As you may have noticed, I love two things: automating things on my Mac and finding cool utilities to make my Mac do my bidding. As fun as this is, sometimes this can cause what Bart likes to call “spooky action at a distance.” Let’s start off with a scary story. Story Time One day, […]
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SoundSource Deep Dive: A ScreenCastsONLINE Tutorial
SoundSource from Rogue Amoeba is a powerful menu bar app that gives you full control over your Mac’s audio outputs, inputs, sound effects, and more — without ever opening System Settings. I use it every day, so when it came time to create a ScreenCastsONLINE tutorial on SoundSource, I figured it would be a quick […]
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Control Brightness on ViewSonic VP2788-5K with BetterDisplay
Retraction on Diatribe about ViewSonic 5K Display and Brightness Keys Last week, I told you about the $929 ViewSonic VP2788-5K display and sang all of its virtues. But then I went on a rant about not being able to control the brightness of the display using the brightness keys on my Mac. I described in […]
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CES 2026: Motion Sensors Enabled by Sentistic
Allison interviews Justin Groot, Founder and CEO of Sentistic, about their AI-powered software that runs on standard motion sensors to dramatically cut unnecessary energy use in buildings. Sentistic Pulse targets the growing problem that data centers, AI workloads, and modern buildings are constrained more by energy consumption than by raw compute capacity, and aims to […]
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Yolink Water Leak Sensors from Yosmart
Right before Christmas last year, we had a leak inside the wall of our kitchen that caused us a pretty big repair bill. Luckily, we were home when the leak occurred, but we still had to have half a wall torn out, giant fans put in to dry it out, a plumber to repair the […]
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CES 2026: TCL NXTPAPER LCD Tablets with “Electronic Paper” Displays
Allison interviews Sara Yin from TCL about their NXTPAPER line of tablets, which use an LCD-based “electronic paper” display rather than traditional e-ink. These tablets come in multiple sizes, ranging from 8.7 inches up to 14.3 inches, forming a family that has gone through four generations of development since 2021. Sara explains that the NXTPAPER […]
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Macstock 2026 — With a Coupon Code!
I mention the virtues of Macstock year-over-year, but I’m going to do it again. Macstock is what a lot of us refer to as “coming home.” It’s the friendliest conference I’ve been to, where you can sit down next to absolutely anyone and strike up a conversation. You’re guaranteed that they’ll be fun and interesting. […]
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Security Bits — 12 April 2026
Feedback & Followups Listener and community feedback, developments in recently covered stories, and developments in long-running stories we’re tracking over time. 🇺🇸 A good analysis of the US router ban that had just broken last time: The United States router ban, explained — www.theverge.com/… Reported as a Probably Breach last time: 1.2 million Crunchyroll users […]
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ViewSonic VP2788-5K — Almost as Nice as the Apple Studio Display at Half the Price
I was pretty excited to hear that Apple came out with two new versions of their 5K Studio Display, but I, like most of the Internet, was disappointed in what they announced. The reason I’m talking about it right now is that I’ve been testing the ViewSonic VP2788-5K 27″ display that might be a good […]
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CES 2026: Cearvol Over-the-Counter Hearing Aids
Allison interviews Brian Feeser from Cearvol about their over-the-counter hearing aids which are a more affordable option to traditional hearing aids. Brian first shows the Cearvol’s Nano hearing aids, which are their simplest and easiest to use design – they don’t require an app or smartphone to use. The Nanos look like normal earbuds and […]
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