Episode 50 – Moderately Desperate Regret

Friends with Brews

I noticed when you started counting us down the first finger I got was the middle finger

Well, there was a delay.

Hmm. I see. Okay Well, it’s not too late to tell you this job interview isn’t about my credentials. It’s about yours So, I don’t know if you want to start by flipping me off, but you can

I can

Oh peter. How have you been peter?

I’ve been good. I’ve been busy.

Uh-huh,

but i’ve been good Yeah, I I just had some minor tech glitches which were easily solved by a reboot but I recently Installed steam on my laptop.

No, I think you meant stee.

Well, my laptop meant stee Stee if you will stee because my macbook air m2 first, you know the first m2 macbook air The third key in a row now to start to fail is the m key. I forget which ones First

I think you mean your acbook air 2

my acbook air 2 exactly Because there’s no m there’s no macbook.

It’s not What is happening with your keys? I don’t understand.

I thought these are not the old butterflies whatever but but they’re Failing so i’ve got a uh an appointment with a genius on thursday wow, and So, yeah, we’ll see what happens but but also I installed steam In hopes of playing Baldur’s gate 3 with my friends.

I’ve heard about that.

Yeah

friends I mean i’ve never heard anything about Baldur’s gate 3

right? Well, anyway, it’s dungeons and dragons, uh, but you know ported to To steam to windows to mac except the mac version is very rough. So it’s like a preview. It’s not ready for prime time yet And i’ve got two older core i7s and even though they You know, I forget which which core i7 because that name alone doesn’t mean anything.

I know they’re all and Yeah, it doesn’t mean anything at all

supposedly the well the the four digits that follow those letters core, you know, and number core i7 the four digits that I have on mine are higher than those four digits Listed as the minimum system requirements. So I think that means that I meet the system requirements, but I first off Okay, when I download something I have bought a couple of games from good old games gog. com I did not buy this from gog.

I bought it through steam Why because steam listed the mac version on their website? Whereas gog did not and I think it’s just because steam is like yeah It exists wink wink. Whereas gog was like now you can’t actually play this. We’re not going to offer you as a download interesting So I set up an account on steam which was an annoying process. I Finally purchased the game on steam which was an annoying process I Then had when I went to run the game.

Well, okay first off then I installed it on my two old machines and this thing it’s like 100 some odd 124 or 129 gigabyte download So this thing took hours to finally download and install and then I finally got it installed and um, I went to run it and the first thing you have to oh, well now that you’ve Installed it. You need to set up an account with larian studios.

I guess that’s the publisher So I did that and then different You know, so then I did that and then and they’re like, okay Well now you have to link your larian account to your steam account Which I tried to do but that page wouldn’t render all the way so I couldn’t do that so I couldn’t start it Yeah, so I started on a different computer finally got in finally got it all to load and the thing it’s just like It’s how you would expect a game to play on a 10 year old laptop It’s super choppy. It doesn’t load all the way, you know, you click on something and there’s like a 20 second lag and then the character starts moving.

Is this a versus other people game?

I don’t think it’s made to be that way. It’s it’s generally it’s parties. No, it’s good.

Yeah So otherwise you would just lose you would just be dead.

Yeah, I don’t think they have a player versus player option But it is multiplayer for sure And one of the reasons that we got it is because you can play on a lan still and you can theoretically when it’s done Play on a windows or a mac.

Oh I just wish I had known that you know that I I wish I had not bothered with steam because then the next thing that happened is I installed it on my mac too and as i’m booting up steam is like oh we have to boot up too We’re gonna start and oh we’ve installed a new audio driver, which needs to and i’m like go away I move it away.

I start doing other stuff and then the steam window pops up in my face and i’m like Calm surrendered, you know peter.

Hmm.

Let me ask you something When you come in on monday and you’re not feeling real Well, does anyone ever say to you sounds like someone has a case of the mondays.

Do you have a case of the mondays?

Yeah, but it’s wednesday you have a case of the undays by the way Okay, before we go any further talking about our technology We forgot to talk about these

Yes, let’s talk about These these being drinks. We are bruised. What do you drink?

It’s got i’m drinking coffee today. I have a trailhead coffee roasters Hingakawa or hingakawa or I don’t know how it’s pronounced this is a Well, let me describe the coffee. This is basically a rwanda coffee from what I understand The coffee is amazing.

We are beyond excited have it in our wheelhouse.

Apparently they’ve got it in a wheelhouse It’s a weird place to keep your coffee, but okay. I found it in whole foods drink it Love it juicy with notes of papaya and brown sugar superb as a pour over and a punchy little beast as What’s so espresso? What’s so stand for? Mr. Coffee guy

single origin?

