131: Finding Your Way Back In
21 Aug 2015Skylake power savings, John’s superior ECC RAM, iPhone rumors, and Marco’s obscene power switch.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show:
- Microphones and Electronics
- Follow-up:
- How Intel Skylake is faster
- ECC RAM
- Encrypted backups and password management strategies
- Jason Snell on Alphabet on Upgrade (Overcast link)
- Overcast playlist modification from the web
- iPhone rumor time!
- Post-show:
- John, the FiOS Fairy, and wireless routers
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Chapters
- Pre-show: Marco vs. SM7B
- Follow-up: Skylake
- Follow-up: ECC RAM
- Sponsor: Lynda.com
- Encrypted-backup lockout
- Follow-around: Alphabet
- Overcast playlist requests
- Sponsor: Hover
- iPhone “6s” rumors
- Sponsor: Harry’s
- iOS Force Touch predictions
- Post-show: John’s router
Pre-show: Marco vs. SM7B
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I installed the world’s most expensive power switch. There
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a product by the audio company called Sheep, which I like a lot. It is actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pronounced that way. And they sell a lot of products, mostly headphone amps and stuff, most of which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I own or have owned at some point. And they’re great. And they sell a product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco called the Word, the W-Y-R-D.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, so Sheep sells the Word, so it’s the Sheep Word?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, so I have a word between my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB hub and my audio interface. And the purpose of the word
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is to provide power isolation. It’s basically like the USB equivalent of a ground loop isolator for audio.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You ever have to use one of those, like in car audio or anything?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know what you’re referring to, but I’ve never had to use one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s literally just like to make sure there’s no like physical, like I think it uses transformers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something. I don’t know, John, you probably can explain it better. More than meets the eye. Yeah, basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it electrically isolates the two sides, in the case of a ground loop isolator, of an audio signal,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the case of this word, of a USB signal. And when I was originally using the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wonderful, but incredibly picky Shure SM7B microphone, which in case that’s the same one that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made you get, at first, that neither of us are using anymore for many reasons, one of which is that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just incredibly picky and incredibly unforgiving of room noise. It’s like a combination
⏹️ ▶️ John of you and me. Yeah so anyway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of them that one of the many stupid things that I that I threw money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at to try to fix The sm7b and make it less less hissy on the low end of the track
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Besides I actually bought a gold-plated cable which was incredibly stupid But somebody told me that these Mogami
⏹️ ▶️ Marco XLR cables make a big difference And this is what all studios use and
⏹️ ▶️ John of course they do well Did you put you might have had it backwards because they’re directional?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, actually XLR cables are kind of just because there’s always like a there’s one male and one female and
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway I’m trying to make an audiophile joke. I don’t know enough about this insanity to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know anyway But the other thing I did was I bought this word because I figured maybe just maybe there’s like you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know some some noise Coming in from the computer and the main reason I have it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is is Was for that but the reason I keep it now is because I really just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like having a power switch for my USB pre to and And I could just unplug it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then plug it back in to the USB port when I want to use it. Like Casey, it sounds like you do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I don’t want that. I want an actual power switch. So I use a sh** word
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on my audio interface primarily as a $100 power switch.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is entirely in keeping with your whole thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know. That’s why I didn’t want to admit this to anybody.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine to admit. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John the gold-plated cable is more shameful.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I was desperate. So here I had this mic that everyone was telling me this mic is amazing, it’s awesome, all you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need is a really good preamp. Okay, I bought a really good preamp. Not cheap! And then, oh, there’s still some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hiss at the bottom. And I was like, oh, actually, oh yeah, maybe your cables are introducing noise.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, XLR cables are balanced, and so it is extremely unlikely to introduce
⏹️ ▶️ Marco noise. I don’t know the electrical details, I think it might actually be impossible, but it is extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unlikely at any rate. So, I thought, you know what, a Mogami XLR
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cable, it was like $35 or $40 or something for like a 6 foot. I’m like, let me just try it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, any other XLR cable is like a dollar a foot maybe. You know, like this is like $35. Let me try it. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco desperate. I have all this noise and this mic I really want to use and this mic is awesome in every other way and everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else seems to have no problems with it. Merlin uses one, Jason Snell uses one, Michael Jackson used one, Robin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Quivers uses one. Everyone else has no problem with it. So maybe I should try this and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe the problem must be me. Nope. The problem is the SM7B. And it turns
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out, as I learned later on after throwing lots of money at mine trying to get rid of the background hiss behind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything, if you go to Shure’s website, they actually have a little microphone comparison
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. And their sample has the hiss too. And it turns out that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know the details of how this works. Again, I’m not an electrical engineer. John almost is, right? The computer engineering thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco explained it on your show. Me as well. Oh you too Casey? I didn’t know you were computer engineering. Mm-hmm. Okay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so you guys should both be telling me but basically there’s inherent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco noise in any given amount of resistance and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inherent resistance of the SM7B it is so low output it needs so much gain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that just the inherent resistance in it makes it so that there’s oh even even with perfectly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clean gain there will always be a certain base level of noise in every mic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the SM7B is so incredibly gain hungry and needs so much gain to be audible, so low output,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that that base level of noise is always audible. So there is no way to make the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SM7B noiseless. So all that money was mostly wasted. All
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that hassle was a huge pain in the ass and a huge waste of time, money, and effort, and aggravation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And now I just use a different mic which is way cheaper and better. Can’t you just filter that out? You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t. So that’s what I was doing. So my step in while editing the podcast, my first two steps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were always a you know convert everything, line it up, and then I would bring in each of our tracks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into Adobe Audition because there’s you know most most wave editor programs will have some kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of thing where you can you can select a portion of silence that contains basically only noise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like when the person is not talking and they haven’t hit the mute switch yet. So a section of the track that contains only noise, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can select that, you can say profile this, and then in the whole track remove that profile of noise.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Audacity has one of these, it’s really not very good, it leaves a lot of audible artifacts in it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Audition has a really good one, Adobe Audition. For all three of our tracks, I would bring them in there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I would noise profile the hell out of them to really get rid of that. The problem is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not a perfect removal, it still does leave little bits of it, so like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the silence you wouldn’t hear it between somebody’s words but like as they would talk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you would hear like the noise come in and out a little bit and it was very subtle but it just drove me nuts because it really and like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is like there’s just some some portion of I know sound soap is a similar kind of thing everyone has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know their things that they that they like that they use but all these things were the same way but they always leave
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit of artifacting in there you can’t perfectly remove it basically or at least without
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really muffling the sound which I also was not willing to do. So yes you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can remove noise but not perfectly and it’s better to eliminate the source of noise in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first place. Anyway I’m using a new mic tonight so I don’t want to tell you what I’m using yet but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m testing I’m testing different mics for an upcoming review.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well so after you had told me to get the SM7B and then you said no no no no no
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get the crap what is it the beta something something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something. I first told you to get the beta 58a because that’s because I had used that I got one I’m like oh my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco god this is amazing and then afterwards like two weeks later like a month later I told you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wait can you still return that because I just discovered the beta 87a which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way better than the 58a it sounds a lot nicer to me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it has none and it has no other downsides like what makes the beta so great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that they have incredibly high output so this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll do a quick side note here. If you ask people about microphones, usually you’re gonna hear from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people who know certain ones are the classics. Because microphones don’t change very often.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like the SM7B I think came out in 1987 or something. And most of the, the betas came out in the 90s.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mics don’t change very often. They don’t come out with new models all the time. And many of them have been around for 20, 30 years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All of them have some kind, all the well-known ones have some kind of history of oh, well this one was used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on these albums these singers and or this one this is this has been in radio studios for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for decades like they all have these these these backgrounds of being classics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being well known and so if you if you ask people that recommendations I’ll often recommend these classic old mics because they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have like nostalgia or because they have reputation from forever ago the problem is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the I don’t know 90s to now there has been a huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco movement towards NIB magnet driven mics rather than the old kind of magnets that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sucked. Like the newest models many of them have switched over to use those and mics that are made with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those usually have way higher output levels and so therefore
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a way higher signal-to-noise ratio so way lower noise and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually the the microphones that were recommended for years are the old kind and they are a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pain in the ass to use if you’re trying to get rid of the background noise or have none of it to begin with, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re not in a professional studio. And the new ones are usually way better, but no one’s recommending
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them because, you know, how many people buy more than one podcast mic to even do a comparison?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you ask people online, you’ll hear from recording engineers who’ve been working in studios for 30 years, and they’ll tell you all the old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones. So that’s why I’m working on a microphone review. Anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, it’s funny because the 58A that I’m rocking. I think I have that right. The 58A that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m rocking, when we were recording, I think it was analog, two or three weeks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago, all of a sudden Erin comes like bombing in the room, which is extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey abnormal. So of course, I’m thinking like Declan is near death or something like that. Well, she goes reaching
⏹️ ▶️ Casey behind my laptop screen. And I thought, well, okay, that’s fine, but weird. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it turns out that our house phone, which never rings except for telemarketers was ringing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a telemarketer. I’m sitting literally three feet from it. I had no idea and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the best of my knowledge I don’t believe that even came through on the track
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and this is like two or three feet from where the microphone is. That’s how unbelievably good the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 58A is. So if the 87A is even better I don’t even know what to say like that’s just phenomenal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right so the 87A basically it has all the advantages of the 58A which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco insane background noise reduction because and and they these are super cardioid so they’re very unforgiving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you move side to side or if you back up like you will lose volume very quickly but in a practical home
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcast studio that’s actually a really good thing because you’re probably working in your home office there’s probably other things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in your house that might make noise and so it really is nice to have extreme background noise rejection
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know if the cost of that is you have to be pretty on top of the mic oh well you know that’s it’s pretty easy to snap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up to stand up a mic if you pay attention so and that’s easier than trying to eliminate every source of noise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a typical house for most people. So, the 87A has all of that same characteristic,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but better sound quality. Because the problem with the 58A is that it really is kind of muffled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sounding and kind of flabby in the lower mids, if that makes sense, or like the upper bass. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it kind of sounds like really big and boomy a little bit too much. And so, Casey, for you, I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco EQ that out. But sometimes, like when I hear you on other podcasts, sometimes they don’t EQ it out and I’m like oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he should be using the 87 and EQ can only do so much to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you know given because it a lot of people once they learn a little bit they think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh it’s all about frequency response curves and you can just make any mic sound like any other mic by just adjusting the EQ and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no it doesn’t really work that way there’s other variables and yeah anyway that’s it for mics that’s all I have I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even think this is gonna go in the show. This is really inside baseball.
