00:00:03 ◼ ► You know what else is suspect? We went live before we did pre-flight. So now we're going to do a visual pre-flight for the bootleg members. Are you ready?
00:00:08 ◼ ► A visual pre-flight? Why can't we do an audio pre-flight? Everyone please look at the document. Oh my god, I don't know if I have... Okay, yes, carry on.
00:00:15 ◼ ► Alright, so first we're going to do this part. Why can't we do this verbally? Why is this a problem? Because the pre-flight is secret. Marco says that this part is not going to take a long time and I hope so. He's full of it. Because I want this part to be very close to the front of the program and I would like Casey to throw it to me for this part so I can try to get it in and out quick. Then we have our regular... Why don't we reverse those? Why are we not reversing these? Because this leads into this.
00:00:43 ◼ ► No, no, no, slow down. I'm saying why don't we do the... I can't say. Oh, I asked Marco about that while you were off rebooting. That does not belong before the modem sound.
00:00:52 ◼ ► Yeah, and Marco thinks this order is better and he said he'll be short. Okay, anyway. Alright. We had this discussion without you Casey. If you just got to be here for the whole meeting you'll get it.
00:01:01 ◼ ► Oh, kiss my ass, John. God bless. Alright, so then we got all this stuff here, our usual stuff. Notice there is a next week divider so we're not actually going to do all of it.
00:01:11 ◼ ► Then all the way down here we have this. This is the worst content we ever made. This is so bad.
00:01:17 ◼ ► Over here we have this from Marco. Alright, and he can take all the time he wants with that because the only thing we have after it is this from me which actually isn't that long. And if we want to skip it again it's fine. And then we have this.
00:01:28 ◼ ► Wait, I lost it. Where's the this? Yeah, we went back. I scrolled up. I scrolled up. We went back north. If we have to skip this thing from me again it's fine because again it'll keep and then we scroll up and then we have this.
00:01:47 ◼ ► The main part was just the beginning part and sorting this stuff out. Actually, I would have done more pre-flight stuff if we were actually off the air but we aren't.
00:02:00 ◼ ► Cool. Was it a cardboard box that you fashioned into a truck or was it actually a truck in the shape of a box?
00:02:16 ◼ ► Yes, typically you use moving trucks to move objects and that was indeed the use here. We are moving. We are selling a house and so we're moving out of it and moving our stuff to a new house.
00:02:29 ◼ ► It is a big ordeal that I'll be going through for some time. This was stage one. This wasn't everything because apparently this is the first time we are selling a house.
00:02:38 ◼ ► The process of selling a house first involves you taking like three quarters of your stuff out of it to stage it to make it look like a total super human lives there who doesn't live the way anybody lives.
00:02:50 ◼ ► So stage one is to get rid of much of your stuff and we'll get to more of that later in the show I think.
00:03:03 ◼ ► But the gist of it is we rented a budget truck to move a whole bunch of stuff into a storage unit temporarily.
00:03:11 ◼ ► I've never used a storage unit before. That's new to me. The last time I drove a rental truck like this I drove a U-Haul when I moved to Pittsburgh in 2004.
00:03:23 ◼ ► And not since then as far as I know. I can tell you that the rental truck industry has actually not seemingly changed that much since 2004.
00:03:35 ◼ ► The truck back then, just a regular U-Haul, like a 10 or 12 foot truck, not like a separate trailer or anything, just a regular 12 foot box truck.
00:03:44 ◼ ► Back then it was very difficult because not only was the truck itself a horrendous thing that barely moved, but back then, this was in the summer, it didn't have air conditioning.
00:03:55 ◼ ► It didn't even have any kind of input for the radio. So what I did to amuse myself on, I had to drive it on like a four hour drive, so what I did to amuse myself was I put my PowerBook G4 on the passenger seat, just open, and just blasted music from iTunes as loud as it would go.
00:04:16 ◼ ► Yeah, on the built in speakers on the PowerBook G4. Although to be honest, man, so when I was done with that computer I had to sell it to fund my core duo MacBook and I wish I didn't sell it because it was in pristine condition.
00:04:36 ◼ ► Maybe I should send you some junk from my house because I have that same Mac and it's in pristine condition. Well, kind of pristine. I think I upgraded the hard drive on it myself so there may be a little bit of entry damage.
00:04:46 ◼ ► Alright, we'll negotiate that later. But anyway, so the new moving truck that I rented this week, it is significantly upgraded in the sense that they now come with air conditioning.
00:04:59 ◼ ► They still lack power locks and power windows, which basically means, well, you just can't roll down the right side window because you can't reach it.
00:05:08 ◼ ► The lack of power locks is certainly interesting. Like when you have to go in and get gas, you better be able to lock it.
00:05:16 ◼ ► Then you have to lock it by putting a key in it and turning it. There's not even a key fob with a remote. You have to actually insert the key into the door and turn it to lock it.
00:05:25 ◼ ► Which is not difficult. It's just something I haven't had to do in a very long time because key fobs have been a thing for quite some time now.
00:05:33 ◼ ► My favorite thing about driving this box truck is that it had a rear view mirror. I don't entirely know why because it was looking at the box.
00:05:43 ◼ ► Yes, it's just looking at the back of the passenger compartment, the solid wall. So I don't know why it had a rear view mirror, but it did.
00:05:53 ◼ ► The radio still today had no inputs, no cassette deck. It was just a radio. It had a menu button, but I was like, "Maybe they snuck some Bluetooth in here."
00:06:09 ◼ ► My only entertainment method, because I wasn't prepared. If I had advance notice that I was going to be doing this by a long way and I actually planned for it,
00:06:18 ◼ ► I would have gotten a vent mount for my phone and maybe an FM transmitter for the radio. I had neither of those things.
00:06:26 ◼ ► So I just put the phone in the cup holder and had the wonderful experience of trying to echo the sound out of the cup holder so it amplifies. We've all done this.
00:06:40 ◼ ► I've always been told that you shouldn't wear headphones while driving. Some people even say it's illegal. I'm not sure if that's true or where that might be true.
00:06:48 ◼ ► When I'm driving this giant vehicle that I'm not familiar with, I didn't want to have any risk of not hearing a horn or something like that as I accidentally emerged into somebody.
00:06:57 ◼ ► The reason I brought this to the show is briefly, first of all, just to mention, trucks are hard. Driving a truck is hard.
00:07:08 ◼ ► It was no easier than it was back in 2004. It just had air conditioning this time. It also smelled no better.
00:07:17 ◼ ► You've all smelled this before. It's the smell of a really old car that hasn't been cleaned that well throughout its life.
00:07:27 ◼ ► It's hard to describe. It's the smell of old car upholstery. It's not smoke per se, but it's fast food and farts. It's weird.
00:07:41 ◼ ► I just stunk like that the rest of the day. I had to wash all those clothes, everything, right off when I was done.
00:07:48 ◼ ► Anyway, driving a truck is hard. One of the things that makes driving a truck hard is that there's a lot of roads that trucks aren't allowed on or won't fit on.
00:07:57 ◼ ► In New York, around here, there's tons of parkways. New York parkways don't allow trucks. The way to get almost anywhere involves a parkway at some point.
00:08:09 ◼ ► One of the key advances that I've had since 2004 is now we have cell phones. Instead of having my power book on the seat, now I have my phone in the cup holder to play music that way, which sounds about as good.
00:08:25 ◼ ► But now we have GPS apps. That's great. To try to get from anywhere in the New York metro area to anywhere else in the New York metro area without GPS apps that are somewhat traffic aware is not fun.
00:08:37 ◼ ► But I knew from experience driving the RV a couple years ago, I can't just use Waze or Apple Maps or Google Maps because they don't have any options as far as I can tell to only ride on roads that trucks are allowed on.
00:08:52 ◼ ► So not to ride on any New York parkways and things like that. GPS apps seem to not cover this well. At least all the mainstream apps. I looked in Google Maps, I looked in Apple Maps, I looked in Waze.
00:09:02 ◼ ► If anybody knows, please write in. I couldn't find any options to give me a truck-allowed route in any of the mainstream apps.
00:09:12 ◼ ► You should find out what apps the truckers use because surely it's useful knowledge to them, right?
00:09:16 ◼ ► I asked Mr. Budget, the guy at the budget pickup place, I asked Mr. Budget, "Do you know of any GPS apps on the phone that will give me a truck route?" And he suggested this app called Truck Map. Great. So I download Truck Map.
00:09:33 ◼ ► Between Truck Map and the other app I tried, which I'll get to in a second, this was a series of total failures of app review to the point where if you've ever been rejected by app review, this is going to make you mad.
00:09:47 ◼ ► Oh great, I'm so excited. So, Truck Map, and it seemed to have a lot of use, a lot of ratings. For no reason that I could tell, it requires your phone number just to use the app at all. I don't know why, I had to give it my phone number to do anything.
00:10:06 ◼ ► There is no obvious functionality that seems to justify needing a phone number, but I had to give it a verified, like it verified it with the SMS and everything, verified a phone number. Okay, so they're going to spam me forever. Great, thanks a lot.
00:10:18 ◼ ► So I drove from the Budget Pickup Place back to house number one using Truck Map. And this was a wonderful app in terms of it did pick truck safe routes, except that it would say, for instance, "Turn right onto whatever in four miles and then never say it again."
00:10:41 ◼ ► As you're approaching the turn that it told you about five minutes ago, it doesn't tell you, "Turn right." It will never tell you that direction again. So you just have to be watching it, I guess, which is not super safe, especially in a truck that you've never driven and you aren't a truck driver.
