ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► I really did have fun, and if I sounded otherwise on the show, then edit me to make it sound like I had fun.

00:00:05 ◼   ► No, I did. It was good. I had fun, too.

00:00:08 ◼   ► I'm glad you two are having fun while I'm at work.

00:00:10 ◼   ► [laughter]

00:00:12 ◼   ► Hey, I'm at work, too. It's only Marco that isn't, because he's doing my work for me.

00:00:16 ◼   ► Tell me all about it.

00:00:18 ◼   ► I was suffering. It was just a little bit chilly outside at the outdoor mall when the kids and Aaron were in the Children's Museum in the mall, and I was working on my Adorable.

00:00:29 ◼   ► Yeah, it sounds like a hard life.

00:00:31 ◼   ► It was tough. It was very difficult.

00:00:33 ◼   ► Yeah, because it was a little chilly.

00:00:35 ◼   ► It was just a touch too chilly.

00:00:37 ◼   ► If I'd moved out of the shade, it would have been better, but then I wouldn't be able to see my goddamn screen.

00:00:42 ◼   ► [beep]

00:00:44 ◼   ► I don't know if it was because I stumbled onto the Wikipedia page for bug-out bags.

00:00:49 ◼   ► So this is the "Oh, shit, I've got to get out of the house now."

00:00:52 ◼   ► Who are you bugging out from?

00:00:54 ◼   ► Yeah, so I was doing the show notes for Ask ATP. What's our WWDCEDC?

00:01:01 ◼   ► Which is Everyday Carry, and then I was trying to find a link for EDC, and then I stumbled on Everyday Carry on Wikipedia, and that led me to bug-out bag, and I was just reading about blizzards and earthquakes.

00:01:12 ◼   ► For all the natural disasters that hit Virginia.

00:01:15 ◼   ► Hey, we have not hurricanes in the Florida sense, but hurricanes in the surprising amount of rain and wind for as far inland as I am sense.

00:01:24 ◼   ► And so that can cause some problems from time to time.

00:01:27 ◼   ► Yeah, but I think you're far enough inland that it is merely surprising, not like life ruining or house destroying.

00:01:34 ◼   ► Nine times out of ten, I would agree.

00:01:36 ◼   ► There have been occasions that it's been actually legitimately scary, but yes, you are certainly far more right than you are wrong.

00:01:43 ◼   ► But did you know, Marco, that a bug-out bag, or BOB, may also be referred to as a GOOD bag, which is an acronym for Get Out of Dodge, an INCH bag, I'm Never Coming Home, a Personal Emergency Relocation Kit, or PERC, or a Quick Run Bag, a QRB.

00:01:59 ◼   ► Needless to say, someone has been looking at Wikipedia lately, and that someone is this guy.

00:02:03 ◼   ► See, I feel like there's probably a lot of overlap between that community and the red staters, like people who fantasize about zombie apocalypses and watch The Walking Dead.

00:02:17 ◼   ► Well, I wasn't going to bring The Walking Dead into it, but I was just going to make the same point.

00:02:21 ◼   ► This is like the slightly kinder and gentler version of the fantasy where you're going to be defending your family with your giant collection of firearms.

00:02:28 ◼   ► The slightly kinder one is that I'm going to somehow escape disaster when others don't because I have a well-packed bag, and that will make all the difference.

00:02:37 ◼   ► Right. Nobody prepares a bag like this without a little bit of a fantasy in their head that they someday will have to use it.

00:02:45 ◼   ► It's the same thing with buying guns and everything. People fantasize about having a reason to use these things, and they kind of revel in the idea of that.

00:02:55 ◼   ► That's why I can't even look at everyday carry stuff because it very quickly turns to knives and guns.

00:03:01 ◼   ► I am very interested in lots of other things that people typically classify as everyday carry, but if you look on Instagram or anything, it's quickly knives and guns. Very, very quickly.

00:03:13 ◼   ► I couldn't agree with you more. It's funny because I don't know if it's because I've lived in Virginia for a while.

00:03:19 ◼   ► I don't know if it's... It was never Boy Scout, so it's not that, but there's something that appeals to me about the thought of having a bag that I can grab at a moment's notice and know that anything I could reasonably need is within it.

00:03:31 ◼   ► I've talked many, many, many times about what I call my Go Pack, which is all of my nerd... It's like my nerd bug-out bag, right? So it's all of my nerd cables.

00:03:41 ◼   ► Right. I have one of those too. And I fantasize about someday needing that micro-USB to USB-C cable.

00:03:47 ◼   ► I'm right there with you. But I'll snark aside, it really is convenient. And I think the difference between what I call a Go Pack and a bug-out bag is that a Go Pack you use presumably at least a few times a year.

00:03:58 ◼   ► No matter how much or little you travel, you're going to travel at least occasionally. And so at least occasionally you'll use a Go Pack.

00:04:04 ◼   ► Whereas I do agree with what you're saying. A bug-out bag is like, you know, I'm like, you know, hand-wringing in a happy way. Like, "Oh, I can't wait to have that natural disaster so I can use my first aid kit that I spent $350 on that lasts forever."

00:04:17 ◼   ► I don't know. Like, it appeals to me in a sense because I like the preparedness aspect of it, but I don't really see the point, you know?

00:04:27 ◼   ► It's not really prepared. It's not like, even your adapter bag is probably not actually preparing you for anything but like any of those other bags.

00:04:34 ◼   ► In the balance of things that are going to help or hurt in the case of any kind of disaster, the few items you put in that bag are not going to make any difference.

00:04:43 ◼   ► Like, it's not, you know, unless you can fit food, shelter, and a vulnerable bubble and three years worth of shelf-stable food into that bag, it's not, you know, the bag will not make the difference.

00:04:55 ◼   ► And like the reality is like, if society ever falls apart that much, we're all just going to be killed immediately. Like, we're going to last no time at all.

00:05:03 ◼   ► Well, I would have been killed but I had a bag with some stuff in it.

00:05:06 ◼   ► Hey, hey.

00:05:07 ◼   ► That did it.

00:05:08 ◼   ► You say you're going to die immediately, but I have plenty of friends with these small arsenals in their homes which does not make me comfortable.

00:05:14 ◼   ► Yeah, they're all going to kill each other. It doesn't matter and it's not going to help you.

00:05:18 ◼   ► Yeah, and like what value will you provide them?

00:05:20 ◼   ► I'll be delicious to eat. I don't know.

00:05:22 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly.

00:05:24 ◼   ► Well, gamey.

00:05:25 ◼   ► You'll have this bag they can take very easily from you.

00:05:27 ◼   ► Yeah, right.

00:05:29 ◼   ► For real.

00:05:30 ◼   ► I don't know, this is all somewhat, follow me down this tangent, this is all somewhat relevant because last night we had one of the, you know, it's funny as parents how quickly you lose the ability to be woken up overnight.

00:05:43 ◼   ► So Michaela is 16 months old and, you know, she has been sleeping through the night for most of those 16 months and for the times that she wasn't, generally speaking, it was Erin who was going in to nurse her.

00:05:54 ◼   ► So, you know, I got to sleep through the night a lot.

00:05:57 ◼   ► But last night we had Declan having a bad dream.

00:06:00 ◼   ► Then of course we had a smoke alarm that decided to go off and even though the battery from the, you know, 9 volt tongue test seemed fine, the smoke detector was dissatisfied with it.

00:06:11 ◼   ► So we had to do that, change that, and that was in Michaela's room which made it all the worse.

00:06:15 ◼   ► And then of course that woke her up which made it even worse.

00:06:17 ◼   ► And then there was something else that happened.

00:06:19 ◼   ► Like all of these are minor, oh the power flickered, that was where this tangent came from.

00:06:22 ◼   ► The power flickered a few times which is pretty unusual for us these days.

00:06:25 ◼   ► And of course my UPS is going ballistic and, you know, things that are on smart switches like the fans in the kids room are now turning themselves off.

00:06:34 ◼   ► And none of these are a big deal.

00:06:36 ◼   ► Like in and of themselves none of them are a big deal.

00:06:38 ◼   ► It just so happened that they all decided to hit at once, like one hour apart from each other, which was not fun.

00:06:43 ◼   ► So I'm a little tired and a little loopy.

00:06:45 ◼   ► But I don't know, it just got me thinking, like, what would happen if legitimately like our seemingly very vulnerable power grid like legitimately just got hacked and shut down?

00:06:57 ◼   ► Like what happened, what was it, around 2004ish when the Northeast, you know, like shut down for two days or something like that?

00:07:03 ◼   ► That sounds terrifying.

00:07:05 ◼   ► I was on my way to work at Staples.

00:07:07 ◼   ► Oh nice.

00:07:08 ◼   ► Nothing happens. I think we didn't have power for like a week maybe on Hurricane Gloria before you guys were born maybe.

00:07:13 ◼   ► You just hang out in your house and I mean especially if it doesn't happen in the dead of winter.

00:07:17 ◼   ► In the dead of winter you've got more problems but places with the dead of winter also have fireplaces and you can get by.

00:07:23 ◼   ► Even that time, like when we had that giant Northeast blackout when I was working at Staples, like it was really inconvenient for the few hours that we were in Pennsylvania that we were out of power and then it was fine.

00:07:36 ◼   ► Like I have, oh jeez, I mean I have the amount of like battery capacity and flashlight capacity that I have in my office right here within 10 feet of me is incredible.

00:07:48 ◼   ► Like I could keep our phones charged and at least one room of our house somewhat lit with flashlights for like a week with what I have right here already.

00:07:58 ◼   ► And when am I ever going to need it? Like probably never.

00:08:01 ◼   ► And if any of it ever comes up I'll be really excited to use it. Oh I have just the battery for this purpose right?

00:08:07 ◼   ► And like that'll happen maybe once every 10 years for an hour and then it will never happen after that.

00:08:13 ◼   ► You know my parents live about 45 minutes from me and they have this very fancy inverter generator that's enough to power not the entire house but like a large portion thereof.

00:08:24 ◼   ► It's like a 6,000 watt generator or something like that.

00:08:26 ◼   ► And my mother-in-law who is about 20 minutes from me has a whole home like natural gas generator.

00:08:31 ◼   ► And I've really really really kicked around the idea of spending something like, what it was like two or three thousand dollars I think for a very fancy inverter generator.

00:08:41 ◼   ► And so you know like and I already have a hookup in the fuse box to plug it in and you know I could power whatever portions of the house I wanted.

00:08:48 ◼   ► This is like the bug out bag but even more expensive right? Because I really really want to get this like $3,000 generator just so I know that I will never have the problem.

00:08:57 ◼   ► But then it's exactly what you were saying earlier Marco. Then I'm just like fantasizing about the power going out.

00:09:01 ◼   ► Like ooh maybe tonight's the night. Ooh it's getting windy. It's getting windy. Should I go get the generator ready?

00:09:05 ◼   ► It is so silly like I haven't bought it because I know deep down it's a complete waste of money.

00:09:09 ◼   ► Especially since we have relatives so close but I want it.

00:09:13 ◼   ► That's the thing like if you're actually losing power so incredibly frequently that this thing would like pay for itself that's one thing.

00:09:21 ◼   ► But the reality is like in most places around here like where you live too I'm sure like you lose power so infrequently and in such short periods that like worst case scenario.

00:09:30 ◼   ► If you lose power and you like can't stay in your house and maybe it's like in the middle of winter and it's really cold outside or something like that.

00:09:37 ◼   ► So like it's kind of you know so you kind of need heat to stay in your house and you don't have it.

00:09:40 ◼   ► And it's too cold to just put on sweaters and blankets and everything and you can't get space heaters and all this other stuff.

00:09:44 ◼   ► Then it's like okay well then you know get in your car and drive somewhere like drive as far away as you need to to get a hotel room.

00:09:51 ◼   ► How much does that cost for like the one time every 10 years that you'll need to do that versus like what it costs to get a generator installed.

00:09:58 ◼   ► They should sell people just empty metal shells like they would never know right.

00:10:02 ◼   ► Just like selling this thing and it just makes noise and it's very heavy because like it just sits in your house and rots right.

00:10:07 ◼   ► It's just it's waiting out there you're hoping it's not just like rusting or whatever.

00:10:11 ◼   ► Well it does more than that. Like I know my in-laws have one and I think once a week it does a self-test.

00:10:18 ◼   ► You know you have this massive you know gas engine thing that once a week goes for like you know 15 minutes while it self-tests itself.

00:10:27 ◼   ► Like this these things aren't without their downsides right.

00:10:31 ◼   ► It's something that you have to get installed get periodically maintained or serviced you know it's very intrusive invasive.

00:10:38 ◼   ► It takes space out of your yard or out of your house or whatever like you know it isn't like a it isn't like a small deal.

00:10:44 ◼   ► And it's for a benefit that you probably will never need or you would need once every 10 years.

00:10:50 ◼   ► But then you could just go to the hotel room somewhere and like for way less money and not having that you know noise and space and giant things sitting in your yard for the last decade.

00:10:59 ◼   ► It's not unusual for us to go to Erin's mom's on a Sunday afternoon and that's when her whole home generator decides to do itself test.

00:11:06 ◼   ► And it is exactly what you described. It's extraordinarily loud. It runs for like 10-ish minutes and it's very random.

00:11:13 ◼   ► And so every time I'm like what what what oh right and it just freaks me out every time.

00:11:18 ◼   ► And it's not a big deal like it in the grand scheme of things.

00:11:22 ◼   ► It helps her because she is she's not remote by any reasonable definition of the word but she's remote enough that power does go out for her you know periodically.

00:11:30 ◼   ► And so it does make sense for her to have it.

00:11:32 ◼   ► But yeah for us and where most of the electric lines not you know near ish us are in ground and the one tree that kept knocking out our neighborhood's power during you know in the outside in the above ground section has been trimmed back a couple of years ago.

00:11:48 ◼   ► And ever since that tree got trimmed it has been pretty reliable here.

00:11:52 ◼   ► But it was just a few years ago I don't remember exactly when I want to actually play six or seven years ago that one hurricane came through Richmond and the south side of Richmond which is not where I am.

00:12:01 ◼   ► Don't be creepy. They were without power for as much as two weeks and that was surprising.

00:12:06 ◼   ► And we knew the hurricane was coming like it wasn't that much of a surprise that it was coming but it brought far more damage than anyone expected.

00:12:13 ◼   ► And so we were fine. This is when we did have a generator that has since died.

00:12:18 ◼   ► But we we had I think didn't have power for like two or three days or something like that.

00:12:25 ◼   ► And like I said the other side of Richmond didn't have it for as much as two weeks and it was it was something else like it was intense for a while.

00:12:32 ◼   ► But even then like I feel like the the solution you know we are fortunate that we have some disposable income.

00:12:39 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:12:39 ◼   ► Right. And so like I think the solution is very clearly like just apply money to this problem until it goes away.

00:12:44 ◼   ► Like when when it happens if it happens. Right.

00:12:46 ◼   ► So like it like you know my car can go 300 miles from my house before I have to stop anywhere.

00:12:53 ◼   ► So if anything ever happens to the area that I'm in I can put my family in my car and drive somewhere up to 300 miles away where I can get a hotel room.

00:13:03 ◼   ► I'm sure I know the local hotels are probably going to be very crowded but I'm sure within 300 miles I can find a room.

00:13:08 ◼   ► But if you if you had that kind of a problem though wouldn't you take the BMW rather than the Tesla?

00:13:13 ◼   ► Why on earth would you take the Tesla?

00:13:15 ◼   ► Because I can plug it in anywhere and it will already be full.

00:13:19 ◼   ► It will already at all times have that 300 mile range whereas the BMW might have a quarter tank of gas in it.

00:13:26 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:13:27 ◼   ► Sure but.

00:13:28 ◼   ► You can't guarantee like any given day that the BMW is going to be full.

00:13:31 ◼   ► And that makes sense.

00:13:32 ◼   ► Whereas you know the Tesla is going to be full.

00:13:33 ◼   ► I agree with you but don't you think if there was a risk of the hurricane you know hitting the New York or whatever you know or a blizzard hitting New York area.

00:13:40 ◼   ► Don't you think you would go and fill the BMW if it was really that much of a problem because if it were me and I had a you know Dino Juice car in a Zap Zap car sitting in the garage.

00:13:50 ◼   ► I would absolutely choose the BMW just because of the convenience of being able to fill up just about anywhere without having to worry about power.

00:13:57 ◼   ► Plus you can relive Mad Max the movie that neither of you saw.

00:14:00 ◼   ► I saw Fury Road.

00:14:01 ◼   ► Right I'm at the original.

00:14:02 ◼   ► Anyway.

00:14:03 ◼   ► If there is a severe natural disaster there it's more likely to be really hard to get gas than electricity.

00:14:11 ◼   ► Like if we're out around here like you know with U.S. infrastructure and everything there's frequently like you know runs on gas stations before major hurricanes where like you just you can't get gas you have to wait in very long lines to get gas.

00:14:22 ◼   ► If everyone because everyone else has the same idea.

00:14:24 ◼   ► Oh I better fill up my car right like before any kind of major hurricane is actually very hard to get gas around here.

00:14:29 ◼   ► Whereas like you can almost always find power somewhere either in your house or if you have lost power like within 300 miles it's probably easier to find power than gas during a natural disaster honestly.

00:14:41 ◼   ► I want to argue with you but I don't know enough about this to be able to make any sort of compelling argument.

00:14:46 ◼   ► That's alright.

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00:16:39 ◼   ► [Music]

00:16:42 ◼   ► Alright, first and foremost I need to remind you, no I'm just kidding.

00:16:45 ◼   ► We're all done with that don't worry.

00:16:47 ◼   ► Thank you everyone who bought shirts and hats and polos and sweatshirts and everything else.

00:16:53 ◼   ► Really and truly from the bottom of our hearts we really appreciate it.

00:16:56 ◼   ► I would like to just vindicate myself, is that the word I'm looking for? I don't know, whatever.

00:17:01 ◼   ► I'd just like to congratulate myself that within I think an hour or two of the sales closing at Cotton Bureau.

00:17:08 ◼   ► We got tweets from people saying, "Oh God I forgot is there anything I can do?"

00:17:11 ◼   ► You guys think I'm just saying that to be a jerk, you know to be a big jerk.

00:17:16 ◼   ► You think I'm saying that to be mean. Oh no, it was within an hour or two that there were poor people.

00:17:21 ◼   ► And I mean that genuinely that these people were upset.

00:17:23 ◼   ► I do feel bad for them but that's why we reminded you.

00:17:27 ◼   ► So anyway, thank you everyone who bought shirts and hats and everything else.

00:17:32 ◼   ► I really and I know my two co-hosts really do appreciate it.

00:17:36 ◼   ► And I am super amped to hopefully see some of this walking around the San Jose area in just a couple of weeks actually.

00:17:43 ◼   ► It's coming up real soon.

00:17:44 ◼   ► Yeah, thanks everybody.

00:17:45 ◼   ► I wondered if Casey would find a way to get mad at listeners again even though the sale was over and he found a way.

00:17:51 ◼   ► That's what I said.

00:17:52 ◼   ► Why do you stop yelling at them? They just want to, you know, they're just buying merchandise. You don't have to yell at them every week to shame them for not buying in time.

