Entering My Dad Era

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 a turkey-filled Matt Birchler. Matt, how are you doing? I'm full of turkey. It's a very timely comment today, but of course, due to our recording schedule, people will be moved well on from Thanksgiving, and they won't care at all about this. yeah i kind of forget about that all the time sorry about that people and we are joined by i'm assuming a turkey less neilion did you have turkey yesterday neilion no why would i i don't

support me and matt in our time of need celebrate america i don't even know if turkeys grow here like is that a fruit is that a juice okay it's a bit of a juice yeah yeah i thought that was just like a prop on friends oh yeah so it's it's tradition in america to just place it on your head it's a uh you know american mating ritual it's a thing okay all right moving on uh let's get into some oh god let's get into some tiny topics you you might assume this based on your reaction i assume you're looking at the one that says

aerospace follow-up which you will be surprised here is not from me yeah do you guys need me for this can i just go over there for a little bit yes yes we need you for everything okay so yeah i put this in because um like i was feeling super happy about matt uh because matt was incredibly like enthused last week about aerospace he made a video on youtube um So many, like looking at the comments that you got, people are also like riding the wave, the hype wave with you.

So I wanted to ride the hype wave with you as well. So I tried it again. I tried it again. And I like it more now. And I am really sad. So why am I like doing a follow up? Because I'm really sad. And the reason why is the issue that I mentioned during the challenge last week is the keyboard layout thing. Aerospace only works with the QWERTY layout or DIVORAC for some reason.

And so, yeah, with my French keyboard, it's a nightmare. And during the challenge last week, I was not specific enough because I could not remember well why it was annoying that it did not work with the French keyboard layout specifically. And the reason is, and this is something that you go over in your video, is that when you switch between workspaces, so you hold option plus the number keys on the number row or option plus a letter.

Because there are letter workspaces. And so the letter workspaces I can ignore, but switching between numbered workspaces, impossible with a French keyboard layout. Because the number on the French keyboard layout is where all the special characters go. And most apps, they don't care. They just know the position of the key on the keyboard, and that works. Aerospace, they seem to map to the character that a key prints out specifically.

So it doesn't know that the A, so that's the E with an accent on top, that's the number two key on the French keyboard layout. It doesn't know that. So it thinks I'm hitting option A instead of option two. Anyway, you see what I mean? It's a nightmare and I'm so sad. And I am amazed that this is not a major issue on their GitHub repo or anything. So I just want to put this out there.

If anyone of your enthused members of your audience are willing to like grab their pitchforks and combat this injustice with me and restore compatibility with the French keyboard layout in aerospace, please do it. That's it. I think that's a good thing to do. We should make it work for Neil Leon so that Chris feels peer pressure to join the club.

You're right, Chris. You survived. I blanked out for a little bit. I don't even know what you guys said. Okay. I put something else as another tiny topic. It's called reduced animation follow-up. I always remember, forget, because now all my devices are in French, so I forgot how this accessibility setting is called in English. Is it called reduced animation or reduced motion? It's reduced. It might be reduced motion.

It might be reduced motion. That actually sounds right. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, Reduce Motion, I mentioned this quickly on an episode not so long ago. I've turned this on on my Mac and I really like it. It replaces all of Apple's macOS's fancy animations like entering mission control where all the windows go, they fly all over the place, especially with stage. I don't use stage manager, but you see all the kinds of fancy animations that macOS does.

It replaces all of that with fading animations, which I really like. It's a bit weird at first because maybe your brain relies a lot on this special awareness that the animations gives you. But once you get used to it, I think it's really nice. I really like it. And this is a follow-up. Just to say, I'm still using it and I did not think that a month later I would still be using it. And I want to encourage everyone to start using it.

And since it's an accessibility setting, it means that a ton of apps respect this. Even web browsers, even websites, well-made websites, some well-made websites, they will disable CSS animations, over-the-top stuff that they implement in their design. And sometimes it's nice. You want them, but sometimes it feels refreshing that all of these animations are gone and everything's instant on the web.

So anyway, just another argument if you want to try this at home. - Yeah, it's not something I use personally. I like the animations. But yeah, especially if you're a web developer, it's so easy to add. It's just like adding support for like dark mode. There's like prefers dark scheme or whatever, and then you put your rules for there. You can just do a, I forget what it's called, but something like prefers reduced motion. Prefers reduced motion, something. Yes. Yeah, so you just place your rules there and just animation, none. Boom, you're done.

It's super, super simple. So if you are a web developer, if you have animations, check it out. It's worth doing. Yeah. And just like any accessibility setting, this is something that some people need because they have vision problems and stuff. But just like any good accessibility setting, it benefits everyone. So even if you don't feel like you need it, you might like it, which is nice. Real-time follow-up on the aerospace thing. We can see if this works, but I think I have a solution for you to make it work.

Also, I think I'm learning that the French layout is called the AZERTY instead of the QWERTY. I've said this so many times. You don't listen to me. No, apparently not. I didn't take it in until I saw it in text. Look at it here. I'm showing you on the camera. It's very cool. Yeah. Okay. Anyway, I'll send it to you after we recorded. Okay, okay. Maybe it'll be a joyful Friday for you. I will tell you all next week, if that works.

Third item, sorry. There's only me bringing Tiny Topics today. I didn't have anything. It's a slow week in America this week. I'm just doing the show by myself. Black Friday. Like, yeah. I know. I'm just like, it was a slow week. I didn't really have anything to add for Tiny Topics. It's okay. You're snoozing on your turkey. That's nice. I kind of am. Yeah. I just wanted to shout out an update. It's in beta still of the app that I mentioned a while ago.

Once again, that's called Moz. M-O-S. and that's a Mac app that adds smooth scrolling to any mouse that you want to use so by default mouse when you scroll it's a bit janky it's alright it's janky, it doesn't look like super smooth like if you're scrolling on a trackpad with your fingers and this app it adds that, when you scroll with your mouse wheel it nicely flies by and you can tweak the duration of the animation.

You can make it super snappy while still be really smooth on screen. Anyway, so it got an update 4.0. It's in beta still, but it's coming out soon. Now the app is not authorized, which means when you install it, you don't have to do the dance. It's system settings to authorize it manually and blah, blah, blah. So that's good. So Apple likes the app. Apple has approved the app. Yes, of course. And it's still completely free. And now it has a nice feature that you can, an experimental feature that you can enable, which instead of like smoothing your scroll,

it replaces the scroll with a trackpad emulation. It's like when you're scrolling, it emulates as if you are scrolling on a trackpad, which means macOS thinks you're scrolling with a trackpad makes the animation super smooth, extremely smooth, just like on the track. It feels weird. And I don't think I like it in most instances. However, the app allows you to enable it on a per-app basis. And I think in Ivory for Mac specifically, it works really well to scroll the timeline and to go back and forth between the posts view, the replies,

and back to timeline, et cetera. It feels very smooth. All right, that's it. MARK MANDEL: Interesting. That's pretty cool. MARK MANDEL: That reminds me. So I have two things to add on top of that. So this app's called Moss. Wasn't that the name of the application that Monica's millionaire boyfriend made in Friends? That became the UFC fight Jon Favreau, who is now one of the heads of Star Wars. I don't remember. Wasn't that the name of the app? I'm like 90% sure that's right. How could that be an app?

