645: A Fan of the Fan

It's time for episode 645 of the Clockwise Podcast from Relay, recorded Wednesday, February 25th, 2026. Clockwise, four people, four tech topics, thirty minutes. Welcome back to Clockwise, the tech podcast where time is the spice of life. My name is Dan Morton and I am joined e come on, it was written right there. My I'm joined as always across the internet by my good friend, my pal, the one and only Micah Sergeant. How you doing today, Micah?

I'm doing well. I thought it was great, you know. It was a good joke. Uh but the the groans would suggest otherwise. I the I you know, I knew I regretted letting the audience laugh track in here, uh because they they you live by the laugh track and you die by the laugh track. Uh this is of course the show where we discuss four tech topics with two fantastic guests to my left this week. It is CEO slash lackey at Rogue Amoeba, Paul Cavasas. Welcome back, Paul. Thank you. Uh to my left.

It is someone covering tech and transport at Mobile Tech Journal. It's Jeremy Birds. Welcome back to the show, Jeremy. Hey Micah, the only place I get welcomed like nicely, formally this sort of thing, is on podcasts, so that's why I'm here, just for a little self esteem boost. I like it.

All right, let me kick things off this week. Several Apple products are reportedly imminent, coming perhaps as early as next week, perhaps even a cavalcade, some might say. of products are rolling out. I'm curious to know of the various things that have been rumored, are any of them of specific interest to you, whether it's something you're looking to buy or something that you're just intrigued to see Apple do. Paul, why don't you kick it off?

I need a new Apple TV because the old Apple TVs don't get the Snoopy screensaver, and that is bogus man. Uh so I've got one TV that's got a Snoopy screensaver and it's awesome. And I've got one TV that does not have a Snoopy screensaver and it's lame. So I'm looking for a new Apple TV. That's what I'm looking forward to, but I'm I should also say I'm happy to see the well, hopefully see the continued constant updates to the Mac lineup which

uh for several years now has been just updated regularly and that's great. We had a real fallow period where it was not updated regularly and that was very bad. So uh I'm not in the market for a particular Mac right now, but I'll be very happy to just see continued updates to the Mac. I am actually looking forward to seeing what exactly the new Apple Studio display is going to look like. Believe it or not. Uh I have the first one, and I think that the reason I like it so much is. Altyazı M.K.

Might have to pay for it. They're a little expensive and so my work bought it for me. That's gonna be a feature of the second one, Mike. I know. Because here's the thing.

I like having the all-in-one minus the webcam, which is garbage and will always be garbage, but um I like having the all-in-one in terms of the speakers and uh the ports on the back and the quality that you can typically get from uh apples choices on display because of course it's usually not something that the company's making itself, but um that And what we are rumored to hear, which is uh better display HDR support.

Um, is just interesting. So I'm waiting to see what Apple does uh with the Apple Studio display two that makes it worth. uh getting an Apple Studio display to, and if that's something then that I could be convinced and coerced.

Uh so yeah, that's that's what's got me interested. Jeremy, what about you? Well I'm over here still rocking my M One MacBook Pro, M one iPad, and I gather that's sort of uh we're talking baby new MacBook Pros this year, and these are rock solid. I mean I've not really thought about Updating or replacing these. But one of my, I would say, great luxuries in life, other than owning a boat

Um, is that everything I own is on my laptop. I've got a four terabyte drive, no network attached storage, no external drives, just all there backed up to Backblaze.

I don't know, this could be insane. I have not seen the pricing. Are they already at eight terabytes? I'd be waiting for the new one anyway, but an eight terabyte uh MacBook Pro would be incredible and save me having to make difficult decisions about what to keep and not what not to keep. So that's sort of That's on my agenda, but it's not about the M five, it's just about getting a bigger hard drive for all my boat and train videos.

Uh these are all good answers. The the one that I think I'm most interested in from a overall strategy point of view is this rumored low cost MacBook. I'll put low cost in in scare quotes there because who knows how much it will actually cost, but it will probably be the cheapest laptop Apple has made in a long time. Certainly the cheapest new laptop that they have rolled out.

I think that's an interesting strategy for them. I'm also intrigued'cause he'll be the first uh Apple laptop to come in real colors, uh, potentially, we'll see. Uh, for many a year since those iBooks, uh, way back when. So I I feel like there's an interesting strategy change there for Apple because Apple has tended to try and say, well, we're not competing by making the cheapest computers, we're competing by buying you know, making nice computers and we price them where we price them. Um

And so that's yielded a a introductory level price that's always been pretty much, you know, just sub one thousand dollars. Sometimes, you know, nine hundred bucks, and then of course you've had some weird one offs like that old Mac. uh M one MacBook Air that's stuck around uh Walmart, I believe may still be there for a super low price.

