Technically Working - EP2
The transcript was generated thanks to Auphonic.Transcript
Michael: [0:00] So this might be an interesting show because we really haven't talked as much as we normally do. By the way, we're recording. At least I feel like we haven't.
Damashe: [0:09] No, we definitely did not talk as much this past week as we normally do. I mean, what has been going on? Trying to recall now. Kinda funny about the week. Like I really don't remember what the hell I was doing most of the week, but I know I've done stuff. Like I've gotten things accomplished.
Michael: [0:28] I'll tell you what I haven't been doing and that's time tracking.
Damashe: [0:32] Yep, nope, I have not been doing that. I epically 100% failed on that attempt.
Michael: [0:40] Honestly, I forgot that we even talked about it until I started editing the episode. Like, oh, oh, that's right.
Damashe: [0:48] So I didn't mention it in the last episode, but I was going to actually try, and I will do it this week, I'll go set it up and start doing it. I was gonna actually try out the timing application. they do have a couple of suggested shortcuts that you can use to run from your phone if you're away from the computer. The thing that kind of interests me about timing, and I'll give it maybe a couple of weeks before I make a decision to switch back to Timery, because I mean, I'm paying for Timery, but the thing that really interests me about timing itself is that on the Mac, it can auto track like what apps you're in, things like that, right? And you can go in and assign, let's say if I'm on the Blind Employment Solutions web domain at all, or if I'm in a specific folder that's labeled, you know, it's named Blind Employment Solutions, I can have that time automatically assigned to the Blind Employment Solutions project, for example. So that kind of interests me, and I don't necessarily, at least to my knowledge right now, I have a lot of situations where I'm not on a computer and I need to be tracking time. So I'm gonna give that a try and we'll give it a two week trial. So I'll let you know for sure if I did it when we record next, which should be next week sometime.
Michael: [2:15] Yeah, I'm gonna have to call out on you on the 10th. I'm telling you now. So we'll figure that out.
Damashe: [2:21] What's going on on 10?
Michael: [2:23] Two Fridays from now I can't record. So we'll see. You mentioned in the last episode, and this is just top of mind, I don't know if I like having the previous episode top of mind, but you mentioned that the summer's gonna be super busy. It looks like the spring's gonna start getting busy too.
Damashe: [2:40] Yep, I mean we'll have to figure out something for next week, because I'll be in Birmingham next week. But I'll be back Saturday, so I figure we can maybe get that episode in like Saturday evening or something, or Sunday, something like that, just so we got that one done, and then if we can't get one in the following weekend, we still got one in reserve that we can just push on out.
Michael: [3:03] I hope my mind doesn't become broke with the dates. Ha ha ha.
Damashe: [3:10] We should set up a calendar, or, well, we don't necessarily have to set, wait. Let me walk that back a little bit. We have a calendar. We can invite each other to events, but when I said we should set up a calendar, I started thinking about, well, do we want to publicly let people know when we're recording? That'll be a thing we'll come back to because that would require us to be live streaming, which we're not doing as of yet. We will eventually get back around to doing that if for no other reason, just to keep those muscles well-developed. We will be streaming to the, when we do start streaming, the plan, at least from our perspective, is to always stream to the live.yourownpay. Which I need to fix that server. But always stream to the live.yourownpay because me and Michael may on random occasions be trying out some different software for streaming live or whatever too. So the one place I think streaming to that IceCast, ShoutCast, one of those servers servers would be at least a stable, like if you want to listen to us live stream when we started doing that, you can always go there. We'll probably be in Clubhouse sometimes, we may be streaming to Facebook live sometimes, or YouTube sometimes, or LinkedIn, because I think Mike can do it on LinkedIn, I don't think I have that capability yet.
Michael: [4:32] I haven't looked. Or we might take over the IA cast live stream too, so if you were to do some of that, Mike just, say, hey Michael, I'm stealing your stream for a minute. I wrote all these notes up and I'm kind of distracted because I'm like, hey, I can write down some ideas while I'm editing this to talk with Damasi about. And for some reason my note is gone. So I probably had it selected and just started typing over it. Undo is my friend. The Tip For The Week - Undo
Damashe: [5:02] Undo is an amazing useful utility. Hey, that's the tip for the week. If you don't use on the Mac is command Z in most cases that will undo whatever you just did. I think on Windows is control Z. Yep. But whatever it is, whatever application you're in, this works in a lot of places. Like I accidentally overwrote something and I can't remember what I was working on, but it was something for JJ and command Z got me, you know, back to where I was because voiceover was being weird for a second. But the tip is get familiar with whatever the undo key command gesture, et cetera, is on your OS is of choice. Because it can be immensely helpful. Sometimes, sometimes, sometimes, sometimes it's just your reaper correctly though. You'll be sitting there hitting undo for like 15 minutes because you're saving too much data, but as Reaper.
Michael: [5:59] Yes, yes. Which can be helpful and annoying at the same time. So I'm gonna go off the top of my head because I'm using markers in Reaper. And so I'm thinking about starting to do is taking some clips and I gotta work this one through with you because I have some ideas, but I don't fully know. And me and chat GPT, well, I'd rather your opinion on the show instead of it. I was gonna say we're not getting along, but I have no problem with chat GPT. Anyways, taking clips out of the show and publishing them in the feed throughout the week or publishing them somewhere else. And I'm thinking 30 second conversation clips. Like the tip is if you use Zendesk, you can use control option to do a lot of keystrokes. And then we just share that tip and then put something at the end that encourages people to stay subscribed or to share with someone who might like this. And then that encourages them to listen to the longer form show.
Damashe: [6:57] Ha ha, see this is the show people, like this is how we wanted to do the show, good deal. See This Is The Show
[7:02] So I'm gonna share with you what I was thinking about as I was trying to get into Clean Feed today, which is I don't wanna necessarily publish like our little short clips or tips or tutorials to the feed itself, because one I feel like it's probably gonna screw up numbering and it may screw up the way the website handles it too, but what we could do is publish them to YouTube.
