I've Automated My Partner

Welcome to Comfort Zone, a podcast all about pushing your hosts, well, outside of their comfort zone. I'm Christopher Lawley, and every week I am joined by two incredible co-hosts, but one of them might need a colorblind test. As always, we're joined by Matt Berchler. Matt, how are you doing? I was doing great, and I thought we were going to not talk about the colors thing, but I guess we're talking about the colors. Orange gate. Yeah, absolutely. This is orange gate. And we are also joined by Niléane. Niléane, how are you doing? Hello. I'm doing well.

Yeah. So right off the top, we should start talking about our challenge last week and who won democracy. Niléane, you want to take it away? I don't even know. I didn't look at it. Oh, I looked. I looked. Oh, you won, Chris. I won. Okay. So the results are 46% for you with the home widget. second place it's me at 32% and then 21% is Matt who's disqualified anyway because his icon was not orange it was orange all the robots agreed Synology photos not orange but people agree

the people didn't agree and I will say I almost said something when we were recording last week but I didn't because I knew it wasn't orange and I knew people wouldn't vote because our listeners are a stickler for the rules looking at you age of empires pick um even though it's made by microsoft um but uh yeah our audience is a stickler for the rules and that icon is not orange by any means it's a pinkish reddish no it's a reddish orange but it is it's orange you know why i didn't notice

when we recorded uh it was because it was already getting dark here so my monitor was already in night shift mode. And I think it made it look way more orange. More people should use night shift mode. Nope. I literally didn't say anything because I knew it would take you out of the competition and you're just one less competitor. I'm here to win. I don't know about you what you all are doing. I'm here to win. So there you go. Exactly. Exactly. If I would have made Matt pick a different app, he might have won. So, you know.

If you were more honest you would have a lot of people also said uh why not have a cast one of us should have picked it yes but it was the obvious pick like it's it's a very good pick and probably the best app with an orange icon but i wanted to pick something that you know maybe people hadn't heard of or hadn't been using so yeah i wanted people to get outside of their comfort zone of what orange is orange is broader than I think people are willing to give it credit for.

Next, I'm going to pick like the Lightroom app or something like that and be like, oh, well, what? I mean, I even said it in the show is the title of the episode. What even is orange? And it was a joke. It was not meant to be taken seriously, Matt. But anyways, we should probably move on. I see there's some follow-up items in here. Somebody put something about calendar updates. Who was that? So that would be me. Last week, I talked about a new menu bar thing, a new calendar menu bar app that's called Calendar.

So C-A-L-E-N-D-R. And I just wanted to mention this app has been updated 10 times this week alone. Every time I open my Mac, there's an update. And I want to say this as a good thing because, like, over the past week alone, the developer has fixed so many problems and added features that were not there last week. Among which, the thing where it can show you your upcoming event in the menu bar, right in the menu bar.

Now, there's a setting so that it can flash red when it's getting, when it's about to start. So it will flash red and it can also make a sound, a tiny bell alert that sounds pretty fine. And you can turn those off. Actually, you couldn't turn those off until yesterday. I opened an issue on the GitHub repo, and I asked the developer, can we have a setting to turn that off, please? I don't want the sound.

And just within a few hours, the guy pushed an update, and now there's a setting to turn it off. So I just wanted to mention that. Kudos to the developer who's really on it and releasing updates as fast as he can. That's awesome. I got a question for you, especially on the Mac. On the iPad and iPhone, probably doesn't matter as much. But on the Mac, would you like a bunch of small updates where you're constantly having to like, OK, click install update, wait for the update to install and then launch the app?

Or would you like just like give me like an update a week or a couple updates a month kind of thing? I'm not sure. I'm not bothered by it. And I'm thinking right now there's a bunch of updates coming out just because the thing is new and he just wants to get it to a good place really quickly as fast as he can. And I think that's good. I'm assuming that at some point it's going to reach a point where he's going to consider it's good as is and will slow down the updates.

Gotcha. Nice. I like updates as quick as they're ready. Nice. Just give it to me when they're ready. Especially just like if it's an app I use a lot, knowing like there's one thing different in this one and I can focus on that, that's nice. Rather than like here's the 50 things we added and it's hard to notice everything. Yeah. There are some apps that I use a lot like Obsidian. I constantly just have the test flight version installed because I want the newest thing as quickly as possible from them. And they do a really good job of keeping their beta up to date and always having new things and stuff in there.

So, yeah, I do that. But if it was a creative app like Final Cut or Final Cut is a great example. I'm already off the beta version of Final Cut and back onto the store version, though I think they're the same. I don't think that there's been a new test flight or anything like that because I don't want to, like, creative apps, those aren't the ones I want to risk on having beta bugs. Yeah. This did make me think of one thing I would love for Apple to add. You know how with test flight, if you, or test flight apps, when you, like, install an update or it auto installs an update, the next time you launch the app, it throws up, like, a sheet that says here's the release notes?

I would love to be able to turn that on for just normal app store apps. Almost no one wants it. But I would like that. If I had an update and I could easily see what had changed, that'd be a cool thing to turn on for nerds like me. I don't have auto updates on. I just go every day to the app store, check to see what's new, and then look at the release notes and hope something's in the release notes. But indie apps are good about that. It's the big apps that aren't. But yeah, all right. And then I also tried Neelion's pick from last week, Wiper 2.

Is it Wiper 2? Yeah. Okay. All right. I don't know why. I just looked at the name really quick. I was like, wait, is it Wiper or Whisper? But it's because I've been playing around with all the speech-to-text models and stuff like that. W-I-P-R. Yes. No E. One vowel, not two vowels. Yeah, I like it. It's really fast. That's the one thing with content blockers that I've never been huge fans of is some of them can slow your browser down. but Wiper, I don't notice anything.

It's very fast, very clean. Really good pick. Solid pick last week, Nelian. Yeah, it's great. All right, should we get into the show? Let's do it. Matt, you're first up in the document. What do you got for us this week? I have such a cool app. I just want to say something. This app, Matt is obsessed. Just a warning, he's obsessed. He's done a million videos on his YouTube channel about it.

And it's great. I've done two, but yes. I haven't, I'm very curious about it because, well, Matt, you take it away. We'll talk about it. Yeah. So, okay. So the app is called Supercharge and it is basically, I mean, there's been plenty of apps like this over the years. It's an app that makes a bunch of small tweaks to your Mac and tries to adjust some of the maybe paper cuts you might have.

Or what they really focused on when they launched was finding things people who may have switched from Windows would miss from Windows and adding it to macOS. And so I really like this app. It's from this guy named Sindra Soros. I'm not sure exactly how to pronounce his name, but he's made a ton of apps over the years. A couple of ones that stood out to me. He had an app called Ico or still has it, I guess, that does AI powered transcriptions.

He has an app called HyperDuck. That's pretty cool. That lets you share links that you find on your iOS or vision and OS devices and send them to your Mac. It's kind of like airdrop from anywhere in the world. And he also has a really cool one called Velja. VELGIA. Links to all these in the show notes. But this one is basically like a you set it as your default browser on your Mac and then you can tell it different URLs where they should go. So if you have like a work browser and a personal browser you can have all your Google Docs links go to your work browser and you can have everything else go to your like personal browser which is really cool.