Follow-up: Skylake
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we should do some follow up and let’s start with Intel Skylake and how apparently they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John Not cheating. It was a question when we discussed it last time, like how are they getting the power savings? Because we hadn’t heard
⏹️ ▶️ John any of the details and apparently not all the details are out, but some some of the details are out
⏹️ ▶️ John on the typical Intel trickle of information about their new chips. Our second thing, I had a good
⏹️ ▶️ John story about this. Put a link in the show notes. What it comes down to, they talk
⏹️ ▶️ John about the things that make it go faster. It’s a little bit bit wider, there’s a little bit more instructions in flight,
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit more parallelism that can extract. But the power savings, it’s just more of the same stuff, but it’s cool. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John Intel processors and all processors for a long time had the ability to throttle themselves down to slower speeds
⏹️ ▶️ John when they when they don’t need to be used and then throw themselves up when they need to be used. And they do this on on a
⏹️ ▶️ John scale that makes sense to CPUs. Like I think when a lot of people conceptualize it, you’re like, OK, and when
⏹️ ▶️ John when like my audio compression thing finishes and I stop using the mouse, then
⏹️ ▶️ John like a couple seconds later the CPU drops down to a slower speed and then when I run a Photoshop filter
⏹️ ▶️ John it runs to a faster speed. That’s human scale. CPU scale, the CPUs
⏹️ ▶️ John most of you are using now, they change frequency in, you know, in tens
⏹️ ▶️ John of milliseconds, right? So they’ll do a bunch of instructions, realize there’s not that much more to do,
⏹️ ▶️ John or the operating system will signal them there’s not much more to do and they will 30 milliseconds later
⏹️ ▶️ John go into a slower speed mode so they’re they’re going faster slower faster slower many times in a single
⏹️ ▶️ John second and the operating system is involved because you know this commute some communication about it thinks
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s okay for the if it wants to go into energy-saving mode the if the CPU is trying to save energy the CPU doesn’t think it has a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of jobs to schedule and it’s you know like the there’s not a lot of CPU usage you can say okay you can scale
⏹️ ▶️ John down I can still at my work done that type of thing well in a sky like
⏹️ ▶️ John CPUs rather than having the operating system communicate back and forth but takes which takes a long time just get
⏹️ ▶️ John get the message you know relatively speaking on the scale of milliseconds takes a long time for the operating system to
⏹️ ▶️ John figure out that things are kind of chilling down on the computer tell the CPU hey there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not that many processes that want the CPU as compared to a few moments ago so it’s okay for you to crank down
⏹️ ▶️ John send that signal to CPU the CPU gets at CPU honors it and then things that may have changed in that interval. So instead
⏹️ ▶️ John Skylake CPUs are taking over this responsibility so they can change frequency in one millisecond from
⏹️ ▶️ John faster to slower. So basically on a millisecond to millisecond basis the CPU can decide how you know
⏹️ ▶️ John what what its clock speed wants to be. And then there’s the usual stuff of turning off execution units when they’re not used. They’re doing more
⏹️ ▶️ John of that more granular like if no one’s using the AVX2 extensions just turn that unit off entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John because it tends to be used for specialized purposes. They tweak the caching a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John to redistribute the memory they’re using for cache. They put the cache out farther from the chip so it can be…
⏹️ ▶️ John so the the ED RAM cache that some of these chips can have inside of them
⏹️ ▶️ John can be used… it’s cache coherent all the time so it can be used by other parts of the system like the graphics system and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway the… oh and then one more interesting thing is that the Skylake CPUs
⏹️ ▶️ John can go way way down, apparently down to 100 megahertz. But this
⏹️ ▶️ John at the process size that we’re using, the leakage current becomes a factor, like how much electricity
⏹️ ▶️ John is just going through these things, even when they’re supposedly off. And so there’s kind of an it’s kind of like driving a car, there’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John an optimum fuel mileage, like the optimum speed for getting the best fuel mileage is not one mile an hour, and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not 100 miles an hour, it’s somewhere between there. Well, for a CPU, there’s an optimum like
⏹️ ▶️ John how optimum power using speed so because if you go really really fast then
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously using tons of power because the power usage is like this the square of the frequency or whatever but
⏹️ ▶️ John if you go super slow you think isn’t that great why don’t just go slower if it’s the square of the frequency we go slower and slower we’ll just save more and more
⏹️ ▶️ John power but there’s a certain amount of leakage that happens all the time if you go super slow it’s gonna take you longer to do the calculation
⏹️ ▶️ John so if you go down to 100 megahertz all of a sudden it’s taking you 10 100 times as long to do the calculation
⏹️ ▶️ John which means you are staying in the 100 megahertz mode for a really long
⏹️ ▶️ John time and during that whole time you have all the leakage of all the transistors that that are
⏹️ ▶️ John you know powered up and you know that have power going to them even if they’re in the off position so you want to find the sweet spot
⏹️ ▶️ John where you get the work done as fast as possible but you keep the the clock speed as low as possible and
⏹️ ▶️ John this is another thing that the CPU does to try to find that sort of mileage sweet spot in the
⏹️ ▶️ John car analogy there’s some other stuff in there as well people Let’s just read the article, although I just tried
⏹️ ▶️ John to summarize it. I did a bad job of it. But anyway, Intel, filled with clever people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It sounds like this could be a pretty big deal, though. I mean, the early reports that we’re seeing from early
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reviews, rumors, tipsters here and there are all basically saying that Skylake is probably going to be a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really big deal in power savings.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And this is the type of stuff where you can imagine, like, this is the thing I like to see in CPUs. They have all these systems
⏹️ ▶️ John for throttling the chips up faster and slower and saying, going to shut off this section of the chip when it’s not in use. DevTools has been doing that for
⏹️ ▶️ John years and years and years. And there’s always something where you where like you have an established system where
⏹️ ▶️ John in this power mode, the operating system communicates with the chip. And it’s like, isn’t that a great feature? Like whenever they come up with that, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John several chip revisions ago, it sounds like it’s the best thing since life spread. But as those chips go out there, they realize
⏹️ ▶️ John now if you want to squeeze any more power out of it, the limiting factor is that lag between when the
⏹️ ▶️ John operating system determines that we should slow down to when we actually slow down during that time. so much might have
⏹️ ▶️ John changed in the instruction stream that actually we might want to be speeding up at that point, we might have missed the part when we should have slowed
⏹️ ▶️ John down. But you can’t make that kind of change. It’s significant. It requires a damn it,
⏹️ ▶️ John the tick, whatever the hell it requires the thing where you do where you make a, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John architectural change, because that’s not a small change saying, we’re going to do it all on chip versus we’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ John have the operating system communicate these things all the time. So you just kind I got to wait
⏹️ ▶️ John for the next big revision for them to try an entirely different strategy
⏹️ ▶️ John And things like well when the process I was down at 14 nanometers suddenly the leakage Is
⏹️ ▶️ John the leakage current is a big problem and so now we have to actually find that sweet spot We can’t just say you know what lower frequencies are always
⏹️ ▶️ John better because that’s not true anymore You go down too low and you take too long and you’re just leaking Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John chips are weird and getting weirder all the time but Skylake looks like all the ideas they had, that they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John known they should have done the past few revisions, you’ve got to wait because these things take years and years to get
⏹️ ▶️ John designed and tape out and qualified and all that good stuff.
Follow-up: ECC RAM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so speaking of hardware, do you want to tell us about ECC RAM? Because apparently we have all the things to talk about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John ECC RAM. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is more good news on the ECC RAM front. This is from the world’s most interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John excited. I think this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good stuff. It’s interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, I know.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m excited for ECC RAM. Hey, I don’t get file system integrity until 2017 or whatever. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is what I have to tide me over. So, anonymous source talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John ECC RAM. ECC RAM, as we’ve known it and discussed, it requires support from the memory controller
⏹️ ▶️ John because basically the RAM chips have an extra thing on them that holds the parity information and it sends
⏹️ ▶️ John all this information out to the memory controller and the memory controller says, you sent me this info and here’s the parity info and it will
⏹️ ▶️ John use the parity info to determine if there are any problems and correct the problems that it can, that’s why it’s error correcting code.
⏹️ ▶️ John We should just put a link to the Wikipedia page on ECC or error correcting code or parity and you can figure out how it works.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s up to the memory controller to do that. It gets all the info from the chip, reconciles it all, corrects any errors, and passes it on.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s what I’ve got in my Mac Pro. That’s what all the Mac Pros have. That’s the feature
⏹️ ▶️ John that I want, the error correcting, ability to correct small errors in RAM
⏹️ ▶️ John that happen. Increasingly, we’ll get to this in another piece of followup, happen much more frequently.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sorry for a quick interruption. Interestingly, the current Mac Pro, while it has allegedly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco workstation GPUs, they don’t use ECC RAM on the GPUs and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s been a lot of problems with the with the 2013 cylinder Mac Pro and the GPUs in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and you know maybe and and if you put you know six gigs or whatever VCC GPU
⏹️ ▶️ Marco RAM in there it would be a lot more expensive in all likelihood and that’s probably why they didn’t do it but it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of unfortunate that that isn’t even an option on the current Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John Wasn’t there something about that GPU also not really being one of the pro GPU is being more like a
⏹️ ▶️ John Souped up consume one of the consumer GPUs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s basically a gaming GPU. That’s rebranded and adjusted slightly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s and that’s unfortunate again. It’s like I That that computer that cylinder drives me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nuts. It really does. It’s like I there in so many ways I want one in so many ways. It’s terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and And like it Apple keeps narrowing like certain product lines like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new MacBook one ding and the new Mac Pro they keep narrowing further
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and further the question of who is this for and I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they’re going a little too far with that a lot of times and with a lot of these modern products that like they’re by narrow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by keeping narrowing and narrowing everything and and making it for fewer people like the old Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro was for a lot of potential people I mean And it was always expensive compared to the other ones, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was basically a generic tower made of Apple hardware. It was like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a, not generic, but you know, it was a tower. You could do anything you wanted really to the inside.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It could be in lots of different configurations for lots of different types of needs, ranging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the way from power user geeks all the way up to video editors and special installations and everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that. Because the new Mac Pro just cuts off so much of that because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is so specialized. They really like, they lopped off a huge part of the market. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the MacBook One, I feel like it’s the same kind of thing where it’s like, you know, a lot of people like it. It looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really cool. It feels great. It’s very portable. But some of the decisions they made,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which didn’t seem entirely necessary, we talked about both these things a lot, so I’ll wrap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it up. But some of the decisions they made with the MacBook One and the new Mac Pro, it cut off so much of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco potential market for maybe looks, maybe, I mean, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s some benefits here and there,
⏹️ ▶️ John In the case of the Mac Pro, it’s just like the ad said, they pushed the human race forward. It’s just they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey an awesome job on
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Like, it’s a little bit flaky. I kind of think of the first cheese grater,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Power Mac G5, mine had a chirping power supply and still does, as it sits in my attic somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sounds like the the 2013 Mac Pro a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John issues with that machine is a lot of software related issues Especially if you try to run the thing with a
⏹️ ▶️ John retina ish display attached to it You just mentioned the GPU issues
⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s not it doesn’t like it’s supposed to be this workstation class machine but doesn’t have ECC VRAM
⏹️ ▶️ John and What was it some other problems with the GPUs that we’re talking about they failure rates or whatever it just
⏹️ ▶️ John wait for revision to you The 5K iMac you have right now has the same problem in terms of the GPU overheating
⏹️ ▶️ John when you try to play games. It’s just that you don’t play games, so you don’t care. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco wait for revision two.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, honestly, my review of the iMac 5K,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco roughly one year in, it came out last October, so almost one year in. My review of the 5K iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is I have zero complaints. It is great. Yeah, I would love it if the fan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was silent under full handbrake transcoding load, like the Mac Pro, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the iMac it is audible, but that’s it. Like, it is amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in every other possible way. And the screen is so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good that it makes every other screen, including the 15 inch Retina MacBook Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look muddy by comparison. Like, it is so good. It has, like, the same way the Retina
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Pro ruined every other screen for me when it came out, the 5K iMac screen has ruined every other screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me now, including that one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, when the next revision of Mac Pros come out and they finally decide to make a 27 inch monitor
⏹️ ▶️ John out of that same screen that’s in Marco’s iMac and you put them both together, maybe second
⏹️ ▶️ John time’s the charm, we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see. Yeah, I’ll probably get one of those combos eventually. All
⏹️ ▶️ John right, but I still didn’t get to the good news about ECC RAM. Sorry, we’re actually going somewhere with this. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I described how ECC RAM works on my Mac Pro, like it’s those extra chips on the thing, it sends it to the memory controller, so you
⏹️ ▶️ John need, the RAM is more expensive because you got extra chips, memory controller is more expensive because it’s got to do extra stuff and it’s specially designed
⏹️ ▶️ John to do this and then it passes the information back to the CPU. Well in DDR4, the
⏹️ ▶️ John upcoming or current I think the stuff is out now, standard for RAM, ECC
⏹️ ▶️ John is built directly into the chips. So it’s not like the
⏹️ ▶️ John DIMMs send the information to the memory controller and the memory controller looks at the information that was sent along with the parity
⏹️ ▶️ John information, reconciles it and moves it on. has no idea that ECC is involved. It happens all entirely on the DIMM.
