626: I’m Doing Great, Pumpkin

It's time for episode 626 of the Clockwise podcast from Relay, recorded Wednesday, October 8th, 2025. Clockwise, four people, four tech topics, 30 minutes. Welcome back to clockwise the tech podcast where we carve out 30 minutes each week. for Tech Talk. I am one of your hosts, Micah Sargent, and I am joined across the internet by my good and spooky friend. It's Dan the Man Morin. How you doing, Dan? I'm doing great, pumpkin. Thanks for asking.

I'm doing much better now that you've called me pumpkin. It was that or Jack. I don't know. I feel like pumpkin was a little more fun. Thank you. Because also sometimes it's important to point to people, point out for people what the pun is in the first place. So while you all. ponder the pun. I think it's time that we say hello to our awesome guests to my left in this spooky ghost table. It's Allison, Podfeet, Sheridan. Hello, Allison.

am i really here or am i sora oh no this opens up a huge can of worms well to my left this week it is youtuber and the second biggest star wars fan on this podcast right now it's christopher lawley welcome back chris Ooh, I would like to challenge you for, uh, biggest Star Wars fan. Like there needs to be a clockwise spinoff, like 30 minutes of like just quizzing of Star Wars questions.

Member episode. There you go. It can happen. We're ready. I felt like I had to throw the gauntlet. I don't know why I'm being combative today. It's fine. Somehow, every time I'm on, we always figure out a way to talk about Star Wars, so we have to do it.

Well, while those quiz questions are quickly written, let me get things started. You know how this works. Four topics, 30 minutes. Mine for you is this. I'm just curious. Do you think that color... e-ink displays are compelling, or do you find this tech to be a bit of a fad? Allison, we'll start with you. I love this question because just like a couple of days ago, I posted an article about choosing my next Kindle.

And I went to a physical store, I think it was a Best Buy, and I looked at the color ink displays and I looked at their big, what is it called, Kindle Scribe. I was kind of wanted to play with this stylus and thing. And then they've got the color version of that. That's over $600, I think. And what I ended up buying was a Kindle nothing. Oddly, the main reason isn't because I didn't want color. I mean, the color is kind of cool, but...

All the Kindles are too big for my hands. And I don't have like little tiny lady hands. I've got pretty big hands for a woman and I just find them too hard to hold in the hand. And so the reason I didn't go color was because it was too big. And that seems like a very odd reason. I hadn't heard good things about him and it was twice as much money as the Kindle nothing. So...

All the way around, I'm not seeing a great reason for me anyway. I read text, so don't really need the color ink display. So I'd have to go with fading fad. You know what, Mike? I'm glad that you phrased this question this way. Because what you asked was, do you think color e-ink displays are compelling? But I agree also with...

Allison, I mean, most of us are mainly exposed to e-ink via an e-reader. And I agree that in those cases, there really isn't much of a reason to get color. Most of what you're reading is text. And if you are reading stuff with illustrations, the color reproduction... Most of the current level of color e-ink screens just isn't good enough for like a graphic novel or something like that. It's just not going to look as good as, say, an iPad.

So I think for those, it's not super critical. It feels like more of an opportunity for those e-reader makers to squeeze a few extra bucks out of us. I don't think that's great. However, there are a lot of great applications for e-ink screens besides e-readers.

I have my own little custom e-ink screen project that I built a year or two ago that's an on-air sign, and I used a color e-ink screen for this. It's an older model. It's a very slow, refreshing model, but the e-ink color technology has gotten better. and better. And I think a lot of these cases where you're talking about things where it's like public signage or using them for displays in stores or museums or stuff like that, I think adding color to that is great. I think having that ability...

is fantastic. And so, you know, I don't think necessarily that color e-ink in and of itself is a bad technology. I just think applying it in e-readers is probably not the best place for it. Chris? Yeah, I agree with both Allison and Dan. I have two e-ink displays here in the house. I have a Kobo e-reader and I have a kind of like this status board device thing that can have like my calendar and task list.

shipping products and all sorts of different things on there, both of which are black and white. And they're perfect for that because they... you know, they're black and white e-readers. I'm just reading text off them. I don't really need any color. I have looked at color e-ink displays before for reading like comic books, but...

