00:00:00 ◼ ► All right, I'm going to use my sweet Rube Goldberg to Dropbox upload right now. Get ready.
00:00:10 ◼ ► But your next innovation is going to be a black piece of tape to cover the LED that's shining in your face.
00:00:16 ◼ ► You know, I'd like to file a complaint to the two of you and you did not know this was coming.
00:00:26 ◼ ► Right now as we speak, there is something that Marco and I should be watching on YouTube right now.
00:00:32 ◼ ► Right now there's a replay of a jam band's concert from last year. Want to guess which one, Marco?
00:00:43 ◼ ► So I don't know what you're talking about, but I'm pretty sure it's not Fish, so it must not be a jam band.
00:00:48 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Dave Matthews Band had last week, this week, and I think for
00:00:54 ◼ ► the next several Wednesdays are replaying concert videos on YouTube and they're broadcasting them live.
00:00:59 ◼ ► Last week I recorded it live using YouTube DL and then realized the next morning I didn't have to
00:01:05 ◼ ► bother with that. I could just download it after the fact, you know, because sometimes on YouTube
00:01:09 ◼ ► I think you can make things live and then they don't get saved, so to speak. I'm sure there's
00:01:14 ◼ ► better terminology for this. And in the case of the Dave Matthews one, it was perfectly up and
00:01:19 ◼ ► available the next morning. But yeah, I think I might have to skip the show from now on because
00:01:24 ◼ ► I've got more important things to do. Yeah, it's a good thing that, you know, we would never possibly
00:01:29 ◼ ► download an HLS stream and be able to preserve it forever in our Plex libraries. So we definitely
00:01:34 ◼ ► have to watch these things live as your jam band does what my jam band's been doing for quite some
00:01:39 ◼ ► time. You know, that's just mean. You're not wrong, you're not wrong, but it's just plain mean, man.
00:01:45 ◼ ► Marco's gonna add it to his definition of a jam band. Does not allow downloading of high quality
00:01:51 ◼ ► people's knowledge in band. It really, you know, I do think I probably shouldn't say this out loud,
00:01:57 ◼ ► but here we go. I do think not irregularly about the epiphany that either you or I might have been
00:02:03 ◼ ► me had several months ago when I realized that my definition of jam band, your definition of jam
00:02:09 ◼ ► band are very, very different. And to recap, I think it's fair to say, and correct me, but your
00:02:14 ◼ ► definition of jam band is kind of the style of music and less about whether or not it's improvised.
00:02:20 ◼ ► And to me, I don't really care what style of music it is. It's just whether or not it's improvisation.
00:02:24 ◼ ► And we can get into another argument for the 95th time over who was right. It ultimately doesn't
00:02:28 ◼ ► matter, but it really made me feel better. Yeah. Mine, yours is more, yours is a more literal
00:02:34 ◼ ► interpretation of like a jam band is like a band that jams. It's almost like, like if, like if your
00:02:40 ◼ ► definition of country western music could not be made in New York city, like if by definition,
00:02:44 ◼ ► if somebody, if a country singer came to New York city and made music here, it would not be country
00:02:48 ◼ ► western music. Like that's, that's kind of like your definition of jam band is like a band that
00:02:52 ◼ ► jams. Like it's very literal. And I think many people share that definition, but you know, from
00:02:57 ◼ ► the point of view of like, if you are a, like say a Sirius XM jam band station that totally exists,
00:03:03 ◼ ► that's a genre of music that you play. It's not, Dave Matthews is on, if I'm not mistaken,
00:03:07 ◼ ► I think, I don't know. I haven't had serious in a long time, but they might be, the point is like
00:03:11 ◼ ► a jam band is not any band that jams. It is a musical genre that happens to include a lot of
00:03:17 ◼ ► jamming, but that doesn't necessarily mean that any band that jams has suddenly become a jam band.
00:03:25 ◼ ► but I, it would, it would, it would genuinely annoy me to no end when you would just fluff off,
00:03:30 ◼ ► Oh, Dave Matthews isn't a jam band, Dave Matthews isn't a jam band, this is not a jam band. And,
00:03:33 ◼ ► and I feel like my world has been righted by realizing that we're just having two different
00:03:38 ◼ ► arguments at the same time. Like so many arguments in modern culture. We're never going to come to a
00:03:44 ◼ ► resolution because we're totally arguing different things. I mean, at least we're not moving the
00:03:50 ◼ ► goalposts like Jon always does. Am I right? So let's start with follow up. What you were talking
00:03:55 ◼ ► about was exactly that you have two different sets of goalposts. And that's why you couldn't,
00:03:58 ◼ ► you couldn't fare where the disagreement was. Here I am quietly not liking either band. So
00:04:02 ◼ ► who's doing it right here? Yeah, I guess, I guess you win again. All right, let's start with some
00:04:07 ◼ ► follow up first and clearly most importantly to everyone involved with the show. My garage door
00:04:13 ◼ ► project monitor, my garage door monitor project is complete. So Casey, is your garage door open or
00:04:18 ◼ ► closed right now? Well, I would have to look at the app right now because I'm in the other room.
00:04:23 ◼ ► I'm in the office and not the bedroom. Does your window have line of sight on your garage door?
00:04:31 ◼ ► Could you peek? No, it does not. I don't know if you set me up for that on purpose or not,
00:04:35 ◼ ► Marco. Either way, it was well done. Wait, wait, wait, I've got it. Can you have a camera that
00:04:40 ◼ ► looks at the light? Yeah, that's what I should do. There we go. I can get the new Raspberry Pi camera
00:04:44 ◼ ► that's like 50 bucks or something like that. Super high res and it's totally overkill for what I
00:04:49 ◼ ► would need this for. And all it has is a view of this tiny LED on your nightstand. Right.
00:04:52 ◼ ► Oh goodness, that's hilarious. But anyways, the project is complete. Don't ask me to show you what
00:05:01 ◼ ► most of the components look like because there's not any real good mounting set up for any of this
00:05:05 ◼ ► stuff. But it does work. It is complete. There's an LED that is in my bedroom that is illuminated
00:05:11 ◼ ► when the garage door is open and it is extinguished when the garage door is closed. And I am very
00:05:16 ◼ ► excited about this. And for phase one, it is complete. Phase two, which I haven't started yet,
00:05:23 ◼ ► is, and I think we discussed this last time, is to get a relay, well I have a relay, but to get that
00:05:28 ◼ ► relay working such that I can hypothetically raise and lower the door via the Raspberry Pi as well as
00:05:35 ◼ ► just monitor whether or not it's open or closed. But I think most important of all, we need to
00:05:46 ◼ ► it's not necessarily specifically designed for a window, but my close proximity only read switch
00:05:58 ◼ ► post moving earlier? Because it sounds to me like what you're describing is not what happened. At
00:06:03 ◼ ► this point, Marco can add the diddle do music and play back what I said, which I believe was
00:06:08 ◼ ► something like, I think you might have too much confidence in your switch. Not that it would never
00:06:13 ◼ ► work, which is what you just said. So, so much for correctly identifying the goal post movers.
00:06:19 ◼ ► I'm glad it worked out for you. I was pessimistic. I expressed doubt, but it looks like it worked out
00:06:26 ◼ ► well. So yeah, so I'm excited about that. And you can see in my Insta stories, you can see that I
00:06:37 ◼ ► I am good enough to make a successful solder, even though it is hideous to look at and yeah,
00:06:42 ◼ ► so it's all working. I'm really excited about that. And I don't know if I'm going to be able
00:06:45 ◼ ► to do any more work on this before next week's show, but hopefully at some point, I'll be able
00:06:49 ◼ ► to start toying with that relay and see if I can see when I get that working. So I, I will take my
00:06:54 ◼ ► victory lap right now. Moving on. I was looking through the mentions for the ATP Twitter account,
00:07:00 ◼ ► which I try to keep up with and I do a terrible job of, and somebody wrote something that at a
00:07:06 ◼ ► glance, I almost skipped over it because I was like, I don't care about this. And then I went
00:07:09 ◼ ► back and was wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. So Derek Van Ittersum wrote, you can use Synology's
00:07:14 ◼ ► cloud sync to take a folder on the Synology and sync that with your Dropbox files. Yeah,
00:07:19 ◼ ► I knew that. Okay, whatever. That folder can also be synced with Synology drive. What? Thus,
00:07:24 ◼ ► Dropbox can sync, Dropbox synced files on all devices with no Dropbox app installed anywhere.
00:07:36 ◼ ► but then I realized he was basically solving my problem for me. And I feel so dumb for not having
00:07:41 ◼ ► thought of this already. So there's an app on the Synology. So this is a, you know, Synology
00:07:45 ◼ ► package that runs on the Synology called Cloud Sync. And I'd been running it for a long time
00:07:49 ◼ ► to get a local backup of my Dropbox. And it would just act as a Dropbox client. It would sync all
00:07:55 ◼ ► of my files, you know, from Dropbox down to the Synology. And again, I just used it as a one way,
00:08:00 ◼ ► like replicator. That's not the only way you can use it. That's just how I was using it.
00:08:08 ◼ ► although it has the same problem as Apple TV, where there's one phrase that means like 95
00:08:14 ◼ ► different things. One of the things Synology drive means is they're like pseudo Dropbox like thing,
00:08:20 ◼ ► where the Synology is the one source of truth for all of your data and all of your other devices can
00:08:25 ◼ ► hook up to that Synology. And it acts basically like Dropbox. You know, it has a client app,
00:08:30 ◼ ► everything stays in sync, et cetera, et cetera. But it had never occurred to me to bring the two
00:08:35 ◼ ► together. So what Derek is saying is I could and have, I could take the Synology Cloud Sync
00:08:42 ◼ ► server side stuff and have it save and replicate my Dropbox into my Synology drive root folder.
00:08:51 ◼ ► Am I making any sense, gentlemen? Are you with me? Totally. Yeah. It sounds like a very casey
00:08:55 ◼ ► solution to a problem because it's overly complicated. It solves a problem that doesn't
00:09:00 ◼ ► need to be solved that badly. And it involves a Synology. And it adds potential additional problems.
00:09:05 ◼ ► Remember we talked about this way back when of like, you know, in general, putting a sync
00:09:21 ◼ ► stop you from doing it, but Synology is more laissez-faire and you can do it, but I would really,
00:09:27 ◼ ► I mean, maybe two layers deep, maybe that'll be mostly okay, but I wouldn't go three or four
00:09:32 ◼ ► layers deep. That's a little bit sketchy. And of course, you know, I don't, you do have to have
00:09:38 ◼ ► something that syncs with Dropbox. So presumably is that Dropbox software or is that something using
00:09:42 ◼ ► some kind of public Dropbox API? Do you know the, the origin of the Synology Dropbox app?
00:09:47 ◼ ► You know, I don't, uh, I would assume they're just using public Dropbox APIs, but I certainly do not
00:09:53 ◼ ► know that for a fact. They're scraping HTML from the web. You don't want to know how it works. It
00:09:59 ◼ ► works. It's fine. Just close your eyes. Well, and to that end, I did do this earlier today when I
00:10:04 ◼ ► saw this tweet and was like, wait, what? Oh, and so I tried it and at a glance in the last hour or
00:10:11 ◼ ► two, since I've tried it, it seems to be working just fine. You know, famous last words, knock on
00:10:15 ◼ ► wood, et cetera. And so just for a test, I don't know if either of you guys happen to be sitting
00:10:19 ◼ ► at your computers. When I did this, I put a different audio file into our shared Dropbox folder,
00:10:26 ◼ ► where we share our recordings from these episodes. And I did that using the Dropbox web app. And sure
00:10:33 ◼ ► enough, you know, maybe 15, 30 seconds after it had uploaded using the web app, it ended back up
00:10:39 ◼ ► on the same computer where it, from where it started. But inside, you know, my Synology Drive
00:10:43 ◼ ► Dropbox folder, and then I deleted it locally using Finder and almost instantaneously it was
00:10:49 ◼ ► removed from the Dropbox web app. So at a glance, this is working. And as someone who doesn't really
00:10:56 ◼ ► use Dropbox anymore, except to share files with you guys and with Mike and a couple of other random
00:11:00 ◼ ► scenarios here and there, I'm actually really, really excited and pleased with this because I
00:11:04 ◼ ► don't think I'm going to be stressing it very much. And it seems to basically offload all the ickiness
00:11:10 ◼ ► of Dropbox onto the Synology, which for me for now seems good. So if you're in this weird scenario
00:11:17 ◼ ► where you have a Synology, you're using Synology Drive, you too, all 12 of us, dozens of us maybe,
00:11:24 ◼ ► we can benefit from this weird but awesome setup. The one thing I would watch for is for like when
00:11:29 ◼ ► you're nesting multiple servers like this is situations with very large files that actually
00:11:34 ◼ ► take an appreciable amount of time to transfer. That may not be much of an issue because you have
00:11:38 ◼ ► such a fast internet connection and so on and so forth. But like, when it's just one service,
00:11:42 ◼ ► it can sort of say, I'm not going to make the file look like it's done until I know that it's done.
00:11:47 ◼ ► But when you've got two services, the outermost service may think, oh, a new file has appeared.
00:11:53 ◼ ► And as far as it can tell, it's all set to go. So let me make it appear on Casey's Mac. But really,
00:11:58 ◼ ► Dropbox is still syncing it in. And anyway, that's potential dangers of nesting services inside each
00:12:05 ◼ ► other. But if you're just very careful and do things very slowly and are very kind to the
00:12:09 ◼ ► software and you're just copying one file and you wait a long time and don't yank it out from under,
00:12:13 ◼ ► it'll probably be fine. We'll see. I mean, when Marco starts sending me angry text messages
00:12:18 ◼ ► wondering where my file is. Yeah, truncated audio files. And I would say like, don't put your Git
00:12:22 ◼ ► repo in there or anything. No, no, no, certainly not. I mean, how really like how is this incredibly
00:12:27 ◼ ► convoluted pile of hacks better than just using iCloud drive? Oh, I'm all in on iCloud drive. I'm
00:12:32 ◼ ► ready. Because we're hoping that the files won't just disappear one day or just fail to sync for
00:12:37 ◼ ► some inexplicable reason. That's the I think in this scenario, you'd get an error if something
00:12:42 ◼ ► failed to sync and the chances of files just disappearing or lower. Yeah, I don't know. But
00:12:47 ◼ ► like the more I thought about this problem, the more I've thought, let's just try iCloud drive and
00:12:50 ◼ ► just see how it goes. Yes, I'm ready. You know, I don't like having to run these persistent demon
00:12:56 ◼ ► services on my computers all the time, unless really necessary and unless they're really
00:13:00 ◼ ► providing a strong benefit. No matter what we do, iCloud is already running. iCloud drive is already
00:13:06 ◼ ► there already syncing. It's already on every device that we use. It's already running anyway,
00:13:12 ◼ ► no matter what we do. So it's like we're already paying the price for the usage of iCloud drive
00:13:16 ◼ ► here. We might as well use it. And then I can get rid of all this other crap software. But there's
00:13:21 ◼ ► more price the price of, hey, it didn't sync my file when it's just running and it's not working
00:13:26 ◼ ► correctly, but we're not using it. We don't pay that price. So yes, you're right that we have the
00:13:29 ◼ ► overhead of doing something. But if we never actually use it to do anything, we don't, you
00:13:33 ◼ ► know, we're not asking it to actually run. And also we don't aren't exposed to the bugs. I'm still
00:13:38 ◼ ► in favor of SFTP. That is still my favorable solution to this. Because we all have SFTP
00:13:44 ◼ ► clients, and they don't run all the time. And you know, if you really want something that's mounted,
00:13:48 ◼ ► it's really easy to mount an SFTP driver, whatever. Well, for the record, Marco, I am all in on iCloud
00:13:54 ◼ ► drive, or at least giving it a shot if nothing else. So you tell me when you're ready. Why don't
00:13:58 ◼ ► you just use iCloud drive and then have that sync to your Synology and then have that sync to an
00:14:02 ◼ ► SFTP server. Perfect. Nothing could go wrong. All right, John, tell me about RSI and voice control,
00:14:08 ◼ ► if you please. We had further discussion on RSI in the last episodes. Ask ATP, we've talked about
00:14:15 ◼ ► in many episodes in the past. And we got a couple of interesting examples of solutions to RSI.
00:14:22 ◼ ► One is from, oh, I got to do these names. I got to practice that. You're going to read them.
00:14:33 ◼ ► his last name right. Anyway. Tatsuhiko Miyagawa has an example of someone using voice control
00:14:43 ◼ ► to program in Perl, which, ha ha, yes, we all know. It's got all those funny punctuation symbols and
00:14:47 ◼ ► everything like that. The programmer is Emily Shea, and there's a video of her at a conference
00:14:53 ◼ ► explaining, here's how I use voice control to be a programmer, which you would think A, is going to
00:14:58 ◼ ► be hard no matter what, because programming in general is filled with all sorts of symbols and
00:15:02 ◼ ► things you have to do that aren't natural. And B, Perl, oh my goodness. And of course, there's a
00:15:06 ◼ ► couple of humorous videos out there on the web of showing how terribly unmodified voice control
00:15:14 ◼ ► software deals with Perl in particular. I think she uses one of them in the presentation. I don't
00:15:18 ◼ ► know if this is the original funny, you know, haha, trying to do voice control for Perl, but it is one
00:15:22 ◼ ► of them. So I recommend everybody check that out if you want to see what's possible. It sounds funny.
