633: Functional Tassels

It's time for episode 633 of the Clockwise podcast from Relay, recorded Monday, November 24th, 2025. Clockwise, four people, four tech topics, 30 minutes. Welcome back to Clockwise, the tech podcast where it's finally time to talk turkey. My name is Dan Morin, and I'm joined across the internet by my good friend, my pal.

And the person I am thankful for. It's the one and only Micah Sargent. How are you doing today, Micah? Well, I'm caught off guard, Dan. That's my goal. Every time. Sweet and sincere moment. I too am thankful for you and thankful for everyone who listens to our show every week. Me too. I'm also thankful for our two fantastic guests this week. To my left, it is indie podcaster Alex Cox. Welcome back, Alex. Hello. Thank you so much for having me. Delighted to have you.

And to my left, nine to five Mac editor in chief. You know him. You love him. It's Chance Miller. Hello, Chance. Hello. Thank you for having me back. You all got welcome back, which means you did a great job any other time you've been on. That's something to be thankful for. All right. Let me kick things off here with my first topic.

Technology these days often feels like it has gotten less repairable. I want to know if you've had any luck fixing a piece of tech instead of replacing it. Alex? Nope. Maybe a decade ago, I fixed an iPhone 4 screen, which felt like a big deal because it was one of the first, like, wow, there's a lot of glue involved with this. I tried with a five and never again. That's it. You're done. Yep. Yep. Fair. I do have an iFixit like toolkit for aspirational future repairs yet to use it.

I love that. I am very much a, I like fixing things. And so I have, I just had a, like a little light. go out that was a little led light and i was i have this little thing that i wear around my neck that's technically for reading but i use it for uh crafting A little book light. And it went out. And so I had to take it apart. And oh, somehow the wire like overheated and ended up.

kind of frying part of it. And so I was able to replace the wire for that. We also have a candle warmer that ended up dying at one point. I opened it up and turned out I just needed to have a new cord installed. So I got a new cord and installed that and set up the necessary tension knot and did what needed to be done. I have a, an Eve mug and for some reason they made the charging base with stupid pogo pins. And so I have this like.

little bag but it's a little bag filled with pogo pins because they're very small and sometimes i have to re-solder some new pogo pins onto the board so yeah i oh my god i do a lot of little fixes and i i really enjoy it As far as like a main gadget, haven't done that in a while. Last time was a MacBook Pro where I replaced the battery, but... You literally had to take everything out of it. And I think I'm still recovering from having to have done that. Chance, what about you?

You really set me up for failure by making me go after you because I've done absolutely nothing. I tell people I'm like the world's least handy person. So if I buy something from like Ikea, I'm absolutely checking that box at checkout that's like... Yes, someone from TaskRabbit, please come and put it together for me. I have, like, recently I've had our Dyson vacuum a couple times. It's like broken in the past year.

And I've been trying to make an effort of not just throwing money at it and buying a new one, probably not from Dyson because it's been horribly unreliable. But both times I've called them, dealt with their support, done. They want you to do like a video chat thing. It's a whole process that's not very enjoyable. But I did it both times and they sent me a part instead of an entire vacuum. So I was proud of the environmentally friendly effort I took for that. But that's probably the extent of it.

That counts. I was going to say I was feeling very proud of myself until Micah went. Oh, no. I'm thankful for you. No. I recently had an issue with... We have a... a baby monitor for my son. And we don't use it as much as we used to because he's older now, but we still do like to keep an eye on him when he's going to bed because he has a tendency to run around and do all sorts of things. And it would stop...

And it stopped really lasting very long on its battery. And at that point, we hit a point where it's like it basically needed to be plugged in every time. And that was driving me a little bit batty. And so I was searching. I was like, I don't even know how I buy another unit, just this part. Do I have to replace the whole thing? And I stumbled across a Reddit thread talking about replacing the battery. And even better, there was a YouTube video.