00:18:01 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:18:02 ◼   ► Which one of us is bad cop and which one of us is good cop?

00:18:05 ◼   ► You're the bad cop. I'm trying to be the good cop here. Thanks for buying our stuff.

00:18:10 ◼   ► I hope you like it. I'm not going to be mean to you and yell at you.

00:18:15 ◼   ► Hey, sometimes you need some tough love.

00:18:18 ◼   ► I do want to congratulate a certain co-host of mine even though he is being bad cop and say that…

00:18:25 ◼   ► You're the bad cop. I was the bad cop.

00:18:26 ◼   ► No, no, whatever. It's really just like rectifs.

00:18:30 ◼   ► Anyway, I would like to congratulate Jon for his very amusing, what you have put in the show notes as "frame game fun."

00:18:37 ◼   ► Which if you don't follow Jon on Twitter, first of all, you're making a mistake.

00:18:40 ◼   ► But second of all, Jon was giving away codes for free t-shirts and the way he was doing this was by putting increasingly, or I guess decreasingly, whatever, smaller and smaller photos or clips of frames of movies into tweets and saying the first person to correctly identify them will win a free t-shirt code.

00:19:00 ◼   ► And I didn't know most of these movies.

00:19:04 ◼   ► This contest is not for you two, obviously.

00:19:06 ◼   ► I know, I know.

00:19:07 ◼   ► And even the one, like you had Jurassic Park at one point…

00:19:10 ◼   ► Don't ruin the surprise.

00:19:12 ◼   ► Oh, sorry. You had something at one point that I had seen.

00:19:15 ◼   ► Once I saw the full frame, I was like, "Oh, oh, oh, okay, that makes sense."

00:19:18 ◼   ► But man, just looking at each of these pictures individually, I didn't have the faintest idea.

00:19:22 ◼   ► I presume, Marco, you were also clueless?

00:19:24 ◼   ► I recognized zero of them, to nobody's surprise.

00:19:27 ◼   ► Yep, same story here.

00:19:29 ◼   ► Yeah, so we get these codes and we want to give them away to fans, right, because what else are you going to do with them? But you want to try to make it fun or… I don't know. I've tried a whole bunch of different ways.

00:19:41 ◼   ► I used to do like trivia questions where the answer was like, "Take the first letter of the first word and the last letter of the last word," and then those are two characters that you replace in the promo code.

00:19:49 ◼   ► So I would put in the promo code with a bunch of X's, and then I would just…

00:19:55 ◼   ► There would be like trivia questions or whatever, but it's really, really hard to ask anything, especially trivia questions or tech questions that people can't Google for in two seconds.

00:20:04 ◼   ► And I always wanted the person who wanted to be somebody who knew something, not somebody who was just as good at Googling.

00:20:09 ◼   ► And so of course I tried to Google them myself before I did them, but it's really… it's just lots of really fun, interesting questions.

00:20:16 ◼   ► You realize, "Oh, they can Google that in two seconds."

00:20:18 ◼   ► So everyone's, you know… in fact, if you Googled it, you might get it before someone who was like, "Oh, it's on the tip of my tongue. What's that thing?"

00:20:24 ◼   ► So I tried a couple different things this time. One of them was doing drawings.

00:20:28 ◼   ► Like I actually took out my Apple pencil and drew something on my iPad.

00:20:32 ◼   ► It said, like, "Identify this thing that I drew," because if you take a photo of a regular thing, people can just do like a reverse Google image search and find similar pictures.

00:20:41 ◼   ► And it tells them what it is.

00:20:43 ◼   ► But if you do a line drawing, all Google finds is just a bunch of other line drawings that are totally unrelated except that they're white backgrounds with black lines.

00:20:50 ◼   ► So I did that, and that worked, but I really didn't have any more ideas about things I could draw.

00:20:54 ◼   ► So I came up with the frame game thing where I think it mostly worked for the intended purpose.

00:21:03 ◼   ► I'm taking, you know, a frame of a movie, and I'm taking a very, very small portion of it.

00:21:08 ◼   ► Like, incredibly small, but it's not randomly chosen.

00:21:11 ◼   ► If it was like a computer that said, "Here's a movie. Pick a random frame, and then pick a random square that's like, you know, a centimeter by a centimeter," nobody would get it.

00:21:19 ◼   ► Because given a random section of a random frame, it could be anything.

00:21:23 ◼   ► It could be like a piece of blue sky or a green leaf, how you're going to identify the movie, right?

00:21:27 ◼   ► So the whole point of the game is I would try to pick the smallest piece that I could, but strategically chosen from a frame that is significant, from a movie that I think people will know, and from a portion of that frame that I think will evoke the movie.

00:21:44 ◼   ► So one of them, in case you already read it before, the Jurassic Park one, it's an iconic scene from the movie.

00:21:51 ◼   ► And if you see a portion of it, you can mostly tell what it is, because it's like some kind of scaly skin, it was a dinosaur surprise, and then some sort of like man-made lines, like a thin white line, then a black field, and then a thing with a red with a little lighter thing around it.

00:22:08 ◼   ► But it's a particular color scheme, just that portion of colors next to something that looks like dinosaur skin should bring to mind that scene.

00:22:15 ◼   ► And sure enough, from this picture, it looks like nothing. You know, instantly people get it. They're just like, "Oh, Jurassic Park."

00:22:21 ◼   ► You know, like I post the thing and then like I refresh my Twitter client, and there's the answer. Like I just scroll like a little bit and there's the answer.

00:22:27 ◼   ► So people were getting them really, really fast. I think the best one was the one I have in the show notes, if you guys can look at it on the left.

00:22:35 ◼   ► It's like a smudgy orange square with some black stuff on it. And the best thing about that one is that it's one of those things where out of context, especially if surrounded with a white background, it just looks like nothing. It looks like mud, right?

00:22:51 ◼   ► But if you see the full frame, that part that I'm showing you is like the brightest part of the frame. You know, you would think it's basically like the sky and sunlight.

00:23:01 ◼   ► But it's like when you do an optical illusion and you're like, "These two things are the same color." And you're like, "No way. They're not the same color."

00:23:06 ◼   ► And then you take like a little piece of paper that just has a hole punched out of it, and you just put the little piece of paper so you can just see that region.

00:23:12 ◼   ► And then you slide it over so you can see the other region. You're like, "Oh, I see." Without the surrounding stuff, they totally are the same color.

00:23:18 ◼   ► Anyway, that one was great because if you don't know the movie and don't know why it's famous, you would never get it. But people got it instantly.

00:23:26 ◼   ► I think there was only one that really stumped people, and that was where I misdirected by grabbing a portion of a frame that had a thing that was in the background.

00:23:35 ◼   ► That's kind of mean, but I figured people might have noticed it in the background, but they didn't.

00:23:39 ◼   ► But people got all of them eventually, and the thing is you can't really Google them. If you try to Google image search and any of these little snippets, you come up with nothing.

00:23:47 ◼   ► So I enjoyed that, and I think I'm going to do it more in the future unless someone can come up with some other way to defeat Google while also rewarding people for obscure pop culture and/or tech knowledge.

00:24:01 ◼   ► I thought it was a very clever way of doing it, and I was enjoying just watching along with the whole thing. But yeah, most of these I didn't have a clue what they were.

00:24:12 ◼   ► Oh, the earring one was good too. I did lots of eyeballs and stuff, but then I did one that was showing someone's ear with an earring in it, and it was like the Shawshank thing.

00:24:20 ◼   ► After all, how often do you look at a woman's earring? There are lots of famous scenes where you're like, "Oh, I know that person. I know that actor. I know this famous scene."

00:24:27 ◼   ► But do you know what earrings they were wearing? I just put the earring and the ear up there. Instantly, people got it.

00:24:34 ◼   ► People are amazing. Someone was tweeting, "It should be like the collective wisdom of people on the internet versus the world's most powerful AI."

00:24:42 ◼   ► And I think the internet would give them a run for their money.

00:24:45 ◼   ► I was having a conversation with somebody once. There's a subreddit or something like that where you can put up a picture of something somewhere, and it can be as obscure as a portion of a carpet of a hotel.

00:24:58 ◼   ► And the whole shtick or game of this subreddit is to try to determine where on the planet that picture was taken.

00:25:06 ◼   ► And according to whoever it was that was telling me this story, it was stupefying how accurate these people can get.

00:25:14 ◼   ► Based on just infinitesimally small pieces of information, they can find exactly which room of a hotel somebody was in or something.

00:25:23 ◼   ► Maybe I'm exaggerating somebody. You get the point I'm driving at. It is unreal what the hive mind of the internet, when it puts its hive mind together, can do. It's just tremendous.

00:25:33 ◼   ► Just earlier today, I believe it was, we heard some news from Apple with regards to Intel CPU vulnerabilities.

00:25:40 ◼   ► And I forget the marketing names for these things, but this was the thing with predictive execution. Is that right?

00:25:49 ◼   ► It's another one like that. It's a new one, but it's along the same vein.

00:25:53 ◼   ► Similar to Meltdown and Spectre. Yeah, very similar to those where basically it's exploiting some of the side effects of predictive execution and faults and stuff the way Intel CPUs work.

00:26:08 ◼   ► John, I tried to read the paper right before we started here, and I honestly had a hard time figuring it out. John, did you actually have a better understanding of this?

00:26:20 ◼   ► I didn't put it in here for us to dive into the nitty-gritty details. Just to revisit this topic, because we talked about it more last time.

00:26:29 ◼   ► Situations where Intel CPUs, if you can get them to run anything, you can read information that you weren't supposed to be able to read based on the effect of you running your thing.

00:26:39 ◼   ► Whether it's timing or faults or other things, the side effects of what you're running let you determine something about the world.

00:26:48 ◼   ► And once you have a tiny little tool like this, like, "Well, if I do this in just the right way and either look for this side effect or check this timing,

00:26:56 ◼   ► I can tell whether the first bit of this thing that I'm not supposed to be able to read is a 1 or a 0.

00:27:02 ◼   ► And then if I do it a certain other way, I can tell the second bit and the third bit and the fourth bit and then computers that are great at doing stuff repeatedly,

00:27:08 ◼   ► then you're off to the races and now you're reading bits of information that you weren't supposed to be able to see.

00:27:13 ◼   ► Which are probably mostly garbage, but you just keep running it and just read everything that's in there and eventually you can start to extract interesting information that might be in memory or in caches or whatever.

00:27:22 ◼   ► And this has plagued Intel CPUs for a little while now. And the first time it went around, it was like, "Okay, well, Intel CPUs have this problem,

00:27:30 ◼   ► but ARM CPUs that Apple uses in its phones don't because ARM CPUs are...

00:27:36 ◼   ► The ARM CPUs Apple is using are generally simpler and didn't have the same speculative execution logic or didn't have hyper-threading or like, you know,

00:27:44 ◼   ► we're basically like the features that were being exploited didn't exist in the ARM CPUs.

00:27:49 ◼   ► Now, this one, I assume, is the same type of deal, like where people say, "Oh, well, you know, this is why Apple should switch to ARM because they wouldn't have to deal with all these Intel problems."

00:27:57 ◼   ► And there's two parts to that. One is that there's always fixes for these things of like change something about either the operating system or the microcode in the CPU to avoid the situation.

00:28:10 ◼   ► But those solutions are getting increasingly onerous. They were already kind of onerous with the Meltdown Inspector thing.

00:28:16 ◼   ► But now for this one, Apple has a support article that explains what to do to avoid this. And it's like, "Turn off hyper-threading on your CPU."

00:28:26 ◼   ► That'll do it. If they're exploiting some aspects of hyper-threading, you just turn it off, it'll be fine. But turning off hyper-threading is bad.

00:28:32 ◼   ► In Apple's document, they're saying, you know, this is straight from their thing, "Testing conducted by Apple in May of 2019 showed as much as a 40% reduction in performance."

00:28:41 ◼   ► This is Apple saying this. This is not like a sensational site saying, "Oh my goodness, 40% reduction in performance as much as," sure, "as much as a 40%..."

00:28:49 ◼   ► Anyway, that's bad. The whole point of using Intel CPUs is because it has all these features to make them faster.

00:28:55 ◼   ► If you have to disable those features for security to make them slower, that's bad.

00:28:59 ◼   ► Now, I don't know if Apple's latest and greatest ARM CPUs have similar features that could be similarly exploited.

00:29:06 ◼   ► This paper isn't focusing on ARM. For all we know, there could be a paper that comes out next week or next month or next year on how to exploit similar things in the most advanced ARM CPUs that either exist already or are going to exist.

00:29:17 ◼   ► So it's not like ARM is magically immune because it starts with a different letter or because it's got the Apple magic.

00:29:23 ◼   ► But both Intel and Apple are now well aware of this type of problem, and presumably in all their new and upcoming CPUs, they're trying to address it as best they can.

00:29:33 ◼   ► But I think this is interesting in that it's just another nudge in the direction of getting Apple up Intel.

00:29:42 ◼   ► Again, not because ARM CPUs are magically great, but because if an Apple CPU has this problem, I bet Apple feels better about it than if Intel does because Apple is highly motivated to fix its own CPUs for its own products.

00:29:54 ◼   ► And Intel is slightly less motivated. It's more motivated about protecting its business and all this other stuff, and maybe it doesn't view Apple as an important customer if it knows they're already going to bail.

00:30:02 ◼   ► This is why Apple wants to own and control the core technologies, blah, blah, blah.

00:30:08 ◼   ► And the other thing that I want to talk about this is, I think I saw a couple of things like, if you're executing code, it can do all this stuff and get it all your memory, but just don't run any strange programs in your computer and you'll be fine.

00:30:21 ◼   ► It's not a thing that someone can use to break into your computer.

00:30:25 ◼   ► But as far as I'm aware, and again, I don't know if you saw it when you were looking at the paper Marco, but you just need to execute anything on the CPU.

00:30:34 ◼   ► So one thing that we execute on our CPU all day long is JavaScript in web pages.

00:30:39 ◼   ► I think a lot of these papers, perhaps also including this one, have a demonstration of the exploit using JavaScript on a web page.

00:30:46 ◼   ► And so, yeah, it's not like you have to download a piece of malware. I'm not sure if it's this one or the other things, but if you can just run JavaScript and exploit this, that's really bad.

00:30:55 ◼   ► That's really, really bad. To be clear, as they point out, there are no exploits in the wild that do anything with this.

00:31:00 ◼   ► And just because you can read this information, you'd have to do a lot of reading and transmitting that back to something that can process it and figure it out.

00:31:07 ◼   ► It's a little bit of a road from this exploit to breaking into someone's computer, but it's not that long of a road because as we browse the web on our computers with Intel CPUs, we're executing JavaScript all day long.

00:31:20 ◼   ► And that JavaScript could be mining for bitcoins, or it could be searching our memory for encryption keys, or who knows what it's doing.

00:31:26 ◼   ► So as these stories come out, I think a lot of, you know, if you're not a tech nerd and not following these things, you might not know about them, but if you know a little bit, you're like, "What can I do?

00:31:38 ◼   ► What should I do to protect myself against this?" And the answer is, like, there's not much you can do.

00:31:43 ◼   ► Like, you can do what's in the Apple support article. They have you boot your computer with some NVRAM ARGs that slow your CPU way down by disabling features.

00:31:50 ◼   ► You could do that, but does that kind of protect you, or is that just going to protect against this particular bug and you're just waiting for the next one?

00:31:57 ◼   ► Like, it's one of those situations where it's bad and there's not really much we can do about it, except not use our computers with Intel CPUs, I suppose, or hope there aren't similar exploits to ARM ones.

00:32:08 ◼   ► I feel like this is, I think we said this last time, it's worse than Heartbleed because at least Heartbleed, you could patch a buggy piece of software everywhere, and even that was a pain.

00:32:16 ◼   ► This is like a hardware problem, and you can't really change the hardware that's in all of our computers other than disabling features, and even that might be complete protection.

00:32:24 ◼   ► So I don't have any good advice for people. Like, I'm not going to recommend everyone slow down their CPUs, but I'm also not going to say that you're safe, because you're not, and we're not.

00:32:33 ◼   ► So I guess we'll all just hang on here and wait for the new products with new CPUs that avoid this.

00:32:40 ◼   ► Well, actually, I don't have to worry, because all these bugs only apply to CPUs made after 2011, so I'm actually safe.

00:32:47 ◼   ► Your computer is so primitive that it has none of these.

00:32:53 ◼   ► It has no hyper-threading. It does have speculative execution, but apparently hackers can't be bothered to find exploits in 2008 CPUs.

00:33:03 ◼   ► So if you're using a 10-year-old computer like me, you're actually safe, but everyone else should be real worried.

00:33:07 ◼   ► Well, except, isn't your software probably riddled with vulnerabilities that are no longer being patched?

00:33:11 ◼   ► Nah, nah, it's fine. I mean, I have the latest Safari and everything like it. Everything's fine.

00:33:15 ◼   ► Are you sure?

00:33:16 ◼   ► I think I do. Let me see. What is the latest Safari? Everyone go to your "About Safari" window.

00:33:22 ◼   ► Why don't you tell us what you have before we tell you, and you're like, "Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally."

00:33:25 ◼   ► I have a 11.1.2.

00:33:27 ◼   ► I have 12.1.14607.1.40.1.4.

00:33:32 ◼   ► I don't have the newest, but I think they're still doing security patches.

00:33:36 ◼   ► Oh, yeah, funny how the story changed. Well, it's not the newest.

00:33:38 ◼   ► I have the newest Safari. Well, it's almost the newest.

00:33:40 ◼   ► Well, you know what I mean, like they might still be updating. I think they are still security patching the 11 version.

00:33:46 ◼   ► I do have a software update pending. I should see what that is. Oh, my word.

00:33:49 ◼   ► I was about to go to system preferences, but that's not where the software updates are in this operating system.

00:33:53 ◼   ► Oh, my God.

00:33:55 ◼   ► Oh, no, it's just the Kindle app updating. Never mind.

00:33:58 ◼   ► John, you know, I really, I'm not sure my body is really ready for the 14 straight episodes that we spend talking about whatever Mac Pro has released,

00:34:11 ◼   ► either loving it, hating it, critiquing it, being hypercritical about it, whatever.

00:34:16 ◼   ► But at this point, your computer is so ancient that I am willing to take the fall for you, John, and deal with these 14 straight episodes of nothing but Mac Pro.

00:34:26 ◼   ► Just you have something built this millennium.

00:34:29 ◼   ► I don't think it'll be that many episodes, but the problem is that the real problem is after Marco buys it, you have to get like, so we'll buy, we'll talk about it, then we'll buy it and we'll talk about how he bought it.

00:34:40 ◼   ► All right. And then Marco will talk about some weird problem that he has with it.

00:34:45 ◼   ► And then Marco will talk about his disillusionment with it. And then Marco will talk about why he sold it in place to buy something.

00:34:49 ◼   ► Whereas I won't say anything else after it after I get through the initial like stuff.

00:34:53 ◼   ► I'm hoping anyway. That's possibly true. I will concede that much.

00:34:58 ◼   ► Marco, you're going to have to deal with more Mac Pro talk for Marco in the long term.

00:35:03 ◼   ► That's probably true. Like the case he buys for it, like the backpack he puts it in.