That's a feature of ARK that I really like. They call it air traffic control I think where you can route different domains to different places but anyway this guy's made a lot of apps and supercharge has a bunch of little things so the ones that really stood out to me are cut and paste in the finder which i use all the time on my windows computer and i miss on the mac so just command x to cut it command v to paste it and it moves the file apparently there is a keyboard shortcut to do this on the mac but it's hidden and i had no idea this existed but if you copy something and

then i think it's command option shift v to paste it will paste and move or something um but anyway this just makes the normal keyboard shortcut for cut and paste to work in the finder um i love that uh it lets you open apps with just the return key so normally it to open apps from the finder you would do command return this one just lets you do return if you prefer that which again is how windows does it and the killer thing no two killer things you're right neiliana i'm obsessed the two other killer things about this installing new apps so if you have an app

that's in like a dmg file where you're like you mount the dmg and then you're supposed to drag the app to the applications folder what this does is when you mount the dmg so you downloaded the dmg you clicked it from your downloads folder it mounts it supercharge will show an alert that says oh looks like you want to install this app do you just want to click this one button and i will move that app to the applications folder i'll unmount the dmg i'll trash the dmg file and i'll open the new app for you that's nice apple should this is i love dmgs i love that they're very simple to

install apps but so many people don't understand how these work i see so many people who just like i know people who download the dmg they open they mount it they launch the app from there and they continue to use it that way for the rest of their life which is no way to live i don't know why it works i think i don't know it's terrible this reminds me when at the time when to play some games on old computers on windows you had to insert the DVD?

Like the game couldn't run without the DVD inserted? I mean, we could go back to 8-inch floppies. I mean, that's the Mech Warrior, baby. Nobody knows what that is. Matt does. Matt and I are the old folks. Back in my day, I had to use an 8-inch floppy to play my games. Somehow, I'm older than you, Chris, but I didn't have to do that ever. Yeah. Okay. All right. Well, it's because I was a poor Windows person.

Oh, yeah. Well, I had no games, period. So, anyway. Are you talking about the save icon? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Basically. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then if you're a developer or you do any development work, a really crazy thing that isn't in macOS, but I would love to be, is creating a new text file from the Finder. So in the finder, you can hit command shift N to make a new folder. But if you want to make just a new text file, like you're working on a tiny little project, you have an HTML file, you need to add your styles.css.

You can't do that from the finder. With supercharge, you can create a keyboard shortcut. I just have an option N. It makes a new text file. You name whatever you want. And it also has an option to open that file immediately after you name it. That is awesome. That is something that bothered me about macOS for years because back in my IT Windows career, just being able to right-click and create a new text file was super important because, you know, that's how we did documentation and all that stuff is like, oh, hey, here's a folder full of things and here's the readme file.

And, yeah, that's a killer feature right there. I love it. Yeah, because my solution before this was to open the folder in Visual Studio Code and then make a new file. It's insane. That's no way to live. Yeah. More things. And then I have a conversation topic for us. Okay. If you use Apple Passwords in macOS... What are we on? Sequoia? Sequoia. Sequoia. Thank you. In macOS Sequoia, they added a menu bar app for the Passwords app.

So if you're using the new Passwords app and Apple Passwords, there's a menu bar app. however you can only access it with the mouse there's no system keyboard shortcut to do that unless you use supercharge which adds a keyboard shortcut to launch the passwords menu bar items so you can just hit the keyboard shortcut type in the thing you want and like hit enter to go straight to it lovely much closer to the one password kind of universal launcher that they have also major paper cut in mac os when you have those notifications at the top right of your screen that are just sitting there and you have to mouse over and especially if you have like a stack of three or four of them. You have to click the X four times

to get rid of all of them. You can set a keyboard shortcut to dismiss them all instantly. It's lovely. I do like the command, option, control delete. And it just deletes all my notifications. I did improve this in one way. Now in notification center, the clear button, it clears everything. That's good. Was that there before? I think it wasn't there before. I don't think it was. Because I remember people I remember people talking about that over the summer about the betas that the and that before

in macOS you literally would have to you cleared them by like groups so like messages calendar reminders like there was no clear all right I think that's right yeah the last thing before we get into the conversation of what we want Chris you mentioned the context menu in windows you can right click and do a bunch of things there's also the ability in supercharged they just added this the ability to add a bunch of custom items to the right-click menu in the finder. So for example, and you can customize this to whatever you want. I forget all of them.

I should have pulled them up. But like, for example, I can right-click a file and I've added copy path to one of my menu items. So instead of just copying the file name or the file itself, I can copy the path to it, which is good if I'm working in the terminal. There's another one I think that's right-click and you can select open this in the terminal. There's another one for if you right click an image, it can show you the resolution of that image without you having to open the Infos panel or open it in an app. It's lovely. It's great. And all of this is totally opt in.

So you can opt in to the ones you like. Don't use the ones you don't like. And it's getting updates like every week or two. The reason I made a second video about it is not because I'm obsessed. Although I might be. I'm getting there. But it's because they added so many things since the last video, which was like three weeks ago. So I wanted to talk about those new things. But yeah, it just adds so many little things. And you can do these in other ways. Like there's other apps that have done these, but like the interface is nice. It's been very reliable for me. There's a free trial of it. You can just use it for free.

I think every 12 hours, it will yell at you and say, please buy it. But all the features are there if you want to try it out. And I think it's like five or six bucks to unlock the whole thing. So it's not an expensive app. That's not bad at all. It's not bad. So I really like it. link in the show notes you should check it out but what i was curious about is the big thing with this at least it launched the things that they did were like a lot of the things people like about windows let's make them available on the mac if you want to use those things so i was wondering if there are any things you guys would love to see from other operating systems apple bring to the

mac or the ipad or the iphone even from other operating systems yeah well i think the big one for me is is from the mac so right now there is uh in shortcuts there is a feature called and i'm stalling because i'm looking it up uh it's quick actions so in finder uh on mac you can use shortcuts in the quick action menu so you can select a file or select a group of files or something like that and run a shortcut against them uh that is not on the ipad i would love that to be on the ipad that

that would be killer uh and i honestly just getting files to be one-to-one with finder on the mac would be would be a a big a big step forward my one would be a feature from from gnome so the desktop environment on linux and that feature is uh the activities view so that's like the overview the the main overview that you get in this desktop UI.

It's very similar to Mission Control. And I love Mission Control for that reason because I was used to that to GNOME before and felt at home using Mission Control. But I think GNOME's overview is just a lot nicer in the way that it works. And it's hard to describe. There's the fact, for example, that it acts like a main view for everything.

So it shows all of your virtual desktops. It shows your dock. It shows also the equivalent to launchpad on the Mac. So this is where you search apps. So it's a combined view with spaces, mission control, the dock, launchpad, and spotlight. Imagine all of this in one main overview that you can trigger with a shortcut. I think on a laptop with a touchpad, you can just like on a Mac, swipe up with three fingers and get to it.

