40% Sickos

Welcome to Comfort Zone, a podcast all about pushing your hosts, well, outside of their comfort zone. I am Christopher Lawley, and it's been a while since I've gotten to say that, but I'm also joined by Matt Birchler. Matt, how are you doing? I'm doing good. I'm happy to be podcasting. I'm happy you got to give your intro again. First time in a while we've gotten to hear it. Yeah, it feels interesting to say. I almost forgot how it goes. Uh, Niléane, how are you doing? We're also joined by Niléane.

How are you? Hi. I'm doing mild. I'm in a mild way today. And you know why? Why is that? Because I'm so big news in my life. I signed up to finally pass my driving license. And for that, I had to send the state or whatever, the official agency, whatever, a photo and I had to go take an ID photo.

And I don't know if that's the case in the US, but you have to get very specific kind of photo. So you have to go to one of the official, granted, they have an official license, the machines, they have an official license because they frame perfectly fine, perfectly correctly your face. And in the end, you look terrible. So this is why I'm not doing as good as I would. And here, look at this nightmarish face of mine if you're looking at the video.

And if you're only listening, you can only imagine me, but worse. This is my future photo for my driving license. Please don't get mad at me, but it looks like that's your mug shot. Like that literally looks like a mug shot. There's no way you cannot make it like that. That's same in America. It is a very, very common thing to get your driver's license photo, think you did a great job, and be like, oh, no, how? How did it go so poorly again?

So I got my original driver's license photo taken when I was 15, so when I got my permit. I just had it updated for the first time this year, so I had the same photo for 20 years. It was bad. This one somehow is even worse. And funny tech anecdote regarding this photo thing. So you go to the machine, right? And so you sit well, you respect all the instructions.

And after 15 million tries, it tells you, OK, now your photo is valid. And it prints it for you and you pay eight euros. And you wonder why that costs eight euros because no one's working for the thing. And they're just paying for the ink, I guess. But also, why are they paying for the ink? Because this print, I will not show it, but on the backside, there's a QR code and a long string of digits. And this is what you send on the official website. You send the code to them and they get the photo digitally.

So I signed up today. I entered the code and my photo appeared on the website. And why do I have to print this? Why do I have to pay eight euros for this? Now you have a mugshot of you. Yeah. Anyway, I thought that was funny. Back in my days, that did not work like that. You had to send the photo. Yeah. Anyway. I mean, from my perspective, I'm like, only $8.

What a deal. We pay much more. Okay. Yeah. I don't remember how much mine was in order to get the federal thing so I can actually fly. I don't remember. It doesn't matter. anyways oh a real podcast yeah the real id that's what it's called yeah yeah yeah uh which don't anyways we don't even need to get into that uh we we have a show to do uh and we got some tiny topics as always i don't know who put this first one in here i'm gonna go ahead and venture to guess it was matt burtschler you you've made a good guess and it's uh very just literally 30 seconds

on the 2025 phone of the year, the Samsung Galaxy Suntra. Oh, no. I just wanted to call out. I love Samsung. They've done this for a long time with software updates. On the main settings screen, there is a software update button. When you tap that, it takes you to this very nice update screen. You can check for updates. And if you do have an update available, it links you to a website with human readable release notes that talk about every nitty gritty detail, but also a high level thing.

and no worries because my software is up to date right now because I always go here and I like it. So Samsung does software updates right, which is not a thing we said 10 years ago, but should be said. That's true. What a turnaround. Chris, I can see your 2010 showing. Things have changed, my friend. I, I, okay, sure, whatever. This is me not caring. But, you know, I have a transition for the next tiny topic. But you know what company, who is the CEO of the company who makes great software updates?

Right? You know? Is it Intel? Almost. No. No, it's Tim Cook. Apple, of course. Oh, okay. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I forgot about him. Yes, that was a good transition, right? Timmy C. Yeah. Yeah, so we thought we would mention, by the time you're listening to this, it's been two weeks or three or minus five. We don't know. Time. It's a concept.

Yeah, we record always in a weird schedule. So it's strange keeping up with the news. And this is why we don't cover the news right as they happen anyway. But I think it's important that we mention that Tim Cook hanging out at the White House on the very day that a citizen gets one more citizen, American citizen gets killed. Murdered. Not great. Yeah. Assassinated. And I despise, personally, I don't know about you, I really despise tech people, commentators, not mentioning it.

even though they cover the company. Like, this is part of the news cycle that you're supposed to cover. This is my opinion. You cover Apple stuff all the time. And AirTag that's barely changed is released. And to tell the difference from the new one compared to the previous one, you have to open it and look at the serial number and you will cover that, but not cover Tim Cook for some reason. This is a subtweet. Anyway, it sucks. Yeah. Yeah, I just, how, like, I, first off, don't go to the movie premiere.

Like, don't go. But then, also, like, taking a photo with Brett Ratner. Brett Ratner, is that his name? Yeah, I don't care. Anyways, he's not a good person. Like, don't do that. Like, what? Like, the amount of PR people that Apple has, how did somebody not go? Maybe don't go to this. Maybe call in sick. Maybe say you got to babysit your niece. Maybe I don't know. Just there's so many excuses. Maybe just don't go to that. But yeah, this.

But since we are late, he has since like released a memo internally. Oh, God. Where supposedly that's supposed to like make up for it because he said he stands. What did he say? It was the most nothing statement. Like, it was, he called for de-escalation. That's right. It was just, it was the most, like, generic nothing statement that it literally could have been applied to any situation.

I think he was talking about you, Chris. You need to de-escalate right now. Yeah, you're getting a little hot. Yeah. Yeah, I could pop off about this for an hour. Like, I'm so, like, really. No, maybe he means you need to de-escalate all the iPadOS stuff. oh my god all i will say is uh tim cook goes to donald trump's house more often than i go to my family's house to my best friend's house it is it is remarkable and uh yes we're two weeks

late to this one but it's likely he'll go over again for some other play date it'll be great yeah just copy and paste the statement whenever he goes over uh and and plays xbox with uh trump yeah also just to say Donald Trump is ultimately the problem here but also you can have a spine against authoritarianism you know maybe Apple should take one of those new air tags and put it on Tim Cook's spine maybe that's what he was doing it's 4D chess oh no we've become the conspiracy theorists but maybe anyways I yeah I just and once again and once again

if it's your job to cover Apple, if you're not covering this, I have no idea what sort of thought process is going through your head to justify it. It makes no sense to me. No sense. I, and to everyone that's like, well, just stick to tech I think it was the guys over on Upgrade said this best like the lines between tech and politics are gone. There is no...

The last decade has completely erased that. There is no more like, oh, we can separate politics from tech. I like computers. I love computers. I would much rather just talk about computers and silly things you can do with computers. But you can't have one and not the other. That line is gone now. It's not even blurred. It's gone. Yeah. anyways uh i don't know how to transition from that but i do have something fun uh this week on cozy zone neilion came up with probably our best topic ever oh she chose violence she chose

correctly she chose the dark side because we ranked all of the star wars movies and tv shows with an asterisk. We didn't include the holiday special. All of them, except the holiday special. Yeah, because we all knew. Maybe we could do... Maybe next Christmas, we'll watch the holiday special and talk about it. Maybe. We'll see. We'll see. Because I think Neelian and I have both seen it, but I don't think Matt's seen it. No, I've seen seconds of it, and it is

even worse than I've even imagined. Oh, you've never seen it in its entirety? I have seen literally five to ten seconds of it. Wow. I think this might be something we have to do. I watched it this Christmas, actually. Why do you hate yourself, Divya? It was really fun. Oh, it's so bad. But anyways, we ranked that. We ranked all the movies and shows. It was good. There was some infighting. And for those that don't know, Cozy Zone is our member show. We do an extra episode of the podcast every week.

