¶ Welcome and Guest Introductions
It's time for episode 632 of the clockwise podcast from relay recorded Wednesday, November 19th, 2025 clockwise for people for tech topics, 30 minutes. Welcome back to Clockwise, the tech podcast where unlike the Knights, we aren't getting any longer. I am one of your hosts. My name is Micah Sargent, and I am joined across the internet by my good pal, my dear friend.
the one and only Dan, the man, Morin. How you doing, Dan? I'm doing great. Imagine if we had slowly been getting longer over the entire duration of this more than a decade we've been doing this show. Millisecond by millisecond? Milliseconds. That's right. Somebody paying attention. We've almost made it to 31 minutes, but you wouldn't know unless you looked really closely. It's a long game. Literally. While one of the, what do they call them? Spreadsheet jockeys.
starts furiously going back through all of that. Let me go ahead and introduce the first of our two awesome guests. To my left, editor-in-chief at No Jitter, it is Lisa Schmeiser. Welcome back to the show, Lisa. It's always a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me. And to my left this week, it is visual effects supervisor at Sandwich Video, Dan Sturm. Welcome back, Dan. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. Hello, everybody.
Alrighty, folks, you know how this works. We've got four topics in just 30 minutes. Mine for you is this. I'm just curious, is there any tech?
¶ Black Friday Tech Deal Wishlist
that you're eyeballing for the upcoming Black Friday, well, upcoming or already here, Black Friday or Cyber Monday deals. Lisa, we'll start with you. If televisions count as technology, I have had a hankering for one of the frame televisions for years and years and years. I want something that looks less like a TV and more like a beautiful picture hanging on my walls. And at the risk of sounding like the human embodiment of...
a Spotify ambient sounds playlist. I, I really, really love the screensavers on Apple TV, especially like the, the ones where you're zooming over like the Kahala forest Valley or whatever. And. When I see my 2026, I imagine instead of our 2006 era Sony, um, Aqueous television, you know, state of the art then still working fine now, but instead of that.
Imagine like a beautiful, elegant, thin frame hanging on the wall. And I can see like all of those golden manta rays off the coast of Borneo or all of the spinner dolphins off of the coast of Mexico. Or I can go down the Trinity Renovir in the fall. as I zone out and try to find my Zen. So that's what I'm coveting right now. It's funny that you mentioned that, Lisa, because Micah, you'll be astonished to hear I too am looking for TV. Oh my God!
but it's not for me oh you you no my i was just visiting with my folks and they have a samsung tv that is like doing the dreaded all the backlights explode right they all get super bright so they have They're up to like 17 bright spots on their screen. And my mom's like, I think we need a new TV. I was like, yeah, I think you need a new TV too. Now here's the funny thing about this. Honestly, Micah, you're going to laugh. You're going to love this. That TV is newer than my TV.
My TV has lasted longer. I don't know why. That Vizio from 2014 is like a tank, man. Dude, mine is from 2006, and it works perfectly. Yeah, see? Then they make newer ones. They're not as good, right?
Yeah. And anything in the Morin household has to commit to the bit. So it's... Yeah, that's right. You got to get into that. So yeah, I'm going to be browsing around as well. I don't know if I'm looking for a frame, although they are very nice, Lisa. I agree. Oh, they're so pretty. But I'm going to be looking to see... what my folks might be able to replace. I think their TV is bigger than mine, too. It's definitely like 4K. Mine is not. Anyway, looking at that, I also will add I bought...
Just the other day for my wife, a new pair of AirPods Pro because she had my old set and they were finally giving up the ghost. And I saw Walmart had a sweet deal on the AirPods Pro 2 for $139 or something, which is... quite the steel. So I ordered her a pair of those for her birthday slash Christmas because they are both in December. Dan, what about you?
See, I'm over here taking notes because my TV is also dying. Like a third of it flickers for like a solid five minutes every time I turn it on. But then it like evens out and I kind of forget about it. And also one of my AirPods Pro, the left one, makes that horrible crackling noise. So I just usually use one of them now.
