Brett v. Bread Cheese

[00:00:00] Intro: Tired. So tired, Overtired.

[00:00:04] Brett: Hey, everybody. You’re listening to Overtired. That sounded way more chipper than I feel. Um, uh,

[00:00:10] Jeffrey: woke me up

[00:00:11] Brett: this is Brett Terpstra. I am, uh, I am back after a week of being ill and, and missing my friends here. Uh, speaking of my friends, I am here with Jeff Severns Guntzel. Hi, Jeff

[00:00:23] Jeffrey: Hello?

[00:00:24] Brett: and Christina Warren. Hey, Christina.

[00:00:26] Christina: Hello. Hello. Welcome back, Brett. We’re glad to, uh, to have you, uh, back with us again.

[00:00:32] Brett: I spent six days unable to get, like, I was alternating between laying in bed and reclining on the couch, uh, just for the sake of variety, but I couldn’t, I couldn’t walk. My stomach was, I was doubled over in pain.

[00:00:47] Jeffrey: Ugh.

[00:00:48] Brett: It was horrifying, and I won’t go into details, but I will never eat bread, cheese.

[00:00:57] Christina: Now, now breaded cheese. Cuz you, you, we we’re talking about this pre-show. Do you just mean like, like a, like, like, like, like craft? Like what? What do you

[00:01:03] Brett: No, no, no, no, no. So it’s called bread cheese, also known as grilling cheese. And it’s like a, a one inch by four by four inch block of, uh, I don’t know exactly what kind of cheese it is, but it’s designed to put on like the grill or to put in a saute pan and

[00:01:22] Jeffrey: Like, like halmi cheese,

[00:01:24] Brett: I have no idea what that means. Um, but you heat it until it gets like a little bit gooey, like a brie consistency.

[00:01:30] And then you can like season it, like chop it into like strips and put like Italian seasoning on it and grill it till it gets like a nice char on the outside.

[00:01:40] Christina: Oh, okay. I’m, look, I’m looking this up now.

[00:01:43] Brett: of

[00:01:43] Jeffrey: it’s halmi cheese.

[00:01:44] Christina: I’m looking this up now. Like it looks pretty great. I, okay. I’ve had every variety of cheese and I’m lactose intolerant. I should add, um, which, uh, but, but my attacks don’t leave me with like six day things. I, I will, I will shit my guts out, but then it’s usually like over with, um, as soon as it’s out of my, you know, like, system.

[00:02:06] Um, and, and I, I love cheese, so I will deal with it, but, uh,

[00:02:10] Brett: I, I could deal with that. I have the opposite problem.

[00:02:14] Christina: Right, right. Yeah. And, and, and actually, I, I should, I should, um, uh, clarify. I’m not lactose intolerant. I mean, I, I think I am, but I’m, I have a milk allergy, which is different, but, um, anyway, uh, but, um, I’ve never had bread cheese, but, um, it’s intriguing to me, but I’m also probably not gonna go near it because of, uh, uh, you know, what it, what it did to your body,

[00:02:40] Jeffrey: it’s, here’s a, here’s a 2005 Bon Appit article. Love Halloumi. You need to know about bread, cheese.

[00:02:47] Brett: there you

[00:02:47] Jeffrey: I’m just bringing Halmi back in the conversation cause I have a feeling.

[00:02:51] Brett: You call it, you’re like a goddamn cheese bro.

[00:02:54] Jeffrey: Yeah. I, my

[00:02:55] Brett: A cheese

[00:02:56] Christina: I’m, I’m, I’m also seeing Tuia, uh, but, but I’m, I’m sure

[00:03:00] Jeffrey: Yeah, that’s the same. That translates to bread cheese. Apparently that’s like Swedish or Finn, depending on the fucking website.

[00:03:06] Chat. G P T Save me

[00:03:09] Christina: Exactly. Chat. Pt. What is bread cheese?

[00:03:14] Brett: I have it loaded right now. Let’s see. What is bread, cheese, bread, cheese, also known as, who is the type of cheese that originated Finland. It is a semi-hard cheese that is traditionally made from cows milk, but can also be made from a combination of cows and goats milk. The cheese is typically formed into a loaf or a round shape and is often served, sliced or grilled.

[00:03:39] And then it goes on for multiple paragraphs that I’m not gonna, I’m not just gonna make our, like we, we could have chat, G p t, write our podcast. We could just do a whole podcast reading from chat g p t, but I feel like it would be a bit dry.

[00:03:56] Jeffrey: That is not the fun or even effective way to use chat. G P T I found I, I did just a little bit of that stuff and I was like, this is kind of boring. But then it was, the coding was just like, oh.

[00:04:07] Brett: I missed, I missed last week’s conversation, but I, I have a couple, I wanna, I wanna like revive it a little bit. Maybe after mental health corner, we can talk just a little bit about my experiences with chat G P T and where I see it fitting in and, and what dangers I see. Uh, do you want me to start?

[00:04:25] Christina: Yes. I want you to start because you, uh, are the one who’ve you’ve, you’ve been gone. So we need, we need to hear from,

Mental Health Corner

[00:04:31] Brett: So, uh, the day, the day that I felt better, the day I got some relief from my stomach pain, I immediately, uh, felt like I was getting manic. Um, I went from. Stuck, stuck on the couch to like, oh my God, I can catch up on everything in a day. And, uh, uh, so I, I did not take my, uh, ADHD meds. Um, I got exercise, I took a shower.

[00:05:01] I ate all three meals and, and, uh, went to bed on time and I slept fine that night. I woke up the next morning, still feeling manic. Um, but I have slept every night since then. Um, not as much as I usually do. My body, like left to its own devices, once nine and a half hours of sleep. Um, and I’ve been getting more like seven, but I am sleeping.

[00:05:28] Um, so I would say I’m in a hypomanic phase right now, and I kinda, if I can maintain my, like, self-care levels at this point, um, I can, I can live with this for as long as it lasts. Uh, I, I, I rather enjoy it. I’ve, I’ve written so much code and kept up with work and kept up with my, like, personal relationships and been able to settle down and watch arrowverse shows every night. Um, it’s, it’s working out. I, I can work with this.

[00:06:02] Jeffrey: Nice.

[00:06:03] Brett: Jeff

[00:06:05] Jeffrey: Uh, I’m podcasting for the first time through Progressive lenses, which is awesome. Thought I’d hate it. I do kind of hate it actually, but I don’t hate, I don’t hate it. Like, oh my God, I have to wear progressive lenses. It’s like now my reading glasses are always on me and it’s kind of awesome. And, and related to that, I just had a birthday and,

[00:06:27] Brett: Oh yeah. Happy.

[00:06:29] Christina: Yes, exactly. Happy.

[00:06:30] Jeffrey: Thank you. And, uh, I like, I don’t, I don’t like birthdays, like I like to celebrate them or anything, but I like anything that kind of marks a beginning or, or suggests a clean slate, even if it’s sort of a false promise . Um, and uh, and I’m also just feel like every time I’ve been in a seven year, 27, 37, 47, I always felt like I might as well just round up at this point.

[00:06:58] And so the time between 47 and 50, I have a feeling is gonna feel like the time between 37 and 40, which is like, I’m just 50 that whole time . But it’s just like

[00:07:08] Brett: do that. I, I round up by fives no matter what age I am. Like right, right now I’m 45 and if someone asks me, I have to think hard to realize I’m only 44.

[00:07:18] Christina: See, see, see, I ran down by 10,

[00:07:20] Jeffrey: around town by 10. Yep. Yep. That’s one way to do it, for sure. Um, but yeah, I don’t know. Like every once in a while, uh, the way Facebook plays out on your birthday can be nice. Other times I’m like, I don’t buy it, you know? But like, but, uh, this time around was just nice. I got some nice messages and stuff. So anyway, and I’m just kind of, I don’t know, I’m like, weirdly, not physically, but like existentially, I’m comfortable in my years.

[00:07:49] physically, I’m not at all comfortable in my years. Um, so it was a, it was a, a big year of changes for me in terms of. Medication, which is an ongoing sort of collaboration. Uh, it is a collaboration, but I was gonna say calibration. Um, but yeah, I was there. I got to spend uh, my birthday with my dad and uh, my parents were divorced when I was two and my dad lives in a different state and this is only the third or fourth time I’ve ever been with him on my birthday, which was kind of fun.

[00:08:19] Kind of unusual.

[00:08:21] Christina: Yeah. That’s nice. That’s really nice.

[00:08:23] Jeffrey: it was good. Especially cuz I like my parents and

[00:08:27] Brett: Lucky.

[00:08:27] Christina: is, which is fantastic. I, I, I, I love hearing that. Yeah.

[00:08:31] Jeffrey: Yeah. And then from like, speaking of my parents from a pure, um, joy standpoint, um, so my dad and my stepmom are, are very much, uh, like I am like them. I, they, my stepmom is an artist. She makes artists, she makes art out of junk. Um, my dad is a total hobbyist, like electronics and a workshop and all this stuff.

[00:08:50] So whenever I visit them, it feels just like how life ought to feel. But it’s also, there’s a real taste for the absurd. And so my dad gave a paintball to my boys to shoot into the ravine off the deck. And my stepmom, who used to be an elementary school teacher, was like, I was inside with her. She’s like, I could put my Turkey suit on and I could go out there and they could shoot me

[00:09:12] And she’s like, exactly what she did. She put a Turkey suit on, she had a gobbler that she was shaking. And she ran around while my sons shot her. And I was just like, you know what? This is great. I love absurdity so much. Absurdity equals joy. , that’s what chicken.

[00:09:30] Brett: I forgot to, uh, I forgot to mention, uh, I had a psych appointment this week, um, Monday. And, uh, I was told that my provider is leaving the clinic.

[00:09:45] Christina: Oof.

[00:09:46] Brett: and so the, the woman I was seeing before her when I was still at the same clinic, um, had come back and I was like, oh, well I’ll just go back to this woman who, you know, saved my ass.

[00:10:00] She was the one who gave me vyvance after years of not being allowed to medicate my adhd. So, but she’s leaving at the same time. Everyone’s leaving and the one psychiatrist they have left in the practice is not taking new, new clients.

