Everything I Type is Quack

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. As always, I am joined by Matt Birchler. Matt, how are you doing? Chris, I'm doing good, but slightly embarrassed for reasons that will become clear as the show goes on. Ooh, okay. Interesting. You know, good mad embarrassment can be funny for the show. We'll see. Might be good content. Anything for the content, as the kids say.

We're also joined by Niléane. Niléane, how are you doing? Hey, I still look like I'm crying, and I promise you, it's not because I'm sad to be with you. And now it's become a thing, so I will say it every week. It's allergy season. Oh, allergies. I get them bad, too, so I totally understand. We have a plethora of tiny topics. So let's just get right into it. First up, I was on Mac Power Users this week.

Well, at the time of recording it, it's not the latest episode. But after this episode comes out, the episode of Mac Power Users. So, like, if you wanted to call in for that episode, you should have called in, you know, an episode ago kind of thing. Yeah. No, so I was on Mac Power Users. It was a ton of fun. got to talk to David and Steven about you know my switch from the iPad to the Mac and apps I'm using, workflows, automations all sorts of fun stuff it was a good time all around good time and you both get a couple of shout outs on there so

oh my god you mean David Sparks has heard my name yes yes don't freak out stay cool stay cool all right Nihon you have a bunch of stuff in here what's going on yes I'm sorry it's my fault there's so much there's so many tiny topics today first I have an essential Mac utility brought up by our listeners I swear to god if this is clack I am quitting the show

well it is not clack you're in luck it is in fact a quack oh so that it is spelled i can't keep serious it is spelled k w a c k seeing your faces is awesome um so somebody named ret r-h-e-t-t um recreated the entire not the entire, but they recreated a website that looks like the Clack website,

but it's actually for Quack. And the app is pretty much the same. But instead of mimicking mechanical keyboard sounds, when you type in Mimics, it plays sound effects of Quack. Quack, Quack, Quack, Quack, Quack, Quack, Quack. This is on the App Store. This got through App Review. On the App Store. I'm really going to have to send an email to AppReview. So there you go.

I've tried it. It works great. Exactly as advertised. It's completely free. It's got a five-star review right now on the App Store and deserved. So that's done with my first tiny topic. I move on to the next one now. And it is a series. You're okay, Chris. I was trying to do a really raised eyebrow, but I can't do the Vulcan thing of where I just raise one eyebrow. I raised both of them, so I have to use my finger to just raise one.

And I accidentally flipped off the camera there, but I'll cut that. Oh, no. I have installed it, and it is running, and I can't stop it. I need to find out. Everything I type is quack, quack, quack, quack, quack. I failed to mention that it's permanent, But it's part of why it's so great. So I can move on. Five stars. Five stars. Yes. The next two items are about Blue Sky.

You know I love to rant about Blue Sky. And I will never stop. I will never stop. I was thinking about this. You are to Blue Sky as I am to Clack. Sure. yeah but unlike me you don't bring it up i have to bring it up see okay okay fair fair i i mostly just don't want to acknowledge that it exists clack that is yeah i would like to acknowledge the yeah i would love to acknowledge that blue sky doesn't exist but unfortunately it does so i you know i love to rant about blue sky and there are two pieces of items actually three uh two three

items about Blue Sky this week. As we're recording, of course, you're in the future. First, Blue Sky has unveiled that they are going to roll out blue checkmarks because as always, Blue Sky they have this thing where they look at every single thing that went wrong with Twitter before Musk. Like every single thing that went horribly wrong, they look at them and they are like yes, we should do that again.

It was great. Let's do it again. So blue check marks of course were a terrible thing which is my opinion but I believe it is accurate because my opinion is that it rapidly became an opaque system where Twitter was able to verify at their own soul, discretion, whoever they wanted.

They never verified me. Me neither. But this means that in the fact, the people who were verified had to be either extremely famous, white, American, European politicians, like people in power. And I believe that's wrong. I believe verification is a great feature to have on social media platforms. But it should be accessible to everyone. Everyone should be able to publicly verify that they are who they are and allow their followers and users to cross-check references

to see that the person is who they say they are. I don't see a reason why an activist in Romania who only has, say, 5,000 followers cannot have a verified tag on their profile, No more than Katy Perry. Verification is a very useful feature, but it must be accessible to everyone. Blue Sky has its own verification feature in the form of domain names as usernames.

Kind of works, kind of okay. But they're essentially undermining that by rolling out their own blue checks now, which is a similarly, like, coming from the top system where they will attribute manually those blue check marks to people on the platform. And they will also entrust third-party organizations to verify people themselves.

And I kind of hate that the coverage about this news has been, hey, BlueSky is doing blue checkmarks the right way because third-party verifiers will be allowed to verify accounts. Yeah, sure. But here's my question. It's a rhetorical one. Yeah, but who decides who is the trusted verifiers? Like BlueSky is the only entity here who will have the final say on every blue checkmark applied on the platform.

That's not great. That's the contrary to being a decentralized platform, in my opinion. I definitely get that. I do like that they have the domain validation like Mastodon has, which is basically, as far as I know, the only way anyone's done a good, anyone can validate themselves. Is there another way that my wife, who is not famous, is not online, has no idea what a DNS record is, has never written HTML, how would she verify her code in a good system?

