I Paid for Those Pixels

So which Pokemon game is it? Welcome to Comfort Zone, a podcast all about pushing your hosts, well, outside of their comfort zone. I'm Christopher Lawley, and as always, I am joined by two incredible co-hosts. And this time, for the second time around, I'm hoping I'm joined by Matt Birchler and he's not frozen because his internet chopped off. Hey, he's waving. I think I'm here. Yes, hello. We can hear your vocal tones. Can you see my beautiful face?

And we're also joined by Nelian. How are you, Nelian? I can see a face. Oh. Yes, hello. Hello. All right, so we got a show to do, and I think every single one of these, oh, no, almost every single one of these is probably Nelian, so go at it. So it's difficult because right now I'm trying to navigate how to get screenshots from your Nintendo Switch.

Yeah, I think you have to go into the screenshots thing and then send them to the Nintendo app. And then in the Nintendo app, you have to send them to the photos app. It's not easy. I just have one question for the nation of Japan. Why? Why is it so hard? Because it's Nintendo. Oh, my God. As soon as the internet was invented, Nintendo went... Do we have to? What is happening? So you got to get the Switch app and then...

Anyway. So what are my tiny topics? Yes. So I've been complaining about my hearing health issues. Issues, plural. And I mentioned this a while ago, you can adjust the left-right audio balance on macOS, right? If you go into system settings and then audio, there's a left-right slider. And it's a great accessibility feature that should be easy to use, that should be reliable.

Because some people, like in my case, this is not a permanent disability that I'm having, although it's almost becoming permanent because I've been having this issue for years now. But it turns out that left-right balance slider, it resets itself randomly with no pattern, with no predictable pattern. And it's a known issue. Like, I've been reading online, people with hearing disabilities, they have this issue all the time with macOS, apparently.

especially with AirPods. And also the left-right audio balance slider, it doesn't show up for certain devices. Shows up for AirPods, shows up for the built-in speakers. Some of my external headphones doesn't show up. It's, I'm angry, I'm angry about this. But here's my tip. I have a tip. I've been working around this with the audio MIDI app that's built into macOS.

Know about that app, right? Yes. Yes, I do. The icon is pretty nice. It's like a piano keys. Yeah. It's pretty nice. It's one of the few Tahoe app icons that I think is actually an improvement. Yeah, it's pretty good. It's a pretty good one. Well, with that app, you can see all your audio devices listed in the sidebar. And if you select one, for which the audio left-right balance slider doesn't show up in system settings,

well, in this MIDI, I don't know what it's called in English, by the way. What is it called exactly in English? It's Audio MIDI Setup is the app. Audio MIDI Setup, yes. So in AudioMedia setup, you can select the device, and there you will have all sorts of advanced settings to configure the audio. You can change the supported sample rate, bit rate, whatever, blah, blah, blah, blah. But also you have multiple sliders. And in my case, for my external DAC, it gives me three sliders, a main volume slider, as well as a slider for the left channel

and a slider for the right channel individually, with precise values. So what I do is I lower the right slider slightly and it's the equivalent of adjusting the left right slider in system settings. Here you're lowering the volume of just one channel on the right to balance the audio. And you can do that very precisely unlike the one in system settings because it shows you how you you've lowered that by minus five

decibels so that's really nice if you need consistency if you need to always set it back to a specific value this app is good and i have found that adjusting those sliders in the audio midi setup app it's it it sticks for longer than using the one in system settings So this is my accessibility tip for macOS. And please, Apple, you have big words all the time about accessibility.

This is such a basic thing. And apparently people have been complaining about this for 10 years. I'm not exaggerating. There are Reddit threads about this dating back to 2010 and earlier. The audio balance resetting itself randomly, that's been an issue forever, it seems. I didn't care. I don't know. I didn't want to fix it. So that was my first thing. My second tiny topic is, Matt, you taught me something the other day on Mastodon.

Oh, no. Apparently, 3D secure doesn't exist in the US. Oh, yes. What? No. This baffled me. You key in your card number, and you hit pay, and who knows? Whatever. It just goes through. So for those who don't know, apparently, because apparently most of our audience doesn't know what 3D secure is. This is like some kind of banking standard. That's not even only in Europe. If it's not in America, it's not a standard.

Matt, you know more about banking. 3D secure is in most of the world. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's mandated most places. Like, it's standard. It's very standard everywhere except the U.S., basically. So it's some kind of 2FA where if you do an online payment on, I don't know, whatever, a payment system online, that payment system will redirect you to a temporary page that's managed by your bank.

So you're suddenly on a page that's got your bank's logo and all of that and account information. And it tells you, hey, go into the mobile app on your phone and press accept to confirm that you want to pay for this. There are multiple ways that this is managed. Most of the time, this is like this. You have to open your banking app on your phone to confirm. Sometimes it gives you a code that they send you via SMS or email or another way.

And, yeah, I was baffled to learn that this is not a thing in the U.S. And also it explains, this is why this topic came up on MasterDone, it explains why on so many of the home screens that we've roasted on Cozy Zone, European people, they have a banking app on their home screen. And somebody on MasterDone was telling us, yes, that's because I often need to confirm 3D secure and open the banking app quickly. Sounds like a huge pain.

I reserve the right to have my credit card number stolen. That is my right as an American. And I don't want these extra steps. And it is your privilege. It will happen. Yeah. Oh, it happened to me two weeks ago. To be fair, if you have a decent bank thing, bank app, they will send you a push notification, and you have to tap on that, and it confirms immediately. But some banking apps that are not as well made, they make you go into the app and confirm twice or whatever.

And it's more annoying. In my case, I've never felt the need to have my banking app on my home screen for this reason because it just gives me a push notification. I swipe on the notification, press accept, and that's it. I don't have to open it. It seems like if it's a push notification, it's not a big deal, but it's everywhere. It's always a thing that I have to remind myself because at work, where I work in payments, In the US, nobody cares. Nobody even thinks about it. We have it available. You could buy it and use it in the US, but it's very, very not used. But in Europe, they're like, yeah, obviously it's got to work with 3D Secure.

It's not going to? Are you being serious right now? It's so core to everything. So, yeah. That's a little world knowledge for our American audience. And a tie-in to our cozy zone, home screen roasts that were pretty nice to do. My third item is I want to complain just for one second. Let me complain about something else. I'm putting you on the clock. Thank you. One password raised... One second over.

Sorry, go ahead, go ahead. I just had to make the joke. I'm sorry. One password raised at prices. For some people, up to a 33% price increase. In my case, it's a 38% price increase. I'm guessing because euros. I don't know. You need them freedom dollars. I'm really angry about this. And the way they've done this announcement is over email. So it's like some kind of...

It's in a weird mid place where it's not quiet. Like they've not done this quietly because they sent an email to everyone. But also, it's not like they really want... What would you expect them to do? Actually, I'm curious. I would expect some kind of a big announcement on their website, a blog post or something. They do blog. One password does blog posts all the time. Yeah, but who's going to see, as their users, who's reading their blog versus who's checking their email?

