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Welcome to Mac Power Users. I'm David Sparks and joined as always by my pal and yours, Stephen Hackett. Hello, Stephen. How are you doing? A little under the weather, but I'm good. How are you? Yeah, excellent. You know, I love that you just like you woke up, got a little problem with the voice. You're like, I don't care. I'm delivering Mac Power Users to the Mac Power User people.

That's right. Yeah. Yeah. My apologies. David is going to do a lot of the driving this week, but it's a feedback episode. You can't miss one of those. Yeah. So we're going to drift into obsidian, woodworking. Oh, no. That's what we're going to do. No. No. You have been sending me some woodworking pictures. You're working on some good stuff. Yeah. Well, one of my goals this year is to do a little bit more of that, so I decided I'm going to try and spend –

Like on most days, daily-ish, as they say, I'm going to try and spend an hour a day in the shop. So I've got a new bookcase that's coming along, looking pretty good, all hand cut, all hand planed, looking good.

Either way, that's not why we're here today. We're here to talk about the Mac Power Users and a feedback episode on more power users, which is the ad-free extended version of the show. We're going to talk about adventures and food tracking apps. I have been doing some experimentation. I have thoughts, so we've got a good topic for more power users today. But getting on to the feedback, we got a bunch of email over the last several months, frankly, over all these developments in voice-to-texts

Anybody who's been listening to the show for any amount of time knows I'm a big fan of dictation to your computer. I think it's just a great way to get that lousy first draft in or just to capture text quickly with your voice. And I've been on this road for, well, 30 years. I started in the early days on the PC when I was a lawyer.

And you had to dictate by putting a space between each word. Oh, man. Yeah, it was rough, but it still made sense to me.

And now it is so much better. And the thing people are specifically asking about is, you know, what is this whisper thing and why is it a dictation thing? And, you know, what are our thoughts? So I thought I'd talk a little bit about that today. So a whisper is a speech to text model that open AI, the chat GPT people put together, and it is a artificial intelligence kind of machine learning technology that

And there's a couple things about it. They put a lot of data into it, as OpenAI does. So it immediately was pretty fast and efficient as a voice-to-text engine. But they also were able to get in multiple languages, background noises. And just in general, it's just an excellent device.

for getting speech to text. Like a few years ago when Apple said, oh, we changed the way that Siri does dictation. It's now a transformer model. Well, that's T is the T in GPT. And the other thing that they did that made it really great is they open sourced it. So anybody can use it. They wanted it for their stuff, but they made it available to anybody else.

And then we had this kind of explosion of whisper-based voice-to-text apps showing up on Mac and iPhone, iPad, even Vision Pro. So I've been, as you would expect, playing with a lot of them. And so I have thoughts about them. In general, I would say that they do pretty good. I think this is...

Where I'm almost tempted to say that this is a solved problem now, that you can talk to your computer and it's going to nearly perfectly transcribe you. I'm sure there are some people that are exceptions, maybe voice patterns, unique accents or something are going to throw it. But it just seems to me like most people I talk to in the Mac Sparky Labs that are using this stuff, and myself included, are

It just kind of works now. So that's the good news. The bad news is there is so many different applications out there to choose from. It's like, where do you go?

And one of my big fears about these Whisper apps is that they are flash in the pan. Like some developer says, oh yeah, I'm going to take that open source Whisper thing and make an app that does transcription. And then three months later, they're like, well, now I'm going to go do something else. That was fun. But you know what I mean? And that I think is a very likely scenario because of the fact that

There are, it's so easy, barrier to entry is low, and it's just so easy to make a good voice-to-text transcriber when you attach it to the Whisper engine. So in the year or two that I've been playing with this stuff, I've been looking for apps that seem like they have staying power. The ones I'm going to talk about actually cost money, except for one. But I do think if you're interested in this, they don't cost that much money. They're a lot less than what we used to pay for Dragon Dictate.

Have you played with any of these, Stephen? Yeah, I've been using Mac Whisper, which is, well, it's a Mac app that uses the Whisper model to transcribe episodes of the podcast. And I don't think it's good enough. Like, I don't feel comfortable publishing it as a transcript yet, mainly because a lot of these tools struggle with

different speakers and like, Oh, this David said this, Steven said that, but I'm doing it. Um, and I have them all in notion now really as a search tool for us. And it's not perfect by any means. Um, but sometimes it can like, okay, I know we talked about this, um,

Can it at least narrow it down? And then I can kind of cross examine that versus the links we've had in the show notes and the show description, like maybe try to find what we spoke about. And I will say, this is a place where like having the M4 Max, my new laptop, it's so much faster at it than the M2 Pro was. Don't tell me that. Don't tell me that. Yeah, it is. Mac Whisper is the first one on my list because, you know, it's a,

It it's made, I forget the developer's name, but he, um,

He has been really working hard on this app and it's been out for a while now and it's got several significant updates. It costs actual money. So, you know, you're giving him some money. He's he's continuing to work to make the app better. And I consider this to be the transcription machine for the Apple ecosystem nerd. So like if you want an app that can, you can just throw things out and get transcripts back out of Apple,

on your local device without sending it to a cloud or paying for a subscription service, because there's a bunch of them out there that you can pay for that'll do this in the cloud for you. But this is great. And again,

When I did the shortcuts field guide, I did some tests with it. You can have it not only transcribe just a general transcription, you can also have it do what they call SRT, where it timestamps them based on the length of the video. So then you can put closed captioning into your videos with it. It also does, whoops, I accidentally just triggered one of the other ones I want to talk about. I hope you didn't hear that. It also does, it

It does a great job of translation now. So once you finish it and say, okay, put this in French, simplified Chinese and Japanese, and it will put it out to you in the transcribed format. Now, I'm sure that if you paid a professional translator that they would do a better job, but this is just tools you're getting out of the box. And like you, I find it very useful for just getting transcriptions of stuff I work on.