Which is probably not a good way to live. Oh, that's so sad. It's like a monocle, but for your ears. Exactly. All I need to do is hear the words, right? That's how you're supposed to watch TV and movies. But for Black Friday, I always, you know, I can't resist smart home stuff. I mean, I always I want more of my switches and lights and things to be controllable by my phone. I've got the one that I use the most is a dimmer from Wemo, which, you know, Wemo's app is going away and it just.
it likes to disconnect from time to time, but it's a touch sensitive dimmer and I always hit the wrong thing at the wrong time and it kind of drives me nuts. But, um, the other thing is I think, I feel like I'm, uh,
I might become one of those guys that drinks like a whole pitcher of coffee every morning. So I might be looking for like, you know, one of the old drip style coffee makers where I can just drink a ton of coffee in the morning. Cause I think that might, that might be a fun experiment for the next couple of months. I'm not sure. Just to see, just to see how it goes.
So for me, I am really looking at some of the stuff on Bamboo's website. So Bamboo, B-A-M-B-U is 3D printer manufacturer. Folks will know if they know the lore that I... a couple of Black Fridays ago, purchased a... 3d printer and then left it in the box for almost a year because i just didn't get around to like starting it finally got around to playing around with it and have been making stuff over the course of the past several months
And now I want more filament. And there are really good deals on that. What I'm trying not to do. is convince myself that I should get the new one that they just came, like the new printer that they just came out with and try to sell the one that I have right now because I don't need it, okay? I don't need it. But outside of that, Dan Sturm, there's a really cool coffee pot that is also a milk frother. And it's like a universal pod machine, too. And it does it all.
And I, yeah, I've been eyeballing that thing as well because we've got multiple coffee methods and mostly I use. my AeroPress, but I've got this stupid big milk frother thing that I would love to get rid of and just have the little steam frother. So maybe that. We'll see. Thank you all for your answers on that. Let us go to our next topic, which comes from Lisa.
¶ Meta App Rollbacks: Desired Features
All right. So I recently read that Meta is deprecating its mobile messenger apps. And this way, instead of having to switch, if you're on your phone, having to switch between like your Facebook app, when you make the post for giving away things on. the site normally known as FreeCycle and getting people's messages going, Mimi, I'll take it. You have to switch to like the messenger app. You no longer have to do that. You can just do it all in one app. It's kind of an...
old school regression, like it's going back to the basics. And I wanted to ask you, what else should Meta be rolling back in their apps to bring it back to the old school for you? Like, what could you happily never see again? Facebook or Insta? You know, I honestly don't use a lot of meta apps. I recently removed threads from my phone because I decided I did not need a third, you know. text-based social media network and I wasn't getting enough out of it.
And so I do still use Instagram. I think the thing I would most like rolled back there is the algorithmic timeline. Now, I know you can go and look at the non-algorithm timeline. I do it every time I start the app. I go to the top. I tap it. I go look at the people I'm following. There's generally a lot.
less content, which is fine by me. However, I have that because you can't set it as your default, I believe, unless they change that finally. You can do it on threads. Threads you could change. Every time, right? They know. They know they've got one shot at sucking me in. and they're really good at whatever that top post is, I'm going to be like, oh, what is that? And then I'm gone. And then I'm lost. I'm stuck in the algorithm. And I get it. They want that engagement.
But it drives me bananas because all I really want to see is like pictures from my friends of the cool stuff they're doing and not celebrities on talk shows. Why do I want to watch that? I don't know, but I do. Drives me mad. Anyways, get rid of that.
get rid of that dan following on with that the um the threads previews you get in instagram are so perfect at just like cutting off like the last third of the sentence where you're like yes somebody did what i'm really angry about i it makes me like i I realize how roped in I've been that I have to hit the hide button. It's like, you get this feature off of here. You're too good at this. Go away. Um, but, uh,
My answer was going to be, you remember that terrible version of Facebook they had called paper where it was like that weird horizontal scrolling thing and you kind of flip up. I liked it because it was so fast to just see what's there and then get out of there that.
