22: Full Brichter
18 Jul 2013Bugshot, its omitted and future features, and exploring NAS options: Synology vs. homebrew, NAS backup considerations, and hoarding terabytes of Apple videos.
Episode Description:
- Marco's new-new app, Bugshot, and some of its design decisions.
- Cutting features from 1.0 and trying to keep Bugshot from taking too much time.
- Bugshot gets the John Siracusa treatment.
- Exploring NAS options and initial impressions of the Synology DS1813+.
- Economics of FreeNAS or Mac Mini alternatives.
- iSCSI on Macs: the
free$89 globalSAN initiator and the $195 ATTO initiator, which comes recommended by storage expert Dave Nanian. - NAS backup options, since Backblaze doesn't do network drives: CrashPlan (with widespread upload-speed issues), or Arq (with potentially expensive Amazon Glacier or S3 costs).
- Backing up Mac filesystem metadata, Backup Bouncer, and current scores of online backup apps.
- Data hoarding and falling into John's backup vortex.
- The Apple Keynotes podcast feed.
Sponsored by:
- Mind Blitz: An action-puzzle twist on the classic memory matching game.
- Transporter: Private cloud storage. Use coupon code atp for 10% off.
Transcript start
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Time boxing is such like a consultant speak thing to say. I don’t even know what that means.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s doing a task, but limiting it to a certain amount of time.
⏹️ ▶️ John But time is one dimensional. Boxing doesn’t make sense.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, the thought is, oh, I don’t know how long this task is going to take me. All right, well, we’ll time box it for two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hours and see where you get.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe time bracketing? I’m trying to think of something that doesn’t imply a second
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Only you would be pissed off that time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John is one dimensional.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s probably regular English words that will work here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you did something at an interesting hour last night by the time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’re recording, but almost a week ago by the time most people hear this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I released a new app for the first time in a long time. How’d that go? Really well, actually.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this was my few days project app that I discussed a couple episodes back.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the app is called Bugshot, and it is kind of like Skitch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for iOS without sucking. So it’s basically, it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very, very simplified screenshot annotation app where it just shows a list of all your screenshots in your camera roll,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then you get to draw big orange arrows or boxes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on them to point out certain things in them, and then email them or do something with them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s literally all it is, boxes and arrows, orange on screenshots.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The reason I created it is because, just a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco couple of weeks ago, I was in the back den playing with my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kid and navigating through a podcast that was playing on a speaker
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I noticed yet another visual bug in Downcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while I was doing this. Towncast still has a few issues on iOS 7. It works,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but there’s a number of UI glitches. And so I took a screenshot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I always do. Whenever I see a bug in an app, whether it’s mine or somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else’s, I always take a screenshot with the intention of going and, you know, once I get back to my big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer, emailing it or fixing it if it’s my bug or something like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. And usually I forget to do this. And so what I end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up with is I’ll go through my camera roll looking for something else and come across all these screenshots of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bugs that I have long since forgotten about that are either out of date or I’ll look at the screenshot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and think, what, why did I take this screenshot? What’s wrong with this? Like I’ll forget and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it won’t be immediately obvious upon looking at it like, wait, why? Why did I think this was a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this basically, Bugshot for me was a way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to both give screenshots like a workflow, like to make an app that’s dedicated for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco receiving them and doing something with them immediately on the phone. So it kind of gives me an excuse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to like remind myself, oh, now that I have this app, and especially now that I made this app to do this, I won’t just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screenshot and forget. And also the annotation part of it is very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco handy to prevent the second problem, which was forgetting why I took the screenshot or it not being 100% obvious
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and having to describe to somebody in an email or something exactly what part of it you’re talking about.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s what it is. And there were a number of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco decisions I made along the way. Mainly I knew this was not going to be, like, the app that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco carried me in business for the next five years, and so I didn’t want to spend a whole lot of time on it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And almost every decision I made during development I had to balance against like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay, well I could do X, Y, or Z, or I could do this this way or this other way, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’ll take a week, or that’ll take too long, or that’ll have ongoing maintenance, or something like that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I only want to spend a few days on this. And of course a few days became about a week, but still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a week for an app really isn’t that bad relative to anything else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even with this app where its feature set is relatively small and trivial,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s still a lot of implementation to get right, and a lot of decisions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make along the way, and just a lot of work to do. You know, screenshots, the icon, there’s all sorts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of stuff that no matter how simple your app is, if you want it to be high quality,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if it’s simple, you still have to do a whole bunch of stuff. So there’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a whole bunch of topics in here we can talk about if you want, but that would probably take too long. I mean, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to spend all day on this podcast. So I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What interests you here?
⏹️ ▶️ John I have complaints. Do you want complaints?
⏹️ ▶️ John hoping you’d have complaints. Do you want to go first, Casey, or do you want me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to go? I actually only have one in particular, so I can go first and then leave you the floor for the next 50 to 90 minutes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But Marco was in town, as we talked about, I think, the last episode. He was in town
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a party that we threw, what was it, last weekend. And so he showed me the app.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think you had already sent it to the App Store at that point, but it wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of course. Yeah, that’s true. And I had seen, well, John and I both had seen a couple screenshots, but that was my only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exposure to it. We barely talked about it. And basically, Marco handed me his phone and said, all right, here you go.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So in using the app, I thought it was extremely intuitive. I thought that the way in which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you drew things was very reasonable and made a lot of sense. I wasn’t really clear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how to delete something, so I just tried a couple things, and the second thing I tried, or third thing I tried, was double tapping on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an object, and sure enough, there it went. So I thought that was really nice. There was no demo needed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought it was extremely intuitive. I know you got some flack on Twitter about that, but it made sense to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The thing that I didn’t like, however, is you took the easy route, which is probably what I would have done with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the boxes in that the touch target for any rectangles
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or squares or whatever or what have you, they’re the entirety of the rectangle including
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the inner part that’s actually clear. So if you were to put an arrow or another box inside
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the bigger box that gets a little bit dodgy in terms of how you select what you want to select
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that really annoyed me even though I don’t know why I would ever run into that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well that and so today I spent this morning while Adam was watching Sesame Street
⏹️ ▶️ Marco giving me some time here because my wife was out of town until this afternoon so I spent this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco morning during Sesame Street working on that hit testing and playing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with different things and I’m gonna change it for one for 101 I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna make it so that basically see the challenge here and I face this challenge during development too and I decided to take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the easy way out but the challenge I faced is, so obviously, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you tap and hit a shape, you know, like how, basically what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the bounding box or what’s the bounding path for what should be considered hitting that shape?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the problem is the shapes can be all different sizes. And this is a touch device so everything’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco imprecise. Like the input is imprecise. So if you constantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco miss what you’re trying to hit, that’s bad. But the way it was, especially with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco boxes where if you drew a really big box, you couldn’t draw anything inside of it then.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because any tap inside of it would be considered dragging that box. Even if the space inside of it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really vast and empty. So obviously there’s some middle ground here. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I’m playing with now is basically like if the shape is below a certain size,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just the whole thing is the bounding box, and then if it’s above a certain size, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only its border plus a little bit of padding on both sides of the border. That represents
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the bounding path. And similar thing with arrows, where if the arrow is below a certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco size now, it’s just going to be the whole bounding box of the arrow. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once it gets past, I think I decided about 80 by 80 would be the boundary. Once it gets past that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco boundary, then the arrow itself, its path,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the touch area. But it’s all like, this is a great example of one of those things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where like, the app looks really simple, but there’s a lot of little tiny details like that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where I had to make decisions and experiments and everything else. And that’s, that’s why like, I have a feeling a lot of developers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco upon hearing that this took me about a week to really do and submit, probably would think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a week is way too long for an app that’s this simple. But really, there’s so many little details like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s what takes all the time, really, like you can make a really terrible app, you in two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco days, from new project to submitted in two days.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can do that, but there’s very little chance it’s going to be good. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I really wanted to do was, I wanted it to be very, very simple, but also good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, what was left on the cutting room floor, and John, I know I’m delaying your complaints, but what was left on the cutting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey room floor that you wanted to get done that didn’t, but did that as a conscious
⏹️ ▶️ Casey choice to get it out quickly?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I played with a few ideas. One of them, a smaller version of what I’m about to say, like, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the things I was doing was some kind of state of marking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which screenshots you have dealt with already. So like, you know, like anything that you annotate,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously I’d have to save the annotations, which is a whole, you know, can of worms right there of how do you save and restore these things and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then you have user data to deal with. Then do you have an export? Do you have to sync that? You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, that’s a whole can of worms. The way it is now, you draw your boxes and arrows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then you hit either cancel or done. Basically, if you’ve shared it anywhere, then the word
⏹️ ▶️ Marco changes to done. Either way, once you’re out of that screen, that information is lost. It’s not saved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anywhere. And so that was mostly for simplicity’s sake
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the time constraints. But also, I feel like this is temporary data anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, the whole point of this is, annotate a screenshot and then get rid of it. Send it somewhere,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that you can deal with it in some other place. And for me, it’s just emailing it to myself, usually.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But either way, which I know is terrible, but amazingly, emailing things to yourself is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the best solution to a very, very wide set of problems that unfortunately we still haven’t solved in better ways
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet. But I’m sure everyone I bet I bet even John Syracuse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you still email things to yourself in certain? Contexts
⏹️ ▶️ John I email things myself all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See it is it is the solution to so many problems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. Now what about airdrop because I know that they’ve made passing mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco air Aha, airdrop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does not work between iOS and Mac and seven.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey So, okay, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you haven’t looked much into it yet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So yeah so one of my most frequent things is like I just just took a picture of something and I wanted to get it on my computer faster than a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco photo stream will do it. I’ll just email it to myself. It’s so many people do this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so saving data was one thing that I kind of punted on and decided, well, let’s see if this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing really justifies more time investment. Maybe I will investigate doing that. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have the issue of, okay, well, then like, do you hide screenshots that you’ve dealt with? Because you can’t delete