There's a link in the description where you can go check it out. We'd love it if you'd sign up. That's how the show is supported and how we can keep doing the show and all that stuff. We appreciate everyone that checks out Cozy. So you guys ready to get in the main show? Oh, yes. All right. Well, Mr. Matt Birchler, big business boy Birchler, big, big, big corporate boy Birchler. Oh, yeah. Take it away. I mean, you say that it was about as corporate as it could be. I was at our sales kickoff where I was both in the audience hearing about sales and on stage presenting about products.

And it was great. Wait, you were on stage? Where's the video of this? I want to watch that. There is video of it. But it will not be a light of day. You are required to send it to your co-host. You are required to send it to your co-host. Hopefully there will be a nice picture of me on stage with a mic. It will be great. Let me type Matt Burschler on YouTube. Oh, it's not online. If they put it online, that would be every single slide had confidential on the bottom. so if it's just on YouTube just a horrible fail from our media team anyway what's not a horrible fail

is I have a new app out not a new app, apologies a new app update and it's Quick Notes 2.0 and I wanted to talk about it I don't pitch my own apps enough on this show so my next five topics obviously all five of my other apps will be uh no i'll do i will mix it up but i wanted to talk about this one because quick notes has become one of my favorite apps which i know i'm biased but i genuinely find this

app really really nice uh some general context to start uh quick notes is an app that you talk into the app it transcribes it using apple's on-device model a thing that i learned by making my subtitles app and uh yeah it turns it into high quality text it has some other features uh but it's been very simple and i've used it for writing things to people from my phone when i don't trust apple's dictation to do it right because apple's dictation uses a quicker older way to do it so it can do it in like real time as you talk which is nice and everything and it's better than

it used to be but it's still sometimes i'm shocked by what i see in there it's shocking it's bad yeah but this takes another second but it does work great and gives you much better results i have a cleanup feature that uses the on-device uh foundation model they have which i'm hoping will improve this coming year when gemini is there but uh we'll see um but i also in this 2.0 release first off i had a lot of fun with design before it was all just like stock ios elements as i was

just like figuring out how to do things but i gave it the capuchin treatment it's got some colors now. I think it's your best design yet. I would agree with that. I really like the new look of it. Thank you. Let's move to this note card system. Instead of just a normal table view, I'm doing some fun math, which is not that complicated. Thank you. To randomly color them and rotate them so they look a little messy. Just a little playfulness. People are always like, I miss when tech was fun.

I'm having some fun, folks. it's good I like it and then the other thing is one of the things I personally found myself doing quite a bit with this app was I would just hit record and I would just start talking for like a blog post I was working on or some product spec I was writing up or just something and I was then like copying the whole thing and pasting it into Gemini and being like can you turn this into something useful and I was like what if I just made the product. So I made this new feature called brainstorm mode, which is all about you just start

recording, you ramble on about whatever you want, you can go forwards, backwards, repeat yourself, rephrase things, do whatever you want, you don't have to be like totally put together. And then it'll turn it into something for you. And it's quite good at this. I've used this genuinely every single day, I find it super useful. I'm working on an update that'll let you do tasks. So you can just kind of ramble about what you need to do. I'm really upset that Todoist released their kind of version of this already. So that's annoying.

But this will work for everyone that uses just about any other task manager. It should, yes. The tricky thing is it's all just text, right? So I need to figure out how you can make it so that when you copy it out of this app, or how you can share it from this app to another app in task form. It works with things. It works great with things. But if you use reminders or something else, I still need to figure out how to do that. Yeah, because I know things supports Markdown, like text input and stuff like that. It's going to be difficult because every other task manager does things differently.

Yeah. But can I mention really quick, I used Brainstorm the other day to literally just was like, okay, I want to make a list of all the things I need to still print Gridfinity things for. And I literally just had it recording and was just walking through my office and was opening drawers, grabbing things, taking things out and being like, okay, I need this. And it's like this size. So that's what I need to print a grid. And I just walked. It was super helpful. That is wonderful to hear.

It is, yeah. So that's really it. I actually don't know if I have much more to say about it. But I think this has been a fun little app where it's kind of spiraled from here's a very simple idea of what if I could have better dictation into my phone that then evolved into what if I had a cleanup feature that tried to like clean up that dictation and figure out what you meant to say. And then it evolved into this like what if you just talked and like the app was like this is probably what you meant.

This is what you're trying to get to or this is like how you collect your thoughts. So it's been fun to kind of have it evolve. And it's actually gotten more users with every single update. So that's really cool. At least you're not losing users every single update. That's true. That's true. The other interesting thing I found is that sometimes it's just good to talk something out. There are times where I'll talk for 10 minutes into the app, and then I'll just say, cancel. I got it. Like just having a thing that's like just talking it verbally out loud is sometimes helpful.

So I don't know if I'd pay five bucks a month for that alone, but the functionality it gives you. For me, it's super worth it. So yeah. I do that with my cat. It's your rubber duck. Is that the thing, rubber duck? That's a developer term. Is it? If you're having a problem, you just talk with someone. It doesn't matter if they respond or help you with it. Just talking about it helps. Yeah. Okay. Link to that going in the show notes to prove I'm not crazy.

You sound nuts, but okay. Yeah, I have no idea what to talk about. Yeah, Rubber. So another thing I used Quick Notes for over my holiday break time, I just used it to come up with video ideas and kind of talk about the direction I want the channel to go in this year and stuff like that. It was just like what you were saying. It was very useful to just talk to something, and I didn't do a ton with those notes. It wasn't something that I'm coveting that, but it was nice to just have that and be able to go back and reference it

and just kind of read it back and be like, okay, this is what I'm thinking. And you should also mention your cleanup feature, for those that don't know, cleans up the notes and takes out the ums, the ahs, the pauses. It makes it a little bit more of a... Because dictation in its natural... Dictation in its purest form is not type text. It's not as clean as type text. Because we don't speak that way, or at least most of us don't speak that way.

But your cleanup feature makes it a much more readable experience. It does. Thank you. I have a question before we end my brief segment. I have another question for you too. We're not going to end it. My last part of this segment is I what do you think so okay one of the things I so this is powered by generative AI

right this is using their apple's on device models for most of it's using gemini for some of the longer things like brainstorm mode because uh apple's local model supports very very very small input text um windows so uh yeah if you talk for more than like three or four minutes it literally can't even handle that uh which is crazy so anyway i'm using gemini for it um but all of it's built on kind of these things. But all of the features there are not replacing creativity necessarily.

The intention of them is to wrangle your thoughts or to literally just take what you said and turn it into text. One of the things I'm wondering about, and I feel like it might be crossing a line, is having a brainstorm mode for blog posts. And I'm curious what you two think about that. So it be basically I have a prototype of that's working so basically you would dictate the blog post and it would basically do the cleanup it would add paragraphs it wouldn't change your wording too much but it would change it some and I'm wondering if you think this would be cool or not I don't

really know how I feel that I felt no and then I felt yes and now I don't really know that's tricky yeah um I I don't like my gut is no because you're still dictating and you're still quote unquote writing the blog post but you're speaking it and it's just kind of cleaning up and formatting it it's not like you're just putting in a prompt and saying write a blog post about the five best to be clear sourdough starters yes This would not be a thing where you just like dictate, I need a thousand words on topic X.

