I like to Read My Podcasts

Hi everybody and welcome to Comfort Zone, a show about the hosts getting out of their comfort zone. It is our 10th episode, a milestone episode today. I'm your host Matt and I'm joined as always by Niléane. Niléane, how are you doing today? Hello, I'm fine. We're missing someone. We are missing someone. Yeah, I don't exactly know what happened to Chris, but he is serving a timeout. He's being a little bit for the things

he said last week on the show, which if you can see behind me, I am representing for Daft Punk because they were slandered last week. It was unacceptable. He's recovering from the controversy online. Yes, yes. So, we hope he gets better. He's actually sick. He's under the weather. He should be back next week, but he should be thinking about what he said. And Chris, when you're listening to this episode, he should be thinking about what you said.

so he's he's sick he's down and we're we're hidden him a little bit i feel a little bad i mean when it's deserved it's deserved i mean not the sickness no again oh my god bad people we are bad people well i i am doing well as well and we have a few things to talk about this week anyway. So let's get it going. Nelian, what are you bringing this week?

Yeah, so my thing is a two-part thing. But first, I wanted to talk about the fact that I've set up live TV on my Plex server. And that was an adventure. Did you know you could do that, by the way? No, but all things are possible with Plex, so I'm not really surprised. I know, right? So, yeah, I've had the Plex Pass thing for a while. That's the paying part.

It's a subscription, but you can also buy it for a lifetime, which is what I've done a while ago. And this gives you access to a feature where you can plug in an antenna into a tuner. And that tuner can be connected to your Plex server, which means you can watch live TV on your Plex server. And it's a funny thing because there are the Olympics going on, right?

And I've been wanting to watch the Olympics. Sure. And it's difficult because in France, the broadcaster is the public TV, France TV. and their website is garbage. So if you want to rely on their web player to watch the Olympics live, good luck. So yeah, I've been down this rabbit hole for the past week to try and find a better way to watch live TV. And Plex, yeah, has come in clutch.

I remember that I had a USB stick somewhere in my pile of stuff. And it's an old USB stick where you can, on one end, you can plug in an antenna cable. So if you've got a roof antenna, you can plug in your antenna in the stick. And the stick you can plug in in a USB port. I didn't know these exist. I've never heard of that. It's a small thing, a 10 euro thing on Amazon.

Okay. I bought this thing. I checked my Amazon history. I bought the thing in 2016. And I remember that because at the time I was in a student dorm. And it was really hard. We had a really bad connection there. But in our rooms, we did have antenna ports on the wall. And so if you have a TV in your dorm, you can connect to the antenna port and watch live TV on your TV set. And at the time, I bought this USB stick because I did not have a TV.

But I wanted to watch at the time the Euro, the football Euro 2016 live on TV. So I bought this thing back then in 2016 and it worked. I had to watch it to watch TV in VLC because that's another piece of software that can do everything. You can watch live TV in VLC. If you find a way, you can. Why not? You can even record live TV with VLC. Of course. So what's your Plex server? Are you using a Mac or something else?

So that's something I've already mentioned once. I've got an old MacBook, a 2015 MacBook Pro in the living room. That's right. Yeah, and I've installed Linux on it, so it no longer runs macOS. It runs Linux. Okay, a Mac, but not really. Not really. and on it i've got a bunch of stuff i've got my home bridge instance which is why i've mentioned this before yep it's coming back to me yeah i've got other things a bunch of small things really

i've got a time machine instance running over the air on that thing via samba the samba protocol it's a whole thing i wrote about this on on mac stories actually and now there's breaks on it but anyway so I dug up that USB stick and works really well actually via Plex but here's the thing in the living room the antenna port is on the other hand of the room from my main piece of

furniture where there's my tv set there's the said macbook pro and a bunch of other things so I've had to run a cable from that port yes to the macbook pro an antenna cable so i measured a bunch of stuff and i came up with a number that i needed at least a 15 meter cable oh my god yeah i'm not sure What was that in American, in Eagle units?

