Episode 25 – The notch or not
Mon, 24/1/22 • 51:29
SPEAKERS
Craig., Martin, Tina, Alastair
Craig.
Hello and welcome back to Episode 25 of the Brew and byte show, or should I say season two? First up who shall we say hello to let’s say hello to Tina. How are you?
Tina
Very well thank you very you know not too bad considering it’s pretty miserable outside had a good Christmas night everyone asked it to
Craig.
true indeed it is rather cold out there at the moment. What do we expect for England? And next up our resident tech expert. How are you, Alastair?
Alastair
I’m good. Thanks, as Tina says, trying to enjoy ourselves in this cold time of year but enjoying myself in front of my Mac so
Craig.
and not forgetting the man that spent the whole of Christmas backing up his entire network. The backup King, how are you?
Martin
Hi Good evening, Craig, Tina, and Alastair and all the listeners. Welcome to 2022. Can you imagine you have to say that quick. Otherwise, it just hurts far too much. Yes, I have all my backups done. I was I was quite specific on what I was trying to get done over the Christmas had some time to get things in order. So now I have a nice range of clean and full external hard drives, say no major failures ahead. No, they did not. I normally have a routine that I keep my main backup hard drive for three years. And then I buy a new one. And that becomes I bought a new one. I’ve got a couple of good deals before Christmas bought myself a new eight terabyte drive. So that now becomes my new Drive. And the old ones then all moved down the line to the redundant spot at the bottom of the hill.
Alastair
I could just see this he has he has this bookcase behind him with all these hard drives, you know, and it slowly upgrades over time.
Martin
You can’t have enough hard drives. I’ve only ever had that ones for backup hard drive, which was the live drive actually failed. It was a what was it a Western Digital I think and that that failed. And if you hadn’t had another backup it would have caused this problem. So you know anyone out there if you’ve got if you are using an older hard drive, especially a spinning disk one, think about upgrading on a regular basis.
Tina
Whereas I’ve actually had a hard drive file of a computer. It was a PC many years ago, I had a Sony hard drive.
Craig.
Okay, shall we look at what’s First up on our news this week? What shall we pick on first I’m going to say iCloud private relay. Has anybody tried this tested it? Beta-ed it, had problems with it yet?
Alastair
not experienced any problems with it. I have it currently turned on on my iPhone. And on my one of my hard drives. And my MacBook Pro seems to be working quite well. Safari tells me on my phone, weekly updates of how many things that’s blocked. And I haven’t come across any websites which she has said no, we don’t like you. I’ve read up on Mac rumours that T Mobile US is the de-activating it always having a few issues. But I’ve not come across anyone yet. Who’s had any problems? I have a few people who don’t really understand what it is or why would you want to use it. But once I explained it to them, they’re quite happy to have it turned on?
Craig.
That is actually a really good question. Because I think people are under the misconception that it’s some form of VPN service. But what does it actually do, Alastair ?
Alastair
What it does is in the past, prior to this, you would have an IP address set for your phone from your service provider. And that would identify you as being sort of somewhere in the south of England and on this particular network, and it would be tied to you and you wouldn’t change from it. So advertising would follow you around the internet, your service provider would know exactly what you’re doing and could market things to you. So Apple then said, Okay, we’re gonna do a single private relay whereby they would have one set of IP ranges. So when you go and request, say to BBC website, it goes out to something called DNS server. So that’s one request, and then you get to reply back coming back from another direction. And Apple made sure that the inquiry going out was from one IP and the one coming back was a different one server defending was trying to track you it would have, they wouldn’t be able to pinpoint what you’re doing or try and market to you. So it’s a way of obscuring who you are and what it is that you’re looking at.
Craig.
And I am right in saying that it’s not available right across the board, am I it’s only on certain apps that it works.
Alastair
So the best way is thinking while it’s on Safari, and there is a variation of it on mail effectively it’s a safari based one
Craig.
did anybody see the news where mobile phone providers or carriers however you wish to describe them kicked up a huge fuss this week over this service and they’re potentially blocking it? Do we know the reasons why
Martin
I don’t think they like the fact that they can’t track you as easily. It’s all to do with money. Of course. They make money from passing on the information where you’re what you’re likely to be looking at what all goes back to the the apple initiative last year just means that it’s more difficult for them to understand what you’re up to. And we know how they can make more and more money out of it.
Tina
And also, I mean, I, I signed on to a website on my phone, and I’ve got the prompt, do you want to give them a fake email, that wasn’t the term they used, but that’s what I meant. So I’ve now got an email that I use for this website. And it’s, you know, it was prompted, it was very clever, because it also said, and as soon as you want to stop receiving, you can switch this email off. So it does give you a lot of control. And if you want to check what you’ve done, there’s a list of them on your phone. So it gives you a lot more control. What I did find interesting when I was researching for tonight, so I’ve had it on my phone for a while, but I’ve just switched it on on my Mac. So I’ll be curious how that pans out. And for some people like me, because I’m not very techy, I use Safari. So I’m just I think it’s just gonna be a background thing that I use all the time. I know that there are two settings, you could have general or you could actually pick where you want it to be. So I’ve gone with general, it’ll be interesting, because I mean, there are some things that are region lock. Now I play, I’ve got a friend who used a VPN in Dubai who did that specifically because she wants to watch Doctor Who on iPlayer. So that’s not one of the things that you can do, I believe I think it’s very, you know, so if something’s got a regional lock, this doesn’t bypass that. So if that’s what you want, for whatever reason, you would need a VPN.