⏹️ ▶️ John Still has still requires extra hardware and you know to store all that information but it’s transparent to the memory controller.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you can basically take this ECC, not all DDR4 but some of them can,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can take these ECC DDR DIMMs and shove them in any machine
⏹️ ▶️ John that supports like I guess the physical form factor and everything else involved with it but the memory controller doesn’t have to be special
⏹️ ▶️ John which means it is presumably less expensive and less cumbersome and it’s harder for Intel to segment their
⏹️ ▶️ John marker and all that other stuff. There is a little bit of extra cost because like I said the memory
⏹️ ▶️ John is going to cost a little bit more and if you’re soldering it to the board you got to find maybe more room to solder the stuff but
⏹️ ▶️ John as DDR4 becomes the standard across the entire industry it’s that
⏹️ ▶️ John that could be the backdoor for ECC. It’s basically like you get it whether you want it or not it’s built into the chips
⏹️ ▶️ John and you don’t have to worry about memory controller support or anything like that. And the only possible downside
⏹️ ▶️ John is that the on-die ECC that’s on the DIMMs themselves will only catch errors related to
⏹️ ▶️ John the chips on the memory, you know, the memory chips themselves. It won’t catch anything that happens like
⏹️ ▶️ John when the signals are on their way from the memory thing to the memory controller. And our anonymous
⏹️ ▶️ John source originally said the vast vast majority of all DRAM errors are related to the things on the chips, but
⏹️ ▶️ John then corrected him or herself later to say, you know what, all of the errors are related to things that
⏹️ ▶️ John happen on the chip because even if you having the separate
⏹️ ▶️ John thing lets you correct the the things between the DIMM and the memory controller you still have to go from the memory controller to the CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John bottom line is those those interconnects are fairly reliable so this
⏹️ ▶️ John is basically the way that we’re all gonna get ECC it seems and then finally there is a link
⏹️ ▶️ John to a PDF talking about various problems with you know modern
⏹️ ▶️ John RAM and the size that we’re fabbing things and everything and it talks about the
⏹️ ▶️ John bit failures and the times between them and so on and so forth and the conclusion it comes to is the most effective way to
⏹️ ▶️ John deal with variable retention time failure bits is generally
⏹️ ▶️ John believed to be ECC and this whole thing about new memory that
⏹️ ▶️ John the modern memory the size that’s fabbed out that the problems inherent in fabbing memory it’s smaller and smaller sizes
⏹️ ▶️ John basically leads to the conclusion that all RAM is gonna have to be ECC if we keep
⏹️ ▶️ John shrinking it because as you make as the process size gets smaller and smaller on RAM
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s much easier for a bit to be perturbed one way or the other when just everything is so much smaller and so you need
⏹️ ▶️ John ECC just to make the things work reliably period so there it’s gonna be built into all RAM eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John if RAM keeps shrinking no matter what is the potential conclusion from this paper so we will put
⏹️ ▶️ John all those links in the show notes Ben Hayes wrote in with a stat I think it’s come up the past time last time we talked about ECC
⏹️ ▶️ John something that I’m not sure about how accurate this is but I will link in the show notes it says 96%
⏹️ ▶️ John chance of having a bit error in three days if you have four gigs of RAM so
⏹️ ▶️ John like these these bit errors are happening if you believe that stat there is another paper that I’ll link that says
⏹️ ▶️ John DRAM errors in the wild a large-scale field study
⏹️ ▶️ John this is from 2009 so it’s not particularly new so things may have changed for the worse or the better depending
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s probably for the worst if ECC is not involved since more than 8% of dims are affected by errors each
⏹️ ▶️ John year so this is happening to all of our computers unless you have ECC like me
⏹️ ▶️ John whether you know it or not most of the time it doesn’t make a difference it’s probably not corrupting your data it’s probably not doing anything
⏹️ ▶️ John wrong you just got to get unlucky once
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fair enough yeah and and also it is worth pointing out that while there might be a bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco error somewhere on a RAM chip that also might not be in a section of RAM that is currently being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used and will and will cause a problem for you.
⏹️ ▶️ John could be totally unimportant. It could never even be read. It could be read and discarded. It could be,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the high bits of something that gets masked out. It could, you know, the chances are very good that nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John bad will happen. But if there, you know, if you believe the first stat where it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John basically, every three or four days, you’re going to have a bit error, you’re just spinning that roulette reel multiple
⏹️ ▶️ John times a week. And over the course of many years, maybe maybe you get one kernel panic because you don’t have ECC RAM.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I’ll, you know, I’ll take it. Like, don’t give me that kernel panic.
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Encrypted-backup lockout
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, just a little bit more follow-up. Jason wrote in and said, I made a new partition
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on my hard drive and the hard drive got corrupted. I had a backup, but the backup is encrypted with a strong password,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is only in my key chain, which is only in the file vault and encrypted user account in the corrupted partition
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and of course in the encrypted backup. So I have a really nice backup, which is a total brick until quantum
⏹️ ▶️ Casey computers can crack the AES-256 encryption. I see many friends doing backups using strong
⏹️ ▶️ Casey passwords and a password manager and checking every quote encrypt box they see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey By themselves, these are all good, but together I found out that they can be dangerous. I didn’t hear a read about that before. Perhaps worth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a warning. I’d love to hear your comments. Yeah, you have to be careful about that stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s a really good point though, because I definitely tick all the encrypt check boxes and without
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one password on a device somewhere, I am completely lost. That being said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have one password on two different Macs, an iPad and an iPhone. So it would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey take a pretty catastrophic issue for all of those to go away. And by the way, it’s stored
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Dropbox, so I’d have to lose Dropbox as well. But it’s certainly something to think about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s why they say your backup isn’t really a backup until you try restoring from it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What if you lost Dropbox? Like, what if your Dropbox file got deleted or corrupted or whatever?
⏹️ ▶️ John Even before you start thinking about what if you lost Dropbox, putting it on Dropbox at all. Almost everything you
⏹️ ▶️ John can do to protect yourself from the scenario he’s describing weakens your encryption. Because now you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John saying this super strong encryption, these super strong passwords, if Dropbox’s encryption
⏹️ ▶️ John is crappy, or their security is bad, or whatever, like you’re basically, you’re combining
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of different kinds of encryption, but not layering them, you’re just saying whichever one of these is the weakest, if someone gets to
⏹️ ▶️ John my Dropbox X, they own me, because everything there they can get at. And once they can get that, they’ve got got my passwords and I’ve got you know what
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean or your email for that matter like there’s always whatever the weakest link is
⏹️ ▶️ John in the chain someone just needs to get through to that so you do I was you know I was gonna suggest the same thing one way to protect yourself
⏹️ ▶️ John from this is to make sure that sort of the keys to the kingdom are
⏹️ ▶️ John like what if your house burns down the keys to the kingdom can’t be in your house you have to have them someplace else
⏹️ ▶️ John so that if your house does burn down you can still decrypt your backups that are off-site or whatever and
⏹️ ▶️ John you know how would you decrypt your backups that are offsite, the key can’t be in the encrypted backups like this, like poor
⏹️ ▶️ John Jason here. You have to have them someplace else and maybe putting them in Dropbox would be the place to do it. So hey, you protected
⏹️ ▶️ John yourself, but you’ve also weakened your security because now you’re relying on Dropbox
⏹️ ▶️ John not to get hacked and it Dropbox is a big target.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s true. But I mean one password has its own encryption. So you would have to lose Dropbox’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey encryption and then one passwords wouldn’t you?
