Upgrade - 630: Repeat 600 Times

Episode Date: July 27, 2026

From Relay, this is Upgrade episode 630 for July 27th, 2026. Today's show is brought to you by Backblaze, Claude, and Century. My name is Mike Hurley, and I'm joined by Jason Snow. Hi, Jason Snell. Hi, Mike Hurley. It doesn't feel like July 27. It doesn't, because it is the summer of fun. Summer fun! And we're recording this episode like a week early.

Because we're, I think, both traveling? I know I am. I think this one's on you. This one's on you. This one's on me. I'll take this one. So we're actually going to do a fully out of time episode today. We've got a fun thing planned.

But before we talk about that, I have a Snell talk question for you. Great. This comes from Stephen Hackett, who wants to know, does Jason still shut down his Mac at night? Okay, look, I answered this in the connected feedback form as requested. I saw it. I saw it. But now we're doing it here.

Okay. All right. perhaps it will have already been addressed on Connected last week. No. No, okay. No, no, no. Because I'm doing it here. And Stephen's not on that episode or wasn't on that episode, I guess?

We're recording so far in advance because of my travel. I am traveling this last week. But then you're traveling. Anyway, it's a mess. It's a whole thing. This is why we do the summer of fun. And actually, the way that this was phrased when I first saw it was, was, does Jason still shut down his laptop at night?

But that misses the point. It's shut down his Mac. at night. I used to have a desktop Mac. Yes. I used to have a Mac studio and before that, an IMac Pro. Yeah. And at the end of the day, I would leave my garage and that was it for the day. And I wasn't going to come back in here and do another couple of things or whatever. And so I would shut down because it has the advantages of sometimes things get weird after the Mac has been running for a little while. I would just shut down in the morning I'd start up. It also meant that I had a switching power supply or like, power strip. So like when I shut down the computer, it would turn off my studio display. I have some

USB devices that I don't want. I really just don't want the USB device on 24 hours a day. They're attached to the studio display. So when the, when the computer goes down, all the power goes down. And that means the USB devices go down. It's a very good system. When I got a laptop, I did change things because now that I have a laptop, I feel like you don't shut down a laptop. night. You just laptops, you just close them, put it to sleep. And in fact, since I'm doing this single cable life, what I do at the end of the day

is unplug the cable. And that does everything you need, doesn't it? And in fact, it turns out that although it's a little bit more carefully set, I have a Thunderball Hub. And the Thunderball Hub draws power because it's powering the laptop. And that, I can set that.

So when I unplug my laptop, the Thunderbolt dock knows it's not plugged in anymore. It's not drawing power, at which point my switching power supply turns off. And my studio display loses power, my USB interface to audio loses power. Everything shuts down. And that's what I want. So that's the method now is I don't put my computer to sleep at the end of the day. I unplug it. And it's usually lid closed.

So I literally literally just pull the plug out and then, walk away. And so it's asleep sitting on my desk. And in fact, if I need to do something, I can come back in and plug it back in or I can pick up a laptop. I had that happen the other week where I was working on something out here late in the evening. Lauren was working late. And I was working out here on something using Claude Code. I was building a tool for us to use for designing California. And I was still in it. And she came home. We watched some TV and I was like, I got to finish this thing. And I thought about like, like, like, maybe I could do like a screen share from my iPad.

And I thought, oh, I have a laptop. I'm just going to pick up a laptop and carry it to the, into the house and keep working on it, which is a thing you can do with a laptop, which is nice. So that's my answer is I have a similar setup. And I find value, just as I found value in shutting down at the end of the day, because it's creating a little bit more of a barrier for going back out and doing a little more work because I try to, when I'm done for the day, I try to market as done for the day, especially since I do a lot of podcasts in the evening for incomparable and stuff,

like when it's a day where I feel like, you know, this is it. And it's going to be dinner and watching some TV and stuff like that. I want there to be a little bit more of a barrier there. It's just now it's the pulling the plug instead. I pull that fender bowl cable out. I'm happy because if you were shutting down a laptop every day, that would be madness. That's not how you do it. I just need a barrier.

And so that's my little ceremony. is I pull the plug. That's my comfort. That's it. If you would like to send in a question to help us open a future episode of Upgrade, just go to Upgradefeedback.com and send in your Snow Talk question.

So today's episode is a Macintosh workflow special. We're going to talk about our Macs. We're going to talk about how we use them and how we got our stuff done and also recommend some of our favorite utilities for people to use. And this came from a couple of, of questions that we've gotten recently-ish. Pierre Luke wrote in and said, I bought an M3

Pro MacBook Pro in April and I'm still wondering what are some of the best utilities you think are essential for you, what are some recommendations you have? And Dylan wrote and said, I just replaced my MacBook Pro of an M5 MacBook Air. It's been so long since I got a new OS that I've forgotten things that may have missed out on what should be first on my list of things to try. Yeah, you lift out the important thing. Dylan replaced a 2014 map. Oh, yes. Wow. Okay, that's a good time. You're going to have a good time. So this, thank you for that. When I saw 2014, I was like, that wasn't that long ago. That was the thought I had in my head. But no, that's a very long time ago. And so when thinking about, you know, we knew we had this episode, USU suggested, like, we've kept

some of these questions in the document for a while. It's like, oh, we could build whole episodes around this. And so this is a great time to do it. And we have like a few different things that we're going to do in today's episode. But I wanted to start out, Jason, and just kind of give a refresh of our kind of our Macs, the basics of them and some of the specs that we have. So you were just talking about your laptop. What is your laptop? I have an M4 Max, MacBook Pro, the 14 inch, the smaller one. And again, it's closed most of the time. Although when I visited you in London, you, as we'll get to in a moment, you have two monitors attached. And I found some of your I found your way is interesting and intriguing.

And I thought, could I attach another monitor to my setup? And then I thought to myself, wait a second, I have another monitor attached to my setup. It's my laptop. So since then, when I'm recording a show, I actually open the MacBook Pros, beautiful display that I almost never use. I open it. and I'm monitoring our recording over on that display. It's not a display I need to really interact with, which is one of the reasons why I don't really love multiple displays

is that I'm always going to look at the display in front of me and the idea of doing any detailed work on a display that's kind of like off to the side is not something that interests me, but it's been very useful. I also occasionally during the World Cup, I was putting World Cup games over there while I was doing work. I just have them on over there in the corner or a baseball game or whatever, and they just kind of like are there.

And it's ambient. It's not my focus, but it's around. So I'll do that. But primarily I have a studio display. I have a Caldigit, Thunderbolt Dock that is attached. So that's providing power. I had that single cable. Coming off of there, I've got my, you know, audio interface and I've got a backup drive.

Trick to the backup drive for when you're yanking a cord out of your laptop every night is there's, I wrote about this at six colors. you can set a USB drive to not auto mount in macOS. And then I use carbon copy cloner to clone to that drive. And it mounts it at like 2.30 in the afternoon. It mounts it. It does a run and then it dismounts it. So when I unplug the computer at, you know, five or six or whenever I'm done for the day, I'm not making everybody angry because I pulled a plug while there was a drive connected.

So that's part of my strategy there. So yeah, a bunch of those peripherals and the specs, it's 36 gigs of RAM, and a 2 terabyte SSD. And yeah, and it's in, it's the black one, the space black or whatever they call it now. Do you have stickers on it? Only my rainbow, six-color rainbow apple decal on top of the Apple logo, but otherwise no. So the machine that I'm talking to you on right now is my M4 Pro Mac Mini. It has 64 gigabytes of RAM, 2 terabyte SSD, and it's connected to my old studio display that I've had for a while that I bought when the original studio display came out. And then to the side, I have a Dell monitor, which was the monitor that I had before.

Actually, I had an LG and a Dell monitor. They were one of those monitors I was using before the studio display came out with my MacBook on my second desk, because I have a specific desk for recording podcasts, which is more kind of like enclosed in my studio. People see it in the video. And I have, it's more soundproofed, right? Yeah, you've got stuff.

You've got panels around you. Yeah, and a big curtain. And it's like a smaller, more enclosed kind of focus desk. And so that's, I have like a, you know, like a fixed computer for that. And I was using an LG display here.

And I had a Dell display on my, the desk that I set out to just do work. That's not recording podcasts. When the studio to Spike came out, I then brought that other monitor over and put it in portrait mode and put it to the side just to have audio hijack on when I'm recording. So audio hijack just lives there. It's on the right hand side. And it just means that I never have to, I never get into a scenario where I could accidentally click something that I don't want to. And I can always see it running whenever I want to look over and see it running. I love it. That's what I'm doing right now. I appreciate that approach. I think it's very clever.

This monitor is way too big, though, for this purpose. Like, I think at some point I would like a much smaller monitor that I could use this for, but it was kind of like, I have it. So why not just use it for that? Just to make a suggestion, if at some point you have a leftover unused iPad that supports... Yeah. What's it? Sidecar. Because I've got an arm, an iPad mounting arm. Yeah.

And I can set it up where my iPad is right next to my display. And a sidecar works okay. Does sidecar just connect on its own? Or do you have to enable it every time? No, I don't. I mean, you do have to enable it, but it might connect every time after that. I don't know. If it does automatic reconnection, then I would do it.

But otherwise, you could just get a small, a nice little time monitor and have a hang out. Little guy. Yeah, a little guy. Because this monitor is way too big, but it's just like I have them. And they're good monitors. So it's like, well, I'm just going to use them. But it goes way too tall. You look like you're some weird commodities trader who's like got the data up.

And you're like, sell, sell, buy, buy. It's that sort of thing going on there. It does introduce an issue for me, which I will talk about when we talk about some essential apps and utilities right on in the episode. Okay. The main Mac that I use every day is now my M5. MacBook Air, which has 32 gigabytes of RAM, two terabytes of SSD. So I had an experience yesterday where I was bouncing a logic project. I was like I was getting ready to post an episode of

Cortex, which again, summer of fun might be out like before. Anyway, but this is where we are in a time vortex. Everybody knows who that guest is. Wow, what a guest you got on that. What a guess. It's, this computer is so much faster. Yeah. Like this is like the thing where I've noticed it the most of like watching logic bounce. Faster than the previous computer you were using for logic? Yeah, my M2, Apple care, right? So like from the M2 to 3.m5? Yes.

Yeah. It's unbelievable. Faster processor, faster storage. Yeah, yeah. And they, you know, I also like we make, I make YouTube videos where it's kind of, I use an Apple Fusion cast to kind of just take a video. You give it a thumbnail. It just like makes it for you.

It was done so quickly. Like, so I've really can notice the speed now in a way that I haven't experienced yet. And also just in general is an update to my experience of this computer. So I have a studio display XDR on that desk. Man, using a Mac in high refresh rate all the time is a treat. It is a treat. I love it. Like just surfing the web is so much nicer because the pages all just scrolly smoothly.

It really is excellent. I have one more Mac in my life, which is, my M1 Max MacBook Pro, which has 64 gigabytes of RAM and 2 terabytes of storage. That is now kind of sitting as a network attached computer. Oh, yes. It's doing some backup stuff from me. And I'm going to do some file management stuff of that. There is still like a question in the air of what I'm going to do with that computer.

But it's there now. It's always connected. Where is it living? It just sits on the desk that you were on. Okay, and it's open? It's open. Yeah, that's the weird thing about using a laptop as a server is you've got a laptop sitting there,

and you've got to put that sign on it that says, this is a server, please do not touch. Yeah, but luckily no one's ever here, got me, so. That's true. Jason, where do you put the dock on your Mac? Oh, are we doing that? Mm-hmm. I am always a right dock person.

Me too. Right, right dock is the best place. It's just, I used to be, when you could do it a bottom right doc person. Was that, were you doing that with like P-list hacks or was it, was it an option once?