The color reproduction on them is not great, like Dan said. They basically have the saturation slider down to 10%. They just don't look great. If I'm going to read a comic book, I'm just going to read it on my iPad. So I'm not... In personal... device tech i don't really see them being that useful i don't see unless somehow they're able to get to a place where like the saturation and the color reproduction can be a bit nicer but the current implementation of them today i think they're

They're more of a fad and they don't really bring anything extra to the table. Yeah. All interesting. I have thought that I would be the person who wanted to have a sort of. e-ink display for taking notes and using it to sort of read something and then take notes on top of it. And that is where the idea of a color e-ink display seemed compelling because it would allow me to sort of differentiate between the text that's on the screen and how I am annotating the document a

Every time I've seen one of these e-ink displays, I found them underwhelming in that concept. Certainly as an e-book reader or something like that, it's just felt... not necessary that said i do love the idea that one day i could have you know a nice sized thing on the wall that is an e-ink display that I could then display a bunch of different types of artwork and it would feel a little bit more real than something like the Samsung frame or what have you.

Perhaps it's not there yet, but I do hope that one day it is. even better and more rich than it is in its current iteration. Thank you all for those answers. Let's go to our next topic, which comes from Allison.

incredibly terrifyingly realistic short videos using simple prompts. You go into the app and you look at the camera, you look up, you look. to the right, I think it is, and you read three numbers. And from that moment forward, you can create videos with yourself in them that are... terrifyingly real. And if your friends are in there and they agree to allow to be a cameo in your videos, you can create deep fakes that are, again, absolutely terrifying. And I'm curious.

Have you played with this yet? And is this indeed the end of times? So is it the end of times? Yeah, probably. But I don't know. Maybe this is just one reason. It is disturbing. You know, the industry has gone kind of full steam ahead on these kinds of products. We've seen also, I believe Meta has their Vibes feed or whatever, which is all just AI-generated videos. I find it uncomfortable and disturbing and not a thing I really want to use or make.

I don't know. Maybe I'm just getting old. And maybe this is the wave of the future. But I feel like the dangers outweigh the benefits here so highly with the ability to just create so much. disinformation functionally or to do things. I mean, I just think about even the examples of like cyber bullying and stuff like, God, I would not have wanted this to exist when I was a kid or a teenager. Certainly, I'm not sure I wanted it to exist.

now. So I'm not eager to use it. I feel like I've got to give it a try just for the purposes of being conversant with it. But it gives me the willies, frankly. Let's go to... video creator extraordinaire, Chris Lawley, to find out what he thinks. I hate it. I absolutely, absolutely 100% hate this as somebody that has hundreds of hours of video of themselves on the internet. Maybe not hundreds, probably somewhere around there. I don't know.

I have a lot of video of me on the internet. I do not like the idea of Somebody being able to take my likeness and turn it into an AI powered video and make, hey, here's a Christopher Lawley video of an iPad review or something like that. And I know technically Sora has.

rules against that kind of thing. But you know what? Robin Williams' daughter, Zelda Williams, basically had to come out and say, please stop sending me AI-generated videos of my father. And that is... disgusting that people were making that and sending it to her yeah that is so gross i hate this i have complicated feelings when it comes to ai already basically it boils down to i like assistive ai things that i can use tools that can help me in my job where like i can send a contract and get

you know the the high the key highlight points out of it or i can send a video to a service and like uh whisper or uh my friend matt birch he has an app on the app store i'll just plug it really quick quick reviews where i can send a video to it and it will create an SRT file for me. So I have subtitles for my videos and I can put that on there for accessibility reasons and all that stuff. That's great. But the ability to generate video and images of other people without their consent.

is gross and like the the ai videos i have seen they especially now before we even started recording allison shared one that she made with me and it was uncanny i mean the lighting like i'm a video person like like damaged i'm a video person i'm like the lighting looks natural Like that's usually what used to be the dead giveaway for me. But like the lighting, there's a light bulb above their heads and like it was perfectly shining on their foreheads to make it look natural lighting.

We're approaching a very scary time of not being able to discern what is real and what's not on the Internet anymore. I think you put it perfectly. That's how I feel about it as well. I already have this. I mean, truly, anytime someone shares something with me, my immediate instinct is. That's fake. And it has to be like, I just don't believe I don't believe anything anymore. No, I but.

Yes, I have downloaded this app. I was given an invite code. I always want to be aware of how this stuff works. And I was able to quickly generate a video of my coworker who had invited me because they. had uploaded their video and I was confused at what was real and what wasn't because it had made him say things. And I thought,

wait, did it send it to him and then say, you know, say this, this passage, or did it just wholesale generate this? Because it actually sounds like him. It didn't 100% look like him, but it did sound like him. And I thought, okay, that's pretty. terrifying that this was all just wholesale generated. And then more importantly,

Now that it's got all of this stuff, is it using all of these videos to train more? And we're all just going here, have this here, have this. That's kind of Allison round us out here. Well, I don't disagree with anything anybody said here, of course. It is a really fun app to play with. And what I'm enjoying about playing around in it is that you get to see what people's imaginations are. Like, what is the first thing they think of that they want to see if it can do?