⏹️ ▶️ John It depends on how you store it. If you’re storing in one password versus like I use FileVault encryption I’m just going to write down
⏹️ ▶️ John my like secret secret, you know, they have the thing like, please store this in a safe place. What if you just put that in a text file
⏹️ ▶️ John and stick that on Dropbox and you’re like, hey, Dropbox is encrypted, right? Which is true it is or if you put it in an encrypted
⏹️ ▶️ John disk image on Dropbox, but then you have to have the password to the encrypted disk image. And where do you put that one like you’re just chasing your tail.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not it’s not as impossible to do this. I’m saying for the thing, the things that occur to most people to do to protect
⏹️ ▶️ John this information, usually leads to either not actually solving the problem like the case of putting an encrypted
⏹️ ▶️ John disk image on Dropbox then you have to pop the password to the encrypted disk image on a sticky note that’s in your drawer when your house burns
⏹️ ▶️ John down you can’t get to anything anyway or it weakens things because you literally made a text file and Dropbox and put
⏹️ ▶️ John your you know tertiary password that unlocks the thing that unlocks the thing that unlocks
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing in a text file and Dropbox and you just hope Dropbox doesn’t get hacked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any thoughts Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Marco man this guy has really geeky friends but no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean it really you know you guys covered it pretty well like it you know I also use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one password I also store it on Dropbox the question is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco suppose you lose access to every computer that you currently have that works and every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco device you currently have that works suppose you suppose like a Matt Hohner happens to you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where all your devices get wiped at once so you you don’t have access to your any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco existing installation of 1Password or anything so the question is can you can you recover from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that how do you get up from that again so in my case the question is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I what I really need is I need access to my email account and Dropbox
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like though if I have access to both of those things I’m okay but you get honin that stuff is gone too
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s so you got to figure that like you know well so here’s here’s the backstop is One of the reasons I stay
⏹️ ▶️ John away from, like I’ve almost, I have, I’ve bought one password, I think I’ve bought one password more than one time,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’ve played with it, but I’ve never taken the full dive, and here’s why, because I’m afraid
⏹️ ▶️ John of having, being in this type of situation where your passwords stop
⏹️ ▶️ John becoming something you know and start becoming something you have, and I need to have at least one super
⏹️ ▶️ John important password be something I know. So then yeah, I could get hit in the head really hard, and then I won’t be able to decrypt
⏹️ ▶️ John my data but my ultimate backstop is there is at least one
⏹️ ▶️ John password in the chain and it’s a big long complicated password and it’s the only place that exists
⏹️ ▶️ John is in my head and it’s never used anyplace else and I never told anyone and it changes and you know
⏹️ ▶️ John and like fine delete all my stuff I can find my way back in
⏹️ ▶️ John and there’s more than one of those like I have I don’t have a lot of passwords memorized not saying this is what you do hey memorize all your passwords so
⏹️ ▶️ John you all have too many friggin passwords I use keychain one password could fulfill the same thing. But I
⏹️ ▶️ John feel that most of the people who use one password because of the randomness of the passwords because of how strong they are,
⏹️ ▶️ John give up on on memorizing any of them. You can store passwords that you make up yourself in one password, you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have to let it generate the passwords for you. So I would encourage people to someone
⏹️ ▶️ John to somewhere have a password that you know, yeah, and yes, the people in the chat room saying isn’t one password like that, there’s the one password
⏹️ ▶️ John that you know to open your one password. Again, you always want to make it so that
⏹️ ▶️ John you have a way in even if everything is gone, what if your one password database is gone, because they’ve they’ve owned
⏹️ ▶️ John all your stuff. And all basically you have is your encrypted like backblaze backup, right? Having your one password
⏹️ ▶️ John password, knowing it in your head does not help you get your backblaze password back if you don’t know your backblaze password.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if your backblaze password was in one password, and you just assume you’d always have one of your devices that you could look it up on. That’s a problem,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So just So always make sure that if everything you have gets owned
⏹️ ▶️ John and you don’t have control over it, you don’t have access to your email, your whole house burns down, all your devices are broken
⏹️ ▶️ John or erased, all you’ve got left are basically your offsite backups that are all encrypted. You need some way to
⏹️ ▶️ John decrypt them. The passwords that are on those encrypted backups are not going to help you. There has to be one of them in your head and
⏹️ ▶️ John hopefully it’s the one that lets you do a sequence of events that lets you decrypt whatever it is that you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John pulling from, whether it’s Backblaze or a hard drive you have at your parents’ house or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is why my Backblaze password is one I know in my head. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rely on one password for that one. So my way in would be Backblaze.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If I lost everything locally, all my devices, then I could log into Backblaze with the password I know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get my one password file there, and then get everything else from there.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even that, you get to pick your own password. Backblaze doesn’t have the password.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you’ve ever typed it into Backblaze’s website, But essentially, if Backblaze has been hacked in some
⏹️ ▶️ John way, like they could have your Backblaze decryption password too. Like then you’re just relying on, OK, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John my house isn’t going to burn down. Because Honand was like, everything he’s got, his house might as well burn
⏹️ ▶️ John down. Like that was a malicious hacker doing bad things to all his stuff, taking over everything. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that could happen to you. So it’s something worth thinking about. But
⏹️ ▶️ John at the same time you get Honand, Backblaze is not also probably going to be hacked. Like those two things may happen, but you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John just hoping like, are they can happen at the same exact time? Probably not. So you’re, you’re playing the odds with something there. But
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s always freaked me out about those things where most encryption services are designed so that they never do take your
⏹️ ▶️ John decryption password, they don’t store it anywhere, you type it into a thing to prove that you are you to do your restore from
⏹️ ▶️ John the web. But the bottom line is you are typing that password and they’re like, Oh, no, don’t worry, we use JavaScript is never actually transmitted
⏹️ ▶️ John to our server happens all client side. Yeah, yeah, yeah, maybe it does. Maybe it doesn’t. If you get hacked, it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John anymore, right? The hacker is the first thing they’ll do is make it so that when anyone types in their password for restore,
⏹️ ▶️ John they actually grab that information and put it somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You have to think about these kind of failure situations. Like, I don’t trust iCloud Keychain with anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t trust iCloud with anything that’s totally only living in iCloud. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iCloud’s failure mode is kind of unknown and poorly defined
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and probably not great. Most cloud services, their failure mode is kind of like the failure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mode of an airplane. which is if an airplane totally fails mid-flight, you have a really big problem. Or Dropbox’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco failure mode is more like a train. If a train fails, generally speaking, what happens is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it just stops moving. Everyone’s still okay, you know, just like, you know, just everything pauses,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically. And there’s a lot more recovery from that, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco relying on things like Dropbox and Backblaze, like Dropbox moves stuff around between computers, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of those computers or more can be running a backup program, And those are just files that you have moved between your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computers that live in a regular folder that is right there in the file system.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It isn’t anything special or weird. It’s just a folder that happens to be synced by this background process between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your other computers. And then your backup program can read that, back it up to its website, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can restore that onto any computer. The fewer airplane-like failure modes you have here, the better. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something like if you have everything backed up to your Apple ID or to a Google ID or any kind of big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cloud service, well, what happens if they lock out your account? What happens if they think you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did something fraudulent or against their TOS, or they just screw something up and you get locked out of your account?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How screwed are you with that? You really have to think about that kind of failure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mode and think about what will happen in Scenario X, how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco safe is my data really, and how big of a problem would it be if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cloud service x just kicked me out one day or just totally failed.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you want to have a backstop that doesn’t involve memorizing things, you can always go back to good old physical security, get a safety deposit
⏹️ ▶️ John box at a bank, put a bunch of passwords on it on pieces of paper like it’s that’s what two factor
⏹️ ▶️ John authentication is about and in terms of like using something you have and something you know, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John just keep adding factors like and then you’re just you’re increasing the odds that you’re going to be okay and that like, here
⏹️ ▶️ John is a series of things that would have to happen for me to be screwed and it becomes increasingly implausible. It’s like, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John my house burned down and I get hacked and backblades get hacked and someone holds up the bank and opens my safety
⏹️ ▶️ John deposit box. Unless you’re in like, unless you’re in like a Wesley Snipes movie or something where it’s like the
⏹️ ▶️ John world’s greatest heist, this is not going to happen to you probably. But one of those things could definitely
⏹️ ▶️ John happen. Water damage takes out all your devices, right? Or you do get hacked and everything that can be remotely
⏹️ ▶️ John done via dot Mac gets it’s wiped and because you use Apple services for everything you’re up
⏹️ ▶️ John the creek right so this is a good feedback from
⏹️ ▶️ John Jason we should all think about this go through the scenario in your head say if this happened what would I do and then
⏹️ ▶️ John dry run that say okay I’m gonna pretend I don’t have access to any of my devices can I do that thing I said
⏹️ ▶️ John I could do and that’s where you’ll find out actually I don’t have that password memorized anymore and where did I put that scrap of paper I had that on
⏹️ ▶️ John did I give that to my parents when I last saw them? Is it in with our birth
⏹️ ▶️ John certificates in a safety deposit box? I don’t remember where that is. Maybe you have to have another piece of paper that tells you where you put the piece of paper
⏹️ ▶️ John that has the passwords on it. So do a dry run. It’s like a fire drill school. It’s good to
Follow-around: Alphabet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So one last bit of a follow-up. We had talked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about, actually this is follow-up on follow-out. So we had talked last episode about Alphabet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Google’s not rebranding but reorganization. And Jason
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Snell on Upgrade talked a bit about that, which was very interesting because he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had lived through some very similar stuff when he was at IDG. And I’ll butcher the details
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I try to repeat what he said. But suffice to say, in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey his perspective, it didn’t seem like it was particularly malicious. It wasn’t about hiding things. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was just about reorganizing things that should probably be reorganized. So we’ll put a link
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not only to that episode in the show notes, and that’s a great podcast if you’re not already listening to it. It’s Jason Snell and Mike Hurley.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I’ll also put an overcast link with the relevant timestamp. How convenient is that?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you can check that out as well. So that was our last bit of follow-up,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I am not mistaken.
Overcast playlist requests
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anything else gentlemen?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah Marco I want a way to add uh podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John episodes to playlists from the web. Add to overcast then I have
⏹️ ▶️ John to go into overcast and then go to the playlist that I use and then edit playlist and then go add episode and then
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just too many things. Right from the web add to playlist make a little pop-up menu of all my playlists. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John my feature request.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The main reason why there’s no overcast web playlist support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is because the the code that that decides how to insert new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco episodes into a playlist and how to sort them because i have manual sorting and all these different sort options and everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco um the code that decides that is so complex in objective c that i’m i
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really don’t want to i’m kind of afraid to try to port it to php to work on the
⏹️ ▶️ John website just have a radio button top add to top or bottom done
⏹️ ▶️ John not asking for the moon i just don’t want to have to go through all those taps like you’re right that’s not the right thing to do it shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John go on the top or bottom but you put it on the form and you make the person pick it’s like you said to put it on the bottom of that playlist so I did you said
⏹️ ▶️ John to put on the top so I did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah that’s that’s not bad actually another thing like people ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco since instacast shut down one of one of instacast features that a lot of people liked is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an up next playlist where you can you know you can hit some some podcast and you can say add
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this to up next and play it play up next or whatever it was and everyone writes me requesting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an up next feature and you know to me it’s like well playlists do that like you don’t I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think I needed an up next feature because I figured I have reorderable playlists you can just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drag things around as you want them to be played in the playlist but you have to get it added to
⏹️ ▶️ John the playlist to begin with that’s the hurdle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes so I so anyway my theory is at some point during the 2.x cycle I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna add an up next feature and just make it add it to the playlist like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not going to be a separate feature it’ll just add it to the current playlist after the current item and if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re not playing current playlist it’ll create one called up next and add these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things to it and switch to that just because like you know it’s like I can I can already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solve this in another way that I totally support and let me just you know make this easier for people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know and then my
⏹️ ▶️ John use case is like people are always recommending interesting episodes of podcasts that I don’t want to subscribe
⏹️ ▶️ John to. Like, you see them in tweets. And I love it when they put overcast links, because then I’ll have the add to overcast, but then there’s still the
⏹️ ▶️ John extra step of like, oh, well, it just added that episode’s overcast and it’s there, but I don’t play, I’m always
⏹️ ▶️ John using one of my playlists and it’s not on that, you know. So, it’s like, we’re so close. We’re so close to just, I see a link,
⏹️ ▶️ John someone provides a cool overcast link, and then on the drive home, that episode will be there,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it will be part of my playlist, and when my current thing I’m listening to is done, the next thing, you know, that I saw will play.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So for me, I don’t run into this problem because I basically have one main playlist
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where the filter is include everything except X, Y, or Z. Like certain shows I save for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different context in life or listening with my wife or whatever else. So my main podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, my main playlist is everything except X. So when I add a new episode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or a new podcast, it shows up in my main playlist. So I don’t have this problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, I’m doing a white list instead of a black list. So it’s only
⏹️ ▶️ John these things. And I have a really big backlog, so I probably always want it to be added to the top. Or like you said,
⏹️ ▶️ John up next, like basically after whatever it is that I’m currently in the middle of listening to. Right? Because if it gets added to the bottom,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s too much of a backlog. If it gets added to the top, I may be listening somewhere in the middle. I was thinking about
⏹️ ▶️ John my other solution to this is I will just stop using playlists and just try to do everything from the main screen. I don’t even know if
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s possible. I guess it’s not really the way I want it to be because I do use the playlist and I do
⏹️ ▶️ John prioritize things and I do like how the shows come into the little priority sections or whatever. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty much, it’s only one playlist that I use almost all the time. I have a few, like you said, custom ones for like
⏹️ ▶️ John road trips and kid safe things or whatever. But most of the time I’m using my main playlist
⏹️ ▶️ John and that one. I want stuff to go into there somehow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now you’re going to make me do some work. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John done with streaming. I don’t want you to run out of features. Thanks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Believe me, I have a big list.