I forget whether there was an option or whether there was a fairly simple utility the did or whatever, but you used to be able to pin it at the bottom and now you have to just, and it's been so long now that I don't even know if I would want it at the bottom because it's been in the center of the side

for so long. I think maybe the reason I liked it at the bottom is because the trash can is at the bottom and that means that's where the trash can was on the desktop on classic macOS was bottom right. So maybe it felt at home there. And then to specify about my doc, I have, I'm going to say here,

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. I think I have 10 apps that are permanently in the dock. Okay. And then three that are currently running in there. And then on the other side of that line, I currently have three items, which is my downloads folder, an experiment I am trying,

which is a saved search and the trash. You can save searches in Finder, and you can drag them to the dock. And my thought there was, I wanted a list of my recent items in my stories folder. My storage folder goes back. It autophiles.

I have Hazel, auto file it, but it goes back, you know, two or three weeks of the, stories, these are stories that I've written or I've edited or I'm working on. And what I wanted was like a little narrower view, like just show me the stories that have been modified in the last five days or something like that. Because once you get a lot of things in a folder in the dock, accessing the folder in the dock becomes a little more problematic. I'm trying it out. I'm not sure whether I will keep the saved or not. But I'm giving it, I'm giving it a go. I think it's

an interesting idea. I may just go back to putting my stories folder in there. I wish I wish there were better options in how folders display in the dock. That's a, that's a thing I should write about at some point. I wish, because having quick access to stuff on my Mac is really good. And I find that I go through this rigmarole of like, oh, the server isn't connected. So I got to do this. And then I click this. Or like, I need to bring these two windows up. And I, I'm realizing I might need to actually think of some methods to make those simpler. Because, because you know me, and this is going to be a theme today, I like an automation.

But it's truer to say what I don't like is repeating the same eight steps several times a day when they're always the same. It's like, why am I doing this to myself? So we may get there. So I save search right now, but I may just go back to having my stories folder in there. Because it's auto filing old stories into an archive folder, it's never that long. But I was playing with the idea that having be even more constrained.

It's like only five or six items, which means I can very quickly open a story I'm working on. It's a nice idea. Yeah, I'm dock on the right side. I have like on this Mac, I have like 20 something apps under dock. I actually started. I mean, there are just things that I use a lot. I was thinking recently of like I don't think I ever launch apps from the dock. Like I don't even.

Oh, man. I don't even think I need one. Like I'm just all spotlight. That's why I, that's why I have those apps over there is that they're the apps. They're the apps I basically want on, almost all the time. Yeah. And if they're not on,

I like to see that they're not on and be able to just get them on immediately. So like music, which I use, I use music to play music while I'm working. Yeah. It's in the dock. And it's in the dock.

It's not always running, but it's there and I will get to it immediately. It's true. Could I not just do command space and launch music? Well, I could, but I don't. I don't.

I use that for like miscellaneous. So yeah, I mean, I could probably survive without a dock at all. but that's how I've chosen to use my dock is is for those like the top eight or whatever that if they're not open they're probably going to be open soon and then and then they're running apps too.

Yeah. Yeah, so I get it right? Like I feel like I used, I just think over time I just never really find myself clicking things in the dock very much. I get it. I'm just, it should my habit has been that way. I know this of you, but I want to talk about it, desktop usage. I know that you use your desktop. right, you put things on the desktop. Yep.

And I have previously, I would say, either made fun of you or said, like, what are you doing? Why do you do that? Jason, I'm becoming an active project from the desktop kind of guy. Ooh, interesting. This is designed in California is doing it to me.

Ah, I see. It's my influence then. The thing is, so we share project files with Dropbox and with a lot, the many things that have gotten worse of Apple's file provider APIs. One of them is

logic projects unzipped become a nightmare for sinking. There can be lots of issues. And so we have to zip them to share them with each other and we're doing a lot more of that. So when I unzip them,

I have to put them on my desktop. There's nowhere else to put them. And so I'm becoming more of a like and then everything's getting put on the desktop and then when the edit is complete, zipping up, moving all those files up into the cloud and they're not doing it anymore. So I'm becoming more of an active project on the desktop kind of guy because it's the place,

I don't know where else I put it. And the desktop is like the perfect place. Yeah. Desktop has always been a place where I put stuff that I want quick access to. I currently have like three folders out on the desktop, but those are ones like there are reasons why they are there. I know I've got my documents folder. I got Dropbox.

I got lots of other places. But it is the whole idea. at like, first off, I will say, Apple lets you put things on the desktop for a reason, right? It's not for people, I hear from people who are like, oh, I don't like anything on the desktop. It's like, okay, that's your choice.

But like, it's not unnatural to have files on the desktop. In fact, I would say it's natural to have files on the desktop because that's why you can do that. They let you do that. So I use it as that. I try not to be messy. I try to organize things in folders when I have that. We're working, you know, I'm working on this video.

tool for design in California and I've got a bunch of reference files for that in order to test it and I could have them scattered all over or I could have them in the problem with the Dropbox file provider stuff is after a while the file provider is like this file's pretty big I'll just delete it and you can download it later

and it's like I don't want to download it later because I'm going to need it later and stop removing the files that I need to have so I've got some of those big files out on the desktop in a folder Yeah. The thing that has changed, so I used to be worse at this. I used to have, I mean, I have a memory of John Syracuse needed to print a boarding pass for his plane when he was out at WWDC and I had him do it in my office at Macworld. And that meant that he, it meant John got to see what my computer was like. And it was very much one of those like, I don't know how you live like this moments for John. He's like, this is, what are you doing? I'm like, just print your boarding pass, John. I'm neater about it than I used to be. I have. more things in my finder sidebar where I can just drop things. I'm more organized. I have a stories folder where my working stories go in and they're not out on the desktop. But the other

thing that I've done that I don't do anywhere else, because everywhere else in the finder I am in list view. I'm a list view person. I have always been a list view person. But on the desktop, it's obviously not list. You can't have a list on the desktop. It's icon view. on the desktop. And so I have it set to arrange. So it arranges itself automatically by, what is it, by name? Okay. So basically, I can't mess it up.

The visual, like, files sitting out on the desktop, they're always start at the top right, and they're always going, I think, by their name alphabetically. and so if I drag something else out there, it kind of goes in a spot. They're not all scattered and messy anymore. They're just kind of in a... I don't use any of this.

I don't use stacks or anything like that to organize them. I just wanted to be a little bit easier. Yeah, I have sort by name. I feel like you've got to do that. For me, the thing that becomes a problem is my wife's stuff is like this.

Things just start. stacking on top of each other because there's no more place of them anymore. And I think that is when we get too far. Like if you can't see your desktop anymore, because you just have like so much stuff that your entire monitor is multiple times covered in files, like that's too much. Yeah. Don't do it. Don't do it. At that point, you should use the grouping stats or whatever they've got. I said that to her. She's like, don't touch it. I was like, okay, fair enough. I'm looking, you know, I get it. Right. Like, I get it. My last question for you in this segment. Preferable find a view

Yeah well like I just said It's list for me Okay Always I am a I'm somebody who comes from classic Mac OS Yeah list view is the preferred view And I know what you're going to say And so I'll just say from my perspective People can do what they like

I find column view Yeah An abomination Okay Foisted upon us by Steve Jobs and the other people from next And I hate it Okay. Well, I'm appreciative of it because I like column view. That's how I tend to navigate, but I also enjoy list view. So like when I'm finding what I want, I'll use column view to get there. And then I'm like, great, now I can go into list view and arrange stuff. I like the combo.

All right. But I often feel like finder just decides what it wants to show me. Like it's just like, I want you to look at this view. And it's like, I don't want that. But thank you for trying. That's also true. Yeah. There used to be like alternate browsers for the Mac before. OS 10 came out that were like, like column view. They were like little disc browsers. And I, I never understood them either. And then when Next came in and, and obviously they liked, I mean, that's one of those things that I think it's just down to, it's maybe more than Steve Jobs. It's like Steve Jobs liked that view. And so it's in the Mac now. It's just like how Steve Jobs really like next email client. And that's why we have Apple Mail. It's because Steve Jobs was like, yeah, are you kidding? I'm not reading my email on some other program. We're going to

over and they're like, yeah, yes, Steve. And probably they agreed because they're a bunch of next people too. But yeah, that's fine. That's fine. I see the utility of it. I see the kind of weirdness of me kind of doing command down to enter into a folder and command up and navigating that way through the file system. It's a little bit weird.

I get it. But it's, it's, I'm not, I see no reason to change, basically. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Backblaze. A question worth sitting with if you're a map. back is where your work lives, is how deep does your file history actually go? ICloud will keep your current files in sync. Time machine is going to save those local snapshots for you, but neither keeps a complete searchable year of every version of every file you've touched, every draft, every iteration,

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no credit card required, at backblaze.com slash upgrade with the code Upgrade 20. Our thanks to Backblaze for their support of this show and Relay. So for this segment of the show, I believe you have some questions for me. Yeah, I was inspired by your work on Cortex. Thank you. So for the last year or two, year and a half.

Year and a bit. Year and a bit, you've been doing, so Gray is on leave and you've been doing the state of the workflow interviews where you're talking to very interesting people about how they get their work done. Yeah. And I was thinking it would be interesting to talk about the state of your workflows and how you get some things done. Because that's not a, that's not a thing that has happened on cortex. because you're asking the questions, not, although I'd love you to get

some incredibly famous person on and said, let me tell you how I do my job. So someone, a previous guest, has wanted to do this, and so there is a possibility that I will do it at some point

in the future, but not in any time soon. Interesting. So I thought I'd start with this show. What is your process for prepping for upgrade? Okay. So it's actually,

it is an all-week thing with the majority of the work happening on Monday. So when I see things online that I think are worth considering for conversation, so people posting articles, news breaking, things being shared with me, I save them all in an Apple Note. I really love this system. The Apple Note share extensions really good. And then I could just save links.

And I like that in Apple Notes. It does the kind of rich link. So then when I go back and look at it later, I can very easily see what the link is before I even click it. I get the little preview of like the headline and who wrote it and that kind of thing. So I will add these things all through the week,

but on Monday mornings, I will sit down and go through my RSS feeds. And I try to keep my RSS feeds relative, like the amount of subscriptions, relatively lean. I've definitely gotten into that trap before. I have way too many. And at this point,

I feel pretty good about what I've got. And especially for this show, I have a few trusted sources of news and I can get everything I need from those. And it's the same thing that I'll go through my RSS feeds. I'm not reading the articles. I'm finding the things that I think could be interesting. And then I'm adding them again to that Apple Note. Then I will go into the Apple Note and I will rearrange these articles,

like the links into kind of chunks, so like the segment chunks. Right. And then for building, so maybe I'm jumping ahead now, but then I will take those, I will open them all up for each segment, I will read through all the articles, and then I will start building the Google Doc outline for that. Okay. So that's when it goes to Google Doc is after you open them out of, out of notes, then we build, because we use a Google Doc. Yeah, nothing's going into Google Docs until I'm like, all right, I'm right in the show now. Okay. And this is where we take advantage of our time.

difference because I'm sleeping, but it's daytime for you. So you, because we record this at 9 a.m., my time, 5 p.m., your time, which means you have a work day on Monday and I don't. So I will get up on Monday morning and open Google Docs and see what the show is going to be. And while I'm drinking my tea and eating my breakfast. Yeah, for me, I will spend, it's probably a couple of hours now on Mondays. most weeks getting upgrade ready. That has increased in time over time.

I'm not entirely sure why. But I'm happy with the amount of work that is going in. It's when I'm doing the majority of my reading of what is occurring. Like there will be, you know, if I see a link, you know, if everyone's talking about, say, like, just talk about the lawsuit stuff, right, from a couple of weeks ago with OpenAI. I didn't read the articles until Monday because I want to kind of immerse myself in the news on the day that we record the show. That is my preference because that really helps me be very aware of what I'm going to be talking about.

Like I had this thing like on last week's episode with the public betas. I had written all my notes the week before. and so when it came to the show, when we ended up talking about it, I had to read through it all again to get it back in my head again. I wouldn't have needed to do that, and I don't typically need to do that.

