For the past five years or so, I've gone to the MADE bike show in Portland every summer, which showcases custom bike builders, people who make related products, and suppliers for frame builders. It runs through Sunday and if you're in the area and love bikes, I would say by all means go and marvel at the sights. Here are some of my favorite things from the show.

There were dozens of one-man frame building shops with interesting designs. I loved the creative use of small tubing on this frame and fork.

No. 22 is one of my favorite new builders because they really nail the custom finishes and make a whole bike with matching fenders look well thought out. These are high end, builds that likely cost about 10 grand but they look really incredible with the integrated paint jobs.

Every year there's a paint trend that blows my mind and this year it was multicolored stuff that was so wild I honestly don't know how someone made it. It could have been sponges or using salts in the paint, but I think it might be hydrodipping. There were half a dozen bikes with paint schemes like this, that looked like they were hand brushed under a clear coat.

The first custom bike I ever got was built by Mike DeSalvo in Ashland, Oregon and I was stoked to see him again, this time with a flat bar gravel bike that matched his Baja bug.

Chatting with Mike, I learned this was his first car that he learned to drive in the early 1990s, which he found for sale a couple years ago and bought back. Now he's restoring it how we wished he could have back when he was a teen (so far it's got the big 1800cc bus engine in it for power and speed).

32" wheels are all the rage and personally, as much as I hate how the bike industry urges everyone to try a new wheel size every few years (along with a new bike to go with it), I am looking forward to someday having a 32" wheeled gravel bike because for tall people like me, we have to run big ugly frames and I can't wait to get a bike with a normal-looking sized frame on it with the giant wheels.

I loved this 80s looking red bike that reminded me of a Murray BMX bike from a Sears catalog and the red, white, and blue one really had a nice NASCAR vibe with the paint and the sponsor stickers.

There were vendors selling parts related to these builds with lots of custom bag makers, but I really loved the colors that Ortelib was showing off this year. I used them for touring the Oregon Coast ten years ago and loved my bags (but mine were plain black).

There was a big contingent of builders and parts suppliers from Japan, including this Sim Works booth that replicated the small shop in Tokyo by the same name with lots of shirts and parts for sale.

The MADE show is pretty fun and there are about a hundred different bikes to look at from dozens of different builders. They also feature parts suppliers for builds including metal manufacturers, which always cracks me up. You might be looking at a custom Mosaic Titanium bike and the next booth over is a steel tubing manufacturer that's talking directly to budding frame builders. It's an interesting mix of bikes built by eccentric people for specific purposes, high end bikes built for demanding clients, and then all the materials you need to custom build your own frames, all under one roof.

A couple years ago, GM made waves by saying that soon, all their new cars would be completely free of Apple's CarPlay and Android Auto support, instead opting for the "Android Automotive OS" in their cars.

Admittedly, I'm a huge fan of CarPlay for basic safety reasons and how it lets you hear or send texts without ever having to look at or touch your phone, so I was not happy to hear this news. I remember when this was first announced for Chevy EVs and when it was later expanded to all their cars in the future and the resounding response was that car buyers were PISSED.

Chevy claimed they were doing this for privacy reasons, that none of your driving or phone data would go to Apple any longer, but instead it would all go to Google (who would likely share it with General Motors, the owners of Chevy).

Chevy seemed to ignore the uproar from their fans and went ahead with it anyway, and as far as I can tell, all 2025 Chevy electric vehicles shipped with the Android Auto OS and don't interface with your phone beyond bluetooth or let you see CarPlay or AndroidAuto apps on your dash.

The accidental A/B test

Honda, much like Toyota and Subaru, didn't have a robust EV research and development program and kind of lagged behind their rival auto companies on selling EVs, so they partnered with other auto brands to rebadge, rebrand, and resell versions of cars made by other companies.

One case in point is the Honda Prologue EV. It's a partnership between Honda and Chevrolet, where the Prologue is basically a Chevy Blazer EV with Honda badges, slight visual differences in the sheetmetal and interior, but all the underpinnings are straight up Chevy. Even though the keys say Honda on a Prologue, it's a General Motors key design with a Honda logo over it.

But one big difference the Prologue has from the Blazer it is based on is this: it includes Apple CarPlay and Android Auto integration.

The car industry accidentally did something I've always wanted to see, which was to release basically the same car under two brands and models, with one major consumer-facing difference. It's kind of remarkable how good of a experimental design this is, since the performance and driving characteristics of both cars are identical, but drivers in one model get a major phone integration the others do not.

So how did that work out for Chevy?

You can look up actual sales numbers in GM and Honda's annual reports of sales they're required to publish to investors, and here are the results for the last 2.5 years they've both been sold in the US:

Note: The 2026 figures cover January through June and are not full-year totals.

The last column on the right is the most telling. For the years these cars were sold together, the Honda outsold the Blazer by 43%, 73%, and 166% in each time period. Today in 2026, people are buying a Honda Prologue over one and a half times more often than the Chevy Blazer EV the Prologue is based on.

Of the total number of EV sales between the two brands, here's a graph of how many sold were Hondas (orange) and how many were Chevys (blue):

Give consumers a choice, and they'll take the best option

Drivers want more options for how they interact with their devices, and they are increasingly preferring to buy a Chevy covered in Honda badges that comes with phone integrations instead of buying the actual Chevy the Honda is based on, which lacks it.

I wonder if Chevy will ever backpedal from their choice to remove CarPlay and Android Auto? Drivers seem to be voting with their dollars on the question, and they're voting favorably in one direction on this issue.

Now that the market has spoken loud and clear, will General Motors listen?

(This post inspired by a toot my pal Pat wrote months ago that made me want to look up the latest sales figures today)

The first time the Honda Fit made me stop and think "huh, maybe that is a useful car?" was when I read this review at Cool Tools where it sounded like it was as handy as a small truck, got over 30mpg, and was reliable as hell.

Then I got to sit in one at an auto show. It's roomy and visibility is great. It's really incredible how much bigger it feels inside for such a small car, plus the "magic seat" in the rear can fold down or completely up, giving you ample space for large things you'd never think could fit in a Fit (I guess that's why they gave it that name?).

For years after, whenever anyone I know needed a cheap, reliable, safe car for their newly-licensed driving kids, I'd give the same answer: just buy a used Honda Fit. I know several friends that followed this advice and I've never heard any complaints.

The funny thing is that I didn't even know Honda stopped making them until 2022 when a friend asked which small car would be perfect to use in a city and I suggested they get a new Fit. The last time I looked at the Honda Fit was around 2020, the last year it was sold in the US. The top tier model, the EX-L, came with leather and heated front seats, which was kind of remarkable for a car that only cost about $20,000 new. My friend was bummed there were no more new Fits and ended up buying a Toyota instead.

Inexpensive doesn't always mean cheap

The Honda Fit is a unique car, in that it was inexpensive, but still built relatively well for its price. It's highly reliable, and nothing about it feels cheap. The gas tank only holds 10 gallons, so it doesn't cost much to fill up and drive. It's downright dignified how a growing family can buy one without being forced to replace it in a few years from normal use like other truly cheap cars.

The Honda Fit sold really well for Honda, with about 750,000 units sold in the US between 2007 and 2020. I see them everywhere now that I spent a few months researching a purchase.

Things to look for when buying a used Fit

Two generations of Honda Fit were sold in the US, but I wanted the most recent version, which was sold as the 2015-2020 model years. It's still big inside for its size, and has good safety ratings.

My general advice when buying any used car is to look for a high trim model, because when you're comparing used cars today, getting all the options might only cost you a few hundred bucks over another used base model car. But when these cars were new, the cost of extra options might have been several thousand dollars. To get the most comfortable car I could, I looked for only the EX or EX-L models (the EX-L only came in an automatic).

