519: Paint My Wings

26 Jan 2023

Touch-screen Mac rumors, a USB-C charging dilemma, finding apps for kids, and blasting our doorwalls with insufficient pressure.

Episode Description:

• Pre-show:
  • Frame Game
  • ❗️ New Member’s special ❗️
  • Belated observation of an anniversary
    • Casey’s ATP announcement tweet
• Follow-up:
  • The new Mac mini is the same dimensions as the old one
  • But the base-model SSD is far slower… again.
    • Max Tech
  • Twitter officially bans third-party clients
    • Diff (via Andy Baio)
    • Twitter Dev’s tweet
      • Jason’s thoughts, which are 😗👌🏻
      • Jason’s follow-up
    • Twitterrific Goodbye
      • Linea
      • Tot
      • xScope
    • Tweetbot Goodbye
      • Ivory
  • Twitter does, indeed, seem to be crumbling
  • Valentines Day at White Castle
  • Unusual ways to listen to ATP
  • Some Movie Club follow-up:
    • Regarding Hunt’s language change (via David Watson)
    • Some thoughts from Patrick Warn
      • The Whistle Blower
    • Smarter Every Day gets on the USS Toledo
• Marco’s USB-charging question
  • The John Gruber gloves
  • Zippo HeatBank 6 hand warmers
  • C2C caberQU
• Apple is exploring touchscreen Macs 😱
• #askatp:
  • Any app suggestions for young kids? (via Lee Jarvis)
    • Toca Boca
      • Paint My Wings
    • Pok Pok
    • ABCMouse
    • Sago Mini
  • How in the 🤬 can you move or rename an open document on macOS? (via Brian Coffey)
  • How do we handle health insurance [since 🇺🇸 sucks]? (via Nevin)
• Post-show: Window-washing follow-up
  • Unger HydroPower Pure Water system
  • GEKA QuickConnect
  • DeWalt’s awful cordless “power” “washer”
  • DeWalt’s awesome cordless blower
  • Solving the Biggest Problems with Windows

Sponsored by:

• Hover: Find a domain name for your passion. Get 10% off your first purchase.
• Guardian Firewall: Because privacy matters. Now, more than ever.
• MacUpdater: Keep all of your apps up-to-date effortlessly.

Become a member for ad-free episodes and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!

Transcribed using Whisper large_v2 (transcription) + WAV2VEC2_ASR_LARGE_LV60K_960H (alignment) + Pyannote (speaker diaritization).

Chapters

1. 🎺
2. ATP Movie Club #4
3. Tin podcasting anniversary
4. Sponsor: MacUpdater
5. Follow-up: Mac Mini size
6. Base SSDs still slower
7. Twitter: quickly, we promise
8. Sponsor: Guardian Firewall
9. Sliders & White Castle
10. Unusual ways to listen
11. Follow-up: Hunt for Red October
12. USB-“C” charging dilemma
13. Sponsor: Hover
14. Touch-screen Macs?
15. #askatp: Apps for young kids
16. #askatp: Moving open files
17. #askatp: Indie health insurance
18. Ending theme
19. Hoses & window-washing

🎺

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Let me toot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco over here that we’re live.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I actually don’t mind toot as a name. I know a lot of people find it incredibly tacky. I think it’s great.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John love it. I was just updating the frame game code. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all the code, you know, I have variables with tweet in the name, and I have variables with toot in the name.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I mean, I think it is childish, but I don’t mind it. Like, whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t think it’s childish. I think it’s childish to think there’s a problem with it. If you’re a mature person, you say,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this is a fun, fanciful name that relates to elephants. Thumbs up. And it begins with a T and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sounds kind of like tweet. Like obviously it’s piggybacking on the existing nomenclature for stuff. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so much better than saying post. I heavily endorse Toot, even though as we know, it has been

⏹️ ▶️ ^John officially renamed in the source code for the software that most of these sites are using. But who cares?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m still calling them Toots.

ATP Movie Club #4

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Uh, this past Monday, as we record, we released the fourth episode, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey bonus fourth episode in what was intended to be a three-part trilogy as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey opposed to a four-part trilogy. I don’t know. Anyway, it was supposed to be a trilogy on, uh, the ATP

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey movie club and we righted my wrong. Well, I’m not sure it was wrong, but these two would say it was wrong. It

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was righted my decision. Oh, fine. Uh, we, we, we fixed my, my, my faux pas earlier

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and choosing the rundown as my a ATP Movie Club choice from earlier. Instead,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey we have, or I guess not instead, but in addition, we have done and recorded

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and published for members, we have published ATP Movie Club number

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey four, which is The Hunt for Red October, 1990, 1991, I forget what year it was. One of my favorite movies of all time,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and Marco had never seen it and John had thoughts.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey With that said, stay for The Hunt for Red October talk, but come for the popcorn argument that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey we had in the very beginning.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} I will say nothing else.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I will say nothing else, but that the member special, within the span of probably 60

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey seconds, maybe even 45 or 30 seconds, we got into an argument about popcorn. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so if that is something that interests you, and it should be, atp.fm

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey slash join. And again, this is in, correct me Marco, this will appear in both

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the bootleg and the members only feeds. Is that correct?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s correct. That way, in case you only listen to the bootleg feed, you don’t miss it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And again, the argument in the beginning is worth the price of admission, if you ask me. So, hp.fm slash join.

Tin podcasting anniversary

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And also, we, slash I, messed up last week. I forgot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to recognize that the three of us have been podcasting together for 10 years now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ATP has not yet hit 10 years. It’s coming in a couple of months. But the first episode of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Neutral, where I introduced myself to the internet by swearing at Marco of MemoryServe.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} That is correct.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Was released on the 17th of January, 2013. So the three of us

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as a team have been podcasting for 10 years. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if you had told me when I was arguing, well not arguing, but when I was discussing with Erin whether or not it was worth spending,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t know, two or three hundred bucks on a road podcast during the boom and so on and so forth, and I said, well you never know what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey will happen. And she was like, yeah, I guess you’re right, but geez, that’s a lot of money. I know you’re right, it is a lot of money, but you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey never know. Well that was 10 years ago and a lot’s changed since then. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey genuinely, from the bottom of our hearts, thank you to everyone who has listened to Neutral, who has listened to ATP, who has joined as an ATP

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey member. Thank you to all of you. It has been an unbelievably cool and wild ride for all of us to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey doing this for 10 years together. Obviously, you two have been doing it quite a bit longer than I, but as a unit,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the three of us have been going for 10 years.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco What is it that makes somebody wanna buy a white car?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We’ll never know, we’ll never know. And speaking of that being a Neutral thing, I feel like this is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John occasion inflation, right? Where you’re like, oh, let’s celebrate the day we first

⏹️ ▶️ ^John met and the day we went on our first date and the first time we held hands

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it just keeps going and going. And it’s like, if you’re gonna start from the day we did neutral, but then what about also the day

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we started ATP? And then what about the day we recorded the first ATP? And what about the day the first ATP was released?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And what about the day ATP.fm went up? And it’s just, it’s too many holidays. We really need to pick one and stick with it. And if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I had to pick one, I would have picked publication date of first episode of ATU. But now you’ve blown it. Now we’ve done the 10

⏹️ ▶️ ^John years thing. So I’m putting a moratorium on 10 years of podcasting.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey No. No, we still have to recognize. There’s one more date to recognize as far as I’m concerned.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And that is when we announced ATP, which I have linked to my website.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I still have all my tweets up because I’m an idiot. March 11, 2013. Listen

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to Marco Armit, Syracuse Tonight, Talk Tech. If Cars Isn’t Your Thing, the Accidental Tech Podcast, atp.fm.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey celebrate Casey’s gotcha day. Yep, that’s right. That’s right. March 11th, 2013. That

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is the only remaining celebration with regard to the 10 year anniversary of

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} us. Do you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know about gotcha days, Marco?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I know Casey does. Is that like when you pick up a puppy or something?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, it’s like it’s not the dog’s birthday, but it’s the day that you get the dog.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Aw, it’s really cute. We’re still not going to celebrate that, but it’s That’s really cute. I know. I know.

Sponsor: MacUpdater

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We are brought to you this week by Mac updater. It’s important to keep your apps updated

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for the latest features and bug fixes and security patches. But manually searching for updates,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco downloading them, installing them, including them up takes time and effort, especially for out

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of app store software. So many out of app store apps don’t have built in update checks,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or their update checkers might break over time, it can be very annoying and error prone to keep track of. So Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco updater can help you automatically track the latest updates of all of your installed applications.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They have version information for over 100,000 apps and growing one click updating

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for the most popular apps for over 6200 of them. And so Mac updater has this database they manage

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it checks them for new apps searches directly to install all auto updatable apps via the discover

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco function. They even have discover as a website. It’s a very, very cool feature. And it can also scan

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco non-app software that you might not think of as getting updates, like audio plugins, screensavers,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pref panes, and more. All of this is done with privacy in mind, there’s no registration required,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco MacUpdater does not track your personal data. So check it out yourself at corecode.io.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco This is MacUpdater, this is free to use in a limited version, there’s also a standard version which costs $14.99,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one-time purchase. There’s a Pro version for $34.99,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and there’s upgrade discounts available and discounts for students and people who live in non-G40

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco countries. Plus, the new Mac Updater version 3 is currently in beta. During beta testing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this is totally free to use. Mac Updater 3 is Venturer-only and it has a bunch of cool features like new

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple Silicon migration assistance, automatically updating all eligible apps after each scheduled scan,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the option to reinstall your apps when you move to a new Mac, and more. So check out Mac Updater. Once

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco again, core code.io slash Mac updater. Check it out today. Thank you so much to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Mac Updater for sponsoring our show.

Follow-up: Mac Mini size

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Anyway, we should do some follow up and hey, the new Mac Mini is the same size

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as the old one? Question mark? What’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} going on here?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Pretty definitively no question mark. So it’s definitively in multiple aspects. So lots of people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who have them say, oh, they’re the same size. I can tell. Mac Stadium, one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of those companies that rack mounts these things or whatever, also confirms it in a blog post that we’ll link and I would trust

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them because they’re the ones who would care about millimeter differences. And lots of people have gone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John deep into, well, why are the numbers different on Apple’s website? What it comes down to is probably just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John differences in rounding and significant digits and what units they’re in. And someone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John did a, did like a dive of like, okay, well, if they did it this way, if they measured it in millimeters,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John then converted the inches, then rounded to one significant digit, but then converted the inches to centimeters. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, I, I, I don’t, the real question is why did Apple change the way they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John round these numbers on their website. Maybe it was just, uh, I don’t know, some new person doing it or someone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John didn’t know the old way or whatever, but it seems like a little, a little stumble. Like if it really is the same

⏹️ ▶️ ^John size, why change these? Maybe it was a company wide policy change. It was like from now on for all our hardware products, we’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John always going to do things in this particular order. So we don’t have any variances, but anyway, uh, the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mini is the same size as the old Mac mini. And other people have said that they think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John also the 14 inch MacBook pro is the is the same size but I haven’t seen that one confirmed but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mac Mini same size.

Base SSDs still slower

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, and then there’s another kerfuffle with regard to SSD speeds

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and the new Mac mini So I don’t have a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey whole ton of patience for this like it is a thing it is real But I I feel like it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey one of those. Oh, we got you. We got you Apple. We caught you red-handed And it’s like yeah, okay

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey fine So the short short version John you can even the long version but the short short version is, think about maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not getting the smallest SSD available on basically any current Apple product,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey because it’s probably gonna be a little bit slower than all the others.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John A little bit, half the speed. So we talked

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} about this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at length the first time it happened, which I think was like the M2 MacBook Air. It’s the same issue

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as that, that for a given SSD size, they’ll put half

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as many chips on the motherboard, because instead of having, you know, they can get one chip that is the entire capacity.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but that halves the bandwidth of the SSD to the SoC and making it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John roughly half the speed when benchmarked. And it’s usually only on the lowest of low end things. So in this example,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the 599 M2 Mac mini, the bottom end one that comes with a 256 gigabyte SSD,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it has one SSD chip on the motherboard that is 256 gigabytes. And then it has a blank spot

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where the other SSD chip would go. And that Mac mini, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is a hundred dollars cheaper than the M1 one is. The SSD is about half the speed of the M1 because the M1

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mac mini didn’t have this problem. It came with two 128 gigabyte chips

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it had the full bandwidth. Same exact issue exists on the M2 MacBook Pro, if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anyone remembers that thing, the M2 MacBook Air. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s annoying because I understand maybe it’s a cost savings in an economy scale or whatever, but it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not just like, oh, it’s 5% slower or whatever. It’s literally half the speed. Most people don’t care about that speed,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but it makes the lowest end model. It makes it that so you have to warn people Here’s an annoying thing. We have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to warn you about we didn’t have to do this with like the M1 MacBook Air for example We did there’s nothing to warn anybody about that It’s just decide

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how much storage you want decide how much memory you care about but like there’s no sort of like Hidden thing you have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to worry about and now apparently this is a thing that Apple is going to roll out these product lines and for like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maybe for the whole m2 generation Through some cost-saving measure or whatever. You have to warn

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people Hey, if you actually care about SSD speed, but you probably don’t but you might

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t get the lowest end one and it makes the lowest end one the worst deal the the best example is the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John MacBook Pro which is like a machine that starts at $2,000 and you get a $2,000 machine But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you’re not careful if you got the lowest end $2,000 one with the with the 256 gig SSD because you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John didn’t need that Much space it’s half the speed $2,000 machine shouldn’t be crippled in this way.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So this is a thing it is known It is not really a news story, but it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John something to keep in mind It’s something to listeners of this show to keep in their mind if they have any

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Relatives or friends who are thinking of buying any one of these Macs to just to let them know Hey

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you’re gonna you know, and you may think oh, it’s no it’s never gonna come up If you just web browse an email, it’ll never be a factor

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You never know what people are gonna do with their computers and like and it’s like I said, it’s not 5% slower It’s 50%

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the speed of the thing. So I really wish Apple and the M3 generation stops

⏹️ ▶️ ^John doing this. Or here’s another option, Apple, stop shipping 256 gigabyte

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} SSDs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on any of your computers. We can hope.

