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468: You Got Your Non-Money's Worth

 

00:00:00   I have entered the world of winter luxury.

00:00:03   - Did you get new gloves or something?

00:00:05   - I did get new gloves.

00:00:07   They're okay, but like all gloves, they're at best okay.

00:00:10   I do think, you know,

00:00:12   we did get a lot of glove recommendations.

00:00:15   The recommendations were all over the map

00:00:17   and there was no consensus whatsoever

00:00:19   on like what might be good.

00:00:20   - Well, I think there were two strong themes,

00:00:22   both of which we, well, one of which

00:00:24   we definitely touched on in the show

00:00:25   and the other one that was,

00:00:26   we should have touched on it more.

00:00:28   One was hey mittens are warmer than gloves. A lot of people said that right and we did mention that on the show

00:00:32   Although it was so fast you might have missed it and the second one was layers like, you know

00:00:38   Wear a thing underneath a thing right on your hands

00:00:41   in fact

00:00:41   some of the some of those things that were suggested were these all-in-one things were like it's a glove on the inside and then

00:00:46   a mitten on the outside and you can unzip the mitten and get the glove but you can do that yourself with

00:00:49   Glove liners back in the 80s 90s. We have these sparkly glove liners

00:00:54   They look like a Michael Jackson glove for skiing.

00:01:00   I think the idea is that it would reflect the heat.

00:01:01   Honestly I don't know because I was young.

00:01:02   It was just like, "Here, these are glove liners.

00:01:04   You wear them underneath your gloves."

00:01:05   I was like, "Alright, whatever."

00:01:06   I didn't really question why they were sparkly.

00:01:08   They were sparkly, but you can buy ones that are not sparkly or silky or whatever.

00:01:11   So I feel like those are the two big themes.

00:01:13   Then after that it was just, "Here's the favorite glove that I've tried."

00:01:16   Yeah.

00:01:17   And I feel like part of the problem here is that this category, literally just the whole

00:01:21   category is bad in some way.

00:01:24   part of the problem is that people have vastly different

00:01:27   needs, like my needs, it's so funny.

00:01:30   People often will recommend gloves that,

00:01:34   I have tried either that glove or something very similar

00:01:36   to it and it works great when it's 40 degrees,

00:01:40   but you need very different things when it's 20 degrees.

00:01:43   And you need very different things when it's 10 degrees.

00:01:45   And I feel like people just think that cold is cold.

00:01:50   And you don't realize 20 degrees

00:01:53   makes a pretty big difference.

00:01:54   You wouldn't wear the same clothing

00:01:57   between a 60 degree day and an 80 degree day.

00:02:00   That's two very different needs.

00:02:02   Well, for some reason, people think,

00:02:04   oh, these gloves that work when it's 30

00:02:06   will work fine when it's 10.

00:02:07   Nope, doesn't work that way.

00:02:09   So I got some more gloves, they're okay,

00:02:11   and they continue my parade of okay gloves,

00:02:14   none of which I'm extremely happy with.

00:02:15   See also, to do apps, weather apps,

00:02:19   so many things like that in life, right?

00:02:22   you're like 80% happy with something at any given time.

00:02:24   Gloves are definitely one of those things.

00:02:25   But that is not the luxury I have entered.

00:02:28   I am podcasting right now from a top, a new heated rug.

00:02:35   - That's a thing? - I was gonna say.

00:02:39   I really thought you were gonna say

00:02:40   you got silk thermal underwear.

00:02:42   And then when you said sitting atop,

00:02:44   I'm like, did you get like a heating pad for your butt?

00:02:45   But no, it's the rug that's heated?

00:02:48   - Yes.

00:02:48   So, a place I used to live had radiant floor heat

00:02:53   in my office, and I loved that so much,

00:02:56   because it's amazing.

00:02:58   If you have to have a home built for winter weather,

00:03:01   or configured for winter weather,

00:03:03   trust me, you want heated floors.

00:03:06   It is by far the best form of heat for a house,

00:03:09   for almost any needs.

00:03:11   - Right up until it leaks.

00:03:13   - Well, you can also get electric heated floors,

00:03:16   but hydronic heated floors are very hard to leak

00:03:19   when they're like in a slab.

00:03:21   - Yeah, they're good right up until they're not.

00:03:24   'Cause then you have a bunch of tubes going through

00:03:27   concrete that you have to break open.

00:03:28   The modern ones, they usually take aluminum stuff

00:03:30   and they nail the tubes to the underside of the subfloor,

00:03:33   so at least if it leaks, you have access to it.

00:03:34   But yeah, those things last a good 20 to 50 years,

00:03:38   and then it's someone else's problem.

00:03:40   - I mean, fair, but I mean, that's true of many

00:03:43   large construction projects and houses.

00:03:45   Like that's not that unreasonable.

00:03:46   - But usually not heating.

00:03:47   Like if you think about the stupid radiators in my house,

00:03:50   put in here in the 30s and still going strong.

00:03:53   Like there's the bearing stuff in the floor

00:03:55   is A, not accessible and B, subject to all sorts of things

00:03:59   that just bear pipes going through the wall,

00:04:00   not subject to.

00:04:01   But your point stands, you're gonna be out of the house

00:04:03   by the time this happens.

00:04:04   So yes, if you're getting a house and you have a choice,

00:04:07   put the heating in the floor and then when you die

00:04:09   or move out, someone else will deal with it.

00:04:11   - Yes.

00:04:12   And so, I don't have that here, and I missed it dearly.

00:04:17   And I've tried, you know, last winter I tried,

00:04:19   oh, let me just try turning the heat up

00:04:22   a few more degrees in the room.

00:04:23   And that doesn't really solve the problem.

00:04:25   Like, my feet and legs would be kind of cold,

00:04:28   or my hands would be kind of cold,

00:04:29   but the rest of me would be fine.

00:04:30   - Are you not wearing slippers?

00:04:32   - No, I am wearing slippers.

00:04:33   - What kind of slippers?

00:04:34   - Well, in all fairness, they're not technically slippers.

00:04:39   - Oh, here we go.

00:04:40   - They are what the website described, I believe,

00:04:42   as driving moccasins.

00:04:44   Like, they're slippers. - What?

00:04:45   - They're just, they're slippers with heavy rubber.

00:04:47   - Can we get a link to this?

00:04:48   Can we get a link to this so we can have a ruling?

00:04:50   - I'm gonna find a link to what I'm wearing right now,

00:04:53   which is the latest in a long line

00:04:54   of mildly satisfactory slippers.

00:04:58   Can you guess that the ones I know you get,

00:04:59   they don't make them anymore?

00:05:00   Can you guess? - You don't say.

00:05:01   - I'm so surprised.

00:05:03   - Well, actually, no, it's not true.

00:05:03   They make them, but they don't make them in wide anymore.

00:05:05   I'm like, seriously, you still make them,

00:05:06   but you don't make them in wide?

00:05:08   - There's nothing about your body

00:05:09   that has ever in its entire existence been wide.

00:05:11   You clean, you have wide feet.

00:05:14   - My feet, with slippers, I like the gloves,

00:05:17   I like them to be oversized for extra warmth.

00:05:18   These are the ones that I'm currently wearing right now.

00:05:21   I've got complaints about them, but--

00:05:23   - You?

00:05:24   - Lack of warmth is not one of them.

00:05:25   - See, these giant, like, the ones that have, like,

00:05:27   basically, like, an entire rabbit stuffed inside of them,

00:05:30   like, all this fuzz coming out,

00:05:31   that to me is, it's like too, it's too fuzzy.

00:05:34   - It'll keep your feet warm.

00:05:36   - Well, that's too warm.

00:05:38   That'll make my feet too warm.

00:05:39   So what I wear is basically uninsulated,

00:05:43   how to put the link, these Duluth.

00:05:45   - Yeah, these are nowhere near slippers.

00:05:48   They're not even in the vicinity of slippers.

00:05:50   - They're called slippers right there in the title.

00:05:52   I don't know how these aren't slippers.

00:05:53   I know what you're talking about.

00:05:54   You can't slip your feet into them.

00:05:55   - No, he's talking about mine.

00:05:56   - You can.

00:05:56   - No, I'm talking about Marcos.

00:05:58   I haven't even looked.

00:05:59   Oh yeah, yours are preposterous.

00:06:00   I've seen these in action.

00:06:01   They're ridiculous.

00:06:02   But I don't doubt that they're incredibly worn.

00:06:04   - You haven't seen these.

00:06:05   You've seen similar ones, yeah.

00:06:06   I see what you, yeah.

00:06:08   Those are actually, yeah, they're driving shoes.

00:06:12   - Yeah, these are not slippers, Marc.

00:06:13   - I've never driven in them, that's stupid.

00:06:15   - I do, let me just say I do like the fact

00:06:17   that they have rubber bottom things on,

00:06:20   because that's a thing people miss about slippers.

00:06:22   When buying, if you're going to buy, you know,

00:06:24   half year, you know, six month slippers like I do,

00:06:27   it is good to have a sole on them

00:06:28   that you can walk outside in to like,

00:06:31   go get the mail or take the dog out

00:06:32   for a brief walk or whatever.

00:06:34   - Hard agree, hard agree on that.

00:06:35   - Right, yeah, I do that all the time.

00:06:37   If it's clean and dry outside,

00:06:39   yeah, I'll take the trash out wearing these, it's fine.

00:06:42   So anyway, I do wear slippers, however,

00:06:44   I was not, I just wasn't getting the kind of warmth

00:06:47   that I knew that a heated floor could offer.

00:06:49   And so first I looked at,

00:06:51   should I get one of those little panel heaters

00:06:53   and put under my desk for supplemental heating?

00:06:55   - What do you mean by panel heater?

00:06:56   - It's basically a radiant space heater,

00:06:59   but there's a whole category of them

00:07:01   that are made to go under desks,

00:07:03   and it's a vertical panel

00:07:05   that just radiates heat onto your legs.

00:07:07   The reviews were all really mediocre

00:07:08   and they looked like they sucked

00:07:10   and I didn't want that under my desk.

00:07:11   And I tried, at first, I tried this little tiny

00:07:14   like $40 heat mat that's like the size of like,

00:07:19   I don't know, it's like an 11 by 17 piece of paper,

00:07:21   like that kind of size.

00:07:22   - You have to keep your feet directly on

00:07:24   and hit the little piece of paper.

00:07:25   - Yeah, and I tried that and it did work

00:07:28   in the sense that it was pleasant and it kept my feet warm,

00:07:32   but it was, first of all, really cheap and crappy looking.

00:07:36   It's not something I was proud to show at my office.

00:07:38   And it just was such a tiny little area.

00:07:41   And so it's like, I want something bigger.

00:07:43   So I started looking for,

00:07:44   do they make larger versions of that?

00:07:47   And it turns out there's this whole category

00:07:49   of basically heat pads that you put under rugs

00:07:53   that are made to heat rugs.

00:07:56   Now my office didn't have a rug,

00:07:57   so I went through the process of finding a rug I liked.

00:08:00   (laughing)

00:08:02   - Can we see the rug too?

00:08:03   Put some links in this.

00:08:04   - Yeah, it's a ruggable thing, it doesn't matter.

00:08:06   Does it have like a race track on the road or no?

00:08:09   Actually, it kind of does.

00:08:11   You could get up some cars and--

00:08:13   I'm in.

00:08:14   That's actually not that far from the design.

00:08:18   Hold on, I'll find the design.

00:08:19   A race track, though, you could have like a town

00:08:21   where you have roads, but then there's like a post office

00:08:23   and like the--

00:08:23   Yeah, yeah, like the kids-- yeah,

00:08:25   you have them in your kids' rooms.

00:08:26   That was actually the rug we had like in our downstairs,

00:08:29   like a den area for the longest time.

00:08:32   I think IKEA still makes those.

00:08:33   And the kids grew out of it, and we still have the rug there.

00:08:36   and I guess it eventually occurred to us

00:08:38   when the kids are both approaching teenagers

00:08:40   that we probably don't need that rug anymore.

00:08:42   - So you actually kept something

00:08:44   for a long time in your house, Jon?

00:08:45   - Yeah. - No, surely not.

00:08:47   - I think we've still got a lot of baby clothes, so.

00:08:50   - I'm surprised, it only lasted one generation so far.

00:08:52   That's the bigger surprise.

00:08:54   - I don't think that rug is an erratic,

00:08:56   at least I hope it isn't, but if it is, throw it out.

00:08:58   - All right, here's my rug.

00:08:59   It's the ruggable-- - Ruggable.

00:09:01   - Metro Slate Blue Rug.

00:09:03   - Your Instagram victim.

00:09:04   - Well, this is a racetrack.

00:09:05   - Yeah, I told you, it kind of is.

00:09:07   - Yeah.

00:09:08   (laughing)

00:09:09   All right, no, that's cute.

00:09:11   How big is it?

00:09:12   - Five by seven.

00:09:13   'Cause that's enough to go under the whole area

00:09:15   that I put my feet, plus to go under my chair,

00:09:17   that way I don't have to run the chair

00:09:18   over the rug to floor transition.

00:09:20   It's kind of hard to run the chair over this rug now,

00:09:24   'cause it's like the ruggable rug itself,

00:09:27   'cause it's a thin rug with a thin liner behind it

00:09:30   that keeps it from scooting around.

00:09:32   Then the heat pad, which is like a giant foil thing,

00:09:35   then under the heat pad is the insulation mat as well.

00:09:39   So it's like four layers of rug stuff,

00:09:42   but my God, is it nice.

00:09:43   - Well, when your house goes up,

00:09:45   this'll be good for insurance purposes.

00:09:47   (laughing)

00:09:49   - I think it's done in a fairly conservative way.

00:09:53   Everything is pretty conservative on it.

00:09:55   So it's very well guarded, and it's only 300 watts.

00:09:59   It's not that much power.

00:10:01   So yeah, so it's glorious.

00:10:04   - Did you ever put a link to the heating thing?

00:10:06   - No, hold on, I'll dig that up too, hold on.

00:10:09   - I saw a lot of bad reviews.

00:10:10   When I first got assaulted by Ruggable ads on Instagram,

00:10:12   I looked up some YouTube reviews

00:10:14   and there were a lot of complaints about them.

00:10:16   - Yes, here, so here, the ones on Amazon

00:10:19   all seem to have really wacky reviews

00:10:21   and also the Amazon ones seem to be based

00:10:23   on either Asian or European rug sizes

00:10:25   and so I couldn't find one that would fit

00:10:28   under any size rug that Ruggable sold

00:10:30   and I wanted one of their rug,

00:10:31   so I knew they were okay and they were pretty cheap.

00:10:34   And so here, so the one I got is from CozyWinters.com.

00:10:37   The RugHeat brand is the mat.

00:10:40   And this brand did not appear

00:10:41   to be reliably available on Amazon.

00:10:43   But I got it through here, it was great.

00:10:45   And yeah, five by seven, it's glorious.

00:10:47   - It's got a little hair dryer GFCI thing or something

00:10:50   in the wire, which is nice.

00:10:52   - Yeah, like a giant, it's basically a giant GFI thing

00:10:54   on the--

00:10:55   - And then, what was I gonna say?

00:10:58   What I need, speaking of things I don't need through rugs,

00:11:00   is I need a, something with more traction

00:11:03   because when people are in front of our house,

00:11:05   my dog is very upset about it

00:11:06   and she runs back and forth from one rug to the other.

00:11:09   And each time she changes direction on the rug,

00:11:10   she shifts it and I always have a rug like in front

00:11:12   of my door so when you come into the house,

00:11:14   the first thing you step onto is not a hardwood floor

00:11:16   is put onto this rug.

00:11:18   And she's constantly forever like moving that rug

00:11:21   by little bits at a time and I'm constantly moving it back.

00:11:23   And it's got one of those traction pads underneath it,

00:11:25   one of those kind of like mesh rubbery things.

00:11:27   But when it's only like a small like area rug

00:11:30   for just the front of the door,

00:11:32   It just, you know, it doesn't have enough weight

00:11:34   to get traction.

00:11:35   - Yeah.

00:11:36   - And yeah.

00:11:37   - Well, I'll tell you what, like,

00:11:37   on this page it says, "Note you must use a non-slip rug pad."

00:11:40   That rug pad that I, that's the one I got for under it,

00:11:43   it is extraordinarily non-slip.

00:11:45   Like that's, you actually might want to guess a small one.

00:11:48   - What's the, what is it made out of?

00:11:50   I mean, the problem is the rug size.

00:11:52   Like, I mean, 'cause if you can imagine,

00:11:53   if you made a three inch--

00:11:54   - Well, you cut it.

00:11:55   - A three inch by three inch rug,

00:11:56   no amount of like non-slip stuff would work

00:11:58   unless it was literally sticky like tape, right?

00:12:01   - Yeah, I mean, I would imagine after a while,

00:12:04   if it was moving frequently,

00:12:05   then it might pick up enough dust

00:12:07   that it might lose its grippiness,

00:12:08   but it's pretty, like it was grippy enough

00:12:11   that once it's down, you really can't scoot it around.

00:12:15   - Unless a dog runs at it

00:12:16   and then changes direction suddenly while on the rug.

00:12:19   - Right, yeah, and if you have a very small rug,

00:12:22   that's gonna be obviously more likely to happen,

00:12:23   but I can tell you, if you somehow put a five by seven rug

00:12:27   in that area, it's not going anywhere.

00:12:30   Yeah, I got those like 3M tacky stuff underneath.

00:12:33   There's lots of things I can do,

00:12:34   but instead of just resign to moving it.

00:12:35   - Yeah, what's the micro, not microfiber,

00:12:38   the micro suction tape? - Micro suction tape?

00:12:40   - Yeah, something that's actually sticky would probably help.

00:12:43   Of course, then you need it to stick

00:12:45   to the underside of the rug as well,

00:12:46   which is often the problem.

00:12:47   - Yeah.

00:12:48   - Oh man.

00:12:50   You know, it's funny hearing you talk about, you know,

00:12:52   the difference between 60 and 80 degrees

00:12:54   and 30 and 10 degrees.

00:12:55   And I'm just reminded how much better Fahrenheit is

00:12:58   for ambient air temperature than anything else.

00:13:00   'Cause what's the difference between 60 and 80 in Celsius?

00:13:02   Like 16 to 17 or something like that?

00:13:05   - Yeah, it's like one degree.

00:13:06   - Yeah, it's an entire 20 degrees in Fahrenheit,

00:13:10   because you can tell the difference in Fahrenheit

00:13:12   between just a degree or two.

00:13:14   But in Celsius, it's like a degree

00:13:17   to cover that entire delta.

00:13:18   - It makes me think, how do they,

00:13:20   do all thermostats have fractional,

00:13:22   maybe it must have fractional degrees.

00:13:23   - It's barbaric, John, it's barbaric.

00:13:27   Can you imagine going through life saying,

00:13:28   "Oh, it's 16.5, like come on."

00:13:31   No.

00:13:32   - Yeah, or like to wake up at 17.35.

00:13:36   (electronic beeping)

00:13:37   - All right, let's do some follow up.

00:13:39   Google has shipped tapback parsing.

00:13:43   That's a tongue twister.

00:13:44   So we talked about this,

00:13:45   I think it was just last week or the week before,

00:13:47   and we were lamenting how you can see,

00:13:49   like Jason liked blah, blah, blah in iMessage

00:13:52   and SMS group chats, or I guess SMS,

00:13:54   or really MMS group chats, strictly speaking.

00:13:57   - It's pronounced mms.

00:13:58   - In the mms group chat.

00:14:00   And yes, this is where everyone that's not American says,

00:14:02   "Why are you using iMessage or whatever for this?

00:14:05   "I understand, because we're weird, that's why."

00:14:07   We're not weird because of Fahrenheit, mind you,

00:14:09   we're right about that,

00:14:09   but maybe we're a little wrong about this.

00:14:11   - And to be fair, the metric system is superior

00:14:14   in pretty much every other way.

00:14:16   - I don't think it's pretty much in every other way.

00:14:19   In literally every other way.

00:14:21   - Except when describing ambient air temperature for humans.

00:14:24   - Right.

00:14:25   - That is clearly Fahrenheit superior.

00:14:27   I will give you the metric system

00:14:28   for literally everything else.

00:14:30   - Yeah, I'll use it for cooking, that's fine.

00:14:32   - I do, yeah, I always like, well first of all,

00:14:35   sorry for the tangent.

00:14:36   First of all, when I was doing my bake-off last week,

00:14:41   one of the things that I sought out when looking for a recipe

00:14:45   was a recipe that gave me the ingredients in weight.

00:14:49   Because for the love of God, I don't need,

00:14:51   don't tell me to add a cup of pistachios

00:14:55   What does that mean?

00:14:56   (laughing)

00:14:59   Like, give me grams.

00:15:00   How many grams?

00:15:01   I have a kitchen scale that weighs in grams.

00:15:02   Give me grams.

00:15:03   Like, that's what I want.

00:15:04   And yeah, so metric is great for that.

00:15:06   Cooking by weight is wonderful

00:15:07   and so much better than volumetric measurements

00:15:09   for things that are not liquids.

00:15:10   It's fantastic, so yeah.

00:15:12   - We get everything wrong.

00:15:13   We get everything wrong except Fahrenheit.

