Technically Working
10 days ago

#160 – Push to Talk, Pull to Cloud

Technically Working Episode 160: Push to Talk, Pull to Cloud

Episode 160 opens with the numbers. Total downloads across the lifetime of the show have hit 33,505, with episode 159 pulling 137 listens and episode 158 sitting at 157 after 14 days. The average is holding around 150 per episode and has been gradually climbing even without any real marketing. Word of mouth and the occasional Mastodon post have done all the work so far. If you want to help, leave a rating in Apple Podcasts or Pocket Casts.

From there we get into Apple news. Tim Cook announced he'll be stepping down as CEO, with John Ternus taking over. Michael bought one share of Apple stock and is hoping for the best. Damashe has thoughts on Tim's legacy as an operations-focused leader, where Apple got comfortable, and what services growth has cost the company from a user experience standpoint. Neither of us are financial advisors. Please do not take investment advice from this podcast.

Michael also turned a year older this week. Happy belated birthday from the show.

Then: AirPods Pro 3. Michael got a pair as an early birthday gift and called Damashe immediately. The volume adjustment from the stem alone was worth the upgrade coming from first-gen. The adaptive listening feature is useful but aggressive, and Comply foam tips are probably going to be necessary for a secure fit. Damashe is sticking with his Pro 2s for now but is more likely to buy than he was before this conversation.

Community Builder Tools is going to the cloud. Michael walks through the current setup: developing on Windows, pushing to a Raspberry Pi running Ubuntu, deploying from GitHub, with automated database backups running on a cron job and syncing to Dropbox via rsync. He's now using a web-based version of Builder to manage convention events, which work similarly to the ACB Community schedule across multiple Zoom accounts. A training is happening the next day. More details coming soon.

Waymo. Michael is flying into San Francisco on May 20th for the GitHub hackathon and plans to take a Waymo just for the experience. Damashe is less enthusiastic than he was ten years ago, not because the tech isn't impressive, but because he's seen enough things break to have questions. The power outage in San Francisco that left Waymos sitting in the road is a real example. The conversation goes wide from there: onboard compute versus network dependency, insurance liability, the limits of LLMs, rural connectivity, and whether the companies working on this are solving the right problems in a meaningful way. Damashe would still take one in Austin this summer. He just has more conditions attached.

The POC radio. Michael ordered the Lucid Budget Radio, a push-to-talk over cellular device that costs $99 with cellular plans starting at $20 for a year. It does not make the Nextel chirp sound, which is a disappointment. It does work across AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon via a smart SIM. It's accessible — the manufacturer responded to a blind user's feedback within three weeks with a working solution — and Michael is already thinking about using it for convention communications.

Damashe also covers a dual-SIM router he picked up for his work van, how he's using a physical eSIM card to load up to eight profiles, and a new office space he's moving into next weekend. He's looking for suggestions on door access solutions, a security system, and sound panels. Send ideas to [email protected].

Todoist check-in: Michael is at 7,425 completed tasks and sitting at Grand Master status with 15,000 points to go until Enlightened. His current streak is seven days after breaking it. Damashe broke his for the same reason: things got done, the app didn't get opened.

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