00:35:08 ◼   ► Now it doesn't work with his weird Microsoft keyboard. Yeah.

00:35:12 ◼   ► How he can't plug in his amps.

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00:37:11 ◼   ► Steve Trotton Smith had an interesting tidbit. This is actually a few weeks ago now, I think about Mac OS 10 15, which is the forthcoming version house cleaning.

00:37:23 ◼   ► And so his tweet reads dashboard isn't the only thing gone in 10 15. Sorry, John.

00:37:28 ◼   ► So is 32 bit app and plug in support carbon ink quick time seven and quick time plug in. Sorry, John.

00:37:34 ◼   ► PPTP, which is a VPN protocol that I guess is really insecure, but is very convenient and hardware raid.

00:37:40 ◼   ► But you will get Python 3.7 Ruby 2.6 at least says Steve.

00:37:45 ◼   ► I don't really have a whole lot to say about this other than I am surprised some of the stuff lasted as long as it did.

00:37:51 ◼   ► Did anyone else know that ink ink was still in there?

00:37:54 ◼   ► I knew it was in there, but I I've never actually seen or used it.

00:37:58 ◼   ► The last time I saw or used it is when I wrote about it in a Mac OS 10 review.

00:38:03 ◼   ► Honestly, if you ask me now, I don't even remember how to find it, but it's still in the operating system.

00:38:08 ◼   ► So right now, yeah, this this looks like the 64 bit transition was a good time to kind of clean house and get rid of old stuff, but they didn't deprecate the 32 bit.

00:38:18 ◼   ► So this is this is kind of like the other shoe dropping on the 64 bit transition for the Mac, which so long ago, most of us barely remember it.

00:38:25 ◼   ► So, yeah, we went 64 bit and then eventually all the 32 bit stuff's not going to run.

00:38:30 ◼   ► And that's not a problem if that stuff was also updated 32 bit, but everything opted 64 rather.

00:38:36 ◼   ► But everything that wasn't updated to 64 bit is stuff that Apple doesn't want anymore.

00:38:41 ◼   ► So quick time not updated because it's not going to continue hardware raid.

00:38:44 ◼   ► I guess they're not into it anymore. You know, carbon already we know didn't get 64 bit famously a while back dashboard.

00:38:52 ◼   ► I mean, that should just go away, period. Like I say, this is something you use every day.

00:38:56 ◼   ► I'd use it every day. But like it's it's obviously not maintained in any possible way.

00:39:01 ◼   ► It's only been getting buggier over time. So it's like, well, if you're not going to keep developing that software, don't keep including it with the operating system.

00:39:08 ◼   ► And I don't know if there's a 32 or 64 bit issue there, but this could be one of the big Mac operating systems to leave behind a lot of stuff.

00:39:19 ◼   ► And I'm hoping there'll be some way to like run VMs or something to be able to access old software that you need to just use briefly for some reason or another.

00:39:30 ◼   ► Even if it's just I don't know what I'm going to replace quick time seven with. I mean, you know, FFmpeg.

00:39:38 ◼   ► Maybe, maybe like I'll end up just googling and searching stack overflow for FFmpeg incantation strings.

00:39:44 ◼   ► I don't. That's not. Isn't that the UI to FFmpeg?

00:39:48 ◼   ► Pretty much. Hey, man, I have I have a whole folder in notes that's like my recipe book for FFmpeg.

00:39:55 ◼   ► And it has saved me countless hours because a lot of this over time I've learned, but there is a lot that it's it's literally like casting a spell.

00:40:05 ◼   ► And so having this like series of of examples and one dot in my notes app is has really saved me.

00:40:12 ◼   ► Yeah, but in the process of saving you countless hours, how many hours has it taken to figure out the correct commands the first time?

00:40:18 ◼   ► Exactly right. Now it's many, many, many hours.

00:40:21 ◼   ► I don't really use the QuickTime Player seven for too much like it does much more than I use it for.

00:40:26 ◼   ► And for people who don't know, who haven't been longtime Mac users and they think all QuickTime seven does is like save in different formats or something or and have a plug in structure so you can play different formats.

00:40:36 ◼   ► It does that. But it also lets you arbitrarily cut, copy and paste sections of media, not with a particularly nice interface, but it lets you do it.

00:40:46 ◼   ► It doesn't just let you like the replacement that uses AV Foundation doesn't let you trim the ends. It lets you cut, copy and paste anywhere in there.

00:40:53 ◼   ► You can paste one track on top of another track and overlay them so you can add a new soundtrack to a portion of the thing.

00:40:59 ◼   ► Like you don't have to just append or like slice in the middle and insert.

00:41:03 ◼   ► You can extract tracks and save them out and just have it files and then copy and paste from them.

00:41:07 ◼   ► Like it's it's like a kind of like a blind video editor where you don't get the movie or Final Cut Pro style timeline.

00:41:15 ◼   ► You just get a single bar with regions on it. But you can do a surprising amount of things.

00:41:19 ◼   ► But mostly what I use it for is to to extract tracks and to change formats.

00:41:23 ◼   ► I could probably use that event thing for that. But really, it's a nice player. The controls don't float over the movie.

00:41:28 ◼   ► So you can see the movie and go a frame at a time when you're watching this.

00:41:32 ◼   ► The Star Wars trailer for the 19th time. Sorry, the Star Wars teaser because I don't watch the trailers.

00:41:37 ◼   ► And, you know, it's brush metal and it's silly and all that stuff. But I miss it. And I have a bunch of plugins.

00:41:41 ◼   ► Let you play stuff from the playback front. I think this is a good time to talk about alternatives to QuickTime player 10 X whatever.

00:41:51 ◼   ► Just for playing stuff like forget about all the other features I talked about.

00:41:56 ◼   ► Because QuickTime seven with a whole bunch of plugins could play almost any format.

00:42:02 ◼   ► And since that's going away, if you're just left with the QuickTime player 10 or X,

00:42:07 ◼   ► it can only play like the handful of formats that AV Foundation deals with and not all these weird obscure formats and container formats that we might want to play.

00:42:15 ◼   ► You can use FFmpeg to transform them. But who wants to transcode things?

00:42:21 ◼   ► Casey does.

00:42:22 ◼   ► First of all, yes, I love transcoding. It's my favorite thing to do.

00:42:25 ◼   ► But second of all, you can use FFplay, which is a truly awful way to just play stuff that that FFmpeg can read.

00:42:33 ◼   ► But that is not the spirit of what you're after. And I think the spirit of what you're after is I don't know how to pronounce this, but I I N A, which is basically just a gooey front end FFmpeg as far as I'm aware.

00:42:43 ◼   ► I'm not sure what the guts are, but the app itself, I mean, it's not particularly Mac like, but it has it has enough of my minimum set of features.

00:42:52 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't know how to pronounce it either. But it's nice because it's quick to command space to it because not many other applications begin with a double I.

00:43:02 ◼   ► But the UI is just like a little rectangle. I think it might have rounded corners, which I don't like. But anyway, and it plays the video, but it's got lots of options and it has so many options.

00:43:13 ◼   ► It lets you like export a config file with all your preferences so you don't have to reset them elsewhere, which is like I said, not very Mac like.

00:43:19 ◼   ► That's amazing.

00:43:20 ◼   ► But the most important thing it has, like out of the box, like a lot of other video players, it doesn't do what I want in terms of navigating the video.

00:43:28 ◼   ► What I want is spacebar to play pause, which it does. But then I want the left and right arrow keys to go a frame at a time.

00:43:34 ◼   ► And very often the Apple decide, oh, for the right arrow key is skip forward five seconds and left arrow skis skip back one second.

00:43:41 ◼   ► I don't want that. I want a single frame. Well, in this app, IANA, whatever the hell it's called, you can just change the configuration and say, I want the right arrow key to be move forward one frame, which is probably some FFmpeg command that is sending under the scenes or whatever.

00:43:55 ◼   ► And it does it. And so you can just set it up the way you want it. And it plays movies and you can scale them at different sizes and it plays every format you can throw at it and every container format I've thrown at it.

00:44:05 ◼   ► And it does a fine job. So that is my current replacement for playback.

00:44:10 ◼   ► My current replacement for editing is nothing is Casey, I guess.

00:44:14 ◼   ► And iMovie, I suppose. But honestly, iMovie has very limited options and I don't have a working copy. I might have Final Cut Pro 4, but I don't think it still runs.

00:44:26 ◼   ► I'm probably going to end up buying Final Cut in the 64-bit era if I can't do basic video editing anymore, but I'm holding off on that.

00:44:34 ◼   ► Can I put out a request to the audience? I have a quest that I don't want to undertake myself. I'm hoping the audience can do this for me.

00:44:43 ◼   ► What I want that I haven't been able to find in my admittedly zero research is every video editing app out there, from the simple to the complex, from Apple's built-in stuff all the way to things like Final Cut and beyond,

00:44:59 ◼   ► every video editing app seems to want to put you into this project workflow where to do anything to a video you have to first make it into a project and then it copies the file god knows where and takes up god knows how much disk space.

00:45:14 ◼   ► And you need to then create an event within the project. All that stuff, I hate dealing with that kind of structure.

00:45:23 ◼   ► What I want is to occasionally make small edits to videos, like what QuickTime Player 7 would do, but even beyond that if possible.

00:45:31 ◼   ► I want basically preview for videos. The way preview allows you to make small image edits, just simple stuff like cropping, rotating.

00:45:43 ◼   ► If I accidentally shoot a video and it's the wrong orientation, let me rotate it. Even Apple's built-in Photos app doesn't let you do that.

00:45:50 ◼   ► I couldn't find how to rotate a video in iMovie either. It's probably hiding in there somewhere, but it's not obvious.

00:45:56 ◼   ► What I want is a simple video app that lets you just open a video file, perform some basic operations, whether it's cropping, trimming, rotation, and not just 90 degree rotation.

00:46:08 ◼   ► What if the video is tilted a little bit and I want to rotate it 3 degrees and crop it into whatever can fit there.

00:46:14 ◼   ► Ideally even basic color and exposure correction, basic audio correction maybe. Basic operations that you might want to do a video, just open a video file, perform those operations, and save the file.

00:46:26 ◼   ► Not adding it to any library or project in the process. I want that to exist. I don't know if it already does, but I have yet to find it.

00:46:34 ◼   ► I have that problem with the size of when I do my Destiny videos. I have gigs and gigs and gigs of video and then I make a 3 minute video out of it. I don't want those gigs of video hanging around, but I do want the original clips in the original format.

00:46:47 ◼   ► I would like to losslessly clip out just the parts that I have. I think Final Cut used to have this feature, maybe it still does where you tell it.

00:46:54 ◼   ► Okay, I'm done with the edit. Discard any media not used in the edit, but keep all the media losslessly that contributes to the final thing so I can remake videos.

00:47:04 ◼   ► That's interesting.

00:47:05 ◼   ► I don't know if iMovie does that. If it does, I don't know how to make it do it.

00:47:09 ◼   ► So I just have my disc slowly filling with gigs of Destiny videos, which is probably untenable long term.

00:47:16 ◼   ► Eventually I'm going to have to get Final Cut and learn how to use it in some way, but I'm holding off on that as long as I possibly can. I might as well wait until the Arm Macs come out and get the Arm version of Final Cut, right?

00:47:27 ◼   ► Something like that. This actually does sound, Marco, exactly like what I would like for not the YouTube videos that I'm occasionally doing.

00:47:37 ◼   ► We're still telling ourselves that, huh?

00:47:40 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly. But no, I would love this sort of thing, but I don't need a project right now, so stop trying to put bad thoughts in my head.

00:47:47 ◼   ► Speaking of projects, iMovie is worse than even you describe, Marco, where you have to make a project for stuff.

00:47:52 ◼   ► Again, unless I haven't figured it out, iMovie, you hit the little plus thing to make what you know is going to be a new project, and you get a little empty area and you can drag in clips and do all this stuff and so on and so forth.

00:48:04 ◼   ► But until you hit the left arrow navigation, like the back navigation in the upper left, I can't figure out a way to name the project.

00:48:13 ◼   ► When you hit the little left arrow to go back to the project screen, it says, "Oh, and by the way, you should name this thing," because it's called My Project until you go back.

00:48:20 ◼   ► So what I end up doing is I go into the project and then immediately go back, so I get to name it and then go back in again.

00:48:25 ◼   ► It's a strange flow where it doesn't ask you what you want to call the thing until...

00:48:29 ◼   ► iMovie is all autosave, right? It's the iOS style, so there's no saving or anything.

00:48:33 ◼   ► They're working at it for a really long time, and it's just called My Movie for the entire time you're doing it.

00:48:38 ◼   ► Until you're basically done, and you're like, "Oh yeah, I have to name this thing." It's very strange.

00:48:43 ◼   ► And again, not particularly Mac-like. I see what they're going for. Most of the time, I kind of like the autosave nature until I get too bold with my Undo/Redo.

00:48:52 ◼   ► Have you ever done that? I do it in text editors sometimes.

00:48:55 ◼   ► If you're in a good text editor, I use Undo/Redo as fast-forward and rewind, so I will do a bunch of stuff, and then I'll be like, "Did I forget something? What was that like before?"

00:49:08 ◼   ► And then I'll just hold down Undo for a while and watch my changes, rewind, rewind through history, and rewind through history.

00:49:13 ◼   ► And then what I'll do is I'll get back to some state. I'm like, "Oh yeah, this used to be like this, and I wanted that line."

00:49:18 ◼   ► So I'll go grab that line and copy it.

00:49:20 ◼   ► But if in the course of copying that thing, I accidentally hit the space bar or hit the delete key or move the text or something...

00:49:27 ◼   ► Oh, and you've lost your Undo history.

00:49:29 ◼   ► Oh, no.

00:49:30 ◼   ► That's right. Now I've hosed my Undo history, and now I can't redo it.

00:49:33 ◼   ► I'm so paranoid I will have saved it, and I have my editor configured to save a backup copy every time I save.

00:49:39 ◼   ► So I've never actually lost stuff this way, but sometimes it's frustrating.

00:49:42 ◼   ► You blow your redo stack because you're 700 items back in Undo because you've been holding it down for three seconds.

00:49:49 ◼   ► And now all that's gone, and you have to go find the save that you made just before you did the Undo.

00:49:55 ◼   ► I feel like that when I'm using any of these sort of autosave apps where I can undo and redo, but I can't even revert to a previous version because there's no saving.

00:50:04 ◼   ► And if it did save, what would it save? Like, to your point, Mark, the project file, does that have all the media inside of it?

00:50:09 ◼   ► Did it leave the media where it was? Is it just referencing it?

00:50:12 ◼   ► Who the hell knows? My awareness of what iMovie is doing under the scenes is very low.

00:50:18 ◼   ► All I know is that it needs lots of disk space.

00:50:20 ◼   ► All right, so we've pwned one out for Carbon for anything else?

00:50:25 ◼   ► Oh, yeah, the reason I was thinking about this is what crap on all of our computers is going to break that we're not even thinking about?

00:50:32 ◼   ► I suppose we could all run activity monitor and look at all the 32-bit apps, but the one I was thinking about recently I was actually kind of panicking about.

00:50:41 ◼   ► I saw people fretting about Adobe doubling the prices on their subscriptions to their various apps because they can.

00:50:49 ◼   ► And I was like, "Well, I don't have a subscription." I bought the last version of Photoshop that you could download that was just run by itself.

00:50:57 ◼   ► I think it runs without a network connection.

00:50:59 ◼   ► Adobe Photoshop CS6 I bought because I was aware at the time that either it was probably or was known to be the last version that's not Creative Cloud infected and stuff.

00:51:10 ◼   ► This is before they went super duper subscription for everything, I think.

00:51:13 ◼   ► I'm like, "Oh, my God, is CS6 32-bit?"

00:51:18 ◼   ► As far as I can tell, it's not. I think it is 64-bit, so I think I'm safe, but I'm paranoid about it breaking because A, I don't want to buy Photoshop again, and B, you can't even buy Photoshop anymore.

00:51:27 ◼   ► As far as I can tell, you cannot buy Photoshop. You can just rent it along with a bunch of other apps that you don't want for like $10 a month.

00:51:34 ◼   ► I love Photoshop. It's how I prefer to do any image editing just because I've been using it so long, but I don't use it $10 a month worse.

00:51:43 ◼   ► I use it once every two months or something.

00:51:46 ◼   ► Or sometimes I'll use Photoshop to crop something. I'm just used to Photoshop. You could do that in preview. There's no reason to use Photoshop.

00:51:53 ◼   ► I have Acorn. I have a whole bunch of other apps. Why the hell am I using Photoshop to crop something?

00:51:57 ◼   ► Because I'm used to Photoshop. That's why I do it.

00:51:59 ◼   ► So I'll be sad if I can't run it, but I'm not going to pay $10 a month for it, so I really hope CSX keeps running.

00:52:05 ◼   ► But as far as I can tell, other than all my old Mac games breaking what else is new, I don't think I'm going to be missing any major piece of software.

00:52:13 ◼   ► What about you guys? What do you think is going to break?

00:52:15 ◼   ► Nothing that I can think of.

00:52:16 ◼   ► I'm looking through my system information list of all the 32-bit apps.

00:52:21 ◼   ► By the way, if you go to System Information, under Software, Applications, there's a column there called 64-bit (Intel)

00:52:30 ◼   ► and so you can see all the things and anything that says "No" in that column won't work in the next version of Mac OS.

00:52:35 ◼   ► For me, it's mostly just a whole bunch of ancient Adobe binaries from old installations of Adobe stuff,

00:52:41 ◼   ► but not the apps, just installers and utilities and stuff like that that happen to be dumped there.

00:52:47 ◼   ► I don't think there's anything here besides QuickTime Player 7 that I ever actually launch.

00:52:55 ◼   ► I have a ton of stuff, which I didn't realize, that is not 64-bit, but as I'm looking through it,

00:53:02 ◼   ► it's like a graveyard for all the abandoned iOS projects I've done since literally 2011.

00:53:10 ◼   ► All of this stuff is stuff that I haven't looked at in three, four, five, six, seven years.

00:53:16 ◼   ► There's a whole bunch of copies of FastText apparently floating around somewhere on my drive that are not 64-bit. No way.

00:53:23 ◼   ► There's a Google Talk plug-in that I don't think exists anymore.

00:53:27 ◼   ► The stuff that you were saying from Ecamm, that seems to be most of it.

00:53:32 ◼   ► On Rar, X, if you were to ever find something that falls off the back of a truck, which I would never do,

00:53:38 ◼   ► that is convenient. I'm sure there's something more modern and better now.

00:53:42 ◼   ► But yeah, that's about it for me.

00:53:44 ◼   ► Can't copy and paste from the system report window? That is not a good MAG app.

00:53:50 ◼   ► Anyway, I have a lot. I think about half of the things listed in that little window.

00:53:55 ◼   ► That's not surprising.

00:53:57 ◼   ► But it's tons of crap. Stuff from Windows XP? Why the hell is it even showing that?

00:54:03 ◼   ► It's probably like VMware exposing that, I suppose.

00:54:05 ◼   ► I would guess. Is your processor 64-bit, John, or is it too old to be 64-bit?