Okay as espresso you might utter the following. Whoa wtf dang.

Okay.

Okay.

Yeah See I did the pour over so i’m not uttering Wtf, okay.

Yeah, okay.

Okay.

Yeah Kind of punk rock that way but quite delicious in the end anyway So yeah, I guess I might have brewed it a tiny bit weak. I don’t get the papaya for sure the brown sugar I could believe okay.

Okay.

Yeah, I don’t know. It’s good. It’s not a bad coffee. It’s just I don’t always pick up all the flavors. They say I should pick up.

I mean, you might not and I think that’s okay. So I Got myself a new coffee grinder last week.

Ooh

So I updated uh, I upgraded to the fellows opus Conical burr grinder.

Okay, you had me at opus.

Yeah, so I got that and the reason I got it is uh, It was so I got this article on wired, you know saying here are the best coffee grinders and I was like, okay You know what new job. Let’s look around maybe now it’s time to treat myself to something And I found the one that was listed as the quietest one we tested but also, you know, highly rated So I was like, all right. Let’s let’s check this thing out. Let’s see what’s going on. I got it and it Definitely has upped my coffee game. The coffee just tastes way better than it did using the Well when I bought them, I think they were like 35 Mr. Coffee burr grinders.

Okay, I can believe that.

Yeah, it’s probably a more consistent grind a way more consistent But this thing is way cool So not only is it super quiet It has like a little the the lid on it when you flip it over it has a little dividing line So it’s broken up into like approximately 20 grams and 40 grams So you can choose like that if you like it’s made of some kind of Static material I have not yet encountered any static.

Oh

So far there’s no coffee dust going around.

Oh, that would be nice

the catch bucket that you grind into Oh and it all you know, it grinds everything straight down, right? So as opposed to my mr Coffee ones which ground them sideways so I regularly had to clean that out.

That’s ours Yeah, the grinding takes place behind the hole that it shoves them through.

Yeah bingo. This seems to take place above It comes down into this little catch cup now.

Here’s the cool thing the surface on which the catch cup sits is magnetic and so when you put the cup into place it Slides itself right into the right location. There’s no clicking. There’s no jamming. There’s no clipping into place It just finds them, you know, like one finger. You’re just slightly Snaps into place.

Oh and it comes with a 30 60 or 120 second grind So you can just press it once twice three times and then When i’m done I just lightly tap the unit on the side and that seems to dislodge all the extra Like one time there was just a little dusting of coffee that had fallen through. Yeah, it’s great.

I’d use that

The only thing that’s really changed is with the aeropress I now have to use the the little extra funnel the wide funnel from the aeropress and then I can just take the coffee Out dump it right in in one shot and it goes dump it right in the coffee tastes noticeably better

So peter that sounds amazing that design alone sounds amazing because ours is not only ours is super noisy It shoves the coffee grinds out the front like most of them do into the thing The cup that it dumps them into is held in place by a little tab On the bottom which means what does that mean? It means that there’s little tiny lines perforations in the floor and dust goes out onto your counter and your coffee grinder Uh, I recall I believe when you got it because I believe I was there and you got a very highly rated coffee grinder, right?

It was very highly rated and yet it’s it just annoys me in so many ways Uh, not so many ways it annoys me in the two ways that I described the noise and the mess I have to put paper towels under there I basically I put a slightly damp paper towel under it so that when I shove the cut back in All the grinds that it’s going to shove out through those little holes don’t wind up on my counter.

Okay? And it’s just annoying. It’s a waste of paper towels for one thing. It’s a waste of yeah Uh, it’s just I don’t know. I like the sounds of yours.

Okay, i’m gonna go search for it It’s called the opus magnum the opus, uh, the fellows the brand is fellows opus is the line and it’s a conical burr grinder Wait fellows makes like staplers and stuff.

I believe I believe they do And shredders.

Yep. It might be the same one.

I don’t know but it’s the same name regardless Maybe we can replace our paper shredder with this as well Maybe we could just shove paper right in there.

I mean you got to clean it out eventually somehow, right?

That’s actually a pretty cool looking grinder.

Yeah, and what’s even cooler is the the grind so yeah, it’s it’s pretty good I’m, very i’m very happy Good.

Well good. I don’t think we paid that much less for ours if we did pay less even We might have even paid more.

It was in the same.

No, it was definitely in the same range definitely in the same range Damn it. No you won.

Well, I I waited it out by what though a year Probably over a year at this point.

Yeah.

Yeah, it was it was last may when I was out there.

