Thread do be Like That

Welcome to Comfort Zone, a podcast all about pushing your host, well, outside of their comfort zone. I'm Christopher Lolly, and each week I am joined by two incredible co-hosts. First off, it's Matt Birchler. Matt, how are you doing? Chris, I'm doing well. I wasn't expecting to. I woke up feeling rough today, and as soon as I started to get ready for Comfort Zone, I started to feel better. So I think that's a good sign. Well, you're in your comfort zone, but we're pushing yourselves out of our comfort zone, so I don't know where I'm going with that. Anyways, we're also joined by Niléane.

Niléane, how are you? Hello. I was feeling weird as well, but it's because of the heat. I was outside today, and I had to buy some groceries, and that was a nightmare. Interesting. Well, I'm feeling good. Danielle is sick, but that's... So, I don't know. Maybe she got the comfort zone bug. I'm sure she will have something to keep busy.

Yeah. She's playing with the Switch 2 right now. So, yeah. Yeah. All right. We have some feedback and tiny topics. You guys just want to get into that? Medi wrote in. I think it's Medi because you didn't sign your message. So, maybe it's anonymous, but also there's your email with your name in it. So, I don't know. I think it's Medi. We should probably say if you send in feedback and you don't want us to read your name or you do want us to read your name, maybe put a note in there. Anyway, so Mehdi wrote in and he wrote in a long message for us.

I will not read all of it, but he wrote in about our conversation last week on French ISPs and your horror when I told you about the prices here in France. And so basically, Mehdi is from France, a Frenchman who studied in the US for a year, they say. And he says, I was also shocked at how bad things were there. And what is funny is that he also mentioned that the ISP that I switched to free, they have higher tiers available, which would interest Chris and Matt as YouTubers, he said.

Around 50 to 60 euros per month for 8 gigs down and up. Symmetrical. Oh. The difference in price usually comes from the various streaming services included or not. Netflix, Disney Plus, Amazon Prime, that is. Or Canal Plus, which is a French provider, TV service. And he specified that my offer that I got is the entry-level tier. And it's a new offer that just came that they added to their portfolio, let's say.

And it's a new package which doesn't include TV. That's correct. I love that Mehdi looked at the offers and tried to guess which one I had. And yes, that's exactly the one I got. So it's the one that you get just internet in there and a landline, which nobody uses anymore. But yes. And no TV. Usually they always have TV in the author.

Yes, and he also wrote in with a bunch of details. I invite you, Matt and Chris, to read his message because he has a bunch of info in there that may be interesting. And basically he also wrote in about the fact that free, the ISP in question, they are the ones who changed everything in France, basically in terms of prices. They arrived in 2012 regarding their mobile branch for data plants on mobile, and earlier for at-home internet.

And basically, yeah, they broke the market. And they introduced, actually, they introduced competition in a market that was completely locked before. We had much higher prices before then. But then they arrived and we had a huge competition and all the other ISPs had to follow or else die. And yeah, so that was really interesting. Thank you, Mehdi, for writing in. And another feedback we got is from Dave, who did sign.

his message. Dave says, thanks for the great show. I really enjoyed the format, the chemistry between the team. Thank you. My question for the team would be, if Apple did not exist, what would you all be doing? And he has a specific question just for Matt. Have you tried the Orion and Kagi search? Orion browser and Kagi search. So first question, what would we do without Apple? So right now, I would probably want to do like car YouTube or something like that.

I love making videos. I love doing stuff like that. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a director in Hollywood and make movies and stuff like that. But as I got older and as I got a little wiser and understood what it would take to do that and the politics of Hollywood, I was like, nope, I kind of just want to go do my own thing. And YouTube allowed me to do that. So I'd probably make like car videos or something like that because that interests me. but I don't know. I really love what I do. That's something I've been thinking about a lot lately is like what would be next for me if YouTube was to evaporate tomorrow?

What would be next for me? And, you know, honestly, I don't know. Like I really don't know right now. So that's probably a little scary that I don't have like another idea, but maybe it's also a really good thing because I love what I do. Yeah, that's pretty good. I would probably be doing exactly what I'm doing today. across the board. I'd be talking about Windows apps. I might be a Linux freak. I don't know. I mean that in a nice way, by the way.

I don't know. And then my day job would be the same. So my life would change in no way. I would just have this weird little feeling that something was missing and I wouldn't know what it was. Yeah, my answer is basically the same. I would still be a Linux head. Because at some point, I stopped being a Linux head and became an Apple head. I think I would just still be a Linux head. Or all in on Google stuff.

I don't know. Because a lot of Google things apply to Apple and vice versa. So that would work, I think. Yeah, and Matt, what about that specific question that Dave asked you? I have used both of those. I've used Kagi several times. I think it's the best search engine, period. That's the one you have to pay for, right? You do have to pay for it.

It's like five bucks a month or so, but I don't currently pay for it because Google's good enough or maybe something I talk about later on in the show. And Orion, I just don't get Orion. I think that's made by the Kagi team as well. Yes. It's fine. If you want a WebKit browser that's not Safari, it's kind of, it's decent. But yeah, not for me.

But I love Kagi search. Kagi search is very good. All right. And Chris and I are not allowed to respond. Nope, not one bit. The question was for Matt. Thank you, Dave. And I think that was it in the feedback form and also a bunch of other very nice messages from people. And I'm looking now if there's something I missed, but I think, yeah, mostly just nice people saying nice things to us. Also, some comments about Liquid Glass.

Some people agree with me. We have had several comments about Liquid Glass. Some very long that we don't have time to get into, but we have read them. And some of us agree, some of us disagree. It is what it is. I'm very much looking forward to when iOS and all the other OS updates ship, and we can really dive into the shipping version of Liquid Glass. But I kind of have, well, we'll save it. Matt, you added something. I did. I wanted to just do a couple follow-up items on the MetaRay Bands that I didn't get to talk about or didn't have enough experience with them to...

