535: Proper Governance
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From Relay, this is Connected, episode 535. Today's show is brought to you by Squarespace and NetSuite. I'm your annual chairman, Federico Vittici, and it's my pleasure to introduce Mr. Stephen Hackett to the show. Hello, Stephen. Man, I don't have a title. It's bumming me out. Well... Do better, right? Just get good. You gotta get good. Make better guesses. I am joined by our keynote chairman, Mr. Mike Hurley.

Still feels good to have a name, you know? A name, yeah. I'm happy to still have something to hold on to for a while. That's good. Hey, speaking of holding on to things, we need to make something right. Okay. In September, during the podcast-a-thon, we had a segment in which we taught Jason how to coin flip. And he graduated coin flip university. So we need to update the Bill of Rickies program

I still think we can use dice by peak out, but in person, I think Jason could be allowed to make coin flips again.

So I think we just take out the lifetime ban bullet point. Oh my God. We're doing it? We're doing it. He successfully flipped a coin like multiple times. Federico, it was weird. I was there and I don't really believe it. The man knows how to do it now. So it isn't fair to uphold the ban. It's like watching somebody learning, I don't know, how to smoke or whatever. He's doing it now. Or just flip a coin, which is what he did learn.

Or whistling, you know, like if you could teach someone how to whistle. What I'll say is, because we've got to observe the rules, let's just make a mark on the Bill of Rookies. We will need to come back to this when the time is right, and we will adjust the wording. Okay, I will do a comment. For context, I will say, whenever we do it, I would still like to maintain in the written form

the fact that jason was bad at it before and then got good it's like jason snell previously had a lifetime ban on flipping yes in relation to the rickies something however however yes and there needs to be the word however at some point in the in the phrasing okay all right okay i'm making a comment on the page in notion so next time we play a game we will look at this

And I will also just state for the record, based on... It's not in my power to summarize the amount of feedback that we have received about the previous games. Let's just say we're all aware that there could be some potential issues with the new Bill of Rikies, but the farm will be finding that out together. Yeah.

We'll see. It's basically what I'm going to say is we'll see how it goes. And we're all going to go on this world of adventure together as we score this throughout the year. Something that I thought about like is if there is an Apple event during my parental leave, there's going to be some interesting. And if, and if, because obviously I will nominate somebody right to play. It's just like when I was gone in October, no big deal. Sure. But if, but you had nothing to lose. So like if,

If that person loses for me, then I don't know. Then they lose. Then I don't know. No, no. You make them your stand-in. I'll have to contest it because I don't know about you, but I know the Bill of Rickies and there's nothing in the Bill of Rickies that talks about this. Well, you should have thought that before you had a kid, you know?

That's why I had my children before the Billerickeys, to avoid this. That is not why that happened. We'll see. What I'm saying is, I'm sure it will be fine, but we'll see, you know? You got to pick somebody good. True champion or not. Maybe I'll pick one of you. That would be complicated. You thought about that? You know, who knows what's going to happen? We'll find out. Maybe Federico and I play against chat GBT, you know?

No, we did that once, didn't we? We played with chat GPT once and the people who make the rookies websites were very upset with us.

there it was upset it's true the eternal struggle that's the eternal struggle it's true we'll see what happens i don't think it's something i need to worry about because i don't think there's going to be an apple event before the wwdc but you can never you can never know no i think i think there'll be some new products potentially when you're out but i think it's all press release stuff like you're not going to have a key a video for an m4 ipad air or an m4 macbook air like well lots of people would tell you that the iphone se is the most important phone that apple makes so they'll do an event for that but

I don't think that that's the case by any stretch. Follow-up. Speaking of devices that people think are more important than they actually are. Oh, my gosh. Wow. Okay.

All right. Let's talk about the big iPad air. Steven, what did people write in to tell us about? So many people wrote in to tell us that they love the big iPad air. So listener Robbie wrote in, uh, this is Robbie. I'm a musician and teacher and know many professionals who only buy the pro model iPad to use the app for score to read sheet music at a legible size. Uh, four scores come up before on Mac power users. And we interview musicians. It's very popular. Uh,

But it's not, going back to Robbie, it's not power hungry. You don't need an iPad Pro to run it. People just want the big screen. Many of my peers were pleased at the announcement of a more affordable large iPad and will likely update to the large Air next cycle using it only for live performances. And Robbie has a link we'll put in the show notes talking about their rehearsal tech setup, which I found really interesting. So good use there, I think.

And then listener Duncan wrote in another reason that the 13 inch iPad air exists is for businesses. I have multiple local restaurants in my city that have a 13 inch iPad pro at the host stand to run the seating application. So like, you know, these booths are taken, these are waiting, that sort of thing.

This is obviously overkill for the powerful iPad Pro. I'm sure there are other business applications that would be a better fit for the 13-inch iPad Air. A lower cost is a win for these small businesses. Also good. Also good. So, yeah, people are excited about it, you know, as they should be. But it doesn't sound like any of these people have actually bought one. Well, I mean, Robbie sounds like he's going to.

Yeah, but he hasn't, so he might change his mind when the time comes. What if they made a bigger iPad mini, like a 13-inch iPad mini? Yeah, what if, you know? You know? What if? We want Apple to get weird. Let's do it. Come on, Apple. Think about it. Think about it. iPad mini plus. iPad mini max. Uh-huh.

See, they need you in these rooms, Stephen. You know, Apple really went downhill after I quit, you know? Yes, that's true. I forget that when you said that, I forgot that you worked at Apple. Yeah, I was a genius, you know? Conflict of interest right there, you know? Wow. I never worked at Apple. I never worked at Apple. Federico, you ever worked at Apple?

Never. Can Stephen be trusted, really? Like, if you think about it? I'm not sure. Oh, I don't trust anyone. That's how you get around it. Wow. Can't have a conflict of interest if there's no interest, you know? And if I'm always conflicting. Constant conflict, zero interest. Please. Conflict is my father.

Stephen, you wrote an article about your UniFi setup. Oh, I did. In the middle of that article, there is some follow-up for this show. You brought to the show a while back that you were having issues with battery drain on your Apple Watches, and you weren't sure what it was, and then you kind of came to the conclusion that you thought it was your new Wi-Fi setup.

And in this article, you referenced this and how you fixed it. So I want you to talk about that on the show. Yeah. So I switched over to Fiverr in October. It was finally available on my side of the street. You can read a lengthy explanation of that in the footnote of this article. Big footnote. Big footnote. Yeah. It's almost its own article. Yeah. There are a couple examples of 512 with like a linkless thing where I write one sentence, but then like two paragraphs in the footnote. Sometimes it's just fun, you know? Get weird. Yeah.

I think Federico does a really good job of that in his reviews. You know, the footnotes are some of the best parts. Yeah. Yeah, thank you. You can't really footnote a podcast. I mean, we tried with the B-sides feature in our CMS, but no one uses it. It's not really a footnote so much, you know? Like, that would be weird, wouldn't it? If you actually did do that. Anyway. A footnote. That's when you, like, write something on your toes. It's a footnote. Hello? Hello? Hello?