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. As far as I know, there’s no API to delete things from the camera roll from an app, which is probably for the better, honestly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But But either way, there’s no API to delete things. So I can’t do that. So I could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hide them, but then what if you want to annotate the same screenshot twice? Then you have to have some kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco UI for showing hidden items or toggling the done state. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so there’s all sorts of little things like that. Like, well, if you do this, then you have to add this, this, and this to make it good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it ends up saving data or marking things as dealt with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are both bigger topics that I didn’t want to address yet. And the other big thing, which a few people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have requested, is the text tool. Being able to draw text on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the photos. And a lot of people have requested this. Back in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco days of using Skitch, and it’s still on the Mac, I still do use the old version of Skitch on the Mac, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously text is very nice to have, but the problem on iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically is implementation. The way I would want to do it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be that you are typing directly on the image, like you pick a place, the keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comes up, and you are typing directly onto the image in the big orange font with the stroke, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly as it’s going to look, Wissy Wig style, you are typing directly onto the image.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And doing that in iOS in a way that doesn’t suck for other reasons, doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that in iOS is not easy. And it’s getting easier with every version, but I still have to support 6 for this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app, obviously 7 is not out yet for the public. I can’t make an app to the app store that requires iOS 7
⏹️ ▶️ Marco today. So I have to do, I still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to do this in a compatible way. Anyway, so doing text right on the image like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would have been at least another day of work, probably a couple days to really get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it right, because there’s so many weird little things with text input and I realized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that that you know when I would when I would email these things usually I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just whatever commentary I had that required text I would usually just type it into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the email you know usually there’s the subject just here’s here’s what I’m talking about with this arrow point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is thing in a screenshot if it even needed any text so I kind of figured that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you know if most of the sharing targets of you know whatever you’re gonna do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco next after you draw the arrow in box on this on the screenshot if the next step in your workflow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is going to involve text input which almost all of them do then I kind of figured
⏹️ ▶️ Marco text was less important for this app and so I I wouldn’t mind adding it at some point but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think it’s ever gonna be worth the time to really do it well and I don’t want to do it badly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right now to further delay John and make him even more grumbly why not iOS 7
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only I mean And obviously if you wanted to release it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco today, you’d be so happy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I can’t, that’s the problem. Well, right, but why not hold
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it? Why not wait? Well, because it’s really useful right now. As everyone’s apps are breaking under iOS 7,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s including Apple’s and the OS itself. It’s very useful. Like, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the reasons why I decided to make this app right now, is because I’m constantly finding UI glitches with 7.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And whether it’s in the OS or other people’s apps running on 7, there’s so many problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because so many things are different, So many of the Apple apps are really rewritten
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or have really kind of rough edges still. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for this to be most effective for me, and I think for a lot of people, I really had to get it out there now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco during the iOS 7 beta. And so that’s why it doesn’t require iOS 7, basically, because I can’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. All right, I’m sorry, John. Please take the floor.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, some of my complaints are things that Marco had to omit. And he already named a couple of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John the one where you can’t draw a box inside a box. Casey got that one. And
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Mark Martin wrote about
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Oh, that’s fixed for 101. There you go. And I was thinking of saving
⏹️ ▶️ John the screenshots and the annotations separately within the apps documents
⏹️ ▶️ John silo, basically as a roundabout way to get the same thing you were talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about, where you’d have some sort of process whereby you went through the screenshots and
⏹️ ▶️ John did something with them. And then they would go someplace else. And they would disappear from the main list. And saving the annotations
⏹️ ▶️ John and the shots separately would be so that if you changed your mind later you hadn’t, you know, that
⏹️ ▶️ John was my solution to unhiding the screenshot, that you don’t see it on the main screenshot list anymore, but you see it in your
⏹️ ▶️ John ones that you’ve dealt with and when you see it there, if you change your mind and want to report a different thing, you can add a different set of annotations to the
⏹️ ▶️ John same image. But anyway, you already talked about those. The ones you could do, although you already
⏹️ ▶️ John put out 101 already, well actually- No, I haven’t submitted it yet, I’m working on it today. Oh, see, that was one of the things, I was trying to figure
⏹️ ▶️ John out, what version of this do I have? the device there’s no way for me to tell inside your application or in iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John at all what version I’m using it like there’s some is there some way in settings I looked I didn’t see any way
⏹️ ▶️ John to get a version number out of it anyway the toolbar buttons on top I haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ John used iOS 7 enough to know if this is accurate but they highlight on you know
⏹️ ▶️ John on mouse down to use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was actually just talking to John Gruber about that he complained the same but the same thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so there’s two problems one is that I did not implement
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a highlight state and so I’m going to do that in 101 just basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these controls are all mimicking iOS 7 style or totally ripping it off and and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so I I’m going to do that the highlight state but I actually don’t know I’d
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love to hear from users or from listeners although I probably won’t hear it in time before I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco submit 101. As far, and this is a really nitpicky detail, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as far as I can tell I can’t figure out if there is a good way for UI segmented control,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is what this is. This is a real segmented control just using UI appearance to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco customize the way it looks. I can’t figure out how with UI segmented control to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do the thing where you, if you tap down and then drag your finger out and release it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t trigger it. I’m using, this is really technical, I’m sorry, but I’m using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the UI control event value changed mode here. And I tried the control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco event touch up inside, which is usually how you do that, and that didn’t work. Like it’s still just fired
⏹️ ▶️ Marco upon touch down. So I don’t really know how to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I only spent like two minutes looking at it because it was right before the show. So I’ll look at that later. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I might not be able to fix that easily. We’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s debatable at this point whether it would be more expedient for you to go full
⏹️ ▶️ John Bricktor on it and just drag yourself around wrecked and do your own hit testing and like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean? Oh, that’s definitely not worth it.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Well, I mean, but
⏹️ ▶️ John like if you’re trying to take segmented control and figure out how to, like, if there’s no event for you trying to figure out some way
⏹️ ▶️ John to get it to do what you want, you could burn a lot of time trying to make the existing control do what you want. And if you had spent
⏹️ ▶️ John that same amount of time simply implementing your own really simple control,
⏹️ ▶️ John it might end up being a washer. It might end up being faster. It probably also depends if you’re Lauren Brichter because presumably
⏹️ ▶️ John he has a little bit more experience making
⏹️ ▶️ John widgets from scratch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If I were Lauren Brichter, I would have written this entire UI in OpenGL and re-implemented every part of UIKit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my own awesome, better way and spent six months making this app. But unfortunately,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t justify that amount of time and I’m not Lauren Brichter and so it would take me way longer than it would take him.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So unfortunately, that’s not going to be an option. I am I do I would like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get that detail right about about the tuck shop and touch
⏹️ ▶️ John I was seven doesn’t do that then right it was I was wondering like maybe maybe this is how I was seven does it and you’re? Just faithfully reproducing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well no Gruber pointed out that on the notification center segmented control The like all events
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or today like with the thing on top notification center that that behaves properly And what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you guys are talking about and so I but again? I haven’t had much time to look at it yet probably right after we record the show I will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spend another 20 minutes on it and figure out the solution, but right now I don’t have it, and I don’t know if it’s going to be easier or
⏹️ ▶️ John screenshot list the highlight issue there is that there is no highlight It just
⏹️ ▶️ John zooms the image up and there’s no like you know Dimming it or doing any sort of highlight to let you know
⏹️ ▶️ John that Like you like you let go of your finger and the thing zooms up to full size, but there’s no highlight and that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that’s interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that I can probably fix
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the collection view like that’s apples collection view right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it is but And this is actually the first time I’ve ever used a collection view So I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know whether this is the responsibility of the view or more likely It’s probably the responsibility of the cell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to implement that so I will I will look at that
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and the collection view was flaking out. I can’t tell I haven’t been able to reproduce this one I should have screenshotted
⏹️ ▶️ John it, but I was like I’m sure I’ll be able to reproduce this Let me screenshot it But no so when you go into landscape then you go back into you
⏹️ ▶️ John know you go into landscape It changes the layout of the thing and then when you go back into portrait briefly it’s two columns
⏹️ ▶️ John and then it goes back to three columns and it got stuck in two columns for me for a while
⏹️ ▶️ John but then I just filled around with it some more now I can’t get it to get stuck but that’s that’s almost certainly a collection
⏹️ ▶️ John view bug of some kind of probably not your bug but I would watch for it in your travels through the application
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the things I did that was actually a surprising amount of the of the coding and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the getting things wrong and then figuring out how to get things right I was handling rotation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I didn’t want to like so basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the app only ever present screenshots full screen at a hundred percent scale
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is no zoom there is no panning or anything and this was all for simplicity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and speed of dealing with it so you know there there is like the whole point of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this app is to get in and get out very quickly to do what you have to do because it just like any good workflow tool
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t want the tool to be slowing you down necessarily. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco collection, the list view, does support rotation, but the drawing view does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not. There’s all sorts of weird complexity of, well, if you’re in portrait
⏹️ ▶️ Marco orientation in the list and you select a landscape screenshot, then the whole app basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forces itself to be in landscape mode during the editing, so you’ve got to turn the phone on the side, And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once you’re done, it switches back to landscape if it needs to. There’s all sorts of complexity like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, or implementation complexity, to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get around the need for zooming and scaling, basically. So there’s a few things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about that that I’m not 100% happy with. One thing I’m not happy with is how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco images appear in their native orientation in the list. And so if you have a mixture
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of portrait and landscape screenshots in your camera roll, then the layout gets really inefficient
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and gappy and it just kind of doesn’t look good. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m playing with different options there. I tried some of them during development and I just didn’t like any other alternatives.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So here we are with this. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rotate them all to portrait. You know, I tried that and there were, first of all, a lot of difficulties
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing that well. But it didn’t really look great, and it didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco handle rotation that well. I might revisit that at some point,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it was not good. I thought that would be the answer, but it wasn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John And my final complaint was that, the one I gave you last week, the first thing I thought of was after I draw these little overlay things,
⏹️ ▶️ John particularly arrows, can I manipulate them after the fact? And you can move them, but you can’t resize
⏹️ ▶️ John them or reorient them after the fact. And I would expect anything that lets me draw a little rectangle gives me anchor
⏹️ ▶️ John points on the four corners so I can resize the rectangle and anything lets me draw an arrow lets me twist the arrow around
⏹️ ▶️ John and stretch it out to make it longer or shorter I mean like it moving it pretty much solves the problem of like
⏹️ ▶️ John how do I make it an arrow precisely point to something because if you start where I
⏹️ ▶️ John first tap with my fat finger that’s not very accurate but if you do it the other way where you start with the stem then
⏹️ ▶️ John as I drag out to the thing I’m trying to point to my my finger is covering it anyway so there’s no good solution
⏹️ ▶️ John there You have to have some after manipulation, and you allow moving after, which allows you to reorient it. But basically,
⏹️ ▶️ John if the overlays were sort of persistently vector shapes instead of being
⏹️ ▶️ John rasterized and just being able to be moved around.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and they actually, in the code, they are. And the rectangles can be scaled if you pinch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. The arrows cannot.