But it clearly feels like this is intended to capture that section of the market and it's intended to do it with slightly different style. I'm curious to know what the trade-offs will be. I mean, we the the word is that it will be powered by an iPhone uh A level chip. I mean those things are no slouch certainly, even compared to some of the uh M level chips, but probably there will be other trade offs as well. Um

I'm curious, I because I I'm not sure I will buy one, but certainly there is some appeal in the idea of a low cost colorful uh laptop for me. So I'm kinda Interested to see what the story is behind that and what the trade-offs uh uh that we'll be making. But thank you all for your thoughts on that topic. Let's go to our second topic, which comes from Paul. I have been shoveling a lot of snow recently, and I'm pretty sick of it.

Uh, but for various reasons not worth getting into, I can't use a snowblower, but it got me thinking about technology and the weather. So I'm curious what technology you have that helps you deal with the weather. I suppose that fun gear like um leaf blowers and lawn mowers. That's technology. It's just a different kind of technology. Um, so yeah, that's that's the tech that I use. I um when we moved here, I specifically said.

I'm finally entering my uh sort of like suburban dad era where I open up the garage and inside hanging on the wall, uh beautifully organized are my different um tools that I use. And so I've got a a leaf blower and and, you know, different attachments based on what I'm doing. I have actually used now I think about it, I have used it for snow.

Uh, because a leaf blower can come in handy if you've got a little area of snow and you don't want to take the time to shovel all of it. Um, so yeah, I I don't have anything Uh outside. autonomous or anything like this is all still technology.

Beautiful. Well then in that case I have answered your question and we can move on to Jeremy. No snow blowing for me. Uh air conditioning, that's a big win. When I got a a house with air conditioning, this is the first house I've ever been in that has air conditioning.

I think there must be a few brands, but the sensible uh little plugs you can plug in and remotely control your aircon is top tier. You don't wanna arrive home and then blast the aircon. You wanna have that on before you get in the door. And I don't know if you've all seen these uh I think they were popular for a year or two, I saw them everywhere, these neck fans. But you put'em around your neck? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you are a fan and you have a fan.

I'm a fan of the fan around my neck and boy do I feel smug when I'm li you know, on a on a train or somewhere without air conditioning and it's just blowing a tiny little bit of air on my sweaty neck. That's the only way it works, you need a sweaty neck. If your neck isn't sweaty it's not Sorry. Yeah, these are these are good, so I'd recommend.

These yeah, these are interesting solutions all. I have some stuff in the house, so we have an Eco B thermostat and it has we have a bunch of those little remote sensors. Um it come it can you can buy and and attach to it so it basically can get the readings from different rooms in the house and can try to sort of optimize for when people are around in certain rooms, you know, night versus daytime, etc., telling whether rooms are occupied, etc.

Um that works pretty well. Uh it's hooked up to a heat pump. We have a whole house heat pump here. This is tricky, uh uh, where I live and where Paul lives, because many heat pumps don't perform well at lower temperatures, so if it gets really cold, uh my house unfortunately falls back to a gas furnace that is there.

Um I also have solar panels on my house that I had installed last year. Those work pretty well except when they're covered with snow. Doesn't do much for ya. And then you get a really fun avalanche when it gets warm enough that all the snow slides off of them and crushes your trees. Um but yeah, that's that's pretty good. I do have a NetAtmo weather station that I've had for several years.

I am considering just retiring it because I find I don't use it that much. Like it's still, you know, uh I have like a little there's a little module that's out on like our shed in our yard and then there's um, you know, an indoor one and I find A their connectivity pro has problems at times and B most of the, you know, general weather apps are good enough. where I am that the uh the having my own weather station doesn't really offer any additional information for me.

Um but beyond that, like I I too am out there shoveling. I don't have a snowblower. Fortunately I have a neighbor across the street who took pity on me yesterday and snow blowed snow blowed out our driveway entrance, which was amazing'cause that was otherwise I was gonna be out there.

For an hour and possibly either throw out my back or have a heart attack. So I decided just to leave it there. And fortunately he came along and helped me out. So, you know, that's my best advice is uh Weathertech neighbors with Weather Tech. Have a bad. Paul, why don't you wrap us up? For me the the high tech gear that I have uh realized that I have is uh a fabric called Merino wool, which is just straight off a sheep. But uh it is straight off. It's straight off the sheep. She's on, yeah.