Anyways. No, we're done now. Bye. Switch to fiber. That kicked off, as you can imagine, a nerd project to update my Wi-Fi. And I ordered the U7 Pros, which is a line of Wi-Fi 7 access points from Ubiquiti. And it seems like the U7 line in general maybe isn't ready for primetime.

I had a lot of issues with IOT devices and the Apple watches in my household dropping off the wifi, struggling to stay connected. And like, I'm sure you've experienced this. Like if you go hiking or something and your phone drops out of cellular range, it gets hot because it's like cranking up the radios to connect to something.

And did some reading. Not everyone has this problem, let me say first of all. But some people seem to. So I swapped out the U7s for a U6 product called the U6 Mesh, which instead of being wall-mounted or hanging on the ceiling, they're like standalone tubes, basically. I did that because it was actually better for me to be able to sit them where I needed them.

And that has solved the issue. So everything has been good. I, it does sort of negate my original goal of like, I want faster wifi because these are just wifi six and that's what I had, but I'm hopeful the U seven line gets drained out and in the future I could upgrade to it. But, um, but in the meantime, I have enjoyed other benefits of being in the unify ecosystem, uh,

I, for years, had trouble because I was using just kind of cheap gigabit switches. I mean, I guess I could have bought something nicer, but every two or three years, I would have like a Netgear or a Linksys, whatever, gigabit switch just die. And I have one in the house and one in the office. The two buildings are connected by outdoor rated ethernet that is run between the buildings. And things were always kind of flaky. I also had an issue where

When you have an Eero set up, you have an Eero at the top of your network. So you have your cable modem or fiber modem or whatever, and then you have an Eero, and that's where all the routing is handled. And for years, across multiple Eeros, I would have that Eero drop its wired connection from gigabit to 100 megabit. And that was fine when I had slow internet, not fine when I had fast internet. And so I would...

be uploading a show. It's like, why is this taking so long? And my whole network was like capped at a hundred Meg because that head Eero would lower its connection speed. I was never able to fix that. And so that is fixed. I've got reliable switches and yes, the wifi is not as fast as I want it to be. But again, I could fix that in the future. I will say I was, I should have expected it. I was unaware the unified community is,

is very a very particular group of people oh that's one way to say it okay so i had somebody like someone was like oh how are you racking your uh gateway because the gateway have is like really small it's basically the size of like a sandwich i was like i'm not just like on a shelf in my kid's closet where the rest of my network stuff is like it's fine so it was like why aren't you running fiber between your house and your studios like because i just have ethernet run like it's fine um

It's fine. So I may not write about UniFi very much in the future to save my inbox. Why don't you just put a satellite dish on the side of your house and aim it at the pod cabin? I know. That's what you should be doing instead. I know. Do I want to run fiber between the house and the studio? Yeah, kind of. But there's no need to. Because everything I did is gigabit. So I didn't go to 2.5 gig. There's no real benefit for me to do that, even internally on my network. So...

So yeah, seems to be fixed. Wi-Fi is not faster, but I got fancy network equipment. That's fun. I feel like there should be a phrase, like a term for this though, where like, it's not like a zero-sum game or something, but they're not too far from it, where you made a nerd change because of a specific thing you were looking for.

but you actually didn't get that. Yeah. Right. Where like you, you wanted faster internet to take, like get the most benefit out of your gig, your fiber connection.

But you haven't gotten that. You're back to the same thing, but you're so far in now that now you're like, well, I'm in this now, so I'll get the most that I can out of it. Where maybe if you'd gone for a Wi-Fi 7 Eero system, you may have actually gotten what you wanted instead of going to Unify and changing everything out. And yes, you've gotten other benefits, but the original reason for changing...

was more getting the faster speed that you can't get yet, right? Yeah. It's almost as if you left one social media network because you didn't like the way it was run.

And you went to a different one that you thought was going to be better, but turns out just as bad. What do you do? Yes. Hypothetically. Well, I don't know. I think from what you're saying, you invest deeper into the new one, I think, based on what you said. Maybe you should go outside and look up into the blue sky. Just use Wi-Fi, not fiber. I think that's what you're saying.

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Mastodon, the social platform, is becoming a non-profit. So they're creating a European non-profit entity that will be responsible for Mastodon ecosystem and platform components. Basically, Eugene Rochko, who is the founder, lead developer, creator of Mastodon, will no longer be solely responsible for the management and focus of the Mastodon product. And the non-profit

we'll call it Mastodon Nonprofit, will own the for-profit entity that currently exists.

This has been reported in a bunch of places. TechCrunch had a good article about this where I got this information from. One of the things in there was 835,000 monthly active users use Mastodon, which is really small. It's a big number, but for a social media network that is small, I think it says something for what Mastodon is, where it is essentially people like us. It's nerds.

and I think at this point that number to me was interesting because it signals to me that I don't consider it likely that this will grow significantly I mean like what is blue skies like 20 million now or something like that right um

So, you know, threads and Twitter are in the millions, I think 100 million or something like that. I'm not particularly surprised by that number, but it's just interesting to see. You can make a very good business on 835,000 monthly active users, though, I'm sure. But I think that is also seemingly not what they care about now. It's just kind of making it sustainable and...

you know, available and kind of like more political. How many users do you say Mastodon has? 835,000 multi-active users. Yeah, so it looks like Blue Sky's 26 million. Yeah. Which is wild. I found this interesting. It's interesting that they're doing this. It's a thing that really it seems like they have announced that they're doing it, but we don't really know a lot of what the detail of what this is going to be. The thing that immediately jumped to my mind is like...

I would be interested to understand how in the long term is a WordPress scenario avoided here? Like my original thought was like, how much control will Rochco continue to have? And so I'll give a couple of quotes from the TechCrunch article that are from Mastodon. Throughout, we will focus on establishing the appropriate governance and leadership frameworks that reflect the nature and purpose of Mastodon as a whole and responsibly serve the community.

Mastodon is trying to avoid situations where only one person has decision-making powers with today's new structure. So it's interesting, but I think this... I...

I don't know. I don't know if non-profit entities and for-profit entities being owned by one another is really a thing that works in the long term. Maybe I just don't know enough about this. Well, that's what I'm thinking of as well. If Mastodon remains a for-profit entity, they're currently just making money from Patreon and grants and merchandise. So it's not like...

But they might one day say, all right, you have to pay to use Mastodon now. And then what happens? How does that change the way that the for-profit entity considers itself? And then how does that change the non-profit entity that owns the for-profit? It's very confusing, right? And I don't see a scenario where something like this isn't at least a little bit complicated. It's absolutely complicated. I think any governance of...

a platform this big, you know, even 835,000 or whatever it is, it's bigger than anything we're doing.

