Get Me a Dr. Pepper Robot

Welcome to Comfort Zone, a podcast all about pushing your hosts, well, outside their comfort zone. I'm Christopher Lawley, and each week I am joined by two incredible co-hosts, and this week one of them is finally a winner. First up, Matt Birchler. Matt, how are you doing? Chris, I'm doing great. I'm not going to spoil the poll, but I'm also, I spent all of last week in the big city, and Now I'm back in the Midwest where I belong, and I'm very, very happy. Back in my comfort zone. You were in Big Apple.

Did you do the thing? I might have done it when I was there earlier this year, where you're like, you quietly say under your breath, I'm walking here. No. What's going on right now? But I should have. Never mind. Anyways, we also have Neil Leon. Neil Leon, how are you doing? It's complicated, Chris. If you're watching the video, I've got a red nose because allergies. You're going to see me sniff. But maybe Chris will cut all of them out. But good luck for that.

And yeah, big upset in the polls. The people are not happy. Yeah, and I represent the people. So let me tell you they're not happy. Wow. Okay. You know, whenever a French person talks about how the people not being happy, that usually doesn't end well for the rulers. I know how to deal with that. I'm just saying. Yeah. So, Neil, why don't you take us through a democracy and who won with our challenge of do iPhone photography?

We had three different photos. And why don't you take us through it? All right. So, there was a – we had one photo each. by the way we forgot to add the links to the bonus photos that we talked about on the show so i've added them posthumously to the show notes so if you download the episode again i think you'll see them in the show notes uh sorry about that and but yeah so there was one photo each i submitted my kitty in black and white jumping out of a window um jumping in from the window i guess

There was Matt's doggy sitting on a couch looking outside at a car of all things. Nice. And there was an Iron Man set, Lego set from Chris. So the results are in the same order. 33% for the kitty, 37% for the doggy and 30% for the Lego set. Very close. Very close. I was shocked.

Yeah, although we have a message from a representative of the people. Oh, God. So I'm going to read this message to you now. They're saying it's a great upset. Everyone was sad. Obviously, Hillary, I mean, Matt didn't win. So obviously, we need to recount everything. some ballots had Lego inscribed in manuscript on them so that was irregular all around hey why are you kicking me I lost

and plus according to the constitution of comfort zone there must be at least 200 votes for the results account so we will be rescheduling this poll I'm uncomfortable with this impression the speech so yeah I must agree with that person so yeah you can agree with them but I you know what I'm gonna back up Matt I'm gonna say Matt won

Matt had a great photo you know I knew I was gonna lose the minute you guys put up your pets as the photo I was like there's no way I could win and especially because I couldn't original plan doing yosemite but um congratulations matt you are you are a winner i thank you so much i think we've all won though because this is the first poll i think ever where we've all gotten over 30 of the vote right this is i this is hands down the closest we've ever been uh so i i think we all did a decent job how about three pats on the back for all of us everyone just pat yourself on the back? Sure. Just three times.

Don't get cocky. But, you know. Yeah. I did four. That's it. I'm taking away your championship. Neal, you're the winner. No. There you go. All right. Everybody knew it. I was the winner. Sorry. I went to all the other. Cut that, cut that, cut that, cut that. Okay. I'm going to get the show back on track here. All right. So last week, I talked about the Apple Watch Series X, and New Leon did not approve of my orange watch band.

Apparently, it wasn't the right orange. Or Series X. Did I call it a Series X, didn't I? I did the thing. Oh, my gosh. That's Matt. You can email at Matt Birchler for that one, people. No. So I got my new Nomad Sport band because I wanted something that matched the jet black of the Series X. So I'm curious if Nelian approves of this color, but this is a dark green. It's still the Nomad Sport one, but do you approve of this color, Nelian?

Because you did not approve of the last one. It's okay. I like it. Okay. All right. It kind of matches the walls in my studio. Yeah. If I turn on the lights here and I put it up next to the walls of my studio, it's a very similar shade of green. So, yeah. I like it. Cool. Cool. Well, we've got some stuff to go over. Niléane, you are first up in the document. Yeah, I'm sorry about that. Take it away. No, I'm excited to talk about this. You messaged us about your topic, and I'm excited to talk about it.

Yeah, so this week I thought I would force, I guess, everyone listening to this show to step outside of their comfort zone. Like, usually it's us, but you guys are going to do the job, you people listening um the thing is everything sucks and that's the title of my segment everything sucks and i think while we're all spending an uncomfortable an uncomfortable moment right now because everything sucks we should take some time to cry it out loud like please let's just say out

loud, everything sucks. I don't know if that warrants the explicit tag. Americans accept professionals. No, no. So I can say it sucks everywhere. All right. So everything sucks. To keep it short, but I won't, billionaires are ruining our lives. Left and right, everywhere, they're ruining our lives. They won't pay for our pensions, they won't pay for our

roads, schools, medicine, wages, efforts to combat the impediment, that is climate change, of course. And in short, they're paying for other things instead, right? They're paying for the metaverse, they're paying for AI, they're paying for rockets, for cyber things that drive on roads and hurt everyone on the roads, like all cyber things should do. And for people in costumes pretending to be robots.

So yeah, they're paying for that stuff instead. What a bunch of lovely chaps. I love them. I love them, billionaires. They're amazing. But that statement, billionaires are ruining our lives, that is still true. Still true, even if we restrict ourselves to tech here. Like I mentioned a bunch of tech examples and other world examples. There's wars, schools, hospitals that are not being funded properly. Because some people are hoarding the money. All right.

But even if we only count tech, because we're a tech show after all. Yeah, billionaires are still ruining our lives. I think that still works. That statement is still true. Zuckerberg is out there wearing dumb shirts, praising his own name, and thinking he's got the future figured out. You know, a couple of years ago, that future where we all live in the advertisement field, metaverse. But I'm hearing now that maybe he's moved on from that.

Maybe he doesn't want the metaverse anymore. At least he's not focused on it anymore. Too bad he renamed the company after it. But anyway, so yeah, now he's moved on to recreating Twitter from scratch. But worse, because let's make it more fun. So let's make it worse. got it and on that platform now uh you can share photos of the aurora borealis outside yeah if you've seen it in the past few days i was i know guys i know i was so mad i i can we give a

little bit of context for people that don't know of course go ahead uh the meta account on threads basically said, oh, did you miss the Aurora Borealis? Well, here, we recreated it in popular cities like San Francisco, New York, London, all those big cities and stuff like that with meta AI. So basically, they took images and took realistic looking images and created them with AI of these popular cities of like the Golden Gate Bridge

and tall buildings and all that stuff and put the Aurora Borealis behind it. And it's just, it's so terrible when you have these amazing photographers, and not even people that call themselves photographers. People that literally just went into their backyard, set up their iPhones and did a long exposure shot, took some amazing photos, and were sharing them on their platform. And instead of Meta basically going through and sharing those people that did amazing actual work, that took actual photos of the Aurora Borealis,

they used AI to create fake images that are not the Aurora Borealis. That was not something that actually happened. And as somebody that—I'm a photographer. I consider myself a photographer doing photography work. That, to me, is the most, it's the cringiest, it's just the fakest thing that you could possibly do. It's the worst. And it's taking away from people that are actually having, that have artistic talent and are sharing their art with the world.

It's taking away from that with something that is fake and never actually happened. Yeah. If I could tell a quick story about this, actually. I mentioned I was in New York last week. And in New York City, we're a little too far south to really see the whole Borealis. But for about 10 minutes, you could really see it in the sky. The sky turned pink. And we weren't following the news. We didn't know this was going to happen. I think I actually saw it in one of your photos.

