Tong Family

Wow Ventura has an interesting feature called Continuity Camera, it lets you use a close-by iPhone automatically as your webcam. The picture quality is definitely way better than a MacBook Pro image and it does work very automatically which is kind of a miracle. If the Mac and the iPhone are on the same account, you get a new dialog on your phone saying do you want to use this with Continuity Camera if you have a compatible application. In my case, Google Meets in a Brave Browser actually works.

This also gives you Center Stage, Portrait and Studio Light and other great effects, these are somewhat hidden, they are in the Control Center. The most interesting is Desk View so you can use the iPhone camera to look down.

So when you flip on Center Stage, you can literally wander around the whole room and the 12MP camera has so much resolution. Also Portrait does a great job of background blur and Studio Light is much more subtle.

Shokz Headphones and Macs default Mute defeat

This has been driving me crazy for months. When you connect these awesome Shokz headphones to the Mac, they work great, but if you use a two-way conference applications it pushed the Shokz into mute mode and it isn’t clear how to defeat it.

It turns out that to mute and unmute, you press the + and – for volume simultaneously and it turns off the mute. Eureka, this has come up a bunch in various forums and the fix before was to buy a $50 dongle from Shokz that would fix the bug, but this is a much better answer. Ah, the Bluetooth interactions are just crazy.