Brew & Byte – Episode 2 – Mac and chips

[MUSIC]

Hello and welcome back to episode two of the Brew and Byte show. I’m your host Craig.

Hooray, we survived episode one.

And now we’re back for our next episode of our show.

A big thank you to the London Mac user group for sponsoring us.

This week we’re here with our resident tech expert Alistair and fellow committee member Martin.

How has everyone been? Wet. Very wet. Yes. Very good. Apart from dodging the rain. Yeah, it’s been

having some interesting challenges on some Macs this week. And yourself, Martin? Yeah, it’s very

much the same word out there in the country. It’s been pretty appalling, which meant it’s given me

time to mess about with Finacop Pro. I’ve been trying to work on a couple of projects this week

learning some new tricks and tips from some of the Finacop Pro experts out there.

For those of you that are not based in the UK, this week has been raining non-stop. For the first

time in a long time, we say goodbye to an extra sunny September. It seems a bit miserable right now,

but we’ve entered another new month without an iPhone for the first time in eight years.

But I’m very pleased to say that we were overwhelmed by the support from our first show.

We’ve had listeners from the USA, Ireland, China, Italy and as far-reaching as Australia

and New Zealand.

If that’s you, please get in contact with us.

We’d love to hear from you.

Coming up in the show this week, we have the introduction of the Apple Maps Lookaround feature.

Apple suppliers are not quite recycling, as well as your tech questions and not forgetting

our new suggestions of the week.

First up, let’s have a look at the new Apple Mac.

And Alistair, have you managed to have a look at the new update to Apple Maps?

Yeah, I was looking at it when I upgraded to iOS 14 on my iPhone.

You now will see on the right-hand side, you’ll see what looks like a pair of magnifying binoculars.

And if you click on those binoculars, you’ll get a little picture in picture of the high

street of where you’re looking up.

I was having great fun looking around London and going, “Ooh, that’s my high street.”

And I noticed that the photos are of higher definition than Google Street View, and they’ve

also tried to keep as many sunny days as possible, which I appreciate considering it’s so wet

outside in the photos.

So it looks impressive from what I can see, and the photos don’t look as flat as some

of the Google Street View images.

seen it at all Martin? Yes I was having a look at it on the MacBook Pro, the app and what was

looking at for me was the new 3D views which again the quality has jumped quite considerably from the

original 3D views. Unfortunately at the moment they seem to be limited to the bigger cities,

We have London, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle and Glasgow and Edinburgh,

Belfast and Dublin are the ones shown when you look on the app. You see a little 3D symbol

and that means you can go into the town or city you’re looking at, click the 3D button and you’ll

go down to quite some quite detailed shots and the even to the extent you see people in the

the photographs which is quite a lot better than it used to be.

How about the other cities, somewhere like Southampton or Brighton?

No, unfortunately they don’t seem to be important enough to Apple yet but bizarrely you’ve got

places like and no offence to people who live in stoke on Trent or even Blackpool have got

3D renders. So you don’t have to bother going to Paris to see your town. Now just go to

3D view of Blackpool on maps.

It’s great.

That would be brilliant.

All we need to see now is we’ve got donkey view,

so you can see the donkeys running across the beaches here.

Yeah, something like that would be great.

Yeah, very much so.

But yeah, a good improvement.

Do any of you use the maps for

directions, road directions, traffic directions?

I find the Apple Maps are better when you’re on

motorways because they actually give you the 3D view.

so you can actually see which turning it is

and how far the turning is to get there.

But I have both Google Maps and Apple Maps on my iPhone

and I use it on a regular basis.

Use Google because they were ahead of things

and they knew actually where the roads were,

especially when traveling around London.

But if I’m teaching or doing presentation,

I always use Apple Maps

’cause they have the better pictures

and they look far nicer, especially in 3D.

And if you’re trying to work out when you go to a new city,

what the place looks like,

especially if you’re coming out of an underground station.

I always think Apple Maps is far superior,

so you can actually have a look around.

So when you come out the tube station,

you know exactly where you’re heading for.

I think it’s improving.

It’s looking a lot better at the moment.

• Yeah, I do use it occasionally,

but my preferred is TomTom,

mainly because that lets me know

when the speed cameras are around,

so somehow try and keep holding my license.

Tom Tom is helping out Apple Maps now, isn’t it?

Yeah. Yeah. So when they bring in the speed warning cameras and Apple Maps,

I’ll be there. No problem.

I don’t know if you also saw.

Have you tried using the Apple Maps flyover mode?

So you actually get a almost

drone tourist view of a city

that highlights all of the tourist points to go and look at.

No, I haven’t seen that. I must admit.

I’ve seen it, but I keep forgetting where it is.

London does a nice flyover of St Paul’s and the London Eye.

It seems very flashy. It’s almost along the lines of the drone flying we saw at

the recent event. What I would love to have is that when

you ask for directions, it actually does a drone view of the directions that you

would need to go. That would be very good. So if you wanted to say,

take me from Parliament Square down to Buckingham Palace, it would fly you down Whitehall and

then down through Abertyar, down the bow and then you could stand in front of the Buckingham Palace

and then it would spin 360 and stop. That would be quite fun.

Oh, but we don’t want too much. We won’t get any tourists coming out to look at these places.

I could just go on Apple Maps and do the tourist trip without having to come to Britain.

Maybe it’s a pre-record for the Apple car.

And maybe it’s a new feature, you know, it’ll be Apple plus maps, drone view.

Yes, yeah, next one.

Brilliant, that’s great.

The other thing that came to light this week was that the UK government is supposedly spending

£11,000 on new iPads for care homes.

I don’t know if anyone saw this crediting the source here from the independent.

it’s believed that the UK government has made a 7.5 million pounds investment into providing

iPads into care homes to cater for the restrictions around COVID-19. But supposedly so, each care

home is receiving between one and two iPads so that we can do FaceTime or Zoom calls.