00:54:10 ◼   ► 64-bit. Oh, disco's not going to work anymore.

00:54:14 ◼   ► The iWork Tour.

00:54:17 ◼   ► Oh, wow.

00:54:18 ◼   ► The WOC Bingo app.

00:54:21 ◼   ► Halo. Halo's not going to run it. All the games are going to break, obviously.

00:54:24 ◼   ► That's probably going to be the biggest loss. Not that I play Mac games a lot, but every once in a while I launch one and play with it.

00:54:29 ◼   ► Those Mac games are either made by porting companies that don't exist anymore.

00:54:33 ◼   ► If they do exist, there's no way they're going to update them.

00:54:35 ◼   ► There's never going to be 64-bit ports of any of that stuff.

00:54:38 ◼   ► That's kind of sad. That's why I hope there's a VM solution or something like that.

00:54:42 ◼   ► Because these games don't take a lot of power. They could run fine in emulation.

00:54:45 ◼   ► Not emulation, but you know what I mean. In some kind of virtualized environment.

00:54:49 ◼   ► I don't even know if VMs would target that type of scenario.

00:54:54 ◼   ► On an OS that doesn't allow 32-bit executables run a VM that can somehow run 32-bit.

00:54:58 ◼   ► I don't even know if they can do that.

00:55:01 ◼   ► I hope somebody does something.

00:55:02 ◼   ► Oh, iWeb. iWeb's 32-bit.

00:55:04 ◼   ► The backup application. Remember that? It should have a little umbrella when Apple made a backup application.

00:55:09 ◼   ► That was before my time, I think.

00:55:11 ◼   ► Yeah, same.

00:55:12 ◼   ► This is the type of thing where you can plan and you can think what's going to break.

00:55:16 ◼   ► I'm sure the Apple installer will have a stage that tells you these are the apps that aren't going to run anymore.

00:55:22 ◼   ► They tend to be pretty good about that.

00:55:23 ◼   ► But at that point, what are you going to do? Stop the install? Save a list of them?

00:55:28 ◼   ► Take a screenshot? Take a picture of your screen with your phone to remember which applications?

00:55:31 ◼   ► I mean, you'll find out when you... kind of like I used to find out when I'd upgrade to any of the versions.

00:55:36 ◼   ► I'd upgrade to Snow Leopard and half of my applications have the circle with a line through it over the icon.

00:55:40 ◼   ► Because they don't run on this version of the OS anymore.

00:55:42 ◼   ► It's not because of any sort of bit transition.

00:55:44 ◼   ► It's just like, nope, not compatible with this version of the OS at all.

00:55:47 ◼   ► That happens all the time.

00:55:48 ◼   ► But I feel like this is going to be the big one.

00:55:50 ◼   ► And to be clear, I accept this as a... you have to do this every once in a while.

00:55:55 ◼   ► You can't keep all the old software running forever. It's counterproductive.

00:55:58 ◼   ► You just end up being Windows.

00:56:00 ◼   ► So I think it's good to clean this stuff out.

00:56:03 ◼   ► It's an opportunity to find new, interesting, better alternatives.

00:56:07 ◼   ► I'm happy finding that ENO or whatever application.

00:56:10 ◼   ► Because I'm glad someone's developing...

00:56:12 ◼   ► Someone who has some of the similar values to me in terms of configurability and UI and feature set

00:56:20 ◼   ► is making a video player for the Mac.

00:56:22 ◼   ► And it's not even Marzipan.

00:56:23 ◼   ► Like, what's even going on? When's the last time I saw a new Mac app?

00:56:26 ◼   ► Real-time follow-up from a friend of the show, Steve Trout and Smith.

00:56:30 ◼   ► He posted to Twitter a couple of weeks ago, which I did not notice or didn't remember.

00:56:34 ◼   ► There's a way to actually force your Mac to run only in 64-bit mode,

00:56:39 ◼   ► which I haven't looked into the instructions yet, but we'll put a link in the show notes.

00:56:43 ◼   ► So you could boot into this 64-bit only mode and see how many things fall apart

00:56:47 ◼   ► to kind of get a taste for how screwed you are.

00:56:49 ◼   ► Yeah, it's not entirely representative because there's parts of the OS that are 32-bit

00:56:53 ◼   ► that will presumably be ported so you don't have to worry about them, but it'll be broken.

00:56:57 ◼   ► But yeah, you can definitely find out which of your apps aren't going to work.

00:57:01 ◼   ► Like, part of it is which apps aren't going to work, and part of it is just to find out

00:57:05 ◼   ► which one of these developers is going to release a 64-bit version.

00:57:08 ◼   ► Because I bet a lot of them are.

00:57:10 ◼   ► It's still a developed application and they just never saw the need to be 64-bit,

00:57:15 ◼   ► and they're going to release a 64-bit version, but they're not going to release it until they have to,

00:57:20 ◼   ► essentially until this OS is out for real.

00:57:23 ◼   ► So even if you find them, it doesn't mean for sure you're not going to be able to run it.

00:57:26 ◼   ► Just maybe go to their website, see the last time it was updated,

00:57:29 ◼   ► send their support person an email and see if you get a response and say,

00:57:32 ◼   ► "So are you going to make a 64-bit version of this?"

00:57:34 ◼   ► And if you don't get a reply, that probably means no.

00:57:37 ◼   ► Oh, man. We'll see what happens.

00:57:40 ◼   ► Hopefully it won't be too bad, but I bet you there's going to be a lot of whining

00:57:44 ◼   ► about random things that just stopped working that nobody expected to stop working.

00:57:48 ◼   ► And speaking of the end of this thing, they're finally upgrading to a more modern version of Python and Ruby.

00:57:54 ◼   ► Command line stuff, there's other sort of--

00:57:57 ◼   ► I mean, obviously the stuff with the ship is the operating system, that's fine,

00:57:59 ◼   ► but if you're like me and compile a bunch of software out of the box,

00:58:02 ◼   ► I think most of my compile stuff is 64-bit,

00:58:04 ◼   ► but there's another situation where if there is anything built with 32-bit,

00:58:08 ◼   ► it probably means that no one has bothered messing with it for such a long time

00:58:13 ◼   ► that it just happens to build using Apple's GCC lookalike emulation in 32-bit mode.

00:58:19 ◼   ► And when 64-bit comes--

00:58:21 ◼   ► I mean, I guess you could still compile 32-bit executable, I suppose,

00:58:26 ◼   ► with the GCC's cross-compile thing, but you can't run it.

00:58:29 ◼   ► And to answer the chat room's question, no, I'm not going to use Homebrew.

00:58:33 ◼   ► I don't know. I think it'll work out.

00:58:35 ◼   ► I wish--yeah.

00:58:37 ◼   ► This is one of the few times that I wish--I don't wish I was still writing the reviews,

00:58:40 ◼   ► but I had already written the review because I would know the answer to a lot more of these questions.

00:58:43 ◼   ► Nice.

00:58:45 ◼   ► Because when you're forced to write the review, you're forced to learn the answer to all these questions,

00:58:48 ◼   ► and now instead I'm just asking the questions to the air,

00:58:51 ◼   ► and I've got to read someone else's really big review.

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01:00:44 ◼   ► Thank you so much to Linode for sponsoring our show.

01:00:46 ◼   ► [music]

01:00:50 ◼   ► All right, let's move to Ask ATP, and we start with Alex White, who writes,

01:00:54 ◼   ► "I hear Syracuse say that he writes lots of code comments.

01:00:57 ◼   ► Many coders today consider comments to be a 'code smell,' that is to say it's not good.

01:01:02 ◼   ► Why does John think that they are valuable?"

01:01:05 ◼   ► And Alex wanted to chime in that they also think that they are valuable, for the record.

01:01:10 ◼   ► I mean, I suppose Margot probably doesn't have too much experience with other programmers,

01:01:16 ◼   ► so I think--have you ever met someone who considers comments to be a code smell?

01:01:22 ◼   ► Never.

01:01:23 ◼   ► No, I don't think so. Not that I can recall.

01:01:25 ◼   ► I would presume at some point or another, I don't think I've heard anyone explicitly state that they think it's a smell,

01:01:33 ◼   ► but certainly by virtue of the lack of comments in their code, you can kind of deduce that they think it's a bit of a smell.

01:01:40 ◼   ► But no, I don't think I've ever seen anyone thumping their chest saying, "This is gross. Get it out of here."

01:01:45 ◼   ► I mean, I can guess the logic behind it.

01:01:48 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah.

01:01:49 ◼   ► If you figure, like, you know, I think there's two arguments against comments that I can think of.

01:01:54 ◼   ► One would be the code should be self-documenting, and the second would be that comments don't update themselves when the code changes.

01:02:01 ◼   ► And so if you, like, refactor or rewrite or change something, you know, there's a chance the comments could be out of date.

01:02:06 ◼   ► But besides those two things, which aren't, like, massive problems, I mean, I don't write a ton of comments,

01:02:14 ◼   ► so it's not--you know, maybe I'm the wrong person to talk about this,

01:02:17 ◼   ► but I don't think comments indicate, like, technical debt or bad code smell or anything in and of themselves.

01:02:24 ◼   ► I think they can reflect other problems, maybe, but, you know, the presence or absence of comments doesn't itself indicate much of anything.

01:02:32 ◼   ► Yeah, the self-documenting thing is--what I was thinking of is probably the strongest reason.

01:02:37 ◼   ► They're not updating stuff. It's like, it doesn't make any sense.

01:02:42 ◼   ► You control both of them, so, yeah, they could get out of sync, but you could also have random lines of garbage code and dead code.

01:02:48 ◼   ► Like, is code a code smell? Anyway.

01:02:51 ◼   ► For the self-documenting, this gets into--I was forced to try to explain this to my son because he's doing programming.

01:02:59 ◼   ► I was trying to tell him how to write good comments.

01:03:01 ◼   ► This is all just basic advice that you hear from when you're learning programming,

01:03:04 ◼   ► but it's worth talking about for a non-programmer audience that may be listening to this and just about to fast-forward.

01:03:11 ◼   ► I'm not talking about that, Jason, because we're talking about programming.

01:03:14 ◼   ► The self-documenting thing is like, the code should be obvious in itself.

01:03:18 ◼   ► You shouldn't need a comment to explain it because if you have some code that's super clever and you need to write a thing about, like,

01:03:23 ◼   ► "I know you can't figure out what this is doing by looking at it, but let me explain,"

01:03:26 ◼   ► then that's a sign that you're being too clever for your own good.

01:03:28 ◼   ► And there is definitely a too clever angle, but on the flip side of that, in terms of, like, documenting the code,

01:03:36 ◼   ► self-documenting code, as in, "I can tell what that line is doing," is not really what the purpose comments are supposed to serve.

01:03:44 ◼   ► So the canonical example of a bad comment that we've all seen is--and I can't even use this in Swift anymore.

01:03:49 ◼   ► He was doing Swift, so I had to self-edit myself instead of saying, "I plus plus," so you can't do that.

01:03:53 ◼   ► Anyway, like, "I plus equals one," or "I plus plus," or whatever.

01:03:58 ◼   ► You're taking a variable and you're incrementing if I want to.

01:04:01 ◼   ► So that would be the code line.

01:04:02 ◼   ► Wait, what? They took out plus plus in Swift?

01:04:04 ◼   ► Oh, where have you been? Where have you been, Marco?

01:04:06 ◼   ► Don't even get me started. This makes me so angry.

01:04:08 ◼   ► Why? Why?

01:04:09 ◼   ► They didn't take it out. I don't think it was ever there.

01:04:11 ◼   ► No, it was there.

01:04:12 ◼   ► Oh, it was briefly--I don't know. Swift 2 went away, 3?

01:04:15 ◼   ► Yeah, it was early. Don't--I can't handle this conversation.

01:04:20 ◼   ► He literally can't even.

01:04:21 ◼   ► Swift is such a d--it's just--why? Why does it have to be such a d--all the time?

01:04:26 ◼   ► Because of pre-post and increment and pre-increment.

01:04:30 ◼   ► Anyway, that's not really just what we're talking about here.

01:04:34 ◼   ► The canonical example--I'm going to use "I plus plus" to pretend we're objective-series.

01:04:38 ◼   ► And the canonical example of a bad comment is "add one to i."

01:04:41 ◼   ► Like, that's the comment.

01:04:43 ◼   ► Right.

01:04:44 ◼   ► So that's--for non-programmers, you know, plus plus means just take the variable and add one to it.

01:04:48 ◼   ► It's a short way of writing that, right?

01:04:50 ◼   ► And if your comment says "add one to i," that is a useless garbage comment

01:04:54 ◼   ► because anybody who is a programmer knows what "i plus plus" does,

01:05:00 ◼   ► and you writing "add one to i" does not add any information whatsoever.

01:05:05 ◼   ► Like, it's just noise.

01:05:07 ◼   ► It's forcing someone to read it before they get angry by the time they finish reading it.

01:05:11 ◼   ► Like, oh, great. That doesn't help, right?

01:05:13 ◼   ► So self-documenting code--"i plus plus," arguably, if you're an experienced programmer--

01:05:17 ◼   ► is self-documenting. You look at it. That's the whole line.

01:05:20 ◼   ► There's no other--it's not in the middle of a big complicated expression.

01:05:23 ◼   ► It's just bottom line by itself.

01:05:25 ◼   ► Or "i plus equals one" or "i equals i plus one."

01:05:28 ◼   ► It's self-documenting.

01:05:30 ◼   ► But what you write comments about is not what a librem code is doing--

01:05:34 ◼   ► I mean, there's lots of things you write comments about,

01:05:36 ◼   ► but I'm starting at the micro level here--

01:05:38 ◼   ► is why it's doing it.

01:05:40 ◼   ► So to give an example, this is--

01:05:42 ◼   ► I ran across this on the same day I was trying to explain comments to my son.

01:05:45 ◼   ► It was some actual coded work that I was looking at that someone else wrote,

01:05:48 ◼   ► and it was like, "If interval greater than one and value greater than equal threshold,

01:05:57 ◼   ► do whatever is a conditional and an if."

01:05:59 ◼   ► You look at that, and you're like, "I know what all those operators mean.

01:06:01 ◼   ► I know what a greater than means.

01:06:03 ◼   ► I know what greater than or equals means.

01:06:05 ◼   ► The variables are named reasonably.

01:06:07 ◼   ► Intervals, like some interval that thing is taking place,

01:06:09 ◼   ► and threshold is like some value when it's whatever, right?"

01:06:12 ◼   ► You don't need a comment on that.

01:06:14 ◼   ► The stupid comment would be, "If interval is greater than one,"

01:06:18 ◼   ► or if you write the English version of it,

01:06:20 ◼   ► or if value is greater than or equal to threshold or whatever.

01:06:23 ◼   ► Anyway, but the question that a comment would need to explain here,

01:06:28 ◼   ► and I think this is the annotation I added to the code review,

01:06:31 ◼   ► was you should put a comment on this thing not explaining what the code does,

01:06:35 ◼   ► but explaining why it's doing this.

01:06:37 ◼   ► And in this case, it was like, the question is,

01:06:40 ◼   ► "Why is it greater than or equal to instead of greater than,

01:06:43 ◼   ► and why are you checking if the interval is greater than one?

01:06:46 ◼   ► Why do you care if the interval is greater than one

01:06:48 ◼   ► before you check the threshold?"

01:06:50 ◼   ► Now, I more or less knew why,

01:06:52 ◼   ► but that's the type of thing you put in a comment.

01:06:54 ◼   ► It's like, "Well, if we do this for fractional intervals less than one,

01:06:58 ◼   ► and because the conditional is greater than or equal to,

01:07:01 ◼   ► and the thresholds are integers, but the interval is afloat,

01:07:07 ◼   ► you may end up redoing this check multiple times per second

01:07:11 ◼   ► because you'll check again every tenth of a second,

01:07:14 ◼   ► but you won't pass the threshold until you get to a certain point."

01:07:18 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

01:07:20 ◼   ► I'm explaining it poorly, but it's more obvious if you're a programmer

01:07:24 ◼   ► and have done stuff like this before,

01:07:25 ◼   ► but the point is, that's what you write the comment about.

01:07:28 ◼   ► And explain, this isn't a mistake.

01:07:29 ◼   ► I didn't accidentally put greater than or equal to.

01:07:31 ◼   ► This comparison to the interval is not redundant code that is pointless

01:07:35 ◼   ► because interval is always going to be greater than one.

01:07:37 ◼   ► What you have to do is explain,

01:07:39 ◼   ► "Well, this is a double conditional because one's an integer and one's a float.

01:07:43 ◼   ► In a situation where this one is less than one,

01:07:44 ◼   ► you don't want to check this multiple times because it would be inefficient."

01:07:46 ◼   ► That's what you write in the comment.

01:07:48 ◼   ► And that's the lowest-level comment I'm talking about,

01:07:50 ◼   ► moving all the way up to a comment about

01:07:52 ◼   ► what the hell this function is supposed to do, broadly speaking.

01:07:55 ◼   ► What arguments does it take? What return value does it have?

01:07:57 ◼   ► What exceptions could it throw?

01:07:58 ◼   ► And this structure is a way to do that, depending on your language.

01:08:01 ◼   ► Classes, what the hell's the point of this class?

01:08:03 ◼   ► What is it supposed to do?

01:08:04 ◼   ► What are its responsibilities, broadly speaking, in a large function?

01:08:08 ◼   ► Break it up into pieces.

01:08:09 ◼   ► This is the part where we do the setup.

01:08:11 ◼   ► This is the part where we do the work.

01:08:13 ◼   ► This is the part where we do the cleanup.

01:08:14 ◼   ► That's what comments are for.

01:08:16 ◼   ► They're not for, "Tell me what this line of code does."

01:08:19 ◼   ► It's about the why and about the overall design.

01:08:22 ◼   ► The best comments you see, like a lot of examples in Apple's code,

01:08:25 ◼   ► where they'll do little ASCII art diagrams of in-memory structures

01:08:29 ◼   ► for nitty-gritty code that's doing lots of bit-slinging and stuff.

01:08:32 ◼   ► Those are invaluable.

01:08:33 ◼   ► Like, "The code is obvious.

01:08:35 ◼   ► Look, I'm just taking this pointer and I'm iterating."

01:08:37 ◼   ► Or, "But show me.

01:08:38 ◼   ► Show me the little rectangle.

01:08:39 ◼   ► Show me the region.

01:08:40 ◼   ► Show me how things are done."

01:08:41 ◼   ► You can do a surprisingly rich set of documentation

01:08:45 ◼   ► just with little ASCII symbols.

01:08:47 ◼   ► So comments, I think, are super important.

01:08:50 ◼   ► Doing good comments, writing good comments, is a skill and it's difficult.

01:08:54 ◼   ► The first step in that journey is knowing not to write "add1" to "i."

01:08:59 ◼   ► But there are many, many steps after that,

01:09:01 ◼   ► and I highly endorse getting good at writing comments.

01:09:04 ◼   ► Yeah, that was the thing I was going to say, which you eventually meandered toward,

01:09:08 ◼   ► which was, "It's less about what and more about why."

01:09:12 ◼   ► And I don't think I really ever--

01:09:14 ◼   ► I don't think I had intuited that until somewhat recently.

