793: Accurate, Not Boring
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Welcome back to the Mac Power Users. I'm David Sparks and joined as always by Stephen Hackett. Hello, Stephen. Hey, David. How are you? I am great. Today we're going to be talking feedback. This is one of my favorite show formats because it allows us to free range the Apple ecosystem. That's always fun. Yeah. Yeah. Like chickens. Yeah.

Yeah, there we go. It's like chickens, but nerdy. We got a lot of stuff on the agenda. A lot of questions came in, a lot of great feedback. Today on more power users, we're going to talk a little bit about how we're using AI. I did a disastrous experiment with trying to make it edit my ad read. I can't wait to share that story with you, Steven. You're going to hate it. But hey, I tried.

And it's just kind of fun to talk about what we're doing, the stuff as it continues to evolve. But that's the ad for Extended Version Show. You can learn about that over at Relay.fm slash MPU. But I think we should just like dive into it. We got a lot of stuff here today. Yeah, we're going to dive into the cloud first.

All right. I like that. My analogy broke down. Nice metaphor. We spoke about iCloud.com on a recent episode, and it was a lot of fun to dive into what Apple has available on the website. But I got some stuff that we need to clarify from that episode. Yeah.

We said, I think more than once, which is kind of embarrassing, we kind of conflated some stuff with advanced data protection and access to your data on iCloud.com. So here's the real deal. Sorry, we got this wrong. If you turn on advanced data protection, which adds into an encryption to many more things in your iCloud account,

then you can temporarily allow access on iCloud.com. So in settings, these are two separate switches, advanced data protection and allow access on iCloud.com. In fact, you can disable iCloud.com access without turning on advanced data protection if that fits your needs and scenario better.

But if you have ADP turned on, you can temporarily allow access to the website. So how that works is you go into settings, go into iCloud with ADP turned on. You say, I want access on the website and you have to approve that on a trusted device. So on your iPhone or on your Mac, you'll get a pop up and say, hey, you know, is this you? And then you have access to iCloud.com for one hour.

But each time you go to a new section of iCloud.com, so say that you're in notes and suddenly you want to go over to photos, your trusted device will have to, you will have to allow it on a trusted device again. That makes sense. So each step of the way, your device is really checking that it's really you. And then after an hour, the access gets shut off and you have to turn it back on if you want it.

Yeah, I thought we said the first part, that you could have it independently turned off, even if you didn't use ADP, but the...

temporary access part was new to me so yeah we didn't get we didn't get into that so uh so that's the deal there is a support article called manage web access to your iCloud data in the show notes you can go read more about it and like we said I've got advanced data protection turned on and got my recovery key safe and sound because if you turn this on one of the side effects is Apple can't

to get back into your account if you lose your password. And so that really is a big factor in deciding if advanced data protection is right for you or right for someone in your family or someone that you're helping. If they're a person that can't handle not living without a password reset, maybe think about it. You know, for me, I have my recovery key. It's safe and sound in one password.

I have a PDF of it, you know, in there and you could put a printed version of your recovery key in your safety deposit box or your fireproof safe in your house or whatever. But it does limit because of the protection. It does limit Apple's ability to get you back into your account if you misplace that password. Now, the tradeoff is you get two factor authentication on many more things. For me, that's worth it. I can I can be OK with having a recovery key and having, you know,

that sort of safety net of Apple support taken away, but that may not be true for everybody. Yeah. I mean, I think anybody listening to Mac power users is a candidate for this. I mean, I think you probably have your act together, but what Steven says is absolutely true. You, if you lose the recovery key and you forget the password, you are SOL on all your data. That means your pictures are gone. Your files are gone.

anything that you know have you have connected iCloud is just gone Apple can't do anything to help you get it back um so that that's a real risk but the upside is you your data is much more secure than it is otherwise like you know they get a subpoena they're going to give them whatever's there and um if it's if you've got ADP turned on it's not going to be much if they get hacked

The bad guys are going to get whatever's there. But with ADP on, I think it's going to be a lot harder. So it just depends on your level of expected privacy and your willingness to put up with the pain and inconvenience of having to be responsible for your own recovery. Right.

You don't get it. And I would really just consider it. And the one thing about this I would say is do not like a lot of people listening to the show are the people who like help friends with stuff. Do not cavalierly tell people to turn ADP on because you may be helping a friend lose all their photos if you do. If someone's keeping their passwords in a legal pad, like one of my loved ones, you know, ADP may not be for them.

Yeah. Or the sticky pad or the Microsoft Word doc. All those people. No. Yeah. Oh, the Word doc. That's a classic, man. That's classic. I was once with an Apple employee who told me the exact number of like law enforcement data requests like inside the company. I guess the people who care about this stuff know like they keep track.

And it's a lot, you know, and it was really bugging them. And I think that's why ADP exists. I think the people at Apple, they don't want to, you know, they want you to be private. They want you to keep your data private. So that's something I like about the company, frankly. iCloud Private Relay, I think we were kind of dismissive of it because of our experiences with it. But we got feedback on that as well.

We did. We had a couple people who kind of wanted more detail on what it is and how it works. So it prevents websites from seeing your IP address and location and prevents network providers from collecting your browsing activity in Safari. So we did talk about that. If you use an alternative browser, say that you use Chrome or Firefox on your iPhone or iPad or Mac, you

or you're using any other application that talks to the internet, iCloud Private Relay doesn't do anything to protect your IP address and location in those applications. It is just for Safari. Now, I would argue that, you know, your browser has much more information about you than a lot of other things and a lot of

A lot of the other risks that come with like data, you know, any apps can have their data encrypted at this point that's in the app store. Any, but the web is like this much broader thing, right? And you do a lot more things on the web than an apps. And so,

It may work for you if you use Safari and you want those additional privacies. This is a layer on top of Do Not Track and all the other privacy things built into Safari. And honestly, I don't think Apple gets enough credit in this area about building in privacy into Safari in particular. They've done a lot of work to keep advertising networks and

rogue, you know, bad websites from following you around the internet. And sometimes it's a little annoying, right? Sometimes those features can get in the way. I think that's what we were sharing that our personal experiences with iCloud private relay have not been great. After we published that episode, we got some feedback about this and I turned it back on for almost an entire week. And it just wasn't like it's still not

Great. Like I still felt like I was running into websites that weren't loading correctly or were behavior that I wasn't expecting. But it is an option if you want that privacy. So my overall like opinion on it hasn't really changed, but I did want to clarify that it is IP address and location tracking prevention just in Safari.

I like you, I believe in the concept and I love that they're doing it, but it, it does cause problems. And the thing is you forget that you turned it on and you're on the web and something's just not working and you can't figure out why.

And then you go and you turn off, you know, you turn off private relay and suddenly it works again. So that's the part. I don't know how they thread the needle, but hopefully they're still working on it. And I think what you did is right. I think like every six months I should go and just try it for a couple weeks again. Because I would love to just leave it on. I use Safari. I am a privacy-minded individual. And if this would work, I would love it.

Maybe I should write a shortcut. I don't know if there's a shortcut or an Apple script I can write to toggle it. Like just so like in case of emergency toggle it without having to go dig into the settings. Maybe I'll look into that. That might be something for the future. Yeah. A couple other things you can do.

set it up where iCloud private relay is enabled on like a per Wi-Fi network basis. So have it off at home. But if I'm on the work Wi-Fi, turn it on if that fits your needs. You can also, I didn't know this, you can also have it enabled or disabled based on what SIM is active. So a lot of people, I got friends who work this way where they have

An eSIM for where they live, an eSIM maybe here in the US that they turn on or off. And maybe you want to have iCloud Private Relay turned on for one of those lines and off for one of the others. Yeah, like when you're traveling, put the shields up, you know, kind of thing.