That's like 50 feet. 50 feet. In Eagle units, yes. As we prefer to call them. Freedom units, I think we say. Freedom units. That's it. And finding that cable was not hard. You can find them online really easily or even in the tech store. The issue is finding a good cable. Because when you run a cable that length for an antenna signal, Any corner can break the signal for a bunch of channels.

It's been really hard to find a good cable that I can run easily along the wall and not break the signal along the way. But I did find one and now it works. I had another issue, which is an interference issue. And interferences are something that I've been struggling with my whole life, it seems. Last time I mentioned this is because, remember my Thunderbolt talk issue? Yes, yeah. Yeah, that was the thing.

It was interfering with Bluetooth and a bunch of things. Here, the issue is that my MacBook Pro running Linux is plugged into the internet via an Ethernet cable. And it turned out that this Ethernet cable ruined the antenna signal when they were plugged on the same dock. Of course. Of course. So I've had to plug in the antenna cable into a second port on the MacBook Pro itself.

So it's got a dedicated port now. And now it's all good. If you've got Plex and if you're paying for it, I recommend checking this out because it's actually really cool. The end result is I can watch live TV anywhere in the world from the signal of my antenna roof. And thinking about this now, it's pretty good. It's compatible with the HD Home Run. Have you heard of this? I've heard of this. I know like Casey Liss adores his.

Yeah. Yeah. This is a thing I've never gotten the courage to buy, but I know people love. Yeah. The AG Home Run, what it does is it's a box. You plug in your antenna into it and it broadcasts your TV over your network, your local network. And you can use apps, various apps to watch TV on your network. And there's the channels app that's popular for that. And Casey Liss mentions that app often.

So I investigated that route. But it turns out that Plex can fill in that gap. And if you got a Plex server in the living room like I do, no need for either the channels app or the HD home run. All you need is a 2016 USB stick. Yeah, I'm looking at these USB sticks online and they look as goofy as I thought they would. They're like thumb drives, but with a little twisty thing at the end. Yeah, the round part looks really goofy.

so okay so yeah because you plug it into plex and that video stream is basically just like any other file on your plex server so you could use it on an ipad or exactly anywhere right yeah and you can record live tv and when you record a broadcast in plex you can save it to a specific library in Plex. So you can save a program in your movies library or in your TV shows library

and it's just another file among your other files in your Plex server. Interesting. Yeah. Okay. Can you schedule recording? You can schedule recording. I'm an Olympic nerd so I've scheduled the closing ceremony so that's going to be recording on my end because I like to keep pack of those and yeah it's pretty good i'm really happy with the setup yeah interesting plex is an interesting one i feel like plex is one of those companies that

every few years we get mad at them for something and like i feel like nobody uses them anymore but then so many people still use them and and like like it so um yeah that's cool i haven't looked It's been a long time. Yeah, me neither. I had abandoned it. I used to just use the Infuse app to stream content from the server itself. Just connected via SSH, SFTP, and stream the content directly, stream the files directly.

and that worked fine, but the Infuse app has been unstable, unstable, to say the least. - I agree, that's been my experience as well, which was very upsetting. Ironically, one of the fixes to make Infuse more reliable that I found was to actually set up Plex on whatever device has your files, and then have Infuse look at the Plex server, like log in with Plex, and that seems to work better. Yeah, but at this point, you should just use the Plex app.

Yeah. Although, what are we if not a community of people who like to make things more complicated than they need to be? Okay. Okay, so this is live TV. Did you set this up for the Olympics specifically, you said? Yeah. Yeah, should we talk about this now? Yeah, I guess it's a good transition. Yeah, let's just go into the Olympics. So, we're watching the Olympics. I'm watching the Olympics. So I'm an Olympics nerd, but just in the nerd aspects of it.