00:15:29 ◼ ► It sounds a little bit humorous when you watch it, but you can't help but be impressed. It's kind of
00:15:33 ◼ ► like a Casey setup only with an actual purpose, right? So the purpose is, the purpose is, hey,
00:15:38 ◼ ► this is a health issue. I need to find a way to do my job without using my body the way I was using
00:15:49 ◼ ► not a raspberry pie, but the software equivalent essentially, to make a setup where I can
00:15:53 ◼ ► effectively program Perl and use my computer. And then the second one is Philip Brokum, who has a
00:16:01 ◼ ► video showing his hands-free technique of using his computer. So not just like, hey, I'm not typing
00:16:07 ◼ ► when I'm programming, but like entirely hands-free as in I'm not using a mouse or a track pad. I'm
00:16:12 ◼ ► not touching the keyboard. And you might think, how can you use a computer like that? Sure, you
00:16:17 ◼ ► can use voice for the text input, but what about everything else? Well, the answer is in this video.
00:16:22 ◼ ► He says he's been a developer for 15 years, 10 of which have been hands-free. You should definitely
00:16:28 ◼ ► check it out. And he sent this because he just wanted people to know that the idea of don't use
00:16:33 ◼ ► your hands, like the humorous advice that I said that a doctor might offer you if you're having
00:16:38 ◼ ► some problem is actually possible if you're willing to put in the effort. One of the examples
00:16:42 ◼ ► I was super impressed with is like it shows the, you know, the strengths of voice input. We all
00:16:47 ◼ ► kind of know most people can speak better than they can type. It doesn't mean they can speak
00:16:54 ◼ ► faster than they can type, but most people, if it's just like an English sentence or, you know,
00:16:59 ◼ ► prose sentence, they can rattle that off pretty well. And the voice input software, if it's good,
00:17:05 ◼ ► will make sure there's a single space between every word, every word is spelled correctly,
00:17:09 ◼ ► like all that stuff. And you won't have typos. You might have spicos where, you know, homonyms
00:17:14 ◼ ► and end up in the sentence or whatever, but you can, you know, most people can rattle off a
00:17:19 ◼ ► sentence faster than they can type. So add to that reasonably efficient use of the rest of the
00:17:24 ◼ ► computer. And he does a little demo at one point in this where he's like, I'm going to take a
00:17:27 ◼ ► picture of myself and then email it to myself, which is a silly exercise, but it does demonstrate
00:17:32 ◼ ► all the things you would imagine would be such a pain to do with voice control. Take a picture
00:17:35 ◼ ► of yourself with your computer and then mail it to yourself. Well, now you've got a file and you're
00:17:39 ◼ ► dragging things around and you've got to open your mail app and you've got to add the attachment. And
00:17:42 ◼ ► then, you know, he writes a line of text into the message. He does that task of take a picture of
00:17:49 ◼ ► myself and email it to myself in an email with one sentence in it. I think just as fast as any person
00:17:54 ◼ ► using both of their hands could do it. Maybe not faster, but I think just as fast. It's a very
00:17:59 ◼ ► impressive demo. So check both of these out. If you want to see someone program pro by voice,
00:18:03 ◼ ► check out the first one. And if you want to see someone do look, look ma, no hands, try the second
00:18:08 ◼ ► one. What is this pedal that he's using? Cause I'm only now watching this for the first time and I'm
00:18:12 ◼ ► not listening to it. So what is the pedal for? It's a three button pedal, basically. It's got a
00:18:17 ◼ ► big fat middle part of the two parts on the side that you can kind of feel. And you know, he's just
00:18:21 ◼ ► got the buttons program to do various things. He's got the middle button, the middle part program to
00:18:26 ◼ ► be mouse click the right one program to be right click and the left one program to be turn on and
00:18:30 ◼ ► off the mouse tracking thing. Huh? Well, and it's tracking using his head, I guess, just from the
00:18:35 ◼ ► looks of it. It's tracking using the little reflective thing on the end of his headset mic.
00:18:39 ◼ ► He's got to have the headset mic for, you know, for good voice control. And all he does is stick
00:18:43 ◼ ► a little reflective sticker to the end of the headset mic. Eh, voila. Huh? That is wild. Look
00:18:47 ◼ ► out, look how well it uses the mouse. Like he's targeting the mouse better than most like average
00:18:52 ◼ ► people I see trying to use the mouse like they're driving a tiny arrow shaped car along the screen.
00:18:57 ◼ ► No, this is, this is really wild. I cannot believe how well and how efficient he is at doing this
00:19:05 ◼ ► stuff. Uh, and the reason you want to watch the Emily Shea video is because, uh, one, one facet
00:19:09 ◼ ► of it to spoil it is that, uh, there is a different set of words for letters. You know, what is the,
00:19:15 ◼ ► uh, the one called, uh, is it like NATO radio something or other one where it's like X-ray,
00:19:20 ◼ ► Foxtrot, all that business, right? Yeah. The phonetic alphabet, as she points out in the video,
00:19:26 ◼ ► a lot of those words are multi-syllabic. And so it's kind of a mouthful if you get the, you know,
00:19:30 ◼ ► they're multi-syllabic for a reason, but if when you're talking directly into a headset microphone
00:19:34 ◼ ► for your computer, it can get a little bit cumbersome. So she's got a second set of words
00:19:38 ◼ ► for letters in the alphabet. For those who don't know, this is like, if you had to say the letters
00:19:51 ◼ ► phones and cell phones, they're very bad at conveying speech. So if you're trying to spell
00:20:00 ◼ ► they all kind of sound the same over, you know, a 22 kilohertz connection with some noise.
00:20:04 ◼ ► And so it's like B as in boy, right? You do that thing. Well, there's a canonical set of those that
00:20:10 ◼ ► are developed for NATO or the military where X is X-ray and F is Foxtrot. Anyway, that's what we're
00:20:15 ◼ ► talking about. And so she has a different set of them that are shorter. Uh, she also uses VI. So
00:20:22 ◼ ► to exit VI, exit VI while saving, she has to say WQ, but instead of WQ, the word for W is whale
00:20:32 ◼ ► and the word for Q is quench. So she says whale quench. Like if you just listen to it, if you just
00:20:38 ◼ ► listen to a transcription of her using her computer, it sounds like ridiculous gibberish,
00:20:43 ◼ ► but it's amazing to watch. So recommend both videos. So John, if you ever wondered what it
00:20:48 ◼ ► sounds like to Mark when I, when you talk about destiny from the way you described this video,
00:20:52 ◼ ► it sounds exactly like that whale quench could totally be an exotic weapon in destiny. Three
00:20:57 ◼ ► bungee call me. I rest my case. The area of RSI and accessibility and, and similar things where
00:21:05 ◼ ► like there are kind of unusual methods to interact with a computer is always fascinating because to
00:21:10 ◼ ► people who are not accustomed to doing these things, it seems impossible or it seems like
00:21:14 ◼ ► magic or it seems like superhuman when people can operate their computer or their devices with these
00:21:21 ◼ ► input methods that like we don't use most of the time or that we don't even know exist.
00:21:25 ◼ ► But the reality is like every way that we interact with a computer was new to us at some point,
00:21:31 ◼ ► you know, the keyboard and mouse were new to all of us at one point. At first, when we got,
00:21:36 ◼ ► when we were first learning how to use computers and use keyboards and mice, we were inefficient
00:21:40 ◼ ► with them. And I'm sure seeing someone who was an expert typist, you know, blast away the hundred
00:21:46 ◼ ► words per minute on their typewriter or on their keyboard. That seemed like magic to us. If we,
00:21:51 ◼ ► if we didn't know anything about it, if we hadn't used it before, but like that, and like everything
00:21:55 ◼ ► else, it's possible to learn these things. And it's amazing, like what the difference between like,
00:22:02 ◼ ► when you are totally unfamiliar with a task and someone who is a pro at it and like whose brains
00:22:08 ◼ ► have wired those pathways to be really good at something. There's a huge difference. And
00:22:13 ◼ ► our brains are capable of so many things that we don't realize they're capable of with practice and
00:22:21 ◼ ► with time investment. The reality is you can probably be super fast at lots of these different
00:22:26 ◼ ► methods that we don't think of. It just takes time. Just like, you know, on a smaller scale,
00:22:30 ◼ ► my, my using a trackpad on the left and teaching my left hand as a right-handed person, teaching
00:22:35 ◼ ► my left hand how to use a trackpad kind of in parallel with also using the mouse in my right
00:22:39 ◼ ► hand. That felt really weird for the first, as I said, week or so maybe. And now it doesn't anymore.
00:22:45 ◼ ► And now it's just something I do. And my left hand is totally fine. I occasionally mention this
00:22:50 ◼ ► and I hear from people saying, how can you do that? I don't know how it's possible. And I say,
00:22:53 ◼ ► yeah, well try it. It is, it feels weird at first and you build it up and you get faster and you get
00:22:58 ◼ ► better and it doesn't take, it isn't, it isn't that hard. And something like this where, you know,
00:23:02 ◼ ► to, you know, most of us like, you know, typical computer users using keyboards and mice and
00:23:06 ◼ ► trackpads, it seems magical that somebody can use voice control software or other input devices.
00:23:13 ◼ ► Similar, like if you've ever, if you've ever seen a visually impaired person use voiceover,
00:23:16 ◼ ► who's really good at it, it's a similar thing. Like it really does seem superhuman to us
00:23:21 ◼ ► because we, we can't perceive using this tool that way, but that's only because we are not
00:23:26 ◼ ► accustomed to it. We are not familiar with it. We aren't, we aren't, we aren't already experts with
00:23:30 ◼ ► it. We're not using it every day, but that isn't to say that we can't learn. Yeah. The interesting
00:23:39 ◼ ► are not necessarily any less efficient than the sort of default ones that we use. Most of the time,
00:23:45 ◼ ► the reason these input methods demonstrated here aren't in widespread use is either because they
00:23:52 ◼ ► have some attribute of them that's annoying. So for example, controlling the cursor with a little
00:23:58 ◼ ► reflective thing, that means you have to have something strapped to your head. And that is way
00:24:02 ◼ ► more of a burden, just like it's annoying to have a thing strapped to your head, like just in terms
00:24:06 ◼ ► of mass adoption, right? Convincing people to put on a headset to use a computer versus you sit down
00:24:10 ◼ ► and put your hand on a thing, right? There's a reason the mouse, you know, is the superior
00:24:15 ◼ ► solution in that scenario. But practically speaking, if you can get over that very tiny
00:24:19 ◼ ► hurdle of you put a thing on your head, I'm not entirely convinced that that system is less
00:24:24 ◼ ► efficient than using a mouse with your hand or that people would be worse at it because we're
00:24:28 ◼ ► kind of used to like pointing our heads at things that we're interested in. And the second thing is,
00:24:32 ◼ ► a lot of these input solutions require computing power that didn't exist at the time where we were
00:24:37 ◼ ► sort of laying the foundation for the current, you know, de facto set of input methods, right?
00:24:42 ◼ ► And we're kind of stuck with things that one, like the reason we have the keyboard looking the way it
00:24:45 ◼ ► does is because of typewriters, right? It's, you know, so a lot of these decisions take a long time
00:24:49 ◼ ► to change. And so in the beginning of computing, the idea that you could put a tiny little piece
00:24:53 ◼ ► of reflective tape to the end of a headset mic or the idea of a headset mic at all, for, you know,
00:24:59 ◼ ► home computer users and that your computer could visually track it no matter where your head was,
00:25:02 ◼ ► it's just science fiction. But today, no problem, right? And so it's going to take a while for
00:25:13 ◼ ► the evolution of our input methods. And arguably, the iPhone is an example of that. Touch input has
00:25:18 ◼ ► been around, but it took a while for the technology to get to the point where touch input can finally
00:25:22 ◼ ► be good. Same thing could be true of, you know, looking at things or pointing your head at things.
00:25:33 ◼ ► that's another situation where the hurdle is now I have to get a thing and sit under my desk, and
00:25:37 ◼ ► it's on the floor, and it's more expensive. There's all sorts of hurdles besides efficiency. But I'm
00:25:40 ◼ ► saying if you get over all of those, it's like, yeah, but of course, using your head into foot
00:25:45 ◼ ► pedals less efficient than a mouse, is it? I'm not entirely sure. It's weirder. People aren't used to
00:25:49 ◼ ► it. There are barriers to entry that don't exist. It takes more sophisticated computing and software.
00:25:54 ◼ ► It's not built into the US. It's all sorts of things stacked against it. But once you get once
00:25:58 ◼ ► you sort of reach cruising speed, it might be just as good or even better in some scenarios. Same deal
00:26:03 ◼ ► with voice recognition, huge technical hurdle. But once you get over it, it's, you know, it is better
00:26:09 ◼ ► than typing for a lot of scenarios. And I say this to somebody, I didn't mention this in the last time
00:26:13 ◼ ► we talked about RSI, but the time before that I think I did. When I was writing, you know, 40,000
00:26:18 ◼ ► word Mac OS X reviews for Ars Technica, for a large portion of them, I dictated them. Right? I
00:26:23 ◼ ► mean, granted, it's pros, it's easier. I'm not programming, right? But yeah, I dictate them. That
00:26:27 ◼ ► saved me from typing. And it's weird to do and takes a while to get used to. And unfortunately,
00:26:32 ◼ ► the software used in at least one of these videos is Dragon Dictate for Mac. They don't even make it
00:26:36 ◼ ► for Mac anymore, which is kind of crappy. But yeah, I bought a piece of software and I talked
00:26:41 ◼ ► to my computer. And it was weird at the beginning, but eventually got used to it. And it's kind of
00:26:46 ◼ ► relaxing to be able to just sort of sit back in your chair and ruminate and fire off a sentence
00:26:50 ◼ ► and then change your mind. And you know, and all without touching anything. Your hands aren't doing
00:26:54 ◼ ► anything. So that was an answer to a question a lot of people asked, have you used voice recognition?
00:26:59 ◼ ► Yes, I have. Haven't used it to program Perl, but I've definitely used it to write pros.
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00:28:31 ◼ ► Was it this week or last week? I want to say it was last week that we had an interesting podcast
00:28:41 ◼ ► come out. Our friend Federico Vittucci interviewed Craig Federighi of Apple, mostly about iPad and
00:28:48 ◼ ► the new cursor stuff and iPad. And the interview is, I don't know, 20, 30 minutes, something like
00:28:53 ◼ ► that. And I really enjoyed it. But apparently, Jon, you need to do your victory lap now about
00:28:59 ◼ ► Destiny. So let's just get it over with. It's not a victory lap. I'm just pointing out something
00:29:03 ◼ ► interesting from the interview. Yes, it's a good interview. You should check it out. Like, this is
00:29:06 ◼ ► exactly who you'd want to hear talk about that, Vittucci, the hardcore iPad user, and Craig Federighi,
00:29:11 ◼ ► who's basically in charge of software, or at least in charge of iPadOS at Apple, talking about the
00:29:16 ◼ ► evolution of those two things. So definitely check it out. A couple of things jumped out of me in the
00:29:21 ◼ ► interview I thought were cool. One, and we'll put time-stamped links in the show notes for these,
00:29:26 ◼ ► was a bit where Craig talks about the logic they added for the thing where when you move the cursor
00:29:32 ◼ ► on iPadOS, it morphs into the button. It changes from the little circle to be just highlighting the
00:29:40 ◼ ► button if you get near the button. And he talks about how they did some essentially client-side
00:29:46 ◼ ► prediction to say if you flicked your finger across the trackpad on your iPad Pro, if you
00:29:53 ◼ ► flicked your finger kind of in the direction where a button was and it looks to them like
00:29:58 ◼ ► if allowed to continue at this trajectory, at this velocity, it would land more or less where
00:30:04 ◼ ► the button is. They would do that for you and snap your cursor to the button that it looked like you
00:30:09 ◼ ► were kind of flicking towards. So you're basically making a gesture, and instead of them requiring
00:30:13 ◼ ► you to steer, carefully steer the little cursor there, they would snap the cursor to the button
00:30:18 ◼ ► if you have that little cursor changing shape mode on. And he describes it in a little bit more
00:30:24 ◼ ► detail here, but basically what he's describing is almost word for word a match for portions of
00:30:31 ◼ ► the implementation of Aim Assist in Destiny. So Destiny is a first-person shooter. You may have
00:30:37 ◼ ► heard of it on this program. It's available for personal computers and consoles, and on consoles,
00:30:42 ◼ ► people use controllers, which just have little thumb sticks, and it's actually pretty hard to
00:30:47 ◼ ► precisely control where a little aiming point on the screen is with just your thumb on a thumb
00:30:52 ◼ ► stick. There's not much range of motion, and it's not absolute. It's relative, right? So it's not
00:30:58 ◼ ► like when you put the cursor to the far left, it hits the left-ended screen, and the far right
00:31:01 ◼ ► hits the right, and you're kind of driving the cursor. So there's all sorts of limitations that
00:31:04 ◼ ► make controlling the cursor with a thumb stick worse for precision than, say, using a mouse or
00:31:09 ◼ ► touching the screen directly, which is what the kids these days do, or whatever. So to make a
00:31:14 ◼ ► first-person shooter playable, games usually have to have some kind of Aim Assist that has to
00:31:20 ◼ ► interpret what you're doing with your thumb to control the cursor and what's on the screen.