00:15:15   That's the only thing we've got.

00:15:17   So we gotta cling to it because we do dates wrong.

00:15:20   Like, month to year, no.

00:15:22   No, that's preposterous.

00:15:23   - YMD is the only way to go.

00:15:24   and it depends on the context,

00:15:26   but it's either YMD or DMY, one or the other.

00:15:29   - Yeah, what did I come across recently that had dates?

00:15:31   Oh, I think it was the, I was scanning pictures

00:15:35   and they had the little burned in dates, you know,

00:15:36   one of those. - Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:15:38   - And I transcribed the first maybe 20 or 30 of them wrong

00:15:42   until I hit something where I said, wait a second,

00:15:44   there's no month 29.

00:15:46   Wait a second.

00:15:48   'Cause it was two digit day, two digit month,

00:15:50   two digit year.

00:15:52   And that is just wrong, I'm sorry.

00:15:54   - See, for normal colloquial use, I'll do day, month, year,

00:15:58   because it's unusual for scheduling things

00:16:00   that you're gonna worry about another year.

00:16:02   Now, if you're sorting stuff, then absolutely,

00:16:04   you're, what is it, year, month, day?

00:16:05   - Why am I being misspoke?

00:16:07   You mean month, day, year.

00:16:08   - Oh, no, he doesn't.

00:16:09   So you're saying 25th January, that's--

00:16:12   - Yeah, oh yeah. - Oh, God.

00:16:13   - Because I'm that jerk, because we get it wrong.

00:16:15   We get it wrong, it's stupid. - See, that, to me,

00:16:17   the only way that's defensible is if you're European,

00:16:20   in which case you're charming and it's not your fault,

00:16:22   but if you are actually using the month name

00:16:26   or abbreviation instead of the number.

00:16:28   - Yeah, no, we're just talking about numbers here.

00:16:29   If you're writing out the words,

00:16:31   there's an obvious way to do it,

00:16:32   but if you're not writing out words

00:16:33   and you're just doing numbers,

00:16:34   it's either ISO, whatever that thing is,

00:16:36   where it's your month day,

00:16:37   which everybody understands and sorts and is nice,

00:16:39   and everybody loves it right up until the year 9999 moment

00:16:42   when the entire planet, if they're still around,

00:16:44   is gonna curse us all, right?

00:16:45   Fine.

00:16:46   But in this country, it's month day, month day, year.

00:16:50   - That's so big.

00:16:51   when you just use numbers, that's the rule.

00:16:53   And I know it's bad and people don't like it,

00:16:55   it doesn't make sense and so on and so forth,

00:16:56   but it has a lot of utility.

00:16:58   And if you're in this country, Casey,

00:16:59   do not do day, month, year with digits.

00:17:01   You're angry people.

00:17:02   - Well, it depends.

00:17:03   If it's for myself, I'll do day, month, year.

00:17:05   If it's for other people, then yeah, yeah.

00:17:06   - But you'll have no idea except for when the days

00:17:08   pass the number of months.

00:17:09   - Ah, no, I always know.

00:17:11   - For the first 12 days of the month, it'll be ambiguous.

00:17:14   - If it's for yourself, it's YMD,

00:17:16   'cause then you're a programmer and you can sort things.

00:17:17   - Oh, no.

00:17:19   - Well, see, here's the thing, we're getting sidetracked.

00:17:20   I was really having fun, making fun

00:17:22   of how stupid Celsius is for ambient air temperature,

00:17:25   'cause it's so bad.

00:17:26   - Agreed.

00:17:27   - And we get everything else wrong.

00:17:28   And it's so funny how dug in the entire planet is

00:17:32   on Celsius for ambient air temperature,

00:17:33   and it's so stupid and wrong.

00:17:35   It's preposterous how wrong it is.

00:17:38   - Well, we screwed up the calendar too with,

00:17:40   I forget what the historical reason of,

00:17:41   I think it was like some, was it Greek or Roman people

00:17:43   shoved in some months themselves

00:17:45   and screwed up the numbering,

00:17:45   so oct isn't the eight month and dec isn't the 10th month,

00:17:48   It's all messed up now.

00:17:50   - I actually also print,

00:17:52   so we have a printed family calendar on the fridge

00:17:54   just for a quick reference,

00:17:55   and we start the week on Monday

00:17:58   because the Europeans get that right too.

00:18:00   The weekends should be together on the end of the line.

00:18:03   - Yeah, I don't necessarily agree on that one.

00:18:05   - Not down with that.

00:18:06   - No.

00:18:07   - Yeah, well, you guys can be wrong all by yourself.

00:18:08   - There's a Roblotta Night episode about it.

00:18:10   Check it out.

00:18:11   - All right, so let's get back

00:18:12   to what we were trying to talk about.

00:18:13   Google shipped Tapback Parsons.

00:18:15   So instead of saying Casey likes this message,

00:18:18   Casey likes this message about how Celsius is dumb,

00:18:21   then apparently it will say something different.

00:18:23   So let me read a quote from, I believe this is Macworld,

00:18:26   instead of quote, Jason liked this message, quote,

00:18:28   "When an iPhone user selects a tapback,

00:18:29   "Android users will see a small emoji

00:18:31   "under the message rather than above it,

00:18:32   "but otherwise they function just like they would

00:18:34   "if they were using an iPhone.

00:18:35   "As a result, iPhone users won't have their conversations

00:18:37   "cluttered with tapback text,

00:18:38   "and Android users won't feel like second-class citizens.

00:18:41   "It's a true win-win and the smartest messaging feature

00:18:43   "Google's implemented in years."

00:18:45   Which isn't saying much

00:18:46   because how many messaging protocols and things

00:18:48   Have they canned in the last 10 years?

00:18:50   - It's a big number.

00:18:51   I forgot someone did an article about it.

00:18:52   I think it was double digits, right?

00:18:53   - Yeah.

00:18:54   So apparently, and then to be clear,

00:18:57   this is shipping as of I think today or yesterday.

00:18:59   And then continuing very briefly,

00:19:01   tapping the emoji brings up a banner

00:19:03   at the bottom of the screen that says translated from iPhone

00:19:05   with the appropriate emoji.

00:19:06   Responses come in as quickly as a text

00:19:08   and even have a nice bit of animation

00:19:10   that feels incredibly natural as per Macworld.

00:19:12   So I think this is excellent.

00:19:14   I wish, like we had said an episode or two ago,

00:19:16   I wish there was the same on the incoming side, because if

00:19:19   you're in a group chat with iPhones and Android phones,

00:19:25   you'll see, like, Katie liked blah, blah, blah.

00:19:27   And I wish that Apple just parsed those.

00:19:28   I understand why it isn't entirely reliable 1,000% of

00:19:32   the time, but I don't care.

00:19:33   So that's shipping now.

00:19:34   And so I sent this link to my brother-in-law, who is the

00:19:38   lone Android person on a four-person group chat between

00:19:41   Aaron, me, him, and his wife.

00:19:43   And do you wanna guess what his response was?

00:19:46   - He can't update his phone to that version.

00:19:48   - Very, very good guess.

00:19:50   That is not correct though.

00:19:52   Excellent guess though.

00:19:52   I award you full points even though

00:19:54   that is not the correct answer.

00:19:55   - Hmm, I don't know.

00:19:57   - Hmm, too bad I don't use Google's message app.

00:19:59   - Oh, of course.

00:20:00   You know what? - Of course.

00:20:01   - Android people, you can have the world

00:20:05   you've made for yourself.

00:20:07   - Exactly.

00:20:08   - I would like to have a diversity of messaging apps

00:20:11   and be able to use iMessage from third party clients.

00:20:13   - Well, that's fair, that's fair.

00:20:15   - Sorry for doing another tangent here,

00:20:16   but this continues to just boggle my mind,

00:20:19   and I don't actually talk to the people

00:20:21   who I see do this, 'cause I don't wanna bother them,

00:20:23   but here, I'm on a podcast, I'm gonna say it again.

00:20:25   Every time I see somebody who I know,

00:20:28   or someone who I know is like a tech nerd or whatever,

00:20:30   just complain on a podcast about how annoyed they are

00:20:35   about being assaulted by ads in Twitter,

00:20:37   and the trending tweets and promoted tweets,

00:20:39   and all the ads they see on Twitter,

00:20:40   and I just go like, what are you doing?

00:20:43   Why?

00:20:45   Why are you ever seeing ads in Twitter?

00:20:47   And I think like, don't say that to them,

00:20:48   'cause they know, it's not like they don't know.

00:20:50   There must be something about the official client

00:20:52   that is part of how they do it.

00:20:53   And I go through this whole thing,

00:20:54   I'm like, maybe they're really into like trending topics,

00:20:57   or like, they don't, they follow 800 people,

00:21:00   so they can't use their timeline normally,

00:21:02   so all they can ever do is look at hashtags

00:21:04   and trending things, like is there something,

00:21:06   because third party clients don't have access

00:21:08   to all the stuff the official client has,

00:21:10   and I'm like, what is keeping you on the official site?

00:21:13   For people who don't know,

00:21:14   if you use a third party Twitter client,

00:21:16   you don't see any ads on Twitter.

00:21:17   You never see a promoted tweet,

00:21:18   you never see an ad, ever, ever, ever, right?

00:21:21   You also don't get trending topics promoted,

00:21:24   like there's a whole bunch of features you don't get,

00:21:25   but if you don't care about that,

00:21:26   if you just want a time-ordered set,

00:21:28   a list of tweets from people you follow, right?

00:21:30   Third party clients can give you that.

00:21:32   And all these tech nerds I know, they know this,

00:21:34   they know this.

00:21:35   Sometimes they have these third party clients installed

00:21:37   and they use them sometimes,

00:21:38   But then they come on and say, oh, every fourth tweet is an ad.

00:21:42   It's like, what?

00:21:43   What are you doing?

00:21:44   Anyway, I'm sure everyone has their reasons.

00:21:46   There must be something about the official client

00:21:49   that third-party clients don't have.

00:21:50   It just kills me, though.

00:21:52   If you're annoyed by Twitter ads and you

00:21:54   don't care about any of the features that

00:21:56   are only in the official Twitter client,

00:21:58   please use a third-party Twitter client on your iPhone.

00:22:00   I don't know what the situation is on Android.

00:22:02   I'm sure there's a bunch of things you can get.

00:22:04   And then you just never see an ad again.

00:22:06   It's great.

00:22:06   Try it.

00:22:07   I know real honest to goodness nerds,

00:22:10   like people in our social circles,

00:22:12   that use the official client and swear by it,

00:22:14   and for the life of me, I do not understand it.

00:22:16   - Yeah, it's gotta be one of those features

00:22:18   that we don't use in third-party clients

00:22:19   that only exists in the official one.

00:22:21   Like that they don't browse their timeline,

00:22:23   or they only look at trending topics.

00:22:25   I don't even know what all the features are,

00:22:26   but there's surely some features that you can't do

00:22:28   for a third-party client that are only in the first party,

00:22:30   and that's how they use Twitter.

00:22:31   So if you don't have that feature, it's pointless to them.

00:22:34   - Yeah, I don't get it.

00:22:35   John, can you tell me about a friend of ours

00:22:37   who is an Academy member?

00:22:39   - Sure.

00:22:40   Feedback about screeners.

00:22:42   The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

00:22:44   has an app for a few years that provides streaming screeners

00:22:46   and this is the first year where they were prohibited

00:22:48   from physical screeners to be sent to its members.

00:22:51   So that's, you know, cool.

00:22:52   If you think about all the different things

00:22:53   that have screeners, you know, the Oscars,

00:22:56   the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,

00:22:59   probably gonna be like the top tier,

00:23:01   they have the best, the most money,

00:23:02   the most ability to move away from silly plastic discs.

00:23:05   Anyway, continuing this feedback.

00:23:08   "So the other guilds and groups are following the Academy's lead.

00:23:10   Physical screeners are environmentally wasteful and are much more expensive to create and

00:23:13   ship than digital streamers and much easier to pirate, and are also more difficult for

00:23:17   small studios to produce and send out."

00:23:19   That's another thing I hadn't thought of.

00:23:20   Like, if you're a small independent movie studio, you have to get a bunch of plastic

00:23:24   discs printed, which is probably hard to do now because it's not as common as it used

00:23:28   to be, whereas you just upload a digital file to something and it'd be way easier.

00:23:32   Anyway, continuing.

00:23:33   As of right now, 162 movies are available to stream on the Academy app.

00:23:38   So I guess everyone can't be an Academy member, but it's good to know that even that part

00:23:42   of the industry is slowly moving into the modern age.

00:23:46   We are sponsored this week by Linode, my favorite place to run servers.

00:23:50   Now you know, this is a nerdy show.

00:23:52   I'm a nerd, you're probably a nerd, and nerds sometimes just need to run servers.

00:23:57   And Linode is by far my favorite place to do that.

00:24:00   I've been with them personally since long before they

00:24:03   were a sponsor, I think for about 8, 10 years now,

00:24:05   something like that.

00:24:06   And I picked them initially because they had the best bang

00:24:11   for the buck, basically.

00:24:12   They had amazing value.

00:24:13   They had great-- everything you'd expect,

00:24:16   resizable, basically Linux virtual hosts.

00:24:19   And you could move them around to different physical hosts

00:24:22   and have all the backup tools and the resizing

00:24:24   and everything else.

00:24:24   And they have only-- not only have they

00:24:26   kept all those features for that entire 8 or 10 years

00:24:29   I've been with them.

00:24:30   but they have only gotten better over time.

00:24:32   So they have, of course, great support,

00:24:34   great control panel, a great API, great tools,

00:24:37   great capabilities.

00:24:38   They now have specialty capabilities

00:24:40   they've added in the meantime, things like GPU compute plans,

00:24:43   high memory plans, dedicated CPU plans,

00:24:45   a whole block storage offering, Kubernetes support,

00:24:48   an upcoming bare metal release,

00:24:50   and they have all sorts of stuff,

00:24:51   a one-click app marketplace.

00:24:53   They support centralized tools like Terraform.

00:24:56   There is so much at Linode,

00:24:58   And all of that is with amazing support, amazing value,

00:25:01   amazing control panel, like all that stuff

00:25:03   that you need from a host.

00:25:04   I'm just so happy with Linode.

00:25:06   I host a lot of servers there.

00:25:08   If you're listening to this show from our members feed,

00:25:10   that's hosted on Linode.

00:25:11   If you've visited our website, that's hosted on Linode.

00:25:13   If you have ever used Overcast or if you're using it now,

00:25:16   that's hosted on Linode.

00:25:17   So much, I have so much experience with Linode.

00:25:20   And I just keep going back there

00:25:21   because it is just the greatest place I've found

00:25:23   to run servers.

00:25:24   So visit linode.com/atp, create a free account there,

00:25:29   and you get $100 in credit.

00:25:32   Once again, linode.com/atp.

00:25:35   Create a free account and you get $100 in credit.

00:25:38   Thank you so much to Linode for hosting all my servers

00:25:40   and for sponsoring our show.

00:25:42   - And then John, tell me more about Game Pass,

00:25:47   because apparently we still haven't quite gotten

00:25:50   this 100% right.

00:25:51   - Right, so the main thing we got wrong last show

00:25:53   was talking about how game pass is no good to you if you're into PC games but

00:25:56   there is a game pass for PCs it's called like whatever game pass PC for P just

00:26:03   for PC games right and on top of that there is also a game pass for more money

00:26:07   that will give you access to PC and Xbox games for I think it's like the regular

00:26:12   one is like $10 a month so you can choose do I want game pass for my console

00:26:15   $10 a month do I want it for my PC $10 a month or do I want game pass ultimate

00:26:20   which everyone insists on it abbreviating as GPU which I feel like

00:26:22   it's a little overloaded in the gaming space.

00:26:24   But anyway, Game Pass Ultimate for only $15 a month

00:26:27   gives you access to both PC and Xbox games.

00:26:30   And then in addition to that, I said it would be great

00:26:32   if you could pay a little bit more to get an Xbox Series X

00:26:35   as part of your Game Pass subscription,

00:26:37   because you can get the cheaper Xbox, the Series S.

00:26:40   You can, you can pay more money

00:26:41   and they will give you a Series X.

00:26:42   And from what people tell me,

00:26:44   it's more like a 0% interest loan than a rental.

00:26:48   So it's not like you can have it for one month

00:26:49   and just return it and just stop paying.

00:26:51   you're basically signing up to buy the console, but there's no interest on it.

00:26:56   And it's actually a fairly good deal.

00:26:58   If you if you actually do want the console and the games,

00:27:00   of course, the problem with getting, you know, you can in theory,

00:27:04   get the Xbox Series X console as part of Game Pass.

00:27:06   But good luck getting that because supplies are limited

00:27:09   because covid supply chain and so on and so forth.

00:27:11   And then finally, don't forget that we talked about this in past shows

00:27:16   Xbox cloud gaming where you can play any of these games on Xbox.com in the Xbox app on your PC,

00:27:25   in the Xbox game pass mobile app on not your iPhone because Apple doesn't like that,

00:27:32   and also on Xbox consoles. The fact that you can play on Xbox consoles is wild, right? So

00:27:36   you have an Xbox console, but rather than playing the game on the Xbox, you can stream it. It's

00:27:42   actually running, the game is actually running in a data center somewhere and you're streaming it.

00:27:45   I guess maybe that lets lesser consoles play better games,

00:27:48   but fascinating.

00:27:50   Anyway, this, Sir Tech already had a good interview

00:27:52   with the Microsoft gaming guy,

00:27:54   what's his name, Phil Spencer, a while back,

00:27:57   and he talks all about Microsoft's strategy of like,

00:27:59   "Look, we just want you to be able

00:28:00   "to play your game everywhere."

00:28:01   Of course, it's nice for Microsoft to say that

00:28:03   because they essentially own two of the platforms.

00:28:06   They have a console, and they also essentially own

00:28:08   the entire PC space, so they seem, "So we're so magnanimous.

00:28:11   "We want you to play anywhere on our platform A

00:28:13   and on our other platform, B.

00:28:15   I guess they don't have Windows Phone anymore,

00:28:17   so they're being nice, letting it be on Android,

00:28:19   and then Apple's being mean,

00:28:19   not letting them have it on iPhone.

00:28:21   But anyway, Game Pass, it's a pretty good deal

00:28:23   if you are interested in the games

00:28:25   that are available on Game Pass,

00:28:26   which are not all the games in the world,

00:28:28   but a lot of really good ones,

00:28:29   and if you don't want to pay for individual games.

00:28:33   - So moving right along, we had a fair bit of feedback,

00:28:36   and a lot of it was really, really good,

00:28:37   about Apple in the Netherlands and their fine,

00:28:40   which we had described as basically just a fee,

00:28:42   'cause Apple is more money than God,

00:28:44   so why don't they just pay this fine,

00:28:46   treat it as a fee and move on with their lives?

00:28:48   - I wanna add one thing to that, by the way, though.

00:28:50   The fine is just a fee is a saying,

00:28:53   a common saying of like, if you have enough money,

00:28:56   if the only penalty for doing something wrong is a fine,

00:28:58   and then you basically get to do it whenever you want,

00:29:00   because money means nothing to you,

00:29:01   and you just get to go do it.

00:29:02   And a lot of people were pointing out,

00:29:04   just in general before we get to the specifics

00:29:06   of the Netherlands, that most places that have a fine,

00:29:11   it's not just you get a fine

00:29:12   then you're allowed to break the law forever.

00:29:13   Either that fine repeats or that fine increases or something else bad happens that escalates

00:29:18   and we'll talk about the potential escalations over the Netherlands situation in a second.

00:29:23   But I do want to point out that the reason a fine is just a fee saying is so common is

00:29:26   because if you are wealthy, very often you've already gotten to do the thing and reap the

00:29:32   benefits of it.

00:29:33   So yeah, maybe after you are fined, then the next level up the fine gets bigger or the

00:29:37   next level up you go out of business or whatever like the next level of like

00:29:40   punishment is you already got to do the thing and only had to pay the the fine

00:29:46   and that's simply a fee for you getting to do the thing so say the thing that

00:29:49   you were getting to do is this is obviously not particularly relevant to

00:29:52   apples example but it's the most egregious example say you're dumping

00:29:56   chemicals somewhere where you're not supposed to be dumping them you've

00:29:59   already dumped them you can't get the chemicals back out like they say there's

00:30:03   no process to like extract it or like remove it or clean it up it's like

00:30:06   like dispersed into the environment and it's like,

00:30:08   oh well Shrug, I guess I'll just pay the fine.

00:30:10   You already did the bad thing.

00:30:12   You already didn't have to pay to dispose of your whatever

00:30:14   and now it's just dispersed in the hole

00:30:16   and so you just pay the fine.

00:30:18   And in that case, there is no escalation

00:30:20   because maybe you get fined more the next time you do it

00:30:22   but maybe you just need to do this one time.

00:30:24   I don't wanna pay all these millions of dollars

00:30:25   to clean up this factory so I'm just gonna dump this all

00:30:27   and it'll disperse into the atmosphere and I'll pay the fine.

00:30:30   That is the worst case of the fine, it's just a fee.

00:30:33   In the case of Apple, you know, they're doing a thing

00:30:36   And you could say, well, they got to impose these unfair

00:30:39   App Store rules for years and years.