Well, it was. It was like an accounting app. That was last century. It was an application, maybe. It was an application. Okay, whatever. And this brings me to a very important piece of follow-up, tiny topics that I should point out that I texted both of you about yesterday, and I should have added it in the show notes. The Pulsar Golf Mouse that I got. Oh. Oh, boy. So that was $150 mouse that Matt egged me on to buy. He was like, you won't do it. You won't do it.

You're not brave enough. He said those exact words in that episode. No need to go back and listen. He did say those exact words. Roll back the tape, everybody. So, I got a text message from FedEx yesterday morning that I thought was a scam. I was like, oh, this is a scam. It said I owed, let me, I'll pull up the exact words for you here. It said I owed 94.5 in duties, taxes, and fees. And I was like, that's weird.

that says 94.5. And I was like, whatever, that's clearly a scam. But something about the tracking number had me just double check it. So I double checked it against Parcel and it was the tracking number for the Pulsar mouse that I got, the Gulf Livery mouse. So I didn't click the link. Don't ever click the link in those scam text messages that you get. Even if it might not be a scam, don't click the link. So I went to FedEx where I have an account with FedEx so that like all the tracking come in and sure enough i owe 94 and 50 cents for that stupid mouse i really liked it though

so this mouse is now a 250 dollar mouse which i believe is more than the mx master 4 i think it's twice the cost of it when you say it like that i'm so like a good deal unbelievably mad i love the look of this thing that's crazy it's it's featured in a video that's coming out but i'm gonna have to make a pen comment on on like hey if you're in the u.s like be careful of this i i don't even know how to navigate those waters without getting uh political and getting a bunch of annoying youtube comments but yeah i gotta do it so yeah it's it's it's very weird

because I'm still using the mouse that I got and was very happy with. And I have received no such messages. Mine was delivered via UPS, but that shouldn't make a difference. I don't know. So I think the difference was the cutoff time when you ordered it versus when I ordered it because all the tariff stuff kicked back in November 1st. Oh. So I think that's what it was. So stupid. I'm so pissed. I'm so unbelievably angry about this. So I got to pay that later today.

I was kind of curious because they delivered it I have it in hand it's not like they can send it back now so I was like what happens if I don't pay it but I have a feeling they would send me to collections so I don't want to deal with that anyways this week on Cozy Zone we well actually technically if I can peek behind the curtain for a second we haven't done this yet because we're going to record this tomorrow but we are going to play a game called Time Guesser which is Nelion's thing Neil Leon is do you want to share what this is about to kind of give people a tease or do you

want to just say go watch it no yes I can say so it's a it's a game in the web browser do you know GeoGuessr no yes okay Matt knows it's a it's a very popular game uh where um that plays in the web browser where it drops you somewhere on the in the world in google street view okay no indication whatsoever no map or anything and you have to pinpoint on a map on google maps where you are and you can move around you have to pinpoint on the map where you are so that's geoguesser

it's become huge this game there's a competitive side like there's yeah it's esports now um But time guesser is kind of that, but with photos, old and slightly less old photos that are taken in some place at some date. And what you have to do is guess when it was taken and where. And that's it.

Interesting. And I believe I will have to check. I believe we can play multiplayer. If not, we can just, I think we'll do maybe a round each or something. Okay. I'm excited for this. We're recording those tomorrow, so I'm excited. Or maybe we can do co-op. What do you think? I like it when we compete against each other. I feel like that's when things get a little spicy and it makes for a little more entertaining. Yeah. We'll see. Maybe we do round robin and we keep track of how many you get right or something.

Yeah. I will try it out later today before we record tomorrow, and I will adjust. Okay, cool. All right. Let's get in the main show. Matt, you were first up in the document. What do you got for us this week? Did you actually do your homework this week? I did my homework every week. No, I was listening back to the episode, and we teased that you didn't do it, but then we get to your spot in the challenge, which you went last in the challenge, and there were still 37 minutes left in the episode. Yeah. I was very proud. I usually have like the shorter segment and so I was very proud to have the longest segment.

Last week it was good. So today, welcome back to the short segment with Matt. I wanted to revisit a product we talked about a couple months ago, which were the AirPods Pro 3 because it's been a few months and I would like to award these headphones an award. oh this is my biggest disappointment of 2025 i hate these headphones i i really really really really dislike them wait a second hold on one second i gotta double check something okay so

the name in riverside says i'm christopher lolly and you're matt birchler but you're the one coming in with the really hot take interesting i thought there was actually something wrong um yes i just a couple days ago i just gave up i have been trying to give them a go i've been trying to give them the benefit of the doubt because they're a couple years newer like in the next year or two they'll get they may get features that the uh the old airpods pro 2 don't get I just can't do it.

I really, really, really don't like these earbuds. The main issue is comfort. I find these remarkably uncomfortable. These are maybe the least comfortable headphones I've ever used from any company ever in my life. But since you're a co-host on Comfort Zone, when you get out of your Comfort Zone, you should be using those. I have been trying to have uncomfortable ears for months.

You should have the most uncomfortable AirPods or headphones because we're trying to get out of our comfort zone. Neon is absolutely right. Okay. Well, anyway, I give up. I can't do it anymore. Like literally sometimes like actual pain in my ears from like wearing these things, which is not good. And yes, I've tried all the tips that are in the box. I've pulled that stupid little paper thing and I've been like, okay, maybe these will work. And then I try them and then they don't for different reasons.

So I just don't like it. You have to kind of like to get the additional noise cancellation, you have to really wedge them in your ear as well. So you can't really like wear them loosely. If you try to like not wedge them in, they just fall out. It's so, it's so rough. And then like I put in, these are the AirPods Pro 2 that I still had. And I put them in and it was just the most wonderful feeling. They just go perfectly into my ears. They fit great. They feel good. They sound, I'm going to be honest, exactly the same.

