September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, and today is, believe it or not, September 32nd. Which means it’s time to raise money for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

Some friends and I will be doing a twelve-hour telethon today, from noon Eastern through midnight Eastern. I’d love it if you joined us. I’d love it even more if you donated.

Let’s hang out and help give this children more tomorrows.

Seems that I got a little over-excited. As did most of the internet.

In my last post, I noted that GM seemed to be… ahem… pumping the brakes on their anti-CarPlay agenda.

As per Joanna Stern (Twitter link), I got that wrong. In my defense, so did most of the internet, but I did too.

I still think it’s utterly ridiculous that Rivian — and GM! — are leaving money on the table by not supporting CarPlay. You’d think the overwhelmingly positive reaction from press and customers alike would be a hint to re-evaluate things. Alas.

Nevertheless, here’s the state of the world today:

✅ Most new cars, at all sorts of price points
✅ 🆕 Motorcycles (like the Honda Gold Wing and Harley Road Glide)
✅ Boats
✅ Showers
❌ Rivian
❌ 🆕 GM vehicles

In 2023, General Motors decided to make a curious commitment: their future electric vehicles would not feature CarPlay.

Those of us with brains on the outside thought this decision quite curious, but it was limited to future electric cars only. While still dumb, at least they weren’t actively taking away from what was already on the market.

Just shy of a year ago, GM CEO Mary Barra extended this lunacy edict to include all future internal combusion vehicles as well.

Unsurprisingly, this did not end well:

The backlash was immediate, and the data was brutal. Surveys at the time found 79% of new-car buyers would only consider a vehicle that offered CarPlay, and that it was available on 98% of new cars sold. Dealers warned buyers would simply walk to a rival showroom.

Welp, look who did an about face after realizing they scored a tremendous own-goal:

This week [GM] unveiled a new infotainment interface, debuting on the 2027 Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra pickups, that folds smartphone projection back into the dashboard and runs alongside GM’s native system.

So, updating my last post:

✅ Most new cars, at all sorts of price points
✅ Boats
✅ 🆕 GM vehicles [again]
✅ 🆕 Showers
❌ Rivian

You’re leaving money on the table, Wassym. I promise: it doesn’t have to be this way. CarPlay is additive, after all.

Since I’m, well, me, I often find that I want to send multi-gigabyte files to others. I want to do this quickly, but also securely. About eleventy years ago, I got a deal on a lifetime Droplr account, and that works great for files up to around 15 GB. But what about even larger stuff?

I’ve found two approaches that work well for this, though I will concede, they’re both… a touch fiddly.

Both of these require using Homebrew to install them, and they must be run from the command line. Perhaps there are GUI wrappers for one or both of these, but I’m not aware of them.

Magic Wormhole

magic-wormhole was the first tool I used to do this sort of thing. It’s reliable and easy. magic-wormhole makes it quick and easy to send files between computers regardless of what network they’re on.

To send a file between computers/people:

1. On the sender, start a session by selecting a file to send:
   wormhole send ~/path/to/some/file.mp4

2. This will emit a text-base code, as well as a QR code. For example, in a test, I received the following:

    On the other computer, please run: 
   
    wormhole receive 8-virginia-beehive
   

3. Guess what‽ On the other computer, you’ll run:
   wormhole receive 8-virginia-beehive

4. Wait while the file is transferred; it shouldn’t take too long.

In my experience, magic-wormhole always uses a relay — the connections are rarely direct. However, the files sent via the relay are encrypted. Additionally, in order to make connections easy — and sharable using the brief numeral-word-word template — there’s also a “mailbox server” used to facilitate these connections.

All that said, magic-wormhole is great for novices, if they’re able to use the command line under direction from you.

Tailcat

Just announced this week, tailcat can best be summarized by the marketing line they’ve adopted:

Tailscale, without Tailscale, by Tailscale.

Perfect. No notes.

I’ve spoken about my love of Tailscale many times before on this blog. Tailscale is many things to many people, but in short, it answers the question of “what if I could connect to all of my devices, no matter where they are, or what network they’re on?”.

tailcat uses the underlying Tailscale technology to punch holes in firewalls and establish direct connections between two computers. You don’t need to run the full Tailscale client software. You just need to pass a [very unwieldy] code between two people.

To send a file between computers/people:

1. On the receiver, start a tailcat session, and point to a destination folder:
   tailcat recv ~/Downloads
2. The receiver will emit a very long string that is the “key”; use iMessage or some other out-of-band communication protocol to send this to the other person. The string will begin with tco.
3. The sender will then send the file in question, using the long string:
   tailcat cp ~/path/to/some/file.mp4 tco[…]:
   Note that you need to add a : suffix to the long string that was passed.
4. Wait for the transfer to finish. It shouldn’t take long.

There is a whole discussion about how this works under the hood, but the short-short version is that the connection starts by using a very aggressively throttled relayed connection through one of Tailscale’s servers. Note that your data is end-to-end encrypted, so they can’t see any of it; they simply carry it.