You see the, our show document, I write in like full sentences, but I very rarely am reading what I've written. Yeah. But by seeing it written out, I remember what I was thinking a few hours ago, and then it helps me kind of get all my thoughts out. So I like that process.

of kind of ingesting the information, digesting it in the way that I need to, pulling out the things that are important. And then it kind of just floats around in my head for we record a few hours later. Right. And we should say we use Google Docs. Partly, it's historical. But really, it's just mostly because it's a real-time editing environment that we can both sit in. It's the best one. It's the best one. And so, you know, as we move through the show of segments running along, you know, you'll see Michael pull the sponsor breakup and, you know, we'll cut something out. And, you know, we'll move things around. We had, in last week's episode, there were like three things we had to cover at the end of a segment. And then you sort of naturally flowed into one. Yeah. That was not that was the third one listed. And I noticed, I saw you take the other two and copy them or cut them and paste them below so that they remained in the right sequence for us to, to cover the other issues. So that's, you just got to have a live environment like that. Google Docs remains the livelest, right? There are a lot of things that allow you to do quote-unquote real-time collaboration.

Google is the only instant one. The rest all can take a little bit, you know, they can get a bit stuck. Google never get stuck. And when you're recording live like we do, the last thing you need is some sort of lag that slows everybody down and confuses people. Coming up with ideas for things that are beyond just like I saw a headline.

Yeah. You know, because we do other stuff here. we have other concepts. We're like, you know, are we going to do a draft or are we going to talk about this? Or are we, do we, you know, is there something interesting for the summer of fun or whatever it is beyond just sort of reacting? How do you collect those? It has become something I need less. It feels like in the last couple of years, the news cycle just never ends.

You know, like, we've said this a bunch of times with a summer of fun of like we actually need to do fewer summer of fun. episodes because there's, quote, no news, right? Like now we're doing this one because it would be ridiculous. The other thing summer does is travel. Yeah. So we can have things like this, right? Because it's so like, this is just ideas that we keep. And the idea for this episode was collected in like a similar way that I would do this kind of stuff. If I have an idea, I would just throw it in the Apple Note. Like there are a few topics that are basically completed in our Apple Note that if we ever have a big hole in an episode, I have a bunch of things that I'm ready to. to just drop in. And these can be a combo of things that I've prepared previously, but we didn't get to them, but they're timeless, so I keep them. Or there are things that I think would be interesting to talk about,

and I will just write a couple of lines down. And I just save them in my Apple note, and I'll get to them when I need them. Sometimes I will be sitting and working on a show, like, Upgrad, or any of my shows, it's like, there's nothing to talk about. I need to come up with something. And that is where the time zone difference helps me because I can sit 20, 30 minutes and be like kind of brainstorm some ideas or some things might want to talk about. But like with me and you, I can spend that time in the like in my early afternoon and I know I have many hours to try and come up with some kind of topics. So sometimes it does require brute forcing.

But that isn't very much, especially if I upgrade anymore really. All right. Yeah, I end up dashing things off in the show. Yeah. Sometimes in the Apple note, sometimes in the show dock itself, we have a little space down at the bottom, which is like other good ideas and other summer fun ideas and things like that. If I have an idea for something, I'll just throw it in there and then, you know, later, months later, you're desperate and you look and you're like, oh, yeah, we could do that. But there is also the incredibly wacky summer of fun document, which has just some truly unhinged ideas in it that maybe one day we'll take. We have ticked some of those off over time. Oh, yeah. The jingles were in there.

episode. I mean, all that stuff is... Recording outside. Yeah, the wild ideas are definitely there. You want to talk a little bit about how we collaborate on this show? Yeah, I think that like, you know, you've kind of touched it already that on the face of it, what it appears like is I write the document, you open it up, and then you read it, and then we do the show. And like, that is kind of like the simplest way of... of boiling down

upgrade. But I actually think of our collaboration as like this asynchronous thing where you are doing the work

for upgrade every day and I only do it on Mondays because you're you are working on six colors.

Right. So you don't need to read everything on Monday. Like I don't, I think it's very rare that I would put in a big topic

and you have not come across this, right? Unless it's something I've had to create, right? Right. So I,

I think that there is, you know, I draw a lot from what you write on six colors. Sure. If, you know, if something is of interest to you that you've written about it, I will always consider it for a topic because it's like, we've already spent a bunch of time thinking about it. That's the like virtuous cycle of all of this in the ideal is, you know, either I write about something and then it becomes fodder for upgrade or we talk about it on an upgrade and it becomes fodder for a post or one of those. Yeah, but then it's in general. I think the reason that this show is good, which I think it is, is because we work very well together. Like we creatively match quite well and we also fill in gaps that the other one has. Like I think we're a very good team, which is why we're now, you know, very happy and very eager to be launching new projects together because we work well together.

Yeah. Yeah, we've got a proven track record. The show doc, anything more we need to say about the show document itself in Google Docs? You do your reading and building. Yeah. I come in in the morning drinking my tea, looking at it. I don't know. I mean, I will sometimes, you get text for me sometimes, right?

Where it's like, oh, Jason's up and moving now. It's 3 p.m. on Monday in London. It's gotten time. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. And this is where I will be like, I don't know if we should talk. about that or maybe this should be sometimes it's very minor sometimes it's it's like I'm uncomfortable with this topic or do we really have to do this topic or sometimes I have memory of us also doing the

thing where I'm like I don't know about this topic and you're like well we have to talk about it and I said can we just like let's not overdo it let's keep it minimal and you're like yeah yeah yeah that's fine where it's sometimes it's as simple as me saying I don't want to make this a big thing let's make it a small thing because I I I could see how it could get overblown. And I, a lot of times there's a topic where I'm like, uh, like, I'm sick of the topic or I think that the topic is overblown. I'm like, let's not go too far down. And other times I'm like, oh, this is a, this is a great topic. And things, I, the last couple of weeks I've had cases where I've basically like, done some strike through or deletion of a couple of things where I'm like, eh, that's not that much of a story. Like last week, there was that NBC story about that guy who

emailed the wrong person. And like, people talked about it a lot. But, um, I thought Gruber had a good take on it, which is like, this is kind of nothing and, like, probably has no impact at all, but NBC was so breathless about like, oh, we've got details of a secret thing that probably somebody from Open AI told them about this thing. And they ran with it. And so I mentioned it in passing, right? But we didn't cover it. The funny, what was very funny to me last week, and maybe there's a, if there is the luck of it being a two shot in our video, you'll see me smile at the time where you referenced it with about the exact amount of time I wanted to spend on it. Oh, interesting. But had previously said, let's cut it. And I thought that was

very funny. Well, honestly, that was my thought, though, is I don't mind mentioning it in passing. But what I don't want, I didn't think it merited you saying NBC is reporting that. I wanted to be more like me going, did you see that NBC report that was dumb? I kind of wanted to knock it down. I wanted to make the point, like basically agreeing also with John Grubber's point of like, this is a thing that Open AI believed is something that is important. They, yeah, gaha, we've got a smoking gun. It's like, no, they don't. This is nothing.

And, you know, like, just because there was this mix up, which is just a clerical error, it's like, well, this doesn't now mean that you're exonerated. You know, nothing's changed. But sometimes that happens where I just, I'm reading through the dot. you've assembled it and then I'm giving it a straight down read and sometimes things will jump out at me and I'll be like, I don't know about this or what about this or all that. Not a lot. It doesn't happen a lot. But every now and then, you know, I will send you a text and go, oh, I think we should take this out or whatever. And that, that tends to happen. I would say, you know, 7.730 my time. So, you know, 90 minutes to two

hours, maybe an hour before we record. So we've got a little bit of kind of before the show starts warning time for you to do it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and what I also like in some, there have been times in the past where you'll say that and I'll say, I disagree and this is why I disagree. And then we all do the topic. Like it's, it's, I don't ever think of it of, and I'm sure you don't intend it to be that this is like, well, what I say goes. It's like there is a conversation to be had. But most of the time, there are things to say, I don't want to talk about this. And it's like, I will just take it out because I'm not married to it. But sometimes there are things where I'm like, I think we should discuss this in some way. And most of the time that happens,

I end up being happy. We talked about it after I talked about it. Yeah. So it says something. So how does this differ from the other shows that you do in terms of prep? So I think the key difference for upgrade compared to my other shows is I do the lion share of the prep, like basically all of it. No, you do the outline.

You're not going to be here next week. Yeah. And I will do the outline. And I can do the outline. I mean, like, I am also a host of shows and stuff, right? Like, I can do it. But for this show, I don't do it. You do it.

Yeah. So how does that, how's that work? Is it, you know, there's not, Stephen doesn't make the outline for connected. You're all throwing things in the hat? So I would say that for connected, Stephen is kind of like the keeper of the outline but we're all putting things in. It's more, more shared. Okay.

And some weeks, it might be more one person's show than the other. For the pen addict, Brad does for me, what I do for you. Ah, okay. So Brad does the whole document, and then I will go in and add what I need to add. And then Clortex, I don't even, it's kind of, at the moment especially, is not really comparable. This is an interview show. So it's like, I'm writing all the questions. But it's a very different type of show prep, I would say.

but also like my other regular show is already considered an analog they're also more like connected where everyone's kind of just like throwing stuff in the bucket. I initially thought that I would be doing more of the prep work for upgrade and practically speaking

the time difference that is a great advantage for us is the driver of why you push the outline because I feel like the alternative is that I'm working on the outline on a Friday afternoon and the day. danger there is that stuff will happen. And also Friday afternoon is not the, I mean, I have done some upgrade prep work on Friday afternoons. In fact, when I'm doing, when I'm hosting the show without you, it's either Sunday afternoon or Friday afternoon. I'm doing the bulk of the work. But I think it's generally made more sense for you to do it because you're the one who's got a full work day before we do upgrade on. I would need to do it over the weekend, which I'd rather not do, or on Friday afternoon, which again,

it's like, I don't know, I can do it, but it is not as natural to do it then as it is, to do it on Monday morning. I like to do it, though, because it forces me to really pay attention. Yeah, it works for us. Yeah. It works for us. It works for us. It's how I feel confident in the things we're going to talk about. It's like, well, I've done the work. Exactly. No, we've got, I mean, we've been doing this so long now that that is, we've, we've kind of figured out a way that works for us. I want to ask you a question that's a David Sparks question. Every year, I have. I have. I haven't done it this year. I need to do it. I do this personal offsite where I basically go somewhere that is not my office and I like write up a bunch of things and think about my job and I'll talk to other people. I've talked to you and Stephen and Gray and Dan Moran and like Lex Friedman. Lots of people. I'll bring in as like guest speakers to talk about what I do and what I should be doing and things like that. I think it's a very useful exercise. And for me, the thing that was is maybe

the most interesting as a part of that exercise is the question of how many jobs you have. What are your different roles? What are your different jobs? Because I discovered the first time I did this that I had like 12 different jobs. Some of them big. Some of them little. But I consider myself sort of like a 12 thing per worker. And, you know, the natural outcome of that was that's too many jobs for one person to have. And so I was wondering. How many jobs do you have? I don't know if I could count. I mean, because I have, like, I have, I would say, five big buckets, and then maybe each of those buckets might have a couple of different jobs in them. So, all right, so I'm a podcast co-host, right?

That's one of them. But sometimes I'm also a podcast editor. And being a podcast co-host means hosting and producing. So that's a few jobs. and I do three weekly and four monthly shows. That is not including designed in California, which is both a weekly and monthly show. Depending on how we think about it,

it's kind of always on, I guess. So there's that. I have the business of Relay, right? And like looking after business stuff. With Cortex brand, I have business and also product and marketing, because it's a tiny business really. like with people working in it.

