I'm Knee-Deep in Turkey

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, but out of the three of us, only one ate turkey. As always, we're joined by Matt Birchler. Matt, how are you doing? I'm doing great. I'm still knee deep in turkey leftovers. Yep, not a turkey person. And we're also joined by Niléane. Niléane, how are you doing? Hello, I'm doing well. I've had a week.

You've had a week. Once again. Yeah. That's probably a good thing to have in a week. Yeah. Depends, depends. Okay. All right. Well, you know what? I'm looking at a document here. We don't have anything in follow-up. So are we just getting right into the show this week? Yeah. Wow. All right. Yeah. I don't think we didn't do democracy either for the last challenge, did we? No, we didn't. Right. Equally thankful. We kind of had a weird week because we released it a week early or a day early because of Thanksgiving.

And then, yeah, you know, schedules this time of year, they all get thrown off. Wait, were we supposed to have one and I forgot? Is that what happened here? I don't think we ever said we were going to, but I also don't think we ever said we weren't going to. Okay. Okay. Maybe we should, should we do democracy every week or should democracy be a sometimes thing? I think democracy has been a sometimes thing for a while now because there's like certain challenges that I just don't think work for, like the accessibility challenge, like that

just didn't work for democracy. I feel like we've assumed yes, democracy, but yeah, I don't know. Okay. Something to think about. I mean, democracy is over anyway. No, we're happy podcast. Happy podcast. I'm happy. Happy thoughts. Happy thoughts right now. Not doom and gloom. Nope, nope. Back to doom and gloom. Anyways, all right. Well, let's get into the show. Nelian, you're first up in the document, and I'm very excited to talk about this because I also tried this this week, not knowing you were going to talk about this.

I'm very excited about it. Okay, so my topic this week is something that filled my TikTok feed, like, exclusively. It was only this in my TikTok feed for the past two weeks. And the topic is Flight Simulator 2024, which came out last week, I believe. And yeah, so I've never played any Flight Simulator at all. This is my first one.

and what prompted me to try it this time is that looking at those TikToks they really made me want to fly over my home island like I really wanted to give it a try and see if I can fly around over my home island so yeah I've been trying it I've been playing it at night because I was very busy this week during the day so I've had sleepless nights

trying to understand how the hell do you take off in this game it is very hard especially if you've never touched anything like it so yeah but it's been a lot of fun and the career mode is, I think it is new. There's never been a career mode, if I'm right. So it is new. It is nice for me because, like, in the beginning, they teach you, like, the basics of flying a plane

and how it works and how to configure basic things like your heading, leveling your altitude, etc. And managing your throttle, etc. So that's been nice. The game has been bombed with bad reviews. Why this time? Why? I think I know why.

There's no wokeness to be denounced here. The issue here is that it is extremely buggy. Oh, yeah. Oh, okay. And I can tell it's very buggy. The game crashes very often. But even when it doesn't crash, inside the game, so many bugs. Setting a flight plan will do just random things, adding waypoints everywhere.

So if you enable autopilot, your plane will end up just doing weird maneuvers without you knowing it. And that's because between the time when you've set your flight plan and the time when you've taken off, the game has decided to add a bunch of random waypoints in the middle of departure and arrival. And that's, it's such a nightmare. And you try to just fix it on the in-game tablet. There's an in-game tablet where you can fix your flight plan.

You try to fix it and it doesn't work. You can't remove waypoints. buttons just don't do anything all over the game buttons don't do anything sometimes and sometimes they do you just gotta be lucky okay so that's the state of the game the bugginess is not necessarily new to flight simulator so I played the last flight simulator the 2020 version for like hundreds of hours I love that game and hard crashes happened there too although much less I had some fun bugs with

autopilot as well we're like in the jumbo jets and like the like passenger airlines yeah those the autopilot would only work if I was in a specific camera mode so in the cockpit not gonna work in the chase cam not gonna work but there's like a cinematic like drone camera you can have it would work if I was in that camera so very weird things um and only in some planes other planes would be fine um so yeah bugginess is definitely par for the course but i've seen some crazy ones here like i had someone

and one of my friends was having an issue where every time they loaded up a new flight that they were going to do their plane would start a couple feet off the ground and then when they hit like like start plane it would like fall and crash so they couldn't do anything amazing so there's definitely some bugs going on uh there so i started playing it this week as well just because i knew it was new it was on game pass so it didn't cost me anything to to start playing it uh and i was kind of surprised on xbox so i was playing on xbox series x the game itself is only

like 11 or 12 gigs and i was like that cannot be right but apparently most of it is being streamed which caused a lot of issues for me. And I have a fast internet connection. I have gigabit down, but it was still not loading stuff. It was very, very buggy and choppy. I did a little bit of the career mode and kind of got bored with that and then went into the free play

and found out you can fly an F-22 Raptor. And I was like, yes, please. So I flew that through New York and I was like, this is awesome, this is amazing. But yeah, so it was just fun flying around. I don't think I'm going to continue playing it unless like, I'm sure they will patch a lot of the bugs, but the whole bugginess plus the fact that a lot of the game is streaming and I don't know if it's because a lot of people were playing it in that first week. Yeah.

It was like bogging down the servers, but yeah. So they have changed how the game works a bit from the 2020 game so the 2020 game was notoriously huge to install i think my install on my pc is like 200 gigabytes of disk space it's taking up and like the updates would be like 80 gigs um it was absurd like if you didn't play for like a month you'd have like an hour of updates to do it was a lot and even then they were streaming a ton from the cloud because it's the literal entire earth that's and it's in very very like high detail in a lot of cases um so you could like download parts

of the map and but anyway it was streaming a lot but it is streaming more now and they were trying to get around that issue of people don't have that much space on their device but right now when everybody's playing it yeah the the streaming part is uh is biting them it seems so like what would it look like when the streaming was an issue like would it just get blocky resolution or It would get low resolution, a little blocky, and then you could tell the frame rate would drop a lot. And when you're flying supersonic in an F-22, that's not great.

Like, I crashed a few times because I was like, because all of a sudden, like, everything would kind of just get really low resolution and the latency would go through the roof. And you can't have high latency in that kind of situation. So, you know, Microsoft has been working to get around that. Call of Duty has always notoriously been extremely large to install. And now you can, like, when you go to install, like, the new Call of Duty game, you can pick and choose what you installed.

So, like, I tried the campaign for a little bit. I didn't finish. I just picked it up. I picked it up before Dragon Age came out, and then Dragon Age came out, and I'm like, I am done with you. I am moving on. But, like, it allowed you just to install the campaign and stuff like that. So I know Microsoft in general is working on trying to like be a little bit better about taking up space. But the whole jump to 4K was just exponential. And like, because that's the thing that takes up the most amount of space is all the assets, the 4K assets.

