A few years ago, I bought a leather Apple MagSafe Wallet with its hobbled Find My integration (wherein your phone merely tracks the location at which it was last disconnected from the wallet, as opposed to tracking the wallet itself). And that was a couple years before they made the product even worse by switching to the vegan FineWoven MagSafe Wallet.

Well, this wallet I never really liked is falling apart, and so I went searching for something better. All I want is a leather wallet that has a strong magnet and can reliably fit 3 or 4 cards without eventually stretching to the point that a mild shake will cause your cards to slide out.

After hearing the hosts of ATP talk up the company Bullstrap as a great iPhone case maker that continues to have the #courage to use real cow-murdererin' leather, I figured I'd try out their Leather NavSafe Wallet in the burnt sienna color. I was extremely excited to switch to this wallet, because it promised genuine leather, real Find My integration, a really strong magnet, and a rechargeable battery. Finally, a MagSafe wallet with no compromises!

It sat in my mailbox for about a week because my dad died, and between receiving the delivery notification and returning home, I thought about how excited I was for this wallet every single time I had to pay for something. That's why I tore open the bag and set it up right in the little community mailbox parking lot, instead of waiting the 30 seconds it would take for me to drive home first.

First impressions? Well, dad always read everything I posted to this website and he hated it when I swore gratuitously, so I guess the gloves are finally off.

This motherfucking Bullstrap Leather NavSafe Wallet is a goddamn piece of shit.

To be clear, I am recommending you not purchase the Bullstrap Leather NavSafe Wallet. You probably don't want to buy their Leather Magnetic Wallet either, and—given that they're charging $79.99 for this trash—I plan on avoiding all their bullshit until one of them contacts me to explain why their wallet isn't as bad as my hyperbolic ass is making it out to be. Despite wanting a leather wallet, I believe the life of every cow has value, so it's a goddamn shame to see this one's wasted on piss-poor products like this.

Key points follow, in descending order of positivity:

1. The Find My setup works, that much I know. I decided to return it within 30 seconds, so I can't attest to its actually-finding-it functionality—all I can say is that I would feel profound disappointment upon successfully locating a Bullstrap Leather NavSafe Wallet
2. The Qi charging of that wallet might work too, beats me. I won't be holding onto this thing long enough to drain the battery
3. The wallet purports to fit 3 cards, but it's obscenely, ridiculously tight. It's so tight that I barely got the second card in. It was only due to my journalistic commitment to fully evaluating the product that I attempted to wedge in a third—a decision I immediately regretted. One presumes this rich Corinthian leather will stretch with time, but it won't be on my watch. Perhaps this wallet was designed for a simpler time, back when nice credit cards were made out of plastic and not bulletproof steel
4. Speaking of the leather, it is extremely genuine, because it already had a scratch along the entire bottom edge before I'd even removed it from the insufficiently-protective plastic bag it was shipped in. Since their return policy requires products to be returned in "unused, re-sellable condition", perhaps this one had been sold, unused, and returned a few times already
5. Instead of a thumbhole on the back side through which to slide your cards upwards and eject them from the wallet, you're left with only this weird little cloaca at the bottom that no earthly finger could ever squeeze into. Maybe they imagine customers taking a tiny flathead screwdriver and shoving it up the glory hole in order to get their cards out? Because that's what I had to do
6. The magnet is so fucking weak I thought that I might have forgotten a step in the setup instructions. I literally double-checked the box to make sure there wasn't some kind of adhesive magnet I was supposed to affix on my own. Whatever this magnet is, I would not call it load bearing—two metallic cards and a driver's license left it so precariously attached to the back of my buck-naked iPhone 16 Pro that a heavy breath and a generous jiggle was all it took to dislodge it. To make sure the weight of my cards wasn't to blame, I tested the wallet empty and the magnet is quite a lot weaker than the already-way-too-weak Apple MagSafe wallet and absolutely no match for any of the sub-$20 junk you can find on Amazon in this category

I ordered it directly from their store, which means I also apparently have to pay $7.99 to return it, which feels like bullshit. Come to think of it, the fact I have to wait to hear back from their customer support to get a shipping label is actually why I'm writing this review. I just needed someone to talk to, apparently.

Anyway, this is your regular reminder of why we all ought to just keep ordering garbage products on Amazon and making liberal use of their generous free return policy while we let independent resellers and the resiliency of the US economy rot on the vine. Fuck's sake.