So you kind of everybody does a bit of everything. And then working with Cross Forward, which is mostly marketing, but again, it's like everyone kind of gets involved, right? Where like everyone's doing testing and everyone's making feature suggestions

and all of this kind of stuff. So I would say I have, I have lots of jobs, but they're in buckets, I would say. So, okay. A lot.

A lot. I mean, we could bring, break some of those down, though, also and say you're, you know, you're an upgrade, you're the upgrade, co-host and, um, document generator, right? Like, there, and, and, and then it becomes even more, you, you, you have even more jobs then, right? Like, it's a lot. It's a lot, right? And this is, I think it's not ideal, but the, the, the bottom line is if, if, I think what I tell people is, if I could, if I could only have a couple of jobs, I would probably be much happier.

Yeah. But my jobs don't pay enough for me to only have one or two jobs. I have to have more jobs because that's how you, as an independent person, you have to make more jobs and bring in your income. And that requires you to, you know, I can't, I can't, you know, say I'm only doing two projects, right? I just, I can't. Yeah. I mean, there, I have a, I have a, an asterisk on that, though,

just the type of person I am. Like, someone else could run relay. Sure. And, like, financially, I would be okay from that. I have, I have divested myself of all the things I'm willing to let other people do. Yeah. That's the, that's the challenge is, like, like, so I stopped doing downstream, and I'm not doing macro-columns anymore.

So those are things I don't have to do. But a bunch of stuff that I did, I also delegated. And, and that, that's what it comes down to. Remember, you used to edit this show, and now you don't. Oh, yeah. So you can divest yourself of some of the work. But others of the work, you're like, I'm not going to. This is a part of what I am or who I want to be,

or I feel like I am the person who needs to do this in order for it to be right. Yeah. I think that's reasonable. I am just, you know, how I have been in my life, and especially over the last 10 years or whatever, if I'm doing something creative like this, I have to be a driving force for it because I wouldn't, I don't think I would want someone telling me how to do my shows, you know?

Yeah. But yeah, I think it would be a scary exercise for me to list it out so atomically, like you've mentioned, right? Like if I was to sit and take each of those shows and what are my responsibilities in each of those shows, I would say I have a lot on my plate. Yes, I would. is, I think, fine for me. I think it is kind of what I like to be busy. I don't think, I do not enjoy not having something to do.

And I'm pretty good at prioritizing. Like, you know, my life is run by my task manager. I have things that have to be done on certain days. And I know what they are when I look at the lists. And then I also have things that I can then start to, you know, chip a way out when I need to. too. And I also, I have a lot of help around me to do, right? Like I have, I have an assistant, like a personal assistant. And then also in my businesses that I'm a part of, there are people

that are there to help. Sure. So, you know, like, these aren't things where I'm handling every piece. I'm pretty good at delegating because I don't think I could do the stuff that I do without some form of delegation. And to-doist. Yeah. It's to-doist and delegation is how I manage. And I think I manage, okay.

At least, I don't feel like... So I think a key thing about wherever you understand if you're managing is, do the people around you feel like you're reliable? And I would say that the people around me feel like I'm reliable. I don't think that... Absolutely.

I mean, you never know what people... But, yeah, I mean, you... No, absolutely. Yeah. I feel like people can rely on me and I don't feel burned out. I'm actually like, you know, you've got a note in here about my yearly theme. And so I'm just going to jump to that real quick, right? Okay. You know, this year is the year of new for me. And that is, you know, weird for me to think about because I had kind of decided I didn't want to tackle new projects for a bunch of reasons. But this year I've been doing that, you know, and it started with working with David and Stephen at Quarrow. forward, that was like a new opportunity that I was really excited about and has led to me learning a lot of things. And it kind of kicked me into thinking that maybe I had gotten a bit stuck in my ways and it was time to start thinking about new stuff to do. And design in California would not exist if I hadn't set my yearly theme as the year of no. Because there is no world

in which I would have suggested to you, what about a new podcast? Like it just wouldn't have Come on. It would just never would have been a thing I would have considered. And so I feel, and at the moment, I feel very satisfied with my work in general. I've gone through periods of feeling burned out. But like, even though right now I think I have more on my plate than I've had in years, I am excited about these, about my projects. And I'm, I look forward to the work that I do.

So I think that there will always be, as there always have been, times of adjustment for me. And I absolutely expect that a few years down the line, I think everything I've just told you that I'm doing, it's not going to look exactly the same as it does right now. Like there's going to be more delegation. But I also like delegating because it means I get to like help other people, you know? Like I get to, if I'm able to hire someone to do something for me, it means that that's somebody. else who I'm able to enable from my work to be independent on their own. So I like to do it where I can.

Talk about the Year of New and Design in California. Are there specific things about that project that are making you change or create new workflows? I would imagine so for both of us, right? Yeah, I mean, the biggest one is the schedule.

It's like trying to juggle that schedule. And I'm still very much trying to understand that. And I think that's probably probably going to be months and months into the future before I feel like I have a good handle on it. And it is through the project just having more moving parts and also having a lot of people touching it. So that's the thing that I'm working out. But luckily, we're kind of the head of ourselves a bit right now, which is good. So that's going to be something that is going

to take a lot of effort. And I'm trying to understand new tools to help me get good at that. I do also feel like there is there is opportunity to make this project complicated that I am interested in pursuing in ways that I haven't done before. So like taking transcripts of episodes and saving them in places

to be referred to later on. It's like a thing that I've only ever done this for Cortex. I've not really done it for any of my other shows. And I don't really feel like I use it very well for Cortex. But I can imagine a scenario where it could become useful in the future. So adding in some post-production steps of like transcribing these episodes, saving the transcripts, putting the transcripts in Notion, so they're like searchable, stuff like that. I feel like there is, there are some parts of the process that I think I would want to add in to designing California that over time I think will start to bear fruit.

But then this is also a thing of like this project has so many moving parts and so many episodes that are generated at once. A lot of files just in general being created, which is making me think I need to do more about my file management. And I've mentioned this on previous episodes and I think I know what I'm going to do now. But getting like a network attached storage that I can have here in my studio where I can just move things to, because we're just going to be generating a lot of stuff that I want to keep, but we don't need access to all the time. Yeah, this is the, I think, an important thing for that podcast is that unlike upgrade,

more like what I do with Incomparable, I want to have those files forever because you never know when you might want to go back to that in some way. I just feels like, because it's more evergreen, it's a little less locked. I want to have those files. And that means you've got to put them somewhere and that means you need a lot of storage. Exactly. And it really does add up. And so this is also making me think that with all this kind of stuff,

setting up some automations to help me achieve some of these things. You know, like transcribing files and putting those where I need them to go, moving files around certain periods of time. And I feel like I've always been quite, we're going to talk about automation in a minute, but for you, I've been hesitant about automations in the past because I sometimes feel like they can,

get you into a situation that you don't anticipate. Things don't work the way you want them to. For me, I'm very much like I like to just do things manually and know they're done, but I feel like there's probably a balance that I can find between the two.

Like, I use Hazel to do some stuff. Yeah, yeah. That has been very good for me. Great example. And like rock solid for years. So like I have, you know, I have a Hazel rule that runs every two months to clear out my audio hijack recording folder.

like if anything's more than two months old you could just get rid of it now yeah so and that kind of stuff has been very good to me in the in the past so I think I need to get to get better about that that's great you want to talk about cross forward a little bit sure yeah

because you know the very different role it's very different yeah doing some very different stuff with David Smith and Stephen Hackett yeah what have you learned how has that challenged you it is a challenge I mean I would say it's a challenge because it's a lot of new stuff, really.

Well, okay, the basics of the role are things that I've done before. So, you know, marketing and looking at product and thinking about how to communicate. Like, those are skills that I've built through my various endeavors, but also from before, right? Because I worked in marketing before. And so, like, working with agencies and stuff like that is something I kind of know how to do. what I've enjoyed about this role is that it is challenging. It's challenging because of scale is very interesting. Like the scale of the apps that we manage across forward is way beyond anything I've considered

before. And so there are good opportunities in that and also complications. You know, you never want to make a mistake in something, right? And so there's like a lot of checks and balances that I put in place. for myself for the things that we communicate to customers in the app and like really trying to think things through because the knock-on effects of getting something wrong can be a problem. You know, like if 0.01% of which Smith users hit a problem, it's a lot of people, right? Like in a way that wouldn't be with my other stuff because the scale is very different.

So that has been an interesting thing to kind of consider. And in general, I found it fascinating to learn a lot more about. the daily life of an app developer. I understand how, you know, I understand apps once they're a product that exists in the world. I have, and I had a vague idea of what it was like to make software, but being involved in the business

and seeing the behind the scenes has been very interesting. But I also love it. And I'm very thankful that David and Stephen and everyone at Crossford because we are continually growing, team right now, encourages and wants product feedback from everyone. They don't have to want me to say, I think this about this feature, I think that about that feature. It would be very easy to say,

Mike, you just talk about them when they're done, right? Like you help the communication of this. So I like being able to contribute and seeing how these things become a thing, you know, how these ideas become features. So that's been really exciting. And then for the start, that I don't know how to do, because there is a lot, especially in marketing today, especially to reach Widget Smith users. It is understanding of platforms that I don't really understand. Like, I don't use TikTok, right? I don't use it. But someone's got to. So we work with an advertising agency now to help us understand that. And so I like that process of working with a team of professionals who I can then kind of interface with them together,

we can create strategy. And I've done that kind of stuff before. So it's been, it's been fun for me to get back into that life a little bit as well. Great. Well, thank you for answering my questions. Thank you for having all these questions. Very nice. I wanted to ask you about automations, though, before we move on. Because you are, you're a big automation boy. And I kind of want to talk about that a little bit. Because you've always got some form of automation going. I do. I feel like at all times. Well, not at all times. But this is what I said before, which is I just hate it. Like computers are meant to eliminate drudgery, not create drudgery.

And I feel like that's one of the great tragedies when you use a computer is that they're creating drudgery when they should be eliminating it. And so like I said earlier about feeling like I might need to do some other optimization or automation. I hate having to do eight steps to do a thing every time I do it and I do it multiple times a day. I should say what I don't want to get over into is sort of like wasting your time with automation. This is what I always have with like productivity tips and things like that is you get across eventually into the you're spending more time trying to focus on productivity advantages and you're not. doing your work, right? You don't want to do that. And so with every automation I think of, really I'm trying to calculate out, is there a net benefit for me? How long is it going to take for me to make this thing? And then how much time does it save? And if it's going to take me

hours to make it and then save seconds, unless I'm going to use it for years and years and years, it's not worth doing it. Now, in an era where you can use a, you know, an AI to build a, a Unix, you know, a Python script or a shell script or something. Like that balance changes, which is exciting. Yeah. But that's what a lot of it is.

It's like, like I have a, I have an automation using Stream Deck, which is a fun little, little button thingy that, that I have, I was skeptical of, but I've actually come to really like.

I have a bunch of automations on there. And they can range from fairly simple. Like I have a button. and I press to record upgrade. And I have a button, and it does more than one thing. The button to record upgrade actually records the upgrade session in audio hijack, and it also sends the social media messages that say,

upgrade is live. And they both happen at the same time, which is great, because I used to have to press the record button and then go to social media and type, upgrade is live. And now I don't. I just press a button. Everything just happens.

And with incomparable, we do a live stream. I stream music before we get started and then I have to flip over and we get started and start the recording. And I have a very complicated automation there that uses audio hijack. Audio hijack has its own scripting interface using JavaScript.

And I have this button on my stream deck that when I press it the first time, we go live, but it's playing music from the music app. And then I press it again, and now our voices come over the stream and the recordings start. And then when I press it a third time, it stops the recording, takes us off the live stream,

and actually, like, looks up what the episode is in my Google sheet. Oh, wow. Makes a folder in Steven Shepansky's Dropbox, because he edits the show with that name, and moves all my files into that folder. That's pretty cool. It's pretty cool, and it works, and it saves me some time and saves me some overhead. And it's not always about, like, oh, and that only saves you a little bit.

