625: My House is at the Maximum Level of Smart

It's time for episode 625 of the Clockwise Podcast from Relay, recorded Wednesday, October 1st, 2025. Clockwise, four people, four tech topics, 30 minutes.

Welcome back to Clockwise, the tech podcast where it's finally time for spooky season. My name is Dan Moore and I'm joined across the internet by my good... friend my pal the spooktacular one and only mike a sergeant there should be a way to make your name spookier and i just didn't have it in my head immediately

It's okay. I don't know, really. Micah Scargent, maybe. That's pretty good. I like it. I just want to call you, for some reason, Dan Booberry Morin. And I don't know why, but I do. And so I am. No way to stop you. 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 the guy who makes Lex Dot Games, the co-host of The Rebound and All Around Great Person. It's Lex Friedman. Hi, Lex.

I prefer Lex Feardman. To my left is consumer technology journalist Flo Ion. Hello, Flo. Hello. I don't know how to make my name spooky, so I'm just going to make sounds. Ions are kind of scary. Yeah, ions are scary. They can mess up your body, free radicals. I think we should all agree to let ions be ions. I thought Free Radicals was what you had in Portland. Anyway.

We are kicking things off here. Four topics, 30 minutes. Mine for you is this. Amazon released a bunch of new hardware yesterday, including new Echo devices, a new Fire TV, a color Kindle Scribe. I just want to know, does any of this do anything for you? Are you excited about any of these announcements or have you moved on from the Amazon ecosystem? Lex, was that a pun when you said it was? I liked it. So here's the thing.

I own numerous Echoes and they're my best responding smart devices in terms of things that you talk to in the house. We have two Fire TVs in this house and four out of five Freedmans use a Kindle. And still, no, none of it does anything for me. If somebody said, hey, here's a new Kindle Scribe, I'd probably use it. I see those ads in my Instagram feed for the remarkable all the time. And I think, boy, I have no need for that. But that would be also a fun thing to own.

It seems to me that those devices, the Remarkables, aren't that good for e-reading. And it seems like e-readers aren't all that good for note-taking. So I don't need a Kindle Scribe. I'm not going to get a Kindle Scribe. My paperweight works just fine.

I have no need to upgrade any of my Echo devices. I think this is an ongoing problem for Amazon. It's not too dissimilar from how people in the Apple ecosystem hold on to iPads for a really long time. I don't need to update my TV every year or two. It's been doing just fine. My Echo is all work.

I don't need any better music quality than what I have. So yeah, I'm not buying anything. I can read my books. I can listen to stuff and I can watch stuff. I'm all set, but thank you anyway. Wow. Same. Yeah, it's cool. The new stuff is cool, but. I have all of the Amazon devices that I need and more than I need, frankly. And as far as TVs go, good, fine.

That's not I don't need any of that. And then, yeah, the Echo devices that I have had in the home. I don't have any currently, but I have them, but I don't have them plugged in. I don't need any new ones. So I'm. interested in the technological advances that the company is making. Very cool. And perhaps Dan will end up with a new TV because, you know, that'd be nice. But yeah, none of this is anything that I need.

and much of it is nothing that I want. I maybe could be convinced of the color Scribe, but again, the other one's just sitting in a drawer. So I don't really need it. I just kind of want it. Flo, what are your thoughts on all of this? My thoughts are no. The Amazon ecosystem, that's the one that I spend the least time in. I've had to go back to it, though, because now I'm going back to the smart home as a beat. So it's like, OK, we have all this new stuff coming.

out we gotta get with the program um as for the kindle like i struggle to read past work hours i'm so tired my my eyes are so tired by 5 6 p.m uh i even have like a two generations ago paperweight, and it's just, it's literally... underneath a microsoft service collecting dust in my bedroom i do love audiobooks so that's kind of how i take in most of my narratives these days and i'm kind of in this frame of mind right now where i just want to have

mobile device on me. I think the most interesting part actually of the Amazon news this week was... the fact that they're moving away from Android as the bones for the Fire TV accessories. So I'm going to be very curious to see what that OS is about. Supposedly, it's more streamlined with a fraction of the bulk, which is why... these sticks are still so affordable. So we shall see.

