Boom, Firefox Out of the Question

Welcome to Comfort Zone, a podcast all about pushing your hosts, well, outside of their comfort zone. I'm Christopher Lawley, and each week I am joined by two incredible co-hosts. As always, I am joined by Matt Birchler. Matt, how are you doing? Chris, I'm doing well, but I'm feeling less cool than others because I don't have lasers in my intro. I was actually off screen when the episode started, my God. Yeah, it's not very professional. I mean, and I'm totally leaving that in. We're also joined by Neelian. Neelian, how are you?

I'm fine. I was fine until off the air just a minute ago. You said you did not notice the difference with my hair. It's noticeably shorter, and yet you did not notice. Well, I'm sorry. Look, you have headphones on. It's hard for me to tell. Okay, yes, that is noticeably shorter. Yes. Much better, Chris. This is a rookie mistake. This is a rookie mistake. I make those all the time.

So we are recording like an hour earlier than normal so I'm like a little like not quite awake. My Dr. Pepper hasn't quite kicked in like it normally would. So, yes. But you know what? It's currently fully night time all the time. Yesterday, we made the time change back to wintertime, right? Oh, no. We're in the couple weeks where it's off. And I am depressed.

I am fully depressed. It's nighttime by 5 p.m. or so. And it's fully raining slash snowing all the time. So I just want to say I hate you all from this hemisphere, The northern hemisphere is the worst. I want to go back to my country where it's sunny all year long and people are nicer with each other. And that's it.

This is my statement. You don't like the hemisphere that's cold and mean? This is shocking. Okay, hard to disagree. So it is still dark outside for me as well, but that's because the sun hasn't come up yet. It's not that it has gone down. but I love this time of the year I love when it gets dark early I love when it stays dark I love when it's cold I have seasonal defective disorder but the opposite from everyone else I love the winter I want it to be winter all the time

would you say Chris that you like to play it cold and hence that you are a cold player oh no No, no, no, no. I thought you were going to go like cold-blooded killer or something like that. Yeah, totally. Yeah. But no, cold-blooded killer. No, no. But man, do I love the winter. I absolutely, it's my favorite time of the year. We could go on for an hour like this, but do you mean like a California winter?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so like a slight chill in the air. Yeah, a slight chill in the air. When you walk outside, you're going to want a jacket, but you're not going to have to deal with snow. Yeah. I'm shaking my head in Midwest. It's kind of like my country, you know. La Réunion Island is like that. Okay. In the winter, I could get on board with that. Just a little chill and that's it. Yeah, a little chill. It's a little cold. You're going to want a jacket, but you don't have to deal with snow. Oh, no jacket here. No, no. Oh, no, no. You're going to want... I look good in a jacket, so I want a jacket.

Okay. Okay. All right. We need to move on. We actually have a podcast to do that's not about weather or seasons. So we have some tiny topics. Matt, I think you put this first thing in here. Yeah, I think I did. It's the browser podcast, everybody. Oh, yes. And just very quickly, a new web browser came out that I've been using. It's from this little company called OpenAI. It's called ChatGPT Atlas. And it's nice.

It feels nice to use. I could rant for a long time about how I think agent modes are so stupid and maybe they'll be useful one day, but they are terrible right now. And they seem to be marketed specifically at the sorts of people who have assistants that just do things for them. And they haven't grocery shopped for themselves in 10 years and they haven't booked a flight because they just have someone do that for them. And they think everybody lives this way.

Anyway, I find them very stupid, but it feels nice to use. It's got some nice animations. Yeah, it's okay. Yeah. So as the other co-host of the browser podcast, I will step in and say that I also tried it for like 30 minutes. And I saw your video, expert video, Matt Bertschler on YouTube. And I agree with all your takes. It looks very pretty. It feels nice.

And I agree with you when you say especially that a web browser must feel nice to use. It's a must. That's my number one requirement. It needs to feel good. Yes. Firefox, boom. Out of the question. Out of the question for this only reason. Please Mozilla hire a designer someday. But anyway, so it's nice. But other than that, it's just like dear. which means if you don't know what EDI is for this is exactly the same yeah the same conclusion that you will reach

what is this for you can just open a chat GPT tab if you need to ask a few chat GPT questions during the day anyway yeah we'll see what they do with it we'll see what they do with it but I don't know I wanted to bring it up because it's, in my opinion, the only browser that has a chance to do anything notably big because people know who ChatGPT is. They seem to know how to get hit apps. I want to ask you both.

What do you think of the icon? The app icon. I don't think I'm allowed on the browser podcast. Okay, yeah, you're in the audience. Yes, we have an audience member speaking from the back. What did you say? This is definitely on the iPad, right? Like I could definitely go download this and use it and it's totally going to work. Okay, cool. I'll go check it out. You need to install a VM first, but then, yeah.