Alastair
You’ll get something which will be classified as Britain, but you won’t necessarily if you’re trying to mask the fact that you’re in London or you’re trying to mask the fact that you’re in Edinburgh, it won’t sort of suddenly give you a new city from your choice. It will be whatever pool of IP ranges it as available at that time. So if you were doing something which was particularly tied to a region, it says, Okay, we’re only going to be doing this for people and in a certain region, you may end up with a few problems. But that I think has been resolved in most areas from what I gathered. The reason they didn’t want to give the the access to it is because they wanted to have a paid for service. And they didn’t like the fact that Apple was giving this for free. It’s always a bit tricky when reading into the American news about American networks, because they have different privacy laws and different sets of values. But I have not come across any Europeans networks who’ve had any problems with this.
Craig.
It’s also not available to everybody. Yes, it’s not released publicly yet because it’s still in beta or beta testing mode. But you have to be an iCloud plus subscriber to actually have access to it to then you
Alastair
automatically get iCloud plus if you are over on iOS 15
Tina
No, I think you’ve actually got to have the parts the paid service. Yeah,
Alastair
you can’t be getting he won’t get it if you’re on the five gigabyte plan if you’re on the 50 gigabyte plan 100 gigabyte plan or or bigger so I think it goes up to was it three terabyte I think now is the biggest stores it’s still on two terabyte you will get the service if you pay any money to Apple for their iCloud service, you will become an iCloud Plus member. And you can opt in for privacy really, most people don’t have it turned on that there is a there was Apple was saying that you can have a look at the settings and you can also turn it on not only for just your carrier, but also for Wi Fi. So if you’re on your home Wi Fi or you’re travelling Wi Fi, so you’re visiting a friend or relative or you’re on corporate Wi Fi, you can turn on this feature. And the issues I have seen are only for you know very large corporate networks. And you’re sharing something on the same network. And because it you’re getting different IP ranges on Wi Fi, it may cause a few issues. But normally your IT department will tell you about that ahead of time. Other thing is, in the past, when I’ve come across this issues with American networks, it’s because they want you to upgrade to a higher plan. So it comes back to money again. So we say are we not supporting this feature on the lower budget plans? If you would like this new Apple feature, please pay us more money.
Tina
I think it’ll also be interesting to see what’s allowed way and you’d be surprised because it isn’t just places like China or no for instance Dubai has a lot of control over what’s allowed. It is interesting, wasn’t it because there was a man that was prosecuted to do with his ring doorbell
Craig.
he was he was prosecuted by his next door neighbour I think on privacy grounds. I read that
Tina
and he was prosecuted because not because of video because if you saw the pictures controlling it was should have been looking forward. He she was to the right of him and it was to do with the audio function because they had several ring some of them weren’t doorbells, they were just you know, recording audio and video of his garden because apparently a car had been vandalised and it’s to do with the audio. And one of the reasons that he was done in the end is it She said, right, you’ve taken this audio, I was parking my car in a general area. That’s not acceptable. And he denied recording it and didn’t delete it. So he was done not so much because of the initial recording, but his subsequent behaviour to do with the recording, because I initially felt quite sorry for him. But then I realised he was being quite sneaky.
Alastair
It all comes back down to that permission statement, isn’t it? So that’s why Apple have taken the stance on privacy related it, you should have the ability to opt in not the ability to opt out. And that’s what they’re coming down to. It’s not that they don’t want advertisers to do things. But they would like advertisers to let you know that this is happening. But they don’t want to go down the route of Oh, tell everyone that you’re storing cookies, which everyone gets annoyed with and goes Yes, yes, yes, whatever.
Craig.
On the subject of sharing information. Let’s say this one’s more sharing of images. And I know Martin is the keen photographer amongst us as well. What has Apple launched this week? In regards to photography?
Martin
Oh, it’s put me on the spot. Thank you very much. I didn’t I have to admit I didn’t see Craig. I’ve been so tied up with other work. So go on, enlighten me what have they launched with the camera. So
Craig.
Apple have launched their annual iPhone photography awards, and you’ve got a deadline of March to submit your entry.
Martin
It’s that time of year actually the most of the big organisations launched their photography of the Year award. So you’ve got the Royal Horticultural Society. You’ve got landscape of the year got the photographer, society, dozens are out there all launching, I haven’t read all the rules and regulations yet. Is it limited to iPhone pictures?
Alastair
Yes, it is. So that what it says is submitted through the group’s website, any photo can be submitted to the content provided that it was shot on an iPhone or iPad and has not been digitally altered by the desktop programme programmes such as
Craig.
Photoshop, but it can be taken with any photography app on an iOS device.
Alastair
Yes, but it means it doesn’t have to be Apple’s software, but it has to be taken on iPhone or iPads and can’t have been altered by desktop software.