It only saves time, but part of the cost of using a computer to me is just the details of, like, I got to click here and I got to open that up. And I got to open this up. And then I got to click here and then I got to drag that thing over. And then I got to click here and drag that thing over. And then I have to wait. And then I have to right click on this and press copy. And then I have to switch over here and I have to press paste. And like, that's when I am driven to do in automation.

Is not that I don't know how to do the 10-step process. But at some point, my brain says, why am I doing a 10? step process when I could be doing a one step process. Wouldn't that be better? And that's where, that's where this stuff tends to lead for me. And keeping in mind always that I'm just not going to automate something for the thrill of it. It needs to, it needs to be something that's going to make my life better by saving time or saving annoyance. Because again, it's not all about the time. It is about, I don't like, again, it's just the, the boredom, the unwee of having like a 10 step thing that I don't want to, like, do I have to.

click over there and then click over here and I just don't want to do it. It's boring. Fix. Computer, do that for me. So that's a lot of what I do. Sometimes I just, I do feel like some automation stuff that I see though. It's like it's held together so like with such rickety tools. Oh, that's the danger.

Right. We're in the betas right now and like shortcut stuff just breaks. Right. And then it's like, well, now like I get nervous about relying. on something that is then going to cause me outsized frustration or somebody else outsized frustration later on. I know. Like I move all of my podcast recordings manually. Right. So I will move, you know, what happens is when I press stop, I do have an automation in audio hijack that it opens the finder window.

Oh, that's very funny. Whereas when I press stop for upgrade, it copies my file into the place where it goes. So my file's always in there when we stop. But I don't have a different session for every. show because I have so many shows, right? So it's like I will just move these things manually because I don't want to create a scenario for Jim where I haven't got the files that he needs.

And that can happen if I'm, you know, relying on some weird automation. Let's imagine I've pressed the connected recording rather than the upgrade recording and now here we go and now all the files are in the wrong place. Although Jim can always access all of them because he has all the shows. But nevertheless, nevertheless, but this stuff is

Well, you can set up an automation that knows when you record upgrade, but it wouldn't work today because we're recording on a different day. I mean, I do have some stuff with shortcuts for like time tracking where I press a shortcut when I'm recording a podcast and it looks at my calendar, gets the name from a specific calendar, sets that as the tag for the time tracking, and then sets a focus mode for a couple of hours. So just stuff like that. I'll give you an example of an automation I did recently that I really like. So I changed how we post the Sixth Collars podcast. And there are two versions of it because the higher level members get a longer like post show. And so I bounce those out of logic. I've got two different versions of it and make the MP3s.

I haven't automated that yet, although I totally could, but I haven't yet. Because I used Forecast and Marco didn't build in any automation tools for Forecast. He probably would tell me I should just vibe code. something. Yeah, if you say it enough, it'll be like, just make your own. I don't want to, though. I don't want to. So I made an automation. So I got, what I have to do is I have to upload these two files to my FTP server and get the URLs of them and then put them in a CMS page. And what my automation does is I right click on the folder that the MP3s are in and say, upload the Sixth Colors podcast.

And it looks in the folder. It sees the two MP3s. And then it uploads them to the right place. And more than that, because I used to do this one at a time, but now it does them both together. More than that, one of my security through obscurity for the,

for the member podcast is I add a tag with a dictionary word on the end. So you can't guess. this recently when I've been had to upload episodes of upgrade yeah and I see weird words and lips in like ah he's he's messing around because otherwise if you if you get the if you get the path you could guess what the podcast is and continue to get the podcast later yeah and so I just put in words and then you can't guess it well I have the script do that now so instead of me having to do that like in the finder or something the script uploads that file with the with a dictionary word

tagged on the end and remembers that and then the best part is, oh, and then it brings up a little dialogue that says, what's the title of this episode? And it, and it puts, it auto fills with what's on the clipboard because the title is probably something I copied out of or into forecast when I, when I made the MP3s. And then it opens the CMS page and paste in the title, tabs down to the first URL field and paste in the, the first URL tabs again and paste in the next URL. And then it sits there. And I put in the description and I press save and it goes live. And like, on one hand, it seems like a lot.

But on the other hand, it's just saved me a lot of right click on this file, upload it, wait for it to do, go to the CMS, paste that in, go back to the finder, right click on that other file, you know, rename it, then upload it, then paste it in. And then go into the clipboard history and find the title and paste that in. And like, and I just realized at some point, it's like, I could probably. probably make this one step, couldn't I? And I'm using keyboard maestro for part of that. Keyboard Meister, which we'll talk about maybe a little bit later,

which is such a great tool. And I had this realization, I was like, is there an API that let's be connect to the CMS? And I was like, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to keyboard Maestro literally just open the webpage and tell it like, paste and then tab and then tab and then paste this other thing, and then tab and then paste this other thing. Because it's just, just do it.

Like, I don't, I don't need to be fan. about it. Just brute force it by moving around in safari and it totally worked. So it's stuff like that. That is my answer. It's like, yes, I think it's, I have fun messing around with my weather station or stuff like that. But what I'm really ultimately getting at in most of these is I just don't want to make, I want to take a 15 step process and make it one step because it's, it's just, I hate going through those steps and it's rote and it's drudgery. And I want to, I want to, eliminate the drudgery. That's what I'm trying to do. Thank you, computer. You know, is what you do for us. Thank you, computer. And then occasionally it's something that's actually useful. Like, we have a setup where, um, uh, electric car charging in the summertime, I can, uh, do it all entirely on solar overage, which is entirely free. Like literally once our

batteries are full, all extra solar power instead of going into the grid, it just goes into the cars. It's very, it's great. It's free. It's, it's literally free. And we've got it set up so that, you know, if you leave your car plugged in overnight, it'll charge overnight. And then it's using the grid to do that. But it'll charge overnight because sometimes you've got to have a full car in the morning. But sometimes I forget to unplug it. And it's summertime. I don't want to charge from the grid. There's going to be more sun tomorrow, probably. And I was able to, with a little help from Claude build a script

that can talk to my solar provider and basically say, is there a car plugged in right now? And it runs at 9 p.m. And if a car is plugged in, it uses pushover, which is a very nice app

to send a push notification to my iPad and my phone saying, hey, there's a car plugged in. And that's great because if I want there to a car to be plugged in, I'll just nod and be like, yeah, there is a car plugged. But if I don't, it's a great prod for me to go out and unplug it because I don't want to charge off the grid overnight. I got tired of forgetting. Little thing again, but like,

it's that moment of like computers should be able to tell me this, right? Like, they should be able to tell me if a car is plugged in or not and turns out they are. So, that's cool. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Claude from Anthropic. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you. Whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. So as Jason just mentioned, Claude is fantastic at helping you write scripts for automations.

It's just a thing that it's very good at and it can just handle these things for you. I think we've both played around with this kind of stuff in the past. I also wanted to mention something in a completely different vein where I wanted to update my bio on LinkedIn. If you've ever used LinkedIn, LinkedIn has a specific way of talking. Like people on LinkedIn talk in a, like use it a lot. They talk about themselves and their work in like a very specific way. And I felt like the way I would write a bio for myself.

self would not fit LinkedIn speak. And also, I don't like writing bios. Like I don't, I don't like that. So I was able to walk of Claude, make some suggestions, and I said, help me craft this in a way that would appeal to people on LinkedIn. And we did a very good job together. So it's great with tasks like that, all the way up to helping you write scripts so you can understand if your electric car is plugged in or not. If you're a developer spending half your day on tasks, you wish you could just hand off Claude code or run in your terminal, read your code base, and can take action on things like writing tests, refactoring, or debugging without your hand-holding it through every step.

You can forget about basic web searches of Glaud. Claude is excellent at deep research. This means you can dig deeper with extensive sources, proper citations, and do it all in a fraction of the time. You know, maybe this isn't the most sophisticated, but for a trip that I'm taking, the one that I'm taking, which is why we're recording, I wanted some help with trying to understand what things I could do in the area, places that we could go to eat that was around where we were staying,

and I was able to work with Claude to help me put together like a really good list, we'll format it exactly the way that I want and do a bunch of research for me. You've got Claude Code. That's at the frontier of Argentic Coding. It's not just another coding assistant. It will handle project-wide refactors for you while preserving your coding style and showing its work, and you stay in full control. You've heard us on the show in the past, both Jason and I have been working on tools for designing California project using Claude,

because it's allowing us to build software, which is just for us, that nobody else is going to build. We know exactly what we want, and we can work with Claude Code to be able to get things to work exactly the way that we want them to. And it's a fantastic way of being able to build projects. For problems worth solving, get started with Claude today at clod.a.ai slash upgrade. There is c-l-a-u-de-a-i slash upgrade and check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all of the features that I just mentioned. That is at Claude.a-I-slash upgrade. Our thanks to Claude for their support of this show and relay. So let's talk about some essential Mac.

I say utilities. And that is like for me, a lot of the stuff is stuff that lives in a menu bar. It's the things that I want to talk about. Not just the like, you know, like, hey, I use Safari. Like specific things that I feel like are also many of them very Mac. Like these aren't going to exist a lot of this stuff in the way that I use them on iOS and iPadOS. These are things that I use to be able to get my work done.

And maybe we should take turns in this. I'm going to put links to all of these in the show notes, so you can go and check them out. I want to start off with one of my favorite apps that I've found recently. I heard it recommended a bunch on the Wayform podcast. It's called Blip. And Blip, here's what I'll say just to begin with. It's essentially Airdrop, but way faster or more reliable. Like that's the starting point for Blip.

And for me, that was one of the things I wanted to use it is I'm, I'm, sharing a lot of files for my work with Cross Forward, like for building some of the posts that we put in the inspo tab in the app. And it's like sending a lot of imagery and widget files from my test iPhone to my Macs and a different ICloud account. So AirDrop can get difficult. Blip, super easy. Like, I have the app on my iPhone.

Then my devices show up in the, not just in the share sheet, but you know you've got like the contacts, the quick contacts that was over the share sheet. So I can just open the image, press blip, it goes straight to the device. Blip also works when you're not in the same location as a device. It's awesome. It's super fast. I find it to be even more reliable than AirDrop is. And I'm a big fan of it.

It's a really nice app. And also, it deals with large files sizes, much better than AirDrop. It's more reliable in my experience. So I recommend it. All right. not a draft. We're just going back and forth. I love Swift Bar.

You talk about things in your menu bar. Swift Bar is this little utility that lets you basically run a script or even a shortcut of anything and put the output in the menu bar. And so this is where I have my weather station is in there. So I have the current temperature

and like, is it hotter or colder than yesterday? And if I click, I can see like a forecast and I built that myself. I've got one for my solar where it basically has a couple little icons that say like right now there's a little sun says like, yes, I'm generating power

and a little battery with a lightning bolt in it says I'm charging your battery right now and if I click I get some details that I'm generating 41% of my max capacity right now and the batteries at 54%. And then I also have another one that shows us literally as we live stream this on Relay's live stream server how many people are listening?

That just pops up when we're live. and I could put anything up there. When we were doing the Kickstarter, I had our Kickstarter total up there. Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, this is interesting. Because I've not used tools like this before

because I don't know how to write the scripts, but now I don't need to know. There is the tools that were write the scripts for me. Yeah, because basically, if you have any Python shell script, whatever, at the end, it prints to the, it has an output that it prints. And that goes to your menu bar, basically, is how it works. and there's some rules of like you put a little,

you put one line and that goes to the menu bar and then you put like a couple of minuses in the next line and that means everything below here is in the drop-down. There's like a syntax for it. And that's great because I, you know, I don't need to find an app that will put my weather station information that I want in my menu bar. I just have a script that does it.

And so I love it. It's just a great little Mac. One of the best things about the Mac is icons in the menu bar. Bottom line. Love it. Swift Bar is, do you get it from GitHub? Yeah, it's free. There's a few of them.