[00:10:16] Jeffrey: Oh.

[00:10:17] Brett: So hopefully I will be able to, my, my psychiatrist is moving north to Edina, uh, which is farther than I would want to

[00:10:26] Jeffrey: Yeah, it’s just, why don’t you say how far for people that aren’t in Minnesota

[00:10:31] Brett: I think, I think it’s about two hours.

[00:10:33] Jeffrey: Yeah. It’s about

[00:10:33] Brett: Um, and, uh, uh, but she would do telehealth. Uh, so, so if that works out and I can get into her, uh, new client list after she moves, um, I’ll be okay. If not, I’m fucked. Like there is nowhere left to go in Winona and especially nowhere that would, that understands that treating A D H D prevents, uh, addictive behavior, um, like that is somehow despite, you know, plenty of studies to back that up.

[00:11:07] It is not common wisdom among medical providers. Um, and I could easily lose my ADHD meds again, which would be catastrophic,

[00:11:17] Jeffrey: we can talk about this offline, but I have somebody for you who I’ve never had to see in person. She’s actually over by the South Dakota border, um, and she’s my medication manager. So if you, if you get stuck or if Psychology Today doesn’t help or anything, I know this person would understand exactly what you’re describing.

[00:11:33] Brett: Cool. All right. That’s all. I, Christina, your turn.

[00:11:38] Christina: Yeah. Well, I’m, I, um, like cross my fingers for you, um, on, on that front, Brett, because like, that’s, uh, beyond like, stressful. I, I, I know, but, but I, I’m hopeful that like, with the Teladoc stuff, hopefully like telemedicine is in a much different place than it was three years ago, which is like the good thing.

[00:11:59] So hopefully that will continue. But, but also hopefully like, uh, it’s great that you have, uh, Jeff, um, to, to maybe give you, um, some names too. But yeah, so, um, thinking that, thinking good thoughts for you there. Um, as for me, so, um, I’m okay. Uh, I’ll, I’ll just be be honest. Um, right before we recorded this, uh, Microsoft, uh, who, uh, owns, uh, GitHub, um, announced that they’re doing 10,000, uh, layoffs, um, uh, between now and, and the end of March.

[00:12:30] And, uh, you know, as far as I know, uh, I, my job is safe. Uh, and, and my colleagues at GitHub are safe, but. This is the sort of thing that that does weigh in on my mental health. Um, and it, it, it’s, uh, and, and I think it weighs in on anybody’s mental health, but I think it’s, it’s one of those things where, because I’m such a workaholic and because so much of my identity is tied up to my job and because of the past, uh, frankly, I’m not going to say P T S D, but, but PTs d like experiences that I had working in, in the, the media industry, which I know Jeff can relate to.

[00:13:09] Um, seeing things like what’s been happening in, in the tech industry, uh, you know, over the last few months, but, you know, is, is hard. But then seeing it affect, potentially affect, you know, people that, that I’ve worked with and, and know and care about, like, and, and I, and I don’t know who’s safe and who’s not yet, right?

[00:13:26] Like, which is like, honestly like the, one of the, the worst parts. Um, and I’m not even impacted as far as I know, knock on wood, but. It, it’s hard. Um, and so these are those things where, you know, like I, um, am very fortunate that I now work in an industry that has better severance and that has better policies and that has, uh, better job demand than, than what I used to do.

[00:13:51] But it, it’s still really, really difficult. And, and it’s one of those things that’s challenging for me. Um, like, it, it just, it, it’s hard. So it, it does impact my mental health when, when things like this happen. Like I can’t just turn it off, you know what I mean? Like, it’s just, it, it, I, I, I have like a very real reaction to it.

[00:14:11] So, um, so that, that happened right before we, uh, started recording. Um, other than that, um, you know, it’s been pretty, it’s been pretty good. I’m actually, um, going out of town with my mom, um, wheelie for Vegas tomorrow morning. Yeah. For Adele. And I’m really, really excited about this because this trip has been in the works since, you know, like.

[00:14:34] November or December of, of, um, of, of 2021. Um, and then the, the concert was supposed to be in, um, April of, of last year, or, or March of last year rather. Uh, and, and Adele, um, postponed her, um, her concert series. Um, and, um, so we’re going, um, our concert is on Saturday. We’re gonna go see the, the Beatles, um, se show on, uh, on, on Friday.

[00:15:00] Uh, we get in tomorrow. Um, my mom has never been to Vegas before and, uh, I’m super, super excited to like, show her Vegas. We’re staying at the Venetian, which um, is one of my favorite, um, like, uh, hotels, uh, strip things because they, every, every room is a suite, so you get, you know, I think it’s a better experience.

[00:15:22] And then I think she’ll, um, like. The layout of, you know, kind of the, the Italian, um, like the, you know, uh, theme of, of the hotel. Um, you know, I can’t take her to Rome, but I can take her to fake, you know, Vegas, Rome. So, um, it’s, uh, so I’m, I’m really excited about that. And, uh, I’m, I’m, I’m, I’m, I don’t know, I’m, I’m really, I feel just like really happy that I can do that for her.

[00:15:48] And, and she’s really, really excited. So that, that definitely helps like my mental health a lot to, you know, bring other people joy. So, yeah.

[00:15:58] Jeffrey: That’s great

[00:16:00] Brett: Nice.

[00:16:01] Jeffrey: love.

chatGPT (Part III)

[00:16:02] Brett: I wanna, I wanna dredge chat, g p t back.

[00:16:06] Jeffrey: Drudge suggests that Jack g p t is not at the surface already.

[00:16:13] Brett: So I, I’m fascinated with chat. G P T. I know you guys already talked about it a bit. Um, I’ve had, uh, consulting clients that have come to me with like, excited that chat, G p t wrote them say an Apple script to do something and they show it to me and they’re like, what do you think? And it has been clearly wrong.

[00:16:37] Like, I mean, I can look at it and immediately say, this does not, this will not do what you think it’s gonna do. Um, but before we started recording, I decided to just try, um, some prompts for various AppleScript tasks and it nailed every once. So I don’t, I think if you give it the right queries, you can get good code.

[00:16:59] Um, like when I ask it to write Ruby Methods for me, uh, it gives me honestly, The best, the, the most accepted answers. Um, like, uh, stack overflow worthy answers for doing basic things. Uh, bubble sorting and sorting a raise by length and things like that that can be done in, in one line. And it, and it nails it, it does a really good job.

[00:17:24] And it’s, it’s become a great little tool that prevents me from having to go to stack overflow to answer basic questions. But you can’t do it if you don’t understand the language to begin with because it’s very, I would say

[00:17:42] Christina: Very

[00:17:42] Brett: 50 chance, yeah, it, there’s a 50 50 chance. It gives you code that looks good and doesn’t work at all, or, or, or has, you know, faults that will bite you in the end.

[00:17:54] Um, overall though, still I’m impressed. Um, I also have been using it, uh, for content development, um, because. I can give it like a very specific prompt, like, uh, write a Terraform script to spin up an Oracle compute instance and describe how to define the variables necessary and where to find them. And it will take that prompt and basically write out a tutorial for me that I can then, I mean, it takes some editing and it gets a, it gets some stuff wrong, but as a prompt to like get going on an article.

[00:18:34] Um, like sometime ask it what the top three reasons to use markdown are, and it will write you an article that honestly, I, it’s the exact same thing I would’ve said, and, and it even sounds like my voice. It’s weird.

[00:18:49] Christina: It. Well, honestly, your your, your stuff I’m sure has been used in the model, right? Like, like I, I like, you know what I mean? Like that, that, that’s the, the truth is that, um, cuz they’re, you know, scraping a bunch of, um, resources and, and I would, I’m sure that, that you are, things you’ve written are definitely part of the corpus.

[00:19:06] Sorry, go on Jeff

[00:19:07] Brett: Ask it to do it in Dickensian style and you’ll get a different answer.

[00:19:13] Jeffrey: I find that using chat, G P T for code purposes is helping to sort of. Helping me get closer to a definition of a kind of, um, programmatic literacy that I’ve always been kind of seeking and wanting to have for myself and describe for others. Just like you can’t sit down and code, but when presented with code, you can ba basically understand what’s happening or, or just on the most simple, simple level you are able to create in text a multi-step algorithm that can be translated into code.

[00:19:50] Right. Um, and what I’ve found so kind of interesting and fun in chat, G p t is like, it almost, it quite frequently gives me the wrong thing. And if I, if I give it the error, it always goes, sorry about that

[00:20:05] Brett: yeah,

[00:20:05] Jeffrey: I was trying to have you go this way and now I’m gonna have you go that way. Which is such a bizarre.

[00:20:10] Brett: you can keep adding to your query and like, it’s a chat, right? And you can say, well, that won’t do this. Or, or, why does it do this? And it will continue to, uh, refine its response. And I love that it gives you a description. Anytime it writes a method for me, it will explain to me afterwards why it used the, you know, method calls that it used, why it used the functions it used, um, and what each one does, which is more than you will often get from a stack overflow answer.

[00:20:42] Jeffrey: And I’ve found that when you ask it to write a complicated function or a script, it will comment it, um, and comment it pretty well. I mean, but the other thing that I find really useful is I have it, write me something and then I just go line by line and say, what does this do? What does this do? If they haven’t already explained it right.

[00:21:00] And then the other thing I do that helps me a lot just in learning is I say, what’s another way to do. Right. Like, or like I did one early on where I was like, show me how to, you know, scrape the title of an article in a webpage in Node. Now show me in Python. Now show me in Ruby. Right? And it was like, you can just kind of look at how those things, um, are different across languages.

[00:21:21] It’s just, to me it’s like an incredible teaching tool. But like you said, you can’t just take it and assume that what you’ve got is correct . You definitely have to, you have to fact check it, but you can fact check it with chat G P T for the most part, which is crazy. Crazy. I love when it’s like, oh, sorry about that.

[00:21:37] No, you’re right. You know, that’s

[00:21:38] Christina: Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:21:39] Jeffrey: that’s the least thing. I did not expect that for it to be like, oh yeah, no, you’re totally right. Um, you know, it’s, it’s beautiful.

