613: Please Accept the Terms and Conditions

It's time for episode 613 of the Clockwise Podcast from Relay, recorded Wednesday, July 9th, 2025. Clockwise, four people, four tech topics, 30 minutes. Welcome back to Clockwise, the tech podcast where you just need to count to 10, 180 times, and we're done. My name is Dan Moore, and I'm joined across the internet by my good friend, my pal, my co-host, the one, the only, Micah Sargent. How are you doing today, Micah?

In your head. Your head. Oh, in my head. Oh, in my head. Okay, that's fine. Hi, Dan. I'm doing well. Oh, sorry. In my head. Yeah. My kid can only count as high as 20. So I feel like, you know, we all have our crosses to bear. All right. Well, this is, of course, the show where we invite on two fantastic guests to talk about four tech topics. To my left this week, it is Emojipedia founder.

and the only writer at Mobile Tech Journal, it's Jeremy Burge. Welcome back, Jeremy. Hi, Dan. I've been pumped up the running order. I don't think I've ever been a second guest, so I'm very excited. What's the pressure? You know what you did. Oh, and to my left. See, it's ruined the show. I was so busy counting. Michael doesn't know what to do. I don't know what to do. To my left, chief podcaster at podfeet.com. It's the wonderful Alison Sheridan. Welcome back to the show.

Allison. And your cleanup hitter here to save the day. Oh, yes, indeed. Batting forth is a good place to be in this show. All right, let me kick things off. Apple says public beta versions of its new software updates are coming in July. I'm checking the calendar.

It's July. My question is, are you already using any of the betas or will you wait for the public beta or maybe wait for the full release? If you're already using them, what feature or features have stood out to you? And if you're not, what feature or features are you looking forward to? Jeremy. Will I be using the public beta? Absolutely not. Yeah, no interest in getting any beta software on my device this summer. My phone gets hot enough in the summer times.

sunbeaming down, taking some nice boating videos, photos, all this sort of thing. So there's nothing these days. I used to have to obviously fire up my backup devices for the emoji updates, but... Yeah, I don't need the beta train. I'm happy to wait, but... There is something that I'm looking forward to very much. iOS 26. I was watching the WWDC keynote with Mike Hurley. And when this came up, I was very excited. It is the collections tab at the bottom of the photos app.

the rest of you you probably know because you're all nerds but if anyone listening you're nerds too but it's the new little interface down the bottom that you get back the ability to have your library view with all the photos and then the other tab with all the the albums and everything it's what they shoved right down the bottom Last iOS update, and I've found that absolutely infuriating. Mike and heaps of other people don't care. They're just like, oh, it's fine. I like it.

I don't mind that stuff down the bottom, but for me, it's literally, I use that Photos app so much for, you know, the Grams and the TikToks and all the things, but... Like it's for me, it's as if you had the finder and you had to scroll past all your photos, all your files chronologically.

to get to folders or to get to your sidebar. Like that's what it's like. I find a photo, you know, a year ago and then I want to check something in an album and I have to scroll all the way down to get back to the albums, to have a look at an album and now I've lost the spot.

I don't know how anybody isn't annoyed by this. But anyway, I'm very happy to have a feature, which is kind of sort of how the Photos app worked two years ago. And I won't install the beta to get that. Micah, what about you? So, yes, I am running the beta. I said I'm only going to put it on the work phone because then I don't have to worry about it. But the problem is the work phone doesn't have a cellular.

connection. And so I wouldn't be using it as much because it wouldn't ever leave the house. And I'm like, I gotta I gotta be using it more. So I installed it on my main phone. I also have it running on a non-production Mac and an iPad. And look, it's fine. Things have gone well so far. I've had battery issues, but I haven't had a lot of crashes. But let me tell you this.

The thing that has been the most important beta update for me that I would have run had I known that this was a feature. I just used it last night for the first time. I popped in and said, you know what should have beta? My AirPods. You know why? Because now they can detect the moment I fall asleep and pause the media I'm listening to. What? Life changing, life changing. And I just did this for the first time. It was I got the notification this morning that it finally installed.