And even funnier, I recognized the name on the YouTube video, which happened to be a Six Colors subscriber. I was like, wow, this is great. So I bought a battery off Amazon. I followed the video's instructions. which fortunately, Alex, you'll be glad to hear, I used my iFixit kit, all those parts I had. I was perfect for that job. I had everything I needed. I took the whole thing apart. I plugged the new battery in. I put it all back together.

from basically almost totally stripping one screw. I did it perfectly fine. So it does all work. And I was very proud of myself for that because it was like, I don't know, 15 bucks for a new battery or something. So I really like it, but that is...

you know, anything where it comes down to soldering, uh, Mike has got one over on me there. Cause I just don't, I don't do soldering. I like soldering. It's pretty great. I just, I've never dealt much with solder and it scares me a little bit. So it's been. Many, many years since I did any soldering. Maybe. We'll see. Maybe that's my new hobby. I should say the reason I don't...

try to fix things anymore while I do try and fail is because usually there's heat involved and just keep me away from the hot things. Good advice. All right. Thank you all for your thoughts on that topic. Let's go to our second topic, which comes from Alex.

All right. So last week, I believe it was a friend of the network, Shelley Brisbane, posted on Six Colors about... a new accessibility focused grip that iphone not goodness i sound like my grandma that apple had launched sorry grandma that apple launched um the hikawa magsafe phone grip and stand and it honestly looks like something you'd get from the tiktok shop except it's

costs like $70 and the idea is like, hey, we're going to make accessibility cool, which it already is. But I was wondering, since Apple is making more and more unhinged decisions with how... there not with this one necessarily but like with their little pouches and slings like do you have a dream accessory that you just have never had or haven't been able to make or whatever

So I wouldn't call it a dream accessory for me. It is instead a sort of like, if I'm going to have this, I wish it was like this. And that is that I did get. the stupid, um, I don't even know what it's called. The, the sling thing, not the, not the one that's a million dollars. The cross body strap. Thank you, Dan. I'm thankful for you. Um, the cross body strap.

And the thing that's blech about it is that it's something that doesn't attach and detach easily. And so if Apple made a new one that had some sort of like... latching mechanism that meant you didn't have to have those weird little uh like tassels hanging from the bottom of the phone that Would be an ideal first party accessory because when I have used the crossbody strap, very rarely, but when I have, I've actually really liked it.

for the purposes that I had, which was like, I want to have my phone available really quickly for taking photos of whatever it is that I'm about to do. And then having a little bit more steadiness, very much like that experience, but didn't like that most of the time when I didn't need it. It was just there and kind of obnoxious in its existence. So yeah, that's my sort of iteration on a dream.

Chance, what about you? It seems like you just want functional tassels, really. Functional tassels is precisely what I'm after. One thing that I've loved about like the iPhone 17 and the iPhone Air series is just how like. As Alex said, like unhinged Apple has been with all the accessories like the cross body strap. I really love the Beats case that has like the built in lanyard. That's also a kickstand. I think that's so clever and so cool.

The iPhone Air MagSafe battery, I think. If you would have asked me this question six months ago, my answer would have been, I want Apple to make a new version of the MagSafe battery that they made for like the iPhone 12 or whenever that was. Since I use the iPhone Air, the MagSafe battery pack is perfect for me, so I don't have to make that complaint anymore. For this question, the thing I thought about was kind of big picture, and I think what I want is an accessory to the iPhone, that is.

The meta Ray-Ban style of glasses, but made by Apple. I just want something that lets me take that first person point of view video and those pictures integrated with my iPhone, not made by Meta. And it's a huge missed opportunity for Apple, I think, that they let that whole category kind of pass them by and let Meta become the dominant player in that industry.

And now like Bloomberg is reporting that, oh, Apple might jump back into that category, but it won't be until 2027 or whatever. I think it's super disappointing that for whatever reason, Apple didn't see that as a viable accessory to the iPhone category.

Because I don't want AR glasses. I don't want VR glasses. I just want to take those videos and pictures that are from that first person view. So that's kind of the dream iPhone accessory for me right now. That was a pretty good answer, actually. I really... I kind of want that too. I'm not a big accessory person, honestly. I don't think my accessory game is particularly on point. So all I have is bad joke answers like a MacBook Pro sock.

and a thing for my Apple Vision Pro where it doesn't get dark enough. So if there was just some sort of big, giant black sheet I could put over my head when I'm wearing the Vision Pro, or I don't know if anybody else as old as me remembers the math net. from square one television where they had calculators and shoulder holsters. What about an iPhone shoulder holster?