Twitter: quickly, we promise

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, let’s see if we can get through this quickly. Since we last recorded,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Twitter has officially, for realsies this time, banned third-party Twitter clients.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey They updated their developer agreement on Thursday the 19th of January with a clause

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey banning, quote, use or access the licensed materials to create or attempt to create a substitute or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey similar service or product to the Twitter applications. The addition is the only substantive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey change. I don’t think I pronounced it right. But anyway, it’s the only big change. 5,000 word agreement. The funny thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} is, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco think you actually did it. I think it’s substantive, which is what you

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} pretty much said. You got it right the first time. Oh, my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey bad. Anyways,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Andy Baio. It’s the one time you get it right. I know, I know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Let me throw whom in there. I’m sure I’ll get that

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} right too. Anyways,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey diff was from Andy Baio, which we’ll link in the show notes, and it is exactly as described.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey There’s almost no difference. This is kind of gross. Like, it’s within their right to do so.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I think Ben Thompson was leading the charge, or at least of the people that I’ve heard, leading the charge that, hey,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey they should have done this a long time ago if you think about Twitter’s business from Twitter’s perspective. And I think that does make sense. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the way they did it, the way they made this happen was super gross. Like on the 17th, so this was right,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think, before we recorded, the Twitter dev, Twitter account tweeted, Twitter’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey enforcing its longstanding API rules. That may result in some apps not working. Like, get the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey F out of here.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I love the fact that they included longstanding. So setting aside the arrow of time, which dictates that the 19th

⏹️ ▶️ ^John comes later than the 17th, right? This is their one and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John only official communication that even vaguely relates to explaining why

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all our Twitter apps weren’t working. It didn’t name any specific apps and it cited longstanding

⏹️ ▶️ ^John API rules. Two days later, they made like a one line change to the Twitter developer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John agreement to ban all third party applications. So anyway, this is just conclusively in case you were wondering. No, they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John still didn’t say what they were doing, still didn’t give any explanation or reasoning or whatever, still did it without communicating

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for, I think it was like a week or five days, six days before anybody knew anything. But then eventually,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John finally on the 19th, they updated their developer, again, without any communication

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to anybody. The only reason people know this is someone was looking at the developer agreement and saw the diff, right? That says, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no, all third-party applications that try to be like the Twitter clients are banned. So this is the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John conclusion to that story. the conclusion is that there are a bunch of jerks over there at Twitter and all third

⏹️ ▶️ ^John party clients are dead.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah. And, and, you know, Tweetbot has formally said, you know, it is no more Twitterific has formally

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey said it is no more.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They said, they said that before the 19th actually. Oh, sorry.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} That’s true. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah. Because like, you know, obviously when Twitter says, yeah, you can’t have a third party client anymore, that ends everybody.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But even before that they had given up because their apps had been inexplicably banned. Right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yep. Yep. I was listening to Connected before we recorded,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and I think Federico hit the nail on the head. It’s just Twitter, or it seems

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like at the very least Elon, is just without class. There’s just no class.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Whether or not you think he’s bright, whether or not you think he makes good decisions, and again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I could make a strong argument that this was from the perspective of Twitter a good decision. I don’t like it at all, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I understand it. But it was just done in such a gross, classless way.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I hate it so much. I love, though, however, dear friend of the show, Jason Snell,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey replying to that Twitter dev tweet and hello future Marco, because you’re going to

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} have to deal

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey with this. Jason said, and I am quoting, you are full of shit. And that was the entire

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey tweet. And it was so perfect. I loved it so much. And then he replied to himself

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey two days later with a link to Engadget, you know, talking about the new rules

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey within the contents of his tweet other than the link was, quote, longstanding quote.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Just so good. I love it so much. Oh, gosh. Anyway, it’s just gross.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It makes me feel terrible for Tapbots, for the Icon Factory. It’s just gross. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey there’s ways you could have handled this that weren’t gross. And, you know, Elon, as he always

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey does, chose violence. So what are you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco going to do? And I think if we can somehow turn this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco horrible thing for these developers into a positive thing at all,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco keep in mind that these two apps, especially in the case of TapBots, this is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the vast majority of their income. And for IconFactory,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for Twitterific, Twitterific is a pretty substantial chunk for them. This is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a really, really good time for the community to help out

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco these two developers by looking at their other software. And if you could use any of it, buy it. This

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is the time, like right now, because this just came out of nowhere for them. And these

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are two really fantastic app developers that have been on the platform for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco an extremely long time. It would be really nice for the community to help them

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco through this transition. You know, Icon Factory has a lot of other apps. I love Linnea,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} their Sketch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco app for iPad.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey hot is excellence as

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} well. Yep,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco taught is fun. Like it’s kind of this like almost like a little like memo clipboard kind of management. It’s really cool.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Anyway, check out these apps. And then tap bots just launched ivory, their mastodon client,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I strongly suggest look at these two companies apps, buy them if you can. And if you if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can use them, if there is some way to give them money, please take that option now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Because these are great developers and we want to support them because this is the kind of apps like what these two

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco developers make are such top notch apps. These are the kind of apps that make the platform

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco special. These are the kind of developers that we want to support that don’t do any of the like, you know, weird

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco privacy tracking BS, or like scammy kind of things that we see so often in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco other places in the app store. This is the kind of app that we should support. This is the kind of developer that deserves our support.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So please help them out by their stuff. If you are mastodon, which I strongly suggest

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you’re on Mastodon, definitely go get Ivory. It is a fantastic Mastodon client so far,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and they’re constantly working on more of it. There’s going to be a Mac version from what I understand in probably the near future

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as well, which will radically improve my life. So yeah, check out

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco their work. And it’s this is the time to do it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, just to make absolutely clear, Ivory is publicly available on the App Store. It had

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} been It just came out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, it had been on like a semi-open beta where they would release slots or they would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey release signups for test flight, but now it is for realsies in the app store

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and anyone can get it right now. And also to go back to the Icon Factory very briefly, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey use Xscope a lot, but it is invaluable when you are trying to work

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey out UI related things on a Mac. Like if you’re even in the simulator, it doesn’t matter.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It probably even supports iOS in ways that I’m not even familiar with. But one way or another, Xscope is also

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey great. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey from the Icon Factory, Linnea, TOT, Xscope, from TapBots,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Ivory, all of these get my highest recommendation. And I think I probably speak for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey both you fellows in saying that. So please check them out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John If you’re a Mac developer, one reason to get Xscope, aside from the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John obvious, like, oh, I’m using it to measure stuff on my screen related to my app. If you’re a Mac developer, you have to do screenshots

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for the Mac App Store, if that’s where you’re selling. And that usually involves arranging windows and then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John taking screenshots on a Mac. And if you want to do that in a repeatable way,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Xscope is great for that because you can set up frames and guides and all sorts of other

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things that Xscope does. And of course it saves them and they’re persistent. They will let you precisely

⏹️ ▶️ ^John position the windows of your application so that from version to version, your screenshots like, oh, where

⏹️ ▶️ ^John did I put this? Was it centered on the screen? How high was it? You know, like, do I have to line it up to the mountains

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the desktop background, so exactly in the same spot, Xscope. Xscope solves all of that for you. Just turn on all the guides

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and frames and everything, line up your windows, turn off all the stuff, take your screenshot, so handy.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, imagine if you’ve ever been using Photoshop or something like that, and maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you drag a box, and you see, oh, it’s telling me how many pixels that is. How convenient.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Xscope is like having that kind of little convenient thing for anything on your screen,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just as an overlay to your screen. among many. I mean, it’s one of those apps, there’s so many

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco little tools built into it. So it’s one of those apps, like it isn’t just one thing, but that’s one of the things. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s the thing that I really enjoy about it. I use that all the time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And then continuing to talk about Twitter, and by the way, we did pretty well. That didn’t take that long.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} So let’s see how

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey long this one takes. Twitter, their infrastructure seems to be crumbling very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey slowly and somewhat quietly. John Gruber over at Daring Fireball. I remarked over

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a week ago that I was no longer seeing mentions or replies directed at my Twitter account. For a day or two I was seeing a handful of them,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but now they’re gone. At this writing, I see a grand total of one mention from my account going back to January 5th. My

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Twitter mentions are nearly completely useless. For well over a decade, Twitter mentions have been my primary way of interacting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey with the Daring Fireball audience. Obviously, that’s no longer possible. So be it. All the good action is over at Mastodon now

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey anyway.” Now, just to be clear, I have literally a tenth of the followers that John has on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Twitter, And I would get, I don’t know, somewhere between 10 to 50

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at mentions a day, maybe 100 on a slightly busier day, and obviously a lot more if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey something really blew up. For John Gruber to have five or whatever he said,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or one, clearly something is broken here because there is no chance that Gruber is getting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey only one mention a day. I mean, I guess anything’s possible, but I would be just dumbfounded. So this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is indicative that maybe things are not going well over at Twitter world.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would also say too, like, you know, when comparing follower counts between Twitter and Mastodon,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s not really a great direct comparison because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Mastodon, you know, most of the people who were posting there and getting engagement there, it’s a fairly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco new thing. And so whereas on Twitter, a lot of the followers that, you know, us old accounts

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have, many of those people, first of all, aren’t real.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Second of all, have abandoned their accounts, but their accounts still exist, so they still count as a follower.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And then third of all, because Twitter’s algorithmic timeline based previously

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for most of its people, now for all of its people since they killed these apps, not everyone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco who you follow is even going to see your post, even if they read, quote, their entire

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco timeline, whatever that’s being shown to them at that time. So the numbers on Twitter, it’s kind of like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, like other services, like, you know, you see these very large numbers, but then that doesn’t actually mean

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that all those people are going to see what you post. In fact, only a very small percentage of them will. On Mastodon,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because both it is newer and therefore has fewer abandoned accounts, and also because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it is not consumed in an algorithmic timeline by almost anybody,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think the ratio of engagement to followers is greater on Mastodon. In other

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco words, a larger percentage of your followers I’m mastered on are likely to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco see your posts and engage with them than that same percentage on Twitter.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, what has changed in my usage since last episode was, last episode, remember, was a bunch of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John third-party clients were banned, but as I said on the show, not all of them, and we had no official explanation.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So what I had been doing was fleeing from the popular applications that had been banned to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John other less popular third-party Twitter clients. I must have bought like five of them. I would buy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one, I would use it, it would get banned. I would buy another one, I would use it, it would get banned.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco This does not sound fun. What a fun afternoon this is.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I distributed a lot of money, just like a last burst of money to writers

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of these obscure third-party Twitter applications. For people who don’t know, my weird way

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of using Twitter has always been to be a Twitter completionist. I would read my entire timeline.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I follow a small number of people who don’t post a lot, but I would read everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that everybody that I follow posted, and I would also read all of my ad mentions and all of my direct messages, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s how I’ve always used Twitter, which is weird, but whatever. So I was using third-party

⏹️ ▶️ ^John clients because I didn’t, I tried using the first-party one, but obviously it’s filled with ads. It does

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have the algorithmic timeline, but it also has the following timeline, not the For You timeline, but the following one, which is supposed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to not be algorithmic, but I was noticing the same thing as Gruber was noticing. I was like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this can’t possibly be my replies. Like, everyone didn’t leave

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Twitter, right? And it’s just, it seemed to me that I wasn’t seeing my, so I would look at the third party Twitter clients

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when they were still working, and sometimes they would show more than the first party ones, sometimes the first party

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one would show more than them, sometimes they were the same, but everything just seemed off, right? Okay, so now

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the third party ones are gone, they’re all banned, right? So I’m just using the first party client, and again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I was noticing the same thing Gruber was noticing. this can’t be like all you know, I’m looking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at again, I’m looking at the following timeline, not the for you timeline, I’m looking at the supposedly non algorithmic

⏹️ ▶️ ^John timeline. And I’m looking at my mentions and notifications in the first party client or on the web, or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John using tweet deck, which is also a first party thing. And I’m like this, this can’t be everything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And sometimes I would try to run searches, and I would find ad mentions of myself and searches that didn’t appear in mentions.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And basically, I what I had to do at a at a certain point, I guess like two or three days ago, was I went