And then lastly, you have some control over how specific your location and IP are shared. So the thing of it hiding your location, that could work against you in certain scenarios. Like you're going to a website and it needs your location and it doesn't have it or it gives a bogus one or something like that. So you can...

set in settings, iCloud private relay, IP address location. You can maintain the general location. So that would give you like, okay, I'm in this country or in this region. Or you can do country and time zone, which is a little bit more obscured. So you do have some options there to kind of fine tune it. I guess the question is, you know, anybody interested in this stuff is probably going to get a VPN. And, you know, where is the tipping point between this and a VPN? Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, a VPN is going to cover all of your traffic in and out of your device, not just Safari. A VPN also lets you manually select what location. So if I'm in the US, but I want to look like I'm in the UK, I can set my endpoint on the VPN to London or someplace in the UK. And so it gives you more...

It gives you broader protection in terms of everything on your device. It gives you more control. And of course you can use it like in a corporate setting, you may use a VPN to get like back into a network, right? Or I could set up a VPN on my router to say, hey, route all my traffic wherever I am back through my house or, you know, through my ISP. So you have a lot more flexibility there. You know, iCloud Private Relay is a consumer kind of everyday iPhone user kind of thing. And a VPN I view more as a bit of a power user type thing.

But even then, you have to be careful with VPNs because not all of them are created equal. In fact, if you watch the news, sometimes you'll hear about this VPN or that VPN being controlled by a government somewhere, and they're actually just collecting data on you. So be careful when you pick a VPN. This episode of MacPower Users is brought to you by Squarespace. Go to squarespace.com slash MPU to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using the code MPU.

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All right, David, we are recording this one a few days earlier than normal. I've got some some an event coming up. So it's weird recording on a Friday. But here we are. So I put out a call for questions on the MPU forums. And if you're not on the MPU forums, you should definitely go check it out. It's a great resource.

no, like no exaggeration here. More than one time over the years has it happened where I'm searching for like a, Oh, I have this thing going on. How do I fix it? Or like doing research for the show and end up on our own forums because the folks there are just absolutely great. It's a great resource. It is smart people and very, some very active users.

And neither of us are that active on it. You know, I guess I should just confront that. I'm really busy. I make a lot of stuff. And so I don't do that much on the farms. I do try and check in on occasion, though. But it is really impressive when you go in there and see what's happening. Yep. It is a community resource. This is not like me and you using it for announcements or stuff, although we do a little bit of that. It is a group of people.

And I can tell you, it gets a lot of traffic. It does. It does. But Martin wrote in and said, just listening to your recent episode on iCloud.com, I'm curious to know why you're using iCloud or Dropbox versus a NAS. I know there are all the additional features in Apple One, but I would have thought that given the amount of data you produce, that NAS would be far more cost effective.

I recently took the plunge on an as and set up my family members for a photo backup. I also run two businesses. So all the data is accessible offsite. All good. That's a, that was his question. Those are all good reasons to run an as. I didn't really think about it in terms of the content of that show, but that, that is a good point. Yeah. The way I, I mean, the reason I use Dropbox and pay for is collaboration that I have with

tons of shared folders with tons of different people across a bunch of projects and Dropbox is our joint file system for those things. Now it is true. I also have things on Dropbox that I just want there, right. To either sync between my laptop and have access on my phone or my iPad. And, you know, iCloud could do that. Dropbox could do that. And you can do those sorts of things with a NAS, but it is a bit trickier. You know, there are like, I know in Synology, like they're,

for the iPhone. Like you have access to all your files and for backup, it's great too, right? I have just have a bunch of storage space on my network that I can just drag things over to. A lot of NAS products even offer time machine server support. So you flick a switch on and a max can use the NAS as a time machine target over the network. You can do that with a Mac mini or something like I do, but you can also do it with an ass.

That said, I have a little story for you. I have for a long time been on a MacBook Pro. I've gotten the 8 terabyte now twice on the M2 Pro and the M4 Max that I have now. And where that came from was I was coming from a Mac Pro where I had all my storage internal. And I really was at a place where I didn't want...

that was just on an external drive, right? Even if it's SSD, right, I got to clone it or make sure it's backed up somehow. And I really wanted all my stuff with me all the time. And that worked really well until I was running up against the eight terabytes. Oh, yeah. And so I wasn't there yet, but I crossed like the six and a half terabyte threshold on my laptop. And I was like, oh, like there's light at the end of the tunnel and it's a train, you know, like one of those feelings.

Well, you can just get the new Mac Studio with 16 terabytes. You know, I could do that, but I only have so many kidneys, right? Like I only have so many organs I can sell on Facebook Marketplace. And so I actually kind of did – this has been about a month and a half now. I did a bit of an audit of kind of where I was storage-wise and –

I could have done several things. I could have offloaded to just a big drive at my desk and then, you know, have a clone of that or have it pulled into Backblaze or something. So there was a backup of it. But I was also at a point where I wanted to, or the need also arose for some like additional time machine server usage in my household. So another MacBook Air came into the house as my kids are getting older for homework and those sorts of needs and,

And what I was doing through the Mac mini, like that drive was, was basically full. And I was like, okay, like there's a lot of things happening here at once. I need some more storage. I needed more time machine server space for the household. And so I actually went this route and for the first time in like eight years running a NAS. Now I did not buy a Synology actually bought. And I know like,

Someone emailed me like you're a ubiquity fan boy. Like, yeah, maybe, uh, they've got an ass product that I purchased and chunked a bunch of hard drives in. And I moved, uh, about four terabytes of basically like cold storage off my laptop onto it moved all the, I think there's three MacBook airs or two MacBook airs in my wife's MacBook pro and

backing up to it for time machine server over the network. And it's just like coming away in the other room in my office. And so I have done this, but it was more of a local storage situation. It will not. And I'm not planning on replacing something like Dropbox or iCloud drive with this. Like I mentioned on the iCloud show, my wife and I share an iCloud drive folder. That's pretty big. It's got a bunch of documents and stuff in it.

I could move that to the NAS, but one, we're already paying for the iCloud storage for other reasons. But secondly, for her, it's just a folder in Finder and she doesn't have to like mount the NAS drive and like find the folder. And like, I want it to be easy for her. I don't mind the, is this on my laptop or is this on my NAS? But I don't want her to have to deal with it. And so, yeah.

Like I don't, so like Ubiquiti, like they have a Mac app that sits in the menu bar that auto mounts the volumes for you. Like I don't have that on her laptop. Like I have it set up for the time machine server stuff, but she doesn't, like I don't think she's ever seen these volumes ever mounted on her Mac. And that's by design that she doesn't have to worry about this. And I can access it from home. I can access it from anywhere.

far because you know away from the network because i have that set up as well but those aren't those aren't files and folders that i need on a regular basis like my working data set is still on the laptop and it means in two or three years when i buy a laptop again i will not buy the eight terabyte again i will be able to fit in four uh comfortably so yeah there you go there is a nas in the mix i just hadn't told anybody he just had to wait for ubiquity to make one it is really nice

I am. A couple points here. First of all, I think there's probably a Ubiquity episode on Mac Power Rangers because you keep talking about it. I actually don't even really understand what the Ubiquity thing's about, but I know it's like a network system, but it's also...

a lifestyle, I guess. I don't know. It can be. I think we need to dig deep on this at some point because I think people are curious. I for one. Maybe we should do that not around tax season because I could see this costing money. So let's wait. But either way, let's put that on the list. The other thing is

I always go back up and down this too because recently I talked about should I upgrade or not? And the reason I didn't, frankly, was because of that 8 terabyte drive. And I really, really like having it as much as I hate how much Apple charges. And it seems ridiculous how much they charge.