Explain. Nerdiest aspects of it. For example, I have a special interest in the opening and closing ceremonies. I don't know if you can relate at all to that. I always watch the opening ceremonies. And then I never have ever watched the closing ceremony. Oh, you don't? No, they're not as big and like bombastic. So I guess I don't really know what they are. I've never really watched them. Yeah, they're mostly the same as the opening ceremonies, although you're right, they're often less grandiose.

And for the past decade or so, what they've done for the closing ceremonies is they tend to just be a big concert. With the, so a bunch of artists perform and at the end there's the protocol part with the speeches and they extinguish the Olympic flame and all that and yeah so this year the opening ceremony in Paris was really interesting

it took place in the city itself instead of in the stadium and so of course in France we it's the first time that the olympics are in my country so it's been different to be so aware of everything come coming up to the to the olympics so i was aware of who the uh director was for the olympic ceremony what they were planning to do uh who was to perform even though there was a bunch of surprises there and it's been really fascinating to me especially because I

always watch the Olympic ceremonies and tend to analyze them over analyze them okay yeah I loved that running up to the Olympic ceremony on on the day itself people were so worried because it was the rain was pouring down on the city it sure was and everyone like in the media they were like oh this is going to ruin everything uh because

everything's outside it's on the river uh maybe the river level is going to be too high the boats won't get under the bridges. Oh my God. All the catastrophic scenarios. In the end, and that's something that the director itself said, he's, let's talk about that director for a bit. He's called Thomas Joly and he's a theater director and you can tell he's an artist, like he's a core artist

in his field and what he had to say about the pouring rain after the fact after the ceremony he said it was just amazing i could have i could not have hoped for better it was you can you could tell he was really really happy about the end result because in his mind it empowered some of the shows performances that were taking place, the fact that dancers kept going under the pouring rain, and that everything was able to take place on the sand despite the rain,

and that everyone was able to perform. And there was a moment, especially in the ceremony, that was a representation of the climate urgency. a bunch of dancers were performing on the boat, on the platform, on the sand, and that was supposed to represent the climate emergency. And yeah, he really loved, apparently, that the rain was pouring down on those dancers as they were performing this act.

So yeah, anyway, one last thing. Since I've set up live TV on my Plex server, I'm able to fill gaps in my sleepless nights, because I tend to have a chaotic sleeping schedule. And at night, there are the surfing competitions. Why at night? Why late in the night? Because they take place in Tahiti. Yes.

Yeah, in Polynesia. So, I don't know, that's 12 hours behind us. so while it's noon there it's yeah it's deep in the night here in france and it's been really soothing i fell asleep multiple times just watching nice surfing competitions yeah the surfing is is interesting because like they're not um you kind of have to wait for the waves you can't just like exactly have a bell go off and then you do your run or whatever like you're kind of just like

floating out there on your board until the right wave comes and like it's an interesting uh interesting thing i didn't watch much of it but like my wife did and she was again really taken aback by like how much of it is just waiting for the right way yeah and for you it's in the evening right it's it's um yeah i think it's in the middle of the day at some point okay but yeah we haven't been watching much of the live stuff we've been mostly watching the prime time coverage at the end of the day so

that's like 7 p.m until 10 10 30 our time and yeah that's been that's been good i will say on the opening ceremonies um there were numerous times where i like my my reaction was oh this is very french this is very what i think it it was it just felt very french to me i can't explain it exactly but like which is great i mean that's what the the opening ceremonies are supposed to be right yeah um and and the the metal band that played in the rain uh that was that was amazing that was surprising that was the first time i've seen metal played at the

at the opening ceremonies. So that was pretty cool. But yeah, like I said, I'm mostly watching the primetime coverage, which is like the consolidated, like big events. So it's mostly been swimming and gymnastics for me. But I've got to see America win a whole bunch of golds. I think I said last week, this is the, these are the two weeks every couple of years where I'm the most patriotic. They're flying the flag there. They're all excited. I'm like, yes, go America.