My dad, Fred Searls, passed away suddenly on Sunday night. Fortunately, my wife Becky, my brother Jeremy, and I were able to get on a flight to Detroit Monday to be with our mother Deanna and start making arrangements.

We worked together to draft this obituary, and it just went live on the funeral home's website (which is how people do it these days, apparently).

Here's the middle part that's actually about the person:

After earning his D.D.S. from Northwestern University Dental School, Fred practiced dentistry in Trenton, where he served patients with care and compassion for over forty-five years. In 1997, he and his family moved to Saline, where Fred's warmth and generosity quickly made him a vital part of the community he came to love.

Fred enjoyed a wide array of hobbies and interests. In his prime, he was an avid golfer and a long-distance runner, and always pushed himself to excel. In retirement, he took up rucking, a pursuit that blends walking and strength training by hiking with a weighted backpack—combining his love of staying active outdoors with his enthusiasm for connecting with neighbors and offering a helping hand. This balance of active engagement, relentless kindness, and community spirit defined Fred's life and the legacy he leaves behind.

And here's the service information (with added hyperlinks):

Funeral services for Fred will take place at the Tecumseh Chapel of Handler Funeral Homes at 1:00 pm on Saturday, December 21, 2024. Following the service, guests are invited to a luncheon at Johnnie's Bar, located at 130 N Main St in Onsted. Visitation will be held at the funeral home from 5:00 pm – 8:00 pm on Friday, December 20, 2024 and for one hour, beginning at noon, before the service on Saturday. Memorial contributions in honor of Fred may be made to the Huron Valley Humane Society.

If you knew dad and are able to come, we'd love to see you there. Whether or not you knew him, I'd be grateful to hear your memories, thoughts, and feelings—feel free to drop me a line at justin@searls.co 💜

Goofing around with podcast transcripts today. Here's what I did to transcribe version 26 of the Breaking Change podcast, after a couple hours of being mad at how hard the Internet was making it:

1. Run brew install whisper-cpp, because I'm fucking sick of cloning one-off Python repos.
2. Download a model and put it somewhere (I chose ggml-large-v3-turbo-q8_0.bin because it's apparently slower but more accurate than "q5", whatever the hell any of this means)
3. Since your podcast is probably an MP3, you'll have to convert it to a WAV file for Whisper. Rather than create an interstitial file we'd have to clean up later, we'll just pipe the conversion from ffmpeg. That bit of the command looks like: ffmpeg -i "v26.mp3" -ar 16000 -ac 1 -f wav -
4. Next is the actual Whisper command, which requires us to reference both the Metal stuff (which ships with whisper-cpp) as well as our model (which I just put in iCloud Drive so I could safely forget about it). I also set it to output SRT (because I wrote a Ruby gem that converts SRT files to human-readable transcripts) and hint that I'm speaking in English. That bit of the command looks like this: GGML_METAL_PATH_RESOURCES="$(brew --prefix whisper-cpp)/share/whisper-cpp" whisper-cpp --model ~icloud-drive/dotfiles/models/whisper/ggml-large-v3-turbo-q8_0.bin --output-srt --language en --output-file "v26.srt"

Here's the above put together into a brief script I named transcribe-podcast that will just transcribe whatever file you pass to it:

# Check if an input file is provided
if [ -z "$1" ]; then
  echo "Usage: $0 input_audio_file"
  exit 1
fi

input_file="$1"
base_name=$(basename "$input_file" | sed 's/\.[^.]*$//')

# Convert input audio to 16kHz mono WAV and pipe to whisper-cpp
ffmpeg -i "$input_file" -ar 16000 -ac 1 -f wav - | \
  GGML_METAL_PATH_RESOURCES="$(brew --prefix whisper-cpp)/share/whisper-cpp" \
  whisper-cpp --model ~/icloud-drive/dotfiles/models/whisper/ggml-large-v3-turbo-q8_0.bin \
  --output-srt --language en --output-file "$base_name" -

If you're writing a script like this for yourself, just replace the path to the --model flag and you too will be able to do cool stuff like this:

$ transcribe-podcast your-podcast.mp3

As for performance, on an M4 Pro with 14 CPU cores, the above three-and-a-half hour podcast took a bit over 11 minutes. On an M2 Ultra with 24 cores, the same file was finished in about 8 minutes. Cool.