ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► I installed the world's most expensive power switch.

00:00:04 ◼   ► There is a product by the audio company called "Sh*t" which I like a lot.

00:00:08 ◼   ► It is actually pronounced that way and they saw a lot of products, mostly headphone amps and stuff.

00:00:14 ◼   ► Most of which I own or have owned at some point and they're great.

00:00:19 ◼   ► And they sell a product called the "Wyrd".

00:00:23 ◼   ► Wait, so "Sh*t" sells the word. So it's the "Sh*t" word.

00:00:27 ◼   ► Yes, so I have a sh*t word between my USB hub and my audio interface.

00:00:35 ◼   ► And the purpose of the word is to provide power isolation.

00:00:39 ◼   ► It's basically like the USB equivalent of a ground loop isolator for audio.

00:00:42 ◼   ► You ever have to use one of those, like in car audio or anything?

00:00:45 ◼   ► I know what you're referring to, but I've never had to use one.

00:00:47 ◼   ► It's literally just like to make sure there's no like physical, like I think it uses transformers

00:00:52 ◼   ► or something.

00:00:53 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:00:54 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:00:55 ◼   ► Jon, you probably can explain it better.

00:00:56 ◼   ► Yeah, basically the it's it electrically isolates the two sides

00:01:01 ◼   ► in the case of a ground-loop isolator of an audio signal in the case of this word of a USB signal and

00:01:07 ◼   ► I when I was originally using the the wonderful but incredibly picky sure sm7b microphone which case that's the same one that I made

00:01:16 ◼   ► You get at first that neither of us are using any more for many reasons

00:01:19 ◼   ► One of which is that it's just incredibly picky and incredibly unforgiving of room noise. It's like a combination of you and me

00:01:25 ◼   ► So anyway, one of the many stupid things that I threw money at to try to fix the SM7B and

00:01:36 ◼   ► make it less hissy on the low end of the track, besides I actually bought a gold-plated cable,

00:01:41 ◼   ► which was incredibly stupid, but somebody told me that these Mogami XLR cables make

00:01:45 ◼   ► a big difference and this is what all studios use.

00:01:48 ◼   ► Of course they do.

00:01:49 ◼   ► Well, you might have had it backwards because they're directional.

00:01:52 ◼   ► Well, actually XLR cables are kind of just because there's always like a there's one male one female in anyway

00:01:57 ◼   ► I'm trying to make an audiophile joke. I don't know enough about this insanity to know anyway

00:02:01 ◼   ► But the other thing I did was I bought this word because I figured maybe just maybe there's like, you know

00:02:06 ◼   ► Some some noise coming in from the computer and the main reason I have it is is

00:02:11 ◼   ► Was for that but the reason I keep it now is

00:02:15 ◼   ► because I really just like having a power switch for my USB pre - and I could just unplug it and

00:02:21 ◼   ► Then plug it back in to the USB port when I want to use it like Casey. It sounds like you do

00:02:26 ◼   ► But I don't want that. I want an actual power switch. So I use a word on my audio interface

00:02:33 ◼   ► primarily as a hundred dollar power switch

00:02:37 ◼   ► This is entirely in keeping with your whole thing. I know that's why I I didn't want to admit this to anybody

00:02:43 ◼   ► That's fine to admit. I think the gold-plated cable is more shameful. Yeah. Well, I was desperate

00:02:48 ◼   ► So I here I had this mic that everyone's telling me this mic is amazing. It's awesome. All you need is a really good preamp

00:02:54 ◼   ► Okay, I bought a really good preamp not cheap and then oh, there's still some hiss at the bottom and say oh actually

00:02:59 ◼   ► Oh, yeah, maybe maybe your cables are are introducing noise now XLR cables are balanced

00:03:05 ◼   ► And so it is extremely unlikely to introduce noise. I don't I don't know the electrical details

00:03:11 ◼   ► I think it might actually be impossible, but it is extremely unlikely at any rate

00:03:15 ◼   ► So but I thought you know what an ex a Mogami XLR cable

00:03:19 ◼   ► It was like for 35 or 40 dollars or something for like a six foot

00:03:23 ◼   ► I'm like, let me just try it, you know any other XLR cables like a dollar a foot

00:03:28 ◼   ► Maybe you know like this one. This is like 35. Let me let me try it. I'm desperate

00:03:31 ◼   ► I'm I have all this noise in this mic

00:03:33 ◼   ► I really want to use and this mic is awesome in every other way and everyone else seems to have no problems with it

00:03:37 ◼   ► Merlin uses one Jason Snell uses one Michael Jackson used one Robin quivers uses one. Everyone else has no problem with it

00:03:43 ◼   ► So maybe I should try this and maybe the problem must be me

00:03:48 ◼   ► Nope, the problem is the sm7b and it turns out as I learned later on after throwing lots of money at mine trying to get

00:03:55 ◼   ► rid of the background hits behind everything if you go to sure's website, they actually have a little microphone comparison thing and

00:04:02 ◼   ► their sample has the hiss too and it turns out that

00:04:06 ◼   ► There I don't know the details of how this works again

00:04:10 ◼   ► I'm not an electrical engineer John almost is right the computer engineering thing you explained it on your show me as well

00:04:15 ◼   ► Oh you too Casey. I don't know you were computer engineering mm-hmm, okay, so you guys should both be telling me

00:04:20 ◼   ► but basically there's

00:04:22 ◼   ► inherent noise in any given amount of resistance and

00:04:27 ◼   ► The the inherent resistance of the sm7b it is so low output it needs so much gain that just the inherent resistance in it

00:04:36 ◼   ► makes it so that there's oh even even with perfectly clean gain there will always be a certain base level of noise in every mic

00:04:44 ◼   ► and the SM7B is so

00:04:46 ◼   ► Incredibly gain hungry and needs so much gain to be audible solo output that that base level of noise is always audible

00:04:54 ◼   ► So there is no way to make the SM7B noiseless. So all that money was

00:04:58 ◼   ► mostly wasted all that hassle was

00:05:02 ◼   ► Was a huge pain in the ass and a huge waste of time money and effort and aggravation and now I just use a different

00:05:08 ◼   ► Mic, which is way cheaper and better. Can't you just filter that out?

00:05:10 ◼   ► You can't so that's what I was doing

00:05:13 ◼   ► So my my step in while editing the podcast my first two steps were we're always like, you know

00:05:18 ◼   ► Convert everything line it up and then I would bring in each of our tracks into Adobe Audition

00:05:23 ◼   ► because there's you know, most most wave editor programs will have some kind of thing where you can you can select a

00:05:29 ◼   ► portion of silence that contains basically only noise, like when the person's not talking

00:05:34 ◼   ► and they haven't hit the mute switch yet. So a section of the track that contains only

00:05:38 ◼   ► noise, you can select that, you can say "Profile this" and then in the whole track remove

00:05:42 ◼   ► that profile of noise. Audacity has one of these, it's really not very good, it leaves

00:05:47 ◼   ► a lot of audible artifacts in it. But Audition has a really good one, Adobe Audition. For

00:05:52 ◼   ► all three of our tracks, I would bring them in there and I would noise profile the hell

00:05:56 ◼   ► out of them to really get rid of that. The problem is it's not a perfect removal. It

00:06:02 ◼   ► still does leave little bits of it. So like in the silence you wouldn't hear it between

00:06:08 ◼   ► somebody's words. But like as they would talk you would hear like the noise come in and

00:06:12 ◼   ► out a little bit and it was very subtle but it just drove me nuts because it really and

00:06:15 ◼   ► like this is like there's just some portion of it. I know Sound Soap has a similar kind

00:06:20 ◼   ► of thing. Everyone has you know their things that they like that they use but all these

00:06:24 ◼   ► things work the same way, but they always leave a little bit of artifacting in there.

00:06:28 ◼   ► You can't perfectly remove it, basically, or at least without really muffling the sound,

00:06:32 ◼   ► which I also was not willing to do. So, yes, you can remove noise, but not perfectly, and

00:06:39 ◼   ► it's better to eliminate the source of noise in the first place. Anyway, I'm using a new

00:06:44 ◼   ► mic tonight, so I don't want to tell anybody I'm using it, but I'm testing different mics

00:06:48 ◼   ► for an upcoming review.

00:06:49 ◼   ► Well, so after you had told me to get the SM7B, and then you said, "No, no, no, no,

00:06:55 ◼   ► no, no, get the crap. What is it? The beta something something something?"

00:06:58 ◼   ► I first told you to get the beta 58A, because that's, because I had used that. I'd gotten

00:07:02 ◼   ► one, I'm like, "Oh my God, this is amazing." And then afterwards, like two weeks later,

00:07:06 ◼   ► like a month later, I told you, "Wait, can you still return that?" Because I just discovered

00:07:11 ◼   ► the beta 87A, which is way better than the 58A, it sounds a lot nicer to me and it has

00:07:21 ◼   ► no other downsides. What makes the betas so great is that they have incredibly high output.

00:07:27 ◼   ► So this is, I'll do a quick side note here. If you ask people about microphones, usually

00:07:33 ◼   ► you're going to hear from people who know certain ones are like the classics. Because

00:07:38 ◼   ► don't change very often. Like the SM7B I think came out in like 1987 or something and

00:07:42 ◼   ► you know most of the betas came out in the 90s. Like there's mics don't change very

00:07:47 ◼   ► often. They don't come out with new models all the time. And many of them have been around

00:07:50 ◼   ► for 20, 30 years. All of them have some kind, you know, all the well-known ones have some

00:07:55 ◼   ► kind of history of, "Oh, well this one was used on these albums by these singers and

00:07:59 ◼   ► or this one, this has been in radio studios for decades." Like they all have these backgrounds

00:08:06 ◼   ► of being classics, being well known.

00:08:08 ◼   ► And so if you ask people about recommendations, they'll often recommend these classic old

00:08:12 ◼   ► mics because they have like nostalgia or because they have reputation from forever ago.

00:08:17 ◼   ► The problem is in the, I don't know, 90s to now, there has been a huge movement towards

00:08:24 ◼   ► NIB magnet driven mics rather than the old kind of magnets that sucked.

00:08:29 ◼   ► Like the newest models, many of them have switched over to use those.

00:08:32 ◼   ► And mics that are made with those usually have way higher output levels and so therefore

00:08:39 ◼   ► a way higher signal to noise ratio, so way lower noise.

00:08:43 ◼   ► And so usually the microphones that were recommended for years are the old kind and they are a

00:08:49 ◼   ► pain in the ass to use if you're trying to get rid of the background noise or have none

00:08:53 ◼   ► of it to begin with, especially if you're not in a professional studio.

00:08:57 ◼   ► And the new ones are usually way better, but no one's recommending them because, you know,

00:09:02 ◼   ► how many people buy more than one podcast mic to even do a comparison?

00:09:06 ◼   ► And if you ask people online, you'll hear from recording engineers who have been working

00:09:09 ◼   ► in studios for 30 years, and they'll tell you all the old ones.

00:09:12 ◼   ► So that's why I'm working on a microphone review.

00:09:15 ◼   ► Anyway.

00:09:16 ◼   ► Well, it's funny because the 58A that I'm rocking, I think I have that right, the 58A

00:09:21 ◼   ► I'm rocking. When we were recording, I think it was analog, two or three weeks ago, all

00:09:28 ◼   ► of a sudden Erin comes like bombing in the room, which is extremely abnormal. So of course

00:09:32 ◼   ► I'm thinking like Declan is near death or something like that. Well, she goes reaching

00:09:36 ◼   ► behind my laptop screen and I thought, well, okay, that's fine, but weird. Well, it turns

00:09:42 ◼   ► out that our house phone, which never rings, except for telemarketers, was ringing for

00:09:47 ◼   ► for a telemarketer, I'm sitting literally three feet from it. I had no idea. And to

00:09:52 ◼   ► the best of my knowledge, I don't believe that even came through on the track. And this

00:09:57 ◼   ► is like two or three feet from where the microphone is. That's how unbelievably good the 58A is.

00:10:03 ◼   ► So if the 87A is even better, I don't even know what to say. Like, that's just phenomenal.

00:10:06 ◼   ► Right. So the 87A basically, it has all the advantages of the 58A, which is insane background

00:10:13 ◼   ► noise reduction because, and these are super cardioids, so they're very unforgiving if

00:10:17 ◼   ► you move side to side or if you back up, like you will lose volume very quickly. But in

00:10:21 ◼   ► a practical home podcast studio, that's actually a really good thing because you're probably

00:10:25 ◼   ► working in your home office, there's probably other things in your house that might make

00:10:28 ◼   ► noise and so it really is nice to have extreme background noise rejection. And you know,

00:10:33 ◼   ► if the cost of that is you have to be pretty on top of the mic, oh well, you know, it's

00:10:37 ◼   ► pretty easy to stand up to stand up to a mic if you pay attention. So, and that's easier

00:10:41 ◼   ► than trying to eliminate every source of noise in a typical house for most people.

00:10:44 ◼   ► So the 87A has all of that same characteristic, but better sound quality. Because the problem

00:10:51 ◼   ► with the 58A is that it really is kind of muffled sounding and kind of flabby in the lower mids,

00:10:57 ◼   ► if that makes sense, or like the upper bass. Like it kind of sounds like really big and boomy,

00:11:01 ◼   ► a little bit too much. And so Casey, for you, I just EQ that out. But sometimes like when I

00:11:06 ◼   ► hear you on other podcasts, sometimes they don't EQ it out. And I'm like, "Oh, he should be using

00:11:10 ◼   ► in the '87.

00:11:11 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:11:13 ◼   ► And EQ can only do so much too.

00:11:15 ◼   ► Like, you know, given, 'cause a lot of people,

00:11:18 ◼   ► once they learn a little bit, they think,

00:11:20 ◼   ► oh, it's all about frequency response curves,

00:11:23 ◼   ► and you can just make any mic sound like any other mic

00:11:24 ◼   ► by just adjusting the EQ.

00:11:26 ◼   ► No, it doesn't really work that way.

00:11:27 ◼   ► There's other variables, and yeah.

00:11:28 ◼   ► Anyway, that's it for mics.

00:11:30 ◼   ► That's all I have.

00:11:30 ◼   ► I don't even think this is gonna go on the show,

00:11:32 ◼   ► 'cause this is really inside baseball.

00:11:34 ◼   ► (electronic beeping)

00:11:35 ◼   ► - So we should do some follow-up,

00:11:36 ◼   ► and let's start with Intel Skylake

00:11:39 ◼   ► and how apparently they're cheating.

00:11:41 ◼   ► - Not cheating.

00:11:42 ◼   ► It was a question where we discussed it last time,

00:11:44 ◼   ► like how are they getting the power savings?

00:11:45 ◼   ► Because we hadn't heard any of the details.

00:11:47 ◼   ► And apparently not all the details were out,

00:11:49 ◼   ► but some of the details were out

00:11:51 ◼   ► on the typical Intel trickle of information

00:11:54 ◼   ► about their new chips.

00:11:55 ◼   ► Ars Technica had a good story about this.

00:11:58 ◼   ► We'll put a link in the show notes.

00:12:00 ◼   ► What it comes down to,

00:12:01 ◼   ► they talk about the things that make it go faster.

00:12:02 ◼   ► It's a little bit wider,

00:12:03 ◼   ► there's a little bit more instructions in flight,

00:12:06 ◼   ► a little bit more parallelism they can extract,

00:12:08 ◼   ► But the power savings, it's just more of the same stuff, but it's cool.

00:12:11 ◼   ► Like Intel processors, and all processors for a long time, had the ability to throttle

00:12:16 ◼   ► themselves down to slower speeds when they don't need to be used, and then throttle themselves

00:12:20 ◼   ► up when they need to be used.

00:12:21 ◼   ► And they do this on a scale that makes sense to CPUs.

00:12:25 ◼   ► Like I think when a lot of people conceptualize it, you're like, "Okay, and when my audio

00:12:31 ◼   ► compression thing finishes and I stop using the mouse, then a couple seconds later the

00:12:35 ◼   ► CPU drops down to a slower speed.

00:12:37 ◼   ► And then when I run a Photoshop filter, it runs to a faster speed.

00:12:40 ◼   ► That's human scale.

00:12:41 ◼   ► CPU scale, the CPUs most of us are using now, they change frequency in tens of milliseconds.

00:12:50 ◼   ► So they'll do a bunch of instructions, realize there's not that much more to do, or the operating

00:12:55 ◼   ► system will signal them there's not much more to do, and they will, 30 milliseconds later,

00:13:00 ◼   ► go into a slower speed mode.

00:13:01 ◼   ► So they're going faster, slower, faster, slower, many times in a single second.

