Is This Podcast Real?

What is that glass? What are you? You're jerking out of a jar. Oh yeah, it's a mason jar. Yeah. Okay, okay. And this is how we're starting the episode. 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, and this week we are all back together. As always, I am joined by Matt Birchler. Matt, how are you doing? I'm doing great. I'm glad we are all back together this week.

And we're recording on a day I don't work, so I'm actually way off my schedule, and I just finished my breakfast. I just scarved down a breakfast burrito two seconds ago. So I'm feeling great. Breakfast burrito. I was going to have a slice of Danielle's birthday cake for breakfast, but instead I had to fix a garbage disposal. That was the whole thing. But we're also joined by Niléane. Niléane, how are you doing? Hello, I am back. I'm fine. I survived a heat wave that was horrendous. It's on its way down. I don't know how to say it. It's about to go away, fortunately, until it comes back, probably in a few days, because this is the times we live in. And I'm doing well.

Nice, nice, nice. Yeah, it's only going to be 95 degrees here today. So, you know, it's only sort of scorching hot. So, but anyways, we have a big show for you all this week. But first, we have some tiny topics. Nelian, I think you have a couple for us. Yes. So I will have a main topic that will be dramatic. But first, I have two things to mention. In episode 49, that was a few weeks ago, I recommended a small Mac utility that is still called Folder Preview.

And what this does is when you install it, when you press spacebar on your Mac in Finder on a folder, it will let you preview what's inside the folder and it also works with zip files. And that's extremely useful. That's really neat. There's one huge caveat that I want to mention to this folder, to this utility, which I have since uninstalled because of that caveat, which is that I found out that...

So I have a 256 gigabyte MacBook Air. And that fills up quickly sometimes. And I don't know why. When it does fill up completely, I don't know why. It's always an investigation because macOS sucks at showing you what's eating up all your storage. Oh, it's always like the macOS system using 100 gigs and it's like some cache. Yeah, it's some cache somewhere. Good luck figuring it out. And maybe you reboot your Mac and it's gone.

Maybe it's not gone. So this time I found out that folder preview was heating up about 20 gigabytes on my Mac in some cache folder. I got rid of that so fast. And you know that feeling when you delete a huge thing on your small SSD and you're like, oh my God, suddenly I have storage left. And yeah, it felt like that. So anyone who also has a small SSD in their MacBook and if you have installed folder preview, look out for that.

Maybe it will happen to you. It's okay. I uninstalled it. It's very useful, but it's not super essential. So it's all right. Nice. Yeah. Second thing that I want to mention is, you know, I'm a trackpad girl. on my desk. I have an external Magic trackpad. For a few weeks, I've been using something else. I got a mouse. What mouse? I got the MX Master 3S from Logitech. Nice.

Oh, you have one. Mine's over there. And I just want to mention that it's great. I had one MX Master before. It was the very first one the original mx master i had it and i had it for years that i think did not was not dying it kept going uh but it did die at some point a few years ago and then i switched over to a range of mice then the trackpad for a while but lately my um what's that called your

Oh, like RSI or... No, what's that body part called? Arthritis? Oh, an ankle? Yeah, my ankle. A wrist. A wrist. My wrist? Wrist. Yeah, ankles. Head, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes. I'll figure it out eventually. Yeah. Not a native English speaker, as you can tell. So, yeah, my wrist started to hurt lately. So, yeah, I decided to go for a real mouse.

I installed something that allows to add a smooth scrolling to your Mac. Yes. Because... I think the Logitech software gives you an option to do a smooth scrolling. Yeah, but that sucks. That's barely smooth. I don't know what it's called. Smooth scrolling doesn't smooth anything. I don't know what it does. I installed something called MOS. MOS. It's an open source thing on GitHub. It's free. And it just does that. It lets you...

It makes it very smooth to scroll with a regular scroll wheel. And you can tweak the speed and the length of the animation and how slow it bounces up and down. So it's really nice. I want to recommend that. And that's it. That's what happened while I was away. except for my main topic of the day. Now, I will say for people that have like wrist or hand pains, like RSI issues or arthritis, vertical mice, and I know Logitech have one,

actually really do help. Like a few years ago, I had some issues and I used a vertical mouse at my day job and it really did help with that kind of like wrist RSI pain. But yeah, trackpads aren't great for those. For those paints. I've got one here. It's the Logitech, what is it called? Lift. Lift, yeah, yeah. I think that's the one I use too. Yeah, it's got a quiet click.

Yeah, quiet click is the way to go. Yeah. They have the MX Vertical, but I don't think it's quiet. And I think it's great. I've been using it on and off. I just think it's too small I don't even have a big hand but like when I hold so this is very video heavy sorry but when I hold it like that so as you meant to my pinky is off the side and so if you're on the desk

my pinky is just like constantly hitting the desk it should be taller is what I'm saying for my whole hand to fit comfortably on the mouse so that's why it's not ideal for me I get that yeah absolutely I like the MX Master 3S it's a good mouse but it doesn't work well with the iPad and that's on Apple because for some reason they do not support third party mouse scrolling yeah they don't work great they don't scroll well I don't know why Apple doesn't address this

it's been this way ever since they added mouse support but even on the Mac crazy how scrolling with a regular mouse on the mac is just janky as heck i mean it's okay it's not as bad as on the ipad but it should be like at least smooth when you scroll with it i don't know yeah yeah you know what i do when i get because i get wrist pain as well yeah i go to the ipad because the touchscreen does not i have no issues when using a touchscreen now let me float an idea it passed you matt and i know you've never thought of this before but like what if you were to have a

macbook like say a macbook but then maybe you could like fold the screened over and like then touch the screen like it's just a concept i know you have never personally thought of it and like and you're probably like on the fence about wanting something like that but you know it might that would probably uh fix your issues yeah you know i i thought it was i actually thought it was better that I had to switch all the apps in the operating system I used when I started to get wrist pain. But this is actually a better idea. What if it could just be one? This is a good thing.

I'll think about this. I'm glad you brought it up. Yeah, just some food for thought. You can definitely go out and buy one of those right now. All right, let's get into the main show. Unless anybody else has anything? All right. Well, I have an idea for a topic that I wanted to talk to you guys about because I've kind of been rethinking this, but I want to talk about our gaming setups. You know, Nintendo Switch 2 just came out. There's been a few other things that have been happening.

