catatp.fm Unofficial Accidental Tech Podcast transcripts (generated by computer, so expect errors).

176: Yellow Sock Time

Screen time for kids, more on APFS, and 400 tiny trucks working together to deliver the latest Top Gear.

Episode Description:

Sponsored by:

  • Amazon Music: Songs of Summer: This Amazon Original playlist features exclusive originals and covers to get you set for the summer.
  • Harry's: An exceptional shave at a fraction of the price. Use code ATP for $5 off your first purchase.
  • Casper: An obsessively engineered mattress at a shockingly fair price. Use code ATP for $50 toward your mattress.

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

Chapters

  1. Pre-show: Top Gear update
  2. Linus Torvalds on HFS+
  3. Follow-up: HFS+ integrity checkers
  4. Sponsor: Casper (code ATP)
  5. APFS: Space sharing
  6. Sponsor: Harry’s (code ATP)
  7. HDMI CEC and universal remotes
  8. Sponsor: Amazon Music
  9. “Screen time” for kids
  10. Ending theme
  11. Post-show: Samoas and ice cream

Pre-show: Top Gear update

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are either of you watching new Top Gear?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No. What? Why would I do that?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I still am, but

⏹️ ▶️ John just very slowly. I watched episode two. I think I’m on three.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Two is no good. Three is where it starts to take a turn, in a good way. Two is the one where they review the big yellow Ferrari, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yes,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe that’s right. I like the Ferrari. Well, yeah, but the episode’s

⏹️ ▶️ John still no good. However, the three through five are much improved. I’m not going to go into the details of that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m going to go into the details of the three. I’m going to go into the details of the two. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco going to go into the details of the three.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m going to go into the details of the two. I’m going to go into the details of the two. Well, yeah, but this yep, the episode still no good. However The

⏹️ ▶️ Casey three through five are much improved Worth watching. So Marco definitely don’t even bother

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with one and two three fifty fifty. I would say yes, so 60 40 Four

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and five definitely if you have time worth watching

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I’ll just start like with season this plus one and just tell me when that tell me if that’s good

Linus Torvalds on HFS+

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We should probably start with some follow up. And is it Linus or Linus? I always get it wrong.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Torvalds had some had some things to say to you, John, of all people about HFS

⏹️ ▶️ Casey plus.

⏹️ ▶️ John It wasn’t to me really, this was the thing I was looking for. Last week, I said that Linus Torvalds

⏹️ ▶️ John had said unkind things about HFS plus, because he had had a run in with it, as

⏹️ ▶️ John it relates to the Git version control system. And I googled for it and I found this exact

⏹️ ▶️ John URL, but I you know, it’s like an banner blindness had Google Plus blindness This is a Google Plus page. Oh that

⏹️ ▶️ John that can’t be it I thought he had a blog post or something and I just ignored this this Google Plus thing It turns out

⏹️ ▶️ John that his little I don’t know if this is the origin But this is another place where he complained about it

⏹️ ▶️ John is in a comment on a Google Plus page So it’s basically invisible as far as the civilized world is concerned

⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, I think I noticed it because I think he did what the equivalent of at mentioning me there And I probably

⏹️ ▶️ John got some notification in Google Plus back when I was still paying attention to Google Plus And

⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll put a link in the show notes Remember when you go to the link there’s no way to directly link to his comment as far as I could tell you just

⏹️ ▶️ John have to scroll until you see his name and The substance of it doesn’t really

⏹️ ▶️ John matter that much as we talked about it last week It’s more if you want to see the things that people

⏹️ ▶️ John both love and hate about The Linux kernel Linus Torvalds

⏹️ ▶️ John and just those communities how he just says everything in sort of a rude dismissive way

⏹️ ▶️ John like the HMS plus is actively designed to be bad by people who thought they had good

⏹️ ▶️ John ideas and they should just they’re paste eaters and they have no idea what they’re doing

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s it’s very rude like you can say all the same things about being rude and that’s a topic that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John come up a lot in open source communities like some people enjoy that like it’s raw

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s keeping it real and other people like I don’t want to hang out with a bunch of people who are jerks to each other right can we not talk about technical

⏹️ ▶️ John issues without calling people names. Might as well, can’t.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s too bad. Anyway, there. So just following up from last week and closing the

⏹️ ▶️ John circle on why HFS Plus makes people angry. And you can see it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John basically about he really doesn’t like NFD, the decomposed normalized form from

⏹️ ▶️ John Unicode. Even though HFS Plus doesn’t use the exact NFD form, it uses actually a variant. But

⏹️ ▶️ John he really hates that entirely. Like he thinks that just shouldn’t exist and no one should ever use it. And he doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John like the fact that it normalizes and he doesn’t like the fact that it’s case insensitive. So he’s really got a lot of complaints about

⏹️ ▶️ John HFS plus.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Go figure. Is he like the king of not invented here syndrome?

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not not invented here. It’s just like he’s totally he would I would imagine he would be in the camp where

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, why is the file system doing anything to my file name? Why is it trying to do something stupid? It should

⏹️ ▶️ John not be messing with my file name. It should just do it should should just be simple and Unix-like and sort of

⏹️ ▶️ John worse is better. Oh, if your system call fails, just try it again. You’ll get an error code that tells you that. You better check the error

⏹️ ▶️ John code. Just check it. It’s so simple. I think that’s, you know, it’s a bag of bites. Just put whatever bites you want in. You

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know what it means? That’s your own stupid fault. Now I’m doing my weird pretend I’m Linus Torvald’s

⏹️ ▶️ John voice, but that

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco would be my guess. You have a voice for

⏹️ ▶️ John that. Yeah. Philosophically, he seems to be in the camp that things

⏹️ ▶️ John should be simpler and it’s kind of a violation of the contract for

⏹️ ▶️ John the file system to take your file name and do something weird with it. Fair enough. Ciao!

Follow-up: HFS+ integrity checkers

⏹️ ▶️ John Tell me about Integrity Checker. This is the program I was trying to think of, the already existing longstanding

⏹️ ▶️ John program that will wander your Mac disks and write out a bunch of checksum files

⏹️ ▶️ John and then check that your files haven’t changed. It’s from Digiloid Tools.

⏹️ ▶️ John From Mac Performance Guide, we’ll put a link in the show notes. I believe it sprinkles a bunch of.IC

⏹️ ▶️ John files all over your disk. A lot of these things that do checksums do something like this. they’ll either want to modify

⏹️ ▶️ John your files by adding an extended attribute, or they’ll want to sprinkle a bunch of files all over your disk with checksums in

⏹️ ▶️ John them. And there’s advantages and disadvantages to that. The advantage is that you can’t

⏹️ ▶️ John lose like all of your checksums at once. Like the checksums go along with the directory. If you move the directory, the checksum

⏹️ ▶️ John file goes along with it. If one of the files gets corrupted, you don’t lose all of your checksums. Like it

⏹️ ▶️ John has advantages over a central database, but the disadvantage of course is that you get a bunch of these little dirty files sprinkled

⏹️ ▶️ John all over your hard drive. So you’d be hesitant to point it at just an arbitrary directory tree because

⏹️ ▶️ John you’d be like, am I going to make some program angry or confused by putting a bunch of these files in the

⏹️ ▶️ John directories that they don’t expect to be there? But anyway, you can check it out. It apparently

⏹️ ▶️ John uses SHA-1 checksums. And in my quest to remember this

⏹️ ▶️ John tool, lots of other people sent in other tools saying, is this the one you were thinking of? Is this the one you’re thinking of?

⏹️ ▶️ John Integrity Checker was the one I was thinking of, but a few other ones came up. There’s trick bit, which

⏹️ ▶️ John is a node of module that does something similar. And

⏹️ ▶️ John apparently they ran out of vowels. So it’s ch k bit, we’ll put a link to that in the show notes. If you want to

⏹️ ▶️ John use JavaScript to do your check something,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hear your snark there. Yeah, well,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not bad. There’s a bunch of tools around par two, based on the p

⏹️ ▶️ John archive format. And part two is just the second version of it. this is

⏹️ ▶️ John sort of a next step up where instead of just writing out checksums, you’ll write out parody files

⏹️ ▶️ John to, uh, correct errors that it finds. So it won’t just write the checksum. So, you know, there’s an error. It’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John essentially do sort of like the same thing that like a, a raid five, uh, does not, not the same algorithm,

⏹️ ▶️ John but more, more fancy algorithms for adding parody information so that if you do

⏹️ ▶️ John detect some corruption, you can correct it. And you just tell it what percentage of your disk space you want to dedicate to parity

⏹️ ▶️ John information. So you could dedicate, say, 5% of the of your disk space, like if you have

⏹️ ▶️ John a directory, it’s 100 megs, you can say, Okay, I’m allowing you to use five more megabytes, just to store parity information

⏹️ ▶️ John so that you can recover from one or two or three bit errors or whatever, that you find encryption. So that’s, that’s, again,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like a user space version of the kind of protection that raid might provide you or,

⏹️ ▶️ John or something like ZFS, where they duplicate the data and duplicate the checksums and all that stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, so if you hypothetically have ever found a file that’s fallen off the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey back of a truck, you might have seen parts associated with that, depending on which truck

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you happen to have found that file on the back of or falling off the back of.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, only if you found it on the back of a really old truck.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, very, very old truck. We’re talking like Model T or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco all.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even though those old trucks are still running and no one really knows about them. And that’s amazing. But it’s a really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco old truck. That

⏹️ ▶️ John is true. talking about pirated files on Usenet. Why would they use, do they use

⏹️ ▶️ John the original PAR? Why would they use parody information? Are they trying to…

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know nothing of this, John, but if I did know something of this, I believe it’s PAR 2. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe the rationale is, suppose you split up your file on a whole bunch of little ancient

⏹️ ▶️ Marco trucks, you’re missing one truck, one truck didn’t make it, so you have like 400 other trucks,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you have like two PAR trucks.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John And the PAR trucks

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can replace any of the missing other 400 trucks. So then you can put back together your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really big truck that you’re trying to assemble

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John so you can finally watch the new

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Top Gear.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John This is barbaric. Barbaric.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, this is the best. I love you guys. All right, what did Tony Gray have to say?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, Tony Gray tweeted that he apparently is in the process of trying to make

⏹️ ▶️ John a HFS checksum utility as well. So when he heard us talking about it, he’s like, hmm.