They had the biggest boat on the sand. I know. I love that boat. We got LeBron James at the front holding the flag like George Washington. I loved it. By the way, something that's been fueling the memes here is Snoop Dogg. Oh, my God. Yes. Yeah. So I think most people here don't realize, well, always wonder why is he there? why is he everywhere in this olympics and i think he's a co-host right is that it on nbc he's he's there with nbc he's he's working for nbc at the olympics um i don't know what his norm

if he what his relationship all the time is but yeah he's there for nbc to film a bunch of segments and just be a personality and just be the delightful snoop dog that we all know in the past strange yeah i'd also love it sure yes yeah snoop dogg is is really it's really interesting because like i was a kid when snoop dogg was more known as a musician who was making controversial music and uh and now he's just like this delightful guy that everyone loves for being adorable uh most of the time so it's really yeah it's quite the transition that he's

made successfully apparently too yeah you said the olympic ceremony felt very french to you and that's really interesting because i think i speak for many french people that we were very worried that this was going to be the case because when the french tend to be something that they want to look very French, they tend to just take out all of these stereotypical things, cringy

things, like people wearing berets and sporting a baguette under the arm and dancing the con which they did by the way but fortunately that was sweet and short okay did not last too long but in the end we were i think most people here were pleasantly surprised that this was very a very original show yes well yeah very unexpected yeah it's usually like the boats were

interesting in a whole different way than like you normally see with people walking out into the stadium um and i also kind of like that the show because the show is usually like 30 minutes or an hour or something at the start and then it's hours of people marching in with their country and then this time it was like there was some ceremony then we watched people um coming in but they were coming in constantly and then there'd be like different segments of the show a new musician would perform or there'd be a new dance or a new short film in the middle so it kind of made it more interesting

throughout for for me yeah i agree yeah but yeah it was cool that they used the city more even though it rained and although apparently they loved that so but it didn't it didn't ruin it by any means i didn't think i don't think so yeah i think it looked really sick in some places there um yeah but apparently they did cancel at the last minute a bunch of small performances that were supposed to take place on the roofs okay because apparently like they were planning to especially early in the ceremony to flood the roofs around the sand with

dancers and there were still some shots that were left in where there's one a ballet dancer performing on one roof and it's a beautiful shot with paris behind him but apparently it was planned that behind him on other roofs it was to be filled uh supposed to be filled with dancers but they had to cancel that because of him because i suppose uh roofs be slippery in the way yeah that's a little bit of a bummer but sure still and they were mostly planning on the golden hour light

early in the ceremony when we had gray skies well we were still pretty good cool yeah and we're filming this at the end or recording this at the end of the first week of the Olympics so I think next week is more of the track and field stuff so we have no idea how that went out or that went so don't hold it against us but yeah last night i got to see the uh u.s women's gymnastics all around

finals so simone biles winning another gold medal gg gg everybody well i have brought an app this week and it's another new app very traditional pick for uh for comfort zone an app you're shocked i know um and this is a new app that came out a couple weeks ago and i probably could have talked about it then but i wanted to let it sit for a little bit longer

because i have more complicated feelings about it than i felt i could share like right away when it came out and that app is overcast which just went through a major rewrite and a new update that released on the 10th anniversary of the app and i think there's some good and some bad stuff with it and i think that's what a lot of people are feeling with it um including marco the developer mark armand so i kind of wanted to talk about after maybe a month using it at this point i think like what's going well and what's i think uh was maybe rushed out too early or i hope that is fixed

soon. So this is normally where I would say, Nelian, do you listen to podcasts? But I think you do. So what do you use for your podcast app? Are you an Overcast fan or do you bounce around? So I am an Overcast fan, but something happened this year. Apple released transcripts in Apple podcasts and that has changed everything for me i was gonna say changed everything everything

because i've been using overcast for years and i don't even remember since when but so i'm i'm mostly using apple podcast currently but i've been checking out overcast since the redesign the rewrite for the past month so yeah yeah and i think did you do the review on mac stories i did Of course, you've beat me again to the punch. This is just what happens. I just go through Neil Leon's drafts on MacStories and I see what I can talk about.