I think they should do both. I'm not saying they should do one over the other. The way they've done this right now is to explain. So they send an email to everyone. And that email says, hey, we are great. We've done these things that are great. And there's a bullet point list of things that no one cares about, including one that enraged everyone, including me, that was, hey, now we have AI-powered item renaming in one password.

Nobody asked for this. I've never even seen that. I use one password every day. I've never even noticed that. Me either. When I saw this, I looked for it in the app. I don't even think it's rolled out yet. I don't even know what they're talking about. Maybe it's coming soon. I don't know. Look, like I said on Masada, they had to raise their price. They're now a sponsor of the Formula One Red Bull team in a very prominent spot. It's right on the halo. So when you see the cameras inside the car with the driver, you see their advertisement. They had to raise it. Look, and now Ford is the engine supplier for Red Bull Racing.

That is a premium brand. They are the premium of premium on the grid. Mercedes, premium. No, Audi. No, Ferrari. That's not premium next to Ford. Ford is the creme de la creme. Yep. Nope, they had to raise their price. So, honestly, you're helping out Ford by paying more money. So, thank you for your service is what I'm saying. You're helping Ford is the worst thing somebody could ever tell me. It's clearly... If I go on Henry Ford's Wikipedia page right now...

No, don't look at that. No, don't look at that. I would not be happy to. No, no, don't look at that. He's not even alive anymore, so don't look at that. That's true. That's some good news in this world. He's not alive anymore. Anyway. anyway just like we don't have to go too long on this um i'm angry about this the the price increase is is not well justified and it's a huge price hike it's not just like we're

raising by one percent or anything 38 price increase what do you mean um so yeah i'm really angry about this. I feel like they should have just a cheaper consumer option that's like... Obviously, they've expanded into business stuff, and those people will pay quite a bit more, but it feels like just for goodwill alone, they should have something more affordable. If you're not a big business boy, you should get the consumer pricing.

Enterprise software is so differently priced to consumer software. When I was in IT, We were looking at LastPass because this was before one password was on Windows. I don't remember. We were looking at LastPass, and we got the enterprise pricing for LastPass. And it was insane. I think it was near $30,000 for my organization for the year. And I had the hardest time selling that to the CFO until there was a big password breach thing.

like a bunch of his information got stolen and I was able to sell it. Yeah, and in the case of 1Password, it's become kind of like it's full of features and there's so much room here to offer a cheaper plan with just the fundamentals. Like 1Password, it can be your SSH agent. It can be a database storage. You can create databases in 1Password. Yeah, that's too much. You can store so many things in one password and create so many things.

And it has a bunch of developer features. All of this most people don't need. And if you made this one password, you're listening to this because you love me. If you made a cheaper plan with just the passwords, OTP and passkey stuff, that's it. This is the cheaper plan. I would buy it. I would pay for this. In this current state, with the price increase, I'm going to cancel it. So, yeah.

Well, get ready for pain because they all suck. But they could be cheaper. You know, passwords really isn't that bad. Passwords suck so much. And only stay on Apple devices. I want to move on. We can't even get into it. Let's keep moving on. We can't even get into it. We're going long already on tiny topics. Nope. I want to move on. We can't. I have made a thread on Mastodon to explain bullet point by bullet point why Apple Password sucks so much. Unless you use Safari on macOS.

If those two conditions are not met, Apple Password, stop recommending this to people. Like, stop. You're being mean to people. It's free and it works. It doesn't work. It's the issue. Anyway. My forfeit. I have put in a link and I titled the link, you never knew you needed this. I want you to click this link. This is crazy. So I will explain what it is once you've seen it.

This is a Reddit post. What is this? Titled swipe typing for your Mac. And it's a video of someone like who's, you know how there's a swipe feature on iOS, like on smartphone keyboards, right? Where you could swipe on the keyboard and it's great because you can go really fast to type words and prediction does the heavy lifting. and somebody made this, but for real keyboards, real desktop keyboards, where you have to keep pressing all the keys

and swipe on the keyboard like a maniac. It's crazy. This is terrible. It looks slow. But the one thing I appreciate on this Reddit page is the top comment, we have gone too far. Yes. I love that the example in the video is them typing into the terminal, which is a chaotic place to be using swipe to type. And I'm just imagining what this would be like on a mechanical keyboard where you have like a chasm between each key. Yeah.

That breaks my brain. The higher profile, the more fun this probably is. Yeah, I'm done. Okay, link in the show notes. You'll see it. Yeah. It's wild. Okay. I have two quick tiny topics, and they are really quick. last week i talked about using a traditional watch instead of an apple watch because the apple watch was driving me crazy and i talked about some of the things i liked about the apple watch that i realized i liked after i let it go what watch do you think i'm wearing right now has it has it you said you were going to go back to the apple watch in that episode but i'm going to say you

stuck with the traditional watch for another week i'm going to say you put the apple watch back on and you got annoyed with it and you went back to the traditional watch. Yeah, I'm assuming nothing has changed since last week. You're still using the normal watch. I'm back on the Apple Watch. I, this won't be the whole topic, but I am back on the Apple Watch and I actually like the Apple Watch more than I have in years because I've seen what life is like without it and I don't like it.

So I'll talk about this more at a later date. uh yeah uh the other thing i wanted to mention is uh if i could hijack this podcast to talk about my new podcast i did launch a new podcast um i think i got the the uh the energy from doing the one solo show i did here and i was like oh i could just talk and i can talk about like we don't really talk about the news like the tech news really that's going on and so i thought it'd be fun to do that so anyway it's called a better computer you'll be shocked to hear uh it's on youtube and audio so um check it out link in the show notes is it like um voice like voice messages

you're sending voice messages but publicly no it's it's more of a professional style podcast so it's not just hey so yeah i was yeah so i want to tell you about it but yeah anyway yeah no it's not me like laying on the floor with my like the voice memos app open on my phone next to me and i'm like, dear diary, here's what I'm thinking about today. That would be hilarious. But it's more like you're just having a conversation with the voices in your head, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And they're scary. And this week on Cozy Zone, which is our members-only show we do every week, we put out an extra episode of a podcast every week, we played the game GeoGuessr, which was really fun. I literally just finished editing it right now before we sat down to record, but by the time you're listening to this it's already out timelines they're weird anyways it was really fun and there is a huge payoff like there is a huge victory lap moment it's amazing could not believe it happened it's fantastic the entire world was available to us and I cannot believe the last location

that we got this one thing insane insane also I dox myself in that too so and I didn't even edit it out so people out of free dox themselves just everyone everyone be cool and if you're gonna come over make sure you bring cookies that's all I'm gonna say all right you guys ready to get in the main show let's do it all right Matt you're first up in the document what you got for us the world is hard the world is complicated yeah I wanted to have a simple topic this week

and it's partially related to cozy zone where we have spent three episodes brutally roasting our listeners' home screens. Although Neilian's been surprisingly nice. It's weird. And I thought it was only fair because I'm pretty proud of my current home screen. I think it's pretty nice. But I feel like there will be critiques and I thought it was only fair to turn it back around and I would like you to

to roast my iPhone home screen, which is perfect. And you cannot say anything bad about it, so please don't. But let's see what you got. Okay. Okay. All right. Should we describe Matt's home screen first? Yeah. So it's a light mode home screen with a blue background with I think a flower in front, like a yellowish, orangish flower. On the lock screen, he's using the big clock.