⏹️ ▶️ John So this This is, again, I said it’s not a new idea. There are existing applications that do it, and there are

⏹️ ▶️ John even applications that have not yet been released that do it. And of course,

⏹️ ▶️ John all of which makes me even less inclined to even start this project. But I can tell you that all these different tools that I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John looked at, none of them does it exactly the way I would want to do it, but that doesn’t mean I’ll ever actually find the time

⏹️ ▶️ John to make this program. But we’ll see.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco How is it possible that I’m going to be a Mac programmer before you are?

⏹️ ▶️ John I did programming on with Mac toolbox back in the day and made silly little programs that did

⏹️ ▶️ John nothing So I think I’d beat you to it. You were probably in what elementary school anyway Yeah, most likely

⏹️ ▶️ John you have the hand of window dragging yourself. You didn’t get it free as part of the framework It’s like oh you want

⏹️ ▶️ John your window to be draggable. Well, you better get the drag event

⏹️ ▶️ Casey talk about barbara

⏹️ ▶️ John Otherwise you just launch your application. There’d be a window on the screen. You couldn’t move it You’d grab it by the towel bar and it wouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John budge Mac Toolbox. Yay!

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APFS: Space sharing

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⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to Casper for sponsoring our show.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, kids, we did not cover all of the Apple platform file system.

⏹️ ▶️ John No, stop saying platform. It’s just Apple file system. Why is that? Why is that still alive? Because there’s a P

⏹️ ▶️ John in there. It’s Apple. Yeah. M.A.C. OS and Apple file system.

⏹️ ▶️ John Nicholas Cage. Come on. You don’t. You don’t get that don’t pretend you get that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyway, tell me about space sharing John

⏹️ ▶️ John While we talk about these last remaining APFS topics you guys should think of something for us to show Otherwise, we’re

⏹️ ▶️ John gonna do how to handle email or screen time for kids We can talk about top gear some more just I think

⏹️ ▶️ John we did actually talk about these in a post WWDC thing But I’ve thought about them a little bit more

⏹️ ▶️ John space sharing is the first one where I Forget the terminology the guy make like a

⏹️ ▶️ John container for APFS and you can put a bunch of different volumes in it but you don’t have to partition it.

⏹️ ▶️ John You just make one big giant container and then you can make as many volumes as you want and every single volume

⏹️ ▶️ John sees the entire size of the container, which seems weird, but

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s great so that you don’t have to do, in Unix, Parl and Steal, think of how big should I make the user

⏹️ ▶️ John partition? How big should I make the slash partition? You don’t have to think ahead of time about how

⏹️ ▶️ John much room something is going to take up. If you have a large volume you want to divide up between multiple

⏹️ ▶️ John uses, you just let them go at it and they will find their natural equilibrium or

⏹️ ▶️ John one of them will grow too fast and you’ll be disappointed and you wish you could partition it. But I think you’ll still be able to make multiple containers

⏹️ ▶️ John like old style partitions. I haven’t tried it. But anyway, that’s interesting

⏹️ ▶️ John from a UI perspective because it’s got the same problem as Drobo had like what Drobo would show

⏹️ ▶️ John you how much space would show a much larger amount of space than it was actually available. Like For example,

⏹️ ▶️ John the time machine, if you’re doing time machine to a Drobo and as time machine ran eventually, you know The Drobo would just run out

⏹️ ▶️ John of space but time machine can’t predict that because they can’t really get an accurate read on how much space there really is because of the

⏹️ ▶️ John Similar space sharing type thing. That was a multi-disk situation. But anyway, I don’t know how you show

⏹️ ▶️ John Space sharing to the user. Do you just show them and I’m assuming like oh I’ve got one terabyte drive with three

⏹️ ▶️ John volumes on it three one terabyte volumes And if you get info on each of those three volumes, they all say yep I’m I

⏹️ ▶️ John am one terabyte volume and I have this much free I Don’t I don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ John how you can show that in a sensible way But I’m glad the future exists because I like the idea of not having to think about it ahead of time

⏹️ ▶️ John and make fixed size Partitions, although I’m not sure that’s the thing people do anymore Do either

⏹️ ▶️ John one of you have any of your discs partitioned or do you have more than

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one disc? I do have more than one disc I don’t have them partitioned at all And I think one way

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can do this maybe is with the with network drives at least they have the quota system

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But this is how this is how Synology’s Time Machine hosting module works.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I should point out again, I think I’ve said this before, but I’ve done many different ways of Time Machine

⏹️ ▶️ Marco backup from Direct Attach disks to a Mac Mini server running OS X server with Time Machine server

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that to the Synology thing. I’ve never used a time capsule, but otherwise

⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything else I’ve done. And the Synology system is by far the most

⏹️ ▶️ Marco reliable with Time Machine. I’ve never had to like format the whole partition and start again because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco time machine kept thinking it was full. Like that happened with literally every other method I’ve tried. Never happened

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the Synology one. And what I have is what seems like a pretty complex setup, which is a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco single, I believe, eight terabyte volume that is split between me and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco TIFF. And each of us connect to it with a different username. And each username has a 50% space

⏹️ ▶️ Marco quota on that volume. we both fill it or come very close to filling it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco much of the time and it’s fine like it has never erred out time machine

⏹️ ▶️ Marco always keep him to date so you know what i know this is a complete diversion but huge recommendation

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for using the time machine thing on sinology is because it’s amazing

⏹️ ▶️ John i’ll do one better i have the same i have not a single volume but i have a time machine volume and i think sinology

⏹️ ▶️ John only lets you have one time machine volume i think that’s actually like a raid a raid set at this point because it’s it’s bigger than

⏹️ ▶️ John any one of my single discs and I have three or four different computers backing up to

⏹️ ▶️ John Time Machine, and I don’t do anything with Quotas. I just let them run. Interesting. They just kind of fight it out?

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what they’re doing. All I know is it never bothers me. The backup is complete successfully. You can recover files

⏹️ ▶️ John from it. I think they just, you know, when one of them sees that the thing is filling, they trim their old backups, you know?

⏹️ ▶️ John Like, it’s, as far as I’m concerned, it’s magic. Yes, I don’t do anything with the Quotas. It’s a free-for-all.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just like, whoever, whichever Time Machine backup ends up getting close to the the end of the disk,

⏹️ ▶️ John it says, oh, it’s time for me to trim some old backups and it does that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s cooperative time machining. Mm hmm.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nice. Yeah, I would I would double down on what you guys said as well. I have two physical

⏹️ ▶️ Casey disks that are joined in whatever the rate is that is non redundant because it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco zero.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. And so so I have two disks joined rate zero. I do the quota thing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Marco’s talking about. I have yet to have an issue outside of a disk failure, which is beyond

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Synology’s control. No, it’s worked really well for me. Well, how did we get on this subject? What were,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, uh, John asked if we partitioned stuff. I have, um, not partitioned

⏹️ ▶️ Casey any Mac I’ve owned ever to the best of my recollection. I’ve never done even, um, bootcamp,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which you would think I would have given my prior profession, but I always just used VMs. I used to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey aggressively partition my, my actual physical Windows machines in the past. Um,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I remember since ever I would have like my OS drive and then my like data drive and then an

⏹️ ▶️ Casey applications drive, thinking that if I ever wanted to put on a different OS, like a new version of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Windows, whatever, then all that other stuff could just remain where it was. And in reality, that has never

⏹️ ▶️ Casey been the case ever, ever, ever,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever. Yeah, I mean, with Windows, I would do the same thing. Because if you’re a Windows Power user,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you get into the habit of like, just maybe once a year, you just reformat your system drive and put it all back

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and start clean. Because with Windows, you basically have to do that to have a well-running system.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And once I moved to Macs, I think I’ve done that literally since the time I started using

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Macs in 2004. I think I’ve started clean twice in that entire time.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think my first time since 2008 was when I got the iMac. And then I was much more

⏹️ ▶️ Casey piecemeal about it rather than just transferring everything. Well, you know, like doing a migration assistant

⏹️ ▶️ Casey style thing. But anyway, yeah, so that was an extraordinarily long answer to the question that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John asked, which was, do you guys partition your drives? And John, I’m assuming you did say you do or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re going to say you do, I assume?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I do. Not my main drive, but I have so many drives except for this. They’re all split up into little pieces, mostly because

⏹️ ▶️ John the drives are so big, it’d be a waste to dedicate. I’m not going to dedicate one terabyte to boot camp,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? So that drive is split and other drives like are just divided into pieces.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I’ve never done the separate user directory. A lot of people do that. Like they have their home directory

⏹️ ▶️ John and all their files on one drive and then like basically a boot drive with the OS on it and

⏹️ ▶️ John their applications. And I never quite understood that split. And anytime I ever try to split like that back in the

⏹️ ▶️ John old days of very tiny hard drives, I always got it wrong. Like you try to guess how big everything is and give room

⏹️ ▶️ John for growth. And if you guess wrong on the operating system is like, you know, system 7.5.5 comes

⏹️ ▶️ John out and it’s a little bit bigger. And, you know, it’s just, it’s so easy to get that messed up. So, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, I think I will use a system like this because I have things partitioned now

⏹️ ▶️ John and I realize if I ever got close to, you know, my space constraints, I would have all this wasted space.

⏹️ ▶️ John And you can resize partitions to some degree, but it’s not as flexible as you’d want. So I think I will use space sharing. I won’t

⏹️ ▶️ John be confused by the size stuff. And I suppose other people, normal people who would be confused,

⏹️ ▶️ John just never partition anything. so maybe it’s a non-issue. But speaking of Time Machine, that’s, there’s an

⏹️ ▶️ John APFS thing related to that. First of all, you can’t even use Time Machine with APFS right now, but that’s obviously a temporary condition.

⏹️ ▶️ John APFS doesn’t provide any particular new features that make it

⏹️ ▶️ John easier for you to answer the question, hey, what’s happened since the last time I ran a backup?