You've got access to the GitHub. Yeah. So, yeah, so I've been using, I think you're totally right. I think that transcripts in Apple Podcasts is like the best new feature in any podcast app in like years. For me, I think it's the best thing since Overcast added clip sharing. like four or five years ago which i think i may be the only person in the world who uses on a regular basis but i think is really awesome um yeah they really good yeah so so yeah i use overcast i kind of bounce around i'm i'm i i can't stick with anything forever so like sometimes i'll be like

oh i like castro is queuing an in-box system i really like that but then i realized that castro kind of was let it withered on the vine for a few years and the new owners are hopefully going to fix that but yeah it's it has other issues that I don't love about it and then I go to Apple podcast but then I find that UI to be a little busy for me it's not exactly what I want just a couple more taps to get everything that I need and then I get tired of that so I go back to Overcast or Pocket Cast or something and like on the one hand I'm happy that the Apple ecosystem has so many good

podcast apps but overcast is the one that i always come back to so i'm an overcast user right now i may switch for like a month sometime in the next year but i'll come back to overcast i'm sure and i was excited for this update because overcast is i guess i should explain why i use overcast i use overcast because it just lets me do the very simple thing of subscribe to my podcasts have new episodes show up like right after they release and just be reliable always work and that was super useful to me I didn't need a ton of new features it just worked great for me

and the one piece of feedback I would have for it is it kind of felt like an older iOS app not like a legacy piece of software or anything but like it worked kind of like how iOS apps worked five six seven years ago and there's like ever since SwiftUI there's been like kind of these paradigms and new UI elements that Overcast didn't use. Wasn't a huge deal, but it did feel a little old. And it turns out, I'll direct people to, I'll put a link in the show notes, but there's a recent episode of the Accidental Tech Podcast where Marco Arment, the developer of Overcast,

talks for like an hour on what the state of Overcast was, what he felt like he needed to do to get it up to date and make it a thing he could actually maintain and add new features going forward because he was apparently just in a mountain of technical debt and it was just a pain to do anything and so a really great episode he talks about like how like it got so bad that like he felt he felt like like am i should i even be a developer anymore because i don't know if i can do this anymore um really great episode highly recommend listening to it but yeah so he basically

rewrote the entire ui of the iphone app using swift ui and it's got a new design that's very similar to the old one but with a couple little tweaks and i think the new design is pretty good but definitely coming in hot um is what i would say uh i like the now plane screen i like that you can like tap the artwork to see the show notes and they just kind of like fade in and cover the whole screen i like that he's improved the download indicator i like that he's moved away from the kind

of like five panes thing on the now plane screen where you would like swipe left and right to get things like I was always like multiple pages away from the thing I needed to do and now it's kind of all the pains was small yeah and they were very small you're right and show notes were weird yeah the new design there I think is a step forward overall I don't think it's perfect we'll get into that but yeah so I I do like this new design and again it's built in SwiftUI so it feels a little fresher things just look a little nicer not like remarkable or anything but it is definitely nicer

than it was before. But there have been a few issues for me. And the issues are, well, there's one big one. And one of the things I liked about Overcast is that the sync was super fast and super reliable. So like I would listen on my iPhone and then I'd want to switch to my iPad and I could just open the app on my iPad and it was exactly where I was in the same episode. And I could just pick up listening there. That doesn't work for me anymore on the new app. And that's because sync just doesn't work literally at all for me.

So all of my devices are on different sync profiles because none of them can see the other devices and see that there are sync profiles that they can even use. So it's very strange. I have no idea what's going on there. It's very weird. I take it you have not had that issue. I have not. But Marco did release a fix for that, didn't he? for the sync issues it was in the release notes and it did not fix my issue oh okay so it yeah so i've uninstalled the app i've reinstalled the app i've i've tried all the

things right like i'm not new to troubleshooting i know um the basics so i've done all those things and then like the tricky thing is i was like okay well maybe i should just like delete the sync profile and like maybe like delete it on all the devices but there's no ompl import or export right now so i can't save my shows i'd have to like resubscribe to everything again which i'm loath to do i don't particularly want to do that but maybe i maybe i need to to uh to fix this and get it into a good state but yeah that was that's the biggest bummer for me is like i don't