So yeah Anyway, there you go in other news, uh carvana has um increased the Trade-in value of my tesla went up to a couple thousand dollars to 23 and a half But after I got over the emotion I’ve decided i’m gonna hang on to the tesla again because after all it does have a brand new motor in it now So that is true. Yeah, you know, so I was like, all right I’m, not gonna say, you know, the like what could possibly go?

Yeah, sure things could go wrong, but i’m gonna i’m gonna just try to hang on it one more There is a lot to be said for Not incurring a new car payment bingo and i’m still paying this one This one has uh, i’ve got I think three more payments left on this one, but you’re almost there once that’s done You know once that’s done that’s like an extra Almost thousand bucks in my pocket.

So yeah, that’s yeah that that comes in handy You could buy a couple burr grinders for that.

You could a couple couple of good ones.

So moving on to my brew And spoiler alert listener, this one is going to fall under our favorite category of if I were desperate I have athletic brewing company

I remember them

Oktoberfest fest brew

see it sounds good.

It does sound good Wait, let’s well, let’s see.

Does it sound let’s find out Yeah, that sounds okay, that’s okay.

Yeah, let’s find out Wow, that sounds very active that sounds good right so far.

It sounds really good.

Let’s find out what happens when I drink it Well so far it’s mostly foam Oh, it tastes just like every other athletic brewing beer that i’ve had in other words this tastes like a hoppy Non-alcoholic lager or maybe even their ipa just slightly less hoppy.

Oh no

On no planet no continent and certainly not if I was in germany would I call this?

an octoberfest

If you tried to give somebody that in germany, you’d probably get beaten up

They would not call this an octoberfest.

It doesn’t look like the can the can looks like an octoberfest It’s got the nice fall colors.

The can is beautiful.

The beer looks like a light lager

I feel like they spent all their money on the cans and the design and then just at the last minute They’re like, oh we gotta put something in there if we just package this Differently people will think it’s a an octoberfest.

Yeah, that’s great. Do it.

Hey franc. What are you doing over there? Peeing did you have beer before you peed? Yes scoop that up. We’re putting it in this can

I didn’t say it was that bad.

Oh, okay.

Well Anyway, there you go.

So that’s that’s my brew for today and so another thumbs down Yeah, if I were desperate,

so let me ask you this. Is that something someone gave you or did you buy that?

No, I bought it. I bought it.

You’re hoping that maybe because you’re thinking at some point They’ve got to make something that’s worth drinking.

Okay, remember so I had the athletic I their their ipa and again Yeah, if I was desperate, okay, you know, it’s a non-alcoholic But again, the only thing it seems like the only thing these people understand is hops That’s the only flavor. The only flavor in their beers is hops and that’s kind of disappointing.

So they’re not the only ones

Yeah, so there you go.

They’re far from the only ones in the beer industry to have that I like this can a lot better than their run wild one.

Their run wild can does nothing for me

Yeah, and you know as a runner I thought hey run wild maybe though. Nope.

Sure.

No, it didn’t.

Nope It didn’t

here’s your review from the run wild dear god. Why tastes like desperate regret? This thing makes me want to spit it out like poison

Wow, I don’t remember saying those words, but okay

you did you did you were very emotional about your

I don’t remember saying Spit it out like poison. I’m gonna have to go back and Listen to that episode.

That’s what I have typed in here and I don’t think I made that up

Yeah, but that could have been you cloning me with Eleven Labs for all I know

No, I only did that once and I don’t think the Eleven Labs drink anything that I recall.

So you say oh Man, one of the things that I played around with on my mac recently was adjusting the visibility And the high contrast settings and things.

Mm-hmm

So as you know, I think we’ve talked about before like i’m colorblind I have trouble distinguishing some shades of red from shades of green and you know, therefore Oranges and yellows purples and blues, you know, etc So I was playing around with all of my devices recently because I had set like the different You know color profiles on my phone.

I never realized I could do that on my mac also so I was doing that and while I was doing that I found like the high contrast settings And i’ve enabled a number of those so a lot of my stuff looks kind of like it would if it was on a mac classic If you

oh really?

Yeah, it looks it looks really old school for most apps that support it But it’s a lot easier to read so i’m like You know, that’s kind of cool.

But it’s you know, essentially it’s there’s a lot more black and white And the borders between things are just way clearer way more clearly defined So yeah,

that is one thing that modern macos is not good at is delineating some of that stuff They make it hard to find certain elements and they think that looks beautiful, but sometimes it just looks annoying.

Yep We’ll just hide these it’s great. He’ll love it. Yeah, who yeah Discoverability who needs it?