And, like, my whole setup has changed a lot in the last, like, year and a half since Danielle and I moved in together. I used to live by myself, so hogging the TV wasn't really a big deal. You know, I could sit there and play on the TV all day long if I wanted to, and nobody would care. But since Danielle and I moved in together, you know, you don't want to be the person playing a single-player game while the other person just sits there and watches. That's no fun. So I've kind of been really, you know, rethinking my whole setup, and I could go through mine first, and I do have a couple questions for you guys,

but, you know, for me, like, everyone probably has, like, the main thing that they go to for big AAA games. And for me, it's the Xbox Series X. I think I've talked a little bit about this show that I've been kind of curious about building a gaming PC. But every time I think about it and look into it, I'm like, man, once I do that, I got to deal with updates. I got to make sure games are configured correctly.

I'm going to want to deal with mods and all that stuff. And honestly, when I sit down to play a game, I just want to turn it on and it works. And one of my favorite things about the Xbox Series X is the quick resume. I turn it on. I want to resume a game. I click it and it just jumps back exactly where I was. There's no loading screens. You don't have to go through any menus or anything like that. You just jump into it. And with a Windows computer, I just don't want to deal with the maintenance of it.

I will say, it's not as bad as it used to be. And if you get a nice PC, which Chris, I know you would, you don't have to worry about those settings. They're going to be fine. Yeah, I don't know. I just, like, I don't want to deal with the Windows aspect of it. Oh, for sure. To kind of jump ahead, I talked on the show probably about a year ago. I got the Legion Go, and that is one of those handheld portable Windows gaming PCs. And it is a full PC. It has Windows 11 running on it.

Like, you can do... I mean, I could throw Microsoft Office on there and type in Word if I really wanted to. That would be miserable, but I absolutely could do it if I wanted to. That has basically gone out the window. Because I was just constantly having to deal with updates for it. I was constantly having to figure out, okay... And it's a handheld gaming PC. So, like, there is an aspect of, like, is this thing powerful enough to run this certain game? So, there was a lot of games where I was like, okay, it's not quite running the way I wanted it to.

And then there was, like, the gaming PC level on top of it of where, like, you had controller support. And it was trying to emulate an Xbox controller. So, if the game had support for Xbox controllers, which most games do, it should just work. But boy, like there was just like this level to it that like it didn't always work consistently. And I just found that to be frustrating. So the Legion Go has kind of been out for me. So like the Xbox Series X is where I play big AAA games. And I'll play them during the day while Danielle's at work.

Or I'll play them like while she's doing her own thing or something like that. So I'm not really hogging the TV. But really lately for me, the Nintendo Switch has been where it's at. Even before the Switch 2 came out, like I was playing the Switch OLED. and like the Nintendo Switch 2 is like, honestly, since that has come, that's the only thing I've touched. I haven't played a single game anywhere else. You know, this is where obviously I play all the Nintendo games because those will never go anywhere else but a Nintendo console. So, you know, Mario Kart, Zelda, Mario Games, Animal Crossing, those kinds of games obviously are all played there.

But I also play all like the indie games and stuff on the Switch 2 or Switch 1 before that. and it's just like a great place for like indie games like right now there's a big sale going on on the nintendo e-shop and i just bought a bunch of games last night that i've been wanting to play for a while they've just been on my wish list and you know i'll sit down and i'll go through them like cult of lamb has been a game that i've been i've been told i need to play and i just haven't been doing it it was on sale um unicorn overlord was another game i've heard a lot about that uh i've

kind of heard it's like fire emblem-esque um that was on sale so like i just got those and and i i've been loving the switch 2 so much i've been playing it a lot in handheld mode even though it's not great ergonomically but this way i can play while danielle's watching her show or danielle's playing her game on the xbox or something like that like we can play games together and it works out great that way and i've just been really liking that but i do have one other thing that i've been using Give me one second. Here we go. I knew there'd be a twist at some point.

Oh, it's purple. It's purple. So this right here is the A&Odin Portal 2. And if you're a listener of the NPC podcast, you know, the sister podcast with John Federico and Brendan, you'll know kind of what this is. This is an Android device. I own an Android device. I, Christopher Lawley, own an Android device. And a Windows PC, but they're both gaming handhelds. This, for the audio listeners, so it is a device running Android.

It has controllers built, and it kind of looks like the Switch Lite is what it looks like. And I actually have this, like, ergonomic case on it. If I take it off, it looks even more like the Switch Lite. This right here has an OLED display. It's like a seven-something-inch OLED display. It also has really nice controllers, really nice thumbsticks. It's got, like, the extra buttons on the back that you can program.

It has a Snapdragon something-something processor. I don't remember what those are. That covers Android for the past 20 years. Yeah. It's got, like, so there's different tiers that you can buy. this one is the middle tier which has 500 gigs of storage and 12 gigs of ram but you can go all the way up to a terabyte and 16 gigs of ram and what this is great for is emulating games so i ripped a

bunch of my game boy games super nintendo games all sorts of different stuff a few years ago and i have been using this to play those games um this is fantastic i absolutely love this thing Um, I've been, you know, one with emulator games and ROMs and stuff like that, there's a bunch of things you can do with it. So like you can modify them. So like some games, like if they like originally were just four by three games, you can, there are mods out there so that you can force them to be like 16 by nine. So they fill in the rest of the aspect ratio and stuff like that.

this thing is good what's that mods can be good and see that's the thing is this is my device that i go crazy modifying with because i find it to be fun and not frustrating and maybe it's my background in it but i find windows to be frustrating to modify like i like stuff on windows i just don't like doing it i don't have fun doing it and the benefit of this thing though is there is a micro SD card with it right there that you can put all your stuff on. So if you want to go and modify

stuff, you just take the micro SD card out, plug it into your computer, do all the mods, copy all the files over, and then you just put it in here. It's not like the Legion Go where you're having to sit there and use the virtual on-screen keyboard or something like that to type, which Windows virtual on-screen keyboard sucks. But the other benefit of what this has is it has Wi-Fi 7. So I have been using this to also stream games from Xbox Cloud. So there is an Xbox app that you can use to stream

games. It's not great. There is a third party app that you actually have to sideload. But because this is Android, it's incredibly easy to sideload called better x cloud. And with that, you can set up a whole bunch of settings, you can set the you can set the bit rate, you can set the resolution, you can set um desired frame rate you can set a whole bunch of different settings in there and like i just turned it up to maximum and i was playing like borderlands 3 on this which is a very chaotic game and it was fantastic it was like i was playing it natively on console i was able to

shoot things i was able to like it was fantastic uh i was surprised how well it works so i have been using this to stream games that support Xbox Cloud, which is basically anything on Game Pass supports Xbox Cloud now, and some other stuff as well. So I've been really enjoying this as kind of like my, I'm going to sit down and play Xbox games, but be able to stream them while in bed, or while Danielle's playing something else. Yeah, it works really, really well together.