00:31:25 ◼ ► And so if it looks like, for example, you're flicking your finger up towards where somebody's
00:31:30 ◼ ► head is, and they calculated that trajectory that if it continued along that course, your cursor
00:31:36 ◼ ► would come more or less near the head. They will snap your aiming cursor to the head so that you
00:31:42 ◼ ► can pull the fire button and get a head shot. Whereas in reality, if they let the cursor go
00:31:45 ◼ ► where it was going to go, maybe it wouldn't have been anywhere near their head. Maybe it would have
00:31:49 ◼ ► just fired over their shoulder or something like that. And there's all sorts of kinds of Aim Assist
00:31:53 ◼ ► in Destiny, not just what I described. But all that stuff needs to be there to make the game
00:31:58 ◼ ► playable and fun. And the interesting thing about it in terms of gaming, and probably it's also
00:32:04 ◼ ► true of hardcore iPad users like Paticci, is that if you play Destiny with a controller,
00:32:09 ◼ ► you play the Aim Assist. Once you get to sort of a medium level of experience with the game,
00:32:26 ◼ ► And rather than taking the time to carefully get in that direction, at which point I'll be shot
00:32:31 ◼ ► myself, I quickly flick towards there and time it so that the Aim Assist, where my cursor slows down
00:32:37 ◼ ► ever so slightly when it passes over their head, that I can pull the trigger at the same time.
00:32:40 ◼ ► By the way, I'm terrible at this. I'm the world's worst drag sniper. But I still play the Aim Assist
00:32:51 ◼ ► application, not because it's Destiny, but hearing the application of general gaming technology,
00:32:55 ◼ ► because every first person shooter that has control over support does something like this.
00:32:59 ◼ ► The application of gaming technology to personal computers, to non-gaming applications. And I think
00:33:04 ◼ ► that's a great idea. I think we should see more of that. All the same tech that make games fun to
00:33:11 ◼ ► play and make them feel responsive and make it feel like the game is doing what you meant in
00:33:16 ◼ ► your head and not what you did with your actual body, all that just makes using your iPhone or
00:33:23 ◼ ► your iPad or even your Mac also feel good. So more of that, please. I would just like you to know
00:33:30 ◼ ► that because I feel so lost by the terminology in Destiny, it was only halfway through your monologue
00:33:37 ◼ ► when I realized you were saying Aim Assist. And for some reason I kept... No, no, no, no,
00:33:42 ◼ ► you pronounced it correctly. But I kept hearing in my brain Amethyst, which I assumed was some
00:33:46 ◼ ► sort of like weird Destiny thing. This is on me. You were pronouncing it just fine. It's just,
00:33:53 ◼ ► Yeah. Well, I'm so used to not understanding anything Destiny related that I just assumed
00:34:03 ◼ ► The more derogatory term was called auto-aim back in the day. The PC users would say, "Oh,
00:34:08 ◼ ► you have auto-aim, automatically aims for you." By the way, PC users, sorry to disappoint you,
00:34:22 ◼ ► like on YouTube, just search for like how to make platforming feel good or all sorts of stuff. Like
00:34:27 ◼ ► every game does this to some degree. There's lots of platforming videos because there's just well
00:34:33 ◼ ► known things that platformers do. Like for example, Coyote Time, which is a term that was coined,
00:34:39 ◼ ► I don't know, maybe a decade ago or so, and that everyone in this video uses. That's...
00:34:43 ◼ ► I have to give so much context. I feel like Merlin. I have to give so much context to explain
00:34:47 ◼ ► this. Coyote Time refers to Wile E. Coyote. Who's Wile E. Coyote? Wile E. Coyote used to chase a
00:34:54 ◼ ► Roadrunner. He was a cartoon. And one of the things that would happen in the videos is he
00:35:04 ◼ ► but they make new Mickey Mouse cartoons now. I haven't checked on Disney Plus. I don't think
00:35:14 ◼ ► and he was always running around where there are lots of big cliffs for comedic value, and he would
00:35:18 ◼ ► run and find himself... Find that he had run off the edge of a cliff, but he wouldn't fall to his
00:35:23 ◼ ► death until he realized that he'd fallen off the edge of the cliff. So at a certain point, he's in
00:35:27 ◼ ► midair, over the edge of the cliff, so we can all appreciate his comedic situation. Then he looks
00:35:32 ◼ ► down and then he falls. Pretty much every platform game that feels good, a game where you're like a
00:35:37 ◼ ► side-scroller where you're jumping around with a little character, allows you to essentially run
00:35:40 ◼ ► off the edge of a cliff and still hit jump, even though you're no longer on the cliff. Because if
00:35:46 ◼ ► they didn't, you would feel cheated by the game. You were like, "Hey, I hit jump. I didn't fall."
00:35:50 ◼ ► And the game knows, no, actually, your little character was off the edge of the cliff before
00:35:54 ◼ ► you hit jump. So you should, by all rights, fall to your death, but instead, we will build in some
00:35:58 ◼ ► amount of Coyote time, which allows you to jump. In fact, speaking of modern game builders, there
00:36:02 ◼ ► was a good video, I think, on the Celeste video game, a game that Tiff really enjoyed and talked
00:36:07 ◼ ► about with Mike on their gaming podcast. Celeste does that and more. You can find that video. If I
00:36:14 ◼ ► find it, I'll put it in the show notes. If not, just search for Celeste game mechanics or something.
00:36:19 ◼ ► All that stuff, like I said, all that stuff that makes games feel good and fun also makes computers
00:36:23 ◼ ► feel good and fun. So I like seeing it here. And I always like seeing some of this talent applied
00:36:27 ◼ ► to things that aren't just shooting people in the head. Yeah, although shooting people in the head
00:36:31 ◼ ► is not good in real life. But virtually, it's basically just like playing a game of tag,
00:36:35 ◼ ► especially since you respawn instantly. So I endorse it when it is in the context of space
00:36:41 ◼ ► magic and not reality. And the second thing that Craig talked about was one of our pet peeves,
00:36:48 ◼ ► closing apps. So he was talking about how people who grew up with technology that was less advanced
00:36:54 ◼ ► get used to the idea that they have to deal with memory. Like he didn't bring this out specifically,
00:36:58 ◼ ► but back on the classic Mac, YouTube probably don't remember this, but back in classic Mac OS,
00:37:02 ◼ ► you could get info on a file in the Finder. One of the fields in the get info window was a place
00:37:07 ◼ ► where you could type in how much RAM the application should have. Because classic Mac OS did not have
00:37:13 ◼ ► dynamic memory allocation in the beginning at all. And then eventually it was still somewhat limited.
00:37:18 ◼ ► Right. It didn't have virtual memory. It didn't have a modern memory system. And so an application
00:37:23 ◼ ► would come with a default allocation, but if you wanted to do something, if you want to open a
00:37:27 ◼ ► really big document or you want to do something demanding or whatever, you could increase that
00:37:30 ◼ ► amount of memory. And that type of manual management of like, "Oh, I have to keep track
00:37:34 ◼ ► of how much memory the thing needs. And if it's limited set too low, I have to quit the app and
00:37:39 ◼ ► make it bigger and launch it again." All that sort of ridiculous stuff of managing memory.
00:37:43 ◼ ► He brings it up in the more modern context of, on the Mac, I have to worry about whether an
00:37:49 ◼ ► application is running or not. Do we need to launch the application first or whatever? That
00:37:52 ◼ ► was the whole push at various points in the history of Mac OS to make the distinction between
00:37:59 ◼ ► running and non-running applications less visible to the user down to the point where they stuck
00:38:05 ◼ ► this to a preference where you can remove that little dot on the dock that's supposed to be
00:38:09 ◼ ► underneath running applications. You could just make it so there's no dots. And what do you care
00:38:12 ◼ ► if it's running or not? If it's not running and you launch it, it'll just pick up right where you
00:38:20 ◼ ► just like iOS developers. iOS developers had to do it because their app could be killed at any time
00:38:24 ◼ ► and was killed at any time when there was no multitasking and now it was killed less frequently,
00:38:28 ◼ ► but still killed. So every iOS app has had to do this from day one, but Mac apps haven't,
00:38:34 ◼ ► and it's been difficult to bring up the speed of it. But all of this was about how that mindset of
00:38:40 ◼ ► making the user worry about implementation details related to memory and running applications was
00:38:45 ◼ ► something of the past. And Craig says, "People who were brought up in that environment, to this day,
00:38:52 ◼ ► we see them constantly force quitting applications on their iPhones." Which is true. He didn't go so
00:39:00 ◼ ► far as to tell those people they were bad or wrong, but they are. It's because he's very
00:39:04 ◼ ► political. But he did say that people who are brought up in that older world bring those
00:39:10 ◼ ► habits forward and think they need to manually replace, which I think is also true. But I would
00:39:15 ◼ ► say that even kids who are brought up and have no idea what classic Mac OS is, they're brought up on
00:39:21 ◼ ► modern things. The first device they ever used was an iPhone or an iPad. They're doing it too.
00:39:30 ◼ ► manage memory. So I really hope that, you know, this is just a throw off line in one podcast,
00:39:35 ◼ ► but I really hope that Apple understands the root problem related to people obsessively force
00:39:39 ◼ ► quitting apps is not that everyone who's doing it is an old fuddy duddy who grew up using classic
00:39:44 ◼ ► Mac OS. That's not what's causing this. There are people like that for sure, right? But that's not
00:39:49 ◼ ► the root cause. And so I hope they have a deeper understanding of exactly what's going on and
00:39:53 ◼ ► exactly why this phenomenon of reflexively force quitting every single application on your iOS
00:39:57 ◼ ► device has swept the world like coronavirus. Anyway, bad comparison. I'm sorry. Yeah, I was,
00:40:04 ◼ ► if you didn't bring up this part of this angle on that interview, I was going to bring it up because
00:40:09 ◼ ► I love that interview. The Federico and Federighi interview over on App Stories was fantastic. I
00:40:16 ◼ ► really enjoyed it. But that was the one thing that stood out like when he kind of disregarded or
00:40:21 ◼ ► excused this behavior of people force quitting apps as, oh, well, you know, it's just people who were
00:40:25 ◼ ► used to the old way of doing things on PCs. Like, no, that's not it. Like there's people do it for
00:40:30 ◼ ► many more reasons than that. Some of which are actually good reasons, much to my chagrin as a
00:40:35 ◼ ► developer, because people force quit my app all the time and then complain about it not like
00:40:43 ◼ ► Regardless, like it's a real thing that people do for very good reasons, some of which are,
00:40:50 ◼ ► you know, urban legends, some of which are placebo, but some of which are actually real
00:40:53 ◼ ► reasons. And if Apple doesn't understand them yet, they really should. The reasons aren't good,
00:40:59 ◼ ► but the reasons exist and aren't what Craig said, right? So they have their reasons for doing it.
00:41:04 ◼ ► They're just mistaken about, you know, the connection between, you know, thing that I want,
00:41:09 ◼ ► therefore action will get what I want. And, you know, as you point out, Marco, a lot of times,
00:41:17 ◼ ► why doesn't Overcast ever download my stuff in the background? Because you keep force quitting it.
00:41:24 ◼ ► This brings me back to that idea that I had many shows ago, that some new version of iOS should,
00:41:34 ◼ ► just make all the little pictures disappear from the multitasking switcher, but not have it actually
00:41:42 ◼ ► what does force quitting do? How many people who aren't developers know all the consequences
00:41:47 ◼ ► of swiping up that little thing? Like very few, right? And they wouldn't be doing it reflexively.
00:41:52 ◼ ► But like, you know, I don't want to get too deep into it again, because we talked about many times
00:41:55 ◼ ► in the past, but people want to clean that thing up. And every once in a while, there's a super
00:42:00 ◼ ► duper legit reason to force quit a single misbehaving app or a few misbehaving apps. But
00:42:06 ◼ ► it's just so much easier mentally to say, you know what, look, I'm just going to clean them all up.
00:42:10 ◼ ► It makes me feel good to clean them all up. Every once in a while, it fixes Facebook from killing
00:42:14 ◼ ► my phone battery. So it's just a thing I'm going to do from now on is I'm going to force quit every
00:42:19 ◼ ► app all the time. And it's my idle animation. I'm online, force quit, force quit, force quit.
00:42:24 ◼ ► I'm going to put my phone in my pocket, force quit, force quit, force quit, force quit. Please,
00:42:27 ◼ ► everybody, don't do this for a variety of reasons. Force quit apps when they need to, not reflexively
00:42:31 ◼ ► all the time, because it's fun. It was a good interview and it's worth your time. John and Marco,
00:42:38 ◼ ► can you please ensure that you have given me lifetime free access to your applications?
00:42:43 ◼ ► I want to make sure that I have all of your stuff for free. I haven't gotten that one. That's an
00:42:48 ◼ ► interesting one. I wasn't sure which one of you this was that put this in the show notes,
00:42:57 ◼ ► give me your app for free quote. Yeah. So this is just, I don't want to have a preface here.
00:43:03 ◼ ► This is not like serious complaint, at least not for me, not, not a serious kind of complaint
00:43:07 ◼ ► or anything like that. It's not like saying, Oh, it's so hard to be developed because people
00:43:11 ◼ ► email us. Not that at all. It's just that, you know, as someone who, as a newbie to the,
00:43:20 ◼ ► I noticed that I started to get a bunch of emails that I did not get in the past, right?
00:43:26 ◼ ► Just because I have, you know, a couple of apps in the app store. One of those varieties of emails
00:43:32 ◼ ► that I've been listing here is essentially an email that where someone asks for a free copy
00:43:37 ◼ ► of your application. Now there are legit versions of that. Hey, I want, I want to review your
00:43:42 ◼ ► application for my publication. Can you give me a free copy or whatever you can argue about the
00:43:45 ◼ ► ethics of them getting a free copy and reviewing it and stuff like that. But that's what promo
00:43:48 ◼ ► codes are for. You know, partially Apple gives you a system where you can generate a coupon code that
00:43:53 ◼ ► you can give to somebody and they get a free copy of your app. Great. Like there are legit reasons
00:43:56 ◼ ► for that. You know, and Hey, people can ask, you know, it doesn't hurt to ask, right? If you want
00:44:02 ◼ ► a free copy of an app, maybe you just ask for it. Maybe you'll get one. Maybe you have a story. Oh,
00:44:06 ◼ ► I'm a student and I really want to use your app to make this thing, but I can't afford it because
00:44:09 ◼ ► it's expensive. You know, yada yada, whatever. Everyone's got a reason. The reason I bring this
00:44:13 ◼ ► up though, is that just having two apps, I noticed a certain similarity almost as if it's like a form
00:44:26 ◼ ► real effort to give a reason. Like I'm, I'm in financial straits or whatever, or I really need
00:44:32 ◼ ► this app to do more, which makes sense for my apps, which are, you know, simple utility apps
00:44:36 ◼ ► that don't cost a lot of money and honestly don't provide so much functionality. But like,
00:44:40 ◼ ► I need this app for my work. No, you don't. It's an app switcher and a window layering, like, you
00:44:45 ◼ ► know, behavior modification. There is no work that you do that requires those applications. Right.
00:44:51 ◼ ► But, you know, after the, you know, 50th or 60th, one of these emails that all look the same and say,
00:45:03 ◼ ► what is the benefit of, you know, mechanically, you know, through, you know, through some
00:45:08 ◼ ► automation, simply sending every single developer on the app store, a free request or the application,
00:45:12 ◼ ► I suppose, you know, even with a very small hit rate, if you send out 300,000 emails and you get
00:45:18 ◼ ► 0.01% back, you know, you got some free apps. Great. But then of what value are those free apps?
