Maybe I'm Scrobbling and Don't Even Know It

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 this week one of us is incredibly over-caffeinated. Spoilers, it's me. As always, I am joined by Matt Birchler. Matt, how are you doing? I'm doing okay, but I just realized I don't have my coffee with me, so I'm going to be under-caffeinated this episode. Maybe we'll balance each other out. Yeah, I hope so. Probably not. And we're also joined by Niléane.

Niléane, how are you doing? I'm doing better now that summertime is here. We have switched time zones, finally. Yeah, it was a weird couple of weeks where we moved hours. Matt and I moved hours, but you didn't. And we didn't realize it and scheduling things. It was time zones, man. Time zones. Anyways. Yeah, and suddenly it's day outside. very late, which is very weird. Yeah, it was getting pretty tough there for a little bit.

You were like, we'd start the podcast in the day, and then by the end it was pitch black. You were just sitting in darkness. Yeah, but now it's almost middle of the afternoon or something. Well, we have a few things in the tiny topic section. I'm not sure who put this first thing in here, but I will let you take it away. Oh, yeah, listener replies. Last week, we said we were looking for some listener replies to our challenges or our end-of-show questions.

And we got a really good one from a listener named Aelin. I think I'm pronouncing that right. And he's got a whole set of keyboard shortcuts that he's using to automate a ton of things, a ton of words. And I think we'll link to his post in the show notes. But what I thought was really fun about his solution is we often talk about a super key on your Mac, like where you set caps lock to be like command, option, control, shift.

He has a meh key, which is a slightly less super version of that. That basically, what is it? I'm looking at the post now. It's basically like all but one of those. And so he has a whole separate section. So it's shift, option, control. It's his meh key. And so he has that set up basically to launch apps to do text expansion. And so lots of really cool stuff in there. And I thought it was worth sharing. Nice. I like this.

I like that idea a lot of a meh key. I might steal that. I was looking at like the right shift key. And I was like, you know, I don't use that for anything. So that would kind of make a interesting meh key. I have something here in the tiny topics. It's kind of a serious note, actually. I owe the two of you and every single one of our listeners a very deep and heartfelt apology. In fact, Editor Chris, if you wouldn't mind putting in some somber music right here.

What's going on? What did you do now? In the last episode, we held a conclave for our challenge where each one of us voted for ourselves because we refused to let the other person win. And I said a tie is like kissing your cousin. Disgusting. But I made a mistake. The saying is not a tie is like kissing your cousin. A tie is like kissing your sister, which is even more disgusting. What? And I messed this up.

So I do apologize for messing that up. Okay, somber music over. Apology moved on. Anyways, yeah. Yeah, ties are gross. They're like kissing your sister. I completely forgot that you said that last week. So I'm glad that I'm reminded now. Yeah, you should be. You should be glad that you're reminded about that. But anyways, you know, I made a mistake and it's just not something I'm used to doing. Anyways, moving on before my ego gets too big.

One other thing, I found the ultimate calendar app. It trumps all other calendar apps. There are no other calendar apps that are needed anymore. It's the Nintendo calendar app. Oh, focus. Looks amazing. Anyways, yeah. I mean, why would you want to put your own personal calendar events? Like, why would you want to put meetings or something into your calendar when you can have a whole app dedicated to just Nintendo news? Anyways, this is the only calendar app I use anymore.

So if I don't show up to appointments or comfort zone recordings on time anymore, just know it's because I'm using the Nintendo calendar app as my primary app, widgets and everything. And you're not able to actually add calendar events to this. So, yeah. Perfect calendar app. It's really a remarkable thing to launch a calendar for just your company's events. Right? Name one other company that can do that and actually get people to download it. Apple. But even then, like, outside of us nerd people, would we really, like, I know my girlfriend wouldn't do it.

She has Apple devices, but she wouldn't do it. But she would download the Nintendo calendar app in a heartbeat. I think 2025 Apple would do it and they would charge for it as part of iCloud Plus. You got to pay like 30% of every... You can put business appointments in there, but if that business appointment equals a sale, you have to give them 30% of it. It's only fair. Yeah, it makes sense. They made the platform. What are you going to do? Take all the credit. All right, well, let's get into the main show.

Matt, you're first up in the document. What do you got for us? So I come to you again as a man who has built a new thing. Yes. A Lego set. I made a Obsidian plugin following, I think, in the path of Federico Vatici. Got to plug in curious and wanted to make the plugin that I've always wanted for Obsidian, but has never existed.