They block out noise exactly as well. There's numbers on Apple's website. I don't believe any of them. Maybe it's because they fit so poorly that whatever seal is supposed to be made is not being made properly in my ears. but I don't care if it works well for other people like their pods pro to just do everything just as well for me so yeah I uh I'm back on the twos and um I actually need to have like two sets

for different scenarios uh so I'm looking online to like find their pods pro 2 for cheap so I can just have those because I've been using the twos and the threes and it's just the twos are way better for me i love the threes love them um comfort wise they took a minute to get used to but i they once i got used to them they're fine noise cancelling is better i do have one complaint

but i think it's another complaint you have so i won't i won't i won't uh spoil your your your party okay so in addition to the comfort there's inexplicably other things that i don't love about these the number one thing is battery life i think we talked about this when we initially discussed it i think chris you and i have different priorities for battery life because you were like well the battery life is better and i was like well the battery life is worse uh so who's correct and so you like my my memory is you like that you can take them out of the case and they will last longer on a like the earbuds themselves will last longer on a single charge and you can wear it for like

eight hours put them back and charge them up for me i was annoyed that the case while getting slightly bigger also has less battery in it so you get more battery perch um in the buds but the case has less battery and so the result of this is that you're charging the case more often than you necessarily would have which again if you have different charging patterns is fine if you just toss it on this charger every single day no matter what um you don't need to worry about it but i don't so uh the amount of time between using the case uh or charging the case is a thing i care about yes uh i still stand by wanting longer battery in each of the bud i i stand by that and i i like that

but i absolutely agree with you i am charging the case way more often now which isn't as big of a deal because I have a MagSafe fuck dedicated for AirPods in my bedroom and then I have the MagSafe stand famously well you have to listen to Cozy Zone actually no that was our desk that was the freebie episode so yeah everybody can hear that one but the MagSafe stand that covers just a small corner just a small tiny corner of my monitor it's really not that big of a deal really not just a couple thousand pixels so I have plenty of places

to charge AirPods but where I found it to be a little annoying Because since we've recorded that episode and talked about that, I've traveled with the AirPods. And that's when I'm like, okay, I need this case to last a little bit longer. And that's where I started to find it annoying. So I agree with you that the fact that they got bigger but have less battery is weird. It is weird. It's a very weird thing. And what's even more annoying, I don't know if you've noticed this. My AirPods, the 3s, never charge to 100%.

Yes. They always charged 80%. 80. Oh, wow. Which is six. I mean, assuming the math is all linear and everything, that's 6.4 hours on the threes versus six hours on the twos. If the twos charge 200 and the threes charge 80%. So there's almost no difference anyway, unless I actively hit the pop-up that comes up on your iPhone that shows you. Here's the spinning AirPods. Is that the buds or the case? The buds. The buds, yeah. Yeah, specifically the buds. If I can add something on to this, I noticed this actual morning on November 28th, the Friday, my Apple Watch Ultra 3 is all of a sudden only charging to 80% as well and not charging to 100%, which is not something I have said.

In fact, the Ultra 2 started doing that, and I went in and turned off the charge limit thing to have it charged to 100%. And I noticed this morning I rolled over at 630 this morning, and it had the little indicator that it wasn't fully charged, that it was only at 80%. And I was, you know, WTF, OMG, Apple, what's going on? And, yeah, that setting got turned on. So I'm wondering if Apple is, like, turning it on automatically. Interesting. So I just wanted to say I'm really let down by these.

It's a bummer. I think the AirPods Pro 2 are still the GOAT, and the reasons are simple. They are exactly the three, except better. And that is, that's it. Except they have better noise canceling. They do, they absolutely do have better noise canceling. I have verified that. And they have better Bluetooth range. If you remember, they passed the refrigerator test where I am able to leave my phone or iPad in my office and walk to the refrigerator with the AirPods in and they never cut out once.

And that is an important scientific test that they were able to pass. And for that reason alone, the AirPods Pro 3 are superior and Matt should be forced to wear them and use them. I would contend that if I walked over to your refrigerator right now, neither of them would work. And therefore, the test does not work for me. I don't know. I think you should do it. I think you should put the twos in, walk to my house, go to the fridge, then walk back to your place, put the threes in, and then walk back. It's the only way to know. You can't bring both with you at the same time.

You have to do the back and forth walking. Okay. Okay. So, yeah. It's the same chip inside. They're way more comfortable. better battery for me it's still the spatial audio it still does the head tracking that i get to turn off that's all good i hate the head tracking um it got the live translation feature which i will never use but it was a cool thing and neilian you did a nice a fun video about that when that came out and the one the two things that i think are better about the threes that i wish the twos had uh the better waterproofing is a thing um i think it's ip uh six five versus six seven

or something like that but anyway it's more waterproof on the threes which would be nice because i do run in the rain um i love a rain run um but i've always survived with the twos so i'll be fine uh the heart rate tracking i do actually like in the threes those are nice on occasion my watch will just be dead and i'll have to like go on a walker or whatever and it's nice to just be able to start a workout from my phone and be able to have heart rate tracking on that so that is a nice thing i would like that it would help me uh actually move away from the apple watch if i ever

wanted to but i don't know i don't use it enough for that to be worth the discomfort every day so yeah airpods pro 2 still incredible still my favorite apple product in years can i add my grain of salt of course so i only have the twos uh second gen and i so i've been using them a ton for years and i hate them more and more every day um because they're not cancelling any noise anymore

and like this isn't the first time that I've had these with AirPods like after a while they stopped cancelling noise as well as they did initially and like they're pretty clean I clean them regularly I don't even know what's going on and looking online seems it's a regular like it's a regular thing. A ton of people have the same issue. Whereas AirPods age. And I wanted to mention as well, since we're talking about airports, I've got the Big Chungus Airports.

They were gifted to me last year. Yeah, the chunky monkeys. Same story. I hate them more and more. They're so heavy. The connectivity issues are driving me nuts. sometimes I use them a ton with the Apple TV like mainly these days and like the it just with the Apple TV

it's insane like the audio gets out of sync one times out of three yes but anyway I just think and oh yeah and I want to say as well they don't cancel noise I did it before as well. Same issue. So I don't know what's going on. I'm in my era anyway when I want to go back to wired everything in terms of audio.

But I think the AirPods Pro 3 just looking at the chart on Apple's website that compares it compares them with the twos. It doesn't seem like like a good purchase anyway when you've got the twos um yeah so i appreciate um the salt that matt is bringing the salt always love some salt i i will leave on a high note for myself uh i want to give a shout out to the apple compare page it is such a nice thing for people like me

who want to compare products and like is this upgrade worth worth it what was this product like how does it compare to this year's like no one else that i've seen has compare pages this complete and like that goes so many years back with products like i was interested in the iphone 10 compared to the iphone 8 for an article i wrote a couple weeks ago and i was able to just pull them up and see what the differences were between those products it was incredible it's so so nice so the apple.com compare page an underrated champion and they don't hide it either i always think it's

funny whenever people are like oh it's just a it's just a the new apple product is just the same thing with another number they're just trying to hide everything i'm like no they literally have a compare page where you can go through every single spec about it and whatever anyways doesn't make a difference uh you are both bad mousing my uh favorite childs or one of my favorite children of the year and um i will not disperse this i challenge both of you to a duel you could just challenge us to use the AirPods Pro 3 for a week? I don't have them. I'm not buying these.

Oh, and also, like, people, if you want to leave feedback in our feedback form, the link is in the show notes, I would love to replace my AirPods with something that I can wear comfortably in bed. Because these hurt so much. And I use them a ton in bed. Question. Are you a side sleeper? Is that why they're uncomfortable? Yes, exactly. So I would need something like flatter, less bulky in the ear.

