah, it's fine.
Everybody go to.
Go Hammer Dave's show. We all love each other here. Yeah, yeah.
But, you know, then you can just have that. And I have that for a ton of things.
And the Cloudflare tunnel is what lets you do that. There are two pieces to the tunnel.
One is, you know, in your Cloudflare dashboard, you set it up and tell it what you want it to do.
And that's where you would say, look, I want bitwarden.mackekev.com to point
to this server, giving it the local
IP address on my local network and the port that I want it to access.
Right. And then on that local machine, it could be on another machine,
but it's easiest on that same local machine,
you install sort of the Cloudflare tunnel client, as it were,
and then that will do the sort of second half of the routing for you.
So you get all the Cloudflare security, you get their denial of service protection,
all of those things because it always – no one knows your IP address.
It's always a Cloudflare IP that they are going to, and then the tunnels and
forwarding happen behind the scenes.
It's probably geeky enough for us today, but it really is – setting it up is
fairly straightforward.
They've got good documentation and they do have a docker container container
station thing that you can set up to to to be the the client the manager the
internal manager of the tunnels
so i i they're one of my favorite things man i use them for so many different
things now and it works great and what's cool is if you have your own domain
You set up the tunnel connector once for the domain, and then you can add as
many subdomains as you want.
You don't have to go back in and, like, add another connector for each of those.
You just go into the Cloudflare dashboard and say, okay, you know,
for whatever .macgeekup.com, point to this machine at this.
And it's like, okay, do whatever you want. It's great. Works really well.
Yeah.
Does that make any sense?
So it makes total sense. And I was looking there, too, to see,
because one of the things I had done, but I was still having an issue.
And I think it had to do with whether the port was properly opened or something.
But I had set up a CNAME record on my domain pointing to vault.mydomain.com.
Yes.
And I was able to get there, but not reliably.
There was one or two other things. I had to turn off external management on
my router, that sort of thing, which I don't need any longer anyway because
of tail scale because it kept going to my routers page.
That's the problem, right, is you're trying to get to port 443,
and only one device can exist on any given port, but the Cloudflare Tunnel…
Deals with that for you. Correct. Awesome. Yeah. So I'm going to play with that.
That sounds like my solution.
It's what you want. Yes. 100%. And it really, you have to have Cloudflare managing
your DNS for that domain, which I highly recommend everybody do.
They don't have to be your DNS.
They don't have to be your registrar. You could pay somebody else for your domain
and just have Cloudflare be the DNS servers.
Uh however i have moved all of my
domains registration to cloudflare because it's the cheapest registrar
you can find um and this is not an ad
for cloudflare but uh but even cheaper
than namecheap yeah way cheaper yeah yeah yeah because they offer it as like
an ancillary service it's just they just it's pass-through costs yeah man okay
cloudflare they're they're an interesting company they they're like certainly
they're they are a for-profit entity and and they make money And I'd love that for them, but they're,
they're, they really do have like this mission of making the internet more reliable,
faster, more secure, like all of those things.
And they, they offer enough free tools that people like, you know,
like us can just take advantage of for our home networks and not have to pay them anything.
I mean, I, I do wind up paying them because we use them as the front door for
Mac geek up.com too. Yeah.
They have a great WordPress caching sort of integration that's worth paying them for.
Uh, and then like I built our whole, like the backbeat media privacy pixel,
which keeps you private, your information private from like the sponsors that
want to, to, to know things about, they want to see metrics for the show,
but it's like, yeah, okay, that's fine.
But I'm not going to give you, you know, your metrics. I'm going to give you
aggregated metrics. And we built an engine and it runs as a cloud flare worker.
And I pay for that too, but I pay like five bucks a month for that.
It's super inexpensive.
So, yeah, it's a good thing.
Oh, fantastic. Yeah.
All right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And while we were chatting that, Tom Campbell mentioned that Uplock is the name of the app.
Thank you. I knew we would get there eventually.
And he says it's $15 a year.
Okay. Great. Okay. Well, there you go. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I love that. I'll remember Uplock eventually, I promise. Yep, yep.
Uh yeah yeah fun stuff all right so nerdy stuff
Yeah i'm.
Not i'm i'm i'm not afraid
Wonderful wonderful rabbit hole that was a fun one i liked.
It yeah yeah
So i got one more quick tip um you remember we were going to and from ces i
was trying to use that that digital id that you set up on your phone it goes
in your apple wallet and and man it's fantastic all you have to do is,
touch that digital ID to the TSA thing and you're good to go, right?
Except it didn't work. It didn't work in Boston. Okay, well,
you know, remember it didn't work?
I do remember that it didn't work, yes. I think I was clear on the other side
of security by the time you got through.
And I was still futzing with it.
Super efficient.
Well, and all kudos to my daughter who figured it out because you call up,
it's like apple pay or anything else you and you call that the digital id card and you call it up,
And you tap it to their little terminal instead of giving them your driver's license.
And my daughter's the one that figured out that after you do that,
the wallet comes up and says verify.
And you have to double tap like it's Apple Pay and it face IDs you.
So someone can't get your phone when it's unlocked and open that,
you know, go to that and then sneak through. It face IDs you.
And here's why i believe yeah and tsa reps didn't even know this sure they're
starting to i had the first when we came down here to florida the first tsa
rep that i ever dealt with that knew anything about this goes you know you're
gonna have to verify that i'm like you're the first one that knew that everyone
else is like don't know why it doesn't work give me a driver's license yeah right,
okay so yeah so after you tap their
little terminal there you have to verify on your
phone yeah on me and it takes your face id and
then it passes the secure token to tsa sure to
go so um and now here's why i think and people are like i don't want to you
know have that on my phone and have my phone passing data to the tsa and all
that but but here's why i think it's more secure than your license using your
license your license gets scanned and your photo gets taken for facial id recognition yes,
The digital ID system stores your photo on your phone. It doesn't take your
photo at that time or give it to TSA or they don't save your photo or anything
like that because it's all been in there and it's all been verified one time.