He's got a couple of widgets at the bottom. He's got the camera and the flashlight lock screen or quick action buttons. And importantly, I should say importantly, before we move on from the lock screen, I am using the depth thing to have the clock go just behind the flower a little bit. And you get some of the color in the glass. And so that's, you know, just want to call it out. That's attention to detail. I think that's one of the nicer liquid glass elements. Like, I think that looks really good. on the home screen. He's got one widget.

It is a medium-sized weather widget. We'll get into that. Then he has two rows of where apps would go missing, so there's a blank space. And then there's two rows of apps at the very bottom, and then there's stuff in the dock. Now, right off the bat, I've got to ask you, Matt, what are you hiding? You've got something redacted on this weather widget of yours. What are you hiding? Are you a part of the Epstein files? Is this the Epstein file? You're in the epstein files aren't you and epstein comes up again um i this is actually a great thing for you to

i was hoping this would come up i the thing i hate about weather widgets so much and i don't know why they all choose to do this why do you show my current location why do you make it impossible to take a screenshot and share it with the world what why just show like the little location icon if you want to indicate that it's like showing my current location like i don't need to see where i'm where i am right now at all times it drives me crazy i don't understand it i completely agree with you on this it's not like i don't just like randomly get dropped off in the middle of nowhere like and i was blindfolded and i don't know where i am or anything like that like i i i know where i

am i know it's i travel around yes but i know where i'm at if i'm in new york i'm gonna know i'm in new york i don't need my widget to tell me i'm in new york so i'm with you on that but you still redacted it so i'm assuming this is uh epstein file related so yep um what is this widget i'm not i'm not familiar with this widget it's very um bold this is widget smith ah okay that was my that was gonna be my guess so i have not used widget smith basically ever i know it got like It was like huge when Apple introduced widgets and like it went viral and everything.

And it's been a great business for David Smith since then it seems. But I just never got into it. But I got this cool wallpaper and I didn't like how the other weather widgets looked. I used Carrot Weather for the actual weather app. And I wanted something that matched the flower. And so I got this blue and yellow one that I think looked pretty good with it. There's so much customization in that app. It is absolutely insane. There is genuinely like a hundred different styles for the weather widget, if you want them. It's crazy.

Yes. I love how great it is at customization, but I feel like for me, it's too much. And like, I would just spend all my time customizing it. Whereas like, I'm not an Android person. The idea of having productivity on my phone is not me being able to customize my home screen. It's me being able to actually do stuff. Yeah, that's right. I took a shot at Android there. Keep talking, Chris. I'm still managing Nintendo Switch screenshots. Okay, cool. I've got plenty of stuff here. Down in your dock, you have messages, reader.

Classic. I guess we could say that's Mimestream, the Mimestream beta. And then is that what I think it is in the last icon? It is. Is it really? It is. I'm going to force you to say it. It's Claude. Oh, oh, wait, okay, never mind. Okay, that's the Claude. I'm not used to the Claude. You thought it was perplexity. I thought it was perplexity for a minute. I'm not used to the Claude light mode icon. And for some reason, I thought it was perplexity, and I was going to shame you to, okay, but I do have stuff to shame you about.

If you were using perplexity, I was going to really rip you a new one. But in your doc, you have badges on three out of the four apps, including Reader and MimeStream. What is wrong with you? Why do you have badges on Reader and Mindstream? I mean, if anything. What is... If I could have badges on Claude, I would. I would add more badges. I actually stand by them. You are a monster. Why would you do this to yourself? That's a monstrous answer. It's chaotic. It's evil.

It's... I'm... I'm able to talk now. I have transferred the screenshots. Okay, perfect. For the challenge. Okay, so I think I know where the wallpaper comes from first. Okay. I would love to actually know the source. I got it from some random person on threads who did not credit anyone, so I have no idea what the source is. Okay. Are you on your Macs? Yes. If you go to the system settings, this is tutorial. Are you doing the bit from... Oh, no.

No. Wait. No. Yes. What? Follow my tutorial. Then scroll down in the sidebar to wallpaper. Okay. there's a section at the top that's dynamic wallpapers, right? Yep. Yeah. You can find the one that says Ventura. Yep. Yeah. So Ventura is a dynamic wallpaper, but you will see that this is not quite Matt's wallpaper. So now follow the next step of the tutorial, which is at the top, you will see there's a button that says screen savers.

Uh-huh. Uh-huh. And in there, there's a category that's macOS. Select the Ventura screensaver. And you will see a little preview that screensaver plays in the thumbnail. And if you look at it closely while it animates, you will see that Matt's wallpaper is actually a frame from that Ventura screensaver, animated screensaver.

Interesting. So Matt stole from Apple. That's right. No. And for real, though, I don't think it is exactly that, but it's extremely inspired by a frame from that, I'm pretty sure. Okay. Well, that's good. Yeah. See? Yeah. They call me Holmes. Nellian Holmes.

now to the roasting so I think the wallpaper looks really nice I like it yellow I like some yellow some bright yellow I think it reminds me too much of the Windows 11 wallpaper but that's okay it's good as well true it's weird that some apps have gone missing on your home screen I don't get why why the empty space so I listened to Mac Power users the other day

and they were reviewing their own menu bars on their Mac setups and David Sparks is a crazy man his menu bar is filled with hundreds and millions of icons at least and to justify that he said I paid for those pixels so I might as well use them. I thought that was really deep, a deep thought to keep in mind and I think maybe you should apply that to your home screen. You paid for all the pixels and you're leaving them empty.

I paid for the pixels. Yeah, it's a bit sad. At the end of the day, that is what we're doing. Interesting. Yes, it is. I think it's great. I don't think you should use all the space in your home screen. I think you should let it breathe. You should let it be more focused. You don't have to use all that space. Relax. out of the eight apps that you do have on your home screen, one of them is YouTube. Why do you have YouTube on your home screen? I watch YouTube all the time on my home screen. Same. It's on my home screen as well. Really? Yeah.

At the very least, I'll use it to scroll through my subscriptions feed and save things to watch later so I can watch it on my TV. See? It's on my home screen. Okay. Yeah. Alright. I guess. And I have it, you'll notice I do have it kind of near the middle of the screen, which is where the videos play. And so that's kind of like how your camera app requirement needs to be where the camera thing is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. I'm with you. Okay. You have the icon on the screen where the video will be. On the same exact screen. On the same screen.

