00:00:00 ◼ ► I have a very, very mini topic that is so small I decided to use it now as a pre-show because it's stupid.
00:00:07 ◼ ► All right, everyone look at the clock. Let's see how this one goes. All right, carry on.
00:00:12 ◼ ► All right, so I've decided that I should read more. Oh, I'm here for this. You read all day. You're always staring at the computer screen. There's words all over it.
00:00:21 ◼ ► Well, you know, it's funny, like, you know, for somebody who used to make a service that was primarily about reading things. It was about reading things later, not now. Important distinction.
00:00:29 ◼ ► Yeah, well anyway, I haven't really used it in a long time. I just started again recently because I just have not really been reading web articles and stuff.
00:00:39 ◼ ► And I mean, frankly, the web is a dumpster fire and there aren't that many articles that I really intend to save and read from the web these days, which is its own issue.
00:00:47 ◼ ► You should make an app that makes it easier to read those without all the ads and junk in them. You should do that.
00:00:52 ◼ ► By the way, God, like, Apple News is such a crappy experience because there's just giant horrible ads, like, every two paragraphs.
00:01:01 ◼ ► And even like I recently, I mentioned in brief a while ago that I started paying for a New York Times subscription because I was tired of like rationing how often I would click on their links and it felt stupid.
00:01:12 ◼ ► And it is also a terrible experience. Like, I pay for this. I pay for that and I pay for Apple News, you know, through iCloud Plus or whatever, and both of them just fill the experience with ads constantly.
00:01:25 ◼ ► No wonder nobody reads stuff on the web anymore because they ruined it. Like, it's a terrible experience.
00:01:30 ◼ ► And even when you pay for it, you can give them money and it's still full of horrible ads, like, every two paragraphs. It's ridiculous.
00:01:38 ◼ ► Anyway, setting that aside, I decided I should read more, just not that, but, you know, maybe the occasional book or, you know, longer articles or whatever.
00:01:47 ◼ ► I've kind of like lost my attention span for reading and it's very difficult and I thought that's probably not good for myself overall.
00:01:52 ◼ ► So anyway, I decided to read more and I decided what I should try again is an e-reader because I have used e-readers in the past.
00:02:00 ◼ ► I have really enjoyed using them. I spent a lot of time using them. I have, in the meantime, since mailed them all to John Siracusa as packing material for other objects that are more useful.
00:02:09 ◼ ► But e-readers are really inexpensive and they've come a long way and I figured, let me give one a shot.
00:02:14 ◼ ► So I got the, at first I tried to get, there's this brand called Books with an X on the end, B-O-O-X.
00:02:21 ◼ ► They make these fairly interesting e-reader tablets that are basically Android tablets with the full Google Play Store available.
00:02:35 ◼ ► And so you can run, like, so I thought, like, what, wouldn't that be interesting? I could like run the Instapaper app and even I could run the Kindle app in case I don't like their built-in bookstore or whatever.
00:02:45 ◼ ► So I could do that but still have the benefits of an e-reader, which, you know, I really do enjoy e-ink as a screen technology.
00:02:51 ◼ ► I like the way it looks. I like reading from it. It has a lot of advantages in terms of battery life and a lot of versatility with things like, you know, viewing outdoors.
00:03:02 ◼ ► You know, one of the places I've read is in the summer on the ferry where I'm often sitting on the roof of the ferry outside in direct sunlight.
00:03:09 ◼ ► And it's somewhat difficult to read, you know, an iPad or iPhone screen in direct sunlight, especially while you're wearing sunglasses.
00:03:15 ◼ ► And when the polarizing direction of the screen is, like, the wrong way for your sunglasses so it makes it even dimmer.
00:03:21 ◼ ► Anyway, I thought, let me try a modern e-reader to see, you know, it's been a number of years since I've had one.
00:03:39 ◼ ► So I decided to get one. I did not know this existed at all. I decided to try the color one, which is not color e-ink.
00:03:59 ◼ ► I don't know. They have a bunch of item names that are all very, very, very similar to each other.
00:04:15 ◼ ► I sent it back the long way. I'm like, fine, let me, you know what, screw this, let me just try a Kindle.
00:04:20 ◼ ► And so I got the latest Kindle Oasis. I really enjoyed the last one before I stopped using it for five years and then sent it to John Siracusa.
00:04:32 ◼ ► So the answer is not a lot is new. In fact, they're actually worse than they used to be because certain features that I used to enjoy,
00:04:39 ◼ ► like the old like magazine newsstand thing built in, are gone now. They just stopped doing them.
00:04:44 ◼ ► So like there's certain things like I just, you know, if you want like, you know, the daily, you know, say the New York Times delivered to your Kindle,
00:04:50 ◼ ► that used to be a thing that they would make in a custom format. And it was actually really nice.
00:04:55 ◼ ► It was a nice experience if you were willing to pay for it. And as far as I can tell, that's mostly or entirely gone now.
00:05:01 ◼ ► And some of those things you can get in various ways. Most of them you can't. And the experience for all of them is worse now.
00:05:06 ◼ ► Also, the Kindle software in general has just gotten more complicated. The experience is way, first of all, it's really slow to navigate stuff.
00:05:15 ◼ ► And I forget whether it was always that slow or whether it's gotten more bloated over time.
00:05:20 ◼ ► It's always, I mean, I haven't used a modern one. I'm trying to figure out what the heck version of the Kindle I have.
00:05:26 ◼ ► But I can tell you that my Kindle, and this is, I think the first one I ever had, which Stephen Hackett sent to me,
00:05:32 ◼ ► but I briefly used Erin's and she's had Kindles on and off for years and hers were always dog slow. Mine is dog slow.
00:05:43 ◼ ► And to be fair, I'm not just talking about the E Ink refresh. That's fine. I'm okay with that. I accept that. I've lived with that for a long time. It's fine.
00:05:51 ◼ ► I'm talking about you push a button, one, two, three, then the screen flashes and does something.
00:06:03 ◼ ► It's really a pretty poor experience. And as they've moved them all towards being touch screens and touch first UIs, I think that has not helped them.
00:06:11 ◼ ► Things that I've been spoiled by in Apple world, like I'm trying to hold the Kindle to read with it.
00:06:17 ◼ ► And occasionally the edge of my hand will just slightly register as a touch on the edge of the screen.
00:06:28 ◼ ► I spent the ridiculous sum of money to get the one model they offer with page turn buttons.
00:06:36 ◼ ► So you have page turn buttons that you can use, but you can also tap the screen whether you mean to or not.
00:06:49 ◼ ► Because the whole point of it is make the thing really super small on three sides so you can hold it.
00:06:54 ◼ ► Anyway, every Amazon Kindle I've ever gotten has been a frustration experience of like, I love 75% of this.
00:07:02 ◼ ► And then they just fall over on what seem like things that could be really basic settings or small implementation changes.
00:07:08 ◼ ► And they just don't do it. Because they just don't. Amazon's not good at making things nice.
00:07:20 ◼ ► Meanwhile, then the books thing pops back in stock and I'm like, let me give it a shot. What the heck?
00:07:27 ◼ ► It is even weirder than I could have possibly imagined. So first of all, it's a Chinese company.
00:07:34 ◼ ► And the interface is in English, but a lot of the interface that you run into ends up dropping back to Chinese.
00:07:45 ◼ ► Sometimes you'll end up seeing a wall of Chinese. I'm like, well, I don't really understand this.
00:07:50 ◼ ► I don't really know what to do here. The firmware update, the update notes will all be in Chinese.
00:08:03 ◼ ► So the way they do color, I think I figured it out. I think the way they do it is there is a regular black and white e-ink screen below.
00:08:27 ◼ ► And the colors are not at all vibrant. They're very, very low saturation, very basic colors.
00:08:35 ◼ ► It almost looks like you took a picture of an old box of Crayola crayons and ran it through a sepia filter.
00:08:47 ◼ ► And everything about the books tablet made the Kindle feel like you discovered SSDs for the first time.
00:08:55 ◼ ► Like the Kindle I thought was god slow. Oh my god, the books tablet. Everything is even slower.
00:09:02 ◼ ► To the point where you tap something and you might wait 10 seconds before it then updates the screen to go to whatever you navigated.
00:09:10 ◼ ► And it's not, this is simple stuff, like navigating to the library and between pages of screens of apps or whatever.
00:09:32 ◼ ► And it has a drawing app and I'm sure there's a few more in the Play Store if you want.
00:09:41 ◼ ► I was very impressed. I know there's a tablet called the Remarkable that's been around for a while that I frequently get Instagram ads for.
00:09:54 ◼ ► Anyway, going back. So this device was infuriating because it was like, okay it's an Android tablet.
00:10:03 ◼ ► Add E-ing on top of that. I thought it was going to be really cool and it really wasn't.
00:10:15 ◼ ► As I mentioned last week I got an iPhone SE refurb because I needed a phone to pair with Adam's watch and I didn't have an SE.
00:10:23 ◼ ► Because all of my old test devices for like, you know, keep this thing on iOS 15, keep this thing on iOS 16.
00:10:27 ◼ ► All my old test devices aged out at iOS 15. None of them can run 16 because they're all like, you know, the iPhone SE, the iPhone 7.
00:10:39 ◼ ► And because we're about to enter beta season so I want to have like a set of devices I can put on all the new betas without disrupting my main stuff.
00:10:46 ◼ ► And then at the end of the summer be able to keep a set of devices, whatever it is, keep one set of devices on iOS 16 and watch OS 9 and whatever else.
00:11:14 ◼ ► Because all of our iPads have either been given to family members or are currently in use or whatever.
00:11:47 ◼ ► I thought, let me, why don't I just set up this iPad mini since I have to have it as a test device.
00:12:24 ◼ ► And all those are signed, like that's all signed into my real account, but then nothing else is there.
00:12:41 ◼ ► Not all. You know, if I was reading it in direct sunlight on the top of the ferry, the Kindle is still better for that.
00:12:51 ◼ ► There are more options, there's more customization to be had, it's way more responsive.
00:12:56 ◼ ► You get all the Apples built in, like palm rejection, making sure you don't have erroneous touches, all of that's built in.
00:13:04 ◼ ► It is just so much nicer and it was so much faster to set up, so much easier to manage.
00:13:11 ◼ ► And again, the direct sunlight viewing is not going to be as good. It isn't water resistant the way a Kindle is.
00:13:30 ◼ ► And it's no contest compared to an iPad mini that was actually fairly close to them in price.
00:13:38 ◼ ► Why don't you try the Kobo? Kobo is Jason's favorite. I'll put a link in the show notes.
00:13:44 ◼ ► It's his most recent e-reader roundup, which was I think 2021, but I think he picked Kobo as his top.
00:13:58 ◼ ► For a second I believed you. I was like, wait, that explains everything. But no, I was going to say the exact same thing.
00:14:02 ◼ ► Is the Tobor joke from the incomparable? People who get it get it, people who don't don't.
00:14:06 ◼ ► Yeah, and I should credit Jason because I've read the Six Colors articles on e-readers every time he publishes them.
00:14:19 ◼ ► But he cares a lot more than I do about this stuff and he has way more experience with these things.
00:14:26 ◼ ► And part of that is like, you know, I figure if I'm going to have a non-iPad reader, I figure, well, Kindle is probably best because it has the ecosystem.
00:14:38 ◼ ► Also, for whatever it's worth, I really like the old default Kindle font, PMN Cecilia. I love that font.
00:14:47 ◼ ► And that font is available in all of the Kindle apps on other platforms and on real Kindles themselves, labeled Cecilia.
00:14:53 ◼ ► And I don't think any other reading app offers it. And so I kind of like, you know, I'm a snob in certain ways.
00:15:00 ◼ ► I love reading with that font, like long stuff. So I even miss it when I'm using Instapaper because they don't have it.
00:15:09 ◼ ► But anyway, so, you know, Kobo, where Kobo is better, I think, in Jason's experience is I believe it offers more option to not have force justified text.
00:15:34 ◼ ► Probably because of some weird detail about like the weird mobi format they were using and whether the publisher has enabled some other flag in the EPUB or whatever.
00:15:43 ◼ ► Bottom line though is that with a Kindle you oftentimes are forced to take force justification and it's really hard to read stuff that way.
00:15:50 ◼ ► So, you know, for a device devoted to reading you would expect it to have a really great reading experience and it kind of doesn't in a lot of cases, which is unfortunate.
00:15:58 ◼ ► So Kobo is better, I think, in those areas. But I don't want to lose the ecosystem advantage that I get from Amazon.
00:16:13 ◼ ► I have access to Apple Books, I have the Kindle app itself, which the Kindle app offers almost the same reading experience as hardware Kindle devices.
00:16:22 ◼ ► But with smoother animations and faster responsiveness and higher resolution for images and stuff like that.
00:16:31 ◼ ► All that is to say I've tried e-readers again. I think if I read a lot of novels while sitting in bathtubs or pools I would love the Kindles.
00:16:46 ◼ ► So I'm glad you phrased it exactly that way because for me, now granted I'm on an older Kindle.
00:16:58 ◼ ► Apparently according to Amazon I registered it with Amazon in 2016 and I don't think it was new at that point.
00:17:16 ◼ ► I do read novels on the beach when I go to the beach in the summer. I don't live there so it's a very rare occurrence.
00:17:21 ◼ ► But what I love about my Kindle is that I can always read on my Kindle and it is always comfortable.
00:17:35 ◼ ► It's ridiculous how big I have the font. But I do that so this way whether or not I have my contact lenses in.
00:17:49 ◼ ► You just don't look at your Kindle screen with the font cranked up to see if you can fit more words than I could fit in my 160 by 160 palm screen that I read books on.
00:18:12 ◼ ► Because pretty much any time anyone looks at my Kindle, especially people who have Kindles, they're like,
00:18:26 ◼ ► I understand what you're saying Marco that you've kind of built yourself a similar situation.
00:18:30 ◼ ► But there's no chance for distraction. I can use it at night and it has its own backlight but it can get super crazy dim.
00:18:36 ◼ ► I can use it in direct light. I couldn't agree with you more Marco that I love the reading experience of e-ink.
00:18:42 ◼ ► It feels so much more like -- well not literally feels -- but it gives you that figurative feel that's much more like paper.
00:18:51 ◼ ► I love my Kindle and if it broke I would replace it with either another Kindle again for ecosystem reasons like Marco was saying.
00:19:09 ◼ ► I can see how you landed there but for me, give me e-ink all day every day because that is so much more comfortable to read in my personal opinion.
00:19:18 ◼ ► Well, how long was that? That was about 20 minutes? That was your super quick mini topic?
00:19:28 ◼ ► It's not called the merch store, please, please. Let's not sully it with this terrible name.
00:19:32 ◼ ► It's the ATP store. The ATP store has returned. Time was that Casey would herald the return to the ATP store. But now he keeps saying merch and I don't know why.
00:19:44 ◼ ► The ATP, don't call it merch. Don't call it merchandise. It's just the ATP store. It's back, baby.
00:19:56 ◼ ► Nevertheless, the store is back. We have a couple of offerings. We have the Mac Pro Believe shirt, which we're going to talk a little bit more about in a moment.
00:20:04 ◼ ► Suffice to say, it is the top of the modern Mac Pro with the word "believe" beneath it.
00:20:09 ◼ ► Then we have the ATP Six Colors logo and we have that in monochrome on several flavors of material.
00:20:23 ◼ ► Additionally, we have brought back from the ATP vault the Pro Max Triumph shirt, which has all six of the Pro Max through the years in profile in multicolored ink.
00:20:42 ◼ ► We also brought back the ATP Polo. You're welcome for the six of you that really, really like it, of which I'm one of them.
00:20:48 ◼ ► And the ATP hoodie is back. So if you need to perhaps re-up your hoodie, I wear mine so darn much that I'm probably going to get it back up just to be safe.
00:21:08 ◼ ► So go to your member page on ATP.fm and you should see your special discount code that you can enter in at Cotton Bureau to save 15%.
00:21:20 ◼ ► And additionally, this will be available until Saturday, May 6. I didn't do this exercise with you last time, so we'll do it this time.
00:21:27 ◼ ► You are somewhere right now. Maybe you're walking, maybe you're driving, maybe you're just sitting around listening.
00:21:32 ◼ ► Wherever you are, think to yourself, "Is it safe and appropriate for me to buy an ATP something right now?"
00:21:41 ◼ ► If you're driving, think about where you're going to end up. Are you going to the office? Are you going to Whole Foods or Kroger or something?
00:21:50 ◼ ► What you're going to do is you're going to park your car or stop walking, wherever the case may be, and then you're going to go to ATP.fm/store.
00:21:55 ◼ ► And you're going to do that and you're going to buy some merchandise or stuff. Whatever, John, I'm sorry.
00:22:00 ◼ ► You're going to buy some stuff and you're going to do that before May 6th. You're going to do that today.
00:22:06 ◼ ► So this way, I don't get to make fun of you for being that dum-dum that says to me, "Oh, is it still open? I forgot!"
00:22:17 ◼ ► I would say we always try to do these sales for three episodes of the show. This is the middle episode.