00:13:06 ◼   ► And the operating system is involved because some communication about it thinks it's okay

00:13:10 ◼   ► if it wants to go into energy saving mode, if the CPU is trying to save energy, if the

00:13:14 ◼   ► CPU doesn't think it has a lot of jobs to schedule, and there's not a lot of CPU usage,

00:13:19 ◼   ► you can say, "Okay, you can scale down, I can still get my work done," that type of

00:13:23 ◼   ► thing.

00:13:24 ◼   ► Well, in the Skylake CPUs, rather than having the operating system communicate back and

00:13:29 ◼   ► forth, which takes a long time to get the message, relatively speaking, on a scale of

00:13:34 ◼   ► milliseconds takes a long time for the operating system to figure out that things are kind

00:13:38 ◼   ► of chilling down on the computer.

00:13:40 ◼   ► Tell the CPU, "Hey, there's not that many processes that want the CPU as compared to

00:13:44 ◼   ► a few moments ago, so it's okay for you to crank down."

00:13:47 ◼   ► Send that signal to the CPU, the CPU gets it, the CPU honors it, and then things that

00:13:50 ◼   ► may have changed in that interval.

00:13:51 ◼   ► So instead, Skylake CPUs are taking over this responsibility so they can change frequency

00:13:55 ◼   ► in one millisecond from faster to slower.

00:13:58 ◼   ► So basically on a millisecond to millisecond basis, the CPU can decide what its clock speed

00:14:03 ◼   ► wants to be. And then there's the usual stuff of turning off execution units

00:14:06 ◼   ► when they're not used, they're doing more of that, more granular like if no one's

00:14:09 ◼   ► using the AVX2 extensions just turn that unit off entirely because it tends to be

00:14:14 ◼   ► used for specialized purposes. They tweak the caching a little bit to

00:14:18 ◼   ► redistribute the memory they're using for cache, they put the cache out farther

00:14:21 ◼   ► from the chip so it can be, so the ED RAM cache that some of these chips

00:14:25 ◼   ► can have inside them can be used, it's cache coherent all the time so it can be

00:14:31 ◼   ► used by other parts of the system like the graphic system and everything. But

00:14:36 ◼   ► anyway, the oh and then one more interesting thing is that the Skylark CPUs

00:14:41 ◼   ► can go way way down apparently down to a hundred megahertz but this at the

00:14:46 ◼   ► process size that we're using the leakage current becomes a factor like

00:14:50 ◼   ► how much electricity is just going through these things even when they're

00:14:53 ◼   ► supposedly off and so there's kind of an it's kind of like driving a car there's

00:14:56 ◼   ► like an optimum fuel mileage like the optimum speed for getting the best fuel

00:14:59 ◼   ► mileage is not one mile an hour and it's not 100 miles an hour it's somewhere

00:15:03 ◼   ► between there. Well for a CPU there's an optimum like how optimum power using

00:15:10 ◼   ► speed so because if you go really really fast then obviously using tons of power

00:15:14 ◼   ► because the power usage is like this the square of the the frequency or whatever

00:15:17 ◼   ► but if you go super slow you think isn't that great why don't we just go slower if

00:15:20 ◼   ► it's the square of the frequency we go slower and slower we'll just say more and

00:15:23 ◼   ► more power but there's a certain amount of leakage that happens all the time if

00:15:26 ◼   ► you go super slow it's gonna take you longer to do the calculation so if you

00:15:29 ◼   ► go down to 100 megahertz all of a sudden it's taking you 10, 100 times as long to do the

00:15:33 ◼   ► calculation which means you are staying in the 100 megahertz mode for a really long time

00:15:39 ◼   ► and during that whole time you have all the leakage of all the transistors that are powered

00:15:45 ◼   ► up and that have power going to them even if they're in the off position.

00:15:48 ◼   ► So you want to find the sweet spot where you get the work done as fast as possible but

00:15:52 ◼   ► you keep the clock speed as low as possible.

00:15:54 ◼   ► And this is another thing that the CPU does to try to find that sort of mileage sweet

00:15:58 ◼   ► spot in the car analogy.

00:16:01 ◼   ► There's some other stuff in there as well.

00:16:04 ◼   ► People should just read the article, although I just tried to summarize it.

00:16:06 ◼   ► I did a bad job of it.

00:16:07 ◼   ► But anyway, Intel, filled with clever people.

00:16:13 ◼   ► It sounds like this could be a pretty big deal, though.

00:16:15 ◼   ► I mean, the early reports that we're seeing from earlier reviews, rumors, tipsters here

00:16:20 ◼   ► and there are all basically saying that Skylake is probably going to be a really big deal

00:16:24 ◼   ► in power savings.

00:16:25 ◼   ► Yeah, and this is the type of stuff where you can imagine, like this is the thing I'd

00:16:29 ◼   ► like to see in CPUs, they have all these systems for throttling the chips up faster and slower

00:16:32 ◼   ► and saying we're going to shut off this section of the chip when it's not in use.

00:16:35 ◼   ► The M-TOL's been doing that for years and years and years, and there's always something

00:16:37 ◼   ► where you have an established system where in this power mode the operating system communicates

00:16:43 ◼   ► with the chip and it's like, isn't that a great feature?

00:16:45 ◼   ► Like whenever they came up with that, you know, several chip revisions ago, it sounds

00:16:47 ◼   ► like it's the best thing since sliced bread, but as those chips go out there they realize

00:16:52 ◼   ► now if we want to squeeze any more power out of it, the limiting factor is that lag between

00:16:56 ◼   ► when the operating system determines that we should slow down to when we actually slow

00:17:00 ◼   ► down. During that time so much might have changed in the instruction stream that actually

00:17:03 ◼   ► we might want to be speeding up at that point and we might have missed the part when we

00:17:06 ◼   ► should have slowed down. But you can't make that kind of change. It's significant. It

00:17:11 ◼   ► requires a—damn it—the tick, whatever the hell. It requires the thing where you

00:17:15 ◼   ► make an architectural change, because that's not a small change saying, "We're going to

00:17:20 ◼   ► do it all on chip versus we're going to have the operating system communicate these things

00:17:24 ◼   ► all the time."

00:17:26 ◼   ► So you just kind of got to wait for the next big revision for them to try an entirely different

00:17:32 ◼   ► strategy.

00:17:35 ◼   ► And things like, well, when the process dies down at 14 nanometers, suddenly the leakage

00:17:40 ◼   ► current is a big problem, and so now we have to actually find that sweet spot.

00:17:43 ◼   ► We can't just say, you know what, lower frequencies are always better because that's not true

00:17:46 ◼   ► anymore.

00:17:47 ◼   ► You go down too low and you take too long and you're just leaking.

00:17:49 ◼   ► Yeah, chips are weird and getting weirder all the time.

00:17:52 ◼   ► But Skylake looks like all the ideas they had, they've known they should have done the

00:17:56 ◼   ► past few revisions, you've got to wait because these things take years and years to get designed

00:18:01 ◼   ► and tape out and qualified and all that good stuff.

00:18:04 ◼   ► All right, so speaking of hardware, do you want to tell us about ECC RAM?

00:18:07 ◼   ► Because apparently we have all the things to talk about with regard to ECC RAM.

00:18:11 ◼   ► This is more good news on the ECC RAM front.

00:18:13 ◼   ► This is from…

00:18:14 ◼   ► The world's most interesting podcast.

00:18:16 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:18:17 ◼   ► I'm so excited.

00:18:18 ◼   ► I think this is good stuff.

00:18:20 ◼   ► It's interesting to us.

00:18:21 ◼   ► Yeah, I know.

00:18:22 ◼   ► I'm excited for ECC RAM.

00:18:23 ◼   ► Hey, I don't get file system integrity until 2017 or whatever.

00:18:29 ◼   ► This is what I have to tide me over.

00:18:30 ◼   ► So anonymous source talking about ECC RAM.

00:18:35 ◼   ► ECC RAM, as we've known and discussed, it requires support from the memory controller

00:18:39 ◼   ► because basically the RAM chips have an extra thing on them that holds the parity information

00:18:44 ◼   ► and it sends all this information out to the memory controller and the memory controller

00:18:47 ◼   ► says you sent me this info and here's the parity info and it will use the parity info

00:18:50 ◼   ► to determine if there are any problems and correct the problems that it can, that's why

00:18:53 ◼   ► it's error correcting code.

00:18:54 ◼   ► We should just put a link to the Wikipedia page on ECC or error correcting code or parity

00:18:59 ◼   ► and you can figure out how it works.

00:19:00 ◼   ► But it's up to the memory controller to do that.

00:19:01 ◼   ► It gets all the info from the chip, reconciles it all, corrects any errors and passes it

00:19:05 ◼   ► on.

00:19:08 ◼   ► And that's what I've got in my Mac Pro, that's what all the Mac Pros have, that's the feature

00:19:13 ◼   ► that I want, the error correcting, ability to correct small errors in RAM that happen

00:19:18 ◼   ► increasingly, we'll get to this in another piece of follow-up, happen much more frequently.

00:19:23 ◼   ► Sorry for quick interruption.

00:19:25 ◼   ► Interestingly, the current Mac Pro, while it has allegedly workstation GPUs, they don't

00:19:32 ◼   ► use ECC RAM on the GPUs.

00:19:34 ◼   ► And there's been a lot of problems with the 2013 cylinder Mac Pro and the GPUs in it.

00:19:39 ◼   ► And you know, maybe, and if you put, you know, 6 gigs or whatever of ECC GPU RAM in there,

00:19:45 ◼   ► it would be a lot more expensive in all likelihood.

00:19:46 ◼   ► And that's probably why they didn't do it.

00:19:48 ◼   ► But it is kind of unfortunate that that isn't even an option on the current Mac Pro.

00:19:53 ◼   ► Oh, wasn't there something about that GPU also not really being one of the pro GPUs

00:19:58 ◼   ► being more like a souped-up consumer, one of the consumer GPUs?

00:20:02 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:20:03 ◼   ► It's basically a gaming GPU that's rebranded and adjusted slightly.

00:20:09 ◼   ► And that's unfortunate.

00:20:10 ◼   ► Again, it's like, that computer, that cylinder drives me nuts.

00:20:14 ◼   ► It really does.

00:20:15 ◼   ► It's like, in so many ways I want one.

00:20:17 ◼   ► In so many ways it's terrible.

00:20:19 ◼   ► And Apple keeps narrowing, like certain product lines like the new MacBook One and the new

00:20:27 ◼   ► Mac Pro, they keep narrowing further and further the question of who is this for.

00:20:33 ◼   ► And I think they're going a little too far with that a lot of times.

00:20:37 ◼   ► With a lot of these modern products, by keeping narrowing and narrowing everything and making

00:20:42 ◼   ► it for fewer people, the old Mac Pro was for a lot of potential people.

00:20:48 ◼   ► It was always expensive compared to the other ones, but it was basically a generic tower

00:20:54 ◼   ► made of Apple hardware.

00:20:55 ◼   ► It was not generic, but it was a tower.

00:20:58 ◼   ► You could do anything you wanted really to the inside.

00:21:01 ◼   ► It could be in lots of different configurations for lots of different types of needs, ranging

00:21:07 ◼   ► all the way from power user geeks all the way up to video editors and special installations

00:21:12 ◼   ► and everything like that.

00:21:13 ◼   ► Whereas the new Mac Pro just cuts off so much of that because it is so specialized.

00:21:18 ◼   ► They really like, they lopped off a huge part of the market.

00:21:22 ◼   ► And with the MacBook One, I feel like it's the same kind of thing where it's like, you

00:21:25 ◼   ► know, a lot of people like it.

00:21:27 ◼   ► It looks really cool.

00:21:28 ◼   ► It feels great.

00:21:29 ◼   ► but some of the decisions they made,

00:21:32 ◼   ► which didn't seem entirely necessary,

00:21:34 ◼   ► we talked about both of these things a lot,

00:21:37 ◼   ► so I'll wrap it up, but some of the decisions they made

00:21:40 ◼   ► with the MacBook One and the new Mac Pro,

00:21:41 ◼   ► it cut off so much of the potential market

00:21:44 ◼   ► for maybe looks, maybe, I mean,

00:21:47 ◼   ► like there's some benefits here and there, but--

00:21:50 ◼   ► - In the case of the Mac Pro, it's just like the ad said,

00:21:53 ◼   ► they pushed the human race forward.

00:21:55 ◼   ► It's just they didn't do an awesome--

00:21:57 ◼   ► - Did they?

00:21:57 ◼   ► - They didn't do an awesome job on it.

00:21:59 ◼   ► Like, it's a little bit of like—I kind of think of the first cheese grater, the PowerMac

00:22:03 ◼   ► G5.

00:22:04 ◼   ► Mine had a chirping power supply and still does, as it sits in my attic somewhere.

00:22:09 ◼   ► That sounds like the 2013 Mac Pro.

00:22:12 ◼   ► A lot of issues with that machine.

00:22:15 ◼   ► There's a lot of software-related issues, especially if you try to run the thing with

00:22:19 ◼   ► a retina-ish display attached to it.

00:22:23 ◼   ► You just mentioned the GPU issues, that it's supposed to be this workstation-class machine

00:22:28 ◼   ► it doesn't have ACC VRAM and what was it some other problems with the GPUs they

00:22:33 ◼   ► were talking about the failure rates or whatever it just wait for revision to

00:22:37 ◼   ► you the 5k iMac you have right now has the same problem in terms of the GPU

00:22:40 ◼   ► overheating when you try to play games just so you don't play games so you

00:22:43 ◼   ► don't care but yeah wait wait for revision - no I'm honestly like I my

00:22:49 ◼   ► review of the of the iMac 5k one roughly one year and it came out like last

00:22:54 ◼   ► October so almost one year in. My review of the 5k iMac is I have zero complaints. Like

00:23:00 ◼   ► it is great. Like yeah I would love it if the fan was silent under full handbrake transcoding

00:23:06 ◼   ► load like the Mac Pro because on the iMac it is audible but that's it. Like it is

00:23:12 ◼   ► amazing in every other possible way.

00:23:14 ◼   ► I will see if it cooks your GPU.

00:23:16 ◼   ► And the screen is so good that it makes every other screen including the 15 inch Retina

00:23:22 ◼   ► MacBook Pro look muddy by comparison. Like it is so good. It has, like the same way the

00:23:29 ◼   ► retina MacBook Pro ruined every other screen for me when it came out, the 5k iMac screen

00:23:33 ◼   ► has ruined every other screen for me now, including that one.

00:23:37 ◼   ► Well, when the next revision of Mac Pros come out and they finally decide to make a 27 inch

00:23:42 ◼   ► monitor out of that same screen that's in Marco's iMac and you put them both together,

00:23:47 ◼   ► maybe second time's the charm, we'll see.

00:23:49 ◼   ► Yeah, I'll probably get one of those combos eventually.

00:23:51 ◼   ► Alright, but I still didn't get to the good news about ECC RAM.

00:23:54 ◼   ► Sorry, we're actually going somewhere with this.

00:23:57 ◼   ► So I described how ECC RAM works on my Mac Pro.

00:24:00 ◼   ► Like there's extra chips on the thing, it sends it to the memory controller, so you

00:24:02 ◼   ► need the RAM is more expensive because you've got extra chips, then the memory controller

00:24:05 ◼   ► is more expensive because it's got to do extra stuff and it's specially designed to do this,

00:24:08 ◼   ► and then it passes the information back to the CPU.

00:24:10 ◼   ► Well in DDR4, the upcoming or current, I think this stuff is out now, standard for RAM, ECC

00:24:19 ◼   ► built directly into the chips. so it's not like the the the DIMMs send the

00:24:26 ◼   ► information to the memory controller and the memory controller looks at the

00:24:28 ◼   ► information it was sent along with the parity information, reconciles it and

00:24:31 ◼   ► moves it on. the memory controller has no idea that ECC is involved. it happens all

00:24:34 ◼   ► entirely on the DIMM. still requires extra hardware and you know to store all

00:24:38 ◼   ► that information but it's transparent to the memory controller. so you can

00:24:42 ◼   ► basically take this ECC, not all DDR4 but some of them can, you can take these

00:24:46 ◼   ► ECC DDR DIMMs and shove them in any machine that supports like I guess the

00:24:52 ◼   ► physical form factor and everything else involved with it but the memory

00:24:55 ◼   ► controller doesn't have to be special which means it is presumably less

00:24:58 ◼   ► expensive and less cumbersome and it's harder for Intel to segment their marker

00:25:01 ◼   ► and all that other stuff. There is a little bit of extra cost because like

00:25:05 ◼   ► I said the memory is gonna cost a little bit more and if you're soldering it to

00:25:09 ◼   ► the board you got to find maybe more room to solder the stuff but as DDR4

00:25:14 ◼   ► becomes the standard across the entire industry, that could be the back door for ECC.

00:25:19 ◼   ► It's basically like you get it whether you want it or not, it's built into the chips,

00:25:24 ◼   ► and you don't have to worry about memory controller support or anything like that.

