Retina Density and Monitor Quality

It's time for MacGeek Gab and listener Dan brings us our quick tip of the week with I've been listening to the Geek Gab since you were in double digits . Awesome, and the Mac cast at the same time too. I love the new format with the three of you. Quick iPhone tip that my wife found if you are on a list like your messages list in mail , tap select , you can then run your finger down the left hand to easily select multiple emails at a time instead of individually selecting each one. Much quicker for cleaning out your junk email. Maybe everyone knows this, but I did not , and a lot of people probably didn't, or you would have read it in. So thanks for all the great work you put into the show and a shout out to the So there I was podcast. I'm a pilot and I really love the stories that are shared on Pete's, not just Pete podcast. So there I was. So thank you, Dan for that. More quick tips like this, plus your questions answered today on Mexico eleven forty four for Monday , june first, twenty twenties. It's actually eleven forty five, eleven forty five. I knew that for Monday eleven forty five. That's right. June june eighth, twenty twenty six. Yes, june eighth being national best friends Day here in twenty twenty six . Greetings folks and welcome. Woo, that was hot. I messed with my micraine. Micrain? No, but I'll give you a migraine , migraine. That's when the mic's so loud, it gives you a migraine. We've made up a new word . Greetings folks. And welcome to MacGeekeb, the show where you send in tips like that and we share them. You send in cool stuff found and we share that . We send you send in your questions. We share your questions. We try to give them answers . And the goal is that each and every one of us learns at least five new things every single time we get together . Our sponsors for this episode include Keepers curity. com slash mg where you can go to get sixty percent off their personal and family plans only for podcast listeners . Helixleep dot com slash mg where you can go and get twenty percent off site wide , which is a great deal. And then nordlayer com dot slash browser where it's a great business browser that's built for all of those SaaS apps that we live in now, still giving you the security that you need. So we'll talk more about all of those in a little bit. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Newmarket, New Hampshire, it's Ron Burgundy, who will read anything on the teleprompt in front of it Monday june first , yeah, Monday, june eighth, you know, whatever it is. Now, okay, really it's pilot Pete, but I'm feeling a little Rond Burgundyish after that. Yeah . Yeah . Well, yeah, I realized I didn't update our script document with all the right things. So you just read what was on the screen. Well that's right , that's me. It's a steak glassy San Diego. Yeah . That's right. Yeah. Actually, I'm Emma in Burgundy giving you a mic screen. I'm Durham, New Hampshire while I'm recording this, but when this comes out, I will be in Los Angeles and not attending W W C. And like I said last week, we will not be doing a we will we will be doing a re actions to WWC, but they will be well considered reactions because they will happen a week later because of my trip to Go see Rush , which will have been last night in the grand scheme of things once this episode comes out. But we don't know when you listen. It doesn't matter. That's the beauty of your life. This could be a year from now. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We'll all know what if you're just getting there, you got a year to go to catch up, so you got a lot of entertainment in front of you. That's right . Infotainment, Pete. Absolutely. Mike grains and infotainment. All right. Not only do we get a show title that soon and yeah . Tim e will Tim shares something that I've experienced too, and I hopefully we already have a fix for it by the time we're all listening to this. He says after the IOS twenty six point five update, my seventeen pro max battery life took a dramatic plunge and felt hot to touch the back almost all the time . Also it would stop charging with an overheating message . All things my iPhone fifteen Pro Max did routinely, but my seventeen M Paxro had never done. He says, The fifteen Pro Max is the only iPhone I've ever had that had those kinds of heat issues. There's a very bad thermal design. He says, All right . Force closing all of my apps and restarting the iPhone several times had no effect . So my next step was to go in to settings general and reset and then choose Reset All Settings. My phone immediately went back to having excellent battery life and is cool to the touch almost all the time. The interesting thing is that when looking at my daily usage under battery , there wasn't really much difference in what the iPhone said was using battery prior to Reset All Settings and after . He says the settings app didn't show any apps that were culprits. So apparently whatever PLIS file that had become corrupted in the update wasn't something that the daily usage could monitor. So I haven't quite experienced the I haven't experienced the overheating messages on my seventeen pro , but twenty six point five definitely introduced a market increase in battery drain a similar increase in heat just to the hot to the touch on the on the phone . And twenty six point five point one has come out since then and I just installed it on line before we recorded or within several hours of recording. So I can't really speak to how it's doing on battery life, but I'm hoping that that will fix it. Folks online have reported this reset all settings that we described works however , do this with great caution because Reset All Settings. It does not erase your data , but it does wipe out Wi Fi passwords. And if you are syncing to iCloud keychain, it will push that sync up to the cloud and wipe out WiFi passwords on all of your devices . So and we've been through this many times over the years. It's surprising to me that Apple hasn't come up with a way to work around this. But the workarounds that we found are either turn off iCloud entirely, which comes with its own set of of asterisks , or turn off iCloud keychain on your phone , do the reset all set tings , reboot the phone, let it do the thing , let it let it chill for a little bit. In fact, if you could wait a day, that'd be even better , but definitely wait some amount of time and then add your phone back to iCloud Keychain and that for most of us has been enough to mitigate that password that password settings . So those wires and more . Yeah. Yeah, here's even more evidence that something weird's going on with the battery in my humble opinion because I just pulled up the twenty six dot five dot one update and it says this update addresses an issue for a small number of users, only a few million of you that may prevent wired charging on iPhone Air and iPhone seventeen models when the battery is nearly drained. So there's some power issues with twenty six. five that and you know I noticed it draining. I didn't notice the heat, but I did notice much more usage. Yeah . Yeah because I had to go back to charge to I've been using the charge to eighty percent and I went back to charge to one hundred percent this week while I was traveling mostly because I was traveling but also because I noted you know all of a sudden I'm down in the twenties in the middle of the afternoon. Yeah here. Yeah , yeah , yep, I need to I need to do that. I'm about to head off to this trip to LA and I don't want to have optimized battery charging getting in my way. So I just turned it off on mine too. You can turn that off. That eighty percent thing that Pete mentioned is controlled in settings , battery charging . And then there's a setting for optimized battery charging, which is the thing that will stop it at eighty percent until it knows to go higher . But that may have been what you were talking about. The other thing is you can set a charge limit on your phone to eighty percent as a as a hard cap, right? And so maybe that's what you're talking about. But either that's what I had said. Yes. Okay . Yeah . And I think I could be wrong, but I think that that has been actually helpful because when I check my battery health, here I am almost nine months later and I'm still at one hundred percent capacity on my battery. Oh, that's good. Many, many cycles. Yeah , I haven't I haven't damaged it yet. That's good. That's good. Yet being the functional word in that sense . Yeah, I mean my phone is fascinating. My iPhone seventeen pro . My manufacture date. So I mean it my first use was September of twenty five because that's when it was released and that's when I got it. I got it on release day. Manufacture date is listed as july twenty twenty five, which is interesting. Yeah, I know . But my