Podcasts about AppleScript

Brett records an episode without Christina and Jeff and chats with Melissa Davis (The Mac Mommy) about her start as a mommy blogger and longtime Mac podcaster, her tech-support work, and the strange lack of closure when online friends disappear. They trade mental-health and chronic-illness updates, Adderall vs. Vyvanse, difficulty finding curious doctors, and being labeled “worried well.” Don’t worry, they nerd out on mechanical keyboards, Karabiner, and remapping keys. GrAPPtitudes include Bartender 6 Pro, Sortio for AI tagging, Sketch Party TV, and Karabiner. Sponsor OneSkin improves your skincare routine with science-backed skin care products. With over 10,000 five-star reviews and validation from clinical studies, OneSkin has made a name for itself in the skincare industry. If you’re interested in trying OneSkin for yourself, you can get 15% off your order with the code OVERTIRED at oneskin.co/OVERTIRED. Chapters 00:00 Meet Melissa Davis 00:56 Early Podcast Days 02:20 Tech Support Seniors 05:52 Digital Legacy Work 06:50 Sponsor: OneSkin 08:14 Mental Health Check In 08:34 Insomnia And Focus 13:19 Doing Time Tracker 16:04 Suspenders And Stenosis 20:18 Mobility And Home Hacks 22:10 Melissa Health Update 23:25 ADHD Meds And Mutations 25:25 Curious Doctors Matter 27:59 Vyvanse Vs Adderall 30:26 Tracking Mood With Data 32:27 Cane And Somatic Therapy 36:09 Somatics For EDS 36:50 Yoga Modifications 38:19 Polycystic Liver Shock 39:20 Fatphobia In Healthcare 40:56 Pole Dancing Reality Check 41:55 Mechanical Keyboard ASMR 45:56 Nail Art And Picking 49:09 Keyboard Layout Rabbit Hole 01:00:59 Shortcuts And Muscle Memory 01:03:12 GrAPPtitude App Picks 01:14:07 Karabiner Power Tips 01:17:30 Wrap Up And Thanks Show Links hEDS Doing Timing Royal Kludge Keyboard Gamakey Silent Linear Switches EPOMAKER Switch Benefit Section EPOMAKER AegisSil Keycaps Set SketchParty TV Karabiner Sortio Bartender Pro Day One Join the Conversation Merch Come chat on Discord! Twitter/ovrtrd Instagram/ovrtrd Youtube Get the Newsletter Thanks! You’re downloading today’s show from CacheFly’s network BackBeat Media Podcast Network Check out more episodes at overtiredpod.com and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Find Brett as @ttscoff, Christina as @film_girl, Jeff as @jsguntzel, and follow Overtired at @ovrtrd on Twitter. Transcript Nails and Keys with Melissa Davis (The Mac Mommy) [00:00:00] Meet Melissa Davis Brett: Hey, this is Brett Terpstra. I am without my usual cohorts, Christina and Jeff. Um, so I, I wanted to, you know, get a, get an episode out for all of you listeners, and I reached out to Melissa Davis, known as The Mac Mommy. Um, I don’t, I, I don’t know if they’re still known as The Mac Mommy, but in m- in my lifetime they have been. Um, Melissa, why don’t you introduce yourself, let people know, like, M-Ma- long time, like Mac personality, podcaster. Tell us where you came from. Melissa: Where did I come from? Outer space. Uh, I came from being a mom. I, I, I will admit, this is hard to admit, But I will admit I started out as a mommy blogger. That’s, like, kind of a bad word nowadays. Brett: back, back, yeah, this is way Back when Melissa: [00:01:00] Yeah. Early Podcast Days Melissa: so we’re talking, like… Well, my oldest is gonna be 20, Brett. My oldest is gonna be 20 this summer. End of, end of June he’ll be 20 years old. So that’s about how long I’ve been doing podcasting. I mean, I started, I started, like, when… Well, you know what? I started listening to Adam Christianson’s The MacCast Brett: But you know what? I started Sure. Like one of the very first podcasts, Yeah. Melissa: still, I still listen to him on the Mac Geek Gab. Like, his voice is just so soothing to me. I used to… Like, that was the f- Back when I had, I had, I remember I had, like, an old G4, uh, Quicksilver Mac, and in the stinky little back room of our old house. And I used to, I used to download the podcasts, burn them on a CD, put them in my Walkman, ’cause I didn’t have an iPod yet at the time. I wasn’t that… I was never really that cutting edge. And I’d burn them on a CD, I’d put the CD in my Walkman, and then I would sit and nurse, I would nurse my baby. I, [00:02:00] and I would have to tuck the, uh, the headphones, you know, I’d have the ear- the, the wired, kinda like I have now, uh, and tuck it behind my back, like, behind my shoulder, because otherwise he’d, like, yank on the cord. And I would just listen to podcasts while I nursed. And I… And then, uh, then I met Victor Cajiao, and I started just kind of being, like, a serial podcaster, showing up here and there, and then it just kinda grew from there. Tech Support Seniors Melissa: Um, and I do… So I do tech support. I’m an IT tech s- tech support person. I… People call me their computer guru. I mostly work with, uh, the senior population, our, our vintage people, which I, I’m slowly becoming one of them. We’re all, we’re all gonna go that way. Brett: I feel like anyone who does Mac tech support deals with probably an, a, a population that skews older. Melissa: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it’s actually, it’s actually more– I will say it’s actually more difficult to work with somebody younger. Like, especially people my age or people [00:03:00] that are like, say, in their sixties I consider pretty young, 70 even. Uh, yeah, so but it’s, you know, the people are so, so interesting. You can learn so much. I love working with this population because they’re like encyclopedias, and the stories they tell you and the things you learn, it’s pretty amazing. And I could just, I could just spend– I have actually spent all day with some of them. Some of us just have really great chemistry and, you know, it’s… They– I, I’m also– I have ADHD, that’s no secret. And I think when you get older, um, not– it doesn’t affect everybody, but I do see a lot of what could be either they, they have ADHD or it’s like a– Brett: they have Melissa: of creeps in and it’s just a natural process of aging, cognitive decline. So, yep. Brett: have a lot of patience. Sure. S- some of my, some of my most interesting relationships over the last 10 years have been with, uh, Mac users in their late 70s, [00:04:00] 80s. And, uh, like they’ve been– They’re very– Like, they’re definitely… The people that I’ve known have been technically capable and very interested in learning. That’s why they follow me. That’s how I meet them, right? They’re like, they read my blog, which is just all nerd stuff. And, and so they’re, they’re technically competent, and they’re doing things that I can only aspire to be doing in my 70s and 80s. Um, I had a guy who was writing his memoirs at, in between like mountain bike rides. And so here’s the thing, though, is when you, when you know someone online and they’re in their 80s and you stop hearing from them for a Melissa: Yes. Yes. Brett: you have to assume that they have passed on. and that is sad, and you never really get any closure because you don’t know their friends or family. You [00:05:00] never get like a notice, an obituary. You don’t, you don’t know where these people go, um, and you don’t know how to check in on them once your normal channels of communication are severed. Melissa: Yeah, we’re at that age where we probably start reading the obituaries. Like, I haven’t heard from so-and-so in a while. Let me check the obits." Brett: I had, I had– Before NVUltra went on for, what’s it, like five years now, uh, without a release, um, I had a project called BitWriter with David Halter. And Melissa: remember you mentioning that, yeah. Yeah, and you wondered. Mm-hmm. Brett: he stopped responding. Melissa: you find out any at all? Any, Any, concrete… Brett: Nothing. I have put feelers out everywhere I can think of. I have no idea what happened to him. Melissa: went Richard Simmons, huh? Brett: yeah. Yeah. With less Melissa: No contact. No contact. Aw. Digital Legacy Work Melissa: I, I’m lucky that, uh, in my line of [00:06:00] work, I do typically hear from the family if they’ve passed on, because I form kind of a bond with a lot of people. I, I typically don’t lose clients unless they die, so… Brett: and you have some, like, in real life connections to Melissa: Oh, yeah. Yeah, I do, I do both. I do… I have some clients where I’ve never met them in person, I’ve only ever done remote. Uh, and then, but most of my clients are, are local, the majority of them. But I, I still s- see them remotely too, so yeah. I’ve, I’ve actually been hired by some people, um, mostly I’ve had two male clients who they got a terminal illness, they knew they were terminal, and they followed me online and they pretty much hired me to take care of their surviving spouse. So that, that was… that’s a difficult thing, but I’m just honored that they chose me to, to help them out with that. So I’ve kind of been a bit of a digital undertaker in that regard. Sponsor: OneSkin Christina: I want to take a moment to share something that has significantly improved my skincare routine, OneSkin. [00:07:00] So we all have those days when our skin doesn’t feel its best, and I’ve certainly been in that boat, especially recovering from surgery. And I was tired of navigating through endless products that promised results, but often fell short. And that’s when I discovered OneSkin. It was founded by scientists dedicated to longevity, and this brand stands out for its commitment to real science over marketing hype. They tackle the fundamental question of how to actually slow down skin aging rather than just masking it. And their groundbreaking ingredient is, uh, ZeroS01, and it’s a proprietary peptide designed to help deactivate the damaged cells that contribute to aging skin. Since incorporating OneSkin into my routine, I’ve actually been noticing some improvements. My skin feels smoother. It looks more vibrant. Um, it’s definitely more moisturized, and so this is benefiting from its focus on supporting collagen and strengthening the skin barrier. With over 10,000 five-star reviews and validation from clinical studies, OneSkin has made a name for itself in the skincare industry. If [00:08:00] you’re interested in trying OneSkin for yourself, you can get 15% off your order with the code OVERTIRED at oneskin.co/overtired. That’s 15% off at oneskin.co/overtired using the code OVERTIRED. Thank you for supporting our show by checking them out Mental Health Check In Brett: Um, so do you wanna do a mental health Melissa: Sure. Brett: I, I know, I know you’ve listened to the show before. I know you know how this works. Melissa: how this works. Brett: Would you like to start? Melissa: I think I would like to hear you start, and then I’ll, I’ll add on Brett: that sounds good. Insomnia And Focus Brett: Um, so sleep continues to be a major issue for me. Um, I actually for four days in a row last week, I got eight hours of sleep a night, which was insane. I felt so good. Um- The first night… So I take [00:09:00] Lamictal for bipolar, and if I miss my evening dose, I crash and I sleep in the next morning, and I sleep soundly. Like, it’s the best sleep I can get. And then I wake up and all of a sudden the withdrawal kicks in, and then I’m shaky and dizzy for half an hour after I take the dose. Um, but that’s after, like, a solid night of sleep, and it never works two nights in a row. And, like, I’ve tried, like, maybe if I take Lamictal in the mornings instead of the evenings, maybe I’ll sleep through the night. It doesn’t work after that first missed dose. Um, but then I just, without making any changes in my lifestyle, started sleeping, and I thought finally after, like, two years of insomnia, I had turned a corner, because I can’t remember the last time I got eight hours of sleep for more than two nights in a [00:10:00] row. And then it ended, and then I was up. I’ve been up since 2:30 today. Melissa: I wondered, yep. Brett: I mean, I went to bed at 8:00, so that’s still nine, 10, 11, 12, 11, Melissa: I actually dozed off on the couch around 8:30. Like, if only I could just be in my bed right now, just be, like, transported. Yeah. Oh. Brett: Oh, I, I wish. If I could go back to bed… Like, sometimes I’ll, I’ll lay back down around 7:00 or 8:00 and get, like, another half hour of sleep, but it’s really that, like, uninterrupted block of deep sleep that I need, not… I take naps during the day, and I can usually fall asleep for half an hour, um, given that I’m usually functioning on five hours of sleep anyway. But anyway, um, I– That, that’s just kind of par for the course for me, so, like, any, any of our listeners know that that’s gonna be the first thing I report. Melissa: are you, [00:11:00] like, kinda competing? Like, are you trying to get eight hours because that’s what’s prescribed? Have you ever thought about Brett: be- actually, what works eight and a half, like I’ve, I’ve… Back when I had the option to sleep more than five hours, like, I did a lot of kind of experimentation and Melissa: know where your sweet spot is. Brett: Well, it… See, the sweet pot- spot changes as you age, though, and you need less sleep as you get older. So, so I can’t say for sure that eight and a half hours is still my sweet spot. Um, and I think honestly, if I can sleep seven hours, I feel pretty good, and I consider seven hours a good night’s sleep. Melissa: Yeah, ’cause mine’s like between four and six. Brett: really? Yeah. See, Melissa: feel Brett: I don’t function well. Oh, I don’t function well on anything less than seven hours. Melissa: I just have a love-hate relationship with sleep. I just don’t– I just hate to sleep. I just would rather be doing other things. Life is [00:12:00] just too interesting. Brett: I get that. I– get that. I– as someone who’s bipolar and has had like manic episodes where I’m up for five days straight, like I, I love not sleeping. Um, w- when, when I have the mania to give me energy and back it up. It’s when I’m just dragging all day and feel like a zombie. The thing– The, the plus side to it is the more tired I am, up to a certain point, the better I can focus. Like my brain slows down and it’s really easy for me to get into hyperfocus. And like most mornings I’m up at, you know, 2:30, 3:00 and I just start coding. And I can not only hyperfocus, but I can switch focus between three or four different projects like simultaneously. I hit compile on one, I move on to the next one, and I can rotate [00:13:00] through them and like keep track of all of it. And then right around 10:00 AM, my ability to do that ends and suddenly I like flip to a project and I cannot for the life of me remember what I was doing, which is why I’ve spent my life building note-taking apps and, and time tracking tools. Melissa: Yep, same thing. Doing Time Tracker Brett: dude, h- d- I don’t… You might not be familiar with my project Doing. Melissa: N-no, but I– you alluded to something. that’s not what you’re working on with Dan though, is it? Brett: No, no, that’s gonna be Melissa: Dan on that too. I, I, don’t know what it is yet, but yeah, I’m, I’m Brett: Oh, it’s… Yeah, it’s gonna be cool. Melissa: that’s so exciting. Brett: no, Doing is a command line tool where you can type things like, “Doing now podcasting with Melissa,” and it starts a timer for like what I’m doing now, and then I can ask it if I leave and come back, I can say, “What was I doing?” And it’ll tell me, [00:14:00] “You’re podcasting with Melissa.” Obviously, that’s a weird example ’cause I’m not gonna leave in the middle of this. But then it can give you like totals, time, tag-based time totals, uh, for your week and everything. It can show you like what you finished yesterday. Um, it’s not so much a task tracking app as it is a tool for keeping track of what you’re doing in the moment. Um, for, for people like me who switch between four projects at once, it’s really handy. And some guy, some fucking guy Melissa: Some fucking guy. Brett: it, rewrote it in Rust, and it is really good. it is really good. Uh, he like, I- Oh yeah, I use Melissa: Okay, ’cause Brett: This is, this is separate. this is this is a little more ‘ intentional than Timing. Um, I use both. They kind of work together, and Doing can actually import Timing’s JSON exports. So you can turn your, you can turn [00:15:00] all your Timing data into command line, uh, readable Doing files. Um, but anyway, this guy rewrote it in Rust with my permission, and he gave me full credit on the page. And I think I’m switching ’cause Doing is written in Ruby, and Ruby is slow, and Rust is fast. And like my Doing file where it stores all of my current projects, like my Doing items, gets so big that it can take Doing like up to five seconds to respond when I ask it, “What was I doing today?” Which is five seconds is a long time on the command line. Um, and his Melissa: pretty instantaneous. Brett: his version is like 100 milliseconds. Boom. But anyway, Melissa: It’s almost like you built your own little AI thing. Like, what was I doing? What Brett: kinda, kinda, yeah. Melissa: you doing, Dave? Brett: This is, this [00:16:00] was built long before AI was a common thing, but the other thing that’s contributing to my mental health Suspenders And Stenosis Brett: is suspenders. Melissa: Ah, yes. Brett: So I have I have gained 100 pounds, um, not, n-not of my own choice, but like I had rapid weight gain and I recently got a stenosis diagnosis, which I hate the Melissa: telling you, I’m telling you, we’re like 23 and me here. I’ve got that too. Brett: apparently during one of my, like when I gained 50 pounds in like six weeks, my body was looking for places to store all the new fat and decided my spine might be a good place for that. Um, so I have fat in my spine and I have degrading discs. This is separate from my love of suspenders, so I’ll get back to [00:17:00] that. I, um, Melissa: Wait till you get it in your eyeballs. Brett: Oh, for real? Melissa: Yeah, you can have… I have, um, what’s it called? Cholesterol. Yeah, if you look at your eyes really close, if you see like a white kind of w- ridge around your irises, that’s cholesterol. Brett: Oh, wow. Yeah, I hope, I hope that hasn’t happened yet, but who knows? Um, Melissa: Brings out Brett: I– So I have all this, I have all this extra weight and I had a lot of trouble with belts. A, belts hurt ’cause they dig into my, my gut, and they don’t really work. I, every, every time I stood up, my butt crack showed and I had to like wiggle my pants up. And then I I tried a pair of suspenders and it was like a l- a switch had been flipped. All of a sudden my pants just stayed up without any constriction around my waist, just like they just stayed with me wherever I went. And now I can, [00:18:00] I can tuck my shirts in and it actually looks kinda cool when you got the suspenders look going on. Which means, so like for a long time I only wore one brand of shirt, um, and because they, it was, it fit my belly and it was long enough and like it wasn’t, wasn’t baggy around the top and didn’t hang off my belly like a muumuu. Melissa: Mm-hmm, Brett: And like, so I, I, I only wore this brand of shirt and I own like 15 of them, and I would just cycle through Melissa: dresses, they’re just your Walmart $10 cotton tank dress. Love it. Brett: Yeah. But now that I can tuck my shirts in and feel okay about it, I can buy those extra large nerd shirts, ones with funny slogans and stuff on them. And normally those would hang straight down off my belly, and I hate the way that looks. But now I can tuck those in, which means I can get back to wearing funny, [00:19:00] ironic T-shirts, and it, it’s like opening up a whole new world of possibilities Melissa: That is a bonus for mental health. Brett: every day now I put on my suspenders and it makes me happy. Um, Melissa: wonderful. It’s almost like a, like a mobility aid. Brett: Kinda, yeah. Melissa: yeah. Brett: of, I– So I, I have a monopod, um, like a tripod that folds up into a walking stick, and it’s nice and light and it is an adjustable height ’cause it’s designed to be used as a camera tripod. Um, and I’ve started walking with it Melissa: yeah. kinda like you’re Brett: I c- yeah. Yeah. Like one of my fat friends has s- literal like ski poles. They’re like half height ski poles and they walk with them and it helps them a ton, and I Melissa: Yeah, hikers use those. Brett: try that out. But a walking stick [00:20:00] really does help with my stenosis, but I can still, even with a stick, I can only walk for about five minutes, which is about .3, Melissa: Yeah. Brett: 3, .3 miles. Um, and then I have to stop and sit, and it’s been a real pain, literally. Mobility And Home Hacks Melissa: And is standing difficult, too? Brett: standing is worse than walking. Melissa: thing, yeah. Standing’s worse. Brett: Yeah. Like if I am in the kitchen and I’m at the stove cooking, before the onions start to brown, I have to sit Melissa: Yeah. Yep. Brett: Uh, so we now have a stool in our kitchen, Melissa: Do you have one in the shower? Brett: yes. Well, our shower, our shower has a nice, like the back of the tub is a seat. Melissa: Oh, okay. Yeah. Brett: I don’t know if this house was designed by old people or not, but, um, but it’s certainly everything is relatively [00:21:00] accessible in that way. Um, but the stool in the kitchen means I can cook dinner. Emptying the dishwasher is the worst for me. That just like bending over, picking stuff up, and then just moving back and forth, like the five feet across our kitchen. My– I, it takes me three stops, three rests to get a dishwasher emptied. Um, and then I’m kind of ruined after that. I hate it. And I hate that I Melissa: stress mat? Brett: What’s that? Oh, you mean Melissa: mat to stand on? Gotta get, gotta Brett: think that would help? Melissa: Oh, yeah. Yeah, I have Brett: used to have one Melissa: and one in front of the kitchen, and I don’t even, I don’t even, do the cooking. Brett: Ha. I used to, I used to have one of those in front of the stove when I w- when I didn’t have pain, but just because I was really getting into cooking and I was spending a lot of time, and I was starting to feel it in my knees. Um, yeah, maybe I should do Melissa: I think it’s a fatigue [00:22:00] mat, I think they call it. Brett: Yeah. Melissa: Yeah, Brett: That sounds Melissa: plus they look cool if you get little designs on them and stuff. Yeah. Oh, we could spend the day talking about just mobility aids and ergonomics and all that kind of stuff. Melissa Health Update Brett: Well, it’s your turn. Talk about whatever you like. Melissa: Yeah, you give me some ideas to talk about. Um, yeah, I struggle with a lot of the same things that you do. Um, I’m always like kinda comparing notes every time you post something. I’m like, "Oh No, ‘Cause you talked about Have you … You haven’t started the injections yet, have you? Brett: No, and they just delayed those. I don’t get them until like June 20th or something. Melissa: nervous about those for you, because I’ve had those and I’ve decided to just swear off them, so I’ll just kinda give you just a heads-up. I mean, it does raise your blood sugar, so that’s not great, and, um, it can give you the roid rage, kinda make you angry, so that’s something to watch out for, and more weight gain, so …But it’s like one of those things where you just have to kinda try [00:23:00] it and see if it works, because if it does work, then you could be more mobile and then maybe drop a few pounds and get some of that weight off of your spine. But if it doesn’t work, just know that that can happen, Brett: my doctor did not mention any of those side effects, so good to Melissa: Yeah. Yeah. It’s, it’s the chronic life, so that’s, that’s what, that’s what, uh, affects my mental health, so I’m, I’m really good at faking it. I am actually … I will say I’m actually feeling a little bit more even. ADHD Meds And Mutations Melissa: I’m on, uh … I love when you talk about different prescriptions and stuff. Uh, I just mentioned, so I’m taking Adderall. That is, ugh, it’s a mixed bag. Um, I wanted to ask you about Vyvanse, cause that’s the next thing for me, but it’s, like, super expensive, so I’m trying to make Adderall work as best I can, but I’m, I’m in the process of playing with the dosage. But I think she told me, like, the highest was 30. The thing is, uh, I’ve had genetic testing done, and [00:24:00] I have this condit- not a condition, but it’s a I’m a mutant. It’s a genetic mutation called, it’s, it’s just initials. It’s MTHFR, lovingly known as Brett: you process your, your, chemicals twice as … fast. I have Melissa: Yes, faster processing in the liver. So that’s when she told me, ’cause she started, uh, me out on methylphenidate, and I was like, “Well, what about Adderall?” Because it, I see it work for my kids, you know? The kids are chip off the old block, right? And so I’ve had them tested too, and all three of us are positive for that. It’s lovelin- lovingly known as the motherfucker gene mutation. Um, yeah, so, and it is. It’s, it’s quite a bitch, um, ’cause it causes a whole bunch of other problems. And of course, we’ve talked about Ehlers-Danlos, so I have, uh, hypermobile Eh- Ehlers-Danlos. I’m having a hard time … I’m just having a hard time with that in general, mental health wise, because there’s just not enough awareness about it, enough people, and doctors, doctors and nurses. And you know, I’ll, I’ll say I wanna, I would love to be able to get [00:25:00] to a point where I can just say, “I have H-E-D-S,” or heads or what- however they’re gonna pronounce it, and, like, somebody know what that is when I go in for an appointment. But I still have to explain it, you know? And then that, that cuts into my time. ‘Cause they only … When you’re, when you’re our age, they only give you, like, 15 minutes, if that. When you’re much older, ’cause I’ve had to take, I’ve had to take family members to the doctor, they get a whole lot more time. But, uh, you know, it’s like, "Oh, you’re, you’re too young to be this sick. You’re too young to be this old," Brett: Right. Yeah. Curious Doctors Matter Brett: Um, I did– I found that doctor for me that knew exactly what all those acronyms meant, knew exactly, like, not only did they know what POTS was, they knew like seven different kinds of POTS and what tests to use to narrow it down. And then she got called up to National Guard Melissa: Oh, I wondered, I wondered, what happened to that doctor, ’cause it sounded so Brett: I waited. I was on a, I was on– I w- I had an appointment scheduled that was gonna be six months from the time she [00:26:00] left. Um, and I had it scheduled, and it was on July 7th. And then I got a letter in the mail saying that her Guard duty had been extended, and now I can’t see her again until September. And, like, I’ve, I’ve tried seeing other doctors that work with her, but none of them have the knowledge she has, and it was such a relief Melissa: Is this the curious one? Okay. I always think about you whenever I’m either looking for a provider or in the, in the midst of, of getting, you know, shuffled around to a new provider. I’m like, “I hope they’re curious,” ’cause that made– that meant so much to me when you explained about how a doctor needs to be curious. I’m like, “That’s what I need.” I need somebody… Or even just my therapist. I have a new, a new therapist that I see, and she’s really curious, and I really, really like that about her. That’s something that helps with mental health, is when somebody’s curious, ’cause I’m Brett: it goes h- it goes hand in hand with credulousness. Like, [00:27:00] first they have to be willing to believe you, and like, especially when it comes to invisible issues like EDS. Like, you have to be willing to believe a person and then be curious enough to look for answers. Like, the first step is believing, and the second step is curiosity. Melissa: Yes. I’ve already had my patient record marked as… Have you ever heard this one? Worried well. Brett: No. Melissa: I looked it up. It’s basically hypochondriac. Brett: Yeah, that’s what I was gonna guess. That Melissa: Yep. I actually– I was proud of myself because I actually did confront the doctor about it and I said, “What does this mean?” I said, “I, I looked it up and it kinda concerns me ’cause it makes me look like a hypochondriac.” And she said, "Oh, no, no, that’s just a, a code that we use when we don’t have something else to assign to it so that insurance will pay." Bullshit. Brett: Yeah, right? I feel like that’s exactly the kind of [00:28:00] thing insurance doesn’t pay. Melissa: Mm-hmm. so Vyvanse Vs Adderall Brett: what do you wanna know about Vyvanse? Melissa: Um, a- and I know it’s different for everybody, but I just kinda wondered what your take was on it. Um, how– can you compare it to Adderall at all for me, Brett: Yeah. Melissa: no comparison? Brett: it’s basically a non-abusable, I would call it lower lying version of, of Adderall. Like, it’s in the same family of stimulant as Adderall, but it can’t– It isn’t processed or it’s… I don’t remember how the mechanics of it work, but you can’t snort it basically. Like, it doesn’t, it doesn’t do anything Melissa: Which I wouldn’t wanna do anyway ’cause there’s nothing up here. Brett: Sure. Sure. And then, yeah, I’m not suggesting that was gonna be a problem for you. Um, but it’s also, like, it’s way, um, for me anyway, it’s way calmer. [00:29:00] Um, and there are people that say it doesn’t do anything at all. Um, especially a lot of people, a lot of people say the generic version doesn’t do anything, um, and that the name brand version does, but I haven’t found that to be true. Like the generic, which you’re correct, still costs like 200 bucks a month, um, for the generic. Um, but it is– It’s not my favorite. Melissa: I wondered why– what made you stop taking it. Did it just not work for you? Brett: No, I still take Vyvanse. Um, yeah. Um, I used to take, um, Focalin, which I loved. Melissa: That really worked for my kiddo, yep. Brett: but it also triggered my mania, Melissa: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Brett: so I was always walking this line of like, do I wanna be super productive and manic with like weeks of depression in between, [00:30:00] or do I just wanna be somewhat productive and stable? Um, which is why I’ve stuck with Vyvanse, and my doctor loves it enough for me that she won’t, she won’t prescribe anything else for me at this point. Like, I’ve asked about switching. I’ve asked about moving back to Adderall and things like that, but, Melissa: It seems like you’re, like you’re kinda on an evening out. Brett: Yeah, I haven’t had a manic episode for a couple years now. Tracking Mood With Data Melissa: Do you track it? Do you– Like, have you ever seen those– I keep seeing these ads for it ’cause, you know, the algorithm feeds us the stuff for wearables that are, um, called– I think it’s called Visible, so it makes your symptoms more visible instead of invisible. Like, do you track it? Do you Have you nerded out on your own data? Brett: like my mania and depression? Melissa: Yeah, like do you track it and look at graphs or anything like that to Brett: See, I’ve never had to use an external tool because I can just look at GitHub contribution graphs, and I can look at [00:31:00] my RSS feed, and I can see exactly, like for a period of like eight years, I can pinpoint exactly where my manic episodes were, um, because that data is historically preserved out there on the internet for all to see. Um, it’s, yeah, it’s– Well, and that’s, like I built tools that gathered that, those various sources of data. Um, and then there was a, a tool called, um, I forget. Melissa: cool, though? Hmm. We’ll think Brett: But it could pull, it could pull in all that data. Um, Bell Beth Cooper, Hello Code, I can’t remember the name of the app. Melissa: Yeah, it’ll come to you eventually. Brett: sure. Uh, but it could pull in like your GitHub, uh, commits along with like what the weather was at the time, how many songs you listened to that Melissa: Oh, day one sorta does that, yeah. Brett: Does it now? Melissa: A little bit, yeah, your locations, [00:32:00] um, if you turn on some of those things. Like not– I don’t think it does the music and things like that, but Brett: I haven’t used it for a while. I haven’t used it for a Melissa: I was gonna switch to the journal app. I was actually really… I held off on upgrading to Tahoe for the longest time, but that one kept nagging at me ’cause I thought, oh, you know, maybe. I mean, as much as I love Day One, I, I thought about, I thought about actually switching over, but no. I tried it. I’m, I’m gonna stick with Day One. Brett: Cool. All right. Cane And Somatic Therapy Brett: Um, so did you have, did you have more to add to your Melissa: Oh, I was gonna, I was gonna add on to what you were talking about with the suspenders. I did start… I think you probably… Well, yeah, you commented on it. Um, I started using a cane, and that I have mixed feelings about that. Um, I should have brought it in here so I could show you. I’ll show you later, ’cause, uh, anyway, it’s, it’s purple. I did get a pimp cane. That’s what my husband calls it. I thought, damn it, if I’m gonna use, like, a cane, then it’s gonna be [00:33:00] purple, and I’m gonna like looking at it, as much as I hate to use it, so. So I’ve been trying to use it. I… What you were talking about with, uh, with finding a curious doctor, I do have new physical therapist, um, so I’m really happy about that. Same kind of thing where she’s super booked. I think that’s just how it is. Like, the really good ones, they’re good, and, you know, it shows because it’s, it’s hard to get in to see them. So yeah. So I’m, I’m looking forward to that. We’re gonna be doing… Have you heard of somatic therapy? Brett: Yeah. Melissa: Yeah. So ha- have you tried it? Do, do you like it? Okay. That’s, that’s what I’m embarking on. Brett: I actually have a friend who teaches classes in it. Melissa: Oh, Al probably knows about that. Brett: y- yeah, Melissa: Yeah, I’ll, I’ll Brett: and it is, it is amazing how hard just doing things, doing motions you’re used to, but doing them very slowly and intentionally. It is like you– Just like, Just like, doing y- like a clamshell where you drop your knee, you’re [00:34:00] on your back and you drop your knee down to the side and bring it back up. Like that motion, most of us, even infirmed people can do that okay. You try to take… You try to do that and take like five breaths in each direction, and you’ll start shaking. It’s very Melissa: Ah, uh-huh. Yep. Brett: Yeah, but it’s good. Like it’s g- it really retrains your muscles. It really, it strengthens, retrains, and helps with, uh, finer motor control. Melissa: Oh, that’s interesting. Yeah, I, I’m, I’m a little bit on the skeptical end of it, so that’s why I’m, I’m glad that, that you, you vouch for it too. It’s like I know that it works, but I just… I guess I wanna understand the science of it a little bit more. Like, for example, I’ve tried, uh, acupuncture, and I just didn’t feel like it did, did anything for me. I think you have to be, like, a believer, and I just Brett: think so. Melissa: I, I, I even did that on purpose knowing that I kinda felt like it wasn’t gonna work. I was like, well, what if I just go into this? ‘Cause, [00:35:00] ’cause I talk to people and they’re like, "Well, you have to believe in it." I’m like, but what if I don’t? I just don’t, you know? I’m, I see it Brett: it’s not medicine if you have to believe in it. Melissa: Yeah. I mean, I see it work for other people. I know there’s, you know, such a thing as placebos and things like that, and I don’t know, it’s, it’s woo-woo and I, I, I like woo-woo stuff. I, it just, it didn’t do anything for me, so… It’s not to say that it doesn’t work for other people, but it just did not work for me, and I, I kind of, I, maybe I just, uh, did that on purpose when I, I try- probably just tripped myself up going into it thinking, well, I just don’t believe it, so if it works, then there must be science behind it. And then, then, I’ll believe. But it didn’t work out, so. So the, I’m a little bit on the fence about the somatic thing, but the, the, the gal that I’m working with is just so, she has EDS herself, and like, like what you were saying, like, she, she knows all about it and she could even, you know, tell me the, the type that she has, and I was like, I met, I met, actually last week I met two zebras in one week. [00:36:00] You, you’re familiar with the, the zebra mascot? If you, uh, the saying goes, if you hear hooves, think horses. But we’re not horses, are we? Yeah, so Yeah, so that’s, that’s our, our Somatics For EDS Melissa: EDS Brett: somatic– somatics you don’t have to believe in for them to work. Melissa: Okay, that is Brett: it’s an actual physical therapy method that trains the finer muscles, um, that surround your larger muscles and, and strengthens those, and it– Yeah, it’s for real. It’s, yeah, it’s not like a… It’s soma- I think, Melissa: w- totally Brett: ’cause I I had the same reaction when someone said somatics, ’cause I think, “Oh, that’s some holistic idea of the body, um, of soma,” and it’s… No, it’s, it’s got legit physical therapy behind it. Melissa: And, Yoga Modifications Melissa: you used to do a lot of yoga too, so that probably makes Brett: I still do. Melissa: Yeah? That’s [00:37:00] wonderful. Brett: it’s gotten really hard. Um, I can’t, I can’t– So I get dizzy Melissa: Yeah. Brett: going from sitting to standing, um, and my back gives out if I am in, like, horse or warrior two for more than a couple minutes. Um, and I can’t do cobras because I have a belly like a nine-month pregnancy. Um, so I have to do, like, prenatal yoga, um, which is actually a thing. Melissa: that’s a good idea. I’m glad you brought that up. I should look Brett: a- and I do chair yoga, um, where I I take the class that everyone else takes, but I modify it to work with… Like, there, there are defined moves that you do with a chair instead of. Instead of doing down dog, you do, like, a 90-degree down dog holding the back of a chair. Um, and you put, like, a knee on the chair to do warrior two, so you’re actually [00:38:00] resting. And Um, and you can do it fully seated too and get at least the arm exercises out of it. So I’ve been trying to maintain, maintain flexibility and some endurance. I’m not doing yoga the way I used to do it, but I am still Melissa: I’ve seen some of your poses. It’s pretty impressive. Brett: Yeah, back in the day. Melissa: W- when you could be upside down. Polycystic Liver Shock Melissa: I should look into that because I, you know, although I’m done having babies, like far done having babies, I have… You probably know about this too, I have polycystic liver disease, which is a really rare type of liver disease, and it’s not fatty liver. Oh my God, I have to keep telling doctors that. That’s the other thing. It’s like, it is not fatty liver. It is not. It- they’re cysts. It’s a totally different thing. I’m basically full of bubbles. So I… But it feels like that’s why I went in to get it. I didn’t actually get that checked. I found it accidentally when I went in for an heart, for a heart CT. That’s when they found it, and for a, a breast MRI, so [00:39:00] both those, those types of scans caught it. The other parts were fine, so my heart’s fine, so that’s a relief. But yeah, so this was a bit of a shock. And so I don’t know exactly what it means moving forward, um, but my entire liver is, like, engulfed in cysts, so. Right? But my blood work is, is fantastic right now, so I’m just gonna keep Brett: That’s good. Melissa: hoping it stays that way. Brett: That’s something. Fatphobia In Healthcare Brett: Um, I I have heard for a long time about, um, doctors being fatphobic and, and always assuming that, um, always assuming that your health i-issue is because you’re fat and not even looking for underlying issues, which has been an interesting experience for me because that really never happened to me. Melissa: Mm. Brett: Um, at least not once I switched to Gundersen from, like, a local clinic. Then I realized that it’s not just being fat that gets you [00:40:00] stigmatized, it’s being a fat woman. Melissa: Mm, I was gonna say try having a uterus and being Brett: yeah. Yeah. Um, like I talked to one of my best friends, April, who he’s, has been on Melissa: by, women doctors. Brett: Yeah. Yeah. And that’s, that’s what April tells me. She tells me all these horror stories. Even after finding care she trusted, she still has to deal with people saying, “Well, if you just lost some weight.” Like, she’s been fat her whole life. She’s in better shape than most skinny people Melissa: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Brett: I mean, she does sit-ups with 50-pound plates and does, like, five, 10 miles at a time on her, like, on her bike and, like, she’s in great shape and still has to walk with the ski poles, and she’s getting her second knee replaced this week. And, like, it, it’s just infuriating to hear the way that doctors dismiss Melissa: You know what the problem is, Brett? Brett: goes through [00:41:00] when Pole Dancing Reality Check Melissa: Not enough doctors have watched fat pole dancers. That is the problem right there. They need more education. Brett: Um, yeah. There’s, there are a couple of, um, queer burlesque shows Melissa: shows, yes. Brett: in my area that almost always include a plus-size pole dance, and it is amazing to Melissa: Oh, it’s mesmerizing. It should be an Olympic sport. Remind me to send you the, the link to, unless you’ve already seen it, have you seen the Deadpool pole dancer? Brett: No, I don’t think Melissa: you are in for a treat. We might just have to put that in the show notes, but I don’t know, I don’t know if your listeners are that, are into that It’s fully clothed, but it’s, there’s even blue Crocs involved. Brett: So this is nobody that you’re seeing on the Melissa: I wondered, yep. I wondered, yeah. Aw, he looks so soft. Mm. Mechanical Keyboard ASMR Brett: So you’ve [00:42:00] gotten really into mechanical keyboards. Melissa: have, I have. In fact, uh, I was gonna, I was gonna see how this might sound, but I, I brought my little box of key caps to show you so that I could say, welcome to my ASMR channel. Brett: That would… is is that a thing? I bet there are ASMR, like, key switch testing. Melissa: yeah, yeah. I’ve run across a couple of videos where, you know, they’ll have a hashtag ASMR in there, and that’s, that’s what it is. Do you experience ASMR yourself? Brett: No. Melissa: No? So when you listen to those videos you don’t get like the s- the tickling of the spine and stuff? Brett: No. Melissa: I do. It actually, it goes, it… I forget. I always forget what the acronym stands for, but it, you know, has something to do with the meridian. So if you can i- imagine your brain like split in half, and I feel it right on this side. It goes, it goes like the, down the back of my head, behind my ear, and down into my shoulder. It [00:43:00] is the funkiest feeling, and I love it. I love it so much. Even when we were talking about animals in the, in the beginning and I even had a cat that would come and just like kind of lick my ear and, oh, I just, I love that. Most people cannot stand that sound. They have the opposite condition where they can’t handle somebody chewing gum. My grandfather had that. Um, some, some kinda, it ends in a tonia. Misatonia or something like that, um, where… I don’t know. Do you have any of those like sound sensory issues? I have a lot of Brett: really don’t. I’m very, I’m very, like, sound Like, I like loud, heavy music. Like, that does something for my psyche. Um, but general sounds, they neither bo-bother me nor stimulate me. Melissa: imagine what that’s like. I just can’t. I’m So bothered, and my kids too, and you know, ugh, God, Brett: So El Melissa: has been problematic. Brett: El is, El is, definitely sensitive to sound, um, in a way that Like, even my [00:44:00] mechanical keyboards can’t be, can’t be on the same floor of the house as Elle. We pretty much live in silence, and that’s fine for me most of the time because, like, it just doesn’t affect me either way. So, like, keeping things quiet is easy, and I focus well in silence. And then when Elle’s gone, I blast my music, and w- when I’m in the car, I blast my music, and then the rest of the time I live in the quiet place. Melissa: Mm-hmm. In The Quiet Place. Brett: Yeah. Melissa: Yeah, we have- something a little similar, but m- my husband and I have, uh… We have our his and hers kind of setup here in, in the, in our den, in our inner study. So he’s got his side and I’ve got my side. So we’re together, and he does a lot of grading papers, and he’s really good about putting his, his earbuds in and just tuning the whole world out. He’s… It’s fascinating to watch that man just [00:45:00] execute. I mean, I just am so envious of people who can just execute. But the, the, the, yeah, the sensory, it’s all about the sensory stuff for me when it comes to keyboards. I actually thought about… I don’t know how popular it would be, but I also thought about making a podcast, a video podcast, that would highlight the intersection of nail art and mechanical keyboards. Because I’ll tell you, that’s actually what… I’ve always loved mechanical keyboards, but yeah, the, the one that I had, someone had given me a, a Matias, and oh, it’s, it’s so loud, but it’s like high-pitched. It’s kinda sharp. And it was even kind of annoying to me after a while. And then it does not, it’s not a mechanical keyboard in that you can’t pull the switches out, so you’re kinda stuck with what you got. Like, you might be able to change the key caps if you could find them, but couldn’t change the switches. And something happened to the S key, and I was like, “All right, it’s over,” so. But I can’t get rid of them either, so one of these days I wanna have like a display of, of keyboards. [00:46:00] Nail Art And Picking Melissa: But what got me, what got me into saying, “Okay, I’m finally, I’m just gonna invest in a keyboard because it’s ergonomically important to me,” is I have… And I can’t pronounce it, so I’m not even gonna try, but there’s a condition, and it’s a self-diagnosed thing. But I, I am a picker. I pick my skin a lot. Um, I think it’s called derma something Anyway, so I wasn’t gonna try to pronounce it. But, uh, I’ve always had that condition since I was a kid. I didn’t even know it was a thing. I just thought everybody get, uh, picks. But then during the pande- during the pandemic, it got super bad. Like, I had, I had, um, some panic attacks and, you know, as a lot of probab- people probably did. But it got so bad to the point where I had picked my fingers and they were bleeding and they were throbbing and they were hurting. And I said to one of my kids, I said to my youngest, I said, “Can you just, like, if I, if I’m picking, can you just let me know?” And then I regretted doing that because then he took it on as this, like, full-time job, you know? And it kinda [00:47:00] gave him anxiety, and I thought, “Oh, okay, that, that was a bad thing to do.” So I s- I let him off the hook. I said, “No, you don’t have to tell me anymore.” Um, because, yeah, ev- even if I went to, like, just kinda, like, clean under my nail or something. So it was actually causing a real problem for the family that I was just picking so much. And it’s not just my fingers, it’s, like, other parts of my body. So I thought to myself, “Well, what can I do about this?” And so I started putting fake nail tips on. And I hate to be all, like… I don’t know, I’m not, I try not to be, like, a very vain person, but I really started kinda falling into the nail art side of things, and I, I just recently learned how to do gel and work with, um, uh, what’s it called? Uh, not resin. So I… Oh, that’s another ASMR thing. Do you like to watch resin pours? Brett: I do, actually, yes. Melissa: that’s… Okay, so if you like resin pours, if you like to watch the viscosity and the way the, the chemicals, like, form together and when they, when they mix colors in and stuff, [00:48:00] that’s what it’s like with nail art but on more of, like, a macro level because it’s, you know, you’re working with small stuff. Like, just, just recently I learned how to do… So I’m showing Brett this on, on camera, but I recently learned how to do the kind of nail polish that you take a magnet and you run the magnet along it, and it makes this, like, a cat’s eye. Brett: Yeah, that’s cool. Melissa: I love it. So, so that, so combining nail art then, and I thought, “Well, now I’ve got these long nails,” but all of my keyboards have been these flat, really low-profile keyboards. And, you know, I just, I started to dread it. So then I was kinda caught between a crossroads. Like, either I leave nails off and I can type really, really fast and have high accuracy with no nails, but then as soon as, as soon as I get, like, a little snag or something, then I start picking and then it’s just, it’s all over then. Or I try to find a way to work with these nails. So that’s what I started thinking, “Well, maybe if I had higher keys.” And so then I just, yeah, rabbit hole. [00:49:00] Went down the rabbit hole, and I’ve, I’ve just kinda been there ever since. And, uh, it really, I think, uh… Let’s see. How long ago did this start? It’s only been about maybe like six months or something like that, so. Keyboard Layout Rabbit Hole Melissa: But in that time so I’ve started, um, building a collection of switches. So I’ve been really interested in both the key caps and the switches. Um, I’ve got my baseboards. I like my Royal Kludge the best. This is… I’m gonna show Brett my Royal Kludge. So, so this is what it’s looking like right now. Brett: Yeah. Melissa: It is very purpley. Um, I did post some pictures. I can… I don’t know if you do pictures in show notes, but I could take some pictures for you It’s got a knob. It’s got, um… Let me see if I can do it real Brett: Do you use the knob. I have a couple keyboards with knobs and even a joystick, and I never actually use them Melissa: Good question. Um, I, I use it, I try to use it for volume at [00:50:00] times, and that’s probably what I use it for the most. But this one does have a… Let’s see if I can get this into focus here, backwards and upside down. It’s gonna be upside down, but you see how you can put, you can put your logo Brett: Oh, yeah. Nice. Melissa: got my The Mac Mommy little logo on there. Otherwise, it gives you the time in military format, so that’s kind of handy to have. Um, but yeah, it’s… To be honest, I, I love the, I love this Royal Kludge because it’s nice and heavy, and I love the form factor. It’s got a number pad, um, because I’m, because I am a grown-ass adult and I need a number pad. Um, but it’s nice and heavy. It doesn’t, it doesn’t move around my desk a lot. I kind of have to type, like, kind of crooked, ’cause that’s just the way my neck goes to the wrong way and stuff like that. So I like being able to fit it on my desk. I have a, I had a larger one made by Red, uh, what is it? Redragon. This is the one that I started [00:51:00] out with. Gonna make lots of noise here. But as you can see, this one is way bigger. And it was, as much as I liked it, I mean, I fell in love with it, but what was happening was my accuracy was, like, really thrown off because I fe- I kept feeling like it just needs to be, like, a couple centimeters to the right or a couple centimeters to the left. It just wasn’t centered very well. So this one, my husband gets all the hand-me-downs, so that one went over onto his desk. Uh, and then I also have a baby keyboard here, and this is another Redragon. This is my little mini one. Brett: that’s, that’s the kind of keyboard I mostly use, like a 70% keyboard. Melissa: Yeah, I think this one’s even 60. Um… Brett: My– The one I’m using right now is, uh, 60. There’s no, there’s no function row, there’s no arrow, there’s no keypad or, like, arrow pad. Um, Melissa: No [00:52:00] arrows? How do you live without arrows? Oh, do you, you mapped your keys to something Brett: so it looks like this, Melissa: nice. I love the Brett: that the, the space bar is split in two. Yeah, my, my, my partner says it looks like, uh, gay ’80s. It’s all pink and blue and purple. Um, but the, the space bar is split, and the right half of mine functions as something called a mod key, and when I hold that down, then my I, J, K, and L keys become arrow keys. Melissa: Oh, wow. Brett: once you get used to it, you never have to take your hand off the home row. Melissa: Oh my God, that must be amazing. Brett: It– Yeah, once you get used to it, it, it’s so… Like, g- moving to a keyboard that doesn’t have that is kind of tortuous. On my MacBook Pro, I have remapped it using Karabiner so that Melissa: [00:53:00] That’s what I’m using. Brett: if I hold, the semicolon down with my pinky, then H-I-J-K-L become, Melissa: Oh, nice. Brett: become arrow keys, so I still don’t have to move my hand all the way down and to the right. Like, that’s such a inefficient movement that then I have to, like… Because I don’t have great feeling in my fingers, so finding, on a low-profile keyboard, finding the, the homing buttons again Melissa: Oh, do you use the humming buttons? See, that’s the thing, I was never taught that. I mean, I took like a ty- I took like a typewriting class back in high school, and I just didn’t like it. I, I just taught myself. I just… I’m an autodidact that way, so I just taught myself. Brett: my dad, back in 1984, we had a typing program on our PCjr, and I Melissa: It wasn’t Mavis Beacon, was it? Brett: remember. I don’t remember. All I know is, like, It taught you touch typing, and it would give you [00:54:00] these lessons, and you would basically just mirror what was on screen. And at the age of seven, I was typing at about 68 words per minute on an, on an old IBM PCjr keyboard. Um, got a lot faster through high school and everything. But yeah, I was, I was, from day one, I was raised to be a touch typist, and, and I took all the classes they had in school. Melissa: But you still touch Brett: labs. Yeah. Melissa: Uh-huh, yeah. So you don’t do the home rows. Brett: No, that is touch Melissa: Oh, touch typing, so you do feel… for the bumps. Brett: Yeah, I feel for the bumps, and then I just, like, my f- my key, my fingers never really leave the Melissa: Oh, yeah. See, I wish I could do Brett: centered home row. Yeah. It’s, it, it’s good. Um, Melissa: And you’re using the split, so my gosh. Brett: What– You get used to that too. Um, like, [00:55:00] I can’t do it with the split far apart. I’ve seen people use, like, splits, like, way out to the sides, and I can’t, my, my brain doesn’t do that. Like, my hands have to be within, like, six inches of each other. Melissa: I always thought, it would be so cool to have something where you could have it, like, raised up like this, right? And use your hands sideways. Brett: Yeah. Well, that’s I mean, that’s essentially, I have, on the bottom of this keyboard, I have these risers. Melissa: Oh, uh-huh. Oh, Brett: So it sits, right now I have it at about a 45-degree tent, tent, tent. Um, but it can go up to more like an 80-degree tent, where you’re actually Melissa: Wow. Brett: uh, almost like you’re clapping, you’re typing. Um, I don’t Melissa: of that. I have a, a, handshake mouse. Brett: Vertical mouse. Melissa: You like… Is that what you have for a mouse too? Brett: no, I, I love Melissa: Trackballs. Oh, trackpads. Oh, okay. Brett: Apple’s Magic Trackpad changed my life. I’ve never used– I’ve never gone back to a [00:56:00] mouse since the first Magic Trackpad came out. Melissa: So you’re all about the gestures then? Brett: yeah, Melissa: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That’s great. Brett: Bet- bet- better touch tool for the win. Melissa: You know what it is for me, is because of the type of work that I do, and this is very much true for both of us, you do these things because of the type of work that you do. The type of work that I do, I’m in everybody’s homes, so I have to ty- I have to be able to type and use their mouse and, I mean, it’s actually a very dirty job. So I keep hand wipes with me everywhere. Um, that, that was why during the pandemic I was like, “I am not coming to your house and I am not touching the stuff that you just picked your nose and…” Yeah, mm-mm. But, so, so i- it’s been kind of keeping me almost like a purist in a way as far as keyboards have gone all these years. I, I finally just kind of let go and embraced this recently, th- which is why I’m so excited and why I’m just kind of nerding out on it, because when, when I worked [00:57:00] in, like, I’ll call it the industry, um, I got my f- my start in prepress. So I worked in prepress, I was a typesetter, and we had… That’s what I kind of miss. We had the old clunky beige keyboards, and I had my muscle memory such that I think my o- my Option key would have, like, the indentation of my nail on it. You know? ‘Cause I had, just like you have, keys that are programmed. I could… I was a Quark queen. I don’t know if you’re familiar with QuarkXPress? Brett: Oh, yeah. Yeah. I was a graphic designer. I I know Quark. Melissa: Yeah, I loved it. I was… And, and I used it back in the OS 9 days, OS 7 really, is when I started out. Uh, I did not like the OS X vers- OS 10 version of Quark. Did not like it at all. Brett: No, but that’s Melissa: it was slow. Brett: Adobe came out with, what was, what was Adobe’s… InDesign. Yeah. By the time I had started, by the time I had started my own ad agency, we were all InDesign. Melissa: Oh, [00:58:00] nice. Okay. I mean, it was a Brett: and none of the, none of the print shops expected Quark files Melissa: Yeah. Oh, it was so expensive. I remember I had to buy it when I was in college, and I remember it cost, like, $800. I’m probably still paying for that, damn it, in interest. Yeah, so that, that’s how I got my start originally, and that’s how I was doing… I, I went to… So I have, I have a Bachelor of Fine Arts. I went to college in order to be a designer. I wanted to be a designer designer, and that’s what I, what I thought I was good at and thought that I liked doing, ’cause, you know, “Oh, you’re a girl. Go to art school. You like to draw.” You know? I’m always bitter about that because I really wish that I would’ve been able to go… I mean, this was, you know… I’m, I’m 51, so this was back in the day where girls, girls don’t do computers and girls don’t do coding. G- girls don’t do computer science. They didn’t even call it computer science. They didn’t even call it graphic design back then. It was commercial art. Um, so I studied that and, you know, I liked it ’cause I thought, “Well, this is what I could, I could take my art and make [00:59:00] a living into it.” And then fast-forward, um, I just started to fall in love with the technical troubleshooting side of things. So as, as good as I was at the technical typesetting and the technical, like, putting prepress things together, you know, um, uh, key sheets and s- you know, things like that. Do you remember, was there, uh, did you ever use a program called Quick Keys? That was one of the ones Brett: familiar. Melissa: you could map your own keys to things. So w- when I was in prepress and doing typesetting, I used that program and I, I mapped all my keys, and I had all these quick keys and stuff so I could go really, really fast, you know? So when they wanted something done fast, they gave it to me, and I could just fly through documents with this. But then as people learned that I was good at this kind of stuff and troubleshooting, they’re like, “Oh, hey, Roger needs, you know, has a problem. Can you go help him?” So I’d go over to his cubicle, I sit down, and he’s got nothing. You know, he’s got [01:00:00] no quick keys, no nothing, and you just kinda get lost because your muscle memory just adapts to it. And I couldn’t help people the way… And, and that was what it was about for me. I really liked more helping people and troubleshooting and the technology side of things than the actual design process. So I kind of went to the other side with it. And so I just kind of, like, vowed that, okay, I’m not gonna do any kind of, like, customization on my own workstation because then I’ll, my, my muscle memory will map to it, and then when I go to sit down to help somebody else, I won’t… You know, I’ll be so much in my own world that I won’t be able to help them. And so I just kind of, like, remained a, a pu