So it's not code itself. The text code is not what takes up all the space. It's all the 4K assets. So, yeah, there's not really a good like compromise because you don't want to compress that. Because then it's not 4K and it doesn't look good and all that stuff. Yeah. So, Nelian, you said the TikTok. I was curious what the TikToks were. But it's like people flying over their hometowns and like their current homes and stuff. Is that what you did as well? It's a bit of that. And also just people showing off like the cities and how they were rendered.

And it just looked very good overall. And OK, so guys, aren't you wondering how am I playing the game? This is another question. Yeah. So, I don't have a PC. I don't have a PC. So, I just, I had to figure this out. I subscribed to three months, just to see what it's like, to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, which gives me access to Xbox Cloud Gaming.

And that's how I've been playing the game. Ah, okay. Yeah. And it's fine. Although you can tell that Microsoft doesn't put the highest end machines on their cloud gaming service. they are pushing that they're pushing that the marketing of the cloud gaming thing quite a bit so they just recently announced every game pass game is now available for streaming and they are they're they're doing this whole campaign uh now where like basically they're showing off different devices like laptops phones tablets and they're like this is an xbox because you can stream games

and stuff like that now yeah and but it's not great like the resolution is not great i think They're still considered in beta. Yeah, it's in beta. I was going to say, my understanding is their Xbox Series X equivalents, like rack-mounted Xbox Series Xs or whatever, running it, which is great. But also that's a 2022 console, not a 2024 PC. And Flight Simulator is such a PC game. And I have a very high-end PC, and I can wreck my computer if I want to with Flight Sim.

And it's not like you're getting your own dedicated Xbox Series X in the cloud. Like, yes, they have a bunch of those probably chained together and multiple instances of Xbox running on the hardware. I highly doubt they are like, OK, for every person that's logging into Xbox Cloud, you get an Xbox Series X. Yeah. But so, yeah, here's my struggle. I wrote in the document, what am I supposed to do? Crying emoji.

because I really want to keep playing this game, but I don't have a PC. Xbox Cloud Gaming works good enough. And it's funny because you mentioned how sometimes it lags because the servers are behind. When you're playing it with Xbox Cloud Gaming, whenever the game starts to lag, you wonder, is it me? Is it my connection to Xbox cloud gaming that's lagging or is it the game itself?

And 99% of the time, it's the game itself that's lagging. And I can tell because I can just like do a speed test and do whatever to test my connection and it's perfectly fine. It's just the game itself that's lagging on Microsoft servers. And that's funny. So what are my servers to do? So I don't know, but I'm going to try something. I'm going to try subscribing to something else because I'm not getting a PC anytime soon.

I don't have the budget for that nor the space for that matter. So I'm going to subscribe to another service that's called Shadow. The website is shadow.tech That's a cloud gaming service or a cloud PC service I should say. So you get access to a PC in the cloud and you've got a full Windows machine. Like you can do whatever you want with it. And they're pretty highly specced.

You've got a GTX 1080 at the minimum. The base offer only has 6 gigs of RAM and that's not great. But the mid-offer, which is about €29, that's got 16 gigs of RAM. It's the main difference between the two. So I think they're having right now a Black Friday offer, which has a discounted price for three months.

Once more. So I'm going to take them on that and try this out. so the way it works that you subscribe you get access to a machine that you can stream and you can install whatever you want on that so i'm going to install flight simulator locally on that machine and and i see how it goes this looks pretty cool it is pretty cool i've so i should disclaim i've already used this service once. It was a while ago, like three years ago, I believe. And at the time,

I used it to play City Skylines and some other games. It worked really well. The company had a different honor back then. So since then, the price have gone way up. It used to be pretty cheap. Now, yeah, they are like what you would expect for this kind of service. I think 29 euros is like what you would expect out of this service for what the machines are specced.

And the performance of the streaming performance is pretty awesome. So, yeah, anyway, I will report back on this. I want to play Flight Simulator decently and not via Xbox Cloud Gaming because that's been horrendous. Yeah. Well, yeah. And I do kind of like piggybacking off of what Matt said. It is very buggy. Like I'm playing it locally on an Xbox Series X and you'd think Microsoft would optimize for that.

Yeah. Because that's probably, well, I don't know. What's a bigger gaming platform? Windows or Xbox? Windows is the biggest gaming platform in the world. Really? Yeah. Why do games always come to it late? So people talk about like, yeah, PC is kind of a niche, but like Steam alone has like 140 million active players every month, which is more than more Xboxes and PS5s than have ever

sold in the past four years. Like they literally can't have that many active users because they don't have that many units out there. Like, PC is huge. I will say I have been considering, and I think this might be a 2025. Wait, what year are we? We're in 2024? Whatever, next year project. That I have been considering building a gaming PC, but I would want to put it underneath my TV, and I would just use a controller. I'm not a keyboard and mouse gamer.

I can't do it. I used to be able to do it. I can't do it anymore. um yeah so chris i think you would love that i think i think you you could really get into i think it's going to scratch the itch your keyboard habit has yeah you can get you can i've shown you a picture of the rgbs on my desktop pc you don't have to do that you can be very classy you can get like a like a black like a like a dark black um and like wood accents like little mini art mini case you can get really high end specs and like for me i know you're an xbox guy and the great thing about like how microsoft's treating their games in the last couple years is everything is

on pc day one yeah and if you care about like having the best performance a modern pc destroys the consoles like it's ridiculous how much more powerful they are right now and if you're used to buying macs even an incredibly good pc is going to be cheaper than a macbook the baseline macbook pro yeah yeah it's ridiculous i kind of spec something out the other day and i went just ham on it and it was still a thousand dollars which is a lot of money it's double the price of my xbox but it's also wild will wildly outperform my xbox no problem oh and by the way it's modular so when comes time

to upgrade you know oh i need more ram i need more drive space i don't need to upgrade the whole thing I can just upgrade bits and pieces here and there until you get to like, oh, I need a new motherboard. In that case, you kind of have to... That's a whole other story. But yeah, I'm glad you're enjoying this, Neelian. I'm glad it's kind of like scratching an itch for you. Oh, yeah, it is. Like just spending hours just trying to understand the buttons on the dashboard of this Cessna 172.

Yeah, it's really good. and to be fair like every day I launch the game and some bugs are fixed okay that's good yes some bugs are disappearing day by day some of the worst ones are still here but yeah yeah I will keep you updated yeah and if you're listening to this and just want to send me a gaming PC just go ahead yeah this is why we need to get start reaching out to some of these companies

and be like, hey, send us review units. Send me a Cessna, Microsoft, please. Yeah, there you go. No better way to learn how to do it in the game if you know how to do it in real life. Exactly. Before we move on, I wanted to call out really quickly, there's a Noclip documentary about Flight Simulator, the 2020 game, but it's really good. I'll put a link in the show notes. And one of the things they talked about in there, one of the things the developers talked about, is they had some analytics on what flights people did. And by far, the most common thing people did was fly over their current home, their childhood home.