battery, my maximum capacity is also still one hundred percent after two hundred twenty five cycle counts. So yeah, yeah. So there you go. My manufacturer date is August, first use October, one hundred and forty six cycles and still under one hundred percent. So yeah, I'm feeling pretty good. Yeah, that's pretty good. That's pretty good. Treating it good. That's the idea, right? Like that's it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah . Who knew that you don't necessarily want to take your battery one hundred percent every day? Yeah , whoa, I mean counter intuitive. I think every Tesla owner knows this, right? Like I don't think that Teslas will charge to one hundred percent by default. I think there's a way to do it or something, but I don't own a Tesla. So I don't but I know that there's something there with that. But yeah, you need that extra little goose. I guess you can get it up there. You can you can do it temporarily do it on the way. No, no. Okay , yeah. I believe. So yeah. Yeah . But it's counterintuitive. You think you want a completely full battery to start every day, but I mean I do , like I do, but I don't. Like I understand that it's not the best for the technology all the time. Right. It's well, really, I think where it's not the best for tech . And please correct me if I've got this wrong. It was true at some point, but you know, things change. Feedback at MacKeb. com You heard him feedback at MacKe b. com. com and I suppose this is the moment to note that if Adam were here, he would say feedback at Mackeb. com but he had a lack of scheduling issue today. So but my understanding and actually I wish he was here for this conversation I mean I wish he was here in general, but this conversation specifically because I know he went deep on battery stuff too . He was bad for batteries to remain at one hundred percent , right? That was that was the thing. The zero percent also bad, right? Either extreme , no bueno . Be in the middle and like Adam used to say on Maccast all the time but I happily co opted the phrase is batteries are happiest and will last longest if you keep the electrons moving , it doesn't matter which direction , right? Out or in is okay, but very good. Keep the electrons moving. Yeah . So yeah, yep, that's an interesting note in the wake of the , you know, there geez, it's been probably fifteen years ago now, UPS lost a jet in the Middle East due to a lithium battery fire. And it was not long after that, that became a huge issue. And that's why you can't take your hoverboard on airplanes and such now or put lithium ions in your check batteries. So I have to I have to put my hoverboard in my check baggage now. That's good for my flight tomorrow . Yeah . So but it was after that that the battery consortium realized and finally agreed not to ship the batteries fully charged anymore. So that's why they only come at fifty to sixty percent. Yeah . Yeah. It reduces the cargo fire potential potential substantially. Yeah it makes sense. Yeah makes sense . All right, shall we move on to Kent? We found out the hard way. We should . We shall. Here we go. Kent raids in a quick note, if you expand a stack on your desktop, the first item in the expanded lineup essentially in the location the collapsed stack was an icon that looks like a down arrow or carrot in a square . You collapse the stack by clicking that arrow. So yep. Super Yeah. Makes sense. Yeah, yeah, last week's conversation about stacks definitely . Yeah. I still need to play with that more. I have not played with it. And it seems like a long time ago I did, but yep. It happens. That's why it's good to talk about this stuff. Mark brings up something here. He says , Gents, I don't know why Pete gets singled out, but I will not do that. I mean, I think by not doing it, by telling us, you're not doing it, I think you've actually done it just in reverse, but it's okay because I love you guys. Since I make my living , I find great entertainment and education each week well worth the financial support as a premium member. Thank you for that. Mark. Since yesterday, I was assisting one of our British clients with their Apple TV setup. He was trying to watch Sky News with his UK account and the video was not four K. The audio was out of sync and the crawler was jittery . It was perfectly clear on the Samsung YouTube TV app. It turns out that by default, Apple TV locks the frame rate to sixty per, cent which is the default in the US. He says I applied Apples fixed, which we will explain, and he says, Wow, it now looks and sounds like the Samsung YouTube TV app or the Apple TV in my living room. He says , the fix is to enable enable match frame rate on the Apple TV. And Apple's setting says this forces the Apple TV to switch its output to fifty hertz automatically when you watch UK European content. Open the settings app on the Apple TV, select video and audio, select Match Content and turn Match Frame rate to on . And Apple's note is that when you start a video the screen may go black for a split second while the TV itself changes gears to match the frame rate this is normal. And that makes perfect sense. Yeah , that's not a not a bad thing. It's worth it , it's worth experimenting with in your environment . Many TV's do a great job of taking what's coming into them and resampling it on the fly and just kind of doing all that. And then you get a smoother experience because you're not getting that jump in modes and all that stuff . But if you need it, it's very helpful. The other thing on this knowledge based article that Mark sent us is the audio sync . And it says if the lips are still out of sync after turning on frame rate matching, use the built in cal ibration tool to compensate for the television's audio processing delay. Go to settings, video and audio, scroll down to the calibration section, and select wireless audio sync. Follow the onscreen prompt using an iPhone . The iPhone will actually listen to tones from the TV speakers to calculate the exact delay and permanently align the audio so that your video and audio are in sync. Oh, very cool. Yeah, yeah. See how much easier it was in the days of silent film? So I don't know I've played for I've played in a band that accompanied silent a movie before. That's a trigger thing, man Yeah. That is, yeah. Yeah. It's fun. I remember that. They did that with the middle school piece. Yeah, they did. That's actually a silent movie. Yeah. That's actually where I did it. Yeah, our local middle school when we when we had this band director, Dave Irvin, who was he was one of a kind. He is one of a kind. He retired, he's still alive, yeah. And he would do this and he brought me in to do fully sounds. Like so the band played the music and I would like was part of a two man team that you know did all the sound effects and all that stuff. Yeah. Yeah, fantastic. Yeah, it's fun. Can I briefly play a little game of stump the dummy and ask 'cause you may not be able to help me share this or get my head around , but it's herts and frame rate are always considered two different things. And I know that European is fifty herts, USA is sixty hertz default. But frame rate is either like twenty four or twenty nine . So what you are correct? Yeah. What is the hurts doing ? Oh , I mean, it's the it's the hurts is the refresh rate, right of the got you. Of course for a second it refreshes a given frame. So yeah. Correct. Correct. So you're getting essentially let's just round the numbers up. If it's thirty frames a second and sixty hertz, you're getting each frame is refreshed twice . Yes, yes, that's right. It would have boiled down to it. That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep, but then it's four Yeah, it's the refresh rate of the screen. But also happening because of the power , right? Sure. Yeah, because USA is sixty hertz and Europe an is usually fifty. Yeah, there's two things. We're conflating two things here now. Yes. That's that's why I was saying help me get my head around. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Now that you're confusing me here. So there is the no, there's the power supply that would be fifty or sixty herds. And then also there's the refresh rate of the display that could be fifty sixty. We've seen displays with one hundred twenty and her tz refresh rates right like so yes, yeah, they're I'm imagining it has also anything to do with the power supply for to make it easy for the engineers to make it make it work but it may not be. That's just my scientific wild ass . Yeah , I don't I don't know I really I truly don't know. Yeah . Who I win. I stumped the dum.my Well, I would and you definitely yeah and you confuse me too, which I love. Sorry. But no, I also wonder the refresh rate is like you may be right that it's synced to power because of the power supply of the TV , but it might also be synced to power so that incandescent lights in the same room don't oscillate differently and cause strobing and all that weird like whatever the optical version of comb filtering is I don't know, I don't know. Maybe it is comb filtering. I don't know. But yeah, back right into that answer there, Dave, I think. Yeah , that makes perfect sense. Yeah . And you can see it best when here's where I notice it is when you now put your car in reverse and the backup camera . the light Ssee behind you are refreshing at a given rate. So that's, you know, in the old days it used to be a video, a VHS cam pointed at a TV screen, you could watch the lines go down the screen. The refresh was occurring and yeah, yeah, so I don't yeah, I'm not I don't I don't know what the actual reason was, but we've speculated quite a few. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I bet someone knows and will I bet we get an email or two this week . I don't involved to the answer to this feedback at MacECAB dot com dot We had a discussion , I think after we finished recording Mackeecap eleven forty four last week last week where I was in effect it definitely was because I was doing some of the post processing of the show where I log in and I upload the audio to Apple Podcasts and kind of do some things. And I had to relog into Apple Podcast, whichs of course meant using my passkey . And the only place that my Apple podcasts or my Apple ID's passkey can live is in Apple passwords. It does not like I have found no way to add it to like one password or keeper or anything like that. There was just nothing . And I went through and was trying to do it and Kiwi Graham in the chat like in our discord chat said, yeah , Apple account passkeys are only created via the settings app and therefore are tied to the Apple keychain . So there is no way that you can have a third party app, at least not that we've found create and store an Apple Pass key, which is kind of a pain in the neck. It's like, you know, why make it difficult Apple? Like pass keys are supposed to be this universal thing, not something that I have to . So yeah I believe that is correct. It certainly matches my experience and I've tried several times to be like, why can't I just get one of these into something else? And there's just no way to. It doesn't offer to do it. It's very strange. So if anybody has figured it out, again, let us know. But otherwise we will we will operate under that understanding. All right. Yeah , we have other things to talk about, but this seems like a perfect time to talk about our sponsors . And here's the thing about password managers . Most of us know we're supposed to be using one and a lot of people are , right? A lot of us are , but most of us can't even fathom the idea of switching because we assume it's going to be like a whole project. I was certainly in that camp, but you know, I recently started testing Keiper, our sponsor. And the thing that surprised me most was how fast I was actually up and running. Importing my existing passwords was genuinely painless, faster than I expected from somebody like me who's been on the internet for like way too long and has way too many logins, right? And once you're in, it just works. 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And I've been sleeping on a helix mattress for years now, right? It's one of the best things I ever done. And I recently just upgraded to the Helix Midnight Lux . And what gets me is the new mattress obviously is fantastic. It's a brand new mattress. Helix makes fantastic mattresses . But what also gets me is how great my helix that I've had for years still feels, right? That consistency over time is really impressive to me right. It's the quality, the comfort , that consistency, really great stuff . And what I love about Helix is that they actually match you to the right mattress for how you sleep. You know, side back stomachs, firm, soft cooling options, right? They have over twenty different models and the quiz makes sure you land on the right one for you and if you have a partner that you sleep with for your partner as well, the quiz actually works for, you know, it's got you can do it for one person or two people simultaneously . 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Go check it out. I think you're going to like it and our thanks to NordLayer browser for sponsoring this episode. Outstanding Okay , I think we should probably move to questions. I love it. And yeah, Vashan writes in Good morning, gentlemen , and he didn't even single me out. Sir. We need to stop that habit . All right, yeah. I don't know if I'm offended or thrilled. Yeah, that's right . He says, Vashan writes, I woke up one morning to the names of some of my contacts not showing up in the contacts app . When trying to send a text message, I have to search for the name which does appear and allows me to send a message. However, looking at the list of previously sent messages, it only shows the number. How do I retrieve my contact names? I cannot use an older backup because that would set me back too far and would remove recently added info from my phone . What suggestions would you have for me to be able to retrieve my contact names? I have multiple Apple devices, but it seems they've all synced to the same missing information. I have turned contacts on and off to no avail. I have also refreshed the contacts app, and that doesn't work either. Please help. Thanks in advance for Sean. Yeah . So I don't know what kind of backup you have Visha , but if you have , if you did an export from contacts like if you go into contacts on your Mac, you do file export , you can you can absolutely then take that and import it back in and it will merge with what you currently have . So if I were in your situation, that's where I'd start even if the backup was quite a ways ago, like you can still kind of do that merge. Actually, that's not where I would start. It's the second thing I would do. My start would be to go to File, Export Contacts Archive and save a backup of what I currently have. I know it's not perfect. I know it's missing things , but it is what you have. And that might prove to be important as we start messing with things . But hold on, what could go wrong? Exactly. Well, that's the thing is this is an exercise in learning. What could go wr ong. In fact, troubleshooting is often an exercise in learning, what could go wrong, right? Like but and choosing not to do things based on like there's this balance between , well, it might fix it, but it might also break it worse, right? I remember when I was a teenager , I had bought my first CD player, you know, and then years later , and it was one that had like, it was a single CD player. The drawer , it had a motorized drawer, right? The drawer would come out and I loved it. It was great. I mean, obviously, you know, it's a music fan and like the CDs were cool and like all that stuff . And so over time though, it started skipping . And I was like, this is okay. CDs, like this is a mechanical problem. I reasoned, you know, I didn't know if I was right or not, but my thought process was like, okay, there's a mechanical problem here . You know, I don't know. And it finally got to a point where I was going to replace it . And I think this was my first experience with the freedom that comes when you know something is currently worth zero to you, right? Like I was going to replace it. So anything that I did to it was not going to make it functionally worse for my purposes, right? I mean, I might actually make it functionally worse, but already it was already beyond the point of which I was going to replace it. So I was like, okay, I feel comfortable opening this thing up. And I didn't know, like, CDs, lasers, like, what was I going to find in there? And I opened it up. It was a very simple thing. You know, of course, obviously it was much larger than it needed to be so that it could like be the size of like a rack stereo unit like we all had back then . And I realized that at the back of kind of the mechanism that would slide the tray in and out , there was a spring . And I thought, well, wait a minute , if that spring has like softened over time , maybe the part that's moving along the CD is literally being dragged down by gravity and that's why it's skipping. Like it's skipping lens down the CD . And so I looked at it and it was like, yeah, it's a little bit teethered. And so I took the spring out and I stretched the spring and I did the things that you do to make a spring more sprung and I put it back together and it worked for another it worked for years after that until I finally got like a you know a five disc CD changer because that was all the radio at that point or whatever. But there's that freedom and in knowing that most likely you can't either can't make it