00:30:41   And then this fine comes along and they pay it

00:30:44   and they get to do it for an extra three or four weeks.

00:30:45   Apple getting to control the App Store

00:30:48   in the way it is a custom for an extra few weeks

00:30:50   or months or even years is not that big a deal.

00:30:53   But I just want to explain the saying

00:30:54   that it doesn't necessarily mean that like,

00:30:57   oh, well, it's not just a fine, it isn't just a fee

00:30:59   because eventually you're gonna have to stop doing it.

00:31:01   Very often, getting away with it for some period of time

00:31:05   is the whole ballgame.

00:31:05   and then you just pay the money

00:31:06   and then you're good after that.

00:31:07   - Yep, so we had said last week, you know,

00:31:10   that oh, well, the Netherlands is, you know, not 1,000,

00:31:13   like three million people or something like that.

00:31:15   I forget what the number was.

00:31:16   - 18 million, two big cities, two New York cities maybe.

00:31:18   - Okay, so it's two New York cities.

00:31:20   What are they really gonna do to Apple?

00:31:22   So, Rene Zwisterloot wrote,

00:31:24   and there were several others that wrote,

00:31:25   but I like this one a whole lot,

00:31:27   so let me read what Rene wrote.

00:31:29   If Apple just pays the fines,

00:31:31   and the ACM, that's the Dutch authorities,

00:31:34   will sue again, will win, and will get three zeroes appended to the penalties.

00:31:38   Neither the ACM nor judges are political, and they do not need to be elected.

00:31:42   So Apple can't simply rely on a horde of angry voters to fix this problem.

00:31:46   If they threaten to pull the App Store, then the ACM will simply tell them to go right

00:31:49   ahead.

00:31:50   And then the ACM will take their case to the European Court to get the App Store banned

00:31:54   for all of the EU.

00:31:55   That's more or less the point of the EU.

00:31:57   Whilst the EU is wildly at odds with itself about what the EU is and is not supposed to

00:32:01   stand for, the one thing that all member state rulers and governments generally all agree

00:32:05   on is that they won't stand for individual member states to be bullied by non-governmental

00:32:09   entities. Surely Apple is not willing to pull all products from the entire EU, which means

00:32:14   they will lose if they decide to die on this hill. I thought that was a really great summary

00:32:18   of the situation.

00:32:19   Yeah, that's, of course, the question is, will it escalate up to the level of the whole

00:32:23   EU thing, or would Apple do whatever it takes to appease them, and that what they're doing

00:32:27   now is flouting it and paying their fee or their fine, and they'll do that for as long

00:32:33   as they can until it seems like things might escalate and then they'll say, "Okay, okay,

00:32:36   what do you really want us to do?" And we'll see how it shakes out. I'm assuming Apple

00:32:39   wouldn't be stupid enough to, you know, antagonistically escalate this to all the EU, but that is a

00:32:44   possibility and that is, of course, what the EU stands for. In the EU, it is union. But

00:32:49   the UK can go after themselves, I guess.

00:32:51   Ooh.

00:32:52   Too soon. Too soon. All right, so a couple things about new beta bits, starting with

00:32:55   with the new Face ID unlock.

00:32:57   Ryan Booker writes, "Face ID with a mask

00:32:59   asks you to scan with and without glasses

00:33:01   if you're wearing glasses,

00:33:02   and you can add extra glasses," which is kinda cool.

00:33:06   And you guys haven't tried this, right?

00:33:07   You're not on the betas?

00:33:08   - I just installed it this morning

00:33:09   and have not tried it once.

00:33:11   - I would like to try it.

00:33:12   I'm excited to scan my glasses.

00:33:14   - Go team.

00:33:15   And then Carlos Carpio Garcia writes,

00:33:17   "New Face ID works within apps even if you're masked,"

00:33:20   which I think they talked about this on,

00:33:22   was an upgrade this week?

00:33:23   I think there was more discussion about that.

00:33:25   But basically, if you think about, say, Apple Pay, for example, or 1Password, when you're

00:33:30   using the Apple Watch-based mask unlock, you still have to enter your passcode for 1Password

00:33:35   for Apple Pay, things like that.

00:33:36   And apparently, the new eye-only Face ID scan, when you have a mask on, it actually will

00:33:43   work for 1Password, Apple Pay, so on and so forth.

00:33:45   So that's worth looking into, and I will definitely check that out when the beta is no longer

00:33:50   a beta and when it's released.

00:33:52   And then Carlos continues, also unrelated,

00:33:55   well, actually this is me saying also in unrelated,

00:33:58   apparently universal control works from WiFi to cellular.

00:34:00   I have not tried this myself because again,

00:34:02   I'm not on the betas, but this is what Carlos wrote.

00:34:05   But universal control is a big advantage over sidecar.

00:34:07   As expected, Carlos is a teacher,

00:34:10   my school's network has several resources

00:34:11   and web pages restricted,

00:34:13   but sometimes I have to access them.

00:34:14   They usually meant disconnecting sidecar

00:34:15   and using the cellular capabilities of my iPad

00:34:17   to access the web I wanted.

00:34:19   Well, universal control works even when the MacBook

00:34:22   and the iPad are in different networks.

00:34:24   I can use the MacBook Air to disable the iPad Wi-Fi

00:34:26   and continue controlling it to freely browse the web

00:34:28   from the iPad while the MacBook Air

00:34:30   is stuck on the school Wi-Fi.

00:34:32   This is the only place I've heard of this.

00:34:33   I have no idea if it's accurate or not,

00:34:34   but I have no reason not to believe it.

00:34:36   How freaking cool is that?

00:34:38   - Does an AirDrop use like a ad hoc local Wi-Fi network?

00:34:42   Maybe they use the same thing?

00:34:44   - It could be, I don't know.

00:34:45   I just thought that was super cool though

00:34:46   and that was the first I'd heard of it.

00:34:47   - I've seen a lot of demos of the universal control

00:34:49   and as delayed as it has been,

00:34:51   I can imagine it's tricky to pull off, but boy it looks really neat when you see it done.

00:34:55   It's got to be some kind of persistent, you know, whether it's the same technology as

00:35:01   AirDrop or not, it's not like there's a waiting cursor for some kind of connecting thing.

00:35:07   It makes me think of a recent complaint, a decades-long complaint that I've had.

00:35:12   I'm in my computer room here, my computer is here, the other side of the room is my

00:35:17   wife's computer on that desk, they're both connected to the same Ethernet network.

00:35:21   Very often I want to copy files from one Mac to the other and I'm cursed to use the finder

00:35:25   to do that.

00:35:27   And it's just so hard.

00:35:28   It's just so slow, so painful.

00:35:30   Like it's just bad.

00:35:32   Like I would be better off using FTP honestly because FTP clients can be persistent, they

00:35:37   always work.

00:35:39   Like when I try to, what I want to do is like, can you put your receipts into the expenses

00:35:43   folder because I'm doing taxes stuff, right?

00:35:45   I need to connect to her computer as her, which I can do because I know her password,

00:35:49   in my key chain and everything, right?

00:35:51   We're all in the family here.

00:35:52   But whenever I connect to that server,

00:35:54   Command + K or whatever, it connects as me.

00:35:57   Even if I connect to smb colon slash slash,

00:35:59   my wife's name at her computer named,

00:36:02   like I'm doing the syntax that says,

00:36:04   don't connect as me finder and finder's like,

00:36:06   I'm gonna ignore that crap before the at sign.

00:36:08   I mean finder successfully connects,

00:36:10   but it connects as me.

00:36:11   So I have to do that race,

00:36:12   where you have to click the connect as thing, right?

00:36:14   Where it opens up in the finder

00:36:16   and then it shows it's connecting,

00:36:17   and you click connect as, like disconnect,

00:36:19   then connect as, and then you get to type in your name,

00:36:21   and it has a checkbox to remember the password,

00:36:23   but it literally never, ever, ever does, right?

00:36:26   Maybe it's because I'm using the .local,

00:36:28   you know, Bonjour, Rendezvous names, who knows?

00:36:30   But it is so painful, I'm like,

00:36:32   these are two computers in the same room,

00:36:33   on the same wired network,

00:36:34   and I just can't have a persistent folder

00:36:36   that I can just double click and it will open?

00:36:38   Why don't you just make an alias of it?

00:36:39   Why don't you do this, why don't you do that?

00:36:40   I've tried all these things, they're just so unreliable.

00:36:42   And yet, apparently, two devices,

00:36:45   not even on the same wifi network,

00:36:46   You can drag your cursor between them seamlessly

00:36:48   and drag files between them.

00:36:49   Like, why does that work?

00:36:52   And why can't I just-- it's so painful.

00:36:55   Honestly, I should just use-- I should literally just use

00:36:57   transmit or some FTP client, because that will always work.

00:36:59   It will never connect as the wrong user.

00:37:01   It will just-- it's so frustrating.

00:37:04   I don't know if I'm the only one who has this problem.

00:37:06   Maybe it's because I'm not using the IP address,

00:37:08   but I'm using a dot local name.

00:37:10   And if I do use an IP address, the stupid alias would work.

00:37:13   The latest thing in Monterey is the alias

00:37:14   gets a generic document icon.

00:37:16   It's an alias to a folder on my wife's computer, right?

00:37:19   But now it just looks like a blank white document

00:37:22   with a little dog-eared corner of the page on it.

00:37:23   Why?

00:37:25   God only knows.

00:37:25   If I double click it, it will usually connect

00:37:27   and change back into a folder icon, but not always.

00:37:30   Anyway, sorry, sorry to derail.

00:37:32   - I get the feeling, you know, like, whenever,

00:37:35   Apple is not great at maintaining things

00:37:39   that they don't seem to use themselves,

00:37:42   and it seems to me every time I use, like,

00:37:45   any kind of finder, like network share feature

00:37:50   of any kind like this.

00:37:52   I think I would venture a guess,

00:37:54   Apple does not use this kind of function internally.

00:37:58   'Cause it just seems like it always has been

00:38:02   mediocre at best, it almost never changes

00:38:05   except in the direction of gradually breaking more.

00:38:08   (laughs)

00:38:09   - Yeah, what do you all use for this thing?

00:38:11   Like when you need to drag things between your,

00:38:14   two different Macs that are on your home network.

00:38:16   How do you do that?

00:38:17   - I usually do that connect as thing if I have to,

00:38:20   but more often than not,

00:38:22   if we have to send files together,

00:38:23   we'll just AirDrop them,

00:38:24   because that works much more reliably than network shares,

00:38:28   which is annoying.

00:38:29   - When I'm the only person in the house, though,

00:38:31   I would have to go over to the other computer

00:38:32   and click accept, you know what I mean?

00:38:34   Whereas with file transfer,

00:38:35   I just don't wanna keep getting up

00:38:37   and going back and forth

00:38:38   when I'm doing a bunch of stuff like that.

00:38:39   - Oh, to be clear,

00:38:40   AirDrop is totally the wrong solution for this.

00:38:41   I mean, especially 'cause like,

00:38:43   If I presume both of those computers

00:38:45   would probably have wired ethernet,

00:38:47   it would be ridiculous to use AirDrop for this purpose,

00:38:51   and it would be slower to use AirDrop for this purpose.

00:38:54   But that's not how things work.

00:38:57   People are still emailing files to themselves

00:38:59   'cause that often is the best way to transfer something.

00:39:02   - I mean, I think, Jon,

00:39:05   what I would recommend is what Aaron and I do,

00:39:08   is we have a shared Dropbox folder,

00:39:10   and even though I don't really use Dropbox anymore--

00:39:12   - It's such a long way to go.

00:39:13   - It is, but it works every time.

00:39:16   Like, do you care?

00:39:17   - I mean, like, once you get connected, it works fine.

00:39:19   I'm just frustrated with how cumbersome it is

00:39:21   to initiate that connection, right?

00:39:23   Like, once I'm connected and it's a Finder window open,

00:39:25   it's fine, like, it just files transfer,

00:39:27   it does all the things, right?

00:39:28   But it's just, it seems like it,

00:39:30   the reason I'm contrasting with Universal Control

00:39:32   is like, look how seamlessly these two

00:39:34   completely independent devices

00:39:35   running different OSes can be.

00:39:36   Like, you can drag your cursor between them seamlessly,

00:39:39   you can drag a file from one to the other

00:39:40   and it just instantly appeared.

00:39:41   I'm talking about all the demos I've seen.

00:39:43   Universal control is so impressive.

00:39:45   How can that be so seamless with no setup,

00:39:47   no configuration, no dialogues, no password login

00:39:50   or whatever, it's just so seamless.

00:39:52   And yet, getting that other Finder window

00:39:56   that is a folder on my wife's computer

00:39:58   to appear in my computer, in my Finder,

00:40:01   that sort of hurdle that you have to overcome each time

00:40:03   has just enough little stumbling blocks

00:40:05   that it just, I wish it was seamless

00:40:07   and I wish it was way faster.

00:40:09   Because even if everything goes perfectly

00:40:10   and you double click the alias,

00:40:13   the amount of time it takes before that finder window

00:40:15   appears and you can drag stuff into it,

00:40:16   is so long compared to again,

00:40:19   slamming your cursor against the edge of your Mac screen

00:40:21   and having it appear on your iPad.

00:40:23   - You know, another couple of things you might want

00:40:25   to at least consider, Synology Drive,

00:40:27   if you wanted a faux Dropbox that doesn't leave

00:40:29   your network, like that would be presumably much quicker

00:40:32   and it has a concept of like a team folder

00:40:36   or something like that.

00:40:37   I don't know if they do that.

00:40:38   - And you're saying leave that always mounted.

00:40:39   (laughing)

00:40:41   - Yeah, well, it operates much like Dropbox,

00:40:44   so think of it as like a fake Dropbox,

00:40:46   and so you could do something like that.

00:40:47   - Oh, so you need to run an app on your Mac, then?

00:40:49   - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:40:50   But what you can do, though, is you can stop running--

00:40:52   - Yeah, that's never gonna happen.

00:40:53   - But you can stop running the Dropbox app,

00:40:55   because you can put your Dropbox within your--

00:40:57   - I'm running a Dropbox app now.

00:40:58   Dropbox is an on-demand launch for me.

00:41:00   - Oh, you are a weirdo.

00:41:02   But nevertheless, you could SCP,

00:41:04   and why wouldn't you just try VNCing,

00:41:06   or remote desktopping, or whatever?

00:41:08   'cause that supports file transfer between Macs.

00:41:10   - Does it?

00:41:11   No, I don't wanna go that whole,

00:41:12   I don't want her entire screen on my Mac.

00:41:14   Just plus sometimes she's--

00:41:14   - I'm answering your question.

00:41:16   Well, anyway, Neil underscore underscore in the chat

00:41:18   swears that if you use .home instead of .local,

00:41:21   magic happens.

00:41:22   I don't know why, but that's what Neil--

00:41:24   - I mean, like I said, maybe there's some particular thing

00:41:26   that I'm doing that makes it cumbersome,

00:41:27   but the two basically bugs are that the Finder

00:41:32   insists on connecting as me instead of my wife,

00:41:34   even though I put the username in the URL,

00:41:36   And the other one is it just takes a long time.

00:41:38   It just takes a long time to, you know,

00:41:41   when it is in the process of connecting,

00:41:42   it's like the computer's right over there.

00:41:43   They're both, these are two idle, very fast computers,

00:41:47   like literally feet from each other,

00:41:48   connected to the same ethernet switch.

00:41:50   It should be like instant, kinda like Universal Control.

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00:43:40   - So Nintendo hasn't been purchased yet,

00:43:43   but apparently everyone else has.

00:43:45   So Sony has bought Bungie for $3.6 billion.

00:43:50   Now I'm hoping against all hope that that means

00:43:54   that we don't have to hear you speaking in other languages

00:43:56   about Destiny anymore.

00:43:57   Is that how this works?

00:43:58   - No, how is that not going to happen?

00:44:01   Of course that's gonna happen.

00:44:02   We're not that lucky.

00:44:03   I know.

00:44:04   This is like on topic.

00:44:05   Although I have to tell you when this happened, I thought of our long running joke of like,

00:44:09   oh, we're recording another episode until X time in the future unless of course Apple

00:44:14   buys Nintendo or something.

00:44:16   And that has been a joke for years.

00:44:17   And at this point it's becoming a lot less of a joke, isn't it?

00:44:22   Everybody's buying these big gaming companies that were not previously thought of as being

00:44:26   for sale.

00:44:27   You know Activision Blizzard obviously was 70 billion and Activision of course bought Blizzard before that and then what was it take to bought Zinga

00:44:35   And now Sony's buying Bungie and it's just it's a free-for-all in the gaming world

00:44:40   And so Apple buying I mean not that I think we've talked about this on pet

00:44:43   I don't want Apple to buy Nintendo. I think that would be bad for the world

00:44:46   And I don't think Nintendo is particularly for sale but geez that's scaring me with how close it's come anyway

00:44:54   - Right, first of all, for the record,

00:44:55   I don't think that's going to happen.

00:44:57   - Yeah, no. - For lots of reasons.

00:44:59   I mean, without getting too far into it,

00:45:01   the big ones are that Apple undervalues gaming,

00:45:04   and Nintendo's probably worth a lot,

00:45:06   so I don't think they'd come together on a price.

00:45:08   And also, Apple, I can't imagine Apple ever buying

00:45:13   a sizable company that is itself opinionated,

00:45:18   because Apple is extremely opinionated,

00:45:21   and I can't see them buying an opinionated company

00:45:24   in a way that wouldn't destroy that entire company

00:45:27   or clash heavily, 'cause Apple wouldn't let

00:45:30   whoever's being the opinion holder in that company now

00:45:34   continue to do that role,

00:45:35   'cause Apple can't have that under them.

00:45:37   They would be the opinion directors

00:45:41   of whatever they're buying,

00:45:42   and so to have the idea that Nintendo

00:45:45   would be absorbed by Apple in any kind of graceful fashion

00:45:48   I think is a fantasy,

00:45:49   and so even if they could come together on price,

00:45:51   which they probably wouldn't

00:45:52   because Apple undervalues gaming,

00:45:53   I can't see that culture ever blend together.

00:45:57   - Yeah, I don't think Nintendo would ever be for sale

00:46:00   at any price at this point,

00:46:01   but stranger things have happened,

00:46:03   and time marches on and Apple's attitudes change,

00:46:06   and the culture fit between Nintendo and Apple

00:46:10   actually is closer than maybe any other purchaser

00:46:15   in terms of the sort of happy,

00:46:16   shiny, user-friendly type of thing.

00:46:19   And just because it would be terrible

00:46:21   doesn't mean some future Apple management wouldn't do it anyway and destroy Nintendo

00:46:25   in the process, which is why I keep saying it'd be bad for the world, because I agree

00:46:28   that this would not be healthy for either company, because to the extent that Nintendo

00:46:33   stays Nintendo, that would be unhealthy to Apple's culture and vice versa very strongly.

00:46:37   If Apple started to screw with Nintendo, it would just crush the company.

00:46:39   But in the future, a future Apple could somehow discover the technology of how to acquire

00:46:45   someone and not screw with their culture, because that has occasionally, not commonly,

00:46:50   But occasionally it has happened in the past in the entire world of business where someone

00:46:53   buys someone and doesn't immediately screw them up.

00:46:56   But yeah, it's not likely.

00:46:58   But anyway, getting back to the story, I think this has a chance of happening.

00:47:03   Other companies are better about acquiring certain kinds of other companies and not immediately

00:47:09   screwing them up.

00:47:10   So Sony's buying Bungie for a pittance, $3.6 billion.

00:47:15   It looks like a pittance compared to $70 billion for Activision Blizzard, but there's a lot

00:47:19   of IP under that 70 billion umbrella, whereas Bungie is just one company.

00:47:24   To sort of size this up, Star Wars was bought for 4 billion, so Bungie is worth almost as

00:47:28   much as a Star Wars.

00:47:29   Good grief.

00:47:30   Alright, which, you know, again, gaming is bigger than movies has been for a long time,

00:47:34   people don't realize it, but yeah.

00:47:36   But the reason this is extra significant to me, obviously, is because the game I play

00:47:40   all the time is from Bungie, and of course Bungie is a long time game developer, close

00:47:44   to my heart because they were a Mac game developer first, and Halo was supposed to ship on the

00:47:47   and the Mac and the Microsoft bought them,

00:47:48   they went independent, now Sony bought them.

00:47:50   - You're still bitter about this.

00:47:51   How many years ago was that, 20?

00:47:52   - Still bitter about it, yes I am.

00:47:54   - Oh my gosh.

00:47:55   - So, why is Sony doing this?

00:47:58   As a lot of people are saying,

00:47:59   this looks somewhat defensive,

00:48:01   because hey, everyone's buying everything.

00:48:04   You know, it's good for us to have a popular gaming company

00:48:09   with a popular gaming franchise in our pocket,

00:48:11   because Microsoft, our big competitor in the console space,

00:48:14   has a lot of things in their pocket now.

00:48:16   But interestingly, both companies, with Microsoft and Sony, are saying, "I know we just bought

00:48:22   a bunch of games, or gaming companies, or developers, or whatever, but don't worry game

00:48:28   players out there.