00:22:24 ◼ ► The next episode will be the very last one. And the problem with trying to say, "Oh, I've got one episode left. I'll just deal with that stuff then."
00:22:35 ◼ ► And the store is only live for a couple of days after the publication of next week's episode.
00:22:40 ◼ ► I myself have almost forgotten to buy stuff. Alright, so one time I did forget to get stuff from the store.
00:22:48 ◼ ► Of course, I had an inside line of the Com Bureau folks and I said, "Hey, can you get me these items?"
00:22:55 ◼ ► So I would say this is the time to do your ordering. Don't wait until next week because it's only going to be a few days after the show is published.
00:23:06 ◼ ► And I'll just remind everybody that if you don't care about shirts or don't want to pay for expensive shipping on a mug or whatever, but you still want to give the show money, membership.
00:23:16 ◼ ► As for products, I want a few clarifying points on the Mac Pro Believe shirts. The last episode I said it is the duty of the audience of this show to find out which of you actually got a WWDC ticket because none of us did so far.
00:23:32 ◼ ► And pick one of you to be the designated person to take one for the team, the team being ATP listeners, buy a Mac Pro Believe shirt of your choice, wear it to WWDC and make sure Apple executives see it.
00:23:47 ◼ ► And I'll be happy to say that many people from our audience said, "Hey, I got a ticket and I'm planning on going and I ordered a Believe shirt."
00:23:58 ◼ ► Lots of people suggested that we buy this shirt and send it to various Apple executives, which seemed like a reasonable idea, but I'm not quite sure how to do that because I don't know what their mailing address is or whatever.
00:24:15 ◼ ► And I had to decide what kind of shirt, you know, it's going to be a Mac Pro Believe shirt, right? I had to decide what he would like.
00:24:20 ◼ ► So I looked at his most recent, I don't know if it was, I think it was his most recent video, like the event video.
00:24:24 ◼ ► I forget what they were announcing. I just went in my archive of event videos because of course I save all these videos.
00:24:28 ◼ ► I loaded it up and I scrubbed it until I saw John Turnus and he was wearing black from head to toe.
00:24:37 ◼ ► Because I assume they picked their own outfits for, you know, like no one's forcing them to wear all black.
00:24:44 ◼ ► So I got a black Mac Pro Believe shirt and I sent it to John Turnus and then the address of like the spaceship in Apple Park.
00:24:51 ◼ ► Will that get to him? They probably have people screening their mail to make sure they're not getting sent, you know, anthrax or whatever.
00:24:57 ◼ ► I hope it gets to him. But anyway, the reason I sent it to him is because like I said, from what I've heard, John Turnus actually does believe in the Mac Pro and I wanted to send that to him as a form of support within the organization.
00:25:07 ◼ ► Maybe he can just wear it to a meeting, you know, ask me about my shirt, right? Anyway, so I did that.
00:25:12 ◼ ► And the other thing is for the people who got a ticket and who are going to wear their shirt to WWDC, on the off chance that some Apple person actually asked them about it, like an executive or whatever,
00:25:24 ◼ ► like I said last time, you can always just lie and say, oh, I really love the Mac Pro or whatever, or you can tell the truth and say, I don't care about the Mac Pro, but you know, some people on ATP do and explain all that stuff.
00:25:35 ◼ ► But there's a nuance I feel like I was leaving out there because I thought of this when I was seeing something about it. I was like interviewing with Tim Cook or something. Wasn't there some interview with him recently? Some article?
00:25:45 ◼ ► There was an interview with him. I think he was in GQ recently. Anyway, I was reading an interview with Tim Cook and I'm always thinking about, you know, we always have these conversations with the Apple community about what it's like to talk to Apple executives and how hard it is to,
00:25:56 ◼ ► how hard it is to get them off message. Like they're all, you know, media trained and the people who do talk to the public usually have some practice doing it. So you're not going to get them to say something off the cuff or whatever.
00:26:05 ◼ ► The only person who got away with that was Steve Jobs. Even the CEO, especially Tim Cook, doesn't do that. He could do that. Who's going to yell at him other than, you know, I don't know, the board or the shareholders or whatever, but Steve Jobs didn't care about that.
00:26:16 ◼ ► But anyway, everybody's so controlled. Right. So there is the problem that say you're sitting there and like, you know, some important Apple executive comes wandering over to you and says, Hey, nice shirt. And you have this like, this is it. I have my opportunity to talk about this podcast shirt that I wore with an Apple person.
00:26:31 ◼ ► And I feel like what's going to end up happening is the interaction is going to go such that the Apple executive comes away thinking, isn't it nice? A customer likes our products, right? That you're like, you're like, this is your favorite Apple product. And you wore a shirt talking about your favorite Apple product. And they'll come away thinking it was not so nice. Even our obscure products that most people don't care about. There's somebody who really cares about them. Oh, isn't that nice?
00:26:55 ◼ ► And I feel like that's the wrong message. And it's really hard not to have that message go through. Because if you're an Apple executive, and you exchange pleasantries with a person who's wearing a shirt with a picture of your product on it, you're going to come away thinking, a fan of our products.
00:27:07 ◼ ► But the actual message is, I don't know how you would convey this. It's basically impossible. I'm just I'm just I'm not telling you what to do. I'm just acknowledging a problem here.
00:27:16 ◼ ► What we want them to say is like, we care that this product exists and we wish you treated it better. And it's very difficult when you meet an Apple executive to tell them something that you think they did poorly. Because A, that's rude, right? So don't do that.
00:27:31 ◼ ► And B, like that's not the time or place to do that. And yet, that's that's the whole point of the shirt. You don't have to say that you can just wear it.
00:27:38 ◼ ► And that places blog posts on Twitter. Yeah, exactly. You know, all right, like, whatever, right? Yeah, exactly. Write a blog post or, you know, just write an article in a publication of your choice or talk about it on a podcast. When you meet an Apple executive, they just want to hear the pleasantries.
00:27:51 ◼ ► That's where the shirt comes in. The shirt should sort of speak on its own. I feel like you don't have to say anything about it. You can just wear it. And that will be the message, the silent message that that you believe in the Mac Pro.
00:28:01 ◼ ► And the silent message is, we don't think you believe Apple. We believe here in the audience. We wish you believe, too. We wish you would update it more than every five years or so. We wish it wasn't always on life support. Like, those are all things that you can't say that I'm hoping the shirt conveys.
00:28:14 ◼ ► But I feel like if you actually had a chance to talk to one of them, that's not the right time to actually discuss that. But I don't know what you should say. Maybe you should just sit there silently and point to the shirt. I don't know.
00:28:24 ◼ ► Anyway, I just wanted to acknowledge that and the difficulty of talking to Apple executives and my hope that my shirt does some talking for us.
00:28:31 ◼ ► Godspeed, John. Godspeed. Speaking of good luck to you, what's going on with your bug these days?
00:28:42 ◼ ► If you've got a podcast that you think people might hear about your... Anyway, this is the bug I talked about on three episodes so far, one of which it was cut out of.
00:28:49 ◼ ► Last episode wasn't cut out and I talked about it again. I've got some more progress on that bug.
00:28:55 ◼ ► To refresh your memory, the bug is that when I drag a window in any application around, if it's near any other windows, it gets super slow and laggy and jumps around.
00:29:05 ◼ ► And if you hide other windows so that they're not visible or you move them away from the window you're moving, it chills out a little bit and doesn't do it as much.
00:29:14 ◼ ► It seems kind of like a bug in the window snapping behavior that I added to Mac OS many years ago where if one window comes close to another one, it snaps to its edge or whatever.
00:29:23 ◼ ► And I couldn't figure out what this was. At first I removed some third-party software and I was like, "Oh, it went away. I've solved it." But then it came back.
00:29:29 ◼ ► And so I've been trying to track it down more, talking about it on Mastodon, communicating with various people, back-channeling with Apple because of course the feedback gets no response.
00:29:39 ◼ ► Since then I've done some more stuff. I removed more third-party stuff because last time I said I'd removed all third-party kernel extensions and all third-party system extensions as evidence from, what is it, kextload and system extension control or something? What the hell is the command?
00:29:55 ◼ ► System extension CTL is the one for system extensions and kextat. Both of those are showing zero, but there's more stuff.
00:30:10 ◼ ► I'm going on a rampage removing third-party stuff because the one tiny bit of back-channel information I got was that lots of other people aren't having this problem.
00:30:18 ◼ ► Some other people are and I hear about it from Mastodon, but lots of other people aren't. So I'm like, "This has got to be something that I'm using, something that's specific to my setup."
00:30:28 ◼ ► So I removed Steermouse, which is my mouse acceleration thing. And I was like, "Oh, that's got to be it. I can't believe I didn't think of that." Because it shows up as a, used to be a preference pane and now it's a settings, whatever.
00:30:39 ◼ ► But it's not a kernel extension or a system extension, but it is a thing that has to do with the mouse, so I installed that.
00:30:45 ◼ ► Then I was communicating on Mastodon with Steve Trout and Smith. I sent him some of my spin dumps that I had sent him the feedback and he looked at them and he saw some Adobe stuff in there.
00:30:56 ◼ ► And he's like, "I can't tell if this is a symptom because Adobe has a crash reporter that catches crashes and it was showing up in the spin dump."
00:31:02 ◼ ► And I was like, "Fine, wipe all Adobe stuff off the system," which was not easy. Let me tell you, I used the Adobe uninstaller to remove all Adobe stuff.
00:31:10 ◼ ► There was still more Adobe stuff. And I know that because after I used the Adobe uninstaller and I rebooted, upon login I got a crash report screen from an Adobe thing.
00:31:19 ◼ ► It just luckily gave me the path to the Adobe thing. So in applications, utilities, there was a bunch of old Adobe stuff.
00:31:27 ◼ ► Each time I did one of these things, remove Steermouse, remove Adobe, I would reboot to clean everything out.
00:31:34 ◼ ► And the problem, what I had been telling people on Mastodon, is the problem goes away when I reboot, but it comes back within minutes to hours.
00:31:42 ◼ ► Which is not a very precise thing, but that had been my experience. It always comes back, but it doesn't come back immediately.
00:31:48 ◼ ► Sometimes it comes back in a few minutes, sometimes it comes back in many hours. I didn't understand why.
00:31:53 ◼ ► So after removing Steermouse, I rebooted, I'm like, "It's not coming back, I fixed it." But then it came back.
00:31:58 ◼ ► After I wiped everything Adobe, I'm like, "It's not coming back, I fixed it." But then it came back.
00:32:03 ◼ ► Also, Typinator, which is my text expander type thingy for abbreviation stuff, that recently had a Ventura update.
00:32:11 ◼ ► So it was a for-pay update, but I'm like, "I'm going to pay for it, I use it all the time."
00:32:15 ◼ ► "Fixes compatibility Ventura," it said, "Yes, yes, I updated that." I didn't uninstall it because it has to do with typing, not mousing.
00:32:25 ◼ ► And I also uploaded a new YouTube video, which we will put in the show notes, that tries to better demonstrate the problem.
00:32:34 ◼ ► So I was using TextEdit as the windows that I'm going to be near, and I was using Stickies as my window that I move around.
00:32:40 ◼ ► You can look at the video. The main reason I put that up there is all the conversations I'm asked to have,
00:32:44 ◼ ► it's very difficult to tell if other people are actually having the same problem as me.
00:32:53 ◼ ► And if you are dragging windows around while your computer is slow and laggy, you'll be like, "Hey, I have that problem too."
00:32:57 ◼ ► But I'm like, "No, mine is a very specific problem. It has nothing to do with load on the system, it doesn't go away.
00:33:03 ◼ ► Once it starts happening, it is permanent and stays there forever, 100% reproducible for hours and days and weeks.
00:33:09 ◼ ► It will not go away, and it is always there, and it has a specific behavior with respect to other windows that are near it."
00:33:18 ◼ ► And through discussing it with people, some people I eliminated said, "You're having a different problem than I am."
00:33:23 ◼ ► Other people still said they looked at the video and said, "Yeah, that's exactly what's happening to me."
00:33:28 ◼ ► And I would ask them questions, "Are you running any Adobe stuff? Are you running Steermouse?"
00:33:34 ◼ ► I did have a breakthrough though, because I finally figured out, after I reboot, what makes the problem come back.
00:33:46 ◼ ► And I'd almost declare I'd fix it a mess, and they're like, "Let me wait a day. Let me wait two days."
00:33:49 ◼ ► And it would come back, and I'm like, "Damn it. I didn't get rid of it." I figured out what makes it come back.
00:34:02 ◼ ► And that's why it was throwing me off, because I switched to my wife's account to mess with the photo library, right?
00:34:09 ◼ ► So I still have to hop over to her account. Not as much as I used to, because I can do most of this stuff with shared library.
00:34:14 ◼ ► But when I want to do real organization into albums and stuff, or the face recognition, because it doesn't share face recognition either, I have to switch to her account.
00:34:22 ◼ ► So it's basically like, after I reboot, how long before I fast-use a switch into my wife's account?
00:34:27 ◼ ► And as soon as I fast-use a switch into my wife's account, it starts happening in both of our accounts.
00:34:38 ◼ ► So I updated the feedback. I already updated the feedback. This video updated the feedback.
00:35:07 ◼ ► I haven't put anything back on. I haven't put Steermouse back on. I haven't put Adobe anything back on.
00:35:25 ◼ ► Steve Trout and Smith had a lot of ideas about the Adobe things, reading the window list and stuff like that.
00:35:36 ◼ ► Here's the fun thing about it. If I log out of my wife's account and it switches back to mine,
00:35:47 ◼ ► I'll log out of her account, switch back to mine, grab the Sticky's window, shake it around,
00:35:59 ◼ ► Whatever it's doing behind the scenes to finish the logout of my wife's account eventually gets done,
00:36:23 ◼ ► Anyway, I hope someone at Apple looks at this, or I hope it cures itself in the next update or something.
00:36:36 ◼ ► At this point, now that I know sort of, not what's causing it, but how to trigger it and how to work around it,
00:36:43 ◼ ► I'm a little bit less inclined to keep removing software for my system, but I probably will.
00:36:54 ◼ ► because I am, this is not scientific at all, but I can't think of anyone I know that runs multiple accounts on their Mac.
00:37:05 ◼ ► I do. This is not, like, my wife's Mac Studio, that's the one where people are likely to log into it,
00:37:23 ◼ ► so it actually happens less frequently on my computer than the other computers in the house.
00:37:43 ◼ ► "Are you logged into more than one account?" Some of them were, some of them weren't, so...
00:37:50 ◼ ► That's why I'm hoping all these spin dumps I'm uploading to Apple will tell them something.
00:37:54 ◼ ► Yeah, and before people ask, like, there are limits to the amount of inconvenience I'm willing to incur to deal with this,
00:38:03 ◼ ► "You should do SafeBoot, you should wipe your entire computer and make a fresh account."
00:38:27 ◼ ► Well, on your computers it's different, but on the back end of Intel computers you hold down shift during boot,
00:38:31 ◼ ► on your computers you hold down the power button and there's something that's a SafeBoot.
00:39:00 ◼ ► and then just try switching, doing faster switching and see if that makes it come back.
00:41:17 ◼ ► the number of ports is fairly low, and the cost per port is fairly high on many of them.
00:41:48 ◼ ► you've been able to get, like, a 10-port USB-A hub that had USB 3.0 speeds on many of those ports
00:42:11 ◼ ► So I hope we get to that world soon with USB-C, but this is an important step to get there.
00:42:29 ◼ ► Google Authenticator now will sync your 2FA codes if you wanted to, which is super exciting.
00:42:37 ◼ ► Yeah, I would have liked this before I had to spend three and a half hours sitting in the Apple Store
00:42:48 ◼ ► Since dealing with that, I have actually migrated all of my two-factor stuff into iCloud Keychain,
00:43:03 ◼ ► Kind of like how I use Chrome and Safari all day long, and Chrome doesn't integrate with iCloud Keychain.
00:43:26 ◼ ► But, even with the cool shortcut from Ricky Mandela that lets you jump into the passwords...
00:43:41 ◼ ► It's the second level thing, but you can put that on your home screen and jump right to it.
00:44:06 ◼ ► You launch the app, you can see all your stuff there, and you just tap the one that you want.
00:44:42 ◼ ► But I'm glad it has syncing because that will save me a lot of headaches next time I upgrade my devices.
00:44:50 ◼ ► iCloud Keychain is end-to-end encrypted, which means that Apple can't see anything in my iCloud Keychain.
00:45:03 ◼ ► You can see an explanation on this Twitter thread that we'll put in the show notes from.
00:45:19 ◼ ► In other words, they intentionally didn't do this because it gives Google the ability to save people's bacon if they screw up real bad.
00:45:26 ◼ ► And that is a tradeoff. But I just want people to know, don't enable this syncing if you care about Google, the company, having access to your two-factor codes.
00:45:35 ◼ ► Again, this is not for passwords. This is just for two-factor authentication code things.
00:45:39 ◼ ► All right, tell me about Duncan Wilcox's woes with regard to duplicates in Apple Photos.
00:45:55 ◼ ► So they recently added it for shared libraries, and I've been working through that with my giant collection.