And it would just give you a thousand words. It would be, if you just said that, it would just give you one sentence back. So it would not be like that sort of thing, but it would be changing some of your wording. And yeah. How different would it be from something like Grammarly? It would be more than Grammarly would probably do. More than Grammarly, but a lot less than a prompt engine kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah, there's these things out there where you can prompt it like three or four questions, and it'll write you a blog post based on those.

It would not be that. I don't think it's bad, but it's right on that line. Yeah. Like, it's right there. I think you would get some pushback from some people, but I think other people would see it as a very useful feature, especially somebody like me who doesn't blog because I just don't have the time to sit down and write an article because I just don't.

my opinion probably doesn't matter as much because my line is way higher than all like even your app and many other apps if I know they use LLMs I tend not to use them anyway there's something fundamental about this that makes me gravitate away from anything that touches this and I'll talk about this in my topic in a minute but yeah so I don't know what to tell you

I don't take notes anyway so I would not use your app for real in actual use I would not find a use for it and I think I would even less be tempted to try to use it but I'm a radicalized fella so what do you know so we answered your question right Matt? I think so what were your questions oh I had a question what is that serif font that you use in the app

I really like it oh it is oh shoot we've been talking about fonts so much on Cozy Zone be sure to go check out the links actually that episode's not out just yet soon soon well one of them's out but another one's not quite out that'll be if you listen to this now it'll be in the future but if you're listening to this in the future then it'll be in the past so in terms of Tim Cook hanging out at the White House being the year zero it's in probably like year

year two or three but maybe you know if he does it again does that reset I think it does yes So maybe it's like year negative five. I don't know. Yeah. You don't have to find it. I'm going to find it. I have to open the project. Okay. You're fiddling in Figma or sketch or whatever. Fiddling in code.

In Xcode. In Xcode. Xcode. It's the idea that Elon Musk makes. Yeah. Yes, exactly. Exactly. This is how they do SpaceX and all of that. It's Franches. Francais? Francais. What? How do you spell that? I'm messaging you to a link. Link will be in the show notes. Oh, I'm curious.

It's on Google phones. Oh, okay. France. What is that? Allons-y. If it's French, I think it's Francais. I cannot wait to see how it's spelled now. Okay, here it is. We got it. Okay. Oh, there it is. Francines. I don't think that's French in any way. So I'm not. Okay, I'm not doing an accidental racism. Francais? Oh, that's disappointing. I was hoping it was Francais. To me, that's not a French word.

Okay. I mean, it looks like it could be. Oh, that website. What is going on on that website? Whoa. Can I have a Google font? The website. Oh, okay. Sorry. You sent a Google font link. But if you click on the Google fonts on the homepage of the font, like at the top, francis.undercase.xyz. Oh, whoa. That website is fun. Oh, this is wild. Link in the show notes for sure. Oh, yeah.

Oh, wow. Oh, my gosh. You're adding stickers. Yes. Okay. So, this is what I'm going to be doing for the next hour. It says, new smooth font. Just looking special. I'm going to try and crash Safari. Extra wonk. Oh, my gosh. This is the greatest website ever. Okay. This is like two weeks in a row we've had good websites. Yes. Make the web fun again, people. We should get that printed on a red hat. Font website is always fun. This is great. Oh, my gosh. Actually, that wouldn't be a bad merch idea.

Oh, my gosh. This is amazing. Okay. All right. We need to get back to the main show. My question for you, Matt Burschler, is you've talked about how you've been doing your development in the past. Has that changed in any way? Are you using any different tools? No, not really. Oh, okay. I stayed relatively consistent. I'm not trend chasing necessarily. I'm just... You're not constantly swapping out your AI co-worker for a new AI co-worker?

No. I know how this tool works, and so I use this tool until this tool starts to suck. But it works great now, so that's what I'm using. I have another question. When are you making me a web browser? Oh, my God. I will never make a web browser. When are you making me hush for the iPad? I mean, surely you're making a web browser. I might make Hush for the iPad. Actually, I did start to try making Hush. I don't want to say what I was going to call the app because if I still actually use it.

I could not figure out how to actually do what needs to be done with the audio. But if I figure it out, I will work on it. Can you call it Shush? That's not far off from what I was going to call it. Okay. What if you make a web browser and then you call it Shush? What if you just made Hush but for the iPad? I'll think about it. Obviously, if I make a web browser, it'll be called Quick Links. That's a terrible name.

I'm sorry. That's just a Raycast feature. I'm having so much fun with this web page. I'm literally just like... Oh, you're still on that. I'm still on it. I'll send you a screenshot. It's literally just covered in stickers. This is amazing. Everyone needs to go check out this webpage. Just like last week, slam on your brakes if you're driving. Just middle of the road, middle of the highway, slam on them brakes. Neelium just learned how to drive, so she'll attest this is totally safe. I've not even started, but I will remember this.

Slam on your brakes and go to this website. I will remember this lesson. Yep, yep. It's totally okay to slam on your brakes in the middle of the road if there's a cool website, your podcast that you're listening to mentions. Okay. Okay. This is the greatest thing ever. Are we moving on? We're moving on. Nelian, what are you bringing this week? Okay, I'm bringing a triumvirate of... I've put it on two things in the document, but one's missing.

A triumvirate of things. Audio upgrade is the first one. Let me update the document. What is Notion doing? Was autocorrecting my... Anyway. How dare it autocorrect? You did not legally allow it to autocorrect you. Let me start over. Okay, I have a trio of topics. Because I was sick that one time, and then it was not my turn to talk about stuff when I returned.

So I've accumulated small things to talk about. First thing is I upgraded my headphones. I, yes, what? They look the same. They're the same. Sorry. They're the same, but upgraded. I got new ear cushions. Maybe you can look at them on the camera, but visually they're not really different from what they used to be, from the stock ones. So these are the Meze 99 headphones.

By the way, May they have released a second gen of these headphones, the 99 second gen, they're called. And they sound like, it looks, on paper, it looks like a really nice upgrade. But anyway. So I got some ear cushions, and those are leather ear cushions, compared to the stock ones that are pleather. And the default ones, they feel like stiff and they don't have a ton of depth.

So my ear touches the driver a little bit, which is all right. But I was looking for something else. And these kept being recommended. Let me show you the box. It's from a brand called Deconi. And the Reddit audiophile people who have the Meze 99, they keep recommending the Deconi ear cushions that are designed. They have a pair of ear cushions that are not universal. They're specifically tailored to the Meze 99.

And I got that, and I'm really happy about them. It doesn't affect the sound much, which is good, because I really like the sound of these headphones. But in terms of comfort, huge upgrade. This is the first thing. The second thing is something I teased before. I have a new keyboard. It's been four weeks now. But hey, let's pretend I just got it. I have a new keyboard. So remember how I love the Magic Keyboard?

And then I also love the Logitech MX Keys Mini. And why do I love this keyboard? Because I'm sensitive to the amount of effort I have to put it in my hands to type, right? And high-rise keyboard, like the taller they are, the less likely I will like them. Which is why this keyboard is a mechanical keyboard, but it's a low-profile one.

I thought I would give it a go because it's a low-profile one. It's a Nufi one, and people like Nufi, so I wanted to try them. Chris doesn't like Nufi. I still have no idea why, by the way, but he will tell me. Chris is, and I say this with love, a real, real, real snob when it comes to keyboards. Yeah, I can tell. Okay. He accepts it as the compliment it was meant as.

So I have a few bullet points to go through about this keyboard. So first, what is it? I want to show you on camera, but you can click the link if you want to see the listing. This is the Air 75 V3. And this is the one and only new keyboard I can get. And the reason why is this is the only one they offer with the French layout. So it needs to be ISO, which means the tall return key, enter key on the right side.

