Patrick Gentry

It’s Wrapped week! It seems the internet has been buzzing about all their various data being repackaged into fun graphics and insights. As someone who loves data, this never stops being fun to me as well.

• First up it’s YouTube recap! It was great to see YouTube jump on this bandwagon. YouTube premium is the only “streaming service” I am making consistent use of these days. The insights here were pretty cool.

• Next is the OG! Spotify has been doing this the longest and they do the best job at packaging the data in interesting ways. My top artist was the Corner Room which isn’t terribly surprising. I did find some new artists and I listened to a lot of music in general… forty one thousand minutes worth 👀

On this Thanksgiving week I am so appreciative for a lot of things!

• My little girl just turned a year old. While she doesn’t sleep particularly well at night, she is happy and healthy and such a positive little light in our family. Never have I seen so much personality in such a tiny package (and my boys are no slouches when it comes to personality).
• I’ve said it a couple of times here, but I am so grateful for a good year in mortgage. Going all in has made such a positive mental shift for me. While I haven’t stuck with posting on Facebook/Insta I have kept fairly consistent with posting to my blog and taking ownership of my business.
• I really enjoyed this week’s bonus episode of Waveform. One of my favorite YouTubers (Michael Fisher) who was covering Windows Phone back in the day interviewed my all time favorite YouTuber (Marques Brownlee). It was excellent hearing 2 pros talk shop, and the ethics of “taking down” bad companies with bad reviews.
• This one is a bit in the weeds, but Spotify’s new Listener Statshas been an interesting insight into my listening habits. While on its own that might be illicit a response of “hm neat I guess” what elevates this a bit for me is the suggestions under that week’s listening. I clicked through a few of the suggestions and all but one of them were excellent! If you’re a Spotify user and you like finding new music, this one may be worth a few clicks for you.

See you in… December 👀

This week will be a little different! I don’t have a specific recommendation, instead I wanted to share a few thoughts on the M3 iPad Air I got for an early Christmas present.

Previously I had the 2020 iPad Air. I used this device extensively at work primarily for customer contact and occasionally for meeting notes. Even 5 years later that device has served me well. The biggest problem was that I had foolishly opted for the 64 gb model. Anytime it was time for an update I had to start culling apps. In short, it just wasn’t working for me any more.

Enter the M3 iPad Air! This time I went with 256 gb and a color that could arguably be described as “blue.” It is a very happy time looking at the storage tab in settings and only be filling it up 1/3 of the way. While that was an expected outcome, I wasn’t prepared for much snappier the M3 was vs the A14 that was in my previous model. Everything feels so much better! What Apple is continuing to accomplish with the M series chips is incredible. When I stop and think that this model is 2 generations behind what’s current I’m even more impressed.

This isn’t a full review as I’ve only had the device a couple of days, but if you’re considering an upgrade into an M series iPad, you too will likely feel the improvements!

This was a week mostly dominated by sickness. A mild bug has made its way through the kids and Steffani. It has missed me… so far, but I’m sure my time is coming 😅. The recommendations are a bit limited as a result. Side note, I never intended this roundup to be so dominated by music. Especially Christmas music, but there has been some solid new releases and my Christmas playlist was feeling a bit stale so I’ve been excited to add new music to the list!

• My first recommendation is Brad Paisley’s new album. It’s been a long time since he has released any music and his last album was pretty meh for me. I love to see his songwriting humor shine through. I was smiling from start to finish on my first listen through. My favorites are the more sentimental tracks of Snow Globe Town, The First Noel and O Holy Night.
• My favorite Christmas album in a long time comes from The Corner Room however. Their whole “thing” is to set the Scripture to music, and they’ve been doing it for years. The latest album follows their continued excellence. Every song is a great listen with my favorite being John 8:12.

As we keep on marching forward into what is traditionally the “slow season”of mortgage, I’m nearing my most applications generated in a rolling 30 day period. God has really blessed this year!

• Follow up from last week, I rolled credits on Triangle Strategy! Apparently there is some golden path to get the true ending, however I’m not a big fan of advertising choices that matter and then having only one path to a true end. I still love the game though and I may revisit it again to get the true end. That final battle was intense, I was down to just my spy surrounded on all sides. My take cover ability was the only reason I was able to win 😎
• Another Christmas song from Pentatonix! They have done Silent Night before but this version with the King’s Singers is exceptional!
• Gabz has some great thoughtson sticking with known quantities when it comes to tech. I have similar feelings of not wanting to make big moves when my own work flows and family patterns are established (and entrenched).

As we moved out of Halloween into the Christmas holiday season it really strikes me how quickly this year has passed! Georgia will be a year old at the end of the month.

• Probably the highlight of this week has been getting to play Rocket League with some of the original crew. It’s very inside baseball but it was still meaningful and the game holds up super well even so many years later
• I’m not the biggest fan of Christmas albums but [Brandon Health’s latest ]([open.spotify.com/album/0JK… has several great songs. We need Emmanuel, God Made a Way, and Baby Boy all stand out to me.
• Sticking with music, Little Big Town released a mishmash of covers and oddities in an EP. My favorite track by far is their almost totally a cappella cover of [Rocket Man]([open.spotify.com/track/7bU…
• Lastly! [Overcast]https://apps.apple.com/us/app/overcast/id888422857has released an update that has fixed almost all its bugs from the rewrite. The only lingering bug (outside of OS bugs) I’m having is issues on the Watch app where the time stamp doesn’t advance. Otherwise we’re back to flawless excellence and I’m SO HAPPY!

