This One Time at Bandcamp

Welcome to Comfort Zone, a podcast all about pushing your hosts, well, outside of their comfort zone. I'm Christopher Lawley, and each week I am joined by two incredible co-hosts that I'm very thankful for. As always, I'm joined by Matt Birchler. Matt, how are you doing? Chris, I'm doing splendidly. That's great. And we're also joined by Niléane. Niléane, how are you doing? Hello, I am okay. I am very tired. Today we were recording one hour later than usual.

And I just want to address that we're living in the dark now. And I hate this. Like I have not seen the sun in days. And I hate it. So, yeah. So my girlfriend and I, Danielle and I, we talk a lot about seasonal defective disorder. And we both have the reverse of it for most people. We thrive in the winter. We thrive when it gets darker early. I get so much more work done in the winter.

When it's summer, because it gets so hot here, I get less work done. Like, you can look at my channel, and you can look at the publication dates, and I always publish more in the winter than I do in the summer. Yeah, we have the opposite situation here. It becomes unsufferable for a few months in the Chicago area. I literally, I was in, I spent this past week in Florida, It was 70 to 80 degrees. It was incredibly warm, a Chicago summer. And I came home and my flight was delayed an hour and a half because there was so much snow on the runways

that O'Hare Airport was operating at 50% capacity. And it was a mess. And it sucks outside. But it's Thanksgiving this week, so as we're releasing. So I will be more positive from now on. But I do like the winter. Yeah, stop being Mr. Negative. I don't like the winter. So that's the thing with Thanksgiving. You try to be positive. Yeah, there's a whole bunch of other stuff to it. But if you want to boil it down, it's basically just a time to reflect and figure out what you're grateful for.

You know, you get together with your family. You get together with friends. Some people do what's called a Friendsgiving, where, like, on a separate day outside of Thanksgiving, they will have, like, a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, but with just friends, not family. And then they'll do their family one on the Thanksgiving Thursday. Sounds good. Yeah. So we have a couple of items of follow-up. But first up, we always start with democracy when we have it. Nielian, you want to take it away?

Yeah. So like I said last week, this was going to be hard to describe to the audience on Mastodon. Because I'm guessing most people vote before the episode is out. Anyway, so the direct result of this is that a lot less people voted. There's only 36 people who voted in the poll. But I guess the electoral college can... whatever.

I tried to go somewhere. So yeah, I won at 53% with my automation to send links to my Mac when I put my iPhone on the MacSafe dock. Then right behind me is Chris at 36% with his on-air sign that lights up when he wants people to leave him alone. And dead last, that is at 11%.

shout out to the four people who voted for me yeah with his infamous online movie reviews that he automated it's going great by the way I enjoy that automation I have my on air sign on right now even though nobody's actually home but it's tied to my automation so it just turns on no matter what so yeah I do have a little bit of follow up regarding the challenge so I mentioned on there that I was trying to automate my my queue garage door opener and i had quite a few people reach out to me uh

publicly privately uh basically say try the miros adapter now i actually have used this before i use this at my old place at my condo and it works amazing so totally aware of it totally have used it before super great the unfortunate bit is it does not work with our garage door opener right now the adapter according to Miros doesn't work Miros is kind of weird this adapter because you have to buy the thing and then you have to like contact them

and be like hey I also need this separate adapter to go on top of it because they just don't include everything in the box I was super fortunate with my condo I actually didn't need any of those adapters because the garage door was that old but my current one doesn't work with any of the adapters that they have So I actually need to go and replace the whole garage door opener, which isn't that big of a deal for me because I've actually installed those before. I helped my brother install one at his house. So it's not the end of the world, but I have a really long house chore list already.

So it's not exactly at the top of the list right now because I have a bunch of other stuff, including getting the Christmas stuff, but not until after Thanksgiving. Because you don't put out Christmas stuff until after Thanksgiving. I think. That's going to be my hot take for the episode. I used to be like you. Smart. You used to be like me, smart. Why don't I let people be happy? No, I genuinely don't care. The only time it really bothers me is when I see people start to put out Christmas stuff before Halloween.

That's pushing it. We had somebody in the neighborhood that literally before Halloween, they had their Christmas decorations up. And I'm just like, okay, that's too soon. I have to call out the city where I live. Okay. That is Grenoble in France. This city does something that I found really funny. You know the illuminations in the streets for Christmas? Oh, yeah, like the Christmas tree lights and stuff? Not the Christmas tree, but like, I don't know how you call that, Just decorations all over the light poles and some buildings as well.

Just the ones that light up. The thing that they do is they leave them up all year. So you've got all year long, you've got some Merry Christmas signs over the streets in some parts of the city. They just don't light up at night. So at night you don't see them, but during the day you see them. That's weird. And they turn them on at the end of November until January. But the rest of the year, they just leave them up. Whereas it's an exception.

Like most cities in France just take them down and reinstall them every year. But yeah, here they've taken a don't care approach. Just leave them up. I've seen people leave lights up on their house. Like there's some houses in my neighborhood that the lights are up all year round. They just don't turn them on. And those are one thing. Like if the city left the lights on or lights up, that's fine. But like giant, like Merry Christmas signs. Yeah, the signs. Yeah. There are some. There are some. They do add real Christmas trees in the streets in December.

And those, they don't stay, of course. But yeah. Interesting. All right. Well, we got one other item and follow up. I'm assuming, Matt, you put that in here. Yeah. Yeah, this is mine. So I wanted to talk about the Final Cut Pro captions, which we talked about a week or two ago, and I have tried using. And unfortunately, I'm quite disappointed with them and will not be using them, which is a bummer. No, why? So the first thing I was curious about was how long they take to generate.

I've got an M2 Pro, MacBook Pro, Mac Whisper, which I've always done to just drag the video file in once it's done rendering and generate a thing. I captioned our last podcast episode as a test case. So that's like an hour and 20 minute video. MacWhisperer took about five minutes to generate the subtitles. And Final Cut did it in exactly one minute. So it was very, very fast. And the subtitles are more accurate than YouTube's auto-generated ones. So that's good. That's a low bar. That's a really low bar.

