Who among Us Is Sane?

Welcome to Comfort Zone, a podcast all about pushing the host, well, outside of their comfort zone. I'm Christopher Lawley, and each week I am joined by two incredible hosts. First, Matt Birchler. Matt, how are you doing? Chris, I'm doing swell, and I'm super cool over here. Mmm. Not mmm. Midwest has perks. You are a cool guy. Come winter, I'm going to remember that. We're also joined by fellow person that's dealing with hot temperatures, Niléane.

Niléane, how are you doing? I'm not cool, but I'm fine. Yeah, so just a little word of warning. This may not be the best audio quality episode. Both Niléane and I are dealing with wild heat temperatures where we are. Where I am today, it will reach 110 degrees Fahrenheit. this weekend, it will reach 117 degrees Fahrenheit. So, suffice to say, I'm going to leave the AC on.

I clicked it up, but I'm going to leave the AC on for me, and I know Nelian is going to leave the AC on for her as well. Yeah. Just because that's just what we're going to have to do. Sorry. But it's just going to be way too hot for us not to be able to. Yeah, it is about 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Oof. Now, is France, I know the UK is not, but is France kind of built for hot temperatures like that or no? Oh, no. Oh. Yeah, no, it's a bit of a disaster.

Oh, no. I know people in, when American people come to France, they are astonished that people don't have AC in their homes, although it gets really hot in the summer. So, yeah, I'm fortunate enough to have an AC unit, but it's quite uncommon, actually. Oof, yeah. Here, it's been... Hot summers here are nothing new. Like, it's not interesting, but hitting 117, that's a first one for me.

So, I'm just hoping our AC doesn't go out, and we literally are loaded up on groceries and stuff, and we're just going to stay indoors all weekend long. So, yeah. Anyways, weather is not that interesting. But we have an interesting show. Niléane, you are first up in our document today. What do you have for us? All right. I just want to preface this by saying that when we started doing this show, I did not expect to bring up politics as much as I do.

All right. But hey, my tech life revolves around my work, my work as an activist. And yeah, so sorry about that. But my topic this week is how I have been, I have been forced to come back to X, formerly known as Twitter for the past two weeks. Yeah. Do you have an idea why? Well, I know you guys are doing some elections and like there's multiple rounds of elections or something.

I'm not entirely sure how this works. Yeah, that's it. So let me talk to you about this. Obviously, I quit Twitter when all the things that you know about happened. And some guy brought a thing in the Twitter HQ. But so ever since I haven't been on Twitter much. However, with these elections, I realized something.

Because things started to get wild, guys. And it's been a bit funny, actually, because some crazy things have happened. Some people are saying that in the past two weeks, a decade worth of politics has happened in France. And you can imagine that all these events unfold at a speed that you cannot just cover and you cannot just catch up on easily just by reading the news.

And so I've had an old reflex coming back to me to haunt me for the past two weeks, which is I should just open Twitter and check out what is going on right now at this minute. Because otherwise, I'm not up to date. I'm not aware of the latest happenings in this crazy campaign. And that's why I've revived an old... So my old Twitter account, my big Twitter account, is now gone.

I've removed it. It's gone. Hopefully, it's gone from their database, but who knows? So I've had to revive an old private account, which I used for close friends on Twitter. So I revived it. I'm not posting anything on Twitter. I'm just using it to read, basically. And also because you cannot use Twitter anymore if you're not logged in. I don't know if you noticed.

If you were sent a link to... Yeah. If you were sent a link to X, formerly known as Twitter recently, You may have noticed that you can't read replies or read an entire thread if you're not logged in, which is the worst. So dumb. It's so dumb. So dumb. But maybe you don't realize the impact that this platform has had on the campaign here in France. Let me give you an example.

If you're trying to live without Twitter, if you're trying to just catch up on the news of the day in the evening by reading the French press, right, you will notice that every single story that is being written and published in the press has one source. nothing else than one source and that is ex-formally known as Twitter because every candidate there are

I believe there were over a thousand candidates because it's a legislative election so yeah every constituency has a bunch of candidates every candidate in the country has used and uses today ex-formally known as Twitter I'm going to say that every time by the way so to publish statements, to say whatever is on their minds. And I think this might be a take, but I believe it.

I think the campaign would not have been this crazy if ex-formerly known as Twitter wasn't there. one crazy event that happened let me tell you about it very quickly the conservative party Les Républicains has been in a debacle where their leader joined the far right party against the opinion of the majority

of his own party So he was formally expelled from his party, even though he's the leader, which he contested. And we all learned that in real time on Twitter, including all the journalists following the story. And in the end, he closed himself in the headquarters of the party.

and forbade everyone from entering the HQ. What? And we were seeing this unfold in real time where there were journalists outside the HQ filming his window on the first floor and he was waving out of his window from inside his locked HQ while all the members of the party were outside of the HQ trying to get in and my guys the videos that were swirling around of every member of this party having

his own take having their own take and trying to get in there was a crazy video where the vice leader of the party tried to get in because she finally found the key to the front door and she was not able to open it. She had to be helped by a bunch of people to open the door while the leader was still locked in, while the leader was still locked in locking himself in his office on the first floor.

That was crazy. Final thing, this week, my organization that I work for, we published a statement. It's a significant statement and because we announced that we are determined to challenge the French government in court for something really important. We won't get into the details but we had to get this press release out there right. So we did it both ways. We went the traditional way which is when you have a press release just sent it to the press right so we have obviously a big file of journalists of

press media press media and we sent out our press release hoping that it would pick it up and of course no one picked it up a few hours later we posted the same press release on ex-formally known as Twitter. And oh my God, it was suddenly picked up everywhere. So it is just a dramatic example of journalists have not moved an inch away from Twitter, from ex-formally known as Twitter.