Well, great answers, everybody. I'm kind of on the same page with all of you, which is, you know, in the past, I've had some Echo devices. They're still around somewhere, but like Micah, they have long since been removed from active service. So I'm basically all in. I just got my repair.

HomePod back, which we talked about last week a bit. So I've got a few HomePods. I don't use them a ton for all the things they can theoretically do, but I do use them for playing music and in the kitchen and stuff like that.

Given how much I use Apple devices, the Echo does not seem like a real story there. Similarly, we only have one TV in the house. And yes, it is a little bit on the older side, but it still works. It's got an Apple TV connected to it. Yep. Just like Lex. So I have no immediate... desire to replace that must, especially not with something else from the Amazon ecosystem.

And then I do have Kindles, but I've recently in the last few years shifted more and more to reading stuff on the Kobo e-readers. I have a couple of those. Just because I didn't... I wanted alternatives for just like Amazon being the...

default, right? Being the place that you just got to buy a book you buy from Amazon. As somebody who writes books, I just felt like I wanted to have access to something a little less monolithic there. So I've been buying what books I do buy through Kobo, but mainly...

using the library. So I'm not really going to get a new Kindle. And to Lex's point as well about the Remarkable and stuff like that, I am in the exact same place. They always look super cool. And I realized I could spend all that money and I would never... Use them. So yeah, not much coming out there, though. As Flo said, too, that's an intriguing announcement about them moving away from Android, clearly trying to make a bigger play in having their own ecosystem as opposed to writing.

on the back of Google. So I guess we'll see what happens. But thank you all for your thoughts on that. Let's go to our second topic that comes from Lex. I'm curious about what health stuff you use technology to track and what hardware or apps you use to do it. It could be... rings and watches. It could be just apps that are good for helping you stay on track with fitness or intake or whatever else. I'm curious what everybody's using. I track my sleep.

Right before I moved to Portland a couple of years ago, I was diagnosed with sleep apnea. and started wearing a CPAMP. And so I got back into sort of actively looking at my sleep and seeing what my respiration overnight was and then looking at... oxygen saturation. And to answer what I use to do that, it's almost all hardware stuff. When it comes to sleep tracking and O2 saturation, I have an Aura ring. And then my mattress is an eight sleep mattress.

actually not the mattress, but the cover on it is. And so that also helps to inform my sleep tracking and respiration rate and everything there. So yeah, between sleep and hearts. Oh, and then for heart stuff, Apple Watch and also the a ring. I kind of like having the combined data to see what feels more accurate based on having more information available to kind of compare against. Flo, what about you?

So I primarily use the Aura Ring 4. I love the sleep stats that I get with it. I've been playing a lot with the AI agent on there. I recently, this is very unfortunate, but I recently just had COVID followed by strep, which was awful. So, yeah, so I was sick for like three and a half weeks, most of September. And it was really interesting seeing the.

seeing the way the oral ring was just like, hey, your body's under a lot of stress. And I kind of appreciated the validation from the smart ring without me having to go in and tell it like, hey, I'm hurting. But there's definitely some stuff that could be...

improve there. I just don't think that that's something that a smartwatch will really step in for. I currently switch off between The Pixel Watch 4, so Fitbit on the Pixel Watch, Samsung Health on the Samsung watches, and then over on the OnePlus side in the Android ecosystem, we have O-Health. which is what their little suite is called. And then Android has this thing called Health Connect, which is an API that connects it all. And so I use that API to dump all of my workouts into Strava.

which is the main logging place where I mainly log. And that's because I like the social media aspect of it. And also you can post pictures of your hikes and stuff. I would like more stats. It's part of the reason why I wear the Aura Ring 4 around the clock, but currently that's the easiest thing for me to wear, to get...

what I need out of it. When I wear the smartwatches, it's because I want to see what my aerobic performance is like. I want to see how I'm breathing, how far I'm going. I need GPS. I need hands-free controls for music. when I'm out on my walks or my workouts or whatever. But I really like the way the smart ring has just sort of taken over all the passive stuff for me. I love to take those logs to the doctor. I really do. I have mixed feelings on a lot of these health trafficking apps.