It's so nice having it all in one. I mean, it's fast. It's all there. Like everything works with my, my, my cloud backup system. And like, it is very convenient to have a big internal drive and unfortunately not bumping up against it like you are. But I also had a little bit of a reckoning and I ended up dumping a lot of my production files. Cause you know, we make,

you know, over a hundred videos, just tutorial videos a year and labs plus all the meetups and stuff. And then the field guides are about a hundred videos per field guide. So we make a lot of video, but I don't need to keep all the quick time and the, you know, all the,

you know, final cut and all this stuff. All I need really is the final product. Yeah. And by doing that, my storage went back down to just south of six terabytes and I'm comfortable with that. I think it'll work. Maybe someday it'll be a problem and I'll have to do a NAS or something, but I had one years ago and it just felt like me, like it was just,

extra work. You know what I mean? It was like, there was always something going on with it to answer Martin's question. That's why I don't mind, you know, paying iCloud and Dropbox and, and like having extra drives around the house. Um, and I'm sure a NAS solutions have got a lot more, you know, reliable in the years since I used one. And that's, that's one reason I went with the ubiquity is like the Synology. They're great products. I really like Synology is, um,

But it's a whole computer and that can be great if you want it to do computery things like you want it to download TV shows for you or sync with a Dropbox. Like I just wanted a bunch of storage on the network and the the UNAS is what they call the UNAS Pro is what they call it. The UNAS Pro is not a computer like that.

It's just a bunch of hard drives on your network. Now, the downside of that is that backing it up is harder than on a Synology because Synology, you can like install applications and like, oh, back up to this or that. So what I had to do, because the, the UNAS software currently, it can back up to Google drive or an SMB share. Neither of which really makes sense for me. Like I don't, the Google drive got expensive pretty quickly.

because I have a Mac mini that's on all the time is I installed arc ARQ, which is this really powerful backup program. And it backs up the Sonata of the Synology, the UNAS volumes to backblaze B2, which is like their S3 competitor and,

I'm paying just a few dollars a month to back all that stuff up to B2. And if things got seven hard drives in it, like I could lose the way I have it set up is I could lose two before my data was at risk. So I don't expect to have to go to B2 and get my data back, but it is backing up over arc to B2. And that's been a really good experience for me. I've really been happy with how that worked out, but it's,

If you move to a NAS, that's a complicating factor, I think. Yeah. And my situation is so much easier. It's just like I've got a slow, I'm holding up air quotes, SSD in an OWC enclosure where I've got a carbon copy cloner clone the drive every night. Plus I've got a couple slow SSDs in another enclosure where I have time machine running. And then I have two...

uh, eight terabyte OWC spinning drives. And I keep one offsite and one here. And every month I just copy the whole drive to it. And, but the, the actual process is so easy. And then like when I go on vacation or I leave town, I have my little MacBook air, but I bring the carbon copy cloner clone in the bag. Okay. And so if I get there and I need something that's on my home machine, I've got it with me.

So I don't even, it's a very simple process, but that's the benefit of it. But man, Apple really sticks you when you want to get a lot of storage. And I just, if they didn't do that, I feel like so many more people would see the benefit of this, but yeah, I get why they, uh, yeah. Uh, I like Clark's question to us. Do you gents ever get sick or bored of talking about this stuff? Clark? Nope. What are you talking about? Yeah.

I jump out of bed every day. Guys, look, I have a storied past. I was a fancy professional. Now I get to talk about this stuff for a living. I'm the luckiest guy in the world, Clark. No, I don't get tired of it. And it's always changing and there's always new stuff. And it's like, just when you think you got it figured out, AI shows up, right? It's like, it's all, it's so fun. Yeah, this is all good.

I like that you asked the question, Clark. I do too. And, you know, that's not to say there aren't seasons or like you're more or less annoyed with something in tech, but it is so much fun to get to do this. It's the best job I've ever had. It's the longest job I've ever had. And I'm just super fortunate to get to do it. But now I, you know, I love prepping for the shows. I love recording the shows. I love writing about this stuff. Like it is so much fun.

Yeah, if this ever dries up, I am so screwed because there will never be a job like this. KJW wrote, other than for evaluation review purposes, do you think you would consider a foldable iPhone for your normal daily usage? I'm so glad he asked this question because I...

in fold curious me too the rumors the rumors are starting it's like it's supposed to be i think the last room i heard was like it's 5.5 inches with a screen on the outside and you open it up and it's like basically an ipad mini size screen but not dimensionally you know and like wow that sounds really interesting to me if apple did it right

I mean, I'm sure it's got all sorts of asterisks involved, right? You fold the screen. How's that going to hold up? You know, is it going to be thicker in your pocket? All that stuff. There's a huge bunch of questions, but it sounds to me the rumors seem to be getting hot and heavy. So maybe this is an actual product that's going to show up in the next few years. And I'm going to be sorely tempted. Me too. I'm super interested in this.

I think thinking about my personal use, like having something that's phone size, then I could fold open to watch a video or read on is really compelling to me. And even I think like evaluation and review purposes, like I,

I think it would have to be normal daily usage, I think, for a long time. Like, something like this is such a fundamental change to a product that we all use every day. Like, this would not be a review that I could write in a week. It would be impressions maybe after a week or two. But if this comes out...

I think it would definitely find its way into my life. And honestly, I kind of feel that way about the rumored thin phone for this year, even though like I love having the pro and like all the cameras and stuff. If, if the, you know, 17 air doing quotes with my fingers, cause we're not sure if that's the name, um,

that could be such a fundamental difference too like i feel like that may be the one i go with this fall now you know we'll see what happens but folding is such a big deal i think for us to really understand it would take a lot of time and yeah and it comes with so i have so many questions about it like what happens when you open it like are you running ipad os in there like what because there's so many so many interesting things come up when we talk about this i'm really intrigued

There's a bunch of folding rumors now. They were also talking about a folding iPad, but the, I think we just got to see what they do. And, and Apple's very good at giving you the story behind the product. Yep. I also think it's going to be very expensive when you think about it, it's going to have essentially three screens.

two inside and one outside. And I do worry about camera quality because I really like taking pictures with my phone. And if it has to get thinner so it can fold, does that mean the cameras get compromised? That's frankly my fear about the iPhone Air that seems imminent this year as well. It's like, how bad do the cameras get in order to make it thinner? Yeah, it's definitely a concern.

I'm not as interested in the idea of an iPhone Air as I am a folding iPhone. But like you, I would be tempted, honestly, just to try it, just to talk about it. Yeah. Mark wrote in, David sounded on the edge about ScreenFlow. Where does he stand now? I think it might have been the last feedback episode. Recently, I kind of went on a little bit of a rant about ScreenFlow. This is the production software I use to make screencasts.

And they have not updated in a very long time. And it kind of feels abandoned, but now there's a new beta out. So I guess it's not, but either way I have left it in the rear view mirror. I rage quit the app. It doesn't happen to me very often, especially something I've been using over 10 years, but like I was just trying to do some basic stuff. And again, it just started not doing what it's supposed to do. And yeah,

I ended up spending like three hours to do something simple because the software wasn't working. And I thought, you know, I could be spending three hours trying to make this thing work or I could spend three hours learning a new app. Yeah. I downloaded all of the screencasting apps that I could find. And I ended up surprisingly with Screen Studio.