That's a complicated thing. And like the nonprofit thing is fine. But like what I wrote in my link to it was what matters is like the people running the nonprofit, right? At the end of the day, it is still a series of decisions that has to be made. Is it better that it's going to be some sort of board of people as opposed to one dude? Like probably, but it's not a fail safe. You don't, we don't, it's not, these things are not inherently good, right?

because of the fact of what they are, right? Sure. Non-profit and charity and a group of people, they're not inherently good just because, or even open source, right? That's the other thing I was looking for. None of these things are inherently good just because of the way that they're set up. It still requires people making the right decisions, which they definitely won't do all the time. Federico, what do you think about this?

This is one of those things where I wish I had thoughts, but I really don't. And probably because I am, I don't know, maybe I'm not mature enough. I don't know. I just, I would like to say something that doesn't make me sound like an idiot. Sure. And there's probably no other way to say it. So whatever. Um,

Why can people not be weird psychopaths on the internet? Why do we... You asked how do we avoid the WordPress situation. Not that I'm accusing anybody of being a weird psychopath, but just broadly speaking... These are two unconnected scenarios. Just like...

I honestly don't know what to say. Like, okay, now it's going to be a non-profit. But like, what if the non-profit is managed by a bunch of weird psychopaths? Sure. Then what? Like, you know, like, I just think whatever is going to be Eugene Rochko or the non-profit, if whatever person or organization is behind Macedon, if at some point they come out and be like, uh...

Guys, we like Nazis now. Like, no matter who's behind it, it's going to turn the whole thing sour. Yeah, and that's kind of what I'm saying. These things, they sound nice, right? And that is interesting. And there's probably a lot of niceness in it, but none of these things give any kind of certainty to anything. It's kind of what I'm getting at. Exactly. Like, there's...

Sure, there's more governance. Now everybody likes to use this word. This is like when everybody started using the word colorways last year. Now everybody's using governance. Okay, so now there's proper governance behind this. Governance is the word of the year. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. Okay, there's proper governance. All right. What happens if two years from now, turns out there's one real nasty weirdo in that nonprofit? Do we like Mastodon now? Yeah.

Like the governance could slow Macedon down. Yeah. Right. Like there are still things that Macedon does not have that people want it to have. And there's like a roadmap. Right.

What if now the implementation of new features require the governance structure to approve? And that is a six month process, right? Slowing down further. It's like all of these things are just different ways of doing things. It's not inherently good or bad. And the reason I'm mentioning this is I've seen a lot of people being like, oh, this is incredible. Like I am sure there are things about this that are better. And like, and you can look at this and be like, I would prefer this to

to threads and like and i understand that right like i get that but it's none of these things are good inherently because they're still made up of people who are complicated and like you're saying about like the psychopath thing i think anybody that wants to run anything of scale yes has something in their brain that makes them want to do that

That goes for me. I am including myself. Anyone that wants to run their own business has a thing in their brain that makes them want to do that. Because it's not, it is, you have, it goes for all of us, I think. Like you have in you something which means you are willing to make decisions that impact other people. Like you are willing to do that. That is a thing and at a scale that is larger than just my own family.

Not everybody is willing to do that or wants that. And that grows all the way up to, I want to leave my country. There is a scale between business owner, this is a Mike Hurley thought, a business owner and president.

And there is like a scale of like where you are on that because, and that is about how much power you want in your life, how much control you want in your life. And that there is this, there is a scale and a spectrum between these things. And like the, the bigger the thing is that you're trying to run, the more willing you are to make these kinds of decisions and choices. And that doesn't mean you're good. It doesn't mean you're bad. It just means that like there is a level of detachment that you are willing for yourself to go through and,

And yeah, anyway. Mike. And it's just, yes. You're getting ready to be a dad. Yeah. What if you form a nonprofit to raise your child? It's a governance structure. She needs to be feeding. I mean, I think, well, I mean, it feels like there is a governance structure already, which includes everybody else in my family. But like. That's complicated.

complicated so we can talk about that there already is a governance there really feels like there is a governance structure that that's gonna gonna own the uh the internal structure of my own family yeah inside of its family yeah but yeah that's kind of my i don't know why i decided today i wanted to to share this like thing that i consider to be a fundamental truth but that is it just like everybody and people people make decisions those decisions aren't always good and that is just kind of the way it goes and

no structure can guarantee good because the structures also change because you look at open AI. It's like, oh yeah, nonprofit, that's good until they decide they don't want to be that anymore. And now it's a, well now all the bets are off, right?

Yeah, yeah. I think especially with these things, especially with technology products, there's the type of nerd, and I'm saying that in a lovingly affectionate way, nerds tend to seek consistency and rigidity and something that is predictable. So like, oh, Macedon announced a non-profit, that means it's always going to be good because we like non-profits, right? But like you said, like,

people change their minds people change their nature people are guess what inherently opportunistic there is something that i fundamentally believe and you will not nobody can change my mind about this this may be the most obvious silly thing i've ever said on the show everybody has a price literally everyone on planet earth has a price there is

There is a monetary amount that hypothetically I could give to Eugene Rochko and be like, hey, I want you to become real nasty on Macedon after I write you this check. There is that amount. There's a number that hypothetically I could put on that check. And so that kind of utopian...

like scenario where, oh, everything is always going to be the same. Like I could potentially, I could name one technology that was released, never touched again, and it always stayed the same forever.

And it's RSS. It was literally created, released on the web, and they never got weird. In fact, it's so awesome. And it's only because nobody owns it. Exactly. Because nobody... The moment that a person owns anything, there is the potential to be used for good, but also to be used for evil and nasty things. And there's never going to be consistency. Well, RSS is used for nasty things.

Sure. Do you subscribe to any? Well, no. It's like it can be used for ill, right? Because it is just the same as like, I am convinced there is hate on Mastodon. You know, like I know it's there. I just haven't found it, you know, as such. Right about ubiquity. But like there are definitely communities on Mastodon that aren't good.

Yeah. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because ultimately, like Federico said, people are opportunistic. I can't say it. You got there. I did. But also, like, all of these platforms have the same inherent problem that short-form text-based social media platforms

It's just problematic. And when you can hide behind an anonymous face, or even if you're required to use your own name and face, people are ugly on the internet. And that's just how things are. Yeah, it doesn't matter. So basically, within you, there are two wolves. One is good wolf and the other is bad wolf. And try not to, you know, succumb to the bad wolf, if you can. That's basically the gist of it.

I will sum this up by saying, I think that it is very good that the people who run Mastodon are trying their best, right? Yes. That they want to do things the right way. And I think that is good.

I have been especially reminded of that over the last couple of weeks. That's like, oh, they're trying, you know, like they're trying out here. But my point is like, I am intrigued about it. I want more information because I don't really feel like they've given a lot of it yet because it feels like they're very much working it out and they just wanted to announce that they were doing it and they definitely chose a right time for that. I think from a PR perspective, they chose the right time for that. I don't know if that was their consideration, but they did anyway.

And I am intrigued to see where they go with it. I want to see them do good stuff with it. I believe in Mastodon now more than maybe I have in a while. But it's just like, just to remember, so we don't get disappointed, don't potentially get disappointed later on. None of these things give perfect outcomes. And I think we would all be happier if we stopped looking for them.