And I wake up in the morning and then I have like a little bit more sleep and I turned it on and I woke up and my audio book had paused and I hit play and I was like, that's what I remember was last that happened. This is amazing. So yeah, beta. I'm there. What about you, Allison? Well, I'm glad you asked because the thing I'm looking forward to most about the new liquid glass is explaining it to my 90-year-old father-in-law.

It's going to be awesome. This is a guy that just does not like change. I mean, he keeps his printer in his dock. And if for some reason he loses it from his dock, there's an emergency phone call. So yeah, liquid glass is going to be, that's going to be awesome.

Luckily, he's really security conscious, so he always goes to the next OS, but it's going to be a nightmare. But in reality, for me, the thing has got to be the windowing in iPad OS. I'm a heavy iPad user. I use a 13-inch iPad Pro with the Magic Keyboard. I'm using it.

Probably 50-50 with my Mac. So being able to do windowing in that environment is just going to be great. I'm so tired of struggling with slide over. And the three dots on the top, I know they're supposed to do something, but all they ever do is confuse me when I try to get to the... the top of the screen. So I'm looking forward to going into that advanced mode. That's really what tickles me the most.

I've been on the betas since the first beta on my iPhone and my iPad and my MacBook Air. I'm on the watch beta now too. I'm on everything except my production Mac mini. and my Apple TV because I share it with my wife. And it's mostly been pretty good. I enjoyed a bunch of new features. You know, I've enjoyed seeing the evolution of Liquid Glass over the last few betas. I do think it's gotten better and better as they go. And so I've been more pleased with that.

There's a bunch of little features that I like in there, but the one that I was going to pull out, which is the thing that I feel like... is going to make the biggest difference for my life is spam filtering in phone and messages. I have been befuddled for years as to why Apple does not spam filter messages, especially with the huge amount of text.

and even now iMessage spam. So I'm really looking forward to that getting handled better. I still kind of hope someday maybe they'll bring that to mail and replace the really, really old spam filtering that's been on macOS, but never on iOS or iPadOS. But I guess iOS 27 for that. So we'll see. I think that this is going to be some interesting updates. I'm really interested to see how people react to all of them when they do.

either switch to the public beta or the final releases in the fall so i guess we'll see but thank you all for your thoughts on that let's go to our second topic which comes from jeremy it does come from me uh so

Earlier this week, Jack Dorsey somewhat announced BitChat, which is a messaging app. It uses Bluetooth as sort of a mesh network to chat with people nearby. It doesn't need Wi-Fi or cellular. I say somewhat announced because he... Kind of just said, I've been working on this thing. So, but nonetheless, I'm just sort of interested more generally if you've used any Bluetooth mesh networking sort of local area stuff on your phone to communicate without Wi-Fi or cellular.

And is it something you're interested in? If BitChat comes out and is good, is it something you'd pop on your phone? I've never used anything like this before. I think... I would somewhat be interested in it. I mean, conceptually, absolutely. And for people who really need it, absolutely. I've attended a few... events where perhaps something like this would be helpful to have.

when I don't want to use, you know, cellular service or public Wi-Fi, for God's sake, to be able to communicate with people I'm there with. So yeah, I think this is a good thing that is being created, allegedly, we'll see. But I don't have like a regular use for it. So yeah, this is very much a...

We'll see sort of situation for me. Allison, what are your thoughts? I definitely see the value of using this during protests and protesting protests becoming more and more of a way of life. But he actually did publish the code on GitHub and it's already got 21 poll requests for fixes. for everything from buffer overflow vulnerabilities to improvements in accessibility. So I think he really did do this.

What I couldn't find in the white paper he wrote was how users are identified. Like how do I'm at an event and I want to talk to Micah. How is it? I talked to Micah. I literally couldn't figure that out. And he talks about ephemeral identities with no. registration, random peer IDs generated from each session. And then he says nickname base. So maybe if I know his nickname, I can find him. I'm not really sure.

It is really, really interesting how it works as a mesh network. And he goes through and describes that. And he has a mermaid diagram explaining the public-private key exchange. And of course, the names he uses are Alice and Bob. But it never explains how Alice first announces her. public key to Bob. So I don't understand how you find people. I think it's cool. And I think it's especially crazy that he says, this is what I did this weekend.