You now have two posters of Mark Zuckerberg in your bedroom. Again, just out of frame. It's wild. Okay. Battery life. If you use them for audio, I was getting about 40% drain in an hour. So two and a half hours of battery if you just use them consistently as headphones. If you don't use them as headphones, they last days and days and days and days.

because they're just not really doing anything. I also wanted to say that taking photos with these, I said it was kind of like an iPhone 12 camera and I should not be held to that. I've looked in more detail. I think the video is better than the images. The images are probably a little worse than an iPhone 12, but the video I still think is really nice. The tricky thing is figuring out how to frame your photo because you have no idea. And so I found that naturally, because I was doing comparisons with my phone and the glasses, and I was just naturally looking off to the right, apparently.

Can't you just draw a square with your hands like this? That would be a great feature. No, remember, it's backwards. Right. Oh, that's true. That's true. So is the camera lens on the right or the left temple, as we learned from Danielle? I think it's on the right temple. And the other side is just a light. You'd just be doing this. And if you're audio listeners, just go to YouTube. Because I have no idea how to explain what I'm doing right now. In framing, drawing a rectangle in front of you, your index finger and your thumb.

Yes. On both hands. Should I add more details? I have no idea. It's a rectangle. You make an L, you make an upside down L, You put them together. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's the movie director thing, right? It's like... Yeah. We're making it worse. People are imagining all sorts of things. Which doesn't make any sense whatsoever because lenses and... Whenever I see somebody doing this, I know they're just posing for a photo. I know they're not actually framing a shot. But that's okay.

Anyways. Last two things real quick. Speaker quality. I hadn't used them for music. And they're definitely not as good for music. You can definitely hear the degradation and quality. For audio, it's quite good. But it does, once you get past like 80% volume, it does start to get a little, you can tell it's pushing itself as far as it possibly can. And the final thing is the build quality of them. Quite good. But I also have just regular sunglasses. And I kind of was comparing the two.

The one annoying thing about this is that this is like plastic that's like two pieces of plastic like molded together on the temples. and so when you put them on it kind of scratches your head a little bit in a way that normal sunglasses don't so it's it's not horrible and like you just yeah I mean you can I'm not in pain right now but I feel it more I feel it more than normal sunglasses I'm so sensitive to this kind of things when there's a very small

seam between things on objects I use daily, I will throw them away. No, okay. I have one thing to say about the Mater Ray-Bans, which is that I have seen them somewhere in the news over the past few, maybe last year, I don't know. And I could not remember where last time. And I looked it up. They were in the French news last year or so because a famous French YouTuber called Amixem, He used them in a hidden camera video.

And so basically the concept was he went to campings and hotels to review them using hidden cameras. And he also had the meta ribbons on his face. So what's funny is that when you film with the meta ribbons, they have an LED on them, if I remember correctly. So the way he does this is he's at the counter at some hotel and he's just putting up his hand like this, like just trying to hide the camera slightly.

And it works. Nobody noticed. But he was in the news because in that hotel, he caught a straight up case of homophobia. Like in the sketch, in the bit, he was with a male friend. And basically, they would not rent out a room to them because they were saying they were together. And that ended up in the news and all of that.

Hidden camera show on YouTube catches a homophobic hotel. Wow. Anyway. Wow. That was not where I thought that story was going to go. Yeah, so perhaps Meita is a friend of the gays. There you go. There you go. You hear that, Mark? Yeah. Yeah. It's good for you. We just watched The Social Network last night. Oh. Yeah, anyways. I've seen that movie before, but anyways, Danielle needed something that was low-key, and The Social Network is pretty much as low-key as it gets.

What? That is the most insane take I've ever heard. No, no, no, no, no. Hang on. Let me rephrase. So she had this massive headache and massive stomach ache. She didn't want to watch something that was shooty-shooty or loud or comedic or fast-paced. She wanted something that was kind of low-key, slow-paced. It's not a high-octane movie. It's no fast and furious kind of thing. Okay. I see what you're saying, but I disagree. Yeah. You know, the other thing she's been liking watching while she's not been feeling good is Mindhunter.

Like, that kind of low-key. It's not talky fast. It's not shooty shooty. It's not fast cars, loud sounds kind of thing. It's kind of low key. You can just kind of just follow the dialogue kind of thing. Human drama is low key. Yeah. That's Chris. Serial killers and billionaires. They're low key. Title. So the last thing in Tiny Topics, we're kind of going long on this, but last thing I want to mention is Comfort Zone has saved the camera app

and Apple. We did it. We did it. All 100% us. So we recorded an episode talking about iOS 26 and we all agreed it was insane that the camera app had reverse horizontal scrolling. The very next beta update, which came out before that episode got published, introduced a setting to reverse the horizontal scrolling. So you could put it back to the normal way of horizontal scrolling in iOS. But then our episode came out and the next beta came out and it took that setting away and put back the natural horizontal behavior.

The natural, like if you swipe to the right, it goes left. And if you swipe to the left, it goes right. That natural behavior. We saved the camera app and subsequently Apple as a company. We did it. Tim Cook, check should be in the mail. with like $1 million a piece or at the very least, let us pick out a computer of our choice. And we want to be able to go through the full configurator with Pro Display XDRs. Here's the thing though. Did we save Apple? Because I keep complaining about Liquid Glass and it's still here.

Yeah, but could you imagine if they would have shipped Liquid Glass and the camera app with broken scrolling that everyone would have gotten Android phones. Everyone would have got Android phones. So we saved Apple. Liquid glass, that's a whole other thing, but the two things combined would have been too much. We saved Apple. Tim Cook, million dollars, or at least let us pick out our own computer. I will just say, if I'm Tim Cook, I'm letting us pick our computers. Probably. $10,000 total.

I mean, I'm going to max out a Mac Studio with a Pro Display XDR. But yeah, you know. A little less than a million dollars, though. I will take Tim. I want the million. I would prefer the million but I'm just you know whatever's easy for accounting you know whatever okay whatever all right let's get in the main show Niléane you have a topic that I know you're excited to talk about because it's been punted so many times for the little story every week I want to bring this topic and it's been the case

for like four weeks five weeks I bring this topic and we bump it for something else that's more urgent or more timely And now I can finally talk about it. So I will pull them out. Hey, headphones. So there's this thing where I was not sure if I already talked about this on the show. So I had to look through our notes all the way back. And no, we did not. I think we did have a conversation about this, but that was off the air.

