Our Holiday Nerd Projects
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Hello and welcome to App Stories. I'm John Voorhees and with me is Federico Vittici. Hey Federico. Hello John, how are you? It's good to see you, sir. How are you? Good to see you. I'm doing fantastic. It's the, you know, as we're recording this, the final few days before we go on a bit of a holiday break. I published a few days ago on Mac Stories. If everything goes well, I mean, the article is ready. I'm going to do a little bit of a

I published my big story that took six months to research. Not six months to write because I'm a faster writer than that. But it took six months of experimentation and research and buying equipment, returning some of that equipment,

But I published a story about the iPad and how I can now do everything on the iPad, including recording this whole thing now. Yeah, the video right here. It's all done. There's an iPad here. It's all done with an iPad and a camera that is connected to my iPad. It's a whole thing. Plenty of photos, plenty of links and details in the story. Yeah.

But yeah, we're going to record these. We're going to talk about our holiday projects, which is an annual App Stories episode. The things we are going to play around with, because sure, the holidays are a time for relaxing and spending time with the family and loved ones, playing video games, just chilling, but also...

We never completely turn off that part of our brains, you know, that's thinking about productivity and apps and workflows and automation. So we're going to be talking about those non-gaming, non-chilling projects that we will be tackling over the holidays.

Yeah, as I think I texted you over the weekend, I said, you know, I feel oddly relaxed from having just reorganized my RSS feeds and my reading setup, which we talked about in the pre-show where I actually got a head start on my holiday projects by working on RSS, read later, some shortcut stuff, all related to reading and research. And if you want to hear more about that, you can join Club S.

Mac Stories Premiere by going to plus.club or you can subscribe separately to App Stories Plus by going to appstories.plus. So that was the pre-show, but we're going to talk about the rest of it right now because there's a lot. And I find, I actually, you know, I suppose it is work, but it's also not work. I would be doing this whether you and I were writing at Mac Stories anyway. Yeah, and I think you have more opportunities

Right now, at least, you have more on your plate than I do in terms of ideas, if only because I've been doing some of this for the past few weeks. So I really got a bit of a head start. And we talked about this in the pre-show last week on App Stories Plus, like my experiments with Obsidian and using AI. I'm going to be talking about that stuff in a bit. But I think the...

Big project that I also want to sort of get involved with is trying to figure out how to automate more parts of your workflow in terms of production. And I want to help. Yeah, I appreciate it. You know, I have some ideas, but I wanted you to explain sort of the things that you're seeking to automate and what parts...

of your, especially your production workflow could use some automation next year. Yep. Yep. No, definitely. Definitely. I want to do that because, you know, at the end of the day, it's about getting the, getting the work done and doing the creative stuff, which we talked about on our assistive AI episode.

And the more we can maximize that through automation, the better. And I think that that's kind of a theme of some of my holiday projects this year. I mean, I'm going to be digging in in a way that I think you already have to a certain degree with things like

and ChatGPT and using them for coding purposes. Because, for instance, the Godspeed task manager that I've been using for a while now has a very nice API. And I haven't really touched that API, but I have uploaded it to ChatGPT into a project. I've already started setting up these projects where it now has, for reference, the

you know, the API as well as examples of how I have my tasks set up and organized with folders and recurring things. So it can kind of look and help me put together some periodic tasks. And that's what I'm going to be doing because that's something that you and I have both done at times. I do find that for certain kinds of recurring tasks,

It's better to generate them with automation on a weekly or whatever monthly basis than it is to actually make them as recurring tasks. By which I mean, for instance, app stories. On a Sunday afternoon when I was using things, it would just fire off a shortcut on my Mac and generate things.

the latest episode of App Stories and all the things I had to do to produce that during the course of the following week. All those pieces, including the episode number and everything, would automatically get dropped into things. And I should be able to do that with Godspeed as well. I like that because one of the things about recurring tasks is that while Godspeed has this

this notion of snoozing things. So you can move them to a later date without messing up when they actually recur the following week.

I, I'm not in the habit of using that yet. And what I'd prefer to do is have a new project set up every single week so that what I can really do is move those things around as needed. Cause you know, our schedules move around, whether it's when we record or when I get around to editing and that kind of thing. And by setting those up on a weekly basis as a brand new project every week, it, I find it just more flexible that way sometimes. Mm-hmm.

I need to look into Godspeed. I was also playing around with the API, and I think it's been a clever idea to... So you basically uploaded the API documentation to ChatGPT as a project. Yeah, I did. They also have a separate URL scheme, which I uploaded as a separate project. I don't know which way I'm going to go yet. I think I'm going to try to go with the API if possible, but...