While the relayed transfer is happening, behind the scenes, tailcat is trying to establish a direct connection between you and your friend. Once that direct connection is established, tailcat stops using Tailscale’s relay, and simply sends the files from one computer to the other. At that point, you’ll see the transfer speed ramp up dramatically.

Trade-offs

If you want something that’s [mostly] easy to use — particularly for novices — then you should probably use magic-wormhole. It’s far easier for people to understand and interact with. However, it’s slower.

If you want to transfer files as quickly as possible — ease of use be damned — then tailcat is your answer. Doing some quick testing with a local friend, we found magic-wormhole topped out at around 5 MB/sec, where tailcat topped out at around 20 MB/sec.

No matter what, both tools are invaluable to have at your disposal.

Life has been quite busy lately — in the good way! — and as such it completely fell off my to-do list to post about an appearance from a couple weeks ago.

I was interviewed by Eric Schwarz on his podcast Magical & Revolutionary. In the show, we discuss ATP, Analog(ue), Callsheet, my other apps, tinkering, fast food, and cars. Eric also asked me his traditional seven questions, which I told myself to prepare for… and then forgot to. 🤦🏻‍♂️

The episode was fun to record, and Eric is a good interviewer. Come for the history discussion and stay for the fast food. 😏

Callsheet 2026.7 is rolling out in the App Store now. If you aren’t offered the update, go to the App Store details and you should be offered to upgrade it there.

There’s a lot of fixes and some great changes/improvements in this version. Here’s some of the new or dramatically improved features:

• The main search box has been embiggened slightly to make it a little easier to spot
• Active Plex connections can show playback from all your servers, or, optionally, just one server.
• If you use Infuse to play media off your Plex server, those sessions are now shown in Now Playing
• On a cold start, Callsheet attempts to clean up temporary/cached files that are more than a day old
  • In Persnickety Preferences, you can also force a cleanup
• The Control Center widget no longer has the redundant Search in the subtitle

And though the list of fixes is quite long, here’s a trio that are worth calling out specifically:

• Fixed an issue where sometimes an actor’s height would disappear
• Fixed an issue with Apple TV premieres that showed the wrong relative date, particularly for users on the west coast of the US
• Fixed an issue where movie collections wouldn’t show if any of the movies didn’t have a release date

You can see the full release notes in the App Store.

Today, MasterCraft has announced it is adding CarPlay to some of its upcoming pontoon boats.

For those keeping score:

✅ Most new cars, at all sorts of price points
✅ Boats
❌ Rivian

What the hell are we doing here, folks?

It doesn’t have to be this way. I promise.

Today your pal and mine, Lex Friedman, released episode two of Your Daily Liss. Which is to say, I was a guest on Your Daily Lex, episode #1048.

Lex is traveling at the moment, and has both pre-recorded episodes of YDL, as well as had guests like me sit in.

Your Daily Lex is far more fun and interesting than a daily podcast about a middle-aged white dude should be; here’s hoping I didn’t besmirch the podcast’s good name. But even if I did, a little under five minutes won’t kill you. 😏

This week I was also on Clockwise. On the episode, I joined Aleen Simms, Dan Moren, and Mikah Sargent to discuss Apple’s recently-released public betas of 𝓍OS 27, how we read for pleasure, embracing multicolored smart lighting, and how we prepare for disaster both physically and digitally.

I’ve become a prolific Goodreads user over the last several years. Reading a book is a commitment, and I like to record the completion of that commitment. Goodreads does that for me.

Goodreads also lets you rate books, on a ☆☆☆☆☆ → ★★★★★ scale. My personal rating system seems to be… stingier… than most:

• ★☆☆☆☆ A truly terrible book that I regret reading.
• ★★☆☆☆ A book that was not good, but was worth finishing.
• ★★★☆☆ The default rating. Enjoyable.
• ★★★★☆ Above average. More than just enjoyable; worth recommending.
• ★★★★★ Truly excellent. One that made me think about things differently, and/or I would recommend to others without being solicited for a recommendation.

Of the 216 books I’ve read and logged on Goodreads, only five have earned ★★★★★. Of those, two were books about Apple, one was the absolute classic The Power Broker^[1]. The other two were Upgrade and Project Hail Mary.

When I watched the film, I expected it to be a standard film treatment of a novel: the main points would be hit, but so much would be skipped. As it turns out, I don’t think that’s true at all. The film was astonishingly true to the novel, though particularly the last act got fast-forwarded quite a bit.

Last week, I was lucky enough to join Aleen Simms, Quinn Rose, Brian Warren and, of course, Jason Snell, to discuss the film on The Incomparable.

During the discussion, we discuss how the film stands as a film, how it compares and contrasts with the book, and how much we fell in love with Rocky. Forgive the spoiler, but we were all pretty effusive, and I think that comes through in the episode.

I had a blast recording this one, and if you’re a fan of the book or the film, I think you’ll have a blast listening.