Screen Studio is not the biggest and baddest screen casting app, but it does a really good job of capture. It uses a bit of artificial intelligence to build in some nice smooth animation, and it makes it really easy to export it at a high degree of quality.

So the whole system for me has changed now. And this is kind of fun for me to have a new workflow after doing the same thing for all the time. But what I liked about ScreenFlow, what drew me to it, it did everything. You could do titles. You could add live video to it. It was a top-to-bottom screencasting solution. I could tweak the audio and do everything I wanted right in that one app. This doesn't do that. This is just really good at capturing the screen.

And what that means is now my workflow is more complicated. I capture in Screen Studio, and then I move it over to Final Cut, where I do all the post-production stuff. JF, who does edits for me as well, he does it in DaVinci Resolve. So we both use a different kind of secondary app. But it means the titling is better. It's actually a better product, but it takes more work now.

And I think it was time and the videos look good. I wasn't saying anything publicly about it because I wanted to like get more time with it. I didn't want to say I was going to use this and give up on it, but I recorded over 80 videos for upcoming Alfred field guide, all in screen studio. I've now recorded a ton of max, max,

There are things I don't like about the app. I'm not going to get into it all, but it gives me what I need, a reliable way to record the screen in my voice, and then it adds extra work for me to make the final product, but I think the final product's actually better. So there's your answer. And I would imagine it's one of those things that no one could guess which video was the first one, right? Yeah.

They could because they look better. They look better, okay. I mean, they're more active. Screen Studio...

has a really nice fluid animation and it like follows your mouse. So when you click on things, it zooms in and does that. And it makes it very easy to add that kind of animation. That would be very time intensive to do that in ScreenFlow. So if you look at my old ScreenFlow screencasts, they're all very static. You know, it's kind of one shot and there are very few zooms and pans and this, there's more of that.

And I think it looks more dynamic. So you would be able to tell. Okay. And also, frankly, the transitions are better. The titling is better. The headers in and out are better because I'm using a professional app, Final Cut, to do them. ScreenFlow did that stuff, but it didn't do it as well as Final Cut does. Okay. Cornchip asks, if you had a redo on your workspaces, would you make them the same sizes? Anything else you would change?

I honestly, Corn Ship, Corn Ship is one of my favorite contributors in the, in the forums. Cause always there, always interesting comments. This could be a whole show if I was allowed to. You're, you are not. Would you change something about, about your space?

I love my space. I love it. No, I don't think I would change anything. I mean, I was so intentional with it. Like there's no windows on a North facing wall. What somebody told me has decreased the value of my home and I don't care because now I have the perfect space and the, no, I guess the one thing I would do if I had to do over again, but I was kind of up against the wall in terms of the money I was spending is I would have gone even a little harder on sound dampening. Like I,

Like if you read about it, there's people, they like do two layers of drywall and there's all, you know, there's lots of ways to make a room even deader. And this room's a little too hot. You know, I wish it was a little, the absorbed sound a little better.

And I've done things. I've added equipment to the room to kind of absorb it better. And I guess I sound okay right now. I don't know. If you're listening, let me know. I would have liked to do that. But in hindsight, I didn't have any extra money to spend to do that stuff. So I don't think I really would have done much different. The one thing I did at the very end when we were planning it was with the way the room was set, we were originally going to make it like two-thirds of the size it actually is.

And I just decided to, you know, to go ahead and spend the extra to make it bigger. And I'm super glad I did that because it really gives me a lot of room to work. Cause I'm shooting a lot more live video than I ever had. And it's just really nice having the extra room. Yeah. So for, for me, uh, you know, I had my original studio space, you know, now, gosh, eight years ago or something, uh,

And then during COVID, little more than doubled it with a new room. The existing studio was an existing structure that we just renovated. And then this new room is new construction. And I am very happy with how that turned out. I really felt like I squeezed everything I could have. And the old side is like, I mean, it's like 10 by 12. Like it's not a big space.

And I had really dialed that end of like everything in here has a purpose. It can only live where it lives, like through many iterations of like the desk is here, the shelves go here, this type of shelf, that type of thing. And with the new side, I was able to take all that I had learned and improve upon it. So like one thing I wanted was I wanted more natural light because I didn't have any in the old building, which was like a concrete bunker.

And this new one has like beautiful, huge windows that serve no purpose. And sometimes are actually a pain when it comes to production because

But I love having the daylight. It made the building much taller. It made the building more noticeable from the street even, which I didn't really want. But it was a trade-off I wanted to make. And I'm very happy with it. It's more than double the space that I had. And it's great. When people come in town, they have space to work.

I have room to spread out. I've got room for the collection and I can be sort of mid project and still like have my desk to myself. Like I have a workbench and a second table. Like though that extra sort of working spaces has been awesome. Yeah. And did you see how he slid in there? He can store all his, his old max without making Mary mad at him. Yeah. I mean, there's still a lot in the attic, but they're not in the house. They're out here or they're in the attic. Yeah.

Yeah, so the way I handled light was I put... I do have big windows, but they just don't face south. And so I never have direct sunlight. And that gives me enough light, so...

Yeah, I don't want to indulge myself on this, but I really love my space and I spend a lot of time thinking about it. I still think about things I might want to change. I'm right now in the midst of building a desk shelf. You know how these companies sell the shelf you put under your Mac or under your screen? But they're very expensive. It's just kind of shocking to me how much they get for them. And I'm like, I'm a woodworker. I can buy a piece of walnut and cut some joints. So I'm actually in the process of building my shelf.

I'm also going to be adding wheels to my computer desk. I think I can roll it around. I think that'd be fun to be able to change position when I want. Okay. So I still got stuff going on. But yeah, thanks for, Corn Chip, thanks for giving me the chance to yak about my studio because that is something I like to do. We had several questions about how we name things. So I thought it'd be fun, you know, let's just talk about what we name our things. Like, what's your Wi-Fi network called?

Yeah. So my Wi-Fi network name is very simple. It is the street that my house is on and then net. So I don't live on Main Street, but if I did, it would be Main Net. It's straightforward. It's been that way since I moved here through several iterations of my Wi-Fi. Because as we're going to talk about, renaming a Wi-Fi network really stinks.

Yeah. I named mine back in the Seinfeld days. That's how old it is. And I named it Spar America, like Craymerica. Awesome. I really wish I hadn't. I want to change it. I actually came up with some names that I thought would be good. You want to hear them? Please.

Okay, one was... And listener Russell wrote in that he named his OB-WAN Kenobi with W-A-N, which I thought was great. That's really good. But before I read this, I had written down OB-WiFi-Nobi, which I thought was pretty good. But I think Russell wins that one. I also was thinking Rebel Base, and then the one that really stuck with me is ArteNet, but that gets a little hippie. But the problem is...

I can't rename my network. You want to tell them why Steven? It's fine for your Apple devices, but for internet of things, things like cameras and sensors and things that have to connect to your wifi, you will spend the rest of your life updating them. Yeah. It would be misery. That's why. And my hope, my family, things would just stop working in the house and, and the lights wouldn't go on the, you know, everything would break. And, and,

Just the thought of like spending two weeks getting that fixed just because I changed the name of the network makes me want to, you know, throw something through the window. So if we do this show in another 10 years, it'll probably still be Spar America. It would be easier for me if my street name wasn't in it because anytime I share a screenshot of something, I'm like, is my wifi name in it? Cause I got, don't don't want to give up my street name.

So, yeah, it would be easier for me if it were something else, but I am not ever going to change it. Even if we move, David, I think I would keep it the same and name it after our old street because it would be such a nightmare. Yeah. Okay. Fair enough. So that's our Wi-Fi. What about devices?