Yes. That makes sense. Yeah. Okay. I think there's a lot of flexing, bragging that's happening here. yeah he's got his own apps on there yes two of them only two of them one of them which is all of them will be yours one of them is not public yet so we shouldn't say the name of it oh yeah yeah okay oh you're developing Apple Podcasts Matt that's your app that is Apple Podcasts is a bigger flex the fact that he has two of his apps on his home screen or that he

the MimeStream beta. Which one's the bigger flex do you think, Deleon? I don't know. I also have the MimeStream beta. I can't keep it. I do not, but it doesn't support IMAP so I didn't bother reaching out trying to get it. It's in my doc. It's the best email app there is. It doesn't support IMAP. It's an email standard. It's been in beta so long I forget it's in beta. I think it's still in beta, right? It is still in beta. But it's very much an open public beta.

And he keeps, like, every two days, there's a new test flight build. He keeps just refining it. He won't ship it until it's perfect, it seems. It is. I will, this is what I will say. MimeStream for iOS has been the best email app on iOS for a year at this point. Yeah. And it's still not ready for public. I would say if you released it now, it would be lauded as the greatest email app on iOS. it's so good it's going to get me to move my email and I'm not looking forward to that like I keep putting it off because I don't

want to move my email but I know I need to move my email and maybe even since it's been in beta for so long maybe even MacStories he will have like retroactively he will have many select awards oh yeah they're going to come take mine away because they're like well obviously everyone was using Mimestream last year yeah you should be happy that he didn't release that last year believe me I am okay yeah you know overall I think it's good but those badges man that's what's really

killing me and the whole redacted being a part of the Epstein file thing that's that too you know so that's why you were making that joke I was only half listening because Nintendo is bothering me so much and I don't understand why you made this joke because It's censored. Yeah, because you redacted the... Yeah. What are you hiding? Oh. My God. I don't have much to roast. I like it. Okay. I got something. I got something. No. On the lock screen, you have the camera as the quick action.

Next. Yeah, one of the two quick actions. But I know you, and you have an iPhone with camera control. Why have you not replaced this with something more useful like the Apple TV remote? I'm going to be honest. I don't know why that is there, and I don't know what to replace it with. I never use it. Apple TV remote. Apple TV remote, dude. What is this suggestion? What? What do you mean? Try living with somebody that doesn't put the TV remote back where it's supposed to go. Oh, I do that. You do that or your wife doesn't.

I live with someone who does not put it back. Okay, okay, okay. It could be anyone. Why isn't it on the couch arm or whatever? It's a flat arm. It's made for this sort of thing. But where is it? God knows. It could be between the cushions. It could be on a table. It could be in another room. I don't understand. Under a blanket. It's crazy. Yeah. I have official suggestions for those controls on the lock screen. Mine are, on the left, Shazam. It's really nice to have the Shazam button right here.

Okay. I have that in control center. And the other one is a timer shortcut. Because you're in the kitchen. You always need the timer. that's what Siri's for I just yell at Siri you still trying to talk to that thing I'd rather tap two buttons on my phone to set a time if my hands are dirty or something if I'm cutting meat or something as you recommended to me last week you know how to count just count why do you need a computer to do that that's true okay yes Oh, my.

60 minutes, 59-59, 59-58. You got this. I still think that... So I have Flashlight and Apple TV Remote on my lock screen, and those two are really handy. I like those a lot. The Flashlight, though, needs to be the Action button. No, the Action button is my Action Cut shortcut that gives me a list of a bunch of shortcuts that I ever watch. What about it being the Flashlight? It's amazing. I'd rather have Action Cut because I have literally a long list of shortcuts I run for those.

You know why people love me in life? People are in love with me. I come across people, they love me. And the reason I hang out with random people, they love me. The reason why is I have the flashlight on my Action Button and I'm able to light up their way. Like you're in a dark street. You know what? It's late at night. You just gone out from a bar, you're all drunk, and the streetlights are all off. Because now, you know, the woke government is turning off the lights at night so that you can see the dark sky and animals don't die.

So, yeah, but fortunately there are people like me who can just activate the flashlight right here with the action button. And people love me for this. I'm lighting the way, literally lighting the way for them. I think I've turned on and off the flashlight a hundred times in the time that you said all that. You need to be looking at the phone. I can turn on the flashlight while it's still in my pocket. Yeah. Everybody's favorite thing to happen. Yeah. Yeah. Let me drain my battery on my iPhone Air that already doesn't have enough battery.

No. I actually cut up there, flashlight down there at the bottom. It's the right way to go. the people have spoken. And you know what? If people don't love me and don't want to hang out with me, I'm actually okay with that. I'm a huge introvert. I would rather just sit at home. You know, Chris is actually right. That camera shortcut on the bottom right, it should be on the top right. On top of the way the camera is on the top. If you could put the button there, yes. But it actually shouldn't be on the lock screen at all because you have camera control and I know you have camera control.

What I've done in the past, and maybe I should do it again, I would have like a pro camera app, like Obscura or Halide or one of those. I'd have that as the shortcut so that I could normally use the camera control, but if I knew I needed to get like a raw photo, I would switch over to that. But I'm just lazy. All right. I'm going to give you... I'm going to give you a six because of those badges. The Epstein file thing and the camera button thing. Those are the things that are knocking you down.

I'm going with 8 yeah that's a 10 as far as I'm concerned I really like it I couldn't have done better if that's a 10 maybe you should use a timer because you can't count anyway thank you for roasting me let's move on what do you got for us this week let me slurp some water okay so you know i'm a mad woman and i carry around a macbook with an ssd attached to the

back of it yes i've been doing that for months now and it's because of you it's because of a challenge. It all started. Challenge. That made me switch to offline music entirely. Pretty sure that was your challenge, by the way. Yeah, who knows. Not Matt and I's fault. And I bought a new iPhone just for that with more storage. And then an SSD attached on the back of my MacBook just to increase the storage that I have available with me at all times on my MacBook.

Just one thing real quick. We were recording on a Friday and I just got an email from a band I really like that their new album is out. And because of our conversations last year about how streaming music doesn't pay much of anything at all. I'm literally in the middle of buying their new album right now. Is it Gorillaz? No, it's Vox Trot. Because Gorillaz released their new album today and it's amazing and I bought it on Bandcamp. Okay. It's amazing, you should listen to it. Okay, I will. I have not checked out yet, I'll add it to the cart.

Yeah. Anyway, I'm sorry. But you're right to say, yeah. You can buy your music if you can. So, yeah, I have an SSD attached to the back of my Mac. And it escalated to a thing where I have accumulated small tips to optimize that setup. And I thought I would walk you through it. What do you think? Yes, please. Yeah. So, you remember at one point I bought some kind of pouch for the SSD on the back of my MacBook that I stuck to a shell, like a hard shell,

those protective shells that you can get for your laptop. I got rid of that. That was too bulky. So now the SSD is attached to the back of my MacBook with just a Velcro patch, a Velcro sticker. So I can just easily remove it and put it back on there. So that's one thing. And the second thing is I went on a quest to find the perfect cable, and that was so difficult. That was so hard.

