Aric answers PMUG members’ questions about Contacts and Calendar app issues, Updating the Apple Watch installed OS, festive lights on your Mac, Dropbox issues, and more!
Automatically Generated Transcript:
Aric • 00:00
Welcome to the PMUG December 2025 podcast. Today, we’re doing an extended Q&A with lots of interesting questions. Let’s get started.
Michael • 00:16
Hello, everyone. You know me as PMUG’s webmaster and the one who updates PMUG social media accounts. My day job is as a website designer for a small website design firm in Princeton. Unfortunately for me at work, business has been down and my boss can only afford to have me working part-time, so I’m looking for a new job. If you know of any business or organization that needs a webmaster, website designer, graphics designer, or social media manager, could you please get in touch with me? Even remote work is fine. Here’s my contact information, and I’ll also put my contact information into the Zoom chat window. Oh, I have to share my screen. Come back to Zoom. Oh, here we go. So here’s my contact information. And I’ll also put this into the chat. Thank you very much. I appreciate it.
Aric • 01:06
No problem. Good luck.
Michael • 01:08
Yeah.
Aric • 01:10
OK, so this month, we are doing a extended Q&A session. We already have a number of interesting questions. For the questions that came in, there weren’t a lot of links. but the ones that I have, let me just paste it into the chat here. I’ll paste it again at the end in case anyone joins us sort of near the end or in the middle of the presentation. There’s that. Okay, so this way you have references to all the links that I’m going to talk about today. And also, we’re going to start with the questions that everyone sent in. If you’re not currently asking a question, I recommend that you keep yourself muted. Most of you are, so that’s great. We’ll also be recording tonight, as usual. So if you don’t want to appear on screen, make sure you leave your video off. You can also paste questions into the chat box. I will check them out after I’m done covering the questions that everybody sent in originally. So now that we’ve got that out of the way, let me go here and share my screen. Do this one. Okay. Okay. All right. Hopefully everybody can see my screen. I can, yes. Just thumbs up if you can’t. All right. Great. Thank you. So let me switch over to my question and answer document. Okay. All right. So one of the first questions that I received was from someone who was having issues with sleep tracking on their Apple Watch and Apple phone. And they wanted to know, is there a way to fix it? Because they were getting weird numbers like, you were asleep for two days, that kind of thing. And they wanted to know if it was possible to fix. So I’ve actually run into this for someone else in the past. So I do have some experience with it. And before we get started, if you’re not already aware, if you have an Apple Watch, you can track your sleep. Obviously, you have to wear your watch to bed. But given that your Apple Watch charges up very quickly these days, you know, you can charge it up, you know, for 15, 20 minutes before you go to sleep and you’re good to go all night. But in order for it to track your sleep, you do need to set a few things up. So this document right here from Apple will explain how to set up a normal sleep schedule if you’re not familiar with it. It’s also in the links document that I sent a link to in the chat. But specifically, for most people, once you set up a sleep schedule, it just sort of works. You wear your watch to bed, and then it will tell you how long you were in bed, how long it thinks you were sleeping, and what cycles of sleep you were in, whether it was REM sleep or deep sleep, etc. If you run into problems where it is giving you what you’re sure are incorrect information, for example, you’ve been sleeping for days at a time, etc. It is possible that there is a disconnect between the data that’s coming from your Apple Watch and your phone. And believe it or not, both are used during sleep. The only thing that’s critical to have on you is your Apple Watch. But there are some things where in order to figure out whether you’re actually sleeping, it’ll check the status of your phone as well. So if you run into any problems, the first thing you want to do is make sure that both your iPhone and your Apple Watch have the same version of the operating system installed. So right now, the latest and greatest is iOS and Apple Watch 26. So make sure that you have that. and that includes any minor updates that might be available for your watch or for your iPhone. Make sure that they are the same one. This helps to avoid problems like disconnects between sending data between your Apple Watch and your iPhone. Since your Apple Watch backs up directly to the paired iPhone and sends data to that iPhone, it’s important that they both more or less stay on the same version of the OS that you have running on them. Another thing to make sure that you do is to ensure that you have in the privacy and location section, there is a system services section, and then you go to motion calibration and distance. You have to make sure that it is on. So let me just show you really quickly. Okay. Hopefully you can see my iPhone now. Thumbs up. Can you see my? Oh, good. All right, so we’re in settings here. So I’m gonna go down to privacy and security, and then location services. And then here’s a list of everything that has access to location data. And if you scroll all the way to the bottom, there is a system services section. This is services that are built into the iPhone that may need to access your location. So you click on that or tap on that, and then it will go here and show you a variety of system services, which you can turn on and off. But this one right here, motion calibration and distance, that needs to be on for sleep tracking to work. So if it isn’t, make sure you turn it on. Or if you want to make sure, you can turn it off for a moment and then turn it back on again to make sure that it’s properly set. And then you’re good to go there. The next thing that I would do in a situation where you’re having a problem like this is I would restart both your Apple Watch and the iPhone. Sometimes just restarting both of them can get the connection reconnected and make things work properly again. Another thing to keep in mind is that when you are sleeping, you want to make sure that your Apple Watch is snug, but it doesn’t have to be too tight. but it shouldn’t be loose and sort of sliding around on your wrist. But it doesn’t have to be real tight where it’s cutting off circulation. You just want to make sure that the various lights, etc., and sensors that are on the bottom of your Apple Watch can make proper contact with your skin. And also make sure that you have plenty of battery life on the watch before you go to bed. And like I said, it only takes 15, 20 minutes. And as long as you have at least 30% available on your Apple Watch, you’re generally going to be fine. But, you know, if you want to charge it up more, that’s certainly up to you. Now, if all of that still doesn’t fix your problem, the thing I would do is remove and re-add your Apple Watch to your iPhone if nothing else works. So to do that, it’s very similar to the process you would follow if you are getting a new Apple Watch. So you go to the Watch application, click here on All Watches, and then here’s my Apple Watch. And you can remove the Apple Watch by clicking the eye there and then just scrolling down and going to Unpair Apple Watch. What this will do, we’ll make a full backup of all the data that’s currently on your Apple Watch, including any health data, etc. And then when the backup is fully complete and only then, it will basically wipe your watch, remove all of the data and get it ready. So it’s like a like a brand new watch. Then you would just repair it with your iPhone like you would if as if it were a new watch But restore it from the backup that was just made It will ask you when you when you go to set up the watch Do you want to restore from the this backup the more recent backup? You do want that? You don’t want to start as a new watch And then once you do that, you should be good to go I did that for a friend of mine and that fixed the problem So I wouldn’t start with that particular step only because it requires a bit of effort. But, you know, if nothing else works, then it’s certainly worth looking into. Okay. Go here. Okay. Now, that’s it for that particular issue that should fix most of the problems you have with sleep tracking. Another question that I got from some people who sent in questions was they were having a problem getting Siri to pronounce contact names correctly. If you have friends or family who have unusual names or perhaps pronounce their name in a way that is not immediately obvious just from looking at the spelling of the words. Or if for any other reason Siri happens to mispronounce your name or somebody else’s, you can fix that. In order to avoid accidentally triggering her too often, from now on I’m just going to refer to her as “Dingus” instead of her name. So this way it doesn’t trigger any of your iPhones, etc. So for example, if Dingus is not pronouncing your name correctly, as the main user of your iPhone, you can just