635: Crying Blood Emoji

It's time for episode 635 of the Clockwise podcast from Relay, recorded Wednesday, December 10th, 2025. Clockwise, four people, four tech topics, 30 minutes. Welcome back to Clockwise, the tech podcast that's jingling and ring ting tingling too. My name is Dan Morin and I'm joined as always across this vast and snowy internet of ours by my good friend, my pal, the one, the only Micah Sargent. How are you doing today, Micah?

It's a little chilly here, Dan, but I'm making it work. Oh, okay. I didn't realize it got that cold where you were.

It's because of the snow you mentioned. You're mocking me. You're mocking me and my freezing cold temperature. It's fine. We're okay. Everything's fine. Let's just move on. This is, of course, the show where we invite on to fantastic... guests to talk to us about four tech topics to my left this week uh someone who is not it's not cold where they are probably the founder of emojipedia now writing a mobile tech journal jeremy burge how you doing jeremy

It's always sunny here on Clockwise. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Just you're in the clockwise weather zone of sunshine. Keep watching the sun. Don't look directly at it, though. To my left, senior reporter at Engadget, it's Carissa Bell. Welcome back, Carissa. Hello, hello. You know how this works, 30 Minutes for Tech Topics. Let me start it off by saying, what?

in your mind, is the worst feature that Apple has added to its various software platforms this year? And why is it auto-mixed? No, that's mine. You can't steal it. Come up with something else. Jeremy, what do you got? What is the worst feature this year? I know it's easy to dunk on. It's been... A big topic for many reasons, but liquid glass is clearly the worst feature. Didn't add anything for me. It's either neutral or bad other than a cool few little areas. So I would...

happily ditch my liquid glass on everything. But auto mix is also very bad, but I want to hear why it didn't. I don't think so. Micah, why is auto mix the worst? Dan, here's the problem. I also think auto mix is the worst. So we'll talk plenty about it, but I'm... doing it as well too bad because here's the thing I love perhaps more than many things a good DJ transition

I used to use an app that is no longer available that would do real, true, good, delicious beat matching and transitions. And when I would go on road trips... I would turn that on and I would use that. It was clunky. It was terrible in terms of its sort of UI and UX, but it did the thing that I wanted and it was very good at it.

And this has let me down entirely. So I'm talking more about how there are better ways out there than what is available. But yeah, I got to go with AutoMix too. I'm sorry, Dan. Carissa, what's your worst feature? Yeah, so I guess mine is also kind of liquid glass related. But specifically for me, it's the fact that they moved the search bar to the bottom on everything. I've just found that extremely disorienting.

And then also when you're browsing in Safari, I share a lot of tabs, a lot of stuff I'm reading, a lot of stuff I'm seeing. And the fact that you have to get like the share menu is an extra tap away. It's kind of hidden, just annoys me so much every single time. It just drives me nuts. Can I add to yours, Carissa, that the search being at the bottom I like, but it's that the search is at the bottom, but all the other stuff's at the top still.

So I'm cool with moving stuff to the bottom, but search is at the bottom, but then back is at the top. So you're doing a lot of thumb exercise for no reason. So that's, yeah, I agree with you there. It's to limber up your thumbs, Jeremy, please. They're already limber. They're not limber enough. No, they're not limber enough. They could be more limber. Thumb calisthenics.

Some of us have carpal tunnel and it's rough. Some of us have early arthritis. So yeah, I'm actually on board with that. By the way, you can change the Safari one back to the old style because they've decided that nothing, they were not committed enough to any of these designs to not let you go back at least. in some fashion or another, whether it's the tinted on liquid glass, the Safari toolbar coming back, mail going back to the old way it looked.