Michael: [7:23] Ooh, there you go. And explore using AI art to generate the artwork for the YouTube, and then come back and share about how that experience went.
Damashe: [7:36] I see. Now there's a reason to start using the AI art. Good deal. Because the only thing I could think of was like, well, if I was still writing blog posts for anybody, I might, you know, use them. But I'm not. So didn't have a use case for them.
Michael: [7:49] It may be what I'll do since we haven't published Would I have dubbed episode zero? We can change it to episode one if you'd prefer that, but. Which one? The one we recorded last week. That's going out on Monday.
Damashe: [8:01] See?
Michael: [8:01] See? Date.
Damashe: [8:02] That's episode one. Okay.
Michael: [8:04] Episode one. Well, if that is one.
Damashe: [8:07] This is two and then we'll, you know, count off from there.
Michael: [8:10] Yeah. Now I forgot where I was going with that. Has it been warm over there?
Damashe: [8:19] So it has been exceptionally warm today. It actually cooled off to where I did, you know, grab a hoodie before going outside to do anything. But it was exceptionally warm. We actually had a tornado watch last, what was it, it was last Friday, actually. I can't remember specifically. No, no it wasn't. It was Monday or Tuesday, I think. We had a tornado watch. Yeah, it's been exceptionally warm. Looks like maybe the cold weather may start to creep back in. So it's like that, that fake spring, uh, which I'm fine with honestly, cause I'm really not comfortable with like 70, 75, 65 between, you know, anywhere between 60 and 75 degree weather in the middle of February. It makes me uncomfortable. And Alabama is very prone to tornadoes. Georgia's not much lower than them, but I feel like Alabama gets more tornadoes than, than happened in Georgia. So it's not comforting either because I've never actually been in a tornado and that's one of those things that I could go the rest of my life without having the experience.
Michael: [9:26] You're not eager to have that experience.
Damashe: [9:29] Not at all. Not at all But we do have the plans and hey, there's another tip for people think about emergency Preparedness for the area that you live in like, Think About Emergency Plans
[9:39] you know for me is more tornadoes or bad thunderstorm for other people It may be you know severe snow it could be severe flooding like whatever the case is but think about those things before There's an alarm going off telling you hey hey, we're under this watch or this warning because it's coming. And just on basis of what we have done, because I haven't done a lot, like I didn't go out and buy a generator and all that stuff. But I do have some power banks, which you can't get from AT Guys. The ones I'm using right now, the accessible 10,000 or 20,000 milliamp power bank is a good useful thing to have around because if your power goes out, but the cell networks are still up, you're able to charge your phones.
[10:23] Picking up some, if you're in a household of, where there are any sighted people, I know a lot of people when I was younger, everybody would go out and buy candles, and you would have candles in that random kitchen drawer and in there for if the lights went out. Well, buy LED flashlight. Probably gonna get a lot more use out of that and you don't risk burning down your house in the midst of everything else. I don't have any specific recommendations for LED flashlights, but there are a lot of them out there that are pretty, and they're bright in their battery usage. The battery drain is not much anywhere near what it used to be with the older flashlights that I grew up with, where you put two C batteries in there.
Michael: [11:01] And you know, if you really- I remember those.
Damashe: [11:04] Yep. So LED flashlights are a good thing to have. There are some, I believe, that are also USB chargeable. So again, having a power bank or two on hand is helpful. Bottled water or some way to put a good amount of water in a bottle. Whether you're using bottled water that you purchase out of the store, you just have containers or water bottles that you can use. Making sure that you have a source of clean drinking water on hand is important. Depending on your circumstances, I haven't done this because if we have a, again, my situation here is more concerns about tornadoes and thunderstorms. Maybe flooding the river bad enough to get to us, I don't think it'll happen. Or we at least have time to get off this side of town if that were to happen. But if you're in a scenario where you could be, you know, trapped for a ridiculous amount of time, some candy goods around, I do have candy goods. I also have a deep freezer, well, a upright freezer with a lot of meat in it. So, you know, when it goes sideways, man, I'll be out there on the grill after the tornado if it doesn't take it away.
Michael: [12:10] Man, meat got so expensive. We are nowhere near where I wish we were. Not at all.
Damashe: [12:17] Neither are, we're not where I would like to be at anymore because yeah, when meat first started going up, like I had to start going into the stores to, you know, the actual freezer to pull out stuff to cook. So yeah, we're not where I would like to be at, but I'm gonna attempt to get back there. Another idea, if you're like me and you cook, or if you're like Michael, because Michael cooks a lot and they also barbecue a lot, check out local meat markets. Oftentimes they may have slightly better prices on meat than your traditional grocery stores. So if you've got a local butcher shop or a meat market style place. And the secondary effect of going there if they do have better prices or comparable prices is you're also most likely supporting a local business as opposed to a larger chain. Not pulling a, hate the larger chains, hate large corporations deal, but hey, COVID taught me the value of supporting local businesses as much as possible, when possible.
Michael: [13:27] Yeah, and I always forget about the, and I don't know why I do, but we forget about the local people.
[13:37] Convenience convenience. We've gotten lazy Lately, we've been doing the factor meals. Factor
[13:42] I think I supposed to send you a free box or something But so tell me about those they're High class expensive TV dinners is the best way to describe them And if you know, you know, so they're they're actually pretty good though So I believe all of them or most of them cook at 375 They come in a cardboard sleeve and you push it out of the cardboard sleeve. All the instructions are on there. I will admit that I have not checked to see if they OCR or if there's a QR code, but you could easily use something like IRA or Be My Eyes to give you the instructions. 99% of the time I have not heard instructions for one that is different than this. 375 for seven minutes in the oven or I think I don't remember how long it is in the microwave because I think it's seven minutes in the microwave but Mallory tried nine minutes in the air fryer and then it started melting the container that it was in so I'm not gonna give recommendations for microwaves or air fryers and it's got a vegetable and a protein and starch usually and some sort of sauce and it warms up to be pretty good it reminds me a lot of remember when we were doing HelloFresh, except for we didn't have to cook it. So everything comes, I believe it's already cooked and you're just heating it up.