Looks interesting. I think it’s a good idea because it at least gets those who are

are maybe not able to afford an iPad the ability to sort of have a phone call with their relatives,

especially if their relatives are not in the same city as them.

And Apple are superior when it comes to tablets than Android.

I can understand why it’s only one because there’s so many care homes in the UK,

but I just hope that the nurses and the other people who are there are Apple-perficient

so that they can get the best out of those iPads that are being sent.

The Apple support in the background is quite good.

If you have issues with that, there’s quite a lot of support both through the Apple app, the Help app, Support app,

also, I say directly from the stores themselves, and there’s loads of stuff on YouTube there to get you through that process

of using either FaceTime or Zoom, or I suppose they wouldn’t have Microsoft Teams on them.

I wouldn’t be thinking Apple would be loading that kind of software onto them.

It does work, but it’s primarily designed mainly for the MacBooks and the desktops.

It’d be interesting to see what does work off there. You could probably also get Skype.

So if you need to do a long distance call to another country, you could do it off Skype.

It would probably work quite well. And if you wanted to see what it was like outside,

so you could go on to Apple Maps, I guess, that would be quite useful.

BBC News might be helpful for some, or iPlayer.

Yeah, yeah. I hear also, Craig, that they were going to give one to each prison.

I think that’s something in the story.

Supposedly so. I believe there is actually an application that is built

specifically for the prison service as well from what I read.

understand it’s called Purple Visits, which is a video conferencing form of application

that has quite a lot of restrictions.

And a little prison officer in the corner, a little picture in picture window watching

and listening what’s going on.

I would like to imagine some of the videos that might be transferred backwards and forwards.

Yeah, that would be quite a sight, I’m sure.

I think that also highlights the fact that maybe they should now start looking at multi-user

for iPad.

Or even an admin account and their guest account.

So once one person has used it, you could just sort of hit the dustbin and it sort of

cleans out the cache and everything that goes with it.

Because have you ever used the iOS education application that controls iPads?

It was quite useful. You could have one that mastered all of them and you could distribute

it to all the iPads. So if you wanted to give them all a handout, that was quite useful.

But if you’re only getting one per care home, you probably wouldn’t need it. But I could

understand if you wanted to do mass roll out across the UK, that would make sense.

One man netted a hundred thousand US dollars in a week because of his design of the new

iOS 14 home screen. Did anyone see this article?

I didn’t see it, but I’m intrigued.

No, no, explain more, Craig, explain more.

So one particular design-orientated gentleman

decided to redesign the layout of his apps,

so that included the actual app icons and the placement on the actual screen,

and he supposedly shared his new layout on various social media.

And he got so many inquiries about the design, it looked great.

How did you do that?

That he decided to actually set up a page in which he could sell the layout.

And it’s been so popular that iOS home screen became one of the top trending items on Facebook

and Twitter and there’s netted one nice design person, a hundred thousand.

I see it’s now on iMore. So if you look on iMore, they’re talking about it.

He was charging $28 per pack for the icon sold.

He was an artist and they don’t look too bad from what I can see.

It’s an interesting subject that people obviously were

keen to have. Yeah, the example I found, I think they were like

black and white or monochrome icons. He looked very much like a 1940s or like

Bletchley Park clock display which I quite like. Are there any new particular features of iOS 14

that you like? I like the new app manager or the app library as it’s called. I found that a lot more

useful and quicker to search through so many apps because I don’t know unlike some other people I

have quite a lot of apps. I think I’m up to 80 different applications now. And I don’t

like to group them in boxes. I like to have home screens. I know different people have

different ways of laying out their home screen. My partner Colorco coordinates hers, which

is quite different. So every time there’s an update to an app and the icon changes,

might involve rearranging the home screen.

(laughs)

• I’m like that.

I like to put all my apps,

which I use most frequently into certain boxes.

So I put all the sound apps together.

So it’s like your podcast, your music apps together,

all the photography apps together,

all the map apps together.

And so I can sort of find everything in one go

or things which are partner apps.

So I put like Dropbox in association

with all the other blue icons so I can identify it.

So it’s next to Mac, Tracker and other things.

So I can, I spot things by color

’cause I noticed I don’t look at names.

And it’s annoying when they start changing the colors

because you’re going, “Damn, now I have to put something

“else in that row.”

So it’s an interesting game to try and set it all up

and put the board in color coordination.

Apple are quite good.

Google could be a bit annoying

’cause it will work perfectly

And then they go and change the color and it’s like, “Damn!”

But yeah, I’ve spent quite a bit of time making sure I’ve got them all that way around.

And I was quite surprised that when I upgraded to iOS 14, it didn’t destroy my grouping.

That was nice.

And it reminded me very much of the early days of Android phones before I moved to iOS.

I found out this week and I wouldn’t say I’m an Apple expert but I’ve been using Apple

for years now so I’m fairly comfortable with the systems.

But on my home screen, Craig you said you think you had 80 odd apps.

I think I’ve got 80 odd screens.

There’s a whole row.

The row of dots across the bottom almost disappear.

So I used to flick from screen to screen one at a time to get to where I wanted.

realising if I run my finger over the dots I can zoom straight away from front to back really quickly.

So it’s always those little tricks that you don’t know until someone points them out.

So as much as you think you know about this stuff there’s always something new a new way of doing it.

So yeah. And have you tried putting your finger in the dots and you see all the home screens in one

• No, I haven’t tried that.

Oh no, you can’t see anything.

No, okay, all the way up, yes.

(laughing)

• With the social hubby screens you’ve got.