This could be a rabbit hole. But I wear a pair of, I use the Beats Flex. Because I listen to a podcast. The Beats Flex, I've gifted them to my partner. Yeah. But like I sleep on my side and I always put one in this I'm not sleeping on. So I don't know. I never have two. Do you have two in your ear when you sleep? Yes. I hate having just one in one ear. Oh. You're right to mention this. Like probably this would have been the first feedback.

Just wear one in one ear. But I just hate this. It gives me a headache honestly just to have one sound in one ear. So you need something like that that kind of lays flat and probably hooks over your ear so it doesn't like fall out and like fall behind the bed or something. Yeah, maybe. Something like that. A while ago, I saw something like that. Some company kickstarted something, like some kind of speaker that you put inside your pillow duvet, like inside your pillow cover.

And it's some sort of very low speaker that you can only hear when you have got your ear on it. and that seems that's wild yes and like they touted as I don't remember the name I should look this up they touted this they touted this as something like even if you split with your partner next to you next to you they won't hear it because it's just you you need to have your head on your pillow to hear it I would call BS on that I bet you I could hear it I bet you I could I got good hearing yeah I got good hearing for things that annoy me

for like talking to me, I have a hard time hearing. But if there's something that's a really annoying sound, oh boy, do I focus in on that and I can't let that go until it stops. Yeah. Kind of same, yeah. Yeah. Alright. Nelian, did you bring something more joyful? Sure. Yes. Actually, yes. I've brought some kind of weird piece of software.

so Chris earlier you said it's a slow week you're right you're right but still fortunately I did have something to bring because I have installed a new piece of software on my Mac this week it's called B-Tunes so B-E-A Tunes yeah you're doing the dance because you're right to do so because on the webpage like the stock picture in the header of the webpage is a bunch of people dancing.

At some sort of concert. Anyway, this app, it seems to have been around for a while and you can tell by the design of the site. Oh, you can tell. You can tell, yeah. However, it's still updated. Latest update, 28th of October this year. So very much still maintained. So what is this? iTunes is something that I stumbled upon because I was looking for some way to mass tag my music files.

And by that, I mean the music tags in a music file where you specify artist, album. So all my music are already super well tagged. No issues there. Especially the stuff you buy from Bandcamp and stuff. They're all extremely well tagged. It's perfect. However, there's a bunch of obscure tags that you can add to your music and that I want.

I will mention two of them. And those are the two that led me to B-Tunes. Have you ever heard, guys, about Replay Gain? I don't think so. No. Replay gain is, I will probably describe this in such a wrong way and the people who know what this is by heart will scream, but I will try to explain. Replay gain is some kind of standard in music to normalize the audio volume across all of your music.

And the way it works is that it's just a tag inside your music file that music players can read. And using that tag, they can dynamically adjust the volume so that basically nothing's too loud or nothing's too low. It's not something that flattens the volume or anything. It's just like it mostly, like most audio volume normalization tools, it reduces the peaks mostly and brings up the very low volume stuff in the music.

iTunes, that's something like that. That's very similar. Sound check. Sound check, exactly. That's been around for decades or more. As far as I can tell, replay gain is just another variant of the exact same standard. It's just like its values are placed on another part of the spectrum. Like it's not like the normalization values are not quite the same, but it's the same standard.

And yeah, there's a bunch of similar standards that you can use. For example, there's one that's managed by the... I should have written this down. The European Union. No. The European Broadcasting Union. EBU. I think that's it. This is the organization that makes Eurovision, by the way. and they they suck by the way sorry you will have to I don't know Chris bleep that yeah I was about to say it again

they suck because Eurovision they are allowing genocide people to compete anyway derailing so fast replay game where are you going with that but I was replay game back on track replay game so it's a nice tagging system that you can add onto your music files so that music players that support it, they can just like iTunes, they can just normalize the audio volume across your music library. But you need to add those tags because they're not there by default.

So you need to add them. And there are a bunch of tools that do this and Btunes is one of them. So just basically you point Btunes to the path of your music library, like the folder. All the music files show up in Btunes. You can select all, start to scan. You select that you want to add the replay gain tags. You can leave all of it by default. You can actually choose a bunch of different standards. The standards that I've just described, you can pick them all.

You can choose the EBU's standard. You can choose some very old ones that iTunes is based on. Or you can choose the replay gain 2.0, which is the more recent one than newer music players use. You can do all of that. Select which ones you want or just leave it by default and apply. And it applies all of that. It adds the tags to all of your music files. I did that for my music library. Right now, as you know, my music library is on a Samsung T7 SSD.

So it went really fast. That was nice. And yeah, and you know, I'm still using Swinzian as my music player. And Swinzian has support for replay gain. So that's great. This is amazing because like some albums are mixed with a very high volume. Some are mixed with like quite the country. They are really, really low. You need to turn up the volume when you listen to them.

I have two examples. the dune soundtrack in my library i specifically have the dune part two soundtrack yeah amazing piece of music from hans zimmer as always um however the volume is super low on that album at least the copy that i bought i i got it on cobus but uh but pretty sure it's probably standardized, wherever you get it.

So the volume is really low on that album. Compared to, I've got an album from Bob Marley, like this is the album that everyone's got, it's called Legend I believe, so it's a compilation of Bob Marley's greatest hits. album volume is really high like you can i always need to turn it down a notch when i listen to the album and now with the replay gain tags i don't adjust the volume anymore like swindsion does it

for me dynamically that's pretty cool that's really cool so that's one way that b tunes has been useful Another way is, so that was the first example. Another example is adding BPM tags. So BPM tags is, BPM stands for beats per minute, I believe. And so that's basically how fast your music feels or how slow. This is a useful piece of data for DJs when they need to match up songs, amazing transitions.

They need to mobilize their skills and transition from one song that has a certain DPM to another. DJ stuff. Chris is at the club. Just fully at the club right now. He's enjoying himself. I'm up in the club. Even if you're an audio listener, you can hear him slightly out of breath. So I'm not a DJ, but how is that useful for me?

It's useful for me because in Swinzian, this is almost about as much about Swinzian as it is about Btunes. But in Swinzian, you can create smart playlists, just like in the old days of iTunes. And smart playlists, if you don't know, is that you create a smart playlist and you can just add a bunch of criterias. basically it's if and or and you can match tags so i have a i have a playlist for a smart playlist for example that i've called forgotten and that smart playlist has a bunch of rules in there

actually it has a single rule in there which is last played is in the last 13 weeks and i've set the rule set to be none. So if in that smart playlist, only my music that I haven't listened to in the last 13 weeks show up so that I can just listen to music that I haven't listened in a while. Anyway, so smart playlist is awesome and you can create those rules based on the tags that are inside the music files. And I thought if I had BPM tags on all of my music, I could create smart playlists where I could create an energetic smart playlist

where it would only select my music that has a BPM higher than 130 BPM or something. So like the stuff that really moves, that feels like gives you the envy to dance or something. The issue is BPM tags are not in all of the music files by default. This is not a tag that's always included in your music files.