I do also have the analog pocket, but this has kind of replaced the analog pocket for me as like if I'm going to play like a Game Boy game or something like that, I've kind of just been going to this guy. But that's kind of my setup. I'm kind of curious what your guys' setup looks like. Not much has changed since I last talked to you about Fight Simulator. Okay. So I was at first playing it via whatever Microsoft, what is it called?

Xbox, cloud, whatever. Yeah, Xbox Cloud. That never works. Yeah, I was using that. That was terrible. And then I subscribed to a service, a cloud gaming service that's called Shadow. It's owned by OVH nowadays, I believe. OVH is a French company that mainly deals in web services. Like you can rent dedicated servers.

They deal in data centers. Yeah, anyway. I believe it's about 20% of all master's servers that are hosted in OVH data centers. And then there's Hetzner. And anyway. Weird. Okay. Interesting. Yeah. So I'm using that service and it's been pretty great. I don't play a lot of games, as you may know. I still play a bit of Flight Simulator from time to time. It's been running great in that.

So what you get with this is a full PC. So when you install a client on your Mac, you launch the client, and then you get a full screen Windows desktop. And you can do whatever you want with it. Some people use this just to work and they don't play any games at all. In fact, they have a lower tier where the graphics card is not much. It's just for people who want to work on a Windows PC remotely for some reason, in a cloud PC. But my tier, I had a discount at some point.

I believe it was for Black Friday. And it's an unlimited discount. So if I keep renewing it, I will still get the discount forever. And mine costs €76 per three months. so that's oh that's not bad maths that's about 25 euros per month and that offer it's all right uh so you can you can stream uh 4k uh up to 120 fps wow yeah uh so if your connection can support

that it's great uh i don't even have i don't even have a 120 fps screen uh i guess my phone Yeah. And you can install it on your phone. But yeah, I use it on my Mac and I have, they have an Apple TV client as well, which is amazing. Oh, that's cool. And yeah, that's amazing. So you launch the Apple TV client, you have a full Windows desktop on your Apple TV, which is insane. You cannot use it at all.

Like, how do you even control the mouse? I have no idea. And I have not figured it out. Maybe they have a compatibility mode with controller. But what we've done, so I don't even have controllers. I have a Stasia controller, but that's not been working great lately. So I have the Nintendo Switch controller pro, the pro controller. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I have that paired to the Apple TV in the living room. And I can use that with that cloud PC. And so what I've done, because you cannot control the Windows PC on the Apple TV, You can not control the mouse.

I have enabled the Steam big picture interface. So if you're not familiar, that's the big interface that you can navigate easily with a controller. That's the interface that they have enabled by default on the Steam Deck. Oh, yeah. Okay. So it's a very regular console-like interface where you can browse through your game library and the shop. And it's easy to navigate with a controller. So now in the living room, when I launched the Shadow app, it just gets into Steam and it's just like launching it to a game console.

And that's been working great. We've been playing a bunch of tiny games in this way in the living room. And I got a bit of good news lately, recently, which is that they have informed me that my offer will be upgraded at the same price. Like the machine will be upgraded. I'm guessing they're upgrading all of their machines at this tier. So it says at the latest on the 15th of July, so probably soon, my machine will get a GTX, what is it, RTX 4060?

I don't even know if that's good. Oh, that's good. Okay, that's good. That's pretty good. I don't even, I have no idea. I just know that currently the machine had a 1060, I believe, or something like that. That'll be a significant upgrade. That's a big jump. Yeah. And yeah, so that's great. And more RAM, I believe it's going up from 8 to 16 gigabytes of RAM. So that's good. And the price remains the same. I'm not sure if the price remains the same because I have the discount that's indefinitely going.

I mean, probably. Like, you have a definite discount. Yeah, that's how it works, I guess. So that's been great. And that's just it. I have a Nintendo Switch first generation, as you know, because, yeah, anyway. And, yeah, that's it. And lately, I've not been playing anything apart from Flight Simulator. I played a bit of Euro Truck Simulator again because the Grease DLC came out. So now you can drive through Greece.

And they announced an Iceland DLC. I'm excited for that one. And that's it. Iceland's high on my list of places I want to visit. Well, yeah, with Eurotrack Simulator, your dream becomes true. I think I want to go in person, but yeah. The DLC is not out yet, so not now, but probably in a few months. Okay. That's pretty cool. I like that the streaming setup works for you. I'm glad that works for you. Yeah, we have a great connection, fiber connection here, and it's been working amazingly.

Our Wi-Fi is terrible. We have an old router provided by our ISP from years ago, and it's got Wi-Fi 5 gigahertz, and that's it, and it doesn't go through walls. I'm in this room right now where, as you remember, I had to run a huge internet cable to this computer to take advantage of my connection.

And I don't want to upgrade. My ISP provides better routers, and I could get that for 10 euros. I don't want to bother. Yeah, it's like a whole thing when you've got to upgrade your router. Yeah, I talked to my ISP. Yeah. Yeah, my ISP router is basically in modem mode right now, and I use my own routers. Yeah, I could do that as well, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. Matt, what about you? What's your setup look like? Mine's a little more maximalist.

So let's start from the smallest and then get bigger. Okay. So, like you, I have an analog pocket. Nice. which I love because it plays actual Game Boy games. This is the one that I bought in 2001, two, whenever Golden Sun came out. Oh, nice. I couldn't see what a game it was. Yeah. It's a thrill to be able to just like pop in these cartridges and they just, I pick up where I left off. It's great.

And like, like you, I may have loaded my collection on here, so I don't need to have the cartridges. I think it's blowing out the screen. Yeah, yeah. All we can see is a black line. Perfect. But that black line represents so many fun games from my childhood, which I get to play on that. And I love, this is the way I will play Game Boy games because this feels right. It does. I don't like playing them on a bigger screen. Yeah, I kind of agree with you.

I love the analog pocket. My thing is I don't like managing multiple devices. Yes, you can technically move your save files back and forth between ROM devices, and there's ways to kind of get that to sync, but does it work? I don't know. I mean, it's not going to work with the analog. You'd have to have Android devices. But I just like being able to pick up one device. And it is annoying when I don't have a game that supports, like I can't get a game to support 16x9 on the Odin Portal 2.

But yeah, the analog pocket does just feel right for Game Boy games, especially like classic Game Boy games, like Game Boy and Game Boy Color. Yeah, and what I love about it is there's no internet on this at all. It never gets software updates. Kind of back to our conversation last week about pro apps that only update we need them to. This thing just works. It just works. It never phones home. It never bothers me about an update. It's lovely. But you can update it, And if you got it when it originally updated, there's now an update, or got it when it originally came out, there's now an update that supports Super Nintendo games.