But that’s very useful if you want to delete

a whole screen in one go,

or if you want to jump at speed from say one

to in your case, probably 79,

you know, you could save you having to wear out your fingertips.

• I’ve got 14 screens,

how’s that, I’ve got 14 dots at the bottom of my screen.

Right, so yes.

So it’s always about learning new tricks and learning new items.

So you think you know, you think, or you think everyone else knows.

So if you have any tricks like that, anyone out there who’s got,

who’s stumbled across or found something that they think they’re the only one

who knows about, please let us know.

Come right into the show.

Tell us about your trick or your tip so that all of us can learn to say some,

some time and effort using our Apple kit.

The one thing I would say, which I find very useful is I went into the

camera and turned on QR code scanner.

So back in iOS, I think it was at 12 or 13,

they made it part of the app automatically.

And if you turn it on, the amount of times, especially

in the UK, when you’re going from restaurant to pub

and you have to scan the QR code for the menu

or scan the QR code for the tracking trace,

it comes in very useful when it’s a downside quicker,

when you’ve got it integrated straight into your camera.

It does point and it works.

So it’s excellent.

So that’s a very useful tip.

There’s two tricks I learned tonight.

Well done.

Thank you.

Do you have any favorite iOS 14 additions to the OS so far?

I do.

I do like the fact that, yeah, OK,

they’re following the Android thing about being

able to have widgets on the front screen.

That I have found.

I’ve got my calendar right on the front screen

and the weather and the maps act straight away.

So I can look at a potential client or a potential appointment I’ve got to go to,

straight into the map, straight into directions, let me know it’s going to take me an hour and a

half to get there. That I found, again, saves me a lot of finger flipping, trying to get

sort of the different apps to find out basic information so quickly. So yes, that’s been a

real plus for me for iOS 14. I would say that they’ve cleaned up the, you know,

know when you go into contacts and you’re looking up someone’s name, they’ve cleaned it up a bit

now so you’ve got like gray areas so that you can distinguish against the white background or the

vice versa in dark mode. So you can distinguish what’s happening. I’m looking forward to the point

of when someone are getting included into a group messaging because then you can start to reply to

one person in a group. But most of the people I know are on other messaging platforms like WhatsApp

or Telegram or Hangouts. So it’d be interesting to see once I get various things come in.

I haven’t had a chance to play with that much on here, although I am playing with Dark Mode at the

moment. I didn’t like it on iOS 13, but seems to be slightly more efficient on iOS 14.

What about you, Greg? My favorite is maybe an obvious or not so obvious one,

is if you’re a fan of using emojis, you can now tap on the emoji icon in the keyboard

and search emoji. Oh, that’s very useful. So if you want a smiley face, you can type smiley

or happy or example being earlier I was looking for a icon for some headphones and I literally just

typed sound and it recommended about five or six different emojis to use straight away. Well,

The one I was trying to find the other day was fingers crossed.

And it took for ages having to scan for all the yellow fingers

to try and find the one with fingers crossed.

What was it?

Oh, yeah.

The emojis don’t have the British swearing ones in them.

They only have the American ones,

and that’s what I’ve noticed.

So I was looking for one of those because I was trying to reply

back to someone that wasn’t there.

I was going, “Damn.”

Well, that’s something that this podcast is going to be fighting for, the UK requirements

from Apple. So we want UK swear words, is that what you’re saying now?

And UK swear symbols, so you could have the emoji, two fingers. Because we know via your

trackpad and your magic mouse recognize the two finger gesture, but not the two finger

that most Brits are thinking of.

• That’s right, that’s right.

And I imagine the other countries around the world

will all have their own little symbols and gestures

that could be followed into emojis.

• You do say that.

If anybody’s running the iOS 14.2 beta at the moment,

there are some more localized emojis.

One for the Brits out there.

We now have a teapot and some biscuits.

• Yay!

(laughing)

• To go with Brewer and Brighton.
• It’s very good, it goes well with our day.

Yeah.

• And we’ve also got some interesting Italian hand gestures

in the house.

(laughing)

• Oh dear.

Right, so it still goes,

so you can still, it’s amazing where you can find opportunities

to make money.

You know, you create your own apps.

said that that guy who created a simple template, usually because people that sort of either

haven’t got the technical skills or can’t be bothered to invest the time in learning

how to do it. So yeah, send in $1.99 or whatever it is and you get your you get your template.

I’m also happy that a designer for a change has made the money because normally it’s

something obscure or something really annoying to remember Flappy Birds years back in the

guy who made a fortune from it from was it Vietnam and he released his app on

iPhone and it suddenly went colossal and he made a colossal amount of money it

was the first guy to make a lot of money from the iOS platform so oh there’s one

last news flash subject that I I’ve just come across I don’t know if any of you

saw you can now happily get back in an Uber in central London without any legal

issues. I don’t know if any of you saw that.

I can’t install it. No, no, no. My iPhone refuses point blank to install it. So I install

the app and then it says, “Watch your name, put your name in, put your email address in.”

It says, “We’re about to send you a text message.” At every point like that, the phone deliberately

deletes the text message. It will not let it go through. It won’t complete. So I have

to put it on my Android phone. So my iPhone goes, “No, no, no, no, no, no. We can order

a black cat? Yes, happy to do that. Order Uber? No. Does not like Uber. Doesn’t like Uber will guard

lost to the country. I mean, it’s quite funny. If my friends got distinct personality to it.

I don’t mind that Uber have got their license back. My only question is, is when this week I

ordered a takeaway and it took them 50 minutes to find my house. So by the time I got my food,

it was very cold. Not good. Not good. So I won’t be doing that anytime soon.

You also mentioned Craig there about a recycling issue that we’ve come across.

Do you want to expand on that a little bit? Yes, I’m not 100% up to date with all the details,

but from what I understand is that Apple use third-party companies to deal with a lot of

of their recycling of their electronics.