Sponsor OneSkin improves your skincare routine with science-backed skin care products. With over 10,000 five-star reviews and validation from clinical studies, OneSkin has made a name for itself in the skincare industry. If you’re interested in trying OneSkin for yourself, you can get 15% off your order with the code OVERTIRED at oneskin.co/OVERTIRED. Chapters 00:00 Gang Back Together 01:23 Mental Health Corner 01:39 Back Pain Diagnosis 07:09 Dental Insurance Racket 12:34 Post Surge Recovery 19:24 Surgery And Withdrawal 24:36 Sponsor One Skin 26:23 Terminal Widget Reveal 31:24 Widgets And Visualizations 34:51 Release Plans And Review 36:56 Universal Bundle Pricing 37:38 AI Boosts Mark II Sales 39:20 Leaving Oracle Behind 40:03 Ninety Hour Workweeks 41:55 NV Ultra Vaporware Woes 43:17 Missing Collaborators Online 45:09 Dan Peterson Secret App 46:23 The Pit TV Complaints 50:49 ER Nostalgia and Cast 54:01 Season Two and Other Shows 58:33 Gratitude App Picks 01:00:09 AI Tools and Claude Code 01:04:35 Bookshelves and Audiobooks 01:07:10 Wrap Up and Sleep Show Links TerminalWidget Marked 3 Bezel BookShelves Claude app Join the Conversation Merch! Come chat on Discord! Twitter/ovrtrd Instagram/ovrtrd Youtube Get the Newsletter Thanks! You’re downloading today’s show from CacheFly’s network BackBeat Media Podcast Network Transcript Projects and Pitt-falls Gang Back Together Christina: [00:00:00] What’s that? Do you see a podcast update in your feed? Well that’s because you’re back on, on Overtired and, uh, and I’m Christina Warren and I’m joined by, uh, Jeff Severns Guntzel and Brett Terpstra. What do you know? The whole gang is back together. Overtired, everybody what Jeff: Hi everybody. Brett: I need a, we need a party sound. We need a Christina: we do. We need a soundboard. We need a soundboard and we need a, a way to be like what Gangs all here. Some sort of a like a either a a we need a horn. That’s what we need. We need one of those. Those horns they play at at at football games. Jeff: would like that very much. Brett: or that like B. Christina: exactly. Jeff: yeah, Brett: That would really wake people up. Christina: It really would. And, and especially, um, all of us. ’cause I we’re recording this earlier than we ever do. Brett’s been up for a really long time and, uh, I think Jeff is probably like raring to go, but I’m like, I, well now Jeff: raring to go, but I’m warming [00:01:00] up. Christina: Yeah, I, I, I’ve been up since like five 30, so I’m okay too, but yeah. Brett: I wrote an entire shortcuts in shortcut intense interface for my new app this morning, and it’s actually working. I’ve never written for shortcuts before. Christina: Well, Ooh, we will, yeah, you gotta talk to us more about that ’cause I wanna hear more about that. Mental Health Corner Christina: Um, but first I think we should probably do, um, because it’s been a while since we’ve all been together, we should probably do a little bit of a mental health corner. Brett: yeah, Who wants to kick that off? Okay, fine. I will. Jeff: health. Mental health. Silence. Back Pain Diagnosis Brett: I, uh, I, I, my sleep has gotten a little worse than it was before when I told you it was bad. Um, I’m, now, I’m back down to like five hours a night and I just wake up at like 2:00 AM. And like I go to bed by eight or nine and I get up at [00:02:00] 2:00 AM every morning and I just cannot, for the life of me fall back asleep. And for like the first hour I’m up, I’m not even really awake. Um, I’m just kind of sitting on the couch staring at my computer and not be, not able to do anything After about an hour. Um. I, I, I’ll get some coffee, I’ll take my meds and like then it’s kind of like most people’s, like maybe 10:00 AM 11:00 AM um, by, by like 3:00 AM but it’s still wearing me down. Um, I got, so I’ve had back pain, um, for a while now. Uh, I can’t stand up for more than about five minutes and I can’t walk for more than three to five minutes, which has really put a dent in my, um, ability to exercise. And, um, so I finally got, I got an MRI [00:03:00] done, and they. Diagnose me with stenosis, which I think is kind of a, a broad term, but like a couple of the discs in my lower back have collapsed and, um, they, they, they think I can be treated with, uh, with shots and not surgery. Um, so I’m hoping, I’m hoping to get that figured out because, okay, so right now, uh, we, we always go on walks in the wildlife refuge, um, like the wetlands refuge near us, and I love it. We, we see so much cool stuff there and I hadn’t really been able to, but what I found was this little, it’s like. Folded up, it’s like two feet tall, uh, camp chair and it, it’s like a camp stool. And so I carry that with us while we walk and then like every three minutes I’ll like have to set it up on [00:04:00] the side of the trail sit. And if I sit for two minutes, the pain goes away, I can then walk again immediately. Um, but like after, after three to five minutes, like my back freezes up and I, like, I literally, I can’t move anymore. Um, so this little, uh, take carrying a chair and doing it in three minutes stints, um, has at least allowed me to get out and get some green time. But that’s kinda where I’m at. Jeff: What does this little chair look like? Uh Brett: It’s blue Jeff: huh. Brett: and it has four legs and it’s can canvas. Jeff: is it like an adorable little camp chair that you’re supposed to be able to like Brett: I think it’s a toddler’s ch camp chair. Jeff: Excellent. This is the detail I Brett: like, it’s smaller than my butt. Like I’m perching on it, but it’s enough to like get my back, uh, into feeling. Okay. And it’s not too heavy to like carry[00:05:00] Jeff: Show art, but the art, the art is you perching. Just to be really clear. Brett: Yes. My, my 280 pounds pound perched on a two foot camp stool, it’ll be great. Jeff: Wow. Well, I’m glad there’s something like some kind of thing Brett: Yeah, no, it’s actually really good. It’s really good to get the stenosis diagnosis and ’cause for a long time I just assumed because I gained weight, my, my back wouldn’t work anymore, which was depressing. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I’ve been this heavy before and I have not had this pain. And even after my first like 50 pound sudden weight gain, I didn’t have back pain. So it didn’t make sense that my body just couldn’t handle it, uh, like something else had to be going on. So it was actually much like any diagnosis, I think, um, other than, you know, terminal illness, but for like A [00:06:00] DHD or stenosis or any like mental health condition, it’s a relief to get a diagnosis and find out you weren’t crazy, you weren’t making things up. So yeah, I’m, I’m grateful. Christina: No, I completely like, can, can relate to that. ’cause when I, like with my back, well my cervical spine, um, it was kind of a similar thing. Obviously mine was more acute and it was a different scenario because I got, um, like the, you know, diagnosis relatively quickly, although it still felt like it took longer than, than I wanted it to, to, to get my MRIs and whatnot. Um, but it was similar to you. It was like kind of a relief to be like, oh, okay, so you have like a major problem. This isn’t just you being a wimp and, Brett: Yeah, exactly. Christina: exhilarating pain. Right. Like excruciating pain. Right. And, and just even having that, even knowing, okay, I don’t love that I have to go through [00:07:00] this whole thing. Um, I’m, I’m still like relieved to have a diagnosis and a plan forward. Dental Insurance Racket Brett: Oh, and also I, so I’m on state. Healthcare, and that includes, um, Delta Dental, but it’s this weird version of Delta Dental that nobody in my town accepts. Um, so I have to, I have to drive 45 minutes to get dental care and even then they can’t, he can’t do root canals or anything. And I needed two root canals and that would’ve involved driving two and a half hours or three hours and then going back to the 45 minute away place. And so what I did was I took the extra money I had saved outside of my, like, nest egg savings, but like my working savings. And I paid for a year of actual Delta Dental, um, and started going to a place [00:08:00] just really close to me and, um. It turns out that the best dental health insurance is still shit like it. I don’t know how much dental work you guys get done, but it is, Christina: it’s, it is crappy. Brett: it’s a, it’s, it’s a racket. And I actually watched a YouTube video on why dental insurance is a scam. And it like interviewed Dennis who actually take these like Delta Dental and the Medicaid dentists. Um, and it is truly a scam. And what I found, and this is much the same experience, uh, Christina talked about with her, um, MRII think it was that you did a cash pay. Um, I talked to the dentist and I said, do you have a cash paid discount? And he’s like, oh yeah. And basically. I can just pay cash and do everything for about 60% of the normal cost, and that is better than what [00:09:00] Delta does for me in most cases. Plus, I need so much work that my $2,000 cap with Delta is gone. Christina: Well, I was, I was gonna say like, so when I joined Microsoft, Microsoft used to have really good. Dental insurance, um, respectively speaking as, as good as it can be. But there were still, you know, caps on how much work would be done. But I found like a good person to go to. ’cause I had an incident, um, about a year after I moved to Seattle, maybe less than that, where um, I had to have an emergency root canal and like that sucked. Um, like I went into a normal dentist. She was like, this is what you need. And then I had to like, take an Uber, like over to a guy and see him like that day at like 5:00 PM and I’m like, you know, all like drugged up and, and getting the root canal. And that was not great. And I needed a lot of, of, of work done. Um, and so we split it over like she was a really good dentist and so we split it over. We were like, I was coming close to. The, the end of the calendar year. So she was like, okay, we’re gonna do all of this work and then we will start the next year [00:10:00] when things go forward. And like she knew how to play the system and was like a really good dentist. Well then Micro, then I went to GitHub. GitHub used, um, you know, uh, Delta Dental. And, and that can vary based on plan. Microsoft is apparently on them too. Google also had them on a slightly different plan, and it’s like you never know what you’re getting. And yeah, to your point, because if you need a lot of work done, if you have anything specialized, if you’re, you’re lucky if you get the right plan and you can see a provider in your area, great. But if you don’t, to your point, it is often, this is just fucked up. Like, especially if you’re having to pay out of pocket for it anyway. If it’s part of your employer, you know, benefits, maybe it’s a little different, but it’s like even then it can still wind up being less expensive to just pay the cash stuff than whatever your deductibles are, which have a cap anyway. And, and, and, and, and then, yeah, the, the, the way that the, the Medicaid or, or even insurance pricing works, stuff that they might charge you a very nominal fee for, for like a cleaning or whatever is, or a cavity fill [00:11:00] is gonna be, you know, they’re gonna bill insurance like three or four times that Brett: Right, exactly. So I pay, I pay like 800 bucks for a year of Delta, and that gives me basically $2,000 to work with, plus whatever price they can negotiate. Um, but like you said, like they, they bill three times. Um, so like what still comes out of my like $2,000 pot, um, is higher than I would’ve paid with Christina: If you just paid cash, if you just had an $800 budget, or if you got like, yeah, that’s the thing. Okay. This is an AI app that somebody should build. And I’m saying this hoping that maybe something the audience will, or maybe one of us could vibe code it, because this seems like this would be a relatively easy calculator to do with like certain providers if they, if they, you know, list their things where you could like run the costs and be like, okay, this is, I’m gonna put in this number. This is what my, you know, provider’s fees are. This is what my [00:12:00] insurance thing is. Um, Brett: what my cash pay Christina: this is what my cash pay is. Is it cheaper for me to spend $800 a year on Delta Dental or to just pay cash directly with my, my dentist? Brett: Yeah. Have you as I’ve, as I’ve said to people who have pitched ideas to me in the past, you’re talking about a spreadsheet? Christina: Yes. It is a spreadsheet to be completely out. Yes. But I can now use cloud code to, to to, to, you know, figure out the formula for me is the real thing. Brett: Yeah. There you go. All right. Who’s up? Post Surge Recovery Jeff: Dr. To, um, I can talk, uh, uh, I’m, I mean, I’m doing really well. Uh, I we’re a couple months past, or, you know, a couple months past the operation Metro surge stuff here in January and February, in a little bit of December, but really January. And that was, I’d never kind of experienced like a, a full [00:13:00] taxing of every single person and kind of person I knew and which was amazing. Um, and, uh, and it took a minute when things settled here, um, to, for everybody to kind of figure out what. How to just even enter into the world every day because everything had been driven by what was happening on a almost hourly to hourly basis for, for some time. And, um, and so I kind of moved through that, that period, which was like quite a sort of come down, uh, of adrenaline and, and amygdala sparking. Um, and, and have kind of smoothed a little bit. And, um, and I’m just doing well. I’m having a nice, a nice goal of it right now. Christina: Good. Great to hear. Brett: I, I guess that everything’s relative. Right? Jeff: Yeah. Everything’s relative. Yeah. Yeah. But I think I would call this a nice go of it, uh, even outside the context of comparing [00:14:00] to, to Operation Metro Surge. Brett: that’s, that’s, I, I’m happy for you. That’s awesome. Jeff: I think actually the last time I was on the podcast was with you, Christina, in January right after we had had a raid in our alley, which was even before the surge Christina: You before the big surge, even before Jeff: of an early start. Christina: I was gonna say even before, like I, I, I don’t even know if, if, if the, the, the murder had happened. Um, Jeff: not at all. In fact, we only had 100 extra ice agents here at the time and within a couple of weeks there’d be a woman in front of my house, uh, being pulled out of her car ’cause she was following ice agents and throwing me her phone as she gets tossed into a, into a fucking ice truck. And like it was just, everything happened so fast and so slowly all at the same time. And, and obviously there’s still all sorts of stuff going on, but it is indisputably not what it was in January and February. Brett: I was gonna ask you about that. ’cause like the total number of deportations is only slightly [00:15:00] lower right now than it was during the surge. Um, and they, they removed, they added like, what, 3000 agents and they removed like 800 of them. So, Jeff: they’ve removed way more than Brett: Hey, have they Jeff: oh, yeah. We’re down to, I haven’t, I don’t wanna say the numbers because I haven’t looked at them. We’re, we’re back down to like the high hundreds and we, our baseline is like 1 25. Brett: Okay. Jeff: Yeah. You can tell. Um, it’s, yeah, you can tell. And I, and I’ve been down to the WPO Federal building a a few times, um, which is where ICE was kind of headquartered and there’s just the level of activity there is very low. Um, they had some new vehicles come in at one point about a month ago, but mostly those are replacing rentals that they were using. So it wasn’t like people took it as kind of an indication that they were, you know, staffing up or suiting up again. But it was really just kind of replacing their, their really weird, like sort of duct tape together invasion. Um, it’s kinda like in Iraq when they decided they were gonna [00:16:00] actually armor the Humvees, it was kind of like a little bit of a switch of, of vehicles. Um. Yeah, it’s much different. And like, you know, all the people either in my life or in my community that were in hiding or not, I mean, for the most part, not in hiding anymore vulnerable folks and undocumented folks. And, um, so it’s like, it’s qualitatively and nervous, systemly different Brett: Yeah. Yeah. Jeff: for everybody and still sucks. And there’s still a risk and a threat and, and a horror. And a terror. Brett: Yeah, down here in southern Minnesota, I have not gotten a call to do a food delivery or a grocery delivery for, yeah, a couple months. Um, so yeah, I guess it really has calmed down across the state. Jeff: Yeah. Thank God. I mean, who knows what they’re up to that isn’t as visible, but thank God Brett: exactly. Jeff: over. So yeah, I, I mean it’s, and I actually just had my, my brother’s been in town and every time someone kind of comes to visit, they wanna like. You know, kind of hear or take in what the thing was and you start describing it again, and [00:17:00] now it just, I mean, it felt like a dream at the time. It just felt like, how could this be real? But you were just so in it, like every single person, like you said, Brett, like people were doing grocery deliveries or people were, you know, cooking food for the people that were kind of on the front lines, or you were following ice, or you were dispatching people to follow ice, whatever. It was like every. Single person I could think of as doing something. And uh, and, and so when you try to describe it now, when you look around, especially in my neighborhood where they were all over, um, it it, it seems like, was this, was this real, um, like, was it even real because like, I don’t know, like the end here. ’cause this could go on forever, but I don’t know if any of you saw the footage that went around of a high school called Roosevelt High School, where, uh, where Bovino showed up and there was all this crazy shit and the, the footage of this, um, went around the country and like it was, you know, reposted by freaking everybody that was my son’s school in my neighborhood. And, and so like, it was just this constant thing of like, bovino at my son’s school, binos at my gas station. Like, it was just [00:18:00] utterly insane. And now, and, and every street felt almost, you could feel ice on the streets. Like you would see ghost cars where they had taken people or whatever. You could like, feel ’em on the streets. And so you walk around, you walk around the same streets now, and it’s just birds and kids playing and you’re just like, did that, was that real? Brett: There, there was a tow truck driver that was interviewed who had taken it upon himself to tow those ghost cars for free back to their origin. Um, and just like leave them for people. Jeff: at least, or he would take them in and not charge if you came in for them. And it’s, and that’s just it. Everybody, everybody. It was incredible. It was incredible. Christina: It’s crazy. Jeff: Yeah. All Christina: I hope, I genuinely hope that they’ve lost interest and, and have moved on to other things. Brett: Like Seattle. Christina: yeah. Well, I mean, Seattle is obviously a very different situation and, and that had a, a longstanding, I think, impact. Um, and, and I, I, I. I’ve said this, I said this at the time, people who made that really bad were the [00:19:00] activists who came in outside the so-called activists and putting that in quotation marks who came in, who didn’t even live in the city and agitated things and made things way worse than, than they, than it should have been. Um, but yeah, but I hope that it’s like Seattle, that it just kind of falls like the, the government doesn’t come back and, and continue this, you know, reign of terror. Jeff: Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Surgery And Withdrawal Christina: Um, well, I’ll, I’ll be quick. So I, I had surgery since I guess the last time I was on, Jeff: Sure did. Christina: that went well. Um, the surgery itself, I’m still in some pain, um, in my shoulder after the surgery, uh, which was not like you were fi fixing my cervical spine. But, um, they, uh, I guess however it worked, like I, I think as muscular, um, I, I’ve been going to to to PT for the last few weeks. Um, but I still having some, some shoulder pain. That’s, that’s getting better. Um, the hardest thing was actually some of the medication stuff. So [00:20:00] I, uh, gabapentin, um, I know it’s a lifesaver for a lot of people. I don’t have a good reaction to it. Like I’m one of those people. Like, it, it a, it makes me feel kind of loopy. I don’t like it. B it’s very difficult for me to sleep on it. Um, which, which is a problem and, you know, but, but the big thing is it just kind of makes me like, feel like I’m not kind of in my own head. Like I feel like, don’t know, like, um, altered on it. I, I would say. And so I went off they gabapentin and no one told me, and I am gonna put this as a PSA out there. ’cause I know a lot of people take it. Do not go off of that cold Turkey. Jeff: mm. Christina: They didn’t tell me that. Um, which someone should have, but no one told me that. And it can actually cause seizures if you do other things. But in my case, the real thing was that I had withdrawal. That was some of the worst withdrawal I’ve ever had. In my life ever. And, um, it like awful, like awful, awful, awful to the point that to go off the Gabapentin and they had me on like a, a decent dosage. It [00:21:00] took me a month because I had to keep going basically down like one pill like every week to step down. And, but I mean, I was getting, you know, like, like hot and cold sweats, you know, like feeling like my teeth were gnashing, you know, like nauseous, just like awful, awful stuff. So it took me, you know, a month to go off of that. I had to extend my medical leave in part because of the medication withdrawal stuff, because I was like, I can’t go back to work if I’m gonna be like, still dealing with, with medication bullshit. Um, so, um, that was actually, you know, in some ways like more, uh, of an issue than like recovering from the surgery itself, which was major. Like I, I tried to kind of downplay like what it was, but it was, it was major surgery and um. Um, I’m glad that it’s over. So, you know, onwards and upwards. I’m, I’ve been back at work for a couple weeks. Um, still kind of settling in on that, but, uh, but yeah. Brett: That [00:22:00] withdrawal sounds terrible. Usually you have to do opiates to get that kind of fun. Christina: Yeah, well that was the thing. I saw somebody on, I read it, which of course is anecdotal. I don’t usually look for this stuff, but sometimes you just wanna feel like, okay, is it, is it common for me to have this withdrawal or not? And somebody, and one of the subreddits was like, this was worse than coming off of heroin and I in a jail cell, and I should know because I’ve done that. And I was like, okay, I, I’m not going to equate it at that level, you know, for, for me. But it was definitely like that bad. It was, let me put it this way, it was bad enough that at first I thought. It was the opiate withdrawal because I, they gave me some, some oxy, um, um, contin. Um, and then the doctor was like, no, that’s not a high enough dosage. This is, you know, um, it, it, it probably was gabapentin and, and it, it. What pissed me off is that one of the physician’s assistants or whatever, when I’m telling like my doctor about this, I’m like, okay, if I need another nerve drug, then we need to find something [00:23:00] else. I can go on select so I can go on, you know, something else. But, but I, I clearly can’t stay on this. A, they kind of gaslit me because I’m a woman and obviously my pain and my symptoms can’t be real. So that’s like number one. And that’s just a fact. I don’t care if you’re a male or female doctor, they don’t take you seriously. I’ve complained about that before. Um, b like she had the nerves to say, she was like, well, you know, if the withdrawal is that bad, then why don’t you just stay on the medic medication? It’s not that it, it, it, it’s fine. I’m like, no, it’s not fine. It makes me feel altered. You’re telling me that it’s for nerve pain, that my nerve pain should be fixed if my nerve pain isn’t fixed and if I need something for nerve stuff, then that’s one thing and we could maybe look at an alternative, something that doesn’t make me feel loopy and lets me sleep. But if your suggestion is, oh, to avoid the bad withdrawal, just stay on the drug. I’m sorry, what the fuck are we doing? Um, and, and then the doctor’s like, well, you know, we get this all the time. We never see side effects. And then I looked it up, you know, in the actual drug literature and no, there are side effects exactly like the ones I experienced. So I was like, I recognize that. [00:24:00] I always am usually that like one percentile person who gets like the weird side effect. Like, that’s who I am. I get that. But Brett: crazy. I’ve, I’ve gone off of gabapentin. It sucks. I You’re not crazy at all. Christina: yeah. But, but it just, it just was frustrating to me that like the, the suggestions like, we’ll just stay on it. It’s like, no, like that’s, that’s, that’s not actually gonna be a thing anyway, but onward and upward. Jeff: Yeah. Wow. I’m glad you’re through that. Like Christina: Yeah, me too. Me too. Okay. Sponsor One Skin Christina: Well, I know we have some other topics we wanna get to, but before we do that, um, let’s take a moment to talk about our sponsor of today’s episode One Skin. So, um, you know, I, I’ve gone through a number of different things with my skincare routine over the years. Some have been more effective than other. Um, you know, um, my skin kind of goes back and forth between being too oily and too dry. I’m kind of in a dry [00:25:00] phase right now, and, um, there are tons of products out there that, that promise results. And then you, you get them in the, and they’re, they don’t necessarily work. So, uh, I wanna talk to you about One Skin, which was founded by scientists, and it’s dedicated to longevity. And, um, the, the brand is actually committed to being real science over marketing hype. And so, uh. What they wind up. Uh, what, how, how this works is that they use OSO uh, zero one, which is a proprietary peptide, which is designed to help deactivate the damaged cells that contribute to aging skin. And, um, I’ve been using one skin, um, for a little bit, and I, I’m, I’m liking it. I like how it makes my face feel. Um, I like, um, the fact that, uh, it’s. You know, what the peptides are supposed to do is help basically, uh, support collagen, uh, uh, of production and, and, and strengthening the skin barrier. Um, I’m not alone. There are over 10,005 star reviews and there’s validation from clinical studies and, and it’s making a name for itself in the skincare industry.[00:26:00] So if you are interested in trying one skin for yourself, you can get 15% off your order with the code Overtired at one skin.co/ Overtired. That’s 15% off at one skin. Do co slash Overtired and use that code Overtired. So thank you one skin for supporting our show and check them out. Brett: Awesome. Terminal Widget Reveal Brett: Do you guys, can I tell you about terminal widget? Jeff: Terminal widget. Yes. Set it up. Terminal widget. Brett Terpstra. What’s Brett: so I, I, I wanted, I had scripts running in the background and I wanted a quick way to check them and I thought it should be easy to put. Script output into a, like a widget on the desktop. And I could not find anything that actually worked. Like Shellfish has a widget, but it, it takes minutes to update and it’s flaky and, and the other apps out there [00:27:00] did not work for me. So I thought I would build my own. So I think I started it a month ago. Um, I built a, just something for, you can run a terminal command and update a progress bar or an image or, uh, like sparkline text or just straight up text output from your. Terminal, all kinds of charts and everything, and, and it updates instantly on your desktop, uh, with like a 0.5 to one second delay, uh, which I wasn’t able to find anywhere else. I had to like, use JSON payloads and like basically a cloud kit watcher, um, cloud kit because I did also port it to iOS. And, um, so I can run one command in my terminal or from a script in the background and have my iPhone and my desktop update with progress. Um, I am working [00:28:00] on a watch version of it that is not, I, I have it working in the app, but I wanna make it so it works as a complication. Um, that’s gonna take a little more doing, uh, but this morning and yesterday I spent working on. The Apple script and shortcuts interfaces for it. And I hate designing Apple Script dictionaries, uh, because there’s no, like, there’s no standard for like terminology and there’s no like golden way to do it. And I always end up messing it up even when I do have a plan. This time I think I actually succeeded in building out a dictionary that makes semantic sense and is somewhat. Predictable if you’ve ever written Apples script before, but I also added all of the widgets can be controlled from shortcuts. You just drag in like a chart widget into your shortcut and pass in like a value or like a, a chart of values. It can [00:29:00] do matrices and sign waves and, and line grass and bar charts, and it’s pretty nuts. You can check it out. It’s not available yet, but all of the documentation and all of the screenshots are at Terminal widget app. Um, and I am, I’m pretty impressed with myself and Christina: yeah. Brett: that’s what I’ve been working on while waiting for Mark III to make it through app store reviews so I can finally publish that. I, my latest rejection first, I got rejected, like a couple legitimate. Uh, concerns, but then I had a CLI that I wrote that was embedded in the app bundle and there was an option to create a sim link in your, in your terminal to use the CLI. And this was just a convenience method for like, you give it command line flags and it converts it into URL handlers and they rejected me for Christina: [00:30:00] I was gonna say, I was gonna say, they don’t let you do that. Like what I’ve seen with other apps do is usually there’s like a, um, in the app store is that usually you have to download a helper to install the CL. Brett: right. So what I did, uh, to get past the rejection was completely rip out the binary from the bundle. Uh, if you go to the install cli CLI tool menu item, it simply takes you to a webpage where there’s a, a notarized signed PKG file, or you can install from Homebrew, but it’s completely separate from the app store. And the last rejection said that I was requiring users to download an external app in order to use the app. Which is ridiculous on its face. Like it’s, it’s a convenience method. In no way do you need to download it. Um, there’s no requirement. In fact, it’s almost buried that you would even want it. Um, [00:31:00] and so I argued with the reviewer for a couple days ’cause they were replying like once a day. Um, and then they told me I had to go through a re uh, the appeal process. So I submitted an appeal at four 50 this morning. We’ll see how long that takes now. But in the meantime, terminal Widget is keeping me sane. I’m having a lot of fun with that. Widgets And Visualizations Jeff: I have some terminal widget questions. I’m looking at the site right now. Um, so talk to me about, um, talk to us about your, your initial use case, like was, which you’ve kind of described already, which is you just wanted to be able to check on these scripts Brett: Yeah. I just wanted a progress Jeff: But then Brett Terpstra kicks in ’cause like I just wanted a progress bar and now I’m looking at all the flags and everything else that you could have. You know, I’m curious like of all of the options that are in there, I want you to just share something that might not be intuitive or might not guess you can do. And then I’m curious of like if you have something you’re like, and what I [00:32:00] really want it to be able to do is. Brett: So you can pass it up to a hundred numbers, like a, a list of space or canvas, separated numbers that you can output from whatever script you’re developing. And you can have it, uh, output a sine wave or a um, uh, a waveform. I like the waveform visualization for it. And so you can get like pretty cool visualizations out of. Tabular data basically. And I also just added, um, tabular, like you can, you can give it a CSV file and it’ll generate a table for you. And it really only works well on like the large widget size. Um, but on both, on both iOS and Mac, uh, the tables look pretty good. Jeff: Nice. Christina: That’s awesome. I, I have a, I have a nerdy, uh, well, but less nerdy question. [00:33:00] Um, on the Terminal WIT app website, um, you have like a, a video of a, like, you know, showing off like, um, you know, your, your, your terminal app open and, um, the, the text being typed out. What did you use to create that? Did you use a remotion or did you use something else to generate that Brett: I scripted that, um, I, I wrote if there’s a helper Christina: charm or something? Brett: No, Christina: Okay. Brett: I, it’s a helper. It’s a helper script that it, it clears the screen and then it takes a table of commands and it types the command out with like a jitter delay. So it looks somewhat natural, like typing. And then it actually runs the command in the background. And then once the command’s finished, it clears the screen and does the same thing with the next one. Um, so I can just feed it like a, a, uh, a file with all the commands. I wanna run one per line. Um, and it just types them out and executes them. Jeff: That’s awesome. Christina: Cool. Brett: I know, [00:34:00] like I looked into like using like as, as as cinema. Um, and it just to get that kind of really. Smooth, rapid typing out of it, uh, without, you know, all the backspace and everything. I, it was, I found it difficult to program it to, to code it. And by the time I had it figured out, I figured I should just write my own script for it. Christina: Yeah. There’s, um, there, there’s a, a. Service called Remotion, which can do some of that sort of graphical work, which is what I thought you might’ve used at first. Um, charm has a thing called VHS, which is basically like a CLI home home recorder, which is pretty cool. Um, and I’ve used that before, but yeah, I was just kind of curious, um, what you did, but yeah, you just built your own. That’s awesome. Very cool. Release Plans And Review Christina: Um, now for your, your, when do you think like, because I, I noticed that you have like for for blog book and for terminal widget, you have like coming soon. Is that like, ’cause [00:35:00] you’re still kind of like working on stuff or, um, are you going through review hell with those as well? Brett: I haven’t even tried getting either of those reviewed. Um, blog book I is approved for test flight, um, and anyone who wants in on that can just contact me. It is getting the slowest development out of all my projects right now just because it is, it’s a more niche app that I don’t think is gonna make a ton of money. But, um, mark III is where most of my effort is going. Then I’m working on porting mark three’s, uh, store kit stuff into NV Ultra, and then I can focus on trying to usher terminal widget through app review. Um, I have a feeling that’s going to go very poorly and I may end up just releasing outside the app store, but because it has an iOS Christina: I was gonna say with the iOS component is the hard part. Brett: I kind of have to, so we’ll see what happens. Christina: Yeah. [00:36:00] ’cause I was gonna say, ’cause like, I mean I guess what you could do is if you did something for the iOS F would make it different though. Like if it’s just, ’cause I’m sure it has, it’s working out. It’s pretty much just remote instance that’s showing Brett: No, no, it’s got, it’s a, Christina: you, you built in your own terminal emulator into it. Brett: no, there’s no, no, no, no, no, no. There’s no terminal in this app at all. Like, you use it from whatever terminal or from shortcuts. Um, so it’s all native widgets on both. Christina: right. I was just saying in terms of the app store thing, like, I guess like if since there’s not a native terminal on, on iOS, it’s, I’m assuming that it’s, it’s a remote widget is what I was trying to get at. Brett: Essentially, yes. But if you write a shortcut on iOS that updates the widget, it updates both iOS and Mac os. So it is usable entirely. You could just buy it for iOS and, and it would be a functional app. Christina: okay. Okay. Universal Bundle Pricing Brett: But I do intend, I hope [00:37:00] to sell it as one universal bundle. So you pay like 9 99 and you get the iOS, the Mac, and the watch app without having to buy for every platform separately. Um, I just don’t see it being like such a valuable app that it’s worth making people go through that rigamarole. Christina: right. No, I was just trying to think. Brett: and everyone I’ve shown it to so far has been excited about it and the most common response I get is I will buy this as soon as I figure out what I would use it for. I’m like, yeah, okay. Jeff: Okay, fine. Awesome. AI Boosts Mark II Sales Jeff: And can you talk about how, because the whole world now works in markdown marked, has gotten a bump because I think that’s an amazing story. Brett: Well, yeah, it was. was a few months ago now, maybe six months. Um, my sales just started increasing and I was looking everywhere through all my traffic and all my logs [00:38:00] to figure out where this, where these people were coming from. Um, and it was eventually pointed out to me that if you ask any agent, any AI agent what you should use to view markdown, um, they would point you to Mark two. And it was now, for the last four months, five months, it’s been doing five times the sales year over year. What it was doing, Jeff: How close is it to the highest it ever was? Brett: um, the highest it ever was was actually when it was only 2 99. And Gruber wrote about it. Uh, back in this is like 2000. This was over a decade ago. And, um, back when, like one tweet from Gruber meant like success and that I made that year, I made almost a hundred thousand dollars on it.[00:39:00] Um, this is nowhere near that. This is doing like Jeff: But it’s a highly unexpected bump, right? Like in a delightful, delightful bump. Brett: yeah. It’s doing, it’s doing without even releasing Mark iii, I’m making about half of my former salary off of it. Jeff: Nice. I’m happy for you. Leaving Oracle Behind Brett: Also, uh, one year, um, in two days I’ll be one year out of Oracle and I quite happy about it. Jeff: that’s great. I was wondering about that, Brett: I don’t miss my corporate job. I miss, I miss some aspects, health insurance, paychecks, things like that. But Jeff: that aren’t at all about the content of the job, right? Brett: Well, like that stuff has never mattered all that much to me if I’m happy doing the work. And I really wasn’t happy doing the work. Christina: Well, that’s, that’s the thing. I’m glad that you’re, I’m glad things have been going well. I’m glad that, that the, the agents have, uh, been telling everybody about Mark two. Hopefully they will also tell them [00:40:00] about Mark three. Um. Ninety Hour Workweeks Brett: My, my dentist was doing was doing small talk with me, and he knows I’m a app developer and he asked me, so how many hours a week do you work? And I happen to know the answer because I had just read my timing app report for last week and I said, 90. And he said, oh wow. How much do you make? And he’s like, if you don’t mind me asking. So I told him and uh, it saying it out loud, it’s basically like 20 bucks an hour I get paid. And like, it’s not nothing, but once these apps are out and I can sit back and just make some passive income off of it, I will, I’ll be much Jeff: So it’s 90 because you’re, you’re developing multiple things right now and, and you love it. Brett: I’m pretty much, I’m pretty much on my machine all day except for like an hour for [00:41:00] like getting out, exercising, getting on my recumbent bicycle and an hour for eating. Um, Jeff: Is it time for you to get a trike? I’m serious. Brett: I don’t, I don’t know, I, I actually want to try just getting back on a regular bicycle. Jeff: Hmm. Brett: Um, but I, yeah, like a recumbent tricycle, that’d be pretty awesome. Jeff: dad uses him. He actually just converted one to an to an E-bike. Plus it’s hot now ’cause of DTF St. Louis. Christina: right. Jeff: Awesome. Uh, is that it for your app development because wow, that’s like, uh, quite a, quite a deal. You got anything else in the cooker? Brett: Well, like we talked about blog book. Right? Jeff: Yep. Brett: Okay. Yeah, that’s, that’s what I got. Jeff: Nice. Brett: that’s my big ones. NV Ultra Vaporware Woes Brett: NV Ultra is, um, literally only waiting on me to [00:42:00] get Mark three out and then NV Ultra will be out. And it is well passed a time when it would’ve been a smash hit. Um, when, when Nv, when NVL first started dying before, uh, before something like obsidian really Christina: I was gonna say, if sitting is unfortunately Brett: yeah, they obsidian and five or six other apps have really eaten up market share for, uh, NV Ultra. But it would be nice just to get it published. I have been talking about a replacement for NV for over a decade, and Jeff: Am I gonna get sued if I say this is not your fault. Brett: It’s, it’s not my fault, like none of them have been my fault. Like they’ve all fallen through on me. Um, but I think people don’t believe me anymore when I say it’s coming. In fact, it, in fact, if you ask an AI agent, they will tell you that MB Ultra is vaporware.[00:43:00] Christina: Well, Jeff: a lot ai. Christina: I mean, look at this point, even though yeah, it’s been in beta and you’ve had other things going on. I mean, like it, you know, again, it wasn’t your fault, but, but, but you know, we’ve all been in those situations where you’re like, it’s coming, it’s coming. Or this thing is like, at a certain point you’re like, okay. Like Brett: Yeah. Missing Collaborators Online Brett: Well that there was Bit Writer Christina: TechMate too. Brett: Bit Writer was one that preceded NV Ultra and I was working on that with David Halter, who was a co contributor on VT and. He disappeared. I don’t know if he died or what, but about years ago he just stopped replying to emails, disappeared off of Slack, disappeared from the internet. Just I, and I don’t ha I don’t know his next of kin. I don’t have anyone I can like ask, Hey, whatever happened to David. So if you’re out there, if you’re listening, I’d love to hear from you just to know you’re alive. Just to, just to [00:44:00] check in. Um, I’ve actually had a few people disappear over the last couple months that ha it’s been disconcert when, when you’re used to hearing from someone at least, you know, once a week even. But some of these people were like every day, um, I. Jeff: from them, meaning seeing them somewhere or corresponding or. Brett: Uh, online. These are, these are people I only know online. So like seeing them on Macedon or Facebook or getting emails or text messages from them. Um, a couple of them were in their eighties or nineties, and so it’s not, Jeff: That might be your problem. Brett: it, it’s not out of the realm of the possibility that they have passed on. Um, but some of them were younger than me and one of them has come back after two weeks of messaging, like every other day, like, Hey, are you okay? Haven’t heard from you. Um, finally they’re like, oh, yeah, I’m here. [00:45:00] And offered no explanation for where they’d been or why they went silent, but I didn’t pry either. So. Dan Peterson Secret App Jeff: What is your project with Dan Peterson? That’s on our, our list. Brett: I don’t know if I’m allowed to say a lot about it, but I’ve been working. Dan Peterson is one, the original designer of one password and worked with them for like 20 years before he struck out on his own. And we’ve teamed up, we’re working on a couple things, but one is a a, an IO iOS app that he has put in. I, I don’t even know how many hours into the design of it, like 3D modeling, spline rendering, and um, and then we ported it into an iOS interface. And it is gorgeous. It, it will it when, when it gets to market, which we’re hoping to have it in [00:46:00] testate in time for Max stock in July. Um, it’ll be the best looking app I’ve ever been a part of. It’s gonna be so cool. Jeff: Nice. Christina: That’s awesome. Jeff: Busy time. Brett: Yeah. Jeff: It’s Christina: That’s awesome. Jeff: What else do we got? I mean, Brett, you showed up with a big list. The Pit TV Complaints Christina: I was gonna, is anybody watching anything? Uh, good on TV or rewatching anything? Jeff: I have a serious complaint to put into the world, so I’ve avoided the pit for a long time. Uh, just ’cause I’m, I don’t, I’m not a huge like yeah, Brett: drama. Jeff: it is great. Except are there two separate writing teams for the stars and staff and the people that come in as patients? Because the writing for the people that come in patients is. Awful. They acting sometimes too. Sometimes there’s some people that sell it. I’m only through season one, uh, but I was like, I have been yelling at the tv, uh, about this [00:47:00] for some time. Um, besides also yelling at the TV for the point at which, um, our young friend with a w as a last name Whitaker, who, uh, gets blood all over his face and then they don’t actually immediately clean it up. Um, uh, so I yell at the screen and I like the show, but I yell. I haven’t had a TV show that I’m like, oh, for fuck’s sake now. I mean, I can handle that in The Walking Dead. I can handle that in that kind of movie. But in the ER thing I’m like, come on, you can’t get a writer to handle the patients. I don’t understand. You’ve got an incredible cast, like an incredible cast. Brett: It’s actually all ad-libbed. Jeff: all ad-libs, like the clown. There’s a clown, I won’t give it up, but there’s a, there’s a clown that has been through a mass event and he’s in the, uh, he’s in the ER with his clown makeup on still, and some blood going down his face and at some point he looks around and he goes, what a circus. I just think they, I think, I don’t understand. This confuses me very much [00:48:00] in TV shows when you’re like, okay, you’ve got a great writing team, but clearly you have a separate writing team that is doing just this little job that is actually quite important. So that’s my complaint about the pit. Otherwise, I like it quite a bit. I’m very excited to start season two, probably this weekend. Christina: it’s a good season. It’s a good season. So, yeah, ’cause, because, because I, I, I, um, it, it ended last week and I’m, I’m a big fan of the pit. I will say this, the pit fandom is insane and not in a good way. Like these are people who don’t understand how to watch television shows and don’t understand. Like how television shows work, and, and then also become very entitled about like, how, like their vision of the characters and things should be on a level. Like the last time I’ve seen it, it it’s the same, it’s similar with heated rivalry, but it’s somehow worse because this isn’t like a genre show like that. It’s like low quality for like, you know, middle aged like white women, um, in the suburbs. Um, who, who just like to see two, two hockey players. [00:49:00] You know? Fuck. Um, like, like the pit is actually like, I’m not gonna call it Prestige TV because it’s not er level, but it’s a very good show and it’s extremely well acted. And I think the writing, um, I, I think make a good point about the, uh, the patients not getting as good of storylines as the doctors. But, um, Jeff: no. I don’t need storylines. I Christina: no, I I mean the Jeff: words they Christina: Yeah. Yeah. No, that, that’s, that, that, that that’s what I mean, like, like that, that, that, that I, I, I hear, I hear your Jeff: Because where there’s a patient storyline, those are almost exclusively great. Christina: Yeah, it, so you’re more talking about like, like, like the kind of the background characters, like, kind of like the, the, the one-offs. Yeah, I think, I think that’s fair. Well, a lot of the writing staff and like executive producers are doctors or people who have like, you know, worked, um, extensively in healthcare. And so I, I, I wonder if like, that’s kind of part of it, um, where Brett: they’re really good at writing the doctor’s parts. They’re not so good at Jeff: so good. Oh my God, so Christina: so good at doing the doctor’s parts and, and the procedures. Like they wanna be medically [00:50:00] accurate and like they really, they really are committed to that. There are, um, there are a couple of, I’m trying to think, um, the, the Whitaker thing, I think that was just, I enjoyed that myself. Like the fact that he’s always getting blood Jeff: Oh, I loved the bit, I just couldn’t believe that. I couldn’t believe that through quite, you know, a couple of different bits after that. The blood’s still on his face. I’m like, there has to be a protocol to get blood off your face. Christina: No, there definitely has to be, but I mean, part also one of the running gags first season two. And, and sorry for spoilers, for anyone who hasn’t watched the pit Jeff: Wait, I’m gonna close my ears. Okay. Go ahead. Wave when you’re done. Christina: Rob Robbie can’t pee. And, uh, this wasn’t a real spoiler, but like, but one of the things is like, you know, Robbie’s never able to like, go to the bathroom. Like he can never find a way to pee. So Jeff: I’m back. Brett: you’re safe now. Jeff: I’m back. Christina: you, you’re safe. And I didn’t spoil anything. I was ER Nostalgia and Cast Jeff: The other thing I’ll say about the pit that surprised I did not watch ER and not ’cause out of bad attitude. Uh, it was just a point in my life when I wasn’t watching a lot of tv. Um, I also didn’t realize until I was [00:51:00] like five episodes in that Noah Wiley was a big character in er. I think that’s really cool. Um, Christina: Okay. Okay. I, I understand you weren’t watching TV then, but how did you not realize that Noah Wiley was Jeff: I didn’t know Noah Wiley’s name. Like I, this is just not, I don’t hold names of people. I, you know, I also, on the albums, I love that. I don’t remember song, I don’t know song titles half the time. Um, so I don’t mind You can, you can be very disappointed and express it. And I will accept it. I will receive it. Christina: No, I’m just shocked Jeff: to be better. Christina: because I, I mean, ’cause because I was like 10 years old when ER came out and like, I don’t know, like they were like, that was the number one show on television Jeff: Totally. And I mean, Clooney, come on. I know Clooney. Christina: course Clooney, but, but like, but it was Clooney. It was, but but like the, the, the, the, the original, it was Clooney, it was uh, uh, Sherry Stringfeld, it was um, um, uh, Eric Lesal. It was Juliana Margolis, it was Noah Wiley, and it was Anthony Edwards. So like, Jeff: Oh, my favorite Timber Christina: and I was gonna say ironically going into when er came out, like the, the name was Anthony [00:52:00] Edwards, like, he was like number one on the call sheet, right? Like Clooney I think was like four. Um, and, and then, and then Clooney because he’s a good guy, like blew the fuck up and then still did them a solid and did like a full freaking five years on that show, Jeff: Yeah, which is awesome. Christina: he did not, David, David Caruso, it like David Caruso, who famously like had one, you know, big season of NYPD Blue fucks off to go do a movie career. The movie career implodes, there’s a clause in his contract because A, b, C was so furious about how the way he quit NYPD Blue, that they were like, okay, well you can’t do any television for x number of years. And then his movie career dies and then he has to like come like hat in hand to like CSI Miami. Jeff: Yeah. Yeah. Well I love the pit and this thing that surprised me is the thing I always stayed away from is like I can handle gore in almost every context except real life. And so like I can do all the gore of the Walking Dead. I can do all the gore of Game of Thrones or something, but like, I was like, I don’t know if I want, [00:53:00] yeah. Gore. I love it. I mean, I love it. ’cause I’m fascinated. I’m just fascinated. I’m like, oh, that’s what it looks like when you do that. Like, right. Like you just snip the fingertip off. That’s what it looks like when you do that. Like, Christina: no, Jeff: the first Christina: they show some of the stuff, Jeff: yeah, the first half. I did this every time I covered my face whenever it was like that. And then all of a sudden I could handle it. And I was like, this is fascinating. This is totally Christina: What episode are you, are you up to? How many do you Jeff: I actually, I only have 15 left. I have the last episode left. Um, and unfortunately, like we’ve had, like my brother’s, not unfortunately, my brother’s been, we had stuff every night until late for like three or four days. And I’m so ready to watch that thing. And now, now my wife’s going outta town, so I’m not sure we’ll even see it for another week. It’s making me crazy. Brett: are you watching it together? And you have to wait for her. Jeff: Yeah. Well, and we, and, and sometimes it’s easy for us to find a show together and sometimes there’s just a long dry spell. And so it’s also just like nice. It’s just nice to have a show together always. Um, and so it’s the combination of like, that’s just nice to do and I’m right at the end and I’m just ready to Christina: And you just wanna do that together? [00:54:00] Yeah, no, it makes sense. Season Two and Other Shows Christina: Um, I, I’m, I’m curious to see what you’ll think of season two. Um, I, I, um, it’s, it’s different in some ways. It doesn’t have like the, the, I’m not spoiling anything, but like, it doesn’t have like a big like, catalyzing event, like, like season one does. Um, but I still think it’s, it’s really good TV and, uh, yeah, definitely one of my favorite shows, um, hacks is Back for its final season. That’s definitely one of my favorite Brett: That Jeff: I never Brett: good. I, I finished season one. Um, I think there’s three seasons or is there more? Christina: This, it is now in its fifth season. Yeah. Brett: Okay. Yeah. I, I finished season one and then kind of forgot about it, and then I just saw some trailers for the new season and thought, oh, I should get back into this. It looks, it looks like it, it, it looks like it did well, um, Christina: No, I mean, shrinking. Yeah. Brett: I was gonna say, the new season of shrinking is really good too. Christina: Yeah, it is. Yeah. Um, well, well, uh, bill Lawrence is, is, uh, who created that and he created Scrubs and Spin City and [00:55:00] some other things. Like he’s, he’s really, really, um, good. He also did Rooster, which is now on HBO Max. Um, but, oh, the Scrubs Revival. Speaking of, of new shows, I don’t know if it’s gonna get like renewed because it hasn’t been renewed yet. And so I’m a little bit concerned that it hasn’t been renewed yet, and I only did nine episodes for the first season. But the, the Scrubs reboot, revival, whatever you wanna call it, and I say this is somebody who was a huge scrub fan. I, I don’t consider the, the final season to be scrubs like that. It is not part of Canon to me. Like, I feel like that, that, that wasn’t it, but I thought they actually did an amazing job, um, with the, with the reboot. Like I actually. And, and it was hard for them too because John c McGinley is on Rooster and, um, uh, Judy Reyes is on, um, uh, high Potential. And, um, so, you know, the only like, you know, main characters from the original that they have back in every single episode [00:56:00] are, um, uh, Elliot, JD and Turk. Um, but, uh, and then, and then you see, you know, kind of like, like Carla just isn’t in the office sometimes, but she has some guest appearances. Um, but they actually managed to, to do this, they managed to do like a next generation type of story, but still focused on like the main characters you love, but still kind of bring in like new younger doctors in like a way that I’m genuinely really impressed with how they did it. And, and like it kept the heart and kind of the, the feel of the original, like I, it, it was, I was very, very impressed that they were able to recapture. What made that show so good, um, for, its, I guess they’re calling it its 10th season, but, um, I, I really hope that it comes back because that’s a really good show. Brett: Speaking of reboots, um, they’re rebooting, um, Malcolm in the middle, Jeff: I Christina: Yes, they did. [00:57:00] Yeah. They did a four episode thing. Brett: but what I saw an, I saw Hot ones versus with, um, uh, Frankie Muni and whatever. How Christina: Yeah. Brian Cranston. Who, Brian Cranston. Who, who was, who was the, the father of, of, of Mel King on the pit. Brett: Oh, there you go. Jeff: is so cool. I love her so much. Brett: but anyway, they’re talking about why Dewey wouldn’t come back and basically he was like, I haven’t acted since I was nine. He’s like, he is busy. He is got a life Christina: He’s in grad school, like he went to Harvard and stuff like, like, he’s like, uh, I, which I, I love. And I’m like, okay. You know, I mean, I would’ve loved to see Joey too, but I don’t blame him for being like, no. Brett: Yeah. Jeff: Yeah. Yeah. Brett: neither, neither did the other actors, I don’t think. I think, uh, it, it wasn’t necessary to Christina: no, I was gonna say he wasn’t because Brett: the Yeah, Christina: mean, look, they were able to do Fuller House without the Olson [00:58:00] twins who were a much bigger part of that show Jeff: Fuller Christina: ever was. And, and I, I, I’m not even like defending Fuller house. Like it was, it was fine. It was whatever. But like, even that, you were like, there were enough characters where you’re like, okay, so, so Michelle isn’t here. And that would’ve been weird, to be honest. I don’t think that, like I know that everybody would’ve loved having the cameo, but it’s like, how in the hell are you gonna have the Olson twins, like as adults, even in a cameo on Fuller House without just completely taking you out of the whole thing. You know what I mean? Brett: Yeah. Christina: Like, it just, it just wouldn’t be possible. But Gratitude App Picks Brett: we try to fit in a gude before Jeff: Should we grab, Christina: yeah. Let’s do a gratitude. Brett: Um, I can kick it off. I got one I’m excited about. Um, found this app called Bezel. Um, I needed to do iOS screenshots and I needed to do iOS recordings, and I played around with using Screen flow and screen Studio and Camtasia, and I didn’t like [00:59:00] any of the ways that they recorded iOS movies. And then I found Bezel and I mean, c So screen recording built into iOS, in my opinion, is better than any of the like screen casting apps can do. Um, but bezel, if you, if you hard co hardwire your phone to your computer and turn on screen, mirroring it can record. Perfect. Um. iOS recordings, and it’s really good at just taking screenshots with a single key key command. You get a screenshot with a bezel like the outline of the phone and a desktop background behind it. So I can just hit command S as I like, move through my phone, uh, and then my right hand on my phone, my left hand on my keyboard, and I can get a dozen iOS screenshots in five minutes, and they’re ready to go, like ready to [01:00:00] publish. It’s really nice. Jeff: That’s really awesome. I’m gonna try that. Christina: Same, same. Do you have one Brett, or do you want me to, or uh, Jeff do or do you want me to go. AI Tools and Claude Code Jeff: Uh, I’m happy to go. Um, so this is, this is, uh, an easy one in a way, but I, I wanna be specific about what’s been so useful. So I’ve been using cloud code and vs code forever. I mean for the last, I’d say two or three months. ’cause I’ve got really, really deep into using cloud code actually for qualitative work. Um, but also a totally bananas project I built that has both a. Physical component and a heavy duty code component, which I’ll talk about sometime. Um, but, um, I, and I’ve used the desktop app for cowork and for like just the standard chat and I’ve loved that, but I never used it for cloud code until this latest update, which added like a really amazing interface for cloud code. Um, which is kind of my gratitude is that tab of the desktop app, which like, when you open it up, it gives you like just an awesome little like, work summary of like comedy sessions [01:01:00] you’ve had, how many total tokens you’ve used, like overall the last 30 days, the last seven days, what your peak hour is your longest streak. It has the like GitHub, like little chart that fills in. Um, and, uh, and, and that’s like been really cool to see. Um, and you can also see your usage of various models. It’s just a nice little thing that pops up. And then when you’re actually working, it’s really amazing because you can pull up these sidebars that have like diffs or like a preview or you can just get a terminal open in there. Um, and I have. I have loved that. I still like feel more at home in the VS.