Uh, but no, it's uh I had I I run and I run in the winter and it stinks and it's terrible and uh it's just not fun, but I do it. Uh probably because I hate myself. I don't know. Um But uh the gear that I had was I had like high tech performance gear and it was Not great and it would need to get washed every single time. And uh I spent a little bit of money, I got the got some uh really nice merino wool stuff, and it keeps me warm and it doesn't stink, doesn't have an odor.

Uh and it does not need to be washed nearly as much. So that is uh it doesn't sound high tech, but uh I I view it as much more high tech than the, you know, Nike performance, blah blah blah. Uh so yeah, that's that's the one that uh is helping me deal with the winter right now.

All right. That is two topics down, two topics left to go, which of course means it's halftime here at Clockwise. And this week's episode is brought to you by Insta360. Now, you might already know Insta360 for their action.

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All right. Halftime is over. Micah Sargent, what do you got for us? I would just love to know what apps, services, or techniques do you use to remember things? Jeremy, we'll start with you. I feel like uh my my day to day uh process is the the Snell method of just put everything in the calendar.

And uh that doesn't scale now that I have more things on than fit in the cal in the calendar. Uh doesn't mean that I've found something better, mind you. I just struggle with uh updating a calendar poorly and kind of putting things on future days to say Yeah, maybe I'll do that task on this day, or maybe I should remember this on that day. And yeah, it's a mess. Um the notes app. I'm a big fan. Big fan of the notes app, you know, put put everything in there. Just

I've given up any structure there. You just a new note for everything. Search is pretty good. It's the only place search I think is decent on iOS is the notes app. So bung everything in a new note, it's quick to open. And the last place is the contacts note field. But I don't know whether any of you use this field for the contacts, you know, if I'm like, ah, next time I see this person I should remember to

Yeah, maybe, where you can't see more than one or two lines of editing your contact note field on iOS. So you kind of I'm actually typing in the dark, I'm typing on the keyboard and it's below the fold of the keyboard and I just have these ridiculous contact notes because I just You know and you mash it a night yeah, anyway, so classic notes, calendar app, and uh contacts field in a big old scramble, and as a result I don't remember a lot.

I I tend to if I start feeling like there's more things I need to remember than I'm capable of holding in my head at one time, I usually use the reminders app and to just like make myself a little to do list or just a list of things I need to check off. That tends to be sort of my default for anything that's sort of tactical.

For I do use notes a lot for things that I'm writing on specific projects. Like if I'm working on a book or something and I think of something that I want to use there or I have, you know, links to stories that I've like, oh, this would be a cool thing to work in. I have a note for something that I'm working on. I use notes a lot. I have

A tho more than a thousand notes in my app notes because I never delete them either. Um I do have a bad history of leaving, you know, like windows with tabs open in Safari if there's things that I want to get back to. And again, I find that's just a place where things go to die'cause I've totally forget.

to check them again. On my Mac it's much more efficient to do that because I get more annoyed about just having extra windows open on my map Mac, but like Safari tabs on iOS, that might as well be a great So yeah, I don't really have a great strategy, I would say. I would say of a kind of a hodgepodge of tactical approaches to this. I'm not sure that it's anything worth uh emulating though. Paul, what about you?

So yeah, I I use reminders a ton. I actually have this is this is gonna sound ridiculous, but I have a a text document that contains all the reminders that are in reminders because I'm terrified of losing those reminders. So it's things like uh I could look at this document and I could tell you that my passport is gonna need to be renewed in about six years. Or like

You know, pay pay uh taxes is pretty obvious, but like, you know, various things that might only need to get paid once a year, they go in there. So I I have all these reminders, but then I have a a a ridiculous backup of that. uh in a text file that if I ever really needed to, I could recreate uh all these things. Uh but the surprising answer, I think, is photos.

Uh, photos is uh Micah, the question that you posed uh in the spreadsheet before the show was how do you what do you use to remember things? And I often find that I, you know, it's it's a year later and I say, Oh, what was I w we were we were in Portland, Maine, what were we doing that day? And I can look at photos and see, oh, you know, we went to that lighthouse or we had dinner here or whatever. Uh and so photos being able to search by date.

Location search is not nearly as good as it should be, but uh that it's possible at least. Uh but yeah, searching through my photos library is often a way that I uh recover some piece of information that I'm looking for. So the main way that I remember to do things, it's it's sort of three methods. First and foremost is the calendar method. I live and die by my calendar.