⏹️ ▶️ John not figure out that rectangle thing. I spent a while trying to resize those rectangles. All I ever did was move them. I guess maybe I was
⏹️ ▶️ John pinching outside them. You got to start inside, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And one of the problems is just on the iPhone there really isn’t a whole lot of space
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do pinching and rotation gestures. And it’s really, really hard to do with any kind of precision on the iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco On the iPad, of course, it’s a different story. But for me, I’m using this mostly on the phone. And so, you know, whatever decision
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I make have to work well on the phone for this. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one big thing is I don’t think, well, I tried very briefly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in early development having pinch and rotate enabled on all shapes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It didn’t work that well. It was very hard, again, with precision. It was very hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do it, especially to avoid accidentally rotating something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you’re supposed to be pinching it. When you combine rotation and scaling simultaneously
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the same gesture, it kind of behaves weirdly and there’s weird edge cases you can get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so there were a number of things that just didn’t feel good with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having that in place.
⏹️ ▶️ John You probably have to go modal like those old apps where you tap the thing and that makes the little anchor things
⏹️ ▶️ John appear and then when you select one of the anchors it’s clear if you are now in rotation or scaling mode
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and hit areas all
⏹️ ▶️ John increase like a like a full-fledged vector drawing app on the iPhone would
⏹️ ▶️ John but like that it also falls under the scope thing of like
⏹️ ▶️ John now you you’re getting into, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. Well, and then like every one of those things that you add, that needs UI. And a lot of times that needs state,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as you said. And so that just adds so much complexity to using the app and to building the app that, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it very, very quickly balloons in both scope of development, and also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just different modes the app can be in and different ways it could slow people down or confuse
⏹️ ▶️ John But right after you sell the first 50,000 copies of this app, then you gotta get working on this feature list.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, if I sell 50,000 copies, I would consider doing that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now I’m at something like 1000 I think so. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty impressive. And actually, I thought of one other complaint that I had when we were when I was looking at it last weekend.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I apparently am the only person on the planet that likes shake to undo because I went to try that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John out. Okay, thank
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you, john. I complained about it. And Marco definitely said in so many words, you’re insane
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for even wanting that. And I want to say underscore agreed with you, but I don’t recall. So apologies underscore
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco putting the word
⏹️ ▶️ Marco general off. I think you’re right. I think we both agreed. Again, apologies if this is wrong, David. But I think we both agreed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that shaking your phone is ridiculous and it should never do anything because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s ridiculous. It is ridiculous, but I do find, I did try it. I do find myself trying it because I do want to undo
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of times. And although shaking is ridiculous, it’s kind of the, you don’t need a UI button for it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John perhaps, you know, like maybe it’ll work. And sometimes it does and it makes me feel good when it does, even though I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John shaking my, you know, iPod.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But now, all in all, it certainly is a really interesting exercise in doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a small app and just like you’ve been discussing this entire time, cutting out what you don’t need.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Being able to spin an arrow or re-anchor an arrow, I think would be nice. But to your point
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a minute ago, if it’s not done well, it’s I’d rather not even have it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve come to that conclusion, I think, after seeing Apple make that choice so many times, like copy-paste
⏹️ ▶️ Casey early on in iOS, for example. So it certainly, I can’t say I’ve had to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use it yet, partly because I’m not running iOS 7, but it certainly made a lot of sense. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought it was very intuitive with almost no UI. So I thought it was a job well done.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you. And another issue with adding these things, like even in development, when I briefly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had the text tool in the toolbar, that toolbar gets really crowded really quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And right now, with the cancel button on one side, the action button on the other, and the two buttons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the middle, on an iPhone in portrait orientation, that toolbar is pretty much full already.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so the question is, if I wanted to add a color picker,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or additional tools, text, or like somebody in the chat just suggested
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a redaction blur or blackout, blackout sensitive information that’s in the screenshot. That’s a good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco idea, but like where’s that gonna go in the interface? And you know as soon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I go beyond one toolbar then the interface becomes a lot bigger and heavier. Like the whole point of this is to annotate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screenshots at 100%. So there really isn’t a whole lot of room to like crowd the screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with buttons and stuff. And it’s just like that toolbars already full, so like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what do you do? Right? Like Again, there’s no good option.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so a lot of times the answer is just, well, you know what? It’s better to just keep it simple. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, and it’s another reason why I didn’t really go for more tools is because I think an arrow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a box, that’s the essence of this kind of tool. There are other more specialized things that might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be nice. Like, oh, maybe you want to draw a circle or an actual rectangle that’s not rounded corners
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or, hell, a triangle. If you want to annotate something with a big hollow triangle, I’m sure somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wants to do that. And there are cases where more specialized tools would be better,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but to have an app with all that stuff in it, it very quickly becomes Illustrator.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John And that’s a very different thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like the show opening, I think it was the show opening last week that you threw in there. The thing I suggested when we
⏹️ ▶️ John were talking about this after last recording session was like you could, you know, you’ve got
⏹️ ▶️ John box and arrow, replace box and arrow with, uh, the ability
⏹️ ▶️ John to draw a free form with your hand. And then an item lets you just pick color and transparency, like a pop over lets
⏹️ ▶️ John you pick color and transparency. So then you’ve got redaction circles, arrows, you know, you got my yellow highlighter that I
⏹️ ▶️ John want 50% transparent yellow, you know, default, like, and then you just draw with your finger on things and yet you can’t make a
⏹️ ▶️ John precise arrow, but you can circle things. You can redact things. You could square put squares around things.
⏹️ ▶️ John It produces a different result than the type of thing you’ll see from this where you get a nice
⏹️ ▶️ John rounded rectangle and a nice arrow pointing it and stuff. Maybe it’s less precise as well, but you would have
⏹️ ▶️ John enough toolbar space for basically for that it would be like I guess just one
⏹️ ▶️ John toolbar button or maybe you could put two. One for color and one for transparency or you could do them both if you did a popover.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because there’s no tool selection, the only tool you have is I guess maybe like brush size or something. But
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, that would be a different way to go with this instead of vector art go with you know finger painting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean yeah, and certainly like you know having like basically a pencil tool Would cover a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that right like if you just if you just added a third tool And it was a pencil that would definitely cover
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of these cases, but Again, there’s a whole but there’s a whole lot of UI state that you have to add
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to that then Like you know whatever you know once you draw the thing then do you pick the color
⏹️ ▶️ Marco afterwards? Or do you try to shove the color thing somewhere on the bar somehow and invent space out of nothing?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then the more things you add to the bar, even if you can make them fit Then they have they necessarily have to be smaller
⏹️ ▶️ Marco each and so then it increases the chances of somebody hitting the wrong thing and being Frustrated or doing something they don’t want to
⏹️ ▶️ John saying replace the box in the arrow
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco with oh I see
⏹️ ▶️ John with the brush, you know, I mean like to two replacement things So just brush and color
⏹️ ▶️ John slash transfer It’s still need some kind of overlay or like dialogue or something to pick the color and the transparency
⏹️ ▶️ John because that’s too much controls to Put in a toolbar But if you but if that’s the only thing in the toolbar you’ve got room for like
⏹️ ▶️ John the one button to pick size the other button to pick color and transparency, you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I guess oh And it’s funny that in pan and scan in the chat Just just said
⏹️ ▶️ Marco zoom would be a handy a handy feature The problem with zoom is that it conflicts with gestures
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for everything else So if you had pinch to zoom for instance then you can no longer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pinch on a rectangle to resize it.
⏹️ ▶️ John You could be the first iOS app with a plus button in the corner that you hit and it zooms by increments plus plus plus plus.
⏹️ ▶️ John That will give you the ratings. That’ll get you the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ADA. Honestly I bet I’m not the first.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure you’re not the first system app out there that probably uses a greater than or less than sign on a
⏹️ ▶️ John UI button to do it and do it like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco zooming in and out. Alright let’s go to our first sponsor before I forget to do sponsors this episode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because we’re a half hour in. Our first sponsor is a new sponsor this week. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an iOS game called Mind Blitz. Mind Blitz is a twist on the traditional
⏹️ ▶️ Marco memory matching game you know like where you flip over cards and you try to remember what card is where and then you try to pair them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up with the matching cards. It’s like that with action puzzle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco elements. So it’s a beautifully designed game. They They have achievements, high scores, power-ups,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco penalty cards, they have different gameplay modes, there’s a blitz mode and an endless mode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this is really like a very deluxe, fancy action version of that old memory
⏹️ ▶️ Marco card game. In blitz mode, you flip over the cards to match corresponding pairs, and then you fill up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this power meter with every match you make, and then you get points, and then you can redeem the points for power-up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cards. And then in endless mode, the player competes for the fastest time without the worry of the timer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or penalty cards. It’s just fastest time to complete matches. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like a more pure version of the memory game. And it’s beautifully designed. I even had some suggestions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the developer. The developer bought the sponsorship probably like two or three months ago
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. It was pretty far, pretty long ago. And I had a few suggestions for like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adjusting some of the timings on some of the things. And sure enough, he
⏹️ ▶️ Marco improved They’re done and they’re in the app and he’s very responsive to suggestions,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the app is just really really solid I really enjoy playing it. It’s a universal app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is mind blitz Universal app just two bucks dollar-under nine in the App Store
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So search the App Store for mind blitz two words or go to mind blitz app.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ATP to find it you guys play this game right
⏹️ ▶️ John did it look like this before I was seven came out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that was always the style.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is very iOS 70, right down to the icon, I think, too. If you look at the icon, that would fit in
⏹️ ▶️ John with the Johnny Ive color scheme, you know, for the
⏹️ ▶️ John standard built-in icons. Yeah, now I play memory games like this with my daughter a lot, where you have
⏹️ ▶️ John to put the physical cards on the ground and get them all set up, and I think we actually have an odd number of them, so one of them
⏹️ ▶️ John ends up always not having a match, and setting up the cards and cleaning them. Yeah, I’m definitely
⏹️ ▶️ John ready to jack into cyberspace and not have to… What? To
⏹️ ▶️ John not have to… To what? You know, what they used to say in the 90s, man, no more physical
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, everything’s gonna happen on the interwebs. They didn’t say interwebs back then, but anyway, they definitely did say jacking
⏹️ ▶️ John into cyberspace. Yeah, it’s nice not to have to clean up the cards is what I’m getting at.