You can have it your way as long as it's one of these two ways. Yeah, I mean, sure, I buried the lead there. It's automix. I mean, automix is... Oh my God, what? What? I know, it's shocking to everybody. It's the weirdest feature. You know, Micah's right, a good DJ transition, fine. That's great. But as somebody who has a very eclectic collection of music, hearing an instrumental...

you know, movie score piece mixed into a pop music thing, complete with the tempo adjustments and everything. And because it can take a long time, right? If it's like, wow, this is a really fast song and I need to match it to this really slow song that's coming up next you know here's the difference between auto mix and a dj a dj picks the song that is coming next he doesn't just try or she doesn't just try to mix it with

whatever they are being told to play next, because that would be bananas. So, you know, it's, it is the, it is the problem. One of the signature problems with AI is that it's not really. you know, aware of anything. It's given to, you know, an input and output and it's told to make those things work. And it does. It does exactly what it is designed to do. The problem is what it is designed to do is bad.

So I found it very jarring, right? Because you matching those tempos sometimes takes like 30 seconds. And if that's like a two minute song, that's a quarter of the song. So all of a sudden your song sounds and you think you are losing your mind. I have heard some wild transitions and you're like, nobody in their right mind would ever attempt this. And it's impressive from that standpoint of like, I can mix any two songs together. Watch me do it.

but it is ill-founded and it's pretty bad. I mean, liquid glass has its downsides too. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna. spend that much time on it. But, you know, I think the auto mix is one of those ones where it sounded like a great idea, but they did not at all think through how people actually listen to music.

But thank you all for your thoughts on that. Let's go to our second topic, which comes from Jeremy. So I'm curious, have any of you bought tech gifts for people special in your lives this year? And if so, do you care to share what they are? I've noticed that a lot of people who aren't techie people, they just have one charger and one cord, maybe two cords. And...

I think that everyone should be able to have multiple charging adapters and multiple cords. And so I have a little sort of care package. situation for Christmas this year for some of my close friends who live locally, where it's just, you know, a few anchor chords. that will last longer than the ones that I have seen that they have that look like absolute messes, look like some sort of steampunk thing at this point with the plastic coming away from everything, and an extra adapter.

And yeah, I think that'll be helpful. So I haven't bought any big tech gifts, but just some little tech gifts for quality of life is what I've done. I always feel like tech gifts can be kind of a double-edged sword, especially if you're... giving them to older relatives because you give them, you know, the tech thing and then you have to set it up for them, which like depending on.

The situation can end up being a bit frustrating, at least for me. I don't know if you all have been in a situation where you're kind of like the tech person in your family by default. i have not bought any tech gifts yet um i usually my dad is like a pretty serious hobbyist photographer so i usually try to find some a cool camera accessory or something like that for him. I haven't quite settled on what I'm going to get this year, but probably something camera related is definitely on my list.

Yeah, so far, I bought my wife a pair of AirPods Pro 2 because they were on amazing discount. with the introduction of the AirPods Pro 3. And she had a pair and they died. And she didn't use them a lot. um she has a pair of beats headphones that she likes and uses a lot of times but they she did wear them sometimes like when falling asleep and stuff and and the battery these were my old hand downs on the last set and so the battery was pretty

almost gone and they just were like getting worse and worse. So I bought her a brand new pair, which I gave her actually for her birthday because her birthday is in early December, but she still hasn't set them up, which is one of those. little things as a tech person that makes me twitch when it's like a brand new thing and it's still in the box why why why why are you doing this to me um i know that's that's my problem to deal with though um

Beyond that, I also like gave some, you know, I gave my dad like an old like laptop because he had a really old MacBook, you know, 10 year old MacBook or something. And I gave him my old M1 MacBook Air. that I had after I upgraded earlier this year. So that's kind of like an early Christmas present style thing. Yeah, the hand-me-downs, they work. My dad is very recalcitrant, does not want anything changed ever.

The one thing I was debating was trying to get a new... And I'm really sad about the state of this, but my parents have... I've set up their... TV system for them in years past and they are currently using an old Logitech Harmony remote. I would love to find them a new universal remote that's easy to use and doesn't have a bunch of complicated like buttons or screens on it or whatever.