00:48:30   We're not going to make these games exclusive to our platforms, because that's not what

00:48:34   we do anymore."

00:48:36   And for the most part, I think they are believable.

00:48:42   That is a plausible thing, because that's not the best strategy anymore.

00:48:46   So right out of the gate, Bungie has said, hey, Sony bought us, but just to reassure

00:48:51   everybody, Destiny, which is currently available on many platforms, Xbox, PlayStation, Stadia,

00:48:57   I don't know if it still exists, PC, right, will continue to be on all those platforms.

00:49:03   Our future expansions will continue to be on all those platforms.

00:49:06   We're not even going to differentiate the platforms.

00:49:08   Like Destiny back in the day, back in Destiny 1, I think even a little bit in Destiny 2,

00:49:13   actually had PlayStation exclusives.

00:49:15   Like if you got Destiny 1, there was like a weapon

00:49:18   that you could only get if you had a PlayStation

00:49:19   or like a PvP map that was only available on PlayStation.

00:49:22   And that wasn't, you know,

00:49:24   that wasn't because Sony owned Bungie.

00:49:26   It was just, you know, Sony did a deal with Bungie

00:49:28   and said, "Hey, if we pay you some extra money,"

00:49:31   or I don't know what the deal was behind the scenes,

00:49:33   but give our players something extra.

00:49:35   So there'll be a reason that Destiny on PlayStation

00:49:38   is ever so slightly better than Destiny on Xbox, right?

00:49:41   They don't even do that anymore, right?

00:49:43   So Destiny now is everything's the same for everybody.

00:49:46   I think they, I thought Bungie did that back

00:49:47   when they were with Activision as well,

00:49:49   because Activision probably brokered that deal.

00:49:50   But anyway, when you have a game like this

00:49:53   that gets, like the more people that play it,

00:49:57   the more money you make, because the more people play it,

00:49:59   the more people buy the expansions,

00:50:00   the more people buy horse armor,

00:50:01   we talked about that in the past show,

00:50:03   you want as many players as you can playing your game,

00:50:06   and if you limit it to certain platforms,

00:50:08   you're giving up players

00:50:09   who could potentially be giving you money.

00:50:11   So Bungie says, "Don't worry,

00:50:12   Sony bought us, but Destiny will stay on all platforms.

00:50:15   But of course, Bungie has been for, I think,

00:50:18   at least one year, possibly multiple years,

00:50:20   been working on the next big thing,

00:50:21   because game development takes a long time.

00:50:23   So as Destiny is quote, unquote, winding down, right,

00:50:27   Destiny was conceived of as a 10-year game, a decade game.

00:50:30   It came out in 2014, I think.

00:50:33   And they're just about gonna hit that.

00:50:34   So Bungie has announced the future of Destiny,

00:50:38   the expansions they're gonna have up through 2024.

00:50:41   So that would be a 10 year game, right?

00:50:43   But you gotta start working on your next thing.

00:50:45   So Bungie has been working on, in secret,

00:50:47   whatever the heck its next thing is,

00:50:48   or its next two things or whatever, right?

00:50:51   For a while now, well before this acquisition.

00:50:53   And so the question is, okay,

00:50:56   Destiny's gonna be available on all platforms,

00:50:58   'cause it already is,

00:50:59   and you're not gonna take it away from people,

00:51:00   'cause why would you give that up?

00:51:01   You already paid the money to make Destiny on PC,

00:51:04   to make sure it runs well on Xbox,

00:51:06   to make sure it runs on PlayStation.

00:51:07   You already paid that money.

00:51:08   Of course you're gonna leave it on those platforms,

00:51:10   because you'd be losing money by sacrificing those people who play on those platforms.

00:51:15   But for your next game, surely that will be PlayStation exclusive because Sony's big strategy

00:51:20   is all these PlayStation exclusive games like The Last of Us and Horizon Zero Dawn and Uncharted

00:51:28   and I'm just naming games that I like but I'm sure there's lots of other exclusions

00:51:30   in PlayStation as well.

00:51:33   What about those next games?

00:51:34   But on the day of the acquisition, in little Bungie's little fact that we'll put in the

00:51:38   show notes, they put in an item that says in their fact,

00:51:43   question, Bungie has future games in development.

00:51:46   Will they now become PlayStation exclusives?

00:51:48   Answer, no, period.

00:51:51   We want, and then they expand.

00:51:53   We want the worlds we are creating to extend

00:51:54   to anywhere people play games.

00:51:55   We will continue to be self-published,

00:51:57   creatively independent, we will continue

00:51:58   to drive one unified Bungie community.

00:52:00   That is pretty unequivocal.

00:52:01   Now, just because you say something in a fact item

00:52:03   doesn't mean that four years from now things won't change,

00:52:06   'cause that's the whole deal with acquisitions.

00:52:08   You see it all the time.

00:52:09   Usually it's more dire.

00:52:11   There's an acquisition and then there's some press release

00:52:13   that says, "Don't worry, everything you love

00:52:15   "about Company X will remain the same."

00:52:16   And then two months into it, it's like,

00:52:18   "Yeah, they fired everybody and they changed everything."

00:52:20   When you have a new owner, you can say whatever you want,

00:52:24   but you can't really, it's very difficult to put anything

00:52:26   into the agreement that says, "You are acquiring me.

00:52:30   "You will be in charge of me,

00:52:31   "but you agree not to be a bad parent."

00:52:34   There's no real way to enforce that,

00:52:37   because they're like, "What if we just fire you all?

00:52:39   Now we can do whatever we want."

00:52:40   Like, you can't, it's not like a partnership.

00:52:43   It is an acquisition.

00:52:45   So, anything can happen in the future.

00:52:47   But this is, I think, the first time I have ever seen

00:52:50   such a strong statement on day one

00:52:52   that not only will our current games not change,

00:52:54   but even the things that we're working on

00:52:56   that aren't gonna be ready for three years,

00:52:58   those will be multiplatform too.

00:53:00   And that speaks to the idea that in the gaming market today,

00:53:04   though exclusives are beneficial

00:53:07   for driving differentiation to your platform.

00:53:08   Certain kinds of games,

00:53:10   particularly what they call live games,

00:53:12   where a game runs for years and years

00:53:14   and they just give you new content and new content,

00:53:17   the best way to make money from that game

00:53:19   and the best way to get the most number of customers

00:53:20   is to make sure it is available everywhere

00:53:23   that people can conceivably want to play it.

00:53:25   Microsoft is obviously going to an extreme

00:53:27   by letting you play it on your cell phone

00:53:28   through their cloud gaming thing.

00:53:30   But, and you know,

00:53:31   Sony doesn't even have a subscription program yet

00:53:33   to rival Game Pass,

00:53:34   although like I said last week,

00:53:35   They are rumored to have something like that.

00:53:37   But that seems like it's the future of these type of games.

00:53:40   And Sony talked about, we acquired Bungie,

00:53:42   'cause they have shown they know how to run a live game.

00:53:45   They've been running Destiny since 2014,

00:53:48   Destiny/Destiny 2.

00:53:49   The fact that there's one and two is a accident,

00:53:52   an unfortunate accident history,

00:53:53   there's neither here nor there.

00:53:55   But that is a type of game.

00:53:57   Not all games are like that.

00:53:58   Obviously, Candy Crush isn't necessarily like that.

00:54:00   It's a different thing.

00:54:01   But live games where, you know,

00:54:04   Millions of people play it for years and years,

00:54:06   and every year they give you money,

00:54:08   and also they buy horse armor inside the game,

00:54:10   and the whales buy tons of horse armor

00:54:11   across multiple platforms.

00:54:15   That is a very viable business model.

00:54:17   It doesn't matter how awesome that game is,

00:54:20   you shouldn't use a live game

00:54:21   to differentiate your platform.

00:54:22   You should use single-player games,

00:54:24   like again, The Last of Us or something.

00:54:25   When that's on your platform,

00:54:26   that can get people to buy it because like,

00:54:27   well, if I have to buy a platform to pay destiny,

00:54:29   I'm gonna buy the one that has the next Last of Us game

00:54:32   'cause I love that franchise or something.

00:54:33   so you pick a PlayStation, right?

00:54:35   And that could be why PlayStation

00:54:36   is winning this generation.

00:54:37   But this, I have to say that I mostly believe

00:54:42   the statements here.

00:54:44   There's also statements about like creative freedom

00:54:47   and the fact that they will continue to be self-published,

00:54:49   right, that Bungie is trying to retain

00:54:52   as much of its independence as possible

00:54:54   while still being owned by Sony.

00:54:55   And I think Sony is the type of company

00:54:58   that has shown that it is plausible

00:55:00   that it could acquire a developer

00:55:02   and not ruin them by screwing it up,

00:55:03   because Sony has done it before.

00:55:05   They have bought a bunch of developers,

00:55:07   and they've generally not screwed them up.

00:55:10   Sometimes the developers themselves screw up,

00:55:12   but that's not Sony's fault.

00:55:14   But they buy these game developers,

00:55:16   and they become owned by Sony,

00:55:17   and they put out another hit game.

00:55:20   In a hit-driven business, nothing is guaranteed, right?

00:55:22   So you could get the biggest names

00:55:24   to direct your new movie for your streaming platform,

00:55:26   and maybe the movie's stinker, and maybe it won't.

00:55:28   But the best odds are by buying a company

00:55:29   that's made a lot of hits.

00:55:30   Bungie made a bunch of awesome games on the Mac that nobody knew about but that I played, right?

00:55:35   And then they made Halo, which is the whole reason the Xbox exists and is still a viable platform in my opinion.

00:55:39   And then you're like, "Okay, well that's great, you had one great hit."

00:55:43   And then they made Destiny, another great hit.

00:55:45   So they have a track record, right?

00:55:48   And it's mostly a lot of the same people there, and there's some continuity of culture,

00:55:53   so it is not implausible to say whatever Bungie is working on next for their next decade-long game

00:55:58   that will launch in 2024 or 2025 or something,

00:56:01   might also be a hit.

00:56:03   And even if it's not, you just bought a company

00:56:05   that has years and years of experience running a live game.

00:56:08   And Sony, if you want to have popular live games

00:56:12   that run really well on your platform

00:56:14   that are defense against the ones

00:56:16   that Microsoft just bought,

00:56:18   it's good to have Bungie in your pocket.

00:56:19   'Cause if the Cold War becomes hot many years in the future

00:56:23   and they say, well, Microsoft says,

00:56:25   well, guess what, Sony, Call of Duty,

00:56:26   you can't have that anymore.

00:56:27   'Cause we own that and we're taking it away

00:56:29   'cause we're angry at you.

00:56:30   And they'd be like, okay, well, we'll take away

00:56:32   whatever the hell the name of the game

00:56:33   after Destiny is gonna be, right?

00:56:34   So it is good to have some extra weapons in your pocket.

00:56:37   But in the meantime,

00:56:38   they bought a really good game developer.

00:56:40   They probably won't screw it up.

00:56:41   And from Bungie's perspective,

00:56:42   this is super important to the game of Destiny

00:56:44   because Bungie's problem has been lately

00:56:47   that they don't have enough money or people

00:56:49   to keep up with the voracious hunger

00:56:51   of the people who pay for their live game.

00:56:53   When they were in a publishing deal with Activision,

00:56:55   Activision gave them an influx of money and said,

00:56:59   "Here you go, here's a bunch of money.

00:57:01   "Make the next expansion to Destiny really awesome,

00:57:04   "so we'll make lots of money from it.

00:57:06   "And by the way, I know you can't hire people this money,

00:57:08   "so you can contract out to,"

00:57:10   what are they called, Vicarious Visions, I think?

00:57:12   They contracted out to another developer to say,

00:57:15   "Please help us make this expansion to Destiny,

00:57:17   "because we don't have enough Bungie employees

00:57:19   "and we can't hire them fast enough."

00:57:21   And Activision gave us a bunch of money,

00:57:23   And that was the best recent expansion

00:57:26   when they had help from other people.

00:57:27   So when Bungie split from Activision,

00:57:31   said we didn't like Activision

00:57:32   'cause Activision was a crappy company

00:57:33   and they were all mean there and it turned out to be true.

00:57:36   And they made us do dumb things in the game

00:57:40   and Activision did arguably make Bungie do dumb things

00:57:42   in the game that nobody liked or whatever.

00:57:43   And it was a fraught relationship.

00:57:45   So Bungie split from them and said, we are independent.

00:57:47   Now we have creative freedom and we can,

00:57:48   we're finally free to make our game better

00:57:50   in the ways that we want.

00:57:51   Because Activision did screw with Bungie's creative vision

00:57:54   and made the game worse.

00:57:55   And when Bungie got split from them,

00:57:57   they got to fix all those problems

00:57:58   and that really helped.

00:57:59   But they didn't have all that Activision money.

00:58:01   So post Activision, most of the content for a Destiny

00:58:06   was a little bit smaller, not as big, not as much stuff.

00:58:10   And actually that third party developer

00:58:11   they got to help them was really good

00:58:13   and added a lot of their own flair and panache

00:58:15   to the content.

00:58:16   Now they got Sony money and Sony has a lot of money.

00:58:19   So hopefully Bungie will have a bunch of cash

00:58:22   and maybe be able to contract out

00:58:23   if they can't hire people fast enough

00:58:25   or use some of Sony's other gaming talent

00:58:28   to make the next few expansions of Destiny.

00:58:30   But more likely that money will be falling

00:58:31   into whatever the game after Destiny is

00:58:33   and they retain their creative freedom.

00:58:35   And it was Sony that bought Bungie and not Microsoft.

00:58:38   And so I give a cautious thumbs up to this acquisition.

00:58:42   I hope that Destiny does continue through 2024

00:58:46   and is everything it could be.

00:58:47   And I hope the next franchise is good too.

00:58:49   - Cool. - Cool.

00:58:52   - So you're all gonna get PlayStations

00:58:53   and play Destiny with me for the big member special, right?

00:58:55   - Oh, yeah, about that.

00:58:58   - You have this gaming streaming setup.

00:59:00   Arco's got it over there, we're so close.

00:59:02   We just gotta shift over a little bit

00:59:04   to get a console streaming setup going.

00:59:06   - No, this setup can actually capture consoles just fine,

00:59:09   'cause it's all based on HDMI capture.

00:59:11   However, I don't know how easy it is

00:59:14   to get a PlayStation right now.

00:59:16   - Yeah, that's the thing.

00:59:17   - Yeah, I mean that's like I said about the Xbox Series X,

00:59:20   you can get it as part of Game Pass

00:59:21   if you're willing to wait.

00:59:23   - I mean, I would entertain playing Destiny

00:59:27   on some sort of streaming setup,

00:59:28   even if that required getting a PlayStation,

00:59:30   but I would need to get the PlayStation, like you said.

00:59:33   I mean, it's--

00:59:34   - I mean, you can get a PS4 technically,

00:59:35   but that'd be gross, come on.

00:59:36   - That's right, I don't wanna have to fish

00:59:40   another damn HDMI cable through the wall either.

00:59:42   (laughing)

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01:01:44   - I got a problem.

01:01:49   So back in 2006, Google offered this thing

01:01:54   called Google Apps for your domain.

01:01:57   And at the time, I mean, Google,

01:02:00   man, there's so many problems with Google,

01:02:01   but one of the things is they like changing

01:02:03   the names of things 85 times and just keep throwing things

01:02:07   against the wall until something sticks.

01:02:08   And back in 2006, it was called Google Apps for Your Domain,

01:02:12   and then it became something else,

01:02:13   something else, something else.

01:02:14   It was G Suite for a while.

01:02:15   Is it still G Suite?

01:02:16   I don't even know.

01:02:17   It's like Google Workspace now or something?

01:02:19   I don't even, I can't keep it straight.

01:02:21   But one way or another in 2006,

01:02:23   you could get Google Apps for Your Domain.

01:02:24   If you were a nonprofit or like, you know,

01:02:26   basically just a family, you could get a custom,

01:02:29   you could get Gmail and, you know,

01:02:31   the things associated with it,

01:02:32   with a custom domain for free.

01:02:34   And I don't remember how long they said this was going to last.

01:02:38   Some people have said lifetime.

01:02:39   I don't know if that's true or not.

01:02:40   But one way or another, it was free at the time.

01:02:43   And they cut that off six years later in December of 2012.

01:02:46   And at that point, they were not accepting new free accounts

01:02:50   anymore.

01:02:51   And I have and had and have one of these free accounts.

01:02:55   My personal email is one of these accounts.

01:02:57   It's gmailunderthehood, but it's @caseylist.com.

01:03:02   And as of a couple of weeks ago, they've said,

01:03:05   "Hey, guess what?

01:03:06   "If you wanna hold onto that, you're gonna have to pay up."

01:03:08   And there's been a little bit of updates since then,

01:03:12   but they had said basically,

01:03:13   you have to sometime in the next couple of months,

01:03:17   I forget exactly when it is, I wanna say it's July,

01:03:20   you're gonna have to go ahead and start paying us.

01:03:23   And I think it's something like

01:03:24   five or six bucks a month per account.

01:03:28   And so obviously everyone who has these accounts

01:03:32   got very, very upset about it.

01:03:33   So as of just a week or so ago, Google relented slightly.

01:03:38   And they said, "Legacy G Suite users would be able to migrate

01:03:41   to free accounts." So reading from an Ars Technical article

01:03:44   we'll put in the show notes, "First, Google is launching a

01:03:46   survey of affected G Suite users.

01:03:48   Apparently, the company is surprised by how many people

01:03:50   this change affected.

01:03:51   Second, it's promising a data migration option, including

01:03:54   your content purchases, to a consumer account before the

01:03:56   shutdown hits." So Google said, "In the coming months,

01:03:59   we'll provide an option for you to move your non-Google

01:04:01   workspace paid content and most of your data

01:04:03   to a no cost option.

01:04:04   This new option won't include premium features

01:04:07   like custom email or multi-account management.

01:04:09   You'll be able to evaluate this option

01:04:11   prior to July 1, 2022, or should I say one July 2022,

01:04:15   and prior to account suspension.

01:04:17   We'll update this article with details in the coming months.

01:04:20   So first, I would like some advice,

01:04:23   but John in particular, since I know that you use Gmail,

01:04:27   do you have anything to add about the story so far?

01:04:31   - I mean, this, so the idea that you could get email

01:04:36   with a custom domain for free from Google

01:04:38   definitely falls into the category of

01:04:42   if you think you're getting something of value

01:04:44   but you're not paying for it,

01:04:45   you're obviously subject to the whims

01:04:47   of the company that's running it,

01:04:48   that one day they might decide to charge you

01:04:50   or they might just decide to make it go away.

01:04:53   But I have to say that whatever this was called

01:04:54   when you started it, what was it like,

01:04:56   Google Apps for your domain or whatever?

01:04:57   - I believe that's right, yep.

01:04:58   - It's had a good run.

01:05:00   - Oh, it has.

01:05:01   2006 you did this not like they use this for a year and then and then like turn the screws in you

01:05:05   Haha, once I got you addicted to it now, I'm gonna start charging you a year later. What is it?

01:05:09   I can't do the math in my head like

01:05:11   15 years

01:05:13   It's it got it. I don't I gotta do the math. It's very difficult. It's 15 and a half, isn't it? Okay

01:05:18   I just I'm always afraid that I'm getting math wrong on the fly. Anyway, it lasted a really long time and

01:05:24   I feel like you got your non money's worth. Oh, yeah

01:05:29   Now it is disappointing that it seems like you know, you know, like some people say I want them to charge money

01:05:35   So then I know it won't go away

01:05:37   But sometimes when they charge money and I'm assuming this is the case here in case you can tell me for sure

01:05:41   Sometimes they decide that the customer for this is not you like that. Yes, they're gonna charge money for it

01:05:46   But they're gonna charge so much money that it's clearly meant for

01:05:49   Businesses small businesses big business and not for individual people who just like that of any domain now

01:05:54   Is that the case like if you if you chose to pay for this how much would it cost?

01:05:58   So that's the shtick, right?

01:06:01   Or that's the thing, is that I need to figure something out.

01:06:05   And so, I will answer your question,

01:06:07   but just to set some understanding between all of us.

01:06:11   So I have almost 20 gigs worth of email.

01:06:13   I don't know how, I don't know why, but that's the case.

01:06:15   And I think part of the reason is because my earliest email,

01:06:17   I looked this up last week, I think,

01:06:19   my earliest email was the 16th of July, 2004.

01:06:23   So that's 17 years, six months, and 17 days ago.

01:06:25   - Do you have a lot of attachments?

01:06:27   'Cause I remember you said that casually

01:06:29   like in the chat or something

01:06:30   and I looked at the size of my email

01:06:31   and it's not using that much.

01:06:35   - I would assume so.

01:06:36   And ETP gets a preposterous amount of email

01:06:38   but almost no attachments so it must not amount to much.

01:06:41   - Did you just email yourself like MP3s for a few decades?

01:06:44   - No, I don't think so.

01:06:45   I mean, anything is possible, but I don't think so.

01:06:47   - I mean, my earliest email is from 1997.

01:06:50   - Yeah, well.

01:06:51   - Oh, I technically have one from 1969

01:06:53   but everyone who knows Unix knows what that is about.

01:06:55   - Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.