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iPhone “6s” rumors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So we’re starting to get into iPhone rumor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And here we go. And there has been an interesting rumor that just came out in the last day
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or so. And this was broken, or at least this entered my world by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way of a friend of the show and prior guest host, Christina Warren.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And she had tweeted, or retweeted Cult of Mac saying that someone has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey found iPhone 6S in the color pink,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I thought was very interesting. And as the spouse of someone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who once owned a pink Razr, and I think I speak for Marco when I say that as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This could be very enticing to Aaron and perhaps Tiff as well. I don’t know, any thoughts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on this? than that I’m happy to see them you know try to do something that appeals
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that well on the surface anyway appeals more directly to women.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well this is a this where you play the clip of me saying that Apple needs to make its phone in more colors. Mission
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I assume this is actually
⏹️ ▶️ John true. Yeah people like colors people like to pick colors it’s annoying from an inventory standpoint
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s something that people like and they should totally do it and I really hope this is true because it will help them
⏹️ ▶️ John sell phones and it will make people happy and with anodization like there or if that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John even a word anodizing aluminum that’s what I think is you could do you can make colors they got space gray
⏹️ ▶️ John like you know they got a gold one they got like sure pink do all the
⏹️ ▶️ John colors go crazy thumbs up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah I mean so I actually I just brought Tiff in here so she can actually tell you what she thinks herself because she’s a person
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so here hold on hey I’m a person
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey hi there how’s it going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good how you guys doing well. So what do you think about this pink iPhone?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Uh, it’s pink. I just posted the picture that looks like the pink razor. Yeah. Would you, would you buy one?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John You had, you had the pink razor though, didn’t you?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did have the pink razor. I had the pink razor because the pink razor was one of the first pieces of technology.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe the second piece of technology that I ever got my hands on that I felt was kind of made for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lady. I got really excited about it because all the other phones before that just kind to look like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco silver pieces of electronic like they just weren’t as appealing and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you get this pink little razor phone and it’s adorable and it’s skinny and it’s flippy and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just had to have it so I had the pink I had the light pink one not the hideous neon pink one that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one was awful but I’m not a pink person so I won’t get the pink iPhone because the white one is there.
⏹️ ▶️ John Are pink phones just for girls Tiff?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No pink is not just for girls my son has a pink stroller. So pink is for boys who like pink,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they like pink.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s funny. It’s funny to bring up the razor, though, because hand on heart, I’m not trying to be funny. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey might not have ever loved any of my iPhones as much as I loved my silver razor that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had. Geez, I don’t know, like 2007, something like that. I loved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my razor more than almost anything. And I don’t really know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why I just think I was so mesmerized, like you said about how thin it was.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was sleek looking. It was awesome. And, and that pink color, that light, the what made me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think of the razor when I saw the leaked photos of the iPhone fake, whatever they are.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, it just, that’s the same pink. That’s like that metallic look to it, you know, with the color.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that was kind of new then. So it was super appealing that it was new, not that it was pink.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. We should point out that various people in the chat room are very insistent that these are fake the line in the show. It says pink
⏹️ ▶️ John phones, question mark. So do not bank on these things being real. But making a bunch of fake pictures
⏹️ ▶️ John of it and showing it to people and seeing the reaction is all part of the process. These images traveled around Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ John and social media pretty quickly because people are excited at the idea of a
⏹️ ▶️ John top-of-the-line iPhone that comes in a color that’s not like black or gray or white or black or,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, something, a pink high-end phone, I think would
⏹️ ▶️ John sell and you know any other sort of colors that look good in anodized aluminum
⏹️ ▶️ John So even if this is not real, I hope that it will be real someday.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I agree I want a teal one put that out there someone Photoshop that so we can have
⏹️ ▶️ John Do that yourself in Photoshop it just you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s true and I’ll leak it everywhere and to be like, oh my god Do you iPhone everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John gotta send it through an anonymous source? You gotta not have it come from you and just have it Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s true. I gotta find myself a tipster. Where can I find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey one of those? All right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll put Marco on I tiff bye Hi, so yeah, I mean these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are probably fake right though the the pictures that we actually that were leaked or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what everyone insists. You can just mess with a little hue slider in Photoshop and make phones pretty much any color, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean it looked a lot like they took the picture of the gold one and just did they replace color thing and
⏹️ ▶️ John But they look good. Like these mockups or whatever, like that looks like, if Apple made that product,
⏹️ ▶️ John it looks totally in keeping with their recent aesthetic of their designs. The color is kind of just
⏹️ ▶️ John the right shade of pink where it’s not in your face, really, really bright
⏹️ ▶️ John pink, but it’s also not so muted that you can’t tell it’s pink.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this is a great product. I wish they would make it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, you know, they already make so many metal colored products all the iPods, now the iPod
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Touch, they made the iPhone 5C, well that wasn’t metal,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they obviously are capable of mass-producing aluminum
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bodies for electronics in this price range with pretty much any color they feel like.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, I don’t know, I do wish they would have more of them, just to give more variety.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s just an inventory thing, like we’ve done various times on past shows the
⏹️ ▶️ John multiplication to figure out how many varieties of a particular iOS device are, now allow each one of those to
⏹️ ▶️ John be done in colors. The fan-out starts to get a little bit crazy.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so I can see why they would not want to add even more colors
⏹️ ▶️ John to the set of colors they already have. But people like colors, so I think they should do
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And speaking of metal, that’s the next item we have in here about iPhone. This one, more solid than a pink phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John is yet another parts leak. got their hands on what is purported to be the actual
⏹️ ▶️ John back case of the iPhone 6S or whatever they end up calling it. And this is a video
⏹️ ▶️ John with strength tests. They’ve got an iPhone 6 case, this is a YouTube video I’ll put in the show notes, and they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John got a supposed iPhone 6S case, and they’ve got a fairly primitive screw-based
⏹️ ▶️ John machine that applies pressure to it, it measures how much pressure it takes to bend, and to spoil
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole video for you, this is just the case, this is not the actual phone, so this This is just the back case with no
⏹️ ▶️ John insides in it, so obviously it’s weaker than the entire foam which has a front laminated to it and everything and is more structurally
⏹️ ▶️ John solid and has stuff in the middle of it and all that stuff. But just the case, the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone 6 bends in a way that it doesn’t spring back from around
⏹️ ▶️ John 30 pounds of force and the new one bends around 80 pounds of force. So it’s more than a 2x increase
⏹️ ▶️ John in stiffness from a case that is still made of aluminum and still looks about the same.
⏹️ ▶️ John They didn’t mention anything about it being heavier or thicker or whatever. What they did do was take
⏹️ ▶️ John a device to it that supposedly measures the content of the metal, like they scraped away the anodized
⏹️ ▶️ John surface and got to the metal underneath, and what they found is that the new one uses more zinc in the aluminum mix. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like a 7000 series aluminum instead of a 6000 series aluminum. Bottom line is, if this
⏹️ ▶️ John video is to be believed and they really did get one of those cases from the new iPhone 6s, it’s way, way
⏹️ ▶️ John stronger, and that’s a good thing. kind of like how Apple learned
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of, you know, with the antenna gate thing. It’s like, oh, I’m taking it. It’s not a big deal. But in the next one of
⏹️ ▶️ John these phones, we’re actually going to change things to further mitigate the issue. And the same thing. Bending is not a big deal. But
⏹️ ▶️ John in the next one, we’re going to make it stronger, because why not? Why not make it stronger? It’s just like
⏹️ ▶️ John we can’t escape the car analogies every year, every time a new model of some car comes out. Here’s the new generation of Honda Civic, 15
⏹️ ▶️ John percent more torsional rigidity. Like they just the body shells always get stiffer in cars. It doesn’t go the other way. It’s like, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is the new version of the Toyota Tundra and the body has 20% less rigidity.
⏹️ ▶️ John Nope, it’s always, you’re always stiffer. You’re always lighter, always stiffer. And so that’s the direction they should be going.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they’ve been going that direction with their laptops too. Like unibody was a big upgrade. I don’t think we have any bendgate
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff involving laptops, but if they keep going, they will pretty soon because I bet you could take a MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John one and give it a nice curve if you tried hard enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. I thought this video was very interesting and the first time I’d seen it was via Mike Hurley that we spoke about a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little earlier. But it is very fascinating and I’m very curious to see if this is the real
⏹️ ▶️ Casey deal. Now my 6 that I have right now, as far as I can tell, it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not bent in any way, shape or form. However, and I think we talked about this months ago, I do have the little crescent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey moon on the front-facing camera. So if you look
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the front-facing camera, and by the way, if you have an iPhone 6, you might want to ignore me for a second because you cannot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unsee this. But anyway, if you look at the front-facing camera, there’s a little bit of trim
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is under the outer glass, but it kind of shimmies over and leaves a little crescent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey moon left behind. It’s hard to describe, but trust me, it happens to a lot of people. And what I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey intend to do is get this thing, get it looked at right around the time the the new one comes out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I can either, you know, get it repaired before the warranty expires or perhaps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get it repaired before I sell it if I can convince Aaron that it’s okay for me to get a success.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well you have to, your camera is clearly defective. Right, there’s no other choice and I can’t fix it except
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I go fix it. Do you have a
⏹️ ▶️ John white front on your phone? How can you even see that little crescent? I don’t have a white front, come on. Well
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m looking at my phone with the black front and if there was a crescent how would I even see it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it’s it’s real. It’s so what happens is something in there shifts off of its axis
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, I know but I’m like if that happened is the thing that shifts also black
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s it’s grayish Stanley geek in the chat is saying the crescent is a shift of the foam padding between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the camera and the glass and that’s what It looks like
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, I’ve heard of this problem. I was just saying like if this happened to me How would I know it if it was also black? I
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like I wouldn’t be able to see it, but if it’s a different color then I guess it stands out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I mean, it’s it does it stand out quite clearly like once you look at it It’s like my first iPhone 6.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I actually got a swap because it had a really bad one And my current one I’m looking now, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s right there It’s clearly visible like it’s definitely you know on the right side that’s definitely shifting away, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a much smaller Version of the shift than what I had originally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah So I just found a link that I put in the chat And I’ll put in the show notes and if you scroll down just a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bit They have a close-up image of an iPhone 6 and that is almost exactly what mine looks like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like a crescent moon Yeah, mine doesn’t have this problem. Thankfully. Otherwise, I would have to destroy my phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it Renz is asking in the chat. Was it delivered this way or did it happen over time?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m pretty darn sure it happened over time. Although like the FedEx arrow I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know it was there until somebody said something about it. And I was like, wow, I wonder if oh god
⏹️ ▶️ John I still worry about occasionally putting my iPhone 6 down on a flat surface just one of these days is I’m gonna realize
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s like a little rock to it because it’s it’s taken on a little bit of a bend from being in my pocket I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just tried that I just took as you guys were talking but I just took it out of the case and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like oh no and then I was like oh no it’s rocking because of the camera bump so yeah so now I’m like I tried hanging that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bulge off of various edges of the desk you know cuz like what if the desk isn’t exactly flat here and I moved it around a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different parts of the
⏹️ ▶️ John we should not be doing this we should be doing what you’re supposed to do with LCD monitors back in days don’t look for dead pixels just don’t look for
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t run those patterns, don’t do the thing that helps you find them. Like if you find it legitimately fine, but if you don’t, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you ever have it at Pixel?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh yes, I did. My 22 inch Apple Cinema Display, that beautiful thing, had, I can tell you where they are. I can put my
⏹️ ▶️ John fingers right now and pointing
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco them on my screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John There was one in like the lower left. Wait, are you a screen toucher? No, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco not actually touching.
⏹️ ▶️ John One in the lower left and one in the upper, towards the upper, lower right and towards the upper left corner.
