5 Tech Purchases I Regret (And 5 I Don't)

5 Tech Purchases I Regret (And 5 I Don't)

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[Music] hey everybody it's almost the end of 2024 uh and I really kind of can't believe it and so I thought it would be a really great opportunity to take a look at the last year and rate a bunch of different things in my top five and maybe one thing in my bottom five this is a look back at everything that's worked and hasn't worked for me in the year 2024 let's start off with the technology I featured a lot of tech on this channel in the year 202 for and I've got a few picks of uh Tech that I just I really like that really stand out for me and actually one of them I'm wearing on a regular basis it's the OnePlus Watch 2 and I reviewed this you know right when it came out probably about nine months ago hybrid OS architecture and what does that actually mean it's essentially that the operating system works in two different directions two different modes essentially and what that does is that results in a really wonderful battery life for the watch I mean here we are about 8 n months since this watch was released and I'm used to getting 3 to 4 days of battery on a single charge which is all because of that hybrid OS architecture really delivers on the promise of the battery as an Android Weare device I've never had an Android Weare device uh that was this effective when it comes to battery I will say that there is a little a little bit of battery wonkiness it really depends on what watch face you're using I had a couple of months there where I was using the Bold numbers watch face and suddenly my battery usage started going through the floor and I realized eventually that it was that watch face I had to switch away from it so keep that in mind that might help you out the pixel 9 series so I have the pixel 9 Pro this is kind of my daily driver phone I've also used the pixel 9 that's actually the the phone that I did the review on the Channel with and specific spefically I'm just a huge fan of the design the design approach of pixel devices in general has been appealing to me and this year they went with more of like a flat design still a very premium build depending on the version that you get kind of shiny uh Hardware around the sides and in the back the framing an excellent OED panel up to 120 hertz your eyes are just going to be really happy mine certainly are Gemini integration of course some people can take it and leave it I actually really appreciate having Gemini there it's not something I use all the time but when it's there and when I need it it's nice to be able to jump into it and I would say probably more than anything and consistently is the case with the pixel series is the camera system especially the telephoto on the 9 Pro that I have right here use it all the time I am just a nut for a solid telephoto camera and the pixel 9 definitely uh delivers the 9 Pro anyways and speaking of telephoto the Galaxy s24 Ultra I know I have that around here somewhere as well too oh I have too much stuff just piled up around me I'm so happy you can't see it but the Galaxy s24 Ultra love the premium build of this device again going for a flat design in certain areas the the actual display doesn't curve around the sides like it used to I think that's a really smart touch it's just a really um solid feeling device it feels very premium I love the camera output and also the look of the cameras I mean that like protruding camera look on the back is just kind of a nice look I love that but the output of the cameras themselves and like I said I'm a fan of telephoto you actually have a 3X and a 5x telephoto on board it's a chef's kiss I absolutely love it I use it all the time and not to mention video footage if you go back to my earlier reviews on this channel the OnePlus Watch 2 OnePlus 12 review uh the streamer battle Google TV streamer review on 4K review I did most of the b-roll on all of those reviews with the 4K video on the s24 ultra and so it really does deliver and I continue to go go back to this for that b-roll time and time again because it just looks good especially when you throw it in a Premiere and do a little bit of color treatment you can get some really great output on it project muhan and and Android XR you know it wasn't very long ago it was just a couple of weeks ago that I went down to the Google campus and got to go first hand into these unreleased devices Samsung's project muhan Next Generation XR from from the company still unreleased we still don't know when it's going to be released outside of next year 2025 but man playing around with it the spatialized photos and videos that kind of conversion that Google showed off of taking a 2D image from your Google photos library and turning it into a spatialized image was just so so uh intriguing and convincing it was really cool also the pass through resolution and depth it was very accurate it felt when I put the headset on that the distance to things was dialed in to a degree that I hadn't experienced before I wasn't tenuous or nervous about moving around in the room like I was going to run into something because the scaling was wrong so that was cool then of course the multi modal AI Gemini on board but it's not just oh Gemini AI is on board it sees everything you see it also sees everything on the screen it sees everything in the room you can query it about the things that you see and so it's not just an AI that can like turn on and off a setting in your settings it can do so much more and I believe that it will project Astra also unreleased also you know shown off just earlier this month at the Google campus I got to play around with it after it had had been teased to Google IO earlier this year that multimodality on board you know when you're wearing these glasses and you're going around the world it just allows everything that you look at to be an information source and that's just a