641: Across the Country the Short Way

It's time for episode 641 of the Clockwise Podcast from Relay, recorded Wednesday, January 28th, 2026. Clockwise for people, four tech topics, thirty minutes. Welcome back to Clockwise, the tech podcast that's also a time machine. It just runs forward at normal speed. My name is Dan Moran and I'm joined as always across the internet by my good friend and my pal, and the one and the only.

And my good friend Pat I don't know why I'm repeating myself. It's Micah Sargent. Wel welcome. Hi Micah. How are you? Hello. Welcome back to me. To the show you co host. How are you? I am great. It is good to talk to you over the internet, Dan. We're saying weird things today. All hail our robot overlords. No reason.

Uh, this is of course the show where we talk about four tech topics with two fantastic guests. To my left this week it is podcaster and fiber artist and all around wonderful human being, Aline Sims. Welcome back, Aline. Hello, my current status is fighting with my yarn while you're talking. That's good. I like a little multitasking when when we're doing the show. Get that show that yarn who's boss. Perhaps our creative director would be able to do

something with that. It's Christopher Finn joining us back on the show. Welcome back. Hey, thank you so much for having me. I genuinely do not dare to fight yarn. My wife, so many of my friends are crochet knitters. McCrami artists and I very much leave that to them because it scares me. Find uh by the way, go and have a l uh research of uh Ferrite core memory after you've listened to this show, folks. Amazing thing. Oh, all right. Bookmarking that for later.

Uh but right now we gotta get to the tech topics. The first of which comes from me and it's this.

Apple officially launched its new Creator Studio bundle today. I'm curious if you have any interest in this new offering, whether or not it's something you will be subscribing to, do you use any of these apps? Uh, and or do you have any other strong feelings one way or the other about this bundle? Aline, start with you. Oh my gosh. So my first reaction when I heard about the creators creator studio was

Are they actually going to update the apps? Because Apple does have a history of having apps that they kind of let languish for a long time. I still fe still feel a little salty about the way they abandoned Aperture, which was a photo editing app that I loved. And so I'm like, well, there's you know Pixel Mater now again theoretically and I just I don't know I don't know if I trust them to get involved or invested in an ecosystem to actually keep up with it in a way that's compelling.

I'm not feeling enthusiastic about it, obviously. Um, so I'm just gonna kinda wait and see what happens and hopefully they will get more attention than um some of their Their stuff has historically.

Yeah, I um I use many of the the apps that are part of the Creator Studio bundle and kind of bothered by them, yeah, all being part of this one subscription and how that could impact things negatively. Uh but Each of the individual apps that I use, I use Final Cut, I use Motion, I use all of the the iWork suites. are all sort of necessary parts of my toolkit. And so in that way, I think that those tools are sort of getting

some level of at of attention, and that does make me feel a little bit hopeful. But what that means going forward is obviously yet to be seen. Uh what do you think, Chris? A bit like Micah, I use a bunch of the tools anyway. The fact that they appear under a bundle is mostly a financial commercial thing really. It gives me

uh shades of when Adobe brought together a bunch of apps under the Creative Suite as it was first called then. I remember going to the launch of that in New York many years ago. And It annoyed me then and annoys me now that we call this a suite call a studio in this case, but it ain't. Like there's not specific interoperability between the apps. Um if you look at what Affinity did, for example, with Photo and designer and so on.

that was a much more considered coherent suite of apps that all work together. In fact now obviously under Canva you just get one canonical app. And that does everything. It's just got different personas for whether you're doing pixel vector or page layout stuff. But one thing I will say in in closing is I found out about a new app through it. I'd never heard of Mainstage before. I had to go and look up what it was. And it strikes you one as one of those apps that

obviously professionals tend not to use it's as an apt as an accompaniment to um logic as a live performance controller. But I bet that for everybody who uses that They'll be watching this announcement and just d desperately praying, hoping that this means a further investment in that, because I bet they rely on it.