Oh, interesting. Yeah, even from fancy music stores like Corbuse, BPM tags is rare to have. And this is why Btunes exists originally, I think. This is like a tool for DJs, which explains the dancing people on the front page of the app. It's made for DJs because DJs, since BPM tags are not always included, DJs, they need a way to add those BPM tags to all of their music files.

And you can do this. So you can scan all of your music library with it and then tell it to add BPM tags. it will analyze every music files and try to guess the BPM and write it as a tag in the music files. So that's really nice. And what's really nice is that it's also crowdsourcing the data. So if another user of Btunes on the planet has already scanned this specific music to add BPM, Btunes on your computer will not have to scan it again.

It will just recognize that it's already in their database and just apply the BPM number to your music file because it's just the same track. That's pretty cool. Yeah, so it's actually really well optimized. You would think that analyzing all of your library, that could take weeks, depending on if you're storing on a tiny, compact USB flash drive from the SanDisk. But no, actually, it's pretty well done, and it will not reanalyze tracks that it already knows.

And that's it. I've added BPM tags to all of my music library, and I have created a bunch of smart playlists in Swinzian. I have a chill one. And the rule is any track that's whose BPM is under 80, simply. There's a bunch of false positives. Like some tracks, you would think that... Like this makes the assumption that low BPM equals chill music. Yeah. That's not always...

It's very often true, but it's not always true. Yeah. But it's good enough. It's still like it allows you to start playing music without thinking too much about it and stay in a relatively like consistent mood. Like it avoids abrupt transitions between a very slow track and a very moving track, very fast moving track.

So I think it's useful. The service I use for the music for my videos It's called Epidemic Sounds. And one of the things they added, I think they added it after I started using it, or maybe it got added around the time I saw, I don't remember, but they have a beats per minute for all of the tracks in there. So like, it's really nice. I use that to kind of match things. So that way you're not going from 60 beats per minutes to 120, like you have a smoother transition and stuff like that. And that is a really nice feature for kind of making things a little more kind of flow together.

Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, if you tag all of your music files with this and you have a music player that allows you to create this kind of smart playlist, it does exactly that. It avoids harsh transitions between your music if you just want to shuffle your songs. I could see me using this, not necessarily for my music library, but for my video music library and tagging stuff. Because what I do, so I use Epidemic Sounds, but I keep all the, because it's the service I pay for that gives me access to the music.

And I keep the download, once I download a video file, or once I download the music track, I keep it on my NAS. And this would be an interesting way of kind of tagging all that stuff and organizing it. I might play around with this. Yeah, I might play around with this. This is meant for DJs, so definitely for niche use cases like that, I think it could work. Yeah, interesting. Just wanted to mention, it's a one-time purchase. 35 euros. That's not bad. Also works on Windows.

And you can understand why, because as soon as you start it, it's a full-on Java app. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. You've seen the best for last. I've seen worse Java apps. It's all right. It works. It just does one thing really well, and it's powerful. And, yeah. But, yeah, beware. It's the full-on Java app. It's, like, it's laggy.

The UI is laggy, and your computer is not lagging. The software is not actually lagging. It's just UI stuff. It's Java. Yeah, it's Java UI. All right. That's it. That's pretty cool. I like this. I like a good niche piece of software. You know me. I think the big piece of software that I started using, I guess I started using it last year, but I've just been in love with it as Hush. I've been using it for so much stuff lately. Is it Java?

I don't think so. I really don't think so. But it has very little UI to it, which is one of the reasons why I like it because there are those crazy audio apps that like can do a bunch of stuff for cleaning up audio tracks. But I don't know what most of that stuff does. And this has one slider and takes care of everything for me. So, yeah, it's pretty cool. You guys ready to get in the challenge? Yes. All right. So it was my challenge. And the day that we're recording is Black Friday. So I thought it would be an interesting idea to do kind of a timely challenge.

So the challenge was find a good Black Friday deal on a piece of tech and then bring it to the show. The winner of this challenge is whoever gets their co-host to order the thing they brought. Bonus points. You have the product in hand when we record. Oh. Okay. Be right back. I forgot to have it in the room with me. Okay. No, it's fine. It's fine. We can wait. What do you think it is, Matt?

I think it is a little lamp that you plug into your phone oh god no and it's bendy the $2 lamp is on sale actually that would be hilarious it's like $1.98 yeah alright do you guys Neilion is back you guys mind if I go first go ahead yes please Okay. So I have been so excited about this ever since we recorded last.

Like I have been, I am, I am embracing dad mode. I am in my dad era without actually being a dad. I do not have kids, but without being a dad, I, you know, we got a house we're getting to, I'm getting tools. I'm doing projects and stuff like I am in my full dad mode. So for you guys this week, I have, well, give me one second. The Craftsman V20. What is this? Oh, yeah. Is that a cigarette lighter?

Oh, I know what this is. I know what this is. Is this the battery? No, but you can use batteries with this. So what this is, is this is a portable air pump for cars, bikes, balls, anything that needs to be blown up with air. So, you know, so like. Okay. Family friendly show. My bad. Okay, so the way this works is you can plug it in three different ways.

It has a traditional plug, but it has a really short cable, so you need like an extension cord. It has, as Matt noticed, it has a really long, I forget what this is called, but traditionally in America it just plugs into the cigarette lighter port. Oh, yeah. Into a car. I don't know what that's actually called, but I'm assuming most people know what that is. Or you can use a Craftsman battery and plug it in on the back. and this so what this does is for cars bikes whatever you put it has a bunch of different adapters and stuff on the side here that you can plug in so you can basically hook it up to just

anything and what's cool is right here on the front you can set the psi that you want it to be so for example my car requires that all four tires be 32 psi for each tire so i can set this to 32 PSI, plug it in, hit it start, and it will blow it up to exactly 32 PSI and shut off automatically. So you don't have to sit there and go to the gas station and, you know, hook the thing up. And you're trying to blow up the tire while it's really cold outside.

Your hands are freezing and like you're undoing it, looking for the little number. And it's like, OK, is that quite 32? Because it's not actually like numerical. They have like 30, 35, 40. So you're like trying to get it exactly. You don't have to deal with that. Are you just saying numbers now? No, this is an actual thing. And I have some dad tips at the end of this too. So this, you just plug into the tire. You hit 32 or whatever it is for your car. And it blows up, hits 32, cuts off. Same thing with bicycles, balls, whatever.

Like whatever you want. Like you can blow it up. It's perfect. It's amazing. I've been wanting one of these for a while now, and I'm so excited I have one of these. I was like, yes, because I have essentially I have three cars I manage. I have my car, I have Danielle's car, and I have Danielle's mom's car that I help out with. So I have like three cars that I manage. No more going to the gas station to blow up tires or anything like that. I just pull this out of the garage, put it on, set it to the PSI, and go.