say, “Hey, Dingus, learn to say my name.” And when you say that, she’ll say, “Okay, tell me how to say your name.” And just say it how you want it to be said, and then she’ll basically repeat it back to you. If everything’s okay, you’re good to go. remember that method of pronouncing your name for the future. But for others, if you run into a problem, you will need to go to the contacts application, either on your phone or on your Mac, doesn’t really matter, as long as you have them, you know, synchronized through iCloud. When you make changes in one place, it should appear in contacts everywhere. But just make sure that you have a contact for the person whose name you want Dingus to be able to pronounce. You don’t need to have a lot of their details, but you do need to have their name. So add a contact if necessary, and then you can go through that process. So let me show you how to do that. I’m going to use contacts on my Mac just because it’s a more straightforward process for me to show you on here. So right now what we’re looking at is a sort of a test category where I’ve made a bunch of copies of existing contacts that I have. This is just a test contact that I’ve created, and then there’s one for where actually work. That will become important later. If you don’t have the contact, you just hit the plus button up here, and then you hit “New Contact”, and then you can create a whole new contact. But let’s say for example, I do have a contact in my account here that I want Dingus to be able to pronounce. So I just select the contact, and then I click edit, and then here are all the different form fields, etc. And then let me go to, yes, we’re going to go to settings here. I’m going to show you how to add fields that don’t currently exist in the contacts app. On your iPhone or iPad, at the very bottom of the edit screen, there will be add field button. It doesn’t appear on the contacts on the Mac. That’s because it’s under settings. And we go here to template and you can add a field to the default template that is used for your Mac. So there are a variety of items that are not usually there. But in this case, what we’re looking for is you want to add a pronunciation field. So if we go over here, where is it? I don’t see it. Let’s scroll up here. Okay. It’s not here. Okay. Believe it or not, this phonetic first last name is not what you want. That is a field that you can use to put in a phonetic pronunciation that is a reminder for you. So let me switch over to my iPhone here, and I will show you on there how to do this. Demo is fun. Okay. Okay. Go to contacts, and then I’m going to choose my card and then edit and then scroll all the way down. Okay. Okay, and then we have this add field here. So click add field and you have pronunciation first name and pronunciation last name. Okay, so depending on what they’re getting, what Dingus is getting wrong, if it’s the first name you want to put in pronunciation first name, if it’s first name and last name you want to put in both. So put in, say, pronunciation first name. And here it is right here. OK. So Dingus actually says my name correctly, even though it’s spelled a little differently. But if you had an unusual name, you could just write in here how to say it, so like that. And what you would do then is save this, and then ask her to say that contact’s name. And she will use this as the sort of template for how to say the name. If it’s still not quite correct, feel free to adjust this pronunciation section until she gets the pronunciation exactly correct. Okay. I’m going to remove that because I don’t need it right now. All right. There we go. And if we go over to here, that’s weird. Okay. Anyway, that is how you basically tell Dingus to correctly say a name. Readjust it as many times as you need until you get the pronunciation just correct. Now, there were other questions about the contacts. This next question says, in the last few years, I’ve had several problems that I’ve not been able to resolve. Inexplicably, a large number of contacts simply disappeared, and I couldn’t recover them. Subsequently, for a time, contacts were appearing, duplicated in the contacts program. Although most of that has since gone away, a few contacts are still duplicated. Very recently, again, a large number of contacts has once again disappeared, without any particularly discernible pattern. At least one of the contacts was many years old and hadn’t been modified in several years. and at least one of them had been added within the last six months. So they wanted to know if I could help possibly recover missing contacts in a case like this and, you know, how to deal with things like duplicates, etc. He says, I am using Apple’s online backup, so I assume that means iCloud, but I’m concerned if I can recover an old version of my contacts. Basically being concerned that like if you cover an old version of the contacts, it’s going to roll back changes that were made more recently. Okay, so while I can’t definitively tell you exactly why you’ve been having these problems, I can actually hazard a few guesses. So there may have been a few things going on. One, there may be some sort of have been some sort of disconnect between the various devices. iCloud, back in the day, iCloud was not super reliable a long time ago. So there were periodically issues where syncing wouldn’t work correctly or there’d be other problems like that. Thankfully, that is something they’ve resolved in more recent versions of iCloud. And honestly, it’s been pretty rock solid for the most part on the iCloud side of syncing. That doesn’t mean you can’t still have problems. So it is possible that there was some sort of disconnect between one or more of your devices. Maybe some of the data hadn’t been synced over to all of the devices, or perhaps there was some corruption on one of the devices and some of the data disappeared there. The disappearing data there then got synced to iCloud.com and then disappeared from all your devices. because iCloud is the definitive location where the definitive list of your contacts and other things that you sync up there lives. But of course, this is not primarily a backup. It is a syncing. So if you remove a contact from your contacts app, it will get synced everywhere, and that particular contact will disappear. Now, obviously, a lot of people have realized, like, oh, hey, I made a mistake. You know, I don’t have any other backups. You know, what can we do? And thankfully, Apple has sort of come to the rescue a bit. So there is a method to recover recently changed or deleted contacts using iCloud, if that’s where you sync your stuff to. I will show that in a minute. And obviously, if you do things like time machine backups of your main or one of your Macs, the data may live there as well. So that’s another possible location where you can go to get it. So no matter what the problem actually was, though, you’re probably going to want to do these following steps on a Mac rather than an iPhone or iPad. because there are some things that are just way easier to do on a Mac, as well as if you do time machine backups, you’re going to need to access a Mac where those backups are located. So ideally, what you want to do is go to your Mac that has the most complete current set of your contacts. Maybe it still doesn’t have everything you need, but make sure that it has as much as possible of what you’re looking for. If all your Mac’s various contacts apps are exactly the same, then it doesn’t matter. Generally speaking, they will be, but every once in a while, like if you have a Mac that is not currently connected to the internet, its local copy of your contacts may be different. And so you may be able to recover some data from there. Now, like I said, if you don’t use Time Machine and you don’t have any other backups, that’s okay because you can always look into iCloud for some backups. But if iCloud doesn’t have what you’re looking for and you don’t have any other backups, well, your data is gone. It’s one of the reasons why I always recommend, you know, regular backups. It’s a good idea to have multiple backups in multiple locations just for situations like this. But let’s see if we can possibly show you how to recover some stuff on your Mac that will sync over to your other devices. So we currently have contacts open here. And the first thing you’re going to want to do is you’re going to want to back up your existing contacts. because any restorations we’re going to do will probably overwrite some of the newer stuff. So you want to make sure that no matter what, you have at least one good backup that you can restore, both locally and preferably on some other device. So the first thing you want to do is you want to go into your contacts here, and you want to go to Settings. And then go to vCard here at the end. Generally, by default, probably version 3.0 is going to be selected. If you have an older version of Contacts, this number may be different. Pick whatever the most recent version of vCard is available for your Contacts. And then I would also make sure that export notes in vCard and export photos in vCards are selected. because that will back up more of your data so that you can restore from vCards or from a contacts backup. Okay, so to back things up, typically what you want to do is you want to go into the all contacts