That's, I guess, what I'm curious about. To be fair, the Mastodon way is quite different from BlueSky. It's HTML on your site. BlueSky is a DNS record. So one is a bit more accessible from the other. But I think more than that, the key difference between the two is that Mastodon, you can have multiple links, verified links in your profile. Because somebody brought up this argument, I think, is valid about the blue sky domain names as usernames which is a if you are christopher

nolan um you can just buy a christopher nolan underscore whatever dot com domain name bogus domain name just to pretend you're christopher nolan on blue sky which i have seen that happen quite a few times yeah it's already yeah um so as a user you'd have to check that domain name to see if it's actually that person's domain, like this person is legit. Whereas on Mastodon, like as a person, you can provide multiple verification links in your profile.

And I think that's more useful because it allows people to cross-check themselves. So for example, in my case, I can have a MacStories link that's verified in my bio on Mastodon, as well as my own website or the organization I work at or whatever. I can have multiple verified links. I think that's important. Maybe Blue Sky should do that. But no, Blue Sky, they want blue check marks. Yeah. The other thing I think that's interesting that Blue Sky does have is they do have a decentralized system for this.

I don't think it's widely used, but I actually follow someone. I follow an investigative reporter who basically does his own verification. and it's basically a plugin I've applied to my Blue Sky account that adds icons to people. So that's at least something that they have, but it's not the official blue check. This lets me move on to the next item. I think like this on paper, it looks good, but in practice, it's not great approach to Blue Sky.

We've seen that before when they are advertising their sales as a decentralized platform. Oh boy, this week, once again, we have seen proof that Blue Sky isn't actually decentralized. And I will beg, seriously, I will beg people to stop saying that it's decentralized. Yes, they are laying down the foundation to become centralized. Who knows if they actually want to do that because it doesn't seem high on their priority list right now.

And yes, technically, it could be decentralized. But come on, people. There's one single server. And the proof this week was that Blue Sky went down for about two, three hours, a couple of hours at least. And why is this news? Why is it like... have you ever heard somebody say mastodon is down i mean honestly yes many times yeah but those people like they have no idea that the majority of the network is actually online

the fact that blue sky when you say it's down yeah it's actually down like 99 people cannot access it yeah it's i think it's like tangible proof that this network is not actually decentralized yet I'm honestly wishing that it becomes decentralized just because I can sleep at night without thinking about this. But yeah, anyway. I will move on to my next item, which is not about Blue Sky. It is about a poll, because I published a poll without you guys.

I'm sorry. This week on Mastodon. This poll was about something very funny that I stumbled upon on my back, Which is that, so I went into system settings on my Mac because I wanted to check when my AppleCare Plus plan was going to renew. Because I know the date is coming up. I've got an annual subscription for a coverage on my MacBook. I just wanted to go into system settings and check when is the due date.

So to do that, you go into system settings on your Mac. You go into general, then about, then there's a line with your Apple Care Plus coverage. You can click on that and it opens up a pop-up window inside the settings, a model window, I guess, inside the system settings app, where there is a button which is manage plan. So you would like to click on that to see more details about your subscription plan, right?

And the poll, my poll on Masternone was, guess where that button takes you. Because it's not what you think. It will open something unexpected. Unless you're Chris, because Chris immediately guessed when I asked you in our group chat. I guess because Chris is old. Very old. I've been around. I was around for this era. I knew where it was going. So the options that I put in this poll were, does it open Safari on a 404 page, page not found?

Does it open a Mac App Store on a home page? Does it open your Apple Care Plus details in the music app? Or does it crash system settings immediately? And the answer is it opens your plan details in the music app. This is wild. And the reason for that is, and the reason why Chris knew that, is because subscription things in general on the Mac used to all live inside one app, which was iTunes, in the old days.

And apparently some of it still does today for some weird reason. So don't forget, if you need to check out, to check on your subscription plan for AppleCare, headed to the music app, of course, because, of course, that makes sense. It is wild that Apple created this payment system and store database thing in 2000 or 2001 for music sales, to sell music singles. And that is almost all of their services payments run through that still.

Like, that's what the app store is built on. That's what these subscriptions are built on. buying movies, TV shows, ringtones. It's all based on the iTunes framework. Yeah. So everyone has legacy code and it's undefeated. Yeah. And we understand that. Imagine like somebody random just got their Mac. The Apple store guy told them, hey, you interested by AppleCare? They got it.

Then on the Mac, they end up in a music app of all places to check out how it's going. So yeah, anyway. All right. Well, I have a few things as well. Follow-up item number one. I have two items. Follow-up item number one is another shout-out to Jetlag the Game, which is a YouTube series that Neilian, you brought up a few weeks ago. I said, like, the following week, I started watching it. I enjoy it. And my wife has now gotten sucked into it as well.

And she's like, do not skip any episodes without me. Like, I'm in. I'm into this. Should I watch all the old seasons? Would I love The Amazing Race? Like, how deep does this rabbit hole go? So it is a massive hit in the Burschler household. So thank you. Awesome. I have an update, which is that as of today, I have watched all of it. Nice. Wow. Season 1 to 13. I have seen them all and it's great. Excellent. I think we're going to watch the America one next to really appreciate how expensive it's going to be for them.

They're taking these flights through Europe that are so cheap. Like it doesn't even make sense to me how cheap these are. Oh, really? Okay. And how easy it is to do. It's wild. The other update is it's another week and I've written another app. So I just wanted to shout out a new app I'm working on. It's on my QuickStuff website. It's called MastoThreads, which I have not checked if anyone's taken. If someone has, then I apologize and I'll change it. But it's basically a Mastodon web app for writing threads, optimized writing threads, which I haven't found a great solution for.