You can trigger it the same way. And I think if Apple went all in on this, combined everything, spotlight, all of that into one single view, into another powered mission control, I would be very happy. That would be cool. i would like that i i would like that on the ipad that'd be pretty i think he would work well on yeah can i just say uh clipboard manager probably not just even not just on the ipad but everywhere on every apple computer platform iphone mac ipad like a system-wide clipboard manager that would sync between your devices so even if i copied something on my iphone i could still get to it on

my iPad I mean come on like how it's 2024 have a clipboard manager yeah that's a good one um mine is a little controversial maybe um in is it is it like off orange not not quite orange but off well it depends what you have in there in the Windows taskbar at the bottom right next to the clock there's like a little I don't even know what it's called but there's a little thing where all of your like background apps run like there's tiny little icons for like you'll have steam your antivirus what yeah in the taskbar you click a little thing and it shows like a little square

above it with a few icons yeah i would love something like this not exactly this but like something like this in mac os so that there was a more native way to do kind of the bartender thing of hiding things oh yeah or like hiding them when they don't matter but then exposing them when they do matter. I think Windows does something like that too, where they'll kind of pop out of there when they're doing something. Something like that would be cool on macOS because, again, there's just so many things up in the menu bar, and being able to have a native way to kind of collect those and show them in a different way would be kind of cool.

Yeah, that'd be cool. Yeah, that was something when I was a big MacBook, or not big MacBook user, But like when I was that year where I was having to edit video on the MacBook Pro, I was a big bartender person. And I customized bartender so that like if the MacBook Pro was plugged in at 100%, hide the battery icon. But if it wasn't at 100% or I wasn't plugged in, show the battery icon. Or show like different apps based on different contexts and stuff like that.

So that would be pretty cool. I literally have in my document stuff I want from Apple a menu bar for the iPad. Because while the iPad kind of has a menu bar, like where the clock is and the Wi-Fi and cellular and battery life and stuff like that, it's technically a menu bar. I would like something a little closer to the Mac where I could have items up there. And then they could take it a step further. So you know how you can hold down the command key in an iPad app and it'll show you all the keyboard shortcuts for that app?

What if they took that menu bar, because that's basically a menu bar. It has file, edit, a bunch of different menu items in there, and put it up there so you can just select them and tap on them and get to them. It might be a little closer, bring iPadOS a little closer to macOS, but I think that would actually be really handy. Yeah, it would. Yeah, I like it. I don't think I have another one. I have another one. Actually, I have so many, but I will wrap it up.

I will give you three more. How many can I give you more? Ten more. You can do no more than ten more. Okay. How about I just rapid fire through some of these really quick. The font book on iPadOS. Oh, yes. Apple's way. So Apple tried rethinking. So let me back up. To install third-party apps for a while. Third-party fonts. you've had to use profiles, which is not a very, like, it's not great.

It's clunky. It's not great. Then Apple came up with this whole other way of, like, okay, fonts can basically donate apps to, or I'm sorry, apps can donate fonts to the system, but literally nobody uses them. There were two apps that came out. There was an Adobe app and a third-party app. I think the third-party app is gone, and I don't think Adobe supports it anymore. Like, nobody used them. It wasn't great. So just bring FontBook. Let us install all the fonts that, like, I have fonts that I've purchased years ago.

And let me just drop them in a FontBook. The PDF preview window. So there is preview in iPadOS, but it is a lot more stripped down than the Mac version of preview. I'd love to see it bumped up a little bit. And add tab support, especially considering, you know, you're limited to four windows with Stage Manager. And then the cursor enlarge shake feature from macOS. So, you know, in macOS, if you shake your mouse or trackpad, really, it'll, like, enlarge the cursor and show you where it's at.

This needs to be on the iPad, especially with, like, how low contrast the pointer is in iPadOS. In fact, I went through and enabled an accessibility feature to add, like, an outline to the cursor because it's so low contrast. Nice. And then, oh, I'll give you two more. And options for screen recordings to go straight into a folder and not into your photo library. And then universal control between iPads.

So let me sit at my iPad Pro, move my cursor over to the iPad Mini, select something, and then go back. Yeah, that's good. I have two more. Okay. You've inspired me. Oh, my God. This is not ending. Okay. They'll be very quick. non-controversial. The first one is Mac should get touch support. We're just going to move on. The second one is that on iOS and iPadOS, screen recording, I should be able to select a specific app and only record that app so that I could avoid... Can you not do that right now?

You can only record the whole screen. Guys, I think that's an iOS and iPadOS 18 feature. Screen record one app? Yeah. Is it really? I think so. The only option I have is microphone on or off. Yeah, I don't remember that being a thing. Okay, let's investigate. If I do this, do that. Oh, there's the thing. Yes, I can. I can do it. So what there is is the ability to output your screen to different apps.

So I can output my screen to Camo Studio, Discord, WebEx, Zoom, even Instagram. No, you're mistaken. I think this is recording that app only. How did you go? From Control Center, long press screen recording, then you get a list of apps, right? Yes. Those are the ones that output your screen, that output to your screen. So, like, I can select. So, in mine, so I can do Camo Studio, Discord, Instagram, WebEx, and Zoom.

And what this does is it outputs your screen recording to those apps. So by default, it selects photos. So when you're done recording, it'll just save it to photos. But these other ones you can select. So like if I was, we were doing a Zoom call, I could share my screen with you that way. Yes. So that was the other thing actually related to it is if I'm, I literally cannot use my iPad for my work because at work, I'm often sharing my screen. I'm sharing one window or one tab specifically, and there's no way to do that from the iPad.

Yeah, it's an all or nothing thing. Was that removed during the beta? Oh, I'm going crazy, guys. Was that removed during the beta? I don't think that was in there. I don't remember that. That would be so frustrating. Sorry. There is something. I'm sure of it. Okay. If you find a follow-up item. It'll be a follow-up item for next week. We'll put it in the show notes if we find it as well. Yeah. Listeners, if you know, you can add us on Mastodon or one of the other bajillion places that we're about ready to talk about.

Good transition. Should we move on to the next subject? Yeah. Let's move on. Neilian, what do you got for us this week? Oh, we're moving on. Okay. Sorry. It was a good segue. We had to use it. Okay. Yeah. Not obsessed at all about this. Okay. Yeah, I want to talk about Blue Sky, guys. Okay. Have you heard about Blue Sky? I've never heard of it. Are millions of people using it suddenly?

Apparently, it's the happening place now. It's where all the cool kids are, I guess. I don't know. Yeah, my mastermind timeline is, have you heard of Blue Sky? You know the meme, the girl shouting, screaming at the guy? Oh, yeah. She's like, have you heard of Blue Sky? Yeah, that's what's happening. So, I want to talk about it because I have feelings. Okay. and I've always had feelings about Blue Sky. And I'm getting very frustrated by the discourse, let's say that, around it.

I want to preface this by quoting someone from my Mastermind timeline that I don't want to, I don't want to say their name because I'm not sure they would agree that I would quote them, if that makes sense. But they said it can be so hard to be the person in the room who cares the most about doing the right thing. And I feel like this right now. I feel like I'm one of the only ones who care about doing the right thing when it comes to choosing your main social platform, let's say, to use.