I think it's fine. It's whatever. Yeah. Yeah, right? Okay, this is the take, I think. It's whatever, which is disappointing. Because I think the name is very good. It's a good name for a browser. so. Atlas, yeah. Atlas, yeah. And the icon is disappointing. Not that I would use the JGPT browser. Not for more than 30 minutes. Yeah. Just to know what I'm angry at. Exactly, yeah. You gotta know what I'm angry at.

Okay, cool. Thank you for coming to the browser podcast. Thank you, Matt. Whoa, that was weird. I was like pushed back into like an audience seat, but I was the only audience member, and I lost my microphone, but then like somebody handed me a mic for 10 seconds and then took it away yeah weird wow um i don't know what happened there all right uh we have a couple other things and tiny topics uh what else is going on here okay so i put in a cryptic phrase i wrote the young they like their find my i put this in the document just because I wanted to chat with you about it. It seems like I've seen this mentioned

around and about like the younger folks like I'm talking about people who are still going at school for example or even maybe early university that kind of age so they already have smartphones and all of that and they all add each other to on find my and here especially as you can imagine in France the majority of people don't have iPhones right it's it's quite actually it's quite a minority

especially if you looking at a young crowd they mostly have Android smartphones okay and yet this is still a thing. The clicks, the groups of friends, they have subgroups inside them that have added each other on Find My and the Android majority are feeling left out. So weird. Wow. I mean, the Android people should have made better choices.

That's clearly the answer. Oh my God. Well, I mean, if you remember, Find My originally started off as a social network. It was Find My Friends, and that was supposed to be the location-based social network, and I guess it's finally taking off. Yeah, interesting. It's a thing for families. My family has added to it, but Friends is interesting. I guess if you're in high school, you're constantly hanging out with friends and stuff. Yeah. When we did our trip to Disneyland, Find My was awesome. Like, we were just able to be like, oh, those people, they are at Space Mountain or those people are on whatever.

Like, we can, like, just find each other whenever we'd break off and go do our own things and stuff. And we'd meet back up together and stuff. It was fantastic. But there's the thing where I think, like, most of these young people, they use Snapchat to see each other on the map. Because so snapshot has the snap map. I don't know what's called anymore and So they mostly use that but there's like this sub click of people who have that but interesting

On iOS with the fine minute one gets a shot. That's interesting Brand random thing. I know we were short on time It is super interesting to hear especially like teenagers are mostly Android. I'm over there in the US everyone is. Okay, everyone is. In the US, the majority of people have iPhones, but it's like 60-40. I don't know what the exact number is. But with high schoolers, it's like 95 to 5. Everyone has an iPhone. If you're a young person, you have an iPhone.

It's crazy. It's the boomers that have the Android phones. If you want to be one of the cool kids, if you don't want to be a pariah in high school, you have an iPhone. You got to be a blue bubbler, which is why Google has that whole ad campaign about blue bubbles don't matter, but they do. In high school, at least. All right. What's next? This next item is interesting. I did not write this. So this one's from me.

The whole note is Pokemon is French. And I just wanted to bring this up very quickly. I think when we discussed video games on a Cozy Zone episode, Nelian, you revealed you've never played a Pokemon game. No. So I just wanted to throw this out there. The new Pokemon game, Pokemon ZA, is not strictly in Paris, but this city is Paris. It is very clearly a French city. There is an Eiffel Tower. There's an Eiffel Tower in it.

And just if you were ever to start one, this would be an interesting one. This, honestly, it may come up later in the episode, but Pokemon AZ, my hot take on it, it is the best Pokemon game to get started with Pokemon. It holds your hand and kind of walks you through a lot of different, very complex things that Pokemon has just added on years of years and years of generations after generation after generation. It's a great Pokemon game if you've never played Pokemon and you want to get started and you want to learn the ins and outs of it.

And it's French. So I've seen screenshots and TikToks of Pokemon ZA. Is that it? ZA, yeah. Yeah, ZA. And one particular TikTok was some French streamer was like ranting really hard about the game because they're saying the city in the game feels extremely empty and almost eerie.

And they were like, how did I pay 70 euros for this? And they look and they open the map in the game and they show the entirety of the map and it looks minuscule. So this is all I've seen about the game. That's probably fairly early on in the game. It definitely fills up. I would not call it. When you get going in the game a few hours in, it fills up. So I would say that's probably a little more sensationalized.

Okay, so you know what? I will not play the game. Oh, okay. All right. This week on Cozy Zone, we played soccer, internet soccer, and it wasn't boring. It might be the first soccer game ever that wasn't boring. So go check out Cozy Zone. It's actually a good one. And for Cozy Zone subscribers, there is a link in the episode to where you can go watch the video version of it so you can actually watch us play internet soccer.

We did our best to make it very audio friendly, but the video version is very, very good. Especially at one moment where I realized something and, yeah, I'll just leave it at that. Yeah. All right. You guys ready to get in the main show? Sure. All right, Niléane, you're first up in the dock. What do you got for us this week? Okay, so there is definitely a theme throughout today's episode, which is video games.