00:10:57 ◼ ► I've recently switched to not having the voice on. Like this past year, I haven't had the voice on on my GPS. And obviously that doesn't tell you ever to turn. And it's a different style of driving, but it's the same type of thing. You say, "Okay, I have to turn right coming up in like three miles." And you mostly just like, I glanced back at it to see that I am at where I think I'm at, but it never speaks to you. Did it not show you like the road and like where you are relative to it?
00:11:19 ◼ ► It did, but it was in a cup holder way down there, not in my field of view anywhere. So I kind of need the voice thing. So anyway.
00:11:25 ◼ ► Well, I mean, what you need to know is the name of the road. And you know, back in the day, we didn't have GPS and we just drive by looking at a hackster and then you get in the car and go.
00:11:34 ◼ ► Yeah, exactly. So really quick, since we've distracted you from this story that you promised was going to be short and is nothing of the matter. So what are the parkways nearby? So it's Sawmill, the Hutch. What other ones are in your...
00:11:53 ◼ ► Basically there are, like to get from Westchester to Long Island, I would normally go on at least two and possibly up to four parkways. So anyway, so truck map that required my phone number, bad. Very, very bad.
00:12:08 ◼ ► So then I was, so when I was, after I had loaded the truck and I was about to do like the big drive, the big like, you know, two and a half hour drive, I thought, all right, before I start this giant drive, let me get a better app.
00:12:17 ◼ ► So I looked around the app store and the one that seemed like the more popular one was called Trucker Path. So I was like, great.
00:12:25 ◼ ► This didn't tell me, you know, before downloading that, oh, it says it uses, it does truck GPS, but what it actually does is regular GPS and only does truck paths if you have an in-app purchase. Okay, well, fine, whatever.
00:12:42 ◼ ► Yeah, it prominently advertised. It was $20 a month. The UI had the big $20 a month price. So you go hit subscribe, you start the free trial, thank God, shut the free trial. And if you don't look too closely, you might miss the fact...
00:12:57 ◼ ► Yes, build annually. It's actually a $250 annual subscription that would start in one week.
00:13:06 ◼ ► Yeah, thank God. So I did cancel it before the week was up, thank God. As soon as I saw that, I'm like, oh, add a note to reminders right now.
00:13:14 ◼ ► And anyway, my favorite part, so we have misleading pricing in the purchase screen. Then after the in-app purchase is completed, so after you have either purchased it or signed up for the trial, so you're in now, it puts up a modal screen that you cannot pass until you give them an email address that it verifies.
00:13:33 ◼ ► Where is App Review on this? App Review gives us so much crap for such little things in the apps. Meanwhile, here's this app that's used by what appeared to be hundreds of thousands of people. It has a misleading IAP pricing screen, pretty severely misleading.
00:13:47 ◼ ► And then after the IAP, it forces you to give an email address with no way to proceed until you do. And by that point, you're committed, you've already purchased it. But you can't actually use your purchase until you give them an email address.
00:14:08 ◼ ► Yeah. Common practice, Marco. I don't know why you don't do it. It'll load this SDK into your app and it'll detect when it's in an App Review testing center and it will disable all those screens.
00:14:17 ◼ ► So anyway, this is the app that I was taking the big drive with. I'm like, it can't be worse than Truck Map, you know, because I need these voice directions to work because I can't look at my phone constantly in a cup holder. So I get on the road with this app.
00:14:29 ◼ ► Now, it had told me the first direction was whatever direction the truck was currently pointed in, you know, turn right on the next street.
00:14:37 ◼ ► Well, when I left my driveway, I went the other way because the way it was telling me to go would have been down a very steep hill that I was not going to take an unknown old truck on.
00:14:47 ◼ ► So I went the other direction out the block. It's like half a block out of the way. I'm getting on the road, you know, I saw what highway it was taking me to, so I was kind of just navigating myself to the highway and I realized it hasn't told me anything recently.
00:14:58 ◼ ► Huh, what's going on? And I looked down at the cup holder phone and it is still showing the first direction that I didn't take.
00:15:10 ◼ ► So it's saying turn right on street that's like, that's now at this point like 10 miles behind me. I'm on the highway at this point and I'm like, oh my God, I don't know where to go.
00:15:19 ◼ ► Unless I just keep following the line, which I can't keep looking at in the cup holder, I'm stuck.
00:15:24 ◼ ► So I eventually had to like pull off into one of those gas station things that's like attached to the highway, not a rest stop, you know, in New York you don't have room for that.
00:15:40 ◼ ► And so I had to pull into one of those where the truck would actually fit and, you know, reset the app to, you know, take it out, force quit it, go back in.
00:15:51 ◼ ► Eventually, once I did that and then I followed its directions perfectly, then Trucker Path worked.
00:16:06 ◼ ► So and even like the truck safe routes that you have to take are the worst routes to get to anywhere you want to be.
00:16:14 ◼ ► Because you can only like because, you know, when you were in here, like a third or a half of the highways you aren't allowed to take.
00:16:40 ◼ ► There's all these like right side merges you have to do, which is super not easy in especially in these crappy trucks with no visibility.
00:16:48 ◼ ► But a lot of like a lot of the places that you are that it's easy to stop like these little like side rest area things.
00:16:59 ◼ ► Like I passed the Long Island Welcome Center, which is funny because it's like the middle of Long Island and no trucks exist.
00:17:18 ◼ ► And second of all, if you see a U-Haul or a budget or other kind of like rental truck on the road, stay far away from it because chances are they can't see you.
00:17:37 ◼ ► Make this easier with with GPS apps or like Apple Maps, Google Maps, Waze, add a truck option.
00:17:44 ◼ ► Frankly, I'm shocked. I figured at least Waze would, but I couldn't find anything like that in any of these apps.
00:17:54 ◼ ► So it doesn't. I'm not sure that they would. I hear what you're saying, but I don't know if that's really true because I don't know.
00:18:10 ◼ ► Actually, I don't even know if they have toll roads in California. If you live in California, please don't tell me you don't have toll roads.
00:18:13 ◼ ► I don't want to know. Have fun paying your eight hundred dollars a year for your LLC as opposed to the bargain five hundred dollars that I pay.
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00:20:12 ◼ ► So once again, Squarespace.com/ATP when you're ready to buy for 10% off your first purchase of a Web site or domain.
00:20:30 ◼ ► We really never renegotiated that, but you've been doing a bunch of homework. Tell me about this, please.
00:20:34 ◼ ► So last episode, we talked in the after show about membership and the ad landscape and podcasts.
00:20:40 ◼ ► And we asked for feedback. We got tons of feedback. Thanks to everybody who sent us feedback.
00:20:44 ◼ ► But as we mentioned on the last episode, we also wanted to try to get like more structured feedback and hopefully for many more people,
00:20:50 ◼ ► because we got a lot of feedback. But, you know, people who choose to email us or to date us or whatever are a smaller number compared to the vast number of listeners.
00:21:01 ◼ ► The survey is for every single person who can hear my voice. Doesn't matter what your membership status is or was or anything.
00:21:07 ◼ ► If you're a listener to this program, we want you to fill out the survey. Try to make it short.
00:21:21 ◼ ► So if you just want to click a bunch of buttons and don't want to fill in any text fields, that's fine.
00:21:24 ◼ ► If you do want to enter stuff in text fields, there are a couple of questions like that.
00:21:33 ◼ ► That's where you want to go. Hopefully we'll get enough responses that this is the only time we'll need to mention it.
00:21:38 ◼ ► But if not enough people respond for us to feel like we have a significant sample, we'll mention it next week.
00:21:45 ◼ ► Indeed. So yeah, just to repeat, whether or not you're a member, if you're a current member, a lapsed member, a never member,
00:21:54 ◼ ► It would help us to understand what you folks want from us and what's best for membership and so on.
00:22:00 ◼ ► So it is very quick. I have taken every permutation of this, both in the sense of every draft and also I have clicked my way,
00:22:12 ◼ ► It should only take you a couple of minutes. It's very, very quick. So please check it out.
00:22:16 ◼ ► Yeah, the key things that are really worth hearing about, and we got a lot of this from the email,
00:22:20 ◼ ► but this is a larger, more structured way to get it. The key thing we want to know is basically what's important to you and what's not.
00:22:27 ◼ ► That's really the major conclusions here. Because we can guess. We can say, oh, maybe we should do more X or maybe we should adjust Y.
00:22:33 ◼ ► But it's hard for us to know what's important to a lot of people and what's not important to a lot of people. So anyway.
00:22:39 ◼ ► And it's dangerous to rely on the people who message us because their opinions are certainly valid, but we don't know if they're representative.
00:22:45 ◼ ► You know what I mean? Because the people who respond to us on a show depends a lot on what we say on the show.
00:22:49 ◼ ► So if we say something on the show, we'll get responses that are related to what we said, but don't necessarily reflect what everyone is thinking.
00:22:57 ◼ ► You know, like if we talk a lot about like white miso paste, we're not going to get a lot of responses about garlic because people are going to be like,
00:23:06 ◼ ► It's like, I guess our audience loves miso paste and hates garlic. You can't make that conclusion because we talked about white miso paste.
00:23:14 ◼ ► So that's why we want to do a survey. We hope just everybody takes a survey. Like whoever you are. Click, click, click, click, click. Ten questions. You'll be done. Please take it.
00:23:28 ◼ ► Well, some people in the chat room are filling it out and somebody who shall remain nameless had the same complaint that Marco and I did.