And that was to post to my ghost website from an Obsidian Note. And it's real. I'm using it. I posted like five to ten posts with it. And it's so cool. I'm so happy that I was able to make this. I did see you published a video about making this Obsidian plugin. And I have it bookmarked because I, like you, am very Obsidian plugin making curious. I have an idea for something. I just haven't had time to do it. And I very much am excited to watch that video so I can kind of see how you did it and go from there.

Yeah. So before I get into the details of what I made, I'm curious. All three of us write things. I write for my personal blog. Neilian, you write for Mac Stories. And Chris, you write, I presume you write scripts. I assume you're not just winging it on camera. So I'm curious, where are you guys doing your writing? Where are you publishing from? Do you have any cool tools that you're using? Are you happy with your setup right now? Are you looking for something new? What's the deal? Neil, I'm curious. What are you doing for MacStory stuff?

It's very boring. Excellent. Yes. I use Obsidian just for MacStories. There's nothing else in there. It's just drafts for MacStories. It's a single-purpose app for me. And I use it, yeah, to write the stories and then send over the markdown files to Devon, our editor, who edits the stories. And then I just have to copy and paste them into WordPress on the site when they're ready to publish.

And that's it. End of story. In Obsidian, I have one single plugin which lets me spell check. And that's it. Spell checker. And that's it. and don't do anything else. Why do you write an obsidian? If it's just a markdown doc, you could theoretically use anything, right? Is there a reason you use obsidian? That's true. I think it's because this one scales down fine. Obsidian, when you've got nothing in there, just markdown files, it's very basic, and that's what I like about it.

And the fact that you can easily drag and drop images in there, and they work right away. Like they show up in there, the preview, the way they're doing the preview, like you can see the syntax at the same time as the formatting. Not all Markdown editors do that or they do it in a frustrating way in my experience. I don't know. Okay. Just for these reasons, yeah. Yeah, that's reason enough.

That's fine. Chris, what do you write in? So like I said, I use Obsidian. Obsidian is fantastic for markdown writing, especially for me. I, unlike Neil, I use Obsidian for everything. Note taking, like little text snippets, little things I just need to remember. Like I have like the maintenance record for my car in Obsidian. Like you name it. like stuff around the house like things like the our exterminators information our landscapers information like that kind of stuff everything goes in obsidian for me like i do everything there i

write all my scripts everything's there um for the blog posting side of things like i do have a blog technically uh and it's hosted with blot.im uh which uses git i've never bothered to set up a connection between obsidian and blot.im because i don't really write standard blog posts the stuff that gets published to my blogs are uh when i post a new video when i um uh post a new episode or when we post a new episode of comfort zone and if i guess on a podcast or something like that i'll write something like that but uh those are all automated through shortcuts like when i publish

new video i can literally just hit run on shortcut and it takes all the information formats it in a blog post and pushes it there i don't that stuff doesn't touch obsidian but anything i manually write obsidian okay so i i like obsidian um but i do most of my writing especially my long-form writing goes to ghost and ulysses is what i've written in for many years uh it's oh they had a weird name before they changed to Ulysses. But yeah, I really love Ulysses. I think I've called it like my favorite app, period, at times. I really, really love it. But I do, it seemed silly to me

that I couldn't publish Ghost from Obsidian. And I wanted to make that a thing. Now, to be clear, there was a plugin, there is a plugin on the community plugins thing right now that is for posting to ghost and it does technically function but it's so bare bones and it didn't suit my needs didn't support images didn't support like the metadata that i would want to use and so it didn't really work for me um and so i made this plugin it's called ghosty posty and which is is great um i'm really happy with the name it's the most proud thing of it i i am but uh no i've been using

this to just write notes in obsidian i'm using the front matter so the properties feature of obsidian so i can actually like put like the tags there i can put the stat the post status or is it scheduled or whatever all that can go kind of in there so i can just have that ready to go but it posts it uploads images it does everything as a native like post in um in ghost it's not uploading just like a markdown block or anything which is fine that works actually is a lot easier if you do that this project would be a lot easier if i was just doing that um but but yeah it's

it's great i love it um there's a couple components that were tricky um primarily parsing the markdown data turns out to be more complicated than i expected um you'd think oh you just kind of do it or whatever uh but i had a had a friend uh beta testing it with me um and he was like oh you guys it doesn't do horizontal rules you can't do an hr um and i was like oh you just do three dashes and he's like i do four dashes and i was like i didn't even consider that was a thing i thought i thought three was the standard it's gonna be like dashes versus asterisks for bullet points and

stuff like that yeah yeah probably would you do four i don't know but it works it works in other apps. So I need to make mine. So my logic was if it's three dashes all on the run on the line, that's the HR. It turns out I should do if there's three or more, or maybe I should do two or more, maybe one or more. I don't know. But like figuring out how everybody's going to do it is tricky because people have different expectations for how it's going to work. Like writing is one of those things where, especially if you do it a lot, you kind of get picky and you kind of get set into