After reading a great number of reddit and honda forums, here were my rules of thumb when searching for one to buy:

• A Fit can go for 200,000-300,000 miles easily with routine maintenance, so I was looking for a 2015-2020 model with around 100,000 miles on it for around $10,000.
• I think it's important to buy one with a clean title. Whenever I searched Facebook Marketplace for one, almost all the good deals were for Fits that were previously in an accident. Salvage titles aren't necessarily a death sentence, but when you're searching for a car, you might as well avoid ones that suffered an accident, especially when you can't tell how severe an accident was.
• I even searched CoPart local auctions and you can see where all the Honda Fits that were in accidents are coming from, but I never found one I thought I could fix cheaply myself.
• Honda Fits with a clean title are easily found at dealers on their used lots as trade-in cars, and I used Visor.vin to track good examples down.
• Dealers charge a lot for a used Honda Fit! There are even examples of people selling a used Honda Fit today for more than the cost of the car's original sticker price.
• I found non-Honda dealers typically sold them cheaper than Honda dealers.
• You have to move fast. When a good deal came around on a Honda Fit at a local dealer, it was sold before I could even test drive it the next day.
• There are about 1,000 Honda Fits for sale nationwide from dealers on Visor.vin and I set it up to get a daily email with new listings that I would check each morning.
• I found a Honda Fit in Idaho that met my needs and I was the first customer to call about it when it hit their lot. The next day, the dealer had people from Minnesota and Florida interested in buying it, so I purchased it online before I even got to test drive it. This was something I've never done before but I already lost out on three other Honda Fits I wanted, but sold too quickly.
• Many dealers pay for CarFax reports on their cars. If you can view one for free, definitely check it out, and look at its maintenance history. If previous owners mostly serviced them at a Honda dealer, you can trust the car was well taken care of and will likely be reliable since Honda mechanics regularly touched the car during its life. If you mostly see them getting oil changes at a Jiffy Lube, some basic maintenance was probably skipped.
• Visor.vin lets you search for every specific option, so if your heart is set on the cool but weird purple color, or the awesome orange paint that Honda Fits came in, you can limit your searches to those.

Engine wise, here are things I learned:

• The 2015-2016 models can have injector problems but Honda did a recall to replace them (the cost of new injectors is about $1,000 with labor) so be sure one you are buying already got the recall work done.
• Ask a seller to record a video of a cold start of a 2015-2020 Honda Fit you are considering. If you hear a loud 1-to-2-second rattling or grinding noise, that's a failing VTC (Variable Timing Control) actuator, which is another $1,000 repair.
• For a real cold start video, ask them to record turning the engine on so you can hear the engine come to life, then have them pan over to show the dashboard where you should see a blue temperature icon warning that the car is cold. If you see the blue icon you know they really recorded it after letting the car sit for 8+ hours
• The automatic CVT transmission can have issues in the 2015-2020 models. If you don't maintain them, they fail and I saw several used Fits with replaced transmissions. The consensus on reddit is that if you do a fluid flush on the CVT every 50,000 miles (instead of the suggested 100,000 miles) the car will run well forever.
• Personally, I avoided the CVT problems by only looking for a manual transmission Fit, but on Visor.vin, there are only about 50 manual Fits for sale nationwide at any time, making the process of finding one more challenging. Plus, driving a slow car feels fast when you get to pick the gears.

In terms of interior electronics, I learned:

• CarPlay was only available on the 2018-2020 model years, in the EX, EX-L, or Sport trims. The LX base model never came with CarPlay.
• For 2015-2017 model years, you can swap out the stock stereo with a 2015-2016 Honda CRV touchscreen stereo if you buy a no-navigation model, then update its firmware to add CarPlay. I found one from a junkyard on eBay for about $150.
• All the plugs are shared between the Honda Fit and the Honda CRV of those years, so it's seamless and every feature like the backup and blind spot cameras will work.

The verdict? It's a solid car

So far I've tinted the windows and bought an old CRV radio to get CarPlay into it. Next, I'm putting a small amp, subwoofer, and updated door speakers to make it sound better.

I bought this car for a family friend who needed something reliable that was cheap to drive.

When I drove it off the lot, I got a low fuel warning, and filling it up only cost me about $30 for 8 gallons of fuel. The car got over 35mpg on the way home so I didn't even need to fill up again for my 250 mile return trip.

It's a bummer Honda stopped selling the Fit in the US, as it was a popular, reliable, inexpensive car. I assume they made better margins on more expensive models like the Honda CRV and they focused on those instead, since they not only halted production of the Fit, but also the HRV, which was a subcompact crossover that shared the same engine and chassis as the Fit.

When the pandemic hit, the gym I worked out at closed down for almost a year. I was used to working out a couple times a week with a trainer leading me and it wasn't about huge gains or getting ripped, as we mostly did body weight exercises focused on building core strength. I found out quickly that having a strong core meant whenever I did something out of the ordinary, I would rarely feel sore afterwards, which was a new feeling as a middle-aged person.

I go snowboarding about once every 4-5 years. In the old days, I would do it and have fun but feel totally wrecked the next day. But a couple years after doing regular workouts, if I went snowboarding, I'd feel fine the next day. It was pretty amazing and kept me going to the gym for my entire 40's.

Early in the COVID shutdown, I bought a Bowflex PR1100 on amazon for $400 to setup in my barn due to the closed gym. By late summer of 2020, I would see the exact same Bowflex listed on Amazon for $1200.

I knew a Bowflex wasn't exactly like spending an hour in a well-appointed gym with a trainer, but I followed a bunch of the suggested workouts on the Bowflex YouTube account, and eventually found a video for a whole body workout that left me feeling pretty close to how I did when I left a real gym.

Things go fallow

For a couple months of early COVID, I'd head to my barn and pull up the YouTube video with headphones on, watch the first exercise to check my form, then pause it and do the exercise set after switching back to music. When I was done with each exercise, I'd go back to YouTube, unpause it, watch a few seconds, then go back to music, and repeat.

After a few months I got lazy and stopped working out. I eventually returned to my old trainer and gym but after a couple more years, his landlord kicked him out of the space and I have been gym-free for the past few years and not feeling too good about it.

A rare good work of AI

At my last freelance gig, we were constantly encouraged by management to experiment with AI and report findings back to the group. I was trying to think outside the box and one of my ideas was to ask Claude to turn the workout video I followed into a PDF printout that I could glance at instead of using YouTube. But I did want to track how much of the weight bands I was using each time, so I thought maybe a whiteboard would work better instead?

I sent the video link to Claude and described what I wanted, but Claude was blocked from accessing YouTube. So I used a random YouTube download script to make a local copy of the video, which I uploaded to Claude, and gave it the same prompt.

Claude proposed a web app on my local server written in PHP, with clips of each exercise turned into animated GIFs, along with a rudimentary weight tracker with graphing. I was surprised at how well it guessed at what I wanted and the first draft of what it came up with was honestly amazing.

I've used AI for coding help like this a bunch ever since and this early experience was one of the best ones I've had to date, and one of the examples I use when talking with skeptical friends about how technically interesting AI can be for building custom personal software.

You can take a horse to water but you can't make them drink

It was nearly a year ago when I got the first version of this web app working, but of course, I continued to let the Bowflex gather dust under a pile of boxes in my barn instead of using it to workout.

A couple weeks ago, I decided to revisit the project in ChatGPT's Codex. I didn't like that it was one giant web page of 9 exercises and I wanted a more mobile-friendly layout with "cards" I could step through one at a time so I could concentrate on one exercise at a time.

Soon I had a revised local web app doing exactly what I wanted, and I actually hit my home gym last week and I've done 3 workouts since, and I have to say it's been pretty incredible.

I pull up a bookmark in mobile safari, watch an already running animated GIF of the exercise being done with proper form, along with whatever weights I used the last workout. I do the set, then submit the same weight or a higher one if I changed it, then the next exercise loads and it repeats. It's really easy to use as I step through 9 total exercises in about 20 minutes while listening to music.

Here are some screenshots of the app in action.

I actually missed the gym?

Working out as an adult frequently seems like telling a kid to take a bath. Kids hate the idea of it, protest doing it, but when they finally do, they love it. After a handful of sessions in my makeshift home gym with my little web app, I feel tons better. I used to hate going to a real gym, but having one walking distance from bed somehow makes the excuses to not workout harder to ignore, so I do it.