That's the correct standard that it needs to be to support the French layout. And also then the printed key caps need to be the French layout. And it's the only one they offer like this. All the other keyboard models they have, they're all formatted in the US. NSI, is that the NC layout with the long, wide enter key. I do not like that. Enter keys rule.

Yeah. Yeah. In Europe, we have better enter keys, in case you didn't know. Look at this beauty. Anyway, so a few things that I like about this keyboard. I got the Blush Nano switches, which is one of the three switch options they offer. Blush Nano are described as quiet and the creamiest of the three, I guess, is what people say about it.

I don't think Nufi used that term at all, but quiet and creamiest of the three options that they offer. So I went for that. It's linear and I had like I never had a mechanical keyboard so I had no idea if I wanted to like a real like an actuation point that I could feel or a linear switch. So I just like I don't know I picked one and those were quiet and I wanted more quiet ones. So I picked those and I'm really happy about them.

I think they sound great and they feel good. So no regrets there. the layout 75% is that what it is because it's called Air 75 yep that's a 65% keyboard that's not a 75 I don't know it's got the whole function row oh it's got the function row 65 would be without the function 65 would be no function row when do you get to the sickos where you don't have normal keys is that 60%

that's yeah where you don't have like an exclamation point or something or like a question mark and then you can get to the 40% ones which are missing half the alphabet oh yeah there's no number row on those yeah and like literally half the alphabet is missing like it's like how do you what are you doing here they are monsters and then you have many layers to switch between yeah you gotta like you gotta like jump between layers and they'll swear oh I can type faster this way I'm like No, you can't.

You're a liar. They probably can, though. They probably can. Because they're sitting else. Anyway. So I like this because this format, 75, I liked it because the full function row plus two buttons compared to, like, the Magic Keyboard or the Logitech I had. And on the right-hand side, there's a bunch of keys. By default, they are, like, page up, page down, start, end, or whatever. and you can see on the camera but I've moved around a bunch of things the row on the right the column on the right side

I've customized I've put in like three blank colored keycaps that I've assigned to launching specific apps and an emoji key and otherwise everything's pretty much standard I really like this is the final thing that I really like about this keyboard is the tiny knob it's got a tiny knob I I have no idea why but I really like this

kind of control the volume I have one question yeah what do you use it for obviously volume but I've done one special thing with it but yes first yes it's really funny that I've looked around on the web about knobs on mechanical keyboards. People are always like, this is so cool. You can do that in Figma, do this in Photoshop. What do they actually do? The real world, it's just a volume knob.

Yep. 100%. There's nothing else useful you can do. I've been 100% guilty of saying, oh, this is a knob. You can program it to do so many different things. You know what? Every single knob on every single one of my keyboards does. Volume control. And it only works on some inputs. Yep. Oh, because my big KRK speakers doesn't work with those because they have to be plugged into an audio interface which has its own independent audio knob. Yeah. Which is why I don't, any of the keyboards I use now, I don't have knobs on them.

So, yeah. It's a volume knob. And I think it's perfectly fine. like this is what it's meant to be. It's a volume knob. Embrace it. And I really like it. This is the best way to adjust volume. Now, so there's one special thing that I've done with it, which will transition me into the one thing that I like a tiny bit less about this keyboard. But the special thing that I've done with the knob, so you can configure what it does when you turn left, what it does when you turn right, and what it does when you press it down.

and I've customized what it does when you press it down to be to have mapped it to an Apple script that's running a shell script anyway to a script which cycles through my audio outputs and this is amazing because control center on macOS I hate it I want to burn it with fire and every time I have to go in there and switch the audio output,

I really hate my life. Now I can just cycle through my audio outputs by just pressing the knob down. And I have basically four audio outputs that I regularly use. So the MacBook speaker, my main monitor built-in speakers, my external DAC that I use with my headphones and the audio interface that I use to record stuff and to be on calls. So I have to cycle between all four.

And this makes it super easy. My shell script is great. So how did I customize this? I did this with the software that Nufi ships because this does not support via, which is the thing that many mechanical keyboards support. And Nufia being weird because some of their models support VR and some don't. They're like, I don't know.

That's weird. Yeah, they're playing both sides. They want to please people who just want VR and they want to not care about people who don't care. There's no mechanical keyboard person that doesn't want VR. VR is great. But so they ship something else that's called Nufi.io. And it's just like VR in terms of how it runs. It's in the browser. And you need a Chromium browser, of course. And so you plug it in and you do everything with it. You can even update your firmware.

And you can map anything you want to any keys. From a web browser? Yeah, it's crazy. That doesn't seem like a feature that they should be able to do. Chris doesn't know what it's like. I've installed Chrome so I can use Via because Via doesn't work in WebKit This really looks like I've never used Via but I cannot tell what this one is missing from Via Here's what I'll say Via is most likely just the open source version of whatever

this is Imagine Microsoft Word and then the open source. Well that's not a good example because Word is atrocious. Yeah, they're trying to productize the open source project. It's the Chromium to Chrome or Chromium to Edge or something or whatever the open source version of Chrome is. But I guess that's fine. I cannot tell what's missing if there's anything missing. You can do all the crazy Seco macro stuff and it's saved on device like on the keyboard.

So it's cool. You don't have to worry about having a software running. Well, the nice thing about that is if you take that keyboard and pair it to another computer, that stuff just moves with it. You don't have to redo all of it from scratch. It's at the firmware level. Exactly. And for example, I still use the Hyperkey for the Capsule Key. It's my Hyperkey. And I've done that using Nufi.io. Nice. So that means I can just pair my keyboard to any computer and the caps lock key will be a hyperkey.

So that's fun. Yeah. Anyway, I've done a few small things. Like there's a screenshot button that I have on my keyboard that's mapped to CleanShortX, the different features. But it's just one button, one key. And what you can do is that you can assign an action to when you press it down once, when you press it down for like two seconds and when you press it twice. So one button can do three things.

So I've done that with the screenshot button so that I can press it once to just select a portion of the screen, press it twice to start capturing OCR, so like to start copying some text on screen, and long press to start a screen recording. So I really like this screenshot key that I have now. And that's it. That's cool. That's it. Yeah, that's pretty cool. I like the whole, I might have to look into that for something.

I have an idea. So probably VIA does this, right? Yeah, probably. I think VIA does. All right. And it's got RGB as well. I've turned it off. First, I put it in yellow so that it matches my desk mat, and it was really pretty. But also, it's not really useful. The keycaps are not shined through anyway. So it's just, I don't really get it. It's illuminating between the keys, which makes no sense. And at night, I still cannot see the top of the keys anyway. So I've turned it off and I've got more battery life.

And so as far as I can tell, the battery life, really good. Really good. I have not charged it once and it's been about four weeks. Yes. So this is pretty good. I fully support this. I think low-profile mechanical keyboards are what more people should have. Whoa. No. Okay. Okay. Chris? No. I need you to take your fancy hat off and recognize that most people use a magic keyboard or some Dell keyboard that plugs in that they got in a box.

A low-profile mechanical keyboard is more welcoming. It's more inclusive. It's more what people are used to and want. It does wireless in basically every case. They're wrong. Which my keyboard does not. I'm borderline sick. Why does your keyboard need to be wireless? It sits at your desk all day. It doesn't need to be wireless. Oh, by the way, this is wireless, and you can connect to three devices at once, just like the Logitech, and a fourth one using the dongle. And it's got a slot for the dongle. The dongle's always there. You cannot use it.