So because I have a lot of feelings, I've divided this discussion into three questions. and feel free to jump in at any point. Can we go back just a minute for those that don't know what Blue Sky is? Just in case if there's somebody out there that doesn't know what it is. Can you just like explain a little bit about what it is? Because like until about a month ago, I didn't pay attention to it at all. And then I saw people kind of starting to talk about it a little bit more. And I was like, I should probably jump on this thing and at least get my handle so nobody else takes it.

Like Instagram where I have to use a filthy underscore the end of my name. Okay, so BlueSky is a social platform. It looks very similar to Twitter, the interface and the app as well. It was a spawn-off from Twitter, actually, a few years ago. It was a hobby project by Jack Dorsey himself. He wanted to create a decentralized version of Twitter. So he created this sub-company, I guess, I don't know, this

work group inside Twitter to work on this, to create this new social network that would be decentralized. A bit like MasterDone, I guess. And time has passed. Jack Dorsey got another hobby, as he does, which involved crypto or something or whatever. And Blue Sky became independent from Twitter. It became its own thing, its own company. And they still kept working on it. And now it's live.

People are using it. And this week in particular and last week as well, since the US election, people have been migrating to it from X, I guess, to Blue Sky en masse. And also a little bit from Threads to Blue Sky and from Mastodon as well to Blue Sky. So like a lot of people are migrating to Blue Sky right now. Is that a good summary? of the situation. Yeah, I think so. I think that's perfect.

Yeah. So like I said, I have a lot of feelings and I think we can go through this discussion with three main questions. The first one is, is it decentralized? The answer is yes, technically. And the technically here does a lot of heavy lifting. So it's based on a protocol that's not ActivityPub. ActivityPub is the protocol that's been getting a lot of traction this year with Mastodon, Flipboard, and Threads.

Threads is trying to adopt the protocol. And that protocol means multiple, like, various social platforms can interact with each other. And users on the platform can interact with users on other platforms. And BlueSky is based on their own protocols, which is supposed to do a bit of the same thing, but it's very different, technically speaking. It works very differently from ActivityPub. And it's really hard to understand. I try to understand it.

Basically, it's not much so that you have different servers that you can create accounts on. Blue Sky is more like you can host your data on different servers, but you can still use the main server, things like that. It's very, like the nuances are weird. I'm not sure they, like if Thought Masterdown was hard to understand, I think the decentralization aspect of Blue Sky is hard to understand. On the other hand, because it's hard to understand, people don't care about it.

People just sign up on the main thing, the company's main server, let's say, main domain, bluesky.social. And I think people like that. And I think, yeah, it's a good point for them. people just know how to sign up on the thing there's just one address and on that one address everyone is there you can talk to anybody you don't have to understand if it is decentralized i think that's an issue though like we've just spent a full year talking to ourselves i mean among tech people let's say among nerds we've talked talking to ourselves about the fact that

decentralization is good and it's pretty it's pretty cool that we're moving in that direction because if social networks become more decentralized as we go we depend less on one company at a time one set of people at a time and you can have more control over your data and where it is you can migrate your account like so many possibilities uh that make it better i think there's a danger here that's my opinion feel free to jump in i think there's danger here with blue sky which is that blue sky is so it's a vc backed uh company so like they're getting funded getting rounds of funding

they're not making any money i don't think they're about to make money anytime soon well there's not even ads in the timeline like i was looking at a prep for the show and i that was one thing i noticed is there's no ads in timeline. So there's no way they're making any money. I didn't pay to sign up. I didn't, yeah. Yeah. And that's the second question that I wanted to ask. Is it viable? And I'm worried about this as well. Like, it's, like I said, it's VC money. At some point, they're going to have to make some money.

How is that going to look like? Do they? Because, I mean, you have companies like Snapchat and even Twitter before Musk bought it, they never made money. I think there was like a couple of quarters where each of them made a little bit of money, but like most of the time they were constantly losing money, but they kept getting funding from VCs. So like... Yeah, but the VCs are expecting a payday someday though, right? Like either you're going to get acquired by somebody or you're going to have a business model.

So Blue Sky is going to have to make money eventually. I did see someone from the Blue Sky teams say their plan is to one of their plans is to sell access to like special algorithms so that's one of the things that is interesting about blue sky is they have a reverse chronological feed but then they also have the ability to set up custom algorithmic feeds so they have a discover feed that's kind of similar to what you get from most like for you pages out there with like a mix of things you follow but also popular things on the platform but there's also like an art one or a

environmental one or like there's a whole bunch of different ones out there that you can follow but yeah apparently they have some plans to potentially do something with those but i don't know why you would pay for that yeah i'm not quite clear with their especially because you can make those yourself like as a yes as an end user you can inside the app create your algorithmic feed yourself which personally honestly is like one of my favorite things about blue sky um it's a good feature i feel like i've had a it is a good feature i feel like i have had a not super popular opinion

that algorithm algorithmic feeds don't have to be terrible they just happen to become terrible when they're run by megacorps like twitter or uh meta where they need to boost engagement and the way You boost engagement is boosting engagement bait and rage things and everything. But like the example I always give is like, if like Chris, we talk a lot online, we talk about like my, the app should know that I talked to you. And if you post a video or you make an announcement, I want to see that.

And if I have 700 posts in my feed, they're not all equally important to me. I would want to see some more than others. And I'd like it to help me do that. So I like this possibility of having the mix of reverse chronological or algorithmic or mix. And you can easily swipe between them and set your own. It's not like threads where you go to the algorithm or the reverse chronological one. And then the next time you open the app, they're like, no, no, no, no, no. Back to the for you. And now they're burying it even further. So like they really, they really don't want you using that.

Oh, yeah. Well, you don't use the app as much. You mentioned, like, it can get bad when it's run by Megacorps, like you said. And that's something that I hear a lot about Blue Sky. I'm a bit, like, very, actually, I'm trying to contain myself. I'm very frustrated by the naivete of people. Like, people are very naive about Blue Sky.

what I mean by that is I see a lot of people on Blue Sky itself. I'm just browsing Blue Sky. People are like, okay, so we have a good time here. We've gone away from Elon Musk and we've come to this special place run by good people. Some people in my mentions even told me like the leftists. I don't know how they know that.

I don't know how they know that they are leftists, but sure. If that makes you happy to think that they are leftists, fine. And I just want to say to those people, without sounding condescending, I want to say, like, I would be worried in your place. This company is still like a Silicon Valley type of company. they still, like we said, they're going to try to make money at some point, probably.

And they will have their best in their own interests at heart as a company. And that's OK, because that's what companies do. And it's frustrating because I think we've come away from that ideal that we've spent a lot of time talking about of the Fediverse. And like, we're not putting ourselves in the crisp of a single company. But I'm now seeing those same people. I'm not going to say names like I did the other time when I got mad.

But I'm now seeing those same people feeling very happy about themselves, throwing their data into the hands of a single company once more. And I'm like, is this really better? Yeah, I mean, well, this is the adventure that like every social network goes through, text-based especially. It's like, it's all fun at the start. Like the first like couple weeks of threads were a thrill. Everyone was weird.