Which we did not plan. We did not plan on. It just happened to be that. So, yeah, Chris, you will be talking as well about games. But I have been having struggles with gaming this week, and I feel sad. And I just want to, like, I need my therapy. You need to therapy me. Okay. So, we wanted to play a game with a close friend of mine because we were bored.

We usually hang out on Discord during the weekends. And we're like, what are we doing? And I know he and I are both soccer fans, football fans. And we like the FIFA games. you know about the FIFA games, right? Oh, yeah. Now it's called EA Sports, whatever, FC, FC Sports, because EA, they didn't want to renew the contract with the FIFA

to use the name. But that was the worst rebending of all time because everyone still says FIFA, even if it's been three years now. Anyway. So we wanted to play that game. So I bought it on Steam. My friend did as well. While he ran to the shop, so he lives in the city center, he ran to the shop.

And while he did that, I was just waiting for him to get back because we wanted to launch the game at the same time and discover the game at the same time and start playing football together when he came so he went to the store i didn't say why to purchase a controller because he didn't have a controller i still have my stadia controller my one and only stadia controller and i use that to play games um so anyway so he went and bought a controller especially for this like specifically

for this game so that we can play together. He came back from the store, so we were happy. You remember what my setup is, right? When I need to play games, PC games. You've got the remote play, I forget what it's called, but you do like some sort of streaming thing. Yes, I've got a subscription to Shadow, which is a cloud gaming PC subscription service. So basically you get a full PC.

kind of I guess anyway you get a full Windows machine with a graphics card the one I have is a 40 on my offer is an equivalent to a 4060 so it's pretty good graphics card and yeah so I launched that installed the game and I could not for the life of me start the game oh no can you imagine why stadia controllers not support it

oh no it works just fine oh drm no not drm but it's something stupid like that believe me i don't know um they don't recognize uh your graphics card or something like that okay i will guide you. It's something that's common to a lot of competitive games. Anti-cheat. Exactly. The game it just does not launch on a cloud gaming PC because it detects it somehow and when you go to a specific support page

from Shadow, they are aware. Like, they have a section, EA blocks all of their games from running on our machines due to anti-cheat software. So I was extremely sad and disgusted because... And I felt quite guilty because my friend, they had just run to the store to buy a controller specifically for this

and we can't play the game. Oh, okay. That sucks. That sucks. Does the story have a happy ending? No. Oh, no. No, no, no. But there is like a, yeah. So in the end, yeah, kind of a happy ending. Okay. Because there's no, like, there's no solution to this. Like, we did not play FIFA. And I am sad because I don't deserve any happiness in this life, apparently. I can't play FIFA.

I can't play this nice game with my friend. I think not being able to play FIFA, a soccer game, might actually be a blessing because you won't be bored. Yeah. And in the end, we tried to look for something else. And we started playing No Man's Sky. This was my first time playing No Man's Sky.

It runs amazingly. I've already got 10 hours or so of playtime, even though we installed this two days ago. And yeah, No Man's Sky is great. I've heard this. oh you haven't played No Man's Sky either? no ok so No Man's Sky had a terrible terrible launch and there was a lot of things promised in it that

did not come with the launch at all but it is they have like put a ton of time into it and it has become a great game it's great it's like Minecraft meets Satisfactory meets I don't know. Elite Dangerous. Exploration game. What's the Kickstarter game that's never actually going to come out that has Mark Hamill in it? Star Citizen.

Yeah. Oh, Star Citizen. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That game is never actually ever going to be officially released. I'm calling it now. It looks incredible. We don't need to go down this, but there's so much stuff here, but yeah, I don't know if they're ever going to do it 1.0. So this is kind of a mid-happy ending. We played No Man's Sky, and I will keep playing No Man's Sky. But I need therapy because I want to play FIFA games.

And here's the picture. I can't buy a gaming PC. like this is too much of an advancement especially right now because things we are looking to buy a house that money needs to be saved up to the cent and i can't i can't invest in a thousand dollar pc okay yeah so and i wouldn't even have the room it's um that's it I'm just sad I can't afford a gaming PC

the few games that I want to play they run terribly you remember the flight simulator saga that I've had to go through No Man's Sky runs great but that's just one game Eurotrack simulator is alright but it doesn't detect properly my driving stick okay okay yeah i have a question and a suggestion question okay um the question is have you gotten

a refund from steam for the game oh yeah okay okay just making sure immediately yeah yeah for those who don't know if you play less than two hours of a game and it's less than two weeks since you bought it you can do a refund exactly for any reason at all which is awesome that's cool um my next question was according to Microsoft everything is an Xbox so is there something you could do to get the Xbox version of this over

their streaming or is an Xbox Series S a possibility this is my statement slash question so do you mean the Game Pass thing um maybe game pass i know you can just buy the game and then i i don't know how the streaming works if you have to say i can i can help you with this yes mr xbox please help us because i i did a whole big deep dive on this so there's like multiple tiers to xbox game pass there's xbox