⏹️ ▶️ John And a tip for people who are playing this game by themselves, you don’t have to wait for
⏹️ ▶️ John the sound to finish playing to go for your next pair. So it’s possible, if you’re fast,
⏹️ ▶️ John to have many more than two cards visible at a time. A little tip there for people
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to hone their high scores, but I enjoyed it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Actually, that was one of my suggestions to the developer was in the mechanics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of when you have more than two cards flipped over, like how you know whether a match has succeeded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or failed. And yeah, he’s very responsive. this game is it’s a fantastic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco implementation it really is like a deluxe action card memory game and it’s you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know it’s really it’s you know bringing the best of the old with John’s cyberspace jacking
⏹️ ▶️ John really my cyberspace Jack I was like like William Gibson’s or something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh goodness no it is it really is a great game and the thing that bothers me about this game though which I know I shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey complain about sponsors but it just proves to me how crummy my memory is. Because I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey terrible at this game. And it’s because I have the world’s worst memory.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Wait, John,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how old is your kid that plays this game? Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t even go there. Six years old. I’m pretty good at the game. Maybe I’ve been honed from practicing on the
⏹️ ▶️ John rug with a six-year-old. But I think the thing that really helps in this game is the really deep, saturated colors
⏹️ ▶️ John they have. A lot of times I’m matching by color, not even
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the symbols. You know what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean? Yeah, that helps a lot. I mean, there’s so many nice little touches. It really is a very polished game. So, alright,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thanks a lot to MindBlitz. Go to mindblitzapp.com slash ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or search for MindBlitz, two words, in the App Store. Two dollars, universal app, great game. Thanks a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alright, so another thing I wanted to ask you about, Marco, since apparently this is turning into the Marco Show,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’ve been fiddling a lot with network-attached storage these days.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s pronounced NAS.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, how is that different from the thing you’re putting in the M5? Just kidding.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Oh, it doesn’t need that, believe me. No, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does not. No, it does not. No, but tell me about what you, I know you were seeking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different options, you were talking, well, and even when we were at WWDC, I remember being in line for Presidio once, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you were talking about, should I go Drobo, should I go Synology, or whatever it’s called. What did you end
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up concluding, and how’s that going?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, I should disclose, so basically I decided through various research and Twitter mentions, I decided
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to go with Synology. Synology? Did we ever decide what that is?
⏹️ ▶️ John Tell them to sponsor the show and then they can send your pronunciation guide. Okay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, I’m gonna say signology because that’s how I say it in my head. So Until somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco corrects me Authoritatively. Alright. So anyway, I decided to get a signology
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I ordered it from Amazon and it was like a Saturday night so it hadn’t it wasn’t gonna ship
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for like another day and a half or something like that and Between the time I ordered it and when it was going to ship
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a representative from signology saw me tweeting about this stuff and offered to just send me the thing for free,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which was very, very nice of them. And so I cancelled my Amazon order and they very generously sent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me the one I was going to get for free just so I could have some experience with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they aren’t sponsoring the show, but that was a very nice thing of them to do, and so it’s worth mentioning that. It also, obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is required for probably sensible disclosure reasons for me to tell you that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so I’ve had a lot of time with it, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still have a lot to do with it. I haven’t done that much just because I filled it up with a whole bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of 1, 2, and 4 terabyte hard drives that I had lying around, so it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco takes a pretty long time to alter anything that involves 12 terabytes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of raw storage. But like, you know, it’s the kind of thing, you know, you, oh, I want to, let me try this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco volume and this other kind of structure. All right, start and I’ll come back, you know, midday tomorrow, it’ll be done.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now let me interrupt you real quick. I should have asked you to start off. What problem or problems were you looking to solve by getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a very good question. All right. So the main reason I wanted to get into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco network attack storage is that I’ve always loved having internal hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drives in the Mac Pro, as we’ve talked about many times before, just like Sean. internal drives because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I really really hate more than anything is a desk covered in hard drive enclosures.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hard drive enclosures are terrible. They have usually either really bad cooling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or no cooling so it results in either a tiny like 40 millimeter rattly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fan on your desk all the time going and making too much noise or no cooling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the hard drive overheats and dies in a year and a half. Either way is bad. Enclosures
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are kind of overpriced if you get them empty and if you get them full,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like directly from people like Seagate and Western Digital, then they usually have like really kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of oddly cheap construction and just kind of weird. And it’s very hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get one that’s not USB, that’s actually reasonably priced. Like USB ones are always cheap, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco historically if you wanted to get good speed you’d have to go like Firewire 800 and those were very expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco These days you have Thunderbolt or USB 3 to choose from, although at least USB 3 is finally good. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway, I don’t like little individual disc enclosures, and I don’t like having to have them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on my desk, and having more wires, and more things that make noise right in front of me, and more power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John all this stuff. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what I was gonna say, don’t forget the stupid power adapter.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because every single one of the drives needs to have its own cheap little terrible power adapter
⏹️ ▶️ John and brick that you need to, like, it’s always like a brick and then a cord hanging from it, so you’ve got these little just bricks
⏹️ ▶️ John littering the floor and you need to find someplace to put them.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then the plugs, yeah. I just ordered new drive enclosures now that we’re complaining about them. Wait,
⏹️ ▶️ John which one, what did you get? I’ve been getting these ones from Otherworld Computing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they’re not my favorite, but they’re not terrible. They’re kind
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I like their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco construction, but they’re very expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t like much about them, but I have had several of them, and And unlike almost every
⏹️ ▶️ John other enclosure I’ve gotten, the Power Bricks have not died. So thumbs up on that. Although
⏹️ ▶️ John bulky. Yeah, because that’s the big thing. The Power Brick is the weakest component in these things. And the Power
⏹️ ▶️ John Brick dies, and then you’re just left with this useless thing. And no, I got it because I have spare drives hanging around, and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John doing lots of Mavericks testing. And I’m like, you know, I bet I could really use one more spare drives.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I have the mechanisms. I just have, I don’t want to keep swapping them in and out of my Mac Pro, and I need to be able to hook it up to a
⏹️ ▶️ John laptop. So I just go, all right, let me just get one more enclosure. And I looked around for like Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ John enclosures, but it was like, no, I don’t want to spend that much money. Just, so I bought another one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and the problem is Thunderbolt won’t work on your Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John It won’t work on any of my computers that I would need to test on.
⏹️ ▶️ John so I bought another one, but yeah, I’m in the same situation as Marco. I like my internal drives, and I’m sure what he’s leading
⏹️ ▶️ John to is that, you know, eventually we’re going to get computers, like probably both going to get the Mac Pro, and
⏹️ ▶️ John if we do, no internal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco storage there. That’s exactly it. I mean, and it isn’t just about that. It’s, you know, if you can move to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a world you don’t need a whole bunch of internal drives, then you can…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that enables you to switch to the new Mac Pro if you want to, or to switch to a laptop full-time, or to switch to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an iMac without having a desk covered in hard drive enclosures. Like there’s all sorts of benefits of simplifying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your setup and adding flexibility to shifting a lot of this stuff to a network attack storage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco box. Also just for, you know, physical reasons, I like not having that crap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all over my desk, a network attachment I can put anywhere in the house that has networking. And if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco willing to tolerate wireless, you can put it really anywhere. For me, I like things wired, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I had my house construction, I did run Cat5 wiring or Cat6 wiring to most of the rooms.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I actually have mine in what’s basically my server closet,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is just the closet in my office that I had them install an outlet and two network ports
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in. So that’s where I keep the router and the printer and all the crap. all the crap. Are you worried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about heat inside a closet? I was worried. It is a very big closet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so and so like basically my stress test was I filled the Synology with eight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco disks and had it like restructure the array by rebuild
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the array by replacing one of the disks and then I closed the door and left in July
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for eight hours and then I came back and opened the door and it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it it was like one degree hotter than the room next to it. So it wasn’t a meaningful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem, I don’t think. Anyway, and I still like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s the closet that’s like 10 feet from my chair, I still go over there and walk in periodically to check
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the temperature to make sure it’s not getting too hot. But so far, it never has. So I don’t think it’s going to be a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so my goal really here was, as I said, just flexibility. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can get away from requiring a big hard drive, or requiring multiple big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard drives in my main computer. Because obviously, that world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is ending in Macs. The current Mac Pro is the only one that can do that, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s going away. Even the Retina MacBook Pro doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even have two bays anymore. like you know the old ones you could put you could replace the DVD-ROM drive with a second
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard drive bay which I did for a while you could do that you know the new ones you can’t do that the iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still has two bays has like an SSD bay and a big drive bay but I bet the days of that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are fairly numbered I bet that goes away probably within three or four years so you know obviously we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco moving away from having any kind of replaceable drives in Macs let alone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco multiple bays And again, also, if you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco network storage, then you can also do things like get an SSD for your only drive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on your main computer, or get a computer where SSDs are the only option, and not be too constrained by the size of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SSD. So all these things, very, very good, very important,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and very, basically it’s adding some slight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time and investment now to add a lot of flexibility in the future. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s why I decided to do this. I’ve done a few things with it. I have Time Machine running to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right now I have the drives as one giant array using their dynamic resizing thing, which is kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of similar to what Drobos do, I think. I’ve never owned a Drobo, so I don’t know exactly, but I’m pretty sure it’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same kind of thing, which is, it’s like a software dynamic raid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where it’s, they kind of dynamically manage the storage for you. I don’t think you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have any kind of direct block access to it, so they can do that. So you can like, pop out a small drive and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco add a bigger drive and it expands the array to have more space, stuff like that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m trying that now. The only thing I don’t like about that setup is that it requires
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all eight disks to be reading and writing whenever anything’s accessed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s loud and it’s keeping all of them spinned up almost all the time. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s just inefficient. It’s kind of inelegant. So I think what I’m going to do, I still have enough spare drives lying around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I can move stuff around pretty easily. So I’m going to probably break that array tomorrow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the next day and split it up into like one for my time machine, one for Tiff’s time machine,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and one for our big archive. and maybe that one’s expandable, but the time machines aren’t, et cetera.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One big concern here was backup. And so you guys both have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do you both have Backblaze?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I use CrashPlan.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have both. Okay. Really, I’m curious, what’s your split
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there, John? Like, what do you use each of them for?