Damashe: [15:05] Gotcha. So.
Michael: [15:08] Yeah.
Damashe: [15:09] They, I've been seeing some interesting stuff. So that guy, Aaron Franklin, the barbecue guy on YouTube from Texas that a lot of people reference, you know, he recently, well, not so recently now, but a while back put out a cooker that he designed, the smoker, outdoor smoker or whatever. It's like three grand, so I'm not interested in talking about it at all. Don't even want to have a conversation about it other than, hey, Mr. Franklin, if you're listening and you want to know how intuitive your cooker is to use for a blind barbecue, or, you know, I'm interested, I'll send it back to you. I won't keep it. Right. Other than that, I ain't looking to spend three grand on no, uh, no cooker right now, man. That's a little... One day, one day, uh...
Michael: [15:54] Then we won't use AI generated art for the graphics.
Damashe: [16:02] No, I'll take real pictures. I'll let my son come out and actually use my phone to take pictures. He takes really good pictures with iPad. I'm like, you're doing that good with iPad. If people are impressed, man, imagine if he had a a decent actual iPhone with with zoom and crap. Right. But another thing that he has started doing, and I don't know if this is continuing or whatever, but it was interesting to me when I heard about it because it kind of made me think about some of the food boxes and food prep stuff, is he will cook a brisket and ship it to you. And then all you have to do is like oven warm it. And he gives you the instructions and the temperature and all of that. And people have said that, you know, the few reviews I've seen of it, people are like it tasted, you know, pretty damn good to be something that was shipped to them, you know, frozen or whatever. And they unthought it and oven did it. And I'm like, OK.
Michael: [16:50] But see, I think they've actually figured it out. They're not actually freezing it. So they're just packaging it well and then sending you blocks of ice. Dry ice? Yep, on the top and bottom. So it's like you're just putting what was already cooked in the fridge and then reheating it.
Damashe: [17:06] In the fridge and then reheating it, yeah. That's kind of what was, I was like, huh, dry ice is probably the solution there. So that's an interesting thing. So, I don't know. One day, Mike may get a slab of ribs that just shows up in the ice.
Michael: [17:18] I was just thinking like, huh, I didn't know this guy. I don't even know this guy. You've probably shared it with me, but I've just skipped over it.
Damashe: [17:26] So probably not he hasn't done anything that I thought was you know worth video wise for for Me, I don't think he's done anything that that's significant enough is to be like watch this video because I can tell you what he said Which I probably have but none of his videos are like extraordinarily descriptive or anything So, you know, it's it's you can pick up some tips from watching him. Just like a lot of the other barbecue videos, right?
Michael: [17:50] But No, I mean I might I might package some ribs up for you dry oxygen sent it to you I'm not ordering from that guy the Oh The head I almost said hello fresh the factor meals come with like coupons of different places and I've heard of butcher Butcher block is that the name of the box? Yeah.
Damashe: [18:13] Yeah You worked adjacent to someone Yeah, I did.
Michael: [18:16] That's what I've heard of them. But there's another one that came with, I think it's $50 off the first box, $30 off the second one, and $20 off the next two. And that's how they get you. When they tell you $150, you don't get $150 off your first box. So be aware of that, people. A lot of times it's a higher amount off the first week and then lower the second week, and then look, you know, $20 off for three or four, two or three weeks, and then they go back to the full price that you forgot. So your bill goes up $20 a week, unless you use to-do lists or reminders. But this one is they send you meat, and I was gonna look at the pricing of them and look at the accessibility of them. Because, you know, sometimes, sometimes these organizations do partner with local farmers, so it'd be interesting to do that research. I've given way too much into convenience, I think, and I'm realizing that more.
Damashe: [19:17] Yeah, that is again, one of the lessons though that I learned from COVID is oftentimes that convenience, like you don't realize it until there's something that takes away the convenience, right? So like when we were going to Walmart, well, not me, because I don't go to Walmart, when Tia was going to Walmart and there was no toilet paper to be found, it was like, hmm. So that convenience, I've always been able to run into Walmart to grab something you need real quick. ain't working out for us right now.
Michael: [19:40] Yeah.
Damashe: [19:42] For anybody that is an Amazon Prime subscriber, Uh, then you have to be a Prime subscriber. And you don't object to Charmin. I don't know if there's any reason not to like Charmin tissue, but just in case, whatever, ignore me. But they have some extra large rolls, 24 pack of extra large rolls from Amazon. Last I looked, and every time I've looked, has always only been available to purchase if you are a Prime customer. I actually now have that on subscribe and save, so I get a box of it every month and now I'm just putting boxes. I mean, at some point I may have to stop, but we never quite get there. It's like, oh, two boxes outside. Okay, let's skip the next month. Like we haven't quite gotten there yet. We were there at one point, but that was during the great toilet paper shortage of 2021 that one time. So, wait, no, was that 2020? Yeah, that was 2020. Yeah, the great toilet paper shortage of 2020 that one time. I wasn't sending nothing back. I wasn't skipping nothing. I'm like, nope, send me my toilet paper every month.
Michael: [20:45] You can give me and I will take it.
Damashe: [20:47] I will take it. I will put it in the shed outside. You know, if it gets to be too much of it and it's continued for too long, I might be, you know, in the Walmart parking lot, selling rolls of tissue. It never got to that point, but I, I was strategizing.
Michael: [21:04] Points where it was like, do I need to Look, I actually got some toilet paper.
Damashe: [21:09] I can afford to sell some of this, you know, get this cash app set up, man. And swear cash, get me a card reader right out there like the Girl Scouts. Like, they selling cookies, I'm selling toilet paper rolls.
Michael: [21:19] Oh. So get ready, send Nipless this computer. I can talk about it because I was thinking about dates and this will go live after his birthday, but Mallory's all set up on the Mac mini for the most part. So you can only have parallels on one computer activated at a time. And I want to talk to you about backups because one thing you need to follow up on from episode one is your own pay.com slash backblaze. No, backups does not redirect.