really cool concept especially with that built-in memory so it can remember in the past certain things that it's noticed and then you can query against that then you've got the raxium displays very sharp I mean wonderful crisp colorful the output is just awesome this is going to be a big deal when it comes out I'm pretty convinced of that people are gonna really kind of flip their lid when they actually see this firsthand you just wait it's going to be pretty awesome all right how about the top five best tech purchases for my business and right at the top again it's around here somewhere God I feel like such a hoarder right now the osmo pocket 3 I actually got the Creator combo so it's a whole kit a bunch of accessories and everything that have to do with the osmo and this is easily at the top of my list it's versatile it's Run and Gun grab and go like if I need a camera really quick and I want it to be stabilized I want it to look good nice quality 4K footage the the osmo pocket 3 is really just time and time again the more I use it the more I realize I can trust it and that's really at the end of the day what I want something that's easy to use that I can trust with a quality and actually it's comes with the DJ ji mic 2 if you get the Creator combo I actually have two of those mics so you can pair this device with that and it becomes really easy to just take it out of the box you know turn on the microphone hand that to someone and start shooting it's a key piece of gear in my Arsenal $669 for the osmo pocket 3 Creator combo the Elgato prompter which I'm actually talking into right now Elgato makes great quality pretty affordable stuff I'd say and this thing is really simple I've used a lot of prompters my day they're always these big hulking environments that require a separate person to run them and this is really designed to be the sort of thing that I a Creator can run myself it's small and relatively easy to tuck into a corner it doesn't take up a huge amount of space I can show an extended desktop on it which is kind of what I'm doing right now because I just kind of have talking note talking point notes I don't have a full script for this um so I can extend that onto the screen with the extended desktop or I could throw streamyard and zoom calls into that monitor and then it looks like I'm looking at you when I'm talking to you things do get a little small the display is I'd say a little small for my taste or my aging eyes so you might notice that some of my videos I'm a little bit closer which you know can be kind of nice for other aesthetic reasons but it's also so that I can see everything on the screen if I'm completely honest um also has some propter software that recently pushed out a new update a very long overdue update for Voice sync capability so you can load your prompter copy into the prompter software and you can turn on that voice recognition and it will detect where you are in the script it'll scroll for you and that's just amazing $280 for the Elgato prompter the A10 mini pro ISO now I first used the A10 mini during the pandemic when I was still working at twit and I had my podcast Studio upstairs they gave me an A10 mini to do some little video switching mine however here is the iso version and that essentially means that I can it's a four input video switcher and I can set it up so that it puts out the switched version and it also records each individual input as an ISO um isolated recording so that I can do whatever I want later and to be quite honest I had ideas that I might need that and in reality I really haven't used that part of it at all but regardless it's a key piece of gear for what I do down here in this studio it allows me to switch between my a-roll camera which is what I'm looking into right now my b-roll camera which is above me for a top down shot and any other cameras that I plug into it which I sometimes do I do wish it was 4K it's just an HD uh video switcher but hey you can't have everything $500 for that now upstairs I have my podcast Studio up there for when I can't be down here and I wanted a video switcher up there too cuz I have two cameras and instead of getting another A10 mini I got the OC ghost stream M2 this is a two input video switcher and it's a fifth of the price it's $130 I found it on Amazon it's a simple switcher it does do picture and picture and it has some configuration around that but really I just use it for switching between my a roll shot and my b roll shot and you know there's not a whole lot more to say about it it does what it does and it does it pretty well I've been using it for probably about 5 months now and for 130 bucks you just can't beat it is really great and finally a neck Mount I don't know that I have the neck Mount here let me see if I can find it n there we go got an elaborate organizational system that involves zip locks what I wanted were POV shots I wanted to be able to put like my osmo pocket 3 right here my chest shooting out so when I have phones in front of me it actually look like you know I was using the phone or you were using the phone through the shot and so what we have here is a neck Mount and essentially you know it's kind of got this rigidity to it I can put it around can snap it into place oh do I have this on backwards let's try this again I can put it around snap it into place that lays against my chest I know it's kind of nerdy but it allows me to then pop the oso pocket 3 you know if I was doing this right now I probably wouldn't have the full extension on but essentially I can have this mounted on my chest looking out with the camera then all my footage is from my perspective and which is really great and now a couple of things to note you know you can see it kind of does a little bit of a wobbly thing depending on you know if I'm talking or animated or whatever you got to be careful about that also I've noticed that when I breathe you know your chest expands and so it kind of