You know, the Mac Sparky kind of media empire, we run the whole thing out of Notion. And one of the jobs JF has is every time I release a new video, podcast of the labs, whatever, that he just runs it through Mac Whisper and adds the transcript to the project note. And we've been doing it now about a year, maybe a little less than a year. And it's already paid huge dividends because I can just search basically the whole corpus of stuff I've published and

And like, it could be like, did I ever talk about that Miles Davis album? You know, or did I ever cover, you know, how to change your image and in contacts or whatever. And anything I search, it just goes through and looks through every word I've spoken that's been released and finds it for me. And it's really powerful. And this doesn't cost a bunch of money like it used to. So you can get it for, there's a free version of,

And then for the pro licenses, which I have, it's 49 euros. You know, that is not, not bad. You can buy 10 licenses for one 99. That's great. It's just a really good app. And I find it really useful for that type of work. Now they've, they keep expanding it and they're trying to kind of push into the live transcription stuff, but I haven't found it to be the best solution for that. At least for me.

What I like to use for one, and I'm distinguishing this between my Mac and the iPhone. On the Mac, there's an app called Super Whisper, and it's part of Setapp. And it's another one, single developer, but the app has been out now for, I think, about a year and a half, if not more. So it's kind of got a proven pedigree and track record. And again, a continuing...

you know, additional features added, like a lot of them. And what it does is the way I've, I've wired it up. In fact, that's the app accidentally triggered earlier. The right, the right command key. If I just hold down the right command key, it just starts listening and I say anything I want and it, it transcribes it to text. It's got a little text box that puts it in where you can see it, but it also has this really clever feature called modes. And this is what the pro version where you can say, okay, well, if I'm in an email, I'm,

then you have permission to look at the email screen. So when I say, hi, Steven, it spells out Steven the way it's written in your name, not the other way, you know? And, um, and it, it's smart enough to look at the stuff I'm reading that I'm replying to in an email. So it gets jargon, right. And things like that. It's very clever what he did with that. And the other thing he did is he has now started uploading his own, uh, transcription, um,

And they are like really accurate, really fast. And there's one that's kind of big. I think it's 1.6 gigabytes that you can download if you need to do it locally. Like you're somebody who can't share your data with the cloud. He's also got a cloud-based one. That's also super fast. If you don't want to download it. So it's just like the app is just getting kind of the right kinds of features and the settings of this app are just bananas. Right.

I might do that thing again where I'm going to share a Max Barkey labs video. Cause I made a video for the labs and, and you can just go watch it if you, if you're interested in this, but I just feel like he's doing a good job of, of,

of giving me something I really wanted was the ability at any point to just start talking and have usable texts that I can drop somewhere. Those models or those modes can be either smart or dumb. And by that, I mean, the smart one is exactly what we've been talking. I'm sorry. The dumb one is exactly what we've been talking about. You hold down the thing. It runs whatever audio you're feeding it through the whisper engine and transcribes it for you. So that's the basic.

But you can also have it say, after that, then apply machine learning or AI to whatever the outputted text is. So you can say, okay, first transcribe what I say. Then after that, go through, look for any instance where it says Max Barkey, M-A-X-B-A-R-K-E-Y. Mm-hmm.

which happens sometimes and change it to max Sparky and also put it in Markdown format. And also, you know, and you can just give it a bunch of instructions on what to do with the text. So not only does it transcribe for you, it applies post formatting. You can even say, you know, the usual, like have it be more professional or sound like a pirate or whatever you want. So you can have it transcribe and apply an AI layer afterwards and

in one fell swoop, which is great. It also has the ability to dump whatever you have into the active cursor location. So not only do you get the little text box, like when I'm in mail, it just goes, I put the cursor where I want it and I dictate and it dumps the text right into the reply and I'm off to the races. It's just really fast and the

the app, it seems like every month or two just gets a little more awesome with some cool feature. In fact, the, I watched the YouTube video from the developer as we were prepping the show and he says, yeah, I'm going to go back to modes and redo those. So my guess is the modes are going to get even more powerful the next month or two. So yeah, it's just really great. It's a Mac app. He also has a iPhone version. I don't find that one as useful. Well,

One clever thing he did is he made a keyboard so you can trigger the dictation from the keyboard into the app. That's clever. Yeah, but a lot of the dictation stuff on mobile is harder because you don't have the easy way to insert yourself into other applications than it does on the Mac. But Super Whisper, definitely thumbs up if you haven't tried it.

I'll put, like I said, I'll put a link in the labs for that labs video for people if they want to get a little further feeling on it. Have you ever played with that one or heard of it? I have come across it. I remember your video, but I have not played with this. And now I am downloading it in the background. Yeah, I think it's, I think it's pretty well done. And like I said, there's, there are a lot of alternatives to these, but I was looking for apps that have been on the market for a while that actually charge you money and

that I feel like, and they're getting active development and aren't just some experiment from a developer. And then my favorite on mobile is whisper memos. And I've talked about this one on the show now for like a year, but I just think he did a great job. It's a, it's a little app. It does everything locally. It runs it through the whisper engine and does a good job transcribing a super whisper and whisper memos. Both have the ability to insert custom, uh,

So you can have words like Mac Sparky or unique pronouns that you want to make sure that it always gets and it'll get them. And Whisper Memos like goes the extra yard with automation. They have all the shortcuts plugins, which was the key.

And I've shared this before. I'll share it one more time for folks who haven't heard this before. I run a shortcut connected to the orange button on my Apple Watch Ultra that triggers whisper memos. So the workflow for me is I'm sitting anywhere. I think of something I want to have written, whether it's an email, a task, or a blog post, or anything. And I just push the orange button. I start talking to my watch. And then when I'm done...

The watch and the phone are talking. Whisper does the transcription on the phone. And then it has the ability to email it somewhere. So I have it emailed to my magic email address with Drafts because Drafts has a kind of a, one of those mail drop services. So the workflow is I push the orange button, I talk, and then a few minutes later it's in Drafts. And I have found that to be one of the best workflows I came up with in the last year. I use it many times now.