Yeah, I saw it. And so for like 10 minutes, it was happening. We didn't know what was happening. Someone just looked. We were looking at the New York skyline. were on a boat a small little boat at the time and we someone looked at the sky and was like that looks pink is that noise pollution and no we're like oh my god it's the aurora burials we're gonna we got to take a picture and me and this other photographer on the boat scrambled into like high gear like he's like digging into his bag getting the right lens getting the right camera combination um he's like he's like there's like nobody out here who's able to get the shot so i'm gonna get the shot and I'm going to get it online right away and hopefully like a lot of people will

see it and be impressed by it. And like he got this amazing shot. I got an okay shot. But like it was this really cool moment of like spontaneity and using technology, right? Like we're using modern cameras. We're using like the Internet to distribute everything we're using. I mean, he posted it to Instagram was where he went first. So I'm at a platform, but like we use these things to just and everybody on the boat had a smartphone and everyone you know like when you're far south like we are or farther south um your phone will see the borealis better than your the naked eye so like everyone's like getting their phones out and they're like oh my god it looks incredible on my phone and like it was just an

awesome moment and then to like get home and like a day or two later see those like just ai generated ones it was really a bummer because it was like that was a human moment that used technology and then this is like here's a technology that doesn't require the human element of it and that was definitely a bummer yeah you had an actual human a moment and and it is an artistic moment your your photos that you posted we should put some links in the show notes but the photos you posted of new york i i am legitimately bummed it wasn't this week the challenge was to do iphone photography because you killed it you did you took some amazing photos uh but you had a human a moment

And behind those photos, there is emotion. I have a photo hanging in my office of a photo I took. It's a snowstorm rolling into Yosemite. And I took the photo literally as we were hauling it out of Yosemite so we didn't get trapped in the snow. And we literally pulled over at Tunnel View really quick. I jumped out, grabbed my camera, didn't even have time to change lenses or anything like that. I had an 85 millimeter lens, which is way too zoomed in for a shot of tunnel view.

So I'm like having to stand way back and hold it up high to snap this photo. And I got this photo. It's one of my favorite photos I've ever taken. It's in my wallpaper pack. It is literally the reason why my wallpaper pack did so well, because everyone wanted that photo. I love this photo. But when I look at it, there is emotion behind it. And when I look at AI photos, there is not emotion behind it. It is like, oh, yeah, this thing generated a bunch of pixels. Like, there's no human emotion to that.

Yeah. I mean, you're saying that you should point your phone camera at the sky like a fool. I don't think, like, guys, I agree with the billionaire. I think ask Meta AI to make up the photos. It's so much easier. Yeah, and I think billionaire... Why go outside? You could just ask it to show you what outside looks like. And that's what I was about to say, billionaire led Google, because let's keep talking about billionaires. Billionaire led Google will do the exact same thing.

Right now, they're letting you make up your own photos on the fly from your own photos. But like, OK, maybe next year's Pixel phones won't have a camera sensors at all. Like no camera sensors. Why do you need camera sensors? Your camera's got all you need. It's got a GPS location. It's got a gyroscope. It can tell where you're pointing the phone at. And it can just make up on the fly what you're supposed to see. And I'm sure that will go well. And I'm sure I'm about, I'm just making a prediction that it's just a joke.

But somebody's out there thinking, oh my God, give me that VC money. I've got a concept on my hand. Let me sell a bunch of rabbit things. Whatever. Just a random animal that I'm just throwing out there. Let me just, yeah, make something. Meanwhile, because like we're a Mac Stories podcast. So we're a fan of a certain company, maybe. That's called Apple. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Maybe there's a billionaire up there. Maybe at Apple as well. Yeah. I think there's a pattern here. And billionaire led Apple is also building up its own corner. of the AI neighborhood. And this is where, guys, I had to write down the rest of this because I want to bring you into a metaphor. Okay. Let's think of the AI neighborhood. So it's an AI neighborhood where billionaires are living in a huge mansion, right?

In the middle of it. I'm going to have to do a lot of bleeping. Sorry. in a nicer corners of the neighborhood. And where every time you speak, there are speech bubbles above your head that are summarized by AI. So everyone speaks in bullet points. That goes well every day. That goes super well. Everybody gets what the other says. That's sarcastic. Nobody gets what other people are saying. And where there's a certain someone dominating this corner of the neighborhood that's led by Apple because each billionaire

has its own corner. Like I said, Apple has its own. And in the Apple corner, you've got someone dominating it that's called Siri. And now, so Siri used to be an old guy like hanging out, answering questions. Can we label it as Tom Hanks? Because I like to think of old Siri, like Tom Hanks just sitting in a rock. Yeah, used to be Tom Hanks. Yeah, and now it's somebody much worse. Okay, maybe it's Elon Musk, this guy. is Tom Hanks now and he's wearing a glowing cape like a queer baiting glowing cape and now everyone pretends that he's better and by everyone I mean Apple pretends that he's better he's better than

the old Siri now he's got a glowing cape anyway that's the neighborhood that AI neighborhood sucks so everything sucks that AI neighborhood sucks and to bring you along the metaphor once more there in this neighborhood you're allowed to walk into anyone's home steal their stuff right under their nose feed it to your own ai pets because everyone has an ai pet in there so you can sell it and you can sell your ai pet to make more ai pets and you can steal ai pets to make more of your own ai pets it's beautiful it's a it's a glory this ai neighborhood and when i say ai when you when i say

you're allowed to do all these things. I mean, of course, if you're one of the billionaires or in the corner of the neighborhood anyway. So this AI neighborhood, we're not talking about a gated community, though. Like, we agree. Because the open web, the open web is open. You can, anyone can come in. Anyone can come in the gated community, right? I mean, no, it's not a gated community. Sorry, sorry, Mishap. It's not a gated community. It's a neighborhood. It's open. So come along, bring your friends, bring your family, pick your own spot in the neighborhood.

Even if you're poor, you can come in. Sure, there are walls all around the neighborhood. Sure, there are bouncers at every entrance and exit to make sure that only a reasonable amount of black and queer people are allowed in. Sure, sure, sure. Oh, and sure, if you're one of those lucky black and queer people who got in, those AI bouncers might throw you around over the wall if you speak too loudly. Sure, okay. And sure, that might also happen if you dare say that most of the residents hate your guts and draw swastikas under your speech bubbles above your head

with a bunch of VC money of all things to sell back your speech bubble with their swastika under it. Because insults generate money just as the rest does. But it's open. Okay, it's an open community. It's an open neighborhood. Everyone can come in. If you've got a startup, you can get a proper plot in the neighborhood. You won't have to live in the dumpsters like the common people who get in the neighborhood. You'll have to wire your electricity. If you're one of the startup people, you'll have to wire your electricity to one of the billionaire homes, of course,

which means they'll be ready to cut you off at any moment if they don't like you anymore. But I'm sure you'll have a great time being friends with them and getting wired up to their electricity directly. And maybe you'll become one of them. Who knows? Hey, it's like high school. It's like the cheapest, the most hyped clique in high school. Maybe they'll let you in. They're totally not making fun of you. Anyway, but don't fret. And I'm almost done here because, like, I need to get this all out, all out.

Don't fret. There are people just outside the wall of this wonderful non-gated community neighborhood that are reporting on everything that happened inside, right? We agree. There are reporters, journalists that are doing their job, right? And sure, sure, some of them blame the EU for trying to rein in those billionaires. Sure, sure, some of them are doing that. And sure, some of them are too excited about threads to properly report about its AI moderation that keeps throwing minorities over the world.

Sure, sure. And sure, they will report about the failures of those AI moderation tools on threads. As soon as white people begin to be impacted by them, sure, that will happen. And that happens all the time. But also sure, as soon as Instagram head Adam Mothory, that's his name, right? Says everything is fixed. Moderation is fixed. We looked at it. Oh, there was an issue. Okay, we looked at it and it's fixed. those reporters out there outside the world will immediately go back to praising the platform and report about every single of its new features without ever mentioning again the fact that those

failures are still here and ruining the online presence of people of minorities. So guys, guys, I think, I think that everything sucks right now. I just got a feeling that everything sucks right now and it's about to suck for a long while i'm glad chris that you said that this word won't get censored it will suck for a long while and i'm sick of this anyway no i i i totally get where you're coming from i i have a um i have very very complicated feelings when it comes to ai uh like we talked about like the creative tools like the stuff that people are using to generate

images and videos and be like oh my gosh we'll never actually have to go and shoot anything ever again we'll just type in what we want to me that that sucks like i i hate that because as somebody that went to film school and studied old films and old movies and current movies and you know loves loves watching the process like the behind the scenes process of how things get created and captured. I love that. That is art to me. That is true art. But typing something into a text box and saying, hey, give me a 20 second clip of a kid running around in a field holding a balloon.