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, a little bit, like it’s, but basically it’s still gonna have to use something like FS events, where

⏹️ ▶️ John any IO that goes through the kernel is logged in some fashion, and then you can find out what has changed

⏹️ ▶️ John since the last time you ran, probably with the same APIs, but in a similar fashion. So it doesn’t have

⏹️ ▶️ John something like ZFS’s give me the block diff since last time. And even if it had

⏹️ ▶️ John that, even though that’s super efficient, it doesn’t quite work with Time Machine’s UI because Time Machine lets you exclude things. And

⏹️ ▶️ John if you do anything at the block level, you can’t be excluding as easily as, based on

⏹️ ▶️ John file path or whatever. So APFS doesn’t give any advantages to Time Machine in terms

⏹️ ▶️ John of that kind of efficiency, but it does give lots of advantages in terms of making

⏹️ ▶️ John a consistent backup. We talked about this before in the W3C show with snapshots where Time Machine

⏹️ ▶️ John can take a snapshot of the drive as it exists in a certain state and then just slowly back up from

⏹️ ▶️ John that snapshot. So it won’t have to worry about like, Time Machine ran for three hours and

⏹️ ▶️ John when it started backing up, it backed up these files, but these files had backed up three hours later. So

⏹️ ▶️ John you have this weird mixture of different time periods. It’s like painting the Golden Gate Bridge or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John You got to go back to the beginning and find any tiles change you you’re waiting for this period this sort of period of quiet

⏹️ ▶️ John When things have settled down don’t worry about that with snapshots just take a snapshot back up from there destroy the snapshot

⏹️ ▶️ John when you’re done That’ll be great and also for the purpose

⏹️ ▶️ John of this gets into the next thing for the purpose of making multiple backups where the

⏹️ ▶️ John files that haven’t changed are the same sort of the time machine models you can go to the finder and Browse your backups, and they all look

⏹️ ▶️ John like Complete copies of your data, but of course they’re not storing the unchanged data multiple times They’re using hard

⏹️ ▶️ John links so they have hard links to files and hard links to directories But you’re gross and weird You don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John have to have those anymore because of the the copy-on-write stuff that APFS has

⏹️ ▶️ John And you can do clones where you can clone an entire directory And say this entire directory tree

⏹️ ▶️ John make a copy of it But not really like you can do it like basically in constant time. You’re not actually copying

⏹️ ▶️ John everything You’re just saying now there are two of these and they are independent copies. If you were to go into the copy and modify a file,

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re not modifying the file in both places like you would with a hard link or something. It’s copy on right. So as soon as

⏹️ ▶️ John you modify one of the change files, then they start to diverge. But the actual copy operation

⏹️ ▶️ John is just a clone operation. It’s it’s very, very fast. It’s one of the demos they did in the WWDC session.

⏹️ ▶️ John So that has some people paranoid because they’re like, well, frequently when I’m working on something, I’ll go to the to the Finder and

⏹️ ▶️ John duplicate it and put the other one off to the side, like poor man’s version control. You ever do that, where you just make a copy

⏹️ ▶️ John of a folder just in case and put it to the side? All the time. And it’s like, well, but

⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes I do that. What if one of the things gets corrupted because there’s a bad sector on disk? Well, if my clone

⏹️ ▶️ John is an actual clone, the bad sector on disk is gonna blow away both of them, or corrupt both

⏹️ ▶️ John of them because they share the same storage under the covers. Well, if UFS doesn’t dictate that every

⏹️ ▶️ John single copy is a clone, there’ll be two different APIs. I’m not sure which one the finder will use. I’m assuming it will

⏹️ ▶️ John use the fast one But even if the finder doesn’t offer this feature there will be a way

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure from the command line But if not, you could write a program to do it to say no do like a regular copy where you just copy it Don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John do the clone thing. So that’s another UI Nuance

⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple will have to decide how to navigate and that users will get to take advantage of and honestly I think I think it’s good to have both features.

⏹️ ▶️ John Sometimes I do want to make a clone of this gigantic directory tree for free

⏹️ ▶️ John in constant time and other times I want to say no actually copy every single one of this pieces of data to

⏹️ ▶️ John a new place on disk because that’s what I want so I look forward to hopefully it’s like a modifier

⏹️ ▶️ John key you can hold down or something I look forward to that being exposed in the finder but I am resigned to the fact that I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John probably end up having to do it from the command line and the other fun thing about clones this

⏹️ ▶️ John is sort of for Apple’s purposes again this whole this whole file system is for Apple’s purposes, is that it

⏹️ ▶️ John can be atomic. Apple has a lot of things in the system, including some file formats, quote unquote

⏹️ ▶️ John file formats, that are actually directories full of files, like.rtfd is actually a directory

⏹️ ▶️ John full of a bunch of other things. And in a simple application like, I was

⏹️ ▶️ John gonna say teach text, geez, what the hell is it called? TextEdit, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John on macOS. TextEdit can make rtfd quote unquote files, which are really

⏹️ ▶️ John directory trees. And when you save, it’s trying to do like a safe save where if the

⏹️ ▶️ John plug gets pulled in the middle of your save operation, you either have the new version of the file, the old version, you don’t have like half and half.

⏹️ ▶️ John So the atomic save operation now will do like, and this is also in the

⏹️ ▶️ John the W2C session, if I recall correctly, it will like write the new version of the file

⏹️ ▶️ John to a new location, rename the old one to a weird name and rename the new directory on top of the

⏹️ ▶️ John old one. But there’s still a period in which things are inconsistent. When you rename the old one one to a new name,

⏹️ ▶️ John but you haven’t yet renamed the new one on top of it. Now you have two files, neither of which is named like the old

⏹️ ▶️ John one. And they might both be hidden because you don’t want people to see this weird stuff going on. Um,

⏹️ ▶️ John so that’s not great. Uh, APFS, you can do an atomic clone. Uh, and so you can sort

⏹️ ▶️ John of, in one operation, one atomic operation, either completely do it or completely not do it.

⏹️ ▶️ John You have the old file, you have the new file. And of course it’s super efficient and all the other stuff. So

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s gonna be neat for people writing applications. If they have similar file formats, it’ll make those file formats

⏹️ ▶️ John more tenable because before it was just kind of such a pain and you knew you had this race condition where things could be in a weird state

⏹️ ▶️ John for a small period of time. You can even see it in the finder sometimes because the finder’s now actually reactive to changes.

⏹️ ▶️ John Where if you watched when like TextEdit saved, you’d see these weird temporary files and a double file and a rename

⏹️ ▶️ John on top of the other one. And with cloning, hopefully that will go so fast that you won’t see it anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, my favorite is, since I’ve been doing a lot of Swift development lately, just like Marco, I’ve had

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a playground on my desktop, and every time that the playground goes to save itself, or if I save

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, it’ll flash from the playground icon to the generic folder

⏹️ ▶️ Casey icon, and then back to the playground icon once Finder catches up and realizes it’s one of those like bundles.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s actually, I remember when that feature came to the Finder, like having an efficient way to sort of tell

⏹️ ▶️ John the kernel, hey, I’m interested if anything happens to any one of these files. So if anything changes

⏹️ ▶️ John one of these files, I don’t care what process it is in the whole system, let me know so I don’t have to pull. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John cause the old model was like, if you had a Finder window open and other applications were changing it, it’s like the Finder window could pull periodically.

⏹️ ▶️ John And if it was pulling, you would never catch a change that’s that’s fast. But because it’s using KQ or FS events

⏹️ ▶️ John or some other system that is, you know, that’s not pulling that the kernel will notify the Finder,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s fast enough to catch almost any change. In fact, it might still catch the clone, But hopefully

⏹️ ▶️ John it will only like flash briefly and you’ll see the old file and then blink and then the new file and never will you see the

⏹️ ▶️ John weird ivory name this to not be an RTFD anymore or not be a.pygron anymore

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. I guess the final item is snapshots that we already talked about. I

⏹️ ▶️ John wonder if there’ll be any UI to that. Probably not, because it’s more like a programmatic thing. Time Machine will

⏹️ ▶️ John be creating and deleting snapshots behind the scenes, but you don’t need to see that. Programs like SuperDuper might create

⏹️ ▶️ John snapshots to backup from, but you don’t need to see that either. It’ll probably do it through an API. There will be a command line, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John sure. But I can’t envision any particular reason for there to ever be a GUI

⏹️ ▶️ John for doing snapshots. So I guess another third-party opportunity. Because it’s a straightforward API

⏹️ ▶️ John and you can make a cool third-party thing that lets you view and

⏹️ ▶️ John create and destroy snapshots. I’m not making that up, but that’s another idea for people who wanna make an application

⏹️ ▶️ John that three people will buy.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, John, there’s a lot of app ideas that I’m like, you know, I would love for this app to exist.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you look around and it just doesn’t exist. And at some point, you gotta, you know, you’re a programmer.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco At some point, you gotta be like, you know what? Fine, I’m gonna make it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I imagine someone will make that snapshot thing. Like, do you ever see like backup loop or those other

⏹️ ▶️ John time machine browsing things that let you like look at your time machine backups or like there are fancy interfaces

⏹️ ▶️ John to the TMU tail command line? There’s lots of GUI apps like that. I’m sure someone will make one just because

⏹️ ▶️ John if an app like this is easy to make, all you’re doing is making it more convenient to do stuff that you could do from the command

⏹️ ▶️ John line, someone will make it. So I feel like just by talking about it, it will come into existence.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but you know what else though? Even if somebody makes it, they’re not gonna make it your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco way. Truth.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s true. So you have to do it, John, it’s obvious.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll say, I don’t understand when I would do any of these things. Like, it’s not like I

⏹️ ▶️ John have a lot of time that’s not occupied with other stuff that I would rather be doing.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Brian Ash in the chat just made an excellent point. He said that Underscore is listening and he just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey completed it, which is probably accurate.