00:45:24 ◼ ► Like, did someone, did someone write a script and do this and then they get like three or
00:45:31 ◼ ► Because they're going to be random apps. Someone replies, okay, here's a free copy of my app. And
00:45:36 ◼ ► you're like, oh, well, I don't need this app. Is it just kind of like a collecting thing where
00:45:40 ◼ ► you never actually use the apps? You just, you just want to have the free copies and you can
00:45:44 ◼ ► compare like who has the most free apps. Like, you know, look how many free apps I have, you know,
00:45:49 ◼ ► like you compete to see who has the most, if you can break the purchase page in the app store by
00:45:53 ◼ ► having hundreds of thousands or hundreds of thousands of apps. Anyway, I just thought this
00:45:59 ◼ ► was interesting. And it made me think about the kinds of emails that you expose yourself to by
00:46:05 ◼ ► participating in an ecosystem. And in this case, it's the app store or whatever. And I have my two
00:46:09 ◼ ► little dinky apps and this is the one I could think of. But I just thought you two probably
00:46:12 ◼ ► have similar stories, especially Marco, about the kinds of emails you start getting once you're in
00:46:17 ◼ ► the app store, especially if you have like a significant application with kind of a high
00:46:21 ◼ ► profile. But I guess I'll start by asking, do you two get the give me a free copy of your app email
00:46:30 ◼ ► remember a single time I've gotten that. So maybe my apps aren't as good or aren't as popular or
00:46:34 ◼ ► aren't as visible, but not as expensive as mine. Your apps are free though, right? That maybe that's
00:46:38 ◼ ► why. It's free to download. And then they're both five bucks. It's a different, a different
00:46:42 ◼ ► form letter to say, can I please have your an app purchase for free? I, again, it surely has happened
00:46:48 ◼ ► at some point, but off the top of my head, I can't remember it having happened. Yeah. So I used to
00:46:53 ◼ ► get these all the time for Instapaper because when I ran it, Instapaper had a paid upfront app
00:46:59 ◼ ► and I, you know, I didn't use an app purchase at the time and, or at least not anyway for a while
00:47:05 ◼ ► anyway. So like, so it was paid upfront. So I got these emails all the time. So one of the reasons
00:47:12 ◼ ► people would get it is, you know, Hey, I want to, you know, I want to review it or I'm just a poor
00:47:16 ◼ ► college student, please give me, you know, people begging for it. And there was not much value,
00:47:21 ◼ ► honestly, in giving most of these people free copies of your app. It's one thing, you know, if,
00:47:26 ◼ ► if you are serving some kind of humanitarian or charitable purpose, but if you're looking at it
00:47:31 ◼ ► purely from a business point of view, like what's the value to me of a few people having a free
00:47:36 ◼ ► copy? Like it's usually not even worth your time to respond. What about exposure Marco? Yeah. So
00:47:41 ◼ ► that's, that's one of the most common variants that I, that I got was along the lines of,
00:47:48 ◼ ► hi, I'm so and so I have a popular YouTube channel in country X that is not your country. If you give
00:47:56 ◼ ► me a promo code for your app plus like three other promo codes to give away on my channel, I'll talk
00:48:02 ◼ ► about you and you can have exposure, that kind of thing. So they, so that's, you know, you were
00:48:06 ◼ ► asking John why somebody, what, what people do with their free codes. If they get more than one,
00:48:12 ◼ ► they usually will use one for themselves and they will give one away as some kind of contest on
00:48:16 ◼ ► their YouTube channel or their blog or whatever. These are usually YouTube channel. And, and the
00:48:22 ◼ ► funny thing is like if you actually look at these people's YouTube channels, they have what 30
00:48:26 ◼ ► subscribers maybe like it's not, you're, you're never going to get any kind of meaningful value
00:48:30 ◼ ► out of that. I would also say just as anecdotal, you know, counter argument to those kinds of
00:48:41 ◼ ► they never asked for a promo code. Like the ones that actually mattered, the ones that actually got
00:48:48 ◼ ► significant attention that actually possibly might've moved the needle of sales of my apps at all
00:48:52 ◼ ► were never anything that requested a promo code from me. So for whatever it's worth, you know,
00:48:58 ◼ ► that's, but, but I've, I got, I got the emails all the time for this paper. For Overcast, I haven't.
00:49:03 ◼ ► And I think, you know, you know, it's, it's because he's a free apps up front. For a long time,
00:49:09 ◼ ► you couldn't even have promo codes for in-app purchases. I'm not sure you can now. And if you
00:49:14 ◼ ► can now, I'm not sure whether you can do it for subscription purchases or not. And since Overcast
00:49:19 ◼ ► currently only has a subscription purchase, I don't know if there's any real way for me to do that,
00:49:23 ◼ ► but either way, nobody ever asks. But yeah, certainly the, you know, exposure on my YouTube
00:49:29 ◼ ► channel, give me five codes to give away for like 30 subscribers. That's, that was a very common
00:49:33 ◼ ► thing to get. That shows an interesting, some amount of savvy that they must know that there's
00:49:39 ◼ ► no such thing for, as a promo code for a subscription based in-app purchase or whatever.
00:49:44 ◼ ► Otherwise they would just ask anyway, and you know, whether or not you can actually give it to them.
00:49:47 ◼ ► So there's, it feels like there's knowledge on the other end. Yeah, they, exposure or whatever,
00:49:54 ◼ ► I, I, I give away free apps all the time. Like, I don't care if I, if I'm, if I happen to have
00:49:59 ◼ ► the App Store Connect window open and I want to generate a promo, I can generate a promo code.
00:50:03 ◼ ► I'll just give them, like, I don't, I'm not begrudging these people, these apps. I just,
00:50:11 ◼ ► I'm amazed, in the case of my weird little apps, I'm amazed that anyone would go through the effort
00:50:23 ◼ ► especially if you're an automated form thing, like, it's just going to be like, here you go.
00:50:32 ◼ ► especially if they write more than one sentence and have some kind of explanation, it's like,
00:50:35 ◼ ► ask for a free copy of Photoshop or something like, Switch Glass is not going to change your
00:50:46 ◼ ► But these days, when, you know, most of the things that are receiving these emails cost like,
00:50:55 ◼ ► - I'm at the top of that range. Five dollars is the hundred dollars of today's app store.
00:51:17 ◼ ► steady trickle of people just, you know, people and/or scripts asking for free copies of apps.
00:51:23 ◼ ► The other thing is that, then I never hear from them again, right? No one ever replies and say,
00:51:27 ◼ ► gee, thanks for the free app. Like, you will never hear from them again. You send the promo code,
00:51:34 ◼ ► So what other things have you gotten? What other kinds-- strains of emails that you get
00:51:46 ◼ ► - I feel like every three to six months, I send a DM to Marco and Underscore in Slack saying,
00:51:55 ◼ ► hey, I just got this thing from Dun & Bradstreet. This is total garbage, right? And usually it's
00:51:59 ◼ ► like a race between the two of them to see which one of them will say, yes, total garbage,
00:52:07 ◼ ► they're some kind of like business directory company or something that's been around forever.
00:52:12 ◼ ► And Apple uses them to, during your account setup, when you set up a business app store account,
00:52:19 ◼ ► Apple uses Dun & Bradstreet to verify your info, basically as like, almost like a credit or
00:52:24 ◼ ► verification agency. Like, they're using them in that role. And so you have to submit your info,
00:52:29 ◼ ► and Apple makes it easy, it used to be way harder. Apple now makes it pretty easy to go through this
00:52:33 ◼ ► process, but basically you are submitting all of your business info, your EIN, your name and
00:52:40 ◼ ► address and everything, to this private company, Dun & Bradstreet, for Apple to verify that,
00:52:46 ◼ ► through them, that you seem to be a legit business. And then after that, Dun & Bradstreet will,
00:52:58 ◼ ► both phone calls and postal mail stuff, and I think maybe also email. So it's typically,
00:53:05 ◼ ► it typically will say something on the lines of, you need to complete your business credit report,
00:53:10 ◼ ► and finish your business credit report today by filling out this form or paying us this money or
00:53:15 ◼ ► whatever. And all it is is Dun & Bradstreet, like, basically selling you like fake verification for
00:53:21 ◼ ► fake spots and fake yellow pages, like that kind of crap. And every business gets weird, scammy,
00:53:27 ◼ ► solicitation attempts from services, like usually in the mail, just by having registered a business
00:53:32 ◼ ► somewhere in some database somewhere. But Dun & Bradstreet really takes it to another level by
00:53:37 ◼ ► how scammy their stuff looks, and it makes it really just dirty feeling that Apple is so involved
00:53:42 ◼ ► with them, or at least was, I don't know if they still are, but Apple basically forces all
00:53:47 ◼ ► developers with business accounts to subject themselves to this other company and give them
00:53:52 ◼ ► all this information. But I wonder if they still do it. - Yeah, I had to do it. - Oh, great,
00:53:57 ◼ ► so they still do it. - As of the beginning of this year, and I was just registering as an individual,
00:54:01 ◼ ► I didn't have an LLC at that point, and I still had to do it. - Yeah. - And they did call me.
00:54:06 ◼ ► - Yeah, it's, like, for a company that values privacy so much, it's kind of crappy that Apple
00:54:13 ◼ ► forces everyone to submit themselves to this really terrible company. - Their checking wasn't even that
00:54:19 ◼ ► thorough. You know what you reminded me of when you mentioned snail mails? Do you guys still get
00:54:22 ◼ ► the snail mail of, this isn't being in the App Store, but if you have any domain names registered,
00:54:27 ◼ ► there's a reasonable chance that you're gonna get a actual piece of paper mail to your house that
00:54:31 ◼ ► says, "Your domain is going to expire, renew today," and it's basically another registrar
00:54:37 ◼ ► trying to essentially get you to transfer your domain name from your registrar to them. - What?
00:54:41 ◼ ► No, I don't think I've ever gotten one of these. - Yeah, well, 'cause I do a pretty good job of
00:54:45 ◼ ► not having my address on any of my Whois anywhere, so most of the time I don't get those for domains.
00:54:54 ◼ ► stuff that's like New York tax scams of, like, it'll look like I owe money to the state,
00:55:01 ◼ ► and it's really, you have to look really carefully and find the one line of text on this piece of
00:55:08 ◼ ► paper somewhere that says, "This is a service by a third party," but it's real scammy. But that's
00:55:14 ◼ ► just any business in New York State and probably any state. - Yeah, the domain name stuff, like,
00:55:18 ◼ ► in the days before Hover, domain privacy was either not common or very expensive for both,
00:55:24 ◼ ► and so I do have domains or did have domains where I didn't have domain privacy, and now I think
00:55:30 ◼ ► this just, you know, they're forever gonna be sending me snail mail with some kind of domain
00:55:34 ◼ ► name coming. I still think, every year I go check this and I just say, "Are there any domains that I
00:55:38 ◼ ► still haven't transferred to Hover?" Which, frequent sponsor of the show, you know, disclaimer,
00:55:42 ◼ ► disclaimer, but I legit put my own, I don't get any kind of free domains, I'm legit paying for my
00:55:47 ◼ ► own domains to be on Hover, just because it's convenient to have them all in one place in Hover
00:55:50 ◼ ► as a nice service, yada, yada, this is not an ad. Anyway, some domains, like, I bought a long time
00:55:55 ◼ ► ago that on, like, five year, like, long expiration dates or something, and every year I go and say,
00:56:02 ◼ ► "Are all my domains on Hover?" And it's like, "Oh, there's still that one over there," and it has,
00:56:06 ◼ ► like, multiple years left on it, and I'm like, "Do I want to go through the transfer thing?" I'm like,
00:56:10 ◼ ► "Eh, no, I'll just wait a little longer," so I keep deferring it, so it could be some, or, like,
00:56:14 ◼ ► I think actually Hover doesn't do some subdomains as well, some really super-excure ones that Hover
00:56:19 ◼ ► either didn't do or doesn't do. Anyway, all this is to say is that I'm hoping someday when all my
00:56:23 ◼ ► domains are on Hover that has Whois privacy by default, I think, this will be solved. Not that
00:56:28 ◼ ► I look at my snail mail anyway, but I do recall seeing one of those in the past several years,
00:56:42 ◼ ► there's this company, oh, God, I cannot think of what it's called, they email you cold,
00:56:55 ◼ ► airs on some cable channel. - Oh, yes, yes, oh, man, I know what you're thinking of. Oh,
00:57:00 ◼ ► what is that called? - I can't find it in my email. I can't remember even what cable channel,
00:57:04 ◼ ► like Bravo or something, I can't find it. Anyway. - No, it wasn't Bravo. I know what you're
00:57:07 ◼ ► thinking of, though. - Yeah, you got it, probably every developer gets this. So it's like we produce
00:57:12 ◼ ► a video segment on technology on cable TV, and it gets millions of people, whatever, whatever,
00:57:19 ◼ ► and we'd love to feature your app in a segment on our show. It's very salesy. It's like contact us
00:57:26 ◼ ► if you want to talk more and everything. So one time I actually did, I was curious. I'm like,
00:57:31 ◼ ► well, that sounds like a lot of people. What do they want from me to get featured on their show?
00:57:35 ◼ ► If they just want to talk about my app, it's no skin off my back. So I scheduled a phone call
00:57:40 ◼ ► with them, and what you eventually learn on the phone call is that they are going to, you have to
00:57:47 ◼ ► pay them thousands of dollars, and they will produce a video segment, and it doesn't actually
00:57:54 ◼ ► really air to any number of people. Whatever cable channel it is might show it once at two
00:58:01 ◼ ► in the morning or something, and they have this YouTube channel that they also will publish it to,
00:58:05 ◼ ► and many of their advertised numbers of like, you'll get this many subscribers, are actually
00:58:11 ◼ ► like YouTube views, and their YouTube channel looks horrendously sketchy, and it looks terrible,
00:58:17 ◼ ► and it doesn't seem like anybody watches it or anybody real watches it, but it takes you quite
00:58:24 ◼ ► a lot of engagement with them before you can even get to the point where you can realize this,
00:58:29 ◼ ► where you can realize like, okay, A, they don't seem to have the audience they claim to have,
00:58:34 ◼ ► and B, they want me to pay them a lot of money for this. So really what they are is like a video
00:58:40 ◼ ► production, you pay them to make kind of an infomercial about your app, and nobody will ever
00:58:45 ◼ ► see it, and it's, I actually went and watched some of the things they make, and they're hilariously
00:58:49 ◼ ► low effort, formulaic, low value, it's just amazing, and they wanted, I forget what they
00:58:56 ◼ ► said, but I think they wanted like at least like $5,000, it was a lot of money. Anybody on the app
00:59:01 ◼ ► store for a non-trivial amount of time, you're very likely to get that. Oh God, I gotta look
00:59:05 ◼ ► up what this is called. - Jelly has found it, Jelly has found it. So this was addressed to Jelly,
00:59:09 ◼ ► whose actual name is Daniel. "Hi Daniel, I'm reaching out to you because one of our senior
00:59:13 ◼ ► producers here at NewsWatch--" - That's it, NewsWatch! - "Came across gift wrap and thought it would be
00:59:17 ◼ ► great for a feature on our nationwide show. In case you haven't had a chance to watch an episode,
00:59:21 ◼ ► NewsWatch's 30-minute morning--" I can't believe I'm reading this, but it's so bad. "30-minute
00:59:25 ◼ ► morning news show brings our audience up to date on the latest innovations for both consumers and
00:59:29 ◼ ► businesses, from apps and tech products to B2B services--" I'm surprised you got through B2B
00:59:34 ◼ ► and didn't just immediately delete this, Marco-- "and even interviews with celebrities. The program
00:59:38 ◼ ► is broadcast nationwide on the AMC network in over 200 markets and reaches over 95 million households
00:59:43 ◼ ► across the US." - Yeah, so that's what I got, I scheduled a call them, this is back in early 2019.
00:59:48 ◼ ► Oh, here, their standard plan is $4,500. They go all the way up to the exposure package,
00:59:55 ◼ ► $9,500. All the metrics are still the same, I wonder what's different. It's standard interview
01:00:02 ◼ ► or exposure for $4,500, $7,000, $9,500, but all the metrics say they're the same. I wonder,
01:00:09 ◼ ► what does exposure get me for $9,500? Yeah, that's, yeah, so there's, the thing is, the App Store
01:00:16 ◼ ► is an active market where people are making lots of money and there's lots of traffic and lots of
01:00:21 ◼ ► everything, so there's gonna be a million vultures out there. There's gonna be scammers, there's gonna
01:00:26 ◼ ► be just opportunistic vultures who aren't quite running scams, but they're at least doing things
01:00:30 ◼ ► kind of not in a great way. There's gonna be all sorts of stuff because it's an active market,
01:00:35 ◼ ► it is possible to make money here and through legit and non-legit ways, and so people will try,
01:00:42 ◼ ► and many of them will succeed. There are so many scams on the App Store and around the App Store,
01:00:48 ◼ ► this is just scratching the surface. I would say the general advice for many of us who listen to
01:00:52 ◼ ► those apps in the App Store is like, if you have an app that you know is like, you know, it's an
01:00:58 ◼ ► app you made, it's cool, you like it, but it's not like super popular, like, you know, like my apps,
01:01:02 ◼ ► they're little toy apps that I like and think are cool, but they're not super popular, if you get
01:01:06 ◼ ► people approaching you with business deals, they're probably scams. If you are a big app developer and
01:01:12 ◼ ► you have a popular, sophisticated, well-regarded, well-reviewed app, you're gonna get legit people
01:01:18 ◼ ► talking to you like, hey, let's do this thing, right? But like, be suspicious if your app has
01:01:22 ◼ ► like 10 downloads ever and you're getting people who want to do business deals with your great app,
01:01:26 ◼ ► like just, sometimes it feels good to think that, oh, hey, someone noticed my app, but chances are,
01:01:32 ◼ ► like, you know, compare your sales numbers to the supposed attention you think you're getting.