00:25:28 ◼   ► And the only possible downside is that the on-die ECC that's on the DIMMs themselves

00:25:31 ◼   ► will only catch errors related to the chips on the memory, you know, the memory chips

00:25:37 ◼   ► themselves.

00:25:38 ◼   ► It won't catch anything that happens like when the signals are on their way from the

00:25:41 ◼   ► memory thing to the memory controller and our anonymous source originally said the vast

00:25:46 ◼   ► vast majority of all DRAM errors are related to the things on the chips but then corrected

00:25:51 ◼   ► him or herself later to say you know what all of the errors are related to things that

00:25:55 ◼   ► happen on the chip because even if you having the separate thing lets you correct the things

00:26:02 ◼   ► between the DIMM and the memory controller you still have to go from the memory controller

00:26:05 ◼   ► to the CPU.

00:26:06 ◼   ► Those interconnects are fairly reliable.

00:26:09 ◼   ► So this is basically the way that we're all going to get ECC it seems.

00:26:13 ◼   ► And then finally there is a link to a PDF talking about various problems with modern

00:26:20 ◼   ► RAM and the size that we're fabbing things and everything.

00:26:24 ◼   ► And it talks about the bit failures and the times between them and so on and so forth.

00:26:29 ◼   ► And the conclusion it comes to is the most effective way to deal with variable retention

00:26:33 ◼   ► time.

00:26:35 ◼   ► bits is generally believed to be ECC and this whole thing about new memory, the modern memory,

00:26:42 ◼   ► the size that's fab'd at, the problems inherent in fabbing memory at smaller and smaller sizes

00:26:47 ◼   ► basically leads to the conclusion that all RAM is going to have to be ECC if we keep

00:26:52 ◼   ► shrinking it because as you make, as the process size gets smaller and smaller on RAM it's

00:26:58 ◼   ► much easier for a bit to be perturbed one way or the other when just everything is so

00:27:01 ◼   ► so much smaller and so you need ECC just to make the things work reliably period.

00:27:05 ◼   ► So it's gonna be built into all RAM eventually if RAM keeps shrinking no

00:27:09 ◼   ► matter what is the potential conclusion from this paper. So we will put all those

00:27:13 ◼   ► links in the show notes. Ben Hayes wrote in with a stat I think it's come up the

00:27:17 ◼   ► last time we talked about ECC something that I'm not sure about how

00:27:21 ◼   ► accurate this is but I will link in the show notes it says "96% chance of having

00:27:26 ◼   ► a bit error in three days if you have 4 gigs of RAM." So like these these bit

00:27:31 ◼   ► errors are happening, if you believe that stat.

00:27:33 ◼   ► There is another paper that I'll link that says,

00:27:35 ◼   ► "DRAM Errors in the Wild--

00:27:37 ◼   ► A Large-Scale Field Study."

00:27:40 ◼   ► This is from 2009, so it's not particularly new.

00:27:42 ◼   ► So things may have changed for the worst or for the better,

00:27:45 ◼   ► depending-- it's probably for the worse if ECC is not

00:27:47 ◼   ► involved.

00:27:48 ◼   ► It says, "More than 8% of DIMMs are

00:27:49 ◼   ► affected by errors each year."

00:27:51 ◼   ► So this is happening to all of our computers,

00:27:53 ◼   ► unless you have ECC like me.

00:27:57 ◼   ► Whether you know it or not, most of the time,

00:27:59 ◼   ► it doesn't make a difference.

00:28:00 ◼   ► It's probably not corrupting your data.

00:28:01 ◼   ► it's probably not doing anything wrong,

00:28:02 ◼   ► you just gotta get unlucky once.

00:28:04 ◼   ► - Fair enough, yeah.

00:28:06 ◼   ► And also, it is worth pointing out that

00:28:08 ◼   ► while there might be a bit error somewhere on a RAM chip,

00:28:12 ◼   ► that also might not be in a section of RAM

00:28:14 ◼   ► that is currently being used

00:28:15 ◼   ► and will cause a problem for you.

00:28:18 ◼   ► - Yeah, it could be totally unimportant.

00:28:19 ◼   ► It could never even be read.

00:28:20 ◼   ► It could be read and discarded.

00:28:22 ◼   ► It could be the high bits of something that gets masked out.

00:28:25 ◼   ► Chances are very good that nothing bad will happen.

00:28:29 ◼   ► But if you believe the first stat where it's like,

00:28:34 ◼   ► basically every three or four days

00:28:35 ◼   ► you're gonna have a bit error,

00:28:37 ◼   ► you're just spinning that roulette reel

00:28:39 ◼   ► multiple times a week and over the course of many years,

00:28:42 ◼   ► maybe you get one kernel panic

00:28:43 ◼   ► because you don't have ECC RAM.

00:28:44 ◼   ► But I'll take it.

00:28:47 ◼   ► Don't give me that kernel panic.

00:28:48 ◼   ► - Our first sponsor this week is lynda.com, L-Y-N-D-A.com.

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00:31:30 ◼   ► Thanks a lot.

00:31:31 ◼   ► - All right, just a little bit more follow up.

00:31:34 ◼   ► Jason wrote in and said, "I made a new partition

00:31:36 ◼   ► "on my hard drive and the hard drive got corrupted.

00:31:39 ◼   ► "I had a backup, but the backup is encrypted

00:31:41 ◼   ► "with a strong password, which is only in my keychain,

00:31:43 ◼   ► "which is only in the FileVault encrypted user account

00:31:45 ◼   ► in the corrupted partition, and of course in the encrypted backup.

00:31:50 ◼   ► So I have a really nice backup, which is a total brick, until quantum computers can crack

00:31:53 ◼   ► the AES-256 encryption.

00:31:56 ◼   ► I see many friends doing backups using strong passwords and a password manager and checking

00:32:00 ◼   ► every quote "encrypt" box they see.

00:32:04 ◼   ► By themselves these are all good, but together I found out that they can be dangerous.

00:32:07 ◼   ► I didn't hear or read about that before, perhaps worth a warning?

00:32:09 ◼   ► I'd love to hear your comments.

00:32:11 ◼   ► Yeah, you have to be careful about that stuff.

00:32:14 ◼   ► It's a really good point though, because I definitely tick all the encrypt checkboxes,

00:32:18 ◼   ► and without one password on a device somewhere, I am completely lost.

00:32:24 ◼   ► That being said, I have one password on two different Macs, an iPad, and an iPhone.

00:32:29 ◼   ► So it would take a pretty catastrophic issue for all of those to go away.

00:32:34 ◼   ► And by the way, it's stored in Dropbox, so I'd have to lose Dropbox as well.

00:32:38 ◼   ► But it's certainly something to think about, and that's why they say, "Your backup isn't

00:32:42 ◼   ► really a backup until you try restoring from it.

00:32:45 ◼   ► What if you lost Dropbox? Like what if your Dropbox file got deleted or corrupted or whatever?

00:32:50 ◼   ► Even before you start thinking about what if you lost Dropbox, putting it on Dropbox

00:32:54 ◼   ► at all, almost everything you can do to protect yourself from the scenario he's describing

00:32:58 ◼   ► weakens your encryption. Because now you're saying this super strong encryption with these

00:33:02 ◼   ► super strong passwords, if Dropbox's encryption is crappy, or their security is bad, or whatever,

00:33:08 ◼   ► Like you're basically, you're combining lots of different kinds of encryption, but not

00:33:12 ◼   ► layering them.

00:33:13 ◼   ► You're just saying whichever one of these is the weakest, if someone gets to my Dropbox

00:33:16 ◼   ► X they own me.

00:33:17 ◼   ► Because everything there they can get at.

00:33:19 ◼   ► Once they can get that, they've got my passwords and they've got, you know what I mean?

00:33:22 ◼   ► Or your email for that matter.

00:33:24 ◼   ► Like there's always, whatever the weakest link is in the chain, someone just needs to

00:33:27 ◼   ► get through to that.

00:33:28 ◼   ► So you do, I was going to suggest the same thing.

00:33:31 ◼   ► One way to protect yourself from this is to make sure that sort of the keys to the kingdom

00:33:35 ◼   ► are, like what if your house burns down?

00:33:38 ◼   ► The keys to the kingdom can't be in your house.

00:33:40 ◼   ► You have to have them someplace else so that if your house does burn down, you can still

00:33:44 ◼   ► decrypt your backups that are offsite or whatever.

00:33:47 ◼   ► And how would you decrypt your backups that are offsite?

00:33:49 ◼   ► The key can't be in the encrypted backups like this, like poor Jason here.

00:33:53 ◼   ► You have to have them someplace else, and maybe putting them in Dropbox would be the

00:33:56 ◼   ► place to do it.

00:33:57 ◼   ► So hey, you protected yourself, but you've also weakened your security because now you're

00:34:01 ◼   ► relying on Dropbox not to get hacked, and Dropbox is a big target.

00:34:06 ◼   ► That's true, but I mean, 1Password has its own encryption, so you would have to lose

00:34:10 ◼   ► Dropbox's encryption and then 1Password's, wouldn't you?

00:34:14 ◼   ► It depends on how you store it.

00:34:15 ◼   ► If you're storing in 1Password versus like, I use FileVault encryption and I'm just

00:34:18 ◼   ► gonna write down my like secret, you know, they have the thing like, "Please store

00:34:22 ◼   ► this in a safe place," what if you just put that in a text file and stick that on

00:34:25 ◼   ► Dropbox and you're like, "Hey, Dropbox is encrypted," right?

00:34:27 ◼   ► Which is true, it is, or if you put it in an encrypted disk image on Dropbox, but then

00:34:31 ◼   ► you have to have the password with the encrypted disk image, and where do you put that one?

00:34:33 ◼   ► Like you're just chasing your tail.

00:34:36 ◼   ► It's not as impossible to do this, I'm saying the things that occur to most people to do

00:34:40 ◼   ► to protect this information usually leads to either not actually solving the problem

00:34:46 ◼   ► like the case of putting an encrypted disk image on Dropbox then you have to pop the

00:34:50 ◼   ► password to the encrypted disk image on a sticky note that's in your drawer when your

00:34:52 ◼   ► house burns down and you can't get to anything anyway.

00:34:54 ◼   ► Or it weakens things because you literally made a text file in Dropbox and put your tertiary

00:35:01 ◼   ► password that unlocks the thing that unlocks the thing that unlocks the thing in a text

00:35:05 ◼   ► file on Dropbox and you just hope Dropbox doesn't get hacked.

00:35:08 ◼   ► Any thoughts Marco?

00:35:09 ◼   ► Man, this guy has really geeky friends.

00:35:13 ◼   ► But no, I mean, it really, you know, you guys covered it pretty well.

00:35:16 ◼   ► Like it, you know, I also use 1Password.

00:35:19 ◼   ► I also store it on Dropbox.

00:35:22 ◼   ► The question is, suppose you lose access to every computer that you currently have that

00:35:28 ◼   ► works and every device you currently have that works.

00:35:31 ◼   ► Suppose like a Matt Honan happens to you where all your devices get wiped at once. So you

00:35:37 ◼   ► don't have access to your any existing installation of 1Password or anything. So the question is,

00:35:43 ◼   ► can you recover from that? How do you get up from that again? So in my case, the question

00:35:48 ◼   ► is like, what I really need is I need access to my email account and Dropbox. Like if I

00:35:55 ◼   ► have access to both of those things, I'm okay.

00:35:57 ◼   ► But you get Honan, that stuff is gone too.

00:36:00 ◼   ► So you gotta figure it out.

00:36:02 ◼   ► So here's the backstop.

00:36:03 ◼   ► One of the reasons I stay away from, like I've bought one password, I think I've bought

00:36:09 ◼   ► one password more than one time, and I've played with it but I've never taken the full

00:36:13 ◼   ► dive, and here's why.

00:36:14 ◼   ► Because I'm afraid of being in this type of situation where your passwords stop becoming

00:36:22 ◼   ► something you know and start becoming something you have, and I need to have at least one

00:36:26 ◼   ► super important password be something I know.

00:36:29 ◼   ► So then yeah, I could get hit in the head really hard, and then I won't be able to decrypt

00:36:32 ◼   ► my data, but my ultimate backstop is there is at least one password in the chain, and

00:36:39 ◼   ► it's a big long complicated password, and it's the only place it exists is in my head.

00:36:43 ◼   ► And it's never used anyplace else, and I've never told anyone, and it changes, and you

00:36:47 ◼   ► know, and like, fine, delete all my stuff, I can find my way back in.

00:36:52 ◼   ► And there's more than one of those.

00:36:53 ◼   ► Like I have, I don't have a lot of passwords memorized, I'm not saying this is what you

00:36:56 ◼   ► should do, hey, memorize all your passwords.

00:36:57 ◼   ► We all have too many friggin passwords. I use keychain one password could fulfill the same thing, but I

00:37:01 ◼   ► Feel most of the people use one password because of the randomness of the passwords because of how strong they are

00:37:07 ◼   ► Give up on memorizing any of them you can store

00:37:11 ◼   ► Passwords that you make of yourself in one password. You don't have to let it generate the passwords for you

00:37:15 ◼   ► so I would encourage people to

00:37:17 ◼   ► Someone to somewhere have a password that you know, yeah, and yes the people in the chat room saying isn't one password like that

00:37:23 ◼   ► That's the one password that you know to open your one password again. You always want to make it so that

00:37:28 ◼   ► You have a way in even if everything is gone

00:37:32 ◼   ► What if your one password database is gone because they've owned all your stuff and all basically you have is your encrypted like backplace backup

00:37:38 ◼   ► right

00:37:39 ◼   ► Having your one password password

00:37:40 ◼   ► Knowing it in your head does not help you get your backplace password back

00:37:44 ◼   ► If you don't know your backplace password and if your backplace password within one password

00:37:47 ◼   ► You just assume you'd always have one of your devices that you could look it up on. That's a problem, right?

00:37:51 ◼   ► So just always make sure that if everything you have gets owned and

00:37:54 ◼   ► And like you don't have control over it

00:37:57 ◼   ► You don't have access to your email your whole house burns down all your devices are broken or erased

00:38:02 ◼   ► All you've got left are your basically your off-site backups that are all encrypted

00:38:05 ◼   ► You need some way to decrypt them the passwords that are on those encrypted backups are not going to help you

00:38:10 ◼   ► There has to be one of them in your head and hopefully it's the one that lets you

00:38:13 ◼   ► Do a sequence of events that lets you decrypt?

00:38:15 ◼   ► Whatever it is that you're pulling from whether it's backblaze or a hard drive you have at your parents house or whatever

00:38:20 ◼   ► Yeah, this is why I like like my back blaze password is one I know in my head like it

00:38:25 ◼   ► I don't you I don't rely on one password for that one

00:38:27 ◼   ► So and so my way in would be back blaze then like if I lost everything locally all my devices

00:38:33 ◼   ► Then I could log into back place at the password

00:38:35 ◼   ► I know get my one password file there and then to get everything else from there

00:38:40 ◼   ► But even that like I was you know

00:38:42 ◼   ► So it's like you get to pick your own password back place doesn't have the password

00:38:45 ◼   ► But if you've ever typed it into back places website essentially a back place has been hacked in some way

00:38:51 ◼   ► Like they could have your back place decryption password to like then you're just relying on okay

00:38:56 ◼   ► Well, my house isn't gonna burn down because honan was like everything

00:38:59 ◼   ► He's got his house might as well burn down like that was a malicious hacker doing bad things to all his stuff

00:39:04 ◼   ► Taking over everything so like that could happen to you

00:39:07 ◼   ► And so it's something worth thinking about

00:39:11 ◼   ► But at the same time you get honed and backplace is not also probably going to be hacked like those two things may happen

00:39:16 ◼   ► But you're just hoping like are they gonna happen at the same exact time probably not so you're you're playing the odds with something there

00:39:22 ◼   ► But uh, there's always freaking out about those things where most encryption services are designed so that they never do take your decryption password

00:39:28 ◼   ► They don't store it anywhere you type it into a thing to prove that you are you to do your restores from the web

00:39:33 ◼   ► But the bottom line is you are typing that password and they're like, oh no, don't worry

00:39:36 ◼   ► We use JavaScript is never actually transmitted to our server. It happens all client-side. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, maybe it does

00:39:41 ◼   ► Because maybe it doesn't.

00:39:42 ◼   ► If you get hacked, it doesn't anymore, right?

00:39:44 ◼   ► The hacker is the first thing they'll do is make it so that when anyone types in their

00:39:47 ◼   ► password or restore, they actually grab that information and put it somewhere.

00:39:52 ◼   ► You have to think about these kind of failure situations.

00:39:55 ◼   ► Like, I don't trust iCloud keychain with anything.

00:39:58 ◼   ► I don't trust iCloud with anything that's totally only living in iCloud.