[00:21:47] Christina: yeah, exactly. It’s like, uh, let, let me find a way of explaining myself, you know, which, which might still be wrong, might still be wrong, but, but, but let me, let me find a way of, of, of explaining myself and, and correcting myself on this. Yeah. Um, si, Simon Wilson, uh, who, who’s, uh, um, uh, um, you know, one of the creators of Django.

[00:22:03] Great guy, and, and his log is, is so good. Um, Simon wilson.net. We’ve mentioned, um, his stuff before, but

[00:22:10] Jeffrey: Yeah, except the last time I mentioned him, he was gratitude and I called him Simon Williamson. Sorry, Simon. Anyway, go

[00:22:17] Christina: but, but he, he, he’s been, um, doing like, uh, you know, his kind of like, he’s been, uh, using various G PT three, 3.5 things, um, for months now, uh, with, with co-pilot and with Codex and, and with Chad C p t and, and using the API and other stuff and doing these sorts of, uh, I guess kind of experiments. And it’s been documenting.

[00:22:39] This is what I love about him so much, is that he documents every single thing that he does and what he learns. Um, his, his website is just so freaking good. Um, but yeah, that, that’s one of the things that some of his examples have said over the months, as, as I’ve been, cuz I’ve been obsessed with, I’m so glad that you two are obsessed with this too, cuz I’ve been obsessed with this stuff for like months now.

[00:22:58] And, um, I, I feel like now because, because, uh, as we talked about last week, J Jeff, the interface is what makes chat g p t different. It’s like the, the stuff was already out there, but the interface has, has, I think just opened it up to a whole new audience. And so, um, the discussion is now, it’s not just me screaming on Twitter or on my YouTube show or in like, private conversations.

[00:23:22] It’s um, like everybody’s having able to have these things. But Simon’s you know, tests have kind of shown what you’ve, what you’re talking about, how, you know, you can like, argue with it and it’ll, you know, kind of correct itself and, and give you results. But I think you point out a good thing, um, Brett, and honestly this is to me at least a little bit encouraging right now, is that yeah, you do still need to have a certain understanding of what you’re, what you’re looking for to be able to get the best results out of it.

[00:23:49] Like if you’re just going to be relying on any of its output for anything, like, for some stuff that are some basic, you know, like, well, I mean, and even then, I mean, there could be errors, but if, if you’re talking about some like very basic concrete kind of like factual things or, or some very basic like mathematical stuff, like I think that the results you get from it, uh, could definitely, um, be kind of probably taken without doing fact checking, but for anything else.

[00:24:17] Yeah. Um, it really does help to have a, an understanding. Of what you’re doing. Um, that’s why, you know, GitHub, that’s why we call it co-pilot And, and not like, you know, it, it’s like your, your pair programmer, like, you know it, it’s sitting, you know, behind, you know, sitting in a cockpit with you. It’s not writing your code for you.

[00:24:34] And that’s how I always try to explain it to people. I’m like, look, this isn’t doing it for you. You need to have an understanding of what code you’re doing, and the more you do, the better it will be. And the same is true for chat G P T, right? Like the more you know, the better the results you can get because the prompts you can give it are better.

[00:24:49] And the more you can like, kind of argue or disregard, you know, if it’s gonna give you an Apple script that is not correct versus, and that honestly makes sense too. I, I don’t know, like the cor because you know, the, the corres for a lot of the code stuff is obviously GitHub and although there is a lot of AppleScript on GitHub, there’s way more Ruby code and there’s way more, way more like bash code and other things.

[00:25:11] And so that’s going to play a role in what types of coding it can do and learn from, right? Like the data sets. All kind of go into that. So it’s, you know, the, the more you use it, um, at least with, with copilot, the better it gets. Um, but I, you know, the, the better these models will get over time, these things will get better.

[00:25:31] But yeah, the, it’s, to me it’s, it’s, I kind of appreciate that you have to know a little bit about what you’re doing, because that makes, I don’t know, a, it makes you work a little bit more for the results, which kind of makes it feel more like a puzzle and, and b you know, like, I think that it, it can hopefully prevent against some of the abuses, uh, that could potentially come from it.

[00:25:55] Brett: Like I could see eventually a day coming where code becomes irrelevant because. We can just tell a computer what we want to accomplish as as complex as we want, and it writes all the code, like the, like the id, the, the job of coder, uh, could eventually be irrelevant. I did want to mention like one of the great features of Warp the Warp Terminal, um, is there ai, uh, like you can just write out like, how do I colorize a man page and it will give you the command to do it.

[00:26:29] Um, I term just added open AI

[00:26:33] Christina: Oh, did it?

[00:26:34] Brett: If you

[00:26:34] Jeffrey: Oh, it did.

[00:26:35] Brett: if you open the composer, you can write out like what you want to accomplish and hit the Engage AI button and it will give you like four or five different ways to accomplish whatever prompt you gave it. Um, built right into the terminal and there’s no keyboard shortcut, which I find annoying.

[00:26:54] You have to like, you can pop open the composer with a keyboard shortcut. You can tell about your, your query, but then you have to grab your mouse and. Click the, the open AI button. But, uh,

[00:27:05] Christina: Is this an A beta or, or what? What was this saying? Cuz I haven’t

[00:27:08] Brett: what am I running? Um, I am on build, yeah. Beta nine

[00:27:17] Christina: Okay, cool. Oh, that’s awesome. That’s really cool.

[00:27:22] Brett: Yeah, it is. Um, also, uh, there are multiple menu bar chat, G p t implementations for Mac.

[00:27:31] Um, the one I’m using, they’re all the same. Like they’re all just, you know, web kit browsers into,

[00:27:37] Christina: absolutely. Into a menu bar.

[00:27:38] Brett: AI website. But, um, the one I’m using right now I love, except it has a hard coded, uh, shortcut for command shift G, which is find backwards when you’re in an editor. So I’ll be like, searching and I’ll hit

[00:27:54] Christina: Oh yeah. That’s terrible.

[00:27:55] Brett: hit command shifty and, and the chat window pops up.

[00:27:58] Uh, so I’m, I might try to find one that at least has like a

[00:28:03] Jeffrey: What is the one you’re using?

[00:28:05] Brett: what?

[00:28:06] Jeffrey: What is the one you’re using?

[00:28:08] Brett: Um, they’re all just called chat, G p T, um,

[00:28:13] Jeffrey: Yeah, I’m using one in, um, Chrome that just, just for the purpose of downloading

[00:28:17] Brett: the one I’m using is from VI Vince, l w t, um, chat, G P T Mac it’s called. But they’re like, I’ve seen four or five different implementations of this,

[00:28:33] Christina: Yeah.

[00:28:34] Brett: just little swift

[00:28:35] Christina: yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. His, his is the number one on, uh, the first GitHub result I got. He’s,

[00:28:40] Brett: yeah, and I found it, I found it via that menu bar. Jeff pointed out, uh, a site. I can’t remember. I’ll, we should

[00:28:48] Jeffrey: I am, I’m taking notes for show notes, but I’m taking 'em on an index card, so

[00:28:53] Christina: which, which I.

[00:28:54] Jeffrey: you know what, I have not been able to type while we’re talking. I cannot do this podcast and write show notes. I cannot do it, but I can write on this index card.

[00:29:03] Christina: I love it.

[00:29:03] Jeffrey: a, it’s a big index card, not just a little one. Uh,

[00:29:06] Christina: the, I I I I appreciate that. I, I, but I love that you lo that you know that about yourself because they are two different, um, um, like modalities and I can type and talk at the same time. Um, I would actually probably have a harder time writing and talking at the same

[00:29:20] Jeffrey: Interesting. Well, I don’t know if you know this about me, but I cannot type without looking at the keyboard, so that just adds another layer of sort of

[00:29:28] Christina: no. Okay. No, no. But that actually makes sense because, but, but you could probably, I don’t know, can you write without looking

[00:29:34] Jeffrey: I mean, I can write, yeah. I can kind of keep an eye on it, you know what I mean, while I’m writing Yeah.

[00:29:39] Christina: Yeah. Whereas I’m

[00:29:40] Brett: no way I could write

[00:29:41] Jeffrey: It, well rem but, but like years with a reporter’s notebook in my hand, trying to get every kind of

[00:29:46] Christina: No, right.

[00:29:47] Jeffrey: it automatic

[00:29:48] Christina: It does. Except, so what’s funny about, it’s that for me and my reporter’s notebook has always been my phone because I, I literally started like in like the smartphone era. And so, um, because when I graduated from college, like literally it was like iPhone was already out. So for me, if it wasn’t a recorder, I’ve always taken notes on my phone.

[00:30:11] So it, it, so, so you see what I’m saying? So it, it’s a similar sort of thing, but yeah, I, I’m a, I’m a touch typist, as is Brett, so

[00:30:19] Brett: did you guys ever use Pair Note?

[00:30:22] Jeffrey: What’s that?

[00:30:22] Christina: No.

[00:30:23] Brett: a, it was a Mac app. I don’t remember if they ever made an iOS version, but you, it would record what you were listening

[00:30:30] Christina: yeah, yeah. I remember

[00:30:32] Brett: note, any note you typed would get a timestamp

[00:30:36] Jeffrey: Shut

[00:30:36] Brett: you could just click on your, you could click on your note and you could.

[00:30:41] What was happening when

[00:30:42] Christina: I remember this now. I

[00:30:44] Brett: notes didn’t have to, your notes didn’t have to explain everything. They just had to be like, uh, here’s a point where we learned about blah, blah, blah, and you just click it and get the actual audio from what you were experiencing at the time. It was

[00:30:58] Christina: I, I remember this now. I don’t think I ever used it hardcore. I u I used to use Evernote ironically, um, for those purposes be because, yeah, because I had like, uh, one of those pens that that integrated with, with Evernote that could

[00:31:10] Jeffrey: Oh, right. Yeah, I remember

[00:31:12] Christina: uh, like the live scribe pen I think they were called. And, um, but honestly, a lot of times for me it it, because I, the way that I would, I would take notes on calls is like a, I would try to record the phone calls, which.