00:45:59 ◼ ► The last episode I said that I had been informed that duplicate detection is not as smart as you might think it is.
00:46:09 ◼ ► It puts them in recently deleted or whatever and I just back them all up and shove them in an archive somewhere so that if it did screw up something, I have that thing there to save my bacon.
00:46:19 ◼ ► So that way I don't have to visually vet every single duplicate that resolves because it literally resolved 30,000 of them for me.
00:46:30 ◼ ► Duncan says, "Regarding Apple Photo duplicates, check your Photos projects, especially if you made some recently with Motif or similar."
00:46:37 ◼ ► By projects he means like the little photo books that you can make or whatever. They're in the sidebar on Apple Photos on the Mac.
00:46:43 ◼ ► You see a list of all your products if you made a calendar or a printed book or whatever.
00:46:47 ◼ ► So Duncan says, "I think mine are missing photos like Swiss cheese following the deleting of many duplicates. I have about 90,000 photos."
00:46:54 ◼ ► It continues, "Merge duplicates does figure out if a photo is in an album and preserve that relationship.
00:47:01 ◼ ► For example, a low res version of a photo in an album, the low res version is deleted from the library but the higher res version is now in the album."
00:47:12 ◼ ► When it merges duplicates, you don't have to worry about, "Oh, the one that threw out is the one that was in my album and now it's missing from my album."
00:47:19 ◼ ► No, it takes whatever one it picks to be the winner in the duplicate fight, that one takes the place of where all the other ones that got chucked away ended up being.
00:47:31 ◼ ► So I went and looked because I have tons of photo books. I make a photo book at least once a year, sometimes more for my Long Island vacation and maybe other vacations.
00:47:44 ◼ ► I click on the project and I get a little dialog box that would say, "Some photos are missing. Some photos have been modified, moved or deleted outside of the application or removed from some sections of this project."
00:47:54 ◼ ► And the example I have here, pages 1, 5, 6, 9, 10, 12, 14, I'm not going to read all the numbers. A lot of pages are missing covers.
00:48:12 ◼ ► The whole reason I keep these products around is that someday those books get destroyed.
00:48:22 ◼ ► I did spend a lot of time making those books, which means picking the photographs that are going to be in the books, picking how those photos are going to be arranged on the page, how they're going to be cropped, picking the cover image, picking the back if there's any text.
00:48:44 ◼ ► I'm like, "Hey, if I lose a book or the house burns down, I can restore my backups in my new house and just reprint all those books at massive expense."
00:48:59 ◼ ► So I investigated, I looked at one of the books, and these are all done with, at this point, third-party software.
00:49:08 ◼ ► Both of those companies, I think, were involved in printing the books when Apple did it.
00:49:11 ◼ ► So I picked a book. I picked my most recent photo book that was missing photos from tons of pages.
00:49:15 ◼ ► I went to the first page where it said it was missing photos, and sure enough, where there should have been a photo, there was just the gray, like, "A photo goes here."
00:49:24 ◼ ► But the thing is, all the photos that it said were missing, they were still in the projects.
00:49:28 ◼ ► Because when I open up the little photo sidebar to pick a photo to go in that spot, the photo that should be in that spot was in the sidebar.
00:49:37 ◼ ► So I think what's happening is, Apple Photos is doing the right thing, but this third-party software is confused about the fact that previously, the photo with some internal identifier was on that page,
00:49:55 ◼ ► And the sidebar, you know, the project showing which photos to pick from, that understood that, but the page did not understand it.
00:50:01 ◼ ► And so, what I had to do was, for my most recent few books, and I'll explain why in a second, I didn't have to do all of them,
00:50:08 ◼ ► I just went, I had the paper book in front of me, found the missing photo, looked at the paper book and said, "Okay, it should be this photo, and it should be cropped in this way,"
00:50:16 ◼ ► and I just reselected it from the sidebar, put it in there, and repaired the most recent three books.
00:50:21 ◼ ► And the reason I only had to repair the most recent three books is because the whole reason I'm doing this is to sort of preserve the work that I have done,
00:50:28 ◼ ► so I know which photos are on which page and how they're arranged and all that, but there's a better way to do that.
00:50:33 ◼ ► The better way to do that is to make a digital version of the book, and Apple's photo books had a way to do this, and so do all these third-party, or at least, so does Mimeo, the third-party extension that I use.
00:50:44 ◼ ► You can export your book as a PDF. It doesn't really look like a book anymore, but it does show every single page in the print layout.
00:50:52 ◼ ► And I had exported the PDFs dutifully for every photo book that I have ever done over the many years, except for the past three years when apparently I forgot all about it.
00:51:04 ◼ ► I used to be able to export as two kinds of PDF. One was called a regular PDF for viewing, the other was called a "production PDF,"
00:51:12 ◼ ► But anyway, there's only one choice now in Mimeo, which is export as PDF, and so I did that.
00:51:16 ◼ ► So now I have backups of all my books, like their layouts, their actual print-style layouts for every single page of all my books in a digital form,
00:51:25 ◼ ► which of course is nicely backed up, and now I don't feel the need to go back through every single one of my photo books and repair the missing photos,
00:51:34 ◼ ► And there is some hope that these third-party extensions realize that this is going on, and figure out how to, you know,
00:51:43 ◼ ► swap in the newly winner of the duplicate merge process into the place where the old one was, but I didn't want to raid around for that.
00:51:51 ◼ ► So, hopefully, in what is hopefully the final wrinkle in the share lively duplicate thing, check your projects.
00:51:58 ◼ ► If you care about this at all, check your projects, and if you have to, you can repair them without too much work,
00:52:07 ◼ ► And I would suggest that if you do care about the layout, export to PDF, because then all your work will be preserved,
00:52:13 ◼ ► and in the worst case scenario, you could recreate the book from scratch by looking at the PDF.
00:52:21 ◼ ► Stephen Brandon writes, this is kind of a lot, but we did our best, and by that I mean Jon did his best to pare it down,
00:52:28 ◼ ► with regard to Atmos and DTSX on Apple TV, although the listener on a past episode said that they had an HTA-9 system,
00:52:38 ◼ ► The issue is that the Apple TV will not even pass through the Atmos or DTSX metadata on anything other than EAC3.
00:52:44 ◼ ► The Apple TV will not let apps bitstream anything other than a few formats to a receiver or anything else,
00:53:05 ◼ ► This might seem like it would make it impossible to pass along the height and other Atmos-type metadata,
00:53:09 ◼ ► but there is a solution. Apple does use a technology called Dolby MAT to embed this data into PCM audio for some audio,
00:53:21 ◼ ► which apparently modern receivers can understand, but Apple doesn't seem to allow third-party app makers to access this option.
00:53:32 ◼ ► With every TV OS release, I always hope that we'll find out that Apple has opened this up to the makers of apps like Plex and Infuse.
00:53:38 ◼ ► All of this is to say that those of us with high-end receivers still have the problem with Apple TV
00:53:43 ◼ ► of not being able to take full advantage of the audio on our ripped Blu-ray collections.
00:53:51 ◼ ► Obviously I don't have high channels, but the other thing is that I have a Blu-ray player. I don't have ripped Blu-rays.
00:54:05 ◼ ► There's lots of other possible solutions. It's kind of disappointing that the Apple TV literally won't even pass it through.
00:54:13 ◼ ► Part of having the receiver is that you can hook all sorts of stuff up to it, like an actual Blu-ray player,
00:54:40 ◼ ► That said, you are correct that most people probably shouldn't care if you don't have high channels.
00:54:46 ◼ ► And most critically, if you consume content exclusively through streaming, it literally doesn't matter.
00:54:50 ◼ ► But of course, he says, "Those of us who have invested in high channels and synologies filled with Blu-ray reps are the only people who should care."
00:55:09 ◼ ► We decided this week to have a special where we don't have any regular ads in the show.
00:55:13 ◼ ► It is devoted entirely to our Wonderful Merchandise sale, which you heard about earlier, and ATP membership.
00:55:19 ◼ ► So, here's how this works. If you become a member, that sale we talked about earlier, you get 15% off everything that you could buy right now in our time-bound sales.
00:55:28 ◼ ► These are like the big sales that we announce in the show and do for a few weeks here and there.
00:55:35 ◼ ► Right now, if you're buying a t-shirt or a mug or a few different things, it might actually make it cheaper to buy a membership than to pay the full price of the items that you're buying, even though these are wonderful prices, etc.
00:55:53 ◼ ► Because members, the key benefit that most people sign up for is the ad-free version of the show.
00:55:58 ◼ ► I personally love doing this. When there's a podcast I love that offers membership with an ad-free feed, I always buy it.
00:56:24 ◼ ► ATP.fm/join. You can join us for just $8 a month and a couple other different currency variations if that works out for you.
00:56:34 ◼ ► ATP.fm/join. You get a merch discount, you get an ad-free feed, and even more that I'll tell you about in a little bit.
00:56:54 ◼ ► Moving on, there was some breaking news that happened, I think, as we were recording last week that I don't know if we'll have too much to say about this famous last words, but I wanted to call it to our attention, to your attention.
00:57:08 ◼ ► And this is particularly relevant to me because, if you recall from a couple episodes ago when we were talking about FlukeUp, as Erin continues to make fun of me for.
00:57:17 ◼ ► Anyways, as we were talking about that, I was saying, you know, even though there doesn't appear to be very much, if any, charge for using the Movie Databases API right now, you never know what will happen, right?
00:57:37 ◼ ► And it sounds like at first they kind of took the Twitter, or one of the 17 iterations of Twitter's approach in that they said, okay, well bots will remain free, but other things like full featured apps like Apollo, which is my preferred app for looking at Reddit, that will, the API access for Apollo will not be free.
00:58:03 ◼ ► So a quote from their announcement, which we will link in the show notes, "We are introducing a premium access point for third parties who require additional capabilities, higher use limits, and broader usage rights.
00:58:12 ◼ ► Our data API will still be open for appropriate use cases and accessible via our developer platform."
00:58:17 ◼ ► So, of course, a Christian who writes Apollo was pooping his pants when this all went down, and apparently had a couple of phone calls with Reddit, and he put together a really, really, really good post on Reddit, of course,
00:58:37 ◼ ► And so, quoting Christian, "To this end, Reddit is moving to a paid API model for apps.
00:58:44 ◼ ► The goal is not to make this inherently a big profit center, but to cover both the cost of usage as well as the opportunity cost of users not using the official app, lost ad views, etc.
00:58:53 ◼ ► The API cost will be usage-based, not a flat fee, and will not require Reddit premium, which is, I believe, Reddit's paid thing, for users to use it, nor will it have ads in the feed.
00:59:11 ◼ ► Also, it's worth noting that Imgur, I guess that's how it's pronounced, has, I guess, recently banned sexually explicit uploads, so there's apparently a big kerfuffle about that.
00:59:20 ◼ ► I don't personally care about that at all, but it's kind of tangentially related, so worth noting.
00:59:25 ◼ ► But yeah, this is why pricing for anything where you're not controlling the API is tough, right?
00:59:31 ◼ ► You know, because you never know what the future will bring, and you don't want to have to renege on a lifetime unlock that was like just a bit more than a monthly fee or something like that.
00:59:41 ◼ ► Like obviously you probably wouldn't price a lifetime unlock that cheaply, but you see what I'm saying, that, you know, you never know what the future will bring,
01:00:00 ◼ ► If not, we can just move right along, but it was an interesting and relevant thing for me anyway, given what I'm working on right now.
01:00:08 ◼ ► I mean, the escape hatch for things like this, it's not great, and, you know, customers hate it and developers say they don't like to do it, but you just, you know, you make Apollo 2, and that one is subscription only, right?
01:00:18 ◼ ► With all these terrible options that we're kind of accustomed to as both customers and developers on the App Store, like, we can't do upgrade pricing, we can't do this, we can't do that, but there's, you know, the way to do it is you just, well, this product is dead now, sorry, here's version 2 of the product, which would have just been the next update to this one, but can't be for reasons related to how the business of the App Store works, so, and then everyone yells at you, and they give you the one-star reviews, and it's just like, it's a very sort of, very unhealthy dynamic, I feel like, in a lot of ways between customers and developers.
01:00:47 ◼ ► Because in many cases, developers would like to do things that are, that customers would like better, like, we would, you know, upgrade pricing, for example, or like, somehow giving lower prices to people who recently brought a thing like, you know, a make a new version of a thing, and there's an upgrade price, but if you bought the old one recently, you get the upgrade for free, and all the things that Mac developers would do before the App Store, you know, where you have the flexibility to be nicer to your customers.
01:01:16 ◼ ► And the App Store does more of those things than it used to, but still not nearly as many as good Apple developers used to do back in the days before they were constrained.
01:01:25 ◼ ► And this is an example, hey, our app used to be like, you could do a one-time unlock, but that was when the API was free, now the API is not free anymore, and eventually we're going to go into the red on all those users, because their lifetime unlock is going to run out, essentially, and then we'll be losing money every time they use our application, and that's not tenable, so how do we deal with that?
01:01:45 ◼ ► You'd like to just be able to say to those people, you know, after your money runs out, start paying the monthly thing or whatever, or it'll stop working, or like, you could do something that is better than, hey, the app you're using is dead, now here's Apollo 2, and you've never purchased anything in Apollo 2, so you're starting from zero, and that will make people feel bad, because they're like, I bought a lifetime unlock, and you'll be like, well, you did get a lifetime unlock for Apollo 1.
01:02:10 ◼ ► It's just such a stupid situation that nobody likes, and it just makes everybody upset.
01:02:17 ◼ ► Part of it, obviously, is what you're talking about, Casey, which is like, well, isn't the root problem here that you sold an application with a flat rate unlock, and you didn't control the API, and you just assumed it would be free forever?
01:02:26 ◼ ► Yeah, that is kind of the root problem here, but a lot of things work like that, because, you know, free APIs often exist, I don't quite know why Reddit had it, maybe they were just, you know, management was not paying too much attention.
01:02:39 ◼ ► A lot of the time, it's like companies that are in a growth phase, they're VC funded, and they just need to get big real fast, and so yeah, everything's free, the accounts are free, using it is free, the API is free, free, free, free, because we need to get users, users, users, eyeballs, or whatever you want to call them, whatever the lingo is, because we need to, you know, get big enough growth numbers to get our next round of funding, but then eventually, like, the check comes due.
01:02:59 ◼ ► You actually do get big, and it's time to start turning on the money tap, see also Netflix, Amazon, and many other big companies, or you didn't get big, and now the company's going down the tubes, and they need to make money.
01:03:09 ◼ ► I don't think either one of those applies to Reddit, they've been around for a long time, they're not in their growth phase, they already did grow pretty big, but I think they have management now that's saying, you know, running this API is actually costing us a lot of money, let's see if we can get some return on that investment, and they're doing it in a,
01:03:24 ◼ ► it seems like a fairly thoughtful way to try to get money from people who can afford to pay it while not destroying the value of their service, you know, by allowing bots and stuff like that, basically the opposite of whatever Twitter's doing.
01:03:36 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, I think you can look at this and you can see, this is probably what Twitter should have done, like, Twitter probably should have taken an approach like this.
01:03:44 ◼ ► Should be run by people with a clue, yeah. I mean, people who care and are competent, but you know, the age that Reddit came up, as John was saying, it kind of started as, you know, it was a very nerdy thing, launched by very nerdy people during a very nerdy time of the internet.
01:04:00 ◼ ► You know, this is, Reddit's been around for quite some time. And when it was coming up, that was the era of like the Web 2.0, everything has an API, like that kind of age. And as we talked about before with Twitter, like, at some point people realize, you know, companies realize like, why are we giving away value?
01:04:20 ◼ ► And why are we, in many cases, more importantly, why are we giving up control? So, Reddit came right out and said, like, part of their reason for this was that people who use third party apps, like Apollo, aren't necessarily seeing Reddit's ads or aren't, aren't in some other way, like benefiting whatever Reddit's newest business direction or revenue opportunity might be, because they're not using the Reddit official apps or website.
01:04:45 ◼ ► And so obviously, many companies would look at that and have looked at that situation and would say, well, we don't want to give up any control. We don't want to give up control of our product or our monetization strategies or whatever. So we're just going to not have a public API or shut down the public API.
01:05:01 ◼ ► That's how Overcast is. Overcast does not offer an API for lots of reasons, including that. And so you can see why companies would get there. But it is difficult when you have a product like Twitter, where the API is such a key part of what makes it useful to a lot of people.
01:05:17 ◼ ► And so you have to have a bit of a different calculus there to do it right and to support the things that cause your service to have value to a lot of people.
01:05:28 ◼ ► Or like Reddit, where you have years and years of people using an API. Like it's not as big a deal as Twitter, whereas like the third party clients were such a big part of its growth. But like, you've got a legacy of people using applications like Apollo.
01:05:40 ◼ ► Some of your best Reddit users probably use Apollo. So making the decision to say no more third party clients would be the wrong move. But at the same token, you can't like lose money on those people.
01:05:51 ◼ ► Right, exactly. And, you know, in the case of Twitter, I think they called it wrong. You know, Twitter saw a problem, which is a real problem, which is we have these third party apps that are making people not use our first party apps and are not showing ads and are eating into the control of our product experience.
