I'm Holding Up Poop

Welcome to the Thunderdome! Two men enter, one man leaves! Because this week, I am joined by Matt Birchler. Matt, how are you? Chris, I'm shook. I wasn't expecting this. This week, we are the Thunderdome, because New Leon is not here. So it's just the two of us. And we can make it if we try. But, really, only one of us is going to get to leave. the other one will be permanently stuck in riverside oh at least until next week actually no it'd be two weeks because next week i'm getting the new roof so we're delaying the recording yeah

that would be an interesting challenge um stay in the riverside call until next podcast that would be awkward but like if i wasn't the person stuck in the riverside call i would periodically just join it just to see what was happening oh yeah that'd be interesting okay all right all right We have a show to do and you put in all the tiny topics. Thank you. I did not get a chance. I literally woke up and I was like, I have something happening this morning. And I was like, oh, it's comfort zone. I better get prepping. Yeah.

We have a feedback form, famously. Always mention it. Link in the show notes. And people give us feedback. And so we have a little bit of a backlog to get through. So I wanted to mention a couple of things people brought up. The first is just a shout out. I wanted to do a shout out to Max and Joe, who listen every week. And they also bought some of the Palestine Cola that Neil Leon recommended. So they did not say whether it was good or bad. They just said they got it. So I don't know. But shout out to them.

Hi, Max and Joe. Hope you guys are well. Hope you enjoyed the Cola. Though, I would like to say the official comfort zone recommendation is a Diet Dr. Pepper or Dr. Pepper Zero Sugar with Cream Soda. That is the official comfort zone recommendation. That's, you know, it's a recommendation for sure. No, it's the official one. It is the party line. Okay. Okay. I'm not willing to die on this hill. Also, Henry from the feedback form has a question for us. Henry says, I'm seeing rumors of a new MacBook Pro that may have cellular and other rumors that a following MacBook Pro might have a touchscreen.

So let's assume both of these things actually happen. And in 2027, we have a MacBook Pro with cellular and a touchscreen. Do we have an iPad? They did specify. They knew the answer for Neil Leon, which was a resounding no. As it remains, she remains not owning an iPad. But wanted to know for us. So I can go first and say, until Apple releases a tablet-style Mac, I will still have an iPad. Yeah. I think that would be the same thing for me. Because while the MacBook Pro having a touchscreen would be interesting, until you can detach it, and for audio listeners,

I'm literally detaching my iPad and holding it and using it as a tablet, that doesn't make sense for me. But it does really make me think that at some point, I think the Mac and the iPad are going to converge. I really do think the Mac and the iPad. Not five years from now, or maybe five years. I'm coming around to this more. I am too. The more and more I think about like, if Apple really does do a touchscreen Mac and they do kind of start to overhaul Mac OS

to be a little more touch friendly. And I know you've done the work and show that like, yes, it is already to a point where you could touch the thing. Most things, yeah. Most things. But like, you know, they start to add interactions and stuff like that and gestures and stuff like that via touchscreen, you know, via that. I don't think right now it makes sense, but maybe five years from now, maybe 10 years from now, the iPad and the Mac converge. But that was not the question. It was not the question. The question was.

Would we still have an iPad after this mythical MacBook Pro with cellular and touchscreen converge? And I have said for years now, a big reason why I like working from the iPad is those two things, the touchscreen and cellular. I think I would still have an iPad because, you know, it's still not a tablet. The MacBook would still not be a tablet. But it would get harder and harder to justify the iPad lifestyle if that MacBook Pro did exist. Yeah.

Okay. So we would still have our iPads. Would I buy a new iPad? I don't know. I feel like my M4 iPad Pro is going to last me my entire adult life. Like, I don't feel like I could use this forever and I'd be very happy. That's going to be the 2018 iPad Pro where it lasts people like six or seven years. Like it's going to be one of those iPads that just sticks around for a really long time. Yeah. It's so good. And the final one, another question for us. I'm calling this an icebreaker question.

It's kind of an end of the show question, but we'll do it at the start just to get the ice broken. It's from a longtime listener, several time writer, inner, FloGro. nailed it uh and their question is what is the first app in your purchase history in the app store now i looked at this up i'll give you a second to pull it up because it actually takes a little longer than it used to um in the app store search but i looked this up before we recorded in 2007 before the app store even existed in my purchase history i actually have tetris

which I think was some special thing for the iPod. Oh. So I'm not counting that necessarily. Okay. But the first app that I downloaded for an iPod Touch because I didn't have an iPhone at the time was very unexciting Pandora. And the second was IGN's app. Right? Yeah, you need that hot gaming news.

Listen, there were 30 apps you had to download. You downloaded what you could. Yes. So mine is not going to be correct because the Apple ID that I am using now with those purchases is not my original Apple ID. I had an issue with my original Apple ID and I don't remember exactly what happened, but I kind of abandoned it. But it wasn't that big of a deal because I didn't have that much stuff on it. so for this Apple ID the original thing is Flickr for some reason I don't know why and then the second thing

which is hilarious is Remember the Milk oh heck yeah yeah so I thought that was kind of funny but yeah this is not my original Apple ID so this one started back in 2009 which I believe is after I got an iPod Touch I already had an iPod Touch at this time. I don't know if this is when the App Store came out. App Store came out in 2008. Okay, so this definitely wasn't it. Okay, yeah. Because I had an iPod Touch when the App Store came out.

I had the original iPod Touch, and then I paid the $15 to get iPhone OS 2 to get the App Store on it. The thing right below Pandora is the iPhone 2.0 software update, which I had to pay for because I put weird stuff, weird stuff back in the day. Yeah. Yep. Yep. It used to be $15 to upgrade your iOS. Crazy. And we thought that was cheap compared to what macOS was because it was like 130 bucks for many years and then dropped to 30 and it's a whole thing.

Yeah. Yeah. Software. OS updates are weird, man. Weird. Yeah. Weird history. We used to pay for them. Now we pray we don't even get them. Okay. All right. This week on Cozy Zone, I needed my co-host's help. I asked Matt and Neilion for some free graphic design advice. And oh boy, did I get it. We came up with a style guide for my YouTube channels, which is already reflected in my current YouTube videos. But you should go listen to that episode. And for those that don't know, Cozy Zone is our members-only podcast where we put out an extra episode of the show every single week.