It's like you also don't have to delete your WordPress blog. You don't have to do that. All of these things. You've got to find what works for you. You find your own way of drawing the circles you need to draw. But we can't get along forever hoping that everything will be perfect forever because otherwise really the only thing you can do is just not use the internet. This episode of Connected is made possible by NetSuite.

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The guide is free to you at NetSuite. N-E-T-S-U-I-T-E. NetSuite.com slash connected. Our thanks to NetSuite for their support of the show. So switching gears to something hopefully more fun and less... Maybe we were not pessimistic. We were realistic. But in any case, a very different topic. I had an idea. It's a new year. Mike is going to be a dad in this new year. So I thought...

I wanted to take a look at what are some of the apps, some of the services, some of the maybe changes in our typical workflows that at some point this year we think we would like to try. Like what are things...

Usually I have these thoughts over the holiday break. I'm like, what do I want to try in the new year? Is there anything new that I want to try? New apps? New web services? Is there a particular change about the way I work that I want to try next year? So I thought, let's think about these things. And I think we can round robin them. Although I think Steven, until a few minutes ago, only had one kind of menacing item in his notes.

I do like the idea of round robin, though. I do like that. Maybe Stephen sometimes would just have to say same. It's going to be lumpy. Mike has like six things in here. Yeah. Well, you know, I can just like round robin at the end to myself. We'll find out. Yeah. I ain't going to go first. I'm going to just try rip the bandaid off because... Yeah, you are with this first one, my friend. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's fine. You know me, I don't care about people's judgment, except for my girlfriend.

And my dogs, although they're not strictly speaking people. Do they have thoughts about email? Well, I'm sure they have thoughts about the computers I use. In any case, I am trying superhuman as my email client. Wow.

And here's the best part. Yes, it's very expensive. I was going to say, like, talking about, like, everyone has a price. Hey-oh! Puerto Rico is pretty high. Yeah. Because I got to pay for superhuman, man. Come on. I need that nasty check. Come on. It's surprisingly good. That's the thing that surprised me the most. Like, I don't hate it. In fact, I...

I kind of really like it. Tell me why. This is more expensive than I thought it was, Federico. Yeah, because they added AI and they raised the prices. So did, I got an email today, Mike, I should tell you this, our Google Workspace bill is going to go up because they decided everyone should pay for Google Gemini. But what if we don't use it? Too bad.

Okay. Well, I'm pleased that I actually started using... I upgraded the one that I have for Cortex Sprint because I'm using Notebook LM. Yeah. Very slowly. So I had already done it. So I guess now I won't feel that too much because I'm already using Gemini. So I like it for a bunch of reasons.

I try not... I mean, obviously, the price is a concern. The thing is, like, between, like, regular emails, like, from developers, like...

discovering apps, working with developers for betas and stuff, working with PR people, and also using email because of CloudMax Story support. It is a core part of my business, and I spend a lot of time in email. It's what I do. I'm not saying that the price is justified because I don't think it is, but I don't feel awfully terrible about it. You feel like you're getting something for the money you're putting in. I am. I am. So...

It is surprisingly fast. And it's, I think, the best search, the fastest search I've ever tried in an email client. I think it's faster on desktop devices. It's very much like a keyboard-driven email client. On desktop, it's very impressive how fast it is. I'm using it primarily on iPhone and on the iPad. And so while the interactions are still fast,

on iOS and iPadOS. They're not as fast as on macOS. And I have to imagine, I think they are on Windows too. Still, there are a lot of keyboard shortcuts and I really appreciate the keyboard navigation that is also supported on iPad where you have hotkeys where you don't have to use the command key. Like for example, I'm looking at an email, I can just press the letter E like on Gmail desktop to

instantly archive that message. And there are plenty of those similar keyboard shortcuts. The main thing for me is the, they're called split inbox approach and notifications based on each split. So a split would be like a view. It's basically like you can create multiple custom views for a particular subset of senders.

You have your default important split. So a split, like they call it split because they literally split the screen in multiple tabs. You can call them tabs. You can call them views. The idea is the same. You create multiple views for different types of senders. I have my PR view where all the people from Apple PR go. And you can do that by literally like creating a filter and adding content.

contacts via their email addresses to that view. I have a purchases view where I created like emails that I get from PayPal, from Amazon, from eBay, like all the places that I used to buy stuff online.

I created a split called internal where I keep track of email communications starting from the Mac Stories team. So threads that I share with John, with Rob, with Alex, and so forth. You may say, well, don't you want to use AI products that categorize emails for you? Yes, I would like to, but the thing is they don't do a good enough job and I am too particular about my email to fully trust those implementations.

So I very much like this idea of like, I'm going to create my own splits. I'm going to take like an hour of my time to do some organization, but then I know that those things are going to work forever. Uh, and for each split, you can configure notifications. So for example, I don't want to be notified when I get like a newsletter, but I want to get notified if something hits my PR or my important split. So that granular control really works for me. Um,

Search is great. Regular search. But I was also surprised by their new Ask AI feature. Now, sure, this feature is not for everybody because it's kind of creepy. Obviously, Superhuman is storing the contents of your emails and there's an AI looking at those. But like,

After 15 years of trying multiple email clients, signing up for a whole bunch of apps and services, I'm past the point of creepy. Like now, if anybody wants to read my email, like because they're shady and they're running a shady business, like I'm well past, like that ship sailed many years ago. So whatever. The Ask AI is great.

Not perfect, but more than good, I would say. Like, you can ask a question like, hey, for example, yesterday I was like, when did I buy the anti-glare Steam.co.led? And it says, analyzing your email, and like,

15 seconds later was like, I found your confirmation receipt for the similar color anti-glare like last year, you know, on such and such day. Like, great. Like, and over the past few days, I had plenty of like similar natural language queries about my emails where like I remembered one or two details. But like if I wanted to use regular search, it would have taken me five minutes.

to maybe find that exact message. Here, I can just write down a sentence and it's going to use my data. It's going to look into my data to find me the result. Now, I understand some people are not okay with that. I am okay with AI helping me with my stuff, with my consent, because I get hundreds of emails every day. Nobody's got the time for that. I need to be efficient. I need to be fast. And so anything that helps me find the stuff I'm looking for and be faster,

It's good enough for me. So, yeah. I, like, look, it's expensive, but I'm going to keep using it. Do they have team? Is there, like, team sharing? Like, can you and John both use Superhuman and have a chat? I think they do, but I think John fundamentally hates Superhuman, so I haven't even pitched it. Okay.