01:09:19 ◼   ► And sometimes I would describe what's happening

01:09:21 ◼   ► when it was either a little bit clever or a little bit convoluted,

01:09:25 ◼   ► which sometimes it's hard to distinguish between the two.

01:09:28 ◼   ► And it wasn't as often that I would be sure

01:09:31 ◼   ► that I was describing the "why."

01:09:34 ◼   ► But whenever I read that or heard that the first time--

01:09:37 ◼   ► it may have been from you, for all I know--

01:09:39 ◼   ► that really rocked my world in the best possible way.

01:09:41 ◼   ► And that is what I would recommend.

01:09:43 ◼   ► Certainly there are times where describing what is important,

01:09:47 ◼   ► but you should start from the perspective of,

01:09:50 ◼   ► "If I'm going to write a comment here,

01:09:52 ◼   ► I should describe why I wrote the code that follows," or above it or whatever.

01:09:56 ◼   ► The dark version of that is if you work for a jobby job

01:10:00 ◼   ► for a big corporation, chances are good that a lot of the comments you write

01:10:04 ◼   ► will explain, "This is like this because the previous version of this product did this.

01:10:10 ◼   ► And when this person was here, he decided it wanted to be like this.

01:10:13 ◼   ► So we did it like that. And if we ever change this thing,

01:10:15 ◼   ► we can get rid of this. But for now, you have to leave it.

01:10:17 ◼   ► Actually, don't delete this, even though it looks super dumb.

01:10:19 ◼   ► We have to keep doing it this way.

01:10:21 ◼   ► Here's a URL to something in our bug tracker.

01:10:23 ◼   ► And if you check this part of the code in this file,

01:10:25 ◼   ► and if it ever changes, you can go back and clean this up,

01:10:27 ◼   ► like historical documents.

01:10:29 ◼   ► Because again, you're never going to figure that out by looking at the code.

01:10:32 ◼   ► If you just look at the code, you're like, "This makes no sense.

01:10:35 ◼   ► Actually, I know it seems nonsensical, and it is bad.

01:10:38 ◼   ► But let me explain to you why it's bad, and let me stop you from deleting it,

01:10:41 ◼   ► because if you delete it, stuff will break, and you might not realize that."

01:10:43 ◼   ► You don't feel good writing that comment,

01:10:45 ◼   ► but that's an important job of comments in a real code base

01:10:49 ◼   ► where you don't have the luxury of just making everything beautiful all the time.

01:10:53 ◼   ► Not often, but there were definitely occasions where I was asked or compelled

01:11:01 ◼   ► or what have you to do something that seemed weird or I disagreed with

01:11:06 ◼   ► or something like that or just seemed counterintuitive at first glance,

01:11:09 ◼   ► even if I did agree with it.

01:11:11 ◼   ► And I would definitely write, "The following was decided

01:11:14 ◼   ► because of such-and-such conversation between me and such-and-such person

01:11:17 ◼   ► on such-and-such date with my name attached to it."

01:11:20 ◼   ► So exactly what you said, future me or future coworker or what have you,

01:11:25 ◼   ► when they stumble on this and go, "What?"

01:11:28 ◼   ► then they can see the comment and say, "Oh."

01:11:31 ◼   ► And sometimes to your point, Jon, it'll be a link to like,

01:11:34 ◼   ► "God help me, it was Jira at my most recent job,"

01:11:37 ◼   ► but a link to an issue tracker that says, "Okay, let me explain the history here

01:11:42 ◼   ► and what was going through all of our minds at the time."

01:11:45 ◼   ► Be careful with links, though, if your company changes the issue tracker

01:11:49 ◼   ► every three or four years, then all those links break.

01:11:52 ◼   ► Like I said, the main thing I tend to end up commenting here is like,

01:11:55 ◼   ► "Future person," which may be me,

01:11:57 ◼   ► "At what point is it safe to undo or get rid of this hack?

01:12:01 ◼   ► What conditions must be met? Like, this is gross,

01:12:04 ◼   ► this shouldn't be done this way, we have to for some stupid reason

01:12:06 ◼   ► that I want to document. To tell when it's safe to fix this,

01:12:09 ◼   ► check this, this, and this."

01:12:11 ◼   ► And I found that very valuable as someone who's been at the same job for many years,

01:12:15 ◼   ► for my past self to leave things like that and go,

01:12:17 ◼   ► "Oh, I can delete this now because past me says it's okay,"

01:12:20 ◼   ► and you still have to figure out how to test it, but it's much more reassuring than like,

01:12:23 ◼   ► "Can we change that? Like, it explains this big, long-winded reason,

01:12:26 ◼   ► but does that still apply? Is that still true of that other module?"

01:12:29 ◼   ► You know.

01:12:31 ◼   ► You know, I was thinking recently, this is a tangent,

01:12:33 ◼   ► but I was thinking recently back to when I worked at Northrop Grumman,

01:12:37 ◼   ► and I was working on a code base that was very old, very, very old.

01:12:41 ◼   ► It was a C++ code base.

01:12:43 ◼   ► I don't know C++ very well anymore, and I don't recall exactly what the timeline was for all these things,

01:12:49 ◼   ► but I feel like it predated the C++ standard template library.

01:12:55 ◼   ► So strings were not something that existed in C++ when this app had started life.

01:13:01 ◼   ► Well, anyway, I bring all this up to say it's a very old app,

01:13:04 ◼   ► and I remember at the top of each and every file in the entire app,

01:13:09 ◼   ► and this was a big app, like a couple hundred thousand lines or something like that,

01:13:12 ◼   ► at the top of every file, there was the entire change history,

01:13:16 ◼   ► like all of the basically commit messages that you would add by hand and go through code review.

01:13:21 ◼   ► Well, and there was some other way to track that information.

01:13:23 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly. No, and I know, and now I scoff at it,

01:13:26 ◼   ► but at the time it was actually pretty helpful,

01:13:28 ◼   ► because I forget what--we were on the rational suite, I think,

01:13:30 ◼   ► which was a complete piece of garbage at the time.

01:13:33 ◼   ► This was in '06, '07, somewhere in that neck of the woods.

01:13:36 ◼   ► That's great when your version control system requires an installation of a kernel extension,

01:13:40 ◼   ► which Rational ClearCase did at various points.

01:13:42 ◼   ► Oh, yeah, so anyway, but I just--just a few days ago,

01:13:46 ◼   ► I was reflecting on that, about how we would have, like,

01:13:49 ◼   ► one or two hundred lines for some of these files,

01:13:51 ◼   ► you know, like the string that was home-brewed, you know, for this project.

01:13:56 ◼   ► That string file had like a hundred or two hundred lines of just version history

01:14:00 ◼   ► in a huge-ass comment all the way at the top,

01:14:03 ◼   ► and in a lot of ways I think it was ridiculous,

01:14:07 ◼   ► but I also found it somewhat useful,

01:14:09 ◼   ► and it was also kind of funny to go spelunking through this version history

01:14:13 ◼   ► and see, like, upper management back when they were just grunts,

01:14:16 ◼   ► you know, who had made commits to, like, the string library,

01:14:18 ◼   ► and you think, "Oh, you know, Sue Smith,

01:14:21 ◼   ► when did she ever actually write code?

01:14:23 ◼   ► John, you know, whatever, he wrote code?

01:14:26 ◼   ► I just knew him as, you know, super director,

01:14:28 ◼   ► and, you know, Sue's underling," or whatever the case may be,

01:14:31 ◼   ► and it was always funny to see some of those people that had been there forever

01:14:34 ◼   ► back when they were, you know, in my position, just slinging code.

01:14:38 ◼   ► That's me now, because people come to me and say,

01:14:40 ◼   ► "I'm editing a bunch of code, and I did the whatever blame thing,

01:14:43 ◼   ► I don't know, all the lines are from you."

01:14:45 ◼   ► I'm like, you know.

01:14:46 ◼   ► Yep.

01:14:47 ◼   ► I said eight years ago, I'm like, "I don't know."

01:14:50 ◼   ► I was speaking of version controls,

01:14:52 ◼   ► and I think I'm annoyed that my son's programming class doesn't teach him,

01:14:55 ◼   ► because, you know, I mentioned that he should use version control,

01:14:57 ◼   ► and he just rolled his eyes at me, but sure enough,

01:14:59 ◼   ► I go over and look at his little Google drive,

01:15:01 ◼   ► where he has to upload all of his source code,

01:15:03 ◼   ► and what do you see in the folder with all his .swift files?

01:15:06 ◼   ► Tank_v1, tank_v2, tank_v, you know, version control by file naming.

01:15:12 ◼   ► Oh, God.

01:15:13 ◼   ► Like, because they don't teach them to use version control,

01:15:15 ◼   ► and even if they did, they can't use it in Google drive

01:15:18 ◼   ► the way they're forced to submit things, and locally, locally on the local Mac,

01:15:22 ◼   ► .swift files, he's doing the same thing.

01:15:24 ◼   ► I didn't, I'm not going to go through, like,

01:15:27 ◼   ► I have to learn Git or something.

01:15:28 ◼   ► Honestly, I don't even know how Git integrates with Xcode,

01:15:30 ◼   ► so I'd probably just host something, and I'm like, "All right,

01:15:32 ◼   ► just keep doing that, but know that this is not what normal people do."

01:15:35 ◼   ► Like, this is not the way to do it.

01:15:37 ◼   ► Yeah, it's funny you bring that up, too,

01:15:39 ◼   ► because when I graduated from Virginia Tech

01:15:42 ◼   ► with a computer engineering degree, I had never used source control.

01:15:45 ◼   ► Like, I feel like, and this was in 2004 when I graduated,

01:15:49 ◼   ► I feel like the program I went through was really good.

01:15:53 ◼   ► I really honestly believe that, but it was very, very, very academic

01:15:58 ◼   ► and not terribly pragmatic, and that I somewhat regret,

01:16:03 ◼   ► and I had to learn a lot of that stuff in my first job.

01:16:06 ◼   ► Like, oh, this would have been so nice to have known about source control

01:16:10 ◼   ► three years ago when I was working on school stuff,

01:16:12 ◼   ► although at that point I was such a slacker,

01:16:13 ◼   ► I probably would have avoided it anyway, but nevertheless,

01:16:16 ◼   ► it was all that stuff, like, practical software development

01:16:19 ◼   ► that I just didn't really get in school.

01:16:21 ◼   ► So I don't find it, particularly in high school,

01:16:23 ◼   ► it's high school that he's in, right, not middle school?

01:16:26 ◼   ► High school, yeah.

01:16:27 ◼   ► Okay, so yeah, I'm not entirely surprised that

01:16:29 ◼   ► his school program doesn't teach you about source control,

01:16:33 ◼   ► but yeah, now, thinking of going back to that time,

01:16:38 ◼   ► just, ugh, like, it's incredible to me that I was able to graduate

01:16:42 ◼   ► from a four-year program and get an engineering degree

01:16:44 ◼   ► in something that was related to software

01:16:46 ◼   ► and still had never used version control at the time.

01:16:50 ◼   ► I presume at this point that is very much a part of the curriculum,

01:16:54 ◼   ► but back in the early aughts, it was not.

01:16:57 ◼   ► Did you ever do anything with it?

01:16:59 ◼   ► No.

01:17:00 ◼   ► So you never had source control anything in school?

01:17:02 ◼   ► No, not at all.

01:17:03 ◼   ► We barely learned anything, any kind of practical

01:17:07 ◼   ► tooling kind of things like that.

01:17:09 ◼   ► My computer science education was much more focused on

01:17:12 ◼   ► the theoretical, the types of languages,

01:17:16 ◼   ► stuff like how to design a compiler, that kind of stuff.

01:17:20 ◼   ► It was nothing about version control or bug trackers,

01:17:24 ◼   ► anything that you get in modern software development practice.

01:17:28 ◼   ► At the time, it really annoyed me, but their argument,

01:17:32 ◼   ► the school's argument was those things are going to go,

01:17:36 ◼   ► they're going to go in and out of fashion in a few years,

01:17:39 ◼   ► whereas we don't want your education to be out of date

01:17:42 ◼   ► in five years when the tools change.

01:17:44 ◼   ► And that's fair, but the reality is that just means

01:17:47 ◼   ► that you have to pick up all that stuff on the job.

01:17:49 ◼   ► Yeah, colleges generally consider themselves

01:17:51 ◼   ► not to be vocational schools, and they're trying to teach

01:17:53 ◼   ► you theory and math and stuff that doesn't change,

01:17:55 ◼   ► and it makes some sense, but for something like version control,

01:17:58 ◼   ► in a four-year program, there's room for one section

01:18:02 ◼   ► of one course that teaches you something practical.

01:18:05 ◼   ► It doesn't suddenly turn into like apex tech for programmers.

01:18:09 ◼   ► It doesn't suddenly turn into just a boot camp.

01:18:12 ◼   ► You're still learning all the CS theory and all the algorithms

01:18:15 ◼   ► and all the crazy math and whatever you're learning,

01:18:17 ◼   ► like the timeless stuff that doesn't change or that isn't

01:18:21 ◼   ► dated to certain technology or products,

01:18:23 ◼   ► but just in one class, maybe in your first class,

01:18:25 ◼   ► maybe as like a freshman class just to get you up and running

01:18:27 ◼   ► before you know anything anyway.

01:18:29 ◼   ► Just teach them the basics of version control.

01:18:31 ◼   ► I learned version control not from any of my classes,

01:18:34 ◼   ► I'm pretty sure, but because I'm so old,

01:18:37 ◼   ► I learned it from the very first web pages showing you

01:18:41 ◼   ► how to build like web pages and websites.

01:18:43 ◼   ► It showed you how you could use CVS to help you build websites.

01:18:47 ◼   ► That did not age well, that knowledge and skill

01:18:50 ◼   ► and practice did not age well at all.

01:18:53 ◼   ► I think even in some of my early jobs,

01:18:56 ◼   ► I was using Subversion, like my first job I used CVS.

01:19:00 ◼   ► And RCS was what I read about in my really old

01:19:04 ◼   ► Beardyman Unix books, but I never actually used it

01:19:06 ◼   ► because I could tell just from reading about it

01:19:08 ◼   ► that it was terrible.

01:19:10 ◼   ► CVS is so much better.

01:19:12 ◼   ► Until you want to delete a directory.

01:19:15 ◼   ► Just got to fix stuff in the attic, everything will be fine.

01:19:18 ◼   ► All right, let's move on.

01:19:20 ◼   ► The next Ask ATP question is from Dan Provost,

01:19:22 ◼   ► friend of the show.

01:19:24 ◼   ► And Dan writes, "I'd love to hear your methodology,"

01:19:26 ◼   ► this is mostly for Jon, "I'd love to hear your methodology

01:19:28 ◼   ► for rating movies on Letterboxd," or Letterboxd,

01:19:31 ◼   ► "I give way too many movies, either 3.5 or 4 stars.

01:19:35 ◼   ► My system is broken."

01:19:37 ◼   ► Oh, I mean, my system I use is similar for what I use to music,

01:19:43 ◼   ► which is like, it's a little bit different.

01:19:46 ◼   ► So for movies, like, we've talked about this on,

01:19:50 ◼   ► I've talked about this a lot on my podcast,

01:19:52 ◼   ► of best versus favorite.

01:19:55 ◼   ► Is this your favorite song, or is this the best song

01:19:57 ◼   ► in your collection?

01:19:59 ◼   ► And for songs, I tend to lean more on the favorite side,

01:20:02 ◼   ► like the songs that I like a lot.

01:20:04 ◼   ► They may not be the world's best song,

01:20:06 ◼   ► but they may get very high ratings because I like them.

01:20:08 ◼   ► We talked about this last time with, like,

01:20:10 ◼   ► songs with catchy music that I like, but with stupid lyrics.

01:20:13 ◼   ► Movies, for whatever reason, I lean slightly more

01:20:16 ◼   ► in the direction of best, so I will only give a five,

01:20:20 ◼   ► you know, they do star ratings up to five,

01:20:22 ◼   ► I only give a five-star rating to a movie

01:20:24 ◼   ► that I think is just excellent.

01:20:26 ◼   ► It's not perfect. Five doesn't mean perfect,

01:20:28 ◼   ► but it means this is, there are very few movies

01:20:32 ◼   ► that are better than this.

01:20:34 ◼   ► Like, this is the cream of the crop.

01:20:36 ◼   ► This is a great, great movie.

01:20:38 ◼   ► Like, it does everything well,

01:20:40 ◼   ► everything that it set out to do, it does well.

01:20:42 ◼   ► Even if it's the type of movie I don't like,

01:20:45 ◼   ► I might give something five stars

01:20:47 ◼   ► because I think it was, like, an amazingly executed movie

01:20:50 ◼   ► in a genre that I'm not that interested in.

01:20:52 ◼   ► So it's not my favorite movie that I would give it five stars.

01:20:54 ◼   ► That's rare, but I'm saying I just lean slightly more

01:20:56 ◼   ► in that direction.

01:20:57 ◼   ► So the fives are reserved for movies

01:21:00 ◼   ► that I think are just unassailable.

01:21:02 ◼   ► Like, you can find things to poke at them that are wrong,

01:21:05 ◼   ► but in general, they do everything they're supposed to do,

01:21:07 ◼   ► they have some exceptional elements,

01:21:09 ◼   ► and they have nothing super bad about them.

01:21:11 ◼   ► Once you've reserved the fives for those,

01:21:14 ◼   ► you realize there aren't that many fives

01:21:16 ◼   ► out there in the world.

01:21:17 ◼   ► Like, the best picture winner of the Oscars every year,

01:21:20 ◼   ► chances of that being a five are pretty low lately, right?

01:21:23 ◼   ► So the fives are just, you know, every once in a while,

01:21:27 ◼   ► a movie will come along that you think is a five.

01:21:30 ◼   ► So cut them out. You don't have to worry about them.

01:21:32 ◼   ► It's gonna be, like, a handful of movies.

01:21:34 ◼   ► Now you're working with one through four.

01:21:36 ◼   ► Four are movies that are really, really good,

01:21:42 ◼   ► but there's at least one thing that you're like,

01:21:45 ◼   ► "Eh, that could have been a little bit better."

01:21:47 ◼   ► That's what the fours are.

01:21:48 ◼   ► Three and a half is, "This was a good movie,

01:21:52 ◼   ► but there is something obvious wrong with it

01:21:55 ◼   ► that I don't have to think too hard about."

01:21:57 ◼   ► They blew it in one particular aspect,

01:21:59 ◼   ► and it's not like, "Eh, that part wasn't good,"

01:22:01 ◼   ► but, you know, or that aspect of it

01:22:04 ◼   ► could have been a little bit better,

01:22:06 ◼   ► but overall it was a pretty good movie.

01:22:08 ◼   ► Three is my threshold for liked and didn't like it.

01:22:11 ◼   ► If it's a three-star, it's, like, the minimum

01:22:14 ◼   ► that I'm gonna give a movie that I mostly liked,

01:22:17 ◼   ► but it's got a lot of issues, right?

01:22:19 ◼   ► But I still like, "Eh, I still had fun. It was fine,

01:22:22 ◼   ► but it's not really a particularly good movie."