section of your contacts, and then that will list every contact that you have, which is ideal for this particular situation. I’m just going to go back to test here because I don’t need to back up my entire contacts. So the first thing you want to do is Command-A or select all of your contacts. Again, if you have all contacts selected, you do Command-A. You’re going to get all of your contacts backed up. Now, go to File and then Export. And the first one you’re going to want to do is this Contacts Archive. And this will back up your entire, all of your selected contacts and all the data inside the Contacts app completely in a way that you can restore later on. So this is a guaranteed complete copy of your contacts. So definitely, you know, click this and it will ask you where to save your backup. Put it somewhere safe. you can make more than one of these backups and put them in different locations. For example, if you have a thumb drive, I also recommend keeping a copy there. So if something happens to your Mac, you still have another copy of your backup here. And then just to be safe, you will want to export vCard. This will export all of the vCards as a single file. whatever you have selected will be exported as a single vCard file, which you can then import back into your contacts. The nice thing about this is you can always leave off certain vCards, certain contacts that you don’t care about or that you don’t want to back up or you don’t need to worry about. So for example, if you know that there’s some contacts that you made very recent changes to, you can select only the ones that you made very recent changes to and export the vCards for that. This way, when you restore for an older backup, you have just the things that you know you made changes to recently saved in a way to make the restoration easy. But go ahead and select everything and then export vCard, select location, save it to more than one location, ideally just to be safe. Okay. And then once you’ve done that, just to be extra, extra safe, because believe me, the number of times that people have burned themselves purely by accident because they hadn’t planned properly for their backups. I would also have all of them selected and select export as PDF. This will give you a PDF file that contains all of the contact information for all of your contacts. Now, it’s not something that you’re going to be able to import directly back into contacts, but here’s the thing. If for some reason the other exports get corrupted or go missing, at least you have a copy of all of your contacts that you can, you know, pull data out of and, you know, restore them by hand if need be. So again, just better safe than sorry. But that is every method that the current contacts application allows for backups. Now that you have the backups, we can try restoring from older backups. Now, if you use Time Machine, you can restore right from here. Just make sure that your contacts app is the frontmost application, and then you can go up here and go to browse time machine backups. I’m not sure this is going to work because of the recording that we’re doing. Yeah, it doesn’t. Or no, I just– yeah, you guys can’t see it. It’s on my other screen. I’m just going to click cancel here since you can’t see that. But basically, that puts you into time machine mode where you can sort of like go backwards and forwards in time. And it will show you the contacts in your contacts app. So you can look at any of the old backups that you have until you find the cards, the contacts that you’re looking for that went missing. Then you can select them or you can just have it restore all of the contacts from that older backup. Now, if you have it restore all the contacts from the older backup, yes, it will wipe out any of the newer changes that you made to those contacts. So just keep that in mind. But thankfully, you have backups of all of your data so you can just re-import the changed vCards or other items that you want to fix after restoring from your Time Machine backup. Now, if you don’t have Time Machine, that’s okay as long as you’re using iCloud to synchronize stuff. You can go to iCloud.com and here’s mine. Yours may look a little different. but essentially this is your iCloud data on the web. And in this case, what we want to do is go in one of two places. You see these little dots here? This is a quick access menu, right? We want to go down here to data recovery, okay? Or you can scroll all the way down and go to data recovery here. Either way, you end up in the same spot, but go to data recovery. This over here, restoring files actually takes a bit to load all of your files. Now, data recovery only stores data for the last 30 days. If the problems you were having, like if stuff disappeared longer than 30 days ago, well, this is not going to be able to restore that data. But if it happened within the past 30 days, you might be able to get it right here. You see where it says restore contacts. If I click on it here, you can see all of the backups that iCloud has saved for me automatically. I can’t see the data. I can only see the date that things were made. But if you know roughly when your contacts disappeared, you can restore from the date that you want. Now, this will completely restore your contacts on all devices to whatever date it was that you select. So if I select November 20th, no changes I made since November 20th will appear in my contacts. However, iCloud will automatically make another backup of your current contacts before it restores the old one. So if you look at the old file and it’s like, oh, this doesn’t have what I’m looking for, you can go back to the very latest and greatest version of your contacts. You would just click “Restore” over here, and then you have to wait a bit. iCloud will do its thing and then it will send the data to all of the devices that are connected to iCloud. that can take a little bit of time for the changes to appear. So don’t click restore and then expect to immediately go to your Mac and look at the contacts there. It may take a few minutes before everything gets changed over. So be a little bit patient and then go check your devices to see if the data you’re looking for has been restored. At that point, you can export, like, for example, if only a few cards were missing and you only want to restore those, but you’d rather keep all of the more recent changes that you made to your contacts, what you can do is restore the old version, you know, export the cards for all of the changed or missing contacts, and then save them locally, then go back here to iCloud, restore the most recent backup that was made, and then you can use the vCloud, the vCard backups that you made to restore the missing carts. So that at least gives you some options. But, like I said, it’s 30 days. You don’t get to control how often backups are made. Generally speaking, if you make any changes on a given day, iCloud will go through and make a backup on that day so that you have the ability to restore from whatever changes you made at that time. But it is sort of a last resort. But if you don’t have this or if it’s not there, then, like I said, you might want to look to see if you have any old devices that haven’t connected to the internet recently that, you know, maybe might have some old contacts on it that you can use. Okay, where are we here? Okay, next question. Removing duplicates. So the other thing that you mentioned is that you occasionally get duplicates created that many of them have gone away over time, but not all of them. So there is a tool in built-in contacts that will find and offer to remove and or merge duplicates. So you can do another one of these select all contacts, or you can just select a few that you want to have the system check. Go to card up here on your Mac, and then you can go to look for duplicates. it’ll look through the ones that you have selected and I’ll say hey I found some duplicates and then it’ll ask you know hey do you want me to merge the duplicates together so there’s only one remaining copy so it will if if all of the copies are exactly the same you’ll just end up with one card that has just the data if you have more than one card that have slightly different data in it it will merge all of the data and you will get all of the data in a single card. You may want to go back and look at the merge card to get rid of any old data or anything you no longer need. And then if you’re not sure, you can just click cancel here. I’m not going to merge because I made these copies myself. So in fact, when you are using Contacts, if you, for example, are importing vCards from some other program, because vCard is a common format that most contact apps use to share data. So you can import data from other Contacts apps that way. But contacts will look at the cards you’re importing and will tell you, hey, these look the same or very similar to cards that are already in your contacts. and then you can choose to, you know, keep the new one that you’re importing, keep both the one that you have currently and the new one you’re importing so that you end up with two copies of the same card. That may be useful if you want to, you know, manually compare the two before you make any changes or you can merge the existing card with the one that you’re importing. So you have one card with