I remember when I was going hard at a gym ten years ago so much so that I always felt some part of my body was torn up and exhausted, and I used to think about how pointless the gym seemed on the face of it. You'd go to a place and pick up objects that are so heavy they tear your muscles up every time and then you come back in a couple days and do it again, and then repeat forever. I always walked around feeling slightly sore and like my body was trying to catch up and recover from the stupid things I was picking up too often.

Today after a few years without regular strength workouts, I realize now I actually missed that feeling. It feels great to finish a workout. But I also feel good in the hours after a workout and the next day, knowing I'm tearing myself up a little bit while my body builds itself back up stronger.

It's only been a couple weeks so obviously, I'm not going to feel invincible if I went snowboarding tomorrow, but I feel like having this helpful app and a regular routine is going to make recovery from unusual events much easier in the future.

When I was a teen, my dad had a knack for talking small businesses he frequented into hiring me as their newest lowest rung helper. To be clear, I didn't want these jobs, so I developed a knack for staying at them for three days. I don’t know why it was three days but it always was. I went through half a dozen jobs over the course of my freshman high school summer, back when my dad yelled at me for being useless because I wasn’t hitting the pavement looking for work the moment I turned 14.

The various jobs were odd. Once I made meatball subs at an Italian restaurant until 2am as a 15 year old (technically against child labor laws). I worked briefly at a Jiffy Lube cleaning up the place until my third day when I accidentally walked into a car lift, cut a gash into my head, and then used the main bathroom to wash up all the blood in front of customers.

About half of the jobs, I was incompetent at and not interested in learning to do better so I was asked to leave, but the other half I could tell were bad jobs I didn't enjoy doing so I quit at the three day mark.

My first real job that I wanted for myself was one I kept for a couple years during the tail end of high school, working at a bike shop. As a bike kid, this was the dream job that all my bike riding friends did as well. They were mostly in it for the steep shop discounts on parts that we constantly broke at local jumps and ramp parks, and since we all knew how to fix our own bikes, being paid to fix other people's bikes was easy part time work that still gave you time to ride bikes.

I couldn't find an opening at my favorite shops so I ended up at the third shop in my little town, the one I went to least. It was run by an old guy who was obsessed with his computer and his 30-something son that ran the front of the shop, and I came on as a low level mechanic to assemble new bikes, fix things on old bikes, and do light sales in the showroom.

Lessons from labor

I didn't enjoy the old man that owned the place. He gave off creepy vibes and he treated everyone like crap, constantly giving us lectures that he thought were pep talks. If anyone did something wrong at work, there would be an instant all-employee meeting where he'd dress down the person in front of everyone in hopes that none of us would ever make the same mistake again. I could tell even back then as a kid, this wasn't an ideal approach to managing.

The old man also did weird vindictive stuff like force us to cut up all our bike boxes before throwing them out. Typically a busy bike shop builds 10-20 bikes a week and they come in these huge 4x8 foot boxes that are about a foot deep. People would raid the dumpster for the boxes to use them for storage or moving, and honestly, it seemed harmless to let people have them, but we had to take a razor blade and cut them into many pieces before tossing them out, just to waste the boxes (we didn’t even recycle back then).

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When I got my first paycheck I saw I was paid below minimum wage, which I didn't think was possible, given the name, MINIMUM. Then I learned 1980s California labor laws said if you were under 18, you could be classified as a probationary worker and get 50 cents less per hour for up to 90 days at any new role, so I made $2.75 instead of $3.25/hr for the first three months.

The one perk I looked forward to was buying new bike parts cheap. Most bike shop employees I rode with said the standard was getting to buy parts at dealer cost, or at worst, a shop might add 10% overhead. So that meant a $100 retail bike part would typically cost an employee $50-60. But the old man set our discount at 10%, which was better than nothing, but not by much.

For a brief few years (mostly high school and early college) I didn't own a personal computer and stayed away from them unless I had to. It was at this bike shop that I got to experience the future of computing from the shop owner.

He read PC magazines all day and was constantly working on a store database package that I suspect he wanted to sell to other shops as commercial software. It was way ahead of its time because we always knew exactly how many Chris King headsets were in the display case because the terminal said so.

But I remember the employee meeting where we got our own tracking code to type in whenever we helped a customer, then I remember later on when the owner showed me his monitor which had the total amount he'd ever paid me in hourly wages against the total sales I'd racked up. I think I was selling parts at about two times more than I ever cost the shop, so I wasn't yelled at, but I didn't feel great seeing my job reduced to a spreadsheet cell.

I used to tell friends I felt like a gallon of milk being sold at a grocery store with an audible scan and beep, as I used a terminal to clock in and out, handle repair payments and record sales using my code.

I got out of school each day around 2:30pm so I only worked from 3pm to 6pm which was when the shop closed, and I tried to be a good worker until the day the old man yelled at me for fixing bikes all the way up to 6pm. I thought the mantra was be the first one to show up and last one to leave as the best way to show you were a dedicated employee, but the old man shouted that I need to wind down my tasks ten minutes before 6pm each day so he could lock up instantly at six o’clock.

Being low on the totem pole, I did whatever they asked me to, so I would vacuum the shop every day and rearrange bikes and check the locks on the outside bikes on the curb and bring them in each night.

One of the worst off-label things I had to do was the night the old man had friends stop by as they were all going out to a dinner and a play and he told me to wash his car, and then also his friend's car. There was something really annoying about being in the hot sun washing cars you don't own while old guys watch through a window, periodically telling you that you're doing something wrong and need to redo it. I remember being happy when they finally drove off.

Depth perception? Never heard of her.

I remember the worst day at that job. The old man was reading business magazines and saw an article that said a brighter store would lead to higher sales so my job on a long weekend day was to replace every overhead fluorescent bulb with a higher wattage one and scrub out the light fixtures of any dust so it would cast maximum brightness (for maximum sales!).

It was a big shop and I spent a whole day on top of a 8 foot ladder, precariously reaching up to pull down light tubes, grab a pail and sponge and wash out the fixture, then put new bulbs in. The old man helped by standing at the base of the ladder to yell at me. I wasn't getting enough water on my sponge to scrub the still-electrified light fixtures. I was moving too slowly. I needed to get old bulbs out and new ones in faster. No, faster than whatever it was I was doing.

There was one moment that completely broke me. I was born blind in one eye and I don‘t technically have working depth perception, but my brain makes do and I’m mostly ok estimating things based on shadows and light. Occasionally, something will appear in a way I can't see any context and I'm pretty hopeless. One example is if you put a empty glass a couple feet in front of me on a table with nothing behind and ask me to place a straw into the glass without moving my head or body, I will very likely miss the glass entirely with a straw.

That day I realized there was something about 4 foot long tube lights, the all white light fixtures, and trying to get two little electrical prongs on each end to click in just so while also teetering high above a ladder that caused me to constantly miss hooking up the new lights, and the old man was letting me have it. I tried to tell him this was a weird vision thing for me and I wasn't purposely trying to stay on top of a ladder putting lights in for hours.

When I finally got off work that day, I had to pack up all the old bulbs into boxes and gently place them into our store dumpster because if I broke even one, the old man told me he'd get an extra bill on top of his garbage collection.

The retaliation

I remember going to my best friend's house after work, who happened to work for the old man and his son at the same shop a few years before I did. I was sore from head to toe and I told him all about the old man screaming at me to go faster when I couldn't really do the job correctly because of my weird vision problems.

My friend listened to all the details of my day. Then he asked me when I worked again, and I said I was off for a couple of days. He asked if the light bulbs were still in the dumpster and I said yeah, then he said let's grab our bikes and ride down there right now.

I didn't know what my friend was planning but I played along and when we got to the shop it was probably about 11pm. He shared his elaborate plan: we’d take each of the old long fluorescent tubes, slide them through the mail slot on the front door of the shop, then launch them into the air to fall into the shop. That was the whole plan. I appreciated the simplicity of it.