Maybe there is something out there and I should just give this project up. But it's been fun to write a Mastodon thing for the first time, which is not that hard. So it's pretty cool. I'll put a link in the description. Well done. It's actually going to be very useful for me, I think. Excellent. Isn't it always nice when somebody makes a utility that's like, oh my gosh, I've been needing this. Somebody else made it and I don't have to make it now. It's good. I love that.

All right. You guys ready to get in the main show? Let's do it. Yes. I am first up in the document here. And this week, I have a journey for you all. So grab your coat, grab your walking stick, grab whatever, you know, hobbit food you want because we're going on a journey. That wasn't funny at all. All right, moving on. Well, I'm intrigued, is it? Okay, all right. Well, make sure you have your one ring because we're headed to Mordor. All right, I'm going to drop that because it's really not funny.

All right. So a couple of weeks ago. Well, let me back up. I've mentioned multiple times on this show and videos and stuff like that, that my studio and office space were in two separate places. The studio, obviously, where I am sitting right now, if you're watching the video version, the and the office was just outside of the studio in this weird, like, end of the hallway annex. like it didn't really make sense like the developer like nobody really knew what to do with this space

like it was like it was kind of part of the hallway but also it was like indented so like you could put stuff there like it just never really made sense if you go back and watch any of my videos about like my office setup uh in like the last couple of months like you will see you'll see it. Big problem with that, with it being in the hallway, is people walk through there when people are home. If my girlfriend's home, if my girlfriend's mom is staying with us at the time, people walk through there.

I have ADHD. I get very distracted by that. I get very distracted by, oh, what's going on? So did you kick your girlfriend out? Yeah, does this a massive life update? Massive life update. It kicked her out. Yep, I'm here by myself again. No. So I, basically, I took my desk and office stuff, and I brought it here in the studio, and I took a few things out of the studio

and kind of like rearranged things. So office and studio are in one place, and oh my gosh, I love it. It's wonderful. Like, it's great. back to back to having everything in one space. I can close the door. I can focus. Nobody comes up and talks to me while I'm trying to work. ADHD sucks. But yeah, if somebody comes up and tries to talk to me while I'm working, there goes like the rest of my afternoon. Like it's just like, that's just how it works.

It's terrible. It sucks. But that's the way my brain works. So now I am back to like having everything in this space. So I tried a few different things. When I brought all this stuff in here. When I got the M4 MacBook Air to review, Apple sent me a second studio display. Because with that MacBook Air, you can now have two displays plugged into the MacBook while also using the MacBook Air display at the same time. So, theoretically, you can have three displays going, and they wanted me to test that out.

So, they sent me an extra studio display. So, I was like, okay, well, let's try having two studio displays going at the same time. two not one but two uh that lasted maybe a couple hours uh that sucked um because if i wasn't distracting myself with one display i was distracting myself with the other display so i that didn't last too long but man i i kind of loved it for like video editing and stuff like that it was great it's almost like i would love to have some kind of like modular desk that like

okay, I'm in video editing mode, and a second display just shoots up. Okay, I'm in writing mode. Second display goes away. Okay. So you just had them side by side, right? Like each landscape layout and everything? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the one that they sent, and this is the other issue is, my studio display, my personal one, is the tilt and height adjustable one. I'm tall. I'm 6'2". I have to raise that thing up. The standard tilt one is not tall enough for me. Well, they just sent me the tilt one.

So I was having to put it on top of books in order to raise it up to be the same height as the tilt and height adjustable one. And it just didn't really sit right. So that was part of the other issue too. But I was also like, okay, if this works, if this is something that I liked, I was going to go buy a second studio display. But it turns out it didn't work. I have a suggestion, but I think I know the answer to why you're not doing this. My way of doing this is I have the laptop on the laptop stand next to my main display.

And most of the time it's closed. But when I need a second display, I just open it up and I have two displays in front of me. Yeah. And most of the time it's closed. Like, I'm a IQ. I don't want multiple displays because I get distracted. I could do that. I like the idea of having the same display, so it's the same size, and it just kind of looks nicer kind of thing. I don't know. I'm a little picky about that stuff. You also get into a spot with, if you have different size monitors, you have to align them in the settings,

and there's times where you'll drag something from one window to the other, but if the alignment's off, the mouse will get stuck at the corner, and so you have to lower it and stuff. Is that a major problem, though? It is a major problem. We're spending thousands of dollars to fix it. What the heck? It's a minor. Listen, I'm a one monitor guy, so I actually agree that two monitors is distracting. And it's pretty big as well. Like, you're a... Is this the first time we've all agreed on something?

No, I think you should get a laptop stand to work from a laptop. So, I do have my... I do have that... Pro sitting next to my monitor with my currently 13-inch iPad Pro. But when I get back from my trip, I'm going to sell that and get an 11-inch one. But I have that sitting next to my monitor, and I use a universal control. Wait. Yeah. What's the one?

No. It's universal control. Sidecar. No. Sidecar is the one where it gets macOS on the display. Universal control is the one where you can just move your mouse over and control iPadOS, right? Yeah. Okay. Universal control is the one I use. And that's kind of nice for like, I will use that a lot for like having a script open while I'm editing or having like research notes open or contract or even just like the music app or something like that. Like I will do that. And that works okay.

It's not nearly as distracting, especially because I've really changed the way I'm using my iPad now. So I don't have nearly as many apps sitting on the home screen to distract me. Like, Ivory and Discord and all that stuff are taken off now. So that has been okay. And I think I like that better than having, like, two full-fledged monitors. Because also, two 27-inch monitors is really big on your desk. Like, that takes up a lot of space. Like, one of them was covering up one of my speakers, and I didn't really like that because it didn't sound as good then.