Not monthly, weekly. So there's two episodes of us every single week. So we bless your ears with our vocal tones. Are there rumors? Are there rumors we're only doing this monthly? Do people think we're doing this monthly? We're doing weekly bonus episodes. People are enjoying them. That's where the spicy stuff comes. We get Chris uncensored in these episodes. Yeah. Before this, we did a Star Wars tier list. I gave up bleeping it.

You may not want to listen to it around children. I gave up bleeping it when I was editing it. I was just like, yep, nope, we're just going to keep moving on. Because, yeah, that's members only. It's our After Dark show. Not officially. Not usually. Usually the kids are fine to listen. Usually, yeah, usually. But, yeah, usually I bleep it. But that one was us extra spicy, and I just wanted to leave it in. All right. We should get into the main show. Yes. Matt, what do you got for us this week? It's a little bit of a weird week.

Normally, this would be your week off, but Nelian is not here. So we pulled you off the bench. Yes. So I wanted to pick something that would make Nelian yell at her iPhone while she is listening to it. So that she has follow-up for days next week. Oh, boy. Is she going to? So I wanted to talk about AI from a couple different angles.

I am a Mac first guy who also uses an iPad. You're an iPad first guy who also uses a Mac. We're both sitting in front of me right now, actually. Yeah. Same, actually. So I wanted to talk about some of the things I'm using these AI tools for, how I'm finding them useful, and kind of how it feels like they've really taken over what is exciting about software on the desktop. And I was curious how it feels from the iPad user perspective, because some of the things I do just don't exist on the iPad,

and I was wondering just if there's any differences there. So my world is broken into two silos. Two wolves, what is it? There's two somethings inside you. sheep and wolf clothing or wolves and sheep clothing no i'll put a thing in the doobly-doo uh there's something the doobly-doo oh that's a new one yeah i'm stealing that from hank green or john oh okay uh so in my work life i i do some things and then at home i do other things which are increasingly code code and code but at work which is the thing i don't talk about as much

I'm actually using these tools quite a bit and I'm finding them quite useful and they're making my job easier in genuine ways. I feel like I've lost some of the audience already by just saying that they're actually useful but I've been at this for years. I genuinely think these things are bringing some value so the first thing I'm using is no taking assistance so um i don't know how much i'm supposed to say about what we do at work

i don't know doesn't say what you do just yeah yeah i that my general when i had a day job my general rule of thumb was like i can talk about how i do things yeah but i don't talk about what i do yeah so meeting notes this is a thing that is that haunts me at work is oh we talked about that and we said, oh, God, what did we say? What did we decide? I think we decided this. Do we have any record of that? No. Oh, God, I remember this.

Chris is having flashbacks to his corporate world. Literally, my old day job corporate life is my personal Vietnam PTSD moment. All along, the Watchtower is playing right now. Choppers are flying in. Napalm is going off. Yeah, this is my flashbacks. Without mentioning these specific tools, in case that matters at all, there are several tools that help do this. There are bots that will join the meeting with you, and they will have access to the people in the meeting,

so they'll know who says specific things. You won't have to guess at who said they would do this thing. This was their action item or whatever. So it is able to accurately say, this person said they would do this, and this person said they would do this. And it also has a full transcript that's searchable and goes into a web interface where you can say, when did we talk about this? And you can find the meetings. That's very useful. I use that on a regular basis. I also take those notes and I put them, the meetings I'm in, I put them into an Obsidian vault. So I have an Obsidian on my work computer where I just save the meeting notes as markdown files.

And those just go into the same folder. And I just have this big thing and I can search an Obsidian and I can use like cloud code. locally to ask questions about it and find things. So, media notes, awesome. Summarizing them and the full transcript, beautiful, beautiful stuff. The other thing I do, I mentioned Obsidian. I have, I think I've talked about this before, so I won't go too deep into it. I have all of my work in Obsidian on my work computer. It's all Markdown files. So, the projects I'm working on, I have all

the info in there. If I get, I work in payments. So if a Visa and MasterCard have documents that are important, I save them to that vault and they're searchable there. So highly recommend if you're like keeping track of projects and have a lot of stuff going on. And Obsidian vault is wonderful. And because it's all text files, you can use something like Cloud Code or Cursor or something, whatever, to look at that folder and you can do AI stuff with it. So that's kind of the big stuff I'm using at work.

It doesn't sound like a lot, but I'm in so many meetings. Matt has sent us screenshots of his calendar. Yeah. And it is insane the amount of meetings he is at. It's always back to back. His calendar is full of meetings. And there's usually one little block in the week, and that's where we throw comfort zone at. Yes, yes. We record on Fridays in part because that is the day where I can slot out a little bit of time to make it work. But yes, meetings are very much the job in a way. So communicating and stuff and understanding when we've made decisions is very important.

And truly, like, having all my information in one place, even if you're not using the AI stuff, I would recommend using Obsidian at work because it's very, very good. And it's all local, so there shouldn't be any security issues. And then there's my home life, where I don't do it. Oh, another thing I do at work is I mentioned Visa documents. They love a PDF that's 1,000 pages long and is not very clearly explained and is hard to search. So throwing that into Claude is what I tend to use and asking questions on like, where is this talked about?

Can you help me understand this? It is very, very helpful for those sorts of things. So, yeah, the specs in the payment space are maybe intentionally confusing from those big companies. Anyway, I won't go down that rabbit hole. Yeah, that's where I can see you getting in trouble. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But at home, I'm also using AI stuff. I'm using it largely for coding. Shocker, I don't know if you've noticed, I've released a few apps. I'm trying to become the new David Smith.