Yeah, it was probably when we were waiting for Matt to show up because he's always late. Yeah, exactly. He's always late. So let's describe this. These are my new favorite pair of headphones. What do you think of the looks? I love the look. That look, it matches the look of my desk, black with a walnut wood outer shell on the ear cups. They look great. And they kind of have this almost 60s-era headphone look to them.

Would you say that's fair? Sure. I don't know. I wasn't there. Well, neither was I, but I mean... I was. That's exactly what they looked like. Thanks, Matt. A resident old person. So, yeah. To go along with that description, they have walnut ear cups. Can you hear that? That is solid walnut. That's satisfying. Real walnut. I have not even said the name of the product. These are the Maize 99 Classics. Meze is a Romanian company, I believe. They make headphones, audio gear,

and these are their flagship product. Not the flagship. The most popular one. The flagship ones cost thousands of dollars. Meze 99 Classic. These are the Mustang GT to the GT500. That's what they are. Yes, in a term that our audience can understand. Everyone can understand that. You know, they're the Mustang GT, which is what I got, to the GT500.

Everyone gets it. Or rather, they are the MacBook Air, right? Oh, okay. The MacBook that everyone gets. I don't get that one, but okay, whatever. I'll just take your word. So, okay, I just really love these headphones, and I don't have anything bad to say about them. Just one thing, maybe. So I will just go through everything that I love about these headphones. And you can ask any questions you have, maybe, if you have any. So first, the build quality is amazing.

This is robust, and yet it's super lightweight. Compared to my AirPods Max, when I take off the AirPods Max, put these on, it feels like I'm not wearing anything. It's a drastic difference between the two. And it helps that the headband, as you can see, is like a kind of a suspended airband design. So it's got a cushion that's on a spring, I will say, like a springy band.

You get it, maybe. Underneath a metal arc over the cushion. So basically when you put them on your head, I have two headphones. I have already a pair of headphones on my head. Oh, there's the thumbnail. Yeah. So when you put them on your head, your head basically rests on this cushion, on this suspended cushion. And there's not much weight at all on your head. It's amazing. Okay. So the bigger, the metal arc, that's providing like the structure of it?

I was like, what are those for? Yeah, it's rigid. You can't... So there's nothing adjustable, is something I should say. You don't adjust anything. When you put them on your head, this... Basically, it weighs down on your head automatically, depending on how you adjust the ear cups on your ears. It's just elastic like that. They automatically adjust for you. Yeah. Yeah. So this company, Meise, the headphones that they make, and this is the second thing that I really love about these headphones,

everything that they make, you can take apart and replace everything yourself with just a screwdriver. Oh, wow. And there's no glue anywhere in this. Maybe inside where there are, I don't even know, maybe those are screwed down and just without glue. I think they said somewhere there's no glue. Anyway, I watched a video of somebody taking those apart. It looks like it's really easy. You just screw off the things everywhere, just follow a guide.

You plop the cushions off and you can just put everything back together. And you can go on Meze's website to buy all the parts that you need, if you need to replace anything. The easier thing to replace is the band, the cushion, because those are screws exposed, exposed screws on the outside of the metal arc here. So you can just take the cushion apart and replace it really, really easily. As well as the cushions on the ear cups, you can just pop them.

Those are easy to replace, but annoying to replace because you have to just line the faux leather inside the seam. It's very, very finicky. Yeah, but doable and without any tools. So that's good. Third thing I really like about the headphones is the cable. So it comes with two cables. Both are almost exactly the same, except that there's a longer one and a shorter one.

This is the shorter one. The shorter one has headphone commands on there, which only work if you use the headphone jack directly in a device. If you use a USB-C dongle, this will not work. Ah. Yeah. The cable is extremely lightweight as well. If you compare that to the, you know, Apple's old Lightning to Jack cable for the AirPods Max, the very flimsy one.

Yeah, the worst cable ever made. Exactly. So it's like the weight of that, but better built, and it doesn't feel like it's going to break apart. The cables that go from the cups to the part where they meet is a rubber-like material, so it doesn't make any noise when it rubs against your clothes, whereas under where they meet, it's a braided cable.

So there's the best of both worlds here. And my understanding is that initially these launched with a full-bladed, braided cable all the way. And people did not like that because the braided part would just rub against your clothes and make noise in your ears. Okay, fourth thing is the sound quality is awesome. These sound amazing. They are not neutral headphones by any means.

it's a v-shaped profile so you get a bunch of bass the high ends feel very sparkly very nice and yet it's very like a ton of clarity no distortion as far as i can tell they are low impedance and if it can drive them these are meant to be like taken away on on a trip they even advertise them for taking them on the plane even though these are don't have any noise cancellation whatsoever but yes i can tell that they isolate pretty well as far as a passive isolation can go uh i do not use them outside i just use them either at home on the train and

on trips i still use the airpods max with the noise cancellation um and oh i forgot one thing about the cables. So you notice how the cables, they go into each cup. Yeah? Yeah. You can plug the, you can take them off. These are jacks. Mono jacks on each side. And if you notice the headphones themselves, they are symmetrical. There's no left or right side.

Oh, that's nice. Which means that the right side is whichever end you plug in the right jack. and the left side, whichever end you plug the left jack. So that's really nice. And I think that's basically it. These sound amazing. And the last thing I wanted to mention is that I've combined them with a new external DAC, USB-C DAC. It's a very small one that you can take with you, put in your pocket.

Oh, wow, that is small. It's very small. It's the iFi Go Link. They have two models of this one. They have the iFi Go Link Max as well. The only difference between the two is that the Go Max can drive higher impedance headphones. They have more power. And the Go Max also has the balanced jack. You know, the smaller jack. The two millimeters and some very small jack.

So it has both. But this is a smaller one, the simpler one. A few words about this DAC. So high quality, works great, nothing to say about it there. I want to touch on the cable. So it basically looks like a USB-C dongle. There's a USB-C end and the other end where you plug in the jack cable from the headphones. between the two you will notice it's a braided part like a translucent white braided cable very thin and this looks like it's going to break apart at any time but this is very strong like actually

when you have it in hand this is really good it reminds me of the way IEMs are built if you have ever held IEMs, in-ear monitors that musicians use, singers to hear them. Like very, very extremely neutral kind of headphones that people use. Many of them just have this type of cable. It's braided, smooth, and yet very resistant.

