You've Unlocked Something in Me

Welcome to Comfort Zone, a podcast all about pushing your hosts, well, outside of their comfort zone. I'm Christopher Lawley, and each week I am joined by two incredible co-hosts. As always, I am joined by Matt Birchler. Matt, how are you? Oh, hey, that's me. I'm doing well. Nice. Good. And we are also joined by Niléane. Niléane, how are you? I'm doing well. Chris, how are you doing? Are you well? And you got a new haircut. Yeah, I never get asked how I'm doing. So I'm going to do a 30-minute monologue on how I'm doing. No, I got a haircut.

I got, as my grandpa would say, you got your hairs cut because you got more than one. Why'd you only get one cut? Oh, boy. If you tell him you got a haircut, he'd be like, why'd you only get one cut? That's solid dad humor right there. Yeah, yeah. Anyways, so I'm noticing, and this might be a first since we've started doing it, there is no tiny topics. Is there no tiny topics? That's true. There are no tiny topics. Maybe there's a feedback.

I think there was a feedback thing, but I don't remember what it was, and I forgot to put it in. We're recording on a weird day, people. Everything's all thrown off. Who knows what's happening? Yeah, I've got one feedback. I can read that. Okay, all right. I remember reading this one. That's from Jair from Mexico. Oh, yes, I remember this one. Yeah, they wrote in to say they're a long-time listener, so thank you. And they were bouncing back on how we name our devices. And they said, and this person has all the dad jokes inside them,

they said, my name is Jair, pronounced as in Yair and Yair. So Jair. Okay. Yeah, I guess. And the way I do it with most of them is as simple as Apple TV of Jair. or Jair iPhone 13 Pro Max. But for my MacBook and AirPods, I actually named them like this. Jair AirPods Pro 1 and 2 and MacBook Jair Air. Jair Jair. So they're doing puns with their own names. Their own name. I appreciate the puns. Yeah.

So you guys remember how I named my devices after Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? Of course. I'll never forget. Okay. And I've named my AirPods typically after movies. So like AirPods Pro 2, where AirPods 2, AirPods are, after Die Hard 2, Die Harder. AirPods Pro 3, or AirPods Pro 3, the return of the AirPods. No, I'm sorry. I'm saying AirPods. No, I call them EarPods. I don't even call them AirPods. I call them EarPods. EarPods Pro 3, return of the EarPods. The AirPods Max 2. AirPods Max 2, The Secret of the Ooze. Oh, my God.

White earpods. TMNT 2 reference, baby. That's the one with Vanilla Ice doing the go, ninja, go, ninja, go. Go, ninja, go, ninja, go. Go, ninja, go, ninja, go. Go, go, go. I find this whole TMNT2 obsession a little disturbing, honestly. I love TMNT2. It's weird. And why earpods? Because it sounds funnier than AirPods. Everyone's stuff is named AirPods. And see, I do this from the old school days of like you actually used to have to go into Bluetooth or Wi-Fi and connect to your devices and stuff like that.

So I would always name stuff like something so it would be different. So it would be distinct enough. And usually I would name it so that it would be at the top of the list if the list was alphabetical. So I'd usually do like an underscore in front of my Wi-Fi name or something like that. So if the Wi-Fi list was in alphabetical order, mine was always at the top. Because, you know, if you're smart enough to do it and smart enough to know how it works, why not take advantage of it? It's not a bad idea, honestly. Hmm. Yep. This week on Cozy Zone, we tier listed the classic Mac OS wallpapers,

or Mac OS X for some of them. And I think it's safe to say none of us were happy. I think we all walked away upset a little bit in some way. I didn't realize who I was podcasting with. A couple geniuses. I don't even know. I don't even know. You're mostly mad about Chris, right? My takes are more mad, yes. More mad about Chris. At some point, Chris hits a wall, and I am just angry at him. The thing you need to know, my two co-hosts, they both live places, but I live in California,

and a majority of the macOS now, which doesn't, it feels weird saying this, but a majority of the macOS stuff is now California places, not cats. Yeah. So I don't know why, but I still think there's more cat macOSs than there is California places in my head, but that's not true. But due to macOS, California is too mainstream now. You know, it feels boring now to hear California names. We need the Midwest names to start coming. No, until there's macOS Fresno, I won't give it up. And that's going to be like the worst macOS release.