Damashe: [21:53] No, because I didn't fix it yet because I forgot. Thank you for, let me add that to, to do it so I don't forget to do it.
Michael: [21:58] How, while he's doing that, before he comes in and replies to what I was going to say, I did get control shift Q to work in to do it. So I'm using that more often. You do have to go into advanced and I was looking for it to say the name, like say what, what the keystroke it was looking for was as I was using the tab key to get through. And it was just saying edit box. Well, that edit box is where it wanted me to type the keystroke. And I finally figured out by pressing VL left arrow that it wanted the keystroke for a quick ad. And when I got that set up, that worked for me. So that's why I kind of find it as I was not actually paying attention. I was trying to just use tab to navigate the interface.
Damashe: [22:41] All right. Got that added. Also, it helps if you have Todoist start when your computer starts. You're not pressing the shortcut and like, hey, why ain't this working? It's like, oh yeah, because I restarted the computer and Todoist is not even running.
Michael: [22:53] Have you found a way to get Mac, oh, you're not on Ventura, so this probably isn't an issue, to get it to stop telling me new login item added. New Login Item Added
Damashe: [23:05] No, but I did find it annoying when I was on Ventura. It's like, okay, I just did it. I will go- It was super annoying to me too, because so I have an app running on my Mac called Block Block. It's from Objective C, S-E-E, Objective hyphen S-E-E dot com. And the guy used to work for, I wanna say he used to work for the NSA, but I might be wrong about that. I'll go look before I make that official. But at any rate, he used to work for some government agency, and he used to work for the NSA, for some government agency and he's done security work most of his life. And when he got, when he retired and started, I think when he got his first Mac is when he started writing security tool for the Mac, because he had been a Windows user his entire career. So Block, what BlockBlock does is you set it up and, you know, fairly accessible. I haven't run into any issues with it or whatever. It's just a background daemon that's running. but it will notify you of.
[24:09] You know, apps that try to install, say, a, you know, kernel extension or apps to try to install a startup, you know, tool to run that startup without your, you know, you manually going to do that. Now, if you go do it, it's not going to pop up. But let's say you install Google Chrome, because Google does this. You install Google Chrome, you're going to get a dialogue pop up from blockbopper that says, hey, this process just tried to install this thing and it tells you what it is and whatever it's like. It's the Google software update daemon. I'm like, I don't really want you to just run that all the time. So you can block it or you can allow it. You can do a temporary of either one of those. There's a check box you can check that says temporarily. And then you can say allow or block if you're like, I don't know what that is, but I don't want to block it forever. So temporary, which I have done a few times because I'm like, I have no idea what that is. Let me go Google it. Or, you know, temporary allow something because you're like, oh, well, I need maybe just to work for a little while. So for me with Ventura, what was happening is I would install, you know, install, cause I think, no, I just did a straight upgrade to Venture, but I think I installed something. It was like, first I get the block block alert that such and such is trying to install a tool. And it's like, okay, well allow that. Cause I don't want that to run a startup. And then Mac OS chimes in, you just added a new startup login item. It's like, well, geez, man, will somebody please shut up?
Michael: [25:25] And block block just does it once though for you, right? Like you just get like, unless you say remind me later, or is there a remind me later?
Damashe: [25:34] There's not, so that's when you do the temporary.
Michael: [25:36] And then it pops back up again.
Damashe: [25:38] Yeah, then it'll pop up the next time it tries to run or something like that and tell you.
Michael: [25:42] But if I say- Mac OS is like, if you turn on your computer and get a notification, it has to remind you that you also have a new item added to your login.
Damashe: [25:51] It's like, yeah, we did this already. We've been down this path.
Michael: [25:54] So the secret is, that I've found is VOO, interact with notifications, VO shift space to do actions on that notification, and then close it. And that seems to get rid of it from what I've observed.
Damashe: [26:09] Yeah, they are a little, I don't recall, but I don't know if I actually really delve too deeply into the system settings on Ventura, either while I was on it, to look at notifications to see if there's like, A, can I turn this off? But that is, let me go look up Objective-C. I Found My Notes
Michael: [26:32] I found my notes finally. You wanna know where they were? Further down the document in drafts. So I thought about while editing setting Discord up. We have the Payone Media Discord server. I don't know if you have an interest or is Slack better for community? Do you think? Because I've been using Slack lately more than I have in the past.
Damashe: [27:00] I think Discord gives us a little bit more flexibility. So like if we wanted to set the location for live streaming to be in Discord and make use of that. Also Slack, Slack is going through, they're still going through changes. Like you recently discovered that you now only have 90 days of history.
[27:24] And Slack, I know this is a probability with Discord also, but I feel like nowadays people are a lot more comfortable more familiar with Discord because so many people are using that as a thing. And if we want to have that be a paid feature or anything like that, hooking into that directly so it's more automated is going to be a hell of a lot easier than dealing with Slack for that. And Slack's just gotten weird. I'm sorry. They're a little too corporate now. Like they used to be like even despite, you know, some random accessibility issues here and there over the years, Slack used to be one of my favorite apps that was just out there that everybody used like out of all the stuff that people use but now now it's like it's too busy it's kind of like zone like zone was always great very clean and all of that and now it's just so much cruft it's like I don't want to huddle I don't know what a huddle is it's it's slacks version of you know the live chat that you would have in discord they just name it differently yeah I mean I technically know I actually know what it is like but it's a stupid name and it's like it's not immediately obvious. And also, why are you shoving this in my face when I'm in a Slack workspace with three people and only one of them is here right now. So there's two of us in this Slack actually talking. Like, why would we wanna do a huddle?
Michael: [28:45] Like that makes no sense. And we're messaging back and forth. Come on, you can't tell me you don't know what we're messaging back and forth because I'm sure you do. So use AI and determine, oh, he doesn't need a meeting. Let's not put that ad in front of him.