Yeah, so it's passing that secure token and they aren't even taking your photo
and saving that for 10 minutes, 10 hour, however long they save it.
So because there was someone that said, I'm not doing that because I think,
you know, I don't want to pass all my phone data to the government.
Your phone stays in your hand the whole time. You're not giving your phone to
them. Yeah. So here's an interesting thing about that.
You're right. If you go into your wallet and you pull up your digital ID,
it's just right there, but it's not active, right?
I mean, it's activated, but it's not ready to go.
However if you pre if
you want to pre-authenticate it you it seems
like you can if you double click the side button uh it's
going to bring up your your you know your apple pay with your default credit
card right like that's that's what happens when you do that on your phone but
you can tap at the bottom to change credit cards you can change to your digital
id there and now you've already face id'd it you can just tap it on the thing
and you're done i think oh yeah
I'll have to try that.
Yeah yeah right yeah just and and by the way uh that all that tip also works
with with apple pay right like we know that we can take our phones and just
tap them on the thing uh and apple pay will come up and then and then you have
to put it up to your face to authenticate right
But you can pre-authenticate by doing that same thing, right?
You double tap or double whatever you want to call it.
Double press the side button, authenticate it. Then you just tap and you're
done. The transaction is complete. So, yeah.
Interesting.
I know.
Yeah.
Yeah. It's good stuff.
Fantastic stuff. Yeah. And then there was one other thing I was going to say
about it. Now I forgot what it was.
That's all right. We're going to, we're not, the show's not over quite yet, Pete.
So, you know. Oh, good. All right.
That's good to know. I got to try that out. The other thing to talk about here
while we're kind of on that same, because we've got summer travel coming up.
There's TSA Touchless ID now.
That's cool. Yeah.
It is.
You have to enroll with your airline, as you know.
You have to enroll with the airline that you are flying that day.
Because I enrolled with one airline back in January or something when I was going to L.A.
And it was great. I just got to do the thing. And then when Lisa and I were
getting ready to go to Austin, I was like, oh, you should enroll with,
you know, with the airline to make sure you can can do it.
When I enrolled with whoever I flew, I can't remember, maybe American to L.A.
We flew southwest to and from Austin.
But with with American.
Uh you know you when you did when i did it in the app maybe it
was delta i can't remember but uh when i did it in the app
it was like okay you're good to go for a
year and it was misleading to me i thought i was
good to go for tsa touchless id with
any airline for a year i just
misunderstood that not so much because when
we when we got to the airport with our southwest things
lisa had gone in and done it in the southwest app and i was like yeah you
just you pick an app at southwest is fine we're flying that one she did
it like two weeks before we get our boarding passes we get
there and it's like wait why does yours have the little green circle or
whatever green halo and mine doesn't it was like oh
i didn't do this in the app and i
don't have my passport with me i guess we flew we flew southwest back from austin
i didn't bring my passport so i couldn't sign up while i was down there because
i didn't have my passport to because you have to you know do the rfid with your
passport to sign up for it so that was uh that was the issue ah
Okay well did i lose it turns out yeah no i'm sure i should be there i turned
up the uh i turned up the air conditioner came on so i turned up the noise gate just a.
Little bit okay get
That out of the way when i wasn't speaking but uh and it turns out the other
thing for those of you that are airline employees they may or may not give you
that uh because we ride on debbie's passes.
Oh i see we
We don't get the touchless but it's really cool you just swipe it and go hey dave go ahead.
Boom that's it you're good to go you
By your first name and say.
Go yeah they know yeah yeah but but definitely
get that set up ahead of time i had to do it with my passport i'm sure there
are other ids that that you can do and maybe if i thought about it maybe i could
have done it with my license i don't know maybe I don't know but anyway set
it up with the specific airlines upon which you will be flying that's my advice to you
Yeah.
And my recollection is it was passport.
Even though, you know,
Even for domestic, they want your passport in the airline app. Yeah.
Yeah. That's, that's what, because it's a more
Verifiable national ID.
I guess that's right. Yeah. Cause they've got your picture on file with the
passport and all that stuff.
Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. That's interesting. I, I, I'm going to,
I'll do it in the Southwest app and see if I can get away with not using my passport.
Uh so yeah i i will i will state
that i am i know i'm change resistant because
it turns out i'm human uh but i was not
thrilled with the new southwest boarding procedures so just just sharing that
so there you go not my not my favorite experience but it was fine uh it's just
just another thing about air travel to love uh all right uh let's see we have flip
Flops and tank tops.
That's it man oh no i i don't mind
the flip-flops and tank tops i just didn't i like with
southwest previously i could pay 15 bucks and make sure
i boarded the plane early and it seemed like that was that has gone away like
we were in group eight man i haven't been in group eight to board an airplane
in a long time i did not like that feeling yes i'm spoiled but it's it's because
i spoil myself i just it was new and i did some
Things are worth it to you.
Correct And I didn't know that I needed to do anything different.
Like the pattern has changed, right? The whole system has changed.
And so I need to learn what I need to do to go through that system to make me happier.
And that's like, it's fine. Like you said, some things are worth it.
Yeah. All right. We have other things to talk about. And the next thing I want
to tell everybody about Pete is our sponsors.
Because, well, 500 gigs on your Mac sounds like plenty until your Mac studio
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your 20 off i think you're gonna love it go try it out and thanks to mac paw
and clean my mac for supporting the show.
In addition, this episode is brought to you by Pocket Hose, the world's number one expandable hose.
