Patrick Gentry

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! The one issue it has made it a no go (for now) and that is, it’s 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 had 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. Additional the focus on discovery is of no use to me. But it’s easy enough to make a playl… stations.. 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.

As I see my fellow tech enthusiasts become disenchanted with Apple because of all the gestures wildly, it makes me consider my attachment to the Apple ecosystem myself. The prognosis? I’m very attached! With that in mind, it may be fun to explore the why, so what better way to do that than with a list?

1. Apple Watch

My most locked-in gadget is also the one that generates the most complicated feelings. On the one hand, the integration is Apple at its best. Apple’s cloud ambitions really shines here with phone number relays, iMessage support, phone calls and of course health data all in a tiny package. This list is mostly focused on hardware however, and hardware is where my disenchantment is most on display. The best looking versions of the Apple Watch are just okay to look at. Not ugly mind you, just okay. I have never been a big fan of the square aspect ratio, and while I’ve gotten used to it, I still can’t say I like it. Additionally if you are like me and care about how your watch looks, the cheap watch just isn’t a great option. The soft aluminum scratches super easy (level 3 on the hardness scale), as does the screen. You have to step up to the 800 (!) option to get stainless steel and a more scratch resistant glass which is just difficult to stomach since the battery will very likely need replacing in about 3 years.

The competition has a much richer set of hardware choice, with options that are very attractive, and in general much cheaper for comparable hardware features. They fail in software compared to Watch OS, especially on general health tracking. The specialty watches like Garmin are miles ahead in their niches, I’m talking the more every day stuff.

2. iPad

One level down and my feelings are less complicated. The iPad really serves its purpose well for me. The ability to tap into a rich app ecosystem while still having a corporate managed device is really serves me well. I can get into almost every work app I use from the iPad, and the Magic Keyboard means I can basically do most aspects of my job on the go with an ultra portable device. My primary use case for the iPad however is just texting clients. Being a mortgage lender, I have many conversations going at any given point with several borrowers, and being able to manage those with a keyboard is so much easier than tapping things out on my phone. The limitations of the iPad are present but for me personally they don’t come up as often and so I’m pretty happy overall with the iPad, especially considering there isn’t really a viable alternative on the Android side.

3. iPhone

Ah the iPhone. While I’m pretty meh on the iPhone in general, it’s the lynchpin of all the other devices discussed up to this point. It’s my primary camera and (i)messaging device, and so the fact that data syncs to everything else makes the iPhone quite important. It’s also by far the most boring device I own. It’s a toaster, a refrigerator. In most ways that’s fine, my phone is so integral to my job and day to day life I don’t want to shake things up too much. I would be lying however, if I said I didn’t want some kind of excitement again in the phone department, either in software or hardware. The rumored redesign coming this year may be just what the doctor ordered since AI probably won’t be that differentiating factor.

4. Apple TV

Even more toaster like, it’s the Apple TV! I use this device daily, mostly as a YouTube machine and it does its job well! But wow is it a boring device in almost all aspects. Similar to the iPhone, that works fine for this device, but some rethinking of the software would be welcome. Luckily for the Apple TV, all of it’s competition is ad ridden filth, so Apple can get away with being boring here. It feels like this area is rich with the potential for disruption however.

5. Mac

In some ways I have the most nice things to say about the Mac. I really like the OS, and most of the hardware options (though they are quite pricey when you start considering proper storage tiers). The issue for me is that I’m just not much of a power user and so my NEED for something as powerful as Mac OS just isn’t there most of the time. It’s all preference, and I really do prefer to use the Mac when I can. It has it’s software challenges but for the most part it’s so far ahead of Windows it’s really easy to overlook most of them.

… like me.

Last weekend I started the process of moving my photo storage from many scattered locations (OneDrive, Google Photos, Apple Photos) into one place of truth. In some ways this was less of a chore than it could have been. OneDrive makes getting photos off of the service much harder than it has to be. There is no transfer service, and no easy way to select several photos and download them into a usable format. Thankfully there weren’t many photos that were only on OneDrive, so all I really needed to do was get them off of Google Photos. Simple enough yeah?