That is obviously the goal. And it's to the point in one of the Mac Stories weeklies that went out, they talked about an update and they're like, surprise, surprise, guess who has another app update out? I was like, I appreciate the sass. you just need a tiktoker to make a viral thing and and then you will be the next oh my god yeah forget all the stuff i just said if i get a if i one of these things goes viral i'll just be doing this full time um but anyway i'm doing that i'm using cloud code cloud code is the goat uh cloud code is awesome um specifically the ecosystem they've built up again i don't want to go too deep

into this, but the ecosystem is outstanding. I can open it in my terminal on my computer and work directly in my local files. It works great. And their web interface is incredible. But the use case that I love is when I'm out and about and I get an email or a social media message that's like, hey, this thing's broken or this would be a great little feature to have. Instead of me having to make a task to do this later or to just remember it, which I would probably do or try to do, I can copy their request. I can go over to the Clawed app. I can find the project that they're

talking about. I can paste that in. And then I can just add my own context of like, this is, I think what's going on. This is how we should fix it. Go. And then I put my phone back in my pocket. I keep walking the dog. I do whatever I'm doing. And then when I get home, there's a new branch that I can test. I can see if it worked. And with the current models, 90% of the time, it just works right away. So I'm able to handle these requests very, very quickly. And also without disturbing what I'm doing at the moment. I can have it, I can get it out of my head

and move on with whatever I was working on, which is really nice. This morning, I was getting ready for work, getting dressed, shower, all that good stuff. And while I was doing that, it was coding up a new feature for quick reviews. It was great. It was so nice to just have it kind of like working in the background while I was able to do the things that I needed to do. And are you doing that through the iOS app or are you going to like clod.com or whatever their website is? I'm doing both. It works exactly the same in both places.

and the chats persist. So you could start it on your phone and then open the web browser on your Mac or iPad and it's there as well. And it's like, if it's still working, you still get it in progress. So it's really great. It's really nice. Nice, nice. That's interesting. Okay, interesting. So I know ChatGPT has their codex thing and there's other options out there, but I think the thing about CloudCode I like is that anywhere I am, I can kick it off. Whereas with like the chat GPT one, you have to be at your Mac and only your Mac.

That's the only place that works. So, yeah. Also, and this is going to terrify some people. I have, I had a bug on my quick stuff website. And this is actually where it's pretty cool for the iPad. So I was on my iPhone, but this would have worked on the iPad as well. Someone reported a bug with one of the apps on QuickStuff. I gave Claude on my phone the fix.

Go do this. I saw the code that changed. It was very minimal, so it looked safe. I created a pull request for it. I, in GitHub, merged the pull request. It automatically deployed to my server, and the fix was there seconds later. And I didn't have to use a Mac. I was able to make a code change and publish an update to the web from my phone, which is crazy. Okay, that's pretty cool. And you could do that from the iPad as well.

Yeah, so it's pretty rad. And last thing I will say, as a developer, Apple's done a great job. We give Apple a hard time on a lot of things on this podcast. They've done a very good job with what they did in the OS 26 updates for their foundation model access and the speech analyzer. It's so good. It's so easy to work with. I do hope they both get better.

And I have hopes that with the Gemini thing they're doing. Partnership? Pivot? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Partnership. I'm hoping that we'll see improvements there and I'll get them for free. Air quotes, hopefully. This will be the year that I learn how many of these OS updates you truly do get for free, because I don't know. But they're genuinely awesome. Google did not have a solution for this for a while. It looks like they do have a better solution now that will match kind of both those things Apple does.

But the device support isn't 100% there. It's really good on pixels. They've started rolling it out on other devices like high-end Samsungs and the like. it's a little messier there. But I think Apple's done a really good job with kind of how they've made the developer experience. Yeah, because like, for example, your transcription app can run on any iPhone that runs iOS 26 and any iPad that runs iPadOS 26. Yes, exactly. And that's so much easier than...

It always comes back to the fragmentation question, I guess. If you're doing normal stuff on Android, it's totally fine. But if you're doing like cutting edge stuff, then yeah it's still a weird thing yeah yeah so i was curious what's it like on the ipad do you feel like the ai stuff is something that you like can't ignore or is it there but it's not as big a deal i'm curious where they are for you so yes um definitely can't ignore it uh especially given

what I do to make a living. Like you, I am pretty much all in on Claude. Not pretty much. I am all in on Claude. I've canceled ChatGPT. Just as a company, I'm not the biggest fan of Sam Altman. And then there's perplexity. Don't like perplexity. You don't like perplexity? I haven't heard this. Yeah, I've never mentioned this before. I don't like perplexity. And their CEO, you know, definitely doesn't have the second most punchable face in all of tech. Oh, God, I can't stand that guy.

I really cannot stand that guy. And the thing that attracted me to Claude is their CEO has just like flat out come out and said, no, we're not doing generative AI. We're not doing image generation. We're not going to, you know, rip off, you know, artists and things like that. We're not. That's not what we're here for. We are making a tool to assist humans. We're not making a tool to replace humans. Whereas a lot of these other people like the perplexity CEO has basically said, oh, yeah, you don't even need to watch YouTube anymore.

You just talk to us because we ripped all of it off. Look at us. We're so funny. I don't know why you want to punch him. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm all in on Claude. And on the iPad, the Claude app is pretty good. I use it for pretty much whenever I have a question about something, whenever I want to search for something, I use it. My only complaint about Claude that it does that I, well, the thing that I like that ChatGPT does that I really wish Claude would do is ChatGPT gives the sources.

So when you ask a question like, what is, how would I make a sourdough starter kind of thing? gpt would give you sources in line with its feedback whereas claude puts all of the sources down at the bottom and you have to click the sources button and then go through them i really wish they would put the sources in line and just right next to it because i i like clicking on those sources i like going to those original websites oh interesting they do that on the desktop it's a

little surprising they don't do that on the ipad wait huh really or they push an update i've never seen them on the desktop but let me hang on i'm going through my chat history now and i'm like trying to like find something i say this because literally today i was looking up some information and i was like oh these inline links are so convenient i wonder okay that must be new because i haven't seen them okay all right okay all right that must that must be new um so i take that back Anyways, they're okay, whatever. So I like Claude for that. But like you said, Claude and AI stuff on the iPad is very different from AI stuff on the Mac.