Damashe: [28:59] Right. Same thing with Zoom. Like I haven't used any of your apps. Could you just stop shoving your apps in my face? Like I don't want Zoom phone.
Michael: [29:06] Nope.
Damashe: [29:09] Interesting you sent me an email from someone the other day or you've copied me in on an email from someone the other day and turns out they were using Zoom phone. Yeah. When, yeah, I was like, oh, that's interesting. Not interested in Zoom phone, however, or any of Zoom's other apps, but yeah. So I think Discord would be a solution. But I tell you what, if you are listening to this and you have an opinion whether we should, you know, look at using Slack or Discord for our community, our future community, because it's not imminent. It is a definite thing we will do, but it's not imminent. So don't feel like, you know, oh, you're gonna chime in when you hear this and then it'll be up in two weeks. Like that ain't happening. No. But if you have an opinion, reach out to us there. You can go to yourownpay.com slash TW and leave feedback there. Or if you're brave or adventurous or whatever the proper term for it would be and you're on Mastodon, you can find us there. We'll have that information for you at the end of the show.
Michael: [30:10] Yeah, because I think I'm changing my Mastodon link. I told Michael that yesterday. So it's important to segment your list, Damasi, isn't it?
Damashe: [30:21] It is. You can set up a Mastodon. So I wonder how much weight it would be to run a Mastodon instance, say, for pay-on-media on Cloud Run, right? And just have, like, just you on there, but it's your address though.
Michael: [30:37] Cause then I could build out whatever timeline I wanted to see and not be influenced based on other people's Mastodon servers.
Damashe: [30:48] Like you would still connect to theirs, but you will be on your own instance, so it wouldn't be a...
Michael: [30:53] So someone reported me yesterday to the server admins, to their server admins, who then apparently sent a report to Michael, who's the server admin of the server I'm on. And Michael knew me, but they flagged like seven or 10 of my Mastodon posts. And this is all relative to when we're recording, obviously, because I'm using, you know, yesterday and today. And Michael and I were talking on the IA cast about that. And I explained, you know, with Twitter or Facebook or all these other social networks, there's one Elon Musk that can make the decisions that influence who can do what on where. And when you're in Mastodon, sometimes you don't even know who's making those server admin decisions. And maybe that is something you need to think about taking under your control so you can influence what you see and what you don't see. And block yourself if you feel you're being inappropriate.
Damashe: [31:49] I mean, I probably wouldn't block myself. I'd probably block whoever was complaining about me. But your point is taken though. Yeah, that is one of the interesting things about Mastodon as a service. And I feel like... I feel like I don't really know the proper nomenclature. So if I use the wrong word, it's because, you know, I'm a baby over here. Listen, the nerds or geeks or whatever we will fall into the category of being people who are very interested in technology and also have an appreciation of how the open internet has benefited us and how closing things does not necessarily always benefit us.
[32:31] Mastodon is a very very interesting solution. The problem there however, the same thing that makes it a great solution and why so many people flock to it when it first came out as far as like, you know, those geekier people. It's the same reason I ultimately don't think it's going to work as a true replacement of a Twitter. Because it is very, it's very federated, it's very spread out, right? There are so many different servers and the rules are set by the server admin for the server that you're on and If let's say there's a server with a lot of nastiness on it that you know Michael decides he doesn't want to even see their stuff He can just block that entire instance and it doesn't exist to anybody that's on his server Like you cannot get to it. You won't be able to see it as long as you're a member of Michael server But the same thing that makes that great the same thing that makes that terrible, right? because you're going to have people who are either overly aggressive about what they do or they're just very lackadaisical and do nothing. And the general public, I don't think, is really prepared to kind of deal with that level of exposure slash responsibility. I think it's great because it puts the responsibility on somebody to do something, but we can't have seven billion Macedonian instances out here in the world, so everybody's running their own.
Michael: [33:55] Because then that's just blocking with a different name man.
Damashe: [33:59] That is that that is a whole giant mess Somebody was talking about how they move their their instance or set up their their instance And they had to move their account over to a new instance and it slowed their instance down Significantly when they whenever they were migrating, you know over because it has to go out and reconnect Your new account to all of the people that were from your imported account, right? So it doesn't just yeah, so when you went in this is a good because I did not know this, Mastadon Tip
[34:30] So you do have the ability for people listening, you do have the ability, if let's say you went and joined mastodon.social, when you're just like, okay, everybody's trying this out, I'm gonna go to mastodon.social and sign up for a free account. And then let's say you decide, well, you know, I'm gonna make my own instance and just use my domain. So I'm gonna use, you know, Michael at payone.media, that's an email address, people don't look for more mastodon with that. But let's say you want to do that right.
Michael: [34:58] But could that be a mastodon address too? Could that be my identity for pay on media?
Damashe: [35:03] It could if we set up, well, probably not. And the reason that it couldn't be is because the reason that wouldn't work. Yeah, payon.media is already set up. Pointing out payon.social, however, could be.
Michael: [35:18] Yeah, because you know, I need another domain name.
Damashe: [35:23] So I'm gonna come back to that domain thing, domain name thing, because something occurs to me, having a bad habit with domains has not necessarily been a negative thing for me as much as I thought it. I found a benefit to it, I'll put it to you. I'm not gonna say it's not a negative thing, but I think I found a benefit to it. But you can transfer to a different server. So let's say you decided I don't want to be on Macedon.social anymore, I want to go to to accessibility.social, what is it called? No, disability.social, or disability.world, or something like that. There's a disability.something Macedon instance. So you can migrate your Macedon.social.