I am not the target audience for most of us. I do use Logic, um, to edit podcasts when I need to edit podcasts, but I do it exclusively on my Mac because the i iPad version of Logic is like Podcast hostile.

So this doesn't directly affect me because I also think it's one of those things where the current version that I'm using will continue to be sufficient for my needs, basically until they stop letting me run it at what point whatever point that is, but I feel like I got several years of runway before that happens probably and I'll deal with the next that next step at that point.

I've used Final Cut Pro on occasion to do some video editing projects, but it's it's such a thing that I do like once in a blue moon that I don't you know, I don't own it. I didn't buy it. Uh the idea of a subscription where I could turn it on for a month and use it would be fine for me. Um I didn't use

Pixelmater before, but that's it's a nice app. Like all the creative stuff I think is fine. I think it's fine to bundle that. I'm glad that the for the moment the Mac versions still have standalone purchases because it does feel a bit like they're saying Yes, we realize many of you just use a tool on the Mac to get this done.

uh rather than the iPad. Yeah, I don't I mean but that's the thing. It's like nothing is nothing is ever certain for the long term, right? Like nothing is ever assured. So in that sense I I can't sweat it too much. Because that could all change in a year or two. Who knows? The IWork integration stuff that they've done is by far the most

bizarre. And I will add frustrating. As of this morning, I updated um numbers on my MacBook to the version in the App Store now listed as fourteen point five and got a pop up when I when I launched it saying this version will no longer be updated. You have to go get the new version, um, which is part of Creator Studio, but the apps themselves are free, even though they're part of Creator Studio, but some features are locked.

And I'm just like I I'm opened the new versions of the apps on my iPhone, and even there it's like telling extolling the virtues of Creator Studio and it's like I I use numbers and pages pretty often. It it bothers me more that these have somehow been uh sh you know, absconded into this Creator Studio app with a kind of more threatening future there. So

That bothers me a little bit more. Uh I'm kind of waiting to see how it shakes out because I I'm not going to pay for Creator Studio just to get access to those new iWork features. That feels like a bit of a crock. So um not thrilled about that.

But I think overall the idea that it was moving all the software into a creative bundle, well, you know, that's pretty much as y you have all said, that's what Adobe and Affinity and all those other companies have done. So it doesn't shock me in that way. But we'll see how this continues to develop and maybe

If the apps get updated more timely now, then it will all be worth it. But thank you all for your thoughts on that. Let's go to our second topic, which comes from Aline. Okay, so I have moved four and a half times in seven and a half years.

Three of those moves were across the country, three. Uh as Tony Sindelar likes to point out, my dear DM on Total Party Gill, um, they've all been across the country the short way, so I guess they count less than if I was going the long way. Um, but my husband and I have moved, we're buying a house, we close on Friday, knock on wood. Um, it's been a minute since I paid attention to like the home tech market.

So I'm wondering like what products do you use and love? Like what should I be looking into acquiring? And do you have any tips for getting set up in a like a new house? Like obviously I've moved a lot and I've been set up as a renter, but I haven't been able to like put holes in the wall or paint the walls or make any cool changes. Just my homeowner device with just holes in the walls everywhere. Just make as many holes as you want. It's great for resale value.

Uh yeah, so for me I think that the Lutron Caseta uh line is to this day one of the best things that you can get uh in terms of of home lighting. A lot of times obviously you're buying a house that's already built and so you are uh working with what you have and it's very easy to turn non smart lighting essentially into smart lighting.