So it might be worth doing the firmware update. Yeah, so I have my Super Nintendo games on, I think, Super Nintendo and the original NES. There might be something else it supports, too. But I did do a firmware update on mine, and all my Super Nintendo games are on there. And it's a great device to play them on. Interesting. Okay. Well, getting larger, we have this. Ooh. Oh. Is that a DS? It's a 3DS. Nice.

And this, I never owned a normal DS or a 3DS. I just missed those generations. And so I never got to play any of those games. I got into the Pokemon franchise for the first time since the 90s last year. played a couple games, and apparently the heyday of the Pokemon series were these DS and 3DS games. And so I want to play some of those. And I wanted to play the 3DS one because I've never seen the 3D screen, and it's kind of cool.

So I picked this up on eBay a couple months ago, and it's a delight. The screen isn't great for modern standards. I would love an analog version of this with like the 10x resolution, but the 3D effect is cool. And you can jailbreak it so that you can do whatever you want with it. And that's lovely. So you can't get games for it now. So I've got a cartridge in mind that I'm playing. I'm playing Zelda Link Between Worlds, which is a fun game.

It turns out you can turn into just paint on the wall and you kind of shimmy back and forth. It's lovely. Oh, yeah. I remember that. Yeah. It's great. It's so fun. And it feels just so good to play. It feels pretty solid and, like, is the sort of Nintendo hardware that you can just, like, throw on the ground, and most of the time it'll survive. Oh, the 2DS. The 2DS was, like, the child Nintendo DS. That thing was indestructible.

Like, you could drop a nuke on that thing, and it'd be fine. Was that the wedge one that didn't survive? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was, like, no hinge, no nothing. It was designed so you could give it to a kid and they can't break it. One of my biggest gaming regrets is selling my 3DS. Basically selling any old Nintendo console. I have a couple of them still. I have my Nintendo 64, but I sold my GameCube because the Wii could play GameCube games.

But there's just something about the GameCube that was just fantastic. And I sold my 3DS as well. And I regret selling those too. Yeah. I've sold all my old consoles because I had no money. And what you don't realize is that eventually you'll want those again. And then they will be more expensive to repurchase them. Yep. But such is life. I had the original Nintendo DS. You did? Oh, really?

Yeah. That was a Christmas gift. I mean, I was a small child. I never had the original one. I went straight to the 3DS. But the nice thing about the 3DS is it could play DS games. Do you remember PictoChat? Did the 3DS have PictoChat? I think it did, but I wasn't really into that. That was so fun. See, I missed all the... Because I wasn't there for the original DS stuff, I missed all the whimsical stuff with it.

like I missed the second Animal Crossing game like the Animal Crossing game I played on the DS was New Leaf which is a great one but yeah yeah okay I want to go quick because I still have three devices third biggest is Steam Deck that's big it's slightly bigger than the Switch 2 but if you can see on video the killer thing that it has over the Switch 2 is actual controllers that you can actually yes so i didn't intend to do that the new switch is better than the original one but uh yeah i love the steam deck it's more of like a console than a pc

uh just opens up you know you know the interface it just opens up here's your list of games you pick the game and it just works uh i love the steam deck does the steam deck have like a quick resume thing kind of like the xbox yes well that's not exactly the xbox does it better than anyone else because you can have like multiple games i think frozen oh yeah and you could have multiple people like if i'm playing a game and then danielle starts playing her game and then i go back to my game it resumes so yeah no it'll it'll pause a single game and then you can resume it but that's it so similar to like the ps5 switch everything but xbox so um yeah so that was that's the other one i love that that's where i play a lot of my all my lower end pc games or mid-range pc

games um it's just fun uh there's an f1 manager game that i may be in the top 0.1 percent of the world of people who play i treat it like a screen saver i play it like while i work it's just off to the side and i'm like having practice sessions go and races and qualifying it's a wonderful game um anyway that's a rabbit hole we had enough f1 talk last week and we have some more coming for the challenge we have some more coming for the challenge um last two uh switch two which you already talked about very happy with it just want more games uh that are made for it that'd be great

um and then the last thing my baby uh is my gaming pc which i i love it ruined consoles for me give us some specs the specs uh so it is an intel i7 i want to say a 13 700k cpu it is one of the ones that was had those uh overheating problems that intel had to fix with a firmware update um so got to re uh i don't even know what the phrase is i had to go deep into the bios to fix that one

that was not fun and that is why i don't want a windows gaming pc yeah you'll be fine you'll be fine um that's the cpu it has an nvidia rtx 4070 super gpu uh which plays effectively every game that I want at 4k at least like 60 hertz usually more like 100 um 64 gigs of ram and uh whatever else is interesting I don't know upgradable storage I can put as much storage in there as I want what a concept and is that that uh yeah I know right uh and is that plugged in at your office like at your monitor where you work or is that plugged into your tv where is that plugged in at

it's in the office so it's where i am now so i'm i've got my mac plugged in now but i just move the thunderbolt cable over to the pc and then that's using all the accessories and everything so very easy to uh switch around nice nice nice nice so yeah so it is a so it's thunderbolt for the video card you're not using display port uh it's doing it's usbc as display port oh okay gotcha whatever it does but whatever it's doing i get the full display port it's like 2.1 specs so i'm getting a 4k monitor at uh 240 hertz jeez yeah that's right we've talked about that

that's wild that is yes yeah so crazy um i actually use it at 144 hertz just because like i never get that frame rate anyway in games so why spend i feel like i should let the monitor rest i don't know if that's a rational thing i feel like it's working harder if it's doing a higher frame rate sure yep yep uh well that's really interesting i thank you guys for for for that information i i i like that we have a a spread of different opinions when it comes to like our gaming setups like

none of us are the same other than like we all have Nintendo Switches uh but yeah the um I do have a question for you guys like and Neilian you kind of already alluded to this but uh what games are you guys currently playing like what are you currently playing like for me uh I like I said I haven't really put down the Switch 2 since I got it so I've been playing Mario Kart World obviously but I've been going back and playing Tears of the Kingdom because I actually never finished that game on the Switch. I can't remember why I didn't finish it. Something else must have came out, or I must have got busy with something, but I never finished it. So I've been going back,

and I'm doing all the side quests, all the main quests. My goal is to not 100% it, but do a vast majority of it. And something that I've actually been enjoying, I thought it was going to be kind of a joke, but the Zelda Notes app. So Zelda Notes is part of the Switch 2 upgrade for Tears of the Kingdom and Breath of the Wild. It's built into the Nintendo Switch iOS, and I'm guessing Android app. But there's a Zelda Notes feature in there. And there's like a few things. There's like daily bonuses, and like you can check your progress of like, how many shrines have you done? How many

Korok seeds have you done? Stuff like that. But they also have a map. And the map shows everything. Shows where all the shrines are, shows where all the Korok seeds are, shows where all the caves are, shows where all the wells are, shows where everything is. And as somebody that, like, I like exploration in games, but Tears of the Kingdom and Breath of the Wild are huge, and I just don't have that kind of time anymore. Like, you know, I don't have video game time like I did when I was a kid or a teenager. I'm an adult now with a business and a girlfriend and family and all that stuff, so I don't have that kind of time.