00:40:03 ◼   ► Because iCloud's failure mode is kind of unknown and poorly defined and probably not great.

00:40:11 ◼   ► Most cloud services, their failure mode is kind of like the failure mode of an airplane,

00:40:15 ◼   ► which is if an airplane totally fails mid-flight, you have a really big problem.

00:40:19 ◼   ► Dropbox's failure mode is more like a train.

00:40:21 ◼   ► If a train fails, generally speaking, what happens is it just stops moving.

00:40:26 ◼   ► Everyone's still okay, you know, just like, you know, just everything pauses, basically,

00:40:31 ◼   ► and there's a lot more recovery from that, right?

00:40:34 ◼   ► So relying on things like Dropbox and Backblaze, like Dropbox moves stuff around between computers

00:40:40 ◼   ► And one of those computers or more can be running a backup program and those are just

00:40:44 ◼   ► files that you have moved between your computers that live in a regular folder that is right

00:40:49 ◼   ► there in the file system that is, you know, it isn't anything special or weird. It's just

00:40:53 ◼   ► a folder that happens to be synced by this background process between your other computers.

00:40:57 ◼   ► And then your backup program can read that, back it up to its website, and then you can

00:41:01 ◼   ► restore that onto any computer. Like, the fewer airplane-like failure modes you have

00:41:05 ◼   ► here the better. And so something like, if you have everything backed up to your Apple

00:41:09 ◼   ► ID or to a Google ID or any kind of big cloud service, well what happens if they lock out

00:41:14 ◼   ► your account? What happens if they think you did something fraudulent or against their

00:41:18 ◼   ► TOS or they just screw something up and you get locked out of your account? Like how screwed

00:41:23 ◼   ► are you with that? You really have to think about that kind of failure mode and think

00:41:28 ◼   ► about like, you know, what will happen in Scenario X, how safe is my data really and

00:41:34 ◼   ► and how big of a problem would it be

00:41:37 ◼   ► if cloud service X just kicked me out one day

00:41:41 ◼   ► or just totally failed?

00:41:42 ◼   ► - Yeah, and if you wanna have a backstop

00:41:44 ◼   ► that doesn't involve memorizing things,

00:41:46 ◼   ► you can always go back to good old physical security.

00:41:47 ◼   ► Get a safety deposit box at a bank,

00:41:49 ◼   ► put a bunch of passwords on it on pieces of paper.

00:41:51 ◼   ► That's what two-factor authentication is about

00:41:55 ◼   ► in terms of using something you have

00:41:57 ◼   ► and something you know, just to keep adding factors.

00:42:00 ◼   ► And then you're increasing the odds

00:42:02 ◼   ► that you're gonna be okay,

00:42:03 ◼   ► that like here is a series of things that would have to happen for me to be screwed

00:42:06 ◼   ► and it becomes increasingly implausible.

00:42:08 ◼   ► It's like, okay, my house burned down and I get hacked and bank plays got hacked and

00:42:13 ◼   ► someone holds up the bank and opens my safety deposit box.

00:42:15 ◼   ► Unless you're in like a Wesley Snipes movie or something where it's like the world's greatest

00:42:20 ◼   ► heist, this is not going to happen to you probably.

00:42:23 ◼   ► But one of those things could definitely happen.

00:42:25 ◼   ► Water damage takes out all your devices, right?

00:42:27 ◼   ► Or you do get hacked and everything that can be remotely done via .Mac gets wiped and because

00:42:32 ◼   ► you use Apple services for everything you're up the creek, right?

00:42:35 ◼   ► So this is good feedback from Jason.

00:42:40 ◼   ► We should all think about this.

00:42:41 ◼   ► Go through the scenario in your head.

00:42:43 ◼   ► Say, "If this happened, what would I do?"

00:42:45 ◼   ► And then dry run that.

00:42:47 ◼   ► Say, "Okay, I'm going to pretend I don't have access to any of my devices.

00:42:50 ◼   ► Can I do that thing I said I could do?"

00:42:51 ◼   ► And that's where you'll find out, "Actually, I don't have that password memorized anymore.

00:42:54 ◼   ► And where did I put that scrap of paper?

00:42:55 ◼   ► I had that on.

00:42:56 ◼   ► Did I give that to my parents when I last saw them?

00:42:59 ◼   ► Is that with our birth certificates?"

00:43:02 ◼   ► safety deposit box, I don't remember where that is. Maybe you have to have another piece

00:43:05 ◼   ► of paper that tells you where you put the piece of paper that has the passwords on it.

00:43:08 ◼   ► So do a dry run. It's like a fire drill at school. It's good to walk through.

00:43:12 ◼   ► (laughs)

00:43:13 ◼   ► All right. So one last bit of follow-up. We had talked about—actually, this is follow-up

00:43:20 ◼   ► on follow-out. So we had talked last episode about Alphabet and Google's not rebranding

00:43:26 ◼   ► but reorganization. And Jason Snell on upgrade talked a bit about that, which was very interesting

00:43:33 ◼   ► because he had lived through some very similar stuff when he was at IDG. And I'll butcher

00:43:38 ◼   ► the details if I try to repeat what he said. But suffice it to say, in his perspective,

00:43:45 ◼   ► it didn't seem like it was particularly malicious. It wasn't about hiding things. It was just

00:43:49 ◼   ► about reorganizing things that should probably be reorganized. So we'll put a link not only

00:43:55 ◼   ► to that episode in the show notes and that's a great podcast if you're not already listening

00:43:58 ◼   ► to it it's Jason Snell and Mike Hurley but I'll also put an Overcast link with the relevant

00:44:03 ◼   ► timestamp how convenient is that so you can check that out as well so that that was our last bit of

00:44:10 ◼   ► follow-up if I am not mistaken anything else gentlemen yeah Marco I want a way to add podcast

00:44:18 ◼   ► episodes to playlists from the web add to Overcast then I have to go into Overcast and then go to the

00:44:25 ◼   ► the playlist that I use and then edit playlist and then go add episode and then it's just

00:44:28 ◼   ► too many things.

00:44:30 ◼   ► Write from the web, add to playlist, make a little pop-up menu of only playlists.

00:44:33 ◼   ► That's my feature request.

00:44:34 ◼   ► ERIK HURST-LEE, PRODUCER, PRODUCER, PRODUCER, PRODUCER, PRODUCER, PRODUCER, PRODUCER, PRODUCER,

00:44:35 ◼   ► PRODUCER, PRODUCER, PRODUCER, PRODUCER, PRODUCER, PRODUCER, PRODUCER, PRODUCER, PRODUCER, PRODUCER,

00:44:36 ◼   ► PRODUCER, PRODUCER, PRODUCER, PRODUCER, PRODUCER, PRODUCER, PRODUCER, PRODUCER, PRODUCER, PRODUCER,

00:44:37 ◼   ► PRODUCER,

00:44:37 ◼   ► cast web playlist support is because the code that decides how to insert new episodes into

00:44:45 ◼   ► a playlist and how to sort them, because I have manual sorting and all these different

00:44:48 ◼   ► sort options and everything, the code that decides that is so complex in Objective-C that

00:44:55 ◼   ► I really don't want to. I'm kind of afraid to try to port it to PHP to work on the website.

00:44:59 ◼   ► Just have a radio button, top, add to top or bottom. Done. Not asking for the moon.

00:45:06 ◼   ► I just don't want to have to go through all those taps.

00:45:08 ◼   ► Like, you're right, that's not the right thing to do.

00:45:10 ◼   ► It shouldn't go on the top or bottom.

00:45:11 ◼   ► But you put it on the form and you make the person pick.

00:45:12 ◼   ► It's like, you said to put it on the bottom of that playlist,

00:45:14 ◼   ► so I did.

00:45:15 ◼   ► You said to put it on the top, so I did.

00:45:17 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:45:18 ◼   ► That's not bad, actually.

00:45:20 ◼   ► Another thing, like, people-- ever since Instacast shut down,

00:45:24 ◼   ► one of Instacast's features that a lot of people liked

00:45:27 ◼   ► is an up next playlist, where you can hit some podcast

00:45:32 ◼   ► and you can say, add this to up next,

00:45:33 ◼   ► and play up next, or whatever it was.

00:45:35 ◼   ► and everyone writes me requesting an up next feature.

00:45:40 ◼   ► And to me it's like, well playlists do that.

00:45:43 ◼   ► I didn't think I needed an up next feature

00:45:45 ◼   ► because I figured I have reorderable playlists.

00:45:47 ◼   ► You can just drag things around

00:45:49 ◼   ► as you want them to be played in the playlist.

00:45:51 ◼   ► - But you have to get it added to the playlist

00:45:53 ◼   ► to begin with, that's the hurdle.

00:45:55 ◼   ► - Well yeah, so anyway, my theory is at some point

00:45:58 ◼   ► during the two point X cycle,

00:46:00 ◼   ► I'm gonna add an up next feature

00:46:02 ◼   ► and just make it, add it to the playlist.

00:46:05 ◼   ► Like, it's not going to be a separate feature.

00:46:07 ◼   ► It'll just add it to the current playlist

00:46:09 ◼   ► after the current item.

00:46:10 ◼   ► And if you're not playing current playlists,

00:46:12 ◼   ► it'll create one called up next and add these things to it

00:46:17 ◼   ► and switch to that.

00:46:18 ◼   ► Just because, like, you know, it's like,

00:46:20 ◼   ► I can already solve this in another way

00:46:22 ◼   ► that I totally support.

00:46:24 ◼   ► And let me just make this easier for people.

00:46:26 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:46:26 ◼   ► And then my use case is, like, people are always

00:46:29 ◼   ► recommending interesting episodes of podcasts

00:46:31 ◼   ► that I don't want to subscribe to.

00:46:32 ◼   ► Like, you see them in tweets.

00:46:33 ◼   ► And I love it when they put overcast links,

00:46:35 ◼   ► 'cause then I'll have the add to overcast,

00:46:36 ◼   ► but then there's still the extra step of like,

00:46:38 ◼   ► oh, well it just added that episode's to overcast,

00:46:40 ◼   ► and it's there, but I don't play,

00:46:42 ◼   ► I'm always using one of my playlists,

00:46:44 ◼   ► and it's not on that, you know,

00:46:45 ◼   ► so it's like we're so close,

00:46:46 ◼   ► we're so close to just, I see a link,

00:46:48 ◼   ► someone provides a cool overcast link,

00:46:50 ◼   ► and then on the drive home, that episode will be there,

00:46:53 ◼   ► and it will be part of my playlist,

00:46:55 ◼   ► and when my current thing I'm listening to is done,

00:46:56 ◼   ► the next thing, you know, that I saw will play.

00:46:59 ◼   ► - So when you, so for me, like I don't run into this problem

00:47:02 ◼   ► because I basically have like one main playlist

00:47:05 ◼   ► where the filter is include everything except X, Y, or Z.

00:47:09 ◼   ► Like certain shows I save for different contexts in life

00:47:12 ◼   ► or listening with my wife or whatever else.

00:47:14 ◼   ► So my main podcast is,

00:47:17 ◼   ► my main playlist is everything except X.

00:47:20 ◼   ► So when I add a new episode or a new podcast,

00:47:23 ◼   ► it shows up in my main playlist.

00:47:24 ◼   ► So I don't have this problem.

00:47:26 ◼   ► - Yeah, no, I'm doing a whitelist instead of a blacklist.

00:47:30 ◼   ► So it's only these things

00:47:32 ◼   ► And I have a really big backlog, so I probably always want it to be added to the top.

00:47:36 ◼   ► Or like you said, up next.

00:47:37 ◼   ► Like basically after whatever it is that I'm currently in the middle of listening to.

00:47:39 ◼   ► Right?

00:47:40 ◼   ► Because if it gets added to the bottom, there's too much of a backlog.

00:47:42 ◼   ► If it gets added to the top, I may be listening somewhere in the middle.

00:47:45 ◼   ► I was thinking about my other solution to this is I will just stop using playlists and

00:47:50 ◼   ► just try to do everything from the main screen.

00:47:51 ◼   ► I don't even know if that's possible.

00:47:53 ◼   ► I guess it's not really the way I want it to be.

00:47:55 ◼   ► Because I do use the playlists and I do prioritize things and I do like how the shows come into

00:47:59 ◼   ► little priority sections or whatever it's just pretty much it's only one

00:48:04 ◼   ► playlist that I use almost all the time I have a few like you said custom ones

00:48:06 ◼   ► for like road trips and kids safe things or whatever but most of the time I'm

00:48:12 ◼   ► using my main playlist and that one I want stuff to go into there somehow

00:48:18 ◼   ► huh now you're gonna meet me do some work yeah you're done with streaming I

00:48:22 ◼   ► want you to run out of features thanks believe me I have a big list all right

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00:51:19 ◼   ► with different registrars.

00:51:20 ◼   ► Hover is by far the best one I've ever used.

00:51:22 ◼   ► Check it out, hover.com.

00:51:24 ◼   ► Use promo code this week,

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00:51:28 ◼   ► Thanks a lot to Hover for sponsoring our show once again.

00:51:31 ◼   ► - All right, so we're starting to get

00:51:34 ◼   ► into iPhone rumor time.

00:51:37 ◼   ► - Oh boy.

00:51:38 ◼   ► - And here we go.

00:51:38 ◼   ► And there has been an interesting rumor

00:51:41 ◼   ► that just came out in the last day or so.

00:51:44 ◼   ► And this was broken, or at least this entered my world

00:51:48 ◼   ► by way of a friend of the show

00:51:50 ◼   ► and prior guest host, Christina Warren.

00:51:53 ◼   ► And she had tweeted, a retweeted cult of Mac

00:51:57 ◼   ► saying that someone has found iPhone 6S in the color pink,

00:52:02 ◼   ► which I thought was very interesting.

00:52:05 ◼   ► And as the spouse of someone who once owned a pink razor,

00:52:10 ◼   ► and I think I speak for Marco when I say that as well.

00:52:13 ◼   ► - Oh yeah.

00:52:14 ◼   ► This could be very enticing to Aaron and perhaps Tiff as well.

00:52:18 ◼   ► I don't know, any thoughts on this?

00:52:19 ◼   ► Other than that, I'm happy to see them try to do something that appeals—well, on the

00:52:25 ◼   ► surface anyway—appeals more directly to women.

00:52:27 ◼   ► Well, this is where you play the clip of me saying that Apple needs to make its phone

00:52:31 ◼   ► in more colors.

00:52:33 ◼   ► Mission accomplished.

00:52:34 ◼   ► I assume this is actually true.

00:52:37 ◼   ► Yeah, people like colors.

00:52:38 ◼   ► People like to pick colors.

00:52:39 ◼   ► annoying from an inventory standpoint, but it's something that people like and they should

00:52:44 ◼   ► totally do it and I really hope this is true because it will help them cell phones and

00:52:48 ◼   ► it will make people happy. And with anodization like there, or if that's even a word, anodizing

00:52:54 ◼   ► aluminum that's one of the things you can do. You can make colors. They got space gray,

00:52:58 ◼   ► you know, they got a gold one, they got like sure, pink, do all the colors, go crazy, thumbs

00:53:04 ◼   ► up.

00:53:05 ◼   ► I mean, so I actually I just brought Tiff in here so she can actually tell you what

00:53:09 ◼   ► she thinks herself because she's a person. So here.

00:53:12 ◼   ► Hey, I'm a person. Hi there. How's it going? How are you guys doing well? So what do you

00:53:19 ◼   ► think about this pink iPhone? It's pink. I just posted the picture that looks like the

00:53:23 ◼   ► pink razor. Yeah. Would you would you buy one? No. You had you had the pink razor though,

00:53:29 ◼   ► didn't you? I did have the pink razor. I had the pink razor because the pink razor was

00:53:33 ◼   ► was one of the first pieces of technology,

00:53:35 ◼   ► maybe the second piece of technology

00:53:37 ◼   ► that I ever got my hands on that I felt

00:53:39 ◼   ► was kind of made for a lady.

00:53:42 ◼   ► I got really excited about it

00:53:43 ◼   ► 'cause all the other phones before that

00:53:44 ◼   ► just kind of looked like silver pieces of electronic.

00:53:48 ◼   ► Like they just weren't as appealing.

00:53:51 ◼   ► And then you get this pink little razor phone

00:53:52 ◼   ► and it's adorable and it's skinny and it's flippy

00:53:55 ◼   ► and I just had to have it.

00:53:57 ◼   ► So I had the pink, I had the light pink one,

00:53:59 ◼   ► not the hideous neon pink one.

00:54:01 ◼   ► That one was awful.

00:54:02 ◼   ► But I'm not a pink person, so I won't get the pink iPhone

00:54:05 ◼   ► because the white one is there.

00:54:07 ◼   ► - Are pink phones just for girls, Tiff?