Yeah, mine is not very inventive. I basically do ISMH, which is, you know, username I've used forever, plus whatever it is. So my laptop is ISMH Book Pro 14. My phone is ISMH 16 Pro. It's not real inventive.

Yeah, that was kind of boring. I know. But I feel like it was kind of on brand. You're very, yeah, no, it's just you're very accurate, right? Okay. Former Apple genius, you're not going to mess around. It's going to describe which device it is and that it's yours. Accurate, not boring is what you're saying. Yeah. Good save. I wish I'd never said that. All right, what about when you say you name your machine, that could mean different things, right? Yeah.

Do you name it for the network or do you just name the hard drive? What do you do when you name a machine? Yeah. I name it in system settings, general about like, so it shows up on the network that Macintosh HD, like it's hilarious that it's the boot drive of the Mac is still called that one. No Macs have booted from hard drives in a long time. Yeah. And Apple doesn't use Macintosh anywhere. Like Mac,

it's the Mac basically everywhere. If you go to about Finder, it's the Macintosh desktop experience, which is just incredible. But Macintosh HD is really old and I don't want to change it for a couple of reasons. One, I like that it's kind of a throwback. But...

You less now. And if like, if you're better at your computer than I used to be, you're okay. But if you have any scripts or anything that like depend on the entire path and you change your boot drives name, you got problems. Now you shouldn't write your scripts that way, but I still have some old stuff floating around and I think I'm a little afraid it would break some stuff. So Macintosh HD, but yeah, I just name it in system settings and I feel like that's the right answer.

For me, at least. No, I totally agree. And if Apple ever does stop calling it Macintosh HD, it will break my heart just a little bit. Me too. Just a little bit. Because I remember the days that was the thing, right? Yep. And the word Macintosh there meant so much because every other computer sucks so bad. And you just saw that Macintosh HD is like wrapping yourself in a warm blanket.

historically I named my computers after jazz artists. So I always, whenever I had a big one, like an iMac or Mac studio here, that would be Mingus after Charles Mingus, a bass player, big guy played a big instrument. And so my, my big one was always Mingus and my little one, which would be a laptop was always dizzy or bird, just kind of depending on how I felt when I got the device after dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.

Somehow, I fell off the wagon. When this came in, I looked and I have David's MacBook Air, which I think was a default name that Apple put in. And then the studio is Sparky's Mac Studio. So I don't even have a consistent convention between the two of them. I felt very sad.

that I had somehow stopped bringing this little moment of delight to my device name. So I promptly renamed them. So now I have Mingus and Dizzy back. But yeah, thanks for asking the question because I somehow fell off the wagon. What about iOS devices? Are you doing anything there? Yeah, again, it's just ISMH plus whatever it is. So like ISMH Pad Mini for the iPad Mini, right? Accurate, not boring.

Yeah, forever my iPhone has been R2-D2, though what I carry now is R2-D2. It doesn't tell me which iPhone it is or anything. I just like the idea of R2 was always there for Luke, right? That's right, yeah. Help in hand. I feel like if I was about to be thrown into a pit with a monster, that my phone would throw me a lightsaber. It would if it could. That's right. So R2-D2, and I just call the iPad Holocron.

which is a Star Wars reference to it's like a source of knowledge, you know, and I thought that'd be kind of a good name. I thought about C3PO and C3PO is kind of annoying and I didn't want to name my head after C3PO. I considered once I went through a big Lord of the Rings phrase phase last year. I read all the books again.

And man, Tolkien can write. I'll just say that. If you've never read the books, read them. They're incredible. The world building, the dude invented languages. Like it's, it's, it's unreal. Yeah.

I mean, the movies are really good, but the poetry of the books, I read the book when I was like 15 and I went back and read them again last year. It had been, you know, like a few, a little water went under the bridge since I read it last and I liked them even more the second time. But so for a minute I was thinking that last September, what if I just named my iPad, my iPhone Frodo and my iPad Sam, but then I ultimately didn't do that, but I thought about it. So yeah.

Yeah, I like that. I've given it thought. Yeah. I think you just need a system. I, you know, I have seen where people use names of planets or, you know, very common, I think it's characters out of your, you know, your favorite fiction. Like, yeah, you just need a system. And maybe I'll get more exciting about mine over time.

I did at one point I was using like, um, star Wars ships names. Like I had red five and the Falcon. Oh, that's good. Yeah. But, but I just like the iPhone to me is like, like my little buddy, you know? And maybe one day when Siri gets good, it'll be even more so. But I just like the idea of calling it R2D2. Boy, did you see that article this week about the internal stuff at Apple over Siri? There were a couple, I'll have some links in the show. Yeah. It's, it's a mess, man.

Yeah. I, I actually came away reading the article feeling better about it all. It's like, it sounds like it's been a mess a long time, which explains why we've been complaining so long. Although I do wonder, cause I know Tim listens to us in the gym every week. He does. Tim, we told you about this. Yeah.

you knew this was going on just from Mac Power. I don't know how this happened. But the promising thing of these articles is it sounds like there's a new sheriff in town and they're actually doing the right things now. So I felt it was actually, I was disappointed in what seemed like indifference to a big piece of the platform for a long time, but I was encouraged by, it looks like, action now. So hopefully that's true. Siri, man. Yeah.

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We've been doing, we're on a journey here. I haven't, the labs members know this, but I haven't really said much publicly, but last December, my wife had a heart attack and she's okay. It's all good. You know, she got a brand new stint. As my daughter says, mom got her heart detailed, but it could have been, could have been really bad. It was, it was, the situation was not good. Let's just leave that. And Daisy and I are not

gluttonous. We're pretty careful about what we eat. We've been going to Pilates for a long time. We do stuff, but the doctors kind of decided, well, you know, you're just genetically predisposed to this stuff. You shouldn't have that kind of blockage at this age, so you can't be really careful. And I don't want my wife to do this alone, so we just decided we're going to change the game here in terms of health. And I wanted to share some of the ops and stuff we've been doing because I think it's kind of interesting. Yeah, yeah, I'd love to hear about it.

Yeah. And like I said, don't, don't need to write me telling me how sorry you are. She's doing great. Daisy's in fact, she feels better. Right. Because when you go from 99% blockage to no blockage, suddenly you can go up and down stairs a lot easier. Right. So she's good, but we, we want to make sure that never happens again. So the first thing is I've talked about food noms before the tracker and

I love it even more. It came up last week with Kim. I almost talked about last week, but I thought, well, let's just, I want to go into the whole thing and we didn't, I don't want to waste Kim's time, but food noms to me just continues to be the best food tracking app. I went, when we started on this journey in December, I went and looked at all the competitors and I'm like, no, cause I was willing to switch over. Sure. Like at this point I'm willing to spend money to, to get the health thing figured out. And, and,

If there's a better one, I'll get it. I just want to, once again, endorse Food Noms. I think it's great. I think the model's good, the pricing makes sense, and it's really good at tracking food.

Uh, another app that we have discovered that we really love is called Yucca. Y U C A. Have you ever heard of this one, Steven? I have not. Uh, this was, this was new to me. This is excellent. Cause you know, one of the things that you want to do when you get more healthy is be careful about what you put in your mouth. And this is an app you take to the market or the store and you pointed at something you want to buy and it gives you a thumbs up or thumbs down tells you if this is good or bad.

I guess it's Yucca's opinion, right? Yeah. But they explain the basis of their opinion. Like, this has way too much sugar or whatever. And it gives you healthy alternatives to what you're pointing at.