worse or if, you do make it worse , you can come back, you can recover from it. And so that's why , you know, we always say make a backup because it buys you freedom during the troubleshooting process. If you have that backup, you know , that you could just kind of do more than you might otherwise be comfortable because worst case scenario, you got a backup over there. It's offline, you know, it's no body's touching it, whatever. And you can go back to that. So that the backup buys us freedom to troubleshoot and try things that might otherwise scare. . Yeah . All right , yeah. I noted Kiwi Gram wrote in Discord Essays. I've seen the Messages app do this occasionally where it doesn't translate numbers to contact cards and I don't think the problem was in contacts . And then going back to Vashaun's quest ion, it seems almost like it's more in the interface. Although he says the names are missing from his contacts. That yeah, that I've seen I know what Key Grimm's talking about and it could be that for sure. Yeah, I wasn't sure how to interpret it. But you're right , Kiwi Graham, that there is that issue that interface seems to break . Well, and I think it's because theact Csont database is stored in a way that is efficient for reading, writing, or really anything at all. Or anything. Yeah. Well well, and the case case case is a case in point like if I'm on my, you know, Max studio here and I update like if I go into contacts and I update your phone number or if I'm in messages and I add a contact, you know, bas ed on a phone number that I've just gotten, which happens fairly routinely. I can watch my CPUs peg all of them at one hundred percent making an editing to a contact This is insanity how are we in twenty twenty six and that's a thing that brings my Mac to its knees. Like I wouldn't dare edit a contact while we were recording the show because I'd probably hear audio skips . And that 's insane . Like we're literally doing like video streaming like video and audio streaming. Like we're doing all these things. Updating a few kilobytes in a database . Don't you dare to do ? Oh yeah, but my guess is there are many people out there nodding their head saying I never thought about it but, I have learned the hard way. Like we get these gut reactions with our computers, right? And it's like yeah, I'm not gonna touch that. Oh, that's no , that slows everything down. It's crazy. So yeah, I think this is a but that's certainly right. And over time the, you know, the names will appear in messages , you know, once it can has the CPU horsepower to get it back. But But what Vashon described might be that, it might be that there was actually, you know, loss in the context. I think he said he looked in his other devices, right? And it 's great. And they had all synced badly. Yeah , yeah. Sync was working . Right, ye,ah exactly . So yeah. There's your good news, Vashan. Your sink is working just dandy. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. You know, so alright I'm sorry to ask because I may have lost the bead a little bit because I was trying to look at that and then Kee Graham's comment. But can you resummarize what you think his first effort should be? Fashion's effort should bes. Yeah , restore from backup. He said he has a backup. He doesn't want to do right. Yeah, yeah. Right. Gotcha. So if that doesn't work , then I mean , if you don't have the data somewhere, you don't have the data somewhere, but don't, you know, his concern about restoring from the backup was to me sort of we can overwrite newer data. Yeah, which I don't think it will, but it might, which is why you do a backup. And that's why we talked about the CD player. So there you go. You know what, Pete, you go back and listen, I recorded it for you. I'll release it. There you go. On june eighth, probably not june first, but I'll release it at episode eleven forty five on june eighth. All right. You're sure it's not eleven forty four. I am. I am certain of this. 'Cause my teleprompter said it was Hey, Si has a question . All right, take us away, Si kh. Mark Mackey Gents . I want to get some advice on what to do with a very old iPad Pro. It's a twelve point nine inch from twenty fifteen. It's locked into iOS fifteen point five way before iPad OS became a thing . And most of the apps I like to use nowadays are not working. Slack , browsers , a lot of apps just are not working really . So I want to get some ideas of what I could do with it. It's only got thirty two gig capacity, so very limited storage , maybe a second screen, but I just want some ideas from your fine audience and yourselves . Thank you . Yeah, of course. Yeah, it's interesting. I too have more than a few of these vintage iPads laying around . I try and use them as long as I can as like on stage iPads for reading charts or mixers, but they also run into the same problem that you're talking about where the apps themselves require in a new version of iPad OS . And that's often dictated by Apple. Apple really encourages developers to keep raising the minimum IOS so that you can take advantage of all the new frameworks and things that they add . I don't think it's a nefarious thing on Apple's part , but it does mean that there's these devices that are perfectly good , hardware wise that simply cannot run the things that we all want them to run I took recently took one of my iPads and I wanted a weather station and I think I've talked about this on the show. I'm sure I have . And I'd been looking at third party weather stations and it was like, wow, that one's not going to display this, that one' sos not going to dis play that. And I'd also really like, you know, like a small display of the weather in the town in Italy where my daughter lives and like all that stuff. And then I thought, wait a minute. So I used clawed code. And I worked with it. I told it about all the different smart home things that I have in my house and we engineered me in claw code, engineered a dashboard, a weather dashboard that runs on one of these old iPads and it sits in my kitchen and it pulls data from my sensors in the house, you know, so I can see that I have access to pull and then the things that I wanted that I don't have access to. There's third party data sources that if you as long as you're pulling limited amounts of data, you get access for free . And then I run a little engine on I could have run it on like my Sonology or whatever I chose. to run it on the headless iMac because why not? And so it runs on that and the iPad just acts it's just a web interface that the headless IMAC exposes using , J youav knowa,Script that Claud Code helped help write wrote most of it for me. Let's be candid. I engineered it and architected it in collaboration with Claudcode and then it wrote all the code And now 's what it runs as we love it. We have it in the kitchen. We use it every day. And what was really nice about it is it was like, okay, well, I'm standing across the kitchen . I can't quite see the temperatures that I want to see. Like there's details that I only matter when I'm up close, but when I'm halfway across the room, I want to see what's it what's the temp? Inside and outside and I want it to be very obvious which is which. And so we don't have them , you know, we have them actually slightly different sizes and it's like it's completely customizable because we wrote it ourselves. So that kind of thing for an old iPad can really be fun. And you know, the nice part is if I have a second old iPad, I can point it at the same web interface and now I have the same weather interface in multiple places in the house. I didn't need to write any more code. So yeah . I don't know. That's a great idea. Yeah. Yeah. It's fun. I wonder tell me what you think of this idea as you were talking, it came up and I thought, well, there may be some security issues here, but what about running it as an exit node for a tailscale? If tailscale will run on it, but I think you're going to run into the problem that we've already discussed that I don't know what the minimum IOS is for tails here. Yeah. Yeah, I can I can look, but like my iPad, I think I think that one I forget which model it is, Pete, but I think that one runs maximum of IOS twelve , but I know I have an iPad somewhere that's like i Pad OS nine or maybe even if it's an IOS nine. So yeah, my guess is that something like tailscale I don't even actually can your phone your phone can't be an exit node so no, even your I thought theiPad could. Can it ? I know the iPad can be a could be a home hub for a while but I wasn't sure if the iPad could be a tail scale exit note. I mean there's no technical reason why not but yeah you're probably not Yeah, you have to configure that on the on the device itself. So yeah, I think I think you may be right. I hadn't thought of that you have to configure it on