This is really cool. You know what mine does? Mine plugs into my CalDigit hub, and no matter what computer I plug into that, it's connected. I don't have to worry about pairing or anything like that how do I mute Chris people are wrong I'm right I haven't been mean like this in a long time no no no but then you gotta worry about charging the thing I don't have to charge my keyboard you can't I haven't been mean like this in a long time I've tried to put the character away for a bit but uh no everyone else is wrong I'm right be snobby about your keyboards people You're doing the lightning defender argument

of like, lightning's not complicated. It's simple. Every cable does the same one thing. USB-C is so complicated. Oh, does lightning do any of the complicated things? No, it can't even do them at all. As long as you buy nice, high-quality cables that do all the things. LTT.com. By, uh... They actually did just release some cables. I wanted to see who would get the joke. At least when you did.

Buy a big keyboard, people. You'll be happy. You can take me later. Look, buy a big keyboard. It'll equal your happiness. And then you can send me a cake. I like the Costco vanilla cake. It may sound boring, but it's a really good cake. I don't know. That's a cute keyboard. Look at it. It's so cute. I've customized a few of the keycaps. I bought another keycaps from Nufi to customize some of the modified keys. to have a, like, so I could get a yellow spacebar. It's really nice. Look. That doesn't go a lot better than the stock.

I've got traffic lights. See? Red, yellow, green. Ooh, can I do things with aerospace with those? Probably. Oh, probably. All right, I'm leaving. You guys have fun with the rest of this. Okay, so this was the keyboard. Oh, one last thing I almost forgot. This is running long. One last thing is, remember my love for clack? so clack if you really like you didn't listen to the early comfort zone clack is a great piece of software that you can install on your mac

to like to virtualize a mechanical keyboard sound to hear them in your headphones it's really cool i genuinely think our show rocketed this up the charts it was in the top 10 mac apps on the store i'm going to check right now link in the show notes obviously don't you dare I will go in and delete it. So what I was about to say is I love Clack, but this does not make sense anymore. Like I had to disable Clack because I had double the sound.

That was weird. I had double the sound. So I disabled Clack and now I have the real sound from the keyboard. I think the great Dr. Pepper in the Sky. By the way, it sounds great. It sounds great, this keyboard. I really like the sound. I just want two things. Number one, Clack is number 12 on the paid list in the US Mac app store. Still too high. It's mostly Apple apps ahead of it. It's one of the top third-party apps on the Mac. Thing number two is, have you genuinely been using Clack all this time?

Yeah. Why? Okay. Clack is your aerospace. Like, that's... Like, yes. I'm not playing, like, some kind of weird character. I use the stuff that I talk about. Maybe I use it for just a week, but some stuff I really like and keep using. I really like the Magic Keyboard I use all the time and the MXKis Minis as well. No, it's not. It's Magic Keyboard. Look, everyone go to Mode's website, buy a big, nice keyboard, build it yourself.

You'll feel a sense of accomplishment. Everybody go to Porsche's website. Just buy a Porsche. You'll be much happier. Okay, if you're doing that, Also send me a GT3 RS. Maybe Neelian sends Neelian a GT3 RS. Anyway, I have a third thing to cover. I have a third thing. And I've written in all caps in the show notes for us. The third thing is my browser nightmare. Oh, no. Do you really need me for this one? Yes. It's a spin-off show, the browser nightmare.

I'm in it again. And this is why it relates to what I was saying about Quick Notes and LLMs in general. Chrome, I've been using Chrome all this time. It works and this is why I use it because it just works. And it's got good performance and it's fluid and it runs like a blink and then it runs really fast and it's great. But I'm being just like, same reason why I stopped using the before it.

The Gemini stuff all over the place. I want to, like, once again, I've said this twice today. I want to burn it with fire. There is a Gemini button in my Chrome and I don't like it. And I can't disable it. This is not good. Is that a flag? Maybe. Is it a flag? I wonder if there's a flag. Even if it's a flag, I don't want to run after flags. They're adding a sidebar as well.

I just saw the other day. I will have to disable the Gemini sidebars. So I'm in the browser void again. I tried other browsers. I went back to Safari for a few days this week. I do not feel so good. Hey, at least there's no AI stuff in it. Well, there is a little bit of AI stuff, but it just doesn't work. Yeah, there's the summarize stuff in the reader view. It doesn't work.

Safari, I will say it a third time. I want to burn it with fire. Like the UI is a nightmare. It's, I do not, like, you know, sometimes I read the WebKit blog, where developers behind WebKit, they post updates what they've been working on. And every time there's a screenshot of their own browser of Safari, it looks atrocious. And I'm like, they're really using it.

And they're happy with it, it seems. I cannot, for the life of me, understand what they've done with Safari this year. And it's not just the design. It's also the bugs. The UI is buggy as heck. You drag and drop tabs and they go blinding white on you for some reason. You switch tabs and the full color of the Chrome, like the UI Chrome, changes. And if you disable that, they added the option, by the way.

They added the option maybe a release ago to disable the fact that it changes color, the UI changes color based on the website. If you disable that, then the full UI goes either white or dark or black if you're in dark mode. And then it makes no sense because there's no divider between the top of the UI and the web page itself. It just looks weird. And also in terms of performance, I almost forgot for a few days that the web could be smooth.

Like I forgot. It was erased from my memory. - I'm browsing in Safari right now. And thanks to Matt Birchler, birchtree.me's tip on getting 120 hertz refresh rate. And so far, it's pretty smooth right now. Can I just say, I don't know if I've ever been more proud of myself in the Apple community than ever. Than about this thing. I just wrote a little blog post on it. And then everyone was talking about it a week later. I was so happy. And such a nice thing. Everyone finally getting 120 hertz and being like, oh, this is nice.

Why is that not on by default? Yeah, why have they done this? I mean, why? Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. Anyway. Nothing makes sense in Safari anyway. Yeah. I feel like Safari and like people who love Safari love it because they loved the version four or five years ago. And it's just, well, this is Safari. It's obviously faster and better and better on battery and all these things. But like, I don't think any of those are. I think the UI in Safari on Tahoe is the...

Apple Music gives it a run for some things. Oh, yeah. I think in Safari, it's just ugly. Everything's so bubbly, especially once you get some tabs going. It's like bubbles next to bubbles that are just like... It's so... It looks really ugly. And since bubbles cast shadows, especially in light mode, it's just all shadowed. So it's not even like a pure white toolbar. It's just gray. It's sad. I think it looks really, really rough. Yeah. Yeah. And I just want to shout out both Federico and John because they've posted a few updates to MacStories this week

on their website. And those include, by the way, because the club website and MacStories were merged this week, and big technical feat. Congrats. And so they have screenshots in the stories with Safari. And I like the... Those are John's... I think John's screenshots are always chaotic evil because his screenshots always overflow with stuff.

He's like... His mind is like this, it seems. And his Safari, like the full row of extensions filling up the address bar. This is incredibly incredibly overwhelming. Anyway. Whenever I have a confession. Whenever I send you two screenshots and it includes a web browser, I always make sure I clean up my tabs before I do it. Oh, Neelian is notoriously and famously known for just if you give her a screenshot, she's pinching

a zoom. She's checking all the details. I sent these two once a photo of my, like, living room, and Neelion threw it in, like, Pixelmator Pro to make sure things were, like, level. Like, oh, like, Neelion is the biggest pinching zoomer out there. Oh, man. She will tear apart. She will send, I'll post a video, and, like, a day later or whatever, whenever she comes around to watching it, she'll start sending me screenshots of stuff that's in the video that I think are totally, like, no one's going to catch.