01:01:38 ◼ ► Marco needs to be a little more careful because he does have an actual popular app that people
01:01:41 ◼ ► know about that people want to do legit business deals with him all the time, which he also rejects,
01:01:44 ◼ ► but whatever, like, there's legitimate people who are doing that, but if you just put your first app
01:01:48 ◼ ► on the App Store and next week someone wants to do a great, important business deal with you,
01:01:52 ◼ ► probably a scam. - Something's up recently. I don't know what the market force is that's happening
01:01:58 ◼ ► right now, but in the last month, I've heard from three different companies who expressed
01:02:04 ◼ ► serious interest in buying my app, not because they wanted a podcast app necessarily, but because
01:02:12 ◼ ► they wanted to just buy my app and just stick their ads in the bottom of it and they can make
01:02:16 ◼ ► enough money through those ads to pay good prices for apps. Like, is that market somehow hot right
01:02:23 ◼ ► now, hotter than usual? - I don't know. If they can buy your app for a little enough money and it's an
01:02:28 ◼ ► automated process, you make it up in volume, I guess. You buy a bunch of apps, you put your ads
01:02:32 ◼ ► in the bottom, it takes about a week for people to notice, you get your impressions during that week,
01:02:37 ◼ ► and you're done. And you just dip it in the app or delete it from the store and just rinse and
01:02:41 ◼ ► repeat, right? - But this was like actual humans reaching out specifically for actual, like, this
01:02:46 ◼ ► app with substantial offers. - You gotta compare. Like, the more users an app has, the more it's
01:02:52 ◼ ► worth their time to actually engage humans and try to actually, you know what I mean? Like, I don't
01:02:56 ◼ ► know how the math works out, but maybe they do, you know. We'll see. If you keep getting offers like
01:03:02 ◼ ► this five years from now, assuming we're all still here, then it's obviously a viable business for
01:03:07 ◼ ► somebody. I advise you don't sell, by the way. - Thank you. Yeah, I don't really want to. Usually,
01:03:13 ◼ ► like, everyone has a price, right? Yeah, I would sell if somebody offered enough money,
01:03:18 ◼ ► but that number's very high. - My number is lower. Call me. Actually, no, my number actually,
01:03:25 ◼ ► well, yeah, all right, it is lower, but still not as low as you think because if someone, you know,
01:03:29 ◼ ► bought my little utility apps and ruined them, I would have to write them again 'cause I run them
01:03:33 ◼ ► all day, so I do actually need them to continue working. - Yeah, I just, at this, like, I learned
01:03:41 ◼ ► my past story with, like, having apps and then selling them, like, it was, it was fraught. There
01:03:49 ◼ ► were problems. Like, one of the reasons I have no interest in selling is because things are going
01:03:53 ◼ ► well and, you know, I don't really have anything else I want to be working on, but also, like,
01:03:59 ◼ ► I don't want my podcast app to suck and if I sell my app to somebody who is gonna ruin it in some
01:04:05 ◼ ► way, then I won't have a good podcast app to use anymore because I don't like anyone else's. That's
01:04:11 ◼ ► the reason I made mine, so I would probably just make another one. Like, I don't know, but I'm
01:04:18 ◼ ► not sure how well that would go over with the deal. - It's the Brent Simmons approach. - Yeah,
01:04:23 ◼ ► right. - I think you have to wait, like, 10 years in between those two events, though. - Yeah, and
01:04:27 ◼ ► I probably wouldn't be able to do that. - Well, that's how you know you're a cool kid is if Marco
01:04:31 ◼ ► puts you on the test flight for Sunny, the replacement for Overcast. John, is this gonna
01:04:40 ◼ ► be a happy story about importing old footage or is this gonna be a sad story? 'Cause I don't know if
01:04:50 ◼ ► no, it's not, you'll see. Anyway. - All right, tell me about importing mini DV videos. - So,
01:04:55 ◼ ► when I first had my kids, the state-of-the-art technology, or at least my first kid, the state-of-
01:05:00 ◼ ► the-art technology for taking videos of your kids was still mini DV camcorders. This is a tiny little
01:05:07 ◼ ► magnetic tape and this adorable little mini digital video cassette and you put into this
01:05:14 ◼ ► device and it would turn and the tape would go past the recording heads and it had a lens and,
01:05:18 ◼ ► you know, it's an old-style camera but it was digital video, right? So, it was doing some kind
01:05:23 ◼ ► of MPEG compression or something and recording onto this tape. And, you know, it didn't take
01:05:30 ◼ ► long for iPhones and in my case, iPod touches and other things to come out and video to be taken in
01:05:36 ◼ ► more convenient packages, right? But before that happened, I recorded many, many tapes of my kids,
01:05:44 ◼ ► both my kids in fact, although the first more than the second, you know how that goes, parents.
01:05:47 ◼ ► But mini DV tapes, especially in the time I was making them, I had like my blue and white G3,
01:05:54 ◼ ► I think, when I first started making these, that's actually a lot of data. Like, if you just pull the
01:05:59 ◼ ► digital, the DV files off of the mini DV tapes, it was gigs and gigs and that used to be a lot back
01:06:04 ◼ ► in the days before, you know, multi-terabyte hard drives. So, I'd have them on the tape
01:06:10 ◼ ► and the tapes are digital, right? But I can't actually take them off the tape and put them on
01:06:14 ◼ ► my computer. They wouldn't fit. They were like 100 times larger than the capacity of the hard drives
01:06:19 ◼ ► in my computer. So, they're never going to go on my computer. But I did, you know, I would take
01:06:24 ◼ ► snippets of the footage and I would edit them in iMovie and I'd make a little movie and share it
01:06:28 ◼ ► with the relatives. Like, I'd do all that. But even just doing that one iMovie project for like
01:06:32 ◼ ► a 60-second clip or something was, you know, a significant amount of data and then I would just
01:06:36 ◼ ► throw away the files and just keep the finished video, right? So, I had all those. I had all of
01:06:39 ◼ ► my little projects of little things. But I had the raw material hours and hours, literally hours of
01:06:45 ◼ ► mini DV footage on all these tapes. And I wanted to have them like available in some way on my
01:06:50 ◼ ► computer. So, way back in the day, it was in the Mac OS X era, I got an app called iDive that
01:06:56 ◼ ► unfortunately no longer exists. And what iDive would do is you'd hook up your camcorder and it
01:07:01 ◼ ► would essentially do two things. One, it could take like a tiny, blurry little thumbnail every
01:07:08 ◼ ► n seconds. So, you'd have like a scrubbable thumbnail, you know, highly compressed thumbnail
01:07:12 ◼ ► timeline of your video. And two, you could also make massively compressed postage stamp size,
01:07:18 ◼ ► you know, H.264 or whatever was the algorithm of the day. I think this might predate H.264.
01:07:24 ◼ ► Tiny, heavily compressed miniature versions of your stuff. And you could fit all of that on my
01:07:30 ◼ ► computer of the time. So, what I did was I used iDive to transfer, you know, these thumbnails and
01:07:37 ◼ ► heavily compressed, you know, tiny versions of the video to my computer. So, if I ever said, "Oh,
01:07:42 ◼ ► where's that video of, you know, my daughter doing this cute thing?" I didn't have to remember which
01:07:46 ◼ ► tape it was on. I could go and physically look, you know, scrub through the video, "Oh, it's that
01:07:49 ◼ ► one." And then pull out the tape and get the quote unquote high quality footage off of the mini DV
01:07:54 ◼ ► and do stuff with it in iMovie, right? And if anyone has, doesn't remember, never knew what
01:08:01 ◼ ► importing DV footage was like, at least with my camcorder, the only option I had was essentially
01:08:07 ◼ ► press play on the camcorder and allow the computer to record in real time. So, if you have 90 minutes
01:08:13 ◼ ► of mini DV, that's going to take 90 minutes to import. Repeat for your shoebox full of tapes.
01:08:18 ◼ ► It took a long time. Yeah, I mean, because the mini DV format, I think, was very closely tied
01:08:23 ◼ ► to FireWire. Like, I think it was basically sending a, like, raw FireWire stream. It was,
01:08:29 ◼ ► it was like 400 megabits per second, like exactly like the, it was, it was something like that. It
01:08:33 ◼ ► was like, it was very closely related to the FireWire spec and FireWire was basically made
01:08:38 ◼ ► for DV. Yeah, the standard, yeah, they were tied closely together. A lot of the selling points of
01:08:43 ◼ ► FireWire was that it could handle the latency and the strict timing required to have that constant
01:08:50 ◼ ► stream of video coming down so it didn't have any hiccups or anything. And, you know, anyway,
01:08:54 ◼ ► the FireWire USB battles were long over, but back in the day, it was important. And my camcorder did
01:08:58 ◼ ► have a FireWire port on, FireWire 400 port, because that was the only FireWire at the time I got it.
01:09:03 ◼ ► So I did that. I spent the hours importing everything into iDive and I brought that iDive
01:09:08 ◼ ► library with me along from, you know, my PowerMax into my Mac Pro. And then eventually I brought it
01:09:13 ◼ ► on to my current Mac Pro. And this is long after iDive stopped being developed. This is long after
01:09:20 ◼ ► iDive stopped working, I think, even. I think it broke in one of the old versions of macOS,
01:09:24 ◼ ► but if it hadn't broken then, it certainly would have broken now because it was a 32-bit app. And,
01:09:27 ◼ ► of course, you know, anyway, and the company that makes it like just has a sad little web page. It's
01:09:32 ◼ ► like, we don't make iDive anymore. Sorry. But I had all this footage in iDive and I was like, well,
01:09:38 ◼ ► can I rescue that or do I want to rescue that? So, you know, I did. This is kind of a casey
01:09:45 ◼ ► solution. You know, fire up a VM with an old version of macOS 10 on it, you know, and yeah,
01:09:52 ◼ ► that works and you can run iDive. I don't recommend it, but I got it working well enough
01:09:57 ◼ ► to like be able to sort of look at what's in iDive and with modern eyes, it's like, yeah, this isn't
01:10:03 ◼ ► really worth saving. The total size was like 50 gigs or something, but it's 50 gigs of postage
01:10:08 ◼ ► stamp size garbage thing. So I'm like, okay, well, that was fun. Having iDive there was useful
01:10:15 ◼ ► as a way to look things up quickly, but now it is of no value to me. But I do actually want the
01:10:19 ◼ ► contents of those videos. So I had to eventually face the reality that I would, I have to reimport
01:10:27 ◼ ► everything. And that meant, you know, 90 minutes per tape. I did that over the course of many,
01:10:34 ◼ ► many weeks. And I imported and I use modern compression and these like H.265 and the full
01:10:40 ◼ ► quality ones, they're still big, by the way, if you'd import them, like, I don't know if it's
01:10:44 ◼ ► uncompressed, but it seems minimally compressed or uncompressed. They're big, but even by modern
01:10:48 ◼ ► standards. But if you H.265 compress them, you can get really good quality and they end up being kind
01:10:53 ◼ ► of small. So I re-imported every single one of these tapes and then I deleted my iDrive library.
01:10:57 ◼ ► Notice, Casey, the order that I did that in, by the way. Reimport the new ones first, then,
01:11:03 ◼ ► anyway, because for all I know, the tapes are all entirely bad. And that's the one wrinkle in this,
01:11:08 ◼ ► is that when I was re-importing them, a couple of them, especially at the beginning of the tapes,
01:11:13 ◼ ► would have all sorts of digital noise and stuff all over them. Like these giant blocks of, you know,
01:11:18 ◼ ► white and blue and pink and stuff like that. I'm like, hmm, well, you know, these tapes,
01:11:23 ◼ ► they are very old. They may have deteriorated, stretched out, you know, got demagnetized or
01:11:27 ◼ ► whatever. But very frequently I would, you know, if I saw that, I would stop, rewind the tape,
01:11:33 ◼ ► everyone loves rewinding, and then start the import over again. And either the noise would go away or
01:11:40 ◼ ► I'd get different noise. And so each tape that I had noise on, I took two or three attempts to see,
01:11:45 ◼ ► like, and I would only let it run if I got past the first minute or so with minimal noise.
01:11:49 ◼ ► But it was interesting, this is my first actual experience with trying to rescue digitally stored
01:11:56 ◼ ► media from my distant past and having some of it deteriorate. The good thing about whatever
01:12:03 ◼ ► algorithm or whatever format they're using is that just because there's some noise and garbage and,
01:12:08 ◼ ► you know, it's not, I say noise, it's analog noise, just because some of the bits are obviously
01:12:13 ◼ ► flipped and screwed up on this thing. It didn't stop it from importing. It didn't stop it from
01:12:19 ◼ ► mostly working. There's just some garbage on the screen and it eventually clears up. I'm glad the
01:12:23 ◼ ► entire tapes weren't like this. Like it was mostly just at the beginning. But a few of them, you know,
01:12:28 ◼ ► I did have some data loss. Like there are sections of the picture of the first few minutes of a couple
01:12:32 ◼ ► of these dozens of tapes that have a bunch of garbage in them and we're going to get those back.
01:12:36 ◼ ► So what can you do? But I'm mostly glad that it worked and that I now have a hopefully more robust
01:12:44 ◼ ► digital copy of this. Fingers crossed for Bitrot not to bite me. And then of course it has entered
01:12:49 ◼ ► my patented backup vortex and is now copied in a thousand places, including by the way,
01:12:55 ◼ ► putting them into my photo library because why the hell not? That puts it in five more places.
01:12:59 ◼ ► So that's it. It was mostly a good story. I didn't actually lose any, none of the tapes were
01:13:04 ◼ ► unreadable, but you know, maybe three or four minutes of video total are kind of scrambled a
01:13:10 ◼ ► little bit out of the hundreds and hundreds of minutes that I recorded. God, you know, not just
01:13:16 ◼ ► technology wise, but it became clear to me when watching it that I, at least personally, used to
01:13:22 ◼ ► record video in a very different way back then. Like every shot was like, they were long, right?
01:13:29 ◼ ► I mean, I would film 90 minute tapes. No one is taking 90 minute videos of their kids on their
01:13:34 ◼ ► iPhone unless there's some like very enthusiastic relative who wants to record Little Timmy's entire
01:13:41 ◼ ► birthday party. People are taking clips. And honestly, if you try to do 4K 60 on your iPhone
01:13:46 ◼ ► of Timmy's birthday party, you're going to fill it. Like that stuff takes up a lot of room. People
01:13:51 ◼ ► take much shorter movies, including me. I take much shorter movies. Oh, the dog is doing something
01:13:55 ◼ ► cute. Fine. You take a 60 second movie, maybe at most, but looking at this footage and like, wow,
01:14:00 ◼ ► I just kept rolling. Just like, you know, minute after minute, hour after hour, just like,
01:14:06 ◼ ► it's great because you get to see my kids doing things in an extended way and not just trying to
01:14:10 ◼ ► catch the one cute thing, but like, you know, here's an entire feeding and the cleanup afterwards.
01:14:16 ◼ ► So it was fun. I enjoyed watching the videos out of the corner of my eyes as they totally
01:14:24 ◼ ► monopolized my computer for hours and hours on end. Oh, and the other fun part of this was,
01:14:35 ◼ ► Mac Pro. It wasn't that bad. That's the other reason I did this. Look, if I keep waiting,
01:14:39 ◼ ► eventually no series of dongles will get me where I want to go. And those tapes are not getting any
01:14:43 ◼ ► younger, so I better just do it. So I did. I'm glad it mostly worked out. Yeah, my kids were cute.
01:14:48 ◼ ► Uh, Mini-TV video quality is terrible and the audio on the camcorder was not good. But hey, my, uh,
01:14:56 ◼ ► my, uh, childhood movies are on Super 8, which, uh, has its charms. Uh, Casey would love it for
01:15:01 ◼ ► the ceremony, of course, but, uh, A, there's no audio whatsoever. Uh, B, the frame rate is what,
01:15:07 ◼ ► 12 frames per second? What a Super 8. It's really low frame rate. Uh, and C, it looks worse than
01:15:12 ◼ ► Mini-TV, even with the digital noise. Oh man. I remember, um, I might've told this story on the
01:15:19 ◼ ► show, but dad, uh, it was maybe when I was like newborn or maybe it was my immediate younger
01:15:26 ◼ ► brother. Um, but this thing lingered for long enough for me to have a memory of it to this day.
01:15:31 ◼ ► Uh, dad had some sort of camcorder where the camera did not have any sort of apparatus with
01:15:40 ◼ ► which to save the data it was capturing. So what he ended up having to do was carrying an entire
01:15:46 ◼ ► VCR on a shoulder strap. So this is like, and for those of you who are not old, like us, that was
01:15:52 ◼ ► very early in camcorder days. Yeah. Yeah. So imagine like, I know some of the kids these days
01:15:58 ◼ ► don't even know what a Blu-ray player is, but just for the sake of discussion, imagine a,
01:16:01 ◼ ► like a PlayStation that you, that you put on a shoulder, put on a shoulder strap and wear it.
