I recently saw the new Toy Story 5 movie, and I want to suggest you consider seeing it with any kids in your life. Let me explain. I’ll keep the spoilers light, because you should see it. The setup is that a kid gets…
Continue reading →This Week in the Labs — July 10, 2026
It’s been another onboarding week in the MacSparky Labs community. This week we’ve crossed over the line to 6,000 members! Below you’ll find the week’s new videos and podcasts, a few of the conversations happening in the member community, and what’s coming next week.…
Continue reading →The DAK Catalog
At a recent Labs meetup, the conversation wandered into 1980s mail-order catalogs, and I lit right up. If you were a nerdy kid back then, you know what I’m talking about. The DAK catalog was the best of the bunch. When one landed in…
Continue reading →A Golden Age for Fraudsters
Apple is building scam detection into the operating system. With iOS 27, a new framework called Trust Insights watches for the behavioral fingerprints of a scam in progress, the odd timing and out-of-character payments that signal someone is being coached. It runs on-device, and…
Continue reading →A Hopeful Word on the New Siri
I’m late linking this one, but it’s worth catching up on. Joanna Stern spent a week with the new Siri in iOS 27, and her verdict is that it’s very good. Her take matches mine. The new Siri pulls context from Messages, Calendar, and…
Continue reading →A Ritual for Switching Gears
Lately, I’ve had an influx of admin work as I’m shifting platforms. And I noticed over the last few days that all my unrelated work has felt harder, as my brain keeps shifting back to the admin tasks I suddenly find on my plate.…
Continue reading →This Week in the Labs — July 3, 2026
This was a transition week around here. A lot of you are moving into the new Circle home for MacSparky Labs, and it has been fun watching the place fill up. If you are a Labs member and you haven’t made the jump yet,…
Continue reading →On Pain and Happiness
A listener recently wrote in about something that stopped him mid-page. He’d picked up Gregory Hays’s translation of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, while working through a hard stretch in his life, looking to Stoicism for a foothold. Then he hit a line in Hays’s introduction:…
Continue reading →Intentional AI 3: Context is King
On this episode of Intentional AI, Chris Bailey and I dig into the idea that sits under everything else: context is king. The model you pick matters less than the raw material you feed it, so we get practical about what context actually is,…
Listen & read notes →Mac Power Users 855: Shortcuts with Viticci
I just spent an hour and a half talking Shortcuts with Federico Viticci, which means I walked away with about six new projects and zero free time. Federico runs MacStories and knows more about Shortcuts than just about anyone, so he was the person…
Listen & read notes →