Everyone was having a blast. And now you go to on threads and it's the common complaint is, oh, I'm seeing posts from two days ago, which was brutal on election week. To just have that thrown back in your face. Anyway. And then like it's engagement bait because they're paying people to for some people for like how much engagement they get. So you just get these like this terrible stuff. Just not like evil. Although there is that too. But just like just cringey. It's becoming more like Facebook. I feel like the stuff that I see people post on Facebook and I'm like, do people actually like this?

But anyway, and Blue Sky is going through that right now. Right. It's been around for like a year, like officially. But now it's getting these waves of people who are seeing it for the first time and it's weird and fun and everyone's figuring it out and they don't know like what the rules are or the like what's going to be successful there. So they're all just kind of like having fun. But eventually, if it gets really big, it's going to have the same issues that these other services get to. They're going to have the moderation challenges as well. I think I know one of the things I like about Mastodon is that it isn't as big as Twitter or Threads.

And it's a smaller group of people that are engaged. And I don't know. I used to always like take a month off social media like every year. And I haven't done that in the past couple of years since I went to Mastodon. Like maybe it's less engaging overall, but it's also less stressful to me. Yeah. And I like that. I like having it as an option. And like I know the Mastodon vibe doesn't work for everybody. like some people don't like some people think it's all linux lovers with um who want to police everything you say and i mean there's there's a segment of that but like i don't think that's the

vibe everywhere but like the vibe doesn't work for everybody and so they tried threads now they're trying blue sky and like i guess i'm not super upset about other options out there i do definitely resonate with the talking about blue sky as a decentralized option when up until a few months ago it literally wasn't decentralized and even now it's technically decentralized but it's confusing and no one's actually doing it um yeah right now it's actually technically decentralizable but it's not happening guys nothing's roasting down stuff that's how they get you yeah i uh

i i i love mastodon mastodon is like if i wake up and i want to see what's going on mastodon in ivory like that's what i open up first to see what's happening i i love that the problem is it breaking out of the core nerdy tech sphere so like we we were talking offline um just in our tech group and i was like i love mastodon but there are things on mastodon that will like there's stuff that will never appear on mastodon like formula one formula one we'll just call formula one twitter but I think we all know what we mean is like the core group of like Formula One journalists.

They will never be on Mastodon. There were some people that set up like basically before Twitter broke all the API stuff that like some people took like and basically made a bot so that it would just replicate whatever these people posted on Twitter over to Mastodon. And that was nice. But of course, Twitter broke all their API stuff. So that stuff no longer works. So I would love to see Mastodon be able to break out of that kind of nerdy tech bubble.

But I just don't like it's it's too confusing for a lot of people to understand that, like, you don't have to go to Mastodon.social to sign up. You can host your own things or you can go to these other places, but then you can you can get to this other stuff. Plus, with there not being an algorithmic timeline. And I kind of I like exactly what Matt said. I like algorithmic timelines until it gets to a point where, like, okay, we're focusing on engagement instead of, like, what our users, what would actually be useful and stuff our users would actually want to see.

And, like, algorithmic timelines are a great way to discover new people. I found a lot of people because of that. In fact, I'm pretty sure I found Matt because of that back in the Twitter days and stuff like that. So, that's the thing. And like, yes, algorithmic timelines, they can go bad, but, and, and you can also kind of train them. I posted something on, it might've been threads or something earlier this week about like Instagram's for the, for you explore page finally understands me because it was a wall of photos and videos.

There was a photo of one Lego, a photo of one iPad and everything else was puppies. And I'm like, this is perfect. This is exactly what I want to see. This is amazing. I love it. I'm trying to convince my girlfriend that we should get a dog right now, but she wants to wait. But yes. Just get the dog. See what happens. No. High risk. That is very high risk. Anyways, point is I want to see Mastodon take off more, but the current flavor of Mastodon, I don't see it breaking out

of the techie world and like kind of techie adjacent world, I don't see it breaking out to the masses. So what I would kind of branching off that, what I would say is I like Mastodon. I love ActivityPub. So I find myself rooting for ActivityPub more than Mastodon specifically. Like I use Ghost for my blog and Ghost is working on adding ActivityPub integration. So I'll sometime in 2025, it looks like, be able to make it so if you want to follow my blog on ActivityPub

with whatever app you want, you can do that. I already interact with a lot of people using MicroBlog, which also has ActivityPub integration, so we're able to follow each other and talk to each other. And, like, I don't even have to think about it. WordPress even, like, you can leave comments with a master done post on the WordPress blog. Yeah, exactly. Nice. And then threads. Threads?

I know when they announced they were going to do activity pub integration, I feel like there were two camps. There were camps of people who were like, they're never going to do it. They're just lying to get people excited because decentralized is like the hot new thing. And then there was another group who was like, yeah, they're going to do it. It's going to be good. I was in the they're going to do it and it's going to be good camp. And I think a third thing has actually happened with them is that they are doing it. And like, I know secondhand in some cases, but I know some of the people working on it and they do want to do it and they do want to do it right.

And they, I think the individuals working on it have good intentions. I'm talking like the people actually doing the work, not necessarily the heads of Instagram or anything. Yeah. I think, I think they are trying to do a good job and be a good steward to the standard that they're building to. However, they're building it out so slowly and adding things so slowly that it's making, I'm noticing people who did turn on Federation, in some cases are turning it off because it feels kind of broken in this half integration way.

I can't, like, I can see replies, but I can't reply to them myself. It was just like this black box. And, like, I think that has actually been a surprising thing is that it's taking them longer than I thought it would take to turn it on. And because it's not on by default, you're not getting that automatic, like, cross-pollination of just people on different platforms talking to each other. Which is a real bummer, because I do think Threads is the best chance at a very mainstream Twitter-sized text-based network.

And I just wish that was going smoother. Because I do want ActivityPub to go. Like, if I started to dislike Mastodon and something cool and new came out, I'd like to be able to move to that. I'd like to be able to change where I'm interacting with things. And because ActivityPub is the thing that's, it's an ActivityPub account, not necessarily a Mastodon account. Right? Can I move my ActivityPub to another service or would that not really work? That would work if the destination service has taken this into account, I think. Okay. Gotcha.

So, yeah, I mean, that's why I'm rooting, I think for me, Activity, I need to remind myself sometimes that I'm actually rooting for a standard, not necessarily a specific app. I think Mastodon is the best app right now, but if something else came out that was better for me, I like the idea that I could interact with them if I wanted to, or I could just full-on move my account over there. And I think that's a very good point, and I think that's one of the two main red flags I have about Blue Sky. The first one is moderation.

The way that they're going at moderation is very strange, and I'm going to come to that. But the other one is the protocol. Like they chose to go with their own protocol. And they did in the early days of Blue Sky, they did consider adopting ActivityPub. They did not at the time. And you can understand the reasons why, because at the time, ActivityPub was very regimentary. It was very early. But still, they went ahead with their own protocol. And now, in reality, yeah, the thing is not going to interact with anything else but Blue Sky.

So that's one red flag. I want to come back to moderation. I want to highlight just one fact, something that happened when Blue Sky was invite only. If you remember that, about a year ago, I don't remember. Like they rolled out a public beta that was invite only. And they did not have the ability to block people. And this immediately went to...