So that's nice. Any questions? I love these headphones. The price. I wanted to touch on the price. A bit less than 300 euros they cost me, which is a pretty good price, I think, for what I've got. And these have become my favorite headphones. And this has truly made me reconsider using AirPods Max at all, in many occasions, even outside, still using them outside. But the fact that they are so lightweight, that they sound so amazing that I found a pretty good solution

to have both great quality with this deck and still be able to carry it with me. I think I'm done with Bluetooth. Maybe. Maybe I'm done with Bluetooth. That's a bold statement. And it feels amazingly easy to be back to a state where I can just plug in my headphones into anything. And since it's USB-C, the dongle, I basically can plug in to anything, even maybe the Switch.

I don't know. It should work because I can plug the USB-C earpods into the Switch and get those. So it might work. I need to try that. There's a headphone jack on the Switch too, right? I don't even think you need the dongle. That was my question. Do you need the dongle for your MacBook Air? Because doesn't that have a high impedance headphone jack on it? Yeah. But again, these are low impedance headphones. So even if the headphone jack on the MacBook wasn't for high impedance headphones, it would work just fine.

But yes, it works just fine. I'm using the dongle all the time just because I've decided this is with the headphones. Like this is the dongle that goes with the headphones. It means I can easily just plug it in anywhere without having to worry about the port. Gotcha. Yeah. That makes sense. Do you find going from the AirPods Max to wired headphones, the wire to be annoying when you're like sitting at your desk and working?

Like, does it feel like it gets in your way? Because like, that's how I feel. Like right now I have wired headphones on and I'm like, ah, this thing's in the way. Like I would love wired headphones or wireless headphones. spot. Yeah, this is why I started with the cable, because you're right, it can be annoying, and this is why Bluetooth is so great, but there's been a lot of thought put into this cable, and I think it's a really good cable. It doesn't get in your way, and the design of a splitter, and it's splitting between the two cups, it means it's in a predictable position in front of you,

like hanging in front of you on your torso. It's not like when there's only one cable coming from one cup. It's on your side and it goes into the way of your arms when you're doing things. Yeah, exactly. And same with the ones I'm wearing right now. So yeah, it's a very smart design. It's a design that's thought to be used when you're doing things with your hands and not want to be bothered by a cable.

Interesting. These are pretty cool. I'm going to check these out. But I'm pretty much in the wireless. When I'm sitting at my desk working, I want wireless headphones. Audio quality to me when I'm sitting at my desk working isn't the highest priority because usually, like, lately, I've just been using the Nintendo Music app while I'm working. So, yeah. But these look pretty cool. Oh, I had one small flaw to mention. I almost forgot. Which is that when you're wearing them, for example, outside and you're walking while wearing them, you will hear the metal.

I don't know if you can hear in the mic. Like if you walk on rocks, on gravel, you will hear the metal that just ring a little bit in your ears. I think it's a trade. Like, there's not much they can do if you want to keep the metal and the structure. I guess they could use plastic, but that would feel worse. So I think it's a decent trade-off and it doesn't really matter if you use them mostly at home.

There you go. I'm happy if I need to talk about my headphones. You can do your show now. i had a few questions and you then just kind of answered them as you went i was curious why uh yeah why you why you wanted to switch especially for like when you're out and about bluetooth is pretty convenient but when you're at your desk i i like a wired connection as well just it's like because it's super reliable and you just plug it in and it instantly works and

There's no like, especially with like the Apple stuff, the like multi-device pairing, like I can't, this is crazy. I can't leave my Mac unlocked because when I, for whatever reason, my AirPods will always choose to use the Mac. And if I'm like in the house or even if I'm like walking outside close enough to it, it'll auto switch to the Mac away from my iPhone. And I do not know why. So I definitely appreciate the satisfaction of just plug it in.

in the last year, I want to say the auto switch feature has gotten even more buggy. Like, I have that same issue. But like, if I'm working on my iPad, and then I pick up my iPhone and like, look at something, it tries to switch over to my iPhone. And it's like, no, you were literally playing something on my iPad. I don't want you to stop playing like it's playing there. It's especially egregious when it happens to podcasts. I don't know. I have one trick that I came up with.

so these are so good that I want to use them with the TV in the living room usually I use the AirPods Max with the Apple TV in the living room but how do you use this with the Apple TV? maybe you know what I did I actually don't what I'm doing is I take my MacBook Air with me take it to the living room plug the headphones into the MacBook Air and on the Apple TV I switch to the MacBook Air as the audio output

and that's it I just keep the MacBook Air on the couch table next to me and I can use the good headphones with the Apple TV that works this is genius is what you mean to say sure This is undeniably a solution. That is true. It is absolutely a solution. Maybe it could be another way if Apple added ports to the Apple TV.

But that's how it goes. So for my topic this week, I found something. Some of you may have heard of these before. there were eight created. They're known as the Seeing Stones. Most of which were lost in various wars and taken over and sunk. There are three known, one of which is in the

hands of the Dark Lord Sauron, the White Wizard Saruman, and the Steward of Gondor Dinathor. Well, I found one. I found a plant here. It's the big ball. I'm just kidding. It's the big ball. I had to do my Lord of the Rings bit. It is really clipping. It's big. It is very big. I was shocked how big it is.

So this is the big ball from the last episode that Nelian had me talk about or had me purchase that she found and I'm trying to see if I can bring the light down so it's not constantly clipping. The Eve flare. So this is the Eve flare big ball. This is a HomeKit thread smart home device that is a LED ball with RGB lights. So you could change the lighting. Now, here's the really weird thing.

It's supposed to be thread, so it's supposed to be like respond instantly. It's very slow. Oh, no. It's very slow to respond. uh i don't know why that sometimes though it is it is like like i just changed the i just dropped the opacity from uh 100 to 43 and it took forever for it to catch up like changing the colors takes forever it takes multiple seconds it is very very slow explain changing the opacity of the ball. So it's just like

I'm sorry. Intensity? Intensity is what I meant. Okay. I was going to say. Does this disappear? So this is a HomeKit device. So when you add this like most Eve stuff, you add it straight to HomeKit. There is an Eve app that you can add stuff to but really you're just adding it to HomeKit and the Eve app is accessing HomeKit. So it has the ability to change for video viewers. You can change the intensity. Sorry, not opacity, intensity. You can change the colors, and you have option to the color picker in iOS.

