626: No Longer ery Good
13 Feb 2025Merging Apple accounts, home-status displays, emotive robots, and why we really do want cellular Macs.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- Flighty has other perks (via Stephen Klinck)
- First reports of Invites use in the wild (via Jim Weinert)
- You can use a cable with Sidecar (via Matt West)
- Why not use a Wi-Fi hotspot for “cellar Macs”?
- Why not AirPlay to Sonos speakers? (via Ryan Powers)
- DeepSeek censorship across models (via Sebastian Raschka)
- Has Apple ever… used… Screen Time? (via Jonathan)
- macOS UNIX certification (via Paulo Pinto)
- Migrate purchases from one Apple Account to another
- The new JoyCons do act as a mouse
- An alternative for Apple TV audio (via Nicholas Correnti)
- Casey’s new arrivals
- Hyperspace updates
- Reclaim 1️⃣ file for real!
- Slack
- An aside about bug reporting
- Apple ordered to open encrypted user accounts globally for the UK
- ELEGNT: Expressive & Functional Movement Design for Non-Anthropomorphic Robot
- Ask ATP:
- Post-show: Restaurant-tech update
- Dante
- Ubiquiti Flex (Useful little PoE switch)
- Ubiquiti Flex 2.5G PoE (2.5G version with 10G uplink)
- Ubiquiti Switch Flex XG (10G switch)
- Members-only ATP Overtime: iOS 19 UI rumors and the design language of Apple Invites
Sponsored by:
- HelloFresh: America’s #1 Meal Kit.
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Chapters
- Future-purchase rationalization
- Follow-up: Flighty sharing
- Follow-up: Apple Invites
- Follow-up: Cabled Sidecar
- Merging Apple purchases!
- Yes, we need cellular Macs
- Why use the Sonos app?
- More on DeepSeek
- Impossible Screen Time
- Mac UNIX certification
- Switch 2 mice
- AirPods with Apple TV
- WLED & TRMNL
- Hyperspace updates
- UK backdoors the world
- ELEGNT
- Sponsor: HelloFresh
- #askatp: App-wireframing tool
- #askatp: Is HFS+ still useful?
- #askatp: Special file metadata
- Ending theme
- Restaurant-tech update
Future-purchase rationalization
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think I actually might be wearing out my MacBook Air keyboard. What?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Are you using it that much? Yeah, so I really am. So, because I’m, I keep going, you know, I’m doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco restaurant stuff, so I’m on the ferry back and forth. I go to the city sometimes, I’m on the train back and forth. So, in all these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco times, if I’m traveling, like taking a weekend trip somewhere, I’ll take just the Air. So I’m actually using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it a lot. This is the M2 Air. So I’m using it a ton, actually.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the V is no longer very good. Well, no longer airy good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The command key is starting to go now too. The one that’s nearest to the V. I
⏹️ ▶️ John thought we were out of this phase. We got rid of the butterfly keyboard. These keys are just supposed to work. I thought maybe you were talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John your alien style acid blood slash finger secretions that are wearing off the paint on
⏹️ ▶️ John the keycaps. But no, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco saying you press the
⏹️ ▶️ John key and the letter doesn’t appear on the screen?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like I gotta like press it harder and I keep missing pastes. Yeah, that’s no good. Oh, good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I know. It’s like, I don’t know. Are these easy to repair these days? I have no
⏹️ ▶️ John They can, I mean, you can bring it in and they’ll take off the little key cap and put it in a new scissor switch or whatever, but I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John hoping it’s not. I’m hoping it’s just the plastic mechanism that makes the
⏹️ ▶️ John key cap go up and down and it’s not the little switch that’s below it that the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco key hits. Yeah, God knows, because it’s out of warranty like by a pretty good amount now.
⏹️ ▶️ John We see what you’re doing here, Mark. We know the M4 MacBook Air is coming out soon. You’re sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John like laying the groundwork for why you of course need to get an M4 MacBook Air.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, so okay, there are two things that would make me rationalize that very quickly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I think are plausible. Like cellular, I don’t think is plausible yet. That would do it no matter what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because, God, another, like I had to reboot my phone yesterday to make it work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the ferry like as a tethering source. There have been so many times in the last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco few months that I, like I used tethering at at least once a week, usually more. I’d say maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco four times in the last few months I’ve had to reboot either the MacBook Air, the iPhone, or both to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get tethering to work. Like, it’s so buggy. But anyway, what would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make me upgrade? Like, sight unseen. Would be a significantly brighter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen, because I’m often using it in sunlight, or a nanotexture option. Like, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either of those come to the Air, which I know that’s not really an Air thing, it’s more of a MacBook Pro thing, and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Pros now do have that?
⏹️ ▶️ John I can see them doing the nanotexture since it’s pretty cheap now, right? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was a couple hundred bucks on the laptops. Like it’s- Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing compared to the SSD upgrade prices they have on the MacBook Air.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know, but I could also, like it wouldn’t surprise me if they keep that as a MacBook Pro only feature. So I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But certainly I would love nanotexture and more brightness because I am often using it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like in a sunny train window or on the sunny ferry. Like, and so that would actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get me to upgrade.
⏹️ ▶️ John I had to wave my dad off from his Mac can’t run the current version
⏹️ ▶️ John of TurboTax, so that is what’s triggering his need to upgrade. He has a 10 year old MacBook Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John and he can’t run the latest version of TurboTax because it’s tax season. So I was like, well, it had a good run, 10 years, and
⏹️ ▶️ John I was recommending what he should get. I said, don’t buy a computer because the M4 MacBook Airs are gonna come out, and that’s what you should get, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah. And he’s like, MacBook Air? Why not MacBook Pro? And I explained to him what the differences are, and I basically
⏹️ ▶️ John asked him, the only thing that will be relevant to you is if you think your current screen is not bright enough,
⏹️ ▶️ John because if you think your current screen is not bright enough, a MacBook Pro will have a brighter screen. I didn’t think about the idea that
⏹️ ▶️ John the MacBook Air could have a brighter screen, but I really doubt it’s gonna have a 1600 nit HDR,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, MacBook Pro screen. But he said he was fine with the brightness. So I told him to wait
⏹️ ▶️ John and he’s gonna get the M4 MacBook Air when it comes out. But you, I can imagine if you’re using the thing on a ferry
⏹️ ▶️ John with the sun coming in through the window, a brighter screen would definitely help. But a non-functioning key
⏹️ ▶️ John on the keyboard would probably also make you buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. Well, it depends on like, what will it take to get this fixed? Cause I like the error
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rate of the non-functioning key and the fact that it’s traveling to the command key now, like the error rate’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going up. And so it started to get really annoying. So I, you know, if it’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be, if it can be a quick, easy fix, maybe I’ll get it fixed. If it’s gonna be like, you know, a $600 fix,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s no way I would do that. So
⏹️ ▶️ John They can do the key cap for you right in the Apple store. I’m not sure replacing the key cap will fix it for you, but they can definitely do that
⏹️ ▶️ John for a very small fee while you wait probably. I hope so. you
Follow-up: Flighty sharing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some follow-up. Stephen Klink writes, I liked John’s example of Flighty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as an app that doesn’t need to involve other people, but wanted to note that one of my favorite features is the ability
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to share a Flighty card with anyone via a simple URL and have them see the exact same info
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as me. No app required, not even an email address verification code. That’s a great point. Flighty even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does that part well. Yep. I mean, it’s a great app. It really is. If you fly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in an airplane with any regularity whatsoever, you should definitely check it out.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or if you pick up people at the airport who are flying an airplane, get the app anyway. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the main thing I use it for, is picking up other people at the airport. I’m not the one flying, but still, the app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. I think all three of us give it our official two thumbs up.
Follow-up: Apple Invites
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With regard to Apple Invites, Jim Weiner writes, my birthday’s coming up, happy birthday,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I thought I’d try out Apple Invites. Even if you can easily log in without an Apple account, my Android friends
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cannot figure it out and are giving up. Invites creates different links when I invite someone via their phone number
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or email. Why can’t it use unique links to authorize attendees? Of the 12 people attending my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey birthday, only three people, two Android, one iOS, have gone through the hassle of RSVPing in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the app. Everyone else has just texted me back. I’m so annoyed that I want to write my own invites app.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think that’s the solution, but yes, this is the danger of foisting technology onto
⏹️ ▶️ John other people in your life who just want to do a thing that I think does not necessarily involve technology. They
⏹️ ▶️ John can tolerate it if it works well enough that it doesn’t get in the way, but the second it is not perfectly
⏹️ ▶️ John easy and seamless, It’s like, oh, I’m just going to text the person.
Follow-up: Cabled Sidecar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, with regard to Sidecar, we have a little bit of feedback from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Matt West. I’m a software engineer at Google. And while it is discouraged, though not altogether forbidden, to sign
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into one’s corporate Mac with a personal iCloud account, it is possible to use Sidecar on a personal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad over a USB-C cable. I don’t know why I didn’t think of that. It’s a great point.
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t even know it worked over USB-C. I’ve always just done it wirelessly, but that’s cool. Yeah. Bye.
Merging Apple purchases!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, you have manifested something, and it’s a real
⏹️ ▶️ Casey boon for a lot of the old-time Mac users. Do you want me to do this? Do you want to take your celebratory lap?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I’ll let you do it, but let me just preface this by saying that even though it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ John I complained about a thing on a podcast, and then the next episode Apple did something about it, which has happened frequently
⏹️ ▶️ John in the past, this is absolutely a stop clock is right twice a day phenomenon. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John been complaining about this for decades. If you just complain about something every single day. Eventually,
⏹️ ▶️ John something happens to address the thing you were complaining about and I was like, Oh, look, your complaining worked.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you just you know, it’s kind of like that thing where you tweet that every single team
⏹️ ▶️ John won the World Cup and then you just delete all the ones that are wrong. Well, maybe it’s not the same. It’s more like the stop clock. But anyway, I take
⏹️ ▶️ John no credit for this other than the credit due to everyone who has been complaining about this exact issue for I
⏹️ ▶️ John think 25 years Apple IDs slash Apple accounts have existed. It just so
⏹️ ▶️ John happened that one of the very regular times when I and other people complain
⏹️ ▶️ John about this happened to be last week. Since last week and now, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John has finally actually done something to address it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this is this is one of those things that like, I bet this was a huge pain in the butt for them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, no, no manager is ever going to advance their career by doing features like this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but God, it was so necessary. So I’m glad they did. It took 25
⏹️ ▶️ John years to get it done.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. All right. So what we’re talking about is migrate purchases from one Apple account to another Apple account. A reading
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the knowledge-based article, which will be linked in the show notes. If an Apple account is used only for making purchases,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey those purchases can be migrated to a primary Apple account to consolidate
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, let’s pause right there because I read this when it first came out. I’m like, what What are they
⏹️ ▶️ John saying? Are they saying if you have an Apple ID that you’ve only ever used
⏹️ ▶️ John to make purchases, then you can migrate them? But what if you’ve used that Apple ID for
⏹️ ▶️ John something other than making purchases? Like it’s so weirdly phrased and we’ll get into
⏹️ ▶️ John the limitations inherent in this, but it’s like, what I was complaining about last week was the ability to merge
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple IDs. This is not really that, but this is the major part
⏹️ ▶️ John that people want, which is, hey, I bought stuff on one Apple ID, but I have another Apple ID or I bought things on two
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple IDs and I want to combine them. There’s a lot more to an Apple ID than just stuff that you bought. There’s all your data.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s all everything having to do with the history of that account. Truly merging accounts would be very big. But this
⏹️ ▶️ John this article and this feature is clearly focused on just purchases and the way they word it makes it seem
⏹️ ▶️ John like if you have this account where you’ve never done anything except buy stuff, then you
⏹️ ▶️ John can transfer them. That’s not really the case. You can transfer them no matter what you’ve done that on an account, but a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John that stuff that you’ve done is not going to come. Only the purchases will be transferred.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And by the way, this feature isn’t available to users in the EU, United Kingdom, or India. So tough noogies.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can choose to migrate apps, music, and other content you’ve purchased from Apple on a secondary Apple account to a primary
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple account. However, it’s worth noting, I’m not reading anymore, but there are a lot of limitations here
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and let me read from the knowledge base a smattering of limitations. Neither Apple account
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can be a child account created through family sharing. Neither Apple account can already be used for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey migrated purchases. You can actually undo a migration of purchases, which is kind of surprising.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you undo a migration of purchases from secondary account, you won’t be able to migrate purchases again for a year.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can’t migrate purchases if both the primary Apple account and the secondary Apple account have music library data associated with
⏹️ ▶️ John Now that’s a pretty big one because now it’s like, okay, well, I want to migrate purchases, but if you ever like
⏹️ ▶️ John had music library data associated with one, like if you have like basically an iTunes, you had
⏹️ ▶️ John an iTunes library on both of them, you can’t transfer stuff. Like, isn’t that,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s, that’s kind of what they were getting at and they’re like, if you’ve only used it for purchases, that seems like a big limitation.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like just, I know they’re not gonna try to merge the music library stuff, fine. Like they’re just trying to transfer
⏹️ ▶️ John purchases, but it’s like, well, well, I’m sorry. Both of these Apple IDs have music
⏹️ ▶️ John library data associated with them, so now you can’t transfer stuff. Look, yuck, that is
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the worst limitations.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can’t migrate purchases if you’ve set your Apple One subscription to provide iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ Casey storage to a third different account. If your primary account has never been used for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey purchases or free downloads, you can’t migrate purchases. I think the implication there is because you don’t have any
⏹️ ▶️ John No, no, it’s the other way. It’s the primary account. It’s the one you’re migrating them to. Oh, my bad. That one has
⏹️ ▶️ John to have been used to do stuff, which makes some sense, but still is a little bit meh.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I didn’t catch that. That’s a good call. Thank you for the clarification. Neither Apple account can be receiving any special access
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to apps or content. For example, an Apple account enrolled in the VPP program. What is that? Volume purchase
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John program? Yeah, volume
⏹️ ▶️ John purchase program, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The volume purchase program program. That’s it. To an employer to receive special access to apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then as a lot of people found out shortly after this was released, you also lose all your test flight
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enrollments. And apparently one of the things that you’re shown when you do a migration is on screen. It says
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the following will not be migrated to the primary account, personalized recommendations, digital project reviews, and test flight
⏹️ ▶️ Casey access. And then it continues, access to test flight won’t transfer to the primary account. To continue using test flight, sign in with the primary
⏹️ ▶️ Casey account and request beta app access again.