⏹️ ▶️ John But he made the iOS version, so it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey good

⏹️ ▶️ John for me.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. All right. Are we done with APFS? Is that it?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think so. Like, these are things we already talked about in the WWDC thing. I don’t think there’s anything

⏹️ ▶️ John new. We didn’t have many questions from listeners about it. Although I did, no one

⏹️ ▶️ John has yet called me on the mistakes I made about ASCII, seven-bit ASCII

⏹️ ▶️ John versus eight-bit ASCII and UTF-8, but I guess no one cares, that’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ John I know I made the mistakes. People who know know I made the mistakes. It was really not mistakes, it was just errors of omission

⏹️ ▶️ John because it doesn’t make any sense. I kept saying 255, but obviously, if you’re gonna use all 255

⏹️ ▶️ John combinations of eight bits, you have no way to implement UTF-8, and that’s obviously not how it works. So

⏹️ ▶️ John anyway,

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HDMI CEC and universal remotes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Harry’s comm promo code ATP for $5 off. Thanks a lot. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Have some important follow-up actually that surprise

⏹️ ▶️ John follow-up. I think you missed that part of the show, but go ahead

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have follow-up on HDMI CEC Your favorite topic.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh god. Oh You’re an HDMI CEC unicorn or no longer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever since I got the new Apple TV So what was that October November? Whatever whenever that was? does.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco My TV is very old. It’s like a 2006-ish Panasonic Plasma.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Apple TV was not able to do anything else to it except any input given to the Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco TV remote. It would automatically switch the input over to the Apple TV. So it was able to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco steal the input, the video input from the TV, which is really fun. If Tiff was playing a game on the PlayStation

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then you brush the remote and all of a sudden the input switches, that was fun.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco couldn’t turn the TV on but it could turn the TV off which was really nice

⏹️ ▶️ Marco every night you know we’re done watching TV hold down the home button for a few seconds you put you hit sleep

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and both things turn off it’s awesome and that worked flawlessly and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco now it just doesn’t and it’s so much worse and I’ve tried power cycling everything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have no idea what to do like nothing changed it’s exactly like what you said

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was like you know it’ll work and it’ll just stop working and you have no idea why and nothing fixes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it like it just stopped and it’s so frustrating now now

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like once you have that convenience to have to then go back and now I have to turn my TV off separately

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which means I have to like have the remote out and everything it’s this is like the worst

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like first world problem ever but I just wanted you to know John that HDMI CEC that that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco your your your prediction came true that it never it never works

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the time for everybody. And if it does, just wait.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the good news is it’ll start working again eventually, too. That’s all

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco part of the

⏹️ ▶️ John experience. One day, who knows what it’ll be like. You’ll disconnect it or you’ll reconnect something

⏹️ ▶️ John else or it’ll start working again. Back when we were discussing this, I did hear from a lot of people like, CEC

⏹️ ▶️ John works fine to me. Sometimes I would hear from them again a couple of months later, go, oh, it stopped working.

⏹️ ▶️ John Exactly. But not always. I bet, just like there are Tapticlick Wizards, there are CEC Unicorns

⏹️ ▶️ John who just have never had a problem. And so, if their luck continues,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s possible to live a life where a CEC always works. It just seems highly unlikely to me. Like, I’ve never met

⏹️ ▶️ John one of those people, but I’m sure they exist somewhere. I mean, someone wins the lottery too, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Serious question, Marco. Have you gone into the settings to see, because I could swear

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that in settings, it has an option whether or not to use CEC. Of course, it’s not labeled that way, but it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, turn off the TV power when the Apple TV power turns off or something like that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and not to say that you changed it, but maybe like a software update flipped that on you or something like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that and maybe that’s what did it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah can you just just check to make sure it’s plugged in not to say that you unplugged it just take maybe take

⏹️ ▶️ Marco out the

⏹️ ▶️ John plug. Sometimes sometimes there’s dust in the plug yeah you just want that. Yeah just blow

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the plug yeah. You’re the worst. Here I am trying to help you and that’s what I get.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I

⏹️ ▶️ John actually haven’t checked the settings. For the power thing though isn’t there IR still in the remote?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yes. Yes. So you can’t just do use that for the power like take CEC out of the equation just

⏹️ ▶️ John use the IR for the power for your TV.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think there’s a way to tell the Apple TV like send the IR thing now. I think it only

⏹️ ▶️ Marco works for volume control.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I thought too but it might be worth looking into. I know Joe Steele loves his Apple TV you can

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ask him about it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean honestly like I’m I’m very happy with the Apple TV in most other ways like yeah the remote

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is stupid but you know they’re like the the software environment, yes, there are many flaws. However,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco having used the other TV boxes that are competing with this, and you know, even compared to the old

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple TV, this is still the one I prefer, and I still use it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for, you know, a very heavy use every day. And it’s unfortunate that it is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not perfect, of course, but nothing ever is that it can’t be complained about.

⏹️ ▶️ John Good try. Good try. Well, so my world, I mean, I don’t know if you remember,

⏹️ ▶️ John but you’ve seen my table with a thousand remotes. CEC is against my religion. I do not have it. I have it everywhere.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I also have a thousand remotes. And I don’t have a universal remote. But here’s the thing about a thousand remotes. They

⏹️ ▶️ John never don’t work. And I use the correct remote to do all the things. They always work. And there are never

⏹️ ▶️ John any weird interactions. And the boxes don’t know each other exists. And that’s the way it should be. I did enable

⏹️ ▶️ John it at one point for like my entire setup. But my setup is way too complicated for… I could barely get it to work

⏹️ ▶️ John momentarily. I’m like, this is untenable. And I would see it break within minutes because of

⏹️ ▶️ John me not turning things on in the right order. So I immediately turned it off everywhere, which is a shame, because there are a couple of features

⏹️ ▶️ John that I would like, but I get by pretty well with all my remotes knowing how to do IR stuff. So I can do

⏹️ ▶️ John volume up and down on the TV and power on the TV from a bunch of different remotes. But IR and learning

⏹️ ▶️ John is fairly stable technology, not like the CEC stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m also, I think I’m on your side in regards to the what appears to be your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco position on universal remotes. I, we have a Logitech Harmony something or other

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know, when we bought it a few years ago to try to combat this issue

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I just have never, we’ve never found a universal remote that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, that is actually like worth, it’s actually a net gain. You know, like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s almost like the XKCD comic of like, you know, all these standards are a mess.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco What we need is a new standard. Like that’s kind of what like it’s like all I have too many remotes.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco What I need is another remote and then you just have more remotes like and it and you can’t actually get rid of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the other remotes because you still need them sometimes to do certain things and sometimes the universal remote like gets

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like unsinked with the state of the things and so it thinks things are in a certain state that they’re not in and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just such a pain and then my now my remote has firmware that needs to be updated and needs to be on my Wi-Fi

⏹️ ▶️ Marco network and then it’s just like it’s just a pain. It’s such a pain.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I couldn’t agree with that more. We had a very old Harmony or equivalent,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, three, four years ago now, and I didn’t understand how it could possibly work until

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I realized that it was tracking the state of the system as best it could. But just like you said,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it can’t actually know the state of the system, so it was constantly losing track of things.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And when it worked, it was brilliant, but it almost never worked, and it was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey very frustrating.

⏹️ ▶️ John I continue to believe that a good universal remote would actually simplify things, especially

⏹️ ▶️ John for the members of my family who are not me. But as we discussed at some point

⏹️ ▶️ John about car stuff, I’m a climate control micromanager in the car. Like I want the individual

⏹️ ▶️ John controls for fan speed and temperature and which direction the air is flowing. And I’m exactly the same way with TV.

⏹️ ▶️ John I have a million remotes. I know what all of them do. I know which things I want on

⏹️ ▶️ John for which shows at which time, depending on my mood and just I, you know, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John exact. It feels to me that the part of my brain is activated is exactly the same part of my brain is activated when I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John messing with climate controls in car. And so I don’t pretend this is an optimal setup, but it has the advantages of being

⏹️ ▶️ John completely understandable to me and deterministic. And I, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John I micromanage it. I just, you know, when do I want the big speakers on or the little ones? Do I want surround

⏹️ ▶️ John decoding? Or is this thing stereo? And then I want to turn on the Dolby Digital thing. and

⏹️ ▶️ John do I want it down to like the Apple TV apps? Like, do I wanna use Infuse to try to get it to send the unmodified

⏹️ ▶️ John DTS and do the decoding on the Apple TV? Or do I wanna let the iMac do it and do it through Plex? And

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s how I work. Like, I wish it was simpler. I wish there was one app and one box and one interface and all my stuff was

⏹️ ▶️ John in one place, but that’s just not the case. And so since things are in a million other places, having a million

⏹️ ▶️ John remotes and a million things to adjust seems like an honest representation of the reality of where the hell my media

⏹️ ▶️ John is. And I don’t think it’s unlearnable. I think I’m trying to see who is a second place

⏹️ ▶️ John person in the family who understands the system. It’s probably one of my kids, maybe my youngest.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. Nobody really understands it fully except for me, which is potentially a problem. Maybe I should write something

⏹️ ▶️ John down. Like if I get hit by a bus, here’s how to watch TV. But it’s not that bad.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you make fun of me for vinyl? Oh.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John nothing to do with vinyl. This is just the interface wise. Like I said, I’ve never bought a universal remote, But

⏹️ ▶️ John I assume it would make things easier, especially if you have a universal remote and you turn on CEC

⏹️ ▶️ John everywhere, then maybe it would have a way to detect and it could repair CEC screwed upness. But who

⏹️ ▶️ John knows? Maybe not. I still do have devices that are IR only and you have to have like IR blasters

⏹️ ▶️ John and other crap like that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, you just like it for the ceremony. It’s a terribly inferior standard, but you just like

⏹️ ▶️ John it. It’s not. It’s not about ceremony. It’s all just like it’s there’s no ceremony to micro managing the climate

⏹️ ▶️ John control in the car. high I want the fan speed and I know what I want the temperature set to and I know if I want it to

⏹️ ▶️ John coming out the top vents or the bottom vents or both or defroster I know all those things so I can just set them directly.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am so happy that I don’t stress about those sorts of things. You know what I do in my car? I hit the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey auto button and then I usually hit the all button that Marco wishes Tiff’s car had

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey then I set a temperature and then I don’t friggin think about it anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like the automatic transmission of climate control. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know Casey if you manage it it yourself then it would just it would it would feel

⏹️ ▶️ Marco warmer and less artificial it would remind you of your childhood. On

⏹️ ▶️ John this note there is no vinyl analogy to be had here there is absolutely no connection to vinyl

⏹️ ▶️ John whatsoever because it’s not like the video or sound changes quality

⏹️ ▶️ John depending on what remotes I use you understand this is the vinyl analogy is no good. Just throw it out the window

⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t even throw it back in Casey’s face to make fun of it because it

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I can try. I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ Casey been visioning, you know, the, well, you may not, but the emoji of the woman with her arms like in a cross in front

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of her face. I’m envisioning John doing that sitting in front of his computer.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s exactly what I look like.