It could have been Tahoe. Like, maybe that's what they should have named Tahoe, was macOS Fresno. Anyways, so that's Cozy Zone. That's our members only show. You get an extra episode of us every single week. Link in the description below or show notes or whatever it's called, along with our feedback form if you want to send in some feedback. But you guys ready to get into the main show? Yeah. All right, Matt, you have put a single link in the show note. I have no idea what this is. I haven't even clicked on it. So what do you got? So what I have is an app that I just started using yesterday.

So you'll forgive my lack of a deep dive into it. But it's an app called Cogito, C-O-G-I-T-O. And it is a Markdown editor. Cogito. So it's a beautiful Markdown editor, and it's made by, I forget his name, it's Fabrizio Rinaldi, who is one of the founders of Typefully and Mailbrew back in the day, if you remember

that, which was like a personalized newsletter generator thing. And it's a, yeah, it's a Markdown editor. So it is a native Mac app that you just point at a folder on your computer and it loads up all the folders and all the files and the markdown stuff just shows up in a nice little interface. And so you can edit stuff here. What I have done with it is I've pointed at my Obsidian Vault. So if I'm just writing or adding files and stuff, I can just go through here instead of using Obsidian.

So if you like Obsidian for its organization, but you don't like how it looks or how it feels to use, I would recommend installing some themes. But if that's still not enough, this could be a cool option. And it's completely free. And, yeah, it's just nice. It's a nice little app. I feel like I'm getting dangerously close to the end of my pitch, and I'm only a minute in. But it's kind of cool to just have a native...

It's basically a preview of what a native Mac version of Obsidian would be if they made it. Obviously, plugins and stuff don't function in here. So if you want to use those, you kind of have to go back to Obsidian. But yeah, it does commit a cardinal sin. It has universal search, which works nicely and shows like your recent files at the top of the little thing. But how do you think you bring up this search in the app? What keyboard shortcut would you expect this to be? Command K?

Yeah. Command K. Not correct. That turns a link into whatever text you're highlighting. Oh, is it command, not colon? What is that? Oh, like backtick? Slash? Yeah. No. No. It's not. It's not Command S, is it? It's not Command S. What does Command S do? Nothing, as it should. Okay. I don't know.

I just downloaded the app, but I'm not looking at the keyboard shortcuts, so I don't know. My friends, it is Command P to... What? what oh my god a little surprising this is that needs to change it should be command o nope command o allows you to open a folder okay that makes sense why command o because that's what it is in my obsidian vault because that's open yeah

But that makes sense that Command O opens a folder for this. Because Obsidian, you're not trying to open something in macOS. Yeah. Because that's the whole vault structure thing. I guess in fairness, Command P in Obsidian brings up the command palette. Yeah. But that makes sense. Oh, this makes people angry. I don't know if you've seen Stephen Hackett talk about this, but he's very angry. Because Command P is print. on a Mac. Yeah, but are you going to print markdown documents?

Like, who's printing? Actually, you know what? I take it all back. I literally just tried to do that the other day because I was trying to take a markdown document and turn it into a PDF, and I was like, oh, I know how I can do this super easy. Just go to print and then, you know, save as PDF. And that didn't work in Obsidian, so... Because Obsidian doesn't have print at all. Like, there is no print function in Obsidian as far as I can know. It's a shame because, as I've learned from you two, I need to have a backup system. And I would like to backup my vault by printing it and storing it in my house. Makes perfect sense.

Paper backup, definitely the best way to back things up. One terabyte of paper. Yeah, I don't even want to... The trees are going to be very mad at me. But yeah, it's a cool little thing. And I just like little apps like this that try to do one thing and do it well. It's pretty rad. It looks nice. So this person makes Typefully, yeah? And I just want to say, it's time. What's his name? Fabrizio? It's time to let X go. This is what I have to say.