Now, here's my dad tip for everyone out there. For cars, okay, this is in America for sure. I don't know if this is worldwide. I'm going to assume it's worldwide because it's a car manufacturer level, but I don't know. But if you ever need to put air in your tires and you're like, oh, I don't know what level I need to blow up my tires to. You open up the driver's side door and in the seal, there will be a sticker. And that sticker will have what each tire needs to be.

Sometimes the front and back tires are different. Sometimes it depends on your car. Sometimes they can be different. Most of the time, they're the same. So like I said, for my car, it's 32. That's a little bit lower than most cars because I have low-profile racing tires on my Mustang. But that's... So don't just assume your car is 32. Open up that driver's side door. Look for that sticker in the seal, like the little... I don't even know what that's called. But when you open up the door, it'll be next to the driver's side seat. There'll be a sticker there.

It'll say the PSI level for each tires, like the front and back. Look for that. There you go. That's my dad tip. And get this. I got, so this thing's normally $100. I got it for like $60 on Amazon. So that was the Black Friday deal. Love this thing. I've had this on my wish list for a while, and I was so excited when I saw this was on sale after last week's, like, this was like, I didn't even look at other stuff. I just ordered this immediately. Yeah, this is a very good thing to buy. If you have a car, I highly recommend getting one because, yeah, $60.

You can get them for cheaper. I have one that's not very good. It has, well, go to a level, but I don't believe it's actually going to that level. So I may be getting something like this, but it is such a life improvement when you get one of these in your car. And when you have low air pressure, especially in the Midwest where it gets really cold and suddenly all your tires are showing low pressure. It is very, very nice not to have to find the gas station that has the actually good and functional air pressure thing.

Because sometimes you get there and it doesn't work or it's being occupied. And this is like so simple. So a very good thing to get. And in California, technically, they're not supposed to charge for you to blow up. Like they're not supposed to charge for air and water for tires. But sometimes like those guys, like the one by my place, they literally put an NFC payment thing, like credit card payment over that sticker where they're like, oh, we're not supposed to charge for it. So like they make you pay for it. It's stupid. But yeah, no, I literally when I saw this, I thought of you, Matt.

And I was like, oh, Niléane might like something like this for her bike. I could see Niléane liking that. No. Okay. Well, I tried. But I was like, I thought of Matt. I was like, it's cold where he lives. That would suck. It gets cold here, but it gets real cold where Matt lives. Matt gets real cold. And I was like, this is for him. And yes, Matt, upgrade your cheap one. You can get some of these for like 20 bucks. But like you said, I do not believe those are actually getting to the right PSI.

And being at the right PSI for tires is important. Yeah. Yeah. This is a good challenge. whatever the word is. Submission. Submission. Thank you. Regarding bikes, here you just drive your bike on a bike road in the city and every once in a while you will come across an air pump to fill up your tires. And that's it. Oh, that's so awesome.

Yeah. It's really there. It's just on the bike lanes. We live in America. Here you gotta pay for your air. To clarify, is it just someone just left theirs, just laying down on the street, or is this like a permanent fixture in the... It's a permanent thing, like on the bike roads. Seriously? Oh, wow. Every once in a while, you come... Yeah, there's a bunch. Every time you describe France. There's one at the train station as well. Sounds magic. That's wild. It's the city, like the city stuff.

Huh. I would move to France just for the macaroons, but like... I would move for the macarons. But regarding the size of the thing as well, did you expect me to carry this thing on my bike? No, no, you don't carry it. Well, okay, so if you have a car, this would go in your trunk, no problem. This would go in the car trunk, no problem. But this is literally just going to go on the shelf in my garage. And then when I need it, I just grab it and then put it back when I'm done. And they do have smaller ones, but I got this one specifically because I can get the battery, which I need to order.

And it'll do all four tires, no problem. And I don't need to worry about plugging it in. That's why I got this bigger one. Lovely. Yeah. That's the only thing holding me up. I could use the cigarette lighter as the power source, but a battery would be nice. But I'm bought into the Milwaukee system, not the Crashing one. Okay. So I'm bought into the Milwaukee. Matt, I appreciate you. I'm bought into the Milwaukee system as well. One second. Hang on, one second. What's Milwaukee? Is that a state?

That's a state. It's a city. It's a city. It's a city? No, it's a tools company. Okay. Yeah, it's like craftsmen, but Milwaukee. Okay. Hang on. Hang on. Hang on, guys. This will be worth it. Hang on. Hang on. Hang on. Hang on. All right. Let's go here. Hang on. What's going on? This guy. He's blinding us with the lights. Yeah, let's go.

got my milwaukee drill my milwaukee impact gun i got my milwaukee screwdrivers over there i am i am with you i bought into the milwaukee system the only reason why i didn't get a milwaukee one it wasn't on black friday sale okay but there is one what's the milwaukee system like all of it if you buy together yeah yeah basically they have the same batteries that will power all of your tools so you can have one battery and it powers your drill it powers your air compressor it powers everything so if you buy into one system he makes like really high quality tools as well

like they're not like they're not like low quality ryobi stuff like they're high quality tools um obviously not a fan of the harry potter stuff don't need to don't need to even say that but there's a meme that goes around that like i i see it like every once in a while that like When you become a dad, you get sorted into four houses, and there is Milwaukee, DeWalt, Ryobi, and one more. Ego, maybe? I can't hear you guys. What happened?

Oh, no. Oh, we can hear you. We can hear you. Oh, hang on. What? He got disconnected into the excitement. Chris, you went too dad. You got too excited. I unplugged my headphones. I got too excited. You just walked away from the desk. We had phones at that? No, the cable should reach, but something happened. Did you guys hear what I said about the... Yeah, we heard you. We heard everything. All right, cool. Yeah, Harry Potter, bad JK Rowling, but that is a very funny meme.

Yes. Man. Such a dad convo. Oh, that's great. I am in my full dad error without actually being a dad. That's good. Embrace it. Yes. All right. Neilion, what did you bring to the challenge? So I'm glad that with your submission, you have expanded the definition of a piece of tech. Well, we did this early on in the episode. Remember when Matt brought a tea kettle? Yes. It has an app anyway. Yes. You're right. There's a precedent. Yeah, there is a precedent.

We can pretty much say if it qualifies. And remember when we also did the take a break with tech and stuff like that and you put a blanket over your chair? That's true. We're pretty goosey-goosey here. That's true. We're pretty goosey-goosey. Man, I forgot blanket gate. Wow. Thank you, Matt, for the precedent early on. Anyway, so my piece of tech with an amazing... So let me pitch this to you before you click. Amazing piece of tech here that will be a major life improvement for both of you.

It's affordable. It's useful. It's literally a health-preserving device. I have owned mine for about a year, and my health has improved. Are you ready to click now? Click on the thing. And I have it in hand. I will reveal it shortly. It is called the Chom-Chom Roller. It is a pet hair remover.