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to my accounts, my account, my hypercritical account, I don’t know if

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} I did it on the rectifs account, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anyway, on my Twitter accounts, I posted the same tweet and I said, the ban on third party Twitter clients

⏹️ ▶️ ^John has severely impaired my ability to read or even see all mentions slash replies directed at this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John account. Please consider following me on Mastodon, blah, blah, blah, and I get my Mastodon link, right? Because I can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no longer use Twitter for what I use it for. I can’t be a Twitter completionist because I don’t believe that I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John seeing everything that I’m supposed to be seeing, and I can’t use it as a communication medium because as far as I can tell,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m seeing a fraction of a percent of the people who are at mentioning me, no matter what I do.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m not looking at the algorithmic timeline, I’m supposedly looking at like my mentions, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Or the non-algorithmic timeline in the first party client. And so it’s just like, as far as I’m concerned, Twitter

⏹️ ▶️ ^John doesn’t work. Now, is this because they’re having weird backend problems and queues are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John overflowing and things are getting dropped? Or is this because even the non-algorithmic one is algorithmic and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they want me to pay for Twitter blue to, you know, to account the Facebook move where it’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John oh, you know, you built up this big following on Facebook. Well, now you actually want to reach those people, pass, right? But Gruber

⏹️ ▶️ ^John does play for Twitter blue and he’s also having the same problem. So Twitter is just broken, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And, you know, again, I was not leaving Twitter because I was still getting value

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out of it. There’s people I follow there who aren’t on mass that I don’t know, I wish I would come over, but they’re not there yet. And I would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John still see things there that I didn’t see in Mastodon. So I was living in two worlds. I was not leaving Twitter, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to like just setting it aside or I can’t look at it anymore. I was trying to use it as much

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as I could until all the value fell out of it. And through whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John has caused this to happen, most of the value has fallen out of it because I can’t use it. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you’re following me on Twitter, consider following me on Mastodon.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You know, it’s just Syracuse at mastodon.social because if you’re sending me stuff on Twitter,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I literally can’t see it anymore. I don’t know why I can’t see it. I don’t have an explanation, but I’m just using

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the first party client on the website. You’re trying to out mention me and I can’t see it and I don’t know what the solution

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is. So please come over to Macedon where the software actually works.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I love like, we all have our reasons for leaving Twitter. You know, some of them are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco moral, some of them are political. Yours, the software is broken. It doesn’t work. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco practical. I can’t be a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John completionist. It doesn’t work. I can’t. Exactly like Gruber said.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like Gruber said, this is how he was interacting with the Daring Fireball audience. But if he can’t see what they’re writing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to him, he can’t use it for that anymore. Right? It’s just it’s not fair to anybody involved,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because people are writing and they think that you’re seeing it and ignoring them. And you’re not seeing it, so you don’t get to, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John communicate with them. It’s just bad. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco amazing. You’re totally right. Like, this is a totally fair and reasonable

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco reason. But it’s just so funny that this is what pushed you over the edge.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And even speaking of like, you know, even before that I had made a conscious choice to,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if I had something clever to say, to say it on Mastodon first or on Mastodon only. So I had already made that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John transition, but I was still looking at both places, right? Still trying to maintain my presence there. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even now, like for the announcement accounts, like if I post something on my blog at Hypercritical on Twitter,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’ll post it there. Like just like we post the at ATP FM, like we’re going live thing to Twitter. No,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} we don’t. I was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey gonna say, I don’t think we do anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} If

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we don’t anymore, because that was my task. And once I couldn’t use an app to do it anymore,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco last week was the first week we didn’t do it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Anyway, I’m still posting announcement stuff when I can on Twitter as well.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Because there’s no way that everyone’s going to see my pinned tweet. And this is the first time I’ve ever pinned a tweet

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to my thing on Twitter, by the way.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} You can do that?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah. Because it’s not fair to the people who don’t listen to the show. I don’t know. They just be like, oh, what happened to John?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where to go, right? So I’m going to continue posting my stuff there, like when I have a blog

⏹️ ▶️ ^John post or something else like that. But if you want to converse with me or see

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my stupid jokes, come over to Massadon.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, they finally got you.

Sponsor: Guardian Firewall

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We are sponsored this week by Guardian Firewall. We all know what it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like to be tracked online. We see it every single day using the internet, but we don’t need to accept the way

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things are. Guardian provides industry-leading privacy protection by combining a cloud

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco firewall and a VPN service. Trusted by digital security experts around the world, Guardian’s VPN

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hides your device’s IP address and encrypts all internet traffic, while Guardian’s cloud firewall protects

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco your privacy by preventing services from collecting data about you. Guardian has blocked over

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco 100 billion attempted connections to trackers for customers since the launch of their service.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Guardian was also recently acquired by DNS filter DNS security that enables you to block content categories

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco including malicious sites like malware, phishing, botnets and more. So you can get the added security

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of DNS filter that’s now integrated into Guardian. DNS filter will take care of your security,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco while Guardian protects your privacy. With over 70% of all cyber attacks involving the DNS

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco layer, it’s paramount that you protect yourself via DNS. So visit GuardianApp.com.atp

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to get $10 off Guardian Pro today. Or search for Guardian Firewall Plus VPN

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to download the iOS app for free on the app store to start your 7-day free trial. Once again, guardian

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco app.com slash ATP for $10 off Guardian Pro, or just search for a guardian

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco firewall plus VPN in the App Store, you will be amazed by what you’re able to block.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so much to Guardian for sponsoring our show.

Sliders & White Castle

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Moving along, Frank Ramblings had some feedback on Valentine’s Day at White Castle. How did we arrive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on this topic? I remember talking about it, but how did we get there? It was sliders. It was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sliders. And by the way,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} the quick

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} follow up

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on that is that yes, there are some people in the United States who use sliders to mean sliding glass doors. There are also people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who call them door walls. I have not been able to pin down sliders. Door walls? Door

⏹️ ▶️ ^John walls. It’s big in Michigan.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s a Michigan thing, which I find to be ridiculous. But apparently that’s the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} thing. All

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco right. I’m a little bit biased being from Ohio, but that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, so the thing about thing about sliders is I cannot pin it down geographically

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because people from all over the country said both we call them sliders or no one here calls them sliders.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We’ve covered a lot of the country from California to Michigan to Florida to New York, both

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yes sliders and no sliders from like all these places. So I don’t understand. But anyway, It is definitely a thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It is not just a Marco ism. But I would say that the majority of the people hadn’t heard of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it, but enough people had. And they’re just from all over the place. Doorwalls, I think, is based on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an advertising thing, maybe. Some company

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} that someone explained

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} it to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John us. Yeah, that was like a TV ad. And that caught on. Anyway, setting that aside, that’s why we were talking about it. As I said, sliders,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John those little hamburgers. Then we started talking about White Castle. And then someone mentioned something about getting a Valentine’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Day reservation at White Castle. And that’s what this is about.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, well, thank you. I appreciate it. So Frank Ramlings writes, one Valentine’s Day over a decade ago, when I was a hopelessly single

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey 20-something living in New York, I decided to grab takeout at the White Castle near my office on my way home from work. I figured that was the one place

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I wouldn’t be surrounded by couples. I opened the door to find all the tables covered with red and white picnic tablecloths,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you know the ones, and a uniformed member of the White Castle staff

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey standing at a host stand greeted me to ask, do you have a reservation? I’m sorry, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} probably shouldn’t be laughing, but this is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey too funny. Apparently for people of a certain age who grew up in the area of malt shops and jukeboxes, White Castle is quite

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the nostalgic date night destination. The place was full of older couples enjoying their sliders with a smile.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey The best part is there was full table service. Staff members were bringing the couple’s orders to their tables and serving

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey them soda from the fountain in plastic champagne flutes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} That is awesome.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think it was also frank, but somebody pointed out there’s a post on eater.com from 2017 which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey goes through the history of how this came to be. I couldn’t help but read it and it was delightful. It wasn’t a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey terribly long read and I loved it. So you can check that out if you are so inclined.

Unusual ways to listen

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Anonymous writes, I was listening to the latest episode of the bootleg while at work earlier today when I heard Casey

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey mention the guy who downloads episodes and listens when at work on a submarine. I wanted to share my odd listening experience.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I work in a high security environment where I can’t have any personal electronics other than certain types of CD

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey players. Each week I either use G-Powder on my PC or I dig through the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Apple podcast library on my Mac to pull the newest episode of the bootleg and burn it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to a CD so I can listen while I’m at work. Well done, Anonymous listener.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well done, indeed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Rip, burn, mix.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} That is fantastic.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And just for everyone’s sanity, I did go back to this person and ask, can you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at least use MP3 CDs? That way you don’t have to change the disc every 80 minutes, which is like, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can’t even get through one episode of our show on one disc. Oh, that’s true.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I didn’t even think about

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} that. Maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John he has an MP3 CD player and sorry, rip, mix, burn, not rip, burn, mix. It’s been a long time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco anyway, so Anonymous did say they are allowed to use certain mp3 CD

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco players so that we at least avoid the 80 minute limit for discs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s incredible. I did not even cross my mind. I’m glad you asked.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Every bootleg is a triple album.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey In one of those ridiculous jewel cases.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You’re only you’re allowed to use like you know like vinyl records, and you have to flip it over every 18

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco minutes or whatever

Follow-up: Hunt for Red October

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, then we can’t help, because we’re us, we can’t help but do a little bit of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey follow-up about the member special that you probably haven’t even heard yet. So you can either

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey skip the chapter or you can come back to this later. Again, atp.fm.com. David

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Watson wrote in with regard to the language change in the Hunford October, if that doesn’t mean anything to you, again, listen

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to the episode. David writes, the word the political officer says when they switch languages is Armageddon,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which is the same word in both English and Russian, which I think I had known once upon of time but had completely

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey forgotten so I thought that was very cool. Additionally, Patrick Warren writes, the Hunt for October episode

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was my favorite movie club episode so far. Thanks. Well, thank you, Patrick. The Whistleblower from 1986 is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey my favorite Cold War movie. As a sonar tech in the Navy from 81 through 85, it was very accurate

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in its details. On my ship, a then-new Spruance-class destroyer, we didn’t use a dot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey matrix printer or a computer to identify subs. The computer was Hollywood fantasy and I,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey now this is me, I thought this was fascinating. This is such an obvious point that I didn’t consider. So coming back to what Patrick was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey writing, the computer was Hollywood fantasy and the printer would have been too loud. Duh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey how did I not think of that? A dot matrix printer hammering away in the middle of the ship that’s supposed to be running silently.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It’s such an obvious thing that I just did not even cross my mind. Anyway, back to Patrick. We had an electrostatic

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey printer, which plotted the sound sent back from a sonobuoy by frequency. An eyeball, a pencil, good headphones,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and reference books. It was a very manual process and I spent as much time being trained as I did on the ship.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey To this day, I can still write reverse and backwards, as we had a side-lit Plexiglas status or target board

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in the CIC, what is that, Combat Information Center, I think, that we had to keep updated from the backside

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey with grease pencil. The navigator with his charts and grease pencil didn’t seem out of place at all.” I thought

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that was excellent feedback, very interesting. And then finally, Adrian Mester wrote in to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey point us to Destin from Smarter Every Day, which which is a YouTube channel similar to like, you know, CGPGrey’s.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey He did an overnight right before the world ended on the USS Toledo, which is a Los Angeles-class

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey attack submarine. He has a playlist that Adrian Langton will put in the show notes. I want to say it’s like nine

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey videos, each of which is like around half an hour. So we’re looking at like four

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey hours of content. And I started watching one of these just a day or two back, and then promptly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey watched all of them because I could not help myself. They were freaking fascinating. So if you are at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey all interested in the hunt for October and submarines and things of that nature, absolutely worth

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey your time. I thought they were incredible. So go check those out. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I watched those when they were released. They’re really good. A YouTube playlist is always good when it starts

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with a submarine poking through the Antarctic ice or wherever they

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} were in that first episode.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yep, it’s so good. It’s so, so, so good. So yeah, check those out.