The calendar has all of my events in it. It sometimes has non-events in it as well. I don't quite have the military schedule of every single thing is is uh marked and and and ready to go, but If I didn't have my shows and stuff on my calendar, who knows if I'd be there? Um, outside of that, I also use.

uh the do app do e I've talked about it plenty on this show and other shows but uh it is basically just a nag nag nag version of reminders and so anything that I absolutely have to do in a day uh that is not an event goes into do. And that gives me the ability to mark it off when I've done it. And if I haven't done it, then in five minutes or 15 minutes or 30 minutes or an hour, it will bug me again and say, Hey, do this thing.

Um, and then the only time that I use reminders, and I can't wait for do to finally add this feature, so I can just use do for it, is for location-based. uh reminders. And that is that when I'm in my car I will uh hit the little Siri button on my steering wheel and say, remind me when I get home to do blend. And it's usually just something that's popped up in my head while I'm driving that I need to do when I get home. So that's the the one time that I use reminders and not do.

Uh anyway, let's move along to Jeremy for our next talk. This is somewhat of a leading self serving question, but I am also interested just a small bit, but I am interested. Uh does your city where you live support contactless payments to tap and ride on your public transport? And does it support express mode? Uh where you can tap without doing face ID. And if not, uh maybe you've used it while traveling. Any thoughts? Tell me about it.

Ha ha it's me and that means I get to snake it from Paul because we're gonna have the same answer. Go ahead. Uh yeah, Boston Boston does have tap and go now, which is great. Um it works uh across all of our transit lines. I think pretty much all the the rail and uh buses at least. Uh that rolled out only in the last couple of years, but I find it uh amazing because

I think, you know, I I for many years I had a transit card. In fact I think I kept the same like plastic transit card for the entire time that it existed, which was kind of amazing. It never expired for some reason. So I just kept using it. Um and I finally was able to retire it when they switched to tap and go. And what I love about it is that I have definitely taken trips where I've like, you know, walked to our, you know, nearby subway station, tapped on

taken transit all the way to the airport, flown to a different city, tapped on a civ like a public transit system there and just gotten to where I'm going. And that feels so seamless and nice that it's it's just wonderful to do. So I've had a lot of experiences using uh tap and go in various other cities uh and the express mode transit, um which I've set up for a long time um and it worked.

Pretty great. Sometimes I wish there was a little more uh a granularity with some of the express mode things because like sometimes I'm traveling on work and like I wish I could just You know, I know I can manually go in and set it, but I wish I could add like a some more uh like customization to exactly when those things get used or what systems they get triggered on. I don't know.

Um, but uh I will say uh it's a nice advantage over having I like I have an envelope in my desk top desk drawer here that has like transit cards from a bunch of different cities. And like having being able to retire m many of those has been great.

And now I just get super annoyed when I go to a city that doesn't have it. I think I I think Seattle, where I was last year, I don't think they had it. And I was like, come on, Seattle. What are you doing here? Anyway, that's my experience. Paul, what do you got?

Uh so I first used this in London years ago. I d I don't know when they first got it, but I'm pretty sure I used it in twenty nineteen. They might have had it for years before that. Uh and then it came to New York City where I travel a decent amount and it was great. And then it came to Boston, as Dan said, and it's great. So uh if you live somewhere that has public transit and it has contactless payment, uh you should be using it. It's way better than, as Dan said, than uh the specific cards.

I love using public transit when I travel and it makes it super easy to do. You just Tap your phone. Uh usually uh they have express mode set up so you don't even need to pull up your your Apple Pay, but uh I have been uh for maybe twenty years I've I've traveled and used public transit and for the past five or so I've been Uh really enjoying the fact of not needing to go hunt down a transit card, uh not needing to figure out how to do anything, just step on, tap and go.

Jeremy, your your question asked about Apple Wallet transit cards, which is the only one I'm aware of is the uh BART card. For San Francisco is basically a card that goes into your Apple wallet and it's still a transit card. The Washington Metro has one too. I'm sure others do, yeah. So I I've used the Bart card because I had a Bart card and

Uh I was able to take the physical Bart card and get it into my Apple wallet, and that was kind of magical actually. Uh and I was able to do it all while sitting at a coffee shop. instead of needing to go somewhere to do it. But it also felt like a complete relic because why do I need this card at all? So to have a a digital representation of the card still felt strange.

But Jeremy, th you said this was a self serving question, but it got me to your website, which is express transit dot com. And uh Having gone to that website, I learned that if I was using a MasterCard in Boston and s many other places, I would get two fifty back, two dollars and fifty cents back every month that I spent ten bucks.