[00:31:25] You know, once they got rid of the headphone jack especially got complicated. I would love to talk to you about whatever your recording setup is now. Um, uh, Jeff, because I’m always Oh, yeah, well that’s primarily what I used. I would use, primarily use Skype and call Recorder. Um, and now I guess it would be Zoom, but, but Skype worked well because you could have, you could actually dial a real phone number.

[00:31:42] Um, and, and obviously, you know, some of the rules are dependent on what state you’re in, deter determinant of, you know,

[00:31:48] Jeffrey: Yeah, totally. Had to make sure it was a one one party recording

[00:31:51] Christina: one party or, or, or letting people know. But a lot of times what I would do is like, if there were calls that I would be on, you know, like I’m just such a fast typer and because I can like listen and kind of type at the same time, I would basically just almost transcribe like the call while I would be on the call.

[00:32:07] Um, you know what I mean? Like that was sort of my kind

[00:32:11] Jeffrey: I can, I can basically do that and did that. It’s just, it was, it was a mess because it, as long as I was on a phone call, it didn’t matter that I was looking at my keyboard. Right. But if I’m on a Zoom call or something like that, I have to give attention somehow and then that’s just forget about it.

[00:32:27] Brett: so Evernote got acquired.

[00:32:29] Christina: Yep.

[00:32:30] Brett: I think we can all agree Evernote, Evernote is, is shit these days.

[00:32:35] Christina: Oh yeah. I, I stopped paying six or seven years ago.

[00:32:38] Brett: yeah. I, I, I left even longer ago than that. Like I was very gung ho on Evernote when it

[00:32:44] Christina: You were like, you were one of the very, I, I, I was an Evernote user, I think because of you. Because they had a Mac app, like beta thing or something. And you got us. We wrote about it too. Well, you wrote about it and you got us into it, and so you were the reason that I ever used it to begin with. You were like one of their biggest evangelists for a long time.

[00:33:01] Brett: yeah.

[00:33:01] Jeffrey: It was great in the moment that it was great in the moment that it was the only thing it did that.

[00:33:06] Brett: The lock in became apparent the first time you wanted to move your notes and you realized that there was no viable way to extract your information from Gavin. That’s when I left, and then I watched it just bloat and bloat

[00:33:25] Christina: Yeah, for, for me, when I should have left and I still paid, and this was the thing, and I paid because out of this bullshit sense of loyalty, she had this corporation that had raised hundreds of millions of dollars, but I remembered when they were smaller and I was like, it’s only 50 bucks. 50 bucks a year or whatever.

[00:33:42] I will pay this. I don’t really use it that much, but I’ve got my notes and this is fine. I’ll pay my $50 a year or whatever. You know, my, my, my fee is. Um, but when I probably the writing was on the wall, like when they, remember when they did the recipes app?

[00:33:55] Jeffrey: Yeah.

[00:33:56] Christina: Yeah, they did like a fucking recipes app Evernote, like recipes or some shit.

[00:34:00] And I was like, okay. I was like, and they were selling socks and they were doing all this stupid shit and I was like, okay, Phil, whatever his last name was. I was like, you are absolutely. Yeah. I was like, you are absolutely. What are you doing? Right, because I got like the moleskin integration. I got the live scribe integration.

[00:34:18] That was okay. Then when they start, then, then they acquired and ruined Skitch, and I was like, I, I, I can almost, I can, I can almost,

[00:34:27] Brett: then stop supporting it. Like sketch is shit now. Yeah,

[00:34:30] Christina: been shit for years, but like, but they, but almost as soon as they acquired it, they ruined it. Right? And, and so then yeah, I was like, okay, that’s fine. But then they raised their prices to the point where, for me, and I am a price insensitive user, and when I’m like, okay, actually this is now going to make me go through the hassle of canceling, like, but that was, that was six or seven years ago.

[00:34:53] But yeah, they’ve been acquired by somebody,

[00:34:56] Brett: bending spoons, bought them and immediately laid off. Laid off 18% of their staff, um, saying they were trying to compensate for overexpansion and inefficiency, both of which I would agree were problems. So it’ll be interesting to see if, if they can salvage Evernote at this point. I mean, Evernote has a lot of users,

[00:35:21] Christina: Yeah, I

[00:35:22] Jeffrey: Still, I just got, I had to . I just had to fix, uh, a CNC machine. And the software and instructions came via an Evernote note.

[00:35:32] Christina: God, see, well, no, so which, which, which is ridiculous. Yeah. No, no. Because at this point now what do people use to use notion, right? And, and some other things. And like, and, and I have my own issues with the notion. Like I actually, I don’t think that’s actually great software, but I know a lot of people love it.

[00:35:45] Um, I actually don’t think it is, but whatever. But like, um, no, they’re at best, let’s just be honest. They’ll be able to be a very small, you know, but sustainable, hopefully sustainable business. Even though I, I, I don’t enjoy it as much. Like OneNote is free and then I have Office 365 that I, that I pay for plus, you know, I get it free at work or whatever, but I, I pay for the, the family plan cuz honestly that’s like the best hundred bucks I think you can spend, um, you know, for like six people or whatever to get office and, and um, uh, OneDrive access.

[00:36:18] But like OneNote one note’s pretty great for 99% of you, honestly. OneNote’s pretty fucking great. And they don’t put limitations on how many devices you can have connected to it, which that was the shit that Evernote started when they were like, oh, if you don’t pay us this amount of money, you can only have one device connected.

[00:36:35] And I’m like, okay, you’ve locked my, all my notes in. Yeah.

[00:36:39] Brett: two things about Evernote that I loved when I was using it. One was, um, handwriting. Transcription. Uh, so I could take, like, I like Jeff, I prefer index cards to a moleskin. I actually have, it’s shaped like a moleskin, but it’s an accordion folder for index cards. And that’s, that works better with my brain than having this very linear page by page kind of note system.

[00:37:04] Uh, number two was the web clipper. It was the first

[00:37:08] Jeffrey: the Web Clipper was woo. Loved it.

[00:37:12] Brett: and it was spectacular. Uh, Devin think has added a web clipper. Uh, they

[00:37:17] Jeffrey: They’ve had one for a while.

[00:37:18] Brett: they actually used my software

[00:37:20] Jeffrey: Oh, really

[00:37:21] Brett: yeah. Uh, they use a version of, of Marky, the Markdown a fire, uh, that they ran locally. And it, you could clip markdown copies of any webpage or any selection on a webpage.

[00:37:33] Um, and I, I tried to talk Fletcher into incorporating. Web clipping into Envy Ultra. Um, I even did all the coding. I made it work, it was happening. Uh, but he thought it was Bloats, so that’s when I made Gather, uh, which you can run as, uh, as an Apple shortcut and clip any webpage straight to Envy Ultra, like it has their command line flags that will take whatever eclipse and automatically turn it into an Enval Ultra note.

[00:38:04] Um, so

[00:38:05] Jeffrey: love that feature.

[00:38:06] Brett: this is all inspired by Evernotes Web Clipper though,

[00:38:10] Christina: Yeah.

[00:38:11] Brett: honestly, like, especially when it comes to like Stack Overflow stuff, when I find the answer to a problem that I’ve run into multiple times, I just wanna clip it into my own knowledge base, uh, and make it make it way more searchable.

[00:38:24] So, um, yeah, the Web Clipper lives.

[00:38:28] Christina: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:38:29] Jeffrey: I love that.

[00:38:30] Christina: I was gonna say the web clipper was one of their great things and like Microsoft obviously like, uh, has one too and a lot of other people do as well. And like people have built things into obsidian and, and other stuff. Right. Um, but they were the first to really, to my knowledge anyway, I think they were the first ones to really, um, at least the first bigger ones to implement it.

[00:38:48] There might have been some smaller people. I don’t wanna like make a universal statement. Somebody will, somebody will tell us on the Discord or on Twitter, be like, no, actually this company had a web clipper first. Well, I don’t remember it. Um, but yeah, no, the web clipper was, was massive. And I remember the handwriting recognition, that was a big deal too.

[00:39:02] And that was a thing that I remembered. Yeah, I really enjoyed that cuz you could take a photo of your handwriting and it would do it like there were

[00:39:09] Brett: I would take, when I ran a company, um, I would take all client notes on index cards, and then when I got back to the office, I would just snap photos with my phone and I would have digitized notes in Evernote ready to go. Uh, it was, it was very handy. I don’t know what exists currently, cuz I, I don’t, I gave up on trying to hand write notes.

[00:39:31] I,

[00:39:31] Christina: Yeah, same.

[00:39:33] Brett: only gotten worse over time

[00:39:34] Christina: The the best thing that I found, so the best thing I found is, um, I think it’s, is it’s no two, it’s N O T U I think it is, but they make, um, let me find it. Uh, handwriting recognition. Cause they license their tech, um, to, um, other people. Um, it might be no to, um, because they have an iOS app, but then they do also license their, um, yeah, Nodo Inc.

[00:40:02] So they, um, is, is this them? Maybe it’s not. Um, there’s, um, A service that basically does, like, I think in my, from my perspective, the very best handwriting recognition and they’ve licensed their, um, technology to a number of other companies, including various iOS apps, but also even I think like, um, some, um, of the other like ein um, tablet things and whatnot.

[00:40:29] And so if you have an iPad and you use an Apple pencil, it is like fantastic. Uh, it might be Nobo. So that, that, that’s the best one I found. But I’m, I’m with you. I, I don’t, I don’t, uh, do, um,

[00:40:45] Brett: handwritten notes

[00:40:46] Christina: no. Well cuz my handwriting is, is just complete and, and utter like garbage.

[00:40:51] Brett: have a contest to see whose handwriting is worse.

[00:40:53] Christina: It’s probably yours. But, uh, because if I, because well then I only say this cuz because if I, if I, if I try it, it’s my script that’s the company’s name, my script.

[00:41:01] But they, uh, so, and, and there’s, there’s an app that you can get in the app store that works really well. Um, and, uh, but, but they, they, um, License their technology to other people. But, um, yeah, uh, if I try, mine can be decent, but like, it hurts to write. I just, I don’t, I haven’t

[00:41:18] Brett: My hand cramps almost immediately.

[00:41:20] Jeffrey: Mine always been like that. Surely there’s a tool or will be a tool that you train it in your handwriting and then it can just go from there.

