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

232: You've Exceeded Some Limit

Cleaning out the show-notes cabinet.

Episode Description:

Sponsored by:

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MP3 Header

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

Chapters

  1. Intro
  2. A10X is TSMC 10nm
  3. Sponsor: Fracture
  4. Netflix credits skipping
  5. Crock pots
  6. Policing online communities
  7. Sponsor: Eero (code ATP)
  8. Crazy Overcast crash
  9. Sponsor: Betterment
  10. Crazy Overcast solution
  11. Cross-examination
  12. Ending theme
  13. Post-show 🖼️
  14. 1984 Mongoose Californian 🖼️

Intro

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was going to buy a streaming box for Fleeting Moment when I thought… When you were becoming a vlogger, right? Well,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, I’m still becoming a vlogger just exceptionally slowly, but I thought about buying

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a streaming box when I thought I was going to get into like Switch streaming with iMike,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then never ended up doing so.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wonder which of us makes our second YouTube video first, you or me?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s a race to the bottom,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I assure you.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s start with some follow-up. Guess what? We don’t really have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey any. I think that’s because in part we just released or Marco just released.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, last week’s episode earlier today, because we are recording

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the episode from the future in the past or something, because it is currently

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the 20th of July. We were recording the episode that will be released on or around the 26th of the drill

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of July, because our vacations are in serial. And so we didn’t really have time to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey amass follow-up. Other than to say we are going to be doing a Q&A

⏹️ ▶️ Casey episode, I believe, what did you say, John, Master of Ceremonies Syracuse? You said the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John fourth. I

⏹️ ▶️ John think it’s recording on August 4th and we’re doing a double recording with back-to-back episodes which

⏹️ ▶️ John is why we’re doing the Q&A because we’re just going to answer questions until we all die and then Mark will make two shows out of

⏹️ ▶️ John it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sounds wonderful. So, anyway, so yes, please pile up questions. At this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey time, the only way to get a question put in to be a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey contender for the show is to tweet with the hashtag, ask ATP.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Please do not email us because it will get lost to the ether. And if we were cooler, like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hello Internet, we would have asked for postcards, but we are not that cool nor that organized. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that would be a

⏹️ ▶️ John terrible mistake if we learn nothing from

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Hello Internet. Who wants to

⏹️ ▶️ John go to the post office or P.O. box and bring home a bunch of pieces of paper and then transcribe the things on them.

⏹️ ▶️ John Terrible mistake.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So please tweet hashtag ask ATP and and we

⏹️ ▶️ Casey will hopefully select your question. Anyway, that’s that’s it for follow up, right? That that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey might be record time. We should have a we should have somebody go through and chronicle how long we spend on follow

⏹️ ▶️ Casey up. Like what is the trend line look like?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sure there’s like one angry fan who has has already done that. Is that fan you?

⏹️ ▶️ John Because no one else cares. Sometimes there’s none at all. Sometimes there’s just one thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John Sometimes there’s a lot. If we record two days before we do a second recording, usually not

⏹️ ▶️ John that much. Funny how that works

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco out.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey You You should go on Adobe

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Schedule vacations more often.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re right.

A10X is TSMC 10nm

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh man, all right, so let’s start with the topics. And first thing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the Apple A10X is 10 nanometer. That’s cool, so tell us about this,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John.

⏹️ ▶️ John Remember we were talking about Intel and their process advantage and how Taiwan Semiconductor

⏹️ ▶️ John was supposedly catching up, but you know, Intel still had a lead and all this stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ John And we were seeing, we were gonna see, you know, Intel was gonna be first at 10 nanometer with

⏹️ ▶️ John a significant, you know, type of chip, not just memory or something like that. But as people

⏹️ ▶️ John who took apart the new iPad with the Apple’s A10X and

⏹️ ▶️ John it discovered the A10X system on a chip is

⏹️ ▶️ John using Taiwan Semiconductor’s 10 nanometer process.

⏹️ ▶️ John And A10X is not a tiny chip. I mean, in the grand scheme of things, it’s not as big as a Xeon,

⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s pretty complicated, right? It’s got multiple cores and a GPU and IOS. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John not just as simple as a memory chip. So I haven’t been keeping up with Intel and

⏹️ ▶️ John its various woes that much. But bottom line,

⏹️ ▶️ John of all the Apple devices we care about, which includes PCs and iPads and

⏹️ ▶️ John watches and phones and all sorts of other things, the first one, as far as I’m aware, to get a 10

⏹️ ▶️ John nanometer chip is this one. And the chip is not from Intel. So whether

⏹️ ▶️ John or not Intel has, quote unquote, lost its lead in process, it continues to be

⏹️ ▶️ John embarrassing that Apple’s system on a chip, a

⏹️ ▶️ John XX line of chips, are so fast and

⏹️ ▶️ John so low power and now are on a smaller process than the chips that are in all

⏹️ ▶️ John of Apple’s Macs. So it’s kind of exciting slash depressing, depending on how you look at it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So remind me, and I’m not being funny at all, What is the 10 nanometer represent the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey lines within the processor like the quote-unquote wires? Is that correct? Or is that not even close?

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I don’t know. They call it feature size I’m sure there’s some standard for measuring from you know, this thing to that

⏹️ ▶️ John thing like

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I

⏹️ ▶️ John think it was like a dot pitch on monitors I’m sure there’s some standard because you say well What is a feature like it’s from you know

⏹️ ▶️ John from one transistor to another how closely you can pack them together or like I have no Idea,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe it’s like the center of one to the center of the next one

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but but there’s different geometries like this is their fin FET thing like they’re actually 3d If you look at the shape

⏹️ ▶️ John of where the source and drain and gate and everything is they they all have all these clever arrangements of layers

⏹️ ▶️ John of stuff Someone should look up you probably just go to the Wikipedia and find out but it basically if you think of it

⏹️ ▶️ John like dot pitch On a monitor, it’s from you know How from the center of like a marvelous

⏹️ ▶️ John thing from the center one thing to the center? Yeah The question is how do they just determine that because I think there are different sizes

⏹️ ▶️ John and configuration of things that you can put down on a chip I’m assuming it is like

⏹️ ▶️ John the smallest distance between two features so anyway

⏹️ ▶️ John Time when some conductor doing pretty well Apple with its a series chips doing pretty well

⏹️ ▶️ John Intel I Don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey one time,

⏹️ ▶️ John okay Kind of stumbling to those the recent announcement. They were getting out of the wearables market that they

⏹️ ▶️ John were never really in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I was gonna say what did they have in the wearables market?

⏹️ ▶️ John But they had a program and an initiative and an attempt, like they’ve done many times. Like remember when they tried

⏹️ ▶️ John to get into the standalone GPU market with, what the hell was that called? Chat room will tell me

⏹️ ▶️ John in

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco seven seconds or so. Oh yeah. Yeah, like about five years

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ago maybe?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, where they were taking a bunch of little x86 cores and put them on a Larrabee. I got it before the chat

⏹️ ▶️ John room, ha ha. And they were going to make a run at the GPU market. And they had

⏹️ ▶️ John Evangelist and they had APIs and they had some Silicon and it just never came together and said,

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, okay, well, we’re not going to do that. And then they concentrated on their internal GPUs like

⏹️ ▶️ John the integrated ones. And they’ve come a long way on that partially supposedly a rumor has

⏹️ ▶️ John it at the behest of Apple asking for more powerful integrated GPU

⏹️ ▶️ John so they don’t have to include a discrete GPU and every single Mac just have to have any graphics performance where the damn

⏹️ ▶️ John they were going to get into wearables and they had an initiative and the head of team and they had a blah, blah, blah. And now they’ve just

⏹️ ▶️ John bailed out. They also had a bunch of things like getting into set top boxes

⏹️ ▶️ John back in the day. What all the Intel fail programs where they’re going to enter a new market. I mean, if you

⏹️ ▶️ John want to trace it all the way backwards, it’s when they divested of all their arm holdings. They had both at the another

⏹️ ▶️ John thing, X scale, they

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco had arm

⏹️ ▶️ John CPU and they said, now we’re going to get out of that business. Probably it’s going to turn out to have

⏹️ ▶️ John been a bad idea, but in theory, like I mean, it didn’t have to be. It could have been they they got out of that business

⏹️ ▶️ John and they made a bunch of their own x86 chips that

⏹️ ▶️ John were just as good as the things that Apple is making now. But they didn’t. They didn’t make those. And Apple did.