So it's just great. And that's all based on the whisper technology. Yeah, it's really cool. One thing to be mindful of, if you want to play with these tools is that this is really one of the areas where Intel Macs are kind of left out. Some of these models will run on an Intel Mac. Sometimes it's like an older version of a model and some of these tools require Apple Silicon. So that's something to be mindful of. And I do want to highlight something.

that I do think it's important is that a lot of these tools work offline. Like with Mac whisper is downloading a model and then running that locally on your hardware. In fact,

Mac Whisperer is the only thing that I've gotten the fans on my new MacBook Pro to be audible was I dumped like 300 episodes or something onto it to transcribe overnight. It's like, oh, I can hear this laptop. That's weird. But it's really great that it's happening offline just on my local silicon that I paid for. But that's always something to be mindful of with these services is to know what the data is doing where.

Yeah. And that's like one of the things I like about super whisper is they're super transparent. When you connect it, it says, do you want to use a cloud-based model? Do you want to use a local one? And then it tells you how much, how big it is. It gives you an accuracy and speed estimate, and you just kind of choose your own adventure. My own advice there though, is don't,

Don't ever like download the super fast inaccurate models. There are, they have models that are say, okay, this will be a 10 on speed, but like a five in accuracy. Don't do that. Get the accuracy number up because you'll get frustrated if you let it do it inaccurately. So, so there is a definite difference between some of those models. A couple other things I wanted to say about this is,

This is as bad as this ever will be. You know, that's the thing about artificial intelligence. It's in its worst iteration right now. I mean, this stuff is improving dramatically fast. And a year from now, I can't imagine where Whisper will be, but I'm sure it'll be.

much better than it is now. So it's getting better all the time. If you're looking for transcription, I think this is something worth checking out. And those three apps are the ones I would start with. I mean, we have a forum if you've got others that you want better. Honestly, there are other apps other than these that are probably just as good. Maybe there's some that are better. I don't know. But these are the ones that in my testing kind of rose to the top. And these are the ones I'm using every day.

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David, we recently did our episode about family tech support. I hope that was useful for people. I have a Mac mini on my workbench right now from a family member. I'm getting set up for that. Well into January. Are you setting it up or are you fixing it? Setting it up. So they, I think I told this story on a show. Maybe I just texted it to you. A family member of mine, I totally forgot about this setup. They were running a,

a really old iMac with a virtual Windows XP machine for something they're like hey this isn't working anymore and I it was like oh I set this up a long time ago like we need to we need to fix all this anyways I bought a refurbished M1 Mac mini off of eBay and you would never know that it wasn't brand new like it didn't come in the Apple box but the thing is perfect and yeah

So anyways, getting all the stuff moved over. But we had some this this sparked some email and some conversation, which was awesome. Robert wrote in about Apple mail and security in terms of, you know, some of those phishing attacks. Could you maybe talk a little bit about that?

Yeah. He was making the argument that we should turn off smart addresses. So the way it works is by default, if you look at the addresses, it'll just say Stephen Hackett. It won't show your email address in the two from, you know, blind copy lines in the old days. That's not the way it worked. Like when email was first a thing, you always saw the email addresses of the people you were sending to, but they tried to make it more user-friendly by making what they call this, this feature, uh,

But if you turn it off, then the actual email address will be visible. So when people try to phish you, you'll note that the email address is visible.

It doesn't look like something from Chase Bank, but it was like a bunch of random characters and maybe a domain in another country or something that just, it just doesn't look right. That's one way to do it. You can also hover over that in the, when someone sends you an email,

If you just hover over it, you'll get a list. If you hit the little arrow next to it, it shows you the actual email address. That's the way I deal with this. I actually keep smart addresses and I kind of like it. But if I am questioning an email, I will always check the, that's one of the steps I'll take is to go up to the email address, hit the little arrow and just check what the address is. Yeah, that's really good advice. I use MimeStream, but it has the same thing. Like I can click on it.

It shows me the address. And of course I can copy it or whatever. Yeah, that's huge. Because I mean, dude, I got one the other day that...

Had I not been paying attention, it looked like a legit email from Apple. It was about something iCloud. I was like, I know this is fake because I do this for a living, but boy, this would be really confusing to a lot of people. It's gotten really good and kind of scary out there. Yeah, since we published that episode, we've heard from people. I've heard from lab members and also listeners that

just sharing kind of war stories of, you know, how good some of the attempts are against them and, and, you know, sharing, you know, like, it's not like the old days where the, you know, the, the, the text of it had poor grammar and like, it was like really comical how bad it was when they first started making these attempts. But now maybe partly because of AI, uh, these things are way more convincing than they used to be. And, uh,

I do really worry about family members. Like I said, when we record that show, I feel like a lot of us that are, you know, kind of thinking about this stuff don't get caught in it as easily. But when you look at stuff that nearly catches Stephen Hackett and then you aim that at somebody who's like a retiree and not really into computers. Oh, boy. Yeah. It was incredible how real it looked.

scary. David wrote in one addition to your episode on holiday tech support would be something on configuring Apple watch safety features such as fall crash detection, including the emergency contacts. I just visited my dad over Thanksgiving and helped him set this up on his Apple watch. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So it's weird that that fall detection doesn't work unless you're over a certain age. I think it's a 50. I'm not sure what the age is, but

that's off by default unless you're old enough. I happen to be over the threshold age, so it wasn't a problem for me. But yeah, I think young people would like to have help if they fall or crash as well, right? Yeah, so it works if you're younger than 55. It's only on by default if you're over 55. I've got it on.