Like, I'm like, I'm not worried about cleaning this up. Like, no one's going to catch this thing. Nope. She, like, goes through it frame by frame and finds everything. Yes. Anyway, I will make you guess now before we conclude and move on to the challenge. Which browser am I, like, we're using Riverside still to record. Yep. Which browser am I using right now for this call? I have a pretty good guess.

and I think it's based because I've been listening and I know what your requirements are put on my product manager hat I would guess given the desire for chromium the desire for no AI features and your general European tendencies you're using Vivaldi right now that's what I was going to say yep oh nice That's the browser podcast.

I am using Vivaldi. I have issues with it. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It is strange. A million features are thrown at it. And I kind of like that about it, actually. It has every feature. It has everything. Like even earlier today, I was looking to disable. So they have a built-in ad blocker that I don't want to use. I want to use my own ad blocker, so a separate extension. But if you use your own extension, the icon for the built-in ad blocker is still there in the address bar,

and there's no way to get rid of it. So I Googled, how do I get rid of it? And then I discovered a world of things. I discovered that you can apply custom CSS to the Vivaldi UI. And people share all kinds of CSS snippets to customize the Vivaldi setup. So there's just a tiny three lines of CSS you can add to remove the built-in ad blocker icon. You can add CSS to disable that thing or add thing or customize the margins on that specific button.

There's a whole world out there of UI customizations for the reality. This is what I'm giving a go right now. I will update you. Okay. I look forward to the update. I look forward to you trying another browser. I mean, look, 10 years ago, Vivaldi was my default, and I was kind of the weird Vivaldi guy. And it's good to see them still going and still being interesting. I didn't realize they were that old. Oh, yeah. I remember using it a long time ago.

And you're right, Matt, that one reason I'm trying Vivaldi is because they're making it a marketing spiel that they're never going to add AI features in this browser. Oh, yeah. They're going hard on that. Absolutely. So on one of my other apps, Bestomasto, which shows you the top 20 posts in your timeline, literally every day there's a Vivaldi post up there of their like, no AI bros. And then there's just getting likes and boosts all over the place. Like they know their audience.

And I think that's good. Like if you have a niche, go into it and play, embrace it. And I'm in that niche. I'm looking for a browser that's promising me to never add AI. So I will give it a try. Nice. Yeah. And I wish DIA had a kill switch for the AI features. I really like the UI of DIA. It's getting better every week, by the way, because I still check it out every week when they update it. It's getting better. The type groups are amazing.

The sidebar is amazing. The performance is amazing. But just let me get rid of the AI. Half the time, I'm doing a Google search, and it's not a Google search. It will ask chat GPT. I don't want that. Anyway, I'm done for real. Okay. All right. Well, let's go on to the challenge. And it was my challenge this week. And the challenge was to pull an old device out of a drawer and use it. We all have that drawer full of old tech devices or tech devices we're not using anymore that aren't part of our current setup of, you know,

like I use this for work or I play games on this or I use this for watching TV or something like that. So pull out an old device and use it for a week. You guys mind if I go first? Yeah. You go ahead. So my device, it's back here. I was just printing a Gridfinity thing for it. I actually brought this to the show sometime last year, but is the and odin 2 portal and i bought this originally as a way to stream games and i was

using this specifically with like the xbox cloud streaming stuff wait wait wait wait hold on what which what year is this from it's from last year but we we said in the recording it there wasn't like a there wasn't like a line in the sand of how old it needs to be it just needs to be a device you weren't using anymore. And I'm getting to why. It does not even define as old. I canceled the Xbox Game Pass stuff. Okay. And I haven't been using it. It's literally been sitting in this drawer right back here.

But let me explain how I've been using it because it's actually cool and pretty useful. Okay. So for those that don't know, this is an Android handheld gaming device. There's a million of these out on the market. This is a fairly powerful one. There is a new AnOdin 3 now that's even more powerful, but I didn't want to buy something new because the whole deal was pull something old out of a drawer that you weren't using anymore. So for those that don't know, sometime last year there was an app that hit Android called Game Hub.

And what Game Hub is is it's a way for essentially windows and steam emulation on an android device so with game hub i'm able to install that app log into steam and download steam games that are originally for windows on android and play them so i have been playing so i set that up and it was actually kind of a pain to set up um let me turn down the volume so it doesn't completely destroy the audio um but i set it up and for video people you can see Dead Cells is right here.

And I was playing Dead Cells. That's right off my Steam account. But the other thing I was playing that was really fun is I put Skyrim on this as well. Nice. So I've been playing Skyrim on an Android device this week. Okay. So I was confused for a minute. This is running Android natively. Yeah, literally here. I'll show you. Chris goes Android. No, let's not go crazy. Literally Android right there. For video viewers, that's Android. Oh, hang on. I hit the button. Sorry.

For video viewers, you can see. Let me try and block my face so it focuses. But why is it not focusing? It's somehow focusing less. It's not focusing. It's focusing on your clock. It's a blurry Android home screen. Yeah. They need to get retina over there. Man. Yeah. Wow. We've had it since iPhone 4. Look at them. Why is it focusing? It will focus. Oh, there we go. There we go. Okay. Now it's focused. So you can see that. I can pinch and zoom. That is clearly Android.

I haven't cleaned it up. There's so much crap on here because I don't care because I go into Game Hub and I can literally just start playing Skyrim and it's running locally on the device. It's not streaming it. It is running on the device via emulation. And it runs really well. I was getting... So I set it to the high settings and in a dungeon in Skyrim, I can get full 60 frames per second. I've set up in Game Hub a limit of running at 60 frames per second because I don't need to go over.

It's fine. In the open world of Skyrim, I get anywhere from like 40 to 50 frames per second. So pretty decent gameplay. It looks good. I mean, Skyrim's a really old game. It doesn't, so it's not. You're not going to be able to play something like Cyberpunk with this because it's running an emulation layer on a handheld device. Like you're not going to play Cyberpunk. You're not going to play something modern. but small indie games are going to work great. Older games, they're going to work great on this. And it's been a lot of fun. Like I've, I've, I've just been playing Skyrim on this thing.

And like the device itself, you can see it's not super big. So if it's good in my hand and I could just pick it up, play it and, you know, put it down when I'm done. But yeah, that's what I've been doing. We got to get you a Steam Deck. I am just waiting for a Steam Deck 2. Well, so the whole reason why I did this is in preparation for the Steam Machine. I think I'm pretty much in the camp of when the Steam Machine comes out, the Xbox and PlayStation are going away, and that is going to be where I'm playing video games from now on. And this could be, like, with Game Hub, this could be the place that I play handheld, those weird indie games like Ball Pit and stuff like that.

I can play this. But I'm kind of just waiting for the Steam Deck 2 to come out. I'm kind of at the point where I'm like, the Steam Deck 1 is just old enough that I'm like, I don't want it. And I know they've like said they're, it's not like they're taking their time with it or something like that. But like, I'm just like, it's not, it's, it's too old for me to jump in now. Yeah. And I'm just waiting for the next one to come out. Okay. Well, I think this is fun. And I am honestly based on the release date of yours relieved. Oh, okay.

I won't say why yet. But yeah, so that, that's, that's what I've been doing. Skyrim on an Android. Speaking of the upcoming Steam Machine and all that, are we not worried about the price? We're horrified of the price. I'm horrified, yeah. But we are aware of the RAM Pockerplips. I mean, that's going to affect everything. That's going to affect everything from toasters to TV.