I was a rule-follower from the day I was born and a straight A student, but that day of work truly broke me. I hated the old man and how he treated everyone and especially so with my sore shoulders and getting yelled at for my own disability. My friend always came up with crazy schemes like this that I usually ignored or talked him out of, but this time it sounded justified.

I will never forget the first light tube. Thankfully it fit through the mail slot in the door, and I got about 75% of the bulb through, angled it up to 45º, then I reared back and shoved the end of it through with all my might.

It floated through the air in slow motion, in a perfect, impossibly high arc. Eventually, the trajectory lead to the sales floor, where dozens of new bikes were parked. The moment a light tube made contact with the bikes, it exploded in a burst of white powdery gas and glass shards going in all directions that rivaled the greatest fireworks I'd ever witnessed.

"GIVE ME ANOTHER ONE!" was my immediate response.

I don't think I knew what the word "catharsis" meant at age 17 but I knew I felt great for the first time in months. All the dehumanizing treatment and yelling and frustration that I endured for the past year vaporized as each light tube exploded inside the shop. Eventually I grew tired of launching light bulbs so my friend took over and launched the rest into the shop until we were completely out of tube lights from the dumpster.

We sat and enjoyed our work from outside the shop as the moon's light reflected in glittery glass shards all over the floor. I rode home exhausted, and went to school like normal on Monday morning.

The aftermath

It's funny, but even as a goody two shoes life-long rule follower, I knew what I did was very, very wrong, and I had lots of guilt, mostly about how my coworkers had to clean up my mess. But I also knew to keep my mouth shut for the first time in my life.

I went to work a couple days later on my normal schedule and never brought up "the incident" until a coworker filled me in. I acted surprised and asked about the cleanup but they said it was fine, as they just rolled all the bikes outside and spent a couple hours vacuuming up glass before putting things back in order. I remember the old man's son wondered how someone even knew there were light bulbs in the dumpster that night but the shop was subject to random acts of vandalism several times a year and they chalked it up to that and I never heard it mentioned again.

The funny part is that I continued working at the shop for another year, tolerating the old man’s antics while having a better opinion of his son, since I knew what he went through. I never lashed out again, and only quit when I graduated high school and moved away to start community college.

Last week I drove down to Ventura and LA to visit with friends and family. Here are some highlights.

Adamson House

The Adamson House is known as the "Taj Mahal of Tile" because the owners owned a nearby ceramics factory when it was being built and filled it to the brim with incredible tiles.

I'd never heard of it, but when my aunt mentioned it, I was down because any time you can tour a house owned by someone that owned a tile company, you will NEVER be disappointed that they didn't use enough varieties of tile.

The home was a summer cottage for a wealthy family and it's situated in a perfect spot, just off from Surfrider beach, on 13 acres of waterfront.

The grounds were incredible and after a slight snafu, we caught the first docent-lead tour of the home right after it opened up for the day (only $7/person since it's a state park and not a for profit enterprise!).

Our guide told the long story of the family that was basically so rich they bought 17,000 acres on the coast and effectively owned all of Malibu themselves, but over 20 years they burned their family's fortune fighting lawsuits so they could bar anyone from entering their property and have Malibu all to themselves. The guide told the story as if the owners of the house were the heroes of the journey but I think our docent sensed the vibes of us and another family that we were glad the owners lost their Supreme Court case and a rich family didn't get to own dozens of miles of pristine coastline so the state of California built highway 1 right through their giant ranch.

It was also funny to learn the ceramics company was a fluke, that the family was running out of money fighting court battles for so long that they searched for oil reserves on their property but found they had really dense clays that were ideal for ceramics, then started a tile company a mile away from this house, and used the house as a showroom for the work.

Oddly, we were prohibited from taking any photos of the interior, which is a shame because that's where most of the magic was. But here are some more tile on the outside photos.

It's wild that one family could own all of Malibu at one time and were so fiercely protective that they had armed guards on horseback patrolling the land kicking people off of it. The tour didn't answer too many questions about who exactly the family bought the land from, and what rights those people had to it (the further I dug down later, the more it seems Spain just decreed it was theirs in the 1800s then sold it off to wealthy ranchers).

The family fought the state of California for another 50+ years after to try and keep the place to themselves, but I'm glad in the end the house wasn't bulldozed and instead put on the national registry of historic places so anyone can take an affordable tour of it today. It really was an incredible house with minimal wear and tear or damage even though it was built in a beautiful but fragile spot right on the beach. It's a marvel that it looks so good after 100 years of the elements (the tiles inside in the bathrooms are still wildly vibrant in color).

Post-tour, we got lunch at Duke's in Malibu and I had a pretty great Hawaiian plate lunch in a ridiculously beautiful spot right on the water.

Fires

Driving down, I stayed in Medford, Oregon which is near a 30,000+ acre fire that has been going for several weeks, and the whole town smelled like a campfire with air quality to match. On my way home, I saw something new that I suspect will become commonplace soon: warnings in map apps saying my trip home might be delayed by wildfire closures. Lucky for me, the 5 freeway wasn't closed even though there was a hundred acre fire near it that I never ended up seeing.

Up near Medford on the way home, I got a glimpse near sunset of a fire's smoke pouring over a mountain which gave the whole valley a kind of incredible atmospheric look to the horizon.

It kinda sucks this is the new normal for summers in the West, but I guess we need to get used to it.

For months, I’ve heard rumblings about a cool new game coming out from the people that did the Untitled Goose Game. Last month, I was lucky enough to get to play it in a beta test version with four friends in the same room, working together on screen.

It’s called Big Walk and it’s officially out starting today.

It’s a fun premise and had entirely new-to-me game mechanics. You have to get a few friends and agree to all play the game together at a set time, and everyone has to have good headphones and a microphone.

You’re dropped into a strange place and together you and your friends have to figure out ways to use any objects you find, along with figuring out the various rules of the space, and the audio aspect of it is key to the whole game’s design.

Talking to friends is the only way to figure things out, but the audio is highly directional and degrades quickly if you put any distance between you and your friends. So you have to stick together somewhat.

In my test game, we got dropped onto an island and we figured out quickly we needed to find a few objects to unlock a puzzle, and your first inclination is to shout out “hey everyone, let’s split up and all go find stuff” but once you’re a few feet away from your colleagues you can’t hear them at all. That means if you do find something cool or figure out something new, you have to find others to tell them. And when people start scattering across the game, it gets infinitely more difficult to find your friends again.

I only got to play it for an hour with friends and it was really fun. I can’t wait to get a copy of it, schedule time with friends, and play out the whole game together.

Check it out, you won’t be disappointed.

I spent my first 30 years growing up in California, and the state abounded with great architecture, even though California isn't generally that old of a place. There is the Gamble House in Pasadena, the Case Study houses in Palm Springs, and then all the midcentury modern stuff in Bel Air and Hollywood Hills I'd see back when I worked at UCLA. Santa Barbara's mission style is so strong that every building for miles around looks identical to the next in white stucco, arched doors and windows, and red tile roofs. When I lived in San Francisco, I especially loved the Palace of Fine Arts but I also lived a couple blocks from the Painted Ladies. There's even a few Frank Lloyd Wright buildings dotted around the state.

As I got older and traveled to different parts of the country, I enjoyed seeing things I'd never seen before but were considered common in other places. Stuff like soapstone countertops in New England kitchens that were sourced from local quarries, or how driveways are often paved with oyster shells whenever I was in a coastal fishing town. The first time I went to Austin for SXSW, I loved how every house seemed to have a foundation carved out of local limestone and how great it looked in the Texas sun under every home.

Maybe ten years ago, I was in Seattle and walked past a new house being built, and they were using some veneer stone on the outside that looked like Texas limestone, but it looked weird in the context of Douglas Firs and Western Red Cedars. In a damp, green place, the white stone looked out of place.

Ever since, I'm keen to notice when a building looks like it's from somewhere else. It makes me stop and wonder why someone chose a material that wasn't local or followed a building style from a faraway land.

There's a building in Northwest Portland, near 19th and Kearney streets that always looked out of place to me. I dug into my photo archives and I've snapped random shots of it over the past decade, at first because it looked so unusual for Portland.