How are those two connected? What's going on? Because there's an X link at the bottom of the page. His only social media presence is on X. That's his only media presence. Oh, okay. Also, Typefully is like an app for publishing to X as well as other social media platforms. Okay. I could see if you had a business and it relies on publishing to... Okay, yeah. But yeah, you know, I... Yeah. Typefully began as a Twitter thread builder and then eventually added other social networks. And like a year or two ago,

they added the ability to... have to sign up with a twitter account which made sense way back in the day but sucked if you were just using it for mastodon and blue sky like i do um but they added the email update or sign up so you can just sign up without having a twitter account so but yes gotcha he's a yeah okay x user and it looks like kog kogod the the markdown deal is big is a big selling point of this is it works with type fully so you can publish right to type fully from this markdown. Oh, wait, can you? Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Wow, Matt, you're doing a great job bringing this up your topic. Oh, it's the last thing. Can you take over here? That'd be really helpful. Okay, so it looks like, so there's an editor mode, so just like Obsidian, there is an editor mode so you can type and everything but there's also a reader mode which will render the markdown into like, you know, readable markdown. how do you do people use the reader i guess they probably do i just never i've never felt the desire to like read in the markdown so i can see two use cases for it first preview it preview like okay

make sure all the links and stuff are you know working uh like properly like it's like the markdown all the markdown syntax stuff is there for for the proper links and like it renders properly two I use it for when I am doing like filming a video I will do the I will do the formatted markdown just because it gets all the extra stuff out of the way when I'm recording a video so I just have my script there

okay fair enough fair enough that's pretty much it though okay let's see what else does this thing have you can add multiple locations There's, okay, so there's search features. Let's see. You can hide the sidebar so you can have like a nice, you know, just, ooh, there's tabs. There is tabs. If you hit Command T, there's tabs. There's tabs. I love me some tabs. I like the tab design, though it looks like it's broken because I can't go back to my previous tab.

So there is technically tabs, but it doesn't work. Can we talk about tabs in Notion? I hate them. I hate them so much. The tabs in Notion, they should not be. What? I don't know. What do you lie on? I don't know. They feel not good. Something is not right with the tabs in Notion. I can't quite put my finger on what's wrong.

What I don't like about Notion tabs is if you click a new tab, it's assigned to whatever Notion database you're in. So we have our comfort zone one. I can't go and search for something in my personal Notion database. I have to go and switch databases. So what I do is I have tabs for each database that I'm in. And so if I need to open a new tab in that database, I first have to click to the tab that's in that current database,

then start a new tab. They should just be able to search across all the databases and not just your one. I think I should just stop using Notion in the app. I should just use it in the browser. I think the Notion app's not bad. I think they don't understand tabs. I'm aware that I've not made real arguments about this sentiment, but it's real. It's a real sentiment. I do not understand why you don't like them. Me neither. I really don't get it.

But will somebody talk about the tabs in Notion? I don't like what we're talking about, but yeah. Wait, what? I'm so confused. I'm absolutely confused. Also, I just realized I went out of order in our show doc, so things are completely messed up. Yeah, I don't know why you did that. Yeah, I'm sorry, because I scrolled too far, and it looked like Matt was first, and I scrolled too far. Notion's fault. Yeah. Somehow the tabs were. It was a notion.

Oh, boy. The tabs were covering it. Well, I'll tell you what. Chris, you've unlocked something in me, and now I've linked my Typefully account to my Markdown editor, and now you will have to deal with the threads. I also, looking at, going back to the Markdown Editor, I don't even know how to pronounce it, I'm sorry. Very minimal editor options. So it's basically font size, line height, body width, text font, and code font.

And it doesn't even look like you can add your own. It's just like some predetermined ones, but it has JetBrains Mono, so I don't really care. Okay. What else do you need? I mean, just JetBrains Mono. It also has IBM Plex Mono, which is another really good one. I do like IBM Plex Mono. How old are you? Very old. Anyway, this is my contender for the Gladiator duel that I think we're building up to. Obviously. Episode 100. Ooh, that might be a good episode 100 idea.

We spend 24 hours tier listing every comfort zone episode. Oh, yeah. Dibs on not editing that. No, I'm just kidding. All right. Anything else on this? Try it out. Give it a shot. Yeah, yeah. I just downloaded it. Interesting. Pretty lightweight. Yeah. All right. We should transition to Niléane. However, Niléane, I'm looking at your notes. this may be a first. I don't know what any of these words are. I don't. Maybe that's why

I subconsciously skipped Niléane. Because I have no idea what's happening here. Okay. I'm so fascinated to learn something new. Alright. Just remember, we're tied on time. Sure. So, for once, I will talk about headphones. Oh, my God. For once. I know I don't do it enough, but I thought this is a good... Yep, that's exactly what we were all thinking.