Claude Cowork came out of an accident.Felix and the Anthropic team noticed something interesting with Claude Code: many users were using it primarily for all kinds of messy knowledge work instead of coding. Even technical builders would use it for lots of non-technical work.Even more shocking, Claude cowork wrote itself. With a team of humans simply orchestrating multiple claude code instances, the tool was ready after a brief week and a half.This isn't Felix's first rodeo with impactful and playful desktop apps. He's helped ship the Slack desktop app and is a core maintainer of Electron the open-source software framework used for building cross-platform desktop applications, even putting Windows 95 into an Electron app that runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux.In this episode, Felix joins us to unpack why execution has suddenly become cheap enough that teams can “just build all the candidates” and why the real frontier in AI products is no longer better chat, but trusted task execution.He also shares why Anthropic is betting on local-first agent workflows, why skills may matter more than most people realize, and how the hardest questions ahead are about autonomy, safety, portability, and the changing shape of knowledge work itself.We discuss* Felix's path: Slack desktop app, Electron, Windows 95 in JavaScript, and now building Claude Cowork at Anthropic* What Claude Cowork actually is: a more user-friendly, VM-based version of Claude Code designed to bring agentic workflows to non-terminal-native users* Why “user-friendly” does not mean “less powerful”: Cowork as a superset product, much like how VS Code initially looked simpler than Visual Studio but became more hackable and extensible* Anthropic's prototype-first culture: why Cowork was built in 10 days using many pre-existing internal pieces, and how internal prototypes shaped the final product* Why execution is getting cheap: the shift from long memos, specs, and debate toward rapidly building multiple candidates and choosing based on reality instead of theory* The local debate: why Felix thinks Silicon Valley is undervaluing the local computer, and why putting Claude “where you work” is often more powerful* Why Claude gets its own computer: the VM as both a safety boundary and a capability unlock, letting Claude install tools, run scripts, and work more independently without constant approval* Safety through sandboxing: why “approve every command” is not a real long-term UX, and how virtual machines create a middle ground between uselessly safe and dangerously autonomous* How Cowork differs from Claude Code: coding evals vs. knowledge-work evals, different system-prompt tradeoffs, longer planning horizons, and heavier use of planning and clarification tools* Why skills matter: simple markdown-based instructions as a lightweight abstraction layer for reusable workflows, personalized automation, and portable agent behavior* Skills vs. MCPs: why Felix is increasingly interested in file-based, text-native interfaces that tell the model what to do, rather than forcing everything through rigid tool schemas* The portability problem: why personal skills should move across agent products, and the unresolved tension between public reusable workflows and private user-specific context* Real use cases already happening today: uploading videos, organizing files, handling taxes, managing calendars, debugging internal crashes, analyzing finances, and automating repetitive browser workflows* Why AI products should work with your existing stack: Anthropic's bias toward integrating with Chrome, Office, and existing workflows instead of rebuilding every app from scratch* Computer use one year later: how much better it has gotten, why vision plus browser context is such a superpower, and why letting Claude see the thing it is working on changes everything* Why many “AI verticals” may get compressed: specialized wrappers may matter in the short term, but better general models and stronger primitives could absorb a lot of narrow use cases* The future of junior work: Felix's concerns about entry-level roles, labor-market disruption, and whether AI can compress early-career learning into denser simulated experience* Why Waterloo grads stand out: internships, shipping experience, and learning how real teams build products versus purely theoretical academic preparation* The agentic future of the desktop: what it means for Claude to have its own computer, whether AI should act on your machine or a remote one, and how intimacy with personal data changes the product design space* Why Electron still mattered: shipping Chromium as a controlled rendering stack, the limits of OS-native webviews, and why browser engines remain one of the great software abstractions* Anthropic's Labs mentality: wild internal experiments, half-broken future-looking prototypes, and the broader effort to move users from asking questions to delegating increasingly long and valuable tasks* Why the endgame is not just more capability, but more independence: teaching users to trust AI with bigger scopes of work, for longer durations, with fewer interventionsFelix Rieseberg* X: https://x.com/felixrieseberg* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/felixrieseberg* Website: https://felixrieseberg.com/Anthropic* Website: http://anthropic.comFull Video PodTimestamps00:00 — Cheap execution and building all the candidates00:44 — Intro in the new Kernel studio02:47 — What Claude Cowork is04:18 — Why user-friendly can be more powerful05:33 — How Anthropic built Cowork07:09 — Prototype-first product development08:00 — Why local computers still matter09:20 — Skills, primitives, and platform leverage12:13 — Cowork's architecture: VM + Chrome + system prompt15:38 — Felix's own bug-fixing Cowork workflows17:38 — Local-first agents20:16 — Evals, planning, and knowledge-work optimization23:14 — What Anthropic means by evals24:21 — Scaffolding, tools, and why skills matter27:44 — Demo: YouTube uploads and self-generated skills31:03 — Calendar automation and cleaning your desktop34:47 — Browser context and why DOM access matters37:47 — Skills portability and plugins44:36 — Which AI categories survive?46:19 — Junior jobs, simulated work, and labor disruption52:00 — Gradual takeoff vs big-bang takeoff53:42 — Finance, taxes, and enterprise verticals56:24 — Vision and the improvement in computer use57:31 — Why Claude writes its own scripts58:06 — Should Claude have its own computer?1:01:26 — Windows 95 in JavaScript1:03:19 — VM tradeoffs and sandbox design1:07:23 — Approval fatigue and safe delegation1:11:18 — The future of Cowork1:12:27 — What comes next for agentic knowledge work1:15:13 — Electron, Chromium, and desktop software lessons1:22:16 — Multiplayer agents and coworker-to-coworker workflows1:26:05 — Anthropic Labs and closing thoughtsTranscriptAlessio: Hey everyone. Welcome to the Latent Space Podcast, our first one in the new studio. This is Alessio, founder of Kernel Labs, and I'm joined by swyx, editor of Latent Space.swyx: Yeah, so nice to be here. Thanks to, uh, TJ, Alessio, Allen helping to set everything up. It looks beautiful. We even have the logo outside.Yeah, kind.Felix: It's like really nice, right? When you walk in here as a guest, you're like, ah, this is a serious production. You're like, feel it immediately.swyx: Yeah. Felix, you've been, you're, you're currently a product manager of Cowork or,Felix: uh, really Technicswyx: Eng. Yeah. The, the identities are kind of vague member technical staff.Felix: I know member staff is like, the official title will carry around forever.swyx: Yeah. I basically kind of wanted, like we've been. Kinda obsessed. I, I've been using it a lot, even for managing latent space. Like, uh, cowork helps me upload videos and like title things and like edit and everything. It's, it's like really amazing.Alessio: Cool. He said multiple times Cowork has said gi in the group track.swyx: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so we have a second, uh, we have a second channel, uh, for latent space tv. Uh, and I, uh, and uh, we basically, this is our Discord meetup. Um, and I I, we have like Claude Coworks, it might be a GI, I don't know if we, we have, uh, uploaded it yet, but one of the sessions was like a, like a Claude cowork thing.Felix: I, you have to see, I would love to see it. Like, I'm so curious, like one of the most fun parts of my job is like constantly see the weird things people use Cowork for because it's obviously like very hard for us to actually design for specific use cases we do. But like every single person who's like most amazed is usually amazed about a thing that I didn't even expect cowork would be good at.Um, we have a new designer and it's one of the first small tasks. I was like, Hey, we need like a new emoji for cowork for our internal stock. It's like a pretty small thing. I like, can you please do it? And he drew an SVG and just gave it to coworker was like, can you animate this emoji? And now it has like this beautiful loopy animation.Um, and I mean, I think obviously this goes down to like, it turns out you can do more things with code than you expected, but it, it's like that kind of stuff that is really fun to me. So, long story short, I would love to see like, the kind of things you're doing.swyx: I'll pull it up. I'll pull it up.Felix: Yeah. Yeah.swyx: Uh, but before we get into it, I, I think always wanna start with like a top level. What is Claude Cowork for people who haven't heard of it? Haven't tried it out.Felix: Okay. Uh, real quick, Claude Cowork is a user friendly version of Claude Code. So the way it basically works is we have Claude Code and for us, fairly impressive agent harness that over December we noticed more and more people are using either, even though they're not technical, they, they're not at home in the terminal or they are at home in the terminal, but they started using Claude Code for non-coding workloads, right?Like managing expenses or like filling out receipts or organizing a knowledge base. Like there was a big obsidian moment that a lot of people liked and we wanted to capitalize on that, but also bring, bring this capability to people who are not terminal native and who might not know how to like brew and store something.So cowork is Claude Code running in original machine with a little bit of padding, a little bit more guardrails, making it a little safer and a little bit more convenient for people who don't wanna first open up the terminal when they go to work.swyx: It's interesting, uh, that is kind of. Pitch that way as a more user friendly thing because I always feel like it, it, to me, I I treat it as like why I'm familiar with Claude Code.Like we, we did a Claude Code episode Yeah. A year ago. But this one is like even more power user tools ‘cause it, uh, it kind of integrates much better with like clotting Chrome and, uh, in all the, all the other tooling. But like, maybe, maybe that's like a perception thing, right? LikeFelix: No, honestly, I don't think you're wrong.This is like a, a thing I've been thinking a lot about for like the last two weeks. So,swyx: but when they say user friendly, it's like, oh, it's the dumb down version. But no, actually this is the superset.Felix: Yeah. Like, I think a similar thing happened, A similar thing happened to me about 10 years ago, like maybe 12 years ago when I was at Microsoft and we started working on, on Electron and like browser-based technologies and cross-platform stuff.And one of the first use cases was Visual Studio Code, which used to be a website. And the initial narrative was, or Visual Studio Code is, is like a more user-friendly version of Visual Studio. But in a similar vein, I think there was some voices saying, oh, this is. For serious developers, like, we're not gonna use this.Right? For like anything. And I think in the end what happened is people have different stories about why Visual Studio Code became such a big thing. But my personal, my personal belief is that the Hackability and the extendability has like played a pretty big role, right? You can hook in Visual Studio Code that like almost any workload, it's so easy to hack on, so easy to put extensions for it.And I think cowork might be hitting a similar thing where it's very easy to extend and it's very easy to bring into your workflows. Uh, so the convenience I think is a bit of a, it's obviously the thing we strive for as developers, but I think the way people find value in it then is by probably mapping it onto whatever they actually have to do in their job.Alessio: So end of last year, you see the spike of like non-technical usage and clock code. What's the design process to say we should make clock code work? Because I mean, you built it in only 10 days. Um, I'm sure there was some discussion before on whether it's easier to use mean. You know, like making, making like a desktop GUI is obviously one way to do it, but like there's a lot of nuance in the product.Like maybe talk people through what was like the trigger of like, we should build a separate thing. We should not build like a different plot code thing. And then maybe some of the more interesting design decisions that maybe you didn't take.Felix: Yeah, I think philanthropic, we've been thinking about ways to move people who are comfortable with using Claude to answer questions and bring more of the power of like this thing to now like, execute tasks for you.I can like solve problems for you can like build things for you. How do we bring that capability to people who are currently mostly comfortable with like a like question answer paradigm within the chat. And we've had a lot of prototypes around that. Just going back as far as like easily a year and a half.Like we had a lot of people working on that. Um, and internally philanthropic is a very prototype demo, first culture. We have a lot of like internal prototypes that don't reach the public. What Cowork actually became is like we sort of picked the right pieces out of the many prototypes that we had.Right. And that's, that's maybe also like, I think an important qualifier whenever people mention this like 10 day number. I do think it's important to me to mention that within Double Scratch there was like a lot of stuff already happening, right? Like, and I think it's important for people to remember that when you build a website, you use React, you use like a bunch of other things.And this is like a similar scenario with like a lot of pieces we already had. Um, and in terms of decision path, I think we live in like an interesting new world where execution is actually quite cheap.swyx: Mm-hmm.Felix: So maybe, maybe what you would do That's so crazy. The year. I know it's wild.swyx: You should be, ideas are cheap.Execution is the hard part. IFelix: know. And like the, we, we used to live in this world maybe where you would take a product manager and the product manager would go to a number of potential customers and in this like very low bandwidth way, would try to. Try to like tease out what are the problems they're having, what are they willing to buy?Um, and then maybe what can you build to like drive out that need and then you go back and you like draft a spec and you think about it and then like you make a design and you execute it. We internally philanthropic app, not pretty much closer to the point where we're like, don't even write a memo, just like build, like let's build all the candidates very quickly.Let's just build all of them and then pick the best ones. I think the, the decision that is most impactful both for the product as well for the users right now is like the way we put value on your local computer. I think that's a big decision point a lot of people have thought about. Should this thing, whatever it is, should it ultimately run into computer or should it run in the cloud?‘cause they're big trade offs, right?Alessio: I guess like if we solve auth, it would be easy to do in the cloud. But I think like the fact that I can just download any file from anywhere and then put it and cowork there, it's like a big unlock. Um, I mean it's interesting you mentioned reusing certain pieces. I think this is something I've been thinking about even with Claude Code, right?The price of like writing code is going to zero, blah, blah, blah. But it actually seems like the value of having some sort of platform substrate is like increasing because as you build these new things, you can kind of plug them together.Felix: Yeah.Alessio: So I almost feel like when people are saying, oh, the value of a lot of software is gonna zero because you can recreate it, to me it's almost like the opposite.It's like having an existing platform to build on top of. It's like even more valuable because you can kind of bolt things on.Felix: Yeah.Alessio: You have obviously mcps, you have skills, you have like obviously the models, which is a big part. All these things kind of come together. Do you feel like that's a valid way to think about it, where people should invest even more in kind of like primitives.To rebuild on or are you like recreating a lot of it each time because like things change and it's easier to rewrite than reuse?Felix: You know, I think, I think you're right. I think you're right that the holistic platform is really useful. And this is maybe a whole like a somewhat contrarian view to a lot of people in ai.I actually don't think that the future is going to be hyper personalized software down to the point where everyone is running their own version. Like, I actually think it's going to be quite hard for all of us to have our own internal chat tool and like, if I wanna talk to you, likeswyx: howFelix: is that gonna work, right?In the, in the context of cowork and how we build it, I think it's a bit of a combination. Like what the, the execution that gets cheap is not necessarily rebuilding all the primitives. I think our priori, there's also not a lot of value in it. So for instance, my team did not think about rebuilding clock code.We're like very much started with the. The core thesis of this should be Claude Code.Mm-hmm.Felix: And then we'll like build things on top of it. The part of the execution that gets a little cheaper is like, how do you take all of these Lego pieces and put them together in a way that makes sense for users?It's like actually valuable. You have so many different approaches now in terms of what kind of, what kind of things do you actually elevate to a primitive, do you strongly believe that all your products should be built by just combining primitive that the public also has available? Do you keep some things internal?Um, and I think that's still evolving, but I think what's probably gonna go away is like, I'm not sure if it's gonna fully go away, but I'm gonna say, I think for me personally, I will probably no longer try to come up with a really good product without testing up with people. This is not a new concept, but wherever you used to have to make costly decisions around, do we pick technology A or technology B, or do we like, um, build it this way, build it the other way.I really strongly believe now you just build all of them and try them out with a small focus group and then whatever, whatever is better is what you go with. Right. And that, that is probably quite different even from how we maybe worked a year ago. Right. Like, I think, I think this happened very recently.Alessio: Yeah. I started building something in on Electron since you're here. Coincidence. Uh, but then Electron and like SQL Light are like, there's like some issues that like between development and like, uh, building anyway. And I was like, let's just rebuild the whole thing in Swift and just recreated the whole thing in Swift.And it's like, I. It's done.swyx: You know, I didn't take any effort. I, I, I don't even know Swift.Alessio: Yeah, exactly. I was like, I'm the, I'm not reviewing it anyway, whatever. You can write in whatever language you pick, but the important stuff that I did was not write the electron bindings. Yeah. It was like the logic of what happens in the app, you know, and then the model is like, yeah, I can just recreate the same thing as withswyx: Yeah.I, I think you still want, especially for people who are doing like high performance software or like very complex software, uh, you still want like, some view of the architecture. Uh, but you can use markdown for that,Felix: right? Yeah.swyx: Uh, you don't actually have to read the code again. I, I'm still like on a sort of like a definitional thing.Um, can we build a good mental model of Claude Cowork? Um, this is what I have, right? Like you you said it's like fundamentally cloud co. We don't wanna touch it. There's the cloud app, there's clouding Chrome. I think you guys do something different in planning, but, uh, I've been talking with Tariq who is on the cloud co team, and you guys are, he's like, no, we just exposed planning.Maybe we can clarify like, what are the major pieces. That people should be aware. It goes into cowork, like,Felix: okay, I think you basically have them. So really, um, you can, you can take planning more or less out. I think there's a few things that are really valuable in cowork. Um, the virtual machine is probably the most powerful thing.So we currently run like a, we currently run like a lightweight VM and we put clocked out into the vm and we do that for, for, um, a number of reasons. Safety and security is a big one, but even if you, even if you ignore for a second safety and security and you're just like, okay, Yolo, I want this thing to do whatever.It is quite powerful to give Claus on computer that is like generally a good idea. And in terms of architecture and UX and everything else that we've been working on, philanthropic, it often is quite useful for you to like anthropomorphize, um, clot aggressively and just be like, this is a person. What will you do if you give a, if you had a person, right?Yeah. And the analogy I've given my dad this morning who is still like quite insistent on using chat even for like coding things, is if you were a developer and your employer told you that you don't need a computer, they're just gonna like, send you emails with a code and you send emails with code back like that, maybe work for Patrick Miles in the back, but that it's not very effective.Um, so what we can do with the VM is because it's a, it's a Linux system, Claude Code has more or less free reign to install whatever needs to install. It can install Python, it can install no js. We do have strict network ingress and egress controls. So you can still, as, as a user in like plain human language, make it clear to, to the entire system what you're okay with and what you're not okay with.But at no point do we have to ask a real person, like a, like a person who might be in marketing or a lawyer. I'd have to go to a lawyer and be like, are you okay with me installing Homebrew?Alessio: Yeah, yeah.Felix: Right. Because the implications of the question and the answer are complex and nuanced and like, not, not easy to reason about.This gives us a lot of distraction that makes Cloud very powerful. Now then around it, we, we do probably have a number of things that also keeps growing almost every single week that you're probably noticing that make cowork maybe better for certain tasks than just cloud. Cloud on its own. Yeah. But most of those actually live in the system prompt.They're about like, what can we infer about the work that you do? What can we, what can we intru in the system prompt to make that more effective? It's of course the like very tight integration with Cloud and Chrome. You're noticing that a lot of people, especially as the models get better, a lot of people throw up their hands when it comes to MCP connectors in this area.I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna go through like 25 M CCP connectors, click off everywhere and then like half of them don't let me do the things anyway. So Cloud and Chrome is quite powerful because we can just talk to the cloud and Chrome sub agent and that will just do things for you.swyx: Yeah, so, so one example right in MCPI, honestly, I think that the state of MCP is kind of, kind of.Really hard to integrate. Um, I need to, I needed to add, uh, Figma MCP to the coding agent that I use.Felix: Yeah.swyx: Uh, and, but I didn't wanna read the docs, so I just had caught to it. And it's, it's great at reading docs and the same, same way I had to set up like a Google Cloud, um, account for some project I was working on and get some API keys somewhere.And Google Cloud is famously super hard to navigate, so I just didn't wanna deal with any of it. I just used Claude CoworkFelix: within the first week of developing on Core. This happened very, very quickly. Um, I caught myself by starting to use cowork for coding tasks, which is not ostensibly what we built it for, right?We don't need to. But I found myself, um, I found myself like on our internal, internal tool that we have for, to collect crashes and just like debugging information and I found myself sort like picking out the ones that I think we can easily fix versus the ones that might be like kernel corruption or something else on the operating system.And I found myself sort of picking these out and then just telling Clark, go fix this bug. I was like, what am I doing here? Go one level up, tell a cowork, I want you to go to all these crash tools. I want you to find all the bugs that you think are fixable and not like an operating system crash. And then I want you to tell another cloud to like fix all of that.Um, and that's, that's, that's sort of another cloud,swyx: just so it can spin up another instance or,Felix: uh, it, currently what I do is, um, and this is a bit of a hack, but I tell it to use clockwork remote to which website itself? Yeah, that's interesting. So you basically take, if you, if you imagine like a dashboard with like 20 bucks, you, this is remote control or clock or remote, or, sorry, I just wanted to confirm what, the way I'm using it is.I have cowork running and I'm telling cowork, here's where I normally go every morning to find the latest bugs. Go read the entire bug list, separate out which ones are fixable, which ones are, are fixable, and then for the fixable ones, four is this almost loop. For each bug, write a markdown file with a prompt.And then for each markdown v, that is a prompt. Start of a cloud set. So natively Claude Code hasswyx: this concept of subagents. Mm-hmm. And this is basically a subagent, but you're not using the subagent functionality.Felix: I'm not using the subagent functionality. And the reason I'm not is because I'm firing that off as a Claude Code remoteswyx: task.Felix: Yes. That's kind of nice. ‘cause then I can just fire it off. I can go to my next meeting and in Claude Code remote. Now the work is happening.swyx: Mm-hmm. Yeah. You, you see like you're already starting to use the cloud over your local machine. And I think this is one of those things where like. Shouldn't just everything just be cloud first, right?Felix: Ah, this is such a good group. I'm like solely bad about this. I have so many thoughts about that. Okay. So I generally believe that Silicon Valley overall is undervaluing the local computer. And my default argument for that is always how come we're all using MacBooks and not like an iPad or a Chromebook?Um, that there is like still value in, in having a local machine. And now when I think about Clot, it's this entity that is supposed to be very useful to you, like it tremendously useful to you. I think that entity needs to have access to all the same tools you have access to. Otherwise it's gonna be hamstrung in like all these complex ways.And there's, there's sort of two approaches we could take. We could say, okay, we're gonna like one by one chip away at everything that is at your computer and move it into the cloud. That's, that's one way to do it. Um, and I think other products have taken that path. I personally, this is a very personal opinion, but I personally, for the amount of tools that I use.Just don't have the patience to give another tool like permissions to every single thing and keep those permissions up to date. The second thing that I'm still grappling with, and I don't have a good answer for anyone just yet, but the second thing I'm still grappling with is what does it look like for someone to slurp up your entire work and put that in the cloud?Like if I, just as an example, like if you could click a button and it just clone your entire computer into the cloud, is that something that you would want? I'm not totally convinced yet that all everyone will. Mm-hmm. And that is sort of like upstream of all the technical issues we're gonna have. ‘cause like in general, I think the world is not ready for this kind of stuff.Like, I'll give you one quick example that would probably be very easy for us. So as a desktop app, we in theory with your permission, can do a lot of things on your computer, including reading your Chrome cookies. If we really want to do right, we could take your Chrome cookies, you would have to decrypt them for us.We could put those on the cloud if we really felt like it. Pretty easy solution. That would be super cool. We could just be like, oh, we can do all your tasks in the cloud now. Um, a lot of websites, thanks, include it. If, if they see the same authentication from like two different locations, we'll just lock down your account and now you have to go to the branch and be like, okay, I, I'm here with my passport.You actually know that. Wow. Yeah. As tired as well are of the term agent for the age agent future, I think there's a lot of stuff that sort of slowly needs to catch up and until that's the case, the way I, as someone's working on clock and make Cloud most effective is to like put it where you are working.swyx: Anything else? I thought with our mental model, so like, basically like, uh, part of me also just want, like the more I understand how it works, the more I can use it to its full potential. Right?Felix: Yeah.swyx: And so what I'm get hearing from you is you told me to delete the planning thing. You're not doing anything special on, on the, that's only exclusive to Qua cowork.Felix: We have some tricks for this sort of like change week over week. We eval cowork maybe against different use cases than he would evil clock code, right? If you think about it this way. Okay, so like clock code is our eval clock cowork. Yeah. So clock code is like quite optimized for coding tasks and we mostly value it whether or not we're getting better or worse depending on how good it is at like a typical suite job.And Clark Cowork on the other hand, we evaluate more against typical knowledge work, the kind of stuff he would find in finance or in like maybe a, like in like a legal office. Um, my personal use case is always like managing my things, like managing my personal mortgage or something like that, right? Or like wealth planning for me and my family.Those are the kinds of use cases we eval, clock cowork on. And what you might be picking up on is like the subtle changes we make to the system. Prompt what we put in the system, prompt how we steer, clot with the tools we give it. Um, like either it'd be better in one or the other direction and whether there's a trade off, try us exist a lot.CLO code will be better of a code and Claude Cowork will be better. For non-coding tasks, will those gaps still exist in the next three generations of models? It's like a little unclear to me though.swyx: Yeah,Felix: because right now these like hyper optimizations we make, I'm not sure for how long they're still be relevant.swyx: I think what I was referring to was also, it, it just, uh, it qualitatively felt different when I probably, it's just all prompting and I'm reading too much into it, but like the, the fact that it comes out with like a nine step plan, I can edit the plan and give feedback and, and, and see it execute the plan.Yeah. It felt more long range than in Claude Code, but maybe that already existed in Claude Code and you just build a nicer UI for it.Felix: It's kind of both. Um, like if the Clark Code people who build the planning functionalities would city, they probably say yes, we have all of those things in Clark code and they do.Um, I think people tend to give cowork. Tasks that are maybe of longer time horizon, I thought isswyx: so long. Yeah.Felix: That's like one thing, right? It's just like that the, the chunk of work tends to be maybe a little bigger. And then the second thing is that because the work, when it gets longer, it gets a little bit more ambiguous.We do tell co-work to make heavy use of the planning tool or to make heavy use of the ask user question tool, right? We do want it to come up with like. Different scenarios of, okay, tease out what the user actually wants. Don't go off to work for like four hours and then come back with the wrong thing.And you're probably picking up on that.swyx: Yeah.Felix: Um, I wish I could tell you I like built this magical thing and it's like, there's some secret sauce,swyx: but No, no, no. I mean, it's, it's just clarity is good that, you know, engineers just want to know. Yeah. They can, they can plan around it. And then I think also for me, um, I am realizing I have to switch to my, my other machine because this is a new machine that doesn't have my session.But, uh, yeah, the, the, the planning is really important for, for me to like approve or like to see whether it's like, it's right. The ask is, the question is so beautifully presented. I mean, it also, it also available in like cursor and, and in Claude Code. But like, I, I think like it's so nice to see that it, like it's kind of for me like to understand that it gets me, it gets what I want to do.Felix: Yeah.swyx: Yeah.Felix: It probably very hardswyx: just on the topical evals. Mm-hmm. When you say eval, I think people are very vague about what it means. Is it just like vibe testing or do you have like automated programmatic evals of Claude Cowork?Felix: When we say eval, uh, what we really mean is that we essentially take the entire transcript, including all the tools that clot has available ultimately to it, and we then measure what are the outputs, depending on what we tweak, right?So we do run that a lot. We use that in training. Um, we use that in, in like, if you sort of separate out post training from like the scaffolding around it. Cowork sort of exists in the scaffolding space, but obviously we also train on it a little bit. Um, so when we say eval, we mean given the certain transcript, what do the outputs look like?Including the file outputs as well as like the actual token outputs, like the ones that you see in the chat window.Alessio: I'm curious, um, how much of the failure modes are the model intelligence versus like the usage of the end tool to put the intelligence in? Like the well planning is like a good example, right?It's like one thing is to come up with a plan. The other thing is like make a nice spreadsheet. Yeah. That kind of runs you through the plan. Like how have you seen that? Well,Felix: the thing that I grapple with a lot is that whatever scaffolding you come up with, I think we still have a bit of sort of like model overhang where the model is dramatically more capable than right.Users end up using it for. And I think part of that is that we're just not getting the model all the tools to do all the things that's theory capable of, right? There's like one thing, um, however, whenever you do build the scaffolding, I'm sort of wondering at what point, at what point will that scaffolding go away and like how much you invest in figuring out what the right scaffolding is.It's kind of up to, it's a little bit of a bet. And one thing that I as an NJ quite enjoy is that like working in philanthropic and working at a frontier lab, I maybe have a little bit more insight into what's coming, coming down the chute in terms of like, what's the next model, what is the model capable of?What is good at, what is it bad at? And I'm, I'm increasingly wondering, is the right thing for us to like really invest too much in sort of these like scaffolding corrections where the model might otherwise not misbehave, but just not do the thing that you want?Alessio: Yeah.Felix: Or is it to just like give it as many capabilities as possible, try to make those safe so there's the worst case scenarios, likeno status might be otherwise.And then just simply wait a second for the next model drop. I'm personally, currently more leaning into the ladder. I think we're gonna see a lot of like applications and companies that do very impressive things with ai that in the short term might seem very effective ‘cause they're very specialized to individual use cases.But I think once models get better generalization and get better at like those specific use cases without being super guided on those, I'm not sure how long that's gonna stick around. And you can kind of, kind of already see this in like skills and NCP servers, right? Mm-hmm. We've, we've already seen sort of this like slow shift from MCP service to skills.And like, maybe a good example is Barry who made skills. He was initially hacking on something that honestly looked a lot, looked, looked a lot like what Cowork does today. It was sort of thinking about what if cowork, but for like people who don't wanna build code. Mm-hmm. And, um, he too did that as a prototype inside the desktop app.One of the first use cases we thought of were, okay, what, what are like coding like use cases that could really benefit from graphical interfaces and like from being a little separated from the actual underlying code. And everyone comes with the same answers. Data analysis,Alessio: right?Felix: Yeah. Or saying how many users do we have today?How many, like, it's always data analysis. And I think the thing that ultimately led to skills is that we wanted to connect this little prototype to our data warehouse and. The team very quickly discovered that like instead of building a custom tool for the thing to talk our data warehouse, they just like meet and embarked on follow like mm-hmm.Dear Claude, if you want to get data, here's the end point. Here's what the API looks like. You'll figure it out.swyx: Ah.Felix: And then it be hand over control. Yeah, yeah. Also just like maybe go one step up in the layer of abstractions, right. Just, yeah. Instead of, instead of telling the thing, here's ACL I, please call the CLI, or here's an MCP.Please call this ECT shape. Just like this is the end point. If you wanna know something, if you post here, maybe you can do post sql. It's gonna be okay. And that ended up being so effective that they started trying the same pattern of like just giving the model a markdown file that describes whatever it needs to do.That the whole thing eventually became skills and we're like. We should package this up. This is a good idea.swyx: Yeah. Um, we've had Barry Mahesh, uh, on, on our conference and uh, he's uh, definitely got a good idea there.Felix: Yeah.swyx: I wanted to show you the, how I've been using Claude Cowork.Felix: Uh, this is was my favorite part.swyx: This is this. So this is like me, uh, this is how we run the Discord. Uh, we literally, uh, at first I didn't trust Cloud Core. This was my very first usage.Felix: Okay.swyx: Right. So then I was like, okay, I will just try to manually download from Zoom all my recordings and upload it to YouTube. Yeah. Because this is a very laborious process.I got a click, click, click YouTube, um, isn't super user friendly. Uh, and it just did it. And then I was like, actually, you know, even the download from Zoom part, I should also. Put into Claude Cowork, and then I did it right. Here's a bunch of, and it starts compacting here, and it, and it, it starts to even be able to do things like look through the individual frames of the video to name the video so I can upload it auto automatically.Oh, that is, and this replaces my job as a YouTuber. We will forever appreciate your creative Yes. You know, and so that's great. Uh, but then by the way, it compacts and makes, makes like a new thing, right? So I, I don't, I don't have the initial, initial thing, but then I asked it to make its own skills so that it, so that something that's repetitive and one-off and human guided becomes more automated and I can use the skills independently and reuse them.Uh, and it obviously you can write skills and that goes into context and skills at the bottom here, which is, which is so nice. Um, so I have all these skills that, that I now sort of do on a weekly basis. Uh, I know you've released scheduled Coworks, which I haven't done yet, butFelix: course I should try them. I, I think this is like so wonderful and fun for me to see because.One thing that is very fun for me about skills in particular is that they're so easy to make. Like anyone can make a skill, like a text message, could be a skill, and they can be so hyper personalized to you. And this is like sort of the subtraction layer, right? Like, um, I, I'm just guessing, but I assume, heck, you are very good at your job.You're probably given this thing some guidance about how to do it, right? I,swyx: I just said, wrap everything up into, into a skill, right?Felix: Yeah.swyx: And then, uh, and then I was like, actually, sometimes I might need to break, uh, things apart because some parts fail or some parts might be needed in individually. So I told it to split one skill into three skills.So it's like a skill splitting thing, and then there's like a parent skill that just orchestrates all of them if I want to use that. You know, like, um, I think that's, that's like really good. Uh, and, and, uh, there's, there's one more part, which is the, uh, Google Chrome thing that I told you about.Felix: Yeah.swyx: Where I'm like, okay, you know, what's better than uploading, using Claude Coworks to YouTube?Like actually. Looking at the docs to like programmatically upload to YouTube and then putting that in a skill. And I've never done that before. I don't want to deal with Google Cloud. Yeah. So Claude Cowork does it for me.Felix: That is really cool.swyx: So, so I, I just, I don't care. I just, like, I do a thing. I don't, it doesn't really matter.Felix: That is really cool. And then you've, I assume paired the skill just with the script that it's built.swyx: Yeah, no, I just update, update the skills.Felix: Oh, that is beautiful. Yeah. That's wonderful.swyx: It's kind of like a skill, like, uh, uh, basically I think like the way that people ease into Claude Cowork is like take a knowledge work task that you would normally be clicking around for and then, uh, try to turn, turn that, and then you do the, okay, well what if you went further?Okay. And then when, if you went further, when, if you, and it sort of expand the scope of cowork as you gain trust with it and, and also teach it how to replace you.Felix: Yeah. It's like a little bit like playing factorial, but for your own life. Uh, like you say, you start really small.swyx: Yeah.Felix: You start automating something really tiny and like.Once it clicks, you keep adding onto this like automation empire. Just like make your life easier and easier. My favorite skill has been, um, every single morning Kohlberg starts looking at my calendar and make sure that there's conflicts because people tend to schedule a lot of meetings, sometimes last minute, sometimes miss it soft and painful.And a lot of products have existed like that A lot. I've written in the custom prompt there. I haven't made it a skill, um, honestly should.swyx: Yeah.Felix: But I've given it like pretty clear instructions about okay, here are some people, if they book over other meetings, I'm probably gonna go to their meeting. Like if Dario schedules a meeting.swyx: Right.Felix: Not try to reschedule down. Right. Um, and I think there's some other rules in there about like what kind of meetings I care more about what kind of meetings I care less about. What is okay to like, maybe pun like when I want to be, when I want to be working, when I don't want to be working. And it's those really small things that I can think kind of click with people.Right. When we launch co-work, I think one of the US races that went most viral on Twitter. X was clean up your desktop, which is stuff, because silly, that's such a smart thing, right? Like you don't need to model to clean up your desktop. Not really. Um,swyx: like this, like clean up my desktop.Felix: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.swyx: I need to, I need to choose my desktop, right? I guess give it access to my desktop.Felix: Yeah.swyx: Okay. Uh, okay. This is very scary. Oh, we'll do it.Alessio: I did, I did it with my downloads folder. It was like, you have so many term sheets and there's like eight copies of your rental lease for your office. I was like, all right.Like, don't yell at me.Felix: It's like, it's not such a small task. And then like, I, I would never go out there and normally otherwise and tell people I've pulled a product. It can organize your folder. Right. Um, because it feels small. But I think to your point like,swyx: oh, here's, here's the, here's the ask user questions.Felix: Yeah.swyx: Uh,Felix: beautiful. Right. Elite obvious junk. You probably shouldn't click that.Alessio: No.Felix: If he's not done right.swyx: As long as it's reversible, I don'tAlessio: make up blend to,swyx: yeah. Uh, yeah. No, I, I have a, I have a typical, everything is super messy folder. So, yes. I think this, this is super helpful. So this is a pretty simple task.Mm-hmm. But I've, okay, here it is. Right. Here's the progress. I don't see this in, that's why I'm like, this gotta be something different than, uh, than Claude Code, because I'm like, weFelix: do. Yeah. That's, we do system prompt that. We're like, all right. We want you to think about like, this task Yeah. Methodology.Yeah.swyx: And then I can, I can, I can do like little suggestions for, for, for these things. It's beautiful. Look at this. I, I can, I can like say like, oh, don't do that. Don't do this. It's amazing.Felix: I'm so happy. You like it. Um, I mean, the other way around, like we're part of the Clark core team, if you would like this in Clark COVID.swyx: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, so, so yeah, I mean, uh, this is really good. Obviously I, I'm like kind of raving about it. Uh, you know, I have other things like sign up for pg e so if you can do phone calls for me, that'd be great. Um, I, I do, peopleFelix: have done that. Obviously you can't do that natively, but people have done that with like, various other providers.swyx: Yeah. Uh, and then this is like signing up for the Figma MCP. Um, I, I really am trying to do like everything, um, data analysis as well. I do think, um, oh, design to code, uh, very, very good. Right? So like, here's a Figma file, take it. And then this is where like a lot of other tasks is like knowledge work, like replace my manual clicking, but this is no, I would normally use Claude Code or uh, Claude Code for this, but because I perceive that you have better Chrome integrationFelix: mm-hmm.swyx: I, I think you can actually do a better job of this. And I, this, this is one shot at my, uh, conference website.Felix: That's pretty cool. Like at some point I would love to like, hear how you feel about code. In the desktop apps, which is like I never use, which is the, the same team. Same team.swyx: So I use the call code in terminal, which I, I perceive to be the default way of cloud coding.Felix: So one thing this has,swyx: sorry, I'm just like, I'm notFelix: here, I'm not here. All products. Can I talk about other stuff? Like I, I'm not sure if people out there wanna like hear me advertise my stuff for like an hour. Please do that. Um, this thing is like a builtin browser, which is a thing a lot of products have said.Yeah, it's a builtin browser. And I think giving cloud eyes into like what you're actually working on makes it so much more effective. And that's probably what you've seen in cohort because it can see Chrome, it can like debug the dom, it can like see things. Um, that does make it more powerful.swyx: Yeah. So, so I think, uh, my mental model was kind broken.‘cause I only use this cowork because I thought it had a, a browser thing in it. But I understand that the Claude Code app. The app version of Claude Code does have a built-in browser. I've seen, I've seen this preview thing.Felix: Yeah.swyx: I just, I've never used it.Felix: But in the end, in the end, you sort of have it by hard.Yeah. You basically get the same thing. Right? Like the, the, the additional skill that you're describing is chart is better if we can see what it's working on. Right. That's, that's sort of like the summary here and like whether it's using your Chromeswyx: Yeah.Felix: Or it's just like making up its own little like browser.It doesn't really make a big difference because either way it's gonna see what it's working on and that just makes it much better. And then you don't have to run QA for your cloud.swyx: Why doesn't it pick up my existing Claude Code sessions? ‘cause I, I mean, obviously I've used Claude Code, but Excellent question.Um, don't have a good answer other than like, we're honest. Just haven't Yeah. This is what the Open AI team does. Okay. Uh, cool. I I I don't have other, like, I, I just, I, I do wanna expand people's minds and also maybe show people if they haven't really done it, but like, I, I think it's very interesting how I sometimes use this more than I use, I mean, I use dia, right?Yeah. Um, I, and I use, uh, I've used like all the other agentic browsers and philanthropic didn't have to build an agentic browser because you just had Claude Cowork and that's enough.Felix: Yeah. I also think like maybe integrating with number of excellent browsers out there, it's like currently on my personal priority list, a little higher than like trying to rebuild a browser from scratch.Yeah. You know, never say never, but I think going back to this idea of like, we wanna plug this into an entire existing workflow, I think our goal is actually to not replace any of the applications we have in your computer. But instead of like, work really well within a new workflow,Alessio: make the new one. Yeah.Are, it seems that nowadays, especially on the browser, most of the innovation is like user ergonomics. It's not really like the underlying browser engine. So I feel like to call it, it doesn't really matter if it's like the, uh, or Chrome or Alice, whatever.Felix: Yeah. We wanna, we wanna meet you wherever you are.Which is like, like obviously I would say that, but it's also just generally true because I don't wanna shrink my potential user base artificially by saying, okay, like, I'm gonna start building for the people who are willing to switch browsers.Alessio: Right.Felix: That's such a, like, you know, like many lawsuits have been filed over who gets to review the browser and like a lot of money has switched hands over the question of like, which browser is default and which search engine is default within the browser.Um, I just wanna build for, yeah, I wanna build for swyx essentially. Like, I wanna, I wanna, I wanna build for people who have a number of annoying tasks that they feel like. Maybe clock could do it. Could do it for them.Alessio: Yeah. What do you think about skills portability? I think there's been one thing, I use another thing called zo, which is kinda like a cloud computer plus agent.And I have a skill to add visitors to the office. Yeah. So whenever somebody has to come in after hours, they need to check in downstairs. Um, but I wanna like text the thing, so it doesn't really work in, in cowork, but now that skill is in the zone harness and it's not in my cowork thing. And then if I make a change, it's gotta, I gotta sync them.How do you see that going? Like I see memory as like. Cloud personal, kinda like, I don't necessarily want my memories to be cross thing.Felix: Yeah.Alessio: But I do want my skills to be cross agent that I use. I think with MTPs, people do the same thing. It's like, oh, Mt. P Gateway. Mt P registry. I don't really know if that's like a business.So I'm curious like if you've had any thoughts in the area.Felix: I think for me, this is sort of where I go back to the really basic primitives for our skills are file-based instead of like this complicated thing that exists inside a place somewhere that is like super proprietary. I'm really leaning into the idea of like, it's all just files and vultures, and that makes it very portable on its own.Right. We do have skills as part of this container format, which was just called plugins.Alessio: Mm-hmm.Felix: And plugins are available both for Claude Code and Claude Code work the same format, and you can install plugins. This works in cowork today. You can basically say, I'm gonna add a whole, like just a GitHub repo as a.Skills marketplace or like a plugin marketplace. And that's how we're doing portability. I think we have a lot of room left to grow in. How do we make it easy for people to know that they can write skills? How do we make it easy for them to just like, share a skill with you? Because obviously all the words I just said, right?Like I'm losing most of the knowledge worker base out there, right. And start by saying, oh, you can connect to GitHub repo. It's not exactly how most people will end up working in like a general knowledge worker space. Um, but I think there's something there. And another thing that's there that I think has not really been properly explored is the, the, the combination of which part of the skill is very portable and then which part of the skill is like very personal to you.Right. And I think that's something we haven't really solved as an industry. Hmm.swyx: It's like, which, how you wanna introduce more structure to the skill or have always have like. Public skill, private skill, you know, pair. Yeah, yeah. Kind of. I think there'sFelix: like a, like the easiest way to do this, which is we do like use string interpolation or something.Right, right. Yeah, yeah. Insert username here, insert like phone number, insert, like known folder, locations, that kind of stuff. Um, that's probably clunky. That's why we haven't built it. Um, but I do think someone is going to come up with like an interesting way to keep everything we like about skills. The portability is just a file, it's just marked down.It's just text, honestly. Right. Like a text file words. The complete lack of structure, which means you don't need any kind of tutorial to write a skill. Just like explain it to Claude the way he would explain it to me and Claude will probably get it before I work. Mm-hmm. Right? You're just like, for booking a flight, tell Claude how to book a flight the same way we tell him somewhere.I just started working here today. But combine that with a very like, personal thing. Um, maybe we'll stick with a booking a flight example. I don't actually think. AI should be booking flights. I think the tools we have is yes.swyx: Yeah. Finally, somebody says it. It's the default demo that everyone's making.Felix: I'mswyx: like, I even against like booking demos, it is not a good showcase.Felix: Yeah. I'm like, I just wanna book my flight myself. But, um, I think there's a lot of things that have a personal and a non-personal component and that's maybe why people reach for flight booking because some things are very universal. Yeah. Super flight is usually better, right? Like few people try to book the most expensive flight.And then some things are quite personal about like what times you prefer, which seat you prefer, which airports you prefer. Combining that and like a skill format that is actually portable, compatible, easy to understand for people. I think that would be very exciting. We just haven't figured it out yet.Alessio: Yeah, I think the text part every, I think everybody by now has some sort of like cloud file thing. Either Dropbox, Google Drive, whatever. So it feels like in a way it should basically like sim link. My skills into all my agent harnesses. Yeah. Just keep those ing like we have internally this like valuable tokens repo, which is like all the commands sub agents.It's good. Uh, and then I build like a TUI where you can start it and be like, you know, install this command and this three sub agents into this agent in this folder and just copy paste this. It doesn't do anything. It literally cp the file into that. But I feel like there should be something similar where like whenever I go into a new thing, it's like, hey, here's like the link to exactly the cloud folder and just bring down these skills into this.Yeah. Like today it doesn't quite work like that. Like if I install a new agent, I cannot, I have to like copy paste all the skills and I don't even know where they are.Felix: Yeah.Alessio: That's like the big problem. It's like where do I find them?Felix: Yeah.Alessio: Um, so I'm curious like in the future like that, that almost feels like my personal productivity thing will be my skills.Felix: Yeah.Alessio: Is not really the product that I use. Everybody has access to the same product. But today there's, that just looks like copy pasting ME files, IFelix: think so many things I, I really like thinking about agents and LLMs just as like another coworker. So many attempts have made to build documentation companies that are like, oh, we're gonna solve oil documentation problems.Um, I myself, like spend a little bit of time working in notion, right? I'm like deeply familiar with the concept of let's get everyone on the same page. Mm-hmm. Right? And what you're basically saying here is you want all your agents to be on the same page about your preferences, about the skills, about the way they ought to work and like how they ought to execute.And I'm not sure what the right thing is going to be if it's going to be some, some company that can say, all right, we're as an independent body, we're not trying to like, push into any particular product. It's our job to be like the skill authority, and we provide, I don't know, we're gonna be the Dropbox of skills and we can just sim link us into all the products we want to use.I'm not sure that's gonna be viable business, but as, as an idea, it would be cool.Alessio: Yeah. Yeah. I think so many things are just going away as businesses. It's like, how am I supposed to do it? I'm not even asking somebody to make a product about it. Like yeah. I wanna personally know. And there's things like you said, it's like you almost wanna skill and then interpolate it between personal and work.So if I'm booking a fly for work, it's different than I'm booking a flight personally.Felix: Yeah.Alessio: In some ways, yeah. But like a lot of the scaffolding is the same, you know? Cool.Felix: I mean, as an engineer I will tell you like, you know, technic a person to technic a person. I will just be like siblings.Alessio: Well that's what, that's what I do.We call that MD and agents that MD's just the same how sim length. And so it is like, that works, but it feels like, yeah, I don't know. MaybeFelix: you can always go one, you can always tell cowork problem and then cowork will solve it for you. Just make the siblings. That's like one way to do it.Alessio: That's true.That's true. All right. Everything is called cowork.Felix: Uh, potentially spicy. Question for both of you.swyx: Uh, which of these industries will go away?Alessio: Okay, so what Felix was saying before is interesting. There's busy like. The short term pressure of like, we need to turn these tokens into valuable things, which is I should build the last mile product that harness the model.And then there's the question of like, long term, which ones are gonna still be valuable? And I think you're kind of seeing this today with like, uh, you know, the coding space in a way is kind of like everybody's moving up and up in stack because you need more than just turning tokens into code. I think search, like enterprise search is kind of saying the same thing.Like with G Clean and like all these different companies is like, at the end of the day, if Cowork is the one doing all the work, the search itself is like such a small part that like, I don't know if I'm really gonna pay that much money just to do search. It's almost like everything is like a cowork vertical.So like how much can cowork first party support?swyx: Mm-hmm.Alessio: And how much can it not? I think for a lot of these things, the planning thing that you were showing do Which one? The planning. The planning.swyx: Okay. Yeah. Yeah.Alessio: That's one thing where like most of the value that these agents provide is like they're better at planning for specific tasks.Yeah. And have better tools for it.swyx: Yeah.Alessio: But I think the models are now moving in that direction and they have the right harnesses and they're on your computer. So for me it's almost like if for the end customer trusts your startup to be the provider of that task result, then I think that works. This is, uh, something that, this is a shortswyx: spike that we're, we're working on.Uh, yeah.Felix: I think, look, I'll, I'll, I'll tell you this, like I don't think I'm the best person to like actually estimate which industry is going to be hit the hardest. But I do think that at philanthropic as a group of people, we're deeply worried about the impact. That the tools are going to have on the labor market, especially for like junior employees that, because I think, I think it's only honest to say that when we talk about automating a lot away, a lot of the work that we personally find annoying that we maybe think's not the best use of our time.In a lot of industries, that kind of work would've been given to a junior entry level employee. Yeah. Right. And I think it's, it's only, it's only right to be really worried about that and like worry what that's going to do in particular to people like enter the shop market.Alessio: Mm-hmm. I have a solution for that.Which you make them, you create simulative jobs for them.Felix: Okay.Alessio: So this is, this is like half joke, half true. So if you think about software engineering, when you're like a junior engineer, you work like 1, 2, 3 years. And in those three years there's like maybe like a handful of moments where like you really learn something.And then a bunch of other days where like you're not really progressing.Felix: Yeah.Alessio: I think now we can use AI and these models to actually like shortcut these careers and almost like simulate the early years of your work and like just make them like super dense and like these learnings, it's like, hey, we're working on this feature, which is like a distributed system and you need to learn this thing that might take three months at a company.And so you take three months here, it's like we're just simulating the whole thing. It's actually not a real thing. And in one week we kind of speed run through the whole thing and you kind of learn your lesson from there. And we kind of repeat that in like one year. You basically get like three years worth of like projects and experience.Yeah. I think it's harder for like things like sales or for things like, you know, marketing because you don't really have a way to get the feedback loop. But I think a lot of it, it sounds kind of silly, it's like you're making the new effect job, but it's almost like you go to college, right? People pay to learn how to do it, and this might feel similar where it's like, hey, we have the.Jane Street Simulator is like, you wanna come work at Jane Street? We'll just put you in the simulator for like three months.Felix: Wow.Alessio: And you'll come out of it. It's like, you know, I'm ready.Felix: So there, there is an aspect here. I'm not an expert enough to like actually know what, what is going to happen to marketing or legal or finance, right?Like, I don't work in those jobs and I, I don't think I should talk about them, but I am an engineer and I think I have a pretty good idea of what engineering is like. And I think one thing we're sort of seeing is that as a company and also as, as the public, we're like deeply worried about entry level, but we're also seeing more senior engineers accelerate it.If like they're more productive. They, they actually increase the value they provide. And the thing that I'm thinking about a lot is the fact that even before all of this happened, um, I've always had a lot of respect for the University of Waterloo and the, the new grads that have joined my teams as from coming from the University of Waterloo always felt like.More ready than new grads will like literally spend their entire time at the university regardless of how good, but never actually had to work inside an environment where you have to ship things that eventually will be used by users. And I'm, I'm, I'm German. I like initially went to German University and I think the, the, the like information systems programs, there tend to be very theoretical, right?Like I often give people the example of like trying