01:06:10 ◼ ► And we don't control them. They're run by, you know, other random people who we don't control. And so we have limited ways to deal with this. And so we're just gonna shut it down. You know, that's kind of a, you know, brute force approach that, you know, I don't think was the right move for them for lots of reasons.
01:06:26 ◼ ► I think they destroyed a lot of value for both them and other people, but especially I mean, just for Twitter itself, they destroyed a lot of value of Twitter by doing that, like not being able to run simple bot accounts that people actually use for various useful legitimate purposes.
01:06:41 ◼ ► That is, I think, destroying lots of value of Twitter. And so and will ultimately, I think, serve them poorly with these decisions, among any other decisions they've made.
01:06:51 ◼ ► And to be clear, like that was the stuff we're talking about here is most recently what Elon did. But prior to that, many, many years prior, Twitter tried to thread this needle by having the same realization that, oh, third party clients have been such an important part of Twitter.
01:07:05 ◼ ► But we can't get rid of them entirely because our best users use them. So what can we do? And they basically tried to sunset essentially third party clients where they sort of said, if you have an existing third party client and you have a lot of customers,
01:07:18 ◼ ► we'll let you have, I don't remember what the calculus was, was like, say you've got, you know, 100,000 customers, you can have 100,000 more. But then that's it. Right. And they had this whole token based system where every customer you got, you were using up one of your tokens.
01:07:32 ◼ ► And I don't remember it was like you got to double your customer base or triple it or whatever the calculus was. They basically said, no more third party clients, but anyone who already exists, you can keep running your business up to a limit.
01:07:44 ◼ ► And the limit was pretty big. That's why for years and years after they did that, I was still using Twitterrific, which was, you know, I think the original third party Twitter client that I used for the entire history of Twitter until it went down the tubes.
01:07:55 ◼ ► That's how they tried to throw the needle. And at that time, everyone was pissed off then. That's why my Mastodon accounts are all from 2017. Or app.net or whatever. We went to app.net. We went to Mastodon, right?
01:08:07 ◼ ► Because we were annoyed. But by the way they tried to throw that needle, it was like, don't you realize how important third party clients are? And that was the kinder, gentler way to try to do it.
01:08:15 ◼ ► It's they were not just going to kill all third party clients. We're not going to just remove the free API. But we do want to take back control of the experience.
01:08:23 ◼ ► And basically, we don't want there to be any more clients, just the existing ones can continue to have a business. And then the Elon Musk way to do it is just to turn everything off and shoot yourself in the foot over and over and over again.
01:08:33 ◼ ► But the Reddit way I feel like is even better than what Twitter did because it's like, look, all those third party clients, they're important to our business. And we can literally make money from them.
01:08:43 ◼ ► Not a huge amount of money, but hopefully enough to pay for to offset the cost. So we won't lose money on them. And we will keep the people, the users of Apollo who are in theory, very avid, you know, good customers for Reddit in terms of they use the product a lot.
01:08:58 ◼ ► We can get money from them through third party clients by charging for an API. And maybe that will cover costs. We'll see how their plan goes for them. But it definitely seems nicer than either one of the certainly nicer than the current Twitter plan, but also nicer than the whatever year that was 2017 ish plan from Twitter.
01:09:15 ◼ ► The only thing I would criticize about this, so it's a rest plan so far. The big thing we don't know the pricing yet, but they have said that the way it will be structured, at least in their current idea of this, the way it will be structured is the users won't pay, the app developers will pay.
01:09:33 ◼ ► And I think that's backwards. I always thought this is what Twitter should do. Make the user accounts pay the service for API access with those accounts. So for instance, if Twitter is going to have their monthly premium plan, whatever, you know, Twitter blue, whatever, whatever it would be, charge users a few bucks a month for whatever that account level is.
01:09:53 ◼ ► And then you can use that account level with any app using the API. And then the app developers are never financially involved directly with the company or the users.
01:10:02 ◼ ► Yeah, I'm not sure. I know what you're going for for that. It seems better from a user's perspective, but I think allowing the app developers to essentially skim off the top and be like in the middle there is important because here's the deal.
01:10:15 ◼ ► It still costs money to maintain and develop Apollo. And so like, you know, good third party applications may still want to charge a subscription, but it's so much harder for them to do that.
01:10:26 ◼ ► So I have to pay for a subscription for the API to Reddit and I have to pay for a subscription to Apollo. If you just combine those two together and add a profit margin for Apollo, even though it would be more total expense, you just feel like, oh, I'm subscribing to Apollo.
01:10:39 ◼ ► And basically, you know, your money is passing through the developers of Apollo and they take a cut and then the rest of it goes to pay for the API. Kind of like weather applications.
01:10:46 ◼ ► We don't pay for, you know, whatever the weather API is, you know, AccuWeather API. Individual customers don't sign up with AccuWeather to get an API and then shop for clients. We all just buy a weather app.
01:10:57 ◼ ► We pay for the subscription to the weather app. The weather app takes a cut of that and then passes the rest of the API thing.
01:11:03 ◼ ► I guess it hasn't been tried the way you're describing, so it could work kind of like it worked with RSS. We'd pay for Feedbin or Feedly, right?
01:11:12 ◼ ► And then we'd use a news reader on top of that. So I think it can work. I just wonder if in this case it would be too much subscription.
01:11:22 ◼ ► But we'll see. Just from reading the subscription, it doesn't seem unreasonable, but I don't know what Reddit users are like.
01:11:29 ◼ ► I don't know how this is going to turn out because every customer base is different and I'm going to say that the customer base for Reddit API usage is probably not like the general public.
01:11:39 ◼ ► I would agree with that. I think the other advantage of doing it this way is that Reddit is likely to come out looking like a good guy because unless you're deeply in tune as to what's going on in the machinations of what's happening behind the scenes,
01:11:56 ◼ ► what it looks like is that Christian's going to have to start charging more. I'm assuming. I don't know this. But Christian's going to have to start charging more or just, you know, kill the free version of Apollo.
01:12:05 ◼ ► And from a user's perspective, unless you're really plugged in, that just means Christian's a big jerk. Well, it's obviously not true, but that's what it seems like, right?
01:12:13 ◼ ► Whereas if Christian instead says, "Oh, well, you have to open a direct relationship with Reddit and give me access and blah, blah, blah," then Reddit's the jerk because you have to go and talk to mom and dad about it.
01:12:25 ◼ ► But the way it works now, the way Reddit wants it to be is that, "Oh, Christian's a big jerk. He's the one that needs extra money. It's not us."
01:12:31 ◼ ► Well, really it is, but don't look behind the curtain. It's Christian that's the problem. And so from a business perspective, it's a win-win, right? Because they get more money and they don't have to be the bad person.
01:12:40 ◼ ► And so I totally understand why they're doing it. But again, if they're really doing this just to recoup the expense and a little bit of the opportunity cost, if that really is true, this may not be bad at all. But time will tell.
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01:14:58 ◼ ► So we had an Ask ATP from probably a while ago, knowing us, that we decided to promote to a full on topic, because I thought this would be kind of fun for the old dudes here to reminisce a little bit. So Torb wrote that they had watched the Verge video about the Lisa, which is only about 10 minutes long. It's pretty good.
01:15:19 ◼ ► It's very good. They mentioned offhand that the original Mac didn't have multitasking! I just really wondered what would that have been like. I think John would know. And then I thought I'd love to hear all of you talk about how computers you used when growing up were different and how they affected your usage patterns.
01:15:37 ◼ ► So I have a little tour of seminal moments of my childhood with regard to computing, but perhaps we should start by John answering the question, "So how did multitasking work on the original Macintosh, John?"
01:15:49 ◼ ► Yeah, I guess, you know, as we get older, young people don't realize exactly how primitive things were. I often think, I've heard this from other people my age, I often think that I'm very lucky to have been born when I was in terms of technology, and I think we all kind of were, because we got to see both sides of the big internet divide.
01:16:11 ◼ ► What was life like before the internet was pervasive, and what was life like after? And we were there for that transition. So we have those two experiences. We did have a time in our life without the internet, and we know what that was like. And that's, you know, kids born today never have that time, right?
01:16:26 ◼ ► And that was important for me. I also got to see the personal computer revolution. Like I existed at a time when personal computers were not a thing, and then they became a thing, and I was there for that happening. Many things like that I think about the dawn of the web, I was there for that.
01:16:41 ◼ ► It makes us all old fogies, but it is very interesting. It's kind of like people who were born during the industrial revolution or the advent of cars. There's lots of very important technological inflection points in history, and we got to live through some really important ones. That does mean I have the perspective of what things were like before.
01:16:58 ◼ ► Even video games, like going from literal Pong to what we have today is a leap that is going to be a while before the next leap like that happens. Maybe it's AR/VR, but honestly I think it's going to have to be something past that with some kind of neural interface to have the same impact as going from Pong to today's games.
01:17:18 ◼ ► So for the Apple platforms in particular, remember the Lisa was like $10,000 in 1983 money or something? It was not an affordable computer. It cost as much as a car, more than a car. That's why the Mac succeeded.
01:17:38 ◼ ► One of the reasons why the Mac succeeded and the Lisa didn't. It was just too darn expensive, but it was also much more powerful. Like with all that money, it was going to making a more powerful computer. Even though the Mac was also expensive, it was $2,400 in 1984 money. It was a quarter of the price of the Lisa.
01:17:55 ◼ ► So while the Lisa had some rudimentary form of multitasking, the Mac absolutely did not. Remember the original Macintosh had 128 kilobytes of RAM. That's like Commodore 64, Vic-20, they had even less. This thing ran a full GUI. A full complete GUI. 128 kilobytes of RAM.
01:18:18 ◼ ► There wasn't much room for anything. It got around to using lots of ROM. One of the things you would learn about back in the early days of the personal computer is that it was very important in your first course. This is the keyboard, this is the monitor, there were no mice because they didn't know about them.
01:18:32 ◼ ► The next thing you would learn is the difference between RAM and ROM, which is a distinction that has not been important in anyone's life. Anyway, the Mac had a bunch of ROM and that saved a bunch of memory. That stuff could be in read-only memory that was always accessible and you didn't need to waste RAM on it.
01:18:49 ◼ ► So just really quickly, to put things in perspective, you said 128 kilobytes of RAM. So the icon for my forthcoming app is 125 kilobytes. Just the icon. Is that compressed? Probably, it's a JPEG. The point is that... Your icon is not a JPEG, please.
01:19:08 ◼ ► It is absolutely a JPEG. Concentrate here. Why is it a JPEG? It's not a JPEG. Please don't make it a JPEG. It's not. It's absolutely not a JPEG. I'm looking in the asset catalog, in the file system. It's a JPEG in the file system. It doesn't frickin' matter, Mike.
01:19:25 ◼ ► You are not using it. Why don't you paste a screenshot into a Word document? Get a PNG, please, for your icon. I will bother Jelly, who was kind enough to do this and is probably listening to this mortified, because I bet you he sent me a PNG and then somehow it ended up a JPEG. I don't even know how. Concentrate. Concentrate, John!
01:19:44 ◼ ► Alright, anyway, here's the thing about bitmaps. The uncompressed version of the bitmap of your thing, add it up. Add up the RGB values. The uncompressed size of that is way bigger than 128 kilobytes.
01:19:54 ◼ ► Exactly. And I'm not running a full operating system in this space. I'm just storing a very, very large icon.
01:20:01 ◼ ► Yeah, if you didn't run it, store one icon asset. That's it. All your RAM is gone. So the way this manifested in multitasking is a couple different ways. Remember, I did have a VIC-20 before this, which had 20 kilobytes of RAM. It's even less, but it did nothing. It was attached to your television set. It had a keyboard. It had no mouse. It had no GUI. It was a command line or N basic. Very simple stuff.
01:20:24 ◼ ► But this was a full-fledged GUI. The original Macintosh had one floppy drive built into the computer. I didn't have an external one. So you got one 400K floppy drive. That's all your data. And what you do is you'd stick in a floppy disk. You'd turn the computer on, stick in a floppy disk. Because if you turned the computer on, it would just have a flashing question mark icon. You stick in a floppy disk and it boots. That floppy disk has the operating system on it.
01:20:46 ◼ ► I feel like you need to slow down here again. There was no hard drive. There was no storage on the computer.
01:20:57 ◼ ► That's true. But on the original Mac, there was nowhere to put your stuff except the floppy disk drive, which granted wasn't floppy.
01:21:04 ◼ ► I mean, those are all personal computers. The Commodore 64 didn't have a hard drive. The VIC-20 didn't have a hard drive. The Apple II didn't have a hard drive.
01:21:11 ◼ ► Agreed. If you're less than a million years old like we are, this is probably not really making any sense.
01:21:19 ◼ ► You're booting and running from this floppy drive. So the floppy drive had the operating system on it. You could also wedge onto that floppy disk. You could also put one application. So you could put maybe MacPaint on there.
01:21:30 ◼ ► So then you could boot from the operating system on the floppy drive. And then you'd see the operating system and you'd see MacPaint. You'd double-click MacPaint. And when you double-click MacPaint, everything goes away and just MacPaint is running.
01:21:40 ◼ ► And if you saved the document in MacPaint, you could save that to the floppy disk drive, too. But not too many documents. But if you saved too many documents, up now you've filled your floppy drive.
01:21:48 ◼ ► Because remember, the floppy disk, the 400K floppy disk has the OS, the one application you're using, and all the files you're saving from that application.
01:22:00 ◼ ► I think the OS was maybe half. I mean, I should fire up Mini VMac and check what it is. But it seemed like there was enough room. You could have more than one application on there. It didn't seem like it was taking up more than half. Maybe it was. Maybe it was like 300K. I can look it up. But it was small.
01:22:16 ◼ ► Here's the workaround for this. Eventually, if you're a power user like me, you'd be like, "Okay, but I've got MacPaint, I've got MacWrite, I've got all my school papers. It would be better if I had this box of floppy disks here." What I would want is I can have an operating system disk.
01:22:32 ◼ ► I would also like to have a data disk or maybe a disk that just has MacWrite and all my papers on it. Remember, MacWrite came on a floppy disk from Apple that said MacWrite. It was printed or whatever. But you'd also want to have, "What about all these other floppy disks? I'll just store my papers on those."
01:22:48 ◼ ► The way it would work is you'd boot from your startup disk or whatever, then you would eject that floppy disk. The floppy disk icons would appear on the desktop. I think that's not even the default on MacOS anymore. But the floppy disk icon would appear on the desktop.
01:23:02 ◼ ► When you ejected it, you'd see a greyed out icon of the floppy disk that you just ejected. It would still be visible there, but it was a ghost of its former self. Then you would stick in your other floppy disk, the one that has a different application, a MacDraw or something on it.
01:23:25 ◼ ► Or it has your files on it or something. You'd stick that one in and say, "Okay, here's my school paper, and I double-click my school paper." Double-clicking the school paper would launch MacWrite, but MacWrite was back on the other disk.
01:23:36 ◼ ► So what it would do is it would eject your disk and say, "Please put in the system disk that had MacWrite on it." And you put in the system disk, and it would go grind, grind, grind, and then it would eject it. It would say, "Please put in the disk that I documented."
01:23:46 ◼ ► And you'd put that in, and it would go grind, grind, grind, and it would eject it. And you would swap the disks back and forth because it would need to be like, "I'm running the application, but I need the document, but I need the application, but I need the document."
01:23:58 ◼ ► Back and forth, back and forth. You'd see both people with their hands who got good at doing this, like basically using a single hand to catch an auto-ejecting 3.5-inch floppy disk and insert another one back and forth.
01:24:11 ◼ ► And you had long breaks between, but there was also mechanisms that would help you with that. That was the dance. It was, again, an amazing feat of resource usage, that this tiny amount of RAM and the data from the application and the data from the document,
01:24:24 ◼ ► that you could essentially run the system manually swapping back and forth each resource that the computer needed at the time that it needed it. And it would take forever because floppy disks are slow, you'd have to wait for it to read, find the place, get the data, put a little bit in RAM, eject it,
01:24:40 ◼ ► get the other thing back and forth, and the money you wanted to save, you'd have to do the same thing, and then when you quit the application, you'd have to go back to the finder, so you'd have to put the system disk back in.
01:24:48 ◼ ► That experience, to get back to the point of this question, was very formative because, well, for one thing, it showed you kind of the mechanics of multitasking because you were the part of the multitasking system, essentially.
01:25:02 ◼ ► You were the meat part of the multitasking system, and you could see, look, it's not doing more than one thing at a time, it's just doing multiple things one after the other interleaved.
01:25:12 ◼ ► You were literally interleaving by swapping disks back and forth, so you could see the mechanics of, now the computer needs this, now the computer needs that, it needs to write here, it needs to read from that, and you knew that there was a limited resource of RAM and that it was pulling things in and out of there or whatever.
01:25:26 ◼ ► And so when multitasking started to slowly arrive with the advent of the Mac Plus, which had one megabyte of RAM and hard drives and stuff like that, you could see the mechanics, you could see those mechanics compressed.
