Hello, my imaginary friends

Title: Bernie Was Right All Along Duration: 8:55 Simon records while cooking his first roast chicken in months, with a short grumble about steam escaping from the wrong side of a pan lid. He gives a quick update on the Obsidian and Claude automation of his work. His agents (or "angels") now generate daily progress reports and a weekly one, split into three reports (two main topics plus e...

Title: The Quiet Comfort of Bose @topgold Duration: 6:42 Simon records on a wet Sunday drive to pick up his son, following up on Bernie's (@topgold) talk about refurbishing Bose QuietComfort earbuds. He's been refurbishing old MacBooks too, and expects to take on Emilia's MacBook Pro soon, upgrading it with the Legacy Patcher. The main story is restoring Jana's 20+-year-old Bose Qu...

Title: Last Year They Cheered for Me, Now It's My Turn Duration: 3:22 Simon is catching up on yesterday's missed episode: he skipped his usual walk to go to the local-area Toastmasters contest and support his club's champions. He also had roles in the contest for two neighbouring clubs, one of them as chief judge. Results included a second place in Humorous Speech and a first in Table...

Title: Thanks to Bernie, My Work Vault Has a Dashboard Duration: 9:43 Still walking home along the canal, Simon continues the dashboard story, now applying Bernie's (@topgold) idea to his work Obsidian vault. His scheduled agents (or "angels", as he calls them) include an inbox processor that tidies and files notes and transcripts. Each agent adds links or summaries to the dashboard,...

Title: The Personal Dashboard Worked, So Work Obsidian Is Next Duration: 6:28 Simon is still two days behind on Audio 365 after missing yesterday and the weekend, which sets off a nostalgic tangent about old CPUs (286, 386, 486, pre-Pentium). He's walking home along the canal, by the railway line, having dropped the car off for its MOT. He's decided against driving into London and is working from...

Title: Bernie's Dashboard, and the Day iCloud Hid My Vault Duration: 7:23 Walking back from his favourite tree with his head torch on, Simon reflects on a screenshot of Bernie's (@topgold) Claude-generated dashboard, which makes him want one of his own. His agents keep producing reports and summaries that he then has to hunt for in Obsidian, so a dashboard of the latest ones could replace...

Title: Paying It Forward with Gemini and a Pile of Universities Duration: 7:03 After a first visit to a new client's office, Simon takes an evening walk in the woods with his torch on, spotting eyes reflecting from the bushes. He plans to show his son how an AI chatbot can help him weigh up universities: feeding in his likes and dislikes, getting a pros-and-cons table, and asking about distanc...

Title: Claude Finally Talks to Obsidian on the Old Mac Duration: 8:35 Simon takes a drizzly after-work walk in the woods in waterproofs, having trimmed his beard to half an inch. He catches up on resurrecting his 2013 Intel MacBook Air. After a stubborn cryptography compile error with the uvx MCP command, installing it via MacPorts finally got the Obsidian connector working with Claude desktop. Ch...

Title: Work on Holiday? Only If You're Overcommitted Duration: 12:54 Simon walks the canal in the rain to get his coffee, and gets his beard caught in his raincoat zip for the first time. He reflects on a podcast episode from Simple Joe about whether it's okay to work when you're on holiday ( https://thesimplejoe.com/2026/10/07/prove-me-wrong-its-okay-to-work-while-youre-on-vacation/ )...

Title: Legacy Patcher, modern possibilities Duration: 8 minutes 17 seconds Simon's on an after-work walk in rainproof trousers (hence the rustling you hear). He's got an update on his project to breathe new life into the old 2013 MacBook Air: he took the plunge with OpenCore Legacy Patcher, a community-supported app that allows installation of newer versions of macOS on hardware that's...