⏹️ ▶️ John And so that’s how you lose. You can trace it back. Oh, you should have said there’s no guarantee that if they kept X scale that they would

⏹️ ▶️ John have been able to do as good a job as Apple is doing now. So it’s a weird world we live in for someone who

⏹️ ▶️ John grew up in the Wintel era. But I’m still rooting for Intel because all the CPUs are all the Macs and I want

⏹️ ▶️ John a really good Mac so let’s get going.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah that’s pretty much what why I care about this stuff so much like I know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it’s probably for lots of reasons we’ve discussed before it’s probably unlikely that we’re ever gonna see or at least

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess never say never but that anytime soon we’re gonna see Apple bring the A

⏹️ ▶️ Marco line of ARM CPUs to the Mac and have ARM Macs and that’s kind of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a shame because these CPUs are awesome like they keep making these amazing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco chips and with their in-house designs that are kicking the butts of everything else in the mobile market

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Intel is really you know having a hard time getting incremental performance

⏹️ ▶️ Marco gains every every time they release something and they were even having a hard time releasing anything. So I kind

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of wish that more of this excitement would be available on the Mac side because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know who knows what they could do right Right now they have this amazing A10X chip,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco based on the amazing A10 chip, making the iPad very competitive with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco low-end Macs in CPU performance. And imagine what they could do with that if they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco let it run in a 150-watt desktop enclosure. That could be really amazing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But for lots of reasons we’ve discussed before, basically making our Macs is neither

⏹️ ▶️ Marco easy nor likely. But I do think that’s kind of a shame because there’s all this exciting stuff

⏹️ ▶️ Marco happening over in the ARM world that us Mac fans are just kind of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a part of or minimally a part of.

⏹️ ▶️ John I continue to think that there is nothing specifically magical about ARM that guarantees that if Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John did have a team that said, hey, you’ve got 150 watt power budget, go nuts. They would just have to end up doing all

⏹️ ▶️ John the same things that Intel does with its Xeon, only Intel probably has a bunch of them patented and Apple doesn’t have experience

⏹️ ▶️ John with them because you do end up making different choices you have a ridiculously high power budget like that. And there’s no secret

⏹️ ▶️ John sauce that only Apple knows. And a lot of the tricks they know from their experience with low power stuff are

⏹️ ▶️ John not applicable to 150 watt power envelope. So you know, I think they would

⏹️ ▶️ John make good chips, no doubt. And maybe they would make ones that are actually better than what Intel offers, but it’s not, I don’t feel like

⏹️ ▶️ John they would be crushing them in the same way that they’re crushing on the, on the, you know, on the low power side, because

⏹️ ▶️ John this is not Apple’s first chip. Like what was the a six was their first, you know, sort of their own design.

⏹️ ▶️ John They’ve had years and years to get this good at system on a chips in tablets and phones. They have

⏹️ ▶️ John no experience so far and making, you know, a Xeon class processor. So even if they did make one,

⏹️ ▶️ John the best you could hope for is probably like parody or a slight edge on Intel’s things because they can make different choices, but

⏹️ ▶️ John give them four or five years and I think they’d be doing really well. But who knows? Then we wouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John be able to run windows as well as we can now. So that would be

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco sad. Who

⏹️ ▶️ Marco runs windows anymore? year is this? I do. Casey

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey does. I used to. No, I don’t anymore. I used to. Yeah, Casey’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a real developer now.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Ooh, sick burn. But yay!

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, my apologies to everyone who has to develop on Windows. I feel bad for you.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Hey

⏹️ ▶️ Casey man, I maintain C-sharp is an unbelievably good language. It’s just everything around it that’s garbage.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco agree. I completely agree. And Microsoft has almost always been really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco good at developer tooling. Like, they’re really good at that, just Windows is terrible.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the developer tools are usually great. One thing before we

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cap off this topic is that I do think that even though my example of the 150

⏹️ ▶️ Marco watt Mac Pro slash high-end iMac chip would maybe be hard for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco them to move to, the A10X, the iPad class of chip

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re making now, which is not that different from the iPhone class chip they’re making is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably suitable for at least the bottom two lines of MacBooks.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco At least the MacBook 12-inch and at least the what I call the MacBook Escape, the non-touch bar 13-inch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Pro. I bet they could make an A-series chip that would be very competitive

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in those two form factors.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean they already do practically.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, exactly. It’s just

⏹️ ▶️ John a question of the GPU and by the way it’s making me think about things about Mac losing out like, oh, so they’re missing out on apples

⏹️ ▶️ John on the potential of apples expertise in the areas where they’ve been shown they can make a really good chip and their potential expertise

⏹️ ▶️ John for higher bandwidth chips. And also apple thus far is missing out on the other place that the action

⏹️ ▶️ John is happening that is relevant to the Mac in terms of silicon chips that are inside their

⏹️ ▶️ John NVIDIA GPUs. That is currently where a lot of the exciting high end action is happening

⏹️ ▶️ John on desktop computers, and apple is thus far pretending it doesn’t exist

⏹️ ▶️ John and continuing to ship AMD slash ATI GPUs, which are fine, but it’s not,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s like the excitement is happening on the arm side with Apple’s own things. And in the GPU land, the discrete

⏹️ ▶️ John GPU land, the excitement is happening on Nvidia’s side of the fence. And Apple is like, no, we’re

⏹️ ▶️ John just, you know, Intel and AMD, and we’ll just ignore, ignore all those fireworks and then the

⏹️ ▶️ John happy laughter happening in other areas.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And I do think ultimately, one of the biggest reasons why we’re unlikely to see ARM Macs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the foreseeable future is I really don’t think that a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of Mac apps would be rewritten or recompiled for ARM in a prompt

⏹️ ▶️ Marco manner. I think the Mac is, you know, some parts of the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are very healthy. Content creation, you know, pro high-end productivity tools, these are fairly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco healthy, but there’s a whole lot of Mac apps out there that are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically unmaintained and some of which are very, very old. And they continue to work now, just because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the architecture hasn’t changed in a long time, in over 10 years. And so, they continue to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco work, but I worry if Apple were to force

⏹️ ▶️ Marco an incompatible move to the basis of the operating system, I worry about what would happen

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the app ecosystem. I bet we’d lose a lot of apps. As we’re seeing right now with, I mean, look,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS, in this way, iOS is way healthier than the Mac OS.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the transition to Mac to iOS 11 is losing lots of apps. Just from the 64-bit change,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was only a few years ago. For the Mac to change CPU architectures,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would be, I think, really difficult to move a lot of Mac software over,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just because so much of it’s unmaintained.

⏹️ ▶️ John Numerically, iOS obviously will lose more because it’s numerically got so much more. But on the Mac, I have some confidence.

⏹️ ▶️ John The Mac has gone through this multiple times before in the past, that yes, you always leave stuff behind. But

⏹️ ▶️ John the apps that we care about would would be ported just just like they reported from 68k to power PC and

⏹️ ▶️ John those same apps that we care about that we’re still are unreported from power PC to Intel. And they reported from Intel 32 bit

⏹️ ▶️ John to 64 bit and they would be ported from 64 bit like the apps we care about would would be

⏹️ ▶️ John ported. It’s just maybe like one or two random abandoned apps that you would lose. But numerically

⏹️ ▶️ John speaking on iOS, there’s just so many apps and we all have some I think I don’t know Do you think you

⏹️ ▶️ John have more apps installed cumulatively on your iOS devices or on your Macs, like numerically?

⏹️ ▶️ John Each application icon counts as one thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, it’s no question, iOS.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would guess the same. Yeah, yeah, yeah, probably. Maybe not on my iPad, on my iPhone,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes. I think my iPad is relatively lean and mean, but iPhone, yeah, I think Marco’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right.

⏹️ ▶️ John How many applications are in your applications folder on your Mac? Just pick a random Mac.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have 129.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey 112.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Although many of these I barely even recognize because I long show them frequently.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John I know. We all have junk in there. Oh, this is reassuring. So

⏹️ ▶️ John in my applications folder, I have two applications called System Preferences, which apparently

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey have

⏹️ ▶️ John exactly the same name.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That’s good.

⏹️ ▶️ John This does not make me feel good. This is from 2014.

⏹️ ▶️ John And the second one is from 2015 and 2016. And

⏹️ ▶️ John one of them does not have a.app extension. That makes me feel good.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I gotta clear a lot of this crap out of here, my God.

⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, you wanna guess how many applications I have in my application?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, if I have 129 and I keep things pretty minimal, I’m gonna guess you have 200 maybe? Yeah, I’m gonna say 250.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is it prices, right, rules? No. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John okay, then I don’t have to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey bet one application.