game pass then there's xbox cloud streaming but then you can get xbox something something ultimate which gives you game pass and cloud streaming the problem is is their cloud streaming service is probably the it's it's gotten a lot better it has gotten a lot better but it is the worst out of all the cloud gaming streaming services to the point where i have given up on it i've given up on the legion go i've given up on like the the cloud streaming handheld stuff i just like cannot get current day games to run great i can get older games to run fine i can get like turn-based games

to run fine but i just can't get so i've given up on the whole xbox cloud thing and i can imagine on a fifa game that you're playing against somebody else you're going to want as low as latency as possible that i don't think is going to be the best solution where you might be able to get away with something is nvidia geforce now because i could see nvidia geforce now where it's because you're not renting a p you're sort of renting a pc but you don't get that windows level you're just playing games on it and with that i'm sure they've worked with ea to make sure like the their sports

games and stuff are are running fine because it's it's a fairly popular fairly big game streaming service and that one seems to have the best performance so that might be an option for you the other option is um so you don't you don't want to spend any money at all no i here comes the piracy no no i that will never be a recommendation for me i can get that will never be a recommendation from me i'm trying to figure out a way where you don't spend money but you get a Nintendo Switch 2

because I have a feeling that would solve a lot of your issues. How? I don't know. I haven't figured that part out yet. It just sounds really good. It sounds really good. I agree. Next time you see a truck driving through your neighborhood that has a Nintendo logo on it, rob it. No, don't do that. You know, I'm worried about the Switch option because speaking of the Switch, both No Man's Sky, for example, because we're talking, we've mentioned these two games, Both Monomensky and FIFA 26 are available on the Switch.

I've played a FIFA game on the Switch before. It was the worst gaming experience of my life. Yes, yes. They did the new on the Switch 2. It is better. It is 30 FPS, though. So it is actually the same game now, which it wasn't on the original Switch when they did those famously terrible ports. But it is 30 FPS, not 60, which is... Interesting. Rough. Interesting. Yeah. But No Man's Sky runs great on the Switch, too. I'm just...

In fact, it's on sale right now. I'm honestly probably going to buy it again just so I have it on the Switch, too. Just checking now, regarding GeForce now, FIFA isn't available on GeForce now. And it seems like it's not available on any cloud gaming thing at all. It seems EA really doesn't want anyone to play this game remotely. Yeah. Yeah. So if FIFA is the requirement, your best bet, I think an Xbox Series S is cheaper than a Switch 2.

I think that's the cheapest option. I think that would be your cheapest option, which I know you don't want to spend money, but I think given your current circumstances, that might be your best bet. I think it's 300 euros. I'm not saying it's cheap but it is cheaper I think it's the cheapest option because it sounds like no matter what you would need new hardware 350 euro which is more than it was when it launched because Xbox just raised the price that's 100 less

than the Switch 2 that doesn't seem like a big enough difference I would just get a Switch 2 ok I mean I love my Switch 2 I mean I'm not saying you guys have to find a solution I don't deserve happiness like I said No that's not true I just don't know with your current setup Especially since EA doesn't allow you to stream the game I even thought about the Steam Deck option

Turns out not compatible with the Steam Deck. And see, this is why I'm at the point where I'm like, okay, all these weird handhelds are just not for me right now because they're taking, because they require too much configuration and too much hacking around in order to get everything to work right. And I'm just like, just give me the Switch 2. Chris, you really need a Steam Deck. I need to send you a Steam Deck so you can experience one. Because I think you think it's a PC and it's absolutely a console.

I know it's not, but at this point, the Steam Deck is so old that I'm just waiting for the Steam Deck 2. Like, I'm just like, I don't want to invest that money and then get something in like a year later and the Steam Deck 2 comes out. Yeah. I'm fine waiting. Okay. But I could absolutely see a world where the Steam Deck 2 comes out and I get that. And you get all of us it so that we can all play FC 26. Because then we can... No. I mean we did play football together right imagine that with just better graphics yeah I'm good I'm good

I'm good that's it guys I don't have anything else I'm just sad and I want you to leave the show today with that feeling of sadness of Niléane is sad and I want I want that feeling to linger in your brains. Because while you are all having fun, playing FIFA with all your friends all the time. Not me. I'm good. I can't. I don't deserve it.

So there you go. This is the moral of the story. I don't think you don't deserve it. But I do have the other side of the coin. I am so happy with my gaming setup right now. Great. I'm sorry, Julian. See what I said? see i am so sorry so we spoke about the switch 2 when it came out and honestly i haven't other than playing borderlands 4 for a little bit on the xbox the switch 2 is the only place i've been playing games since it came out like i haven't touched the xbox like the ps5 is boxed up to be sold i am like the switch 2 is like where everything is at absolutely love it so i have a

few pieces of follow-up and like some items accessories that i wanted to talk about and share with you all that I think are interesting. One of the things I think Matt and I both complained about with the Switch 2 was it was very flat and not very ergonomic. And it started to hurt my hands playing handheld. And I play handheld quite a bit because I don't want to hog the TV. I don't live alone anymore. I don't want to hog the TV. Danielle hogs the TV. What? I didn't say that? No. So playing handheld with the Switch 2 as it is, it starts to hurt your hands after a while.