Yeah, no.

The first hurdle came when I tried to use the Google Photos transfer tool. Helpfully Google provides a tool at all unlike Microsoft, however it doesn’t work if you have enabled Advanced Data Protection (totally reasonable). It makes sense, but it was an annoying roadblock. Google also provides a handy “takeout” service to package up data for you to download. Great! I’ll just download it myself and move everything into Apple Photos myself!

This is the point that cheapness got me. I am rocking a base-model M1 Mac Mini with 256 gb of storage. This has honestly been fine for me as almost everything I do lives in the cloud, I’ve always had 70-80 gb free in the machine and haven’t really needed to manage it much at all. Until last weekend.

Google broke apart my takeouts order into to pieces, one 50 gb and the other around 35 gb. That actually worked out great given my storage issues. The problem was, when I I downloaded the first takeout file onto my system, it was in the form of a zip file. In order to do anything with the file I had to unzip it, effectively using up 100 gb of storage which I didn’t have. I tried uninstalling apps and deleting unused data, but I just couldn’t clear the space I needed. This was quite the puzzle.

The solution I came up with was to download the zip file onto my phone into iCloud, unzip the file into my Mac (so the space used wasn’t eaten twice) and then drop all the photos into the Photos app. I had to do this for both takeout files… it was quite the process that took a couple of days of tinkering to make sure everything carried over. All because of 256 gb of storage. So don’t be like me, buy the next tier of storage up (or keep a large portable hard drive nearby and empty). ^1

^1 I had one of these storage drives but it wasn’t allowing me to write data to it… A problem to solve for another day 😬

This one might be a little bit sales-y… but hear me out! When you’re in a commissioned base job (or self employed) it generally doesn’t work for you to “hold back.” Logically I’ve known this, I’ve been in commissioned sales for 6 years. For various reasons not particularly interesting I’ve often made decisions to not do what was common among my peers. I felt like holding onto these things gave me some control of my destiny and wasn’t “necessary” for me to do my job effectively. For a while I was right… then things started changing.

For those who haven’t tried buying or selling a home in the last 5 years, let me tell you, 2020 and 2021 were legendary years in mortgage. Rates were low, prices were reasonable, and people had money for down payments. With limited experience, I managed to close a number of loans that would make 10 and 20 year veterans in the space green with envy. All this accomplished without promoting myself on social media, giving out my personal cell phone, and limited effort on the weekends.

Enter 2022… inflation is on the rise, and so are interest rates, and home prices. I began to realize that I would need to make some changes if I was to continue to survive in the industry. The easiest things to change was to my explicit to customers my availability on weekends and evenings and to give out my personal cell phone for ease of access. I was most afraid of this, it felt like I would be answering calls and texts at all times and having to give up family time. The reality was customers are usually understanding of my time and when they do reach out, it’s important (like making an offer or issues impacting closing). It was actually a blessing since having easy access to me, also meant I had easy access to my customers too. It was a win-win.

So why write this now? Well, because social media. I have largely given up on big scale, algorithmic social media. I’ve kept my facebook and instagram accounts, largely so I can still use modern-day Craigslist, aka Facebook Marketplace. While I don’t love giving my personal data away for free to the world’s largest corporations, the people I care most about (my family, church, and referral partners) are all on facebook/instagram. And so I’ve started posting stories and getting back into that world to make sure I’m were my circle of people are too. I can already feel a difference in how I’m connecting with people and I think this may be a final missing piece of going all in.

Believe it or not, this isn’t about social media. With this final(?) piece of letting go, I can feel my mindset shift. I’m approaching business differently than I had last year when i wasn’t doing anything with social media. I feel like I’m approaching everything with more clarity and focus largely because I’m not “holding on” to something that wasn’t that big of a deal in the grand scheme. While I would love for my whole circle to own their social presence (micro.one is a dollar per month guys!) it’s just not realistic to stay in touch with my larger circle in niche smaller circles. So I will do both!