Maybe it is literally just me, but it was super reliable for many, many years. And then this new update came out and it just didn't work for me anymore, which is a bummer. - Yeah, it is. You can, yeah, I was about to say, you can export your OPML file on the web, but I don't think you can import. - You're right. - Yeah, you can export, I can see it. - Okay. - But you can't import. Yeah. Okay. Well, maybe I'll just be an iPhone only listener until the import features brought back.

But yeah, the other thing that I would love to see improved is the now playing screen, which I said I do like on the whole. I think there are too many buttons too far apart on that page though. And what I mean by that is the chapters are kind of up and to the left of the progress bar. And they're far away from the like audio settings and far away from the info button. And if I want to share an episode, so like I, again, I said, I do a lot of clip sharing.

So I like to share links to podcasts. That's two taps away. Now I have to hit the info and then all the way at the top of the screen, I hit the share button. And so there's just a couple of things like that that oh and the touch targets the touch targets are pretty small yeah compared to what they were yeah yeah i was talking with someone who uses overcast in their car and they don't have car play or anything so their phone's just kind of mounted up on the um on the dashboard and they they said their biggest challenge with this one is they can't like while they're driving they

can't tap that button because they can't hit it accurately while they were able to swipe more easily with the old UI. So I don't know what the solution is here. Maybe I should do a mock-up and see what makes sense. Maybe I'll decide that, oh, actually, he's done it as good as he can do it. But yeah, I'm not quite sure what to do here. But yeah, the touch targets are a little small, and they're all kind of spread out in a way that I don't love personally. Yeah, maybe. I mean, I get the idea of having the chapters button around the progress bar.

but maybe they should be at the bottom of the screen like along the sound features and airplay and stuff yeah i kind of think so as well and like especially like i'm using an iphone like a max phone there's just so much space down there well you brought this on yourself i bought the best phone sure bigger phones are better um yeah so so that that's that's a thing it's not the biggest thing in the world the sync issue has definitely been more of a thing for me so maybe i should try to

fix that through whatever i need whatever i can do but yeah so i know you reviewed it already but if you could summarize maybe how do you like the new app uh the new update are there anything that stood out to you um i mean i agree with everything you said basically but i do think say good uh it's a welcome rewrite like the app feels a lot better overall and as a long time fan of the app i'm excited to this is how i concluded my my review i'm excited that he has a new foundation

to yes move the app forward and that's a really good thing because as you said the app has been stagnating for a while and i'm excited to see how well it can be updated from now on and how regularly it can be updated from now on one thing that i've seen a bunch of people be upset about is the removal of the ability to stream episodes so now in the new overcast you have to download episodes and you can't just stream them but i think that's mitigated with the fact that the app is really fast like the server stuff is really fast you can i mean i don't even have to think

about it you just tap on an episode and starts playing because the download uh only took about a few seconds at most yeah yeah maybe more of an issue if you just have slow internet um yeah i suppose but yeah i should say before we get any further i should say i did i was a little negative They're on the things I didn't like. I am super happy that the app was rewritten and is a more maintainable code base that can get updates more easily.

And I hope that it actually pans out and he's able to do a bunch of updates and make the app better and add all these features that he's wanted and users have wanted for a long time. I guess I was coming from, a few minutes ago, more of a normal user's perspective of I was using this app that worked a certain way and I was used to it. And it changed in ways where the benefits aren't necessarily there yet. Yeah. Right? Some of the things are nicer, but it did lose some features. It lost some functionality.