USB-“C” charging dilemma

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, let’s do some topics. And I understand that we have a question from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the audience, Mr. Armand, if you please. I do.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco All right. So in case no one has ever known this before,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the world of USB-C shaped plugs is a little bit complicated,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and you don’t always get things working the way you expect them to when you plug a cable that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco looks like that into a hole that that looks like that and that seem to connect and seem to be compatible and even both say USB-C.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know, I don’t know if this is a common problem. So anyway, the latest USB-C

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thing that’s that’s annoying me is that I have an increasing number

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of devices that are accumulating in my life that have USB-C shaped

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco charging holes but do not support USB-C power delivery or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco PD. And so So therefore you have to use a USB-A charger

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and an A-to-C cable to charge these. What?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, that’s so gross.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, and this is, you know, this is, it’s mostly like, you know, cheaper or lower end stuff or, you know, kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of, you know, less, less sophisticated, let’s not say electronics, you know, stuff like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my, I have like USB hand warmers, which by the way, I love USB hand warmers. This,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it, look, gloves all suck. I have tried so many gloves

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of all different brands. That brand you just said in your head. Yes, I tried it. I swear I guarantee

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you. I tried it. Yes, that one too. Oh, he hasn’t. No, trust me. I have. I have tried every

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kind of glove from every brand at every different price point made of every different material and layering strategies

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and everything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Don’t forget about mittens. We talked about this on a past episode. Someone should find the link.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yes, mittens also suck. They suck for different reasons. For instance,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s very hard to manage a dog leash or ride a bike while wearing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco mittens. Now, every time I leave the house, I’m either managing a dog leash or a bike.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So anyway, mittens are terrible. I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just repeat what I said when last time we talked about it. If your hands are that cold, your body is probably improperly dressed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and I wear gloves every day when I walk my dog out in the cold and I’m fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Anyway, continuing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Continuing. So, and yes, I’ve tried those like lobster claw gloves where it’s like you have like one finger free,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Otherwise it’s a mitten or like the two and two, doing like that Star Trek thing. Da da chick, da da

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco chick. They all suck. The solution I have found to warm hands in the winter

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is to have the gloves that, you know when,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco listeners and Casey, you know when John Syracuse is really frustratingly right about something and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you don’t want him to be right, but he is.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a couple years ago, John Gruber gave me his glove recommendation and I’ll look it up and put it in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco show notes. It’s these like thin, I think North Face gloves. And it’s just, you know, basic

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thin gloves that have like touch screen compatibility through some of the fingers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and those little like grippy dot things so that you can like open a dog poop bag and stuff like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I first tried these and I’m like, these are not warm at all. These suck. I can’t believe Gruber recommended these.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Why did he? These are the worst gloves ever. And because I remain so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco dexterous and I can use my phone through them and they have the little grippy dots and everything. They’re a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really good version of that kind of glove. And so they just became my most frequently

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco worn gloves. And I just had cold hands all the time. And I’m like, well, you know, the warmer gloves that I’ve tried all suck for different reasons.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So anyway, and yes, I have tried heated gloves. Those also are a thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that are real. They also suck for different reasons.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Mostly that like, they put the battery in like that big kind of collar

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco part it goes over your wrist, and it just becomes this giant, bulky, unwieldy thing, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the heat wires are never where you want them to be. Like, the whole glove doesn’t warm up.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, that battery pack should really be on your waist, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, yeah, it should be the size of two iPhone 14 Pros, and you just put it in your pocket and change it every 90 minutes. That

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sounds like a lot of fun. Not this week, everybody.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We’ll get to it someday.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Not this week. That sounds awful, but we’ll get to it. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco derail of a derail. So, USB hand warmers. I discovered these last

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco winter and I’ve been using them and I have a couple of cheap ones from like you know random Amazon

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco no name manufacturers where like it’s just a whole bunch of vowels starting together and I have some nice ones from Zippo

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and they’re all really good. Like and the Zippo ones I use the most I’ll put those in the show notes as well. They’re fantastic

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it has changed my game because if you’re just holding a USB hand you know get two

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you see one in each pocket you can then use the thin useful dexterous gloves

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and still have warm hands and it’s way and like a thin glove with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a hand warmer and for me is way warmer than a thick glove with that one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so anyway hand warmers are great however the aforementioned cheapo Amazon

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hand warmers have USB-C holes on them and I can’t charge them with USB PD plugs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco same deal with a few other things I have in my house so far I have a couple of I I think they even have a battery

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pack that works that way. But the USB hand warmers are also battery packs if you need them to be.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I have… there’s a wireless microphone charger. Like, there’s a whole bunch of stuff in my house that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kind of like low-end or cheap or no-name stuff that has USB-C holes for charging.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But if you plug in a USB-C PD power supply, it will not charge it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You have to charge it with a dumb old USB-A regular, like, you know, 5 volt, 2.4

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco amp or lower supply. supply. So my question to the listeners is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is this just an impossible problem for these devices? Like, is it just that these devices

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco were too cheap to actually implement USB-C PD support correctly to like negotiate

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with the plug what they should need? Or, is there some kind of USB-C

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco plug-in charger that I can get that charges everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco via a USB-C hole, including these dumb old USB-powered devices that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco expect dumb old USB power over a USB-C cable. Is there some depth of field? And I’ve tried

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco every charger I have. I’ve tried the Apple ones, the Anker ones, the RavPower.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like every plug-in USB-C PD charger brand that I own, I’ve tried

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco them all. I thought at least the Apple ones would because they’re usually really good. But nope, I haven’t found a single

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one yet. So if anyone knows, is there a USB-C plug-in charger, multi-hole

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is better, but single hole, I’ll take it if it’s all I can get. Because if there is, I want to replace

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all of my travel chargers with those and a few of my home chargers with those. I hope that exists,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but if it can’t exist, we have a lot of people in our audience who know the USB-C

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco power spectrally well and everything, please tell me if it can’t exist for some reason. but it’s just this annoying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thing that once again, USB-C is not universal in some weird little odd way

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that is documented nowhere.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} And- You wanna

⏹️ ▶️ ^John replace all your travel chargers because they can’t charge your hand warmers? Wouldn’t you want to,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, I can understand it’s convenient not to have actually a bunch of extra chargers in your house, but don’t replace all of them. Like when

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you travel-

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I only use like three of them. Like it wouldn’t be a huge

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} replacement deal.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But, but like, but changing up all of your important chargers for the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one that can charge your hand warmer seems unwise to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco me. But it’s not just the hand warmer. And so I keep, the point is, I would love,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the whole point of moving to the world of USB-C is, hey, you know what, finally, we can get rid of all these

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco custom cables for everything and just have one cable that charges everything, except your iPhone or an Apple Watch,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but one cable that charges everything. That would be great. And it’s just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yet another exception to that list. Do I have to carry around now a USB-A brick and an A to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco C cable just to charge certain things in my life. So if I can just, if there’s a brick out there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that has USB-C holes that can charge everything, I would love to know that. Thank you.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You know, this is tangentially related, but this reminds me that recently,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m actually, it was maybe late last year, I somehow was directed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to, I wanna say maybe Christina Warren pointed this out on Twitter. Hey, remember Twitter?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Anyway, pointed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey out this thing, It’s horribly named the C2C Caber QU.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey C-A-B-E-R Q-U. And this is a Kickstarter. It is also, I think, a product, like a full-on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey product now, because I received my Kickstarter, you know, whatever thing. And what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it is, is it’s a extremely basic circuit board, and it has

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a whole shed load of LEDs on it. And you plug one USB-C

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey cable in to this board on both sides. sides. So on the left hand side you plug in one end of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey same cable, on the right hand side you plug in the other end of the same cable. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what it does is it lights up all of the pins

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that make contact. So what this means is in combination with the owner’s manual

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you can see, oh well, and I’m making this up, RX1 plus and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey minus are connected, TX1 plus and minus are connected, VBUS is connected, shield is connected, ground is connected,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, this is just USB 2. Oh, wait, this other cable has another 300 different

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey things connected. Oh, that’s a full-on Thunderbolt cable. And so what it lets you do is figure out exactly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what the hell the stupid USB-C cable is that you have. Because just like freaking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey HDMI, you can never frigging tell what a cable is. You can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey never frigging tell. There’s no consistency as to how they’re labeled. They’re often not labeled

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and you never frigging know. So this thing, I don’t remember what I paid for it. It was somewhere between 20 and 50 bucks,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which is between 10 and $40 too much because this shouldn’t be a problem, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey be that as it may, this thing is incredibly useful. And again, I will

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey put a link to the show notes, or put a link to it in the show notes. I definitely strongly recommend

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it. It is very useful. Again, it’s not solving the exact problem you’re talking about, Marco, but I did notice

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey when I was at Disney World a couple of weeks ago, I was trying to charge, I think the play date,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and I don’t recall which cable it was. I was in a hurry so I didn’t like try to diagnose

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or debug or whatever what was going on. But I was trying to charge the Playdate and I had a USB

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey C to C cable that apparently didn’t charge the Playdate because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it wouldn’t start charging. And then I plugged in a different cable, maybe like an Apple cable or something. And suddenly it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey charged no problem, like the same power supply, the same everything. So having this, I didn’t have this in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Disney World of course, but having something like this if I was at home, I would have, you know, compared the two cables

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and seen, okay, maybe this USB C2C cable doesn’t do, to your point earlier, Marco, doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey do USB PD, it just transmits like some bare minimum

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of power or something like that. And so, yeah, I recommend this C2C Caber-QU,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey very, very, very useful toy to have in the house. But again, unfortunately, Marco, that is not solving your problem, and I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey am sorry.

Sponsor: Hover

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We are brought to you this week by Hover, a great place to buy and manage

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco your domain names. Hover is a jumping off point for a ton of entrepreneurs, and they want you to start your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco next business with a domain name. Honestly, that’s how I start all of mine. Any project, any business I have, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco always check for domains first, because to me, whatever domain I can get is a big part of naming

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the project. Hover makes this super easy with over 300 domain name extensions to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco choose from when you’re building your brand or naming your next project. No matter what you want to build, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a domain name waiting for it. I personally, I love their search. They search

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all of those TLDs. They give you tons of options. And it isn’t just like, you know, whatever you searched for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco online.info, like it’s good search suggestions. And they really, they have, you know, great

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco algorithms there. And they really surface, you know, wonderful options for you. There’s of course, chances are whatever name you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco searching for there, it is probably available at one of those TLDs. And they have support for as far as I know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all of them, or at least all the ones that anybody can reasonably buy. They have great tech support if you need it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and their support team does not try to upsell you. It’s a point of pride for them. They only work hard to get you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco online. They aren’t trying to push you into higher packages or anything. Because with Hover, they just give you everything that you should have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with every purchase. They have free Whois privacy protection, a clean UI, monthly sales on popular

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco TLDs. So it’s not hard to see why Hover is such a popular choice for people like me who

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco start a whole bunch of businesses and start a whole bunch of projects. So see for yourself when you are ready to get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco your next domain name, check out Hover. It is such a pleasure to use it. Grab your next domain

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco name and many more at hover.com slash ATP. You will get a 10% discount

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with that referral link on all new purchases. Once again, hover.com slash ATP

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for a 10% discount on all new purchases. Check out Hover today. Make a name for yourself

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with Hover.

Touch-screen Macs?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So Apple’s gonna make touchscreen Macs, maybe, possibly. You never know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Eh, we’ll see. I mean, it’s not surprising that Apple has people working on this. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s not surprising that people want this. This is one of those things that I think a lot of people want before

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they have it. Or a lot of times if you, you know, you might touch a screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thinking it’s a touchscreen and then you realize afterwards it’s not and think for a minute, oh, this is broken. But then you get used

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to it. There’s been a lot of arguments over the years for and against Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to add touchscreens to their laptops. One of the biggest and strongest arguments

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is that because people are so accustomed to phones and tablets

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and even PC laptops, which often contain touchscreens these days, you can say, well, people expect

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it to be a touchscreen. And so because people expect it, you should kind of just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco follow what people expect. And that’s a pretty good argument. That being said,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I have a PC that has a touch screen. It’s terrible. And not in the sense that they did

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a bad job. In the sense that it’s not very useful. And the few times

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I have touched it, usually if I’m trying to brush peeps of dust off the screen and then all of a sudden it treats

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it as a mouse input and the screen moves, I’m like, wait, what? It’s not fun.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And this doesn’t even go into the problems of like ergonomics

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or things like UI design of how the Mac UI would need to change to be more touch friendly,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but I don’t know. To me, this is the kind of thing that it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco surprise me at all that Apple is, that there are engineers assigned to work on this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But it would surprise me if it ever shipped that way, at least in the products

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that we know of today. Now if for some reason there became some

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kind of hybrid iPad book down the road, whatever it would be,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco where maybe something that has otherwise MacBook hardware

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco would also have like a touch mode where you could for some reason, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco don’t know, flip it around like this little convertible Windows. Again, none of this sounds like something Apple would actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco make, but if there were some kind of hybrid OS mode

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco swapping thing, maybe it would make sense then, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t know. I think this is the kind of thing that I’m sure Apple is working on it. They should

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be experimenting with this on a regular basis, but I don’t know if it’s ever really going to be good

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco enough to ship in any products as we know them today.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think it’s not just that people expect it that Apple might be working on it. And by

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} By

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the way, this is a Bloomberg story. We’ll put the link in, but I think it might be behind a paywall, but the exact wording

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is the typical waffling that we’ve been seeing for years. I think the last time we discussed this was maybe a year or two

⏹️ ▶️ ^John years ago. It says that Apple engineers are actively engaged in the project, indicating that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the company is seriously considering producing touchscreen Macs. So they’re seriously

⏹️ ▶️ ^John considering it. Well, that’s good to know. And it’s based on current and current deliberations. The company could launch its first