As far as other technology, I do think that Phillips Hue is still rock solid. I know I'm going with a lot of lighting, but that just is the the the state of things in terms of where you can find some of the best stuff. when it comes to the rest of it. It's all over the place, honestly. Uh, I think you can find really good low budget stuff like Accara and it will give you what you need, or you can invest in, you know, one specific platform. It it it just it depends.

on kind of your unique setup at that point. But I think specifically when it comes to lighting, Lutron Caseta is the thing that I recommend first and foremost. Chris, what about you? Uh in terms of specific things, I'm gonna echo Micah with uh Philip Sue. I've be uh but but specifically one

approach one philosophy with that, which is that I've been basically adding Phillips Hugh lights to our various houses over the course of I it must be pushing twenty years. It can't be as bad as much as that, but fifteen years at least. And it started off with like a little bit of a little bit of a little And the starter set which came with the bridge and three balls. And gradually more and more things have been added to that that are home kit compatible.

And it's a huge it it's a nicely organic system'cause you you can just do that and you can kind of configure and reconfigure. and things like we've got a big strip adapter behind the T V that's got power sockets in it and USB sockets so that we can have, you know, some mood lighting that's a that's controlled in scenes and But it is the very kind of aggregatey kind of vibe that I like about it. You can just you don't have to have it all figured out, you can just like do one or two rooms.

And things can accrete as they go. But I will say, over that 15 years or whatever it is I've been using, I'm still using that original Star Trek set. And I think that was were probably the first LED bulbs I ever had. And it's astonishing to me and delightful that those things are all going, I actually don't know how to replace a h home kit light bulb in a home

And, you know, has a ha has a drop in replacement so that all the scenes and accessories and stuff still just do the same thing and I don't have to have to re add something and then go through the process of defining my scenes all again. But It's delightful. It can be moody, it can be bright, and just being able to see he's very

Good night, and then all the lights go down, my kids night light comes on to the right level, that's that stuff is brilliant. The one thing that I would like to be able to add to my home that I can't currently because we do rent is a home kit compatible lot. I know that some people have got a lot of very good scepticism about uh like Bluetooth locks, but I would like to be able to just tap that button that says good night and know that the house is locked.

My wife was really frustrated when we had uh smart bulbs because it meant you can't, you know, fiddle with the switches or whatever and It sometimes you just need to turn something on and off. And the casitas I've had for a long time. I have them in uh throughout the house. I don't have them on every switch because I don't feel like every switch needs it, but I have them in a lot of places where we end up using it. And

Uh she's endorses them wholeheartedly because you can always just turn the lights off. I've never had a reliability issue with them. They've been totally solid for me. Smart locks, I have three level locks. basically on the external doors of the house. And l everything I think Chris just said, like I I totally agree with that. I will a hundred percent

uh use those uh they they lock at night when I say goodnight. Um I can lock them remotely. They have the ones on our um main external doors have uh NFC. Uh, so I can unlock them with my watch or my phone, which is great. Uh I honestly am at the point where I carry keys still, but I don't remember the last time I had to use a key.

I think one of the other things uh that's sort of uh an approach to think about is looking at sort of roadmaps for some of these products insofar as you can. Like, you know, nothing's perfect in a lot of these things, it's a lot there's a lot of transition right now. We still had like that matter.

uh uh protocol that's still gaining speed. There's now one for uh smart locks as well, a Lero. I don't remember what they call it, but like essentially like a like a standard that's gonna be across the industry. So trying as much as possi possible to find stuff that is going to

adhere to these standards going forward. I think, you know, obviously it's beneficial because it m extends the longevity for you and also makes your your smart home stuff a little more portable if you're working with different platforms. But that said, I also have gotten a lot of value out of a, you know, super cheap smart plug that I've plugged in somewhere that works with HomeKit and I just don't don't worry about it.

Aline, why don't you wrap us up? Yeah, uh so we've been in an Airbnb for the last several months since mid November. And the thing that I have missed most is talking to my little cylinder speaker and saying, hey Turn off all of the lights and having all of the lights turn off. I don't have to like I hate g realizing that I like left the bathroom light on as I was walking out before bed and like having to get out of bed and the floors here are concrete so it's cold.