00:54:08 ◼   ► - No, pink is not just for girls.

00:54:10 ◼   ► My son has a pink stroller,

00:54:11 ◼   ► so pink is for boys who like pink, if they like pink.

00:54:15 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:54:17 ◼   ► - It's funny you bring up the Razer though

00:54:19 ◼   ► because hand on heart, I'm not trying to be funny.

00:54:21 ◼   ► I might not have ever loved any of my iPhones

00:54:25 ◼   ► as much as I loved my silver Razer that I had.

00:54:28 ◼   ► Geez, I don't know, in like 2007, something like that.

00:54:31 ◼   ► I loved my razor more than almost anything.

00:54:35 ◼   ► And I don't really know why.

00:54:38 ◼   ► I just think I was so mesmerized,

00:54:40 ◼   ► like you said about how thin it was.

00:54:41 ◼   ► - It was sleek looking.

00:54:43 ◼   ► It was awesome.

00:54:44 ◼   ► And that pink color, that light,

00:54:46 ◼   ► what made me think of the razor

00:54:47 ◼   ► when I saw the leaked photos of the iPhone,

00:54:50 ◼   ► fake, whatever they are,

00:54:52 ◼   ► it just, that's the same pink.

00:54:54 ◼   ► That's like that metallic look to it,

00:54:56 ◼   ► you know, with the color.

00:54:57 ◼   ► And that was kind of new then.

00:54:58 ◼   ► So it was super appealing that it was new,

00:55:01 ◼   ► not that it was pink.

00:55:03 ◼   ► - Yeah, we should point out that various people

00:55:04 ◼   ► in the chat room are very insistent that these are fake.

00:55:06 ◼   ► The line in the show, it says,

00:55:07 ◼   ► "Pink phones?"

00:55:09 ◼   ► So do not bank on these things being real,

00:55:11 ◼   ► but making a bunch of fake pictures of it

00:55:13 ◼   ► and showing it to people and seeing the reaction

00:55:15 ◼   ► is all part of the process.

00:55:16 ◼   ► These images traveled around Twitter and social media

00:55:19 ◼   ► pretty quickly because people are excited

00:55:21 ◼   ► at the idea of a top of the line iPhone

00:55:24 ◼   ► that comes in a color that's not like black or gray

00:55:27 ◼   ► or white or black or, you know,

00:55:30 ◼   ► pink high-end phone I think would sell and you know any other sort of colors

00:55:36 ◼   ► that look good in anodized aluminum so even if this is not real I hope that it

00:55:42 ◼   ► will be real someday yeah I agree I want a teal one put that out there someone

00:55:46 ◼   ► photoshop that so we can have that yourself in Photoshop it just you know

00:55:51 ◼   ► that's true and I'll leak it everywhere and to be like oh my god to your iPhone

00:55:55 ◼   ► everybody gonna send it through an anonymous source you gotta not have it

00:55:58 ◼   ► come from you and just have it yeah that's true I gotta find myself a tipster

00:56:02 ◼   ► where can I find one of those hmm all right look I'll put Marco on right if

00:56:10 ◼   ► bye hi so yeah I mean these are probably fake right though the the pictures that

00:56:15 ◼   ► we actually that were leaked or whatever that's what everyone insists you can

00:56:18 ◼   ► just mess with the little hue slider in Photoshop and make phones pretty much

00:56:21 ◼   ► any color but yeah I mean it looked a lot like they they took the picture of

00:56:25 ◼   ► the gold one and just did the replace color thing

00:56:27 ◼   ► and made it pink.

00:56:29 ◼   ► - But they look good.

00:56:30 ◼   ► Like these mockups or whatever,

00:56:32 ◼   ► like that looks like if Apple made that product,

00:56:34 ◼   ► it looks totally in keeping with their recent aesthetic

00:56:37 ◼   ► of their designs.

00:56:38 ◼   ► The color is kind of just the right shade of pink

00:56:41 ◼   ► where it's not in your face, really, really bright pink,

00:56:45 ◼   ► but it's also not so muted that you can't tell it's pink.

00:56:48 ◼   ► I think this is a great product.

00:56:51 ◼   ► I wish they would make it.

00:56:53 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, they already make so many

00:56:55 ◼   ► metal colored products with all the iPhones,

00:56:58 ◼   ► I mean all the iPods, now the iPod Touch,

00:57:00 ◼   ► they made the iPhone 5C, well that wasn't metal,

00:57:04 ◼   ► but they obviously are capable of mass producing

00:57:08 ◼   ► aluminum bodies for electronics in this price range

00:57:12 ◼   ► with pretty much any color they feel like.

00:57:14 ◼   ► So, I don't know, I do wish they would have more of them,

00:57:19 ◼   ► just to give more variety, but.

00:57:20 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's just an inventory thing,

00:57:22 ◼   ► We've done the various times on past shows, the multiplication to figure out how many

00:57:26 ◼   ► varieties of a particular iOS device are, now allow each one of those to be done in

00:57:31 ◼   ► colors.

00:57:32 ◼   ► Like, it just, the fan-out starts to get a little bit crazy.

00:57:36 ◼   ► And so I could see why they would, you know, not want to add even more colors to the set

00:57:41 ◼   ► of colors they already have.

00:57:44 ◼   ► But people like colors, so I think they should do it.

00:57:46 ◼   ► And speaking of metal, that's the next item we have in here about iPhone.

00:57:49 ◼   ► one more solid than a pink phone is yet another parts leak.

00:57:54 ◼   ► Someone's got their hands on what is purported to be the actual back case of the iPhone 6s

00:57:59 ◼   ► or whatever they end up calling it.

00:58:02 ◼   ► And this is a video with strength tests.

00:58:04 ◼   ► They've got an iPhone 6 case, this is a YouTube video I'll put in the show notes, and they've

00:58:07 ◼   ► got I suppose an iPhone 6s case, and they've got a fairly primitive screw based machine

00:58:13 ◼   ► that applies pressure to it, it measures how much pressure it takes to bend, and to spoil

00:58:17 ◼   ► the whole video for you, this is just the case, this is not the actual phone, this is

00:58:21 ◼   ► just the back case with no inside in it, so obviously it's weaker than the entire phone

00:58:25 ◼   ► which has a front laminated to it and everything and is more structurally solid and has stuff

00:58:29 ◼   ► in the middle of it and all that stuff.

00:58:32 ◼   ► But just the case, the iPhone 6 bends in a way that it doesn't spring back from around

00:58:38 ◼   ► 30 pounds of force and the new one bends around 80 pounds of force.

00:58:42 ◼   ► So it's more than a 2x increase in stiffness from a case that is still made of aluminum

00:58:46 ◼   ► and still looks about the same.

00:58:50 ◼   ► They didn't mention anything about it being heavier or thicker or whatever.

00:58:53 ◼   ► What they did do was take a device to it that supposedly measures the content of the metal.

00:58:59 ◼   ► Like they scraped away the anodized surface and got to the metal underneath.

00:59:02 ◼   ► And what they found is that the new one uses more zinc in the aluminum mix.

00:59:06 ◼   ► It's like a 7000 series aluminum instead of a 6000 series aluminum.

00:59:10 ◼   ► Bottom line is, if this video is to be believed and they really did get one of those cases

00:59:14 ◼   ► from the new iPhone 6s, it's way, way stronger, and that's a good thing.

00:59:18 ◼   ► And kind of like how Apple learned, kind of, you know, with the Antennagate thing, it's

00:59:24 ◼   ► like, "Ah, Antennagate is not a big deal, but in the next one of these phones, we're

00:59:27 ◼   ► actually going to change things to further mitigate that issue."

00:59:30 ◼   ► And same thing, "Bending is not a big deal, but in the next one, we're going to make it

00:59:34 ◼   ► stronger too."

00:59:35 ◼   ► Because why not?

00:59:36 ◼   ► Why not make it stronger?

00:59:37 ◼   ► It's just like, we can't escape the car analogies.

00:59:39 ◼   ► Every year, every time a new model of some car comes out, "Here's the new generation

00:59:42 ◼   ► of Honda Civic, 15% more torsional rigidity, like they just, the body shells always get

00:59:46 ◼   ► stiffer in cars.

00:59:47 ◼   ► It doesn't go the other way, it's like, "Yeah, this is the new version of the Toyota Tundra,

00:59:51 ◼   ► and the body has 20% less rigidity."

00:59:54 ◼   ► Nope, it's always, you're always stiffer.

00:59:56 ◼   ► You're always lighter, always stiffer, and so that's the direction they should be going.

01:00:00 ◼   ► And they've been going that direction with their laptops too, like Unibody was a big

01:00:03 ◼   ► upgrade.

01:00:04 ◼   ► I don't think we have any bendgate stuff involving laptops, but if they keep going, they will

01:00:09 ◼   ► pretty soon because I bet you could take a MacBook One and give it a nice curve if you

01:00:12 ◼   ► tried hard enough.

01:00:13 ◼   ► Fair enough.

01:00:14 ◼   ► Now, I thought this video was very interesting and the first time I'd seen it was via Mike

01:00:19 ◼   ► Hurley that we spoke about a little earlier.

01:00:22 ◼   ► But it is very fascinating and I'm very curious to see if this is the real deal.

01:00:26 ◼   ► Now, my 6 that I have right now, as far as I can tell, it is not bent in any way, shape,

01:00:32 ◼   ► or form.

01:00:33 ◼   ► However, and I think we talked about this months ago, I do have the little crescent

01:00:36 ◼   ► moon on the front-facing camera.

01:00:39 ◼   ► So if you look at the front-facing camera, and by the way, if you have an iPhone 6, you

01:00:44 ◼   ► might want to ignore me for a second because you cannot unsee this.

01:00:47 ◼   ► But anyway, if you look at the front-facing camera, there's a little bit of like trim

01:00:52 ◼   ► that is under the outer glass, but it kind of shimmies over and leaves like a little

01:00:57 ◼   ► crescent moon left behind.

01:00:59 ◼   ► It's hard to describe, but trust me, it happens to a lot of people.

01:01:02 ◼   ► And what I intend to do is get this thing, get it looked at right around the time the

01:01:07 ◼   ► new one comes out so I can either get it repaired before the warranty expires or perhaps get

01:01:14 ◼   ► it repaired before I sell it if I can convince Aaron that it's okay for me to get a 6S.

01:01:20 ◼   ► Well you have to.

01:01:21 ◼   ► Your camera is clearly defective.

01:01:22 ◼   ► Right.

01:01:23 ◼   ► There's no other choice.

01:01:24 ◼   ► And I can't fix it except when I go fix it.

01:01:26 ◼   ► Do you have a white front on your phone?

01:01:28 ◼   ► How can you even see that little graphic?

01:01:29 ◼   ► I don't have a white front.

01:01:31 ◼   ► Come on.

01:01:32 ◼   ► Well, I'm looking at my phone with the black front and if there was a crescent, how would

01:01:35 ◼   ► I even see it?

01:01:36 ◼   ► It's so tiny.

01:01:37 ◼   ► No, it's real.

01:01:38 ◼   ► So what happens is something in there shifts off of its axis.

01:01:41 ◼   ► Yeah, no, I know, but I'm like, if that happened, is the thing that shifts also black?

01:01:47 ◼   ► It's grayish.

01:01:48 ◼   ► Stanley Geek in the chat is saying the crescent is a shift of the foam padding between the

01:01:51 ◼   ► camera and the glass.

01:01:53 ◼   ► And that's what it looks like.

01:01:54 ◼   ► Yeah, I've heard of this problem.

01:01:55 ◼   ► I was just saying, like, if this happened to me, how would I know it?

01:01:57 ◼   ► If it was also black, I feel like I wouldn't be able to see it.

01:02:00 ◼   ► If it's a different color, then I guess it stands out.

01:02:02 ◼   ► - No, I mean, it stands out quite clearly.

01:02:04 ◼   ► Like, once you look at it, like, my first iPhone 6,

01:02:08 ◼   ► I think I actually got it swapped

01:02:09 ◼   ► because it had a really bad one.

01:02:11 ◼   ► And my current one I'm looking now, it's right there.

01:02:13 ◼   ► I mean, it's clearly visible.

01:02:14 ◼   ► Like, it's definitely, you know, on the right side,

01:02:16 ◼   ► that's definitely shifting away,

01:02:17 ◼   ► but it's a much smaller version of the shift

01:02:20 ◼   ► than what I had originally.

01:02:21 ◼   ► - Yeah, so I just found a link that I put in the chat

01:02:24 ◼   ► and I'll put in the show notes.

01:02:25 ◼   ► And if you scroll down just a little bit,

01:02:27 ◼   ► they have a close-up image of an iPhone 6,

01:02:29 ◼   ► and that is almost exactly what mine looks like.

01:02:31 ◼   ► - Well, it's like a crescent moon.

01:02:32 ◼   ► Yeah, mine doesn't have this problem, thankfully.

01:02:34 ◼   ► Otherwise, I would have to destroy my phone.

01:02:36 ◼   ► - And Renz is asking in the chat,

01:02:39 ◼   ► was it delivered this way or did it happen over time?

01:02:42 ◼   ► I'm pretty darn sure it happened over time,

01:02:44 ◼   ► although, like the FedEx Aero,

01:02:47 ◼   ► I didn't know it was there

01:02:48 ◼   ► until somebody said something about it,

01:02:50 ◼   ► and I was like, wow, I wonder if, oh, God.

01:02:52 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:02:54 ◼   ► - That's why I still worry about occasionally

01:02:56 ◼   ► putting my iPhone 6 down on a flat surface,

01:02:58 ◼   ► just one of these days is I'm gonna realize there's like a little rock to it because it's

01:03:01 ◼   ► taken on a little bit of a bend from being in my pocket.

01:03:04 ◼   ► I just tried that. I just took, as you guys were talking about, I just took it out of

01:03:07 ◼   ► the case and tried it all over my desk. At first like, "Oh no!" And then I was like,

01:03:10 ◼   ► "Oh no, it's rocking because of the camera bump." So yeah, so now I'm like, I tried hanging

01:03:14 ◼   ► that bulge off of various edges of the desk, you know, because like what if the desk is

01:03:17 ◼   ► exactly flat here and I moved it around a little bit different parts of the desk.

01:03:21 ◼   ► We should not be doing this. We should be doing what you're supposed to do with LCD

01:03:24 ◼   ► monitors back in the days. Don't look for dead pixels. Just don't look for them. Don't

01:03:27 ◼   ► - Don't do it, don't run those patterns,

01:03:28 ◼   ► don't do the thing that helps you find them.

01:03:30 ◼   ► Like if you find it legitimately fine,

01:03:32 ◼   ► but if you don't, don't look for it.

01:03:33 ◼   ► - Did you ever have it at Pixel?

01:03:34 ◼   ► - Oh yes I did, my 22 inch Apple Cinema Display,

01:03:37 ◼   ► that beautiful thing had, I can tell you where they are,

01:03:39 ◼   ► I can put my fingers right now,

01:03:40 ◼   ► I'm pointing them on my screen.

01:03:41 ◼   ► There was one in like the lower left.

01:03:44 ◼   ► - Wait, are you a screen toucher?

01:03:46 ◼   ► - No, I'm not actually touching.

01:03:47 ◼   ► One in the lower left and one in the upper,

01:03:49 ◼   ► towards the upper, lower right

01:03:51 ◼   ► and towards the upper left corner.

01:03:52 ◼   ► The lower right one was the worst

01:03:54 ◼   ► 'cause it was like stuck on red.

01:03:56 ◼   ► Oh man.

01:03:57 ◼   ► It was a good practice for me having to learn with the image retention from Destiny HUD

01:04:02 ◼   ► and now the Cartoon Network logo, which is the new bane of my existence, which is a black

01:04:06 ◼   ► and white opaque logo on Cartoon Network.

01:04:10 ◼   ► Now I'm having my kids shifted into different positions with the screen format changing

01:04:14 ◼   ► to try to not burn that in.

01:04:15 ◼   ► But I realize the Destiny logo is fading, but now I'm like, "Oh, great, CN.

01:04:19 ◼   ► Thanks a lot, guys."

01:04:20 ◼   ► So are you forcing them to do the various stretch modes and everything to just move

01:04:24 ◼   ► it around?

01:04:25 ◼   ► - Oh my God, that's terrible.

01:04:27 ◼   ► - It's not terrible, it's fine.

01:04:28 ◼   ► I mean, they watch Full House, which is standard def,

01:04:30 ◼   ► and like that just looks terrible

01:04:31 ◼   ► no matter what you do to it.

01:04:32 ◼   ► I just haven't moved it around.

01:04:34 ◼   ► Or just stop watching Cartoon Network

01:04:35 ◼   ► 'cause these shows are crap anyway.