[00:41:29] Brett: All right. We should fit on a sponsor break.

[00:41:31] Jeffrey: Hmm. I’ve got a, I’ve got a segue. I’ve got a segue, but first I wanna say that, um, per note, uh, no update in six years, but $40. $40 in the app store, So they’re willing to take that money knowing that they warned you,

[00:41:46] Brett: it. I used it before the app store existed,

[00:41:49] Christina: Yeah. Yeah. I was gonna say, I remember the app store, oh, Skitch is still in the freaking app store and it’s still like an app that like is recommended and I’m like, this app is garbage and hasn’t been used in years and you should really use, um, what is it? A, um,

[00:42:02] Brett: clean shot

[00:42:03] Christina: clean shot? Yes. Clean shot. Because that’s, that’s the replacement and that’s better on every level.

[00:42:08] Jeffrey: They just need, the app store just needs a tab for graveyard, so it’s like you can still see what was

[00:42:13] Christina: the problem, the problem

[00:42:14] Brett: site, if you go to, if you go to the project

[00:42:16] Jeffrey: Yeah. I love that you do that.

[00:42:18] Christina: I do too.

[00:42:19] Brett: section at the.

[00:42:21] Christina: The problem, the problem is though, Jeff, if, if, if we, if the app store, if the Mac app store had an area called like graveyard, it would be almost the entire app store. That wasn’t anything that was like an iOS app. I

[00:42:31] Jeffrey: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, right, right, right, right. Exactly.

[00:42:33] Christina: We, we at some point, uh, cause we need to get a responsible break.

[00:42:36] I’m gonna let you do your segue, but at some point we should have, especially since we do our gratitude segment, so we should just have a whole like segment talking about like the, the utter failure that has been the Macapp store.

[00:42:48] Jeffrey: Yeah. Okay. Fine.

[00:42:50] Brett: someone suggested that we do a gratitude of like, uh, like an r i p gratitude apps. That, apps that have

[00:42:57] Christina: I love this. Yeah.

[00:42:59] Brett: my, my, my, my submission was, uh, delicious library. Um, but we could talk about, uh, the apps that were amazing in their heyday, but have since passed

[00:43:09] Christina: Yeah, I, oh, I love that. Okay. That’s, I, I mean, I don’t wanna wait until Halloween, but maybe like, uh, we, we, we could do it for Halloween and then also do it on Halloween. I think that would be great.

[00:43:20] Jeffrey: But there’s also this element of like, with Pair Note, which is such a great concept, surely that’s, that exists in some piece of software somewhere. It’s like a wonderful feature. Um, but I don’t, I can’t think of what piece of software that is, and I feel like the three of us would know it

[00:43:34] Brett: Like it’s not a

[00:43:35] Jeffrey: it

[00:43:35] Brett: hard concept to like, to add a timestamp at the time you hit the keyboard. Like it’s, that’s pretty basic. So it’s gotta, there has to be a something. No, that

[00:43:46] Jeffrey: Yeah. Interesting. Um, okay, so here’s the thing. I, I realized something. It’s just a dirty little secret. I’m not even sure it’s exactly true, and I’ll tell you why, which is that I’m still paying for Evernote. Through the app store, through some fucking work iCloud account that I cannot somehow access anymore.

[00:44:04] Um, the last time I, I went to try to figure out what it was. I figured out it was that, but I couldn’t cancel it and I can’t, we don’t have to get into that mystery, but it’s my segue into talking about Rocket Money, which is formally known as True Bill. It’s a personal finance app that finds and cancels your unwanted subscriptions, see what I was doing there, and monitors your spending and helps you lower your bills all in one place.

[00:44:27] Now, the last time I talked about Rocket Money, I talked about just the how, like , how easy it was for me to actually like, wrap my mind around how much I was spending on various services that I’m really not even using. And that was a large amount and I actually used it to, um, cut down on that amount. I have not yet used their function that allows you to empower them to cancel something.

[00:44:55] Brett: The concierge

[00:44:56] Jeffrey: The concierge function. And I’m think, but here’s the question. Do you think it’ll work for an Apple store, um, like forever Evernote through the app store? Uh, because it can’t actually identify it except for the amount, right? So I, I’m kind of,

[00:45:12] Christina: I’m gonna say probably not, because I think that they’d need to have access to your iCloud account, but,

[00:45:17] Jeffrey: problem.

[00:45:18] Brett: even, even the apps you subscribe to through the app store can’t cancel your subscription. You have to go to your subscriptions page to cancel the subscription. Um, so I could see that being very problematic for a service like True Bell.

[00:45:34] Christina: but it can at least find it as like a, one of your, like bills and you can like at least see, you know what I mean, which is great. You can highlight and then you can figure out in your case, oh, hey, this is a, an iCloud account I used for something else that I just completely forgot about and, and I can go ahead and, and cancel it, which is fantastic.

[00:45:51] Jeffrey: In our, the way we budget, uh, we each have like discretionary money and I have to file that goddamn thing to my discretionary money every month. It’s just like 4 99 or something. Anyway, here’s, here’s, here’s the challenge I’m putting to rocket money next. So I have a fellowship through the University of Southern California’s.

[00:46:09] Called the Civic Media Fellowship. It’s with their Annenberg Innovation Lab and comes with that, a college email or a university email. Right. Which definitely means discounts. And when I first got the fellowship, um, when I first came on board as a fellow, there, I, I did a whole ton of that, um, and then felt like I’d pretty much exhausted, uh, , exhausted my, my discounts.

[00:46:34] But I’ve decided using Rocket Money, I’m going bit by bit through every single monthly charge and, and then going and seeing if they have an education discount and seeing if I can apply that discount. So stay tuned, but that’s how I’m using. Rocket money next. Um, and I’m, I’m very excited. It’s amazing to have a university email

[00:46:55] Like I really feel like I haven’t used it nearly to the extent that I should have so far. Um, so anyway, that’s, that’s, that’s why I have been loving rocket money. It can just really like, visualize for me and really multiple different views, like how much money I’m spending every month. And like, I get kind of like old man mad when I look at it.

[00:47:15] I’m just like, ah, they’re just, they’re robbing me for every dollar I’ve got. You know? Like it used to be like, man, Netflix is great. Lot cheaper than cable used to be. And now it’s Netflix and Hulu and Disney and everything else. And it’s just kind of crazy.

[00:47:28] Brett: Peacock.

[00:47:29] Jeffrey: Yeah. Yeah. So anyhow, I, I’ve been, I am so grateful to, to rocket Money for helping me kind of track all of that in a way that I never have before.

[00:47:39] It’s a good kind of New Year’s partner. Um, so stop throwing your money away, cancel unwanted subscriptions and manage your expenses the easy way by going to Rocket money.com/ Overtired. That’s rocket money.com/ Overtired. That is rocket money.com/ Overtired. Three three times. That’s all I’ve got. You got you.

[00:48:03] You’re up.

[00:48:03] Brett: We’re also, we’re also doing a podcast swap with the Mac Observers Daily Observations podcast. Um, do you follow Apple News? Do you listen to podcasts? There’s a podcast all about Apple News that we’d like you to check out. It’s the Mac Observers Daily Observations podcast. When they say daily, they mean it mostly Monday through Friday.

[00:48:28] T d o hits you with 20 minutes of talk on the most interesting Apple stories going since 2014, the Daily observations has been talking Apple News of the day on the day. That’s the announcement of the Apple Watch, the Free You two album. Nobody wanted the announcement of Apple TV plus the transition to Apple silicon.

[00:48:47] And so much more ripped from the virtual pages of Mac observer.com host Ken Wright brings in TMO staffers and other tech types for quick, informative and entertaining talks, centered around the stories of the day. If you follow Apple News and you listen to podcast, put this one in your ear, the Mac Observer’s Daily Observations podcast online@macobserver.com or wherever you get podcasts.

[00:49:14] I always second guess myself because I know there’s a difference between Apple silicone and silicone breast implants, and I never remember whether it’s silicone or silicone. I think I got it right though,

[00:49:28] Jeffrey: Congratulations,

[00:49:31] Brett: so I, I don’t know. How do you, do you guys have time for one more topic and a gratitude, or do you have a heart out?

[00:49:39] Christina: I’ve got time. Do you have time? Yeah, because this is good, I think, speaking of Apple News, right? I know what you’re gonna get.

[00:49:46] Brett: Well, kinda, yeah. So early this week I suddenly got an error that, uh,

Damn You, Twitter

[00:49:52] Brett: Tweetbot on my Mac could not log in to Twitter. And, uh, I tried a few times, uh, and then went to check like the status, did some searches on Twitter, um, and found out that without warning, um, Elon’s Twitter had, uh, curtailed access for a huge swath of third party Twitter applications.

[00:50:21] Um, and at first it was like, maybe there’s, maybe there’s a bug. Maybe, maybe it’s just expected downtime with the amount of layoffs they’ve had. Uh, but, uh, then on their, uh, a p I pages, they were all listed as suspended. And, uh, it has become very evident that, uh, Whether Elon himself or uh, a group of people under Elon, I’m gonna go with Elon himself, have decided that, uh, third party Twitter clients are not profitable and have cut out their access.

[00:50:57] And I think it is a horrible idea, especially after all of the hoops that developers like Tweetbot and Twitter, Twitter have had to jump through

[00:51:07] Jeffrey: such a journey.

[00:51:09] Brett: Twitter, um, and all the concessions they’ve had to make. The fact of the matter is you don’t see ads when you’re using Tweetbot, and that is a major selling point for using tweetbot or Twitter or, you know, tweet, tweet deck or whatever.

[00:51:25] Although Tweet deck is owned by Twitter now, I

[00:51:27] Christina: Yeah. It is, it, it’s, it is, yeah. It does. It tweets been known by Twitter for 12 or 13 years. Um, so, but, uh, it’s also basically kind of been abandoned. Um, I mean, it, it works, but, but there’s been a big question as to like, Is anybody who works on it still around, but

[00:51:46] Brett: Yeah. So this is very disconcerting to me. I, I have loaded for the sake of, you know, still being able to use Twitter, um, without the, the PWA that Christine uses, um, I have loaded the Twitter app on my Mac and it is awful. I don’t mind Twitter on the iPhone. Um, it actually, it’s really nice because things like polls, uh, don’t show up in tweet bot, but they do show up in the Twitter app.