all of that data. So it’s pretty straightforward stuff. Okay. All right. At this point, given that you’ve had a number of problems, I’m going to suggest a rather unusual next step. This is not something that most people will probably need to do, but might be useful in your particular instance since you’ve had weird issues crop up and you’ve imported contacts from old applications in the past, etc. So once you go through all of your backups and you restore all of your contacts to the best of your ability, once on your Mac, Once you’ve gotten it as good as it’s going to get, you know, go through and look through your contacts and make sure that everything is okay as much as you can. Then what you can do is sort of a reset, if you will, of contacts. And the way you do that is, once again, you know, select all of your contacts that are newly cleaned up and ready to go. Go to files, go to export, make the contacts archive, export, export all the V cards, export as a PDF, etc. This way you’re covered, right? And then when you’re sure that you have all of your backups okay, yes, you can look at your V cards just by pressing, you know, you can select the V card in the finder and press the space bar and you can see the content of your V cards right in the finder. So make sure that everything’s okay and your backups are good. As long as that’s the case, you might be able to solve some of this weirdness that occasionally crops up by essentially nuking all of your contacts and bringing them back in and then re-syncing them. So in this case, you would go to all contacts, select all of your contacts just like normal, and then you can delete all of the cards. Get rid of all of your contacts so there’s nothing left. And then you have to let iCloud do its thing. And this is a little bit scary, but it’s going to copy over the, you have no contacts to all of your devices. You want to check and make sure that that happens before you do any restorations. What that’s going to do is essentially reset the contacts database and make sure that it is clean. Then you can go back using the backups that you’ve made, and you can restore them to your local Mac. That will bring back all of the contacts that you used to have. Then iCloud will once again say, “Oh, look, all these new contacts are here.” So it will go and push all of those contacts to all of your devices again. Again, this is not something that most people should ever do. But in your particular case, it might be handy. This might solve the problem where you get weirdness happen from time to time. So worth a shot if it’s a repeating problem as it was in your case. But otherwise, don’t do that. because obviously when you nuke your contacts, there’s always a slight risk that maybe, you know, something happens and you lose your contacts, which is not a great thing. But again, as long as you’ve made good backups, you can restore them right in the contacts app here, just like there’s export, there’s an import function. It’s grayed out right now because I have this stuff here selected, but you can import the stuff that you have exported here to bring it back into the contacts. Okay. If during this process, if like, let’s say for example, one of your devices refuses to sync with iCloud, you may wanna turn off iCloud syncing on that particular device and try turning it back on again. Or maybe there’s something wrong with that particular device. maybe there’s some odd corrupted data stored locally on that device that’s causing a problem, this process will expose that and then you can manually on that device, you know, delete all the contacts and get rid of the data that’s missing and then reconnect it to iCloud to re-sync over everything. But that should get you going again. Okay, next question. And this refers to calendar issues. This question says, in the Apple Calendar program, is there any way to make sort of a default calendar the default choice when I’m entering or downloading a new calendar entry? Sometimes when I try to automatically download an entry, it downloads to a calendar from a different service or it uses a different one of my stored calendars as the default on that device. And I’d rather it just use one that I select as the default. And so the answer to this is yes. Yes, you can absolutely do that. You can control on every single one of your devices what calendars do and don’t appear. And it can be different for every device. So perhaps on your Mac, you want the full complement of calendars. But on your iPhone, you only care about your work calendar. So it is possible to just set it so that that calendar appears on your iPhone. Again, on every device, you can choose what the default calendar is on that specific device. It can be different for every device. They do that intentionally again because every device is used for different reasons, so they don’t want to assume that one size fits all. I will show you how to make that happen. Some providers like iCloud, Google, Yahoo, AOL, Outlook, Hotmail, etc. offer not just mail as a service, but also notes, calendars, contacts, etc. And when you first set up one of these services on one of your Macs or your portable devices, you’ll usually be asked which of the available data types you want to use on your device. You can enable it or disable it so that you can add or remove whatever you do or don’t want on that particular device. So let me walk you through the sort of basics. It’s not terribly difficult. So if we go to system settings, a second here. Okay, and then we’re going to go down to, where is it? Here it is, internet accounts. So on your Mac, if you set up mail or calendars or whatever, any type of internet accounts, your Mac will keep track of that and will not only tell you which ones you’re using, but you can change the settings here. So, for example, on Yahoo, if I click here, you see I have a Yahoo account that I’ve had for eons. I don’t really use it for much, but there is some mail that comes in there. But Yahoo supports both mail, contacts, calendars, reminders, and notes. I don’t use Yahoo’s anything other than mail. So I have all of the only thing I have enabled here is mail on my Mac. And so the calendars that appear on Yahoo will not appear on this Mac. because I don’t want to use them. But if, for example, on my iPhone, I did want the calendars from Yahoo to appear, I can go into the same settings in calendars on the iPhone, which we’ll do in a second, and enable the calendars option. And you can do this for all of your different accounts. And that will control what you see, whether in your contacts or your calendars. In this particular case, you were concerned about your calendars. So that’s what will appear there. Now, if you are doing this on your phone, the process is similar. Let me get out of here and go to here. And then I don’t want to do that. And then we’ll go to settings. And then I’m going to just… Huh, that’s interesting. I’ve never tried to do this before. I wonder if I can just type. No. We’ll just go to apps then. There we go. If I go to calendar, you see right here at the top it says calendar accounts. I click there and here’s all the accounts that have calendars available in them. It’s not necessarily the ones I have activated here. For example, again with Yahoo, I just have mail enabled on my phone. If I want to see the calendars here as well, I select calendars and then the calendars will magically appear in the calendars app. That is true for all of the accounts that you have set up. Contacts, etc, notes, all the same way. But that’s not defaults, that’s just are these calendars available locally on this device, yes or no. If you want to change the default for your particular calendar program on the device. On the iPhone, you’ll go into the calendar settings here, and then scroll down to default calendar right here. If we click on that, I can select all of the different calendars that I have currently activated on this device. My Yahoo ones aren’t activated, so you don’t see those. Okay, but you see my work stuff here, etc. So I can pick whatever I want my default to be. And then a little checkbox will appear next to whatever the default is. So in the future, on my iPhone, if I go to add something to my calendar, the default will be this appointments calendar here. But on my Mac, if I want to, you know, if I want to do something a little different, I can. Here’s my calendar. And then I go to settings and then accounts. Here are all the calendars currently set up on my Mac that have calendars available. Whether I’m using them or not, it doesn’t matter. And you can just click on the various calendar providers that you have and then just click click or unclick this enable this account and that’ll show you that calendar in in the calendars application and then as far as your default goes for this mac you go over to general here and then default calendar is here so here on my mac my default is my icloud home calendar. So when I create a new event or if I add one from the web, that’s where it will go by default. And you can change that at any time. Okay. All righty. That’s how you get everything squared away with your default calendars and setting up your calendars on your various devices. So one last question that I received prior to tonight, and then we’ll open up the floor for other questions or follow-ups for existing