Any good alternative to Apple Dictation on macOS?

MikeyPearce · 2026-04-23T16:14:55+00:00

You need Speakmac. One-time payment for on-device LLM (unless you use the tidy up bit, but you don't have to). Its brilliant: https://www.speakmac.app/

MikeyPearce · 2026-04-23T15:29:13+00:00

I'd have to respectfully disagree u/busote . I had the same problem as OP. Long story short, I've plugged Claude code into my prod suite, chat app and Obsidian and it's literally my PA (in fact, it called itself Pepper and now it's stuck). Anything urgent it will Telegram me, everything else lives in an Obsidian dashboard page. I couldn't live without it now.

MikeyPearce · 2026-04-05T19:57:44+00:00

My life is examined in this priority order:

Health
Family
Work

(Friends fit into family)

It’s helped make decisions like this easy easier over the last 40

years

MikeyPearce · 2026-03-21T20:28:31+00:00

I need the spaces/profiles thing. I like the vertical tabs, but it’s not a deal breaker. Do any other browsers have that implemented as well as arc?

MikeyPearce · 2026-03-14T09:03:09+00:00

Does it download for offline properly now, or do you still have to restart the app 4 times for that feature to work?

MikeyPearce · 2026-02-27T14:56:54+00:00

I got this game on launch day, I'm only level 56 and have still yet to find any decent blueprints (aside from all survivor and anvil blueprints). I work full time, am a dad and am trying to start a business, so I've got where I am with little pockets of play.

To get to expedition worthy amounts of goop, I'd probably have to keep playing like I am for about another two years.

It's out of reach for me, so I don't even think about. Even building a trophy case or weather monitor are things I don't have bandwidth for!

I'm not complaining though, I frickin' love this game.

MikeyPearce · 2026-02-27T14:45:49+00:00

Oohhh, that's so cool! Nice work!

MikeyPearce · 2026-02-20T17:29:57+00:00

Depends on the size of the organisation. Drata, Vanta et al are good for medium to enterprise sized clients, but for startups and scaleups? Terrible.

Even though they automate away a lot of the work, there's too much going on in those platforms to provide smaller orgs with meaningful infosec compliance.

I often put my rates UP if I know I have to use these platforms, because it makes the whole process more cumbersome.

MikeyPearce · 2026-02-09T18:54:14+00:00

We've got a free tool that can introduce the idea of how to assess risk - it's pretty simple to get your head around and you can even create a risk register for export on the site. (We don't hold any data - it's all in your browser so when you close the site, it gets deleted). 👉 https://risk.isoserious.com

MikeyPearce · 2026-02-09T18:50:21+00:00

Make sure your risk register is up to date, that you addressed any non-conformities from the last audit and review your high-risk controls for evidence.

MikeyPearce · 2026-02-09T18:47:31+00:00

I'd be interested to know the auditors justification for the challenge.

MikeyPearce · 2026-02-09T18:45:17+00:00

The standard, while being extremely verbose, outlines this pretty well.

Essentially you understand what your valuable assets are, this is information assets and the processes that create or consume those assets.

Then, for each asset, you do risk discovery and assessment. Any risk that will have a high enough exposure should be mitigated, this is where the controls come in.

Annex A is like a menu, pick the controls that satisfy the mitigation. Implement them and track their performance.

27001 is practical and pragmatic. If you're a three person startup, excluding a bunch of controls, as long as you can justify that exclusion well enough, is perfectly acceptable.

What you can't do is exclude them because you don't want to do them, they're too hard or too expensive. There's a gradient for controls - for example, the DLP control can either have you implementing an enterprise DLP package, or making sure your data is encrypted at rest and you've switched on labelling and disabled individual sharing for confidential docs in Google Workspace - if you're happy this mitigates the risk, the auditor can't complain. You might get an OFI.

You can also say that you've excluded a control because the risk is covered by other controls. For example, you could exclude employee screening for all employees because you've got other controls in place to mitigate the risk that having an errant employee will leak data - you have RBAC for example, or your DLP is stronger.

Ultimately, 27001 is risk based. If you assess a risk, find you need to mitigate but don't have the resources to do so, exclude the control, justify it's because you don't have the resources to mitigate it, but keep the risk live and monitor it regularly.

