Mic Drop offers temporary floating status warnings and a persistent Menu Bar item as options. I’ve gotten so used to having a physical mute button on my podcast recording setup that it’s quite disconcerting when I use a different setup that doesn’t offer one.… | Continue reading
Generating an image using Image Playground. Apple Intelligence is back, and this time it’s visual. With the iOS 18.2, iPadOS 18.2, and macOS 15.2 updates, Apple is rolling out its second round of generative AI features, including its first image-related features like Genmoji, Ima … | Continue reading
Jason bought a laptop, Apple and Sony may be cooking up a Vision Pro scheme, and we review Apple Intelligence in iOS 18.2.… | Continue reading
There’s a line in Titanic that any IT or security professional can relate to. The ship’s architect explains that he wanted to include enough lifeboats for all the passengers, “but it was felt the deck would look too cluttered.”… | Continue reading
I took piano lessons when I was a kid, and always hated practicing. I can blame it on the cold room we kept the piano in, but part of the reason I hated it was that most of what I played was boring.… | Continue reading
My thanks to Magic Lasso Adblock for sponsoring Six Colors this week. With over 5,000 five star reviews; Magic Lasso Adblock is simply the best Safari ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.… | Continue reading
Developer Simon Støvring (Scriptable, Runestone) has just released a fun new app for the holidays called Festivitas: Festivitas automatically adds festive lights to your menu bar and dock upon launch and you can tweak their appearance to match your preferences ✨ That’s it—that’s … | Continue reading
Lex gets a new Watch, Moltz is tired of technology and Dan thinks Apple doesn’t need our help.… | Continue reading
Our family tech support travails, tech gift recommendations under $50, smart home decorations, and seasonal music recommendations.… | Continue reading
The KVM switches between the Mac mini and MacBook Pro, allowing them to share the keyboard, a monitor (on the arm above) and a mouse. The Zoom Podtrac P4 audio interface is also shared between the two Macs. … | Continue reading
Stephen Hackett joins Jason to discuss emergency calls, reaction to Jason’s “The Mac is the Model” piece, iPhone metals, our innate troubleshooting powers, Jason’s laptop dilemma, the ChatGPT Mac app, and some very old Vision Pro news.… | Continue reading
A while back I wrote about a piece of software that let you control Logitech’s Litra Glow camera via Shortcuts. But recently I came across an even better option that’s even easier to use and set up.… | Continue reading
Magic Lasso Adblock: 2.0x faster web browsing in Safari Want to experience twice as fast load times in Safari on your iPhone, iPad and Mac? Then download Magic Lasso Adblock – the ad blocker designed for you.… | Continue reading
My book about Apple’s Photos app on Mac, iPhone, and iPad has been updated to cover some additional stuff announced with the iPhone 16. It’s a free update for fourth edition readers.… | Continue reading
My thanks to Magic Lasso Adblock for sponsoring Six Colors this week. With over 5,000 five star reviews; Magic Lasso Adblock is simply the best Safari ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.… | Continue reading
Our tech use with family and friends during the holidays; gadgets we’d bring for a long, power-limited day trip like attending a Supreme Court rally; seeking or avoiding Black Friday tech deals; and the apps we use for recipe discovery and management.… | Continue reading
‘Tis the (Black Friday) season.… | Continue reading
Apple’s movie mistakes, Comcast pushes cable channels onto the ice floe, Diamond exits bankruptcy, Netflix goes live, the holiday season as a streaming opportunity, and our TV picks!… | Continue reading
Apple might recommit to the smart home, Smart Siri feels a long way off, Apple’s movie movies anger Hollywood creatives, and Jason’s done with the era of App Store exclusivity.… | Continue reading
Do you want to block all YouTube ads in Safari on your iPhone, iPad and Mac? Then download Magic Lasso Adblock – the ad blocker designed for you.… | Continue reading
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, writing at The Verge: Next year, [Apple] will reportedly launch an “AI wall tablet for home control,” and it’s said to be developing more devices for the home (including cameras, a tabletop robot, and maybe even a TV). … | Continue reading
Journalist and developer Tyler Fisher, on his personal blog: Today I’m excited to launch the public beta of Sill, my new social media tool. Sill connects to your Bluesky and Mastodon accounts and aggregates the most popular links in your network. … | Continue reading
My thanks to 1Password for sponsoring Six Colors this week. 1Password wants you to understand the details about how laws like GDPR can affect your business.… | Continue reading
Apple’s spent a lot of time investigating alternative ways of interacting with its devices, but one of my favorite is one of the newest: head gestures with AirPods.… | Continue reading