So, and, you know, we can't cover up speakers, like, because I have those massive KRK speakers on my desk. Yes, you need to hear the quacks. i walked right into that but this leads me to the final part of the journey i was like okay i'm enjoying playing with the mac but one of my chief complaints about the mac for a long time now has been it's a very distracting platform even with just one monitor you can have a lot of things open. There can be things

happening in the background. There's stuff flying all over the place like trapeze artists. Stuff is happening on the Mac. And I was like, okay, I want to find a way to really just make the Mac a little more iPad like when I need to really focus on a particular task. Writing, photo editing, video editing, the stuff that's a part of my work. So I played around with a bunch of different apps, but ultimately I came back to the trusty utility which is Raycast. And Raycast has an extension built into it. It's a first party extension called

Raycast Focus. And what this does is it allows you to set up categories. So in these categories, you could set up, you can label them. So for example, I have a video editing one, which in there, I put the apps Final Cut, Hush, Whisper, Photoshop, and Lightroom. So when I sit down to video edit, I can start one of these focus sessions and you just, it'll ask you for a goal. It'll ask you how long it wants to run. You can pick indefinitely. So it doesn't have to be a specific timer, but then there is an allow and block section.

And then you can put your categories, apps, and websites underneath it. So what I do is for video edit, for this video editing example, I select the allow button and then I can put, uh, I put, you know, the video editing category in the bottom bar. And what this does is if I have any other apps open that aren't in that category, it closes them automatically. And then if I try to open those while this focus session is going, you get like this orange glow around the screen and it blocks anything from coming up.

And I love this. This has been killer for me to keeping me staying on track and focused. I set up categories for stuff like email where it's just Safari and mail. I set up a writing one, which gives me Obsidian, Raindrop.io, Dark Noise, and Safari. But it blocks websites like I can set it up so that YouTube and stuff like that aren't allowed.

So that's great. I love that. And then there's like photography and stuff like that. So I can get like just Photoshop and Lightroom and I'm not able to open up anything outside of those. But then I do have set up a block list. So I have one called social apps. And this includes ivory, blue sky, discord messages, and all of the distracting websites, YouTube, anything that I can distract myself with. So if I'm doing like kind of general work, I can start a focus session and type put in blocked apps, make that the blocked category.

So if I try and open up any of those apps, you just get this orange glow, orange banner around the screen and you are denied opening those apps. And I love this feature so much. I was using it last night to bust through some video edits because I'm shoving a couple of weeks worth of work into one week because I'm going on vacation and I'm very excited. But oh boy, have I needed to really buckle down and get work done. And this has been a great way to do that. Is this one more instance where Raycast has made a better feature than Apple?

Yeah. They did this with the emoji picker. They did this with the clipboard because Apple doesn't have the clipboard manager by default on the macOS. And I guess they're also doing this with focus modes because focus modes are on macOS, but I never hear or see anyone use them on the Mac. I do, but I just use them to manage notifications.

They definitely sync to my Mac and I see them come up, but I just carry on with my business the way I always do. It doesn't change anything like it really does on my phone. Maybe I can do more here and I just haven't looked into it. I don't think it can block apps like the Raycast Focus feature does. Yeah, and that ability to just be able to prevent things from popping up has just, it's really helped me kind of get over that hump of like, okay, there's a lot happening on the Mac.

And like spaces are great, but it's really easy just to jump over to another space. But when you are running this focus stuff in Raycast and you go to click on an app that's not in the allowed list right now and you get that orange banner, it's kind of a great like almost kind of like a little bit of a slap like get back to work kind of thing. Like it's kind of nice. So where was the story? You pitched us a story. Oh, it was just a story of fixing my focus. Okay. And, you know, being able to actually get work done.

and a journey of trying things and finding something that actually works. Landscaping your mind. Exactly. I started off in the weeds out in the hallway and we pulled it back. We did try getting a little crazy, maybe making one of those bushes shaped as an animal. We'll do a flamingo or something like that with the second display. You've lost me. It didn't turn out. then you know we just kept it simple with focus sessions and yeah uh i i really do think it is a killer feature and if you're using raycast try it out nice this is a feature i keep not using i think

it's in the free one as well it is it is a part of the free version of of raycast lovely and i should by the time you're hearing this i should have a video on raycast out already uh i'm basically about my Raycast setup. So if you're curious about Raycast, how it works, what you can do with it, you can go check that video out because it goes into a lot more than just the focus session stuff. Who is definitely coming for your turf, Matt? Yeah.

Coming for you. Keep an eye on you. Who's the Matt King? I hope it stays me. It's like West Side Story. We're going. All right. Well, that's what I have this week. Unless you guys got any questions, Matt, what do you got? I have a delivery arriving in the next five to 10 minutes. So it's going to be thrilling as I talk and then suddenly walk out of the room.

This will be nice. Yes. So I am bringing a couple apps, but more of a thing that I have found useful recently. And those are speech-to-text apps. So I find myself using my computer a lot and typing a lot. And these phalanges get sore sometimes. Like, if I do too much computing, I get...

Matt, you're supposed to be one of us, a mechanical keyboard sicko. Hey, by the way, do you know where I first heard the word phalange in my life? Where? On France. Oh. Regina phalange, which is an alter ego of Phoebe on France. And at the time I was a child, I did not know what phalange meant.