⏹️ ▶️ John The lower right one was the worst because it was like stuck on red. Oh, man, it was a good
⏹️ ▶️ John it was a good practice for me having to learn with the the the image retention from Destiny HUD and now the
⏹️ ▶️ John cartoon network logo, which is the new bane of my existence Which is a black and white black and white opaque
⏹️ ▶️ John logo on cartoon network now I’m having my kids shifted into different positions with the the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John format changing to try to not burn that in but I realize the destiny Logo is fading, but I’m like, oh great CN.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So are you forced them to do like like the various stretch modes and everything to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John just move it around? Oh god,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s terrible. It’s not terrible, it’s fine. I mean they watch Full House, which is standard death, and like that just looks terrible
⏹️ ▶️ John no matter what you do to it. I just have them move it around. Or just stop watching Cartoon Network because these shows are crap anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John And seriously, television companies, don’t put an opaque, completely black and completely white logo on
⏹️ ▶️ John for the entire run of your show that you’re airing? Ridiculous.
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iOS Force Touch predictions
⏹️ ▶️ John couple of more uh phone things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are we going to be force touching each other this fall
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah that’s one wow do we all just assume that’s going to be there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco i guess you know there’s been a lot of a lot of talk about like you know what can we do with force touch and and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been a lot of a lot of intelligent people also saying you know this this could be weird or a problem or unintuitive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco um because you know tying functionality to force touch has a number of issues um
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the biggest is that anything you tie to Force Touch this year is only going to work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the newest iPhones. So it’s gonna be a while before the majority or the entirety
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all devices that can run iOS, whatever, actually have hardware support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Force Touch. So that’s problem number one. There’s also, there’s problems with potential
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accessibility and RSI issues. The Relia guys have been talking about this on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Connected and on Upgrade. Like, I believe both Mike and Steven,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t find a force touch gesture comfortable on the watch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The feeling of applying more pressure than necessary against an unmoving piece
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of glass, if you do it a few times in a day, fine, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if that becomes a common gesture, I think that might be uncomfortable. Certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has issues for people who have motor disabilities or arthritis or lots of other issues.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it is it is not universally accessible by any means. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not necessarily you know an incredibly good idea to be doing a lot. We you know we don’t we I mean and we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still don’t really know the full RSI cost and risks of doing lots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of computing on these little touch screens because they’re just too new. We don’t really have enough experience with that yet but you know this could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be this could be an issue. I’m just saying it could be an issue. And the biggest thing for me is you know we see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of how they did force touch on the Mac with the force touch track on the watch force touch is kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like a menu button and I think the watch is so constrained in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco UI design and in space and physical design it’s so constrained that I think that kind of makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sense it’s not you know there might be other options it’s certainly not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very discoverable but on a watch you have to make a lot of trade-offs on the Mac they added force
⏹️ ▶️ Marco touch in a way that you know as we discussed when it came out like I think it should have just been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a shortcut for right-click but they didn’t do that instead it’s the third
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of click that does something in you know whatever app you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in it varies and most apps don’t do anything or they do something standard like a dictionary window or something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in some apps it’ll do something special but there’s really no way for you to know what it’s going to do without just trying it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it because most the time it doesn’t do anything special I have young people aren’t going to be force clicking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Macs in random places as a general habit, even if that was a good interface design, which it isn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So on the iPhone, I think we’re going to see something kind of between those two.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I fear we’re going to see something between those two, because it’s going to be kind of this third
⏹️ ▶️ Marco action that you can just try force touching in various places. You might get like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a menu or something. I don’t know. That doesn’t seem like a great idea to me. What I hope they do,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and obviously I’m sure it’s too late for anything to change, not like they listen to me anyway, but what I hope it is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a shortcut to long press. Because if that’s what it is, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that way first of all, then if you’re a software developer, you don’t have to worry about the install base
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of who has this and who doesn’t. As a user it’s even easier, so if you just add a gesture recognizer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a UI element for a long press recognizer and it happens to fire on a force touch,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I think would solve a lot of problems because you wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be adding a whole other thing to the interface that never existed before. You would avoid the install
⏹️ ▶️ Marco base issue and it would leave this accessibility option long pressing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, not everyone can do it, but it’s a lot easier to long press than to force press. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have seen so many people, when they try to use an Apple Watch, and you tell them, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco force touch, and you try to explain to them how to force touch, it is so hard to get people to recognize the difference
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between force touch and long press. And they’ll try long pressing and nothing happens, and they think it’s broken.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so if those things end up being the same thing, and a force touch is just a long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco press that you can do faster, that I think is a good way to integrate it into the UI.
⏹️ ▶️ John have to worry about the software support if the OS takes it. If it becomes like multitasking gesture
⏹️ ▶️ John or as the tipster is saying like bring up like control center or like a menu or being like
⏹️ ▶️ John like if the OS owns it entirely then you don’t have to worry about support for that. If they try to
⏹️ ▶️ John make it long press then the OS kind of can’t own it because that has to go through the application.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um force press on the watch I’m kind of used to it like when I change clock face
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the key thing is the the vibration feedback that accompanies it makes it feel like one big thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John If that wasn’t there. I think it would be too weird. But and and by the way, our tipster
⏹️ ▶️ John says that forced touch is coming and someone wrote in a little while ago and say, why are you giving all this time
⏹️ ▶️ John to the tipster? You don’t even know if he’s real or not. That’s why we say these things. If the tipster says forced touch is coming
⏹️ ▶️ John and the new iPhones come out, they don’t have forced touch. That lets us know and let’s all of you know how much we should discount
⏹️ ▶️ John the tipster. But if it does come, that’s one more, you know, one more notch in the hey, you got this right, even
⏹️ ▶️ John though it’s pretty easy to guess because I would of bet on it being there. And the reason, by the way, I bet on force that you’re being there is because
⏹️ ▶️ John they have room for the sensors. The watch has it. The Max have it. They’re going to do it like and like Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John saying, all right, fine, you put the hardware there. How do you deal with the software? They can work that out. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe they make a bad choice in the beginning and they revise it in iOS 10 or something. You don’t like you don’t have to commit to that now.
⏹️ ▶️ John You just need to put the hardware and then you can figure out how you want to use it software wise, how
⏹️ ▶️ John it is used in the OS, how it’s passed through the apps or if it’s passed through the apps at all and all that stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John can be worked out. And by the way, the tipster says, this is gonna be a new color for the phone, even though the fake thing, even
⏹️ ▶️ John though the pink things are fake. So that’s another thing you can put in the column. When the new phones come out, if there is no new color or they don’t have forced
⏹️ ▶️ John touch, we can just start saying this tipster guys yanking our chain. Everything here has asterisks or question mark effort. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that there will be forced touch. I think there is a way to make forced
⏹️ ▶️ John touch, make the phone a better thing to use. I’m not entirely sure
⏹️ ▶️ John that their first crack at doing that is going to work because I have no experience using
⏹️ ▶️ John it on the Mac. On the watch it works, but on the watch, like they have to do it because like Marco said, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not, you have so few avenues to try to put like rich input
⏹️ ▶️ John on there. Forget about like a five finger texture to go back to the home screen or whatever. Like I love doing that on iPad. Do you
⏹️ ▶️ John guys do that? The five finger squish? Totally. I try to do that on my iPhone 6 sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John and it doesn’t work and it annoys me. Like, you know, it just, it’s silly. It shouldn’t work on the iPhone, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just so convenient that I want it to work on the iPhone 6 and it’s almost big enough that I could
⏹️ ▶️ John do a three finger squish. Anyway, forced
⏹️ ▶️ John touch on iPad starts to make a lot more sense especially if you start adding stylus support and all the other stuff like that. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this is just, this is going to race across all of Apple’s computing devices and I think Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John will find a way to make it useful.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I have this fancy new Retina MacBook Pro with the forced touch trackpad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t find myself force touching really ever. The only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time I ever find myself forced touching is when I want to look something up that’s on screen. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because if you highlight on most apps, if you highlight
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a word or not even highlight, if you just have the cursor over a word and then force
⏹️ ▶️ Casey touch, it will open up the dictionary pop over and show you the definition of what you’re looking at.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then as Marco was talking, I was thinking, well, what the crap else does force touch do? And I don’t know because I didn’t even remember
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so there’s like a zoom right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah variable speed playback and quick time Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, that’s a little different, but I’m talking about like a force touch click and so in finder force touch click does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quick view Which is actually pretty convenient quick look quit. Sorry. Thank you quick look
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so that that’s actually fairly convenient Although I didn’t even realize it till just now if force touch on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Mac is not something I think ooh, let me try that that. However, I completely agree with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you, John, that I find it very natural on the watch, and I’m curious to see what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it works like on the phone. I suspect it will not replace long press, even though I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that would be a smart way to handle it. I think it’s going to be some other sort of gesture.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll just be so happy to not have to long press to place the cursor that it won’t matter.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know I will be so happy because I despise long press. I despise having to do do something for a set amount of time
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s always I’m just so spoiled by Twitter if it like the swipe cursor controls or whatever like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s gonna be so awesome on iOS 9 when I do not have the long press to do to put the cursor somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ John I hope it’s awesome I’ve heard from some people who are testing iOS 9 which I haven’t tried at all yet that
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes if you’re fiddling around with typing you can fool the keyboard into thinking you were trying to do
⏹️ ▶️ John a two-finger drag which is the cursor movement control and like I wasn’t doing a two-finger drag I’m just being kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John sloppy typing with my thumbs that will kind of annoying me if that ends up being a problem so I hope they get these kinks worked out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thanks much for our three sponsors this week hover lynda.com and Harry’s and we will see you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over they didn’t even mean to begin because it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental. John didn’t do any research, Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Casey wouldn’t let him, cause it was accidental. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was accidental. And you can find
⏹️ ▶️ John the show notes at ATP.FM. And if you’re into Twitter, And if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John into Twitter, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and T. Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t mean to.