So I started looking for those grip cases. And like D Brand has one and they had some issues with it, but then they fixed it. But then there was a bunch of other ones. But a lot of the grip cases don't allow you to dock the Switch at the same time. And while I do play a lot of handheld, I also play on the TV. And my number one requirement was I do not want to have to take apart this thing in order to dock the Switch and then put it back together. So the one that I found that I actually really, really like is the Savage Raven by Skull & Company.

And you got to say it like that because it's full gamer. So it's just this little grip. It's like this little plastic thing that goes on the top of it that clips onto the top. Oh, look at that. Yeah, clips onto the top and then clips onto the bottom. And then what you can see right here is there's a grip on the left side. There's a grip on the right side. And you can hold it. Now, what's cool about this is it comes with three different styles of grips. There's a low profile, a medium, and a huge one. I have the huge chunky one on here because that's what fits my hands.

So if you have small hands, they have grips for you. If you have big hands, they have grips for you. If you have normal size hands, they have grips for you as well. But I've been using this for two weeks now, and I absolutely love it. I can dock the switch while this is still on it. I could pick it right up, start playing handheld. And you know what's really nice? It's not that expensive. If you go to their website, we'll have links in the show notes. When I bought it, it was $32. And that was a few weeks ago.

That was like three weeks ago when I ordered it. And guess what? It's still on sale for $32. So I think it's one of those things where it's permanently on sale because they want to make it look like, oh, you need to buy it now because it's on sale now. But it's actually this is just the price. That's my feeling. I don't know if that's true or not, but that's my gut instinct because it's been on the same sale price for three weeks now. Yeah, kind of like the MacBook charger in the EU. Yeah.

My one regret is I didn't buy... So there is, you can buy the grips, but you can also buy a combo of the grips and a carry case that the grip, that the switch with the grips will fit into. And I regret not buying that. and I might have to reorder this whole thing because it doesn't seem like you can order it separately. Chris, you've got a carrying case already in your suitcase. Don't even say. You're wearing the case. You are wearing the case.

I am not wrapping up any of my expensive, nice technology in a shirt. Chris, I want to say about the grip. Look who's back. The wrong orange is back. It's the Nintendo Switch. Okay, their website does not do a good job. It's the Nintendo Switch Red. It is the same red-orange color that matches the Joy-Con thing on the... Let me try and get it in focus. So it's the same orange color that's on the...

Excuse me. That was weird. Voice was cracking. But same orange that's just underneath the sticks is the handle as well. And you can get it in all black. I honestly didn't see there was an all black option because I would have ordered that. because I'm not a big fan of the blue and red-orange mismatch. And the wrong orange. Yeah. Yes. One second. I've decided it's the wrong orange as well.

Okay. Well, how's this orange? It's the wrong one. Oh, wait. Is your orange iPhone pink too? No. No, it's not. No. Have you seen this? Yeah, yeah. The people using isopropic alcohol on their iPhones, and they're turning them like pinkish, reddish. That's kind of cool. I don't know. I kind of regret my purchase now. I wonder what happened to the blue one. As you should. Ooh. Has anyone done it on the blue one? Do we know what color this one turns? I don't know. You just paint it twice.

Should I risk it all and just go ahead and- Do it. Do it. Absolutely. It's not my iPhone. I don't care. But anyway, Savage Raven grips, absolutely fantastic. They're not that expensive. They fixed the ergonomic issues of the Switch. I wish I didn't have to put a third-party case on it, but you know what? My hands feel good playing this for a long period of time. We had some stuff happen over the weekend, and there was a lot of waiting around. Well, I played a lot of Switch handheld this weekend, and my hands felt fine.

Whereas if I played it without it, my hands would be destroyed. So if you have a Switch 2, highly recommend this. The other Switch accessory I got is the TomTalk carry case. I like this carry case because it's a hard shell case, and it's super low profile to the point where it literally has, if you look here on the sides, it has the D-pads and the sticks because they actually, like, that's where they actually go, the Switch's D-pads and sticks go because they made it as low profile as they possibly could.

So they have these little bumps and stuff on the outside of the case. And on the backside, the back is as flat as it can be. And then it has, it pops out a little bit for the joy cons and stuff like that. Uh, really liked this case. I think John Voorhees was the one that told me to get this one. So thank you, John. Uh, and it even has a little place in here for you to put your cartridges. If you have physical switch cartridges, uh, I bought, I have four and I regret buying those four because I wish everything was digital. Oh, my hands are too big. too big i can't get the cartridge in and out it's so hard for me oh ridiculously hard for me but yeah

good carry case only complaint is i can't put the savage raven grips in there uh with it so i had to take them out um and then i don't remember if we talked about this or not when matt and i spoke about the switch too but the pro controller is amazing if you don't have the pro controller get the pro controller it's so great in fact we bought two of the pro controllers because daniel's brother was coming and staying with us for a little while and we're we literally spent the weekend playing mario kart uh so we got like a second one and and so now daniel and i both have a pro controller so

uh it's a little more fair but i can still beat her you know no problem and in mario kart okay yeah the pro controller is uh the dark horse for the best thing about the switch too it's so so love it Very, very comfortable and, like, maybe my favorite of the, like, the Pro controllers that all three consoles have. I think I still like my Xbox Pro controller better. Oh, that's my least favorite of them. Interesting. Really? Well, this is just us being classic.