So I can move this around. Oh, this is the color picker that you find in Quick Reviews. Yes, this is the new iOS color picker. You guys do more marketing for my app than I do. It's great. You can also save colors, so you can pin them down here and stuff. There's a temperature tab, so you can do it by temperature. if you want. I'm sorry, it's clipping. It's not changing live, is it? It is, it is, but it's clipping. So, like, it just looks white, but really, right now, it's orange, but because of the camera, it's clipping. I didn't do a

very good test of this, but I'm turning it way down, and it's still clipping. So, it's at, like, 20%, so it shouldn't be clipping now, but you can kind of see it's a little blue now. Yeah, we can see it's a white, but it's a cooler, warmer white yeah it's really blue right now like it's very blue how does it look like in real life it looks very blue it's very blue right now okay and i i'm turning the brightness down to see if i can get it to stop from clipping let me try adjusting the camera settings hang on okay i would describe this as as like how apple colors their ipads and iphones most years where it's it's technically blue just a half of two.

Oh, there you go. There we go. Oh, now it turned off. Okay, so Chris turned down the exposure. So if you move it around a lot, it shuts off for some reason. Let me... Oh, no, no, just change colors. Wait, that's weird. Is that a feature? I don't know. I think I just discovered something. I think it has touch controls, right? Oh, maybe that's what it is. I read that it has touch controls. It's tapping. It's a tap-tam. Palantirs are very mysterious Palantir Palantir The Tolkien people will come for you Matt Yeah So I don't know how

Well this is going to show up in the final video But you can kind of see the color changes now Now we see it Yeah so it's cool It changes colors It has a base station that you can put it on to charge In the instructions it says it takes up to 6 hours To fully charge uh it did not take that long for me but i don't know if it was partially charged when it came out of the box or not so okay does it charge with usbc no so it has this guy hang on one second this guy oh hang on let me adjust the it's the base i see okay so this guy right here which now

is clicking this is very hard this is a very hard thing but this is a base so it's got two gold contacts that you just put you just set it on and it'll charge use regular outlets and okay okay so you could just like leave it if it's permanently in the same spot you just never think about charging it exactly and but you can't pick it up and take it with you it also has this hook on the bottom so you can hang it oh my god that's amazing so you can hang it as well yeah do i detect another

five-star review coming? You could spend $500 a hand at five on your Christmas tree. That would be one big Christmas tree. You would really need some strong branches. It's not super heavy but you would not be able to put this on a regular branch of a Christmas tree. It's not time tree. But overall it's pretty nifty. It is HomeKit so you can enable it with HomeKit automation. Let me do something here for you. So I can, let me turn up the brightness so people can see it.

Okay, so it's kind of green right now. You can kind of see the green on my face. Studio lights off. Does it get really bright? This is as bright as it gets, but it's okay. So studio lights are off. This is off right now. It kind of may look like it's on, but it's off. And then I can do studio lights on. any second now Siri don't do us like this hang on studio lights on I hate Siri there we go and then now you can kind of see

it goes back to like this warmer color I have the automation to set to this like orange-ish warm color but you can kind of see the glow on my face so anyways this is the big ball also known as the e-flare but a big ball is a much better name. In fact, it's literally in HomeKit, it's named The Big Ball. So I can say, hang on. Let me... In show notes, it will be listed as The Big Ball, not whatever its product is. You'll know it. We should clarify Eve did not approve that we call it The Big Ball.

Eve should. But they should, yeah. Big Ball on. Yeah, so do you think it's worth the price? Is what I wanted to ask. um outs okay if we did not do this for the challenge i would not buy this because i don't really have a need for something like this this is not the kind of decor style our house is um so i i don't have a need for this so for a hundred bucks no is it a cool thing to play with if you like smart home lights yes absolutely if you like smart home lights if you want something if you want

some kind of portable light. If we did more in our backyard, I would be like, wow, this is really cool. Like if we hung out in our backyard at night, this would be cool to put on a table or something like that. But I don't really have a need for something like this. So for me, no, because I'm the kind of person if I don't have a need for something, I don't spend money on it. But if you like smart home lights, if you want a portable light, if you want something that has RGB, LED, something you can automate, yeah, this would be pretty fun to play with. Nice.

I think the version of this I would buy is a bug zapper version. So if you did bring it outside, you could put it on your patio table, and it would just get the bugs as they come around. Oh, gosh. That'd be my use case for it. Then I'd buy it. I got to be honest. I hovered over the buy button at least two times after we recorded last week, because I was tempted. One other thing. When Danielle saw this, her first thought was, this looks like the Taylor Swift era ball thing.

Apparently, they had these balls. They did this witchy scene in the Ares tour, and the backup dancers had these balls they were holding. Oh, really? That's what this looked like. Maybe it is, but they had, maybe. It's definitely not. She showed me an image of it, and their thing was this multicolor, pulsing, much more palantir-looking thing. But she asked me to mention Taylor Swift. She wants tickets or something. You've mentioned that so many times today, and it's not the last time.

So, yeah, that's nice. It's not the last time? It's not the last time. How do you know it's not the last time? Yeah, I know things. I'm very confused. Okay, all right. But anyway, this is the big ball. Unless you guys got any other questions, we should probably move on to the challenge. I like the big ball. I love the big ball. Just out of curiosity, if this didn't support HomeKit, would this even be a valid topic for Comfort Zone? I mean, yeah, it's still smart home automation. What do you mean? I'm just curious. I keep thinking about that tea kettle. I can't stop thinking about it.

I think so. It's still smart home stuff. I think you should bring the tea kettle. I'm going to bring it back. Here's my one-year review. I actually thought about been mulling around an idea where we revisit certain topics, because I think that might be interesting to revisit older topics, but that's something we can talk about later. How scuffed will the big ball be in a year? I don't know. It depends on where it ends up. Depends on where it ends up and if a cat can get to it.