I can't have an assistant join a meeting with me and start taking notes because iPad sandbox limitations. Claude code perfect example Claude code does not have access To the file system on iPad OS I can use there is a Claude code tab in iPad OS In the app and I've used it To make some drafts actions Works perfect for that but I can't have it browse my obsidian Vault and be like hey give me a Summary of all that stuff whereas I

Can do that on the Mac and I'm gonna Start doing more of that because that was Great example that you brought up um so like there's there's huge limitations there that i find very like to be a big bummer like cloud code on the mac is i cannot believe how good it is it has been the thing that has been getting me to gravitate more towards the mac when i sit down and work like cloud code specifically has been the thing that has had me grabbing the macbook pro over the ipad pro a lot lately

and it's had it's really been giving me a lot of thoughts about like i don't want to give up my ipad like i'm i'm not going to give up my ipad i'm flat out not but it's definitely made me think about like more even more now like when do i grab the mac versus when do i grab the ipad and and this has all been really like kind of new thoughts because i just a couple weeks ago i put out a video about my Mac workflow in a post-iPadOS 26 world.

And in that video, I talk about, yeah, I just grab my iPad most of the time. But now, like in the past couple of weeks, it's probably been a 50-50 split because of tools like Cloud Code being able to do things like with the file system in terminal that you just can't do in the iPad because it's limited. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. And obviously, Clawedbot, sorry, Moldbot, sorry, OpenClaw.

You can't run OpenClaw on an iPad. And I would recommend not even try. I would not. Right now on February 6th, 2026, do not run OpenClaw unless you really know what you are doing. And by really know what you are doing, you are a security expert. To which point you would toss it into a fire because I don't even know if you know what you're doing. Clawed? Yeah. If you know what you're doing, you would not install OpenClaw.

Exactly. If you don't know what you're doing, you shouldn't install OpenClaw. I know what I'm doing, and I'm a curious person, and I installed OpenClaw. Oh, did you? After about a day, I uninstalled it because I started playing around, and I started looking around, and I'm like, my email is public? so like if I did the email skill somebody could easily do prompt injections like too much of my life is public for something like open claw and I was just like I just I can't this spells this spells disaster for me because I was gonna make a video about it and I was like

the minute I make a video about it anyone that wanted to get access to and like it's happened to me before like I've had to change i've had to change some stuff in my life i i've had to change my phone number because i've accidentally leaked my phone number uh my my yeah my yeah i i changed my phone number a few years ago um because i leaked my phone number in a video and people started trying to get into things uh so yeah um like and that was when i was a much much much smaller channel like that was like

pre 50,000 subscriber channel. Like, so I wouldn't even like now I wouldn't even want to mess with that stuff. Like, yeah, it's so crazy. Um, what I will say, uh, is Claude on the iPad is, is a really useful utility. I use the project feature quite a bit. Um, I use the project feature to, um, go over contracts with me. I read every line to a contract, but you know, it's nice having an extra set of eyes. I use it for some formatting stuff.

I use it for a bunch of different things. I take the transcripts from your lovely transcript app. I throw it into Claude, and I have it give me title and thumbnail suggestions. Now, most of the time, these aren't in my style. These are very general, like what would work on YouTube. But YouTube now has A-B testing for titles and thumbnails. So every once in a while, I'll just give the YouTube algorithm what it wants. and a more YouTube-style title.

Not necessarily thumbnails. I try and keep all my thumbnails my style. And Matt did the shock face for audio listeners. But it's been a handy tool for me to kind of like basically have an assistant. And this would never replace a person, but I also can't afford to hire an assistant right now. It's just not something in the books, let alone my company's not set up for that. Like, you know, if I was to hire somebody, you know, I'd need to provide health insurance and all that stuff.

Like, I wouldn't want to be one of those people that, like, you know, I'm going to give you a minimum wage. And you can work for a big YouTuber and just completely get ripped off the whole time because you get to work for a YouTuber. No, I wouldn't want to do that. But my company is not set up for that. So, Claude has basically been my assistant and kind of a lot of, like, my sounding board. Like, I can talk to it. Yeah. And a lot of times it gives me suggestions and I ignore its suggestions because I don't like them, but it gets my brain thinking on other things.

Yep. That makes sense. So, yeah, that's it. I just wanted to kind of talk where we're at. I will say I don't think you necessarily have to follow these things. I think, one, if you do not like them, you can still be a part of the tech community and just not be into this stuff. But for me, it's hard to ignore. And it is the new exciting thing for me. And I hope we figure out the issues with it so that it can be a less controversial thing in the future.

But it seems everything will be controversial. I think there'll be a balance found. I think eventually. And you can kind of already see a lot of people walking back the line of like, this is going to radicalize everything. And really, it's just like, oh, this is going to be a really helpful tool for people to get their stuff done. And that's kind of what I've always said is what it's going to come down to is the venture capitalist AI bubble will burst. The tools will get bought up by big AI companies or not big tech companies and other companies.

And these will just end up becoming assistants to people and not necessarily replacing people because there will always need to be humans involved. Yep. Sweet. awesome cool neiliana we look forward to your feedback which i'm sure will be you guys nailed it we'll see oh she's raging right now she is she is she is red hot um okay all right take us into the physical world yes so i i wanted to talk with you uh because you and i have both gotten into 3d printing in the last few months and i thought it would be interesting for us to do a sort of

beginner's guide to 3d printing i've had a lot of people ask me questions about 3d printing and i've i did some research uh in between you getting your 3d printer and me getting my 3d printer and it answered some questions but didn't answer all the questions so i put some stuff in in our document and i figured you and i can kind of just walk our way through this and and kind of just answer you know some general questions as to you know why you want to get into 3d printing and if you do get into it what should you do nice so i i think the first thing we should start with is

why you should you even care about it like why should you why why should you even be interested in 3d printing uh for me i've been like fixing things around the house uh i i've printed some stuff uh we'll get into like some filament stuff later but i bought some heavy duty filament so i was able to fix a few things that needed to support some weight and stuff like that and it's been really nice just being able to like see a problem and come up with find a solution come up with a solution and a few hours later literally have that solution in my hand and go and implement it yes i'm