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, check podcast so
Post-show: John’s router
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a story time with Papa John all right gather around gather around the the hot
⏹️ ▶️ John picture it Sicily 2008 no Seven
⏹️ ▶️ John years ago. I look this up because I couldn’t remember how long ago seven years ago the Fios fairy came to my
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Brought a fiber optic
⏹️ ▶️ John cable down Put a big thing in my basement
⏹️ ▶️ John hooked everything up, took this Action Tech Verizon Wi-Fi router
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, plugged it in, set up whatever sacrificial Mac I
⏹️ ▶️ John let him get his paws on, left my house, and then I promptly unplugged everything that he had
⏹️ ▶️ John plugged in, put an Ethernet cable into the ONT in my basement, threaded
⏹️ ▶️ John it through my house, put it into an Apple AirPort Extreme, Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John and by the way before I unplugged everything I made it release the IP address or it’s the HTTP release rather so
⏹️ ▶️ John that when I plugged in you save yourself a phone call yeah And then I plugged in my
⏹️ ▶️ John airport extreme the flat one or one of the older flat ones And that
⏹️ ▶️ John has been running my home network for seven years Zero problems with it and never crash
⏹️ ▶️ John it never spontaneously rebooted and never did anything wrong super solid fanless
⏹️ ▶️ John workhorse of a router so that was seven years ago
⏹️ ▶️ John a couple months ago I was fishing around under my desk I think I was hooking up the PlayStation 4 or something
⏹️ ▶️ John and I saw that some of my power strips down there were looking kind of creaky I’m like you know what I should buy some new power strips so I bought some new power strips
⏹️ ▶️ John replace the old power strips with a new ones wallet is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this something anyone else has ever done
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah like cuz it was they were really old they’re like from when I was in college I’m like this kid this probably doesn’t even work as
⏹️ ▶️ John a surge suppressor anymore it’s so old and grimy looking and I wanted to get some nicer ones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no I mean you’re right like cuz like you know like the little things in them burn out after a while but but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has anyone Casey have you ever looked at a look below your desk and said you know what I need new power strips these power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco strips are no good
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t be crazy you probably have newer ones you don’t have ones from when you were in college under there right I might
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know I mean I very well may you don’t Marco you kidding you know how once from last week under there. I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John house to be off the network so I quickly unplugged
⏹️ ▶️ John the router and plugged it into the wall socket directly while I did all the plug shuffling
⏹️ ▶️ John because I was trying to figure out how to reroute wires because it’s rude to have the entire house be off Wi-Fi while I’m doing all this
⏹️ ▶️ John messing with. Fast forward to a couple days ago and
⏹️ ▶️ John our house lost power which is very rare like it happens maybe once every other year and it
⏹️ ▶️ John lost power for 20 or 30 minutes and when the power came back on I was surprised to see that
⏹️ ▶️ John my Wi-Fi didn’t reconnect and so I went over to see my router and the light was off on it and
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t know what the deal with that was because normally there’s some kind of light on it so I unplugged it I reset it I hard reset it it
⏹️ ▶️ John all the things you could do and the real bad sign is when you plug it into power it was making this terrible
⏹️ ▶️ John little noise, like a little rhythmic buzz, and like the four green lights on the ethernet ports
⏹️ ▶️ John were blinking and the internet says basically your thing is fried. And I believe that my thing is fried, it did not come back to life, so
⏹️ ▶️ John my venerable airport express that I loved for so long finally gave up the
⏹️ ▶️ John ghost. Pretty sure it got killed by a power surge because it was the only electronic device in
⏹️ ▶️ John my entire house that is not hooked up through a surge suppressor and is the only one that died, and that’s super sad.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so I took to Twitter looking to find out the reason I hadn’t replaced it in so long
⏹️ ▶️ John was one it was super reliable and I was afraid of getting something flaky and to the new one that Apple made has a fan
⏹️ ▶️ John in it and I didn’t want that and the third reason is all the other ones that people recommend like the wire cutter and everything
⏹️ ▶️ John never tell me whether I could hook my printer up to it via USB and I basically like everything works
⏹️ ▶️ John why am I even bothering to replace this but now I was forced to replace like oh I gotta go through this whole thing I gotta find like does
⏹️ ▶️ John anyone know like a really good Wi-Fi router that hopefully has better signal strength than my airport extreme which
⏹️ ▶️ John is terrible Wi-Fi signal strength like it’s one of the really older ones it’s terrible signal I know it has terrible signal I just kept using because
⏹️ ▶️ John it was reliable right something that has better signal strength that supports the newer standards
⏹️ ▶️ John and that I can just unplug this thing and plug everything back into it including the USB from my crappy Canon printer
⏹️ ▶️ John my crappy Canon printer that yes supports Wi-Fi yes supports Ethernet but when I first got the printer I tried all those things
⏹️ ▶️ John except for Ethernet I tried Wi-Fi but not Ethernet I think anyway their drivers are really flaky I hated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it so you tried everything except for the most reliable option. Go ahead.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Well, no, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not that it’s the networking. Like some of the Wi Fi was flaky, like, Oh, I can’t get the signal from point A to point B. It’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John network printer, like you have to install the drivers to print to it as a network printer. And the drivers are really flaky and terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I had no faith that it would be updated. And this was years ago. And I tweeted this, by the way. And some people are like, I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John got that same printer, and I’ve never had any problems. Believe me, go look through my mentions. Anyone who said that many more
⏹️ ▶️ John people said, I’ve tried it through Ethernet. I’ve tried to Wi Fi, the flaker, the drivers are flaky. It’s a nightmare.
⏹️ ▶️ John I went back to direct connector USB or whatever. Anyway, I just didn’t want to have to change things, didn’t want to have
⏹️ ▶️ John to buy a new printer, I just wanted to work the way it worked. And I didn’t want a fan, so I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want to buy the Apple one. So I was just looking for a recommendation, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, anyone who’s got the wire cutter recommendations or has tried some of these wire cutter ones, have you found
⏹️ ▶️ John one that you can do this with? I know there’s like little dongles you can plug into a lot of the Wi-Fi routers that give you like
⏹️ ▶️ John a USB print server that you can plug the USB thing into, and I got a lot of suggestions. Some people said the number
⏹️ ▶️ John one wire cutter pick does have a way for you to plug in the USB thing with like a weird
⏹️ ▶️ John kernel extension and like to the router and some custom app thing that’s really flaky and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just I don’t I don’t want to sign up for that and so eventually people just started saying hey including
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco I’ve got one of those old crappy flat airport extremes that’s terrible Wi-Fi signal that I’m not using anymore do
⏹️ ▶️ John you want it and the answer I realized was you know what yes I do want
⏹️ ▶️ John those I don’t have any devices that support 802.11ac, so I don’t need anything with ac.
⏹️ ▶️ John In fact, I had to downgrade my network from N to BG support because
⏹️ ▶️ John my son is using a 3DS that only supports BG and doesn’t support N, and so I can’t go N only.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so a bunch of people were coming out of the woodwork and saying, I’ve got old airport express that I’m not using, do
⏹️ ▶️ John you want them? Including Marco who was on vacation at the time, and I said, oh, well just when you get back home, look at it and tell me.
⏹️ ▶️ John Instead of looking and telling me, he just merely shipped it without asking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I knew you would say no and I wanted to get rid of it So I just shipped
⏹️ ▶️ John it bottom line is I had now have multiple old unwanted airport extremes coming
⏹️ ▶️ John to my house Oh And the other part of the story is the day this happened I had a podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John at night not this one, but a different podcast and it was like t-minus like
⏹️ ▶️ John 2.5 hours until I had to record a podcast and I didn’t have an internet connection All I have is my cell connection. I don’t know how to record
⏹️ ▶️ John a podcast over that my signal strength isn’t great anyway So I had to get back online.
⏹️ ▶️ John So remember that seven years ago when the guy came and hooked everything up at my house and I promptly disconnected everything?
⏹️ ▶️ John What I did at that point was took the ActionTech Verizon router that he had plugged in and all
⏹️ ▶️ John of its associated accessories and put it in a Ziploc bag and put it in my basement. So seven years later
⏹️ ▶️ John I went back down to the basement, pulled out the Ziploc bag, took out a brand
⏹️ ▶️ John new looking Verizon router that had been exposed to air, not been exposed to air
⏹️ ▶️ John for seven years, plugged it in and realized that I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John get an IP address and can’t get a new DHCP lease because I can’t release it
⏹️ ▶️ John from the dead unit because the dead unit is dead. I tried cloning the MAC address to say I can get convinced
⏹️ ▶️ John that the Verizon router is the same. I’ll just have the same MAC address. Nope, it would just would not give me a thing. I just had to wait it out.
⏹️ ▶️ John And like I fought with it for a really long time until the point where I’m like, you know what, I’m at the point now where I’m going to call Verizon
⏹️ ▶️ John customer support. That’s how desperate I am. So I was as I was going through their phone tree, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think the lease finally ran out and I got an IP address and so I’m using the router
⏹️ ▶️ John now. It’s pretty crappy, gets good speed, it gets better Wi-Fi signal than my airport extreme,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is depressing, but that pancake thing was not very good. All this time you could have had better Wi-Fi.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not that much better, like it’s better in my son’s room but it’s worse in some rooms in the downstairs. I don’t understand
⏹️ ▶️ John how that mix of events happens, but anyway, the Verizon one, what couldn’t I do on it it was
⏹️ ▶️ John a kind of a pain to get it to distribute the IP addresses the way I want it for some reason when I had my custom DNS that I
⏹️ ▶️ John have on a lot of my machines it was cranky about that like I had a manual IP address and a custom DNS and just
⏹️ ▶️ John all name lookups would fail and I had to let it use the DNS on the router otherwise I couldn’t look up anything anyway
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want to deal with it the sooner I can get this stupid blinking light thing out of my house and back into the ziploc bag the
⏹️ ▶️ John better so thanks to everyone who offered to send me their old crappy hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John and there are many of them and thanks to the people who are actually sending
⏹️ ▶️ John it to me including Marco even though he shoved a bunch of other crap that he doesn’t want in that box so one thing
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah we’ll see what’s in there why don’t you put some gold cables in next time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no so so I I came home I I learned so I did have the kind John
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanted and I don’t use it anymore so I thought it was it would be my closet so I get home
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and And I see that apparently the one I was thinking of, I think I already gave it away to somebody else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so the one I was thinking, so the only one I had in my closet was the tall one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The current model actually. So the tall AC version that John didn’t want, I knew he
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t want it because it has a fan in it. Even though you can’t hear the fan. And so I knew if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I asked him if this was okay he would say no. So I just didn’t ask him. I put it in a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco box and I threw in a whatever the first cheap Nexus tablet was was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Nexus 7 or something whatever the very first cheap Nexus tablet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was I’ve had one of those in my closet for I don’t know three years sitting around doing nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s totally useless so I I packed the the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Airport Extreme with a few pieces of packing paper and a Nexus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tablet and and ship that off to John.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was like the last time you sent me a stack of Kindles with basically nothing between them, just like Kindles stacked on top of each other
⏹️ ▶️ John like a four inch high solid stack of Kindles with nothing between it and no other padding in the box. You
⏹️ ▶️ John just open it up, it’s like, why is this box so heavy? You open it up, it’s just a solid stack of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Kindles. Well, they’re very dense when there’s not much else in the box. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John and like I said, my daughter is still using one of those. She’s using the one that has like a scratch on the screen. It
⏹️ ▶️ John came out of the box like that, like it’s a big gouge in the screen or whatever. the one with the stupid IR touch sensors
⏹️ ▶️ John that try to figure out where your finger is. That’s the worst
⏹️ ▶️ John generation Kindle Touch. Yeah, but that’s what she’s using. Both my kids don’t like to read. They’d
⏹️ ▶️ John rather have paper books and, you know, I don’t understand. Like they do everything else on the iPad. They’re always watching YouTube instead
⏹️ ▶️ John of TV. But when it comes to reading books, they like the paper ones. They don’t like e-books and they don’t like reading
⏹️ ▶️ John them on their iPads.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Well, it gives
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it a warmer sound. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they’ll come around eventually. The Kindles are weird though. Like, it is kind of a weird
⏹️ ▶️ John experience, especially with the flaky touch screen. If you’re used to the responsiveness of an iPad screen, the Kindle is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John ugh, this feels weird and you can’t even touch this one. You have to use these buttons and you can touch this one, but the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John updates slow. It just feels awkward. I think it is like, it’s not that it’s intimidating,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it feels like it’s broken. It doesn’t, you know, in a way that a paper book doesn’t feel like it’s broken. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll probably come around. So that’s what I’m speaking to you now through this seven year
⏹️ ▶️ John old Verizon router that’s been sitting in a Ziploc bag. Yeah, I’m glad
⏹️ ▶️ John I had my phone because I had to Google for what the default password is
⏹️ ▶️ John or how to reset. I could have figured out there’s a big reset button on the back anyway. But I went through the whole sequence of events
⏹️ ▶️ John that I’ve done before of like, factory reset your router or determine what the factory
⏹️ ▶️ John password is, figure out what the IP address is. is this gonna be 1001 or 192, 168, blah, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ John interface was weird. Like, I’m like, maybe it doesn’t work in Chrome. It does this crazy thing where you type the username and then when you type in the password