I know. But it does punctuation. It does capitalization. It gets all of our names hilariously wrong. but almost all of them do um however it's completely unusable for anything that i can imagine um and the problem is it generates you the captions in a itt file okay okay so srt is the normal captions file format that everyone supports itt stands for itunes text track and you can Imagine it is a proprietary file format that only Apple services use, except QuickTime doesn't know what the file is.

VLC doesn't know what the file is. As far as I can tell, this file is unusable in anything I would possibly do. Unless you're probably exporting video to put into the iTunes store or whatever they call it now. Potentially. That's so dumb. It's so frustrating. And it's not just like an SRT with a different extension. It's a totally different, more complex file format. So you can't just like change the extension or anything. It's frustrating. So long story short, this isn't the full topic. So we don't need to get too into it. But unfortunately, while it is very fast generating these files, it's very fast generating something I do not need.

The one thing you can do is when you're exporting, there's a new option in the roles tab when you're exporting to burn in the captions. So if you do want captions on screen, you can do that. I guess there's subtitles at that point. But there's no formatting of them. You can't style them. They're not going to be fancy like some of the ones you see. They're just going to be like white text on a black background. So kind of a bummer with those. I wanted to mention it because I was so excited when we talked about these. And I was like, yes, this is going to make my workflow easier.

And it sadly doesn't. That's really frustrating. That's a bummer. Apple, come on. Yeah, it gets you so close. So close. I was like, ITT? I've never heard of ITT before. And then I Googled it, and it was like iTunes text track. And I was like, no. Isn't it an alien in a Spielberg movie? E.T. No, that's E.T. Yeah, I know. It was a joke. Oh. Sorry. Well, now I'm embarrassed.

All right. Well, let's get on to the main show. And I'm first up in the document here. And I figured, because this episode is technically scheduled to come out on Thanksgiving, but I think we're going to try and get it out a day early if everything goes smoothly. If it didn't, it means you all were ornery in the car and we had to turn it around. That's a joke because people road trip on Thanksgiving. It wasn't funny at all, so I'm just going to move right on. So I thought for my topic, since it is Thanksgiving here in America, that we would talk about tech that we are thankful for.

And we're just going to kind of round robin this for stuff that we enjoy. I put in a couple of items. Looks like you guys put in a couple of items. Feel free to, you know, do as much as you want. But we won't go, you know, we won't make this the whole episode. But I wanted to start off talking about, well, the iPad Pro, specifically the new M4 iPad Pro. This has been an absolute delight of a machine. This is obviously my main computer. It has been a while since the iPad Pro has gotten a really big update.

I would say the iPad Pro is kind of on this every other update cycle for big updates. So if you kind of go back, cast your mind back to 2018. We got this big redesign. Huge. It was like, I don't even remember what the chip was. It was A17. No, it wasn't that. It was like A14X. No, probably even further. A12. It was A12X. That's what it was. And then 2020 comes along, and it wasn't that big of an update. It went to the A12Z, which got an extra GPU core, and then a couple of really minor things.

And then we go to 2022? 2021? 21. 21. And we got the M1 iPad Pro, which brought Thunderbolt, up to 16 gigs of RAM, a 2 terabyte model. That was a big update for me. That was a huge update for iPad Pro users. Then we got the M2 one, which was kind of a minor update. And then we got the M4 one, which was a big update. It was the first Apple device with the M4 chip, OLED display, redesigned Magic Keyboard, Apple Pencil Pro.

There was a lot of stuff in here. And I have absolutely loved working from this machine this year. While iPadOS didn't get much of anything this year, at least hardware-wise, we got something, which when you look at last year, we didn't get any iPad updates in 2023. So in 2024, it was nice to get both an iPad Pro, an iPad Air, and an iPad Mini. Almost the whole lineup has been completely updated, just waiting on that base iPad. But I've really enjoyed working from this machine.

The Magic Keyboard, the new Magic Keyboard, is probably one of my favorite upgrades because it just works so much better than the previous one. Better viewing angles. I was somebody I didn't think I needed a function row. I take it all back. The function row has been great. Bigger trackpad, better build quality. I went through like two or three of the old Magic Keyboards because I just typed on them so much, and they just started to come apart because the build quality was not there. So overall, that's been great. OLED screen on this iPad is absolutely gorgeous.

I love editing photos and videos and watching movies and shows on it. It just looks absolutely gorgeous. And the M4 chip. The M4 chip is incredibly fast. It handles all my workflow. I don't feel anything sluggish even when I'm editing multiple streams of 4K video, HEVC video on top of that. Yeah, I just absolutely love this device. Uh, but the kind of part that I'm thankful for, is it necessarily just this iPad, but the iPad lineup as a whole, because, uh, the day that we're recording this, actually my

YouTube channel, and it's Friday, the 22nd, November 22nd, we're recording this. But today my YouTube channel actually turns eight years old today. And the whole reason why my channel is what it is today is because of the iPad. So just I'm kind of thankful for the iPad lineup as a whole for what it's enabled me to be as a creator and give me stuff to talk about. But also just I love it. Like I love working from this platform. And I hope that kind of comes through. Very nice.

Yeah. Very good. I have that one as well. I'm using it right now for show notes. So love it. Everything you said is very true. I'll double down on the keyboard. The Magic Keyboard is notably better. And yeah, it's just a great, great device. Yeah. So I figured we'd round robin this. So if one of you wants to go next, that way I'm not just talking for a long period of time. I have the M2 MacBook Air. Okay, nice. Because the M2 MacBook Air was my first MacBook since the 2015 MacBook Pro.

And between the two, I never owned another Mac. I, for a time, even I only used an iPad Pro for about a year or two. I don't remember. The 2018, the model, then the M1 model. And that was great. And at some point, I just felt like I needed to upgrade my Mac. Like this couldn't go anymore. And I think it was when Big Sur came out, Mac OS Big Sur, that I started thinking, okay, maybe I should get a Mac

because it wasn't supported by my old MacBook Pro. And even though I didn't use it anymore that much, I only used it sometimes when I need to do a Mac-only task. Yeah, it became very problematic. It was very slow, very sluggish. And so I went with the M2 MacBook Air. And this thing is, I'm still amazed by it. Like, it's so light. It's very beautiful, even.