01:25:40 ◼ ► I did eventually get an external floppy drive, then I'd have two floppy disks at the same time, and you wouldn't have to swap.
01:25:50 ◼ ► And they were both in at the same time, and you would see how much faster that was than swapping disks. It wasn't twice as fast, it was like 50 times as fast, because you didn't have to wait for a mechanism to eject a disk and put it back and everything.
01:26:04 ◼ ► That was an important experience, I felt like, because it made me appreciate multitasking, it made me understand what was going on, and also the primitive approaches to multitasking.
01:26:12 ◼ ► One of them was called, I think this was called Mini Finder. If you were in an application and you wanted to launch another application, you'd have to quit back to the Finder and then find the other application and launch it.
01:26:24 ◼ ► Mini Finder lets you quit one application, not go all the way back to the Finder, but just go to a Mini Finder, which would just be like a little dialogue in your screen that would just show the installed applications that are currently on any disks that are in, right?
01:26:39 ◼ ► And launch it from there, and you'd be like, "That's so dumb, why not go back to the Finder?" Because going back to the Finder, everything took forever. The other thing people don't realize, everything took forever.
01:26:48 ◼ ► So you're like, "Oh, it takes too long to quit back to the Finder, I'd rather quit back to Mini Finder and save myself literally 25 seconds every time I want to do this." This was multitasking, right?
01:27:08 ◼ ► So, Mini Finder was a feature, and you're saying, "Yes, this is what I want. I want to be able to switch between more than one thing at a time without having to wait 67 seconds between things. I want to wait 22 seconds. I can go back to Mini Finder, then launch MacWrite."
01:27:24 ◼ ► Because I didn't want to have to load the whole Finder and all the information that—I didn't have to load the whole Finder program, I wanted to just load Mini Finder. So coming from that, it's kind of like people who grew up in the Depression, saving boxes and twine and stuff. It's like, "You never know when we're going to need this stuff, because things are good now, and we're able to afford food, but someday we might not. So we've got to save all these containers and save this warm clothing."
01:27:47 ◼ ► I feel like I was kind of brought up in Depression-era computing resources, where I don't expect to have lots of RAM or lots of memory, which is kind of rich coming from me now, my gigantic computer with my huge screen and my huge amounts of RAM.
01:27:59 ◼ ► But maybe that's my reaction to it, is that I'm just making sure that, as God is my witness, I'll never be RAM-hungry again. That's a reference. Neither one of you have seen that movie, but it's fine.
01:28:10 ◼ ► That's where I'm coming from, and it makes me in some ways appreciate where I am because I came from that and because I grew up doing that. It does not make me nostalgic for those times.
01:28:22 ◼ ► I do not have nostalgia, unlike Casey with his vinyl records, for the time when I had to do that. When I was in that, when I was doing that, all I wanted was more.
01:28:31 ◼ ► Two floppy drives, a hard drive, a color screen. I wanted that stuff so bad, and eventually I got it. It just took decades.
01:28:40 ◼ ► And so it makes me appreciate what I have now, and I still have that same attitude, which is like, whatever I have now, I've never felt like, "Oh, this is probably just about enough. The poor 640K will be enough for anybody."
01:28:52 ◼ ► That whole idea that we ever arrive at some sort of ending point and computing resources are sufficient is not a thing. Not an illusion I ever had or ever experienced because I always wanted more.
01:29:05 ◼ ► Because when you see the multitasking with the floppy drives going back and forth, you can see how much better this would be with more computing resources and more money.
01:29:13 ◼ ► And you know how computing has been improving over your life, and so you can see the future and you want to be there. And that has never changed for me. So I look at my gigantic screen now and my huge Mac or whatever, and I can see, "Yes, but could you actually use ten times more computing resources a hundred times?"
01:29:28 ◼ ► I say, "Yes, I totally can." Because there's plenty of things that I feel like are not up to snuff and that could be better. Do I need a screen that's the size of my house? No.
01:29:36 ◼ ► But if you could spray images onto my retinas, I'm all for that as long as it doesn't burn my retinas out. So I'm not content with the status quo because I can see how things can get better.
01:29:46 ◼ ► And because I've seen how things have advanced and where we came from, I see how the pieces fit together also helps that I was a computer engineering major and been a developer for 20 mumble years or whatever.
01:29:57 ◼ ► But I still feel like I'm traveling that road and I never feel like I'm going to get to a point where things are satisfactory and I think further progress is pointless. It just makes me hungry for more.
01:30:09 ◼ ► You know, it's funny hearing you talk about that. I remember, I've brought this story up many times, but I vividly remember, I don't recall exactly when it was, given the house we were in, I want to say it was early 90s, but I remember having an argument with a distant cousin of mine who was quite a bit older than me, that one could never, it would be impossible to fill a one gigabyte hard drive.
01:30:34 ◼ ► Because he had one for whatever reason, this was long before that was really a thing. And I was like, well, what do you need that for? You would never fill a gigabyte. What could you possibly fill a gigabyte with? It will never happen.
01:30:47 ◼ ► And that lasted like a year, maybe two before that was clearly incorrect. But no, this got me thinking about some of the pain. So that's all the pain that John had to live through. But Marco and I had our own pain.
01:30:58 ◼ ► And I know Marco... On your one gigabyte hard drive story, I think I said this last time you told the story as well. This is a great example of us not getting quite what we want. I remember having similar conversations about, oh, you know, hard drives are so big, you'll never be able to fill them.
01:31:11 ◼ ► And every time I saw a bigger hard drive size, what I would say is, I want to be able to fit all the files from all my past computers. You know, this big box of floppy disks. I want all those floppy disks to be on there.
01:31:24 ◼ ► I also want the hard drive of my previous computer, just like, you know, just the whole hard drive. And then I want all my new stuff. And I want to repeat that process for every new computer that I get.
01:31:34 ◼ ► So that when I get a new computer, it literally has all my files from all my past computers plus the new files. And I have to say, as fast as hard drives have advanced in size, I have not been able to do that. They're just not big enough.
01:31:44 ◼ ► I am bursting at the seams on a 4 terabyte drive on this Mac Pro, and it does not have all my files. Now, all my files from my fast computers are small, but they're not small enough to fit on here.
01:31:55 ◼ ► Yeah, my classic Mac OS files could probably fit, but not my previous Mac Pro. I had a multi terabyte thing too. And then the one before that was like maybe 1 terabyte. The one before that was 500 gigs.
01:32:05 ◼ ► So I still feel like, boy, if only I had a petabyte, then maybe I could fulfill my dream of all my past computers are on every computer. And when I buy a new computer, it has to be big enough to fit all my past computers.
01:32:18 ◼ ► And that's like starting from zero. Then that's just like the like the tear button on the scale. And then all my new storage is above that. And we haven't achieved that dream. So keep trying everybody.
01:32:27 ◼ ► Yeah, we're working on it, right? But no, you know, you were talking about how you had to swap floppies. And I remember doing some of that when I was really little. The difference, though, is that your computer was fancy enough that it would actually eject the floppy itself, whereas Marco and I had to hit a button in order to eject the floppy when we were told to.
01:32:43 ◼ ► But you could hit that anytime you wanted and just destroy all your files because your computers were garbage.
01:32:51 ◼ ► Yes. Auto, auto, auto, eject and auto inject. Let's not forget the auto inject because when you're swapping floppies back and forth, which I was doing all the time, auto inject is you'd press it and you'd press it in and it would get you.
01:33:03 ◼ ► There's like a spring for us that you to feel. And instead of like on a PC where you had to shove it all in with your thumb and then close the little door, you would push it in.
01:33:10 ◼ ► And this is three point five inch, not five and a quarter five quarter slid and smooth. Then you turn the door three point five inch. There was always spring resistance. But on a PC, you had to shove it all in.
01:33:17 ◼ ► But on Macs, they had to auto inject and auto eject. And inject meant that once you pressed it past a certain point, it would suck it out of your hand and go in.
01:33:24 ◼ ► So you didn't have to shove your thumb all the way into the mouth of your computer. You just push it in a little bit. And of course, auto eject means it would go and the disk would pop out by an inch.
01:33:36 ◼ ► Auto inject and auto eject were essential if your life was spent swapping 400K floppy disks. And even when it was the swapping wasn't there, auto inject and auto eject were definitely differentiated Macs from PCs, as did the three and a half inch floppy disk.
01:33:51 ◼ ► Because five and a quarters were literally floppy and had exposed magnetic media and were just barbaric. Three and a half were obviously superior.
01:34:02 ◼ ► Not that shortly. At least not in childhood years. Because you know when you're a kid from the age of 7 to 8, seems like a millenia.
01:34:12 ◼ ► So yeah, back in the day that, and I forget Marco when you had a computer in the house, but I know you were exposed to them.
01:34:21 ◼ ► Okay. So when I was little, I remember wanting to play various computer games like Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego and shoot, I'm trying to remember what else.
01:34:34 ◼ ► Sure. Then eventually SimCity 2000 much, much, much later. But early on when I was first exposed to DOS, like Windows, that's Disk Operating System.
01:34:45 ◼ ► that was the absolutely barbaric version of what John was doing on his fancy-pantsy Mac—there
01:34:49 ◼ ► was no windows. If it existed, it had not reached mainstream at this point. It probably did exist,
01:34:56 ◼ ► but nobody was using it at this point. And so we had to do everything via the command line.
01:35:01 ◼ ► And I've told the story many times, I'll tell it very briefly again, that I was always asking my
01:35:06 ◼ ► dad for help. Like "Dad, how do you do this? How do you do that? How do you do this? How
01:35:09 ◼ ► do you do that?" And eventually—for all my dad's many perks—patience is not one of them.
01:35:13 ◼ ► And eventually he literally handed me the DOS 3.3, I believe, owner's manual or user's manual,
01:35:19 ◼ ► whatever, and said, "Just read this." And I did. And here I am, you know, 20, 30 years later.
01:35:25 ◼ ► 30 years later. But anyway, what Marco and I had to manage was we had to write our own config.sys,
01:35:32 ◼ ► because remember, it's 8.3 file names, John's favorite thing in the world. We had to write our
01:35:36 ◼ ► own config.sys, which would explain to the computer what sort of kind of drivers it would
01:35:41 ◼ ► need to load. And we had to write our own autoexec.bat, which would then finish the startup
01:35:47 ◼ ► process by running different things after the computer had reached a bare minimum level of
01:35:53 ◼ ► functionality. And I remember vividly that I would have to make a decision and swap my config.sys and
01:36:02 ◼ ► autoexec.bat files with different ones based on whether or not I needed a mouse, because to load
01:36:08 ◼ ► the mouse driver used some of, I think it was 640k of conventional memory. And then you also
01:36:15 ◼ ► had like RAM on top of that, but conventional memory was where stuff like drivers sat. And so
01:36:20 ◼ ► I needed to be aware of whether or not the game I was about to play needed the mouse and run the
01:36:25 ◼ ► right config.sys and autoexec.bat in order to make sure that I have either enabled or disabled the
01:36:31 ◼ ► mouse, because if I don't need the mouse, I want to save some of that conventional memory, because
01:36:35 ◼ ► some of the games I'm playing, they're like bumping up against the edge of the available
01:36:41 ◼ ► conventional memory that I have right now. It's barbaric. It was ridiculous. I also remember,
01:36:47 ◼ ► this is probably something that Marco can chime in on, you know, when the Sound Blaster came out,
01:36:50 ◼ ► when sound cards came out and things like that, you needed to do like this whole dance with
01:36:55 ◼ ► interrupt request ports, IRQ ports, and make sure that you like told the software and the hardware,
01:37:01 ◼ ► okay, you want the Sound Blaster and IRQ 12 or whatever the case may be. And that was always a
01:37:05 ◼ ► fricking nightmare because you never knew which one was the right one. And then as I got a little
01:37:08 ◼ ► bit older, I would write like, you know, menuing systems for my autoexec.bat. So it would be like
01:37:13 ◼ ► this ridiculous, think of it as shell scripts, but like this ridiculous menuing system where,
01:37:17 ◼ ► you know, you would, you would click or you would type, okay, a G for games, and it would bring up a
01:37:22 ◼ ► new menu for all the games you could play and it would load them up and whatever. This is what we
01:37:33 ◼ ► - Oh yeah. - People always talk about the original iPhone and how amazing it was that it was so
01:37:37 ◼ ► smooth and responsive for the incredibly limited hardware of the time. But the 128K Mac is kind of
01:37:43 ◼ ► in a way that no other products, except maybe a couple of well-known game consoles were, like,
01:37:48 ◼ ► they were able to ring out such amazing performance of such incredibly limited hardware. A full GUI
01:38:02 ◼ ► of a command line thing, but a full GUI operating system from top to bottom with everything working
01:38:08 ◼ ► with, you know, sound card, like, you know, full, like, I think it was like 22 kilohertz sound. So
01:38:14 ◼ ► it wasn't CD quality, but it wasn't like the bleeps and boops of the, you know, MS-DOS thing. So you
01:38:18 ◼ ► got a quote unquote sound card, like everything, everything a more modern PC wouldn't have for
01:38:23 ◼ ► such a long time with so much more resources that they've somehow managed to get to work on 120.
01:38:28 ◼ ► Obviously it didn't stay 128 for long. 512 came out of then one megabyte and ramped up pretty
01:38:32 ◼ ► quick, but that's why like the tales of the original Mac team are fun to read is it's kind
01:38:36 ◼ ► of like reading, you know, uh, kind of like Apollo 13, uh, you've got to fix this problem and you've
01:38:42 ◼ ► got this set of stuff and some tape. Can you make these parts into a complete GUI operating system?
01:38:47 ◼ ► No, you can't have more RAM. No, you can't have a bigger screen. No, you can't have a hard drive.
01:38:51 ◼ ► Uh, good luck. Uh, and that's why, you know, Mac uses are, uh, insufferable. And the only time I
01:38:56 ◼ ► had to deal with a auto exec bad and, uh, config.sys was when I was on my friend's house,
01:39:00 ◼ ► trying to get PC games to run. And then you got to play with both of those files until the game ran.
01:39:03 ◼ ► And then I just, you know, I played the game and I left. Yep. Yep. It was the worst. And speaking
01:39:08 ◼ ► of the worst, I remember when, when my dad and I originally wanted to get a, an internet service
01:39:14 ◼ ► provider in ISP, uh, we needed to figure out how to use the modem. And so we had to write our own,
01:39:21 ◼ ► I don't know why this was the case, but I vividly remember doing this. We spent literally like a
01:39:25 ◼ ► week writing the haze, like ATDR, AT whatever, whatever. Everybody had to do that. That was
01:39:32 ◼ ► just part of being on the internet back then, even on the Mac when I had to run my Z modem thing. I,
01:39:36 ◼ ► I knew the, uh, the AT modem and it strings and all that stuff. We had to do that by hand. There
01:39:41 ◼ ► was no documentation anywhere. You just kind of threw junk against the wall and hope for the best.
01:39:44 ◼ ► You can get the documentation on the internet though. Well, yeah, but you got to get on the
01:39:48 ◼ ► internet to get the documentation off the internet. I know it's a chicken egg, but good thing was I
01:39:52 ◼ ► was, uh, I was in college then, so I could just go down to the computer lab and look up stuff.
01:39:59 ◼ ► And then, you know, so at this point, you know, you really want to play games with your friends
01:40:05 ◼ ► and you could do dial up, uh, you know, where you could literally dial your friend's house
01:40:14 ◼ ► you know, over dial up, which was impossibly slow and you couldn't do anything other than play the
01:40:18 ◼ ► game. There was no chatting with them. In most cases, you just play the game. That was that.
01:40:22 ◼ ► Um, and then eventually, you know, we got to the point that we wanted to do quote unquote land
01:40:26 ◼ ► parties, but lands weren't a thing or at least not for kids my age. So what we would do is we
01:40:31 ◼ ► would bring our tower computers and our 7,000 pound CRT monitors that were only 13 inches.
01:40:36 ◼ ► And we would bring them to our friends houses and then we would set them up in a very small
01:40:40 ◼ ► and very stinky room where you would use something called a serial cable. So it was a serial cable,
01:40:46 ◼ ► but I think it was like a crossover on the inside. So you could connect two serial ports to, you know,
01:40:51 ◼ ► you a serial port on one machine to a serial port in another machine. And then you could play each
01:40:55 ◼ ► other locally, which was so much better than doing it over dial up because it had by comparison,
01:41:00 ◼ ► infinite bandwidth. And then over time, then there was some modicum of networking and DOS,
01:41:06 ◼ ► like IPX networking. And there was eventually some software, I know I've talked about this several
01:41:11 ◼ ► times in the past, called Kali, K-A-L-I, which would mimic IPX networking, but do it over TCP/IP.