They are still using that platform as their main source of info, as their main way of keeping up with events. And so are everyone that need to be, so are every person, people that need to be up to date as well. So that includes people like me, activists that need to be kept up to date for their work and political personalities as well. So that's where we are, guys.

I think I wanted to bring this up as my weekly topic because I think we tend to forget. I mean, I don't, but I think people tend to forget, especially in the tech bubble, how dramatically still important that platform is today. And oh boy, it's dramatic that it is because nothing works on that thing. And yeah, something I've noticed is since I left the platform is the prevalence of community notes.

Are you aware of those? Yes, I see those on like Reddit all the time where like there's like a subreddit called Get Noted where like funny people, like funny like community notes show up on there. We're correcting people and stuff like that. Yeah. So that's been super prevalent here during the campaign, because, of course, when candidates say things on their account, they are really widely shared and they have voice because those get picked up immediately by the media.

as I said, the amount of community notes that were put in the wild on that platform. And those community notes have an immense relevance as well, because those also get picked up by the media. So there's this story that keeps unfolding itself where some guy posts something and then gets community noted, which then gets picked up again, which then he says that community

note is false, although it most always is true. But yeah, I could rant about this, but yeah. Yeah. Community notes are actually one of the few things that I really like about Twitter. I would like to see those in more places because, like you said, more often than not, they are pretty reliable. I think that you come from a generally like a diverse group of people who tend to only agree on things that are more than likely true.

But other than that, yeah, I was definitely surprised to see this as your topic today. Like, I remember when I joined Mastodon, I joined Mastodon back in like 2016, but I didn't really use it. It didn't really click with me until I also left Twitter in 2022. And Neilian, I remember you were one of the people who I followed early on and were very helpful in helping me understand Mastodon, understand some of the things that I was confused about, some of the things that didn't work for me.

And so, yeah, I was surprised to see Twitter as your topic this week. Yeah, obviously I'm going away as soon as this blows over, but yeah. Yeah, I was kind of surprised as well to see Twitter as your topic. So basically what I have heard, and I've only logged into Twitter two or three times since I've left the platform. Like when I said I was leaving the platform, that was the last thing I said on the platform. I borrowed the thing from Federico and John. I made my profile icon black and white.

Like I couldn't make it more clear that I'm not there. But there was a couple of things that were sent to me and required me to log in that I wanted to check out. So it was annoying. But those few times I logged in, it just looked like it was just spam bots and, you know, people just trying to pull a fast one on other people. Like it was just scams and spam bots and everything. And like, honestly, a lot of the people that I followed that I really enjoyed aren't there anymore. They're either on Macedon or Threads or both of those.

Yeah, and I think you're making a great point because in this campaign, Twitter has contributed immensely to amplifying the voice of basically the fascists, the fascists, right? The far right. As you know, when you got a blue checkmark on Twitter, when you pay, your replies are at the top beneath every post.

which means even if you're looking at a post from a decent person who is saying something decent, and right underneath, every time, always, you get some truly awful things that are being written and that are amplified by Elon Musk, basically, and the system he put in place. Yeah, that's that's when they destroyed what a blue checkmark means, what verification means.

And they're like, anyone can have this. And also your stuff gets amplified that that kind of destroyed the platform like that. That was when it's no longer Twitter. It's no longer what what like that. It just drives me nuts. So like my account is still active specifically because, you know, I use Twitter for years, probably a decade or more. Actually, I know it was more than a decade. But I so links to my Twitter account are all over the Internet.

So I don't want anyone else to be able to go and scoop that up and, you know, act like they're me and do things that aren't so great. Because I mean, there's no way I could find all the links to my Twitter account on the web and like scrub them clean. Like, so it's just one of those things. It's like I just want my account to stay there and just be dormant and not let anyone take it over. Yeah. So anyway, that was it. Okay. So, Matt, what do you have for us this week?

All right. So I have something totally different. I have a new email app. Well, it's not a new email app, but it's new to me. And it's called Superhuman, which I'm guessing a lot of people listening to this have at least heard about this app and probably know two things about it. I'm guessing the two things you know are it's very expensive and it was an early personal email app to do read receipts.

And they do that by like an invisible pixel in the email that lets the sender know when the receiver opened the email. So creepy. So creepy. I have so many hot takes on this app. I can sense it. I'm just going to wait for Matt to finish. But oh boy, do I have some hot takes. He's boiling. Yes. Okay, I need to do this before the temperature gets so hot that Chris literally explodes from anger.

okay um so very quickly what's superhuman so basically i wanted to try superhuman because i have always been intrigued by it right like i've like many people i've struggled to find a really good email app that works for me and it's on every platform that i use and superhuman just had was one that i knew of that i'd never tried and the big reason i tried it there were two reasons the first was it's $30 per month, which is insanely expensive. And the second reason was until a

certain point, I don't know when they stopped doing this, but you had to do like a personal one-on-one video call with someone from the company to even set up an account, which was, I just wasn't going to do that. Right. Um, like I do YouTube, I like companies reach out to me, like if a company wants to do a, like a meeting to show me their app for like a YouTube thing, I don't even want to do that. Like I say no to almost every single one of those anyway. So the idea of doing that for like just a thing that I'm using privately, I was not into.

But I figured, hey, let's light $30 on fire and try it out for a month. And they stopped doing the one on ones. So I was able to just create an account and get going. So as far as I can tell, Superhuman really leans on a couple main draws. The first is speed, like everything in the app is built around getting you through your emails quickly. So everything can be done with a keyboard shortcut. Everything can be done with a command bar that you bring up with command K.