⏹️ ▶️ John field, you type one character, but it shows three dots. Yep. Like Lotus Notes. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John it does like a client-side JavaScript masking crap. Like all this sort of fake, pointless security
⏹️ ▶️ John that they’re trying to do to be, and at first I was like deleting the key down handler to stop it
⏹️ ▶️ John from doing that, then I realized I had to let it, because I thought it was a bug, like I thought this thing was created
⏹️ ▶️ John before Chrome even existed, right? So maybe it just doesn’t handle modern browsers. So I’ll just put the password
⏹️ ▶️ John directly into the input field and submit, but then I realized I just have to let it do its clients. Anyway, and then you go into
⏹️ ▶️ John that UI, and I’m trying to get it to release the IP address, and I’m cloning the Mac address, and it was a
⏹️ ▶️ John fun hour and a half or whatever. Basically, I burned down the clock until it just gave me the IP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I mean, and you know, I’ve made that phone call many times, whenever I’ve changed my setup or changed routers you got to call Verizon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I’ve never gotten it to actually successfully release the old IP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and give me a new one. I’ve never gotten that to work. How long did you wait? Because it’s usually like two hours ish. I’ve never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco waited that long. I have a three-year-old who wants to watch Magic School Bus on Netflix. There’s no way I’m gonna wait that
⏹️ ▶️ John It may take that long to get through the 17 tiers of support you have to get to the guy who knows what you say when you say just release
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, honestly I’ve had great luck. Usually those phone calls are less than 10 minutes long.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very good luck with that. But no, I mean it’s interesting. So like those ActionTech routers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re actually pretty decent routers because it’s kind of like the way that back when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone companies made the phones and had to support and they own the phones and you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you paid for you know similar to how cable boxes work today for most people. Where you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco own the box, you pay the cable company for service and if anything was wrong with the box,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have to deal with it. Like they have to send someone out to your house or do something out like so you know so they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make the boxes really well to you know to very conservative
⏹️ ▶️ Marco strong standards so that they tend not to break and that’s how phones used to be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t remember like the
⏹️ ▶️ John big bakelite as Dr. Drangham are pronouncing those big solid phones right
⏹️ ▶️ John but these aren’t these are subcontracted like action tech is like a third-party company that they’re there
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco yeah right but still gonna make these things
⏹️ ▶️ John for us but yeah no it seems pretty solid and the performance is really good but obviously like it doesn’t even support and because the end
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t exist back then. So it’s up, it’s BG only. Right. And the UI is silly
⏹️ ▶️ John looking and it’s like a little, it looks like, it looks like a Linux style UI at best.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, and it doesn’t, there’s no USB port on it for my printer. Like it’s just, there’s a reason
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t want to use it. I just didn’t want to be involved with that at all. Like, you know, does it retain my IP addresses while my
⏹️ ▶️ John Macs go to sleep for back to my Mac auto waking like all that stuff? No, it doesn’t. Like that’s why I didn’t want it to be involved. and
⏹️ ▶️ John you can put it in bridge mode and like turn off the Wi-Fi and use both of them but that just seemed like one
⏹️ ▶️ John more potential thing to go wrong so I just want ethernet right from the wall into the thing so I’ll be happy
⏹️ ▶️ John when whoever’s shipment of their gently used
⏹️ ▶️ John airport extreme stuff arrive at my house and the one with the fan Marco I’ll plug
⏹️ ▶️ John it in I’ll give it a try I’ll see if I can hear the fan everyone tells me someone did like a decibel test they were like look I’m three inches away
⏹️ ▶️ John with my with some sound meter app for the iPhone that says 40 decibels and
⏹️ ▶️ John which it rates as you know the sound level in a quiet house so we’ll see if
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t hear the fan I’ll probably be okay with it but it’s right on the desk where I play
⏹️ ▶️ John ps4 I’m like I will be able to touch it with my hand and that’s kind of where it has to be in terms of all the
⏹️ ▶️ John wire routing that goes all over the place so if I can hear it I’ll be swapping in one of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so if since you since you already keep it out on your desk at proper height,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why did you not consider the Google OnHub?
⏹️ ▶️ John First of all, the thing is ugly as sin.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hold on, I would just like to state for the record that I am using the same ActionTech
⏹️ ▶️ Casey router that I received in 2008 as my router, and it is running
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wired into one of the flat airport extremes, and that is how I’ve been running my network for like two years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now. Before that I was just using ActionTech without anything else. So you’ve got
⏹️ ▶️ John it in bridge mode and you got the Wi-Fi turned off?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mm-hmm. That’s exactly right. And it
⏹️ ▶️ John works just fine. Is this the MI-424WR? I have no idea.
⏹️ ▶️ John says it right on the front, along with a million blinking lights.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, well, that’s true. I can’t read it from where I am. Let me log into that ridiculous admin panel with the ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey password crap that you were also talking about earlier. Let me see if it says on here. This thing, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looks like it hasn’t been updated in eight years. I know it has but it is ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ John and speaking of like what Marco was saying like when the phone company has to do it they don’t want to be have the ones to swap it or whatever when I
⏹️ ▶️ John was a Media one customer which became Comcast which became Xfinity
⏹️ ▶️ John blah blah blah blah But anyway media one when I first came to Massachusetts back up from from Georgia It
⏹️ ▶️ John was a cable modem and the thing it looked like the outer case was made of cast iron I know it wasn’t made
⏹️ ▶️ John of it Like, you know texture and cast iron pans where it’s kind of like dotty Yeah, like the little dots like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the texture they had done on what I assume is like the aluminum case But like wait a ton and have these fins on it like a heat
⏹️ ▶️ John sink It was just built like a tank But it was a piece of crap like I had so
⏹️ ▶️ John many problems with that thing people would come out and check all the wires on our house and check the signal Strength and say everything’s great
⏹️ ▶️ John and understand maybe you need to put some more filters here like all analog BS crap to try to get the cable signal to be
⏹️ ▶️ John right and We went through that over the course of like a year and a half and then eventually I just got
⏹️ ▶️ John a new Motorola surfboard thing from like Best Buy or something and installed that it’s like oh god boy all the problems
⏹️ ▶️ John are gone drop connections are gone don’t have to worry about signal strength anymore even though that
⏹️ ▶️ John thing looked like it was built like a tank it was obviously crappy and old so I don’t trust
⏹️ ▶️ John the media the ISP companies to to care if my connection is flaky
⏹️ ▶️ John or not as fast as it can be they just care like that I keep paying whatever like rental fee or whatever than I’m renting anyway
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think I’m renting this I don’t understand why I even still have it but I’m glad I did because that was literally my only backup option I don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John any other routers in the house I was thinking of driving to an Apple Store and just buying the stupid fan
⏹️ ▶️ John tower thing or whatever if I couldn’t get the Verizon one to work but the Verizon one
⏹️ ▶️ John came right out of the box like a champ everything about it worked I knew about the IP
⏹️ ▶️ John releasing thing that I wonder if there is a way to release it if the other one is dead because I don’t understand when I clone the Mac address
⏹️ ▶️ John I couldn’t say hey just give me the IP like I am I am that same Mac address
⏹️ ▶️ John like I obviously don’t know about the details of how this networking works I really thought that would work and when it didn’t I was kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no I mean you just call them and they can they send like a remote command to your ONT to
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah I mean that was that was another possible option the people were like if you restart your ONT and then someone else would
⏹️ ▶️ John said I restarted my own T and it didn’t work and I wasn’t willing to do that oh yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no I’ve tried that there’s there’s like all there’s like three different levels of resetting it’s like from like pulling the battery out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I tried all that and none of that actually worked but calling Verizon fixed it
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve done the Verizon call before during other crises to try to get that done. But
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, like I said, the phone tree was long enough that by the time I was about to be connected to a
⏹️ ▶️ John person The green light went on. I was like, oh, never mind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I have a mi 4 to 4 dash WR hardware revision DS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and dog What I was going to say earlier that I actually forgot was I didn’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the secret to having a good Fios installation, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is to have them run Ethernet out of your ONT. So mine is actually – the reason I’m sticking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the ActionTech in no small part is because I have coax coming out of the ONT
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into the ActionTech. And that’s – the internet is riding on the coax. the coax. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really regret when they did the installation not having them run Ethernet. I think you did, John, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe, Marco, you’ve said in the past you did as well. But either way, I am running this ancient MI-424WR
⏹️ ▶️ Casey revision D, and it has apparently been active for 711 hours, which is about a month.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HOFFMAN You can, if you physically run a cable to it, that’s another thing that you can call them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just say, can you switch my ONT to Ethernet? And they will say, okay, and they will do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is the ONT the one that’s in the house or outside the house? I always get them backwards.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The ONT is the thing that’s probably in your garage or basement.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s in the garage then.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s got green lights on it. It looks like, yours it might be smaller, but it’s like a white
⏹️ ▶️ John rectangular box mounted to a wall. It can be in the garage.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, fiber goes in and either Ethernet or coax or both goes out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, because I have a box on the outside of the house that I thought is where the actual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fiber came in. No, that’s your water meter. No, no, no, no, seriously. There is a files box on the outside
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and a files box on the inside. Hand on heart. I’m a hundred percent sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. You just look at what’s in the outside of one. It could just be a box covering the hole they put in your house. No, no, no.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve opened it up for some reason or another, and I could swear that’s where my O and T
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, but again, I always get them backwards. So I’m probably wrong, but, um, but anyways, but yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so there’s a box on the outside box on the inside and I can never keep them
⏹️ ▶️ John straight when the installer was here. Like I was pretty much going to let them do what they wanted because I knew as soon as they left, I would just disconnect everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John but the one thing I had to say was, no, no, no, don’t, just leave the Coax in the basement, do Ethernet from the box. And they’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you won’t be able to get on demand. I’m like, it’s fine. I don’t want, you don’t want on demand?
⏹️ ▶️ John I do not want on, in fact, I have a TiVo, not a cable box, so I couldn’t get that anyway. So just leave the Coax
⏹️ ▶️ John here. And I just could not believe that anyone would pay all this money for Fios and not have on demand. This was 2008 or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, to the installer, Fios means TV.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s true. Now, the one nice thing I will say about having the ActionTech on Coax is that I really wanted an Ethernet drop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey down in the family room and the ActionTech routers upstairs in the office.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And what I did was I went on Amazon and got a Mocha Bridge. And what that allows you to do is it’s not,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, full speed. I’ve done speed tests, damned if I remember how fast they were. But you can get the Smoka
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Bridge that takes coax in and has Ethernet on the other side. And so I have a hub hooked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up to the Smoka Bridge, hooked up to the coax, and it can get on the network by but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because the action tech is taking coax now yes I could have put another mocha bridge on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other side but it was pretty neat to be able to just add an Ethernet drop arbitrarily anywhere that I have a cable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drop and since this house was built in the late 90s I have cable drops freaking everywhere I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know I just thought that was a neat trick
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah I feel like I should save this thing because I think this is the this airport extreme because
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it is the most reliable piece of networking hardware I have ever owned it It has literally never
⏹️ ▶️ John done anything wrong. It has just sat there for seven years doing its thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Especially like, you know, you can usually get like a Switch to last that long maybe, but like something that has as many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco roles as a wireless router, like that whole integrated package, plus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the print server and everything else.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I would mess with it. I would mess with it with the airport utility. I would open up and close it. I remember opening
⏹️ ▶️ John and closing ports to try to play Quake III Arena. Like that’s how old this thing was, to try to play multiplayer Quake III Arena like
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to open ports up for BitTorrent before the clients were good and got through your firewall
⏹️ ▶️ John no matter what. You know, it has done its job well and it never
⏹️ ▶️ John made any noise and it didn’t have obnoxious lights and it was really small and flat and yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe I’ll put it in a little frame somewhere. You mount it on the wall, it could be like art. It’s kind