questions. The question I received was, I remember that there used to be a program for OS X that would allow you to put twinkling lights and snow and snowmen and Santas and stuff on your desktop, but I haven’t been able to find it lately. Is there a program like that that works with modern Macs? And the answer is yes. Yes, there is and it’s called Festivitas. It’s available at festivitas.app. It’s available for both the Mac and now for the iPhone. The iPhone is a relatively new edition and it can put you know twinkling lights of various types on your screen. It can make it snow. It can do the same on well it can’t make it snow on every screen in your iPhone, but it uses widgets on your iPhone to sort of make it look like there’s just colorful lights twinkling on the top or bottom of your screen. And it’s relatively inexpensive. I think it’s four euros for the Mac, and it’s recommended, I think, $6 for the iPhone. So it’s not going to break the bank and it works pretty well. Let me show you. So I have it set up here. You can see it has the lights up here and it’s sort of subtle because that’s how I have it set but you can increase the brightness of the lights. You can change how the lights look. You can change how the strings look. You can change what happens when your when your pointer gets near some of the lights. Right now I have it set to sort of move out of the way, but you can also have the lights fade so that, you know, they don’t block things that you’re trying to point at. Let me go over here and I will bring up the settings for Festivitas so you can see your options. So you can obviously start this automatically at login if you want. You can show the app in the menu bar, the dock, or both, or nowhere at all. If you choose nowhere at all, it kind of makes it hard to get to these settings, but you can, there is a way to basically, you can just double click on the application that lives in your application folder called Festivitas, and the settings will come up and offer to make changes, etc. But usually I just have it live in the menu bar, which is up here at the top, because I don’t want it, which is right here. And then it needs some accessibility permissions to do what it’s got to do, which I have already granted. This app does not, if you’re wondering, doesn’t share data with the developer, et cetera. So everything stays locally. And this is not a subscription. You buy it once, and you get it until the next major version comes out. And then you can control both the menu bar, i.e. lights hanging off your menu bar up here at the top, or you can even have lights in your dock. It’s off right now because of the recording settings that I have, but normally there are lights down here at the bottom, But because we’re recording tonight, you can’t see them. But they appear above your applications, not below. And you can control not only how they look, how they twinkle. You can control the speed at which they do that. You can control the colors. There’s a variety of different color options that are preset, or you can make your own if you want to. You can add multiple groups of colors. So you can add, you know, if you want more than five colors, you can just click add here and you can keep adding more colors. So it is pretty, you can control the thickness of the cable. You could hide the cable. You can change the color and you control whether you see the lights or not and whether how opaque they are. So let me show you the menu bar settings. you can see how they change. So if I choose a different color here, the colors change to match the new color set. And the nice thing here too is it’s not just sort of winter holidays. They have a variety of different light styles. So they have like fall lights and lights for Valentine’s Day, stuff like that. So pretty much whatever holiday or time of year you’re interested in, there’s probably a light set for that particular thing. In fact, he even has a light set for WWDC. Of course he does because he’s an Apple developer. They regularly add new features and functions to this app, so highly recommended if that’s something you’re interested in. But like I said, not only that, but it can make it snow either on your desktop or above all of your applications. If you select above, as you can see here, it’s actually snowing above all of my applications. It’ll get in the way of the apps as I’m using them, which is fun, but may not be ideal. Now, you can make it go away by using your pointer here. It sort of moves the snow out of the way so it doesn’t get in your way as much. And you can increase that by increasing the repel strength here. But also you can just make it snow on your desktop. So it will go behind all of your applications and only snow on the desktop. So it doesn’t get in the way of whatever you’re doing, but you can still make it festive. And the kind of interesting thing, he’s added support for shortcuts so that you can do things like change when it snows or have, for example, if there’s snow in the forecast, it can automatically start snowing on your desktop when it starts snowing outside. Or it can play music and turn on festive lights at certain times of the day if that’s what you’re in the mood for. Like I said, it’s not just for winter holidays. You can set this up for whatever you’re in the mood for. And for four euros, it’s a steal. Okay. All right. Let’s go back to… I’m going to stop sharing temporarily. And then I’m going to go back to the chat here. And then we’ll open up the floor for other questions. Let me just review to see if there are any questions in the chat that I have missed while I was talking. um okay so frank asked how do you upgrade an apple watch operating system um so in order to do that it’s very similar to the way it happens on your iphone uh let me just i’ll it’s easier just to show you so let me go back to share and then we’ll go to desktop 2 okay and uh you do this You can do this on the watch too, but honestly, it’s easier on your phone. Move this over here. Okay. We’re going to go down here. Go to the watch app on your iPhone and then go to general. And then up here at the top, you’ll see software update. So you click that and it’ll check to see if there’s any updates available for your watch. If there is, it’ll offer to download them. You can then say yes, go ahead and download it. You obviously do need to take your watch off and plug it into power in order to be able to update the operating system. But, you know, you have to charge your watch at some point. And so you can set it so that your watch will automatically update when it is locked and it is charging on power. It will automatically attempt to update the watch operating system while you’re essentially sleeping or doing other stuff, charging your watch. So that’s how you do it. It’s not dissimilar to how you would do it if you wanted to update your iPhone. So in the iPhone, you would go to your settings. You go to general here. Let me get rid of this. So you would start here and then you go to general and then software update. And then it’ll look for updates to your phone. Okay, that answers that question, I think. Let me see if there are others. Temporarily stop sharing. Okay, so Terry says she has a Dropbox question. So what is your Dropbox question, Terry?
Terry • 59:38
Well, many years ago, I guess I signed up for Dropbox because my friend said, oh, we need to share files. Let’s do it this way. And I had a client that wanted to do it that way and, you know, was all fine and good. And so apparently, and this was two computers ago, or the previous computer, I guess, not the computer I’m currently using. And apparently I set it up so that it backed up my computer. You know, they said it could, so why not? Sure. And there was something that where you could have things in a folder that wouldn’t really be on your hard drive, but they would be in Dropbox. And when you accessed them, they would open up and like that. Well, I don’t use Dropbox anymore. I don’t really want to use it. I don’t care about it. and I get these messages, your Dropbox space is at capacity. Click here to upgrade or blah, blah, blah. So I tried to unwrap all this stuff, and I did get the Mac backup to stop being a backup, but there’s still a Time Machine disk that wants to backup. Even though I don’t use that disk anymore, I have a different disk that I use for Time Machine now. And then I did identify a folder on my hard drive that must be the special folder. And it has like 70 megs worth of files that I really don’t care about. But what disturbs me the most is that when you look at your directory path, I guess because of this backup thing, I’ve got the Mac and then I’ve got users and I’ve got Terry and then I’ve got Dropbox. and then I have Mac and then I have documents and blah, blah, blah. So I have this immediate folder in there. And, you know, how can I like disentangle myself from Dropbox? Okay. So do you have the Dropbox client installed on your Mac? Yeah. When I go to the, can I share my screen? Sharing is turned off. Well, yeah, I do. It’s in the menu. When I click what’s up in the menu, I get a little thing, and up comes – I can click here, and then my preferences will show general accounts, backup, blah, blah, blah. So, yeah, that’s our –
Michael • 01:02:18
Terry, I made you a co-host, and now you can share your screen.
