00:00:00 ◼ ► So you two are probably slightly too young to remember this, but when I was a kid there was tons
00:00:06 ◼ ► of stuff like on TV and books and everything about Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster and UFOs. Did you
00:00:13 ◼ ► catch the tail end of this craze maybe? Like probably the same books in your school library,
00:00:17 ◼ ► but anyway I used to watch these things all the time on TV. It was like Secrets of the Unknown or
00:00:22 ◼ ► that thing hosted by Leonard Nimoy and they would, you know, talk about each one show about each one
00:00:27 ◼ ► of the things. They'd show that same blurry picture of Bigfoot or they'd show that little like the
00:00:30 ◼ ► silhouette of the Loch Ness Monster, like one or two famous pictures of that, or like the UFO shows
00:00:35 ◼ ► that have like that same blurry picture of a hubcap or like these videos of lights going by
00:00:40 ◼ ► or, you know, this blurry black and white photograph of something. And I would just watch
00:00:45 ◼ ► this stuff for hours. Like they could do like an hour-long network special with like one photograph
00:00:50 ◼ ► and they would just milk that photograph for all it was worth, right? And I was fascinated by it
00:00:54 ◼ ► because it's like there's these secret things in the world that nobody knows about, but people
00:00:58 ◼ ► have seen like they do tons of interviews. Like I saw the lights in the sky and it came down to the
00:01:02 ◼ ► into the clearing in the woods and, you know, plenty of that. But then just like the one picture,
00:01:06 ◼ ► right? Or like the one outline of Loch Ness Monster, but all the tales from the people who
00:01:10 ◼ ► are around the Loch Ness Monster, they heard about it. And, you know, it's, we still do this,
00:01:13 ◼ ► I suppose, with a certain other kind of mystery things where you just stretch out a tiny bit of
00:01:18 ◼ ► content for, you know, an hour at a time. But if you had told like, you know, the kid version of me,
00:01:24 ◼ ► that someday people like everybody would have a phone in their pocket, you know, it's like,
00:01:29 ◼ ► we're gonna get that Loch Ness Monster now. Like UFOs will not escape us now. Like the only reason
00:01:34 ◼ ► we don't have this footage is because you're just out in the woods, you know, you're on a camping
00:01:37 ◼ ► trip, who has their camera with them? Or if you have your camera with you, like it's in your camera
00:01:41 ◼ ► bag or something and the UFO goes by and you miss it, right? Same thing with Bigfoot. You're out
00:01:45 ◼ ► hiking in the woods, you can't get your camera out in time or who even has a camera with them. But as
00:01:49 ◼ ► soon as we, you know, if you told me that everybody's gonna have a camera, we are gonna have so
00:01:54 ◼ ► many Bigfoot pictures, we're gonna have so many UFO pictures, we will have like the Loch Ness Monster
00:01:58 ◼ ► will be like documented and high def video. It would be amazing. That's what I would have said.
00:02:04 ◼ ► But of course, here we are today where pretty much everybody does have a phone in their pocket. And
00:02:09 ◼ ► what happened when most of the world got a phone in their pocket in the form of a smartphone,
00:02:14 ◼ ► or a camera, sorry, a camera in their pocket in the form of a smartphone was we didn't see
00:02:19 ◼ ► tons more pictures of UFOs. We didn't see tons more pictures of Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster.
00:02:25 ◼ ► What we did see were tons and tons more pictures of police beating people up. That's what we saw.
00:02:33 ◼ ► Not what you would have expected to see, not what the child would have expected to see.
00:02:38 ◼ ► And this is not a new original thought. I've heard this many times in the past, but I dwell on it.
00:02:44 ◼ ► I think about it from time to time because it is a strange facet of technology, right? From the
00:02:51 ◼ ► Rodney King tape, which I think was probably VHS or whatever the heck it was to today's smartphone
00:02:56 ◼ ► videos of police brutality that we see everywhere online. Technology has made what has been a
00:03:01 ◼ ► reality for centuries visible to everybody. And I think most of us don't like what we see.
00:03:06 ◼ ► This country has a racism problem, and it has a policing problem. And whatever we've done in the
00:03:17 ◼ ► Yeah, and I'm sorry if talking about this offends anyone. It's not my intention, and I'm not
00:03:25 ◼ ► anywhere near an expert in any of this. So I'm actually very nervous and uncomfortable to talk
00:03:30 ◼ ► about this. But that is a good thing right now. A lot of us need to be made a little nervous and
00:03:36 ◼ ► uncomfortable right now because silence and complacency is worse. So I'm going to start by
00:03:47 ◼ ► and that's privilege. When I was first accused of not acknowledging my privilege a few years ago,
00:03:52 ◼ ► I didn't know really what it was. I hadn't really thought about it. And I felt a bit defensive when
00:03:57 ◼ ► people started saying that, as if I was being attacked unreasonably for something that I didn't
00:04:01 ◼ ► even think I did anything. And I also felt that it denied the work I've done to get to where I am,
00:04:08 ◼ ► because I come from a lower middle class, single parent family, and I've worked really hard to earn
00:04:15 ◼ ► everything I have. But a huge degree of privilege was under all of that. I'm a white, cisgender,
00:04:24 ◼ ► heterosexual male. I was born in the US. I was raised Catholic. I was put through decent schools.
00:04:29 ◼ ► There's basically nothing about me that is widely persecuted by any group. I don't get stereotyped.
00:04:36 ◼ ► I don't get treated unfairly by pretty much any part of society. I mean, I'm a nerd. That's never
00:04:40 ◼ ► been great. But even that these days is fairly reasonable. And I had it hard growing up in
00:04:47 ◼ ► various ways. And so accusing me of being privileged felt like it denied me of the ways it was hard for
00:04:53 ◼ ► me. And if discussions about privilege frustrate or anger you, that's understandable because it's
00:04:59 ◼ ► uncomfortable. It's a whole uncomfortable truth under everything, but it doesn't mean it's not
00:05:04 ◼ ► there. And we need to face uncomfortable truths a lot of the time. And privilege doesn't mean that
00:05:11 ◼ ► you don't have problems or challenges in your life. But it does mean that you don't have certain
00:05:17 ◼ ► types of problems and challenges that a lot of other people have. And you probably don't even
00:05:23 ◼ ► ever need to think about those problems because of some inherent aspect of your genes or where you
00:05:29 ◼ ► were born or who your parents were. And that is absolutely a real thing. Being privileged in
00:05:35 ◼ ► certain ways doesn't mean that your life is easy or perfect. And it doesn't mean that you're a bad
00:05:39 ◼ ► person, or that you need to apologize for who you are. But it is a necessary concept to keep in mind
00:05:46 ◼ ► that you have advantages that other people don't. And that part of your privilege is that you
00:05:51 ◼ ► probably never even knew about it until someone pointed it out to you because you never even had
00:05:55 ◼ ► to think about it. Now the flip side to that is that a lot of people are unfairly disadvantaged
00:06:01 ◼ ► in society merely because of who they are. Now I don't need to be afraid to wear a hoodie,
00:06:18 ◼ ► I've never had to fear for my life if I saw a police officer. I've been pulled over a few times
00:06:25 ◼ ► earlier in life for minor driving infractions, and I was never terrified that my life could be about
00:06:31 ◼ ► to end. And the last time I was pulled over was a decade ago or more, and I was let off with just
00:06:37 ◼ ► a warning. And now I'm a white man in my late 30s. I am invisible to the police. Part of the immense
00:06:45 ◼ ► privilege I've been given is that I don't need to think about the police at all in my daily life,
00:06:54 ◼ ► Millions of people out there are not so lucky. Now being a police officer, you know, it's a risky
00:07:03 ◼ ► and it's a hard and it's a thankless job. You know, they're just people, and many cops, possibly
00:07:08 ◼ ► even most of them, are good people. I know a few cops myself and they seem like good ones. They
00:07:13 ◼ ► seem like good people. Some of our listeners are even cops. You know, you've written in before.
00:07:16 ◼ ► But there's a lot of cops out there who are assholes at best, and often violent assholes.
00:07:25 ◼ ► Many cops out there act more like wannabe military soldiers who are battling against the people
00:07:32 ◼ ► they're ostensibly there to protect and serve. Like they're at war against their own citizens.
00:07:36 ◼ ► And even honestly making an analogy to soldiers here feels like an insult to actual military
00:07:41 ◼ ► soldiers who are usually much better disciplined and probably more accountable to their actions
00:07:44 ◼ ► than bad police officers in the US are. And there aren't just a handful of bad police officers in
00:07:50 ◼ ► the US. There is something deeply toxic in police culture and their attitude and the power and
00:07:58 ◼ ► political structures around the police that not only seems to prevent bad behavior from being
00:08:03 ◼ ► punished or weeded out, but actually cultivates and protects bad behavior that's there. And bad
00:08:10 ◼ ► police officers have been unnecessarily assaulting and executing citizens that they're supposed to
00:08:14 ◼ ► be protecting for decades, especially black people. And the system of weeding them out or bringing
00:08:28 ◼ ► under-accountable and under-supervised police force, it's especially damaging because the
00:08:33 ◼ ► police are where you go if someone is hurting or threatening you. So if it's the police themselves
00:08:38 ◼ ► doing it, most people have no realistic recourse available to them. So because of the police's role
00:08:46 ◼ ► and their power, they don't just need to be held responsibly accountable for like a basic level of
00:08:55 ◼ ► average people, but instead in most places in the US they're held to a much lower standard
00:09:00 ◼ ► than most people are. And nobody in the US suffers more destruction by militant, violent,
00:09:09 ◼ ► unaccountable bad police officers than black people. Now, a well-functioning society tries
00:09:16 ◼ ► to put everyone on a level playing field. They try to neutralize as many unfair sources of privilege
00:09:23 ◼ ► as possible so that everybody has the same rights and the same opportunities. And I don't know how
00:09:28 ◼ ► anybody can look around the US and think that we are anywhere near that. We do not have a
00:09:33 ◼ ► well-functioning society. We have a lot of work to do in many different areas, especially how the US
00:09:41 ◼ ► treats black people. And a few years ago when the phrase "black lives matter" came up, it's such a
00:09:49 ◼ ► simple and elegant and powerful phrase. "Black lives matter." It's not about harming anyone.
00:09:56 ◼ ► It isn't about putting anyone else down. It's a simple, powerful statement of fact that our
00:10:07 ◼ ► made so many people so uncomfortable and so angry that they had to immediately counter it with
00:10:15 ◼ ► things like "all lives matter" or the even worse police glorifying version of "blue lives matter."
00:10:20 ◼ ► And not only do those completely miss the point, they actively fight against it. And in most cases,
00:10:28 ◼ ► it's not people being ignorant. They actually intend to fight against it. Most people who
00:10:32 ◼ ► have a problem hearing the phrase "black lives matter" are refusing to acknowledge that the US
00:10:39 ◼ ► treats black lives as more expendable or less valuable than white lives. That's a hard thing
00:10:44 ◼ ► to think about, but the reality, actual data from many sources over many decades supports that.
00:10:51 ◼ ► Nobody should have to assert that their life matters. But the sad truth is that black people
00:11:00 ◼ ► still do. And that's awful. Nobody should react negatively or defensively when someone else
00:11:08 ◼ ► asserts that their life matters. And yet that's how a lot of people react when black people are
00:11:12 ◼ ► the ones making that assertion. Our country is still extremely racist. We have an overtly
00:11:21 ◼ ► racist president who empowers and encourages white supremacists in 2020. That is completely
00:11:30 ◼ ► ridiculous, but it's true. We have an incredibly long way to go. Black lives matter. And if that
00:11:39 ◼ ► makes you uncomfortable to hear, you need to take a moment to examine that. You need to really,
00:11:43 ◼ ► truly examine why you have a problem with people fighting to get their society to behave as though
00:11:50 ◼ ► their lives matter. Imagine if you had to fight to get your society to value your life simply
00:11:56 ◼ ► because of who you are. And then consider why we let our society become and remain so dysfunctional
00:12:12 ◼ ► Now, we have the immense privilege of being able to talk about tech stuff for the next couple of
00:12:20 ◼ ► hours, providing us and you an escape from the really bad realities of what's going on out there.
00:12:27 ◼ ► So we're going to try our best to do it and to keep the show going as we've done every week for
00:12:32 ◼ ► the last seven years. Try to make the world better with whatever way you can. Please try to help. Try
00:12:40 ◼ ► to become aware of what's actually going on. Vote when the time comes to vote. And in the meantime,
00:12:46 ◼ ► help any way you possibly can. Yeah, Marco speaks for all three of us in saying that black lives
00:12:54 ◼ ► matter. I know that all three of us are deeply upset and concerned with what is going on.
00:13:01 ◼ ► We're doing what we can by talking to all of you, amongst other things, to try to do our little part
00:13:08 ◼ ► in making things better. I don't know what to say to someone who finds that black lives matter is a
00:13:19 ◼ ► controversial statement. Like to me, this is the way it should be. Everyone should be equal.
00:13:26 ◼ ► Everyone is not equal, unfortunately, but they should be. And I personally, now I will not speak
00:13:31 ◼ ► for the three of us. I have no time or tolerance for people who feel otherwise. And I just wanted
00:13:36 ◼ ► to thank both Marco and John for saying so much more eloquently than I could have exactly the
00:13:42 ◼ ► things that I am thinking as well. To try to pivot this a little bit toward technology, the three of
00:13:48 ◼ ► us thought it would be nice to read a little bit of a memo that Tim Cook had written to Apple
00:13:53 ◼ ► employees about George Floyd and kind of what's been going on. We're not going to read the whole
00:13:58 ◼ ► thing, but I do think there are a couple of passages that are really important. And it is
00:14:05 ◼ ► coming from a gay man who has certainly put up with his own difficulties growing up and even today,
00:14:13 ◼ ► the things that I don't have to worry about. Just like I don't have to worry about being white.
00:14:18 ◼ ► I don't have to worry about being white. I am a heterosexual, cisgendered white dude. It's pretty
00:14:24 ◼ ► easy for me. It's pretty easy by comparison. So I thought Tim's memo was very interesting. Let me
00:14:30 ◼ ► read a couple of passages. "To stand together, we must stand up for one another and recognize the
00:14:35 ◼ ► fear, hurt, and outrage rightly provoked by the senseless killing of George Floyd and a much
00:14:40 ◼ ► longer history of racism. That painful past is still present today, not only in the form of
00:14:47 ◼ ► violence, but in the everyday experience of deeply rooted discrimination." And he goes on a little
00:14:55 ◼ ► later, "To create change, we have to re-examine our own views and actions in light of a pain that
00:15:01 ◼ ► is deeply felt, but too often ignored. Issues of human dignity will not abide standing on the
00:15:08 ◼ ► sidelines. To our colleagues in the Black community, we see you. You matter and your lives matter.