I think I should take a picture for this, actually. Is this the blurriest picture I've ever taken? It's okay. It looks good. Oh, okay. Yeah, that's perfect. It's even featuring my Alprazolam. There you go. That's fine. Okay. so yeah I have been on the hunt for the perfect cable and I found it this is the one you can see on the photo this is a cable from Charge which is a brand so it's spelled A-S-H-A-R-G-E at one point they they got popular for one product

they released some external batteries that looked really cool like they were with translucent cases that looked really cool. MKBHD reviewed one at some point. So that's how they got famous. But they also do a bunch of storage accessories and cables and SSD enclosures. And they make this cable. And this cable specifically has two right-angle ends. So it fits really nightly when you have to stick something on the back of your laptop.

And they also advertise this as something ideal if you want to stick an SSD on the back of like a Steam Deck to have some external storage on a Steam Deck or things like that. And that cable, it's really flexible and it feels sturdy and it's high speed. This is why it's hard to find a cable like this because you need something that's short but not too short and short but not too long.

Like just the right length so that it doesn't overflow on your MacBook when you carry it around and flop everywhere. But it needs to sustain the speeds to be able to take advantage of your really nice SSD. I've got a nice SSD. It's the external T7 from Samsung. So that is a popular one, right? And this supports that. This is a really nice cable. I really recommend it. And it's not expensive.

It's 10 euros. I don't know. It doesn't show me the price in dollars. It's $10 as well. $10. There you go. So it says on the website up to 10 gigabytes per second of transfer and supports all the charging you want, all the charging watts, all the Edisons. So that's really nice. So this is my first tip. If you're in my situation, you're looking for a perfect cable to optimize that setup, I think this is the one.

Another tip, this is more in terms of software now. macOS, it lets you offload a bunch of stuff to external storage. And most people don't really know about this. And I didn't. I had to look it up. And one thing I did, so, you know, my MacBook's internal storage is 256 gigs. So that's really tight. Yeah. And one thing, whenever I inspect my internal storage, I realize that one of the big things that fills it up is Apple Photos.

And obviously, this is frustrating because I use iCloud, right, for my photos. So everything should be offloaded, right? But macOS and Apple Photos, when they see that you have like 50 gigs free of available storage on your internal SSD, it will just cache everything that it can on that remaining space. And it's so annoying. Like Apple Photos was taking up to 50 gigs at a time on my 256 gigs MacBook, which is insane and really frustrating.

So I looked up tips to, like, how can you limit that? Like, how can you force Apple Photos to offload stuff to the cloud and don't keep stuff locally all the time like this? And the short answer is you can't, really. This is dark magic. Apple decides for you, like, probably Tim Cook in the morning has a routine. He goes through every user and decides how much storage it takes up on their individual Macs. So you can't really deal with that. Well, because you can do, you can have your iFotos library file be somewhere else, but as soon as you have iCloud photos,

it has to be in your home directory in the photos folder. And that's the thing. No, it doesn't. And I learned that. I thought like you. I was pretty sure that you had to have your photo library file in your home directory. You can't store it anywhere else. Turns out you can. You can move it to an external SSD like me that's, for example, stuck on the back of your MacBook.

And the thing is, if you want to use that library that's on an external SSD as your system library so that iCloud works with it, well, you can just press the button in the Photos app. There's a button for this in settings, in the settings of the photo app. You press, I don't remember the button was, use as system library or something like this. Click on that and then you can re-enable iCloud after you moved it to the SSD.

And now that's it. My Apple Photos library lives on my external 2TB SSD. And it's awesome. But you remember that the way that Apple Photos work is if it sees that you have a ton of available storage, it doesn't hesitate to cache hundreds of gigabytes of photos because it's like, hey, you got the space.

Yeah, you can download everything. Sure, you check the box that says you want to offload stuff, but no, no, no, you have the space. You can have this. Oh, man. So there's another tip for this. If your external SSD, like mine, is formatted to APFS, you can easily create a volume on there, a specific volume on there. So you go into disk utility, you create a new volume on your SSD, and you can...

So when you create an APFS volume, this is getting technical, but when you create an APFS volume on an SSD or on a disk, you can set a quota so how big can it get at most and you can set a minimal size how small must it be at least and so what I've done is I did not set a minimal size so it can be as small as possible but I did set a quota

I set a quota of 200 gigabytes so there's now when I plug in that external SSD, there are two things that mount on my desktop. The regular volume that's always been there with all my music, my files, all sorts of stuff. And there's a new volume that I called Photos on which there is just the photo library. And that's it. Just that. And now Apple Photos, it sees that volume and it goes, okay, you've only got 200 gigs of free storage, so I can't go

over that. There's nothing I can do. I can't go over that. This is just the storage you have. Even though that 200 gigs volume lives on a 2 terabyte SSD. This is a very complicated way to do it, but it is a clever way to go. Yeah. It's the same thing with messages message i i recently my mac recently gave me the dreaded i don't have space to save this file and i was like oh no and so i recently went through a whole adventure of figuring out where the space is going um xcode had generated 400 gigabytes of stuff for me that i had to clear out

that was a big problem um because every simulator you have is effectively an entire iphone or ipad it's the entire everything um those add up uh also every build it's a whole thing um so i cleaned up out of that but along the way i found oh messages is taking up 50 gigabytes photos is taking up 60 gigabytes and it's like there's nothing i can do about those i guess with photos there is something now but like i really just wish there was a slider where i could say never cache more than like with messages five gigabytes of stuff like how much do i need cached for messages like it's crazy that's

taking up 5% of my hard drive. My one terabyte hard drive is 5% messages. Why? When you say it like that, that's crazy. It's insane, yeah. Yeah, Apple is being so weird about this storage stuff. There should be more granular control over all of this. Yeah, exactly. So that's one more way that you can offload stuff to an external SSD. You can move that photo library to that SSD and make it a system library so that iCloud works with it.

And you can also, if you want to go further, you can create a specific volume of a quota on that SSD so that this photo library doesn't blow up and fill up your entire SSD. One more tip. Two in one, actually. You can offload apps as well onto an external SSD. And that's pretty cool. I've identified at least two ways to do that.

The Mac App Store actually has a setting now. And once again, I was not aware of this. I learned this while looking for it. If you go into the Mac App Store, you go into the settings for that, There's a new checkbox there where you can decide to automatically install apps that are bigger than one gigabyte to an external storage device. And you can select whichever you want.

You have a drop down there. So you check that box. You select your SSD that's stuck on the back of your MacBook. And there you go. And now when you install big apps from the Mac App Store, they will automatically install to the SSD and not your internal storage. That's nice. This is really nice. So right now, I only have three apps on my SSD that I installed this way. Let me tell you which. Of four, actually. Affinity Publisher, CapCut.