[36:03] Account over to this new server, which will take it away from Macedon social, put it on a new server. But when you do that, what you think in your mind, at least if you're me, what you thought in your mind is like, oh, okay, so I just move over there, and it just kind of handles a low level redirection if people are still looking for me at the old thing and then they'll see the new thing. It just brings over like a JSON file or something with the people that I'm following. And I just import it and there we go. Well, no, you do import some stuff, but then it goes out and says, Oh, you were following Damacy Thomas. So now we're gonna, you know, re-follow him from this new server. The old server's gone away, so now we're re- So I'm gonna get a notification that Michael just started following you. I was like, I thought Mike was already- Mike, you weren't following me on Vast with All Mike? Oh no, I just migrated to server. Oh, okay. So that's the thing I did not know about. So while it's going out to fetch all of that data to, one, update the information for people who are following you, and also reconnecting your account to the people that you were following, That is putting a lot of load on the server. So it's going to slow it down a little bit when that when that process is happening.
Michael: [37:16] Can you run? I'm not going to get into it. I was I was thinking of ways that you know, somehow WordPress and Mastodon could be integrated together, but I don't I don't know if I have the energy to explore that.
Damashe: [37:30] So I don't have the time to explore that. I think there is something there, and I'm really honestly just kinda waiting on, I think Matt, Matt WordPress, because I can't pronounce his last name correctly, but then Mellonwick, yeah, Matt WordPress has talked about, and I think there's already support low level in WordPress for the protocol that Macedon uses, which is, is it Open Pub?
Michael: [38:01] I honestly don't know.
Damashe: [38:03] Uh, crap. I just hit the wrong keyboard shortcut and I got to wait for Safari to open, open up all these windows that were in there. Yep. Yeah. Okay. You're done. All right. Now close. I got to set that shortcut back over Chrome because what about do not disturb? Oh, I'm on the objective. I did not see where this guy used to work at by the way. I was looking. What is...
Michael: [38:37] Be My Eyes and APH Connect Center, an exciting partnership.
Damashe: [38:44] Activity Pub is what it's called. So there's support for Activity Pub and WordPress because I believe, can't say friend of the show because I ain't never talked to her, but highly respected podcaster and automator, Rosemary Orchard has a microblog and I believe she's running through a WordPress installation. So instead of her going to like micro.blog, now I could be wrong about that, but I think she does. Someone for sure does, but I'm thinking it was her that I saw this set up on. So instead of going to micro.blog and paying them money to have your own domain and all of that, I think she's running her own kind of instance that allows Activity Pub connectivity. So there is something there. Me and Marty actually had a conversation about, I told him at some point I will sit down and explore the probability of setting up like a very lightweight WordPress installation on a ton of plugins or anything like that, and configure it to functionally work with microblog, microblogging through activity pubs so that people that are using microblog, whether their own self-hosted instance or using the pay-for-service or whatever, will be able to follow or whatever you do over there. I don't really understand what you do over there, But like, you know, so people can see my posts, right? I post something like, you know, hey, check out this quick tip video or whatever.
[40:09] But also have that be able to be federated directly into an account for me on the Mastodon as well. And I'm thinking since you can go that way, you should also be able to post something to Mastodon and have that published to a micro blog set up. So it's something to explore. Absolutely don't have the time for it right now. Got any ideas of you found somebody on YouTube who's done it or you've done it or you got a GitHub, you know, reach out to us. We're glad to listen, talk about it. And if somebody's already done it and all I have to do is follow a tutorial, I would be more, I'll get it done quicker. I'll say that. that.
Michael: [40:47] That's why I appreciate the the launch bar tutorial that you post and somehow we need to we need to go back to that calendar Things some point maybe offline because then we can start strategizing publishing content Anyways that launch bar trick where you highlight an item in find or press and hold Command space and then tab to Reaper and hit enter and then all of a sudden that files in Reaper in a new project and I'm going to use chat GPT and and see if there's a way to to select multiple items and have it open multiple items on multiple tracks, because right now it just disregards everything except for I think it's the first track. Yeah, it's the first track that selected.
Damashe: [41:32] Ah, yeah, that would be.
Michael: [41:39] So that's I can give it launch bar and let it I can do a launch bar. Oh, go ahead, because he's going to bark.
Damashe: [41:46] So here's a tip to try. I haven't tried this yet with Reaper, but do the thing like you just said. So let's say you select two or three files, and then you hold down Command Space, and you tab to Reaper. Try hitting Command D on Reaper to see if dropping them on Reaper has a different aspect. Or just highlight them in Finder. Do your multiple selection thing in Finder. I bring up Launch Bar, find Reaper and hit Command D to drop that finder selection on Reaper and see if it handles it differently on import, doing it that way.
Michael: [42:24] I will try that before the end of this episode and let people know.
[42:30] Because I can copy things from Finder and drop them into Reaper just fine. And then it prompts me, do you want to create new tracks or put these on the same? It's like the same track. And so I typically just say copy or new track for each one, because that's what they are. Because typically what you want to do. Segment Your Lists
[42:52] Right. So, Demacia is on a mailing list today for an affiliate that I pay for, and someone sent out the annual, it's time to renew your membership, right? Because that's how affiliates make some of their money. In some cases, a majority of their money is their membership. And it went to everyone, which then turned into a back and forth unnecessary mess of people saying, I thought I paid you two months ago, or I thought my membership was up to date, or here's my PayPal email address. I'm glad no one sent credit card emails. If you know, well, you know what I mean, cause you've seen that type of stuff. And it had me thinking, man, the importance of segmenting your membership list, I need to sit down and do some segmentation of the Southwestern chapter of ACBO as the president, because I don't know if we have that segmentation in, and it would be valuable ways of getting it done. And I'm kind of stumbling because I'm realizing that that's something I need to do.
Damashe: [43:55] Yeah, it is important. And most situations, most software, like most email marketing software that I have used, definitely all of it that I have used, allows for segmentation and taking actions, there can be triggers of different things depending on the service.