00:15:15 ◼ ► This is a moment when many people may want nothing more than a return to normalcy or to a status quo
00:15:20 ◼ ► that is only comfortable if we avert our gaze from injustice. As difficult as it may be to admit,
00:15:26 ◼ ► that desire is itself a sign of privilege. George Floyd's death is shocking and tragic proof that we
00:15:33 ◼ ► must aim far higher than a quote unquote normal future and build one that lives up to the highest
00:15:38 ◼ ► ideals of equality and justice." So Tim goes on to say, "Apple is donating to Equal Justice
00:15:45 ◼ ► Initiative among others and offering a two-to-one match for employee donations in June, especially
00:15:50 ◼ ► if you're an Apple employee, but certainly any of you listeners. If you have a couple of bucks to
00:15:55 ◼ ► scrape together, I think the Equal Justice Initiative is a great place to throw a few dollars.
00:16:01 ◼ ► And if there's other ways that you can help, I absolutely think that that's a great thing to do,
00:16:08 ◼ ► now. Jon, particularly with a little contribution from Marco and I, has put together a whole ton of
00:16:19 ◼ ► you can go through and look at these links and try to learn a little bit more. Certainly,
00:16:25 ◼ ► I need to look at some of these links that I have not seen before. And I need to learn a little bit
00:16:28 ◼ ► more. We all do. And by the way, about the donation thing, like that's part of it. If you're listening
00:16:34 ◼ ► to this, a lot of people are like, "Oh, I care about these things. And I agree with you, but I
00:16:37 ◼ ► don't know what to do." I think that's a common feeling. What do I do? I don't know what to do.
00:16:41 ◼ ► We got to do something. I guess I can tweet a hashtag, but honestly, what can I actually do?
00:16:45 ◼ ► So that's kind of what these notes are about. And I was personally in a similar situation.
00:16:54 ◼ ► what do I give money to? Paralyzed by choice. Look at all these different places." And it's like,
00:16:57 ◼ ► you just have to give it somewhere. And what I personally did, not that I next time recommend
00:17:02 ◼ ► this, I used Apple as a proxy to say, "Well, I bet Apple's not going to give their own money
00:17:08 ◼ ► to some fake fly-by-night charity that doesn't actually do the good work that it claims to do."
00:17:13 ◼ ► So I gave money to the Equal Justice Initiative. Maybe that's foolish, but honestly, it's better
00:17:18 ◼ ► than just being paralyzed by choice and being not sure if you're sending it to the right place or
00:17:22 ◼ ► whatever. Apple's giving it to that. I didn't get it to do one match, unfortunately. But
00:17:27 ◼ ► that's what I did. And these links in the show notes are trying to help answer the question of,
00:17:34 ◼ ► "I don't know what to do. What should I do? And how should I do it?" Maybe you don't want to or
00:17:39 ◼ ► can't give money, but you can give time or you can just learn about things or whatever. So there's
00:17:45 ◼ ► going to be a ton of links. There might be better ones if you have suggestions. You can send them
00:17:49 ◼ ► and we can add them to the show notes or whatever, or just tweet them to people. But I think they
00:17:53 ◼ ► answer a lot of common questions. I'm just going to go down and read the titles of them. It'll help
00:17:58 ◼ ► say what kind of links there are. First one is "11 Things You Can Do to Help Black Lives Matter
00:18:01 ◼ ► and Police Violence." Everyone loves listicles, right? Just give me the list. And it's not 10,
00:18:06 ◼ ► it's 11. "How to Safely and Ethically Film Policemen's Misconduct." At the top of the show,
00:18:11 ◼ ► we're talking about the ubiquity of filming. There are things to know about how to do that safely and
00:18:18 ◼ ► ethically. And so there's an article on it. "How to be an activist when you're unable to attend
00:18:26 ◼ ► Protests Safely in the Age of Surveillance." If you are at a protest, how do you protect yourself?
00:18:32 ◼ ► We know that there's tons of ways that third party companies and the government can track you,
00:18:39 ◼ ► and this will help you counteract some of that. "Books about Race and Racism." Here's a big list
00:18:44 ◼ ► of books. If you want to sit down with a book and read and learn about this, there's a lot to learn,
00:18:47 ◼ ► and there are a lot of really good books on it. There are podcasts. Hey, surprise, you like podcasts.
00:18:52 ◼ ► There are podcasts that talk about racism. 16 podcasts, another listicle. There's a lot of them.
00:18:57 ◼ ► Pick one. Listen to a couple episodes. Learn something. There was an interesting Twitter thread
00:19:01 ◼ ► by a data scientist who has a bunch of research-based solutions to stopping police violence,
00:19:06 ◼ ► basically saying, "Let's look at the data. Let's look at things that have been tried and measure
00:19:10 ◼ ► how effective they had been." It's a little bit turns out-y, but there's a lot of good data in
00:19:14 ◼ ► there. Again, he's a data scientist. Check out that Twitter thread. There's also a big site that
00:19:20 ◼ ► Obama put up, which is a similar type of, "Hey, you don't know what to do. Come to this site,
00:19:24 ◼ ► and we'll link to a bunch of things." Again, using Obama as a proxy for probably linking to some
00:19:30 ◼ ► charity that's a scam or a front or whatever, probably pretty well vetted, and lots of links
00:19:34 ◼ ► to learn more. Then the final thing I'll add is one of the other things that I've tried to make
00:19:40 ◼ ► myself do as a benefit to myself and my family, but also to myself, is find a way to talk to you,
00:19:46 ◼ ► if you have kids, find a way to talk to your kids in an age-appropriate way about this issue.
00:19:52 ◼ ► Because if you don't talk to them about it, no matter what age they are, unless they're an actual
00:19:56 ◼ ► infant, they know that something is going on, just in the same way as if you didn't talk to your kids
00:20:01 ◼ ► about coronavirus, they're going to notice, "Why aren't I going to school?" Kids know. Kids know
00:20:05 ◼ ► about this stuff. If you don't talk about it at all, I feel like you're missing an opportunity
00:20:10 ◼ ► for both you and your kid to come to a better understanding of this. I know it's hard to talk
00:20:16 ◼ ► to your kids about this. I know. I have kids. I try to do it. It's not easy. But forcing yourself
00:20:21 ◼ ► to figure out how to do that, how do you talk to a five-year-old about this? Forcing yourself to
00:20:25 ◼ ► figure out how to do that makes you think about it more, just like saying stuff on a podcast makes
00:20:29 ◼ ► you have to think about it or writing makes you have to think about it. Even more so, when you're
00:20:33 ◼ ► talking to your own kid, you don't want to screw it up. You're like, "How do I talk to my kid about
00:20:37 ◼ ► this?" So they're not scared. They don't have nightmares about it. But I do want them to know.
00:20:44 ◼ ► Find a way. Practice between you and your partner, if you have one, to try to figure out what you're
00:20:52 ◼ ► going to say. Practice in your head. But I found that an important and valuable exercise. Obviously,
00:20:58 ◼ ► it's a little bit easier when your kids are older, unless they're really ornery teens. But either
00:21:07 ◼ ► show notes as well, I'm going to try to add—and I will I will tell the other guys that they will
00:21:14 ◼ ► try to add—some links to some Black developers in our community that you can follow. And really,
00:21:21 ◼ ► just having these voices in your world and in your timeline can make your perspective shift. And
00:21:28 ◼ ► I really recommend adding as many as you can. All of them, if possible. And definitely patronizing
00:21:37 ◼ ► their apps and watching their conference talks and so on. So we will put some links as well in
00:21:43 ◼ ► the show notes. There's a lot here. If I remember, I'll also put some book recommendations that I
00:21:48 ◼ ► cannot vouch for myself, but I've been told are good. And I've been told by people who would know.
00:21:53 ◼ ► So I think that's much better than an endorsement from me. So really, if there's ever a time
00:22:01 ◼ ► to let us three nerds assign homework, I think now is the time to try to spend a few minutes and look
00:22:09 ◼ ► through these links and see what you can learn. Because all of us, myself extremely included,
00:22:14 ◼ ► have a lot to learn. And I think that although this is a terrible awful situation that we're
00:22:21 ◼ ► in the midst of as we record on the evening of June 3, I really pray and hope that it will be
00:22:28 ◼ ► ultimately for the best and that good will come of it. As far as going forward, this is important to
00:22:33 ◼ ► us. We will not be making the show about this, but it's important to us and it may come up again.
00:22:38 ◼ ► It likely will come up again. And we will not shy away from talking about it if necessary. But that
00:22:43 ◼ ► being said, as Marco and Jon had said earlier, we want to provide some amount of release and some
00:22:51 ◼ ► amount of entertainment for ourselves, for you. So once I give these two guys a chance for closing
00:22:57 ◼ ► thoughts, we're going to move on with a more traditional show. I'm ready to do a tech podcast
00:23:01 ◼ ► now, I think. Yeah. Alex Chan writes, "They were struck by something that Jon said on the last
00:23:09 ◼ ► episode. Jon said if you threw the new ATP website at Netscape Navigator 3.1, it would die horribly
00:23:14 ◼ ► and it would look like nothing. And Alex tried it. And Alex said, "It turns out what actually
00:23:20 ◼ ► happens if you try to view ATP.fm in a very old Netscape Navigator is that it looks like nothing
00:23:24 ◼ ► because the browser gives you an error." And the error that they got was, "Netscape and this server
00:23:28 ◼ ► cannot communicate securely because they have no common encryption algorithms." Which makes sense,
00:23:32 ◼ ► but it's kind of a bummer. That being said, Alex tried the next best thing, which is what I would
00:23:37 ◼ ► have tried, which is Lynx. If you're not familiar, Lynx is a text-only web browser that is designed
00:23:43 ◼ ► for like the command line. And Alex writes, "But the site does work in Lynx and is fairly usable,
00:23:48 ◼ ► including the flexbox on the store page, which it looks straight past. All of those paragraph
00:23:53 ◼ ► and unordered list tags have paid off." I just think this is delightful. I don't have any
00:23:57 ◼ ► screenshots, unfortunately, but I do think it's absolutely delightful. Yeah. The thing I forgot
00:24:02 ◼ ► about Netscape is that SSL/TLS has changed so much in the years between then and now that they
00:24:09 ◼ ► can't agree. They can't do an encryption handshake between themselves. And so if your site insists
00:24:14 ◼ ► on HTTPS, the browser can just not make a secure connection to modern servers because basically the
00:24:20 ◼ ► algorithms and protocols that were used back in the day are now all considered insecure and
00:24:24 ◼ ► aren't supported by good websites. So that's a bummer. But yeah. Yeah. It's one of the weird
00:24:30 ◼ ► things that like it kind of a lot of old devices now, like a lot of older OSs, older laptops,
00:24:36 ◼ ► older, you know, other devices are just rendered fairly useless these days because of this
00:24:41 ◼ ► particular issue. Like if you try to boot up an old OS, it can still run a lot of old software made
00:24:46 ◼ ► for it, but anything that involves the internet will probably fail because of this exact thing.
00:24:51 ◼ ► And there's usually no possible way to update super old hardware to any kind of software that
00:25:02 ◼ ► I think the chat room might've gotten this in the last episode and I just didn't see it. But
00:25:06 ◼ ► anyway, I was trying to remember what the heck the name of an OpenDock thing is that, you know,
00:25:10 ◼ ► not the container, but the things that bring tools into the container that you can use to edit the
00:25:14 ◼ ► document. And apparently the word I was looking for was parts and OpenDock part, according to,
00:25:19 ◼ ► I think this is from Wikipedia and OpenDock part can be anything to a normal app that a normal
00:25:23 ◼ ► application would offer. For example, a spreadsheet part, a text part, a database part and so on.
00:25:27 ◼ ► So there you go. OpenDock parts. The world feels better for having known that little piece of
00:25:33 ◼ ► trivia. Oh, the world, the world should feel even more better about this next one. Last episode.
00:25:38 ◼ ► This is why I have to write things down. Last episode when we were talking about clipboard
00:25:41 ◼ ► managers, I made a mental note to myself. I was, we started to talk about it. Make sure you
00:25:46 ◼ ► mentioned that Windows has one. And I didn't write it down and we got off on, I was listening back to
00:25:53 ◼ ► Yeah. Well, we collectively got off on a tangent and then I grabbed the tangent at the end and got
00:25:57 ◼ ► off and like, oh, well, I guess we're done with the clipboard thing. And I never mentioned that.
00:25:59 ◼ ► Yes. Windows, like so many things, has built this new clipboard manager. I don't think it's enabled
00:26:04 ◼ ► by default. I think it's been there for a while now, but if you have Windows and you want a
00:26:09 ◼ ► clipboard manager that is part of the OS and is made by Microsoft, it's there. Consult Google
00:26:15 ◼ ► to find out how to enable it. I think maybe it's just Windows key plus V or something. But anyway,
00:26:18 ◼ ► we'll put links in the show notes to give more information about that. It's a simple clipboard
00:26:22 ◼ ► manager, but it's there. I can't believe you knew about it and you could have saved us from a week
00:26:26 ◼ ► of getting the same follow up over and over again. And you didn't say anything. That's why I made a
00:26:30 ◼ ► note to myself. I'm like, oh, make sure you mention that. Cause you don't want to spend a week getting
00:26:33 ◼ ► here. And the reason I know about it, of course, is I'm spending time at Windows, which is basically
00:26:37 ◼ ► my destiny launcher. That's why I know it's there. Oh my goodness. That's delightful. All right. And
00:26:45 ◼ ► then I guess it probably falls to me to do this thing that's slightly uncomfortable this particular
00:26:51 ◼ ► week, but the ATP store, this is the last week for it. The pre-orders will end on the 7th,
00:26:58 ◼ ► which is Sunday, I believe in the evening. So if you would like any of our sweet, sweet merch,
00:27:04 ◼ ► please feel free to go and throw a few dollars that way. This is after you've given to your
00:27:10 ◼ ► favorite Black Lives Matter charity. This is after you've bought a bunch of books about racism that
00:27:14 ◼ ► you're going to read and learn all about after you've done all of that. Exactly. If you still
00:27:18 ◼ ► also want like an ATP mug or something, we're selling them to the 7th. Don't wait too long,
00:27:22 ◼ ► because it'll be gone. Yep. So don't forget every single time somebody sends a tweet. Oh,
00:27:27 ◼ ► is it too late? It's too late. Isn't it? I forgot. Oh, I forgot. It's too late. The good news is
00:27:32 ◼ ► the Black Lives Matter charity and those books, they're on sale forever. Yep. Never too late for
00:27:37 ◼ ► them. One of my favorite things to do is to tell you guys about why I'm a moron. And this is Casey
00:27:45 ◼ ► Sanetti at Corner episode number 379. You don't need to tell us Casey. Oh, oh no. Sick burn. You
00:27:53 ◼ ► can take that a lot of different ways. The fact that you chose to take it as an insult, it's just,
00:27:56 ◼ ► I find insulting personally. Oh God, this is going nowhere good. Okay. So we got a new TV in,
00:28:03 ◼ ► on Cyber Monday this past year. So we got an LG OLED 55C9 AUA, which is basically the 55 inch 4k
00:28:12 ◼ ► HDR OLED. And I really like that TV. I really do. It's, it's been really good to us. It works really
00:28:19 ◼ ► well. And after having it, after having had it for, I don't know, maybe a month, I finally got
00:28:25 ◼ ► around to putting it on our Apple home kit home. And sometimes shortly thereafter, although I don't
00:28:33 ◼ ► know exactly when it was, we noticed this thing would just periodically turn itself off, which was
00:28:39 ◼ ► really frustrating. Can I offer the, can I shortcut your story or do you not want me to spoil it?