Martin
But does the desktop software also include photos
Alastair
anything which is classified as a desktop version is not not permitted? So you could use the photos on the phone. But as soon as it goes off the phone, you’re not allowed to use it.
Craig.
The other interesting thing is, is that there is actually an entry fee five pound
Alastair
$50.
Martin
I think we should all have that. And I’ll certainly put something in next month, see if I can get something that might stand a chance has actually been considered
Craig.
Rumour has it the entry winners will be announced some time round in July as it was the year before.
Alastair
I don’t think it’s that I think what they say is if I remember correctly, from the photos I’ve seen when they were doing it off to snow plough. Remember, there was that amazing one in the snow, which they did when they first started bringing the photos and they said you have to agree to allow them to use it in publicity, but you own the rights to the photo. But if Apple use it and makes money from it, you can’t get any of the money. We should make
Tina
sense, wasn’t it? Because what you want to do is highlight what the quality of the photo that you can get from an iPhone is interesting, because I’m reading rumours about the iPhone 14. And there’s a debate about whether or not they’re going to have a 48 megapixel sensor. And and that’s just really interesting, because you’re just thinking, okay, 48 megapixels, but what size is the lens going to be? What’s the size of the pixels because I know that there was in camera, especially the little cameras like the point in shoot, there is a bit of a megapixel rice originally and then slow down because people realise it’s not just about how many pixels, it’s also their size that matters. So sometimes you’re better off to have fewer megapixels with better size pixels to take photos. And I’ll be curious, I’m not sure what I do with 48 megapixels on the phone.
Alastair
There’s also the other one, which Apple will always point out, which is that you don’t need to have high megapixel count if they’re clever software, which works on using a neural engine makes a photo of a composite photos, which is a smaller file size. Because just because you’ve got a sharper image doesn’t mean it’s a better image. What you really want is a photograph which understands, okay, this is sky, this is the building. This is a person standing in front and let’s get the right lighting for each one of those elements. So the photo looks really interesting, especially if you’re shooting at night or in a dark pub or something. What’s
Tina
interesting is I’ve just scanned some very old photos, and I think it was probably old formula 110. And so I can look at the pictures and I know what they are. And interestingly, it’s from a long while ago but I’m thinking it’s that person and it’s a demonstration of how clever your eyes already how clever your brain is. Because when I’m looking at it on Photoshop close up, I am hard pressed to see any detail. It’s just that there’s nothing there because that, obviously, I used to print but the print was printed from such a small negative that there just isn’t the detail. And it’s some interesting, I’m tempted to put it into Lightroom to see if what they’re, they’ve got a sharpening thing that’s meant to be amazing. And they are sharpening I’m curious what they do.
Martin
You got to remember the song Tina is not what you got is the way you use it actually does this isn’t an apple competition. So actually nothing to do with Apple is that this is a, an organisation, obviously you’re doing it for the money. And it’s, it’s, it’s not clear, I’m trying to look through the terms and conditions about they have the right to use your photographs anyway they want. Whether they pass them on is another matter. So you need to be a little bit wary about some of these competitions you enter in that you’re giving away as you pointed out all the rights, ad infinitum to your photographs. Some of the lesser ones, especially a B, little b capital ones, say a toll free entry. They’re just photographs, they just want to build up their own stock of photographs, which they then sell on. It is a little bit galling. So just be a little bit careful about that. Do we
Craig.
want to discuss what Apple have done over the last 12 months? Or shall we say not sure not
Martin
have we got the next three days to talk with for Apple got up to 2021? Yeah, by all means, Craig, is this a euphemism here about the notch or the pill or the punch hole or whatever? They’re the rumour mills are going mad about the moment about what what Apple are going to do with the so called notch reduction
Alastair
as getting rather disappointed because I was expecting to see a source of submits and looking phone you know, we’ve really sharp corners and suffering. It looked like paracetamol or something but no, no, we’re not going anything like that. We’re just getting slightly curved circles.
Tina
I’d like to set this point, Apple Watch. And the reason I’m going to say that is there were all those rumours about what the new Apple Watch was gonna look like. And they were all wrong.
Martin
For certain put put your put your house on it, you can bet your mortgage on it’s going to look like this, it’s going to mirror the square edge look of the MacBook Pro. And yeah, you’re right to the the experts, we’re about as far removed as they can possibly be.
Tina
So it’s January, they’re going to make the announcement for the iPhone 14, probably September, October time, we’ve got months of this. And really, it’s what people are used to. So I’ve got a I’ve got a 12 I will wait and see what the 14 is going to look like. And we’ll see because I thought I wouldn’t be I’d be distressed by the knotch. And quite frankly, within minutes I was used to it. So you know, it’s more for a lot of people now to do with how long they’re contractors and whether or not they’re going to upgrade after 24 months or 36
Martin
Coming back to the issue though Can you imagine if they went and sat in front of Steve Jobs and said oh by the way, we’re going to have this pill shaped slot and then beside it we’re going to put a hole punch which is going to be off centre What do you think after we fired a lot of them I should think it would have been complete nonsense I just I just can’t see Apple doing something as a statically ugly looking as the knotch and at the pill and I punch hole may be reduced the notch down smaller already they put it they take off it last year 20% was reduced in size they may very well do that and there’s all this talk about what they can put under the screen or they can still shoot to the screen without being affected and the three problem areas are obviously the camera lens you want that to have the best clearest view the infrared sensor and the other one is it the dot dot matrix viewer but it needs that needs to see through a clear screen so but I’d say Tina I haven’t noticed a notch on my phone for years it’s just there’s it’s become an apple feature isn’t it? It’s a bit like it’s something you associate now with with Apple I can’t see them going down the pillar not true at all.