I don't know. I don't want to say this word. This went bad. People got harassed. They couldn't block people. And their excuse, public excuse at the time was to say basically, yeah, we thought it would go well since the beta was invite only which is like it's a keyword that once again comes up they are very naive very naive about all this and the moderation approach on Blue Sky is you can make your own moderation rules there are controls inside the app to moderate yourself in quotes

very naive I want to like we're going when you when you say moderation rules you mean like i can't call somebody a bad like if i call somebody a bad name i set up my own moderation rules so that that doesn't get published no not really okay it's more like you can like you can set up mute lists and oh you can share mute lists and stuff like that okay that's kind of nice that you can share mute lists that That is something that I always wanted back in the Twitter days where like, that is kind

of a cool feature. But yeah, no, there should be actual moderation. But there's a worry that they are going to do less because their excuse to do less on the moderation front is you have controls. I see what you're saying. So I'm not saying that's what they are doing. I'm saying that's my worry. Okay. Yeah. I want to wrap it up because we're going long the final questions so there were two questions that we kind of discussed around is it decentralized is it viable there's one last thing because I want to go out on a high note

is it plain better than X threads or mastodon and I've highlighted four things on which I think it's better the first one is starter packs starter packs is a feature of Blue Sky I have a big caveat to this, but I will come to it. Startup Parks is a feature where people can create a list of people and share that list on Blue Sky. And people who come across this list can open it, see who's inside the list and follow everyone at once. So people are sharing like, here's all of my favorite design people.

Here's all my favorite journalists. And as a user, you can come across that list and follow everyone in that list. My big caveat is that right now, you cannot opt out of being included in a list. Like if someone puts you in a list, you can like say, no, don't put me in that list. I want to get, I want to be out of that list. Please remove me from that list. You cannot do that. And there's only one way to do that, which is not great.

You have to block the person who made the list. if it's a well-meaning person who made the list but i'm just putting out the scenario if one well-meaning person creates a starter pack that starter pack gets really popular and bad meaning people use that list to harass people yeah that can happen uh what can you do the only the only thing you can do is block the well-meaning person who made the starter pack instead of just say I want to get out of startup.

Maybe that will come. The other good feature is there's a ton of reply controls on BlueSky. So you can say, disable replies on that post, disable the ability for people to quote that post. That's really good. That's good. Yeah. I know that the MasterDone team, they are working on quote posts right now. And they will add these controls as well to control who can quote you. Hopefully. Yeah, I know that's on their roadmap.

I want to say the app. I think the app is good. It doesn't look good. It looks good enough, but yeah. It looks good enough. I would say it's better than the Twitter app from a few years ago. I haven't used Twitter since like a month after Musk bought it, But I would say it's better than what the Twitter app was a couple of years ago. I think I agree with you. I disagree, but we can move on. Okay. And the last thing I want to talk about, just mention the general crowd on Blue Sky is very diverse.

A ton of people there. So I guess that's good if you just want to have a diverse timeline, a bunch of different topics on a single platform. But again, keep in mind all I've said before. I'm frustrated about the fact that, especially among the tech crowd, that this platform is garnering all the intention despite all of its flaws and the values that one can have in general in life.

So, yeah. looping back again to what I the person I quoted on Mastodonic, it's really hard to be the person in the room who cares the most about doing the right thing. Like right now I feel like I'm very obsessed with doing the right thing. The correct platform should take off and right now it's not the correct one that's taking off. Even though we have the ability to make it happen to make it it's first thing, you know this course I guess. I did see a post from Eugene rochco um yeah mastodon founder and runner and everyone um ceo i guess uh he said that in the

past like few days or weeks or whatever mastodon seen like significantly higher growth as well not a million people per day but it is seen higher growth than normal as well so there are people choosing mastodon but blue sky is definitely getting the headlines one thing is true that mastodon is growing constantly just at a slow rate i i for me i think i agree with both of you I like Mastodon. I think that's definitely the place I like to go. I wish all these other services were adopting ActivityPub right from the start and full ActivityPub, not like kind of halving it like Threads.

Because ultimately, I hate having all these different apps and feeds and different things I need to jump between. I would love to have just like, let me have my Mastodon account and follow people on Mastodon, Activity Pub, Threads, Blue Sky, and just like, you know, everyone gets to choose where they want to be, ultimately, but we can all follow each other, and it's not limited to services and stuff like that. But unfortunately, that is not the world we live in. I would also say, one of the things that I like about Blue Sky is not the app necessarily, I like Ivory better,

it's not necessarily the protocol, I like Activity Pub better, it's that people are being silly, and I would like a little more silliness on Mastodon, So if you follow anyone who is just straight up silly, I would love to know who they are. I've got a bunch of those. Oh, perfect. They are French, though, but you speak French now, so that's good. Okay, yes, I've done a week and a half of Duolingo in French. I know how to say dog cat. You're basically French now. You have the hat, you have the baguette, you have the Eiffel Tower behind you. You're good to go.

Show title. All French people have the Eiffel Tower behind them, right, Nelian? Yeah, let me check. okay I'm not French oh no well no you're indoors you got when you're outdoors it's it's just okay right I mean it's too big to be indoors I mean let's not be too silly all right anyway have fun on blue sky people just be mindful I'm worried about you like just keep this in mind I'm worried about you all blue skies my

prediction is a pessimistic one. Plus guy is going to mess something up and you are all going to be stuck with it if you're stuck with it. There you go. But that happens and that's okay. I guess maybe. Okay, I'm done. I'm done. Alright, you guys ready to get silly? Let's get silly. Alright, let's get to the challenge. The challenge this week was mine and it was to automate something that annoys you. I can go first. So earlier this year, I've talked about this before, my girlfriend and I moved in together and I used to live by myself.

So it was no problem for me. I could record whenever I wanted. I didn't have to worry about people making noise or coming into the office or anything like that. And also, my girlfriend's mom stays with us once a week. She stays with us. We've had some family in town staying with us. And something that I have been struggling with is kind of like, I don't want to just go out and tell people, okay, shut up, I need to record. But I kind of want a visual way for people to know, hey, I am in my studio, I'm working on something, and I don't want to be bugged.

So I kind of thought about different solutions, and what came to mind is the classic on-air sign. You guys know what I'm talking about, the on-air sign? Yeah. Like radio stations and TV stations and stuff would have this on. Yeah, Frasier, exactly. We have this on-air sign. So I put two photos in the show notes. We can put these in the show notes of the actual episode, too, so people can click on these. But what I did is I ordered an on-air sign, and it's this neon sign that hangs right outside of my studio in kind of my office area because it's this weird, like, annex, end of the hallway kind of thing.

But it hangs right outside my studio, and it's this big, bright neon sign. And you cannot mistake when it is on. But how I automated this is I got a smart home plug. So that way I can turn it on and off via automations. And what I did is I took my filming focus mode, which when I enable that, it triggers a background shortcuts automation that does a bunch of stuff. It turns on studio lights. It obviously blocks notifications.