⏹️ ▶️ John that worked, IconFactory is finding out that you can’t just request access from the primary account
⏹️ ▶️ John because when you try to enter it, test flight says, oh, you can’t enter that person, they’re already registered.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you delete them, it doesn’t help because when I try to register any, like it thinks like both email
⏹️ ▶️ John addresses or both Apple IDs are associated with the same thing. So whichever one you try to register with, it thinks they’re already registered,
⏹️ ▶️ John including after you delete them. So some bugs remain. So, you know, a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of people are looking at this and like, finally I can do this big transfer. Unlike iCloud photo
⏹️ ▶️ John library, where I pretty much did it on day one after messing with the betas, I would recommend people wait
⏹️ ▶️ John on this one because this feature did take 25 years or so to arrive. It is extremely limited.
⏹️ ▶️ John It has a lot of caveats. It’s probably has a lot of bugs. Maybe let other people go first. You’ve been waiting for how many
⏹️ ▶️ John years for this? You can wait another month just to see, let Apple shake out the stuff. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John this stuff, like messing up purchases and other things associated with your
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple ID, historically have not been fun or easier sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John possible to get fixed. You can call Apple support. You can go through all the different levels. You
⏹️ ▶️ John can like, you’re just, can somebody, like I bought this movie, can somebody make it work again?
⏹️ ▶️ John a year and a half labor, and maybe someone will do something about it. Like it’s not the type of thing where you can just fix
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff easily. Certainly you can’t do it yourself because they’re Apple servers. And then getting Apple to fix their server stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John is incredibly difficult. So maybe just chill on this one. If you’ve been able to sustain
⏹️ ▶️ John your current split environment with multiple app IDs, keep these limitations in mind
⏹️ ▶️ John so you don’t accidentally trip one. Like don’t accidentally make an iTunes or make a music library on one of the accounts
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, but maybe let some other people go first and see
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco how it works out for them
⏹️ ▶️ John before you transfer stuff. So anyway, I applaud Apple for doing this, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have a lot of faith that it was done as well as it could have been. Certainly
⏹️ ▶️ John it is not the merging of Apple IDs, which would be a union of all of your stuff, which would be incredibly difficult.
⏹️ ▶️ John But again, 25 years is a long time and Apple has a lot of money, so I feel like they should have been able to do it. But transferring purchases,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a good start. Maybe in a year it will be ready.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you haven’t tried it yet then, huh?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t have things to transfer. I do have multiple Apple IDs, but one of them is my developer
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple ID, which I’ve only used for, I think that was my original Apple ID. And the only reason I had it was
⏹️ ▶️ John to register for developer discounts back before it was an email address, back in the day when
⏹️ ▶️ John you’d subscribe for ADC Premier, when you get a free ticket to WWDC, and a hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John discount that was tremendously huge that I used to buy like my Power Mac G5 and Cinema
⏹️ ▶️ John Display. That’s the era that my original Apple ID dates to. And then I
⏹️ ▶️ John got another Apple ID when iTunes came out. And those are the, and I have other ones for testing
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff or whatever, but those are the two main ones that I use. But there is nothing on my developer account except for developer stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John My WWDC ticket, all my apps, blah, blah, blah. That’s my developer account. All of my
⏹️ ▶️ John personal stuff is on my personal Apple ID. All my movies, all my music, TV shows,
⏹️ ▶️ John all that stuff, all the apps. So I don’t have anything to transfer.
Yes, we need cellular Macs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we got a handful of people who, I don’t know why people are so grumpy about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco and I’s desire to have a cellular Mac, but people are, maybe not grumpy, but they seem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey deeply confused that this is something that we would desire.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I said, they haven’t been convinced because they haven’t ever been in a situation where they’ve seen what
⏹️ ▶️ John a difference it makes. Like it’s not the end of the world. Like you can get things to work. Marco can reboot
⏹️ ▶️ John his phone. He can reboot his laptop. It will eventually work. But if you haven’t experienced
⏹️ ▶️ John how much nicer it is, not to deal with that, it just seems like not that big of a deal. And
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll, all those people, all the doubters will be convinced when Apple finally ships this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and the thing is like, I don’t, like, when people tell you in tech,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I need Capability X, I need this, here’s why I need this, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need this. If you respond by saying, no one should need that, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a helpful response. Like, I don’t know who needs to hear this. apparently everyone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but like, you know, if someone is telling you, especially like, look,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casey and I, like, we know computers pretty well. Like, I’d say, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco safe for us to say, without any modesty, we are computer experts. We are pretty good at computers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So when we say, we want a cellular modem built in so we don’t have to use tethering,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because tethering is not working well for us, I think we can say with some credibility, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what we actually want. So for people to come and say, you don’t want that. Why do you want that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s stupid. No one should need that. That’s what you’re saying is you don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, or you don’t think you want to pay for that maybe. That’s different from no one needs that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, a lot of people writing in have another solution that they say, why don’t you just do X?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m doing X. I think it’s fine with me. I’m solving the problem in this other way. If you
⏹️ ▶️ John two only try this other way that I’m recommending, you wouldn’t want this anymore. I think that is the more common one, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is, you know, again, assuming that you either have never tried the thing that they’re doing, or
⏹️ ▶️ John that if you did try it, you would find it satisfactory.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so a lot of people wrote in and said, hey, why not use a hotspot, man? You should just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use a hotspot. A hotspot will fix all your problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So right now, yeah, there are those standalone, like basically little tiny wifi routers with cell phones in them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But don’t drain your phone battery, because it’s got its own battery. Right, it has its own battery to drain and to keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco charged. I actually currently own one of those. I bought it for a trip
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two years ago or one year ago, and I’ve been using it since then as a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco backup internet connection, as for my home internet. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are fine. In certain ways, they’re better than tethering. In certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways, they’re worse. They are not as good as built-in cellular.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the main reason why is because, once again, It is a separate device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that requires you to, first of all, carry it. Second of all, the data plans on it are actually very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expensive. Like the AT&T ones, I think what I pay is, I think, 50 bucks a month for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they’re like, you know, limited data caps and everything. They’re not great plans. And obviously this will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vary by carrier and country and things like that. But like, here in the US, the plans for those are not amazing. At least
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you want decent coverage. So sorry, T-Mobile people, that’s not gonna work for me. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. Anyway, so yeah, separate plan, and it’s an inexpensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plan. Now granted, whatever they would offer on a computer, maybe it would be the same plans. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would be something between the iPad plans and that, I don’t know. Whatever corporate laptops have, I’m sure it’d be the same plans
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then. I don’t know. Like the handful of corporate laptops that have built-in sub-monitors, I don’t know what they charge.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I’m sure that would not be that different. But it is a separate device that you have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco carry, And they’re not small. They’re the size of like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, basically like a tiny Wi-Fi. Like the one I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The deck of cards. I’d say mine is like two decks of cards. Or like, you know, maybe like a novelty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deck, like a large print Uno or something. So it’s not, they’re not small.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s just one more thing to charge. And you have to like turn it on. And as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long as it’s on, it is using power and draining itself slowly. So like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, I could put it in my backpack when I’m gonna like, you know, go on the ferry for the day, but I still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to like remember to go reach in there, turn it on, it’s gonna take up space in there. I have to make sure it’s charged
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before I put it in there. And then am I gonna remember to turn it off when I’m done? Like when I arrive? And then what if I accidentally leave
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it on all day and it’s dead? Like it’s just, it’s another thing to manage. And that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is better in the sense, it’s better than tethering in the sense that the laptop will indeed connect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to it fairly quickly because it is basically broadcasting a tiny wifi network. So the laptop treats
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it more like Wi-Fi. So that’s good. But it comes with all those other burdens that I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not sure are worth it. And this should tell you something, that I literally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just said I own one of these devices and I don’t bring it with me for my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco daily ferry trips because it’s too much of a hassle.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. So I had realized, I’m pretty sure I talked about this on the show, I realized
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a while back that at my local library libraries, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re all incredible and I’m so lucky to have them. But one of the things they offer is you can check out a hotspot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the library and you get it for three or four weeks and you pay nothing for it. And when you’re done, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bring it back. And our library in the County in which I live, they distribute
⏹️ ▶️ Casey T-Mobile hotspots, which are okay. They’re physically, you know, the devices themselves
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are clearly a little bit older and T-Mobile coverage is okay. Then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a neighboring county that’s like a 20-ish minute drive from where I am. And they actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey offer, not only do they offer reciprocity with, you know, cardholders from my county, but they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also offer Verizon hotspots. And they’re a little bit bigger, but they’re way more modern and they work
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really well. And so this is relevant because I tried my darndest to make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure I had a hotspot available for football tailgates. Because if you recall, I did that whole tailgate tub thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I have a portable router in the tub, which yes, I know that’s a little redundant. We’re not gonna talk about it right now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but there’s reasons. And what I’ll do is I’ll plug one of these wifi hotspots via USB into that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey travel router to distribute internet. And it is nice and convenient, but I echo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything that Margo said. It is not as convenient. It is one more thing to manage, both physically and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey charge level. It’s not small, particularly the nicer Verizon one is quite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a bit bigger than the T-Mobile one. The T-Mobile one really is like a deck of cards, but I concur with your assessment of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Verizon one. It’s like a couple of decks or a big deck of uno or something like that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no matter what, it’s one more thing to worry about. And I think I would feel very differently if I was doing like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey long car trips with the children all trying to use iPads or something like that. And that’s where something like a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little MyFi, they’re often called colloquially, but one of these little portable hotspots, that’s where it shines.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I don’t care about that yet. Maybe I will in the future, but not today. And today, what I want to do is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want to open my laptop and have it be immediately connected to the internet. And that is, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not have to worry about any freaking thing else. And that’s not a hotspot. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is what I want. I want a cellular Mac. That’s what I want.
Why use the Sonos app?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ryan Powers writes, why does anyone use Sonos app in the age of AirPlay 2? I have two identical Sonos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey setups in my primary and guest bedrooms. A TV with a beam and Ikea Symfonisk, I think I’m pronouncing that right, surrounds.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I also have a few Sonos Ones in our kids’ rooms and a Sonos Move. I’m a sucker for Sonos and use these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey speakers regularly to play all sorts of audio. Here’s the thing, I’ve not opened the Sonos app since I set these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey speakers up months or years ago. I play to the speakers using AirPlay or the Apple TV hooked up to the beams.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was genuinely surprised to hear that anyone cared whether the Sonos app worked or not. It’s totally irrelevant
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to my Sonos use case. What am I missing here? Is there some amazing thing in the Sonos app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that makes it a must use? I think, strictly speaking, I believe in order to have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lossless playback in each Sonos app, but I could not possibly care less about that. Just to be clear, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey care. I don’t think I’m capable of hearing the difference. I don’t think you are either. But I don’t care.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So in any case, the reason I like it, I feel like I might’ve glanced off of this last episode,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the reason I like using the Sonos app is because I don’t want to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do any sort, or I don’t want my phone or other device to be in the midst of playing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything when I’m trying to use it. I want, I view the ambient music in the house to be a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey house thing, not a Casey’s phone thing. There’s nothing wrong with what Ryan is saying. And if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that works for you, then keep on keeping on. I mean, that’s great. But to me, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like having everything in the Sonos app, the playback, the management of speakers,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the management of volume. I like having it all in there. And for all of the foibles that the Sonos app has, and it does have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey many, managing which things you’re playing and the volume of each is so much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better, even in the crummy versions of that app, than it is for me anyway in AirPlay 2. I find
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I start an AirPlay 2 speaker, it’s…
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh yes, okay, yes, I’ll play music now at a volume that is nowhere near the volume you expect. it will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either be exceedingly loud or almost silent. And that is just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco what I want.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so for me, I don’t care for using AirPlay 2. And the only time I do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey coincidentally is with this podcast app I like called Overcast. That’s pretty much the only time I ever use AirPlay 2
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for any of my Sonos stuff. So that’s my use case. I don’t know, Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you might have the opposite opinion of me because I thought you were mostly AirPlaying, is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I almost never open the Sonos app for any reason.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The only reasons I open it are to change configuration. Basically, if I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanna, either if I’m adding or removing a product, or if I, like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other day, I moved some stuff around to different rooms, I had to modify some stuff there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or if I wanna change some settings, like oh, I wanna change the EQ on this speaker. Otherwise,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am never in that app. There is never a time when I think I would like to play music, let
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me dive into that mess and connect it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my stuff. Like, no, that never happens. I use Sonos for TV sound
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and for AirPlay sound, and I never open the app for anything else.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s fair. And I’m not trying to say that I’m right or you’re wrong. It’s just not the way I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of and want to manage my music. This is actually very similar to the opinions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I had about Spotify versus Apple Music. Bear with me here. One of the things I loved about Apple, excuse me, about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Spotify before their app got real bad. But up until a couple of years ago when I really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey went all in on Apple Music, the Spotify app, I viewed that as ephemeral music. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes, I marked favorites and so on and so forth, but that was music that I didn’t own and that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could go away at any moment. And that was where the, their music lived. Even the music I liked,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was their music, it’s over there. And I liked having iTunes, you know, Apple Music, like the non-streaming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey form of Apple Music, the Apple Music app. I like that as being my music, the stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I brought. You know, maybe it’s Dave Matthews concerts or maybe it’s stuff I paid for, whatever the case may be. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the things that really turned me off about Apple Music originally when I first started converting to it was that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there was no delineation between my music and their music. Over time, I’ve started to feel differently about that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I don’t think it really matters because my music is kind of everything, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like there really is, the distinction was always kind of synthetic or arbitrary anyway, but it’s that sort
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of delineation. I like compartmentalizing the home music playback
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the home and my playback, be that Instagram or maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m watching something while there’s ambient music playing, that can happen on my phone.