And it's with your bicycle experience. It's very useful. Yeah. You crashed your bike. Are you okay? Yeah. So there is this excellent page on Apple support site, like links to all their safety features. And this is the first time I've come across this page, but it is really impressive. Honestly, impressive how many things,

these devices can do. And some of it's on the iPhone, some of it's on the Apple watch, some of it's on both or a combination thereof. You mentioned fall detection, which has been around for a while now since the Apple watch series four. But another great one of course is crash detection on the iPhone and Apple watch. So if you're in a car crash and you have an iPhone 14 or Apple watch series eight or later,

and it detects a severe car crash, it will help connect you to emergency services. I saw this firsthand a couple of years ago when I was on a car accident and my watch and phone were going ballistic. It is really, like, I find it very comforting that if something really bad happens, that my watch and phone, you know, like with the crash detection,

it starts a countdown and if you don't stop it, it's calling emergency services for you. Like, yeah, that's what I want. Like when, when the Apple watch came out with this, I upgraded my wife kind of off her normal cycle for Apple watch upgrades. Like I want you to have this, like,

This is, you know, it was before I discovered how well it works. And yeah, so go through that page and, you know, make sure these things are set up. That's really good advice. I think it's great for if you have older parents or even just anybody. Like, I don't think you've got to be over 55 or almost 40 with a mountain bike to have fall detection on. Like, I think everyone should have that on. I think these things can be really important. And any...

you know, slight battery life hit you have, which I don't even know if there is any like, uh, fine. Like that's fine with me. Cause I want, I want these things to have my back. Yeah. A little battery life versus death. That's your, that's your consideration. Um, there, there's also a feature in there and I would recommend frankly going through the page, Steven linked and maybe even sending it to a few family members, um,

But they have the medical ID thing there. And I have a personal experience with that. We were driving home just like a few months ago. For whatever reason, the whole Sparks family was home. So we went out to lunch together. We're coming back.

And we're in the car and we see a woman on the side of the road laying down in the gutter with her dog running around, you know, it's like, Oh no. You know, so I was very proud of my family. We, we jumped into action. We pulled the car over kind of blocking traffic from her, you know,

We, one kid got the dog, one kid called 911. The other, you know, we turned her on her side. You know, I didn't, that's the only thing I knew I was supposed to do. And got the dog, got the traffic to stop and, and fire department showed up within minutes. It was all, everything happened the way it should. And she's okay. So that's, that's the end of the good part. I want to jump to that part. In fact, she came over to the house and thanked us later. She's very nice lady. But the one thing she didn't have was medical ID. And she,

The paramedic when I was there, because they were going through her phone, they're like, oh, we don't have anything. You know, like, does she have seizures? Is there something going on with her medically that we need to know before we start putting drugs in her? And all she had to do was turn it on. And so in your health app, you've got a thing called medical ID where you can put all your medications, any conditions you have. And if you pass out on the side of the road someday, you will greatly help your caregivers by doing that. So do that.

It'll take you a minute. It just takes a second and you can access it from the locked phone. So in that case, like someone's unresponsive, an EMT can pick up the phone and, and, and see this data. I mean, the guy didn't know I'm a Mac power users hosts. Right. He just said to me at the time, he's like, ah, I wish she had, you know, it's like, you know, you, you see it firsthand. Yeah. And, uh,

that, that is a, that was a good reminder for me. I'd set mine up, but Daisy hadn't set hers up. So we just sat down at the kitchen table together and,

Got a list of her medications and her conditions and filled it out. And gang, it just takes minutes, really. It could save your life. And keeping it up to date is important, right? If your situation changes, make sure your medical ID is updated. Yeah. One thing I'll add here is something that I have in mind, because there's a notes field in the medical ID. Like there's a lot of structured data, right? Like height, weight, age, gender, you know, sort of stuff. And then there's a text field.

And I have in mind that, you know, if my 16 year old son is with me, he is a brain cancer survivor who has a seizure disorder. Like if we're in a car accident, like, and I can't be helpful, I can't communicate. They need to know that about him. And he's got a phone now, but it basically just lives at home. And so I have it and Mary has it in our, in our medical IDs. And so think about that too. Like,

Am I a caregiver to somebody that if I can't communicate, someone in the situation needs to know what's going on? I think medical ID is super well thought out. It's been around for a while. It was like iOS 8 or 9 or something. It's been a minute since they've released it. And I think it's great. I find it encouraging that that emergency responder knew to look for it because I've always kind of wondered that. Yeah.

That's one of the first things he did. Yeah. Yeah. That's really cool. I think it proves that it works. And so definitely spend some time getting that set up. Yeah. What I would also recommend is make sure you put contact information there. That's also super important. And if you've got older relatives or people who you know in your life who you know are not going to bother doing this, this is a chance for you to help them out.

All right. More feedback. Apple TV remote. Many, many people wrote in to tell us that you can find the newest Apple TV remote with your iPhone. Yeah. Yeah.

We had talked about they should put an AirTag in it. I think we got more email about this than anything we've gotten email about in a while. So I will put the document in the show notes. If you open the remote application on your phone, most easily done from Control Center, and you swipe down from the top, there's a little Find button next to the Apple TV name, and it will find the remote for you.

what we found out was that you and I are both cheap and we have not bought new Apple TVs in a long time. That's what we found out. Mine's up to, no, this is, it's more embarrassing for me. I have the most recent one and this was not on my radar. So yeah. Thank you. Okay. All right. Well, I, I'm going to update one, one of these days, but I, every time a new one comes out, I'm like, well, the old one is still doing what it needs to do. So I'm not sure I need a new one. Well,

Well, for me, I had a 1080 television forever. And then I bought, when we got our 4K TV, I bought the Apple TV and they haven't updated it since. Yeah, my main television downstairs is still 1080. And I keep looking at that because the one on the bedroom is 4K. And man, you know, I kind of want to replace it. But that is a thing where my wife is like, really? We need another TV? Yeah.

That is one where I have to walk a bit, walk a bit on eggshells. Either way. Nice. Nice to know. Thank you everybody for writing. I truly did not know that. I mean, sometimes you learn things from the audience. That's right.

Grant wrote in, uh, I like this one. He says, thanks to Max Sparky. I'm now fully committed to the grid affinity system and bamboo printers. You're welcome. Grant. Yes. But then he continues. This has led to a ridiculous number of STL and three MF files as I'm a data pack, right? Any suggestions as to organization? I like to keep copies of my files and event. I need to reprint down the road. Yeah. I just use nested folders. The, um,

So what I do is you have the screw together grid is the one I use as the main one. And those files are named really wonky as you download them from the internet. So I've renamed them just by their size, you know, like five by five or, or five by five grid or two by two grid. So the grids are in one location and they're easily named with the actual grid size. And then I do the same thing for anything I create. So it'll be like,

two by three pliers holder. And then I just have a folder that I put them all in. It's not that bad for me, but it also is something I'm constantly adding to. And I have to be careful because often I design my own using Shaper 3D and I'll save them temporarily to the desktop. And then that's where I get in trouble.