All right. Well, let's move on to the challenge. I believe it was Matt's challenge. It was indeed. And my challenge was adopt a European app or service for the week. ideally when you didn't already use. And I can get us going. Go Europe. Yay. I brought... Well, let's not get too excited. When Europeans get too excited about Europe, I get to find something. Bad things happen.

Yeah. I'm not part of that. Okay. So I have been using a new search engine. So interesting that it came up earlier in the feedback. i have been using quant oh what is quant i have never heard of it as well but it is a search engine i have it is a french search engine and it's okay it has okay so let me so i'm not using i'm not going to be switching to quant but what quant seems to be and again i don't i'm not an expert on quant uh is similar to duck duck

goes pitches we're a search engine privacy first we don't uh right under right right under on their kind of search page the search engine that values you as a user not as a product um so yeah privacy focus search interesting and i don't know if this is because i'm just from america but literally every single search I do makes me do a captcha. Oh. And it's that sort of captcha that makes you drag the puzzle piece over to fill in.

I'm not getting it. Every single search. It's crazy. Don't throw me nuts. So that's one thing. The search engine is fine and I'll search for the big ball. We'll see what comes up. I don't know if I'd want to search for that. I would not want to search for that. I realized it as soon as I said it. But you know what? These results are, it's golf. There's a big ball that's, oh, this is a huge ball. Oh, there's like companies that just sell big balls.

Anyway, let's keep the, yes. So anyway, so a fine search engine. Seems fine. They also have a QuantJr, which is a search engine for kids, it looks like, and favors kid things. I don't really know if it blocks search results for much, but yeah. Interestingly, their main search page has an English version that I get to see.

QuantJr is all in French, so no English version. but I probably wouldn't use that anyway, so that's fine. It's probably because you're not a junior. Like, you're not Matt Birchler Jr., as far as I know. And that's why, like, oh, you're not actually a junior, so you can't use this. You think it's for kids, but really it's a search engine for people that are juniors. I had not thought about this, but you're probably right. My guess is this is the thing that they have in schools.

Oh, yeah. computers in schools. Oh, interesting. I have no idea. That's my guess. Okay. It could be. But it's a nice search engine. Again, I didn't do enough to like... Oh, one thing. It has no idea who I am. And that is the worst thing about this search engine. Really? Yeah. I search for Birch Tree. I get birchtree.org. Birch Tree Bread Company who's always outranked me. Doesn't know me.

Thespruce.com, Birch on Wikipedia, leafyplace.com. There's no birchtree.me. This is brutal. Doesn't know me. It knows me. It's all that Matt does. Actually, what if I just search for Matt Birchler? Does that come up? Yeah, it knows you, Chris. It pulls up my mastodon right away. It knows me, so it's good. It works. All good. That's cool. I'm good. Anyway. Oh, my God. Maybe it doesn't. So it's got AI overuse at the top. I don't know if you mentioned that, Matt.

I haven't seen those. You don't have them? Is that region locked? That might be a region bank. Okay, so when I do a search on Quant, I get a big AI overview at the top, kind of like what Google is doing. They call them flash response. And anyway, when I search for Chris Lolly, It says, Chris Lolly is an experimented urologist. Ah, this guy. Based in Wilmington, Ohio. Oh, Chris knows this guy.

This guy was the bane of my existence when I started YouTube. And I got him. Because people would search for me and be like, you're also a doctor? And I'm like, no, I'm not this guy at all. And then I finally took over the first page of Google. But if you Google me, it shows all my links. All the links are me. But the summary of who I am is this guy. It's such like an ego thing. Like I totally know it's like an ego thing, but it bugs the crap out of me.

I'm like, those are my links, but that's not me. So you know what? When I click on to expand the overview, there's a button to expand. Now it says Christopher Lawless is a professional cyclist in Britain. Lawless? I'm so sorry. I want. No, never mind. Don't like the search engine. So, yeah, I've heard of Krant a ton, a ton, because it's been one of those French startups, tech startups that took off at some point.

Like they took off in Europe, mostly like in Germany as well. And at some point, even Macron talked about like, hey, look, we're proud of our French tech. they started pushing this everywhere like but the truth is nobody likes it it's not good they have them by default in administrations because they make partnerships with tons of companies so you get to work and that's the default search engine

and it's just annoying for everyone involved but good for them I guess So that's why I was guessing that Quant Jr. was in schools, because I would not be surprised if they have some partnerships with the Ministry of Education or whatever. They want an offer, maybe, and they have them by default in schools. I would not be surprised, because they've been really pushed by this kind of initiatives over the years.

Interesting. Okay. Well, that's Quant. All right. Well, I really thought about this, and I really struggled with this one. I did a bunch of research. I was trying to find apps specifically that were developed in Europe, and I was coming up with a bunch of things, and pretty much all of them I had tried because I was looking at really productivity apps and stuff like that. And then I was really thinking about, like, what's in my stack? And something I noticed is it has been over a year now since I have left the Things app.

I left Things for Reminders, and then I left it for Todoist. And I know in maths, it was like, ideally one you don't already use. But every time I publish a video, there is one to five comments about when are you going back to Things. So I took this opportunity to revisit the Things app. Things three, the task manager. And you know what? It hasn't changed at all in the last year. And that's the big issue with it. There hasn't been any significant changes in the last year.

I literally set it up and used it exactly like I did a year ago. And I was very disappointed to see that. I don't know if they're working on Things four. I don't know what they're doing. But they haven't really changed much in the last couple years. So Things is from which country? Germany. oh okay yeah sorry i forgot to say that bit uh yes uh so i was kind of a little disappointed i was you know i was like you know i i wanted to revisit it because everyone asked me what i'm

going to do it some of my most popular videos are about things people love that app but i'm just like they haven't really done anything to the app to make it new and to kind of like push it forward interesting ways. One of the things I've talked about, especially with Todoist is having a Kanban view is just super important to me now. Like that's just the way I lay out my projects because I'm working on multiple different things now with comfort zone and videos and some other side stuff. This is how I lay out what I'm working on, where everything is in the progress, really important to me. It does have the deadline feature, which I absolutely love.