And part of the supply chain survey,

they have discovered that this company

has not been recycling their items

and actually selling them on.

So it’s not exactly green recycling in that respect.

• But surely Apple would take stock of the serial number.

And if that came back online,

that phone or computer or something like that.

Surely they would be able to tell that that was

a decommissioned piece of kit

and shouldn’t be followed up.

Maybe that’s where it came from.

• I do wonder that because they’re,

I’m assuming that for electronics,

some of the data is actually wiped

before they go into a recycling system.

• Yeah, that’s what I was thinking.

Yeah.

• That sounds strange.

So you have to be very careful how you that and that stuff you’re handing into a an Apple store

It’s not just you know going somewhere that’s offering to recycle for nothing. No exactly

Okay, I think that’s worth following up. It’s we’ll look at that

Yeah, it also shows the importance of a company carrying out a survey on its supply chain

Which to be honest Apple are quite good at and kind of leading the way in doing that

Yeah, I imagine because they’re under such pressure about their overseas

suppliers some of their

Working practices and methods are not not as

as good say as America or Britain’s companies that

Exploitation is going on. So yeah, I think they do follow up on that

But yeah, that’s a that’s an interesting way if you’re thinking you’re you’re going into the shop to recycle old computers to get rid of them

I see far too many of them are local dump if you go down there

they have a container for you to throw your IT equipment into.

And it’s usually full.

It’s quite shocking the amount of IT stuff that just goes in.

I don’t think it goes into landfill, but we look at the amount of kit

that’s going into that container.

And it’s purely just, it’s just computers and stuff like that.

It’s not other electrical items.

There’s a separate skip for that.

This is purely old computers and items like that, old game controllers

and stuff like that.

So it’s quite a big business, I’d imagine.

Well, it’s because they want to get all the rare metals out of it and the rare

earth items out of it because that’s where that’s all the money.

It’s like all the gold, the silver, all the other bits, which are on the

components and on the motherboards.

We no longer have lead on the motherboards.

So at least that’s one plus side.

In this part of the show, we discuss your technical questions and see

where we can be helpful.

understand the problems that you’ve come across in the day-to-day use of your Apple product.

First up we have a question from Andy in Wiltshire. He says, “I am a household of 2.4 children.

We have some iOS devices which we all share one family computer, but recently I’ve noticed that

the hard drive was becoming rather full. To discover that 400 gigs of my hard drive is

backups from my kids iOS devices. Is there a better solution to managing backups and can I use an

external drive? So this one I think we’re going to sort of split up between us because we have

slightly different views of this but so I’m not sure if people know but in the if you’re looking

you’ll use a folder under library and under application support you’ll see a

folder called mobile sync and inside that folder will be all your Apple iOS

backups but there’s a far easier way to find it and the easy way to find it is

if you go up to the Apple logo on the top left of your screen and then click on

about this Mac you’ll see it will say tell you what operating system we are

And if you click on the third tab along, it says storage.

And underneath storage, it would say Macintosh HD,

or whatever your name of your hard drive is.

And to the right of that, it says manage.

And if you click on manage, that would produce a list.

And it will show you where all your iOS files are.

If you click on the iOS files, it will show you all the backup

you have on your hard drive.

So I recently went to a client and they

had 42 gigabytes in iOS backups dating back to the iOS to iPhone 5 and they had an iPhone 11.

Now the iPhone 5 they no longer had they traded it in so the backup was sitting there doing nothing

so I just went through and cleaned out the old backups and just left the last three years because

those are the iOS devices they had.

If you did want to move the backups off-site,

you can to a external drive,

you just got to, the quickest way to do it

would be to go to Finder, then hold down the Alt key

and then click on Go and then go down to Library.

And as I said, it’s Library, Application Support,

Mobile Sync, and then you would move over

each of the files for what it is.

Unfortunately, they’re not named in nice things.

Their afternoon Merrick files,

normally about 20 characters long,

which is why I recommend normally you go through

the Apple menu version because the dam’s like simpler.

Do you have anything to add to this, Martin or Craig?

• No, I quite, I like the managed system

you just mentioned, it’s very good

because it highlights some of the very large files

you have on your system.

It picks them out for you.

And you can either work out where do you wanna keep them,

move them to,

was it Andy, was to get gentlemen’s name Craig?

• Yes, it was.
• Andy mentioned about using it in external drive.

I think since a lot more of us are doing,

certainly video files, video files take up

large amounts of space.

It’s worthwhile having,

I’ve got two or three different external drives

and I put various different aspects on this.

So one is purely for video.

So all the video files I take, they go on there

to keep my, I’ve only got a 500 gig SSD on my MacBook Pro.

So I tend to use that for documents.

So yes, having a range of external drives

to put different types of documents and files on

makes a lot of sense.

The other problem as well is, as you said,

you mentioned cash files earlier on, Craig,

the system does tend to store them,

keep them running for far longer than you need.

So I think a proper housekeeping routine

once every few months that you go through these

and find out what’s been stored, what’s been kept

and what you can safely get rid of makes perfect sense.

Again, I have to go back to the Apple support lines.

If you go on to theapple.com,

go into the help there.

There’s lots of good guidance documents

on how to remove data and files safely from your machine

without throwing away something that’s actually

vital to the system.

And again, it comes back down to–

I’m sure I’m known as the backup king.

I’m the one who’s always banging on about how much you need

to do proper backups.

If you have that, then if you have inadvertently deleted

the last time video of your great-grandmother’s 80th birthday party. If you have your backup,

so you can find it some way and bring that back. Maybe we should do a podcast. Just let

me waffle on for half an hour about backups guys and just do that at some point. Bore

all the lists as silly about my backup stories and backup methods.