The people demand it, though. Yeah, they demand it all the time. Do they? Yes. Okay, so I've been exploring some audio stuff. But no, so it's not directly about headphones. Like, there's no new headphones or whatever. New earpads, though, but I already told you about this. No. So this is more on the software side and also a little bit of hardware. Let me start with the hardware, actually. I got this thing. Look at it. Look. It's tiny. Look. I don't even know what this is. It's just a black rectangle.

Look at it. Why is it got a clip? Niléane is holding up a black rectangle. Is that a DAC? That has a clip. It also has a clip. So, yes, it is a DAC. Okay. It's got USB-C port on the bottom, two jacks on the top. One is 4.4mm, the other is 3.5. The 4.4 one is a balanced jack. I will not get into it, but people who know, know what it's for. And it's got a tiny OLED screen on the front.

Look at it. Can it play Doom? Sure. No, probably not. Although, I don't know, maybe. So, yes, this is the FiiO BTR15. This is a DAC, a very nice DAC. But it's like one of the... There's a range of DACs, right? There's the extremely fancy ones that are massive and take massive cables and can power

very demanding headphones or speakers. This is a tiny one that's meant to be portable, as you can see. So it also means that it's more affordable. And I really like it. It's really good. So what it does is it converts digital signal to analog signal. This is what a DAC means, digital to analog converter. Yes. Basically, this is your only headphone jack. When you get it, this is meant to be your only headphone jack.

You plug it into your Mac, for example, to a computer. You can also plug it into your iPhone's USB support or iPad or whatever. And you just plug in your headphones and you can listen to music that way. And so it supports high-res audio and high-res sample rates and all of that. It's a very nice DAC. And it can power some pretty powerful headphones. My headphones, I have some... My headphones are low-impedance.

I don't have something that's like 300 ohms or whatever. So my headphones, they are not very demanding. But still, it makes a difference. When you give more power, for example, my Meze headphones, when you give them more power, like, they come alive. It's really nice. Some really nice things to say about the FiiO BTR15 is that it also is Bluetooth. And this is what the B stands for, I guess, in BTR15.

It's also Bluetooth, which means that you can plug in your headphones into this, connect it to your phone via Bluetooth, and now you have turned your wired headphones into Bluetooth headphones. That seems like a lot of extra steps. It's extra steps, but also like your wired headphones, they are the better headphones, and you would not have been able to use them wirelessly without this. So it's like something you did not have before.

And it's not like you're trying to replicate something that already exists. I spent a lot of money on AirPods Max too. I'm just saying. Don't take this away from him. This from this, in addition to my headphones, is way less expensive than your single pair of headphones. I have no idea what you're talking about. But this is nice because you get the best of both worlds. You have your nice headphones.

You have a lot of power coming into them. So they come alive as should be. They sound really great with this DAC. But also, you're free from your phone. You can leave your headphone in the room and go into the other room. It's really nice. And you can clip this to your clothes. I've been clipping it like this, by the way, to the, like, I wear hoodies all the time. Oh, to the string of your hoodie. We've got to keep in mind the audio listeners. So this is really nice.

So anyway, this is really nice DAC. Some niceties about it. you have some on-board software, like you can navigate with the menu, or there's an app if you don't want to fiddle with the menu. So you can have a full 10-band EQ on this. So you can fully customize the audio signature that you want, and it's saved on device, which means that that EQ you can use wherever you are, with whichever device you want,

with whichever headphones you want. Because usually when you do EQ, you do it like with software or, for example, on your Mac. But now you've got to make sure that you turn it off if you use different headphones, because that EQ won't sound as good with different headphones. And also if you switch to your iPhone, but now the EQ isn't there on your iPhone anymore. So, yeah, having it on a device like this that's portable that you can use everywhere

with audio hardware is really, really good. I have no opinion on audio stuff. I think AirPods and AirPods Pro sound the exact same. But I do have a serious passion for exactly what you just talked about, where you program something like that into the device itself and not in software. This is like a thing with keyboards. With my keyboard, the keyboard layout is on the firmware of the board. And I plug it into any device, it's the exact same.

If it's a Logitech keyboard, you can't do that because it needs the Logitech app to interpret everything. And so you plug it into a different device and, ah, it's different now. So I love it when you can do that sort of thing. So I fully support that. That is the most exciting thing for me so far about this product. And there's a bunch of nice stuff. Even if you don't care about EQ, there's a bunch of other things that you can set on the DAC itself and it's saved to the hardware. For example, you can limit the volume, the max volume. So, for example, this is pretty powerful.