I mean, just making those mermaid diagrams had to have taken all weekend. I don't know how he did this, but anyway, it's interesting. Yeah. When you're a billionaire, you have a lot of help probably. That's all I'm saying. Yeah. That's a great point, Allison. I was thinking about that too. Like, you know, how do you like.

If I want to talk to you and Micah, do I have to like physically be in touch? Hey, come up to you and like, what's your nickname? And can we do this? But that sort of reduces some of the ability to have, I mean, or is it totally anonymous, in which case somebody could pretend to be Micah talking to me? I wouldn't know if it's Micah. or not, unless we had established some previous secret or something.

But there are advantages to that too, right? I mean, the fact that it's anonymous, if you're using this to organize things, that provides no way to track down, you know, identities and stuff, which could be beneficial as well. It's an interesting project. I've never really had a chance or opportunity. or reason to use anything like this, but I think it's clever and interesting.

I don't quite understand why Jack Dorsey is doing this. I don't understand him as a person, I think is the problem. And seeing the various things that he has done throughout his life, which are either like...

Well, that seems like it could be kind of cool or beneficial. And why are you doing this? This seems terrible. So interesting to add yet another dimension there. But I... I do think I like the idea of something that is built with sort of that security and anonymity from the ground up as being...

Really interesting. Also kind of a throwback to like, it reminds me of the days when, you know, when I was in junior high school, my friends and I used to dial into each other's modems and just, you could just type in the terminal, like to each other, character by character. Those were the days.

uh jeremy why don't you wrap us up i got all the kids have uh replaced that with shared google doc that's the that's the school approved way to chat to your friends uh just type in the same doc but uh yeah for the for bit chat specifically i mean it's

Maybe if it turns into a successful and widely spread product, then that seems useful to have. Yeah, really good points from Alison about how you discover people and the public-private keys. I guess I was more curious, bigger picture, if longer term.

Apple or someone, it just feels like your phone becomes so useless once you don't have cell or Wi-Fi reception, which seems an obvious statement. And I know they've gone down the satellite path for emergencies. And maybe this is too complicated, but I just always kind of thought...

Wouldn't it be great if iMessage could work locally? You know, that if it could fall back and you've already, you know, AirDrop does, there's already Bonjour and Rendezvous and Apple has all this sort of local area networking capability. And yeah, I just think that for me would be more useful, something that's embedded but allows you, say, yeah, to be on a plane or at a music festival is a big one. Phones never work there. It'd be handy to find your friends.

Yeah, protests are a very good example, although the anonymization might be potentially more helpful there or not, depending on how well it's implemented. I just, yeah, I do think it would be helpful for... Apple or any OS vendor to have more local area networking and functionality. It seems like the assumption is you always have reception and, you know, I'm often in places where suddenly I don't have any internet.

And everything becomes useless. You can't even buy an eSIM. You can't get to an area with bad reception and go, oh, I'll get an eSIM on a different carrier because you need reception to get an eSIM. So I guess bigger picture, I wonder how much this sort of stuff, mesh networking in general, could. be something you could use alongside cellular and yeah yeah

For this particular product, I don't know. We'll see. We'll see. But yeah, I would love personally maybe iMessage itself or other things I already use to have some kind of mesh or local area fallback. I think that'd be cool. All right. Two topics down, two topics to go, which of course means it's halftime here at Clockwise. And this week's episode is brought to you by Clockwise Swag. All the Clockwise Swag you could want. T-shirts, hats, mugs, tote bags, phone cases.

Bespoke tapestry. No, we don't have those yet. Not yet. They're coming. Probably soon. I don't know. We'll see what Cotton Bureau does for us. You can find all of that swag at clockwise dot social. You can buy it for your friends. You can buy it for your family. You can buy it for yourself. I'm not judging. You just buy it. And of course, most importantly, besides sporting very cool clockwise gear, it helps support the show.