So it was very much a nostalgia thing. Yeah, when you said that, I was like, it's true. I do it all the time this week. I did Yosemite. I really wasn't interested in flying over Fresno. It's just flat. There's nothing to see. But I did fly through Yosemite, and that was pretty cool. It was really satisfying when I figured out some of the... main autopilot features and just landing with ILS and everything going smoothly. Yeah, that was extremely satisfying.

Well, kind of speaking along the lines of PCs and desktops and stuff like that, I took a huge step outside of my comfort zone this week. Okay. Ready? In the words of Taylor Swift, are you ready for it? Yeah. Yes. mac mini this right here is the new m4 pro mac mini uh apple uh no uh apple sent me this as a review unit uh i had a couple of ideas that i want to explore kind of at the end of this year beginning

of next year and stuff like that uh and one of those is i realized i haven't used the mac in a couple of years the last time i used the mac was um i guess it was actually i know i take it back it was last summer was the last time i used the mac because apple sent me the m2 max uh max studio as kind of a hey we're sorry we weren't able to get you a vision pro demo at wwdc kind of thing um and i used that for a little bit but i didn't use it that much because final cut pro for the ipad was

already out so it was like one of those things i used for specialty projects and stuff like that but for the most part i was sticking to my ipad but uh i got this guy and oh boy is this thing stupid fast and if you're watching the video it's really small it literally it fits in my hand it's the size of my hand and as we've established i do have big hands um but uh it fits in my hand right here it's really fast and it's really it's it's really neat uh i kind of re-pulled apart my whole desk setup so that way yes is it the power of the sun i knew where i was going with that it is the

power of the sun in the palm of my hand there you go matt doesn't get it that doesn't get it spider-man 2 spider-man 2 come on i just got the star wars references now we're moving on yeah nearly on and i speak the same language um but yeah so uh i redid my desk setup so that basically the CalDigit TS4 hub that I have is the brains of everything. So there's nothing plugged into the back of the studio display.

There's nothing plugged into individual computers. Everything gets plugged into that hub. So that way, basically, now when I sit down at my desk, I can either plug that hub into this Mac Mini, or I can plug it into my iPad and I can go back and forth. I did look for a Thunderbolt 4 KVM switch. and I couldn't find any that seemed to work reliably. Basically, there were a couple out on the market and everyone basically kind of said like, it might work sometimes, it might not work, good luck.

And I was just like, they were very expensive. You're looking at like 300 bucks for one of those. And I'm like, that's too much money to spend on something that's not gonna be guaranteed to work. So right now I'm just unplugging the Thunderbolt cable and plugging it into this guy. But since this is the M4 Pro Mac Mini, it does mean the Thunderbolt ports on the back of this, not the two on the front. The two on the front are regular Thunderbolt 4, but the three on the back, they are Thunderbolt 5. And I don't have anything right now that takes advantage of Thunderbolt 5, but I was doing some reading.

And OWC has an external drive, and I think they're going to send me a review unit when they get more in stock. But basically, if their marketing is to be believed, their Thunderbolt drive that plugs into the Thunderbolt 5 port should be just as fast or maybe a smidge slower, but pretty close to the speeds of the internal storage of the M4 Pro Mac Mini, which I was getting about 6,000 megabits per second.

I always get those confused. But overall, it's been really interesting to revisit the Mac. I loaded up a bunch of apps and stuff that I really love, like HyperKey and Keyboard Maestro and Raycast and all that stuff, and I've been having a lot of fun with those. I've edited exactly one project on this. I used Final Cut and edited my favorite tech of the year, that video. You might notice there were some Final Cut plugins and stuff that I used for that. I have mixed feelings about going back to the Mac version of Final Cut.

There's a lot more you can do with it than the iPad version. You can speed up your workflow, especially when you get into custom keyboard shortcuts. So one thing I did was in Final Cut for the Mac, there's a few options there that you can't do on the iPad. So they have this feature called Optical Flow, which basically allows you to slow your film clips down. The b-roll shots that I do, those slow-moving panning shots you see in my videos, those are filmed at 60 frames per second.

I edit at 24 frames per second. So you can slow those down to 40%, and you don't have any, like, choppiness. You don't lose any frames. It still plays back that 60 frames per second clip at 24 frames per second, which makes that clip longer, gives it that nice, smooth slow-mo shot. But if you want something even smoother, go to 120 frames per second. Now, while my camera can technically shoot 120 frames per second, it shoots it at not as a high quality 4K.

It's kind of a lower quality, lower bit rate, essentially a 4K mode. So what I do on the Mac version of Final Cut is I can slow it down to 20% or even 10%. And you can go in and turn on this feature called optical flow. And since I've been back on the Mac, there's a new version that uses machine learning. And what this will do is it will actually generate frames to put inside this clip so you can slow it down even further than what you filmed it. So if I filmed it at 60 frames per second, I could slow it down to 10%, which would be 100 and I can't do that math.

It's more than 120 frames per second. But turn on this optical flow and it's just smooth. And then you can take it a step further and turn on stabilization. So what I did is I created keyboard shortcuts for turning on the optical flow, slowing it down to either 40, 25, or 10%. And then, well, I created keyboard shortcuts for those. And then what I did is I went into Keyboard Maestro and I set up another kind of a global keyboard shortcut that would trigger both of those keyboard shortcuts at the same time.

Because if I'm turning on one, I want to turn on the other. Especially if I'm going to like 20 or 10% percent. But what I couldn't find, and this is where it kind of got fun, and I'm like, oh man, I really wish I could do something like this on the iPad. Is I wanted to have it automatically turn on stabilization as well. So I wanted it to stabilize the clips afterwards. But there is no way to assign a keyboard shortcut to stabilization in Final Cut. So what I did, because this is a Mac Mini, it's not a laptop, it's not being unplugged or plugged in different monitors or things being blown around.

And I'm using Final Cut and I'm using Final Cut. I'm making it as big as the screen, not using it in the technical full screen mode, but I'm blowing it up as big as I can. So basically full 16 by 9, but you still see the dock and you still see the menu bar. So that stabilization button is always in the same place. So what I did is I used keyboard maestro and had it record where I clicked. So now what happens is if I hit F2 or F3, F2 will slow it down to 20%. F3 will slow it down to 10%.