This is small, but very powerful, which means it can explode your ears. If you use low impedance headphones with this and go to max volume, not only it may damage your headphones if they can't handle the power, but it will damage your ears. So you can set a max volume that you can never go over. What? What? Don't worry about it. What? I can't hear you. What? You're fine. What? So Matt, yeah, Chris has been using the DAC maybe. Look, I know how to rock and roll.

And when you do that, you go up to 11. Yeah, if you're not busting through several pairs of headphones per year when you rock out, are you even, I don't know. Why did you think I had to buy AirPods Max 2? Jesus Christ. I mean, the AirPods Max, you can't even blow them up because they're like, you can't even do wired properly anyway. They don't even do analog in any way or form.

Yeah, so you can limit the max volume. This is nice. And the last thing, which will help me transition to the other things I want to mention, you can save a left-right balance on it. so this ties back into the my hearing issues that i've been dealing with with my left ear i keep seeing this my left ear i'm hearing not as good and i keep seeing doctors who are all sorry chris and anyway so this is the lasting issue for me i need to set up the left right balance on my devices

and yeah if I can do it on this one I can do it now on this one hardware and it sits everywhere it is fixed value that I do not have to replicate because on macOS it's a fuzzy slider on iOS it's also a fuzzy slider but it's a different scale of a slider that so you can't set it now I just have one left-right balance setting on this one DAC, and it persists everywhere. I just have to use this.

So this is nice. However, and this is my transition to, like, I have discovered a world of, like, a tiny world of software for the Mac that lets you do all of this in software, obviously without the advantage of having it on a device that's portable that you can use with multiple headphones and mics and whatever. But in terms of EQ, for example, I was looking into something.

So, you know, like I said, I want to shift the audio balance to the left a little bit for me. But that's not quite what I want. It helps. Like, it feels better when I shift it a bit to the left. But it's not quite right. And the reason it's not quite right is because something that's actually pretty common in I'm reading with people who have hearing impairment of all kinds.

But most usually when you are one ear that's impaired or like not functioning as properly, it's not just that you have less volume in that ear. It's also that you have a different range of frequencies that are affected. Like, for example, in my left ear, I can hear less bass and less like the trebles and the highs. Those are the two things that I hear less compared to my right ear and compared to what I was before I was having those issues.

Whereas like the middle of the spectrum, like the vocals, the mids and all that, I can hear just fine in the left ear. So I don't need to raise those in the left ear. So when I use the left and right balance slider and shift it to the left, it raises everything on the left to compensate. Or rather, it's not really. It lowers everything on the right, but you know what I mean. But it turns out there are ways with software that you can EQ your sound

just for a specific channel, just for the left channel, for instance, which is what I've done with EQ Mac. And I forgot to put in a link, but I did put a screenshot in the Notion, if you want to look. This is the first, no, the second screenshot, sorry, not the first one. Let me reorder now. So the tall screenshot. It looks like this. I have no idea what's going on here. This is an app that you install on your Mac, and it's, so you know about SoundSource, maybe. Yeah. Yeah, it's just SoundSource.

Pretty sure they were a previous sponsor. Yeah, that's right. Rogue Amoeba, the sponsor does. So EQ Mac is just, on the basics, it's just SoundSource. But it's got more advanced features that are integrated. Whereas SoundSource, you have to rely on plugins to do the same sort of things. So what you can see on this screenshot, let me go from top to bottom. At the top, so you have just the global volume of your Mac, right? There's a volume knob.

On the right, that's the left-right balance. You can see on my screenshot, it's set to perfectly centered because remember, I'm setting the balance on the DAC, not in software. Below that, you have an app mixer, so you can set the volume per app, just like SoundSource, right? And you can mute specific apps and all that. And below that, this is the interesting part, you have an EQ. So EQ, so just to remind everyone, EQ is you raise and lower volume on specific ranges of frequencies in the sound.

So it sounds complicated, but it's really not. Picture like a five, no, let's say a three band EQ. Like this is very basic, three band EQ. First band, you can control all the bases, right? The third band, you control all the highs. And the middle band, you control all the mids. That's to simplify things. And that's just EQing. You just raise and lower volume on those bands. And so EQs, they can be extremely fine-tuned.