01:04:36 ◼   ► And seriously, television companies,

01:04:38 ◼   ► don't put an opaque, completely black,

01:04:40 ◼   ► and completely white logo on

01:04:41 ◼   ► for the entire run of your show that you're airing.

01:04:45 ◼   ► Ridiculous.

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01:06:07 ◼   ► has always been this unachievable goal

01:06:10 ◼   ► of using a brand new blade every time you shave.

01:06:14 ◼   ► Now when the blade cartridges cost four bucks each

01:06:16 ◼   ► from the big brands, that's kind of ridiculous.

01:06:18 ◼   ► That's really not, you know,

01:06:19 ◼   ► responsible or affordable to many people.

01:06:22 ◼   ► With Harry's blades being so affordable,

01:06:23 ◼   ► you actually can achieve that.

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01:06:27 ◼   ► every time you shave with a reasonable budget.

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01:06:33 ◼   ► and you know, if you have sensitive skin like me,

01:06:35 ◼   ► the difference is huge.

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01:06:57 ◼   ► but we have heard from so many women who use them as well

01:07:01 ◼   ► that, 'cause you know, the world of women's razors

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01:07:32 ◼   ► Go to harrys.com and you can also use promo code ATP

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01:07:39 ◼   ► Thanks a lot, harrys.com, promo code ATP.

01:07:41 ◼   ► Thanks a lot.

01:07:43 ◼   ► couple more phone things.

01:07:46 ◼   ► - Are we gonna be force touching each other this fall?

01:07:48 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's one.

01:07:50 ◼   ► - Wow.

01:07:50 ◼   ► - Do we all just assume that's gonna be there?

01:07:52 ◼   ► - I guess.

01:07:53 ◼   ► You know, there's been a lot of talk about like,

01:07:56 ◼   ► oh, what can we do with force touch?

01:07:57 ◼   ► And there's been a lot of intelligent people also saying,

01:08:00 ◼   ► this could be weird or a problem or unintuitive

01:08:04 ◼   ► because tying functionality to force touch

01:08:07 ◼   ► has a number of issues.

01:08:09 ◼   ► One of the biggest is that anything you tie

01:08:11 ◼   ► for a force touch this year is only going to work

01:08:14 ◼   ► on the newest iPhones.

01:08:15 ◼   ► So it's gonna be a while before like the majority

01:08:18 ◼   ► or the entirety of like all devices that can run iOS,

01:08:22 ◼   ► whatever, actually have hardware support for force touch.

01:08:26 ◼   ► So that's problem number one.

01:08:28 ◼   ► There's also, there's problems with potential

01:08:30 ◼   ► accessibility and RSI issues.

01:08:33 ◼   ► I, like the relay guys have been talking about this

01:08:35 ◼   ► on connected and on upgrade.

01:08:37 ◼   ► Like I believe both Mike and Steven,

01:08:41 ◼   ► I don't find a force touch gesture comfortable on the watch.

01:08:45 ◼   ► The feeling of applying more pressure than necessary

01:08:50 ◼   ► against an unmoving piece of glass,

01:08:53 ◼   ► if you do it a few times in a day, fine.

01:08:56 ◼   ► But if that becomes a common gesture,

01:09:00 ◼   ► I think that might be uncomfortable.

01:09:02 ◼   ► Certainly it has issues for people

01:09:03 ◼   ► who have motor disabilities or arthritis

01:09:06 ◼   ► or lots of other issues.

01:09:07 ◼   ► So it is not universally accessible by any means. It is not necessarily an incredibly

01:09:14 ◼   ► good idea to be doing a lot. And we still don't really know the full RSI cost and

01:09:21 ◼   ► risks of doing lots of computing on these little touch screens because they're just

01:09:25 ◼   ► too new. We don't really have enough experience with that yet. But this could be an issue.

01:09:29 ◼   ► I'm just saying it could be an issue.

01:09:31 ◼   ► And the biggest thing for me is we see kind of how they did Force Touch on the Mac with

01:09:35 ◼   ► the Force Touch trap. On the watch, Force Touch is kind of like a menu button. And I

01:09:40 ◼   ► think the watch is so constrained in UI design and in space and in physical design. It's

01:09:46 ◼   ► so constrained that I think that kind of makes sense. It's not, you know, there might be

01:09:52 ◼   ► other options. It's certainly not very discoverable, but on a watch you have to make a lot of trade-offs.

01:09:57 ◼   ► On the Mac, they added Force Touch in a way that, you know, as we discussed when it came

01:10:02 ◼   ► out like, I think it should have just been a shortcut for right click. But they didn't

01:10:08 ◼   ► do that. Instead it's this third kind of click that does something in, you know, whatever

01:10:14 ◼   ► app you're in. And it varies and most apps don't do anything or they do something standard

01:10:17 ◼   ► like a dictionary window or something. In some apps it'll do something special but there's

01:10:21 ◼   ► really no way for you to know what it's going to do without just trying it. And because

01:10:26 ◼   ► most of the time it doesn't do anything special, I have young people aren't going to be force

01:10:30 ◼   ► clicking on Macs in random places as a general habit, even if that was a good interface design,

01:10:35 ◼   ► which it isn't. So on the iPhone, I think we're going to see something kind of between

01:10:40 ◼   ► those two. I fear we're going to see something kind of between those two, but it's going

01:10:45 ◼   ► to be kind of this third action that you can just try force touching in various places.

01:10:52 ◼   ► You might get like a menu or something. I don't know. That doesn't seem like a great

01:10:56 ◼   ► idea to me. What I hope they do, and obviously I'm sure it's too late for anything to change,

01:11:01 ◼   ► not like they listen to me anyway, but what I hope it is, is a shortcut to long press.

01:11:08 ◼   ► Because if that's what it is, and that way, first of all, then if you're a software developer,

01:11:13 ◼   ► you don't have to worry about the install base of who has this and who doesn't. As a

01:11:17 ◼   ► user, it's even easier. So if you just add a gesture recognizer to a UI element for a

01:11:22 ◼   ► a long press recognizer and it happens to fire on a force touch, that I think would

01:11:27 ◼   ► solve a lot of problems because you wouldn't be adding a whole other thing to the interface

01:11:34 ◼   ► that never existed before. You would avoid the install base issue and it would leave

01:11:40 ◼   ► this accessibility option long pressing, you know, it's still, not everyone can do it,

01:11:44 ◼   ► but it's a lot easier to long press than to force press. And I have seen so many people

01:11:49 ◼   ► when they try to use an Apple Watch,

01:11:52 ◼   ► and you tell them, oh, force touch,

01:11:53 ◼   ► and you try to explain to them how to force touch,

01:11:55 ◼   ► it is so hard to get people to recognize

01:11:57 ◼   ► the difference between force touch and long press.

01:11:59 ◼   ► And they'll try long pressing and nothing happens,

01:12:01 ◼   ► and they think it's broken.

01:12:03 ◼   ► And so if those things end up being the same thing,

01:12:05 ◼   ► and a force touch is just a long press

01:12:08 ◼   ► that you can do faster,

01:12:10 ◼   ► that I think is a good way to integrate it into the UI.

01:12:14 ◼   ► - You don't have to worry about the software support

01:12:15 ◼   ► if the OS takes it,

01:12:17 ◼   ► if it becomes like multitasking gesture

01:12:19 ◼   ► or as the tipster is saying, bring up control center or a menu or being like-- if the OS

01:12:25 ◼   ► owns it entirely, then you don't have to worry about support for that.

01:12:28 ◼   ► If they try to make it long-press, then the OS kind of can't own it because that has to

01:12:32 ◼   ► go through to the application.

01:12:35 ◼   ► Force press on the watch?

01:12:37 ◼   ► I'm kind of used to it.

01:12:38 ◼   ► Like when I change the clock face, I think the key thing is the vibration feedback that

01:12:41 ◼   ► accompanies it and makes it feel like one big thing.

01:12:44 ◼   ► If that wasn't there, I think it would be too weird.

01:12:48 ◼   ► And by the way, our tipster says that Force Touch is coming.

01:12:51 ◼   ► And someone wrote in a little while ago, "Why are you giving all this time to the tipster?

01:12:55 ◼   ► You don't even know if he's real or not."

01:12:57 ◼   ► That's why we say these things.

01:12:58 ◼   ► If the tipster says Force Touch is coming and the new iPhones come out and they don't

01:13:01 ◼   ► have Force Touch, that lets us know and lets all of you know how much we should discount

01:13:05 ◼   ► the tipster.

01:13:06 ◼   ► But if it does come, that's one more notch in the "Hey, you got this right," even though

01:13:11 ◼   ► it was pretty easy to guess because I would have bet on it being there.

01:13:13 ◼   ► And the reason, by the way, I bet on Force Touch being there is because they have room

01:13:16 ◼   ► for the sensors, the watch has it, the Macs have it, they're going to do it.

01:13:21 ◼   ► And like Mark was saying, alright fine, you put the hardware there, how do you deal with

01:13:24 ◼   ► the software?

01:13:25 ◼   ► They can work that out.

01:13:27 ◼   ► Maybe they make a bad choice in the beginning and they revise it in iOS 10 or something.

01:13:30 ◼   ► You don't have to commit to that now, you just need to put the hardware in and then

01:13:33 ◼   ► you can figure out how you want to use it software-wise, how it is used in the OS, how

01:13:38 ◼   ► it's passed through the apps, or if it's passed through the apps at all and all that stuff.

01:13:42 ◼   ► That can be worked out.

01:13:43 ◼   ► And by the way, the tipster says this is going to be a new color for the phone, even though

01:13:46 ◼   ► the fake thing, even though the pink things are fake.

01:13:48 ◼   ► So that's another thing you can put in the column.

01:13:49 ◼   ► When the new phones come out, if there is no new color, or they don't have Force Touch,

01:13:52 ◼   ► we can just start saying "This tipster guy is yanking our chain."

01:13:55 ◼   ► Everything here has asterisks or question mark effort.

01:13:57 ◼   ► Anyway, I think that there will be Force Touch.

01:14:00 ◼   ► I think there is a way to make Force Touch make the phone a better thing to use.

01:14:06 ◼   ► I'm not entirely sure that their first crack at doing that is going to work, because I

01:14:11 ◼   ► don't have experience using it on the Mac.

01:14:13 ◼   ► On the watch it works, but on the watch they have to do it because like Marco said, you

01:14:19 ◼   ► have so few avenues to try to put rich input on there.

01:14:23 ◼   ► Forget about a five finger texture to go back to the home screen or whatever.

01:14:27 ◼   ► I love doing that on an iPad.

01:14:28 ◼   ► Do you guys do that?

01:14:29 ◼   ► The five finger squish?

01:14:30 ◼   ► Totally.

01:14:31 ◼   ► Mm-hmm.

01:14:32 ◼   ► I try to do that on my iPhone 6 sometimes and it doesn't work and it annoys me.

01:14:36 ◼   ► It's silly.

01:14:37 ◼   ► It shouldn't work on the iPhone, but it's just so convenient that I want it to work

01:14:40 ◼   ► on the iPhone 6 and it's almost big enough that I could, but I'll do a three finger squish.

01:14:45 ◼   ► You know?

01:14:46 ◼   ► Anyway, Force Touch on iPad starts to make a lot more sense, especially if you start

01:14:51 ◼   ► adding stylus support and all the other stuff like that.

01:14:53 ◼   ► So I think this is just going to race across all of Apple's computing devices, and I think

01:14:58 ◼   ► Apple will find a way to make it useful.

01:15:02 ◼   ► You know, I have this fancy new Retina MacBook Pro with the Force Touch trackpad, and I don't

01:15:09 ◼   ► find myself force touching really ever. The only time I ever find myself force touching

01:15:14 ◼   ► is when I want to look something up that's on screen. Because if you highlight on most

01:15:21 ◼   ► apps, if you highlight a word, or not even highlight, if you just have the cursor over

01:15:26 ◼   ► a word and then force touch, it will open up the dictionary, pop over and show you the

01:15:31 ◼   ► definition of what you're looking at. And then as Marco was talking, I was thinking,

01:15:35 ◼   ► what the crap else does force touch do? And I don't know, because I didn't even remember.

01:15:38 ◼   ► - There's like a zoom, right?

01:15:40 ◼   ► - Variable speed, playback in QuickTime.

01:15:43 ◼   ► - Well, that's a little different,

01:15:44 ◼   ► but I'm talking about like a Force Touch click.

01:15:46 ◼   ► And so in Finder, Force Touch click does Quick View,

01:15:49 ◼   ► which is actually pretty convenient.

01:15:51 ◼   ► - Quick look.

01:15:52 ◼   ► - Sorry, thank you, quick look.

01:15:53 ◼   ► And so that's actually fairly convenient,

01:15:56 ◼   ► although I didn't even realize it till just now.

01:15:59 ◼   ► Force Touch on the Mac is not something I think,

01:16:01 ◼   ► "Ooh, let me try that."

01:16:03 ◼   ► However, I completely agree with you, John,

01:16:05 ◼   ► that I find it very natural on the watch.

01:16:07 ◼   ► And I'm curious to see what it works like on the phone.

01:16:11 ◼   ► I suspect it will not replace long press,

01:16:13 ◼   ► even though I think that would be a smart way to handle it.

01:16:16 ◼   ► I think it's going to be some other sort of gesture.

01:16:19 ◼   ► - We'll just be so happy to not have to long press

01:16:21 ◼   ► to place the cursor that it won't matter.

01:16:23 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:16:24 ◼   ► I know I will be so happy 'cause I despise long press.

01:16:27 ◼   ► I despise having to do something for a set amount of time.

01:16:29 ◼   ► And it's always, I'm just so spoiled by Twitterific,

01:16:32 ◼   ► like the swipe cursor controls or whatever.

01:16:34 ◼   ► Like it's gonna be so awesome on iOS 9

01:16:36 ◼   ► I do not have the long press to put the cursor somewhere.

01:16:40 ◼   ► I hope it's awesome.

01:16:41 ◼   ► I've heard from some people who are testing iOS 9, which I haven't tried at all yet, that

01:16:45 ◼   ► sometimes if you're fiddling around with typing you can fool the keyboard into thinking you

01:16:50 ◼   ► were trying to do a two-finger drag, which is the cursor movement control, and it's like

01:16:53 ◼   ► I wasn't doing a two-finger drag, I'm just being kind of sloppy typing with my thumbs.

01:16:57 ◼   ► That will kind of annoy me if that ends up being a problem.

01:16:59 ◼   ► So I hope they get these kinks worked out.

01:17:01 ◼   ► Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Hover, Lynda.com, and Harry's.

01:17:06 ◼   ► we will see you next week.

01:17:13 ◼   ► even mean to begin. Cause it was accidental. Oh it was accidental. John didn't do any research,

01:17:20 ◼   ► Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Cause it was accidental. Oh it was accidental. And

01:17:30 ◼   ► you can find the show notes at ATP.FM. And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them

01:17:41 ◼   ► at c-a-s-e-y-l-i-s-s so that's k-c-l-i-s-s-m-a-r-c-o-a-r-m-n-t-m-a-r-c-o-a-r-m-n-t-m-a-r-m-n-t-m-a-r-m-n-t-m-a-r-m-n-t-m-a-r-m-n-t-m-a-r-m-n-t-m-a-r-m-n-t-m-a-r-m-n-t-m-a-r-m-n-t-m-a-r-m-n-t-m-a-r-m-n-t-m-a-r-m-n-t-m-a-r-m-n-t-m-

01:18:11 ◼   ► Story time with Papa John.

01:18:13 ◼   ► Alright gather around, gather around the hot iMac.

01:18:16 ◼   ► Picture it, Sicily 2008.

01:18:19 ◼   ► No.

01:18:21 ◼   ► Seven years ago, I looked this up because I couldn't remember how long it was.

01:18:24 ◼   ► Seven years ago, the Fios ferry came to my house, brought a fiber optic cable down,

01:18:30 ◼   ► put a big thing in my basement, hooked everything up, took this action tech Verizon Wi-Fi router thing,

01:18:39 ◼   ► everything, plugged it in, set up whatever sacrificial Mac I let him get his paws on,

01:18:47 ◼   ► left my house, and then I promptly unplugged everything that he had plugged in.

01:18:50 ◼   ► I put an Ethernet cable into the ONT in my basement, threaded it through my house, put

01:18:57 ◼   ► it into an Apple Airport Extreme.

01:18:59 ◼   ► Oh, and by the way, before I unplugged everything, I made it release the IP address, or it's

01:19:04 ◼   ► the HTTP release, rather, so that when I plugged in—

01:19:06 ◼   ► You save yourself a phone call.

01:19:08 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:19:09 ◼   ► And then I plugged in my airport extreme, the flat one, or one of the older flat ones,

01:19:15 ◼   ► and that has been running my home network for seven years.

01:19:19 ◼   ► Zero problems with it, never crashed, never spontaneously rebooted, never did anything

01:19:23 ◼   ► wrong.