It will automatically apply the optical flow machine learning setting and turn on stabilization for me. So like I have these three things basically trigger with one keyboard press. And I'm just like, oh, I want this on the iPad so badly. It was so convenient. Now, the downside of that is those features require background rendering, which means it renders out those clips and applies an effect, and it creates essentially a new clip for it that takes up a ton of hard drive space.

At the end of the day, my favorite tech of the year video, that project was 500 gigs. Whoa. Which was a lot, especially considering on the iPad, a typical Final Cut project for me is anywhere from 60 to 100. Like, we're talking like my iPadOS walkthroughs that are like 40 minutes long. Those are 100 to 120 gigs. So, yeah. I was like, okay, this is not tenable because I wouldn't be able to work on multiple projects at once

because the version that they sent me has 48 gigs of RAM but only 1 terabyte of storage. So, I'm hoping I get that OWC drive either as a review unit. If not, I'm going to buy one, and I'm going to try using that as the project drive, and then the internal stuff will just be for other things. But overall, I've really been enjoying the ability to do global-wide keyboard shortcuts. I've been playing with HyperKey a lot, and HyperKey is such a fun app. If you don't know what it is, it basically takes your caps lock key, which is a key nobody needs because it's a caps lock key.

What are you going to do with it? And it turns it into a basically a modifier, like a single modifier key that does command, option, control, and shift all in one button press. So you can do like, so like what I used to do back in the day was I would do caps lock R, which would be technically hyperkey R. And it would bring up the new task or new reminder window for things, the global window that you can use anywhere in the Mac. So there's a lot of cool stuff you could do with that that I've just been revisiting.

And but my whole point of this is I'm going to do some videos later on about just kind of like the experience of using the Mac Mini and stuff alongside the iPad. But I wanted to hear from you to the Mac experts. What are some applications that I should be using or specifically also our audience? What should they be using? Like what Mac apps are out there? Like what are the hot Mac apps that people should be trying out? Oh, you've come to the right place. I know I have. Just real quick on that keyboard maestro shortcut you had to click that button.

That's always in the same space. There's also in keyboard maestro the ability to click on a found image. So if you take a screenshot of that button, you can have keyboard maestro find that and click it. And then you can move the window wherever you want. It'll be able to click it as long as it's on screen. That's even better. Okay. Yes. I'm going to go back and redo those automations because those automations were great because it was nice. I was editing in Final Cut, but I was getting really annoyed of having to click the same buttons over and over again. So that's why I made these automations. And I was just like, okay, come on,

let's, there's got to be a way to combine these. And then keyboard maestro. Always keyboard maestro. Yeah. Try better touch tool. Okay. I think I had that at one point. I know I definitely used to use better snap tool um but then towards the end of i think it was when i was using the m1 max macbook pro i switched to lasso because i liked uh lasso you could do not just um keyboard shortcuts but it also had a window where you could basically draw the multitasking window and stuff like that

but um better touch tool i know was kind of came from like hey let's make the touch bar actually useful. What do you do with it now, Neilion? Oh, so many things. Give me like the top two or three. Your top two or three favorites. Mostly I remap keys on the Magic Keyboard. For example, the Spotlight Key on the Magic Keyboard, which is where the F4 key is.

You can't by default remap it to anything else, but I use and I want it to become a raycast key. So using better touch tool, you can do that. Same with the globe key. This is my emoji key and it uses the, I've remapped it to use raycast's emoji picker, which is vastly superior to the native emoji picker in macOS. What do I do? I have a keyboard shortcut, which is globe plus arrow keys to move windows from between spaces, between different spaces.

You can do that using click and drag in Mission Control, but that's just annoying. So I just press the globe key and the left key, for example, the left arrow key, while the window is focused. And this immediately moves this window to the space to the left. That's really useful. I have a using better touch tool and a script. I have it so I can just do globe S to send the window to the iPad inside car mode.

Oh, okay. That's cool. Yeah, that's really cool. I no longer have the iPad on my desk permanently, but when I do, it's nice. Yeah, back to the Mac. otherwise i don't know there's a bunch of other things that i can't think about right now but if maybe i should just open it if you want the list no i i i know you do a bunch you do you write about it a lot over on mac stories and stuff like that but i was just kind of giving like you know the top highlights and stuff like that yeah there you go i um i've been enjoying this mac but it also makes

me appreciate the ipad as well and i don't kind of you know i don't want to i'm not running away from the iPad, especially because like, I found like, okay, I had the heck of a time getting my favorite tech of the year video to export, because I was doing all those like optical flow, slow down stabilization tricks, it really wants to do all the background rendering stuff before you can export the video. And I was just like, it caused so much extra time. And I'm like, okay,

on the iPad, yes, I don't have these features, but I can just export, I can just get things fast yeah and that's i think that's actually for those specific features those those require because they have to analyze the clip and add those frames with everything else the rendering is totally optional yeah and but and for me like those are the things those are the features i miss the most from the mac version of final cut and the ability to paint like copy and paste effects between clips in the timeline uh oh and and user created presets oh my gosh being able just to create user like what

i did is i created a bunch of preset color grades i took my color grades made in preset and then like i have a bunch of like moving like like if i have like a static tripod shot or something like that i created some presets that basically just like punch into 110 and like will pan left like left corner to send her right right dot bottom corner to center or left to left upper corner to right bottom corner something like that and like it'll just add movement to shots that are just you know locked off tripod shots and i was just like oh i wish these were here on the ipad it i i definitely am going to make a video probably in the new year about like final cut for the ipad and what it needs

and like hey this is my workflow this is where i get stuff done but it is not up to par and i i'm not ever expecting it to be 100 on par with the the mac version but simple stuff like being able to your own presets being able to copy effects between uh clips in the timeline that that kind of seems like low table stakes i'm you know i know optical flow and stabilization they can be uh they can be storage intensive and but you know what the ipad ships with the same amount of storage as the mac ships true so yeah i mean i i have a two terabyte ipad right here that actually has more

storage than this Mac. So, Matt, did you have any Mac app recommendations for people? Well, I mean, obviously, Supercharge should be on everybody's Mac. You know, I haven't installed that one. I need to. I was like, oh, what was that one, Matt and Neilian were talking about? And then I got sidetracked and forgot to talk about it. I have another pick. Pixelmata Pro. Oh, yeah. I use that all the time. It's great. Yeah. You've been doing our new style of thumbnails. If you haven't seen our new thumbnails on YouTube, go check them out.

Neelian's doing a great job with them. Matt, what are the top two or three things you do with Supercharge? Cut and paste in the Finder is a big one. Now that I have that, I'm using it all the time. And I really like the auto-install apps. I'm always installing apps, I mean, I guess because of what I do. I'm always trying out new things. So when I mount a DMG on my desktop, it automatically downloads or installs the app, opens it, and trashes the DMG for me, which is just a nice quality of life thing.