moves this out and in so you got to be kind of careful with that I don't know maybe it's a me problem I'm not sure and depending on the hardware that you're using sometimes these things don't tighten down well enough there is another attachment for my Alo pocket 3 where I can you know kind of remove all that extra space and just reduce it to just this size so it's not as bad it's not as heavy anyways um but you know it it does the trick depending on how I set it up it does produce some pretty great POV shots and so that was a you know just $26 for a purchase on that and that really goes a long way all right top five unnecessary Tech purchases for my business I will admit that when I started this business I was operating under the idea of having worked for Studios that had reasonably unlimited budgets for different things that we needed and so I felt like I needed to buy all the things and and so I bought a bunch of things that ultimately I just didn't need one of them though seemed really smart the Elgato stream deck pedal not the stream Deck The Stream deck I do have and it didn't make any of these lists but the stream deck pedal this is a foot pedal and before the Elgato prompter got voice sync capability I got this to roll the switcher cuz like I said earlier you know at other places that I've worked I've had a person operating a teleprompter and now it's got to be me and I'm also reading and I'm also doing all these other things and so I wanted the foot pedal cuz I figured you know as long as my foot is pushing down the pedal it starts to roll on the screen and it takes a little bit of practice but I could get used to it ultimately it was just a little too fiddly for my workflow I know people do use this and it works fine and really it's just sat in the corner collecting dust and now of course with that voice sync capability I just really have no use for it it's not bad it just doesn't really serve my purpose personally Glide gear Medusa body POV vest okay this was my first attempt at POV shop let me see if I can find it okay all right huh oh my goodness like it just kind of looks like looks like I'm going to battle to be honest okay every time I wanted look at this it's like body armor um if I wanted to do POV shot I'd have to put this on I'd have to clip it around and then I would Mount you know the camera out here and you know it has the different kind of mounting holes and brackets areas to kind of connect to which is kind of neat so it's not like this is a horrible solution it's just you know hey it's just kind of dorky but hey I'm it's just me here like I'm fine being a dork up by myself but what I noticed is the structure of it sometimes depending on how you what you have connected into it and how it's all connected and everything isn't rigid or strong enough to hold everything and one way that I really noticed this is if I have a camera extending out on this thing and then I breathe in any way shape or form the video that you see just has a lot of heaving maybe I'm realizing that I just breathe heavily in life I don't know um I honestly I should have done my homework a little bit more cuz really at the end of the day I don't think I need need this body armor um from Glide gear and it wasn't inexpensive it was like 130 bucks or something I don't know it seemed like the right solution I didn't know about the neck mounts and uh so what you going to do I I bought what I thought I needed restream uh okay speaking of doing homework before buying I bought this a full year subscription to restream on a Black Friday deal a handful of weeks ago primarily because I I didn't check I didn't check what I needed to check I didn't do my due diligence about one thing specifically I thought that restream did local recording which is essentially if I connect a bunch of people to restream for streaming our live podcast out to different platforms do does it also offer the ability to record each individual streamer's recording from their machine the way streamyard does is is what we've been using for months now and is we've been having kind of iffy results with it in recent months so I wanted to try something new I bought the full year and it wasn't horribly expensive but definitely you know it doesn't do what I thought it did and so for right now it has very little use to me so it's more of a me problem than a them problem although I have noticed that restream has acknowledged on their site that they are beta testing local recordings coming soon and when that happens this will probably switch columns or at least I'll be testing it to see what the quality is because I'm very curious to see the DJI M 4 or DJI om4 not really quite sure but before the pocket 3 came onto my radar I saw this and it's a gimbal for smartphone I probably have that too hold on all right it's a gimbal that you use with your smartphone again it's probably not you know bad in and of itself it's just when I tried to use it it never I could never really get great results out of it and you know it has a little hand control pad for kind of maneuvering you know and moving it and you know you can kind of see it just it just lit up cuz I just powered it on it can balance and uh straighten the smartphone when it's mounted in there I just anytime I used it the footage that I got out of it didn't make me super happy I wasn't super satisfied with the footage I didn't buy it brand new so at least there's that I got it used and I didn't pay a huge amount for it but you know what the osmo pocket 3 came along and I just really have absolutely no use for this anymore thank you pocket 3 and finally I think on my list of uh unnecessary Tech purchases a DSLR camera or two which is what I have purchased and hear me out on this one I love my Lumix gh5 cameras I have one for my a roll and one for my b roll up there they produce excellent 4K video which you're seeing right now with the lenses that I paired with them so the quality is excellent