⏹️ ▶️ ^John touchscreen Mac in 2025 as part of a larger update to the MacBook Pro. So it’s all just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John rumors. They’re not even willing to say that it’s gonna happen. It’s just, you know, hey, we’ve heard more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that they’re working on it. So you’re saying there’s a chance.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Yeah, I mean, there’s always a chance.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So last time we talked about it is because they were updating the OS in ways that looked like it was helpful for touch, but it turned out to mostly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be for the notch or did it? We’ll see. But yeah, so in

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} terms of like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John oh, it’s what people expect. In the history of macOS, there have been a few things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like this that have basically gone in the direction of doing what people expect,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John despite the downsides. Well, yeah, so the biggest

⏹️ ▶️ ^John example, I think, and this is going way back, is back when the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John first came out, the way you used the menu bar, drop down menus in the menu bar, is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you brought your mouse cursor over to the menu, file, edit, whatever it’s going to be. You clicked on the word that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was the menu title, and you held the mouse button down. While still holding

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the mouse button down, you would move the cursor down until the item that you wanted to select was highlighted, then you would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John release the mouse button and it would select that item. And that was the only way to use

⏹️ ▶️ ^John menus from the menu bar on the Mac. Obviously, eventually Windows came out, and when Windows

⏹️ ▶️ ^John came out, they didn’t do it that way. The way Windows did it was, you can just click on the word

⏹️ ▶️ ^John edit, and then, and you know, that’s it, take your hand off the mouse, the menu stays down.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Then you would move the thing down to cut, copy, paste, whatever thing you wanted to to do. And then you would click again

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to select the item, right? And you could I think in Windows do it the other way as well, right? But the clicking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the menus, as soon as Windows did that, and obviously, Windows had massive market share. If

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you are a Mac user, and you ever saw anybody sit down in front of your computer or another Mac, what you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John saw is they would go to a menu and they would click on it and it would blink, like the menu would blink there for a second and go away.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And they would just stare at the screen and be like, what the hell’s wrong with this computer? Right? Because they were clicking and thinking the menu,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you would stay down and you’d have to explain to them, no, you have to click and hold. And they’re like, why would you have to do that?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s so much harder, it’s so much worse. Now, the reason the Mac did it that way is because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John part of the philosophy of the Mac and a valuable and important and good philosophy was not to be modal,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not to get stuck in a mode. Clicking and having the menu go down is essentially a mode because at that point,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the next place you click is either in the menu, and in which case you’re interacting with the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John menu, or it’s not in the menu, in which case, that click doesn’t count. All that click does,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you’re lucky, is take you out of the mode of, hey, we want you to pick from a menu, and then the menu goes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John away. And the Mac way was more of like, look, you’re holding down the button. You’re not in a mode, you’re holding down a button.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And it’s obvious that when you release the button, you’re either going to select a menu item or you release it somewhere else and you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John done with the action. It was a safer way to interact because you were never

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stuck in a mode. You were never in a situation where the click wouldn’t do what you expected

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because you know, whatever. But practically speaking, not just at what people expect, but it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is easier. Holding down the button is a physically more challenging

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing to do just from accessibility perspective. And also is ever so slightly more annoying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to people. If you’ve used a computer for a long time and you’re not confused by the modality of pull down menus,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re like, oh, why would I want to hold the cursor? And that’s so annoying. I know how computers work, just let me click. And so many people,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, voted with their feet in their wallet to say, I don’t care about the philosophical

⏹️ ▶️ ^John purity of modelessness, I don’t wanna hold the mouse button down. And so Apple eventually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John copied the Windows way and said, okay, now from now on, on the Mac, you can click the menus and they stay down.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You could also still do it the other way on the Mac. In fact, you can do that to this day, if you would like to go

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to your Mac’s menu bar, click and hold on a menu item, scroll down to an item and let go, and it works.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And if you’re a Windows user, you may have literally never done that in your life. But it still works

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that way. So Apple, I’m gonna say like conceded or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gave into the common way of doing things, but it’s not just that it was what people expected,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it was also that there were advantages that people had expressed through their usage

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that they found more valuable than what Apple’s things were bringing to the table. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with touchscreens, it’s similar in that even though Mark, you didn’t find it particularly useful, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John obviously Windows is not particularly touch friendly UI and neither is Mac OS, people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have an expectation that it’ll work that way. And it is sometimes useful, for example, just dismissing a dialogue

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or the most common thing, scrolling something, right? It’s a huge web pages in front of me. It’s a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gigantic touch target. I just want to swipe on it. I swipe on it, nothing happens. I feel like my laptop

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is broken. That is the same experience of someone arriving at a Mac in the 90s, clicking the edit

⏹️ ▶️ ^John menu and watching the edit menu blink onto the screen for half a second and then sitting there dumbfounded going, what the hell’s wrong with this computer?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Right? That is the, the vibe that I feel like could eventually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bring Apple around on this, that it is a useful thing that enough people think it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is useful that. Apple would be willing to do it despite the fact that none of these desktop

⏹️ ▶️ ^John operating systems are sort of touch friendly. Right. And I don’t think Apple needs to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John modify macOS in a huge number of ways to add this feature because the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John expectation would not be, oh, we’re gonna ship a MacBook without a trackpad. No, of course, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John trackpad will always be there attached to it along with the keyboard, right? You’ll always have a precision pointing device.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This is just touch as an augmentation. Now you can pinch to zoom somewhere. Now you can swipe to scroll.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John If you wanna stab a button on a dialog box, fine. but I don’t expect people to be doing pixel

⏹️ ▶️ ^John precise things as that’s why you have a pixel accurate pointing device. The main downsides

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I can see of rolling this out don’t actually have anything to do with the UI

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or anything like that, especially if you’re able to like disable this if you don’t want it, or if it only comes on certain models.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The main downside I see is hardware wise in terms of I would never, I would personally

⏹️ ▶️ ^John never want this and I think professional users also wouldn’t want this, wouldn’t want to compromise the quality of the screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^John display for that touch layer. I don’t think you’d probably compromise it because the screens on phones

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and iPads look great and everything. But if I had to choose between like worse anti-glare,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John worse color fidelity, anything like that in exchange for the touch layer, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a big no-go to me. And I feel like at the pro level, same deal because pro people don’t wanna be touching

⏹️ ▶️ ^John their screens. If you’re doing professional work with graphics or color, you don’t want your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ugly fingerprint smudges all over the things. and you do want the highest fidelity possible.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But setting aside that sort of high-end use case, which I think is kind of rare,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think it’s almost kind of inevitable that Apple will eventually give into this in some way.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This rumor is so confused by the discussion around it of people saying it’s not really a touchscreen

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mac, it’s actually, like you were saying, Marco, a convertible thing, or really what it is is an iPad with a built-in keyboard

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and trackpad that’s not two pieces. And because Apple has all the pieces of all of those things, Like those

⏹️ ▶️ ^John could all be true, right? The hardware and the software exists for everything that we’ve described.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s hard to say from the outside which one of those things they’re going to do. But practically speaking,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if Apple were to roll out a Mac laptop with a touchscreen, they wouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have to do anything besides make a glitzy video showing people pinching and zooming and swiping

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and scrolling. And they could ship it and if they didn’t compromise image quality, they could say, it’s there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John If you want it, you can use it. If you don’t, find the setting buried in our terrible settings application to disable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it, and you’re fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You know, for the longest time, I always thought that a touchscreen Mac would be gross

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or uncouth or not cool or whatever. And I don’t know, I feel like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’ve softened on that quite a bit over the last year or two. And even though it’s not something I feel

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like I am seeking out, I can’t sit here and say that I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey haven’t, you know, tried to scroll on my MacBook Pro, particularly after I’ve spent a long time using my iPad.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Like if I’m using my iPad for a while and then I switched to my MacBook Pro for whatever reason, there’s definitely times

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I reach out and try to scroll. And if that’s what so many people seem to want to do,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you know, what’s it gonna hurt to support that? And I hear what you’re saying, John, about like, you know, the screen fidelity, and it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a good point, like you’re not wrong.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But- I mean, I might be like, it’s like the screen quality in the iPads is great. It’s just, all I’m saying is that would be a bridge

⏹️ ▶️ ^John too far for me. And I think it would be a bridge too far at the high end, but for everything other than the high end weird picky people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like me, I don’t think it would be an issue.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, I agree. And like you were saying, this seems to be something

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that a lot of people want. Like, I haven’t spoken to devout Windows users

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in a long time now, but last I did, which admittedly was a couple of years ago now, they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey often said, well, you know, I can’t even get a touchscreen on a Mac. Like, what the hell is that? And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m not sure why that’s something that’s extremely important to these people, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it doesn’t mean they’re wrong, it’s important to them and that’s fine. And so I would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey be surprised if, you know, like you guys were saying, if Apple isn’t at least exploring this,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think I’d be, I would even be a little surprised if this doesn’t get supported in the next five-ish years,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but I don’t know that it’s solving a problem that I feel like I have, but since it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is, at least the way I’m envisioning it, since it’s additive, what’s it going to hurt? Now, if they completely

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey rejigger Mac OS to make all the buttons enormous, you know, well, I would take enormous buttons that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you can see.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John There’d be too much attention to Mac OS. That’s true. That’s a very good point.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I mean, I would take enormous buttons that you can tell are buttons over the, you know, iOS 7 era.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t even know if this is a button button. But nevertheless, you know, if they’re dramatically changing Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey OS to make it touch first, that certainly give me pause and maybe sour me

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on this whole idea. But assuming it’s mostly or entirely

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey additive, like what’s it going to hurt?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah. And to be clear, it would definitely be additive. So all of the things you’re saying, oh, it’s ergonomically bad. You don’t have your hand

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out in front of you. It’s like it would not be the primary input method. You’d still be used. The primary input methods be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John exactly as they are now. Mouse trackpad, keyboard, all that would be the same. This is just it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kind of like the pencil for the iPad, right? It’s just an augmentation. And speaking of pencil, by the way, that should

⏹️ ▶️ ^John also work on a Mac with a screen like this. And unlike the finger

⏹️ ▶️ ^John touching things, Mac OS is 100% entirely usable with a good stylus.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like no compromises. That’s pixel precise pointing with the stylus, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Which doesn’t argue for them shipping a Mac without a trackpad. I still think that’s a non-starter, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the possibility of a convertible type Mac with the stylus

⏹️ ▶️ ^John would basically not compromise precision at all, right? Because you can get pixel

⏹️ ▶️ ^John accurate with, with an Apple pencil on a Mac screen. So you don’t need a trackpad anymore. You still probably need

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a hardware keyboard if you’re going to type or whatever, depending on how good their handwriting recognition is. But like the Apple has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all the pieces to this. And despite them making the menu bar bigger and a bunch of the touch targets bigger on Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John OS, which we thought was going towards touchability for like dropdown menus, but ended up just being

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the notch or whatever. they don’t need to radically change Mac OS. It’s just a question of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the will to do it and what product they want to roll it out in. And it’s not even a big change.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s kind of like stuff like stage manager where it’s like, if you like it, and we do a good job on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it and people find it useful, great. And if you don’t, just keep using the Mac the way you are. Like, we’re not

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} compromising,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, again, setting aside the possible display fidelity thing or anti-glare or whatever. We’re not compromising

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anything. And who knows, you may surprise yourself. Even if you’re one of those people like me who doesn’t want fingerprints on their screens.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Hey, you got an Apple pencil? How do you feel about using an Apple pencil on your screen? Oh, I can’t use it on a laptop screen.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The screen will tip over. What if the screen folded backwards? And you’re like, hmm, maybe, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John especially since iPad apps also run in Macs with the ARM processors, the pieces are all there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So I feel like eventually Apple will get around to it, especially the new Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as of like the post butterfly keyboard Apple that seems to be listening to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what people want out of their Macs. Imagine that. Yeah, I don’t think this is like, people aren’t clamoring

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for it, it’s not a big demand. It’s not anything like the problems that we had before, but it’s the type of thing where

⏹️ ▶️ ^John eventually you get around to it. If you’re in charge of the Mac product line and your philosophy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is, let’s please the customer by essentially giving them what we want, what they want, it’s not like, oh, we’re just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gonna do focus groups and do whatever customers want. It’s still the Apple philosophy of we’re gonna try to give you a product you didn’t even know you wanted,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but also we will listen to customers. Also, we will be cognizant of the wider world.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s why macOS eventually added the ability to click a menu and have the menu

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stay down because they listened to the wider world. And they said, can we add this in a way that does not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John affect existing users who wanna do it the old way? Because it didn’t. You could just forget this thing really existed. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John granted, if you clicked and then released real quickly, the menu would get stuck down, but it wasn’t that big of a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John compromise. But just so many people wanted it that way and Apple heard that, right? and they essentially

⏹️ ▶️ ^John rejiggered their internal philosophy to saying that it’s more important to give customers what they expect. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John by the way, we here in Apple as computer nerds, once we enabled this feature in our beta builds of macOS,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John system seven, whatever it was, I forget it was, maybe it was macOS 8, I forget, I don’t even remember the OS it came out in,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you get used to it so fast. Just like you get used to, once every 45

⏹️ ▶️ ^John minutes you swipe a webpage on your Mac screen, it’s so easy to get used to that type of thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So the people developing it will eventually say, we’re so used to it, we feel like we can’t go back,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’re definitely gonna roll this out eventually, even if it’s 2025.