It changes the brightness of my devices to 60%, which is like the perfect brightness level for filming them. And it now also turns on this sign as well. So when I turn on the filming mode, this on-air sign turns on. As soon as I turn off the filming focus, the on-air sign turns off. So that way, whosoever home knows, hey, Chris is in the studio. He's filming something. Don't bug him. And I'm so happy with how this turned out. It's not the craziest automation I've ever done.

It's not the most complex automation, but it's actually something that's really been annoying me and is solving a big problem in my life. This is such a good idea, and I want to do the same now. Nice. I'm glad you like it. And it really wasn't that expensive. It was like $20 for the sign maybe, and smart home plugs, like HomeKit, smart home plugs. I got a two-pack for $10. So all in all, it was $30 to do this. It really wasn't that expensive. As you know, my desk is in our bedroom.

So when I'm recording or when I'm on a call during the day or whatever, I think it could be nice to have just a light outside the door right there. Yeah. Tell my partner that I'm on a call or something. Yeah, I like it. Yeah. And it doesn't have to be like a neon on-air sign. Like you could just get like an LED light or something like that. Yeah, exactly. When I was kind of looking through like different ideas, I was like, I kind of love this on-air idea.

So yeah, that's mine. Any questions on it? Yeah, I think I would need something wireless. Yeah, okay. So that is the big thing. So if you look at my photo I put in there, you will see the wire going down the wall. that is not going to stay there. I ordered the stuff. I didn't think about it at first, but I ordered the stuff. Basically, it's exactly what you do to mount a TV on the wall and have all the cables go inside the wall.

I ordered that, so that cable will go in the wall, and then at the base, it's going to come out of the wall, so that way I don't have a power cable draping down the wall because that is not okay to me. Okay. This is very cool. I didn't anticipate the physical world to these automations, but well done. Yeah, no, I wanted to do something. So this wasn't actually my first thing, but the first thing I was going to do was get my MyQ garage door to work with HomeKit. But oh boy, did they do everything possible to block that.

Like I knew they got rid of like Home Assistant had to get rid of their plugin and stuff like that. But I was like, I'm smart. I can figure out a way around this. Nope, they blocked that. Turns out you're not smart. And you know what? If somebody that works at MyQ is listening, which I doubt, but I just want to say your app is horrible. And the fact that you keep blocking this thing is going to cause me to go rip that garage door out and put in something that I can use with the one that I used to have at my condo, the one that actually worked with HomeKit.

I hate your app so much. I hate that MyQ app. It is so unbelievably bad. When you open it, it takes 30 seconds for you to get to the button to open or close the garage door. It constantly errors out, and you have to force quit it and open it back up. The fact that they don't have widget support, and they don't have widget support, and they don't have control center support, because when you open the app and you get to that button, there's an ad at the top. So I guarantee you, they want you to see that ad.

Anyways, this was supposed to be a silly time, and I went off on a rant. I hate that MyQ garage. If you're looking at a smart garage door, do not get a MyQ one. Absolutely do not. You will regret it. It is horrible. I'm going to move on. Let's get silly. Niléane, what do you have for us? You triggered my ADHD there. I did not listen to anything you just said. That's okay. It was just my rant. I was just ranting. Okay. So mine. So I also tried something else before when I'm going to submit to the challenge.

I identified the problem that I knew would be hard to fix. And please don't judge my partner. There's an issue with our cat. Like, our cat is an indoor cat. She goes to the balcony sometimes. The problem is my partner often closes the door to the balcony without checking if the cat is still out there. And it happens often that the cat is stuck on the balcony for hours before I realize that my partner has closed the door and the cat can't get in.

So this is very sad. So I wanted to find a smart fix to this, maybe with a sensor or a camera, a HomeKit camera on the balcony, so I can check, I don't know, or maybe, you know, one of those HomeKit cameras that can detect pets or people? I have one. Yeah, then I looked at the prices of those things. And no, that's not happening. So in the end, I just hung up a paper on, like a sheet of paper on the door to the balcony with a big warning sign and a cat's face that I've drawn on it.

And that just says, beware of the cat before closing the door. And that so far worked. So I guess that's one automation. I automated my partner. So that's nice. But the real submission to the challenge is a lot more tech-headed. And it's funny, Matt, because you actually already mentioned this app in your segment today. I use HyperDuck from the same developer who makes Supercharge.

So that app you install on your Mac and you also install it on your phone. What it does is very simple. It adds an action to the share sheet on iOS or iPadOS, and that action is send to Mac. So you can send any link to your Mac, and the link will open on the Mac in the background. And that's very important, and I like this a lot about it. It opens the link on your Mac in the background. So if you're doing something else, it won't disturb anything. It's just opening the background, adding a tab to Safari or whatever.

And that's very nice. However, I've had an issue with this app, which is when the Mac is off. So it's supposed to work when your Mac is off. And when you turn the Mac back on, it's supposed to just open everything that it missed while the Mac was off. The issue is that thing is not working as expected since the release of Sequoia. Right now, what happens often is I wake up my Mac from sleep and nothing will open, even though I've sent stuff via HyperDock to my Mac while the Mac was in sleep mode.

And the way to fix it, to work around it, I found, is that if once the Mac is awake, you send once again something from the iPhone to the Mac via HyperDock, then it opens everything that it missed. Like it catches up on everything you've sent to the Mac while the Mac was asleep. So my automation is, this is all very hard to understand, maybe, but I'm trying my best to explain it all. So the automation that I've done is that now when I put my iPhone on the MacSafe stand that's on my desk,

it will automatically send an empty link via HyperDock to my Mac so that my Mac, so HyperDock on the Mac will automatically catch up on all the links he might have missed while the Mac was asleep. Does this make sense? It's very hard to explain. Yeah, no, it does make sense. Okay. I think I'm following, yeah. So that's it. That's pretty cool. Basically, when I come to my desk, I put the iPhone on the MacSafe stand and HyperDoc just catches up on the leaks I've sent to my Mac.

That's actually really cool. That's pretty cool. Yeah, that's rad. Dang, you guys both did cool things. What I did was, if there's anything in the world that I'm most serious about, it's movie reviews. And posting the most accurate reviews anyone's ever posted. You mean the worst reviews I've ever read in my life. Some of the worst movie opinions ever. That's right. That's right. I wanted to make this easier for myself because I watch like 120 movies or so every year.

So I watch a lot of movies and every single one I post a review. I post it on a thread in Macedon and I post it on Letterboxd where I like to find new movies and see what other people are watching. And I really love Letterboxd. Maybe low-key my favorite social network that's not really a social network. Oh, that's a, yeah. I really enjoy Letterboxd. I love it so much I pay for my sister's subscription as well, just so she can have a better letterboxd. Anyway. I also pay for my friend's subscriptions to Letterboxd, because I know they wouldn't do it by themselves,

and I want them to use the app properly. Yes. So what I have to do basically is whenever I finish a movie, I want to write a review and I will open my website, Quick Reviews, which lets me generate an image of the review with a score. I then open, I write the review there. I save that as an image and that's what I post to social media. And then I go to Letterboxd and I find the movie. I write the review or I paste the review there and I give it a score and save it there. So I'm doing it two times and there's no way for me to like totally automate this.