but what I've come to realize is they are probably Overkill things look great no question I love how things look through these lenses and through these cameras but I could have just used a great smartphone for my video especially starting out and no one would have really noticed right no one would have said hey your video could look a lot better with a DSLR if I was using you know a Galaxy s24 Ultra for video so so you know I think it's just a lesson learned use what you have not what you think you need cuz you might not need it and that's a pretty pricey kind of expense these cameras were not inexpensive the lenses were not inexpensive I would not go back I'm going to continue using these because I love the quality it's just it's a cost that I probably could have put off until later if I'm completely honest with myself top five AI services that I use regularly top of that list perplexity Pro no question I love perplex I use it every day as my kind of llm system of choice copywriting brainstorming uh titling thumbnail Concepts research you name it I think of every day I think of new ways to use perplexity more and more and integrate it into my workflow spaces is a feature that they rolled out recently that allows you to kind of create tailored kind of zones for very specific use cases so I could load all my documentation on best practices for a specific thing and then when I go into that space it'll be well educated around what the answers are that I'm actually looking for I can't say that I work less because of perplexity but I definitely get more done in the same amount of time and that's what I love about it Opus clip clipping social nuggets definitely not enjoyable for me you know when I'm done with a podcast the last thing I want to do is go listen to that podcast again and look for moments I just it's just not my favorite it feels to me like a a spending of my my time doing something that I don't enjoy I'm not a huge fan of it Opus clip makes it at least a bit more bearable and essentially you can load in a podcast or a video or whatever and tell it these are the things that I'm looking for or make a compilation of these kinds of moments or just pull out moments that you think you know are the are the most exciting interesting moments from the podcast and it will pull out those moments based on what it sees in the transcript and based what it sees in the video and it will edit together a social friendly kind of shortened clip that I can then share out the thing is still requires plenty of work in the process it's not like it does I it attempts to do the whole thing but if you were to just post it the way it is you might save a ton of time but the quality is going to be low like it's a great starting point it's not a great finishing Point let me just say but it definitely helps to identify clips and sometimes you know posting those as well so I got to give it a thumbs up for that it's it's definitely saving me time restream transcription so this is my goto SC transcription site it's completely free you don't even need to log in to use it you just go there upload your MP3 file it gives you a transcript like a minute later it's super fast as with any AI transcription the results are not perfect you kind of got to go through your results and you know if you find misspellings replace them and all that stuff but essentially it gets you 90% of the way there and like I said it's really fast in the process so that's become uh really key to my to my workflow Adobe podcast tool so this is another free tool that has saved me and plenty of other people you upload a wave file of audio that is imperfect usually audio speaking into a microphone let's say across the room and you get all that room noise that Echo here I am talking from across the room with the phone recording oh about 6 or 7 ft away from me the AI system will analyze that audio and then clean up the audio it'll give you the ability to actually move a slider to set the mix of the original version of the audio and the cleaned up version of the audio here I am talking from across the room with the phone recording oh about 6 or 7 feet away from me here I am talking from across the room with the phone recording oh about 6 or seven ft away from here I am talking from across the room with the phone recording oh about 6 or seven feet away from me this is actually really powerful because you don't necessarily want to go 100% And I'm guaranteeing you right now if you go 100% which might be your initial uh kind of uh intention is oh wow this sounds great I want maximum of this if you do that and you sync it up with video it has this uncanny uncanny quality to it and so I highly recommend not doing that I often actually set this to 3 to 5% and find that that's plenty good enough so play around with it don't go overboard with it but it really will save the day and finally yudo which I don't use a lot this is you know music AI service but as a musician it's a great way to bounce ideas off of it so I might take my ideas throw it into udio and say give me some directions on where I could take this as a musician that's really helpful or to build very basic music beds you know sometimes it's a Creator you don't need music that takes Center Stage you just need music to be underneath underneath the dialogue to kind of move things along and never featured fully and tools like this are really great for that and fascinating as a result and finally top five things I learned in my first year of Independence this is where I get a little I'm talking directly to you here with the things that I've really learned first what equipment do you really need it's easy to think you need to buy all these things in order to fuel what you're doing honestly you're probably spending a lot of money that you don't need to spend at the end of the day you know really focus your time on what you are creating the content the value of your content the value of your script you know