And we really appreciate it. So thank you. Go to clockwise.social for all your clockwise swag needs. All right. Halftime's over. Micah, back to you. My question for you. I just would love to know what...

technology if there is any involved wakes you up in the morning is it a phone alarm is it a side table alarm is it just Your body? Is it an Apple Watch you've got strapped to your wrist? What is it? What wakes you up in the morning? Allison, we'll start with you. Well, my answer is so sweet, it's going to make you ill.

A puppy with a soggy toy in his mouth wakes me up every morning at 6.30. The best tech ever. Yeah, if he doesn't have a soggy toy nearby, he just starts licking my ear. And that's at 6.30 in the morning, immediately followed by Steve. with a kiss and a cup of coffee. And if I'm really lucky, we have bananas that day. So I'm afraid it's pretty sickly and no technology involved at all. Wow.

What a blessed life. Yeah. Right? I think you left out a key option there, Micah, which is somebody else's phone alarm. You're right. I did leave that out. That's a key one. It's one of two things for me generally. Right now, it is summer and it gets light. very early here and even with shades in my room i still often wake up sometime between 5 30 and 6 30 every morning because it's just very bright in my room and often very warm as well just because

Summer in New England is kind of like that. So I often manage to like roll over and go back to sleep or put a pillow over my head or something. And that helps. But if that does make me go back to sleep, then I am woken at 7 o'clock on the dot by my wife's alarm because my wife...

She has to get up in the morning. I don't. I mean, technically, I don't have a kid, so I have to get up in the morning anyways. But before we had a kid, she had to go off to work. I'm not going off to work. I'm just going down the hall. Yeah, she's on a stricter alarm regimen than me. So that's what wakes me up. But oftentimes I'm awake anyways. And if I'm very nice to her, then I will bring her a cup of coffee. Oh, that is nice. Yeah, I try. I try.

I never get a cup of tea in the morning, though, because I'm always up first. I'm the early riser. Jeremy, what about you? Yeah, I'm a caveman like Dan. I'm sort of up with the light. So if it's light early, I'm up early. If it's light late, I'm up late. There are a few exceptions. I've got the important thing happening early in the day, body clock alarm. Do any of you have this one?

Like an early flight and you just go. You wake up every 30 minutes. Yeah, I'm every hour, every 30. But yeah, absolutely. Yeah. The airline, I booked a 5am flight sort of thing. If you feel responsible for it in particular, which is my job in this household, is you book the flights, you're responsible for getting us all up. So that one kicks in if it's something important, a plane or a train, and I also have a daughter, so...

If it's winter and the sun doesn't wake me up, it will absolutely be my daughter. I haven't been woken up by my phone except for a flight and a train since she was born. So maybe twice. But can I add a power nap? Good app. It's one of those ones that you put on your phone if you want a little nap, 20 minutes, 40 minutes, and it kind of senses when you're about to wake up and it softly wakes you up. If I have an afternoon nap, I pop that on, you leave the app open.

You say, I want to nap for 20 minutes, but instead of giving you exactly 20, it might wake you up at 16 or 17 when it feels you're about to go into a deep sleep. So it catches you beforehand, so you wake up feeling refreshed and not going, where am I? What year is it? So, yeah, that's a that's a handy one. So most mornings for me, it is a phone alarm that that wakes me up. However.

I do have a bed that has these built in little like vibration thingies that will sort of try to suddenly wake you up. I don't know what it is that made me stop using it, but for some reason I did stop using it. The good thing about it is it is less likely to wake up the other person rather than the phone alarm. Um, but yeah, I, most mornings just wake up anyway. And yes, particularly, so next Monday, for example, I have a, uh, flight.

at seven or something like that. And I already know, A, I won't sleep well, and B, I'll be up three, four, five times ahead of time, because that is how it always goes. as is the way. So thank you all for your answers on that. Let us go to our next topic, which comes from Allison.

I'm curious how many, if any, security cameras you have and why did you put them in or why did you choose not to? Are they indoors? Are they outdoors? What do you got? I have a big fat zero. I have tried some in the past. I bought some Eufy cameras when we first bought our house, thinking they would be handy to put on the driveway, especially because we weren't living there at the time we were doing renovations. And so I set one up by our side door in our driveway.

went up in our backyard. And I just started getting so many notifications. And even when I tried to like pare down, like, okay, only alert me in these cases, these cases, then I had some tech problems with them falling offline or not storing video or whatever. And I just... I kind of sat back and thought, why am I doing this? What am I gaining from any of this? Even in a best case scenario where everything works the way that I want it to work, is this information useful for me?