Is that a thing? No. Okay, well, I've tried. I've failed. Yeah, I don't use cases very much. I mean, I think, you know, honestly, if there's anything that I really want... It's something kind of equivalent to the Magic Keyboard for the iPad.

But lighter, kind of closer back to that old Magic Keyboard, or not the Magic Keyboard, the keyboard case. Remember the keyboard case where you could unfold the thing? I loved how light that was. I would keep it on my iPad all the time. And I like... the Magic Keyboard just fine, and I understand why it's so heavy.

But it also means I don't generally want to carry it in the keyboard case. And so I have to make that determination. Am I going to put in the case or am I going to just carry it with a cover and it's much, much lighter? I don't know if there is a way to solve for that, but I'd love to see a clever adaptation of a nicer, lighter keyboard for the iPad. Alex, why don't you wrap this up?

You stole my answer, but with the exception is I want that for the iPhone with a like four years. Apple was kind of. the magnet magnet they just were the only people who because corporations are people in america who were making actual functional accessories and i made the joke that this new grip from Apple is, it looks like it's from the TikTok shop, but it probably has a really strong magnet and is actually much more helpful if you need it for whatever reason.

And I really want them to lean into more into, I guess, their strap on game. If my one that was my one thing. Don't. Nope. Moving. You know how it used to be. Where you had your armband for your iPod, you would slip it in. What if there was sort of a Leela from Futurama situation where you had...

this band on your arm where you could just slap that right in and actually look at it. And you could, if you wanted to, you could have a magnetic keyboard and... I know all this sounds just absolutely ridiculous, but AirPods. felt ridiculous and everybody made fun of them for what three months until they were awesome so i just want more magnets more wearables and more functional tassels why not Amen.

All right, that's two topics down, two topics left to go, which of course means it is a halftime here at Clockwise. And this week's episode is brought to you by our very dear friends at our own swag store. You can go buy all sorts of Clockwise branded merch. over at clockwise.social hats, t-shirts, tote bags.

tote bags that can be worn as hats, mugs, stickers, stickers that can be put on mugs. You see what I'm doing here? It's not three things. It's one thing. It's the Clockwise merch store, clockwise.social. Go over there. And not only do you get sweet merch, we help support the show.

Thank you for that. And with that, halftime has ended. And Micah Sargent, what have you for us? I just would like to know what's everybody doing these days when it comes to saving links or, you know, trying to hold on to your tabs or... saving articles to read later. Do you have a read it later service? Do you do something else? Do you just not care? Any answer is a reasonable answer. And Chance, we'll start with you.

I almost exclusively just use Safari reading list for this just because it's so easy to click the one button and it adds to the reading list. And then on the Safari start page, you can have like the reading list show up at the bottom. And that encourages me to take a couple minutes each week and either read what I've saved there or purge it and delete it so I don't end up with hundreds and hundreds of articles from years and years. Just a backlog there. I'm also a big...

tab groups user in Safari. So and I kind of also use that as a read it later platform. So throughout the week, I'll add stories specifically for like podcasts to their respective tab groups. Then when it's time to like prep for that episode, I have all of the tabs for that specific show in one spot and I can read through them, sort through them, organize them, and then export it using a Safari extension called tabs to links.

Just right into the show notes. So a combination of reading lists plus tab groups in Safari for me. I use a very complicated system called, if I don't read it now, I never will. You know what? That's future me's problem, finding that article that present me is not going to read. And I don't like that guy. Um,

I just can't be bothered. I've used Instapaper. I've used the reading list, all of that. I think for me, it just becomes such a wasteland. I never go back and read the stuff that I put on lists. So at a certain point, I just stopped saving it. There's too much. That's the problem.

overall it's like if something is important enough that i i do not have the time to read it now but i want to read later i will open it in a tab and leave the tab open and after a while i will either read it or get rid of the tab um

That works better in some devices than others. I find it much more effective on the Mac because then those tabs are always kind of there. Whereas on the iPhone, they get kind of lost, right? Like, you know, yeah, I'll open up the tab interface every once in a while and be like, oh, yeah, there's another tab open there.