00:23:34 ◼ ► Would you like to address this? This person said the none of these options, none of these options option should be at the bottom.
00:23:41 ◼ ► I believe in will HBR in the chat room. I believe that person could figure it out on his own while I say something else about the survey.
00:23:47 ◼ ► So the clock starts seven seconds from now. Will HBR tell me why it's not at the bottom?
00:23:53 ◼ ► OK, well, the one thing I will say about the survey is there is one question that that says which one of these things on its own would make you become an ATP member?
00:24:01 ◼ ► Obviously, you don't see this if you're already a member, but if people aren't members, they get this question presented.
00:24:06 ◼ ► And I tried to bold and italic the important part, which is which one of these things on its own and their checkboxes so you can select multiple.
00:24:13 ◼ ► So it's like we give you a million dollars if we show you a cute puppy. Right. Are those options on the table?
00:24:18 ◼ ► Yeah. So you check the box if one of those line items all by itself with nothing else would convince you to become a member.
00:24:27 ◼ ► So don't check three of them and say, if you did these three, I would become a member. I tried to word it as clearly as I could.
00:24:31 ◼ ► We're trying to condense it so there aren't a million questions. So there's just that one question.
00:24:35 ◼ ► But the part that's in bold and italic, which part on its own would make you become a member?
00:24:40 ◼ ► Anyway, checking back in with will HBR from the chat room could not work it out on his own.
00:24:46 ◼ ► Anyone else in the chat room going once, going twice. The options are randomized because we don't want people to be, you know, to be influenced by the order that we put the multiple options.
00:24:56 ◼ ► Google Forms has a way that says, hey, do you want me to randomize these options? But of course, it also randomizes the none of the above.
00:25:02 ◼ ► So I apologize for none of the above being mixed in, but I felt it was more important to randomize the options so we didn't bias people.
00:25:08 ◼ ► So every time you get one of those questions with multiple options, they're in a random order for you. I apologize for none of the above sometimes being in the middle.
00:25:15 ◼ ► All right. Thank you for that. And then finally, in our announcement section, we have a new member special.
00:25:22 ◼ ► So we had an incredible fortuitous bit of timing wherein we totally decided on purpose, and it definitely was not accidental, to rank or do a tier list of every iMac.
00:25:34 ◼ ► And we have this member special that was released, I think, yesterday as we record. It is available to any current member and any future member.
00:25:44 ◼ ► That's true. Thank you. Thank you for that clarification. So, yeah, I encourage you to check it out.
00:25:55 ◼ ► All right. So with that in mind, let's start with some follow up and let me check my notes.
00:26:07 ◼ ► So the the key thing here is that there was a point in the iMac tier list where we had to discuss the 2006 when they when they first went to Intel.
00:26:21 ◼ ► And then within a fairly short time, I think like seven or eight months, they upgraded to the core to duo in this part of the show.
00:26:29 ◼ ► I'll spoil it for people here briefly. In this part of the show, John expressed feelings that the core to duo was significantly better than the core duo.
00:26:47 ◼ ► So Michael Gabriel writes the court core used the 32 bit mobile only Yona CPUs, which is a descendant of the Pentium M.
00:27:00 ◼ ► It's the Pentium M like totally flipped Intel on its head like it was it was way better than the dumb net burst stuff they were making before that.
00:27:12 ◼ ► And then the core to marked the transition of Intel desktop from net burst, as you mentioned, which is a Pentium four and D scaling up Yona for desktops and adding 64 bit to it.
00:27:22 ◼ ► The X 86 64 migration meant that more meant more than greater than four gigs of memory.
00:27:27 ◼ ► MD used 64 bit to add registers, improve floating point vector processing, etc. Intel was forced to follow.
00:27:33 ◼ ► Big performance boost was available to 64 bit software on X 86, all unavailable to core one Max, the only non 64 bit Intel Max ever.
00:27:52 ◼ ► A lot of people thought that a lot of people kind of missed the word duo and they thought core duo after core to do came out.
00:28:05 ◼ ► And that was not the case. The core to do sounds like it could be twice as good as core duo.
00:28:09 ◼ ► It wasn't. And in fact, you can go fortunately, the wonderful site, every Mac, which I'm sure all of us are familiar with being Apple nerds, every Mac has benchmark histories for all these Macs they list.
00:28:19 ◼ ► And so we can see now modern version of Geek Bench, modern versions of Geek Bench are 64 bit only.
00:28:24 ◼ ► So they were never run on this computer. But you can go look at like the old Geek Bench to 32 bit scores and you can see actually the core duo versus core to duo at the same clock speed.
00:28:42 ◼ ► They both have the same Max RAM of two gigs because this is back when when the standard amount of RAM was like 512.
00:28:50 ◼ ► So the idea that they would support more than four gigs of memory in theory, that's great, but they didn't need it yet.
00:28:55 ◼ ► And the motherboards couldn't support that anyway. So every Mac actually published a whole article.
00:29:02 ◼ ► And they said, quote, the core to do a processor design is modestly more efficient than the core duo processor that it replaced.
00:29:10 ◼ ► And they even quoted a section of a Mac world review that has that since now at four fours, because it's ancient URL.
00:29:24 ◼ ► The core to duo scored 232. So 10 percent faster. But that was at an eight percent faster clock speed, too.
00:29:44 ◼ ► It was it was like, you know, a spec bump, basically. It was between five and 10 percent faster on most things.
00:29:52 ◼ ► And much of the speed increase was due to the fact that the core to duo, because it was newer, it was available in higher clock speeds eventually.
00:30:01 ◼ ► So that was more relevant to the to the performance gains than than the actual core design.
00:30:09 ◼ ► Your complaint, though, now, your complaint was that I was saying like the core to duo is way better.
00:30:13 ◼ ► Because why you'd feel so bad getting the core duo, the only 32 bit Intel Macs, if less than a year later, you get a core to do over 64 bit.
00:30:21 ◼ ► I think that's a big deal, not because Mac OS 10 or something is something going to drop 32 bit support, because that happened way later.
00:30:27 ◼ ► But because, as Michael wrote in to tell us, software that's recompiled in 64 bit goes way faster.
00:30:55 ◼ ► You're not when you get the core to duo, you don't care that the other one is even if it was equally fast clock for clock and yours is clock tire.
00:31:05 ◼ ► A much better one came out for basically the same price and you're stuck in this little area all by yourself with 32 bit.
00:31:16 ◼ ► And by the way, that same article you cited from every Mac, the very last line of the article is,
00:31:20 ◼ ► "Ultimately, 10 to 20 percent faster may not be quite as high as Apple's grandiose claims, but still substantial nevertheless."
00:31:27 ◼ ► So you just quoted the line that said, "Modestly more efficient," and they say, "Substantial nevertheless, 10 to 20 percent."
00:31:35 ◼ ► Well, but see, to me, it's a similar level of performance increase as going from M1 to M2.
00:31:44 ◼ ► But we don't know it's the same performance increase because we don't know if these benchmarks were running 64 bit on the core duo.
00:31:49 ◼ ► If they weren't, it's not a fair or representative comparison because things went 64 bit pretty fast.
00:32:14 ◼ ► If you got the core duo and then seven months later your friend got the core two duo, you felt like you got the loser Mac.
00:32:23 ◼ ► People who lived through it, Marco says he loved his core duo and thought it was great, but maybe he's just like...
00:33:09 ◼ ► I think the reason we remembered is because they kept selling the non-retina one for so long.
00:33:13 ◼ ► Not that it was the only thing that you could get, but I think they sold it for way longer than we thought.
00:33:21 ◼ ► "Let's keep around the old cheap stuff as long as possible to keep this computer cheap."
00:33:25 ◼ ► So they kept around non-retina way longer than everything else, including the MacBook Air, I believe.
00:33:33 ◼ ► I'm not positive on that, but it was either the last or the second to last non-retina Mac by a long margin two from the others.
00:33:42 ◼ ► And then they kept around the spinning hard drive in that computer longer than every other computer they sell, as far as I know.
00:33:48 ◼ ► And by the way, not that we're spoiling the whole tier list thing, but the meta-commentary on things like this and the tier list for youngsters who are listening to the program.
00:33:57 ◼ ► We got a lot of feedback about stuff, and even on the program I was trying to remember various things that I won't spoil at this point.
00:34:08 ◼ ► These are all things I knew like the back of my hand when I was writing for Ars Technica.
00:34:13 ◼ ► So at the time, I knew all this stuff, every detail, every minute thing. But now do I know them? No.
00:34:19 ◼ ► And I know when you're young you think it's weird. How did you know a thing at some time in the past?
00:34:23 ◼ ► It's like, you know, it's your hobby and you're super into it and you know all sorts of stats about your favorite computer, your favorite sports team, or your favorite car, or whatever things you're into.
00:34:39 ◼ ► You think that if you know something now, you'll always know it. You'll never forget the exact gear ratios of your favorite RC car when you're a kid.
00:35:01 ◼ ► Tahir Rangwala writes, "I went on a long search for a Mac text editor a few years back and landed on Cut Editor.
00:35:12 ◼ ► It's open source, fully Mac native, lightweight, very performant, and rather tasteful in its UI. Also it's being actively maintained."
00:35:20 ◼ ► I hadn't heard of this one and if you take a look at it, it's like, "Oh, it looks like a Mac text editor."
00:35:23 ◼ ► I heard it described as a Love Child, indie, New Wave clone of Text Made in BB Edit. But anyway, it's a native Mac app and it adds text. You might want to check it out.