But you can accomplish kind of the same things on either way, I think. Probably the API has a little more flexibility. One of the things I want to figure out is how we can automate the process of knowing...

For example, if you read Mac Stories Weekly, our newsletter, you know that there are sections like app debuts and interesting links where each of us, we highlight like an app update or a new app or maybe some article that we found on the web that is interesting. And often over the past couple of weeks, because we use different task managers and we don't have a shared space

we often ended up in the situation where we were writing about the same app debut or the same link, or maybe I was doing, I was covering something as a link and you were covering something as an app debut, for example. So I want to, I want to figure out a place where like a shared repository or something where we can see, Oh, I'm not supposed to be covering this app update because John has already said he's going to take care of it. And like, I don't want to,

I don't want us to be forced to use the same task manager

because so that we can have shared tasks, I think we should have the freedom to each of us use like the task manager that we prefer, but there should still be like a common source of, like a common database, for example, that resets every week. So like after an issue of Mac Stories Weekly is sent to members, this database should be reset. And so that we can, each of us through the week, we can add, I don't know,

Ivory got an update and John said it's going to take care of it versus, you know, Castro got an update and Federico is doing it. Like that sort of thing. I want to figure out how to do it. Maybe there's going to be... I'm sure there's going to be Zapier in the middle because that's one of the things that I've been playing around with lately is...

web automation, given that so much of our work happens on the web. And, you know, we have a website with an RSS feed that's pretty easy to automate. That sort of thing, I think I will rely on Zapier. So these web-based automations with triggers, always monitoring something like an RSS feed in the background. So one of the automations that I have, for example, is every time a new issue of the newsletter is sent and it says Mac Stories Weekly issue, I don't know, 446,

Zapier takes care of creating a project in Todoist for me that basically says issue 446 plus one, it becomes issue 447. And that's my template for the next issue of Mac. So it's right. Right. That sort of thing, that web based automation, automation that always happens in the background doesn't require shortcuts on my iPad, doesn't require a Mac mini to be always on. That's one of the things I'm going to be playing around with over the holidays.

Yeah, that's a good idea. I think maybe part of it might be that, you know, if we're using different task managers, the way we can do it may be as simple as creating a text file that is in a shared space where we're exporting whatever we put with certain markers in our text in our to do lists.

Yeah. Gets exported there with our names attached to it so we can see what each other is putting together for the issues or something along those lines. Yeah, something like that. I'm going to cheat with my next one. Okay. Because I know I mentioned we're not going to cover like video game related stuff, but this is just a small thing. Over the holidays, I think between the end of December and hopefully January, I will be receiving three more handhelds.

I should be getting... I think I have four coming, Federico. Three or four. So we covered all of these on MPC, our podcast, Next Portable Console with Brendan Ackley. I'm going to be receiving the latest Embernic GBA Game Boy Advance clone. What's it called? The RG34XXH? Yeah.

I think. Ember Nick did it. Yeah, Ember Nick did it. It's called the RG34. No, there's no H on the end. It's just XX. Okay, just like, you sure? Yeah, I'm positive. I'm positive. I didn't do an H because it's shaped like a GBA. But it's horizontal, Ember Nick. I mean, come on. Respect your own standard, Ember Nick. Anyway.

I will be receiving the GBA clone, the TrimiUI Brick, which is a vertical Game Boy style handheld. And at some point, it's looking like January, I should be getting the Aeon Odin Portal. That's the big 7-inch OLED, powerful handheld by Aeon.

I will need to make a decision about what's going to be my high-end handheld Android base for like high-end emulation. So PSP, GameCube, Nintendo Wii, PlayStation 2. And what's going to be the low-end, not in a derogatory way, but just, you know, Game Boy emulation, Super Nintendo emulation, that sort of stuff.

So I will need to make a decision there. And that's something that I will be researching over the holidays. And I think at some point in late January, maybe we'll do an episode of MPC about like, okay, what's our current state of handouts going into 2025 after CES?

Right, right. No, I think that's a good idea. I've been doing this little by little myself with the Retroid Pocket 5. I've been trying to get that set up because it's Android as refined as possible so that when I get the portal, it'll be easier to set that up because it should be roughly the same. So yeah, that's one of the things on my plate as well. But there'll be some Linux handhelds in there as well to fiddle around with.