#askatp: Apps for young kids

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, let’s do some Ask ATP. And Lee Jarvis writes, any mobile or iPad app suggestions for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey young children or suggestions on filtering out the apps filled with ads and IAP garbage? The App

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Store seems to do a terrible job with this. I have a few thoughts. First of all,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Apple Arcade is good-ish for these sorts of things. I haven’t done a lot with Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Arcade, but there’s a jigsaw puzzle app, I think. I don’t know if I’ll remember to put it in the show notes. But there’s a jigsaw

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey puzzle app, a Disney jigsaw app, I think, that comes from Apple Arcade, which does have IAP, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey think, but it gives you a pretty robust.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John IAP and Apple Arcade? I thought none of them had IAP.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Then maybe it isn’t from Apple Arcade, or maybe I’m wrong about the IAP.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Because I was just thinking that this question is about, it’s about apps for young children, not necessarily

⏹️ ▶️ ^John games. But I feel like there should be basically the equivalent of Apple Arcade, but for kids’

⏹️ ▶️ ^John apps, right? Basically, non-crappy, non-casino games

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for children, a place that Apple curates a bunch of applications that don’t have in-app purchase, that aren’t trying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to sell my kid gems or whatever, and that are highly rated, right? And I know the editorial in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the app store kind of does that, but Apple Arcade is so nice and fenced off of like, when you know when you get these

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple Arcade apps, they’re just gonna be fun games, they’re not gonna be sucking money away from you.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, that’s a good point. But leaving that aside, so stuff that I’ve either heard good things about or used

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey myself, the Tokaboka apps, T-O-C-A-B-O-C-A, we’ll put a link in the show notes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t think my kids have used any of these, but I’ve heard very, very, very good things from several parents about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I put that link in there. My kids all use Tokaboka apps a ton as a kid. Obviously my children were this age a long

⏹️ ▶️ ^John time ago. I’m hoping Tokaboka has not become corrupted and turned into a casino.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But when I used it, the kids love these apps. They’re cute, there’s a ton of them, they’re high

⏹️ ▶️ ^John quality, and more importantly, the kids enjoyed them. Like one of the ones that I remember my daughter getting into was like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John very simple, sort of like coloring book type of game where you have like, I think it was like drawings of butterflies

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and you can fill their wings with different colors by, you know, picking a color and pressing on it or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It sounds like the most boring thing in the world, but you give an iPad to like a three-year-old with that application and it’s like one hour

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of a car ride gone. All she would do the whole time is make pretty butterflies and save them, make pretty

⏹️ ▶️ ^John butterflies and save them, make pretty, I still have tons of those pictures on my camera roll of like all the butterflies you made.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Similarly, there was one where you styled hair with like a virtual blow dryer and you would cut it and just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hours of entertainment for small children. No in-app purchases, no ads, thumbs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up Tokaboka circa 2010, and probably still today.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Around 2016 or so, I can tell you they were still that good because that’s about when

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my kid was enjoying them just as much, and I’m pretty sure we did that exact same butterfly coloring

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco game a lot. Yeah, they were great, and as your kids get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco older, obviously the requirements and priorities will change, but when you have very young kids,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, in that kind of like, you know, two to five, whatever it is-ish range,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, stuff like this, which is like, here’s something fun to play with while, you know, while daddy takes a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco second to like cook a meal. Like it’s that kind of thing, where like, you’re screaming in the car, oh my God, but you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just have to get to grandma’s house, like please, just here, here’s Color of Butterfly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Exactly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They have so many apps now, but I just scrolled and looked at it. Do you remember what the name, without looking, Marco, the name of the butterfly app was?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No. Because there was an audio sample that would say it, I believe. Paint my wings.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Hi, paint my wings. Paint my wings.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I was not getting a lot of sleep during this time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I play with paint my wings as a way to zone out. Yeah, paint my wings, still there. There you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey go. All right, then my kids don’t have this. It is actually quite expensive.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I want to say it’s like 10 bucks a month or something like that. But, and my kids don’t use their iPad

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey enough to justify it, but they have used PocPoc, P-O-K, P-O-K.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It has several different like games or screens, whatever in it, most of which are fairly like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey open-ended. It’s not like you must do this sort of thing and then that sort of thing. It’s very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey exploratory, explorative. I don’t know, I’m making up words now, but you get to explore things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And they really, really enjoyed that. That’s again, P-O-K, P-O-K. And then we do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey subscribe to ABC Mouse, which seems at a glance like it would be super

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey gross and the website is from like 99, it looks like, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the app is pretty good. And basically, there’s a couple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of different things you can do in ABC Mouse, some of which are kind of brainless and silly, some of which are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey genuinely learning, but my kids have learned a not insignificant amount from this app. They have a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey videos on it, they also have activities on it. I typically buy a year’s subscription

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for like 40 bucks around Black Friday time. It is quite a bit more if you don’t find a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey sale, but I would encourage you to look for a sale. But again, if you look at the website,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if you look at the app, it looks like it’s kind of janky, but it actually really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey does seem to be really good at teaching at an appropriate level for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey either my kids. And you know, Declan doesn’t play with it as much anymore. In fact, very rarely,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey he’s eight. But Mikaela is five and she still likes it a fair bit. So you can look at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ABC Mouse as well. Those were the ones that I could think of, actually I guess and John could think of, but any other additions?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Marco first.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t know if I have anything off the top of my head. Because I mean, the thing is, as Lee

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco alluded to, the App Store is not a good environment for this. So things change

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco over time. So even anything that we say now, We have to say, well, when our kids

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco were that young, this stuff was good, but now, who knows, right? Like now, those

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco same apps could have been bought by some other company that’s one of those like extraction companies.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t know how many people in the public know this, but in the app store, there is this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco whole economy of these companies or equity groups or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that whose sole job is they will approach and buy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco apps apps from developers that maybe are like past their prime or you know like so like they have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a lot of installed base they have good reviews in the app store maybe they have things linking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to them but they’re just not making a ton of money anymore and these companies will will like buy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco them from their developers and then just fill them with like IAP garbage and subscription scams

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and everything just like coasting on the apps existing install base and and reputation.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And like this is a whole economy of people who do that. And so any app

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that you go to look at in the app store, it could have been a perfectly great app five years ago.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And if it’s still there now, like it might not have the same owner anymore and it might not be a perfectly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco great app anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s like when private equity buys out a company like Toys R Us or Sears or whatever and destroys

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it. Yes, exactly. So, oh yeah, and Noob17 in the chat points out Sego

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Mini apps. This is another, This is like Tokaboka, Sega Mini, we got a lot of great use out of that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t know how they are today because, again, see the aforementioned disclaimer, but those were fantastic

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and we got a lot of use out of those as well. So anyway, you know, unfortunately

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when you’re looking at, you know, apps for kids, if you’re trying, especially if you’re trying to avoid like ads and IAP garbage,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there’s a couple of small tricks you can do. Like for instance, like my kid, we were, we were as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a whole family into Plants vs. Zombies back forever ago when that came out and then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Plants vs. Zombies 2 came out and of course totally ruined the game

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with all of this IAP garbage and like casino mechanics and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s like and my kid was super into it like a couple weeks ago and I’m like I’m looking at this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thinking like I do not I have a very hard time getting into this game because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it is just just constant just emotional exploits, casino mechanics,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just buy more gems and get more scores and get more. And the best thing is there is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco no ad-free version available. Plants vs. Zombies 2 just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has ads. The only trick is if you put your iPad in airplane mode, the ads won’t load

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and therefore will be skipped. And so that is a trick you can do. Like a lot of times

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you put the device in airplane mode, many of the ads and scammy parts

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of them won’t load. And so that’s a thing you can do, but ultimately,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for the most part, this is one of those things where there is no shortcut. You just kind of have to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco look at the apps yourself first before you let your kid use them if you’re gonna be, if this is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco an area that you’re sensitive about or that you wanna be attentive to, you basically just have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to review them yourself, like one by one. The same way like parents who are super

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco strict about certain content being shown in TV or movies will often watch the whole thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco first by themselves before they let the kid watch it. You gotta do the same thing with apps,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco where if this is an area that you care about and if you want your kid to avoid all this stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you pretty much have to just download the app yourself and try it and see first.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco There’s not much, there’s no other silver bullet except Apple Arcade, as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco mentioned earlier, which the whole selling point of it is you get games that don’t have all this stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know, unfortunately, they don’t, you know, there are still gonna be a lot of games that your kids will wanna play,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco especially as they get older and as like their friends start telling them about games. Like, they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco gonna wanna play other games at some point that are not in the little safe area of Apple Arcade.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so you’re gonna have to maybe take a more active role at that point if you still wanna enforce this kind of stuff. But again, that’s up to you.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But anyway, yeah, there’s no silver bullet. The App Store, I wish they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco would have a higher standard around the types of mechanics

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that are permitted in games that are obviously targeting children and I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s again it’s like this is one of the worst things about Apple like morally speaking the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the amount of weird you know ads and casino mechanics

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and weird scams they totally outright not only allow but directly profit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from in the App Store with games that are clearly aimed at children is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco obscene.

#askatp: Moving open files

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Brian Coffee writes, ever since moving to Mac, I’ve been amazed how you can have a document open

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and move it from one folder to another in Finder. You can even rename it. How can macOS do this?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It is written by a longtime Windows user. John, explain this to me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So, the way Windows apparently, according to Windows users and my vague experiences,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John would keep track of files, like, you know, someone writing a program for Windows, is they would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John store file paths, right? So, you know, C colon backslash, you know, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know what the hell they, what are they, program space files backslash, I don’t know what the paths are in Windows.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s progra tilde one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Right,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} there you go.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Exactly. It’s just a string that has the path to the file, starting with the drive letter, ridiculous. Starting with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the drive letter, all the way down to, oh, you know, it would say where the file is, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And that’s why Windows users often have the experience if they’re using an application, that if they move the file

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out from, like they open a text file in Notepad, and then they move the file, and forgive me if Notepad is better than this now, but I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John explain how it could be better than this now. They move the file out of the way, Notepad would still think it would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have, it stored in its memory, oh, I’m working on C colon backslash myfile.txt,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? But you’ve moved it somewhere else. It’s not there anymore. And one of the several things could happen.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John One, if you save it, it would just save it back to where it thinks it was. So it will save it to the directory, you know, we’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John save it to the file path that it has in memory. Even though you move the file elsewhere, now there’s a second file

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with whatever you just saved. Or the other one is, it will get freaked out and be like, I’m editing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a file, but it’s not there on disk anymore. Where did it go? I have no idea because as far as I know, it’s supposed to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be at C colon black slash whatever, whatever my file that text, and it’s just not there. And you’re like, yeah, I moved it. But it’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but all I know is the file path, right? That is a bad way to deal

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with files, but lots of programs historically in Windows have worked that way. How does the Mac,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and I’m hoping these days, how does Windows get around this? What is the alternative? Isn’t that the only way

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to keep track of files? Don’t all files have paths? Well, the first thing to do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is within the programs, this is why it takes a long time if you start off in this way, within the programs,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Windows programs, the Windows API or whatever, it helps to have a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John construct for the program to keep track of files that is something more than just a string,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that is something more than just a file path as written in text. You need some kind of abstraction

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the Mac. They’ve had various names over the years. There’s 50 of them now because it’s a whole platform.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John What are they called, Mark? Do you remember FSREF, FS, there was some other thing that began with FS. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John NSURL. There’s all sorts of other things that is like an object, a structure,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a thing in memory in the application that is more than just a string. Why do you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco need

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, it’s even like, even like at the C level, there’s like the file handle, like the file pointer in Unix.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, yeah, well, that’s a Unixism, and of course Mac is kind of Unix, but Windows wasn’t. So just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even within the world of Windows, some kind of thing that either does not hold a path

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at all or is a more complex structure, especially in the GUI type thing, because under the covers,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a lot of it we get down, I’ll talk about file descriptors in a second. Once you have that, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can put all sorts of crap in that structure. Historically, what the Mac has done is put,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there are structures in the various Mac OS APIs that put more than one way

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to keep track of a file within the same structure. And it will sort of say, well, if you can find it this way, do this. And if you can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John find it that way, do this. And if you can’t find it that way, do this. And at the very bottom of that list of how am I gonna keep track

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of this file is like, if you literally can’t do anything else, at the very bottom, I have a file path,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but hopefully it never comes to that. The most common way to do this on the classic

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mac, especially with HFS and HFS plus file systems, is they had a unique

⏹️ ▶️ ^John identifier for every thing in the file system, just like a big long number that was unique

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for the entire volume. So you just have to keep track of, is on the volume and the volume’s had unique identifiers too.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s on the volume one, two, three, four, five, and it’s file number is seven, eight, nine, 10, right? And there was only

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one file called seven, eight, nine, and it’s not the file name, it is just the ID, the HFS plus unique ID

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of that file. No matter where you move that file, no matter how you renamed it, its ID would remain the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John same. And in that little structure, I forget what it was called. I don’t think it was FS or F. It was whatever the other

⏹️ ▶️ ^John FS thing was or whatever. It would just keep track of the unique ID, the unique HFS,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John HFS plus ID of that file. It would also have the path and it would also have, it would have the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John volume ID and it would have the volume name and it would have tons of information in this structure but it would prefer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to use the unique ID. And that’s how it would keep track of it. Modern Mac OS has similar type structures

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in its various APIs and similar ways of keeping track of it but not every file system has unique identifiers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Most Unix file systems have inode numbers, which tend to be unique within a particular volume, but there are nuances

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there as well. With what Margot was talking about is at the C level, when you open a file at the very low

⏹️ ▶️ ^John level Unix C API, you get a file descriptor back, which is just an integer. That

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is an integer number keeping track of that file handle that is meaningful to the kernel for the life of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that file handle being open. And it’s just gonna be a number like one or two or three because it is local to your process.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It is not a unique number, like universally unique. You can’t store it anywhere. It doesn’t you know mean anything like that. It’s not gonna be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one or two because it’s already taken. But anyway That’s another way of keeping crack because once you have that file

⏹️ ▶️ ^John handle open you can move that file around You can even delete that file off the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John file system But the file handle is still valid because even though it’s deleted and it’s entry in some directory

⏹️ ▶️ ^John entry and the file system has been removed The blocks on disk are still valid because you still have a file handle open to it So how does

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Mac do this and how do other operating systems do this? They don’t use file paths They use

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the best available technique given the file system and the operating system

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to keep track of the file, and that is independent of the file name and location.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Good

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey talk.