00:35:34 ◼ ► There you go. And also we have Chime, which from the website is apparently designed to be a model citizen on the Mac.
00:35:40 ◼ ► It blends modern features with a minimalist UI and supports language server protocol and extensions.
00:35:49 ◼ ► It's a protocol for talking to a language server saying, "Tell me about this language."
00:35:54 ◼ ► Yeah, exactly. It's another process that runs that your editor communicates with and it tells you about the structure, like where are the keywords.
00:36:04 ◼ ► Anyway, this one, Chime, is kind of like a tiny indie Mac version of VS Code in terms of what the UI looks like.
00:36:12 ◼ ► But obviously this is the bad description of both of them. You should check them both out because they're both small and new and interesting.
00:36:44 ◼ ► Okay, that wonderful person writes, "The transcription I usually give to English speakers is Nee, N-E-E, Lay, L-A-Y, A-N, A-N-N, Nee-lee-en."
00:37:06 ◼ ► My point with the whole, like, this is a space ripe for disruption was not that there are not lots of these sites, it's that all these sites are bad.
00:37:12 ◼ ► And so every time someone sent me a site, whether I knew about the site or not, I went to it, looked up this person's name, and then sent them a screenshot showing that this site does not know this person's name.
00:37:23 ◼ ► And in terms of the pronunciation, I think it's an interesting feature of French, I think, where the pronunciation here is N-E-E-L-A-Y, and we would say Lay.
00:37:36 ◼ ► Anyway, maybe we'll put the MP3 in the show notes, or I guess maybe a link to the Toot in the show notes, which has a little video to hear the name.
00:37:47 ◼ ► And it's a criminal that these websites that supposedly are all about pronouncing people's names don't have your name, because I have a feeling your name is not super duper rare.
00:37:57 ◼ ► Anonymous writes, "I'm the subject of Apple, Disney, trash cans, and Apple's inability to design places for humans the way that Disney can.
00:38:04 ◼ ► When building Apple Park, the designers, for whatever reason, neglected to put trash cans in each office.
00:38:08 ◼ ► Instead, each hallway was given a few large bins, which are of course beautifully integrated into the design,
00:38:13 ◼ ► with the apparent intention that people would get up from their desk and walk over to the nearest receptacle whenever they had something to throw away.
00:38:22 ◼ ► Employees got so frustrated, in fact, that they eventually started just leaving their trash in piles outside their doors, which disrupted the beautiful design of the space somewhat.
00:38:29 ◼ ► Eventually, the facilities team came to put a small, ugly, grey, plastic, rubber-made looking trash can outside every office where they remain to this day.
00:38:36 ◼ ► Can we go back to how unbelievably upset I am that people, people who are presumably intelligent to have gotten a job at Apple, are thinking it is okay to throw trash on the ground because you can't be bothered?
00:39:01 ◼ ► It's their job to move the trash receptacles to other trash receptacles. It's not there to pick up after you, you big whiner.
00:39:07 ◼ ► I'm not endorsing throwing trash on the garbage, but I will say that I had no idea about this story when I used trash cans as an example of how Apple might not be as good at designing spaces for real humans as Disney is.
00:39:17 ◼ ► But in fact, it was not just like, "Here's an analogy." No, literally trash cans at Apple Park.
00:39:22 ◼ ► I mean, I find this first of all totally unsurprising that this was not properly accounted for.
00:39:27 ◼ ► But second of all, see, what I would do is I would never throw trash on the ground. That's not me at all.
00:39:38 ◼ ► I was going to say, the supposed solution to having the Rubbermaid trash cans outside every office, how does that help? It's still not near you. You still got to get up and go over there and put the... anyway.
00:39:45 ◼ ► That's exactly the type of things they talk about in these parks where you make this beautiful space and you think this is the way it should be, but then people enter it and people act like people and you're like, "No people! Act differently!"
00:39:55 ◼ ► And really you need to design the space to account for the people, even the bad people who put trash on the ground.
00:40:05 ◼ ► "When you're in Photos, you can edit in an external program one of two ways. As mentioned on the show, while in edit mode, the dot dot dot button has a list of apps that support editing in Photos.
00:40:15 ◼ ► But you can also right-click the photo and choose edit with, which has a shortcut command return for last used app.
00:40:22 ◼ ► This will open the photo, usually in TIFF format, in that app and save the edited photo back to your library when you're done. Any app that can open Photos can be used this way.
00:40:31 ◼ ► In all cases, you can never modify or lose the original. Photos always retains the original image. On the show you referred to the flatten option in Pixelmator Pro.
00:40:40 ◼ ► If you choose flatten, then the resulting image is flattened and saved back to your library as the current edit.
00:40:45 ◼ ► If you choose to preserve edits, Photos retains additional metadata so that it can restore the editing session if you bring Pixelmator Pro's extension back up within Photos.
00:40:53 ◼ ► Whether you have the ability to finally adjust edits or not, the revert to original button is always present in the editing session if the current photo has ever been modified."
00:41:02 ◼ ► Yeah, that was the distinction I missed. There's no way to lose the original, but the preserve edits preserves them so if you go back to the editor, like your layers or whatever the hell you did in the editor, that is preserved.
00:41:13 ◼ ► I always do the preserve thing so I didn't actually know what the flatten did and what the distinction was, but it's good to know that no matter what I pick, it's never going to mess with my original photo.
00:41:21 ◼ ► And then also from Ezekiel Ellen with regard to dumb TVs, "I have a TCL Roku TV and I keep it disconnected from the internet. When you do this, an LED flashes forever until it's reconnected. I used a pair of pliers to remove the LED from the circuit board."
00:41:40 ◼ ► I thought this was going to go, I put a piece of tape over it, but sure, pliers. I put this in here just to show how aggressive these companies are getting about insisting you're on the internet.
00:41:51 ◼ ► Like a hardware thing with a light flashing your face that you can't disable is pretty severe.
00:41:57 ◼ ► I guess the next phase is some giant dialogue in the middle of your television that doesn't go away until you connect to the internet, but I suppose if someone's watching something on broadcast television over the air or watching a plastic disc spinning somewhere and they lose internet connection and they can't watch TV, they're going to be pretty angry.
00:42:19 ◼ ► Let me tackle this one before you go into it because this is something that we talked about on the show where we talked about Disney and I put it in there specifically to remind myself to make a particular point and I didn't make it.
00:42:33 ◼ ► This was the Aaron Thomas question that was like, "Sony and Nintendo have good relationships with game developers. What can Apple and Google learn from them?"
00:42:40 ◼ ► It's related to the Disney thing in a bunch of ways, but the final way that I want to mention is we were talking about Apple keeping its hands off stuff like Apple keeping its hands off beats and whether or not they're doing that.
00:42:50 ◼ ► Apple keeping its hands off the people who make the Apple TV Plus shows and not telling them that they can't have nudity or violence and stuff like that despite the rumors.
00:42:58 ◼ ► So I think there is something to the idea that Apple's ability to keep its hands off, and this sounds so weird because obviously these things are part of Apple, like Apple TV Plus, the studio is part of Apple and beats is part of Apple.
00:43:22 ◼ ► That part, can it keep its hands off when it acquires a business that does something that it previously didn't have expertise in?
00:43:29 ◼ ► Or even when it grows organically, we're going to start our own television and movie studios.
00:43:36 ◼ ► They're going to be part of Apple, but we're going to let them do what they know how to do because we know that we don't know how to do it and we shouldn't mess with them and we'll give them guidance and some direction, but mostly let them do what they want.
00:43:51 ◼ ► I think Apple is much better able to keep its hands off stuff when it is far away from things that it does, and I think that's part of its big problem with games.
00:44:08 ◼ ► I can't speak to Google right now, but Apple, I think the reason Apple and games gets messed up is because Apple and gaming impacts directly on all of Apple's core businesses.
00:44:22 ◼ ► Apple is like, "Well, we know about that stuff. We're Apple. Of course we know about making Macs.
00:44:36 ◼ ► To the extent that there is any overlap between what you need to do to be good at games and existing Apple business and technologies that Apple thinks it already knows, there is conflict.
00:44:44 ◼ ► That, I think, is a big reason why Apple has such problems with games because games touch so many parts of their business.
00:44:50 ◼ ► Apple says, "Don't tell us what to do. We know how to do this. Don't tell us whether we should have Nvidia GPUs or external GPUs at all.
00:45:00 ◼ ► Don't tell us whether we need OpenGL in our operating system or Vulkan. We don't need that. We're going to do Metal."
00:45:04 ◼ ► There is so much entrenched expertise and knowledge and experience related to gaming-related stuff inside Apple that it's very difficult for Apple to grow organically or allow it to come in from the outside.
00:45:17 ◼ ► People who have different ideas and say, "Well, you know, here's how Microsoft does it and how they interface with game developers and it seems to work better for them.
00:45:24 ◼ ► Because look at all the games on their platforms and they have a console and so on and so forth.
00:45:27 ◼ ► And here's how other companies interface with Sony. We brought in these people from Activision or whatever and they're telling us, "Well, if you want to do well in the gaming industry, you've got X, Y, and Z."
00:45:37 ◼ ► And that runs right up against Apple folks saying, "I've been working on the Mac for 25 years and you're not going to tell me what I need to do to my hardware or software platform to do better for gaming."
00:45:48 ◼ ► And that's why I think that's related to this question. That's part of the reason that Apple has such trouble with games. It just overlaps too much.