In this episode James and Frank dive into the practical realities of using AI in everyday development—arguing that AI shines in brownfield (existing) code because it respects your architecture, while greenfield work rewards iterative prompting. They unpack model quirks: context-window limits, hallucinations, and why trying different models matters. The heart of the show is Frank's nerdy delight: feeding a 64KB EEPROM through a disassembler and having Sonnet decompile it into readable C, exposing a PID autopilot and hardware checks—proof that AI can accelerate reverse engineering and embedded work. Along the way they share hands-on tips (trim and clean context, use disassembly first, tweak prompts), and fun examples of AI-generated icons and AppleScript. A must-listen for devs curious how AI can supercharge real projects. Follow Us Frank: Twitter, Blog, GitHub James: Twitter, Blog, GitHub Merge Conflict: Twitter, Facebook, Website, Chat on Discord Music : Amethyst Seer - Citrine by Adventureface ⭐⭐ Review Us (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/merge-conflict/id1133064277?mt=2&ls=1) ⭐⭐ Machine transcription available on http://mergeconflict.fm

The panel of Bart Busschots, Kirschen Seah, Mike Burke, and Chuck Joiner continues the 2025 Holiday Gift Guide #6 with practical and geeky picks, from safety bands and emergency “holding it together” kits to premium luggage, tech pouches, and blazing-fast SSDs. They also highlight an in-flight audio device and the ultimate LEGO gift for Star Trek fans.  MacVoices is supported by CleanMyMac from MacPaw. Get Tidy Today! Try 7 days free and use my code MACVOICES20 for 20% off at clnmy.com/MACVOICES. Show Notes: Chapters: [0:00] Kicking off Part 2 of the 2025 Holiday Gift Guide[0:10] Sponsor: CleanMyMac from MacPaw[0:51] Road ID bracelets and Apple Watch band IDs for safety[5:00] “Holding It Together” kit: gaff tape, bongo ties, and paracord[9:23] Releasable zip ties and other handy fix-it tools[10:51] Thule bike rack and stress-free bike transport[12:54] Cost, durability, and user experience of premium bike rack[15:30] Peak Design Roller Pro luggage and packing system[18:30] OWC Express 1M2 portable NVMe SSD for fast video editing[21:25] CleanMyMac holiday magic ad spot[24:10] 12 South AirFly SE for using AirPods on airplanes[25:44] Peak Design Tech Pouch and cable organization[29:36] LEGO Enterprise D and lighting kit for Star Trek fans[33:01] Free-build LEGO memories and attic city nostalgia[37:47] Lexar MagSafe SSD for direct iPhone video recording[40:38] Where to find Kirshen, Mike, and Bart online[45:04] Closing holiday wishes and gift guide wrap-up Links: Kirschen Seah RoadID Apple Watch IDhttps://www.roadid.com/products/apple-sidekick-stainless-sport-id Optional IDProfilehttps://idprofile.com AirFly SE from 12Southhttps://amzn.to/44PutrL Mike Burke: GuideAlonghttp://guidealong.com MacWhisper Prohttps://apps.apple.com/us/app/whisper-transcription/id1668083311 “The Holding It Together” Bundle Gaffers Tape (2" x 30 Yards) Strong Hold, Easy to Rip, Residue-Free Professional Grade Floor Tape for Electrical Cords, Matte Finish Non Reflective, Weather Resistanthttps://amzn.to/48N5Xc1 BongoTies Original Bongo Ties A5-01 - 10 Pack ~ Professional cable ties made of natural rubber and bamboohttps://amzn.to/44hxLUA Paracord Planet 550lb Paracord – 7 Strand Type III Tactical Parachute Cordhttps://amzn.to/3XMKbjA SOOOEC 100 Pack Reusable Zip Ties Assorted Sizes 6+8+10+12 Inchhttps://amzn.to/3XK5l1U Peak Design Tech Pouchhttps://amzn.to/3KB1Ho4 Bart Busschots: Peak Design Roller Pro Carry-Onhttps://amzn.to/3MybICR Lego Star Trek: U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-D https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/star-trek-u-s-s-enterprise-ncc-1701-d-10356 Brick Popper - World's Fastest Separator Tool - Efficient Remover for Kids and Adultshttps://amzn.to/4ac82Rj Chuck Joiner: OWC 2TB Express 1M2 40Gb/s Portable NVMe SSD USB4 (Thunderbolt Compatible/USB-C) Ultra Fast External SSD Drivehttps://amzn.to/4aFqFNv Lexar 2TB ES5 Magnetic External SSD, Up to 2000MB/s, Compatible w/MagSafehttps://amzn.to/3XKz1Mo Guests: Mike Burke is a corporate technical trainer and automation enthusiast who specializes in creating structured systems that blend productivity techniques with practical technology solutions. Drawing on his background as a former high school science teacher, Mike brings a methodical, educational approach to complex technical concepts. Through his blog and YouTube channel, he shares insights on macOS automation technologies including Keyboard Maestro, AppleScript, and shell scripting. Mike is passionate about the concept of “digital mise en place” — creating thoughtfully organized digital environments that eliminate friction and support creative work. When not exploring new automation techniques, Mike can be found documenting his family's quest to visit all U.S. National Parks. His web site is TheMikeBurke.com. By day, Bart Busschots is a Linux sysadmin, cyber security expert, and Perl programmer, as well  a keen amateur photographer when ever he gets the time. Bart hosts and produces the Let's Talk podcast series - a monthly Apple show that takes a big-picture look at the last month in Apple news, and a monthly photography show focusing on the art and craft of photography. Every second week Bart is the guest for the Chit Chat Across the Pond segment on Allison Sheridan's NosillaCast. You can get links to everything Bart gets up including a link to his photography and his personal blog. Kirschen Seah's background is Computer Sciences with interests in Software Engineering, User Experience, and Mac OS X / iPhone OS development. She started programming with BASIC in 1978 on an Apple ][ and have over 30 years of experience in the field. Kirschen worked on OPENSTEP (precursor to Mac OS X Cocoa) graphical prototyping applications initially when she joined Rockwell Collins (now Collins Aerospace) in 1999, and was a Senior Principal Systems Engineer in the Flight Management Systems department focussed on the user interface for pilot interaction. Prior to joining Rockwell Collins Kirschen worked at Acuity (formerly ichat) developing interactive user interfaces for live chat customer service agents. Now retired, there's now more time to share technical insights on her blog, develop useful scripts (Python, shell), and write Shortcuts. Kirschen is really motivated to share her experience to help fellow software practitioners develop better skills – be that in good design, implementation, or computer science fundamentals. Find her at FreeRangeCoder.com. Support:      Become a MacVoices Patron on Patreon     http://patreon.com/macvoices      Enjoy this episode? Make a one-time donation with PayPal Connect:      Web:     http://macvoices.com      Twitter:     http://www.twitter.com/chuckjoiner     http://www.twitter.com/macvoices      Mastodon:     https://mastodon.cloud/@chuckjoiner      Facebook:     http://www.facebook.com/chuck.joiner      MacVoices Page on Facebook:     http://www.facebook.com/macvoices/      MacVoices Group on Facebook:     http://www.facebook.com/groups/macvoice      LinkedIn:     https://www.linkedin.com/in/chuckjoiner/      Instagram:     https://www.instagram.com/chuckjoiner/ Subscribe:      Audio in iTunes     Video in iTunes      Subscribe manually via iTunes or any podcatcher:      Audio: http://www.macvoices.com/rss/macvoicesrss      Video: http://www.macvoices.com/rss/macvoicesvideorss