So uh you're saving me some money, uh, in the future. Envelope of caches in the mail for you there. Excellent. Making money all over the place. But yeah, so this is uh this has been a really good advance, I think, in the past few years on a whole lot of systems and I'm Excited to use it basically anywhere I can.

Yeah. I think it's fantastic to um lived near San Francisco for quite a bit of time. And so every time we would go into San Francisco Uh being able to just without needing, yeah, to hit the the double tap button on my Apple Watch or on my phone, just popping it against the terminal and knowing that it would work. was really nice and then also knowing that if my battery for some reason ran dead on my uh phone, that I would still be able to use the terminal card that I had built in.

I'll be honest that I don't know what exactly is available here in Portland, but I do know that At the the last time I checked, it was not as advanced as San Francisco was with all of the fancy express modes and all that kind of stuff built in that makes it really handy. Um, Jeremy, why don't you round us out here? Yeah, I gather I put out a a call for feedback on uh this website I've been setting up to you know, make it easier to check.

And I gather Portland, yeah, it's got Apple Pay but not express mode unless you set up the transit card. So it's sort of in that in between stage. And those transit uh cards really helpful if you live somewhere. You know, Paris has one, LA has one.

Uh but as a as a tourist, yeah, you're all right. It's so much nicer just showing up and tapping your phone, not even having to think about even if it's a cool digital transit card, not having to think about how much money to put on or whether you need a pass for how many days. Uh so yeah, that's that's why I set up this little website. Mostly I also think express mode has a branding challenge. Not many public transport systems.

say publicly, you know, on the on signage when you get to the barrier. Ca do you have to do c do you support Express Mode and you look like an absolute idiot like a you know, you show there and you don't do it. Yeah, and you g you go, I understand, I know what I'm doing, but I thought maybe you supported it, so That's that's was my self-serving reason for wanting to put this on the internet so you could quickly check and say, does this city support express mode on Android, they call it? Uh

uh make payment without opening wallet or something. Are you kidding me? Yeah, it doesn't have a name. Uh make payment without opening wallet. There we go. Uh so it's hard from a branding point of view. I could see it. It's too early. That was not a good Yoda, sorry. No, no, that was good. Tap to pay without opening wallets. So I was close. Yeah. Tap to pay without opening wallet. So I think it could do with a branding boost as well. I don't know obviously

trademarks and whatever, blah, blah, but it would be cool if there was a little badge and you could see it when you approach the payment system around the world and know if express mode is supported, but that's not a thing. So yeah, one day, one day we can drink.

All right, that's four topics down. Just enough time for a bonus topic. Really quickly I'll remind you if you'd like to support the show, you can go to clockwise.social and pick up all our great merchandise, hats, t-shirts, tote bags, all sorts of things. Fantastic stuff. Clockwise dot social. And thank you. All right, bonus topic for you all. The Winter Olympics have just concluded. What's your favorite Winter Olympic event, Paul?

Aha, I get to claim the one that everyone wants. Curling. It's gotta be curling. It's always curling. Every four years we all get into curling for two weeks and we learn about it and then we immediately forget it and it's great. And then we forget all about it and four years later we do it all again. Curling. Um, for me it is anything that's gonna have some jumps and some flips. So snowboard or uh skis, just show me those tricks. I think it's awesome. Jeremy, what about you?

Uh can I say I've gone down the runs in Cortina on my snowboard where the Winter Olympics are? Yeah, I did not look quite as as flash as everybody else. I like I don't know what it's called. It's the one where they go on skis, they go over some boxes and rails and then the they do three jumps at the end. Is that what it's called? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's cool. Uh all good answers. I'm gonna pick uh I really like watching the various Bobsled and related events.

I especially like it as it gets more and more stripped down to like do you get to the skeleton? Like I feel like we're only a little ways off from an event where it's just people going straight down those chutes by themselves with nothing. Uh and I'll watch that. It's like water slides, like frozen water slides. Yeah, frozen water slide. I like it. Yeah, I think that's coming. Uh I think it's lethal, but I think it's coming. All right. Thank you all for that.

Uh hey, if you'd like to get ad-free episodes with extra unwound topics every single 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 per year and you'll help support the show. And we appreciate it.

And with that, we have reached the end of this week's episode. All that remains is for us to thank our fantastic guest, Paul Kavasis. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. And Jeremy Burge, thank you so much for joining us. Ah, thanks. I'll go back to bed now. And Michael will be back next week, but until then we remind everyone out there listening, watch what you say. Bye everybody.