And I find myself despairing a bit at the state of universal remotes in the year of Our Lord 2025, where it really feels like these things should be better and easier, and there should be a huge variety of things you can get, but they seem like actually... most of them are bad um so that's on my list of things that i would like to get for my folks this year but i haven't yet found a good product for

I think those are the main ones. Oh, I bought my kid one of those Yoto players. Oh, we have a Yoto. Yeah, the music player. little music player that uses little cards and it's, it's basically, you know, not smart, right? Like it's like a standalone thing. It's not, it doesn't have like a screen really or any of that. So that's, that'll be a Christmas gift for him, which I'm very excited for.

trying out because I know some people who love them and he used a friends and really thought it was cool. So very excited for that. Jeremy, what are your tech gifts? So what have I got tech center this year? I was just in Hong Kong and China where, you know, that's peak tech. I was over the border in Shenzhen where you can get stuff that I'm not buying, but boy, like that's proper.

Things that look, you would be hard pressed to tell that it's not a brand new iPhone 17 Pro until you turn it on and it's on a weird knockoff Android with a skin on it. Like it is flawless. Some of these devices there, which are fun to play with, but I would. Never. Could you imagine getting a fake iPhone? You open it up and it's like, oh, iPhone. Someone has to. It made me think. Someone has to. Someone, somewhere, the relative has gone to this.

tech market in Shenzhen and they've bought effectively what looks like a flawless iPhone 17, but it's running a weird forked version of Android. That's like getting coal in your stocking. So anyway, as far as good stuff that I've bought this year. Some battery packs, they're always a winner, I think, sort of like Micah's charging thing. But maybe these are mainstream Elsa and I missed it, but a lot of the ones that I came across...

have the Apple Watch charger built into the MagSafe area. It's like an indent in the middle of the Qi2 MagSafe area. So you can do regular Qi2 fast MagSafe charging for your phone, but then you can put your watch on the same pad. And it's slightly indented in the middle, which I think every charger should have. And that was very popular, Hong Kong and China. I'm not sure if it's popular in the rest of the world yet. So some battery packs that do that and also have a built-in USB-C cable.

So that, you know, it's just foolproof then, right? You give it to someone, they can plug it in, they can use the USB-C to charge the battery pack, they can use the USB-C to charge their phone, they can use MagSafe, they can charge their Apple Watch. Yeah, that's a big winner. Slimline battery packs this year, you know, they've come around the world. Just these really nice thin ones, just an emergency one to throw in your purse or wallet or something. As far as dumb tech goes.

I agree with you all, you know, like Carissa saying, you know, you don't want to set up something for a family and then have to deal with it, especially my nieces who aren't that old. But what I've got them is this cool little walkie talkie.

video walkie talkie but it's like not wi-fi it's nothing it's like you know old rf tech but it just works yeah not too far away and it's just a little you can see it's live video and you still push the button in the side to talk and it's just you turn them both on it's instant It doesn't even boot up like a smart TV in 10 seconds. You turn it on, the video is showing both screens in a millisecond. It's basically a two-way baby monitor.

Yes, it is a two-way baby monitor. Don't tell them that. So the babies can monitor each other. I understand. It's the Panopticon. No, it's very cool. It's not a baby monitor. If you're listening, my niece is extremely cool. We're not giving you a baby monitor. I want one or two. Yeah, so that seemed fun. And I think they're my ranges of tech stuff, battery packs, and cool little...

video walkie-talkies. But yeah, if you're over the border in Shenzhen, heaps of cool stuff. Millions of little micro cameras and knockoffs. Good fun to walk around. All right, that's two topics down, two topics left to go, which of course means it is halftime here at Clockwise. And this week's episode is brought to you by our very favorite sponsor. It's us. That's right. You can go to clockwise.social to check out all the great clockwise swag we have on offer, including a t-shirt, hat.

tote bag, mug, all those great things, including very soon, and I haven't told Micah this yet, I think we're adding a clockwise hoodie to the mix, too, with a nice embroidered clockwise patch on it. I think it's going to look really sharp if you want to be one of the first people to go check that out.