And it is shocking to me the number of foods you will go to the store that look healthy. I mean, there's a whole science to making packaging that looks healthy. You know, I guess it starts with a label that looks like it was drawn by a child. And then like, you know, they've got a whole thing they do to make it look like it's healthy. And, you know, you know, some person is making it out of their garage with only whole grains or whatever. Yeah.

And it's shocking how many of those you point out and Yaka says, oh, no, don't get this. This isn't good. So I recommend folks get this. It's a weird business model. They give you limited access, but they want you to share it. And if you share it with one person, you get unlimited access to the whole app. It's the strangest thing I've ever seen. But a lot of these health-related...

things are that way they're like supported by somebody who's really wants you to be healthy and they're not looking to make a lot of money they just want to get the information out so yucca is another one i'd recommend i think a lot of my wife's problem is sleep you know she's at a certain age she's been going through menopause hasn't been sleeping great and i you know so we we've got all on with uh this app called sleep plus plus from a developer you've probably never heard of and um

It's a nice looking website. Who built this website? Yeah. Yeah. Full disclosure. Steven does some work with them, but sleep plus plus is, is I, again, it was my wife's health. So I was willing to use whatever, right. I looked at them all. You guys nailed it. Sleep plus plus is great. So that's been another good one. And then to take it to the next level, we went down the rabbit hole of blood glucose monitoring. Have you ever heard of this? I have, uh,

This is something that I think people with certain health conditions were using, but it seems like it's much more approachable now for anyone to kind of do a check-in. So yeah, I really want to hear about this. Yeah, it's got a lot more accessible lately. And so what this is, you know, everybody talks about blood glucose being the holy grail of the Apple Watch, right? The ability to get your blood glucose level and give you feedback. Like for people with diabetes, this is a huge thing. They've got to constantly monitor it.

I'm not diabetic or even close to it, but you know, the, you know, the doctor says your blood sugar is higher than it's been and Daisy too. And so I wanted to get my arms around it. And there is now a consumer product called Stello. There may, I think there was a couple of competitors, but Stello is the one my doctor told me to try. So we bought these things and it's a little like kind of quarter size device that

that you put on your arm and when you put it on it pokes you and it i guess it puts a um it pokes you to to mom you know i guess there's a needle in you when you're wearing it i'm not sure to tell you the truth i frankly didn't go down that rabbit hole too far i didn't want to know yeah there's a small i think a very small needle yeah what i can tell you is i wore one for four weeks and it never bothered me just you almost forget it's there but you put it in the back of your arm

And what you get is they've got this great little app and it tells you constantly, I can think it pulls your blood glucose level every five minutes. And it's really interesting to see like, Oh, if I eat spaghetti, this is what happens versus if I eat, you know, this, you know, it's just a really good data source. And,

And it gives you a real good history of your data. And then I went for a checkup and showed him my doctor. He says, okay, you're looking pretty good. You know? And then, so ultimately after a month I stopped wearing it. Right. Daisy's still wearing hers a little bit longer. She wants to track a little bit further. I have lost like 13 pounds since this all started. I have this idea when I get to 20 pounds, I'm going to wear it again for another month to see if the numbers have changed, you know? Okay. So I've got a couple of them in the drawer here and I,

It's about 50 bucks a month to wear one of these things. It's not hugely cost detrimental. And it's a good source of data if you want.

And it's interesting just to see how sleep, exercise, and diet change your blood sugar level. It's kind of fun to see that if you're a data guy, right? Yeah. The other thing I would say, and this isn't an app, but it was a listener who turned me on, I think a lab member actually, who turned me on to this guy, Michael Greger. And he wrote a book, How Not to Diet. And he's just a doctor who spent a bunch of time

figuring out ways to eat better. And, and spoiler alert, he really pushes plant-based. So we actually do a lot more plant-based eating and, and, you know, just general, we're both feeling better and making progress on it. So it's been really good. And, but there's definitely a technology angle to all this stuff. Yeah. And that's where the conversation of like what Apple could do in the health app gets pretty interesting. Like,

yeah all of this data like tell me what it means give me some explanation my line is i don't want it providing medical like the the replicate your doctor language really kind of

set me off in government's report. But yeah, like what do these numbers actually mean? Like, is there a video I could watch that explains like, you know, this is sort of an average range for this type of person, like the education, the trend building, that sort of stuff. I think there's a lot of room for, and, and the glucose monitoring in particular, Apple's been interested in for years, for years has been reporting that they want to do that with the Apple watch. And, and

haven't been able to do it. And in the meantime, you have all these companies offering, I'm going to put in air quotes like consumer grade glucose monitoring, like you don't need a doctor's order to go, you know, you're not, you're not picking this stuff up. I don't think at a drugstore, right? It's like, no, you can just get it and use it for a while. And, uh, and so the more information we have is good, but it needs to be understandable and,

And, you know, you can take it all and show it to your doctor, but like where's the line and how Apple make that better? All that sort of wrapped up in that broader conversation right now, I think. Yeah, totally. And like this, the way Stella works is you go online, you order it, they mail it to you, and you install it. It lasts two weeks. There's a battery in it. You know, it's got to transmit data, right? And after two weeks, you yank it off.

And it's not painful. Again, none of this is painful. I think a lot of people hear blood glues, it's monitoring. They're like, oh, I don't want to stick that thing in my arm. The way you apply it, it's in like a little canister. You push a button, it pops onto you. You don't even feel it. You don't even feel a poke.

And then it's got a very good bandaid. That's the worst part is pulling the bandaid off at the end. And then, you know, and then you put a new one on and you're good for another two weeks. And it really is a ton of data. And my big disappointment and I, my doctor's great. I love him. He's been taking care of me for a long time, but I go see him and he's got to see 20 other people that day. Right.

So here's this nerd showing him his app saying, hey, here's all my blood glucose. Can you tell me what this all means? And he's like, he looks at the average number. He's like, oh, you're good. You know, that's the extent of his feedback. Right. And then like Michael Hyatt came on the show and said he made a GPT that he puts his health stuff into. And like, I'm super tempted to do that because I've got all this data now and I would love to get some insight to it.

from something that knows more than I do about it, right? But do I want to send my medical stuff to GPT? I'm not sure, you know? So that's why when I hear Apple thinking about doing something like this privately, that's why I'm kind of on the bandwagon for it. But yeah, this stuff has been really good for us and it's been fun to kind of explore these apps. And there's a lot of good stuff. The other thing I would say is Fantasy Hike and Bend, which came up on a show a few weeks ago,

I'm in, man. I'm I've left the Shire. I've got that thing installed now. That's awesome. Yeah. One of my favorite things is I've done is, um, so Daisy and I got into Pilates like about a year and a half ago, but now we are like, I'm going like four times a week. And it's weird because it's mainly like school teachers. Like that there aren't many men at Pilates. And it's funny because every time a new guy comes in, I was going to introduce myself to him because like, Hey, I'm one of the only men here.

But guys that are listening who say, oh, I'm too manly for Pilates, that stuff will crush you. I just, I don't know what to say, but at least for me. So I do that. And then the other thing we started doing is, um,

um, Liana, who an occasional guest here and I are both Disney fans. So we do once a week, we do what we call Disney rucking where we load a backpack as heavy as we can make it. And we walk like 10 miles through Disneyland. It's, it's really fun too. So, so I've got some good health stuff going on and so does Daisy. She's doing great. I'm just super happy that she's okay. And we're both kind of like taking care of this stuff. Yeah. What about you? What are your health apps?

Yeah. So for me, sleep plus plus, like I wear my watch basically every night. I really find value in sleep tracking. Sometimes I get that question like, why would you do that? Or is it worth wearing a watch at night? Wearing the watch at night doesn't bother me. You get used to that pretty quickly.