And yeah, it's very, very fast, like especially once you get comfortable with the keyboard shortcuts, which are very similar to Gmail. So it's not that much of a learning curve, but it or for me, at least as someone who's familiar with those. It's super, super fast. It is like very, very quick. You just hit E to archive, enter to open it, escape to close. And like you're just zipping through your emails. Everything loads instantly. Like it is very clearly an Electron app, but it's very, very fast. And everything is just very, very quick.

They have some features about instant replies. So they have like these pre-filled like one sentence replies for you that are personal and actually better than I think Gmail's. They have conversation summaries. So if there's a big thread at the top of the page, I think this is kind of similar to what Apple showed they're going to be doing with their Apple intelligence. They'll show you a conversation or a summary of the conversation that's happened so far. And then there's also the so, yeah, all of it's very, very fast. Like and the app is the same on mobile, iPad, Mac. Like it works everywhere.

It's the same everywhere. So like all those keyboard shortcuts are still on the iPad version with Magic Keyboard, for example. So that's all really good. Like that I actually very much like. Do you like $30 a month? No, but it's very, very good if that's what you're looking for. I'm sorry, what? $30 a month? $30 per month. Or you could pay a year and then it's like $25 per month. So it's very expensive. And it's not, to be clear, like you bring your own Google or Outlook accounts to this. It's not an email like service.

It's just an app that you have to also. So I'm paying like $10 a month for my custom branded Google account. that's on top of this $30 a month so you got to have some cash to uh justify this um the other thing is much shorter uh they have these kind of like profiles thing for everyone you're talking to over on the right side of the app there's a little there's a column that has the name of the sender and it uses like gravatar i think to like pull a photo of them if it's available it shows links to

like their LinkedIn and social media accounts, if it can find them. I'm not totally sure how it's getting these, but it's really built for executives is what it feels like. People who spend all the time in their email and need to know like, OK, quickly, where are we at in this conversation or like, who am I talking to? And it's all optimized around that. And so I guess my perspective is I'm not an executive.

I don't want to be an executive. That doesn't sound like the life for me. But I do really get frustrated with email and I want to get through my email quickly. And on the speed side of things, it does do a pretty good job of that. Like their app is absolutely not a native app. Like no one, if you're into like Mac apps, Mac apps and that sort of thing, like you're not going to like this app. It's very much not native, but it is very quick and it is pretty well designed at like optimizing for getting through your email quickly.

But I will not be using this. It's $30 a month, which is insane. So even if it was the greatest thing in the world, I don't think I'd pay for it. I think if it was $10 a month, I'd be tempted. But even that's quite a bit. And the thing I wanted to maybe talk about after Chris Rance is I almost think with this tool, the expensive price of it, the $30 a month, which like, Neil, you were like, sorry,

what? It costs how much? Like, I almost think that's part of the appeal of the app. Like, I think if it was $100 paid up front or if it was $10 a month, it wouldn't have the reputation that it has, the cachet it has. Like, the fact that if you're someone who thinks of yourself as very important and needs to get through emails or forget the first part. Like, you are someone who needs to get through your email inbox quickly.

Your time is valuable. I think the idea that I'm paying a lot of money to get this done has kind of an appeal. And like, it's not something everybody's using. It's not something that just every random person can try out and use and stuff like it's exclusive. It's an exclusive tool that I am using to really optimize my productivity. Right. And so I don't know if I can't think of any other products exactly like this, but it is interesting.

Like the thing that drew me to this kind of was how the heck are they charging that much for it? How is it possibly worth that amount of money? And after using it, it's not magic. I do get why people like it, but. It I think if it wasn't this expensive, I would have tried it five years ago and like, oh, it's OK. And then I would have stopped using it. But because I don't know, I'm not really sure what I'm getting at exactly. But like, it is interesting that I wonder how many of the people using it, the price of it is actually one of the things that makes it feel special and something that they want to use.

So, I don't know. I'll hand it off to Chris, who I think has some things to say. Just before Chris says something, to me, it feels like looking at screenshots and the website and everything. It feels like if Newton, do you remember Newton? That was a male service as well. Oh, yeah. I guess. It feels like Newton and Raycast had a baby.

Yeah. Actually, yeah. Do you concur? Okay. I do. It is definitely a similar vibe. And I did love Newton. So, actually, that's an interesting... Yeah, I loved it too. Yeah. It was much cheaper, though, too. Yeah. Can I go? Can I go? Chris, unload. Let's hear it. Okay. Future Chris, editor Chris, get the bleep button ready. Oh, no.

Oh, my gosh. This app is a status symbol, is what it is. That's all it is. It is a status symbol. So back when this app started, they wanted me because I was covering all the apps on YouTube and all that stuff. And they wanted me. And I entertained the notion for about five minutes until I found out they wanted me to do not an onboarding, an interview. They wanted me to interview for this app.

It wasn't an onboarding. They call it an interview. They care about the status symbol and who was using it. an interview for what they want you to interview to be able to use the app they they what no i am not doing that they want it they want it they want ceos and social media people and all that stuff to be seen using their app and that's why they want they're they are essentially the blue check marks of twitter but for email clients like they want

I hated that so much. It turned me off on the idea so much that they wanted me to interview, and it was just a select group of people that were going to be able to use it, and you had to prove that you were worthy of using it. No. That's absolutely not going to happen. It was not going to fly with me at all. And they wanted me because they knew I would cover it. Like, I covered the apps I use. That's what I do on my YouTube channel. Oh my gosh, it feels so good to get that off my chest. So one of the funny things on that note of the interview thing, they call it a one-on-one now, but I posted on both Mastodon and Threads, like, hey, I'm trying not superhuman.