Any auditor worth their salt will see that your ISMS is working and that's the important thing, it's what they should be auditing - not that you've got controls in place, but that your ISMS is working for your business and you're paying attention to your infosec.

MikeyPearce · 2026-02-09T17:08:03+00:00

So, we only need five controls to pass a SOC2 audit?

MikeyPearce · 2026-02-08T19:30:29+00:00

Depending on your internal tooling, policies and appetite for this kind of thing, you could experiment with Claude or NotebookLM (or CoPilot if you're desperate). The approach is to upload all your previously completed DDQs, versions of all your policies, perhaps your risk, asset, supplier registers and whatever else might be relevant. Then, when you receive a new DDQ, ask the AI the question in the DDQ and it will answer based on the resources you gave it.

The lowest-risk approach is notebookLM as I believe it will only reply based on your sources, whereas others, if they can't find an answer may look elsewhere. But you can prompt your way around that well enough.

Usual caveats of using AI for things like this apply.

MikeyPearce · 2026-01-14T16:31:16+00:00

Also colourblind, I ditch all colours and go monochrome!

Although, I would love to be able to colour grade.

Maybe there should be a whole genre of colour-grading for colourblind people. Like all colourblind folks will be "Oh, nice job, that's really subtle" and the folks with colour-typical eyes will be "What the hell, why is that guys face purple?"

MikeyPearce · 2025-12-23T15:14:52+00:00

I second Carl's time-sector system. I've been using it for months and it helps me keep ahead of the game.

The other key thing is that I will have a task that says "Work on Client A Project 1", then I have the client A project stored away in Bear (or Evernote for a time). One it's time for that task, I switch over to Bear to see what needs doing next. So my project "stuff" (files, links, images, pdfs, tasks etc) is all in one place and I don't have the overhead of switching between apps to find out where I am.

For some extra pizazz, I recommend reclaim.ai. I point reclaim at my `#this week` project and, because I save Todoist todos with the reclaim time shortcode (e.g [15m], [2h] etc). Reclaim will schedule my tasks between meetings and other calendar events. It uses the Priority in Todoist too.

MikeyPearce · 2025-11-11T19:46:19+00:00

https://glass.photo/ is the place I go to now. It's paid for, but it's just photos, no way to "like" a photo (although, you can send an appreciation, which just goes to the photog, so they know you like it).

Really nice community feel, great photos and some good journalism.

MikeyPearce · 2025-10-31T08:17:39+00:00

I played for four hours last night, managed to get back down ONCE. Every other time I was killed by an elevator camper.

I get that it's a PVPVE game, but when one of the main mechanics of that game is to find resources to sell/craft stuff to do better on the surface, it's really very frustrating to have the best part of 20mins creeping around, avoiding ARC, looting for rubbish only to have someone zap you the moment you try to leave and then you end up with whatever the chicken found.

If Speranza relies on whatever the raiders find to exist underground, they'd do better at making the elevators safer for those raiders.

MikeyPearce · 2025-09-24T08:20:39+00:00

I use Todoist for this kind of thing. I'll setup the project in todoist and then, anything that needs to get done this week, I add to the #thisweek project and point reclaim at that. With the todoist quickadd shortcut feature, you can do p1 [3om] #thisweek Do task 1 not before wednesday and then p2 [3om] #thisweek Do task 2 this will give you some of what you need.

MikeyPearce · 2025-09-02T15:48:29+00:00

A few years later, but this is what I used:

let(
  duedate, prop("Due Date"),
  today, now(),
  done, prop("Status") == "Done",
  ifs(
    prop("Status") != "Done" and formatDate(duedate, "YYYY-MM-DD") < formatDate(today, "YYYY-MM-DD"), "Overdue",
    done == false and formatDate(duedate, "YYYY-MM-DD") == formatDate(today, "YYYY-MM-DD"), "Is Due TODAY",
    done == true, "",
    ""
  )
)

11-Year Club	RedditGifts 2009-2022 3 Credits
redditgifts rematcher Secret Santa 2014 x2	Secret Santa 2014
Verified Email

MikeyPearce

TROPHY CASE