So I recently made an Alfred rule that takes care of it for me. If it's a 3MF or it goes into a two sort file, and then I sort them from there. So I've kind of got it under control. But I think when you first start doing stuff, this is an easy problem to find yourself in. Yeah, mine's a disaster. I'm with Grant. Mine are all in a Dropbox folder that is...

It's truly terrible in there. I need to fix it. Now, we haven't talked about it on the show, but you have sent me, you know, and our friend messages thread, pictures of you printing up grids and gridfinity stuff. But I didn't really hear the end of the story. Are you doing that? Is it still happening? What's going on with your gridfinity situation? Yeah, so the workbench in the studio has one pull-out drawer. That's all gridfinityed.

And I am like a third of the way through...

printing stuff for my toolbox in the garage. I'm just going to do the top couple of drawers. The bottom doors are for bulkier things. Sure. But where all the sockets are. And so I've not assembled any of it because that's going to be a whole thing. But I have all the grids printed and some of the things that I know I need. It's just kind of been a slow process. It would be faster if I...

I thought about this recently, like the drawer comes out of the toolbox. Like what if we take it out and I just bring it into the office? It's like have it on the floor and then I can just be working on it, you know, more regularly, but I'm slowly, slowly chipping away at it. And it is great. Once you have everything right, the way you want it, it is so cool to know. Yes. Like open the drawer and you will see, you know, the tape measure in the bottom left corner. Like that's and put it back when you're done. Like it's great. Yeah.

No. In fact, I have, like I said earlier, with Shapr3D, you can really customize those grids. There's a set of downloadable grid boxes where they're solid. So then you basically just draw the shape, like the shape of your tape measure on it and then extrude it. So you basically create a tape measure sized hole inside your grid. And of course, so that's the next level for me. And I have...

someday, Stephen, you'll have to come visit me, but I've done pretty much every drawer that I control with this stuff, but I'm still finding myself making little adjustments and changes every

And I just find it kind of a fun hobby, really. You say, oh, I don't like the way that looks. I'm going to make a new grid for that. And you design it, you print it out, and it's going off in the garage while you're working. It's almost like a very expensive, silly Pomodoro timer. It's like, OK, can I get the show outline done before this is done printing kind of thing? And it's just fun.

There's happy chemicals in my brain that are released when I have things organized. So it's a thing. I know there's a lot of people listening to this show that have got into it like Grant. And it's pretty awesome. Yeah, no, it's great. Glad you're enjoying it. Glad you're enjoying it. And there's a tool called the Gridfinity Generator, where if you can't find something you need, you can just...

downloading a cad program like designing yourself like it's just a web tool and you say oh i need this many rows this many columns and then it spits out a file for you i just did a design because i have a bunch of lightsabers they sell these uh of course lightsabers at disneyland and whenever i have a big event in my life i buy one they're about 150 bucks and that's kind of my like

It's my reward often. Only light side, by the way. I don't buy any dark side. You got to choose a side. But I like to hang them on the wall. And I bought a pack of 3D printed wall hangers years ago before I had a 3D printer. And they started breaking because they were printed with poor quality materials and the fill was really low. So they just weren't structurally very sound.

So that gave me an excuse to redesign my own hanger. And it came out so awesome. And then I have like a, a base on it where I can, I can print separately a plate with the name of the person who it belonged to. And, and then I can do that in multicolors because you can do that. And so, yeah, I've been having, that's my latest 3d printing adventure.

Yeah, that's awesome. The other thing I did that was kind of interesting is because I'm making this bookshelf, I actually printed out a small version of it just to look at the proportions of it before I started cutting wood. So a lot you can do with a 3D printer.

All right. iCloud speed. Gene wrote in, I went to iCloud all about all about two years ago, but it's still kind of disappointing how slow it is sometimes for a file picture upload from one device to another. Before going to iCloud, I was using Dropbox and even back in the day with Dropbox, the syncing was instantaneous. I really can't figure out how they haven't gotten up to speed with this after asking all Apple users to rely on iCloud. It reminds me of when we had iDisc,

And it was a crapshoot how long it would take to sync something. Well, Gene, I would say iDisk was like next level bad. Because I remember, like I would do like a five line text file

Just to see if I could confirm it was working. And that would take an hour. So yeah, this is way better than iDisk. But yeah, agreed. I think Dropbox is faster. And even worse, there's no way to push the information to sync faster. You just have to sit and wait. This mostly happens with photos with me. I like finishing up on things on one device and picking up on the other to continue on. All legitimate. All legitimate.

Yeah, I think it is too. And we've spoken about it before. You just don't have a lot of controls with iCloud. You can now tell it on the Mac and iOS, the newest versions, like always keep a folder downloaded, which is an improvement. But if something like if something happens to your sync process and it just stops, like restart your computer, like there's not a lot of levers you can pull.

Yeah, we have these massive, when I make videos for the field guides in the labs, I send them to JF for his edit. And those are really big files. And we've experimented with iCloud and we, you know, we stuck with Dropbox. We also did an experiment with Notion. Same thing, just super slow, trying to sync them through Notion. So Dropbox still wins if you need speed and big files.

But iCloud is so baked in, you know. Yeah. It's pretty nice. It's hard to argue with sometimes. I got big Print Center news. Are you ready? All right. We talked about Print Center recently. Yeah. And one of us was like, oh, you only see it when you print. And it's like, not a real app. Turns out, thank you to the NPU forums for

You can put Print Center in Control Center on iOS 18. So you don't have to print something and wait for the Print Center app to appear out of the mist. You can just launch it directly from Control Center, which I wouldn't have in there all the time. But if I were troubleshooting something, I could see myself adding it. Yeah.