01:19:25 ◼   ► Super solid, fanless workhorse of a router.

01:19:30 ◼   ► So that was seven years ago.

01:19:31 ◼   ► A couple months ago, I was fishing around under my desk.

01:19:34 ◼   ► I think I was hooking up the PlayStation 4 or something.

01:19:38 ◼   ► And I saw that some of my power strips down there

01:19:39 ◼   ► were looking kind of creaky.

01:19:40 ◼   ► I'm like, you know what, I should buy some new power strips.

01:19:42 ◼   ► So I bought some new power strips,

01:19:44 ◼   ► replaced the old power strips with the new ones in the wallet.

01:19:46 ◼   ► - Is this something anyone else has ever done?

01:19:48 ◼   ► - Yeah, 'cause they were really old.

01:19:50 ◼   ► They were like from when I was in college.

01:19:51 ◼   ► I'm like, this probably doesn't even work

01:19:53 ◼   ► as a surge suppressor anymore.

01:19:55 ◼   ► It's so old and grimy looking

01:19:56 ◼   ► and I wanted to get some nicer ones.

01:19:58 ◼   ► - No, you're right.

01:19:59 ◼   ► 'Cause the little things in them burn out after a while.

01:20:02 ◼   ► but has anyone, Casey, have you ever looked

01:20:06 ◼   ► at a, looked below your desk and said,

01:20:07 ◼   ► "You know what, I need new Power Strips.

01:20:08 ◼   ► "These Power Strips are no good?"

01:20:10 ◼   ► - No, don't be crazy.

01:20:11 ◼   ► - You probably have newer ones.

01:20:13 ◼   ► You don't have ones from when you were in college

01:20:14 ◼   ► under there, right?

01:20:15 ◼   ► - I might, I don't know, I mean--

01:20:16 ◼   ► - I very well may.

01:20:17 ◼   ► - You don't, Marco, you kidding?

01:20:18 ◼   ► You don't have ones from last week under there.

01:20:20 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:20:22 ◼   ► You bought new ones because these saw that,

01:20:24 ◼   ► some of them had gold plating on it.

01:20:25 ◼   ► Anyway, so, but when I was under there,

01:20:29 ◼   ► unplugging the stuff from the old Power Strip,

01:20:30 ◼   ► plugging it into the new one,

01:20:31 ◼   ► I didn't want the whole house to be off the network, so I quickly unplugged the router

01:20:35 ◼   ► and plugged it into the wall socket directly while I did all the plug shuffling because

01:20:40 ◼   ► I was trying to figure out how to reroute wires.

01:20:41 ◼   ► It's rude to have the entire house be off Wi-Fi while I'm doing all this messing with.

01:20:46 ◼   ► Fast forward to a couple days ago and our house lost power, which is very rare.

01:20:54 ◼   ► It happens maybe once every other year and it lost power for 20 or 30 minutes.

01:20:59 ◼   ► When the power came back on I was surprised to see that my wifi didn't reconnect.

01:21:04 ◼   ► So I went over to see my router and the light was off on it.

01:21:06 ◼   ► I didn't know what the deal with that was because normally there's some kind of light

01:21:08 ◼   ► on it.

01:21:09 ◼   ► So I unplugged it, I reset it, I hard reset it, it did all the things you could do.

01:21:13 ◼   ► And the real bad sign is when you plug it into power it was making this terrible little

01:21:17 ◼   ► noise like a little rhythmic buzz and like the four green lights on the ethernet ports

01:21:22 ◼   ► were blinking and the internet says basically your thing is fried.

01:21:24 ◼   ► And I believe that my thing is fried.

01:21:25 ◼   ► It did not come back to life, so my venerable airport express that I loved for so long finally

01:21:32 ◼   ► gave up the ghost.

01:21:33 ◼   ► Pretty sure it got killed by a power surge because it was the only electronic device

01:21:37 ◼   ► in my entire house that is not hooked up through a surge suppressor and is the only one that

01:21:41 ◼   ► died and that's super sad.

01:21:43 ◼   ► And so I took to Twitter looking to find out, the reason I hadn't replaced it in so long

01:21:48 ◼   ► was one, it was super reliable and I was afraid of getting something flaky and two, the new

01:21:52 ◼   ► one that Apple made has a fan in it and I didn't want that.

01:21:55 ◼   ► And the third reason is all the other ones that people recommend like the wire cutter

01:21:58 ◼   ► and everything never tell me whether I can hook my printer up to it via USB.

01:22:03 ◼   ► And I basically like, everything works, why am I even bothering to replace this?

01:22:07 ◼   ► But now it's forced to replace it, like oh I gotta go through this whole thing, I gotta

01:22:09 ◼   ► find like, does anyone know like a really good Wi-Fi router that hopefully has better

01:22:14 ◼   ► signal strength than my airport extreme which is terrible Wi-Fi signal strength.

01:22:17 ◼   ► Like it's one of the really older ones, it's a terrible signal, I know it has terrible

01:22:19 ◼   ► signal, I just kept using it because it was reliable, right?

01:22:23 ◼   ► that has better signal strength, that supports the newer standards, and that I can just unplug

01:22:27 ◼   ► this thing and plug everything back into it, including the USB from my crappy Canon printer.

01:22:31 ◼   ► My crappy Canon printer, yes, supports Wi-Fi, yes, supports Ethernet, but when I first got

01:22:35 ◼   ► the printer I tried all those things, except for Ethernet. I tried Wi-Fi, but not Ethernet,

01:22:38 ◼   ► I think. Anyway, their drivers are really flaky. I hated it.

01:22:42 ◼   ► So you tried everything except for the most reliable option. Go ahead.

01:22:44 ◼   ► Well, no, but it's not that. It's the networking. It's not that the Wi-Fi was flaky, like, "Oh,

01:22:48 ◼   ► I can't get the signal from point A to point B." It's the network printer. You have to

01:22:51 ◼   ► install their drivers to print to it as a network printer and the drivers were really

01:22:54 ◼   ► flaky and terrible and I had no faith that it would be updated and this was years ago

01:22:57 ◼   ► and I tweeted this by the way and some people are like I've got that same printer and I've

01:23:01 ◼   ► never had any problems with it but believe me go look through my mentions anyone who

01:23:04 ◼   ► said that many more people said I've tried it through ethernet I've tried it through

01:23:08 ◼   ► wi-fi the drivers are flaky it's a nightmare I went back to direct connector USB or whatever

01:23:14 ◼   ► anyway I just didn't want to have to change things didn't want to have to buy a new printer

01:23:17 ◼   ► I just wanted to work the way it worked.

01:23:20 ◼   ► And I didn't want to fan, so I didn't want to buy the Apple one.

01:23:23 ◼   ► So I was just looking for a recommendation, like hey, anyone who's got the wire cutter

01:23:28 ◼   ► recommendations or has tried some of these wire cutter ones, have you found one that

01:23:32 ◼   ► you can do this with?

01:23:33 ◼   ► I know there's like little dongles you can plug into a lot of the Wi-Fi routers that

01:23:36 ◼   ► give you like a USB print server that you can plug the USB thing into.

01:23:39 ◼   ► And I got a lot of suggestions.

01:23:41 ◼   ► Some people said the number one wire cutter pick does have a way for you to plug in the

01:23:45 ◼   ► USB thing with like a weird kernel extension and like to the router and some custom app thing that's really flaky

01:23:51 ◼   ► it's just I don't I don't want to sign up for that and so

01:23:53 ◼   ► Eventually people just started saying hey including Marco. I've got one of those old crappy flat airport extremes

01:24:00 ◼   ► That's terrible Wi-Fi signal that I'm not using anymore. Do you want it? And the answer I realized was you know what?

01:24:05 ◼   ► Yes, I do want one of those. I don't have any devices that support 802.11ac. So I don't need anything with AC

01:24:11 ◼   ► In fact, I had to downgrade my network from N to BG support because my son is using a

01:24:18 ◼   ► 3DS that only supports BG and doesn't support N, and so I can't go N only.

01:24:23 ◼   ► And so a bunch of people were coming out of the woodwork and saying, "I've got old

01:24:26 ◼   ► airport express that I'm not using.

01:24:27 ◼   ► Do you want them?"

01:24:28 ◼   ► Including Marco, who was on vacation at the time, and I said, "Oh, well, just when you

01:24:31 ◼   ► get back home, look at it and tell me."

01:24:33 ◼   ► Instead of looking and telling me, he just merely shipped it without asking me.

01:24:36 ◼   ► Of course.

01:24:37 ◼   ► I knew you would say no, and I wanted to get rid of it, so I just shipped it.

01:24:40 ◼   ► Bottom line is I now have multiple old,

01:24:43 ◼   ► unwanted airport extremes coming to my house.

01:24:46 ◼   ► Oh, and the other part of the story is the day this happened

01:24:49 ◼   ► I had a podcast at night, not this one,

01:24:51 ◼   ► but a different podcast.

01:24:52 ◼   ► And it was like T minus like 2.5 hours

01:24:55 ◼   ► until I had to record a podcast.

01:24:56 ◼   ► And I didn't have an internet connection.

01:24:58 ◼   ► All I had was my cell connection.

01:24:59 ◼   ► I don't know how to record a podcast over that.

01:25:01 ◼   ► My signal strength isn't great anyway.

01:25:03 ◼   ► So I had to get back online.

01:25:06 ◼   ► So remember that seven years ago

01:25:07 ◼   ► when the guy came and hooked everything up at my house

01:25:09 ◼   ► and I promptly disconnected everything.

01:25:11 ◼   ► What I did at that point was took the ActionTech

01:25:14 ◼   ► Verizon router that he had plugged in

01:25:16 ◼   ► and all of his associated accessories

01:25:17 ◼   ► and put it in a Ziploc bag and put it in my basement.

01:25:20 ◼   ► So seven years later, I went back down to the basement,

01:25:23 ◼   ► pulled out the Ziploc bag,

01:25:24 ◼   ► took out a brand new looking Verizon router

01:25:29 ◼   ► that had been exposed to air,

01:25:30 ◼   ► not been exposed to air for seven years,

01:25:33 ◼   ► plugged it in and realized that I can't get an IP address

01:25:38 ◼   ► and can't get it into a DHCP lease

01:25:40 ◼   ► because I can't release it from the dead unit

01:25:43 ◼   ► because the dead unit is dead.

01:25:44 ◼   ► I tried cloning the Mac address to say,

01:25:46 ◼   ► I can convince it that the Verizon router is the same.

01:25:48 ◼   ► I'll just have the same Mac address.

01:25:49 ◼   ► Nope, it would just would not give me a thing.

01:25:51 ◼   ► I just had to wait it out.

01:25:52 ◼   ► And I fought with it for a really long time

01:25:54 ◼   ► until the point where I'm like, you know what?

01:25:56 ◼   ► I'm at the point now where I'm going to call

01:25:57 ◼   ► Verizon customer support.

01:25:58 ◼   ► That's how desperate I am.

01:25:59 ◼   ► So as I was going through their phone tree,

01:26:02 ◼   ► I think the lease finally ran out and I got an IP address.

01:26:06 ◼   ► And so I'm using the router now.

01:26:08 ◼   ► It's pretty crappy.

01:26:09 ◼   ► Gets good speed.

01:26:10 ◼   ► It gets better Wi-Fi signal than my airport extreme,

01:26:13 ◼   ► which is depressing, but that pancake thing

01:26:15 ◼   ► was not very good.

01:26:16 ◼   ► - All this time, you could have had better Wi-Fi.

01:26:18 ◼   ► - Not that much better.

01:26:19 ◼   ► It's better in my son's room,

01:26:21 ◼   ► but it's worse in some rooms in the downstairs.

01:26:23 ◼   ► I don't understand how that mix of events happens.

01:26:25 ◼   ► But anyway, the Verizon one, what couldn't I do on it?

01:26:28 ◼   ► It was kind of a pain to get it

01:26:30 ◼   ► to distribute the IP addresses the way I wanted it.

01:26:31 ◼   ► For some reason, when I had my custom DNS

01:26:33 ◼   ► that I have on a lot of my machines,

01:26:35 ◼   ► it was cranky about that like i had a manual i_p_ address and accustomed d_n_s_

01:26:38 ◼   ► and just all name look ups would fail and i had to let you use the the d_n_s_

01:26:42 ◼   ► on the router otherwise i can look up anything anyway i don't do with the

01:26:45 ◼   ► sooner i get the stupid blinking light thing out of my

01:26:47 ◼   ► housing back into the block back the better so thanks to everyone who offer

01:26:52 ◼   ► to send me their old crappy hardware and there are many of them

01:26:58 ◼   ► thanks to the people are actually sending it to me including marco you

01:27:00 ◼   ► know you should have the bunch of other crap that doesn't want that box

01:27:03 ◼   ► one thing

01:27:04 ◼   ► Yeah, we'll see what's in there. Why don't you put some gold cables in next time?

01:27:08 ◼   ► No, so I came home, I learned, so I did have the kind Jon wanted, and I don't use it

01:27:16 ◼   ► anymore. So I thought it would be my closet. So I get home, and I see that apparently the

01:27:22 ◼   ► one I was thinking of, I think I already gave it away to somebody else, and so the one I

01:27:26 ◼   ► was thinking, the only one I had in my closet was the tall one, the current model actually,

01:27:31 ◼   ► So the tall AC version that Jon didn't want, I knew he didn't want it because it has a

01:27:36 ◼   ► fan in it, even though you can't hear the fan.

01:27:39 ◼   ► And so I knew if I asked him if this was okay, he would say no.

01:27:44 ◼   ► So I just didn't ask him.

01:27:45 ◼   ► I put it in a box and I threw in a, whatever the first cheap Nexus tablet was, was it the

01:27:51 ◼   ► Nexus 7 or something?

01:27:54 ◼   ► Whatever the very first cheap Nexus tablet was.

01:27:56 ◼   ► I've had one of those in my closet for, I don't know, three years sitting around doing

01:28:00 ◼   ► nothing.

01:28:01 ◼   ► useless. So I packed the airport extreme with a few pieces of packing paper and a Nexus

01:28:11 ◼   ► tablet and shipped that off to Jon.

01:28:14 ◼   ► It was like the last time you sent me a stack of Kindles with basically nothing between

01:28:18 ◼   ► them. Just like Kindles stacked on top of each other like a four inch high solid stack

01:28:22 ◼   ► of Kindles with nothing between it and no other padding in the box. You just open up

01:28:25 ◼   ► and it's like, "Why is this box so heavy?" You open up, it's just a solid stack of Kindles.

01:28:29 ◼   ► Well, they're very dense when there's not much else in the box.

01:28:32 ◼   ► Yeah. Like I said, my daughter is still using one of those. She's using the one that has

01:28:36 ◼   ► like a scratch on the screen. It came out of the box like that, like there's a big gouge

01:28:39 ◼   ► in the screen or whatever. It's the one with the stupid IR touch sensors that try to figure

01:28:43 ◼   ► out where your finger is.

01:28:44 ◼   ► That's the worst one.

01:28:45 ◼   ► It is really the worst one.

01:28:46 ◼   ► That's the first generation Kindle Touch.

01:28:48 ◼   ► Yeah, but that's what she's using. Both makins don't like to read. They'd rather have paper

01:28:53 ◼   ► books and, you know, I don't understand. Like, they do everything else on the iPad. They're

01:28:56 ◼   ► They're always watching YouTube instead of TV.

01:28:58 ◼   ► But when it comes to reading books, they like the paper ones.

01:29:01 ◼   ► They don't like e-books and they don't like reading them on their iPads.

01:29:03 ◼   ► Well it gives it a warmer sound.

01:29:06 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:29:07 ◼   ► Stop.

01:29:08 ◼   ► I think they'll come around eventually.

01:29:09 ◼   ► The Kindles are weird though.

01:29:11 ◼   ► It is kind of a weird experience, especially with the flaky touchscreen.

01:29:14 ◼   ► If you're used to the responsiveness of an iPad screen, the Kindle is like, "Ugh, this

01:29:18 ◼   ► feels weird and you can't even touch this one.

01:29:21 ◼   ► You have to use these buttons and you can touch this one, but the screen updates slow.

01:29:24 ◼   ► It just feels awkward."

01:29:25 ◼   ► I think it is like it's not not that it's intimidating, but it feels like it's broken

01:29:29 ◼   ► It doesn't you know in a way that a paper book doesn't feel like it's broken them anyway. They'll probably come around so

01:29:35 ◼   ► That's what I'm speaking to you now through this

01:29:37 ◼   ► Seven year old Verizon router that's been sitting a ziplock bag

01:29:41 ◼   ► Yeah, I'm glad I had my phone because I had to Google for what the default password is or how to reset

01:29:50 ◼   ► I could have figured out there's a big reset button in the back anyway

01:29:53 ◼   ► But I went through the whole sequence of events that I've done before of like

01:29:56 ◼   ► Factory reset your router or determine what the factory password is

01:30:01 ◼   ► Figure out what the IP address is. Is this going to be 10 0 1 or 190?