the device to be an exit node. So yeah, and I can see why the phone can't obviously yeah , but all right yeah alright yeah and the other one was you know obviously kids and or grandkids it works great for the little color matching games and numbers and counting and the super simple stuff that still works As long as it still works, right? Like the problem is an app that's updated going to very quickly decide to let go of all the old versions of IOS because you want to leverage all the new frameworks and Apple really pushes you to leverage all the new frameworks. So I don't know that it would be a good kid's iPad. Like the security certs on that iPad, even in the web browser, I had to dumb down the web interface to be able to run the flavor of JavaScript that Safari in IOS twelve can run like so there's a it's not yeah yeah that makes that all makes perfect sense but that I'm so back to Dave's idea that's great doing it is you, know but like, that's the thing. If you want to have a game for the kids, just tell Claudcode to write it for you for that iPad. Like that's it . You know, and then as long as it can be done on a web browser , like fine , I don't know , I guess could you I'm trying to think. Yeah, you could develop it locally in Xcode and push it to a local iPad even if you can't submit it to the app store, right? So you could you could write an iPad OS app which I thought about doing with this weather thing. That was where I started at first and it was like, well, let's start with the web the web thing. That might be the simplest. And if that doesn't work, then, you know, we can go kind of near . So a server side app is it work. That's what I'm doing as a server side app. Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly what it is. Yeah, yeah. Yeah . Yeah, for cloud code and GP chat GPT and all those. It'll write so much for you so fast yeah I did. Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah it's it's the only way to code now. I think so you know K,iwi Gamra sh ays a Walmart for a family calendar. Love that. Yep. That works great . Yeah , you know, and prints confirms that iPad and iOS devices cannot be tailscale exit notes. Okay, thank you, sir. Yeah. Yeah, I didn't yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. But even if they could, I don't think you could run like that the iPads that we're talking about security issue. I don't think you'd run it for due to updates. Yeah, because yeah, they're going to update it and I don't run it anymore and if you can't update it then a security is that my point that once you can't update it, you could still run it without updating it assuming that it did , then now you've opened yourself up. So don't do that. Yeah, you're and now you can't do it. So but you're making a no I don't like I don't think you'd still be able to run it. Like I don't think Tailscale would let it log in. Fair enough, right? Like I think you're , but it doesn't matter. We're done, right? We're done. Because the kit doesn't run on. Let's move on, Dave, please get me out. Help me out of this hole on Duke . But it' nos a it's a good good thing. Oh, that the other the other good use for it a digital photo frame , an e reader , a recipe screen again if you can like get the recipes to it, but that would be like imagine having an old iPad in the kitchen that you cared less about if it wound up getting spilled on or something, making that your recipe screen. So yeah, if you can find those apps or create those apps that'll work, then yeah. There's good ide as here. Yeah, yeah, for sure . All right, right, moving on, I'm told . Michael has a question for us. And which one is this? I'm trying to think . No, not that one. This one. Here we go, Michael . Hey there, John, Adam and Pete. This is Michael Colling from LA County. You know, interesting, there was that quick t ip at the opening of the last podcast about you go to press and hold the on iOS and iPadOS , press and hold the app button. You can get a quick menu to updates and it'll take you right to the updates. And then he said, you know, don't forget, swipe down to refresh . And you know, other and I did that and they were like I do that normally. I do the press and hold and updates. And then I did the pull down and they were like twenty updates . It's insane . And this is not even after this and this is after like IOS has been updated with betas and release candidates. And then I swiped it down again and there was like another five. It since I don't know what's the point of pushing these updates if you have to look for them . So that's pretty crazy, but that's how I ask for you. The walled garden. Thanks Lads. I will answer I mean that the reason is that the and this is true on the Mac too , the App Store app is mainly a series of web views . And so that's why, you know, they and they are cached web views so that you can move around the app very quickly and you're not just waiting, you're not feeling like you're navigating a series of web pages, right? And when you pull to refresh , it refreshes that list, that web view . It's also why on the Mac , if you are in the App Store app and you are on the update screen, command R you know, the, same thing you'd use to refresh a web page will refresh that list of updates. And oftentimes if there's more updates, the same thing will happen. You'll see, you know, you'll have three and then suddenly it's like thirteen. It's like great . But that's that's what it is is they cache that so that you're not waiting every time you tap on something in the app store, but it comes at that cost. So why they made that decision, all of those things I'm answering a rhetor ical question because it's kind of what we do on here. But I also want to point out, I had not listened to Michael's comment in with stereo headphones on before . I'm guessing that was recorded on his iPhone because there was a very stereo field to Michael's sound . And I really started to wonder and hope it's not a problem that well I guess I've listeden, I don that't know l Iist'veened in mono. I listen through speakers but not on headphones until just now. But you know, it's there was almost a phasing thing happening and I wonder if when there's some together for listening in mono if it actually winds up lowering the level of the sound because that can happen sometimes when you sum two stereo things that are like hard panned. It was very it was very it was like empty in the middle. I don't know the right words to describe it, but you can listen back and be nerdy about sound with me. So all right. Where are we here? Oh , Blake wrote in with something in response to we were talking about displays last week's episode, Pete . And many people had comments. Blake is the first that we'll address here . We're talking about, you know , it started with using a MacBook with a damaged display when you mentioned Pete that your sister broke her laptop screen and was using it an external monitor or could she use it with an external monitor? And he says, Yes, of course, you can . He says the challenge is that Mac strongly prefer their internal display, especially during startup . Even if the screen is physically damaged and showing nothing, the system often still detects it as the primary display. Because of this, if you simply connect an external monitor and power the Macon, there's a good chance nothing will appear on either display. The trick is to use the Mac in clamshell mode from the moment it boots. Connect the external monitor, keyboard and mouse, open the lid, press the power button, and then immediately close the lid. Timing matters more than people might expect because modern Macs boot extremely quickly. If the internal display is detected first, you'll likely need to force the Mac off completely and try again. It can take a few attempts before you get the timing right, but once you have it working, I generally recommend leaving the Mac powered on and simply letting it sleep rather than shutting it down regularly. That way you don't have to repeat this startup timing screen close process every time. A vertical laptop stand can also make for a cleaner desk setup. So yeah , yeah, interesting. So TLDR, damaged screen mac books can work with an external monitor, but you may need to boot directly into clamshell mode. So that's great news. I will I will pass that along to her today. We haven't talked this week. Yep . Yep. Yeah, it was I thought it was a good follow up. And then kind of as a bonus cool stuff found Michael sorry Bl,ake says I recently helped my best friend's father set up a new M four mini with an MSI monitor. He says my friend found a utility monitor control on GitHub. It's monitor control all one word with a camel humped C in the midd le and we've got it linked in the show notes. He says it can be installed via Homebrew if you like. That allows MacOS