So I like that quite a bit. Nice. I would also recommend Accents is maybe the tiniest niche little app. But in macOS, you can change the accent color of the UI. So it can match whatever the app wants it to be, or you can set it to red, green, purple, blue, all those colors. But the iMacs have special colors that only they get. So if you buy a yellow iMac, there's a special yellow that matches your Mac.

Accents lets any Mac use those accent colors. And they just updated it recently to include the 2024 variants, which are slightly different than the 2020 variants, or 2021 variants, which is crazy. But yeah, Accents, totally free, little app. And I can't not recommend CleanShot if you take a lot of screenshots or do screen recordings. There is nothing better. Full disclosure, I do work with them on their release notes videos, but they did not pay to get on this podcast. I just really love the app. Oh, wait, I have another one.

I installed it yesterday, so it's a fresh one. It's called Clack. Clack? No. And I want to mention it because Chris is going to love this. And that as well, I guess. So you know how I don't have a mechanical keyboard. I only have a magic keyboard. And every time I try to switch to a different keyboard, I go back to the magic keyboard. But what if you could still have the clacks? Exactly.

Yeah, you get it. So what Clack does is it adds clackety sounds when you type on your keyboard through your headphones and you can pick the best sounding switches in the app. So I don't remember which ones I've selected. Flopples, Cardboard, I guess. There's Cherry MX and a bunch of... Who cares? Just pick the best sounding one. And it's great. It's very satisfying.

And I don't, Jack, forever now, I got rid of the main reason people buy mechanical keyboards just by buying this $5 app on the Mac App Store. And you do the same. It's called Clack. K-L-A-L-C-K. As the editor, I have the full ability to cut this bit out. Oh, my gosh. It's great. Permission to go on a tangent.

No. Okay, so you just get to it anyways. And you can't get clack on an iPad. Yeah, see, that's why the iPad is superior. Okay, so this showed up the other day. This is a mechanical keyboard that was sent to me as a review unit. It's the N65 Panda. And this is really interesting. It has ceramic keycaps. This is new for me. I've never had a ceramic keycap.

Check this out. Just listen to how this sounds. I'm going to point my mic down. Hey, this is just like the Clack app. I am kind of obsessed with the way this sounds. And the ceramic feel, it feels very different. It's very shiny. But yeah, anyways. Get a real mechanical keyboard, not this fake.

I don't have to. You didn't get it. Okay, I think I should start over. No, no. We're going to move back on. So getting back to the Mac Mini, one thing that I actually found really interesting, so the M4 Pro chip has different power modes you can put the chip in. So by default, it's in automatic mode, but there is a low power mode and a high power mode as well. And if you leave it in automatic, it'll just switch back and forth. But I put this thing in high power mode, kind of expecting, like, the fans to spin up while I was doing all that Final Cut editing and, you know, the clips were being analyzed and stuff like that.

And I never heard the fans, which was really, really impressive for this guy. I kind of wasn't, like, I wasn't doing the thing where I was specifically listening for him. I was just using the Mac, and I never heard fans spin up or anything like that, which was nice. Yeah, I'm really impressed with this. I have that Ugmonk Gather monitor stand on my desk, and this fits right in the shelf for it, which is kind of nice. But I actually don't put it in the shelf because I want to be able to unplug the cable that goes to the CalDigit dock from here and plug it in my iPad and vice versa.

So it kind of just sits on the side. But, yeah, I'm really loving this Mac Mini. And when I go to send this back, I think I might trade in the M2 Mac Mini I use for recording this podcast. And I might get one of these. And just basically, because like right now, say my iPad was to die. I don't have another computer. Like I don't have a backup computer to work on projects. I don't have a backup computer to like, you know, deal with work stuff if something were to happen to my iPad.

And I'm kind of thinking like, you know, the Mac is in a really interesting spot right now. I don't want to make it my main computer. I don't even want to, I don't even really want to work from it like every day. But it might just be nice to have one around to be like, hey, this interesting app is coming out that I'd really like to cover. Or, you know, like Sidecar or something like that. When like those kind of features that work with the iPad. having something like this around so I can cover that stuff, I think might be kind of interesting.

You're never going to get me to say don't buy a Mac. I know, I know, I know. I just really love it. This whole process made me appreciate the iPad even more just because of the flexibility of the iPad of like, it's a tablet, it's a laptop, it's a notebook with the Apple Pencil, oh, it's also a desktop. And it's just like, yeah, that flexibility is really nice for when I need to like work in different places and stuff like that. Yeah, that's the one thing as well for me is Mac laptops are awesome.

They have the apps I want, but I do miss the physical flexibility of the iPad of being able to morph into whatever I need on the go. And if I was to get a Mac laptop, I would get a MacBook Pro because video editing and stuff like that. And then now I'm dealing with fans and stuff like that, so it's not as easy to work in bed or something like that. Like, I just love the iPad for what it is. That being said, I wouldn't mind if the iPad got some more battery life because those Mac laptops and their battery life right now, oh boy, I'm jealous of those.

They're very good. Do you guys have any questions on the Mac Mini? I mean, look at that thing. If you're not watching the video, you're missing out. It literally is the size of my hand. I mean, my hand's a little bit bigger, but it's really nice. Have you tried throwing it through a window? I have not. Okay. I really don't want to break a window or this and make Apple mad and not get review units anymore because getting review units is really nice.

My bank account appreciates it. You could film it and slow it down, slow the footage down. It would be really cool. Oh, you could get a really cool, yeah. But if this broke, I wouldn't be able to slow the footage down to like 10% because I don't have enough that can do it. One thing I'll say, them going to all USB-C, really nice. The Ethernet port on this one is the 10 gigabit Ethernet port. I'm so glad they didn't go away from that because what I can do with this is set up a local connection

between my NAS and this, so I can plug the 10 gigabit Ethernet port from my NAS right into this, set up static IP addresses for that, and then still be able to use the 2.5 gigabit per second connection on the CalDigit TS4 over Thunderbolt. So I'm still getting a fast internet connection, but the 10 gigabit port is literally just to go between this guy and the NAS, and it works really fast. It's really nice, especially since my NAS has an NVMe cache, so it's not actually writing stuff to the spinning drives.

It's writing it to that cache, and then it gets copied over to that afterwards. and then it also has an HDMI port as well if you have an HDMI monitor but I'm just using the Thunderbolt ports nice I continue to look for a reason to buy this computer even though I don't have any I want it so badly I mean video editing machine but I have one of those do you though? ooh a good question do I? do you? man I'm trying to help you out here I know I'll resist for as long as I can but you have not made it easier it sounds very cool honestly if i was to buy a mac today this

would be the mac that i would buy uh hands down it handled like it's fast enough to handle all the video stuff that i do uh you know the background rendered stuff did take a little bit of time i you know went away and did some chores while i was doing that uh if i was all in on the mac i would probably get like the the super high-end mac studio so i didn't have to wait for anything but I'm not all in on the Mac, so that wouldn't make sense for me. Alright, very cool.