so glad you said that that is exactly the thing that i like the most well i'm sure we'll get to it more later but that is exactly the thing you see a problem and in a lot of cases you can solve that problem um very quickly like like for perfect example i'm gonna fix this problem a little later today uh in our closet on danielle's side of our closet she has a lot more clothes than me uh and her the we have these wooden bars that you hang the clothes from and it's missing one of the supports

that goes from the wall to that bar well i have the correct filament that's going to support weight so i'm literally after we're done i already have the model ready to go i i literally just haven't hit print yet uh after we're done recording i'm gonna hit print print that out and i'm gonna go install that in our closet nice so that way because the bar is literally dropping right now like it's literally like you see it uh uh kind of bowing and which is not it's not great it's not yeah it's not not great bob um but other stuff like i've been organizing my office i've been

talking about this in videos and on the channel like my office has been a disaster for a long time i've had stuff shoved in every corner it looks good in videos because i purposely don't point my camera at that but it has been just physically driving me nuts to the point where i've been implementing gridfinity and we'll put a video about what gridfinity is in the show notes but we've also talked about it but gridfinity is kind of the system for organizing things um to where you can put like print out boxes and custom custom shadow boxes and things like that so stuff goes in it and you know what i've printed all this stuff and i now actually have more storage than what i did

before because before stuff was shoved in drawers and it wasn't you know put in there optimally and now stuff is kind of optimized for space and i'm and i have extra space now for for more stuff i've also thrown out a bunch of stuff and given away a bunch of stuff but i i have more space now and i don't feel as cluttered it's really nice just to add on to that um my wife is a tech skeptic whenever there's new tech in the house she's like why did you buy this is this going to be worth it This is very often her feedback.

And in fairness, sometimes she is correct. But I've been working on our kitchen drawers. So I don't use a lot of drawers in my office. I haven't been gridfiniting here. But in our kitchen drawers, we have junk drawers. We have like, you know, the drawer where you put the spoons and the measuring stuff and the can opener and all that. And so I started gridfiniting one of them, the junk drawer. I thought it went great. And she was like, you can just order these on Amazon. So she ordered some bins from Amazon to put in the drawer.

And she got so frustrated that they weren't sized right, that they were okay, but they were just too generic. They were just too generic. And she was like, okay, do the thing with this one now. And so we have great fitting drawers in there now. So it is really nice to just be able to get things in your drawers specifically that fit perfectly. That's really, really valuable and really, really cool.

Yeah, I had probably those same Amazon bins your wife ordered in my office here before I had a 3D printer. And they sucked. They didn't fit right. I wasn't able to fit everything I needed into them. Some were too big. Some were too small. It sucked. Now everything is perfect and it takes up less space. So I'm able to fit more in those drawers. It's fantastic. But the last thing, like I've been printing stuff for other people. So for example, my brother has this big water bottle, but in his truck, the cup holders are too small for his big water bottle.

So I printed an adapter for his cup holders to put his water bottle in. I printed a Apple Watch charger for Danielle. I printed, she's an optometrist. I printed these business card holders that are glasses. I printed a bunch for her so she could give them to other optometrists too. But like the model for those, because that was a model she found online, it was way too big. So I was able to go in and modify that model and shrink it. If we would have just bought those off Etsy, it would have been too big and unusable.

So I bought it, or I printed the first one out. We realized it was too big. And so I went in and modified it, dropped it by 30%, and it works perfect now. And, like, we have a family friend who they live far away from their parents. And they have kids, so they like to FaceTime their parents, their grandparents. And they didn't really have a good way of holding up their phone for that. And they have a Dalmatian. So I 3D printed them an iPhone stand that is a Dalmatian.

And, yeah, like, it's perfect for them. So, like, there's just things you can do to help people out. like I'm going to be printing a bunch of organization stuff for my dad here soon and for his shop. And yeah. Yeah. That was great. My, uh, my wife goes to, she's a teacher and so she has water with her cause she's talking all day, needs a water bottle. And so she has a bunch of Stanleys. It was a problem for a little bit. We've got it under control, but, uh, we have a lot of Stanleys. Um, and so there's a lot of straws and the straw container we had with like this box, this little, little container thing.

It sucked. It was a pain every single day. I started screaming two days ago because they started to like fall out. It was a horrible thing. And I was like, I'm fixing this now. And I made this, I found this like really great pen holder that works great as a straw holder. And it's so nice. And I got it up and got it up in there. And now all my problems are gone. It's so nice to just like have these things. And I hadn't printed anything in a few weeks. Like that you get kind of the, the 3d printing fever when you first get the printer and you're like, I'm going to print every day for the rest of my life. And then you kind of realize you don't need infinite plastic in your house.

But it is really, really nice in those situations where you do get frustrated with something. You're like, can't this be any better? You feel like you're in a infomercial. Is there no solution to this problem? There often is. You know what? This has really replaced for me. Buying those $10 to $30 items off Amazon that like, oh, I need this thing to fix this small problem. Yeah. And like, that's what this is replaced for me is, is I've, I've like, I was just looking at my Amazon orders for something we'll get to a little later.

I have not bought that much off Amazon or the web in the last few weeks because I'm not needing like these small things to fix problems anymore. I'm just printing them. Which sounds like I have a lot of problems, but I do have a lot of stuff to fix around the house. Like I, we've, we've, we've had a kind of a disaster or so. But I want to talk about like what printers should people look at. And I think you and I are going to have similar recommendations of look at Bamboo Labs first as the company that you should look at. Only look at Bamboo. Yes. Yeah. Honestly.

I've looked at others. I've read reviews on others. And a lot of others are very fiddly. They're like, it's literally Android versus iPhone. You have other options if you want to get really precise and really fiddly and really. But like if you want something that just works pretty much right out of the box and will do all the calibration automatically for you automatically, you want to go Bamboo Labs. And for me, I think like the printer I would recommend is the one I have is the A1 because you get the full size print bed, but it's not very much money.

You can get them for under 300 bucks. Yeah, the A1 is probably good. I have the A1 Mini just because it was stupid cheap. And it's mostly fine, but every once in a while you do write into things you want to print, and it's like, ah, it actually doesn't fit on the board. Yeah, I see a lot of models of like, hey, this one works for all these printers. Oh, and here's this A1 mini version where you're going to have to print multiple parts and then assemble it yourself. Yeah. So that is a little annoying, but yeah. Yeah. If you don't mind spending the extra, it's usually less than $100, the difference between the A1 mini and A1.