Oh, Paul, you know what? I already see where this is going, and I feel bad for John. Where it's going is John's going to turn Mac Stories over to a non-profit to run. Take Federico's decision-making away. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, it's... So, really, your main...

your main kind of like set of features that you're benefiting from is the way it integrates with AI and also the way in which you can kind of create custom saved filters. Oh yeah, you, yes, you have other features. I just sort of took them for granted. Like you can snooze emails, um,

Yeah, I mean, it's got all the basics. I'm just wondering, like, what is it about Superhuman that is better than, like, Spark? And, yeah, I mean, Spark, bless them, they're trying with AI, but it's, yeah. Yeah, no, it's not good. I also wanted to mention, like, yes, it was the splits, AI, the notifications. I also love, like, really...

love especially on ipad command k opens the command bar that is kind of like kind of like raycast or kind of like the obsidian command palette but for email like you just entered the name of your command like block or spam or undo like whatever like you can yeah it's very nice all right anything more on superhuman

No, I think that's about it. Feel free to make fun of me. I can take it. I've been around. I think all of mine are baby related. Oh, I'm not next anyway, so Stephen, you're going first. Stephen is up next with the real menacing entry. The real menacing one is file storage upheaval.

Oof, okay. I think it's menacing because coming from you, a data holder... Yes, it's concerning. So two things have happened in the last little while. The first one is... Okay, so I will admit that...

I got the one terabyte iPhone this time around because I lack having my photo library locally on my device. You did it the last time around too. I've done it a couple of times. It's because we both agreed that our company was buying us five 12 gigabyte iPhones and then you decided you were going to get a one terabyte iPhone for yourself. That's how I know it happened last time too. You know, there's perks of holding the debit card.

Yeah, it turns out. I thought you did it for the PDFs, man, not for the photos. That's right. It turns out you, okay. I also have my Dev and Think database locally on my phone in case I'm on a subway and I need to look up something about the eMac. You're joking, you're joking, you're joking, but I know that you thought about it. So I got the dreaded message that your iPhone is full.

And looking through the storage screen on the phone, which is way slower than it should be still, even with all these things, you know, give up on Apple intelligence and make that screen faster. Apple, you know, that's what I'm saying. And, uh, the only solution was to on my phone, have my photo library, you know, don't do the thing where it's mostly in the cloud. I now have 850 gigabytes free on my phone. So, uh, uh,

Not going to be buying a one terabyte phone anymore. I will go. I will go smaller for sure. So this happened. But when I was looking at my storage, I realized that my iCloud family plan, which is four terabytes, we have less than a terabyte free. I think it's like 500 gigs free because that has our shared photo library between Mary and I. But two of my children have phones and they got backups and their own

My daughter in particular, growing photo library. That still feels like a lot, though. It is a lot. It is a lot. Are you sure there's not things that can be removed from there? Like old devices that are backed up? I did look through the backups. I had one old iPhone that was taking up some backup space, so I got rid of it. And on Mary's, she had an old iPad. But that wasn't like...

a terabyte data, right? So it's mostly photos, which I believe. So I'm also going to be running into soon having to jump up in iCloud space unless I can do something. And honestly, I don't know what to do about that. So that's thing one, iCloud photo library, all that. I like iCloud photo library. I don't want to change it. I like the family sharing. I'm probably just going to have to pony up for the six gigabyte plan, which is the next one up.

How have you found so far? I said four terabyte, by the way. We're on the two terabyte plan. There's not a four terabyte. You go from two to six. So forgive me. Okay. How so far have you found not having your photos locally on your device? Just today, I wanted something and I tapped on it. It was like downloading from iCloud and it just, on my fast fiber, just spun for like 10 seconds. I was like, oh, come on. So anyway, but I got to do it like,

We have 90,000 things in our shared photo library at this point. So I just have to live with it. If they bring a two terabyte iPhone next year, will you just get a two terabyte iPhone and re-enable it again? I mean, we'll see what the nonprofit says. Nah, you'll do it. We know you'll do it. Don't even. Although I predict you'll buy two iPhones next year. So I predict it. I wish I predicted for you, Federico. I don't know if you've heard it yet either.

Oh, I heard it. My prediction that I share here is that both of you will buy the slim iPhone and then change to another iPhone before the end of the year. Oh, no, I don't think I'll buy it at all. I know myself, I'll just get the Pro Max. We'll see, is what I'm saying. It's been a while since I swapped phones mid-cycle. Can't say that about Federico.

I don't know. No, you say it's been a while. I don't know if that's true for you. No, it is true. You just said that, but I'm not sure that that's true. Yeah, it's been years. I don't know if that's accurate. It is. Someone will correct us if it is, but I'm not sure that that's accurate. It's also been a while since I broke a phone. Didn't you recently buy a phone and then change it because of the color? No. Okay. I'm using my pink Desert Titanium phone with no case. Okay. Living my life.

Good. So that's thing one. I've got to continue with all that. Thing two is I switched. I became a UniFi person. I've been ubiquity-pilled. UniFi sells a relatively inexpensive NAS. Ah, there we go. Okay. And I was talking to a friend of mine about this. Doing the NAS and filling it with hard drives and moving stuff off my laptop that I don't actually need on my laptop...

I could do that several times before paying for the 8 terabyte again. Now, I did just buy a new laptop at the end of the year, but I'm kind of thinking for the future. Why do you want to do this?

The whole point of spending the $4 million for an 8TB SSD is because you say, I want it all on the computer. But if you move it off the computer, it's not there anymore. So why do you want to do this? You just constantly want to move things around. All you ever want to do is move things. It's upheaval. I really like copying stuff in Finder, I guess. I think maybe after having three kids...

uh now you are substituting that feeling with sort of birthing archives and hard drives instead wow you need that thrill in your life and i understand it i understand sure um but there's got to be a cheaper way to do it man yeah tattoos would be a cheaper way of doing it here's what's gonna happen if you do this uh-huh

you're going to keep everything on your laptop and then also store it on a NAS. That is what will happen. And at that point, why? Why is none? No, because then you'll get the NAS, then you'll back up the NAS. So then everything will be 12 places instead of seven or wherever it is right now. Do whatever makes you happy, ultimately. But just understand that you will want to keep it locally. Okay.

So I'm just going to spend some time this year just evaluating my storage stuff. It's a new thing for you. It's a new thing. It's not new, but here I am. Tell us about yours. All of my things are baby related. So...

Obviously, I'm going to be taking a lot of photos, more photos than ever. Maybe I will need to move to iCloud Photo Library at some point in the future. Although I feel like my time frame on that is a little bit further out. Mine is less. My photos are, I don't know, like 700 megabytes or something like that.

Right now, but I know it's going to increase. I mean, one of the ways that I know it's going to increase is because one of the things I want to do is not just take photos, is actually to take more video. I'm not much of a taking video person, but I know that I will want to do more of that because there's a lot of that. And somebody wrote in, made a specific suggestion, which is the main thing that I'm recommending, is to use an app called One Second Every Day. Mm-hmm.