Yeah, you’ve also got iCloud backup, but that mainly backups the important files, but it

doesn’t backup the files within a file. So, for example, if you had WhatsApp, it doesn’t

back up the text messages inside it. It just backs up the fact that you had the app. So

that’s why backing up to a computer is more useful in a lot of scenarios because it backs

up almost a clone of their phone and everything which was third party which you had on that phone.

The one thing it does interest me though when you look in manager

you get this curious box which says ‘others’ and it’s usually bigger than all the rest of ours put

together. What on earth is in others? Alistair? So others I’ve discovered is a

cross between system updates, system files such as hibernation files when

your computer goes to sleep and a series of cache files, save state files and

other files like that. There’s one of my favorite apps for finding out where all

your disk space is gone to. Is Daisy disk? You come across this at all?

So Daisy disks is excellent.

The really colorful pie chart. Yeah. That’s how I describe it.

It’s also great fun because you can see everything in the pie chart very easy and can say well that’s

where the big file is. I also like it because you can say scan as admin and it allows you to see

all the hidden files. So for example, on my MacBook Pro, I’ve got a snapshot from July

from when I downloaded the beta for Big Sur. And then of course, I transferred it to an external

drive, but I still got the snapshots picking up space on my MacBook. And I’ve got a lot of space

on my SSD. So I have to go into the terminal and start deleting files. But I didn’t know it was

there until Daisy Dix showed it to me.

If you would like to get in contact with us, you can always send us an email at [email protected]

or you can find us on Twitter @macusagroup.

But for more information you can always join us on our website at www.lmug.org.uk.

We always love to hear from our listeners.

And for our second question, we actually have a voice message from Sophie and her question was.

Hi everyone. I’ve been recently getting notices on my phone warning me of storage running out and at some point all my apps started crashing.

So I deleted pretty much all of them and the biggest files as well.

And when I went to check the storage, the bar was still full, but what was taking up all the space was labeled as other.

Why did that happen even after deleting all the apps and all the big files?

Thank you.

So how do we access this other file, Alistair?

So to access another file on a MacBook, so where are we talking on the iPhone?

Sorry, yep, yep.

So there’s an article on Apple’s website called “Clear Other Storage on Your iPhone or iPad”.

If you have iOS 13, there’s an update in 13.6.1 which is designed to fix this issue.

But the other recommendation is that the other files tend to be cache files or system updates to iOS,

iOS which haven’t cleared or they could be files relating to Safari.

So previously opened Windows, you may have like 20 or 30 Windows open.

So the current recommendation from Apple is to connect your iPhone or

iPad to a computer and use the backup facility in iTunes.

And then choose Restore iPhone, which will put a fresh copy of the operating system

on your phone and restore the data you’ve just backed up

back onto your phone.

And that should resolve the issue of not being able

to delete large files.

It’s apparently an error in the last operating system.

It’s also, they said it’s,

Apple are saying it can sometimes happen

when trying to back up from iCloud.

So there’s sometimes, if you’re in an area of poor reception,

you can sometimes get copies of two files or something

because it didn’t realize that you’d pulled down

one file from it.

• Right.

Yeah, looking on my phone now,

I said, it’s telling me I’ve got a 10 gigabytes

of other data, system data includes cash logs

and other resources currently in use by the system.

This value will fluctuate according to system needs.

So I don’t suppose you can play around with that too much

as it’s an important part of the operating procedures and system.

But it does seem to take up, well, it’s not too bad on my phone.

I’ve got a lot of big enough storage that I can cover that.

But I suppose if it’s taking more than this lady was saying about

a large proportion of a phone, then that might be the way to go about it.

The other thing I found was when I looked at,

If you go into your iPhone and you click on, so I get this in the right order, so if you

click on your name where it says Apple ID iCloud, then you click on iCloud, then you click on Manage

Storage, that breaks it down. And where I discovered I had a lot of space was on the backup,

which is the first list. And what I had had was I had my last three iPhones were sitting on there,

include and my iPad were sitting in the backup. But because my iPad and my iPhone 5c and

sewa are not compatible, you couldn’t put the same data on so it does come up as other.

So you might want to sort of just delete one of those backups, which is what I did.

Good. Well, I hope that answers the question for the day. If not, please come back to us. We can

always give you some further advice if we can. Brilliant, thank you. So lastly we have a question

from Mohammed who said that he recently updated his phone to iOS 14. “I know that I can view the

battery life of my individual AirPods. Is there a reason why one AirPods shows 10% battery lower

than the other one? Is my AirPods 40?” Okay, so does anyone have any suggestions?

Well, I would say if it’s only, it depends on how the age of the, the, the, the AirPods,

unfortunately, I’ve had AirPods for quite some time now.

And one of my AirPods, the right hand AirPods routinely has less charge in it than the left

hand.

I think that’s down to, in my case, to the fact that I use the right hand AirPods on

its own a lot more times when I’m answering phone calls and stuff like that.

I only put the one earphone in to answer or take the call and talk through it.

When I’m listening to music I use both but the right hand one gets used far more than

the left hand one. So I presume that would have effect on the life of the battery. That battery

is being charged many more times, many more cycles than the left hand one. So that could be if you’ve

been using them for quite some time that could be one of the reasons why you might be getting a

slight difference now in the performance of the two AirPods.

Craig, you also found out an interesting fact about the AirPods.

I did and I believe it actually covers all of the different models. So the original AirPods

version wireless or version two and the AirPods Pros. From what I understand is that one actual

airport acts as a master or a receiver and it transfers the sound or the data between the two

devices. So one is actually working a little bit harder than the other and drawing more power,

hence the variation in the battery life.