Like, I would probably go with the A1. If you're wanting to spend a little bit more money, probably look at the P2S. I'm already like, this is the one I'm going to upgrade to. Because I know I will eventually upgrade. This one's a full enclosure one. It has a few more features and things like that. It has a bit more control and stuff like that. The price jump is much higher. But if money's not an object for you, that is the way you should go. Yeah, I would recommend the A1 or the A1 Mini to prove if you actually would get use out of it.

And then once you start pushing up against those limits, the P2S or PS2, it can't be the PS2, the P2S. No, P2S. P2S. Yeah, I know. That is, I think, the clear upgrade one. That's what I would go with if I ever felt I needed to do more. But honestly, I'm pretty happy with the Mini. Good. It's all small things I have to fix, but I do think it is a very viable thing. And like you said, the thing I've heard other people on YouTube who are more into 3D printing. The way they've described it is basically the bamboo ones are for people who want to print things and they don't want 3D printing to be a hobby.

They just want it to be a tool that just works out of the box. Genuinely, you don't have to level the board. You don't have to do any vibration compensation. It all just happens on its own. Like I would be useless with one of these other printers because I have no idea how to do those things because it just, you know, you turn it on, it does that automatically for you. And the Maker World app and everything, the Bamboo Handy app is so useful for just finding things and printing them and monitoring them and getting live activities on your phone. It's very nice.

Yeah. Yeah, we should mention, if you do go with the Bamboo Labs one, you have to go in. They have a live activity so you can monitor your prints in real time. But you have to go into, you tap the Me tab, you go to settings, you go to notification settings and you go to uh i think it's general services i don't know it's somewhere in there under notifications you have to go in there and you have to enable live activities

it's not enabled by default which is annoying it's crazy i had no idea this was a thing chris you sent a screenshot of your your live activity and i was like how yeah yeah i i you know what i was literally like there has to be a way to enable live activity i was thinking like some third party app or something like that i was i was asking claude and claude came back with oh here go into the app and do this and i was like oh my god really why is this not enabled by default and then the nice thing is if you're on mac os you can get the live activity in your menu bar that way too

oh yeah for me my partner's right next to me but yeah yeah um the other thing i want to mention is when you go to buy a printer if you're interested in doing multi-color stuff buy the ams with it right away so the ams is this ability to have four different spools of filament and we'll get into what filament is in just a second but four different spools of filament uh which actually we should just explain what it is the filament is the plastic spools so what you're printing with so think about it as like the ink cartridges for a 2d printer but it's it's the plastic for the the

filament the ams without the ams you can print with one spool so you can swap out that spool you can put one color at a time or one type of filament at a time with the ams what you can do is you can have multiple colors you can have multiple types of filament or what you can do is you can have backup rolls of filament so say i'm print uh printing with pla black and that pla black runs out but i have another roll of pla black on there it can just roll over to that second roll and then start printing with that. The reason why I say if you're interested at all in that, buy it at that point is

because buying the AMS is incredibly hard. I have missed. So I want the AMS. I've been trying to buy the AMS since I got my printer on Christmas Day. It has been in stock twice. I've set up the email notifications twice. Every time I get the email notifications, it's immediately sold out. I cannot get it. And you can't just click the buy button. It just says out of stock will be available in and who knows so i'm just like stuck without it i'm stuck just being printing one roll if i would have got it if i mean this was a christmas present so like i whatever but like for example if i would

have ordered this and bought it with the ams it would have taken a little bit longer to show up but you have the option of ordering it with the ams right then and there i really wish i would have had the ams i think it's a lot cheaper if you buy it bundled as well you're probably going to save like over a hundred dollars i think if you uh do it that way i i regret it as well i i got mine without the ams because just the price point was too good at that point yes uh it took it a little outside of the impulse purchase territory uh for me so i didn't get it but i do regret it because it is a pain it's

not the end of the world it takes like two minutes but it is for me i have to go out to the garage i have to it has to heat up and you pull it out and you pop put the new one in and if you've got the wrong color in there and you want to print something you're just like oh so i think if you have any intention of sticking with this for a while you will almost certainly want to print several colors um you'll probably have black and white and then some fun colors and uh yeah um it's a pain not to have it and again the app makes it very easy to say i want you to print in this color

or if the model has multiple colors it can handle those for you but even if you're just going to print single color it's so much nicer not imagine if your printer like your 2d printer you had to go in and put the cyan in instead of the yellow like it would it would be crazy it would be so annoying or just like having a backup for like when you're when you run out of filament for that because like right now i'm like looking at my filament thing i'm like am i gonna have enough for this print am i gonna have to change it midway which means i have to be home and like i have to like monitor

I want that AMS so bad. I'm considering buying one off eBay or something just to be able to get one. But yeah, I really wish I would have got it. But we should get into the different kinds of filament. So like I said, filament is the plastic and it comes on spools. And you can buy filament from Bamboo Labs or you can buy it from other third-party things. It's not like HP printers where you have to buy HP ink for it.

Like pretty much there's different types of filament, but we'll take PLA for example, which PLA is the most basic type of filament. You can buy it from like a company called ESUN and use that. I've just been buying filament from Bamboo Labs. One, if you buy it in bulk, it's really cheap. Two, they have these reusable plastic spools that are really nice. So I'm not getting like a bunch of extra plastic or cardboard being wasted. I can just reuse these plastic spools that are really handy and they're really easy to use.

Plus, if you do get the AMS, they have these QR codes or these code things on the side where the AMS will automatically be able to read exactly what kind of filament it is and will adjust the settings for your printer automatically, which is really nice. But so I'm mostly print PLA. and PLA is really nice because it's easy to print with like you're gonna it's pretty forgiving like you're gonna get good quality prints with it pretty much every time um it has a really wide

color selection PLA is the one that like you might see like there's uh like transparent PLA there's wood PLA there's glow in the dark PLA but glow in the dark PLA requires a special nozzle which is called a hot end. So you need the hardened steel one, not the stainless steel one. You need the hardened steel one, which I do have those now so I can print glow in the dark. But yeah, it's nice. It's also biodegradable, which I just found out. It's corn-based.