00:28:45 ◼ ► You always do this to me, but fine, John shortcut my story. I don't want to spoil it entirely.
00:28:49 ◼ ► I'll give you a separate second one. Right. So I've actually had people ask me about this
00:28:54 ◼ ► very thing. They say, Hey, this is slightly different. Hey, when you, when you turn off
00:28:58 ◼ ► your TV, does it turn back on in a couple of seconds? It's kind of the opposite of your
00:29:02 ◼ ► problem. Right. Weird. And I, I do have that happen and your story, I'm not going to spoil it,
00:29:08 ◼ ► but I had the same thing happen with my receiver where I'd just be watching TV with my receiver
00:29:14 ◼ ► and then it would just turn off like in the middle of watching a movie. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And
00:29:19 ◼ ► you know, of course the receiver turns off and eventually like just everything reroutes and the
00:29:22 ◼ ► sound starts coming out of the TV or whatever. And at first I was like, I got to return. This
00:29:25 ◼ ► is something wrong with it. Like it overheats or something or anyway, I don't want to spoil it.
00:29:28 ◼ ► Continue with your story. I'll be revealed. Uh oh. Thank you. I appreciate your incredible
00:29:33 ◼ ► self-control. So eventually both of us, but particularly Erin has had enough of this because
00:29:40 ◼ ► she's a normal human and doesn't want to put up with my bull crap. And so at some point she
00:29:44 ◼ ► basically said to me, look, we either need to get this thing serviced or returned or what have you,
00:29:49 ◼ ► or you need to find a way to fix this. So of course my natural inclination is I was always
00:29:54 ◼ ► an HDMI CEC unicorn. I guess my time has ended and I no longer have my single horn on my head.
00:30:02 ◼ ► I am no longer a CEC unicorn. I am a CEC every man. And that's the problem. HDMI CEC if you
00:30:08 ◼ ► recall is this thing. I forget exactly what it stands for. It doesn't matter, but it lets
00:30:12 ◼ ► various different devices like power on and off other devices. Right. And for the longest time,
00:30:17 ◼ ► even on my last TV, my 1080 TV, it always worked. I never had a problem. So I decide, you know what,
00:30:24 ◼ ► I'm going to go nuclear and I'm going to turn off anything that even smells like it's something that
00:30:31 ◼ ► would automatically turn the machine, turn the TV off. I'm going to turn, I'm going to turn off
00:30:35 ◼ ► the auto like sleep thing, which I know is probably driving, driving John up a wall, just thinking
00:30:40 ◼ ► about it, but I'm gonna turn that off. HDMI CEC is off. Everything's off. Gets taken out of the
00:30:45 ◼ ► Apple home kit home. I forget what else I flipped off, but I flipped everything off and sure enough,
00:30:52 ◼ ► it doesn't turn itself off anymore. Now this is good because that means it's a, and I'm doing
00:30:58 ◼ ► major air quotes here, software problem in the sense that, you know, some setting somewhere has
00:31:03 ◼ ► screwed this up. I don't know what it is, but something somewhere screwed it up. So over time,
00:31:09 ◼ ► I've been a little, I've been trying to perform a little more science and I've been slowly re-adding
00:31:13 ◼ ► different things like the auto power off if you leave it on for a long time and like, you know,
00:31:17 ◼ ► idle. I eventually added HDMI CEC and waited like a month and that wasn't an issue. And
00:31:24 ◼ ► it was the weirdest thing. I realized that only when the garage door raspberry pie was on the
00:31:31 ◼ ► network. No, I'm just kidding. That would have been kind of hilarious, but no, that's not it at all.
00:31:39 ◼ ► So anyway, so about a week ago, I finally re-added it after having been off our Apple home for a long
00:31:45 ◼ ► time. I finally re-added it to our home kit home and sure enough, just a day or two back,
00:31:52 ◼ ► it turned itself off. Remind me again, I know I asked this when you first brought this up
00:31:57 ◼ ► many shows ago, remind me again, why you want it on here, your home kit home thing. I would
00:32:03 ◼ ► like to integrate it with something that mostly works most of the time and make it less reliable.
00:32:07 ◼ ► But he had a reason. Was it just so you could like turn it off by voice? What was the reason?
00:32:11 ◼ ► Yeah, basically so I could turn off my voice. Like there are occasions that I do not have a remote
00:32:15 ◼ ► handy that can turn the TV off. To be clear, it's very unlikely and I can get off my lazy
00:32:20 ◼ ► hindquarters and just go walk across the room and get the remote. You should get the clapper.
00:32:25 ◼ ► I should get the clapper. In any case, I mean, part of the reason I got this TV is because I
00:32:33 ◼ ► wanted something that had home kit just because I thought it would be like future proofing in the
00:32:36 ◼ ► same way I've made the speech many times. I would only buy cars that had CarPlay now, I have Marco,
00:32:41 ◼ ► because I want a future proof. I only want to buy a TV or perhaps future, you know, home electronics
00:32:47 ◼ ► where relevant that have home kit support. And you're right, like your implied statement here is
00:32:52 ◼ ► that I don't need home kit. Yeah, correct. No argument, but I wanted it. And so it turned itself
00:32:58 ◼ ► off the other day as we were watching it and I was upset and Aaron of course pounces all over me.
00:33:04 ◼ ► Look, see, see, I told you. And, and, but I said, well, wait, hold on. This is the first time it's
00:33:10 ◼ ► happened. And I don't know what it was about this particular moment, but it occurred to me,
00:33:15 ◼ ► wait a second. It is exactly 6.40 PM, which to any other family on the planet means nothing,
00:33:23 ◼ ► but to the list family means something because at exactly 6.40 PM home kit runs our nighttime
00:33:31 ◼ ► automation. I don't recall ever having been ever having added our TV to that automation,
00:33:40 ◼ ► but sure enough, when I went into whichever one of the 17 different places you can find a home kit
00:33:45 ◼ ► automation and found the good night or go to bed or whatever it was called automation, sure enough,
00:33:50 ◼ ► guess what was there? Turn the TV off. And so finally, I think I've solved my problem. And the
00:33:57 ◼ ► TV, since I've done that just a few days ago has not just randomly turned itself off for no reason.
00:34:02 ◼ ► And I bring all this up because I was really scared to ask like Federico, who I think has the same
00:34:06 ◼ ► TV. Marco, I think you have the same TV. I didn't want to ask anyone like, do you have this problem?
00:34:12 ◼ ► Cause I really had this, this, this creeping suspicion that it was something dumb I had done
00:34:17 ◼ ► now in my defense. Like I said, I don't think I knowingly or, or autumn or willingly added it to
00:34:22 ◼ ► the good night automation. But I do think I am using the like the canned good night automation.
00:34:28 ◼ ► And it is very possible. I don't know this for sure, but it is possible that adding a TV to your
00:34:34 ◼ ► home automatically sucks it into the good night automation and tells it to turn itself off. If
00:34:39 ◼ ► that's not true, it's okay. But I wanted to bring this up as kind of a PSA. If you are also having
00:34:44 ◼ ► random issues like this with one of your devices, Hey, maybe check out your home kit automations.
00:34:50 ◼ ► It might be there in summary. I'm an idiot. Yeah. Well, so the heading of this item says
00:34:54 ◼ ► Casey is a moron. So I thought for sure it was just the sleep timer, which is a feature that
00:34:58 ◼ ► like every TV has had forever. Basically you can tell it to turn itself off after a certain period
00:35:03 ◼ ► of time or at a certain time, like, like television have had this for decades, right? Why my receiver,
00:35:10 ◼ ► it has something similar where it's like, it's basically like a timer. Like once you turn the
00:35:14 ◼ ► receiver on after X number of minutes, it will turn itself off as a way to prevent it from just
00:35:19 ◼ ► being on all night. If you just go to sleep and forget about it, it'll turn itself off.
00:35:23 ◼ ► But I never set this timer and out of the box, it was set for like three hours. And if you're
00:35:28 ◼ ► watching some TV and then you put on a movie, you know, depending on how much TV had been watched
00:35:32 ◼ ► before that, you could be in the middle or towards the end of the movie and it will just shut off.
00:35:43 ◼ ► back before the kids were totally addicted to their iPads, they actually used to sit in front
00:35:46 ◼ ► of the television and watch stuff. And then you'd come over and you'd watch stuff after they go to
00:35:49 ◼ ► bed and it's totally plausible that television, you know, the receiver at least could be on during
00:35:52 ◼ ► that whole time. Anyway, yeah, just fixing that timer was like one of the things I did in the
00:35:57 ◼ ► first month I had it, which was refreshing. The other thing I mentioned before of like, hey,
00:36:03 ◼ ► when you turn your television off for the remote, sometimes does it turn right back on?
00:36:06 ◼ ► I have a theory on that. I don't know what's causing it, but I am, I'm using my TiVo remote
00:36:13 ◼ ► to turn my television on and off. You can train the TiVo remote either by entering a code or like,
00:36:18 ◼ ► it has a learning feature. Anyway, you can use the TiVo remote to control features of your television
00:36:26 ◼ ► And what I always assume is happening is I press the power button and the TiVo remote sprays out
00:36:33 ◼ ► a bunch of IR stuff. It's like, all right, any Panasonic TV anywhere in my vicinity, turn off now.
00:36:39 ◼ ► And the first little bit of that spray turns my TV off. And then like, I put the remote down on the
00:36:46 ◼ ► end table and the last little bit of the spray turns it on. That's my theory. I can't prove it.
00:36:51 ◼ ► And I don't know, like if I, if I like put my hand over the IR part right after the TV turns off,
00:36:55 ◼ ► does it not happen? And it doesn't happen every time. It happens like once every three months
00:36:59 ◼ ► and you start thinking you're crazy. So I don't have a solution to that one, but it's not a sleep
00:37:02 ◼ ► timer. And then the great thing is if you pick up the remote and press the button again, it just
00:37:07 ◼ ► turns off and stays off. Like, it's like, I just did that. Am I holding the button down too long?
00:37:24 ◼ ► he's hoping against hope because he is in denial, like all children, like all parents of young
00:37:27 ◼ ► children and denial that they're going to keep going to bed around that time. And it's like,
00:37:34 ◼ ► we'll have the evening to ourselves because we'll put the kids down and they'll be down by 7.15 and
00:37:38 ◼ ► the whole evening will stretch out before us. Those days are ending. Don't tell me these things
00:37:44 ◼ ► because I know that you're right. I know you're right. But I am. Has Declan stopped napping yet?
00:37:48 ◼ ► Yes, but he has an hour of rest time every day. Yeah, I remember the rest time years. Yeah,
00:37:59 ◼ ► we just need a break. Yep, that's exactly right. And so far he seems mostly okay with it. He just
00:38:04 ◼ ► basically has the run of the house to do whatever he wants. What's deeply alarming is that I think
00:38:09 ◼ ► Michaela is starting to drop her nap and that, oh, I just don't even want to think about it.
00:38:15 ◼ ► It's only a matter of time before they're trying to figure out how to do donuts with your front
00:38:17 ◼ ► wheel drive hatchback. Excuse me, sir. Excuse me, sir. How dare you blaspheme my car like that?
00:38:26 ◼ ► It is a Haldex all-wheel drive system that is mostly front wheel drive, front bias. It is
00:38:31 ◼ ► extremely front biased, but it can, thank you very much, push torque to the rear wheels. You jerk.
00:38:37 ◼ ► So you've got the best of both worlds. You got torque steer and the inability to do easy donuts.
00:38:42 ◼ ► Oh, stop it. You, it does not torque steer. The inability to do easy donuts, that is correct.
00:38:47 ◼ ► If you just go in reverse, tell Declan. Tell Declan. I was about to say, at least I'm not
00:38:50 ◼ ► doing reverse donuts like you are. Does your, your car doesn't even have a locking front diff,
00:38:55 ◼ ► does it? I don't think it does. No. Of course not. You can do that single, that single burnout. You
00:39:01 ◼ ► can't leave 11s, you leave 1s. Oh God. I put the power to the road, Kasey. It's all about efficiency.
00:39:07 ◼ ► Oh God. I can't even, I cannot even. I don't want to waste that power destroying my tires.
00:39:12 ◼ ► We are sponsored tonight by Tom Bihn. Let me tell you, I like my Apple stuff a lot, but I love my
00:39:22 ◼ ► Tom Bihn stuff. I have their Cadet kind of brief Kasey laptop bag. I have their Co-Pilot carry-on
00:39:28 ◼ ► kind of laptop bag. Two of their parental unit diaper bags. And I also have two of their reusable
00:39:35 ◼ ► cloth face masks. Because for the last couple of months, Tom Bihn has been making, guess what,
00:39:39 ◼ ► reusable cloth face masks. Each of these masks is $13. And for everyone that's purchased, they
00:39:44 ◼ ► donate one. These masks have comfortable stretch down-elastic gear loops. They have a customizable
00:39:49 ◼ ► conforming nose bridge so you can get it nice and tight around your nose. They have two sizes. And
00:39:54 ◼ ► over the past two months, they've made 160,000 of these things for hospitals, government agencies,
00:40:00 ◼ ► businesses, etc. And they've donated 55,000 so far to tribal nations, healthcare workers, homeless
00:40:05 ◼ ► shelters, and more. What's even better is they have a public Google Sheet where you can see
00:40:11 ◼ ► exactly how many have been donated, how many are queued up to be donated, where they've been donated
00:40:15 ◼ ► to, etc. If you already have a mask or don't want Tom Bihn's excellent mask, let me tell you what.