You can have 8-band EQs, 10-band EQs, 15, 20. Those exist in software just like this. Or in hardware, you have huge table. some DJs have this in front of them with a bunch of vertical sliders No, the only thing DJs have is a MacBook Pro and they just hit the space bar. That's the only thing they do and then they do this, they pump their arms in the air and people think that's a job I'm a cranky old man That's right

I apologize for every DJ Don't apologize on my behalf That's all they do, they just hit the space bar on a MacBook Pro Oh my god So this is the lower part of EQ Mac This screenshot here I've got an EQ here With two bands set up And the first one is Around 88 hertz So that's in the bass And you can see It's got the yellow The yellow curve on the graph Can you see that yellow bump On the graph It shows you where that band, my EQ band is.

So it's a peak. And it's basically in the area around that yellow curve is where I'm raising the volume. Okay. And there's another band that I've set up. It's a green one. This one is on the right edge, on the right half of the graph. And in this area is where I raise the volume of the highs and a bit of the mids as well. And this is it. And for both bands, in EQ Mac, you can set it to only affect the left channel.

So now, thanks to this, I'm able to, like, compensate instead of just raising everything on the left. Just raise just a little bit the bass. And you see, I'm raising the bass a little higher than I do the highs. because I feel like that feels more right, that compensates better when I'm hearing, when I'm feeling in terms of my hearing problematic. So yeah, this is like, this is bizarrely hard to find,

like software that lets you EQ just on one channel. mostly 90% of the time you find EQ software that lets you just adjust the EQ on all channels equally. So this is really nice. But if you have sound source, you don't want to buy EQ Mac. By the way, EQ Mac is actually really, really good. It does a bunch more things. This is one feature that I'm highlighting here, but it's very powerful. You can use it very basically like I'm doing, but

it's extremely powerful. It also has device order priority. You can set it to like, you can prioritize specific outputs as you connect them and automatically switch to that output. It's really nice. But so does SoundSource. SoundSource has that feature. And if you already have SoundSource, I found out that you can also do this in SoundSource. That is EQ just on the left or on the right. But you need a plugin. And so this is my second screenshot here in the document. Holy Windows XP, Batman. Yeah.

Have you seen this? The face of this? I mean, it does look like every other audio. Audio plugins have this very, like, they're still very skeuomorphic. They have a vibe. They're very, like, a lot of audio plugins mimic hardware. So the audio plugin UI looks like the hardware. And because audio people are cranky. You think I'm cranky? Audio people get cranky if you change anything at all.

My brother's an audio person. Like, anything changes. Like, Apple, every year when Apple does major software updates, I get a call from him yelling about how he hates it. Every single year, without fail. Well, I think, yeah, I think they are a good person. Yes. Eh. Eh. So, yes, you can get a plug-in. This plug-in you have to install. So, SoundSource ships with a bunch of included plug-ins, I think so, maybe.

I don't remember which ones I installed or which were built in. But you can install additional plugins in SoundSource. So this one is called Voxengo Overtone GEQ. I guess that's the full name of it. It's free. You install it. It shows up in SoundSource. And the UI is very weird. And if you don't know what any of the names, any of the buttons mean, It's strange.

I had to poke around to understand what I was doing. Whereas in EQ Mac, to do basically the same thing, it felt very intuitive. And clearly, this plugin is meant for another population. This is meant for people who know what they're doing and what they want to be doing with this. They're nuts. Yeah, but I feel like after a few weeks of playing with plugins like this, maybe I'm becoming one of them. I don't know. I rest my case. Yeah, yeah. You're quite right. You're quite right. But, yeah, as you can see,

I've tried to do basically around the same thing. There's less bands here. Like, it's way less precise. It's just, like, there's just a few bands. So I just raise the sliders a little bit in the lower frequencies, raise a little bit in the higher frequencies, and just on the left channel, the right channel is unaffected. And, yeah, this replicates pretty much. what I've been trying to do. Nice. And I guess, yeah, that's it. This is just like a little bit of meandering I've been doing over the past days and weeks,

just trying to play with audio. This DAC is awesome. Makes my sound, my headphones, they sound amazing with this. I actually did not realize that the difference would be that huge. I had read on Reddit forums or whatever, where all the weird audiophile people hang out, people who have these headphones, they say if you get a more powerful DAC, even though it doesn't really need it, if you get a more powerful DAC,

they will come alive. That's not good. Is it Toy Story? Oh, I wish. I wish they would come alive. But yeah, when you read this, you're like, what does that even mean? Like, they already sound amazing. What do you mean they come alive? And then you get a more powerful deck and then you understand. Like, there's truly more, I don't even know how to explain, but there's like more sound. But not even in terms of volume. There's just like more sound without raising the volume. Yeah, I know. That's great.