The panel of Bart Busschots, Kirschen Seah, Mike Burke, and Chuck Joiner continues the 2025 Holiday Gift Guide #6 with practical and geeky picks, from safety bands and emergency "holding it together" kits to premium luggage, tech pouches, and blazing-fast SSDs. They also highlight an in-flight audio device and the ultimate LEGO gift for Star Trek fans.  http://traffic.libsyn.com/maclevelten/MV25311.mp3 MacVoices is supported by CleanMyMac from MacPaw. Get Tidy Today! Try 7 days free and use my code MACVOICES20 for 20% off at clnmy.com/MACVOICES. Show Notes: Chapters: [0:00] Kicking off Part 2 of the 2025 Holiday Gift Guide [0:10] Sponsor: CleanMyMac from MacPaw [0:51] Road ID bracelets and Apple Watch band IDs for safety [5:00] "Holding It Together" kit: gaff tape, bongo ties, and paracord [9:23] Releasable zip ties and other handy fix-it tools [10:51] Thule bike rack and stress-free bike transport [12:54] Cost, durability, and user experience of premium bike rack [15:30] Peak Design Roller Pro luggage and packing system [18:30] OWC Express 1M2 portable NVMe SSD for fast video editing [21:25] CleanMyMac holiday magic ad spot [24:10] 12 South AirFly SE for using AirPods on airplanes [25:44] Peak Design Tech Pouch and cable organization [29:36] LEGO Enterprise D and lighting kit for Star Trek fans [33:01] Free-build LEGO memories and attic city nostalgia [37:47] Lexar MagSafe SSD for direct iPhone video recording [40:38] Where to find Kirshen, Mike, and Bart online [45:04] Closing holiday wishes and gift guide wrap-up Links: Kirschen Seah RoadID Apple Watch ID https://www.roadid.com/products/apple-sidekick-stainless-sport-id Optional IDProfile https://idprofile.com AirFly SE from 12South https://amzn.to/44PutrL Mike Burke: GuideAlong http://guidealong.com MacWhisper Pro https://apps.apple.com/us/app/whisper-transcription/id1668083311 "The Holding It Together" Bundle Gaffers Tape (2" x 30 Yards) Strong Hold, Easy to Rip, Residue-Free Professional Grade Floor Tape for Electrical Cords, Matte Finish Non Reflective, Weather Resistant https://amzn.to/48N5Xc1 BongoTies Original Bongo Ties A5-01 - 10 Pack ~ Professional cable ties made of natural rubber and bamboo https://amzn.to/44hxLUA Paracord Planet 550lb Paracord – 7 Strand Type III Tactical Parachute Cord https://amzn.to/3XMKbjA SOOOEC 100 Pack Reusable Zip Ties Assorted Sizes 6+8+10+12 Inch https://amzn.to/3XK5l1U Peak Design Tech Pouch https://amzn.to/3KB1Ho4 Bart Busschots: Peak Design Roller Pro Carry-On https://amzn.to/3MybICR Lego Star Trek: U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-D  https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/star-trek-u-s-s-enterprise-ncc-1701-d-10356 Brick Popper - World's Fastest Separator Tool - Efficient Remover for Kids and Adults https://amzn.to/4ac82Rj Chuck Joiner: OWC 2TB Express 1M2 40Gb/s Portable NVMe SSD USB4 (Thunderbolt Compatible/USB-C) Ultra Fast External SSD Drive https://amzn.to/4aFqFNv Lexar 2TB ES5 Magnetic External SSD, Up to 2000MB/s, Compatible w/MagSafe https://amzn.to/3XKz1Mo Guests: Mike Burke is a corporate technical trainer and automation enthusiast who specializes in creating structured systems that blend productivity techniques with practical technology solutions. Drawing on his background as a former high school science teacher, Mike brings a methodical, educational approach to complex technical concepts. Through his blog and YouTube channel, he shares insights on macOS automation technologies including Keyboard Maestro, AppleScript, and shell scripting. Mike is passionate about the concept of "digital mise en place" — creating thoughtfully organized digital environments that eliminate friction and support creative work. When not exploring new automation techniques, Mike can be found documenting his family's quest to visit all U.S. National Parks. His web site is TheMikeBurke.com. By day, Bart Busschots is a Linux sysadmin, cyber security expert, and Perl programmer, as well  a keen amateur photographer when ever he gets the time. Bart hosts and produces the Let's Talk podcast series - a monthly Apple show that takes a big-picture look at the last month in Apple news, and a monthly photography show focusing on the art and craft of photography. Every second week Bart is the guest for the Chit Chat Across the Pond segment on Allison Sheridan's NosillaCast. You can get links to everything Bart gets up including a link to his photography and his personal blog. Kirschen Seah's background is Computer Sciences with interests in Software Engineering, User Experience, and Mac OS X / iPhone OS development. She started programming with BASIC in 1978 on an Apple ][ and have over 30 years of experience in the field. Kirschen worked on OPENSTEP (precursor to Mac OS X Cocoa) graphical prototyping applications initially when she joined Rockwell Collins (now Collins Aerospace) in 1999, and was a Senior Principal Systems Engineer in the Flight Management Systems department focussed on the user interface for pilot interaction. Prior to joining Rockwell Collins Kirschen worked at Acuity (formerly ichat) developing interactive user interfaces for live chat customer service agents. Now retired, there's now more time to share technical insights on her blog, develop useful scripts (Python, shell), and write Shortcuts. Kirschen is really motivated to share her experience to help fellow software practitioners develop better skills – be that in good design, implementation, or computer science fundamentals. Find her at FreeRangeCoder.com. Support:      Become a MacVoices Patron on Patreon      http://patreon.com/macvoices      Enjoy this episode? Make a one-time donation with PayPal Connect:      Web:      http://macvoices.com      Twitter:      http://www.twitter.com/chuckjoiner      http://www.twitter.com/macvoices      Mastodon:      https://mastodon.cloud/@chuckjoiner      Facebook:      http://www.facebook.com/chuck.joiner      MacVoices Page on Facebook:      http://www.facebook.com/macvoices/      MacVoices Group on Facebook:      http://www.facebook.com/groups/macvoice      LinkedIn:      https://www.linkedin.com/in/chuckjoiner/      Instagram:      https://www.instagram.com/chuckjoiner/ Subscribe:      Audio in iTunes      Video in iTunes      Subscribe manually via iTunes or any podcatcher:      Audio: http://www.macvoices.com/rss/macvoicesrss      Video: http://www.macvoices.com/rss/macvoicesvideorss

The 2025 MacVoices Holiday Gift Guide #6 kicks off with a lively mix of community banter and practical tech recommendations by Bart Busschots, Kirschen Seah, Mike Burke, and Chuck Joiner. Picks include a rechargeable wallet tracker, travel-friendly guided tour apps, sustainable coffee gear, foldable keyboards, a compact control surface, a powerful dictation tool, and pro-level video-switching software, each reflecting the interests of the panel members. (Part 1)  MacVoices is supported by CleanMyMac from MacPaw. Get Tidy Today! Try 7 days free and use my code MACVOICES20 for 20% off at clnmy.com/MACVOICES. Show Notes: Chapters: [0:00] Gift Guide introduction[0:32] Panel welcome and format overview[1:55] Meeting the guests and holiday camaraderie[4:42] First pick: Chipolo rechargeable wallet card[7:40] Second pick: GuideAlong offline narrated travel tours[11:27] Third pick: OXO Quick Brew coffee device[18:26] Fourth pick: ProtoArc foldable Bluetooth keyboard[21:05] Sponsor message: CleanMyMac holiday edition[23:00] Fifth pick: Stream Deck Neo compact controller[25:55] Sixth pick: MacWhisper dictation and transcription[30:20] Seventh pick: Thule bike rack engineering[34:20] Eighth pick: Switcher Studio iPad-based video switching[38:39] Closing and support information Links: Kirschen Seah Chipolo CARD - Rechargeable wallet tracker card, Bluetooth tracker, item locator, passport finder compatible with Apple Find My or Find Hubhttps://amzn.to/44YRvMT Elgato Stream Deck Neo – 8 Customizable Keys, 2 Touch Pointshttps://amzn.to/4oLtNuN RoadID Apple Watch IDhttps://www.roadid.com/products/apple-sidekick-stainless-sport-id Optional IDProfilehttps://idprofile.com AirFly SE from 12Southhttps://amzn.to/44PutrL Mike Burke: GuideAlonghttp://guidealong.com MacWhisper Prohttps://apps.apple.com/us/app/whisper-transcription/id1668083311 “The Holding It Together” Bundle Gaffers Tape (2" x 30 Yards) Strong Hold, Easy to Rip, Residue-Free Professional Grade Floor Tape for Electrical Cords, Matte Finish Non Reflective, Weather Resistanthttps://amzn.to/48N5Xc1 BongoTies Original Bongo Ties A5-01 - 10 Pack ~ Professional cable ties made of natural rubber and bamboohttps://amzn.to/44hxLUA Paracord Planet 550lb Paracord – 7 Strand Type III Tactical Parachute Cordhttps://amzn.to/3XMKbjA SOOOEC 100 Pack Reusable Zip Ties Assorted Sizes 6+8+10+12 Inchhttps://amzn.to/3XK5l1U Peak Design Tech Pouchhttps://amzn.to/3KB1Ho4 Bart Busschots: OXO Brew Rapid Brewer - Portable Coffee Makerhttps://amzn.to/3MssIKQ OXO Good Grips Silicone Reusable Bags – 4 Piece Lunch Sethttps://amzn.to/48Q72A2 Thule EuroWay G2 920 Bike Rack for carhttps://amzn.to/4aAUxKT Peak Design Roller Pro Carry-Onhttps://amzn.to/3MybICR Lego Star Trek: U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-D https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/star-trek-u-s-s-enterprise-ncc-1701-d-10356 Brick Popper - World's Fastest Separator Tool - Efficient Remover for Kids and Adultshttps://amzn.to/4ac82Rj Chuck Joiner: ProtoArc Foldable Bluetooth Keyboard, XK01 Folding Wireless Portable Keyboard with Numeric Keypad, Full-Size Travel Keyboards for iPad Tablet Smartphone Laptophttps://amzn.to/4oMWgjU Switcher Studiohttps://www.switcherstudio.com OWC 2TB Express 1M2 40Gb/s Portable NVMe SSD USB4 (Thunderbolt Compatible/USB-C) Ultra Fast External SSD Drivehttps://amzn.to/4aFqFNv Lexar 2TB ES5 Magnetic External SSD, Up to 2000MB/s, Compatible w/MagSafehttps://amzn.to/3XKz1Mo Guests: Mike Burke is a corporate technical trainer and automation enthusiast who specializes in creating structured systems that blend productivity techniques with practical technology solutions. Drawing on his background as a former high school science teacher, Mike brings a methodical, educational approach to complex technical concepts. Through his blog and YouTube channel, he shares insights on macOS automation technologies including Keyboard Maestro, AppleScript, and shell scripting. Mike is passionate about the concept of “digital mise en place” — creating thoughtfully organized digital environments that eliminate friction and support creative work. When not exploring new automation techniques, Mike can be found documenting his family's quest to visit all U.S. National Parks. His web site is TheMikeBurke.com.   By day, Bart Busschots is a Linux sysadmin, cyber security expert, and Perl programmer, as well  a keen amateur photographer when ever he gets the time. Bart hosts and produces the Let's Talk podcast series - a monthly Apple show that takes a big-picture look at the last month in Apple news, and a monthly photography show focusing on the art and craft of photography. Every second week Bart is the guest for the Chit Chat Across the Pond segment on Allison Sheridan's NosillaCast. You can get links to everything Bart gets up including a link to his photography and his personal blog. Kirschen Seah's background is Computer Sciences with interests in Software Engineering, User Experience, and Mac OS X / iPhone OS development. She started programming with BASIC in 1978 on an Apple ][ and have over 30 years of experience in the field. Kirschen worked on OPENSTEP (precursor to Mac OS X Cocoa) graphical prototyping applications initially when she joined Rockwell Collins (now Collins Aerospace) in 1999, and was a Senior Principal Systems Engineer in the Flight Management Systems department focussed on the user interface for pilot interaction. Prior to joining Rockwell Collins Kirschen worked at Acuity (formerly ichat) developing interactive user interfaces for live chat customer service agents. Now retired, there's now more time to share technical insights on her blog, develop useful scripts (Python, shell), and write Shortcuts. Kirschen is really motivated to share her experience to help fellow software practitioners develop better skills – be that in good design, implementation, or computer science fundamentals. Find her at FreeRangeCoder.com. Support:      Become a MacVoices Patron on Patreon     http://patreon.com/macvoices      Enjoy this episode? Make a one-time donation with PayPal Connect:      Web:     http://macvoices.com      Twitter:     http://www.twitter.com/chuckjoiner     http://www.twitter.com/macvoices      Mastodon:     https://mastodon.cloud/@chuckjoiner      Facebook:     http://www.facebook.com/chuck.joiner      MacVoices Page on Facebook:     http://www.facebook.com/macvoices/      MacVoices Group on Facebook:     http://www.facebook.com/groups/macvoice      LinkedIn:     https://www.linkedin.com/in/chuckjoiner/      Instagram:     https://www.instagram.com/chuckjoiner/ Subscribe:      Audio in iTunes     Video in iTunes      Subscribe manually via iTunes or any podcatcher:      Audio: http://www.macvoices.com/rss/macvoicesrss      Video: http://www.macvoices.com/rss/macvoicesvideorss

The 2025 MacVoices Holiday Gift Guide #6 kicks off with a lively mix of community banter and practical tech recommendations by Bart Busschots, Kirschen Seah, Mike Burke, and Chuck Joiner. Picks include a rechargeable wallet tracker, travel-friendly guided tour apps, sustainable coffee gear, foldable keyboards, a compact control surface, a powerful dictation tool, and pro-level video-switching software, each reflecting the interests of the panel members. (Part 1)  MacVoices is supported by CleanMyMac from MacPaw. Get Tidy Today! Try 7 days free and use my code MACVOICES20 for 20% off at clnmy.com/MACVOICES. Show Notes: Chapters: [0:00] Gift Guide introduction [0:32] Panel welcome and format overview [1:55] Meeting the guests and holiday camaraderie [4:42] First pick: Chipolo rechargeable wallet card [7:40] Second pick: GuideAlong offline narrated travel tours [11:27] Third pick: OXO Quick Brew coffee device [18:26] Fourth pick: ProtoArc foldable Bluetooth keyboard [21:05] Sponsor message: CleanMyMac holiday edition [23:00] Fifth pick: Stream Deck Neo compact controller [25:55] Sixth pick: MacWhisper dictation and transcription [30:20] Seventh pick: Thule bike rack engineering [34:20] Eighth pick: Switcher Studio iPad-based video switching [38:39] Closing and support information Links: Kirschen Seah Chipolo CARD - Rechargeable wallet tracker card, Bluetooth tracker, item locator, passport finder compatible with Apple Find My or Find Hub https://amzn.to/44YRvMT Elgato Stream Deck Neo – 8 Customizable Keys, 2 Touch Points https://amzn.to/4oLtNuN RoadID Apple Watch ID https://www.roadid.com/products/apple-sidekick-stainless-sport-id Optional IDProfile https://idprofile.com AirFly SE from 12South https://amzn.to/44PutrL Mike Burke: GuideAlong http://guidealong.com MacWhisper Pro https://apps.apple.com/us/app/whisper-transcription/id1668083311 "The Holding It Together" Bundle Gaffers Tape (2" x 30 Yards) Strong Hold, Easy to Rip, Residue-Free Professional Grade Floor Tape for Electrical Cords, Matte Finish Non Reflective, Weather Resistant https://amzn.to/48N5Xc1 BongoTies Original Bongo Ties A5-01 - 10 Pack ~ Professional cable ties made of natural rubber and bamboo https://amzn.to/44hxLUA Paracord Planet 550lb Paracord – 7 Strand Type III Tactical Parachute Cord https://amzn.to/3XMKbjA SOOOEC 100 Pack Reusable Zip Ties Assorted Sizes 6+8+10+12 Inch https://amzn.to/3XK5l1U Peak Design Tech Pouch https://amzn.to/3KB1Ho4 Bart Busschots: OXO Brew Rapid Brewer - Portable Coffee Maker https://amzn.to/3MssIKQ OXO Good Grips Silicone Reusable Bags – 4 Piece Lunch Set https://amzn.to/48Q72A2 Thule EuroWay G2 920 Bike Rack for car https://amzn.to/4aAUxKT Peak Design Roller Pro Carry-On https://amzn.to/3MybICR Lego Star Trek: U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-D  https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/star-trek-u-s-s-enterprise-ncc-1701-d-10356 Brick Popper - World's Fastest Separator Tool - Efficient Remover for Kids and Adults https://amzn.to/4ac82Rj Chuck Joiner: ProtoArc Foldable Bluetooth Keyboard, XK01 Folding Wireless Portable Keyboard with Numeric Keypad, Full-Size Travel Keyboards for iPad Tablet Smartphone Laptop https://amzn.to/4oMWgjU Switcher Studio https://www.switcherstudio.com OWC 2TB Express 1M2 40Gb/s Portable NVMe SSD USB4 (Thunderbolt Compatible/USB-C) Ultra Fast External SSD Drive https://amzn.to/4aFqFNv Lexar 2TB ES5 Magnetic External SSD, Up to 2000MB/s, Compatible w/MagSafe https://amzn.to/3XKz1Mo Guests: Mike Burke is a corporate technical trainer and automation enthusiast who specializes in creating structured systems that blend productivity techniques with practical technology solutions. Drawing on his background as a former high school science teacher, Mike brings a methodical, educational approach to complex technical concepts. Through his blog and YouTube channel, he shares insights on macOS automation technologies including Keyboard Maestro, AppleScript, and shell scripting. Mike is passionate about the concept of "digital mise en place" — creating thoughtfully organized digital environments that eliminate friction and support creative work. When not exploring new automation techniques, Mike can be found documenting his family's quest to visit all U.S. National Parks. His web site is TheMikeBurke.com.   By day, Bart Busschots is a Linux sysadmin, cyber security expert, and Perl programmer, as well  a keen amateur photographer when ever he gets the time. Bart hosts and produces the Let's Talk podcast series - a monthly Apple show that takes a big-picture look at the last month in Apple news, and a monthly photography show focusing on the art and craft of photography. Every second week Bart is the guest for the Chit Chat Across the Pond segment on Allison Sheridan's NosillaCast. You can get links to everything Bart gets up including a link to his photography and his personal blog. Kirschen Seah's background is Computer Sciences with interests in Software Engineering, User Experience, and Mac OS X / iPhone OS development. She started programming with BASIC in 1978 on an Apple ][ and have over 30 years of experience in the field. Kirschen worked on OPENSTEP (precursor to Mac OS X Cocoa) graphical prototyping applications initially when she joined Rockwell Collins (now Collins Aerospace) in 1999, and was a Senior Principal Systems Engineer in the Flight Management Systems department focussed on the user interface for pilot interaction. Prior to joining Rockwell Collins Kirschen worked at Acuity (formerly ichat) developing interactive user interfaces for live chat customer service agents. Now retired, there's now more time to share technical insights on her blog, develop useful scripts (Python, shell), and write Shortcuts. Kirschen is really motivated to share her experience to help fellow software practitioners develop better skills – be that in good design, implementation, or computer science fundamentals. Find her at FreeRangeCoder.com. Support:      Become a MacVoices Patron on Patreon      http://patreon.com/macvoices      Enjoy this episode? Make a one-time donation with PayPal Connect:      Web:      http://macvoices.com      Twitter:      http://www.twitter.com/chuckjoiner      http://www.twitter.com/macvoices      Mastodon:      https://mastodon.cloud/@chuckjoiner      Facebook:      http://www.facebook.com/chuck.joiner      MacVoices Page on Facebook:      http://www.facebook.com/macvoices/      MacVoices Group on Facebook:      http://www.facebook.com/groups/macvoice      LinkedIn:      https://www.linkedin.com/in/chuckjoiner/      Instagram:      https://www.instagram.com/chuckjoiner/ Subscribe:      Audio in iTunes      Video in iTunes      Subscribe manually via iTunes or any podcatcher:      Audio: http://www.macvoices.com/rss/macvoicesrss      Video: http://www.macvoices.com/rss/macvoicesvideorss

AI Assisted Coding: Building Reliable Software with Unreliable AI Tools In this special episode, Lada Kesseler shares her journey from AI skeptic to pioneer in AI-assisted development. She explores the spectrum from careful, test-driven development to quick AI-driven experimentation, revealing practical patterns, anti-patterns, and the critical role of judgment in modern software engineering. From Skeptic to Pioneer: Lada's AI Coding Journey "I got a new skill for free!"   Lada's transformation began when she discovered Anthropic's Claude Projects. Despite being skeptical about AI tools throughout 2023, she found herself learning Angular frontend development with AI—a technology she had no prior experience with. This breakthrough moment revealed something profound: AI could serve as an extension of her existing development skills, enabling her to acquire new capabilities without the traditional learning curve. The journey evolved through WindSurf and Claude Code, each tool expanding her understanding of what's possible when developers collaborate with AI. Understanding Vibecoding vs. AI-Assisted Development "AI assisted coding requires judgment, and it's never been as important to exercise judgment as now."   Lada introduces the concept of "vibecoding" as one extreme on a new dimension in software development—the spectrum from careful, test-driven development to quick, AI-driven experimentation. The key insight isn't that one approach is superior, but that developers must exercise judgment about which approach fits their context. She warns against careless AI coding for production systems: "You just talk to a computer, you say, do this, do that. You don't really care about code... For some systems, that's fine. When the problem arises is when you put the stuff to production and you really care about your customers. Please, please don't do that." This wisdom highlights that with great power comes great responsibility—AI accelerates both good and bad practices. The Answer Injection Anti-Pattern When Working With AI "You're limiting yourself without knowing, you're limiting yourself just by how you formulate your questions. And it's so hard to detect."   One of Lada's most important discoveries is the "answer injection" anti-pattern—when developers unconsciously constrain AI's responses by how they frame their questions. She experienced this firsthand when she asked an AI about implementing a feature using a specific approach, only to realize later that she had prevented the AI from suggesting better alternatives. The solution? Learning to ask questions more openly and reformulating problems to avoid self-imposed limitations. As she puts it, "Learn to ask the right way. This is one of the powers this year that's been kind of super cool." This skill of question formulation has become as critical as any technical capability.   Answer injection is when we—sometimes, unknowingly—ask a leading question that also injects a possible answer. It's an anti-pattern because LLM's have access to far more information than we do. Lada's advice: "just ask for anything you need", the LLM might have a possible answer for you. Never Trust a Single LLM: Multi-Agent Collaboration "Never trust the output of a single LLM. When you ask it to develop a feature, and then you ask the same thing to look at that feature, understand the code, find the issues with it—it suddenly finds improvements."   Lada shares her experiments with swarm programming—using multiple AI instances that collaborate and cross-check each other's work. She created specialized agents (architect, developer, tester) and even built systems using AppleScript and Tmux to make different AI instances communicate with each other. This approach revealed a powerful pattern: AI reviewing AI often catches issues that a single instance would miss. The practical takeaway is simple but profound—always have one AI instance review another's work, treating AI output with the same healthy skepticism you'd apply to any code review. Code Quality Matters MORE with AI "This thing is a monkey, and if you put it in a good codebase, like any developer, it's gonna replicate what it sees. So it behaves much better in the better codebase, so refactor!"   Lada emphasizes that code quality becomes even more critical when working with AI. Her systems "work silently" and "don't make a lot of noise, because they don't break"—a result of maintaining high standards even when AI makes rapid development tempting. She uses a memorable metaphor: AI is like a monkey that replicates what it sees. Put it in a clean, well-structured codebase, and it produces clean code. Put it in a mess, and it amplifies that mess. This insight transforms refactoring from a nice-to-have into a strategic necessity—good architecture and clean code directly improve AI's ability to contribute effectively. Managing Complexity: The Open Question "If I just let it do things, it'll just run itself to the wall at crazy speeds, because it's really good at running. So I have to be there managing complexity for it."   One of the most honest insights Lada shares is the current limitation of AI: complexity management. While AI excels at implementing features quickly, it struggles to manage the growing complexity of systems over time. Lada finds herself acting as the complexity manager, making architectural decisions and keeping the system maintainable while AI handles implementation details. She poses a critical question for the future: "Can it manage complexity? Can we teach it to manage complexity? I don't know the answer to that." This honest assessment reminds us that fundamental software engineering skills—architecture, refactoring, testing—remain as vital as ever. Context is Everything: Highway vs. Parking Lot "You need to be attuned to the environment. You can go faster or slow, and sometimes going slow is bad, because if you're on a highway, you're gonna get hurt."   Lada introduces a powerful metaphor for choosing development speed: highway versus parking lot. When learning or experimenting with non-critical systems, you can go fast, don't worry about perfection, and leverage AI's speed fully. But when building production systems where reliability matters, different rules apply. The key is matching your development approach to the risk level and context. She emphasizes safety nets: "In one project, we used AI, and we didn't pay attention to the code, as it wasn't important, because at any point, we could actually step back and refactor. We were not unsafe." This perspective helps developers make better judgment calls about when to accelerate and when to slow down. The Era of Discovery: We've Only Just Begun "We haven't even touched the possibilities of what is there out there right now. We're in the era of gentleman scientists—newbies can make big discoveries right now, because nobody knows what AI really is capable of."   Perhaps most exciting is Lada's perspective on where we stand in the AI-assisted development journey: we're at the very beginning. Even the creators of these tools are figuring things out as they go. This creates unprecedented opportunities for practitioners at all levels to experiment, discover patterns, and share learnings with the community. Lada has documented her discoveries in an interactive patterns and anti-patterns website, a Calgary Software Crafters presentation, and her Substack blog—contributing to the collective knowledge base that's being built in real-time. Resources For Further Study Video of Lada's talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LSK2bVf0Lc&t=8654s Lada's Patterns and Anti-patterns website: https://lexler.github.io/augmented-coding-patterns/ Lada's Substack https://lexler.substack.com/ AI Assisted Coding episode with Dawid Dahl AI Assisted Coding episode with Llewellyn Falco Claude Flow - orchestration platform   About Lada Kesseler   Lada Kesseler is a passionate software developer specializing in the design of scalable, robust software systems. With a focus on best development practices, she builds applications that are easy to maintain, adapt, and support. Lada combines technical expertise with a keen eye for clean architecture and sustainable code, driving innovation in modern software engineering.   Currently exploring how these values translate to AI-assisted development and figuring out what it takes to build reliable software with unreliable tools.   You can link with Lada Kesseler on LinkedIn.

Doug Adams of Doug's AppleScripts was a guest on the very first episode of MacVoices and he's back to help celebrate the 20th anniversary of the show. Doug looks at AppleScript's enduring legacy, automation on the Mac, and his inventive “bathroom music” project. Doug and Chuck discuss the evolution from CDs to streaming, Apple Music's scripting roots, and the changing ways people collect and experience music. Later, Chuck talks about the genesis of MacVoices, how his other shows (MacNotables, The MacJury, and MacVoicesTV) eventually merged into MacVoices, and answers some frequently asked questions.  Show Notes: Chapters: [0:00] Celebrating 20 years and welcoming Doug Adams [1:54] The early days of AppleScript and Mac automation [3:10] New automation tools vs. AppleScript's staying power [6:42] AppleScript inside Apple Music [9:02] Music app evolution and metadata management [13:43] Metadata obsession and smart playlists [15:35] Doug's “bathroom music” automation experiment [21:13] Home automation frustrations and AppleScript limits [28:09] Most popular Doug's Scripts and Apple Music quirks [31:11] Apple Music vs. local libraries [36:12] Collecting CDs in the streaming era [38:55] Generational shifts in music perception [42:10] How music has (and hasn't) evolved since the 1960s [45:25] Doug's “Next Track” pick: Lucinda Williams [48:29] A look back at 20 years of podcast history and evolution Links: MacVoices Legacy Channel on YouTube Guests: Doug Adams is an AppleScript developer and, since 2001, the proprietor of Doug's AppleScript. Doug is an audio and voice-over producer by trade and formerly worked in radio broadcasting as—at various times—disc jockey, announcer, production director, and program director. He is a musician, a life-long music lover, and all-around audio geek who also co-hosts The Next Track podcast with Kirk McElhearn. Support: Become a MacVoices Patron on Patreon      http://patreon.com/macvoices      Enjoy this episode? Make a one-time donation with PayPal Connect: Web:      http://macvoices.com Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/chuckjoiner      http://www.twitter.com/macvoices Mastodon:      https://mastodon.cloud/@chuckjoiner Facebook:      http://www.facebook.com/chuck.joiner MacVoices Page on Facebook:      http://www.facebook.com/macvoices/ MacVoices Group on Facebook:      http://www.facebook.com/groups/macvoice LinkedIn:      https://www.linkedin.com/in/chuckjoiner/ Instagram:      https://www.instagram.com/chuckjoiner/ Subscribe:      Audio in iTunes      Video in iTunes      Subscribe manually via iTunes or any podcatcher: Audio: http://www.macvoices.com/rss/macvoicesrss      Video: http://www.macvoices.com/rss/macvoicesvideorss

Doug Adams of Doug's AppleScripts was a guest on the very first episode of MacVoices and he's back to help celebrate the 20th anniversary of the show. Doug looks at AppleScript's enduring legacy, automation on the Mac, and his inventive “bathroom music” project. Doug and Chuck discuss the evolution from CDs to streaming, Apple Music's scripting roots, and the changing ways people collect and experience music. Later, Chuck talks about the genesis of MacVoices, how his other shows (MacNotables, The MacJury, and MacVoicesTV) eventually merged into MacVoices, and answers some frequently asked questions.  Show Notes: Chapters: [0:00] Celebrating 20 years and welcoming Doug Adams [1:54] The early days of AppleScript and Mac automation [3:10] New automation tools vs. AppleScript's staying power [6:42] AppleScript inside Apple Music [9:02] Music app evolution and metadata management [13:43] Metadata obsession and smart playlists [15:35] Doug's “bathroom music” automation experiment [21:13] Home automation frustrations and AppleScript limits [28:09] Most popular Doug's Scripts and Apple Music quirks [31:11] Apple Music vs. local libraries [36:12] Collecting CDs in the streaming era [38:55] Generational shifts in music perception [42:10] How music has (and hasn't) evolved since the 1960s [45:25] Doug's “Next Track” pick: Lucinda Williams [48:29] A look back at 20 years of podcast history and evolution Links: MacVoices Legacy Channel on YouTube Guests: Doug Adams is an AppleScript developer and, since 2001, the proprietor of Doug's AppleScript. Doug is an audio and voice-over producer by trade and formerly worked in radio broadcasting as—at various times—disc jockey, announcer, production director, and program director. He is a musician, a life-long music lover, and all-around audio geek who also co-hosts The Next Track podcast with Kirk McElhearn. Support:      Become a MacVoices Patron on Patreon      http://patreon.com/macvoices      Enjoy this episode? Make a one-time donation with PayPal Connect:      Web:      http://macvoices.com      Twitter:      http://www.twitter.com/chuckjoiner      http://www.twitter.com/macvoices      Mastodon:      https://mastodon.cloud/@chuckjoiner      Facebook:      http://www.facebook.com/chuck.joiner      MacVoices Page on Facebook:      http://www.facebook.com/macvoices/      MacVoices Group on Facebook:      http://www.facebook.com/groups/macvoice      LinkedIn:      https://www.linkedin.com/in/chuckjoiner/      Instagram:      https://www.instagram.com/chuckjoiner/ Subscribe:      Audio in iTunes      Video in iTunes      Subscribe manually via iTunes or any podcatcher:      Audio: http://www.macvoices.com/rss/macvoicesrss      Video: http://www.macvoices.com/rss/macvoicesvideorss

Joe Kissell returns to introduce Take Control of DEVONthink 4, a deep guide to the powerful information management tool. He outlines new features like versioning, audit-proof databases, and enhanced PDF navigation, while also explaining the app's new hybrid licensing model. The discussion highlights DEVONthink's versatility for everything from paperless offices to academic research. (Part 1) Today's edition of MacVoices is supported by MacVoices Live!, our weekly live panel discussion of what is going in the Apple space as well as the larger tech world, and how it is impacting you. Join us live at YouTube.com/MacVoicesTV at 8 PM Eastern 5 PM Pacific, or whatever time that is wherever you are and participate in the chat, or catch the edited and segmented versions of the show on the regular MacVoices channels and feeds. Show Notes: Chapters: 00:08 Introduction to DEVONthink 4 02:52 The Power of DEVONthink 08:17 Evolution of Take Control Books 10:46 Task-Oriented Approach to Learning 14:46 New Features in DEVONthink 4 17:41 Licensing Model Changes 20:18 Editions and Pricing Options 22:52 User-Friendly Subscription Model 23:16 Key New Features Overview 30:00 Enhanced PDF Features Links: Guests: Joe Kissell is the publisher of Take Control ebooks, as well as the author of over 60 books on a wide variety of tech topics. Keep up with him if you can on his personal site, JoeKissell.com, and on Twitter. Support:      Become a MacVoices Patron on Patreon      http://patreon.com/macvoices      Enjoy this episode? Make a one-time donation with PayPal Connect:      Web:      http://macvoices.com      Twitter:      http://www.twitter.com/chuckjoiner      http://www.twitter.com/macvoices      Mastodon:      https://mastodon.cloud/@chuckjoiner      Facebook:      http://www.facebook.com/chuck.joiner      MacVoices Page on Facebook:      http://www.facebook.com/macvoices/      MacVoices Group on Facebook:      http://www.facebook.com/groups/macvoice      LinkedIn:      https://www.linkedin.com/in/chuckjoiner/      Instagram:      https://www.instagram.com/chuckjoiner/ Subscribe:      Audio in iTunes      Video in iTunes      Subscribe manually via iTunes or any podcatcher:      Audio: http://www.macvoices.com/rss/macvoicesrss      Video: http://www.macvoices.com/rss/macvoicesvideorss

The Road to Macstock Conference and Expo takes us to first-time speaker Mike Burke, who discusses his presentation on “digital mise en place”—a method for organizing digital workflows before beginning creative tasks. Inspired by both culinary prep and The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande, Mike outlines how he will share thoughts on structured folder systems and automation tools like Keyboard Maestro to improve productivity and aid future collaboration.  Show Notes: Chapters: 00:07 Introduction to MacStock01:50 Mike's Presentation on Digital Mise en Place08:08 The Importance of Organization11:28 Benefits of Digital vs. Physical Organization16:05 Becoming a MacStock Speaker19:14 Connecting with Mike Burke Links: Macstock Conference and Expo Save $50 with the Mike's discount code: mikeburke50 Save $50 with Chuck's discount code: macvoices50 Guests: Mike Burke is a corporate technical trainer and automation enthusiast who specializes in creating structured systems that blend productivity techniques with practical technology solutions. Drawing on his background as a former high school science teacher, Mike brings a methodical, educational approach to complex technical concepts. Through his blog and YouTube channel, he shares insights on macOS automation technologies including Keyboard Maestro, AppleScript, and shell scripting. Mike is passionate about the concept of “digital mise en place” — creating thoughtfully organized digital environments that eliminate friction and support creative work. When not exploring new automation techniques, Mike can be found documenting his family's quest to visit all U.S. National Parks. His workshop at MacStock draws on years of experience bridging educational and corporate environments to create sustainable, maintainable digital workflows. Connect with him through his web site, TheMikeBurke.com. Support:      Become a MacVoices Patron on Patreon     http://patreon.com/macvoices      Enjoy this episode? Make a one-time donation with PayPal Connect:      Web:     http://macvoices.com      Twitter:     http://www.twitter.com/chuckjoiner     http://www.twitter.com/macvoices      Mastodon:     https://mastodon.cloud/@chuckjoiner      Facebook:     http://www.facebook.com/chuck.joiner      MacVoices Page on Facebook:     http://www.facebook.com/macvoices/      MacVoices Group on Facebook:     http://www.facebook.com/groups/macvoice      LinkedIn:     https://www.linkedin.com/in/chuckjoiner/      Instagram:     https://www.instagram.com/chuckjoiner/ Subscribe:      Audio in iTunes     Video in iTunes      Subscribe manually via iTunes or any podcatcher:      Audio: http://www.macvoices.com/rss/macvoicesrss      Video: http://www.macvoices.com/rss/macvoicesvideorss

The Road to Macstock Conference and Expo takes us to first-time speaker Mike Burke, who discusses his presentation on “digital mise en place”—a method for organizing digital workflows before beginning creative tasks. Inspired by both culinary prep and The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande, Mike outlines how he will share thoughts on structured folder systems and automation tools like Keyboard Maestro to improve productivity and aid future collaboration.  Show Notes: Chapters: 00:07 Introduction to MacStock 01:50 Mike's Presentation on Digital Mise en Place 08:08 The Importance of Organization 11:28 Benefits of Digital vs. Physical Organization 16:05 Becoming a MacStock Speaker 19:14 Connecting with Mike Burke Links: Macstock Conference and Expo Save $50 with the Mike's discount code: mikeburke50 Save $50 with Chuck's discount code: macvoices50 Guests: Mike Burke is a corporate technical trainer and automation enthusiast who specializes in creating structured systems that blend productivity techniques with practical technology solutions. Drawing on his background as a former high school science teacher, Mike brings a methodical, educational approach to complex technical concepts. Through his blog and YouTube channel, he shares insights on macOS automation technologies including Keyboard Maestro, AppleScript, and shell scripting. Mike is passionate about the concept of “digital mise en place” — creating thoughtfully organized digital environments that eliminate friction and support creative work. When not exploring new automation techniques, Mike can be found documenting his family's quest to visit all U.S. National Parks. His workshop at MacStock draws on years of experience bridging educational and corporate environments to create sustainable, maintainable digital workflows. Connect with him through his web site, TheMikeBurke.com. Support:      Become a MacVoices Patron on Patreon      http://patreon.com/macvoices      Enjoy this episode? Make a one-time donation with PayPal Connect:      Web:      http://macvoices.com      Twitter:      http://www.twitter.com/chuckjoiner      http://www.twitter.com/macvoices      Mastodon:      https://mastodon.cloud/@chuckjoiner      Facebook:      http://www.facebook.com/chuck.joiner      MacVoices Page on Facebook:      http://www.facebook.com/macvoices/      MacVoices Group on Facebook:      http://www.facebook.com/groups/macvoice      LinkedIn:      https://www.linkedin.com/in/chuckjoiner/      Instagram:      https://www.instagram.com/chuckjoiner/ Subscribe:      Audio in iTunes      Video in iTunes      Subscribe manually via iTunes or any podcatcher:      Audio: http://www.macvoices.com/rss/macvoicesrss      Video: http://www.macvoices.com/rss/macvoicesvideorss

Arkadiusz Świętnicki przedstawia możliwości aplikacji Anybox, służącej do gromadzenia i zarządzania zakładkami w systemach Apple. Anybox to menedżer zakładek dostępny na iPhone, iPad i Mac, oferujący funkcje takie jak szybkie wyszukiwanie, pływający pasek zakładek na pulpicie oraz możliwość kategoryzowania zakładek za pomocą zagnieżdżonych tagów i folderów. Aplikacja umożliwia również tworzenie inteligentnych list do automatycznego organizowania zakładek na podstawie atrybutów, takich jak URL czy data dodania. Dodatkowo, Anybox obsługuje integrację z Siri Shortcuts i Apple Script, co pozwala na automatyzację wielu zadań. Dostępny mechanizm Synchronizacji zapewnia dostęp do zakładek na wszystkich urządzeniach Apple. Audycja dostępna jest również w wygenerowanej automatycznie wersji tekstowej

