NC_2023_10_22
[0:00] Music.
[0:14] If you've ever needed to get feedback from a group of people, using the free Google Forms
Google Forms Tutorial on ScreenCastsONLINE
[0:21] is a great way to do it. You can create surveys, get feedback on a class you've taught, help organize a family reunion, or even create quizzes. I've used it to organize the party we used to throw for the Nosilla Castaways at Macworld, and during the pandemic we created a form for what food our friends wanted delivered on Thanksgiving, and I once did a survey to determine the first five apps Mac users install on a new Mac. Spoiler, 1Password was number one by a long shot. Anyway, I mention all of this because last week ScreenCastsOnline has published my video tutorial on how to use all of the features of Google Forms. Go, sign up for the free trial and watch it at ScreenCastsOnline.com.
Find My — The Box is Three-Dimensional
[1:01] Right before Steve and I left to drive to Utah, Steve realized that he couldn't find his iPhone. This happens pretty often, but this time, the car was packed, the windshield was washed, the goodbyes were said to the animals, we were ready to go.
[1:14] As one does, Steve used the side button on his Apple Watch and he tapped the icon to ping his iPhone. But we didn't hear the happy chime from his phone.
This feature rarely fails us, and it was even more surprising because he has a brand spanking new iPhone 15 Pro and the Apple Watch Series 9.
This year's newly released iPhones and Apple Watches sport the second generation Ultra Wideband or UWB chip.
This new chip is supposed to pinpoint the location even better than before.
Instead of the watch just being able to ping the phone, the Apple Watch now shows you an approximate distance as you look for it.
It's just like that kids game where you're trying to find a hidden item and everyone's yelling, warmer, colder, warmer, colder.
Anyway, since Steve couldn't hear his iPhone responding, he started wandering around the house while watching the distance change on his watch.
Concurrently, I used the tried and true method employed by spouses everywhere.
I looked in all of the weird places where I'd found Steve's phone before.
[2:08] After a few frustrating and unsuccessful minutes, Steve and my searches converged near the downstairs powder room.
Steve said that the lowest distance he had been able to find was 9 feet, and it was while he was standing in the powder room.
But whenever he went out of the powder room, the number went up.
I suddenly knew where the phone was. Like Khan in the second Star Trek movie, we had been thinking in two dimensions.
I decided to think out of the plane, and I went directly upstairs from where Steve was standing.
Sure enough, his phone was in our closet, directly above the powder room.
My goal in telling you this story isn't just to signal that I'm a Star Trek fan, but to, hopefully put this little anecdote in the back of your brain, just in case you're ever searching for your phone with your watch.
Think inside the box, but remember, the box is three-dimensional.
[2:52] Music.
Tiny Tip — Easy Way to Bring in Windows to the Foreground with Stage Manager
[3:02] Last December, my buddy Ron and I had a chat for the NosillaCast on why we both love Stage Manager on the Mac.
In the last 10 months, my love for Stage Manager has not dwindled a bit.
Even with my devotion, there was one thing that still felt really clumsy.
Let's say I'm writing an email to someone and I want to add an attachment.
With Mail in the foreground of Stage Manager, I can get to the Finder in two different ways.
I can Command-Tab to it, or I can click on a Finder window that I see in the stacks on the left.
If there's a stack with just a Finder window open, that window will pop into visibility and the Mail window will go into a stack.
While I can drag the item from the Finder, now I don't have the Mail app visible to drag it into.
In order to get both apps visible at the same time, I have to have one app visible and then, click and drag the second one on screen.
[3:52] That's dandy, again, if the Finder window is the only thing in that stack or if it's on the top thing in a stack.
But sometimes the Finder window is in a stack with another app, so I have to drag the first app into visibility, then drag the Finder into visibility, and finally hide that second app again.
This is a glorious example of faffing about.
At this point, if you're not already a fan of Stage Manager, I may have convinced you to never try it, but please bear with me on a tiny tip that solves this problem.
I was listening to the HomeKit Insider podcast from the fine folks at Apple Insider, hosted by Andrew O'Hara and Stephen Robles.
It's a great show. Anyway, I heard one of the gentlemen briefly mention a better way of moving windows around when using Stage Manager.
He said that you can hold down Shift-Command while clicking on an app in the stack and that app will immediately join the current main window.
It is awesome! No more dragging in and out and command-tabbing around.
I can't believe how much more efficient Stage Manager is with this tiny trick.
[4:50] Now, I've been using the drag and drop problem to illustrate the value of this shift command click trick for Stage Manager, but remember, there's a lot of times you just want to see two apps at the same time.