More on DeepSeek
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, with regard to DeepSeq censoring in different models, Sebastian
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Raska writes, while the 671B DeepSeq R1 flagship models based on 671B DeepSeq V3, the smaller DeepSeq
⏹️ ▶️ Casey R1 models have different base models. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of models in one sentence, but that’s okay. A possible explanation is that the difference in censoring could already
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be taking place on the base model level. The 70 billion model is based on Lama, which is Meta.ai’s model.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then the 32 billion model is based on Quen, or Xuen, Q-W-E-N, I’m sorry, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey butchered that, model by another Chinese company. You can confirm this via the official technical report, page 14,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey table 5, which is in GitHub, and we will link in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ John That makes a lot more sense to me. I didn’t realize the 70 billion one was based on Lama, so that one probably doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John as Meta’s, Meta slash Facebook’s AI model. one doesn’t have Chinese government censoring in it versus
⏹️ ▶️ John the 32 billion model based on another Chinese model. So yeah, that’s a lot of this
⏹️ ▶️ John is I think branding is the confusing thing like, oh, these are all deep seek LMs.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s like, well, what is the base model? And is the base model for the big one you’re using through the app the same
⏹️ ▶️ John as the base model for the small ones you can download? And apparently it’s not. So that does make more sense. But it is
⏹️ ▶️ John still kind of weird that this one company is fielding these different models with different base models with very different
⏹️ ▶️ John censorship behaviors. But that’s apparently the way it is now.
Impossible Screen Time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. Screen time, we talked about. I think, what was it, John, you had like some sort of throwaway
⏹️ ▶️ Casey comment about that. What was the genesis?
⏹️ ▶️ John just it’s another one of those things that is complained about all the time
⏹️ ▶️ John by me and others. And so, last episode, I made my, I don’t know, annual, biannual
⏹️ ▶️ John screen time unreliability complaint because it’s unreliable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. So, Jonathan writes, I don’t see anything wrong with screen time numbers. And they provided at an image where it says
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screen time, all devices, daily average, 2,395 hours and 49 minutes. That’s a high daily average.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of work. Even if you have like,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you buy every product that Apple owns and you leave them open and running all the time, setting aside
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that it shouldn’t be counting that as your screen time if you’re not in front of that computer, I still don’t think you can hit 2,300
⏹️ ▶️ John hours a day. That would be a lot of open devices with
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of open apps all counting at the same time. This was not the only feedback
⏹️ ▶️ John we got about screen time. And my offhanded aside about how screen time has never been reliable.
⏹️ ▶️ John So many people sent screenshots of their completely absurd, ridiculous numbers
⏹️ ▶️ John that don’t make any sense. Even when the numbers were within the realm of imaginable reason of like, well, 30
⏹️ ▶️ John something hours and maybe it’s counting multiple apps that are running on my Mac at the same time, blah, blah, blah the numbers
⏹️ ▶️ John never made sense to the people reporting them. It’s like, this doesn’t feel like I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John connect these numbers to things that I did. And so what’s the point of this feature? Like I said,
⏹️ ▶️ John it might as well be a random number generator that just makes a bunch of graphs. This has
⏹️ ▶️ John never worked. I used it, tried to use it for my kids to track and control. The control part, by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John also doesn’t work very well, but the tracking definitely doesn’t work. Does it like, what apps are my little kids using and how
⏹️ ▶️ John long are they spending on? Who knows, because the little numbers and bar graphs are basically meaningless.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’ve had this feature in their operating system for years, they advertise it. And as far as I could tell, it just does not work
⏹️ ▶️ John and has never worked. Cool.
Mac UNIX certification
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right last episode you had made mention of Apple’s Unix Certification
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Mac OS and Paulo Pinto writes it is still certified as Unix Oh three But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there are several things that have to be enabled or changed that Mac OS actually works as a certified Unix
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Also, the latest standard is version Unix. Oh seven This was really so there was recently a very ranty article
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on OS news going over how Apple has achieved its certification We’ll link that from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tom Huelda, I believe. Anyways, Tom writes, in order to be allowed to use the Unix trademark, your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey operating system needs to comply with the single Unix specification, SUS, which specifies programming interfaces
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for C, a command line shell, and other end user commands, more or less identical to POSIX, as well as the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey X or OpenCursive specification. Mac OS 15.0 only conforms to version three of the SUS, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what Paolo was saying, which dates all the way back to the ancient times of 2004, when Marco and I were just graduating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey college. And as such, macOS is only Unix 03 on both Intel and ARM.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey However, you can argue that this is just semantics since it’s not like Unix and POSIX are very inclined
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m kind of surprised Apple was keeping this up because if you read the article, which is provocatively titled, Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John macOS Unix certification is a lie. They like, basically, there are a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of settings in macOS that you have to toggle to make it so that macOS passes
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever the certification is. And I’m kind of amazed that Apple is still doing
⏹️ ▶️ John that because the settings are probably annoying to maintain to like, we gotta make sure, they went through the
⏹️ ▶️ John effort to certify what was then Mac OS X as a real trademark
⏹️ ▶️ John UNIX, all caps, U-N-I-X. And they’ve just kept up that certification by every time they
⏹️ ▶️ John add something to Mac OS that would make it not comply, they have a switch that says, put it back
⏹️ ▶️ John to the compliant mode. And most of the things that like, they’ve switched or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s better the way Mac OS does it out of the box, but to pass
⏹️ ▶️ John the test, it has to do with the slightly worse old way. And so they have a way to do it. They have a
⏹️ ▶️ John way, okay, turn it back on, turn this thing off, turn this performance enhancement off, change this behavior back to the way
⏹️ ▶️ John this Unix specification wants it. Now, they’re not keeping up with the certifications. It’s not like they’re, you know, I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John how much, what difference is there is between Unix 03 to Unix 07, but I’m actually very surprised that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has kept this up. and I think they’re putting in a surprising amount of effort
⏹️ ▶️ John there. And I don’t mind that these things have to be settings. I would prefer, I would be just fine if they left it behind and said, you know
⏹️ ▶️ John what, we’re not gonna bother complying with that. All those settings, remove them, remove that code, remove those conditionals, because
⏹️ ▶️ John in most cases, when you look at what they are, they’re things that are not relevant to the average person’s life,
⏹️ ▶️ John or they’re things that no end user would ever like, if they had some software that
⏹️ ▶️ John wasn’t working right because that setting was wrong, like a lot of them require like disabling system integrity protection and stuff like
⏹️ ▶️ John that. I was like, no thanks, I’d like to leave system integrity protection enabled. And I would
⏹️ ▶️ John like modern behaviors. I don’t really care about compliance with the 2004 Unix spec. But there you have
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Apparently they’re still complying. I don’t know if it’s just corporate inertia, but
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, I think you can safely leave that one behind. You don’t need to keep maintaining all those feature toggles.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think Tom was particularly worked up about the fact that yes, you have to flip
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these switches, but I agree with you. Like this is the march of progress. and things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are better the way it ships by default. I guess, unless you’re a purist, but for any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey regular or reasonable human, it’s better this way, and at least a fallback is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey provided. Now, I concur as well with you, John, that I think it’s probably long since time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they just walk away from all this, but I don’t really understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why we are all so worked up about this. It
⏹️ ▶️ John could be like a government contract, you can only use this software if it’s Unix compliant in some government application,
⏹️ ▶️ John But honestly, if that was the case, that there would be people in government taking macOS and making
⏹️ ▶️ John it like worse and less secure to pass government compliance stuff, which again, is not too surprising.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, there’s always reasons for this type of stuff, but it would be nice if they moved on from this. But
⏹️ ▶️ John apparently they’re still doing it. So there you have it.
Switch 2 mice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We had talked a couple of weeks ago. Was it over time? I believe that we were talking about this. Is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that right? Yeah, I think so.
⏹️ ▶️ John The switch to intro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right we were talking about the switch to introduction and I believe if memory serves
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco was convinced that the joy cons would not support any sort of mouse movement and John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was convinced that they absolutely would and it turns out that John and John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is owed a dollar from Marco because We
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know that yet, but it’s leaning in my direction.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It’s certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looking at all signs point to yes. So reading from Ars Technica, the Japanese language patent about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Switch 2 Joy-Cons, whose illustrations match what we’ve seen of Switch 2 Joy-Cons precisely,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey features an English abstract describing, quote, a sensor for mouse operation, quote, that can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey detect reflected light from a detected surface, the light changing by moving over the detected surface.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Much like any number of optical computer mice. Schematic drawings in the patent show how the light source and light sensor are squeezed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inside the Joy-Con with a built-in lens for directing the light to and from each. A machine translation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the full text of the patent describes the controller as a novel input device that can be used as a mouse and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other than a mouse.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey language. That could also be the translation, but yes. In mouse mode, as described in the patent, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey user cradles the outer edge of the controller with their palm and places the inner edge on, for example, a desk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. I think it’s a thing. I mean, we’ll say you’re right. It’s not a done It’s undealable. It certainly seems like
AirPods with Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We had talked about at some point how it’s difficult to hear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dialogue on TV shows these days because the three of us are old. And Nicholas Carrente writes, On the topic of poor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dialogue mixing in streaming shows and movies, I’ve been using this solution for years now and it works great. Use AirPods with your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple TV. The sound quality is excellent and I can understand dialogue clearly every time. What makes it even better is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Apple TV lets multiple people connect their iPod— excuse me, AirPods simultaneously. My partner and I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey made this our default way to watch TV. We only switch back to regular speakers when we have multiple guests over. It’s become such a game
⏹️ ▶️ Casey changer that I consider Apple TV’s best feature. Have any of you ever tried the setup either solo or with someone else?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do do this probably once or twice a week when it’s just me. A great
⏹️ ▶️ Casey example of this is from from my kitchen. You can see into the living room
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and since slash R slash TV too high, you can see the TV from the kitchen. But in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey order to hear it, I either need to grab one of my Sonos portable speakers, which occasionally I’ll do, or I’ll just throw
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my AirPods. and then I can hear it much better without having to crank, you know, the main sound system.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I can’t say that I’ve ever done this with Aaron, and it sounds like it would be awfully
⏹️ ▶️ Casey burdensome to start and stop every time. But again, I’ve never tried it, so I might have that, you know, totally
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is kind of a testament to how difficult it is to get good audio in home
⏹️ ▶️ John television watching environments, because I mean, I think most people just move, use their TV speakers and TV speakers
⏹️ ▶️ John are usually terrible and that means that whatever sound was recorded
⏹️ ▶️ John in the show setting aside how well the dialogue is mixed in it or whatever it has to pass through your cruddy TV
⏹️ ▶️ John speakers and bounce off the back of the plastic casing and the wall and the floor and everything and eventually get to your ears
⏹️ ▶️ John and by the time it gets there it’s substantially changed from what was originally put into the show again setting
⏹️ ▶️ John aside whether what was put into the show was good or not that what the AirPods are doing for you there is they’re cutting out all that in-between
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff we’ll get the audio digitally to very close to your ear
⏹️ ▶️ John and then we will amplify it and play it into your ear holes. And so all that stuff that
⏹️ ▶️ John I talked about, the shape of your room, your walls, your credit TV speakers, that is all eliminated from
⏹️ ▶️ John things that can make the dialogue hard to hear. And you’re left only with how well was dialogue mixed.
⏹️ ▶️ John If everybody had a like theater quality, you know, speaker setup
⏹️ ▶️ John for their television, this wouldn’t be as big an issue. you were sitting on your couch, you’d still
⏹️ ▶️ John only have the problem of how was the audio mixed on the show and you wouldn’t have those other problems. So most people just don’t do
⏹️ ▶️ John that. Even if people have something like a soundbar or whatever, it’s not like that is even calibrated in any way or may
⏹️ ▶️ John actually be making things worse when it comes to dialogue legibility than the television speakers, which are often tuned to make
⏹️ ▶️ John dialogue understandable at the cost of other things.
⏹️ ▶️ John So yeah, most people don’t have fancy hi-fi setups. And it actually is surprisingly
⏹️ ▶️ John difficult to get a home theater setup to do a good job on
⏹️ ▶️ John audio because most of the audio comes out of the center channel speaker. And for a variety of reasons, the center
⏹️ ▶️ John channel speaker in home theater setup is like the unloved stepchild. It is
⏹️ ▶️ John not the glory speaker. It is not the one that people think about. And yet it is the most important speaker
⏹️ ▶️ John when you’re hearing people talk on a television show. And so, so many things about the design, the physical
⏹️ ▶️ John design of center channel speakers. I think I talked to us on a show a while ago when I was talking about my home theater setup
⏹️ ▶️ John Are conspire to make the center channel very bad at what it does
⏹️ ▶️ John And yeah Headphones are a great solution to that if the pairing works well And if you have a small number
⏹️ ▶️ John of people, that’s great. And also if you don’t want to disturb people elsewhere in the house
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. Yep, and also to get ahead of follow-up With you had said, you know uncalibrated sound
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bars that I get the point of what you’re saying But you know, I can do I forget what it’s called like truth It’s not true tone,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s some, something where I take my phone and wave it around the room while the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sonos is playing some sort of particular tone. And it will do, maybe not the kind of calibration you’re talking about, John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but somaticum of calibration.
⏹️ ▶️ John no, I think people just don’t even do that. Like, it’s just too burdensome. Like, they don’t look it up. But most soundbars do
⏹️ ▶️ John have something that you can do to help. Now, does that process help? And how good is it compared to
⏹️ ▶️ John the fancy ones? But still, I bet most people who have a soundbar, take it out of the box, hook it up, sound comes out, sit
⏹️ ▶️ John down, that’s all. Like they’re not seeking only, only like home theater nerds
⏹️ ▶️ John or like actual professional installers are gonna even bother launching an app and trying to do it. Definitely.