Sm2n 2026-10-07 #audio365 (280/365) Deer in the twilight, clarity in code

Sm2n 2026-10-07 #audio365 (279/365) Sister

Title: Legacy hardware, modern problems Duration: 6 minutes 40 seconds Simon's on an after-work walk in the dark woods, and he's got a technology puzzle to solve. He's giving his MacBook Air 2020 to Emilia for her university work—it's his main personal machine where Claude, transcription, and all his AI work lives. To get ready for the switchover, he's migrating everything to a...

Title: Tired digs, timeless priorities Duration: 2 minutes 21 seconds Another university visit this weekend—this time to Cambridge with Henry. It's the second time they've been, and he still likes it. The observations: the accommodation is noticeably more worn out than other universities they've seen (both Henry's and Emilia's visits). But Henry isn't bothered by it. What matters is what you learn...

Title: Workarounds and guardian angels Duration: 6 minutes 30 seconds Simon's experimented with running his Claude skills in the Code environment today, but hit problems. His transcription skill and other tools don't behave the same way outside chat—they have different constraints and limitations. The culprit: the Obsidian MCP connector has a 1MB file-size limit, which broke his 8MB docume...

Title: Small trims, big systems - Claude and the beard Duration: 8 minutes 4 seconds Simon's taking a late afternoon walk to the coffee shop and reflecting on small changes. He trimmed his beard to 16mm this morning—three months since his last proper shave, which he's now using as a checkpoint to decide what comes next. The main thought is how his AI work system is starting to click: Claude's agen...

Sm2n 2026-10-01 #audio365 (274/365) Closing the Loop: an AI Work System Epiphany

Title: The Cancelled Meeting & the Knowledge System
 Duration: 17m 16s A mixed day: Simon's client presentation originally scheduled for next week got cancelled, leaving him and his colleague frustrated after all their preparation work. During a walk through the woods, he spotted wildlife (deer with antlers for the first time, and a mole), which helped ease the frustration. The episode's real focu...

Title: Deer, Agents, and Terminator Risks Duration: 16:25 On Tuesday, 29 September 2026 (episode 272 for the year), Simon takes an after-work walk in the woods with apples and cucumber in his bag. He witnesses 3–4 deer successfully crossing a busy road—cars slow down and turn on hazard lights to protect them. One deer almost gets hit by speeding cars but manages to escape. He reflects on avoiding...

Title: Vault Indexing Is the Real Problem
 Duration: 13 minutes On an after-work walk through the woods on a cool, dusky evening, Simon reflects on feeling slightly unwell following his flu jab the day before. He describes the frustration of an online pharmacy booking that required him to show up with physical documentation anyway, forcing him to use public WiFi to retrieve voucher details mid-app...

Title: The Clay Models and What If
 Duration: 9 minutes 51 seconds Simon visited Coventry University yesterday with Henry to tour the campus as he considers applying. They were taken into the clay modeling workshop—and Simon was hit hard by the experience. When he was Henry's age, he dreamed of becoming a car designer and wanted to study automotive design at Coventry Lanchester Polytechnic (back w...

Title: Claude Beats Copilot in PowerPoint Duration: 8 minutes 57 seconds Simon records Audio 365 episode 269 on Friday, 25 September 2026, getting ahead because he'll likely miss a day over the weekend. He's impressed by Claude's title suggestion "The Root Cause" for an old episode about tree roots blocking a pipe. He's been experimenting with AI for PowerPoint presentati...

Sm2n 2026-09-25 #audio365 (268/365) Increasing confidence in creating work presentations with AI [Duration: 08:17]

Sm2n 2026-09-24 #audio365 (267/365) two lessons on using Claude, and a question for @omaniblog about Octaver

Title: Future people will laugh at how I used to create a slide deck Duration: 13:22 SM2N recaps a recent AI workflow experiment: dictating a rough speech outline into his voice recorder, feeding the transcript to Claude to structure it into a talk, then generating a slide deck — which came out well but needed manual reformatting to match his corporate template. He describes swapping in his own ro...