What do you want to know about it? Or like people who use it, what do you like about it? And I actually had numerous people reply who are fans of it and do use it, who said you really should do the one on one to like understand their thought process around the app and how to get the most out of it. And I thought that was really like I haven't done it, so I can't I can't say how it is. But I did think that was interesting that just like normal people who I know are not executives are not like CEOs or anything were like, yeah, that was actually a really nice thing that I got out of it.

Is it a sect or something? it's more like a cult um no so i like that's the word yeah yeah yeah it's more like a cult um but so like matt i cover a lot of apps on my youtube channel so i get a lot of app developers whether it's sponsored stuff or just regular developers wanting to do like a one-on-one call like to show me how the app works and i used to say yes to those because i was like oh you know maybe there's some hidden stuff in here that i might find i never get shown anything

that i can't figure out on my own i i i highly doubt their one-on-one call would be that beneficial it really feels like oh we want the ceos of all these big companies to come in and use them so we could say that oh hey someone so and so the company use it let's just be honest somebody in twitter uses us kind of thing like yeah like i i refuse to say the other word that they actually are now um i just i i i i'm so like no and all the stuff that's on your list matt that that you like about

it i am able to do with a combination of apple mail and sane box or uh now with the apple intelligence stuff and and the new mail features that are coming i think they said later this year i know it's not coming in September because it's not in the betas right now. But I know it's coming later this year. But like none of this stuff is particularly special. And I am somebody that gets tons of emails. I responded. I'm going to pat myself on the back here right now. I responded to

over 100 emails yesterday alone. I had a massive amount of emails in my inbox. That's not even counting the emails i just deleted that i literally went back and counted all the sent emails i sent it was over a hundred geez none of this stuff is special that sounds like a nightmare to me it is an email is my personal hell i hate email i hate dealing with email if you email me and i you i don't respond it's nothing personal it's just i get too much email and i just can't deal with it all and i'm not going to hire somebody to to deal with my email because i just don't see a

benefit in dealing with it like it's i so i'll tell you a little bit about my email system and i'll make it quick i promise so i use apple mail as the client i have my own personal email account that i pay for through hover because i have all my domain stuff and i just use hover mail and stuff like that um and then i have sane box and sane box handles all the filtering basically if you're somebody i talk to or i've responded to or or anything like that you go into my inbox If we have never talked before or I've never responded to any of your emails or anything like that, you go into the same later folder.

If you're just a random person that's emailing me, you go into the same later folder until I start talking to you. Then you get promoted to the inbox. And then all the newsletters get filtered into the same news folder. And then there's the same black hole one, which because I have a public email address that you can get from YouTube or my website or something like that, all these scrapers have got that email address and put me on so many lists. I get literally hundreds of emails a day. So that black hole feature is really important for me.

So I block a ton of email. But then I use like the VIP feature in mail so that I get notifications from important people. And that is like core people. So like the management company I work with and some PR people, mostly just from Apple, that I need to like, oh, hey, these people are important. they sent me something i need to deal with it like that day so that's kind of like my email system there's nothing in superhuman that would benefit me it's totally just a status symbol it's 100%

a status symbol anyways rant over i'll move on thank you for your time i rest my case your honor yeah so the thing i didn't mention is yes on the mac i use mime stream as my email and i do also Usain box to kind of filter emails in a very similar way you do and I found that to be quite helpful and MimeStream has awesome keyboard shortcuts it's super super fast it syncs very very quickly like all that is great on the Mac as well the pain point for me is on the iPhone and iPad where I cannot find a good email app and it sounds like it works for you but I despise Apple's mail app i find it so hard to use so slow so frustrating like it doesn't work for me so if mindstream

releases their ios app eventually which they've been working on for a while so i'm hoping it's soon but i've been hoping that for a few months uh this won't even be a thing for me but yeah the apple mail app is just so frustrating i'm actually i'm actually shocked you're able to use it not want to throw it out a window i actually don't have a lot of issues with it i i think same box helps with that and like the filtering process of that um i would love to use mime stream but my main email client is just a regular email or my main email account is just a regular imap email account through hover it's not a google account so i can't use mime stream until they

implement imap support so i know that's on their roadmap but it's not from what i saw from their roadmap it doesn't look like it's a priority right now um but yeah i i would love to use mime stream but just because of the way my email is i can't and uh i don't really want to move my email account because that's just not something i'm really wanting to do right now yeah uh mime stream is really good. I love this app.

And to talk about my setup, because I think we are doing this now. I just, a few years ago, I just merged all my accounts into one. So my work email and additional work inboxes as well. And my personal email, all redirect to one Gmail account and I use that in MimeStream and that's it. And I have a bunch of filters set up.

I've set up a ton of them actually. But yeah, ever since I haven't touched it and it works great. So yeah. Nice. Alright. I will wrap up. My last thing. If you use Superhuman and you like it, I do get it. I've been negative on it. chris has been negative on it but like i do understand why you might like it if you like the interactions like i i've the same way i could see why like some people look at me and use for

using fantastical and they use the apple calendar app and they're like it does the same things why do you even why do you care about these little details and i can explain why i like these little details and they don't get it and they don't really care about those details so that's fine i can understand why someone likes the details of superhuman i can't justify the price But I do understand why if you like it and you can afford it, I could see why you would go with it. It's an app. It's an app for CEOs. Like, it's literally an app that's like, we're going to tailor to, like, the CEOs so we can, you know, make sure we're really helping them grow their business.

And, you know, it's really important for us that we engage as a community to really understand the email workflow. Yeah, and like we just really want to be connected to, you know, our clients and the people we work with. And email is a big part of that. This reminds me of the conversation around, hey, remember, hey. Yeah. Never got into that one. I'm glad I didn't even get tempted by that one.