And gotta go turn the light off and then get back in bed. It's terrible, awful, horrible. How did we survive before smart lights? But The other discussion that we're having is what we want to do about security cameras, how many we want to have, how much of the street do they get to see. because um some of the panel probably remembers that I have been very anti-like Nest. doorbells for a long time. Um, anything that software controls what gets uploaded to a server

I just don't trust it. So we're like, okay, can we strategically place the cameras so it's like keeping an eye on we can keep an eye on our property, but we're not capturing the street and it's not being uploaded to a server we have no control over and You know, those kinds of discussions that you need to have in twenty twenty six in the US. But um, I'm really looking forward to getting the smart lights back.

All right, it's two topics down, two topics left to go, which of course means it's halftime here at Clockwise, and guess what? This week's episode of Clockwise is brought to you by Surfshark. Secure your privacy with Surfshark, go to Surfshark.com slash clockwise for four extra months of Surfshark. Internet security is more crucial than ever. So why not protect your online life with military grade encryption and enjoy a secure, unrestricted internet experience?

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of Surfshark VPN. Secure your digital world now and start surfing securely. Our thanks to Surfshark for the support of this show and all of Relay. All right, halftime is over. Micah, what do you have for us?

I'm curious if you've ever used Apple's continuity camera features. There are actually quite a few, including being able to import scans, uh, use your iPhone as a webcam, take photos and have them pop up in like the iWork suite.

Uh if you do use Apple's continuity camera features, what do you think of them? Chris, we'll start with you. I actually mu use the webcam feature quite a lot. Now normally as folks uh behind the scenes in this call will know you're talking to me in a beautiful Sony Z V ten with a F one point four sigma sixty millimeter lens.

And I look gorgeous. Nothing to do with that me, but the quality of the video is impeccable. Um but I do use the iPhone sometimes as my webcam. Um either if I'm just gonna be somewhere else Or if this camera's out of commission for some reason, I'll put a little Belkin uh mag safe adapter on my monitor and use my phone.

But it's pretty reliable and I find that having that um big, big, big step up in quality from the built-in webcam on my Uh 16 inch MacBook Pro, which is in part a step up, yes, in sensor quality, but also the fact that you're not sort of double chinning and somebody looking up your nose as you look down at a laptop. uh webcam is uh itself a big quality life upgrade.

If you look on my uh Mastodon account, which is just Chris Finn at Mastodon.social, you'll see from today a picture of me using it when I was on the road with the camera set up in my car, with my iPhone rather set up in the car, and it looks Great. And yes, I was tempted to set up my Sony camera for that call because I had it with me, but I managed to restrain myself. Be very proud of me. It's a great feature. It's

surprisingly robust and it's a great one to have in your back pocket. Yeah, I do use continuity camera, although my use cases for it are a little weird. I have a couple of regular uh DD games that I play. Um, both online and off. These specifically for the ones that are offline. Um, my wife is in my group with me, and so it's usually the two of us sitting on our couch. and we do a zoom call on the Apple TV. So I use the continuity camera feature there.

So I can put our I put my iPhone like I have that little magnet thing that goes on top of the TV and I put my iPhone there and that way it can capture both of us. Um I have some frustrations with that setup, mainly because we are just far enough away from the T V that the iPhone microphones are not great at picking us up. Um so people miss us talking sometimes.

But it's convenient to be able to do that. Previously I was using like a laptop on a, you know, uh uh Ottoman or something in front of us, which is less than ideal.

But the features are nice. I I think the the pictures are great. The cameras on the iPhone are so good that they are really ideal for that sort of thing and it's nice that you don't have to go out and buy a separate camera. I've used it occasionally for like you know, uh video podcasts or whatever here on my Mac, although I did uh invest in a four K camera, a separate webcam the recently, so I haven't needed it as much.