01:16:13 ◼ ► that is taking video. So just indescribably bad with burn in that lasts for like 20 minutes.
01:16:19 ◼ ► Anytime you get anywhere near a light. And that was his setup in the best. Surely the batteries
01:16:24 ◼ ► lasted all of like four and a half seconds, but that's what he had to do was, you know,
01:16:27 ◼ ► actually hit the record button on the VCR that was hooked up to the camcorder. And the VCR was like
01:16:33 ◼ ► specifically designed to do this, but nevertheless, it's still like a household VCR that you're
01:16:40 ◼ ► carrying on your shoulder that probably weighed like 10 or 15 pounds. And God knows how much
01:16:44 ◼ ► power it drank. It was preposterous. And that was early videos of maybe not me, but certainly my,
01:16:50 ◼ ► my younger brothers. It was just the worst. The super eight said such bad light sensitivity
01:16:56 ◼ ► that this is probably also true of your, or your VHS set up that my parents had this like
01:17:10 ◼ ► people talk about being on movie sets and how there's so many lights and it's so hot and they're
01:17:14 ◼ ► so bright, right? That's what you had to do. Take any kind of video where you could see people. So
01:17:18 ◼ ► everyone, even though it's just indoors and normal indoor lighting, like during the day,
01:17:21 ◼ ► everyone looks like you found them in a cave, right? Cause it looks, it's total blackness
01:17:25 ◼ ► outside the radius of this white hot burning sun that you have to like have mounted on top of your
01:17:30 ◼ ► camera. Yeah. My first camcorder experience was only a small generation after Casey's. It wasn't
01:17:37 ◼ ► even ours. Like it's like our family friend had one and we could borrow it like whenever we had
01:17:41 ◼ ► like a school play or something. This is interesting. So Rybur in the chat is saying that the term
01:17:45 ◼ ► camcorder actually refers to a camera with a built in recorder. So that's what the one that I first
01:17:52 ◼ ► used was. They had, they had figured out how to miniaturize VCRs enough that it was still a full
01:17:57 ◼ ► size VHS cassette, but you could put this full size VHS tape into the camcorder, which was
01:18:04 ◼ ► approximately the size of a VCR, you know, vertically. And so it weighed a ton. It came in
01:18:09 ◼ ► this giant black carrying case. Like it was the size of like a desktop computer, like the case.
01:18:16 ◼ ► And inside you get, you'd pull out this heavy giant camcorder with a battery that was probably
01:18:22 ◼ ► about the size of like the sole of a shoe, like this huge long rectangle, like big thick thing.
01:18:29 ◼ ► And I remember like having it on your shoulder and I would, I must've been maybe, I don't know,
01:18:35 ◼ ► 11, 12 when we were using this thing. And so like having that on my shoulder, I'm like, yeah,
01:18:39 ◼ ► I'm like the scrawny kid. It, you could only hold it up for maybe 15 minutes before your shoulder
01:18:45 ◼ ► would hurt like hell because it was just so heavy, but it was all, it was a full VCR. Like you could
01:18:50 ◼ ► actually, you know, you could connect it to your TV and you could actually watch movies on it. Like
01:18:55 ◼ ► you could, you could put in any VHS tape and hit play and you could watch movies either on the
01:19:00 ◼ ► little tiny black and white eyepiece screen, which was actually, I think a little CRT in there.
01:19:07 ◼ ► Or you could, you know, connect to your TV and have that be your VCR if you really wanted to. But
01:19:17 ◼ ► yeah, this is all analog by the way. No, there's no digital anywhere. And this is all just analog,
01:19:21 ◼ ► analog quote unquote standard deaf because there was nothing else, videos. Yeah. JVC had the first
01:19:26 ◼ ► breakthrough product though. The one that was red, red and black kind of, that was the kind of one
01:19:31 ◼ ► where it broke through to the point where people would look at it and not be horrified that this
01:19:35 ◼ ► is an actual product. The JVC one was like, ah, kind of looks like a camera until you got it.
01:19:38 ◼ ► The JVC, the original JVC was also huge, but at least it wasn't like a shoulder bag, like
01:19:42 ◼ ► Casey's dad thing. That was the early adopter model. Yeah. So I put in the, in the chat, there's
01:19:47 ◼ ► an RCA camcorder and, and this is my, this, this matches my mental model of what these things used
01:19:54 ◼ ► to look like. And if you're used to holding up, like I joke about how we're old and kids these
01:19:59 ◼ ► days, but really, and truly, you know, people that are 10, 15 years younger than us have probably
01:20:04 ◼ ► never seen this. And this is the highest possible tech option that you had. And really the only
01:20:10 ◼ ► option that you had in the pro consumer or consumer category was something that was basically a VCR
01:20:16 ◼ ► that was mounted, like Marco said, on your shoulder that had a lens in front of it. I found the JVC
01:20:22 ◼ ► one. I think it's the JVC GRC one, the old red and black model. It's so small compared to that RCA
01:20:30 ◼ ► one, isn't it? Yeah. Right. Yeah. This is the one, didn't MKBHD do one of his like discovering old
01:20:34 ◼ ► tech videos on this camera? It was either this or something very similar to this. Yeah. It's,
01:20:37 ◼ ► it's a very famous thing. I think my aunt had this one too. I think this, there was also a similar
01:20:43 ◼ ► looking VCR at the time. And I remember it because it was the first remote control I can recall
01:20:49 ◼ ► seeing and had a wire. It had a long wire, but it had a wire. It's remote though. You could be on
01:20:55 ◼ ► the couch and you could hit play. That is, that is some stuff. Yeah. In some, in some respects,
01:21:00 ◼ ► it makes you think that like the, like super eight and a 16 millimeter and like the film ones
01:21:05 ◼ ► had a certain classiness that maybe this RCA one did not like, it looks impressive and everything,
01:21:11 ◼ ► but in the end, like, like the idea of film, like actual photo sensitive film flying past
01:21:18 ◼ ► an aperture at, you know, 16 or 12 frames per second or whatever. And that you would get that
01:21:22 ◼ ► film developed and that you would, that you would show it using a projector in your house that you
01:21:27 ◼ ► had that you could project the film onto your screen that you also would have to have a big
01:21:31 ◼ ► reflective movie screen in your house. My, you know, my parents had all of these things.
01:21:35 ◼ ► The idea that you could do it all electronically with the, the Azure called the VCR and your TV,
01:21:40 ◼ ► like it was amazing, but in some ways like, huh, but our TV is 21 inches. The projector
01:21:46 ◼ ► screen was huge and I don't get to hear the chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken
01:21:49 ◼ ► anymore. I remember when I was in elementary school you would, you would know you were in for
01:21:56 ◼ ► a good day because the real to real projector would come into your room and that's how you would watch
01:22:00 ◼ ► a movie. Do you remember this? You know, cause there, there wasn't, there wasn't any sort of like
01:22:05 ◼ ► portable TV situation in like, cause as I got older in elementary school or perhaps middle
01:22:10 ◼ ► school, they would eventually stick these, you know, 50 pounds CRT TVs onto like a cart, right?
01:22:18 ◼ ► How did we not all die from those TV carts? It's the most top heavy thing in the world.
01:22:22 ◼ ► Like take this huge CRT and put it as high up as possible on this stand that weighs nothing,
01:22:27 ◼ ► this rickety metal stand with wheels on the bottom. And it's amazing. We're not all crushed
01:22:31 ◼ ► to death underneath those TVs right now. And put it in a room full of like hyper kids, like
01:22:41 ◼ ► The kids can trip over. I mean, to be fair, it was a, you know, kind of a trapezoid in profile.
01:22:47 ◼ ► The base was slightly bigger than the top, but it was not well balanced. I never even heard any
01:22:53 ◼ ► stories of those falling on people. I guess we just all thought they were stable, but yeah,
01:22:56 ◼ ► the film projectors were certainly more fun because it was more of a possibility of fire
01:23:00 ◼ ► and melting. Because of the, you know, I had to explain this to my kids. What were we watching?
01:23:05 ◼ ► We were watching some movie. No, it wasn't a movie. It was Little America, an Apple TV Plus
01:23:11 ◼ ► show, which I can actually recommend that I hadn't, didn't look at until someone tweeted at us and I
01:23:15 ◼ ► checked it out. And actually there's, you know, the episodes are hit and miss, but the good thing is
01:23:19 ◼ ► that they're all standalone episodes. It's not a series. So I would say just watch the first three
01:23:23 ◼ ► episodes of Little America. You'll know if you like it. It's only like 10 petal. Anyway,
01:23:27 ◼ ► at one point they're showing a thing that's supposed to have taken place in the sixties
01:23:30 ◼ ► or something. And a bunch of people are outdoors watching a movie, like an American movie in a
01:23:33 ◼ ► foreign country and they get to some dramatic scene and then the film gets stuck and it melts.
01:23:39 ◼ ► Right. And I, it occurred to me that my kids probably didn't know what they were seeing. Like,
01:23:43 ◼ ► I guess people have seen this in movies, you know, they still do it as a kind of a trope, but like,
01:23:47 ◼ ► instead of showing the picture, all of a sudden a white blob appears in the center of the picture
01:23:52 ◼ ► and it starts to expand and there's color fringing around it. And I explained to my kids what's
01:23:57 ◼ ► happening there is that the, the film that you can shine light through to make the picture,
01:24:02 ◼ ► that's flying past the light and the projector, the film got stuck. And the only way you can get
01:24:07 ◼ ► light bright enough to project was to have a very big and very hot light. And if any piece of film
01:24:12 ◼ ► stays in front of that bright, hot light for more than a couple of seconds, it melts. And that's
01:24:17 ◼ ► what you're seeing on the screen. What you're seeing is the white hot light of the projector
01:24:20 ◼ ► melting through the frame of film that got stuck in front of the light. And that's why it looks like
01:24:24 ◼ ► a big melty thing. I enjoy explaining stuff like that to my kids. Soon I'll be explaining to people
01:24:30 ◼ ► what the little icon of the phone handset means on their iPhones. Yeah, right. What is that shape?
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01:26:14 ◼ ► Let's do some Ask ATP. And let's start with Jamie Bender who writes, "If Apple does release an
01:26:25 ◼ ► ARM-based Mac, would we be willing to buy the first-gen machines that run it, or would we wait
01:26:38 ◼ ► Uh, for me, I don't know. I honestly don't. I mean, generally speaking, this is where I say,
01:26:42 ◼ ► "No, it's not for me. I'd wait." And then I end up buying it on the first day. So probably that's
01:26:47 ◼ ► what I would do. But it's a much more invasive, let's say, change than a lot of the things that
01:26:57 ◼ ► I've lived through as an Apple user. Maybe not John, but for me. And so I don't know what I
01:27:00 ◼ ► would do. I'm really not sure. I would like to think I would wait until at least the second
01:27:06 ◼ ► model, if not the second generation. But I do like me a new shiny, so I don't know what I would end
01:27:14 ◼ ► Initially, I'm thinking like, "Well, of course I'm not going to buy it on day one because I got
01:27:18 ◼ ► this big, honking, expensive computer that I'm going to be using for a long time, right? Even
01:27:22 ◼ ► if they do come out with a new one, I can't afford to get a new umpteen thousand dollar..."
01:27:26 ◼ ► You know, so of course not. But what I think about is, especially in these days of remote learning
01:27:32 ◼ ► and all sorts of other stuff, how my kids are fighting over the one laptop we have, because
01:27:35 ◼ ► none of them want to use the desktop computer because desktops are for old people, I guess.
01:27:39 ◼ ► I could potentially be in the market for another laptop to deal with having two teens in school
01:27:46 ◼ ► where they need laptops. So they could each have sort of one of their own. We've got the
01:27:50 ◼ ► previous generation is the... Yeah, I'm losing track of that. Yeah. The butterfly keyboard
01:27:56 ◼ ► retina MacBook Air is what we've got. 2017 MacBook Air. And it's fine for their purposes,
01:28:00 ◼ ► and the keyboard hasn't broken yet. But if they came out with the very first armed computer and
01:28:04 ◼ ► it happened to be a laptop in that sort of the MacBook Air class price range, I might get it
01:28:11 ◼ ► just to give the kids another laptop. And because of course I'd be curious about technically what
01:28:16 ◼ ► it's like or whatever. So it's not out of the question. It really depends on what computer is
01:28:20 ◼ ► first. If the first one is a 16-inch MacBook Pro, no, I'm not getting it because I'm probably never
01:28:24 ◼ ► gonna get that computer. But if it's a kid-appropriate laptop, I might get it on day one.
01:28:34 ◼ ► there's going to be issues, right? But that hasn't stopped me before. I got the very first
01:28:40 ◼ ► Power Mac G5. There was a lot of inherent risk in that, and mine did have a weird dripping power
01:28:46 ◼ ► supply. But there is also the excitement of having the new thing ASAP. So if I bought it on day one,
01:28:54 ◼ ► I wouldn't be buying it expecting it to be perfect. I'd be buying it knowing there could be weird
01:28:58 ◼ ► problems. But if you go into that with your eyes open and that's part of the experience you expect,
01:29:04 ◼ ► it can still be fun. Yeah, I mean, I think the most likely source of weird problems is gonna be
01:29:08 ◼ ► the OS and the application ecosystem. It's gonna be the software side of things. The hardware is
01:29:14 ◼ ► probably gonna be rock solid because it's probably not gonna be that different from iOS hardware,
01:29:18 ◼ ► because their record on that is very strong. So really, the bigger challenge is gonna be how
01:29:25 ◼ ► ready will both Mac OS, presumably it is Mac OS, and the apps that will run on it, how ready are
01:29:33 ◼ ► those? How mature is that gonna be on day one? And the answer is probably gonna be, I'm sure most
01:29:39 ◼ ► stuff will work most of the time, but there's gonna be problems. And there's gonna be certain apps
01:29:42 ◼ ► that you just can't run for a while, while they get updated. And some of them, like any other
01:29:46 ◼ ► transition, some of them will never get updated and they won't make the transition. And so there's
01:29:50 ◼ ► gonna be issues like that. But that's probably gonna be true for the first few years of them
01:29:55 ◼ ► being in existence, probably through multiple revisions of the actual hardware. Unai Haran
01:29:59 ◼ ► writes, "Hey Casey, which file system did you use to format your big external drive? Maybe it's a
01:30:04 ◼ ► question for John, but an accumulated experience in the last months, I think you were the one."
01:30:08 ◼ ► So this is with reference to the Best Buy 12 terabyte drive that I got in desperation and made
01:30:15 ◼ ► a duplicate of my Synology on to. I formatted it APFS because it seemed like the most appropriate
01:30:20 ◼ ► thing to do and the path of least resistance when I'm hooking it up to a Mac Mini. Now,
01:30:25 ◼ ► John can tell me what I should have done, but to quickly answer the question, it is APFS. John,
01:30:30 ◼ ► what should I have done? - A lot of people have asked about this. APFS does not perform well on
01:30:37 ◼ ► spinning disks. It was not designed for spinning disks. That's not its strong suit. It is
01:30:44 ◼ ► kind of an anti-pattern to put APFS on a spinning disk. But the reason a lot of people end up doing
01:30:50 ◼ ► it, including me, my internal clone of my boot drive is a spinning disk that is forming with
01:30:59 ◼ ► is to just actually make a clone. So if the disk you're cloning is APFS, so is the clone.
01:31:04 ◼ ► It's a very straight, I use SuperDuper to do that. I'm not even sure if SuperDuper can do an APFS
01:31:09 ◼ ► clone to HFS+, but it's just more straightforward to me to say, if you're gonna make a clone of a
01:31:14 ◼ ► disk, make it identical to that disk. I don't run anything off that I mentioned, I think,
01:31:18 ◼ ► on a previous episode that I accidentally booted into that and couldn't understand why it was
01:31:21 ◼ ► making so much noise. I don't recommend people use APFS on spinning disks unless they're using it as a
01:31:29 ◼ ► backup that's just there, just in case, or a clone or something similar. HFS+ and HFS before it were
01:31:36 ◼ ► made in an era when the layout of the structures of the file system on the disk were tailored to
01:31:43 ◼ ► the idea that you had a disk head zooming back and forth on a spinning platter and you had to wait for
01:31:48 ◼ ► the platter to spin around the part that you wanted and you had to move this place at one place or
01:31:51 ◼ ► another and you had to wait for it to stop shaking so it stabilized in a little thing. And so HFS+
01:31:56 ◼ ► does a lot of work to jam all of its important structures into continuous blocks in a single
01:32:01 ◼ ► location so that that little disk head doesn't need to fly all over to this to do a simple operation.