Hey folks, Alex here

Another brand new stop on The Road to Macstock Conference and Expo is a conversation with Michael D.J. Eisenberg, The Tech-Savvy Lawyer. Michael discusses about how he became a dedicated Mac user, and how his talk will on insights into using artificial intelligence for automation tools like Hazel, AppleScript, TextExpander, and Microsoft Word. He also offers a tip or two from another passion: coffee.  Visit Macstock Conference and Expo and use Michael's discount code, TECHSAVVYLAWYER, or the MacVoices discount code MACVOICES to save $30 on your registration fee. Today's edition of MacVoices is supported by MacVoices Live!, our weekly live panel discussion of what is going in the Apple space as well as the larger tech world, and how it is impacting you. Join us live at YouTube.com/MacVoicesTV at 8 PM Eastern 5 PM Pacific, or whatever time that is wherever you are and participate in the chat, or catch the edited and segmented versions of the show on the regular MacVoices channels and feeds. Chapters: 00:00 Introduction to MacVoices with Michael D.J. Eisenberg00:40 Meeting Michael D.J. Eisenberg on the Road to Macstock06:27 Exploring Simple Programming and Automation with Hazel and Scripts10:55 Understanding AI and the Imperfections in Automation12:57 Basic Functions and Tools for Enhancing Automation22:20 Special Offerings and Coffee Connoisseur Insights24:51 Inviting Audience to Join Macstock with Exclusive Codes Guests: Michael D.J. Eisenberg is a solo practitioner based in Washington, DC, advocating for veterans, military members, and their families for nearly two decades. Michael has been helping lawyers and law offices utilize technology tools to promote efficiency and effectiveness for decades. He created the blog and podcast The Tech-Savvy Lawyer in 2019 to share that information and more with the world. Support:      Become a MacVoices Patron on Patreon     http://patreon.com/macvoices      Enjoy this episode? Make a one-time donation with PayPal Connect:      Web:     http://macvoices.com      Twitter:     http://www.twitter.com/chuckjoiner     http://www.twitter.com/macvoices      Mastodon:     https://mastodon.cloud/@chuckjoiner      Facebook:     http://www.facebook.com/chuck.joiner      MacVoices Page on Facebook:     http://www.facebook.com/macvoices/      MacVoices Group on Facebook:     http://www.facebook.com/groups/macvoice      LinkedIn:     https://www.linkedin.com/in/chuckjoiner/      Instagram:     https://www.instagram.com/chuckjoiner/ Subscribe:      Audio in iTunes     Video in iTunes      Subscribe manually via iTunes or any podcatcher:      Audio: http://www.macvoices.com/rss/macvoicesrss      Video: http://www.macvoices.com/rss/macvoicesvideorss

Another brand new stop on The Road to Macstock Conference and Expo is a conversation with Michael D.J. Eisenberg, The Tech-Savvy Lawyer. Michael discusses about how he became a dedicated Mac user, and how his talk will on insights into using artificial intelligence for automation tools like Hazel, AppleScript, TextExpander, and Microsoft Word. He also offers a tip or two from another passion: coffee.  Visit Macstock Conference and Expo and use Michael's discount code, TECHSAVVYLAWYER, or the MacVoices discount code MACVOICES to save $30 on your registration fee. Today's edition of MacVoices is supported by MacVoices Live!, our weekly live panel discussion of what is going in the Apple space as well as the larger tech world, and how it is impacting you. Join us live at YouTube.com/MacVoicesTV at 8 PM Eastern 5 PM Pacific, or whatever time that is wherever you are and participate in the chat, or catch the edited and segmented versions of the show on the regular MacVoices channels and feeds. Chapters: 00:00 Introduction to MacVoices with Michael D.J. Eisenberg00:40 Meeting Michael D.J. Eisenberg on the Road to Macstock06:27 Exploring Simple Programming and Automation with Hazel and Scripts10:55 Understanding AI and the Imperfections in Automation12:57 Basic Functions and Tools for Enhancing Automation22:20 Special Offerings and Coffee Connoisseur Insights24:51 Inviting Audience to Join Macstock with Exclusive Codes Guests: Michael D.J. Eisenberg is a solo practitioner based in Washington, DC, advocating for veterans, military members, and their families for nearly two decades. Michael has been helping lawyers and law offices utilize technology tools to promote efficiency and effectiveness for decades. He created the blog and podcast The Tech-Savvy Lawyer in 2019 to share that information and more with the world. Support:      Become a MacVoices Patron on Patreon     http://patreon.com/macvoices      Enjoy this episode? Make a one-time donation with PayPal Connect:      Web:     http://macvoices.com      Twitter:     http://www.twitter.com/chuckjoiner     http://www.twitter.com/macvoices      Mastodon:     https://mastodon.cloud/@chuckjoiner      Facebook:     http://www.facebook.com/chuck.joiner      MacVoices Page on Facebook:     http://www.facebook.com/macvoices/      MacVoices Group on Facebook:     http://www.facebook.com/groups/macvoice      LinkedIn:     https://www.linkedin.com/in/chuckjoiner/      Instagram:     https://www.instagram.com/chuckjoiner/ Subscribe:      Audio in iTunes     Video in iTunes      Subscribe manually via iTunes or any podcatcher:      Audio: http://www.macvoices.com/rss/macvoicesrss      Video: http://www.macvoices.com/rss/macvoicesvideorss

Another brand new stop on The Road to Macstock Conference and Expo is a conversation with Michael D.J. Eisenberg, The Tech-Savvy Lawyer. Michael discusses about how he became a dedicated Mac user, and how his talk will on insights into using artificial intelligence for automation tools like Hazel, AppleScript, TextExpander, and Microsoft Word. He also offers a tip or two from another passion: coffee.  Visit Macstock Conference and Expo and use Michael's discount code, TECHSAVVYLAWYER, or the MacVoices discount code MACVOICES to save $30 on your registration fee. Today's edition of MacVoices is supported by MacVoices Live!, our weekly live panel discussion of what is going in the Apple space as well as the larger tech world, and how it is impacting you. Join us live at YouTube.com/MacVoicesTV at 8 PM Eastern 5 PM Pacific, or whatever time that is wherever you are and participate in the chat, or catch the edited and segmented versions of the show on the regular MacVoices channels and feeds. Chapters: 00:00 Introduction to MacVoices with Michael D.J. Eisenberg 00:40 Meeting Michael D.J. Eisenberg on the Road to Macstock 06:27 Exploring Simple Programming and Automation with Hazel and Scripts 10:55 Understanding AI and the Imperfections in Automation 12:57 Basic Functions and Tools for Enhancing Automation 22:20 Special Offerings and Coffee Connoisseur Insights 24:51 Inviting Audience to Join Macstock with Exclusive Codes Guests: Michael D.J. Eisenberg is a solo practitioner based in Washington, DC, advocating for veterans, military members, and their families for nearly two decades. Michael has been helping lawyers and law offices utilize technology tools to promote efficiency and effectiveness for decades. He created the blog and podcast The Tech-Savvy Lawyer in 2019 to share that information and more with the world. Support:      Become a MacVoices Patron on Patreon      http://patreon.com/macvoices      Enjoy this episode? Make a one-time donation with PayPal Connect:      Web:      http://macvoices.com      Twitter:      http://www.twitter.com/chuckjoiner      http://www.twitter.com/macvoices      Mastodon:      https://mastodon.cloud/@chuckjoiner      Facebook:      http://www.facebook.com/chuck.joiner      MacVoices Page on Facebook:      http://www.facebook.com/macvoices/      MacVoices Group on Facebook:      http://www.facebook.com/groups/macvoice      LinkedIn:      https://www.linkedin.com/in/chuckjoiner/      Instagram:      https://www.instagram.com/chuckjoiner/ Subscribe:      Audio in iTunes      Video in iTunes      Subscribe manually via iTunes or any podcatcher:      Audio: http://www.macvoices.com/rss/macvoicesrss      Video: http://www.macvoices.com/rss/macvoicesvideorss

Microsoft recalls Recall. An Arc browser impostor contains malware. We'll tell you which older devices will be able to run Apple's newest operating systems, and we discuss the security and privacy improvements Apple has announced for its upcoming OS releases. Show Notes: Microsoft pulls release preview build of Windows 11 24H2 after Recall controversy Intego discovers fake Arc browser with unique AppleScript malware component A Bug Allowed Kids to Visit X-Rated Sites. Apple Took Three Years to Fix It. Top 5 security and privacy features of macOS Sequoia, iOS 18, and iPadOS 18 Apple's Forthcoming AI Operating Systems – Intego Mac Podcast Episode 348 Apple Intelligence: Why most users won't get it Apple still leaving critical vulnerabilities unpatched in macOS Sonoma When does an old iPhone become unsafe to use? When does an old Mac become unsafe to use? Behind OS X's modern face lies an aging collection of Unix tools Intego Mac Premium Bundle X9 is the ultimate protection and utility suite for your Mac. Download a free trial now at intego.com, and use this link for a special discount when you're ready to buy.

On this episode of For Mac Eyes Only: Mike and Eric cover the basics of automating tasks on the Mac with an overview of Shortcuts, Automator, Keyboard Maestro, and AppleScript as well as a couple “helper apps” to make Shortcuts more powerful. Eric steps us through a real-world example of a time-saving workflow created in Shortcuts. Mike's Essential App pick this week: Free Ruler.

Shortcuts aren't just a little Applescript goodness that can be used to make droplets. Although you could do that. Shortcuts can be used to perform fairly complex atomic operations. In this session we'll look at some of the work Damian Cavanagh has posted to his Github, and the crazy lengths he went to in order to have Shortcuts that work with device management options. Hosts: Tom Bridge - @tbridge@theinternet.social Marcus Ransom - @marcusransom Guests: Damian Cavanagh - LinkedIn Links: ShortcutsForJamfPro Canvas podcast - Workflow Series Automators podcast - Shortcuts utility apps Actions app GitHub repo Sponsors: Kandji Kolide Watchman Monitoring If you're interested in sponsoring the Mac Admins Podcast, please email podcast@macadmins.org for more information. Get the latest about the Mac Admins Podcast, follow us on Twitter! We're @MacAdmPodcast! The Mac Admins Podcast has launched a Patreon Campaign! Our named patrons this month include Weldon Dodd, Damien Barrett, Justin Holt, Chad Swarthout, William Smith, Stephen Weinstein, Seb Nash, Dan McLaughlin, Joe Sfarra, Nate Cinal, Jon Brown, Dan Barker, Tim Perfitt, Ashley MacKinlay, Tobias Linder Philippe Daoust, AJ Potrebka, Adam Burg, & Hamlin Krewson  

Topics: -The Andy Esposito story from an ACEs conference event long ago is the gift that keeps on giving. -Jerry gives a shout out to our friends at TidBITS Content Network. -Dave Hamilton of Mac Geek Gab mentioned blazing fast ThunderBolt cables from Leirui. Available on Amazon. -Joe has some personal experience with Nudge and AppleScript automation from macsudo.com. -Joe wants to do some follow up on all the automations within Addigy…when he has time. -Sam made a mistake deploying Nudge and found out the result the hard way. -The power of beta testers is crucial. A small group of tech savvy employees that can vet your deployments. -Sam has some experience with UniFi's Cloud Controller and shares some of what he has learned. -Ryan Grimes gave Joe some tips on keeping tabs on UniFi alerts using Uptime Robot. -LTE backup ISP options are critical when another ISP isn't available for a business.

You've got some juicy tidbits from Mac Geek Gab 1004 with Pilot Pete and Dave Hamilton. Ready? Raise your watch, say “five minutes,” and boom – timer set. Jazz up your Notebook with emojis in the folder names, create a dedicated email address for newsletters, and if you're into privacy, […]

Hey dear ThursdAI friends, as always I'm very excited to bring you this edition of ThursdAI, September 21st, which is packed full of goodness updates, great conversations with experts, breaking AI news and not 1 but 2 interviewsThursdAI - hey, psst, if you got here from X, dont' worry, I don't spam, but def. subscribe, you'll be the coolest most up to date AI person you know!TL;DR of all topics covered* AI Art & Diffusion*

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit sub.thursdai.newsHey! Welcome to this special ThursdAI Sunday episode. Today I'm excited to share my interview with Killian Lucas, the creator of Open Interpreter - an incredible new open source project that lets you run code via AI models like GPT-4 or local models like Llama on your own machine. Just a quick note, that while this episode is provided for free, premium subscribers enjoy the full write up including my examples of using Open Interpreter, the complete (manually edited) transcript and a video form of the pod for easier viewing, search, highlights and more. Here's a trailer of that in case you consider subscribingIf you haven't caught up with GPT-4 Code Interpreter yet (now renamed to Advanced Data Analytics), I joined and when it first launched and we had a deep dive about it on and even at the day of the release, we were already noticing a major restricting factor, Code Interpreter is amazing, but doesn't have internet access, and can't install new packages, or use new tools. An additional thing we immediately noticed was, the surface area of “what it can do” is vast, given it can write arbitrary code per request, it was very interesting to hear what other folks are using it for for inspiration, and “imagination unlock”.I started a hashtag called #codeinterpreterCan and have since documented many interesting use cases, like comitting to git, running a vector DB, convert audio & video to different formats, plot wind rose diagrams, run whisper and so much more. I personally have all but switched to Code Interpreter (ADA) as my main chatGPT tab, and it's currently the reason I'm still paying the 20 bucks! Enter, Open interpreterJust a week after open sourcing Open Interpreter, it already has over 20,000 stars on GitHub and a huge following. You can follow Killian on Twitter and check out the Open Interpreter GitHub repo to learn more. Installing is as easy as pip install open-interpreter. (but do make sure to install and run it inside a venv or a conda env, trust me!) And then, you just.. ask for stuff! (and sometimes ask again as you'll see in the below usage video)Specifically, highlighted in the incredible launch video, if you're using a mac, Code Interpreter can write and run AppleScript, which can run and control most of the native apps and settings on your mac. Here's a quick example I recorded while writing this post up, where I ask Open Interpreter to switch system to Dark mode, then I use it to actually help me extract all the chapters for this interview and cut a trailer together!

We talk about the LUI ( Linguistic User Interface), Steve's 3D printed house, using ChatGPT to automate your day with AppleScript, updates on LK99, Cold Fusion and Worldcoin, Robot Taxis, Amara's Law, De-Globalisation and ask the question - is stealing things the best business plan of all time?

Today on the show, Steven and Shaun present the first Double Tap Express - your weekly round-up of the week that was on Double Tap. We look back at Google I/O and hear thoughts from Double Tap TV's Marc Aflalo on the event, plus we get an exclusive hands-on review of the Pixel 7A smartphone that Google just announced. Watch Marc's review of the Pixel 7A on YouTube here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=1scXkudG61g&feature=share Google I/O 2023 is a wrap; here's a list of everything announced TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/10/heres-everything-google-has-announced-at-i-o-so-far/ We also discuss the surprising news that Apple is bringing their much loved Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro apps to iPad from May 23rd. Read more about the Final Cut and Logic Pro apps coming soon to iPad here: https://www.macrumors.com/2023/05/09/apple-announces-final-cut-pro-and-logic-pro-for-ipad/ Steven also presented his demo of a new AppleScript submitted to the AppleVis forum online that can help speed up Voiceover. Read more on how to access the AppleScript and try it out yourself: https://www.ap-plevis.com/forum/macos-mac-apps/how-hopefully-speed-voiceover-launch-time-perfor-mance-mac-no-terminal-required Plus, Robin Christopherson joins us to talk about how he has benefited from using an Audiogram imported into the Health app of his iPhone to hear calls, podcasts and more, better. Get in touch with the Double Tappers and join the conversation: Email: feedback@doubletaponair.com Call: 1-877-803-4567 (Canada and USA) / 0204 571 3354 (UK) Twitter: @BlindGuyTech / @ShaunShed / @DoubleTapOnAir Mastodon: @DoubleTap YouTube: DoubleTapOnAir

Thank you to our VIP sponsors! Topics: -Archiving/Deleting in Apple Mail is inconsistent. -Jerry has been seeing issues on multiple computers when upgrading from macOS Ventura 13.2.1 to 13.3.1. Reinstalling the OS still creates data issues. -“That's a lot of nanas to deal with”. -Pro tip about using the Option key when clicking About This Mac to reveal System Information. -Thanks to Guillaume Gete for 80 Shades of the Option key -Joe talks about his use of Nudge as well as an AppleScript automation with the help of sudoade. -We discuss end user perception as Sam talks about a story upgrading Wi-Fi for a new customer. -Jerry mentions The Hawthorne Effect, which discusses how people increase efficiency when they feel like they are being watched. -Joe had been recommending a mail server upgrade to a client until finally one day, their provider went down. They still did not learn their lesson. -We get into how to quote email migration projects and the economy of scale.

In this episode, Rosemary and David are joined by creator of PCalc, Dice and About (by PCalc), James Thomson. They talk about James' first implementations of automation in his apps, as well as what automations he's using now, and AppleScript vs Shortcuts.

Bart continues his miniseries on shell scripting by teaching us conditionals in the shell. In order to explain why conditionals are a bit odd in shell scripting, Bart first walks us through how it was originally done and then shows us the evolution to a much better method. It's still weird, and many things are opposite of what you'd expect (like 4 is actually > 10), but he gets us there in the end. I was most excited to finally learn what `fi` means, which shows up in shell scripting and I'd seen before in AppleScript. You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net. Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript: CCATP_2023_02_18

Bart continues his miniseries on shell scripting by teaching us conditionals in the shell. In order to explain why conditionals are a bit odd in shell scripting, Bart first walks us through how it was originally done and then shows us the evolution to a much better method. It's still weird, and many things are opposite of what you'd expect (like 4 is actually > 10), but he gets us there in the end. I was most excited to finally learn what `fi` means, which shows up in shell scripting and I'd seen before in AppleScript. You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net. Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript: CCATP_2023_02_18

Topics: -On this episode, we welcome Ross Matsuda - Apple Systems Administrator from Ntiva. -Ross is also the creator of sudoade -Ross majored in theatrical direction with a minor in graphic design. -He spent 7 years as an Apple Genius and also with Apple corporate. -We discuss the necessity of support with Apple's products. -We get into GUI scripting with AppleScript on Ross's site, sudoade. He developed a way to integrate automation with Addigy to only see the minor updates available. -Initially using Nudge, he decided to develop a method that worked best for  his users. -Joe has seen a much higher level of software update compliance since using Nudge and Ross's solution. -PSA - get your Mac computers at least to 12.6.3 to avoid unexpected problems when performing updates. -Joe & Ross talk about simpler ways of presenting information and designing for the user experience.

In questa puntata Roberto e Filippo faranno un approfondimento sul programma di posta elettronica montato sui dispositivi Apple: Mail. Puntate precedenti sulle email e come gestirle 29: Email (Introduzione): il problema delle email e come cercare di risolverlo (https://a2podcast.fireside.fm/29) 32: Email (parte II): gli aspetti tecnici (https://a2podcast.fireside.fm/32) Manuali Pagina per tutto (https://support.apple.com/it-it/mail) Mac (https://support.apple.com/it-it/guide/mail/welcome/mac) Dispositivi iOS e iPadOS (https://support.apple.com/it-it/ht201419) iCloud (https://support.apple.com/it-it/ht203528) Mail.app Di serie su tutti i Mac, iPhone ed iPad Da un po' di tempo ne esiste anche una versione per iCloud.com Utilizzare Mail di iCloud su iCloud.com (https://support.apple.com/it-it/guide/icloud/mm6b1a17e3/icloud) L'interfaccia web molto simile all'app La mail di Apple @iCloud.com Legata allo spazio iCloud Filippo che ha i 2 Tb per esempio può archiviare email fino a sulla soglia Cercare le email in Mail sul Mac (https://support.apple.com/it-it/guide/mail/mlhlp1003/15.0/mac/13.0) Cartelle smart Novità iOS e iPadOS 16 Annulla invio: Se hai commesso un errore o hai inviato per sbaglio una mail, puoi annullarne l'invio con Annulla invio. Programma un'email Puoi scegliere Send later (Invia in un secondo momento) per fare inviare un'email a Mail a un orario predefinito. Ricordamelo: Fatti ricordare da Mail di un'email tra un'ora, stasera, domani o in qualsiasi altro momento. macOS Ventura Le novità di Mail sul Mac (https://support.apple.com/it-it/guide/mail/cpmlwn/mac) Automazioni Situazione differente tra macOS e iOS / iPadOS Su macOS ci sono altri strumenti più potenti per automatizzare Mail Su iOS / iPadOS Solo Comandi Rapidi Comandi Rapidi e Mail iOS / iPadOS macOS (https://support.apple.com/it-it/guide/shortcuts-mac/welcome/mac) AppleScript (https://help.apple.com/applescript/mac/10.9/) Automator (https://support.apple.com/it-it/guide/automator/welcome/mac) Le Regole / Automazione di Mail su macOS Come funziona ? Condizioni Azioni La funzione più potente è esegui AppleScript … ma richiede poi certe competenze per far funzionare il tutto Link a post su Stackoverflow dopo si spiega come creare un AppleScript che funzioni con le regole di Mail (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27952360/applescript-rules-in-mail) Possibilità di regole su iCloud ma meno incisive e solo per dominio iCloud Utilizzo delle regole di filtro in Apple Mail (https://clean.email/create-email-rules/apple-mail-rules) Interessante articolo con varie regole (https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/apple-mail-rules/): Identifica le e-mail di persone che non conosci Elimina spam persistente e e-mail inoltrate Usa i nomi di dominio per catturare e-mail importanti Raccogli e-mail con PDF Plugin estensioni SpamVerse (https://c-command.com/spamsieve/) Cifratura email Free-GPGMail (https://github.com/Free-GPGMail/Free-GPGMail) GPG Suite a pagamento (https://gpgtools.org/gpgmail/index.html) Come usare PGP su Mac (https://proprivacy.com/email/guides/pgp-mac) Articolo con vari “vecchi” plugin I miei nove plug-in indispensabili per Apple Mail (https://www.macworld.com/article/223159/my-nine-must-have-plug-ins-for-apple-mail.html) Impossibilità di scrivere email in markdown MA c'è un trucco Scrivere in markdown Convertire MD in Rich Text con un comando rapido Copia incollare il testo all'interno di Mail MailMate (https://freron.com) Come potete sostenerci Se vuoi supportare il podcast ti chiediamo con il cuore di fare una recensione su Apple Podcast. Se volete sapere come fare una recensione trovi qui (https://www.avvocati-e-mac.it/podcast/itunes). Potete anche scriverci a scrivi.a

Topics: -Joe recommends https://photosautomation.com for a multitude of automations, including voice control. -He also created a series of AppleScript automator workflows to manage multiple Photos libraries. -Managing multiple display screensavers - http://www.cs.uni-bremen.de/~zach/software/ArtSaver/index.html -A great tip is the MonitorControl project to manage your external displays. Sam is very grateful. -An external display that Joe likes is the DELL U2720Q which works over USB-C as well as an Apple TV screen on a second input using HDMI, with HomePod mini for audio. -One last item is a great keyboard customizer for macOS: Karabiner-Elements. Joe used it to remap his F6 key. -Sam recommends Miro to create visual collaboration tools. He used it to create a powerful presentation for a client. -TextSniper is Jerry's go-to tool to capture text. It's incredibly useful and simpler than using the built in functionality of the OS to capture text. -Sam had a troubling issue with a Synology connected to Active Directory. DNS servers were changed without alerting their team and the Synology could no longer display file share data since all permissions were tied to Active Directory. -One of Joe's clients calls him AFTER making changes to their VOiP system and needing emergency support. -Joe received good feedback from Sam and others about using an M2 in clamshell mode. He can now make a more informed decision for a client. -When setting up a new iPhone, Joe uses John Gruber's tip to use the device to device transfer instead of iCloud backup. An important factor for this is porting over credentials stored in Keychain.

Andrew and Jason are joined by special guest Scotty J, Shortcuts specialist and co-host of the podcast Nested Folders! He shares his tech experience and boosts representation of the Northern Hemisphere! Meanwhile, Martin interrupts the conversation from afar with a weird collection of stories... Missing Man Formation 00:00:00 Two years of this show!?

How do you manage recurring projects? In this episode, Morten and Lars will walk you through: - How Areas of Focus might be mixed up with recurring projects - How you go about building checklists for recurring projects - How they both use checklists for recurring projects in their systems, Apple Notes/Omnifocus and Todoist/OneNote ..and much more! You may want to watch this one (YouTube links below) as Morten shows his approach. Links: - GTD Summer Camp 2022: www.GTDSummerCamp.com - Our episode on Natural Planning Model®: https://soundcloud.com/gtdnordic/the-natural-planning-model-from-gtd - Tim Urban: Inside the mind of a master procrastinator (TED): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arj7oStGLkU - Curt Clifton's Apple Script that Morten uses as ""Populate template placeholders"": http://curtclifton.net/poptemp - Morten/Lars' channels on YouTube, if you want to watch the episodes: - Morten: https://www.youtube.com/c/MortenRøvikGTD - Lars: https://www.youtube.com/c/LarsRothschildHenriksen We really hope that this episode helps you on your GTD journey and, as always: If you have any feedback we'd love to hear from you via podcast@gtdnordic.dk, you can learn more about GTD in the Nordics at GTDnordic.com and find cool GTD gear at GTDshop.com.

In this episode, Rosemary and David are joined by Daniel Jalkut, the man in the red sweater behind FastScripts, MarsEdit, and the Core Intuition podcast. Together they ponder the future of AppleScript, the restaurant at the end of the universe, and just how fast is a script?

In this episode, Rosemary and David are joined by Daniel Jalkut, the man in the red sweater behind FastScripts, MarsEdit, and the Core Intuition podcast. Together they ponder the future of AppleScript, the restaurant at the end of the universe, and just how fast is a script?

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: 100 Tips for a Better Life, published by Ideopunk on LessWrong. Write a Review (Cross-posted from my blog) The other day I made an advice thread based on Jacobian's from last year! If you know a source for one of these, shout and I'll edit it in. Possessions 1. If you want to find out about people's opinions on a product, google reddit. You'll get real people arguing, as compared to the SEO'd Google results. 2. Some banks charge you $20 a month for an account, others charge you 0. If you're with one of the former, have a good explanation for what those $20 are buying. 3. Things you use for a significant fraction of your life (bed: 1/3rd, office-chair: 1/4th) are worth investing in. 4. “Where is the good knife?” If you're looking for your good X, you have bad Xs. Throw those out. 5. If your work is done on a computer, get a second monitor. Less time navigating between windows means more time for thinking. 6. Establish clear rules about when to throw out old junk. Once clear rules are established, junk will probably cease to be a problem. This is because any rule would be superior to our implicit rules (“keep this broken stereo for five years in case I learn how to fix it”). 7. Don't buy CDs for people. They have Spotify. Buy them merch from a band they like instead. It's more personal and the band gets more money. 8. When buying things, time and money trade-off against each other. If you're low on money, take more time to find deals. If you're low on time, stop looking for great deals and just buy things quickly online. Cooking 9. Steeping minutes: Green at 3, black at 4, herbal at 5. Good tea is that simple! 10. Food actually can be both cheap, healthy, tasty, and relatively quick to prepare. All it requires is a few hours one day to prepare many meals for the week. 11. Cooking pollutes the air. Opening windows for a few minutes after cooking can dramatically improve air quality. 12. Food taste can be made much more exciting through simple seasoning. It's also an opportunity for expression. Buy a few herbs and spices and experiment away. 13. When googling a recipe, precede it with ‘best'. You'll find better recipes. Productivity 14. Advanced search features are a fast way to create tighter search statements. For example: img html will return inferior results compared to: img html -w3 15. You can automate mundane computer tasks with Autohotkey (or AppleScript). If you keep doing a sequence “so simple a computer can do it”, make the computer do it. 16. Learn keyboard shortcuts. They're easy to learn and you'll get tasks done faster and easier. 17. Done is better than perfect. 18. Keep your desk and workspace bare. Treat every object as an imposition upon your attention, because it is. A workspace is not a place for storing things. It is a place for accomplishing things. 19. Reward yourself after completing challenges, even badly. Body 20. The 20-20-20 rule: Every 20 minutes of screenwork, look at a spot 20 feet away for 20 seconds. This will reduce eye strain and is easy to remember (or program reminders for). 21. Exercise (weightlifting) not only creates muscle mass, it also improves skeletal structure. Lift! 22. Exercise is the most important lifestyle intervention you can do. Even the bare minimum (15 minutes a week) has a huge impact. Start small. 23. (~This is not medical advice~). Don't waste money on multivitamins, they don't work. Vitamin D supplementation does seem to work, which is important because deficiency is common. 24. Phones have gotten heavier in the last decade and they're actually pretty hard on your wrists! Use a computer when it's an alternative or try to at least prop up your phone. Success 25. History remembers those who got to market first. Getting your creation out into the world is more important than getting it perfect. 26. Are you...

en este episodio os vamos a realizar una pequeña demo, también os comentamos de que Ángel ya pertenece al equipo de colaboradores de este podcast, de hecho es quien nos va a brindar esta pequeña demo de cómo implementar para darle más utilidad a los comandos de teclado de nuestro Mac y también algún que otro AppleScript, por último también tanto el compañero ángel como el compañero javivi nos comentan sus experiencias con las desconexiones de sus auriculares con sus dispositivos de Apple. Métodos de contacto. manzanitaaccesible@gmail.com Twitter https://a2.fyi/CUvmNE Fan Page de Facebook https://a2.fyi/huSRTU Donde nos podéis escuchar. Apple podcast https://a2.fyi/lHUm1K Overcast https://a2.fyi/PtnMn5 Ivoox https://a2.fyi/QtmfBi Twitch https://twitch.tv/lamanzanita_accesible Amazon music https://music.amazon.es/podcasts/28290d9a-9529-4abb-a444-bdf6f7794e3a/LA-MANZANITA-ACCESIBLE-PODCAST?ref=dm_sh_DqjvCj9KYK7yi3dBlDkVfACvm Enlace de donaciones. https://www.paypal.me/manzanitapodcast Gracias por escucharnos, un saludo de parte de todo el equipo.

Apple Lore: The Pinks Versus The Blue Meanies Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us for the innovations of the future! Today we're going to cover two engineering groups at Apple: The Pinks and the Blue Meanies. The Mac OS System 6 had been the sixth operating system released in five years. By 1988, Apple was keeping up an unrealistic release cadence, especially given that the operating system had come along at an interesting time when a lot of transitions were happening in IT, and there were lot of increasingly complex problems trying to code around earlier learning opportunities. After sweeping the joint for bugs, Apple held an offsite engineering meeting in Pescadero and split the ideas for the next operating system into two colors of cards: pink, red, green, and blue. The most important of these for this episode were pink, or future release stuff and blue, or next release, stuff. The notecards were blue. The architects of blue were horrible, arrogant self-proclaimed bastards. They'd all seen Yellow Submarine and so they went with the evil Pepperland Blue Meanies. As architects, they were the ones who often said no to things. The Blue Meanies ended up writing much of the core of System 7. They called this OS, which took 3 years to complete, The Big Bang. It would last on the market for 6 years. Longer than any operating system from Apple did prior or since. System 7 gave us CDs, File Sharing, began the migration to a 32-bit OS, replaced MacroMaker with AppleScript and Apple Events and the Extensions Manager, which we're likely to see a return of given the pace Apple's going these days. System 7.0.1 came with an Easter egg. If you typed in Help! Help! We're being held prisoner in a system software factory! You got a list of names: Darin Adler Scott Boyd Chris Derossi Cynthia Jasper Brian McGhie Greg Marriott Beatrice Sochor Dean Yu The later iterations of the file ended “Who dares wins” Pink was meant to get more than incremental gains. They wanted coorperative multitasking. The people who really pushed for this were senior engineers Bayles Holt, David Goldsmith, Gene Pope, Erich Ringewald, and Gerard Schutten, referred to as the Gang of Five. They had their pink cards and knew that what was on them was critical, or Apple might have to go out and buy some other company to get the next really operating system. They insisted that they be given the time to build this new operating system and traded their managers to the blue meanies for the chance to build the preemptive multitasking and a more component-based, or object-oriented applications esgn. They got Mike Potel as their manager. They worked in a separate location looking to launch their new operating system in two years. The code named as Defiant, given that Pink just wasn't awesome. They shared space with the Newton geeks. Given that they had two years and they saw the technical debt in System 6 as considerable, they had to decide if they were going to build a new OS from the ground up, or build on top of the System 6. They pulled in the Advanced Technology Group, another team at Apple, and got up to 11 people. They ended up starting over with a new microkernel they called Opus. Big words. The Pink staff ended up pulling in ideas from other cards and got up to about 25 people. From there, it went a little off the rail and turf wars set in. It kept growing. 100 engineers. They were secretive. They eventually grew to 150 people by 1990. Remember, two years. And the further out they got the less likely that the code would ever be backwards compatible. The Pink GUI used isometric icons, rounded windows, drop shadows, beveling, was fully internationalized, and were huge influences in Mac OS 8 and Copland. Even IBM was impressed by the work being done on Pink and in 1991 they entered an alliance with Apple to help take on what was quickly becoming a Microsoft Monopoly. They planned to bring this new OS to the market as a new company called Taligent in the mid-90s. Just two more years. In 1992, Taligent moved out of Apple with 170 employees, and Joe Guglielmi, who had once led the OS/2 team and had been a marketing exec at IBM for 30 years. By then, this one one of 5 partnerships between Apple and IBM, something that starts and stops every now and then up to today. It was an era of turf wars and empire building. But it was the era of Object orientation. Since Smalltalk, this had been a key aspect in higher level languages such as Java and in the AS/400. IBM had already done it with OS/2 and AIX. By 1993 there was suspicion. Again they grow, now to over 250 people, but they really just needed two more years, guys. Apple actually released an object-oriented SDK called Bedrock to migrate from System 7 to Pink, which could work also work with Windows 3.1, NT, and OS/2. Before you know it they were building a development environment on AIX and porting frameworks to HP-UX, OS/2, Windows. By 1994 the apps could finally run on an IBM RS/6000 running AIX. The buzz continued. Ish. 1994 saw HP take on 15% of the company and add Smalltalk into the mix. HP brought new compilers into the portfolio, and needed native functionality. The development environment was renamed to cq professional and the User Interface builder was changed to cqconstructor. TalAE became CommonPoint. TalOS was scheduled to ship in 1996. Just two more years. The world wanted to switch away from monolithic apps and definitely away from procedural apps. It still does. Every attempt to do so just takes two more years. Then and now. That's what we call “Enterprise Software” and as with anyone who's ok with such pace, Joe Guglielmi left Taligent in 1995. Let's review where we are. There's no real shipping OS. There's an IDE but C++ programmers would need 3 months training to get up to speed on Taligent. Most needed a week or two class to learn Java, if that. Steve Jobs had aligned with Sun in OpenStep. So Apple was getting closer and closer to IBM. But System 7 was too big a dog to run Taligent. Debbie Coutant became CEO towards the end of the year. HP and Apple sold their stake in the company which was then up to 375 employees. Over half were laid off and the organization was wrapped into IBM as would be focusing on… Java. Commonpoint would be distributed across IBM products where possible. Taligent themselves would be key to the Java work done at IBM. By then IBM was a services first organization anyways, so it kinda' all makes sense. TalOS was demoed in 1996 but never released. It was unique. It was object oriented from the ground up. It was an inspiration of a new era of interfaces. It was special. But it never shipped. Mac OS 8 was released in 1997. Better late than never. But it was clear that there was no more runway left in the code that had been getting bigger and meaner. They needed a strategy. The final Taligent employees got sucked into IBM that year, ending a fascinating drama in operating systems and frameworks. Whatever the behind baseball story, Apple decided to bring Steve Jobs back in, in 1997. And he brought NeXT, which gave the Mac all the object-oriented neediness they wanted. They got Objective-C, Mach (through Avie Tevanian of Carnegie Mellon), Property Lists, AppWrappers (.app), Workspace Manager (which begat the Finder), The Dock, and NetInfo. And they finally retired the Apple Bonkers server. But as importantly as anything else, they got Bertrand Serlet and Craig Federighi - who as the next major VPs of Software were able to keep the ship in the right direction and by 2001 they gave us 10.0: Cheetah * Darwin (kinda' like Unix) with Terminal * Mail, Address Book, iTunes * AppleScript survived, AppleTalk didn't * Aqua UI, Carbon and Cocoa APIs * AFP over TCP/IP, HTTP, SSH, and FTP server/client * Native PDF Support It began a nearly 20 year journey that we are still on. So in the end, the Pinks never shipped an operating system, despite their best intentions. And the Blues never paid down their technical debt. Despite their best intentions. As engineers, we need a plan. We need to ship incrementally. We need good, sane cultures that can work together. We need to pay down technical debt - but we don't need to run amuck building technology that's a little ahead of our time. Even if it's always just two more years ahead of our time. And I think we're at time gentle listeners. And I hope it doesn't take me two years to ship this, gentle listeners. But if it does or doesn't, thanks for tuning into another episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We're lucky to have you. Have a great day!