01:06:56   So anyway, so I have 17 years of history, 17 and a half years of history.

01:07:01   Also on Google is the shared family calendar.

01:07:05   So the way I've done this, and I will be the first to tell you this was a kludgy, silly

01:07:10   way to do it, but it is the way I did it, and I've done it for years, is that I would

01:07:14   sign into my Google account on Erin's phone, but the only thing I would turn on is the

01:07:19   calendar.

01:07:20   So I mean, yes, she could go in there and like flip on my email if she really wanted

01:07:22   to, but she would never do that.

01:07:24   And so our shared calendar is effectively my calendar, it's just that both of us have

01:07:31   access to it.

01:07:32   So I need to do something for both email, so I can keep my custom domain because I would

01:07:38   like to do that, and something about calendaring.

01:07:40   Now maybe, and we'll get to calendaring in a minute, maybe that's iCloud or something,

01:07:44   I don't know, but we need to do something about that.

01:07:46   Additionally, I should note that as of just a couple of months ago, I'm now paying $20

01:07:51   a year or a little under $2 a month

01:07:53   for 100 gigabytes in Google Drive, specifically for email.

01:07:56   Like I don't use Google Drive for anything else.

01:07:57   It's specifically to handle my preposterous amount of email.

01:08:01   - Quick update, I was just misreading the thing

01:08:02   at the bottom of the page.

01:08:03   I have 14 gigs of mail.

01:08:05   I thought I was reading it as 1.4 gigs

01:08:07   and I just, it was comma versus period.

01:08:09   Anyway, I have 14 gigs of mail,

01:08:11   so 20 gigs has not seen that ridiculous.

01:08:12   - Okay, thank you.

01:08:13   So I'm not sure exactly what to do.

01:08:16   And I feel like, so here are my options.

01:08:19   So Gmail, to answer your question from 20 minutes ago,

01:08:22   Gmail appears to be $6 a month for one account,

01:08:26   that's my caseloads.com account,

01:08:31   plus the $2 a month for storage, potentially,

01:08:33   so that's a total of $8 a month.

01:08:35   And that's not awful, especially for something

01:08:39   as critical as email.

01:08:40   - Yeah, for custom domain, that sounds like a good deal.

01:08:42   - It's not bad, but I don't know

01:08:45   if that's what I really wanna do,

01:08:46   and at this point, I kind of feel like

01:08:48   I should just divorce myself from Google entirely

01:08:51   'cause I'm not using Google Photos anymore.

01:08:52   I'm not really doing anything Google anymore,

01:08:54   so I wonder if I should just divorce myself from it.

01:08:56   - You're using Google Calendar.

01:08:57   - Well, sure, but I feel like I think

01:09:00   that would be a reasonably straightforward thing to replace.

01:09:03   - As someone who uses Google Calendar as a family calendar,

01:09:05   but also for whatever reason,

01:09:07   continues to use the Apple Calendar as well,

01:09:10   I can tell you that,

01:09:11   and I have notifications on for both of them, Google wins.

01:09:15   It is more reliable, Apple's calendar thing,

01:09:18   I have no friggin' idea what it's doing.

01:09:20   I can't understand it, I can't control it,

01:09:22   whereas Google Calendar just works all the time.

01:09:25   So maybe you'll have better luck than I do.

01:09:27   I tried Fantastical, I tried Apple's calendar,

01:09:29   tried all sorts of things,

01:09:31   and Google's calendar just functions all the time.

01:09:35   As much as I love Gmail, I would probably give up Gmail

01:09:40   before I would give up Google Calendar.

01:09:42   - That's interesting, I did not expect you to say that.

01:09:44   That's very interesting.

01:09:45   We don't have particularly complicated needs

01:09:47   from our calendar at this point anyway,

01:09:49   so I feel like that's a conquerable problem,

01:09:51   but maybe my head's in the sand, I don't know.

01:09:54   - Well, I mean, they all have the same features, in theory.

01:09:57   Like, I think our Google Calendar really has come through

01:10:00   with us at the point where our kids got old enough

01:10:02   for them to have their own calendars.

01:10:03   We made them their own Gmail accounts

01:10:05   with their own Google Calendars,

01:10:06   and now I can see, I can put events on their calendar,

01:10:10   and so, and they'll get notifications on their thing,

01:10:12   so like, it becomes a family calendar

01:10:14   where it's not just you and your wife,

01:10:15   but also your kids' events when they're gonna go

01:10:17   to practice or go to this thing or gonna be over

01:10:20   their friend's house or stay late on it.

01:10:22   It's so nice to have that in all one unified calendar.

01:10:25   And yes, Apple Calendar can do that just as well.

01:10:27   In theory, in practice, I find Google much more reliable.

01:10:31   - Yeah, so I gotta look into the calendaring,

01:10:33   but leaving aside the calendaring just for a moment,

01:10:35   like what do I do?

01:10:36   So I told you it's about eight bucks a month

01:10:37   to stick with what I've got.

01:10:40   And that would have the advantage of,

01:10:41   I've actually recently, we haven't talked about it

01:10:43   on the show, but after hearing about it

01:10:44   from several different people on various podcasts

01:10:47   and whatnot, I've been trying MimeStream,

01:10:49   which is a hilariously bad,

01:10:50   although I understand where it came from,

01:10:52   a hilariously bad name for what is actually

01:10:53   a very good email client, but it specifically made it,

01:10:56   at least right now, to Gmail, or Gmail equivalents.

01:11:00   - Welcome to this world, Casey.

01:11:02   No one has made a good email app for non-Gmail email hosts

01:11:06   in probably a decade or more.

01:11:08   - Right, and truth be told, up until literally

01:11:11   a month or two ago, I was using Apple Mail,

01:11:12   And it was fine.

01:11:13   Like I don't love it, but it's sufficient for my needs.

01:11:17   So I could perfectly well go back to Apple Mail

01:11:20   and I'd be fine with it, but I do like MimeStream.

01:11:22   There's a lot to like about it.

01:11:24   So if I go to any other provider

01:11:27   other than just sticking with Gmail,

01:11:29   then I would have to give up MimeStream, which is fine.

01:11:30   In Google Calendar, which I think is fine.

01:11:33   So let's take it as fact, which it isn't,

01:11:35   but let's take it as fact that I wanna switch to something.

01:11:39   Well, what do I do?

01:11:39   I could do iCloud with a custom domain,

01:11:42   But how do I get my archive up to iCloud

01:11:45   and do I really wanna push another 20 gigs to iCloud?

01:11:48   I don't think that's really tenable

01:11:50   on several different levels.

01:11:51   Plus, even though I'm so hilariously in bed with Apple

01:11:54   at this point, it defies description,

01:11:57   do I really wanna add one more thing

01:11:59   and something as critical as email to that list?

01:12:00   - Yeah, I would add to my list of not trusting Apple

01:12:03   that I would have found Apple's email service,

01:12:06   whether it has been itools.com, mac.com, me.com,

01:12:10   cloud.com, under all of its various names,

01:12:13   has worked in the least-- not the least reliable,

01:12:18   but the least straightforward way.

01:12:19   For example, Apple's approach to spam filtering

01:12:23   has very often made it so that sometimes email

01:12:27   sent to their email service will just not

01:12:30   arrive in a way that is 100% invisible to you.

01:12:33   And if you really wanted to pursue it--

01:12:35   Sounds like Apple.

01:12:36   Cool.

01:12:36   Yeah, if you really wanted to pursue it,

01:12:38   you could go through all the tech support things

01:12:39   eventually to come down to like, yeah, we filter out certain email and your thing got

01:12:42   caught in there, but you don't have any visibility into it, right?

01:12:44   It's not like it ends up in the spam folder.

01:12:46   It just literally doesn't arrive.

01:12:47   Like the fact that that has ever happened in the past makes me incredibly wary of using

01:12:53   Apple for mail for my main mail.

01:12:56   I do have, I now I cloud.com, I do have Apple email accounts and I do get mail on them,

01:13:01   but I would never want to use them as my like main most important email because I just,

01:13:07   the idea that I'm waiting for an email that never comes

01:13:09   and I have to go through that dance,

01:13:10   'cause you know that dance happens sometimes

01:13:12   and when that dance happens,

01:13:13   one of the variables I don't want to be,

01:13:15   well maybe they did send it,

01:13:16   but Apple threw it into Dev null before it sent it to me

01:13:20   and there's no way for me to find that out

01:13:21   without like six months of pursuing this.

01:13:24   - Yep, yep, yep.

01:13:25   - And then that's before you get to the idea of like,

01:13:27   oh and you're gonna import 20 gigs of mail,

01:13:29   good luck with that.

01:13:30   - No, that whole like, hosting everyone's email,

01:13:35   dealing with the spam filtering problems,

01:13:38   that's not the kind of stuff that Apple's really great at.

01:13:42   And I don't think that's ever going to change.

01:13:44   To me, look, there's what you should do,

01:13:50   what you really should do, and what you will do.

01:13:53   - I do wanna hear your recommendations,

01:13:55   but let me set another couple of options in front of you.

01:13:59   So we've got iCloud with custom domain,

01:14:00   I agree with everything that you said, Jon,

01:14:02   I don't think I wanna do that for several different reasons.

01:14:04   - Oh yeah, the custom domain part, I forgot all about that.

01:14:07   It's a new feature that Apple provides, it's kind of cool,

01:14:09   but that adds one more thing,

01:14:11   that like, do I want Apple to control DNS related things?

01:14:15   'Cause anytime DNS gets screwed with,

01:14:16   or that MX record is screwed up for any short period of time,

01:14:18   talk about email going into dev, no,

01:14:20   like just, there's so many ways you can mess that up,

01:14:23   and just, even within Google,

01:14:26   there's been many reports, including I think from you,

01:14:27   that like, the fancy one, the one with custom domains

01:14:32   is worse than the free one because it's different

01:14:34   and all of the attention and bug fixes

01:14:36   and everything go on the free one

01:14:37   and sometimes you get weird behavior

01:14:38   from the custom domain.

01:14:40   It's really, and then Apple adds that feature.

01:14:44   I just don't think of Apple in that way

01:14:47   and everything they've done that's been close to that

01:14:49   has made me wary of giving them that kind of thing.

01:14:53   They're not a hosting company.

01:14:54   They don't have tools about, they're not all about,

01:14:57   hey, Apple will let you create your own identity on the web

01:14:59   with your own domain name, which we as tech nerds

01:15:02   are always recommending people do,

01:15:03   whether or not we all completely follow that advice.

01:15:05   If you want to be completely portable,

01:15:07   own your own domain, use one of our sponsors

01:15:09   or something to get it, and then move that domain

01:15:13   around with you from different email providers.

01:15:15   Then you'll always be the master of your own destiny

01:15:16   in exchange for managing a bunch of technical mumbo jumbo.

01:15:19   But hey, you're a tech nerd, you listen to a tech podcast,

01:15:21   you have the ability to do this,

01:15:23   and lots of hosting providers make it easier

01:15:26   and nicer to do that, but Apple is not one

01:15:28   of those companies, and kind of neither is Google,

01:15:31   at this point.

01:15:32   - Yeah, so I could do iCloud, custom domain.

01:15:35   We could, oh, so two more options,

01:15:38   both of which are former sponsors.

01:15:40   I could use Hey, which I know, you know,

01:15:43   we had a little bit of drama about that a few months ago,

01:15:46   but I did try it for a little while

01:15:48   as like an accessory email,

01:15:50   and I actually do really like it,

01:15:52   but here again, like similarly to what happens with Apple,

01:15:57   like do I really wanna go all in

01:15:58   on their completely proprietary setup?

01:16:00   Maybe I do, because there's a lot to like about it.

01:16:03   But I don't know if I do, and that's 100 bucks a year.

01:16:05   - The thing is, I would trust them more than Apple,

01:16:08   because 37signals/basecamp/whatever they're called,

01:16:12   has many, many years experience supporting web applications,

01:16:17   and they have shown, under current management,

01:16:19   a willingness to continue to support stuff

01:16:22   long after it stops making them money.

01:16:24   Like, I think like the original version of Basecamp,

01:16:26   they're still running it for the tiny amount of people

01:16:27   who still wanna use it.

01:16:29   that is above and beyond anything you'll ever see

01:16:31   a company like Google or Apple do.

01:16:33   - Totally.

01:16:34   - And so if you're worried, like if I put all my eggs

01:16:36   in this basket, am I gonna get screwed?

01:16:38   I mean, eventually, yeah, like the founders will retire

01:16:41   and then some private equity company will own it

01:16:42   and they'll screw the whole business up, right?

01:16:44   But for the lifetime of the people

01:16:46   who are currently running the company,

01:16:47   assuming they continue to run it,

01:16:48   they have a track record of continuing

01:16:51   to support their customers way beyond what you would expect

01:16:54   from other companies.

01:16:55   Now, and Hey also offers custom domains.

01:16:58   So you could have your own domain, which again is the big out, where it's like, "Oh, if they

01:17:01   get evil, I'll just move elsewhere and I don't know how to change my email address."

01:17:06   But I think Hay is very opinionated in terms of how they do email, so you have to kind

01:17:09   of buy into that part of it.

01:17:10   But I would, you know, this just shows how little I trust Apple is that I would trust

01:17:14   a tiny little company like Basecamp way more than Apple.

01:17:19   Yeah, and I agree again with all of your points there.

01:17:23   And that's the thing is that even though I genuinely do like the opinions that Hey has,

01:17:29   I don't know if I want to commit to that.

01:17:31   I mean, I don't have to commit to it forever, but you know what I mean?

01:17:34   Like I don't want to commit to it forever.

01:17:35   It's a different approach to email.

01:17:36   Like it may, I still use Hey for one of my email accounts.

01:17:41   And if you want that approach to your email, it works.

01:17:43   But I don't want that approach.

01:17:45   I don't personally want that approach for like my main like fire hose email address.

01:17:50   It's better for a personal email address of someone who doesn't want to or expect to get

01:17:53   a lot of email.

01:17:54   Hey, Excel's there, I feel like.

01:17:56   See, it's funny you say that, because I actually think it would be good on a fire hose email,

01:17:59   but we can argue that another time.

01:18:01   But that's $100 a year, and here again I have the problem of, well, what do I do with the

01:18:05   last 17 or whatever years of email that I have?

01:18:08   It isn't absolutely required that that ends up online somewhere, but I would like it to

01:18:14   be, because I do search my email relatively frequently, granted not for 17-year-old emails,

01:18:19   - And Google does that search really well, I have to say.

01:18:22   - Google does it really well.

01:18:23   - It's a reminder to put a note on your calendar

01:18:26   every six months, every year, whatever interval you feel like

01:18:28   to use the Google checkout feature or whatever

01:18:30   where they give you a data dump of all your email.

01:18:33   - That's a good point.

01:18:34   - And they give it to you in a format

01:18:35   that is in theory portable.

01:18:37   So if and when my Google account gets totally locked

01:18:40   and my life is destroyed, I will at least have

01:18:42   my legacy of email as of on average six months ago.

01:18:45   - Yeah, yeah.

01:18:46   So then the final option that I'm aware of anyway

01:18:48   is former sponsor Fastmail.

01:18:50   And I think the code is still valid, for what it's worth,

01:18:54   even though they haven't sponsored it in a little while,

01:18:55   but fastmail.com/atp, 10% off your first year,

01:18:57   not a sponsor for this episode, but hey, here we are.

01:19:00   Hey, here we are.

01:19:01   And that's five bucks a month.

01:19:04   And what's super appealing about Fastmail,

01:19:06   other than the fact that they sponsor us,

01:19:07   other than the fact that I've heard incredibly good things

01:19:11   from a lot of people, and I think we're about to hear more,

01:19:13   is that they specifically have a Gmail import thing.

01:19:18   So apparently on the server side, they will go crawling through all your email and just slurp it all up and suck it all in.

01:19:25   So my current theory, calendaring notwithstanding, is why wouldn't I just go ahead and use FastMail and just switch everything over there?

01:19:36   Because I've got all my archive, hypothetically anyway, I've got my archive, I've got my custom domain.

01:19:41   They might even do calendaring for all I know, I haven't looked into this yet.

01:19:44   And I've got everything I want and it's five bucks a month.

01:19:47   And granted, I don't particularly want to pay

01:19:50   any amount of money for my email,

01:19:51   'cause I haven't for 17 years, six months, and 17 days.

01:19:54   But like you said, Jon, I've been freeloading long enough,

01:19:56   it seems reasonable, I'm an adult now,

01:19:59   so it seems like a reasonable thing to do.

01:20:01   So Marco, I kinda cut you off earlier,

01:20:05   I'd like to hear your opinion as to what I should do first,

01:20:08   and then Jon, I would like to hear yours as well.

01:20:10   - Okay, well there's, what you should do

01:20:13   for the maximum comedy value for our show

01:20:16   is try to host your own email on your Synology.

01:20:18   - Oh no, no, no, no, no.

01:20:20   - But you shouldn't actually do that

01:20:21   for practical reasons.

01:20:22   - Nobody should do that.

01:20:23   - Well actually, to quickly interrupt you,

01:20:25   there was a time that I think I was doing that

01:20:28   like years and years and years and years

01:20:29   before the Synology, years ago.

01:20:31   And what I found even then, like 15 years ago,

01:20:34   is that to get around like spam filtering,

01:20:37   I don't know anything about this world,

01:20:38   but to get around like spam filtering

01:20:40   and rules and so on and so forth,

01:20:41   it is like genuinely difficult to,

01:20:43   or at least it was then,

01:20:45   I presume it still is now.

01:20:47   - It's probably worse now.

01:20:48   - Right, exactly, to host your own email.

01:20:51   I remember there being some like,

01:20:52   for pay software as a service thing,

01:20:55   or maybe it was installable software

01:20:56   that was like a really good web,

01:20:59   gosh, I wish I remember the name of it,

01:21:01   but it was like a really, really, really good

01:21:02   web like email app.

01:21:04   Oh shoot, it ran on like Linux or something like that,

01:21:06   like the server was on Linux.

01:21:08   And I remember wanting to install it so bad

01:21:10   and use it so badly.

01:21:12   But it was hard to get your emails

01:21:14   to reliably get delivered

01:21:15   because they would see whatever domain

01:21:17   that you were serving from,

01:21:18   and the recipient servers would be like, pfft, no.

01:21:21   And so, I know you're joking, Marco,

01:21:23   I totally get that you're joking,

01:21:25   but the thought did briefly-- - Nobody shows their email.

01:21:27   - Yeah, but the thought did briefly cross my mind,

01:21:29   and then I realized, no, this is a terrible idea.

01:21:32   - And just to elaborate on it,

01:21:34   to explain to people why would it be a bad idea

01:21:35   to host their email, a lot of people probably think like,

01:21:37   oh, but if you have a server in your house

01:21:38   hosting your email, then like,

01:21:39   or you have a power outage, you missed email.

01:21:41   Well, email is storing forwards.

01:21:42   It's not because you'll miss email necessarily,

01:21:44   Although obviously if you really screw things up,

01:21:46   yes, your email can go away in a way

01:21:48   that you can't get it back.

01:21:49   But the real problem is what Casey was getting at.

01:21:51   Email is a protocol based on the hippie dippie days

01:21:55   of the internet where everybody trusted everyone else

01:21:57   and nothing was encrypted

01:21:58   and everybody will just behave themselves.

01:21:59   And as we learned, that's not the case.

01:22:01   Spam is a thing because it is essentially free to send email.

01:22:05   And so in the modern internet,

01:22:06   if you would like to be on the internet

01:22:09   and send and receive email,

01:22:12   Technically, anybody can start a mail server

01:22:14   and start sending and receiving emails

01:22:16   as long as they have all their DNS records set up.

01:22:17   But practically speaking, all of the real things

01:22:22   that send and receive email that trust each other,

01:22:25   that are not known spammers, have a trust relationship

01:22:28   based on sometimes cryptography,

01:22:31   sometimes paying money to do a thing,

01:22:33   sometimes various handshake protocols.

01:22:36   But in general, if you just pop up on the internet

01:22:38   on the IP address vended by your ISP

01:22:40   and start trying to send mail,

01:22:41   everyone will look at you and say,

01:22:43   "Get the hell out of here."

01:22:44   Because you look a lot like a spammer.

01:22:47   Because it used to be anybody could do that.

01:22:49   And you could run your Linux server in your basement

01:22:52   and send your email from it,

01:22:53   or everyone would just accept that mail.

01:22:54   But those days are long over.

01:22:55   That's one of the main tools against spam is saying,

01:22:58   "I'm not just gonna trust any old random computer

01:23:01   "on the internet and accept email from it.

01:23:03   "We're gonna have to do a thing."

01:23:04   And all these people who provide email,

01:23:06   whether it's Google, Apple, FastMail,

01:23:09   They have teams of people whose only job is to make sure

01:23:12   that A, they're not overwhelmed with spam,

01:23:14   which is like, someone was on the chat

01:23:15   we're talking about gray listing or whatever.

01:23:17   When I was talking about mail going into Apple

01:23:18   and then Apple would just throw it away,

01:23:20   everybody's throwing away a lot of mail.

01:23:22   It's just that Apple was more aggressive about it

01:23:23   and didn't give you any recourse

01:23:24   and didn't tell you they were doing it, right?