WLED & TRMNL
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have a little bit of news with regard to my status board project. Apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a listener of ATP reached out to James from Home is Where the Smart Is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is mostly a UK, well it’s a business in the UK as well as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a video, YouTube channel and website and whatnot. And James was kind enough to reach out to me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after doing so. But let me read what Home is Where the Smart Is is all about. This is what James had written.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The trouble was most guides I found to doing LED stuff seemed too involved, even for me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey usually with soldering and jumper wires all over the place. So my dad and I set about making the easiest starter boards we could,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as he is the brains behind the circuit board designs. So we’ve designed these very small boards, which can be powered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from USB if you wish, or mainly for strips that are different voltages, like 12 volts and 24 volts. You can leave the USB
⏹️ ▶️ Casey alone and power the strip instead with an external power supply and the board will power from the strip. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey James was kind enough to reach out and send me all the way from across the pond, send me a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the Homesware the Smart is boards. And what these are, are hilariously,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ridiculously, absurdly tiny ESP32 boards with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little bit of electronics around them. It’s ridiculous how small these things are. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cannot overstate how impressively tiny they are. It’s basically the ESP32 and the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey teeniest little bit of electronics around. I know I just said that, but like, I cannot stress enough. I’d never seen an ESP32 before,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they’re so freaking small. They’re like the size, less than the size of an American postage stamp. So anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey James has sent me one of these and sent me a small strip of, you know, nanopixels. What is, I forget the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey name of it, but it’s like the, whatever I was talking about a couple of weeks ago, the 8212 or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something like that. I’ll put a link in the show notes, forgive me. I forget exactly what these are. But what this allows
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me to do is, you know, James had pre-assembled all of this for me. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what it is, is it’s this ESP32, which he has preloaded with WLED, which is a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Home Assistant style, like, open source project with the best URL I’ve ever seen in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my life. The URL for the WLED project is kno.wled.ge,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which spells out knowledge. So good. So good. Anyway, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s this WLED software. And what I did was I plugged in the strip to a USB port.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I connected to the Wi-Fi that this little itty-bitty postage stamp size chip is broadcasting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I set it, I gave it my actual Wi-Fi credentials. And the next thing you know, I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a web interface for controlling the strip of like 10 LEDs, which is cool. And I guess there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an open source iPhone app that you can download from the store or whatever, and you can control them that way as well, which is also cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the key though, is that as soon as I went back to Home Assistant, have I told you guys I’m into Home Assistant these days? Maybe we should talk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about it. I went back to Home Assistant and I opened it up and it said, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just detected a new WLED device. And so I think you might want to use it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I said, yes, yes I do. And within not too terribly long, I now have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my status board insofar as a strip of little LED lights that are addressable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that the hue or the color is configurable and the brightness. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a red LED for when the garage door is open, a white LED that changes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the brightness based on the inverse of how charged the car is. When the car is almost charged,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s very, very dim, and it goes off when it’s charged. When it’s not very charged at all, it’s as bright
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as the sun, or at least that’s what it seems like sometimes. And then finally, a blue LED for when the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mail is waiting for us. Now, you might ask, where have I mounted this? And right now, it’s just sitting free-balling on my desk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I haven’t figured out where to put it. This is such cool tech. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the historical commission is not aware of much of this happening at this time because I haven’t figured out where to mount it. I think, to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be honest with you, I might just mount it on like the incredible forehead
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of one of my LG 5Ks, just so it’s in the office. Because as Marco was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chuckling and remembers, the forehead in the LG 5K is quite, I mean, it’s only like an inch, but it seems just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey obscenely large when you look at it. And so I might just mount it there and then you’ll plug the USB
⏹️ ▶️ Casey power into the back of the studio, or excuse me, the LG 5K. I just got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to say, this tech is so cool. And getting these components individually, again, James was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind enough to send these for free and didn’t ask for a plug or anything, but I’m genuinely plugging because I enjoyed it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But you can get these boards, and I think Americans, you would have to dispatch them from Amazon UK, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is probably a little bit pricey. But nevertheless, you can get these itty-bitty teeny tiny boards
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you can get these pretty affordable LED strips, and you can do whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you want. This WLED software is super cool. You can configure it through MQTT, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey configure it through Home Assistant. I’m sure there’s like a REST API or something if you want to go that route.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All extremely cool stuff. As if that wasn’t good enough, our friends at Terminal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey delivered my Terminal, and I believe John’s as well. So I set mine up and I’ll let John talk and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey speak to whether or not he did anything with his yet. This thing is really freaking cool. Now, they are a future sponsor and they did send me a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey freebie. So I’m telling you my genuine honest opinion, but to be fair, they did send me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a free one and they will be sponsoring in the future. But it is very cool. The only thing that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bummed me out a little bit about it was I didn’t realize that for purposes of keeping the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey battery to last more than five minutes, it only refreshes at most every 15 minutes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So at first before mine showed up, I’d like coated up this whole WebSockets-based
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing that showed the status board in the corner of the terminal,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco and I was all excited
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco it. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I plugged it all in and I opened the garage door and nothing happened. And it took me a while to realize,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, nothing happened because it only updates every like 15 minutes. And it does that for perfectly good reason.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s because if you refresh even every 15 minutes, it’s dramatically less battery life than it would be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey otherwise. And once I took that status board off and told it, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, anything else you’re showing, you can refresh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey once an hour, maybe even more than that. Battery life has been phenomenal. And so since I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey optioned the bigger battery, I got to imagine this is gonna last at least a couple of months, maybe even as, I think they quoted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey six months, but we’ll see what happens. But I really like this terminal thing, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s very affordable. So even if I had paid for it, I think I would be saying all the same stuff. It is very slick and very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cool. And the fact that you can cause update, or I shouldn’t say cause updates, the fact that you can give
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their servers updates, which eventually the terminal will go and request, via WebSockets is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey super cool. Not WebSockets, I keep saying WebSockets. What am I thinking of? Webhooks?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Webhook, thank you, John. Gosh, you saved my life there. Anytime I’ve said WebSockets in the last few minutes, I meant
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Webhook, I apologize. That’s 100% my fault. AKA an HTTP request.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey request, you’re exactly right. But anyways, very cool stuff. I really enjoy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the stuff that James had sent. Again, Home is Where the Smartest, put a link in the show notes. I’ve really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enjoyed this terminal thing. And even if you’re not interested in either of those devices,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ultimately they’re both powered by the same stuff, which is the ESP32, which is that little teeny tiny
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chip. Very good. John, have you any updates on your terminal?
⏹️ ▶️ John I got mine and I set it up. I tried a bunch of different display
⏹️ ▶️ John settings. Once the terminal website fixed its broken CSS because their CSS was 404ing over the weekend. Somebody
⏹️ ▶️ John pushed a bad update there, but anyway, they fixed that.
⏹️ ▶️ John What I landed on was weather and calendar, but not the
⏹️ ▶️ John month calendar, because I found that the month calendar with the amount of stuff our family has on our shared
⏹️ ▶️ John calendar with all our stuff in it, is just too much information for that small of a display, especially if you
⏹️ ▶️ John want anything else to be there. So I kind of wish they sold one that was four times as big. Yeah, I hear that, I
⏹️ ▶️ John do. Right, because then I would have more room for them. So what I have is that I have the calendar showing just the day’s activity.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it shows like the next couple of days, but it’s not the whole big grid of the calendar month or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then the weather, and I was trying to find out where I’m gonna put this in the house. I ended up putting it basically like
⏹️ ▶️ John over the thermostat in the dining room. It’s in a place central in the house. You walk by it a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ John When we get ready in the morning, people are eating breakfast at that table. They can glance up and see what the weather is
⏹️ ▶️ John and what’s on the schedule for the day. But usually the question is, for me, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John asking me, do you have a podcast tonight? I say it’s on the calendar, it’s not a quite like,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’ll be shocked that I have a podcast on and I said for something that’s been on the calendar for like months at a time or in the case
⏹️ ▶️ John of ATP is just always like what, anyway, it’s on the calendar but they don’t see the calendar
⏹️ ▶️ John or they, you know, so anyway, now there is slightly less of an excuse because they’re walking, literally walking by the thing every
⏹️ ▶️ John day that says what my podcast schedule is. And also, you know, it’s got everyone else’s schedule on there as well. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I am enjoying it. I’m also curious to see how long the battery will last. I also got the bigger battery.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just stuck it on the wall. It was fully charged when I put it there and we’ll see how long it lasts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I have mine set to only refresh, I think every 30 minutes or hour. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I think mine’s close to that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I have yet to have to charge it. Like I stuck it on the wall with Velcro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco strips and it’s still there. Like that was, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a month and a half ago or two months.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, a couple of quick notes on that. First of all, my setup is during the morning when it’s like the high transit,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey getting out the door sort of situation. I have the left-hand side show the next
⏹️ ▶️ Casey day’s calendar. The right-hand side is then split in half again. So it’s the weather at the top and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a countdown until spring break for the kids on the bottom. And then once everyone is kind of migrated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of the house, the kind of steady state of it is the monthly calendar, which for me, I totally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey understand what you’re saying, John, but for us, that’s still simple enough that we can get away with it. And then the other thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was going to say is, I believe, and I check my math on this, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think that a lot of terminals back-end stuff is either is or will be open-sourced.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So hypothetically, John, you could get your own E-Ink display of a different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey size and use a lot of their software or maybe fork their software to power it. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know that you probably don’t have any interest in that, nor do I, but that is something that I think they would enable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you to do if you wanted to go down that route. Again, check my math on that. I might be lying to you by accident.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, probably. Although I would imagine an E-ink screen of the size that I want actually would be kind of expensive. Cause if you think about
⏹️ ▶️ John the biggest E-ink devices like the remarkable tablets or whatever, they do start to get costly when the screens get big. So I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John even sure how big they may make E-ink screens these days.
Hyperspace updates
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, any hyperspace updates for us?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, the test flight is ongoing. We passed an important milestone this past week, which is that the test flight
⏹️ ▶️ John version will now reclaim one file
⏹️ ▶️ John in your updates. I was trying to figure out what would be the first step between like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, not actually making any changes, but you know, we would do all the work right up into it, but then it would just throw away the work that it
⏹️ ▶️ John did because I didn’t want to mess with people’s disks until I had some confidence. I figured one file was the best choice
⏹️ ▶️ John because at the end of reclaiming, it can point you to, you know, this big button
⏹️ ▶️ John to reveal it in the finder. Here’s the one file, look at the one file. Because if
⏹️ ▶️ John I did like more than one, I was like, oh, I don’t wanna have to manually check those files, but you can manually check one file.
⏹️ ▶️ John And what I want you to do, all the testers, I want them to reclaim one file for real
⏹️ ▶️ John and look at that file and make sure it’s not destroyed. I disabled the setting that
⏹️ ▶️ John like skips the trashcan or whatever. is destroyed, pull out the original from the trash.
⏹️ ▶️ John But so far, no one has reported any kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John damage or problem with the restoration process. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John people are reclaiming. People have said they successfully claim this. Oh, it looks fine to me. Looks fine. Works fine. I tried it. You
⏹️ ▶️ John know, like so good. Thumbs up. I’m going to be in the one file mode for a little while,
⏹️ ▶️ John partially because we’re going on a family trip soon. And during that time, I don’t want to be messing with too much test flight stuff. So
⏹️ ▶️ John there’ll be a little bit of a pause here. While I paused, everybody who is a beta tester,
⏹️ ▶️ John please keep reclaiming one file.
⏹️ ▶️ John have a thing that says, oh, I found 10,000 files, you can reclaim all of them, you just gotta do 10,000 separate runs. And you’ll do one file for real each time.
⏹️ ▶️ John As I said in the testing notes, if you wanna pick which file that is, just deselect everything except for a single file group,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then within that file group, only select one file, and then you can guarantee which one file it will do.
⏹️ ▶️ John Otherwise, I think it picks the biggest file. But yeah, the bug,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve burned down all of the outstanding bug reports as far as I’m aware. There’s some enhancement requests and stuff like
⏹️ ▶️ John that. But I’m getting close to being ready to ship this. Like I said, my
⏹️ ▶️ John trip will probably put a little delay in this, but probably early next month, I’m probably going
⏹️ ▶️ John to be shipping this or maybe even before then, because I’ve more or less drawn
⏹️ ▶️ John a line in the sand that I’m not going to add more features at this point, although I did sneak one in a couple of days ago,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I’m really getting to the point where I just wanna say, what’s there is what’s there, make sure it works.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then I gotta do all the other stuff of, try to find some way to make screenshots of this. I always do such a bad job
⏹️ ▶️ John on the screenshots. It’s not a very exciting app. Make a webpage, an announcement thing, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah. Yeah, it’s getting close. The testers, testers have been great. I did start a Slack
⏹️ ▶️ John for it, by the way. I mentioned that in the test flight notes. Slack has been
⏹️ ▶️ John so weird. Like I made a Slack for it. I have a Slack for Switch Class as well, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John the invite link that I put in there, for some people it has never worked, and yet other people have been
⏹️ ▶️ John joining successfully with that link as recently as today.