01:30:06 ◼   ► 192 168 blah blah get in

01:30:10 ◼   ► The interface was weird. Like I'm like maybe it doesn't work in Chrome

01:30:14 ◼   ► It does this crazy thing where you type the username then when you type in the password field you type one character

01:30:18 ◼   ► But it shows three dots. Yeah, like Lotus Notes

01:30:21 ◼   ► Yeah, it just like a client-side JavaScript masking crap like all this sort of fake pointless security

01:30:27 ◼   ► They're trying to do to be and at first I was like

01:30:30 ◼   ► Deleting the key down handler to stop it from doing that

01:30:33 ◼   ► But then I realized I had I had to let it because I thought it was a bug like I thought this this thing was created

01:30:37 ◼   ► Before Chrome even existed, right? So maybe it just doesn't handle modern browsers

01:30:41 ◼   ► So I'll just put the password directly into the input field and submit but then I realized I just have to let it do its clients

01:30:46 ◼   ► anyway

01:30:47 ◼   ► And then you go into that UI and I'm trying to get to release the IP address and I'm cloning

01:30:51 ◼   ► the MAC address and it was a fun hour and a half or whatever.

01:30:55 ◼   ► Basically I burned down the clock until it just gave me the IP address.

01:30:58 ◼   ► Yeah, no, I mean, and you know, I've made that phone call many times.

01:31:02 ◼   ► Like whenever I've changed my setup or changed routers, you got to call Verizon because I

01:31:05 ◼   ► never, I've never gotten it to actually successfully release the old IP and give me a new one.

01:31:11 ◼   ► Like I've never gotten that to work.

01:31:12 ◼   ► How long did you wait?

01:31:13 ◼   ► Because it's usually like two hours-ish.

01:31:14 ◼   ► I've never waited that long.

01:31:16 ◼   ► I have a three year old who wants to watch Magic School Bus on Netflix.

01:31:19 ◼   ► There's no way I'm going to wait that long.

01:31:20 ◼   ► It may take that long to get through the 17 tiers of support you have to get to the guy

01:31:24 ◼   ► who knows what you say when you say, "Just release the lease."

01:31:26 ◼   ► No, honestly, I've had great luck.

01:31:28 ◼   ► Like usually those phone calls are less than 10 minutes long.

01:31:31 ◼   ► It's very, I've had very good luck with that.

01:31:33 ◼   ► But no, I mean it's interesting.

01:31:34 ◼   ► So like those Action Tech routers, they're actually pretty decent routers because it's

01:31:38 ◼   ► kind of like the way that back when phone companies made the phones and had to support

01:31:44 ◼   ► and they own the phones and you know you paid for you know similar to how cable boxes work

01:31:48 ◼   ► today for most people where you don't own the box you pay the cable company for service

01:31:55 ◼   ► and if anything was wrong with the box they have to deal with it like they have to send

01:31:58 ◼   ► someone out to your house or do something else like so you know so they make the boxes

01:32:02 ◼   ► really well to you know to very conservative strong standards so that they tend not to

01:32:10 ◼   ► break and that's how phones used to be.

01:32:12 ◼   ► I didn't talk about like the big Bakelite, as Dr. Drang about pronouncing it, those big

01:32:17 ◼   ► solid phones, right?

01:32:18 ◼   ► But these aren't, these are subcontracted, like Action Tech is like a third party company

01:32:22 ◼   ► that they're...

01:32:23 ◼   ► Yeah, right, but still.

01:32:24 ◼   ► So you're gonna make these things for us.

01:32:25 ◼   ► But yeah, no, it seems pretty solid and the performance is really good, but obviously

01:32:28 ◼   ► like it doesn't even support N, because N didn't exist back then, so it's BG only, right?

01:32:33 ◼   ► And the UI is silly looking and it's like a little, it looks like a Linux style UI at

01:32:38 ◼   ► best and it doesn't, there's no USB port on it for my printer, like it's just, there's

01:32:44 ◼   ► a reason I didn't want to use it, I just didn't want to be involved with that at all, like

01:32:48 ◼   ► you know, does it retain my IP address as well as Macs go to sleep for back time, Mac

01:32:51 ◼   ► auto waking, like all that stuff, no it doesn't, like that's why I didn't want it to be involved

01:32:55 ◼   ► and you can put it in bridge mode and like turn off the wifi and use both of them but

01:32:59 ◼   ► that just seemed like one more potential thing to go wrong, so I just want ethernet right

01:33:03 ◼   ► from the wall into the thing.

01:33:04 ◼   ► So I'll be happy when whoever's shipment of their gently used airport extreme stuff arrive

01:33:13 ◼   ► at my house.

01:33:14 ◼   ► And the one with the fan marker?

01:33:15 ◼   ► I'll plug it in.

01:33:16 ◼   ► I'll give it a try.

01:33:17 ◼   ► I'll see if I can hear the fan.

01:33:18 ◼   ► Everyone tells me, someone did like a decibel test.

01:33:19 ◼   ► They were like, "Look, I'm three inches away with some sound meter app for the iPhone that

01:33:24 ◼   ► says 40 decibels," which it rates as the sound level in a quiet house.

01:33:30 ◼   ► So we'll see.

01:33:31 ◼   ► hear the fan, I'll probably be okay with it, but it's right on the desk where I play PS4.

01:33:37 ◼   ► I'm like, I will be able to touch it with my hand.

01:33:40 ◼   ► And that's kind of where it has to be in terms of all the wire routing that goes all over

01:33:43 ◼   ► the place.

01:33:44 ◼   ► So if I can hear it, I'll be swapping in one of the pancake ones.

01:33:48 ◼   ► So if since you already keep it out on your desk at proper height, why did you not consider

01:33:54 ◼   ► the Google OnHub?

01:33:58 ◼   ► First of all, the thing is ugly as sin.

01:33:59 ◼   ► Hold on.

01:34:00 ◼   ► I would just like to state for the record that I am using the same action tech router that I received in 2008 as my router

01:34:07 ◼   ► And it is running

01:34:09 ◼   ► Wired into one of the flat airport extremes and that is how I've been running my network for like two years now before that

01:34:16 ◼   ► I was just using the action tech without anything else. So you got it in bridge mode and you got the Wi-Fi turned off

01:34:20 ◼   ► Mm-hmm. That's exactly right and it works just fine. Is this the the mi

01:34:26 ◼   ► 424 WR I have no idea. It says it right on the front along with a million blinking lights. Yeah, well, that's true

01:34:33 ◼   ► I can't read it from where I am. Let me log into that ridiculous admin panel with the ridiculous

01:34:38 ◼   ► password crap that you were also talking about earlier

01:34:41 ◼   ► Let me see if it says on here this thing I it looks like it hasn't been updated in eight years

01:34:46 ◼   ► I know it has but it is ridiculous and speaking of like what Marco was saying like when the phone company has to do it

01:34:52 ◼   ► they don't want to be have the ones to swap it or whatever when I was a

01:34:55 ◼   ► Media one customer which became Comcast which became Xfinity blah blah blah blah

01:35:00 ◼   ► But anyway media one when I first came to Massachusetts back up from from Georgia

01:35:03 ◼   ► It was a cable modem and the thing it looked like the outer case was made of cast iron

01:35:08 ◼   ► I know it wasn't made of

01:35:10 ◼   ► Like you know texture on cast iron pans where it's kind of like dotty

01:35:13 ◼   ► Yeah, like the little dots like that's the texture they had done on what I assume

01:35:16 ◼   ► It's like the aluminum case but like weighed a ton and have these fins on it like a heatsink

01:35:19 ◼   ► It was just built like a tank

01:35:22 ◼   ► But it was a piece of crap like I had so many problems with that thing people would come out and check all the wires

01:35:27 ◼   ► On our house and check the signal strength and say everything's great

01:35:30 ◼   ► I understand maybe you need to put some more filters here like all analog BS crap to try to get the cable signal to be

01:35:35 ◼   ► right and

01:35:36 ◼   ► We went through that over the course of like a year and a half and then eventually I just got a new Motorola surfboard

01:35:41 ◼   ► Thing from like Best Buy or something and installed that it's like oh god

01:35:44 ◼   ► But all the problems are gone drop connections are gone. Don't have to worry about signal strength anymore

01:35:49 ◼   ► Even though that thing looked like it was built like a tank. It was obviously crappy and old so I don't trust

01:35:54 ◼   ► the media that the ISP companies to

01:35:58 ◼   ► To care if my connection is flaky or not as fast as it can be they just care

01:36:02 ◼   ► Like that I keep paying whatever like rental fee or whatever than a brandy like anyway

01:36:06 ◼   ► I don't think I'm renting this

01:36:07 ◼   ► I don't understand why I even still have it, but I'm glad I did because that was literally my only backup option

01:36:10 ◼   ► I don't have any other routers in the house

01:36:12 ◼   ► I was thinking of driving to an Apple store and just buying the stupid fan tower thing or whatever

01:36:17 ◼   ► If I couldn't get the Verizon one to work, but the Verizon one came right out of the box like a champ everything about it worked

01:36:24 ◼   ► I knew about the IP releasing things

01:36:27 ◼   ► I wonder if there is a way to release it if the other one is dead because I don't understand when I clone the Mac

01:36:31 ◼   ► Address I couldn't say hey just give me the IP like I am I am that same Mac address like I obviously don't know about

01:36:38 ◼   ► The details of how this networking works. I really thought that would work and when it didn't I was kind of bummed

01:36:42 ◼   ► No

01:36:42 ◼   ► I mean you just call them and they can they send like a remote command to your own T to break the lease

01:36:48 ◼   ► Yeah

01:36:48 ◼   ► I mean that was that was another possible option that people were like if you restart your own T

01:36:52 ◼   ► And then someone else was that I restarted my own T and it didn't work and I wasn't willing to do that

01:36:56 ◼   ► Oh, yeah

01:36:57 ◼   ► No

01:36:57 ◼   ► I've tried that there's there's like all there's like three different levels of resetting it's like from like pulling the battery out

01:37:02 ◼   ► And I tried all the head and none of that actually worked but calling Verizon fixed it in ten minutes

01:37:07 ◼   ► Yeah, I've done the Verizon call before during other crises to try to get that done, but

01:37:13 ◼   ► yeah.

01:37:14 ◼   ► Like I said, the phone tree was long enough that by the time I was about to be connected

01:37:19 ◼   ► to a person, the green light went on.

01:37:21 ◼   ► I was like, "Oh, never mind."

01:37:22 ◼   ► So I have a MI424-WR hardware revision D as in dog.

01:37:29 ◼   ► What I was going to say earlier that I actually forgot was I didn't know the secret to having

01:37:35 ◼   ► a good Fios installation, which is to have them run Ethernet out of your ONT.

01:37:42 ◼   ► So mine is actually, the reason I'm sticking with the ActionTek in no small part is because

01:37:46 ◼   ► I have coax coming out of the ONT into the ActionTek.

01:37:50 ◼   ► And that's, the internet is riding on the coax.

01:37:53 ◼   ► And so I really regret when they did the installation not having them run Ethernet.

01:37:58 ◼   ► Like I think you did, John, and I believe, Marco, you've said in the past you did as

01:38:02 ◼   ► well.

01:38:03 ◼   ► Either way, I am running this ancient MI-424WR revision D, and it has apparently been active

01:38:09 ◼   ► for 711 hours, which is about a month.

01:38:12 ◼   ► If you physically run a cable to it, that's another thing that you can call them and just

01:38:17 ◼   ► say, "Can you switch my ONT to Ethernet?" and they will say "OK" and they will do it.

01:38:20 ◼   ► Is the ONT the one that's in the house or outside the house?

01:38:23 ◼   ► I always get them backwards.

01:38:24 ◼   ► The ONT is the thing that's probably in your garage or basement.

01:38:26 ◼   ► Yeah, it's in the garage then.

01:38:28 ◼   ► It's got green lights on it.

01:38:30 ◼   ► It looks like yours might be smaller,

01:38:31 ◼   ► but it's like a white rectangular box mounted to a wall.

01:38:34 ◼   ► It can be in the garage.

01:38:36 ◼   ► - Yeah, fiber goes in,

01:38:37 ◼   ► and either Ethernet or CoEx or both goes out.

01:38:39 ◼   ► - Yeah, 'cause I have a box on the outside of the house

01:38:43 ◼   ► that I thought is where the actual fiber came in.

01:38:46 ◼   ► - No, that's your water meter.

01:38:48 ◼   ► - No, no, no, no, seriously.

01:38:49 ◼   ► There is a Fios box on the outside

01:38:51 ◼   ► and a Fios box on the inside.

01:38:52 ◼   ► Hand on heart, I'm 100% sure.

01:38:53 ◼   ► - No, you just look at what's in the outside one.

01:38:55 ◼   ► It could just be a box covering the hole

01:38:56 ◼   ► they put in your house to get the fiber.

01:38:58 ◼   ► No, no, no. I've opened it up for some reason or another, and I could swear that's where my ONT is.

01:39:04 ◼   ► But again, I always get them backwards, so I'm probably wrong. But anyways, but yeah, so there's a box on the outside, a box on the inside.

01:39:11 ◼   ► And I can never keep them straight.

01:39:13 ◼   ► Yeah, when the installer was here, I was pretty much going to let them do what they wanted, because I knew as soon as they left I would just disconnect everything.

01:39:18 ◼   ► But the one thing I had to say was, "No, no, no, don't. Just leave the coax in the basement. Do Ethernet from the box."

01:39:22 ◼   ► from the box and like, "You won't be able to get on demand!" I'm like, "It's fine.

01:39:27 ◼   ► You don't want on demand?" I do not want on demand. In fact, I have a TiVo, not a cable

01:39:31 ◼   ► box, so I couldn't get that anyway. So just leave the coax here. I just could not believe

01:39:35 ◼   ► that anyone would pay all this money for a Fios and not have on demand. This was, you

01:39:38 ◼   ► know, 2008 or whatever.

01:39:39 ◼   ► All right, well, because, you know, to the installer, Fios means TV.

01:39:43 ◼   ► That's true. Now, the one nice thing I will say about having the ActionTech on coax is

01:39:47 ◼   ► that I really wanted an Ethernet drop down in the family room, and the ActionTech routers

01:39:52 ◼   ► upstairs in the office and what I did was I went on Amazon and got a mocha bridge and what that allows you to do

01:39:58 ◼   ► Is it's not you know full speed

01:40:00 ◼   ► I've done speed tests damned if I remember how fast they were but

01:40:03 ◼   ► You can get the smoke a bridge that takes coax in and has ethernet on the other side

01:40:08 ◼   ► And so I have a hub hooked up to the smoke a bridge hooked up to the coax and it can get on the network

01:40:13 ◼   ► By but because the action tech is taking coax now. Yes

01:40:18 ◼   ► I could have put another mocha bridge on the other side

01:40:20 ◼   ► But it was pretty neat to be able to just add an Ethernet drop arbitrarily anywhere that I have a cable drop

01:40:25 ◼   ► And since this house was built in the late 90s, I have cable drops freaking everywhere. I

01:40:29 ◼   ► Don't know. I just thought that was a neat trick. Yeah, I feel like I should save this thing because I think this is the

01:40:34 ◼   ► This Airport Extreme because I think it is the most reliable piece of network and hardware

01:40:40 ◼   ► I have ever owned. It has literally never done anything wrong. It has just sat there for seven years

01:40:45 ◼   ► Doing its thing

01:40:48 ◼   ► Especially like, you know, you can you can usually get like a switch to last that long maybe but like something that has as many

01:40:53 ◼   ► roles as

01:40:54 ◼   ► A wireless router like that's that whole integrated package plus, you know

01:40:58 ◼   ► The print server and everything else and I would mess with it

01:41:00 ◼   ► I would like I would mess with it with the airport utility

01:41:03 ◼   ► I would open up and close there

01:41:04 ◼   ► I remember opening and closing ports try to play quick through arena like that's how old this thing was to try to play multiplayer quick

01:41:09 ◼   ► the arena and like trying to open ports up for a bit torrent before it like the

01:41:12 ◼   ► clients were good and got through your firewall and right or what like

01:41:17 ◼   ► You know it has done its job well, and it never made any noise

01:41:20 ◼   ► and it didn't have obnoxious lights, and it was really small and flat and

01:41:24 ◼   ► Yeah

01:41:26 ◼   ► Maybe we'll put it in a little frame somewhere

01:41:28 ◼   ► You mount it on the wall could be like art. It's kind of boring. It's just a white rounded square thing

01:41:35 ◼   ► [BEEP]