That’s all for this week!

In an effort to write more often than once per month, I’m going to attempt a weekly round up post! I envision this to be a mishmash of the various happenings of the week, from things I’ve enjoyed, to maybe a game I’m enjoying or a show I’m watching. My inspiration for this has come pretty heavily from Myke Hurley’s weekly recommendations.

• Things at work have been at an interesting place, rates have been trending down and conversations in general have been trending more positive. It makes for a really energizing environment in general to work within and I’m loving it!
• I’ve gotten the privilege of taking taking Will on a couple of appointments over the last 2 weeks. Given that my wife stays at home with the kids she usually gets to do things like this. It’s been a fun change of pace for me.
• Triangle Strategy has continued to be a great game in my new found enjoyment of tactical RPGs. I’m a little over 45 hours in, and the story is really picking up steam. I’m eyeing the newly remade Final Fantasy Tactics for when I FINALLY finish this gem.
• For a person of a certain age, the Oregon Trail was a corner stone to computer lab time in school. I bought the [board game version](The Oregon Trail: Journey to Willamette Valley by Pressman a.co/d/j7oLGPn) years ago and got the opportunity to play with the boys last weekend. They really seemed to enjoy playing even without the context of the video game I grew up with.

That’s all for now!

While taking a bike ride with my young kids I made a really fun observation of the Apple Fitness app. When my watch recognized I was doing a bike ride it offered up the appropriate exercise, but what was new to me was the live activity getting thrown to my phone. I clicked the activity and I found I was able to cycle through several bits of information I can observe while ridding. There was even a built in speedometer!

This was huge because I’ve been cycling (hehe) through different apps to surface up my cycling speed and seemingly they are pretty terrible.

There can be wisdom in the defaults!

Where is your(my) happiness? Depending on your belief system or lack thereof, it can be in any number of things, God, community, the goodness of people, your significant other, family, pets etc etc…

Politics and technology (and their blending together) is a lousy system to believe in. Corporations are here to extract the maximum dollars, and politics to extract the maximum votes, both will do or say whatever is necessary to do that.

And so, with that in mind, if you enjoy or hate Liquid Glass, that’s okay! Just like we vote for a politician because they are only slightly better than “the other person” our tech can be the same. And if they cross the bridge that’s too far it’s okay to dip a toe into the “other side“ as so many have.

This isn’t a fully formed thought but I wanted to put this down in a blog post because it just feels like so much has gotten blown out of proportion because the podcasters and youtubers who make a living out of big opinions and hurt feelings. They have pushed those feelings down to those of us who just enjoy tech and it might do us all some good to consider that the makers of our glowing rectangles only really care about our money.

That being said, does anyone want to start a consumer electronics company that’s void of politics? I’ll bet there is some demand here!

Indie podcast apps seem to be having a moment… but not the kind anyone wants to have.

I’ve been a longtime user of Overcast on iOS. My love for this app runs deep. It was a pretty big decision point for me making my way back to iOS years ago. Last year it went through some pretty massive code changes that caused no shortage of headaches. I stuck with the app as bugs were being squashed and then… silence. The updates stopped and game breaking bugs persisted. Bugs like… episodes stopping mid playback and then being deleted. Not good.

I did a little research and decided to give Castro a try. Castro is such an amazing looking app! Simple and usable, with a lot of options for customization. Bonus, its sub price is cheaper than most podcast apps too! It has one issue that has made it a no go (for now) and that is, its watch app loses sync with the phone. A bit of background for me, I take daily walks with just my watch and listen to podcasts while I go. Having a functional watch app is a must have feature to me. To Castro’s credit, the developer is incredibly responsive. We exchanged several emails while trouble shooting the problem. Sadly the issue seems to be pretty deep in the code and the developer is planning a rewrite of the watch app, so I’m mostly out of luck there.

While I spent some time in the podcast wilderness, development has picked back up on Overcast! Lots of bugs have been squashed along with a rewrite of the watch app… Yay! (uh oh). Sadly the rewrite has totally broken the watch app as best I can tell. After spending some time waiting on the rest of the bug fixes to come (they didn’t) and even experimenting with the test flight that was squashing watch bugs (my issues remain) I decided to look into other avenues.

And as I start diving into reviews of various podcast apps it seems that the indie scene is having a pretty rough go. And so… for the first time in more than a decade I’m giving Apple Podcast a serious look.

Apple podcasts is weird. Its playlist.. err.. station system takes some getting used to. Additionally the focus on discovery is of no use to me. But it’s easy enough to make a playl… station.. of new episodes and the watch app is actually quite nice. So here I am!

I really hope that Overcast (or Castro) can get their bugs squashed, the indie scene is a my favorite place to be.