So the run wild ipa peter says thumbs down dear god why tastes like desperate regret what episode was that on though?

Uh, it should say

oh, yes, it should

there’s a problem Okay, I don’t want to get into the technical reasons why I don’t have the episode number on that page But there is a technical reason.

Okay, i’ll look for oh, I can’t even search for episode No, you can so if you go to the search and you type athletic it should come up for the episode that it should Well, let’s search for ipa.

Yeah.

No, no if I tell if I look for athletic I get no results Oh, I do. I get I get uh eight results.

Yeah, I don’t oh athlete Athlete athletic athlete. No, I get four results for athletic a th le tic I’m just doing it.

Uh Athletic doesn’t have an e before the l

I know not not not athlete Yeah, athletic.

No, I I get desperate regret.

Okay. I found it episode 11.

Yeah, got it All right. I’ll have to um, i’ll have to listen desperate regret again. That’ll be fun

It’s you were so desperate. I even named the episode after you.

That’s a good one. I like that. So All right. What else is new? What else do we want to cover today?

I don’t know what else is new i’m writing a blog post very slowly about raycast and It’s kind of interesting. I just wanted to highlight some of the things that I Do with it so that people have an idea of what kind of stuff it can do and i’m already Let me take a look here and see how many words i’m at i’m already at 1000 No 10,322. Oh, that’s characters.

I’m at 1696 words Which is pretty long So i’m kind of wrapping up the features and then i’m going to talk about the pricing a little bit and stuff like that But so I talk about how I will talk about in the future when it’s published How yes, it’s an app launcher But I really don’t like that term for these apps because these are more of a utility app to me than just an apple launcher Right app launcher is one of the things they do but it’s only one of the things exactly This does a lot more than just launch apps.

Yes, so I talk about the window management.

I talk about the chat gpt functionality I talk about the snippets And how they can have dynamic placeholders.

So for example If you have a command that you like to execute and it requires an ip address, but it’s not always the same ip address You can make a snippet that has a Left are those called tildes? The things right above the square brackets.

No, those are curly braces

Yeah, so left curly brace clipboard right curly brace and it’ll put that in It’ll put in whatever’s on the clipboard at runtime when you execute that snippet And the neat thing is is when you’re searching your snippets, it gives you a preview based on what’s in the clipboard So you’ll see exactly what it’s going to paste into whatever your window is so it looks kind of funny when you have friends with bruise episode whatever selected and then you’re doing a search for the uh, You know Who is this ip pipe to more command and it says who is friends with bruise episode 37 pipe tomorrow It doesn’t make any sense.

Anyway But the ability to have dynamic placeholders something you and I would call variables That’s pretty cool I talk about the searching safari history, which I use all the time.

There’s a float your notes thing, which is a floating notes window And you can just toggle this little floating notes window it’s visible or not visible and I just use it for quickly writing down notes when i’m talking with someone or when i’m Working in another window for something.

I don’t want to forget and I don’t want to let it get away but I also don’t want to be searching for an app and Failing to capture what’s being said at the same time floating notes window.

This is a floating note.

Okay, right and I assigned a What’s it called an alias to it?

So I don’t have a keyboard shortcut for that but I have an alias And I and it’s tf I think is my floating note is cool.

Yeah, so this raycast just Keeps like every day. It seems like you’re telling me something new And cool.

Yeah, and I do other things like it has a bunch of system things like you can eject all disks Which I use when i’m going to undock my mac I just type, you know, I just trigger raycast and type ej and it brings up the eject all disk things There’s you can sleep displays, which sometimes I do when I walk want to walk away from the mac You can toggle stage manager if you want to use stage manager, I don’t recommend it But if you do it’s way better way to turn off stage manager for those cases where it absolutely breaks something Than doing it the apple way, which is a pain And then there’s a bunch of miscellaneous stuff that i’m going to put in here.

There’s a color picker, which I like There’s a bunch of stuff. Anyway, it’s things like that where I just keep finding more and more things that it can do That I can take advantage of that I didn’t realize it could do And most importantly I can play wordle every day wordle in raycast.

Yeah.

Yep.

Awesome Yeah, well, there you go.

So anyway, i’m working on that i’ll Send you a link to it when I publish it and you can tell me it’s too long didn’t read or whatever

Well, you know just like a little There was one tutorial I read I don’t even know if it’s the official raycast one But there was one review I read and it was like these are all the things you can do But it was just like a list of features and a screenshot, but I didn’t know why you would do it how to do You know like now that i’ve played with it for a little while I gathered, you know, you said oh you can toggle a floating notes window I searched for notes when the first thing that comes up is the apple notes app.