00:40:21 ◼ ► They also are offering, starting this coming Monday at 9 a.m pacific, they're going to be
00:40:26 ◼ ► offering their CINIC 22 and CINIC 30 backpacks for pre-order because they're finally getting
00:40:31 ◼ ► to the point that they can start making bags again instead of just masks. I do not have a Tom Bihn
00:40:37 ◼ ► backpack, and I tell you what, I want one because these things look awesome. And I know a lot of
00:40:42 ◼ ► people who have CINICs and they all say that these things are phenomenal. Go to TomBihn.com,
00:40:48 ◼ ► T-O-M-B-I-H-N.com, and check out all the different travel equipment and accessories that they have.
00:40:55 ◼ ► Check out their reusable face masks. Everything there is excellent. I love Tom Bihn. They can
00:41:01 ◼ ► pay me to talk about Tom Bihn. They can't pay me to say I love Tom Bihn, and I do. So thank you
00:41:07 ◼ ► so much to TomBihn, T-O-M-B-I-H-N.com, for sponsoring the show. Android versus iOS text-to-speech
00:41:17 ◼ ► speed. So this came onto my radar probably because of one of you and in turn because of Dave Mark,
00:41:22 ◼ ► who from The Loop, who had found a video from James Cham who said, "I don't think that people
00:41:33 ◼ ► So here's a little head-to-head example. The Pixel is so responsive it feels like it's reading my
00:41:36 ◼ ► mind. And so sure enough, James has a Pixel and an iPhone next to each other, and they engage the
00:41:43 ◼ ► text-to-speech thing, and it is quite obviously like night and day different. It's preposterous.
00:41:49 ◼ ► And this is really surprising from Apple because Apple is the self-proclaimed king and queens of
00:42:00 ◼ ► only an accessibility feature, but it is very much an accessibility feature. And so I was really
00:42:05 ◼ ► surprised by this, and it wasn't until I looked at the show notes earlier today that I realized
00:42:09 ◼ ► somebody, probably John, has put in a follow-up tweet from Dave where Dave said, "So I turned on
00:42:15 ◼ ► airplane mode, and the iPhone text-to-speech is every bit as fast as the Android text-to-speech.
00:42:21 ◼ ► If I turn airplane mode off, the lag returns. Try it yourself. Not at all sure why this lag is
00:42:27 ◼ ► necessary." So I have theories, but since I didn't put this in the show notes, I will leave it up to
00:42:31 ◼ ► you, John, question mark, to tell me what your thoughts are. Yeah, my thoughts when I first saw
00:42:35 ◼ ► this. Well, the performance comparison is kind of beautiful because you can just put both phones in
00:42:40 ◼ ► front of you, and they're both listening to you at the same time. So it's a very fair test. Like,
00:42:44 ◼ ► you're not speaking to one, you're speaking to both of them at the same time, and you can really
00:42:48 ◼ ► see the difference. So check out that video. And it brought to mind a question. We didn't actually
00:42:52 ◼ ► do it on Ask ATP, but I remember it flying by in the many hundreds of questions that we get. It was
00:42:56 ◼ ► like, "You keep talking about on the show," this is what the listener was saying, "about how much
00:43:01 ◼ ► faster Apple's system-on-a-chips are in their phone than the competition. But how does that speed
00:43:05 ◼ ► manifest itself? Like, yeah, it's faster than all these benchmarks that everyone says is faster,
00:43:09 ◼ ► but like, what does that do for me? What is the speed done for me lately?" I can answer that in a
00:43:15 ◼ ► whole bunch of different ways. Like, for example, JavaScript benchmarks are very relevant to people
00:43:18 ◼ ► who try to load complex web pages on your phone, and obviously performance in games and other
00:43:23 ◼ ► things where you really need every ounce of CPU. And arguably also in battery life, because you can
00:43:29 ◼ ► get more done in a shorter amount of time and go back to sleep faster or whatever. But this is an
00:43:34 ◼ ► example where no matter how much faster your system-on-a-chip is, algorithms win in the end.
00:43:41 ◼ ► So for something complicated, like speech-to-text is not a simple thing, not even as straightforward
00:43:46 ◼ ► as like rendering in a game engine or something. It is very complicated. It's got machine learning,
00:43:49 ◼ ► and it also may have a server-side component to it. And in this performance comparison,
00:43:56 ◼ ► the massive speed difference in the Apple system-on-a-chip is not helping Apple do well
00:44:02 ◼ ► on this test, because it's more than just your CPU speed. It's your algorithms, and it's the speed,
00:44:08 ◼ ► if you're doing server-side stuff, it's the responsiveness of your service that is processing
00:44:12 ◼ ► the text and sending it back. And when you put the iPhone into airplane mode, it's the performance of
00:44:19 ◼ ► the on-chip implementation versus the one that's over the network. Now, the interesting thing about
00:44:23 ◼ ► the follow-up to this is like, "Oh, I put it in airplane mode, and they brought it just as fast?
00:44:26 ◼ ► Try it yourself?" I did. I tried it myself. I didn't have an Android phone here to test with,
00:44:31 ◼ ► although I actually do have one in the house. I should have tried that, but it's like a $50
00:44:34 ◼ ► Android phone, so I don't think it would be a fair comparison. But anyway, I tried speech-to-text
00:44:44 ◼ ► And they were exactly the same speed to me, and that speed was slowish. It wasn't as fast
00:44:49 ◼ ► as the Android phone in this video. Maybe it wasn't as slow as the really slow phone, but it was
00:44:54 ◼ ► I didn't see any speed difference whatsoever. So I don't know what that means. Is mine configured
00:44:58 ◼ ► in a way where it's not sending to the server? I don't know. A lot of the people responded to this
00:45:02 ◼ ► thread saying that when they were offline and did it, the local on-device one seemed less accurate,
00:45:07 ◼ ► but it's very difficult to A/B test that because you might've spoken differently or whatever. So
00:45:11 ◼ ► all this is to say that areas like this are sort of... I mean, we beg on Siri all the time,
00:45:20 ◼ ► and this is arguably not Siri. It's like, "Well, that's not Siri. That's not answering a question
00:45:24 ◼ ► for me. That's speech-to-text. It's totally different." But we all kind of put it under
00:45:27 ◼ ► the same umbrella. I feel like stuff like this makes the on-paper, very, very fast iPhone
00:45:34 ◼ ► feel slow. I can't tell from this testing if the problem is that Apple's algorithms and
00:45:42 ◼ ► machine learning stuff and their model or whatever, they're doing this is worse than Google's,
00:45:53 ◼ ► more laggy, or does things in bigger chunks, or if it's a combination of all of that. But
00:45:58 ◼ ► anybody who looks at this video can see there's a gap, and that gap really ought to be closed
00:46:05 ◼ ► because FaceTime is great, and FaceTime is fast, and all these things, and all the camera stuff.
00:46:10 ◼ ► Like there's, again, measurable advantages to having a high-performance system on a chip.
00:46:15 ◼ ► I think speech-to-text would be one of those things. In addition to lagging behind on how
00:46:20 ◼ ► smart Siri is about answering questions, like getting directions to London or whatever that
00:46:23 ◼ ► was, the last one that went around that was an embarrassment for Apple where it kept trying to
00:46:26 ◼ ► send you to London, Ontario or something. Or, no, what time is it in London? Wasn't that the group
00:46:30 ◼ ► we were supposed to think about? Yeah, something like that. And it was telling you the time in
00:46:33 ◼ ► London somewhere in Canada, which is probably not what you mean. Stuff like that and straightforward
00:46:38 ◼ ► stuff like this. Speech-to-text. I use speech-to-text a surprising amount. My mother uses it like crazy
00:46:45 ◼ ► because she can't stand typing on that tiny little keyboard, and I don't blame her, and her vision is
00:46:49 ◼ ► really bad. And, boy, if you've done that in a responsive system versus one that lags, it really
00:46:55 ◼ ► makes a big difference. So I hope in iOS 13+N Apple gets their act together on this. I hope they do,
00:47:04 ◼ ► but honestly, I'm not thinking that's actually going to happen because ultimately, this is just
00:47:11 ◼ ► a problem with almost everything about Siri, and it always has been. Siri has always been
00:47:17 ◼ ► a little dumb, a little unreliable, and a little slow compared to its competitors. You know,
00:47:24 ◼ ► we've seen Apple. Apple's done a little bit of hiring here or there. We've heard, like,
00:47:33 ◼ ► really hope that Apple realizes how important the quality of Siri is and, despite what they
00:47:39 ◼ ► say in public, how it's not there yet. Because performance is a feature, as is consistency,
00:47:46 ◼ ► and as is actual intelligence of things like the London query. If you use Google Assistant or I
00:47:53 ◼ ► don't have any experience with Cortana or if you use Alexa, it is significantly more consistent,
00:47:59 ◼ ► and it is usually faster to respond. Siri needs to get there, and I really, really hope Apple
00:48:07 ◼ ► has just been working on this for a long time behind the scenes and isn't ready to release it
00:48:11 ◼ ► yet because so far, it has seemed to date from just what gets out there and how things behave
00:48:16 ◼ ► in the real world. It has seemed to date that Apple is incapable or unwilling to make Siri
00:48:23 ◼ ► actually fast and consistent, and clearly, it's possible because all their competitors have done
00:48:27 ◼ ► it. So really, what I want from Siri more than anything, and this is true as somebody who,
00:48:31 ◼ ► like, I regularly use a HomePod and an Amazon Echo, and the Amazon Echo responds to things
00:48:38 ◼ ► much faster. The HomePod hears me better, the HomePod music sounds better, the HomePod also
00:48:43 ◼ ► randomly butts into conversations a lot more that it thinks I hailed it and it didn't, and it's just
00:48:49 ◼ ► slow when I ask it something. Even simple things like "Hey, dingus, play" or "Hey, dingus, pause."
00:48:53 ◼ ► It takes so long to respond that you question whether it is going to respond at all, like,
00:48:59 ◼ ► and it hears me immediately and it like, you know, ducks the volume down on the music. If I'm saying,
00:49:05 ◼ ► you know, "Hey, dingus, pause," it'll hear that immediately and duck the volume, and then "Wait,
00:49:17 ◼ ► simple stuff like that is just not fast, and it should be, and their competitors can do it quickly.
00:49:29 ◼ ► way more than they ever have before. And so far, we don't see any evidence that's actually happening.
00:49:35 ◼ ► So again, I hope we're just not seeing it and it's just not out yet, because what's out there
00:49:39 ◼ ► now from them is not good enough. Yeah, I'm, I don't know, it's so, so easy to bag on Siri that
00:49:45 ◼ ► I just, it's boring. It's boring to bag on Siri yet again. So instead, can I bag on Catalina?
00:49:50 ◼ ► What now? Because I, I have another thing that I haven't yet publicly shared and complained
00:49:58 ◼ ► and whined about that I'd like to quickly throw out. It'll only take a moment. Do you guys use
00:50:04 ◼ ► SMB shares at all? This is like Windows-style shares, perhaps with your Synologies or perhaps
00:50:10 ◼ ► with other laptops or computers in your world. Do you ever really use SMB? That's the default
00:50:16 ◼ ► for all file sharing. If you don't specify a protocol and don't say how you want to connect
00:50:20 ◼ ► to like a file share, it's SMB by default since a couple of versions ago in macOS. Oh, okay. Well,
00:50:26 ◼ ► yeah, I use it. I use it for my Synology like archive share. Yeah, so I use it for my Synology
00:50:31 ◼ ► and there anything is possible. The following could be true because of something weird on
00:50:36 ◼ ► the Synology, although I find it hard to believe because I don't recall this ever being a problem
00:50:40 ◼ ► with Mojave. That, that could be the summary of the last year of the show. I don't remember this
00:50:44 ◼ ► being a problem in Mojave. Anyways, I have noticed that on any, any situation where in my computer,
00:50:54 ◼ ► and this is true of my adorable or my iMac Pro, any situation where my computer loses the connection
00:51:00 ◼ ► to the Synology, now maybe it's something completely reasonable, like I've closed the lid
00:51:03 ◼ ► or it's suspended itself or something like that, you know, some way, somehow it's lost a connection.
00:51:12 ◼ ► Uh, too soon. Uh, anyway, so when I come back, it will more often than not look like the Synology
00:51:19 ◼ ► is still mounted. But when I go to actually drill into it and finder, I see the following error. I
00:51:26 ◼ ► see the operation can't be completed because the original item for quote, in my case archive,
00:51:31 ◼ ► because that's what like the root folder is, but whatever your root folder is, can't be found.
00:51:35 ◼ ► And if I go back in and try it again, doesn't work. If I kill all finder and try it again
00:51:42 ◼ ► immediately, everything works, no problem. Oh, it's great. Everything's great. What do you mean?
00:51:45 ◼ ► There's no problem. Nothing to see here. This is driving me fricking insane. Not to mention that my
00:51:50 ◼ ► machine gun track pad that I've been bemoaning for the last couple of months now, that seemed to be
00:51:57 ◼ ► deeply exacerbated by a tremendous amount of network activity, specifically over a network
00:52:02 ◼ ► share. So like going and downloading something from the internet, not that big a deal. Throwing
00:52:07 ◼ ► a bunch of stuff on and off the Synology would just bring my machine to a screeching halt. And
00:52:12 ◼ ► especially my track pad has something, this is a rhetorical question or mostly rhetorical question.
00:52:17 ◼ ► Has something happened with SMB in Catalina or something around SMB in Catalina? Cause this is
00:52:24 ◼ ► driving me fricking crazy. And I just want it fixed. Please, please Apple, please you fix this
00:52:29 ◼ ► for your pal Casey. That'd be great. There's been big complaints about Apple's SMB implementation
00:52:33 ◼ ► for years, and they haven't proved it a lot by grabbing more better open source SMB implementations
00:52:38 ◼ ► for the client. On the Synology, if you're not aware of this, there are a bunch of settings
00:52:43 ◼ ► on, I don't know if it's on a per share basis or on the whole machine basis, but there are settings
00:52:47 ◼ ► to tell the Synology what versions of SMB to support, what features to support. I don't know
00:52:54 ◼ ► what the right settings are there, but over the years I have slowly turned them all on like
00:52:59 ◼ ► maximum support all the things, support all the extensions, support the highest versions. Cause
00:53:04 ◼ ► you can just say, turn them all on. I haven't noticed any change in performance. I wasn't
00:53:08 ◼ ► having any problems before. I'm not having any problems now, but just FYI, maybe if that will
00:53:12 ◼ ► help solve your problems, you could try that. Machine got tracked, but I thought I was,
00:53:17 ◼ ► I would totally subscribe to the theory that people would put out. There's like a kernel
00:53:20 ◼ ► contention thing with like the USB interface and some kernel lock. Like that totally made sense to
00:53:24 ◼ ► me. But now that you don't have that now that like your backup is somewhere else and you know, like
00:53:28 ◼ ► that that has been eliminated, you're in a similar situation to what I am, which is you have a
00:53:33 ◼ ► computer it's connected over ethernet to your Synology and you copy a big files back and forth.