So if you're worried about like, you know, are you harming, you know, it's biodegradable. So it's kind of nice. The only downside with PLA is it's not waterproof and it's not heat resistant. So anything above like 60 degrees Celsius is going to start to get to warp. And I think like it's not great there. But there's a ton of stuff going on there. And then you can get into things like PLA tough or PLA plus. And this is what I'm using to fix stuff around the house.

So like PLA tough is it's strong. So it'll support a lot of weight. Like, as long as your model is designed correctly, because, again, like, you're building models for this. As long as your model is designed correctly, PLA Tough will probably support just about anything you can throw at it. And then the only other one, and I don't have experience with this one, but I am kind of curious about this, is PETG or PETG. And this is what's good for, like, outdoor stuff and heat-resistant stuff.

This is what I should have printed my brother's cup holder in because come summertime, that thing's probably going to melt. So I'll probably have to redo that form. But that was literally like within my first week of printing. So I didn't know any better. But it's also like impact resistant. So like if you need something that's durable, that's what the PETG stuff is for. Okay, nice. You're much deeper in this than I am. I am just using PLA standard and I'm using it for everything. Have you gotten into PLA matte?

No, I haven't tried that. Okay. It's actually quite nice. So I've printed a few things. Actually, here I can show. I just printed some coasters for my office. And this is a two-part thing. Let me see if I can block my face. There you go. So it's a two-part thing. So it's PLA matte black and then PLA this dark green. And it's really nice. It finishes really well. So if you are having something that's more for display, I would try the matte style finish. Okay.

But it's a little more brittle. So if it's anything that needs to support weight, I wouldn't use PLA matte for. Okay. Interesting. Yeah. I've bought a lot of filament lately. I have a lot of different colors. In fact, I'm at the point where I'm printing storage for my filament. I'm that guy now. I'm literally using my filament to print storage for my filament. Okay. you know that's good i think it's good yeah it's healthy yeah it's fun i i'm having a lot of fun with this uh i also have some recommendations if you do go down this you should probably keep some

extra parts in hand on hand um lubricant for all the the access so for all the the sliding bits and stuff like that i would order some extra hot ends or nozzles um because i've already broke one um and it sucked because i broke it and it was the only one i had so i had to wait a week before i can keep start printing again for that thing to show up bamboo labs is weird like some of this stuff you will get next day some of the stuff will take a week some of it will be sold out for months so this is why i'd say just have some extra parts on hand and then maybe have an extra um uh bed like

the uh surface thing what was that called why am i blanking on that the print bed yeah the print bed um i would have an extra one of those just just to be on the safe side um and if you have issues with adhesion to your print bed so like if you're printing stuff and it's not sticking to the print bed like it should go and take like dawn dish soap and hot water and just rub it all over it and clean it properly and then use paper towels not a towel like not a fabric towel but a paper towel and wipe it off that should fix your adhesion issue that's the most common issue i see people complaining about yes i have definitely had that issue a few times before and

got assorted so it's all good yeah clean your print print beds you can also just flip it over too because there's two sides but true yeah um i i wanted to ask you where do you get your models from are you have you made any models are you um i have not made any models myself yet um i have almost exclusively used Maker World. I have used what is it? Printables.com?

Printables and Thangs is the other big one too. Thangs. It just prints 3D models. If it's a 3D model, you can get it into the app and print it. But I find Maker World tends to have the things that I want. On a few occasions, like you mentioned, the mini is weird. I have made adjustments to a couple products, or products models to make them work exactly for me. Nice. I've just been doing that in oh, geez.

Blender. Oh, you're doing it in Blender. I'm doing it in Blender. Nice, nice. What are you doing? I've been using Shaper 3D on the iPad to make a few things. That's right. I will, you know, I'll just jump into the next section right here. If you're going to make anything or modify anything, get good calipers. And I put a link in the show notes. I don't know if, Matt, you have a recommendation. But to a really good caliper.

And I'm really happy I caught good ones because I've seen issues with, anyways, I've been watching a lot of videos. But I made just a couple of things that are very, very, very, very, very basic. But mostly I'll take models and modify them. And it works out pretty well. It's a very open hobby. And that's what I enjoy about this is everything seems to be open. None of it seems to be locked down.

Bamboo Labs, like the hardware, is the thing that seems to be the most locked down. Like when I was having issues with my hot end and it broke, I was like, oh, man, the one from Bamboo Labs is going to take a week to get here. Is there any I can order off Amazon and just use that temporarily? Nope. They're all proprietary from Bamboo Labs. So it is what it is. But, yeah, I mean, we're coming from the Apple world. We're used to it, right? Yes. Yeah. The other thing I put in the show notes is there's an all-in-one toolkit that I bought that has been super handy.

It has, like, scrapers and pliers and things to clean out the hot end, files, like, all sorts of just, like, really handy tools to have on hand. Just, like, a really, like, kind of a grab bag. It's not very much. I think it's $27. So it was just kind of, like, a handy grab bag of tools to have that I just keep next to my 3D printer. Nice. Yeah. Another thing I really like is they, there's kind of this assumption that you will solve your own problems with the

printer. So like as an example, when it changes colors, for example, or when it's starting a print, it kind of sometimes left like clear out the nozzle and it'll like do this thing where it like shoots off a little bit of plastic off to the side. Oh no, we need to call it what it is. It's poop. It's poop. It's poop. It's called poop. And so on the A1 Mini, I think the A1 is the same. It just shoots it off onto your whatever surface the thing is on. Like it's just going to be just all over your desk or table or wherever you have it, which is annoying.