Craig.
I have a different perception so I don’t think they will remove the knotch I think it will be the year of the notch and that you’ll see introduced on the IMAX that are coming to so they all follow the same design suit
Martin
yeah the iMac has got a camera and on the top of that screen anyway isn’t it so the notch would easily faze him with that the MacBook Pro now has a smaller not with again with the camera and the FaceTime in it so no I can’t see that been a big issue I think again I also thought I remember saying this last year i It wouldn’t surprise me for Apple to put out some deliberate non disclosure items to try and fool people into thinking what they’re what they’re doing. I think they did that last year very affect both the WWDC if you remember back to two then they were all expecting all this stuff to come out and in the end nothing did and again the thing is Tina pointed out about the watch so they were miles off base. But that was Watch. So
Tina
that may or may not be true, isn’t it? But ultimately, there are lots of things now that I’ve got a watch, which is a complete indulgence, because clearly I have the athletic ability of Les Dawson. But what would make it interesting? Well, things like, you know, if they could do your blood sugar level, you know, we’re talking major health things would be interesting now, and I’m not sure what I would need to upgrade the iPhone, because let’s be fair, I know that whenever they release it, it will be the best for iPhone ever until the following year when they release the best iPhone ever. So I’m looking for something you know, the either I like aesthetically. So I love the iPhone five, the one that was very squared off and then the metal only bit I like that I’m shallow. So aesthetically, I like it. Or there’s a killer feature for I’m thinking, Yeah, I’d like that. So you know, I quite liked that idea was it sent the stage the one where it follows you? Yeah, I fancy that not so much that I’m prepared to spend hundreds of pounds though. So you know, it’s got to fit in with something that I really want all when I’m upgrading. See, I think Martin’s still disappointed though, having said farewell to the touchbar Oh,
Martin
don’t start me off again. Of the cry my eyes. Yes. I think I’m the one person in the UK that misses the touch bar. I think I might have been the only person in the UK using the search bar as well. But yeah, no, I’m sorry. I, I’m hoping that I’m hoping that if Apple still on this retrograde path of bringing back items that they’ve lost in the past the 2025 MacBook Pro with the M four chip in it will have the touch bar back. So I’ll be I’ll look forward to that day.
Tina
Not so much like Touch Paper and step back into like touch bar and step back. Is it really? Yeah, I’m really glad to see the MagSafe come back.
Craig.
Yeah, that was that was the biggie I
Tina
think I will be interested in the idea that there might be a more professional Mac, MacBook Air with an end to chips. So that would be interesting. That’s what I’m looking forward to. If it comes,
Martin
can we do a straw poll of all here present, how many of you have actually pulled your laptop off the table or a desk because you got your foot round the cable?
Tina
Oh, there speaks of touchbar person, it’s just an a bit of a soak.
Alastair
I’ve done that. Not with mine. But I was in a room and a client had the cables strung across the room. And as he went to get a drink laptop went flying. And the there were two laptops on the table. One was a PC laptop, and one was a MacBook the MacBook stayed on the table two PCs is up and plate pieces on the floor. The floor was hard concrete. So it’s done that but what was it the the quote was in America what they have on LinkedIn, this says 1000 lives a year in ER rooms in America. So it’s it’s not the adults they’re worried about. It’s the children. So what happens is the MacBooks are solid bits of metal, and they go flying, they can hurt a very small person quite easily. The other thing, which is an important one is that the max is had the coloured lights on it. And the amount of people who complained that they didn’t know if the MacBook was charged or not. One look at the old MagSafe It was either green or orange. And you could tell if it was charged or not. Because they took off little battery indicator on the side remember used to push the button used to go green lights. And so there are a number of people I’ve met who say we wanted the MagSafe back so we could tell if it was charged because they’re doing telephone support. And I would be talking to them. I said well, do you see a light on the MagSafe? And you say yes, okay, it’s working. You can’t do that with the modern ones, which he does plugging
Tina
in I just say when why I think you gave me some support over the phone because we had some sort of meeting. And my laptop went off. And I thought had gone to sleep. And it didn’t come back on again. And that was one of the conversations that you and I had because we were doing this whole thing about could I feel the hard drive, or sort of could and then we were talking about the MagSafe and it was charging. But this the screen wasn’t coming on. As it was it was I think the motherboard had gone, which was quite distressing. But under warranty thank God by two weeks, but yes, so that that was one of the conversations that you and I had when that motherboard went because you were talking about well, what can I say on the mic? Whereas you I can look at my charging thing now on my computer and I know that I’ve got however many 7% But that assumes that my screen is working.
Craig.