#askatp: Indie health insurance

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Nevin writes, hey John, with your switch from jobby job to indie, what did you do about health insurance?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Marco or Casey, I would be interested in your approach to health insurance too. Well, let me jump

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in and answer for John. He did this on easy mode and I’m very, very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey jealous. So tell me, John, what did you do?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Is it easy mode though? Yes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} it absolutely is. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John here’s why it’s not necessary. So what I did, the solution I did, which may or may not be available to you, is my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wife works. She has always worked. has a regular jobby job with health insurance and we had already been

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on her health insurance, our entire family, for a long time because her health insurance has been better

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than mine was for many, many years.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So that’s the easy mode of easy mode, for goodness sakes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The reason I say it’s not necessarily easy mode is having two parents with full-time jobs, which we did for most

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of my children’s life, is not easy mode.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, all right. I will begrudgingly allow that. But specifically with regard to health insurance. It

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is 100% easy mode. I think I can speak for Marco, but I’ll give you a chance a second.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey For me, once I left my jobby job in 2018, I ended up going

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to healthcare.gov, baby. Thanks, Obama. And I pay about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the same for my mortgage as I do for my healthcare, which sucks. And by the way, my healthcare

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey sucks. It’s not very good. It’s expensive as hell, it’s not great, I somehow

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey have to pay for everything always, because my deductible I got the lowest deductible

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey plan I could find and my deductibles are still like $3,000 per person per year

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or something like that, which basically means, or at least my understanding anyway, is accepting like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey just general checkups and things like that. If anything out of the ordinary happens, they don’t pay a darn

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey thing. They may give you a discount if they have a relationship with the doctor, but they don’t actually pay for anything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey until I have paid out of pocket, something like $3,000 per person,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or the family as a family unit has paid something like $10,000 in a year.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And remember, this is, this is, you’re not talking about paying your premiums every month. You

⏹️ ▶️ ^John still have to pay those. This is on top of the monthly bill that you pay just to have insurance.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to make that clear. Which is the same as my mortgage, which again, I mean, I live in a relatively affordable place so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey take that for what you will.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you want to give that, you actually want to give your health insurance number just to terrify the non-Americans?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So my health insurance is something to the order of $1,500 a month, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is about the same as my mortgage. My mortgage actually, last I looked, is a little bit cheaper. We overpay it, but that’s neither here

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey nor there. But I pay about $1,500 a month. So that’s $1,500 a month, every single month. So we’re looking at, what is that, like $12,000, $15,000

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in a year. And again, the only thing I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey get for that, the only thing, is checkups. And by the way, vision

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is not included. Dental is not included. Dental

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is not included. Those are different insurance. And so what he’s basically saying is if someone gets sick and you have to pay for something,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John he has to pay $3,000 on top of the $1,500 a month before insurance will start paying for anything for that sickness.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey mean, the details, I might have that slightly wrong. But yes, that is about the heads and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey heads of tales of it. And again, if I get deeply sick, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey let’s say I have like some $10,000 operation. So I’m paying, in addition to the $1,500 a month, I’m paying $3,000 toward the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey operation. And then insurance will pay for the rest. However, if Erin

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey then gets sick and she needs a $10,000 operation, she

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey gets to pay, which means we get to pay, an additional $3,000.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Because her deductible, mind you, is different than my deductible. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey then I need to pay the $3,000 for her. And then if Declan gets sick,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that’s around the time that maybe insurance will properly take over.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And this is before, this is like the better version. In recent history in the US, there were also

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lifetime and annual maximums. So it’s like, look, if you get really sick, if it’s more than $50,000,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’re just gonna stop paying.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And that I think is one of the biggest things that the ACA, you know, AKA Obamacare,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco changed. Like that all these marketplace plans, you know, at least the, at least,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, that if you have some catastrophe that is going to require you to have like a 200 grand

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco operation series or whatever, like, you know, that they will cover that, but that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and that’s, that’s effectively what you’re paying for with all those premiums and everything. Um, but the, everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco until you get there is horrendous.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah. And like, like you said, this is to cover, oh my God, that’s what this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is for. It’s not to cover anything day to day. You know, we’ve had to take a kid to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the hospital for something that ultimately ended up being minor, but at the time, of course, you don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And those bills have been ridiculous, but not entirely awful. But the key

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is, if like, well, you know, I think Declan was the most recent kid of ours to go to the hospital.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Again, it ended up being nothing important, but at the time we didn’t know. If he had needed emergency

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey surgery, which was on the table as something that we thought might happen. That’s when the insurance

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey really helps. But the hospital visit, I think we paid between half and 80% of it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And the reason we didn’t pay all of it was because the insurance company has some relationship with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the hospital where they’ll bring down the list price, if you will. And I’m making up numbers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at this point. But say this hospital visit was $1,000. Well, it may happen that the hospital

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is part of my insurance network. So instead of charging $1,000, they’ll charge $800.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But that’s what I had to end up, I honestly don’t remember what we paid, but that would be what I would have to pay is the $800. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey again, this goes on until any single one of us hits, I think it’s $3,330 for a year. And by the way, if I hit $3,000 for the year

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and I get sick on December

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey 15th, if I’m still sick through the new year and I start accruing new bills on January 1,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey guess what, baby? $3,000 starts all over again because my life. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey yeah, it’s a mess.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you’re lucky if you can cross a calendar year boundary and still have the same plan. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} that’s true too.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’ve spent most of the last 12 years or so on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my own health insurance plans that I had to buy like this and the vast majority of that time was spent on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the ACA plans, like the Obamacare marketplace plans. And there’s all sorts of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco complexities here, but the basic wonderful

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco loophole that they get get around here is like, you know, state to state, the regulations will vary. And I know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco New York probably like many states has certain requirements of like the plan can’t raise the premium

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco by more than a certain percentage in a year.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John How much does your plan go up each year, Marco?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, so what they would do is every single year,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they discontinue all of their plans and just make new ones and make you totally reenroll from scratch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco every single year, just like buying a mattress. Yeah. So if you like your health care plan this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco year, well, I mean, first of all, you probably don’t because it’s just like Casey’s. But if, suppose, suppose

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you have found a plan that you can afford that covers you and your family as needed to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco whatever degree and that that has enough of your doctor and stuff in it that you can reasonably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco use it. Uh, well come December, come around Thanksgiving time, you’re going to get a notice

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the mail if you live in New York saying your plans over next year, sorry, re-enroll with our new plans.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Now, you go to those new plans, and you’ll notice that they are all both more expensive and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco also worse. It isn’t just one or the other. They’re more expensive and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco worse, and you won’t know, oh, and you have to enroll by a certain date in December,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but you won’t know until after January 1st whether your doctors are really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the plan or not, because they’re gonna still be negotiating with the insurance company until well past

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that December enrollment deadline. So this has happened to me, I think, four times

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the last 12 years where like, I’d have to get a new plan. And then in like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco January, in mid January, where I’m already on this new plan that now costs more and provides less service,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco then I get a note from like, you know, my doctor center basically saying, Oh, sorry, we no longer support,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, plan XYZ. And oh, well, thanks a lot. Now, I’m now I have something to deal with. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s been such a pain. I will say, you know, at least, again, like with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the Obamacare slash ACA world that we’re in now, as terrible as this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is, it was worse before. Because I had to buy plans before that by a couple of years too.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And it was terrible. Because before the ACA, I paid

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even more, like the premiums were even higher for what I was getting back then. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they had those like lifetime limits. They had preexisting condition exclusions, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is another huge thing. You know, at least at least with the marketplace plans, you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that you can go to the state marketplace and buy a plan pretty much no matter

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what, like you can get something if you can’t afford it, they subsidize it. If if you have some kind of preexisting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco condition, well, they have to cover you like there. If you if you have some kind of chronic thing that’s going to require expensive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things again, they have to cover you. That’s part of why they’re so expensive. But look, that’s the role of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco covering everybody, right? So the post ACA world is better than the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pre-ACA world, trust me. However, it’s still a tremendous mess and this is still

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a horrible system. And I hope within our lifetimes, this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is made better in some large way, whether it’s like a single payer or a public option

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or whatever it would be, who knows, but something, you know, Medicare for All, which is already pretty

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco much in the ballpark. It’s like, so something, you know. But this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is just one of those things, like, every country has their BS, their crazy downsides,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and I think this might be America’s biggest one. And if anybody in our government or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco leadership or politics, if they really, truly care

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco about small businesses in this country… Amen, brother. If they really, no politician

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or party is pro-small business if they are against giving healthcare

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to everybody. Because I cannot tell you how many people I know who

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco either didn’t start a small business or abandoned their small business in its

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco early stages because of a lack of health insurance. So many, and so many small

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco businesses are really only possible because the person’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco spouse has family coverage through their jobs, so they don’t need their own health insurance. Like, it’s kind of being

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco subsidized by other people’s spouses’ jobs, but like, there are just so many people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco out there who would start a business on their own if not for this one big

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco problem. And so again, if you care about small business in this country,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you should do as much as possible and support whatever politics you can to increase the social safety net,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and in particular in the area of health insurance.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Could not agree more. And from the chat, somebody writes, I have pretty good insurance, but when I had my gallbladder

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey out, I was getting random bills for over a year. One hospital,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey one bill for the hospital, one for the surgeon, and another for the anesthesiologist. This is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey completely normal for America. It’s not normal, but normal for America, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not at all surprising.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, so we have a lot of work to do in that area. Again, I hope within our lifetime,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this gets improved in a big way. That’s still just a hope though. I mean, it’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what are we gonna get? Self-driving cars, humans on Mars, or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco US fixes our health insurance? None of the above.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, it’s gonna be none of the above, but I’ll take US fixes health insurance.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I would give the numbers on mine if I knew them off the top of my head, but I think they actually might even be more than Casey’s, but my coverage

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is probably better as well. And I think Marcos are also more than Casey’s just because he lives in New York. Oh, unquestionably,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey unquestionably.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I’m above 2,000 now, a month. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey mean, that’s actually less than I would have expected. It’s a crud load of money. I’m not trying to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey say it’s not a lot of money, but given that you live in New York.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, and those deductibles that you were just saying, yours are like 3,000 a person. I think mine are 7,000 a person. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} like, it’s a lot higher. That’s brutal.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Golly, that’s bad. Yeah, New York is not a cheap place for anything, including health insurance,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but that’s… Thank you to our sponsors this week. the New York State of Health.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Stop. No, thanks to our sponsors this week, Hover, MacUpdater,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and Guardian Firewall. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join at hb.fm

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco slash join. Join right now to go listen to that episode about Hunt for October

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and how we are doing popcorn wrong. It is glorious. So thank you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco everybody and we will talk to you next week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Cause it was accidental, oh it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John accidental John didn’t do any research, Margo and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey oh it was accidental And you can find

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the show notes at atp.fm And if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John into Twitter,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey they didn’t mean to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Accidental, check podcast so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John long

Hoses & window-washing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So in our quest to find a listener in every profession under the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey sun, it seems you have sang the siren’s call of window washers, Marco,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and you have some followup for us.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So in last week’s pre-show, I was lamenting that I was terrible at watching my sliders,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my sliding glass

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} door. Excuse me, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey believe you mean door walls?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yes, my door walls, which, you know, I know this is the most first-worldy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco problem ever. I’m I we’re gonna get that right out of the way right now. That’s yes, okay So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I am terrible at cleaning these myself and window washers don’t work out here in the winter

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The good thing is I found something that works for me and it is the most

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ridiculous Method that you can possibly think of which of course makes it the most