And then I just can ignore it because it's not in your face all the time. But if I have a window full of tabs open on my Mac, I'm like, yeah, I got to triage those. I will put in a plug. Years ago, my pal Lex Friedman and I made a bookmarklet. javascript called read it now which you just click and it pops up a javascript dialog box that says okay you can read it now and then you close it

Why? It tickled me and it still does. So I still have that bookmarklet in my bookmarks bar in Safari. And every once in a while, it gives me a laugh. So you got that going for you. Alex, what about you? Oh, well, mine aren't ticklish, but a long time, unlike my aspirational iFixit... Toolkit. I'm not really an aspirational read it later person, but I have been just saving links religiously and without hesitation since...

When Instapaper went away, I exported all of it and realized, oh, wow, I have all of this stuff that I... can easily index and search. So I, but now I use the readwise, read it later. I think that is what it's called. And if I... really, really think I need to read something, I'll use the Obsidian web clipper, so then it gets the entire web pages added to my Obsidian vaults.

And my thinking with that was it's kind of like putting something in my backpack where if it's with my own stuff, I feel sort of obligated to use it or in this case, read it. And that search is even... faster. So I'm a big fan. Nice. All interesting answers and I appreciate them. So for me, I have tried so many different read it later services. There's a great one that I will recommend to people called keep it. And I used to use that a lot. It will archive web pages and save.

all sorts of files. And I used that for a while, but I ended up going back to my tried and true method, which is in my contacts, I have a contact named me. And that me is my phone number that I almost just read aloud in. I'm glad that I didn't. For some reason, I was about to be like, which is my phone number, which is the following anyway. And I just text myself. And so I just have an ongoing text message exchange. Well, it's not an exchange. It's one way. And then I simply use the.

iMessage search, which is trash, to never find what I'm looking for most of the time. But I... And most of the time, what it ends up being is I am sending it to myself to look back within the week. And so I will scroll back and look within the week and find what I'm looking for. And that is my.

The only save it, read it later method that has stuck with me. Thank you all for your answers on that. Let's go to our next topic, which comes from chance. Yes. So with December approaching, it's about to be like. Year in review season, Apple Music Replay, Spotify Wrapped, all of those things are going to launch probably in like the first week of December. And I'm curious, how much time do you spend actually looking at that data? Do you just glance at it and move on?

Do you share it with others? And then also just bigger picture, do you have any specific year in review metrics or goals that you focus on for yourself throughout December? That's a good question. Music stuff, I don't pay a lot of attention to. I will look at Apple Music Replay more out of curiosity, but I don't know. I don't think about it a lot. I don't put a lot of stock in it.

I think the only of the metrics that I really do tend to set for myself is a reading goal for the year. I usually set like a reading challenge at Goodreads for a certain number of books. This year, I think I'm... Kind of behind. But I kept reading really long books this year. That was the problem. So I like I should be reading six shorter books instead of this one really long book. But, you know, that's more for sort of my own attempt at.

I don't know, Betterment? That's a losing game. But yeah, for music and other stuff, I don't tend to think of as much. The one thing that I do regret is that I don't have a better workflow for movies. I have a Letterboxd account. I've used it for a long time, but I often just forget when I watch a movie.

to log it. And so I look back, I'm like, God, what did I watch this year? And I end up having to do weird things like look through the watch history on six different services and look at my purchase history in Apple and try to figure out what were all those movies I saw. Did I like them? I don't even remember.

So every year I sort of set myself the goal of like, I should do better at keeping track of what movies I've seen. And every year I fail. So somebody should come up with an even better service for that because I want one that just like... I want the equivalent of scrobbling, right? I want whatever I watch to just get automatically added to my list, and then I'll remember it probably, probably not. Alex, what about you?

The problem is I like December and going through all of my either successes or failures of the year isn't a great. time because of it's it's busy and also there's snow it's fun so i always do like a meta march where i'll look at everything i've logged over the year and Unfortunately, all of the trendy wrapped stuff has gone away, but I do have a list of...

I go through Goodreads, Letterboxd, and an excellent app called Chronicling, which lets you chronicle whatever. So basically, whenever something happens that I want to... remember such as when I got a haircut which is also easy throughout the year so I can figure like oh wow, this is how long my hair has gotten. But the thing with that is it's much more a practice in memory and not sort of trying to...