So I got my Pocket Hose Copperhead and I'm really just waiting for it to warm
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All right, Pete. It's been a little while since we've done an AI side quest
here and we sort of, you know, dipped our toes into that with your Genmoji comment earlier.
So let's, we've got some AI questions and comments. So let's, let's dig in.
And I'm going to ask you to unmute your mic just because I think it's going
to sound, it's going to sound better. It did.
It stuck. Well, I could open the window and shout, but only the people in Florida
will hear me in the first few seconds.
The people in Torpedo Bay.
Right.
Alabama will be next and then, you know, Mississippi, but you're going to have to listen carefully.
Floribama. I learned about a bar called Floribama last night.
Floribama. It is on the state line and it's not far from about 10 minutes from here.
And yeah, it's right on the state line. Half the bars in Florida, half of it's in Alabama.
A friend of mine is mixing. I think we can talk about this is mixing a show.
They're coming up front of house engineer.
And, and he says, the joke is that the bands in Florida and you mix from Alabama.
But it is yeah, Kenny Chesney is playing there in about a week at the Florida family.
Oh man I gotta look and see if he's here while we're here No.
It is it is a one-off gig and it is invite only for Sirius XM guests but you
know, he's used to mixing stadiums Yeah,
But you know his front of house engineer and you could call him and say Pete's coming.
Pilot Pete I was talking to him yesterday I'm
A Sirius XM subscriber there you go come on man call.
Yeah call series xm i told him he was like he was
like this is crazy he's like i'm used to mixing like stadiums and sphere he's
like this place is gonna be nuts and i'm like you're thinking too much about
it man this is a normal saturday night for me like just go mix it he's like
we might need to bring you in as a consultant he was joking of course but i
there you go told him i was available and ready to go so i'll consult i'll consult
yeah they've got They've
Got like five stages and all that. They do the New Year's Eve or New Year's
Day dip, which is always funny to me because the Gulf of Mexico is about as
cold as the Atlantic in August up in New Hampshire on New Year's Day.
So the polar plunge or something like that. Yeah, the water's like 60 degrees. It's cold.
Yeah. All right. Anyway. Yeah.
So there we are.
Moving on with our AI side quest. From this other
Side We have time for that Our waste has enough time,
Andy writes in and says, what can I do if I'm not comfortable with agentic browsing yet?
I'm still not comfortable with it, and I'm not even using cloud code.
So I'm taking data and pasting it back and forth from the browser and into the chatbot.
Do you have any advice on how I can dip my toes in without going all the way?
So, yes, of course. And I understand why you would not be comfortable with agentic browsing.
Even though I have used it for a lot of things, I don't always let it do its thing, right?
I do wind up, I use Comet as my browser because I like having that AI integration.
Although I've really come to standardize on Claude as my app slash LLM,
you know, interface of choice.
But, you know, I have that free perplexity count for at least another few months.
And I, you know, I use Comet as the browser, which is perplexity browser.
I like having the ability to do all that in my browser. But one thing you can
do is you open up the little chat sidebar and have it.
It can see your the Web page you're on without engaging with it.
Right. Without making changes to it, without you needing to give it permission to make changes to it.
So one of the things is just ask it questions about the Web page that at the
very least saves you from doing
the copy and paste of screenshots back and forth, which can be very handy.
Because a lot of times, as we know, web pages are longer than the screen can
see, but that's okay because the sidebar chatbot can see the whole page.
And so you can engage with it that way and kind of get that functionality without
having to do the copy-paste thing, which can be very handy.
I will say that I've been doing a lot with automation in general and AI-assisted
automation, I'll call it.
And the agentic browsing, I was obviously super excited about it when it first
was something I was able to use and have done some interesting things with it.
But it is not yet...
To the point where it's reliable for like repeatable tasks for me i'd love to
hear feedback at mackeycap.com if anybody is using it reliably consistently
for like real productivity stuff please i let's let's share that here on the show well
We're feedback at.
Mackeycap.com yeah feedback at mackeycap.com and maybe we can even create a
little uh bot to to do that three times for us So we don't have to bother with it.
But but like it is interesting. There are certain things where it's it's good.
Actually, I will say the one thing where I find it valuable is when I have it
doing research for me on like my specific thing. One of the other businesses
we run has a trust pilot account.
I needed to get data out of that. I wanted to analyze our reviews history and
start to look for patterns right now.
I could have like figured out how to export, but I didn't know how to do any of this.
And so I just gave it free reign and said, go.
It didn't make any changes it just dug through
our trust pilot account grabbing the data it
wanted to solve my query and summarize and
analyze and all that so for that it's great for like making changes though it
has trouble like navigating the the the dom the document object model of the
web page and like typing things and all that that that's where it it still kind of falls apart um
It's so that's that's where I am with the agentic browsing. So,
yes, I guess I have found some uses for it.
But but but but you don't have to.
You can like I could I could I could do all that with Trustpilot without giving
it the ability to change pages. I could say, no, I don't want to give you access.
Look at this page. Then tell me where to go.
And then you can look at that page and then tell me where to go again.
And then you can look at that page and then you can do your analysis and,
and it could walk you through it. So that would probably be a way to start to learn.
Maybe to trust it would be to have it instruct you instead of it doing the instructions itself.
Sure.
Yeah.
And I found with, and I, I'm assuming there's a pay thing for Gemini. Yeah. But I don't know.
Yeah, it's Gemini Pro you can get for $20 a month, which I have too. Yeah, yeah.
Okay. So because with Chrome, you hit that little Gemini tab in the top right,
and it too will interact.
The advantage to the Pro is that you can upload PDF files or photos or anything
like that for it to interact with as well, as well as just the web page that's
sitting there to the left.
But yeah I've used Comet and Atlas is chat GPT I need to use I have not used
Clawed yet I need to use that I hear it's.