The battery is, like, infinite. I don't know how they are doing this. I will admit that I don't travel much. So, like, I only work from home. And when I travel, I take my MacBook Air with me. And I just never take a charger with me. Like when I travel to Paris for a day or two, I just don't even take a charger with me. And that's pretty incredible. And yeah, it's still incredibly fast. Today, it's up to the M4 chip, I believe.

M3? Which one is the latest chip? M3. M3, yeah. So I don't even know if there's going to come a point where I will feel the need to upgrade. I feel like that's not happening for the next six or seven years at least. I use an M1 Mac at work. My work computer is an M1 Mac. I have no desire to... It's great. It's still holding up incredibly well. So I imagine the M2 will do the same. Yeah.

For people that are still on M1 computers, the only reason why they might want to upgrade to an M4 is if they have really high, intense workflows. Like I saw, I think it was David Smith talk about basically upgrading to the M4. Or maybe this was a little while ago and he talked about the M3. I don't remember. But I know he talked about like doing an incremental update, like a year-over-year update, because it actually made the Xcode build times like significantly faster.

And he did the math on how much time it would save him. And that was like, oh, yeah, no, this makes sense for a long period of time. But for people that are just, you know, like have a lot of text-based workflows, whether it's writing or email or PDFs or spreadsheets, the M1, let alone the M2, is still really fast. And even like for work, I sometimes still, sometimes now I have to edit video. Like this happens really, yeah, it's a new thing and I'm really bad at it.

But it's for short things and punctual things. But I take care of it because I feel like I can. And it goes really well with the M2 MacBook Air. The only issue is storage. I went with the lowest storage when I bought this. So that's 256 gigs. I did upgrade the RAM. It's at 16 gigs of RAM. Now that's the default, I believe.

Yes. For the base model. Yeah. So that's it. That's my first pick. Yeah, you know, there's something kind of weird about the M4 on the Mac line being the base being 16 gigs of RAM. Because there are M4 chips being made with 8 gigs of RAM for all the iPad Pros that are 256 and 512 gigs of storage. Those still get 8 gigs of RAM. So I'm kind of wondering next time around when the M5 comes around, if the iPad Pro gets updated, if all of the iPad Pros will just have 16 gigs of RAM, and will that go to the iPad Air when that gets to that chip?

Who knows? I don't know, but that's kind of something I thought about when all the Macs were being updated to a minimum of 16 gigs of RAM. So, yeah. But that is, remind me, is the M2 MacBook Air, that was the one that was the very first redesigned MacBook Air of the Apple Silicon. Okay. Yeah. I have a hard time remembering the Mac lineup now, but that was a cool one. I got, I was there at WWDC when it was announced and I got to see it in the hands-on area. And that midnight one.

Yeah, I've got the midnight one. Yeah. That's a good looking one. my partners or my partner often mocks me because i don't have any stickers or anything like personalized on it and it's because i've attempted to add stickers to it but i just i feel like it's it ruins it i want to keep it like it's meant to be it's a beautiful piece of tech i agree i was team stickers for many years and now i don't do them either oh same i used did

stickers on all my iPads and the Magic keyboards and all the keyboards I had and it got to the point when I was going to sell the devices or give them off it was just too big of a hassle to take them off and I was just like you know what and then I also would get this weird issue too the biggest reason why I don't do stickers on my devices anymore is the autofocus from my camera would mess up sometimes and think one of the stickers was my face instead of actually my face when I was recording video so I would get autofocus issues so that's actually the biggest reason why I stopped doing stickers on

my computer nice I wonder if stickers are kind of like RGB for more Apple people instead of having RGB all over our computers we have stickers all over computers and it's a phase we all go through and then we all kind of grow out of it eventually I was never an RGB person I think you would have been good for you no no if you stop I'm classy I'm classy okay I'm gonna bring up the most thing possible and that is libraries um these are tech things i know we're supposed to be yeah i

was about to say yeah this is like his orange icon like no no no no no no so libraries are awesome and likely underutilized by a lot of people uh so if you have a library card this is more u.s centric uh but if you have a library card hey matt we we have libraries too oh do you oh well i don't know how they work um we so if you have a library card and they're totally free it's super easy to get um from your local library you can do a ton with if you if you read books um watch movies you

can do a lot with uh your library card so the two apps i wanted to say i'm thankful for related to libraries are libby which is a pretty outstanding app i don't get how it exists it's amazing i know this i don't quite understand it but i it's it's like don't look a gift horse in the mouth kind of thing yes it's uh yes not getting political um yes libya is fantastic uh it lets you rent ebooks it lets you rent uh audiobooks it's if it they only have a set number available for each one so you have to put like more popular ones on hold but then you get a notification when it's ready

and then you can borrow it for like a couple weeks so there are some limitations it's not like just buying one but like the app is very good it has an integration i mentioned this when i talked about the kindle it has an integration to kindle um so you can like send ebooks to your e-reader it'll it's wonderful the app itself is great as well like it's actually i think better than the audible app for listening to audiobooks it's a delight and it's completely free and is just a thing that anyone can take advantage of i think it's super awesome can i give a libby pro tip sure so uh

be don't don't be cool about this okay everyone be cool don't do this on high demand books that everyone's trying to get a hold of do this on stuff that's just readily available don't don't don't don't don't be a uh i gotta bleep that okay so if you have an e-reader like a kindle or kobo or something like that and you get something from libby you have a set amount of time that you can read that but if you're like me and you're a really slow reader that may not be enough time so get the books put your device in airplane mode read the books and then when you're done

take it off airplane mode so that way you get a little bit extra time i can't believe this but i'm saying don't don't be a not nice person don't do this on high demand books because i do believe that still keeps it out of their inventory. Do there's some books that are just readily available, you know, don't take away from other people's experiences. But, this is something I have done because I am a very slow reader. How many years of jail time are you aiming for here?