[00:52:17] So, on my phone I tend to use the Twitter app and it’s, it’s functional, it’s good on my Mac. The Twitter app sucks and tweet bot rules Twitter rules and it.

[00:52:30] Jeffrey: Ooh.

[00:52:31] Brett: Like Tweet bot has like all of the keyboard navigation I want, has all of the, uh, blocking and filtering that I want. And none of that exists in the Twitter app on Mac.

[00:52:42] And this is a sad state of affairs.

[00:52:45] Christina: Yeah. Well what’s really disappointing to me is. You know, Twitter, terrific. Especially because like, let’s Tweetbot came out after the great, um, a p I purge, uh, the first time, right. So it, it was, it was, it was actually kind of a response to, you know, the death of, of, well, I guess, uh, Tweedy ascending from being like TWE and to being the official client and then some other things.

[00:53:08] But like terrific, which was one of the very first Twitter clients. Invented the word tweet was the first one to use like a blue bird as the icon. Right? Like basically literally like helped, you know, invent a lot of the, the things that we know as, as Twitter and, and were very instrumental in the very, very early days of the platform and being a part of it.

[00:53:28] Like have, they’ve all, as you, as you’ve mentioned, Brett, they’ve had to jump through all these hoops over the years, right? Like where they’ve had to like, follow API guidelines and like, there was a limit on basically like how many, you know, like, uh, tokens they could submit, which for a long time meant that like, it, it curved their growth because there was like a set limit on like how many keys you were going to get because, you know, uh, this is not the first time Twitter has had, um, concerns about third party apps.

[00:53:55] This started back in the Dick Costolo days. And um, and like I remember this cuz I wrote about this at the time and I covered this very deeply, uh, talking to people about the Twitter, but especially talking to the third party developers plus, you know, I was there like, like, uh, like you were right. Like we, we lived with this shit because we were, you know, heavy users.

[00:54:14] But like they, they have gone through all these gyrations last year, Twitter, or maybe it was 18 months ago in the last two years anyway, Twitter revamped its API and actually was really trying to kind of come around and trying to say, Hey, we want people to build on our API again and, and trying to make some things better for third party clients.

[00:54:34] They still were not going outta the way to encourage third party clients because that has not been like in the company’s like, you know, Mo for more than a decade, but they were at least trying to like add a p i endpoints and stuff to make the clients better. And then, you know, and, and Ilan says, oh, we’re going to, you know, have API be more open until he realizes, oh, well people don’t see ads.

[00:54:59] Well, first of all, you could have added ads to the api. Like that’s, that’s number one. If you really, this was really a concern, you could have added that and, and made a requirement that if you wanna have, you know, a token id, if you wanna have access o off access, you have to have ads. And people who don’t want ads would just have to fucking suck it up.

[00:55:14] And frankly, I think that would be a very fair concession, frankly, like I, you know what I mean? Like, if your, if your business is based on someone else’s platform, suck it up. But what’s shitty is that the, the Twitter dev account, which, you know, came back to life after they fired the entire staff that ran that.

[00:55:31] So it, it, it’s a skeleton crew of people tweeted that, uh, Twitter is enforcing its long-standing API rules that may result in some apps not working, which then has community notes on it where people are like, actually, The, the API rules, you know, you, you haven’t told anybody what it is. And, and so, um, it’s just, um, complete bullshit for them.

[00:55:54] Like these are company, like these are applications that have followed every a p guideline. They haven’t broken any a p i rules. And so if you wanna change the terms, I mean, fair enough, but like, don’t pretend like this is something that they’ve been doing behind the scenes that, that somehow, oh, they, they were getting away with something.

[00:56:13] It’s like, no, they were literally following all the terms that were laid out in your, that are still laid out on your own API docs. And so, um, uh, the, the Icon Factory folks have, you know, written about this and it, you know, of course it happened just short of the 16 year anniversary of Twitter and you know, but look, it’s, it’s a shame cuz I, I think that it, for all intents purposes, the third party apps are probably dead and.

[00:56:39] Brett: much, how much do you think if Twitter were to come up with a pricing structure where, uh, apps that wanted to use its API paid like a certain number of pennies per user of

[00:56:52] Christina: they used to do. Which they used to do.

[00:56:54] Brett: How much do you think would be necessary to make up for whatever they think they’re losing on advertising?

[00:57:02] Christina: I don’t think it’s even so much about advertising, cuz the thing is, the fact of the matter is the, the people who use the third party apps, it’s such a small microcosm of users, um, at least who use the consumer apps. I’m not talking about things like Sprout and, and other like, uh, crm, like, like enterprise apps and Sprout.

[00:57:18] I should, I should instantly say they charge like more than Adobe per, per seat for stuff like, so these, these social, you know, like these big apps that, and, and they have paid, you know, more money, at least historically. I know they’ve paid for fire hose access and have paid decent like big fees to Twitter, right?

[00:57:34] But. I, I don’t think that the money would be meaningful because it, it’s power users and it’s very vocal users, but it’s a very small percentage. And I, I know this from talking to past Twitter, um, uh, employees. I think what it is, the reason they don’t want the third party apps is because they wanna control the end-to-end experience, which I understand.

[00:57:50] What I don’t get is that it, if you’re pissed off about, like what you see is like losing advertisements and whatnot, just make that an endpoint. Like just make, just serve the ads in the fucking client and make that a requirement.

[00:58:04] Brett: kills me, what kills me is Twitter rose above all of its compatriots. At the time it came out, it rose above because it allowed third-party developers to create third party tools. It, it offered an API where something like Jaiku did not. Um, and they, that is how Twitter became the, the micro blogging platform.

[00:58:31] Christina: it is. It is.

[00:58:33] Brett: to, and, and this like when they did their last round of like, um, making really strict API rules, like it was the same, same concern on my part, on my part was your API made you like you would

[00:58:48] Christina: Oh yeah.

[00:58:49] Brett: where you are

[00:58:50] Christina: In, in, in all honesty, I’m gonna say I don’t think this is as bad as that kind, because people should have already kind of been prepared to a certain extent, right? Like, I think when that happened, like in 2011, I think it was, or 2012, like that to me was a true slap in the face because that was genuinely like, like genuinely like spitting in the face of your power users and your developers.

[00:59:10] Now, they haven’t even been issuing like, there’s been a problem on Android for years where there haven’t been, you know, because typically I think you were limited with like 250 K or 500 k, um, user accounts that you could get in. So a lot of apps were capped at, at, at a, at a user limit, and that that remained.

[00:59:28] Over the years, um, uh, Twitter and, and tweet bot and a couple of others were kind of grandfathered into higher amounts, but it certainly wasn’t like multiples of that by, you know, like, you know, you gotta think, okay, maybe they have, you know, 5 million accounts and I, and I’m just guessing here, I have no idea.

[00:59:44] It might have been less than that, but, you know, um, certainly it’s not like you’re talking about like tens of millions of people. Um, the one that actually did have tens of millions of people was tweet deck, which is why they bought it. Um, and, um, and, but to me, yeah, it’s, it’s a slap on the face. It just, it just goes against everything that he, you know, when he came in and we knew he was a liar, like claimed, oh, the API is gonna be this and that, and I don’t want it to be an open protocol.

[01:00:11] Well, you, you can’t have it both ways. You either have it as an open protocol or you have it as like a pretty lockdown thing. But again, to my point, I’m like, not that they have people who can really add things to the API cuz they’ve laid everyone off, but like, Add, they could have done this years ago.

[01:00:27] Like add the, the advertisements, add the promoted tweet stuff into the fucking a p I. Like, I, I don’t understand how that’s difficult, like,

[01:00:36] Brett: is, there’s an article in, I believe, the current New Yorker. Um, I don’t remember who wrote it, but I will find a link. Um, and it, it interviews people who have been in the room with Elon when he does like his quote unquote code reviews. Um, and who were responsible for trying to explain the tech stack to Elon and like exactly how those meetings went.

[01:01:03] And it is, I mean, we, it’s nothing, there’s nothing surprising about it. Like we all know what a travesty this has been. Uh, for, for anyone who appreciates tech in general,

[01:01:15] Christina: is

[01:01:15] Brett: Elon is a scourge. Um, but it, but it is a assorted tale. Um, and, and worth a read.

[01:01:23] Christina: Yeah. Um, the one that I read it on, um, was, uh, the Verge who did it with

[01:01:27] Brett: Yeah. The Verge, exer exerted the same article. Yeah.

[01:01:31] Christina: Yeah. Okay. So you’re, you’re talking, uh, New York Magazine. Okay. Um,

[01:01:34] Brett: Yeah. Oh, I’m sorry. Yes.

[01:01:35] Christina: yeah. Um, yeah, I’ll, I’ll put the, I’ll put the link in the, um, show notes. The one thing I’ve said, and I’ve said this before, over the years, what’s, to me, I think Twitter’s biggest failure as a business has been the fact that they never turned TweetDeck into an enterprise CRM SaaS, like customer service product.

[01:01:53] And they could have, they could have taken Tweet deck, they could have invested money in it,

[01:01:56] Brett: was ripe for that.

[01:01:58] Christina: it was, and, and people would’ve paid it and people would still pay it. Like again, um, sprout charges more than Adobe. And, um, so there’s real money in, in that and people pay it. Every big agency, you know, uh, news publications, all kinds of things.

[01:02:14] Like they pay that money and they pay it like happily. They could have, they could have literally been making billions and billions of dollars if they had done that. And, and to me that is like the biggest failure I think of Twitter, like as a company, is that they never turned TweetDeck or anything else into like an enterprise CRM product.

[01:02:32] And if they’d done that, like again, I don’t know if that would’ve saved any of our, um, you know, like consumer clients. Um, maybe they could have put, maybe they would’ve had to put limitations on what you could have done with some of the consumer clients or whatnot. But I, I don’t think that the company would be in the position that it’s in right now if they did that.