It's a great feature. I also want to highlight, of course, that um this feature was somewhat pioneered by a third party company, Camo, uh, which has recently sued Apple over this feature. So that's an interesting development too. Um and those guys did a lot of work

uh to make that feature work without, you know, the sort of the built in support that Apple has. Uh and uh they had a lot of other extra features there that are really, really nice. But um it is still a great feature and it's very convenient for people. Uh Lean? Uh so I've thought about using my iPhone.

while, you know, recording uh well, Total Party Kill is the only video podcast thing I do. I'm also kinda vaguely kicking the round around the idea of starting a YouTube channel and I've wondered about using my iPhone to capture video for that. I do have a mirrorless camera that I could use.

Um, but it's more photo focus than video focus. So like I don't I don't know. I don't know. I've thought about it. Um one of my favorite YouTubers is Becca Fersace and one of the things that sh she's amazing. Um one of the things that she does is she kinda sticks like mag safe rings on surfaces so she can just like pop her phone.

it like anywhere she wants. And one of the things that she has done is she has a mag safering on the lid of her MacBook. So when her MacBook is open, she can have the camera peeking over the edge to act as her webcam because that is the state of Apple's webcams. Um and so I've kind of thought about doing something like that. Like, I don't know. Um I'm interested, but I just haven't taken the time to really look into it and come up with a a solution for it. So

Um maybe my answer to this will change in a couple of months. We'll see. So yeah, I uh I've used the alternative uh continuity camera features more so than the main one, which of course is the ability to use the iPhone as the webcam. Um I was a camo user for a long time. Um and now have a Sony camera as well as my my webcam. When continuity camera came about, I remember uh trying to make it work and it did not work as well as camo did and so then I was done with it. Um

Outside of that, the ability to do scans and bring in photos and stuff, I think is a really cool feature. And I have found uh that to be quite useful at times. um when I'm working in a document. So I I've mostly kept it there and let the webcam portion of it all be handled through hardware more than software.

Uh thank you all for your answers on that. Let's go to our final topic which comes from Chris. We talk about this a lot and we've probably talked about it on clockwise a lot as well and I've missed some of the episodes we have. But I want to know when was the last time that a smartphone released Impressed you, Dan.

I'll get two answers. All right. Wa one is that I thought last year's updates were very good and impressive. I thought the iPhone Air was particularly impressive when I got a chance to hold one in the Apple store. Um that made it form factor sink in in a way that the presentation did not work for me, but I was, you know, I kind of was dismissive of it and then I held it in the star. I was like, actually that is a really impressive piece of hardware.

I'm also a big fan of the seventeen pro. I have the orange uh model and I love the color and I think that it's a really, really capable phone. I generally, you know, like it better than some of the more recent ones. Um If I had to go with one that really blew me away, I feel like the iPhone ten is probably the easy answer here because it was so different. Sorry, Deline. Uh it was so different from what came before it. Like it felt like the future.

So, you know, uh I think that that comes along every once in a while, but it's not certainly not the the yearly norm, right? Most of the time we're seeing incremental updates. Um but yeah, I think uh I think those are the ones that that stand out the most to me. Aline, if just out of curiosity, what would you pick? Well, Dan, it might surprise you to learn that I really thought the iPhone 10 was pretty dang cool when it was announced.

Uh, the iPhone Air this year also is pretty cool when you get your hands on it. My husband actually that's what he decided to upgrade to and then eventually decided that he didn't want the air and went with a pro, but Um it's it it's pretty compelling and pretty cool to hold it. Um if If you're not enamored with having the best camera you can get your hands on, like it's it's pretty neat.

I keep an eye on some of the stuff that comes out of China. There's one um Marquez Brownlee recently did a video where they partnered with Leica. And so th the phone looks like a good point and shoot camera, like with a big lens. So when you turn the phone horizontally, it looks like

you're holding a camera. Um and that's pretty cool. Like the cameras aren't great on it. They're good, but they're not great. And uh I don't know. It was like it just kind of whimsical and delightful. But I'm really struggling in more recent history. Like I think the folds technology is interesting but not compelling for me yet. So I don't know, I'm ready I'm ready to really be blown away by a new cam or new phone here pretty soon.