It rocks for that, too. Sometimes you have more than one application open in a stack.
Let's use our mail example, and you need a Finder window. But it's in a stack with Safari, and you can see in the stack it's actually behind Safari.
If you can get your cursor onto the edge of that hidden Finder window when you hit shift command that then just that Finder window will come forward, not Safari.
Sometimes it's a little tricky to get just that window, but most of the time I'm pretty successful with it.
Now in September of this year, I explained how I use Yoink with Stage Manager.
It solves the drag and drop problem and I'm still a fan, but it doesn't solve the problem of bringing up a stacked application window and it requires buying and installing a $9 app.
I'm gleefully happy about Shift-Command-Click in a stack to make my Stage Manager experience even happier. Next up, we've got Steve, or as he likes to call himself, Steve the Husband,
Star Trails from Insta360 X3 Camera (and a Bonus Video of the Annular Solar Eclipse)
[5:53] on the show here to talk about some of the things he did from a technology perspective that are pretty cool while we were viewing the eclipse this last weekend in Utah. So let's listen to Steve.
[6:05] In August, I gave you my review of the Insta360 X3 Action Cam. My ending line of the review was, the camera has so many features I haven't discovered, let alone use them all yet, so I have a lot of fun ahead of me finding out what this action camera can really do.
[6:21] I've continued discovery of features, and one of my favorites is the X3's ability to capture star trails in the night sky as they appear, at least from our view in the northern hemisphere, to rotate counterclockwise around the north star. In the southern hemisphere, the effect is opposite, where they appear to rotate in the clockwise direction, but there is no prominent southern pole star around which they rotate.
Living in the depths of Los Angeles County, we're lucky if we see a few dozen stars due to light pollution, but we took some recent trips to more remote locations where I could give it a try.
Our latest trip was to Utah with the goal of seeing the annular eclipse that occurred on October 14th.
[7:00] Our first stop was to visit our friends Dean and Suzanne who live in Springdale, Utah, nestled next to Zion National Park.
Yeah, it's a difficult assignment, but someone has to do it.
Coincidentally, Springdale recently earned an International Dark Sky Certification because of the town's successful efforts to eliminate light pollution, so it was an ideal place to try to capture star trails.
[7:24] I had to study up on how to capture star trails with my X3 camera, and then I did my first test while we were up in Mammoth a month or so ago. It worked pretty well, but a nearby cabin light was going on and off during the night, so it wasn't ideal. Now that I had a successful test case, I made some notes for myself so I could reproduce the effect for the trip to Utah.
I'm going to list the steps and settings to capture the star trails that I used with my Insta360 X3 camera. They aren't meant to be a tutorial, but if you have an Insta360 X3, they'll give you a good starting point for your own experiments.
[7:59] OK, to capture the star trails, first connect the Insta360 iPhone app to the X3 camera.
Then select the camera icon at the bottom of the screen, select the Star Lapse option at the bottom of the screen, and then select Manual or M mode. Now we set the shutter speed to 30 seconds, the ISO to 1000 and the white balance to 5500K. Then we connect the X3 to a power bank so that, we can shoot all night without running out of battery. But before we begin shooting, tightly wrap the camera, except the lenses of course, with foil to prevent bleed through of the display light and other lights into the lens. Be sure the camera is in the 360 mode and click the shutter button to begin taking an overnight series of starlapse photos. After you're done When shooting StarLapse in the morning, click on Stories, slide down to StarLapse and select the video just captured to create the StarLapse video.
Now the camera will take some time to create this effect.
[9:01] Optionally, you can do further edits by adding music or titles or other effects that the X3 offers, if desired.
Finally, we'll export using the custom settings Color Plus, Remove Grain, Highest Resolution, and Highest Bitrate settings.
[9:18] We'll export that video using Reframe to get the perspective you want, and then be sure to update the keyframe to save that perspective before you export.
And that does it.
[9:30] If you're interested in seeing the result, I've included in my blog post the StarLapse video from Springdale, with a bit of background music added for effect.
For those who watch the entire video and are very observant, there's an artifact near the end of the video where a passing car momentarily lights up an object in the foreground.
That of course was unintentional.
Leave a comment in the blog post if you can identify what that object is.
You also might notice a few streaks that appear in directions different from the star trails.
The streaks that appear dotted or dashed are passing aircraft, but a few of the streaks are more continuous and are possibly overhead satellites, particularly if they appear near the beginning, just after sunset, or end, just before sunrise, of the video.