But what I did was I created a shortcut to basically just prompt me, what movie did you just watch? So I type out the movie. I hit enter. And it does a couple things to properly URL and code the title that I typed out. And it will open my web browser with my review site pulled up. It will open the second tab with Letterboxd, already searching for the title. So I can just click once on Letterboxd and get to the movie. And then I can write my reviews and do everything from there.

So it's only saving me like 10 seconds, but it's something I do every weekend. And it's a little, yeah, just one of those little quality of life things that wasn't bad enough for me to automate it before. But this challenge gave me the little kick to make it a little easier. And so the things I still need to do are make a system wide keyboard shortcut to launch it if I'm on my Mac. So I can just like hit a keyboard shortcut and just it'll take me straight there. And on the iPad, I can do it from Spotlight.

I don't think there's a way to do a system-wide keyboard shortcut on iPadOS, though. No. Well, no. Yeah. I mean, you could always save the app icon. Go on. Well, there was that feature I talked about in our accessibility challenge where you can enable system-wide keyboard shortcuts for shortcuts, but it enables a bunch of other stuff, too. and it breaks, like if you use Obsidian or something, it breaks a bunch of stuff. Okay, that's right. I remember this now. Okay, but you're right. I could save an icon on my home screen, though. Yes, you could.

Okay. That'll complete the most incredible automation any of our listeners have ever seen. Honestly, one thing I think a lot of people get tripped up about when they're talking about automations is they try and go really big. They're like, I need a hundred action shortcut or a thousand action shortcut that's doing URL encoding and base 64 and all this stuff. And honestly, most of the shortcuts and automations I use are just a couple of steps. And they're just something that they speed up or they do a repetitive task that I would do every day or every week or whatever quite quickly.

And it's something I don't have to worry about. Like, for example, I have a shortcut that the photos that I put in our show notes, I have shortcut that basically pulls up either gives me an option to pull up either files or my the photos app select images and then it uploads them to my website cdn and puts the link to them in my clipboard automatically like it's nothing that wild but it saves me so much time when i'm trying to share photos with you all or or the show notes or something like that we're gonna see if my favorite

automation works oh good morning and thank you for joining us i was not expecting that that was awesome i don't know where i got this from but at any any point i can instantly have tim cook wishing me a good morning yeah i mean that's a great who doesn't want that i'll put a link in the show notes yeah well these were great i think this was a good challenge i don't know how we will I guess we could do democracy for it. But I was thinking about democracy right now and thinking about the Mastodon posts.

How am I going to sum up the automations we've made? Well, that's something you should have thought of before the campaign began. What campaign? What? I don't even know. The campaign, okay, sure. The campaign, sorry. Oh, yeah. Democracy. Yeah. Anyways, moving on. We're going to move on. I can't. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Anyways, Nelian, it is your challenge for next week.

What are you going to have us do? Yeah. So I'm going to suffer from this as well. Oh, no. I feel like I say this every time. You always hype them up and they're usually not too bad. Yeah. Okay. That's not too bad, I guess. My challenge this week is stop using Apple Music. Oh, suffer. Actual suffering. That's just mean. That's just, oh, I have so much in my library.

Same, same. Okay, so I have mitigations to this. You can, like, I feel like we should not force ourselves to spend the whole week without it. So just however much you can. Also, I want us to try, think of three ways. Like not pay for an alternative. So I don't know. There's YouTube. There's other things. I don't know. Interesting.

Free alternatives. If you can or if you want. So clarification. Yeah. Don't use Apple Music. Are you saying the subscription service for streaming music or the entire app? So if I have MP3s and I play them in Apple Music, does that count or no? I did not think about this. I don't know. Okay. Can I launch the app, Apple Music?

Sure. I don't know. I mean, it wouldn't be probably the spirit of the challenge. And I feel like that would undercut your bid for winning. Okay. The spirit. The spirit. Okay. Like the passion. You got to think about the passion. You're right. Okay. Okay. And when it comes to free stuff, a bunch of services have free tiers. Yeah. Spotify has one. I think Deezer. And there's YouTube, of course. I think there are ways.

Okay. And like I said, I don't want to suffer too much either. like maybe at least a day or two. A day. If you can. I was going to say, I would probably not be able to follow this the whole week because I am Monday through Thursday. I am on vacation. And we're road tripping. So I'm like... Podcasts and books only, buddy. Yeah. So I will play with it around this weekend.

Listen to AM talk radio. Oh, God. No, no, no. Have you heard what's on AM talk radio? Absolutely not. All right. Go easy, guys. This is going to be an interesting one. Okay. All right. This will be an interesting one. I have a few ideas, but yeah, we'll go from there. But I think that just about does it for this episode. But as always, I have an end of the show question for you guys. And I think this is a fairly easy one.

What video game are you currently playing? I'm not playing any. Okay. That was really easy for you. I have two that I'm playing, so I can answer for the both of us. I am playing Batman Arkham Knight on my Steam Deck, which is very good. And I played many years ago, but haven't replayed since. And the reason I'm playing that is on my Quest 3, I'm currently playing the new Batman Arkham shadow game which is very good it is that looks very very good yeah i yeah i've been considering

getting a meta quest because there are a few vr games that i'm very interested in i have a psvr2 um which is great for gran turismo and like really great sim racing but uh yeah the game i'm playing right now dragon age veil guard i'm loving it i have i i'm loving it for the most part if you just like every Dragon Age game it's the gameplay and mechanics are very different from the previous one and this one is very very different from all the previous ones there's a lot of stuff I like about it there's a lot of stuff I don't like about it but the stuff

I don't like about it is not what the loud minority gamer gay people are yelling about it's more just like the writing can be a little clunky in some places yeah it's very stripped down. It's like the first RPG I've ever played that has like a market mechanic, but you can't sell gear. There's only like certain items you can sell. So like your inventory is just full of a bunch of gear that you will never, ever, ever use. And you can't sell it. You can't do anything with it.

So like there's a bunch of like weird things. And this game has had, I could go on for hours about this game, but this game has been in development for 10 years. And for most of its life, it was developed as a live services game until Anthem failed. And they basically had a hard pivot going back to like a single player story driven RPG mechanic, which I'm really glad they did. So like I love the Dragon Age games. And the first Dragon Age game is in the top five of my all time favorite games.

There's it is you could play it very surface level, but it can go very, very deep. But yeah, love the game. super fun if you like story driven rpg games go check that out all right well that just about does it for the show a huge thank you to MacStories we are a MacStories podcast after all you can go check out other shows and stuff on the network uh you know what let's do a thing let's recommend another MacStories show i'm going to recommend npc but with the caveat of john brendan

and federico have caused me to spend a lot a lot a lot of money on handheld gaming stuff lately i have for a future episode of this show. Thanks to them. Nice. Is it too easy to recommend App Stories? No. I think it's a great show. I've listened to it for many years. I will recommend Ruminate. It's a very weird window into the American culture. Yeah. So, yeah. Yeah, it's great. All right. They're all good. Thank you all so much for listening and have a great day.

Goodbye. Bye-bye. Bye. Bye.