With this advice. 420. Excellent. The other app, just to mention quickly, if you want movies, you can rent movies the movie selection is much worse though so you're not going to get new releases not even like popular old movies in most cases but there's an app called hoopla which is the exact same thing you enter your library card number and it uh syncs through your libraries and i reused that uh earlier this year i think to watch my cousin my cousin vinnie uh which i hadn't watched in many years i rented it on itunes and the itunes version was out of sync the audio is out of sync

and I tried on multiple devices to make sure like it wasn't just like my home theater setup and it was unwatchable and I was able to watch it on Hoopla just airplayed to the tv which a lot of other streaming apps don't let you do they don't let you use uh airplay the video for whatever reason uh the NFL Sunday ticket app has done that in the past but anyway um yeah so that's an option as well but mostly for the books but I think libraries are an underutilized resource and they're pretty awesome even if you want to do techie things like use a great audiobook and ebook app like Libby

nice like it love it uh libraries are great we have a really great one here locally too so uh we danielle and i go there quite a bit so uh the next device i want to talk about is the legion go uh i talked about this very early on in the show and i was kind of a little lukewarm on it and it really took some fiddling to get it perfect and it took a little bit of like taking a step back and understanding what this device is uh but now i absolutely love this it allows me to play games on the go while i'm traveling games while we have family over like uh just a couple weeks ago i talked

about on the show the whole reason why i did the on-air sign is because we had some family staying with us for some family stuff and it was just like i i i need a break i need to get away from all that for a little bit and play some games and you know what the legion go was perfect for that because they were watching tv i was able to come into my studio i sat in the chair over there and just played some games for a little bit and then rejoined i'm not the most sociable person i need i need me time to relax recuperate really rejuvenate myself i'm just kidding not really i actually do

need me time um but the legion go has been great so a couple of things i've done with it is i've embraced it as the xbox the mobile xbox um i have when i turn it on by default it launches the xbox app so this is where i play a vast majority of the games from um play a bunch of games from game pass some games from my library there's also uh pc games to purchase right from the xbox app really great. Sometimes it's kind of confusing about the way this works, but if it's a play anywhere game,

your saves will sync from the Legion Go to your Xbox and vice versa. It works really well that way. I've been playing Starfield on it where my saves do sync. I've been revisiting Skyrim, but it's like the PC version, so the saves don't sync there, so I've just been playing it on the Legion Go, Age of Empires 2, the remastered's on there, really great. In fact, just last night, I just started playing Dragon Quest XI, and it was on sale, it was the Black Friday sale,

so I got the game for $20, and it's a play anywhere game, so I can play it both on my Legion Go and my Xbox, the saves will sink back and forth, achievements sink back and forth, so I can either play it on my big TV, or I can play it on the Legion Go, doesn't matter, It works incredibly well. That game in particular, I'm getting 1080p resolution, 60 frames per second, and it's still not even capping out performance-wise, so I'm getting really good battery life on top of that.

Just realizing, okay, if you're going to embrace brand new AAA games, you're probably not going to... Like, if you're going for 60 frames per second, you're not going to get great battery life. But, like, games that are a few years older, I think Dragon Quest is, like, two years old, and I'm still getting good performance. It's not exactly the most intensive game. But, um, Starfield, uh, I'm getting decent performance. I'm getting, like, 45, 50 frames per second. Uh, at the, uh, it's, it's technically the lower resolution.

It's actually under 1080p, but, um, the Legion Go has, what is it called? rs i don't remember it's something with the radeon gpu but it actually upscales everything for you so it's running at a lower resolution but it upscales everything so it looks really good uh the screen is really good my biggest complaint about it is the same complaint everyone has about it ergonomically it sucks it's hard to hold uh especially if you're laying down it can feel heavy but overall this has has allowed me to play games on the go and i really enjoy it nice um along the very same lines uh on my list is the steam deck oled uh which i got last end of last year but has been just an mvp for me

for mobile gaming uh basically what you said with it's your mobile xbox it's my mobile steam library uh pc gamer primarily and everything like you said syncs beautifully so i can pick up and play I've actually played like 80 hours of Dragon Quest XI on my Steam Deck as well. Dang, I didn't realize it was that big of a game. Oh, I'm not even, I've got like 20, 30 hours to go. I didn't even realize it was that big of a game. I should also mention the Legion Go. It's not just Xbox. You could do Steam, Epic, all the game stores and stuff like that.

So if you have your library in Steam, you could do that. I just primarily play my games on Xbox. So most of my games are there along with achievements and stuff like that. So yeah, but I'm sorry to interrupt. that's fine um yeah with i mean the steam deck basically all the things you said i think the thing that's great about the steam deck is it feels like a console if you only have a steam deck it's the only thing you use you have no pc where you have like an existing library and you'd never see a mouse cursor you never see a windows interface a linux interface like it is like a switch there's

a storefront they have certified games that they know will work and have been verified to work and a lot of games because it's a very popular handheld a lot of games when on first launch will open to their steam deck visual settings so you'll get just reliable performance uh it's fantastic um but what makes it great for someone like me is that you can also push it beyond what a normal console would do so you can stay within the within the the uh the walls of a normal console just play the games that you are known to work um play games from steam but you can also install games that maybe

work great or literally do not work but you're like I'm gonna try anyway you can do that you can also boot into a Linux desktop if you want and you can install emulators you can install Xbox you can install like game pass and game streaming stuff you can install I think I don't know if the epic store works but like you can play anything basically on there if you want but you don't have to so if you don't want to do any of that that's great um but if you want to push a little further you can as well and i like that it gives you the flexibility um i really like things

that are like that where it's simple by default but if you know what you're doing and you want to do a little bit more uh they give you the freedom to do it so i should also mention that uh if you are an xbox game pass subscriber all of the game pass games are now available for streaming so if you have something like a stream deck or legion go you can just start streaming games you don't have to install them locally i went back so i just finished dragon age veil guard i went back and started playing the very first dragon age game uh and i am just streaming it on the legion go because

it actually has an issue where it won't install properly on modern windows computers and that's really what the legion go is is a modern windows computer so i'm just streaming it and as an xbox 360 game it streams incredibly well so uh that uh is also another option i want to say it's christmas So feel free to ask me for my details if you want to send me a stand-up. I'm talking to YouTube, but also the audience. So, yeah. My second pick is noise-canceling headphones in general.