00:53:39 ◼ ► And I do that and I don't have any of the problems you're saying. I don't have the unmounting problem
00:53:43 ◼ ► or whatever that's going on there. I don't have the stuttering problem. Everything copies at the
00:53:48 ◼ ► speed I expect to copy. So I don't want to tell you. To be fair, once I moved all backing up,
00:53:56 ◼ ► like all network backups off of the iMac. So now it's being taken care of by the Mac mini.
00:54:01 ◼ ► I haven't had a machine contract in a while. It has gotten way, way, way better. And it is
00:54:08 ◼ ► certainly possible. I'm not saying it's definitely not a Synology problem in the same way that I was
00:54:12 ◼ ► saying that my machine contract that is definitely a software problem. I could believe that it's a
00:54:17 ◼ ► Synology issue. And if you are the kind of person that knows this stuff, that actually like does
00:54:25 ◼ ► this sort of thing for a living and you would like to throw some ideas at me with regard to
00:54:29 ◼ ► Synology settings or something like that, I'm all ears. If you're just someone who says, "Oh,
00:54:34 ◼ ► it works for me. Here's what I've got." It's okay. I appreciate it, but don't worry about it.
00:54:37 ◼ ► But I would love to see this fixed. I don't have a feedback entry for radar, whatever it's called
00:54:43 ◼ ► now, feedback assistant thing. I don't have one for this because I don't even know what to say.
00:54:47 ◼ ► Like, and it's not, what I've got is not actionable. Like I don't have, I don't have any
00:54:51 ◼ ► really good way to report this, but if someone from Apple would like to reach out to me, you know
00:54:56 ◼ ► where to find me. I'm happy to do whatever you would like me to do. I'll SysDiagnose until your
00:55:00 ◼ ► heart's content, if that's what it takes. But yeah, people are saying this is more of a finder
00:55:05 ◼ ► problem. People are saying turn off AFP. I'll try that. I don't know if that's going to make a
00:55:10 ◼ ► difference, but I'll try it. But yeah, if you know what this is about, please let me know because it's
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00:57:13 ◼ ► website from Squarespace. A couple of weeks ago, we had a post from Alan Odgard called Mac OS 1015,
00:57:25 ◼ ► Slow by Design. John, do you want to tell us about this? First of all, that's the guy who made
00:57:30 ◼ ► TextMate, right? Yes. Yeah, thought I recognized the name. Anyway, it's a big post about slowness
00:57:37 ◼ ► related to the design of Mac OS. He listed it as a Mac OS 1015 Catalina issue. I'm not sure how much
00:57:43 ◼ ► is new in Catalina versus what has been existing, but what it boils down to are things that are slow
00:57:49 ◼ ► because there's some kind of security check happening before the computer does the thing.
00:57:56 ◼ ► And you know, in the thread around the internet that have been discussing this, people are like,
00:58:02 ◼ ► "Oh, if you turn off system integrity protection, this goes away." And then people are like, "Oh,
00:58:05 ◼ ► I don't want to turn off system integrity protection. It exists for a reason. Why should
00:58:08 ◼ ► I have to disable all the security, good performance, and back and forth?" There's a bunch
00:58:12 ◼ ► of stuff listed having to do with spawning a process and getting access to privileged file
00:58:16 ◼ ► system locations and keychain access and the context API and app launch and all these other
00:58:22 ◼ ► things. And by the way, there's another follow-up post by Jeff Johnson of LabCat Software talking
00:58:30 ◼ ► about the same thing and how random shell scripts that you make are also now checked to see that
00:58:34 ◼ ► they're malware essentially by contacting Apple's service and saying, "Hey, someone's about to run
00:58:40 ◼ ► this shell script that they just wrote. Does this have the same signature as malware if it doesn't
00:58:45 ◼ ► let it launch, but if it does launch it?" And it only does it on the first try and it caches the
00:58:49 ◼ ► answer. And it's tricky to test because people are like, "Well, I just tried it. I wrote a test.sh
00:58:54 ◼ ► script and it was fast every single time. I don't know what's wrong with your system." And it's like,
00:58:57 ◼ ► "Well, you have to give the thing a different name every time and different contents. Otherwise,
00:59:00 ◼ ► it short circuits and it thinks it's the same as the previous script." And it's tricky to test
00:59:05 ◼ ► when we don't really know the implementation, but I thought it was an interesting story because,
00:59:09 ◼ ► again, it's another security versus X trade-off, security versus convenience, security versus
00:59:14 ◼ ► effectiveness, security versus performance. And this reminded me of a strain of performance issue.
00:59:25 ◼ ► I always associate it with Unix because that's where I always see it and it's the OS that I know
00:59:29 ◼ ► the most about under the covers, but obviously it could be in any OS where if you take an operating
00:59:34 ◼ ► system that has some operation that is and has always been synchronous, synchronous means
00:59:41 ◼ ► you ask it to do a thing and then you sit there with your arms crossed waiting and saying,
00:59:45 ◼ ► "Okay, are you done?" And then eventually it finishes and it comes back. And while you're
00:59:49 ◼ ► waiting for it to do that thing, all you can do is just sit there and wait. That's synchronous.
00:59:53 ◼ ► Asynchronous is you tell it to do a thing and then you go on with your day. And then eventually,
00:59:57 ◼ ► at some point later in the day, the thing goes back, "Oh, by the way, the thing you told me to
01:00:00 ◼ ► do, I'm done with it now." That's asynchronous. There are lots of synchronous operations in
01:00:04 ◼ ► operating systems. In general, the operations that are synchronous tend to be ones that
01:00:08 ◼ ► the original designers expected to be very fast or there was no useful thing that you could be
01:00:16 ◼ ► doing in this process while you're waiting for it anyway, so what's the point? An example of that,
01:00:24 ◼ ► a lot of the file system APIs, like the Unix file system APIs tend to be synchronous. Read from this
01:00:27 ◼ ► file, write to that file, open that file, close that file. Each one of those individual read,
01:00:31 ◼ ► write, open, close calls is synchronous in the Unix file IO API because what are you going to do?
01:00:37 ◼ ► If you're about to open a file, you can't go to the next line where you're going to try to read
01:00:41 ◼ ► from the file until you're done opening it. So you're just going to wait until the operating
01:00:43 ◼ ► system finishes opening it and then you get to your read and same thing. I'm going to read from
01:00:46 ◼ ► the file. Well, you can't do anything with the contents until you get them, so that read call
01:00:50 ◼ ► is synchronous. Dumpty dumpty dum read and then you get your thing back and yes, Unix does have
01:00:54 ◼ ► async IO operations and everything like that, but anyway, there are a lot of synchronous APIs.
01:00:57 ◼ ► If you take a synchronous API, no matter what it may be, reading from a file, reading from the
01:01:02 ◼ ► network, anything that has a synchronous API and you decide because of let's say security or
01:01:08 ◼ ► whatever that you want to do something else there like ah ah ah, before you exec CVP whatever that
01:01:14 ◼ ► file, I'm going to add a check that says, oh, before we let exec run, make sure it's not malware,
01:01:21 ◼ ► right? And do it in a smart way like have a cache on locally on the system that we keep track of.
01:01:26 ◼ ► Well, I already checked that already and it's totally not malware. It's fine and make that
01:01:29 ◼ ► check be really fast. But the very first time you run a thing that we've never seen before,
01:01:33 ◼ ► we have to contact Apple server and get the updated list of malware signatures and blah,
01:01:36 ◼ ► blah, blah, blah, blah. And then after we decide that it's okay, we execute that synchronous thing.
01:01:43 ◼ ► And that is a formula for things that are terribly slow because everything that's built on top of
01:01:47 ◼ ► that, that API, the whole big stack of software all the way up to like the finder or whatever
01:01:51 ◼ ► else you're doing, expects that whole chain, that whole synchronous chain to execute quickly. It's a
01:01:57 ◼ ► synchronous API. Like it's like, oh yeah, it's synchronous, but it's always really fast. It's
01:02:01 ◼ ► just, I'm trying to do a very simple operation and I can't do anything until it's done anyway.
01:02:04 ◼ ► And if that took like, you know, 25 nanoseconds before and suddenly takes a second and a half,
01:02:12 ◼ ► no application design can withstand that kind of inflation in the time taken for an operation.
01:02:17 ◼ ► Like, oh, this entire thing was built around the expectation that this thing will take nanoseconds
01:02:23 ◼ ► and now it's taking a second? And we do a thousand of those operations when you like open a folder or
01:02:28 ◼ ► you know, do, you know, whatever it is you may be doing that will destroy your performance. Another
01:02:33 ◼ ► great example of this, I always attribute to this, I'm not sure if it's entirely the case, but
01:02:36 ◼ ► back in the day, the finder had a web dev interface. This is like classic Mac OS and I think Mac OS 10
01:02:41 ◼ ► did as well. And web dev basically made synchronous file IO live on top of HTTP. Like the, you know,
01:02:49 ◼ ► your program thought it was doing synchronous file IO, but under the covers, all your IO operations
01:02:54 ◼ ► were HTTP calls. And this was like the nineties when I was dealing with this. And so those were
01:02:58 ◼ ► slow HTTP calls to slow servers across a slow internet connection. And it would destroy the
01:03:02 ◼ ► finder. Like, you know, I don't think we even had beach balls back in, you know, the equivalent,
01:03:10 ◼ ► it would be doing something that should take like fractions of a second. And it would take two
01:03:14 ◼ ► seconds because it's talking to like some web server running on a 80 megahertz, you know, sun,
01:03:20 ◼ ► one you box in some university somewhere and it's taking forever. And it's just a shame to see that
01:03:27 ◼ ► same, what I imagined to be that same pattern replaying itself here. Now I, I endorse all
01:03:33 ◼ ► these security features. I understand why they're there. There's not really a better way to do them
01:03:38 ◼ ► because in the end for, especially for security, you can't like, Oh, we'll just add them on the
01:03:43 ◼ ► async IO operations. A because pretty much every part of the system uses synchronous ones most of
01:03:47 ◼ ► the time. And B if you only do it on one kind of file access, that's not much security because
01:03:52 ◼ ► anything they wanted to get around it would just use the other API APIs. Right. And you can't do
01:03:57 ◼ ► it asynchronously really, because the whole point is you want to prevent them from running the
01:04:01 ◼ ► malware. You can't let them launch the malware. And then a second and a half later say, wait,
01:04:04 ◼ ► I just found out that malware. It's like too late. You're rude. Right. Um, so I feel for Apple and I
01:04:10 ◼ ► think they're mostly doing the right thing. I understand how it can make it seem like Mac,
01:04:15 ◼ ► quote unquote, max are slow because if you run it, if I run it on another Unix, like I run on Linux,
01:04:19 ◼ ► everything is fast. There's no problem. And you know, Linux has good security too. And yada, yada.
01:04:23 ◼ ► But I feel like Apple is hardening the Mac in the same way they have hardened and hardened the iPhone
01:04:29 ◼ ► to survive in a very hostile environment, more hostile than let's say, than like a Linux server
01:04:34 ◼ ► and a data center, which wants to have good security and wants to lock things down, but
01:04:37 ◼ ► also doesn't have to run like every app that a random person can throw at it and isn't subject
01:04:42 ◼ ► to the whims of a just regular consumer or computer user who just wants to do whatever the
01:04:47 ◼ ► hell they want. And, you know, it doesn't really have a, it's not a fixed workload. It's, it needs
01:04:52 ◼ ► to be a general purpose machine willing to withstand, withstand use by humans. And humans
01:04:58 ◼ ► are inscrutable. So I'm not sure what the solution to here is. Again, the reason it's related to the
01:05:03 ◼ ► other one is like, well, if Apple's service that tells me whether it's malware was way faster,
01:05:08 ◼ ► or if it did a better job of cashing the answers locally, or, you know, like there are ways to help,
01:05:12 ◼ ► you know, mitigate this to be even smarter, but mostly just to be faster. Because I think the
01:05:18 ◼ ► people who have like other people testing and say, well, you know, it's slow the first time, but
01:05:22 ◼ ► it's not that slow. It's like, well, maybe this person has a bad route to whatever host that they
01:05:27 ◼ ► need to contact at Apple, right? Maybe their internet connection is flaky. Maybe there's,
01:05:32 ◼ ► maybe the, their local server for this is slower than the one that you're in. Because you're in
01:05:36 ◼ ► California, right next to Apple's headquarters and you go right to their, I don't even know if
01:05:39 ◼ ► they had data center in California, but I assume they do. Anyway, there are lots of factors that
01:05:42 ◼ ► can add into this. It's kind of frustrating. I can't say I've experienced it myself. I write
01:05:48 ◼ ► plenty of shell scripts and Perl scripts. And if Catalina is checking them against their
01:05:51 ◼ ► notarization server, I have not noticed that delay because I'm not benchmarking them. And
01:05:57 ◼ ► it still seems to be fractions of a second, but then I do have a good internet connection and I'm
01:06:01 ◼ ► not specifically trying to thwart it. So I'm not quite sure what the solution is here, except that
01:06:07 ◼ ► this seems like another one of those things that we just may have to learn as a part of modern
01:06:18 ◼ ► people. And that having to check an unknown executable before it runs is just going to be
01:06:24 ◼ ► a fact of life. Again, except for in a controlled scenario where you're running in a data center and
01:06:30 ◼ ► the whole machine is locked down and you're not, new arbitrary programs aren't arriving on it
01:06:34 ◼ ► willy-nilly. In that case, yeah, you can just run whatever's there as fast as possible. But
01:06:38 ◼ ► in the general case, kind of like having to contact a server to do sophisticated text to
01:06:44 ◼ ► speech because the server and data center has better machine learning algorithms than your
01:06:48 ◼ ► phone does or whatever, or a larger data set in memory. Those are all just probably facts of life.
01:06:55 ◼ ► I don't know. Have you two experienced any of the slowness that is described in these articles,
01:07:00 ◼ ► or do you just not even know what's happening? I mean, I think I haven't noticed the executable
01:07:06 ◼ ► checking slowness. What I noticed is what I was originally complaining about a few weeks ago,
01:07:10 ◼ ► when I think we should also prompt at this blog post, was open save dialogues take a few extra
01:07:16 ◼ ► seconds to show up a lot of the time. And that just makes the whole system feel slow to me.
01:07:26 ◼ ► The open save one doesn't seem like it would be a security thing, but you really don't know?