There's Xbar, which is a rebuild version as well. There are a bunch of different versions of the same concept. But yeah, Swiftbar is swiftbar. com. Okay. Very nice. Before I found Bip, blip, I was using an app called Drops. zone to help me share things via AirDrop.

But I do really like Drop Zones, too. If I ever do use AirDrop or something, I will use this, but it also has a bunch of other things. It lives up in your menu bar, and you can drag a file up there and have a bunch of actions that you can perform on that file. Like I have, you know, you can drag a file up there and drag it over an email, and it will create an email where it attaches that file. I can drag a receipt up there, and it will file it off in the app that I use for receipts

with my accountant. I can drag files up there and it will zip them. So it's just like you drag it over the app icon in the menu bar and it will allow you to take actions on it and you can customize

what those actions are. Just if you don't want to use blip but you do want to continue using Airdrop, this to me is the way the air drop a file from MacOS has always been really weird and clunky. It takes way more effort

and memory to do every time. This is great. you just drag the file up to the drop zone icon and you just drop it over the big air, drop logo and then off it goes. So I recommend that. Nice. Keyboard Maestro,

mentioned already, is the ultimate Apple, you know, or Mac automation tool, actually. It is, it's got a kind of a drag-and-drop interface. It's fairly straightforward.

And the power it has is amazing. So the idea, I mean, it's keyboard maestro, the idea is, bind it to keyboard shortcuts because it's making these macros. You can also bind it to all sorts of other actions and activities. And anything you can think of, basically, it can do.

I especially like it because it has the ability to do things like look at your screen or identify an item appears on your screen and then it knows you can click on it. Like you can literally script like clicking on things on your screen. I just had this. So I had a, I bought a book for Design in California, and it's a Kindle book. And Amazon has cracked down all their DRM stuff,

so you can't really easily convert a Kindle book to something else. And I want a searchable reference of that book in my little Devon think library so that I can more easily search about the book, but I want to be able to search it. And I don't want to, I want to search it alongside everything else, not have to also go into the Kindle app and search. It's stupid.

And I discovered, yeah, all my old DRM removal things don't work anymore. So you know what I did? Keyboard Maestro, because Keyboard Maestro has, among its things, capture part of your screen, and also OCR, an image that it's captured. And I literally wrote in about two minutes, a keyboard Meestro macro that took the Kindle book in the Kindle app on the Mac and OCR at every page and output it at a text. file. So you just had it, like, leafing through for you?

Get the window of the Kindle app, OCR it, append it to this text file, press the right arrow key, repeat 600 times. That's awesome. And I came back 20 minutes later and I had a text file of the entire text of that book that I put in Devon Think because I bought the book, I want to be able to search it. Yeah. Amazon thinks I shouldn't be able to. I don't care what Amazon thinks. Yep. And so, but Keymore Myster let me do that. And I had a bunch of things. There was a, we had to do a mass deletion of a, of a Slack instance at one point. We had to delete a bunch of people from it. And Slack makes you have to click through one at a time. You have to like, you have to a list of people and then you have to click and then it loads another page and then you have to

click. And then it says, are you sure you want to delete and you have to click? And I did a keyboard Maestro macro that did all. It literally would click that, wait for this next button to appear. Once it appears, click it, wait for the next thing to happen. And then just repeat 600 times. And, it's amazing, amazing tool. So worth it for all of those reasons. Plus, it's the single best way to interface on a Mac with Stream Deck because it'll let you run macros on the stream deck and update the buttons and stuff so you can have these dynamic buttons that change based on the current state, which I really love. So my recording button lights up when I'm recording and then when I press it again and it stops recording. It dims again and that's all keyboard maestro doing that. for window management, I use Moom M-O-M. Many tricks. Yeah, for many. My friend Rob Griffiths.

Yeah, Moom has a lot of options that I don't really need. I just have a simple set of keyboard shortcuts that will either, you know, take a window and put it this side of the screen, that side of the screen. Do I want it to be 25%, 50%, 75%, you know, and I can fire them off for different sides of the screen? also to center a screen or I have just one shortcut that just puts my preferred size for what I would think of as a full screen app that I don't have full screen, but it just takes up the vast majority of my display. I really love Moom. One of the things I really like about Moom is that it understands, like the way, you're just talking on a fundamental level, it understands that I don't want things to be, the exact same size if I'm using my studio display or my laptop screen, that it's always going to do things proportionally. I just think that's very nice.

I like it a lot. I've used it for years. It has so many more features than what I use, but I just need a basic set, and it does it really well. Text sniper. Text sniper is, again, it's a thing that while I was working on design in California scripts, I discovered. and there are a bunch of places where you can't select text.

Yeah. There are a lot of places where you can now select text, but there are a lot of places on the Mac where you can't. And I actually had this too where I was trying to extract some text from a PDF to quote. And the PDF had OCR, but it was bad OCR. And I thought, oh, no, this is an old PDF with bad OCR. I'm going to have to re-OCR it. And I have started to do that with my design.

in California references is I started re-OCRing them because there are all these PDFs that were made from book scans like 15 years ago. And the OCR technology was very bad then and it's much better now. But TextSniper, it goes in your menu bar, but basically it's Command Shift 2. So it's like taking a screenshot and you select text on your screen and it puts the actual text on the clipboard. If you're referencing like there are lots of weird places where you can't select and copy text like the app store.

Is an example of this where there's stuff in the app store and you try to select the text? It's like, nope. You can't select that text. You can text sniper it. Command Shift 2, select it, puts it on the clipboard, paste it where you want. It's great. Really useful utility for stuff like that.

And I've definitely used it for, I want to quote something out of a book. And Command Shift 2, just grab that paragraph, paste it in and done. Yes, you should be able to just select the text, but sometimes you can't. Sometimes you can. And text sniper does It's beautiful. Just very simple, targeted, and smart.

So I am a big fan of Clean Shot X for screenshots. Clean Shot X also has this functionality. Nice. So I wanted to mention it is, you know, so I use that, right? So if I ever need to OCR something, I use Clean Shot. I love Clean Shot. And there are so many people who are like, why would you use this when it's built into the operating system? The reason is I think Clean Shot does a much better job of what do you do with,

with a screenshot after you've taken it than what macOS does. So when you take a screenshot in a clean shot, you can take them in a bunch of different ways, right? You can do capture an area. You can capture the whole screen. You can do scrolling captures, time captures. You can record video. You can do text.

You can make GIFs, all that kind of stuff from what's on your screen. But once you've taken a screenshot, it just goes and lives right down on the bottom, right hand side, and you can keep taking more and they just start stacking up. You can then copy them. You can save them. You can open them up and draw on them and you can drag and drop them into different places. They don't save as a file unless you need them to.

I've used this app for a long time. To me, it is like the absolute best way to take screenshots. And they have so many different functions and features that you can try out. And like to make your screenshot experience even better. I will say clean shot. There are a bunch of apps that I use that are on Setap. I use Setap.

I'm a subscriber to it for this. There's like a bunch of these apps that I've mentioned. They're there. So I pay my set-up subscription and I get all these apps. And that's how I have a clean shot. And I really love it. I really recommend just giving it a go, even if you think that the built-in screen capture tools are good enough for you.

I've convinced lots of my friends to do this over time. And they basically all come back to me and say, yeah, you know what you were right. Clean shot is better than the built-in system. It is. That's what you say. have you ever tried clean shot I have looked at it

and I don't understand why I would need it because you can do almost all of those things with the system built in I'm telling you man it's a better experience trust me

just trust me like I believe I felt the exact same when I first used it like why would I need this it's all so easy to do with MacOS they have built a better system

okay this is that it's that classic where it's like Apple did the good enough they took it further all right the reverse Sherlock. I'll just say there's a lot you can do

with the built-in tools. People don't know like you can grab a window, you can grab a window without a shadow, you can put it on the clipboard, like there are so many things you can do from the built-in tools. I believe it. Well, I say I think Clean Shot does a better job of what happens after the screenshot is taken. Like their tool suite for that is really, really nice. The UI is really nice. I'm going to go next with mic drop. Okay.

Mic drop is a utility that I had to get because I am, when I'm out here in the garage, I have a little mute switch that I use that's connected via the XL. See, mute switch. That was me muting myself and unmuting myself. It's connected via an XLR cable. So it's like in line with my microphone. it kills the audio from the microphone. It's very useful when I'm like coughing or clearing my throat or things like that. In the back of the house, when I'm in the alternate recording area,

or if I'm traveling and I've got a different microphone that doesn't have this physical mute switch on it. Some of them have a little mute button that you can tap that's on there and you're tapping around on the microphone to find it and stuff like that. Mic drop lives in your menu bar. You can you can bind it to a keyboard shortcut. You can automate it. actually in the back of the house in that setup, I have it on a stream deck button. And it is a mic mute. That's what it does. It will mute your specific microphone

and show the status of it. And I find that very valuable. It's really nice. Built incredibly well with support for AppleScript and shortcuts. And you name it, they support it. And for a USB microphone without a physical mute switch that I prefer, that is, it gives me a physical mute switch

basically if I bind it to the stream deck, which is really great. Sixtholars logos right there on the, on the webpage. I know, they're very happy that I wrote about it. Yeah. A solved a problem for me really easily. Very nice.

I want to recommend this as a 2N1. Screens and Tail scale. Okay. Very good, like 2 in 1 kind of thing for being able to access Max connected to a network, you know, when you're not, in the physical place, you know, so I can, that the MacBook Pro that I mentioned earlier,

my M1 MacBook Pro, I can get into that Mac from wherever I am using the combination of screens and tailscale. I know that there are many ways of doing this. This has just been the most reliable, most understandable, easiest to use and most documented way of doing this that I have found. And I really like that combo. So I recommend checking them out if you want to try and access a device you know, like a Mac or any device from any other device that you might have. You can use screens and tailscale for that. Nice. How about RetroBatch from Flying Meat software?

This is a batch processing of images. I use this for a few things like for incomparable on the site. We have three different sizes of the show art. And so I have a droplet basically where I drag and drop new show art on a droplet for a retro batch and it just outputs the three different sizes in the right formats at the right time and the right naming. For the take control books, they have a droplet that does like make sure that it's within the image specs that they have where it's like it has to be a certain format and not above a certain size. And so it'll resize it if it needs to and then it puts a border around it.

It's just like really convenient if you're if you're working with images a lot. You can build a whole workflow in RetroBatch and then either run it or create a little droplet you could drag a drop images on and then it'll do all of these things including kind of like the logic of does this need to be smaller and things like that and it takes care of all of that and then as a I'll do a little adjunct too there's a utility called image optim that's free and it does what you might expect which is drag like a ping or you can do a JPEG or Jiff or whatever, but like drag a ping on there

and watch as 40% of the file size disappears. It is, it, it, it cranks on that image and it will make it smaller. And if you are, I do this a lot for my six colors images where I'm trying to be aware of the fact that every single person who comes to the website is going to load that image and that if that image is 400K

instead of 900K, that's good, right? That's less traffic on the internet and all that. K. And you can script it. So I actually, my image uploader for six colors, which is an automation, Mike. It's an automation. I wouldn't expect anything else. It processes the image through image optum.

So it uploads the smaller image. It's linked here to Mac Wild. Lex Friedman says they've got a little So it's a classic. It's classic. And what is Lexi say, the app works efficiently. It's brain dead simple to use

and it does just what it promises. review from 2012. It still does it all. It still does it all. And also Federico from the 2012 my must have Mac apps. Basically, Image Optum works like magic cutting down the size of images

without making them look worse. Yeah, baby. Thanks, Federico from 2012. Mm-hmm. I'm going to mention amphetamine here. Oh, this is good. This is really good. The Mac that I spoke about earlier, the laptop that I keep awake all the time,

the amphetamine, make sure that it stays awake all the time. I turn off the display. I have the display turn off because I do not want the display on all the time. But amphetamine keeps that Mac awake. And you can have it on all the time or you can have it for a certain amount of time or into a process is complete.