So just being able to take the Zelda Notes app, see like, oh, here's a Korok seed, here's the shrine, here's a whatever, and just do those things really quickly is really, really nice. I will say it gives me a theory. So you guys know how the Nintendo Switch 2 has two USB ports? Yeah. Okay. I think that top one wasn't just meant for the camera. I have a feeling there's an accessory coming later that's going to be a second screen, and that's how they're going to emulate.

Because you know how they do the retro game consoles and stuff now through Nintendo Switch Online? This is how they're going to do DS and 3DS games, is they're going to have a second screen that you can plug into that USB port. And I think that was originally how they intended for the Zelda Notes app thing to work. because it is so awkward sitting there trying to play handheld and then have your phone off to the side. And it doesn't even work if I dock my Nintendo Switch and sit on the couch. It's too far away and it doesn't even communicate.

So I think the second screen is how they are really meant for you to use the Zelda Notes thing. Anyways, that's just a theory. But could they not just... For DS games, right, you're saying? Yeah. Yeah, the aspect ratio for that is 4 by 3, right? Yeah. So you can fit the two screens side by side on the Nintendo Switch's display. Yeah, but you know, like... And it's a touchscreen. Yeah, but it's not the same. Like, you're supposed to have top to bottom for the DS. Yeah, sure, but it's a weird accessory to imagine.

That's why I think it would be optional. I think it'll be an option. I don't think it'll be required, but I do think... I think that top USB-C port, that's what that was originally meant for. So it would be on top. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's even weirder. Why? That makes sense. It's just like the DS. Listen, the Switch 2 is so normal. It is a safe update. It's a great update, but it is the safest Nintendo console I think they've maybe ever done. I'm here for some weirdness.

Do something crazy. I mean, sure, yeah. What if they did cardboard VR headsets that you had to fold up yourself? That sounds crazy, but they did it. I don't count anything out. Anything's possible. Remember the Mario Kart game? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I kind of wanted that. But anyways, that's just my theory. It's a working theory, and it's kind of based off a theory. So Brendan on NPC, I think, had that theory a while ago are going to do a second screen to emulate DS and stuff like that.

But I'm kind of working off that theory of like, it's like the Zelda Notes app screams like, hey, this was actually meant to be like there all the time because it's just awkward right now. And I even was like, I wonder if I could get like an iPhone holder that goes on like mouse to the D like the switch to and then goes on the anyways, that's the whole thing. That's how it starts the modding. Yeah, right. Anyway, so Tears of the Kingdom, that's what I'm playing.

Mario Kart World, that's what I'm playing as well. But after I finish Tears of the Kingdom, I really want to play Fantasy Life Eye. That looks like a really interesting game. You've stolen my pick. Sorry. Please talk about it. Because it looks like this weird cross of, like, it's a little Animal Crossing with, like, a little Zelda. Like, it looks really interesting. So, anyways, Matt, tell us about it. And what else you've been playing. It's kind of like, so Fantasy Life Eye, The Girl Who Steals Time, is basically like Animal Crossing and Zelda mixed.

It is a little Stardew Valley-y potentially as well. I'm very early. I'm only like an hour into it. But I've heard enough people really excited about it, so I picked it up. And I always want to get into these games, and I struggle to. So I think this one has more action, and that'll help me. Currently, it is the second best-selling Nintendo Switch 2 game on the eShop. Really? Wow. Yes. It's beating out Cyberpunk right now.

Wow, sir. Anyway, it's very nice. That's one, actually, where I bought it originally on Steam to play on my Steam Deck. And it didn't run as well as I thought it would, because it doesn't seem that crazy a game. But it actually does not run well on PC. And on the Switch 2, super smooth. Lovely. I was about to say there's one game I want to play, like right now. But it's a multiplayer game and I don't have any friends and you guys hate me. So I can't play it. It's called Peak. Have you seen that?

That game has been popping off lately on YouTube and Twitch and whatever. So it's a game where you are very small, like children-like climbers. It's very cartoony. And you climb up mountains and you have to help each other to climb the mountain. And you got to collect loot on the way up. And it's got a bunch of like silliness throughout the game.

And you have to progress through several levels. And you got to go as far as you can. And the very interesting thing that I found about it is the levels, they reset every day. So it's the same level for everyone playing the game, but it resets every day. Oh, so it's like a daily game. Yeah. But the levels are always the same, but not the actual terrain.

That changes every day. So it's like procedurally generated or something. That looks really fun. I want to find people to play with. It looks like it's just on Steam? Yeah, it's on PC only. It's $8. I was about to... Yeah, I suggested that to my partner, but they don't have a PC, and it's not... You can't run it on a Mac. They have a Mac.

So, yeah. I could... Well, if it works on the Legion Go, I could bust out the Legion Go for this. Yeah. It looks better to play with a keyboard and mouse. Oh, okay. I've seen people play on Twitch with a controller, but it looks better suited to keyboard and mouse. I am so unbelievably bad at keyboard and mouse games. Like, unbelievably bad at keyboard and mouse. How come? I don't know. I just, I'm way better at a controller, and I know, like, a keyboard and mouse is supposed to be more accurate,

and, like, you know, all the 360 no-scope pros are going to, like, they're, like, who you got to do. You never grew up with Quake or the likes. I did, actually. like i grew up playing pc games i didn't have a console for a really long time we like i played a lot of pc games um but just over time i graduated or i went i went shifted more towards consoles and i've just gotten really bad at keyboard and mouse uh but like i grew up playing uh uh quake uh mech Warrior, Descent, X-Wing, TIE Fighter, X-Wing versus TIE Fighter.

Like, those were the games I grew up playing. And we did have a flight stick, which was really fun, but I also did keyboard and mouse as well. Okay, okay. But anyways, that was an interesting topic. That was a lot of fun just kind of going through our gaming setup. I enjoyed that. Thank you guys for your input. Nelian, you have kind of been teasing us about your topic. What have you got for us this week? Yeah, it won't be long, but it's like I've been away, right? So you may come out of this hearing me thinking that I've been away because of this.

But I promise, not related, I was away because of work stuff. But basically, let's play a little game. I will tell you the story, and every couple of minutes, I will ask you to guess what happens next. Okay. Okay. All right. Okay. Just first things that comes to mind so we don't spend a lot of time. So I wanted to try out macOS Taho.