you're really kind of getting into the habit and the routine of learning all these new skills and the more equipment that you buy up front you're setting yourself back monetarily because that's money that you're now out that you need to recoup at some point but you're also creating habits around things that maybe were unnecessary to begin with and maybe they teach you bad habits as as a result so what equipment do you really need that's something that I've been learning time and time again figure out how to love the process or it eats you and I've really struggled with this at times throughout the last year where I'm like H I don't want to edit this video I just want to publish it and move on to the next thing because there's certain parts of this process this whole experience that I really enjoy I really love you know creating and shooting and everything and editing sometimes it takes so long and it takes so much required focus and attention that I can get impatient and if I push back if I'm so impatient that I start to kind of rebel against the process then I start to feel kind of miserable through it all and that impatience can be a real detriment to my output and to what I'm creating and I think it comes across in kind of energetically speaking as well so I've really had to learn to love the process to slow things down and to just be okay with the fact that not every part of my job is the enjoyable part and that leads into the third point the magic you're looking for is in the work you are avoiding my goodness how many times did I run into this where I'm like I just don't want to do that thing I don't want to do that thing so I keep putting it off and then when I finally do that thing I'm like why didn't I do that sooner because now all of these other things are happening or oh that wasn't as bad as I thought it would be um it really is true it's proven to be true through time and time again for me throughout this year the magic that I'm looking for is in the work that I'm avoiding do the work I'm avoiding there's there's gold on the other side of that effort and uh fourth the importance of community collaboration relationships because let me tell you this room I know it's super exciting it's pretty lonely it's lonely in here if I don't have people to collaborate with if I don't have a community to tap into if I don't have people who follow and watch my work and uh reach out to me and you know I don't have a conversation with them I used to work in a business in a company with an office and people and you know being communicating with people is just kind of part of my daily routine and now it's it's kind of me and my dogs and sometimes my wife and my kids and it can be really lonely and so there's a so much importance around the community that I'm building with this Channel and more and more I'm trying to figure out how I can find ways to really cultivate that on a deeper level and finally comparison is the thief of Joy I am really proud of how far I've come in a year and I've worked harder than I've ever worked at anything to do what I've done so far and yet every once in a while I look over and I see some you know some new person coming into the fold and they're able to launch from zero to 150,000 subscribers and in a matter of months and when I start going down the road of comparison and like oh man it would be so much easier if I was them or if that was my situation it takes the fun away from the experience and if I don't have fun in this experience then the the worth of doing it lessens and starts to deteriorate and the truth is I really do enjoy creating all this stuff I enjoy reviewing products I enjoy going down to the Google campus and you know getting access to something that other people are going to have to wait months to see I I enjoy feeling that my opinions are important enough that people want to hear them I enjoy all of that and when I lose sight of that because I look over there and I see someone else doing it better or faster or in some ways more of this and more of that it just steals all that Joy away from me and you know I've had this happen a couple of times and I've really had to remind myself like I'm I'm super fortunate to have what I have and to have you all in my corner powering me through it all um so I have to remind myself don't look over there because my the answer of what I'm doing is not over there it's right here I've learned so much in the first year of this channel um I have grown from zero when I launched it to right now at least at the time of this recording around 57 700 subscribers in a single year and I'm very proud of that I really feel like I have earned every one of those subscribers through hard work through diligence through being myself in this wild and crazy world of YouTube you know the G the gurus are often going to say that you have to be different you have to stand out to get noticed on YouTube and while that might be true to a certain degree there's no better way to be unique than to be truly yourself and I recognize that I strive to do that every day with every video on this channel so thank you for being here with me on this journey I really do from the bottom of my heart appreciate each and every one of you I'm still only at the beginning of all this and you know I'm really excited for what's in store for 2025 got some really cool things coming up some of the things that I've announced the writing gigs uh you know being on The Daily new show podcast uh in a in a more you know in a bigger way in 2025 there's just a lot to look forward to on top of what I'm already doing so I'm going to be busy and I'm going to keep building this business and hopefully I'm going to keep you engaged and happy with what I'm doing so that you'll be here along uh along with me on the ride so I appreciate you thank you for being here with me and uh Happy New Year see you guys

2025-01-11 11:12

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