From Dean and Suzanne's, we traveled to Torrey, a small town in southern Utah.
We chose Tauri since it was in the path where the annular eclipse would be fully formed.
From this location, we were able to view the sun for a little over 4 minutes while the moon was perfectly centered over it.
[10:34] Unlike a total solar eclipse where the moon fully covers the sun, leaving just the glowing corona surrounding the moon, during an annular eclipse the moon is farther from the earth and thus appears smaller than the sun.
As a result, the moon doesn't completely cover the sun but instead creates the classic Ring of Fire spectacle. You can read about our exploits in filming a total solar eclipse from our trip to Vicuña, Chile in 2019, and there's a link in the blog post to see that.
[11:03] Since the X3 does not support magnification well, it's really designed for wide angle shots, I took video of the annular eclipse using a 4K camcorder, the Panasonic HC-WXF991, with 20 to 1 magnification and a solar filter over the lens.
Now as a reminder, don't ever point your camera directly at the sun for long periods without a solar filter since it can damage the camera's sensor, just like it can damage your eyes.
You can go to the blog post to see the time lapse video I created of the annular eclipse as we viewed it from Torrey, Utah.
Now if you watch the video, you might notice a couple small dark spots in the sun in the lower left quadrant.
These are not dust particles on the camera lens, but sunspots on the sun's surface caused by active regions where the sun's temperature and light is reduced.
They often appear in pairs as we see in the video.
[11:59] Now, for the bad news about my filming of the eclipse. The main draw for viewing this eclipse is the 4-plus minutes where the moon was perfectly centered over the sun.
During this time, the sun's outer ring appears as a brightly glowing annulus against a somewhat darkened sky.
As I mentioned before, we traveled all this way to view that ring, and the weather was clear so we got a gorgeous view of the Ring of Fire.
As you might imagine, I was really hoping to capture that Ring of Fire with my camcorder.
Now I was successful in collecting all of the phases of the eclipse from beginning to end on video, but if you look closely, you might have noticed that I did not capture the moon perfectly centered on the sun in the video.
When I got back home to download and start processing the video, I discovered, much to my dismay, that I had accidentally turned off the camcorder just before the eclipse entered this crucial phase and turned it on as the ring phase ended.
I think this happened because I was already recording but thought the camera was off, so I thought I was turning ON the recording. Imagine my disappointment after all of my preparation and travel finding out I did not capture the main event.
Let this be a teaching moment to anyone else. Confirm your video camera is in record mode when you really want to record something.
All was not lost, though, since I was able to make lemonade out of lemons by creating the time-lapse video of the eclipse phases.
[13:27] In the blog post, I leave you with a photo of a nearly full annulus, which is the closest I came to capturing the ring of fire just before I turned off the video camera.
As Maxwell Smart used to say, missed it by that much. Okay, Steve, that is exactly the perfect description of this.
Now, the good thing is I have never thought I was taking video when I was actually had just turned off the camera, and I know none of you have ever done it either, but I was amazed at how well Steve took this, because he did so much work to carry all the equipment, get it all ready, and get it set up and everything, and then to have missed just the, some might call it the most important part, because we could have seen a partial annular eclipse from our house.
We went, drove eight hours and then another three and a half hours to get there just to to see the full, the full?
No, it's just called an annular eclipse. Anyway, I still think his videos came out really cool and the time-lapse star trails are fantastic.
Tiny Tip - Even Faster Way to Dress Up Apple Watch Screenshots
[14:29] Music.
[14:38] Music means we have yet another tiny tip. I recently told you about how I made pretty screenshots of my Apple Watch, including nice watch frames and pretty watch bands.
I explained how in order to accomplish this feat, I downloaded the free app WatchShot.
It's an easy to use app and produces beautiful Apple Watch screenshots, but you do have to spend a little bit of time choosing which watch frame you want and which band you want on the screenshot.
If you're looking for a more quick and dirty method that still clearly shows that your screenshot is from an Apple Watch, there's an easier way.
Stephen Ramirez, also known as at SR in our Podfeet Slack, which you should all join at podfeet.com slash slack.
Anyway, Stephen posted a very clever idea of how to get a screenshot of the Apple Watch with a kind of cartoon watch frame and no band using only native Apple tools.
Stephen explained that if you have an Apple Watch Series 6 or newer paired to your iPhone, you can enable screen mirroring of the watch onto your iPhone screen.
Once he had screen mirroring enabled, he simply took a screenshot of the phone and cropped it to square to just show the Apple Watch.