But for me, it's a data point of like how I'm sort of doing. Like if I feel like if I'm midweek and I feel like I'm dragging, I can look at that graph like, oh, I slept pretty bad two nights ago and that's catching up with me, right? And for me, I think for a lot of other people, like your anxiety level and your sleep are really closely linked. They are for me. And so it can be an indication of like,

How am I doing anxiety wise? Like sleep is a factor in that. So those are really the two reasons I, I sleep track. One of the things that drew me to sleep up plus plus is that it gives you kind of like a, I forget what they call it, like a Reddit. It's like a ready rating or like, what do you call it? A readiness score.

readiness score where it just says, you know, overall based on the amount of sleep you had, you're like 80% okay for today or in some cases 30%. And it's like, Oh, this is going to be a bad day. And it's right. It's like it, it really does tell. And it all comes down to getting enough sleep. Yeah. The other one that you guys, I'll say you guys cause you help them out. Um, is pedometer plus plus. I haven't gone down the rabbit hole of that one yet. Um,

I don't do that much step tracking. I just look at the rings. Should I be doing a pedometer thing too? What do you think? Yeah, I find the step tracking useful for a couple of reasons. One, it's sort of, again, because it runs in the background on your watch and your phone.

Yeah. As a sort of as a stand in for the activity ring a little bit, especially for somebody who works at a desk. Right. Like I work now, I do stand at my desk some, but I'm basically in my office basically all day, every day. And so the step counting is a way to look at my overall activity range.

kind of on a given timeframe. And I also like one of my favorite activities is to go for a walk, like through my neighborhood, you know, sometimes like two, three, four miles at a time and use it to track those, those walks. Uh, pedometer plus plus also has a lot of hiking features. Uh, underscore, uh, is a big, like go out in the mountains and hike. And, you know, you'll hear from me in a week kind of guy, which is, which is awesome. Um,

But I'm not a big hiker, but like there are lots of great features in there for that. So that could be a reason to check it out. But again, it likes sleep plus plus it is a factor in kind of my overall picture of how I'm doing. And, um, and it works really well for that because it, again, it syncs with the Apple watch and the phone again, kind of figures out what you're doing.

So Pedometer++ and Sleep++ for me, both super important. Basically, any other workout tracking, I'm just using Apple's fitness or workouts app. They changed the name. It's fitness. It used to be called activity. Yeah. So...

Uh, lifting weights, going on a bike ride, that sort of stuff is all tracked in fitness. I used to use Strava a lot more for tracking my bike rides, but I found that I didn't want these. I didn't really care about the social aspect of it anymore. Like still have it installed. And like, you know, if a friend of mine goes on a ride and like tells me about it, I'll go look up their ride and like see how they did.

And for big rides, I will run it. So like I'm planning on a couple of weeks, actually on Memorial Day to do a long bike ride. And I'll probably run Strava for that. But a mountain bike trip after work or ride my bike around the neighborhood or to run errands, I'll just track it in the in the Apple built in stuff. And the big kicker for that, and I talked about this when it came out on the show, is

is the ability to mount your bike on your handlebars and your phone, to mount your phone on your bike handlebars, excuse me. Yeah, that would be a lot easier. That would be really something. And it basically turns your phone into a bicycle computer. And you can see distance and speed, and there's a bunch of different views you can swipe between.

And I love that feature. And that's really kind of what pushed me over the edge in terms of basically just using Apple stuff for cycling. How do you mount your phone to your bike? What do you use? Yeah, I use the Peak Design System for this. So they have a case and it clips in. And I have one of their out front mounts on each of my three bikes. So whatever bike I'm on, I can throw the phone on there and be able to track it.

I use the same one because it's got a physical latch. Yep. So it's just not coming off. It's in there. It is in there. And for someone who crashes their bike as much as you do, I think that's good. I mean, it does kind of put my phone out there, you know, out in the world, but that's okay. Yeah.

I like having my phone available to me. And then lastly, and they are a sponsor of some other shows on Relay, but I really like FitBod for weightlifting. You tell it what equipment you have and you can say, hey, you know, I'd like to focus on this or that, or you can let it build a workout for you based on your past. And it ramps up the intensity over time. I've used FitBod for years and have been really happy with it.

And anytime I'm in my garage lifting weights, which is not as often as it should be, running FitBod to kind of build those workouts. One of the nice things about my big studio is I can push everything out of the way and I use the Apple Fitness Plus workouts. So I do that pretty often too. Yeah, they're great.

Really, the fitness stuff is what holds the Apple Watch like in my orbit. We've talked over the years on the show how I kind of have seasons where like I just don't want to wear the Apple Watch and want to go to something else, whether for simplicity or just like want to change. And that I still feel that way sometimes. But what keeps the Apple Watch on my wrist is.

is this health and fitness tracking both, uh, both like I'm going on a workout, track it, but also the background stuff, right? Like if my heart rate is like wildly out of whack with my activity, I would like to know that, you know, uh, that sort of stuff, that history over time has really, has gotten more important to me over the years. And so, um,

The Apple Watch is a permanent fixture in my life because of that. Now, it also makes me really wish, I've talked about this before as well, that Apple would just make like a bracelet, you know, like the Nike Fuel Band back in the day, which I loved, like that I could wear on one wrist and wear a regular watch. I would do that. I would give up notifications to have like a fitness band and I could wear like a weird Casio from the 80s. But Apple hasn't done that, so the Apple Watch it is.

Yeah. Now that Daisy's been through this, I am like, if she's walking around the house without an Apple watch on, I like, I go find it and make her wear it. I just feel like it's just like such a key. If you've had heart problems, I mean, please give them, you know? And, and, you know, if someone, you know, I gave an Apple watch to a family member after they had a fall and I was like, you're going to wear this. And they do. And like,

It gives me that peace of mind and, you know, and the car crash detection, which I tested in real life. Like all of these things like build a really powerful story. Thanks for doing that by the way. Yeah. You know, did for the car. I didn't do it. Terrifying. All right. Let's talk about stuff we're playing with. Yeah. So I put some stuff in the notion and then I came back to it and you had filled out your section of this topic and

And the sound I made that came out of my mouth, it was like, like, what are you doing? What, what are you doing? I bought a thing, Steven. You know, okay. You bought a second monitor, which we'll get to what you bought in a second, but that your history here. So for years, we've both had iMac pros, which is like still like one of the best computers I've ever owned. And, um,

You at some point had a display on each side of it and they were like vertical. It had ears. Yeah, it had ears. And then you moved into your current space and you got an XDR. And so you had a giant screen, you went to one screen and,

But now you're back and it's vertically mounted. Like what, what are you doing? Why do you need so many pixels? I kept preaching. One is enough. I don't need any more. And here you are. I have a friend, local listener friend who had a XDR on a, on a visa mount and he wanted to switch to a stand and he offered it to me. And I said, yeah,

Yeah, sure. Let me try it. So I took it. I had it up for like a day and I'm like, oh, I'm going to give it back to you. I don't want it. I don't want it. You know? And then like a couple of months later I was working and I just needed it. And I called him and said, do you still have it? And he's like, yeah, I didn't know what to do with it. So I bought it off of him. And so I've got a second monitor. Part of me really didn't want one. And I'll tell you the reason why is because it is just so much, so much light and pixels, right? Mm-hmm.

the reason I have what I ideally like is to be able to like, just like use it selectively, you know, but I, I still don't love having it to tell you the truth. I reluctantly bought it, but it's so useful. Like when I recorded all these Alfred videos, having the outline just off the camera screen to the right, you know, I'd always use my iPad for it, but it's not very big. And you know, that it's not consistently connected and,