⏹️ ▶️ John My computer’s Backblaze, my wife’s is CrashPlan.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s more redundancy, I assume?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, basically. I got back plays years and years ago. I don’t even know if CrashBlank was around,
⏹️ ▶️ John or at least I didn’t know about it then. And when it came time to get a backup thing for my wife’s thing, I’m like, you know what,
⏹️ ▶️ John why don’t I get a different one? Mostly because CrashBlank had been getting good reviews and I wanted to give it a try.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I figured if it’s way better, then I’ll switch. And it’s basically been a wash. There’s advantages and disadvantages to
⏹️ ▶️ John both, so I just feel a little bit better having two different ones. And yeah, it would probably be cheaper for me to consolidate
⏹️ ▶️ John on one, but I like having two different ones and her computer is all SSD there’s no spinning discs so
⏹️ ▶️ John any problems from like inefficiencies due to crash plant being Java or something
⏹️ ▶️ John I assume they’re being masked by her by her full SSD setup and so I’m happy with that there
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m happy with this here and so I just I’m sticking with it for now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean for me I actually I have both also but I crash plan I basically bought for my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mom’s computer and what one thing that’s nice about it is that it emails you a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weekly, I think, report of your backup status. So I can tell, if my mom’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer hasn’t been backed up in two months, I can tell, you know, I should probably fix that somehow next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time I go see her, or call her and tell her how to fix it. So it’s nice when you want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be updated on the status of things. It is very nice for that. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my problem with CrashPlan is that, from my house, it’s just extremely slow to upload. And I’ve seen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many people online talking about similar problems with CrashPlan in particular. It seems like a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco widespread issue that even though I have this massive upstream pipe, they can only use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like 2.1 megabits of it. And I tried all their tips, every, like all their things,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like turn off encryption or change this buffer size or change this limit. None of them had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any effect on that cap. And it just seems like it just depends on like whatever CrashPlan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco node is nearest to you, you know, whatever you get assigned to, like some of them are just slow or overcrowded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and some of them are. And so I basically can’t use CrashPlan myself.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, every time I’ve looked into that, it’s come down to your distance from the data center that
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re transferring stuff in. And it’s like geography, where you are, what ISP you’re on, what the route
⏹️ ▶️ John is to the server you’re eventually connecting to. And so it’s hard. Some people say, oh, that means you shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John get CrashPlan. But maybe the CrashPlan node that you’re going to connect to is way closer to you and has
⏹️ ▶️ John better connection than the Backblaze one. You won’t know until you try it. For me, it’s about even for both of them. Neither
⏹️ ▶️ John one of them ever fills my connection just because it’s big. But I get better than two megabits on both of them. I get
⏹️ ▶️ John like six, seven-ish, varies, sometimes up to nine on Backblaze.
⏹️ ▶️ John CrashPlan may be a little bit slower, but I don’t watch them that closely because really, it’s not like once you
⏹️ ▶️ John get caught up, it doesn’t run for more than 20 minutes every night. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s funny you say that you didn’t get good speeds with CrashPlan because a friend of mine had recommended Carbonite. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I tried that, and it was going take about seven years for all my data to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Carbonite. And then I tried CrashPlan, and this was, when I did my first upload, I want to say it was like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a year, year and a half ago, maybe more than that, and it pretty much maxed my line for like a day and a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey half or something like that. Now it could be that they’re using a data center in Ashburn, which is in northern
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Virginia, which is only a couple hours drive from where we are, and that would be somewhat significant for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey both of you guys. That’s complete speculation. I have no idea if that’s right or not. But I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, you nailed it when you said it. I mean, it was luck of the draw. And Crash Plan worked for me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and had a really good upload speed, although they have a god-awful user interface. And it’s all Java-based, like you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey guys said. And I hate it. But the upload speeds were good. And everything else seems to work reasonably well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I do like getting those updates. So that’s how I landed on Crash Plan. But it was mostly about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey upload speed, which is funny that you said it was terrible for you.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m assuming Marco’s getting to this because he’s going to talk about how online services view his NAS,
⏹️ ▶️ John whether it’s eligible for backup or not, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, exactly. And because that’s the thing, Backblaze, I’ve used Backblaze from my computer and TIFF’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer for I think about three years now, something like that. And we have like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think a total of about three terabytes backed up between the two computers to it. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine. I restored a couple of files from it here and there, and it works. So I like Backblaze a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But Backblaze does not backup network drives. Now, I’ve heard, I haven’t tried this yet, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I might play with this. I’ve heard that if you mount it over iSCSI,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that because iSCSI is kind of treated by the OS as a locally attached disk,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apparently Backblaze can’t tell the difference, but I haven’t confirmed this yet. And so anyway, apparently if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mount iSCSI drives, it will back those up.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was my question about, you mentioned, you’re doing Time Machine to it. Is that
⏹️ ▶️ John one of those things where they’re like, well, it’s not officially supported by Apple, but the NAS manufacturer figures out to make their thing
⏹️ ▶️ John work and every time there’s an OS update you have to wait for the the NAS thing to update to work with it is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they certainly they have in implemented in their software they have some kind of time machine server
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it does work I don’t know if Apple has documented this in any way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John probably not
⏹️ ▶️ John because like NASA’s have been doing that since time machine has existed and every time there’s an update you everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John who has one of these things who isn’t tech savvy is like oh my thing broke why is here I mean you have to understand,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re making it work. And it’s not a big deal, but it’s big enough deal that Apple’s not being careful
⏹️ ▶️ John to make sure they don’t break it every OS update, especially major OS updates. And so that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John why I would be leaning towards, like, that’s why I’ve been worried about a NAS, because direct-attached storage, particularly like
⏹️ ▶️ John direct SATA storage, which is right in there, is the most problem-free way to do time machine.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even external firewire I find ever so slightly flakier than internal drive.
⏹️ ▶️ John My wife has Firewire, although with her system, who knows, it could be the Thunderbolt bridge and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John like that. I have a big Firewire drive attached for her, occasional time machines.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, in theory, iSCSI would fix that problem. Like, you’d still have to get the iSCSI initiator
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to work on the new version
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John of OS X. Yeah, but that’s the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, it’s you hit need. Then you’re like, OK, well, it’s fine. The time machine is fine with it, but does the iSCSI
⏹️ ▶️ John driver work with Mavericks, for example? And how long do you have to wait for them to update the iSCSI driver? And how reliable is that driver?
⏹️ ▶️ John those are the details you know or even stuff like I guess super duper doesn’t care
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well one of us would be in a position to test that John I guess I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could yeah I have all these dry sitting around
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah I mean that’s I suppose like if you if you run with this setup for a while and you’re like okay
⏹️ ▶️ John well you know whatever they did time machine works fine and presumably you’ll eventually upgrade to Mavericks and you’ll say
⏹️ ▶️ John okay well time machine works fine and I could super duper to it and and crash plan or whatever sees it and backs it up
⏹️ ▶️ John then then that’ll be fine. I won’t be that scared to do it, but I wouldn’t want to be the one to find out by buying
⏹️ ▶️ John the big expensive NAS and then trying to get my backup regime to work with it, you know?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I figure, you know, I could always fall back on iSCSI, assuming, you know, like, let’s say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t even tested this, but let’s say Mavericks comes out and it breaks the Synology time machine thing, and Synology
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t fix it soon, which itself is unlikely, I think, because, like, one of the reasons why I picked them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is because they’re very active in development. They have a lot of users. They have a huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco community of people who use and love these things. I have never seen a storage product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’ve very rarely seen any computer products at all that had such a universal acclaim
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as Synology NASA’s. Like when I asked about them, everybody on Twitter loved them. And there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was like, there were zero reports of anything bad. I was shocked how positive the response was.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they really are pretty on the ball with software updates. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco working on a big update now. There’s so much user-created software you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco run on it. They have a whole package store you can browse and stuff. It’s pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco advanced and it seems like they’re really on the ball. That’s generally what you want. You don’t want the manufacturer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that nobody’s using for stuff like this. That’s, I think, more likely to be the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one where some OS update comes out and it breaks something that you relied on and it just never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fixed. You know, whereas if you’re with like the big dominant player or one of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big dominant players, you’re way more likely not to have those problems. Or you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco likely to have those problems be fixed sooner in most cases.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you know what the thing is running? Is it like a free BSD thing in there?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s some kind of Linux or BSD thing. And it has like, it has an Intel Atom processor.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe it’s x86-64, which I was pretty impressed by. It’s like a dual core two gigahertz. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think it was four gigs of RAM. It has pretty good hardware in it. One
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the things I tried was you can, if you want to, you can directly install CrashPlan on it. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tried that to see if that would be any better and it wasn’t, but it’s like, the instructions are like you SSH
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into it. Like first you go enable SSH, then you SSH into it, and you like manually download
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this package with Wget and everything. And so you can do pretty much everything you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can do with a low-powered Linux box right on the thing. So it was. Does it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have built-in stuff? Does it have a DLNA server or anything? It does, yeah. And there’s so many things. I’ve barely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scratched the surface. It has DLNA. It has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iTunes sharing. And again, I’m sure that’s using some kind of undocumented or unsupported API
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by Apple. But it does have an iTunes share. But I haven’t even used any of this stuff yet. I haven’t had time to play with it all yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, because that’s always the, once you go NAS, you’re like, well, once I have a NAS, why don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John I just get a full flat, like get a Mac Mini and hook up a big rated attachment to it. Right, you could. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the big reasons for me, honestly, was simplicity of devices and also cost, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this thing retails for like $1,100. And this is like their high end. It was the DS1813 plus model. It’s fairly new, and it’s eight bays.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a five bay version that’s significantly less. I think it’s $900 or $800.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then you can get, basically, the more bays you want, the more expensive it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But once you put together the cost of a Mac Mini,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even a low-end used one, Mac Minis aren’t that cheap because everybody has some kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of use they have for one. So you can’t really buy a Mac Mini for less than about $500 if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s any good at all. And so you throw in a $500 or more Mac Mini,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco give it some kind of connection. you add like a big enclosure that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has you know four to eight bays in it if you want that to be fast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s gonna have to be probably Thunderbolt and so that’s gonna be really expensive if you don’t care about it being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fast that much you probably at least want it to be firewire 800 USB 3 so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s still you know you’re still talking a lot of cost then you have two things you have two power bricks you have two things heating up your closet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it’s and then you have like the cost savings really is pretty minimal at that point or it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or it’s more expensive going that way. So I looked at that stuff, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco multi-drive high-speed enclosures are really expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you’d end up buying something like that anyway and connecting a computer. But the true Greek way to do it, which neither one of us
⏹️ ▶️ John probably feels like we have time or inclination to do, is get one of the free NAS things, make your
⏹️ ▶️ John own ZFS NAS out of your own BSD box and a bunch of devices. And ZFS is really cool. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m a big fan of ZFS, and people wonder why I don’t build my own NAS out
⏹️ ▶️ John of Z. But I would love for someone to make that product for me to buy, but I’m not going
⏹️ ▶️ John to spend time doing it. I don’t have a ton of time to screw up my storage. I want my storage to be bulletproof, problem-free, supported by
⏹️ ▶️ John a company. Like this analogy sounds like it is. I would prefer it to be from Apple, because
⏹️ ▶️ John then it’s like all one big thing, and I would pay whatever crazy. But they’re not into making storage,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, yeah, honestly, if Apple did make one of these, I probably still wouldn’t get theirs, because it would be some kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of side project for them. They didn’t really care that much about it. and so it probably wouldn’t be very good. But they like the X-Serve raid.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly, yeah. They did make something like this and they no longer make it for very good reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And also, one big advantage that Synology has also over a build-your-own thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that it’s really quiet because it has these two giant, I think they’re probably about 92
⏹️ ▶️ Marco millimeter size fans. They’re big, slow, powerful fans,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and most of the time they’re very quiet. When I first got the thing, I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had it next to my computer, like on a little end table here, because I was still configuring it and still putting drives in and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out, and I figure, all right, I’ll set it up here, and I’ll move it into the closet in a couple days when it’s all set up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I was shocked how quiet it was. The drives make all the noise. The fans are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost inaudible. It was quieter than my Mac Pro. And the Mac Pro, despite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of people complaining about it, I think is a pretty quiet computer, especially given what’s in it.