01:07:31 ◼ ► Well, it could be because I don't know too much about how the system is architected, but
01:07:42 ◼ ► one of the sandboxing things on Mac OS, one of the background processes that manages the whole thing,
01:07:48 ◼ ► is called in reaction to open save dialogues to see if the app has access to whatever path is
01:07:54 ◼ ► being opened or saved to. So that is probably related. I'm guessing it feels like either
01:08:09 ◼ ► It's like your app doesn't-- I don't know under what circumstances that's used versus when it's
01:08:13 ◼ ► not, but yeah, I remember when that was introduced, it was like, hey, it used to be that when your app
01:08:17 ◼ ► threw up an open save dialog box, your app would call into whatever framework, AppKit or Carbon or
01:08:22 ◼ ► whatever, and that would put an open save dialog box on your screen and you would tell it how to
01:08:25 ◼ ► configure it and then you'd get the result. But that would be that would A, all happen inside
01:08:30 ◼ ► your process and B, that would literally be a window in your program, that if you wanted to,
01:08:34 ◼ ► you could walk your own window list and you would find that window. But the security thing that they
01:08:39 ◼ ► added many years ago was that's not even going to be your window. You're going to call the same API
01:08:44 ◼ ► in AppKit or Carbon probably wasn't around by then, but you're going to call the same API to
01:08:47 ◼ ► make an open save dialog box and then what's going to happen is using XPC, we're going to tell some
01:08:52 ◼ ► other daemon on the system, hey, this app wants an open save dialog box and that daemon is going
01:08:57 ◼ ► to display the open save dialog box. If you did PS on it or you did a process tree, you'd see that
01:09:01 ◼ ► that window that's an open save dialog box doesn't even belong to your app. It's not even the parent
01:09:05 ◼ ► process. The parent process is whatever, a TCC thing or a PowerBox D or whatever the hell it's
01:09:10 ◼ ► called and that would present the open save and that would run in a sandbox and be all locked down
01:09:15 ◼ ► and only have the permissions that it's allowed to have based on what your app does and yada yada
01:09:18 ◼ ► and the user would use that open save dialog box to find the file that it wanted and pick,
01:09:22 ◼ ► check all the check boxes or whatever and then hit open or cancel and then it would return again
01:09:27 ◼ ► through XPC back to your application. Oh, here's what they did with the open save dialog box. So in
01:09:31 ◼ ► that scenario, I can imagine like, oh, I'm trying to do XPC to the PowerBox daemon or whatever the
01:09:36 ◼ ► hell and it's asleep or it's swapped out or there's a bug in it where it gets real confused
01:09:41 ◼ ► about whether you have permission to do something or not or it's talking to the lower layer
01:09:49 ◼ ► cuts all things down, but I haven't, like I said, I haven't seen that one. So I don't know. Like,
01:10:05 ◼ ► everyone doesn't have the same thing. It's not like there's some systemic thing that all the
01:10:08 ◼ ► open save dialog boxes are super slow. I mean, just, you know, here, BB at it now. I hit command
01:10:15 ◼ ► O and the window came up pretty much instantly. Like, I don't know, like it doesn't make any sense.
01:10:30 ◼ ► ...these issues that I have that, like, I would feel bad filing it because it's, you know,
01:10:36 ◼ ► because if you're a developer, you know how your heart sinks when you get a report like this. And
01:10:40 ◼ ► it's like, what am I supposed to do with this? You had a weird thing happen once on your computer.
01:10:44 ◼ ► Like, great. Thanks for telling me. What I can't, that's not actionable. I don't know what to do
01:10:49 ◼ ► with that. I suppose they would say, oh, file it anyway. Cause if we could get a thousand of those,
01:10:52 ◼ ► then we'll know it's actually a problem. But I think the issue is that A, most people don't
01:10:56 ◼ ► know how to send a feedback at all. And B, the people who do are mostly programmers and they
01:11:04 ◼ ► thinks that this is not a problem. But honestly, even if a thousand people told them, hey, sometimes
01:11:08 ◼ ► there's a delay, it's still not actionable. It's like, well, I don't know. What am I doing about
01:11:12 ◼ ► that? I try to do it every time I hit commando. It works fine on my system. It works for me. Like,
01:11:16 ◼ ► it's frustrating as a developer to try to not be able to reproduce it. I mean, I suppose we could
01:11:22 ◼ ► all do a SysDiagnos. Like, I don't know. I always wonder if that's just a Bitcoin miner. You ever
01:11:26 ◼ ► think about that? I think it's just a deflection, honestly. It's like, hey, this didn't have a
01:11:32 ◼ ► SysDiagnos, so I guess we can demand it and then probably close it a few weeks later when they
01:11:37 ◼ ► don't do it. I mean, like, especially with a non-actionable problem, you're like, I don't know,
01:11:41 ◼ ► maybe if I can see like what kernel extensions they're running, like, and then like, if you get
01:11:44 ◼ ► a thousand of them and like all thousand of them are running like the carbon black kernel extension,
01:11:49 ◼ ► be glad you don't know what that is, then maybe you say, aha, that might be it. But yeah,
01:11:56 ◼ ► sorry, Apple. I mean, we want this to be fixed, but we don't know how to help you. Help us help you.
01:12:01 ◼ ► And it isn't our job to fix it. Like, it's theirs. It's their product. It's their job. They have
01:12:06 ◼ ► plenty of resources. They should be able to fix themselves without us doing SysDiagnos.
01:12:10 ◼ ► I do want them to know it exists. Hi, Apple. These things exist. I just don't know how to
01:12:14 ◼ ► help get them fixed again. And not our job, but I want them to be fixed as a user. And so if I
01:12:19 ◼ ► could help in that, I would. I just don't know how. So, Jon, I hear that come around WWDC time,
01:12:25 ◼ ► which is approaching, you're going to be getting yourself a sweet, sweet gaming MacBook Pro.
01:12:30 ◼ ► This story has been here for a while and we kept avoiding it because it's a sketchy rumor
01:12:36 ◼ ► and it's old. But what prompted me to push up in the show notes was Quinn Nelson's video he did on
01:12:46 ◼ ► it, YouTube video he did about it, which has a clickbaity title, but you know, hey, it's YouTube,
01:12:51 ◼ ► what can you do? Which is called Apple's Next Failure. And he talks about the prospects of
01:12:59 ◼ ► Apple making a gaming anything. Like the rumor is that they're going to announce high-end gaming
01:13:04 ◼ ► MacBook or iMac. I love these rumors. They're like, it could be a laptop or an iMac. We're
01:13:09 ◼ ► not sure. That's kind of broad. Right. Yeah. This is the quote, Apple plans to reduce high-end gaming
01:13:14 ◼ ► computer edits to the WWDC developers conference. This is how old the story is when it's saying
01:13:18 ◼ ► Apple plans to release 2020. I think this is pre-cancellation, pre-COVID everything. According
01:13:27 ◼ ► details are slim, but the report claims the computer may be a large screen laptop or an
01:13:31 ◼ ► all-in-one desktop with a price tag of up to $5,000, suggesting that it could be either a
01:13:40 ◼ ► AKA competitive video gaming. Right. So I think the reason everyone has ignored this story aside
01:13:47 ◼ ► from the sketchy sourcing and aside from the fact that they can't even decide if it's going to be a
01:13:50 ◼ ► laptop or a Mac, like I look at this and I think, look, if there's any shred of truth in here,
01:14:04 ◼ ► embarrassing GPUs in them. Like, and you could imagine someone determining that and saying, aha,
01:14:10 ◼ ► that must mean they're making a gaming thing because Apple usually uses fairly embarrassing
01:14:15 ◼ ► GPUs. And now there's some model supposedly in some pipeline somewhere that's using like
01:14:20 ◼ ► an actual good GPU and it's expensive. Like the whole computer is expensive, although obviously,
01:14:26 ◼ ► how the hell would they know that? Like anything with pricing is not probably not going to be in
01:14:29 ◼ ► the parts supply chain. Anyway, I can imagine a story spinning out of some piece of information
01:14:34 ◼ ► that says basically like Apple's using good GPUs. Some of Apple's GPUs are actually pretty good.
01:14:38 ◼ ► Like the, the Vega 64, when it was introduced in the iMac Pro, that's pretty good GPU for a computer
01:14:48 ◼ ► not by any stretch of the imagination. And not to mention that the thing that makes a computer like
01:14:53 ◼ ► tailored towards esports or competitive video gaming is its ability to play games that are,
01:14:58 ◼ ► that are played competitively and no Macs really have that unless they boot into Windows.
01:15:08 ◼ ► the prospect of Apple making a gaming PC. And you know, I enjoyed watching it because he starts off
01:15:18 ◼ ► here are all the reasons why this is a terrible idea and wouldn't work. And he, he mostly gets
01:15:23 ◼ ► most of those. Like it's, it's fun when I watch his videos, I forget, you know, one of the things
01:15:28 ◼ ► about being old is you forget that you're old and you, you look at people and you're like,
01:15:31 ◼ ► "Ah, that person's probably my age." Quinn is not my age. He's like half my age. I don't want to
01:15:37 ◼ ► think about it, but like I watch him do the video. I'm like, "Look, there's a dude." Like, "Hey,
01:15:42 ◼ ► yeah, I'm a dude. He's a dude. We're practically the same age." But when, when I see him when he's
01:15:46 ◼ ► talking about like Mac and gaming and he's talking about stuff that's like, practically feels like
01:15:51 ◼ ► current events to me, but literally happened to be like either before he was born or when he was
01:15:54 ◼ ► a toddler, it's clear that he wasn't actually there. And it's like, it's like the history
01:15:58 ◼ ► effect of like, if you weren't there and you just have to sort of research something for a video,
01:16:03 ◼ ► it's not always easy to get the straight story on things. So at one point he says, and I don't want
01:16:08 ◼ ► to pick on Quinn because like this can happen for anybody. If I had to do research on something that
01:16:11 ◼ ► happened when my parents were kids, I would get it wrong too. And they would correct me, right?
01:16:15 ◼ ► Because if you weren't there, it's hard to know, but it's a quote that says, "The Mac was actually
01:16:19 ◼ ► viewed as a viable alternative to Windows gaming PCs." This is around the time of Marathon. That
01:16:24 ◼ ► was never true. It has never been true. Like literally never. You know, Mac fans, which I was
01:16:31 ◼ ► on, you know, we love Marathon because like the Mac finally has a good game. A game that might make
01:16:38 ◼ ► PC people jealous because you don't have this game and this game is really good. And there was the
01:16:43 ◼ ► whole classic Mac gaming scene where I'd argue there were tons of games that were really good
01:16:47 ◼ ► and only on the Mac, but at no point was a Mac actually viewed as a viable alternative to Windows
01:16:54 ◼ ► gaming PC. Never, literally never. Even when the Mac, I would argue, had overall better games,
01:17:07 ◼ ► Right. And that's like the rose colored glasses of like, well, the Mac used to be a contender
01:17:12 ◼ ► of games, but now not. It never was. And the reason it never was is mostly not having to do
01:17:16 ◼ ► with hardware. And again, Quinn goes in the video back and forth between what's, you know, hardware
01:17:20 ◼ ► isn't really the hard thing, except actually it is kind of hard. If you don't try to do it, you're
01:17:22 ◼ ► going to have crappy hardware, witness all the GPUs that Apple has in its computers now. But the real
01:17:26 ◼ ► problem is what games are you going to run on it? How are you going to get any software? You have to
01:17:31 ◼ ► court game developers. You have to support gaming APIs. You have to compete with Microsoft, which
01:17:35 ◼ ► has its own proprietary gaming API that works on Xbox and PCs, but does not work on Macs. And,
01:17:41 ◼ ► you know, or you can build a shim layer to it like they do in Linux where this is Linux front end,
01:17:50 ◼ ► OpenGL thing that Linux supports. It's super complicated. And Quinn also goes into this video,
01:17:55 ◼ ► I thought, it's interesting, the fact that mobile gaming revenue is bigger than console and PC
01:18:01 ◼ ► gaming combined. And, you know, in current days, he has stats from 2019. We all kind of know that
01:18:07 ◼ ► intuitively, like, yeah, most people play mobile games because, you know, most people are not
01:18:12 ◼ ► quote unquote gamers. And what do people who aren't gamers play? Everybody plays games,
01:18:16 ◼ ► well, they just play mobile. We call them casual games, right? But there are more of them than
01:18:21 ◼ ► there are gamers, right? Mobile gaming marketing is really big. And unlike the console and PC,
01:18:27 ◼ ► well, certainly unlike the PC gaming market, in the mobile market on Apple's platforms,
01:18:31 ◼ ► Apple gets 30% of all those sales. Microsoft does not get 30% of all Windows game sales. They would
01:18:38 ◼ ► love to get 30% of all Windows game sales. They do not. And I don't know what the cuts are for
01:18:42 ◼ ► the console makers, but it's probably better than PC game platforms, right? And he also goes into,
01:18:48 ◼ ► of course, Apple Arcade is another way for Apple to try to get money out of the gaming world.
01:18:53 ◼ ► But none of those things have anything to do with what we think of as quote unquote real games,
01:19:04 ◼ ► other than disregarding the slightly rose colored view of the past of the Mac. It's interesting to
01:19:09 ◼ ► explore in entertaining ways. Videos are always entertaining. What the possibilities are for a
01:19:16 ◼ ► gaming Mac. I would love to see Apple rededicate itself to gaming. Stranger things have happened.
01:19:24 ◼ ► Another thing that might have come up in Quinn's research and might have not made the cut for the
01:19:27 ◼ ► video was that at one point in the fairly recent, in this old man's memory, timeframe was Apple had
01:19:35 ◼ ► a push into gaming. They had a bunch of APIs, you know, fancifully called sprockets, input sprockets.
01:19:52 ◼ ► Apple had its own drawing, a 3D drawing API called, what was it? Quick draw, 3D rave. I'm getting it
01:19:59 ◼ ► screwed up. We'll find links for the show notes. But for a while they had an actual team at Apple
01:20:03 ◼ ► who was basically doing what, you know, the equivalent of what the team at Microsoft did
01:20:06 ◼ ► in writing DirectX. We're going to make APIs for the Mac platform whose sole purpose is
01:20:12 ◼ ► to write games. Even today, Apple has SpriteKit, arguably SceneKit, and there's always WWDC sessions
01:20:24 ◼ ► the big cross-platform engines like Unity or Unreal or whatever. They use DirectX, they use OpenGL.
01:20:29 ◼ ► Apple no longer supports OpenGL. We'll probably remove it from the system sometime soon.