I'm not an Xbox guy. Is there a Nintendo Switch 2 Pro controller or is it the same one that used to be? No. No? So your Switch 1 Pro Controller actually can work on the Switch 2. But there is basically an updated version to the Pro Controller that is Switch 2 specific. So it has like the game chat, the Nintendo version of Discord button. It has that. But they also rebuilt it and fixed a lot of the issues.

So they took the rubbery material that was on the Switch 1 Pro Controller. They got rid of that because that would just disintegrate and go everywhere. There are some other changes that I can't quite remember off the top of my head. The joysticks are very smooth. It has the back paddles. Oh, yeah. So those pro things. Yeah, it just feels better. Like, it just feels better to use long term. And I don't know if the battery life is any different, but the battery seems to last quite a while.

So that's kind of like my hardware accessory stuff. Do you guys have any questions on that before I move on? No, you said something about a case, and I just don't understand why anyone would spend money on those. Dude, it's so cheap. And like, don't even with me. Your Switch 2 screen is going to get broken, and I'm just going to laugh. I'm the kind of person who, regarding a Nintendo Switch, I just put it in my backpack, and that's it. Yeah, I wouldn't even wrap a Switch.

Oh, that freaks me out. The few times that I've traveled with it, this is what I've done. I just jam it in there. Actually, question. Do you guys use a laptop sleeve when you put it in a backpack or a suitcase? No. I just drop it in. Because I have, like, well, I have, like, camera backpacks, so they always have, like, nice padded section for your laptop. Okay. Oh, guys, guys. I have a new backpack. Sorry, I'm derailing. We have time, right? Okay, sure. No, we don't. I have a new backpack. It's really nice.

Look at it. That's nice. Yeah. And inside, we have all the time we need to do a backpack tour. No, we absolutely do not. And inside, there's an integrated laptop sleeve. There you go. This is where my laptop goes. Very nice. Nice. Okay. So I'm going to rapid fire some games that I've really been enjoying on the Switch too. First off, Hades 2. Love it. Beat it. Fantastic. Had so much fun with it. Like it even more than Hades 1. Like, I know that's going to be a controversial take with some people. I like it even more than Hades 1. I think it has a better story. I think it has better gameplay mechanics. Absolutely love it. I could spend an hour talking about this game.

Final Fantasy Tactics, the new remake, remaster, whatever you want to call it. I really don't know what the difference is between those two. It doesn't matter. So much fun. Loved this game when it originally came out. Now I'm having so much fun playing it on the Switch 2. It is a long game, so it's one of those things where I'll just pick it up, play a couple of rounds, and then put it down and then go do something else. And then finally, we already talked about it a little bit, Pokemon ZA. I know there's some controversy about it not being a good-looking game. I think it's great.

I'm having so much fun with this game absolutely love it and Matt I've seen you play it you're playing it as well so I'm kind of curious what you think but I'm loving it and the best Pokemon ever is in it and you can get them fairly early on that's Charmander which evolves into Charizard which is the best Pokemon and Mega Evolution is back I love Mega Evolution and I think it's like I mentioned it's like the best Pokemon game to get started with because it holds your hand through a lot of stuff,

and there's a lot of side quests that are basically explaining the ins and outs of Pokemon, which is really cool. And it's kind of a sequel to one of my favorite Pokemon games, X and Y. Hmm. Yeah, it is fun. I'm a Pokemon fan, and I'm enjoying it. I chose, I forget what his name is, I chose the water type as my starter, and closest to Blastoise I can get. it's good. I think the battle system is interesting. It's not a turn based at all. It is a almost MMO style like

cool down system with your moves. So yeah. Good game. I think it's really interesting. It's a lot more like the cartoon to where and like your moves have a cool down. Nelian is giving us the move on gesture with her. Nelian is doing what I do to Matt's topic all the time. derail it and try and change it into something else. But I like the combat system in this. I'm glad it's not, like, I don't expect this to be the next mainline combat system game.

Like, I expect them to go back to turn-based for the proper Pokemon games. But for a Legends game, I think it's fun that they're trying something different. And it's really interesting because I actually have to be a lot more purposeful about what moves I give a Pokemon. Because normally I would do four different types of attack moves to get through the story. Like if it's Charizard, I would go Flamethrower, Thunder Punch, Air Slash or Fly, and Dragon Breath, Dragon Rage, something like that.

Like I would do four different styles. But if I do that in this one, there's a cooldown. So if I need a fire attack to follow up with, and I just use Flamethrower, then I don't have another one until the cooldown for that. So I think it's pretty interesting. If you like Pokemon, or if you've ever been curious about Pokemon, it's definitely worth checking out. All righty. The challenge this week was Matt's, right? Matt, what did you have us do? I had us do something interesting with the local AI models.