[15:44] Now I remember when screen mirroring of the Apple Watch was enabled, but I had entirely forgotten all about it.
Steven even included a link to the Apple support article that explains how to set up Apple Watch mirroring.
It's a really simple process. You open settings on the iPhone and navigate to accessibility.
Under physical and motor controls, you'll see Apple Watch screen mirroring.
When you select it, you'll see a simple toggle to enable screen mirroring of the Apple Watch on the iPhone.
As soon as you flip the toggle on, you'll see a card slide up from the bottom of the iPhone screen that says the name of your Apple Watch and shows the Apple Watch screen with a gray cartoon watch frame.
It's not fancy like the ones from Watch Shot, but it does the job effectively of illustrating that this little rectangular screenshot is actually an Apple Watch screenshot.
[16:30] Now what you do, you've got this Apple Watch up on screen with its little cartoon.
You take a screenshot of the iPhone by pressing the up volume and power buttons at the same time.
You have to have that feature enabled also on the iPhone. Anyway, this launches markup with the screenshot you just took, and from there you can crop in on the little image of the Apple Watch with its cartoon frame.
Save it to photos or files or airdrop it to your Mac. That's it. No third-party app required.
When I tested Steven's cool trick, I played around a little bit with Apple Watch mirroring to iPhone. Guess what else you can do? You can actually interact with the Apple Watch using the mirrored display on the iPhone. You can swipe up and down, left and right, and select things on the watch screen using the iPhone. Not only that, you can actually tap the side button and the digital crown to do things. It's really kind of fun.
But what problem does it actually solve to be able to do this? I can think of a couple of ways it could be useful.
I could see it as a nifty way to allow you to record a video on the iPhone to teach people some Apple Watch tricks.
If you connected your iPhone via cable to your Mac, you could share its screen on applications like Zoom so you could do live demos to family, friends, or user groups.
[17:43] Now, it may work to connect your iPhone to Zoom and other applications without a cable, but I didn't actually test that because I'm figuring that since the watch is mirroring to the phone, You might not be able to mirror from the phone to the computer without a cable, so I didn't actually test that.
Anyway, I made a little video by calling myself on Zoom and I shared my iPhone to the call.
And then I recorded the call while screen mirroring the Apple Watch to it.
I cropped it down and it actually looks pretty cute.
You can look for it in the show notes.
[18:14] Now, if all this sounds like something you'd like to do more often than once in a blue moon, like maybe you teach people all the time and you'd like to be able to do this, you might want a way to enable screen mirroring even more quickly.
IOS has something called the Accessibility Shortcut, which allows you to quickly launch accessibility tools with a triple-click of the side button on the phone.
You can add items to that triple-click of the side button by going into Settings, Accessibility, and down at the bottom under General, you'll see Accessibility Shortcut.
When selected, you'll see a giant list of accessibility options, and if you tap Apple Watch Mirroring, it'll be added to the triple-click shortcut.
If you only have one accessibility option selected, then triple clicking the side button will instantly launch screen mirroring of the Apple Watch.
I should say if that's the only thing you have added.
If you add more than one option to the accessibility shortcut, then triple clicking the side button will show you the list of options you've added and you simply tap to enable whichever one you want.
Now this is definitely one of those things where trying to explain it is much clumsier than just doing it yourself.
[19:16] The only sad thing about all of this is that halfway through writing up this article about it, screen mirroring of the Apple Watch to my iPhone stopped working.
It pops up just fine and says the name of my watch, but the watch representation on the iPhone stays black, spins for a while, and then says, Apple Watch disconnected.
I followed Apple's advice and rebooted both devices. I toggled airplane mode on and off, and I made sure neither device was set to do not disturb, but none of that brought screen mirroring back to life.
I think I figured out what was wrong, so if this does happen to you, listen up.
The newer watches have always-on capability, but when you're not actively fussing with the watch, the screen goes kind of dim. I found that if I made a point of fiddling with my watch face when I was trying to start up screen mirroring, it would always work.
So that's a bonus tiny tips thrown in there for free.
So thanks Steven so much for reminding us about screen mirroring and giving us a much easier way to create illustrative screenshots of the Apple Watch.
Support the Show
[20:17] So, you know who's awesome? Tom Matic.
Not only does he do occasional reviews for the podcast, and not only is he a six-year patron of the podcast, but he just doubled his pledge on Patreon.
Told you he's awesome. If you'd like to be awesome like Tom, head over to podfeet.com slash patreon and pledge your support to the shows we do here at the Podfeet Podcast.