And there have been some stability issues, which just come with a new software update. But, yeah, I think it would have been nice if this update could have been less tied to a milestone. Like, it seemed very important to him to get the update out on the exact 10th anniversary of the app coming out. and you know you have to ship eventually if you wait till it's perfect you're never going to ship anything i work in software design i i know how this works but yeah i do i do think it was maybe a little it came in a little hot um more than ideally it would have been but yeah again it is a better foundation and hopefully this will just mean that a month from now two months from now

all of these complaints are no longer issues and uh and then we can just keep going forward from there yeah for me i have an issue right now a dilemma because this redesign has made me want to use the app again but where are the transcripts i just i need them now i didn't know i needed them i know they're so nice yeah it's really nice and i know that's really hard to because i mean of course marco isn't going to be able to add transcript to transcripts to everything

and be just as nice because the amount of computing power that this requires unless he's got some third party provider. Which is going to cost a ton. That's not something you can expect in a third party app like Overcast. I'm struggling. I want to use Overcast. But I can't. I want to read podcasts. I like to read my podcast. I like to read my podcast.

Episode title. True. Yeah. I don't know how he would do that. It is interesting. The one thing that keeps me on Overcast is the clip sharing. And again, I might be one of five people in the world who use it, but it really is so useful to me, and I like sharing those on social media, and hopefully it drives at least one or two people to listen to podcasts that they didn't listen to otherwise. But I love that. The one thing I wish he could add, and he might be able to do this, again, if more than five people used the feature.

But what I did for a year, I had like a free year of captions, the app, which lets you put a lot of people with social media accounts use this. I use it for work. Yeah, yeah. So it's really nice for social media stuff. I liked, basically I would save a clip in Overcast, and then I would open that clip in captions to add visual captions to it as well, so that people would be able to just read along as the clip goes. And I would love it if he could build that into the app somehow. Like, I think that would be really, really awesome to not have to use this like $100 a year other service to add those. And I'm wondering

if like apple intelligence will let him do that in some way like can he do transcribe the audio somehow i don't really know but i wonder if that's a way he could do transcripts in a smaller way that's not like the apple podcast's best in class sort of thing that they have yeah something that's working live on the on the device yeah because you wouldn't want to because you can use like there's a a beta of mac whisper uh out right now and there's like transcriptionist there's a couple apps that let you transcribe audio and video files on the iPhone right now but it takes forever and

it takes like so much processing power and it would kill your battery and you'd have to like leave overcast open and screen on for them to work so yeah it's there's really no good way to do that but it's only a clip it's only like 30 seconds you could probably do that if you really wanted to you say that you're the only one using the clip sharing feature but what i see every so often since the addition of transcripts in apple podcast is people screen recording i've done this yes oh you've done this yes screen recording the transcripts pane in um in apple podcast to share

I guess. And it's honestly kind of better in a way. Like there's some complications with it. Having used it, it's kind of hard because the text scrolls and it scrolls out of view maybe when you don't want it to. But it's so great to like, I think that's more engaging than kind of the videos that Overcast does now where it's just like a static image with a progress bar that's going across. Like seeing the words is definitely better. Yeah. So I have a question. If Apple Podcasts went away and you couldn't use it anymore, what would you switch to?

And if it's Overcast, if that went away, what would you switch to? Oh, okay. I was about to say that. Well, okay. It was just Overcast, yeah. I realized halfway through the question, it wasn't going to work. That's a tough question. Maybe Castro. I really like the UI in Castro, but Castro is not available on the Mac. And I listen to podcasts on my Mac a lot. But I know that can be mitigated because, I mean, now that I mostly use my AirPods, automatic switching works good enough to have something playing on a second device while working on the Mac.

so i'd say castro castro okay yeah that's a castro okay i'm i think i agree i mean the other option is pocket casts which yeah i'm not a fan i know there's i don't know what it is like pocket casts like on paper is so good and it's everything it's on every platform it does actually really cool sync it does like Spotify style syncing where like if you're like in the middle of an episode not only does it sync your position on the other device

but like if you open it on another device like the now playing screen is that podcast so you can just like immediately pick up where you left off but like I just don't like using it as much as I like using these other apps it's weird I don't quite know what it is I can't put my finger on it it's one of those apps that I recommend a ton and don't like to use it from my yes yes absolutely absolutely that's oh man that might be an interesting thing to write about or do a video about or maybe we can talk about on the podcast one

day of like apps that i love but i recommend other people use something else yeah that's isn't there for me yeah i think obsidian is in there for me like i i use obsidian for very specific things that I could not do anywhere else. But if you want to take notes, I recommend Apple Notes or something like that. Could be a segment for another episode. All right. Chris is writing this down. Oh, yes.