00:45:55 ◼ ► Whereas Disney, I would imagine theme parks does not overlap too much. Although, Apple might say, "We know how to make spaces for humans. Look at Apple Park. It's perfect." Except for the Rubbermaid garbage cans.
00:46:04 ◼ ► Consider becoming an ATP member today. ATP membership gets all sorts of fun little goodies, but the big two are the ad-free feed and bonus content.
00:46:16 ◼ ► So, here's what you get. The ad-free version of the show. You don't hear messages like this or other sponsorships and instead you get an ad-free feed that you can add to whatever podcast player you want to use.
00:46:26 ◼ ► It's a URL unique to you, so you can just do whatever you want with it. Listen anywhere you want. Of course, I have my opinion, but you can listen to any player you want that supports URLs.
00:46:35 ◼ ► So, anyway, that's the big one. You get an ad-free version of the show. You also get whatever kind of member special content we decide to release. Usually, this is about maybe once a month or so, we'll do some kind of member special.
00:46:49 ◼ ► And so we've done things like movie reviews, we've taste tested food on the air, most recently we did two tier lists. A tier list ranking every iPhone to date and just this week, a tier list ranking every iMac to date.
00:47:03 ◼ ► So, there's member exclusive content and the ad-free feed. Those are the big ones and it's just a great way to support the show. There are other smaller perks as well. I'll get to those later in the show.
00:47:12 ◼ ► But basically, that's what you're mostly paying to support the show and you get the ad-free feed and member exclusive content. It's a bunch of fun. So, see for yourself. It's just eight bucks a month at atp.fm/join.
00:47:23 ◼ ► Thank you so much for considering being a member today and we really hope you check it out atp.fm/join. Thank you so much.
00:47:31 ◼ ► We talked a few episodes ago, I don't recall exactly when, about Marco's quest to get better security cameras. And I guess the quick summary was you had, what did you have that was constantly failing, Marco?
00:47:46 ◼ ► I had the Logitech Circle View HomeKit secure video cameras. And I've used them for about two years. They would just constantly fall off the network and were constantly not connected or would have long delays and then fail to connect or whatever else.
00:48:03 ◼ ► So, since talking about this, we got a ton of recommendations for Ubiquiti cameras and also a ton of people saying, "I also have the Logitech Circle View and it has the same problem for me."
00:48:16 ◼ ► So, that was very vindicating that it isn't just me. That everyone's Logitech Circle Views kind of suck. And that was kind of the story with almost every consumer grade Wi-Fi camera that we heard about.
00:48:30 ◼ ► Everyone basically said the same thing. The Eufy cameras seem to be a little more reliable in people's reports, but still not super reliable.
00:48:41 ◼ ► And everyone kept telling me the exact same thing. First of all, because I had asked about Ubiquiti stuff, because I already have Ubiquiti networking gear and I like it a lot.
00:48:47 ◼ ► And so, I knew they had cameras. I asked people if they were any good. Everyone said yes. And everyone also wrote in to basically say, "Pretty much any power over Ethernet wired camera is very good compared to Wi-Fi cameras."
00:49:02 ◼ ► And so, you don't have to necessarily go Ubiquiti. There's all sorts of PoE cameras that you... As long as you can run Ethernet wiring to where you have to be and you have a PoE supplying switch or injectors of some kind, then that's the way to go.
00:49:17 ◼ ► Everyone told me that. So, of course, I bought a bunch of Ubiquiti stuff. That's my standard operating procedure.
00:49:25 ◼ ► Quick review of how this went. In short, extremely well. I've been using the Ubiquiti and UniFi Protect setup now for, I think, about three weeks. It has been awesome.
00:49:40 ◼ ► So, first of all, a couple of drawbacks. This whole thing is super expensive. This is the pro level thing.
00:49:48 ◼ ► A while ago, I was trying to help out my town with their meetings. I talked about it very briefly on the show with the microphone equipment they should use for meetings.
00:49:56 ◼ ► I was recommending, based on my limited experience with wireless mics, I was recommending a pro-grade Shure, the SLXD wireless system.
00:50:07 ◼ ► Because I had used some of the lower end consumer-y kind of stuff before, it would always have static or dropouts. It was using 2.4 GHz instead of some of the UHF frequencies.
00:50:19 ◼ ► I had run into all the limitations of consumer-grade gear in wireless mics. You get the better stuff, it will not drop out. It will not have static.
00:50:29 ◼ ► It will just work. And it has just worked. It has been perfect. It has been flawless. There has not been a single dropout. There is not even a blip of static ever. They just work.
00:50:42 ◼ ► That's what you pay for when you get pro gear. Pro gear, when you're using a microphone or a camera or whatever, when you're using this stuff professionally, similar with computer gear too,
00:50:52 ◼ ► when you're using this stuff professionally, you can't afford to have it not work. If it doesn't work, bad stuff happens. You have to re-shoot a scene or some high stakes thing gets ruined or gets messed up.
00:51:06 ◼ ► Or you look bad because you're trying to be professional and then you show up with amateur gear or whatever. You need it to work 100% of the time.
00:51:14 ◼ ► In the camera business, Wi-Fi cameras are the consumer-level gear. They are inexpensive. If you don't have super high needs, and especially if you're price-sensitive, they're a great option.
00:51:28 ◼ ► But they kind of suck. You kind of get what you pay for. And now that I've used PoE cameras, no question, this is the pro gear.
00:51:38 ◼ ► And that's why the setup costs more. And that's why it has a little bit higher startup requirements. It's the pro system.
00:51:45 ◼ ► And when you want it to work 100% of the time or very, very close to that, that's what you go for. You go for wired Ethernet supplying power and data over a cable, no Wi-Fi.
00:52:03 ◼ ► To get started with a Ubiquiti camera system, you need something that acts as the video recorder.
00:52:11 ◼ ► They have a few pieces of equipment you can do this with. I went with the small version of their NVR, the network video recorder. They have one that has a whole bunch of bays.
00:52:21 ◼ ► I went with the one that only has four bays because it was a lot cheaper and I don't need any more than that.
00:52:25 ◼ ► A couple of little drawbacks here. It's a few hundred bucks. A couple of little drawbacks. It has four hard drive bays, but it does not, as far as you can tell, does not let you configure the RAID.
00:52:33 ◼ ► It just automatically does it. So I bought two hard drives thinking I would run them in RAID 0 basically because this data is not super important that I'm worried about a hard drive crash.
00:52:44 ◼ ► Like erasing last week's footage, it isn't that important that I need to keep it. So I was thinking just to maximize space and retention time, I'd put two disks in it.
00:52:53 ◼ ► Little did I know that two disks in the Ubiquiti NVR will always and only be configured as RAID 1. So I only had the space of one of them.
00:53:03 ◼ ► So they're only redundant and there's no way to make it use two disks as all their space. If you only have two disks in there, it does RAID 1. If you add any more, it does RAID 5.
00:53:32 ◼ ► And my main router is the original UniFi Dream Machine, which doesn't support network video functionality directly.
00:53:41 ◼ ► I thought that by adding an NVR to my network here, I thought that it would integrate better into the Dream Machine so I would have all my like UniFi apps in one screen.
00:53:51 ◼ ► It doesn't. You just have to access the NVR via its IP address. Like that's how you access its web interface. Just the IP, you know, the 1 and 2 dot whatever.
00:53:59 ◼ ► What I probably should have done is I discussed that for the new house I got the UDM SE, the Dream Machine SE that has the hard drive bay in it and integrates this functionality into the router.
00:54:27 ◼ ► But if you are doing a new setup, I would get a Dream Machine router that has built in storage.
00:54:32 ◼ ► The new ones either have like little SSDs or the big hard drive bay. I would just do that.
00:54:41 ◼ ► This seemed somewhat comparable in like, you know, price and quality to the Circle View.
00:54:50 ◼ ► It has a much narrower field of view. So the Circle View has an, I think it's officially a 180 degree view.
00:55:07 ◼ ► Speaking of the G5 camera, I know a lot of people wrote in and said, "Oh, even though the G5 is near you, you should get the G4."
00:55:12 ◼ ► And I don't remember the reason. Was it like less glare or was it also a field of view thing?
00:55:16 ◼ ► No, the reason people cited was that apparently the G5s were mostly a response to COVID supply chain shortages.
00:55:31 ◼ ► I don't know too many details because I decided, you know what, for my purposes, I'd rather get the cheaper ones.
00:55:42 ◼ ► Anyway, yeah, so I went for the newer cheaper models because for my purposes, I wanted to have a few of them.
00:55:51 ◼ ► Margo's kink is putting electronic devices outside that aren't equipped to deal with the weather.
00:55:56 ◼ ► And if he can't put indoor stuff outdoor, he's going to buy the cheapest outdoor stuff he can.
00:56:01 ◼ ► G5 versus G4. One of them says it's built more sturdily and the other one is decontended.
00:56:10 ◼ ► That's amazing. I really want to see the picture of what the G5s look like after a year.
00:56:21 ◼ ► Anyway, all right, so compared to the Logitech, narrower field of view on the G5 Bullet, which is, it depends where you're putting it.
00:56:31 ◼ ► I have found with the Logitech, with the ultra-wide view of the Logitechs, you do see more area,
00:56:37 ◼ ► but it's kind of like the problem with the center stage cameras in the recent cinema display and recent iPads.
00:56:44 ◼ ► You can have an ultra-wide lens and just kind of crop in when you need to see something further in,
00:56:53 ◼ ► I had one spot where I kind of missed the wider angle. In all the other spots I put them, I enjoyed the increased detail better.