⏹️ ▶️ John 311. Oof. Wow.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But like how many do you actually use on a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John regular basis?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not 311. Like I probably use something like 20 or 30

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a regular basis. I mean you know the Mac tools tend to be larger

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in scope and fewer in number for a lot of people I would bet. There’s a lot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more like large productivity tools, large creation tools, large library tools as opposed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to an iOS where you have a whole bunch of stuff that does like little things or one one thing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at a time not to mention iOS has games and the Mac unfortunately doesn’t.

⏹️ ▶️ John I do have a subfolder for games let’s see what’s in that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a subfolder for Mac ports that I

⏹️ ▶️ John haven’t touched. I mean I mean I have a Steam icon there too all right so the games folder only have 42 items but there

⏹️ ▶️ John are subfolders in there so it just goes on and on and on. I got a lot of here’s the thing with the

⏹️ ▶️ John reason I have so many applications is they don’t on the Mac applications don’t aren’t in your face like

⏹️ ▶️ John they are in iOS like in springboard, they’re in your face unless you bury them in a folder, like

⏹️ ▶️ John all the mar again, I don’t watch applications by going to the application, like nobody does you command space or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Of course. Um, and whenever I use like disc inventory X or whatever to find out where all my space is being

⏹️ ▶️ John taken up, it’s never with applications because in the grand scheme of things, they’re tiny, you know, I one terabyte drive, even a

⏹️ ▶️ John huge application, like maybe occasionally like Marco, I get cranky at some multi gigabyte

⏹️ ▶️ John sound samples that are part of some stupid apple application. But other than that, all the data

⏹️ ▶️ John is elsewhere. So I never ended up deleting applications. Like I look in here and I’ve got like,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, I got multiple old, I’ve got Delicious Library 2 and 3. I’ve got many applications where they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John like, the history of the application is present in the folder as the versions and the numbers and the icons go

⏹️ ▶️ John up. And just, I never ended up deleting them because it’s not as, and don’t get me wrong, my

⏹️ ▶️ John iOS home screens are also a giant graveyard of ancient files, which is why I’m kind of dreading when they drop 32-bit

⏹️ ▶️ John support, that’s gonna, well, dreading and looking forward to, because it’ll reduce the number of applications by half,

⏹️ ▶️ John because I think I still have applications there from my original iPod Touch that have just been carrying

⏹️ ▶️ John along from iTunes backup to iTunes backup.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I only had, I think, two. Yeah, I have Scorekeeper XL and iCast Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the Scorekeeper developer said he’s updating it. iCast has already done a new version that’s like a million dollars,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so they’re not actually really going to be lost.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is ICast the thing you use to do the live broadcast from the road?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I used to, yes. It’s an ICast server, an ICast broadcaster rather.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I used to do that from the road. Now I just bring a Mac and use Rugamiba’s ICast app because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s, because it really, I mean, what I learned, you know, while doing our live show

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and, you know, setting up for that and doing various things over the last few years, I’ve learned basically that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I greatly prefer Macs to be in those kind of production roles and not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just for like superstition of Macs being reliable and iPad and iOS not being, but just for the flexibility

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they offer. And like you can do these things on iOS if you need to, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m much happier and more versatile when I’m doing it on the Mac, if that makes sense.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, we all know that you can’t get work done on iOS, so that’s why you’re doing it on a Mac. Oh my God,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still have Firefox? Does anybody still use Firefox?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we’ve gone during the pre-show that hopefully has not hit the regular show

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of watching TV as a group and now we’re letting all the people listen to us

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco plunge

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John through

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and go spelunking through our application folders as a group. This is the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco best. I still have Make MKV. I haven’t ripped a Blu-ray in years. I just did that yesterday.

⏹️ ▶️ John I have Firefox. I also have Make MKV.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just ripped Days of Thunder yesterday. It’s a great movie.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, I don’t need to rip anything. I can just play stuff off of your Plex server.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know, that’s exactly what I was doing. We bought Days of Thunder on Blu-ray, but Blu-rays

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are barbaric, and so I immediately ripped it, and it is now on Plex.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, I still have OpenTTD. I should play that. The Transport Tycoon.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Oh, so good.

⏹️ ▶️ John I have applications with the circle with a line through it. I should just probably delete those. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John think I’ve ever even seen that. not run on my fancy new version of

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS called El Capitan.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Man, I can’t even imagine cleaning out John’s 10-year-old computer like that. What you must

⏹️ ▶️ Marco find there? Never clean it. it.

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Netflix credits skipping

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So thank you very much to Fracture for sponsoring our show once again.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So in the show notes, near-ish the top, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey never ever, ever high enough for us to actually talk about it has been

⏹️ ▶️ Casey three words and it has been here for months. And those three words

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are Netflix credits skipping. And apparently this is enough and John

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is flustered enough that he would like to talk to us about skipping credits

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Netflix. I don’t know why I’m in for this ride as much as you guys

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are. So let’s all buckle up together.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are really scraping the bottom of the barrel here.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We really are.

⏹️ ▶️ John You know why this is in there. I mean, the link there explains it. So this is from March. So yes, it has been

⏹️ ▶️ John there for many, many months. The story, we’ll link to the Verge thing, because by now that’s the only

⏹️ ▶️ John URL we have for the story is that Netflix in their normal way was like testing this new feature

⏹️ ▶️ John on some platforms and some clients for Netflix that when you’re watching a show on Netflix

⏹️ ▶️ John and the credits come on the opening credits to the show like there would be a button in the interface somewhere

⏹️ ▶️ John that says skip credits and you click that it

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey would skip it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh yeah when we were in Chicago we were we were finishing up House of Cards and I had done that by connecting my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my MacBook Adorable to the TV and I saw and use that button and so that was on the web

⏹️ ▶️ Casey client.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and I’m not sure where they’re rolling it out to and what clients or whatever, but it’s not everywhere and it seems like this

⏹️ ▶️ John thing that testing now already for several years that flick has had a thing where if you’re like binge watching and you watch

⏹️ ▶️ John one episode and the next episode is going to come that it will not show the credits to the subsequent episode

⏹️ ▶️ John so it’ll just get right to the program I’ve seen that I don’t know if that show specific or whatever but it’s been doing that for a long time so

⏹️ ▶️ John if you sit down and watch five episodes of a program, you don’t have to see the opening credits five times. But you would have to see it

⏹️ ▶️ John once for the first one. And now with the skip credits thing, it would be like, if you don’t want to see the opening credits to

⏹️ ▶️ John House of Cards because you’re afraid you’ll die of old age,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and you’re on the right

⏹️ ▶️ John interface, you can click this button to skip it. And the reason I put this in the notes

⏹️ ▶️ John so long ago is that four years ago, four

⏹️ ▶️ John years before this feature was added to Netflix, I, in one of my rare fits of blogging, wrote a blog post

⏹️ ▶️ John about this very thing, about the idea of credit skipping

⏹️ ▶️ John in Netflix-type environments specifically. It was also in the context of the PlayStation 4, which was not yet out, but had

⏹️ ▶️ John been announced and the features had been announced, and the title of this post is Annoyance-Driven Development. The

⏹️ ▶️ John idea that you look at a technology product or something that you’re working on

⏹️ ▶️ John and think Think about the things that annoy you and other people about your product

⏹️ ▶️ John and try to knock those down one by one, even if they seem silly. I think,

⏹️ ▶️ John refreshing my memory on this thing, the PlayStation examples were things like being able to pick up a

⏹️ ▶️ John game right where you left off and not having the thing start downloading

⏹️ ▶️ John a software update as soon as you turn it on. And so they did a lot of things in the PlayStation 4 to remove the annoyances

⏹️ ▶️ John of the PlayStation by giving it a low power mode and an auxiliary processor that let it do useful

⏹️ ▶️ John things when it’s quote-unquote off like the fans are Off it’s sitting there. You think it’s completely off, but it’s not it’s downloading

⏹️ ▶️ John software updates in the background It’s you know It’s preserving the state of your game so you can Pick up right where you

⏹️ ▶️ John left up even Nintendo has come on this bandwagon a little bit with the switch where you can put the Thing into sleep mode

⏹️ ▶️ John pick it up get it out of sleep mode and you are exactly at the second you left off in your in your Zelda game

⏹️ ▶️ John Which makes you want to pick it up and play more than if you had to like wait through a boot sequence or launch The game again

⏹️ ▶️ John or something like that and software updates would be ubiquitous nowadays having a download

⏹️ ▶️ John Multiple gigabytes of stuff while you sleep so that when you wake up It’s all just already there for you

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a great example of annoyance driven development because it’s not the end of the world like oh software updates have to happen There’s no getting around the