And I don't mean to brag, but I went so hard on this challenge, I crushed it. So we recorded on Friday morning last week. Friday afternoon, I started working on a new app. Since then, that app is on the App Store, and it has had a software update, and the second update is getting ready to go to the app review. That app is called Quick Notes, which you can't see at all. There we go.

Quick Notes. There we go. Quick Notes is an app that solves my specific problem where I listen to articles while I'm walking my dog. I'll find something I want to write about, and I'll try to write that blog post on my phone. And I just don't enjoy typing, especially because I'm walking the dog as well. I'm doing one-handed. It's a whole thing. So I like to dictate. But dictation on the keyboard, on the iOS keyboard is just not good.

It's really not what I want. But Apple has this incredible transcription thing that runs locally. And wouldn't it be great if I could just talk into my phone and get a high quality transcript of it back and I could copy that and paste into Obsidian where I write. That would be great, Matt. How would you go about doing that? So amazingly, I have not found a good app for doing this. So I made my own. It's called Quick Notes. You just open the app, you hit record, you record your note, and it transcribes it with the high-quality model that they have that I also use in quick subtitles.

Something, something, by doing one thing, you get a skill that lets you do other things. It's very cool. Learning, what a concept. And it's great. So it uses the local AI model on your phone to process everything. And then just as we're recording today, a new update is out that has a cleanup feature because you may pause, you may like, it may not get the punctuation quite right. So now there's a new feature using, again, everything on device, no extra downloads, no calls to the cloud, where you can just clean up the transcript and it will fix the

punctuation for you and it will do all these things. So yeah, that's it. I made a whole app and it's out. it's totally free um no in-app purchase i know chris you'll be upset but yeah i you know uh big business boy birchler though you know he he's he's moving and shaking making deals all over the place but giving apps away for free yeah everything up until the last step is really really hustling and then oh here it is for free i you know this is great uh i am on the test flight for it i didn't

I didn't realize it was on the App Store already, so I will go download the App Store version. I guess it's free, so I guess it doesn't matter, but I do think you should have charged something for this because that is a really good concept. It's really cool. I played around with it a bit, and I'm like, this is absolutely something I could see me using all the time, like out on walks or even just moving around in the studio when I'm picking things up or something like that. It's really cool. Nice. So that's my submission. Nice. I took a shortcut that I had been working on.

I started working on the shortcut like two weeks ago, but it was all using cloud AI. And I was like, hmm, I wonder if I can get this to run completely local and not have to like go out to the cloud at all, can be completely on device, run an airplane mode and all that stuff. So I have in the show notes, task cut local version. And what this does is it creates, it gives you natural language input for Todoist via shortcuts.

Now, what you're going to say is, well, Todoist has natural language input already built into it. You can just open the app and type something and go. I don't want to switch context. When adding a task, I do not want to jump over to my task manager to have to enter something. I want to be able to hit a keyboard shortcut or tap a shortcut and just type away and let it go to the proper place and not have to jump out of the context that I am in. Basically, for me, because I have such weird focus issues, the less I have to switch context, the better I have for me.

So, I'm sorry, Todoist doesn't support natural language input via shortcuts at all. the create task action for Todoist is very limited. It's very like step-by-step, very rudimentary. So what I decided to do was, okay, we will create a shortcut here that starts with the typical ask for input. So you write the task, you write the due date, and then you do have to put, like you would in Todoist,

the pound symbol or the hashtag symbol or the octothorpe, whatever you want to call it, octothorpe, and then the project name. But what this will do is it breaks it up into three different parts. So the first part, it looks for the project name. And I had to add a little bit of logic in here to get this to work on device. So I had to go in there and list out all of my projects in Todoist, which isn't a big deal. That was fairly painless. But it'll look for one of those project names and then pull that out. Then it'll look for the due date and it'll pull that out as a separate variable.

And then it'll look for the task, and that'll pull that out as a separate variable. And this uses three different use model actions, all on device, to pull that out. And then just at the very end, it has the create task for todoist action, and basically takes those three different variables, so task, due date, and project, and puts them in the right spot, and then adds them to where it needs to go. And it works fantastically. I had this when I did the original version, I had it using the cloud model and chat GPT because that's what I thought.

But honestly, just changing up my logic a little bit, I got this to run on device completely and it works perfect. Like I don't have any issues with it. So yeah, that's what I did. Nice. And does it work well enough or is it not as good because it's using? Now that I've changed the logic and the shortcut and added, like went in and added my projects to the prompt, it works perfectly. It works just the same as the cloud models. So I had to add a bit more logic in there, but it runs all on device now.