Yeah, because yeah, you’re right. It’s acting as a transmitter receiver where the other one is just

purely acting as a receiver. Yeah, that would have a difference of the power. I must admit,

I am amazed at the life of the batteries on these. My AirPods are what? Must be about three,

maybe even four years old now. And they’re still going strong. They don’t last as long. They don’t

last for four, five hours, but they’re still going reasonably strong. Which is,

if you think the size of the battery in that thing, it’s actually kind of impressive.

if how considering that so small, how long they last. I mean, I’ve got the

airports to and they they seem to be excellent, but I’m always so amazed at

how something so small could last so long. Considering if you think it’s only

the stalk of the airport, which is the battery in the top bit is just the

speaker, that they’ve managed to get the lithium polymer to work so well. I

I mean, it was only some time back

that we were struggling to get our iPhones to work

for a day and look at the size of the iPhone in comparison.

I mean, what was it?

If you go back 20 years ago, Nokia was king,

especially in UK, and Nokia’s had seven-day battery lives

because they’d moved on to this new thing

called Lithium and Polymer.

Now, that’s the same technology

which we think we’ve got lithium ion,

I think in the new AirPods,

Apple worked with some very clever chemists

to come up with some very clever quick charging batteries.

But I’m always so amazed that the science

that goes into them.

• Can you get batteries changed in AirPods?
• Yeah, there’s a replacement service.

If you lose one or the battery goes,

you can take it into an Apple store.

• Okay, good.
• I used to know how much that cost.

I think it was something like 60 pounds for the case.

• It’s $68, but I don’t know what it is in pounds.
• Yeah. – It’s probably similar.

Six to eight pounds, probably.

• It’s more like, yeah, with the Apple exchange rate

of one to one, yeah, it’s pretty much a 68 pound.

• It translates perfectly across in that respect.

Normally, in this part of the show,

we would discuss some new hardware releases,

but as we’re so close to a possible Apple event,

We didn’t really want to go down the rumor mill.

So this week, we’re going to look at some recommendations

and suggestions of things that we use every day.

If you have any that you wish to suggest,

you can always get in touch with us via email.

You could send us an email at [email protected]

or Twitter @macusagroup or Facebook,

or you can find much, much more on our website.

For our first suggestion, let’s see what Alistair has this week.

• So I would say that I’m a more techie individual.

So I tend to like to install on my computer stuff like iStats.

You come across iStat, Craig?

• I have.

I don’t use it on my personal machine.

I actually run a server here as well.

And that’s a major part of that, keeping it healthy.

• So one of the clever things about iStat,

which I find incredibly useful,

is that sometimes your computer slows down

or the fans suddenly come on,

and you want to know why my MacBook fans come on.

And then you click on the CPU,

and it will say Dropbox Updating,

or something is running in the background.

And what I also found quite interesting

is it can also tell me how much each component

on the computer is heating up.

So is it the CPU, is it the SSD?

And you can keep an eye on that, which is all very useful.

But it also has a very useful,

internet upload download.

And so it gives you in figures in kilobytes,

how much you’re uploading and downloading

and your IP address, so you can monitor it.

So if you want to check is your internet working,

you can just very quickly look at that very quickly

and see how everything is connected.

And I find it quite useful because if you are in a coffee shop

or if you’re traveling around and you want to just check,

am I actually getting any data

or has this particular thing frozen?

You can look very quickly in that top corner

and it’s excellent in my opinion.

It also goes very at the bottom,

is little shortcuts to activity monitor terminal

and other useful little elements,

which I find very helpful because I’ve set up

on my MacBook two different sort of locations,

home and coffee shop.

The reason being is when you go into a coffee shop,

they always have some strange thing at Noxio Internet off.

So I’ve set up a specific Wi-Fi in the system preferences

just for that and I can switch very quickly through iSTAT on that one. So that’s what

I would say and it’s made by Bojangle Software.

Where can you find it Alistair? Is it on the App Store?

I think it’s on the App Store and I’m going to get it from their website because I like

giving them their full month of money. I’m just going to double check the App Store for

£9.99.

Am I wrong in thinking that they also make one for the phone?

I believe they do, but I’ve never actually installed it.

But does Martin have a suggestion for this week?

• Yes, the one I was gonna suggest,

and it ties in nicely with what Alice

has just been talking about.

It’s an app called, or it’s a series of apps,

they call SetApp.

It’s a curated form of apps that work on your Apple products.

You pay a subscription fee each month,

or annually, and it gives you access to about,

I think there’s about 200 apps in the system,

which you can use, you can download,

you can use them as much as you want.

And I said the fee is about,

I think it’s about 10 pound a month.

Now, strangely, I was just looking up

on the list of apps they do.

ISTAT, you just mentioned, Alistair,

is available through SetApps.

So it’s your first month would be free

if that’s the app you want to use.

But the apps on there, I use at least half a dozen

on a regular basis or more, are very good apps.

They tend to curate apps that are the top

of their particular segment, if it’s a creativity app

or a production app or a maintenance app.

And they offer a range of,

there’s usually only two or three per section.

So it’s not like you’re swamped with 200 apps

to do PDF conversion. They will offer you one of the best on the market. So I

think for anyone using Apple products, Set Hats is almost a prerequisite. You

should have that on your system because it may be that you already want to do,

you might want to do one particular move. Let’s say you want to change a .mov

into an MP4 and you don’t know how to do that. You can go on there, download a

simple app, do the process and then you may never use that app again but you don’t have to pay for

it. A lot of these apps that do productivity you end up having to pay or there’s in-app purchases

and all that kind of stuff. So if you’re a regular user of Apple products and you have

a quite a wide variety of needs for different types of apps, have a look at setup. I said I’ve

been using it for years. It’s a very good system for some useful apps that you use on a regular basis

or the odd one that you might need just for a particular job or project that you’re working on.