Go to clockwise.social and remember that everything you buy there, most important of all, helps support this very show, which you're listening to right at this moment. So you should definitely go check it out. We really appreciate it. Clockwise.social for all of your Clockwise swag.

And with that, we have reached the end of halftime, which means I'm going to turn it over to Micah. Micah, what is your topic for us? I was reading an article on The Verge about a little feature called AuraCast that is part of Bluetooth. I would love to know if you have heard. of Auracast. And if you haven't and needed me to explain it during the intro of my topic, I'm sorry. I would just like to know, what are your thoughts on this feature?

I have actually, I'm sort of aware of this. One of my colleagues at Engadget, Billy Steele, wrote a pretty good feature last year at CES about this technology. And I think it's super fascinating. I love the idea that... You can essentially, you know, be in a place, a public place like an airport. And I think you can correct me if I'm wrong. The idea is that you can basically use your own Bluetooth headset, headphones, AirPods, whatever.

and connect to devices that are around you. And it sort of can broadcast that audio to Bluetooth devices. Yeah, it's sort of like tuning in on a radio, but with Bluetooth instead. So that doesn't require you pressing any pairing buttons. It's kind of like an open airwave situation. Very, I think, a pretty cool tech.

Yeah, it seems cool. I mean, especially you think places like gyms and they always have those weird setups with the TV so you can watch it and that stuff never quite works right. I feel like one of the kind of... Things that I never understand about, you know, with some of these core technologies like Bluetooth or even USB, they make these great updates that add leaps and bounds in terms of like functionality. And I feel like it takes so long.

for all the manufacturers and all the devices and everything else to catch up. So right now when I think about it, I'm like, oh yeah, this is cool. It'll probably be two, three years. Maybe this will exist somewhere where I can actually use it. Yeah, it's funny, actually, because it's been around for a couple of years so far. And my understanding is part of the reason it hasn't got wider adoption is because the implementation has needed some work. It just hasn't quite been...

fully baked yet, even though it's part of the Bluetooth spec. And a lot of the companies have not embraced it. I think JBL is one of the ones that has really kind of made a heavy push into it. And some smart TV manufacturers are adding it as well. I think what's probably holding it back from wider adoption is somebody like... Probably Apple and Android embracing it, right? Those are...

probably the big things that will end up with it because there are other advantages to it as well, right? Like if you are playing something on your phone and you want to share that audio with somebody else, you can do it if everybody has Apple AirPods or Beats or whatever. But if somebody's got some other brand of Bluetooth headphones, you're out of luck. Or you need to use a dongle or something like that. So I think it's a great...

feature. It also has huge accessibility implications as well. Because if you're somebody with Bluetooth hearing aids, for example, they already have a lot of features. My parents both have hearing aids. They're both capable of tuning in to a TV or something. can listen directly over their hearing aids to the TV audio.

but it requires some work and an extra, usually an extra piece of hardware, et cetera. So having that all built in and then making it more applicable in other places, go to the movies, for example, and being able to get that audio piped directly in, or even just being in a place where you might.

not otherwise be able to hear something you need to be able to hear, whether it's announcements or something on a plane, for example. I think all those things are huge. And the cross-platform part of it is such a big deal, too, that you don't have to have specific hardware to make it work. I think this is really great tech. I think it will probably take, as Chris has said, some time for everybody to fully implement it. And again, I think the big players are going to be the ones that...

that's when the shift generally tends to happen. So I think we're probably a few years away from this being something that is used broadly. I hope that those big companies... don't sit to themselves, think, oh, well, we've already got audio sharing with AirPods. We don't need to build this feature in because that would be a real shame. But yeah, I think it's cool. And it also, let's be honest, Bluetooth.

is a technology we all use all day, and it's probably the worst technology we all use all day. So anything to help improve that, I think, is a plus as well. Jeremy, what do you think? Well, I, for one, am shocked that a Bluetooth feature remains half-baked up in many years. I can't believe that to be happening. No, as someone who's been on a standard, part of a standards body for a while, I sympathize with people on standards bodies and standards groups like the Bluetooth special interest group.