00:57:03 ◼ ► The Ubiquiti cameras are also substantially larger and I would say uglier, but that also makes them more visible.
00:57:13 ◼ ► You know, one of the problems, one of the most important roles that one of these cameras serves is to be visible
00:57:20 ◼ ► so that people who are trying to walk under my house to pee under it see the camera and maybe get deterred from peeing there.
00:57:27 ◼ ► I've found that the Logitech circle views are so small and discreet that a lot of times people would walk right past it at eye level and not see it.
00:57:36 ◼ ► Marcos' house is on stilts, by the way. I really do wonder where people are thinking, like, "People walk under your house to pee? What?"
00:57:44 ◼ ► Yes, it's near the water so it's on piles. Anyway, the Ubiquiti cameras are much more visible.
00:57:50 ◼ ► And so for my purposes, actually that's good. Like, if you want it to be discreet, don't go with these.
00:57:57 ◼ ► But if you want them to actually be visible, to be some kind of deterrent to people or whatever, it's actually an upgrade.
00:58:03 ◼ ► You could have put big googly eyes on them. You can get those real cheap. They'll hold up to the salt weather. Just giant googly eyes.
00:58:15 ◼ ► Yeah, exactly. Anyway, I would say the image quality is very good. A little bit better than the circle view.
00:58:26 ◼ ► Mostly what I have loved about the G5 and all the Ubiquiti cameras is that they are far more customizable and tweakable for things like activity zones.
00:58:38 ◼ ► So you can draw out, you can load the image in the app and you can draw out, all right, only report person detection in this area.
00:58:56 ◼ ► So if you find you're getting too many false positives because your bike seat looks like a person in certain lighting.
00:59:04 ◼ ► Like turn sensitivity down to like, oh, default's 50%, make it 30%. And you can tweak a lot about it.
00:59:10 ◼ ► And I found with HomeKit Secure Video, I have found those settings oftentimes don't stick or after a while they reset themselves.
00:59:19 ◼ ► I don't know why it's infuriating because like one of these cameras I have pointing basically, you know,
00:59:25 ◼ ► the street in front of my house is in the field of view of one of these cameras where the circle view used to be.
00:59:36 ◼ ► But sometimes Logitech would just forget that setting and would start reporting every single person that walked by on the street, which is not helpful.
00:59:46 ◼ ► I would tell them, for instance, stop notifying me every time you disconnect and go offline.
00:59:56 ◼ ► Like that was a constant battle with the HomeKit cameras. It just keeps forgetting my settings or resetting my settings for no apparent reason.
01:00:10 ◼ ► You said it and it just remembers like, look, it should like, why is that? Why is that not even table stakes? I don't know.
01:00:16 ◼ ► And to run a bit of a test on the smarts of these cameras and the speed of these cameras,
01:00:26 ◼ ► Because this is the one every time we leave or come back, we're usually on a bike because it's a bike town,
01:00:31 ◼ ► and every time we leave or come back, this camera alerts me so I get a tap tap on my watch when I or anyone else pulls into the bike area.
01:00:40 ◼ ► That Circle View, because it's right next to a wireless access point, that Circle View has been the most reliable.
01:00:49 ◼ ► So I wanted to see, you know, one of the advantages of HomeKit is that almost everything about it runs locally on your network.
01:01:06 ◼ ► But I figured, well, to send a notification, they have to like upload the picture to some service somewhere
01:01:12 ◼ ► so that the notification can have access to that image from Apple's notification service to show it on the watch or on the phone or whatever.
01:01:28 ◼ ► So for these three weeks, I've been running both the Logitech and Ubiquiti G5 Bullet in the bike area.
01:01:38 ◼ ► They're always within, you know, like occasionally one will come in before the other or the other one or it'll flip around the order that they come in.
01:02:12 ◼ ► Like when I lowered the sensitivity for the bike area to get rid of the bike seat issue, it didn't start missing people.
01:02:28 ◼ ► One thing it does not have, the HomeKit notifications, if you long press them on the phone screen or whatever, it would actually play the video clip.
01:02:41 ◼ ► Like they'll show you the picture, but you have to tap and actually view it in their app to see the actual video clip.
01:02:51 ◼ ► A lot of times you'd be waiting a long time for that clip to load or it would never load.
01:02:55 ◼ ► With the Ubiquiti cameras, those clips load immediately every single time, whether you are on your network or not.
01:03:02 ◼ ► So there have been times during this time where we've been out of town driving box trucks and I was able to see the notifications and load the video clips and see the guys peeing on my house exactly as quickly.
01:03:13 ◼ ► Or in most cases, way faster, even though this was then streaming from my own network to the internet rather than coming from HomeKit's secure video servers or anything like that.
01:03:26 ◼ ► And then trying to skim through the timeline using the UniFi Protect app is so much faster and more reliable than trying to skim through the timeline of HomeKit stuff.
01:03:37 ◼ ► And of course, as I mentioned last time, this has the advantage of 24/7 recording if you want it to.
01:04:10 ◼ ► This is something I already knew from Wi-Fi access points and stuff, but it continues to be awesome.
01:04:15 ◼ ► Running the Logitech cameras I had to have some kind of power outlet situation for them to supply them with their USB power somewhere within 15 feet of each camera.
01:04:25 ◼ ► And because they're all outside, that involved some logistics like running extension cords in weird places, having those outdoor closed up ceiling boxes around a power strip or something to keep the weather out, John.
01:04:39 ◼ ► So there was a whole bunch of, just kind of cruft, that when I went to PoE for these cameras, I could just get rid of all that stuff.
01:04:47 ◼ ► Because I could just have these all going into my utility closet and then just run a long cable, like a long Ethernet cable, and that carries power and data for these.
01:04:57 ◼ ► So I got to get rid of all those power adapters, all those extension cords, all those USB power bricks, all those outdoor weather enclosures.
01:05:13 ◼ ► For these to be perfectly weather sealed, you have to either use like a mounting box that itself is sealed, or you can use the mounts they come with but they have like a little rubber gasket in the mount.
01:05:31 ◼ ► I think the idea is you're supposed to just run bare wire and then splice your own end on, you know?
01:05:40 ◼ ► Right, but I do. Because I've tried making my own cables and I can't do it. Believe me, I've tried.
01:05:47 ◼ ► Yeah, I just popped the sealing thing out. And then I used dielectric grease around some of the main connectors.
01:05:52 ◼ ► Alright, I was going to ask, because a lot of people send us things like, "Here's what you do for outdoor connections."
01:05:55 ◼ ► And it's like you pack the thing with gel or some other thing to keep the air out, essentially.
01:06:01 ◼ ► I did put that long-term reminder in for a year from now, by the way, because I can't wait to see what these Ethernet connections look like.
01:06:12 ◼ ► And otherwise, the only other thing I would say is this did require me to buy a couple more switches, a couple more PoE switches.
01:06:19 ◼ ► Ubiquiti has this one called the Switch Flex, which seems to be basically made for this purpose.
01:06:25 ◼ ► It's an indoor/outdoor compatible switch, and it has PoE kind of pass-through on all the ports.
01:06:32 ◼ ► I did have to buy some of the really big 60-watt PoE injectors at the other end of those so that the switches could have enough power to spread around.
01:06:39 ◼ ► The cameras use a few watts each, so if you're looking into this budget and plan for possibly some switch upgrades or some power injectors somewhere along the way.
01:06:50 ◼ ► Otherwise, I'm super happy with this setup. It is so nerdy, and it is 100% reliable so far.
01:06:57 ◼ ► And I just like, look, again, because we're in the middle of moving, selling a house, we have a lot going on in our life right now.
01:07:09 ◼ ► And to take something that is super unreliable and irritating and full of paper cuts and to just make it super reliable and just take all those problems away from your life is incredibly satisfying and incredibly valuable, depending on what your life has in it right now.
01:07:26 ◼ ► And this is one thing where I had this unreliable system that was driving me nuts, and now it's gone, and in place of it is something that just works super well.
01:07:38 ◼ ► No, I'm not actually. So Scripted was the app that everyone recommended that allows you to basically bridge any other camera system, including PoE cameras, including Ubiquiti stuff.
01:07:52 ◼ ► I thought I would set that up on something, but first of all, I don't have any spare hardware to run it on right now.
01:07:56 ◼ ► And I looked at it like, oh, should I buy the low-end Mac Mini or some kind of high-end Raspberry Pi or Intel NUC thing?
01:08:02 ◼ ► And I realized, first of all, as previously spoken, I don't have time for this crap right now.
01:08:14 ◼ ► The only major advantage that would provide me is integrations with features that I don't really use.
01:08:21 ◼ ► Like, yes, it turns your other camera system into something that can, for instance, show the person at the door on your Apple TV.
01:08:38 ◼ ► That is valuable, and at some point I might look into it for that, so that way, in case a hurricane destroys my house,
01:08:48 ◼ ► Okay, I mean, I don't know how actionable that is, but it might be worth having at some point.
01:08:54 ◼ ► But for now, the value is just not there. I'm just not having these cameras in HomeKit, and it's fine.
01:08:59 ◼ ► You couldn't just put a Docker container on your Synology? I know this is like this anathema to you, or however you pronounce the word.
01:09:08 ◼ ► Anathema, there we go, sorry. It's one of those ones like Bizelle that I've only ever read and never pronounced.