The Lord really does move in mysterious ways.

When I was in college in the late 00s I was introduced to the website woot.com. Their premise was really clever. Every day at midnight they would post an item of some sort at an excellent discount. This item would be available until it sold out or until midnight the next day.

Simple right? Well to add to the fun, every now and again they would sell a mystery item they lovingly called a bag of crap(BOC). This would be a random assortment of items of dubious quality and origin. There were no guarantees other than there would be at least three items and a bag of some sort included.

Over the years I’ve been lucky/unlucky enough to snag several of these bags. The contents have ranged from miscellaneous Roomba parts to decent quality mechanical pencils to vacuums. It’s always fun and cheap (only 9.99 shipped!)

Steffani and I have had a few different family expenses (braces mostly for the boys) we’ve been planning towards. We like to avoid financing things when possible and so this expense and how to tackle it has been on my mind recently.

Enter the most recent BOC. While I was rocking the baby it was delivered! I opened it up and inside (among other things) was none other than a Tameron 150-500 mm lens! If eBay is to be believed this can be sold for between 800 and 1100! This will go a long way toward taking care of the braces need we have.

The Lord provides in mysterious ways indeed and always just in time.

“All pages, even if they are blank…”

If you’ve purchased a home in the last several years you may have seen some version of a request like this from your processor in regards to documents needed (usually bank statements). I’ve seen some pushback from customers in regards to this request and it felt like a good question to address on a larger scale.

On the face of it, yes it’s absolutely silly that a lender would need the blank pages of a bank statement. butwhy.gif From a sales perspective it’s great to remember that we don’t want to have to request any documents that aren’t absolutely necessary. Every request we make could be the bridge too far that makes an otherwise good experience a bad one. We are acutely aware of this and want to avoid at all costs. So why do we ask for it?

It all comes down to, we don’t know what we don’t know. If we get a document that says page 1 of 10, and the document sent to us is only 6 pages long, we have no idea what’s on missing 4 pages. They may be blank, but they also may contain additional transactions that require other documentation. We simply don’t know, and therefore have to ask. This is usually the cause of the other complaint I hear often which is: “You asked for the same document multiple times!”

As always, if you have questions you can email me here or you can schedule a hassle free call here.

Growing up very modestly has made the topic of personal savings very close to me. It doesn’t help that my taste tends to skew expensive high value. But with some patience and strategy over the years (and some help from my wife) it has been possible to stretch my beer budget to match the occasional champagne taste.

By necessity my approach to new purchases has been a lot of planning and saving. This has worked well however, since I will have a lot of time to consider how useful/fun a particular purchase will be. Sometimes I miss out or am late to the party for something more zeitgeisty, but I’d rather be late than not be there at all!^1

About a month ago I came across a great deal on the ROG Ally Extreme on Facebook Market and was able to jump in on the experiment of portable PCs. I have been saving up for this for about 6 months (primarily completing Prolific surveys in my free time). And wow the wait was worth it!

Windows on a handheld is every bit as fiddly as you would imagine (Windows update amIright?) but having easy access to all the various storefronts without having to dive into the even more fiddly Linux side of things is a welcome trade off.

I hate “calls to action” but I’m genuinely curious how you might approach purchasing “toys.” Drop me a line!

^1Why yes I am an extrovert😅

For the mortgage nerds out there… Closing costs are high on home purchases and refinances without a lot of ways to reduce them (most title companies are going to charge the same fees). However, a little used option folks can use is premium pricing. In effect you take a higher interest rate in exchange for your lender paying a portion of closing costs. This can be handy especially in a situation where you will be selling or refinancing your home again in the near future.

www.nationalmortgagenews.com/news/clos…

Congratulations! Buying your first home is no small thing! This guide isn’t meant to replace your loan officer (but if you have questions beyond the guide I’d love to talk, email me here).