And I decided it wasn't. I also briefly had a wireless doorbell. That was mainly because we did not have an actual doorbell outside our front door. And so people would come and knock on the storm door there. And because there was a little...

like enclosed porch in the way, we would rarely hear it. And so I put up a little wireless doorbell there, but it had a camera on it that I turned off because again, our front door is literally right on the street. Like there's a stoop that comes up like three steps, but it's literally.

two feet from the street or so. And there would just be way too many false positives of people walking by. And I don't want that video footage of people. I don't need video footage of people walking down the sidewalk. So at the end of the day for me, I always felt like it was just a little uncomfortable.

creepy and i didn't need that so uh yeah i haven't really investigated any cameras or really got anything out of it the worst part now is if i put some up in our like backyard or drive or something all it would capture are the freaking rats don't live in the city there's too many rats that's all i'm saying uh jeremy what about you so on the boat where i am right now non-power consumption is too much of a concern that

You don't need anything running in the boat. You want to be passive, nearly nothing running most of the time, and then run things when you want to run them. But I do, as of the last couple of years, have a residence in... Melbourne, where I'm originally from, and because I'm away from there quite a bit, I do have some cameras outside for that peace of mind that if I'm overseas, if I'm on the boat, say, on my extended holiday this year in the UK...

I don't have notifications on like Dan. I don't want to be alerted. It's in sort of a fairly busy area. So there'd be people walking past every minute. You know, I can't have an alert telling me that. So all it is, is I can glance down every few days and go, yep. House is still fine. You know, just that. Also like you, Dan, I also got a video doorbell at the same time.

And I don't know. It's never anything good. I don't need to know. It's either a parcel guy, you know, every now and then, sure, it's like maybe been a parcel or something. And I can say, hey, can you throw it over a fence or can you do this or do that? But more often than not, it's just a disjointed.

conversation and i kind of miss the days where you just you didn't know if you're out of the house obviously i could turn this off but yeah it was the first time i've ever had one but the idea is you just have no idea and you just get home and maybe people rang the doorbell maybe they didn't uh yeah that feels I don't know, intrusive as well, but I've still got that on, especially the whole being overseas thing that, you know, I guess it's good to know, but I do.

Yeah, as I say, it's quite a city area, and I would say genuinely 99% of the doorbell rings are drunk cricket or football fans from a nearby stadium. Wow. And sorry, men, it's 98%. 100% men. It's definitely the exception. I was thinking of making a gallery. I don't know if that's good GDPR or good privacy of sort of people that have rung the doorbell and just kind of run away. That's on them.

As soon as they click that button, they've made the choice. Can I make a coffee table book or something? Put a little post-it note. That's like by pressing this button. Oh God, it's going to ring so much now. Please accept the terms and conditions. I'll turn off the notifications, yeah.

Yeah, add yourself to my book. I dread to think. Anyway, yeah, that's me. A few cameras, just peace of mind, but I kind of vibe-wise more with Dan that if I was home more of the time and everything, then maybe I wouldn't, but yeah. Anyway, no issues so far. So when we moved to this this home here in Portland, it actually came with a ring.

doorbell camera and an outdoor camera sort of on the corner of the property. And it's a Portland's a big city. And there are things that happen pretty regularly here. And we're right across the street from a park, which I think improves things. But also, we do occasionally get some stuff that happens. And in fact, when we first moved here, the first...

day that morning, a package was stolen off our porch. So we kind of quickly learned, oh, we need to be on top of this. So we've added a few more things. Dan, one of the things that I like. uh for the front door i switched it out for a newer camera that has this uh radar built in and so you can tell it only look for motion up to this distance in front of you, anything past that, ignore, because I don't care that there are people walking up and down the street.

given that there's a park. And that's been really helpful in cutting back on how often we get buzzed about things. But yeah, we don't have anything indoors while we're here. I have a camera that I plug in when we leave the house if we're going to be gone for a while. And that's just there, A, so that if somebody does come in, we can see that that has happened and have, you know, notification of it. And hopefully...

mitigate the issue as quickly as possible. But when we come back, it gets unplugged and goes in a drawer. So no cameras inside, a few cameras outside. And that has been helpful at different times. Allison, what about you? Well, my husband Steve says that we have a hobby boarding on an obsession at this point. We have 11 Eufy cams and two ring cameras. Are you running a reality TV show?