So that's the TikTok editor, video editor. I've needed this once or twice. Each, both Affinity Publish and CapCut, they weigh 200 gigs, two gigs each. Two gigs each. I was like, there's your problem right there. I underestimated CapCut. I've also got iMovie, right? Oh, yeah. Nice, classic. Yes, it's in the, sometimes I use iMovie. That was my first non-linear editor, in a way. I know. And Keynote.

Yeah, I wonder why I had to install Keynote on this MacBook. Someone, you created incredible art with it. Yes. And Keynote weighs just about one gig. So it went, automatically went to the SSD. And so what it does, if you're wondering, how does that work practically? Like, are the apps on your actual SSD, where are they installed? What this does, it only creates an applications folder in your SSD.

And it's as simple as that. It's just creating a new applications folder that's on your SSD and your apps are in there. And if those apps that are in there need it, they will automatically create a library folder as well on your SSD. So, you know, sometimes apps, they need to create support files, configuration files, etc. and they put all of that in library, that library folder will also get created on your SSD so that all the data that relate to that app

are all on the SSD. They're not spread apart partly on your MacBook and partly on the SSD. Nice. It really broke my brain years ago when someone told me, your apps can be anywhere. They don't need to be in the applications folder. It's convenient. It's a centralized place for you to see them all. like there's no technical reason they can't be literally anywhere like just put them where you want them exactly yeah and you're right you tend to forget about that but i guess because the other

two big os's are picky about this yeah can i tell you something crazy that's going to make you your skin crawl of course years ago one of my friends got a mac they'd never used a mac before and i found out how they were running their apps because they didn't download anything from the app store they all They got these DMGs. And so what they would do is in their downloads folder, they just had a bunch of DMG files. And when they wanted to use the app, they'd open the DMG and then double click the app from there.

Oh, oh no. But that works, right? It worked. I think some apps would complain. It would cause some like weird, like, I don't know if it's a sandbox thing or whatever, but like some apps would complain. And like, but like this idea that like, oh, he should move those somewhere permanent didn't even cross his mind. That's really funny. I guess, yeah, the DMGs are just volumes, like virtual volumes as well. Yeah. Yeah. It's weird.

I think about that every couple days, honestly. Oh, my God. Are you okay, Chris? I'm good. Yeah. Are you not? I know this is a lot for an iPad guy. Yeah, as an iPad person, I don't even... What do you mean there's an applications folder? And so, yeah, the Mac App Store does this. And Steam as well, which sounds obvious.

This has been the case for years. Steam as well, when you go to install a game, you can go into the properties. You can do this globally or per game. If you do it globally in the Steam settings, you can tell it, always install games to that SSD. And that's it. Boom. All your games will install on the external SSD and never use your internal storage. And you can do this per game as well, for specific games.

And if you have games already saved to multiple drives, every time you download a new game, it'll ask you which one do you want to install to, and it shows you the available storage on each one so you know it's so cool. It's very nice. Steam is the best. It's very nice. Okay, final thing, which contains two things. I've become a bit paranoid about backups, and since now my MacBook comprises of data that's on an external SSD as well

that I also want included in my time machine backups. It meant that I had to upgrade the storage of my time machine disk, the main time machine disk that I use. Is this where you tell us you have a second bigger SSD attached to the other side of the MacBook? No. Oh. No, so what I used to have is a small SSD, an old one actually from Samsung, but it still works. That's one terabyte that's in the cable rack under my desk.

And it's connected to my Thunderbolt dock. So whenever my MacBook's docked, it will back up via Time Machine to that SSD. But one terabyte is not enough anymore because now I'm storing a lot more stuff and even including on a two terabyte SSD. So I need to upgrade the size of that Time Machine disk. Are you aware that SSDs cost a house each now? I've heard rumors.

Yeah. I've avoided trying to even consider buying any. Yeah, I'm very fortunate. I am not in the need for more storage right now. Yes, I was hit by this when I realized I needed more storage for my backups. The 2TB SSD that I have attached to my MacBook, I bought it just before the memory apocalypse. Now it's quadrupled in price. Dang.

So I am Nostradamus, apparently. I have had great foresight in purchasing that SSD right before the apocalypse. But so because I can't afford an SSD anymore, I bought an HDD instead, a 4TB one. Nice. Yes, from Seagate, is that? Yes, probably. Yeah. Seagate. It's a good, like, it's the Amazon's choice.

Like, you type external SSD 4TB. This is the first one. It's got the Amazon's choice badge, Five stars out of five and thousands of reviews. So I got that. Fine. So now this lives under my desk. And unfortunately, I realized that HDDs, they make noise. So it's a really quiet one, this one I got. And people are reviewing it highly for this, apparently. People are saying this is extremely quiet for what it is.

So that's good. But still, I can hear it sometimes, including at night. including when I'm in bed right here at night. And the HDD is right here. So I can hear it and it drives me insane. So I've added a smart plug. This is the whole thing. I've added a smart plug to my desk. So now my entire desk, I can turn off everything with a simple press in Apple Home, right?

I can turn off everything including the HDD. so that doesn't make noise at night. Noise at night. Unfortunately, I don't want to talk to Siri every night to tell it to turn off my desk. So instead, I got buttons from Ikea. So I'll put a link in the show notes. They released these new buttons called Bill Ressa. Let me try to say it in Swedish. Bill, Bill, Bill, I don't know.

Bill Ressa. I don't know. Anyway, those are Matter buttons. They just released those. They're getting mixed reviews in terms of reliability. And apparently the first few ones that came out, like the first batch that came out, had a high failure rate in terms of pairing and disconnecting and stuff. And apparently this has been fixed since now you can get now quietly fixed like they didn't acknowledge it or anything but anyway i

took my chances so i got a pack of three they are colorful so this is the the red one but there's also a green one and a gray one in one pack um so they work with matter and thread so this is nice no need for a hub no need for one of the ikea hub um just add it to apple home and that's it and it works. And one nice thing with it is it works with AAA batteries inside. So you can just put in AAA rechargeable batteries and this is really nice.

Because most of the smart buttons, they need the small pill-shaped batteries that are extremely annoying to change and to replace. So far, so good. I think those buttons are really nice. It's really reliable. It works. It's fast. I won't press it because it turns off my desk. Although I've set it so that I have to long press it. Oh, that's smart. Yes. In Apple Home, you can set it to either do one thing on one tap, one thing on double tap, and one thing on a long press.

And that's it. So this is my compilation of tips. If you are Niléane and you have an SSD stuck on the back of your MacBook, and you want to easily and automatically upload stuff to it and deal with the noise of an HDD Android desk. Nice. Very nice. Well, I'm glad you found a solution that works. Yes. Me too. And I hate AI.

There you go. When you mentioned the prices going up, I pulled up my Best Buy history Because last year I bought a couple, I bought RAM and an SSD, like an M.2 drive for my gaming PC. So I bought 32 gigs of RAM. That was $105 when I bought it a year ago. Today, that same item on Best Buy's website is $412. And it's $30 off right now. The deal ends tomorrow. What a deal.