Its shortcut support is really fantastic, especially with the new use model action in the OS 26 betas. They have the find action in for shortcuts for things. So you're able to filter things and then use that use model action to really like get specific because it's all natural language. It can all go through there. Really cool stuff. But yeah, I just don't see any meaningful changes in over a year, which is not great.

I know it's not a subscription app. It's a buy once upfront app. I don't know if that's hurting them right now. I don't know if they're working on a big update. But I kind of think for the sake of their user base, they should probably announce something soon. Because I'm just like, what are you doing? Like, I'm on the test flight for it as well. And it's all just like bug fixes. So I'm like, okay, that's cool. Like, great, you're fixing bugs. But what are you adding? What are you doing to push the app forward?

And I haven't really seen much. Interesting. Is it a subscription? No. It's paid up front, but you pay for it's not a universal purchase. So you pay for the iPhone version, then you buy the iPad version, then you buy the Mac version. Yeah. It is interesting. They really don't add. If you want constant updates, Things has never been the app for you. No. I disagree. When Things 3 first launched, they were doing big updates.

They were putting out massive. They did a whole update about iPad keyboard shortcuts, the shortcuts app. They put out big, big updates pretty much yearly when Things 3 first launched. Yeah, I guess they did kind of back then. Before Things 3, they were known as the app that didn't get new iOS features until a year later. That was a big thing that people complained about. They got better about that. Yeah. Yeah, I definitely appreciate it. I think the interesting thing is I'm in kind of the opposite box. I use Todoist every once in a while, and to me, it feels exactly the same whenever I go to it, even though I know they add features, but I'm like, oh, this is exactly like it was.

a year ago. Maybe for me it's a little different because I'm paying attention to their blog and their experimental track because they added the deadline feature a couple months ago and that was the thing that got me to jump over to it. And they are adding some stuff but I'm also having an issue with the app right now with the iOS 26 betas where I have to force quit the app in order to get it to do, like to check a task off because like once i check a task off it becomes unresponsive sort of like i can navigate

through the app but i can't like mark something as completed like if i check the box it shows the animation but it never goes away it just stays there so i have to like force quit the app so i'm hoping that gets resolved soon yeah that's annoying yeah anyway i love things things is one of those pro apps i don't want it to change too much that if they just added a kanban view add a can add a kanban view and add the ability to attach files to a task those are those are two things that i've been loving in todoist is so like anytime i get a sponsor and i get talking points i'm like okay i

just add that and they'll always send us pdfs so i just add that pdf to the task so when i go to work on that it's just right there yeah that's going to increase their storage significantly so that's It's going to be a subscription thing probably. Anyway, I don't know. They should. Yeah. Anyways. That's things. I just wanted to revisit it because everyone always asks me about when I'm going to go back to it. And right now I don't think I'm going to unless they put out some major updates. Because I'm like, give me something new. Give me something that can help my workflow.

And I understand there are people out there that's like, nope, I've settled. I like my workflow. I don't want it to change. But to me, I want new tools. I want the ability to try new things. I want to be able to mix things up. So, yeah. My turn? Yeah. Go for it. Okay. So, I've got something pretty interesting. And it fits into a theme, which is I've been talking a lot about public transit in Geneva, specifically. But, yeah, it's an app called Fatic.

You spell that F-A-I-R-T-I-Q. Fair tick. This company is based, I forgot already. I did not write it down. Germany? Somewhere around there, not in France. So, basically, what they do is an app, they partner with public transit networks in cities across Europe. And those cities, they get to use an app with their network.

And the app is a ticketing app. And it's another way of paying for public transit, basically. Let me show you. So what I've done is I've put it on my lock screen here as a shortcut, one of the two shortcuts, two controls at the bottom of the lock screen. So I've just put it here, press it. Boom, launches. And there it is. So for some context, exposure, maybe, it doesn't care.

There you go. For some context, I live in Grenoble, France, and Grenoble has launched an experimentation using FairTik. And I've been a part of the experimentation since exactly one week. This is why last week when Matthew announced the challenge, I told you, hey, I just got into a beta today. which is very relevant. So yeah, so I'm part of this experimentation. Not everyone in Grenoble has access to this, but it's just a opt-in.

So it's easy to get in. You get to install the beta, the app, and you just get to use it. So the way it works is you put in your credit card information. You can use Apple Pay as well directly. And you just, let's say you travel across the city in a tramway. The way it works is you open the app on your phone. You go to the station. You open the app on the phone and you see there's a slider here, a green slider.

You slide it across the screen. You let go. And you start paying for your trip. It uses geolocation to know where you are. So it knows your starting station, the station you hopped on at the tram, the station at which you hopped on the tram. And when you get to your destination, you slide the slider back. Now it will complain because I'm not actually traveling.

but you slide the slider back when you're at your destination and it will automatically calculate what you owe the network it always it's supposed to at least always uses the lowest price that matches your profile supposedly like if the network has a special price for under 25 it will pick that price for you, etc.

So I've tried to use it regularly this week when I was out. Not as much as I thought I would because a heatwave, a new heatwave hit the city, so I did not go out much. But when I did, I used this. I think this is really nice in ways that I did not expect. So I thought it was going to be annoying because usually I use Apple Pay to pay for the tram. Basically, when you get at the station, you have totems on which you tap your phone and it beeps and you've just paid with Apple Pay.

When you use this app, though, you don't have to reach for the totems at the station. you can just get on the tram. You don't have to search for one on the platform. So that's really useful. It means that in specific situations like where you are late, or maybe you're just rushing to get on your tram just before it goes away, you can just get on the train and not worry about having to tap to pay on the platform.

So that's really nice. a downside is that it uses geolocation and you have to remember to slide off when you get off the tram yeah what happens if you don't remember to slide it off so you don't remember if you don't remember to slide it off they have a feature which is called smart stop and supposedly and I've tried this supposedly with smart stop the app will automatically cancel like slide it off for you if you get off the train.