Terry • 01:02:21
Oh, okay. Thanks. Okay. So here’s the – Right. And here’s the folder that’s the Dropbox folder. and what kind of bugs me is is in any like ordinary kind of situation you’ve got dropbox as an intermediate folder and i’m afraid i don’t want to like move anything but i’d like to for them to just go away and stop hassling me about upgrading and okay so you would prefer to stop
Aric • 01:02:53
using dropbox altogether is that what you’re saying or do you want to still be able to use it
Terry • 01:02:57
but just sort of yeah i we use uh google drive to share files with okay the organization i’m with and here’s where where i did manage to undo this one but this one i can’t seem to make it like not want to anyway i would just like to get rid of it sure so um the uh let me uh let me just go
Aric • 01:03:24
over here. The first thing you’re going to want to do is actually get rid of the Dropbox client from your Mac because it inserts itself into your operating system and, you know, makes a lot of cool features work. But here’s the thing, if you don’t really want to use them, then there’s no point you, you know, wasting the CPU and the space, etc. and all that stuff. So, let me go here. I used to use Dropbox as well, but it’s been a few years since I had it installed on my computer. I want to make sure that they haven’t changed the method that they use for removing it.
Terry • 01:04:11
I have it in applications, but yeah, okay, so go ahead.
Aric • 01:04:14
Right. So, okay. So here we are on the Mac. Okay. I’m going to paste a link into the chat here. This is their directions for like, how do you get rid of Dropbox on my computer? So the first thing I would do is follow these directions to basically get Dropbox disentangled from your Mac. Once the software is off your Mac, any, if for some reason, like if it leaves your Dropbox folder behind, because Dropbox started life as just a, hey, we’re going to create a folder on your Mac somewhere, and that we’re going to synchronize whatever’s in there, you know, on all of your devices. And that was its claim to fame. Over time, they’ve added a ton of new features and functions, et cetera. But that basic function is still how it works. So if in your settings, I think under the general sections of the preferences there, I think that’s where you can tell it like, hey, where do I want Dropbox to live? Maybe it’s not there. Maybe it’s maybe sync. Yeah, probably. There is, yeah, there it is. Dropbox folder location. See that users, Terry, Terry Ruby, and then Dropbox? That’s where your Dropbox files are all stored. So when you remove this, you want to make sure you go there to look into your user folder on your Mac there and make sure the Dropbox folder is gone. I mean, obviously, if you want to keep some of the files that were in there, then fine, move them wherever you want them to live. but I would delete the Dropbox folder once you’ve gotten rid of the application. If you try to do it now, it’s going to try to basically undo what you’re telling it to do. So the first thing to do is to remove the application.
Terry • 01:06:21
And the application will remove this.
Aric • 01:06:23
Yeah, it should go in. Yeah, so it won’t get rid of your Dropbox folder itself. That thing right there, user Terry Ruby slash Dropbox, but it will get rid of the integrations on the side, etc. And also, you can just right click on Dropbox there and remove it from the sidebar if
Terry • 01:06:46
you don’t want it to be there. If you right click on that. I
Aric • 01:06:50
don’t their app might might force it to reappear. But yeah, pretty much anything that’s in your favorites there, you can remove that way by right clicking on it and then you you know, selecting to remove it.
Terry • 01:07:02
– This drop box, which shows up here, right under Terry Ruby. – Yeah. – This and, okay, that’s all fine and good. But if I look at something, anything else on my hard drive documents, for instance, it’s underneath drop box also.
Aric • 01:07:21
– Yeah, it’s not really. So I think what you’re seeing there is sort of your top level folders, Because see how it’s showing your user, basically everything that’s in your user’s directory. So there’s your Dropbox folder. But it’s not underneath Dropbox. But Dropbox is sort of insinuating itself as a location pretty much everywhere. I think they do it so that it makes it easier for you to navigate to the location where Dropbox stores files. So you can store more of your stuff in there and pay them more money. But the first thing I would do is get rid of the application first and foremost. Then you can go and just go into your user folder there, select Dropbox and delete it if you don’t want the folders. Then, after you do that, I would go to Dropbox.com and log in on the web. Don’t let it install any of the applications. Don’t let it force you to do any of that stuff. Just go to Dropbox.com, log in, and you should be able to see, oh, here’s all of my data. Here’s where everything lives. So in the web interface, you can actually delete your files from Dropbox. Once you’re sure you don’t need them, you know, go ahead and delete everything. You’re clearly not going to use Dropbox again. You can keep the account open, but if you remove all of the data from the Dropbox website after removing the application, that will clear up the, hey, you know, you need more space because you’ll get rid of all of the data that’s living in Dropbox. So that’s the way to properly clear it out after you’re all set.
Terry • 01:09:18
So what they’re complaining about is these two, is this backup scheme that was happening that I don’t care about because I don’t need it. I mean, I’ve got time. Yeah, yeah.
Aric • 01:09:32
And once you’ve removed everything from your Mac, the application, et cetera, you can just go to Dropbox.com and you can delete literally everything. you’ll go the main the main um page will show you all of the like the all the main folders that are in your dropbox folder and then you can just select them and delete them right in in the web page for dropbox.com and once you do that uh i think dropbox has a like a trash folder so the stuff that you delete will go into the trash and then i think you can tell it to empty the trash if you’re like, no, I definitely don’t want this stuff. And then that will clear up all of that used disk space so that it won’t pester you to keep upgrading.
Terry • 01:10:23
Yeah. Okay. So the only thing that is on Dropbox’s servers, really, is anything in this folder, which is basically the only thing in here that I have actual data in is this one. has some stuff. Right. That’s everything else in here are, are there like sample files and stuff? How do you use? Gotcha. Yeah. All like fake stuff. So there’s really only one of these. So I just, you know, they give you these scary messages about you’ll lose your data and all this kind of crap. And yeah, sure that this is really the only thing that they have, except for those backups that I don’t care about that I would like to get rid of.
Aric • 01:11:14
Yes, yes.
Terry • 01:11:16
And now that I’ve taken the Mac off of the backup, I would have thought that they would have gotten rid of the stuff that was previously backed up.