I’m going to leave one passing comment on this one. I’ve heard that touch bars aren’t expensive repair cost the surprise and the surprise takes a volunteer whoever wants to go first.
Tina
No, no, no. I’m going to do surprise because I can’t I can’t read the suspense and I’ll go first go What’s the surprise?
Craig.
Okay, so A new section we’re introducing to the room by show involves the M one, not the M one chip. But M one as in you have one minute to describe your favourite feature of Macco s that you’ve used this year, are you ready? There will be a countdown 54321.
Tina
So for me, it isn’t an app or a piece of software or anything. The thing that what I find more useful in the whole year is how everything talks to everything else. So it’s the whole iCloud identity. So if I change one thing on one of my one of my pieces of kit, they all know, if I have a new website, if I have a new password, if I change a contact, I don’t have to think about I need to do it on my iPad I need to do on this I need to do on there. It all just happens. Now some of it’s spooky. So if I start watching something on TV, on my iPad, and then suddenly my MacBook knows what I was watching. So something that’s a bit different than prepared to give up a lot, actually, for convenience. So that’s the thing that I found the most useful. I have no idea if that’s a minute or not. But But that’s it, really. The fact that it it knows what I like for websites and everything.
Craig.
Great. You did that in 52 seconds. But who will be a contender next time? That’s going to be the question.
Martin
I’ll go next time.
Craig.
If you’re okay with that it’s going to get more interesting as we go along. There will be different challenges. So it won’t necessarily be a service or a product. It could be an app or something you’ve learned different this week. It has many different consultation.
Martin
Okay, well, I’ll do the next one, Craig.
Craig.
So, this week, we’ve had a series of questions from our listeners and members. And our first tech question of the day is, Can I use my iMac as an external monitor? So there are actually two ways of looking at this? And the answer is yes to both of them, depending on which pieces of equipment you have, or how much you’re willing to spend, as always. So the first one I would say is, yes, you can if you have an older iMac, and you can use target mode, which allowed you to use another device as an external display. And you had to be connected by fundable. If I’m not mistaken, Allister. There wasn’t any other way of doing it. I believe that was correct. This is going back a few operating systems. Now I know this service wasn’t offered anymore in quite a few recent updates to check exactly when it was that they decided to stop that
Alastair
something like Sierra or High Sierra somewhere that far back. And I know one of the updates broke, you had to stay on a particular version. And it worked. He was very specific. It wasn’t on some 21 inch models it was on I think the 27 over 20 sevens but not all the 21 or the 24 inch ones
Craig.
perfect. And the other way of doing it, if anyone has come across a company called Astro pad, or any of you familiar with Astro pad,
Tina
that’s one of the things where you can use your iPad as a graphics tablet attached to a lot you are
Craig.
correct in suggesting that Astro pad actually make two pieces of software, one being the Astro pad app for using an iPad as a Wacom tablet effectively or an input device. But the other one is lunar displays. So they actually created on painted a small device that pushes into the back of USB device. So it could be another Mac it could be another external display. And it actually allows it to become a monitor. And the interesting thing is, is some people may or may not be familiar with this, but the developers are AstroPad were two of the design team behind sidecar for Mac OS. And in particular, pick up the market that there was four people that use MAC’s for target mode, they make three versions of the Luna display, one that is USBC one that is Mini DisplayPort. And the other one is HDMI, and they’re around $130 If I’m not mistaken. So that’s one way of using your monitor as a secondary display. I don’t know if anyone else has any suggestions or use different ways of doing it. Of course you could use sidecar but that’s going on to an iOS device.
Martin
I’ve never made it easy to do that kind of manoeuvre to use your old iMac as a secondary monitor a nd say you’ve lied to other ways that you can do it going back even further in time we used to do that with Ethernet cable you could connect and use target disk mode to view using a Another monitor another computer to view what was on a computer that might had a Duff screen or something like that. But no, I don’t I don’t think it’s an easy route to take. I’d have to ask why. Why are you trying to do that? What’s the rationale behind that move
Tina
is it could be that they’ve got a big iMac. And they’ve got, say, a small MacBook. So what they want effectively is, well, I can’t use this iMac because it’s so old that it’s it’s pointless. But can I use the screen? I think that is, that’s what they want, isn’t it and they don’t want to spend any money.
Craig.
I have just checked my own notes. iMac models shipped between 2009 and mid 2014 have the right graphics card to allow you to create disk target mode. However, Apple eliminated disk target mode support when Mac OS 1014 came out. So the the correct model that you would need is High Sierra or below for it to work correctly. But this seems sceptical because there are some people out there that have mentioned they’re on Big Sur, and they’ve managed to get it to work on an older machine
Alastair
here. But did they change some text file? Or did they do some of the voodoo?
Craig.