I would like that one back, although they did nothing for them, I'm sure. I don't think they made any money or did anything interesting with that app. But if we're being really real, I think Meta should... roll facebook all the way back to my space and we could just get rid of facebook we don't need that anymore friendster gtfo i think i agree with the instagram thing of it being primarily
a non-algorithmic timeline. I also wish that Facebook was not as reliant on reactions, responses, whatever, as the thing that... make the surface posts, but instead was more of what it used to be, which was also a... Timeline based timeline, which is just so much better in so many ways. And then I don't have to be disappointed every time I get text from someone I know who's going.
What do you think about this? And it's some stupid news story that came from Facebook that actually is fake and entirely, you know, unreal. So, yeah, Lisa, what about you? What would you take back to how things used to be? I would love it if I could just get an algorithm that shows me my friends in reverse chronological order.
Because, again, I use Facebook mostly for like getting rid of things at this point or checking in on some community groups I'm involved in. But like I still have all my Facebook friends, people I've known from like middle school or high school or whatever. And what I really hate is.
When I get a post that surfaces in my feed and they're like, I'm so sorry to report that my dear mother passed. And like, it's six days ago. And I'm like, this, this really could have vaulted to the top of my feed past the three. glurge items about lessons i learned from taking my child to a coffee shop or like whatever they force added to your feed i want a reverse chronological feed with the people i follow like make it like it was
Back during the Obama administration. Like, just roll it on back. Make a lot of things back like they were back in the Obama administration. Exactly. Let's take a quick break so I can tell you about our... Swag. If you go to clockwise.social, you... yourself can get some clockwise swag. We've got shirts and hats and totes and all sorts of fun stuff there. And most importantly, when you do make a purchase from the clockwise swag bag, you are helping to support the work that we do here.
on the network and for this show. So heading to clockwise.social and repping the Clockwise logo also means that Dan and I keep paying the Zoom bill and we appreciate it. All right, we are back from halftime, and that means it's time for Dan Morin's topic.
¶ Internet Outages and Decentralization
All right. In recent weeks, we've seen big outages from the likes of Cloudflare and AWS impacting lots and lots of services across the internet. My question is, do you find yourself impacted when these things roll around? Do you find yourself frustrated? Like, how do you cope with it? And, you know, at the risk of sounding like a old snobby grandpa. Was the internet better when it was decentralized and just for nerds? Dan? I don't know if it was better back then just because like...
It's not that decentralization was the reason we didn't have outages in our cloud storage. We didn't have cloud storage back then. But yeah, these outages affect me, but maybe I just am better at finding other things to... keep doing with my day. I just wake up and go, oh, hey, AWS is down. Cool. I'm going to just, you know.
make my coffee more slowly this morning and uh read something i don't know what i do but is your coffee linked to the cloud exactly yes oh no i have no idea how much how long it's been brewing unless i have uh cloud flare working properly that one didn't uh that one didn't show up anywhere other than all the posts about Cloudflare being down. I don't know. Yeah, same. I was going to say that specifically. This last one didn't really affect me. But when it happens, I usually just am going.
oh, there's probably something going on with the ISP. And then I just wait for things to be fixed. And then with the last one, the AWS outage, I said, oh. This is clearly something bigger because I came back, you know, a couple of hours later and it was still not working. And I said, OK, there's something going on here. And then suddenly, you know, I see these posts about.
outages and whatnot. So yeah, some of it can be inconvenient, but I guess I just expect this stuff to happen from time to time. And as Dan said, I just find something else to do. As far as a decentralized web, at least as far as this goes, yeah, that would have been a better way of doing it. I wouldn't mind for it to be a little bit more decentralized in the case of sort of web services. Lisa, what are your thoughts?
The company I work for is part of a much bigger global company. And oh, yeah, we got hit by Cloudflare. We get hit when Microsoft Azure goes down. We get hit when Amazon Web Services goes down.