Lovely. Well, well done. Thank you. It's no app, but, you know, hey, this solves a particular issue for me because I hated jumping over to Todoist. Nice. Neilian. Well, I'm part of this too. if you want to be you see i remember last week you were skeptical of this you didn't seem thrilled about it i like these days i don't care at all whenever i see local ai somewhere i'm like

i glaze past whatever it is in my timeline or whatever so yeah what i've done is i've taken the joke that i made last week literally remember when you announced the challenge i said Oh, I just use Apple Intelligence. And so I replaced something with Apple Intelligence is what I've done. I use Raycast, an AI feature of Raycast, almost daily, which is a grammar and spelling checker fixer thing.

I have that map to Hyperkey G, and I use that all the time because I don't trust my English spelling because I'm not a native English speller. It's been very useful. Before there was AI, I used to use other things. I used to use Grammarly everywhere, but that only works in the browser, so that's annoying. And the desktop app is terrible. So I was glad when Raycast got that feature and I used it every day. And yeah, so I thought this week on my Mac, I will just use the writing tools instead of that.

Oh, no. Oh, no. It sucks. As far as I can tell, the writing tools are a local thing. Like, they run locally. Oh, okay. And you can tell because if you go into airplane mode, disable everything, it still works. You can still spell check and rewrite, do the spell check or rewrite features of the writing tools that Apple provides. And, yeah, they are not great. So one thing that's nice about the rewrite thing in writing tools is that just like Raycast, it will show you what it changes.

However, it only does that in messages and in mail. I've not seen it do this anywhere else, not in Safari, not in Finder, not anywhere else, not in pages even, not in, yeah. I think it does it in notes as well. Oh, in notes. Okay, I don't use notes these days. Yeah. Okay. Yes. I tried to use this last year for my writing as well, because while I am a native English speaker, I typo all the time.

So, yeah, I tried using it, but yeah, it doesn't show a diff. And so I ain't reading all that. Yeah. I mean, every time it's like 10 seconds just passing through it and you're doubting that it's even changed anything and yeah it'll say like like two changes made or something like that and you'll be like okay what yes yes um one thing that i've noticed and that made me extremely mad like um i hate this to a point you have no idea as you

know because of my work i like i have to write about trans rights for example and very specific things about trans rights uh and apple has a flag list of words and keywords oh that it will detect and give you warning every time that it's in there it doesn't prevent you from doing what you're doing like from rewriting or spelling, checking the spelling.

However, it will show you the warning every time and there's no way to disable that. So just so you know, folks, apparently Apple Intelligence doesn't quite like, it will warn you that we do not, I forgot the wording, I should have screenshot it. Apple Intelligence, writing tools isn't designed, is what it says. "Writed tools isn't designed to handle this type of content." It does this every time there's trans, gender in the phrase,

or even like lesbian, or even sex. So if you're writing an essay about sexual reproductive rights, for example, yeah, Apple will tell you writing tools doesn't handle this specific type of content. So anyway. I can see that from like a legal standpoint of like, we don't want somebody using this for hate speech. And then like using, you know, like using Apple intelligence to like format it or change it in some way.

And then being like, see, Apple approves this. And like, yeah. It's terrible. It reminds me of the times when Meta via Instagram would ban accounts that we, or shadowban or hide or auto report posts that contain the word lesbian that blew out a few years ago. And yeah, this is awful. But anyway, yeah, no keyboard shortcut either.

You can't assign a keyboard shortcut to the writing tools. They are buried in right-click menus. So yeah, I'm glad for this challenge because I was able to rant about the writing tools in iOS and macOS. You're very welcome. Glad to give you the opportunity. All right. Well, I think Matt actually wins this challenge. He wins the whole app. Shipping an app is... Shipping an app, yeah. I think Matt actually wins one this week.

That's what it takes. That's what it takes. Making an app from scratch. Yep, an app every time. All right. Nelian, it is your challenge for us next week. What are you going to have us do? Yes. So it's not in the document because I was fighting the formatting all the episode long. I gave up. So remember how I talked about Find My earlier? Uh-huh. Yeah. That was foreshadowing, by the way. Oh. The challenge this week is let's spy on each other.

Oh. Oh. Okay. So we will add each other to Find My. Just for the week after that, let's remove each other. I don't mind. You guys can have my fucking intention. Okay, we'll see, but I don't feel comfortable. But I just have my partner on there. But anyway, just for the week at least, we can add each other and Find My. And so what's the deliverable here? The deliverable is you, I mean, we each will have to screenshot three weird locations that we've seen the other two be about.

Oh, my God. Right? Good luck finding that with me, guys. Good luck. I know. Same. I don't go out much. I don't go out. I just know I have outings planned this week. a couple, but that's it. So it's kind of a game where can you catch the others be someplace else than their home? It's like where in the world is Carmen Sandiego? I like it. Yeah, so just like, just that. Or maybe, I think that can be a decent deliverable, or just maybe let's sum up what the other has done.

My goodness. Let's give a spying report, basically. I love it. Let's wrap up the show here. Thank you all so much for listening. Normally I have an end of the show question, but we are really tight on time this week for some scheduling reasons. I'm just going to wrap up here. Thank you all so much for listening. Have a great day. Bye-bye. Bye.