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“Screen time” for kids

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⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyway are we talking about email we talking about parenting what do you what pick your poison oh man

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a tough one we did get a lot of feedback after the last in the last episode

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we we kind of joked in the after show that if we run out of topics we’re gonna have to talk about those things

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then we got a lot of responses from people saying, please talk about one or the other

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of those things. I think if I had to take a guess, I think parenting might’ve come out ahead. I think so. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John not parenting, it’s specifically screen time for kids.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That’s right, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John This is a very old piece of follow-up, and I think that was the one that’s in the most demand. It’s not like there’s not stuff below it, about

⏹️ ▶️ John Intel making chips for phones, and Chromebooks outselling Macs, and Letterpress moving off Game Center. There are other things,

⏹️ ▶️ John but I don’t feel like we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel for this. I think this is just a better topic than those other

⏹️ ▶️ John ones. Both of these I think are better topics.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey The request was what exactly? Let’s see, Peter Beardsley wrote in.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We still have this? I was joking.

⏹️ ▶️ John He is no longer listening to the show, but a year and a half ago, Peter Beardsley wrote in.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco He has since retired and no longer even uses computers anymore. His kids are in college now.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s very true. He had written in and said, John has been talking about playing Destiny with his kid.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco posts pictures of him playing games on an iPad. The topic of quote-unquote

⏹️ ▶️ Casey screen time is a controversial one in my household. How do you determine what is an appropriate amount? My wife has her opinions

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I have mine, but I’d love to hear yours as well.” So at this point, this is when we

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really anger anyone who we haven’t angered yet in the entire course of the show.

⏹️ ▶️ John No, but most parents don’t get angry. Like I think most parents are beaten down by reality and eventually realize

⏹️ ▶️ John people have different parenting ideas. It’s a tiny minority of parents that are all high and mighty, but having kids is the

⏹️ ▶️ John best thing to teach you that you don’t know the first thing about having kids. But

⏹️ ▶️ John as for the framing of this topic, I don’t really… Not that I don’t accept

⏹️ ▶️ John the premise, but the premise itself contains some opinionated

⏹️ ▶️ John information, which is that screen time, in quotes, which is a phrase I think we’ve all heard from either from ourselves

⏹️ ▶️ John saying it or other parents and stuff that there is a category

⏹️ ▶️ John of activities that your kid can do that involves them looking at a screen, which is basically an electronic

⏹️ ▶️ John thing that shows moving images on it, that that is a valid categorization.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like we don’t talk about like yellow sock time. How much time do you let your kids wear yellow socks? How much time do you

⏹️ ▶️ John let them touch the floor floor time? Like it’s screen time specifically and encoded

⏹️ ▶️ John in that is sort of an unquestioning demonization

⏹️ ▶️ John to some degree of technology. In that like, why is reading a book not screen

⏹️ ▶️ John time? If you read a book on an iPad, does it become screen time because it’s on a screen? Like that

⏹️ ▶️ John screens themselves. Like again, I don’t think this, it’s not like a heavy message, but in this

⏹️ ▶️ John word, in this phrase, in this entire concept, in this question that comes up, the idea

⏹️ ▶️ John that looking at a screen is a fundamental aspect of an activity, I mostly

⏹️ ▶️ John reject. And the book one is the best example because, you know, these days, like, oh, my kids are reading a book, it’s so wonderful, I

⏹️ ▶️ John feel great about it. But if they’re reading that same exact book on their iPad screen, suddenly they’re rotting their brains

⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re just gonna become little zombies and they’re just staring at screens all the time. Same activity, but one

⏹️ ▶️ John has a screen and one doesn’t. So, at least for me, I don’t categorize

⏹️ ▶️ John activities based on the piece of technology they’re using. I would more categorize it as like

⏹️ ▶️ John what is the activity? Are they watching video? What kind of video? Is this fiction

⏹️ ▶️ John and nonfiction? You know, and sometimes you throw something like, oh, they’re watching YouTube, but it’s really just shorthand for categorizing

⏹️ ▶️ John the types of things that are on YouTube. In general, they’re not watching a feature length movie on YouTube. And they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John mostly not watching like serial TV show style things on YouTube. So YouTube is, you know, as kind of a

⏹️ ▶️ John definition, but reading books, watching movies, many things happen in front of screens, writing,

⏹️ ▶️ John my daughter writes a a lot and you know word processors writes fiction and writes down lists and stuff. That’s also

⏹️ ▶️ John in front of a screen. I categorize that entirely differently than her watching you know ever after

⏹️ ▶️ John high or whatever. So that’s that’s my that’s my opening statement I guess on screen time and how

⏹️ ▶️ John do you guys feel about that is that a phrase that is used ever in your house or is it how you think about things at all.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes. So it’s a little bit different for me as compared to you guys because Declan

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is just today actually 20 months old and so he’s not even two years.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We generally speaking avoided show—well, he had no interest in the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey TV for a long time. Then once he started to show an interest, we avoided having the TV on

⏹️ ▶️ Casey when he was awake and around. That’s still mostly the case.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have started—or Aaron, because I’m at work at the time—has started showing him Sesame Street every day,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which he very, very much enjoys. And then we have my old iPad mini

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we have put a bunch of Daniel Tiger and Sesame

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Street episodes on. And we’ll use that only in desperation scenarios, typically only when

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’re in the car because he doesn’t particularly like the car. But other than that,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey he’s very rarely looking at a television screen or an iPad. And I’m not saying that that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, but it feels for us like we should probably avoid it at least for now. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, it’s a little weird because he’s only 20 months. I mean, he doesn’t, he isn’t into it like Adam or like your kids

⏹️ ▶️ Casey would be.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, for us, you know, Adam is, you know, my kid is four and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco he, you know, we’ve, we’ve had, we don’t really draw the distinction. We don’t, we don’t use the term screen time

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or any, or any other, you know, replacement term for that concept. And you know, I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s, you know, like so many things in parenting, it depends on your kid. In our case,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we never specifically glorified things with screens or made them a forbidden thing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or a thing that was saved for only special occasions. It’s like one toy of many in the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco house. Adam could choose to play with the iPad or can watch TV for a while

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or he can do other things. We haven’t really had to set limits because the kind

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of kid he is, at least so far, he treats it like any other toy. He’ll be happy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to play with the iPad for maybe 20 minutes, half hour, and then he’ll want to do something else.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think that’s kind of a healthy attitude for it. Our philosophy on this,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it ever came to having to put any kind of limits in to maintain healthy balances,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco our philosophy is this is a world full of screens that we live in. It’s only getting

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more in that direction as we move forward in time. So Adam is growing up

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a world full of screens. To try to keep him from that or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco limit that artificially in a way that would make it weird to deal

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with screens for him or to make it a rebellion of sorts or only a special

⏹️ ▶️ Marco treat, doesn’t really seem like that fits into the world we actually live in today. I get the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco idea of why people want to limit that and what people want their kids to do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead, I guess, be social or go outside or whatever. But I think if you already have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a reasonable balance of activities for your kid, having

⏹️ ▶️ Marco screens and things with screens be a part of that, I don’t see it as any different

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from any other toy that he has.

⏹️ ▶️ John So as kids get older, like you said, it really depends on your kid, kids will start picking up

⏹️ ▶️ John more of their own interests. Like especially when you’re young ages, you can basically control everything they do. You control the toys they play with

⏹️ ▶️ John because you buy them the toys. You can even control by not bringing them down the toilet that you don’t want them to see the toys

⏹️ ▶️ John that you’re not gonna buy them. Like when they’re very young, you have a lot of control. And so you can sort of provide

⏹️ ▶️ John the balance simply by providing a balance of things that you all approve of. But of course, kids get older, start getting minds

⏹️ ▶️ John of their own. And depending on your kid, they have different preferences

⏹️ ▶️ John and they will gravitate towards something. And then no matter what they gravitate towards, maintaining what you think is a healthy

⏹️ ▶️ John balance may require some intervention. But again, I would

⏹️ ▶️ John say that doesn’t specifically apply to screen. So for example, if your kid starts getting

⏹️ ▶️ John older and becomes really into books, and all they want to do all the time is go

⏹️ ▶️ John up to the room and read, you’re like, Oh, I would be overjoyed if my kid read all the time. But at a certain point, they need

⏹️ ▶️ John to learn how to deal with other people and be social. That’s part of growing up too. So you may find yourself

⏹️ ▶️ John limiting book time, because you need your kid to socialize with other kids to learn how to deal with other people.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like you’re trying to find the right balance for your kid, which the balance isn’t the same for everybody. But most people would say,

⏹️ ▶️ John like learning to deal with other people as part of growing up and you can’t avoid it, even if you’re really, really into

⏹️ ▶️ John whatever it is you’re into. It’s making models or reading books or all these activities that people think are like are healthy and, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John oh, that’s a good thing to do. Like that’s that’s why I hate the screen categorization of screens like

⏹️ ▶️ John there. Certain activities are just accepted by most parents as on a continuum of

⏹️ ▶️ John evil. Right. So reading is one of the best you can do. Making models is kind of in the middle.

⏹️ ▶️ John Making models that have electronics, maybe getting a little worse. Anything that involves the television,

⏹️ ▶️ John bad. Anything that involves computers could be good, but probably also bad. Video games, universally

⏹️ ▶️ John bad, right? And that sort of continuum that we all sort of agree

⏹️ ▶️ John upon before we begin talking about balance, I totally disagree with, mostly for the reasons Marco said. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John we live in a world with screens, we live in a world with television, We live in a world with recorded music, like, oh, don’t listen to those

⏹️ ▶️ John recorded music. It’s live music or nothing. You’ll rot your brain. Like, you know, the novel was

⏹️ ▶️ John condemned as something that would be the downfall of humanity when it was introduced too. So

⏹️ ▶️ John through the lens of history, it’s obviously ridiculous to think about things in that way. But all of those mediums

⏹️ ▶️ John have things that can provide your kid with something. So if your kid is

⏹️ ▶️ John only reading, well, it’s hard for me to find, like if they’re only reading the same kind

⏹️ ▶️ John of simple story over and over again. They’re not really growing as

⏹️ ▶️ John a reader, right? If they’re only watching the same kind of television show over and over again, they’re not really growing as a viewer

⏹️ ▶️ John of, you know, of moving pictures or whatever. Like, and if they’re only playing the same computer

⏹️ ▶️ John game over and over again, they’re not expanding outwards into the like every medium and every

⏹️ ▶️ John form of input and activity has like your kids should be

⏹️ ▶️ John crawling up that ladder and ladder and becoming more sophisticated and learning and growing in all the activities that they

⏹️ ▶️ John do. And if they’re not, that’s, you know, something you have to be aware of. But there’s nothing inherent,

⏹️ ▶️ John I believe, in any of the specific activities that makes them better or worse. Like I would rather my