So I would say that the there’s I just had a look at that I was unaware of it but the

you’ve got some of my favorite apps there you’ve got bartender which is brilliant if you’re running

out of space on your menu bar I think that is excellent. Downey which is brilliant for downloading

media from the web i.e movies and better zip is very useful if you’re downloading zip files

especially zip files which are smaller in size. So you make up 20 zip files which you have to

download which then expand into one big file because you’ll have to send it via email or someone’s

on restricted bandwidth. And I’ve also used it for when I’ve put sending stuff which was

conservatential and I put like a password on it and then I send it across and better as it was

very useful for doing that. Yes, there’s another one of our previous earlier questions as well.

one on there called CleanMyMac, which is again, is a good way, good system for

getting rid of all those excess files. But yeah, at the moment, if you go on to

the website, it’s setapp.com, that’ll actually give you a seven day free trial.

So it gives you a chance to go on, have a look at a couple of apps that you might

need, PDF converters, all that kind of stuff, and use it for seven days. And if

you like it, then take up the subscription. But as I said, I think for

most Apple users, it’s almost first step shop that you should be looking at for

these kind of applications. Brilliant, that’s something very different and it’s

quite nice in that it supports the developers a little bit better than some

of the others. Yes, yeah, the thing I like about it is they don’t just flesh it

out with loads of crap basically. Nearly all the apps on there are worth, if they

want to do that particular job then the app on there will do the job for you

really well. Brilliant. Thank you, Martin. So this week, my suggestions, not really an app or a piece of hardware, it’s a series of new shows on Apple TV Plus. I don’t know if you’ve seen, but this week, quite a few different ones were launched.

Taran was recently released last Friday.

I’ve been catching up with a new documentary series

with Ewan McGregor called “The Long Way Up.”

It’s actually the third part of a TV series

that was actually broadcast on the BBC originally,

but this was a number of years ago now.

In this particular episode,

it’s something in regards to a motorbike type show.

show. Normally I wouldn’t choose this kind of program but it’s not necessarily

like your top gear kind of program. This is more of a documentary series in

regards to what’s happening along a journey and hopefully my technology

skills work I can actually play you a little clip. I’ve been dreaming of doing

a trip through South America for years. But life got on the way and now I’ve

I’ve decided to do the trip with my best friend Charlie Brummer.

You’ve got to look after the relationships in your life.

And if you don’t, you’re just…

You’re losing something that’s very important.

We’ll ride 13,000 miles from the southern tip of Argentina

all the way to Los Angeles.

150 miles every day is the only way to go.

And if that wasn’t enough of a challenge,

we wanted to see if we could do it on electric motorcycles.

I think it’s the future electric.

You need to be the first people to go this distance charging as you go.

I’m hooked, I’m there.

That’s it.

All right, as soon as we finish this guys, I’m charging downstairs to get it onto the show straight away. Brilliant.

The thing that I found the most fascinating was that as part of the documentary it involved looking at the design of the motorbike

and how they are getting around the problem of running an electric motorbike on such a distance.

distance because one particular hint that I will leave with you is how am I going to charge my motorbike in remote areas?

I should leave that one with you. I should let you watch the show to discover how that was done. Good point.

I thought you were gonna ask how do you charge your electric bike at night?

I’ve seen it. I’d already worked out some of the panels, but I thought maybe not. Maybe not.

The other one was Tehran.

Hopefully, I can do the same here.

The show Tehran is very exciting.

Engage, engage.

It’s about an Israeli secret agent

and a mission undercover in Iran.

Our sole job is to plant a virus in Tehran

anti-aircraft defense.

She’s cool, she’s smart, and she will do anything to succeed in her mission, which is very dangerous.

In 47 minutes, you will be on by tomorrow afternoon.

All right.

Very fast, everything goes wrong.

And now she’s ducking to the run, running for her life.

Okay, so this one is slightly different. This is more of an action style drama and I believe there are currently eight episodes.

For both of the TV programs I mentioned, they are being released one episode a week on Friday afternoons.

If you’re desperate to see the next episode.

Tehran was very different. Something that I quite liked about it was that it wasn’t necessarily broadcast

all in English. So there are some scenes where if you’re not a subtitle person,

by all means try and avoid that. It is quite difficult to try and keep up sometimes,

but this one’s definitely highly recommended and it’s one of these programs that will leave

you with a cliffhanger on each episode. But I won’t spoil the story one anymore.

Yeah, but the, the, uh, would you say that that means, uh, if that happens to me,

instead of just watching the one show, I’m going to be watching all five at one time.

I guess that’s my one night of the week gone, you know, for a night, what I’ll be getting

up for work six, six o’clock in the morning.

I’m still half asleep.

You know, thanks, Greg.

That sounds like watching Jack Ryan.

Did you watch that?

Yes.

Oh, yes.

Yes.

And then each episode got more exciting.

And so you watch the next one.

That’s like, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Great. Okay. And what was the you mentioned another one? What was the other one you

said about the connection? So this one’s a personal favorite. I recently sat down to watch a program

called trying, which covers the storyline of a couple trying for a baby. The whole production

was actually filmed in central London in various different locations. It’s good to sit and watch

something that’s made quite locally. It’s also nice to think, “Oh, I’ve been there” or “Where was this

filmed?” Some of the locations you will recognise quite easily because they actually have a house

that’s based in Camden. What I really liked about this program is somebody that’s coming from a

production background and photography was that the entire thing was filmed in partnership with the

the BBC. So it’s actually one of the first Apple TV series to be in partnership with

a broadcasting company based in the UK.

Which is always a good sign.

It’s also nice that you can actually visit some of the nice, wonderful places that are

featured in it.

It’s also nice that we get London rather than New York or Washington. I seem to sort of

know more about other cities than I do about my own ones.

So yeah, sometimes it’s nice to be a tourist for a day just to see what there is.