To give you an idea of why the building stuck out, the photo above shows buildings across the street from the odd one. The rest of the neighborhood looks more like a bunch of generic offices you might see on an east coast college campus.

The roof in particular is what stuck out most to me. There are almost zero tile roofs in Oregon, and stuff like stucco or plaster on the outsides of buildings is equally rare. The building looks way more Spanish Colonial Revival than any other place in Portland so it made me wonder: why is this here? What is the story behind it?

Years ago, I learned some friends worked in the building so I finally got to see the interiors, and it's even more unique on the inside. The inside is industrial, with exposed concrete and vault-like doors in hallways between buildings. Super weird, considering the outside design, right?

Eventually, I got to ask my friend CD, who worked at Rapha when they had an office in the building: What was the deal with this building? Why did it look so out of place for Portland? And what was with all the concrete and brutalism inside, which seemed to have nothing to do with the Spanish-style outsides?

I remember he started with something like "I bet it reminds you of Southern California, right?" Then he told me the whole story of the building.

An architect in LA that worked for the movie studios designed it in the 1930s, and it got built in Portland (maybe that's why it looks like it should be in LA—because it was designed to be in LA by a guy in LA and the studios just built his plans up here?). Originally the building was used for film distribution and storage. Every theater in the Pacific Northwest got their reels from this building and the courtyard on the side that has lots of small storefronts was actually different offices for each film studio. The building has 2-3 foot thick concrete walls to help regulate the temperatures so the film stock was always stable. There were even several giant screening rooms that let them test out the films in a real theater setup (Rapha used to throw watch parties for the Tour de France in theirs).

It was great to finally learn why the building looked the way it did inside and out, and I was fascinated by the story of it and I've told friends that live nearby about it since. A few days ago, I passed it by again, snapped some photos and wondered if the stuff CD told me years ago was really true. After searching around, I found this on a Facebook group that shares obscure local Portland facts:

When I walked by the building most recently, my favorite bit was seeing one of the current storefronts is a boutique hair place that's called Paramount Salon.

I'm not sure if their clients know the whole story of why the salon is called that, but I'm glad I finally got to learn why the building looks the way it does.

A couple weeks ago I stumbled upon this woodworking guy's YouTube channel that is generally pretty silly, but he came up with a clever system to use 3D printing in a woodshop, the likes of which I've never seen before.

Building a crosscut sled for your table saw is such a time-honored tradition that I've already built two of them. A crosscut sled lets you do things you'd normally only do on a miter saw because they're too dangerous or sketchy on a table saw. You also get way more accuracy making these cuts on your table saw versus most miter saws.

But the problem with crosscut sleds is they deteriorate over time as you make various angled cuts or repeat cuts or throw in wide dado blades. As your sled's wood base and fences get increasingly cut up, depending on how often you use the sled, you might need to build a new one every few months.

So I was intrigued when I saw this guy's setup where you build a sled with pre-determined slots that 3D prints fit perfectly into, so if you tear any of them up, you can just print out a new plate and screw it in to start fresh.

Now, the guy behind it sells the plans for a big sled and a little one, along with all the 3D files for $99 and that's pretty steep but also kind of normal in the woodworking community, where I frequently spend $20 to $100 for detailed build plans for other projects. I was curious about how this system worked in practice and ponied up the dough and went ahead and built both sleds last week and I have to say I already love this whole setup.

Here's my basic big sled setup and I followed the plans for reusable cap screws so I can replace any segment of the sled with a simple allen wrench. I printed their blade guard on the back to keep my hands safe too.

Here are some extra attachments I printed, from left to right on the sled:

1. A spline cutting jig to add strength to boxes
2. A corner jig for making picture frames
3. A miter jig for 45º cuts
4. A 1/2" box jig for making finger joints
5. not pictured: multiple copies of the three main panels for different blades

The great thing about the miter and corner jigs is the 3D print is exactly 90º on both, so if you cut one piece of wood on one side and then your joining piece on the other side, they will always match up perfectly, because math (even if your blade was off from perfectly straight the two cuts would always add to 90º).

I can't wait to try out the box jig as I've made finger joints before using a router table and it was a pain. The spline jig is also pretty cool in that it has measurements on the front for how high to set your blade for the exact thickness of your material so you don't accidentally saw through a box joint.

The design of the whole system is really interesting, the sleds were easy to build but I took my time gluing each part up and leaving pieces overnight to dry before proceeding To the next step. Dropping inserts into their slots is spot-on thanks to how everything is locked in with layers of plywood. The photo above is the main filler panel in the back fence and you can see how plopping in a new one will line up perfectly between the 45º cuts in the plywood glued on the fence.

Building the sleds wasn't totally perfect. When I finished the big crosscut sled and did a 5-cut test to check the accuracy of the plan's included straightening jig, my back fence was off by 60/1,000ths of an inch, which isn't great (you want less than 10/1000ths for accurate cuts). After some tweaking and using a feeler gauge then more 5-cut tests, I got it down to 5 one thousands of an inch, which is great for woodworking.

The verdict

I'm about to start a new outdoor chair project and I'll definitely put this new crosscut sled and all its various jigs to the test, but so far I can tell it's a robust system that is going to play well with my new dado blades and help me make sure all my joinery is accurate.

I love that this might be the last crosscut sled I may ever need to build, because I can replace all the parts that get chewed up over time by saw blades. And I love that this guy from YouTube or other woodworkers might dream up any number of entirely new jigs that I could also plop into the sled someday.

A few weeks ago, I read my friend Michael Pusateri's post on this tiny touchscreen you can buy at Aliexpress, and how he programmed it to become buttons for his Home Assistant setup, letting anyone who walks into his kitchen control the lights with a simple tap.

I was immediately intrigued and ordered one because I knew it would solve a problem in my house.

My home office is where I work and because I'm also lazy, I long ago installed a motion sensing wall switch that powers overhead lights. I love that the room comes to life whenever I walk in, saving me a couple seconds of tapping a wall switch. But it also means whenever anyone (including our cats) walks into the room, all four overhead lights flick on. Not ideal at 2am.

Usually this isn't much of a problem but I don't love having four bright white LED overhead lights on late at night if I'm working there, and since the lights have Philips Hue bulbs in them, they can be any RGB color. At night, I set them at a low brightness with a bluish-purple hue that doesn't compete with the brightness from my monitor.

The family-wide issue is, if I set the lights to dark at night via timers (or manually), if someone walks into my office and needs to find something or pick something up off the floor, you'll want full brightness. But not everyone in my house has the Hue app configured and knows the exact 5 taps it takes to select our upstairs hub, then the home office zone, then the overhead lights themselves, before picking a new lighting "scene" color.

Vibe coding a quick timesaver

My touchscreen showed up after about a week so I hooked it up to my Mac, then I pointed Codex at Michael's GitHub of his touchscreen code. I asked it to take his code and tweak it to my own Home Assistant setup in my house, then I added the Hue bulbs to my setup and I could see the lighting scenes inside Home Assistant. I gave Codex my local network information and the Home Assistant addresses for the bulbs and the scenes and told it to make a very simple two button interface that I would keep inside my office. After a couple hours of Codex having to figure out how to talk to the touchscreen over USB and how to flash the firmware, it was operational.

I 3D printed an IKEA skadis mount for it and plugged it into USB power right next to the door to my office. Now, any time anyone wants to make the lights bright or very dim, you just tap the screen to wake it up, then tap one of the big buttons and the lights instantly change.

The verdict: amazing

This turned out really well and was a cheap solution to my problems (it cost me about$16 but it currently shows me $21 for a screen). In the weeks since I set it up, it's been so useful for everyone else in the house that I'm considering buying one for the kitchen to control all the living room lights without anyone having to take their phones out, and another one in my barn to turn all the lights on whenever I walk in (currently I always fire up the Apple Home app and run a shortcut to turn on the 6 different light switches).

If you run Home Assistant as your IoT home backend like I do, pointing Claude or Codex at Pusateri's Github repo will likely get you a custom interface with buttons to control the exact devices you want in just a couple hours of tinkering.