what you want to do. And so, yeah, the formatting is tricky because it works great for me. I'm posting and I'm very, very happy. But yeah, other people do things slightly differently. So I need to like make sure it works for as many people as possible. But yeah, it's been fun. I'll put a link to the GitHub page for it so you can download it and install it in your obsidian if you'd like uh i am hoping to get it into the community plugins list

but that has been a surprising pain point really yeah it's so basically the way it works there is they have a json file in the official like obsidian project uh that is like tens of thousands of lines long and is just a little an object for every single plugin that they support and so you basically create a pull request where you add your plug into that massive json file and you link to it and you they have like a little form you go through where you say i've tested it these are the devices it runs on um they have some automated tests which is cool so like when you up it is it's kind of like

uploading to apple in a way where you uh once you tell them once you like make the pull request and like have a link to your github page it runs some checks on your code and will like check to make sure following best practices and not logging too much of the console or that sort of thing um which i was my first submission was rejected for logging everything because whoops because you're you're a hacker i am a hacker yes uh but um but yeah so i still have not successfully done it um i think they will accept the plugin but i keep running into weird process issues uh that aren't interesting to

talk about but uh the good news is it's giving me more time to work on the plugin and make sure it's more stable by the time it's officially downloadable by everyone but yeah link in the description if you want to try it out and uh happy to receive feedback on how it works for people but yeah it is kind of the the intersection of people who use obsidian and use ghost and i don't know how big that overlap is but i'm in the overlap and i wanted to do so i made it i'm guessing it's probably bigger than you think maybe ghost seems to be getting really popular lately and maybe i'm in a bubble i could i could be very well in a bubble but it seems like a lot of people are looking at wordpress and like oh that's

not great what's going on over there and then other people are looking at substack and it's like oh that's not great that's what's going on over there and it seems like a lot of people have been trying ghost lately but i i again could very well just be in a bubble yeah yeah it's it's it's great i love ghost i'm i'm a huge fan i've been using it since 2019 for my blog uh nice i actually used it way back in the beta in like 2015 2014 whenever it was in beta many a lifetime ago at this point but that one's lost to time i did have a statement on um how i built this app that i want to make we

love statements on the show that was what i was going to ask you i wanted to know how you yeah Yeah. So, okay. So some people would say this was vibe coded. I disagree with that. I think there is a... I hate that phrase. I hate that so much. It's actually everything you hate all wrapped into one, Chris. Yep. I mean, basically, you might as well just have headphones on with like Daft Punk playing while you're vibe coding. Yeah. So this is a thing to unpack in the coming years as we figure out how this works and everything.

But it's a decent amount of work. It's not just like, make a cool plugin, enter, and then you get a plugin. It's a decent amount of work to get this to work right. I will also say that after doing a couple projects like this, personal ones and more public ones like this, it's super, super great at the start. And then you get to a point where it just gets so complicated. Once the complexity of whatever you're building gets to a certain point, it's so hard to make it better to fix things without breaking other things.

And because you aren't necessarily understanding the code as well, you don't know why things are breaking. You don't know where to fix little things. And so I think it's really great for getting to a certain point, but you're not going to rewrite Obsidian this way. You might be able to make a little plugin for it, but you're not going to write all of Obsidian with this. Maybe in like five years you will or whatever. But like right now, I really feel like there's a ceiling. Like it's really great for making simple things. And then you start to get into trouble because you can't continue building it out.

So definitely a thing that I'm learning the more that I play with these things. But yeah, that's about it. But hey, at least Obsidian is not taking 30%. That's true. Can you actually charge for Obsidian plugins? Like going through the Obsidian community store, I don't think you can actually charge. Yeah, every plugin is free and open source. So yeah, there's no way to do it like a private whatever.

Yeah, you would have to do like not add it to the community store, host it on your website, put it behind some paywall or something like that. And then it's a tough experience to install them and to update them and stuff. So yeah, it's tricky. This is really cool, Matt. I love the fact that AI tools and stuff like this are just allowing you to like, hey, I have a problem. There's not really a great solution out there. Fine, I'll do it myself. I'll make it myself.

And I love that. I'm kind of working on something similar where I have a problem, and I'm building a tool specifically for my needs, and it's great to have that ability. It's not something I will ever publish because I am vibe coding it and I don't really care to sit there and check all like the security stuff. I know it'll be fine for just me, but I'm not going to put it out there in the world. But yeah. Yeah. Well, this is like the premise of shortcuts, right? It's like the premise of shortcuts was like people haven't made the thing that I want to do.