My current desktop Mac, the one I work on day in and day out in my garage/office, is an M1 Mac Studio. I’ve had it for almost three years, and it’s still great.… | Continue reading
How we deal with physical media, the most tech heavy restaurants we’ve patronized, tech that ended up disappointing us, and the social media networks of yesteryear that we’d bring back.… | Continue reading
Get ready for the Apple TV TV.… | Continue reading
In my previous post for Six Colors, I wrote about why Apple’s Clean Up (and photo retouching tools in general) were a fine tool for people to have in their photo editing toolkits.… | Continue reading
Is Apple trying to boost revenue by truly embracing smart home products, or is it too late? Also, Jason reviews Kindles while lamenting the current state of e-readers, and the Vision Pro gets new accessories and a music video by The Weeknd!… | Continue reading
When the EU enacted GDPR in 2018, executives and security professionals waited anxiously to see how the law would be enforced. And then they kept waiting…and waiting…but the Great European Privacy Crackdown never came.… | Continue reading
My thanks to Magic Lasso Adblock for sponsoring Six Colors this week. With over 5,000 five star reviews; Magic Lasso Adblock is simply the best Safari ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.… | Continue reading
Monday Night football on ABC, streaming delays, and more TV picks. (Downstream+ subscribers also get: an Unrivaled new sports TV product; Amazon’s deal with the NBA; and pondering the limits of the NFL.)… | Continue reading
On Halloween, Apple announced its fiscal fourth quarter results, posting another flat sales quarter even while continuing to beat all-time quarterly revenue records. And as usual, I filled a bunch of numbers into a Numbers spreadsheet, ran my little charting Automator app, and po … | Continue reading
How we read (with or without tech), our favorite pet tech, whether we’d get a HomePod with a screen, and the small cute tech we like.… | Continue reading
The Kindle Paperwhite (left) and Colorsoft (right). The world of ebook readers is in a weird place, but when hasn’t it been? E-readers have always been a strange product niche, not just since that oddball first-generation Kindle, but since our first attempts to make computerized … | Continue reading
Stay for the thrilling conclusion to Lex’s refund odyssey.… | Continue reading
One of the most-used buttons on my Stream Deck is a one-touch connection to the Mac mini server sitting in a closet in my house. I’m frequently popping in to manage files on my RAID, or reconfigure a script that’s fed by my weather station, all sorts of odd jobs.… | Continue reading
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has been reporting for some time that Apple is planning a “smart display” to be used in the home, but Tuesday he reported a remarkable level of detail: The product has a touch interface that looks like a blend of the Apple Watch operating system and the iP … | Continue reading
Magic Lasso Adblock: incredibly private and secure Safari web browsing Online privacy isn’t just something you should be hoping for – it’s something you should expect.… | Continue reading
Jason’s gotten his hands on the M4 MacBook Pros, the M4 iMac, and a visionOS widescreen Mac display. (And we’re both considering Mac mini purchases.) Plus: Apple’s issues with new products, and the threat of huge EU fines.… | Continue reading
My thanks to 1Password for sponsoring Six Colors this week. Imagine if you went to the movies and they charged $8000 for popcorn. This is something like what IT and security professionals feel when a software vendor hits them with an outrageous premium for Single Sign-On (SSO), o … | Continue reading
Ready to go, a more respectable Vision Pro travel case. Belkin has just released two new Vision Pro accessories—a $50 add-on Head Strap that supplement Apple’s Solo Knit Band, and a $100 Travel Bag.… | Continue reading
The latest update to the MacBook Pro is not a radically different laptop than what has come before. Since the product was redesigned in 2021, subsequent updates have been largely the same, at least on the outside.… | Continue reading
Meet the new Mac mini—for the first time in the last fourteen years, not the same as the old Mac mini. The latest iteration of Apple’s most diminutive Mac really earns that superlative in its newest incarnation, only the third in its history.… | Continue reading
The iMac, redesigned for Apple silicon in 2021, is a gorgeous reinvention of Apple’s venerable all-in-one. It’s colorful (if you want it to be), powerful (enough), and designed to show itself off at home and in public spaces.… | Continue reading
Apple’s AI ads rub us the wrong way.… | Continue reading
Our default apps on iOS, how we feel about Genmoji, our favorite end-to-end encrypted messaging platforms, and whether we use Live Activities for news and sports.… | Continue reading
You may remember Aaron Rodgers throwing a Surface on an NFL sideline, but this year football teams in three college conferences are using iPads, as detailed in this feature from Apple Newsroom: “Having iPad on the sidelines makes coaching way more effective in-game,” says Mike Sa … | Continue reading