One last tip: search Makerworld.com for "ESP32-S3" and you'll find all sorts of custom mounts for the display to let you hang it on a wall, or have it sit on a countertop. It requires constant usb-c power, and some mounts help hide the cords too.

There's been a long rumored Apple "HomePod Screen" product that is always about to come out, to let people control their homes from an iPad-like device in your kitchen, but that would likely cost hundreds of dollars and this is a full color LCD touchscreen with an Arduino backend that is highly hackable for around twenty bucks. That's really incredible when you think about it.

Honestly, this feels like one of those hacker projects that is so good it could be a product normal people could someday buy, but you'd have to also get them into the Home Assistant ecosystem, which probably limits the market of "normal people". Anyways, I can't recommend these cheap little touchscreens highly enough. A year from now, I might have half a dozen sprinkled throughout my house.

Last week, we took a quick trip to Denver to catch the Portland Thorns playing the Denver Summit at their second new stadium of the year (in May I visited their first stadium). We caught up with old friends, dined well, checked out Meow Wolf Denver, and caught the game before flying home.

I googled "hip neighborhood in Denver hotels" and was directed to the RiNo (River North) area of town and it certainly looked like a cool arts district that had priced out all the artists that likely made it a cool hip neighborhood, but a quick googling revealed the history of the neighborhood is actually much darker. RiNo was known as the Harlem of the West, with jazz clubs, studios, and a large population of black artists but they were pushed out 30-40 years ago so that it could be what it was today, which is a cool looking but mostly soulless place with few places to eat or explore.

Later, we had an awesome lunch at Stuben's, they really nail comfort food well. We also had a great dinner at Teocalli Cocina in Lafayette one night.

Since the weather is basically broken nationwide, the entire time we were in Denver, it was in the 90-95ºF range during the day with hot nights. We spent the bulk of one afternoon inside the Meow Wolf Denver experience to escape the sweltering.

I've never been to a Meow Wolf thing before but I've read lots about them and know loads of friends that enjoy them. I went in cold, and it was a feast for the senses, but I was looking for more of a story or game aspect to make the whole experience more cohesive. We installed apps, had a RFID card we checked into stations with, explored all the different rooms and saw on our phones that we got to every single section they wanted us to, but in the end, it was still just kind of ok.

I thought it would have more escape-room aspects, but instead it was an indoor amusement park with tons of spaces to explore and you could tell the "plot" of this location was four alien races coming together in one place but there were no mysteries to be solved or any sort of backstory to slowly uncover.

After we left and talked about it with friends, everyone agreed it would probably be the coolest place on earth to spend time while super high, but with us being completely sober, it was just ok. It does have an incredible level of design, especially when you consider it was all inside what was likely an old office building.

But I just wish there was more to discover and unravel in my visit there, instead of just bright lights and colorful things to look at.

Before dinner one night with friends, they asked "hey do you want to try renting a paddle boat on our local pond?" and I said half-jokingly "oh, like those ones we pedal inside a giant duck?" and they said "Yes, actually. Exactly."

So we did that.

The Denver Summit game last Saturday was brutally hot, completely devoid of shade, and their concession stands started to run out of bottled water for sale. They did have great food and it was a bummer to see the Thorns lose.

After spending all day sweating buckets in 95ºF heat, we had a 7pm flight home, and not much to do before the flight, so we went to the airport and checked into the Capital One lounge, which features showers, endless food and drink, and comfy places to hang out. I took my first ever shower inside an airport and it was life-changing. We were feeling awful and slightly heat stroked out from spending the day outside and it was GLORIOUS to jump in a private room with a toilet and shower, wash off all the layers of sunblock, put on fresh clothes, and hang out inside a quiet airport lounge while we rehydrated and ate loads of appetizing food.

I still contend that every executive lounge in US Airports should actually be what airport terminals are like: quiet, relaxing, and enjoyable. I hate that calm areas with comfy couches and no TVs screaming Fox News and CNN is only a thing for well-off people ready to spend upwards of $100 at an airport.

Flying home around sunset, we got a great view of Mt. Hood on the approach back into Portland.

Last fall, I started taking Zepbound and wrote about the first couple weeks and touched on it after a few months. While it was a pretty life-changing at first, as I did lose 20lbs quickly, I plateaued for the next six months. During that time, I tried a higher dosage level, but unfortunately, the side effects slowly made me feel worse.

A few weeks ago, my last vial ran out and I decided to stop taking it. I might try another GLP-1 in the future—hopefully one with milder side effects—but for now I'm letting my digestive system to recover for a while.

The positives

Zepbound was remarkable about quieting the influence of hunger on my body. For the first few weeks I almost had to schedule meals in a calendar app otherwise I would forget to eat. Eventually, a more normal appetite returned but I did always have to remember to eat light, otherwise my stomach and digestive system would be in for a world of hurt later on. The one thing it really helped out with was I no longer snacked between meals and I would rarely eat after dinner no matter how late I was up.

I am impressed that a drug could control my appetite so completely, which is an impossible thing for any magic pill to do, since so many have promised this over the years but never really delivered until now.

The not-so-great parts

My digestive system slowed waaaaay down and that was a new feeling, and not a particularly good one. My old reliable schedules got out of whack as food took longer to process. When I got food poisoning twice while on Zepbound, it wrecked me for several days each time instead of being a 24hr minor inconvenience, pre-GLP-1.

After 7-8 months using Zepbound, I started getting severe intestinal gas even though I took GasX daily. I'd never had acid reflux before, but I constantly chomped on Tums to keep the heartburn at bay. Some nights, I would randomly wake up in extreme pain in the middle of the night, then belch out a 30-second burp and suddenly feel better.

I began to hate the “shot day” that you had to do once a week. Whenever I injected my shot, I would feel terrible for a day or two after. It got so bad that I started adding a few days after each week, in an attempt to avoid how bad my body would feel after each shot.

Right up until I stopped taking Zepbound, my stomach felt like the gut biome I had that kept things on an even keel had been obliterated over the past few months. I was getting an upset stomach several times a week. I was now severely lactose intolerant whenever I touched ice cream, and after spending half my life as a vegetarian, if I ate any sort of pinto or refried beans, I would feel bloated to the point I almost considered going to an ER once because I was in so much pain.

What's next

Like I said, I might someday try a different GLP-1 or a hybrid mix of them. I disliked the needles and vials of fluid I had to interact with for the first few months of Zepbound. Later, I got injection pens through my health provider and those were a million times easier to use. I would be interested in the pill forms someday, since stabbing yourself gets old after a few months.

I've learned from this experiment that my eating habits were pretty bad in the past, and far too often I ate too much after dinner and late at night. On Zepbound, I was surprised at how little I should be eating at my age and with a slower metabolism. Even while on it, I stopped losing weight for months, even though it was still causing me to eat much less than I used to. I can tell that exercising is definitely more important than I thought. I never really felt I needed to force myself to eat protein though.

After a month away from it, I've gained a couple pounds back but I feel like I know what it would take to lose a few more. I'm glad I tried Zepbound and GLP-1s out, as they're pretty remarkable drugs, but I experience strong side effects with almost any prescriptions and eventually this particular drug was just too much for my system to handle.

For the last few years, I’ve tested out the latest Mac and iOS developer beta versions, and I've had mixed experiences. Sometimes it's been rocky and I regretted doing it, other times, it wasn't bad and I enjoyed new features I've wanted to use months before they arrived for everyone.

The public betas of both MacOS 27 and iOS 27 were released this week, and they coincide with the third release of developer betas. The first few developer betas I've used were pretty buggy. But now that I'm on the third version I can definitely say this year is slightly unstable and you probably want to skip them until September when the final versions come out (hopefully they fix all the bugs I'm seeing now).

MacOS 27

Apple tells you to only load a beta computer OS on an "extra" non load-bearing computer like a spare laptop or something. For the past decade, I used my travel laptop to test out beta developer versions, but a couple years ago I said YOLO and just installed things on the desktop Mac I use daily.