⏹️ ▶️ John kids watch a YouTube video like a science YouTube video than

⏹️ ▶️ John like read a silly book about fairies and rainbows that is two years below

⏹️ ▶️ John their grade level that they’ve read 50 times before. Like one of them uses a screen and one of them is a book and

⏹️ ▶️ John supposedly like the perfect thing that we want our children to do, but you can’t view them that way. You can’t

⏹️ ▶️ John slot them in by the media. So that’s definitely how I look at things. And

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m really, for my kids, mostly looking at what they are drawn to and figuring out what I

⏹️ ▶️ John have to put limits on based on what if I didn’t put limits, they would just do obsessively. And

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not always watch a television show or play a video game. could be any activity they

⏹️ ▶️ John do obsessively. One of my kids always wants to go and hang out with her friends

⏹️ ▶️ John and my son mostly will stay inside and not see anybody. So we’re trying to push one out of the house

⏹️ ▶️ John all the time and the other one trying to get to calm down a lot. So every kid is different.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t know what we’re going to do in the future. I think it’s funny because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was very resentful of my parents or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or extended family putting limits on our screen time. Like I think Marco and I have talked about, although maybe it never made it in the show,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey when we were kids and we hung out, so we were, I don’t know, eight, 10, 12, something like that,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we would meet up and we would hang out and then my grandmother would inevitably, or Marco’s mom

⏹️ ▶️ Casey would inevitably tell us, okay, you’ve played enough on the computer, it’s time to go outside now. And I remember

⏹️ ▶️ Casey being really, really resentful of that because we were having a great time

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we were, in some cases, doing things that you could argue were productive. Like I vividly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey remember spending hours on the world’s crappiest choose your own adventure visual basic 1.0 game. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it wasn’t always Transport Tycoon, although damned if we didn’t play a lot of Transport Tycoon.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that might have been more than half.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But nevertheless, I remember being so resentful of the get outside shtick.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But here I am now a parent, And I feel like I’m reverting into that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey same mindset of, oh, you probably shouldn’t be playing on the iPad

⏹️ ▶️ Casey constantly, which again, he doesn’t because he’s so young, but I could see it happening. You probably shouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey be on the iPad constantly, you should probably go outside. And I feel like, and now

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the time to instill within him that he needs to be a well-rounded person. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I agree completely with what both of you said, that the reality of the situation is that part of being well-rounded

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in today’s society is being comfortable in front of a screen. So I don’t know what

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the right answer is, and obviously Aaron and I will have to kind of fake it till we make it. Well, I guess you never really make it in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey parenting, but you know what I mean? And we’ll see how it shakes out. Fake it till they go to college.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, right? We’ll see how it shakes out as he gets older and perhaps starts requesting these things. But it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey nice because like John had said, we have that control now where he doesn’t ever really see

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the iPad. And so, it’s not, he won’t know or ask

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for it unless we say to him, do you want to watch Daniel Tiger or do you want to watch Sesame Street or what have you.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s also worth pointing out that, you know, we as parents, like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the kids can look and see what we do and it would be awfully hypocritical of us

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to say, you know, you need to limit your screen time while we sit there

⏹️ ▶️ Marco using screens for way more time during the day than that. And like they know that, they can see that, like they’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not gonna respect a rule or the parents making that rule if the parents themselves are blatantly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco violating it all the time.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, I’m guilty of that.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, like I said, you looking at a screen doesn’t mean you’re doing the same thing. Like, I think my kids do differentiate

⏹️ ▶️ John roughly. Like they know when I’m working, you know, sometimes I’m working on my, so they can tell the difference

⏹️ ▶️ John between me working versus me reading Twitter, versus me watching a YouTube video, which I might invite them

⏹️ ▶️ John to join into. It’s the specific activity that’s the issue.

⏹️ ▶️ John Casey mentioned it in terms of like them becoming competent with screens. And for the most part,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think that’s something we need to put an effort into because it would be very, unless your kid like really doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John like them at all, and then you might wanna make sure that they have some minimum competence, but I don’t think there’s any effort we need to make. That’s just gonna happen,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? They can’t help but be competent because they’re surrounded by them because we have a million of these devices

⏹️ ▶️ John at home, and then they’ll see them at school. So that’s gonna take care of itself. But really what I’m thinking of is

⏹️ ▶️ John What are they doing? Like the fact that a screen doesn’t, is not a factor as far as I’m concerned, because I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s magic radiation rotting their brains coming out of like backlit screens. It’s what are they actually doing?

⏹️ ▶️ John Are they learning something? Are they reading Wikipedia pages? Are they, if they’re watching some

⏹️ ▶️ John kind of video, is it a television show that I approve of in terms of,

⏹️ ▶️ John is it constructive in some way? Or are they playing a game that is teaching them something instead of just

⏹️ ▶️ John being, is it age appropriate? a lot of you know is it should you be watching this television show this movie this YouTube

⏹️ ▶️ John video whatever what are you getting out of this are you watching the same kind of thing over and over again are you playing

⏹️ ▶️ John the same kind of game over and over um and of course as you’ll see this as your kids get older i

⏹️ ▶️ John imagine this will not be a thing that goes away but anyone who has kids in double digit ages knows the thing of

⏹️ ▶️ John like multiple screens there my son is forever uh has

⏹️ ▶️ John his ipad playing YouTube videos, you know, in a loop based, not in a loop, but like with

⏹️ ▶️ John on autopile, he doesn’t pick the videos, he just accepts whatever plays next. This is the amazing power that YouTube has

⏹️ ▶️ John over our children. Listening to that on headphones while playing a video game

⏹️ ▶️ John on the television or on like the PlayStation on the monitor. Like so he’s hearing audio

⏹️ ▶️ John from a YouTube video while playing a video game. And then I guess occasionally glancing down at that thing and then his phone is

⏹️ ▶️ John also on the desk and so he’s getting texts from friends at the same time. How do you even parse

⏹️ ▶️ John that? But that’s a thing that people do all the time. Kids do all the time these days. So now you have to look at like the

⏹️ ▶️ John three things that they’re doing. Is he communicating well with his friends? What are

⏹️ ▶️ John the YouTube videos that are playing? Are the YouTube videos related to the game that he’s playing and he’s trying to learn strategies and then

⏹️ ▶️ John implement them? For people who demonize video games that may be like, oh, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John double bad. He’s playing a stupid video game, which I don’t like and he’s watching a video about how to

⏹️ ▶️ John play the video game. what an incredible waste of time. But essentially what he’s doing is like skills

⏹️ ▶️ John that come in, you know, handy, not just for schoolwork, but for regular work, like where you have to

⏹️ ▶️ John learn how to do something sort of on the job while you’re doing it. And you want to be able to do the thing that you’re doing better.

⏹️ ▶️ John And so you’re essentially doing research to fit. I mean, it’s very similar to programming and then just like going

⏹️ ▶️ John to the website and looking at the documentation and having the code in another window and having the web browser open over there. Like we

⏹️ ▶️ John all do that all the time. This is the video game thing is the equivalent of that. And I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ John it really helps your gamer and you understand that these things aren’t just all mindless, that they’re actually fairly complicated.

⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, I mean, you know, from transport tycoon, like, you learned things about you didn’t have the internet

⏹️ ▶️ John probably in those days where you could look up awesome strategies for transport tycoon and stuff, but they’re surprisingly

⏹️ ▶️ John deep and the skills you learn have able to like, juggle strategies and write things down with a pencil

⏹️ ▶️ John and paper and use them to excel in this thing you’re doing, which is granted kind of pointless, but that’s exactly what play is like

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s supposed to be a sort of a trial run in a safe environment of skills that will come in handy later in life

⏹️ ▶️ John and more important situations or you become a game developer and they transfer exactly so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know I would argue like school is pointless like most of what you do in school is pointless but the reason

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you do it is that it’s it’s an educational exercise to develop your brain in certain ways and games

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are often that same thing

⏹️ ▶️ John and even like things like television show and movies like a lot of what I want my kids to learn when they watch

⏹️ ▶️ John media that hopefully is constructive in some way is you see interpersonal relationships.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like, you have a certain amount of interpersonal relationships that you get to try out when you go to school, when you hang out with your friends, but you also learn

⏹️ ▶️ John from the media that you see, how do people relate to each other? What are the various anti-patterns of how they relate?

⏹️ ▶️ John How will I be treated if I act like this? A lot of fiction sort of plays out those things, especially kids’

⏹️ ▶️ John fiction where they show the kid who’s too conceited or the kid who’s shy or bullying

⏹️ ▶️ John or like all you know very a lot of media for children eventually gets

⏹️ ▶️ John into all those topics and they’re just like oh i’m just watching a tv show but i think people don’t realize how much people and

⏹️ ▶️ John even reading books and stuff like that like fiction provides a way to

⏹️ ▶️ John try out activities that you’re not going to actually try yourself but to see pretend people try them out and see the consequences

⏹️ ▶️ John which is why you have to keep your eye on fiction because if you fed your kids the wrong kind of fiction they could You definitely get the wrong kind of idea

⏹️ ▶️ John about the way the world works. So you have to… that’s why you have to sort of be on top of what they’re looking

⏹️ ▶️ John into or whatever. And that’s why, you know, when you’re young it’s easy, but later on they will start picking things on their own. You have

⏹️ ▶️ John to sort of take an interest in what are you watching. And you will have to watch a bunch of episodes of shows

⏹️ ▶️ John that you’re not actually interested in because they’re for kids. But if you don’t do that, you’ll have no idea what it is they’re learning and taking

⏹️ ▶️ John away. Because they, you know, the same way they watch you to learn how interpersonal relationships work, they

⏹️ ▶️ John also learn that from fiction. I think back to the number of things I learned about,

⏹️ ▶️ John learned or mislearned about human nature from television and movies and books from my childhood,

⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s a surprising amount, perhaps more than I learned from, you know, my parents actually

⏹️ ▶️ John telling me in the sort of traditional parenting way of like, let me tell you why you should

⏹️ ▶️ John not be a bully and why you should be nice to your sister or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, it’s funny you bring all this up because just the other day, Erin sent me an article she had found. And we’ll put it in the show

⏹️ ▶️ Casey notes. And the title is Research Shows Preschoolers Who Watch Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood Develop Social and Emotional

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Skills. And this is a study by Texas Tech University, apparently.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And what they did was they had preschoolers watch a nature show for a couple of weeks

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or watch Daniel Tiger, which, if you’re not familiar, it’s the spiritual successor

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Mr. Rogers, which I assume is relevant even into like Brits

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as well, but Mr. Rogers was like an institution for kids in the US. Well, anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so the key quote here is, in the study, which will be published in an upcoming issue to the Journal of Children

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Media, 127 preschoolers watched 10 episodes of either Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood or Nature

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Show over a two-week period. Children who watched Daniel Tiger exhibited higher levels of empathy, self-efficacy,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically confidence in oneself in social situations, and the ability to recognize emotions, or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey better ability to recognize those emotions than the kids who watch the nature show. There’s a kicker though.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey In order for the kids to benefit from watching the show, their regular TV watching experience had to be accompanied by frequent

⏹️ ▶️ Casey parent-child conversations about the media content, which is a part that I found most interesting

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was, yeah, the show may not be a complete disaster in and of itself, but for it to really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sink in and hit home, it’s up to Aaron and I to pay attention and talk to him as

⏹️ ▶️ Casey best as we can with a 20-month-old about what he just saw. And that’s something that we’ve

⏹️ ▶️ Casey taken to heart. And although he hasn’t seen Daniel Tiger in a couple of days since we found this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey article, it’s still something that we plan to do in the future and something we’re gonna try to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey be better about.