⏹️ ▶️ John Some people say, oh, this link has expired. I tried it myself and it worked for me when I did it in an incognito window,
⏹️ ▶️ John but other people say, yeah, that link never worked. So anyway, if you want to join the Slack, as I say in the notes, you can just email the
⏹️ ▶️ John address that’s listed there and just say, hey, I wanna join the Slack and the link didn’t work for me. I don’t know why the link
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t work for you. I can’t figure out what’s wrong with Slack these days, but it’s an issue. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, people have been following great reports. Some people have joined the Slack because they prefer to get feedback that way. Some
⏹️ ▶️ John people are emailing me, some people are using test flight feedback. It’s all systems are go.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, and I will release a version of the app that reclaims everything for real
⏹️ ▶️ John after I have a little bit more confidence with the one file thing, but so far so good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, as a quick aside with regard to Slack, I was using Slack on my iPad, which I do somewhat regularly. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the eight millionth time, I hit the up arrow in order to, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was in the midst of editing a multi-line thing, and I hit the up arrow to go up within the context of the thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had written. And of course, what does it do? But it goes to the most recent message that I had posted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rather than where it should go, which is up within the editing space that I’m working within.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I fired off like a, you know, help message in Slack for iPad. And I threw it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey across the wall, assuming you went into dev null. and within like two hours or something like that, I got a response
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from a human saying, huh, this doesn’t seem right, we’ll look at it. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unreal. Yeah, Slack
⏹️ ▶️ John actually responds to bug reports.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey world where bug reports are actually responded to. And maybe it wasn’t two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hours, but given that what I’m comparing it to is Apple, which is literally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey never, it was effectively instant. It was unbelievable. I was so impressed.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’ve got a lot of good, I’ve filed a lot of those. I’ve actually probably should have filed the thing on the links that I don’t understand, but why does this
⏹️ ▶️ John link work for some people and other people it doesn’t? What am I doing wrong? But it’s honestly not that important.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, if people want access to Slack, they could just email me. But the other times that I have filed things,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s totally like you will get a response from someone who seemingly read and understood what
⏹️ ▶️ John you wrote, which is just mind boggling compared to the Apple experience where if you do get a response,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s so hard to tell. did the person who’s responding to this
⏹️ ▶️ John even read what I wrote? Or
⏹️ ▶️ John they did read it, how did they fail to comprehend it? Like, you start questioning everything about what you’re writing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, was my writing unclear? Like, it’s just, it’s really a terrible experience.
UK backdoors the world
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s talk about some other terrible things, which is to say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple has apparently been ordered to open encrypted user accounts globally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to UK spying. That’s fun. Not US. We’re doing everything wrong in the world,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey except this one thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not yet. I mean, don’t worry, we’ll get there. Well, I mean, give it time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like I really want to rant about this. And I know in the middle of the show is not the place to do it. And I’m trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not make a lot of a lot more work for Marco, but Maybe in an after-after-after show, I can pop off about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this ridiculous coup that’s happening right now. Anyways, reading from The Verge. Apple has reportedly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been ordered by the UK government to create a backdoor that would give security officials access to users’ encrypted iCloud backups.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If implemented, British security services would have access to the backups of any user worldwide, not just Brits,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Apple would not be permitted to alert users that their encryption was compromised. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sorry. Let me read that again. If implemented, British security services have access
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the backups of any user worldwide, not just Brits, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple would not be permitted to alert users that their encryption was compromised.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The Washington Post reports that the secret order issued last month is based on rights given under the UK’s Investigatory
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Powers Act of 2016, also known as, and I love this, the Snoopers Charter.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Officials have apparently demanded blanket access to end-to-end encrypted files uploaded by any user worldwide rather than access
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a specific account. Apple’s iCloud backups aren’t encrypted by default, but the advanced data protection
⏹️ ▶️ Casey option was added in 2022 and must be enabled manually. It uses end-to-end encryption so that not even Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can access encrypted files. In response to the order, Apple is expected to simply stop offering advanced data protection
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the UK. This wouldn’t meet the UK’s demand for access to files shared by global
⏹️ ▶️ Casey users, however. Apple has the right to appeal the notice on the basis of cost of implementing it and whether the demand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is proportionate to the security requirements, but any appeal cannot delay implementation of the original
⏹️ ▶️ Casey order. This is such a bonkers set of rules, my goodness. The UK has reportedly served Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a document called a technical capability notice. It is a criminal offense to even reveal that the government has made a demand.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Similarly, if Apple did accede to the UK’s demands, then it apparently would not be allowed to warn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey users that its encrypted service is no longer fully secure. Now, in case you think the Washington Post
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is crazy, let’s talk about the BBC, who writes this misguided attempt at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sorry, this is a quote that the BBC has quoted from somebody else. This misguided attempt at tackling crime and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey terrorism will not make the UK safer, but it will erode the fundamental rights and civil liberties of the entire population,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey privacy campaigners Big Brother Watch said in a statement. Another quote, the main issue that comes from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey such powers being exercised is that it’s unlikely to result in the outcome they want, said Lisa Forte, cybersecurity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expert from Red Goat. Criminals and terrorists will just pivot to other platforms and techniques to avoid incrimination.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it’s the average law-abiding citizen who suffers by losing their privacy. Entire
⏹️ ▶️ Casey country that loves security cameras more than anyone in the entire world decides that they get to security cam
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything they want in our iCloud backups. Color me surprised.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, they’re not deciding this, but this is a situation where we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John talked about Apple dealing with difficult government demands and
⏹️ ▶️ John just navigating various laws in different countries. but this one I feel like is just so
⏹️ ▶️ John incredibly clarifying given how incredibly dumb this law is, which
⏹️ ▶️ John you outlined well, that like, that it doesn’t just apply to the UK, but they want access to everybody worldwide.
⏹️ ▶️ John So even disabling advanced data protection in the UK does not satisfy it. The answer is
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple pulls out of the UK. No more Apple products will be sold in the UK. That is the
⏹️ ▶️ John only answer to this because anything else is inconceivable
⏹️ ▶️ John unless the unless the diverge article is wrong about what it requires to comply. Because if it was just a
⏹️ ▶️ John matter of, OK, people in the UK can’t get advanced data protection. Oh, well, sucks for them. But if that doesn’t do it and
⏹️ ▶️ John the only solution is they want to back door to everything worldwide. No more Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John products in the UK. Like that is the direct, very straightforward, only possible
⏹️ ▶️ John consequence of this thing going through. Now, maybe their appeal, something will happen there. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s so it’s so difficult to predict what will happen. But given this description of the law, that
⏹️ ▶️ John is the only thing that can happen, right? Like, what am I missing? Is there any possible other
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that could possibly happen?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I think the most likely outcome here is that most countries,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like most, especially kind of like, you know, similar countries in like, you know, development
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and law enforcement status as the US and Europe and everything. I think most countries are going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make advanced data protection illegal. And Apple’s going to have to disable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it or not offer it in those regions. And I think the US is right behind them. Like there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way we could look. We have, you know, the culture of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco law enforcement is that they feel genuinely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco entitled to everything from everyone all the time. They do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not like having, you know, roadblocks put in their face like the Constitution or rights
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or due process. And the last thing they want is a technical roadblock, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they cannot get around. So law enforcement worldwide would love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to just have access to whatever they demand. And the more they can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just have it on everybody and get these pesky judges and processes and constitutions out of the way, the better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they and look, they’re not like evil people. They think they’re doing it for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good reasons. They think they’re protecting us from terrorists and stuff. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in their world, they are justified in their thinking here. Unfortunately, that conflicts with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rights and constitutions and
⏹️ ▶️ John within their world, if their world was just expansive enough to realize what the reality of their
⏹️ ▶️ John world is, is that when you make a backdoor like this, the bad people get access to it. And you get compromised
⏹️ ▶️ John in a worse way than you could possibly imagine. It happened recently with China finding a way into one of the backdoors that was mandated into some telecom
⏹️ ▶️ John system in the US, right? There is no way to make a backdoor just for the good guys. So by demanding
⏹️ ▶️ John that a backdoor exists, you are essentially self-owning. You are compromising your system because the bad people
⏹️ ▶️ John will get access to it. And if you’re a law enforcement agency, that doesn’t help you.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not actually justified, even within their world of like, well, if we just look at what our needs as a law enforcement
⏹️ ▶️ John agency are, this is the right thing to do. It’s not even right then. It is just wrongheaded in every possible way.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I agree that they think it’s the right thing to do. They’re just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco absolutely wrong. Right. But the reality of what’s going to happen here, we have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our own problems here in the US, obviously, with our recent politics. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a swing to the right and authoritarianism is not limited
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just to the US recently. This has been happening in a lot of the developed world. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the culture of law enforcement and government
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having full control over people and the erosion of freedoms is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happening in a lot of places, especially in technology. And the tech companies are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never, like there is not a chance in hell Apple pulls out of a market.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, Apple will keep making all their money in every single market they possibly can.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And what they will do is just the same thing they’ve done with so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many other things, China, the Gulf of America. Like what they’re gonna do is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re going to say, we have to follow the laws in the countries in which we operate. And they’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just not offer the encryption in these countries. Like that’s what’s going to happen. No,
⏹️ ▶️ John that won’t solve it. Like according to what’s written here, they can’t do that. That’s what I was gonna say before. Like in China, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John able to bend over backwards and do what the Chinese government wants. The Chinese government does not want as much as the
⏹️ ▶️ John UK government does. The Chinese government asks for something that they could actually get, which is within China,
⏹️ ▶️ John we have all these rules, we get access to all your servers, blah blah blah blah. But the UK is asking for more than that. They’re saying
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to compromise everybody in the entire world to satisfy
⏹️ ▶️ John our law. Even China didn’t ask for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In all fairness, I think that detail is very likely to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say never mind. I think that one particular detail like I think I think in a month that details
⏹️ ▶️ John When when does that never mind happen? Is that like, does that never mind happen in the appeal process? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think the law can be changed in the appeal process. Anyway, we’re just going by this article
⏹️ ▶️ John here. But why wasn’t it written in the article, Apple can’t do what it has historically
⏹️ ▶️ John done. Its only choices are backdoor every single Apple customer worldwide
⏹️ ▶️ John in perpetuity without telling anybody or pull out of the UK. And that’s why I think
⏹️ ▶️ John they won’t do what they did in the UK and China. If they could do that, you’re right, they would if they can just say, OK, well, there’s a simple
⏹️ ▶️ John change we can make. It’s different for the people in China. Now it’s different people in UK. That’s their deal. That’s their
⏹️ ▶️ John problem. Their justification for China is like, well, it’s better than us not being there because it’s compromised as we are.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re still the least compromised in all of China, which I think is true, but it’s a low bar.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they could say the same thing in the UK. But it seems like, again, I’m not a
⏹️ ▶️ John lawyer, and I have not read this law. I’m just going by the articles in The Verge. It seems like they can’t do that,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is why the only option is pull out of the UK.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, or the option also, I mean, again, not a lawyer. But the other option could be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they will comply within the UK, and they just won’t comply with people outside the UK. And the UK
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can sue them, and they’ll see what happens, and they’ll challenge it. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I suppose. You’re learning lots of lessons from the current administration. I’m just like, what if I just ignore the law? Then what
⏹️ ▶️ John happened? That tends not to be Apple’s M.O.
⏹️ ▶️ John anywhere. They’re much more likely to fall. Like I would imagine what would happen is that this law is so
⏹️ ▶️ John wrongheaded and Apple is so large and powerful and the threat of pulling out is so
⏹️ ▶️ John so powerful to elected people in the UK because of Apple did pull out and everybody in the UK knew it was because
⏹️ ▶️ John of this dumb law. A lot of people aren’t getting reelected. So I imagine what will actually happen is
⏹️ ▶️ John big, important people have big, important discussions, and this will be changed. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John at the very least, they’ll change it so that all of the badness is confined to the UK, which sucks if you’re in the
⏹️ ▶️ John UK. But that is absolutely what Apple will do in that case. They’ll be like, fine, if we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have to do it worldwide, we’ll just do it in the UK. Everybody will know that it’s happening in the UK because we leak
⏹️ ▶️ John this or whoever leaked this like it’s not. Apple can’t technically say anything about it, but now we all know about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John So when advanced data protection disappears in the UK, we’ll be like, oh, that’s why.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the problem is with this law, if advanced data protection disappears in the UK
⏹️ ▶️ John but doesn’t disappear anywhere else, how do we know that Apple hasn’t compromised
⏹️ ▶️ John all its customers everywhere? We would assume they wouldn’t because that just doesn’t seem like something Apple would do. But the law says that
⏹️ ▶️ John they can’t say anything either way. So all these laws that require
⏹️ ▶️ John you not to say anything about something the government is making you do are terrible. I feel like the terribleness
⏹️ ▶️ John of those laws should be confined to the country that a company is in. Like, the US government
⏹️ ▶️ John can make Apple do that. But I don’t feel like it’s tenable to have any government in the world be able to do that. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I really hope that if they can’t come to an agreement, Apple will just come out and say, look, this is what they
⏹️ ▶️ John asked us to do, and we said no.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. It’s just crummy. It’s gross. I mean, as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much as I’m getting fired up about this, I mean, honestly, we have no like to stand on as Americans right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now. It’s, I’m, I’m doing everything in my
⏹️ ▶️ John It is very similar in that it is, it is like, what kind of decision can we make
⏹️ ▶️ John that everybody who has a brain knows is bad and wrong, but can we just force that through
⏹️ ▶️ John because we won an election and will there be any consequences from that? And we were all in the, we’re all in
⏹️ ▶️ John that finding out phase right now because a bunch of bad people with bad ideas were elected and they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John doing stupid stuff. And now it’s a question of how far can you go with
⏹️ ▶️ John that? Because there are, at least in the UK I would imagine, would definitely
⏹️ ▶️ John be electoral consequences of forcing Apple out of your country. Because I think
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of people in the UK who vote like Apple products. That would not be a good move
⏹️ ▶️ John for you as a politician or as a political party. And yet I feel like that is the inevitable consequence
⏹️ ▶️ John of holding the line on this one. Which is probably why they will back off and do something and
⏹️ ▶️ John change it around or whatever, but boy, like just dumb people
⏹️ ▶️ John are gonna be dumb, man. I mean, like, and the US does exactly the same thing. There’s always things going through the legislature
⏹️ ▶️ John in this country of like, we want to have a backdoor, but only for the good guys. And just like, how many times do we need to have this conversation? That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not how math works. Like, it’s just, you can, because that sells well.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can get people to vote for you, say, I’m gonna protect you. I’m gonna make sure that the good guys, blah, blah, blah, because it’s too, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s too nuanced and weird and techie to explain to people why this is terrible. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John we just keep coming back to that same thing around and around and around. Like every government in every part of
⏹️ ▶️ John the world will just keep coming up with the same thing. Was for the reason Marco said, law enforcement wants it, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can run on it and seem like you’re gonna get elected because you’re helping protect the people. And then when the rubber hits the road,
⏹️ ▶️ John hopefully you’ll get enough smart people to talk and say, this is impossible.