But if you want to make sure that a Mac will not go to sleep, that is how you do it. Use amphetamine. That's good. I have that happened sometimes where I'm like working on a project and I know it's going to take a while and I do not want my Mac to go to sleep or lock or something.

Like if I'm capturing pages out of a Kindle document. It's like, do not just keep working. I know I'm not here. Just keep working. Keep going. Okay. Carbon copy cloner. I mentioned it earlier.

You can use this or super duper. I think I have them both running on different systems in my house. But it's a, it's going to make a disc clone every day. So if your computer dies or you need to fish out a file, you can get to it. And these now have more advanced snapshot features, APFS snapshot features,

snapshot features, which means, for example, I now have a 4 terabyte drive as my backup drive on my 2 terabyte SSD for my laptop. And what that means is carbon copy cloner isn't just cloning my existing drive. It is keeping around snapshots of previous versions, which means it is more like a backup, not just like they were originally designed as kind of bootable clones, but it is copying all of the important files on my computer, but it's using the extra space to actually save extra previous days worth of snapshots,

which means that I can roll back. And I have used that drive to pull files off it. I'm like, oh, no, this file went to a bad place, and I need to go back to what it was like a few days ago. I can do that.

I also use time machine, but I leave this disc plugged into my Thunderbolt Hub. And it mounts it at 2.30 in the afternoon, and it runs a close. clone and then it ejects it again. And it does it invisibly. I don't even look at the drive. It's under the desk.

But it gives me that piece of mind. And Carbon Copycler has been doing this forever. It just has Super Duper has, and they're both really great. I don't think I could pick between them, but at the moment I am using Carbon Copycler. Really good. One of the, I think, most used AI feature sets, I guess, is meeting transcription. you know, like so many people are doing some version of meeting transcription. I use a service called Granola to do this.

So essentially, if I'm on a meeting or on a call, I can open the Granola app on my Mac. It will record my input and also the other people or person on the call. Transcribe everything that's said and then create notes at the end, which will be a summary and action items. I've been using it a lot when me and Jason and I are doing designing California conversations. We have these like, we've had production meetings. We're going to keep having them. The thing for me when I'm on a meeting, it's like lots of things get said in meetings, right? And there are things like, it would be nice to do this.

What if we did this? What if we did that? No one captures everything, every idea that happens in a meeting. The computer can capture all of that for you. Summary it. Give the action items and also say who is responsible for each. of them. I think this is a fantastic use of these tools, and I really like Grinola. The UI is really nice. They do a good job. The app does, I like it to use. You can also just take your own notes as well,

and it will integrate those notes into the transcript and into the stuff that comes out at the end. So yeah, very good. I like Grinola a lot. I think they do a good job, and that is my current app of choice for this. I've bounced around for different apps over time. I really like the way to know it does it. Okay. You want to do one more and we'll go to a break? Sure. Let's do Thaw.

Okay. Thaw is a menu bar manager. Golden Gate is breaking all the menu bar managers, but they will be fixed. They will be fixed. Thaw is a fork of ice, which was a different menu bar manager that seems to have gone inactive. and it's open source, so they forked it, and now there is thaw, and they're working on it, working on the Golden Gate compatibility and all of that.

And it's a menu bar manager. You know, Apple should offer one. In Golden Gate, there's actually a vaguest hint of one, which is why everything is broken, I think, but Apple doesn't go far enough with it. Apple is really just kind of making sure that when you get to the notch, it can manage what is not visible because you're at the notch. but I prefer something that doesn't, like I have a lot of items in my menu bar

and some of them I want to be able to get to if I need to, but I do not need to see them littering my menu bar all the time. And that's what I like about thaw. Bartender does this. There are lots of other apps that do that. They're all various shades of broken in the Golden Gate betas, but they all get better.

And I just really like being able to say, I want these visible all the time and these to only be visible when I move my mouse up there and click to get to those items because I don't need the ambient information that carbon copy cloner

is running on my system. I just don't need to know it. I don't need to know that transmit is running. I don't need to know that stream deck is running. I know it's running. I don't need it in my menu bar.

But sometimes you do. That's why, you know, some of them you can take out of the menu bar, but you do kind of want access to them. You just don't need to see them all the time. And this is a way to do that. In the long run, I think Apple wants everybody to use their new system of controls from control center. But the truth is, most apps don't use that system. So instead, I use a menu bar manager

and thaw is a good one, free open source. And unlike Poral Ice, seems to be getting updates. This episode is brought to you by Century. You get a bug report. The user says something was broken, but you can't reproduce it. So you're digging through logs, you're checking traces, and you still have no idea what this user actually saw. Well, Century Session Replay fixes just that. Gives you a video-like reproduction of exactly what the user experienced. Their clicks, their scrolls, what loaded, what didn't, all tied in to the error in one timeline. You can see the console output, the network calls, and even the rage clicks where a user hammered a broken button. Because it's all built into Century, the replay is already linked to the error, the trace and the logs

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They have a free dev plan, and listeners of this show can use the code upgrade 26 to get $100 in Century credits if you're a new user. That's S-E-N-T-R-Y.O and the code upgrade 26 to get $100 in Century Credits. Our thanks to Century for their support of this show and all of Relay. All right, so I'm going to mention PopClip here. So what I like about PopClip is it is essentially bringing the iOS kind of pop-up menu for when you select text, but bringing it to the Mac. So at its simplest, you select some text.

text and it brings up the copy, you know, and paste menus. So that's nice. You've got that there if you want to, if you're like a mouse-based text copier. PopClip is great for that. But you can also add in different functionality into PopClip. So I have a couple that I use very often. I select text and I can press a button to turn that text into Titlecase, which is very helpful for podcast titles because everybody likes to do title case and I find title case sometimes breaks my brain as to what exactly I'm supposed to be able to set it as and so I like that I can select the text press that button it will turn it into title case also going to a URL so if I select some text I can just press a button and it will take me to that URL because as we've mentioned earlier

text isn't always exactly the way you want it to be formatted and maybe a URL is not clickable for some reason, but I can just select that text and pop clip, press the button, and it will take me there. But there's a bunch of things you can do with pop clip, and these are just the functions that I use. Nice. How about Devin Think? Okay. I did it, Mike. I did it. I'm happy you did it. Stephen Hackett made me. This is my design in California app. It is a database. I don't even know how to describe it. I'm probably barely scratching the surface of it, but what I really have is a giant database of documents. And it's all of the documents for design in California. It's the oral histories and it's the books and it's the magazines. And it means that I can fairly easily,

if I'm writing about a particular subject, so the example I'll give is that trip to Atlantic City that we talked about in our sample episodes, I can find every book that talked about that. And exactly where, and I can very quickly jump and see what all the different stories about that trip to Atlantic City were, which is important if I'm assembling a story and I want to refer to all those documents and see, you know, what do they have in common? What, what, how do they disagree or whatever? And the idea of like, I could search a folder. or something, but then you're searching a folder and then you're opening individual items.

Like, it puts it all in one place where I just get search results. And it's like, here are all the search results for all of the books and all of the magazines, all in one place. And I have been doing those things where, you know, some of these books, I buy all the books. But I also, sometimes I find the PDF that somebody scanned on the internet 20 years ago of that book. And just as I rip the text out of those Kindle books for searching purposes, I will download those PDFs of that book that I bought a used copy of it, but somebody made a scan of it already.

And I have found that a lot of those are really bad or old OCR, so the text in them is not. You can't copy and paste it because it's nonsense or it's garbled so much that it's a lot of work to fix it. And modern OCR is much better. So Devin Think has built-in OCR engine. So you literally just right-click on a book and you say re-o-o-o-cr this. And so every time I get a book with bad OCR this,

are. I just say, do this again. And I also have some books that are in RTF or text or whatever. And like, they're all in there too and they're all searchable. And it's great. It's not, I'm not going to read a book in Devon think, right? But I, as a, an indexed repository to quickly get access to exactly what I'm looking for, it's, uh, it's really great. It's, it's really great. And I needed a tool like that. This is one of my number one tools, uh, for that I picked up for design in California. I'm going to recommend P-Calc now. I love P-calk in my menu bar. That is where I interact with it.

And I have a keyboard shortcut. I just press command option P, and P-Calc opens, and I can just start doing calculations. And I also have it set up with a bunch of currency conversion buttons in P-Calc as well, so I use it for a currency converter as well. But I love it living up there in my menu bar. I'm a big fan. And so thank you, James, for having the menu bar app and for making that good over time.

Because I use it every day. And I love having it up there in my menu bar. Nice. That's so simple. Just open the widget in your menu bar. Yep. That's exactly it. And I love it up there.

Nice. Okay. How about, let's see, Calibur. Okay. Calibur is an ugly An ugly, ugly, ugly app. It's an ugly app. You're ugly ugly ugly,

it is, it is an open source cross-platform e-book utility. Tell us everything you need to know. It looks like every open-source project that was brought to Mac OS in the early days of OS10. But it's where I put all my e-books. And I can put e-books in there and I can sync them to my code. It's just really convenient. This is my repository of, and yes, this is where I could extract the DRM from my old Kindle books and then keep them in there and I can put them in my cobo and you can search them and stuff too. It's just a very convenient utility for me to have for all of my ebooks.

So it's, it's nothing to look at, but it's very functional and made more functional by very functional by very various plugins that do things like, let me extract the DRM from once with DRM so that I can just have them and put them wherever I want. Because like I've got the weird, I've got my weird XTE ink, uh, e readers that are like non-standard and they, they don't do DRM and they only do standard EPUBs. And like, if I've got the, if I've got it in caliber, I can output it to that device. In fact, those devices will do a wireless sync with caliber. You run caliber and then you get on a little tiny e-reader and you say, caliber sync and you pick a book and it downloads

it from the server. It's great. Switchglass by friend of the show, John Syracusa. So I had previously mentioned I have an issue with my display and the dock. I like my dock on the right-hand

side. I have my display on the right-hand side. I do not understand why Apple will not allow you to put a dock on every display. I don't understand why they will not let you do this. Like, why one display has to be the most important display and why you cannot put the dock on the middle display if you have a display on the right. Why does it need to go all the way to the

right? I find it very annoying. I wish they didn't do this, but they do. Luckily, John Syracuse saved me because with Switchglass, I have just a kind of pseudo-doc, which these are just the apps that I have actually open and they're there if I need them. I know I mentioned I don't use the doc very much and that is true. But if I ever want to use it, I don't want to have to go all the way over to the right hand side to click on something. Yeah. And so I have switchglass here. It sits on the right hand side and I can get to my active apps whenever I need them. I hate this decision by Apple so much. I don't, they do so many. Now that you've got universal control, you can have a situation where your dock is to the, that you can move past the dock

onto another screen. Yes. With universal control. Yes. So why not just let people choose to show the dock on the main display, even if there's another display to the right of it? It's so dumb. But they're like, no, there's a further, it can only ever be on the furthest out display. Madness. I just hate it. I hate it so much. So yes, thank you, John Sirkeuser for SwitchFod. Thank you, John. Yeah, big fan. I bet you there is, there is no world in which John thought I was a Switchglass user, right? He would never imagine that I used Switchglass. Because it is emulating something from way older versions of Mac OS, right? Yes. So like, I just can't, I would expect that he would find it surprising that I use it. I mean, it's also Drag Thing. That's what I mean, right? Yeah, it's drag thing. It's emulating that

kind of world. So your picks are James Thompson and formerly James Thompson. Yeah, it's just, if James will do it, I'll use it, you know? Yeah. Or if he did it and then abandoned it and then I'll use it even more and I'll be very happy about it. My next one is Else when,

which is originated with our listeners basically, Relay FM listeners. Useful in a couple of ways. So it is a time zone, time zones are the hardest. They're the worst. It's two things. If you're in a Discord, which we have many discords that we're in, you can set a time and then copy it to the clipboard and paste it in. And it will show, I'm so mad that Slack doesn't support this, by the way.