Yeah, I'm really, really thankful for that because I can't handle the world anymore. I'm in the outside world or even the indoor world with noises all around. I can hear the slightest sound coming from my neighbor and I go crazy. So, yeah, noise cancelling headphones have been a life saviour. I can't imagine taking the train without one on my head.

And yeah, lately I've been using the AirPods Max mostly. I also used the AirPods Pro, and before that, the Sony's XM4, XM5, and even before those two, the XM3. And if there's an XM6 coming up, I'm going to get one probably. So, yeah, noise-canceling headphones. Nice. Love that, yeah. Love noise-canceling headphones. I wouldn't be able to focus without them.

Yeah, no, they're great. uh so for me uh i want to point out the peloton rowing machine now this is not a new piece of tech this year uh it's a new new thing that i got so girlfriend and i moved in together she is full-on peloton cult uh like absolutely like we have peloton towels everywhere that that kind of level. But so she had the the bike and the rowing machine and the treadmill. And she really

likes the bike and the treadmill, but never really got into the rowing machine. And I gave it a shot. And I've tried a bunch of different exercises. I've tried treadmills. I've tried bikes. I've tried weightlifting. Nothing ever really stuck with me. But rowing, rowing works like rowing works for me. I actually really enjoy it. So it's been helping me kind of get in a better shape. Like I've talked about, I'm diabetic. Exercising kind of helps regulate your blood glucose levels. Like it'll keep your blood sugar down and all that stuff.

So I absolutely love it. It's really, really pricey for all that stuff. I kind of got lucky. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Nobody look it up. Nobody. I got lucky. I didn't have to pay for it. But I get to use it every single day. I tried going to the gym for a little while, but I'm so self-conscious. I know nobody's looking at me. I know nobody cares what I'm doing, but I'm very self-conscious about the gym.

This is your thing that's like my airplane thing. Nobody cares what I'm watching, but I can't watch anything on my laptop. You know what? Fair enough. We all have a thing. I just struggle going to the gym. like a public gym where like other people are around so uh just being able to go in the other room put on my headphones either listen to the class or listen to a podcast and just row away for 20-30 minutes it's great it's fantastic love the machine uh i have noticed a one i've noticed like my my personal energy level i'm a lot more alert a lot more awake ever since i've started doing this

regularly but more importantly my blood glucose levels because again i'm diabetic have just been smooth uh which is uh really really nice to have so uh i don't know if i necessarily would tell everyone to get the peloton rowing machine but there are a lot of rowing machines out there to look into uh if you're somebody that's like you know i've tried treadmills i've tried bikes i've tried all this other stuff it just doesn't work for me uh the rowing machine's kind of a nice balance for everything. Nice. Okay. I have a few more, but I think I'm just going to rapid fire through them because I think they're all pretty small. So, um, the first thing is the new nodding gestures

in the AirPods this year. So when you get like a notification, uh, for example, like, uh, when I get is like, Oh, did you mean to start a workout? Would you like us to start? Would you like the workout app to start a workout for you? If you nod your head, it'll now say yes and if you shake it it'll thank you um then it won't it'll it'll say no so i really enjoy this um it's fantastic i use it way more than i thought i actually use it more than the pinch gesture for like approving things um yeah the pinch gesture actually i'm not thankful for that's

the biggest bummer of a new feature yeah that for me that that's such a letdown i use my nose more than it and i now use my head shake more than it i don't know i just don't like it oh you mean on the watch on the watch yes sorry sorry sorry sorry not on the airpods yeah okay um so that was one um i also have really come to like the united airlines app um i've been traveling quite a bit for work lately and i always fly united and the app is not really really good uh i can't see chris's face right now because my camera's in the way but i assume he's smiling it is i actually use its live

activity over flighties because i find it more useful as a very basic example flighty tells me how long i have until my flight takes off and the united live activity tells me how long until boarding starts i care a lot more about when boarding starts because that's when i need to be there um you for example but it feels very much made for whenever i am wherever i am in the process of like getting to the airport, at the airport, on the flight or whatever, it changes what it shows me, and it's very, very good. It's showing me what I want to know at that moment.

I'm a big fan. United messed me up earlier this year. They left me stranded in New York when I was trying to get home so I could review an iPad Pro. So they're not at the top of my list right now, even though, like, literally the reason why I got stranded was because of mechanical issues on an airplane. I found out the flight was canceled through Flighty before them. They never even called me. I had to call them.

I ended up having to stay in New York for another night, but it was actually flying out of New York, so I had to stay in New Jersey for another day. It was a disaster. It was to the point where I was running around the Apple New York townhouse where they do all the press briefings and stuff like that. And everyone's filming stuff. Apple PR people are talking everything up. And I'm like, how do I get home?

So, yeah, United not on top of my list right now. I'm sorry. That sounds not fun. I'm guessing United is in their line. They are. Yes. Yes. I think they might be the biggest airline in the US. I'm not totally sure. I thought American was. Or American. Yeah, it's one of the two. I thought American was the biggest. This conversation makes a lot more sense now. Yes. Yeah, sorry. We weren't very American-centric. Actually, this whole segment is technically American-centric, but... Yeah, I'm just trying to go along. Canada has Thanksgiving, too. Canada has a Thanksgiving as well, so...

It was last month, but yes. Eh, they don't do anything right. They put gravy on their French fries. like, ugh. Don't at me. You mean poutine? Yeah. That sounds great. Poutine is great. I love that. Ugh. No. No. Okay. It's good. Look, if you're looking to put something on fries, you put some cheddar cheese and some bacon on it. Oh, what are you talking about? Oh, yeah. I actually don't like cheese fries. Oh, okay. All right. Anyways, we need to get moving here.

We do. Last thing I wanted to call out, non-US regulators. RCS, USBC. I know some people will tell you it would have happened at the exact same time no matter what. I find that very convenient. But anyway, thank you to non-US regulators for not being perfect, but getting some nice things. So the last thing I want to just wrap up with is my studio. I love this studio. We spent a bunch of time putting it together, painting it, getting all the right furniture, setting it up just right.