01:23:26   But everybody has to do that,

01:23:27   otherwise we would all be overwhelmed by spam.

01:23:29   If you think you're getting a lot of spam now,

01:23:30   you have to see how much email your email provider

01:23:33   is throwing away and not allowing to get to you.

01:23:35   And then B, there's all sorts of other

01:23:36   complicated relationships that I don't know

01:23:37   all the acronyms for that make it so that you are

01:23:40   a super duper trusted, no really it's okay,

01:23:42   you're not a spammer type of authentication

01:23:45   so people will make sure your email is delivered reliably.

01:23:49   And that's a problem for people running services.

01:23:50   You can talk to Marco about the services he runs

01:23:52   that sometimes have to send email.

01:23:55   And that's a difficult thing to do,

01:23:56   which is why AWS and other services like that

01:23:58   have sort of trusted mail delivery services.

01:24:01   Where they say, don't try to send email yourself,

01:24:03   send it through, I don't know what the AWS one is called,

01:24:05   like SendGrid or something.

01:24:06   No, I'm mixing up things, but anyway.

01:24:08   Send through this managed service

01:24:10   because we have a team of people

01:24:12   whose only job is to make sure that that mail system

01:24:15   is not used by spammers and is still trusted

01:24:19   by all the other trustworthy people.

01:24:20   It's the only way that the email system works at all.

01:24:23   You will never want to put in that amount of work

01:24:25   for the server running out of your house.

01:24:27   And having emails not arrive

01:24:29   or having to fight with deliverability

01:24:31   and being overwhelmed by spam

01:24:33   are two things you don't wanna deal with.

01:24:35   - Yeah, so what you should do for comedy

01:24:38   is host an ear synology, but that would be the only purpose.

01:24:41   There would be no other value to that

01:24:43   besides comedy for our show.

01:24:44   And even just making the joke right now,

01:24:45   I think we've gotten most of the value out of it,

01:24:46   so let's move on from that idea.

01:24:47   (laughing)

01:24:50   The most pragmatic thing you should do

01:24:54   is stop worrying about this and just pay Google

01:24:56   what they want and keep going with your life

01:24:57   and change nothing else.

01:24:59   But the ideal thing you would do

01:25:02   if you can get over the value of that pragmatism,

01:25:05   is try Fast Mail, it's really good.

01:25:08   So just to give you some idea,

01:25:10   I have a bit under 15 gigs of email,

01:25:14   my plan allows 100 gigs,

01:25:16   that's the $90 a year professional plan,

01:25:19   which is about, what is that, eight bucks a month?

01:25:21   So we're in the similar price ballpark here.

01:25:25   In practice, I haven't paid Fast Mail in a very long time,

01:25:29   because once I posted,

01:25:30   or a couple times I posted referral links

01:25:32   on my blog to my account,

01:25:33   'cause they have a referral program,

01:25:35   and I currently have a referral balance of $2,600.

01:25:39   - Well, can you send some of that my way then?

01:25:41   - I don't think I can.

01:25:42   And it just, it goes up over time slowly,

01:25:45   so I haven't actually paid a fast,

01:25:47   like it just deducts from that every year when it renews.

01:25:50   So I haven't paid in a very long time.

01:25:52   - This is a multi-level marketing scheme.

01:25:55   - No, I don't even need your referrals now.

01:25:57   I can't use all this, it would take me 100 years to do.

01:25:59   - I'm still so annoyed that I didn't do that

01:26:01   with my Dropbox referral code back in the day.

01:26:03   Everyone who bought AdSense keywords for Dropbox

01:26:06   and just got unlimited money.

01:26:07   I did get a bunch of Dropbox referrals.

01:26:10   That's why I was on the free Dropbox plan

01:26:11   for just years and years and years,

01:26:13   but eventually I filled it up and had to start paying

01:26:14   and I'm still kind of bitter about that.

01:26:17   - Well anyway, so yeah, so what's great

01:26:20   about the Fast Mail option is that first of all,

01:26:22   it is a standard host.

01:26:25   When I was looking for this,

01:26:26   whatever it was a million years ago,

01:26:28   I wanted a regular IMAP email host

01:26:31   because I could move to and from it freely

01:26:34   because that's the wonderful nature of email standards.

01:26:39   And, you know, Fastmail, again, yes, previous sponsor,

01:26:42   possibly future sponsor.

01:26:44   Some of this is in their ads.

01:26:45   I'm not trying to give them a free ad here or anything.

01:26:46   I'm just genuinely talking about

01:26:47   how much I enjoy their service.

01:26:49   This is a great host if what you want

01:26:52   is a basic but good email host,

01:26:56   which there's, oh my god,

01:26:59   there is so much to be said for that.

01:27:00   In this world of tech companies trying to be everything

01:27:05   to everyone and trying to make ever increasing,

01:27:08   you know, giant walled gardens that lock you in

01:27:12   in all sorts of ways and try to shove more and more

01:27:15   like enterprise crap onto you all the time,

01:27:18   I really appreciate companies that just do a basic thing

01:27:21   really well and that's what this is.

01:27:24   Now, they have a lot of features I don't use.

01:27:27   Like, I never use the web interface at all.

01:27:29   Like, I just use Apple Mail on all platforms and it's fine.

01:27:32   They do have a web interface if you want it.

01:27:34   One area that's not gonna be as good as Gmail is search.

01:27:38   It's just, Gmail is really good at search.

01:27:40   I don't know anybody who's as good at Gmail as search.

01:27:43   One area that Fast Mail is great is spam.

01:27:46   Because, again, I've never actually used Gmail regularly

01:27:50   so I don't really know much about it.

01:27:51   but I will frequently hear my friends complaining

01:27:54   about how Gmail spam filtering is possibly not working

01:27:57   so well sometimes or working too well other times.

01:28:00   One thing about fast mail spam is that it is customizable

01:28:03   and you can do something like, you can set certain folders

01:28:08   to be your spam learning folders

01:28:10   for your personal spam filter.

01:28:12   So whenever I get an email from somebody,

01:28:15   I would rather never hear from again

01:28:16   like some terrible PR list that somehow I got put on.

01:28:20   I just drag it to my Learn Spam folder.

01:28:22   And it learns it, and that's it.

01:28:24   And I have it set to learn from the junk folder,

01:28:29   and then put its filed spam into a different folder.

01:28:33   That way it's not learning from its own poop or whatever.

01:28:37   Basically, that allows me to use the move to junk shortcut

01:28:40   buttons in mail clients.

01:28:42   And that's basically a Learn Spam button

01:28:44   for my fast mail setup.

01:28:45   So that's a nice little trick.

01:28:47   But otherwise, I love this because it is just, as I said,

01:28:50   It's just an email host.

01:28:51   And I am not an email power user.

01:28:53   I don't want all those advanced features

01:28:56   that all the cool Gmail trendy apps have done over time,

01:28:59   like snoozing and all, like I don't want any of that.

01:29:02   - You can do that on Fastmail apparently.

01:29:04   - Oh you can?

01:29:05   Well maybe not from Apple Mail, I don't know.

01:29:06   But like I love just using the boring Apple Mail client

01:29:11   for my boring email in my boring way

01:29:15   and it just works and I don't have to think about it.

01:29:17   Now again, they offer calendars.

01:29:19   I've never used them.

01:29:20   They offer synced notes and stuff.

01:29:22   I've never used any of that stuff.

01:29:23   I just use Fast Mail for email,

01:29:25   and I use it only through Apple's mail apps.

01:29:30   And that's it.

01:29:31   And it has worked rock solid reliably for, what, a decade?

01:29:35   Whatever it's been.

01:29:36   It's been so good that entire time.

01:29:39   I just never have to think about it.

01:29:40   And that is the amount of effort and focus

01:29:45   that your email hosting choices deserve.

01:29:47   You should never be thinking about them.

01:29:48   It shouldn't matter because email is boring and stupid

01:29:51   and you should just get done with it as quickly as possible.

01:29:54   - All right, Jon, what do you think I should do?

01:29:56   - You know, when I sort of put all my eggs

01:29:59   in the Gmail basket back in the day

01:30:01   and imported all my mail, whatever,

01:30:04   over the years I've sometimes regret

01:30:06   that I didn't do a custom domain

01:30:08   for the reasons that I said,

01:30:09   like you should have your custom domain,

01:30:10   it makes you portable,

01:30:11   you don't have to change your email address.

01:30:12   Like my email address that I use is my firehose,

01:30:15   it ends in gmail.com.

01:30:16   And it's like, oh, you're gonna regret that

01:30:18   'cause eventually something's gonna change

01:30:19   and Gmail's gonna shut down or whatever

01:30:21   and you're just gonna have to change all your accounts

01:30:22   and this would be a giant headache.

01:30:25   But like I said about this Google Apps for your domain,

01:30:28   it's been a lot of years now, right?

01:30:31   Like I've got, I feel like I've already got

01:30:33   my non-money's worth out of Gmail,

01:30:35   even if they shut down tomorrow.

01:30:37   I say, well, that was a good run, you know.

01:30:40   When did Gmail launch in like 2000?

01:30:42   - It was 2004. - 2004, yeah.

01:30:44   It was my last year of college.

01:30:45   So 17 years, I'm just gonna give that a thumbs up,

01:30:50   I'm gonna say I've already got my money's worth, right?

01:30:51   But I basically trusted that Google as a company

01:30:53   would be around for a long time

01:30:54   and that they would continue to run Gmail for a long time.

01:30:57   And if they did start to charge for it, I would pay.

01:30:59   But this whole thing of like,

01:31:01   I get to continue to use it for free

01:31:02   because they're not charging for the Gmail.com ones, right?

01:31:05   But for you, they are charging.

01:31:06   And I think if it was in your situation,

01:31:08   I would just start paying.

01:31:09   Because I wouldn't be in a situation

01:31:14   where I regretted not having custom email,

01:31:15   'cause you did, you were smart enough

01:31:17   to do the custom domain thing,

01:31:18   and that's the email address you use,

01:31:20   and I wouldn't want to give that up,

01:31:21   and I also wouldn't want to do anything

01:31:23   that could disrupt email,

01:31:24   and the least disruptive thing is to just start paying.

01:31:27   So that's what I would do.

01:31:28   But Fast Mail sounds fine, it's just like,

01:31:30   do you want to put in the work to do that?

01:31:32   For me personally, I like the Gmail web interface.

01:31:35   It's the main way I use email.

01:31:37   - Nah, you're messing up for me.

01:31:39   - That doesn't exist in Fast Mail,

01:31:40   so that would be a big hangout for me,

01:31:42   because then I'd have to pick another client, right?

01:31:44   because I'm just using the web interface.

01:31:46   So I would definitely stay.

01:31:48   And I think for you, the least disruption option is to stay.

01:31:51   Because I think Google is still a good mail hosting provider.

01:31:58   Complaints about the spam thing are valid,

01:32:01   but you can try to train it and correct it or whatever.

01:32:03   It's a little bit annoying.

01:32:05   But the search is amazing, and the reliability

01:32:09   has been very, very solid.

01:32:10   So that's my advice.

01:32:12   My number one choice, stay where you are, number two fast mail.

01:32:15   Fair enough.

01:32:16   Real time follow up, I asked a buddy of mine

01:32:18   who was also obsessed with this random email thing

01:32:22   that I think he had brought to me.

01:32:23   I think he had found it.

01:32:24   It still exists.

01:32:26   It's called Zimbra, Z-I-M-B-R-A. And it's like,

01:32:30   you can do it on prem.

01:32:31   You can do it in the cloud.

01:32:32   I'll probably look at it for three seconds

01:32:34   just to remind myself what it-- well,

01:32:35   it's surely totally different than it was 15 years ago.

01:32:38   But anyways, that is also an option.

01:32:40   I can't imagine me deciding to go with it,

01:32:43   but I guess I could run that on my own server.

01:32:47   Maybe I could put it in Docker on the Synology.

01:32:49   How about that, Marco?

01:32:50   Is that sufficient? - Mm-hmm, there you go.

01:32:52   - I could do that.

01:32:53   But I'm sitting here now--

01:32:55   - Can you somehow involve like RX Swift?

01:32:58   (laughing)

01:33:00   - No, at this point, I haven't written RX--

01:33:01   - KZ Greatest Hits.

01:33:02   - Yeah, right, I haven't written RX in a long time.

01:33:04   Still doing Combine here and there,

01:33:06   but no RX in a long time.

01:33:08   But yes, that would be a greatest hits album for sure.

01:33:11   I think sitting here now, what I'm probably going to do

01:33:17   is sometime in the next couple of months,

01:33:19   I'm going to sign up for Fastmail,

01:33:21   and I'm going to try to get it to suck in all my email

01:33:24   from Gmail and just take it for a spin for a month or so.

01:33:27   And if I decide it's sufficient, then I'll stick with it.

01:33:31   And if it's, for some reason, garbage,

01:33:32   then I'll go back to Gmail and give them my money.

01:33:37   Did you say what email client you use?

01:33:40   - So I use MimeStream on the Mac,

01:33:43   which is where I do most of my email.

01:33:45   - But you won't be able to do that with FastMail.

01:33:46   - And I won't be able to do that with FastMail, but--

01:33:48   - Although, isn't MimeStream promising support

01:33:50   for non-Gmail accounts?

01:33:52   - Yes, hypothetically.

01:33:54   - Let me tell you something, Casey.

01:33:55   As an on-Gmail user, every email app always promises that.

01:34:00   It's always coming in a few months, it never comes,

01:34:04   and they get bought or they shut down.

01:34:05   - Yeah, no, I totally agree with you.

01:34:07   - Don't count on that.

01:34:08   If you're gonna jump into any non-Gmail host

01:34:11   for your email options, get used to Apple Mail

01:34:15   or the web interface to that host, that's it.

01:34:17   I guess you could use Thunderbird,

01:34:19   but you're gonna be stuck with very few options.

01:34:22   It does still exist.

01:34:23   - I think you can use Outlook still, right?

01:34:25   - Well, and it's actually, it's funny you bring that up

01:34:27   because what I'm not sure of,

01:34:29   I do not have an Office 365 account,

01:34:31   nor do I particularly want one,

01:34:33   but if somebody wrote to me and said,

01:34:35   oh my gosh, outlook.com or whatever,

01:34:38   does custom domains and it's the best thing

01:34:40   since sliced bread.

01:34:40   I would at least take a moment to look at it,

01:34:42   although I can't imagine I would actually go for it.

01:34:45   But yeah, I agree with, to come back to your point,

01:34:47   I do agree with what you're saying,

01:34:48   that I fully expect that MimeStream

01:34:51   will go away forever for me, and that's fine.

01:34:54   It's only the last month or two I've been using MimeStream,

01:34:56   and I like it, I'm not like hell-bent on it.

01:35:00   So if I need to go back to Apple Mail,

01:35:02   which I can't stress enough,

01:35:04   I know I've said it like three times,

01:35:05   but I just stopped using Apple Mail

01:35:06   like two or three months ago at most,

01:35:07   probably a month or two ago, then that's fine.

01:35:10   I'll go back to what I've been using for the last,

01:35:12   what, 12, 13, 14 years or something like that,

01:35:14   so I'm not too worried about it.

01:35:16   And there is something to be said for using FastMail

01:35:18   in a traditional IMAP server,

01:35:21   and this is what you were saying, Marco,

01:35:22   because Gmail does a reasonable job

01:35:25   of mapping labels to folders and things like that

01:35:28   and trying to play nice with IMAP,

01:35:30   but it's not perfect, it's not stupendous, and so--

01:35:34   - That's why MimeStream is so great.

01:35:35   It doesn't try to treat Gmail as an iMac client, right?

01:35:37   It uses a sort of native Gmail interface,

01:35:39   and that's just way better.

01:35:41   - Yeah, so I think, again, the more I think about it,

01:35:45   the more I'm sitting here today,

01:35:47   the more I think about it, the more I think I wanna

01:35:49   just divorce myself from Google

01:35:51   and just go and get a FastMail account

01:35:54   and then try to use Apple for calendaring

01:35:58   and hope for the best.

01:35:58   And the thing is, if I start making these moves

01:36:02   in the next month or two,

01:36:03   I have some time to say, "Oh, just kidding."

01:36:05   But if I wait until May or June or July or whenever it is that Google starts terminating

01:36:10   me, then I'm going to be in a real bad place.

01:36:15   So hopefully in the next few weeks I'll be making moves on this and I'll have something

01:36:18   to report.

01:36:19   All right, let's do at least a little bit of Ask ATP.

01:36:24   And let's start with Carlos Moffat, who writes, "Any advice on how to back up shared albums?

01:36:29   I recently discovered in a painful way that if you delete one, they are basically unrecoverable,

01:36:34   as they are not included in iCloud backups.

01:36:36   The photos and video files can be recovered, I think, from a local backup, but I'm not

01:36:39   sure if all the files on a shared album are included if a machine is set up to download

01:36:44   all iCloud photos.

01:36:45   And Carlos doesn't mention, but I believe to be true, isn't it a thing or wasn't it

01:36:49   a thing that iCloud album shared albums do not upload in full resolution?

01:36:54   They do not.

01:36:55   That's what I was going to say.

01:36:56   the only place a photo exists is in a shared album, that's bad because it's a recompressed

01:37:01   smaller crappier version of that. Just because you put something in a shared album, don't

01:37:05   delete it from your photo library. The photo library is the real copy of the shared album,

01:37:09   it's crappier resolution, which is kind of dumb. I kind of understand why they did it,

01:37:12   but it seems like in today's storage and power of phone devices or whatever, that they should

01:37:18   just be full resolution and Apple should just have better on-demand downloading. But anyway,

01:37:25   My advice for how to deal with this is annoying.

01:37:29   Like I think it should be recoverable

01:37:31   and Apple should back it up,

01:37:34   especially since what Apple should probably do is like,

01:37:37   I mean, there's lots of different ways

01:37:39   that Apple would do this, but yeah,

01:37:40   make them full resolution and also make it

01:37:42   so that if you try to delete a picture

01:37:44   that's in a shared album, it would yell at you and say,

01:37:45   "You know, this isn't a shared album.

01:37:47   You sure you want to delete it?

01:37:47   It'll be deleted from the shared albums too, right?"

01:37:50   That would be a nice way to do it.

01:37:51   And so that it could just maintain a bunch of metadata

01:37:53   and back it up, but they don't.

01:37:55   So the way to do it is you start on the other end,

01:37:58   when you're, and I know this is hard retroactively,

01:37:59   but when you're creating a shared album,

01:38:02   I would recommend this just not just for backup purposes,

01:38:05   because it's a nice way to do it.

01:38:06   When you're creating a shared album,

01:38:07   make an album in photos.

01:38:10   I'm coming from a Mac centric viewpoint here.

01:38:11   I have no idea how to do this in your phone.

01:38:13   Just use a Mac.

01:38:13   And call that album, you know,

01:38:18   you can make a folder hierarchy in the sidebar in photos.

01:38:20   So just have a folder hierarchy

01:38:22   that says like shared albums or something.

01:38:23   if that name's taken, just use a different name.

01:38:25   And then make an album called whatever your shared

01:38:30   library's gonna be, not shared library,

01:38:31   shared album's gonna be.

01:38:33   And then drag all your photos into that album.

01:38:35   So you're basically making the shared album

01:38:37   as a plain local album.

01:38:39   Because Apple does back up the plain local albums, right?

01:38:43   Once you have that local album done,

01:38:45   just select all and then go and make

01:38:47   a shared album out of that.

01:38:48   There's a little bit of weird stuff

01:38:49   in terms of what order they appear in the shared album

01:38:51   versus what order they appear in the local album.

01:38:56   But as long as you're not too picky about that

01:38:57   or you just figure out the correct incantation to do it,

01:39:00   what it means is that if you accidentally delete

01:39:02   the shared album, all you have to do is go back

01:39:03   to that local album folder, select all,

01:39:05   and make a new shared album with the same name

01:39:06   and now you got all the same photos in it again.

01:39:08   And that will also remind you, by the way,

01:39:10   don't delete those photos, 'cause if you delete them,

01:39:11   they would be deleted from the local album as well, right?

01:39:15   You do end up with a lot of folders

01:39:16   if you make a lot of shared albums.

01:39:18   Apple's limit on shared albums, I think,

01:39:19   5,000 pictures, which might not seem like a lot, but we've had a bunch of family members

01:39:23   who used to have a shared album for like pictures of their kids, and then they realized that if you

01:39:28   just keep having kids and you just keep passing, eventually you hit 5,000 photos and you need to

01:39:32   have a picture of your kids too, and then eventually some people just go with an annual

01:39:35   shared album or whatever. So again, the limits might have made sense, you know, a decade ago,

01:39:40   but now we're kind of silly, but they do exist. But because you can have folders within folders

01:39:44   in the sidebar, you can hide all this clutter, and then you'll always have sort of a backup of

01:39:48   of the contents of your folder.

01:39:49   What you're missing is the comments from Aunt Sue

01:39:52   says how cute the baby is.

01:39:53   Like you're not backing that stuff up,

01:39:55   which is kind of a shame.

01:39:56   - Are we really missing them, Bob?

01:39:58   - Yeah. (laughs)

01:39:59   At the very least, if you have,

01:40:01   if what you're trying to save is,

01:40:02   I have this carefully curated collection of images,

01:40:05   I pick the best 15 images that I sell

01:40:07   as shared with my family.