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Marco method probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It does allow you to buy a bunch of things. So that makes it the most

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So it allowed me to use a bunch of things I already had.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Lies, no

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} way.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That you had already purchased, all right. So I looked at the first

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} link, I’m like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} wow,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Marco got to buy a cool thing, but I guess he already had this toy.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So when the window washers that I normally work with in the summertime, when they were here,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a big thing that they use is called a pure water system. And the idea behind this,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and I have not read up on the science to see if this is actually true or not, but just that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco please forgive me if it’s not. But the selling point of these kind of systems is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco by using extremely purified water as like a rinse stage

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or like say reach really high up windows that it’s pretty hard to get like a squeegee all the way up to. Like if you’re standing on the ground trying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to get like a third story window or something like that. Anyway, there’s these like pure water quote

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco filters that if you, the idea is if you rinse the window with water that does not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco contain any meaningful mineral content, then when it dries,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it doesn’t leave spots behind, because there is nothing to make the spot, because the spot is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco dried minerals. And so if you have a clean window, and you rinse it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with purified water, in theory, it should not have spots.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And there’s all sorts of ways to do this. The gist of most of the systems involves pumping

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco water through some kind of like, you know, like one of those like bags

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of beads or whatever, like whatever the filter method is where you like shove water through a bunch of material

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to try to get crap

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} out of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it. It’s like a pool filter.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Maybe, I don’t know. I don’t know enough about it. Anyway. Pool

⏹️ ▶️ ^John filters have just like a big thing filled with like sand and other type of stuff like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Yeah, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stuff like that, you know. So whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} kind of filter that. It’s nature’s filter. Yes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So there’s,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} you know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s the same way the groundwater on Long Island works. It goes through the sand and it goes underneath the pine barrens and we pull it up and that’s why our water

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tastes good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco There you go, yeah. So whether it’s reverse osmosis or whatever it is, you know, that method

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of filtering. So there are these things that pro window washers often use. After seeing my window

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco washers use theirs, I had thought, well, you know, having window washers come out here is an occasional

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thing and it’s an expensive thing. And what if I want to wash my windows sometime when they aren’t here,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or like, you know, between the times that I’m going to have them be here, maybe I get my own little version of this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so I did, like last summer or the one before, I actually bought the smallest one of these

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pure water filter things they make. I noticed that they said on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco filter thing that it came with these quick connect fittings

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from this brand and I don’t know how to pronounce this, I’m going to try. It’s just G-E-K-A, so I’m going to say

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco G-E-K-A or G-E-K-A, I don’t know. But the G-E-K-A quick connect

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco system. Now another aside here because this is me and this is the show. These

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are the nicest quick connect fittings I’ve ever used in a hose. Now I have since

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bought them for all of my hoses around the whole house. I’ve put them on all the taps. They even have their

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco own little like sprayer attachments that have them built in. I bought all of those and replaced all my older, all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my like cheap crappy sprayers that come with the Amazon hoses. You know, I threw all those away, those cheap plastic things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco These Gekko quick connect things are so nice.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John A word of warning about that, because you live by the ocean, they’re nice

⏹️ ▶️ ^John now. Follow up on this in a few years, because these quick connect fittings

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really do not take well to any sort of grit or corrosion. And that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what you’re all about over there by the ocean is grit and corrosion.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So see how they live. And that’s and that’s fair. And I expect that, you know, it’s it’s a metal fitting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with rubber gaskets. Like, of course, it’s not going to age well.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} And the metal

⏹️ ▶️ ^John slides back and forth and it’s a precise fit. It’s a rough, I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John optimistic about the long-term health of these, very cool. But you’re right, when they’re new, they’re awesome.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yes, and I’ve tried, in previous houses, in previous

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco host setups, I have occasionally bought a single quick connect setup from whatever was ranked well on Amazon,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and I can tell you, this is a step above in quality. This is really nice. So anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so the window washing thing came with these, So I geek out my entire house and all my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hoses. It’s amazing. So anyway, and that dramatically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco improves how nice it is to use hoses. Because like, if you ever, you know, the standard,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I believe it’s called GHT, the garden hose thread, that, you know, that standard like, you know, screw method

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of attaching hoses to each other and to faucets. If you ever see it like spraying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco water out all over the place, The reason why probably is that that connector

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has to be screwed on pretty much all the way to actually be sealed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Because the way it seals is as you screw that connector on, eventually there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like that rubber gasket at the base of each of the like the hole ends. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so you’re slowly pushing the other end of the hose against that rubber gasket

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s at the bottom. And if it’s not pushing against it, or if the gasket is lost or cracked or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or if it isn’t pushing hard enough against it, it’ll spray water everywhere. And so, it’s a pain in the butt.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So quick-connect things are just perfectly sealed normally, all the time, and you just pop

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it on, pop it off. It is a… one of those, like, little life improvement projects. If you ever use

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a hose, ever, get these quick-connect things for it. And so, anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco side note over. So, I also had the, I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco about a year ago, purchased this Dewalt cordless

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco power washer. I am usually a fan of most Dewalt

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco products. You know, it’s like, you have like the battery lock-in problem, like once you get any cordless

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco batteries for cordless power tools, then like, now I’m in the system, now I gotta buy everything for that system

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and only buy things in that system because then I can use the same batteries and chargers everywhere. So of course, you know, I have a need,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I get the Dewalt thing if there’s a reasonable one. And in fact,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I have this Dewalt blower that’s just incredible. Like, it’s this battery-powered 60-volt

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco flex blower thing. Awesome! Anyway, so I’ve had some good luck. So I got this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Dewalt power washer thing that uses these batteries. If you read the reviews on Amazon, it is exactly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco right. It is a terrible power washer. It has no power, it barely

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco washes, It is a terrible power washer. You can just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco take the hose with your wonderful Geekaw Quick Connect system, and you can just take the hose

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and spray something and get about as much pressure as you can get out of this quote power washer. It

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is a terrible power washer, but it has a superpower. It has an attachment

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that lets you pull water out of any reservoir, a bucket, and you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can pump water out of that bucket or whatever at hose-like pressure.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So you basically have a portable hose tank with it. So I had this thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sitting around not being used very much and I had my pure water window washer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco filter thing sitting around not being used very much and right now because it’s winter

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco most of my outdoor hose… all of my outdoor hose fittings are turned off and drained

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for the winter so they don’t freeze and crack. And like, you know, like every fall we got out, like we have like a, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a guy come out and turn everything off and blow out the irrigation and whatever, you know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco However, I had one good idea. Last winter, I had them install a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hose faucet thing in an outdoor utility closet that is like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco partly heated and insulated all winter long. So I have one hose I can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco use that has to get around the entire house. So I have all these like hoses, daisy chain and everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with all my quick connect fittings, like all daisy chain all around the house, tossing them to myself because I didn’t want to like bother anybody and Adam

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was at school. So all crazy logistics to try to get these hoses like all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco around the whole house. But I was able to reach my sliders

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that I wanted to clean. And instead of using the squeegee

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and making a huge mess of it and failing, All I did was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I filled a bucket with my window washing concentrate and water. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco used my stupid, terrible cordless pressure washer to suck the soapy water out

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of that tank and blast it all over the sliders. And this is not enough pressure

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to hurt anything. It’s just spraying it, basically. So blasting it with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco soapy water with my crappy pressure washer, then using my pure water

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco system and like one of those big like brushes on sticks that they use to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like kind of scrub and rinse away all the soapy water with the brush with the pure water

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and then I just let it dry and it was freaking perfect

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it was happy for amazing it looked like the process of me doing this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco looked ridiculous like you know care all this like equipment these blasting my windows

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with this weird pressure washing hose thing that’s covering them in soapy foam. It looked

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ridiculous and I know I could just get a bucket of soapy water and a squeegee

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and if I was more talented at operating a squeegee I know I could do it in probably a quarter of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco time for like twelve dollars but I don’t have that skill and I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco keep trying to learn that skill and I keep not having that skill so instead I have this totally ridiculous solution

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of just repurposing things I already had in ways I didn’t think they’d ever be useful, but it works

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ridiculously well. So this is my solution. It works for me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m sorry about how ridiculous it is, and I’m sorry to the world of window washers, which I now know listens to the show,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at how I am probably not doing anything correctly, but this actually works

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really, really well.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Question about turning off your spigots other than the one that’s in the insulated space.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Do you have the little drainy things on the inside, or are you just turning off the water to them? You know what I’m talking about,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the drainy things? On what? So like you have spigots that are outside the house, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And if you live in a cold climate, when the winter comes, Casey, you wanna turn them off because you don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John want water sitting inside those pipes and then freezing and expanding and bursting open the pipes and making you very, very sad,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? So usually you turn off your outside spigots. But what do you mean by turn off your outside spigots? The goal is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to get the water out of the pipe. So if you just turn to like a little valve or something in your basement that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John says there, No more water is going to come out of this hose spigot. That’s true. But the water that is in that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pipe right now is still there. It is still budding right up against the spigot that’s hanging out of your, your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing. So you need some way to get that water out and you could go to the outside and just open the spigot, but that just might

⏹️ ▶️ ^John let like a little drip bit drip out, but you still could have a bunch in the long pipe leading up to that or whatever. So I’m asking you, Marco,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you have a thing inside your house that lets you drain all the water out of the pipe that leads to the spigot.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Somewhere there is a way to do that. However, I don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco where that thing is. The reason why we have like a guy come out here and shut

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco down all the things, it’s partly because I don’t know where any of those things are. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m pretty sure we have them because it isn’t as simple as, oh, you just turn the knob back

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on, like on the outside and it’s back on again. That’s not how that works.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I would hope in recent houses that you have them. My house is ancient and didn’t have them and I had to actually pay to have them installed. That’s why I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know where mine are.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The thing I’ll add though to that is interestingly, if you have a very old house like I do, especially

⏹️ ▶️ ^John before I got my house insulated, which I know sounds terrible, but again, they didn’t use a lot of really

⏹️ ▶️ ^John good insulation in the 30s, so when I got my house redone and they put actual insulation in the walls,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it really helped our

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} energy bills, let me

⏹️ ▶️ ^John say.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} You don’t spit. You don’t spit.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But before that, especially when I was a new homeowner and we didn’t have those things, I would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just turn off the water to the outside spigots, but I would know that there’s water in there. And again, I would go outside and I would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John open the spigots and be like, come on out water, but just a little bit would drip out. And I knew there was water inside the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pipe, but there’s nothing I could do about it because I didn’t have the little valves. But I went, must’ve gone through like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John seven really cold winters like that. And the reason my house survived and the pipes didn’t burst is because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the thing that makes my house warm in the winter is a boiler downstairs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that makes hot water. And then that hot water goes through pipes to hot water radiators all through my house. And all those

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pipes start from that boiler. And they go up to the ceiling of the basement. And they go

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all around the perimeter of my house and up the outside walls of my house to all the radiators that are on both floors

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of my house. And the hot water that’s in those pipes radiates all of that heat

⏹️ ▶️ ^John into the basement. And it basically radiates all that heat onto the pipes that are leading to the spigots

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that are poking out into the freezing cold air. So just waste heat from my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John house. Like heating, like if you took an infrared camera and probably appointed it at the outside of my house, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John would say, why are all the spigots glowing a different color than the rest of the house? They’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John being warmed by the hot water pipes. I don’t know, I put insulation around as many of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hot water pipes as I could find, but it’s a losing battle, because the water that comes out of the boiler is really hot and it’s going through

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cast iron pipes. And if you put near boiling water through cast iron pipes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s going to, the thermal mass there, it’s gonna heat up the cast iron and it’s gonna make those things radiate heat. And that’s why

⏹️ ▶️ ^John our basement, which has quote unquote no heat in it, is often the hottest room in the house because that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where the furnace is. Now that we have the insulation, it’s not a big deal. And I have the valves and everything is much better now, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it kind of amazes me. I think a lot of like, how you survive

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in a place like New England that actually does have winter is that anything that has survived in New England

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for 20, 30, 40, 50 years has some attribute that makes it like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John dummy proof, right? So in my house where I couldn’t do the right thing with the spigots, don’t worry about it. This

⏹️ ▶️ ^John house has been here since the 30s. If the pipes were gonna burst, they would have already. How does it survive? Probably comical

⏹️ ▶️ ^John inefficiency and lack of insulation, but like, suffice it to say, the things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you still see standing in New England are able to take through whatever means

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the abuse that winter is going to put out. And that’s why I always worry about like new construction

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is like, okay, do you understand why the old construction worked? Because it might not be working for the reason you think it is. And your new

⏹️ ▶️ ^John construction, you probably need those little thingies the marker doesn’t know where they are. And the thing is, they’re basically like a valve inside

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your house. So like you open on the outside valve, right? And then you also open on the inside valve, and that inside

⏹️ ▶️ ^John valve is lower than the outside valve. All the water drains out of the pipe then. This is after cutting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John off the supply to the water, then you open up the other end of this, and then all the water drains out of the pipe, and now your pipe just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John has air in it, and you’re good to go. This has been plumbing talk.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I wish I knew the names of any of those things, but I do know where they are.