Like, that sucks to me. Like, that's, that's not art. But I can also see tools like summary tools of like, hey, here's my email inbox. Like we've talked about on the show, I get at least 100 emails if not hundreds of emails a day. And I would love a really good summary tool of like, hey, here are the 10 of those emails that you actually need to deal with and the rest we'll just delete for you. Like that is actually something I could get behind. Like give me a proper assistant, but I don't want somebody, something that's going to replace the creative field

or the creative work. I'm not somebody that's ever gonna hire an assistant. Like it's not financially or even like professionally responsible for me to do that because it just it doesn't make any sense. But having a computer generated tool be my assistant would actually be helpful to me. But I don't ever want it to start replacing creative aspects of my work and things like that. So that's that's kind of where I fall down on all that. But yeah, I totally get where you're coming from.

I'm somebody that I got really down on technology and Apple and all that stuff earlier this year. And I was just like, I'm like, why am I even doing this? Like, I just didn't I was on the edge of quitting doing YouTube. And that's when I kind of actually came up with the concept of the show of like, hey, let's find something every week that we enjoy. And it's totally OK. Like, I'm glad you brought this up because I your feelings are 100 percent. valid. I know a lot of other people feel the same way you do, including myself. But I wanted, you know, like, I wanted to start focusing on just the positive aspects of technology and gear and apps and

things like that. And that comes from a very privileged place that I can do that. Like, I'm self employed. I'm a white dude, I can I can focus on just the stuff that I want. And whole thing and just walking away and going back and getting a regular day job because i was just i was so burnt out on it so i i i while i i am trying to just focus on positive stuff i also

recognize that there is stuff that uh that sucks yeah i i think the last like five years maybe a and like trendy stuff, the two big ones that stand out are crypto and AI. And crypto was just a mess from the start. I was always very anti, especially like NFTs and that whole sort of world.

And that fizzled out and that was good. Happy to see that. The LLM thing is definitely interesting because I mean, I use an LLM to generate the transcript for this episode every week. The show would not have a transcript otherwise. And that improves our accessibility in apps that use the transcript that's uploaded. That's a good thing, I think. I think on the whole, that's probably a good thing. Because again, we're not going to hire somebody to do that. We're not going to do it ourselves.

If we had to transcribe this whole thing, this podcast would not exist. I've looked into transcribing for YouTube videos and stuff like that. It's just not financially. Financially, it doesn't make sense. Like, what I make from a video is what it would cost for me to transcribe. Like, it just wouldn't make any sense for me to do it. I wouldn't be able to make YouTube videos. But on the other end of that, you have the idea of, like, we're spending like an hour and a half recording this episode. Chris is spending hours editing it.

I'm spending an hour or two doing show notes and uploading to our podcast host. why don't we just write a few bullet points, have ChatGPT turn that into a script, have digitized versions of our voices, record a podcast together, and release that? Wouldn't it be just as good? Like, that's, I feel like that's the version of the Aurora Borealis photos that you're talking about. Yeah. The thing that Chris really gets you fired up about, like, art, if you will. Yeah, because at the end of the day, our podcast has emotion.

I mean, we spent the first few minutes of the show fighting about who won. Like, AI would not be able to replicate that level of emotion, that level of care we put into, like, beating each other every week when it comes to the challenge. Although it would know that 37% is the winner. There would be no contest. Yeah, that's true. That's fair. But yeah, so yeah, I mean, there's, I think the challenge is that we have these new and like, just at a technical level, I think LLMs are very exciting and weird and like, they're very interesting technically.

when you like zoom out and are like here's all the social aspects of it um they get more complicated but like we're just at a weird spot in tech and all of these nearly on like you said all these billionaires are wondering how they can make their next 20 billion and they see new and emerging technologies as a way to do that and um yeah we're just in kind of a messy spot because the new technologies that are kind of on the forefront are kind of cringy in a lot of ways um maybe a nice way to put it and yeah like the moderation stuff and everything that you mentioned there's there's no excuse for that but um yeah it's just a weird time for tech and i think i think this show is at its

best um when we're highlighting the good stuff out there i think we're able i mean obviously we need some variety we need to step outside our comfort zone but i like the service that we try to offer of here are some cool things that we think you'll enjoy and if you are bummed out by the tech world in general, I hope that we can shine a light on kind of the bright spots. And I think that's hopefully a thing that we do relatively well. Yeah. Now, quick, quick, quick tangent.

Question for Neely on. Didn't, okay, I don't know where we are in this whole process because I've been busy with other stuff. But didn't they finally admit that the threads moderation is off and they're currently looking into that? Or are they just like, nope, nope, it's fine. We're done. Adam Marcery posted something along that line we're we're looking into it like they admitted that there were issues moderation issues these past few days what I'm mad about is that people have been reporting issues since day one of threads

like day one and day minus of threads because days minus 100 of threads because those were issues that were already up and being a problem on Instagram. And like, I remember a time that was during the pandemic, I believe, when if you had the word lesbian in an Instagram post, you could have your account suspended. What? And you'll never get it back. And like, I'm pretty sure some of those accounts that were suspended at the time they're still not back like people gave up there's no like there's no

and and i wrote a story about this on MacStories this summer like there's a system system systemic systemic failure from meta to properly moderate the content on its platforms and all right that exists that's a fact of life i'm okay i'm okay with that what i'm not okay with is the verge i'm going to say names i don't care the verge report starting to report of the on these

issues when it's one of those staff one of their staff that start being affected by it yeah like folks do your job look outside of your own sphere look outside of who is your in your office right now and try to find out if this issue has been going on for a longer time. Who has it been affecting, like, my impression here? And I'm not alone, because if you look at the related posts on threads about this, you'll see people saying the same thing that I am right now.

This has been an issue for minorities forever. Accounts get suspended for no reason. You cannot contest it. You cannot go back on it. You cannot get your account back. There are no explanations and you're ruined. If you make a living out of this, you're ruined. I mean, in threads, probably not. But Instagram, imagine on Instagram, some people make a living out of this. Like sex workers, others. I'm trying to think of minorities who wouldn't make money out of Instagram, of all people.

But there are many types of people. That's not okay. And I'm mad at The Verge and I'm mad at others that are doing the same thing right now, reporting on these issues that have been going on for too long and that will keep going on despite whatever Morseri is posting on his Threads account because this guy has a big mouth. He's saying all kinds of things every day and no accountability because he's rich as heck, I guess. Anyway, I agree with you guys.

I'm happy that we do this show and that we bring forward some positive stuff. I think I will keep with what I said at the beginning I think it's important to be mad and I want to be mad and that's what I've decided to go for today I am mad guys I am super mad and and that's why it's my topic for this week because I have nothing else like no I understand I can't think of anything else I am so mad I can't think of anything else right now it takes to bring up I can't like i said i was in that spot earlier this year where i was i was burnt out between

stuff like this and like the ad market i cannot underscore how bad the ad market has been this year uh it's it's been one of like the worst performing years for me period uh and i was just like i i'm kind of done fighting all this like it was it was just so much work to put in to making you know coming up with concepts for videos and putting things in and i i've always you know i i don't

consider myself a tech reporter i don't report on tech news i just talk about apps and things i enjoy and stuff i use and things like that but even that was it was getting to be a bit much because you know stuff was getting garbled up by ai and all that stuff and it just it wasn't it was it was difficult so i i had to make the choice for myself to i am just going to focus on the positive stuff and then i came up with the idea of this podcast and approached you both about it and we we did it

uh but like i because i was i was just close to quitting i just i wanted to quit the whole thing and just walk away from it. But ultimately, I think this is, I don't want to say a phase because it feels like that's downplaying it almost, but I don't think this is how it's always going to be, or at least I'm hoping this isn't how it's always going to be. I'm hoping we can get back to tech being fun and talking about cool gadgets and things like that because I don't want, we all love technology.

Put what's happening in the news aside. Can we all agree we love technology? Of course. And I think you're right that it's good to be hopeful because otherwise we're not going anywhere. Exactly. And it just ends up hurting you as a person. If you're constantly just being negative, it brings down your mental health, your psyche. It's not healthy to constantly be negative. And that's a trap that I fell into earlier this year where I was just constantly negative.

