Shaving With Occam's Razor
Mac Geek Gab — Apple Tips, Tricks, and Troubleshooting
Dave Hamilton, Pilot Pete & Adam Christianson
4.8 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 16 February 2026
⏱️ 85 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary

You get a firehose of genuinely useful Apple tips this week, starting with new muscle-memory moves you’ll actually use: cycling app windows with Cmd + `, nodding or shaking to answer AirPods, dragging apps straight from iOS search, and building Focus-specific home screens so the right icons appear at the right time.
Edge Light turns your Mac into a cleaner on‑camera rig, Display Buddy tames external monitor brightness, and custom macOS keyboard shortcuts plus Dock CPU meters give you fast, surgical control over your Mac.
Then you level up your living room: master the Apple TV remote’s scrub wheel, undo accidental scrubs, jump in precise increments, push video from iPhone to Apple TV, and fling audio to HomePod with a tap. Even Reminders gets a glow‑up so you can punt a pile of alerts in one shot instead of playing whack‑a‑mole.
From there, you zoom out to “meta” geekery: backing up critical Notes (or moving to OneNote, Ulysses, or Obsidian), even flirting with a git repo to sync prefs and personal data like a developer. On the road, you learn how to keep CarPlay tappable with gloves, and in the cloud you explore why chatbots forget context, when to bring in tools like Claude, Perplexity’s Comet, Atlas, Gemini, or Claude’s Chrome extension, and how having an always‑on troubleshooting assistant changes how you work.
Listener reviews cap it off by framing the show as a kind of PhD in troubleshooting, all so you can experiment, push your tech harder, and, of course, don’t get caught.
- 00:00:00 Mac Geek Gab 1129 for Monday, February 16th, 2026
- February 16th: Innovation Day
- MGG Monthly Giveaway – Enter to win a Copilot Money!
- Congrats to January’s winner, Amanda Colyer!
- The MGG Merch Store is Live!
- Quick Tips
- 00:00:01 Michael Ilin-QT-Press Cmd + ` to cycle all windows of that app
- 00:03:06 PilotPete-QT-Nod or Shake to answer your AirPods
- 00:05:49 Clif-QT-Relocate iOS apps by dragging from search results
- 00:07:47 Different home screens for different Focus Modes
- 00:11:16 QT-Use Edge Light for video calls in macOS 26.2-and-later
- 00:16:17 Use Display Buddy to control the brightness of your screen
- 00:18:09 Russell-QT-Map your own keyboard shortcuts in macOS settings
- 00:23:03 The value of an always-on troubleshooting assistant
- 00:26:32 Doug-QT-Set Activity Monitor to show CPU Usage in Dock
- 00:30:40 Apple TV Remote Quick Tip Masterclass
- EyeDentify-QT-Undo Accidental Scrubs on Apple TV
- Using the Apple TV remote’s scroll-wheel emulator to scrub in a fine-tuned way
- Double-tap scroll wheel edges to jump forwards or backwards
- Use Siri Commands, too
- 00:35:16 Dom Bettinelli-QT-Tap iPhone to Apple TV remote to transfer video to Apple TV
- 00:37:15 Tap your iPhone to your HomePod to transfer audio
- 00:37:45 Jeepster-QT-Procrastinate Multiple Reminders at Once
- Sponsors
- 00:41:17 SPONSOR: CleanMyMac. Get Tidy Today! Try 7 days free and use our code MACGEEK for 20% off at clnmy.com/MACGEEK
- Don’t Get Caught
- 00:43:56 Steve-DGC-1128-Duplicate important Notes as backup
- 00:54:56 What about a git repo to sync… prefs, notes, whatever?
- Your Questions Answered and Tips Shared!
- 00:55:53 Steve Hammond-How can I control CarPlay with gloves on?
- 01:00:30 DJ Mac-ChatGPT and others regularly forget what I’ve told them
- Try claude.ai/giggab for half-price Claude Pro
- 01:08:16 William-1128-How do I get my browser to surf for me?
- Reviews
- 01:15:08 gdubs-MGG Review-A PhD in troubleshooting
- 01:16:08 michaefs-MGG Review-A great podcast
- 01:16:57 d32bus-MGG Review-Excellent show
- 01:17:39 MGG 1129 Outtro
- MGG Monthly Giveaway
- Bandwidth Provided by CacheFly
- Pilot Pete’s Aviation Podcast: So There I Was (for Aviation Enthusiasts)
- The Debut Film Podcast – Adam’s new podcast!