01:20:33 ◼ ► Apple has Metal, which is great, but Metal only runs on Apple platforms and does not help you
01:20:39 ◼ ► target consoles or Windows PCs. Apple tends to ship weaker GPUs. The only machine Apple sells
01:20:46 ◼ ► with an upgradeable GPU is this incredibly expensive monstrosity next to me, which I thank
01:20:51 ◼ ► you for, Apple, but no one else is buying that computer. So if Apple decided, you know, like it
01:20:57 ◼ ► did back in the Sprocket days, if Apple decided we're going to get hardcore into gaming, boy,
01:21:02 ◼ ► they have an uphill road. Like, I don't think they would do what they did with Sprockets and say,
01:21:06 ◼ ► we're going to do it all ourselves and make proprietary stuff, but that's just what they did
01:21:09 ◼ ► with Metal, which, granted, you know, just Apple means Mac, iOS, Apple TV, iPadOS, what am I
01:21:17 ◼ ► forgetting? HomePod? I don't know. Metal is an important thing for Apple. Metal is great.
01:21:24 ◼ ► Metal is better than their poorly supported OpenGL was, but nobody is writing games on top of Metal,
01:21:33 ◼ ► you know, big cross platform games. The good thing is that the engine support Metal, like Unity
01:21:38 ◼ ► and Unreal can support Metal and people can build their games on top of that, which helps,
01:21:45 ◼ ► here's a game that was made for the PC and it uses DirectX and it's available on the Xbox and
01:21:49 ◼ ► Windows. How do we get that game on the Mac? It's like, well, reboot your Mac into Windows because
01:21:54 ◼ ► there's no way in hell to run that on the Mac. If Apple developed its own DirectX translation
01:21:59 ◼ ► layer for those games and found some way to run it, just like Valve did with its Linux,
01:22:06 ◼ ► that could kind of happen. But boy, it would take a hell, it would take an effort, let's put it this
01:22:11 ◼ ► way. It would take an effort bigger than their effort to rededicate themselves to the Mac,
01:22:15 ◼ ► which we've talked about a lot in the show. It's like, oh, the Mac has been neglected. Let's have
01:22:18 ◼ ► this big round table. We hear you pro users. You want better Macs. We're going to make a better Mac
01:22:24 ◼ ► about four years from now. We'll fix the keyboard. And then also we'll eventually make a Mac Pro and
01:22:29 ◼ ► John will buy it and it will be great. And like, that was a big effort and it took them a long time.
01:22:34 ◼ ► But they did it right. It was like this thing that they had neglected and they announced they're
01:22:38 ◼ ► going to rededicate themselves to it. And they have, like we had a couple shows ago where like,
01:22:42 ◼ ► hey, guess what? All the Macs are good now. Apple fulfilled its promise to rededicate itself to the
01:22:46 ◼ ► Mac and fix the Mac line from being crappy to being good. Trying to make a quote unquote gaming
01:22:54 ◼ ► Mac and makes Macs viable in the gaming world would take a much bigger effort than what they
01:22:59 ◼ ► did for the Mac. And, you know, again, if mobile gaming is bigger than console and PC gaming combined
01:23:06 ◼ ► and Apple already gets a 30% cut of that entire market on its platforms for the most part, well,
01:23:12 ◼ ► that'd be a tough sell inside Apple to say we're going to dedicate even more resources than we did
01:23:15 ◼ ► to the Mac resurgence. And what we're going to do, we're going to do it about gaming. The only thing
01:23:19 ◼ ► that makes me, gives me a little twitch about this is like, well, Apple is doing a lot with AR
01:23:23 ◼ ► and yeah, there are uses for AR other than gaming. Maybe the primary uses are other than gaming,
01:23:27 ◼ ► but they just bought a VR company and you know, they, at one point they were considering building
01:23:33 ◼ ► a car. So it's really hard, really hard to count Apple out on anything. Obviously I would love for
01:23:39 ◼ ► them to rededicate themselves to gaming. I would love for them to finally get gaming to court game
01:23:44 ◼ ► developers to do what Microsoft did. Like, but I'm, I'm as big a Microsoft curmudgeon as anybody,
01:23:49 ◼ ► but when Microsoft said we're going to get into the console gaming market, they did, they did it.
01:23:56 ◼ ► They dedicated years and billions of dollars and they are now a player in that market. And they
01:24:01 ◼ ► learned how to deal with game developers and they learned how to make good games and learned how to
01:24:05 ◼ ► buy and support good game companies. Hell, they bought Bungie out from under all smack users,
01:24:19 ◼ ► Two, 2000 or something. Anyway. Yeah. Microsoft proves that it's possible. Like if, you know,
01:24:25 ◼ ► again, Microsoft is already in gaming, but they decided to get into the console gaming and they
01:24:28 ◼ ► did it. It's possible. This is the thing you can do. And Apple certainly has enough money
01:24:31 ◼ ► and talent to do it, but I'm not sure if the upside will ever, uh, you know, justify that
01:24:38 ◼ ► kind of investment. So until then I just have these sketchy rumors and a, uh, Snazzy Labs
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01:26:46 ◼ ► and sponsoring our show. Okay, let's do some Ask ATP. And we begin this week with the weakest muscle,
01:26:58 ◼ ► right? What type of view do you guys use in the Finder? I don't even know the names for these
01:27:04 ◼ ► things. Generally speaking, I use just the list view, which is the of the four boxes, it is the
01:27:13 ◼ ► second one. Occasionally, and I find I typically do this when I'm digging through TV stuff that's
01:27:19 ◼ ► loaded into Plex, but I'm looking at the files on the Synology. I'll use the thing that it looks
01:27:24 ◼ ► like a cover flow icon, but it's not cover flow. It's like the multi pane view, you know what I'm
01:27:28 ◼ ► talking about, which is the third of the four icon. No, actually the cover flow is literally.
01:27:33 ◼ ► Go to the menu bar, please, Casey. You're killing me with this toolbar. You're killing John here.
01:27:37 ◼ ► First of all, don't show the toolbar on the Viner. Second of all, go to the view menu, please.
01:27:42 ◼ ► Sorry, as list or as, you can tell how often I use the view menu. Anyway, I use the list view,
01:27:49 ◼ ► which I should now from now on call the list view or occasionally the columns view. I pretty much
01:27:55 ◼ ► never use the gallery view, even when I'm looking at photos, and I very rarely use the icons view.
01:28:01 ◼ ► That is my answer. Marco, what do you use? And then John, after that, you can tell us the
01:28:06 ◼ ► correct answer, please. I use a list view for almost everything. I think the only list view.
01:28:12 ◼ ► Yeah. I think the only time that I don't use list view is when Finder forgets my preferences and
01:28:18 ◼ ► resets it. But otherwise, list view all the way. I like that Marco correctly called the list view.
01:28:23 ◼ ► I think we messed up Casey about making him look at the view menu. And I also don't go to the menu,
01:28:28 ◼ ► but at some point in the past 16 years, Mac OS X put in that menu, it says view. And this is weird
01:28:35 ◼ ► because it would be hard to find this in Apple's human interface guidelines. But the top items are
01:28:49 ◼ ► Like, because they're trying to, it's trying to be a continuation. It's trying to, as if the title
01:28:53 ◼ ► is view as icons, view as list, view as columns. And if you were doing that, it'd be view and then
01:28:57 ◼ ► lowercase as, and then icons, I suppose. It's weird. Anyway, back in the day, I'm pretty sure
01:29:04 ◼ ► the view menu said icon list, you know, stuff that didn't have column. Anyway. So all this is to say,
01:29:12 ◼ ► don't call it icons view Casey, it's icon view. It's weird that it's view as list instead of
01:29:19 ◼ ► view as lists because I don't like looking at this menu. I'm closing this menu. Anyway.
01:29:24 ◼ ► I mean, honestly, I think it should be called view as hamburger because we are taught that
01:29:29 ◼ ► that icon that toggles it on is the hamburger icon, right? For hamburger menus. So there
01:29:39 ◼ ► It's so alien to me to think that people use the finder with the toolbar visible all the time. And
01:29:43 ◼ ► I banished, as we know, banish toolbar entirely because I'm trying to recreate the finder of my
01:29:47 ◼ ► youth and failing because the finder fights me every step of the way. I use primarily list view
01:29:53 ◼ ► in a finder window that has no sidebar and no toolbar. Thank you very much. It just has a title
01:29:58 ◼ ► bar. And then it has a little strip where it says how many items and how much space is available.
01:30:02 ◼ ► And then it has a bunch of columns. That's it. That's my main view. If you look at my finder
01:30:07 ◼ ► windows right now, they are all in this view except for one. I used to be big on icon view
01:30:12 ◼ ► back in the day, back when the finder was spatial and I could arrange my icons to look beautiful.
01:30:17 ◼ ► I can arrange my windows to look beautiful and everything was just arranged just so and it stayed
01:30:20 ◼ ► that way literally forever and never moved. Then I use icon view a lot. And of course I had less
01:30:26 ◼ ► stuff on your computer because the hard drive was 10 megabytes or whatever the hell it was.
01:30:28 ◼ ► Right. I have like a top level set of folders and then I have applications folders and there
01:30:33 ◼ ► were subfolders for games and they all tiled beautifully and all my icons were arranged based
01:30:37 ◼ ► on what was my favorites and how, you know, you know how people arrange their home screens
01:30:41 ◼ ► on their phones now and all the obsession they have about getting their home scene set up just
01:30:44 ◼ ► right and arranging them by color and putting the apps where they're an easy reach and your comment,
01:30:48 ◼ ► you know, all that crap. That was how the finder worked. This is the best way to explain to like
01:30:58 ◼ ► custom icons from icon factory and putting, this is all classic Mac OS mind you, right?
01:31:02 ◼ ► We would do it for the same reason people would arrange their home screens because you were
01:31:05 ◼ ► looking at it every day and you wanted to make a nice little place and like springboard on your
01:31:09 ◼ ► iPhone, it would remember you wouldn't turn on your phone one day and like everything's all
01:31:13 ◼ ► scrambled up. It's like, Oh, like you would never arrange your home screen with that happened. Right.
01:31:16 ◼ ► So the Mac OS 10 finder has never really been nice in that way, but the one window that I fight
01:31:23 ◼ ► constantly to keep arranged in some way is the applications folder and the applications folder is
01:31:29 ◼ ► in a specific position and proportion on my screen. I view it as icon so I can see my beautiful app
01:31:34 ◼ ► icons. I don't bother trying to arrange them because that is way too much task on the Mac OS
01:31:39 ◼ ► finder. I just have them sorted by name. And that lets me not deal with that. And I adjust the grid
01:31:44 ◼ ► size to be just so, so not too many names wrap too much, but they're not truncated either. And it's
01:31:49 ◼ ► like what my current one on my giant screen is six icons across and 10 down, right? And that's my main
01:31:58 ◼ ► icon view. And there are other ones too. I have a bunch of photos, things that are an icon view with
01:32:01 ◼ ► big previews at very large size. So I can see the thumbnails and all sorts of stuff like that. Like
01:32:05 ◼ ► it varies, but in general, it's all list. I'm glad we settled that. Stephon writes as a long and loyal
01:32:11 ◼ ► listener from Germany. I have a question. I love my 16 inch MacBook pro, but I can't always protect
01:32:15 ◼ ► the display from the curious hand, little hands of other young family members. How do you clean your
01:32:20 ◼ ► display? You know, I don't have a good answer for this. And I think John, you have a bespoke cloth,
01:32:29 ◼ ► John: It's not just for the super duper. I did get the cloth. I mean, the, the super duper one
01:32:33 ◼ ► is like, you can't use anything but the cloth, but they all come with the cloth. So I do have
01:32:37 ◼ ► the cloth. So my advice for cleaning displays, like kids have their grimy hands on, which I can
01:32:43 ◼ ► totally relate to because our laptop screen looks like a disaster. A because kids are pigs, but B
01:32:47 ◼ ► because the kids still pick the laptop. They've still picked the laptop up by the screen, which
01:32:51 ◼ ► just, Oh God, it's painful. They don't know. They don't know how to treat things nicely. Anyway.
01:33:08 ◼ ► universal solvent, it will not cut grease as well as a, any kind of cleaner or alcohol or anything
01:33:13 ◼ ► well, but at various times Apple has more or less strangely suggested just use water. Eventually the
01:33:20 ◼ ► finger grease will come off a mildly damp, soft cloth. It's you seems like it's not even damp
01:33:26 ◼ ► enough to do the job because if you make it real damp and then you try to rub and the fingerprint
01:33:30 ◼ ► doesn't come out and you rub harder and then you squeeze out a drop of water and it slides down your
01:33:34 ◼ ► screen into your keyboard. Now you're Casey. So like a mildly, a mildly damp, soft cloth.
01:33:48 ◼ ► rinse the grease off of it, rinse the rag out again. Just plain water will actually get your
01:33:53 ◼ ► screen clean unless like your kids took a Sharpie to it or something in which case, sorry about
01:33:56 ◼ ► that. But just for finger grease, just plain water will do it. That's my advice. Not too much water,
01:34:02 ◼ ► not too much, mostly plants. That's, that's my advice. As for, as for my, uh, my fancy screen,
01:34:08 ◼ ► like my television, although this, the streak has ended, I think for my TV, but like my television
01:34:15 ◼ ► for many years, my pro display XDR screen has never been touched by human hands. Like the,
01:34:22 ◼ ► after coming from the factory, the front screen of my protos, literally never been touched by him.
01:34:26 ◼ ► I peeled off the big gigantic sticky static thing that covers it, carefully peeled it off by the big
01:34:32 ◼ ► handle and put it on my desk. And I've touched the side of the display and I've touched the stand and
01:34:37 ◼ ► I touched the bottom, but I have never touched the front and neither have any of my children.
01:34:41 ◼ ► And for the longest time, my TV was like that because I raised my children to be terrified of
01:34:45 ◼ ► going anywhere near the TV. It's like, ah, Hey, cause it could fall on them and killed them. But
01:34:48 ◼ ► be also don't touch daddy's TV. Pretty sh and my TV screen has never been cleaned by anything.
01:34:56 ◼ ► Right. It unlike a CRT, it doesn't attract dust. Remember that I was always a nightmare with CRT.
01:35:00 ◼ ► It's like it would attract dust to them with like the static electricity or whatever the hell they
01:35:03 ◼ ► could charge. Right. That doesn't happen with plasmas anyway. So there's no dust on it. Right.