01:22:24 ◼   ► And then anything below that --

01:22:26 ◼   ► I don't think I have any two and a halfs,

01:22:28 ◼   ► but twos, ones, like,

01:22:30 ◼   ► I don't even use halves down in those ranges.

01:22:32 ◼   ► Those are movies that you actively disliked,

01:22:34 ◼   ► and not only do you actively dislike them,

01:22:35 ◼   ► but they're not good movies.

01:22:37 ◼   ► They didn't have any redeeming value.

01:22:39 ◼   ► They weren't put together well.

01:22:40 ◼   ► Everything, various aspects of them, were bad.

01:22:42 ◼   ► That's just a question of where the garbage is.

01:22:45 ◼   ► So I think I spent a lot of time hanging out in the --

01:22:48 ◼   ► Maybe I do two and a halfs.

01:22:49 ◼   ► Two and a half, three, three and a half range.

01:22:52 ◼   ► To break into a four, you have to be pretty good.

01:22:55 ◼   ► Four and a half is like it's a five,

01:22:57 ◼   ► except there's, like, one little niggle

01:22:59 ◼   ► that is just bothering me,

01:23:00 ◼   ► and I can't give it a five, right?

01:23:02 ◼   ► So I think if you did a distribution of my movies,

01:23:04 ◼   ► I'm hoping it would show that most of the stuff

01:23:06 ◼   ► is hanging out around the threes,

01:23:08 ◼   ► you know, two and a half, three, three and a half range.

01:23:10 ◼   ► Anyway, that's my system,

01:23:12 ◼   ► and I'm trying to use the whole range.

01:23:13 ◼   ► I suppose I don't use one and two enough.

01:23:15 ◼   ► Like, what distinguishes a one and two?

01:23:17 ◼   ► Probably my hatred for it,

01:23:18 ◼   ► 'cause, like, two is basically, like, thumbs down.

01:23:21 ◼   ► One is, like, thumbs down,

01:23:23 ◼   ► and also I actively dislike you,

01:23:25 ◼   ► and half is when I can't give it zero.

01:23:27 ◼   ► [ Laughter ]

01:23:29 ◼   ► -Oh, man.

01:23:30 ◼   ► Let's just never have you rate your co-hosts, all right?

01:23:32 ◼   ► M. Rosilius writes, "Hey, Marco teases

01:23:35 ◼   ► "that he has a new backpack a couple months ago,

01:23:37 ◼   ► "but he didn't provide any details.

01:23:39 ◼   ► "Can you share the bag and contents

01:23:41 ◼   ► "you're bringing with you to WWDC?

01:23:42 ◼   ► "This is actually relevant for the pre-show

01:23:44 ◼   ► "that may or may not have even made it

01:23:46 ◼   ► into the final recording."

01:23:47 ◼   ► -It will.

01:23:48 ◼   ► -But what would you say you're going to treat

01:23:51 ◼   ► as your WWDC-specific everyday carry, Marco?

01:23:55 ◼   ► -So it isn't every day, is it?

01:23:57 ◼   ► -It's going to have a generator and a really big knife.

01:24:00 ◼   ► [ Laughter ]

01:24:02 ◼   ► -Yeah.

01:24:04 ◼   ► Yeah, I went on this kind of backpack odyssey

01:24:07 ◼   ► over the last couple of years,

01:24:08 ◼   ► and I mentioned on this show before

01:24:11 ◼   ► that I was a big fan of the Peak Design everyday backpack,

01:24:15 ◼   ► but that I had kind of a love-hate relationship with it,

01:24:18 ◼   ► that I liked a lot about it,

01:24:20 ◼   ► and I used it for a long time,

01:24:22 ◼   ► but I had the smaller of the two,

01:24:26 ◼   ► the 20-liter?

01:24:27 ◼   ► Yeah, 20 or 25, whatever it is,

01:24:29 ◼   ► the smaller of the two Peak Design backpacks.

01:24:32 ◼   ► I loved so much about it,

01:24:34 ◼   ► but it just never held enough stuff.

01:24:37 ◼   ► It was just way too cramped.

01:24:39 ◼   ► And the big one I saw, actually last year at WWDC,

01:24:44 ◼   ► two different people came up to me,

01:24:46 ◼   ► because I had mentioned it recently before that,

01:24:48 ◼   ► two different people came up to me and showed me --

01:24:51 ◼   ► They had the larger one, so I could see it in person.

01:24:53 ◼   ► And I looked at it, and I took one look at it,

01:24:55 ◼   ► and I'm like, "Oh, that's way too big for me.

01:24:56 ◼   ► "I can't pull off the larger one."

01:24:58 ◼   ► So I was kind of stuck.

01:24:59 ◼   ► Now, as I was complaining about the smaller one,

01:25:01 ◼   ► one of the very first responses I got for it

01:25:04 ◼   ► was somebody who said, "I had the smaller one, too.

01:25:08 ◼   ► "I had all the same complaints as you.

01:25:10 ◼   ► "I got the bigger one, and it's so much better,

01:25:12 ◼   ► "and it solved all my problems.

01:25:14 ◼   ► "So just get the bigger one.

01:25:15 ◼   ► "Just try it."

01:25:16 ◼   ► But again, I had seen them in person,

01:25:17 ◼   ► and I thought, "It's way too big on me.

01:25:19 ◼   ► "It would look ridiculous.

01:25:21 ◼   ► "It looks comical.

01:25:22 ◼   ► "It's just giant.

01:25:23 ◼   ► "Forget it."

01:25:24 ◼   ► And so I tried a bunch of other ones.

01:25:26 ◼   ► I tried the Tom Bihn Synapse 25,

01:25:29 ◼   ► which I believe I mentioned here on the show

01:25:33 ◼   ► that it didn't fit at all.

01:25:35 ◼   ► The shape it formed against my back

01:25:38 ◼   ► when they were stuffing it

01:25:39 ◼   ► was really, really badly resting on me.

01:25:42 ◼   ► It was clearly meant for people who are taller than me.

01:25:45 ◼   ► And so all the love for the Synapse 25,

01:25:47 ◼   ► I understand from certain perspectives,

01:25:50 ◼   ► but it just didn't fit me.

01:25:52 ◼   ► And the Synapse 19, I didn't want to try,

01:25:55 ◼   ► because from what I understand,

01:25:57 ◼   ► it doesn't really fit a 15-inch laptop very well.

01:25:59 ◼   ► And while I don't currently have a 15-inch,

01:26:02 ◼   ► I want the ability to have one in the future,

01:26:04 ◼   ► 'cause I do waffle between 13 and 15-inch laptops

01:26:07 ◼   ► every couple of years.

01:26:09 ◼   ► So I thought, "Well, I'll try a few others."

01:26:12 ◼   ► I tried the Nomadic travel pack.

01:26:15 ◼   ► And by the way, this is a good time to shout out, again,

01:26:18 ◼   ► to our friend Chase Reeves.

01:26:20 ◼   ► Chase Reeves does a wonderful YouTube channel

01:26:22 ◼   ► and a website at bagworks.co,

01:26:25 ◼   ► where he reviews mid-range to high-end backpacks

01:26:29 ◼   ► and travel bags and other travel gear like that.

01:26:32 ◼   ► And he's a super backpack nerd.

01:26:34 ◼   ► So I love watching his videos for lots of reasons.

01:26:39 ◼   ► I mean, he's also just a really fun person,

01:26:41 ◼   ► but for bag reviews, you can't go wrong with Chase Reeves

01:26:44 ◼   ► and bagworks.co.

01:26:46 ◼   ► Anyway, so I was going through all his recommendations,

01:26:48 ◼   ► watching all his videos, thinking,

01:26:49 ◼   ► "I gotta find my ideal backpack.

01:26:51 ◼   ► "Gotta find it, gotta find it."

01:26:52 ◼   ► And I tried a few, and eventually,

01:26:55 ◼   ► after going through a whole bunch of other bags

01:26:58 ◼   ► and not liking them as much as I love-hated

01:27:02 ◼   ► my Peak Design Everyday 20-liter,

01:27:05 ◼   ► I decided, "You know what?

01:27:07 ◼   ► "Let me just frickin' try the big one.

01:27:09 ◼   ► "It's really big, but it's fine."

01:27:12 ◼   ► And I'm happy with it, finally.

01:27:17 ◼   ► The bigness does actually solve many of its problems.

01:27:20 ◼   ► One of my big problems with the small everyday bag

01:27:23 ◼   ► is that the side pockets were so small

01:27:27 ◼   ► as to be fairly useless.

01:27:29 ◼   ► It was almost like,

01:27:30 ◼   ► "Why do they even put these side pockets in here?"

01:27:33 ◼   ► And the big one, the side pockets are just bigger enough

01:27:37 ◼   ► that it's better, it works.

01:27:39 ◼   ► The laptop compartment is still really tight

01:27:42 ◼   ► if you wanna carry an iPad and a laptop,

01:27:45 ◼   ► but it's doable, and it's way more comfortable

01:27:48 ◼   ► when getting a laptop in and out than the smaller one.

01:27:51 ◼   ► The actual main cargo space is bigger,

01:27:54 ◼   ► and I'm able to fit more stuff.

01:27:56 ◼   ► Not massively more, but more, and it's enough.

01:28:00 ◼   ► I actually still have both sizes,

01:28:02 ◼   ► and for one of the, I took a day trip recently,

01:28:05 ◼   ► and I decided, "Let me load up the small one

01:28:07 ◼   ► "and bring that to see if I miss it."

01:28:09 ◼   ► And immediately, I was like,

01:28:11 ◼   ► "I can't fit anything in this thing."

01:28:13 ◼   ► (laughs)

01:28:14 ◼   ► And so I fully converted it now to the big one,

01:28:17 ◼   ► so I'm happy with that as my bag.

01:28:20 ◼   ► Now, it is a big bag, and I occasionally,

01:28:23 ◼   ► actually, I frequently need or want a smaller bag

01:28:28 ◼   ► for less needs.

01:28:30 ◼   ► When I'm not packing up for a big trip

01:28:32 ◼   ► or bringing a bunch of gear with me,

01:28:34 ◼   ► I'd like to have a smaller bag available.

01:28:36 ◼   ► So I've gone through a similar backpack odyssey with that.

01:28:40 ◼   ► One could argue I should just use the smaller,

01:28:43 ◼   ► one of the everyday bags as my small bag,

01:28:46 ◼   ► and that's a reasonable argument,

01:28:47 ◼   ► which I might end up doing.

01:28:49 ◼   ► I'm currently, I'm testing, I'm using the Archetype Dash Pack.

01:28:54 ◼   ► It's totally fine.

01:28:56 ◼   ► It's not like a stellar bag, but it's nice.

01:29:02 ◼   ► I don't know if I'm gonna stick with the Archetype long-term,

01:29:05 ◼   ► if this is my I'm done small backpack.

01:29:09 ◼   ► Probably not, because there are aspects

01:29:12 ◼   ► of its design that I don't use.

01:29:15 ◼   ► It has this weird sideways laptop compartment

01:29:19 ◼   ► that goes right against your back

01:29:20 ◼   ► that you access from the back side of it,

01:29:22 ◼   ► and I just don't use that compartment at all,

01:29:24 ◼   ► because it's stupid.

01:29:25 ◼   ► I just put the laptop in the main compartment,

01:29:28 ◼   ► where there is a pocket for it also.

01:29:31 ◼   ► I don't know why there's this weird thing on the back.

01:29:33 ◼   ► But anyway, so this bag is not perfect, but it's fine.

01:29:38 ◼   ► But my small bag needs are still unresolved.

01:29:41 ◼   ► My big bag need, though, is pretty well solved

01:29:44 ◼   ► by the Peak Everyday 30.

01:29:46 ◼   ► As for what's in these bags, I decided a long time ago

01:29:50 ◼   ► that I wanted my travel bag,

01:29:53 ◼   ► whatever my travel backpack was,

01:29:54 ◼   ► in this case the Peak design,

01:29:56 ◼   ► I wanted to always keep in it the things I would need,

01:30:00 ◼   ► like electronics-wise, when I was traveling,

01:30:03 ◼   ► which means buying extra things.

01:30:05 ◼   ► In case you discovered this religion recently, too,

01:30:07 ◼   ► it's so much nicer if you can buy an extra charger

01:30:11 ◼   ► and buy an extra cable and buy extra copies

01:30:15 ◼   ► of any tech that you need when you're traveling

01:30:17 ◼   ► and just keep them in your backpack all the time.

01:30:20 ◼   ► Never take them out unless you are using them

01:30:22 ◼   ► during traveling.

01:30:23 ◼   ► That is the only time you take them out.

01:30:24 ◼   ► Otherwise, they stay there.

01:30:25 ◼   ► And that way, you do have kind of this go bag,

01:30:27 ◼   ► at least for tech stuff,

01:30:28 ◼   ► where you know you can just put your laptop in this bag

01:30:31 ◼   ► if it isn't already in the bag and just take it with you,

01:30:34 ◼   ► and you know you have everything you need.

01:30:36 ◼   ► So laptop charger, phone charger,

01:30:38 ◼   ► if those are different things,

01:30:40 ◼   ► any cables you need,

01:30:42 ◼   ► if you want to have a phone charger for the nightstand

01:30:44 ◼   ► for the hotel room, bring that,

01:30:46 ◼   ► the long cable for that, which is nice.

01:30:48 ◼   ► That's another tip.

01:30:49 ◼   ► Get the two-meter lightning cable for your phone

01:30:52 ◼   ► for traveling, it's really nice in the hotel rooms.

01:30:55 ◼   ► So that kind of stuff.

01:30:56 ◼   ► Keep everything separate.

01:30:57 ◼   ► And I also have this old person pill box

01:31:02 ◼   ► that I got from Amazon for two for seven dollars,

01:31:05 ◼   ► and it's like this folding closed,

01:31:08 ◼   ► stick together with magnets, pill organizer box

01:31:11 ◼   ► that has just different little flip compartments

01:31:13 ◼   ► that you can put different pills in.

01:31:14 ◼   ► And I put in there a small amount

01:31:17 ◼   ► of all sorts of over-the-counter drugs

01:31:19 ◼   ► that I occasionally need while traveling.

01:31:21 ◼   ► Antacids, ibuprofen, allergy pills,

01:31:26 ◼   ► Dramamine, stuff that I frequently will need

01:31:30 ◼   ► while traveling that is a pain to have to buy every time

01:31:34 ◼   ► or is very expensive to buy a tiny amount of

01:31:37 ◼   ► in an airport or something.

01:31:38 ◼   ► And it's really nice to have that always with me.

01:31:41 ◼   ► Like, oh, if I'm on the plane and I decide,

01:31:42 ◼   ► crap, I need some Advil right now,

01:31:44 ◼   ► I have it, it's fine, it's always there.

01:31:47 ◼   ► So I have that in there.

01:31:48 ◼   ► I have a couple of packets of fancy instant hipster coffee,

01:31:53 ◼   ► Swift Cup coffee, that's my current favorite one.

01:31:55 ◼   ► High-end instant coffees that are surprisingly good.

01:31:59 ◼   ► They're a little expensive, usually they're about

01:32:01 ◼   ► between $1.50 and $2 each.

01:32:04 ◼   ► So they're surprisingly expensive, but they're very good.

01:32:08 ◼   ► So I have my own coffee.

01:32:10 ◼   ► And that way, when you are on a plane, say,

01:32:13 ◼   ► or somewhere in a horrible place to get coffee,

01:32:16 ◼   ► you can just ask for a cup of hot water

01:32:18 ◼   ► and you can then take out your little packet

01:32:21 ◼   ► when nobody's looking and dump it into your cup

01:32:22 ◼   ► and try to hide the fact that you're being a total jerk

01:32:25 ◼   ► by making your own instant hipster coffee

01:32:27 ◼   ► instead of taking the plain coffee.

01:32:29 ◼   ► But it's totally worth being that jerk

01:32:31 ◼   ► because it is so much better.

01:32:33 ◼   ► What else do I keep in that bag?

01:32:35 ◼   ► Dongles, any kind of dongle I might need.

01:32:38 ◼   ► I have found, I have recently entered

01:32:40 ◼   ► the sub-bag lifestyle for certain things.

01:32:43 ◼   ► I certainly love packing cubes when traveling,

01:32:46 ◼   ► when packing a big bag with clothes and everything.

01:32:49 ◼   ► In the backpack, I don't use them quite as much,

01:32:51 ◼   ► but I do like having a couple of small pouches

01:32:53 ◼   ► for tech miscellany, stuff I don't usually need,

01:32:58 ◼   ► but I might, so that's things like a micro SD

01:33:01 ◼   ► to full-size SD card adapter, the little USB-C

01:33:06 ◼   ► and lightning dongles to headphones, stuff like that,

01:33:10 ◼   ► like the little tech crap that you occasionally need,

01:33:13 ◼   ► a spare SD card, stuff like that.

01:33:15 ◼   ► I have little tiny Tom Bihn zipper pouches for those

01:33:20 ◼   ► that I shove pretty much everywhere.

01:33:22 ◼   ► And that's most of the stuff that stays there all the time.

01:33:27 ◼   ► Oh, like a little tiny notebook and pen.

01:33:29 ◼   ► I think the notebook's from Muji,

01:33:31 ◼   ► like some small thing optimized for low weight and low size

01:33:35 ◼   ► 'cause I don't usually need to hand write anything,

01:33:37 ◼   ► but occasionally I do.

01:33:38 ◼   ► I always carry earplugs with me when traveling

01:33:42 ◼   ► because I will occasionally find myself

01:33:43 ◼   ► in a very loud place and I don't want hearing damage,

01:33:45 ◼   ► so always carry earplugs.

01:33:47 ◼   ► If I'm going on a plane,

01:33:48 ◼   ► I will bring my noise-canceling headphones,

01:33:50 ◼   ► currently the Sony MDR whatever, whatever Mark II.

01:33:55 ◼   ► I should mention my travel setup for powering

01:33:59 ◼   ► and charging my devices is all USB-C.

01:34:02 ◼   ► I have moved everything over to USB-C,

01:34:05 ◼   ► not all the peripherals that I have are USB-C yet,

01:34:07 ◼   ► but all of the power sources

01:34:09 ◼   ► and then therefore all of the charging cables I have are USB-C.

01:34:12 ◼   ► I only keep one USB-A cable with me.

01:34:15 ◼   ► It's one of those like multi-enders

01:34:17 ◼   ► where it's like you have USB-A on one end

01:34:19 ◼   ► and then like micro C and lightning things.

01:34:23 ◼   ► You could stick like little duck heads

01:34:25 ◼   ► that you could stick onto the other end,

01:34:26 ◼   ► but everything else I have is USB-C.

01:34:28 ◼   ► So all my lightning cables with the exception of that one,

01:34:31 ◼   ► every other lightning cable is an Apple USB-C

01:34:33 ◼   ► to lightning cable.

01:34:34 ◼   ► My charging cables are all Apple USB-C to C charging cables

01:34:38 ◼   ► because they're super thin, the Apple ones.

01:34:40 ◼   ► And then my laptop charges with C.

01:34:42 ◼   ► My headphones charge with a C to micro adapter

01:34:46 ◼   ► and yeah, it's wonderful.

