Hello, my imaginary friends

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...

Mistakenly said it's episode 266, but it's actually 265. A second episode from Simon today, recorded walking home rather than to his usual Toastmasters club (he skipped it for a night off after attending a different club earlier). He drifts into a long nostalgic tangent about old chip speeds and 1990s workstations, triggered by the episode number. The real thread: he's sketched a rough voice-memo...

Mistakenly said it's episode 265, but it's actually 264. Simon spent a walk-and-talk episode reviewing three different ways he used Claude while building a presentation. He dictated a rambling problem statement via voice mode (and wasn't a fan of it talking over him), then had Claude tighten it into a punchy line for his slide. He fed Claude his colleague's two-option write-up (dra...

Sm2n 2026-09-21 #audio365 (263/365) A Good Deed for a neighbouring Toastmasters club

I learned today that apparently I’m boiling my eggs the wrong way, and I wanted to cross-check this with @omaniblog and @topgold and anyone else who might be listening

On day 261 (18 September), SM2N talks through his pipeline for turning old Audio 365 recordings into Obsidian notes — transcribing on his Mac, then having Claude summarise, title, and clean each one up before deleting the original from the inbox. He's found a mystery duplicate "episode 190" to sort out later, and is still trying to train Claude to recognise "thanks for listening to... Toodle-boo"...

Simon adds a postscript to yesterday's entry: on his evening woodland walk around 7pm, he noticed an unusual stillness in the air and a group of deer that let him get much closer than usual, seemingly unbothered by his presence. He reflects on the calm, atmospheric feel of the walk without settling on a cause — season, weather, time of day. He's now walking to work in London, heading into...

On his evening walk, mostly in reflective silence, Simon reports that his Miro-based roadmap plan is going down well at work — colleagues want to steal the format, and he's pleased with how collaborative it's become. He puzzles through a comment from @soulcruzer about running Claude, Codex, and a Kimi model inside Obsidian, then describes watching a colleague run Claude via a community plu...

A short extra walk to top up his step count while tea brews, but the real story is a lovely evening: a spontaneous Signal video call with Bernie from his favourite tree, who gave him a tour of his garden and talked through some of his own challenges and solutions — genuinely valuable, despite Simon's phone repeatedly crashing the call with storage issues. He also had a properly mind-bending moment...