I just wanted something that was reliable and having it be an actual Mac screen is so much better. So, so I have this screen and, uh,

And I still like don't like it sometimes, but I bought it and I have it. So here it is. So I just got to come clean about it. It's a visa mounted, but, but that's fine. Cause I put it up vertical just to the right. Okay. My chair is centered on my XDR. It's on my big screen. This is definitely a screen, but it's not really a reference screen. Like historically I would have like email and tasks and everything up there. Yeah. The last thing I want is my email pointing at me all day. So I don't even do that. But whenever I'm recording, um,

It's really useful to have all the recording, like even like as we're recording Mac Power users, the XDR screen has all the websites and the outlines and everything I use to actually make the show. But looking to the right, the screen, I can tell you how long we've been recording. I can see that the recording tools are working, that your mic is working, you know, everything. And I've got all the like

dashboard stuff that I need to record a show. Same thing goes for when I'm recording videos and screencasts. So that's its main purpose. It's also useful for when I do these labs meetups, because we have all these people and I'm trying to like keep people in the room and deal with the chat, but at the same time have data up that I can talk about. It's just useful for certain things, but it's not really a reference monitor like I would historically call one.

I can occasionally find myself putting distractions up there. Like if I'm doing, you know, donkey work, I may have YouTube playing on that screen or Apple music or something over there. But I'm not using it as a daily driver. Rarely do I have like, like in the old days, I would have Microsoft word and my legal research up on the right screen. And like, I don't do that kind of stuff anymore. So I don't really need it for that.

And I'm trying to find better uses for it, you know, to use it better. Everybody knows, it wasn't a show, that I love the idea of dashboard and like status board things. So I'm thinking about like building a custom status board on it, either through...

um, some method of using dashboard widgets. I know there's a couple apps that can run widgets as apps. Maybe I might do that or, um, or maybe I'll just have like moon create a custom window setup, but I, I don't really want it to be a thing I'm looking at all day. I really bought it for production.

No, that's very similar to how I use my laptop open to the left, right? Like currently it's Timery, Zoom, and Audio Hijack. And when we're done recording, good task, we'll go back over there. Like, you know, music is a swipe away. So I get the use case, but boy, having a Polar Display XDR and then a vertical studio display seems like a lot. Yeah.

It is. It is. But hey, I love it. But yeah, so I did that come clean. Another thing I was thinking, maybe an AI co-pilot screen or something. I don't know. I'm just kind of like brainstorming with it now. I've had it a couple months and I didn't say anything on the show because I thought I may end up giving it back to the guy. And honestly, on that spectrum, I'm not 100% in love with having this here because it's so big, but it is really useful. And yeah,

in certain circumstances. So it's staying. What a journey I've been on with this monitor. You, you certainly, certainly have been now are using the speakers or the camera or anything on the studio display or just using it just as pixels. Nope. Not using that stuff at all. I guess it'd be nice to, if my XDR ever gives up the ghost, I can just turn it sideways and I've got a screen, right? That's true. And on the vase amount, is it on an arm or you have, is it have like a stand back there?

I've got an arm. Okay. I've got an arm. Okay. And I've got a high arm because I want the bottom of the screen to line up with the bottom of the XDR. Yes. Yeah. Especially when I get my shelf built. Right. But the, uh,

But if I look up to the, to the Northern most regions of the screen, I'm like looking, I'm craning my neck, you know, it's pretty far up there, but it's good for like, like I said, right now, all the recording thing is there and I can completely, it's always there when I'm recording for the kind of work I do. It's kind of, well, it's really useful. I was going to say maybe a necessity, but I got by without it for so long, but yeah,

But I will never have a recording problem because I'll always see the stuff up here going on while we're recording. There's just really good reasons for me to have one, even though I'm reluctant. Okay. The real lesson here is that people know that they can sell you things, and so people offer to sell you things. Yeah. Well, I've got a lot of nerd friends, what can I say? It's true. I think buying it used was key to the... Because I am a little cheap, and I'm like, I'm not going to spend that much. I would have bought...

you know what? I probably wouldn't have bought one if it wasn't for this one. Right. Cause I can't see myself buying like a cheap one. Yeah. Cause that would make me unhappy. And, um, I can't see myself shelling out for a new one. Yeah. Okay. Uh, for me, and maybe we should say this for, I put in for the fall, a ubiquity show, but, um, all right.

My transformation is now complete that I've replaced my handful of ring cameras with Unify cameras. Okay. From Ubiquiti. All right.

I need to know, is there any category of UniFi product that you have not brought into your system yet? I mean, they sell a lot of things. That's actually kind of a complaint in the communities. Like, y'all make too many things. They do make some door lock stuff. I have a HomeKit lock on my studio door, but their door stuff is really industrial. I have to run a plate in the door jam and stuff. I'm not doing that. But I have their switches, everything.

There are wireless access points and now a handful of their I'm using the G5 Flex cameras, their power over Ethernet. So I ran Ethernet everywhere that I got a camera, which was a real adventure in a couple of places.

And what's nice about it is they, uh, they're actually pretty small and they're just powered over ethernet. So my ring cameras, like you always had to deal with power. And so the one that was like on the front door, like on the front porch, the power was running like through the attic and then like down a channel, like it was kind of messy. Ethernet is easier to deal with, uh, even though you got to run it, you know, it's, it's,

smaller more flexible i had i had plenty of space on my on my on my uh switches to manage it

What I really like about it is there's no subscription. I mean, the hardware is, you know, I bought all new cameras and as we get to in a second, a recorder, but there's no subscription and the data is all recorded locally. So I mentioned my NAS earlier on top of the NAS is an NVR network video recorder. It's got four hard drives in it.

And all that footage is recorded locally on my network. And I can optionally access it from the outside through their app, which I turned on, but it is not getting streamed off to a server somewhere. A couple of things I like about that. I like the privacy of it. And you've talked about this with

uh, home kit secure video, right. And your stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Um, I feel much better with the privacy angle and it means that I can still record even if my internet goes down. And so if the internet is out, I still have got footage of, you know, a couple of things. Um, I, I don't have cameras in the house. I, I, for a while I had a ring camera, uh,

That would come on if we left looking at the, like looking in the living room, I didn't replace that camera. Um, I may at some point, but you know, all the cameras otherwise are outside and it's, it's been great. Uh, it has all the features you would expect from ring. So like, or, you know, any of these other systems like, Oh, I want, you know, I want to know if someone steps in the driveway, but if they're walking down the sidewalk, like don't alert me or, um,

I have mine recording all the time. I could just record, you know, four seconds before and after motion, like on a buffer, lots of options. It's fully built out just like these other systems are. So yeah, pretty great. I feel like that apps probably played a role in your NAS acquisition as well, right? They happened about the same time. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, you know, I'm really looking forward to that show because I'm looking forward to it and dreading it because then you're going to convince me I need to buy stuff. But but it seems like because you're very discriminating and the fact that you've gone all the way down the rabbit hole with Unify must mean it's pretty good stuff. I've been I'm pretty happy with it. But yeah, you run Ethernet a lot of places. You get really good at crimping cat six.

Yeah, you got the tool, right? Man, I got the tool. I played with a couple different types of ends. I found what I like. A whole bunch of stuff. All right, well, thanks again. One more episode of the Mac Power Users in the can. Always doing fun doing feedback. If you'd like to join more power users, the ad for extended version of the show, head over to relay.fm. We'd love to have you join. Thanks to our sponsors, Squarespace and Indeed. And we'll see you next time.