I was not happy about anything. And I kind of had to pull myself out of that. And it took a while. It's something my girlfriend helped me with. I couldn't just be negative all the time because, like I said, I would have quit. But I totally, completely understand where you're coming from, Neelion. And all this does suck. Yeah. you know it doesn't suck chris's audio system yeah so my topic we're just gonna like do where i am so i don't want to like undercut or under

no undervalue what neilion's stuff but like i'm gonna go complete opposite here because i have something i'm very excited about here that's why i wanted to go first so we can like let the air go and go on. Okay. All right. Cool. Because I have something I'm very excited about. So when I moved into my last place earlier last year, when I was single, living on my own, I moved into a condo, I bought a nice TV. I bought the LG C2 OLED 77-inch TV because I love movies, I love television, I love playing games.

So I bought a nice, big, nice TV. This was my treat myself moment. But I also bought a really nice sound system. And this was a Vizio 5.1.2 sound system. So it had a sound bar with three speakers, three front-facing speakers. It had two rear speakers, a subwoofer. But on the sound bar, it also had two up-firing speakers for Dolby Atmos. So that's where you get the.2 at the end. Worked great for the whole time I lived in the condo.

Worked great. My girlfriend and I move in together. We get this house. We move in together. And it just stops working periodically for some reason. Now, this was never hooked up to the internet. There was no firmware updates that happened. Nothing like that. Literally, it was just physically moved from one place to another. That was the only difference. But all of a sudden, stuff would stop working. And you would have to manually go up and unplug it and plug it back in to restart it. And it was getting really annoying.

The other issue too is we moved into this house and we have this layout of we have the living room, the kitchen, and the dining room. It's this big open room. And there was no place to mount the rear speakers. So when you plug it in, it thinks that there's rear speakers, but the rear speakers weren't actually set up. So you were missing part of the audio. You were missing the rear channels. So if you would get something that was playing in a 5.1.2 or what surround sound setup, you are actually missing something.

So it was not working out well, plus it was going out. And then the thing that broke me is that this old sound system had a specific speaker just set up for dialogue. And that just went out. I was having to restart it all, unplug it and plug it back in, and it was just going out, like randomly just stop working. and it wasn't physically going out because if you unplugged the power and plugged it back in it would come back up like everything was just fine so I got fed up with it I was so tired of it it broke me one day and I had been looking at this setup for a little

this new setup for a little while so I just ordered and got about a week ago it literally showed up like the day after we recorded last the Sonos Arc and Sonos Sub oh I've heard of those yeah so this is the big Sonos sound bar That has a bunch of speakers built into it. Including up firing speakers for proper Dolby Atmos. And the big subwoofer as well. Because again, we have this big open room. So if I was to get the small one, it wouldn't work out right.

So I had to get the big one. And I love this thing. It is great. Now, I know there's some controversy with Sonos stuff. I will get to it in a minute. But overall, this thing sounds great. You can use the app to calibrate it. And it's kind of funny because what it's doing is it takes, you set up the system so you tell it what speakers are where and like put the pair together. So like I put the ARC and the subwoofer together so that it knows that it's all connected and it's plugged in via eARC, HDMI cable into eARC.

So it's all physically plugged into my TV or the soundbar is and the subwoofer is wireless. Technically, the subwoofer does have an Ethernet port, but I'm out of network ports at the router up there, so I need to put in a switch. But the subwoofer is plugged into the network ports. I'm sorry, the sound bar is plugged into the network ports. The sub isn't, but I ordered a switch to get that all set up. But it really hasn't affected anything. But I paired them together, and then basically what it does is you go into the Sonos app, and you set up something that's called, I believe it's called True Tone.

and basically it puts out tone sounds and you take your phone and you move around your the area and it calibrates the sound for for your sound system based on the tones and how it's hearing and your position and all that stuff uh it was actually kind of funny because you can't do the true tone calibration while you're on an ios beta and it currently doesn't support the iphone 16 line so So luckily, I have an iPhone 14 or no, iPhone 15 plus view unit that I or no, no, it was actually a 14.

I'm sorry. It was the yellow iPhone 14 plus. It was the mid cycle color. And I still need to send it back. I'm so sorry, Apple. I need to send it back. I just haven't had a chance. I keep forgetting. But luckily, it wasn't on a beta or anything. So I put the Sonos app on that and did that and then moved back. But that was the only way I was actually able to calibrate it because all my other stuff is on the betas right now or a 16 device that isn't supported. But once I did the calibration, I turned on one of the scenes that I think has the best audio mix ever.

And have you guys seen the Batman? I have. The Matt Reeves one? That's a guy in a black suit, right? Yes. Yes, it is. His name is James Bond. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So there's the scene in the Batman where the Batmobile fires up and he's chasing the penguin. And it is one of the best audio mixes I have ever heard. Ever. It is amazing. It is a V12 in that car. Now, personally, I'm a V8 person. You know, Mustang GT, V8 in the morning sounds amazing.

But a V12 with that subwoofer. Whoa. Are we talking about cars? Yeah, yeah. In the scene. In that movie scene. I'm so confused. The Batmobile has it. Okay. Okay. It's really loud. It rumbles. But there's also some dialogue. There's also some gunfire. So there's high-pitched sounds. And then there's this part where this tanker truck explodes and the Batmobile flies through it. And the music is, like, very dramatic and stuff like that. It's just one of the best sounding scenes in any movie I've ever seen.

So I played that and I was just completely blown away. Despite the fact I don't have rear speakers right now. because, again, I don't have a place to mount them, and I refuse to put speakers on, like, have you guys ever seen, like, those speaker stands that some people do when they don't have, like, a place to mount rear speakers? I refuse to put those in my house. For the side ones, right? Yeah, and the other issue, too, is where our couch is, it's in the middle of this big open space, so there's no power around it.

It's a constant problem for me, like, if I'm working out on the couch and I need to plug in my iPad or something like that, I have to get an external battery. so i need to really figure that out um there is a way that i could go up into the attic and mount them up there but i really don't want to go into a crawl space um but anyways best not to yeah it's it's best not to but my point is i am completely blown away by just how the sound bar and sub sounds i don't have rear speakers but it does have doby atmos so you're kind of getting that surround sound

feels still because that's the whole point of Atmos is you you hear the noises coming from all around because it's firing the sound up and it's actually bouncing off the ceiling so you hear it it's pretty cool does it actually work I feel like this is a thing this is no it does okay okay I feel like this is a thing that comes up all the time with speakers like the HomePod people were like really hyped up around like it's not actually a mono speaker it's doing 3d audio it's actually better than stereo and Then it's like, no, it's a mono speaker. I am firmly against using...

I have HomePods. I have the old ones. I have the new ones. I'm firmly against using the HomePods as TV speakers. They do not sound that great. They are faking all of that. What should I do? That's what I'm doing. Oh, I'm sorry. They're actually pretty good. They're fine. They're fine. They are very good. My issue with them is they're wireless. you can't plug an HDMI cable into them and have it go over eARC. So they're wireless. Oh, you can now.

I'm doing that. You can plug an HDMI cable into the HomePod. How? There's no HDMI port on the HomePods. Yeah, you got to kind of dig away some of the fabric, but then there's an HDMI port in there. I don't believe you. No, it works. If you have an Apple TV that they're paired to, it'll do eARC through the Apple TV. Yes. Okay, I was getting to that. You can do that. But I noticed when I tried this, I noticed when I was playing games on my Xbox, there was a delay. It was not synced bright. That's the issue. Yes, if you are just using an Apple TV, it works great.

The minute you use any other input device, that's when there is a slight delay, and it was enough to just drive me wild. I found it worked well for video content on other inputs because video can be buffered. But with games, yeah, you can't do that. So games were the issue I had. I don't think we've had that issue with the Nintendo Switch. Interesting. So I guess maybe we don't notice it. Yeah, no, I definitely had that issue with the Xbox.

Xbox Series X. And I even had the thing where I installed the Dolby app so I was getting Atmos and all that stuff. I was getting the proper... And I was still delayed. If you do have a Dolby Atmos setup, go into the Dolby... And you have an Xbox. Go into the Dolby app on the Xbox, and there is a demo of Dolby Atmos in there that will blow you away. And it does a really great job of turning it on and off so you can actually hear what the difference is.