⏹️ ▶️ John The parenting institution of reading an article and then deciding this is how we have to parent differently because the article says

⏹️ ▶️ John so. It’s a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey fair criticism, but-

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not a criticism, we all do it. We all do it because we’re all looking for, we’re

⏹️ ▶️ John looking for help, right? It’s like, does someone have some ideas that I haven’t tried? I’ll try those. We did exactly the

⏹️ ▶️ John same things. And speaking of the same things about all the studies about how you shouldn’t show

⏹️ ▶️ John your kid any sort of video very early in life, which always made sense to me. I mean, we didn’t need

⏹️ ▶️ John articles to tell us that for the most part. But when your kid is changing from a little squishy larva

⏹️ ▶️ John into like… You know, that does nothing and just poops his pants all the time and can barely

⏹️ ▶️ John hold its head up. They have to learn how to interact with the world. And

⏹️ ▶️ John if kids very, very young can be distracted by moving images, that’s taking time

⏹️ ▶️ John away from them learning like, where is the floor? Where is the ceiling? What are these things poking out of my body and how do I control

⏹️ ▶️ John them? Right? And so that’s why I would imagine part of the rationale behind don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John show very, very young kids television or movies or other things that are irresistibly attractive,

⏹️ ▶️ John and yet don’t teach them anything about how to exist in the world because you’re distracting them

⏹️ ▶️ John from important developmental milestones. But once kids can actually walk and talk and do stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John like that, then moving pictures are just part of the part of the same world as learning to read and

⏹️ ▶️ John learning to absorb information. And speaking of discussing things with your kids doesn’t have to be after school style. Like I remember

⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of the shows I wanted my kids to watch were shows in which characters were similar ages and facing

⏹️ ▶️ John similar challenges. Like I know everyone hates Caillou, but I would always be like, remember that episode

⏹️ ▶️ John where Caillou found his shoes and tied them himself? Like you reference things that I know he’s seen on TV

⏹️ ▶️ John to give him a framework and like he would have to grow as the first child and you know, you both have your first child

⏹️ ▶️ John there. You have to grudgingly admit that yes, I suppose it is it is reasonable for a child

⏹️ ▶️ John my age to be able to do this. Whereas depending on your kid, they may be like, this is an injustice. I can never put

⏹️ ▶️ John on my own socks. This is not a thing that happens my entire life. You’ve been putting on my socks all of a sudden you want me to put

⏹️ ▶️ John on

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey my

⏹️ ▶️ John socks. That’s ridiculous. And he’s like, well, Kai, you does it and he’s your age and they’re like,

⏹️ ▶️ John like, it’s to them, Caillou is real as anything else in the world, right? So you discuss like

⏹️ ▶️ John discussing what you’ve seen, but referencing what you know they’ve seen in a way that it’s like shared

⏹️ ▶️ John culture with your child, you know, or stories, you know, they’ve read like it. Just like in this book, when that happened,

⏹️ ▶️ John that we can apply this to your life, not that they’ll listen to you and say, like, oh, you’re totally right, dad, but at least, you know, you make

⏹️ ▶️ John your point. And so if you just keep doing that, eventually it will sink in.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the other thoughts on screen time.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, so it sounds like none of us are in the camp of like, oh, I really limited and it’s really important. And I think it’s worth

⏹️ ▶️ John saying that, like like so many other things in parenting, if people decide to do that in the grand

⏹️ ▶️ John scheme of things, I don’t think that makes like I don’t think that’s that’s harmful. Like, oh, you know, we

⏹️ ▶️ John limit our kid to one hour of screen time a day in the grand scheme of things. That’s probably fine. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John everyone does has something that they have a hang up about. Everyone thinks the correct balance is

⏹️ ▶️ John a different balance. Obviously you can go too far by demonizing it and making it a treat or whatever, but bottom line is

⏹️ ▶️ John in the world we live in, unless you are Amish and live away from everyone else and don’t have electricity,

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s nothing you can do to stop your kids from learning to,

⏹️ ▶️ John learning to use screens, wanting to use screens. They’re going to be forced to use them in most schools, even public schools,

⏹️ ▶️ John have integration with like Google Docs and stuff. They’re going to use computers. They’re going to use

⏹️ ▶️ John smartphones. They’re going to want a smartphone. They’re going to get a smartphone eventually when they’re adults. Like there’s nothing you

⏹️ ▶️ John can do to stop them from. It’s like trying to stop your kid from learning how the wheel

⏹️ ▶️ John works. Like you can’t do it like it’s going to happen. So I don’t much mind

⏹️ ▶️ John people who have particular policies about how long any activity should be doing. How long should we spend

⏹️ ▶️ John on homework every night? No screens after eight p.m. No bringing

⏹️ ▶️ John your cell phone into your bedroom. One hour using screen time as a reward.

⏹️ ▶️ John There are many things you could do to any activity to demonize it or to make it the forbidden

⏹️ ▶️ John fruit or like, and it all really depends on your kid. Like my parents never let us have soda. You would think,

⏹️ ▶️ John ah, they hid soda from you. When you become an adult, you’d be a soda fiend. Nope, don’t like it, don’t have it, right? Don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John have any soda in my house. But a different kid being raised in exactly the same way that I was

⏹️ ▶️ John could have come out of that and say, oh my God, as soon as I get to live on my own, I’m just gonna drink soda all day. Same exact parenting,

⏹️ ▶️ John different kid. So as with everything in parenting, There’s only a series of differently

⏹️ ▶️ John wrong answers. There’s no right answer.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You sure you don’t have like 37 or so tiny cans of Sprite in your house?

⏹️ ▶️ John I think I still do have 37, you know why? Because I don’t drink them.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Wait, did we give them away?

⏹️ ▶️ John I have to check if they’re still in the basement, but believe me, if I wanted them, they would be gone

⏹️ ▶️ John like the Samoas were gone, because those I do want.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, thanks to our three sponsors this week, Casper, Harry’s, and Amazon Prime Music.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we will see you next week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ John Now the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. John didn’t do any research, Marco

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause it was accidental, oh

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental. And you can find the

⏹️ ▶️ John show notes at ATP.FM And if you’re into

⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey T. Marco Armin,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s accidental, they

⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t mean to Accidental, check the

⏹️ ▶️ John broadcast, so long.

Post-show: Samoas and ice cream

⏹️ ▶️ John Not caramel delights like Samoa’s better firmly in the Samoa camp

⏹️ ▶️ Marco See the Samoas it they’re they’re good, but there’s just I think there’s a little bit too much coconut

⏹️ ▶️ John too much coconut It’s all about the coconut of the Samoas have darker chocolate and the coconuts roasted a little bit darker, too

⏹️ ▶️ John And they’re actually round and not octagon.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t remember what these are I’ve certainly heard of them, but I know I don’t like dark chocolate terribly much I don’t like coconut

⏹️ ▶️ Casey terribly much and I don’t like caramel terribly.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, this is not

⏹️ ▶️ John this is not the cookie for you

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No, definitely not.

⏹️ ▶️ John These are Girl Scout cookies, by the way.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, yes, that’s right. Not in

⏹️ ▶️ John America. Girl Scouts is a what? How would you describe Girl Scouts? It’s a thing little girls go

⏹️ ▶️ John to to learn stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That sounds dismissive, but it’s actually a reasonable summary.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Anyway, they sell cookies to raise money for their Girl Scouting. And

⏹️ ▶️ John those cookies are made by different manufacturers. And the cookies that look almost the same

⏹️ ▶️ John have different names and are made by different makers in different parts of the country.

⏹️ ▶️ John And yeah, you would think it’s like, oh, whatever Girl’s Cookies you

⏹️ ▶️ John grew up with, those are the ones that you’ll love. But I don’t think that’s entirely the case. I think you just have to

⏹️ ▶️ John A, B test every single one of the cookies and see which version you like. Because it’s not a clear victory for

⏹️ ▶️ John either one of the two manufacturers. But Samoas, definitely.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everyone kind of like obsesses over them, but it’s more of like an artificial scarcity situation where like you can only

⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy them certain times a year like that’s like and the reality is like almost all of them

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are delicious because they’re really sugary unhealthy cookies like so of course they’re gonna be delicious like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people obsess over certain flavors like I know I if I had to guess I think the most popular ones are probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thin mints followed by Samoas and followed by those what are the peanut butter ones

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that

⏹️ ▶️ John the tag along tag alongs I think yeah they have different names those are very good too but

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s not much scarcity in my house, I can tell you. The artificial scarcity is like, oh, they’re only sold certain times of the year, but if you buy

⏹️ ▶️ John a billion boxes, they never run out.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So according to Wikipedia, it’s Thin Mints at 25% of the sales. Wow. Caramel Delights.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sorry, Samoas, my bad. Same thing, just different name. Samoas are

⏹️ ▶️ Casey 19%. Dosey Does, which are peanut butter sandwiches, are 16%. And peanut butter patties, which are tagalongs,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are 13%.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which are the ones that is the cookie and the peanut butter with chocolate wrapped around it?