⏹️ ▶️ John fact that you gotta have multiple gigabytes and we can’t make your internet connection faster It’s like but can we design the PlayStation 4

⏹️ ▶️ John in a way to make this less annoying for people? going so far as to have a, you know, a separate

⏹️ ▶️ John mode with a separate CPU and a low power state of like, it complicates the harbor tremendously,

⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s a big win. So in terms of streaming video, I was using House of Cards

⏹️ ▶️ John as an example because the credit sequence is really, really long. I was saying how Netflix has changed how you watch television,

⏹️ ▶️ John how you have to reconsider every part of the experience and think about how annoying it is. And the opening credits aren’t annoying in the

⏹️ ▶️ John old world of television where there were no DVRs and you just watched television when it was on and that was it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Commercials were annoying, but that’s a whole separate issue. But already, with Netflix and streaming video,

⏹️ ▶️ John they understand that people do binge watching and they did that thing where it will skip the credits to the next episode. They just need to go to the

⏹️ ▶️ John next step. Also, by the way, reviews the entire seasons all at once instead of doling them out an episode at a time. They reconsidered so many

⏹️ ▶️ John things and this seemed like the very next thing on the chopping block, which is, hey, credits. They make

⏹️ ▶️ John sense when you are watching television in the old world. in the new world, do they make as much

⏹️ ▶️ John sense to have opening credits before every single episode or before any episode? And I know,

⏹️ ▶️ John as I said in this post, there’s lots of things about union contracts for screen actors and writers

⏹️ ▶️ John and everything. And then there’s the other angle of like, oh, people should get credit for their work and blah, blah, blah, like basically the motivation behind

⏹️ ▶️ John all those union rules and everything. But I think you can’t,

⏹️ ▶️ John you have to change, you have to change your outlook and the rules surrounding all stuff as the technology

⏹️ ▶️ John changes. And technology is changing how we watch television, and so every single aspect of how we watch television

⏹️ ▶️ John should be up for grabs for reconsideration. To say, is this the best way to do it, or is there

⏹️ ▶️ John a better way, given how technology has changed how we watch television? Apparently Netflix eventually,

⏹️ ▶️ John how many years later? Four years later, eventually more or less agrees with me that maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John the credits are a little bit too much, and maybe we should give people the option of skipping them entirely

⏹️ ▶️ John if they want. There’s already no commercials, so they’ve already got that going for them. So anyway, I was excited

⏹️ ▶️ John enough about this in March to put it in the show notes and to leave it there, and now I finally get to talk

⏹️ ▶️ John about it. And I feel like this is… I’m not gonna say it’s vindication, because I

⏹️ ▶️ John know a lot of people agreed with me when I originally posted this, but it’s more of a celebration to

⏹️ ▶️ John say, you know, I’m actually getting the thing that I was asking for. And it seems inevitable, because Netflix

⏹️ ▶️ John is very aggressive on these type of things. I’m just… I’m actually surprised it took four years for them to do it but more

⏹️ ▶️ John like this please

⏹️ ▶️ Casey wow cool i feel better for having listened to that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey nothing you said was wrong but i felt like this has been sitting in the show notes like almost there but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not quite there for months and i was expecting some

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John sort of it’s not it’s not timely

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not like you know it doesn’t go

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey bad john

⏹️ ▶️ Casey i love you so much

⏹️ ▶️ John and you know you don’t I don’t have a product to speak of now that,

⏹️ ▶️ John what did Dr. Wave say your application was? Was it a fart app?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, yes, I was so confused.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It looks kind of like a

⏹️ ▶️ John guy farting, I don’t know. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Marco’s got a problem.

⏹️ ▶️ John Anybody who’s listening to this who has a product or is involved in making a thing that people use, like it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John a potential edge in the market. Think about what is annoying about using

⏹️ ▶️ John products of your type and in the next version of your product, try to eliminate those annoyances and don’t,

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t keep any sacred cows like, oh, we can’t change that. You will find out, you’ll find a lot of people

⏹️ ▶️ John hold sacred many things they won’t even do any consider changing, like you have to consider everything and reconsider

⏹️ ▶️ John it in the face of technology and find the annoying things and be willing to, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John do what Sony did make your product way more complicated and way more expensive, potentially introducing

⏹️ ▶️ John bugs because the payoff is when you when people turn on the PlayStation for

⏹️ ▶️ John the 11 gigabytes of the destiny to beta is already downloaded and the system update has already happened

⏹️ ▶️ John and they can start playing immediately even If it takes forever to download if it does it while you’re sleeping You don’t care and it’s 100%

⏹️ ▶️ John worth it to add an entire separate CPU and low power state and special OS mode for this so

⏹️ ▶️ John And also skip those house of cards credits because come on we’ve all seen them enough now They’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so, I mean they’re beautiful, but they’re so long. Oh my word, it takes forever. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey long.

Crock pots

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so let’s talk about something that always cheers us up Twitter

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and a while back There was a guy I remember

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John when how

⏹️ ▶️ John long was it how long was a while ago Casey?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apparently it was October of 2016. Why

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are we talking about a news article from October 2016? I

⏹️ ▶️ John have a reason for this one, too Oh my god

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bringing out your dead. That’s right. I’m so sorry listeners for this entire episode

⏹️ ▶️ John you did you apologize here? Where do episodes come from, Marco? When three podcasters

⏹️ ▶️ John love each other very much? Somehow, every week there’s an episode,

⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s because somebody, some elves go into the show notes and find a bunch of topics and put them in there.

⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re not gonna do it, guess what?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I’m gonna do it. And then you don’t get to complain about the things that we talk

⏹️ ▶️ John about and try to apologize for the listeners for the things we’re talking about, because guess what? I build the show in the notes and that’s what

⏹️ ▶️ John we’re gonna talk about. And if you wanna talk about something, feel free to rotate something up to the top and then we’ll talk about that instead.

⏹️ ▶️ John In fact, I will offer that opportunity to you now because I just talked about Netflix credit sipping. Is there something that you would like to talk about that you would

⏹️ ▶️ John like to move up? Let me see. Overcast springboard crasher stories? That’s a good

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. That’s kind of boring. No,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it’s not. I think

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it’s exciting. It’s exciting. It was exciting when

⏹️ ▶️ John it happened, but now I’ve forgotten most about it and probably you did too, but it was cool.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s not even old. It’s not even old by comparison to October of 2016. It was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco a couple of months ago.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey In a surprising turn of events, Marco did not immediately command a and then delete the entire

⏹️ ▶️ Casey show notes in a fit of rage when just moments ago

⏹️ ▶️ John Doesn’t look at the most of the time so that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is accurate So down if we scored on a couple pages we have an item that says Oh God TSMC ahead

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Intel on process soon question

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John mark Crystal ball

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Look at the slug on this. 10 nanometer

⏹️ ▶️ Casey chip foundry process coming to Apple partner TSMC ahead of Intel.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John And it was from that ever

⏹️ ▶️ John reliable news source,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey appleinsider.com.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey dated September of 16. Oh my word. We

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John didn’t talk

⏹️ ▶️ John about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, but guess what? They did it. It came true. Maybe this is how we can make things come true. Just put

⏹️ ▶️ Marco them in our show

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John notes. Put them

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in

⏹️ ▶️ John the show notes and it’s like burying a time capsule.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Our show notes are the crockpot of Apple News. Just wait long enough,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco it’s gonna be there.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my god. All right, so let’s talk about Disney, since Marco hasn’t come up with something better. But it’ll

⏹️ ▶️ Casey be the Marco show after this, when we talk about Overcast and Springboard.

⏹️ ▶️ John Marco should start remembering now all the details of the Springboard graduate stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Did you know that Letterpress moved off of Game Center? I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John did.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I did know that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s down here too. You know what we should do?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey If we get really desperate, we should go from the bottom up and just say, we’re dedicated. We have to do it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco We have to do it. Just start at the bottom.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my word. This is so bad. This is so bad. Anyway, all right, I’m going to try to bring this back around.