But I learned that in French, it's simply phalange. So that I knew. Nice. But yes, so sometimes these fingers get sore. And, you know, I still want to do things. And so I've been exploring some speech-to-text things. These have been around forever. Dragon dictation is something I feel like I've heard of. never used maybe i should try that as well but i'm trying some of the smaller indie things um and by smaller indie i started with mac os's built-in text or speech to text its own dictation

uh which is okay um i don't know if you guys use dictation um on the mac or the phone or ipads or whatever nope i use it on my phone all the time uh i use it a good chunk of the messages I send from my phone. Like when I'm at home, I dictate it, which is probably why they don't make sense a lot of times. But yeah, I use it on my phone all the time. I rarely use it on the Mac because I mostly are sitting at my desk and have a mechanical keyboard attached

and I want to type. Yep. So I find the Mac and iPhone one that's built in decent. It's very fast. It's very quick to, as you're speaking, it updates and it shows everything on screen. It's very quick, but it is not super accurate. I used it to help me write a blog post while I was walking my dog a couple days ago. I have never had more typos in a blog post, maybe in my life, that I should have noticed, but I was not paying as much attention.

I assumed the dictation would work. It's okay, but it's not great. And so I've been exploring some other options. Comfort zone MVP right behind Clack. Mac Whisper is another option. I object. I object. I veto giving Clack MVP status. Most voiced product. Comes up every episode. Yeah, but Mac Whisper, which is a great app, also has a dictation mode.

So you can set a system-wide keyboard shortcut. So I have it mapped to the right option button. So if I hold down the right option key, I get a little thing on screen next to wherever I'm typing, and I can dictate, and it all processes locally, and it's pretty darn good. It's absolutely slower than the Mac one. It is far more accurate, though, in my experience. It does a better job with punctuation. It does a better job with pauses between sentences as you just sit there like, what was I going to say next?

It does a better job with those. And the one real downside of it is it really scales with your computer's speed. So because it is doing all the processing locally. So on my M4 MacBook Pro, it's pretty quick. I like dictate, I let go, and within like two seconds, even with like a long thing, it's on screen, it's there. I also have an M1 MacBook Pro for work.

So this is the 2020 model, the original M1 MacBook Pro. It's more like 10 seconds. And that is into the territory of actually too long to wait for my dictation to show up, and it feels kind of not great to use. It works. It's the same quality, but like just takes like 10 seconds. So I think that's probably what I'm going to go with, but there is a third option, and I teased it last week that I've been using, and it's called Aqua Voice.

Now, the problem with this one is it is a subscription, which I'm averse to. I'm averse to having too many subscriptions. This one, I would like not to pay a subscription for it. It's $10 a month, which is also like that's a little much for, I think, what this is. Although it's very useful, so I don't know. I could see if you're somebody that literally dictates everything, that being a steal. But if you're just doing it every once in a while, $120 a year, that's, yeah.

So yeah, so the subscription is definitely a bit much. But this is kind of a superhuman situation for me. I'm sorry. Actually, I'm very sorry for bringing it up. It's not a cult. But it is, it's a piece of software that is too expensive for what I personally get from it. But I find it so good that I'm using it more and I don't want to cancel it. Yeah. So anyway, the cool thing about AquaVoice.

Oh, the other downside is it's not done locally. So it's all sent up. So it relies on your connection. There's privacy concerns, presumably. But I guess I'm not personally concerned with the sorts of things I'm using it for. But it does mean that no matter what computer you're on, it performs the same. So that's good. But the cool thing about AquaVoice is that not only is it using modern models to kind of do the speech to text,

It also is simultaneously using water. Using water, yes. Yes. The cool thing about AquaVoice is that it is not just listening to what you say and turns it into text. It's also listening for instructions as you talk. So you could start dictating something and then be like, oh, I want to change the wording. You could say like, delete that last sentence and then you say this. And it will delete the last sentence you said and replace it with whatever you just said.

It's really good at that. They advertise it as being able to do other things like dictate a list and then say, format that as a markdown list, and it'll turn it into a markdown list for you. So there's some cool stuff there. I usually use it for just error correction, like where I start saying something. I'm like, oh, shoot, go back, say this instead. And it does pretty good at that. But it's just, it's very fast. I've been timing these things. I've been doing screen recordings to get like down to the frame timings down to compare it.

It's about two seconds. So basically no matter how much I say two seconds or so, I've got it on screen. So not as quick as the nearly real time that Apple does. But about as fast as Mac Whisper is on my newer Mac and way faster than it is on a, I want to say older Mac, but it's still a great Mac for basically everything. So yeah, that's what I've been using both of these. I have that one mapped to my right command key so I can choose between which one I want to use on demand.

So I'm really maximizing. And then I've got the globe key or the dictation key, I should say, to do macOS. So I can really do them all if I want. I can have it all. But I've been really enjoying it. It's really cool. I'm using it to write actually, like we write documents at work for projects that we're kicking off. And it is nice to just be able to dictate that and kind of speak in plain language and not have to like type it out

because I never learned how to type officially. You never learned how to type. I never learned how to type. Nope. Barely learned how to read. Definitely don't know how to type. But I've always been a slower typer than I am a thinker and a talker. So it is kind of nice sometimes just to be able to get stuff out on the page and then edit it later. So, yeah, I've been exploring these. I guess I wanted to bring it to the show because it's a cool new app that I've been trying. And I feel like I've had a bit of a rut with new apps that I've been finding.