[44:15] But yeah, I've seen this from large companies too, where they'll send you an email, and you're somehow still on a list, even though you have either purchased said product that they're trying to sell you, or you're already a customer, but they're sending you emails as though they're trying to hook you in to become a customer. But you're already getting subscription money out of me, so why am I seeing this? What else do you want me to do? I can't help you. But it comes down to segmenting people, make sure you have segments based off actions that people have taken, and also being aware of how to not send emails, depending on the system you're using, how not to send emails to people who are also in this segment, right? So something I had to do recently for a customer with Cindy is he wanted to run a new campaign, and I went and made a new list for a campaign that he started that was related to this, where he wanted people to opt in for something. And he's like, okay, well now I have the thing, they're gonna register. If they register, I would like them added to a new list. From his perspective, he kinda doesn't fully understand how everything works and how it's organized. So he'll say, a segment or a list, like whichever is gonna be the way for you to handle it. But he said, the important thing for me is I don't want people who have registered for this event to continue to get emails promoting the event.
Michael: [45:41] That's sensible, right?
Damashe: [45:43] Because that's exactly what you, you know, how that should work. He's like, can you do that? And I was like, yeah, man, it's not a problem. I said, I don't even have to make a whole other list. I said, what I'll do is I'll make a segment for people. And if they're on that segment, regardless of any other list that they may be on, I will exclude that segment from your general marketing campaign. So anybody that gets moved into that segment of this particular list won't receive an email, even if they're on two or three of your other lists that we have in here. He has been exceptionally happy with that result. The other thing I did because I'm using Cindy for him is I went in, because he's using WordPress, which made this easier. I can do it with the HTML code, but it's a bit of a pain in the butt to do it every single time. I would have made a Gravity Form, because if you listen to our prior show at all, our prior show that we were doing, you know, you have to know that gravity, you can say it with me, Gravity forms, it solves all your problems. All your problems. So I made a Gravity form and there is a Gravity form Cindy add-on available from someone. I didn't buy that or find that or whatever. All I did was, you know, it's all Gravity form. We had Gravity forms. So I installed the Gravity forms web hooks add-on and using the Cindy API, I was able to.
[47:12] When people opted in to this, filled out that form, it automatically added them to the segment of this list and then redirected him. That's the other thing. That's kind of the reason that pushed me into the Gravity Forum is that what he wanted to happen is people will opt in, however they got there, whether they found it on social media or they got it from an email campaign. They were registered for his event that he was doing on Zoom, and he wanted them to be added to a segment. And then of course, don't receive any more marketing emails about the event because they're already going. And then have them start receiving a sequence of emails to prep them for the event or whatever.
[47:51] So what made me use Gravity Forums is that he already had one list, and I was like, it makes sense to keep this list intact and just segment the people that are registering for the event. But with Cindy, I can't automatically redirect, you set your redirection to someone registering or subscribing to a list. Is set at the list level, right? I can't set that on a segment level. So if you opt into the list and I have a redirect set up for that list and I don't care how you get to that list, it's gonna redirect you to the same place. Using their HTML code. Well, with Gravity Forms, of course, with the confirmation, you can have the confirmation be a page on your WordPress site or a redirection to another link. So that's what I did there. The webhook add-on was connecting to the Cindy API and I just mapped the form field. So name went to name and Cindy, email went to email. I added another parameter to the URL for the API call for the API call that said...
[48:56] You know, add this custom field or yeah, custom field for registered and then in Cindy, it automatically moves people into the segment that says registered if they have registered, right? So that all worked great. And it got me to really thinking about, okay, I need to, you know, that is a form I can do, one for him, like, and I'm gonna show him how to do this and there's gonna be some Cindy content that I'm gonna create. Generally, but it stemmed from this customer, which is I can simply duplicate that form and show him what to change, and he can start managing his signup forms himself a little bit easier, instead of having to reach out to me every single time he needs to change a form or set up a new opt-in or whatever. So that's great. And then I started thinking about, I started poking through the API documentation a little bit more on Cindy. I'm like, huh, at some point I'm gonna get it worked out so that you can go to a Gravity Forum on the admin side of your site and create a new campaign. Select the list and segments that you want it to go to and hit Submit Forum and that will send you a new campaign.
Michael: [50:09] That's, you know where to find me to test it because that's what I would like and I bet ChatGPT will help me with making some of those WordPress things work. Although I'm a little concerned about using ChatGPT for code right this second because I'm not as qualified enough to tell the security of that, like is that code opening things up and stuff? Yeah.
Damashe: [50:31] Yeah. So I'm decent enough with PHP, most times I can look at it because anything that I've had it generate, like I can look at it and kind of tell it's doing what I think it should be doing and also that it's not randomly making the unsecure call. JavaScript, not so much. Like I don't know if I'm gonna use this at all because I don't know how this works. Let me run this in a local environment and see if it blows up anything or something.
Michael: [51:00] Hey, maybe what we should start doing is finding some code and throwing it at chat.gbt. What does this code do?
Damashe: [51:06] That's a good idea.
Michael: [51:08] See what he starts telling us. Especially with code we know what it does.
Damashe: [51:12] Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so it is important to use the features of any email marketing software that you're using. And from my perspective with Cindy, I want to make this as easy for people as possible to publish a post. And I'm probably going to start this forum out, so I will have you, Tess and Mike, to just pick a list and I'll hand, like, you have to hard code them into the Gravity Forum, Here's a pop-up, pick the list, and then slowly expand out to where I can fetch this stuff and have it automatically populate your pop-up with what your lists actually are in Cindi, because I can't pull that data from Cindi. But if I wait until it's perfect and does all of that, it'll never get done. But if I start one and say, okay, well right now you have these two lists, so when you get ready to send out a campaign, pick from one of these two lists, that'll at least get that part moving and let me know that that works and keep that going. And I'll get around to the other part, probably reach out to GravityWiz and be like, hey, I feel like populate anything should be helpful here, but I need a little bit of your help in order for this to be magic. Hey, I'm gonna send it just like that.
Michael: [52:24] Just send it like that.
Damashe: [52:26] Yeah, exactly that. To help me make this magic.
Michael: [52:30] They, you should open drafts and start that message now because we're gonna wrap up the show here in a minute. But they talk about how they're solving problems for the customers and you're paying for it. And I told someone the other day, I said, you know, I find myself now trying to give customer service a try because doing customer service for as long as I have, I realized not all customer service experiences are horrible. Unfortunately, a majority of them for me in the past have been, but lately I've been actually getting help and I'm like, hey, that saved me, you know, 30 minutes ago to look through your documentation and the headache of not wanting to do it and frustration and stuff.