I have this very niche thing that's exactly for me. Now I have a tool where I can kind of build a little automation to do the thing that I need. And this is, I feel, like another version of that just that gives you access to more environments, more platforms, kind of more things, right? I've used it to create Apple scripts. So, yeah. I just published a video about how I've been using the MacBook Air and stuff like that. And in there, I talked about how I wrote an Apple script to basically launch apps into specific spaces by just running a keyboard shortcut.

So, like, I have three spaces and it launches a bunch of different apps in each space. And I used AI stuff to help me with that. and then I tweaked it from there myself, but it got me 95% of the way there. So it's really cool that these are there. Yeah, so that's it for me today. Plug in another thing of mine. Niléane, what do you got for us this week? I'm going to talk about music once again. Oh, yeah. One of us is excited.

I'm in a music cake again still. Nice. I wanted to ask you first, do you guys Scrobble? Oh, a younger version of me loved Scrobbling. I loved to Scrobble. Oh, so you don't anymore? I don't anymore, no. What's that app that, okay, it's the last FM Scrobble app that a developer made. And I'm so sorry if you're listening, but I actually met the developer at WWDC. And I ask him to explain what scrabbling is to me, because I don'T get it, and I still don't get it.

I don't understand why. I really don't get the whole purpose of it. I'm like, I don't. So, I'm taking it that you don't scrabble. I do not. Sounds like a no. Yeah, sounds like a no. I mean, I don't really know what scrabbling is, so maybe I'm doing it by accident. Maybe you're scrabbling and you don't even know it. Yeah, I mean, maybe I am. Probably not. Okay. Okay, so good question. Scrubbling is an old thing, like Matt said.

Popularized, I guess, by Last.fm. Other services are doing it now. And Last.fm is a service where it tracks and logs all the music you listen to. And it helps you build a library of all the music you've been listening to over years. And it allows you to have stats, very detailed stats about your listening habits. It lets you discover new music using that amount of data. It will make you, if you log in and have an account, you will have recommendations.

And you can follow people as well to see. You can even compete in some way. You can see, hey, have you been listening to more music than I have? And you can, yeah, compete like that in a friendly way, of course, among your friends. And scrubbing is simply the act of logging one song to the service. So that kind of just sounds like what Apple Music or Spotify does automatically. Yeah, absolutely. Those services just try.

So maybe I am accidentally scrubbing. Yeah, but the word scrambling is like very adjacent to Last.fm. That's part of Last.fm experience. And what I like about Last.fm is that it's independent from the way that you consume music. So if, for example, in my case, you stop using Apple Music because now you're just playing music locally on your devices.

And you still want a way to track what you've been listening to. So you can still have recommendations and have stats. And at the end of the year, if you've been scrambling, you're not losing anything. You're not losing the fact that Apple Music is no longer tracking everything you're listening to. And that's been pretty good. I've been using Last of M for a few years, so much so that my usage of it has survived the fact that I switched multiple times over from Spotify to Apple Music and vice versa, and lastly to Apple Music, and now to Doppler and Files again.

So I would recommend people to try it out because it's a way to have like your music history, I will say, saved in some place safe that will not die with your subscription changes. Or the... Obviously, Last.FM is also a company that you have to trust, I guess. But I think it's okay the day that Last.FM goes away. It's okay because you can just export all of your data And like I said, there are other services out there that do it as well.

So it's probably pretty simple to export your data as a CSV file or whatever and import it somewhere else. Whereas, yeah, Apple Music, they do track your listening habits, but you can't take it away with you. You can't take it with you. You can't back it up. So, yeah. And if I wanted to talk about Last.fm today is because I've felt this appreciation again about it since that famous challenge where I installed Doppler and fell in love with it.

Especially the recommendations part, because that's not something that I've been using a lot. I use Last.fm mostly because I want to keep a history of my music and have stats at the end of the year, which are really fun because they're very detailed. I think Spotify is wrapped at the end of the year, but way more detailed, like so many details in there. You can see an hourly clock and how this hourly clock evolves over weeks, over months.

You can specify a specific date range that you want to look at. Generals. Do you listen to a specific genre in the morning or in the afternoon? You can have a peek inside these data points, which is very fun. But the recommendations. I never realized that Laksafim has a special ability, if you've been scrambling for years, to recommend some really good stuff to you. And unfortunately, so that's neat.

But unfortunately, DUI is not quite as nice as just using Spotify or whatever else. So the way it works is you log in to your Last.fm account. You go to the homepage on there on Last.fm. And you basically have a feed where it recommends to you albums, artists, songs, depending on what you've been listening to lately. And the website supports playback directly.