Okay. Okay. Yes. So this, it looks stupid. No. And you're like, okay, how is that different from any other pet hair remover? But this is extremely smart. This is just physics. There's no batteries or anything. It's just physics. Hence, a piece of technology that's genius. Basically, you just go back and forth with it on anything, like a piece of furniture on your clothes. And with the friction and the static electricity, it just grabs everything and stores the hair in the compartment on top.

And you can just open it and empty it sometimes. And look at mine here. So mine is a slightly different model. It's got cat ears. So there you go. Basically, you can find so many of these, just different brand names. It's the same product. Yeah, it's the same product that somebody just puts a different label on it. I picked this one because it's got the Black Friday deal. So I need it to be in the challenge rules. And it's called the Chom Chom, which is perfect. So here's mine.

And I will open it now and you will see the amount of hair in there. Oh, no. I'm kind of nervous about this. I don't like this. It's just cat hair. Oh, no. I don't like this. That's a whole cat. I don't like this at all. You've seen the amount of cat hair. I have not rubbed this directly on top of the cat. This is just from the couch. Oh, man. This is why I'm so glad I have a hypoallergenic dog.

But see, health-preserving device that will lengthen your life expectancy, and it's a great piece of tech. There you go. Yeah, this is great. It's half price right now too. Yeah, minus 47%. Pretty good. Yeah. And you both have pets. So obviously applies to you both. And you do want your life expectancy to increase.

Yeah, you do. Yeah, you want to be there for the AI robots. That's true. I do need to be there to be their servant. Yeah. exactly so that's it alright who added the images in the show notes you should check out the listing there are some animal pictures they have shows that are crazy the animals look horrified oh you're right this is this is fantastic there's a cat with sunglasses

pretty good listing yeah all right all right matt what did you bring okay i'm gonna i i went all out on this challenge i didn't even mean to it just happened uh several hours after we recorded last week i purchased my first well let's just say there are a few tech categories i have never ventured into VR headsets was one that I hadn't literally never used until last year and hardly used this year for what it's worth.

And then another big category are 3D printers. I've never used a 3D printer before, but I've always been curious about them. But they're always so very, very expensive. However, Bamboo Lab, who is generally considered to be kind of like trying to be the Apple of 3D printing, they try to make it as like stupid simple for people like me to just get going. So they have a mini printer. So they have an A series, which are kind of open printers.

There's no like big rectangle around it, no box around it. It's just kind of in the air. So they have the A1 Mini, which is normally $300, which is a little much for an impulse purchase, but it's on sale for $100 off this month. I got mine through Best Buy, but through their website, it's that as well. So I'm guessing it's everywhere. But it's $199. And I picked it up, and, oh, I've been printing things.

So let me take you on a tour of what I've printed. So I started with the Benchy, which is apparently the thing you're supposed to print first. And they give you a little filament. It's a tiny boat. It's a tiny little boat. So I don't care about that. Oh, wow. That was dramatic. It made more noise than I realized. Then I was like, okay, so it functions. It's not a defective unit. Then I was like, what am I going to do with this? I didn't really have a great plan, but I knew there were things that I wanted to do with this.

So the first thing I was like, let's try to make something a little bigger. So in the show notes, you should see a watch charger. In our kitchen, you're going to see some incredible cable management. But in our kitchen, there's a little corner where we have a couple wires that we used to charge things, including an Apple Watch charger. And I just printed a tiny little, very basic Apple Watch charger holder. And so there it is. It works. And so then I was like, let's get crazy. And I was like, what problems do I have? What can I print a little thing that will make my life better?

And so this next one is where I really started to cook. This was, I have a leaf blower and a trimmer, edger, weed whacker, whatever you call it in your part of the world. And I have, for three years since I've lived here, whenever I'm done with them, I just put them on the ground in the shed and I walk away. But, and I could probably. These aren't the Milwaukee ones, by the way. They aren't. I'm on ego and Milwaukee. It's a whole thing. It's a whole thing. um so what i printed i have one picture showing here these two custom mounts that uh one drills or both of them drill into the wall of the shed and then they just perfectly line up with the tools

so i can just latch them on and they just click in the place and it's very very nice so that was very lovely uh these next ones i don't have pictures oh i i don't have pictures for them because I have them right here. This is a little iPhone MagSafe charger that I made. So I need to get a MagSafe puck, but I can just wire it, run it through here. It'll click right in, and then it'll just be kind of up at an angle, and it'll work with the standby mode and everything, and this will be on my desk.

So I'm excited about that. I also made this little Steam Deck stand, so I can hold my Steam Deck up here. It's perfectly aligned with the curvature of the Steam Deck, but it'll hold anything. You could put an iPad in there if you want as well, an iPhone, something like that. And then the one I'm really excited about are these guys. So these are going to, later today, these are going to drill. I'm going to attach them to the bottom of my desk. And then, because my laptop just sits on the desk, now I can put this below and I'll just slide it under my desk so I'll have no visible laptop while I'm docked in.

to my whole setup. This is nice. And this has all been done in three days. I have so much further to go. I actually, after this, I'm going to Ikea. I'm picking up their pegboards. I have six of their pegboards. Oh, yes. Yes, yes. They're going behind my computer monitor. I'm going to put some stuff there because it's just a white wall right now. And then I'm going to put four of them side by side in my garage. And there's a whole community out there There's building custom stuff.

I'm sure even outside of 3D printing, you can buy special things that work with this pegboard. It's super cool. So you can basically make all of this stuff just fit perfectly. There's also this thing called Gridfinity. Yes. Okay, Chris. Okay. Gridfinity is basically this like, it's a grid of stuff. It's made for desk drawers. I don't really have a lot of desk drawers, so I don't know exactly where I'm going to do this. Matt Birchler, as a YouTuber, you must get a husky tool chest to put your equipment in.

The Gridfinity system is perfect for organizing it. This is what I'm excited for. Yeah. So what I like about this, and I'm sure I will bring this as a normal topic eventually, but I'm really excited about this idea of just being able to look at a small problem in my life and be able to make a thing that fixes it these things do not go super quick i should say this took this iphone stand took i think five hours to print these uh four things i'm gonna use for the

laptop holder i took eight and a half hours so it does take some time no for all four for all four oh okay oh that's not okay that's not too bad then so it's not like a like hit print and then walk to the other room and get it yeah but it is a uh you know same day you can have um some crazy stuff i will say the one thing i will say is because it is open it does make a smell it's very quiet but it does have a smell so you're gonna smell hot plastic which isn't delightful so i've actually moved it to my garage and it sits on it sits in the garage and so it just kind of runs there

it's also kind of nice to just like set it and forget it it connects over wi-fi so i can just like from my phone or from my Mac. I can just send it jobs to start printing, and it goes and whatever. And it's got a camera on it. It can do those time lapses if you want. Yeah. It works if you're outside the house. So, like, I was 100 miles away yesterday. The mini one has a camera? The mini has a camera, yep. Oh, wow. So why did you get the mini one over the A1 3D printer, the non-mini one? Was there a big, because I see that one's on sale for $280.

uh well that's double the price i just didn't see it really oh okay i was just curious if there was like a spec thing i really wanted to spend as little money as possible to see if this was a thing that i would enjoy and then if it is if i start to run into limits then i could maybe get something else and then the prices are enough that like if i spend an extra two hundred dollars on this printer that i graduate from pretty quickly it's not going to move the needle a ton overall so So I just wanted to dip my toe in the water. Gotcha. Okay, that makes sense. I'm with you.