Are you ready for the challenge? Check this out. Just listen to how this sounds. I'm going to point my mic down. Let's get to the challenge. I'm really excited. Matt, I believe it was your challenge, right? It was my challenge. Yes. So the challenge this week was to find an open source app that you love. And the only clarification I think I had on this was you should be able to download the source code.

So I feel like there's occasionally apps that are like, we're open source. And it's like, well, where is the code? Can I get it? And so ideally, we should be able to get this on GitHub or something like that. I guess I'll go first. And I thought about this quite a bit, actually. I was pondering it and then the answer just became so obvious to me. And my answer or the thing I'm bringing is Ghost, which is a blogging platform, which I've been using since 2019, I think I've been back on it.

I used it like way back when they were a Kickstarter and just got going. And then I moved away because I didn't have enough stuff. Spent some years on WordPress, spent some years on Squarespace, I think even. and then moved back in 2019. And I've been with them for five years and I'm very happy with it. And I am running it on my own server and I'm updating it, maintaining it myself. And it's just a wonderful blogging platform. So if you need like a full CRM or like PKM, I don't know what the, there's all sorts of these abbreviations.

If you need like a WordPress, like whole thing, this doesn't do that. This is for people who are writing blogs and who maybe have a newsletter that as well. And I happen to be both of those things. So it's fantastic. It's completely free. I get all the features right away. The only hard thing for me is not even the hard thing. The only friction-y thing is that I have to SSH into the server every couple weeks and install an update, which I set up aliases to just be like update.

And it updates the ghost for me. So super, super simple and super reliable. And in a world where Substack has annual drama of some sort and WordPress has drama now all of a sudden, it's nice to be on a platform that has avoided controversy so far, I feel like, and is going into ActivityPub. And as soon as that's available, I'm going to make sure that my BirchTree blog is federated and you can follow it on the Fediverse if you want. But yeah, I think Ghost is amazing and a wonderful piece of open source software.

So this begs the question, what is an app? Oh, is this an app? Yes. So editor Chris, I'm hoping you can go back and roll back the footage. I believe I said a web app as well, but I don't know. You did say, I do remember from editing it last week, you did say you're including web apps and web services as well. Okay. Technically, that should be in the title of the challenge.

What is this? Yeah, technically, maybe it should have been find some open source software you love. Listen, I am such an enthusiast for open standards, including the web as a platform, and I just assumed that that app would encompass web apps. Yeah, so my pick is the web, actually. Mine is HTTP. i love it so matt i've kind of eyed ghost in the past i use a service called blot.im for my website and it's literally just a bunch of text files in a git repo and like you pay them i think it's like

five bucks a month or 50 bucks a year or something like that and it's they handle all the hosting all the updates they make themes you can customize the themes if you want uh you can have it either hosted via git or you can put it in like your own dropbox folder and it syncs to their service and stuff like that it's actually really cool uh but as far as ghost goes can you kind of pay them to handle all the hosting and all the updates if you wanted or is it you're completely on your own

yeah so with ghost they have um if you go to ghost.org i believe um you can sign up for ghost pro which is their self-hosted or their hosted managed solution it's more expensive than five bucks a month i think it's like 20 bucks a month so it will be significantly more expensive but in that case it is kind of just like a we manage everything for you you never have to worry about ubuntu updates or ghost updates or anything um so they do have that option it's more expensive although honestly i i host mine through digital ocean i think i'm on the 20 a month plan there so i don't know if i'm

saving any money but i like having full control i i totally get having full control especially like if it's your main like like kind of like your main home base kind of thing i for me my website is a place of like hey this is where all my work is and all the links to all the stuff you can go find for all the stuff i do and stuff like that like i don't consider my website anymore to be kind of my home base on the internet. My home base is definitely my YouTube channel. But it is nice to have, especially like one of the things that like, I really like about blot.im is it's basically a CDN.

So like anytime we've done, we put images in the show notes, my images are hosted on my website through that CDN. So I could just get links to them. And I have short and nice thing, it's all get so i have shortcuts that use working copy to get links to images put images on my website without like making a blog post or creating blog posts for the website or basically taking videos from my channel or this podcast and automatically adding it to the website and stuff like that so it is kind

of cool like i've completely automated it with a bunch of shortcuts yeah that is nice and a difference from um from blot is that it's not a text-based system so it's not like a flat file um jackal i think is like this too statemic is um there's a few that are like that uh it's not that so there's a database you kind of have to use their ui or their api to uh post things and edit things so no git management of your website if that's part of the appeal yeah i definitely like the git side

of things where i can just i i don't even have to worry about it i i just run a shortcut and working copy takes care of everything automatically uh and i formats everything uploads it does all the commit push pull whatever i still don't know what all of those do and like it like i even use that stuff for my day job but it was to the point where i was like okay i'm just gonna add all of these actions in here and they will be they'll do the right thing you know they'll pull and push and commit and all that stuff i'm just not gonna worry about it uh yeah but my most embarrassing

computer thing is i i for my website quick reviews which is a very basic little web app i do have version control and i use github for that but i do everything through the github desktop app i don't use the terminal at all for it which is embarrassing yeah i what chris just said i enjoy the git side of things yeah no one's ever said that that's impossible i i don't well i like it because it's it gets out of my way i'm not having to log into some web web interface or something like that to create a blog post or something like that i i from obsidian i can hit

share and run the shortcut and it just takes care of everything all right sweet so we have the winner let's see um i think chris you're next in the doc uh what what did you bring he did not pick an app okay it's definitely not an app he literally in his title it does say an app but whatever uh so i had a tough time with this one i kind of talked about it a little bit at the end of last week where i was like i can't think of any like open source ipad apps that i love

And I was like, I really want something I was passionate about. And I was like, okay, I can't find any iPad apps. So I was like, let's just search around for some Mac apps. Maybe we'll just kind of like pull from the archives. And I started searching around for open source Mac apps and literally was remembered about the best one ever. XBMC. For those that don't know, that stands for Xbox Media Center. It has been since rebranded like a decade ago or so.

It was rebranded to be Kodi, which I hate that branding. But I get why they did it because it's now everywhere. And this is what Plex is based off of. This is completely open source. You can go to the GitHub page. You can download it. It's still being maintained. I just looked like there was something that was updated like five days ago. So I was obsessed with XBMC. Now, I'm not running it anymore. And that may be where you get me. But it didn't say the challenge isn't find an open source app that you love and you're currently using.