⏹️ ▶️ John definitely is if you’ve ever owned a G5 before then. Yeah. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way quieter. Yeah, so, you know, it really is, I mean, yeah, I mean, the Synology
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically is just an embedded computer with a bunch of bays and some custom
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software, but it really is a very, very nice implementation of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so once you throw in how nice it is, how flexible it is, how much it can do, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how it’s very cost competitive with building your own, I don’t think there’s much reason to build your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco own, honestly, unless you have very specialized needs that you can’t get with somebody else’s thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John One of my attractions to a NAS is that I wouldn’t have to have it in the same room as the computer, so then I probably didn’t care
⏹️ ▶️ John how noisy it is. Because you’re right, the drives, I know how noisy a drive is. And even if you have a fanless
⏹️ ▶️ John device, which would not be very smart, yeah, the drives make noise. So that’s why I don’t want to buy the new
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple router thing with the fan in it. Because I wouldn’t buy the time capsule
⏹️ ▶️ John It has a fan? Yes, they all have
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey fans. I didn’t know that.
⏹️ ▶️ John The time capsule ones have fans, and even the ones without the time capsule. It’s the same case. They just leave
⏹️ ▶️ John it empty, but yeah, they all have fans, so I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco look at it like.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, plus it’s like this weird vertical, ugly telephone booth thing, so.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I was thinking about buying that because I’m having some range issues. I’ve always had some range issues with the current
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, which is in the aforementioned closet. So the fan wouldn’t bother me that much, but still that sucks that it has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Although, did you know the first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generation Apple TV had a fan and most people didn’t know that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, no. But it was just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really, really quiet most of the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I mean, it was like a Mac Mini, the first generation Apple TV.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like a very, very low spec one. Yeah, that got super hot, even with the fan. Yes, it really did.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, to go back a step, why wouldn’t you just drop like an Airport Express or another Airport Extreme in a different part of the house
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if the house is all wired with Cat 6?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Basically, complexity and interference. I had that set up in a couple of apartments before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I bought the house, because a lot of old apartments have very, very severe range
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems because of what’s in the walls, it’s so old, it’s all like, you know, metal sheeting and brick and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff that is not very radio friendly. And so yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in two apartments I had like the Airport Extreme as the home base station and then like a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Airport Express, usually wired, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very long cable from the base station. And it never worked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that well. Like sometimes Sometimes your devices would pick the wrong one and then the connection
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would just be really bad and they wouldn’t switch to the other one even though it would have a better reception.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Did you have it set up with like that fancy Apple?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco yeah, yeah. That didn’t make a difference? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco WDS is not just an Apple thing, but Apple has like, if you use all Apple stuff, it makes it a lot easier to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, right. And yeah, I tried that and it really didn’t do much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It wasn’t very good. Like if that’s your only option to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good range, then do what you gotta do. But if there’s any other alternative, like if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can just buy a better router and have better range from one router, that’s a better way to go. If that’ll cover
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your area. All right, we should talk about our second sponsor, which is related to everything we’ve just been talking about.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Can you take a guess? Is it FileTransporter? It is, it is FileTransporter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So- I cheated, I knew who it was. You really, you looked? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I looked. That’s such a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But at least I fessed up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this fits in with a lot of what we were just saying. FileTransporter, well, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their website. Their product is just called Transporter. Transporter is an off-cloud, peer-to-peer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco storage drive for privately sharing, accessing, and protecting your files. So what does all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that mean? It’s designed with your modern social lifestyle in mind. FileTransporter is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an enclosure, a drive enclosure, with or without a drive. You can supply your own, or you can buy one directly from them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s an enclosure that looks pretty cool with a network port on the back. So it is basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a NAS enclosure, but with some special software that allows you to do some special things. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one thing is they integrate directly into Finder. And very similar to how Dropbox integrates.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you can use it in a similar way that you would use Dropbox, where you have a special synced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco folder, and you have Finder integration with right-click links and sharing links and stuff like that. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all this data is stored on that physical device that you own, on that physical hard drive sitting in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your house somewhere or your office. And so it isn’t sitting on someone else’s servers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s huge security implications there, huge ownership implications there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you can still, if you have multiple transporter devices, let’s say your friend has one or you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one at home and one at work, you can selectively share files or folders between any two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transporters, any number of transporters, with only the people you select. So it’s nice and secure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco End-to-end encryption with all communication that goes over the internet, so all the data can be read by nobody in transit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you have multiple transporters, they will automatically sync these shared folders to each other.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you really get a lot of that Dropbox-like functionality, a lot of that convenience of cloud storage,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco without having to have your data be held by somebody else. And not to mention that you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get a heck of a lot more space on one of these things. can get from Dropbox way way cheaper.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So just to give you some idea before we get to the end and I have to tell you pricing anyway, these things are really affordable. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the empty enclosure, the empty transporter, you supply any 2.5 inch hard drive, it’s $200.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can get a 1TB drive built in for a total of $300 or 2TB for $400. And if you use our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coupon code, code ATP in their store, you can save 10%. That’s $40 off the big one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a big chunk of money. So you can look at these things at file transporter.com.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you go to file transporter.com slash ATP, they’ll know you came from us. That’s file transporter.com slash ATP.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what else does this do? So you can have automatic offsite backup.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a huge use of if we were just talking about about you know, now actually, I need to revisit that topic when we get when we get back to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the show. We’re just talking about how the heck do you backup network attack storage? With transporter,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a really great option. If you buy two of them, you put one in your house and one in your office or your friend’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco house or your parent’s house or something maybe geographically far away, then you can have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these things automatically back up to each other all the time. And so you have a constant off-site
⏹️ ▶️ Marco backup in real time. And again, everything is encrypted end to end, so it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really, really secure. And it’s also great for collaboration between people. Let’s say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, John and Casey have to send me their audio files after every show we do. If we were all using transporters,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which we’re working on, but if we were all using transporters, then we could just have this one shared folder
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everyone could just drop their audio in that shared folder and it just syncs everywhere using direct
⏹️ ▶️ Marco traffic between our devices and nobody in the middle able to read the data, including
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the NSA or anybody else. And well, unless they’ve cracked the encryption, but I think that’s unlikely. This is pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good encryption. And so you can have this awesome
⏹️ ▶️ Marco collaboration with very large files that would be prohibitive on other services, or would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just really, really expensive or just not allowed, it wouldn’t fit. This is it’s a really great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solution here for collaboration, for sharing, if you want to have like, you know, one at your parents
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or one at your house, and then you can have like a shared photo directory. So you can take pictures or videos of the kids and have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your parents or grandparents see them. There’s all sorts of uses for this kind of thing. documents.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s just so many uses for having your own personal physical ownership
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a device that is still easily accessible and shareable on the cloud. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s transporter. This is a really great product, really great idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Check these guys out, go to file transporter.com slash ATP. So they know you came from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us and help support the show and check out their product. If you buy one, use coupon code ATP,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all lowercase, save 10% off their already very great prices. So and also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the way, those prices before I forget, there is no monthly fee to use all these different internet connected
⏹️ ▶️ Marco services. So sharing services, they manage like, you know, you don’t have to have your own like dynamic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco DNS thing in the middle so that you can find your transporter. They have a server that manages all the stuff for you. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep track of, you know, the IP for your device. So everything just, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t have to worry about all that. But there’s no monthly fee for that. If you just buy the device, lifetime access to the server is included.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So go to file transporter.com slash ATP to learn more about this awesome device. There’s so much there’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, this is their third sponsorship, everyone I’ve brought up different things that there’s so much to talk about with this device.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Really check this thing out. It’s it’s it’s a great device. A lot of uses and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very I don’t know of anything else in the industry that’s like this. So check them out. Thanks a lot to Transporter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for sponsoring the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, you know what it is? Is if you didn’t want to go the nuclear option of like a Synology or Synology, whatever we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey calling it, or a Drobo, but you still wanted a fairly, really cheap,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but not bad cheap, good cheap, network attached storage that actually does more than just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sit there on your own network that you can never access from anywhere else, this is your ultimate answer. And I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey using one that they sent me, which is very nice of them. And I really, really like it. It really is really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I don’t think it has to be, this is one of the reasons why I’m comfortable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talking about this in the middle of a NAS discussion. I don’t think it has to be mutually exclusive between this and a NAS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think these are different use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey cases. No, that’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re right. I think a lot of people are going to be fine with one or the other, but a lot of people could really use both.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It really is about what’s your use case here. And the Transporter does things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I I don’t know of any NAS that does similar things. And it’s all very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco integrated and everything. And it really is a very unique device and very cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. So back to our NAS backup question. I hope this isn’t too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco boring, so I’m going to go through it quickly. Basically, Backblaze won’t backup network
⏹️ ▶️ Marco attach drives. They might backup iSCSI. I will know that eventually if I ever try iSCSI.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My fear with iSCSI is, as we said before, I’m worried about, like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what if the next version of OS X comes out, and there’s only, as far as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know, two major iSCSI initiators for it. There’s GlobalSan and Addo,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the GlobalSan one’s free. Addo’s 200 bucks, I think. Dave Nanian
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of SuperDuper fame, which is an awesome app for cloning drives and backing up, he
⏹️ ▶️ Marco strongly recommended the $200 Addo one. He said it’s significantly better and that he’s seen a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have trouble with the GlobalSAM one. I haven’t tried either of them yet, but he is pretty qualified to know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like storage and people having trouble from Macs using hard drives. So the guy who makes SuperDuper
⏹️ ▶️ Marco knows that stuff pretty well. I would imagine his support email alone is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a vast treasure trove of Mac storage-related issues. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m inclined to try the add-on one, but then again, it’s like, you know, what happens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if an OS update breaks this? Then you can’t access your shares or your drives or your time machines. So I’m a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wary about that. You know, Windows, I believe for a long time now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for I think for a couple of versions, has supported iSCSI initiation just in Windows.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I don’t think we know why Apple doesn’t do it in Mac OS X, except they just haven’t cared yet or haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had time yet. I don’t really know the reason. I assume there’s no weird patent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco issues or anything. For whatever reason, Apple doesn’t support it directly yet, so you have to have these third-party
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things. And obviously, these are probably kernel-level extensions. And that’s kind of questionable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. John, what do you think about that stuff?