Health trafficking. Health trafficking, tracking, tracking traffic. There's a certain degree of like, yes, I do want to have the encouragement of being, you know, nudged towards doing things that are more healthy for me. But it comes with that like awareness of your own mortality that like it's just a thing that I don't like to think about. And I don't think I'm alone in that. That said, I do wear an Apple Watch and have for many years. Currently, I actually wear not at the same time.

two Apple Watches because I have an older Apple Watch, which is my day-to-day watch. And then I happen to have a review unit or a loaner unit that I got. And I've been wearing that to track my sleep because my watch is older. And does not last overnight. And so that's been interesting. I've been intrigued to try that out, especially since Apple started releasing its Sleep Score implementation.

a few weeks back. And so I'm always intrigued when I get to look at that in the morning and it can tell me how well I have slept or not. But, you know, I do have a lot of the basic features on. I do use it for tracking. I just went on a run this morning. Like I use it for tracking my runs. Like I use it, I even do workouts like when I'm biking around to pick up my kid or taking a walk to the coffee shop or something like that. So I try to...

log that data when I think of it. The thing I think that's probably the most useful is a lot of the passive stuff it does, like being able to alert you about changes in your health or possible things that you might want to ask more about. there is a strong argument for that and certainly the stuff where like emergency conditions i think is a really valuable resource to have there um but it's also not something i spend a lot of time you know like digging through all the metrics about just because

I just don't, there's just other stuff I would rather be thinking about. So yeah, I use it, but I don't really think that much about it. Lex, you want to wrap this up here? I too use an Aura watch. Nope, an Aura ring. They don't make a watch yet. And I don't know. The ring is good enough that I...

not infrequently think about ditching my Apple watch because I really like my Apple watch and I also really hate my Apple watch. But with the watch in the ring, I'm tracking sleep. I'm tracking workouts. unhealthily tracking steps. And then I also use MyFitnessPal for all the food going in. I hate MyFitnessPal. It is the app I use the most that I like the least. I think the app is terrible. I use a personal trainer right now who has...

uses an app that's for personal trainers called TrainerEyes. They keep adding and updating their food tracking. In many ways, it's better than MyFitnessPal, but it's also... terrible in its own special way so i stick with the thing i hated first and then i currently still use the peloton app but literally the day we're recording this peloton announced it's uh

latest round of raising rates. So I'm thinking of canceling the Peloton service and just keeping the treadmill on bike. I canceled Peloton service once before and everything gets worse on those devices, but they still work. Uh, so I might do it because I'm annoyed at having to pay the $50 a month. Uh, but yeah, I track everything. I look forward to the day where I don't have to track everything. Um, but right now I still track everything and yet Strava, I find helpful.

In part because it's like a place where all the different things can be amalgamated that doesn't have the crappy interface of Apple's health app. And two, there's something very reassuring about the social aspect of it. When your friend likes your walk, you're like, yeah, it is good. I got those extra. three miles in today. Thanks, Anthony. So I like that too.

All right, that's two topics down, two topics left to go, which of course means it's halftime here at Clockwise. And this week's episode is brought to you by fantastic Clockwise swag. That's right. We have all sorts of great Clockwise merchandise that you can get, such as a hat, a shirt. a tote bag, stickers, all sorts of fun things. A mug.

I don't know. We got it all. Clockwise.social. You can go there and get a full list of all our various Clockwise merchandise. And as a reminder, not only is it great looking and we'll give you a shirt to put on or a mug to drink something out of, but you also help support the show, which is the best part of all.

go to clockwise.social, pick up some clockwise merch. We really appreciate it. Thank you for your support. And with that, halftime is over, which means Micah, it is time for you to tell us what you would like to know from us.