It's a really vivid illustration that when you move from an IT organization where it's a group of people who are responsible for maintaining an on-prem database or... on-prem email servers or on-prem anything servers, when you move from that to, oh, I'm the one who negotiates with our cloud-based providers, like, you take all the control out of your hands.
Do I think the web was better when it was like web 1.0 and decentralized? I think you have to split that question between like the technical answer, which is, well, as Dan pointed out, there was no cloud. And I have vivid memories of like... CGI bin servers going down and breaking websites. So anytime you have a technological component in a vast and interconnected web, when it goes down, it does affect everybody.
Was the web better when it was Web 1.0 from like a content and a community perspective? That is a whole different question and probably one that you could do like a 20 part podcast on. So I will leave it alone for now. You know, honestly. I didn't find myself hugely impacted by the Cloudfeller one yesterday, but then last night, ironically enough.
I don't know if it was an ancillary thing or whatever, but I was on a Zoom call over at Total Party Kill. We were playing some D&D. We were streaming it live, and Zoom just totally... Like we lost first. Everyone was real body and staticky and slow. And then it just kicked us off the call. It was the worst zoom I've ever seen. And we kept rejoining for two seconds and be like, Oh, we're a lot. And then it would go away again. It was really bad. And I got mostly.
mad because I kept checking Zoom's status site and it's like, everything's great. I was like, well, those are lies. You know, I think it's tough when we're in a world, you know, I think he's rightly pointed out, we have so many great services enabled by the fact, surely that we have these services that operate at scale like Cloudflare and AWS. And that makes so many more things possible than were possible, you know, 20 years.
ago. But it is worrying at times to have so much stuff dependent on these single points of failure.
Um, I was reminded at the same time, I was also struggling last night after this to upload a file to Dropbox and it was really slow and it was like chugging along. And then I went and uploaded a file to our... uh you know podcast server via ftp and it's like zip done it's like you know there's something to be said about these direct peer-to-peer connections um that don't rely on giant single services
So I don't know. I mean, I think it's probably six and one half dozen the other in some ways. But I do wonder as this trend continues, whether we are... digging ourselves into a hole of having more and more stuff that's dependent on fewer and fewer companies and fewer and fewer services. That was like the beautiful thing about the early internet was if somebody took down a server, somebody else was like, I've...
I've grabbed the content. Up it goes again. Here you are. Right. And so many things that do work. It's like, oh, my RSS feeds still work because they're just going to directly to the sites, right? Like there is something about that that is nice and robust, even if it doesn't necessarily scale. But thank you all for your thoughts on that and not minding me being a cranky curmudgeon. Let's go to our last topic, which comes from Dan Sturm.
¶ Strategies for Troubleshooting Tech Issues
Well, similarly, we're talking about tech issues, but on a more micro rather than macro scale. I'm curious, what do you do when you run into a tech issue with your device or app or service? Are you trying to find an answer in the... increasingly useless google results are you chatting with an llm or you just go like bug a friend emailing app support or you just call the geek squad uh on your wired landline phone
Yeah, I really like this question because when I think about the way that I do things or sort of interpret things versus how I see maybe others do it around me, because for me. I realize that there's a desensitization that I have to a lot of different tech issues. And so I'm very much of the, if something stops working, I just wait.
And then I come back to it. And if it's still not working, then I know we've got a problem. If it's something that is not solved immediately, of course. Other times it's just like a... oh, this probably is one of these. I just got to turn it back off or turn it off and back on again. And because those troubleshooting steps just happen as sort of second nature.