An interview with Marcel Pociot, creator of BotMan and co-founder of Beyond Code. Marcel on Twitter API Doc generator BotMan BeyondCode Laravel Notification Channels Marcel's Laracon EU talk Night Night Baby | Träum Süss BotMan slack invite Editing sponsored by Larajobs Transcription sponsored by GoTranscript.com [music] Matt Stauffer: Welcome back to the Laravel podcast, today we're talking to Marcel Pociot, the founder of BotMan, the framework agnostic PHP chatbot package. Try saying that two times, 10 times fast. Stay tuned. [music] Welcome back to the Laravel podcast. This is season three where we're doing interviews. It's the people you know—getting to know aspects of them you never understood. Or it's also finding some people who you probably have used their tools or you've seen them but you don't actually, necessarily know who they are. Those names who you've been putting in GitHub require or to Composer require for ages but never actually known who the person is. The guy we have in front of us today, I'm actually curious to see what his entire history of working with Laravel is, but the current most present one that's going on right now is connecting Laravel to chatbots and slackbots, and all that kind of stuff, and this is called BotMan but there's a lot more going on here. First of all, we start with the point where I massacre somebody's name and then we move on to the next point where I ask that person to say their name correctly and then introduce themselves a little bit. Marcel Pociot, that's close, not perfect. He's still smiling, so I didn't massacre it too badly. Can you tell us-- and I'm probably ending up calling you just Marcel through this podcast. Marcel Pociot: Yes, that's fine. Matt Stauffer: That's because it is easier for me to say. Thank You. Can you tell us a little bit about-- just real quick, you don't have to tell us your whole life story, I'll ask those questions but—who are you? What are you doing? What are you about? What's BotMan? What is your new company? Just give us the basics of what should we know about you. Marcel Pociot: Okay. Yes, my name is Marcel Pociot. I think that's at least the German pronunciation. I co-founded a company in December last year. Matt Stauffer: Congratulations. Marcel Pociot: Thank you. Very fresh still. I think you're one of the first people that I actually tell this in person that's not from my family- Matt Stauffer: I got the insider track then. [laughter] Marcel Pociot: -and friends because the website isn't finished yet. Yes. I think I'm quite around in the Laravel community for a bit. Matt Stauffer: You've been working-- I've known you just generally in the Laravel community, but you're one of those people where I know that I've known you but I don't even know how we originally connected. Now, you mentioned that we spoke together at a conference so that it may have been it, but do you have any early claim to fame in the Laravel community? Were there any packages that you did earlier on it that were more popular or is it just that you've been around for a while that you're known? Do you know? Marcel Pociot: Well, I did a few. There is one, I think it's called teamwork, for some user/team association package. Matt Stauffer: I remember that. Marcel Pociot: But they're all a bit older. Matt Stauffer: Where did first start using Laravel? Marcel Pociot: Two and a half years ago, I think. I wasn't doing that much PHP back in the days, at least not with frameworks. At the companies I work with, they were using self-built frameworks which are usually crap. You do this once in your lifetime and never again. Well, I ended up at companies that did it all the time. At one point, we decided that we'd built a SaaS application and we were looking for framework to use. This is pretty much the story I tell everyone when they ask me how I got into Laravel. My boss was really into Zend because of the whole Zend ecosystem, with the Zend Studio and the Zend server. I looked into the Zend framework, I think it was two. I gave it a week, I gave it really my best shot. I even bought a book and to gave it a try. In the meantime, I looked around for other frameworks and discovered Laravel. What I did with Zend framework in a week, I did with Laravel in an hour in the evening on the couch. This was the main motivation to use Laravel then. Matt Stauffer: Got it. Okay. I do remember that one of the things that, originally I saw, is that you were doing the Laravel notifications thing. Did you help co-manage that? Marcel Pociot: Yes. Matt Stauffer: Or manage or- Marcel Pociot: With Mohamed and Freek, yes. Matt Stauffer: Okay. Cool. Got it. Stepping back for a second, it's so funny because I try not to go too deep in my own ethnological and linguistic curiosities in the podcasts because nobody else isn't quite as interested as I am, so one of the things I actually ask myself before we were on a call is how was your English so good, we went to that little bit but I must admit that based on your name, it's sounds French to me, but I know that you live in Germany. Are you French origin living in Germany or I'm I just totally? Marcel Pociot: No. I hear that a lot. I think it's also because of my first name. People try to pronounce it French, like Marcel Pociot or something like that. Matt Stauffer: That's exactly what I expected you to say when you first told me, yes. Marcel Pociot: As far as I can tell, the name-- we can't trace it back that much. I think it's just two generations and it's from Eastern Europe, so that's pretty much all I can say. Matt Stauffer: Okay, but you're German, you live in-- where do you live in Germany? Marcel Pociot: Near Dusseldorf, which is near Cologne so, yes. Matt Stauffer: I took a little bit of German in high school and college and probably forgot the majority of it, but just enough that I can read a couple of German story books to my kids and to try to get a little bit of German heritage in for them. My sister was in a little bookstore, a local bookstore and found this-- what's it called? It's like sweet dreams or something like that - Träumt Suss? Marcel Pociot: Susse Träume? Matt Stauffer: Anyway, it's this cute little blue book so I read it to my son over and over and over again, and my pronunciation was really bad at day one, but over time I got good at it. Then at some point, my wife found the exact same book in English and so now, with both of my kids, I read them both of the books back and forth, but my daughter is understanding enough English right now that when I read the German version to her she's like, "Wait a minute, I don't understand this one". She gets mad at me [laughs] because she prefers the English version. Anyway, cool. I do remember there was another big one, the API documentation generator, tell me a little bit about that project. Marcel Pociot: Well, it's a tool that you can pull into your Laravel application and it will basically just reads the routes that you define, so you can call it and give it the prefix of the routes that you want documentation for and will scan the routes and create this Stripe like documentation. So that you have the documentation on the left and then code examples how you can interact with the API on the right, and it does it by just pausing the routes and then reading the documentation of the code. Matt Stauffer: Is it its own thing or is generating like one of the preexisting styles? You know what I mean? Because I've never got to use it, but we are always looking for API documentation generators. Marcel Pociot: It's a theme that's called slate, so it's using this. Matt Stauffer: Cool. Very cool. I'll put links in the show notes. But the main two that I see associated with your name right now are the API doc generator and then, of course, BotMan, which we'll talk about in a minute. Those are the things and then we've got your company. Let's real quick talk about what is BotMan, where did it come from and then also, what's your company and then we're going to dig into the back story. BotMan, what is BotMan? What does it do and where did it come from? Marcel Pociot: Okay, I'll start with where it came from. It was really just coincidence. Late 2016, Slack announced that they now have a new HTTP based API, it's called event API. Basically, before that when you wanted to react to Slack events, like new messages, you had to connect through web sockets and the new API was basically just webhooks. Whenever a new action appears-- yes. Well, I mean, if you have a large Slack team it will blast a lot of events to your server. When I heard that Slack announced this API, I just thought that it would be cool to have a PHP API that wraps around it and have an elegant API around it, it's sort of what Laravel is all about, then apply this to Slack. Then I did this, I open sourced it. It was called just SlackBot at the time. It lay around there for three or four months, I didn't do anything with it and then, I came up with the idea that it might be cool to connect multiple services to it, not just Slack, but also Telegram and Facebook Messenger. That's the main thing with BotMan. It's one of the only-- maybe it's the only —PHP library that actually allows you to connect to multiple messenger services. Matt Stauffer: Yes. If it not the only, it's the only one that matters. That's what I think. [laughs] Marcel Pociot: It allows you to connect to these services with one API and reuse your code. Matt Stauffer: One of the hardest things for people to think about, chatbots— everyone hears "Chatbot is the cool new thing", whatever and often, it's really difficult to understand in what context would I actually want to use this, what are some--? Some of the simplest ones we've seen are, "Oh well, when I hook into a CodeShip integration, something that already exists but, what are some of the-- either in your personal use of it or in seeing other people use it, what are some of the most compelling uses of chatbots? Whether it's in Slack or Telegram, or whatever else that you've seen to help people's imagination get started a little. Marcel Pociot: Yes, I think the problem is that people always associate chatbots with these super artificial intelligence systems that understand whatever the user wants. In my opinion, it's just a different interface for your application. It's a conversational interface for your application and what I've seen that was built with BotMan, a lot is like websites, for example, for insurance companies. On their website, they have this chat bubble, that you know maybe from Intercom, and what it does is it guides you through the website. When you click on a button, the chatbot opens and asks you a question related to the action that you triggered when you clicked on the button. That's one-use case and I think- Matt Stauffer: I want to stop you for a second. When I think of a chatbot, what I think about is something that allows someone to use a preexisting chat system, like Facebook Messenger or something else, to interact with their backend API. What you're describing sounds like an entirely manual process where you just used webhooks to hook in your app, right? Am I missing what you're talking about? Marcel Pociot: No. That's also possible. With BotMan, it is the web drivers, so you can just connect it to your own API and then you send the message from your user to your own API and reply back. Matt Stauffer: Okay. Got it. Marcel Pociot: But in the end, that's what happens with Telegram or Facebook too. Yes. Matt Stauffer: So really, anything that has to do with sending and receiving messages to your user in a chat-like format. Marcel Pociot: Yes, right. Matt Stauffer: Regardless of which chat format they're usbing. Okay. I think the on page one is just so clear of an example. Everyone has used a website with Intercom on it or one of Intercom's competitors at some point. I get that one. I think that's super compelling. I'm happy to know that if I need to build that, still reach for BotMan, that's cool. I wouldn't have known that until you said that. Have you seen people use-- I think the hard thing for me is that when I think about Telegram or when I think about Facebook Messenger, I very infrequently think about interacting with someone who has enough money to have an API. I think of my friends. I'm sending a message to my friend, my friend messages me back. Have you seen or heard of really compelling use cases where people are using traditional chats systems, outside of Slack? We'll talk about Slack in a second, but has anybody done anything interesting that you know of with Telegram or Messenger or are those little more aspirational at this point? Marcel Pociot: Messenger is used a lot for more marketing kind of services. For example, TechCrunch has this, well, it's a chatbot where you can-- when you sign up you can register for different topics from their RSS feeds. Matt Stauffer: Intere-- wow. Marcel Pociot: Then you get- Matt Stauffer: They are using it to publish information out and people are subscribing. Marcel Pociot: Yes, every evening-- so you can select topics and then the time. Every evening, I get the top 10 stories from TechCrunch into the Messenger. Matt Stauffer: You just blew my mind. My son just started a podcast www.stauffersonscience.com, and I have a whole bunch of people who I grew up with, who are completely un-computer savvy and they're all saying, "How do I subscribe to a podcast?", I'm like, "Oh Gosh, how am I going to handle this?". I could build a little light Laravel or Lumen app that subscribes to the RSS feed of the podcast and allows people to enter their-- authenticate their Messenger information and pushes every new episode to their Messenger inbox. Marcel Pociot: Yes, right. Matt Stauffer: Holy crap, you just blew my mind. That's amazing. That is so cool, that's so clever. That opens up so many things for people to subscribe because everybody, all your non-tech savvy friends, your mom, your grandma, all of them, they all have Facebook which means they all have Messenger. Marcel Pociot: Yes. I think even more like the younger generation because they don't have MacBooks or laptops, they just have smartphone and use Messenger to communicate. Matt Stauffer: Do you know-- I'm sorry I'm just going into the weeds here, but I am so fascinated. If somebody doesn't use Messenger and they send something to a Messenger authenticated thing, does it show up on the web interface in their little messages thing in Facebook website? Marcel Pociot: You mean if they don't use the Messenger application? Matt Stauffer: Like if somebody doesn't have an iPhone but they go to facebook.com on their browser every day, can they do Messenger interactions using the little- Marcel Pociot: Yes. Matt Stauffer: Okay, so it's the same thing as Facebook. Man, I need to pause for a moment, this is so cool. Okay, broadcasting makes a ton of sense. Broadcasting information, this—in some ways, you have some of the value but a lot more configurability of like an RSS feed through a multiple-medium subscription. That makes a ton of sense and I get that now. Marcel Pociot: Plus, I think. maybe this will change over time, but right now the click rates are much higher because it's not that overused as e-mail newsletters. For example, with the TechCrunch- Matt Stauffer: They feel more personal too? Marcel Pociot: Yes. It feels-- even though you know that you're not actually talking to someone at the company, it feels like you're interacting with the company, well, with its brand. The whole market taking thing is really popular on Facebook, also for artists, they have chatbots that you can ask, "where's the next concert?", and the user feels like they are talking to, I don't know, Beyoncé, whatever. Matt Stauffer: Interesting. I was just going to ask about questions. That one right there would feel like a little bit of natural language processing. If you can do some of that then you can have like ask questions of our whatever bot, or whatever, and that makes sense too. You imagine that you are working for some big company, like an insurance company maybe, and they say, "You want to ask us a question? Here, hook up to our messenger bot and you can ask--" blah, blah, blah. The messenger bot parses out using some basic natural language processing. So, the messenger bot is basically BotMan hooked in your API. The API, your Laravel app takes the questions tries to process them, tries to look up an answer and then sends the message back to that person. So that BotMan would be the interface layer in between. Marcel Pociot: Yes, right. Matt Stauffer: Okay, that makes sense. Slack makes the most sense for our context. I think we're all sitting and using cycle work every day, and it seems like Slack is adding more and more things you can do every time. Buttons at the bottom and stuff like that. What is the most interesting thing that you have built or seen built with Slack integrations on BotMan? Marcel Pociot: It's also interesting because Slack got-- I think they moved away from the term chatbots a while ago, and I think they just called it application. They even integrated like forms that open up, like select boxes, drop downs. I haven't seen that many slackbots using BotMan. There's one, I forgot the name who built it, but he built a slack game, it's like a dice rolling game, it's called Liar's dice. Matt Stauffer: I, obviously, could talk about BotMan the whole time. But this isn't actually about BotMan, this is about you. BotMan is amazing, there's all sorts of interesting stuff. You also have given-- do you know if your Laravel EU talk is online? I didn't actually watch those. Marcel Pociot: Yes, it's online. Matt Stauffer: Okay, great. I'll put a link up to your BotMan talk which is called From zero to multi-platform Chatbot with BotMan. I'll put the link up to that one as well. Let's move on to you. The first place I always start with everybody is, when did you first get interested in computers? Or when did you first get access to a computer? What did your original kind of exposure to computers? Marcel Pociot: I think the first memory that I have from a computer was, I was sitting, I might be like 6 or 7, sitting in the living room with my father, and I don't remember what kind of computer it was. But we had a book with games, so if you wanted to play a game that was the source code of the game in the book. Matt Stauffer: Was it BASIC? Marcel Pociot: Yes, it was. You had to type it in and then you got the game. What I remember, maybe that's also the reason why I remembered it is, my father was sitting there and typing everything in, and I just came at the power adapter and the whole thing crashed. [laughter] He was frustrated. Matt Stauffer: Yes, I believe it. I assume that was like one of those black and green old-- those boxes. Very cool. Marcel Pociot: This is the first memory of sitting in front of a computer. Matt Stauffer: I try not to call at people's ages too much, but I think that you're around my age, around 33, is that right? Marcel Pociot: Yes. 32 and in April 33. Matt Stauffer: We're almost exactly the same age. In our generation it was not all that common, at least in the US, I don't know about Germany, for people to have a home computer when we were that young. Since your father was the one doing this. Was your father-- was he a geek or is he a programmer? Marcel Pociot: Not at all, no. He was always interested in it, but well not so much that he really wanted to write more code than there was in the book. [laughs] Matt Stauffer: At what point did your interaction with the computer go from pulling out the plug from your dad typing in BASIC program to you creating things on your own? Marcel Pociot: I think it was-- in school we had, at the programming class, we wrote Turbo Pascal. Matt Stauffer: Wait, what age of school are you talking about? Marcel Pociot: I think this is seventh grade, so I must have been like 12, 13. Matt Stauffer: You had programming class when you were 13 years old? Marcel Pociot: Yes. Matt Stauffer: That's fascinating. When I was in seventh grade, we had typing class and I- Marcel Pociot: With typewriters or--? Matt Stauffer: They were on Macs, but they were old Macs and we'd all sit around and I would finish the Mavis Beacon thing in five minutes and then I'd go try to learn Applescript and write programs that would infect all the other computers in the network and shut them all down at the same time without the teacher noticing, but there's no formal programming education even in high school. The best we had was an engineering class where the teacher would let us go hack around and stuff, but certainly, nothing formal. So, you learned Turbo Pascal in seventh grade? Marcel Pociot: Yes, pretty much and then- Matt Stauffer: How did that go? Marcel Pociot: Well, I think we moved quite fast from there to Delphi where also-- in the class, there were a handful of people that were always very fast with all the tasks and, just as you said, had a lot of time. We developed like a Trojan, a Trojan Horse [laughter] to open the CD trays from the other computers and stuff like that. Matt Stauffer: Exactly. That's exactly what I was trying to do. That's awesome. Okay, early on you were deep in the computers, you were writing code, you were hacking at it. When did you first get into the web? Marcel Pociot: I don't really remember what age I was, but it was like the Geocities sites. All this crappy-- Matt Stauffer: Yes, man. I still remember, mine was MA slash 1984. My first two letters in my name and then the birth year. [laughter] What was your first Geocities site, you remember? Marcel Pociot: No, I just remember that I had this cool hacker name. Matt Stauffer: What? Like 1337 speak?? Marcel Pociot: Yes. Matt Stauffer: One, three, three, seven, four, four, whatever. Marcel Pociot: It was Delta2K, I don't know. Matt Stauffer: Nice. Marcel Pociot: It sounded cool. Matt Stauffer: Yes, of course, with 2k especially. Okay, it's funny because it seems like I'm either picking people to interview who are old head PHP dorks or there's something consistent about folks who are helping lead in our community that a lot of us are from similar generation. I'm curious to see where that goes, but-- you were doing that, you were playing around with it at the side, what did you study? Did you study that in university or--? Marcel Pociot: No. Here in Germany after you finish school, you can either go to a university or you can do training. You go to a company and then you have three years at the company and besides working at the company, you also go to school. Matt Stauffer: Is it a school provided by the government or provided by the company? Marcel Pociot: No, it's just a public school for learning the- Matt Stauffer: For that specific career? Marcel Pociot: -specific profession. Yes. Matt Stauffer: Got it, okay. Marcel Pociot: I did that to become a software engineer and I ended up in a company in Bochum, here in Germany, and- Matt Stauffer: I don't even know how to spell that. I'll put that down on the show notes [laughs]. Okay, cool. Marcel Pociot: Yes, that's what I did. I wasn't that much into liking school that much back in the days. So pretty early on, I decided to skip the school part and rather work five days a week, so that I can hack on some code. That's what I did and then just did the tasks on my own and learned from them on my own. Matt Stauffer: Got it. You have a pretty straight line from being a little kid watching your dad enter QBASIC programs in. Through learning in school and doing your own Geocities stuff, to being a software engineer and going straight in the industry. Have you at any point felt like, "Oh my gosh, this is not what I want to do"? Or is it just been pretty clear since early on- Marcel Pociot: Yes, it's been really clear since early on. Matt Stauffer: - "I'm a programmer, this is my thing"? Marcel Pociot: That's always what I wanted to do. It's always a bit funny when I talk to people that don't really know what they want to do with their lives and what direction they want to go because it was always really clear for me that I want to go to that direction. Matt Stauffer: Interesting. If you today-- and I know that you just started your own company in December, so hopefully this is really fresh in your head. If you today were to be able to pick exactly what you were doing day to day, if your company was successful in exactly all the ways you want it to be, what would you be doing with your time? Marcel Pociot: Right now, I would say I would still love to write code. I heard that you talked about this also with a few other people, what to do when you're 40 or 50 years old. Well, right now, I would say that I hope that I still want to write code at that time Matt Stauffer: If you found yourself in a situation where your company just-- and we will talk about you company in a second, but you just took off and it's going really well. You decide to hire five people and all the sudden, you're spending all your time doing administrative work. At that point, you think you might say, "I gotta fix this, I got to get back into the code"? Is that your sense of it right now? Marcel Pociot: Right now, it is, yes, but I'm just so refreshed and I'm really just coming from a lead developer role. Matt Stauffer: Yes. Okay. All right. Tell me about your company. You went right into that internship, what's your work history look like? You don't have to tell me every company, but what kind of stuff you've been doing. Have you been working primarily for software firms or have you've been working for non-software companies as a software programmer? Marcel Pociot: No. I just worked for agencies, like web agencies. Matt Stauffer: Got it. Marcel Pociot: The first one was very small, four people when I started there which was very cool because I got to do everything. I had to talk to customers and the clients. We had-- it was very small so we had to do things like setting up e-mail accounts for them. They called if they couldn't set up the email account on their mobile phone. Then they would come in with their phone and stuff like that. Yes, the second company was also a bigger agency but still an agency, where I did-- At the first one, I did PHP and then I got a lot into Appcelerator Titanium. Matt Stauffer: That's why I thought you'd done Titanium. Let's talk about Titanium for a second. Titanium, I feel like was one of the first used JavaScript to write multi-platform apps. How is it different and similar from something like Ionic? Marcel Pociot: The main difference is that while Ionic is just html that gets executed on the phone in the browser, or in the web view, Titanium used the JavaScript code that you wrote and they had proxies for the native languages for java or Objective C. Then the JavaScript code would call the native proxy objects that would then execute native code. When you wanted [crosstalk]- Matt Stauffer: It is more of like a predecessor of React Native. Marcel Pociot: Yes, right. It's like- Matt Stauffer: Okay. Got it. Is it still around? Marcel Pociot: It is. The company got acquired and they still develop it but the time Facebook announced React Native, the community just ran away and went to Facebook, yes. Matt Stauffer: Got it. Okay. I'm sorry, I interrupted. You were doing that at that company and then--? Continue. Marcel Pociot: Yes. Titanium was also my main motivation to work on open source in the first place. I haven't done that before and I started developing Titanium modules. Just small user interfaces- Matt Stauffer: Like packages. Marcel Pociot: Yes. Right. User interface libraries to share and I put them open source and I think I did Titanium for, maybe, one and a half years. Mostly Titanium and then also some Java and Objective C to work on some native modules. During that time, I got bit away from PHP because also, at the time, there was no Composer. The whole ecosystem wasn't as stable as it is right now. Matt Stauffer: Yes. What brought you back? Marcel Pociot: Well, I think it was just a client project. [laughs] Matt Stauffer: Okay. Did they say PHP or it was a web and you had to pick and you just pick PHP because you knew it? Marcel Pociot: Yes, because I knew it and also because of React Native. When React Native was announced, Titanium just pretty much died. Matt Stauffer: Yes. But that was pretty recently, right? Marcel Pociot: Well-- Matt Stauffer: Like a year [crosstalk] Marcel Pociot: No. Native is more around more than a year, I think. Matt Stauffer: Is that real? I believe you, I don't actually know. Okay. Yes, let's say, it may be as long time as 2015 but-- because a lot of times when I hear people talk about "I stepped away from PHP--", blah, blah, blah, "and I finally came back", and they are in the Laravel community. A lot of them came back right around the time when Laravel 4 came out. Maybe I just got the timeline on that wrong in my head. When did Laravel 4 come out? Marcel Pociot: When I started working with their Laravel, 5 came out. I think I worked with 4 for about a month. Matt Stauffer: That is what I was expecting then. Okay. Marcel Pociot: Yes. We started this SaaS product at our company and we chose to use Laravel 5 because-- I think the main reason was the form requests, which just blew my mind. I thought they were super cool to validate stuff and then we decided to pick up, there Laravel 5 during the development with the beta, there was no good decision. Matt Stauffer: I didn't say and it was also bad decision. Marcel Pociot: We had to fix several things every day and at some point we just pinned the dependency to one specific commit, so we knew, “okay, this is working” Matt Stauffer: And you built against that commit until you released it until and then deal with all the fixes at once. Marcel Pociot: And then it stays that way for a long time Matt Stauffer: It's funny. This timeline does line up here is what I have seen, as four came out in 2013, five came out in 2015 and React Native was announced probably at some point in 2015. So you were deep in titanium, you were off in that world and interestingly you were doing a lot of other mobile stuff. You talked about getting into Java, getting into objective C a little bit it, so it was both Titanium, which is JavaScript but then also the adapter worlds, which means you got to know a little bit of Java from Android, a little objective C for Apple and then you all of a sudden come and jump back into PHP and it was Laravel 5, things were modern and Composer all that kind of stuff, were you still working for that same consultancy at that point? Marcel Pociot: Yes, must have been sort of at the same time that I switched jobs, yes. And I didn't do that-- I always did PHP in the afternoon on the couch Matt Stauffer: Got it. It was still always like your fun time favorite language because I know a lot of people would say they left, they're like "oh well, I got tired of PHP I left for rails, I got tired of PHP and I left for .NET or whatever, so you still had a soft spot in your heart for PHP the whole time. Marcel Pociot: Yes right, but not with the framework at the time. Matt Stauffer: You ever rolled your own? You said your company rolled their own, Marcel Pociot: Yes, of course. Matt Stauffer: Does it have a name? Marcel Pociot: No, it didn't really have a name, no. Matt Stauffer: Never got that far? Marcel Pociot: No. Matt Stauffer: Okay. You got a pretty classic story here, obviously everyone's different but a lot of us left at some point a lot of us came back at some point but it's interesting for the amount of impact you have made with BotMan you came up to Laravel pretty recently and BotMan isn't really a Laravel framework either. I feel like it was tied to Laravel at some point, is it basically just a PHP framework that does it even have a Laravel convenience layer on top of it right now? Marcel Pociot: Yes it does. It is framework agnostic but there's a piece that's called BotMan Studio which is basically a blank Laravel 5.5 installation with some additional BotMan service provider and additional commands, a Tinker page to play around with it but it's not tied to Laravel. Matt Stauffer: Got it. Okay we've caught up, you switched consultancies, you got in Laravel 5, you built BotMan, you talked about how you built BotMan so let's talk about your company. We chatted on and off about it but let's pretend that we haven't chatted at all. In December you formed your own company, you went out on your own. Tell me about it, what's your motivation, what's your goal, what's your desire; what made you want to get out of working for other consultancies and start your own thing and what is your own thing? Marcel Pociot: Okay. I'm not doing this alone, I'm doing this with a former colleague, he has been a freelancer for a year now already and already a year ago when he left the company, we were already thinking about doing something on our own and I think the main motivation was- when we started this SaaS application at our company, we thought about turning it into its own company, which they eventually did. I ended up sitting in a new office with my now business partner and the CEO from this new company and we basically sat together for 2 years, just the two of us working on the product and we just knew that the CEO back at the time was a sales person and- how can I put it, a sales person as the CEO of a software product is difficult. This was like the main motivation because we had a different idea of the product, the way we wanted to get with it and it didn't turn out into that direction so we thought that, well if we do something on our own, we can give it our best shot. Matt Stauffer: Okay. Is it a similar product to what you originally planned but since it didn't go the way you originally planned you're going to go build, are you doing product work then? Marcel Pociot: Right now the company is called Beyond Code and we are, it's sort of a split. We have, on the one hand, we do projects, project work mostly we try to do it for Chatbots obviously. Matt Stauffer: Your consultancy that builds Chatbots for people as a part of what you're doing. Marcel Pociot: Yes, right. On the other hand, we have BotMan as the library and we want to focus around building a whole product ecosystem around it so that it becomes easier for people to pick it up and use it like analytics, bot building systems. Matt Stauffer: So Beyond Code GMBH, what does that stand for by the way? I've never known that. GMBH. I assume it means limited liability corporation but the Germany version. Marcel Pociot: Yes. Matt Stauffer: Let's test my German. Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung. Marcel Pociot: Yes, that's quite good. Matt Stauffer: All right. I did okay. All right. Beyond Code is a consultancy that builds primarily applications that have Chatbots on them and also uses the finances that come from that to further build the ecosystem around BotMan which is a PHP framework agnostic library to make it easy to build the type of applications that Beyond Code is building for people. Right? Marcel Pociot: Right. Exactly. Matt Stauffer: It makes sense. It's like that, not quite, like the Discourse model where like hey, there's a free or then Wordpress model. There's a free piece of software, there's also the way to pay us to do it, the money that you pay us to do it makes the free piece software better. Everything fits and everything else. Okay. That totally makes sense. All right, that's going forward. A success for the next couple years of your life would mean that the work that you're doing or consultancy work, the work you're doing for clients basically allows you to make BotMan better, is that the general? Marcel Pociot: Yes. Matt Stauffer: You mentioned analytics, you mention understanding what's going on. Are there any other big next goals or features or things that you want that you feel like you can share with us that aren't the secret sauce? Marcel Pociot: No. Not that I can share them. No. Matt Stauffer: Okay, cool. But you've got big plans, it's not just sitting where it is, it is something you want to grow. Marcel Pociot: Yes. Matt Stauffer: Okay, that's cool. I think that the ability to compellingly get someone excited about the possibilities with a Chatbot obviously is going to be a big part of your doing. I'm glad we had the opportunity for that. Like I said, I'm literally going to get off this call and go see how fast I can hack together something to send that one woman who went church with me growing up. Facebook Messenger notifications when my son's podcast goes out. I'm super geeked about that. Okay, let's see. What else, what do you do in your free time? One of the things is that you have such a straight line through programming that I think that I want to know more about what is not programming you. What motivates you? I know you've got a family, I know you've got one kid? Marcel Pociot: Yes, one kid. Matt Stauffer: One kid. How old is your kid? Marcel Pociot: Four. Matt Stauffer: Four. Okay. Obviously spending time with your family is significant but whether with your family or on your own, what do you do outside of coding? What motivates you? What excites you? What do you do when you're away from the computer? Marcel Pociot: I think I have to re-calibrate myself a bit because when I was working at the consultancy, what I was doing in the afternoon was BotMan and now I'm doing this during the day job. Matt Stauffer: Actually I got to stop you for a second. You keep mentioning the afternoon as your free time, what does your schedule look like? Marcel Pociot: It's mostly nine to five. Matt Stauffer: When you say in the afternoon, do you mean after five? Marcel Pociot: Yes, right. Sorry, in the evening. Matt Stauffer: In the evening. Got it. Okay. What you mean is basically your free time, hacking time in your old job you're doing consultancy during the day and then BotMan stuff at night but now the BotMan is your day job. How do you reorient? Marcel Pociot: Yes, I still have to figure that out myself. I'm not that much of like a sports person or anything. I think really my main motivation was to program still. Matt Stauffer: You just love coding. Marcel Pociot: Yes. Well and other than that it's mostly, beside my family of course, playing some video games but- yes. Matt Stauffer: Yes. I'm not a gamer but I gotta ask what kind of games are, I don't even know what questions gamers ask, is it a PC or console that the question they would ask what game you are into? Marcel Pociot: No, it is console but also it's funny and also a bit sad that I just realized that I'm getting old because I'm no longer good at these games. I no longer can play these games longer. I have always liked these big games that pull you in like big RPGs but now with a kid, I don't really have the time to do that. Matt Stauffer: You don't have much time. Marcel Pociot: I don't want to play for five consecutive hours and if I come back after a few days, I don't want an hour to find out where was I or what I'm supposed to do. Matt Stauffer: That's why I loved Nintendo, that's one of many reasons why I love Nintendo. Because for people with families, Nintendo is good. A, because there's games that you can play with your kids, and also user interfaces you can play with the kids, but B, there's games that are like you can dip in and out. Marcel Pociot: Yes, you can just pick them up and then play for half an hour and then your're done. Matt Stauffer: Even Zelda as an extremely immersive game. You can still pick it up for 20 minutes here or there. Marcel Pociot: That is also too big for me. Matt Stauffer: Zelda is. I mean I can understand it. I've played more video games when I played through-- I'm not done with Zelda, but I played more video games when I first got the Switch and Zelda than I have in years. And even so, it was 20 minutes here and there. Because of the Switch, I just put it down and it just pauses it, but I hear you. Super Mario Odyssey is pretty small. And of course, Mario Kart I play with my son nearly every day. Marcel Pociot: Yes, [laughs] me too, yes. Matt Stauffer: Nice. Marcel Pociot: So now we have this rule that we play every other day. [laughter]. Matt Stauffer: Yes, yes. Every night became a problem, so I was like, "You need to get off." The good thing is my son is super, super active. I was a lazy kid, I didn't want to do anything, I just wanted to sit around. My kid, if I let him, we would be outside running around every day, I don't don't have any problems. Marcel Pociot: Yes, my son too. Yes, when I came home from work, usually the first thing that he would tell me was, "Okay, you can leave your shoes on, we go out and play some soccer." [laughter] Matt Stauffer: I love it, that's very cool. Yes, I think my biggest bummer about the neighborhood we live in right now is that-- the best thing about it is the houses are really close and everybody gets to know each other very well, so he's got tons of friends. But the bummer is the yards are so small that there's nowhere for us to play without getting in the car and driving somewhere. Like, play soccer or baseball or something like that. But what we end up doing is just running around in the house like crazy people anyway. Marcel Pociot: [laughs]. Matt Stauffer: It's his favorite game right now. Marcel Pociot: We have people living underneath so we can't do this all the time. Matt Stauffer: My son's favorite game right now is turn on some music really loud, some really hype pop music or something like that, and then run around and chase each other and throw bouncy balls at each other or try to tickle each other or something like that while the music plays really loud. I'm like, "Okay." Marcel Pociot: [laughs]. Yes, haven't done that in a while. Matt Stauffer: What keeps you from getting stuck when you're coding? Or what tools do you use, or what book or what languages. How do you keep either on a single problem, or on a single framework, or single language? What broadens your perspectives? Whether it's in the programming world, like some other programming language, or whether it's something about your family or your life. What helps you keep your brain out of just the really narrow focus of, "I work in one language, one package, all day long." What gives you inspiration? Marcel Pociot: Recently, when we had in mind that we're going to start the company, I focused a lot on the organizational things and on how to get this even up and running. During that time I was not that much focused on code, or on frameworks, or anything else, because it also meant for me just to get out of the comfort zone and start a company, and not have the safety as an employee. What I'm trying to tell is that, during this time, I sort of stepped away from being too close to the coding world a bit, and now I'm just catching up again. But I think it's mostly just talking to other people and exchanging with my business partner, things like that. It's not that I use other languages and look into them specifically to see new things, so it's not that I really have the plan on how to broaden my view. I don't know, I think it just happens this way. And if I'm stuck at a specific problem, I just try to go out for a bit and [chuckle] step away from the code. Matt Stauffer: Yes. All right. I feel like I promised every time that I'm not going to say I could talk for hours and then I do it every time anyway. Oh well, I failed, I did it. Marcel Pociot: [laughs]. Matt Stauffer: We are nearing time, so I don't want to start anything new and big. Are there any other big parts of you, your life, your motivation or your work that you feel like we haven't got a chance to cover? Marcel Pociot: No, I think we covered the important parts, most of all, yes. Matt Stauffer: Okay, I like it. What's your favorite candy? Marcel Pociot: Candy? [laughs]. After the whole Christmas candy mess-- we set ourselves as a family goal to not eat any candy for a week. Matt Stauffer: I like that. Marcel Pociot: My son is doing great. Matt Stauffer: [laughs]. He's doing better than you, huh? Marcel Pociot: Yes, right. [laughter] Marcel Pociot: I cheated but he doesn't know. Matt Stauffer: All right. Well, hopefully, he doesn't listen to this. Marcel Pociot: Well, he doesn't understand English. So-- Matt Stauffer: There you go, that's the way to do it. Reveal your secrets in the other language. Marcel Pociot: [laughs]. Yes. Marcel Pociot: But other than that-- favorite candy-- I'm mostly into some sour candy. Matt Stauffer: Like what? Marcel Pociot: Skittles in sour, they're pretty good. Matt Stauffer: Really? Skittle Sour-- I had no idea. Marcel Pociot: Yes. Matt Stauffer: All right, Skittle Sour, favorite candy. Marcel Pociot: How about you? Matt Stauffer: I ask this question to people all the time and I don't know if I know the answer. The first thing that came to my mind was Snickers. I think that I like candies with chocolate, and I think if it's chocolate plus some things that rounded it out, those are high in my list. I mean I really like Almond Joys, and Mounds as well. But I think Snickers is probably my top one. Marcel Pociot: We all like bread with Nutella, but is it really candy? Matt Stauffer: Yes, but I mean, it's basically candy. Marcel Pociot: Yes. [laughs]. Yes. Matt Stauffer: Yes. It's funny, my wife likes to put Nutella on sweet things. I'm like, "No, no, no, the Nutella is the sweet, I want it on bread or toast.", just plain piece of multi-grain bread, put some Nutella on top of it, good to go. Marcel Pociot: And peanut butter, and then you basically have Snickers. Matt Stauffer: Wait, do you put peanut butter and Nutella on the same thing? Marcel Pociot: Sure. That's literally Snickers, right? Matt Stauffer: Oh my god [whispers]. I had never thought of that. Alright last story and then I got to let you go. My dad worked for a German company when I was growing up, and he was the president of the US distributor of a German-based company. So he would fly over to Germany pretty frequently, and he would bring Levi's jeans and peanut butter to Germany, because it was hard for them to get, and he'd bring back German chocolate and Nutella, because it was hard for us to get. You can get Nutella in the grocery stores now, but back then you couldn't. And so, every time dad came home, we would get Nutella and we tried to keep these couple of jars of Nutella to last until the next time he went to Germany. Marcel Pociot: Okay. Next time I see you, can you get some Nutella? Matt Stauffer: Yes, I mean, we've got a lot of Nutella here, so you have to pick something up to trade with. Marcel Pociot: But not the German one. [laughs]. Matt Stauffer: Yes, it's true, it's true. All right, Marcel, this was a ton of fun talking to you. Thanks for taking some time. Thank you for BotMan, I'm seriously going to go distribute my son's podcasts using it. So you can expect me to bother you with requests for help sometime soon. Marcel Pociot: No problem. Thank you for inviting me. Matt Stauffer: How can people follow you? And, I guess, go start BotMan. What is following after you look like? Marcel Pociot: Well I think the easiest way to connect with me is on Twitter. Matt Stauffer: All right. I'll make sure your handle is linked to the show notes. Marcel Pociot: Okay. Or, if people want to talk about BotMan, I have the Slack team of BotMan where you can join, I think we're nearly 500 people in there. Matt Stauffer: All right, we'll link that in the show notes too. Got it. Marcel Pociot: Yes. Matt Stauffer: Cool. All right, well thanks for your time, was a pleasure talking to you. Until next time everyone. See you later. Marcel Pociot: Bye.