⏹️ ▶️ John It can’t be done. It’s not a thing. This is not a thing, right? And sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John it gets forced through anyway. Like whatever, I wish I could find a link to that. The US thing where we got
⏹️ ▶️ John owned because we did force through our law that required government to have backdoor access to some telecom
⏹️ ▶️ John system. And oh look, China found the backdoor. No one could have guessed that would have happened except
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco everybody who ever looked at it and said,
⏹️ ▶️ John the bad guys will get the backdoor because it’s the best thing to get. If there’s a backdoor, everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John wants it and they’ll get it. That’s just, it’s maddening. But we
⏹️ ▶️ John are doomed as a species to have this debate over and over again. And the only thing we can hope is that
⏹️ ▶️ John smarter heads will prevail eventually on this issue, even if we have degrees
⏹️ ▶️ John of backsliding. So fingers crossed that the UK dodges this one, and fingers crossed that
⏹️ ▶️ John enough people notice what happened in the US with the telecom thing getting compromised. And maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John the next time one of these laws comes up, someone in Congress will bring this up. Not that it matters, because Congress
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t vote based on reason anyway. It’s totally a tribal thing. Our country is broken. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John UK, good luck. We need it and so do you.
ELEGNT
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So last week, I think it was, or thereabouts, we got a very surprising
⏹️ ▶️ Casey release from Apple at machinelearning.apple.com. We got Elegant,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey E-L-E-G-N-T, expressive and functional movement design for non-anthropomorphic robots.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this is a short webpage. It’s not even really a full website. It’s really just a webpage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the most part. It has a link to the full publication and it has a very cute
⏹️ ▶️ Casey five minute video. And in that five-minute video, you see, what is it, Lux, that I’m thinking of from Pixar?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is that right? Luxo Jr.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jr., thank you. It’s a lamp very similar to Luxo Jr. And the TLDR
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of this video is, look, if you’re writing the code or you’re effectively like piloting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a robot, then the most efficient thing for the robot to do is go from point A to point
⏹️ ▶️ Casey B. And that is fine, but it’s kind of clinical when perceived
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by a human. And what Apple is saying is, hey, if we take
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a kind of circuitous way from point A to point B and maybe overshoot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or kind of like brace ourselves to get ready to go and then launch out and go, if we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have these sort of human qualities to it, it’s a much more enjoyable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey experience for the humans observing it. And they have this video that demonstrates this. And honestly, the difference
⏹️ ▶️ Casey between the kind a clinical standard robot and the more emotional,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you will, robot was really stark for me. And I really preferred
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looking at an interact, well, not that I was interacting, but like imagining interacting with the more emotional robot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rather than the one that is arguably more efficient. And they even showed an example where the robot is housing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a voice assistant. And when they asked the robot the question and it kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of like, if I remember right, it kind of like leaned back and thought about it for a second And it didn’t just immediately answer the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey question. And they’re doing the side-by-side and split screen with the clinical version, as I keep calling it, although that’s not what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they called it, and the emotional version, again, not what they called it. And the clinical version was done quicker,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but the emotional version was so much more pleasurable to interact with, or at least that’s what I got from it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, I’m sure you saw the video. So am I bananas, or does this ring true to you?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, first I want to talk about the fact that this web page exists at all. Fair.
⏹️ ▶️ John because if you’ve been listening to the show for the past several months, we’ve talked about the rumor of like a table
⏹️ ▶️ John sitting Apple home device with a screen and the screen is robotically controlled. And there’s that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple framework that currently works with that Belkin camera pointy thing where there’s an API
⏹️ ▶️ John from a Mac or other devices where you can control a like a robot servo type thing
⏹️ ▶️ John or it’s not really a robot, but anyway, a mechanical thing that points a camera in a particular direction. There’s a whole framework
⏹️ ▶️ John for that. So many rumors about Apple products potentially using that. Again, there’s the Belkin
⏹️ ▶️ John third-party one you could buy right now that actually does use it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then the home thing with the screen where the screen points at you and emotes and so on and so forth. And I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a fun tie-in with the iMac G4, the flat screen iMac with the cool
⏹️ ▶️ John spring-loaded like a metal arm thing that they had in the commercial and it was
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of gesticulating and motioning or whatever. Those are all rumors on like Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John rumors and you know, Bloomberg from German stuff or whatever. Usually
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple doesn’t put up web pages showing technologies that
⏹️ ▶️ John for things that have been rumored. Patents sure, cause those have to be public and Apple patents everything. And just because there’s a patent
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t mean there’s going to be a product. But given half a year or more of rumors of a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that has like a screen slash camera on an arm that does like, you know, that
⏹️ ▶️ John points at things and like moves in an emotive way. And then having Apple put this
⏹️ ▶️ John up, it’s almost like it’s so out of character for Apple because
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t tend to, like the analogy is often been used in the Apple community is like Apple doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John make concept cars. A concept car is at car shows or like a car manufacturer will come with a car that they’re never gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John make, that is usually just like a model with nothing on the inside of it or whatever, but
⏹️ ▶️ John that points in a future direction. Here’s some ideas we’re thinking about. Here’s some design ideas, here’s some technology
⏹️ ▶️ John ideas. It’s a concept car. It’s not a product, it never will be a product, but here
⏹️ ▶️ John it shows the direction of our thinking. And if you squint at this, you can see what our future products might have some of these qualities.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple doesn’t do that. They only show something when they have an actual product. So they don’t show their research
⏹️ ▶️ John and development. They don’t show their Orion glasses that they’re working on in the lab that cost $10,000 that
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not gonna ever really sell to consumers. Just show like, look, we’re working on stuff and we’re making some headway. And we’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John they could do that. The whole time they were developing the Vision Pro, they could have been having little tech demos of the various technologies
⏹️ ▶️ John as they advanced or whatever. But that’s not how Apple goes. But here we have seemingly pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John concrete rumors of a thing with a screen where something moves the screen to point at stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then this research thing that says, hey, we’ve been doing some research on how to make things point at things
⏹️ ▶️ John in a motive kind of way. So weird. And like, it almost makes me think, oh, I guess they’re not making that
⏹️ ▶️ John product. Because if they were making it, they would never do this. but maybe like the machine learning research
⏹️ ▶️ John people, like, I know they let them publish stuff, because, you know, obviously with the OLM
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, or whatever, they’ve published papers about things or whatever, but I feel like publishing papers versus
⏹️ ▶️ John making a video, and it’s not particularly slickly produced. Like if you’ve watched like a SIGGRAPH video,
⏹️ ▶️ John or like a video made by like graduate students or PhD students, not that I’m saying it’s a bad video,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s not like Apple polished like WWDC video, video.
⏹️ ▶️ John It looks for all the world like a SIGGRAPH or a PhD student video, and that’s what it smells
⏹️ ▶️ John like. And it’s just like, how did this get out of Apple? Like how? It really does make
⏹️ ▶️ John me think that they’ve decided not to make that product with the little emotive arm thing. But anyway, sorry for that big long aside, because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just boggling my mind that this thing exists. But here it is, I’m looking at it right now, and the webpage is still up. So
⏹️ ▶️ John there you have it. For the difference between the sort of,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I would think it was the car welding robot. if you’ve ever seen, everything’s cars with us,
⏹️ ▶️ John ever seen a car assembly line with the giant robotic arms that weld things on cars?
⏹️ ▶️ John They just move in straight lines. Like, there’s no, they’re not trying to be a motive. They’re going from one welding position
⏹️ ▶️ John to the next as quickly as possible because time is money.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re not trying to impress anybody. But for something that might sit on your desk and, you know, move around
⏹️ ▶️ John and do things, having it look more friendly makes a difference. But here’s the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, two things. One, the thing about mechanical moving things that I’ll get to in a second that I’ve talked about in the past. But the other thing
⏹️ ▶️ John is having a personality and being,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, you called it emotional, less clinical, whatever you want to describe this, being more Disney Imagineering,
⏹️ ▶️ John because Disney Imagineering is 100% like, they do this amazingly well. Getting machines to move
⏹️ ▶️ John in a way that connects with people, either by looking like living things or by evoking emotion or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. That’s the art of animation, that’s how all the inanimate objects
⏹️ ▶️ John and the Beast’s castle and Beauty and the Beast can look like things because they’re squashing and stretching, but also
⏹️ ▶️ John because, you know, it’s the work of an animator. You can do that with physical real world objects as well
⏹️ ▶️ John to have a better connection. But there is a baseline level
⏹️ ▶️ John of actually doing the thing you want it to do that you need to pass
⏹️ ▶️ John before I feel like you get any benefit from being more emotive. In other words,
⏹️ ▶️ John it has to be able to do the thing before you care about, did it do the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John in a way that I find that makes a connection with me? Because if it fails to do the thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John those emotive qualities either have no effect or make you hate it more. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not entirely sure given Apple’s history for things like Siri, that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Any product they field with this type of technology is going to pass that baseline bar
⏹️ ▶️ John of, but did it do the thing at all that I wanted it to do before you get to the point where
⏹️ ▶️ John you can consider, and it did it in such an engaging way, you know? Like, and watching this
⏹️ ▶️ John video, that’s all I could think of is how angry people would get at this poor thing
⏹️ ▶️ John if it did not do the thing they wanted. Like so much of Apple’s, so many of Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like home slash intelligence products don’t do it and how all the extra work they’re putting into being
⏹️ ▶️ John more emotive would not save it from the wrath of the user.
⏹️ ▶️ John I see it in my own kids when they’re trying to talk to our home pod to turn the lights on and off and it doesn’t work and the things they
⏹️ ▶️ John have to say about Siri are not kind and then they talk to the Google device and it always works.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s what I’m thinking, I’m thinking like, the people doing this research should go work for Disney Imagineering
⏹️ ▶️ John because the Disney stuff does do the thing people expect it to do They just expect to be entertained.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you ask this thing to, you know, whatever the, you know, this thing was doing stuff that Apple’s never going to ship
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s too expensive. But if you ask the Apple thing to like, look at me
⏹️ ▶️ John or make sure you can get us all on camera or whatever, and it doesn’t do it, you don’t care how emotive it was in attempting
⏹️ ▶️ John to do your thing. You just care that it didn’t do the thing. And so I, my pessimism about this
⏹️ ▶️ John whole approach is, uh, let’s work on the baseline
⏹️ ▶️ John functionality and get that nailed down before you worry so much about this. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be researching this. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not like you can just add this on later. You should be researching it, but I would be much more impressed by a
⏹️ ▶️ John behind the scenes look at somebody making sure that like, you know, the next home device
⏹️ ▶️ John is responsive and actually does what you ask it to do, which is a bar that they have not crossed
⏹️ ▶️ John with the current ones. as I alluded to before, the mechanical
⏹️ ▶️ John nature of this, with all the servos and motors and moving parts or whatever, is so incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ John expensive. And so requiring of a philosophy that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John does not currently conform to, which is the repairability and maintenance
⏹️ ▶️ John of something with as many moving parts, that I just can’t see any product like this being near on the horizon, because
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing that is difficult about these devices still today is not so much the computer smarts
⏹️ ▶️ John that controls them, but it’s the physical reality of anything that
⏹️ ▶️ John works and moves anything like a living thing. That’s why those like Boston Robotics terrifying dog
⏹️ ▶️ John things cost a whole jillion dollars. It is incredibly expensive to do what
⏹️ ▶️ John our little fleshy flesh and bones and blood and muscles do so easily
⏹️ ▶️ John with a mechanical device. And it’s even more expensive to make something like that mass market that you can
⏹️ ▶️ John just sell to consumers have any expectation of the thing not breaking within a year. So I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John anything like Luxo Jr. is coming our way anytime soon. If we’re lucky, we’ll get a HomePod with
⏹️ ▶️ John a screen where the screen like rotates and tilts and hopefully that won’t break.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And hopefully it’ll work instead of being like, hmm, sorry, I can’t do that right now.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wish I had recorded the interaction with Siri the other day. I think one of my home pods is finally, my original
⏹️ ▶️ John home pod is finally just like not working. And you can talk to it and all it will
⏹️ ▶️ John ever tell you is what you just said, Marco. Like various excuses about why things don’t work. It will never
⏹️ ▶️ John actually do anything. I don’t understand it. I can’t even tell what version of the OS it’s running.
⏹️ ▶️ John When I try to use it on the app, it tells me to bring my phone closer. When I bring my phone closer, nothing happens. So that one
⏹️ ▶️ John may be, you know, slowly sailing off over the horizon.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, in the meantime, it’s like sun setting, sun downing, whatever they call it. You
⏹️ ▶️ John can talk to it and it just talks to you in a series of hmms and ums and not hearing back from your responses and sorry,
⏹️ ▶️ John I couldn’t do that. And it will keep the conversation going like a telemarketer or whatever, but it will never actually do anything. off
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#askatp: App-wireframing tool
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bit of Ask ATP. And let’s start with Glenn Lamb,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who writes, what kind of app planning or wireframing tool do you all use when planning an app? Figma? Pen and paper?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For me, usually pen and paper, if anything at all. Or otherwise, I’ll just start throwing stuff against
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Xcode and start whipping up a bare bones version of something in SwiftUI. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oftentimes, it’s pen and paper, if anything. I’ve never meaningfully used Figma or what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the S sketch, sketch something. I don’t know what I’m thinking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco of. Those are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both software, but sketch is the one you’re thinking of. Thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There you go. Um, I don’t really use any of those personally. Um, so yeah, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just pen and paper for me. Marco, let’s start with you and then finish, finish with John, please.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t do anything like this. I just have an idea and I try to just build it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I, I prototype and I design basically by building it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So in the era of SwiftUI, this is actually great for my workflow here, as much as it is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I can actually just try a bunch of different things really quickly. And this is one of the things I’ve decided,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I talked about it under the radar a bit, but one of the things I’ve decided about why I like SwiftUI,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco despite its prickliness at certain points is that it allows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me to quickly iterate and try different designs and try like radically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different layouts and techniques fairly quickly so that I, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s similar to the type of prototyping that and kind of design iteration that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think other people are able to use these tools for, but that I’m just not like the right kind of designer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to ever do that or think that way. Like for me, if I,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me to tell whether an idea works, I have to build it. And that’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my design process of like how I get good designs at the end of the day is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly by just building stuff and trying it and seeing like, does this look good? Does this feel good? Does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this work well? And you know, if the answer to any of those is no, it’s like, well, all right, let me see what else I can do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here. And I just try a bunch of stuff until I find something that works well.