It's just find an open source app that you love. And I do love this. And I'll get into why I stopped using it in a bit. But basically, XPMC is a place where you hosted all of your media. You could host movies you've ripped, TV shows. You could put music. You could put photos. I think you could even put podcasts in there, maybe. I don't remember. But I just used it for movies and TV shows. So I used to rip all my physical media and I had it. Well, it used to be on a Windows PC.

And then my very first Mac mini, I bought that to be a dedicated Kodi machine. I think it was Kodi at the time. I'm just going to keep calling it XBMC because I like that name a lot better. And that was like the heyday of me using it. And basically what XBMC does is it just looks at a folder directory and it looks at all like, hey, you have a folder called movies, you have a folder called TV shows, and TV shows you can break up the TV shows into seasons. And you did have to be a little, you had to name them properly.

If you had something like that wasn't named right, or the TV episodes were off or something like that, it could throw the whole system off. So you had to be really good about managing it. And you would throw all this stuff in here, it would pull all the metadata for the movie or TV shows, It would pull posters and artwork and actors, director's names, length, year it came out, ratings, all that stuff. It would pull all that stuff, and you could just go through and watch it. But the power of it was people would write plug-ins for it.

So, like, one of my favorite plug-ins for it was—I don't remember what this was called because this was years ago. Who knows if it's even still maintained. But what it would do is it would take your XBMC library and it would essentially make linear TV channels out of it. So you could flip through the channels essentially and pick something to watch. But you could build channels yourself. So you could build categories of channels. So if you wanted a channel that was just all the Star Wars TV shows and movies, you could have that. Or like I had a channel that I called my turnoff of the brain channel where it was like all the dumb comedy shows that I love that you don't require you to think.

But, you know, you could just have them on in the background and things like that. And then you could have like greatest hits movie channel or drama shows or something like that. But like the plugins was where this thing got really powerful. And I absolutely love this. Now, I stopped using it a few years ago because I, this was before I had a NAS, and I didn't do a great job at making sure I had backups of all my media and stuff like that. It was just sitting on external hard drives, and one of those hard drives broke, and I lost, like, half my library, and it was just one of those moments of, like, I can't go through this again.

I can't spin, because it took a very, very long time to rip all that media, because spinning disks, they're slow. And I do mean discs, like physical DVDs and Blu-rays and stuff like that. So it was one of those things, like it died, and I was just like, I can't go through it. But I have been flirting with the idea of probably spinning up a Plex server now that I have a NAS again, and maybe doing something like that, but I just, I haven't brought myself to do it yet. It's so much work.

But this is a service, an open source app that I absolutely love. I would support them. Every time they put out like t-shirts or something like that, I would buy a new t-shirt. Absolutely just loved, loved doing this. But it was just getting to the point where I was spending more time maintaining it than I was actually watching stuff on it. And so I just kind of gave up to it, gave up on it. And it was just like, you know, I'll just buy movies through iTunes or rent movies through iTunes, which as time is going on is not great, because, you know, more and more stuff gets pulled or licensing changes.

or services get shut down and stuff like that. So physical media is nice to have, but if you're going to do this, think out your setup beforehand, do something with a NAS or where you have redundant drives or something like that, because, yeah, that sucked to lose half the library. Have either of you ever used Plex or XBMC or anything like this? I use Plex, yeah. Yeah, I use Plex as well. I recently watched the entire Batman animated series on Plex. It works great for me.

I'm trying to figure out, is there any benefit to me moving to Kodi? I don't think so. I think Plex is the, it's probably, Kodi, okay, Kodi is Linux, Plex is Mac OS. Does that make sense? Oh, okay. That gives me my answer. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. If you're just going to do this. So when I was really big into this, Plex wasn't even really a thing.

I think it was just starting off. And it was one of those things like all the XBMC people looked down upon it because it was like, oh, you're like kind of a ripoff of our thing. But as time has gone on, I think Plex is a little better at being smoother and easier to use as opposed to something like XBMC. Gotcha. I was definitely, back in the day, 20 years ago, I was definitely jealous of the XBMC people. I never really understood it, and I don't think I had the hardware to use it, really, but it sounded so cool.

Well, it started off as a hack for the original Xbox. That's why it's Xbox Media Center. But then it moved on to Windows and Linux and macOS and all that stuff. But yeah, it's definitely, it was a lot of work to maintain. Nice. I like this one. All right. Well, Niléane, what do you have for us? Okay. So that was nice. But I have a pick for the people. And what do the people need?

The people need to have space in their max menu bar. So my pick is Ice. If you're a bartender, that's an app that allows you to manage your menu bar icons, move them around, set rules, hide them either permanently or just for some time, just behind a click on the menu bar so you can reveal them when you need them. So yeah, that's Bartender.

But Bartender isn't cheap. And this year there was this whole drama, like it changed owners and let's not go over that. But Ice is just that. Yeah, so Ice is an alternative to Bartender. It has basically all the same basic functionality. Move your icons around in your menu bar, hide some, reveal some. You can have a bunch of customization options. You can customize how your menu bar looks, change the color, change the shape.

You can completely make it invisible. You can turn the background of the menu bar invisible. It's nice. just play with it it's got a bunch of options and yeah it's contrary to Bartender it's completely free it's open source it's in active development which is not something you can really say about Bartender these days because since the new owner took over the updates have been slow yeah it's not moving around

moving much Bartender. But yeah, Ice is really in active development and it's nice and it works. Like, it's not buggy as heck. Which, once again, is something I could say about Bartender these days. It's very buggy, but Ice is not super buggy. It's really quite stable, actually. And yeah, so the people need this. So I've brought this to the people. Yeah, this is good. I didn't really notice it, but I do use Bartender on my Mac, and I hadn't really thought about it, but you're right.

Updates have basically not happened since new ownership took over, and they had pretty substantial updates. The good news is this app does look very inspired by, we'll say, Bartender. I'm looking at their settings page for the menu bar layout, and that is very similar to Bartender. One big bartender feature that it doesn't have yet is setting up rules so that you can pick a menu bar icon and tell it,

reveal that icon only when it changes state, for example. For example, only reveal the battery icon when my Mac is not charging or something like that, or when it's below a certain percentage. But it's coming to ICE. It's on their roadmap. And since ICE is being updated regularly, I'm confident it will come, hopefully. But yeah, it's on their roadmap on the GitHub repo. You can have a look. They have a bunch of features planned, most of which are just features that you have in Bartender 5.