01:41:17 ◼ ► So you could do these games, all these like old DOS games that were never intended to be played
01:41:23 ◼ ► on the internet. You could now play on the internet, which was amazing. And then the other
01:41:26 ◼ ► fun thing about being on the internet is, you know, when you had your one ISP, well, what happens if
01:41:30 ◼ ► you happen to have a laptop and happen to have a modem and you happen to go traveling? Well,
01:41:34 ◼ ► in order to get on the internet, you would have to dial your ISP, which is presumably a local ISP
01:41:39 ◼ ► in your area code. So if I was traveling away from Richmond, I would be making a long distance
01:41:44 ◼ ► phone call, that was also a thing, to something in the 804 area code. And so then I would have,
01:41:50 ◼ ► I would be accruing charges potentially from the ISP. I'd be accruing charges for the long distance
01:41:55 ◼ ► call. And it was a mess. And that was the one time I was jealous of American Online users was because
01:41:59 ◼ ► AOL had, you know, endpoints, if you will, everywhere. And there was some, there was like a
01:42:06 ◼ ► database inside the AOL app and you would just say, okay, well, here's where I am. And you would
01:42:10 ◼ ► get scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, Richmond, Virginia, scroll, scroll, scroll. Okay, there. That looks
01:42:14 ◼ ► like a local number. And then you could dial your local number and not have to pay long distance
01:42:17 ◼ ► charges to get on quote unquote, the internet. What was your ISP that didn't have local numbers?
01:42:21 ◼ ► What were you using? No, no, I was, it was local when I was in, I wasn't in Richmond at the time,
01:42:26 ◼ ► for the sake of discussion, I was, it was local to Richmond. Yeah, but what was that ISP? Oh God,
01:42:30 ◼ ► I don't remember. It was forever ago. I think it was, there used to be local ISPs. Like they, it would be like,
01:42:35 ◼ ► you know, an ISP in your town or in your region. I know, I know. But like, because I remember, I remember
01:42:39 ◼ ► having the same situation, like, so I, you know, I knew the BU number, 3535,000. But I don't call that.
01:42:45 ◼ ► I don't know if it's still a modem. I guess it was 617. You know, and I could call it from campus and
01:42:51 ◼ ► I could long distance it from home during the summer. Cause this is the other thing that remember. So
01:42:55 ◼ ► like my first experience with the internet was at college in 1993, I guess. But when I came home for
01:43:01 ◼ ► the summer, where did the internet go? It's back at college. So like, like Casey, I could call on my
01:43:09 ◼ ► modem, which I brought home with me, I could call the BU dialed number, but it's long distance to
01:43:14 ◼ ► Boston. So I had, you know, rather than doing that, I, to get a quote unquote local ISP, but even, even
01:43:21 ◼ ► then, even in '93, I think I had Netcom and Netcom was a, I guess, semi-national ISP. And they had
01:43:28 ◼ ► dialed numbers in most major metropolitan areas. So I got to call a New York dialed number to get on
01:43:34 ◼ ► the internet. And then I could hop over to the BU stuff or whatever. Yeah. I was at this point,
01:43:40 ◼ ► that was not what I had and racking my brain. I am pretty sure this was when we were living in
01:43:45 ◼ ► Austin, Texas, and I'm pretty sure it was North American internet and the domain for it was nai.net
01:43:51 ◼ ► and I just went to it and it's like been bought up a thousand times. That's not what it is anymore,
01:43:55 ◼ ► but I'm pretty sure when we were in Austin, when we were writing the, you know, modem codes and so on
01:44:01 ◼ ► and so forth, the Hays codes, I'm pretty sure it was, it was nai.net. I'm almost sure of it. And
01:44:06 ◼ ► they only had an established, they were only established in Austin. Again, maybe it wasn't
01:44:11 ◼ ► Austin, but I'm pretty sure it was. And that's, that's what we had. That was, that was it. And
01:44:15 ◼ ► it was, dad had a tremendous advantage because IBM obviously had like endpoints, I don't know what
01:44:19 ◼ ► you would call them, but like endpoints everywhere. And so we, I could get on the internet briefly and
01:44:24 ◼ ► like check my email using dad's work dial up, but it was, it was just a very, very different time.
01:44:35 ◼ ► you would put it on a diskette or a disk, depending on how old you are and what you would want to call
01:44:40 ◼ ► it. And you would walk it to somebody else and hand them that disk. And now you have transferred
01:44:46 ◼ ► that file because there was no internet. Well, you might've transferred the file. You have to
01:44:49 ◼ ► actually read it off the disk to see if it was actually readable first. Yeah, that's not, that's
01:44:54 ◼ ► another archaic thing from all of our youth is a big subject of advertising and competition in the
01:45:00 ◼ ► computing marketplace was surrounding file format compatibility. It's part of the reason why Macs
01:45:05 ◼ ► were like boxed out of the business market or whatever it was. And there was all sorts of Mac
01:45:09 ◼ ► products like this will let you open files from PCs. Like the, the notion was that basically,
01:45:13 ◼ ► you know, if you had a PC, any of the files that you made in that PC, the Mac could do nothing with
01:45:19 ◼ ► and vice versa. Right. Which I think is a concept that's mostly foreign to people these days,
01:45:24 ◼ ► because basically we've set it on standardized formats, like for images, for example, they're
01:45:27 ◼ ► all JPEGs, pings, both. Those are not platform specific file formats. Like, you know, through
01:45:32 ◼ ► the magic of the web, the platform that nobody owns, uh, you know, the web pages can be viewed
01:45:36 ◼ ► from different platforms. The images can be viewed and I, we still have Microsoft word and stuff like
01:45:40 ◼ ► that, but it used to be that literally every single file you made, no matter what it was,
01:45:44 ◼ ► no matter what was in it, Oh, you made that on a PC. Well, of course a Mac can't read that without
01:45:48 ◼ ► some special software that knows how to read PC files. Cause there was no standardized format and
01:45:53 ◼ ► no internet to sort of force that standardization. And that, that whole concept is mostly disappeared,
01:45:59 ◼ ► especially now that if any application is remotely viable in any platform, it's probably
01:46:03 ◼ ► cross-platform like there are very few, I guess there are probably a bunch of Mac programs that
01:46:08 ◼ ► don't exist on the PC. And I suppose vice versa, but like Microsoft word is everywhere. Every image
01:46:12 ◼ ► format is readable everywhere. Photoshop is everywhere. You know, like it's where the portability
01:46:18 ◼ ► of data is much better now. And I mean like in terms of being able to read it, um, even if we're
01:46:22 ◼ ► not carrying floppy disks around. So yeah, I could take my Mac floppy disk. PCs couldn't even read
01:46:27 ◼ ► the Mac floppy disk. They would, they would ask to initialize it or they would however they would
01:46:30 ◼ ► format it. John, the word is format format. This, this disc is uninitialized. Would you like to
01:46:35 ◼ ► initialize it? I know that message. Well, and vice versa for a long time that if you had a quote unquote
01:46:41 ◼ ► PC desk and you brought it to a Mac, unless again, unless you have, you could tell the Mac was the
01:46:45 ◼ ► lesser platform, like the less market share because on the Mac, there were tons of utilities and
01:46:50 ◼ ► stuff to help you read files from the PC, read DOS formatted floppies much less so in the other
01:46:56 ◼ ► direction because you know, windows didn't have to. So why would it, I mean, we didn't even have
01:47:00 ◼ ► like text encoding. So like, you know, this was before Unicode. Oh, we had ASCII, but like,
01:47:04 ◼ ► nothing stores up an ASCII. Once word processing started to have like bold and italics, like so
01:47:09 ◼ ► much for even, even RTF is, I mean, RTF is still kind of a horror show, but that was close as we
01:47:15 ◼ ► got to style cross-platform style texts before, before the beautiful advent of a PDF and HTML and
01:47:20 ◼ ► all those other things. Man, you guys and your fancy, your fancy modems and ISPs and, you know,
01:47:27 ◼ ► computers, you know, before 1994, I had a very different experience. See, you both had the
01:47:35 ◼ ► advantage that your parents were a little bit more computer friendly. You know, in Casey's case,
01:47:41 ◼ ► a lot more computer friendly, I think. Yeah, yeah. My parents weren't computer friendly. They were
01:47:45 ◼ ► susceptible to other people telling them that this is a thing they need to do for the kid,
01:47:52 ◼ ► Yeah. But you at least had like computer enabling parents. Yes, for sure. I did not have that.
01:47:57 ◼ ► My mom, you know, so number one was, you know, my mom super non-technical. My dad died when I was
01:48:04 ◼ ► very, very young. So I was raised by a single mom. We didn't have any money really. Like we weren't
01:48:09 ◼ ► poor. We were, you know, lower middle class. We got by, but we couldn't buy fancy stuff at all.
01:48:15 ◼ ► The only reason we were really a computer is that one of my grandmothers had passed away and left
01:48:20 ◼ ► us like $2,000. And so we use that to buy our first computer in 94. It was a wonderful gateway 2000.
01:48:25 ◼ ► I love those so much at the time. A 486 PC running windows 3.11 for work groups and a black and white
01:48:32 ◼ ► inkjet printer, which existed then. But anyway, so because we really didn't have any money,
01:48:39 ◼ ► we were able to buy this computer like once in 94, but then not really able to upgrade it ever.
01:48:44 ◼ ► So I was using that 1994 486 computer until 1998 or 1999. Like I entirely, it couldn't run
01:48:54 ◼ ► windows 95. So I entirely skipped windows 95. I didn't use it at all. I went straight from 3.1
01:48:59 ◼ ► to a very short lived stay on 98. And by the way, people were saying, so what, you use a five year
01:49:04 ◼ ► old computer. Who cares? You don't understand how fast computers were changing. The five years from
01:49:09 ◼ ► 1994 to 1998 were very different than the five years from 2015 to 2020. For example, very
01:49:15 ◼ ► different. Things were changing so fast. That's where all the jokes about, oh, you buy it and you
01:49:20 ◼ ► bring it home. It's obsolete. Things were getting better so fast at that point that a five year old
01:49:24 ◼ ► computer was like, why even bother? Right. Even, even though, you know, it wasn't even top of the
01:49:29 ◼ ► line when we bought it because we bought like a mid range one. $2,000 bought a mid range desktop,
01:49:33 ◼ ► not a top of the line desktop in 94. Still true. Still true of Apple today. Yeah. But this was
01:49:38 ◼ ► gateway 2000. I know it was $2,000 in 1994 money, but just anyway. Yeah. But anyway, the, so that
01:49:45 ◼ ► computer that was like, and I, I was entirely self-taught because my, you know, my mom was very,
01:49:51 ◼ ► very non-technical, you know, my sister didn't care. And that was it. That was the whole
01:49:54 ◼ ► household. My mom, my sister and me. So I was the only, it was in my room cause no one else cared,
01:49:58 ◼ ► which is great. That computer, I use that for so long. And again, going back to the, you know,
01:50:03 ◼ ► not really having any money thing, no one in my house was going to agree that we should pay for
01:50:09 ◼ ► a dial-up account or even a modem. So for the first few years of having that computer, for the
01:50:15 ◼ ► first year, I didn't have any connectivity to the internet because that wasn't actually a given,
01:50:19 ◼ ► like why you'd get a computer. It wasn't to put it on the internet. Like there was barely any
01:50:23 ◼ ► internet at all back then. So for the first like year or so or two that I had it, we, I just,
01:50:28 ◼ ► used local software. I would, you know, play around and, you know, MS paint or use Microsoft word,
01:50:33 ◼ ► figure out various things, play some games that I would like buy on CDs. Like you'd go to a store
01:50:39 ◼ ► in the mall and you'd buy like that CD that had, they would say like 200 games and it was all
01:50:45 ◼ ► shareware demos. It was like 200 shareware demos for 10 bucks on this. So I'd have like the first
01:50:51 ◼ ► two levels of 200 different games that all sucked. So that was my gaming situation for a while. I had
01:50:57 ◼ ► to add on the sound card and CD-ROM as a set for Christmas that following Christmas. Cause like it
01:51:04 ◼ ► would have been too much to get that with the computer that I got the computer in spring 94.
01:51:09 ◼ ► And then in December 94, I got the sound blaster 16 sound card with CD-ROM combo. The sound card
01:51:15 ◼ ► actually drove the CD-ROM drive. Like it had the sound card itself had a ribbon cable and I don't
01:51:21 ◼ ► even know what protocol it spoke, but it was probably some early like form of ATA and that
01:51:27 ◼ ► drove the CD-ROM. Didn't the joystick also plug into the sound cards? Yes it did. Yeah. I didn't
01:51:31 ◼ ► have a joystick, but yeah, game pads. Yeah. That would, they would plug in. Anyway, so that computer
01:51:35 ◼ ► lasted me a long time because it had to, to the point where even it even lasted me into the early
01:51:42 ◼ ► internet usage. But again, like I didn't have a modem because we couldn't buy a modem because they
01:51:47 ◼ ► were expensive and who the hell was going to buy a modem and then buy an ISP. So eventually some,
01:51:52 ◼ ► some like friend of my mom's felt sorry for me and gave me like a hand-me-down 14. First I got
01:51:56 ◼ ► a hand-me-down 2,400 baud modem. And this was in like probably like 1996. Like it was way late for
01:52:02 ◼ ► that speed. It was this giant thing. And I remember like I was, I was playing with visual basic at the
01:52:09 ◼ ► time and I needed for somehow I had lost my copy of the VB run, whatever dot DLL file that you need
01:52:14 ◼ ► to run. It's like the runtime for visual basic project. You need to run anything from visual
01:52:18 ◼ ► basic. So I had to download a copy of it. So somebody told me about some BBS. I had to like
01:52:22 ◼ ► dial up this BBS and try to download this 300 kilobyte file on a 2,400 baud modem, which I don't,
01:52:29 ◼ ► I'm not going to do the math now, but I think, I think it ended up, it needed like two hours or
01:52:33 ◼ ► something. Do you remember how much 2,400 baud modem costs at that point? Cause you got the
01:52:37 ◼ ► used one, right? Like why couldn't you buy one new? Like what was it? It was, it was a hand-me-down
01:52:41 ◼ ► like, I don't know, but at the time the current speed at the time was like 28,8. So it was old.
01:52:46 ◼ ► Oh, that's right. So you weren't, all right. It was, I was, I was trying to remember like
01:52:50 ◼ ► my first modem was also 2,400, but that was the fastest speed you could get at the time.
01:52:57 ◼ ► Yeah, no, you're, you're, you're definitely are offset by several years in history. I was just
01:53:00 ◼ ► looking up one Christmas I asked for my, when I got my second floppy drive, which as you know,
01:53:05 ◼ ► as I previously said, is super important. Uh, that second floppy drive in today's dollars was $1,200.
01:53:31 ◼ ► And so that is, that is 1000%. I, again, vivid memory. This was early in my computing life,
01:53:36 ◼ ► early, early, early. I have a vivid memory of using Prodigy, which we briefly had an account on.
01:53:46 ◼ ► Like you see in movies today. You go to a movie and you'll see some kind of thing. And not only
01:53:51 ◼ ► will you see the letters appear one at a time, like they did over a 1200, 2400 baud modem,
01:53:56 ◼ ► but they'll each one will make a beep. Now you can watch all the large language models,
01:54:07 ◼ ► Right. Right. But yeah, that was like my, my whole internet experience growing up was really
01:54:12 ◼ ► weird because so I came to it late. Um, I had very, very basic like that, that computer was
01:54:18 ◼ ► so basic for the internet that when MP3s were starting to become a thing was right at the end
01:54:23 ◼ ► of me having that computer. My, so my first few MP3s I had on that 486 computer with a 400 meg
01:54:29 ◼ ► hard drive. So not only could, you know, but after I've been using this computer for like four years,
01:54:34 ◼ ► the hard drive was nearly full. So to add like a three megabyte MP3 was a big deal for a 400
01:54:40 ◼ ► megabyte hard drive and a 486 can't play MP3s in real time. It's too slow to decode them.
01:54:53 ◼ ► just not decode the upper frequency range because it was too slow. I bet somebody could make an
01:54:59 ◼ ► MP3 decoder written in assembly for a 486. It would work. Maybe. I mean, yeah, this was obviously
01:55:04 ◼ ► very early in MP3 days, so I'm sure it wasn't that optimized yet, but it was, it was bad.
01:55:14 ◼ ► for like some other birthday or Christmas gift bought me a 33.6 modem. And then that changed
01:55:19 ◼ ► everything that was like, Oh my God, now I can actually dial things, but still didn't have an ISP.
01:55:23 ◼ ► My family wasn't going to pay 20 bucks a month. And I was like a young teenager. I'm wasn't,
01:55:28 ◼ ► I couldn't do that myself. So I had a, I had a rich friend though, whose dad had an AOL account.
01:55:35 ◼ ► And, and it was, this was right before AOL went flat rate. You were still paying like whatever,
01:55:42 ◼ ► like $3 an hour to use it, but he would let me occasionally sign in to a screen name that he
01:55:48 ◼ ► created in his account. Problem is AOL accounts wouldn't allow account sharing. So if somebody
01:55:53 ◼ ► was signed in, you couldn't sign in also to the same account. So I would have to leave the call
01:55:59 ◼ ► waiting non-disabled on my modem in its string, leave call waiting enabled and change the unit
01:56:05 ◼ ► string. So the modem speaker would stay on the whole time. So the whole time using the internet,
01:56:18 ◼ ► I would have to flip the modem off. So it would hang up instantly disconnect. I'd pick up the
01:56:24 ◼ ► phone. Hey, sorry. And you know, hang up. And then he'd go sign on, on his, on his account,
01:56:28 ◼ ► like from his house. It was this whole terrible thing. This is also, I had moments of this as
01:56:34 ◼ ► well. I think specifically with AOL, I don't know why maybe I really wanted to get on AOL
01:56:38 ◼ ► specifically because there was something I wanted there. That's probably what it was, but
01:56:42 ◼ ► you would find a friend like Marco was describing whose parents had an AOL account. And then he
01:56:48 ◼ ► would either, well, in my case, he, but they would give you a login or something like that.