Let me see. What am I going to... So I guess the other thing that I want to do is spend more time with some of these assistive AI tools to minimize some of my production stuff. You already talked about that, how you're going to help me with some of that. But there are some things I've been doing that I want to...

kind of institutionalized for lack of a better word, which is one of the things I do is we take our, we have our show notes in Markdown and I end up exporting those in rich text for Libsyn and for YouTube, which doesn't support either. It has to have the bare URL showing. I've been using chat GPT with an instruction that something along the lines of the

move all the URLs to the end of the line, remove the markdown formatting, separate the headers with an extra blank line. I have a long set of instructions that I do, which does a very good job of formatting it so it looks better in the description of the YouTube videos. And I've just been kind of recreating that every time so far. So what I think I'm going to do is...

Have that memorized by ChatGPT and create a little bit of a short form way of doing that, whether it's through shortcuts or directly through the ChatGPT app. I got to look at the best way to do it. But doing that kind of thing, it's also been handy for things like some of these longer term projects, like following government regulation of Apple. Been setting up Notebook LM with...

some of the articles I've saved and some of the documents I've saved for the DOJ lawsuit, the DMA, that kind of thing. And right now there's not a lot going on on either front there, but I anticipate with the new administration coming in in the US that that's going to pick up again. And so I'll be ready for it once that happens.

All right. Yeah, I think I'm also, the other thing on my list is I'm also going to be playing around with Google's Notebook LM. And specifically, I'm interested in the Plus version that they announced. I think it's just for enterprise and education. Well, I mean, I think if you have a Google workspace. Yeah.

They're launching Google Notebook LM Plus for consumers, they said at the beginning of 2025. So I just want to use it with my personal account. And at that point, I will probably consider just signing up for their Google One AI plan. That includes a bunch of things. It includes Google Storage. It includes access to Gemini. And that's one of the things that...

I hinted, I think, last week on App Stories that Google has been doing some really interesting work on AI in terms of just sheer performance. Just this past week, they introduced their Gemini 2 Flash model, and they also introduced their... This is not really interesting for me, but in keeping up with the news, they introduced their VL2 platform.

text-to-video model, which it seems like the consensus is that it pretty much destroys OpenAI's Sora model for realistic video. Now, that's not interesting for me, but all this to say that I think Google has been very quickly catching up to OpenAI, and to an extent, they are eclipsing the performance of OpenAI. There's this rumor

that's been floating around that unlike other AI companies, Google had a breakthrough internally in terms of scaling and pre-training capabilities.

which wouldn't come as a shock given that, as we discussed, Google has its own hardware architecture, unlike all these other companies basically relying on NVIDIA and NVIDIA GPUs. So it wouldn't be a shocker if Google was able to have a breakthrough because they control the whole stack of what they're doing with AI. But in any case, I want to use Google Notebook LM

to basically give it as many of my previous articles as possible and use it as a personal search index so that I can query this database for things that I wrote, not just my iOS reviews, but like articles that are published on Mac Stories and just being able to recall

Because, you know, after 15 years, it can be challenging to remember everything. And so, yeah, that's what I will be taking a look at as soon as it becomes available for regular consumers early next year. All right. Very good. Very good. One of the other things I'm going to be doing is spending more time with the Logitech Creative Console and my Loop Deck, which is...

Still kicking. I mean, Loupedeck got purchased by Logitech a little over a year ago. They've stopped making the Loupedeck, but they're still supporting the software. And I still think it's a better device in terms of the hardware than the Creative Console. But I've got both of them here. And the Creative Console is kind of nice. It's about the...

it's about the size of the height of a keyboard with, with, you know, the, uh, the magic keyboard. So it sits just to the side next to my mouse on my desk. And I've been doing things like setting up spaces to move back and forth since I abandoned, uh,

I abandoned the stage manager just the other week, which I wrote about for Club Maxtra. I wrote about this, yeah. Yes. So now I'm, you know, Nelion had suggested I get back into spaces. So I'm taking her advice and giving it a shot because I think, and I think it's going to work out. But, you know, we'll see. I'm going to have a space for podcasts, a space for writing, and then a space for like communication, I think. So working on that. Obsidian's another area I want to revisit because I haven't really looked

into new plugins in a while. And one of the things that I think in this, one of the themes, I guess, of my projects this year is I want to have places for the different kinds of tasks I use. So I want to create maybe workspaces. I want to revisit those in Obsidian to have certain documents open automatically when I'm working on a particular project. I want to, you know, spaces is kind of part of that. And

And using shortcuts to kind of set up various apps for certain tasks is another one that I'm going to be doing. So it's kind of task-oriented automation stuff.