Yeah. Yes. Okay. I'm going to be the positive one this week. I'm actually excited about that. So this week, and this one's a little cheating because I did this a few weeks ago, but it's been something that I've been wanting to talk about on the show. So it's not exactly, yeah, I'm kind of cheating. It's not exactly something I did this week, but I did play around with it a bit more to optimize it. But it is the Deco TP-Link Wi-Fi 7 router system.

So I needed faster internal Wi-Fi speeds. I just have multiple people in the house now streaming shows. I'm uploading videos to YouTube or playing games. There are all sorts of different things. Just needed faster internal Wi-Fi speeds. My old Wi-Fi 6 router system, it was fine if, like, one person was watching a show and I was off, like, doing work or something like that. But as soon as multiple people started streaming shows and stuff like that, it started to fall down. Plus the area of coverage.

So the house I'm in, it's a single floor house, but it's a very wide house. And the coverage of it was kind of a little fuzzy in the corners of the house. So I just needed something that had a better mesh system. So this right here, I have two devices. I have the main router and then I have the satellite. And what's really cool about these is it has Wi-Fi 7. So it has that Wi-Fi 6 gigahertz band, so that's super fast between the two.

So if you're connected to the satellite, you really don't see much of a speed drop versus being connected to the main router. All of the Ethernet ports on both the satellite and the router are 2.5 gigabits per second, which is awesome. So cool. So like my desk setup has a 2.5 gigahertz ethernet port in there. My NAS is actually 10 gigabits per second. I need to figure out something there.

So I'm not really taking advantage of the full speed of my NAS, but it's still 2.5 gigabits per second. It's still faster than gigabit. And like I said, it has the Wi-Fi 6 gigahertz band. So if you have a Wi-Fi 6E device, not a Wi-Fi 6, it has to be a Wi-Fi 6E device. So like the new iPhones, iPads, stuff like that, you can connect to the 6 gigahertz band and you get much faster, not just internal speeds, but also just regular internet Wi-Fi bandwidth speeds.

So I'm getting a gigabit down on this Wi-Fi network, which is awesome. Love it. I'm only getting 50 megabits up per second, but that's a Comcast issue. Thanks, Comcast. You're the best. No sarcasm there whatsoever. I literally so frustrated. I finally move into a house. So in California, what was explained to me is in California, you legally can't have fiber going into apartments or like condos or anything like that.

I don't know why. That's just what was explained to me. But so I finally move into a house and it's not even near fiber. So I can't get fiber out here. I'm like, oh, it's killing me. It's killing me. So I'm just still on regular copper internet. So I can get gig down, but I only get 50 megs up. But I absolutely love these routers. They have been incredibly fast downloading games, uploading YouTube videos. I've never had this kind of speed.

It's just wonderful, especially with multiple people in the house, whether it's me and my girlfriend or me, my girlfriend, and my girlfriend's mom who stays with us sometimes. There's never any drops. There's never any slowdowns. There's never any issues with the internet. And the nice thing is these were on sale. So a lot of Wi-Fi 7 routers are incredibly expensive. But I got these on sale. So both the router and the satellite was like $400, which is still really pricey. I'm not trying to say that's not, but compared to other Wi-Fi 7 setups, this one was, I'll just say fairly priced compared to those.

And it works really well. Now, I don't have any Wi-Fi 7 devices, which is kind of funny that I wouldn't have bought this. But I was looking at either getting a Wi-Fi 6E setup or a Wi-Fi 7 setup. And I was like, well, Wi-Fi 7 is going to start becoming the new normal here soon. I'm actually genuinely surprised that it's not on the new iPads, the new M4 iPad Pros. I was kind of surprised by that. But it's going to start coming to all the Apple devices and other stuff.

So might as well just future-proof my setup now so I don't have to buy new routers in a year or two. But yeah, so that's what I kind of did. Do you guys have any questions for me? Yeah. When you installed this, did you have to go through all your home accessories and repair them and stuff? No, I did not. Because you know what I did? I kept the SSID, so the Wi-Fi name and the password, the same. So that is the trick if you don't want to repair it.

Now, we did have a couple of issues with, like, the Peloton stuff that we have. We had to unpair and repair them. But for the most part, like, Philips Hue bulbs, smart switches, whatever else I had, just automatically reconnected. Didn't have any issues. So, as long as your Wi-Fi network is on the same, and because this has that 6 gigahertz band, the 2.4 and the 5 gigahertz band are on a shared SSID. So shared wireless name.

And then like it just toggles between the two depending on what the device supports and stuff like that. But the 6 gigahertz band is on its own separate Wi-Fi. So the Wi-Fi name I have is Death Star Wi-Fi. And so that's the main one that's the 2.4 and the 5. But then I have Death Star Wi-Fi 6 gigahertz. And that is just for basically I just use that for devices like my iPad and stuff that really needs really fast internal network speed. So like I do that for my iPad so I can move video projects and files and stuff to and from my NAS over Wi-Fi incredibly fast.

Like stupid fast how great this is. My next big project for this house is to figure out a way to do cabling. I do, there is an attic, and it does look like there are, like, cable tracks going from the attic to, like, the cutouts in the walls and stuff like that. So it should be fairly easy to do it. I just really don't want to crawl up in the attic. So that is probably the next thing for me. But, yeah, right now, Wi-Fi speeds, internal, so good.

So what's the setup process for this? Is there, like, an app on your phone you install, or do you do it on the browser on your computer? Like, how do you set these things up and how do you configure them? The setup process, super easy. If you just want to leave it, you know, automatic, have it pull all the information from your modem. Or if you put your, like, Internet Service Providers router in modem mode or something like that, that's what I did. So I have the Comcast router, but I set it up so that it's just in modem mode.