Do you feel like there's, I feel like there's fewer printer problems than there used to be. Oh, yeah. Yeah, we have a printer here that I bought for not too much money, but it's a laser, and I got it three or four years ago, and it just kind of works. We don't really have any problems. Occasionally, you might need to turn it off and on again, but...

It feels to me like printing is a lot easier than it used to be. Yeah. I mean, I've got this. I think I said it on that episode. I have this ancient brother black and white laser printer. I've had it like 10 years now. And I recently had an issue. We're going to talk about it in a little while. I've had a lot of network stuff going on in my house. And the printer just didn't come back on the network.

And so I just Googled how to factory reset it, which was this hilarious thing of like press and hold the power button and then press it like seven more times. Like, what are we doing? Like don't discount. Stand on one leg. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Whistle Dixie. Yeah, I get it. But it reset like boom back on the network. Like nothing ever happened. The thing like out of all my technology purchases, like,

I think the best value I've ever spent is that Brother printer because it was cheap and like I'm a decade in and it's flawless. This episode of the Mac Power Users is brought to you by Indeed. Go to indeed.com slash MPU and join more than 3.5 million businesses worldwide using Indeed to hire great talent fast.

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All right, we heard from David. He says, I'm that guy. A few years ago, I was washing a 13-foot Boston Whaler at a dock near the OC Sheriff Boats and the U.S. Coast Guard ship Narwhal. I know exactly where that is. It's like 30 minutes from my house. He says, I had a phone in my sweatshirt pocket, and when I bent over, it bounced around on the deck before falling through the slats to the depth of about 40 feet.

Quick run to the Apple store in Fashion Island and I had an iPhone 13. I wasn't ready to upgrade, but Neptune had different ideas that day. I like it. Yeah. And then he closed out. Hey, Dave, it now sits 10 miles from your home as the crow flies.

Maybe I'll go get his phone. That's right. Yeah. We take care of our listeners, you know. It's a service we provide. I'll get my scuba gear on, just go down, get that phone. Yeah, that stinks, man. That's terrible. But that's why you pay for the iCloud backup, though. I mean, you just never know when that sucker is going to fall into the ocean or whatever.

Get run over by a steamroller. Are you old enough to remember Mr. Bill? Oh, yeah. On the Saturday Night Live? Yeah. Remember when he got ran over by a steamroller? Mr. Bill! Yeah, that was sad. Yeah. Yeah, so you never know. So you get that backup done. Indeed. I also have a wet devices story. And listeners may think, Stephen, what did you do? Not me this time, but I am maybe genetically responsible for it because my daughter is

The other night was running in the house. Someone dropped her off. She was out with friends and it was like a biblical thunderstorm when they dropped her off. It was raining so hard. And as she's like running up the walkway to the front door, her AirPods come out of her bag like and shoot themselves into the yard, which has like standing water on it. Right. Yeah.

And we found the case, right? Cause it's easy, but the AirPods were like nowhere to be found, like in the yard somewhere. And it is pouring down rain. It's like, look, they're probably already dead. Like let's let the rain end. And it rained all night. The next morning we went out, we found both of them. One were like, I guess like the, the arc of the case being flunked from her bag, like jettisoned this AirPods so far into my, like, I don't know how, why or how it went as far as it did.

um but i was like don't you know we're not gonna power them on like we're not gonna put them in the charger we're not gonna plug in the charger we're gonna leave them out i left my like two days and the things work like both the airpods pro and the case they work they charge she said i was like do they sound funny because i was a little worried like water got into them and look it will it shave life off the end of these products you know maybe but for now totally fine i was so impressed

Yeah. That's weird when you, cause yesterday this happened to me, I got out of the car with my daughter and the air pod case fell out of my pocket just the way I was sitting and they hit the ground and they explode and they become air pod launchers when they hit a concrete, you know? And it's funny cause it happens so fast. You can't even see it and you always pick up the case and you open it up and they're empty and they're like, you know, 20 feet away. I don't even know how this happens.

But that's another one where the Find My comes in real handy. If you have the most recent AirPods, it will find individual AirPods for you. And it'll make them beep. And it'll also, because of my hearing, that is no use to me. But it does tell me when I'm close to them and I can find them in the bushes or whatever. But yeah, that just happened to me yesterday. Yeah, be careful. AirPods are little, you know? Maybe I should buy one of those rubber outer cases, the locking ones, just in case.

Because I've done this now several times. I also did it literally as I was walking up to airport security, you know, because you're emptying your pockets. I'm at the airport right in front of TSA, drop them, and then the AirPods just launch out of it. And that was great. My wife was so happy with me at that moment. It was just awesome. So what should people do if their devices go in the drink?

Yeah, don't turn them on for a long time. That's the most important part. I was thinking about that since the story came up. What's the current advice on this? Well, for an iPhone, if you have anything modern, you're probably good. They're made to get dunked, so you're all right. There's a great video from Apple where they're pressure washing an iPhone while it's turned on. Yeah.

But your Mac and your iPad, different story. So if your Mac gets wet, first turn it off and immediately unplug it. You know, obviously get electricity out of the situation. In the old days, I would have told you to take the battery out, but that's not possible. So you can't do that. If it's really dunked, turn it on its end, drain water out of it, you know, shake it. If you hear any water inside of it, try to get the water out of it as much as you can.

And then just let it dry for a really long time. And I was looking into this, ways people try to shortcut the process. Like using rice, that used to be something people would tell you, put it in a bag of rice. Don't do that. Apparently there is a rice residue problem that can cause trouble with your thing. If you really want to put it in something, silica gel would be better. But do it in the bags. Don't just get a bucket of silica gel because that will get inside your Mac.

Um, but don't use a hairdryer. Don't use like a heat gun. Just let it naturally dry for, I would recommend a week. And that is, uh, some of the recommendations were 72 hours, but you just really don't want to put electrons through that thing while there's any residue of water anywhere. Yeah.

And, um, so give it as much time as you can. And I think that is the hardest part, right? Because you're like, well, it doesn't work or doesn't it? Do I need to go get a new one? Or is this thing, you know, cooked and you're going to be super tempted to turn it on after a day and you might ruin it. So don't.