Damashe: [53:12] So third tip for today, at least give customer service for a company a try. Because like you, I've had a lot of bad. Now I could really narrow down and target a specific, a few specific areas of companies that seem to have terrible customer service still, but I won't. What I will say is give your customer service a try. Because like for me, with the team at Gravity Wiz, which is a set of plugins that I pay for, they're not, you know, inexpensive.
[53:46] But for paying for the level of support that I get, one is priority support, which is always great to know that you know, it's a good feeling. That's a good word to put into your marketing material if you do customer service. Like, hey, if you pay for this level, you get priority support. It makes me feel great to know when I email you, my email is gonna hit the top of your inbox or the top of your ticketing system or whatever. Is gonna get flagged, like you gotta see me right now, as opposed to someone just asking a random question that just wants to kick the tires of your product, basically, because we get those too. Where it's like, well, can you tell me all about this? And what does that do? Okay, thank you. It's like, you ain't bought nothing.
[54:23] Give customer service a try, though. My experience with Gravity Wheels has been great, and my experience with a lot of different companies has been great. Even sometimes I have reached out to a couple of companies I'm like, hey, listen, I'm trying to do this thing. Little help would be appreciated. A little bit more detailed than that, but no, some help would be appreciated. And they may come back with a, here's a link to a support document that tells you how to do this. But the difference in that versus just, here's a link to documentation, in my experience recently, and most of these have been admittedly either software as a service company, Stripe, or a plugin developer. But the difference is, one, the email is very cordial and personal, but it's not just a random, you know, auto-generated response. And two, they point out, like, what the document is going to explain to me, but they're like, if you have any more questions, follow up. But here's the actual document, step by step, that we wrote that tells you how to do the thing that you're trying to do. And it's like, okay, good. I didn't go look at the documentation first. Because I was like, this seems like one of those weird things where it's not going to be well explained. And then I'm like, oh, they explained it very well.
Michael: [55:26] Yep.
Damashe: [55:31] So give customer service a try. So you've gotten three tips throughout this episode. That's the third one. Take a shot at customer service. I know, I know, you're an internet provider, you're a cell phone company. Their customer service is horrible most of the time.
Michael: [55:45] Most of the, and then you get that one agent that I told her when she fixed our account, so I don't owe as much as I owed. And she helped me get everything figured out. I'm like, why did it take at least five times calling customer service to get a return label to get this issue solved. Like I know what you can do. People just don't try sometimes and then that becomes frustrating. And then it's an endless cycle because you're frustrated the next time you contact customer service and I don't podcast about psychology. So do you have anything else to see?
Damashe: [56:17] Nope. You can find us on your own pay.com slash T W is where you can get the show. There will be also a feedback form there if you have any feedback first remember that we are looking for your suggestions on Ways to set up toggle if you listen to last week's episode You know that we're trying to figure at least I'm trying to figure out that was the best way to structure my toggle So did it make sense for the kind of business of me? And how are you using it? I also look for your feedback as to whether or not we choose to go with discord or slack or some other other twist. We're not doing twist. If you say twist, I'm going to probably block your IP address from the West.
Michael: [57:03] Just so you know.
Damashe: [57:05] And no, you cannot appeal to Michael to fix it because he can't. No, no twist, no twist. But, you know, this cord slack or something else. Somebody recently mentioned Matrix to me, which is something I have not looked into at all.
Michael: [57:19] I've never heard of it.
Damashe: [57:22] I have heard of it, but I've never looked into it So, you know if you got if you got some, you know suggestions about something we can use for our future community that we're gonna build Pass those along any other suggestions feedback about show We're always happy to take that even if it's gonna kid or system, you know Just don't curse because we don't curse here on this show At least the Reaper Lisa not according to what you hear anyway. Yes Yes. Yes.
Michael: [57:47] If you do want to hear cursing, you can pay us to hear cursing. We'll figure that out in the future.
Damashe: [57:52] So, Yeah.
Michael: [57:53] You know pay.com slash TW.
Damashe: [57:54] Yep. And that'll get you there. Also, you can follow us on, wait, is it follow?
Michael: [58:02] Yes. It's follow on Mastodon, if that's where you're going with that.
Damashe: [58:06] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. See, I don't, I don't know how Mastodon works. First, if you do choose to do this, don't be offended if I don't reply to you. It's probably because I don't know you said anything. Just be patient, I'll get back to it eventually. Or as I always say, you can always, no, I'm not gonna. But I'm on Mastodon at damasi at twit.social. And Michael currently is at, so actually I'm gonna make this a lot easier for everybody.
Michael: [58:36] Cause we don't have to do this every week.
Damashe: [58:39] You can do that or, or what you can do also, you can go to Michael.yourownpay.com, and that'll take you to wherever Michael's server is and you can go to Damacy.yourownpay.com.
Michael: [58:48] And take you to wherever I am on Mastodon. Yep, I like it, I like it.
Damashe: [58:55] Now, when I say go there, just to follow this up, see? See what I mean about Mastodon? You always gotta throw in the extra little bits, but make sure we're clear. You're not looking for that on Mastodon. You're gonna type that into your browser, Michael.yourownpay.com. That is going to redirect you to Michael's profile on whatever Macedon instance he happens to be on. Same applies for me. Demasi.yourownpay.com will redirect you wherever I happen to be. Because who knows, by the time this publishes that original URL I gave you, I may have moved. So, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I think that's as smart as when you do this. I think that's what made me come up with the idea because you mentioned earlier that you're moving. I don't know if that's gonna make it in the show, but I know that Michael is planning to move to a different instance. So yeah, I think that is the most clever thing to do. So there's a fourth bonus tip for you. If you are on Mastodon and you have your own domain, like think about just using your domain to redirect people to your profile and they can follow you from there. So that way if you ever move, they don't lose you.
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