And then the 2 terabyte internal SSD was $160. It is today $400. Oh, my God. That's crazy. That is crazy. Like, those were impulse buys because, like, it wasn't that – I was getting so much bang for my buck. Like, it was a great thing. And now, like, that's, like, nearing iPhone cost to get a 2-terabyte just hard drive. Nearing, like, some lower-end graphics cards. Like, this is insane.

Oh, boy. I did buy a graphics card early last year as well. I don't even want to know what that cost now. I can't even buy the hard drives that are in my NAS right now. I can buy... Oh, hang on. I take that back. I can buy one used for $415, which is a 12-terabyte Iron Wolf spinning hard drive, and I bought it for... I don't know. Give me a second here.

I'm curious. You ordered details. I bought... Oh, I guess they were... Okay, they were originally $300 a piece. Okay. Yeah, the HDDs are not getting hit as hard, but... Yeah. Yeah. I wonder what the NVMe that I have in my NAS is. Okay, so I bought it for... We sound like people who bought a house like 30 years ago and are like, I don't know what the big deal is. Everything's fine. I got a good price.

Right. So I have two. Wait a second. That can't be right. Nope. Nope. That's the wrong thing. Never mind. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. My Samsung T7 retails now for about 300 euros. And I bought it for 120 euros. That's crazy. And that was at the end of last summer. Not that long ago. Yeah. So the NVMe that is in my NAS, I have two 2 terabyte Samsung's 970E.

Evo Plus in my NASes. I bought for $229 originally back in 2020. Oh, they're $304 now. But that's a much older, like that is a much older NVMe. So now you can buy used storage from people who don't wipe their stuff correctly and this will go well. And you can get access to their bank information because they don't have 3D secure. Brought it all the way around.

Boom. Alright. You guys ready to get to the challenge? I'm so excited about this. Yeah, and maybe they will, like those people, they will have Pokemon ROMs Ooh. Yeah, on the storage. There you go. Okay, so the challenge was play Pokemon FireRed or LeafGreen, and you must pick Charmander as your starter. That's the red one. And try and get through the first gym. I picked this challenge because both my co-hosts have interesting takes on Pokemon that are very wrong. Neelion has never played a Pokemon game, and Matt, for some reason, thinks Squirtle is the best starter.

Doesn't make any sense whatsoever. I had so much fun playing this. Like, as soon as you turn it on and the music comes back... Now, I did mess up. I thought this was coming... The game was coming out a day before we recorded. It actually came out two hours before we recorded. I played for about an hour today. Okay. Okay. I ended up playing on my analog pocket. because I had it there, and Matt, I know you played. Yeah, same thing. Okay. So I picked Charmander as my starter. I restarted a bunch of times so I would get the right nature.

Oh, you're one of those people. When you pick Charmander, you want to get a modest nature so he has better special attack. Yeah, so I restarted a bunch of times. There's a whole thing. It's never shown in the interface at all, unless you really know what you're looking for, I guess. You got to go into the menu, Pokemon, pick your Pokemon, go into summary, and then it tells you the nature of the Pokemon. Okay. And then you have to look up what the nature actually means online because it doesn't actually tell you in the game. Yeah. But, yeah, no, I had so much fun with this. Like, Charmander's great because you could just, like, blaze through Viridian Forest, like, where all the bug-type Pokemon are.

You just blaze right through them all. Though it's not great when you get to the first gym, but that's why you go off to the side road and you catch yourself a Mankey so that way you have a fighting-type Pokemon. you get to the rock type gem. Anyways, I want to hear from you guys. What was your experience like? So what's the nature? I'm on it. I'm in the summary now. So summary, and then it should be towards the bottom left corner. It should say like kind of like timid or quiet or modest or there should be all sorts of different options down there.

Oh. I feel like an old person. It's right underneath the sprite, like the icon. Yeah, the trainer memo. Mine is the adamant nature. The trainer memo, yeah. Oh, quirky. It's his quirky nature. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, just like me. So, Neil, what was it like playing Pokemon for the first time? I don't really like it. Wow. Okay. So, I don't want to be mean, but like the gameplay loop, like, okay, you got a Pokemon.

Go get more. Yeah, you got to catch more. Yeah. And now you have successfully identified the 30-year loop that people cannot stop playing. Yeah, now I know. Yes. Oh, no, you have to heal the Pokemon. Get a potion. Go at the store, whatever. Do you like RPGs at all? No. Okay. This is going to be a fundamental problem. It seems you don't like turn-based battles or collecting Pokemon.

There's not much for you here. Nope, this isn't for you. Maybe the new Pokepedia game that comes out next week might be more for you because it's very Minecraft-esque. Oh, there's a Minecraft-style one. It looks nice on the Switch 2, by the way, I think. It does. I loaded it up this morning on the Switch 2 and was pretty happy with it. I'm in the middle of resetting, trying to get the right nature for my Charmander. because I'm that person. I put in some screenshots for you as you may have noticed during the show.

First screenshot is the game is not woke. First thing it will ask you is whether you are a boy or a girl. Nothing wrong with that but it's funny. For 1996 that's about as good as you could get. This is a remake of a game that came out in 1996. in the new games they do say what they do say choose your appearance now actually so they actually don't do like are you a boy or a girl they just show you two different character models and you choose which one you want oh people are mad about this

oh my gosh I think Sword and Shield was the first one to do it and people were like I'm boycotting the game because of this and it's like why does it even matter it literally doesn't matter it's like in the start it doesn't like whatever what screenshot is missing Oh, boom. Okay, and look at my second screenshot that I'm having now. What am I doing? How does Notion work? There you go.

So this is how I've named my Charmander. I've named it Birchkris. Nice. So you are both in my first Pokemon experience as Charmander and into one body, it seems. Okay. I appreciate that I feel honored and my third screenshot is even in this 90s game you still have to deal with mail

which I don't actually think is a thing in the game like I don't remember what that's for do you remember Matt I have no idea what that's for I don't remember what the mailbox system is for like I don't yeah the UX part of my brain just kicked in though because this is a screenshot where the prompt is, what would you like to do? And so you should have verbs because you're going to do things. What would I like to do? Mailbox. What would I like to do? Item storage. At least that's, I guess, storage could be a thing. Turn off is a verb, so that's fine.

That works. When you select mailbox, it says, you don't have any mail right now. Oh, inbox zero. Nice. Nice. It beat Merlin Mann to the thing. Nice. Yeah. Matt, what about you? What was it like picking the correct starter for the first time? Okay. So I'm just holding up to camera. I do have Charmander. Okay. Adam and type. I named it Charmander. Now, I have two questions, actually.

I guess most of them are for Chris because Neil doesn't play or care about Pokemon. I know all the things. Yes. Do you name your Pokemon? No. Of course. I never do nicknames. And one of my favorite things about the more recent games was the ability to turn off the whole nickname system. Okay. I don't do nicknames. I don't do nicknames. Your name is whatever your species is. So no Birchkris? No. No Birchkris. This was a faux pas to do this? No, you can do it. Some people do.