It's one of these apps that's like, hey, take a second of video and basically to take one second of video of my child every day. Yeah. It's really cool. It's amazing looking back on video, just your kids, the way they talk and their voices change. It's really good. That's good advice. Yeah. So I want to have video as well as photos. And I also like the idea of this like,

If I can, if I do it, like we all used to do this, right? Like there was that photo a day thing, like a long time ago, like early on in the iPhone. Do you remember this? Take one picture of yourself every day. And it was like an app that like you could line up your face from the previous day. And it was based on a guy saying,

The guy who made the app had done that himself for a long time. I think still does, but was doing it with like a DSLR camera. And then he made an app to do it. And it was a thing that lots of people did. I did that. And then like you would share it every year. Like lots of people would do that. Like you'd share it at the end of the year, kind of how we do our Instagram top nine. But like that all went away. But the idea of doing it in video, I just think is really fun. So I'm going to try this app out. I've downloaded it. And this is going to be one that I'm going to want to have set up when the baby comes.

All right, Mike, you have plenty of picks. Grab another one. Okay. Similarly, photos. Photo sharing with family is obviously a thing that I'm going to need to do now more than I've ever done before. In fact, I've never done before and typically don't like that experience, but I know that it's something that I will want to do and the rest of my family will want to do. So I'm assuming I will just use iCloud Photo Library for this. I know that there are apps that exist online

that serve these functions but everybody that i would be sharing these images with has an iphone and i i don't want to use another thing um and like me and adina have actually started a specific shared album for just the two of us for like through this process of like photos of how she's been growing and photos of scans and stuff like that that will continue to be mine and hers so we have like a shared album even though we also have a shared library um

But like there's, you know, just so we can look through these like specific photos we've curated. And then we will eventually have an album that is shared more widely, right? Like with family and friends if they want it kind of thing of pictures of the baby. So I guess I'm opting for iCloud photos for this. Like I've already had a few people recommend apps for it, but I don't think...

think I need anything other than this. Unless there's something that I'm not thinking about. Okay, the second item in my list of three items is continuing to go even more all-in once again with Obsidian. Because I am fully back after a couple of years of trying a whole bunch of things. I realize Obsidian is my first love. Obsidian is...

Obsidian is my second love, actually, in life. As an editorial widow myself, I found love again with Obsidian after editorial went away.

And I know that I will never love Obsidian as much as I love the tutorial. But it's a different type of love. And I truly do my best work, I think, and my best research. I really, really like working in this app. And I've been making good progress in...

re-approaching Obsidian. Much to my surprise, I started using daily notes. I have become a daily notes person and have been for nearly two months at this point.

Once I understood that I didn't have to be the kind of person who has meetings every day to use daily notes, that's when it clicked for me. I'm just using daily notes to write down what I'm doing every day. And then when I'm done, I just cross those items off. Or maybe I leave them there for future reference. Who knows? I created this nice looking template for my daily notes that I'm going to share at some point with people. And it's been going really nicely. And I will continue.

to integrate Obsidian more and more with Todoist. I am now also back and have been back for the past couple of months on Todoist. I'm using both Reminders and Todoist. I understood that for personal reminders like medications and stuff or family and shopping lists, I'm using Reminders.

And it's okay. It's great at that. But for work stuff, and especially for automation stuff, I just needed the higher flexibility of Todoist. And I...

I have a couple of things that I'm using to integrate Todoist with Obsidian, and I think I will continue to try and put together additional shortcuts, that sort of stuff, to have even tighter communication between the two. I'm very excited about finally having a proper structure for my notes, which is something that I've felt for the past couple of years.

And the thing is, I really consider the article that I published last month about the iPad the culmination of this two-year journey where I tried everything under the sun that I could possibly try. And I...

If I finally came to a decision and it's like that sort of domino effect of like, once I made that decision, everything fell into place. And so to people, it may look like, you know, I'm constantly switching between things. To an extent I am because it's my job to try stuff. But I know because I feel it that...

I am now sticking with a particular set of tools. And so this combination of iPad, Obsidian, Todoist, reminders on Apple Notes for personal and family stuff. Like I know that everything is finally clicking into place after two years and I feel like

incredibly good about it uh in a way that i haven't felt for the past two years what i always felt when it comes to my when it came to my workflow i always felt sort of confused and like unsure what i was gonna do i mean heck for six months i used the surface two years ago and i never told you guys about it like that's how bad it got at one point yeah so

When I say that I feel very good about my decision, I mean it. What goes in your daily notes? Like, what is that for? Okay, let's see. Let me open my daily notes. All right. So first of all,

I made it easy for myself. So I created this template where there's a big giant toggle at the top that says, is this day done? And it's an iOS style on and off switch. And when I consider the day done, I flip it and it turns green and it gets archived. Yesterday, I still got to do a couple of things. There's a link to a Reddit thread about an Obsidian plugin that I want to check out.

And there's a link to another Obsidian note. So it's an internal link to action items from a quarterly call that I had with John about Mac stories. Two days ago, let's see, I had...

I was making a list of games that were being mentioned on the Game of the Year episode of Into the Aether, one of my favorite video games podcasts. Another day I had, this is a shortcut idea, and it says...

Can I recreate the Obsidian web clipper using shortcuts and the summarization features of the Kagi search engine or Kagi, whatever it's called. So like, it's basically like I'm using the daily note as a fast way to open a place in Obsidian that is tied to the current day where I can just type anything or paste anything

so that I can worry about it later. The expectation is that everything that goes in there, something is going to be done with it? Yes, yes. But I don't want to have... It's like a limbo space. Here's the way I think about it. It's a transient place between my brain and my task manager. I know that this is going to be something...

But I don't know yet to what extent. I don't know yet when. So I don't have a due date and I don't have yet a project. I know I'm going to do something with it. And the something may be I'm going to look at it and I'm going to ignore it or I'm not going to like it. But like it's basically an inbox. It's basically a daily based inbox where I put stuff and eventually I remove stuff.

So it's just my way of using daily notes. I know that other people use them as a journal. Some people use them as a log of everything they do. The thing is, and I think I mentioned this before, everything I do eventually becomes public. Like I have a website, I have podcasts, now I have videos. So...

I don't need that type of stuff as much as I need a place where I can put temporary things or some things I may choose to keep an obsidian. Like for example,

Last week, I was ripping PlayStation 2 games and I needed to figure out, like, how do I rip PlayStation 2 games on a Mac? Because apparently you cannot do it on an iPad. So I had to use Silvia's MacBook Pro. And I entered in my daily notes, how do I rip PS2 games? That was the sentence that I wrote down. Later that evening, I reopened up and I was like, oh, yeah, I need to rip the PS2 games.

I turned that line into a separate note. I did some Googling, found the terminal commands, pasted them in Obsidian. And so that note is going to live in Obsidian as a reference for the future. Whenever I get another PS2 game that I need to rip, I'm going to look it up in Obsidian.

Okay. You're also using it as an inbox of sorts, right? Yeah. Little things go in there and the idea is either it's maybe going to become a task or it's going to become its own project which has its own set of nodes. Okay, that's cool. Yes, yes, yes. Stephen, you're up. It's me.

Your friendly neighborhood podcaster. I don't know. Focus modes, something I want to spend some time on. This is mostly because David Sparks, I don't want to say berated me, but got on to me about my lack of focus modes on an upcoming episode of MPU. So I want to find ways to turn work off more effectively on my phone when I'm not at work.