What I would like to know from you is think about a third-party app that you've installed on your PC or your Mac. your Linux machine. What is your favorite third-party app that you've installed? Flo, we'll start with you. One I've been really enjoying is called Ditto. And Ditto, you can find it in the Microsoft App Store if you'd like to go that way, or you could just go download it off the internet.

It is basically a living clipboard. It lives... in your doc and it just tracks every single thing that you copy and yes windows does have like their own built-in clipboard that you can use but it's so heavy in comparison. This one just lets you like drag out a text file of what you had copied like four days ago. And it also does images, which I love. I'm all over like I'm such a messy computer user. So it's so nice to be able to have this.

This kind of built in log that I can just go to. It's also really great when I'm doing edits because I'm constantly, you know, pasting text here and there. And sometimes I'm deleting sentences I didn't mean to. And I'll have a little a little bit of history. left if I need it in case I delete something I wasn't supposed to. For Windows users is wincd EMU. That's WinCDMU, like an emulator. This is very popular because it lets you mount an ISO.

on your PC and run it as if it were a CD in an optical drive. I've been playing with a lot of old software lately, kind of working on a little research project of my own in the background. And this has been really great. because I don't have an optical drive anymore. And a lot of the software that's on the Internet Archive, it's just ISOs. So this way you could just mount it super easy. No problem. Eject it when it's done. I love it. I will pick one Swift bar.

Swift Bar is a little utility for the Mac that lets you write little scripts and then have their output shown in the menu bar. And so I have a handful of things that I've written scripts for. The one that I'm looking at right now is... is my solar panels. It tells me how much energy is being generated and in which direction it's going. So whether I'm exporting energy to the grid or importing energy, how much I'm using.

um and like what percentage of my capacity is being generated and i can click on it to get like a more of a breakdown about this and this is all based on a script actually that our pal jason snell wrote in python and then i adapted a little bit for my usage but i've got some other ones in there too one that does like the uv

current UV level outside, one that checks the battery level on my little e-ink on air screen, all that stuff. And it's like it runs stuff for Python and made with shortcuts or PHP or whatever you want to write it in. JavaScript, it'll let you, you know.

basically run that and then show the results in the menu bar, which is super cool. And then Honoré mentioned, as always, for BBEdit, which is just one of the best Swiss Army tools ever for the Mac. It's a text editor, but it does so much... lots of integration with programming tools, but also just great...

text manipulation tools. So if you have a ton of text and you want to convert it... In the days before, people would just paste stuff into ChatGPT and say, can you reformat that? BBEdit had all those tools for doing regular expressions or removing stuff at the beginning. ends of lines or whatever. And I still turn to it in general when I want to solve a problem because it probably has a tool for dealing with it. So those are my favorites. Lex?

Because Dan gave BBEdit non-array mention, I don't have to. I struggled with the question for a bit, but I'm going to go with two answers now that don't have to include BBEdit. One is I really like Mimestream, which is a mail app for the Mac. It's made by a former Apple mail developer.

Uh, it's what I think Apple mail should be and isn't. Uh, it's downside of course, is that it only works with Gmail email accounts. So some would object to calling it an email app, but that's how I use it. And it works great. And it means I never check my iCloud email, which is fine. Nobody writes to it anyway. And the other one that I'm going to give my honorary mention to is Nova from Panic. I used to do all my, I still do all my web development stuff. I run a website and that's where I.

edit everything for that website. Man, Nova is one of those apps. And there are some that Apple makes and there's some that third parties make, but it works exactly like I wanted to. It's set to be the way my brain wants it to be. It's customizable, but it's, you know, one of those integrated editors where I can see stuff side by side and get the right highlighting, syntax highlighting, and also.

go to terminal windows without switching from the app in real time as needed it integrates with all my uh source control stuff as well man i'm such a big fan of nova and i think that if they stop making nova i would stop updating my websites My pick is an app from a company called CoreCode, and it is Mac Updater. I love an update. And so I every day go to my computer. And I opened up Mac updater and I hit the little refresh button.