The frustration doesn't even register with me. And so I probably don't remember the number of times that, you know, in the past month, my iPhone has done something weird. And most of the time I. suspect it is either something that I have done somehow, or it is something that, again, is resolved by some network issue somewhere being fixed. And so I don't
When I run into a tech issue, most of the time I don't do a whole heck of a lot at all. I just sort of wait and see. But if it continues to be a problem, then I'll go through my typical troubleshooting steps. And then if that doesn't work, then that's where I'm going online to try to find a solution. Usually Reddit is a great place for these kinds of things. And I've found plenty of answers there.
by searching, not by actually messaging on Reddit or posting on Reddit. I've never done that. No, thank you. But yeah, that tends to be the way that I do things. I think... Dan Sturm will talk a little bit about a recent issue where I just assumed that this was me misremembering something or something. And so I didn't even think to.
tell anyone else about it or check in to see if other people had experienced it. And so when Dan did, I said, oh, wow, I'm not alone in this. And it's actually something, you know, that I should sort of clock back into and pay more attention to. Lisa, what about you? So this is my get off my lawn moment. Please, please, please don't ask. Please don't ask AI agents or Google's AI summary or Siri how to solve a tech problem. Because.
They're pattern recognition machines. They're not going to vet the materials that they're checking to see whether or not things actually work. They're just going to try to pattern match your query and spit out a result. Don't do it, man. But I tend to think about tech troubleshooting when I do.
I am reminded of a passage in Tom Wolfe's book, The Right Stuff, which is about the fighter pilots who became the first astronauts. And there's a passage in that book where Tom Wolfe talks about one of the traits that tends to set these...
tends to set fighter pilots apart, like to this day, is even if the plane is like nose diving, these guys are working a problem methodically where they're like, okay, what happens when I try this? Okay, that happens. Let me move on. What's the next thing where it's...
just this series of diagnostics. You don't take the results personally. You're just like, this is a data point. I'll move to the next thing. So if something goes wrong with my phone or my computer, do the local okay what happens when i turn it off and turn it on again all right we're still we're still seeing the problem all right what happens when i do this what happens when i do this and when i move to the next step of troubleshooting if i'm
using, again, the increasingly useless Google. I will look for vendor documentation first, especially for things like smart plugs or other. not terribly complicated technology. you know, download the PDF or have it open in another screen. So I can I can go through scan for what I'm looking for and try to figure out the problem. And then like Micah, I will look for qualified forums like I have found, especially when I'm troubleshooting things on my phone or on my iPad, like...
I found that the Apple Q&A forums are kind of useless because you have like five people asking the same question. There's never an answer. And then there's like, yes, I am experiencing the same thing also. And then an Apple moderator has closed this thread. So if you...
Do a Google query where you're like site colon reddit.com, you know, Apple, iPad, turning green on start. Like someone on Reddit has already like had this problem. Someone else has already solved this problem. You just read down, find the answer and go from there. But I find it's really helpful to like make a practice is like a Zen detachment where he's like, this happens. I find it.
helpful to be like, I'm a fighter pilot. I'm a fighter pilot, and I'm just going through my checklist. None of this is personal. I'm not filled with ineptitude. I'm dealing with a bunch of very complicated systems. One of them has gone sideways. We'll figure out which one. This is a great question. I think it really varies for me. And I think it depends on how much I know about the given topic. If I'm troubleshooting an iPhone or a Mac or any Apple product, I'm usually pretty good at sort of...
going, okay, I know what the usual suspects are, or I know how to find things. If it starts getting really esoteric, it gets harder. But I think the best results then do tend to come from things like Reddit or Stack Exchange or whatever. So for those kinds of things, I feel pretty confident and know how to find things.
Lisa's point about the Apple support forms. They're the worst. They're so bad. They're hilariously bad. But if it's stuff where it's like I'm maybe a little less well-versed in it, I have had some success with... like open you know using chat gpt or claude for those and i'm thinking particularly when i do programming tasks uh because you know i know a little bit of programming but you know just enough to be dangerous as i like to say also i have a um
a linux server i maintain and a lot of times where i run into issues there i've had good good luck um putting my errors into those codes but as lisa's point like you do have to vet and check these things and at least think through
Does that seem like it makes sense? It's going to fix problems because I've definitely gotten into trouble by like following instructions and just getting more and more down the rabbit hole and like breaking things until I have to like revert to a backup or something because it's like I should not have just taken their word for that.
So it really does vary and it's always worthwhile to be skeptical of what is being provided to you and to double check it and see if you can find anything that supports it or at least doesn't jibe with your idea of what's going on there. Those are all really, I think, good tools for the most part. Honestly, the worst thing to troubleshoot problems with is shortcuts on Apple's platforms. Because you can't? You can. Not only can you not do it yourself, but...