Yeah, that’s hard to say. Alistair, would you like to do question number two,
Alastair
someone’s rose written in and said they have a MacBook Pro retina early 2015 2.9 gigahertz dual core Intel my five with eight gigabytes of RAM running Catalina version 10 point 15.7. They primarily use it only for domestic work zoom teams and Office Suite. They say no heavy applications. But running zoom can be heavy if you’re going in excess of two hours, especially in the summertime, and they want it to be dependable for about a year. And they don’t want to upgrade your operating system for forever. It’s slowing down what would you advise in order to maintain the speed and reliability of this laptop. So what I would say is don’t upgrade from gasoline and keep it at Catalina run something like Dr. DX made by binary fruits to check on your harddrive. Regardless if that’s an SSD or mechanical, normal hard drive that will tell you if the drive is slowly failing or decaying, which is very helpful. The second one would be to have at least 20 gigabytes of free space on the drive. Because what we found these drives which run out of space on the hard drive or traditionally slow down and they will start to have higher data corruption. The third one I would say is try not to have these machines run hot for too long. So if you’re doing a two and a half hour zoom call with lots of different people connected to it, it will start to overheat. Because I have virtually identical MacBook Pro. And when I was doing teams, and zoo after about two hours, the machine would cut out because the heat management control kicks in one things I have done also is I’ve upgraded the internal drive. And I would also suggest running ice that software sets I then sta T by Bojangles software. And that would tell you all about what your processor your RAM, your heat of your computer and your hard drive is. So I find that all very helpful and probably run a programme called Silent Nights, which is made by I can never remember how to pronounce it something like eclectic macros, I think, isn’t it. And they it has a very nice lightweight tool, it tells you if you’re all up to date, and you’ve got all the security patches. And then we’ve got the final question, how can we grow?
Craig.
How can I share a Wi Fi connection on one Mac to another over Ethernet, which is the important bit it is Does anybody have any suggestions of how you would go about doing this or even if it’s possible,
Alastair
so this is possible one of two ways I can think of unless any of you can think of is so if you have a Mac Pro Mac Pros have two Ethernet ports on them. So you can plug in an Ethernet port into one Mac Pro and you can make your Mac a hub. So it’s it’s transferring the data it out because Mac Pro’s were originally designed to be servers and servers need an incoming and outgoing port hence why they have two Ethernet ports on them. Or next to use the correct terminology. The other one would be to get a net gear switch which you can pick up you know, you can pick up a very nice four port switch from net gear and we’ll put a link in the show notes and you just connect up to Ethernet cables and you’ve automatically got a share connection would it work if
Craig.
you just literally put the Ethernet cable from one to the other? Would you have to change any settings?
Alastair
You can it depends on how close you have a Mac is. So that’s a peer to peer network connection. You can do that. But and I warn you there is a age gap where this doesn’t work. So what I’m saying that some Mac’s will work very nicely with that. But if you’re running say a Quicksilver g4 with a Mac Pro 2013 They won’t be compatible because There are different models, and they run very differently, you have to get them within a certain age band, I think it’s five years or something like that I have come across this. That’s why I went through the net gear system, because then it’s just as you’re running a third party thing to run the differences between them. Also, it doesn’t work on iOS nine, it works on iOS 8.5. But iOS nine doesn’t work with that peer to peer system close to try it. But 8.5 did work like that at 9.2. Point two didn’t work, but 9.0 did so. And that’s going back a bit,
Craig.
my understanding of it was that to connect to Mac’s together via an Ethernet cable, and in the sharing Preferences panel, you can actually take a box that shares share my internet connection,
Alastair
you can do it that way. But you run up against a problem of bandwidth. Yeah, so what you run up against is two issues, you get the first issue, which is if you’re both on the internet, at the same time, the secondary Mac slows down the first Mac. So they both have to be at the set, they both slow down simultaneously. And the second thing you’ll run up against is that some routers don’t like this sort of double Max system. So you may end up with some web pages not loading and you get a lot of drop packets, and it wouldn’t work well, you’re really forcing one Mac to work really hard if you’re doing teams or zoom.
Craig.
This is kind of a brief thing rather than a feature. It was kind of also something like what you said about Martin about us predicting the year ahead, I thought we could look at it the other way, and pick one particular thing that you think you’ve used the most or that has helped you over the last year. So could that be an app? Could it be something that Mac OS has added as it’s a new year, and January is considered the time where people make new plans ahead from going on a diet to making a New Year’s resolution? How will you be more focused in the year ahead.
Martin
The one thing I wanted to do this year was to get more into shortcuts we use I use a couple of simple ones in TextEdit and stuff like that, too, you know, text replacement, but there are certain certain procedures, I follow them and files come in or stuff after fill out or details and files from one place to another that I think could be automated. And I think shortcuts could help me do that. So this year’s target was really to get more involved in shortcuts, there’s a couple of good sites out there’s a couple of good people on the web, and on podcasts who who are really into to shortcuts, I never really got into Automator I started not try but didn’t quite get the hang of it. But yeah, shortcuts is I think what I could do with using this year if I
Alastair
started to use Apple CarPlay. And there are certain features which are unknown, which you set up. So you’re so used to on the phone, being able to zoom into a map on CarPlay, he can’t zoom on the screen on your car, you have to do it on your phone, and I was comparing Apple Maps versus Google Maps. And in the UK, we have slightly different map systems than what we see in America, we don’t have all the free dimension. And it was very interesting because you could do with the car, I have the directions we’re going straight into the car and you’ll come up on the navigation system as well as in front of on the dashboard, whereas Google Maps doesn’t and this is for Apple CarPlay The other thing I was doing as I you can press you know the the Siri on your your steering wheel and you can ask play this particular thing. And it would that was all quite interesting and doing the voice you know, having a phone call coming in whilst you’re driving. So that was a different experience.