⏹️ ▶️ John John. Yeah, I think Marco hit on an important thing. SwiftUI makes
⏹️ ▶️ John it so much easier as a programmer to rapidly, I’m not even gonna say prototype,
⏹️ ▶️ John but like rapidly get something up on the screen to validate ideas. And if you are primarily a developer,
⏹️ ▶️ John chances are good that your skills are more suited to
⏹️ ▶️ John writing code for trying things out than they are to trying things out in an app like Figma.
⏹️ ▶️ John because apps like Figma or any kind of design app, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not like you can just magically use them. It’s like, well, I’m a programmer. Of course I can use simple media app. Graphics
⏹️ ▶️ John editors are incredibly complicated. And if you don’t use them day in and day out and don’t know how to use them efficiently,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a massive slowdown to try to use a tool you’re not familiar with. It would be the
⏹️ ▶️ John same thing as taking someone who’s an expert at using Figma and Photoshop and sending them in front of Xcode and saying, now prototype this. They
⏹️ ▶️ John could do it, but they’d be way faster in Figma or Photoshop, right? So it’s really a lot about where our expertise lies,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially when you’re an independent developer. You don’t have the luxury of like different departments and different people. You’ve got your current
⏹️ ▶️ John skillset and you can expand your skillset, but under time pressure with limited resources,
⏹️ ▶️ John normally you’re going to lean towards what do I already know how to do? It’s why Marco’s got tons of stuff written in PHP. It’s like, it’s more
⏹️ ▶️ John efficient. Like I could learn a whole new thing or I could just do it in PHP because I know that’ll be done quickly. So
⏹️ ▶️ John during my web development career, did I design things using Sketch or Photoshop
⏹️ ▶️ John or any of those other apps? No, because I’m not as good at using them as I am typing HTML.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would just write, when I wanted to see a UI, I would have an idea in my head and I would write
⏹️ ▶️ John HTML. Like, it’s like, why don’t you just write it down on a piece of paper first? Doing it in HTML for me
⏹️ ▶️ John is faster and better than writing it on a piece of paper because the fidelity of the HTML, it’s literally the thing I’m gonna be making.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, it’s there. I don’t have to, there’s no other step and I can do it faster and better than I can with a pencil, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s, that’s the weird thing that people don’t think about. It’s like, well, sure, you need some place to sketch out these ideas and prototype
⏹️ ▶️ John them. It’s like, I’m faster just doing it, like doing the code, doing the HTML,
⏹️ ▶️ John doing the whatever. It’s not like the finished version, but that literally is, for people with that skill set, the
⏹️ ▶️ John fastest, best way to design things. It’s only not that way
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re actually better with a pencil and paper, a pen and paper, Photoshop, Figma, or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And again, you can learn new skills in those areas, but to be really fast
⏹️ ▶️ John with those design tools does actually require lots of use and experience.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not as simple as like, oh, I’ll just learn what the tools do and I’ll be done. It’s just like coding.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s ways to be more efficient in using the tools that people who do it professionally and repeatedly know
⏹️ ▶️ John that I certainly don’t. And so, yeah, how do I figure out the UI? How did I figure out the UI for the app that I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John doing? I just did it in SwiftUI. And it’s way faster than doing it. It’s even faster than doing it in an interface builder, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is another example of like, oh, you can just mock it up in an interface builder. At this point, it’s probably faster
⏹️ ▶️ John just to do it in SwiftUI because I’m going to have to do it in SwiftUI anyway. Like that’s what it’s going to be written in.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so why would I, why would I pull out interface builder and drag a bunch of little things out and arrange things and say, okay, now
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll go make that in SwiftUI. I’ve just wasted my time. So me and Mark were on the same page here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. Yep. I mean, it makes perfect sense to me.
#askatp: Is HFS+ still useful?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, this one I think is just for John. Mike Hatfield writes, is HFS plus still relevant in 2025? If
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you were adding new spinning drives for media or Linux ISOs in 2025, would you format the file
⏹️ ▶️ Casey system as APFS or HFS plus? Context, my Plex library is growing, so I’m adding storage capacity.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m using a QNAP 4 bay configured as just a bunch of disks connected to a Mac mini via USB.
⏹️ ▶️ John HFS plus is still kind of relevant because it is a file system that was designed in
⏹️ ▶️ John the age of spinning disks. So it’s behavior with respect to locality of
⏹️ ▶️ John disk head movement is so much better than APFS that
⏹️ ▶️ John it is a faster file system on spinning disks. Does that mean you should
⏹️ ▶️ John use it on spinning disks? I feel like, especially in the context given here,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you have a spinning disk and it’s connected to like a NAS,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t use any Mac file system. use BTRFS, use EXT4, use ZFS, use
⏹️ ▶️ John something else better suited to that task, because then you can just SMB mount it on your Mac and it will be fine,
⏹️ ▶️ John is the reason we wanted to get away from HFS+. Despite the fact that it is very efficient for spinning disks as compared to
⏹️ ▶️ John APFS, it is not a great file system. It doesn’t have lots of file system features that you might want, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John for something like a NAS. Other file systems are better there. My
⏹️ ▶️ John personal choice, even when I had spinning disks, you know, in the age of APFS, I would format
⏹️ ▶️ John all my spinning disks as APFS. It would make them slower. Like there’s no doubt about it, it would. But normally what I was keeping
⏹️ ▶️ John on those disks was like large files and other stuff where the performance doesn’t really matter because it just boils down to sequential speed,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is the same, should be the same in both of them, or close anyway. I just took the speed hit because I was sick
⏹️ ▶️ John of problems with HFS+, and I wanted the reliability of APFS despite the
⏹️ ▶️ John performance. So my recommendation, I think it is still relevant for people who wanna make that trade-off.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like if you decide, no, I can’t stand how slow this is, I have tons of small files, HFS is so much
⏹️ ▶️ John faster on a spinning disk, I’m just gonna do that. But only do that if you’re forced to directly connect the disk
⏹️ ▶️ John to your Mac and you can’t stand the speed hit of APFS and you’re okay with running disk utility and run some
⏹️ ▶️ John alt repair errors or you don’t care about errors or whatever. In all other cases, either use APFS
⏹️ ▶️ John on spinning disks and just take the hit or if anything, if at all possible and you’re in a NAS-like scenario,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t use any Apple file system, use a good file system that is supported by your NAS.
#askatp: Special file metadata
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Lian Cowell writes, when discussing John’s new app, he briefly mentioned the many aspects of files
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to consider, metadata, extended attributes, ACLs, et cetera. Would you mind expanding a bit on that? How will your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tool handle that as it deletes a file and then replaces it with a copy on write clone? What metadata, if any, is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey preserved or lost? What metadata, if any, is considered in determining whether two files are identical?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll take the second question first. What do you care about when determining whether files are identical?
⏹️ ▶️ John Literally, the only thing you care about is the content of the file, the data.
⏹️ ▶️ John All that other stuff is not in the decision-making process. All that other stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John can and will be wildly different between two files. All you care is, is this data
⏹️ ▶️ John the same? Because the data is the thing that you’re going to be sharing. That’s the thing you’re going to have one
⏹️ ▶️ John instance of, whereas before you had multiple instances of. Everything else
⏹️ ▶️ John is private and will remain private to each individual file with no sharing whatsoever. So
⏹️ ▶️ John when I’m wandering the disk trying to say, is this file the same as that one? I’m looking at the data.
⏹️ ▶️ John I also look at the resource fork, which technically I don’t think I have to do, but I’m just doing out of habit
⏹️ ▶️ John and honestly how many people still have resource forks? I’m pretty sure the resource work doesn’t matter, but why, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I just, better safe than sorry. So for two files to be considered identical, they must have the same data fork and the same resource
⏹️ ▶️ John work even though the resource fork is accessed through an extended attribute, blah, blah, blah. But setting that aside, nobody
⏹️ ▶️ John has resource forks, it’s not a big deal. Although apparently I do because I have all these ancient files on my, from like old
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac games, classic Mac games and my buried in my games folders. Anyway, so that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John how you decide two files are the same. Once you’ve decided that two files have the same data in them
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’re going to do a space saving clone, yeah, the job you have to perform is, okay, make a
⏹️ ▶️ John clone. So it’s sharing all the data with whatever the original file was or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then the file that you’re getting rid of or replacing with the clone, you’ve got to
⏹️ ▶️ John copy all of that metadata to the new replacement file. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John try to copy all of it. Every extended attribute,
⏹️ ▶️ John every permission thing, obviously the file name, all the file dates, so on and so forth. It’s not actually
⏹️ ▶️ John possible to, on modern Mac OS, to copy all
⏹️ ▶️ John of it. Some things, for example, the file system sort of maintains on its own.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can call APIs that supposedly set it, like things like the last open time, last access time.
⏹️ ▶️ John There are APIs for changing that, and you can call them and they’ll return success, and
⏹️ ▶️ John the file system will be like, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that covered.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because it’s like, you’re trying to tell me the last time this file was accessed
⏹️ ▶️ John was some time in the past, but you just accessed it, man. And so it just
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t do it, which is fine. Like most of the time people don’t care about that. And honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is true. Like this file was just accessed right now. I did it. Like I accessed
⏹️ ▶️ John it, right? And so even though the APIs for setting that return success
⏹️ ▶️ John and there is no error, most of the time the file system will ignore you. Other things
⏹️ ▶️ John you literally can’t set at all. Like there’s a bunch of extended attributes that Apple doesn’t really document well that do
⏹️ ▶️ John various things. If I can’t set those, it’s an error and I can’t say reclaim
⏹️ ▶️ John the space. Like I tried to set all the ones that I can set, but if there are ones that are meaningful
⏹️ ▶️ John that I can’t set, like literally can’t, especially ones that I don’t really know, like it’s like the binary blob
⏹️ ▶️ John of stuff that I don’t understand, my app will throw up its hands and say, look, I tried to save your
⏹️ ▶️ John space on this one, but I couldn’t set the com.apple.macl extended attribute.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sometimes it lets me, sometimes it doesn’t. I don’t know why. Some extended attributes are in fact protected
⏹️ ▶️ John by system integrity protection. If it’s one of those and I can’t override it, I can’t override it, man.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, you know, another thing is, this is a sandboxed Mac app.
⏹️ ▶️ John There is no way that I’ve been able to find to have any sort of like, why don’t you just ask me to authenticate as an
⏹️ ▶️ John admin user, and then your app can do anything. I don’t think you can put an app in the Mac App Store that does that, even
⏹️ ▶️ John though I’m sure there are ones that are there. I think they’re sort of like leftovers from when Apple used to allow that.
⏹️ ▶️ John But right now, I don’t think they do. So again, in future versions, I might have an unsandboxed helper
⏹️ ▶️ John app to help out with this. But right now, if for example, you want to reclaim space used by
⏹️ ▶️ John a file that you do not own, you can’t do that because my app can’t set the owner back
⏹️ ▶️ John to whatever it really is, right? So that’s part of the metadata. Like, oh, I’ve made a space saving clone.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now all I gotta do is make this file look like the one it’s replacing. And the one it’s replacing is owned by, hmm,
⏹️ ▶️ John somebody who’s not me. Well, you can’t CH own a file to somebody who’s not you
⏹️ ▶️ John when you’re running as you. And there’s no way for me to ask for an administrator password to do that or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John So again, if I cannot get the metadata to match to the best of my
⏹️ ▶️ John ability, what I think is the stuff that it needs to match, I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John show an error and say, I couldn’t do that for you. Or in many cases, if I know I won’t be able to do it, I’ll just skip over it
⏹️ ▶️ John and not include it in one of the eligible files. Like, so if I see a file that’s owned by another user, I’m just skipping that or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John There are some that I will let go by. So for example, if I can’t set some date thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the last access date, The fact that I can’t set that, I’m fine with that. Like, but
⏹️ ▶️ John honestly, because I would never be able to clone a file if people insisted that date stay the same. Because look, I am accessing
⏹️ ▶️ John it. It is truthful that that date should be updated to be the date that I did my thing. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I set it and then I forget it. Like I do set
⏹️ ▶️ John it and if the setting call returns an error, I would cause an error, but it always returns
⏹️ ▶️ John success. And so I continue on my merry way. So yeah, I’m pretty much doing, I’m making best
⏹️ ▶️ John possible effort for a Mac sandboxed app. Nothing that any user really cares about
⏹️ ▶️ John should ever be missing, and if it is, my app should bail out and say I couldn’t do this file and move on to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, thank you to our sponsor this week, HelloFresh, and thanks to our members who support us directly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the many membership perks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is ATP overtime. This is our weekly bonus topic. So members get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an additional bonus topic every week, runs usually like 15 to 30 minutes more. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can get that at atv.fm slash join. This week on Overtime, we’re gonna be talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about iOS 19 UI rumors and how that relates
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Apple invites. So if you wanna hear that, once again, atv.fm slash join. Thank you so much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everybody, I’ll talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental And you can find the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show notes at atp.fm And if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John into mastodon, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s K-C-L-I-S-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse, it’s accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to, accidental Check podcast so long
Restaurant-tech update
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have been doing so much restaurant stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John Are you an inferno right now?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I assume it’s a reference I’m not getting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dante’s Inferno. Oh, I didn’t get it either, but that actually, that was a much better joke than either of us gave
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was thinking the coupling direction, which is a very different thing. All right, so anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, so I did ask last week, I had mentioned I discovered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, or I had known about this audio technology called Dante that allowed you to route audio signals over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the network. I had never really used it, and last week I had discovered that I can indeed use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it for some of the needs at the restaurant. Basically, like, you know, certain, like, you know, DJ
⏹️ ▶️ Marco input area is very far away from the amps and mixer and control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco areas and stuff like that, so. And then the subwoofers are really far away from everything else, and so how do we,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, how do we link everything up? And the way it’s been done so far is with a large
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quantity of very old and unreliable cables
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are snaked around the entire restaurant, you know, collecting dust and looking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad. And so anyway, I was seeking to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reduce some of this cable clutter and simplify certain things, make things more reliable and less reliant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on very long analog cables snaked behind God knows what. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Dante is, I haven’t actually had a chance to set up Dante yet, but I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the hardware. I have a bunch of the little tiny, basically they’re dongles. They’re like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco XLR ports with network ports on the other side, and you just plug them into the network and there you have XLR
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in or out. I have a handful of those. We got a lot of feedback
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from people who are familiar with Dante or who use it professionally.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s kind of like if we had been listening to a podcast and someone on, if we three had been listening to a podcast and the person on the
⏹️ ▶️ John podcast said, yeah, I’ve been trying to do this project and someone told me about this thing called Linux.
