The Uninvited Guest is my way of participating on the Clockwise podcast.

Previous one can be found here.

And here are my answers Clockwise #536: Spay and Neuter Your Pets

Mikah’s question

Matter Casting: Where are we watching media?

This question has changed so much in the last months. Before our baby was born we had just bought an 83 inch LG OLED which I had saved money for for more than a year. The pride and joy of our TV watching world and we’d sit together to watch something, some times for way too long.

These days the TV remains off most of the time as we are either sleeping, eating or taking care of baby.

We just use our phones basically. I was able to grab a PlayStation Portal and that’s also brought back to life my gaming a bit when time allows.

As for Matter Casting, it looks like an interesting open standard proposed by the only big tech company without a casting protocol, so of course it will be an open protocol. We’ll see if it is something that becomes commonplace, but without Google and Apple supporting it I find it difficult.

Zac’s question

Bespoke AI Hardware: is there an app from your phone that you’d carry as hardware?

When Steve Jobs introduced the original iPhone the big selling point was that “these are not three separate devices, this is one device”, so I struggle to come up with something that would make sense as a separate device. It has to be for something I constantly do and by having a dedicated device it would save me time or be super convenient to have at a moments notice.

With all that said, the closest things that applies at this time of my life is logging things. We log when our baby was fed and changed, and the app is really not that great, having a dedicated “clicker” that with a push of a button would log the necessary information would be phenomenal.

Dan’s question

CES Highlights: have you seen anything that we are genuinely interested in?

I reviewed the 10 pages of CES coverage by The Verge and everything seems so uninteresting. Don’t get me wrong, there are cool demos and products but nothing I’m genuinely interested in.

One thing I’m midldly interested in is the slew of Wifi 7 routers: it’s still a long ways away since it will need device support before it’s useful, but I’m always looking forward to faster wifi.

Oh and as part of CES, Netflix just dropped a new trailer for the Three Body Problem show they are releasing soon:

I’m approaching this adaptation with scepticism, the trailers look too action-y. But go read the books, 100% recommended.

Jason’s Question

Mouse, trackball, trackpad, etc.: what is the best way to point in a screen?

I’m a 100% mouse person. I don’t use a trackpad and I’ve never enjoyed a trackball.

For the longest time I used a Logitech G602, but I always had to replace them faster than I would have wanted when they would start to double click unexpectedly.

Since then I moved to a Zowie EC2 and haven’t had any double clicking issues. knocks on wood

Bonus Question

What was your childhood sick day TV show?

Back in Venezuela, morning TV was all boring stuff for kids, I don’t think I remember anything specific. Now Sundays was the best, a Tv station would do “waking up cheerfully” from 6am showing cartoons all morning until noon.

Podcasts have this magic where you feel like you’re sitting with the hosts and listening to their conversation. From time to time you even want to intervene and say what you think.

The Uninvited Guest is my way of doing that to one of the must fun podcasts I listen to: Clockwise. I will try to post one of these for every episode that I listen to.

So here are my answers to episode 535: It’s Even Embarrassing in Metric.

Dan’s question

Where are we putting your social media energy these days?

Just like Micah, I really don’t have a lot of energy to put out these days. I scroll threads and mastodon, reply here and there. I was using instagram a lot pre-baby but it’s gone down these days.

Like Dan, I’m waiting for federation with Threads to be in place and maybe I’ll move back to mostly mastodon.

Meg’s question

What subscribers are we canceling this year?

At the end of the year I did a bit of a purge to get expenses under control. Unfortunately that was mostly to podcasts instead of commercial streaming services as the rest of the family was adamantly against it.

But some bigger services were cancelled: Strava, funimation. Day one was also cancelled since I started using Apple’s new Journal app.

Finally I also cancelled F1TV, but I don’t think I’m strong enough to go without formula 1.