It’s also nice to see how other people’s interpretation of the same city goes.

So that’s quite fun. I like playing the guessing game.

Where is that? That looks familiar.

Now, where is that? Is that is that is that Mournington Crescent or is that Camden Town or

so Parliamentary Hill, you know, it’s all fascinating around that part of London.

In being very British and discussing fish and chips,

a fish and chip shop features in the show that’s quite popular in Camden. I will give them a shout

out. It’s actually Poppy’s. Oh, very good. I’ve been to Poppy’s. It’s worth having a look at that

scene in particular. So have both of you been using Apple TV for a while now or?

I just started Apple TV and so I’m starting to watch for All Mankind, the one about

the Russians getting onto the moon first, so quite interesting. So I’m just starting Episode 1

and I was also surprised to see that they’ve got stuff like Fraggle Rock on there, which must be

from the Disney side of them because that’s Jim Henson’s TV. But I remember watching on the BBC

when I was a kid here so I thought that was great fun. It’s interesting they’ve got quite a few

good sort of films there’s the Tom Hanks one on there but I’m waiting for them to sort of expand

a bit more. Some of them seem quite intriguing there was some sort of like some sort of detective

series I think was one of them. Hang on I’m trying to find the name of it. Home Before Dark

So, you’re on a free year subscription.

Craig, are you the same or are you paying for it?

No, I actually did the month free trial a little while ago,

and now I’ve actually gone on to a pay monthly subscription.

But I’m really looking forward to that being included in Apple One,

because that will save some of the pennies to do.

Yeah, I was looking because they announced the Apple TV plus last year didn’t they, the

last show.

And you’ve got a free year subscription if you bought an Apple product or a qualifying

product.

So a lot of those year contracts, free contracts would now be running out, I would imagine,

or finishing off.

It would be interesting to see how many people would actually now start paying for it.

my point of view I’ve kind of hung off I I did the free one week trial and binge

what for all mankind which was great and then I thought okay well fine yes I’m

I’m happy to pay was it $4.99 isn’t it a month so I’ve been hanging on to a

yark I got that down I thought well I’m buying a new phone a new 12 when it comes

out maybe it’ll give me a free year with that but then the one thing that I saw

in the show which we saw last last month was this new Apple One so from my

point of view I already have a two terabyte storage facility so that

cost me X amount per month. I have music match for the family and all the other

bits and pieces so for me even if it is a family premium of I think it’s 29.95

I think they’re talking about again on the dollar pound conversion that’ll be

29 pound 95 I’d imagine. For me that’s only an extra I think for

four pan a month. So that seems to be a no-brainer for me, so I’ll get that and

I’ll be able to get then Apple TV Plus and watch the shows you’re recommending.

Brilliant. I wonder what the general consensus is out there. So again, one

of the things we’d like to hear from it, if you are an Apple TV Plus free

subscriber at the moment, will you or are you considering paying for it now that

the subscription runs out, is the service good enough in your eyes or your opinion to

warrant the fee per month? We’re all inundated with different offers from all the different

suppliers and about now where you go to get your TV. If I bought them all, I wouldn’t

have any time left for doing work or Elmug or even the podcast.

There are some really good ones coming up. Another one that looks quite good is On the

Rocks. That looks quite interesting. The Wildlife Documentary Tiny World that was released yesterday.

I don’t know, has anyone watched Little Voice? Not started that yet.

Not the movie, not called that film. Yeah, no, that’s not what you’re talking about.

No, this is a TV series called Little Voice. Okay. Yeah, that tiny world. Again, I think that the

The good thing it seems to be is these are pretty high quality shows.

The production values seem to be quite good.

They don’t look cheap and nasty.

I’ve only gone by what I’m seeing on the trailers and from the only series I saw was

For All Mankind, which I thought was done very well.

I won’t spoil it for you Alistair, but yeah it was a very good story and it was very well

delivered? It reminds me of when Steve Jobs who went to Pixar and he was being

taught at Pixar how to make good cartoons and then they went on to make

stuff like Toy Story and Wally and other sort of types of series which were all

very well put together animations and I’m wondering if the Disney elements has

has come into Apple and said,

look, this is how to make some good films.

Also with Apple’s colossal amount of money,

they can probably afford to get some very good script writers.

• One interesting thing is the TV series, “Little Voice”

is the story of a girl that’s starting

to try and make a music career.

It’s actually written by, is it Sarah Briella’s?

Famous music artist, but she also wrote “Waitress”,

which is actually now ended thanks to COVID-19,

but the popular West End Theatre show

that has just come to an end.

• I’ve just been looking at the website as well.

They’re also saying that next year,

they’re bringing in a series called Foundation to the,

which is based upon Isaac Asimov’s book series.

And I remember reading them 40 odd years ago

and they totally enthralled me then.

So if this series is anywhere near as good as the books,

that could be, that’s a gimme, that’s a death confirm.

• You may even get the high-end script writers

be interested in that.

Jean Rottenberry, the directors like JJ Abraham’s

and those sorts of individuals, all big Adam Moss fans.

• Yeah, but if you look at the trailer,

the quality seems to be first rate.

So yeah, that’s it.

So I think as soon as Apple One comes out,

I’ll be one the first at the door.

• You can give us our first review, Vin.
• I’ll definitely do that.

Okay.

• I think we’ve now come to the end of our show

for this week.

Thanks for joining us, Martin and Alistair.

Next time we have a special guest on our show,

where we’ll look into the life of an Apple developer

who’ll solve more of your tech questions

and hopefully we’ll have some more news on the update

to the iPhone 12.

In the meantime, I will leave you with some wise words.

Until next time, thank you and goodbye and remember.

• Stay hungry, stay foolish.

Thank you all very much.

(audience applauding)

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