An interview with Antonio Ribeiro, package author and master of StackOverflow Laravel. Rio de Janeiro Laravel-News interview TDDD Stats Tracker Antonio on Twitter Antonio on StackOverflow Antonio's web site Version Google2FA Firewall Pascal Delphi "Concourse" (?) Antonio's photography Editing sponsored by Tighten Transcription sponsored by LaraJobs Matt Stauffer: [music] Welcome back to The Laravel Podcast, this is your host Matt Stauffer. Today I'm going to be talking to someone whose name I struggle with, Antonio Ribeiro. He's the master of Stack Overflow Laravel and much more. Stay tuned. [music] Welcome back to the Laravel podcast, season three. I'm your host. I wanted to say I'm your favorite host but I'm your only host so that'd be kind of cheating. Like when you only have one kid and you say "I'm your favorite kid". I'm your host. I'm one of your hosts. No, I'm the only host. See? Matt Stauffer. That's me. I'm the guy talking to you. Joining me is someone who a lot of you have probably learned from at some point in your life but you often haven't associated that you're actually learning from him. This is the master of Stack Overflow Laravel. That's what's going on here. And I think a lot of people have no recognized that this is actually a thing. We'll get into this in a bit. His name, in Portuguese, is pronounced in such a way that I'm going to totally massacre it. So I'm going to say it and then literally the first thing I'm going to ask him to do is say it the way it's actually supposed to be said. So, Antonio Heb ... Ribeiro. No see, it's totally failed. Say your name for us. Also, what I'd love for you to do is just give us a picture of who are you, what are you about, when you meet someone for the first time what do you tell him about what you do, and then where are you? And then I'll get started in asking some questions. Antonio Ribeiro: Hi Matt. My name is Antonio Ribeiro. Matt Stauffer: Howdy. That's how badly I pronounced it. Antonio Ribeiro: No, no. The second time you say it was really cool. Matt Stauffer: It was a little better? Antonio Ribeiro: I'm from Brazil, originally. I work in Brazil and I work for a company outside Brazil. I lived in Europe for four years or five years. I don't remember exactly how much time. I lived in a city everybody knows. I think everybody knows. It's Rio de Janeiro. It as difficult as my name to say. Matt Stauffer: Rio de Janeiro. [Said with intentionally strong American accent] Antonio Ribeiro: Exactly. I work for the Brazilian government. Specifically, the state legislature in Rio. So I'm a public service. I do six hour per day of public serving. Of work. And after-hours, I do a lot of work. I work for another company. Now, I'm not exactly working for them but I'm available for them. I love the program and that's why I got into Laravel so quickly and maybe had some success in Stack Overflow. So I started my programming life when I was 12, I think, in Switzerland, in a big department store working with computers that were in the store. I was amazed about computers. I got a job when I was 12, 13. Matt Stauffer: You got a job when you were 12 years old working on computers? Antonio Ribeiro: No, not working on computers. I got a job delivering groceries for a store. Matt Stauffer: Oh okay. Antonio Ribeiro: To buy a computer. Matt Stauffer: Oh nice! I was going to say. That's still impressive. Man, you're getting right into it here. You've heard this before and you know that I'm gonna ask about your whole background. But let me pause for just one second because what I want to make sure that I have is ... I want to have context for why it is that I'm talking to you. And like I said, the whole point of this version of the podcast is to get to know the people who everybody knows but maybe they don't know who they are. Also, to get to know the people that nobody knows but they might have benefited from. I think you're in the second box. So, the reason that I originally met you is because I started Laravel. I don't know if you and I started at the same time or not ... So actually before I go any further, what version of Laravel was it when you first started getting really involved? Antonio Ribeiro: 3.2. Yeah, 3.2. Matt Stauffer: Yep, so you showed up there just a little bit before I did. I remember in the early days, and especially in the middle days, every time I'd come across everything in Stack Overflow, you would always be the answer. It's just consistently over and over. And I'm looking at this and you have 59,000 reputation on Stack Overflow. If anybody doesn't know, that's a very, very, very large number of answers. Who knows how good their ideas are here of how many people he's reached but it is telling me that he's reached 3.7 million people with his answers in Stack Overflow. Antonio Ribeiro: Wow. I didn't know that. Matt Stauffer: Right! And the large number of them are in Laravel. His top tag is in Laravel and then he's got Laravel 4. He's got 1,000 posts in Laravel that he's interacted with. Or that maybe even he's created. So there's a lot. There's a lot going on here. He's in the top 0.3% in Stack Overflow and I'm only saying that, not because that makes you worthwhile or not worthwhile, but that was the reason that we originally connected. Now, since you've made a couple repositories in a couple packages for Laravel, the most recent ones that have come up have been your tracker, the Stats Tracker. Then the Test-Dashboard? Is that what it's called? I'm trying to remember what it's called. Antonio Ribeiro: Yeah. I call it TDDD now. Matt Stauffer: Oh, it's got a new name. So TDDD. Antonio Ribeiro: Yeah. TDDD. Matt Stauffer: Got it. Also, the one I've tweeted out a little bit recently is that you have Version. Which basically allows you to pull the version of your Laravel application into your app based on any number of criteria. One of which being the Git tag, which I was super interested in. But it seems like you got a lot more in those. Do you even know how many packages you have? Antonio Ribeiro: No. I'm not sure, really. I have, I think, five or six really popular packages but I have like 150 repositories in my account so I don't know. Matt Stauffer: Yeah. So you're big on Stack Overflow. You've got a lot of packages. You are also are a Twitter presence here and there. Just like a few of the other people we've talked to so far, you're not someone, at least in the US or Europe, where everybody knows you and everybody knows your name. I don't know the Brazilian Laravel community quite so well so is that different either in Brazil or Rio? Do you guys have a really strong community there that you're really invested and involved in? Or are you kind of solo with this? Antonio Ribeiro: Yeah. I'm kind of solo because it all started for me in Stack Overflow. Matt Stauffer: Got it. Antonio Ribeiro: And in English, which is not exactly a language I used to speak. So I decided to go deep in this Stack Overflow thing but it was way before I discovered I was ranking on Stack Overflow. Matt Stauffer: Yeah. Antonio Ribeiro: So, I did not really contacted people in the Brazilian Laravel community but we got in touch via IRC when Taylor was still very frequent. I don't know if they are now because I'm not very frequent now. Matt Stauffer: Not so much, no. Antonio Ribeiro: I know some people of the Laravel community, Laravel.com.br, which is the website but I just saw that they kind of let it down. Unfortunately, the last posts on the websites- Matt Stauffer: 2016. Antonio Ribeiro: 2016, yeah. One of these days, someone asked me if I was going to do a Laraconf Brazil actually. I didn't even know that it was happening so- Matt Stauffer: Right. Antonio Ribeiro: I just say, "I'm sorry." Matt Stauffer: Yeah, so you're relatively disconnected. Antonio Ribeiro: Yeah. Matt Stauffer: I want to get your whole backstory but I want everybody to have the context for what we're talking about here. Do you use Laravel in your day job? Antonio Ribeiro: Yes. Yes. Of course. Everything we do for the government, now, is done in Laravel. Matt Stauffer: Cool. Antonio Ribeiro: Mostly everything. I am a lead of a very small group of developers and we work primarily in Laravel. Laravel and VueJS. Matt Stauffer: Oh, very cool. Did you get in VueJS pretty early last summer or is it something you're jumping into more recently? Antonio Ribeiro: No, no. Pretty early Matt Stauffer: Okay. Cool. Antonio Ribeiro: Almost when Taylor started to talk about it, I got in. Matt Stauffer: Nice, very cool. It's interesting because I just googled your name so that I could throw your website into the show notes and found that you had done an interview on Laravel News. I try to read those beforehand so that I can make sure I'm not covering the same territory and I had never read that you've done that. I had no idea that happened. So, excuse me, I didn't do the research I should have done. But that's fine because I still have plenty of questions and curiosities. Okay. So, you are doing Laravel in your day job but you're also doing some stuff on the side. There's various level of folks who you're working with. You're in Stack Overflow English early. You're somewhat connected but it's been a little while with the Laravel Brazil community. One of the reasons I asked that is because my book has been translated into two or three languages and Brazilian Portuguese is one of them. I was pretty surprised by that because that takes a pretty big commitment for somebody in the community to have decided that it's a group they want to target. I was wondering if there's some huge Brazilian Laravel community that I wasn't aware of. It sounds like at least there at some point was but it, at least the one in Rio, might have gone a little quiet for a little while. Antonio Ribeiro: Yes, I think the community to large but they are not very connected. Matt Stauffer: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Antonio Ribeiro: I think they are more connected in the PHP community than in the Laravel community. Matt Stauffer: Got it. That makes sense. Okay, so before I got to your life story, I want you to give me a pitch real quick on the TDDD and then if there's any other one package that it's just really your favorite package or your favorite contribution to Laravel. I don't know if Stats Tracker or something else but first, tell me about TDDD as if I'd never heard of it before. Then, do you have any other packages that you really love and that you want to share with everybody? Antonio Ribeiro: Well, TDDD is becoming an app actually. It's an app for helping people do TDDD. Basically, you are writing tests. If you write tests before or during or after you are coding- doesn't matter. You can use it to help you test your app during development. You make a change in your code, it will run all your tests. If you do a change in one of your tests, it will run that test particularly. It's basically that. We have some other things it does. It is able to link all the lines of your failures so you can click a link and it will open your PHPStorm, or your Sublime Text, or VSCode. It doesn't matter what editor you are using. I just added code coverage to it so you can also see the code coverage there. It's basically that. You can add as many projects as you have. You can use whatever code editor you have. If you have a project which you have tests in JavaScript, in PHP, in any other thing, you can add as many suites you want to add on it so it's very flexible. I use it all the time. I think it's the package that I'm using the most these days. Matt Stauffer: Okay, very cool. Is this an app where you think that if anybody's doing TDD in Laravel, they should just be using TDDD? Or is it more for specific contexts and not for others? Antonio Ribeiro: No, everybody can use it. If you are using TDD in Laravel or PHP or you can use it in Ruby. It's very open. I think it's a good one to use because Freek has a package almost like it but it's for the command line. Matt Stauffer: Okay. Antonio Ribeiro: The difference for me is that I keep a monitor ... I have three monitors here. I keep a monitor with it and while I'm coding I'm looking at the monitor and seeing if anything is broken with the code that I'm writing. It's very handy. Matt Stauffer: That's really cool. I asked for one other package that is really big for you. I know you've been working on Version recently but I also know that Stats Tracker is one of your more popular ones. If you had one more of your packages that you think people should check out, which ones at the top of your brain? Antonio Ribeiro: I like, very much, Google 2FA but I think there are other options and people are using Authy which you can blend into Laravel very easily. I think Firewall is a package that people should look at. Matt Stauffer: Yeah, I use Firewall. Antonio Ribeiro: You use Firewall? Matt Stauffer: Yeah. I had basically written a crappy version of Firewall and then you can out with Firewall so I just switched over to using your package so ... Could you give like a high-level introduction to what Firewall is? Antonio Ribeiro: Firewall is basically something you put in front of your app to protect it. It's like a real firewall. The difference, of course, is that you cannot rely on Firewall for everything but you can rely on it for things like someone trying to exploit your app. A Firewall will be better on that but if someone tries to hit one route 50 times, it will warn you about them and it can block the person or block the country. It's very flexible in this way too. I like it because one of these days I found someone in Denmark trying to exploit one of my end points so it's cool. Matt Stauffer: Nice. Some of the things that Firewall can do is it black lists and white lists, it allows you to block people really easily. It also does some detection, like you were saying. It does some intelligent detection to find people causing problems. It's also got a couple other cool features. One of the things I liked was, you can basically send everybody on the whole site to a "Coming Soon" page except people with white-listed IP addresses. So there's a couple other tools that are in the same vein of Firewall but are not just for security purposes. Some of them are for access purposes as well. It's really, really fast. I think I remember looking at some other packages and they would add 50 to 100 milliseconds and your GitHub page says 10 milliseconds which is really basically negligible on most sites. Alright, so I have given a little bit of the high-level introduction. Who you are and what ... People may have heard of your or they may have seen your stuff before and not have always known. We're about to jump into the history of who you are but I wanted to point one thing out which is that for the longest time, I had difficulty remembering what your name was because you have an "I" in front of it in your twitter handle. So it says "iantontio" and I would always think, "His name is Iantonio or" ... But then I would remember there's a Carlos somewhere in there and I'd be like "Is it Ian Carlos" and I always had a lot of trouble. I've always wanted to tell you the "I" has been so confusing to me. Alright, so. Antonio Ribeiro: Sorry. Matt Stauffer: No no, you're fine. You said, when you're 12 years old you were in Switzerland? You were living there at the time and you got into computers and so you got a job delivering stuff so that you could have enough money to ... But what I'm curious about is, how did you actually get into computers in the first time? I don't want to go too far down this road but I will mention that there's a little more gray in your beard than there is my beard. Maybe I'll just say that. So at this point you were not discovering the same computers that I was discovering when I was 12 years old. What did it look like for you to learn about and get interested in computers and what were those first computers you were getting interested in at that point? Antonio Ribeiro: Commodore VIC-20 was the first computer I touched with my own fingers. People were talking very much about Commodore 64, I think. I wasn't able to use one but after some time I got back to Brazil. I went first to France. I was there for some time. Then I got to Switzerland, some cities in Switzerland. Then I got back to Brazil and I decided to do a course. I was 18, I think. Then I was really amazed by Apple computers and the first PCs in Brazil. I think it was that. Very early in computing, here in Brazil, I got catched by them. Matt Stauffer: Yeah, yeah. At that point, there were actually classes that you could be taking. You weren't having to teach you on your own, right? Antonio Ribeiro: Yes. Mostly, yes. That was my whole life because first I try a course to get classes and it was not very good because I was already reading a lot about computers and about programming. Then I got to try class of a friend of my father which basically gave me a book and a computer and told me to learn by myself. I was basically self-taught my whole life. Matt Stauffer: Was that Commodore 64 that you were working with at that point then? Antonio Ribeiro: No, at that point it was an Apple 2. Matt Stauffer: Oh okay. So I assume you were learning how to use the machine but were you learning coding, like AppleScript at that point? Or what were you learning at that point? Antonio Ribeiro: First, it was basic and then I got to dBase. You know dBase? Matt Stauffer: No, I've never heard of it. Antonio Ribeiro: Oh yeah. It's like a language for querying databases. Matt Stauffer: Oh okay. Antonio Ribeiro: It was not exactly a language. Then there was Clipper. I think Clipper is a little bit more popular that dBase. Matt Stauffer: I've never heard of Clipper either. dBase and Clipper. Okay. Antonio Ribeiro: Yeah, so those were the languages that I started to learn. Then after doing this course I went to a company to work for them but work and learn. It was more like a friend than a boss. There we started to work with C. Not C++ yet. This was before. We were building a translation system in Clipper and C. Matt Stauffer: Translation meaning translating languages. Antonio Ribeiro: Exactly. It was trying to translate from six different languages but it was like changing words, not really- Matt Stauffer: It didn't understand syntax. It just replaced one word with another? Antonio Ribeiro: Yeah, basically that. After, we started to translate to switch sentences and idioms and things like that. Matt Stauffer: You understood how to do the parsing well enough to write all that? Were you actively involved in writing those translation layers? Antonio Ribeiro: Yeah, it was not exactly a parsing. It was like, try to get the meaning in the sentence and just switch words. Matt Stauffer: Okay. Antonio Ribeiro: Really rudimentary I think. Matt Stauffer: Mm-hmm (affirmative). I'm trying to get all the age ranges here. You said when you got to Brazil you were taking courses so was that university when you got back home? Antonio Ribeiro: No. It was during high school. Matt Stauffer: Oh, okay. Was this job doing the translation layer, were you also still in school at that point? Or was that out of school? Antonio Ribeiro: Yes, yes. I was working then and studying at the same time. Always. Matt Stauffer: Okay, so what was your degree that you were seeking? Antonio Ribeiro: Some years after I got to do university here. I have a degree in computing. Matt Stauffer: Got it, yeah. It sounds like computers have been a thing for a very long time. The first thing you mentioned about when you were younger is getting into computers when you were 12 years old. I know that you're interested in photography and I feel like you've mentioned dancing at one point so I know you have some other things. Are those going as far back as computers, as well? Or have you sort of always been ... Computers is one of your biggest hobbies since the early days? Antonio Ribeiro: No. Both dancing and photography are things that I started five years ago, eight years ago. Eight years ago photography and five years ago dancing. At that point my wife had the dance classes. We are seven years together so seven years of dancing and eight years of photography. Matt Stauffer: That's amazing. What sort of dancing was it? Antonio Ribeiro: Samba. Do you know samba? Matt Stauffer: Yeah, yeah. I can't do it but I know what it is. [laughter] Antonio Ribeiro: Samba, rock-and-roll. We call it differently here but it's like rock-and-roll. And salsa. Matt Stauffer: My wife is a dancer and I'm one of the worst dancers of all time. She's like a professional dancer and I'm a klumbling, bumbling idiot so it's a very fun pair. I know the words even if I don't know how to do anything. So five to ten years of photography, five to ten years of dancing, but this computer thing goes the whole way back there. Was it weird that you were 12 and you were into computing and it wasn't as much of a cultural phenomenon ... I mean, a 12 year old kid that's into computers today is just no big deal. Being a 12 year old in the 90's, for me, was a little bit weird. I get the sense that you were in the 12 year old more in the late 80's or something like that. Was it culturally strange in Switzerland, where you were, or was this a normative thing? Was it normal in Brazil? Was it weird in Brazil? What, culturally, was it like being that into computers that young? Antonio Ribeiro: I think it was completely different for people to know that I was excited about something nobody knew at the time. It was very, very expensive. In Brazil, a computer- it was like buying a car or two. My mother didn't want me to go to that path because she didn't believe very much in the power of a computer. I had to be an engineer or something like that. Matt Stauffer: Yeah, yeah. Antonio Ribeiro: So I asked her to buy me a computer and she basically said no, of course not. Matt Stauffer: Of course not. What are you talking about? What was it that interested you so much about computers when you were 12? What was the thing that you saw or the possibilities that you saw or did you see a specific thing happen and you say, "I want to be able to do that"? What was it Antonio Ribeiro: I think it was exactly that. Infinite possibilities. Matt Stauffer: And you were able to figure that out? That early? Antonio Ribeiro: Yeah, I think so. For a lot of time, in that department store, I was just trying to figure out what the thing was about. I was able to play with it and to write things and to create small programs. It was really cool. Matt Stauffer: I learned basic but you said, this was the Commodore 64, or VIC-something, or I don't know. What were you writing at that point? Antonio Ribeiro: VIC-20. Matt Stauffer: Yeah, 20. What were you writing in at that point, when you were really getting started? Antonio Ribeiro: I don't remember. I was just copying stuff from magazines and then changing words and changing functions. Matt Stauffer: And seeing if you could control things, yeah. Antonio Ribeiro: Yeah. Matt Stauffer: Very cool. When you were back in Brazil, you started studying things. You got the job translating. It seems like you were always had multiple fingers in multiple pies, as the expression goes. What was your goal then? Did you have a goal other than just to do more stuff with computers? Antonio Ribeiro: Learning was always my goal. Even today. What happened there ... Actually I was working for another company in Brazil before going to that job. There I learned to write a little bit more of Clipper and when I go to the company of the translation, I decided I was able to do the translation system in a different way. What we had at the time, it was a software that was plugged into a editor like Microsoft Word. It was not that, it was another editor. It was able to get the words from the editor and write words in another language. So I decided to build an editor which was able to translate at the same time. Matt Stauffer: Oh my gosh. Like a Word Perfect type thing. Antonio Ribeiro: Yeah, exactly. Before Word Perfect. Matt Stauffer: Oh god. That's no big project or anything like that. No big deal. [laughter] Okay so how'd that work for you? Antonio Ribeiro: I was young and I had no idea- [laughter] Matt Stauffer: That's fantastic. How long did that dream last? Antonio Ribeiro: That dream come true. Matt Stauffer: You actually built one? Antonio Ribeiro: Yeah! It was released and it was sold to a lot of people. Matt Stauffer: It was you working alone? Antonio Ribeiro: For some time, yeah. Until I got everything almost done, it was me in secret. Then it became a project from the company. Matt Stauffer: Oh okay. So the company that you were working for sort of absorbed it and then they released it but it was your work originally. Antonio Ribeiro: Yeah but for the company. I was working there. Matt Stauffer: Sure. What I'm hearing you say is- Antonio Ribeiro: Nobody knew exactly what I was doing but I was working there. Matt Stauffer: What I'm hearing you say is that at a relatively young age, you built a word processor from scratch that was live-translating from one language to another that was released and purchased by many, many, many people. Antonio Ribeiro: Yes. Matt Stauffer: No big deal. No big deal. You just do it in your sleep, ya know? [laughter] We've talked about your work there. You released that thing. What was next after that? I assumed you worked there for a little while. You said you started there when you were in school so what was the next big move whether being done with school or being with that company or geographic move- what was the next thing that went from there? Antonio Ribeiro: No big moves. I went from one job to another because I was always seeking something new to do, something new to learn. When I was 21, my girlfriend got pregnant so I got married. Things got a little bit different because I was not working for learning anymore. I was working for money. Matt Stauffer: For providing, yeah. Antonio Ribeiro: To provide. I went to university when my daughter was already born. Then I went and worked for another company of a big friend. Then I stayed there for five or six years and then around 1998 I decided to move completely to a completely different life and built a webhost company. There I working for a company. I was trying to get into the public serving. I was doing a concourse, I don't know how to say that in English but you have to do a test to enter to public serving. Matt Stauffer: Like a certification? Antonio Ribeiro: No, it's like ... I don't know exactly how to say that in English. Matt Stauffer: Okay. Antonio Ribeiro: It's a concourse. You have a lot of people competing for a position in the company. Matt Stauffer: Oh, it's almost like a competition and you have to get a better score on an exam, or something like that? Antonio Ribeiro: Yeah, that's it exactly. Exactly like that. I don't know if you have that in US. Matt Stauffer: I'm sure that concept exists where multiple people are competing for the same promotion. I don't know if it's such a normative thing where we have a word for it though. That makes sense though, what you're saying. Antonio Ribeiro: I got a position; we built the company, me and Anselmo, my partner. The company was doing a lot of things and we were also working for another company rebuilding their system. They have the system written in Pascal. You know Pascal? Matt Stauffer: Mm-hmm (affirmative). I don't know it but I know what it is. Antonio Ribeiro: Actually, TurboPascal at the time and we decided to move everything to Delphi. Matt Stauffer: Okay. Antonio Ribeiro: Me and him, basically, he wrote a 20 year old software into Delphi. Matt Stauffer: Wow. Antonio Ribeiro: That was our greatest move at the time, I think. The company had a lot of clients and nobody knew exactly how to build things for Windows, at the time. Everybody was still working on DOS. The company had five or six different big softwares including a healthcare system using Pascal and everything running DOS. We had to move to Windows because DOS was dying at the time. I think it was almost dead. Matt Stauffer: Yeah. Antonio Ribeiro: That was a really big move. For that move, why we decided to go in this path was because they offered us part of the company. Matt Stauffer: For rewriting all those systems? Antonio Ribeiro: So we had 20% of the company and 13 years ago this move and everything switched and the software was working, they basically cut us off the contact. Matt Stauffer: But you had 20% of the company at that point, right? Antonio Ribeiro: No, not anymore. We lost everything. Matt Stauffer: Oh my gosh. Antonio Ribeiro: That was 2013. It was exactly when I decided go web. We were not web anymore. Actually, the whole problem was we were talking to them that we needed to go to the web. Move everything to the web as fast as we could because everybody else was already there. Matt Stauffer: Right. Antonio Ribeiro: So, they say to us, "No, we cannot do that now" and just cut us off. End of story. Matt Stauffer: I don't wanna go too deep into money issues but if you own 20%, did they just force you to sell your shares? I don't know how that worked legally. Or was it more of an agreement where that was a little more casual. Antonio Ribeiro: Yeah, that was the problem actually. We had no contract. We had no shares. We had nothing. It was basically friends doing something really big together for 10 years or 13 years. They just stopped giving us money and end of story. Matt Stauffer: I don't mean to at all preach in the face of something difficult that you're going through but my business partner, Dan, and I have found that since the beginning of us starting the company together we said, "you know what, we have each been burned in this similar way at some point in our lives. Where we go into business with friends and just hugely regret it later". Because you're working with friends you don't do the same level of protection that you might've normally done otherwise and so what we decided to do as we started our company was to be very legalistic. Even more than you might be with someone that you don't know so that at no point do we get to a point where our friendship is on the rocks because of those tensions. Because everything's explicitly spelled out. But obviously we had that after having been burned multiple times just like you were on that one. So I know how that feels although I don't think to the level that you experienced so I'm sorry. That's not fun. Antonio Ribeiro: Yeah. Matt Stauffer: How did you guys recover from that? That's a hard hit. What did you do next? Antonio Ribeiro: I was lucky because I had two different jobs. The job I still have now, working for government, I had it because it will basically give me money for the rest of my life. Matt Stauffer: Right. Antonio Ribeiro: So I lost 50% of what I was making at the time but that's not really bad. Matt Stauffer: It's not the end of the world. Antonio Ribeiro: I had to move from the apartment I was in. A lot of things happened in my life but I survived. And him too. So it's okay. Matt Stauffer: Okay. I like the attitude. The hosting provider, is that still going on? Because you've mentioned working for the government. You've mentioned working for the translation people. Then you switched jobs to other people. You're mentioned these folks who you had the 20% with but you don't anymore. You mentioned the hosting provider that you created. I'm not always fully following who you work for at any given moment so you're definitely still working for the government because you just told me that. Are you still doing this hosting thing? Antonio Ribeiro: No, not anymore. Matt Stauffer: Oh okay. Antonio Ribeiro: We had to close everything because- Matt Stauffer: Oh I'm sorry. Antonio Ribeiro: The money that we were making with the other company was providing a lot of things, including the hosting company that was not very profitable at the time. Matt Stauffer: Got it. Antonio Ribeiro: So we closed it. Very fast. Matt Stauffer: When you said hosting company, the first that came to my mind was your were running some servers and you were renting out shared hosting but you've never actually said that. What sort of hosting were you renting and what sort of folks were your clients? Antonio Ribeiro: Exactly that. The hosting company started because we knew a little bit about internet. We saw some hosting companies doing really bad things in the market and we decided to get one client of ours, which was not exactly that company that was our partner, and build a site for them. For that we needed a good webserver so we learn a lot of Linux at the time, Debian Linux, build a server, got a home internet connection, discovered how to make things happen to get a DNS up, Apache mail server ... So we learn everything in three months and we got it up. Matt Stauffer: Geez. Antonio Ribeiro: Got it all up and the company was online, working- Matt Stauffer: You said home internet server. You were able to get a fixed IP address though, right? Antonio Ribeiro: Yes. Afterwards, yeah. We started with an IP address. Actually, our tests were all doing at home. Then we got an IP address in an office of a friend in downtown so it was that. After that, we moved our server collocation inside the center and got more servers and the thing got really big. Matt Stauffer: Right. Was it just the two of you remoting into those servers in the collocation center or did you start having other folks working for you as well? Antonio Ribeiro: Not in the webservers company. It was only me and him. Matt Stauffer: Okay. What do you use for hosting now for your side projects? Are you a Linode guy or are you hosting your own stuff? Antonio Ribeiro: Yeah, I host everything in Digital Ocean using Laravel Forge. Matt Stauffer: Yeah. Antonio Ribeiro: Except for my backups that are on Amazon. Matt Stauffer: I do the same thing. I know my way around a basic Linode server or an Nginx and Apache and stuff like that but I'm not to the point where I could be running my own hosting service. It's interesting to hear someone who has such a depth of experience in hosting still choosing. Saying, "Hey this is the easiest way to do it so why not". Antonio Ribeiro: Yeah. Matt Stauffer: So that was 2013. Those things shut down. Since 2013, obviously you've mentioned that the last time the Laravel meet-up was going was in 2016 and you said at that point you had already kind of stepped away a little bit. What have the last four years been like? What have you been working on? Obviously you're still spitting our packages and I'm guessing you're still answering questions on Stack Overflow, although I have not looking at how recent your most recent was. What else are you up to? What are you most interested in? What have you been learning and excited about learning recently? Antonio Ribeiro: I'm learning JavaScript now. Matt Stauffer: Okay, got it. Antonio Ribeiro: I got into VueJS very early but I did not move my thinks to VueJS. Right now everything I do is Laravel, back end API, VueJS front end. Matt Stauffer: Got it. Antonio Ribeiro: The past four years, I was basically learning, doing some jobs and some websites for one or another people or company. Doing some contracting work. Everything is small. Two years ago we started to build things in the government using Laravel so it got really big. I have at least five sites and two mobile apps using Laravel. One of the sites, we have a voting system for young congressmen in Rio de Janeiro. Matt Stauffer: Cool. Antonio Ribeiro: Yeah. My company, it has a program for young congressmen so every year we have all the schools in the state, the students, trying to become young congressmen. We have a big voting, I think in July, and then they go to be a congressman for a week. Creating bills and voting bills in and afterwards those bills usually become a real state bill. Matt Stauffer: Really? Antonio Ribeiro: Yeah really. Matt Stauffer: Wow, that's fascinating. And a little bit terrifying, but mainly fascinating Antonio Ribeiro: [laughter] Everything is done with our real congressman so it's cool. Matt Stauffer: So, you built that. I assume you're using View Router and Laravel is really just basically spitting out the view initialization and then the API but none of the front end of those applications is actually built by Laravel? Or is it more of a mix? Antonio Ribeiro: Oh, no. The APIs, Laravel, the front end, is usually view. Particularly this one is not 100% view yet because it has one year and a half. But it basically VueJS. Matt Stauffer: Stepping outside of coding a little bit, I am going to admit that I am an extraordinarily, commonly ignorant American when it comes to most things Brazil, Portuguese, and even Rio. I've seen a couple movies. I watched City of God a whole bunch of times. My sister lived in Rio for a year and my book was translated- Antonio Ribeiro: Oh yeah? Matt Stauffer: Yeah, she's obsessed with Portuguese. When I went home for Thanksgiving a couple of weeks ago, she had been at the bank after coming back from a year living in Brazil and she heard two people speaking Brazilian Portuguese. She walked up, she said "Excuse me, are you from Brazil?" And they look at her like she's a crazy person. They say "Yes, we just moved here and we're setting up our first bank account". She said, "Let's be friends!" And so they and one of her other random Brazilian friends were over at my family's house for Thanksgiving and my son does capoeira so he was like doing the capoeira plays back and forth with one of the guys who does capoeira. I have this very tiny, tiny, tiny side influence that is bringing more than average amount of Brazil into my life but I really know very, very little about the city. I know very little about the country. I know very little about the language. So as a total American idiot who doesn't know anything, let's start with Rio. What aspect of Rio do you feel like, if someone were to visit, they just needed to take in? Obviously, there's a couple specific tourist sites but what aspect of living there and being there do you think is really interest and unique relative to other similar countries that you would really want people to know about? Antonio Ribeiro: Yeah, I think if you are coming to Brazil you have to come blend. The people are the best. We are, I'll not say "cool", but we are good. We are warming. We love to chat, to be with people, to laugh. Knowing the city is something that will happen really fast if you know people here because, of course, you can go to tourist sites. It's easy to get a book and go to tourist sites but to eat food, if you like food, to eat good food. To know amazing restaurants and not very known restaurants. You have to know people. You have to make friends here. And its very easy to make friends in Brazil. Really, really easy. Matt Stauffer: I like that. Talking about food, if there was one food that you would want everyone to try, what would it be? Antonio Ribeiro: My American boss was in Brazil last week. I got them to eat a lamb. There is a very good lamb here in Lapa. I don't know if you know the name. Matt Stauffer: No. Antonio Ribeiro: It's a very popular part of the city where you can find a lot of bars opening at night. Friday and Saturday you go there and you will probably see like 200 persons. 200,000 persons in that part of the city. It's really very crowded. So the lamb. Matt Stauffer: So, if I were go to and I were to visit, I would need to get lamb. I would make friends with people. Get to know ... And honestly that's one of the most commonly known things about Brazil. It's just wonderful. A lot of the stereotypes also have to do with parties and fun and entertainment and Carnival and all that kind of stuff. Are there any stereotypes or any common misconceptions you think that people have about Brazil and Brazilians that you think aren't true that you want to dispel? Antonio Ribeiro: Probably, people think that Rio in particular is too dangerous to know. Of course, it's dangerous. We are living in dangerous times. But it's not like that. You can come here and you will be safe. It's not like something bad will happen as you as you touch the soil. Matt Stauffer: Walk out the door, right. Antonio Ribeiro: It's safe here. It's a good place to be. Matt Stauffer: Cool, I like that. We're a little short on time but I want to make sure that we touch into the other things that you're really passionate about. We've got dancing and photography cued up. I do want to ask before I go into those two, am I missing anything about you? Is there an aspect of who you are or what you've done, a part of your story or anything, that I've just completely missed that you really want to make sure people get the chance to hear? Antonio Ribeiro: Not at the top of my mind, I don't think so. Matt Stauffer: Okay, so let's talk photography. Antonio Ribeiro: Probably yes, but nothing I can remember. Matt Stauffer: Alright, let's talk photography. What got you into photography? What sort of things do you primarily focus on photographing? How much is it actually a part of your life right now? I know it has been as some point, is it still? Antonio Ribeiro: Yeah, I got into photography because I love to make photos. I'm very technical with everything I do so I like very much to program my camera. Matt Stauffer: Are you a manual-mode kind of guy? Antonio Ribeiro: Yes, yes. I do all the time. I love to take pictures of people. This may be what I do the best. Matt Stauffer: Uh-huh. Antonio Ribeiro: I got known in the photography world by taking pictures of shows and nature. Matt Stauffer: Like music shows? Antonio Ribeiro: Music shows, yeah. Because of the dancing, which is the other, I got to the music of the city. To know a lot of musicians, to be with musicians. I have at least two great friends in music here in Rio. I got to photograph them. Today I think their photos in Facebook and Twitter are my photos. Matt Stauffer: When you go straight to your website, you see photography right in there. Is the background of your website, is that a photo you took? Antonio Ribeiro: Yes. Everything, yes. Matt Stauffer: That's gorgeous. It doesn't look real. I assumed, even though I knew you did photography, I assumed you must not have taken them because they're so beautiful. I'm really impressed with this. Antonio Ribeiro: All of them. You're talking about which one? Matt Stauffer: Well, the first ones that came up the last few times I went were a couple of the view of Rio from above. Then, obviously, I'm sure you're aware it keeps cycling through photos. These are incredible photos. Do you consider yourself a professional photographer? Antonio Ribeiro: Yes but I don't make money from photography. I have some professional work, three or four, but I'm not really into it. I'm not photography too much these days. Photography takes a lot of time. You have to really stop and look at the photo. Retouch sometimes. That takes a lot of time too. It's time consuming so I don't have that time now. Matt Stauffer: Yeah. It's mildly offensive that you can say that you don't even have time for photography and you don't do much and then your photos are this good. I'm just going to tell you that right now. Antonio Ribeiro: Yes. I agree. Matt Stauffer: Yeah, this is really beautiful stuff. Folks who are listening, definitely check it out. Of course this will all be in the show notes. Okay so, do you and your wife still dance a lot? Antonio Ribeiro: We dance a little bit. Not as much as we would like to dance and we are not in the dance classes anymore. We were in the beginning of the year. We went back to the dance classes but our lives are getting too crazy to be there, to go to class every week at such time. It's hard. It's hard for us. Matt Stauffer: Yeah, absolutely. Especially when you have a family. There's just a lot of obligations that come from family and come from work and everything like that. I'm finding that I haven't picked up a lot of my hobbies. Somebody asked in the Laravel advent "What are your hobbies" and I laughed and I said, "Keeping my kids alive". There's just times when, if everybody's alive and fed at the end of the time and the house hasn't burned down, I'm considering it a win. Cool. Well, we're coming up on time. I know I said is there any high-level aspects of your story that we haven't covered but are there any projects or any frameworks or any packages or any conferences or meet ups that you'd like to plug, you want to talk about, or you want to make sure people know about? Antonio Ribeiro: No, I don't think so. I'm basically trying to get into my packages a little bit more. I'm trying to rewrite Tracker from scratch. Matt Stauffer: Oh cool. Antonio Ribeiro: Yeah, because it's getting old. Codes is really ugly to look at right now. I think I have changed as a coder in the past years. Matt Stauffer: It's a couple years old, right? Antonio Ribeiro: Yeah, yeah. It's like two or three years old. I think it was the first big package that I wrote and people really like it. I think I have to give some love to the package again. Matt Stauffer: Yeah, yeah. It's this thing where we look at our old code and we can't imagine how we ever wrote like that but it's still our baby. I like it. It's hard every time. It's hard to cut off talking when I have so many more questions but I feel like we've covered a really good chunk. We made it from at least age 14 until today, even if we probably missed a lot of interesting digressions we could have taken. Thank you so much for your time. It was a ton of fun talking to you. I love getting to learn about you. Thank you for the contribution you make, especially because often you're making those contributions ... Again, I don't want to say nobody knows who you are or anything like that but you're consistently helping. Getting a good Stack Overflow score means that you have helped a huge number of people. You've helped me many, many, many times. So, for the tireless work that you do helping people in our community- thank you very, very, very much. Antonio Ribeiro: Thanks for having me and thanks for inviting me do this interview. And thanks for your blogging too because your blog posts are helping me all the time as well. Matt Stauffer: I love it. Well, I promise that I'm gonna do my best to actually writing them again. I'm in the same pit as you where anything other than the day job and keeping my family alive have really dropped. But my hope for 2018, let's get back into doing these side things and working on our packages and our blogs. Antonio, thank you so much for your time. Everybody else, see everything you need in the show notes. Just go to laravelpodcast.com and we'll see you next time. [music]

This episode was recorded 26 May 2014 live and in person at Brent's office in sunny, lovely Ballard. You can download the m4a file or subscribe in iTunes. (Or subscribe to the podcast feed.) Brent has worked at UserLand Software and NewsGator and as an indie at his company Ranchero Software. These days he's one-third of Q Branch, where he writes Vesper. He is also the co-host of this podcast. This episode is sponsored by Tagcaster. Tagcaster is not just another podcast client — it solves the age-old problem of linking to specific parts of a podcast. You can make clips — short audio excerpts — and share them and link to them. After all these years, that problem is finally solved. This episode is also sponsored by Igloo. Igloo is an intranet you'll actually like, with shared calendars, microblogs, file-sharing, social networking, and more. It's free for up 10 users — give it a try for your company or your team today. This episode is also sponsored by Hover. Hover makes domain name management easy. And it's a snap to transfer domains from other registrars using their valet service. Get 10% off your first purchase with the promotional code MANILA. (Manila was the name of the blogging system worked on at UserLand.) Take a look. Things we mention, more or less in order of appearance: NetNewsWire MarsEdit Glassboard Vesper Manila The University of Chicago DuPont Punched cards University of Delaware Newark, Delaware Fortran 1980 Apple II Plus PLATO Brent's Mom 6502 Assembly 80 column card ALF II Music Construction Set Beatles Rolling Stones Pil Ochs Judy Collins Boby Dylan West Side Story Hair Broadway Soundtrack Delicious Library Epson MX-80 Columbia House Records Cindy Lauper Born in the USA The Clash London Calling Pascal Evergreen State College 1992 1989 Seattle Central Community College City Collegian QuarkXpress LaserWriter Mac IIcx Radius monitor Silo Goodwill Symantec C Grenoble, France Microsoft Word Microsoft Excel Seattle Boeing Photovoltaics University of Washington Institut de Biologie Structurale CEA CNRS Alps (the mountains) Gopher Pine International Herald Tribune Kronenbourg Killian's Red Isère River Chinook's Eskimo dial-up account Zterm Lynx AltaVista Seanet MacTCP MacPPP AppleTalk Yahoo Info-Mac Archive Kagi Maelstrom Performa 604 After Dark Bungie Andrew Welch Usenet fuckingblocksyntax.com Dave Winer UserLand Frontier Aretha release UserLand Software AppleScript HyperCard WebSTAR MacPerl MySQL Spotlight Filemaker Pro Indianapolis Star News Woodside, CA Jake Savin San Francisco Robert Scoble Millbrae Palo Alto Windows Visual Studio CodeWarrior PowerPlant MacApp Toolbox Xcode Project Builder Carbon QuickDraw Open Transport Manila EditThisPage.com Daily Kos joel.editthispage.com Aaron Hillegass's Book on Cocoa Radio UserLand Python MacNewsWire RSS WebKit Safari MSIE for Mac Camino NetNewsWire 1.0 screen shot RealBasic BBEdit Lite TextWrangler Carmen's Headline Viewer Syndirella AmphetaDesk My.Netscape.Com Safari/RSS Ecto Movable Type Mac OS X Server NewsGator Palm Treo FeedDemon Nick Bradbury Greg Reinacker Outlook TapLynx Push IO Sepia Labs Cultured Code and Things Black Pixel Red Sweater Oracle Justin Wiliams NetNewsWire Lite 4.0 for Macintosh Vesper Sync Diary WWDC Parc 55

Robert and Allison have the pleasure of spending this Tech Doctor episode with Keith Watson. Keith is a creative and talented Apple power user who has taught himself to write sophisticated macros using Apple's built-in scripting language called Apple Script. Recently, Keith began integrating his apple script macros into an extremely feature-rich Mac utility called Keyboard Maestro. With the touch of a key, Keith's macros can do such things as speak the current weather, announce free disk space and check the state of an otherwise inaccessible application called Caffeine. Keith is making these macros available to anyone who has Keyboard Maestro installed. You can get more information and download the macros at Keith's Website. In addition to thanking Keith for his work, Robert and Allison want to express our appreciation to Peter, the developer of Keyboard Maestro, who has worked hard to improve support for VoiceOver. In this Blog Post Peter even offers some sample code to show developers how he has improved VoiceOver access in Keyboard Maestro. This is an excellent example of how the Apple Community works together to improve accessibility.

This episode was recorded 17 May 2013 live and in person at Omni's lovely offices overlooking Lake Union in Seattle. You can download the m4a file or subscribe in iTunes. (Or subscribe to the podcast feed.) Gus Mueller, Flying Meat founder, created VoodooPad (now at Plausible Labs) and Acorn, the image editor for humans. Gus is also responsible for open source software such as FMDB and JSTalk. This episode is sponsored by Squarespace. Get 10% off by going to http://squarespace.com/therecord. Better still: go work for Squarespace! They're hiring 30 engineers and designers by March 15, and, “When you interview at Squarespace, we'll invite you and your spouse or partner to be New Yorkers for a weekend—on us.” The great designers at Squarespace have designed an entire weekend for you, from dining at Alder to going to the Smalls Jazz Club and visiting The New Museum. Seriously cool deal at beapartofit.squarespace.com. This episode is also sponsored by Microsoft Azure Mobile Services. Mobile Services is a great way to provide backend services — syncing and other things — for your iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps. Write code — Javascript code — in your favorite text editor on your Mac. (Mobile Services runs Node.js.) Deploy via git. Write unit tests using mocha (or your tool of choice). Supports authenticating via Twitter, Facebook, and Google — and you can roll your own system. It's cool. Things we mention, in order of appearance (more or less): Rock climbing Luke Adamson Missouri 2001 2002 Cocoa Apple IIc 1993 Mac Color Classic BASIC ELIZA Artificial Intelligence Assembler Missile Command Java Eric Albert Perl Animated GIFs CGIs Server push images REALBasic PC Apple IIe DOS Colossal Caves Plover Nibble Civilization UNIX AIX A/UX St. Louis Columbia Math is hard Single sign-on Servlets OS X WWDC Rhapsody 1995 MacPERL NiftyTelnet BBEdit FlySketch Coffee Picasso's bull sketches VoodooPad 22" Cinema Display OS X Innovator's Award O'Reilly Peter Lewis Rich Siegel Mark Aldritt Ambrosia Panic Transmit Audion O'Reilly Mac OS Conference Audio Hijack Paul Kafasis SubEthaEdit Mac Pro Ireland XML PDF Victoria's Secret Caterpillar Adobe InDesign OS X Server Xserve Macintosh G5 MacUpdate VersionTracker QuickDraw Kerberos HyperCard Objective-C messaging system Aaron Hillegass's book Java-Cocoa bridge JDBC Oracle databases 2005 Seattle Microsoft Parents Just Don't Understand Vancouver, BC B.B. King Seattle Xcoders Joe Heck University of Missouri Evening at Adler Wil Shipley Daniel Jalkut Eric Peyton Quicksilver Rosyna Chicago Drunkenbatman Adler Planetarium C4 Wolf Colin Barrett Delicious Generation Disco.app My Dream App Chimera / Camino Santa Clara World Wrapps Buzz Andersen Quartz Core Image Filters Bezier curves Wacom Unit tests Automated builds ZeroLink Metrowerks CodeWarrior NeXT BeOS Macintosh Performa Display Postscript SGIs Sun boxes Mac OS 8 MachTen Netscape Internet Explorer for Mac OS Outlook Express OmniGroup Shakespeare's pizza Pagliacci Neapolitan pizza Everett FIOS Fender Stratocaster GarageBand AudioBus Adobe Photoshop Adobe Photoshop Elements JSTalk AppleScript SQLite WebKit Napkin

This episode was recorded 22 May 2013 live and in person at Adobe's offices in Fremont in Seattle. You can download the m4a file or subscribe in iTunes. (Or subscribe to the podcast feed.) John Nack is Principal Product Manager, Adobe Digital Video. He has a blog (definitely worth reading, especially if you use Photoshop) and is @jnack on Twitter. This episode is sponsored by Microsoft Azure Mobile Services. One of the cooler features recently added is the ability to create custom APIs. Originally you were limited to standard operations on your database tables — but now you can design any API you want. This allows you to create a full REST/JSON API that's tailored to your app, that works as efficiently as possible. (And it's all in JavaScript. Mobile Services runs Node.js. Write your apps in your favorite text editor on your Mac.) Things we mention, in order of appearance (pretty much): Adobe LiveMotion Photoshop John's Blog Kurt Vonnegut Granfalloons despair.com Cocoa 64-bit Carbon 64-bit Unfrozen Cave Man Olive Garden South Bend, Indiana Tiramisu St. Sebastian Breadsticks Monkeys 2005 Movable Type DeBabelizer GifBuilder Anarchie 1984 Mac 2001 Algonquin Hotel Apple II PCjr ASCII Art Clip Art Googly Eyes Bill Atkinson MacPaint Rorschach Test Apple II GS Great Books Quadra 840AV Quadra Ad Director SuperCard Søren Kierkegaard Immanuel Kant Notre Dame Football Windows NT HTML New York City 1998 Flash Macromedia Illustrator Navy ROTC San Francisco GoLive NetNewsWire After Effects Thomas Knoll Camera Raw Photoshop Touch Germany Philistinism Perfectionism Volkswagen Carbon-dating Web Standards SVG CSS Gus Mueller Acorn Neven Mrgan Khoi Vinh Croatia Portland JDI Healing Brush Buck Rogers Creative Cloud Facebook Smugmug WWDC Jetta Ketchup Death-march Comic Book Guy John Gruber “If you see a stylus, they blew it.” Microsoft Surface Metro UI Rahm Emmanuel: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” The Mythical Man-Month Content-Aware Fill Shawshank InDesign Adobe Magazine Nike PageMaker Postscript SLR Lightroom Black & Decker Dr. Evil Loren Brichter Instagram Kickstarter NGO Tumblr Acquisition Troy Gaul Blurb The Onion: Report: 98 Percent Of U.S. Commuters Favor Public Transportation For Others Data T-1000 Syria MacApp Resource Manager John Knoll Industrial Light & Magic QuickTime OpenDoc Corba OLE SnapSeed Mac System 6 Apple events AppleScript Audio Bus 1992 “The only time you should start worrying about a soldier is when they stop bitchin'” Alan Kay: “The Mac is the first computer good enough to be criticized.” TapBots Tweetbot 2 Android Kai's Power Tools Kai Krause Fremont RUN DMC Porsche Boxster Flavawagon Google Glass Robert Scoble

John, Dave and, yes, Pilot Pete come together to share as much Mac knowledge as they possibly can in “just about an hour.” Moving from iOS Battery Life help to AppleScript walkthroughs, your favorite Mac Geeks have a lot to teach you this time around. Enjoy and download today, it's […]

John and Dave come to you today with a fantastic mix of questions, comments, tips and geekery! Topics include customizing the top bar in the FInder, CD Burner issues, figuring out how much RAM you have (and how you can upgrade), solving Bonjour problems, and fixing a bootup problem or […]