Aric • 01:11:26
Yeah, like I said, they have like a trash feature, you know, so in case you accidentally delete something you didn’t mean to, you can go back and restore it. So yeah, you actually have to, you probably will have to go onto Dropbox.com and delete your data and empty the trash. And once you do that, then it should say, oh, your Dropbox is empty. Because, you know, you do get some free amount of storage space in Dropbox without paying anything. It’s not a lot, but you get some. And that you can just leave, you know, you don’t ever have to worry about Dropbox again. Because it’s not, you know, you’re not using it for anything. The account will be there if you ever decide you want to use it again. But, you know, you don’t have to worry about it pestering you. Okay.
Terry • 01:12:14
I mean, I don’t use it, but once in a while my sister or friend might use it. So I don’t hate it and want it out of my life, but I just want to make it just simple and clean. I don’t want these messages saying that, and I don’t want to know that I have my data being stored there and not on my computer. You know what I mean? Right, right, right. It’s clean. So, okay. So you, I’ll stop my share now. So you sent me a link in the chat. That’s how to uninstall the Mac application from your.
Aric • 01:12:52
I will follow up on that then. Yeah. Thanks a lot. I appreciate that. Yeah, no problem. I mean, there are third-party apps that can try to, you know, delete stuff, but generally speaking, follow the directions from the developer and how to remove their stuff. The problem is, like, Dropbox has become bloatware over the years, which started to kind of annoy me because it’s like, we’re not just a folder that synchronizes over data. We’re calendars and contacts and we’re going to do all kinds of things, you know, back up your computer and do all these other things, which fine. I mean, if that’s what you really want from them, but they don’t really give you a choice. They sort of like try to force you to use most of that stuff, which to me is just a pain. So getting rid of it will free up some CPU cycles on your computer and some space. And then you can go to Dropbox.com and get rid of anything else. Okay. All right. Anybody have any other questions?
Frank • 01:13:59
Yeah, I do.
Aric • 01:14:00
Okay, Frank.
Frank • 01:14:01
When I connect my iPad or iPhone to my Mac and I go to the finder to try to, well, to see what’s in it or whatever, it used to show it, but it doesn’t show it anymore.
Aric • 01:14:12
Okay, so it doesn’t show up at all.
Frank • 01:14:14
No, like sometimes I used to back that up to my Mac as well as to the cloud. I back up to the cloud all the time.
Aric • 01:14:21
Right, right, right, right. Okay, so your Mac, what operating system are you using?
Frank • 01:14:29
The latest.
Aric • 01:14:29
The latest, so is it Tahoe or?
Frank • 01:14:32
Tahoe.
Aric • 01:14:33
Okay, yeah, so what’s supposed to happen is that when you take a USB cable and plug it into your iPhone that’s also plugged into your computer. After a few moments, in the finder, if you open a finder window, you should see in the sort of sidebar, like, there’s your iPhone. It should appear there. It sometimes can take, you know, a minute or so before it shows up. But once it’s there, then you can just click on it in the sidebar in the finder.
Frank • 01:15:14
I’m looking there. It doesn’t show up. And when I plug in the iPad, same thing. It doesn’t show up.
Aric • 01:15:21
Huh. Okay. I do know, let’s just see. There might be, like, it’s possible. Have you ever seen on your iPhone or iPad, hey, do you trust this device notification?
Frank • 01:15:39
I’m sure I have. Yeah.
Aric • 01:15:41
So usually the first time that you plug your iPhone or iPad into your computer, it’ll be like, hey, do you want to trust this device? It’s going to say that on the device you’re plugging into your Mac. And if you say no, then it won’t appear in your Mac because your device is automatically blocking the connection. It’s supposed to periodically re-ask you that question. But let me see, because I don’t remember how to sort of force that to happen again. Let me look it up. Okay, let’s see here. Yeah, okay.
Frank • 01:16:26
Now I’m trying to…
Aric • 01:16:27
Okay, here we go, here we go. Yeah, so it says, your device remembers the computers you’ve chosen to trust. If you don’t want to trust a computer or other devices anymore, you can reset the location and privacy settings on your iPhone, iPad, or other device. Okay. So it says in order to, like, if you’ve accidentally said, like, don’t trust this device by accident, you know, if you want to reset that, you have to go to settings on your phone or iPad.
Frank • 01:17:02
All right.
Aric • 01:17:03
Then go to general. Then when you’re in the general section, you got to scroll down to the transfer or reset iPhone or iPad, you know, whatever your device is. And then you type reset. And then when it asks, say, reset location and privacy, but only location and privacy. You don’t want to completely wipe your device.
Frank • 01:17:29
It’s keep testing me, prepare your new iPad. Now, maybe this one was never connected. I don’t know. It’s only a month old.
Aric • 01:17:37
Okay. Yeah, so if it’s never been connected, you should be able to connect it to your Mac. Like I said, it might take a few minutes for it to notice, but it should appear in the sidebar. You might have to scroll down a bit before you see it on your Mac, but it should just appear. If it doesn’t, then that reset location and privacy on the device, you’re having trouble with should get it to work. Let me see if they have any other suggestions for that because there might be some other way to do it too.
Frank • 01:18:08
Just keep saying your iPad is secure, securing all your data on iCloud, uploading apps to data. And it asked me to trade in or recycle. I don’t know why it’s asking me that.
Aric • 01:18:20
Yeah, yeah, you don’t need to do that. There’s just a section for resetting And then there’s a section where it’ll say, like, what do you want to reset?
Frank • 01:18:33
Okay, I found that. There’s a resetting all settings. You don’t want to do the all settings.
Aric • 01:18:39
You want just the location and privacy.
Frank • 01:18:41
Okay. This will reset your locations to the factory default. Well, let’s see what that is.
Aric • 01:18:47
Yeah, yeah. So in other words, it’s going to wipe out your previous privacy settings so that you’ll have to reset them however you want. and also it’ll get rid of your location data that’s stored on the phone. The other thing you can do, USB cable, if you see allowed to connect, choose view. Okay. Following. Okay. So one thing it does suggest, and this is always a possibility, is are you using the USB cable that came with your phone or your iPad? Yeah, this one is, yeah. Okay. The only reason I ask is because sometimes USB cables, they look like they support, you know, they look like normal cables, but they don’t actually support data transfer. So those cables wouldn’t work for, you know.
Frank • 01:19:41
On this iMac or iPad mini, I definitely am using their cable. Yeah. It doesn’t really matter a lot because I back it up to the web and it says it’s there, but I just usually kept it back up on the computer too.
Aric • 01:19:54
Right. Right, right, right, right. So it says that, you know, that should work. Like I said, you can reset the privacy and location if you want to try that again. If it doesn’t work, try keeping your phone plugged in to the Mac, but restart the Mac and the iPhone so that, you know, they’re starting fresh. Then, you know, finish logging into the iPhone and into your Mac there. and hopefully that will get it to be like oh here’s the here’s the device you know do you want to trust it if so say yes on your mac you might say you see a thing that says uh trust um allow accessory to connect um like a it will pop up when when you restart your mac um then click allow and that would that should allow in in a few seconds it should allow your phone to appear in the sidebar there. And that’s the place where, you know how you used to back up your iPhone via iTunes and stuff? Now you do it in the finder by selecting your phone from the list. Yeah, well, whatever. It’s all right. Well, give it a try and see if it works. If it doesn’t… I just was used to seeing it there. Yeah, yeah, it is supposed to do that. But like I said, it is possible that at some point you’re like, no. And then it will remember that and be like, okay, I won’t, you know. Or, you know, it could be just something by accident. Like you didn’t do it intentionally, but, you know, you were moving the phone around or something and it appeared and you didn’t notice and, you know, you accidentally touched the wrong thing or whatever. But that should get it working again if it’s of interest to you.