Like my husband went outside the International Space Station or no, he was on the Falcon 9 rocket. That's he was doing a spacewalk. That was his imagination. And so I like to see what people are thinking of doing and the kind of combinations and the creativity. I think the saving grace of this and the meta AI app that does only purely AI generated stuff.

is that I don't think it's interesting to be just a consumer of. It's not the kind of tool, like you bring it up and you're just flipping through these videos. You're just, after a while, you're kind of like, okay, all right, this is all fake. And I think the only saving grace of these particular tools is that maybe...

People would just get bored with them. It's fun to make them, but is it fun to consume them? And it's got it. The consumers outweigh the creators. So I think it has to be fun to also consume. So I'm hoping for that. But yeah, it's the end of times.

It is half time here on Clockwise, and I want to remind you about our swag. That's stuff we all get. You can head to clockwise.social. to check out our swag. We've got hats, we've got totes, we've got stickers, we've got We've got phone cases, we've got mugs, we've got all sorts of clockwise swag. And when you purchase your clockwise swag and represent clockwise, you're helping to support the work we do here on the show.

you're helping to pay our Zoom bill. So we do appreciate it. Head to clockwise.social to check it out. All right, we are back from halftime and that means it's time for Dan's Topic.

Yes, I'm curious, as we're all Mac users to some extent, how do you manage menu bar icons on your Mac? Are you a minimalist, a maximalist, a selectionist? What are your techniques and tricks? for dealing with that. Yeah, I'm obviously the best person to ask on this podcast first as the resident huge Mac user. I'm just kidding. I'm the iPad user. But I do have a Mac that I use for production stuff. So there are some menu bar items.

I am kind of, I've been using Bartender for a while and I hide most of the stuff, but there's a few key things that I have out like shortcuts, time machine. I have the...

Hand Mirror, which is a really handy utility to kind of preview your webcam and stuff in a little... box um and i just have like a couple utilities that are always in the menu bar and then everything else is hidden but there is a handy feature in bartender that allows you to uh set behaviors of certain icons so one thing i do is when my

My Mac is on battery power. My MacBook is on battery power. It shows the battery icon. But when it's plugged in, it just hides that battery icon. Or when Time Machine is running, it shows the Time Machine icon. But when Time Machine is not running, it hides it. that kind of thing like that that's a pretty handy utility to do things like that um the macbook pro that i'm using right now as my production machine is still on

whatever's before Tahoe. I don't remember what, whatever that one is. Sonoma. Sonoma. Thank you. I had to think. but uh it's so it's still on sonoma so i haven't upgraded tahoe but i do have a macbook air review unit here that does have tahoe on it and i have played with the new menu bar icons or the new menu bar features that allow you to hide certain icons and do uh that and then the new menu bar kind of

applets i don't i forget what they're called sorry i'm the ipad person um where you can kind of group things together that's pretty cool so eventually when this machine does get upgraded tahoe i think i will uninstall bartender and just use the new first party solution Yeah. So I used bartender for a long time. And then the whole thing happened where the company was acquired by another company and it was kind of quiet and the, it was a little bit.

Not great because bartender needs to be able to do screen recording to find out when new icons appear. And that means I want to know what company is responsible for having my screen recording. And so I uninstalled Bartender. Well, I tried a couple of other options and I ended up going back to Bartender. And then Bartender was just giving me too much trouble. And some of the others were just... causing too many issues. And so I just stopped using them altogether. So now I've just got...

I mean, my my menu bar is full on display. There's nothing hidden behind any curtains. Everything's available and visible to you. This is not the Wizard of Oz. It is fine and I don't hate it. And I do like that now I can go into system settings. And I am able to, on my Mac, say, actually, I don't want to display this specific icon. So yeah, the allow in the menu bar option that's now built into the Mac.

Oh, chef's kiss, because that's really all I wanted the whole time. There are just some that I don't ever click on, and that's fine. What about you, Allison? I was a big fan of Bartender for a long time, and I didn't dump them when the kerfuffle happened. But I do like to experiment with new apps. And I learned about an app by Jordan Baird. It's an open source app called Ice.