⏹️ ▶️ John I prefer to run no third-party kernel extensions if I can help it at all. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco getting back
⏹️ ▶️ John to the old Mac Pro again, that was the beauty of the thing. That’s why I would buy the biggest video
⏹️ ▶️ John card that come with because I didn’t want to buy an aftermarket video card and have to deal with the video driver because who knows how that would flake
⏹️ ▶️ John out. So I’m totally on board with the, and I slowly weaned myself off every other one of the, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John memory resident hacking things like the various application enhancer and symbol plugins
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff like that. Like I’m just trying to get that stuff out. So I’m really hesitant to bring in anything
⏹️ ▶️ John else like that, especially something for storage and you know, maybe if it
⏹️ ▶️ John was officially supported by Apple, like that’s even more like, you know, fusion drive. Yeah, Apple says, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John not really technically supported to make your own Fusion drives, but it totally is. Like, you can use the command line utilities. Apple’s on
⏹️ ▶️ John command line utilities, and yet I still feel wary that, you know, someone at Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John is not QAing the setup that I’ve created with my external Fusion drive because it’s not part of their QA
⏹️ ▶️ John automation and they’re gonna accidentally break it and not know it, and I’m gonna be the poor sucker that finds out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, exactly. So yeah, I’m not a big fan of the idea of iSCSI.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It sounds like it would be awesome in practice. Not for our network share, because only really one computer can access
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it responsibly at a time. But certainly for each of our computers’ time machines,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would be perfect.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s not the technology. iSCSI is fine. I mean, it’s the fact that Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’d have to install a third-party driver.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Right, it’s a client issue.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And yeah, I’m with you. I really, it makes me very uncomfortable to have to rely on,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or even have installed, any third-party kernel extensions. I really prefer not to or to minimize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. So I’m probably just going to keep with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possibly hacked network setup that they have where they’re just emulating the Mac OS X slash Time Machine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco server or Time Capsule server thing. Because it works so far. You know, I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see in practice. But yeah, I’ll see. So anyway, for backup, obviously backing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up your Time Machine drive to a cloud service is probably not necessary. It might even be problematic because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of its structure. So I don’t back that up to a cloud service. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I should point out, too, there was an article. I don’t know. It’s probably out of date now. I was trying to find it during
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the discussion before the sponsorship. There was an article somewhere. I’d love the link if anybody can find it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That compared all of the popular online backup services and how they handle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac file system metadata. It was from the Arc
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because Arc won, basically. But I can’t find this right now. If somebody finds it, I’ll put the link in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve been complaining about that for years. First, I’ve complained to Backblaze, then to CrashPlan.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s pretty much trivial to create a file with a bunch of Mac-specific metadata, and then back
⏹️ ▶️ John it up, and then bring it back down and see how much of it you’ve lost. In practice, mostly doesn’t matter. But it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John after a certain number of years, especially if you’re pitching your product to Mac users, you should
⏹️ ▶️ John pick up the ball. And Backblaze, to its credit, has gotten a lot better since the way it started years and years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think Arc is still the only one that’s at 100%.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that wouldn’t surprise me at all. Because Arc is like, you know, Backblaze and Crashplan both have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these kind of Java heavy APIs. Or I don’t know if Backblaze actually is
⏹️ ▶️ John No, Backblaze is not Java.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not a good interface, though. Like, the settings pane, I really don’t care for for Backblaze. It’s better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than the Java thing from Crashplan. But it’s not great. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had some weird UI issues with it over time, where it works
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the data is backed up, but sometimes the UI is a little confusing or clunky. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a huge fan of Backblaze’s interface, but Arc is like a real Mac app made by a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco real Mac nerd who obviously is really into getting it very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac native and getting that right. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really respect that. And that’s obviously one of the reasons why he cares so much about getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the Mac metadata right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway. It’s kind of like something that you could talk to Dave Naney about, because a lot of the cases with the esoteric Mac metadata,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not so much that either Backblaze or CrashPlan isn’t doing it because of some technical reason. A lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John times, it’s like a policy decision. It’s like, all right, well, this thing has ACLs, but it’s mounted
⏹️ ▶️ John with the permissions off type of thing. You’re not even sure what the right thing to do is, like, what UID should I attach to this
⏹️ ▶️ John if it’s mounted with permissions off, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John see that there’s an ACL on it as well. Like, you don’t even know what the right thing to do is. Like, what does this
⏹️ ▶️ John person want? And when they restore it, the environment could be totally different, and things could have shifted.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, it’s not always clear what you should be doing. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I think a lot of these bigger backup things are like, look, we can’t even figure out what to do with that thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we’re just going to drop it on the table and make sure that it works. Like ownership
⏹️ ▶️ John is an obvious one. Say you back up something and you delete that account and someone
⏹️ ▶️ John else comes on with an account with the same UID. You have to just forget about ownership. It’s like NFS. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, your UIDs have to match or you need some sort of directory service or some sort of configuration file
⏹️ ▶️ John to map your UID. There’s no real distributed internet-wide
⏹️ ▶️ John identification. And UIDs are so, it’s just a number. It’s not a good way. So
⏹️ ▶️ John the policy decisions surrounding ownership or any other kind of metadata associated with files is difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John and people just want it to work they just want their data back so you’re like oh this didn’t exactly preserve
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not exactly the way it was when I put it up you know what’s different well if the ownership changed you probably don’t care that
⏹️ ▶️ John much unless like one of the things was set UID root and now your application won’t run because you tried to restore it’s…
⏹️ ▶️ John God, file systems are terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Naturally, you had to throw that in there. It wouldn’t be a complete discussion about storage without
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Syracuse file system complaint. Anyway, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my backup solution for the NAS is a time machine I don’t backup to the cloud because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of issues. And the network shares that I’ve created, right now I’m using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ARC on the Mac to back it up via the network mount to Amazon Glacier.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Glacier for those unfamiliar is kind of like S3 in that it’s an Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco storage service that you can you know access just pay-per-use but it doesn’t really work anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like S3 it it’s made for like long-term archival storage of stuff that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably will never have to look at and if you do ever need to look at it you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t mind it being delayed by like five hours to go retrieve it and so for online
⏹️ ▶️ Marco backup it makes a lot of sense in a number of ways there’s There’s a few weird things about it that make it a little inconvenient, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the great thing about it is that it’s dirt cheap. I believe it’s a cent per gig per month, something like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. So backing up a terabyte is like 10 bucks a month. It’s something like that. It’s not as cheap as backblazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crash plan. It isn’t, you’re right. But it’s way cheaper than S3, which I believe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the base rate for S3 is still eight cents a gig. So it’s like eight times cheaper or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, that’s why
⏹️ ▶️ John ARC was a non-starter back when it came out because it was
⏹️ ▶️ John I have like five terabytes up on these free online at least not free
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco these these five dollar a month online backups or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s that now and so
⏹️ ▶️ John to add s3 that that’s too much for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me exactly so and And crash plan the reason I tried is the crash plan does that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco backup network stuff if you tell it to? And as far as I can tell that doesn’t appear as though it’s going to change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anytime soon It seems like that actually is their official policy to backup network stuff, so So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco um, so Backly’s won’t do it. CrashPlan so far will, if you can tolerate their slow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco upstream, if you have that problem from your connection. And ARK will do it directly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to S3 or Glacier, which is awesome and very nicely integrated, but has high storage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco costs per month relative to their services. So there’s no perfect solution
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for most people. For me, I’m using Glacier through ARK, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s going to end up being something like, know, 10 or 15 bucks a month for what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m putting up there. So I’ll see. That’s what I’m doing so far. It’s worked.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I uploaded the whole set already of what’s there so far. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, so far so good. There’s a number of other advantages to ARC as well. We should really talk about this in more detail. Well, honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we probably shouldn’t talk about it in more detail sometime. But one of the cool things about ARC is that it’s storing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco data on Amazon S3 or Glacier, are these services that you kind of control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because you sign up for Amazon Web Services and then it’s your access keys that it’s using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to access the stuff and to put it up there. So you can always use any other S3
⏹️ ▶️ Marco client or access method and look at your data directly yourself without involving Arc.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then the data format, they’ve actually documented the data format and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they even have this open source GitHub restore tool so that you can always look and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see, like, how do you restore data so, like, if ARK’s maker, Haystack’s author, if they ever go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco away or become dicks or something, you can always go and just get your data off there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and, you know, without being, you know, proprietary, locked into someone else’s server. So there’s a number of cool things about it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as long as you can swallow that much higher storage cost than the other options, which is admittedly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a pretty big problem for a lot of data. I think that’s all I have on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this topic so far. What do you guys, do you have anything to add? This has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey been kind of a Marco show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unfortunately, I’m sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually don’t have any particular thing to add on that. I’d love to get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something like that but to be honest my data storage needs just aren’t that big. I don’t generate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that much data. We don’t have a kid, we don’t have fancy cameras. So for me it’s just not a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey need I have. But John I would assume you have at least a couple questions.
⏹️ ▶️ John couple questions. I mean, I still don’t know what I’m going to do when I get my fancy new Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m thinking about why do I have all this data. The stupid dream that I’ve had since I had
⏹️ ▶️ John a Mac 128K with a floppy drive has been every time I get a new computer,
⏹️ ▶️ John and storage space was going up so much, I’m like, all right, on this new computer, I’ll be able
⏹️ ▶️ John to fit everything from my old computer, plus all the stuff I have that I had to take off
⏹️ ▶️ John my old computer because it didn’t fit. So that box of floppy disks next to it, or when I had a hard drive, I had to have
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of stuff that I can’t fit on the hard drive. But it’s not that important. It’s like old stuff. I’m not really into it, but I have to put it on the side. But I’m like, boy,
⏹️ ▶️ John when I get that next computer, I’ll be able to have all my current stuff plus everything from my entire
⏹️ ▶️ John lifetime back. Because it’s so small. How big was the stuff that was on my Mac 128K? How big was the stuff that was on
⏹️ ▶️ John my Mac Plus? And it’s so tiny compared to the hockey stick graph of the iPhone sales.