Killer. Really great option. if you have an Xbox and Adobe Atmos setup. Have you seen that TikTok? Sorry. Have you seen that viral TikTok that plays some audio for you in stereo? And it's written something cringy on the black screen. It's written like, you don't need Dolby Atmos, stereo is great. Listen to this. And what it's like is like you're in a barbershop.

I don't remember. something like that or a hairdresser and you're hearing sounds from all around you and it's actually pretty impressive so I'm convinced Dolby Atmos doesn't exist I love Dolby Atmos my last sound system had Dolby Atmos and it was killer I loved it I won't go back I won't go to something that doesn't have it because I think it does a great job maybe you should go on TikTok more no I still have never download the tiktok tiktok app i refuse to i i have what tiktok did hold another tangent i don't

anyways refuse wait for mess challenge i oh um but the controversy around sonos right now is like i think it was like five or six months ago they put out an update to their app and it is not a good update like a lot of people have been complaining about it like it's not easy to play music and stuff like that but i don't i don't quite get the controversy and let me explain so yes i use the app to do the setup but once i got the setup done i've never opened the app again because all the

sonos stuff is airplay to receivers so if i'm going to just play music to the sonos stuff i can just airplay it right from Apple Music or Overcast or whatever. So I never actually end up going in to the Sonos app to like do playback and controls and stuff like that. I don't. So I don't get why everyone is so I think it's not a great app. I will fully admit it is not a native app. It definitely doesn't have that native feel. It's not a great app experience. But once I did the setup, I've never had to go back into it again.

So I'm wondering, am I missing something? I think a lot of, I'm surprised how many people I talk to with Sonos stuff who use the app to play to the speakers. They will use the Apple Music integration in the app. They will use the podcast integration and they don't AirPlay necessarily. It's weird. I don't, I AirPlay as well. I had to, I just signed into the Sonos app on my phone for the first time in like five years because like you, I set it up and then I haven't touched it since. It's not an issue for me, but...

Yeah, I don't get it. I'm assuming people just don't know that you can AirPlay 2, you can use AirPlay 2, and it's like the same quality. Like you're not losing anything. So I'm assuming that's the issue. Matt, I didn't know you had Sonos stuff. What Sonos stuff do you have? I do. I have basically... So as with many things, this is your version of it, Chris, and then this is my version of it. so i have the sonos beam 2 i think i think they have second generation so the beam 2 and then i have two sonos ones as kind of satellite speakers and they're kind of um in our our setup we

have a couch in front of the tv and then there's end tables on each side and so the speakers are on both the end tables sort of behind us kind of just on the side of us and it works great i really love it the only issue i ever run into is every once in a while when i'm switching inputs it'll out of sync for whatever reason, and then just switching the inputs and then switching back to it fixes it. But yeah. - I don't have that issue with the ARC. You should buy the ARC, buy the ARC. - That's too expensive though.

- It was very pricey. It was just one of those things, like I was reading up on the Beam 2 because the Beam 2 is significantly cheaper, but what it was saying for our size of the room, like the Atmos stuff wouldn't actually work for our size of the room. And it was, and we actually, okay, I should go back. We actually have the Beam 1, and it is plugged into our bedroom TV. That was the soundbar my girlfriend was using on her TV before we moved in together. But I haven't plugged it into the internet.

It's literally just plugged into the eARC port and just acts as the speaker for that TV. Like, we don't do any Sonos-y stuff with it. And it's fine, but that one doesn't have Dolby Atmos. The first beam does not have Dolby Atmos support. It just does stereo. Yeah. How do you like the sub? The sub is amazing. I'm curious about it. It is the best sub I have ever heard in a home theater setup, period. It is so good. It does a great job of adding really low in, but not doing that rattle of like that you can hear sometimes from some subs that are like turned up way too high or trying to be too aggressive.

I fully endorse getting the sub. Now, from what I was reading is if the sub works best is if you have the arc. If you have the beam, you should get the sub mini. So that way they're kind of like on par with the same audio level, if that makes sense. Okay. All right. Yeah, I'm looking at Submini. That is a better price too. And so, oh, I should also say I didn't pay full price for this stuff. They had a deal going on.

Was it that they had, I think it was like one of their Amazon Prime Day deals or something like that. like it was competing with Amazon Prime Day, but it was a sale on their website, so I didn't pay the full price. But they also have refurbished stuff that I've heard is very good. It's kind of on the same lines as Apple refurbished. They clean it up and stuff like that. So how much did it cost you? I plead the fifth on that. What's the fifth? Oh, sorry.

The Fifth Amendment. The Fifth Amendment of the Constitution basically means you don't have to... It means you don't have to self-incriminate. So if you're pulled over by a cop or something like that and they start asking you, like, did you murder somebody? You can plead the fifth so you don't have to self-incriminate yourself. So I'm pleading the fifth on that. Somebody can go. Look, I've already told you what I bought. You can go on the website and add it up yourself. But I am not admitting it out loud. Oh, my God.

Sorry. But, yeah, it was a lot of money. but to be fair I had been putting money aside to upgrade the sound system for a while because my sound system was going out tell us fifth what doesn't exist in my country that amendment so so I have the right I have the right to be told I'll tell you off air how about that I just don't want to mostly admit it to myself into a part where I'm recording and then I have to listen back to me saying how much I spent because

it was a lot but again I had been setting money aside for a while for this because I knew my sound system was going out so and this is the one that I had been wanting so I like this um just to kind of wrap up it don't have the rear speakers so it's not proper surround sound Dolby Atmos you do need the rear speakers to have that proper kind of setup but uh once I kind of figure out a way and I have an idea, but it's just going to require me to crawl up in the attic, and I really don't want to do that. I have a way of how I can mount those.

I just don't want to do it. But I absolutely love this. I think it's great. I understand if you don't like the app, but also you don't have to use the app. At least the modern Sonos stuff is AirPlay compatible. Maybe the older Sonos stuff isn't, but the modern Sonos stuff is AirPlay compatible. So you don't have to actually go into the app. And it sounds great. Movie nights are amazing with this. It's like those people who use the Philips Hue app.

Philips Hue app. Ah, I can't say it. Philips Hue app. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Not the app, though. Yeah, I couldn't say app. No, the app is horrible. Set them up and then run away. Yeah, some people use that app exclusively. And I think you've got to use Philips Hue to use your Philips Hue stuff. No, put it all in HomeKit or HomeBridge or Home Assistant, anything other than the Philips Hue app. It's wild that Philips has basically made, was like one of the biggest smart home light bulb brands.

I mean, they probably still are, but their app is atrocious. It is so bad. But anyways, that's it for Sonos, unless you guys have any questions on it. Thank you. Really enjoy it. All right, Matt, what do you got for us this week? Oh, I've got a goodie. So my favorite thing in the world, I think, is a new and interesting web browser. And, oh, buddy, do I have one. So today I wanted to talk briefly about Zen Browser, which is a new browser that I will say up front is an alpha.

It's getting updates every couple days. And those updates sometimes break things. So it's not for everybody. So, for example, the latest update broke keyboard shortcuts. So, if you like to Command-H to hide, don't get that. Command-Q to quit doesn't work anymore. Some of them work. Hey, Command-Q doesn't work in Chrome either. Oh, yeah, it does. That's actually a good feature. No, come on. You don't break. I have a keyboard maestro set up to add that feature to Safari on my Mac.

Discord is a million years old app and it doesn't support some basic macOS keyboard shortcuts. Just throwing this out there. So Zen, Zen Browser. I've talked numerous times, I think, on this show about how I use Arc on my Mac, but I don't love the browser company as a whole. I think they're kind of foray into ArcSearch, which is their AI thing.

And they kind of seem excited about the idea of nobody visiting websites anymore. Rubs me the wrong way. So I'm not as in love with them as I have been. So the problem for me has been that their Mac browser is so freaking good that I, you know, it's a balancing act. So Zen browser is the first time in a couple years I've changed my default browser. And it's not better than ARK for me on the whole, but it's close enough that I'm actually really enjoying it. So, Send Browser.