keyboard controls to directly adjust compatible external monitors. In our case, it enabled the standard Apple keyboard brightness and volume keys to control the monitor's brightness and built in speakers without having to use the monitor's physical buttons. I'm sure it offers additional functionality, but that alone made the experience feel much more integrated and apple like, so I wanted to pass it along. Yeah, that's great. I love that. There's lots of apps to do it. I don't think we've mentioned monitor control before, and I love that it's a free app to get into that world and it looks fairly full featured . You know, I wonder I wonder what's going to happen with kind of those we talked about single use shareware from MecPaw in the last episode Pete it's not it's not shareware s orry . It is it is single use subscriptionware because it's locked into setup, right? But they're doing it because of how easy it is to create these these kinds of apps now with with agentic assisted coding, right ? And so I wonder the advent, like, what changes we're going to see from the advent of that and if value of single use shareware is going to go down , like the price that the I mean, the value of it will still be there because we'll use it and love it. But the fact that we can conceive of something and develop it ourselves and run it means like what happens to the third party vendors that sell very simple apps , right? Like the more complex apps, like those kinds of things, I don't think are at and if they're well written and all that stuff, I don't think they're I don't think there's a risk there, but you know, the people who sell the four dollar single, you know, single purpose apps. I don't want to say single use great. You know, does that does that go away? I don't know, like maybe not. Maybe not. My opinion on that is it will for you and and Adam Right. Sometimes me, but not people like my sister who have no interest in correct. Trying to use an egenic assist. Yeah. No, that's that's your right. So it'll reduce the market, but I don't think it'll maybe . But I mean, you know, do I want to spend time in Cloud ? But in the near future, how near, you know, will your Tesla robot go, Hey, go write an app for me that does this . Test it all out, work it through, come back to me when it's ready and not before. And please not before. Yeah, exactly. Yeah . Yeah we will eventually get there, right? I mean, for sure. Computer, what's this? Hey computer what,'s that? And it's Yeah . Well, well later in the day that this comes out, Apple is going to tell us what their strategy, their AI strategy is, among other things at WBC, right? And I what we're hearing as of the moment we're recording this, which is on Friday , is that a big part of that will be, you know, kind of rethinking the S lady not just as sort of voice interface, but like actually an assistance . And so I'm , you know, we will get there. I don't think we're going to get there on Monday, but like this is the path that and it's an interesting path. All right, we had another comment actually a bunch of comments about our discussion on monitors last week. So you want to take us to Michael? I do. Yeah. He writes in, hey guys, great show . In the last episode, there was a discussion about retina monitors being different. I stumbled upon a site after looking at Eclectic Light Company and there is a website called retinodesk. com , which is an independent review site focused exclusively on five K and six K external monitors for Mac. The core premise is that Mac OS is designed around two hundred and eighteen pi, that's the retina density , which only a twenty seven inch five K or a thirty two inch six K monitor can match. Standard twenty seven inch four K panels fall short at one hundred and sixty three pixels per inch, causing a soft text and blurry edge display. I thought I'd share with you and hopefully we can learn learn one more new thing. Keep up the great work Michael So I yes all of this is true . And we got a note from Joe as well telling us about retinades . He says, I know you're focused on the last episode of four K monitors. There's nothing wrong with that. But for those of us that do a lot of photo editing, especially these days when the latest rage is HDR. four K doesn't really cut it. This is I recently ran across a website, Rentades . And he said, for example, did you know that you could buy an acis thirty two inch six K monitor for only twelve dollars ninety nine cents. And like for what you're getting, that's fairly inexpensive, right? You know, it's like less way less than what you're going to pay . So yes , all of this All of this is technically true . And what I was trying to say last week and maybe miss the mark on is that experientially I not sure I agree with this being a human looking at it, right? Like what Retinidus says that, you know , two hundred eighteen pixels per inch is very different than one hundred and sixty three pixels per inch. That is objectively true. And we can draw it and zoom into it and see it. But when it's actually running at pixels per inch I have that website up, the retinasque website up on my screen. The screen in front of me is a two screens they're both twenty seven inch, one's five one K',s four k. The one in front of me is five K. It's a Vsonic five K twenty seven inch screen and I'm looking at the text. And now I'm going to take this and move it over to my Phillips four K screen, which is it's no longer available . They got out of the screen market, but this screen is one of those high quality four K panels . And looking at it , I would arguably say say there's a slight brightness difference so it's hard to say, but they certainly at they look the same, right? Like there is no edge blurring, there is no text softening and I'm gonna step away from the mic here . Yeah I'm not seeing it. Now, you know, my eyes might be a decade or two older than your eyes or vice versa, I don't know, you know, like , but and I of course realize that our eyes , you know, I look at screens all the time. So have I have I finally burned them out? Maybe . But I use an Apple screen on my laptop. I use this screen here. I use high quality four K glass or five k five k glass everywhere . And I don't see it. Now when I go four k on a thirty two inch screen, that I noticed because that's like one hundred and fourteen pixels per inch. So there is a point at which we humans can tell a difference. We, this human , the royal we cannot see a notable difference with text two hundred and eighteen versus one hundred and sixty three. Now HDR, does that matter? Yes. Can you do HDR on a four K screen? Yes . So, you know, color matching, all of those things are perfectly capable in four K versus five K. That Ben Q monitor that I mentioned last week, the four K Ben Cube monitor is HDR capable and I have turned HDR on it and it is a four K twenty seven inch screen and it also, as I said last week looks, fantastic . So like I think I guess what I'm trying to say is look at this and decide for yourself if you need the five K or six K depending on the size , and what pixel per inch density is acceptable or even noticeable to you because we can get lost in looking at the numbers and saying, you know, a higher pixel density number is better and and all it is is a like the only thing objective about it is that it is a higher pixel density number. It isn't necessarily better for you even if you're doing, say, photo editing. I think finding the right screen because I can find well, actually I can't find you a five K screen that looks like crap because nobody makes one because nobody would pay like it wouldn't make sense, right? The economics aren't there for somebody to sell you a crappy piece of glass that's five K. But the economics are there for people to sell you a crappy piece of glass that's four K and they exist. And I have some of them and they're not like I can totally tell the difference between those and a five k screen, but I can also tell the difference between those in a four k screen . So that's what I was saying. But decide for yourself . Like your eyes are different than mine. Like and that's and your sense your sensitivities to these things and your needs are different than mine. So that's the . What do you have anything to say on that pee? No, I just, um, no, not really. I don't need to opine on everything. Okay Can you believe it, folks? Well , I wasn't sure if you wanted to just take us another direction . No , no. My eyes I don't want to sit here and gripe about 'em. Yep, 'cause I'm a full on geezer. Yep, there you go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have reached that status in life. It's okay. Like, you know, it's all a while to get here and here I am. And here we are. Yeah, you earned it. That's right . Yeah, man. Yep. So you want to read the brief review