MacOS Settings I Change After a Nuke and Pave
[20:40] I've talked a lot about the process of nuking and paving my Macs over the years, and I just finished the process a couple of weeks ago.
I've mentioned that I have a giant mind map that I follow to install all of my apps and to configure all of them.
I was wondering, would you like me to go maybe talk through every single app I install and how I configure them in the pave half of the Nuke and Pave?
It's only like 15 pages long in outline form?
Yeah, I didn't think so.
[21:08] But I do a lot of little tweaks to macOS and Apple's built-in apps to make it just the way I like it after a nuke, and I thought that might actually be of interest to many of you.
So we're going to go through a bunch of different things. The first thing is going to be Finder.
[21:21] There are quite a few settings I change in the Finder that I find makes my computing life easier.
With the standard Finder window, there are three bars that are really useful to have visible at all times. The toolbar across the top is on by default, which gives you the access to a number of buttons to control things like changing from icon to list or column view, grouping of files, sharing, and more. But two other bars are off by default, and I feel paralyzed without them. Under the View menu in Finder, you can turn on the path bar and the status bar. The path bar shows at the bottom of Finder windows and it shows you the full path graphically back to the root folder.
For example, I have a folder of images I was working on for this article and I could see with one of them selected that the folder it's in is called paving.
That's inside this week's NoSilicast folder, which is inside NoSilicast Weekly Files, which is inside a NoSilicast folder, which is inside of a folder called Podfeed, which lives in Documents which is inside of iCloud Drive.
Maybe you don't always need to pay attention to the full path like that, but if you do have the path bar showing, you can do magical things like jump to a much higher directory in the path simply by clicking on the icon in the path bar, or you can even drag files up the path using the path bar.
We learned that little trick from Helmuth in the Netherlands a little while ago.
[22:41] The even more critical bar to keep showing in Finder windows at all times is the status bar. This sits below the path bar and it tells you how many files are in the currently selected folder as well as how much space is available on your disk. If the selected folder is in iCloud Drive, you'll actually see how much space you have left in the cloud.
I use the status bar really often when I'm comparing two folders that are supposed to have the same contents. Rather than counting the files, I can quickly tell at a glance looking at the status bar because it tells me the number of files.
[23:14] One of the silliest user interface design decisions Apple has made in the past few years has been to have certain features only visible when you hover over something.
The worst example of this is how if you hover over the title of a Finder window, you'll see the folder icon appear, but if you move away, it disappears again.
Who would want this? Anyway, that window title icon is super useful.
If you're in a Save As dialog box in any application, and you have the folder into which you want to save, open in Finder at the same time, you can drag that little folder icon into the Save As dialog box and it will change where you save to that open folder. I use this all day long. One of the first things I do when I set up a new Mac or pave an existing one is to tell the system to stop hiding that icon from me.
[24:04] I have trouble remembering what it's called, so it's super hard to search for where to turn that darn hiding off, but I'm documenting it now so I'll be able to go back and look it up. It's in System Settings, Accessibility, Display, Show Window Title Icons.
If you toggle that on, then your precious folder icons will always be visible. I have no more idea why this is hidden inside Accessibility than I understand why Apple chose to hide the icon from us in the first place. I don't favor icon view when perusing a folder, but it's the only way to view your desktop. Which is curious now that you think about it.
[24:42] Anyway, for some reason, Apple seems to think that most of us are comfortable living in anarchy with our files and folders just sprinkled haphazardly around on our desktops. I'm sure you don't like it that way any more than I do. Up in the Finder view menu, look for Sort By, and you'll see several options. One is to snap to grid, which is a good first step, because at least when you drag things around, they'll stay in neat little columns and rows.
But I go a step further and I sort by name. This option causes Snap to Grid to be enabled and alphabetizes your desktop files as nature intended. And as a bonus prize, it puts your drives up at the top. Oh, did you say you can't see your drives and external disks?
Take a quick trip to Finder settings and choose which items you'd like visible.
Hard disks, external disks, CDs, DVDs, and iPods.
[25:36] IPads. And connected servers. I know, iPods and connected media, right? Optical media.
That makes a lot of sense. Even hard disks are an antiquated term for internal disks these days, but it's sitting up there in that menu. I think it's curious that this setting isn't in the View menu, but instead it's within Finder Settings. So I'm always bouncing back and forth between those two trying to find it, but I guess we should be happy that they didn't hide it in Accessibility, right?
While you're in the Finder settings menu, did you know you can change the location of where new Finder windows open?