01:35:07 ◼ ► I've dusted the top and the sides and everything, but I've never dusted the screen and there are no
01:35:11 ◼ ► fingerprints on the screen. Recently. I did find a smudge of something on the screen and I have to
01:35:14 ◼ ► deal with that. And I don't know where it came from. Maybe some kids sneeze or who knows what
01:35:18 ◼ ► the hell it was. So the streak is over for my TV after however many years, but as far as I'm aware,
01:35:26 ◼ ► I wouldn't use the soft cloth that came with it because that's packed away and pristine and the
01:35:30 ◼ ► original packaging up in the attic somewhere. I would just get a soft damp cloth and very gently
01:35:36 ◼ ► slowly remove the finger grease using only water. And actually I don't have to be that careful
01:35:40 ◼ ► because if I make a big bead of water and it drips down, it would just land on my desk and not go into
01:35:44 ◼ ► my keyboard. You didn't even give me a chance to finish. I asked you a question and then you
01:35:49 ◼ ► decided to go on a monologue. It's a tough crowd today, guys. Tough crowd. You can talk now. What
01:35:53 ◼ ► else do you have to say about? Oh, thank you, dad. I would love to, uh, I have an extremely
01:35:58 ◼ ► useful solution for this. So I hope you're happy that you delayed me telling you a cup of water on
01:36:04 ◼ ► your screen. Is that it? No, you're the one I'm saying to put water on the screen. Just a little
01:36:09 ◼ ► bit. Here's what you need to do. You need to buy yourself a Volvo XC90. And when you buy that Volvo
01:36:14 ◼ ► XC90, it comes with this absurdly overpriced cleaning microfiber cleaning cloth, which you
01:36:20 ◼ ► can actually buy on Amazon for $17. And that works, but just delightfully. And so if I ever
01:36:25 ◼ ► decide I need to clean screen, I just use that. Yeah. My solution is almost as bad as Casey's.
01:36:32 ◼ ► No, I just, yeah. Microfiber cloths are amazing. Uh, usually you don't even need any liquid. If
01:36:39 ◼ ► you can just like, you know, rub it gently with a microfiber cloth for, you know, five seconds,
01:36:43 ◼ ► you can get almost anything off of the screen. Uh, in the rare cases that you got some, you know,
01:36:48 ◼ ► real sticky, you know, sneeze blob on there or something that is, you really need like,
01:36:52 ◼ ► you know, help with a very, as John said, very slightly damp microfiber cloth can get off pretty
01:36:59 ◼ ► much anything. Um, if you need to go past that, which we probably don't, but if you need to go
01:37:04 ◼ ► past that, there are a whole bunch of various solutions sold by like, you know, office stores
01:37:20 ◼ ► I'm a little concerned that like, you don't, you don't really know what the chemical is they're
01:37:24 ◼ ► using. It might be harmful to your screens coding. It might not. It's kind of, you're kind of, you
01:37:29 ◼ ► know, rolling the dice with that. So it's not a great solution to rely on most of the time,
01:37:34 ◼ ► especially, you know, modern days, back in the olden days when it was just like, you know, a
01:37:38 ◼ ► basic matte plastic covering or a basic piece of glass, it was easier to recommend some kind of
01:37:44 ◼ ► like spray solution. But nowadays the screens have so many like specialty coatings on them to reduce
01:37:50 ◼ ► glare and stuff like that, that you don't really know what's going to damage that coating and
01:37:53 ◼ ► what's not. So ideally trying to use chemicals and try to just stick with microfiber cloths and water
01:37:59 ◼ ► basically. And that gets almost anything out. Yeah. The reason people always suggest microfiber
01:38:04 ◼ ► is they don't want you to scratch it. And you would think that like, if you use something like,
01:38:12 ◼ ► it's a paper towel. Look how soft it is. I can squish it up in my hand or whatever. But those
01:38:19 ◼ ► which is why people say microfiber now, all that said, it doesn't have to be a beautiful bespoke
01:38:24 ◼ ► microfiber. There are lots of sort of soft cleaning cloths. They're like the velvety ones
01:38:28 ◼ ► that you use for camera lenses or whatever. Like all you're looking for is not a textile that has
01:38:33 ◼ ► abrasive elements in it. I don't know what it is. It's abrasive, but little pieces of paper,
01:38:37 ◼ ► pulp or whatever the hell it is. Something like don't judge soft. What I'm saying is don't judge
01:38:42 ◼ ► softness, but like I feel it in my hand and it feels soft. That's not a great way to judge
01:38:46 ◼ ► softness. Mostly you'll probably be okay because especially with Apple's glass things, you're not
01:38:49 ◼ ► going to scratch it. You're not even going to scratch the only phobic coating probably with like
01:38:53 ◼ ► a soft tissue that's damp or whatever. But if you're going to be there, like rubbing away at
01:38:57 ◼ ► some greasy fingerprint, get a screen cleaning cloth. And the thing about screen cleaning classes,
01:39:06 ◼ ► it's just the nature. Like if you're getting it off your screen, where do you think it's going?
01:39:10 ◼ ► Yeah. When you throw something away, whereas away it's going on the cloth. Right. So you do
01:39:15 ◼ ► have to actually wash those cloths or clean them or get a new cloth at a certain point too. It's
01:39:23 ◼ ► Peter wants to know, do you use any tools to protect your kids on the internet? For example,
01:39:27 ◼ ► to restrict searches they can do on Google or YouTube. I know about YouTube Safe Search and
01:39:31 ◼ ► Cloudflare's DNS for families, but I was wondering if there are tools for Apple mail or iMessage.
01:39:36 ◼ ► I don't really have to worry about this yet because my kids are way too little. So I'm going to get
01:39:42 ◼ ► out of the way and let's start with the younger kids. Marco, what do you do? Pretty simple,
01:39:56 ◼ ► but that's mostly just for the screen time limits of like limiting what hours in which it can be
01:40:01 ◼ ► used and, you know, total time and everything. Other than that, the thing is it's hard to use
01:40:08 ◼ ► technological measures to really 100% restrict what your kids can see online because not only
01:40:15 ◼ ► do most of the measures not actually work 100% and not only do kids find ways around them way
01:40:20 ◼ ► more than you might think and spread those ways amongst themselves and, you know, they're smarter
01:40:24 ◼ ► than you think and they figure it out. But also, it's kind of a game of whack-a-mole. Like you
01:40:30 ◼ ► never really can get it all, right? You're never going to protect your kids from seeing something
01:40:35 ◼ ► that is adult or inappropriate in nature if they're looking for that. So there's really no,
01:40:42 ◼ ► in my opinion, there's no substitute for just parenting of just monitoring what they're doing,
01:40:49 ◼ ► of like periodically going over and looking at what they're watching or what they're browsing
01:40:53 ◼ ► or whatever and talking to them about like, "Hey, here's the kind of thing you might run into if you
01:40:59 ◼ ► go looking for it or whatever." Or like, you know, tell them actual risks. As you can say, like,
01:41:04 ◼ ► there's some stuff out there that isn't appropriate for kids. Like if they're super young, you know,
01:41:07 ◼ ► you don't have to be gory and detailed about it, but you can just say like, you know, you might
01:41:11 ◼ ► find things of people swearing or, you know, other stuff or God knows what else they might find.
01:41:16 ◼ ► I think you just have to have some idea what your kid is actually looking at and that's
01:41:21 ◼ ► by simply like being there and monitoring what they're looking at. And when I say monitoring,
01:41:26 ◼ ► I'm not talking about like looking through their search history or like installing some kind of
01:41:31 ◼ ► creepy proxy. I'm saying like actually walk into the room and just like check on them. Like see,
01:41:36 ◼ ► you should have some idea the kinds of stuff they're watching or consuming or looking at online.
01:41:41 ◼ ► I think that's just, you know, basic modern parenting. And that's going to be better than
01:41:46 ◼ ► any kind of, you know, technological barrier you put in place, which is mostly just going to be
01:41:50 ◼ ► a thing that's going to annoy them when they try to do something legitimate and they're going to
01:41:53 ◼ ► try to get around. And then just, you know, as much as you can prepare your children for the realities
01:41:58 ◼ ► of what's in the world and that takes various forms. It's up to you what that means to you.
01:42:03 ◼ ► But, you know, the world is, you know, a big place with a lot of stuff going on, a lot of stuff on
01:42:08 ◼ ► the internet and it's out there. They're going to run into it. So if you can prepare them for
01:42:12 ◼ ► how to deal with it when they do run into it, I think you'll be better off than trying to prevent
01:42:17 ◼ ► it from ever happening. Every parent can kind of draw their own line of how much of their kids
01:42:21 ◼ ► privacy they want to invade versus safety. But I will just say that looking at a very young kid's
01:42:25 ◼ ► search history is hilarious because they'll like, they'll type in like how to fly, how to fly person,
01:42:33 ◼ ► how person fly. Like it's just once they learn how to write, they'll search for the most ridiculous
01:42:39 ◼ ► things and they will not give up like, because they won't get the results they expect because
01:42:42 ◼ ► they don't know how to formulate search queries or because they're asking like a really weird question
01:42:45 ◼ ► and they'll just keep trying. It's awesome. Anyway, what I did like when my kids were younger,
01:42:51 ◼ ► most of the major things that they're going to be interested in, the OS itself, the YouTube app,
01:42:59 ◼ ► Safari, whatever things that they're using, most of those have some kind of extremely weak advisory
01:43:08 ◼ ► level restrictions. And I've always used those just because I'm not trying to stop my kids from
01:43:14 ◼ ► things they're seeking out. What I'm trying to do is reduce the possibility that unintentionally
01:43:21 ◼ ► they will run across something. So, you know, there's an age restriction on like music or
01:43:25 ◼ ► YouTube says restrict content or, you know, it's 20 settings like the OS has one as well,
01:43:30 ◼ ► restrict content for under 17 or eight, you know, just turn all that stuff on it. Because
01:43:34 ◼ ► practically speaking, my experience has been, it doesn't stop the kids from getting to like,
01:43:40 ◼ ► they don't even know it's on. It doesn't stop them from getting to anything that they want to get to.
01:43:44 ◼ ► It also doesn't stop them from seeking out things that they shouldn't be seeing anyway. But what it
01:43:47 ◼ ► does stop them from is like they're looking for, you know, Daniel Tiger and they end up with like,
01:43:56 ◼ ► Those features are ubiquitous and you should totally use them. In fact, even though my kids
01:44:00 ◼ ► are both teens now, I still have those, you know, restrict to 17 plus settings on, on basically
01:44:06 ◼ ► everything. Because they, well, A, they're not 17, not that I really care about those age things,
01:44:11 ◼ ► but B, it doesn't stop them from seeing anything really like, they, I watch rated R movies with
01:44:16 ◼ ► them when I think they're appropriate, but I rent those myself and practice, you know, they can get
01:44:21 ◼ ► to anything on YouTube they want to anyway. Like I'm not actually stopping them. If they really
01:44:25 ◼ ► want to seek out something that's quote unquote not age appropriate, they're totally going to get
01:44:28 ◼ ► to it. But I feel like kind of like how I pay for whatever this service that takes the ads off
01:44:34 ◼ ► YouTube. I'm just trying to make the sort of default that I'm trying to make the neutral game.
01:44:39 ◼ ► God, I keep doing destiny things. You guys don't understand. Anyway, I'm trying to make the default
01:44:43 ◼ ► environment, trying to, trying to get them a better neutral game, trying to make the default
01:44:48 ◼ ► environment without any super, oh, it's not even working. Anyway, I'm trying to make it so that if
01:44:54 ◼ ► they just act normally, then everything will be normal and they won't suddenly have like,
01:44:59 ◼ ► you know, animal mutilation or porn thrown in their face. If any of them come to me and say,
01:45:05 ◼ ► I got to see something for school and this is restricted, I'll just turn it off. Like I don't,
01:45:09 ◼ ► you know, I don't care, you know, they're old enough now, but I think that that really helped
01:45:17 ◼ ► unrestricted access to the internet is going to land on things that they didn't want to see
01:45:22 ◼ ► by accident. And like I said, most of the things like YouTube and Apple's OS and things that let
01:45:28 ◼ ► you buy and see apps and buy and see TV shows or whatever, those restrictions and age ratings,
01:45:33 ◼ ► they work really well, especially for younger kids to just cut out most of the stuff that's
01:45:38 ◼ ► egregious. So that's what I suggest. And what it requires is everything that your kids are going
01:45:43 ◼ ► to be using, like if you use parental controls only then use three apps or whatever, you have
01:45:48 ◼ ► to look in every single one of those apps, find out does this service have parental controls? How
01:45:52 ◼ ► does it work? Can I make an account for my kid? Is it a sub account of mine? How do I put restrictions
01:45:56 ◼ ► on them? How do you know Apple's good about this? You know, you can make it so your kids account,
01:46:00 ◼ ► put it, make a family, you know, the Apple family thing and make your kids, your kids in that family
01:46:05 ◼ ► and make them have to ask you for approval to quote unquote, buy applications, even free ones.
01:46:10 ◼ ► And then you'll always know every single app they download because you'll get a notification on your
01:46:13 ◼ ► phone that says, you know, little Timmy wants to buy this app approve or reject. And you can look
01:46:19 ◼ ► at the app and the app store and it's going to be something you know, if it turns out that's one of
01:46:24 ◼ ► those exploitive free to play games, that's a perfect opportunity to go talk to little Timmy
01:46:28 ◼ ► about how this thing works. And they might still want it anyway, and you might be able to give it
01:46:32 ◼ ► to them. And then you get a notification five minutes later, it says little Timmy wants to do
01:46:35 ◼ ► an in app purchase for 500 coins or something inside the game. And then you can have a different
01:46:39 ◼ ► conversation with them, right? Those are the type of tools I'm, you know, talking about here.
01:46:43 ◼ ► They're not stopping anything. They're facilitating a dialogue and sort of filtering out the worst of
01:46:51 ◼ ► the worst. But you do have to, like Marco said, still be engaged. As your kids get older, they're
01:47:01 ◼ ► everyone remembers, but we were all kids once too. Like that's what kids do. I don't think there's
01:47:07 ◼ ► any avoiding that. I don't think it's healthy to avoid that. Hopefully by that point you have done
01:47:14 ◼ ► well enough in raising your child that like things aren't going to go totally off the rails.
01:47:22 ◼ ► Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Linode, and Tom Bin, and we will see you next week.
01:48:47 ◼ ► I also edit in web text fields. Casey. Oh, my God. Please leave me alone. I do not have time.
01:48:52 ◼ ► Why are you so mean? Nobody edits it. How many times have we talked about this? Do not edit
01:48:56 ◼ ► text in web text fields. Never edit text in web text fields. Like, I don't know how long you have
01:49:02 ◼ ► to, like, what is it going to take for people to learn that? Never. Especially a web text field with
01:49:08 ◼ ► no features, like something I've built. It doesn't matter how many features it has. It's just, like,
01:49:12 ◼ ► it's just not a thing that you ever do. Like, I've been burned by that so many times, so many, like,
01:49:17 ◼ ► web BBSs. You'd be writing an awesome post and then you'd, like, accidentally close the tab or