That's how the story starts. I do not want to upgrade my only Mac. I have only one Mac right now. So that's out of the question. I will not upgrade my Mac. So what I did, what I thought was, I'm going to install a VM. Install it in a VM just to... Because there are some small things in Tahoe that I wonder about, and it's really hard to find information about them, like small settings that I want to check out if they've changed or not in macOS Tahoe.

And so I wanted to check them out by myself. So I installed a utility that's been mentioned by a lot of folks because it's easy to use to set up a Mac OS VM. It's called VirtualBody. Okay? So I installed VirtualBody. I run... So it's very easy to use. You install it, and then there's a wizard that launches and tells you what you want to do.

So macOS, you click through macOS, you set up the size, and then it does everything for you. It downloads the copy of macOS Tahoe, creates the VM, and you just have to sit back and wait until it boots. So now, guess what happens? It installed Linux instead. It installed Tahoe on your main drive, on your main boot. That would have been fun. That's not it. I was like, oh, God, that's it, isn't it?

That's not it. It did not install Linux either. I did click on macOS Taho correctly. No, what happens is my wallpaper disappears. Like on your main version of macOS that you boot into. On the host Mac, my wallpaper disappears. I have the same gray wallpaper that you see in the macOS recovery, right? Dark gray. so I'm like okay maybe that's a visual glitch some graphics drivers are resetting or whatever but it stays

there my welfare stays gone for a while so I start freaking out and now is the next guess for you guys open system settings guess what I see in system settings a beautiful well designed app that everybody enjoys. I'm going to guess system settings shows that your wallpaper is still there. Okay. That's not it. Oh, okay. What I see when I open system settings is nothing.

Oh, like nothing at all. Like it's just gray? The window is empty. Oh, no. The only thing in the system settings window that is showing is my in my Apple account, avatar, you know. But I click on it and nothing happens. And one line in the sidebar, that's the general tab. If I click on the general tab, that's empty. There's nothing there. Oh, no. So, like, something really bad is happening right now, and I don't know why or what.

So, I click back on the virtual. I want to mention everything else is working perfectly fine. like my other apps are still open Safari I'm still able to browse the web so like imagine my Mac is half broken right now for some reason and I can browse the web to search why but I can't find anything by the way I'm typing things like virtual body grey wallpaper system settings gone that's my Google query sure and nothing shows up so that's worrying

when I click on virtual body it starts to freeze. So virtual buddy is like beach balling. Nothing's happening. So I choose the patience and I wait. You wait? I wait. Okay. Yeah, I wait by 45 minutes and I will not have you guess what happens because nothing happens. Honestly, that was going to be my guess. So I force quit virtual buddy and I'm like, okay, Something's gone horribly wrong, maybe, or maybe it's not gone horribly wrong.

I can just try and reboot the Mac. So I reboot my Mac. And now, guess what happens? It's still the same. When I reboot the Mac. It's still the same. Yeah, no wallpaper, system settings is blank. Okay, yeah. Yeah, you're close. Basically, yes, still no system settings, no wallpaper. But it's actually a bit worse because now things are missing from the UI. Control center is gone. Oh, my God.

What did Virtual Body do to your computer? I haven't. So, spoiler alert, I still have no idea what happened. Is it still like this right now? No. Okay, I'm getting ahead. Sorry. Yeah. So, anyway, I will not go through everything that's missing, but a bunch of things are missing. And I have permission prompts showing up. Oh, no. Some of my menu bar apps, like, for example, the Fantastica is telling me I can't access the calendar.

So I click on Allow, but nothing happens because there's no system settings, remember? Things like that. All my third-party apps run, but they can't access anything because there's no system settings. So I freak out and again, I Google things and I can't find anything that relates to this. So what I end up doing is I boot back into macOS recovery and I try something.

In macOS recovery, so you can restore things. You can restore parts of macOS, right? Uh-huh, yeah. Yeah. And one thing that you can restore using the migration assistant, I believe, is system settings. You can restore your macOS settings, right? So I do that. I was like, okay, let's maybe virtual buddy decided system settings needs to be gone. Let's just restore that. Again, that does not do the trick.

Nothing changes. So now I want you to guess because I solved, I mean, I've solved it. I resolved the crisis, let's say. But guess how? I'm going to guess you had to completely reinstall macOS. Like delete the, wipe the drive and restart from scratch. Different guess? I think you just kept rebooting.

Okay, so Chris is halfway there. Because I did try that next. I reinstalled completely macOS. And guess what? It did not change anything. Oh, my God. I reinstalled macOS and it did not change anything. It's incredible. I've never seen that before. Something was deeply broken. So I must say that you can reinstall macOS from the recovery while keeping all your data.

That's the thing that I do. Oh, yeah. See, I think you're going to have to. That's why I said you had to wipe everything. Exactly. So that's why I said you were halfway there. What I ended up doing is I wiped the Mac. completely wiped it and then reinstalled macOS after that and then restored a time machine backup and time machine saved me big time i have daily backups on a local ssd that's plugged in stuck

under the desk so that's always plugged in i'm so glad i have those backups and i have to do that it took me an entire day from the moment where at nine o'clock in the morning I was excited about trying Tahoe in a VM to nine in the evening when macOS was finally reinstalled with all my data data restored I so this is an open like channel people tell me what happened do you have any idea

people listening i still have no idea i'm keep searching for issues like that that people may have had i have no idea what happened why virtual buddy caused me to completely reinstall mac os you know what the really that and this is gonna you're not gonna be happy about this but this the crazy thing is is if you would have just installed mac os tahoe like as the main boot you probably wouldn't have had any issues it probably would have just been fine um yeah i've been having a great experience i could have in directly upgraded to tahoe then decided i don't like it and gone back

to sequoia resolved my yeah yeah i would have spent less time probably yeah that's wild i have no idea what would cause this other than virtual buddy corrupted some you know folder file in the library that that's i mean psa don't install virtual buddy because it's not your mac's not old you have an m2 macbook air that's not like some old like not supported mac like it's a very

common mac that's out there oh don't install virtual buddy people yeah it's from uh gie rambo who's a great developer he's really good yeah i was really everybody yeah oh i feel bad because he's a great developer. Oh, okay. But yeah, that's a weird, that's, I mean. That might be something to DMM about. I don't know, guys. I'm so sorry. So I wanted to tell this story because I think it's fun to look back on.

Very fun. Lots of fun was had. But yeah, so the conclusion to this is I've never seen Tau. You still have seen it? I still have not seen it. I still haven't seen it. Now, hear me out. Have you thought about trying it again? No. No. I'm never touching that piece of software again. You know what? I'm never installing a VM in my life ever again on this machine. I will not do it.