Amazing you know I'll wax a little here maybe it'll be poetic maybe it won't
but there are two pieces to every
to the chat bots that we think about right when you think about chat GPT
ChatGPT is the app, right? Claude is the app. Perplexity is the app.
Right. Then there are the local language models, the LLMs, that sit,
that the app interacts with.
But the local language models are static models. I mean, I know they keep coming out with new ones.
But, like, you can use Anthropic, which is the company that makes Claude,
you can use Anthropic's models inside of Perplexity.
But you don't get the same experience because the app, the interface is different.
And I really argue that the interface matters as much as perhaps even more than...
The llm that's being used in the background because it's the interface
that knows what you have told it right
like like when you when you say oh when i say okay well
i'm gonna you know i've been having this like allergy thing and i
want to help figure i want to figure that out and i'm going to
use claude or anthropics opus and engine because
that's got the biggest context window and it's going to be amazing and that's
true but opus doesn't know anything about me it
like every single query that i send
to it includes all of
my context that is fed into opus
brand new every single query because
opus doesn't remember anything my app remembers
Things your app remembers the things so
it really is how the app is sense of course
it makes it right but like until you stop to think
about it you just think oh yeah well it's it's claude or it's
anthropics engines are good with my data it's like well they
might be but you're handing it your data literally every
time you press send on a query even if it's all in the
same chat it's just taking everything in
that chat and sending it as a fresh new
query every time and this is why
the longer a chat gets the more tokens you
wind up burning the hinkier it gets but but yes
because you're giving it it's not just seeing your most recent
question it's getting everything and claude's really really good at compressing
things down and stripping out the unnecessary stuff and managing all of that
not not to mention that like claude co-work and claude code and like all of
those things but yeah the the app matters just as much so that's that's my that's my poetic waxing
So I got two stupid questions.
Great. Okay.
I know. No stupid questions, only stupid questioners. So first one is you said
local language model. I always thought it was large language.
Sorry. I've been, you, thank you. It is large language model.
Oh, okay. You just saved us. Everybody, you can cancel your emails. Yep.
There you go. But you can do a local though, right? You can.
And I, yes, you're absolutely right. Even as I was saying it,
I'm like, that doesn't sound right.
Okay. Yep. Uh, you're right. Large language model is like the opus.
Those are the, we'll call them the cloud cloud-based models,
but you can run local LLMs, local language models on your, on your Mac.
And Macs are great for running those.
Uh, you would need an interface to do that. And you can use like a llama with
open claw and put all these things together.
But yes, you're totally right. Large language model, not local language model.
Thank you for all your emails that you sent. Yep.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Put, put click on send.
Yeah, that's right.
We got it. All right. The other one is, and I'm going to do what we call stump
the dummy on check rides in the aviation industry, because you may not know the answer to this,
but it was in the news this week, and I'm 99% sure it was Anthropic,
who was going to release something and decided not to because the AI was hacking.
Yeah. Mythos, I think, is their new. So, yeah, they companies come up with their
own names for their large language models.
OpenAI uses, you know, GPT-4, GPT-5, GPT-5.3. You know, that's their thing.
And Anthropic uses names like Haiku, Sonnet, Opus.
And then the next one is supposed to be Mythos. and they they yes they they
said that it was it was it didn't have the right guardrails for the for the
level of intelligence that it it has and and it was
Going out on its own and,
oh man.
Yeah it's a whole it's a whole interesting path man like you know open ai exists
because Google bought what it was.
It deep, not deep seek. Maybe it was deep seek again. Don't do this stuff without research folks. Um,
But Google bought whatever the, you know, the LLM technology was that sort of got us into this world.
And some of the people that work there were like, whoa, this is powerful stuff.
We can't have this in the hands of Google.
We need to start a company to prevent some megalomaniac from being in control of all this.
And so that's how OpenAI was started, right? Chat, the ones that make ChatGPT.
And then as they were working on this before anything had been released to the
public, there were people there that were like, whoa. oh, we can't have this
tech in the hands of a megalomaniac like Sam Altman.
We need to form our own company to protect this. And that's how Anthropic was formed, right?
So I'm skipping some of the details here.
But literally, this is not false, right? There's just more nuances, of course, obviously.
And the train has left the station, the horse is out of the barn, the cat's out of the bag.
It's it's anthropic was ready to release
first and decided whoa we
need to put better guardrails in place we're gonna wait and
in the meantime while they were building their better guardrails uh
was when open ai released chat gpt to the
world in fall of whatever it was three years ago and then six
months later anthropic released you know the first iteration of claude
but um but yeah so anthropic has
a history of of being cautious with
this stuff now of course okay right i mean on
the surface i say good yes exactly yeah i mean i
don't know enough about the company because they are a very secretive company uh as
i i listened to i don't know some podcast about somebody who had some reporter
you know from a large organization who had gone in there and he said they the
only signage that they have about anthropic in the on the building or in the
building is on the inside of the front door which you see as you're walking out which
Reminds employees to remove their anthropic badges before they leave the building
so that no one knows they work there.
So, you know, there's more of a thread here.
You can tug on it and learn. And like I said, I'm glossing over a lot of things.
But it's an interesting little industry, which ain't so little.
All right. Should we move back to some quick tips maybe about on our side quest?
Well, yeah. Yeah, so Jason wrote in with something that I found really interesting,
that it's basically interesting assessment of security issues with AI agents
and a skill you may want to provide your large language model,
especially given how much AI-genic work and browser work you're doing.
And we'll put the link to it in the show notes.
But I did a little research on it, and it turns out, you know,
AI agents can identify phishing attacks with near-perfect accuracy,
but they often have failed to avoid threats when actually performing the tasks as your agent.
So 1Password's testing found agents typed real passwords into phishing pages within seconds.
And their solution was a 1,200-word security skill that improved the safety scores to 95% to 99%.