This was a huge project. that my parents helped out with, my girlfriend's helped out with, my girlfriend's mom helped out with. Even I did a little bit of work. That was a joke. Anyways, I just love it. I love how it turned out. I love the fact that I got all my lights hanging from the ceiling, the paint, the furniture, everything just turned out great. I'm just so thankful for it and it's just made my working life so much better.

I love that fact that I have like a separate office area, which is just like this little weird annex of our hallway that like it intense. It doesn't make any sense. I would love to find out who designed this home and ask them what was the intended purpose for this? Because I cannot figure it out. But my office desk just happens to fit perfectly in there. It's at the end of the hallway. Whatever. It works. But yeah, I'm really grateful for this studio. I'm really grateful for everyone that helped out. The place I was previously, I was only there for a year, but I hated it.

I hated being in that area. It was too small. It was a weird layout. There was basically no natural light, so it was just depressing to sit in. But yeah, yeah, no, I'm, that's, yeah, my studio. Thank you to everyone that helped me with it. Yeah. Yeah, you do seem to very much enjoy it, so it looks great. Thank you. Yeah, I really do. People get compliments on it. You know, Federico wanted me to do the whole iOS 18 club trailer thing in here because he really liked the way I looked and stuff like that.

So, yeah, I think it really worked out great. He likes the way you look. I guarantee it. Another American thing. That is an American thing. Is that a men's warehouse? What are we? I don't want to know. I don't know. I don't know. All right, so that just kind of wraps up what we're thankful for, unless you guys have anything else you want to add? I am also thankful to all of our listeners. Oh. We've been doing this for half a year. This is exactly half a year through, week 26.

Are we really? Oh, yeah. Huh. Nice. Week 26, and it's the eighth anniversary of my channel, too. Huh, that's interesting that I all kind of came up. That's pretty cool. Well, I'm thankful to you, too. I couldn't have asked for better co-hosts to do this show with. Oh, okay. Likewise. That's very nice. Yeah. So we're just going to kind of wrap it up with this segment. We all kind of had something to be thankful for this year. So we're going to move right on to our challenge this week. And the challenge was Neil Leon's. And this was a really interesting one.

But Neil Leon, you want to tell us what you had us do? Yep. My challenge was stop using Apple Music and prioritize free alternatives. And like I said, you didn't have to go all week with it, at least a day or two, which is what I've done. So should I go first? Yes. Yeah. Go for it. Okay. So what I did, how should I go about this?

Okay. So I have a subscription, which I'm probably never going to cancel because it's so useful. It is the YouTube Premium subscription. I cannot imagine going without it now because I hate the YouTube ads so much. And we watch a lot of YouTube on the TV in the room. So you can't just install an ad blocker on the YouTube app on the TV.

So yeah, anyway. But what comes bundled with the YouTube Premium subscription is YouTube Music. So technically, I didn't have to pay anything more. It was already included in my thing. I'm glad you're setting this precedent right here. I'm really appreciating that you're setting this precedent. Okay, okay. So I didn't pay for it. I mean, I am paying for it, but I didn't pay anything more for this challenge. And I don't use it.

I have not used it until now. So I've got a few things to say about YouTube Music. The first thing that I would like to say is that it is the worst app I've ever used all year on my phone. It is incredibly bad. And I mean this in the most constructive way possible. Go on. This app is... Okay, so there's the website and there's the iOS side.

On the web, it's about just as good as the YouTube site itself can get. So, like, it's about the same. The UI is built using the same technical foundation, you can tell. And it's very basic. You just browse your YouTube music library. You can add artists, add albums. And basically the advantage to YouTube music is that anything, any music that you can find on YouTube itself,

you can also find on YouTube music, which is a really large library of music, a catalog of music that you can get your hands on. Because it includes like very obscure stuff that's only on YouTube. And I'm sure we can all think of something. We all have something in mind, something very obscure that we like to listen to on YouTube that's not available on anything else. For me, that's the Bad Lip Reading YouTube channel, which does like parodies of Star Wars.

Anyway, check them out. It's funny. so okay and on the ios side uh the app is uh it feels like it's not a native app it feels like does it do the classic thing of like hey i'm a google app on ios so instead of using classic ios navigation and apis and stuff like that we're just going to use android style stuff and just slam it in your face.

I mean, it's not that a hardcore Android app ported over, but it is a bit like the iOS YouTube app, actually. Like, something feels off about the iOS YouTube app, I think we can agree. Like, it doesn't feel like most native iOS apps, although it has many native features and it works well. But YouTube music feels a bit like this. So anyway, that was about the apps.

I want to talk about the service itself a little bit. And there's one thing in particular that's really bad about YouTube music. And that is the way that you manage your library. And I've made a huge mistake, guys. Like this challenge has hurt me. Oh, no. Okay, so what I wanted to do was to find a way to import my library, my Apple Music library, into YouTube Music.

So I can just like start using the app with all my music already there. There are services online that can help you do this. Just look them up. They exist. There are multiple ones. And that went well. I transferred over my library to YouTube music. And I realized that when you add an artist to your YouTube music library, it also subscribes you to its YouTube channel.

Oh, no. Regular YouTube account. Regular YouTube channel? Yeah. Oh. So I did this, used YouTube music for a little while, for a few hours, then went back to YouTube to watch a video. And my subscription feed was such a mess. And I thought something went horribly wrong. And then I realized what happened. I was suddenly subscribed to like a few hundred artist channels on YouTube.

And some of those are like regular YouTube channels where artists upload their clips, their video clips and stuff. Some of those channels are like automatically generated YouTube channels that YouTube creates for music artists. But anyway, they behave like just normal YouTube channels. so I had to spend hours unsubscribing to all those YouTube channels because maybe I've missed this somehow but I've not

found a way to batch unsubscribe I don't think there's a way now I don't know of a way so I did that I don't know how much time I spend on this but I did that so conclusion my challenge I spent most of my time subscribing to YouTube channels instead of actually using YouTube music and the YouTube music I find is really bad You know what's crazy? Is I think you're still going to win the challenge somehow Yeah Really?