Chris, I hope you're taking notes. I hope you're working, Chris. You're not slacking, right? Supposedly you're in bed. Listening to good music, I hope. Yeah. which could be anything I'm not implying anything at all should we check on Chris because so he's not here but I know someone I have to do this on real time but I know someone who can sub in for him so yeah Chris

what are you up to this week during COVID and stuff. Hey, thanks for checking in. While I'm recovering, I'm diving deep into some iPadOS projects I've been meaning to tackle. You wouldn't believe the new shortcuts I've been able to automate. Also, it's a good time to catch up on some reading. Oh, he reads. Daft Punk actually claimed their helmets improve their music. Can you believe that? It's just another reason I can't stand them. No! Oh my god.

He's the best. He's not ready to come back. He needs to change his mind on this. Chris, Chris, Chris, Chris, Chris. Robot Chris, Chris, Chris. Oh, yeah. They're the same person. Man, sounded the same too. Really iconic. Wow. That was... Anyway. So, yeah. That's overcast. Some good stuff, some bad stuff. But hopefully it's just like incredible update after incredible update from now on. Yay.

And this is when we would normally go into our challenge, but we thought that it was not fair, since this is a podcast about points and winning now. And fairness. And fairness. Things I have not experienced. I haven't experienced winning or fairness in any of these. I've had a bunch of fairness. Lots of winning as well. An entire episode was just about you winning. It was tough. Tough for us. So we're going to hold off. We're going to hold off. As a reminder, we're looking for games, daily games, that we think are excellent.

We're going to try to find what we think is the best for us personally, and then we're going to each bring one that we are going to fight to the death, and we'll have one game that we think is the best for everybody. So another week to prep and get something really, really good. Just know that I have a good pick. I have a better pick. I'm going to win so good. This is my week. I'm finally going to get a W on the board. Sure, sure. I feel so good about it every week and then I lose. So this is a good episode because I can't lose. There's no contest. I mean, okay, yeah, sure.

I was about to bring in something. I know, I know. I should not, I should not. I'll never win. I'll never win. So challenge next week, same thing as before. Yeah, I don't think we have anything else this week. It's going to be a slightly shorter episode than normal, but I enjoyed doing this. It was cool. We hope Chris is back. Despite all the gruff, we do hope he's back next week and feeling great. He's also going to listen to this episode and have a lot of things to say. So I expect our follow-up is going to be significant next week.

But yeah, you can find the rest of my work on birchtree.me. It's where I write everything. Also on social media. Links in the description. Neilian, do you have anything going on this week or anything you want to plug? No, just find me on Mastodon, on MacStories.net, and on my couch watching TV. Excellent. During the Olympics. Yeah. Ooh, and I don't have the fancy app that Chris has for picking questions.

What's your favorite color, though? Oh, that's a good one. um a classic obviously this this changes throughout the years but currently i would say orange but not orange orange like not orange like this headset that i'm wearing uh although that's pink according to apple but they're weird um i would say like a kind of mustard yellow almost orange yeah that shade okay

excellent what about you so for me i think it has to be purple and any purple i just like purple okay i agree yes you're allowed okay it is allowed it's not illegal like some other things it's allowed yeah i mean chris is going to pick black which or brown I mean have you seen his setup on YouTube or deep blue he would pick deep blue maybe okay Chris another follow up item for tomorrow for next week

I can ask robot Chris but that's going to take forever the lag is insane with these robots okay well thank you everybody for listening we look forward to seeing you next time and we'll see you later bye bye bye bye