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s Tagalongs.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco those

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John are

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco good.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tagalongs, crispy vanilla cookies layered with peanut butter and covered with a chocolatey coating.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Those, cold, are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazing.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey My particular favorite is the one that nobody ever buys or likes, which is the shortbread cookies which are

⏹️ ▶️ Casey trefoils. I’m not sure you pronounce that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I like those. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John those

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are good. I love those.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Although I

⏹️ ▶️ John think all of them, like, I don’t know, am I a cookie snob now? I think all of them

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco still basically

⏹️ ▶️ John taste like pre-packaged cookies. The only ones that I think come close to being elevated

⏹️ ▶️ John to the level of something you might buy like a handmade thing in a bakery are the Samoas. Even those still

⏹️ ▶️ John more or less taste like just manufactured cookies. In my old age, I get even more expensive

⏹️ ▶️ John tastes. If it’s not like handmade in a bakery,

⏹️ ▶️ John I think in the sense of do I want to spend my calories on

⏹️ ▶️ John this cookie or do I want to spend it on the most expensive ice cream I can possibly buy

⏹️ ▶️ John and I usually pick the ice cream. Those incredible wasteful, wasteful

⏹️ ▶️ John gelato things in the hard plastic containers. Who came up with that idea? I feel terrible every

⏹️ ▶️ John time I buy one of those. Terrible because they cost like six bucks. Terrible because they come with a hard plastic shell that I try to find

⏹️ ▶️ John some reason to use in the house. Yeah, but I don’t put those in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the dishwasher.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco learn that

⏹️ ▶️ John You can use them to I guess maybe I don’t know that maybe the kids will suffocate on them I was like you put kids toys in them or something

⏹️ ▶️ John or the the jar itself could be a kid’s toy But kids can probably suffocate on them and that’d be bad

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah I mean we have we have a few of them around the house like that we’ve washed out and just like use for containers But the problem

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is it’s kind of like you know those like when you order Thai food and you get like four or five of those black

⏹️ ▶️ Marco circular containers with the with like the translucent white lids liquids.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco For a while, we would wash those out and save them and reuse them for things. But the problem is the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco rate at which we would order Thai food dramatically outpaced the rate at which we could find use for these. And we have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a similar problem with the Talenti Gelato containers. We probably empty roughly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one or two of those a week. So there’s basically no way we can find enough uses for them around the house.

⏹️ ▶️ John I seriously don’t buy that because of the container. The container is literally stopping me from

⏹️ ▶️ John buying that product more. That and a couple of their flavors I feel like could be improved. But

⏹️ ▶️ John I go to the store and I’m like, I’m kind of in the mood for that, but I don’t want that container. It just feels wasteful.

⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of buying takeout, when I get food from one of the local Chinese food takeout places and they give you

⏹️ ▶️ John a giant styrofoam container from the 80s, I’m like, I didn’t even know they still made these. Just a big, white, giant

⏹️ ▶️ John thing of styrofoam. This is not good for the environment. Maybe it’s better now. Maybe it’s all made from cornstarch and stuff and

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not like the bad styrofoam from when we were kids, but it just feels wasteful.

⏹️ ▶️ John If the people from Talenti are listening, make more environmentally friendly containers

⏹️ ▶️ John and you will sell more of your incredibly overpriced ice cream to me.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, what is the name of this ice cream?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s Talenti. How do you spell that? T-A-L-E-N-T-I.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Okay.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m actually making an environmental statement by buying Ben and Jerry’s most of the time for myself,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because Tiff is mostly Talenti. I’m mostly Ben and Jerry’s. You would

⏹️ ▶️ John you would. Ben and Jerry’s has the dioxins right.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ben you know the problem is like I am happy to try other ice creams but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ben and Jerry’s is I just always go back to that like it is just so much better tasting to me

⏹️ ▶️ Marco than almost everything else and not just any like one in particular flavor like just like their base ice cream is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco better tasting than most of them.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah whatever chemical they’re putting in is is is dictating you Like, I’m,

⏹️ ▶️ John I do not, I’m not, I don’t have a particular brand, but I think Haagen-Dazs is probably,

⏹️ ▶️ John I think I’m probably more into Haagen-Dazs than most people. And it’s specific flavors, but Haagen-Dazs, I feel

⏹️ ▶️ John like if you said, who has the best vanilla, if you just had plain vanilla ice cream, I think Haagen-Dazs has the

⏹️ ▶️ John best vanilla.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’d go with you on that.

⏹️ ▶️ John And so, so vanilla Swiss almond, which is basically Haagen-Dazs vanilla with a little chocolate covered almonds is one

⏹️ ▶️ John of my favorite things ever. But Ben & Jerry’s New York Super Fudge Chunk, Haagen-Dazs has no flavor

⏹️ ▶️ John that competes with that. So I’m equal opportunity overpriced ice cream eater.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I have a controversial opinion about this. I know you’re surprised. Dreyer’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey slow-churned low-fat vanilla ice cream is the best vanilla I’ve found. And I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey should say that, what is it, Blue Bell? I think it’s Blue Bell ice cream recently arrived

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Virginia, which I think started somewhere south of here. It was one of those things

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, well, Cheerwine, which doesn’t mean anything to you, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Chick-fil-A is a better example. So only in the south, crawling northwards,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or Sonic is another great example. Everyone I knew had

⏹️ ▶️ Casey known someone that had had Blue Bell and swore

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it was the best ice cream in the entire world. And I’ve had

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a few flavors of blue bottle ice cream and I actually don’t find it to be particularly tasty. The dryer,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey slow churn vanilla, as stupid as that sounds, I mean, hey, I love Diet Coke, so I know everyone’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey surprised. Love that stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think my only ice cream snobbery is, and it only extends so far, is that I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John like ice creams that have things in them other than ice cream. And I know Ben & Ben and Jerry’s falls into that category.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like it doesn’t, you know, it should just be like the old Breyers commercial said, and I really do like Breyers milk, cream,

⏹️ ▶️ John sugar. There should no, should be no guar gum. There should be no like other things. And I know, I know Ben and

⏹️ ▶️ John Jerry’s has those. Like it’s another reason I give a little bit of a nod to Haagen Dazs and Haagen Dazs has them to some degree as well.

⏹️ ▶️ John But a lot of the non super premium brands have all sorts of crazy ass

⏹️ ▶️ John fillers in them

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and I can’t stand

⏹️ ▶️ John them.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I mean, like Haagen Dazs is really good for keeping the ingredient count down, but usually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco only for their basic flavors like once you have like you know fillings in the like you know like other

⏹️ ▶️ Marco objects in the ice cream like almonds and stuff or you know or the flavors get more complicated that ingredient list

⏹️ ▶️ Marco climbs pretty fast and to follow up briefly on on Casey’s Bluebell thing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have not tried Bluebell but I have tried Jenny’s which is I believe the Ohio

⏹️ ▶️ Marco version it’s j e n i apostrophe s this is like it’s also like like a boutique ice cream

⏹️ ▶️ Marco maker And you can actually order them to be shipped to you in a frozen box. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had them originally in a store in Ohio when I was visiting there a few years

⏹️ ▶️ Marco back. And the stores are just amazing. Their flavors, though, are really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird. And so we ordered them one time for something special. I think it was Valentine’s Day a couple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of years ago. We ordered some as a treat ourselves to try to bring back the experience of going to the stores.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And when you order little pints of premium ice cream to be shipped to you in a truck,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it gets pretty expensive. It ended up being something like $8 or $10 a pint.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Some of the flavors were great, some of them were just kind of weird. So it was just like it wasn’t really worth it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you can go to a Jenny’s store, I recommend it, but I would not recommend ordering fancy ice cream on the internet

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s just not worth it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Paul Shookman, Ph.D.: So Dryer, as I’m not that familiar with that name, but looking at the packaging,

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, that’s not one of the ones that I had to fill out. I can’t Find the ingredients list for your particular slow churn thing, but dryers,

⏹️ ▶️ John grand vanilla bean, milk, cream, sugar, skim milk, looking good so far. Corn syrup, cellulose

⏹️ ▶️ John gum, mono and diglycerides, not good, guar gum, dextrose, like

⏹️ ▶️ John lots of, I don’t need all that crap. You can make good ice cream with just milk, cream and sugar and

⏹️ ▶️ John vanilla bean. And like I said, like Marco said, Ben & Jerry’s does it too. I know they all do

⏹️ ▶️ John it. And as soon as you start adding like fillings, like, oh, there’s Heath bars in here. Heath bars are just full of crap, like obviously. And then it goes

⏹️ ▶️ John in the ingredients list because guess what, there’s Heath bars in there. Even just the sugar always has some weird stuff in it, but

⏹️ ▶️ John I try to limit that. That’s why I’ve always been a Breyers fan, that Breyers, for the most part, especially

⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t do like extra creamy or light or any other type of thing where they need to add fillers

⏹️ ▶️ John to try to make the texture back to normal, you just buy plain old full fat ice cream or make it yourself. We have

⏹️ ▶️ John an ice cream machine to make it occasionally. Like seriously, you just need, you just

⏹️ ▶️ John need milk, cream, and sugar, and it makes ice cream and is really good, and vanilla beans. So there’s no reason for anything else unless

⏹️ ▶️ John you start taking stuff out or want to make it seem creamier than it actually is.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey This is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey from a grocery store. This is for my Slow Churn Vanilla Bean, nonfat milk, cream

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sugar, corn syrup, when I think that at this point I’m out. That’s all it takes, this is the corn syrup, is that right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, you know, it’s just sugar, but you can keep going. It’s the other fillers that I think are more objectionable.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Corn syrup, whey protein, buttermilk, molasses, acacia gum, carob

⏹️ ▶️ Casey bean gum, guar gum, natural flavors, ground vanilla beans, and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey whoa, carrageenan?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s the red stuff they squeeze out of red bugs.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey weird, that’s kind of gross. Anyway, that’s the entire ingredient list. So does that’s…

⏹️ ▶️ John Real time follow up, carrageenan is from edible red seaweed, not from red bugs. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ John a different thing that comes from red bugs.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Important

⏹️ ▶️ John research on ATP. Yeah, that’s too much. Try Breyers Vanilla and just see what you’re missing.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I’m sure it’s good. And I’m not saying that this is the best ever, but this is like my go-to ice cream,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey partially because it is slightly lower fat. No, but you could change your go-to ice cream. I could, I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey could. You could start drinking Sprite, you know. I mean, Saturn

⏹️ ▶️ John used to be your go-to car, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, those were the days. Till the wheel fell off. Yeah, it was a great car until then. Great stereo too.