It's not giving out DHCP addresses or anything like that. I disabled Wi-Fi from it. So the TP link routers are what it's connected to. So there is an app and you go through the setup process on it. And if you just want to leave it automatic, super easy. And honestly, for most people, that's what I would suggest. Like I've talked about, my background is a network admin. I was in IT for nine years, so I did not leave it automatic. I manually configured it. I set a really specific range up for DHCP addresses.

I did some stuff with DNS, all that kind of thing. So that took a little bit more configuring. But there is options in the app to set up stuff like VPN or quality of service or all sorts of different things that you would come to expect from modern routers. But you could do it all right from the app. But there is a web browser you can log into as well or a web app that you can log into. Gotcha. Okay. because yeah i have the google nest wi-fi pro um which i like on the whole but kind of like you said there's there's like the default setup the easy setup and then you can go

in and do more with the google ones there's the easy setup and it is super easy and works great but there's not a lot more you can do which is actually turned into a bit of an issue for me in some cases so i have some smart home devices that only work on 2.4 gigahertz wi-fi networks and every and so the the like nest wi-fi has like a 5 gigahertz and 2.4 gigahertz but it does some magic to like make those networks look the same um yeah yeah yeah that's what these do as well yeah and so the um so all my devices i need my like iphone to connect to the 2.4 gigahertz

network but i can't because it's like oh five gigahertz is here that's great i'll do that um so anyway so these devices aren't pairing and the workaround that people online had since you can't like just separate the 2.4 out uh which hopefully you can do on these tp links and honestly would be maybe enough for me to think about getting something like this is you need to get far enough away from your router that the network is so weak that it falls back to the 2.4 gigahertz mode so like they're saying if you're setting up a smart accessory here's what you do you take it

outside into your yard you walk as far away as possible until you have one bar of wi-fi then that will be the 2.4 gigahertz network and then you set it up from there and i can't believe this oh my god are you not worried yeah are you not worried that google is going to stop supporting this product um like everything else they make yeah not really i don't know they've been doing it for a long time and like even if i lose the app like they're just dumb routers they would still function so i'm not super worried about it

but i don't i don't know if i'll be getting them again um i'm also seeing these have four ethernet jacks on the back of each one uh the google ones have one which is honestly almost a crime yeah that's that's not okay um yeah and the and the ethernet ports on the back of these they are all 2.5 gigabits per second they are not just gigabit um a lot of routers that i was finding would have like one 2.5 gigabit per second port or if you wanted to spend a thousand dollars they might have one 10 gigabit per second port which i did not want to spend that kind of money um so i i

i'm really happy with like the port array and one thing they do have on the back and i think it might just be on the main router i don't remember if it's on the satellite or not but there is a usb port so you can do like sharing a usb printers and stuff like that which most printers have wi-fi now and air print and all that stuff but what you can plug into it is an extra hard drive so you can actually set these up to use specifically for time machine like it's in the app that you can set up a external drive as a time machine drive and use that to back up uh your mac over the internet to an external drive and not have to constantly plug in and unplug an external drive that's pretty cool yeah

these are far more technically advanced than i've ever had they look great they look kind of cool too they look i almost look like kleenex boxes what do these remind me of oh that's true i'm seeing it now yeah yeah the only thing is i wish they weren't white so um i have one in my entertainment center like in our living room and it's kind of like with the xbox and playstation which i you know i i got the black cover for the playstation all that stuff so like

it's all right there so the fact that this is white because it's also next to the apple tv it kind of just sticks out so i i'm like i just wish it was black uh i do have the stuff to paint plastic black the the i forget what it's called but it's not spray paint but it kind of looks like spray paint but it's specifically for um painting plastic so maybe i might do that i don't know we'll see just embrace it put it on display somewhere it looks nice i don't like these kinds of things to stick out like we have home decor stuff that i'd rather stick out rather

this stuff just kind of blend into the background oh one thing i will say that's really nice about this you can turn off the led lights so the satellite one is in uh my mother-in-law's room or my my girlfriend's mom's room and uh i can turn off the led lights so because they are kind of bright so that way it's not keeping her up at night love that feature every tech product that has led lights should have that i literally have a roll of gaffer's tape in my closet that i bought just to cover up led lights uh that because like my old router didn't have that feature and that led light

was wildly bright so yeah turn off leds oh can you hear it can you read it what what what's that challenge challenge challenge challenge challenge challenge do you hear the people sing oh wait that's the wrong thing um so the challenge this week was neilians neilians do you i totally just tripped all over my words i will leave that in neilian the challenge this week was

yours what did you have us do yes um i asked you to start journaling for a few days and throw in a twist if you can nice um obviously i already journal on a daily basis so i also went in and tried to uh throw in a twist in my in my habit nice matt uh you're you're up first what did you do so um i did no personal journaling okay again because i'm an emotionless husk of a human

but what i did do is i start i started writing some stuff down so i i used a sidekick notepad uh which i really like i don't take a ton of notes and i got one of these just because i liked how it I do a little bit with it, but I started using it for notes and started using it for work notes, actually. So I'm doing a lot of worky things. I'm using the SEO or CEO email app, and then I'm taking notes about my job.

So what I did on Monday of this week, I wrote like, what do I want to get done? Big picture this week. What are the things I want to like be thinking about this week? And then at the start of each day, I wrote down like a list of a couple things I wanted to keep in mind that day. And I already did some of this, like the daily things. I would do this in things and I still do that in things and I would check them off there. But I was I wanted to see if writing it down physically and like taking a second away from the computer to think about stuff would be helpful for me.