However, I wouldn't trust the Bluetooth special interest group to hit water if they fell out of a boat. I just, I understand it's many competing companies who...

attempt to work together to find shared ground, but they come at it from very many different angles of feature set and implementation. I mean, this sounds great. I'd love it to be well supported. I have... little faith in that happening but you know let's we're an optimistic podcast here sometimes so let's hope this is the time that bluetooth hits it out of the park and everyone works together and it works flawlessly it doesn't have weird

Switching issues, sharing issues, pairing, repairing, unpairing. Yeah, let's just hope all that goes away and Bluetooth becomes the gold standard for reliability that we all want to hear about. Micah, please uplift us all though. Yeah, you sound very convincing. I think this feature sounds cool. And I'm sad that, you know, it's been around for a long time. That's kind of the Verge article touches on the fact that every year the Bluetooth group does.

like one-on-one press events and at CES. And this is one of the features that they talk about every year and are definitely trying to get it to work. And then, yeah, JBL. has been an adopter of it. But as Dan was talking about, people started to think it was a JBL feature because JBL was the only one to support it across, you know, the board or across many of its products. Google.

has started to work on adding it. But overall, I just think this would be a really neat feature to have for many reasons, but accessibility first and foremost. There's at my pharmacy that I go to. There's a television on the wall that has some special pharmacy channel. I don't know how they get it, where they get it. Pharmacy TV. Yeah, it really is like pharmacy TV. But it has information about vaccines. And I was thinking like.

It would be cool if I could be in there and then just pop in an AirPod real quick and find the television and listen. Or when you're at the airport to be able to tune into some sort of like, you know, Alaska air. announcements thing and whatever it happens to be, wherever you are, just the idea that there are these little broadcast channels that you can connect to when you need to would be awesome. And as someone who just used.

Well, tried to use the AirPods shared audio. We were at the airport and my partner and I were trying to watch something and we. popped in our AirPods and I set it up and then it didn't work. And then I set it up again and then it didn't work. And then I set it up again and then it played for half a second and then it disconnected. It's not just Bluetooth that's responsible for this stuff.

All of the audio pairing stuff is still kind of garbage. And I would love to see improvements across the board. But yeah, being able to like aura cast something and then have other people connect to it is a pretty cool idea.

Thank you all for your answers on that. Let's go to our final topic, which comes from Caressa. Yeah, this is in honor of Jeremy being on the show today, Emoji King. And if you could snap your fingers and bring any new emoji into existence, what would it be? All of mine are ridiculous so far, but the one that I thought was pretty good was I was looking for at one point a specific planet emoji. And there are some Earth emojis.

And there is one essentially Saturn emoji. But what I wanted was a Jupiter emoji. And there is no Jupiter emoji. So I used Genmoji to make a Jupiter emoji. And it looks insane. And so I was kind of bummed by that. But I need a full solar system. of options or failing that i think the other one that came up um was uh is there is there a submarine emoji i don't think there is a submarine emoji right jeremy

I don't think there is. Hunt for Red October fans everywhere are really upset that we don't have a good submarine emoji. One emoji only. You'd be surprised or not surprised to know that many, many hours of my life are spent debating how many planets. get added to the Unicode standard. I don't think I'm breaking any confidences here, but yes, the planets, there was an era where a fun compromise, which I think I still stand by, was the better option where you get...

One planet. It's an iconic planet, and that's Saturn, because that's a cool planet. All the other planets are really ticked off now. Yeah, they are. And dinosaurs, the proposal for, I think, 42 dinosaur emojis, ended up with a... a t-rex i like the 42 dinosaur emojis suggest to me they were all submitted by like kids of the age three to seven or so

Yeah, look, that is a small section. I think that's why Unicode made their forms a bit harder to use after a while. I think the open-ended text box. That's funny. Not helpful. So yeah, we've got one extra planet emoji. Sorry, Dan, I don't see the rest happening. All the 42 dinosaurs. What do I want? I'm not a big emoji user. What?