The big things to know about it, I think, are it's based on Firefox. So, unlike basically every other browser out there, this one's for you, Neilian. It's based on Firefox, which is, although, as Mozilla likes to ruin things, we'll see. But it's based on Firefox, not Chromium. Everything sucks. Anyway, sorry. - It's available on every major desktop platform. So Mac, Windows and Linux, and it's the same app on all platforms. You're not like a worse version on a different platform.

And it uses Firefox sync, which is kind of cool. So the team has said they have no plans to make a mobile version of this, but it is, it will sync with Firefox on your iPhone if you use that. What's interesting is I just looked up Zen Browser in the App Store on my iPad, and there is one called Zen Browser. So is it not? I put it in our text group. It's literally, but it has a terrible rating.

It looks like it never gets updated. I don't know. The last update was two years ago. So did these people buy the Zen browser out and are doing something else with it? I don't know what's going on here, Matt. Explain yourself. I think this is unrelated. This is two ratings, an average of three stars. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a five star and a one star. I was going to say, the five star is probably from the developer reviewing their own app. Exactly. You should definitely do it anyway.

But if you have two reviews, you can kind of tell. Yeah, that's unrelated. So not available on the iPad. I'm sorry, Chris. Okay. If you want to power down during this segment, that's okay. Yeah, yeah. I'll go for a walk or something, you know, whatever. But I really like it. And so in addition to, like, the Firefox thing, it's open source. So if you're into that, you can be excited about it being open source. But it also does side tabs. And it does side tabs, like tabs on the left, in a way that's actually good.

I feel like a lot of browsers have added those in the last, like, couple years. And they often suck, but they're very good in Zen. they look nice they're nice to interact with with the latest update you can start dragging them around to do like split screen and stuff and so I really dig this and I don't know I'm just someone who I'm not a huge Safari fan which some people are like why would anyone ever use anything besides Safari and I just don't like it on the whole and extensions kind of suck in Safari like every time

I hear someone complain about an extension, I'm like, what browser are you using? And they're like, Safari. And it's because Safari extensions suck. But yeah, so like Firefox extensions are solid. There's quite a few there, whether you're doing ad blocking or password managers or whatever you're doing, custom style sheets. Am I misremembering something? Didn't Firefox extensions, aren't they just using Chrome extensions now? Oh no, that's Edge. I'm sorry. That's Edge, yeah. So when Edge switched to Chromium, they got those extensions. But basically, I haven't run into an issue where I can't find

the extension I need in the Firefox store. I think maybe what Chris is thinking of is that now there's a standard for making extensions, which means developers can very easily port extensions from one browser to the next. Oh, that's nice. Yeah. I actually think I mixed up Edge and Firefox for a second. Okay. And so, yeah, it's themable. There's themes built in. You can customize the look of it.

I have it set to a nice blue, which I think is very comfortable. But you can make it pink or yellow or orange or purple or red or whatever you want. There's a whole community of extensions as well, so specific to Zen to customize the UI that are already out there. Some of them don't work. Again, it's an alpha. But it's already got people working on it and kind of an active community. It feels kind of like very, very early days of Obsidian in a way, with a lot of people just kind of figuring out what to do with it. If it becomes remotely as successful as Obsidian, that'll be amazing, but time will tell.

There is one downside to this app that will make it immediately a no-go for some people, and that's DRM. apparently to make DRM content work in a web browser you need to have a license and Zen is free and open source and has really no business model right now besides donations and they don't have the money to pay for that so you cannot use Spotify through this you cannot use Apple Music through this you cannot use

Netflix through this YouTube works great but if you use like video streaming or music streaming sites, they are likely not going to work at all. So that's the one thing. I don't do those in the browser, so it's fine, but just be aware. Isn't that messed up? It is messed up. How come you can't just make your own web browser and not invest a ton of money just to make sure that streaming websites work? It's kind of messed up.

It is kind of messed up. But yeah, that's the one thing. I didn't even notice it until I was doing research about the browser and found it was an issue and then tested it and confirmed it was. But yeah. But I guess the solution here is let's make it popular so there's generous donators that can give it the money. Yeah, that would be great. I think they do have some larger donors like bigger companies who have made donations to them.

But yeah, they definitely need more. someone just needs to buy this for them every year yeah this license but uh yeah that's that's pretty much it um the side tabs were the thing i was really excited about it's cool using a browser that's built on firefox and not chromium and um oh it also does that thing again it's in alpha so it's a little shaky um but it does a thing that i think arc does really well uh where you can set up different workspaces where you can have different accounts signed in and you can switch between them with a keyboard shortcut,

which I don't think you can do in Safari. It's like multiple clicks to do it. Yeah, there's no keyboard shortcut, but you have to jump through. But what I do is I tie my profiles for Safari to focus modes. So I have focus modes set up that jump between everything so that way I'm signed into the right accounts. I have a demo profile for when I'm filming stuff so I don't accidentally leak something and things like that. Yeah. Yeah. My use case is I'm like using day job stuff and personal stuff and I'm bouncing between the two.

Like my social media is on one one group. And anyway. But yeah, it does that with workspaces and profiles channels. What are they called? They're called something weird in Firefox, but containers, containers. Thank you. So it is a little confusing to set up. It took me a while to figure out what I need to actually configure. But I do have groups for kind of like normal stuff, YouTube publishing mode and work stuff now. So, yeah, it's pretty nice.

And if you're looking for a new browser that's not based on Chromium, then I think it's worth a shot. Again, totally free and on whatever platform you're using. So, except the iPad. Yeah, I was just looking at the web page and I'm like, I like this. I would totally use this. Hopefully they do bring it. I mean, I can understand why they don't because Firefox is their engine. They would have to create a webkit version of it currently to bring it to the iPad unless they just wanted to bring it to the EU. But hopefully, I'm really hoping that's something that gets opened up everywhere is different browser engines are enabled on iOS and iPadOS.

It would be good. Yeah. The reasoning they gave actually is that they're really focused on the desktop experience. And so they don't see how their kind of UI, not just the engine, but like the UI that they've built, fits on the phone. And so they're kind of punting to like, you can sync with Firefox, but like... I've got an idea for them. Just make Zen search and just strip websites.

Sorry. Yep, I know where you're going. Don't do that, Zen. Just use AI. Don't do that. Please don't do that. Please don't do that. Some of us have bills to pay. Please don't do that. Yep. And it is not my list of things to talk about, but there are no AI features built in. Also because those are very expensive to build and they aren't VC funded as far as I know. So yeah, no money for that. That's good. I like this. I like this a lot. I might just install it on the Mac Mini I use for recording and play around with it.

I wouldn't have much of a use for it because the reason why I have to use the Mac Mini is Riverside, the service we use, requires a Chromium browser. So I'm actually using Edge right now because I refuse to install Chrome. Though, I mean, it probably wouldn't make much of a difference on a Mac Mini. Actually, Matt did that whole video that Chrome doesn't really affect your battery as much as everyone thinks. So it really wouldn't be that big of a deal. I just don't think it does. Yeah. But anyways, I'm just using Edge on this Mac Mini right now because I need a Chromium browser.

But yeah, no, this is really cool. I like it. I must say that my partner, I sent Matt's video to my partner where you introduced Zen browser and you got them to try it out. And I don't know if they switched to it entirely. I should ask. Listen, I'll take they liked it enough to try it out. Yeah, they tried it out. That's a win. That's always a win. Yeah, whenever somebody comments, be like, yeah, you know, I'll do like app roundup videos or something like that.

I'll be like, hey, I found some apps to try. I'm like, yeah, great. That's exactly what these videos are for. So cool. All right. Anything else before we move on? Yeah, we're going really long. Oh, yeah. All right. This week, Niléane, it was your challenge for us. And I have to say, I really enjoyed this challenge. Why don't you explain to everyone what it was? Yeah. So my challenge is pretty simple. It was pretty simple. just go into the accessibility settings on your phone and try to find a setting or a feature, an accessibility feature

that you can use that you want to highlight on the show. Wait. Okay, in our document it said go into accessibility feature on a device, but you just said on a phone. Was I supposed to do it on a phone? Sorry, no, yeah. On a device, you're choosing. Disqualified. I was about to say because I just got disqualified. I just assumed the phone. This happened to me last week. I was like, iPhone photography? Oh, no. I was almost about ready to have to swap out mine with tap backs or something. I was like, oh, no, everyone knows about that.