And I don't know if it was it might have been. But I don't know if just because it was new, but it was kind of nice to just like step away from the computer for a second when I was working and. Think about like what's important right now. What should I be thinking about? And then writing it down and just kind of having that off to the side on my desk while it's working. So, yeah, that's that's what I did. Nice. Nice. Sounds good. So I embraced Apple's first party tools for this.

So first up, I use the Notes app and my Apple Pencil. I am not a big handwriting person. my handwriting is kind of atrocious but one of the new features in ipad os 18 is smart script which is supposed to be able to clean up your handwriting uh public betas aren't out yet so we can't go into too many details but we can't talk about like what was in the keynote and stuff like that so the idea of smart script is it's supposed to clean up your handwriting as you you know write things out but it learns your handwriting so it's not just like replacing you what you hand wrote with like a font that looks like handwritten text it's actually like learning and just kind of cleaning

up and like straightening things out so works pretty good um i'll have more to say on that soon hint hint something something is coming something something big is coming that i'm very excited about in a couple of weeks but can't talk about it just yet um but that worked out really well i mostly just kind of like wrote out like hey here's all the things i want to accomplish today or here's the stuff I did yesterday here are the things I need to do today and like all the tools and gear or stuff I might need to order to accomplish you know the tasks for the rest of the week and stuff like

that and I enjoyed it as kind of like a way way to like start my day and just kind of like set almost a goal for the day of like the things I want to get done and that was really nice I like that but I also used the journal app as well and the journal app is great for taking photos locations and people that were you know in events and stuff and group all that together so for example this week was my girlfriend's birthday and Sunday night we went out to a really nice dinner with some friends and her mom and stuff like that we took photos there's location stuff people

obviously were there so uh i wrote a little bit about that in the journal app it grouped it all together and you can just pull up the photos and see that in the event i went back and did like it pulled a few more events for me that i didn't actually write anything for so it pulled like wwdc i i pulled that and like wrote about that put some photos and stuff in there uh and overall it was nice i i like it i think i will probably keep up using the journal app because what's interesting about that is it's just a way to go back and remember really specific events i don't think i will use it every single day but like when big events happen big trips happen big you know like

nights out and stuff like that happen um and you take photos you get that automatic prompt uh that said hey you did this thing at this location maybe write about it and you can just tap on that notification it'll automatically gather up photos the location people any other stuff and you can into that and then there's some features and stuff that's coming in ios 18 that are interesting but for the most part i i like the journal app i i think i will probably keep doing that nice yeah i really like the journal app as well although last year i was really disappointed with

how basic it was yeah um but yeah they announced a bunch of nice things uh with ios 18 just not support yeah i was about to say um i would migrate if it was on the ipad and the mac but yeah this week i tried to experiment with voice um to journal um here's a bit of a prelude i hate voice messages

same same if you send me a voice message i won't listen i will not listen if you send me a voice message luckily now there's transcripts for him but if you send me a like before there was transcripts for it i'd just be like what did you say like i literally wouldn't listen to him exactly yeah transcript uh is the key um so i tried to journal with voice with this in mind that this podcast is called comfort zone so i should try this because this is probably the the thing that would that i would hate the most i hate receiving voice messages and i hate recording

voice messages so i try to do um to it uh three different ways i um i try to use the journal app to record entries in there. You can record audio in the journal app. And that works fine, although it's really basic. Like, can't do much with your recording afterwards.

And yeah, I guess it works. But it's not as great as it could have been. But you did highlight, Chris, that the journal app has the capacity to bring things together in a nice way, like your photos, your events, people you've met, music you've listened to during the day. And it's actually pretty nice to be able to just add the voice note on top of that with your feelings, how you felt about a specific set of things that's in this entry.

But still a bit too basic. So I went back to my favorite app, which I use, which is Day One. Day One lets you record unlimited voice messages in length. You can do an hour in length if you want. But they do have a limit if you want transcripts. If you want transcripts, you have to record a voice message that's less than 10 minutes, I believe.

and that works fine but once again I was faced with the issue of language the transcription works with the language that you set on your phone so I use my device in English and everything's in English on my devices but I would like to journal in French. I journal in French usually. That's what I use as a language for my personal feelings and stuff.

So I would like to speak into my phone in French and have a transcript. But unfortunately, unless you change the language of your phone, it doesn't work. You gotta choose. I tried just changing day one to French. and I think this is buggy because of the beta so I'm not going to dig too much at this but yeah, it's a bit of an issue

I tried to go a third way about this I started talking about voice messages so I thought, okay, let's just use a messaging app and I started recording voice messages in messages and that went awful yeah there's the nice thing about messages the messages app is that it has transcripts

um and it does sometimes work with french even though my device is in english but sometimes my sometimes my voice message is in French and it thinks it's in English and it tries to write in English, to transcript in English what I said is French and the results are wild. So yeah. Then I tried to do the same thing in Telegram and actually Telegram, so I've got a lot of feelings about telegram but the nice things that with telegram if is if you pay for the app which i

do for now i'm not going to renew this so please don't get in my mentions um but if you do pay for the app you get transcripts on voice messages um it's absolutely insane that this feature is locked behind a paywall but yeah um and telegram's transcription works flawlessly it's really good um so i think that was the best experience that i had with this was sending messages to myself in telegram to journal and actually it when you think about this it kind of works really nicely because um when you send messages to yourself in telegram so you've got your own feed everything's dated

you can go into the details of the conversation and you you have a timeline that you can scroll through and if you send images to yourself as well you can use it in the same way with your photos and scroll through your photos and everything's dated and and you can search for everything you can use hashtags and you can search for links for media for voice for anything really for documents and you can messages other message no you can forward other people's messages to yourself so that it's saved in this feed is in this personal feed so i think they've got something