I find no value in the Recents folder, which is selected by default, so I always change this to my Home folder.
[26:15] Now let's switch gears and change over to talking about iCloud Drive.
I'm a big fan of syncing desktop and documents through iCloud Drive.
I get that there's a lot of reasons why you might not want to do that, but I personally like having all of my documents available on both of my Macs and on my iPad and on my iPhone all within the Files app.
I purposely bought my MacBook Pro with a 4TB drive so that I would never have to make compromises on what I could keep locally.
This giant drive allows me to keep my 100,000 plus photos in full resolution. Having them locally means I can back them up locally and not entirely depend on Apple to protect my precious photos.
[26:55] When you enable syncing via iCloud Drive for desktop and documents, it'll default to optimize storage. This means that it will move files into the cloud that you haven't used recently if it needs to save storage for you. In my experience, it does that even if it's not running out of space because with 4TB I'm not running out of space. So, just like with my photos, I would like all of my documents to always be local. I don't want to have to depend on an internet connection in order to access my own files. To enable syncing of your desktop and documents, start by opening System Settings, select your Apple ID at the top, select iCloud, then iCloud Drive. In the window that pops up, turn on the toggles for both Sync This Mac and Desktop and Documents folders.
Now, in order to make sure your files are always stored locally, if you want to be like me, back on the iCloud page, you'll see a toggle for Optimize Mac Storage.
This will be toggled on by default, but if you have enough local storage, you might want to toggle that off.
[27:56] Now let's switch gears to mail. Setting up mail the way you like it is a very personal thing, so I'm definitely not going to tell you what you need to do, but I will tell you what I like to do.
[28:07] I have several email addresses, but I like my default emails to come from alison at podfeet.com.
When you first set up a new Mac, Apple tells you that it knows best. If you open up Mail, Settings, and select the Composing tab, you'll see that it will automatically send quote, from best account, unquote.
No idea how it decides what is the best account, but I can tell you, for me, it's almost always wrong.
I change mine to my professional email address, and if I'm writing to my friends or family, I can always change it on the fly to my personal address.
I found that this setting is not particularly sticky, though.
It seems to degrade over time on all of my different devices, so it's a good idea to keep an eye on that address from which mail is sending.
[28:50] Now, I don't think I'm alone and being kind of fussy about what fonts I use when viewing and creating content.
In Apple Mail on the Font and Colors tab, within Settings, you can change the message list font and the message font, and you can set a fixed width font.
I'm not particular about the colors for indented quoted text, but if that blows your dress up, you can change that as well.
I've become fond of the Roboto Lite font, which I downloaded from Google Fonts years ago, and Courier is my go-to for a fixed width font.
Even if you're not fussy about your fonts, you might want to change the size of the fonts for the message list and for your messages.
Perhaps you're a youngster and you'd like to pack in more information on the screen.
You can set them to be smaller than the defaults.
If you're a wee bit older, you might want to increase the size.
All of this is available in the Fonts and Colors tab in Mail settings.
[29:41] I find it amusing that when we continue to use terms and iconography that used to have physical meaning and yet no longer do. A perfect example is that every save icon is a picture of a floppy disk and I would bet most younger folks have never seen one. Another great example is the terms CC and BCC in an email. Even if you're of the younger set, you may know that it stands for carbon copy and blind carbon copy, but like the floppy disk you may not know the origin story.
Back in my day, before computers came on the scene for typing, if we wanted a copy of something being typed, we had to put a piece of carbon paper between two pieces of paper.
When you typed on the top sheet, it would imprint on the carbon and transfer the letters to the sheet underneath.
[30:26] By the way, I looked on Amazon and you can buy carbon paper today.
It's kind of funny that that still exists, like lots and lots of hits.
I might buy some just to play with it.
Anyway, when you wrote a letter to someone, it was considered good form to type CC, followed by the name of anyone who received a carbon copy of the letter you were sending.
But if you didn't want the recipient to know that you were sending a copy to someone else, that was called a blind carbon copy.
Now in Apple Mail, by default, you can see the To field, and you can see the carbon copy field, but you don't see the blind carbon copy field.
If you wanna send an email to, say, a large group of people, It's considered good form to hide their email addresses from each other, and the Blind Carbon Copy field is where you do that.
[31:11] In order to be able to send blind carbon copies, go to the View menu in Mail and select BCC Address Field.
If you only want to see the BCC address field occasionally and you're a keyboard shortcut junkie, you can use Option Command B to toggle it on and off.