yeah I'm glad you found a solution yeah I hope your hearing gets better but I'm glad you found a solution in the meantime it's not a great solution like I still it's still very janky all of this like but yeah I guess I make it do I was going to terrify both of you I have used an equalizer precisely once in my life really and it was on the receiver I actually used it in iTunes as well back in the day when iTunes had an equalizer.

But I'm pasting an image into the doc to show you basically what I did. Oh, God. Which is just boost that base, get rid of that treble. I was 10 years old. I didn't know what I was doing. And you have a screenshot from that still? No, I just, I put something together to illustrate. Oh, okay. Yeah, Matt's all about that base. Wait, which side is the base? The right side or the left side? I think the left side is the base. Usually it's the left side. You should flip this technically. Pretend it's the other way around.

But I would just boost the bass, reduce the treble, and I'd be like, oh, yeah, that's how Green Day is supposed to sound. Oh. And that's, you know, that's legit. I think I've had, in this adventure of audiophilia, I guess, I don't know what to call it, I've had a brief period where I was trying to go for like flat signatures and being able to hear everything all at once.

And I prioritize instrument separation over like boominess or width of sound. But now I'm like, I'm all in on just, I want to have fun. And this is the difference between the Beyerdynamic headphones and the Meze. I put on the Beyerdynamic when I want to be able to analyze the music, like get all of the music.

Usually when I discover music for the first time, maybe I will put on the Beyerdynamic just to be able to hear everything. But then if I want to really enjoy it, I put on the Meze headphones and they sound really fun. They have a ton of bass. And some people don't really like the Meze because they have a lot of bass. They sound warm, if that makes sense. They sound really warm. But that's fun. I think people should have fun with headphones. Don't try to be an audiophile person and make your music flat. I don't know what to say. Okay.

All right, we really got to move on to the challenge. The challenge this week was from me to find some pet tech because I'm getting a puppy in two weeks. So I put in our document an automatic ball launcher. And my goal is to teach her how to use this. And basically, she can take a ball, pick it up, put it in here, and then it'll launch it 20 to 45 feet. And they're really soft balls. So this says it can work for indoor, outdoor.

I kind of looked at it, and I think it'll be okay for indoors as long as you don't have a lot of breakable stuff. but I plan I think I could set this up to launch it down our hallway and like she could play with this all day long and I'll teach her how to use it and you know yeah so that's what I got I'm really excited for I bought this already and I'm really excited to teach her how to use it I hope this works it looks cool did you get it already yeah I got it already we haven't got the dog yet but I bought this oh we've been buying so much stuff did you run after the balls to try it out? I didn't run after her,

but I did pick it up and put it in. It works. You did it without any passion. It was a passionless retrieve. She will be much more passionate about retrieving. She is a golden retriever. Can I say something mean? This toy. It looks like a toilet. It does, kind of. I can see. It looks like a potty training toilet. Yeah.

Worst case scenario, your dog sees it that way, too. Nope, that's for outside. That's for outside. Nice. Matt, what'd you do? Oh, I brought... I had a conversation with someone at work last week, and they have multiple cats but you can do this with dogs too and they have a automatic feeder that is extra fancy because not only

can it automatically disperse food on a time schedule you can also put a little RFID tag on the pet's collar so that when they approach it knows how much food it's given them today and will give them food and if you have two pets you can tell the difference between which one and it can say no buddy you've had enough today but then the other one comes up and it gives them food. What kind of CIA rated sort of pet feeder is this? I kind of love this. Danielle's cat feeds herself and we have to lock her out

of the pantry. At the dinner table? Yeah. She makes her own dinner. She made raviolios. Yeah, she made raviolios last night. And she just sat at the table with a fork and knife and stuff. No, she will go in the pantry and climb into the bag of her food and gophers it out. She'll fill up her mouth, bring it out, and then drop it all over the kitchen. And we've had to start locking her out of the pantry. Because even if the door's not close all the way to the point where it latches, where it's just slightly open, she knows how to open the door.