You can start listening to music right on the website. And you have a few settings in your account where you can specify, okay, when I start playing music from the website, use this service to stream the music. And the options that they have are YouTube and Spotify Premium. So you have to, free Spotify doesn't count. And I believe that I checked it last night and I forgot if that's it or not.

But suffice to say that there's not much else. Last website. Where is it again? In the settings. Yeah, that's it. Spotify, Premium or YouTube. So obviously I'm using YouTube because I don't have Spotify. And I don't know if I want to call the listeners for help. When you have Last of Him set to YouTube to use as the playback service, you will have ads.

Because what the website is doing, it's embedding the YouTube videos in the corner in an I-frame. And even though, like me, you may have YouTube Premium, maybe subscribed to YouTube Premium, you will still get ads because that embed does not know that you're logged into a YouTube Premium account. Oh, that's annoying. That's really annoying. And I've been trying to find a way, like maybe come up with your user script, a better JavaScript to let the website know

that I'm logged in. I have no idea how to do that, if it's even possible. Maybe they're not doing it because it's not possible. But I don't know. Maybe someone listening does know if there's a way to go around that. I even tried, there's a few browser extensions in the form of user scripts or extensions themselves that block YouTube ads. So like they are ad blockers specifically for YouTube.

And I was like, okay, I'm going to block. Just to try if technically it's possible to do something to that iframe, nothing works. So I think there's a technical limitation here. But yeah, I'm subscribed to YouTube Premium, and I want to use that on Last.fm. But anyway, good recommendations, bad UI. Yeah, I used to love Last.fm was like one of my bookmarks in the browser.

It was how I tracked everything I did. One of the things I really liked about whatever Scrobble app I used, Because again, this is the earlier days of the web. It wasn't just like Last.fm's Scrabbler. You could download someone else's Scrabbler and you could Scrabble from there. And I was using one that would like, it would mark a song as played if I listened to like 80% of it or something. Whereas I think still today, Apple Music only counts it as playing the song if you get to the very end of it.

Like if you just like skip to the next song with a few seconds left, I don't, maybe it's changed in the last couple of years, but as of like three or four years ago, Those did not count as plays on Apple Music, and that really annoyed me. And so I like that with my Scrobble app, I could say, if I've listened to this much of the song, I've listened to the song, count it towards my stats. Yeah, so which app are you using to Scrobble? I don't Scrobble. I used to Scrobble. 20-year-old me used to Scrobble all the time. So, yeah, right now, I'm fortunate enough that Doppler, both on macOS and iOS, has a Last.fm integration built-in.

So you just log in to Last.fm inside the app and it scrabbles while you listen to music. It's amazing. And on the Mac, I also use a little widget called Sleeve, which shows you a cover art of the album you're listening to right now on your desktop, and you can customize the way it looks. It's very nice. And it supports Apple Music as well as Doppler. So it works with both. Nice. I'm using that on a Mac.

Yeah, that was the other thing too, is like it's not even, I guess people don't do it as much these days, but again, in the early 2000s, you might have multiple apps you listen to music from. You might have like a CD app for listening to CDs that you put into your computer. She was very old at this point. You could have your MP3s, you could have like some sort of like streaming thing and they would all scrabble to the same place. but you could listen wherever you wanted and you'd still have the same stats everywhere. Yeah. So I love that you're keeping the dream alive.

I am. Chris, you're scrubbing now? You're on with us? I still don't get it. I really, I still don't get it. It doesn't make any sense to me. I'm like, I don't, it seems like just extra work while listening to music. It's not extra work. It's not extra work. You set it up once and you forget about it. Yeah, think of it like an open source stat tracking thing. It's not technically open source, I guess, but like... Okay.

It's not locked. Your data is not locked into one app. If you get fed up with Apple Music, you can switch to Spotify or Doppler or whatever and your end of year stats will still be relevant. Yeah. Okay. We haven't convinced them. So the funny thing, Remember when I mentioned I got into vinyl lately, last month? And the app that I'm using to listen to our vinyls on the HomePods in the flat is called Quenta.

And this app also has a Last of Fame integration, which means I can scrobble my vinyls. Pretty cool. This is an incredible segment because I'm writing down show titles and every single one has Scrabble in it. Scrabble. The title should just be Scrabble. Chris's face looks like he's looking into the void. Yeah, we've never lost Chris more in a segment. I'm just like, yeah, okay, I'm glad this works for you.