And it does all the work of scanning all of my apps and looking to see if any of them have updates. And I'd love it because it means I can see new features come in. I feel like I've just got the latest and the best, any of the little... frustrations that I might've had that could be bug fixed. Also that happens. All of it is so nice. And so Mac updater, thank you all for those picks. Let's go to our final topic here, which comes from flow.

Well, Google also had a bunch of stuff to announce this week. It's almost like Google and Amazon planned this. So what they've actually done is so they've completely redone their smart home ecosystem with the promise to. bring in all of your old stuff too so that nothing is left behind. We've got a revamped Google Home app for both Android and iOS. And we've got Gemini coming to all facets of interaction with the smart home.

And I'm very curious to hear from y'all, how do we feel about it? Is this still an era where this... Where the smart home matters. And is the promise of a more conversational AI in the home something that intrigues you? I mean, it does intrigue me clearly because we have all, I'm sure, used smart speakers in the past with voice assistants on them, and we've all been frustrated by their limitations. And if there's one thing that AI chatbots have shown us, it's that...

It's possible to come up with interactions that are, A, more accurate in terms of understanding. set aside the hallucination problem for the moment, but like, you know, parsing like what people are saying and taking the appropriate response and be just the flexibility of like dealing with all sorts of kinds of constructions that may go. beyond what a previous generation smart home assistant was capable. So that kind of thing does have a lot of promise. I don't necessarily want it creating...

like generatively doing stuff, but certainly from a perspective of harnessing AI to improve the voice assistant experience, it seems like a real plus. As far as the smart home stuff goes, like... I think there's still something there. I think it's an interesting field. You know, it's undergone some shift in the past couple of years with the introduction of matter, which is kind of slowly.

getting everything up to parity, you know, the more reliance on things like building thread radios in, like all of that I think is good. But because smart home tech is kind of a thing that I think not unlike our earlier conversation about Amazon, it doesn't necessarily get turned over very often. You're not necessarily out there buying a ton of new smart home tech all the time. And so a lot of us are still using older generation stuff and we won't see...

some of those benefits until we upgrade or add more stuff. I don't think it's necessarily a huge growth sector, but I think that there's been enough of a market there that it has some staying power to it. finding ways to make that more compelling and more interoperable between all the different vendors that you're likely to get stuff from, I think is really smart. And the focus that we've seen from Google and also to a certain extent from Apple on this, and obviously from Amazon...

It makes me think that everybody believes there's still a market there. So hopefully, we'll continue to improve along those lines. But as somebody who no longer has a Google Hub, because mine died, I don't think I'm going to be investing in any more Google devices for mine. home ecosystem in the near future. Lex? I'm mostly annoyed by most of the smart home ecosystem in general, not just Google's. There are multiple

uh, network connected lights, which is in my house that have various symbols on them showing me that they've lost the internet connection. Uh, I do nothing. And then they have the internet connection again. I'm fortunate that the.

smart switch in my bedroom. I don't even know what app it is, quite honestly. I literally don't remember what device is in there, but the smart switch for the lights in my bedroom works. There's an echo. I can say, turn off the bedroom and it does. And I love it. Very pleased. And that way you can turn off lights while you're already in bed. Great.

All the other smart things in my house work sometimes and don't work sometimes. It's like incredibly annoying. And it's the kind of thing where if I had to do over again, I would get only things that come from a single brand. And that's not what happened initially. So there's different apps and some of them work with Echo and some of them work with Google and some of them work with Apple. And it's just such a nightmare. And I don't even.

have optimism at this moment that it'll ever be better. Like, I feel like you would need... If you're in the Google ecosystem, I think what Google is doing makes sense. If you're in the Apple ecosystem, I think you'd want a bunch of smart devices from Apple. And they don't seem, even though there continue to be rumors about what they're going to do with their speakers, they don't seem to be in the market at Apple to make...

light switches and outlets and things. So I feel like my house is at the maximum level of smartness it's ever going to be at, as am I. I will say Google's visual aspect of its hardware I've always appreciated. And when it's come to like the Nest part of what Google does, also the sort of internals I think are really good. I think that they're smart speakers. look good, but the hardware often feels a little lacking. I...