01:34:48 ◼   ► All the power bricks are C bricks.

01:34:51 ◼   ► This is an area that has taken great strides recently.

01:34:54 ◼   ► I guess I'll put in the show notes,

01:34:55 ◼   ► I have a couple of USB-C power bricks that are really nice.

01:34:58 ◼   ► There's the new gallium nitrate, gallium nitride,

01:35:02 ◼   ► whatever the new like GAN standard

01:35:06 ◼   ► or silicon alternative is for making power transformers

01:35:10 ◼   ► has allowed much smaller power bricks than before.

01:35:13 ◼   ► So now like you can get a little 30 watt power brick

01:35:17 ◼   ► or a 45 watt power brick that's significantly smaller

01:35:21 ◼   ► than they were before.

01:35:22 ◼   ► So I now use those on my laptop.

01:35:25 ◼   ► So I don't even carry the Apple 60 watt brick anymore.

01:35:29 ◼   ► I use this like Ravpower 45 watt thing

01:35:32 ◼   ► that is smaller than a deck of cards

01:35:36 ◼   ► and it weighs almost nothing and it's 45 watts,

01:35:39 ◼   ► which is enough for my travel needs.

01:35:41 ◼   ► And so I use that to power my laptop

01:35:43 ◼   ► and I have a couple of smaller ones

01:35:44 ◼   ► like little 18 watt things, little 30 watt things

01:35:46 ◼   ► for powering my phone and those are powerful

01:35:48 ◼   ► and it's a fast charger phone or an iPad,

01:35:50 ◼   ► but they're not that much bigger

01:35:52 ◼   ► than like a phone or iPad power brick would be.

01:35:54 ◼   ► So I have a few USB-C power bricks,

01:35:57 ◼   ► a few USB-C to C or lightning cables

01:36:00 ◼   ► and my one multi cable and that's it.

01:36:04 ◼   ► It's wonderful.

01:36:06 ◼   ► - You might want to reconsider the medicine thing

01:36:08 ◼   ► because like the idea of having stuff always in the bag

01:36:10 ◼   ► writing and waiting for you is fine

01:36:11 ◼   ► for things that don't deteriorate over with age,

01:36:15 ◼   ► but I think some medicines do either lose their potency

01:36:18 ◼   ► with age or other bad things happen to them

01:36:20 ◼   ► even if they're sealed in bottles.

01:36:22 ◼   ► I don't know exactly what you're keeping in there,

01:36:23 ◼   ► but it's worth looking for all the things you keep in there.

01:36:25 ◼   ► If this has been in there for five years,

01:36:27 ◼   ► is it any good anymore?

01:36:28 ◼   ► Should I still be swallowing it?

01:36:30 ◼   ► - That's a good question.

01:36:31 ◼   ► Oh, and the one big important thing

01:36:33 ◼   ► I have come to in the last six months or so

01:36:36 ◼   ► is that I keep two bags.

01:36:38 ◼   ► Like I keep the big bag and the small bag.

01:36:41 ◼   ► All of those exact same things are in both bags.

01:36:44 ◼   ► I have duplicates of everything.

01:36:46 ◼   ► So I can take either bag with me

01:36:48 ◼   ► and I know it's going to have a set of USB-C

01:36:51 ◼   ► whatever cables, the multi cable.

01:36:53 ◼   ► I have two identical pill boxes of all those pills.

01:36:57 ◼   ► They both have instant coffee in them.

01:36:59 ◼   ► Everything is duplicated except for the laptop.

01:37:02 ◼   ► I only have one laptop.

01:37:04 ◼   ► - Do you though?

01:37:05 ◼   ► - All the accessories, actually.

01:37:07 ◼   ► All the accessories, all those cables, chargers,

01:37:10 ◼   ► pills, notebook, pen, paper, all that stuff

01:37:14 ◼   ► is all duplicated between the two bags.

01:37:17 ◼   ► So at any time, I can just grab either one of the bags

01:37:20 ◼   ► and know that I have all those basics covered.

01:37:23 ◼   ► And that has been really nice too.

01:37:25 ◼   ► That has been almost as nice as having the bag,

01:37:27 ◼   ► having all the stuff stay in your travel bag

01:37:29 ◼   ► in the first place.

01:37:30 ◼   ► I think if you are leading a multi bag lifestyle,

01:37:32 ◼   ► that's the way to do it.

01:37:34 ◼   ► Pick two bags, make your big one and your small one,

01:37:37 ◼   ► and load them both up with all the basics

01:37:39 ◼   ► so that they're always available to you.

01:37:41 ◼   ► - So you either have a lot of willpower

01:37:43 ◼   ► or it's a testament to your amazing conspicuous consumption

01:37:46 ◼   ► that you don't find yourself digging into one of those bags

01:37:49 ◼   ► when you just can't find that one adapter that you need

01:37:51 ◼   ► and you're like, oh, I know where one is.

01:37:53 ◼   ► There's one in my bag, which is a no-no.

01:37:55 ◼   ► You're not supposed to do.

01:37:57 ◼   ► But the only reason you wouldn't do it

01:37:59 ◼   ► is if you never find yourself in that situation

01:38:01 ◼   ► because you bought 150 of them to be all over your house.

01:38:03 ◼   ► The luxury of buying duplicates and triplicates

01:38:06 ◼   ► of all your things and having the bags is nice,

01:38:08 ◼   ► but that can get expensive.

01:38:09 ◼   ► And unless you travel a lot, maybe not entirely worth it.

01:38:13 ◼   ► And the second thing is, as your kids get older,

01:38:15 ◼   ► they will probably have fewer compunctions about,

01:38:17 ◼   ► oh, I know where there's, I mean, to give an example

01:38:20 ◼   ► and not a chance of directives,

01:38:21 ◼   ► I know where there's a nail clipper in dad's backpack

01:38:24 ◼   ► because he always keeps one there.

01:38:26 ◼   ► So guess who's always digging into my backpack

01:38:28 ◼   ► because they can't find any of the other nail clippers

01:38:30 ◼   ► because they left them who knows where.

01:38:31 ◼   ► And then I go and look at my nail clipper and it's not there.

01:38:33 ◼   ► Why is it not there?

01:38:34 ◼   ► A kid took it.

01:38:35 ◼   ► So just wait until your kids want your adapters.

01:38:37 ◼   ► Just wait.

01:38:38 ◼   ► - I mean, the good thing is,

01:38:39 ◼   ► when you go to an all-USBC travel lifestyle,

01:38:42 ◼   ► you actually don't need very many different things.

01:38:45 ◼   ► There actually aren't that many, like by quantity,

01:38:47 ◼   ► there aren't that many different things.

01:38:49 ◼   ► And it actually isn't that expensive

01:38:52 ◼   ► to outfit a backpack with these basics.

01:38:54 ◼   ► Because you're really talking about

01:38:56 ◼   ► two or three little power bricks,

01:38:59 ◼   ► maybe three or four cables at most.

01:39:01 ◼   ► You're not talking a whole lot of stuff.

01:39:04 ◼   ► - You know, something that I've discovered

01:39:06 ◼   ► recently is I have my Go Pack,

01:39:08 ◼   ► which we'll put a link in the show notes to that.

01:39:12 ◼   ► And that's fairly large.

01:39:14 ◼   ► And some of that, well actually I guess

01:39:16 ◼   ► all of it is self-created,

01:39:17 ◼   ► but some of that is self-created

01:39:18 ◼   ► because I like to be a little over-prepared

01:39:20 ◼   ► and I have a few things in there

01:39:21 ◼   ► that I probably won't need but you never really know.

01:39:24 ◼   ► - Do you have an entire generator in your backpack?

01:39:26 ◼   ► - No, I wish I did.

01:39:28 ◼   ► Man, that would be convenient.

01:39:29 ◼   ► Heavy but convenient.

01:39:31 ◼   ► But what I've done is I have a Tom Bihn Organizer Pouch,

01:39:35 ◼   ► one of those zipper clear pouches,

01:39:37 ◼   ► probably the same thing you were talking about earlier, Marco.

01:39:39 ◼   ► And I have that clipped to the inside

01:39:41 ◼   ► of my Tom Bihn Co-Pilot,

01:39:43 ◼   ► which is the bag I use more often than not these days

01:39:46 ◼   ► because I don't have a 15-inch MacBook Pro anymore.

01:39:48 ◼   ► Well anyways, in this little organizer pouch,

01:39:51 ◼   ► which is actually quite small,

01:39:53 ◼   ► I keep one Lightning to USB-C cable.

01:39:58 ◼   ► One of those multi-ender cables

01:40:00 ◼   ► that you were talking about,

01:40:01 ◼   ► I think Gruber had recommended it

01:40:02 ◼   ► like a couple of months back

01:40:03 ◼   ► and basically every nerd bought one, including me.

01:40:05 ◼   ► So it's the USB-A to C Mini and Micro, I think,

01:40:09 ◼   ► or something like that.

01:40:10 ◼   ► It's what you described before.

01:40:11 ◼   ► - C Mini and Lightning.

01:40:13 ◼   ► Or C Micro and Lightning.

01:40:15 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that's right.

01:40:16 ◼   ► I keep the Luna display in there.

01:40:18 ◼   ► I keep, as you had said, the USB-C to headphone adapter

01:40:23 ◼   ► and a Lightning to headphone adapter.

01:40:25 ◼   ► I keep a Mini SD and full-size SD card reader.

01:40:29 ◼   ► It's the same thing.

01:40:30 ◼   ► It's the same unit.

01:40:31 ◼   ► It can do both.

01:40:32 ◼   ► I keep a little tiny, tiny, tiny dongle

01:40:35 ◼   ► that's a USB-A to C converter,

01:40:37 ◼   ► because you never really know.

01:40:39 ◼   ► And then a little tiny, I don't know who makes this,

01:40:42 ◼   ► but it's a PowerPort Mini, which is a two-port, oh, Anker.

01:40:46 ◼   ► - Sounds like Anker.

01:40:47 ◼   ► - Right on the side, yeah.

01:40:48 ◼   ► It's an Anker two-port USB-A charger.

01:40:50 ◼   ► So think of something that's about the size

01:40:52 ◼   ► of an iPhone brick, but actually is two ports.

01:40:55 ◼   ► And so this is convenient if you're in an airport,

01:40:57 ◼   ► and me and Aaron want to both charge our phones.

01:40:59 ◼   ► Well, actually, we'd probably be doing that

01:41:01 ◼   ► off of my away suitcase.

01:41:02 ◼   ► I don't even know if they're sponsoring this week.

01:41:04 ◼   ► - Nope.

01:41:05 ◼   ► - But that really is the truth.

01:41:06 ◼   ► That's probably how we would be doing it.

01:41:07 ◼   ► But if not, we use this little Anker PowerPort Mini.

01:41:10 ◼   ► And all of that lives, now admittedly it gets crammed in two,

01:41:13 ◼   ► but all of that lives in this little pouch,

01:41:15 ◼   ► and that pouch can go back and forth between the two bags.

01:41:18 ◼   ► Now, in a perfect world, yes, I agree with you.

01:41:20 ◼   ► I would have an identical pouch for the other bag

01:41:22 ◼   ► that I used to use from time to time when I had a big laptop,

01:41:26 ◼   ► and now I almost never use it, which is a Tom Biddon Cadet.

01:41:29 ◼   ► But anyways, this little pouch,

01:41:31 ◼   ► this is my little mini Go Pack,

01:41:34 ◼   ► and the sanctity of this is paramount.

01:41:37 ◼   ► This is what John was alluding to earlier.

01:41:39 ◼   ► Nothing leaves this unless it goes back in

01:41:42 ◼   ► the moment I have finished using it,

01:41:44 ◼   ► and I am religious about that.

01:41:46 ◼   ► So in a perfect world, I would never go into this

01:41:49 ◼   ► unless I'm traveling, but in the case

01:41:51 ◼   ► that I do occasionally go into this,

01:41:53 ◼   ► even when it's at home, I am very strict,

01:41:56 ◼   ► and I will be until Declan is of age.

01:41:58 ◼   ► Until Declan is of age and Michaela later,

01:42:00 ◼   ► I am very strict about nothing leaving that

01:42:02 ◼   ► unless it is absolutely necessary,

01:42:04 ◼   ► and then it gets dropped right back in as soon as it's done.

01:42:07 ◼   ► - By the way, this whole bag thing,

01:42:09 ◼   ► my whole cables and power and everything,

01:42:12 ◼   ► this is why I want the iPhone to go USB-C.

01:42:15 ◼   ► - Oh, agreed.

01:42:16 ◼   ► - 'Cause right now, I have C to C

01:42:19 ◼   ► and C to Lightning cables,

01:42:21 ◼   ► and I have to have these two different cables,

01:42:23 ◼   ► and there currently is nobody who makes cables

01:42:26 ◼   ► that are C to multi-ender, Lightning, or C.

01:42:31 ◼   ► Those don't exist as far as I know,

01:42:34 ◼   ► and if they did, they would probably be severely limited

01:42:36 ◼   ► with how much power they could transfer or something like that.

01:42:38 ◼   ► Right now, I can take a C to C cable

01:42:40 ◼   ► and charge my laptop with Apple's little skinny C to C,

01:42:44 ◼   ► or their little skinny, yeah, their charge cable,

01:42:46 ◼   ► the one meter charge cable.

01:42:48 ◼   ► It's a C to C cable.

01:42:49 ◼   ► It's as thick as an old Lightning cable,

01:42:51 ◼   ► which is not very thick at all,

01:42:53 ◼   ► and it's very small, light, thin, flexible,

01:42:57 ◼   ► and it can plug into a tiny 30 watt or 45 watt GAN power brick,

01:43:03 ◼   ► and what used to be this big, bulky setup to charge a laptop

01:43:08 ◼   ► is now this tiny, little, thin, light, small thing

01:43:12 ◼   ► that's way cheaper, too.

01:43:13 ◼   ► The combined cost of the cable and the power brick

01:43:16 ◼   ► is like 50 bucks,

01:43:17 ◼   ► way cheaper than buying a separate laptop charger used to be,

01:43:20 ◼   ► and you can keep it in your bag.

01:43:22 ◼   ► And if you don't need it at that moment,

01:43:24 ◼   ► you can use the exact same thing to charge an iPad,

01:43:26 ◼   ► and if you switch out the cable

01:43:28 ◼   ► and put the Lightning version on,

01:43:30 ◼   ► you can use the exact same thing to charge a phone.

01:43:32 ◼   ► And if the phone also goes USB-C,

01:43:35 ◼   ► that makes all of this even better.

01:43:37 ◼   ► I will very quickly throw away most of my Lightning cables

01:43:40 ◼   ► if that happens,

01:43:41 ◼   ► because I have Lightning cables all over the place,

01:43:43 ◼   ► like, just in case, I need, you know, for a phone or whatever,

01:43:46 ◼   ► and it's like, man, that cannot happen soon enough.

01:43:49 ◼   ► Like, the transition, hopefully, of a phone to USB-C

01:43:51 ◼   ► will make this even better, even simpler,

01:43:54 ◼   ► and it'll make me carry even fewer cables.

01:43:56 ◼   ► - Yeah, I am definitely ready for the iPhone to go USB-C.

01:43:59 ◼   ► I don't expect it to happen quite yet,

01:44:01 ◼   ► but I am ready for that life.

01:44:04 ◼   ► - All right, thanks to our sponsors this week,

01:44:06 ◼   ► Squarespace, Linode, and Marine Layer,

01:44:09 ◼   ► and we will see you next week.

01:44:11 ◼   ► (upbeat music)

01:44:14 ◼   ► ♪ Now the show is over ♪

01:44:16 ◼   ► ♪ They didn't even mean to begin ♪

01:44:19 ◼   ► ♪ 'Cause it was accidental ♪

01:44:21 ◼   ► ♪ Accidental ♪

01:44:22 ◼   ► ♪ Oh, it was accidental ♪

01:44:23 ◼   ► ♪ Accidental ♪

01:44:25 ◼   ► ♪ John didn't do any research ♪

01:44:27 ◼   ► ♪ Marco and Casey wouldn't let him ♪

01:44:29 ◼   ► ♪ 'Cause it was accidental ♪

01:44:31 ◼   ► ♪ Accidental ♪

01:44:32 ◼   ► ♪ Oh, it was accidental ♪

01:44:34 ◼   ► ♪ Accidental ♪

01:44:35 ◼   ► ♪ And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm ♪

01:44:40 ◼   ► ♪ And if you're into Twitter ♪

01:44:43 ◼   ► ♪ You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-T ♪

01:44:49 ◼   ► ♪ So that's Casey List ♪

01:44:50 ◼   ► ♪ M-A-R-C-O ♪

01:44:52 ◼   ► ♪ A-R-M ♪

01:44:53 ◼   ► ♪ N-T ♪

01:44:54 ◼   ► ♪ Marco ♪

01:44:55 ◼   ► ♪ R ♪

01:44:56 ◼   ► ♪ Men ♪

01:44:57 ◼   ► ♪ S-I-R ♪

01:44:58 ◼   ► ♪ A-C ♪

01:44:59 ◼   ► ♪ U-S-A ♪

01:45:00 ◼   ► ♪ Syracuse ♪

01:45:01 ◼   ► ♪ It's accidental ♪

01:45:02 ◼   ► ♪ It's accidental ♪

01:45:04 ◼   ► ♪ They didn't mean to ♪

01:45:06 ◼   ► ♪ Accidental ♪

01:45:07 ◼   ► ♪ Accidental ♪

01:45:08 ◼   ► ♪ Tech ♪

01:45:09 ◼   ► ♪ Bar ♪

01:45:10 ◼   ► ♪ Cast ♪

01:45:11 ◼   ► ♪ So long ♪

01:45:13 ◼   ► Semi real-time follow-up.

01:45:15 ◼   ► Apparently Letterboxd does have a view

01:45:17 ◼   ► where you can see your average ratings per year.

01:45:20 ◼   ► It gets a little wonky like back in time

01:45:22 ◼   ► for like old movies where I'll like rate one movie

01:45:24 ◼   ► for the entire year and that becomes the average rating.

01:45:27 ◼   ► But looking at the graph,

01:45:28 ◼   ► you can see my average rating has been going down slightly

01:45:31 ◼   ► during like the years where I watched lots of movies.

01:45:34 ◼   ► My highest rated year with enough samples

01:45:37 ◼   ► is 1980 with an average of 4.38.

01:45:40 ◼   ► 2019's current rating is 2.90.

01:45:43 ◼   ► Ooh.

01:45:44 ◼   ► There's lots of twos around the past five years or so.

01:45:49 ◼   ► Like 2016 is 3.12, it just clears three.

01:45:52 ◼   ► So yeah, I guess that makes me a tough grader,

01:45:55 ◼   ► but I just feel like I'm using the whole range.

01:45:56 ◼   ► I mean, these years, these are years like the 2000s and stuff

01:45:59 ◼   ► where I'm watching lots of movies,

01:46:01 ◼   ► so I feel like the average is representative.