I really don't get the point of it for me, but if it works for you, it works for you. anyway keep scrambling folks and let's talk to you next time when I will have something else to talk about regarding music love it is it time for the challenge? I think it's time for the challenge and this week it was my challenge and I wanted all of us to find a new

Raycast extension and I just want to remind the listeners out there we want you to play along so feel free with these challenges because we give you a little bit of a heads up write in, tell us if you're playing along with us and what you did and yeah we'll pick a few of the top ones to feature and stuff like that so do you guys mind if I go first? please do alright so I have a couple of like bonus things first before I get to my main pick the first one's a tip

a lot of people out there are using AI chatbots now. And every single AI chatbot out there has a Raycast extension that can plug into it. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, you name it, it's out there. So I've been playing around with a few of them. Currently, I'm trying Gemini because I've been using the Google Notebook LM thing, and that's kind of like all part of the paid subscription service. And one thing I did is I set up the Gemini Raycast extension, the chat with it, to a keyboard shortcut of, what was it?

It was control space. I almost said option space, but that's another one. It's muscle memory with fingers, not remembering exactly what the shortcut is. So I set up control space, and I can just sit there and type something out to Gemini, ask it a question, and it'll come back with results. Like the other day I was asked about NAB, which is like a video big showcase conference thing when it was and stuff like that. And I just asked, hey, when's NAB 2025?

And it gave me the dates and stuff like that. So, like, it's actually a really nice tip. It's really, really handy just to be able to, like, just quickly ask, you know, AI tool something and deal with it and then move on. I also have a bonus extension pick for the Formula One people out there. There is a Formula One extension. It's not super complex, but what's really cool about it is it shows the drivers and team standings and the constructors and drivers championship. I can see Lando Norris is leading and stuff right now.

Go, Lando. I'd like to see somebody else win that this year. Really, I'd like to see Lewis Hamilton get his eighth, but it started off too great there. and you can also see when the next race is with this extension as well so those are kind of like my bonus picks for you but my actual pick is kind of like a sub extension so you know how like you install an extension so you can install obsidian extension and then there's like sub extensions for it I don't know exactly how these are classified

so what you're saying is you did not follow the rules I didn't follow the rules. Because I downloaded a bunch of extensions, but then I started playing around with this one. And I hadn't used this part of the Obsidian extension before. So I picked the append to daily note kind of sub extension of Obsidian. And the way this works is you set up like you point it to where your daily note is. But what's really cool is if you have like a template for your daily note, and you have like different headers in there,

you can actually pick like, hey, I want this text that I'm going to append to my daily note to appear under this header. So it's not always appending to the bottom or pre-pending to the top. It can be under a specific header. So I've been using this as just kind of like a general scratch pad throughout the day of like, oh, I need to like write this phone number down or, oh, I need to do this thing. Or, oh, hey, here's like this little thing I need to do. just a second or remember or just like a little text snippet I need to write down or something like that.

And it's been really handy. I set this up to hyperkey D as a keyboard shortcut. So I can just like quickly like knock something out, append it to the daily note and boom, Bob's your uncle. Bob's your uncle. I said that wrong. But yeah. Yeah. So that's what I've been doing. Nothing, nothing too crazy, but it's been incredibly handy. And I would encourage you all to kind of go into the extensions settings of Raycast and look at like the sub extensions in there.

Because there's a lot of cool things for extensions that aren't like the general like chat with an AI bot, add this thing to your notes app or add this thing to your task manager. There's a lot of really cool stuff in there. So check those out. Yeah, nice. I think those are called commands in their parlance. Oh, okay. All right. That's good to know. But yeah, that's a good pick. I've never figured out how to get Raycast to work with Obsidian, really, like a way that worked for me.

But that's a cool way to do it. This is working a lot better. There's also a create note action that I like. It's a little, like I wish you could just say like, just dump it into this folder. It's a little more like, oh, it wants a title. It wants like the body and all that stuff. and then you can pick a folder and stuff like that. I think it can just dump into your default folder and stuff like that, but I do wish it was just like text bar, let me type a line and add it in there.

Yeah. That makes sense. All right. Who wants to go next? Nelian, you want to go next? Okay, so my... Yes, I want to. I did not answer the question. Yes, I want to go next. My extension, my pick, is a powerhouse, projectivity powerhouse, okay? The name is Menu Bar Weather. Whoa! I can see me doing a lot of work with this.

You can only get real work done with Menu Bar Weather. I know. So have I? I have over the past week got a lot of work done with this. So what it does, it's a Raycast extension that once you enable it, adds a menu bar item to your Mac, which shows you what's the current weather at your place, at your current location. You can specify manually a specific location if you want to. You can set it to current location.