Okay. All right. Well, I got two for you. One's more of a tip, and then the other one's an actual pick. So my tip is something I enabled a while ago, and that is the pointer color on iPadOS. So the pointer on iOS when you're using a mouse or a trackpad is just like this light gray circle. And especially if you use dark mode apps, it can kind of blend in very easily. So I went in and turned on the white outline feature for the pointer, and I haven't looked back. It's been great. It's great for showing where the cursor is in videos, but also just like me quickly seeing it.

Absolutely love it. Perfect. You can pick a different color. You can pick orange, blue, whatever. But I just picked white because I just I wanted something simple. I didn't want it to be super dramatic. Just nice for keeping the pointer from blending in. But my actual pick is full keyboard access on iPadOS. So if you go into Accessibilities, Accessories, and Keyboard, you can enable full keyboard access. And what this does is it allows you to control the whole UI right from the keyboard.

So you can select different window panes. You can select different options. Use the tab and space bar and all that stuff, and you can move through everything. Really cool. But the kicker is you can assign keyboard shortcuts to just about every system feature you can imagine using this feature. And it's not just system features, but it's also every shortcut that is in your library as well. Now, this is the only way to get keyboard shortcuts for that on an iPad or iPhone as well.

Keyboard shortcuts for shortcuts are available on the Mac. They have been for years. I've been begging Apple to bring them to the iPad, and they still haven't. But I went through and I assigned some keyboard shortcuts to some of my favorite shortcuts, like task cut was Command-Control-T, snippet cut was Command-Control-S, capture cut was Command-Control-C, and so on and so on. So I used those for a few days, but there was a couple of issues. Full keyboard access really takes over the tab button and the spacebar button.

And it's not really an issue in native apps. It's pretty smart about how to control it. But it puts this window around whatever is highlighted. So you're getting this extra UI element about whatever is highlighted. And you can't disable that. And whenever you hit tab, it tries to move to a different element. And it uses space bar to select things. And especially in non-native apps like Obsidian, it really got confused on when I was trying to use tab for moving through elements or tab when I was

trying to like indent or spacebar when I was trying to add space so if you just use native apps and probably like native apps that have good accessibility support this really probably won't be much of an option for you but I had a ton of problems especially with obsidian because obsidian is not a native app uh it it really like it got really confused on when i was trying to like indent an outline or even just put a space in between words so i did end up having to disable it but it just got me thinking about like how kind of annoying it is that there is a system in place

for adding custom keyboard shortcuts but it's also tied to this other thing and i'm not saying full keyboard access is bad like i'm glad it's there for the people that need it but i don't think these two systems need to be tied together like you should be able to create custom system wide keyboard shortcuts without having to enable the whole like tab and spacebar windowing control system um it's there they just literally just need to pull it apart and i might have mentioned this the apple um yeah i'm glad it's there but like i don't these two things should not be put together

they should be pulled apart because having the ability to set up custom keyboard shortcuts on ipad os would solve a lot of people's problems with using ipad os as like a productivity os like their their main work os yeah i have uh quite a few system-wide keyboard shortcuts i've set up with keyboard maestro on my mac to run things no matter where i am i can copy text as plain text or i can do these quick little things here and there and being able to do that on the ipad through shortcuts would be awesome i will say that there is a history of apple bringing features that are

part of their accessibility settings into full featured things so the mouse cursor is kind of accessibility and that eventually turned into just a feature that was available everywhere um but there's numerous of these so there could definitely be a world where it turns into something you don't have to turn on this feature for yeah and and this has been around for a few years this isn't new to ipad os 18 uh but i i don't know why they haven't brought why they haven't done it it really should

it really should be a thing. Like I said, I'm glad it's there. I'm not trying to put down this feature or anything like that, but I do think like the two parts of it should be pulled apart. Well, there are too many things in iPadOS 18. They didn't have room. Oh, Matt's got jokes today. Sorry, it's a little jam. I've got two suggestions for you, Chris. Okay. For that issue of Obsidian, So one, there's a control center thingy that you can add now.

So you can add a control to control center to toggle on and off full keyboard access. So maybe you could just easily toggle it on and off when you launch Obsidian. Or better than that, I think you can turn it on or off with shortcuts. So you could set up an automation that toggles it on and off when you open Obsidian. So I had this thought, but the issue is I run a lot of shortcuts while I have Obsidian open.

So turning this off would disable those keyboard shortcuts that I set up. So it kind of would just, it defeats the purpose a little bit. Plus there's a few other apps I had issues with. Discord, notorious. Trying to get this feature to work well in Discord, it didn't work at all. Threads, same thing. There's a handful of Lightroom. There's a handful of apps that I use that it just did not play well with, which is unfortunate.

But yes, I did have this thought, and it's a really good thought. It's just I just used too many shortcuts while using Obsidian. Yeah, man. Discord. It keeps coming up today. Have you ever used Discord with Stage Manager? Oh, yeah. It's just the sidebar. It's so bad. It's so unbelievably bad. I'm the bummed person today and yeah, let's go all in Discord. You suck.

Just do something about your apps. Even on the Mac, I mean, on the Mac, it's alright because it's a web app after all, but like, Oh, man. Yeah. So mad right now. Anyway. All right. So that's mine. Matt, what do you got for us? Yeah. So mine is very simple, but I think it's a cool trick that if you're anything like me, which is very few people, I bet, you'll like this. So I keep the text on my iPhone pretty small.

I like to see more text. I have pretty good eyesight. Like below the normal? Yeah, I think I'd say 90%. Okay. Maybe 80%. I'm not sure. Ooh. Flont in your eyesight here. Wow. It's at? I just had to order new reading glasses. 90%. It's funny you say that. So it's at 90%. It's a little smaller than normal. So I have just tons of stuff on screen. But right after I wake up, my eyes are kind of fuzzy.

you're coming out of like sleep mode and everything and i've found i just can't read when i'm reading in bed whatever first thing i do when i wake up is i reach my phone it's fine we don't have to talk about that now um but while my like eyes are still adjusting to like being open and awake for the day everything's fuzzier and so i need this text size to be larger to read whatever's come in And so what I've done is I've created an automation in shortcuts that at 4 a.m. every morning, which is before I wake up, but at 4 a.m. every morning, it will switch my tech size to like 130 percent.

So huge. And then it automatically turns itself off at 6 a.m., which is at what point I'll definitely be out of bed. So from like 4 a.m. to 6 a.m., the text size is very large. And it just means that if I reach over for my phone at that time, I can read the things that are on my screen. And then it automatically switches back to normal after that. So it's a pretty nice thing. Didn't take long to set up either. And it's super simple. I might be able to share that as a link if someone just wants to download it.

Are we talking about the setting that's in display and brightness? Is that not the same one? Yeah, I was going to say, is this not inaccessibility? Oh, no, I didn't mean it like that. He might be disqualified. No, I didn't mean it like that. There is display and text size as one of the top accessibility features. Yeah, I was just confused which setting it was. Oh, yeah. It does live in display size and text size, larger text.

It does have an option there. Found it. But is that the option that you're automating? It is. Okay. All right. Okay. All right. They may show it outside of accessibility as well. Chris was so excited. I was like, ah, one down. So, mine is set to the first. Wow. Oh, yeah. So, which setting is that? There's no number.

Oh, but it's toggled off. No? I don't get it. Mine is literally the middle. Like I am the absolute middle. I just use the recommended one, but I'm an old man. I'm confused. Do you have to turn the setting on for the tech effects? Oh, no. Okay. It gives you more options if you toggle it on. If you have it in control center, it'll tell you the percentage there. I got it. Okay. Okay, nice.