01:09:13 ◼ ► Anyways, the point is, I know that you are, like, allergic, how about that, to Docker and anything like it,
01:09:20 ◼ ► but this really is the sort of thing that if you were to accept help from another human being, hello, I'm that person,
01:09:26 ◼ ► I could get you set up with this, assuming there is a Docker container for scripted, which I would assume there is,
01:09:31 ◼ ► then it would be minutes to get this squared away. Like, I cannot speak highly enough how quickly you could get that running on, say, your Synology,
01:09:40 ◼ ► leaving aside, like, Surveillance Station or any of that, but you could get that running so fast if you were willing to accept ten minutes of help.
01:09:47 ◼ ► Getting the Docker container isn't the hard part. I think it's setting up scripted with the cameras the way he wants it to be.
01:09:54 ◼ ► Making sure it doesn't anger them, and I understand his desire not to overcomplicate it if things are finally working.
01:09:59 ◼ ► Well, also, like, there's all sorts of things, there's stuff like Homebridge, all these wonderful apps that are made to connect different smart home things to different systems,
01:10:09 ◼ ► and that's great. I'm not at a point in my life where I want to add complexity like that to my setup.
01:10:15 ◼ ► Like, I'd rather just have, I'd rather just use the products directly, and to add something like that to my setup, it's a very optimistic thing, thinking,
01:10:24 ◼ ► "I'll just set this up, and then these things will be bridged forever." And that's never how it really works.
01:10:28 ◼ ► You know, always in practice, you have some kind of hack or bridge like that, every few months you've got to reset it or reconfigure it or figure out why something's not working,
01:10:37 ◼ ► and then you have a whole other thing to debug or run or operate. Those Docker containers will eventually need to be updated or will eventually break or something like that.
01:10:44 ◼ ► Yes, but that's incredibly easy. But I do agree with what you're saying in principle, but it is so easy.
01:10:49 ◼ ► Yeah, but that's, it just, that adds more stuff to my plate, and I'm like, I don't, you know, is this additional integration or feature really worth that level of tinkering and maintenance?
01:11:02 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, you're allowed. It doesn't make you wrong. I just, I cannot overstate how easy this could potentially be if you were interested in it, and it sounds like you're just plain not interested, and that's okay.
01:11:13 ◼ ► I remember how excited you were about the Logitech Circle View cameras, so this may be the honeymoon period, and related to that, we got one bit of very adamant feedback from John McMichael who said,
01:11:22 ◼ ► "Ubiquity Video Cameras is hot garbage." Ubiquity Video Camera? Singular is hot garbage?
01:11:31 ◼ ► "And tie them into Security Spy." And I believe I found the correct link for Security Spy.
01:11:36 ◼ ► Security Spy looks like the type, if you have an apartment building and you want to have a station where there's a security guard looking at a bunch of cameras, that's what it looks like, but it's for the Mac.
01:11:44 ◼ ► Looks like an impressive piece of software, but I'm guessing this is not what Marco wants.
01:11:49 ◼ ► And that too, I didn't want to run a Mac server. Because again, what I have now, I have this Ubiquity appliance, basically, the NVR doing the recording and everything.
01:11:59 ◼ ► I know Ubiquity gear, I know I can just let that run for years and never touch it, never update it, never have to worry about, like, is something going to break, you know, something never falls out of configuration.
01:12:20 ◼ ► Okay, the water is on the floor. It is far, it's up. It's like five feet above any water.
01:12:32 ◼ ► Maybe I have a server closet as a term of art, but literal closets and houses tend not to have great ventilation. I do have some concern about the number of other stuff.
01:12:39 ◼ ► Oh, no, that, no, it's a utility closet. So it is ventilated, like, it's where I have other networking gear. It's fine.
01:12:46 ◼ ► All right, so when you open the door, you don't feel a blast of hot air come out at you?
01:12:50 ◼ ► No, no, it's actually partially conditioned the way the house is. So like, you know, right, like when the air conditioning is on, you open the door and you get a blast of cold air.
01:13:05 ◼ ► It's really not. Yeah. So anyway, this system, look, if you're a nerd, this is awesome.
01:13:10 ◼ ► If you're, if you, if you're looking for like a basic, easy to set up, inexpensive, compact home security camera system, this is not that.
01:13:20 ◼ ► But if you want something that's really good, like high, high end needs, or just you want something that works really well, and you're willing to probably spend more than you reasonably responsibly should and have all this gear somewhere in your closet somewhere, then this is awesome.
01:13:37 ◼ ► This doesn't make sense for most people, but if it makes sense for you, it's really awesome.
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01:14:11 ◼ ► So what this means is it is totally raw, totally unedited. You hear all the bad jokes that didn't land. You hear Casey swearing.
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01:14:34 ◼ ► So you get all sorts of little bonus stuff and it's very raw and it's released right after the recording ends.
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01:25:52 ◼ ► So, for instance, if it's an iOS app, Apple announces some new feature for the next OS,
01:36:27 ◼ ► And so I signed into UPS My Choice and it said that there was a 36-pound package coming to me,
01:37:19 ◼ ► Now, what's funny is I think it was literally the day before that we had recorded the iMac tier list.
01:38:16 ◼ ► And then it occurred to me, "Oh, no, no, no, no. This is not a rectangle. This is a pie.
01:40:09 ◼ ► Don't drop the iMac, and don't put it anywhere near the windshield of any of your cars.
01:40:16 ◼ ► Can you imagine if he shatters his glass desk by touching it with the corner of the iMac Pro?
01:41:42 ◼ ► So you looked in the box, and you couldn't tell the difference between an LG 5K and an iMac Pro?
01:41:58 ◼ ► I'm going to put it in slack, and then maybe, Marco, this is not a great picture because it's dark in here, blah, blah, blah.
01:42:07 ◼ ► No, because the... Well, first of all, I want to remain sleepy in my sleepy clothes and my sleepy shirt, but beyond that...
01:42:16 ◼ ► But beyond that, the more important thing is that there's a piddly little teeny tiny light bulb in the overhead fan,
01:42:25 ◼ ► And even if I did turn it on, the light bulb is currently blown because I never use it.
01:42:31 ◼ ► It was like a scene from Blair Witch, the lighting that you've got going on in this room.
01:42:36 ◼ ► So anyway, so I've just put it in slack for you two, and maybe we can make it the chapter art for this chapter.
01:42:42 ◼ ► What's missing there is a gigantic, silver, dark silver space gray foot of an iMac Pro.
01:42:47 ◼ ► Well, at a glance, it looked like it, especially because you can see more of the foot now,
01:42:57 ◼ ► So I saw something that was dark that was the shape of an iMac that was in an iMac Pro box.
01:43:37 ◼ ► That's going to be your desk. It's just going to be like this row of bobblehead monitors, just bobble-obble-obble.
01:43:55 ◼ ► and that bastard just came flying up, just like that piece of crap LG stand loves to do.
01:44:31 ◼ ► you're like, "Do I really want to pay to move this and then have this in the new place?"
01:45:06 ◼ ► So, instead of packing it into a box onto the box truck, I'm having to haul it back and forth
01:45:14 ◼ ► I'm like, "You know what? I'm just going to pack this into whatever box I can find in my attic
01:45:23 ◼ ► Thanks, bud. So, now I'm happy to report, as of minutes ago, well, actually, as of days ago,
01:45:31 ◼ ► which I actually intended to do today because it was gorgeous here and then never got around to it,
01:45:49 ◼ ► All right, Jon, since you apparently did a better job of investigating and interrogating your gift shipment,
01:46:02 ◼ ► I would say maybe he sent the wrong shipments to the wrong people, but now that he's here at the 5K,
01:46:11 ◼ ► Yeah. And I have to say, to start, Marco occasionally does this, and it's a very nice thing that he does.
01:46:21 ◼ ► and spends the money to ship them to his friends instead of just, like, free-cycling them
01:46:29 ◼ ► It's a very nice thing that you do when you get rid of your old tech stuff and you send it to us.
01:46:43 ◼ ► But no, I don't even want to think about how much it was to ship this damn thing to me, so thank you.
01:47:21 ◼ ► What if I just wedge three or four Kindles in there? There. Now it doesn't move around as much."
01:47:42 ◼ ► And it was packed in to try to say, "Well, I think he was actually looking in the house.
01:47:45 ◼ ► What kind of things do I have that I could wedge in here so things don't move around too much?"
01:47:51 ◼ ► Because it looks like I need something that's skinny, that will fit here, that will fill this space.
01:48:10 ◼ ► It's got a USB-connected, DC power connector, so the cables are in there and the things are there.
01:48:15 ◼ ► I already have a Blu-ray reader. I think I have a Samsung, but I don't actually have a writer,
01:48:19 ◼ ► so it's nice to have this, assuming the writer still works and it wasn't just packing material.
01:48:23 ◼ ► So that one, it's like, "Okay, I don't think I really need this. I've never actually written a Blu-ray,
01:48:31 ◼ ► It's small, so whatever, although it's like micro-USB if you remember what that connector looks like. It's gross."
01:48:38 ◼ ► Then there is a plastic spindle, if you remember those from back in the day, of writeable Blu-ray discs.
01:48:44 ◼ ► Hey, convenient. I still don't quite know why I would ever want to write anything to a Blu-ray disc,
01:49:17 ◼ ► But that's not the main concept of this box. That was packing material to be wedged against the main contents of this box.
01:49:23 ◼ ► Yeah. Given that I've described these spacers, Casey, can you think of what might be similar dimensions to a spindle of optical discs and a Blu-ray writer?
01:49:33 ◼ ► It's like a stack. It's like an inch-high stack, and then the Blu-ray writer is like, you know, it's a square about the size of a Blu-ray.