Do’s:

• Talk to a Loan Originator early in the process
  • LOs want to help you get ready and a good one doesn’t mind talking to you months or even a year in advance to help you get ready!
• Have your financial house in order
  • Do you need to have perfect credit? No, but the better your score the more options you will have!
• Know the roles of your team
  • Your loan officer will be the person who helps navigate the financials and loan programs.
  • Your realtor is a local area expert, they are there to help you navigate the contract and offer process and be your advocate speaking with the seller’s side of the transaction.
    • Loan officers don’t make for good realtors, and realtors don’t make good loan officers!
• Save for down payment and closing costs
  • In general you should plan to save up for a down payment of 3 or 3.5% of the purchase price. (100,000 x 3% =3,000 ). Closing costs vary from state to state, but a good rule of thumb is planning for an additional 6000 to 10,000.
• Have an idea of what your maximum monthly payment needs to be. Your loan officer can back into ideal purchase price with this number.
  • Most online mortgage calculators actually do a pretty good job of calculating your payment. Be aware that they often will sell your information to online lenders who will then proceed to call you… a lot.
    • Here is a calculator from a reputable company
• Ask your loan officer about special programs, down payment assistance etc. Not all programs are right for all people, but always ask!
• Get an inspection.
  • I recommend getting your own inspector who is not referred by your realtor (or even your lender). Having a true, uninterested third party separate from the transaction can save you a lot of headache in the future!

Dont’s:

• Add additional debt
  • Will this disqualify you on the spot? Not necessarily, but a lender has to get explanations for any credit pulls you have gotten recently and if you’ve added debt these have to be accounted for and added against your budget. It basically adds more paperwork and friction for you (and it may disqualify you due to budget if things are too tight).
• Quit your job!
  • Seriously, income is one of the most important factors on your loan, you need to keep your job situation as steady and predicable as possible. Don’t start changing your schedule, or how you’re paid (going from salaried to hourly, or from hourly to commission, or W2 to 1099, or full time to part time).
• Commit to a realtor or LO at first contact
  • The beautiful thing about being the buyer is nothing happens without you! No one gets paid, and a home doesn’t get sold until you commit to buying. This is too important of a life event to work with someone who isn’t treating a multi hundred thousand dollar transaction seriously.
    • Do remember that LOs and realtors are paid a commission however, if you know you’re moving onto someone else, we would appreciate the “breakup” call or text so we can move on. No one likes working on the weekend for a deal that’s not going to happen.

Basically all these points could have an “in general” behind them, but if you follow these guidelines you will be largely setup for success! Again, email me here with questions and I’ll be happy to touch base with you!

Technology is an expensive hobby, but one I love very much! Having grown up “on a budget” and very much still there, it often has meant I jump onto the latest and greatest new thing late. So it was with Asus ROG Ally Z1 Extreme (what a mouthful). I picked up this beauty off of Facebook Marketplace for 300 bucks!

But oh wow was it worth the wait! Having been an on and off PC gamer for years I have a fairly healthy Steam library of games, not to mention the collection of freebies I’ve gathered from Epic (which is also why I opted for a windows machine vs a Steamdeck). And even more interesting, with the Z2 generation being announced at CES and the power seemingly not that big of a leap over the Z1 generation] . I really am quite pleased!

As far as what I am doing with the machine, mostly it’s just catching up on a bunch of indies I hadn’t yet gotten around to playing. This thing is no slouch on AAA games. I picked up Jedi Survivor on sale a few weeks back and Ally run it well on low settings. My only quibble is battery life, if you’re running a AAA game on 15 W mode, you’re going to not even hit 2 hours of battery. This is fine for me since I’m just playing around the house and rarely play more than an hour at time, but it’s no Switch on the battery department.

If your needs are similar to mine and you value portability over graphics, then this gets a hardy thumbs up from me!