And it does a lot of the stuff that bartender does. And I really, really like it. It'll let you compress your icon. So they're closer together. So I am a menu bar item hog. I hoarder. I just love them. I keep so many of them, but I'm also. able to hide a lot of them in a secondary bar that pops down below. So very much like Bartender. I can't live without it with using a MacBook Air with a tiny screen with a notch. And I like to get as much screen as I want. So I keep the notch visible.

And but I'm going to go check out this stuff in Tahoe. I'm embarrassed to say I did not know that they had an option to change a menu bar behavior. But I like I like styling it, too, which ice lets you do. So I've got it like in little pills on either side, rounded or.

stadium shape, I guess it is, on the left and the right. It's really fun. Yeah. Thank you all for your thoughts on this. I also use ice currently for the same reason that Micah mentioned abandoning Bartender was that whole somewhat questionable incident.

Ice required some work to get it working in Tahoe because it's currently on a beta there, but it does work now. I'm really intrigued about the stuff that Apple is doing with this new API for writing menu bar extras. It lets you sort of swap stuff between there and control center.

seamlessly and take anything in or out of them anywhere that you want. I haven't seen wide adoption of that yet for third-party apps. I'm kind of curious to see how that plays out. I've been trying to trim down a little bit more. studio display. I got a lot of room. I don't mind throwing a lot of stuff in the hidden section and I can kind of pop it out when I need it.

It's been a little trickier for a MacBook Air with a notch in it because stuff just disappears under that notch. And I find myself wondering how Apple does not have a built-in solution for dealing with that. Maybe it is the Tahoe thing, but even there... That framework doesn't necessarily account for stuff where it's like, you've just got too much stuff. It goes beneath the notch. It's like, why are we not dealing with this in some way?

I found myself over the past few weeks trying to redo my menu bar setups, trying to decide which things I actually need to be able to see at a glance versus which things I only interact with when I'm going up to the menu bar. So therefore, I can hide those. And it's been... Interesting trying to rework some of my muscle memory into that regard. But I do like menu bar apps a lot. And I'm hopeful that these Tahoe changes will eventually make that a little more seamless and easy to do.

All right. Let us go to our last topic, which comes from Chris. Yes. And surprise, surprise. I have an iPad question for you. With iPadOS 26.1 Developer Beta 2, which came out this week, Apple surprised us all by reintroducing SlideOver to the iPad, which was removed in iPadOS 26 when the new window multitasking system came out.

But now SlideOver works with this new window multitasking mode and is resizable. So is this something you will use? And if so, for what? No. When I use my iPad, you know what, actually, I'm going to take this back because I was going to say when I use my iPad, I am almost exclusively a. one app at a time kind of person. But there was something that I used to use slide over for all the time that I then was not able to use anymore. And that was

one password. Most of the time, the built-in password management sort of functionality of being able to use one password with autofill works. And I can just hit above the keyboard and have it. populate the username and the password. But occasionally a site is being silly, funky, weird, and it wants to do some sort of thing where the password location is actually there, but it's hidden in the HTML.

and so it's getting confused and whatever it happens to be where the login flow is just messed up because of clever stuff that some web developer wanted to do. I'm not mad. It's fine. Then those are the times. where 1Password or any autofill doesn't quite work how you expect. And so being able to have it just populate. And with by kind of like dragging over the username and password, email and password is very handy. So in that way, I am celebrating the.

the inclusion of SlideOver once again. I believe that's like the only time I've ever used SlideOver for something was specifically for password management stuff. And I'll use it for that. Allison, what about you? I'm not really a big fan of SlideOver. I never was. I used it, and I did use it for 1Password, like you said. But from what I understand, and correct me if I'm wrong, Chris, I believe that you can only use SlideOver if you're using the resizable windows.

in iPadOS. So the main reason you need slide over is because you're in full screen, but that's the time you can't use it. Is that right? Yes. So the single window app mode, it doesn't work with that. You have to be in the new multitasking window mode, but the app can be full screen and then you can have slide over on top of it. So you could be in that multitasking. mode have safari open and then bring one password and as the slide over window yeah

I always found it really twitchy, but it was the only way you could do like what Mike had just described. And so I didn't find it reliable enough to do that. I'd rather be in windowed mode. pop it up and get rid of it. I don't see a reason for that to really be that helpful, especially since it's not in, you know, you have to be in the resizable window mode anyway. I am digging the resizable window mode. I love it on the iPad Pro.