Policing online communities

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So at some point one day eventually or the years ago it seems

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there was some talk in late 2016 about Twitter potentially looking to be bought

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and there were some potential suitors I don’t remember who they were other than Disney wasn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Salesforce in the running

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe and so what ended up happening and I didn’t get a chance to look at these show notes and refresh my memory.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Being chief summarizer and chief is a little dangerous today But my recollection

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that Disney was kind of sniffing around seeing maybe we do want Twitter

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then realized Oh wait Twitter’s accessible disgusting terrible people So yeah, we don’t want anything

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do with that

⏹️ ▶️ John All right. The reason I put this in there not because I don’t care about this whatever people buying Disney. That’s all news

⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t know why it stayed in the notes, I probably would have deleted it But I saw it down there and it brought to mind something

⏹️ ▶️ John What was it was relevant? It’s it’s eternally relevant. I forget what this specific inciting

⏹️ ▶️ John incident was, but it’s about when you have An online

⏹️ ▶️ John community of any kind. Oh, I know what it was. It was it was the the the pub

⏹️ ▶️ John G thing You guys don’t follow this do you know that is anyways new game player unknown

⏹️ ▶️ John battleground It’s a game. It’s cool. Yeah, you’ll you’ll like the the premise of it. We

⏹️ ▶️ John love games Yeah, well, no, it’s a it’s a game mode. I think it might have started as a mod

⏹️ ▶️ John and now it’s a zone game. I’d always get confused by the deals. But anyway, you are like an army guy. You parachute

⏹️ ▶️ John into this, you know, fairly realistic looking world, like a big open field with some trees

⏹️ ▶️ John and buildings and stuff like that. And you have to sort of scrounge for weapons and

⏹️ ▶️ John bandages and stuff like that. And it’s fairly realistic in that you can’t take 500 bullets, like a few

⏹️ ▶️ John bullets kills you, right? And there are teams and there is sort

⏹️ ▶️ John of a gamey shimmery circle

⏹️ ▶️ John ring dome around the entire play area that starts off really really big, but it slowly

⏹️ ▶️ John shrinks over time, eventually like corralling all the people together and eventually there’s one person who’s

⏹️ ▶️ John left alive, right? So part of your strategy could be I’m just going to crawl in the grass and hide behind this tree and be like a mile away from

⏹️ ▶️ John everybody but the circle will shrink and shrink and shrink and if you’re not out there fighting you’re also not getting better weapons and

⏹️ ▶️ John getting healing supplies and stuff like that. So it’s a fun game mode.

⏹️ ▶️ John And they’re fun videos to watch because there are teams in this friendly fire and it’s and there’s no like radar or anything like that

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re just like crawling around and going through buildings and some people like camp out in buildings and you just go around the door and there’s a guy anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s very popular game right now and the guy who made the game has like a you know community

⏹️ ▶️ John standards for you know for for his game basically saying if you and if you intentionally kill people on your team because

⏹️ ▶️ John friendly fire is a thing uh that’s against the rules and you get banned you know temporarily banned and i assume if you

⏹️ ▶️ John keep doing it permanently banned because that’s bad behavior we don’t want someone who comes to you join a game and the guy on your team kills everybody

⏹️ ▶️ John on his own teams takes their stuff like no we don’t have that right and he did that to like a popular

⏹️ ▶️ John streamer like a twitch streamer and the twitch streamer was cranky about it and

⏹️ ▶️ John said some jokey things to him about like how he was going to kick him in the face or something like that. And the

⏹️ ▶️ John guy, because he had temporarily banned him, and he explained to him

⏹️ ▶️ John why he doesn’t tolerate even jokey sort of threats of violence or whatever. And anyway, that was the story

⏹️ ▶️ John like game creator, bands, popular streamer, and has to explain to

⏹️ ▶️ John him why he doesn’t think threats of violence are funny, you know, counter to everything and

⏹️ ▶️ John macho, stupid gamer dude culture, right? And it made me think of Twitter,

⏹️ ▶️ John and anybody who has any kind of community, whether it’s the game that you made and the standards you make for the people who play your game online

⏹️ ▶️ John or Twitter who makes a service that they let people use or you know just think of anything like if you own a website

⏹️ ▶️ John and you have comment section or you have the old web bulletin boards or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ John online communities and the policing of them it always amazes me that

⏹️ ▶️ John or reddit is a great example always amazes me how reluctant people are in these

⏹️ ▶️ John communities to to enforce any kind of,

⏹️ ▶️ John to enforce their will. Like, so we all have opinions about what we think is good and what’s not good, but

⏹️ ▶️ John the standard sort of non-oppressed majority

⏹️ ▶️ John opinion of like, I, you know, I haven’t, I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ John in a group that is frequently the target of abuse, or I’m at the top of the pyramid,

⏹️ ▶️ John therefore I think everyone should be able to do everything. So even though I think something

⏹️ ▶️ John is bad, I’m not going to tell people in my community that they can’t do that thing, because who am I to judge?

⏹️ ▶️ John And even removing the motivation, just the whole idea of, I want my community to be a place

⏹️ ▶️ John where everyone is free to be themselves and do whatever the heck they want. And it almost seems to me at various times

⏹️ ▶️ John on Twitter and other places that there is nothing so terrible

⏹️ ▶️ John that the people who run the community would decide that it’s not allowed. So it’s like

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco trying to think of something

⏹️ ▶️ John for the show that I could use as an example. Like someone comes in and says, I’m in favor of eating

⏹️ ▶️ John babies. I’d love to eat babies. They come out and I just eat them instantly. Right. Perfectly healthy babies. I eat

⏹️ ▶️ John them. Right. And people like, you know, we don’t like baby eating. Can you ban all the people

⏹️ ▶️ John who promote baby eating in this community? Because they’re really annoying and

⏹️ ▶️ John we’re all against it. Right. in this community of knitters

⏹️ ▶️ John or woodworking people or go-kart enthusiasts or

⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, can we just say that if you promote the eating of babies, you get

⏹️ ▶️ John banned, like no baby eaters, right? And people around the community will be like, well,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t like eating babies, and I know most people don’t like it, but those people should have the right to talk about baby

⏹️ ▶️ John eating. And it’s like, what do you mean the right? It’s your community. It’s a website that you made.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a product that you made. It’s not, you’re not the US government. They can talk about eating

⏹️ ▶️ John babies all they want on their front lawn. I don’t want them in this community. And so they decide to make a community where everyone

⏹️ ▶️ John is allowed to do everything because that feels like egalitarian for them. And you know, it’s freedom. And even if they don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John invoke freedom of speech, it’s like, this is the kind of community we want. We want a community where everyone is free or free to say anything they

⏹️ ▶️ John want, even if it’s about baby eating. And there’s a place for that type of thing. I think

⏹️ ▶️ John you usually call that place 4chan, right? But whatever. But

⏹️ ▶️ John it continues to be amazing to me that you see so little of the other thing

⏹️ ▶️ John where they say, you know what, this is my community and I don’t like baby eating. And if you talk about baby eating here, you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John banned forever. And they’re like, that’s not fair. Just because you don’t like, yeah, yeah, just because I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John like baby eating. That’s the only reason. And this is my community, right? Whether it’s this guy with his game. And

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s why you get a situation where this person saying, hey, killing people on your team

⏹️ ▶️ John is bad and threats of violence on Twitter are bad and you’re going to get banned for it. That’s why it’s a story like

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a story in the gaming news. It’s it’s a man bites dog story,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? Like, whoa, someone, someone decided like their own personal opinion, and they enforce

⏹️ ▶️ John their own personal opinion of their community. Is this person the worst person ever enforcing their own

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco personal thing? Now on Twitter, there’s no

⏹️ ▶️ John personal opinion, I guess Twitter is a giant massive corporation, but they have the same problem that they seem

⏹️ ▶️ John unable to choose to enforce, you know, any kind of standards,

⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s like, well, we don’t want to enforce our standards and other people on the exam. I use baby eating because I was hoping to find something that everyone

⏹️ ▶️ John or audience would be like, yeah, I’m against baby eating. Now the pro baby people go ahead and email us, whatever. But

⏹️ ▶️ John now I’m going to say one that I would have used years ago in place of baby eating, feeling confident that everyone

⏹️ ▶️ John who’s listening to my voice would be like, yeah, totally baby eating is bad. But unfortunately I cannot think that these days.

⏹️ ▶️ John And that is the example from Twitter, where Twitter is like, Hey, are you the

⏹️ ▶️ John neo Nazi party? You want to promote a Nazi agenda? You’re fine on Twitter,

⏹️ ▶️ John as long as you don’t, you know, threaten violence, or blah, blah, blah, or violate one of our things that we decide, we’re okay

⏹️ ▶️ John with Nazis, like if they just want to talk peacefully about Nazi stuff, that’s fine with us as long as they don’t threaten

⏹️ ▶️ John violence, right? Wait, isn’t all of their speech kind of? Well, that’s what I’m saying. Like, I would just

⏹️ ▶️ John hope that Twitter as a company be like, you know what, But even if Nazis are just like talking calmly

⏹️ ▶️ John about, you know, their Nazi agenda, no, no Nazis

⏹️ ▶️ John like, like, are you in a group? Are you in the neo Nazis? Are you in an organization?