here like hear me out developers if you want to make a journal app that's innovative maybe try to replicate what telegram have done with the send messages to yourself feed and bake that into a standalone app and i think you've got something here it works really nice really well the issue with telegram is that um it's a bit of a shady company so i do not recommend doing this actually

because your data is awfully personal especially if you're journaling and you're doing personal journaling so maybe don't do this i don't recommend it necessarily but yeah that was my experiments with voice nice that's awesome yeah that's that's pretty cool yeah i do like how sometimes talking it can be helpful in a way that is sometimes hard when typing i found like when i'm doing image descriptions for like alt text on images i actually find just like dictating those is easier for me than

typing it out so yeah i totally get how like sometimes right typing is better sometimes voice is better yes and as somebody that sits in this office by themselves for eight to nine to ten hours a day uh yeah i talk to myself all the time because that's how i solve problems i i talk it out and nobody else is here so i talk to myself yeah do it lean into it oh yeah no i'm trust me

yeah one time my girlfriend was home and i didn't realize she was home and she's like who are you talking to him like disaster yeah yeah i talk to myself a lot yeah as well oh yeah oh well you know what doesn't matter we're all a little cuckoo for cocoa puffs am i right uh who amongst us is totally sane all right so i i'm not i'm definitely not sane no okay sure i tried something

about you i'm definitely not but hey you know that's okay it works so this week we have a new challenge like every week and matt you are you're i keep tripping over my words today what is going on with me i don't know what is up with me you're super eloquent until transitions transitions are hard anyways oh yeah it's your challenge this week you're you're um gosh that's funny people will get it matt it was your challenge this one it sure was i keep tripping over my words so it was

matt you talk at this point this is staying in right oh 100 this is staying in Matt you say something Okay okay So my challenge this week A lot of pressure to speak correctly now My challenge this week Is a pretty simple one I think we'll find out I would like Both of you and I will do it as well To try a new Or at least One that you haven't used in a long time

Try a new Web browser and make it i would like ideally i would like you to make a default on at least one of your devices you don't have to use it everywhere but maybe change it on your phone your main computer whatever you want um but i want you to really give it a shot and the homework portion of it is next week you must come with one feature at least one feature that you really like about it and wish that whatever browser you normally use had or did in a better way i like this i like we don't just

pick browser right i mean you could but you're not they're not going to pass the homework so it's going to be yeah it's going to be an issue yeah well if i have to use it for a week yeah uh okay all right now i i will fully embrace this i will change the default browser i because i'm somebody that i love like tab syncing and stuff like that and like tab groups and and uh now profiles profiles that's the feature i was thinking of i was trying to think of safari and stuff like that so like all your tabs sync and stuff like that that's a that's a really nice feature so hmm okay all right i i will

fully embrace this so to set up for next week i guess what you don't have to decide what browser to use yet but like what do you use today so i use safari on my iphone and ipad and i use arc on my um chris it sounds like you use safari everywhere yeah safari every iphone ipad and vision pro so uh i actually technically i do on my mac mini i use for recording i technically use edge uh because i needed a chromium browser for riverside so challenge complete no i'm just kidding no i won't do that i won't do that yeah same i same as chris i use the safari everywhere and i've got chrome

right right now just for riverside yeah i use safari everywhere i was on arc for a while on the mac but i kind of hated it at some point so i went back to safari yeah okay okay fair enough well arc is slightly on thin ice with me in general so that's uh part of the reason for this challenge is to uh see if there's another browser that doesn't whose company doesn't annoy me uh like the browser

company does right now even though i love their mac browser they they they rose so high just to fall and like i i never gave arc a shot because like they're the arc browser that is on the mac is not the one that is on the ipad and iphone so i was like oh well i'm not gonna like if i can't have the actual real experience i'm not gonna even bother trying it so um yeah interesting so i hope you guys have fun with it and uh try something new and interesting there's a billion browsers out there so hopefully we don't all get the same thing your year of opera no aren't they

problematic now or something i don't remember so we'll figure every single browser is problematic for one reason or another we're gonna do our best okay we will do our best okay cool all right well that just again i can mess up the transition i don't know what's going on with me today i can't speak uh okay well that just about wraps it up for this episode of comfort zone uh neilion tell people what you're up to this week and goodbye.

Alright, and this week actually when this episode comes out, the election is over. Wait! So, yeah, tune in to my Masternone account for my thoughts on this and find me on Masternone, yeah, at Niléane. And Matt, tell people what you're up to this week and where people can find you. So I Nothing interesting going on, but I'm always writing at birchtree.me.

I love that you're saying this every time. I know. I'm going to have to switch up this question. And Chris is like twisting the knife. So you're not up to something, right? Yeah, Chris is like, I am super busy. I'm so productive. And I'm just like, guys, I'm taking a few months off. This podcast is my only dedicated work. I need like a stick or something I can poke you with. Like, do something. Do something. You should try an app that randomizes a set of questions, you know.

Maybe date questions or something like that. Yeah, I could build a shortcut for that or something. But I am doing a super secret, top secret video filming something that requires travel. which is not something I normally do for videos. I am very excited about it. The two of you know about it, but everyone else will be surprised. I don't think it'll be out by the time this episode is out, but it'll be out shortly after on my YouTube channel.

So I'm very excited about that. And you can find my YouTube channel on YouTube. Surprise, surprise. Christopher Lawley, L-A-W-L-E-Y. Thank you all so much for listening or watching because there's also a video version of this podcast. And a special thank you to MacStories for hosting us. We are a MacStories podcast after all. Thank you all for listening and have a great day.

Bye.