This, I will say, this is at the top of my Christmas wish list. It's not something I'm going to order right now, but this is at the top of my Christmas. The Gridfinity system is something I've been wanting to do for a while. In fact, I've been looking at those websites of like, could I just pay somebody to print this for me and ship it to me? And I'm like, that's kind of pricey. And then like, if something doesn't match up right, I gotta pay it. I'm like, but I'm, this is very cool.

Yeah, and I should say the price of it is pretty reasonable. Everything I've shown you today has taken up like half of a roll of filament and the rolls are like $10 to $20 each. So you can print a decent amount of stuff. Like this, I struggled to find a laptop holder, an underdesk laptop holder that would work for me in the first place, but like it would cut, I don't This was probably the equivalent of like one to $2 a filament. Like it costs very, very little to get these things. So if you find something that you want to do, odds are someone's had that problem before and they've made a model that you can print.

So I know one of the things that attracts people to like the Bamboo Labs one, especially, is that they have like a whole community and website and service of like, hey, here's some stuff people have already made and submitted and you can do that. Is that pretty much what you did for all these things that you printed? You didn't make any of these things yourself. You just went through the app and you didn't customize it at all? Yeah, it's called Maker World. That's right. So that's the kind of the platform that you can post things to and people have reviews and everything. So that's where I found everything.

You can download the files and then they're just 3D models. So you can, if you know what you're doing in like Blender or something, you can adjust them, you can change them. bamboo's app bamboo studio has some tools to do that just automatically but like if you wanted to like uh one of the things i was thinking of is in one of these was to add an extra hole um i forget why but an extra hole would have been useful so if i could figure out how to do that in a 3d program i could easily download the model that someone else made tweak it to my own liking and then um

yeah just print that so yeah it's it's pretty wild it's pretty cool hmm this is i want this so badly me too i want this um which makes me annoyed that that i think by the rules of the challenge this means matt won but yeah because no oh because we're not ordering it right now yeah but you we can still make him lose on the technicality okay yeah let's make a movie we can't have him win two weeks in a row like come on like no in my case uh above don't have the budget for this right now and also we're moving soon so it seems like a sort of thing

that you'd want to get in a new place yeah yeah yeah it would be tough to have i mean you could do it in an apartment but like you'd probably want to have it like next to a window or it's gonna make noise for hours at a time which is it very loud it's not very loud it's okay i it was right over next it was like five feet away from me i would have been completely fine with it running it's just yeah the smell is a little annoying so oh god all right yeah um yeah and i was wondering um yeah the a1 and the like the difference between the a1 and a1 mini is it just like the print size

the print volume then it can yeah that is pretty much it is the size of the plate that you can print is bigger on the A1. The A1 Mini is smaller. But the quality of the prints seems to be the same. Okay. Interesting. Okay. Interesting. Interesting. I want this. I want this so badly. I will add this on some Christmas lists as well. Yeah. Having a 3D printer is the new having a pickup truck. Everyone in your life is going to start coming to you and being like,

Can you do this thing for me? And having a pickup truck was like, hey, can you help me move this thing this weekend? Yeah. Yeah. I fully intend to, hopefully I get one of these and nobody knows I have it. All right. Matt, it is your challenge for next week. What do you got for us? So I have a listener suggested, this was in the feedback form, something someone suggested, which I will say upfront because it is relatively cruel.

Oh, no. So the challenge is try a different keyboard layout for one hour. Not all week, not even a full day. Try a new keyboard layout for one hour that you're awake and use the computer. That might loophole. I was going to move all the keycaps around then go take a nap and then come back and then switch from back. So you can do this however you want.

We'll have to do this on the Mac. I don't know if there's a real... I don't know if you could change the layout of them. I think you can. I think you can do Taborik on an iPad. Could you? Okay. You just want to have... Okay. Okay. I mean, I could take a mechanical keyboard and put some keycaps around and then, yeah. How about you guys try the French keyboard layout? Because I don't type French. It'll make it a little easier to type your name. I use it to write in English. It still has all the characters. Chris does not like keyboards that don't have all the characters.

So knowing it has all the characters is good. Oh, it has a bunch of extra. Even more characters. Yeah. You want more characters? Switch to the French layout. So it could be anything. It could be Dvorak. It could be the other ones that I have no idea about. The German one is pretty good. All right. Oh, boy. This will be interesting. So one hour whenever you feel like being less productive. all right let's uh wrap up the show here but as always i have an in the show question for you uh what is you guys's favorite christmas tradition oh can i go first absolutely so yes okay um so

you know i grew up on an island yes island and so it's in the southern hemisphere so there christmas is in summer. And all my childhood and later my teenage years, like Christmas was a summer thing. And there's one very neat thing. I want to Google it so I can show it to you right now. One very neat thing about La Reigno in Christmas is that a very specific tree that grows on the island

flowers around Christmas. send you the Google image search link. So the tree is called a flamboyant. And it's basically... Oh, wow. It gives out those red, bright red flowers. And every year, just like clockwork, right around Christmas. And so much so that it's become a symbol for Christmas on the island. So fairy tradition is just picking up some of these flowers and hanging them up next to some very Western-oriented Christmas decorations.

You can imagine on La Réunion how it doesn't make any sense at all to use pine trees, fake pine trees as Christmas decorations and hang fake Santas in heavy red coats. And even during Christmas when I was a child, your weird uncle would dress up as Santa but it's 35 degrees Celsius outside and he's dressed up as Santa so he's dying inside the costume.

As the weird uncle, yes, I do understand that. So yeah, weird thing that I've only realized now as an adult that it was a weird thing to have the western kind of Christmas in an island where it's summer, Christmas. Nice. I like it I love this Matt what about you well it's it's a desolate uh winter wonderland over here when it's Christmas

for me so um I I don't know it's pretty it's it's not crazy but I just like that it's a holiday that everybody travels and sees their family um if you see your family I suppose I know some people some people don't but um I don't know if if anyone travels once per year it's gonna be for Christmas at least here in the US. So I don't know. I like it. It's the only time of year I get to see some of my family. Nice. For me, I love watching Christmas movies and I don't bake, but Danielle bakes and I get to eat it.

So, you know, that's kind of fun. All right. Well, that brings us to the end of the show. Thank you all so much for listening. Huge thank you to MacStories for having us. We are a MacStories podcast after all. Be sure to go check out everything else happening on the site. And yeah, that brings us to the end of the show. Thank you all so much for watching. Have a great day. Bye.