Nice. This is cool. I mean, it's no XPMC, but it's not sure. It's a second place. I'm sure people will vote for something that's like 30 years old Nobody has ever heard of it. I think I'll get the nostalgia vote. I think out of the three of us, I'll get the nostalgia vote. I have no idea which one's going to get the vote this time. I don't either. Honestly, I really don't. Normally, I have an idea of how it's going to go, and I'm usually pretty right, but this time, not sure. But it's going to be a good one. Mastodon users, remember which one has the Fediverse.

We'll have the Fediverse. Ice works with the Fediverse, maybe. Explain. Explain. Without XBMC, there is no Plex. Just keep that in mind. Is that a Fediverse? XBMC. Sure. Sure. I'll just say yes. Yeah, why not? What even is a Fediverse? It's a good question. I'm excited about this one. I genuinely have no idea who's going to win, but I think we should do democracy for this one.

Yeah, let's do it. Yeah, I like it. Let's do it. All right. So it is my challenge for you all this next week. So I, Numeon made a comment about how she doesn't have her iPad on her desk anymore. And I'm like, perfect. No. I don't even know where it is right now. Oh, perfect. I want you guys to do something new with your iPad this week. It could be work-related. It could be personal. It could be productivity, a creative project. I don't care. do something new whether it involves a new app a new process trying something new new shortcut very open-ended challenge here i just want you to do something new with your ipad and honestly when

i was coming up with this challenge i was i was really excited what you two would do with it but i have no idea what i'm going to do with it because i do everything off my ipad so i'm like i guess i'm gonna start something new this week um but yeah this will be fun i do something with your iPad. I know what I'm going to do with mine already. Okay. Yours could be just find my iPad. Yeah. I don't know if you'd win with that, though. I have an idea of what to do. Okay, cool. All right, cool. I'm glad you guys have ideas. All right, so that just about does it for this episode,

but as always, we're going to wrap up with our end of the show question, and I kind of wanted to start a series of these based around, like, categories of apps you use. So the very first one is, what app are you using as your read it later app where are you storing all your articles and links and all that stuff okay i'm not using anything right now that doesn't surprise me at all three weeks ago three weeks ago my answer was safari's reading list uh but that's like awful so now when i'm

doing uh remember hyperduck we talked about this last week oh yeah oh yeah yeah yeah so i use hyperduck to send links to my Mac. So when I stumble about something, that's all the time on my iPhone, most of the time. So I just send it to my Mac. And when I wake up my Mac, all of the links are there in Safari. And I just go through the open tabs and close them one by one when I'm done with them. And I just do this. I thought for a second, you're going to be like, well, I just write the https colon forward slash forward slash website link

on a post-it note. I just remember links. Yeah, there you go. Matt, what do you do? So I've been through the ringer on it. I've used everything. I've used Pocket. I've used Instapaper. I've used Omnivore, rest in peace. I've used Safari Reading List. I've used Things. I've used OmniFocus as my read-later list. Because what are they, if not a list of things to do? I've done the same thing. Yeah. Readwise Reader. It's expensive, but it is so good and works perfectly with what I need.

Because usually my workflow is I read something, I highlight what's interesting to me, and those highlights turn into blog posts, and I have a shortcuts automation that automatically turns those into link posts and Ulysses, which posts to my ghost blog. So callback. Have you ever tried to use Rewise Reader on the iPad? I have. I usually read on my Mac or my iPhone, actually. the ipad it's not a great it's if you love native apps it's not gonna do that for you but it works perfectly with my workflow it has keyboard shortcuts very easy very smooth on the

on the on the web and yeah but the ipad app is is bad it's not i i keep coming back to it because everyone talks about it i'm like okay let's give this thing a shot you know it's been a couple months since maybe they've updated their iPad app. It's so buggy. So buggy. I use raindrop.io, which is not a native app, but actually works extremely well on the iPad. What I like about raindrop.io is it's not heavily focused on being a read it later app where, like, yes,

you can have a reading view, but you can also set it up so when you just tap on something, it opens up in your default web browser because I don't just use this for, like, articles I want to read later. Yes, I put some of that stuff in there. But I also put YouTube links, apps I want to cover, gear I want to cover. Basically, if it's a link I want to save, this is where I put it. So I really like it. It does a really good job. There is a free and a Premiere plan. I've honestly been using the free one. I don't know what's in the Premiere one. The free one is very generous, yeah.

The free one is almost too generous because I cannot figure out a reason to pay for it. And I'm somebody that I have no problem paying for apps because I cover them. It's what I do. It's a tax write-off. I can't figure out why I'd want to pay for raindrop.io. So it almost makes me wonder, or it makes me a little worried that they were a little too generous with it. They've been around forever, though, so they're making it work. Yeah, if they're making it work, they're making it work.

I'll take it. But, yeah. But, like, Matt, I've done the thing where I've used my Task Manager as my Read It Later app. I've used my note-taking app, whether it was Obsidian or Notes or Drafts or whatever as a read-it-later app. I've used them all as read-it-later apps. But I really like Raindrop.io. Yeah, and the Raindrop.io premium is $28 a year. Oh, that's not bad. Maybe I should just pay for it. It's like $2 a month. It's crazy. Yeah, for as much as I use it, maybe I should just pay for it. I'll sign up after the show because as much as I use it, I should give them some money.

Well, that just about does it for the show. Thank you all so much for listening. A huge thank you to Mac Stories for having us. We are a Mac Stories podcast after all. Do either of you have something you want to promote this week? You should check out my video about my favorite tech from 2024, which I realized afterwards I am just a stupid YouTuber. There are no affiliate links at all in my... Oh, my gosh, man. What are you doing? I just, I didn't even think about it. I was just like, oh, I should just make a list of the things that I like. And I did that. And I didn't even consider maybe I should try to recommend things that would make me money.

Let me send you my affiliate links. Yeah, I know. Let me fix this for you. I'll use my links. I also just put out a favorite tech of 2024 video. Actually, I think, Matt, you and I put them out on the same day. I think we did, yeah. I think we did put them out on the same day. That was no collusion. That's what you do as a YouTuber. You put it out the day before Thanksgiving. I also do that. I will have a slew of other videos coming out just right after this episode of the podcast comes out.

So check that out. But I wanted to say a huge congratulations to Mr. Matt Birchler because he passed 30,000 subscribers on YouTube. That's a big deal, dude. It is a big deal. I think I hit 20,000 earlier this year. So, yeah. Wow. That's a big deal. This is the kind of time, like, when I think back to my channel, like, it starts to snowball from here. Like, you're going to grow really fast now. So, yeah. Well, thank you. Yeah. We'll talk off air about the stuff you need to have in place.

Because, yeah. Niléane, you got anything you want to promote? I'm not sure yet what I'm going to publish. But sure. I'm going to go on my master's on and figure it out. Yeah. I'm going to fly planes and just rest from my crazy week. Nice. nice alright well thank you all so much for listening goodbye Bye.