Frank • 01:21:43
Thank you.
Aric • 01:21:44
And yeah, because other than that, it’s just like, hey, just make sure you’re using the latest operating system on both devices. Yeah, which or try a different USB cable. The other thing, too, is the USB cable plugged directly into your Mac or is it plugged into like a hub?
Frank • 01:22:01
Yeah, I plugged it directly into the Mac.
Aric • 01:22:03
Okay, okay. Because sometimes hubs can cause weird issues, too.
Frank • 01:22:08
It’s going right into the, yeah, this is the silicon one.
Aric • 01:22:12
It’s right into the back of the Mac. Yeah, then you should be fine.
Frank • 01:22:17
It’s actually right to the front of the Mac, but I don’t think that matters.
Aric • 01:22:20
Yeah, no. As long as there’s nothing between you and then the Mac, then you’re good to go. All right, well, hopefully that helps. If not, send me a message. I’ll see what else I can dig up. But according to Apple, this should probably do it. The thing I would say, if you run into issues, definitely open a support chat with Apple. You can go to apple.com and just the support section there. And you can chat online with an Apple representative. And they’ll help you walk through the problem. Because sometimes they know stuff like, oh, there’s a secret way that we don’t normally tell people how to fix this problem, that they’ll know things that I wouldn’t know about getting it to work again. So, yeah, you might want to try that. Even if you’re out of warranty, they’ll usually answer questions like that without a problem.
Frank • 01:23:18
Yeah, well, they’d like you to come back.
Aric • 01:23:20
Yeah, absolutely.
Frank • 01:23:22
You don’t need to piss off at them.
Aric • 01:23:24
Exactly, exactly.
Frank • 01:23:26
Well, thanks again.
Aric • 01:23:27
Yeah, you’re welcome.
Frank • 01:23:27
We don’t have those parties like we used to have, but I know things happen.
Aric • 01:23:31
Yeah, yeah, it’s been tough. It’s unfortunately very expensive these days to meet in person as a group. Yeah, I know. So I keep looking for options. You know what I’m saying? We could live on the edge and ignore the – but if something happened to somebody, it could be a potential problem. But I’ll keep looking into it and see. Well, this is good. Because it would be nice to be able to get together for sure.
Frank • 01:23:56
Well, I used to have those freebies and selling stuff. It was kind of nice.
Aric • 01:24:00
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. But we paid for insurance when we were doing that.
Terry • 01:24:06
But you’re so small, you could go to any restaurant and just ask for their back room and just have something in a restaurant.
Aric • 01:24:14
Yeah, technically, yes. But also, no, from a legal standpoint, because we’re an official group. You’re just a bunch of people. Technically, we could get in trouble for that, because I did check. Now, whether something will happen, you know what I’m saying? But they’re like, you know, to be safe, you really shouldn’t. You should have insurance for any large get-together that you have.
Terry • 01:24:42
Oh, but come on. You’re not going to have a large get-together. Yeah.
Frank • 01:24:47
You’re in California, right?
Terry • 01:24:49
It would come. I mean, you can see how many people are on this meeting. So how many people don’t come to the Zoom meetings that would come? Right.
Aric • 01:24:58
There probably would be a few.
Terry • 01:25:00
And that would be no different than having a big get-together just with your friends. The back of whatever restaurant chain has a…
Frank • 01:25:12
I’m thinking about them when you get all your snowflakes on the screen and stuff.
Aric • 01:25:17
Yeah, yeah. Well, I’ll look into it, but we might be able to do maybe a get-together at a local restaurant. I’ll have to send a note to the group and see if people are even interested in that. If they are, then yeah. I mean, I would love to be able to get together. It would be nice.
Terry • 01:25:38
And everyone can pick up their own tab.
Aric • 01:25:39
It doesn’t cost you anything.
Terry • 01:25:40
You can do it here. You can do it in the summer. You can do it.
Aric • 01:25:43
Yeah, yeah.
Terry • 01:25:44
Yeah.
Aric • 01:25:45
All right. I’ll look into that. And maybe we can do that one of these months. maybe when the days start getting longer again and people don’t have to drive at night etc
Frank • 01:25:59
and the weather yeah especially lately getting pretty nasty uh the way they talk i don’t know yeah yep yeah it’s
Aric • 01:26:08
it’s definitely cold here in new jersey unseasonably cold yeah so i mean i like cold but uh but i yeah i know it’s a little too cold yeah how cold is too cold how cold is it uh
Frank • 01:26:22
Actually, it’s not too bad out. 37 or 32 now.
Aric • 01:26:25
Yeah, but it gets down to, I think, the other, like, two nights ago, I think it got down to almost five degrees here. Oh, really? Oh, my God. Oh, no. So.
Frank • 01:26:37
It was cold.
Aric • 01:26:39
Yeah.
Frank • 01:26:40
My water bottle that I keep in the car when I go to the gym, frozen solid.
Aric • 01:26:47
Of course. Yeah.
Frank • 01:26:49
So it was cold last night.
Michael • 01:26:51
Well, next week on Monday, the low will be 17 degrees. There you go.
Frank • 01:26:56
That’s on the chilly side.
Terry • 01:26:57
Yep. It’s been in the 70s.
Frank • 01:27:00
Well, you’re a little bit from a place you’re in California, right? Yeah, that’s a little different. And we’re in California, though.
Terry • 01:27:06
In Ventura, Southern California.
Aric • 01:27:08
Yeah, yeah. If you were north, it’d be a little different. But, yeah, it’s funny. I have a friend, some friends who live in Florida, and one of them came out to New York the other day, And it’s like, why is it so cold here? And I’m like, and honestly, it was funny because it was before this cold snap. So it was like, I want to say like 50 degrees. And he’s like, it’s so cold. And I’m like, you have no idea.
Frank • 01:27:38
What surprises me, if you go directly west from where we are in Grand Princeton, you’re still in, you would hit California. People don’t realize that that goes up that far.
Terry • 01:27:49
Yeah. California is a long state.
Frank • 01:27:51
Yeah, it sure is. Well, I’m going to head out. Okay. Good luck, Michael.
Aric • 01:27:57
Have a good December, everyone. And I’ll talk to you later.
Michael • 01:28:01
We will see you in January. January. Sounds good.
Aric • 01:28:05
Okay. Take care. Bye. Bye. That concludes tonight’s podcast. See you next month. ♪ ♪