Sorry, I'm just questioning. investigating the setting uh neilion what do you what do you got for us yeah uh so i've got a feature that's pretty old now like i still think of it as a new feature but it's actually pretty old now it came out with ios 16 i think that's live captions live captions you can add it to control center which i think is essential to use this feature

because otherwise if you turn it on it's always somewhere on screen so it takes room on your screen so anyway the feature what it does is it will transcribe in real time on device whatever audio is playing right now on your phone. So like if you're watching a video on YouTube in the YouTube app and you turn on live captions, you'll get this floating window with the live transcription of the YouTube video. It's using the audio output of that video to transcribe. So it works in YouTube but it

works in any app that outputs audio. It's system-wide and that floating window is always there you can collapse it so it's just a floating pill or you can put it to the side that just like picture in picture uh but i think the so yeah if you want to use this feature add the control to control center so you can just get rid of it when you don't need it need it let me tell you how i found this very useful so sometimes i go to bed i mean i say sometimes always you actually sleep yeah what i meant to say is all the always very often i go to bed way later than my partner

and we sleep in the same bed um so my partner is asleep and i don't want to make any noise and if i've gone to bed without my headphones it's very likely that i'm going to be too lazy to stand back up, get a pair of headphones and get back into bed. So what I do is to use my phone without any sound and to watch YouTube videos on my phone without any sound is turn on live captions and it's pretty good. So you're going to say I hear you in the audience, same person who was complaining already in the reviews on Apple podcast that this podcast is way too political. I hear you

right now you're saying you're saying hey but youtube already has automatic subtitles yeah it's it's much better than that apple's live captions are much better than anything youtube is doing with their subtitles right now that's interesting yeah one main thing that it's doing a lot better is punctuations um so subtitles without any punctuations is okay if you've got sound like

if you got sound and you're reading the the captions at the same times it's all right not to have any punctuations and not to have uh clearly uh the limits of the beginning and end of your of the sentences etc you can still make sense of it but when you've got no sound and you're in bed don't want to get up to get your AirPods reading YouTube's automatic subtitles without any punctuations nothing makes sense anymore like it's really hard to keep up with what's going on and Apple's live captions have

punctuations and they're pretty good at even with intonations like the insert exclamation marks question marks and stuff like that which makes it very easy to read all while watching something. So I would recommend trying it out. Big bummer, it only works with English. Yeah. And I remember that when it came out with iOS 16, I was excited about this feature, but I didn't use it and I never used it

until now because it was only available in English and my phone was set to at the time because I didn't already write for Mac stories and I didn't have to take screenshots of my phone all the time with text in English so I had my phone in French at the time and you've got to have your phone set to English to use the feature, to use live captions yeah it makes sense but it's a bit too bad that you can't just have a different setting in there, I don't know

yeah But anyway, it's really good. Try it out. That's cool. It's a better alternative to YouTube's automatic subtitles. You should go in and watch the video version of our podcast and see what YouTube labels you nearly on. It's pretty funny. It's always something different. It's never the same thing. It's hilarious. It does not know what to do with your name. Yeah. Okay, that's pretty cool. I like that one a lot.

I guess we'll do democracy to decide who wins because I think these are all... So how are we doing democracy for this? Like pick the best accessibility? Pick the best accessibility option? That's not problematic at all, right? Yeah, yeah. No, that does actually sound pretty bad. Saying that out loud, yeah. Maybe we just don't pick a winner for this one. Maybe we don't. Yeah. They're all really good. Yeah, I like all these. I think they all highlight something very different for different people that could benefit from them.

I think I want to pick a spiritual winner, which is Matt, who is Matt, because he's got shortcuts involved in there with the scheduling. I mean, I got shortcuts involved in mine. Yeah, but you disabled it. Yeah, that's true. I did. Mine was more I wanted to highlight this feature and hopefully somebody at Apple is listening and is like, oh, yeah, we should pull these apart. And yeah, it would make sense.

But yeah. Left captions in French, please. Yeah. All right, Matt, it's your challenge this week. What do you have for us? Oh, I have such an easy challenge. I think. Oh, man, I'm so busy this week. It is. You're going to love it. so my challenge is to find a fun free game to play in the app store oh okay i like this yeah i was gonna say apple arcade which is technically paid but they're try to find a effectively free

app an app that you can enjoy for a game that you can enjoy for free okay interesting okay all right i would okay i would count netflix games if you already pay for netflix and i would count apple already paid for Apple Arcade. Well, then I already know which one I'm picking. Okay. Okay. Yeah, I don't think... I think we should take out those. It's your challenge. We're not going to tell you what to do, but we're all going to pick Bellartro, or however you say it.

I hear about Bellartro all the time. I don't know what it is, and I don't want to know what it is. Don't doubt. You will never get anything done. It is the ADHD never get anything else done in your life. Okay. Okay. Let me, let me, let me tweak it then. Um, do you guys both have Netflix? Uh, I don't technically I do, but it's my girlfriend's and I never signed into it. I never watch anything. I, I, I'm so tired of true crime games or true time, true crime shows.

Hmm. Okay. Well, try to find a free game. Okay. All right. Okay. And if it's part of one of those subs, I'm still kind of as free. Okay. All right. It has to be a free mobile game. A mobile game. It must run on your iPhone. You can play it on your iPad if you want, but if someone's listening on their iPhone, they should be able to download it from their iPhone. Okay. All right. I have a spiritual pick, and I'll look for an actual pick, but I have something that sort of... But it's more like... We'll get to it next week. He's already saying that it's going to cheat.

Look at that. No, no, no. That won't be my actual pick. I promise it won't be my actual pick. But it's something I would like to highlight because I think people would like it. But my question for you guys to wrap up the show, what is a smart home device you want but either doesn't exist or isn't possible for you to get yet? Like it's a conceptual thing. Like people are like, it's technically been made, but you can't just go and buy it right now. I think mine is pretty straightforward and it really exists.

But I can't get it. And that's smart blinds. I really want smart blinds. And the way that our windows are shaped, like nothing about our setup would work with those. And I think it's the bias of the tech industry, the home tech industry that's biased towards America because like I don't know any European home, at least not in my area, where smart blinds that are available out there right now would work.

so I'm open-minded. Send them to me if you have that. We have those in our bedroom and I love them. Yeah, we really like it. Matt, what's something you want? So what I want does not exist. It is a robot that will rake my yard for me. Oh, well, I mean, you could get one of the lawnmower robots with the bag and then it would chop up the leaves. Oh, what's a rake? It would take so much.

I'd have to go out there and change the bag like a hundred times. I need like something human size. Maybe Tesla has something like this. Maybe a humanoid robot that could rake out. So, Neilion asked what raking is. You know, like when people like rake up leaves, like they put leaves in a pile and like you see them with the tool that has kind of like, it's like a big fork almost. Oh, yeah. Why do you do that though? Because you want to get the leaves off the lawn and stuff like that.

So what I used to do when I was a kid, that was my chore to rake up the leaves. But we had this huge backyard. I did it one time. It took hours and hours and hours. And then I realized we have a lawnmower with a bag attached to it. So I literally just mowed the lawn, even though the grass wasn't growing because it was winter or fall. Mowed the lawn, chopped up the leaves, put it in the bag, and then dumped it in the green waste bin that we had. that was that's the way to go moment so uh the device i want technically no it doesn't even technically exist amazon says it exists but and they announced it like in 2021 but do you guys

remember the amazon astro bot the whole like the whole robot that was the get me the beer robot kind of thing uh here's the thing about that i would love a get me a beer robot but get me a dr pepper robot really let's let's be honest like that's exactly what its purpose would be for amazon made that thing and it's like yeah it'll get you it'll bring you a drink or something like that but it doesn't have any arms so it doesn't actually open the fridge and grab the drink it's somebody that has to be in the kitchen and puts the drink in the cup holder and then it brings

it to you now i want a robot that actually goes into the kitchen opens up the fridge sees the dr pepper grabs the can and then brings it to me that's what i want you need the tesla guys in the costumes right that was so weird that was unbelievably like that was well the and then apparently the robot taxi wasn't fully autonomous either so like none of it was actually completely autonomous is like okay you are being very shifty right now and that is not okay but anyways let's wrap up the show

thank you all so much for listening huge thank you to MacStories for having us we are a MacStories podcast after all if you'd like to see the video version of this we are over on the MacStories YouTube channel where we just hit a thousand subscribers we're rebuilding that channel and getting it all going so that's pretty cool that is a lot of hard work as somebody that has done that before that is a lot of work that goes into that so super excited about that Matt, Nelian, you got anything you want to promote? no All right. Well, we're just going to wrap up there.

Thank you all so much for listening. Have a great day. Bye-bye.