All of those AI tools will claim they can solve those problems for you, but they don't know because the problem is there's no documentation. So if it doesn't have any documentation to digest and spit out an answer, it will constantly... I'll be asking, how do I do this thing? shortcuts. And it's like...
Oh, just use this action. And I'm like, that does not exist. It's not a real thing. Because Apple does not provide a good extensive list. And if they did, I would just go do that instead. Well, I have spoken it into being. Yeah, exactly. The lady of heaven over here, everybody.
Anyways, yeah. So tools, you got to pick the right tool for the job. I think that's just what it comes down to. Dan, why don't you wrap us up? These are all very good answers. And I wish I had something that was as rational or effective as that. I mean, usually...
Step one for me is complaining about it on social media, which is not very helpful, but like I like to bother my friends. You know, everyone's got a group chat of tech people and you go, hey, you ever see this before? And when they ignore me or say no.
Um, I, I have found recently that I start, uh, and this mostly works for like smaller software development companies or like the professional apps we use at work. Um, I just go straight to emailing support. Like I don't even go through the website cause I've emailed support before and it auto fills support at whatever.
in my email app and I just start typing away. And, you know, some of the time as I'm typing out my my question, I will realize that there was something I didn't test and that will help lead me in the right direction to figuring it out on my own. But otherwise, you know, the.
The support reps usually have the answer at these smaller places. Do you email the wrong support reps ever? You're like, hey, I've got this problem. Surely you can fix it. I'm quite sure I've done that too. I think the thing that they probably...
are a little frustrated with me because I know I've asked the same question to support reps more than one time. I'm like, how do I, where's the API for the, they're like, here it is. It's right here. Thank you. I was like, oh, that was prompt. I appreciate it. Dan, we've been over this. But going back and forth with developers and support reps is very helpful.
The folks that make the visual effects software that I use every day, they also have like engineers on support too. So like I'll ask a question and I'll just get like a giant Python script back. And I was like, wow, you just added a feature to your app because I asked. That was pretty cool. That's neat.
I abuse it so much because they're so nice and so helpful. But Micah, to your hint earlier, I ran into a bit of a hardware problem with my iPhone 17 Pro where the sleep-wake switch just kind of like sticks and doesn't... click as much anymore and uh for that one aside from complaining about it on social media which is what
led you to see that you were not the only one with that problem. For problems with stuff like that, when you're dealing with Apple, as you've all noted, the support forums are terrible. I just kind of ignore it and let the resentment grow in my heart because I know there's nothing I can do about it.
Unless it becomes some sort of like class action suit where everyone gets a free iPhone 17.5 because they admit that they put the wrong membrane under the keyboard again or whatever they did last time. I don't know, man. let the resentment grow in my heart there's your episode title right there that's what it takes sometimes um
¶ Bonus: Sweet, Salty, Savory, Sour?
While we all let the resentment grow, I think we are having just enough time to get to the bonus topic this week. I'd just love to know, sweet, salty, savory, or sour? Which are you choosing? Lisa, we'll start with you. Oh, my gosh. Sweet. I guess savory. I only have to have one. I hate this, though.
dan star as much as i would like to like pretend that this is a difficult thing for me because i like all of these things it's just going to be sweet it's the only thing that i crave all the time i'm gonna go with salty uh yeah salty for me Well, folks, if you would like to get ad free episodes with an extra unwound episode every week where Dan and I.
chat about a given topic, you can become a member of Clockwise. Head to relay.fm slash Clockwise. Sign up. It's just $7 a month, $70 a year. And in doing so, you'll help support the show. That brings us to the end of this episode of Clockwise.
All that's left is to thank our awesome guests. Lisa Schmeiser, thank you so much for being here. I maintain that sweet and salty is a wonderful combination. Dan Sturm, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. You have warmed my heart. The resentment is leaving for now. For now. 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.