It drives me crazy. I could use this all the time in Slack. And Slack will do it for bots, but it won't do it for people. It paste in a code. And what happens is the time is displayed in the local time zone of whoever sees it. So instead of having to say it's this time Eastern, this time Pacific, this time Central, this time New Zealand, this time Central, Europe. P.

You set the time in your time zone and press copy and paste it in and it's that time. Everywhere for everyone. So good. And separately, you can do presets for various time zones or time zone groups and it puts them in text with a little emoji and you can copy them. And I use this like when we do a live event, like a Zoom or something for six color subscribers. I'll put that time in else when and then I will grab the codes because I will. I don't want to mess up the time zones for everybody. Just really convenient, little utility for time zones.

Really great app. Big fan. I was using this a lot when I was streaming a lot. Fantastic. Love it. Yeah. I'm going to mention an app that has time in the name, but is completely unrelated. It's Timery.

Timery is one of my favorite apps of all time. It's a time tracking app. You need a toggle account. But once you've got that, you know, free or a paid account, depending on the features that you need. You can use timery to track your time. I love time tracking. I love it for data.

I love it for understanding what the shape of my work looks like. And it helps me make decisions as someone who likes to think about how they work. I actually have data that proves the work that I've done and how much time I spent on it. Because your brain is very bad at keeping track of that over time. And sometimes the way that you feel about a project can make you. either over or underestimate how much time you spent on it. And I feel like it's very difficult to make decisions about prioritization without data. And Timoree provides me with that data. And it's also made by a great developer, Joe, Timoree Joe. And Timoree Joe has done a great job over the years of keeping

this app up to date and even dealing with some of the really ridiculous, ridiculous, I would say, like, who am I thinking of here? What was the company that I had really? just terrible API changes that they made where they really restricted it for everyone. I don't remember. Oh, Reddit. Reddit like API changes.

Toggle tried to do to try and really clamp down on people using their API. And Joe had to do a ton of work to be able to, like, reduce the amount of calls that the app makes to the API and still make it function very well.

And he did in a wonderful job with that. So I can continue using the app kind of unrestricted by what toggle was trying to do. So fantastic. And also, you know, got liquid glass design and everything now. I love Timery.

I think Timery is my all-time favorite iOS app. I love it. It's okay. My issue with Timery is that the Mac app isn't very good. It works great for me because he's in the menu bar. Like, and he's a bunch of limitations. Yeah, even there, it's just, it's sluggish.

Yeah, it is a catalyst app, I think. And so that's going to do what it's going to do. Yeah. I just, I, if I, if I, because I tried it and what I found is that I appreciated that it was a good iOS app. And but on the Mac, it just frustrated me. And I know why it is the way it is. It's just, I needed it to be good on the Mac, not on the, not on the iPhone. And it, that's not its priority.

No. All right. We always mention it. It's a Hall of Famer, but I'm going to. to put Rogamiba in the spotlight again. Audio hijack and loopback are essential for what we do. And they've made some great improvements with it. The scripting, the JavaScript-based scriptability in audio hijack has allowed me to automate

even more of my professional life in a way that is great. And loopback is a utility that I could argue that the crossover between these two apps, they might need to be the same app or share more features with one. another eventually, but I use them both. Loopback is virtual audio inputs and outputs, and that allows me to route audio in different ways. So for example, I have a, I have a, I used to have this whole like, what app am I capturing? Are you talking on Zoom? Are you talking on Riverside? Are you talking in a web browser? What apps are you using to record a podcast? They used to be that like that Apple MIDI thing. Oh my God. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh yeah. So we're still there. A loopback, I set up a virtual input that's a VOIP apps and it's all the apps. Nice. Nice. And then my audio hijack just records the VOIP input, which is all those apps. And I use it for a bunch of different things. Custom streaming where I need these very particular set of things to go to a different place. It does all of that. You use it for the jingle episodes too, right? Yeah, yeah. And Farago, which is another Rogamiba app, which is the soundboard for that. So, yeah, Rogamiba in general, audio hijack, loopback. And we'll say Farago, too. They all just kind of can't do this sort of thing on the Mac without that stuff.

Absolutely. I'm going to recommend an app now, which is unfindable. And so you have to get the link in the show notes. It is called The Clock. It is a menu bar app for world time. So you can click up there. You can have a bunch of time zones that you want. So I have like time zones that I work with. But it also has a feature that I really like where I can just drag a little slider

and it will show me the time at different time periods. Right? So like I can drag it by like, oh, so when it's six o'clock in the morning in London tomorrow, what time will it be in San Francisco. You can just drag a little slider and it will just keep moving the clocks forward. So I like it a lot.

It also has a, like the clocks have seconds hands on them. And so if I need to know when an embargo is about to hit, I can do my counting down by looking at the clock and then I can press the publish button. So I love this app. But it's very old and I'm always happy that it works in every version of Mac OS because it's been around for a long time,

but it absolutely does the job, and I'm a big fan. All right. Transmit from Panic? Yep. FTP and various other file transfer systems is how I get my files to my servers, my podcasts, and other things.

It also does syncing. I actually keep a backup of all the incomparable podcasts on my local server, and it syncs those automatically. So I've got my own kind of personal backup of all that stuff. They're working on a version 6 that's in beta now that actually looks awesome and has some really cool features in it. So they're not, it has been around a very long time. It's a one with a truck.

One with a truck. But the new beta is also really encouraging that they're doing some really interesting things there. And so, like, I just can't even imagine. That's how I get to file. on remote servers with transmit. That's it. I-Stat menus. I started using I-Stat menus

when we were first starting with video for upgrade because I would upload a video file to Dropbox and it would take an interminable amount of time. It just never could understand how long it was going to take to upload the audio.

And one of the things that I really needed to know was is it actually uploading and I could find out with ISAT menus because you can have the network traffic indicator there. So I had that one. And then over time, just for fun, I'm like in my menu bar, I put my SSD, CPU and memory usage. And sometimes I like to go and see like what's happening up there, you know, like poke around, see what's happening. You know, it's a good time. So I like high step menus. Again, it's another one that's included in set app. So easy one for me.

But for network traffic, I really like it. But also just to understand like, hey, what's going on on this computer and I stand menus let me know? I use an app called Home Control. Okay. It's a menu bar app that gives you access to all of your home kit stuff. But really I use it because

it's got a URL-based automation scheme that allows me to wire my home kit stuff to automations, especially to stream deck buttons. So like, when I go on MacBrate Weekly, it lowers my blinds and turns on all my TV lights.

And those are all HomeKit. So I can just have it automatically lower the blinds or turn on the lights or whatever I need. And it's just, it's nice to have a, they have a shortcuts version now that I have not really used as much that will also do this. But having the ability to automate via a script, home kit item,

is something that I find very useful, especially for all my lights and blinds and stuff in my office. My last one is Super Agent. Super Agent will automatically get rid of and fill out the privacy cookie pop-ups for you when you're on the web. It is an app, but really it's an extension for your browser. you pre-fill it with what do you want to say yes and no to

so you just reject everything or accept functional cookies or whatever and then every time you go to a website super agent very quickly does it all for you sometimes you get to those websites where they're like just like unbelievably huge and you can quickly see super agent doing all the checking and getting rid of it I don't have to deal with cookie pop-ups because they use super agent I'm a big fan of super agent does a good job. California now has the same kind of anti-cooky logic. That's why you asked me. I wonder why you asked me. I

didn't ask you about this. I probably should subscribe to this. It's really good. It does the job. and it also works on the on the iPhone. Yeah. Well, that's exactly it is. I get those on my iPad all the time too. Yeah. Really annoying. Mm-hmm. All right, one more for me. Um, I esotope RX, it is industry standard audio software, but I, wow. Like, I mean, but I love it and it comes in different versions which is great there is the advanced version that will cost you like a thousand bucks but there's also the standard version that's 400 bucks and the elements version that's 99 bucks you say that's great and I agree that it's nice to have choice but as a customer it's like I know the one I need they have a comparison yeah I find I find that I bought advanced once I have a copy of 12, like of 10 advanced or something, but I went back to standard because

most of the tools are professional like filmmaker tools or musician tools, but they have the standard version, and even elements has some really nice stuff in it. But the standard version, like, the stuff that I really like is they've got a lot of, I started buying them because they had a great

dereverb function, which is literally they do lots of incredible math to remove room X from people who have very incredible. It is incredible. And now they have a feature that's called Dialogue Isolate. And in 12, where they've taken a bunch of the functionality from other. I also use it as denoiser, right?

Somebody has a hum. Somebody has a buzz. Somebody has some room tone. I can very quickly sort of select a quiet space where all you're hearing is the noise, not them talking. And you learn that noise and then you apply it to the file and the noise just van. But this new dialogue isolate, it's using a machine learning algorithm that's trained on human voice, so it knows the dialogue and what voice sounds like. And then it suppresses everything else. And it's just got three separate sliders on it. It's such a great interface. And one of them is echo and one of them is noise. And one of them is voice. And so you can slide the voice up or keep the voice where it is, but slide the echo down a little and the noise down. Or in a very echoey room, maybe slide the echo down more. do a preview. You listen to it. It's like, that sounds pretty good. And then, you know,

then you select an hour-long podcast recording and press process and it sits there for 20 minutes. I like this. So what version does this now? I think 12. I like the sound of that because I use some of these things. I'm like, I don't, I don't really know what it wants me to do. You know what I'm? Like, you understand this stuff a bit more than me and I'm like, ah, do I need this or do I need that? But being able to kind of like just push it up and down and like work it out, I think that's really clever.

I like to sound of that a lot. Yeah, it's literally just dialogue isolate. Okay. One thing, it's focused to clean up speech. It's in standard, so you don't need advance to do it. And it's got a very simple interface that is like voice reverb and noise.

And I found that although I still, you know, I still want to like de-reverb or I still want to de-noise. The truth is, if I use dialogue isolate and drag those settings and do a little preview and I'm like, this is a little noisy. I'll slide that down. I used this. We did an episode of Robot or Not where John Syracusa had people working outside his house. They were like jackhammering across the street and stuff. And I used this and like, you can't tell. You can't, you can't hear any of it.

Because it knows, the algorithm knows that that's not a human voice. And so it just suppresses it. And I do that with some of my panelists for some of the podcasts I do on incomparable. They're in echoy rooms. And I know that I can just slide that reverb down a little bit and it will suppress that room echo. And it's amazing how good a job it does at that. So, you know, it's not for everybody. And paying, you know, like I said, there's a $99 version that has some nice tools in it. And then there's a, you know, 350 version that does more.

And then there's this enormous version that costs $1,400. But like in the business we're in, it's totally worth it for me to pay them for their $300 version. It's a $400 version. And it's often, it's on sale sometimes. And, you know, anyway, it's great. Isotope? So this dialogue also isolate. Is it in standard too?

It is in standard, yes. RX12 standard. Okay. Very fun. Very, very fun. Costing Mike some money. Yeah, maybe. I mean, to be honest, when I do need these things, I just ask you.

I'm like, Jason. Yeah, it's true. For me. But maybe I won't need it so much now if they have this UI, which is more understandable to me. Maybe. We'll see. The links are in the show notes for the apps that we've spoken about. If you would like to send us in your feedback follow-up or you have any questions for us on a future episode, just go to UpgradeFeedback.com.

Thank you so much to our members to support us with Upgrade Plus. You can get longer and free versions of the show every week. Yes, they can be longer than this episode. Go to GetUpgradeplus.com. You can find us on YouTube by searching for the Upgrade podcast. I would like to thank Century, Claude, and Backblaze for their support of this week's episode. But most of all, I want to thank you for listening. Until next week, I won't be here, but Jason will.

Say goodbye, Jason Snow. Money, money, money, money. Let's talk about money. That'll be next week. Have a good trip. Thank you. See you in a couple weeks, Mike.