I've got a focus mode now that turns off notifications from several work apps and disables my work email after hours. But I feel like I want to go further. Not really sure what that looks like, but it's something that I want to spend some time on this year. Like having my devices, mostly my phone, being more different during the workday and not during the workday.

I have a podcast to recommend to you that likes to talk about their focus modes. Thoroughly considered. Yeah, very thorough, very considered focus modes. That's what that show's all about. You can go find them out there. Focus modes are very powerful, but I think it's best not to overdo it. That's my personal feeling. Yeah, really, it's just taking my home focus mode and just beefing it up, I think, is more what I want. Because I think I talked about this.

One idea that floated through my head on my sabbatical was like, should I be a person who has a work phone and a personal phone? And I very quickly decided that was a terrible idea. But something there is interesting. So we'll see. It's easier than ever to make those two things the same thing.

I don't know if you're doing this right now. I don't know if you just mentioned this. I don't think you do. If you're changing your home screens... I'm not. That's basically the top bullet point. That is a very powerful thing when it comes to focus modes, is being able to actually change how your phone looks. It's also like, you know, not only are you surfacing the apps that are most relevant for the thing that you're in, I find it as a benefit, like a beneficial thing of making me realize that I am supposed to be doing different things.

If I open my phone and it doesn't look the same. What I would recommend to you is have a different widget arrangement as well as different apps. Maybe use different lock screens and home screens too. I know a lot about widgets. There you go. You could have Widget Smith widgets that are indicative of what the focus mode is. It's just a text widget and it's like...

You're not at work, dummy. Just a stop. Stop. You can have one that says stop and it's red and then one that says go and it's green. Yeah. So we'll see. You know, I have historically like just kind of let those lines blur more than I want to have them blurred moving forward. For instance, like one thing I did maybe out of the sabbatical or beforehand was like

turn off notifications in Slack. Like, in Slack, you know, they have their own scheduling thing. But I ran into a problem where the guy who works on our CMS, our freelance developer, he can only work for us during the evenings. And I would miss, he'd like, oh, hey, are you around? Can we do this thing? And I didn't see it. And so I talked to him, I was like, look, we can move into Slack, but after hours...

like i message is going to be the way to get a hold of me because i'm not getting notified from slack after hours but then we could you know you're like hey i'm around can we do this thing and then we can move the conversation into slack and so some of it's like human stuff but the technology can obviously be very helpful so um yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna explore that why don't you just tell him to like do the slack thing which i like where it can push it through

Well, so I ran into a conflict because I also had my focus mode disabling Slack notifications. And so I need to, like, that's a conflict right now. So I don't know. Oh, you don't need it though. Like if you're now using Slack's ones, then you doesn't need to be in the focus mode. That's why it's a work in progress. Yeah. I'm not helping you. I'm helping you. No, I know. Because like what I'm trying to do is take work out of iMessage as well. Don't put it there. That place. Focus. Turn. I'm changing that right now.

Yeah, change your layouts, like your home screens and your widgets and stuff. Like, that's really helpful. And then kind of, like, have them nicely adapted. Focus modes have gotten so much better over time. If you're a Dunn, I actually also want to talk about focus modes. I am a Dunn.

So I obviously want to use my phone less, right? Like who doesn't, but like, I will, I will want to use my phone differently than the way that I currently use it when I have a child. Cause I, you know, I'm now I'm like, you know, I'm like a phone gremlin like everyone else, but I also don't want to be like that. And I don't want to, I, you know, I have imaginations of like, how would I like my child to use technology? And that does not match with how I use technology. And so I,

That has to change if I want to be a good kind of role model, right?

So really specifically, it's about using my phone more intentionally and being intentional with it. And I want to use focus modes. I use focus modes a lot, but I want to create a specific focus mode for at home with baby. And then with child. So I'm thinking about what that might look like. And something I found out today while I was digging around in focus modes that I didn't know is the...

System that reduce interruptions uses can be used on any focus mode. It's a toggle inside of focus modes. I was like, aha, that is good. It is good. So I'm going to try that. So like I'm going to set up a baby focus mode. I don't know exactly know what that's going to include yet, but I'm going to try the Apple intelligence reduce interruptions feature inside of that focus mode. Did you know that that was a thing, Federico? No.

Because there's a toggle. Because obviously reduced interruptions exists, right? And reduced interruptions in focus modes has the same toggle, but you can't turn it off. It's called intelligent breakthrough and silencing. And this wasn't in focus modes before. And this can now be turned on in any focus mode. And it says, while this focus is active, intelligently allow important notifications to interrupt you and silence notifications determined not to be important. And

Any notification specifically allowed or silenced will always be allowed or silenced. So I'm going to try that. Interesting. I've never been like, I use focus mounts only for the home screen automation changes. I, I've never really particularly cared about notifications. Sure. And I think, I think I have a really strong sense of self, if you couldn't tell after all these years on the show. Um,

Interruptions. I cannot be interrupted. Notifications cannot interrupt me. If I'm doing something and I get something, unless it's like Sylvia texting me, help me, my car is on fire. I don't care. I see notifications come by. Cool. I'll get to them later. I've never had that compulsion to like, oh, I've been interrupted. I don't care. Okay. Yeah.

I've created my baby focus. Nice. It doesn't do anything yet, but I'll think about that one. Because I'll create home screens and stuff like that. Nice. I have a last item on my list. And that is keep doing the research to incorporate more assistive AI stuff into what I do. I hate wasting time on boring

busy work. I think everybody can relate to this. So whether it's going to be like I mentioned the AI in email, that's something that I'm already starting doing. I want to look into this new generation of services that transcribe meetings for you and give you like

of actionable items at the end of the meeting. I know that John really likes to use Granola on the Mac. That's funny. I've never heard of it. I love that there are so many of these things you just never hear of them. Oh, Granola is super good. Like he...

since I'm not using a Mac and Granola is not on the iPad, is sending me these transcripts put together by Granola at the end of a Zoom call. They are really, really well done. But I would like to find something that is web-based or something that is native to the iPad so that I can also have something like this. I've been playing around with...

a voice-based, AI-powered note-taking tools. Something that I realized I've been doing lately is I like to talk to myself when I'm driving. What about? What about? Making a list of things that I got to do. Okay. Yeah.

out loud for whatever reason in English. Like it's totally, my brain is all kinds of fried at this point between languages. I did it like a few months ago, like without thinking about it. And then after 10 minutes that I was talking to myself, like while driving, I realized,

Am I crazy or like, is this actually useful? And so I started looking into like, are there other people on the internet sort of doing the same thing? And so I found this app called, let me give you the name, Super Notes, Super Whisper, Super Whisper. It's using, I think, the Whisper model for transcriptions. But what it's interesting is that you can give the app multiple modes, right?

In the settings, you can create multiple modes. And so, for example, I created one mode called note-taking. And the prompt, like you can give, each mode you can give an instruction prompt.

This prompt, I said, reformats the following text. Structure it for effective note-taking using a combination of markdown, bulleted lists, and numbered lists. Ensure that key points, ideas, or action items are clearly highlighted. Check for correct grammar and punctuation. Do not change the tone. Use as much of the original text as possible. When you think you heard Mac's stories, I actually mean Mac's stories.