01:32:06 ◼ ► APFS does not do that because APFS was born in the world of SSDs where random access is a thing and
01:32:13 ◼ ► there is no more disk head and there's no more spinning platters. So I think Casey did basically
01:32:19 ◼ ► the same thing I would do but it's, you know, if he was actually going to ever try to use that disk
01:32:24 ◼ ► as opposed to just having it as a backup it would be a bad scene. Pascal Lindelof writes, "What are
01:32:30 ◼ ► the chances of Apple ever making iPadOS a multi-user OS? I have a new model iPad Air which is used by
01:32:35 ◼ ► the family around the house but when it's not in use by them I like to use it as a second sidecar
01:32:39 ◼ ► screen. However that requires it to switch from the family iCloud account to my own iCloud account.
01:32:43 ◼ ► This is a very tedious process. I want to have a separate iCloud account for the family on the iPad
01:32:47 ◼ ► to prevent my photo library from getting swamped with pictures taken by the kids on the iPad or
01:32:51 ◼ ► having my YouTube recommendations being overgrown by Sean the sheep." You know, iPads are multi-user
01:32:58 ◼ ► in the education environment but that requires a whole bunch of specific scenarios and circumstances
01:33:03 ◼ ► and software. What is it, Apple Classroom or something like that? I really don't see it coming
01:33:11 ◼ ► to the iPad if at all then I don't see it anytime soon. I mean you could say, John, on an infinite
01:33:16 ◼ ► time scale maybe it would happen but personally I just don't see it in the next few years. But John,
01:33:22 ◼ ► what do you think? This is actually, I was thinking about this and the reason I put this question in
01:33:26 ◼ ► here, this is actually a miniature version of my old hobby horses like back in the day, you know,
01:33:34 ◼ ► Apple's big problem technologically speaking, their biggest amount of tech debt to use modern
01:33:39 ◼ ► lingo that the office drones will understand. The biggest chunk of tech debt was they had an
01:33:45 ◼ ► operating system that did not support preemptive multitasking or protected memory and that became
01:33:52 ◼ ► an increasingly big deal as its competitors got those features and as it continued to not get them
01:33:57 ◼ ► because so much of its software stack was built on the idea of a single continuous memory space
01:34:02 ◼ ► that every app could access at the same time and cooperative multitasking, right? And those were
01:34:07 ◼ ► not the answers to the future. It made sense when they made the decisions but eventually it became
01:34:16 ◼ ► it tried to figure out how the hell are we going to get a modern version of the Mac operating system
01:34:21 ◼ ► while not losing literally all of our customers. It came very, very close to going out of business.
01:34:27 ◼ ► They had like what, 90 days worth of money before they left when they bought Steve Jobs in and X and
01:34:32 ◼ ► everything. So close call. That's obviously a much bigger boulder than this. And I used to complain
01:34:39 ◼ ► about their file system and they addressed that. What were my other technological peeves? I've had
01:34:45 ◼ ► a bunch of these of varying size. Swift. Oh yeah, new programming language. Yep, they've more or
01:34:50 ◼ ► less addressed that too, right? So good on Apple. I think the one time I actually met Craig Federighi
01:34:56 ◼ ► at WWDC a couple of years back, his opening line to me was like, "Well, you got everything you
01:35:00 ◼ ► wanted. You have nothing left to complain about, right? You got your modern operating system. You
01:35:04 ◼ ► got your new programming language. You got your new file system." And he was partly right. But
01:35:09 ◼ ► there's always something else, right? So this little thing here, "Hey, why isn't iPad iOS
01:35:14 ◼ ► multi-user?" iOS from day one, again, for explicable and good reasons, was not made like
01:35:21 ◼ ► macOS where you would log in as a user and all your files would be owned by you, the user, and
01:35:26 ◼ ► iOS on the original... It wasn't iOS. iPhone OS, the firmware on the original iPhone, they called
01:35:32 ◼ ► it firmware. It wasn't even an OS. Yeah, it runs OS X. That's what Steve said, but they never used
01:35:37 ◼ ► that name. Anyway, if you know how that was working under the covers, it was not working like
01:35:43 ◼ ► macOS X. You did not log in as a user. You didn't have your own user home directory. It was weird.
01:35:47 ◼ ► Lots of stuff ran as root. Lots of stuff was sort of... Not that it was single user, because under
01:35:53 ◼ ► the covers, it's still Unix and it's still got the same Unix security model and there was the sandbox
01:35:57 ◼ ► and thing and whatever, but it was just weird and it wasn't laid out or it didn't run like logging
01:36:03 ◼ ► into macOS X. And it still doesn't, right? To this day, there's a weirdness about it where it is not
01:36:09 ◼ ► like, "Oh, well, we can add multi-user to iOS anytime," because it's exactly like macOS X out of the covers.
01:36:13 ◼ ► It's Darwin and you don't know it, but you're already running all your apps out of your own home
01:36:17 ◼ ► directory. Not really. That's not quite how it works. The classroom stuff does this weird user
01:36:23 ◼ ► space reboot and everything, the solution they've had to that has been kind of a hack. So this is a
01:36:30 ◼ ► fairly big piece of tech debt. Assuming that Apple ever wants to have this feature, which I think they
01:36:35 ◼ ► should want to have it eventually, it's not easy to add. Like adding preemptive multitasking and
01:36:40 ◼ ► memory protection, like coming up with a whole new programming language, like writing a new file
01:36:45 ◼ ► system that will work across all their devices, it's not the type of thing that you can bang out
01:36:48 ◼ ► in a couple months. "Ah, we'll get that. No problem. We'll just make that when we need it."
01:36:53 ◼ ► If there comes a point where they want that, and arguably they've already passed that point because
01:36:58 ◼ ► if they could get it easily, they would have done it for classrooms, a place where it is actually
01:37:02 ◼ ► necessary, they had to do it as a hack. Because doing it the quote unquote "real way" where it's
01:37:08 ◼ ► an actual real multi-user system like the Mac is so different than the way iOS works now that it
01:37:13 ◼ ► would be really, really hard to do. Now, again, this is much smaller than even a new file system
01:37:19 ◼ ► and certainly much smaller than how we get a modern operating system. Those are much bigger
01:37:22 ◼ ► tasks and this probably won't hurt them in the long run. But if I had to pick my next area to
01:37:28 ◼ ► watch where Apple's got some core technological problem that is thorny and annoying and is never
01:37:35 ◼ ► going to be easy to deal with on the iOS platform, this would be in my top five for sure. Because it
01:37:42 ◼ ► always struck me as a little bit of a shame that the iPhone was so forward-thinking, so ahead of
01:37:49 ◼ ► its time, so barely possible, like that's part of the miracle, like they were in the Mac, so barely
01:37:54 ◼ ► possible that people thought it was fake and didn't understand how it was done. The original Mac,
01:37:59 ◼ ► I would argue, was even more so if you consider what it did with 128 kilobytes of RAM and all
01:38:03 ◼ ► those other things, right? That it had to be designed with all sorts of expedient hacks just
01:38:08 ◼ ► to even make it possible. And thanks to its success, again, the iPhone much more so than the Mac,
01:38:14 ◼ ► many of those hacks became enshrined. And Apple has slowly unwound them and slowly addressed its
01:38:19 ◼ ► tech debt over the years such that iOS of today is way more sort of sturdy and reasonably constructed
01:38:27 ◼ ► and built, but the legacy of the original iPhone is still in there right down to this inability to
01:38:33 ◼ ► do multi-user in a straightforward way because you just couldn't afford to do that from day one
01:38:38 ◼ ► with the original iPhone. Yeah, to add a little bit to that, I mean, so not only has iOS grown up
01:38:46 ◼ ► not having multi-user support, but iOS has also grown up at a ridiculous pace in a kind of,
01:38:53 ◼ ► you know, frantic software update ecosystem where iOS in general does not get a lot of opportunity
01:39:01 ◼ ► to pay off its technical debt because it's constantly moving and having stuff added and
01:39:06 ◼ ► the market is changing and the hardware is changing and everything is changing so much,
01:39:10 ◼ ► there's probably not a lot of good times that the people who work on core iOS services and core UI
01:39:16 ◼ ► have a chance to work on things that might make this possible or at least easier to do later.
01:39:22 ◼ ► That technical debt is so baked in and stretches across so much of the OS, I don't think they're
01:39:27 ◼ ► ever going to be able to repay it because it's never going to be important enough. It's never
01:39:31 ◼ ► going to be like a top priority thing to add multi-user support to iOS for a number of reasons.
01:39:35 ◼ ► First of all, I never really used Mac multi-user support until about the last year or so
01:39:44 ◼ ► as we've been various like, you know, beach travels and now with home school work and stuff like that,
01:39:52 ◼ ► we've had more needs over the last year for a Mac to be used by two or three people in our household
01:39:59 ◼ ► and so that's become a very common thing for us. And even on the Mac where multi-user support's
01:40:05 ◼ ► been there since the beginning and it's, or at least Mac OS 10, you know, it's been there since
01:40:09 ◼ ► the beginning and it's really, you know, baked into the OS, it's still kind of weird and still
01:40:15 ◼ ► a lot of stuff kind of breaks with it. And that's a mature system that was designed that way, right?
01:40:22 ◼ ► So even when it's baked in, the OS is really most of the time, and the applications on the OS,
01:40:30 ◼ ► most of the time are assuming that it's going to be used by one user on one device period.
01:40:35 ◼ ► >> What kind of problems are you having, by the way? Because I use multi-user all the time and
01:40:43 ◼ ► >> Usually it's like, you know, apps that don't think that they have their registration information
01:40:48 ◼ ► or like they, like Skype keeps trying to install helpers over and over again and it can't. One of
01:40:54 ◼ ► the, oh, and how different Apple IDs work with different passwords and keychain storage, how
01:41:02 ◼ ► somehow on one of the computers, TIFF set up Adam's account using parental control and it's now
01:41:09 ◼ ► entered this state, I haven't done any research on how to fix this, so I'm sorry, everyone's going to
01:41:13 ◼ ► try to email and help me and I appreciate that, but I probably can fix it myself with 10 minutes
01:41:17 ◼ ► of research, but I just haven't done it yet, where it gets to the state where we can't turn off the
01:41:21 ◼ ► parental controls now on his account and they're super obnoxious. Obviously, no one uses Mac
01:41:30 ◼ ► parental controls really, because trying to do anything on an account that has parental controls,
01:41:39 ◼ ► circumvent, and easy to circumvent rather, so it's a double whammy. The only one that you listed
01:41:45 ◼ ► I've seen is the software, non-Mac App Store, like traditional Mac software that wants you to
01:41:52 ◼ ► register on each account, and I'm not entirely convinced those are bugs because it just could
01:41:55 ◼ ► be their licensing model. Maybe the licensing model is easier and your computer needs to have
01:41:59 ◼ ► a license to it, but other than that, I haven't had any of those issues. The worst I can think
01:42:03 ◼ ► is that maybe it's not entirely clear to me when I'm on one user's account what kind of priority
01:42:10 ◼ ► tasks get on the other user's account, like if there are apps that think they're not running in
01:42:15 ◼ ► the foreground, therefore they're never going to do some check or whatever, but in general,
01:42:19 ◼ ► I've been using it multi-user from day one, and I think it works exactly the way you would expect it
01:42:25 ◼ ► to with no problems, because it is actually baked into the OS. You do actually have your
01:42:28 ◼ ► own home directory. You do actually have your own user. The operating system has no problem
01:42:33 ◼ ► running multiple copies of the same application owned by different users. All works out fine.
01:42:37 ◼ ► - Well, I'm glad it works for you. It works okay for us, but yeah, we do run into weird little
01:42:41 ◼ ► issues here and there. But anyway, so I think the bigger challenge here is that most of the market
01:42:49 ◼ ► doesn't really want this anymore. What it would take from a user perspective, first of all,
01:42:54 ◼ ► say you wanted to share an iPad, the idea of how would that work with things like apps,
01:43:00 ◼ ► with the home screen, with notifications, with a lot of the security stuff, with the store kit.
01:43:05 ◼ ► There are so many things about how it would have to work that would greatly complexify things,
01:43:17 ◼ ► challenge with this is that market-wise, I think Apple just wants everyone to buy their own devices
01:43:25 ◼ ► and the market largely has accepted that. If you're gonna have multiple people in a household
01:43:30 ◼ ► who are going to want their own stuff on a device, you probably are gonna wind up having them each
01:43:37 ◼ ► have their own device. And even though it costs more money, this also is a world where people's
01:43:43 ◼ ► primary computing device could be a $400 phone or a $300 iPad. And back when the mainstream
01:43:51 ◼ ► computer platforms were designed back in the '80s and '90s, computers cost $2,000. So it was a much
01:43:58 ◼ ► bigger deal that, okay, you're gonna get a $2,000 computer for your household, you're gonna have it
01:44:03 ◼ ► in the computer room or in the den or whatever, and it's gonna be in the computer cabinet and your
01:44:09 ◼ ► family will share this. It was like a major appliance, it was like a washing machine. It
01:44:13 ◼ ► was like your family's gonna share this major appliance, it's a major investment for them,
01:44:16 ◼ ► at this one station in the household. It wasn't like your computer, mom's computer, dad's computer.
01:44:21 ◼ ► It was just like, here is the family computer. And so multiple user accounts were more important,
01:44:26 ◼ ► as things were bigger, more expensive, younger. Now, technology is so ubiquitous and so much of
01:44:33 ◼ ► it is so inexpensive that everyone just gets their own devices. If you can afford to do that,
01:44:39 ◼ ► which is increasingly accessible as devices get cheaper, everyone gets their own devices and
01:44:43 ◼ ► that's fine. And so the usage demand for multi-user stuff on one device is greatly reduced, and the
01:44:53 ◼ ► need for it is greatly reduced at the same time that the OS is now, like the iOS side of things,
01:44:58 ◼ ► it would be harder than ever to add that to them. So that's why I suspect we're not really gonna see
01:45:04 ◼ ► that come to iOS more than it already has as this weird educational hack thing that regular people
01:45:09 ◼ ► don't have access to. Well, at a certain point, it will become a little bit easier, not just because
01:45:14 ◼ ► they're paying down the other tech debt that's lurking in the operating system, just because
01:45:17 ◼ ► the resources will expand. iPhone used to be so RAM-starved and such slow CPUs. Fast forward
01:45:23 ◼ ► 20 years, there's a huge amount of RAM in everybody's phones and iPads, and you can afford
01:45:26 ◼ ► to do multi-user switching in an efficient way and all that other stuff. They do have a use case,
01:45:31 ◼ ► it's the education use case. Obviously, it's not very important in the grand scheme of things,
01:45:35 ◼ ► but it's important enough that they implemented that weird hack, and that weird hack is just more
01:45:39 ◼ ► tech debt. So even just to address that customer use case, eventually someone's gonna say, "Hey,
01:45:46 ◼ ► like all our iPads have 32 gigs of RAM in them now, and we've actually cleaned up a lot of the
01:45:51 ◼ ► operating system in iPad OS. We're pretty close to doing a one-year-long project to get real multi-user
01:45:58 ◼ ► for iPad, and we could just have a better implementation of our classroom thing." Doesn't
01:46:01 ◼ ► mean they even need to use it for the other things, for regular consumers. But the second thing is that
01:46:06 ◼ ► there are people with shared devices, especially iPads. iPads cost $1,000 now. Obviously, it's
01:46:12 ◼ ► $1,000 in 2020 money, not $2,000 in 1980 money, but they're not cheap. And because of how regimented
01:46:26 ◼ ► someone else use them is disruptive. Not just because you get your kids' YouTube recommendations,
01:46:33 ◼ ► but you can't even unlock the device if it doesn't know who you are, if you're not registered on the...
01:46:36 ◼ ► It doesn't have an awareness of multiple people. Granted, I am an alternate appearance of my wife
01:46:42 ◼ ► and vice versa, but that's stretching the limits so we can just get into our other devices.
01:46:48 ◼ ► It's not an important use case. Apple is correctly prioritizing. There are much more important things
01:46:54 ◼ ► they need to be doing, but it's one of those types of things where, unlike that tech debt coming home
01:47:00 ◼ ► to roost and being a company killer, it'll be more like, "Eventually, we're close enough. We're in
01:47:06 ◼ ► shooting distance of that anyway, and we do actually want to do this thing for the classroom,"
01:47:10 ◼ ► because that's always going to be a shared device situation if Apple keeps its prices the way they
01:47:15 ◼ ► are. A one-to-one iPad thing is very expensive in the grand scheme of things, especially in this
01:47:20 ◼ ► country in terms of how much money we spend on education, that having shared iPads will probably
01:47:26 ◼ ► always make sense in an educational setting. And so, hey, wouldn't it be nice to have a better
01:47:31 ◼ ► version of that? It's a low priority, but I don't think it's a zero priority. And like I said, it's
01:47:37 ◼ ► kind of a shame that if the iPhone had come out five years later, maybe multi-user would have been
01:47:46 ◼ ► users. But the other way Apple can do with this is, they shouldn't do this, but every time I see
01:47:54 ◼ ► one of these messages about why some of my multi-user are sharing an iOS device or even
01:48:00 ◼ ► sharing a Mac, they have multi-user. But iCloud, signing out of iCloud is another reason I want to
01:48:06 ◼ ► use iCloud Drive. Signing out of iCloud is like the end of the world. You want me to delete every
01:48:12 ◼ ► piece of information so that you have to painfully and hopefully restore it all the next time? It's
01:48:19 ◼ ► a big deal, especially if you have a huge photo library. I will never sign out of my iCloud account
01:48:24 ◼ ► ever anywhere if I can possibly help it. So if you're just like, "Oh, we have an iOS device,
01:48:30 ◼ ► but that is on little Timmy's photo collection. I want to pull that photo. And I don't know about
01:48:37 ◼ ► iCloud.com, the web interface. So how do we do that?" Well, I guess I could just sign out of my
01:48:40 ◼ ► iCloud account and sign into Timmy's. Like, "No, turn back. Don't do it." But if you could just
01:48:45 ◼ ► switch to Timmy's account for a second to grab that, that would be cool. I mean, again, storage
01:48:49 ◼ ► space, RAM, like this, you know, I'm not saying this needs to be done today or tomorrow, but
01:48:52 ◼ ► it's out on the horizon as a piece of tech debt that Apple could address that would make its
01:48:57 ◼ ► devices a little more convenient. And it would be nice for you and your 4-in-8 Macs can do it.