⏹️ ▶️ John This new hard drive will hold everything I have now plus everything I’ve ever created in my entire life, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John that has never quite been the case. So for example, like I have an external one terabyte here, just holding
⏹️ ▶️ John WWDC videos for like the past three years, right? Cause I wanted to reference them when I’m writing my review and I couldn’t put them on my
⏹️ ▶️ John main drive because if I put them on my main drive, they’ll start to go into my backup vortex. And
⏹️ ▶️ John my main drive is ever so slightly bigger than my other backup ones. And so I’ll run
⏹️ ▶️ John out of room. Like I won’t be able to make the super duper clone because I’d have to exclude, It’s just easier to get them out of
⏹️ ▶️ John there, right? I have stuff backed up on drives that are shut. Like all my Apple videos, I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John do I really need to see the videos from WWDC 2003? Do I need those to be on my hard drive?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I probably don’t, so put them off. And so I keep thinking of that excuse where I’m gonna get, I was like, all right, I can finally
⏹️ ▶️ John bring all that stuff in. Come on guys, WWDC 2003 is your time to be on the hard drive again. Just because it’s convenient for me to get at that. You know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes I just want, I don’t wanna go rummaging through things and figuring out what disc something was on. I just want it all
⏹️ ▶️ John to be there, right? And so maybe the NAS gives me that. It’s like, well, finally, I could put like 12
⏹️ ▶️ John terabytes. Surely I can fit everything in there. And then I won’t feel guilty about having just gigs upon gigs upon
⏹️ ▶️ John gigs of Apple videos and whatever else in there. And I don’t even forget about, I know the people who are like,
⏹️ ▶️ John have tons and tons of both legal and illegal like movies and stuff. I don’t even do that. I don’t even, I have Blu-rays,
⏹️ ▶️ John DVDs. I do not have digital versions of those. So I’m not even entering that area. I’m just talking about my digital crap,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is like maybe, at this point, 100 gigs or so of photos, plus probably
⏹️ ▶️ John more than that. I have more Apple video than I do pictures of my own children at this point. Although
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey they’ll cross
⏹️ ▶️ John over at some point. But the problem is WDC 2013 is like 1080p video, and that stuff is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can download lower res, but still, it is, even the lower res ones are like a gig per session or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John I almost considered downloading lower res and like, no, you’ll regret it later when you have your three petabyte
⏹️ ▶️ John holographic cube, you’ll be
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like, damn it, I should’ve downloaded 1080p because
⏹️ ▶️ John those things are nothing now compared to my holographic cube.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, my rule is like, if it’s something that can be probably easily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco re-downloaded from somewhere in the future, I don’t need to even store it most of the time. And if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do choose to store it, I don’t really need to back that up to more than just like, the NAS has its own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco built-in RAID level to prevent against some of those failures. And Time Machine is another level. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t need to necessarily cloud backup WWDC videos.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, but the thing is, I don’t assume that I can redownload them. And I assume they’ll go away, and I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco to. Right. Just
⏹️ ▶️ John look at their stupid developer documentation URLs. Every single major release, those things break. So I’m like, I’ll forget it. I’m never going
⏹️ ▶️ John to be able to get these videos again. I got to grab them now, and that’s it. I’m never going to find them again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, for me, it’s like some of the stuff. Like Apple has their, the Apple Keynote podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feed. I think they call it Apple Special Events or Apple You know it’s something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John It’s in there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John multiple feeds is the HD one right 1080p one Which is not confusing at all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right and the 1080p one in many cases is just upscaled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so so those I save all of those And I have those in like long-term backed up storage because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do sometimes refer back to them Yeah, and it would suck not to yeah for the same reason you have them I’m sure you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t even have to ask I know you have them
⏹️ ▶️ John I just looked at I just looked at one in real media real like you know dot RM file
⏹️ ▶️ John looking up the exact quote of it like WWE C 1999 and I had it in dot-rm It’s also on YouTube.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, but you made
⏹️ ▶️ John it more difficult to download I tried to lead you from YouTube and the sync issues were off So I’m like, you know what this real media
⏹️ ▶️ John file still plays and it’s actually higher quality than the YouTube one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, so like, you know that like stuff that’s like for historical reference that I’m likely to look back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on like five or ten years out for some reason that I’ll keep even if it’s big videos, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like WWDC session videos, I very rarely find a reason to look back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more than one year on those, and Apple still has those up from a year ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the first time I’m looking for something from five years ago and can’t find it, then I’ll start saving them.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have a VHS tape of a WWDC thing, which I didn’t go to. It
⏹️ ▶️ John was before my time, but a friend of mine who has been going to Apple Developer Conference
⏹️ ▶️ John as far longer than I have was cleaning out his basement. He said, do you want this? I said, you know what, I think I do.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you still have a VHS tape player? I do. It’s in the attic, but I have it now.
⏹️ ▶️ John My Sony VCR that I bought when I got married still works. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco it? Yeah, I think we should wrap up before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco another two hours about VHS tapes and gigs of videos.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I agree. Thanks a lot to our two sponsors this week, Mind Blitz app and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into Twitter, you can follow them At
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M N-T
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco Harmon, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental They didn’t mean to,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental, tech broadcast so long.
⏹️ ▶️ John Polygon Sandwich had a good line in the chat that I suppose she
⏹️ ▶️ John that my kid should play Casey at Letterpress. What a jerk.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Getting back to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t see that. Oh, that’s funny. I bet you I’d still lose.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We got to make that happen just to see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, don’t if you do don’t tell me cuz oh god
⏹️ ▶️ John she sees me playing and she says what are you spelling like? She’s in kindergarten session really know how to spell anything but she
⏹️ ▶️ John You know you should do it like that There’s a lot to be said Casey for the technique that I have Used very
⏹️ ▶️ John often in both this and Scrabble which is like there’s no time limit just start tapping letters You don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John to know if it’s a word many times I’m surprised when I hit submit that the random assortment of letters that I put up a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John turns out to be a word
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, because there’s no penalty for trying to submit a word.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, so I just I sit there and I just try and try and try And
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it doesn’t work quite as well in letterpress as there’s too many possibilities But Scrabble it works really well
⏹️ ▶️ John because you have you just have the letters you have and the number of combinations is actually quite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I just don’t have the patience for that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s why you lose and lose and lose
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not the sound it makes! What is the sound it
⏹️ ▶️ John makes? That sort of phonetic spelling of a sound, sort of an onomatopoeia for the sad trombone,
⏹️ ▶️ John should not have Ps in it. There’s no P at the end of a trombone sound.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, it’s the sad trombone. I
⏹️ ▶️ John that connection. W-A-H, W-A-H, would be a lot closer. Womp womp sounds
⏹️ ▶️ John like you’re banging something, like you’re playing that, you know, that thing where the moles pop up from the arcade. What is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you go. only you would get this worked up about something so mundane.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I complained about it. I hate it. I hate it when I see it because it doesn’t read right. I read it and I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John for the longest time, I didn’t know what it meant. Then I bothered googling and I’m like, that does nothing like sad trombone
⏹️ ▶️ John noise. W-H-W-H would be way better. Just W-O-M-W-M isn’t good.
⏹️ ▶️ John Womp? Like, it really looks like you’re hitting something. It makes no sense. Oh, God.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you disagree? I want no I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t I never really dug into the intricacies of whether my sad trombone spelling
⏹️ ▶️ John Yours you just I mean it’s the Internet’s and they’ve it’s like the at in front of the Twitter replies Which is so
⏹️ ▶️ John dumb like at whatever. I remember when that whoever first invented that I
⏹️ ▶️ John Did not like it and I mean, it’s not like I could fight against it What could you do but you sort of could because
⏹️ ▶️ John in 2007 in January there was like 100 Twitter users or whatever, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So to hopefully get us back on track in the thing that by definition doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You think we’re gonna get back on track
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after that? No, no, God no. So what are we doing for titles? We doing Full Bricktor? We doing Jack Into Cyberspace?
⏹️ ▶️ John I like Full Bricktor. Jack Into Cyberspace is dumb.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Because it’s funny and you said it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I said it to be intentionally dumb. Sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In any case, so I say Full Bricktor and if we have a quorum on that, then that’s good.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now he’ll listen to the show. his name in the title maybe he’ll perk up yeah that’s that’s how we get him
⏹️ ▶️ John listened to one episode I love how everyone tried to blame me for going on vacation
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone totally missed the whom joke
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there were a couple people that nailed it but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John but all the replies
⏹️ ▶️ John that I saw I guess I just only saw the ones that I mentioned me they’re like oh no he said whom it’s clear who it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of people thought Casey wrote that tweet though
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah because you You are you have not shared the credentials for that account with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me and I presume not John either so that’s all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco you know You’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the only one that doesn’t have it Casey John and I both control it without you
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I do not put anything I disclaim all responsibility for tweets on that account. I don’t have the password
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to you guys if you want I used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John to I don’t Don’t want it
⏹️ ▶️ John Because I don’t have enough by my Twitter client situation is fraught enough
⏹️ ▶️ John as it is and I don’t need like multi-client isn’t handled that well by
⏹️ ▶️ John the ones that I use and I don’t want to add to my pile.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Then we’d have to then like go into like that stupid carrot initials ending every tweet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so everyone knows who it’s from.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do the Paul and Storm thing where you do the bracket. You don’t know who Paul and Storm are. I’ve heard of them. This is my Dark Crystal
⏹️ ▶️ John moment for this week. I’m cutting
⏹️ ▶️ John myself off, not even giving you a chance. I’m just like, I’ve just decided you don’t know who that is. You’re right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve heard I’ve heard those two words or three words
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John As a unit yeah and good night
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Don’t worry about it, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John worry about it. Hey
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Arlington, Virginia, that’s relatively close to me There you musical duo
⏹️ ▶️ John They have a joint Twitter account was the point and they do square bracket capital P square bracket for Paul and
⏹️ ▶️ John s for storm before each tweet is a system.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If we shared the credentials for that account, I think part of the fun would be never signing the tweets,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and everyone, including each other, could guess who the hell had posted them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Although, I don’t know, I suppose it would be pretty obvious, because I’d use whom everywhere. Jerks.