And so there's a million different designs of people who have built their own poop catchers that you can put on there. For video viewers, here's my poop sheet. It's quite full right now, too. yeah i also throw like the supports and stuff in here too okay but like yeah this right here for video viewers that's poop i'm holding up poop title title um but it's great and then there's like

i i assume yours is the same mine came with like a little razor blade uh that you can use to uh kind of scrape things off if you need to because you're not supposed to use your fingers if you can avoid it and uh it's not easy to use that way it's probably not safe to use that way either but you can just print a little holder for it that goes around it and it's it's really cool i i i do like the kind of scrappy nature of it it's a cool little thing i i have read and heard multiple times that you shouldn't use like the metal razor blade so i've actually printed hang on one second a plastic one for me to use and i like this just to get stuff off the because like one things that

it'll do and i'm sure yours is the same way is it prints like a little line of filament before it actually starts to print so i use that this for that so i'm not scratching the print bed and then if i need help getting the the print off of it because sometimes it'll stick um i'll use this but most of the time by the way most of the time if your print is stuck and you're having a hard time getting it off just wait a couple minutes it'll pop off or you can just pick up the plate and you can bend it a little bit and it'll it'll pop right off so um but yeah i i love the scrappy nature of

it like i printed tools for my tools that's great that's cool yeah yeah um the yeah and i printed places for my tools so like i i just i really like this hobby i think for me like this is this has kind of been my thing that i've been really getting into and i've been i've been talking about it a lot both here and on the channel and i've just i i think it's it's a it's a great utility to have around the house if you're the kind of person that likes to solve problems yes and it's very different it's very fun to just have a hobby a tech hobby that's also like in the physical world

yeah yeah yeah and like there's a sense of accomplishment especially when you modify buy a print or make your own there's like this sense of accomplishment of being able to like implement it and put it into action all right well that's it do you have anything else you want to add about 3d printing no it's a great time to jump in yeah i honestly like like an a1 is not very much money like if you like i remember when 3d printers came out and they were thousands upon thousands upon thousands of dollars.

And I was like, I'll never be able to get one of these. I'm interested in it, but I'll never be able to get one of these. And it's both come down in price and accessibility to the point where like, if you don't know how to make a 3D object, you really don't need to worry about it. You just go into the Bamboo Handy app. And if you're not really sure, just go to Maker World. We'll put a link in the show notes. We'll put a link to Maker World. And literally anything that's on Maker World, if you get a bamboo printer, you can just select it and just hit print and like there's no like mod you don't really need

to modify the file at all if you don't want to and again just because they're 3d models even if you go with a different brand you can still go there to browse and just download the file and you can print in another printer yep absolutely all right well this is normally where we would have the challenge but we're postponing the challenge until neilion is back uh because uh the challenge was Matt's and it was make something with some of the new Apple creator studio apps. And I think it would be more fun if all three of us were here for that. Right. Absolutely.

All right. So I think we'll wrap up the show here, but I have an end of the show question for you, Matt, and I made it really specific to you and me because it's just the two of us. How are you feeling about the new F1 cars? And do you think there is a team that is going to dominate this year? It's always F1 when it's just the two of us, isn't it? Exactly. Yeah. we're in the off season i need a fix yeah i i think it's really interesting i don't know who's going to be dominant there's obviously a lot of rumors that the mercedes engine is really locked

into a loophole as of recording there's news out today that possibly that loophole is going to be closed like by the second race so we'll see uh but to be determined i am i don't know i find f1 fans are quick to jump on oh they're going to be so dominant it's going to be a blowout and i don't know i'm a relatively newer fan i guess i've only been at this for like six seven years now and uh so i don't know but i think it's going to be exciting i am excited about the new cars i know seem that much smaller on paper but from what like we've seen they do seem meaningfully smaller yeah

and some of the stuff like they're talking about with them being a little tougher to drive you're not gonna like you're gonna potentially have to like lift and coast on quali laps which is not a thing esteban hakan said said this like with the way the energy system works you may not have enough energy to do a whole lap. So anyway, I think that is interesting and could make it a little, just a little different from how it is now. And that's what the real changes are supposed to do. So I don't know. I guess the money, my money would be on Mercedes to be very successful this year, but I don't know. McLaren could repeat. Red Bull could be doing better than we expect.

I don't know. I think Red Bull finally has a second driver that will be able to keep up. Plus, Red Bull has Ford in their corner this year. Oh, yeah. And Red Bull's pretty much gotten rid of all of the problematic people, so I don't feel terrible rooting for them this year because they got Ford now. Am I a Red Bull fan now? Get Helmut out of there and maybe it's... They got Helmut. They got Christian out of there. They just need to ban Max's dad and I think it'll be fine.

I like Isaac Hadjar. I think he's a nice guy. He had a great season, too. He's really good. He had a great season. That said, Yuki Sonoda, great driver, was having a great season. And then it's a cursed second seat. But maybe the new regulations, new team boss, maybe it'll change this year. Yeah. I think it could be interesting. The rumors that Mercedes is going to dominate with their engines is really interesting. If they close that loophole, which would be weird because that would mean they would have to rebuild their engine.

Would that count against the cost? Oh, that's weird. I'm curious what Ferrari does. It sounds like a lot of teams walked away from the previous generation cars. Not a lot of teams. A few teams walked away from the previous generation cars early so that they could really work on these new regulation cars. So I'm really curious. I'm excited for it to finally start up. I didn't watch any of the preseason shakedown testing yet. Same. I did see a couple of clips, and the engines sound really good.

They sound a lot better than the previous engines. Okay. The previous engines were so high-pitched. They're V6 hybrid engines, turbocharged hybrid engines. So, technically, the engine in my Mustang is a bigger engine than the engine that's in the Formula One car. But they produce more horsepower. The Formula One ones produce more horsepower because it's their hybrid and all that other stuff. but I really wish they would go to like V8s or V10s. I don't think they ever will again. I really wish they would. They need a bigger, louder sounding engine.

Maybe they'll just get like a speaker in the back, a couple home pods in there that'll make the speaker sound. Do the thing that stupid electric cars do. It's like, oh, we just put out artificial sound. Do they do that anymore? Is that a thing? Tesla's still do it, yeah. These stupid Tesla's a waste of metal. anyways yeah um yeah so uh that's it for the show thank you all so much for listening uh big thank you to MacStories for having us we're MacStories podcast after all be sure to go check out the website and all the other writings and stuff they've been doing a lot over there with the new update and

stuff so uh yeah there's a lot happening uh thank you all so much for listening have a great day bye