01:56:53 ◼ ► But like Marco said, if the parent wanted to get online or the kid wanted to get online,
01:56:59 ◼ ► you don't want them to the, especially the parent to see, Oh, you know, Casey is online. What the
01:57:05 ◼ ► hell is this? Well, why was Casey online? You had to be like, you had to be real committed when you
01:57:12 ◼ ► dialed up with somebody else's account and you had to be real sure you were real fast with whatever
01:57:17 ◼ ► you were trying to do, because it was like super dangerous, not literal in a literal sense, but it
01:57:21 ◼ ► was like dangerous. You don't want the parent to know that you're leeching off their account,
01:57:26 ◼ ► especially during the time that it wasn't unlimited because yeah, for a long time, ISPs
01:57:30 ◼ ► were like, particularly AOL was, was, was built hourly. It was, it was built by the time you used.
01:57:36 ◼ ► And so, yeah, this was, this was like the most dangerous game. That's a reference. And it was,
01:57:41 ◼ ► it was, it was so stressful and so frustrating. I mean, again, I was, I was thinking about this
01:57:46 ◼ ► topic earlier today. Like we just assume that the internet is everywhere. I'm not even talking about
01:57:57 ◼ ► internet running through it in some way, shape or form. And that could not have been further from
01:58:02 ◼ ► the truth that this era in computers, I came home when I came from college, I left the internet
01:58:06 ◼ ► behind because the internet was at school. But I came back to my house. My house didn't have the
01:58:09 ◼ ► internet. Where was it? Where does the internet come into your house from? And so I had to like,
01:58:12 ◼ ► I brought my modem home, but the only thing I could dial was the Boston university number. And
01:58:16 ◼ ► so it was just like, I gotta get an ISP. And then we had the, you know, well, we only have one phone
01:58:20 ◼ ► line and I essentially wanted to be on the internet 24 hours a day, which was incompatible
01:58:23 ◼ ► to having with having a phone. So how do you figure that out? And I did actually, we did have
01:58:27 ◼ ► AOL and some other things like that, which I despised, right. Because my first experience was
01:58:32 ◼ ► with the real internet so I could see that AOL was not where I want it to be. Something you both
01:58:39 ◼ ► said reminded me of another thing that from my computing past, that gives me a different
01:58:44 ◼ ► perspective on computers. I just mentioned that like when you, with the original Macintosh,
01:58:48 ◼ ► when you turned it on, it would make a little beep, the screen would come on and then it would
01:58:51 ◼ ► show a floppy disk icon with a question mark on it and it'd be blinking. It's basically saying,
01:58:55 ◼ ► you know, disk, you got to stick in a disk. That's all the Mac did when you turned it on.
01:58:59 ◼ ► But I had had computers before that. Like I said, my first computer was a VIC 20, which we rented
01:59:03 ◼ ► and not bought because it was too expensive to buy. So you used to be able to rent computers.
01:59:06 ◼ ► I don't know how much the rental costs, but presumably it was cheaper than buying anyway.
01:59:09 ◼ ► VIC 20, I think this is true of Commodore 64, Commodore pet, like my original computers. You,
01:59:16 ◼ ► if you took that out of the box and you turned it on, it didn't have a blinking floppy disk icon.
01:59:21 ◼ ► It didn't have graphics. Right. And you connected it to your television. That was your monitor.
01:59:25 ◼ ► But those early computers, when you turn them on, I mean, I don't know if you, did you,
01:59:33 ◼ ► I mean, I never use anything that old, but I remember like, you know, the old Apple twos
01:59:36 ◼ ► that I would have in computer school labs, school computer labs, like you just flip it on and it
01:59:40 ◼ ► would beep and it would have, and the CRT would warm up over a few seconds and you'd see a cursor.
01:59:46 ◼ ► A cursor. And what do you, what can you do with that cursor? What the hell was the cursor there
01:59:50 ◼ ► for it? With those old Apple twos? It was a basic cursor. Exactly. Computers that my very first
01:59:55 ◼ ► computer and the original personal computers that I experienced for the Vic 20 on, when you turn them
02:00:00 ◼ ► on, you got a place where you could type and what could you type basic programs? A computer was a
02:00:06 ◼ ► thing that you program. That was what it was like. And my Vic 20 did not have a floppy drive or a
02:00:12 ◼ ► cassette tape drive or literally anything else that you turned it on and you got a prompt. What
02:00:16 ◼ ► can you do? Well, you could take a computer magazine that you got from library at school
02:00:19 ◼ ► and you could type in a basic program or you could type your own basic programs, or you could make
02:00:22 ◼ ► little colorful squares on the screen by figuring out which key makes a different colorful square on
02:00:26 ◼ ► the screen. Right. But like they like built into the computers was the basic programming language.
02:00:32 ◼ ► And you would type a line number and type a basic thing. And that was it. And you could load your
02:00:36 ◼ ► program and run your program and do stuff like that. So, you know, the Mac was a very big change
02:00:42 ◼ ► for me from many ways. Obviously it was my first GUI computer and the first GUI computer most people
02:00:45 ◼ ► ever seen. But also the Mac, when you turned it on, there was nothing there. You had to
02:00:50 ◼ ► boot into an operating system, run some software, whatever it did not. It did not put you at a basic
02:00:56 ◼ ► prompt. It was the first computer I used that was not essentially, this is a tool for writing and
02:01:00 ◼ ► running programs. The Mac was a tool for running applications, essentially programs that other
02:01:06 ◼ ► people wrote. And yes, you could write your own programs too, but boy, was it more complicated
02:01:14 ◼ ► which I think was great. Like how did all this old stuff, how does it affect our usage patterns today?
02:01:20 ◼ ► You know, I think for my story, it's very, it's a very complicated mess of lots of these things.
02:01:27 ◼ ► Like, you know, from what John was saying a minute ago, having programming be just built
02:01:32 ◼ ► into everything makes me really resent platforms that lock that away or make, you know, make it
02:01:37 ◼ ► impossible to write software for them or very difficult. I don't love that. I love when, when
02:01:44 ◼ ► computers are programmable themselves, when you can use a computer device and write programs for it
02:01:49 ◼ ► on it. I love that. But you know, in general too, like, you know, like my whole history here with,
02:01:54 ◼ ► I didn't have much, I couldn't afford upgrades very often. After that 486, I ended up doing a
02:02:02 ◼ ► series of self-built computers because that was the way to get a computer less expensively was
02:02:08 ◼ ► build it yourself. Like, and I learned how to do all that, which honestly served me very well.
02:02:12 ◼ ► You know, I learned how to build PCs, how to upgrade PCs, how to get different parts together.
02:02:17 ◼ ► I spent so much time building PCs for either myself or for my friends and having to figure out
02:02:25 ◼ ► problems. So much time with like drivers installing, reinstalling windows, all like, Oh, why
02:02:32 ◼ ► does this hard drive not show up? Like so many problems, so much time spent dealing with all that
02:02:39 ◼ ► crap. So much time spent reinstalling windows. And as a result now I'm fortunate enough that I can buy
02:02:46 ◼ ► good hardware now. And so I do because I went so long without having it. Like as John was saying,
02:02:52 ◼ ► when you're a kid, this feels like an eternity. Like when I was a teenager using these slow
02:02:56 ◼ ► computers and I cannot possibly express to anybody who wasn't alive back then how slow everything
02:03:02 ◼ ► was. You know, we talked about it a little bit earlier, but just everything was so slow back
02:03:07 ◼ ► then. It was that slow through the entire nineties and even the early two thousands. Like it wasn't
02:03:14 ◼ ► quite as bad once RAM started getting cheaper in the mid two thousands, but it was really slow in
02:03:19 ◼ ► the nineties because everything was RAM starved. Everything. You just hear hard drive grinding
02:03:24 ◼ ► noises constantly. Or I mean, did you either run software off floppy disks? Cause that was the
02:03:29 ◼ ► switch to hard drives is basically like the switch to SSDs. Like we, most of us live through this
02:03:33 ◼ ► relatively. We lived through the switch to SSDs. Like you would think, well, what's the difference?
02:03:37 ◼ ► Floppy disk hard drive. They're both spinning media. You both got to wait, wait for the
02:03:40 ◼ ► disk to spin around to where you are. And you got to move ahead. But boy, was it different running?
02:03:44 ◼ ► Cause I ran software off floppy drives for a long time, or what seemed like a long time.
02:03:48 ◼ ► And it's the worst. That's and that was back in the era when you could, you know, when you
02:03:51 ◼ ► can listen to computers and hear how they're doing, because they made noises, mechanical
02:03:54 ◼ ► noises that you could interpret, you could interpret their health. And so I'm very familiar
02:03:58 ◼ ► with floppy drive noises and what it sounds like when things are going well and not going well.
02:04:03 ◼ ► And yeah, so that was, that was a whole other level of slow. There was, I suppose there was
02:04:07 ◼ ► cassette tape slow, which is you got to rewind and load the program. And that was like, Oh,
02:04:10 ◼ ► nothing's happening. We're loading the program, come back when it's loaded. So that's one level.
02:04:13 ◼ ► So the next was floppy disks, which was random access, but super slow. Then there was hard
02:04:17 ◼ ► drives. Then there was SSDs and each of those leads. Oh, you're skipping a step. You're skipping
02:04:20 ◼ ► an important step. Then I skipped it earlier too. The CD-ROM drive. Oh my word. I'm putting that
02:04:27 ◼ ► off to the side because that was like backsliding because we had hard drives and it's like,
02:04:33 ◼ ► No thanks, but, but it's a 650 gigs and you can play mist. All right, fine. Not gigs. 650 megs.
02:04:49 ◼ ► and everything like, so, you know, what happened was early CD-ROM drives, they'd be like, you know,
02:04:53 ◼ ► two X, four X. I had a one X drive. Oh, I'm sorry. I think it was $800. Yeah. When I bought it in,
02:04:59 ◼ ► in whatever 1990s money that was. That's rough. That's 150 kilobytes a second. We had one of
02:05:03 ◼ ► those two and again, a differentiator between the Mac and a PC was our original CD-ROM drive,
02:05:09 ◼ ► which was external. You had to put the CD in a caddy. Yeah. Now the Mac, the first Mac drive
02:05:15 ◼ ► was in a caddy too. It just cost 10 times as much as the PC one. Yeah. Yeah. It was probably scuzzy.
02:05:19 ◼ ► It was, it was scuzzy. My favorite part is like when, when we got to the, like the 52 X CD-ROM
02:05:25 ◼ ► era of the, of the mid two thousands, it's too fast. So every time the CD would be accessed,
02:05:38 ◼ ► and it was like a plane taking off. And it was, cause it had to spin up to its ridiculous
02:05:42 ◼ ► spindle speed to, and it wouldn't read anything until it was spun all the way up. So it would
02:05:47 ◼ ► have this like this four second, like just lock of whatever was trying to read it would just freeze
02:05:52 ◼ ► for a few seconds. And you hear this jet engine taking off in your computer. And that was normal
02:05:57 ◼ ► for, for probably six years, seven years, like for a long time, every CD-ROM drive in a PC did that.
02:06:03 ◼ ► Like they all did multitasking. So on the original Mac, you know, I just described how you couldn't
02:06:09 ◼ ► run more than programming at once, but you couldn't do more than one thing at once. Cause the
02:06:13 ◼ ► resources were so limited. The famous example is if you held down a pull down menu, I've already
02:06:17 ◼ ► talked about how you couldn't click a menu, right? So if you click the mouse button and held it down
02:06:21 ◼ ► in the file menu, everything on the, on the computer would stop. Nothing else is happening.
02:06:26 ◼ ► All it's doing is concentrating on drawing that menu for you. Any program that like Mac paint,
02:06:30 ◼ ► it stopped doing anything. Nothing else is happening. Right? Same thing was true for floppy
02:06:36 ◼ ► drives in the finder. If you were copying a file from a floppy drive to the other floppy drive,
02:06:41 ◼ ► if you were lucky enough to have two of them or whatever, nothing else is happening while that
02:06:45 ◼ ► copy is happening. There's a system modal dialogue showing a progress bar. You could do literally
02:06:51 ◼ ► nothing else. You couldn't go mess around in the finder, do something else. It was like,
02:06:55 ◼ ► you're just going to watch that progress where I go. Yeah. As it copies and stuff. And the reason
02:06:59 ◼ ► I bring this up is because like that era of like, Oh, it's a floppy driver. No one has any Ram.
02:07:03 ◼ ► Multitasking is too expensive. Like everything, you know, if you have a GUI computer, like you're
02:07:07 ◼ ► not going to be able to, by the time we get multitasking, everyone had hard drives and like
02:07:14 ◼ ► with somebody I knew had an OS two computer with a floppy drive and in the, whatever it was,
02:07:21 ◼ ► maybe Casey knows what was the file manager called an OS two, the workshell thing or whatever. Oh,
02:07:28 ◼ ► it's a fun, the finder equivalent in OS two. And he was showing me his OS two computer and I was
02:07:33 ◼ ► like, yeah, yeah, I'm actually better blah, blah, blah. And then he copied a file from a floppy
02:07:37 ◼ ► drive. I think he copied it from a floppy onto his hard drive. And then he started to do other things
02:07:41 ◼ ► and like, you can't do anything when you're copying from a floppy drive. What witchcraft is this?
02:07:46 ◼ ► Because it has been so burned into my brain that when you're doing like, like Margaret was saying,
02:07:50 ◼ ► well, like CD-ROM, like when you're waiting for that thing to spin up, nothing else is happening.
02:07:54 ◼ ► Like it's just, you're, you're waiting for an IO. And I had lived so long with the idea with like,
02:07:59 ◼ ► oh, so you're copying something from a floppy drive. That is literally the only thing your
02:08:02 ◼ ► computer is doing right now. You can't even use anything else in the file manager, but then an
02:08:06 ◼ ► OS two, you could copy something from a floppy drive and go do something else. And it was like
02:08:10 ◼ ► this amazing, the magic of preemptive multitasking. That's when I knew the Mac needed a new operating
02:08:15 ◼ ► system. That was it. That was the moment. I knew before that, but you know, it was still like,
02:08:21 ◼ ► it just, it blew my mind in a way that like, I hadn't even occurred to me that this is a thing
02:08:25 ◼ ► in operating could do just because the floppy disk was from the era when you couldn't do that.
02:08:28 ◼ ► Of course, when you copy from hard drives, you can do other stuff, but not a floppy drive because
02:08:35 ◼ ► So this is like, like, like, you know, here you are like wondering about like, you know,
02:08:41 ◼ ► we need a new operating system. For me, my operating system at the time, which was Windows,
02:08:45 ◼ ► it was just telling me over and over again, every, every couple of months when I'd have
02:08:50 ◼ ► to reinstall the whole thing to make it work right, I should be using a different operating system.
02:08:59 ◼ ► Then, you know, looking back through this history, like all the, all the computers I built,
02:09:27 ◼ ► zero patience now for dealing with OS bugs and and cruft and having to reinstall or restore things
02:09:36 ◼ ► and having to reset everything up. I hate doing that now is I spent my entire youth doing that
02:09:42 ◼ ► and not do not getting much else done. At the time, it was vaguely fun because it was all I
02:09:47 ◼ ► had to do and it was the only hardware I had and so fine. But then as soon as I switched to Mac,
02:09:52 ◼ ► like I got a Mac laptop in 2004 because I needed a laptop and they were good. And I was instantly
02:09:58 ◼ ► hooked on Mac OS and my PC usage quickly fell off and I quickly stopped buying PCs because it was
02:10:03 ◼ ► just so much better for my my purposes. I was at that point I was so burnt out from just the
02:10:11 ◼ ► overhead of having a PC and trying to keep it in working order. I was so burnt out from that,
02:10:17 ◼ ► even though I liked it for a while. I was ready to move on and the Mac was that way to move on.