I'm interested in the work that these smart home manufacturers are doing to try to make the smart home become a truly smart home. And by that, I mean stuff just... does what it needs to do in the background because the times when I have pulled that off myself, when I have successfully created automations that have done a thing that I just need them to do.

It's been very convenient and very handy and some of the best instances of reasons to point to to have a smart home. And so if that stuff can start happening on its own. And it can go, oh, wow, he always goes into this room at this time and...

I have information about like when there's a person in the room and what time it is and if there's sunlight or if there's enough light in the room and all of this stuff and combine it all together. And I don't have to create those automations. Then I think that's really what. I'm looking to see next. And it seems like that's something that both Google and Amazon are actively working on. And given my interactions with Gemini.

I do think that Google could be successful potentially in this space. So yeah, I'm here for it. I don't have any desire to buy anything that Google has just put out. But in terms of the software changes, that is interesting to me. If you'd like to round us out here, Flo. Thank you all for sharing your opinion. I do think Google's done a really great job with their Nest hardware. That's the ecosystem in my smart home because I am an Android user.

It made the most sense. But the Gemini of it all, it's still kind of left me wondering if this is the thing that's going to make Google's version of the connected home feel like that future we've been talking about for such a long time. You know, I'm covering this beat full time. So I'm looking forward to playing with this new stuff and see how it works. Wish me luck. Good luck. Thank you. All right.

That is four topics down, which means we have just enough time for a bonus topic. So let me ask you, what time of day do you feel most productive, Lex? I guess mornings. I'm going to say broadly mornings. wake up and the first thing I do is work out because it's the only time I have the motivation to do it. During my workout, I'm constantly making notes to myself. Thank you, Apple assistant, for things that I want to do that morning.

And then post-workout, post-shower, I get all the things done. I'm a morning person. Thank you. I think for me, probably 11 a.m. into the early afternoon. And then... incredibly unproductive around five and then productive again past seven. So there are like two hours in there where it's usually that I haven't fed myself. And so I suddenly think that the world is terrible.

And I don't understand why anyone does anything. And then I go, oh, right, you haven't eaten. And then suddenly I feel productive again. So, yeah. And I think those are the two periods of time.

when i am flo what about you micah do we have the same neurodivergence because that also happens to be my most productive time which is oh it's 10 30 it's time to start the day i feel like writing some something and then i'm dead tired and then suddenly at like 7 7 30 i'm like i could go right a little bit before we put the kid down why the heck not i constantly feel like i'm just chasing chasing the feeling. But according to the Oura Ring, mid-morning is my best time.

I'm a morning person as well. I get up and I try to get out the door and do some stuff before I sort of hit that downhill slide. For me, the worst time, the dead time, is the post-lunch afternoon. I probably should just start doing my siesta then or whatever and then get back into it later at night because post-dinner or something, yeah, I do start to perk up a little bit. The Spanish do it. Yeah, I know. They're on to something, apparently.

They knew it. But thank you all for your thoughts on that. Hey, if you would like to get more Clockwise, if this wasn't enough for you. Well, we've got Clockwise Unwound, which is a short weekly segment that's after the main show wraps up where Mike and I chat about a tech topic. You can get that plus ad-free episodes. Go to relay.fm slash clockwise and sign up for just $7 per month or $70 a year and you'll help support the show.

That brings us to the end of this week's episode. And all that remains is for us to thank our fantastic guest, Lex Friedman. Thank you so much for being here. My pleasure. Thank you for having me. And Flo Ion, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for always having me over. And Michael, we'll be back next week. But until then, we remind everyone listening out there, watch what you say. And keep watching the clock. Bye, everybody.