Birds? It's so fun. It's so fun. We love it. Well, the big thing we just did was we replaced the remaining Outdoor Wise cams with some Eufy cams. And Dan, you are completely right about Eufy. Taming the notifications is quite the challenge. because you get a notification of every time somebody burps within three miles. But the best thing we got was the Eufy doorbell. It has two cameras in it, one that looks at the person and one that looks for packages.

So it looks down at the ground and it actually has AI that identifies that it's a package. So we get notified, you have a package delivered. And so we travel a fair amount and our next door neighbor will come trotting over and pick up the package if we tell them. So it's really nice to know that. We've actually never had anything stolen, never been broken into. And we don't live in a high crime area. That's why this is just a hobby boarding on an obsession.

But we do like the indoor ones for watching, looking at the cats because we travel a lot again. So we have one that's, well, actually there's a camera on their feeder. There's a camera looking at them, eating at the feeder. There's one in the living room, dining room, family room. bedroom of course uh and that's been kind of helpful to keep an eye on them and see what's going on and also being able to look out the back door for skunks before we let our dog out yeah it's a big one

We do like that. But yeah, there's no reason really for what we do, but we really, really like it. It's so fun. All right. That is four topics down. We had just enough time for a bonus topic. Before we get there, I'm going to remind you that we've got a great feature for people who subscribe to our podcast. It's called Clockwise Unwound. It's a short weekly segment after the main show wraps up where Mike and I chat about a tech topic.

And if you want to get access to that, plus ad-free episodes of Clockwise, just go to relay.fm slash clockwise and sign up for just $7 per month or $7 a year. And best of all, you'll help support. the show because as you may have noticed uh there was no real ad at halftime there so i guess everybody gets ad free versions of the show we have to rethink uh all right bonus topic time

Lanes or lines? You show up someplace, there's multiple lanes, like a toll booth or something, or there's multiple lines, supermarket, what have you. Are you a get in one lane or line and stay there? Or do you change? Oh, that one's shorter. I'm going to go over there. I want to know what your strategy is. Jeremy? Obviously, I mean, the superior strategy is to observe what approach slowly, you know, observe and see the best lane once you're in.

Oh, it's a big commitment to change. I think I'd prefer just be wrong and stay than switch and be wrong. You know, it's sort of better the devil you know. So unless you've got a partner or someone around who can split the bill, I think you just you find something to do on your phone, your Twitter. on your phone and you stay put, unless obviously it gets out of hand. So mostly a stayer. I'm going to say stay, Micah. I'm a stayer as well. Absolutely. Alison, what about you?

When it's lines, I will definitely switch. I'll definitely be watching. And I absolutely deploy the two-person strategy that Jeremy brought. You know, Steve's in one, I'm in another. And then we, at the last minute, where it happens for us all the time is airports. That's where you do not want to get in the wrong lane.

I think I'm like most of you in that I tend to stay with the one that brought you. You pick a lane, you stay in that lane. Maybe it's the wrong choice, but there's nothing worse, as Jeremy said, to being like, oh, that one's shorter, and you get in that one, and all of a sudden the one you just left is invariably...

moving past where you were like it's the door it's the monty hall problem right you stick with stick with the lane you're in that's all i'm saying all right thank you everybody that brings us to the end of this week's show all that remains is to thank our fantastic guests jerry birds thank you so much for being here

Thanks, everybody. See you next time. And Allison Sheridan, thank you so much for joining us. Well, it was a delight as always. And Michael will be back next week. But until then, we remind everyone listening out there, watch what you say. And keep watching the clock. Bye, everybody.