Yeah. And if you've spilled something onto it, like a soda or a cup of coffee or something, the residue is a real problem. And in those cases, you may be looking at a repair. And if you have AppleCare Plus, you may have a discounted repair rate if you've got that accidental damage. But I agree with you. Time, I think, is the most important factor. How quickly can you act to get it out of the water, get it drying, and then...

let it dry, like just let it sit. And I think rushing into it is a, is a mistake. Give some thought just to liquids and your device in general. Like if you use a laptop on a desk, don't put your, your water, coffee, soda, whatever on the same desk, you're just asking for trouble.

You know, like a lot of times people will have a separate desk or some other place in the room where you can put your liquid. And then that way you never mix them with my Mac studio. I bought, I forget who even made it. It was overpriced, but it's a piece of plastic.

That's about an inch high, but it's, it's molded and formed perfectly for the bottom of a Mac studio. In fact, if I had to do it again, I'd probably just 3d print something. But the point is my studio is about an inch higher than my desk surface. So if I do spill water or have some kind of problem here, there's no way that's going to get into the system, but you know, just kind of, you can prevent a lot of this stuff if you're careful.

I think iPhones being water resistant is like the best hardware change Apple's made maybe ever. Yeah. All right. Stuff we're playing with. I got a couple for you here. I am a pretty avid Kindle user. I had a Kindle Oasis that I regretfully lost on a vacation. Still maybe the best Kindle I ever used because it was the last one with page turn buttons and everything.

I agree with Jason Snell, like page turn buttons are good. But there are a couple of new Kindles out now, and I gave the Kindle ColorSoft a try. This is an e-ink Kindle with a color display. Amazon's not first to this.

But they made all sorts of claims about how good their color screen was. And it does some interesting things. Like you can see the cover of your book in color and they have this like stand wireless charging dock. So you can like sit on your nightstand and see the image, a different color highlighting, which is actually is pretty nice, but I didn't keep it like it for 280 bucks in the U S and,

doesn't set itself apart enough, I think. And the color, it looks okay. Like if you've seen E Ink Color, they're all kind of the same. Like it's a little desaturated, a little dull. I really just like, I come back to my original belief, like the paper white is the one. Like that's the sort of mainstream Kindle. And I mean, it's 200 bucks for the nice one right now.

But you can get an older one. They're often on sale. The regular Kindle Paperwhite is $160, so you don't even need to get the nice one. And I think the experience is better on the Paperwhite. I think in particular, for the color on the Colorsoft, one of the trade-offs is the contrast in regular text is

isn't as noticeable. I'm not saying the text is muddy on the color soft or like it's hard to read. It's none of those things. But you sit it down and pick up the paper white, it's like, oh, the paper white, the contrast ratio between the background and the text is noticeably better. And I just don't think the color soft is there yet. And so if you were eyeballing one of these, I'm not sure, unless you really want the color highlighting and you don't want

You don't care about the contrast as much, but even then, it's a pretty hard sell for me. Yeah, I just don't really get the need for the color. If you wanted to read comics, an iPad is better for that. But the thing Kindles are good for is reading books. Black text on white paper.

And I'm not sure color is really, I don't know. Maybe I'm just being a curmudgeon. No, I don't think so. And in his review on Six Colors, Jason mentioned the comic thing. And basically, it's not big enough for the comics to be really sort of impactful. Or like if it were the size of The Scribe, their big Kindle.

maybe it'd be different, but the color soft is the same size, I believe is the paper white. So it's not, it's not like you get this experience, you know, this reading these comics or graphic novels that is like really that compelling. So I think even then I don't think it's worth it. You know, so since we're talking Kindles, I, I, I read, I buy a lot of physical books. That's something that's kind of transitioned for me over the last few years. Um,

Books that I really like and want to write in and know that I want to like have as a resource, I will buy the paper book. Sometimes because of the focus podcast, people tell me I should read some, you know, the latest productivity, blah, blah book. And those I feel like are kind of disposable. So I'll buy those on Kindle. But I bought the Kindle scribe when it first released like two years ago or three years ago. I don't know how long now.

So that's the big one with the pen that you could theoretically write on. And that I like the big one and I love the resolution. It's super crisp and I like having a bigger book to read. But the pen is kind of useless in my opinion still. And I know they've released new hardware since then. So maybe it's better in the new one, but we still aren't at a point where you can write on an ebook like you can on a physical book. But I guess I'll just report in that. I do like my Kindle scribe. If you want a big one,

Um, it's kind of nice. I had lunch with a friend of mine the other day who's got one and just swears by it. Like he, he absolutely loves it. It's kind of, he's like, this is what I've always kind of wanted, uh,

which is really interesting. I like that Amazon is trying things, even if they're not all hits or like the scribe is just not for me. But I think it's good they're doing it. I think it's, you know, they have competition now in a way that they didn't have for a long time. And it's good. It means that they are, you know, they are trying things and releasing new products and that's all. It's good for everybody. Yeah. Agreed. Agreed.

All right, let's just bounce back and forth. I've got a new mouse, Steven. Okay. This is from Tim Stringer over at Learn OmniFocus, my buddy Tim.

Learn OmniFocus.com. He told me he bought a vertical mouse. And I'm like, well, that sounds dumb, you know, because it doesn't have as many buttons on it. So it's, you know, it's the Logitech vertical mouse. Okay. And, and then I thought, but you know, Tim's a pretty smart guy. Maybe I should try this out. So I, I bought one and I bought it with the intention of trying it out for a few days and probably sending it back. And that was like three months ago. So this is a Logitech mouse that,

That you hold your hand kind of sideways in. It stands up, in essence. So it's kind of hard to describe, but if you held your hand, rather than turning your wrist to the side, if you held your hand like you're shaking somebody's hand, it fits right into this thing. It's got two buttons and wheels, got a third button and two toggles, and

But, you know, using better touch tool and some ingenuity, you can still give it a lot of different button clicks. But it's really kind of nice. And I came to realize that I really like this mouse. Never thought I would. But it's nice. It has a USB-C charging port on the front. You don't have to turn it on its side. Whoa! Yeah, I know. That's crazy.