that we got. The length of the review I can do it. It doesn't call it up. Not a bad thing. I think it's it's from Hall fan. Fan and cowboy fan . Yeah, let me I think I've got it handy. I think I've got it handy. Yeah, here it is. He says five stars, which is the correct number. If you're going to give us a review so there I 'm not the wrong one. You can review both podcasts. That's right. So there was the US slash read and matge at. com slash review. That's right. We'll get you to the point where you can drop us five stars. If you must give a three star review to a show, go find another show , give it to them, come back and tell us at feedback at MacE ap. com what we need to improve and then give us five star review for so doing . But hog fan and cowboy fan writes in, I always learn at least five new things, love the video version on YouTube on occasion , and either way, it's a great show. Great job. So thank you. We are grateful. Amazing. Yeah, thank you for that. Yeah. Yeah, we love we really yeah, it means a lot. It makes a difference and we love it. And there's the video version in the Mac Geekab app too, and you can swap back and forth between video and audio . It works great. Car play is coming. I have it working in my car, so I can share it with you so you can have it in your car too. So we got our entitlement. So there you go. Where are we here? Oh, we have time. Okay . Father John and I had he had written in about a problem that he was having, and actually I'm not even knowing, I can't even find where this is, but it's okay that he was having with his computer . And did we talk about this already ? Did I I don't think so investigating the crash reports? No. Yeah., okay All right. I don't I don't recollect that. I well, I'm old and don't remember as well. I'm searching here no, I don't think we did. Okay , it wound up in the in the MacGeekab archive, which is the reason that I stopped. He says he says a couple months ago his twenty twenty one MacBook Pro started to crash after like ten or twenty minutes. And it would crash and restart, and he couldn't spend a lot of time on it. So he lived with it for a while. Man, that's a lots of and he says over that time he says I did a bunch of things. I did safe mode, reinstalled the OS, newcompave . You know , he was able to get a time machine backup. Nothing helped though . He says, I thought I was going to have to purchase a new machine. So I continued to find a replacement I could afford . He says, I finally decided to do a DFU reset of the system. Also no help. So he said before I got rid of my machine, I contacted Apple Support. I sent them the crash report info. They found in the crash report information that an SD card I had for storage that I had inserted in the side port, they told me that the SD card had gone bad. He says, I pulled the SD card and the Mac returned to full use. They recommended I take it to an Apple shop for a full diagnostic. He says, I'm three hours away, but it's working. So all is good . And it's a it's a good like there's a good lesson here that when our macs are crashing and we get those crash reports, there might actually be valuable information in them, especially if you're getting multiples . And what I do with them because I don't want to have to read crash reports any more than you do folks is I feed them into my favorite LLM. I'll upload them to Claude and let Claude investigate. And you know, I'll tell Claude what my symptom in it was. And then you know, here's the crash report . And it, you know , this is what this is what LLMs are like perfectly suited for in today's world is taking a massive set of data. And I know Crash reports not that massive, but you know, a massive set of data and distilling it down and cross referencing it with things so that it can understand what that data is telling it, all of those things. So feed them in and see what that's essentially what Apple's been doing for a long time is they've been feeding crash reports into radar over there. And I mean, radar was radar is Apple's like bug tracking system . And it was okay. It was named after, do you know the story Pete? It was named Today's name after Radar O'Reilly. It was named after Radar O'Reilly on Mash because Radar had like the ability to see the future. Like that was his character's kind of like they never talked about it like it was a supernatural power, but he was this, you know, kind of happy going that could hear the choppers coming. We got wounded before the choppers were coming. He could he knew things, right? And he was like, you know, idiot Savant might be the wrong phrasing, but it was like in that realm he was often dismissed. He was, you know, but a lowly, whatever, I forget what his rank was or whatever, but you know, I mean he wasn't a he wasn't a trained doctor. He wasn't a train. He wasn't a, you know, a leader. He was like the captain's assistant or whatever. But boy, howdy, did he know things? And so that's why they named Radar. And their whole idea was if we can create a system that can take all of this data and then start to do predictive stuff, that would be great. And this was, you know, decades ago that Apple created radar, but it's, you know, it was one of probably one of the first large language models. Yeah, I mean, not necessarily a language model, but if the first maybe one of the first uses of machine learning, right? Which is really what's happening here. Yeah . So looking analyzing data. So yeah, let your LLM do it. It's it's a great way to do it. No. So yeah, you started off as a corporal at one point he was a sergeant, but my favorite episode was when they sneaked him into the officer's club and threw a captain's bar on him and they're like, What the hell is this? He's like, Well, you've heard you've heard of Lieutenant Colonel and Sergeant Major. Well he's a cor,poral captain . We're doing a survey. He goes, Well, put me down for don't like it. I don't like it at all. Yeah . Thank you in the army, Corps Captain. Keewee Graham reminds us that Macs also have a hardware diagnostic startup mode , which has gotten even more expansive over the years. So yes, and depending depending on what kind of Mac you have, you can, you know, you launch that but Apple Silicon Mac, it's you know, hold down the power button and then choose from the menu which way you want to go . So yeah all right we got time for another don't get caught here, Pete . Yeah , so I got an email this week that I looked at it and I went, oh, this if someone misses this email, this could be important. OpenAI wrote to me and said there's a security issue involving a common open source library, the TANSTAC NPM . So the open AI team security team has rotated code signing material for all open AI Mac OS apps, including Chat GPT, Codex, Atlas, and the Codex CLI. Please update any open AI Mac OS apps before june twelfth, twenty twenty six. Applications on iOS, Android, and Windows are not affected. They say we found no evidence that open AI user data was accessed, that our production systems or intellectual property was compromised, or that our software was altered. However, we are taking steps to protect the process that certifies our MacOS applications are legitimate open AI apps. So what you should do is go to the links that we're going to put in the show notes to update these apps if you're running them before june twelfth. You do not need to reset your open AI password or rotate your open AI API keys . So yeah . I mean just I really just launch the apps and they'll offer you the updates. That's I mean, that's the TLDRs. Just make sure to update your open AI apps , which is great. Yeah, it's good . Yeah , all right. I'm trying to think if there's anything to add here . And we do have one more don't get caught. It's about it I mean's about, trou bleshooting. We can we can do it. It's not it's not I mean , I always like the don't get caught that aren't doom and gloom. I like the ones that are like informative level us up and this one's kind of similar to what Father John was says basically what Andy had said is that troubleshooting is mostly about asking better questions and att acking your own assumptions before you attack the problem or even while you're attacking the problem . And he says his brother had called him and said that he wasn't able to find his sent mail in Gmail. He couldn't find his sent mail folder. And so Andy asked him, how are you accessing your mail? And he says his brother a little tentatively answered started to answer. And he says, Okay, more specifically, are you using Safari in the web interface or using mail? And he says, Oh, I'm using Safari. Okay, great. So he goes down the path, you know, safari on his Mac, access Gmail, described what he saw. And he's like, yeah, mail, mine doesn't look like that. And so they started up screensharing. Lo and behold, of