01:40:08   If that's what you wanna back up, you use a local album.

01:40:10   If you want to back up the likes and the comments,

01:40:12   there's no good way to do that.

01:40:14   - Anirudh Kuntur writes,

01:40:16   "When using the MacBook Pro's laptop desktop,

01:40:19   "do you keep the charger always plugged in?

01:40:21   "Does that spoil the battery life?

01:40:22   "Are there any tips to maintain the battery health

01:40:24   "of the MacBook Pro when using it that way?"

01:40:26   So as of a release or two ago,

01:40:29   Apple will try, or optionally I believe,

01:40:31   try to take care of this for you.

01:40:34   So if you go into System Preferences, Battery,

01:40:36   and then choose Battery in the sidebar,

01:40:39   Optimized Battery Charging is an option,

01:40:42   and it says, "To reduce battery aging,

01:40:43   "your Mac learns from your daily charging routine,

01:40:45   so it can wait to finish charging past 80%

01:40:49   until you need to use it on battery.

01:40:51   I like this a lot, I have this on,

01:40:53   and generally speaking, I think it works pretty well.

01:40:55   The one thing that I don't love is I kind of wish

01:40:58   it took a page out of, I guess Teslas

01:41:00   and a lot of other electric vehicles playbook,

01:41:03   where I wish there was a way to say,

01:41:05   no, no, no, I want all of it and I want it now.

01:41:07   - Oh, but there is.

01:41:09   - Well, okay, so I presume that just unchecking

01:41:11   this checkbox is the way to do it,

01:41:13   but is there a better way to tell my Mac,

01:41:16   hey, I know tomorrow or later today or whatever,

01:41:19   I'm gonna be away from power for hours and hours and hours,

01:41:21   I want everything you can give me.

01:41:23   How do you do that?

01:41:24   - Yes, so this is one of the wonderful handful of features

01:41:29   that on macOS should be in the system prep pane,

01:41:33   but only appear if you happen to add to your menu bar.

01:41:37   Here, I'll paste a screenshot into our chat,

01:41:40   I'll make this the chapter art for this chapter.

01:41:42   This is what happens for my desktop laptop.

01:41:44   This is how it looks.

01:41:45   So it says from the menu, if you have the battery enabled

01:41:49   in your menu bar, it'll say charging on hold,

01:41:52   parentheses, rarely used on battery.

01:41:55   And there's an item right below that that you can select

01:41:57   that says charge to full now.

01:41:59   - It's like you're an amateur Mac user.

01:42:01   You always hold down the option key

01:42:02   when you click the menu bar icons.

01:42:04   Have we not learned that?

01:42:04   - This isn't even with option.

01:42:06   This is just--

01:42:07   - This isn't even with option.

01:42:08   - No.

01:42:09   - I don't use laptops.

01:42:10   So people don't know, by the way,

01:42:12   Hold down the option key and click on various menu bar

01:42:14   icons.

01:42:15   You see all sorts of fun stuff.

01:42:16   - Yeah.

01:42:17   So this is how it works.

01:42:19   And this is by default. I didn't change anything

01:42:21   from the defaults here.

01:42:22   So this is by default. It keeps the battery at 80%

01:42:26   when it is plugged in as a desktop laptop,

01:42:29   where you almost never take it off.

01:42:30   And it notices that.

01:42:32   It says rarely use on battery.

01:42:33   And it gives you the menu item that you can just

01:42:35   click to say charge to full now, if you happen to need that.

01:42:38   That's it.

01:42:39   So I do keep it connected all the time.

01:42:42   It's being powered by the XDR.

01:42:43   In fact, I don't think there's a way to connect it

01:42:46   to the XDR without having it be powered by the XDR.

01:42:48   - Yeah, I was gonna bring that up too.

01:42:50   - You can maybe use a hub between it,

01:42:51   but then the hub would try to power the MacBook Pro.

01:42:53   Like they all do that.

01:42:54   So yeah, I don't know if there's actually a way

01:42:57   to refuse power while using any Thunderbolt display.

01:43:01   But regardless, yeah, you don't have to.

01:43:04   It manages it for you.

01:43:05   - I mean, even when it didn't, even when the best we did,

01:43:08   I think Apple's laptops used to like hover around 98 to 100 and they would oscillate around that range, right?

01:43:12   Which is better than just being cranked 100 all the time, but 80% is even better

01:43:16   I would still say like if it's gonna be plugged in all the time

01:43:20   Like don't worry. Yes

01:43:22   You are destroying your battery if it was been the bad old days when it was oscillating between 98 and 100

01:43:26   But you're using your computer and if you chose if you use if the way you use your laptop is almost all the time

01:43:32   It's plugged in then just use it almost all the time plugged in right if you're worried like oh now

01:43:37   I'm destroying a battery and now when I go on a road trip, it's gonna be crappy buy

01:43:40   Big external batteries like there's no free lunch here

01:43:44   So even the 80% thing 80% is not probably the ideal charge for the most longevity of a battery the last time we looked this

01:43:51   Up a few years ago

01:43:51   I think 40% charge for lithium-ion batteries like the best storage

01:43:54   Sort of thing if you just want the battery to not wear out when you're not really using it

01:43:58   But yeah, don't just don't worry about it

01:44:02   Like it's nice that macOS has this feature.

01:44:04   If you do want to do the thing where like,

01:44:07   I needed to be at 100%,

01:44:08   now you have to remember to pick the charge to full thing.

01:44:11   You know, like it's a little bit of extra bother,

01:44:14   but honestly, if you can't, if you feel like,

01:44:17   oh, I'm never gonna remember to do that charge

01:44:18   to full thing and now I'm only gonna have 80% power,

01:44:21   then just turn off optimized battery charging

01:44:22   and just sacrifice.

01:44:24   Sacrifice your batteries.

01:44:25   You bought this computer to use it.

01:44:27   And yes, the battery is gonna wear it as you use it

01:44:29   and it will wear out faster

01:44:30   if you don't optimize battery charging.

01:44:31   but if you really can't remember to ever do the charge

01:44:33   to full now option, just wing it, right?

01:44:37   Like, just, like, people, I always talk about empathy

01:44:39   to the machine, but you buy these machines to use them.

01:44:42   There's no way you're going to like,

01:44:44   there's no prize for having a battery

01:44:45   that's in pristine condition when you're done

01:44:47   with that computer, like, it's a waste,

01:44:48   it's there for you to use it.

01:44:50   - Yeah, and also, lithium batteries degrade slowly

01:44:53   over time whether you're charging them or not.

01:44:55   You know, they degrade faster under certain charge patterns,

01:44:59   but you're not gonna have this laptop plugged in

01:45:03   on your desktop for three or four years

01:45:05   and then sell it and it's gonna be

01:45:06   in perfect battery condition.

01:45:08   That's just, batteries degrade over time,

01:45:10   especially the ones we have in laptops these days.

01:45:13   It's not as bad as it used to be,

01:45:14   but they degrade over time no matter how you use them.

01:45:17   So yeah, I'm with Jon.

01:45:18   Use it however you want.

01:45:20   That being said, I think for most people,

01:45:22   leaving the setting on by default is fine

01:45:25   because if you are truly not bringing your laptop

01:45:28   for very many places most of the time.

01:45:30   If it's mostly on the desktop,

01:45:32   and the very first time you take it off the desktop,

01:45:35   you only have 80% battery, well, that's a lot,

01:45:38   and the battery life on these was really good.

01:45:41   And so that's not that bad of a thing.

01:45:43   Like, I didn't even realize this feature was on

01:45:45   for the first couple times I took it away,

01:45:47   because I just, you know, I got where I was going,

01:45:50   like for Thanksgiving and Christmas travel,

01:45:52   I got where I was going, and opened my laptop,

01:45:54   and yeah, it's fine.

01:45:55   It was down, quote, down to probably somewhere

01:45:58   in the high 70s by that point, but who cares?

01:46:00   That's still really great.

01:46:01   This has awesome battery life, and if I,

01:46:03   now that I know that this feature is there,

01:46:05   if I'm like, you know, gonna be on a cross-country flight

01:46:08   or something, then I'll charge it to full.

01:46:10   But until that happens, I'm not really in a big rush.

01:46:14   - And this, the thing you just read, Casey,

01:46:16   this is saying that it does the same thing as the phone does

01:46:18   where it tries to learn your patterns, right?

01:46:20   - I believe that's right, yeah.

01:46:22   - So like, your iPhone is doing this too,

01:46:23   we've talked about it in the past,

01:46:24   things like your iPhone when you plug it in

01:46:26   on your nightstand before you go to sleep.

01:46:28   It doesn't immediately charge to 100%

01:46:30   and then sit at 100% until you wake up in the morning.

01:46:32   Instead, based on when you've woken up in past mornings,

01:46:34   it waits until an hour or two before you wake up

01:46:38   and then it charges to 100%.

01:46:39   You can look at the little battery.

01:46:40   - Yeah, it goes to 80 first and then it holds it at 80

01:46:44   until like 6 a.m. or something like that.

01:46:45   - Yeah, and then it pushes it up.

01:46:46   And it's much more important for a phone

01:46:47   'cause obviously the battery in a phone

01:46:48   is so much smaller than the battery in a laptop

01:46:51   that you're really kind of on the ragged edge

01:46:53   with the phone and phones are so important

01:46:54   that have batteries that they do want your phone

01:46:56   to be 100% when you're ready for it,

01:46:58   because you're not gonna be using your phone plugged in

01:46:59   all day at a desk unless you're a developer.

01:47:02   So the Mac is probably trying to do the same thing,

01:47:06   but like Marco said, the 40% charge thing,

01:47:08   that is in theory, based on, again, years ago,

01:47:12   we're reading this, the best charge level,

01:47:15   if you're just gonna set it in a drawer,

01:47:16   but no charge level stops degradation.

01:47:19   It's just how can we make the degradation

01:47:22   as small as possible?

01:47:23   If you leave it at 100%, leave it at zero,

01:47:25   leave it at 40, A, it won't stay there,

01:47:27   and B, time will slowly damage the battery

01:47:30   just because of the way current battery chemistry stuff works

01:47:33   so use it or lose it, or use it and lose it, there you go.

01:47:36   (laughing)

01:47:38   - Oh man, so Lars Beckema writes,

01:47:42   "My partner's phone was stolen out of her hands

01:47:44   "while walking, so yes, the phone was unlocked

01:47:47   "the other day.

01:47:48   "Unfortunately and unexplainably,

01:47:50   Find My was not enabled on our new iPhone 13 Pro.

01:47:54   Completely erasing and blocking the phone remotely

01:47:56   was out of the question because of this.

01:47:58   Out of curiosity, what do you do to make sure

01:47:59   Find My is always enabled on all of your family members'

01:48:02   devices?

01:48:03   And if this ever happened to you or any of your family members,

01:48:06   how would you make sure any sensitive data would not be

01:48:08   exposed or used in a harmful way?

01:48:10   I'm thinking of certain apps like Gmail, Notes, and Photos,

01:48:12   which can contain sensitive data and which do not require

01:48:16   passcodes or Face ID to open the app.

01:48:18   I don't know how Find My wasn't on,

01:48:21   because I swear that you have to like bend over backwards

01:48:24   to prevent a friend coming on.

01:48:26   And that's for good reason,

01:48:27   because it should be on as far as I'm concerned.

01:48:31   And in terms of protecting stuff,

01:48:32   like honestly I don't, because,

01:48:34   well first of all we'd never leave the house anymore

01:48:36   because COVID, but beyond that,

01:48:39   if we are not in a situation,

01:48:42   our lives do not put us in a place

01:48:43   where this is a thing that is likely to happen

01:48:46   while the phone is actively unlocked.

01:48:48   So I don't have any good advice on this one,

01:48:52   to be honest with you.

01:48:53   - I mean, the good thing is that if someone steals

01:48:55   your phone like this, unless you're being targeted

01:48:58   for some specific reason because you're a senator

01:49:02   or the CEO of some big company or whatever

01:49:04   and they want what's on your phone,

01:49:05   probably they just want your phone.

01:49:07   And so maybe they'd be like, oh, this sucker

01:49:10   left it unlocked, I'll go and try to steal

01:49:12   some credit cards, or maybe they'll do that too,

01:49:14   but you probably 50/50 chance that they just

01:49:16   want the phone, they just want to erase it and resell it or whatever.

01:49:18   So you have that going for you.

01:49:20   But if someone does get your phone and it's unlocked and they have access to all your

01:49:23   stuff, almost every one of these services and things has some way to individually lock

01:49:31   it.

01:49:32   So in Google, you can go to accounts.google.com in your web browser and say "revoke all access

01:49:37   for all devices immediately," right?

01:49:40   Log out of all devices.

01:49:41   Those type of things.

01:49:42   Apple ID I think you can forcibly lock it right by even if it's just by putting

01:49:46   in the wrong password a bunch of times to lock your Apple ID it's a race

01:49:50   against time because obviously they just got your phone they probably you know

01:49:53   if someone really did want to get it your sensitive stuff they probably

01:49:56   already got it but if they're just running you know with your phone and

01:50:00   then eventually they'll look at it later that night baby by then you will have

01:50:02   locked all your stuff so yeah if somehow you manage to have fine I'm not enabled

01:50:07   and couldn't do a remote wipe or remote lock or locks device or anything all the

01:50:11   cool things that you can do, you do have a certain period of time where you can frantically

01:50:15   go through all the services you care about and try to lock them down from a web browser

01:50:19   or another device.

01:50:20   Oh, you know what?

01:50:21   That reminded me too, for people that do the, you know, bring your own device thing for

01:50:26   your employer, a lot of times, particularly if you're connecting to like Exchange or Google

01:50:30   suite, G Suite, whatever it's called today, a lot of times, whether or not you realize

01:50:36   your workplace could lock your device

01:50:40   because by connecting to their email

01:50:43   and their domain and all of this stuff,

01:50:45   oftentimes they have the right to lock either a subset

01:50:49   of your device or your entire device.

01:50:51   So you could ask your work to do you a solid

01:50:54   and do what they probably would want to do anyway

01:50:57   and lock or erase your device on your behalf.

01:51:00   So it's something you could try as well.

01:51:02   - You can also, by the way, someone mentioned two-factor

01:51:04   in the thing, if your phone was your two-factor device,

01:51:06   you can revoke two-factor device access

01:51:10   from various services that you're worried about.

01:51:13   Of course, what if I can't log into that service

01:51:15   'cause my phone was two-factor?

01:51:16   That's what backup codes are for.

01:51:17   When you set up two-factor, most good services

01:51:20   will give you backup codes that you should keep

01:51:21   like in a safe or something in a physical location.

01:51:25   Again, it's a race against time and it's a super hassle

01:51:27   and you'll probably lose this race,

01:51:28   but technically speaking, you can sort of have a,

01:51:31   hey, if my unlock phone is stolen by an inattentive person,

01:51:34   here's a list of things I have to do.

01:51:36   And it's a long, annoying list, but it is possible.

01:51:38   Even if your phone was your one and only two-factor device,

01:51:40   which I don't particularly recommend,

01:51:42   but there usually is a way to solve that.

01:51:44   Get your backup codes, go to the services,

01:51:47   deauthorize all accounts, log out of all devices,

01:51:49   change the two-factor to be something different than it was,

01:51:51   log in with one of your backup codes so you can get in.

01:51:54   Technically, it is possible.

01:51:56   It's just like a movie.

01:51:57   You're just gonna be doing it as fast as you can.

01:51:59   Maybe get your friend to type on the keyboard

01:52:01   at the same time as you.

01:52:02   - Yeah, but the reality is, like what Jon said at first,

01:52:05   like chances are, phone thieves are wanting your phone,

01:52:10   not your data most of the time,

01:52:12   because most people's data is worthless to them.

01:52:15   And like, if the phone they grabbed at your hand

01:52:17   happened to be unlocked at the time they grabbed it,

01:52:20   how far could they get,

01:52:22   and how long could they have access to that phone?

01:52:24   - I mean, they're gonna look for nudes.

01:52:25   Like, it's a thing that we don't think about,

01:52:27   because no one wants to see naked pictures of us,

01:52:29   but if you are someone who people

01:52:31   would want to see naked pictures of,

01:52:32   they will absolutely look through your pictures

01:52:34   and get all naked pictures and post them and everything,

01:52:35   which is terrible, but that is, I feel like,

01:52:37   the most likely thing that someone who grabs your unlock

01:52:40   phone is going to do.

01:52:40   - I didn't think about that.

01:52:42   - I know, we don't think about it

01:52:43   'cause no one wants to see us naked,

01:52:44   but that's not true of everybody.

01:52:45   - Yeah, well, anyway, besides risks like that,

01:52:48   a lot of things, you don't have to worry so much

01:52:51   about them opening up your password manager

01:52:54   or being able to access certain things,

01:52:55   'cause those things are already blocked

01:52:57   by additional passcode or face ID checks.

01:53:00   Making payments is not gonna be possible without you there,

01:53:03   So there's a lot of that surface area of possible risks

01:53:07   is not really there in this scenario.

01:53:10   Again, also keep in mind, it's kind of difficult

01:53:13   to keep an iPhone unlocked for a long time,

01:53:17   especially if you are in motion while doing this.

01:53:20   It would be very likely that this person

01:53:23   would either intentionally or inadvertently

01:53:26   relock your phone fairly soon after the theft.

01:53:30   And chances are what they want to do is erase it

01:53:34   and turn it off as quickly as possible

01:53:36   so that you can't find them.

01:53:38   And then they can then get some money for it somehow.

01:53:42   - 'Cause they don't know find Maya's off on your phone.

01:53:44   'Cause it's on most phones.

01:53:45   - Right, this is the whole point of it.

01:53:47   But I would guess what they want to do

01:53:50   is get that phone erased and powered down

01:53:52   as quickly as possible.

01:53:53   - Yeah, agreed.

01:53:55   - So anyway, we don't know what we're talking about

01:53:56   'cause we're not phone thieves, but fortunately,

01:53:58   we don't have to be.

01:53:59   of our wonderful sponsors this week. Thank you to them. Squarespace, Linode,

01:54:03   and New Relic. And thank you to our members who support us directly.

01:54:07   You can join at atp.fm/join. We will talk to you next week.

01:54:11   Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin.

01:54:18   Cause it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental.

01:54:23   John didn't do any research.

01:54:27   Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, cause it was accidental.

01:54:32   It was accidental.

01:54:35   And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.

01:54:40   And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at

01:54:45   C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey List M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

01:54:54   ♪ Anti-Marco Arman, S-I-R-A-C ♪

01:54:59   ♪ USA, Syracuse, it's accidental ♪

01:55:03   ♪ Accidental ♪

01:55:04   ♪ They didn't mean to ♪

01:55:07   ♪ Accidental ♪

01:55:08   ♪ Accidental ♪

01:55:09   ♪ Tech podcast so long ♪

01:55:13   - Amazon S-E-S, Simple Email Service,

01:55:17   is the name I couldn't think of

01:55:18   of their way to send email

01:55:20   in a way that presumably Amazon runs

01:55:22   make sure is not going to be flagged as a spammer.

01:55:24   Although I bet AWS has a harder time with it than most, because if you wanted to send

01:55:28   a bunch of spam, signing up for a quick free AWS account, paying some money and having

01:55:31   it spam is probably a very common thing, but that's Amazon's job, to make sure that email

01:55:37   from their service does not get rejected as spam.

01:55:40   Was that during the Gmail segment, or did we talk about that earlier?

01:55:42   Yes, it was about how hard it is to be on the internet as a sender and receiver of email

01:55:48   and to be recognized as legitimate.

01:55:50   Oh, right.

01:55:51   Okay.

01:55:52   - Oh, I wanted an update on Marco's car battery.

01:55:54   - Oh yeah.

01:55:55   - I don't have an update yet.

01:55:56   Everyone wrote in and told me what to do.

01:55:58   I haven't been to the car yet

01:55:59   'cause we've had this bit of a problem

01:56:01   called a giant snowstorm like everyone else has had.

01:56:04   I have literally have not even been able to get to it

01:56:06   even by boat if I wanted to until yesterday.

01:56:09   My plan is to, I got some errands to run probably next week,

01:56:12   so ask me again next week.

01:56:14   - You're gonna go to the auto store

01:56:15   and have the cashier install it for you?

01:56:17   This is wild when people are telling me

01:56:18   that the cashier would do it,

01:56:19   but I guess it's just like an auto store employee.

01:56:21   - Yeah, I mean, look, you spent like an hour

01:56:23   telling me how easy it was, so.

01:56:24   - It is, I'm saying it is easy, but it seems like,

01:56:26   doesn't the cashier have to stay there

01:56:28   and check out the next customer,

01:56:29   like if they leave the store and just be like,

01:56:31   I'll, I don't know, anyway.

01:56:32   - No, but my plan is to, yeah, to just go to whatever nearby

01:56:36   like auto parts store is near here and just go buy a battery.

01:56:40   Even if the battery's not the problem,

01:56:42   I'll just go buy a battery anyway,

01:56:43   'cause they're not that expensive

01:56:44   and it probably is the problem, and yeah.