Some people literally spend time naming each one of their Pokemon, and it's a whole thing. But I've never cared about that. My second question is, what do you name your rival? Is it the same thing every time, or is it random? I don't remember what I named him back in the day, but this one I named him Blue because it's going back. Because originally, the default name is your character, depending on which version you're playing.

And in America, it was Red and Blue. If you're playing the Red version, your character, the default name is Red, and then your rival's Blue, or vice versa if you're playing the Blue version. So I named my character Red and the default one Blue, or the rival Blue. What'd you do? In every single Pokemon game, I have used the exact same name, which is my best friend growing up. We both got the game and we played with each other, and so we were each other's rivals. And to this day, he continues to be my rival in every Pokemon game. Nice. Okay, I like that. I was thinking I should have named mine Bartschler, Like, I should have named Rival Birchler.

Oh, wait. Because your rival, when you pick Charmander, your rival picks Squirtle, which is Matt's favorite. So you can pick the rival's name? Yeah, and the startup. I only had the choice between, like, three or four names. The first one is, like, the first option is, like, custom name or new name. I think it says new name is the very first option. So if you pick that, you can type in the character's name that you want. Oh, okay. The UI is imperfect. It's a 1996 game.

The things that stood out to me, the game is kind of fun. For the record, I've played like 100 hours of this as a kid. I really like that when you start up the game, because this is the GBA version, there's like multiple screens where they say, here's in detail what every single button in the interface does. Here's everything the A button does. Here's what the left on the D-pad does. Like everything. It's crazy. I just skip right over them. Yeah. The thing that would make this game impossible for me to play today is there's no experience share.

Yeah. There is. It's later on. But it only applies to the Pokemon that's holding the experience share item. Oh, my God. And it's not the full experience. It's half the experience. So if you get 20 experience points to your main Pokemon, the experience share Pokemon only gets 10. Yeah. That I can be okay with. That's fine. But the fact that you have to bring every single Pokemon into the battle, even if it's just so you can pull them out immediately

to get them experience, I find very frustrating. Any RPG that doesn't have this, it's tough, in my opinion. And especially if you're using a Pokemon that doesn't have an attack move early on, like an Abra. Like an Abra early on only gets teleport until you evolve it into Kadabra. and it evolves kind of at a high level so you have to use it as your primary Pokemon and then keep swapping it out which means your Pokemon take damage but this was the more challenging aspect of Pokemon back in the day

I have a hot take that everyone should play a Pokemon game where experience share isn't on by default and that you should play at least one and then once you beat that you get the quality of life just so you kind of get it Like, life was a lot harder back in the red and blue days and then the gold and silver and ruby and sapphire. But I will say, this is absolutely S-tier pixel art.

I think this is a beautiful game. I miss sprite art. The other thing that's S-tier, the music. The music's so good. The music has never been as good in Pokemon games as it was since the original one. And I know there's a little bit of nostalgia in there, But I truly believe, like, you hear that music come up. I just watched the Pokemon presentation before we sat down and recorded, and they started with that, and I was like, yeah, that's hitting. That's hitting hard. But anyways, that was good. I'm glad you guys played it. We're kind of running long, so let's wrap up there.

And, Matt, it's your turn to issue a challenge. I didn't even have time to say that I don't like the music. You don't like the music? Editor Chris, cut this out. Cut this out. Yeah, I'm like, it hurts my ears. This is Neely up being in the Epstein files. She's losing her mind. Something's happening. Yeah, okay. No, it's... No, it's not really like that. It's really high. It hurts.

High frequency. Okay, the new challenge this week, if you expand the spoiler tag, you will reveal nothing because you cannot see anything. what I would like us to do is a very small one we've talked about password managers today which is great so we're staying on brand I would like each of us and I think I had a challenge like this before, you don't need to use it all week you don't need to do anything like that but what I would like you to do is find a password manager that you don't use right now

and my understanding is I'm one password Neilian is one password, Chris is passwords Apple passwords find a different password manager and find something nice to say about it. Just one nice thing to say about it. One nice little feature. So that brings us to the end of the show. Probably the last episode we might ever record.

By the way, guys, I can't make it next week. I don't think I can make it either. Why is this one so controversial? I thought this would be so easy. Because it's going to be so much work to move to a new password manager. No, no, no. You don't have to move to another password. You could literally go to their marketing page and find a nice feature. You don't have to. I'm not saying switch to it for seven days. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. All right. I'm saying like Chris, for example, you could say one password doesn't suck outside of Safari. What a great feature. Why would I use a different browser other than Safari?

I don't know why I do that. It's not like other browsers can support extensions on platforms outside of the Mac. Chris, can you install apps on external SSDs? No. No. Okay. Making sure. All right. Well, that brings us to the end of the show. We do have an end of the show question, but it's kind of a long one. So I'm going to save it for next week because we're running really long. No, it's a nice one. But we're running long. Oh.

Okay, do you think you can answer it quickly? No, probably not, but... Okay, then we're saving it for next week. Okay. We're saving it for next week. Okay, so my question for you is, Matt, what is your all-time favorite Pokemon game? And my question for you, Nelian, No, Nelian, you're going to get a different question. Nelian, my question for you is, what is your all-time favorite Mario Kart game? I've only played two of them.

okay which one's your favorite out of the two then which one do you prefer uh eight eight deluxe because i am an s tier goddess on that game nobody can beat me okay yeah and the world is the best mario kart world is really good but i've only played a little bit of it um and so i don't really have an opinion that i need mario kart world to get more tracks That's my big issue with that.

We were spoiled by Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and the amount of tracks it had. Matt, what is your favorite Pokemon game? It's either. So I played a bunch of... My favorite is obviously Red because that's what I played. Charizard's on the box. Charizard is the box. That was tough to deal with. Matt, we're running long actually. And then here's what I think of every other Pokemon game. So in the modern era, I played a couple of the more modern ones.

I really like Sword and Shield. I think I got Shield or Sword. I don't know. It doesn't matter. They're the same thing. I really like that game. I think it's awesome. Chris, what's your favorite? I think FireRed is nice. I was disappointed with Ruby and Sapphire. Or not Ruby and Sapphire. Scarlet and Violet. I'm not a big, graphics don't look great. I can't.

4K. It doesn't have 4K 60. What do you mean? That's not going to work. I'm not a big that, but it was bad. It was horrendous. Sword and Shield was good, but I think my all-time favorite is X and Y. Oh, I've never played it. X and Y is really good. I really like the Mega Evolutions. That was fun. Sword and Shield has that too. ZA, but I'm kind of Pokemon ZA, I kind of got burnt out on that. Okay. I have one good thing to say about FireRed. What's that? It's really nice that they added the AI kill switch in the latest release that now you can disable

all of the AI features. Yeah. Because 1996, there's so many AI features in Game Boy 2. Just out last week? Mozilla Fire Red. Oh my God. And that was a great episode, everybody. And that was great. Thank you so much for listening. Have a great day.