[31:28] Now, since Apple first introduced its Mail app, the most recent messages have always been at the top. I wish I knew why, but the default is now to show new messages at the bottom.
If you open Mail Settings and select the Viewing tab, you'll find a nice little checkbox that says, Show most recent messages at the top, as it should be.
I also checked the box right next to it that says, Mark all messages as read when opening a conversation. Drives me bananas when I see that blue dot next to a long message thread and have to scroll through all of the messages trying to figure out which one is unread.
[32:03] Now here's a bonus tiny tip that I learned from the Mac Geek App. If you select a single message within a thread and hold down Command Shift U, it will toggle that one message unread and read.
If you apply Command Shift U to a thread where every message has been read, it gets a little weird. It only toggles some of the messages as unread. But if any of the messages in the thread are marked as unread, it will mark them all as read with just that key combo. No more scrolling to find the blue dot. I plan on using this often because I like to leave just the very last message in a thread unread to remind me to respond to it. And it makes me crazy if the whole thing is unread. So like, let's say there's eight, I'll be thinking, oh no, I've eight unread emails, but it isn't true, it's only one that I really want to get back to, so I'm going to use this control to quickly see and give that one blue dot.
Probably the most irritating thing about a fresh install of macOS is when you open an audio file and it imports the audio file into Apple Music. I literally have never wanted that to be the option. I also never remember to fix this until the first time it happens on a clean install. The trick to fix it is to select an audio file in the finder, such as say an mp3, and then in the Finder menu bar choose File, Get Info, or simply hold down Command-I to bring up the Get Info window. This will give you a lot of fun information about the file. Partway down you should see something that says Open With. It may have.
[33:31] A chevron pointed to the right, which indicates it can be opened. Within there, there will be a drop-down menu which is most likely set to Apple Music. I change the audio files to open in QuickTime. Below that, you will see it says Change All. When selected, you'll be asked to confirm that you want to make such a drastic, scary change, but just say yes.
Once you've done this for MP3 files, you have to rinse and repeat for WAV files, AIFF files, and M4A files, pretty much all your audio file formats. It's a bit of a hassle to do the first time, but it's a lot harder to accidentally open files in Apple Music and then have to go get rid of all those files that are cluttering up your music library.
By the way, you can change what applications open your files of any type, not just audio files.
For example, I set PNG files to open in Shotter so I can easily annotate them or pin them to the screen. I set SVG files to open in Affinity Designer and Docx files to open in Apple Pages.
All right, let's go on Safari now. Years ago, Apple made a very silly decision for one setting in Safari. If you look at the General tab at the bottom, you'll see a checkbox that that says, and I quote, "'Open safe files after downloading.
"'Safe files include movies, pictures, "'sounds, text, documents, and archives.
[34:49] "'This box is checked on by default.' "'I suppose it might be pleasing "'to have files open automatically "'after you download them, "'but how does Apple know that these files are safe?
"'I mean, especially archives. "'They could contain just about anything, "'including executable files.
[35:05] "'I recommend giving yourself the opportunity "'to make sure that you were the one who downloaded a file before deciding to open it automatically. I unchecked this box the first time I opened Safari.
I have a couple Safari extensions that I really like. If you open up Safari Settings and select the Extensions tab, you can add new extensions. 1Password for Safari is a fan favorite that gets installed first thing. I like to use Grammarly to check my spelling, grammar, and punctuation in all applications on my Mac, and I also install the Grammarly for Safari extension. Anytime I'm typing in a web form, Grammarly helps me keep from appearing uneducated.
Last year, I told you about a terrific Safari extension called Keyword Search, and if anything, I am a bigger fan today than ever before. In a nutshell, Keyword Search allows me to type just a couple of letters into the search bar of my Safari windows to tell it which website I want to search. For example, to search my own site, I only type SP before my search term for Search Podfeet. I use GI to do a Google image search, SEO to search Screencasts Online, and SPBS to search the programming by Stealth show notes. I would feel like I had my hands tied around my back now without the keyword search Safari extension.
[36:23] I also have an extension called Open Access Helper, written by NoSilicastAway Klaus Wolf.
I don't often need to use it myself, but it's an extension that helps you find open versions of research papers that might be under a paywall on your first search.
Now, it's not bypassing any copy protection, it's just searching in other legitimate resources where information is more freely distributed.
Since I don't do this kind of research, I keep it on my Mac just the few times I need it, but I don't enable it until I need it.
If you do, it might be a great extension for you.