Honestly, because Steam Deck Stan over here, I got the ROG Ally, and that was because Asus announced at CES that the prices of their things were going to go up, including their existing products. So I was like, well, this might be the last time you can get one of these for less than $1,000. Yeah. This is... It's going to be great. It's going to be fine. Politics and technology aren't related. My only concern about the Steam machine is that because it's going to be this weird PC thing, is that will there be new games coming out eventually, like a couple years down the road?

Will there be new games coming out that won't run on it and won't run on it good? And the Xbox and PlayStation will still be the place where you can pretty much guarantee any new game that comes out, you'll just be able to play it. Yeah. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. I hope so. The Steam deck can play Cyberpunk. Better than the Switch 2. Yeah. And the Switch 2, it doesn't run bad on the Switch 2. But yeah, I'm kind of in the point where I'm like, I'm ready to go in on Steam.

The only thing that I'm going to have to do is convince Danielle. Danielle really likes Xbox achievements for some reason. Not PlayStation trophies, Xbox achievements. And I know Steam has achievements. Yeah. I don't know how wide they're adopted, but... I mean, every game, if the game has Xbox achievements, they'll just have those for Steam achievements. It's the same thing. Basically, everything has them. But no one cares, though. That's true. That's true. I sometimes do. I always like seeing the percentage, like how many other people did the thing that I did.

It's just like they finish this chapter, and you can see the percentage go down and down, and you can kind of see... For me, I always like seeing the notification when you get it, and that's it. then I never think of it again. Yeah. On Steam, after you play, it'll say these are the achievements you got during the session and you can see them in detail. It's kind of cool. All right. Well, that's what I got. Game Hub on Android. It's pretty interesting. If you have an Android device laying around, it doesn't have to be a gaming Android device. Literally, Game Hub is just an app that you can download from the Google Play Store.

Yeah. Matt, holding up his Samsung device, you can get one of those controllers to pair with it then you could start playing Steam games on it. So, like, check it out. Like, yeah, it doesn't have to be a crazy, crazy deal. Just know the better that your hardware is, the higher end games that you're going to be able to play. And you're not going to be able to play the latest games, but, you know, niche indie games or indie games in general, older AAA games like Skyrim work just fine. Probably one of your charger with a screen is running Android, then you can...

Oh, maybe. Maybe. I'll have to look into that. All right, Niléane, what do you got for us? All right. So I will introduce this by showing you... So I really picked something that's old. Okay. Okay. Oh, I need to look up what year it came out, actually. Let me look it up first so I can do a proper introduction. No rush. I'm installing Skyrim over here. Nice. Nice, nice, nice. I mean, what's funny is I didn't have Skyrim on Steam before this.

So this is probably like the 10th time I bought Skyrim. Let's see. I have Xbox 360. Then probably some upgrade version for the Xbox One. Then probably PlayStation. Then probably Xbox. Okay, I got it. I've at least bought Skyrim six times. We are cooking, everybody. Nice. Now, make sure. Oh, one thing I didn't say. I had a weird issue where it didn't download all the packages that GameHub needed. So I had to go into the settings and just manually select them.

I just had a weird issue. So if game doesn't launch right away, just go into the sidebar and just manually download all the packages. Okay. All right. I found the year. Mine was released in 2007. That's not old. It depends on your current age. Let's remember the difference. I know I know that was the joke I was a wee baby right so this is the charger for it let me show to camera

this is a 30 pin charger and the device is is it still on oh it's still on the iPod Nano third generation oh exposure not liking this anyway third generation um incredibly the battery still holds um not like right now I'm surprised that it's still on because it's been a few hours but yesterday it turned off like really fast

so I don't know what's going on with the battery uh it's probably dying very slowly inside um so the third gen nano look at this it's small that's my head for scale iPhone 16 Pro for scale let me dismiss that mom message notification iPhone 16 Pro for scale this is really small thickness iPhone Air did not invent anything look at this

this is really thin so this is the wide iPod Nano There was only one like this, I think. So because first they were tall and then it was variations of the tall format. But the third gen was weird and it was wide like this. And then the later gens, they got even weirder and people turned them into watches. But this AirPod Nano is really nice. It's got a color screen, of course.

And the click wheel is tiny as well. So on the main menu, it shows the preview of your slideshow. I'm really sad that this doesn't look good on camera. Why? Can I adjust the brightness on this? Let me try. Gosh, it's been so long. Oh, there it is. Brightness. Let me pull it down. No. Does the camera pick it up? Yeah.

There you go. So it's in French. French iPod Nano for you. There you go. 8 gigabytes. You can see it's pretty full. I've transferred a bunch of music and it was difficult because I've got all my lossless high-res music. So you were able to put, what, three songs on there? A pretty fair amount, but mostly like all of my old mp3s that are still lying around on my hard drives

because those are low quality and they are mp3s because you cannot transfer anything that's not mp3 to this and most of my music is black so that was sad maybe want to look into hacking it and flash a custom firmware because there are those that there are those custom that you can flash onto old iPods and use any like play flags and I have fancy features

but I did not do that. I don't even know if that's possible with this model. Look at this. And also look at this. Most of the music I transferred, the cover artwork did not go over. Only some of them. And those are tagged right because I'm a maniac. I tag everything right. My music is well tagged. See, there's a bunch of them that have cover art here. Those are the Seaguro's albums. But a bunch of them don't. I don't know why. But look at this.

This is cover flow. Oh, yeah. Do you remember the cover flow? That's fun. Let me open this album. Oh, look at that. This animation, the artwork flips around when you click on it. Oh, yeah. This is so cool. I really like this. when you start playing boom it's really i really like this um this has made me want to try and get like a chunker a big big boy one that you can rip out the hard drive inside and put in

like some of those adapters with a like one to buy sd card or whatever really makes me want to try that um did you know this has games yeah yeah yeah i had poker for it i had the poker with phil schiller i think i'm pretty sure i did a quiz at one point on the show like a year or two ago where i quizzed you guys on what games were on the i had an older yeah i kind of remember that it did not go well i don't think i'll do well here I've forgotten So this one has three

There's iPod Quiz The second one, I can't read that Clondick, I don't even know what that is I tried the third one, which is Vortex And it's just like a Breaking, how is that called In English There's a ball flying around the screen Brick break, yes, but It's circular Because you play with the quick wheel So this is It takes a while to load every time See the processing power in this? Look at this. Oh, yeah.

Oh, boy. Probably could put Game Hub on that and play Skyrim. Oh, man. Yeah, that's cool. I really wanted to transfer some video on it. I could not. It's being extremely picky about... Codex, I'm guessing. Codex. But it made me doubt if it's even possible on this device. So, like, maybe it doesn't support it.

I don't know. But, yeah, the music stuff was really fun. And that's it. Also, by the way, when I first turned it back on, I thought it was broken, but I forgot that there's a hold switch on the button. Yeah. We've all done that. Okay, that's great. I found Daniel's old iPod Classic a couple months ago or maybe a year ago, and I really want to do the mod, but I don't have a local music library anymore.

So it's like, I kind of want to do it. This would be my dream, I think. It would be a fun project. Yeah. Okay. Well, all I can do is disappoint now, and I will. I did do the challenge, but to understand where my product came from, you have to go all the way back to the year 2022. And to this current episode, because I used these headphones as wireless headphones.

