Chris Cantey

Earlier this year, MacUpdater shut down after eight years. If you’re not familiar, it was a Mac utility that helped you track, manage, and install updates across all of your applications. It maintained a database of over 150,000 apps, scanned your Mac against it, and kept you aware of what needed attention. The team behind it had been selling one-year licenses, and after struggling to find a sustainable business model, they decided not to continue. ...

One of the neat features built into PAI is voice feedback. Your assistant can talk to you. It announces what phase it’s in, tells you when something finishes, and lets you know when it needs your attention. The way PAI ships this out of the box is through a built-in voice server that uses ElevenLabs for text-to-speech. It sounds great. But it’s designed for a setup where PAI is running locally on your Mac, and that’s not how I run mine. ...

I took the plunge into the 3D printing hobby a few years back. I’ve still got my first printer, a Bambu Lab A1, and I love it. Great machine. But I’m not a CAD person. I know enough Blender to get by, and I’ve built things I’ve printed there, but it’s not my favorite tool for making 3D printable objects. I’ve done some work in Fusion 360 and FreeCAD too. I enjoy Fusion more, but regardless, none of these are tools I’m deeply proficient in. ...

If you’ve been following along with this series, you’ve got an AI assistant running in a VM. Maybe you’ve built the file drop tool and started exploring what it can do. At some point you’ve probably asked your assistant to build you a web page or a dashboard, and it worked, but then you had to figure out how to keep it running. Where does it serve the page? What port? And when you close the session, the server disappears and you’re setting it up again next time. ...

Prefer video? Watch this on YouTube You followed the setup guide , you’ve got your AI assistant running in a VM, and now you’re wondering: how do I actually get files in there? ...

Prefer video? Watch this on YouTube You’ve probably used Claude or ChatGPT in a browser or app. You type a message, it responds, you ask it for something, it generates documents and content for you. But then you have to download it, copy and paste it, put it where it needs to go. That’s useful, but it’s limited by how quickly you can move data back and forth between what it’s building, the notes you’re feeding it, and the places you’re testing and checking its work. ...

Here’s what keeps coming up for me about AI: we’re calling a lot of different things by the same name. There are the tools themselves. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot. Image generators like Midjourney, DALL-E, Stable Diffusion. Voice cloning, video synthesis, coding assistants. A dozen categories of software, all lumped under one umbrella term. But there’s another layer that I think matters just as much: the perspectives people bring when they talk about AI. How you feel about these tools depends a lot on where you’re standing. Whether you see opportunity or threat, convenience or risk, the future of work or the end of it. We’re not just using different tools; we’re coming at this from completely different places. And I think that’s shaping adoption, trust, and the conversations we’re having about what AI should and shouldn’t do. ...

I’ve been meaning to do this for about a decade. Not this exact site, but something like it. A place to share what I’m working on, what I’m thinking about, and what I’ve learned along the way. I’ve started and stopped a few times over the years, but it never stuck. Life got busy, projects piled up, and the idea of maintaining a blog always fell to the bottom of the list. ...