It's got three different Bluetooth radios in it, so you can connect it to three devices. That's cool. But I don't need to do that because of Sidecar. I can get it on my iPad or my Mac. Right. You know, it's a cool design. I wasn't even aware these existed until Tim told me about it. But if you're looking for something different in a mouse, check out this Logitech vertical mouse. Yeah. And on their page, they also link to the Lyft, which is like a smaller –

version of it because i would imagine more than a regular mouse the sizing of this seems important to me yeah yeah well my hands are big enough they fit this thing nicely that's cool and um and i i uh i'm a believer so yeah there you go i mean looking at it like i've got the mx master 3s and

It doesn't, I mean, maybe it's one fewer button than I have, but like, it doesn't look like you're giving that much up in terms of input. Yeah. The trick is contextual buttons with better touch tools. So like in Safari, it does one thing or, or holding down the shift key and pressing it in Safari does one thing like that's like, I did that with a switching between tabs and Safari. Yeah. Yeah. I mentioned some networking stuff.

I switched from Eero to Ubiquiti, the UniFi system, and I had done their Wi-Fi 7 access points. So a couple in the house, one in the office, and was having a lot of issues. I talked about this here and on Upgrade. A lot of issues with...

um, IOT devices. But the big one was Apple watches dropping off the network and then not reconnecting. So they would basically lose connection to the phone and then they would spend their batteries up, you know, like a lot of Apple devices do have like, Hey, radio is full blast. You know, we're trying to connect here. Uh, it was a real, it was a real mess. And, um, I will say one thing I've enjoyed about the Unify experience so far is

Is it the community is really good on Reddit and on ubiquity zone forums and ubiquity support was just next level. So I did some digging in the forums and on Reddit, and it seems like their wifi seven access points have some issues and some of these areas. And for a while I was like, well, let me turn off the six gigahertz band. And that mostly fixed it, but was still kind of an issue because,

So what I ended up doing was actually swapping the U7 Wi-Fi 7 access points for U6, so their older Wi-Fi 6. Now, it is not as fast as the Wi-Fi 7 was. Wi-Fi 6 will...

in theory, saturate my one gigabit fiber connection. But in reality, that's not really true. But all my things work. And I really like the management stuff with Ubiquiti. Eero has a lot of stuff for like, you put devices into groups, then you can have rules on those groups of like,

These devices can't connect to the internet after a certain time, or you want this sort of filtering on some devices. I got a house, three kids in it. And the unified stuff is just next level with that. And with one thing that I am exploring, haven't made any moves here yet, but like ubiquity also has like security cameras and door locks, like all sorts of stuff that,

That's integrated with their system. And that may be a direction I go at some point. So I am sticking with it, even if the access point's like,

I started this like I want faster Wi-Fi now that my internet connection is faster. Didn't achieve that, but I do like the ecosystem a lot. And I'm keeping my eye on the Wi-Fi 7 stuff. And maybe at some point they'll get it straightened out. They just had a firmware update for those access points this week, but I don't have them anymore. They got sent back. So I'm keeping an eye on that for the future. But several people had written in about that. And some people had issues, some people didn't.

That kind of is how it is, it seems like. Like reading online, like some people had issues, some didn't. I did. But I'm sticking with it, even if the access points aren't as fast as I initially hoped. Every time you talk about ubiquity, I just put my fingers in my ears because I'm super nervous about being tempted to upgrade. A lab member told me about a thing that I didn't know existed called a USB-C air compressor.

mini air compressor have you ever heard of these things uh no this but this looks awesome friends i am about to change your life okay so you they there's a bunch of different people making these i'm sure there's like factories in china pumping these things out uh but the uh but it's a small um

Like about the size of a compressed air can with a pointer on the end and a USB plug in it. And it's a fan and it's a high speed fan. So with a motor in it, so you plug it in, it charges a battery. Then you turn it on and this little high speed fan revs up and makes a whining noise because it's a fan, but it's got the one that I've linked has three speeds and it gets going really fast. And maybe it's not,

quite as powerful as an air compressor, like a compressed air can, but it's very close and you never have to buy another compressed air can. Yeah. The wastefulness of the cans bothers me. Yeah. And it's awesome. I, so I've had it a few months and I use it in the shop and I use it in the house. And like, you know, you look at your keyboard, you see some cruft on there, you pull it out, you zap it and it's gone. You clean off your desk, you clean off your workbench and

I think I want another one. I want to have one in each room because I like, I use them so often. I just, it's just a cool technology that I wasn't aware of. There's nothing like earth shattering here. It's just a really high speed fan that, and then it has a little nose cone. So you can really kind of like, you know, focus the air to, you know, the Venturi effect to get it really blasting out of there fast. And it's just awesome. I, uh,

Like I said, a lab member told me about it. I got one and I was like, yes, where have you been all my life? So if you like to blow dust out of things, this allows you to do that without buying the cans. And yeah, I think I'm very happy with this purchase. I bought a couple of Christmas gifts, right? Because like, yeah, people like this. Yeah. This looks awesome. It looks really good.

Yeah, you got to get one, Steven. Do you know the trick about using like a massager like this, like a handheld massager and cleaning floor mats in a car? No. I'm going to... We're just changing lives today. All right. It's great if you have sand in your car. Okay. You have like one of those massage handgun things. Yeah. Put it on the mat, and it vibrates the mat where the sand...

like dances off the surface and then you can get it with your shop vac really easily. And it works perfectly. I am going to, you changed my life again. All right, great. I will do that. Now I'm thinking about other things I could use it on, vibrate something to clean it. I don't know. All right. Well, get yourself a compressed air duster if you haven't tried it. I think you will be happy. And I say that to not only Steven, but every single one of you.

We are the MacPower users. You can find us over at relay.fm. There is a little button there. You can press to leave feedback or sign up for membership. We love your feedback. These feedback shows are always one of my favorites to do. They're just fun to make. It's fun. So send us some cool feedback. We'd love to hear it. When we get things wrong, as we found out today, we occasionally do, that's another place you can tell us that.

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