Now, it was a challenging week because I was traveling for work. And so the idea of putting some old tech in my bag was not ideal. So what I did was I recently, I've complained about the AirPods Pro 3, which I do not like, but I was using AirPods Pro 2 as my airplane headphones for a couple years. Before that, I had stopped using big headphones on planes. But with my current AirPods, I'm using the newest AirPods that have the noise cancellation. So not the Pros, but the ones that do noise cancellation, which are very good for my purposes.

but I thought maybe that wouldn't be enough for the plane. So I did bring these with me, which I'm now recognizing is probably more space than like an old iPod would have been. But anyway, it's serving double duty. I use these as wireless headphones for the first time in like two years. I don't think you've said what headphones they are. Oh, apologies. That's true. Really, I'm really letting people down. These are the Sony WH-1000XM5s. So I think not the newest generation, but the second newest.

The generation that does not fold. Oh, I remember the infamous one. I have those. Yes, they're in blue. I think they look really nice. But yeah, I got to tell you, they were awesome. It was so good. They did a great job with noise cancellation. like the plane like i don't want to say completely disappeared but disappeared very well uh they the battery life was insane i haven't i have not used these i've not plugged these into charge in like

two years um i have just been using them as wired headphones for the entire time we've been doing this podcast i used them on the plane ride there which was two and a half hours i used them for a little bit in the hotel and then i used them on the two and a half hour plane ride back plus two hours we waited on the tarmac it was really great landing in chicago in a snowstorm um and when i like checked the battery they were at 70 two years since i plugged these in with usbc wow so uh very happy with that it almost feels like a bug like it just has no idea what battery life is in there

who knows but uh yeah um they were great they paired nicely um i know this isn't that right it's not retro tech, but it is an older piece of tech than my current headphones. I hadn't used them this way in a while. Like I said, it was just supposed to be a device you're not really using anymore. Technically, you were using them for the podcast. If we were doing democracy, I would not do well. I would take third place. I understand. But that's where I always fall anyway.

You, Leon, would win with the nostalgia vote. Yeah. Yeah, obviously. I think the iPod always wins. What are your current headphones? I use the AirPods 4th gen with noise cancelling. So just with the earbuds. The earbuds, yeah. Yeah. Even on planes and stuff? Not on planes. Okay. I switched to them around Christmas.

I was able to get a pair. And on planes, what do you usually use then? For years, I've been using the AirPods Pro. I have the XM5s. I've not been using them for a while because I lent them to a friend. And I think they're great. I've been using, like, I used them for a while. It's amazing when you compare them to the Macs, the AirPods Macs, how lightweight they are. They are very, very light.

And they do a great job with noise cancelling. For me, it more than does good enough on the plane. And I think the one thing, the reason that I wanted to switch is that with those ones that wedge in your ears with the tips, they really hurt my ears after more than like, even the pros, the second gen pros, which I loved, like more than an hour with those on, my ears do start to get a little sore. But with these, I had a little line over my head, but like that's no big deal. I have no hair really to see. So, yeah.

these are much more comfortable to wear for like hours at a time okay nice I think we all did great I think I did best I agree I mean I got Skyrim running on Android so I mean I'm installing a game from the app that Chris you had my phone is hot and it is just installing it yeah of something like the Anoden Portal 2, it has fans.

Yeah. So that's probably going to make a big difference between performance wise between this and a phone is having fans like the fans were cooking, but it was able to stay cool and yeah. Okay, well, let's see what passive cooling on a Snapdragon does. We'll find out when it explodes and Matt's not here next week. That got dark. Sorry. New challenge.

Yeah, it's your challenge. Oh, no. The day has come. Okay. What day? The day that I forgot I had to set a challenge. Oh, no. So, you know, I was the same earlier. I was like, Chris, whose turn is it? Because I'm not ready. Fortunately, it was yours. yeah we went back we were like okay Neilion did the Minecraft one I did the old tech one yeah it's Matt's turn yes I was again I was

on a work trip this past week and I got home Friday afternoon and then fell asleep soon after and it's the morning on Saturday so I've not been thinking about this but that's okay the best ideas come when under pressure so I would recommend I could just do an app icon color I haven't done one of those in a while We haven't done one of those in a while. I think, so my gut tells me the thing we should do is try a new app.

Because we haven't done this in a while. But what's the criteria for making us select an app that we wouldn't necessarily pick otherwise? Oh, I have an idea. What's your idea? Oh, I have an idea. You will not like it. No. I think we should use the new keynote that Apple released. and do a presentation about what? I don't know. About something. We should use Keynote for it. Okay.

Huh. Okay. This is a good idea. I'm going to adjust it slightly just so that it's my idea. Go ahead. We should use because it just came out. we should use one of the apps in Apple's Creative Studio to do something interesting. You will just use Final Cut.

You cannot use Final Cut. Damn it. I was just going to make a video. Chris is like, I made a fully produced 10-minute video for YouTube. What did YouTube do? 10 minutes? That would be short for me. Here's a 30-minute one. Come on. How about the... Did you not like the keynote presentation? I do. I think the keynote is a good one, but I feel like we could do some... I don't know what I would present. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know what I would present either.

Also, you could have this in your back pocket as a challenge in the future as well, if you really want to do it. I will adjust it. I will think about this. Okay. So create something interesting with something from the new creator studio. All right. Okay. Okay. My Android phone is on fire right now. My God. You need Neleon's MagSafe fan. Yeah, truly. Send it over. Where is it? I don't know. Throw it through Riverside. All right. Well, that brings us to the end of the show. I have an end of the show question for you, too. And kind of going off of our challenge, I want to know what's an old device you would love to bring back?

not necessarily like trending or anything, but just like an old device that maybe you don't have anymore that you would love to just be able to use again. My PSP. Nice. You know what I'm going to say? Game Boy Advance. Why? Because Game Boy Advance was amazing. That's so much worse than PSP. I know. Game Boy Advance was hard to see. Game Boy Advance was the pinnacle. and like I never had one but I wanted a Game Boy Advance SP so badly.

Oh yeah, that's pretty good. But do you know how I use my PSP? It was my first smartphone actually. Like I used it for everything but playing games. I went on the web with it. Yeah, I talked about it probably. I went on the web with it. I used Skype with it. I used MSN with it. I would listen to my music with it. It was my MP3 player. I would watch movies on it and I would flash all sorts of custom firmware to customize the OS. Oh, that was a good time.

Yeah. I would do a Vita. I used to have a Vita. I bought it years after it was new. I got it on eBay and then I sold it like a year or two later and I really wish I still had it. Yeah, let me change mine to Vita. Yes. This is my lesson to kids everywhere. You are going to want to sell your gaming stuff, You're gaming hardware to buy the new hardware. And I understand you will probably have to because you cannot afford the new stuff otherwise. And maybe that's just the way the world goes. But when you are older, you will want that old hardware and you will wish you still had it.

So if you at all can hold on to it, I know it's tempting. I would recommend holding on to it. Yep. 100%. All right. Well, that brings us to the end of the show. Thank you all so much for listening. Big thank you to Mac Stories for having us. We're a Mac Stories podcast after all. And a huge congratulations to the team over there for launching the new update to the site. Kind of combines a bunch of stuff. Go look at those John crazy screenshots. So many extensions in Safari. So many. Add John to clean up his Safari tabs.

It's every extension available for Safari. That's all of them. Have you seen his doc? Whenever he shares the macOS doc screenshot as well. Like we said, Neelion's the pinch and zoomer. You send Neelion a screenshot or a photo, she will figure out what's going on there. He does this thing where he has so many Safari web apps in his dock as well. It's like he added every website to his dock. Just to have them for later.

This is the one feature John should not have. He's Galaxy Brain. What he's doing is he's treating macOS like it's ARC, and then the dock is the sidebar. Wow. That's Galaxy Brain right there. Mac OS is the new web browser. Okay. Yep. There you go. All right. Thank you all so much for listening. Have a great day. Bye.