I miss the hugs on MSN Messenger. Those used to be a left hug and a right hug that would hug each other from the left or the right. And you could send a hug back to the other person. I also like, I used to be on a forum where Joshua Jones is a long time. Mac icon designer, he designed the little custom forum emoticons on this forum. And there was one that I liked that's just sort of like a little squinty looking guy looking confused with WTF coming out the side of his head.

And a few forums have one of those, but I think that's, yeah, I think a WTF, even though it's not happening, I think that'll be useful in my repertoire. What the fun. A lot of fun is happening here. That's what we say. So there's a dog that is not a Chihuahua, but people use as if it is a Chihuahua because it has that fluffy bent tail like a Chihuahua. I can't remember. Let me see if I can quickly Emojipedia this to see. No, it's just the one called Dog. Dog has a curled tail, and it is...

looks kind of like a Shiba Inu sort of situation going on. It is not a Chihuahua, and I would love a Chihuahua. And it's funny because I thought... I sort of psyched myself out. Sounds like Dan, maybe I did a little bit too. Is there a submarine emoji? I said, wait, maybe there is a Chihuahua emoji now. So I typed in Chihuahua on Emojipedia and there's a flag for the state of Chihuahua.

But yes, there is still no Chihuahua. And I do find it wild that not all the planets have emoji, but it does make me wonder, then does... Pluto gets a half an emoji. My sweet. All right. Starting again. Here we go. I love you, Pluto. Anyway, that's what I would like to have. Carissa, what's your added emoji?

So it's one that I use on Slack all the time. It's probably one of my most used emoji on Slack and I don't know what this says about me. You can kind of... interpret it for yourself but it's the the crying blood face It looks exactly like the sobbing one, but instead of tears, it's just blood streaming down. And it's just such a great reaction emoji. It's like if you want to be really dramatic.

you know, or show just how, how ridiculous thing is. I find it very versatile. I use it all the time. Maybe that's just my, my dark sense of humor coming through, but I find myself like looking for it on my iPhone all the time. I have a friend who uses the gallon of milk emoji, but they have decided that for them and the people who are in the know that it's actually a gallon of bleach.

When they want to chug it, when the situation makes them feel like chugging a gallon of bleach, then they just send that milk emoji. Nice. I like that there had to be a shared understanding of that first, that you had to have the discussion first to make sure we all get it. I'm not drinking milk. It comes up enough. Yeah, exactly. That's the disturbing part. 2025. All right.

Okay. Well, thank you for that. We'll let you know if any of those emoji actually come into being at some point. We'll keep you posted.

That is four topics down. We have just enough time for a bonus topic. So tell me quickly, what is your favorite holiday song, Jeremy? I'm going to pick one that's very popular in the UK. I never hear it here in Australia. Ding Dong Merrily on High, sung by a choir. I'm not sure if that makes it to the US, but very good. Mine is The Christmas Song, specifically performed by Nat King Cole.

I'm going to be really basic and say Mariah Carey, all I want for Christmas is you. Overplayed, but for a reason. Micah took mine. I think I remember this from a previous conversation at some point. That's fine. I'm going to go with my backup, which is Sleigh Ride, alluded to in my introductory line this week. performed, of course, by the iconic Boston Pops Orchestra, for whom it was originally written. So there you go. Check that out. Trivia.

Before we wrap things up, I want to make sure that you've heard the good news about Clockwise Unwound, which is a short weekly segment after the main show wraps up where Mike and I chat about a tech topic. If you'd like to get that, plus add free episodes of Clockwise, just 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.

And with that, we have reached the end of this week's episode. And all that remains is for us to thank our fantastic guest, Jeremy Birch. Thank you so much for being here this week. Thank you, Dan. Thank you, everybody. Happy holidays and Merry Christmas to you all. And Carissa Bell, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you. It was great to be here. I feel like I learned a lot about Bluetooth technology today. That's always my goal. The Bluetooth SIG advertising dollars are about to come on through. I can feel it. Micah, 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.