⏹️ ▶️ John Right? Are you affiliated with them? You promote that in any way? You’re banned. It’s like, whoa, you can’t ban

⏹️ ▶️ John them. That’s freedom. It’s like, no, no, they can have their meetings. Like, they can talk about their Nazi things. They just can’t be

⏹️ ▶️ John on Twitter. But Twitter seemingly cannot bring itself to

⏹️ ▶️ John do that, because it would be seen as like, Oh, Twitter, don’t go there because they don’t let you if they don’t like what they’re saying,

⏹️ ▶️ John they ban you, right? And not just like, you know, things that we all agree are bad, but just like political ideas

⏹️ ▶️ John like the Nazi Party, like some people are just into that, man. Why can’t you just it’s like, can’t we just say no.

⏹️ ▶️ John And Twitter and many other companies inability to draw the line, you know, and

⏹️ ▶️ John draw whatever Twitter wants to draw it like, they I feel like, you know, you lose all the Nazi

⏹️ ▶️ John people. Yeah, the Nazi people will go elsewhere. They’ll have to go someplace else. Like, well, but if I ban too many things,

⏹️ ▶️ John everyone will leave and our daily active users will go. It’s like, you have to make that choice. I feel confident if I

⏹️ ▶️ John was running Twitter, that if we ban all the Nazis, just on principle, like

⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t have to do anything bad. They’re just gone, right? That you won’t

⏹️ ▶️ John lose too many users. And the users you do lose, it’s good that you’re losing them, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John And so it frustrates me as a user of Twitter many other services to see the unwillingness

⏹️ ▶️ John to to enforce, you know, personal standards. And even when you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John if more people did this, that would mean people are gonna have weird personal standards. They’re gonna be like, sorry, nobody’s name

⏹️ ▶️ John begins with the letter J. And then I can’t join their service. And I’d be mad about it. Right. But it’s their service like they can

⏹️ ▶️ John do to make up their own stupid rules, right? I’m just saying like maybe the baby eaters and the Nazis, maybe get rid of them.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s like, well, who cares? Twitter is being more successful if they let everybody in. But things

⏹️ ▶️ John like these rumors about, oh, someone was going to buy you, but your services assess pool.

⏹️ ▶️ John That you know, your choices have a material effect on your company, not just

⏹️ ▶️ John on the users, but you should care about like, what’s it like to use Twitter, the decisions about what is and isn’t allowed

⏹️ ▶️ John affect what it’s like to use Twitter. They also affect potentially who’s willing to buy you, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John And they affect your image like there’s tangible and intangible repercussions to this. So I

⏹️ ▶️ John continue to hope that more services will act like small services with one

⏹️ ▶️ John opinion of the person, like the guy who runs the PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds

⏹️ ▶️ John to say, I have rules, and these are my rules, and you might not like the rules,

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s my damn game. You don’t like the rules, go somewhere else, make your own game, right? You don’t like the rules on Twitter?

⏹️ ▶️ John Nazis, we’re banning you all from Twitter? Go make your own service, go someplace else, go do another

⏹️ ▶️ John thing. we’re not the US government so anyway I’m against baby eating I’m against Nazis I’m also

⏹️ ▶️ John against player killing in battleground

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how do you feel about people who’s names you can with J neutral

⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of people is then being the J. Come on.

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Crazy Overcast crash

⏹️ ▶️ Marco shipping. Thank you very much to Eero for sponsoring this show once again. Marc Thiessen,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jr. Marco, you had some very interesting

⏹️ ▶️ Casey overcast crashes that you had a little bit of trouble figuring out, and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey justifiably, because having heard this story back a couple of months ago when you did discover what this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey fix was, I thought to myself, my goodness, I don’t know if I would have ever been able to figure this out. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s a really interesting, to the best of your recollection, story of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey both what was going on, why it was going on, and how you discovered it. So can you take us through this,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe starting with, how did you discover there was an issue in the first place?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s connected to the back end for the App Store, reports your number of crashes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for each version of your app. And this is as reported by people who opt in to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sharing the stats with Apple and developers during the iPhone setup process. I started seeing a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco big uptick in crashes. I started noticing a separate problem too, which is my app would

⏹️ ▶️ Marco crash in the background a lot. I would get all these crash logs for background crashes. I didn’t immediately

⏹️ ▶️ Marco identify it as such. What I immediately saw was my app would not resume

⏹️ ▶️ Marco playback if you hadn’t been running it in a while. So like if you sent a play command, like let’s say you get

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in your car and the Bluetooth turns on and it sends a play command or you put on Bluetooth headphones and you hit the play button

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on them. I noticed that the app was not in memory anymore. I started getting reports

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that were auto-generated from Springboard that was terminating me in the background for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco holding on to a shared lock on the database file. So I did a number of things

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to try to fix this. I had read somewhere that if you open

⏹️ ▶️ Marco up a background task assertion, so So I forget how,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if the Mac does this, but if the iOS, you do the UI background task ID

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you say begin background task with identifier and it basically gives you a little handle and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you do your task and then you tell it, okay, I finished that, end this task. And then if your app

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is about to be terminated for whatever reason, and you have one of these open, the system will give you a little

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit of extra time to go complete that. So somewhere I read some articles

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I can’t find now, which is probably good to protect the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not so innocent. But somewhere I read some article that said, in order to fix these crashes about holding

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on to the lock too long, just open up a background task for every database

⏹️ ▶️ Marco query that you make. Because the way SQLite works is every query,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it temporarily locks the database file, does what it needs to do, and then unlocks it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this is required because that’s how you have different processes sharing a file or rather sharing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a database through SQLite without some kind of server managing the background. Like, you know, MySQL would

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a server, but SQLite doesn’t. So anyway, so it needs to do file locking to do this stuff. So I,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, got this tip from some random blog post that, oh, wrap every database query in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a background task assertion, and then you won’t have this problem anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was technically true in the sense that when I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco shipped the version that included this fix it was technically true that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was no longer getting killed with that background code however what was happening

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is I noticed that my crash rate rather than going down went

⏹️ ▶️ Marco way way up it took me a while to figure out what was going on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and during the time that I was trying to figure out what’s going on I also noticed that as I would be listening to overcast like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the car on on long car trips sometimes my entire iPhone would crash

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it would do what nerds might know as a re-spring which is the phone does not reboot but it looks like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s rebooting and it just comes back up faster and what let’s see you see the little spinner all your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps quit and then eventually you get back to your lock screen. And the way you can tell that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it wasn’t a real reboot is if Touch ID is still on. Because when you reboot for real, you have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to enter your passcode the first time. But if it does a little spinner and back to the lock screen and all your apps are gone

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Touch ID works, that was a springboard crash, not a full reboot. And I noticed my phone was doing this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more and more. And it was very inconvenient at times such as when I was driving and following

⏹️ ▶️ Marco directions in Waze. And my directions were just gone for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little while while all the apps got killed and I had to restart everything. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I started getting reports from people saying my phone keeps crashing with Overcast but I can’t figure out why.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it took until one guy sent me a video that he showed something

⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazingly useful to me. He said, look, Overcast, if you pause it in the background

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you bring up Control Center so you can see like that Overcast is still in the now playing thing in control

⏹️ ▶️ Marco center after 10 minutes exactly or what no I think it was like three minutes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway after some short duration of minutes it disappears reliably every time

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that led me to finally catch in a debugger and to see that I was being killed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a certain crash with a certain code and it still was not enough to actually figure it out because the code

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was getting killed with was you’ve you’ve exceeded some limit it’s like okay

⏹️ ▶️ Marco well helpful maybe Maybe, you know, thanks, but I have no

⏹️ ▶️ Marco idea still. And I tried a few things, trying to figure out what limit

⏹️ ▶️ Marco am I exceeding here, what does this code mean? Eventually, I realized that this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco would also sometimes correspond with one of the springboard crashes, the whole FOMA crash.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I thought, I wonder if this is related. I direct messaged somebody who

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know on the springboard team. I basically said, look, I’m at my wits end here.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t figure this out. Is there anything that would cause this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco crash code to be sent to my app that might sometimes crash Springboard?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco A little while later, I hear, oh, there’s actually like a bug report internal

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Apple talking about how Overcatch is causing this problem. I was like, nice. Oh, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I never would have

⏹️ ▶️ John told you. I think they never would have told you. They’re just like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t so there is actually there is like a process that happens

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes inside of apple where if you have an app that’s causing lots of problems

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for for apple like they there is sometimes you will you will hear from one of the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the developer evangelists about it. This has happened to me maybe like once or twice ever