13 inch. And, but I do find my, my same bad habits I have on my Mac, which was too many windows open and all splattered all over the place. Every once in a while, I have to just go enough and make something go full screen. So. I feel like I'm probably pretty similar. I used slide over when it was basically the only option, you know, that in split view, and it was fine.

I don't think I used it very much. I do prefer the new windowing system. And I'm glad that their slide over is there for people who prefer it. It's just not really a thing that I find myself using very much. I think it's good that it's there. I'm not sure if I'll end up using it.

I mean, of the things they added in this beta release, it is amazingly not as useful for me as the fact they added an input slider for volume gain, for input gain, basically for external microphones, which actually makes recording a podcast feasible on the iPad now.

So that's a real plus. But as far as slider goes, I mean, I'm honestly more surprised they didn't bring split view back for the single window mode because it felt like a lot of people missed that too. You can kind of fake it in the multi window mode, but it's not quite as... easy to use as it was in the old mode. So I'm kind of curious to see if that'll rear its head again at some point too. Chris, why don't you wrap us up? Yes. So I have the beta on my iPad.

surprisingly uh or not surprisingly but uh i used this the other day and it was incredibly handy so i have 13 inch ipad pro and i had a pdf document that i was referencing but with windowing mode when you start tapping on other apps the other windows start getting shifted towards the background.

The more you pick on other windows, those get moved up forward. The ones you aren't using, they get moved backwards. I needed this PDF document to be on top, and I wanted it to take about half the screen. And no matter what else I opened, I didn't want anything covering it up. So I put this. and slide over. It was penned on top and I was able to take my notes on it and do a few other things regarding this. It was really nice.

The other thing I did is on my podcast, we have a musical challenge coming up this week. And I was able to pin the Apple Music app right there using SlideOver, just pin it right on top. made it really, really small. And so I basically had like a small mini player for music just right there on my iPad screen while I was doing other stuff. And that was kind of really nice.

There's definitely use cases for it. I made a video about this and the big comments seem to be great. This is good, but bring back... split view as well to the other single window mode. So I wouldn't be surprised if Apple reintroduces that as well. With that, we have just about reached the end of this episode. But of course...

We've got time for a bonus topic. I think this one's going to be easy, but we'll see. My question for you. Are you a shoes on or shoes off household? Allison, we'll start with you. Both.

My husband wears shoes all the time and I never wear shoes. How's that for an answer? I love it. Yeah, kind of both effectively. I've had foot problems in the past and it really helped to wear shoes indoors, but I've managed to... clear some of those up so i've been wearing fewer shoes indoors now but yeah kind of both i'm not strict about it yeah so uh i guess

Kind of both, sort of. I work from home. I don't really go anywhere. So my girlfriend for Christmas got these like bombas kind of like house slippers, really thick socks. I don't even really know how to describe them. They're pink. And I stole them from her because they're incredibly comfortable. So I am a guy dressed like Johnny Cash, all in black, except I have pink.

slippers on all day long and they're incredibly comfortable i should probably buy my own pair i know exactly the ones you're talking about i have a pair of them as well and they are very comfortable um growing up lived in missouri especially during the winter, you're going to be a shoes-off household because snow everywhere. Then in California, shoes...

can be worn or not worn. We didn't really care. Now living in Portland, it's wet all the time. So we are a shoes off household. Although we have our, we basically switch. I'm always wearing shoes, but it's between house shoes and out shoes. And so I'm currently wearing the wire cutter pick for the LL Bean slipper. I just traded in my, not actually traded in, but got rid of my Bomba's Harder slipper.

Are you on the Slipper Upgrade program? I am. Thank you very much for asking. Folks listening out there, if you would like to get ad-free episodes with an extra unwound portion where Dan and I have a conversation. Every week, you can become a member of clockwise. Go to relay.fm slash clockwise to sign up just $7 a month, $70 a year.

And as you can tell, given the lack of advertisements, advertisements, if you will, in this show, it was very helpful when you do so. Relay.fm. We've got slippers this week, so we'll see. Yeah, maybe we will. Relay.fm slash clockwise. And now we can truly say goodbye to our wonderful guests, Alison Sheridan. Thank you so much for being here. Well, thank you for having me. Always a pleasure. And Christopher Lawley, always a pleasure of you joining us and may the force be with you.

And may the force be with you as well. All right, Micah, that's it for this week. We'll be back next week. But until then, we remind everybody watching out there, watch what you say and keep watching the clock. Spooky goodbye.