You always find a way The people love Neil Leon The people too love Neil Leon I mean I went with it like I tried Yeah, no for sure Yeah Okay. I went, as I often do, I have disregarded part of the challenge. However, I think in a heroic way. So, you put me in a real pickle.

Because, again, I was traveling this week. Did you pay for a very expensive service? I did not. He went to all vinyl records. He replaced his whole music library with vinyl records. The warmth, Nealion. The warmth. I mean, you joke, but part of this process did involve me buying a new vinyl. Okay. Okay. So I was using Bandcamp this week for music. Yeah, this one time at Bandcamp. Yeah.

Reference acknowledged. Bandcamp is basically a marketplace for musicians to sell their music. And they also sell physical music, digital music, and I think you can also sell like merch there as well. So shirts and that sort of thing. And it's a really cool platform. It's been around for a long time. And basically the idea is if the artist sells on Bandcamp, if they sell a digital album, for example, you as the customer pay like 10 to 15 bucks, like you have forever buying music, and you get a DRM-free version of that music.

You often get a lossless copy as well if you want, but you also get MP3s. And then you can do whatever you want with those. But they're also added to your Bandcamp collection. And so you can use the Bandcamp app on the web, on your phone, whatever. I think there's an iPad one as well. And you can listen to your collection there. So for the last week, I've been listening to only a couple artists because I've only bought from a few, I mean, I have hundreds and hundreds of artists in Apple Music that I've... And you won't support all of them? Well, not as much as Neelion supports them on YouTube, but...

That's true. Neelion didn't like and subscribe. And so what I like about Bandcamp is they are marketplace, so they do take a portion of the money that's made. They take around 10% for most artists, or I think it's 15%, and then once you make over $5,000, it's 10% after that. And then the artist pays the processing fees, which are probably just a few cents on a single record. but yeah the app is fine it's not incredible i wouldn't want to listen to my whole collection there i can't listen to my whole collection there's no way to import music or anything but

all the things you bought there you can listen uh and in the ios app because of app store rules you can buy physical goods so you could go to an artist page in the app and buy their record like their the vinyl of that record or a cd of it uh or you could buy a shirt from them but if they involve a digital copy of the album no no no no you got to go to the web to buy that one which is kind of a bummer because in most cases when you buy so i bought the new jamie xx album um this week i got the vinyl coming the special edition white one it looks great i love this record as well it's

one of my favorite of the year so i was happy to do it was happy to pay the artist directly or more directly and um yeah it came with a digital copy as well so i got the digital one but i had to go to the web to buy it because even though I was technically just buying the vinyl there was a digital thing that I could enjoy on my iPhone if you enjoyed on your iPhone Apple gets 30 percent anyway it's actually really good I really like Bandcamp it also got me to listen to a few artists that I don't listen to a ton but have bought their music in the past there's an electronic

artist called Germany Germany that's pretty good and got to listen to some of their music again because apparently I subscribed to them or like I bought like a lifetime license to their music so I had like so much music from them in my uh I forget what it was but I did buy something that was like just get all my stuff from now until forever wow I need to find that receipt that I paid um but yeah so it's a it's a cool app and I think if you uh like you can obviously buy direct from artists but like if you really enjoy an artist i think a lot of them are on bandcamp

and you can check them out there um or just go to their website and just buy directly from them but i really do enjoy i don't support i don't buy every album i like uh directly from the artist or from some place like bandcamp um but the ones that i really do enjoy i like too uh so this was a good excuse to do that for another uh album this year yeah i've used the bandcamp app And I think it's nice. It's a quirky app, I find. The design is a bit quirky.

It's nice. Who doesn't look quirky? A little utilitarian is what I would say. But, yeah. I think that, I mean by that, the UI choices are kind of strange. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I would agree with that. So, I really appreciate the precedent that Neelian set that she didn't spend any extra money on this challenge, and I didn't either. I did not pay a single cent for any extra service or anything like that.

But also, like Matt, this was a really weird week for me. I had a couple of days of working after we recorded the last episode and then went on vacation and then just got back. So I've had two very different modes that I've been in. So for the couple of work days, I used two different services. I used YouTube and I used the Nintendo Music app. YouTube didn't sign up for anything. I listened to my friend Tom over the Bite Review channel. You may know him.

We'll put a link to this in the description below. But he has a separate channel called Kiriku. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right. But Kiriku Radio where it's just like lo-fi Legend of Zelda meets Animal Crossing music. and it is perfect to like write to. It is the perfect writing background music while doing admin work or whatever. I absolutely love this stuff. It's got like four separate albums. The first one is my absolute favorite, but they're all really good. Great job there.

I just had that on the background playing from YouTube on my phone with AirPods in and just doing my thing. I also used the Nintendo Music app, which we've talked about before in the show, so I won't go into too much detail. Amazing. Again, the Animal Crossing tracks are great. Set them to 60 minutes. Let them do its thing. Absolutely love it. It was great for work. Again, didn't spend any extra money because I'm already a part of the Nintendo online service. I don't know when it renews, but it just renews every year because I...

Nintendo. I mean, come on. They get all my money. Well, Apple too. And Ford. And Dr. Pepper. No, I don't pay anything for the Peloton. That's Daniel. Okay, okay. She pays for the Peloton service. I guess technically that's another music service I use because Peloton, they play music while you're doing your workouts. But again, didn't pay for it because Danielle takes care of that. But once we moved to the vacation side, we road tripped up to San Francisco, and I used Spotify.

Now, despite the fact that I pay for the Apple One subscription family sharing thing, and Danielle and I are in an iCloud family, which means she gets access to my Apple Music subscription. She still pays for Spotify because she likes Spotify. I'm not going to tell her what to do. She can do whatever she wants. But it gave me the opportunity to try out Spotify. I don't like Spotify. It feels like they're cramming a lot into that app, especially with podcasts on top of that.