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it isn’t this isn’t a thing that happens often, but this was happening in the lead up

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to WWDC. This is only a couple weeks before WBC I think if I remember correctly and so the problem

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with that is that this is a time when the entire like all of Apple is basically freaking out

⏹️ ▶️ Marco rushing to finish the WBC betas because that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the first time the OS is really going to see any kind of wide attention it’s going to be installed on a bunch of developer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco devices and a bunch of enthusiasts who say they’re developers who aren’t and just use the developer betas anyway

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so there’s a massive rush right before WBDC for anybody who works in any

⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything near these new OSes to just get it done get to get that first beta ready

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the public and so this was happening during that big crunch time so I imagine

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it slipped at the cracks you know I’m sure it was on somebody’s to-do list to maybe see if they could reach out to me or something and they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t because you can you can imagine Apple is not so keen on an app that can crash springboard

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that’s not something that apps are supposed to be able to do. So basically

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so there was this internal thing that I just happened to like I happened to ask somebody who started looking around

⏹️ ▶️ Marco who happened to find this and then basically the notes that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple engineering had had had noticed about it was that I was taking

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a large number of background assertions in the app which was apparently

⏹️ ▶️ Marco causing Springboard has a watchdog that goes along and checks various limits every few minutes.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That watchdog looked at how many background assertions I had because I was doing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one for every database query. A typical load of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the app is going to make probably a few hundred database queries over the course of navigating the first few screens.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’re talking over the course of typical usage. I might make a few hundred to a few thousand database

⏹️ ▶️ Marco queries over a well-used session of the app. The Background Task

⏹️ ▶️ Marco API was designed back in the early days of iOS for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you to take out one background task assertion if you’re finishing uploading

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a file to a web service or doing some kind of sync operation. Like, okay, take a background

⏹️ ▶️ Marco assertion, finish the sync operation, and then give it back. And so apparently this was designed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for something more on the order of like hundreds

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of these to happen during a process, not thousands of these to happen the way

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was doing it with every database query. And this was causing two problems. Number

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, it would cause this watchdog that goes around to check to see if you’ve

⏹️ ▶️ Marco exceeded your limits. It would cause it to kill my app to say, hey, you’ve exceeded your limits.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But apparently there was also a bug in that watchdog in older versions of iOS before 11

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that sometimes if you had such a ridiculous number of them as I did,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that watchdog would crash and because it’s a part of the system, if that crashes,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically all the springboard comes down and is brought back up. This has been fixed in iOS 11,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it was not fixed for at least the earlier parts of 10. I don’t know if the very last version of 10 might have fixed it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know, honestly. But so basically Overcast was not only exposing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco its own limit crossing behavior, and by the way, I don’t know what that limit is. Nobody will tell me what that limit

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is. It doesn’t really matter for my purposes. All that matters is background tasks or something to be,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, used not in the thousands. But basically

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was causing Springboard to crash. And I greatly, greatly appreciate

⏹️ ▶️ Marco both the user who sent me the video who showed that would be terminated after a certain number of minutes because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that allowed me to get the crash code that was reliably causing this problem and I also greatly appreciate

⏹️ ▶️ Marco anybody inside Apple who who helped me track this down and I really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t appreciate the blog post I read back forever ago and I’m glad I can’t find it now but so I’m telling you all now

⏹️ ▶️ Marco any developers listening don’t use back or background task IDs for frequently occurring things

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like database queries that is too granular and the solution of the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem ended up being something totally different.

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Crazy Overcast solution

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Betterment. Investing made better.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So going back to the original problem. The problem was I was holding on to a shared

⏹️ ▶️ Marco file lock in the shared app container because the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco database file… So quick, very quick overview. I apologize to non-programmers. This is probably very boring.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been trying to not talk about this for weeks and John’s finally making me this week. But anyway, so… And not just him.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, you too. I voted. So anyway, long, long explanation, slightly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco less long again. Um, IOS apps are totally isolated from each other. They, you know, for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco security reasons, for for control reasons, for user friendliness, there’s lots of good reasons. IOS apps.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you’re if your app wants to read or write a file for its own for its own data purposes, it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco writes it in a special sandbox folder that it can’t read or write anything outside of that, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco no other apps can read its files. And this is extremely enforced such that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if you have multiple apps from the same developer, they are isolated from each other.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even if you have extensions of your app, because an extension is technically running as a separate process

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the system, the extension can’t read and write the same data as its parent

⏹️ ▶️ Marco app even. Like that’s how walled off everything is in iOS for various good security reasons.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which by the way I love and I kind of wish that the Mac had more of that. Anyway, Apple created

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a system called Shared App Group Containers to try to solve the problem of, first of all, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, if you have multiple apps from the same developer, can they share any information? And then second of all,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you just have an app with an extension, how do you, like, how do you, it’s pretty hard to make a useful extension

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that can’t read or write any of its parent apps data. The Shared App Container is basically

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a, it’s literally what it sounds like, it’s a shared container that apps and extensions can all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco read and write from, you know, separately, you know, for, you know, separately from their main data space

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so they can share data. I had the bright idea back when the when watchOS first came out

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I had to make my watch extension which was Overcast’s first extension. What if I just move

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the database file into the shared app container and then the extension can read and write the same database as the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco app and I can copy the same model files over and have the extension have a lot of code sharing with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the main app. The thing with iOS is that processes can be randomly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco suspended and terminated without their consent or whatever, as the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco system deems them no longer necessary if the user quits or whatever else. And this is especially enforced

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on extensions. If you open up, say, a widget, like the Today,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, it used to be called Today Widget, and I think they’re just called widgets now, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t even remember.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whatever they’re called in this iOS release. So widgets have very, very low limits

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because you might have a screen that has like five of them on it. Like if you open up your whatever notification center is called

⏹️ ▶️ Marco now and you have the part of the notification center that used to be called today’s screen that who knows what that’s called now. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so you have all these things that might be called widgets on that screen. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco each one of those is running a separate process and so they have very, very aggressive limits on those.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco In the context of a widget or actually any extension technically, there is no such thing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a background task assertion in the typical sense where you say you know begin background task and I’ll tell you when I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Marco done. They have this other thing this NSProcessInfo API that is horrendous and really hard

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use but basically they very aggressively terminate

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the processes of those extensions whenever you’re done with them. So the problem is if you have a shared

⏹️ ▶️ Marco app group container and you have the ability for one of these processes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to take a lock on a file in that you have a problem then what do you do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if say the widget has a lock on the database file which is the single copy that share between

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the parent app and everything else if the widget takes a lock on that file and then gets terminated before the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lock is released what should happen it should the lock not be released

⏹️ ▶️ Marco then the app can’t run because it’s deadlocked to waiting for that lock to be released from the extension that’s not that’s not running right now

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or should you just kind of force the lock to be released, well then you have the risk of data corruption

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because then if the widget then relaunches, the widget thinks the file has been locked that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whole time in the meantime, but it actually hasn’t. So the lock is kind of meaningless and so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you either have lots of bugs or you have data corruption or whatever else. So Apple, realizing this would be a problem,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco built in this wonderful system of this special springboard

⏹️ ▶️ Marco crasher that you will get a log if your app if your app is terminated while it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco holding a lock in the shared container you get these crazy crash logs that were the kind

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was getting to begin with this was the problem I was trying to solve the beginning and the reason I did this whole background task thing that was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco horrendous finally the end of the story I had that problem for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that reason and I tried to solve it with this background task on every database query

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing which was a terrible idea that causes other springboard crashes way way worse crash.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so instead I decided, you know what? I’m just not going to have the database in the share

⏹️ ▶️ Marco container anymore. I just moved it back into the app’s private storage and instead

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the widget communicating with and the watch extension, instead of them communicating

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the parent app by reading and writing the database directly, now they just have their own little mini

⏹️ ▶️ Marco APIs to the parent app where they are communicating via dictionaries that are just being

⏹️ ▶️ Marco written to little files in the share container that are not locked or anything like that. So I took this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco elegant but complex solution of having the database be shared and made a much, much, much

⏹️ ▶️ Marco simpler, lower-tech solution of just passing around serialized dictionaries as unlocked files,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically. And now all these problems are gone. It is totally solved.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco My crash rate has dropped to barely anything, relatively speaking. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is finally done. my users were very patient during this time and I greatly appreciate that along with the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco guy who reported the initial bug and the Apple people who helped me find it. So that is the story.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this was now because this was before the WBDC barrier

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the year of Apple scheduling I have very little recollection of most of these details so I apologize if I got anything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrong. I I apologize for the long-winded nature of this, but Casey and John made me do it.