- Dave’s Business Brain (for Entrepreneurs) and Gig Gab (for Working Musicians) Podcasts
- MGG Merch is Available!
- Mac Geek Gab YouTube Page
- Mac Geek Gab Live Calendar
- This Week’s MGG Premium Contributors
- MGG Apple Podcasts Reviews
- feedback@macgeekgab.com
- 224-888-GEEK
- Active MGG Sponsors and Coupon Codes List
- BackBeat Media Podcast Network
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | It's time for Mac Geekab, and listener Michael brings us our quick tip of the week with switching between app windows on the Mac. |
| 0:09.5 | Today I learned that to switch between Windows of the same app, you can press command plus backtick. |
| 0:18.7 | More quick tips like this, plus your questions answered today |
| 0:21.9 | on MacGeekab 1129 |
| 0:24.0 | for Monday, |
| 0:25.0 | February 16th, 20206. |
| 0:26.9 | So, Greetings, folks, and welcome to Mackeb, the show where you share tips like that, and we share them. |
| 0:49.2 | You send them in, we share them. You send in your questions, we share them. You send in your cool stuff found. We share them. We did that last week. |
| 0:54.1 | The goal is for each of us to learn at least five new things every |
| 1:00.0 | single time we get together. Our sponsor for this episode is Clean My Mac, one of my, and I think I can |
| 1:06.4 | speak for the group, one of our favorite utilities. And you can get seven days free, and then you use our code MacGeek for 20% off at the URL and the show notes. I'm not even going to try to read it. You just go to MacGeekup.com and click on it or just use code MacGeek. We'll talk more about that later. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in South Dakota, I'm Adam Christensen. And here in Dregs, Idaho, Pilot Pete. Dregs, Idaho. I bet it's better than... Drigs. Drigs. Oh, it's better than Dregs. Okay. Close. Right? Yep. It's actually a neat little town. Yeah. In the ski resort right outside of town, there's no way, it's in Wyoming, but the only way to get to it is through Idaho. Oh, interesting. That's kind of like. If there's no roads in or out in Wyoming. Interesting. I know, I know Tahoe is like that if you're in South Lake on the, like, California, Nevada border. That's interesting. That's cool. Yeah. Doing a little snowmobiling out there, huh? Yeah. Going to get to go through Yellowstone tomorrow and spend some time on a snowmobile and seeing all the wildlife. One of my one of my bucket list things. I heard about it years ago and I thought that would always be fun to do. And then our friends that live out here were like, why don't you come out and do snowmobiling this |
| 2:20.9 | winter? We're in. We're in. Yeah. That's a yes. Yeah. That's great. Absolutely. Yeah. Very cool. |
| 2:29.2 | Hey, our full first, and I can't believe I've never really done this before. |
| 3:08.0 | Congrats to January's winner, Amanda Amanda for winning the, uh, uh, giveaway in January where we had a bunch of things to give away from our CES 2026 sponsors. So, uh, so congrats to Amanda for that. And then this month's giveaway here in February, mackeycub.com slash giveaway. You can enter to win a copy of co-pilot money. So make sure you do that too. Fun stuff. All right. Should we, do we have anything to talk about before we get back to quick tips? Anything else to talk about? I got nothing. All right. Then, I got nothing too. You got a quick, you have a quick tip, Pete. I do have a quick tip. So yeah, let me, I'm going to put up the banner too so that everyone can see it while I talk about it. This is, I think, one of our quintessential definitions of a quick tip, right? It's something I do all the time and just realize the other day that I don't know that we've ever talked about it, which is you can nod or shake your head to |
| 3:27.5 | answer or not answer when your |
| 3:29.7 | AirPods are in. So if I have my AirPods Pro in and I think it works with AirPods 2, 3, and 4 pro |
| 3:36.9 | in AirPods 4, when, for instance, a message gets announced, says, you know, hey, Dave Hamilton sent a long message. |
| 3:46.8 | Would you like to hear it? |
| 3:48.0 | All I have to do is not yes, if I want to hear it, or shake my head vigorously, no, if I don't want to hear it. |
| 3:53.8 | And AirPods, or, well, the iOS will then announce, read to me the message or answer the phone. |
| 4:01.6 | Do you want to answer the phone? |
| 4:02.5 | I can shake my head, no. |
... |
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