course, he was using mail, the app and had closed the sidebar. So got the side bar back open, of course, now you can see the sent mailbox, all those things. But that's the, you know, start by clarifying the environment, right? Know what you're troubleshooting and ask those simple concrete quest ions. And so to distill it down even more, before you fix the problem, debug your assumptions, right? I heard somebody say once tech support is ninety percent questions, ten percent answers . So yep , so yeah there's always that I don't know the joke going around in the early days, you know, well have you have you plugged it in, you know? Oh, I asked , you know, I mean, that is like my first question to people is either and it depends on, you know, what information I have available to me is either is it plugged in or have you tried to restart it ? Like because and I always preface it with like look, I'm going to ask a dumb question but it's just worth ruling out and you know, when was the last time you restarted? And sometimes people are like, oh my gosh, I never restart. It's like, okay, well, let's try that then because that like that could be that could just you deal with a bit. Yeah, exactly. That could just deal with this. And then and then this was easy , you know? And a mindset, a philosophy that if I only have to solve a weird problem once, I like to know what caused the problem, right? But sometimes we solve it without knowing why it happened in the first place. And that's okay as long as it only happens once. But as soon as it happens a second time , then we have a pattern develop ed. And now we need to treat this like something that actually needs to be learned and understood , not just bandaid and we're done. So sounds like you need your own radar database. Yeah, we all do . Well, we kind of have it now. I mean, really yeah, like, you know, that 's where that's where troubleshooting with with LLMs, especially LLMs with access to the internet can and I can't st ress that word enough can be helpful , but you need to know what you don't know . You need to you need to have some working knowledge of the subject matter to be able to filter the LLM's responses, suggestions, biases, like it will, I know biases is probably a weird word to use with a non human thing. But what'll happen is it'll it'll, you know, the context window will start to become will start to define what it's going to show you. So if you if you or it find goes starts going down a path of like, okay, this is probably what it is it might be probably what it is, but if it's not what it is now you're you're, you know, you're just getting deeper and deeper into the wrong hole that's what I was worried about. Did it drag down? Yeah , until you tell it , I guarantee you this is not what it is, right? Or stop it? Or please a new session . Like, that's the other way to do it. It's just start from scratch you know, see where it leads because that those context windows become more they become larger and therefore they become more and more l imited, which can be helpful except like I said, if you're going down the wrong hole. So being able to know that is the key. I am very successful troubleshooting comput er stuff, not always successful troubleshooting computer stuff with LLMs, but I am frequently successful, but it's because I've done it long enough that I know when something doesn't smell right'.s It like yeah, , I know why you think that's the problem. It's like we've already ruled that out. Like let's move on. And but if I'm trying to troubleshoot my, you know, dishwasher or my plumbing or something. It's like, well, I you know, I don't or my boiler that morning . I went down an hour's long rabbit hole because I didn't know Didn't know enough to go. This can't possibly be the a thisin't it, Dave. This is wishful thinking. You know, put the pipe down, sir. You know, yeah. I know another guy that's been dragged down many of holes pointing to himself letting AI do this. So I quit trying to troubleshoot with AI unless it's absolutely necessary. Yeah . Yeah. It 's because it will drag you down. It's a very , you know, it's interesting. It reminds me where are we on ? It reminds me of when Google first like really got to a point where you could reliably use it to search for answers on the internet for troubleshooting. And you know, I would go to a client's house and I would, you know, evaluate and then often would go to Google and start searching it. And they're like, you know, and I would often find something that led me down the path, right? And we've all done this. And they would be like, I can't believe I paid you to Google for the answer. And I'm like, oh, of course you did. Like, you didn't Google for the answer. You didn't know how. And I mean , I wouldn't get that snarky unless it was unless it made sense, you know? But you know, it'd always be with a tongue in my cheek , but it's like you didn't know what you didn't know . And so I know how to Google for these answers because I know what it's not already. And yeah, and where some support forums are the read . And how and which ones , you know, when I see ten Google listings, I know to ignore these three because it's like, oh, that's not that's going to bring me down a hole. I don't want to go down. Like I let me filter this, you know, like there's a lot going on that you're not seeing and also that went on long before I showed up. And I usually would really the easy answer was just to tell them like, well, you had Google too. And instead of finding the answer on Google, you chose to find me , and I'm pretty sure you did the right thing, you know, so right and isn't that isn't that what professionals do anyway? They make the difficult and the complex look easy. That's right. Yeah. And we can't all be good at everything. I mean, we don't know everything about computers for sure . And that's the thing I know the most about . So I mean, I'm pretty good with music, but like, I mean, if I if you think a day goes by that I don't encounter something about music that I don't know that I need to learn , like I was at a rehearsal earlier this week where I was like, man o,h I 'm like, I am I need to work. I need to be at the top of my game to even continue to earn my spot to hang. Yeah, exactly to deserve my spot in this room , I cannot take my eye off the ball once. And even with that, I'm still gonna be playing catch up . And I mean, in a sense, I love that. So makes you better. It's what it's how you get better. Yeah , exactly. And that's why you get better at tennis by playing someone that you can crush. No, I mean, but you might get better at tennis by teaching someone that you can crush like there's there's, you know, I mean there's, there's ways of continuing to level up , but anyway. Fair enough. Yeah, yeah. I learned more about flying by teaching it than I ever did by learning it. Yes, there you go, right? You know, yep. That makes perfect sense to me. Yeah . All right, thanks for hanging out. Fun . We're hoping it will be the three of us next week. Like as we've indicated, our schedule next week is for this week or whatever is murky. So and Adam and I have very incompatible travel schedules, but we're gonna try and make it work. So yeah, so there you go. Thanks for hanging out. And some discussion about recording dates changing. That's true. So we'll see where that we'll see where that winds up. I don't know. Thanks for hanging out with us. Thanks for but I think we need we will always leave release date on Monday. I don't think there's a value in not messing with that . So we're not gonna mess with that . But yeah, thanks for hanging out. Thanks to Cashflie for providing all the bandwidth to get the audio and video to you. Thanks , if you missed Adam , the debut film podcast can help scratch that itch . There's more Pete, as he said, several times to the episode at So there I was. Us. And of course, Business Brain and Gigab are my two other shows . There's merch available. Go buy some merch. It's summertime. You want a t shirt? We got t shirts, you want a hat, keep the sun out of your eyes, you know? Got 'em, we got 'em. You requested 'em. We've got 'em Mackeub. com slash merch merch. Go check it out. Thanks for hanging out folks. And yeah, thank you for everything. Thanks to all of our premium subscribers for doing what you do and let me know about the sound of this episode . I'm not going to lead you astray. Although I might have tipped my hat in the intro and maybe the title of the episode early, but I'm curious because there were changes made and I think it's a good thing. But let us know. Feedback at McEv. com . In the meantime, Pete, you got anything to add anything to add that I 'd do. I have a request. Please share the show with somebody and some advice that will get you through till next week. Don't get caught or bad it Later