Okay, so there's a bunch of things that I really like about it. First, the weather source is Open Meteo. Meteo, I don't know how you say it. But basically, this weather source is really nice because my understanding of it is Open Meteo is an aggregated, a combination of a bunch of local sources worldwide.

which means that if your area is supported by OpenMeteo, you'll get pretty accurate data. You should be getting pretty accurate weather data. Sorry. In France, for example, so the National Weather Service here is called Meteo France and OpenMeteo, when you use a location in France with it, it just fetches data from Meteo France, just the country's official weather service, which is pretty accurate.

If you set a location in Germany, same, it will use the National Weather Service in Germany instead. It's pretty cool. And I've been actively comparing the temperature values that it's giving me to Meteo France's own values on their website, on the official website. And they're always the same. It's obviously the exact same data that it's fetching. So that's a very, very good point about this extension, the weather source.

More accurate than Apple weather by a mile, at least in my case. Otherwise, there's a bunch of really nice things about the extension. The fact that when you click the menu bar item, you've got a lot of data in the sub menu. There's a drop down filled with data, but it doesn't feel overwhelming. It's nice because the developer has added icons, cute icons. You can switch between the default icon pack or the default icons, or you can have it use SF symbols instead if you want it to look more native.

And that's pretty much, I don't have much to say about a weather extension in the menu bar. It does what it does. It's a good weather source that I always like it when I find a new weather app. I always like it when I see that it's using OpenMeteo, when it has OpenMeteo as an available source. Carrot Weather does, for example. It's really good news, the fact that Carrot Weather has added that. It means that Meteo France is supported in France.

So there you go. And so this is an extension that lives in your menu bar. Yes. So it's an extension for Raycast that once you enable it, you have to enable it. The command is display menu bar item, I think, something like that. In Raycast, you type that out. Press enter. Shows up in the menu bar on your Mac. and in the Raycast settings, you go find the menu bar weather extension in the list of your installed extensions.

Click on it and in the right pane, there's a bunch of settings there. This is where you set the location, the icons, there's a bunch of settings there. And that's it. And you can move it around in the menu bar like any other menu bar item. Just hold command and drag and drop the icon in the menu bar. That's cool. I didn't, I did not expect a menu bar app to appear as a Raycast extension. I know, I know. And let me tell you my productivity through the roof.

Through the roof. Through the roof. You can only get real work done with it. I completely understand. All right. I have brought a plug-in as well and mine is just a plug-in. No sub-plugins, no menu bars, just a classic. Not a plug-in, an extension. that brought an extension which was the rule uh i am bringing the parcel extension oh i use this one i know this has come up numerous times on the show this app in general but

um yeah parcel is an app for tracking packages and it has an extension i wanted to scroll actually kind of went to the raycast store and scrolled way down to find plugins with lower numbers of installs. I did the same thing. And this one, like 500 or something, like not a massive amount at this point, but it's pretty cool. So basically, there are two commands that this offers. I should say when you first install it, you need to set it up by creating an API key for parcel. You do that by going to parcel on the web. And there is a very basic button that says like, make API key,

and you click it and you copy it, you paste it into the extension and it enables two commands. The first one is to view your deliveries. So I should be specific, it's just called my deliveries, in which case it'll load any deliveries you currently have in parcel in Raycast. So you can kind of see it there. You can filter by active or recent deliveries. So if you wanna see things that recently came, you can do that. It also works with their Raycast AI chat feature that they just rolled out recently where you can ask it things in there.

I'm not entirely sure what you would ask it, but you can. And the other one, which actually I hope we're not doing a poll this week because this one really makes it not as good. The other command it has is add delivery, which starts to look promising. You've got your API key in there. You feel like it should be good. And so in Raycast, you say add delivery, you enter the tracking number, you can give it a description if you want, and then it opens the Parcel app on your Mac and you still have to add the delivery from there.

So that's a little annoying. It seems to lose the ability to auto-select the right carrier. So I think mine always does the post office, but even if it's a UPS or FedEx tracking number. So adding deliveries, it's not really there for me, But it is cool, especially if you are checking a lot and don't necessarily want to open the Parcel app. It's cool to be able to see them just in Raycast. I have a little tip for the Mac people. I have a Mac tip for the people out there. If you use Parcel, use the PopClip extension in order to add tracking information to Parcel.

Because if you highlight the extension or if you highlight the tracking number, you'll get the little pop-up, pop clip thing, pop-up that pops up top of it. How many times can I say pop-up in a row? Then you can just click the parcel extension. It will automatically add the tracking information. It'll auto-select the carrier. All you have to do is type in the description of the thing and then just click add and it adds it right to your parcel. It doesn't even open up the full app. Or I think it does open up the full app, but the only thing that comes into the foreground is the ad tracking information window.