I don't know, share anything or anything like that. Yeah, I don't. So I do the music stuff. I'll talk about that in a moment, but I don't do any of the other stuff, really. I don't have. sort of a looking back and checking for goals situation. I, as far as music goes, I always get a little bummed because I am a big Apple music user, but all of the people, um,

directly around me are Spotify people. And so then they, they're all sharing their little Spotify and rap or Spotify rap situations. And, uh, I go in there and then it's like, It's all classical music because it's stuff that I would play in the house for whenever we would leave so that the dogs didn't hear what was going on outside and instead just had like...

baroque music in the background so my rap doesn't even make any sense um so i did say at the end of last year that i was going to listen on spotify more often but i haven't so no I don't really pay much attention to those things, I guess. Chance, what about you? For Apple Music Replay specifically, it started out incredibly useless and just buggy and didn't give you good data and didn't match Spotify.

anywhere close to what they were offering, but it's gotten better over the years. And with iOS 26, this is the first year that the entire Apple Music Replay experience is native in the music app. or it's going to be apparently. So I'm excited to see what that does because I do pay pretty close attention to my replay data, partially just because I find it interesting. And also I think it's useful.

specifically retroactively. So Apple Music Replay, if you've been an Apple Music subscriber since 2015, you can go back and view your replay playlist for each of those years. And I find that useful for going back and looking for songs that maybe I listened to a lot in 2018 or 2019, but have for some reason forgotten about. And I can add those back into my rotation. So I like Apple Music Replay for that reason.

Bigger picture, I think the one piece of data I look at is just all of my time tracking stuff from Timery, just to see where my time went throughout the year, how much I spent dedicated to things that... make me money and are good for my job versus things that maybe I should scale back or cut a little bit. I think Timery, which uses toggle on the back end, is a really great way to generate those reports at the end of a year.

All right. That's four topics down. We have just enough time for a bonus topic. It is, of course, the week of Thanksgiving here in the United States. So I must ask you, favorite pie, Alex? I don't like this question because, you know, what is a pie? I like... Oreos. That's a layered thing, right? Yes. Oreo pie. I like turtles. No, just an Oreo. There's something in the middle. There's a container. Yeah, it's delicious. There is an Oreo pie.

I would love to try it. It probably is. Is Oreo pie? Are you saying an Oreo is a pie? Are you saying an Oreo is a pie? Yes. An Oreo is clearly a sandwich. One more one more opportunity. Are you on the record? Are you saying an Oreo is a pie? Are you saying an apple pie isn't a sandwich when there it is? It has a crust. There's literal crust on a pie. Most pies are sandwiches. I never said anything about an apple pie. I own. Anyway, I don't know. No, for me, pumpkin pie.

favorite pie which does not have a top on it therefore is not a sandwich and is certainly not an oreo Chance, you want to redeem this? Sure. I think I'll go with cherry pie. I feel like you don't see cherry pie at many Thanksgiving dinners, but if somebody has a cherry pie, I'm making a beeline for that one. That was a good call.

But I think the best Thanksgiving dessert is a pumpkin roll, not a cake, not a pie, not an Oreo, a pumpkin roll. And what is that, Alex? What's a pumpkin roll? Sounds like a burrito. i saw the bonus topic favorite pie and i was like should i just lie should i i don't i don't know and panicked I would have accepted the number 3.1415 before I accepted Oreo. That's all I'm saying. All right.

This question did not go the way I intended or expected. I'm boring. I like a good apple pie, but I will say I also really love a lemon meringue pie or a key lime pie. Those are also really good. You don't get any of those at Thanksgiving, really. So...

Shame, I say. I guess I'll go eat some Oreos. Anyway, have you heard the good news about Clockwise Unwound? It's a short weekly segment after our main show wraps up where Mike and I chat about tech topic. If you like to get that plus ad-free episodes, just go to relay.fm.

clockwise and sign up for just $7 per month or $70 a year and you will help support the show. And with that, we have reached the end of this week's episode and all that remains is for us to thank our fantastic guests, Alex Cox. Thank you so much for being here. I apologize and thank you very much. And Chance Miller, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. I'm thankful for all of you.

And Micah, we will be back next week. We, of course, again, are thankful for all of our listeners. And if you are out there in the US, have a wonderful Thanksgiving. And if not, just have a wonderful Thursday. And until then, we remind everyone out there listening. watch what you say, and gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble. It's tricky for keep watching the clock.