So it was cool to find AquaVoice that's really excellent and a new use for MacWhisperer. You know what you can do to fix your rut? Switch platforms. Become the iPad guy. There you go. You go be the iPad guy. I'll be the Mac guy. That will go well. That'd be quite the change. Oh, you cover the new multitasking features this year. Yeah. Have fun with that. So, yeah, that's basically it. I don't think it's a really deep topic, but, yeah, I wanted to voice that.

I have a practical question. Yeah. You guys keep doing this. you keep remapping your right modifier keys. Do you not use those? No, I do occasionally. Oh, silly. Okay. So, yeah, if I do that, if I use the right command to do something, the voice thing comes up for half a second and then it goes away when I let go. So it's not an issue. Okay. I literally don't use the right modifier keys for anything. I don't even think about them.

Like if I need to hit like command C, it's always left command. Okay. I did that once. I think I tried to remap Raycast or something to the right command key. And I really quickly figured out I need the command key to be a command key, even on the right. You got one on the left side. I know. I use both. See? Two hands. One thing I will say is frustrating on the keyboard thing is on Apple's keyboards, there's the globe key.

That globe key isn't on any other keyboards. And you can't, like, it's proprietary. Like, if you go into VIA with a mechanical keyboard, there is no option to make a globe key. Like, somehow it's just locked down to Apple's keyboards. Yeah. Well, and even in Apple's keyboard settings and system preferences or system settings, apologies, showing my age, you can remap command to be control, to be caps lock. You can move all those around to be whatever you want, but you can't do anything with the globe key.

I think if you have an Apple keyboard, you can map the globe key to something else, but you can not map something else to the globe key. So you can't, I'm not using Apple's keyboard. I'm using my low free and all sorts of things, but no globe key. But on the iPad, you can remap something like the caps lock key to be the globe key. But there's a bug, and it's literally been a bug for like the last five years, that when you unplug the keyboard and then plug it back in, it resets. Oh. That's nice.

Yikes. So it basically updates the firmware, but never hit save. Yeah, essentially, yeah. Interesting. This is so dumb. That's a surprise. yeah yeah yeah it's literally been there for five six years I ever since they've added that feature ever since they added the globe key like you've been able to go into the keyboard hardware keyboard modifier keys and then you can change something like the caps lock key to be the globe key but it doesn't stick huh

well I'll be I will be trying dictation maybe Like, I've never used it and I never see the appeal. But you seem to praise it all the time. And I don't know, maybe it could be useful. I'm becoming a fan. What can I say? I think the one reason that I've never used it a lot is because I'm always worried about what it's actually writing for me.

I'm a control freak. Yeah, and there is a difference between how you speak and how you write. So sometimes you will dictate something that you think makes total sense and you are like, yes, I nailed it. And then you read it back and you're like, why does this sound so stupid? It's a skill, but I guess my question to the comfort zone audience is, do you have suggestions for other dictation apps I should be trying?

It's a thing I'm suddenly interested in. So Mac Whisper, I think, is what my go-forward is going to be because it's free to use now that I bought it. And I'm curious if there's others. You could always get an assistant, and then you can end everything in dictated but not red. Should I hire an assistant to help me type? Just hire an assistant. They type everything for you and everything you, from iMessages to emails to blog posts.

Everything ends as dictated but not read. Okay. Okay. Well, you'll know when I make the switch. It'll be very obvious. I'm dying over here, by the way. Are you okay? Yeah. The pollen. Okay now. All right. You guys ready to get into the challenge? Yes. This was the hardest challenge ever. This one was extremely difficult. Was it hard? Yes, it was.

Yes, it was hard. I know. It was incredibly hard. Niléane, it was your challenge. What did you have us do? Okay, so I wanted us to work together, separately, but together, on a problem that I've had for a while, which is I need for work, I often need to create polls and to vote on decisions, but also to schedule meetings. So, you know, so just to know which is the best time slot in the week to schedule a meeting with a certain group of people.

And I've tried so many services and tools for that over the years. Right now, I'm right at a place where I use the built-in things in Discord to create a poll that sucks. And yeah, anyway, I wanted to see if the hive mind of us three can come up with something better. Yeah. Should I go first? Please. Please. Okay, so my submission to the challenge is the thing that I've been using recently already.

And is called framadate. It is ugly. Okay, so three adjectives to describe it. It is open source, it is ugly, and it's French. Three adjectives that work well to describe this. So it's actually pretty old. It's been around for years. It's made by an association, a collective called Framasoft, which is a French association specialized in creating online

services and tools, which are meant to replace like things that are often proprietary or owned by popular, not popular, but tech giants. For example, they have created, what are some good examples, actually? It looks like they make Peertube, right? Yeah, they have a Peertube server, which is a YouTube alternative, I guess. They have a translating tool.

Oh, yeah, they have Framapad, which is based on Etherpad, if you remember that tool, which is an online collaborative pad where you can contribute, multiple people can contribute together on the same document. So that's called Framipad. But anyway, so they have one that's called Framidate, which was meant to be an alternative to doodle.com, which is the tool that I mentioned last week as an example.

It works well. It works well in the sense that it doesn't have much friction for the people that you invite to it. So, for example, you create a poll. It gives you an invite link and an admin link. So you keep the admin link to yourself so that you can go back and edit the poll to your liking and close it. Oh, so you can edit democracy. Exactly. You can edit democracy.