Okay. PopClip is one of those apps I need to explore one of these days. Yeah. The funny thing is I've installed PopClip back again on my Mac a few days ago. Just a few days ago. Because John wrote about it in the newsletter, in the Club Mac Stories Weekly newsletter. delivered weekly to Club Max to his member. Good luck. But yeah, I've installed it again and I've found one great use for it, but I'm going to keep it for next week. Let's do that.

Yeah, again, if there is a poll, this one is going to lose so badly because the conversation turned into a discussion of an entirely different app. Yeah, that's true. I mean, technically I didn't even bring a new extension so I mean, I probably win this one, but still vote for me. Vote for me. I mean, obviously I'm the right winner. Neilion's going to win. It's easy to win with weather. Well, I mean, you can only get real work done with weather. Exactly. But anyways, yeah, now, I like both

of yours. I already have Matt's installed, so I don't have anything to install, but I am going to try Neilion's. Nice. Yeah, that's really cool. Alright, well, I think we did a great job. Unless you guys have something to add? I'm okay. All right. Well, Niléane, it is your challenge for this week. What are you going to have us do? Yes, yes, yes. Mine is going to be fun, I think. I wanted to do something fun. And it's topical.

There's been some news going around. there are rumors of a new iOS design coming up maybe this year. And our timelines have been filled with funny concept arts that look more or less bad, more or less good, great. Yeah. So I want us to have a go at it.

The challenge is create a mock-up of iOS or iPadOS 19. Wow. I've already lost. Wow. And I want us to go wild with it. Yeah? Let's just... Okay. Let's not just keep to the predicted rumors. You'll be lucky if I can just do something more than cutting together a couple of screenshots and putting something together.

Because, oh my God, am I bad at this kind of thing. I have a suggestion. Maybe so that it's not purely visual, maybe alternatively you could conceptualize something. Just come up with an idea about the two OSs. Okay. Okay. Yeah? Sounds fair. That works. Yeah, I could do that. Yeah. I like it. Okay. All right. So we can do both however we like. Okay. All right. Cool. I will try and do an actual mock-up, but nobody get their hopes up.

Really. Same here. I just want to say, yeah. But, yeah. Yeah. But you two are both way more design-y than I am. So, all right. Well, that'll be an interesting challenge. And, again, listeners, feel free to play along. It'll be interesting to see what our listeners come up with, especially if we do have some like designers. I mean, we got Matt. I think it's going to go, Matt's going to go hard, Neelion, and then I'm going to be way down here.

But yeah. History dictates Neelion will beat me. Imagine if we have leakers in the audience who just provide real screenshots of the real thing and pass it along as the mock-up. I was going to say the winner should be whoever gets their screenshots on MacRumors as a as a leak. Maybe. Let's load up the mock-ups on our phones and show it to the camera.

Yeah. Alright, well we gotta get moving. So that is our challenge for the week. But before we wrap up, I have an end of the show question for you. What is your favorite piece of home tech? Oh, I know. I have a solid answer. Okay. Go for it. I need to find the link to it. I like the Lutron Aurora Smart Bulb Dimmer Switch.

Okay. You're all in on the Lutron Caseta stuff? It's my one Lutron product. Okay. basically this is a switch that I think it only works with hue lights link in the description but it's like a $40 switch that you put on top of your light switch it locks the switch in an on position and then it's basically you press the top of it to turn the lights on bottom of it to turn the lights off and then it's a the outside rotates and you can use it as a dimmer switch

so really nice I use it in my living room to control our lights there and it works great it works lovely so I I love this little thing yeah mine would be just lights in general just lights just lights I'm extremely sensitive to exactly I mean I'm not kidding I'm really sensitive to a good lighting environment and like connected lights smart lights or a great way to make a living space be nicer.

So, yeah. Nice. Mine is the ring doorbell. Despite the fact that we have a no soliciting sign, and specifically our no soliciting sign calls out solar panel salesmen, we still get people knocking on the door. I don't want to get up and go and answer the door for those people. So I just kind of look and I'm like, yep, that's absolutely a solar salesperson. You can always tell by the clipboard. It's always the clipboard. You can tell, so I just ignore it. I love it.

It's saved me a legitimate amount of time. But ours is getting a little old, and I think it needs to be replaced because it keeps falling off our network. So I think it's time to get a new one. But, yeah, that just about does it for the show. Thank you all so much for listening. Big thank you to MacStories for having us. We are a MacStories podcast, after all. Make sure you go check out all the other podcasts and writings. there's a lot of good stuff there like we talked about John just wrote about PopClip I have no idea what Neelion's doing right now

anyways if you watch the video version you just got a fun little tidbit if you're the audio person I don't even know how to explain it I'm sorry but thank you all so much for listening have a great day