And then visit 1password.github.io slash scam to test your AI agents and download
the free security framework.
I interfaced with ChatGPT a little bit about it.
And it says, we've got that guardrail up, not to worry. But,
you know, still, it may not hurt to at least be aware that if you're doing agentic browsing, that...
Your agent is not doing things, entering passwords without your permission and approval.
Yeah. And that's, you know, agentic browsing is but one piece of this, right?
We are Claude Cowork, OpenClaw, all of this kind of Claude Code, for that matter, right?
All of those things, and OpenAI has codecs, that are these agentic things, which we will all want.
Once you start using these agentic things it's really hard
to stop yeah because you just give it a task
and let it run and it goes in like does the
thing and you can even have it be its own quality control and that's
the thing is right now all of these things are
possible but you have to set up an infrastructure of
agents to monitor the agents and like report to you
at certain times and and it it's totally
doable but it is complex and if you don't already know how to do it it's way
too easy to get yourself into trouble right now so this is definitely one of
those do as i say not as i do uh you know scenarios because yeah absolutely yeah yeah well
For for instance if people are wondering what kind of egenic things like i have
it go in i have comet go in, well, perplexity is the comment browser,
but perplexity go in and look through Twitter and find appropriate posts that,
that would be appropriate for
me to respond to and kind of put my show in front of other people's eyes.
And the first time I did that, I said, hey, don't do anything until I read it.
And it put them all in there. I'm like, no, son of a gun, stop.
Since then, I've managed to throttle it back, but it does a nice job of going
and finding other places for me to get my show in front of other people.
So that's one example of what an eugenic browser will do for you.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that is a good way to grow your social media presence
is to be reply guy, right?
Go find other conversations and then just go join them.
I will caution you and anybody listening that
what it was doing where it was posting responses
for you is very much now against X's terms of service and in fact even what
you have it doing where it's going and like scraping and finding the things
that you should reply to technically that is currently also against X's terms I didn't do
That I was thinking it would be a good idea no no nobody saw me you can't prove a thing yeah.
Well, but I mean, like, what's the difference between you going through and
taking screenshots, right?
Like the conversation that started all this and feeding them in.
That's not against the terms of service. It's the, you know, the browsing.
So there's gray lines, there's charcoal gray lines, there's light gray lines, you know.
So just FYI that as we're kind of as a society and as different businesses are
learning how this is going to integrate with what we're doing,
there will be sort of collateral damage points.
So just just be aware that some people, some companies don't like it when when
you do that, which like maybe what I described with Trustpilot is against the
terms of service that we have with them. I can't today.
I don't know. I don't see any reason why it would be. But, you know, maybe they maybe it is.
But but I'm still going to do it because it's so much more efficient than doing
it manually, you know, and I didn't have it enter anything into trust.
It changed nothing. It just used it to go and gather all the data. So...
Yeah. Right.
All right. We've got two more AI things. These are quick tips,
and I think these will probably actually be quick.
Todd says, since you often sing the praises of Setapp, I wanted to figure out
which apps I currently use that are installed on my Mac that are included in Setapp.
So in the Finder, I opened the application folder, selected all,
did a copy, and then pasted the list into Microsoft Word, printed a PDF,
dropped the PDF into perplexity, and asked it which of my apps in the attached
PDF are also available in setapp.com.
That provided the list. He says, but I forgot about utilities.
So I right clicked into the system settings app on the docs,
selected login items and extensions, use tech sniper to capture the apps listed
in the open at login and ask perplexity, which of these apps are also included and pasted the list.
The conclusion, seven of my apps are currently included in set app and I can
save money on subscription fees with those apps.
Love that. And you could probably save the step to Word by just doing,
you know, once it's on your clipboard, paste it into your LLM app of choice.
Perplexity, Claude, ChatGPT, it doesn't matter. Just paste, paste, paste, paste.
One of the things that these apps and LLMs are great at and have been great
at for a while is distilling...
Multi-modal data sets into one now what do i mean by that well if you have a
picture of one thing uh you know a text file of another another piece of related
data and then maybe a you know a csv of
something else related or whatever it will see all of those and sort of homogenize
it in its in its ai brain and and analyze what it has seen so you don't you
don't need to be the one managing and massaging the data just to dump the data
at it let it do its thing um so yeah there you go
uh moving on to roy we
Shall yeah so roy writes in he says i need a qr code to direct folks to a website
to register for a training course i'd previously previously done this on a website
but that was a bit of a pain.
On a whim, I asked ChatGPT if it would generate an image of a QR code linked to that URL,
It created one that worked perfectly. I pasted it into the newsletter. Easy peasy.
Roy, P.S. Love the show. Never miss it. Though on occasion, it costs me money. Lots of money.
I often learn a lot. Five new things from every show.
So thank you, Roy.
Amazing, Roy. Thank you. Yeah. We know we're expensive people to know.
Sometimes. But other times, not so bad.
Other times, we save you money. Well, we try. Like the previous one where you
can not pay two subscriptions for the same ad.
Exactly. that's right yeah that's right yeah so there's
That but uh i will mention though as long as we're on the qr thing i gotta throw
this in here is kind of a cool stuff found the app i use is iqr.
Okay yep
To create my qr codes and i don't it wasn't a lot of money it was like seven
bucks i think for the pro version and that uh and the cool thing about that
is you can put like your little logo right in the middle of your qr it's all kinds of customizable.
