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Mac Geek Gab — Apple Tips, Tricks, and Troubleshooting

Scoring the Sleep Scores

Mac Geek Gab — Apple Tips, Tricks, and Troubleshooting

Dave Hamilton, Pilot Pete & Adam Christianson

Tech News, Technology, How To, News, Education

4.8 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 8 December 2025

⏱️ 80 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Scoring the Sleep Scores – Mac Geek Gab 1119 episode image

You dive into a packed Cool Stuff Found episode this week, moving fast from sensor-powered tinkering with phyphox to smarter dictation using Wispr Flow, altitude readouts in CarPlay, and Emby’s upgraded media management. You get practical wins too: safer file sharing with MetaWipe, smoother workflows through PopClip, a road-tested Nomatic backpack, and Picmal for quick local media conversions. Then the conversation flips to your questions: which sleep score app you can trust, how the new Journals app handles multiple journals, and how to make notifications behave when your Apple Watch is on your wrist. Don’t Get Caught missing the deep cuts.

You also hear clear guidance on backup safety, with SuperDuper, Carbon Copy Cloner, ChronoSync, and Backblaze each playing a different role depending on how you protect your data. To wrap things up, the crew tackles border ID differences between REAL ID and passports, whether upgrading to macOS Tahoe or Sequoia is the smarter move, and a listener warning about bottom-filled beers that’s both funny and useful. It’s a full tour of tech insight and practical nerd wisdom, delivered at MGG speed.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

It's time for Matt Geek gab and listener Ian brings us our cool stuff found this week with,

0:07.6

What?

0:08.3

Did you know that you are carrying a 3D magnetometer, that you can use your phone as a pendulum

0:14.3

to measure the Earth's local gravitational acceleration that you can turn your phone into sonar?

0:25.0

FIFOX gives you access to the sensors of your phone, either directly or through ready-to-play experiments, which analyze your data and let you

0:29.4

export raw data along with the results for further analysis. You can even define your own

0:34.9

experiments on FIFox.org, that's P-H-Y-P-H-O-X, and share them with colleagues, students, and friends.

0:43.2

Some of the selected features are a selection of predefined experiments.

0:46.5

You just press play to start.

0:47.9

You can export your data to a range of widely used formats and remote control your experiment through a web interface from any PC on the same

0:55.8

network as your phone. You need to install anything on those PCs. All you need is a modern web browser.

1:01.7

You can define your own experiments by selecting sensor inputs, defining analysis steps, and creating

1:07.1

views as an interface using our web editor.

1:15.7

And the analysis can consist of just adding two values or using advanced methods like Fourier transforms and cross correlation.

1:18.3

And they offer a whole toolbox of analysis functions.

1:21.2

Dude, that's crazy.

1:23.2

It is.

1:23.8

And some of the sensors, I didn't even know we had on our phones.

1:27.1

You've got an accelerometer, a magnetometer, a gyroscope, barometric pressure, microphone,

1:32.8

proximity, GPS, and all these formats or all this data can be exported in CSV, common separated

1:40.0

value, tab separated values, or Excel.

1:43.2

And the app was developed by the second Institute of Physics at RWTH.

...

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