That is my prompt for this note-taking mode. It's using my OpenAI API key. I love the level. I get it, but the level you have to go to. All I want is for it to do it correctly. Yes, yes. And basically, I put this thing on my iPhone when I'm driving. Say I'm going to pick up Silvia or I'm going to the supermarket or whatever. I'm driving for 10 minutes.

I put this on, I start talking and I leave it on for like 10 minutes and then I press done, wait for like 30 seconds. It does its thing in the cloud and it gives me back a markdown formatted log of the things that I reasoned out loud by myself and I can save it in Obsidian. Look, I am fully aware of the fact that it sounds ridiculous and I look ridiculous doing it.

But once again, I don't care. There's something to the to the fact of like thinking out loud. Yeah, I it's weird, but it kind of works for me. So and lastly, eventually, I would like to find something that works with Todoist and AI together.

I tried... Todoist has an AI mode. It seems to me to be pretty useless because it's not actually querying your Todoist. It's suggesting tasks for you and that is not the thing I want. I couldn't imagine a worse thing. No, thank you. Give me more Todo. I used to be able to use this external chat GPT integration like a custom GPT

at the website to do is to gpt.com a few days ago, it stopped working and the website doesn't exist anymore. So I hope at some point to find, like, I just want to be able to talk to my task manager in retro language and manage my tasks via voice or via text with like short or long prompts, um,

in a way that works. So hopefully at some point in 2025, either Todoist will do it natively or there will be some other kind of integration. Maybe Apple Intelligence will let me do it with the app intents at some point. Who knows? But yeah, finding a way to integrate my task manager with AI would be nice at some point. Did you see, I saw this today, that ChatGPT is adding tasks? Oh yes, and I have tried them and I have thoughts.

I tried it with one very simple prompt last night. I said, remind me at 11 p.m. to review my task manager inbox. And sure enough, at 11 p.m., I got a notification saying, review your task manager inbox. Good. Today, I was like, okay, now let me see what you can do if I give you a slightly more complex prompt.

I asked, and I think I still have it here. I was like, let's do one of those common things that people do. Search for an inspirational quote about art or productivity or a mix of the two from real famous creative people. Include the full sentence in double quotes, followed by the name of the author, the year, and the source, like the title of a book or an interview, etc. And send me this every day at 5 p.m.

Every time this thing tries to run, it says, I ran into an error. I cannot complete the task for you. So that's the thoughts that I have about chat DPG tasks. It's going great. It's going great. Yeah. Yeah. Stephen, do you have any more? I'm sure something will come along, but those two were the top of mind today. Okay.

For me, when thinking of apps like Federico mentioned, I will be using a baby tracking app. And this is to kind of track all of the things that babies do and don't do. And that's the app that I've found and has been recommended to me and the one that I've checked out and I'm going to use is called Mango Baby.

I kind of look at it and think like this is the timery of baby tracking. It is made by a single developer. It integrates all of the features and OS features that you might expect and would want, like has widgets and live activities and everything. And one of my very favorite things, like just thinking about this app conceptually, like they have a free mode and they have a pro subscription that has more features and the pro subscription is a family sharing subscription. And it's like, yeah,

That's good. Because you don't have to do that. You'd probably make more money if you didn't do that because a lot of these apps, you can share everything. You can share all the data.

And I just think that that's really cool that they offer like a family sharing purchase for their subscription. I just think that's really nice. This also goes hand in hand with my beloved iPad mini is going to be repurposed to be in the nursery. And it's going to be for a bunch of things and it's going to be focused around

for parents, right, at first. So it will have all of the, like probably a bunch of widgets on it and stuff for doing some of this tracking stuff. So it's around and easy if we need it. But I also figure it could be used for watching videos and stuff if we're at late night feeding. I got a 12 South Hover Bar Tower as a thing to hold. I saw someone I follow online was using like an iPad stand next to the nursing chair. And I was like, aha, there must be a good one. And I found the good one.

so the 12 south hopper bar tower so you can kind of just have the iPad just sitting there and you can I don't know sit and watch Netflix at 4 o'clock in the morning when you're trying to get the baby to go to sleep white noise machine all that kind of stuff I figure that would probably be a pretty good use of this iPad in its little tiny form so that's that's the end of my little workflow changes for today okay that's also the end of this topic lots of lots of changes you know

Before we finish today, I would like to provide some real-time follow-up provided in the Discord by Spall, who said Stephen switched from an iPhone 14 Pro to a 14 Pro Max mid-cycle roughly in March of 2023, as revealed in Connected 441. So that was pretty recent. Okay. Wouldn't you agree? Pretty recent?

It's hard. A year and a half ago? It's hard to say, really. No, it's not. It's really not. I actually already said it, so it's been said. Yep. We had a lot of feedback about Federico's closing of the show last week. Yeah, people loved it, Federico. See? I knew it. So do you want to do it again? I'm giving myself a new job, so...

I can do it again. Yeah, do it again. Can I do it again now? Please. Well, this has been episode of Connected 535. It was recorded on Wednesday, January 15th of 2025. Keep in mind the date in case, you know, you listen to this in the future, you're like, what are these folks talking about? The United States don't exist anymore. Well, now you know why, because today they exist. Because in the pro show, which is amazing, we spoke about the Nintendo Switch, which may or may not have been revealed at this point.

No, it will never be revealed. The Pro Show is one of the many excellent features of Connected. In this case, it's part of Connected Pro, which you can get by signing up for a Connected Pro membership. You will be supporting us directly. You will also be supporting the Relay FM network, which is a fine company, if I do say so myself.

I want to thank today's sponsors, Squarespace and NetSuite. Now, there's a whole thing to be said about like wrapping up an episode and being like, oh, you got to point people to social media. Now, we're not doing that anymore in the sense that if you want to find us, you'll find us. Like you're going to type my name. You're going to type Mike's name or Stephen's name in a search box. Something will come up.

It may be a fake profile. It may be not. So use your best judgment. Here's the thing. Like,

I could do a whole long list of URLs. I am not because I don't have the patience to do it. So use your best. I believe in you. If you want to find us on social media, whatever it is. I write at MacStories.net. That's the one link I will give you. Mike hosts many shows on Relay. He also does excellent work at Cortex Brand. And he's going to be a dad soon. Thank you.

Keep that in mind when your finger hovers over that Connected Pro membership button. You know, I'm just saying.

He's going to have a daughter soon. So, you know, use your best judgment. And Stephen writes at 512pixels, co-host of the Mac Power Users in a Relay, another excellent show. And that's about it. Like, you can now mark this episode as done or you could wait 15 more seconds for us to say goodbye. Say goodbye, guys. Cheerio. Bye, y'all. Arrivederci.

The only thing I don't like about the Federico outro is the order of the goodbyes. You got to get used to it. Yeah, I guess so. We're doing things different now. Yep. Yep. A whole new world.