I’m like, well, that’s not what I mean Well, he said floating notes. I searched for float. Oh, there it is floating notes. Okay Let’s see.

The good news is you can assign keyboard shortcuts to everything of course Which is a problem if you already use a lot of keyboard shortcuts on your mac because eventually you’re going to run out of keyboard shortcuts right But you can also assign aliases which means instead of just doing a keyboard shortcut to trigger something You still have to pop open raycast, but then you just type your alias real quick and it’ll bring up So if you think of toggle floating notes as tn like toggle notes You just put the alias as tn then you pop open raycast and you type tn and it brings it up that way Whatever works for your brain to find.

Yes,

you can set that as an alias

So that’s something I have not done yet was you were using raycast to Do window placements?

Yeah, how to replace windows and stuff Those I did use keyboard shortcuts.

I have not gotten into that yet because I don’t even remember how to find those

Just just open raycast and type window window Switch windows top.

Oh, there we go. Top right sixth.

There you go.

So if I just do Sixth that’s see.

So what I was doing was I was window six window top window.

Yeah Yeah, I was using rectangle today and I was trying to you know, I had to click on rectangle Right to look and I was like does it do six?

Oh, yeah, there they are six way down there, right?

Click on the top left six

got it.

Okay.

Boom. Got it So now for raycast I can just type six.

Yep top left six.

I’ll do top right sixth and move it over Yep, boom and it moves it over.

Yeah, and the nice thing is I have keyboard shortcuts assigned to the really obvious ones But then those other ones are there within raycast if I want them But I don’t use them as much so I don’t have a keyboard shortcut assigned to them but I can just type window and then like top and it’ll give me all the options of shoving it to the top in different ways and window left and it’ll give me all the options or You know thirds or sixth or whatever and and it gives you those options so you don’t have to assign a keyboard shortcut to all of them if you’re Going to run out of keyboard shortcuts or you don’t have a keyboard shortcut combination that makes sense to you for that window placement But you can do it for your most used ones and then for other ones where you just use them once in a while Just look them up right out of raycast.

Yeah.

Yeah, and and it’s way better than going up to the menu clicking the thing

Yeah, I can hear John Siracusa talking about slowly moving the mouse.

Oh, I gotta open this slowly, you know I gotta grab the mouse Watch someone else, you know, they’re like slowly moving the mouse cursor up there and you’re like, oh god, just let me do it for you Yeah, yeah, that’s by the way.

What was I listening to you on there was was it you and I having a conversation?

I don’t remember.

It was either a video conversation we were having or it was blurring the lines I can’t remember there was a moment where you slipped into John Siracusa voice almost but not quite and I don’t think you were trying to But it was great. I enjoyed it.

Oh happy to help.

Yeah

Oh brother All right. What else we got?

Um, I don’t know probably nothing. How long have we been recording?

Well, then we should we should finish this on a high note and that means I don’t actually have to finish drinking this beer which tastes like moderately desperate regret

See vic asked when when vic was on and I didn’t like my beer I don’t think it was last time but it was time before that and he asked what the protocol was He said am I going to go get a replacement beer and I said no i’m going to keep drinking this one because it wasn’t that Bad, but for sure if you just can’t stand it, there’s no point in keeping going.

Yeah, it’s not worth the calories I’m going to go out after this and i’m going to go to a local brewing company I can’t decide if I don’t know yet if I want to go to medford brewing Or if I want to go to this other place over in malden called faces face plants.

No faces not face plants not face palms I’ve got to check.

Well, I was going to look I was going to say i’ll check medford brewing’s website to see what but Then I remembered wait, they don’t list their beers on their website

Remember you have an ar you have a task to go talk to them about their website I went there and I did talk to them and

I told them and I filled out their email their their contact form and emailed them and told them in person that you know, you just Put your beers on your website, you know, just just uh, ah, yep still not there

I know that you don’t do a lot of website designs But I feel like that’s one that you you should be willing to Depending on how much they want to pay you but I feel like that one might not be a mistake to redesign for them

They have some college kid doing it for them.

So Here’s a good one august 27th destination library Medford public library on 111 high street medford brewing will be pouring at the medford Libraries maker fair from 1 to 4 pm.

Our tap room will also be open that day Beer at the library.

Oh my god.

Those are two things.

I never would have I I’ll i’ll go there unless they get the librarians drunk first

There are going to be some angry librarians running around telling everyone to keep it down It’s going to be absolute insanity Shh

all right, let’s call this Let’s call it.

Let’s call it.

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