The navigation, I don't know, maybe I'm just used to native Apple navigation. Wasn't the best, but one thing I really did like about it, and Apple Music does technically have this feature, but I think Spotify does it better. is it gives you the ability to like select a song and it kind of generates a playlist off that like similar songs or similar artists and stuff like that and apple music has a feature like this but i think spotify did it better where like uh we were going up we went up to san francisco because it was our anniversary but also there was a rise against concert and a restaurant we wanted to eat

at there's a whole bunch of things so we drove up there we put on rise against and like it started playing similar stuff to it as well. And it worked fine for the most part. It was great. I won't switch over to Spotify because it's included in the Apple One subscription, and I reminded Danielle of that, but she likes Spotify, so not gonna... That's fine. But yeah, no, that's kind of what I did. I'm happy this challenge is over, and I can just go back to using Apple Music because I have everything there.

Yeah. I think there's two types of people in this world there are people who don't understand why anybody would ever like the spotify interface and there's other people who are like this is the best interface in the world i don't understand why anyone doesn't like it i don't i don't maybe if i played around with it more but like i was just sitting in the car and i you know uh we took her car up unfortunately i had to leave sally in the garage which made me really really sad um it was a hard time please thoughts and

prayers for this. It was a really hard time for me to leave Sally in the garage. What's Sally? Oh, Sally's my Mustang. My car. My Mustang GT. This is probably an American thing as well. She has her own Instagram account and everything. She's got her own thing going. She's, you know, she's amazing. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. They always are. They always are. Okay. Yeah, she is. Yeah. But no, it was fine, but there was just so much going on in it.

And I don't know, Spotify is just, it's Spotify being Spotify. And I've used Spotify before, don't get me wrong. I used it before Apple Music was a thing, and I switched off of Apple Music and tried it for a while. It's fine, but I don't know. I just like Apple Music a little bit better. And at the end of the day, the content that is in Apple Music is the same content that is in Spotify and vice versa. Like, they have the same stuff. They might have, like, the exclusive Zane Lowe interviews or something like that.

I don't care about any of that. I'm never going to listen to that. But, like, music album-wise, they have the same stuff. So, really, you're kind of just picking which app works best for you. So Spotify, you didn't go with the free tier. No, but I just used it on Danielle's phone because it was paired to her car. So I didn't pay for it. I didn't even put it on my phone, but I was using it. Okay.

Yeah, I know. There's definitely some like, I kind of fudged my way around this one. That's why I was really happy when you set the precedent of, Well, technically, I didn't spend any more extra money. So, yeah. Sure. So now there's the precedent, too, that you can use anything your partner has bought. Yeah. Why not? It's in your house. If you can use it, absolutely. Go for it. Absolutely. Okay. Okay. Okay. Absolutely. All right.

Matt, it is your challenge this week. What are you going to have us do? Yes. So I have a fun one, I think. I would like us all to find an open source app that we love. And there are not too many rules. The main rule is you must be able to download the source code for it. So ideally, we'll have a GitHub link or something. It could be somewhere else, but I'm assuming it'll be GitHub, where you can download the source code. It's completely free, open source, and yeah, you have access to the source code.

You two have this much easier than me this week. Ooh. Why? Why do you say that? Because there's not a lot of open source great iPad apps. Oh. I don't. I don't. I mean, I might have to find a Mac app or something. But I mean. I hadn't thought about that. Yeah. No, it's fine. Hey, no, it's fine. I'm not complaining. I'm just saying you guys got it a lot easier than me this week.

I think you can find an open source app. There are definitely some out there. But I was thinking, as Matt titled it, find an open source app you love. And I can't think of an open source iPad app that I love. Oh, no, not an open source. I mean, technically, Obsidian plugins are open source. So, okay, that's a good question. So I was going to clarify that I think web apps would work.

So for example, Omnivore, which rest in peace, Omnivore would have qualified earlier because it was an app on the iPad, but it was also open source. Maybe it still is. I actually don't know what the situation is there because you could run it yourself. So that would have counted. I think there are some apps that are like that. Maybe is the Macedon app open source as well? But here's the part. Here's the crux of it, though. You put, find an open source app you love. Now find an open source app. So I got to figure out something here.

So I'm going to do some digging. But I just wanted to point out, I think you guys have it a little bit easier than I do this week. Okay, we shall see. I feel like Neilian's more tapped into that world than I am. Neilian's going to crush us with this one. What? I mean, I already picked one last week with Calendar. I mean, the week before, even. That's true. So you could bring something you've already talked about, already used. Like, if you have an awesome app that you already enjoy, then you could totally use that. For the record, I don't have one in mind, so I haven't already completed this challenge.

So, but, yeah, we'll see what people, we'll see what the people find most exciting. The people. The people. Okay. Nice. All right, well, that just about does it. But as always, I have an end of the show question for you guys. And this one's kind of a, I don't know. I just was kind of curious about this one. What is your favorite Apple app? Your favorite first party Apple app? Apple Music.

No way. I mean, it could even be something in that weird utility folder on the Mac. Yes, I'm looking at. So I can go first. I mean, I have to say Final Cut Pro for the iPad. I mean, that is something that I probably should have put in my thankful list at the top of the show that this came to the iPad and it allowed me to get back into my full iPad workflow. Yeah, I actually should have put that in that list there.

Yeah, I was... I think my answer is Final Cut Pro for the Mac. However, because you've said it already, I will go with Apple Photos, which I think is truly outstanding, and I would use... is maybe one of the biggest lock-in features for me. Okay. I really enjoy it. Yeah, I'm keeping Apple Music. Okay, all right. The Mac app is horrible, but still... Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. The iPad app isn't perfect, But hey, you know, it is one of this.

It's better. It's better. All right. Well, that just about does it for the show. Do either of you have something you want to plug this week? Have a great Thanksgiving. Aw, that's nice. It's okay if you don't. Okay. Sure. Have a good giving thanks. Ooh, giving thanks. We'll have to get into what that is. Thank you all so much for listening. A huge thank you to MacStories for having us.

We are a MacStories podcast after all. If you are celebrating Thanksgiving, have a wonderful Thanksgiving, and we will talk to you all next week. Goodbye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.