I would guess that you could tell your ll
your chatbot of choice to do all of those things do the
same but yeah yeah what's the fun of that the one
yourself the one that is best for images right
now is the one it's called nano banana pro it
is part of google's it's google's thing and it's part of
gemini that's absolutely the the best image
generation one that i've found so again these things all leapfrog each other
although sure they do chat gpt with gpt or open ai with gpt 5.4 did not leapfrog
opus 4.6 the way everybody thought it would um that was kind of a sad trombone
moment but anyway they'll figure it out they'll get
There well one other thing i'll mention just on iq on yeah iqr is that as you
create a code you can tell it whether you want it to be high reliability um
medium or low reliability and once you start customizing it by putting in a,
images in the middle of it you can put it in front behind around
yada yada yeah once you do all that it will tell you up front whether this is
going to work or not you don't even have to test it with your phone it's going
to go yeah that's not going to work oh interesting yeah yeah you get a little
green check mark or a red x saying right yep you know no no good fix it yep
what you want to do can't be done yeah.
Right yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah all right uh I have a question for you,
Pete. Actually, I don't have a question.
Listener Joe has a question for us. Joe says, I have a group to which I made changes in my contacts.
I removed some email addresses and added others. It is synced to iCloud.
When I try to use it in mail, mail keeps using the old list.
I look at previous recipients and no group is listed.
When I Googled this problem, it said, ensure your contacts are synced by opening
the app and choosing view refresh.
There is no such option in context view. That's right.
When I enter the group name and then remove it, I'm only removing it from my
current email. How can I make this happen? This used to work.
Yeah, so I think what is happening is mail's doing this to you,
really, not contacts or something.
So the mail's holding on to the version of the old group and keeps using it.
So as soon as you go to put that list in, it remembers and pulls up your old list.
So the group is right in iCloud, but mail is stuck on the old list.
And I had the same thing sort of happen to me before. And what worked was if you go in mail,
you go to window previous recipients and then remove the stale entry or you
can clear the entire list and it'll take a short time.
It'll start rebuilding as you mail people again to email people again and stuff.
But you can actually go in and if you know that only four people came out of
your group, you can go into previous recipients and remove those four people.
And that way, when mail tries to come back and stick its nose into your business,
it won't stick those four people in there.
So but but I would just clear the whole list. It doesn't hurt,
you know, but unless you're relying on previous recipients.
I need to kind of derail us here because he said, I looked at previous recipients and no is listed.
Yeah. So because that's
Why it's not a group, though. I don't think it's a group. I could be wrong because
this fixed it for me when I had the issue.
I know. I have seen it fix it for me, too.
Like, that's where I would look.
And I wonder if maybe it is in previous recipients, but it's just not.
I don't have mail open and I don't want to open mail because I haven't opened
mail on this computer in months.
But I'm looking at it now. It does not list groups.
But is there a filter there? Can you search it down and find things in there?
Yes, you can find things in there. Okay. But like, for instance,
I have donors to my show is one of the mailing lists that I use from contacts.
Okay.
But if I put in the word donor, it just shows support at donor box,
you know, but that's the previous recipient.
It doesn't show the entire list of people that would otherwise be there.
Okay, so that group is not being remembered, at least in that space,
in mail. Right. It's interesting.
Right.
Huh. Interesting.
I wonder where mail is caching all that stuff.
I mean, it seems like from what Joe is saying, from what you're saying,
Pete, it seems like the previous recipient's window is not showing everything that mail gets to see.
Um it would seem like that because i didn't see him say i didn't see groups
in there but but i don't see groups in there either but and when i cleared that
list it worked for us i would still try that see if it's somehow yeah like you
say it's grabbing something yeah that we're not seeing,
interesting yeah yeah yeah.
Context is kind of a mess the context database is kind of a mess i know we've
talked about that on the show before I don't think that's the issue here but
but yeah maybe wiping out all previous recipients would would wipe out more than it shows you
Yeah and I'm not sure that that I'm trying to see look it's been a while since
I've done it but yeah if if I were to look I want to say,
There may be 150 previous recipients, so it wouldn't take you very long to go
through and go, oh, yeah, got to get rid of that, or no, that's one I need to
keep, and you can select all the others and get rid of.
Well, but what I'm saying is, is there, if you, if you granularly remove them,
it would likely only remove the ones that you are selecting and removing.
But if you erase the entire list, does that then erase the, the things that
it's not showing you like groups? Yeah. Right.
So you might like the test for this, and I'm not sure it's going to succeed,
but the test for this would be, you've got to commit and wipe out everything
in previous recipients. Yeah.
Yeah, I agree.
You know, no one wants to do that. Of course, that's, you know,
but I don't know where else it would be stored. If you know,
feedback at MackeyCubb.com. Yeah. Yeah.
We had we had a discussion last week about monitors and lamented the lack of
a 27 inch iMac here in 2026.
And so listener Brent actually went through and created a 2026 iMac that you
can buy today by buying the different parts.
He says regarding the cost of the Apple studio display compared to a display
only option mentioned in last week's episode, uh,
Understanding that the Apple Studio display has the same specs as the iMac 5K
display from 2017, here are those features.
27 5K display, 60 hertz, 1.47 million pixels, 600 nits of brightness.
And then add to that 12 megapixel center stage camera, which Apple Studio display
has, a three mic array, six speakers, Thunderbolt 5, and it's $1,599.
So, okay, there's our studio display, 17-inch, $1,599 with all of the aforementioned features.
Of course, you don't have a Mac with that. So then you go get a base Mac Mini for $599.
You add a keyboard and a mouse for $179 and $79.
And now for just shy of $2,500, you get what a 2026 iMac would likely cost if Apple still sold it.
And good news, you can go buy one. but you can also save a bunch of money and
not buy the screen and buy something for, you know, a third,
the price and maybe be just as happy.
Yeah. Although I guess you really do need, you would need speakers.
You would need like the other things to go along with it.
But, but, but that's an interesting way of looking at it.
So for 2,500 bucks, you, you too can have a 2026 Apple Silicon iMac 27 inch 5k.