of both traditional shortcuts things as well as apps like Obsidian, which have the plugin architecture. Yeah. The final thing I wanted to mention is also about Obsidian. I will continue researching and I think working with Finn. I believe Finn is now over in America because of the holiday break. I will be continuing this idea of like...

using AI to create the template for a plugin and have Finn take a look and review and finalize and optimize the code. So this idea of me giving Finn basically

More than just an idea on iMessage. It's like a head start, basically. Like a head start with a basic template for code created by ChuggyPT01. And have been, you know, take that as a foundation and mold it and finalize it into a proper plugin. I'm fascinated by this idea. And this is part of something that I've been thinking about lately.

even not just plugins that I'm going to share with the world, even just tools that we're going to use internally at Mac Stories, but this idea of using these LLMs for, I call it like personal software. So this idea of like making a little script or a plugin, like just something that it's only for me or it's only for me and you, that typically, you know, would have involved, you know, wasting weeks looking into...

Google searches and copying and pasting random code from Stack Overflow or Reddit or the Obsidian forums. And that act of like copying and pasting other people's code, I think can be optimized by using an LLM, which is basically like, if you think about it, my level of ignorance is always the same, whether I'm copying and pasting someone else's code, which I've done for years. Sure.

Sure. You know, without shame and actually always crediting the people in my articles. Yeah. But my level of ignorance about this stuff is always the same. So whether I'm copying and pasting, but wasting weeks behind that versus doing it, you know, with an LLM,

while still not knowing absolutely anything about this, but just having the tool that is required, I think that can be something very fascinating and very interesting, if only for personal use. So that's something that I'm going to look into. Yeah, I agree. And the thing is about when you copy and paste code is that the problem is that two different people take different approaches to the same problem. So the hard part is fitting it together in a way that works.

Whereas chat GPT can kind of take care of that for you in a lot of ways, which is which is really good All right. I have a few other little things to mention I want to mention that I am gonna try to turn the Mac mini into a retro console I have not had time to do this yet Apple sent me one for review and it's a pretty beefy one It doesn't have a ton of storage, but it's got 32 gigabytes of RAM and it

It's the M4 Pro, so it's more than capable for doing all sorts of emulation. So I want to try that and hook it up to my TV and see how it works as kind of as a set-top box of sorts.

I also am going to finally, I think, do something that I know that you've been doing, which is get off Dropbox. I really need to first get all the files into an external drive. So that's kind of where I'm going with that. That's kind of a boring project, but it is going to take a little while. And then finally, Federico, I have something to show you. I have a surprise to finish the episode off with. I need to create some widgets for this device.

Oh, boy. This is the Terminal E-Ink device. You got the thing. I did, and it just came a few days ago.

I haven't had time to look into it. There's for this an API to create your own little plugins to feed it different kinds of information. As I showed off, this is just the weather currently right here. This will soon switch to how many days are left in the year. Those are just kind of built-in ones you can add. And so that's all I've done so far. But I've got some ideas of things I want to include in there, whether it's task management stuff, marketing,

my calendar, you know, there's little things that can go in there. And I kind of like this weather one too. It doesn't have to be full screen like that. It can be, the screen can be divided into segments, either like into two or three or four segments, I think, so that you can do more than one at a time. And this thing's battery life is remarkable. It came on Friday and I think it's still, it came out of the box at like 70%.

Let's see where it's at right now. I will tell you it's at 67%. My God. Okay. So, so right now, as we record this, that's almost a solid, it's not a week. It's been like four days, I guess, but in four days, it's only gone down 3%. So I, I don't think I'll be doing a lot of, a lot of charging this thing up and I'm just looking forward to, uh, to, uh,

playing around with it because it's E-Ink and very easy to see. And I kind of like it so far. Nice. All right. Well, it looks like we've got a bunch of things to look forward to. We do. Yeah, it's a combination of productivity, fun, and a sprinkling of AI to make it all easier and more efficient to get done, which is good because we, despite the fact that we have a lot of projects, we only have a couple of weeks we're taking off. And I'm sure we both have plenty of things planned with our families as well. Yeah.

All right, Federico. Well, that's it for this episode of App Stories. You can find the two of us over at MacStories.net. Federico is at Fatici on everywhere, really. Blue Sky, you know, Instagram. Just look me up and you'll find me. The Don. He's on the Don. You'll know it when you see it. You'll know it when you see it, when you see that look.

staring back at you through social media. And you can find me as at John Voorhees. That's J-O-H-N-V-O-O-R-H-W-E-S. Talk to you next... Oh, not next week. Next year. Talk to you next year, Federico. Talk to you in 2025, John. Ciao. See you later. See you on the other side.