01:49:02 ◼ ► The iOS device, you should be able to do it too. It'd be neat. That way everyone can use their
01:49:06 ◼ ► shared 27-inch iPad that's, you know, in the computer room. Thanks to our sponsors this week,
01:49:58 ◼ ► N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A. It's accidental. They didn't mean to.
01:50:36 ◼ ► Honda inevitably abandons you, you can come to the Volkswagen Auto Group side of the world.
01:50:42 ◼ ► - And drive around in an ugly hatchback? I think your generation of the Golf R looks way
01:50:59 ◼ ► - I don't like those weird fog lights. What are they doing with the five dice dot fog lights?
01:51:05 ◼ ► - Apparently they're fitting it in the, what is that, hexagonal grill. And I don't know why
01:51:12 ◼ ► - I don't mind the grill. I am a sucker for big front fascia, as I've said many, many times about
01:51:16 ◼ ► the M Sport package on BMWs. But yeah, the fog lights are a little odd to me. I also don't like
01:51:22 ◼ ► that black C just outside the grill area. Do you see what I'm talking about? - Yeah, it's too busy.
01:51:29 ◼ ► - I don't know. It looks okay. I mean, I've seen render, well, not renderings, I've seen some
01:51:35 ◼ ► camouflage pictures of Golf R and it looks okay. I don't know if I'm falling into the same trap as
01:51:41 ◼ ► BMW where the generation of car that I came to the brand, that is the last good one and everything
01:51:50 ◼ ► - Yeah, 'cause I mean, I'll tell you the last good 3 Series was easily the E90 and the F30 was trash
01:51:55 ◼ ► and whatever the current one is has gotta be garbage too. So I am definitely that when it
01:52:01 ◼ ► comes to BMW and perhaps I'm doing that again with Volkswagen. But I am overjoyed to know that if,
01:52:22 ◼ ► a GTI in red? - Why would you? - The whole signature of the GTI is the red line across the
01:52:28 ◼ ► grille. You can't see that when the whole car is red. - I don't know, I mean, I like the GTI pretty
01:52:33 ◼ ► good, the existing one. Obviously, I prefer the R, but you know, it's still a very nice, very fun
01:52:40 ◼ ► car and I'm enthusiastic that this is getting a stick. Now, what will be terrible but hilarious
01:52:45 ◼ ► is if this gets the stick but the R is a DCT only, which would be just my luck. And again,
01:52:50 ◼ ► I'm not looking to replace my car anytime soon. I mean, hell, at this point, I'm ensuring I'm
01:52:55 ◼ ► driving my car every couple of weeks just so it's still functional, you know? - That's all I've done
01:53:00 ◼ ► with my car is go on essentially joyrides to give the car exercise. - Yeah. - I would love to see
01:53:05 ◼ ► your joyride. - The same here. It's got to be the slowest, most boring joyride in the world.
01:53:09 ◼ ► - Oh, there's not a lot of cars on the road. You can, you know, I let the engine warm up a little
01:53:14 ◼ ► bit because I'm old and think that's still a thing and then I go for some high revs. That's fun.
01:53:17 ◼ ► - No, I think that is still a thing. I'm not joking. I really think that is still a thing
01:53:22 ◼ ► where you should have your oil a little bit warmed up before you act like a turd. I mean, look,
01:53:26 ◼ ► Marco's M5, if I'm not mistaken, wasn't your M5 one of the ones where the red line would increase
01:53:32 ◼ ► as the oil got warm? - I don't remember that at all. I mean, I never probably approached the
01:53:36 ◼ ► red line, so I don't know, but yeah. I think what's interesting to me is that you're talking
01:53:42 ◼ ► about this as if you're, as if, you know, this is very likely that by the time you need to buy your
01:53:48 ◼ ► next car, 'cause your current car is what, a year, two years old, something like that? - Year and a
01:53:52 ◼ ► half-ish. - Yeah, so by the time you need to buy your next car, which is probably not for at least
01:53:57 ◼ ► three to five more years, right? - Oh, I hope so, yeah. - Yeah, right, I hope, right? Unless
01:54:02 ◼ ► something goes really wrong with this one. So hopefully, you know, you're talking on like
01:54:05 ◼ ► probably like, you know, a five-ish year time span at the minimum. You honestly think that you're
01:54:11 ◼ ► still gonna have a gas car, or that you're still gonna want to buy a gas car five years from now?
01:54:16 ◼ ► - You know, it's a very good question, and the stubborn child within me says, "Of course,"
01:54:23 ◼ ► 'cause I mean, what monster would buy an electric car where you can't shift for yourself, and so on
01:54:28 ◼ ► and so forth, but the reality is-- - There was that one stick shift electric car. - Yeah, I know.
01:54:31 ◼ ► There was that one off build. But the reality of the situation is I'm already sort of giving,
01:54:37 ◼ ► what's the happy equivalent of side eye, you know, 'cause side eye kind of implies anger, but
01:54:41 ◼ ► happy side eye to electric cars. Like my parents, I think we've talked about this on the show,
01:54:45 ◼ ► my parents got a Chevy Bolt, and it's not remarkable, but it's surprisingly great given
01:54:50 ◼ ► what it is. Now, it's also not as cheap as you would hope it would be. You know, it was expensive,
01:54:55 ◼ ► and it's got problems, but by and large, it's much nicer than I expected, and, you know, if Tesla
01:55:03 ◼ ► wasn't completely canceled by now and more affordable, maybe I would consider a Tesla, but
01:55:07 ◼ ► God knows I'm not giving that man any of my money ever. And so, as I think I said to you privately,
01:55:13 ◼ ► Marco, and now I'll say publicly, I cannot wait for us to reboot neutral while you go on the journey
01:55:19 ◼ ► of picking out what replaces your Tesla, because I don't think you should be buying any more Teslas,
01:55:23 ◼ ► or at least not the way things are right now. - Man, does that guy really make it hard to be
01:55:28 ◼ ► a fan of this brand, and I love the cars, the cars are so good, and look, they're not perfect,
01:55:36 ◼ ► no car is ever perfect, but I love this car so much that if I didn't have anything else to consider,
01:55:45 ◼ ► like this guy and his, you know, often offensive behavior, if my car was stolen tomorrow,
01:55:52 ◼ ► and I had to replace it, I would literally get the exact same thing. And I have said that for
01:55:59 ◼ ► the last, what, five years that I've had Model Ss, like, I love this car so much. I actually don't
01:56:07 ◼ ► love the Model 3 that much, other people like it, so that's fine, it has enough fans. I love the
01:56:12 ◼ ► Model S, I absolutely love the Model S. It is my car, and it feels so much like my car, and I love
01:56:18 ◼ ► so much about it, and the things I like about it, nothing else really offers yet, except maybe that
01:56:24 ◼ ► giant Porsche thing, but I honestly, it has some other compromises that I don't love, and it costs
01:56:31 ◼ ► more money, and so, yeah, I'm not super into the Porsche thing, but there's no other car I want to
01:56:36 ◼ ► drive than a Model S. I love it that much. And so I just, I wish that that guy would stop making
01:56:45 ◼ ► an ass of himself so often, because I don't want to have to make excuses for why I drive the car
01:56:51 ◼ ► that I drive, because the car is great, and he just makes such an ass of himself so often,
01:56:58 ◼ ► it's really hard to deal with. - I think this will solve itself, assuming Tesla can A, survive,
01:57:04 ◼ ► and B, get its act together enough, they will ruin your car, because they will eventually make a new
01:57:09 ◼ ► Model S or Model S replacement that is significantly different from your car, and you won't like it,
01:57:14 ◼ ► and they're problem solved, and then you're like, okay, well now suddenly options are open,
01:57:18 ◼ ► they keep buying used Model Ss of my generation, you know, the good generation, back when I first
01:57:23 ◼ ► started buying the Model S, those were the good ones, because honestly, your first Model S,
01:57:27 ◼ ► granted this, you can cosmetically tell them apart very easily, and they've changed a lot in the
01:57:31 ◼ ► interior, but in general, the size, shape, features, layout compromises of the car are the same,
01:57:37 ◼ ► it's got the same number of seats, the same dashboard, the vertical screen in the center,
01:57:46 ◼ ► even though it's been heavily revised. I'm assuming eventually they will make a new Model S,
01:57:52 ◼ ► and if you look at Tesla's recent cars, like the Cybertruck and the new Roadster and the Model 3,
01:57:59 ◼ ► they have different sets of compromises which seem to appeal to you less, so this may solve your
01:58:03 ◼ ► problem for you, you won't be so tempted, and then you'll have to really gauge what is my desire to
01:58:15 ◼ ► Oh yeah, no, literally earlier today, I was driving today, and I was literally thinking,
01:58:20 ◼ ► you know, maybe at the end of this lease I might buy it out, because I just like this car so much,
01:58:29 ◼ ► maybe, I mean, I have another roughly year and a half left on this lease, so maybe by the end
01:58:36 ◼ ► of this maybe we'll have a lot more electric car models than one will tempt me, but honestly I
01:58:46 ◼ ► Yeah, I don't know, there's so much more, there's so much about Tesla that I like better,
01:58:51 ◼ ► like I like so much about like the UI of the car, the app, the key, like so much about it,
01:59:04 ◼ ► Yeah, CarPlay is the one big thing that I wish they had that they don't, but I'd rather interact
01:59:11 ◼ ► with my phone on the little mount, the ProClip USA mount, sponsor, I'd rather interact with that,
01:59:16 ◼ ► and then have the giant screen for all the car stuff, than interact with Tif's cars CarPlay,
01:59:22 ◼ ► because CarPlay, like the way BMW integrates CarPlay is very clumsy. CarPlay is not a like
01:59:36 ◼ ► system can show or not show, and it's very clunky to get in and out of it. Also, frankly,
01:59:45 ◼ ► and you like wheel through everything with a knob and doesn't have touch screens. CarPlay,
01:59:49 ◼ ► while it works that way, you can navigate CarPlay with knobs, it sucks, it's way better with a
01:59:55 ◼ ► touch screen. I would agree with that, because my car has like a volume knob close to the driver,
02:00:02 ◼ ► and on the passenger side it has like another almost identical knob that's just used for like
02:00:06 ◼ ► scrolling and manipulation and whatnot, and you can use that right side knob for using CarPlay,
02:00:12 ◼ ► which I didn't even realize for months, but you can do it, and I've done it from time to time just
02:00:16 ◼ ► to try it, and it sucks. It definitely sucks, you're right, and even though I stand by sort of
02:00:23 ◼ ► what I said in neutral, that having a touch screen in the car is not the greatest, because you know
02:00:28 ◼ ► you're bouncing around the road and you have this, you know, your finger is so far away from your
02:00:32 ◼ ► shoulder, so it boings even more and so on and so forth, but ultimately I think I would rather have
02:00:37 ◼ ► a touch screen than not, even with all of its troubles and issues with it. So yeah, I can only
02:00:44 ◼ ► imagine that if TIFF's car is still just the knob that it would not be terribly fun, even despite
02:00:50 ◼ ► it being wireless CarPlay, which I'm very jealous of, because mine is wired only and I really wish
02:00:54 ◼ ► it was wireless, but you win some you lose some. Having everything on a touch screen, it sounds
02:00:59 ◼ ► crazy, but now that I've driven a car for five years that has a giant pretty good touch screen,
02:01:05 ◼ ► I can tell you it's fine. It's totally fine. I don't find that it's significantly worse or less
02:01:11 ◼ ► safe or harder to operate or more error prone. I find it's totally fine, and anything about it
02:01:17 ◼ ► that is kind of iffy is down to the design of like, you know, how they've laid out certain controls,
02:01:24 ◼ ► not necessarily like that it's a touch screen or that it isn't a touch screen. And part of this is
02:01:28 ◼ ► like, at least on the Model S, this is not, this is less true in the Model 3, on the Model S,
02:01:32 ◼ ► you actually do have physical controls on the steering wheel and the two stalks that cover so
02:01:38 ◼ ► many common needs that you actually don't use the touch screen as much as you think you would.
02:01:42 ◼ ► On the 3, it's, the 3 has a lot more on the screen and it has like a whole, I think it has one fewer
02:01:47 ◼ ► stalk completely and some of the things you can set are a little bit different, but yes, on the
02:01:52 ◼ ► Model S, it's a really good balance. - You can see your speed right in front of you, imagine that.
02:01:56 ◼ ► - Yeah, right. What a radical idea. Yeah, I don't care for the 3, but I'm glad there's something a
02:02:02 ◼ ► whole lot of them and it's a pretty good car for a lot of people, but it's not for me. But I just,
02:02:10 ◼ ► I just want this car and even if Tesla explodes and flames out and goes under, which honestly,
02:02:17 ◼ ► everyone always thinks they're about to do that and I don't follow the finances enough to know, but
02:02:21 ◼ ► they've been around long enough now that I would meet any of those speculations with quite a lot
02:02:27 ◼ ► of skepticism at this point. But man, I just love this car and I love it so much that I'd rather
02:02:34 ◼ ► have the Tesla I have now with no CarPlay than the best possible CarPlay thing that I can think of
02:02:41 ◼ ► that exists in the market today. Now, in the future, if that changes, who knows? Like, I love
02:02:45 ◼ ► that little Honda E concept thing that is still not available in the US, unfortunately. I love
02:02:51 ◼ ► the way that thing looks. That thing looks awesome. I haven't driven one and everyone says it's not
02:02:55 ◼ ► that exciting of a car to drive, but it looks so cool and it's so compact and it's such a fun
02:03:00 ◼ ► little design. The interior looks like it has a really good design too. That I'm very interested
02:03:06 ◼ ► in as just like a fun option, but that's probably not going to come to the US anytime soon.
02:03:15 ◼ ► and I can pretty much know what are my options going to be when this lease is up. I don't think
02:03:20 ◼ ► there's any massive bombshells that are going to drop that are, "Oh, all of a sudden this new car
02:03:24 ◼ ► model comes out of nowhere and no one knew about it." No, I think we pretty much know what's going
02:03:28 ◼ ► to be there in a year and a half and I think I'm going to stick with this in some form, whether it's
02:03:32 ◼ ► buying this out or getting a new one that's probably the same. Yeah, you should get a fresh
02:03:36 ◼ ► battery. You don't want to keep using that used battery. I know there's a risk if you get a new
02:03:40 ◼ ► one it might be like, you know, might have some manufacturing problems, the steering wheel might
02:03:44 ◼ ► come off in your hand or whatever, but a fresh battery. I feel like if you're going to buy out
02:03:49 ◼ ► the same model of car, you should really get one of the fresh batteries so it'll last you the longest,
02:03:52 ◼ ► right? So you can wait the longest for something that you like equally as much or better. And I
02:03:58 ◼ ► think if and when you do get a more traditional car with a more traditional interior, one of the
02:04:03 ◼ ► things that you will appreciate is, "Oh, this one physical button that was annoying to get to on the
02:04:07 ◼ ► touchscreen, it's so nice to have a physical button for this one task." Right? Because it still is a
02:04:12 ◼ ► thing. I think even your Model S goes a little bit overboard with the touchscreen just to sort of
02:04:18 ◼ ► prove a point and the Model 3 does it even in a more pigheaded fashion. Knobs and buttons,
02:04:23 ◼ ► they're awesome. I'm not even saying don't have it on the touchscreen, by all means put it there,
02:04:27 ◼ ► but certain things being able to have knobs and buttons were striking that balance is the current
02:04:31 ◼ ► exercise of interior car design. And if you look at all the cars that are out there, forget about
02:04:35 ◼ ► electric, just your cars in general, you've got a touchscreen and you've got knobs and you've got
02:04:38 ◼ ► buttons and you've got stocks. How do you balance your controls among them? I think putting
02:04:43 ◼ ► everything on the screen is the incorrect balance, just like not having a screen at all is the
02:04:47 ◼ ► incorrect balance. You just got to find the right balance and use each input area for its strengths.