02:10:21 ◼ ► And I was so thankful to do it. And at the time, you know, I still couldn't afford much,
02:10:25 ◼ ► so you know that the Mac I had was not super fast. But man, it was so much better in terms of like,
02:10:32 ◼ ► not having to deal with a bunch of crap. And then I fell in love with all the you know,
02:10:40 ◼ ► and the you know, the good design. But well, you know, what got me there was I wanted a good
02:10:44 ◼ ► laptop that I didn't have to mess with all the time. And it was it was just so so good. And
02:10:49 ◼ ► that's why like, again, like you look at me, if you look at me today, like what we all joke about
02:10:52 ◼ ► today, like, oh, I keep buying stuff. And I you know, if something doesn't work, I get rid of it,
02:10:56 ◼ ► like, yeah, because I spent my entire youth not being able to buy anything. And with tons of
02:11:01 ◼ ► stuff that didn't work. So now I went the other opposite direction. You know, now I'm like, I have
02:11:06 ◼ ► no patience for hardware that's insufficient for my needs, or stuff that doesn't work very well,
02:11:11 ◼ ► or stuff I have to manage it and mess with a lot. No patience whatsoever. I got better things to do
02:11:16 ◼ ► now. I paid my dues. I've moved on. In 2004, did you care about the Unix, the fact that you know,
02:11:23 ◼ ► the Mac was Unix under the covers? Or is that not yet a factor in your decision? No, that wasn't a
02:11:27 ◼ ► factor at all. I didn't I didn't really know to what degree that was the case yet. Did you I mean,
02:11:32 ◼ ► this is before you were in like PHP, doing the web stuff and everything like that. It was right when
02:11:36 ◼ ► that was starting. Because it was it was when I graduated from college, right after graduate
02:11:40 ◼ ► from college, I was starting to move around a lot. And I needed I wanted something portable.
02:11:44 ◼ ► And I had always like, ventured into the Mac section of Micro Center, you know, like they
02:11:49 ◼ ► would always have like this, like sec, this like sectioned off room, like sectioned off with glass
02:11:53 ◼ ► walls from the rest of Micro Center. And that would be the little like Mac paradise. And you
02:11:56 ◼ ► go in there and you'd like shrink the windows, you see the genie effects. This was early OS 10 days.
02:12:01 ◼ ► I'm not sure paradise is the word I would use to describe it. It was more like a little prison or
02:12:11 ◼ ► I felt like the Mac was marginalized in retail stores. This is the reason Apple opened its own
02:12:15 ◼ ► stores. Yeah, but at least at least you knew that like, if you had a Mac, at least you knew you
02:12:18 ◼ ► could go in there and you could see the four apps they actually had for the Mac you could buy.
02:12:22 ◼ ► And Oh, sick bird. This is 2004. This was 2004 though. So this is post iMac. This is post Mac OS
02:12:28 ◼ ► 10. If you remember in the bad old days, if you went into a store that sold computers before Mac
02:12:34 ◼ ► OS 10, before the iPod, before the iMac, there was a section with Macs and it was sneered upon
02:12:40 ◼ ► by everybody. And it was not well loved. The only place that I, that I ever experienced that had any
02:12:44 ◼ ► kind of well-loved display of Mac hardware was a place that didn't even sell Mac hardware. And
02:12:48 ◼ ► that's egg head software because they would have a Mac there, a fancy Mac that you couldn't afford
02:12:52 ◼ ► because it costs as much as your house. Uh, and they would show it running the Mac applications
02:12:57 ◼ ► that they sold egg head treated its max. Well, but nobody else did. Do you remember I get,
02:13:02 ◼ ► I was national chain, right? Yeah. I don't think we had them in Columbus. I don't think we had them,
02:13:06 ◼ ► but I remember it being a thing that I was aware of. That's where I had to go to be. It was, I was,
02:13:15 ◼ ► tried to get a description to Mac week by lying about who I was and I could never pull it off.
02:13:18 ◼ ► So I had to read Mac week from the, uh, the, the desks of, uh, relatives offices where they got it.
02:13:24 ◼ ► But the only place I could go to see the things that I was reading in magazines was egghead
02:13:29 ◼ ► software. Cause I couldn't afford a color Mac. They cost, I mean, I was just looking up today,
02:13:33 ◼ ► I, a Mac two, the very first color Macintosh with the default smallest possible color monitor.
02:13:38 ◼ ► That was 13 inches, $17,000 in today's money. So that's why I didn't have a Mac too. But if I
02:13:45 ◼ ► wanted to see one in person, it was like going to see like a Lamborghini at the car show. You're not
02:13:48 ◼ ► going to own them, but if you want to see one in person, I didn't go to egghead software and they
02:13:52 ◼ ► had a Mac to set up and then I could be like, there it is. I can touch it. Right. And the people at the
02:13:57 ◼ ► store wouldn't yell at you. Eventually that went downhill too. Cause you'd go see the poor Mac that
02:14:00 ◼ ► was sitting in egghead software, which eventually was like some terrible performer and all of the
02:14:04 ◼ ► desktop would be a hundred folders named ZZZZ from little kids who would just like make a new folder
02:14:08 ◼ ► and just put their, mash their hands in the keyboard. It was sad, but for a while there,
02:14:11 ◼ ► it was nice. Uh, thank you so much to our sponsor this week, which is you, the audience. Uh, you
02:14:20 ◼ ► know, we decided to do a special episode this week where we are entirely audience supported this
02:14:24 ◼ ► episode. So our, our wonderful ATP store, not Mark's store, John, our wonderful ATP store,
02:14:30 ◼ ► you can buy merchandise there. And thank you so much to our members who support us directly.
02:14:35 ◼ ► You've made this show possible this week and you can join us if you're not a member yet,
02:14:39 ◼ ► atb.fm/join. And we will talk to you next week. Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to
02:14:50 ◼ ► begin cause it was accidental. It was accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey
02:15:00 ◼ ► wouldn't let him cause it was accidental. It was accidental. And you can find the show notes at
02:15:10 ◼ ► atp.fm. And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C A S E Y L I S S. So that's
02:15:22 ◼ ► Casey lists M A R C O A R M N T Marco R. Man S I R A C U S A Syracuse. It's accidental.
02:15:47 ◼ ► So I had an idea. I don't know if it's a good idea, but I had an idea. We haven't done it yet.
02:15:54 ◼ ► So I don't want anyone to get too excited and go looking right now, but it occurred to me.
02:16:03 ◼ ► I'm doing it in real time. All Casey talks. It's the best. I'll just edit the file around the
02:16:22 ◼ ► Anyway, I had an idea. I want to make it plain. I'm not trying to be funny. I want to make it
02:16:31 ◼ ► plain. I am reserving the right to take this idea back. I'm reserving the right to cancel it all.
02:16:49 ◼ ► what if we slash I put a link to the test flight for my forthcoming app on your member page right
02:16:58 ◼ ► next to your ATP store discount or maybe really above or below or nearby one way or the other.
02:17:03 ◼ ► You mean look up it's pronounced fluke up. It's pronounced fluke up. Thank you very much. And
02:17:12 ◼ ► But anyways, so my I think what I'm going to try is we're going to put a link to the test flight
02:17:22 ◼ ► for the app into the ATP membership page where you would find your store discount and so on and
02:17:29 ◼ ► so forth. But here's the deal. First of all, done if it. Oh, all right. Look at that. Promise all.
02:17:36 ◼ ► Um, if you are whenever the app is officially released, I'm going to shut this. I'm going to
02:17:48 ◼ ► this beta, this beta is going away. Additionally, I am reserving the right to cancel it at any time
02:17:55 ◼ ► for any reason whatsoever. This is a four fun perk that members have for five minutes or more,
02:18:02 ◼ ► depending on how how I feel about the whole thing. Um, I, I thought it would be fun to give it a shot
02:18:08 ◼ ► and if I'm completely honest, that link will work for anyone under the sun. But here's the thing.
02:18:15 ◼ ► I limited it to roughly the membership count of ATP members right now. So if you share that link
02:18:24 ◼ ► with other people, you're taking away from one of your fellow ATP members. Don't be that person.
02:18:33 ◼ ► please. And thank you. No, honestly, I think we can trust our members. So most people don't know
02:18:37 ◼ ► this. I actually, when, when we, when we were building the CMS, when I was building the CMS,
02:18:42 ◼ ► uh, not letting Casey and John talk. Yeah, there was, there was no, there was no we about it,
02:18:46 ◼ ► which is both great and occasionally annoying, but mostly the JavaScript, uh, uh, it's a very
02:18:51 ◼ ► important part of the system that Casey loves. I love it so much. So when I was building the CMS,
02:18:59 ◼ ► way from the start, but I wasn't sure, like, are people going to like pirate our member episodes
02:19:04 ◼ ► and put them all over, you know, and just, you know, then make a bunch of feeds for other people
02:19:08 ◼ ► to get our member episodes without paying. And I was actually really worried about that. And so I
02:19:13 ◼ ► built this whole system to fingerprint the MP3s that were served to embed like a member ID in
02:19:20 ◼ ► various areas of the MP3 that like wouldn't affect the audio playback. Cause because of my work with
02:19:25 ◼ ► Overcast, I know of a lot of ways to do that. A lot of places that you can shove stuff in the MP3
02:19:29 ◼ ► format and not be seen really, and not be a problem. Um, and so I actually built this whole
02:19:35 ◼ ► thing to like serve files with individual member IDs embedded in them so that if anybody ever did
02:19:40 ◼ ► start sharing stuff, we could like, you know, cut off their account or whatever, and ended up
02:19:43 ◼ ► disabling it in, in a later update because that just hasn't been a problem. Like no one does that
02:19:49 ◼ ► or, you know, or effectively no one does it. And so I really, I want to just express how much I
02:19:54 ◼ ► appreciate that through our members that like, you're, you're not ripping us off. Like you're
02:19:58 ◼ ► not being jerks with their stuff. Like I really appreciate that. And you know, it just goes to
02:20:02 ◼ ► show that, you know, that our, our previous statement that we have the best audience in
02:20:06 ◼ ► the world really is true. Like, you know, other podcasts, I'm sure. Yeah, your audiences are
02:20:10 ◼ ► great. We have the best audience. Let's be honest. Like we like you all out there, you're the best.
02:20:14 ◼ ► Like I really, you are the best. We, we very much appreciate that. Um, so thank you very much. And
02:20:21 ◼ ► so I think with all that said, I think we can trust them not to share your test flight link.
02:20:25 ◼ ► Yes, please. Or at least for some percentage of them not to be interested in testing the program,
02:20:28 ◼ ► leaving the other ones for pirates. I guess that's one way of looking at it, isn't it? But yeah,
02:20:38 ◼ ► on your member page just below where you can find your store discount code. Again, I want to stress,
02:20:44 ◼ ► I'm just trying this out. I thought it would be a fun experiment. I might kill it tomorrow. We don't
02:20:49 ◼ ► know, but we're going to give it a shot and see what happens. I think the one good thing about
02:20:52 ◼ ► this is if you're listening to this and you're like, ah, you know, what is test flight? How do
02:20:56 ◼ ► I use a beta of an iOS application? Even if you have no interest in Casey's application, just going
02:21:01 ◼ ► through the test flight experience is fun. Test flight used to be a third party company that Apple
02:21:06 ◼ ► bought. And now it's part of the Apple developer experience. It's pretty easy. You'll go there and
02:21:11 ◼ ► you'll see a link and like, what am I supposed to do with this URL? If you go to that URL on your
02:21:14 ◼ ► phone, I think it'll show you something that says basically, hey, step one, get the test flight app.
02:21:19 ◼ ► And then we'll have a link to the app store where you'll download an app called test flight with a
02:21:22 ◼ ► little blueprint of a propeller on it. And then it will say step two, after you've installed this
02:21:28 ◼ ► flight app, tap this link and it will open the test flight application and it will say, hey,
02:21:31 ◼ ► do you want to join the test flight app for Casey's app? And you'll say yes. And then you'll see a
02:21:35 ◼ ► list of applications that you have in test flight, which will just be the one you did. And there'll
02:21:39 ◼ ► be a button for you to install it and it will install on your phone and it'll just appear like
02:21:42 ◼ ► any other application on your phone. And every time Casey pushes a new update to the test flight,
02:21:46 ◼ ► it'll automatically update itself or not. I think there's some setting for it, but anyway,
02:21:50 ◼ ► if you've never done an iOS beta test, you should try it because it's actually pretty easy. Like
02:21:55 ◼ ► there's no sort of technical expertise required other than sort of knowing how to follow the link
02:21:59 ◼ ► and dealing with the app store a little bit. And then once you get one test flight, every other
02:22:03 ◼ ► test flight from any other iOS application from any developer works exactly the same way. So then
02:22:09 ◼ ► you can become like all of us in this program and half of our applications have a low colored dot
02:22:13 ◼ ► next to them because we're running a million different betas. That's exactly what I was
02:22:16 ◼ ► going to say is one thing you'll notice is on your home screen on Springboard, there's what is it?
02:22:19 ◼ ► An orange dot? Yeah. It's blue and it's just been updated. Yep. Yes. Yep. And so you'll see a little
02:22:24 ◼ ► dot next to the app and that's normal. But yeah, again, I think this could be fun. I think it'll be
02:22:32 ◼ ► a neat experiment. My intention sitting here now is to let this go until I release the app and then
02:22:38 ◼ ► no matter what, when I release the app, I plan to kill all this off, but I am making no guarantees.
02:22:44 ◼ ► So if you like sign up for membership, I love you. I appreciate that, but you might have access for
02:22:51 ◼ ► a day, an hour, a week, or maybe a month or two. I am making no promises. I just want to make that
02:22:56 ◼ ► extremely clear. I don't want anyone to have their feelings hurt if this goes away quickly,
02:23:01 ◼ ► but we're going to give it a shot and see what happens. I thought it would, I thought it would
02:23:04 ◼ ► be kind of fun. So go into the membership panel. If you are a member, if you're not atp.fm/join
02:23:11 ◼ ► in that membership page, you can see again, the ATP store discount code for you and a link to
02:23:17 ◼ ► the TestFlight beta, which is also just for you and the fellow listeners. And if you're wondering
02:23:22 ◼ ► where the link to your membership page is, if you go to atp.fm/store, the link is there and a little
02:23:26 ◼ ► paragraph explaining how to get your discount code. The other thing that you can do from TestFlight,
02:23:32 ◼ ► by the way, is if you're testing this application and you have some feedback for Casey right inside
02:23:36 ◼ ► the TestFlight application itself, I believe. No, not so much. Not so much. I turned it off.
02:23:44 ◼ ► you have to go through App Store Connect and dig through its terrible interface. I know,
02:23:48 ◼ ► I'm aware. I accept feedback through that on my beta. TestFlight is also available for the macOS.
02:23:53 ◼ ► Well, no, no, no, no, no, no, hold on, slow down. So I turned it off specifically for this group.
02:23:57 ◼ ► So the way TestFlight works is you can have several groups of testers. And so I made an ATP
02:24:01 ◼ ► members group, which this link is associated with, and that group alone does not have the ability to
02:24:08 ◼ ► do feedback. And if I'm completely honest, it's not that I don't care about the feedback,
02:24:17 ◼ ► almost all of whom are friends or whatever. But nevertheless, even still, I have enough users now,
02:24:25 ◼ ► even before all this, that I'm pretty overwhelmed by the feedback and I didn't want to make it
02:24:30 ◼ ► worse on myself. And I knew that if I got a fire hose of feedback from listeners, I would just be
02:24:36 ◼ ► apt to shut the whole thing down. And I didn't want to do that. And that's, again, it's not to
02:24:40 ◼ ► say that I'm not interested in feedback, but I can only take but so much. And so what Jon is talking
02:24:47 ◼ ► about, though, it is pretty slick. I haven't done this in a while, but if memory serves, if you take
02:24:50 ◼ ► a screenshot of an app that you've installed via TestFlight, and if this thing is enabled, which,
02:24:55 ◼ ► again, it is not for members, I'm sorry, then what it'll do is it'll pop up a screen that says
02:24:59 ◼ ► something like, you know, "Do you want to send this to the developer? Describe what you were doing at
02:25:03 ◼ ► the time." I think it'll even let you annotate it, I think. Again, it's been a while since I've done
02:25:07 ◼ ► this. But it is pretty cool what you can do. And then that's all excellent. But the problem comes,
02:25:13 ◼ ► and this is what Marco was driving at, to get to that information, first of all, you never get
02:25:18 ◼ ► notified as a developer when somebody has given you feedback. Secondly, to get to that feedback,
02:25:27 ◼ ► You can't do it in Xcode? I'm pretty sure you can do it. For Mac apps, you can do it in Xcode.
02:25:34 ◼ ► Go to the organizer, and then look next to crashes, there should be a feedback item. Again,
02:25:45 ◼ ► Do the little command, command option shift O, whatever the hell the thing is for organizer.
02:25:51 ◼ ► Oh, yeah, Xcode, it takes a few seconds to open up. This computer is too slow. I need a new one.
02:26:15 ◼ ► then I can go grab a breakpoint. So yeah, Xcode is always running on my computer because I have
02:26:33 ◼ ► This is where this is? See where it says you can click the email button? If you do an email,
02:26:38 ◼ ► it'll compose an email on your email client with the quoted text of their thing. But I think the
02:26:43 ◼ ► most fun thing is if you double click one of these feedback items, look at the interface.
02:26:50 ◼ ► It shows a capsule with an X in it. And that's how you go back. If you hit that little X capsule,
02:26:59 ◼ ► I don't know who made this. I don't know if I've ever seen a computer before, but it is there.
02:27:07 ◼ ► You can see what device they're on, what notes they wrote. You can mark it as resolved.
02:27:14 ◼ ► This was worth the... Okay, I'm shutting the test flight down because I've got what I needed