For this year's Golden Gate MacOS, it's been a mistake.

• Running Xcode is a pain and I have to use a weird hack to deploy any of the Mac and iOS apps I've made in the last month.
• Apple Photos for some reason expanded the 3Tb of photos I have saved in the cloud to fill my 500Gb hard drive on my Mac Studio, and for the first time since I've owned this Mac, I was getting low storage warnings and I had to delete things before I could even download OS updates.
• Being so low on space meant iCloud automatically started offloading almost all my files, including things I used just days ago that were sitting in my downloads directory. So lots of my recent work is "gone" but still in the cloud but also I get the error in the screenshot above whenever I try to download anything from iCloud. Not ideal.
• Dropbox is constantly trying to sync but never finishes so it doesn‘t really work. Dropbox also made a temp file close to 100Gb in size which also filled up my hard drive. Fun.

Bottom line: I really wish I didn't upgrade my desktop, especially since new features on the MacOS side are pretty minor and I don't really see anything new or any upside to taking a risk on my main machine, which feels slightly borked now.

iOS 27

The first couple betas of iOS 27 were pretty rough. My battery would barely last half a day with a iPhone Pro 17 Max. Now on the third version, it lasts most of a day, but in previous years, the battery efficiency didn't ramp up to feeling normal until the last developer betas in late Summer.

Pros

• The new Google powered Siri is actually much better than the Siri of the past 10 years. I usually avoid Siri because I don't want to memorize specific phrases that fail if you got even one word wrong. Now, you can invoke Siri while driving and ask complex questions like "Tell me the current score of the England-Argentina FIFA game" and it will say Argentina is ahead 2 to 1 in the 90th minute and if you follow up with "when is the next game?" it will remember context and tell you the date and time of the upcoming FIFA final. In the past, it would just say I can't do that and you need to stop the car and unlock your phone and look that information up in Safari.
• Being able to adjust the Liquid Glass look to be more opaque is nice and the whole phone feels easier to use.
• The phone launches apps a little faster, which is good.

Cons

• They tweaked how your phone jumps from WiFi to cell connections, but I find it annoying because I have a dead spot in my house where WiFi goes down to about 25% strength, and now it changes over to my 1 bar of LTE coverage which is slower than even the reduced WiFi of a 600Mbps fiber connection.

• I have so many apps I usually invoke search to launch them, but whenever I do it like the screenshot above, various icons are randomly broken, as about 1 in 3 show up as blank black rounded squares. Swiping down to search for an app is like opening a kitchen pantry where half the labels are gone from all your canned goods. You grab one and think is this creamed corn? or apple pie filling?
• Overcast, my podcast app of choice, completely dies in CarPlay any time you select any episode to play.

• My door lock used to unlock whenever I'd wave my phone over the deadbolt, but now it seems NFC features are gone because I have to use my lock's own app to manually unlock my door (it worked perfectly in iOS 26 with just an Apple Pay-style tap of the lock)
• HomeKit has been a little buggy. Beta versions of AppleTV crash regularly, so various switches and lights in my house are sometimes unavailable in the Apple Home app when they were pretty solid before.

• For a few days, there was a random Matter device showing up as a WiFi point within range of my phone. I think it was one of my AppleTVs running the newest beta. It eventually went away.
• Apple Photos did the same thing as my desktop Mac and filled up all of my phone's free space with photos from the cloud, which caused my phone to offload almost all my apps, meaning whenever I want to do anything on my phone, I usually have to reinstall an app first and re-login to a service to use an app.

Bottom line: Having a way better Siri suddenly makes it useful to me, but I still don't use Siri a ton in my day to day so I would strongly suggest most people wait until later public betas if you can't wait all the way to September when the final version comes out.

AppleTV

• After years of flawless support for my Sonos home theater system, for the first couple developer beta versions, AppleTV couldn't see the speakers and when I added them as a new remote speaker system, there was a half-second sync delay when starting any video, making on screen interviews horrible to watch. Eventually on the latest version, my Sonos system seems to work well again as the default.
• The first few betas were buggy to the point the AppleTV would crash and reboot in the night, and I'd wake up to messages saying my main Home Hub was down, then it would be back 10 minutes later, several times a day.

Conclusion

Maybe it's like the Star Trek films where the even ones are good and the odd numbered sequels are not as good, but last year‘s set of betas were not nearly as buggy and I enjoyed using new features before the final versions came out. This year, I'd tell friends to sit this one out, there are so many unexpected things going on with my desktop and my phone and my AppleTVs that it's just not worth the risk at the moment.

I've long been a big fan of over-the-ear, old-school big headphones for comfort and sound quality reasons. It's also because I generally don't like to stick things inside my ears. Apple's ear buds are mostly ok but I dislike in-ear models that you push deeply into your canals to seal out noise, like AirPods Pro or high end in-ear things that musicians and singers use. I'm not a fan of those at all.

I've had a pair of AirPods Max headphones since they came out and I've loved them, though you do sweat quite a bit since they keep your ears pretty warm no matter what time of year it is. One thing I will say though is they are wildly overpriced at $599. They would still be a very high-end device at $299 or $399, which is where I think they should be priced. Years ago, I used home office funds provided by my job to get my first pair.

And while they are a bit heavier than most over-the-ear headphones, I can wear them comfortably for 4-5 hours at a stretch and whenever I'm writing in a strange place, the noise cancellation is a killer feature that lets me shut out the world and concentrate on work. They also come in clutch any time I fly, and I know I travel to new cities feeling fresher because I didn't have to listen to 90dB of jet noise for several hours.

Headphones vs. Sunglasses

Before I ever thought to depend on noise-cancelling headphones for anything safety-related, I did a bunch of research, asking questions on Ask MetaFilter and Twitter a few years back.

The question I always had about these was if they really work or if they trick your brain into thinking they work. Do they merely "mask" the noise energy going into your ears and make you think it is quieter than it really is, or do they literally cancel out actual noise waves so that less decibels of energy hit your ear drums?

In the world of sunglasses, there's a bit of a paradox where if you pay $100-300 for a pair of sunglasses they will certainly have special coatings that block several different types of UV rays from entering your eyes, ultimately protecting you and your eyesight. But extremely cheap sunglasses (think, $10 at the beach) mostly lack any sort of UV filters while still being dark, which means they can cause more damage to your eyes because your pupils are dilated due to the darkness, but having no filters means you're subjected to more UV energy entering your eyes than not wearing sunglasses at all.

Thankfully, the consensus online from audio engineer types was that Active Noise Canceling (ANC) headphones work by creating real opposite sound energy that truly "cancels" out the incoming sound waves and ultimately the energy that hits your ears is greatly lessened. It's not just a trick and it really works how you hope.

Noise canceling on the first version of AirPods Max wasn't too shabby

The AirPod Maxes are great at noise canceling. My favorite trick is to put them on in "transparency" mode where you can hear normally through them with nothing playing on them. Walk over to your kitchen sink, turn the water on full blast, then hit the noise cancellation button and become genuinely amazed at how well they can shut out most sound.

I also love these features when I'm doing loud, dangerous work. Whenever I run my mower, or tractor, weed whacker, or leaf blower, I've always got Max headphones on protecting my hearing. The noise reduction is even so good I can listen to quiet talking podcasts while doing otherwise loud things.

As I've done more woodworking over the past six months I've really come to rely on active noise-cancelling headphones for basic safety reasons. I have multiple power tools that absolutely scream while simultaneously I'm running dust collection vacuums, and being around those noise levels for more than a few seconds is really uncomfortable. I basically never go into my woodshop without my AirPod Max headphones these days.

A version 2 appears

Back in March of this year, Apple announced AirPods Max 2 headphones and most tech websites I read and YouTube reviews said it was a long overdue, but "mild" upgrade that changed the charge port to usb-c instead of lightning, along with the same H2 audio chipset used in the smaller, cheaper AirPods and AirPod pro models that came out a year earlier.