I mean, I guess it's taught me as well that it's okay to install Mac OS and restore from a time machine backup. Because essentially, I was back where I left it. those time machine backups are pretty amazing the permissions will reset for some apps but not all of them that's weird like some apps they don't ask you again but many apps they will just reset everything the permissions are all reset but that's okay once you click through the 100 permission prompts everything works fine

okay quick tangent how for the permission prompts has Apple not realized that like hey instead of popping up five permission prompts every time you install an app, why don't we just have one window that says, hey, we want access to all of this stuff, and you can either click allow on each one or allow all. Like, just one window. That could be a part of the migration assistant when you restore Time Machine backup. Oh, yeah, that'd be good. But yeah, Time Machine, great.

I used it the other day, too. I had a sponsor come back to me and be like, hey, we want to do a second ad spot with you. But I had already deleted the project, and I was like, well, I don't really want to film that whole ad spot again. So I went into Time Machine, grabbed that old project, exported just the ad spot, deleted it again, and was good to go. Like, Time Machine's great. I mean, don't rely on it for an archive, but it's fantastic. I love Time Machine. Yeah, saved me. That is a wild story, Neelian.

That was my topic. That was a wild, wild story. And again, it's not the entire reason why I was gone last week. Although you may believe it. But I'm sorry you haven't got a chance to try Tahoe yet. It's okay. The more screenshots I see, the more afraid I am. That's one I would probably wait until like mid-July into July to probably try out. Guys, we'll talk about it again, but I'm worried about Tahoe in a big way.

I've never been so worried about a macOS release. We'll talk about it. We'll talk about it. I will say, as someone running all the betas, I've had the least issues on Tahoe of any of them. My iPad is a disaster. My iPhone hemorrhages battery and drops down to like 5 FPS daily. I don't know why. It's very strange. We were out all day on Danielle's birthday. I planned like a whole day with her. And the whole time I'm thinking, oh, my God, I have the beta on my phone.

We're in her car. And like, don't even get me started on her car. Like charging my phone in her car is just not a thing. So I'm just like, oh, my God, I didn't bring an extra battery. This thing's going to be dead. By the time I got home, I literally had 5% battery life. The horror. Modern horror. It was not good. all right well you guys ready to get in the challenge oh yeah yeah i have a question what was the challenge i was away uh yeah so matt it was your challenge what would you have us do

this week okay so normally actually i think i can still pull it up because i have the old document so the challenge last week was nope here it is integrate f1 into your digital workflow and i would like to clarify yes go ahead go ahead god i think this is going to go great for us i think it's going to be a winner across the board so for your information listener i was made aware of the challenge so i came back from

paris and i asked in the group chat what's the challenge this week and i'm told this thing this prompt and imagine my face i have no idea i'm like so the first thing i thought is okay i'm going to do something with the f1 key and i'll never see it coming and then chris sends a message to say the F1 key doesn't count. Yep. All my hopes were gone. Because I knew as soon as I said that, I was like, wait, me, Leon's going to do something with the F1 key and not actually Formula One, which is what Matt intended.

Because we had a big Formula One conversation last week. I actually made a mistake last week. I said that Aston Martin was going to be using the Mercedes engines next year. No, they're going to be using the Honda engine next year, which actually, I think, Helps prove my point that Max would go to Aston Martin because he has a good relationship with Honda. Anyways, that's my correction. That's nice. Matt, it was your challenge. What did you do for the challenge? Would it be bad if I said I skipped it? That would be...

Yes, it was your challenge. I would command you to install Virtual Buddy right now on your main Mac. So I've just messaged you guys a picture of my terminal. Oh. And what I did was I got the Aston Martin, who's not my favorite team, but I do think their car looks really, really nice. I got the Aston Martin colors and updated my terminal profile to use it.

Oh. The colors, you mean? The colors, yeah. So it's kind of got their dark green as my terminal background. I'll try to make this the chapter art. And then I'm using kind of yellow as the main text color with a lighter color there. But yeah, it's a little Aston Martin. I like this. Yeah. Does it change anything? I never thought of that. Does it make me more productive? Probably not. Does it make me faster? Not based on the 2025 car. Oh, God, no.

In fact, it probably makes you slower. But would it make Adrian Newey happy if he walked by my desk? Sure. I think that's great. I will say Aston Martin has a really good-looking car, but you know what my favorite-looking car was? A few years ago, the Alfa Romeo red and white one. That was a good-looking car. Then their final year, they went red and black. It didn't look as good, but it was their second to the last year in Formula 1. That red and white car with the green four-leaf clover, that looked good.

That looked really nice. so what did you guys do so I did two things actually so the first one and I think the one that probably counts the most is I listened to the Formula One Hans Zimmerman soundtrack while I worked for the Formula One movie the Formula One movie soundtrack Hans Zimmerman it's great for while you work is it Hans Zimmerman or Hans Zimmer Hans Zimmer So Hans Zimmer.

Okay, I was going to say, is there a new Hans Zimmerman in town? Nope, nope, nope. I'm making sure your DMs, Chris. Your DMs. Hans Zimmer. Hans Zimmer. Sorry. Hans Zimmer. His soundtracks are always great to work to. You know, I felt like I was working faster. Is this real? Is this podcast real right now? No. Oh, yes. With the soundtrack, my DRS flap was open. I was going 20 miles an hour faster. I was able to overtake, clearly.

It was work. But the other thing I did, and it's part of a video that's coming out, is as seen in the hit F1 movie, have either of you, or Neil and I'm sure you're probably not that interested in it. Matt, have you had a chance to see it? Not yet. See what? Formula One movie. Oh, no. Okay. Okay. So, very, very, very, very minor spoilers. There is a scene in there where they're working on the car, and there is a Mac Studio hooked up to two Pro Display XDRs.

So, as seen in the hit F1 movie, the Apple TV original hit F1 movie, you know, you can clearly design a Formula One car from two Apple displays. Well, I don't have two Pro Displays, and I was not going to go buy those, because I wasn't going to spend $12,000. I do have two studio displays here. Thank you, Apple, for sending me a review unit with the MacBook Air. So I put two studio displays on my desk, and I hated every second of it. But I did it for another video, and I thought it counted for the challenge because it was seen in the Formula One movie.

To be clear, your second entry is dual monitors. Yeah, because it was a Formula One movie. Oh, my God. Thank you, Matt. I lost it. That's how they worked on the car. They had dual monitors hooked up to a Mac Studio. Now, I had it hooked up to a MacBook Pro, but... I go away for one week, and this has derailed so much. And then my third thing that I did... Okay. So, as Matt knows, it's highly rumored Max Verstappen is going to be leaving Red Bull this next year.