I I wanna kinda change the word I think'cause impressed it would be a while, but intrigued, um, some of the stuff that nothing puts out I just think is fascinating. Weird blinky lights and clear stuff is all cool to me. And so even though it's not impressive in the sort of, you know, spec sense of the word, it's very intriguing. And so yeah, uh I I have to give props to nothing's design team. Uh Chris, why don't you round us out?

You were a child of the IMAC in nineteen ninety eight. You just ca haven't moved past that translucent plastic, man. That's true, it's true. It was um Xiaomi, by the way, uh Aline that you were thinking of who did the seventeen ultra, which is that collaboration with Mike uh with uh Leica, which is really it I imagine if Mike did a collaboration with Leica.

I think the Z Fold seven uh is the first one of those folding phones. I've gone, that looks really cool. I actually like the flip variant as well. I uh apparently I haven't moved past the um Motorola Razor myself. For me actually my answer's the same as Dan's. It's the seventeen line and it's because of the selfie camp. Specifically the selfie cam, not just the fact that s the square sensor and it can do the orientation switch thing, which is really cool and surprisingly useful.

But actually there have been I mean, call me vain for sure, but there have been multiple times since I got the seventeen pro that I've looked at selfies with me or with I have friends. and gone, you know what, the quality of that is exp it's like it's it's definitely a

huge step up from what we've seen before. The pixels seem to be working much less hard. It's much less of a strain to get a pretty looking image out of the selfie cam on the seventeen. And I wasn't really expecting that level of quality, but it was the for the first time in a big old time, maybe since the ten actually, that I've gone, Oh, that's actually quite impressive.

All right. That is four topics down. We have just enough time for a bonus topic, but first I want to quickly remind you that uh help support the show, you can go and buy some swag, clockwise swag at clockwise.social hats, shirts.

Uh tote bags, uh mugs. Everything. Everything just plastered with that clockwise logo. Anyways, we appreciate it, clockwise dot social. All right, bonus topic time. Pick your favorite time machine from popular culture, unless you have a real time machine, in which case just pick that, Aline. Uh so there's a really good episode of Futurama where they go through future history and then time loops and they go through all of human history again and they do that like several times for

reasons. Um but it's like a cozy looking little time machine and I think that's what I would pick. Somebody on this podcast has to say the TARDIS, right? Whether it's just a time machine or not, of course, is, you know, that's a whole different thing, but I think it's It's a pretty cool time contraption. Uh Chris, what about you? I don't even have to say words. All I have to say is this.

I'm sorry I gotta cut you off'cause they're gonna copyright police are gonna be actors. Come on. You can you can't say anything other than the glory and has to be, doesn't it, Dan? It's a you know it's a good choice. It's it's one of my top Two but I'm gonna pick I was gonna pick my other one, which is sure the TARDIS is great, but

It's kinda cheating by making it as big as possible on the inside. I say the phone booth from Bill and Ted's excellent adventure. I there's not a time in my childhood where I did not get into a phone booth and try pressing the bottom two buttons just to see if it was a time machine.

Um hey, as a reminder, if you'd like to get ad-free episodes with an extra unwound episode every week, you can become a member of Clockwise. Just go to relay.fm slash clockwise and sign up for just seven dollars per month or seventy dollars a year and you'll help support the show. We really appreciate it. And with that, we've reached the end of this week's episode, and all that remains is to thank our fantastic guest, Aline Sims. Thank you so much for joining us on Clockwise This Week.

Always a joy to talk with you all. And Christopher Finn, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Micah. Thank you, Dad. Thank you, Olivi. And we will be back next week. Of course, but until then we remind everyone out there listening, watch what you say and keep watching the clock. Bye everybody.