01:56:47   Then I'll, if it ends up being something more complex

01:56:49   like the alternator, I'll deal with that later.

01:56:51   Yeah, it was interesting that some people suggested lithium ion batteries for cars and

01:56:55   I don't know...

01:56:57   Was it lithium or was it those glass sponge ones?

01:57:02   In any case, I feel like I would need to do research about that because we know battery

01:57:05   technology has moved on very much since the lead acid batteries of the Mac Portable, but

01:57:11   the specific application of a car, especially in a place with winter, is very different

01:57:16   than what you might use in your phone or laptop because as we know, phones and laptops tend

01:57:20   not to do well once they are freezing,

01:57:23   or very hot for that matter.

01:57:24   But cars get very cold and very hot all the time,

01:57:27   and lead acid batteries, you know,

01:57:29   I'm an old fuddy-duddy, they're a known quantity.

01:57:31   I know in where I live, I don't need a battery heater,

01:57:34   'cause I don't live in like, you know,

01:57:35   the wilds of Canada or the Arctic or whatever.

01:57:38   And every place that I've lived has been

01:57:41   the type of temperature where a healthy car battery

01:57:44   will continue to function correctly.

01:57:46   I don't know if that's true of a lithium-ion battery.

01:57:48   Would I need to get a battery heater?

01:57:50   with a second battery to keep my other battery warm?

01:57:53   Or do lithium-ion batteries do better

01:57:54   than lead-acid batteries in New England-style temperatures?

01:57:57   I don't know, and so just go with the default,

01:58:00   which is, well, you know, I know what quote-unquote

01:58:02   car batteries work like, and I'll just buy a new one

01:58:05   when my old one gets bad.

01:58:06   - Did I tell you about my jumpstart batteries

01:58:09   that I have?

01:58:10   - I think you mentioned on the show

01:58:11   where you talked about the car battery.

01:58:13   - Yeah, okay.

01:58:14   - And your USB hand warmers, yeah.

01:58:15   Just big USB batteries to start your car when you need it.

01:58:19   and to pump up the tires, right?

01:58:21   - Yes, yeah, well, yeah, one of them is the lithium type.

01:58:25   The other one is the super cap type.

01:58:28   I haven't had a chance to use them yet,

01:58:30   but the lithium type I kept in the car.

01:58:33   I thought I was being a genius.

01:58:34   I'm like, I'm buying an older car,

01:58:37   and it's gonna have to operate in a lot of cold weather,

01:58:39   and it's gonna be sitting around for a while,

01:58:40   so I should probably get a battery jumpstart thing

01:58:42   just in case and keep it in the car,

01:58:43   'cause I'm, you know, now in the age of lithium batteries,

01:58:46   they've come a long way.

01:58:46   What about a battery tender or a solar thing,

01:58:49   which is something everyone suggested.

01:58:50   Rather than having a thing that jump starts it when it dies,

01:58:52   something just trickle charge your battery all the time,

01:58:54   so it's always okay.

01:58:56   - I might look at that at some point,

01:58:57   but right now, it's not really in a controlled environment

01:59:00   where I would have any kind of, I don't know.

01:59:02   So at some point, I might look at that,

01:59:04   but hopefully that won't be necessary.

01:59:05   But anyway, so I thought, I have an idea.

01:59:08   Since the car, since it's an old-style car,

01:59:14   If I have something plugged into the 12 volt port on the car,

01:59:17   it's not going to constantly drain the battery when it's off.

01:59:20   Like, you know, some modern car might have some weird thing

01:59:22   that it does that.

01:59:23   It's only going to operate that 12 volt

01:59:25   port when the car is running.

01:59:26   So I can leave something plugged in there all the time,

01:59:29   and it would only charge the thing when it's running.

01:59:31   So I thought, great, I'll use one

01:59:34   of the ports on the USB dongle in that 12 volt plug

01:59:37   to--

01:59:38   every time I'm driving the car--

01:59:40   to trickle charge this giant lithium jumpstart battery.

01:59:45   And that way it'll be ready in all likelihood

01:59:47   whenever I would need it.

01:59:48   Or at least it'd be close enough to ready.

01:59:50   - I'll see the caveats about how well

01:59:52   a lithium battery survives extremes of temperature,

01:59:54   especially if it's inside your car in the sun

01:59:56   or freezing there in the winter.

01:59:58   - Right, so I went to the car,

02:00:00   last time I ran some errands

02:00:03   and I was talking about this battery problem.

02:00:05   Well, as I was struggling to start the car the first time,

02:00:08   and I thought, oh, well, it's okay.

02:00:11   I have this lithium battery thing here.

02:00:13   What could go wrong?

02:00:14   And I turn the lithium battery, the jumpstart thing on,

02:00:16   and it shows like an arrow light.

02:00:18   - Nice.

02:00:19   Too cold for me.

02:00:20   - Yeah, and I'm like, okay, well,

02:00:22   maybe I need something not this.

02:00:24   - You need a battery to power the warmer

02:00:26   for your other battery.

02:00:27   - Yes, exactly.

02:00:28   So to augment that, or to possibly replace it,

02:00:32   I ordered the super cap type, which was,

02:00:36   like when I was ordering this,

02:00:37   was waffling between these two types,

02:00:38   well there's this other kind that just uses super caps,

02:00:41   like super capacitors, instead of lithium batteries.

02:00:44   And it has its own trade-offs,

02:00:45   but it has the wonderful upside

02:00:49   that you don't really keep it charged by time,

02:00:52   so you don't have to worry about that,

02:00:53   and it works in more temperature extremes.

02:00:56   - But then you need some electricity

02:00:57   to go into the super cap,

02:00:58   and if you don't have any electricity, you're SOL.

02:01:01   I think we had the solution to this problem last show.

02:01:04   You just need those oxygen activated rust hand warmers.

02:01:08   And then so when you get into the car,

02:01:09   you're like, don't worry, I have a lithium battery.

02:01:11   But the lithium battery says it's too cold.

02:01:12   Well let me just open up these packets,

02:01:14   shake 'em up, wrap 'em around my lithium battery,

02:01:16   warm that sucker up, and then it'll make a happy face

02:01:18   and boot up and then I can start my car.

02:01:20   - Well the good thing is, so the SuperCap thing,

02:01:23   this is actually, I tested this, it actually works.

02:01:26   The SuperCap thing, I can charge it with my laptop

02:01:30   'cause it charges, it has a USB input option as well.

02:01:34   - So okay, so the way they work normally is,

02:01:36   the idea is if the battery has too low of a charge

02:01:41   to start the car, it probably at least

02:01:43   still has some voltage.

02:01:44   So what the Supercap does is you connect it to the battery,

02:01:47   it takes like two minutes to basically suck as much power

02:01:50   as it can out of the car battery,

02:01:52   and then it can deliver it all at once to start the car.

02:01:55   So if the battery has some charge, which it usually does,

02:01:59   then you can turn that into a short burst

02:02:01   of a lot of charge to start it.

02:02:03   That's the idea.

02:02:04   However, it also supports, you can charge it via USB

02:02:08   over about maybe 20 or 30 minutes.

02:02:11   Well, it turns out that's how long the ferry ride is.

02:02:14   So my plan is to just charge it from my laptop

02:02:18   on the ferry when I'm going to the car

02:02:20   and that way I'll show up to my car

02:02:22   with a fully charged super cap in case I need it

02:02:25   and that will work in any conditions.

02:02:28   - Why don't you just charge the super cap

02:02:30   instead of on the ferry ride

02:02:30   from your outlet in your house?

02:02:32   - I'm never gonna remember to do that.

02:02:34   (laughing)

02:02:35   - The good thing is that having an EV for so many years

02:02:37   has prepared you for long periods of slow charging.

02:02:40   (laughing)

02:02:41   - Here's what would happen.

02:02:42   I would plug it into my house,

02:02:43   and then I would leave, and I would forget it.

02:02:45   It would be sitting here plugged into my house,

02:02:47   instead of in my backpack where it should stay forever.

02:02:50   - It can collaborate with your heated rug to start a fire.

02:02:52   (laughing)

02:02:54   (upbeat music)

02:02:58   What's the confusion with a couple of pistachios?

02:03:00   - Because pistachio size is pretty regular.

02:03:02   Like there's not a lot of variation.

02:03:03   You just fill the cup until the pistachios fill the cup.

02:03:07   - Well first, there's some ambiguity.

02:03:09   Are you volumetrically measuring them

02:03:11   with the shells or without?

02:03:13   I know granted it's probably without.

02:03:15   - It's absolutely without, but if the recipe says

02:03:17   a cup of chopped pistachios, you might have a point

02:03:19   because the size you chop them really dictates

02:03:21   how many we'll pack in, and yes, weight is better obviously,

02:03:24   but if they say a cup of pistachios

02:03:26   and they don't say chopped, they mean no shells

02:03:27   and they mean just pour them into a cup measure.

02:03:29   - That's so imprecise.

02:03:30   And with baking, precision is pretty important.

02:03:33   - I think it's actually pretty precise

02:03:34   because of the law of averages and pistachio size.

02:03:37   It's not like you're gonna, it's like,

02:03:38   well, I have a particularly large batch of pistachios

02:03:41   and it screwed up the average.

02:03:42   No, like I think they're very regular in size.

02:03:44   It evens out over the course of a cup.

02:03:46   And if you were to count how many pistachios

02:03:48   or how much weight there is,

02:03:49   if you just took cup after cup of pistachios

02:03:51   and measured them the same way,

02:03:52   I think you'd see that they really hover

02:03:54   around the same amount.

02:03:55   - Anyway.

02:03:58   - I mean, if you did a cup of mixed nuts,

02:03:59   it would be a problem.

02:04:00   Someone did their PhD thesis on this.

02:04:01   - Oh yeah, that'd be terrible.

02:04:02   - Someone did a PhD thesis about like,

02:04:04   if you, you know, you get like those Planner's mixed nuts

02:04:06   or whatever, like the cylindrical jar

02:04:08   that's about as tall as it is wide, right?

02:04:10   - And it has like mostly the crappy notes you don't want

02:04:12   and like two cashews and one with the cashew.

02:04:14   - And so the PhD thesis was trying to explain,

02:04:18   it's one of those things that like,

02:04:19   a thing that no one cares about,

02:04:20   but you can get your PhD if you figure out

02:04:21   how it actually works.

02:04:22   If you take one of those mixed nuts things

02:04:24   and you just shake it with the lid on

02:04:25   and you shake, shake, shake, shake, shake,

02:04:27   and you open it up, what you will find

02:04:28   is all the big nuts are on top.

02:04:30   And someone did a PhD on like, why is that?

02:04:33   It seems weird that the big nuts would come up.

02:04:34   You'd think the big nuts would go to the bottom

02:04:36   and the little ones would go to the top,

02:04:37   but they explained it, they figured it out.

02:04:39   Science!

02:04:40   And if you don't think that works,

02:04:42   get a thing of mixed nuts and shake it

02:04:43   and you will watch the stupid Brazil nuts

02:04:45   that nobody wants will be on top.

02:04:47   - But then everybody would have to get mixed,

02:04:49   mixed nuts, like those planters, tubs,

02:04:51   they're so bad.

02:04:53   Like the nuts that you get in there are,

02:04:55   first of all, grossly over-oiled and salted,

02:04:59   and then the nuts themselves are somehow stale,

02:05:01   and it's just, oh, they're the worst nuts.

02:05:03   I'm telling you, nuts.com, I'm telling you,

02:05:06   they're the best, they're so good,

02:05:08   they're so much fresher than anything else.

02:05:09   - Not a porn site.

02:05:10   - Oh my, no, no, that's something else.

02:05:12   (laughing)

02:05:15   - Least Planners has a good, they're mixed nuts, yeah,

02:05:17   they're just all the ones nobody wants, right,

02:05:19   but they do sell mixed nuts, and there's only two kinds

02:05:22   of nuts, and they're both ones you want,

02:05:23   so they'll have like cashews and,

02:05:27   well they never do cashews in Macadamias,

02:05:28   but they would do it-- - No, that's way too expensive.

02:05:30   - Yeah, but anyway, it's just like two good kinds of nuts

02:05:34   and there's the only kind in there,

02:05:35   and it's because when you do mixed nuts,

02:05:36   you know it's all gonna be the cheap ones

02:05:37   that nobody likes them with one or two good ones,

02:05:39   but you can buy them with just,

02:05:40   I don't think they're called mixed,

02:05:42   whatever they're called, you just get two kinds of nuts,

02:05:44   and if you like both those kinds of nuts, you're golden,

02:05:46   you know, unless you like one way more than the other

02:05:48   and then it's probably not gonna be.

02:05:49   - They would call it two nuts.

02:05:51   I'll tell you one thing, we were joking earlier

02:05:54   in our house here because the best response

02:05:57   we ever got from Siri.

02:05:59   So we were at dinner, me, my wife, and my son

02:06:03   were talking about God knows what,

02:06:05   and somehow the topic of the seven Cs came up

02:06:08   and we asked our cylinder, what are the seven Cs?

02:06:12   'Cause I knew the concept, but I don't really,

02:06:15   what are, you know, we like Atlantic, Pacific,

02:06:17   like what counts?

02:06:19   So we asked, "Hey, what are the seven Cs?"

02:06:22   And Sierra responded, "I only know of two testes,

02:06:26   "the left teste and the right teste."

02:06:28   (laughing)

02:06:31   - I feel like Google would have gotten that one

02:06:34   if you'd asked.

02:06:35   I mean, setting aside the mishearing.

02:06:39   - That's something.

02:06:40   - Testes, one, two, three.

02:06:42   (laughing)

02:06:44   (jazzy music)

02:06:47   The other day, every morning we go upstairs

02:06:52   and we start making breakfast and the routine usually

02:06:56   is like as I start doing all the morning routine stuff,

02:06:59   I will usually, or whichever one of us is up there first,

02:07:02   will ask the HomePod to start playing some kind of music.

02:07:05   So I had this cool idea that I'm like,

02:07:08   hey why don't we every day we listen to one year

02:07:13   of that year's top hits and we go like one year at a time

02:07:16   per one year per day.

02:07:18   So we started out this week, or last week,

02:07:21   we started off with 1960.

02:07:23   - Top hits as in like the top 40?

02:07:26   - Yeah, we asked the HomePod play the top hits of 1960.

02:07:31   And then the next day, 1961, next day 1962, and so on.

02:07:35   And I figured this would be a cool thing to do

02:07:36   to hear all the music.

02:07:38   So first of all, I don't know what the HomePod is using.

02:07:41   Because when you ask for that, at least we're up to 65 now.

02:07:44   I don't know what happens as you get closer.

02:07:46   maybe there's like Billboard charts later on or something,

02:07:48   but in 1960s at least, it just says,

02:07:53   okay, playing the top 25 hits from 1960, whatever,

02:07:58   that's what it says.

02:07:59   Now, granted, songs from the '60s are very short,

02:08:02   but I feel like in a half hour,

02:08:06   I don't think we're getting through 25 of them.

02:08:08   (laughs)

02:08:10   And oftentimes, it will do the thing where after,

02:08:14   maybe 10, 12 songs, it'll play something

02:08:19   and it'll be like, that's not from the '60s.

02:08:22   It will jump forward like 20 years.

02:08:24   It'll do the thing that most modern Apple music things do

02:08:28   where after it hits the end of whatever it was told to play,

02:08:32   it'll just play something else

02:08:33   that it deems relevant to that.

02:08:35   So it's obviously doing this.

02:08:37   So I went to look and I was like, all right, first,

02:08:40   let me just check to see what is it playing this list from

02:08:43   to answer John's question.

02:08:45   And if you search Apple Music for, you know,

02:08:48   the top 25 hits of 1964 or whatever,

02:08:51   I didn't find any.

02:08:53   Like, I don't know where it's getting this from.

02:08:55   There is no playlist in Apple Music to name this.

02:08:57   If you search for like the year,

02:08:58   it doesn't show it as an option.

02:09:00   I don't know where it's getting this from,

02:09:02   but whatever it's getting this from

02:09:03   does not show up in any way I could find on Apple Music.

02:09:05   So that's problem number one.

02:09:07   - If you just ask Siri to list them,

02:09:09   'cause I think maybe this is like Siri knowledge

02:09:11   and not Apple Music knowledge.

02:09:13   Maybe, I guess?

02:09:14   I don't know what kind of mess they have going on over there

02:09:18   but so that's, yeah, so problem number one

02:09:20   is that it occasionally forgets what I asked to play

02:09:24   and just like, oh, all of a sudden we're playing

02:09:26   Audioslave, pretty sure that wasn't around in the 60s.

02:09:29   (laughing)

02:09:31   And then, so there's that issue of like,

02:09:34   and then there's the typical Siri thing of like,

02:09:38   you'll hear the same song repeated within 15 minutes.

02:09:43   Not always, but like sometimes it'll play,

02:09:46   you know, oh great, I wanna hold my hand.

02:09:47   That finally came out and then like, you know,

02:09:50   four songs later, I wanna hold my hand again.

02:09:52   It's like, really?

02:09:53   Like do you have any short-term memory at all?

02:09:56   Like we literally just heard this song.

02:10:00   Like I, why, why is Siri so bad?

02:10:04   Why doesn't this work?

02:10:05   Like we've had voice-activated music cylinders now

02:10:09   in the world of tech for what, eight years?

02:10:13   Like when did the first Amazon Echo come out?

02:10:14   It's been a while.

02:10:15   And why are they still so bad?

02:10:19   And why can't Apple make theirs like passably okay?

02:10:22   Like I don't know what I'm supposed to do here.

02:10:25   Like I, oh, I'm so sad.

02:10:27   And what else am I gonna do?

02:10:29   Like I'm not gonna use Spotify for lots of reasons,

02:10:32   but like the experience of using it on a HomePod

02:10:34   is not great already.

02:10:37   Even if you can get past all the recent BS

02:10:39   they're going through.

02:10:41   And then, you know, any other music service on the HomePod

02:10:44   is gonna be difficult to use, at least.

02:10:49   I don't want non-HomePod speakers there

02:10:52   because like all the, like, Amazon Echo's have a lot

02:10:55   of their own problems recently, like a lot.

02:10:57   Like they're really diving into mediocrity very quickly.

02:11:02   And even those don't sound great.

02:11:06   I don't necessarily think I want a Google ball in my house,

02:11:09   even if it did sound great,

02:11:11   which so far nothing I've heard ever would indicate that.

02:11:13   What am I supposed to do?

02:11:15   - I mean, I just launched the Google app.

02:11:16   First I asked Siri one of the top songs in 1960,

02:11:19   and I got a one-line answer that was like,

02:11:21   "This was the most popular song of 1960."

02:11:23   I'm like, "That's not a list."

02:11:24   So I asked Google exact same question,

02:11:26   "What are the top songs 1960?"

02:11:28   And I'm doing it in the Google app on the iPhone.

02:11:30   Sure enough, it gave me a list of what,

02:11:32   50, 47 songs or whatever,

02:11:34   And at the top, it has little buttons for 1960s rock, pop,

02:11:37   R&B, so you could narrow it down further.

02:11:41   So it seems like Google can give you the list.

02:11:44   And then if you just played it, if I could play it from here,

02:11:47   make this a playlist and Google play music or whatever,

02:11:50   and then just AirPlay it to your HomePods,

02:11:52   I guess you have to have the phone there.

02:11:53   And it's kind of annoying.

02:11:54   You don't get to use the I can control it

02:11:56   from any of my Apple devices thing.

02:11:57   But at the very least, it can come up with a song list.

02:11:59   And if you really wanted to pre-do it,

02:12:00   you could use Google to get the list,

02:12:02   and then pre-make them all in Apple Music,

02:12:04   put them as playlists.

02:12:05   And then you get to fight with the home bot

02:12:07   to try to get it to understand the playlist

02:12:08   you're trying to refer to.

02:12:09   - Yeah, right, that's not gonna happen.

02:12:11   - Especially if your playlist includes a year name,

02:12:13   it would constantly say, well, you said a year,

02:12:15   so I'm gonna try to do that thing I did before

02:12:17   and I'm not gonna look for a playlist by that name.

02:12:19   (laughing)

02:12:20   - Yeah, I mean, maybe the solution is to just like,

02:12:22   you know, run an app on the iPad from some other service

02:12:24   and then AirPlay it, but it's so, I don't know.

02:12:28   Like, and I also, I don't wanna see the list ahead of time.

02:12:31   I wanna be surprised.

02:12:33   That's part of the cool factor of this.

02:12:34   - I mean, if you just do all the list at a time,

02:12:36   you'll forget about them, right?

02:12:37   - I guess that's fair.

02:12:38   - 1960, top song, "The Twist," Chubby Checker.

02:12:42   - By the way, the '60s, so again,

02:12:44   we've only gotten through '65 so far,

02:12:46   but this is, wow, things move fast.

02:12:49   (laughs)

02:12:51   The songs in 1960 are a very different thing

02:12:55   from the songs in 1965.

02:12:56   It's a very short time where a lot changed.

02:13:01   This is why I wanted to do this.

02:13:02   It's really cool to hear these changes happen over time.

02:13:05   It's actually very cool when it works.

02:13:08   It's just hard to make it work reliably.

02:13:10   [beeping]

02:13:12   [ Silence ]