01:49:47 ◼ ► What is in this box? I'll put the picture of this amazing packing jog on our Slack so you can look at it.
01:49:58 ◼ ► Just look at this packing job, Casey. Look at the piece of cardboard between them. Who is he kidding with that piece of cardboard?
01:50:03 ◼ ► This is my separator material, see? It's like padding. I'm amazed that these things came to me.
01:50:09 ◼ ► I'm not going to say unscathed because the home pods are a little worse for wear, but honestly, I can't tell if that's damage incurred during shipment or damage incurred when they were at Marco's house. I can't tell.
01:50:20 ◼ ► So now here's the conundrum. All right, so I already have a full-size home pod. I got one when they were released, right? And it's in my living room doing its thing.
01:50:27 ◼ ► I've got these two things. I'm like, "Oh, two home pods. Oh, well, first I thought, are these the ones that were flaking out at Marco's?" Yeah, they're kind of all flaking out.
01:50:35 ◼ ► Yeah. I mean, so far mine hasn't been mostly, but I barely use it. But I'm like, "Okay, well, I'm sure I'll be able to find a place for these in the house."
01:50:41 ◼ ► And since I've got them, I've been puzzling it over, and I cannot figure out what the hell I'm going to do with these things.
01:50:50 ◼ ► I went into my daughter's room the other day, and she was listening to music on her Google Home Mini, the really, really tiny Puck thing.
01:50:57 ◼ ► And she's listening to music on it. I'm like, "Oh, this is it." I immediately go, "Boom."
01:51:02 ◼ ► Would you like me to replace that Google Home Mini with a home pod? It'll sound way better, and you'll have a home pod in your room. Isn't that cool?
01:51:08 ◼ ► You could even have a stereo pair. And before I could get the words out of her mouth, she's like, "Nope, nope, nope, nope."
01:51:26 ◼ ► Here's the thing. We talk about this with the iMac. Why does it have to be so thin? Who cares about that or whatever?
01:51:31 ◼ ► Non-tech people, people who aren't into tech things as a hobby, do not want technology products to be dominant in their space.
01:51:41 ◼ ► The home pod is too big for a teenage girl's bedroom if she doesn't care about home pods or any of that tech stuff or whatever.
01:51:50 ◼ ► It takes up too much volume. It is too prominent. It's too ugly. It draws too much attention to itself.
01:51:56 ◼ ► Whereas the tiny little puck of the Google Home Mini is practically buried under the other stuff that's there. It's so unobtrusive.
01:52:01 ◼ ► And then, secondarily, she's not because she never wants to do anything that I tell her to do.
01:52:11 ◼ ► So, I'm like, "What am I going to do with these?" I briefly thought about replacing the speakers that are on my desk for my Mac.
01:52:20 ◼ ► Exactly. I remember when we talked about it, I'm like, "No, I don't want to deal with the lag."
01:52:29 ◼ ► My speakers are cheap, cruddy speakers, but they're connected directly with an analog audio cable to the back of my Mac, and there's no latency, and they work every single time.
01:52:40 ◼ ► I'm looking around the house like, "Well, I've got one HomePod in here. If I put the other HomePod, could I get a stereo pair?"
01:52:46 ◼ ► But I have surround speakers in that room. Or the fancy speakers that I bought see past episodes.
01:52:54 ◼ ► And my one big HomePod is buried in the corner behind everything as a punishment for being bad.
01:52:59 ◼ ► It's got photos in front of it. We use it to play Christmas carols when we're decorating the tree.
01:53:05 ◼ ► And when we're decorating the tree, it's actually relocated to the other side of the room, but that's it.
01:53:08 ◼ ► But if I'm going to play stereo music, I have a much better full surround stereo speaker system that I can run.
01:53:15 ◼ ► And I don't have a place to put two HomePods if I wanted to let them do their HomePod-y thing.
01:53:24 ◼ ► I thought about putting them as the TV speakers to the upstairs TV that was next to me.
01:53:34 ◼ ► The kitchen... I mean, there's not a lot of place that we... No one really listens to music out loud in the house.
01:53:41 ◼ ► So, I'm still puzzling over. Right now, they're just sitting on the desk behind me, looking very sad,
01:53:51 ◼ ► I mean, worst case scenario, I could like... I should have offered them to my son, we just took them to college the other day.
01:53:56 ◼ ► Do you want these for your dorm room? He almost certainly doesn't, but maybe he would say, "Sure, why not?" or something like that.
01:54:02 ◼ ► But we have to... We're driving a mini-fridge out to him in a little bit because we're taking separate trips for various reasons.
01:54:15 ◼ ► And also, you have to remember... So, when your kid goes to school close to where you live, the phenomenon of,
01:54:24 ◼ ► "Oh, I don't have to make sure I have everything because I'll just remember what I don't have and ask for a second trip."
01:54:29 ◼ ► That is absolutely in effect. By the time we got home, my text message is, "Oh, can you bring me this and this and this and this?"
01:54:36 ◼ ► And we legit forgot at least one thing. We forgot his mattress topper thing, which we meant to bring with us because it was in the basement.
01:54:44 ◼ ► So, anyway, maybe these will come with me and I'll say, "Hey, you want these?" And he'll probably say no for the same variety of reasons.
01:54:49 ◼ ► Anyway, I'm puzzling it over. But yeah, now I've got two sad-looking big HomePods and a bunch of optical discs.
01:55:02 ◼ ► I mean, just like the box. I didn't get a gigantic box around if you're going to my house or whatever.
01:55:05 ◼ ► And honestly, as soon as I saw the package coming, I kind of had a notion of what they might be, but the second I saw it sitting on my porch, I'm like, "Oh, it's HomePods."
01:55:13 ◼ ► And I can just tell from the weight and the dimensionality, "I know what a big HomePod's like. That's what's in here."
01:55:20 ◼ ► Yeah, because the big HomePods are very heavy. Like, they're very dense objects. Like, you pick one up, you're like, "Whoa!"
01:55:27 ◼ ► So, do you have any suggestions for what I should do with these? Because it's really stumping me.
01:55:31 ◼ ► Like, I'm not against them. They're good speakers. It's two good speakers and I can airplay to them. Like, they should have a function somewhere in my life.
01:55:52 ◼ ► Standalone HomePods are themselves quite buggy, but the bugginess goes up dramatically with stereo pairs, which is a shame because so does the sound quality.
01:56:00 ◼ ► And so, it sucks that you can't really use them in the way they sound the best if you want them to be reliable at all.
01:56:08 ◼ ► I would say, like, anywhere that you might be able to put a single HomePod that maybe could use an improvement in volume or quality, put this there. Or mail them to Casey.
01:56:21 ◼ ► I don't want to, you know, keep sending these, like, the sisterhood of the traveling HomePods.
01:56:26 ◼ ► But now, here's the thought. So, when COVID started, we made my wife, like, a little home office downstairs. I think we talked about this. We got her a nice, fancy standing desk motorized thing.
01:56:37 ◼ ► And her work gave her a bunch of, like, work at home equipment, including a gigantic, like, 32-inch Dell monitor or something or other. It's not retina, but it's huge.
01:56:45 ◼ ► Anyway, she's got her office down there. And at some point, I got the Sonos Toblerone thing. What is that called? The Rome?
01:57:03 ◼ ► So, that means she wanted that, but she said, you know, she had, like, a little mini Bluetooth speaker, and she saw that I had my Roam that I used in the shower. She's like, "Oh, I want one of those." So, I got her one.
01:57:11 ◼ ► So, she does listen to music out loud. And so, I should bring both HomePods down there, because there's plenty of room down there. Like, it's just her office area. There's not a lot of junk down there.
01:57:19 ◼ ► The only downside is, if they are flaky, I'm going to hear immediately, "Just give me back my Sonos thing." Because at least it plays music when I want it to play.
01:57:28 ◼ ► Yeah, I'm definitely going to try that. I mean, she knows I got them, and she didn't immediately say, "Can I have them in my office?" So, I think she might be kind of wary of them too, but she does listen to the program.
01:57:36 ◼ ► So, I'll make a second attempt at pitching her on having these in her office. But she might also say, "They're kind of big," and, you know, whatever.
01:57:42 ◼ ► I mean, they sound amazing for their size too. What's so frustrating to me about the HomePods is that I love the way they sound. They sound great.
01:57:51 ◼ ► They're just really hard to use, because they lack any kind of input. And so, I can't bypass their flaky smarts, because you have to still use AirPlay to connect to them. So, that's no good.
01:58:06 ◼ ► There's no line-in. There's no input method at all besides the flakiness. But once you can actually get them to connect and use them, they sound incredible.
01:58:16 ◼ ► But that's just such a huge asterisk and such a huge downside for them. It makes it really hard to use them.
01:58:22 ◼ ► You could have just gotten a bunch more Sonos stuff, and that would have been fine. I guess Marco isn't sending it to you for free though.
01:58:27 ◼ ► Yeah, again, I didn't have a need for this. But I'm just going to put them down there and not tell her, and just get them set up somehow. And next time she goes down there, I'll start playing music with them. And she'll be like, "Whoa, where's this great music coming from?"
01:58:43 ◼ ► I think it'll be more like you'll be standing on the stairs trying to make your phone connect to them. And you'll be like, "Hold on, hold on. Just wait. Just hold on."
01:58:54 ◼ ► More likely, she's going to go down there and she's going to say, "Why did you put your junk by my desk? Get that off of there."