It's supposed to detect that with your current position and the way you're moving. If it's detecting that you're not on the vehicle anymore. And I did try to rely on that. It doesn't really work. I got off a tram. I was in the city. I was just shopping. And after like 20 minutes, it was still running on my phone. Which is all right. since so in Grenoble when you pay for a trip you pay for an hour so it's the same price for at least an hour so as long as it's on an hour you're not getting overcharged but if you're going over an

hour then it might be problematic to forget to swipe slide it off I think it's interesting when looking at their website they are they have been rolled out like officially here in Grenoble it's just an experimentation but they have been rolled out uh officially in quite a few cities especially in germany which is why i'm guessing it's german uh i remember that it's it's indeed a european company but i don't remember which but mostly in germany and in france they even they were even rolled out uh officially in one of the main regions of france in the main province if you

if you see what I mean so there you can use it for all the trains in the region so that's really cool and I will have to give feedback as part of the experimentation to the Grenoble network I think I will tell them this is really nice this should not become the main ticketing thing. Like, as long as it's just another option on top of the others, as long as there's still Apple Pay, there is still

regular tickets that you can buy and physical cards that you can buy, I think it should be fine. It's a fun option to add to the mix. One thing, though, is that they should roll out at Express Transit mode. That would be really nice. But I don't know how that works if apple is annoying about that or not so yeah cool that's really interesting yeah yeah yeah yeah all right well are we ready to move on to next week's challenge yes i have a challenge i'm so scared i'm i'm really scared neely on whenever neely on texas that she has like a

challenge idea it's never good for that i was struggling to this morning i woke up and i was like, ah, still have to find a challenge. I don't have any idea. And then I thought about it over breakfast. I don't really take breakfast, but imagine I took one. And I came up with an idea. So the challenge is the prompt is officially I wrote it down for you. So there's no doubt. There's no like, okay, no conflict. First off, I want to ask you, are you guys in good terms with your partners?

Yeah. Okay, that will help. That will help. Okay. Get your partner to modify your iPhone's home screen. You can't give them any instructions, and you have to live with their modifications for the week. Can I at least tell them not to delete apps? So let me reread the prompt. All the rules are in the test. Get your partner to modify your iPhone's home screen.

You can't give them any instructions, and you have to live with their modifications for the week. This is perfect. I'm excited. I think it's fine. I think it's a fun one. And this is going to be Danielle and I's first fight. Not really. Hopefully not. Okay. That's a doozy. That's a doozy of a challenge. So after we record, I have to go give Danielle my phone. I was going to say, I'm reading this as I need to do this today.

I mean, no, it's all right if it's just in a day or two. Do what you can. But I should also mention, remember to take a screenshot before. Oh, yeah. So that we can do a before after next week. This is going to be a doozy. All right. Well, that's fun. But I think it's about time for us to wrap up. We have an end of the show question. Again, a reminder, please send in questions. Like if there's anything you want to know about the three of us, please feel free to send in an end of the show question.

It's always the hardest part of doing the show notes every week, like is coming up with this question. But I love doing it, so I don't want to stop doing it. But we have a feedback form. You can play along with the challenge, write in. But if you have an end of the show question, please let us know. And we got one that I really love. What was the last thing that truly excited you to the point of giggling, squeal, or other physical reaction? I know mine. I can go first if you guys would like. Go ahead.

Donkey Kong Bonanza. Every time it says, oh, banana, I would get a smile on my face. I beat the game. I won't spoil it. Loved the ending. It was fantastic. It was a great game the whole way through. I enjoyed it so much. I didn't want to put it down. So mine is Donkey Kong Bonanza. I've never played Donkey Kong. You know, I'm not a big Donkey Kong person either. I've never played a Donkey Kong Country game. In fact, Danielle has been revisiting the old ones on the Super Nintendo Switch thing.

See, you mentioned her again. I did mention her again. Thanks to my challenge. This episode's all about Danielle. But yeah, no, she's been playing the old Donkey Kong Country games. But the only Donkey Kong games I've ever played were Donkey Kong 64 and Diddy Kong Racing. So, yeah. Do you want to go first? Well, second. Sure. The thing that came to mind, I'm not a giggler most of the time, but media-wise, the thing that I think got me closest to giggling

was the movie Sinners, which is outstanding. I still haven't seen it yet. I need to watch it. I knew it would be good. I had heard it was very good. And it's one of those things where it was even better than the hype that I had heard. It is absolutely fantastic. It's a movie, you said? Yeah. It's the new Ryan Coogler movie. He was the Black Panther director.

And it has Michael B. Jordan in it? It has Michael B. Jordan in it. Which every time I hear his name, I feel so bad for him because he has to be Michael B. Jordan because of Actors Guild rules. Because Michael Jordan, star of Space Jam, took Michael Jordan. So he has to be Michael B. Jordan. Yep. I mean, I feel like you still want to do that. You don't want to go your whole life like Michael Jordan and not that Michael Jordan. Oh, yeah. That's a good point. Neil, what about you? Okay, my first thought goes to almost exactly a year ago, July 2024, the results of the snap elections in France.

Oh, yeah. As a reminder, we were all expecting for the fascists to win, basically. All the polls, everything was pointing to, yep, we're heading to that. Let's get a fascist government in place and deal with that. And in the end, the left won. At least they came in first place. I cannot tell you that evening was absolutely crazy. People in the streets, parties, and genuine crying out loud.

It was an amazing night. Just immense relief. But apart from that, if we're sticking to media, maybe, The close second is Endor season two. Oh, yeah. Yeah. This is such an incredible show. Very, very, very relevant in terms of political context. It's very smart about the way it's written.

The characters are amazingly written as well. The story is beautiful. and yeah, I will say that's very close second to that where I got many times throughout the show very, very, very physical reactions in a good way. And the only Star Wars media without a lightsaber. Oh, so far. Yeah, so far.

Was there not one in Lufenstrap? Maybe. maybe, but I mean, okay, no lightsaber got turned on and there was no close-up of a lightsaber. There might be a lightsaber in his shop, but I don't know. That also seems like the kind of thing like the Empire would outlaw, like you would get in trouble. That seems like contraband. Would he want to push that? Because then that's a whole other thing. But let's wrap up the show. Thank you all so much for listening. Huge thank you to MacStories for having us. We are a MacStories podcast.

Be sure to go check out all the other writings and podcast over there. There's lots of cool stuff happening. Thank you all so much for listening. Have a great day. Bye bye.