There you go yeah yeah yeah interesting math i like i i i like it i'm it it
is because you're right that's probably what it would cost if it were being
sold today so i don't know yeah probably
Probably maybe a little less but probably thanks brent good stuff uh i have
another question for you pete
Oh,
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He says, let's see, it's from Matt.
He says, I've been a longtime Plex user and lifetime Plex Pass holder,
as I believe are each of you.
I stream my large media library within my home and sometimes outside to a variety of devices.
Unfortunately, though, as we are all aware, Plex has been recently undergoing
a process known in the industry as, well, I'll paraphrase, And crapification,
a well-known process in which a company stops caring about what their customers
want and only cares about making money to the detriment of the product.
We've already all been through the furor over the out-of-home streaming change. Yep.
But as a Plex Pass holder, that one doesn't impact me. He says,
but they certainly are not stopping there.
And crapification is a never-ending process, which only ever stops when the
product or company dies.
He says, I've been struggling with the Plex team's efforts to shove paid or
commercial supported content onto my screen, making it harder to surface my content, etc.
My fear is that this is only going to continue and get worse.
Plex is now a money making operation and is beholden to corporate masters.
After all, days of fun and frolic with no one getting paid for it cannot be allowed to continue.
So I was wondering, as folks who talk about and use Plex a lot over the years,
what are your thoughts on A, the encrapification?
Of plex now and future am i overreacting b alternatives
are any of them good uh if this topic makes it onto the show i suspect you'll
have a little trouble with encrapification hey that's not my word it's an industry
term maybe we can all agree it's the e word uh yeah i'm fine with e word encrapification
whatever i it then when we've seen this happen to companies and
well actually i don't want i have thoughts to share what are your thoughts pete
Yeah well uh But number one thought is he's not wrong. You know, it's kind of happening.
I think the, but I don't think it's completely gone yet.
And the number one and or two way of dealing with is to pin the library as you
want and disable the online resources that Plex offers.
And you get back to your more original feeling of Plex.
And then he mentioned Jellyfin, and you've got more experience with that.
So I'll leave that to you. But mine has been MB.
And I left Plex to go to MB because I also have an IPTV service,
which MB allows me to DVR my IPTV, but also look at my Plex library.
So I was able to use MB for both. I'm able to get my Plex data.
I'm leaving that Plex library up. Sure. Works great.
I love the metadata that comes along with it. And that's all fantastic.
And that is still very good.
So that's been my method. And then, of course, on the flight on the way down
here, I tried to load MB, and it wouldn't load.
And I thought, well, maybe I'm not connected to tail scale. I've got tail scale
going. It still wouldn't load.
And it turns out somehow I have corrupted or changed a permission or something,
and I don't know what. And, again, now I'm in the middle.
It's hot, and I'm not going to mess with it while I'm here in Florida.
But up until now, MB has been fantastic, a bit of a learning curve to get it set up and running.
But I really liked that as an alternative I played with jellyfin a little bit
when I was looking at you know what am I going to do to get this DVR uh thing
and that's of course the giveaway this month um.
I i think no plex is to get plex is the giveaway this month uh a i thought jellyfin
was no no no no it's it's uh it's a plex pass i've never i've never used jellyfin
before uh i thought you had
Okay maybe my recollection was.
You no then who
Did dave who used it.
We are giving away three uh one-year plex
passes and i okay i don't disagree
that there have been certain parts of plex uh that
have been frustratingly lost in
the development process uh there that the
downloads the way offline
downloads work it's finally better now um but
i i don't i don't so i don't
think mb is the answer i i think mb i've used
plex since the early days when it was a small team the two scots uh you know
that that that built this thing and and were creating this thing and it was
it was created uh it's a scratch and itch right it was you know and then they
turned it into a company obviously in a very successful company uh with
Good user form and support.
Yeah that that does you know that does make money now um i i i don't see mb
even when plex was in its infancy
and, you know, going through the growing pains.
Plex wasn't always, you know, the smooth thing that it became.
And then I would argue it still is.
But I, like...
Even in those early days, Plex was so far, the vision of what Plex could be,
and therefore where they were spending their priorities, programming and all
that stuff, is so different from what I see with MB.
MB is, it will never get to be that smooth experience, I don't think. I know it.
Oh, I concur with that.
So it's great for nerds, but it's a bad UX in a lot of ways.
And I don't see it. I wouldn't say that MB, and after you started using it, because I've had it.
It's always just running. Like you said, you can point lots of things at a media
library that was your Plex library, and they all can just ingest that.
It's fine. You don't need to make copies of your media library.
Yeah and and i so i was like oh let me check out emby again it was like oh yeah
i remember this like it's not it's not you know grandma proof like it's not grandma ready oh no
Yeah no this is it's geeky it's nerdy yeah it's nerdy you know you're gonna
spend a couple hours in the interface getting yourself.
Set up yeah it's fun it's functional and it has lots of and it's functional
it's flexible the form sucks right and and that's how i mean that's that's usually
the balance it's like i I mean,
Apple generally prioritizes form over function sometimes, right?
Like, you know, you don't have all the flexibility and functions,
but you have great form. And that's wonderful.
And Plex, I think Plex has the right balance of form and function.
Now, there are some things that are frustrating.
I know, and I don't know how public, it's not public, I'm sure.
But I know that they had issues with the way their engineering team was led
after like the original founders were no longer kind of involved in the day to day.
There was some some like fiefdom stuff going on corporate internal corporate politics.