⏹️ ▶️ John And like, it’s like a different kind of operating system that you might be able to use in this application. So I’m gonna look into that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like we got the feedback like that about Dante. It’s like the whole world except for us knew about Dante.
⏹️ ▶️ John And once you mentioned it, they came out of the woodwork and it’s like, yes, a million people who use Dante for a living listen
⏹️ ▶️ John to this show. And you’re gonna hear, it’s like saying, Have you heard of this thing called Linux? Some
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of other, it’s not Windows, it’s not the Mac. Interesting, I’m gonna look into that for next week.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so the feedback was pretty universally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two types of feedback. There was one that was from people who said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I learned about Dante, not I use it, that’s separate. I learned about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Dante through some way, and you really should have a totally physically separate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco network for it. And then the other group of feedback was, I actually use Dante
⏹️ ▶️ Marco professionally and this will be fine on your network.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So thank you to everybody who responded. Again, I haven’t had a chance to actually install it yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There was a bunch of wiring that had to happen over my last few visits there, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m looking forward to trying it probably next week. The feedback we got suggested
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that yes, it’s very dependent on obviously like your network speeds, your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco network switching architecture, and how you know, do you switch your support QoS, or do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want to isolate Dante onto its own VLAN and prioritize that VLAN. So I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing a bunch of research on you know, which of these things I should do, how do I do that? The good thing is I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco am using all Ubiquiti gear and all brand new Ubiquiti gear. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought this would be a really good opportunity to try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something I haven’t done before. I am now in that one context
⏹️ ▶️ Marco partially living the 10 gigabit Ethernet lifestyle.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean your restaurant needs that kind of bandwidth. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what everyone said with Dante was like you know you just got to make sure that your network doesn’t get clogged up with other stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we have a gigabit internet connection. The internet connection is used for, you know, there’s going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like wireless terminals here and there. I’m sure that’s not much bandwidth, but still wireless terminals for the POS, the little walk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around handhelds. There’s going to be, you know, the TV streaming over the wifi or over the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ethernet rather, but over the network, um, there’s going to be, you know, there’s wifi around. There’s, I have a guest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco network for the wifi, but I’m all, I, I have it right now, limited in ubiquity settings to a hundred megabits
⏹️ ▶️ Marco total. Um, I don’t know if I’ll keep that there, but just for now. But I’m like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way the wiring is routed through the restaurant, the signals for Dante, in order to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from one location, like from basically from the DJ plugin to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the speakers and the mixer and everything, it has to go through two switches. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m like, well, what’s the latency of Ethernet between switches that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are, you know, well-performing switches? like does 10 gigabit Ethernet actually have substantially lower latency
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than one gigabit Ethernet or does it just run it like more in parallel and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did some quick chat GPT research and apparently 10 giga Ethernet has way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lower latency because it is just running the whole the whole protocol just runs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at faster data rates so I’m like well if my goal is to have lots of headroom
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to reduce latency and I have all of this like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know modern ability to run modern cat 6a wires just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as easily as I’m going to run cat 6 wires why don’t I just run really good wires
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and spend the few hundred bucks on ubiquity store to get a 10 gig switch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for those two long runs so not everything is to oh and then the other thing this is the other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing that made this decision easier a couple years ago ubiquity came out with a switch called the Flex.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is a little five port switch. These are the ones that I have on the outside
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of my house running the security cameras and outdoor APs because they are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco indoor outdoor rated, John. And I’ve had them now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco running very well for I think two years. Perfectly well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s little tiny like there. What makes them great is that They are indoor-outdoor rated, powered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by PoE, and also will then re-output PoE
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to their other four ports. And they’re really cheap. They’re like 100 bucks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or a three-pack for like 280. So I’ve used these Flex switches. I’ve used them all over the place,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at home and different uses. They recently came out with the Flex 2.5G PoE switch,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is only 200 bucks. It’s 8 ports,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco its input is 10 gig, and its outputs are all 2.5 gig.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And all across the Ubiquiti line, 2.5 gig is all of a sudden everywhere. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything supports 2.5 gig. So I’m like, well, I’m already, I’m getting faster,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if I just use that switch, instead of the regular Flex,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then I get 10 gig back to a home switch. So I got the one, they have a like five
⏹️ ▶️ Marco port 10 gig, or a four port 10 gig switch for a few hundred bucks. And they have the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Flex 2.5 PoE for 200 bucks each. And I just needed two of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so now I have basically like all the other, like most devices will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be plugged into a 2.5 gig port. I know they’re not gonna use it mostly, but they will have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that port. But then from switch to switch, that’s running 10 gig.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So for the two long legs where it’s going like across the whole restaurant to a switch and then back again
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a different part of the restaurant, those like trunk legs of it are 10 gig.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s glorious. Like it’s like I wired everything up today and like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I mean, this is the wiring process alone has been, as I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mentioned last time, like very, very demanding. I’m like crawling around on top of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco walk-in fridges, like crawling through an attic space to like run different wires,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drilling lots of holes that, you know, with varying degrees of success. I had to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fish a couple of wires through, like there was like, you know, a wall, and I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to go like from one side of the wall to the other, both of them through holes. So I’m going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through like, you know, hole, gap, hole. How do I get two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ethernet wires through this? I’m looking around, at my house over there, I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of those wire fish things, and I could not find it for the life of me. So I go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back to the restaurant, I’m like, what the heck could I possibly use at the restaurant? And I find there is this metal,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the kind of little tiny flagpole that when you see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somebody decorating their lawn for the Fourth of July with a row of little tiny American flags stuck
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the ground, one of those. And I’m like, if I just tie,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I just like zip tie the ethernet cables to the stick of this, I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stick it through the wall and line it up with the other one and pull it through, like, that’s the kind of, and by the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way, that worked great, and I’ve done it three times. That’s the kind of thing that I’ve been doing the last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco week or so at the restaurant. But it has been very, very fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And now I have everything wired up. I have my 10 gig backhaul trunk links.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have my 2.5 gigs at the two major points of devices. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have all the APs, I have three APs installed. I think that’ll probably end up being enough. Everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is Ubiquiti. Everything is so nice and so easy and so fricking fast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, so far it’s going very, very well. And thank you everyone for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the Dante feedback and everything else. And hopefully Dante running on a 10 gig
⏹️ ▶️ Marco backhaul should be plenty for what’s probably gonna end up being something like four channels or six
⏹️ ▶️ Marco channels of actual.usage.
⏹️ ▶️ John Big question in the chat room of, is this wifi only for the employees or is it for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it will mostly be used by the employees because it’s not like a coffee shop. It’s not like the kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of place people would bring a laptop and come work. It’s a bar and a restaurant. Like, so it would be like no one’s sitting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there with a laptop all day. Like, it’s generally it’s gonna be for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco employees’ phones, I think when they’re bored and it’s slow and then separately
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again the the walk-around POS terminals But those I so I created a private network
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I don’t intend to give that password out to anybody including the employees the private
⏹️ ▶️ Marco network has you know full access to the to the Network I’m gonna put the POE walk-around hand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the POS walk-around handheld things on that network And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I’m gonna actually give the employees if they want to connect their phone for whatever reason will be the guest network.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because that way it limits everything, it keeps, you know, then I don’t have to worry about them giving out our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco private network password to someone else, and then someone else being able to come in and control our mixer or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever, like that’s a terrible idea. So I’m going to try to keep those things separate, and if I need to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so there’s already a VLAN for the guest mode of the access points.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If I need to create a second VLAN for the Dante
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff, I can, but I don’t know if I need that level
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of complexity, because I assume that all these modern ubiquity switches support the proper
⏹️ ▶️ Marco QoS tagging of the packets and everything to probably not need that. But we’ll find out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, the way you’re describing your backhaul between the basically front of house and back of house, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I was planning on doing here when I was still, I mean, I still am fantasizing about like fiber and whatnot,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but if I actually do it is more unlikely with each passing moment,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey especially as I get distracted with all things home assistant. But anyway, my thought was I would have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like fiber to go from the garage, which would be kind of sort of the command center,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then flow up to the upstairs and into some sort
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of like switch in the attic. And then I would probably bring fiber into the office, but everywhere else would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just get probably gigabit Ethernet, maybe not even 10 gig Ethernet, because nowhere else really needs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it except the office and wherever, you know, like the Synology ends up, for example. So it’s a very similar approach
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to what I was talking or thinking about doing. Now at the time I was thinking about doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, I would argue that 10 gig Ethernet was far less common. And the thought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was I would be forever future-proofing by having fiber, which I know is not quite that simple. But for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sake of this conversation, that was the thought. I haven’t acted on any of this and I am unlikely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to unless you know Stephen Hackett comes to visit and wires the house with me. So we’ll see what happens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean the thing is like faster than gigabit internet connections are starting to become available in the US
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that like and and many of the I think the latest Wi-Fi 7 stuff. I think the reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why Ubiquiti is putting 2.5 ports on a lot of their switches now I think is because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of their access points have 2.5 ports because Wi-Fi is getting so fast that I I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at maximum capacity, some of these high-end enterprise APs can actually exceed 1 gigabit. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it is worth considering, it is worth planning for a faster than gigabit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco infrastructure when you’re putting network stuff in. But that being said, you can get 2.5
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over regular, I think even Cat5e might do it, and certainly Cat6 would do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like you don’t even, like a Cat 6A can do everything. So like there’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t need too crazy of like a wiring setup to have very high speeds, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if your distances are short. Like I think regular Cat 6, I think can even do 10 gig
⏹️ ▶️ Marco below something like, you know, a hundred feet or something like that. So like, it is worth considering all these things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re putting new wiring in, but you don’t need to go too nuts with some of this stuff because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can get by with more than you think. Like you can get a lot faster on regular cables
⏹️ ▶️ John Setting aside the Finder’s terrible interface to local file sharing and Mac OS these days,
⏹️ ▶️ John I actually was looking into both 2.5 and 10 gig solely. So the
⏹️ ▶️ John two computers that are five feet away from each other in this room that both have 10 gig ethernet ports on them
⏹️ ▶️ John could talk to each other at 10 gig. My internet is still one gig.
⏹️ ▶️ John So rather than having like a Marcos situation where he’s got like the backbone of the network being 10
⏹️ ▶️ John gig and then it’s branching out, I would have the backbone of the network being one gig. But just in this room, these
⏹️ ▶️ John two computers, they both have 10 gig ethernet ports. They should be
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco able to talk to each
⏹️ ▶️ John other over 10 gig. I would get 12 feet of cable and I don’t even think I need to
⏹️ ▶️ John replace cables. Like you said, Marco, the ones I have would probably do it. But when I started looking at the prices
⏹️ ▶️ John of like a four or five port, 10 gig switch, or even like one with like 10 gig,
⏹️ ▶️ John what do you call it? upstream port and then 2.5 between. It’s getting pretty pricey. I’m like, eh,
⏹️ ▶️ John I hope this’ll come down over time. So what I’m probably gonna do is just do nothing and then
⏹️ ▶️ John wait until the day when 10 gig is, either 2.5 gig is my internet
⏹️ ▶️ John connection, in which case I’ll just replace everything from end to end with at least 2.5 gig,
⏹️ ▶️ John because that would be worthwhile, or when 10 gig becomes cheaper. But I am looking in
⏹️ ▶️ John that direction. Like again, because I always buy computers with 10 gig ports on them, And
⏹️ ▶️ John every time I have to wait for some large file to transfer
⏹️ ▶️ John or even like, even just the Synology, I don’t think, no, my Synology actually has a 10 gig port, but a new Synology that I bought,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would be sure to make sure it had one for future proofing. I do wait for file transfers. And when I’m waiting for
⏹️ ▶️ John them, I start thinking to myself, like you said, Mark, like, would this be faster for Wi-Fi 7 than
⏹️ ▶️ John the wires that I’m using, given that these two computers can see each other? But
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, the March of Technology comes with infrastructure costs.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, and to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clear, I can’t imagine a situation where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this network at the restaurant is going to actually use 10 gig speeds between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything. Like, it’s only gonna have one computer. It’s not transferring large
⏹️ ▶️ John How many tracks of audio would that require? How many tracks of like 96, 192 kilohertz audio of
⏹️ ▶️ John high resolution that nobody can hear the difference? You’d probably need thousands upon thousands of those tracks being transferred
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CD quality 44.1, which I haven’t configured yet, but I assume I’m given those kind of options,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is 1.5 megabits. So.
⏹️ ▶️ John You get a lot of those streams in 10 gigabits.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. But yeah, I don’t intend to actually need that kind of transfer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My goal is, I want nothing to ever drop out, ever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so yes, obviously a physically separate network would probably do a better job of that, but I don’t want to run twice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as many cables and twice as many switches everywhere. I want the one network that I know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will have so much headroom at every possible link that nothing will ever get bogged
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down and make my audio drop or make my TV frames drop. The internet connection might, that’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco separate thing. But I don’t want the audio to start cutting out at midnight when a DJ
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is playing on a Saturday night. And so to have a whole bunch of headroom everywhere I think will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco allow that. Especially because again, it was a difference a few hundred dollars at most, like total, for all of