[01:02:49] And, and I, I look back and I know it’s easy to say hindsight’s 2020, but I remember even thinking this more than a decade ago. It’s like, why are you letting Hootsuite and all these other people. You know, get into this, why are you not building this yourself? Like, what, what are you doing? Because they literally could have built, like Brett and I, we both, we both work in enterprise, um, software to a, to a certain degree.

[01:03:12] Like, you know, how much money you can make from that stuff. It’s just unreal to me that they like left that on the table. And that’s not anything that you are ever gonna be able to get back because the longer the time goes on, the more the service erodes, the more people move away from it, the less valuable it becomes.

[01:03:29] So even if you did come out with a product like that, like, okay, nobody cares anyway.

[01:03:35] Jeffrey: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember there was a time too where like the, there was a service that was built off of Tweet deck and they were charging the New York Times and Washington Post and other major newspapers and news organizations, tons of money to help give them a sort of intelligence that was rooted initially in using tweet deck.

[01:03:54] Um, and that was another, it was one of those enterprise, in a way, enterprise opportunities, like,

[01:03:59] Christina: Oh, 100%.

[01:04:00] Jeffrey: and they were, they were charging so much that I could, not even with a decent budget in my project, could not afford to use it.

[01:04:06] Christina: No. Totally. Right. Like I, I, I remember that and, and cuz we used to build our own, um, stuff, uh, at Mashable. Like we had a, um, uh, an AI team and we had like a data science team and all kinds of stuff where we were trying to um, I guess basically do like predictive stuff to see like what the social lift would be on a story and, and like what we were also trying to do predictive stuff, like what stories were going to go viral, like kind of in the ether and we’re analyzing a lot of that stuff and, um, yeah, like they could have made a ton of money off of that.

[01:04:36] Um, but it’s also, it’s just. To your point, Brett, like this is literally a company that was built on the backs of third parties, like from like, from the get-go. And it’s been disappointing that every single management regime from, from Jack Dorsey to Ed Williams, to to, um, you know, a Dick Costello, to Jack Dorsey again to Elon Musk has basically just like rejected.

[01:05:00] Like the, the community that made it.

[01:05:03] Brett: Yeah. It’s very frustrating.

[01:05:06] Jeffrey: Yeah,

[01:05:07] Brett: Should we, uh, should we do some gratitude?

[01:05:09] Jeffrey: Sheila.

[01:05:11] Brett: I want to go last. I’ll go last. I’m gonna take a minute, but I’ll go last.

[01:05:16] Jeffrey: I’m ready if I should.

[01:05:17] Christina: Yes. Please go.

Grapptitude

[01:05:19] Jeffrey: Um, I am choosing, it’s, it’s a service on a web app called Muck Rock. Um, it’s, uh, by the, by the people who, I mean not originally, but it’s by the people who bring you document cloud, which if you’ve ever seen a, a document embedded into a news story you’re reading, it’s probably comes from Document Cloud.

[01:05:37] And that’s just the

[01:05:38] Christina: Or it should

[01:05:39] Jeffrey: Or it should not script, no scribed, how do you say it? I dunno how you say that one. Scr d um,

[01:05:46] Christina: That’s how I’ve always said it,

[01:05:47] Jeffrey: is the worst.

[01:05:49] Christina: actually. I, I’ve always said scripty. I, I, I thought it was scripty for 15 years. Script.

[01:05:55] Brett: That’d be like saying flick r. Flick r I go I I use flick R for

[01:05:59] Jeffrey: flick. Our scr D scr d I think even to this day, feels like an interstitial on a like tennis shoe hunting website.

[01:06:07] Christina: yeah. No, and it’s awful.

[01:06:08] Jeffrey: say tennis shoe

[01:06:09] Christina: well, tennis, you, no. Cause what’ll happen is they’ll give you all these, like, like you’re, you’re reading it and then all of a sudden it’s like, if you wanna continue reading this, you’re going to have to.

[01:06:17] Jeffrey: exactly, exactly. So Muck Rock is, is for people who are interested in doing freedom of information work. Um, and you have your own account and you can track, you can actually like generate, first of all FOIA requests, which is wonderful. And then you can track them and they actually do some of the back and forth, um, between agencies.

[01:06:40] And so one of the things I do most with Muck Rock is if there’s someone who I, I think might be interesting to see an F B I file on and they’re dead. Um, and they have some newspaper stories about them. These are the, these are the things that have to be true for the F B I to grant you the file of a dead person.

[01:06:58] Like they have to be, the, the establishment memory has to have, uh, has to have given them a place. Um, and so I will just do a ton of these F B I file requests and then, uh, just check back in once a week. And if the FBI writes back with questions, I can, I can see that cuz there’s a little alert. Um, and the cool thing is once you’re done, uh, once you get a completed request, it’s yours alone for a little while, but then it just becomes public.

[01:07:27] Um, and so there aren’t a lot of like, you know, people kind of hoarding, um, information there. It’s really a place for sharing. And so, and I actually recently got an email from a researcher who, um, was using a file I’D requested only cuz it was someone that I. Had admired and I was, I was curious to see what was there and to add it to the record.

[01:07:47] And this woman was working on a documentary of her, her name was Barbara Deming, really amazing. Feminist, pacifist, badass. Um, and she’s like, you’re, the file’s been a huge help to me. And so you kind of, you’re instantly part of a community and um, and they also just have a good site that just shows you what documents are there and what you might wanna look at.

[01:08:07] They write their own posts and articles, and then there are what are called assignments. So somebody is trying to, you know, gather, uh, information around a topic like police union contracts or something you can sign up to help, um, to help, you know, say I’ll do five or six municipalities or whatever. Um, and you become part of.

[01:08:27] Project. And so it’s just a, it’s a lovely, it’s a lovely thing. It’s now attached as a service to document cloud, which is just a great way to host your documents and to, to, to kind of c collaboratively, um, highlight things in the document, uh, look through the documents, whatever, make comments. All that stuffs muck, rock, and it’s, it’s just a lot of fun.

[01:08:47] Like if you have like a little bit of a, of a journalist bone in you, but you’ve never been a journalist, it’s a really fun place to go and, and help with the work of journalism.

[01:08:57] Brett: And they’ve, they have introduced add-ons, uh, which are automations that you can incorporate into GitHub actions for

[01:09:06] Christina: so cool.

[01:09:07] Jeffrey: What,

[01:09:08] Brett: document Cloud using, uh, muck rock,

[01:09:12] Jeffrey: uh, that’s awesome. That’s fantastic.

[01:09:17] Brett: drop this, uh, news

[01:09:18] Jeffrey: Yeah, please do. Yeah, so it’s just a great, I mean, I, I get a lot done thanks to, uh, ed, because it’s funny, it, it, doing FOIA work is a lot of like template work basically. Um, and they just kind of solve that problem. And for me, I know, like I have text expander snippets for, um, public records requests in the various municipalities in which I have projects.

[01:09:42] And like without those, that’s just a barrier for me. It’s just a barrier.

[01:09:46] Christina: No, it, it is And, and I’m sure like, like, like, like, um, like me, you’ve had to teach a bunch of people how to do FOIA

[01:09:53] Jeffrey: totally. Yeah.

[01:09:54] Christina: and I remember what it was like before mock rock. and what it was like for me, and then having to teach people and then after like muck rocket, it just, it makes it so much better to, to teach people and, and, and really, uh, cuts down the barrier.

[01:10:07] And, and it’s important I think, for so many researchers, not just obviously journalists, but for so many researchers, and even just look, this is, this is like, you know, freedom of information act. It’s open for everyone, right? Like, use it like we, we need more people digging into stuff. And, um, it, and like, it shouldn’t be this thing that has this barrier where you feel like you have to know the right language and, and knock on the right door and, and know the right things to get access to because like, no, like everybody’s supposed to have access to this stuff.

[01:10:36] Like that’s why it exists.

[01:10:38] Jeffrey: Yes. And then when you have a place where stuff already is posted there, you, you cut down on a problem that really is an issue. I can say this as a person that works with public records all the time, is like public records. Um, people, the people who are handling public records in an agency get such a huge amount of bullshit requests that are not thought through, that are not actually like, they’re like the worst kind of fishing, uh, , you know, like exercise.

[01:11:04] And I don’t want to say that I side with people who work in those agencies who say, these should not be allowed, whatever. But I do think there’s a, a real like, etiquette to doing this work. And the first one is just to make sure, do everything you can to make sure the information you’re looking for is not already out.

[01:11:22] And then, and then you will just, you’ll have such a better experience trying to get what isn’t out there when you know that it’s not out there. And, and they know that you’ve done that work. So anyway, muck Rock puts so much up. I’ve, I’ve used requests from Muck Rock that I was about to make myself. So anyhow, this is great.

[01:11:38] It’s great.

[01:11:40] Christina: Love it.

[01:11:40] Brett: All right.

[01:11:42] Christina: Um, all right, so my pick is pirate weather. Um, are either of you familiar with pirate weather?

[01:11:47] Brett: No, I, you’ve dropped it into the show notes. I’ve been reviewing it over

[01:11:51] Christina: It’s fantastic. It’s fantastic. Okay, so, uh, you guys remember Dark, dark Sky? Right? Okay. All right. So exactly. R i p. So

[01:12:01] Jeffrey: Body is still.

[01:12:02] Christina: so that is now part of the Weather app. Um, and the API was shut down January 1st. Uh, now if you are building, uh, a Mac app or an iOS app, uh, honestly, um, I don’t think you need to use pirate weather.

[01:12:15] You should use the Apple, like, uh, what is like, like weather cloud or whatever weather kit or whatever they call it, which gives you, if you’re an Apple developer, like 500,000, um, calls a a month. Um, and it has very reasonable pricing. That’s honestly what you should do. You should refactor your app and use that.

[01:12:31] But if you were using the Dark Sky api, which existed for a really, really long time, and you were using it for, you know, like some of your um, uh, home brew projects, you know, like you had it like integrated into, you know, um, like maybe a menu bar thing or you had it into, uh, something with your home assistant setup.