And some people think he's going to Mercedes. Some people think he's going to As Martin. Well, I actually signed Max Verstappen, and he is now my assistant. So, Max, can you come over here? I'm just kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Anyways, that's it. That's all I did. That's all I did. Neil, what did you do for this Formula One challenge? So, the prompt was integrate F1 into your workflow. Is that it? It's never a good sign when someone rereads the prompt.

Just to clarify. Just to clarify. Clarify. Just clarify. Oh, boy. She's about to technically do the challenge. No, no, no. Don't worry about it. Integrate F1 into the workflow. So I did exactly that. Yeah. Formula 1. So I sent you a link that you can click on. And, yeah, I integrated the hell out of Formula 1 into my setup, into my workflow. So what you're looking at is I've got a new wallpaper, loosely inspired by the Formula One logo.

It's Retina Resolution. Yeah. Oh, you said you have Safari background as well? Oh, my gosh. Exactly. So the best way to integrate Formula One to my workflow, I do a lot of work in Safari, as you know. It's my main browser, my favorite browser. So I thought, okay, so let's add that Formula One logo the background for my start page in Safari. And I see it every time I open a new tab. And of course, what I've done is, so the start page opens when you open a new tab.

But I've set, in Safari, you can also set a homepage using any URL of your choice. So now when I open Safari from scratch, just opens FormulaOne.com. So I'm aware immediately of what's happening. I know that Hamilton sets the pace in FP1 at Silverstone. I was not aware. Could he keep his podium streak for Silverstone? I'm sure he will. There's this whole thing going on right now. The last thing I did is just to make sure, because I've got a 3x2 aspect ratio for my monitor, and it crops out the Formula 1 logo on each side.

So to make sure that the Formula 1 logo was visible entirely, at least once in my screenshot I have covered my desktop with this is the most webp images in one desktop in the history of the world I think that's the funniest thing about it is they're webp images I don't know why it's just right click save to desktop yes you know what Nelian

I vote for you for this challenge I legitimate vote for you I've integrated Formula 1 into my workflow and I've gone fast that made me fast you know what I respect the most out of this I think the WebP is just very funny but what I like the most about this is that you're using stacks and it looks like in this screenshot you have expanded the today stack so that once this is done and maybe you've already done this you can just collapse it and then command delete

and it's gone. I may not have done that already. But... Oh, then never mind. I take back my vote. But I will say that as for the entire duration of the challenge, those logos were on my desktop. Yeah, the entire duration all week long. Yeah. Not just in the today because it started January 1st. Now, I will note that there are two PNGs left corner that it's not completely covered in the formula one logo that's

true yeah that's true but it's it's pretty good it's pretty good oh and there is a party to it's 2x png interesting I'm very curious how this happened other things I would like to call out in the screenshot that are not formula one I am so happy with the hard drive sock custom icons you have the iPod sock hard drive icons. Yes. Still using those. I think that's great. And then I noticed you're using widgets at the top right of your home screen.

Yeah. And I've never thought to put them there, but like when you save files, will they go up in the top right and cover the widgets or do the files not cover the widgets? No, they go around. They go around it. Okay. You should be saving files to your desktop anyways. Well. Yeah, I've been doing that lately. Desktop's a great place for files. Chaos. Nope, you create a folder under your documents folder. Please don't notice that the menu bar says comfort zone recording is in one hour and 30 minutes.

You may think that I took the screenshot one hour and 30 minutes before we started recording. Actually, no, that's a mistake. That's a mistake. Yeah, yeah. That's a week-old screenshot. That's a week-old screenshot. Okay, sure, sure. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. Okay. it's not what I expected this is very good this is just pure chaos I love it alright speaking of pure chaos it's Niléane's turn for a challenge and she texted us very excited about this which usually does not bode well for me or Matt

so Niléane what do you have for us this week I want to restore real challenges to the show because apparently they are completely gone. I go away for one week and the challenges don't make any sense. Technically, it was your challenge last week, but you weren't here. So Matt kind of was like, well, I got something. Okay. Okay. So I think I will inaugurate a new format for the challenge. Okay. I think it's going to be fun. So I have a small budget. Okay.

Set aside for the challenge. It's a $40 US dollars challenge. Okay. Okay. And the challenge is Matt and Chris, you will compete to sell me a new accessory. So you have one week to select a new accessory that's under $40 USD. I need to be able to purchase it from France, obviously. And yes, next week, when the challenge section starts, you will compete, argue each for an accessory that I should buy.

and one of you will win and the person who wins is the person who has convinced me to purchase their selected accessory. I like this. I like this a lot. Does it have to be a physical accessory or could it be software? That's a good question. I was thinking physical. Physical. Okay. That's fine. No, that's a separate challenge down the road. I think that's a separate challenge. I was thinking a physical accessory. Okay. I like this. I like this a lot.

I know the budget is tight but I think it makes it more fun I think it makes it more fun too I agree, I completely agree I'm actually excited about this I was worried when you texted us but I'm excited Alright, well that just brings us to the end of the show Thank you all so much for listening but as always I have an end of the show question for you guys and I want to know what was your guys' first pet? Aww My first pet was a turtle. So I grew up on Rennion Island, as you may know. And on that island, we have turtles that people usually adopt. And they live in backyards and they live happily.

and when they're born so they're tiny tiny tiny peas and when they grow up they become humongous and they weigh a ton, not literally but they weigh a ton and so yeah I had a turtle that was a tiny baby and when I had to let it go which means when I left the island and it remained with my mother it was big like that so to other listeners,

that's 40, 50 centimeters high. Wow, that's a big turtle. Big turtle. Yeah, grew up fast. Matt, what about you? I'm assuming goldfish don't count. You know, that was my first one too. It's weird how similar our stories are, Matt. I know. Yeah, you're just California me. I'm Midwest Chris. Not counting goldfish from the fair. My first pet is actually my current dog.

Oh. So I never had a pet growing up outside of the fish until, and then I got one for myself in 2018. We got them. So relatively recently. I, so like Matt, not counting goldfish from the fair, legitimately my first pet. My first pet was a dog. His name was Bear. He was a Rhodesian Ridgeback, which is an African lion hunting dog. but he looked like Scooby-Doo and he was the nicest dog ever. He was great.

I miss him. He was my buddy. Did he solve mysteries? No, but he would come and sit on my bed and watch me play video games and then try and sleep in my bed as well at night. So yeah, he was great. He was a very, very good dog. Yeah, I miss him. He's great. But thank you all so much for listening. Big thank you to MacStories for having us. We're a MacStories podcast. Be sure to go check out all the other podcasts and shows and articles and everything else.

I know they have a lot of stuff happening this summer, so be sure to go check it all out. Thank you all so much for listening. Have a great day. Bye-bye.