Essentially had the company sort of
like shackled or hamstrung by
by that uh in terms of
the features that would be added and and those sorts of things i'm
trying not to like be too specific here but um
but they definitely were in a in a in
a scenario where things could not get
done because of their internal corporate politics
uh i believe they have remedied
that but i don't know for certain uh but
you know and so that i think that hurt them
more than any of the um
you know corporate greed or whatever
you want to call it right like things just went in a weird direction
and and they couldn't steer the
ship the way they wanted to steer the ship i believe they can
Now but there's but they're you know
there's baggage from that that still exists in
the way the apps work that said your advice
pete to reorder and pin
your libraries like when when i was reading matt's
note it's like i don't they're not
shoving commercial content down my throat that never happens
i i just only see my libraries what why
why is he saying this and then you nailed it
when you answered it you were like well you just pin your own content it's like
oh right i pinned my own content years ago i don't see any of the other stuff
that i don't want to see and and that makes a big difference for sure so it
does yeah yeah i plex is great we have you know i've got obviously got family
living all over the i was gonna say all over the country but all over the world
And we all have access to the same media library. We can all easily use it simultaneously.
It just works. It's smooth. There's so much integration with it that I, like there are.
It's an ability to grab metadata and posters for the show and,
you know, to play the theme song while you're looking at the post.
Yeah, and that's the part that MB doesn't have natively.
I know you can add all the plugins and do all those things, but my God,
like why not just install Plex?
Uh right you know so i i still have great hopes for plex and and great like
current use case too there are some things that are like they need to fix but
i think they're aware of it i i i still feel okay i don't i don't think we're
in the encrapification phase of that yeah and
That so well let me say that's why i haven't gone away from it either i mean
i still like it and i still use it in fact with mb being corrupted right now
we've been using the plex library from the plex app this week, but again,
the only reason I went to MB was to DVR my IPTV service.
And the ability to create a, what's the word I'm looking for?
The grid. Oh, yeah. What's on now. Yeah. You can really customize that.
Sure. These are the channels I want listed, and it shows the times that they're
available and all that sort of thing.
You can put all that in there, and I don't believe that. If you can do that in Plex.
I've never found the way to do it. No, I mean, you can-ish.
You'd have to put a third-party sort of filter in front of it, And like,
it can be done, but it's not as that part of things is not nearly as smooth,
but that's also not for, that's not grandma ready in any way,
shape or form, no matter how you like, and I, and I, I say grandma ready.
I obviously, I, you know, I, I know plenty of people who
Are exactly right. It was my mother who needed to be able to hit the power button
and hit the channel up and down button and anything beyond that was lost on her.
But I but I also just stating the obvious I'm using a generalization like I
know plenty of people who are women who have grandchildren that can run circles
around me with some tech stuff.
So like it's not just being efficient here, folks.
Yeah. So I don't maybe we should need to come up with a better term for that.
But but like the person who is grandpa. Yeah, the person who is not interested
in being a nerd is not going to have an IPTV set up like you're talking about.
They're just going to write like it's just not how it is because.
Even with your current setup, right, which is great and you love it and you'll
keep using it. It is fragile.
It's not currently working. You need to go in and dig.
And that's true of a lot of the things that I run in my house.
And maybe this is the best testament that I can give.
I very rarely, less than once a year, have to do any troubleshooting on my Plex setup.
That's, you know, like the worst thing that happens is somebody says,
hey, is the Plex server down?
And it's like, oh, yeah, right. I really need to put more RAM in the QNAP that
I run it on because it runs out of RAM and like that's on me.
But but like, you know, other than that, that's the only issue I have.
Like, I mean, the only stability issue I have, I like I said, I have some specifics.
Like I wish they would get their QNAP certificate signed so that they could
update the app for the server app for QNAP.
Like, I don't know what's taking them so long, blah, blah, blah. but uh
you know like there are some things that are always
going to frustrate you about anything any product right think
about your apple product you know it wouldn't take long for any of us to come
up with the five things we wish apple would add and many of us would not have
the same list of five which is why apple's not adding all of them right you
know otherwise talk about encrapification of a product right like that's the
other side of that is it just becomes features everywhere, and you don't know where to get anything.
So, yeah. But, yeah, I don't disagree.
Plex has seen some growing pains, but I don't think we're at the end of Plex.
I sure hope not. Because there isn't anything else out there as good currently. So, yeah.
I don't remember when I bought mine, but I bought my Lifetime Plex Pass when it was $75.
Something like that.
So it's been 15 years ago at least. Yeah. And what is it now? Is it like $150?
Yeah, $130 or something. But again, go.
It's still worth every penny.
Well, but don't buy right now. Go to MacGeekUp.com slash giveaway and sign up
because we're giving away.
There's, what, 17 days left or something by the time this episode comes out.
And we're giving away three one-year Plex passes.
So you really, you can, you know, you got to be in it to win it, folks.
And you can like vote early, vote off. And there's many ways of like getting
more entries for yourself. It's not just one and done.
Go check it out. Our thanks to Cashfly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you.
You missed Adam this week. So make sure to go listen to the latest episode or
more of the Debut Film Podcast.
Pete's So There I Was and My Business Brain and GeekGab are also out there for your enjoyment.
As is MacGeekGab merch at MacGeekGab.com slash merch.
Go buy yourself something nice. It can say don't get caught on it because that's a wonderful thing.
And let us know if there's some piece of merch that isn't in the store that you want in the store.
Let us know. We have the ability to change that. We know a guy.
You need to get a bikini in there.
A bikini? Listen, I'll put it in the store if you'll modeling oh
You just you got it.
All right okay you
Don't want to see it.
Folks i'll buy the first one yeah that's right yeah yeah talk about not safe
for work man we almost made it through the episode uh before before we have
any more trouble what's your shirt say pete
Well if you're gonna be running around in a bikini don't get caught.
There you go. Me. Fun stuff. Thank you for hanging out, folks.
Thanks to all of our premium listeners.
And we are working on, there's a weird renewal payment issue that's happening.
And I've got WordPress and WooCommerce, like, figuring it out because it's on their end.
So thank you to you. And thank you for your patience.
And don't get caught. We'll see you next week. Later.
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