Martin
I have to agree with the with maps on CarPlay. Now it’s my it’s my go to navigation system and I’m driving around and it’s become very good at identifying problems and issues that are flashed up a warning the car broke down a few miles ahead, especially going around the I’ve been going around the 25 a lot in the mornings and evenings and it’s great though it will tell you yes, the 25 is choked up or blocked here’s here’s the faster route and we kind of learned to our costs we sort of I thought I’ve looked at it a couple of times I thought sorry, you your way home and stick on this route. I know the route better and lo and behold, walk walk straight into a jam or some accident um so so I tend to trust the Maps app now for getting me from A to B it’s it has got I know I know when it first came out. There was some real glitches in it. It’s a very good system now I rely on I used to use Waze but as I said I just find it easier just to plug the phone into the car and away we go
Alastair
by I found I got better if I connected it via lightning cable. I got a better response when I find it Bluetooth I was surprised at how strong the signal is. We did a test by pure by accident I’m next door window and the car drives past low me probably about 30 feet below and my phone wants to talk to the car going past so it’s quite some distance it wants to talk The other thing we thought was quite interesting was the you learn a lot of little routes, you know, it tells you Oh, by the way, you can save two minutes if you go this direction or two minutes going that direction. And the even got to know my habits. So it said, Oh, do you want to go home now? So it worked out, oh, this time we normally going home? Would you like me to give you the home directions?
Martin
No, it has come on leaps and bounds. It’s a good, reliable app. Now for me,
Craig.
Tina, what would you say is been a highlight, or what you would like to achieve in the year ahead,
Tina
I think for me is I need to get out of my comfort zone. So there are lots of things to do that. So I finally accepted that I have to say goodbye to aperture. So this is, this is the time that I am going to be looking more at Lightroom for the moment, and I’ve just got a new camera. So I’m going to be investigating more using things like YouTube, so that, you know, I bought it, therefore, I need to learn it better. And I think that’s also true genuinely about my Mac. But I think like REM now is gonna be my focus. I do regret the loss of Aperture,
Martin
we had a look at that AC DC one we, Tina, I wasn’t really taken on board, which I didn’t seem to offer what I was actually looking for didn’t didn’t, it didn’t match the basic core functions of Aperture. And I just have a problem with Adobe, I don’t like Adobe. So Lightroom is a bit of a pain. So
Tina
I will be happier if I could buy it as a one-off Lightroom classic. That’s the irony. So I yeah, I have a problem with subscriptions. But I think that’s the model that a lot of things are going for now, unfortunately, learn to use the kid that you’ve got. That’s my New Year’s resolution,
Alastair
I would say that these still got a Use Image Capture to take the images off my big camera. So it’s a canon. And then I use bridge just to look at the photos in collection because I didn’t want to go on to a Lightroom subscription, which is quite expensive. So I’m just all I wanted was okay, which photos are in focus which photos are better than the others. Okay, get rid of those and then put them in a folder in Finder. And that’s it. I’m quite basic at times, I have a MacBook Pro with Photoshop already on it because I have a different licence on that one. So if I need to adjust any photos, I’ll just transfer them onto the MacBook Pro. Are they done that way?
Martin
I think also to be fair, as I don’t know whether you’ve used the Photos app on the Mac at all, but it has actually become a pretty good app, you can do most of what you were saying there. In photos. I was looking at it that for me the cataloging is the bit of the issue with photos. It’s not that good at cataloging, or far, far management,
Tina
I just find the file management with photos baffling Yeah,
Martin
it is not it’s not good, that could be sorted out, they could do that better. But other than that it is for rough and ready work where you just want to quickly as you say, click through get rid of LD out of focus ones get rid of all the ones with your finger on the lens, all that kind of stuff, photos can be pretty quick for doing that. And then leaving you with the core of the work you want to do now from there, you can then there are there are some quite a decent range of adjustments that you can do in photos on your images that you’ve got. And then beyond that, you can then take it into something like Photoshop, if that’s your or I use Luminare is quite good. Or what’s the other one Affinity Photo again, you can buy them outright, you don’t have to pay a subscription. And they’re pretty good photo manipulation app applications.
Tina
If photos had a better cataloging system that allowed me more control what it does would be perfectly acceptable for me. Yeah, that’s my problem.
Craig.