01:46:02 ◼   ► But as I go back in time,

01:46:03 ◼   ► either the only movies I even remember

01:46:06 ◼   ► from like my childhood are the ones that were really good,

01:46:08 ◼   ► so the average is high,

01:46:09 ◼   ► or I only have like three movies rated in like 1961

01:46:13 ◼   ► or whatever, so the average is high,

01:46:15 ◼   ► because again, I'm rating movies that I've seen

01:46:17 ◼   ► that are old because they're probably classics

01:46:19 ◼   ► or really good movies.

01:46:20 ◼   ► But yeah, "Lunar Roxy" has got everything.

01:46:23 ◼   ► I'll put that link in the show notes too.

01:46:25 ◼   ► - What else is going on?

01:46:26 ◼   ► - Do you wanna talk about your app

01:46:28 ◼   ► or do you wanna save it for when you ship it?

01:46:30 ◼   ► - At the moment, I am angling and hurtling toward releasing.

01:46:35 ◼   ► It's been extremely fun, extremely stressful,

01:46:40 ◼   ► and extremely weird and good in this last push,

01:46:45 ◼   ► because I've been sending betas or alphas,

01:46:50 ◼   ► I've been calling them, whatever.

01:46:51 ◼   ► I've been sending builds to a bunch of friends,

01:46:54 ◼   ► and I think my test flight has something like 30 people on it,

01:46:57 ◼   ► most of whom are friends.

01:46:58 ◼   ► A few of them are people that I at least casually know.

01:47:02 ◼   ► But it's been a lot of fun getting a whole bunch of feedback

01:47:08 ◼   ► from a whole bunch of people,

01:47:10 ◼   ► most of which has been really tremendous

01:47:12 ◼   ► and has made the app a hell of a lot better,

01:47:14 ◼   ► some of which I disagree with,

01:47:16 ◼   ► some of which I begrudgingly agree with,

01:47:18 ◼   ► or Marco and I have been going back and forth on a few things,

01:47:22 ◼   ► which sometimes we'll be like, "Ah, I don't know.

01:47:24 ◼   ► "I really don't like this."

01:47:25 ◼   ► But then it has led one of us, typically Marco,

01:47:28 ◼   ► to have an epiphany that has made things

01:47:31 ◼   ► really a whole lot better.

01:47:33 ◼   ► So it's been a lot of fun.

01:47:35 ◼   ► When you have a regular jobby job,

01:47:38 ◼   ► especially if it's a -- I don't want to say the word "relaxed,"

01:47:42 ◼   ► but maybe not a fast-paced jobby job,

01:47:45 ◼   ► sometimes you can lose sight of --

01:47:48 ◼   ► It's nice at a regular jobby job to have that moment

01:47:53 ◼   ► when you have to give the big heave.

01:47:55 ◼   ► And I haven't really had to do that in a while

01:47:57 ◼   ► because even at my last jobby job,

01:47:59 ◼   ► for the most part, the deadlines were self-created.

01:48:03 ◼   ► So, you know, "Oh, well, we didn't hit that deadline.

01:48:06 ◼   ► Eh, whatever."

01:48:07 ◼   ► It's been a few years since I've had, like,

01:48:09 ◼   ► a really strong deadline,

01:48:11 ◼   ► and as I've said in past shows,

01:48:13 ◼   ► I really, really, really want to try to at least

01:48:15 ◼   ► get this into app review before WWDC,

01:48:17 ◼   ► preferably out before WWDC.

01:48:19 ◼   ► But at the very least, I'd like to get it in app review

01:48:22 ◼   ► extremely soon.

01:48:24 ◼   ► And having that deadline

01:48:26 ◼   ► and then working with all of my friends and whatnot,

01:48:29 ◼   ► trying to get this squared away,

01:48:31 ◼   ► it has been so stressful and so occasionally frustrating,

01:48:35 ◼   ► but overall, it has been such incredible fun,

01:48:38 ◼   ► and I'm really appreciative to a bunch of my friends

01:48:41 ◼   ► who have spent an unfair amount of time --

01:48:44 ◼   ► and by that, I mean unfair to them --

01:48:46 ◼   ► amount of time helping me out this stuff.

01:48:49 ◼   ► Marco is a great example of this.

01:48:51 ◼   ► My friend, Jelly, who does --

01:48:54 ◼   ► What is it? "Independence"? Is that right?

01:48:56 ◼   ► The really great podcast with Curtis Herbert

01:48:59 ◼   ► and Alex Zou.

01:49:01 ◼   ► I hope I have all that right.

01:49:03 ◼   ► That was right off the top of my head.

01:49:05 ◼   ► Anyway, Marco and Jelly have been extremely helpful.

01:49:08 ◼   ► Ben Rice McCarthy has been extremely helpful,

01:49:10 ◼   ► and it's just been a lot, a lot of fun.

01:49:13 ◼   ► And I'm stressed out of my mind,

01:49:15 ◼   ► but at the same time, I'm really enjoying

01:49:17 ◼   ► getting this kind of across the finish line.

01:49:19 ◼   ► And I think the thing that's most exciting about it

01:49:22 ◼   ► is it's gone from utter crap

01:49:26 ◼   ► both functionality-wise and looks-wise

01:49:29 ◼   ► to something that was at least somewhat --

01:49:31 ◼   ► You know, it was getting there,

01:49:33 ◼   ► both in terms of functionality and looks.

01:49:35 ◼   ► But now, I don't think this is going to win any design awards,

01:49:37 ◼   ► by any means. I'm not trying to oversell it.

01:49:39 ◼   ► But I'm pretty proud of how this looks.

01:49:41 ◼   ► And as someone who is an okay design critic

01:49:44 ◼   ► but has no design eye,

01:49:46 ◼   ► I'm pretty happy that, you know, Ben and Jelly and Marco

01:49:49 ◼   ► have really been able to steer me in the right direction

01:49:52 ◼   ► to get this thing looking pretty good.

01:49:54 ◼   ► And I think that's one of the things that Marco still disagrees with.

01:49:56 ◼   ► And we don't necessarily need to talk about that now,

01:49:58 ◼   ► although we can if it's relevant.

01:50:00 ◼   ► But even with the things that I'm ignoring

01:50:03 ◼   ► that Marco's suggesting,

01:50:05 ◼   ► I still think this is way better,

01:50:08 ◼   ► thanks to Marco and Jelly and Ben's influence,

01:50:10 ◼   ► than it would have been if I just left --

01:50:12 ◼   ► was left to my own devices.

01:50:14 ◼   ► So I thank the three of you, particularly --

01:50:16 ◼   ► and everyone else has been helping out.

01:50:18 ◼   ► It wasn't just the three of you,

01:50:20 ◼   ► but I thank the three of you, particularly.

01:50:22 ◼   ► Oh, man, it is -- oh, I'm so stressed.

01:50:24 ◼   ► I'm excited. Like, I'm really happy, but I'm so stressed.

01:50:27 ◼   ► - I mean, that's part of the process.

01:50:30 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:50:32 ◼   ► - Like, one thing that I think is going to be telling here --

01:50:35 ◼   ► I don't want you to answer this yet,

01:50:37 ◼   ► because you don't actually know the answer yet.

01:50:39 ◼   ► But I will be asking you at some point in the future,

01:50:42 ◼   ► you know, whether this is going to be like making videos

01:50:47 ◼   ► or whether it's going to be something that you want

01:50:49 ◼   ► to actually keep up with.

01:50:51 ◼   ► And what I think you learned, what I certainly have learned,

01:50:55 ◼   ► is that while I kind of learned how to make videos,

01:51:01 ◼   ► I hated every minute of it, and I kind of decided,

01:51:04 ◼   ► you know what, I probably actually don't enjoy this enough

01:51:06 ◼   ► to really keep doing it.

01:51:08 ◼   ► And you are going through a lot of stuff now with this app

01:51:10 ◼   ► that you either have never had to do

01:51:13 ◼   ► or haven't had to do for a long time,

01:51:15 ◼   ► or maybe only had to do it on a different scale before

01:51:18 ◼   ► or coming from a different place.

01:51:20 ◼   ► And so you are going through all the crap

01:51:23 ◼   ► that is necessary to make your own app.

01:51:25 ◼   ► All the stuff that you don't have to deal with

01:51:28 ◼   ► when you have a full-time job with other people

01:51:31 ◼   ► where you're only like one cog in the machine.

01:51:34 ◼   ► And so you're dealing with a bunch of crap now

01:51:37 ◼   ► that you may or may not actually want to do again

01:51:40 ◼   ► in the future.

01:51:42 ◼   ► And I do not want the answer now,

01:51:43 ◼   ► but I will be asking you at some point soon

01:51:45 ◼   ► to try to evaluate that, to try to say,

01:51:50 ◼   ► is this something that you actually enjoy doing?

01:51:53 ◼   ► 'Cause if all this crap that you have to do

01:51:55 ◼   ► to get a version 1.0 of an app out the door,

01:51:58 ◼   ► you have to get an icon made, get the name squared away,

01:52:01 ◼   ► get the app store submission cracked,

01:52:03 ◼   ► get the in-app purchase, all this stuff that you have to do

01:52:06 ◼   ► to get any 1.0 app in the store

01:52:09 ◼   ► when it's only you working on it,

01:52:11 ◼   ► is that going to be something that you actually want to do

01:52:13 ◼   ► again in the future, or is it going to be such a grind

01:52:16 ◼   ► and it's going to get you so down

01:52:17 ◼   ► that you would rather work with other people still

01:52:20 ◼   ► and not do stuff on your own?

01:52:22 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think that's a fair question.

01:52:23 ◼   ► It's actually something I was thinking about earlier today.

01:52:27 ◼   ► Marco and I were going back and forth

01:52:29 ◼   ► a couple of times during the day

01:52:31 ◼   ► where he would suggest something and I would either say,

01:52:34 ◼   ► "Wow, that's a great idea.

01:52:35 ◼   ► "Give me a few minutes," or, "Oh my god, no.

01:52:37 ◼   ► "I don't want to do that at all."

01:52:38 ◼   ► And then oftentimes I would do it

01:52:39 ◼   ► and then sometimes we would end up that,

01:52:41 ◼   ► I would be convinced that Marco was right.

01:52:42 ◼   ► But sometimes I ignored him.

01:52:44 ◼   ► But anyway, as we were doing this back and forth--

01:52:45 ◼   ► - And by the way, just a quick sidetrack,

01:52:46 ◼   ► if you'll forgive me.

01:52:48 ◼   ► I get design feedback from very talented people

01:52:52 ◼   ► making very good points about my app all the time.

01:52:56 ◼   ► I don't listen to all of it.

01:52:58 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:52:59 ◼   ► 'Cause design suggestions are merely that.

01:53:03 ◼   ► They're suggestions.

01:53:04 ◼   ► Any designer who's giving something

01:53:05 ◼   ► who says it isn't a suggestion is lying to you.

01:53:08 ◼   ► It's always a suggestion

01:53:09 ◼   ► and sometimes it's a really good suggestion

01:53:11 ◼   ► and sometimes they point out problems

01:53:14 ◼   ► that maybe you disagree with the way they solved it

01:53:16 ◼   ► but are still legitimate problems that you need to solve.

01:53:19 ◼   ► But regardless, people's design suggestions are just that.

01:53:24 ◼   ► They are suggestions and you don't have to follow them all.

01:53:27 ◼   ► Again, it is worth considering

01:53:29 ◼   ► why they're making that suggestion

01:53:31 ◼   ► and seeing if maybe you can solve it in a different way

01:53:33 ◼   ► if you don't like their solution.

01:53:35 ◼   ► But it's merely that.

01:53:37 ◼   ► It's merely like how other people would do this

01:53:39 ◼   ► and you can take that with a grain of salt

01:53:40 ◼   ► if you want to and you can, for some of these things,

01:53:42 ◼   ► you can say, you know what, I appreciate the feedback

01:53:45 ◼   ► but I wanna do it my way on this

01:53:47 ◼   ► 'cause I think my way is better

01:53:49 ◼   ► or this is the way I wanna do it

01:53:50 ◼   ► and sometimes you'll be wrong.

01:53:52 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:53:53 ◼   ► But that's part of the learning process

01:53:56 ◼   ► that you're going through too.

01:53:57 ◼   ► You're gonna have to figure out for yourself

01:53:59 ◼   ► when to take that feedback and when to know not to.

01:54:03 ◼   ► - Yeah, I completely agree.

01:54:04 ◼   ► So an example of this, and I'll be specific

01:54:08 ◼   ► because I think it's a really good kind of case study

01:54:10 ◼   ► about something that I really enjoyed that happened,

01:54:13 ◼   ► I think it was earlier today.

01:54:14 ◼   ► It's been such a blur.

01:54:15 ◼   ► I've been working kind of nonstop.

01:54:17 ◼   ► - You sound like six builds today.

01:54:19 ◼   ► - Yeah, it wasn't six but it was a bunch.

01:54:22 ◼   ► I've been really trying to get this thing out the door

01:54:25 ◼   ► but the kind of landing screen and a general run of the app

01:54:30 ◼   ► is, the way it existed 24 hours or less ago

01:54:35 ◼   ► was that you have a navigation bar at the top,

01:54:37 ◼   ► you have a button at the bottom,

01:54:38 ◼   ► and a whole bunch of white space with nothing in the middle.

01:54:41 ◼   ► And I didn't love it but it was not something

01:54:45 ◼   ► I was really looking at fixing at the time.

01:54:47 ◼   ► And Marco very justifiably said,

01:54:49 ◼   ► sometime in the last 24 hours, in a nicer way basically,

01:54:53 ◼   ► "You gotta fix this thing, man, 'cause this looks like crap."

01:54:56 ◼   ► And Marco had come up with several different ideas

01:54:59 ◼   ► which I ignored and I did this knowing

01:55:02 ◼   ► that it was going to drive you frickin' mad and it did.

01:55:05 ◼   ► So not in a screw you Marco way, just in a,

01:55:09 ◼   ► I know this is going to really piss him off

01:55:11 ◼   ► and that will cause both he and I

01:55:14 ◼   ► to find a solution to this problem.

01:55:17 ◼   ► So what I did was I put a 50% opacity bit of text

01:55:22 ◼   ► directly in the center of this humongous swath of white space.

01:55:25 ◼   ► - Yeah, you had this button on the bottom

01:55:27 ◼   ► that's basically like start.

01:55:29 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:55:30 ◼   ► - And there was nothing above it before

01:55:32 ◼   ► so it was a giant white screen with a button

01:55:35 ◼   ► like by the home indicator saying start.

01:55:37 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, yep, yep.

01:55:38 ◼   ► - And so your solution was to,

01:55:40 ◼   ► my suggestion was get rid of the screen entirely, just start.

01:55:44 ◼   ► (laughs)

01:55:45 ◼   ► And your solution was to put like a label, a text label,

01:55:50 ◼   ► like in the middle of the white space saying like

01:55:53 ◼   ► click down there to start or something

01:55:55 ◼   ► and an arrow pointing down. (laughs)

01:55:57 ◼   ► - And I knew that I was never gonna ship that for real

01:56:00 ◼   ► but I knew it would get both of us riled up enough

01:56:03 ◼   ► that it would force us to find a solution.

01:56:06 ◼   ► So I was basically, I was compensating Marco

01:56:09 ◼   ► for helping me by pissing him off.

01:56:11 ◼   ► That's how friends work, right?

01:56:12 ◼   ► But anyway, I bring this up in part to laugh about it

01:56:15 ◼   ► but also in all seriousness

01:56:17 ◼   ► because then what ended up happening was

01:56:19 ◼   ► this morning you and I were going back and forth about

01:56:22 ◼   ► what can we do to fix this?

01:56:23 ◼   ► And there were, there's some other nuance

01:56:26 ◼   ► that I'm gonna kind of gloss over here

01:56:27 ◼   ► that was important in the context of our conversation

01:56:30 ◼   ► but what we ended up deciding was,

01:56:33 ◼   ► hey, what if we move the button to the middle

01:56:35 ◼   ► and also when you tapped this go button

01:56:39 ◼   ► which is the button that would go and search for

01:56:41 ◼   ► all these different services for images

01:56:43 ◼   ► for all of your contacts,

01:56:45 ◼   ► that can use a whole lot of data.

01:56:47 ◼   ► And so the way it worked before today

01:56:49 ◼   ► was when you tapped that button,

01:56:51 ◼   ► it would look and see if you were on cell

01:56:53 ◼   ► or if you were on wifi and if you were on LTE,

01:56:56 ◼   ► it would say, well, well, well, are you sure?

01:56:58 ◼   ► 'Cause this could use a whole lot of data

01:57:00 ◼   ► and there would be a prompt and then you could say basically,

01:57:02 ◼   ► yeah, yeah, fine, whatever, or, oh, you're right,

01:57:04 ◼   ► I'll do it later.

01:57:05 ◼   ► And I never really liked that prompt to begin with

01:57:09 ◼   ► but it was important to me that the user was at least aware

01:57:12 ◼   ► that, hey, this is potentially gonna use a bunch of data,

01:57:14 ◼   ► are you sure?

01:57:16 ◼   ► Well, not only did I not like the prompt

01:57:18 ◼   ► but the, well, not the podcast, I love the podcast,

01:57:21 ◼   ► I'm talking about the prompt in my app but I'm just,

01:57:23 ◼   ► anyway, not only did I not like the alert

01:57:26 ◼   ► but on top of that, the code that was holding

01:57:30 ◼   ► all that together, I really didn't like

01:57:32 ◼   ► and it was one of those things where I'm not gonna fix it

01:57:34 ◼   ► right now but I'm gonna have to re-architect this

01:57:36 ◼   ► at some point.

01:57:37 ◼   ► So I already didn't like that whole block of code,

01:57:40 ◼   ► I didn't like this white space, I didn't like the alert

01:57:43 ◼   ► and then what Marco and I ended up concluding was,

01:57:46 ◼   ► hey, let's move the button to the middle

01:57:48 ◼   ► and put a nice little piece of text below it

01:57:50 ◼   ► that basically says, hey, we really,

01:57:52 ◼   ► it's really recommended you do this over Wi-Fi

01:57:54 ◼   ► and that solved everything at once.

01:57:57 ◼   ► It got rid of, or maybe not solved

01:57:59 ◼   ► but at least dramatically improved everything at once.

01:58:02 ◼   ► So it got rid of that huge swath of white space

01:58:05 ◼   ► or broke it up, I guess, if nothing else.

01:58:07 ◼   ► It got rid of that ugly alert that I really didn't like,

01:58:11 ◼   ► it got rid of all the code for that ugly alert

01:58:14 ◼   ► that I didn't really like and in the heat of the moment,

01:58:17 ◼   ► like I was never annoyed at Marco

01:58:19 ◼   ► but I was annoyed at the situation

01:58:20 ◼   ► because I felt like neither of us were coming up

01:58:22 ◼   ► with good answers and I was just getting frustrated by it

01:58:25 ◼   ► but then when, it was mostly Marco I think

01:58:27 ◼   ► but one way or another, when the two of us

01:58:29 ◼   ► reached this conclusion, it was like,

01:58:32 ◼   ► ah, this is exactly what I wanted, this is so much better

01:58:36 ◼   ► and I don't wanna put words in your mouth, Marco

01:58:39 ◼   ► but for me, that whole exchange was one of the things

01:58:43 ◼   ► I miss most about work because even though

01:58:46 ◼   ► I do quite like being my own independent person,