You can actually change the votes too. Like it's a true admin. You can change the votes, which is an issue maybe if you want to vote on official decisions using this. but can you actually change the poll? I don't remember. I remember you can change the votes on the schedule meeting tool in Framidate so that you can but maybe in the poll as well I don't remember yeah and it's quite frictionless the link that you give to people when they

click on it it's pretty obvious what they have to do. They have to fill in their name and check the options that are okay with them. So in case of scheduling a meeting or voting on the poll. But like I said at the beginning, it's very ugly. And because it's very ugly, I think that's the one point of friction for people. They get on this site, and even though there's not much they can do on this site apart from inserting their name,

the UI is very... There's a bunch of stuff on there. that's maybe not useful. It's surrounded by Framasoft's menus and other tools and information. It's a bit overwhelming. Still, I think it's still the best tool yet because I think because it's completely free. There's no ads.

It's run by trustworthy organization, which is a small organization based in France, and that are known for creating reliable online services and maintaining them. I think it's all right. It's not the greatest. It's not the worst. And I think it's good that I mentioned this because this is well known in France, this tool, Framadate. I don't believe it's known outside of France.

Maybe if folks listening to this have never heard of it, you can try it. It's available. The whole UI isn't translated in English. Huh. Interesting. Yeah, I'm using it now. I was on their homepage, and they've got this nice artwork and everything that looks cool. Yes. I was like, it doesn't look that bad. But then I made a poll and I did see what you mean.

I'm like, it can't be that. It's a little rough. It's a little rough. It's a little rough. But like, it's rough, but they have some color codes that work well. Like green is green and red is red. Yellow is maybe. Like, it's very clear what the results are on a poll. But apart from that, creating the poll is confusing. The UI is not great. Voting by itself is not great.

Okay. Well, I think this is great and you did a good job. Thank you. So, but the point of this challenge is that you have found something better, both of you. Matt, what did you find? It's probably time for me to go next. this is episode 47 of the show and thus ends my 46 week streak of achieving the challenge so this is why your sexualism too

yeah this is the challenge that haunted me more than anything we've ever done I went through phases of not understanding the challenge to maybe thinking I understood it, but then looking at it again and realizing, no, I don't think I do. And then I was just pretty busy. And so I was like, I guess I would just email people.

Do you do, like, in real life, do you actually do that? Like, how do you schedule meetings with people? To schedule meetings with people, I email them. If they're internally and I can see their calendar, I will just look at their calendar and Google Calendar and we'll find an open slot. If it's someone external, I will email and say, hey, here's some windows. I'm open. Are you available? So yeah, that's what I do. That's crazy. Okay.

Yeah. I don't even use those office, those things you can do to schedule. You can set up, here's the times I'm free. here's a link to like schedule those I thought those would be cool and like almost nobody uses them they just email me back and say this time and then we just make the meeting so it's like yeah manual I guess is what we do alright so that's something maybe I did do the challenge what about Chris so this is episode 47 of Comfort Zone and thus ending my

46th week of completing this you didn't do the Coldplay challenge Oh, you know what? You're right. I didn't do the Coldplay challenge. Okay, so this is the second time I didn't do it. I struggled so hard with this one. This challenge was... I tried. I actually did. I tried to do some research. I asked ChatGPT for some help. I'm looking at what you wrote in the document. Literally? Literally? Okay, so I looked at a bunch of services.

I'm like, these are so complex and so bad and like require so much. And like, these are terrible. This is absolutely not what Neelion is looking for. And so I was like, well, why not just put a message in Discord and then emoji reply? Like that was like literally the best thing I could think of. I don't know. It's not very good. But I did put a prediction in the show notes for me. And I'm so disappointed. I would have put money on this being true. Niléane, would you like to read what I put in there?

All of it? Okay, sure. Just the last bullet point. I want to read all of it. Just the last bullet point. Okay, sure. Okay. Also, I know Matt is going to build a utility. Christopher Lawley, April 24th, 6th, 46 p.m. PST before anyone has put anything in the document. I am so disappointed. When you issued this challenge, I was like, okay, Matt's just going to build something. He's going to build something, and then we won't have to try that hard.

It does seem like there's an opportunity. It does. It really does. This is open source, right? I could just fork it and do my own CSS at the very least. And just make it look good. You're a designer? You're a coder now? This really needs the Tangerine UI treatment, is what I think. I mean I wouldn't go so far Okay so I think the issue here is that you don't you're not struggling like I do

with this problem Okay maybe we should Should we ask the audience help me This is the thing that our feedback form is perfect for If you have a way to vote for things within your organization and schedule stuff, help Neil Young out. Because I spent, like Matt, I was very busy this week, so I didn't spend, I spent about an hour on this challenge.

That was about all I could do. And I couldn't find anything that I felt like, yeah, this is what she would look for. This is the kind of thing she needs. Because I was just, I was not. I was like, none of this is great. Everything's overly complex and too much. So, yeah. Yeah, everything's too cluttered. Just to name a few of the services that are at least a little well-known besides Doodle.

There's Calendly, because I'm Googling right now. I've seen this one before. Yeah, I've used that one in the past. It's fine, but I don't know. I've had issues where like stuff doesn't show up on the calendar and stuff like that. And like, it's okay. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. There's need to meet.com. I've never seen this one. It looks even uglier than from a date. Okay. Rally.co.