if it's not latched completely 100% and I need to replace the doorknob on that pantry because it doesn't latch all the way sometimes so she knows how to get it open and she'll just feed herself and she got a little chunky there for a little while so we had a worried about heart disease and stuff you know we're not trying to shame her but we do want her to be healthy there's a screen as well that says hello which means you know I'd like it and I guess regarding the pictures, it shows

the name of the cat that it's recognizing, I guess, of the pet that it's recognizing. I guess so. I haven't used the specific one, but it seemed like the most reasonable. Oh, so you didn't order this for your dog. I have one dog, and that dog just grazes. Does this work for dogs as well? It works. I mean, it could work with humans if you put the collar on. It could work with anybody. I guess. That's not a thing we need to explore. Yeah, it's not.

Chris, what did you, or no, Niléane, what did you bring? Yes. So in regard to this challenge, I went on Amazon.fr, and I literally, like I'm not kidding, I literally typed in the search bar, cat toy, pressed enter, order the first result. And this is the first result. What is this? I've got it here. Here it is. Boom. On camera. See, I bought it. Oh, it's so small. Okay. It's a tiny ball that has a motor inside.

And actually, let me show you. There's a USB-C port here. Oh, so the cat can chase it. Exactly. It runs around by itself. And so you attach a little tail to it that flops around. And the cat chases it. And yes, our cat really likes it. It works. oh my god I can't put it back together I put it back together in the wrong way I'm breaking it live the cats are very upset with you

so now it's turned on and you can see oh my gosh that thing that thing gets moving and also guys it's extremely loud oh wow that would get annoying yeah but it works and it was 13 euros literally it has the best seller badge on Amazon. This is the top result. The most sold cat toy in France apparently. On Amazon. Interesting. Alright.

I think we all did the challenge except Matt didn't actually buy the thing. Niléane and I bought the thing. Matt loses clearly. The prompt said find the hungry pets. But how can you review something if you haven't used it? That's not a requirement for YouTube. That's true. I was about to be snarky. That's true, Max. What? Did I just call? What? Oh, God. Yeah. Anyways, Matt, I believe it's your challenge for next week. What do you got for us?

It is my challenge. And I have one question for the two of you. How many apps are in your iPhone dock? Four. I don't even have four. Obviously. I would like us to spend this next week with three apps in the dock. You are a monster, Matt Birchler. You are going to throw off my muscle memory. You are going to throw off. I don't even know which one. You are a monster. Wow. You are a monster. You have to take one app, but then where are you going to put it? What else is that going to change?

Do you have room on your home screen? upon your house, Matt Birchler. I bet you guys use every space on your home screen and now you're going to have to lose something from the home screen. Now I've got to get rid of something and I have three folders on my home screen so I've got to get rid of something in there. It looks stupid already. This is horrible. Why do you hate us? Why? Let's talk about this. Why isn't Apple resizing the dock when you remove an icon? Why is it too wide like this? Because Apple wouldn't ever...

Because Apple's like, why would anyone just put three apps down there? Put the most amount of stuff in there. Add being with it. It's dark resized. Yes. You are a monster, Matt Birchler. Anyway, it should be a fun one. A pox upon your house. A pox. That's it. There's no other details. Just be mad at me for the next seven days. I'm going to be so mad. Luckily, it's actually only a few days. No, wait. No, we're recording on another weird day. Lightly shorter week. Six days. Six days. I thought it was only going to be a couple.

I'm not here in the next one, by the way. You're going to have to do it two weeks then. So sorry. Yeah, you got to go for two weeks. That's okay. I'm not as upset as Chris. This is going to throw off my muscle. Like, literally, I experimented with a different app in the dock recently, and I didn't even make it a half a day. Because I was like, this is just throwing off all my muscle memory. Okay. Well, we'll see how it goes Alright

I'm so mad right now Anyways, let's wrap up the show Thank you all so much for listening I appreciate you all for listening and watching, we are on YouTube Thank you all Thank you to MacStories for having us We're MacStories Podcasts after all Go check out all the writings and other shows on there and have a great day Bye bye Oh bye