Last month, during the Amazon Prime day sales, for a few brief days you could buy a pair of the new version 2 models for only $399, and I took advantage of that offer and upgraded the Maxes I'd had since they launched. It looks like the $399 deals are gone now, but as of this writing you can find new ones in Orange for only $429, which is still $170 off the full price.

One thing I want to make clear that pretty much every tech review site missed is that the noise cancellation features on the AirPods Max 2 headphones are noticeably better. And not just a little bit! When I'm working around noisy machinery these days, I can hear a night and day difference with the version 2 headphones versus the first ones, and I'm really glad I upgraded.

I think the explanation is that sound levels are measured on a logarithmic scale, so if you can lower a sound by ten decibels it will feel like half as much noise to you, and I think that's what's happening the in AirPods Max 1 to 2 updates. The sound cancelling probably did get better by a few dB, but just a few dB is a big reduction in overall energy and wearing them in the real world they sound significantly quieter around the same loud sounds.

If you do any sort of work in places with dangerously high noise levels, or have always been curious about using headphones for shutting out the world and letting you get work done, I can't recommend the AirPod Maxes highly enough. They're easily the best headphones I've ever used, even though I still wish they cost half as much as they do.

It's kind of incredible that these days, barely a day goes by that I don't think about AOL Instant Messenger (or AIM, as I'll call it throughout) at some point.

That statement doesn't make sense on the face of it even to me, since I only used AOL in the 1990s for a short time before I found cheaper ways to get online at home. And I scoffed at all the chat functionality within AOL and didn't understand how a friend was ride or die for their chat room buddies from AOL and kept an AOL account going for years after they needed it, just to talk to their AOL friends.

My first usage of instant messaging was downright jurassic. Back in grad school in the mid-1990s, every grad student had an account on an old 1970s VAX/VMS system, and you could use a command-line function to see who else was at the terminal just like you were, then you could start a >TALK session that was truly instant (you could even watch people type out their messages to you and see them fix their typos in real-time).

Since the pool of colleagues I could connect with was so small and time-sensitive on TALK, most grad students tended to use ICQ, with its cute sounds that evoke instant nostalgia whenever I hear them today (uh-oh!). That meant any time you were sitting at a computer, ICQ would let you know who else was and let them know you were around too, way easier than TALK.

AIM came out around the same time but I avoided it at first because it was AOL and AOL was already a dinosaur by the late 1990s. But ICQ was more niche, as you had to memorize your userID (and judge others based on theirs) just to login while AIM just kind of worked everywhere and was easier overall to use. Once enough of my friends moved to AIM, I held my nose and moved along with them and never looked back.

What it was like in the heyday

I want to say between the years of 2000 and about 2010, I always had an AIM client running on any computer I was using while I was sitting at it. It was kind of like using Slack at a workplace today, but you'd glance over at your list to see who was online currently and catch up with people constantly throughout the day, or even just read their away messages.

Back in the early days of blogging, people who read blogs used to joke that everyone with a blog seemed to know everyone else with a blog and they linked to one another and talked on their blogs like some sort of "secret cabal" or "cult". And yeah, we had annual gatherings like SXSW where bloggers met up in person but the simple fact was we also had AIM running on our desktops.

Maybe it was 9am and I was procrastinating before starting work, and I'd see my friend Dan in Wisconsin that also ran a blog was online and I could tell him how much I enjoyed a recent post of his, or ask him what he was doing for the upcoming holiday weekend and hear weird stuff like how everyone in the midwest somehow owns a boat.

Every blogger knew every other blogger because we talked on AIM constantly throughout the day. I probably read 200-300 daily-updated blogs back in this era and I probably had 50-60 blog authors in my AIM list each day that I could connect with.

Apple even integrated it into the OS

In early versions of Mac OS X, Apple added iChat, which was basically AIM plus local network Bonjour/Jabber messaging, and eventually it supported other IM clients like Yahoo and MSN.

Once it was integrated into the operating system, it became a vital work tool. Everyone I worked with remotely at Creative Commons was using Macs and on AIM. All my non-work internet friends were also on AIM. When you were at a conference, you could even pop open a iChat window to find anyone else using the same WiFi network also using iChat, and drag their name into your buddies list (which is how I accidentally knew when Tim O'Reilly was online for the next 4-5 years).

Online status became a vital feature

I posted this image to Flickr in 2004, showing all my away messages/status settings over the previous year, which included presidential election night 2004 and the World Series, and where I traveled to each month while working at Creative Commons, along with the offline messages I used for my coworkers whenever I popped out for lunch or had to go to the doctor.

The ones about travel were interesting. I'd put "NYC" as my status as I flew into New York for a conference or a visit for a few days and inevitably 2-3 people would message me at some point in the trip and say "hey, you're here? let's get lunch!" and we'd get food together.

Biz Stone mentioned in his book about the formation of Twitter that my away statuses image posted to Flickr drove early ideas around Twitter, because people wanted to share their online status with each other in a subtle way. The first time I used early "Twttr" it was basically a way over SMS to tell your friends what your current status was ("at the store" was a complete message on early twitter).

One-on-one social connections were key

It's funny, but as I look up old images and screenshots of iChat and AIM in Google, I see a lot of promotional stuff from Apple and AOL touting group chat features or the iSight camera's video conferencing that came out a decade before Zoom meetings were even an idea.

But I rarely talked to more than one person at a time over iChat or AIM. It was almost always one-on-one, and I still miss being able to keep track of dozens of friends easily and instantly over so many years. Granted, this was during a transitional period where you still had your offline life and your online life and AIM worked to tell you when your online friends were also briefly online, which added to this feeling of temporary kinship.

Today, I have several hundred contacts in my phone and I could conceivably text them instantly to try and recreate the feeling I had using AIM, but it's not at all the same and so many of those loose connections have withered over the years. These days, if I decide to text someone for the first time in two years, I usually have to explain why because it seems so out of the blue.

Why didn't early internet apps make the transition to mobile?

Something I think about constantly is why didn't AIM become another killer communication app like WhatsApp or Telegram, just a thing everyone uses to communicate no matter where they are or what devices they are using. The same question could be asked about Flickr. Why didn't Flickr go from an online photo sharing app to becoming the way all mobile phone users to share photos with each other and with the public?

In AIM's case, I think AOL was in the dark ages about mobile app development and as we moved off desktop computers and when being "online" meant when you were at your desk with a keyboard, compared to just always being reachable by your mobile phone as the idea of "online" faded to just being on 24/7. AIM was slow to adapt and I remember downloading an official AIM client on my iPhone around 2010 but barely anyone used it and I rarely did as well. The Apple iChat app moved away from being a pipeline for other protocols like AIM messages as it embraced texting and iPhones instead.

There wasn't a way to transition how someone might use iChat at their desk with work colleagues, when compared to the iMessage app on your phone that was focused almost completely on just texting other iPhones (and Apple wanted to sell more iPhones so they pushed that way).

I think Flickr didn't become a great mobile app because Yahoo flubbed the same brief opportunity in ways that AOL did, by waiting too long and not having enough features or surfacing why someone would use an app different from the built-in tools already on their phones.

A transitional period we can't recreate

I miss keeping up with 50 other bloggers and talking to people all over the planet each day. We're all so dispersed now but online all the time that the thing I miss most doesn't really exist.

Back in 2005, I would be at my desk using a computer for maybe 8hrs a day and that would overlap in the mornings with my British blogger friends who were finishing their workday at the BBC. For most of the day I chatted with coworkers and occasionally other bloggers but in the late afternoon I might hear from friends in Sydney, Australia or my Japanese pals as they got to their desks before my day was ending.

These days, I am happy to say I usually use my desktop Mac for only an hour or two a day tops, and frequently go days without touching it. Apple tells me I use my phone about 4-6 hours per day, so it's not like I'm "offline" all that much compared to 2005.

I still miss AIM even though it shuttered forever in 2017. It connected so many people to me, kept us all in touch and updated on what we were all up to. The ephemeral nature of connecting with friends when they were at their desks just like you were (and everyone had a full keyboard to write full sentences quickly) captured a magic moment that nothing today can compare to, and I still miss it to this day.