Okay. Rally.co looks nice. Okay. There's a pricing menu at the top, which I don't enjoy seeing right now. okay Matt I thought maybe you would bring to this challenge a feature in fantastical but you are fantastical I am a fantastical and again I cannot stress enough how I didn't really understand the problem statement

why I don't I think it was because I got hung up on the do democracy thing and I thought it was more of a poll thing than a meeting thing I over-indexed on that I definitely looked more for polls than I did the meeting thing I grouped those two together because most of the tools out there do both so yeah but yeah Fantastical has their scheduling feature

which I've never tried it's decent it's similar to Calendly's and Google's and yeah it's okay well this is disappointing this has gone poorly this has gone terribly okay so I shall vote with emojis is the conclusion of this in this god so never mind that it's not anonymous Democracy shouldn't be anonymous.

Yeah. Okay. No, I'm just kidding. Okay, help me out, people listening. I'll report back if I find anything. Not that anyone cares, apparently, but yeah, I will report back. Sorry. I tried. I just couldn't find anything. Honestly, I felt bad when I didn't have something, and then I felt worse when, Chris, you didn't have anything either. I know. When you started off, I was like, I broke my streak. I was like, oh, no. Okay.

All right. Well, that challenge did not go very well, but maybe this next one will. Matt, what do you got for us in this coming week? And please be nice to me. I'll be in Disneyland. Well, my streak of setting up challenges continues because I do have a challenge for us. Ah, okay. Which is, I didn't write it down, but I should have for exact wording, but I would like us to try to find a new accessibility feature or piece of software that you have not used in the past or don't use currently.

And you might find helpful, either because it's actually useful to you or something you think would be interesting to other people. Did we do this one already? Yeah, we did this one. Did we? Yeah, and you issued it. I am like 90% sure you issued it. It's not my week, guys. No, trust me, I understand. Really? You're right. You muted your mic. You muted yourself again. You went red. Can you hear me?

Yeah. This week is going horribly for me. I understand. Okay. You're right. That's why I was so familiar and why it's such a good challenge. Yeah. I mean, we can do it again. I mean, there's nothing saying we can't revisit old challenges. No. Oh, boy. I also don't think there's been a major OS update since we've done this one. Yeah. No, that makes sense. I had it on the mind because I was doing the dictation things, and that could be kind of seen in that realm.

Okay. So, Chris, you're going to be traveling. we could do something with cameras oh I have an idea if you want I'm listening something with cameras okay okay my idea would be maybe since Chris is traveling to review or at least bring a transit app like a moving around app oh okay see what I mean yeah like train plane car okay I think, yeah, that's a great one.

I like that. I like that. So, okay. So, okay. So, the challenge is to bring a transit app of whatever variety you want. And I would say bonus points if it's not one people typically talk about. Yeah. Okay. So, if you bring Flighty, it's a great app. It's a boring pick. Yeah. I agree. I agree. Okay. Cool. I like this. This is good. This is nice. Thank you. Thank you for taking me into consideration. I really appreciate that because this week is going to be crazy.

Of course. We could have done something like don't use your phone for 24 hours or something. Oh, my God. I would immediately fail that one. I'd be like, great, another challenge I'm not doing because there's absolutely no way. Like, literally, Disneyland runs off of their app now. Like, you order your food through their app. The map is on the app. Like, you do all the shows and reservations through the app. Is it still the Genie app? No, I think it's just called the Disneyland app now. They got rid of the Genie Plus. How many times have they rebranded that?

They've rebranded so many times. They've rebranded all this so many times. Oh, man. All right. Well, that just about does it for this very interesting and wild episode of Comfort Zone. But before we wrap up, I have an end of the show question for you. And my question is, if you could, what game would you have completely remastered from the ground up? Like, what game would you want completely remastered?

Simpsons City Fall. Okay, nice. Yeah. That's a good one. I would say one I think a lot of other people would like, Legends of Zelda Ocarina of Time. Oh, that's a good pick. That's a really good pick right there. It's such a good game, especially if you play it on a modern emulator or if you play the decompilation version, the Ship of Harkonnen build. It's really, really great. You can run it at like 200 frames per second.

It's incredible. But yeah, full remake to make it more in line with the modern people would expect from a Zelda game, I think would be rad. Chris, what about you? And is it Oblivion? And now you're happy? Man, I'm actually very excited to play Oblivion. This week has been hell. And it's just sitting there on my Xbox right now. And I just can't touch it because I got to get so much done.

Now, if I had to pick one, and this game, technically a remaster for this game has been announced. But rumors are it's been canceled and then picked back up and then canceled and picked back up. And nobody outside knows what the state is in. So I just want it to happen. But that would be Knights of the Old Republic. And for bonus points, do Knights of the Old Republic 1 and 2. The best Star Wars game of all time. One of the best RPGs of all time. Such a good game.

Such a good game. And that twist. I won't say it. I don't know what it is. I tried playing that game recently and it's tough to go back to. It is. If you're not nostalgic for it, I played it recently, but if you're not nostalgic for it, It's a rough game. And the Nintendo Switch ports of the second one are broken. I got pretty far into the second one, and then all of a sudden I had a game-breaking bug that just broke that save file. So that was pretty upsetting.

So I would love to see both of those remade. And then, I mean, make a third one while you're at it. Like, come on. Ooh. Yeah, I know there's the online massive multiplayer one, but MMOs have never really appealed to me. Yeah, not the same. yeah I like a good story driven game alright well that just about does it for the show a huge thank you to MacStories for having us we are a MacStories podcast after all be sure to go check out all the writings and other shows and everything else that MacStories has there's a lot going on over there Matt, Nelian anything you want to plug this week just please forgive me find me

a scheduling tool please please go watch my videos because Disneyland's expensive. It's very expensive. Thank you all so much for watching or listening, however you consume it. Have a great day.