[01:12:51] When the API broke, you know, all that stuff broke too. Or when the API died, all that stuff broke too. Well, um, Alexander Ray, he, uh, when he was working on his PhD, he became familiar with the various NOAA data stuff and he created, um, pirate weather to be a drop-in replacement for the Dark Sky api. And 1.0 was released in December and basically works exactly, you know, you can drop it in and basically, you know,

[01:13:19] Brett: change your end point

[01:13:20] Christina: just change your own point and you’re good to go.

[01:13:21] Um, usage is, is capped at 20,000 calls a month, um, every 15 minutes. Um, and, and he can change that depending on this a w s bill. Um

[01:13:30] Brett: he’s paying his AWS bill out of pocket to provide this free service that is understandable.

[01:13:36] Christina: is f which is fantastic. Uh, maryweather uh, dot net I think is, is the website where he like, has like a, shows like what? Um, it looks like he even has like a, a web, you know, interface that shows, um, what, um, With the old kind of, he’s recreated the dark sky stuff. The reason it’s called pirate weather is pretty cute.

[01:13:54] Uh, it’s using the, this H R R R, like this high refresh something or another, um, uh, uh, way, way to get the, the data. And he thought that that sounded like our, like a pirate. So that’s why it’s called pirate weather. Um, but um, he’s on GitHub sponsors if you wanna help him out. I’m, um, I, I’m sponsoring him.

[01:14:16] Once I found out about this, uh, last week, I was like, this is really, really great. Um, and, uh, I don’t know. I think that, um, cuz again, this is kind of one of those examples similar to Muck Rock, where this is public data. Look what Dark Sky did. They didn’t, the, the data, the dark sky gave like wasn’t anything new.

[01:14:34] What they did was they were able to take that data and format it in a way that was really actionable and beautiful. Right? Like that was the real magic.

[01:14:43] Brett: and

[01:14:43] Christina: Yes.

[01:14:44] Brett: multiple sources.

[01:14:45] Christina: Exactly. And, and that was the real beauty of it. Right. But, but it’s like, but the, the, the data is, is, um, this is one of the good things that’s happened, like kind of with the government is, is out there, it’s just, it’s really hard to parse and, um, and, and difficult to kind of deal with.

[01:15:00] And, and the dark sky made that easy. And by kind of reverse engineering and rewriting, you know, making this drop in, like you can take advantage of that same stuff. And so you can use it with home assistant or, or Magic Mirror or, you know, if you had a menu bar or app that was pulling the weather, you know, and, and showing you stuff, um, you just drop in that endpoint.

[01:15:20] So, Pirate weather is, is my pick. Um, Alexander, I think that what he did with this is just fantastic. Also, the fact that he’s funding this out of his own pocket is really great. It’s also all on GitHub. So in, in theory you could build this yourself, you know, if you wanted to, to self host something. Um, but, uh, because cuz he’s, he’s doing it.

[01:15:39] Um, he’s got, um, you know, a bunch of AWS Lambda things, so he’s got some serverless stuff going on because, um, the, the NOAA data set is on aws, which is cool. Um, but, um, yeah, I just, I, I love this. I think that it’s really nice to see people, uh, do things like this and keep little small projects up and running and, um, big, big fan.

[01:16:04] Jeffrey: Awesome.

[01:16:06] Brett: All right. I’m picking from my own library this week. Um, I have been, since this hypomanic phase started, I have been a little bit obsessed with Search Link, which I maintain is the most useful tool I’ve ever created. Um, especially like if you’re doing show notes for a podcast, like as we record show notes, I will just type out text like, um, uh, like New York Magazine, Twitter article and hit a keyboard shortcut and it will create the link for me.

[01:16:44] To the, to the endpoint. And, um, I have added in the last, what day is it? Wednesday right now, as we record, um, in the last four days or so, I have added so many new features. You can create a YouTube embed,

[01:17:02] Christina: Ooh.

[01:17:02] Brett: create the eye frame just by typing bang Y t e, and then giving it some

[01:17:07] Jeffrey: Oh, I say Sir, wow.

[01:17:10] Brett: the eye frame in bed from YouTube.

[01:17:13] Um, it has built-in version checking it. When you run it once a day, it will go to GitHub and check for the latest release. And if you’re outdated in the report that it gives you in an HTML comment underneath your results, it will say, you’re running this version, this version is available. And then you can just select, you can type the word update, select it, and run the service.

[01:17:39] And it will update itself in the process.

[01:17:42] Jeffrey: That’s amazing. It’s amazing Guess and yes, and

[01:17:45] Brett: it, it, so, I mean, basically just to describe it, it is designed so that people who write in markdown, whether for blog or for show notes or for, I mean, I guess those are the two things, right? Um, uh, it allows you to add hyperlinks to your writing without ever switching to a browser.

[01:18:10] You can just type out anything that would be a, anything. You type out a search query like you’re, you’re all web professionals. You all know how to construct a Google query that will give you the right result. This basically just runs that query, takes the first result and inserts it into your writing without having to switch to a browser.

[01:18:32] And it can search iTunes, it can search last fm, it can search the, the movie database. It can search the internet movie database. It can search, uh, Wikipedia, it can search duck dot go. And like basically any kind of search you wanna run, uh, with a very simple syntax, you can just write the text, highlight it and g and turn it into a markdown link and never leave your editor.

[01:18:58] And I have so much fun with this, and I’m, I’m really proud of where it’s at right now. Uh, like, because it runs in a Mac Os service, it has to be one long script. So the more complicated it got, it was like, it had to be a couple thousand lines of code in a single file and it, it became unmanageable. So, uh, this week I broke it out into, uh, kind of a more of a, a, a ruby happy, uh, like bin and lib directories in every, every type of method called sorted out into different files.

[01:19:37] Jeffrey: Nice.

[01:19:38] Brett: in the main file where it has to require statements to include those external files, I have a compile script that we’ll go through and actually grab that external file and inject it into the, the final script. So I can work in 20 different files, but when I get ready to prepare the release, it compiles it all into a single file document, opens up my, my, my services in automator.

[01:20:08] I can just hit paste it, copies it to the clipboard. I just hit paste and save and export a code sign service from it. Um, so big part of this week was automating the release process, um, which won’t, which won’t affect anyone but me, but, uh, it should make for more consistent releases.

[01:20:28] Christina: Yeah. Have you

[01:20:29] Brett: a lot of

[01:20:30] Christina: documented, have you documented that anywhere? Cuz I’ve run into that issue. Like, and I, I, I have like things documented in various places, but for certain stuff that I wanna do, like even for personal things, I find it, you need to like sign shit. And, and the process is I always have to wind up like looking up what I’m doing.

[01:20:48] So if you document what you’ve done anywhere, that would be useful.

[01:20:51] Brett: it is, it is documented to some extent in the Build notes file that I use House, it runs the, like, it’s my make file for the, uh, for the repository and the build notes are included. Um, and, and you can see the compile script that it runs and everything. Um, um, I, I, I could actually make a whole blog post out of this process, but, uh, basically so to, to make a release, I run house it minus R, which for me is Alias, says Bld.

[01:21:21] So I run, build, prepare, and that opens up my services and I export the, the code signed. Versions. And then I run Build Stage, which just basically does a get commit for release preparation and then build finalize, which creates the GitHub release and uploads a zip file of the services to the release and updates the blog pages for the project and change log.

[01:21:51] And, and so it’s, it’s three commands instead of my usual just build, deploy. Uh, but it’s a three step process, but it’s all automated at this point.

[01:22:03] Jeffrey: That’s great.

[01:22:04] Brett: I’m very proud of it.

[01:22:05] Christina: Yeah, no, you should be, and this is fantastic.

[01:22:08] Brett: Yeah. Any, if you write for the web, if you blog or if you regularly create like show notes for a podcast, um, definitely check it out. It will save you so much time.

[01:22:20] Christina: Yeah, this is you, you wrote something like this for me when I was at Mashable. It was a text mate, um, uh, uh, tool and, uh

[01:22:29] Brett: actually came from, it came from the, the, uh, instant web search from the, the blog Smith bundle, which became part of the markdown service tools, uh, as an instant web search. And this was basically the evolution of that. And this is replaced all of those previous incarnations nations?

[01:22:47] Jeffrey: I love it.

[01:22:48] Christina: I’m so excited about this, this is that, because that was one of the, the most useful things I had for years at Mashable was cuz um, you wrote like a custom version of that. Cause when I stopped using, um, locksmith, I, I paid you to do that for me. And that was like some of the best money I ever did.

[01:23:01] Like I ever.

[01:23:02] Brett: add, there’s a yammel based config file that you can add all, all the custom searches you want to, so you can have like a site search for whatever blog you’re writing for, and you can include additional keywords if you like. I have one that’s B T P, and it searches brett Terpstra dot com, but includes the keywords project.

[01:23:23] So I can just, like, I can write type, I can write Btp Gather, and it will link to the, uh, project page four, gather, uh, with one click.

[01:23:34] Jeffrey: That’s awesome.

[01:23:35] Brett: So yes, this is, this is all of that that, that I made you before and, and done some.

[01:23:41] Christina: I love it. I’m so excited.

[01:23:43] Jeffrey: Pretty great,

[01:23:45] Brett: All right. Well, I have to go to a meeting.

[01:23:50] Jeffrey: not me.

[01:23:52] Christina: Yeah. I.

[01:23:53] Brett: Sonar Sonar Code is throwing warnings on pull requests, and I have to figure out why.

[01:24:02] Jeffrey: Well get on. Then get some

[01:24:05] Brett: Sonar, sonar cloud, not sonar code, sonar cloud.

[01:24:09] Christina: Well,

[01:24:09] Brett: for static analysis. It’s, it’s fickle. It’s fickle.

[01:24:14] Christina: good luck with that

[01:24:16] Brett: Hi. Thanks. Good thing I’m hypomanic and can totally deal with this, right.

[01:24:22] Christina: Yeah, I’ve, I’ve gotta write a script, um, and uh, and go in and, and shoot a video. So,

[01:24:28] Jeffrey: Good luck.

[01:24:29] Christina: you. Yeah.

[01:24:31] Jeffrey: All right. You get some sleep,

[01:24:32] Christina: Yes. Get

[01:24:33] Brett: Get some sleep.

[01:24:34] Outro: The.