Micah’s question

Our Apple Vision Pro thoughts

I don’t plan to get one. Price is too high. The technology looks amazing and from all the initial reactions from people that have used it, it looks promising.

I’m more interested in the RayBan Meta Sunglasses. Too bad it’s linked to Meta.

Jeremy’s Question

What feature we want on our phones or computers

Dan’s point about Siri rings so true to me. We started putting HomePod minis everywhere at home and it’s been great to control the smart devices at home. But every time you ask some knowledge question it sends you to your phone to do a search. That’s unacceptable in 2024.

I personally would love more improvements to Apple’s Journal app: hash tags, search, allow third party apps to suggest things to journal about, and a some sort of “memories” feature like the one in photos.

Bonus question: what’s your most anticipated “thing” in 2024

Having a newborn, getting to the point that he starts sleeping all night, and when he becomes more interactive.

Jeremy announcing having a baby and Dan saying he won’t have time to watch Severance season 2 are a great match to my energy, it’s nice to not feel alone in this being tired all the time.

Powerful article by Jessica Wildfire.

Everyone wants to know why teens are crying on their phones. They talk about the mental health crisis. They ask what’s going on.

Well, teens are sad.

Describing why, in this age we (society, the adults) continue going on with inertia while the world becomes worse and worse for the new generations.

The adults don’t want to do anything. They don’t want to take anything seriously. They don’t want to think about the future.

I do feel that we are not doing enough.

The wildfires every year are something we have gotten used to and that’s scary.

The receding ice in the poles and glaciers, and we keep going.

Sometimes I feel I do my part, most of the time I feel I could do more. Planting drought resistant clover lawns and selling our second car.

These are not nothing, but they still feel like they are not enough.

Everybody likes being given a glass of water.

This project is a beautiful list of advice. Some random (and not so random ones):

Give kids the opportunity to learn and practice new things in a low-stakes environment. Failure is important in life, but it needn’t always be costly or dangerous.

This applies to adults too.

Open your mail over the recycling bin.

The analogue spam box.

Before deciding that you have solved a problem, it’s useful to ask yourself whether you understand what caused the problem—as well as knowing precisely how your specific choice of solution has “fixed” it. If you mostly just kept trying various random things until something seemed to improve, you just got lucky. Which is different.

It’s still a valid approach to problem solving.

Three is two, two is one, and one is none.

Applies to employees, and toilet paper rolls.

Every project is a triangle made of time, money, and quality; shortening the length of one side necessarily lengthens one or—more often—both of the other sides.

Seen this one also worded as “Good, fast, cheap. Choose two.”

—-

Thanks, Merlin!

Mike McQuaid sharing some really simple (except, maybe the last one) tips on working remotely:

Evaluate performance on output, not on working hours: When everyone’s not colocated in the same place for meetings, pair programming, etc.: you don’t need everyone to work the same schedules.

Evaluating on output is such a no brainer but I still see sticklers for punctuality (as in start your day at 8am) and explicit focus on marking 40 hours of work.

Write more, meet less […] Instead, consider writing documents which can be linked, shared, edited and kept evergreen for discussion.

He makes it sound easy but keeping documentation evergreen is not easy. Making sure people read and understood correctly even harder.

Slack and email are async, not sync […]

Sending an email or a message on IM should not come with an expectation of an immediate response. But the bigger point he makes is further down and it’s has nothing to do with the tools used and more the message and how it’s phrased:

Don’t send messages saying “Have you got a minute?” unless it’s incredibly urgent that you schedule a sync call now. Instead, ask “Hey, about the meeting yesterday, can I grab your thoughts on the migration when you have a minute?”

This is gold, the second message makes it clearer that taking time to think on a response is ok and expected. Without going into the level of dread that a message like “Have you got a minute?” from a boss generates.

Use emoji to convey emotion

👌

Meet in person (sometimes)

First word that comes to mind is “budget” and it makes me want to cry 😭

Thanks for the tips Mike!