[36:55] Now, I've got a little nerd alert here. If you're a developer, or if you occasionally want to see what's under the hood on a web page, there's a secret menu you can enable in Safari. In the Advanced tab of Safari Settings, at the very bottom, you'll see a checkbox labeled Show Features for Web Developers. This will enable a new menu from the Safari menu bar entitled Developer.
My favorite tool in this menu, when I'm not using the console to play with JavaScript, is the Show Web Inspector option.
If you select the little crosshairs in the tools that pop up from the bottom, you can drag your cursor on the webpage and it'll show you the HTML code for what you've selected.
Now this sounds super nerdy, and it kinda is, but there's a relatively unnerdy thing I use it for.
When I wanna tell you about a video tutorial I've created for ScreenCastsOnline, for example, the one I just did and just talked about Google Forms, I log out of the Sko website so I can't see any of the paid-for content.
Then I use their search for my latest tutorial.
In the Web Inspector, I can use the crosshairs tool to select the free preview version of my video.
At the bottom of the Safari window, I can see the URL for this free preview.
I copy that URL and I post it into a blog post of my own where I can promote the tutorial.
Okay, maybe that is pretty nerdy, but you know, it's just a, might be just the right amount of nerdy for you.
[38:15] All right, let's talk about some more global systems. I'd like to go through a few of the system settings I change at the Finder level.
I am very impatient, so one of the first things I do is speed up how quickly a key repeats if I hold it down.
In system settings, scroll all the way down nearly to the bottom where you'll see keyboard.
At the very top of the menu that opens, I take that key repeat slider and I drag it all the way to the fastest settings.
I don't remember what the default is for delay until repeat, but I drag that slider until it's the second shortest option.
Now this is a perfect example of my preferences that might be very likely different from yours.
Maybe when you open up a new Mac, the key repeat is way too fast for you.
Either way, it's good to know where you can control this.
[39:04] Now, I don't know why it's like a psychological problem, but I really dislike clicking on a trackpad. I much prefer to simply tap the trackpad rather than having to press hard to click.
There are two settings to control this that I like to change, and for no reason other than Apple likes to make settings kind of a fun scavenger hunt, they're two very different places. To simply enable tap to click on your trackpad, in system settings, right below the keyboard settings that we just changed, you'll see trackpad. At the bottom of that menu, you'll see a toggle to tap to click. Now, even if you're okay with true clicking, you know, pressing hard on your trackpad, it's nice to have that feature enabled for when you like to use a lighter touch. Now, the other time I normally have to click instead of tap is when I want to drag a window or a file around on screen. You can enable a feature that allows you to gently place three fingers on your trackpad while at the top of a window or on a file and drag without ever clicking. This feature is called three-finger drag and boy howdy is it buried.
It used to be in the trackpad settings which made perfect sense but no longer is it easy to find.
[40:11] In system settings, guess what? Open accessibility, select pointer control. On that page you'll see a button to change trackpad options. Finally, one of the options that will be revealed is dragging style and it'll have a drop-down where you can select three-finger drag.
Now it is upsetting to me that they didn't hyphen three finger, but you'll get over that transgression the first time you use three fingers to drag a window or a file.
[40:38] Now I had cataract surgery a few years ago and I now have the best vision of my life, but I still run into situations where something's printed too small on a website for me to be able to read.
My perfect, my favorite example of things that are printed too small is street names in mapping apps. You can zoom in, but when you go to try to read them, the cities and streets get bigger, but the street names shrink back to the same size.
The solution is to enable using a gesture with scrolling to temporarily zoom in on your screen. Open our good old friend System Settings again and go to our favorite tab Accessibility and select Zoom. Look for a toggle to enable Use Scroll Gesture with Modifier Keys to Zoom.
Below you'll see the option to choose a modifier key for the scroll gesture. I just use the default control key. Once this feature is enabled, you can hold down the control key and scroll up on your trackpad or mouse. The entire screen will zoom in right where your cursor is so you can read that darn street name. Once you've successfully read the absurdly tiny text, simply hold down the control key again and scroll back down and everything will go back to normal. I really like this feature because it simply never gets in your way, but it's right there at your fingertips when you need it.
Well, I've now talked about most, if not all of these settings in the past over the years, but I've really wanted to collect them all in one place where you could see the kind of settings that might make your Mac life more efficient after a clean install or after getting a new Mac.
[42:08] Well, that is going to wind us up for this week. Did you know you can email me at allison at podfeet.com anytime you like? If you have a question or suggestion, send it on over. I love to help people. You can follow me on mastodon at podfeet at chaos.social.
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[42:50] Music.