My tip going forward for the year is slightly different. So I was going to look at managing tasks or time which is something that seems very limited as we seem to go forward as we’re going back to work for lots of us. So for me, I’ve invested in things three this year, and I’m using that as my workhorse to keep things organized or repeat meetings and I chose it because it integrates so well in so many things. One of them as you know, I like shortcuts and it does lots of fancy things with pulling data from other applications or making lists and working with calendars. That was my main thing for the year
Tina
I use busy count and one of the reasons I like busy cow is that you’ve got your tasks in your calendar and you can see them well in advance. Now to be fair, I haven’t used iCal view so I’m like going back and look at it but I don’t want to be having my reminders separate from my calendar. I want to be looking at the calendar now is obviously less important for me because I don’t go to work. What a wonderful phrase to say but even even so what I want to know When I look at the calendar, I want to think, Oh, well, this is coming out, what do I need to do for it? I don’t need I don’t need, like, probably things as as overkill because you know, I’m saying, oh, I need to post a card, a birthday card, I need to buy this, I need to renew this. I’m not talking, I’m not someone that’s going to have a huge task that was broken down to sub tasks that you might need professionally. I just want general reminders. So you know, I do things I remind myself to sign into my Adobe account, because otherwise a minor saying, is still using this do we need to delete it? So I just signed in? I remind myself for things like that. The irony being I can remember there was something called a lotus organizer, and Johnny I would have hated it would it would absolutely if I did it, because it is it? Is it skeuomorphic the one thing right looks like it is so so Lotus organizer was great because it looked like a planner, it looks like you know, you’re opening a planner, a bit like if you know, I had a filofax, and it had like, today’s tasks in the past today’s pain and you could have it’s a week, you know, I loved it. So I spent years looking for something that replicated that, which is pretty sad. And busy cow mostly does that I don’t like how they’ve changed tasks because actually, I want to know when I want the task to move on to the day I have completed it. Whereas at the moment, the current iteration is that you do it but it stays on the task day, you should have completed it. I just want to know what my tasks are coming up, and what my events are coming up all in one go.
Craig.
Now, yes, we’ve all spoken about these different things. But for the podcast going forward, we’re actually going to revisit the subjects to see how far people have got what they’ve learned what they could have done differently. So the listeners also are aware of what’s going on. Treasure Hunt was the section of the show where we spend many hours dwindling down rabbit holes and looking at other things on the internet when we should be focusing on what we are doing. And it was about you sharing something interesting you found on the internet this week. It doesn’t have to be Apple-related at all. Or it could even be a book. Let’s put it that way. I’ve got I got an interesting book. Yeah,
Tina
let me showyou can’t see it. But these are pictures when I went personally when I was 17. One more interesting thing of the week is seeing all these really, really old pictures. And this is the joy of computing slightly this week is finding some really old photos and then bringing them into the digital age. And that doesn’t fit your treasure hunting. But I do think it was buried treasure. I’m very happy with it. Well,
Martin
my very treasure you want to book I’ve started reading a book called The president is missing. Written by Patterson and Bill Clinton. Ooh, it’s a normal thriller from from Paterson, but it’s got some interesting insights from supplied by Bill Clinton. So yeah, it very got stuck into it quite an interesting story.
Craig.
Go and Alistair What was your pick of the week.
Alastair
So I was given this book for Christmas. This is the hidden London for London Underground. So it talks about the hidden stations or the stations that never got built. So down street being one the deep level shelters which you can see in Clapham South Clapham Common and Stockwell. You can also he also talks about how things have changed. So there was a stations that were planned to be open but never opened. And it’s quite, it’s quite interesting, especially if you if you take in the underground, you go around that you can pick up some quite interesting facts. It’s also got lots of lots of photos in it.
Tina
And if you really want to extend that that’s a book of the tools that are run by the London Transport Museum. So you can actually do those tools because I’ve done a few
Martin
Do any of you use Audible books? Audiobooks? Yes, yeah, if you do, there’s a very good one at the moment by Miriam Margolyes, her autobiography, it’s extremely irrelevant. But it’s really funny, too. It’s just
Craig.
brilliant. I have two random ones for me. So one is the shortcut geek of me. For people that own a stream deck. There’s been some talk around having little icons that can run shortcuts on your Mac. There are some workaround ways of doing this. But now someone on GitHub has released stream deck shortcuts, which makes it really easy for the less geeky of us to run them from a stream deck by pushing one of the little icons you may have to do wonderful things. And the other recommendation is actually a book which is by I’m sure you’ll recognize the name when I say Rory Catherine Jones, BBC technology correspondent recently released a book called switched on and it comes highly recommended if you are interested in the last 25 years of tech and how smartphones have changed our entire world and industry and our ways of life going forward and he is at Westland dinner. Alister.
Martin
You alluded to there earlier on. But the thing you didn’t we didn’t mention tonight was we just celebrated the 50th anniversary of the iPhone.
Craig.
We did. And what was the other celebration? Alistair, you sent it to me to remind me 20 years since the MacBook Pro was announced. Yes. Where has that time gone? On that subject? We will say thank you to our panel. Thank you for the return for season two. Firstly, we’ll say thank you to Tina, thank you for this evening.
Tina
No, no, thank you. I’m not going to go away in stressed about what I said I was going to do and whether or not I’ve been able to demonstrate that I’ve done
Craig.
it. Don’t worry, you’ve now got a whole year and not a minute this time around. So good luck with that. And of course, thank you to Martin.
Martin
That’s a pleasure. As usual, Craig, enjoy our chat and our talk.
Craig.
And of course, thank you to Alister and he’s tech advice as always,
Alastair
it’s nice to be back and discussing things with you guys again then. I hope our listeners will enjoy this episode.
Craig.
Awesome. And as always, it’s thank you for me. Until next time, we’ll see you soon