Cross-examination

⏹️ ▶️ John So I have a couple of questions about this. Yeah. How many database

⏹️ ▶️ John queries were you making?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I never really measured what exactly the threshold of being a problem was.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think it’s in the order of, you know, it’s in the magnitude

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of hundreds over a short time, and then maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Marco approaching thousands if you use the app for a while. And it’s doing a lot of, you know, because the app syncs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco back to the server every few minutes. As you’re listening, every few

⏹️ ▶️ Marco seconds, it’s writing your progress back to the database. That way, in case it crashes, or your phone crashes,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever else, that you don’t lose too much progress. So every few seconds, I’m writing to the disk, at least. And then when you’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing a sync, there’s a lot more queries that go on there. And if you browse a list, it’s loading all that data

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as you page through that list. As you scroll, it’s loading all those table cells for all the episodes. It’s loading all that stuff. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do a good amount of queries.

⏹️ ▶️ John That was my question. So when you’re scrolling through lists, it’s like loading them on the fly at that point with like the, for the data source

⏹️ ▶️ John of whatever it’s called, the data provider for the table view or whatever. Yep. And it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John like pulling the whole list and keeping it in memory and then just doling it out to the GUI

⏹️ ▶️ John data source provider thingy. Like you don’t just do one big giant query up front to get the whole playlist and then just keep it in memory

⏹️ ▶️ John and chuck it out as the table cells ask for it?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I do. And I have some caching built into the database layer as well, so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for instance, I do load the whole list of episodes for a playlist view,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but then as you scroll, I need to know the artwork, and that comes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the podcast record, not the episode record. That’s one level up, and so I have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcasts cached, like I have that in a nice instance cache

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything, but keep in mind, a lot of this stuff falls over if people have a lot of podcasts.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Basically, if it exceeds what my app reasonably expects to cache or what will reasonably fit

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in memory to cache, there’s a lot more queries happening as the stuff is paged in. Also,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if things change, for instance, if I get a change value from

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the server, it invalidates a lot of these values that are cached, so I have to then reload those on their next request.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the list of playable content changes, which basically is like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if a new episode comes in or if an episode gets deleted or if some

⏹️ ▶️ Marco criteria of an episode changes whether it is a member of a playlist or not,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco then that is called, in my app, I call that the playable content change, which is basically like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco some part of what belongs in the list of episodes somewhere is no longer valid. And when

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that happens, lots of things get invalidated. And so there’s a lot going on. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a podcast app is a lot more complex than most people would assume. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco certainly more complex than I assumed when I started writing one,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John as I found out.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they’re only getting more complex over time as the market matures and as the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco scope of these things, the scope of what people expect, expands.

⏹️ ▶️ John expands. It’ll be interesting to see, uh, you know, like, uh, I guess you’d probably get it in a, there’s looking at the console log

⏹️ ▶️ John or using instruments or something like the flow of database queries. Cause I, you know, using overcast everything,

⏹️ ▶️ John well, you know, this does some database queries, but surely I would never guess the size of the number of database

⏹️ ▶️ John queries, like over the course of a 10 minute period that it would literally do thousands, like, especially just during normal

⏹️ ▶️ John use, even accounting for the, Hey, I’m syncing your play position every few seconds. So I found that

⏹️ ▶️ John pretty surprising in this whole thing. And also I would say that whatever that blog post was that you found that

⏹️ ▶️ John was like, uh, just do everything as a background task. Can’t really blame the blog post because

⏹️ ▶️ John any solution like that is like the underlying assumption is you’re not doing hundreds

⏹️ ▶️ John or thousands of database queries. Like you’ve got a couple of database queries and you do them and just put them in the background

⏹️ ▶️ John and you’ll be fine. And you would have been fine if the number was like 20, you know, like a couple of minutes, like five,

⏹️ ▶️ John five database queries every minute. But if it’s hundreds or thousands, then obviously that solution

⏹️ ▶️ John is not gonna work. My question, another question about your not having the database in the shared container and just having

⏹️ ▶️ John the thing right P less to the share container. Does that mean that the main overcast app has to

⏹️ ▶️ John like, be running to notice those things appearing in the shared container and take action on them because it

⏹️ ▶️ John owns the database now? Like, how does that work?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It would mean that but for a variety of reasons, it either always is running

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or becomes running. So let me let me go through. Basically, there’s only two extensions

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that matter for this purpose. One of them is the widget, the other one is the watch app.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco When watchOS, watchKit 1, back for watchOS 1,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the extension for the watch was actually a process running on the phone.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it had access to the shared data container on the phone. So it was actually surprisingly easy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make watchKit 1 apps because you could just share the database, share all the model files and everything,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then just have the watchKit read and write the database directly. And it kind of took care of that for you. WatchKit 2

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and forward, so WatchOS 2 and 3 and also now 4, moved the extension

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to run on the watch itself instead of on the phone. Because running it on the phone made the apps really slow,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically, because it had to send all the interface stuff over Bluetooth and it sucked. That’s one of the reasons why WatchOS 1

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was so bad for apps and why the newer WatchOS has since then been so much better.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so when the extension execution moved to the watch,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that meant it could no longer to read or write the container anymore, because the container’s on the phone. So it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco had its own container on the watch now, but anyway, it couldn’t read or write the database. So that eliminated the whole reason

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had it there in the first place. The only reason this came up is that when I made Overcast 3.0, I made a widget.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the widget was like the first time I was really using, or really taking advantage of the fact that the database

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was somewhere shared to begin with. The watch extension already needed to have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways to communicate with the app, to wake it up if need be and everything. And the watch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco connectivity framework allows for all that. Like there’s different commands and stuff that, you know, there are ways for the, like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it basically is already communicating the way that I said I moved everything to. It was really only the widget

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was causing the problems. And, you know, because I’d already made this move with the watch app. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so the widget, either the phone app is already running, in which case it notices anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or basically I have a mechanism in the widget, because the widget has a play button. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you tap into the artwork in it, it’ll play that one also. So the widget needs to have some way to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wake up the app. If it was just one-way data transfer, if the widget was just like showing status

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the app, like you might have if you made like a weather app, for instance, like there’d be no

⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason for the widget to communicate back to the parent app and something like that. You might just have the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco widget launch the app, but you can do that already. In my app, I had to have some way for the widget

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to communicate back to the app. and the app might not be running. So what I did for that was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the widget basically sends a command through one of these serialized

⏹️ ▶️ Marco playlists. It puts a file in the shared app container that says, hey, do this command. And if it doesn’t get a response

⏹️ ▶️ Marco within some very short time, I think it’s like a half a second or something, then I launch a URL

⏹️ ▶️ Marco scheme that launches the app in the foreground, and you’ll notice that if you use it. If basically the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco app was already running, if you hit that play button in the widget, it’ll just play it’ll start again in the background

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the app was still running so basically this is all a giant pile of hacks

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the short version is the widget tries to tries to send the app command and if

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t get a response it knows it isn’t running so it launches in the foreground

⏹️ ▶️ John my final question because every overcast segment would not be completed without some kind of bug report report

⏹️ ▶️ John slash feature request

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco is

⏹️ ▶️ John my word I’m still

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco this better not be about offline

⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch playback I swear I’m gonna set that feature on fire

⏹️ ▶️ John No, it is not. I know about your woes with that and I did try it myself and I had my own woes because

⏹️ ▶️ John the volume was too low and I couldn’t hear anything, but you know about that already.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s getting worse.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s getting so much worse. My question is about the mysterious

⏹️ ▶️ John world of the internal state of something on my phone that decides

⏹️ ▶️ John what it is that will start playing when my phone connects to Bluetooth on my car.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh, geez. will enter my car.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I just did it today. Actually, before I entered the car, I unlocked

⏹️ ▶️ John my phone and looked and either I either I use the multitasking switcher

⏹️ ▶️ John to go to it, or I tap the overcast icon or it was already in it. But the point is overcast was the front most application,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? I had previously been listening to a podcast I was not listening now I think I double tap my air pods and like put them away or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John But overcast is the front most app. So it’s a sleep button, I go into my car connects to Bluetooth. And instead

⏹️ ▶️ John of overcast continuing to play the thing I was just listening to, music starts to play.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I have no idea how iOS determines what it should start

⏹️ ▶️ John playing when I get into my car and it connects to Bluetooth, but maybe 15%

⏹️ ▶️ John of the time it starts playing music instead of playing the, I mean, sometimes like overcast is

⏹️ ▶️ John long gone. Like I kind of make sense. Like the last time I listened to overcast was last night and I’ve since used Twitter and

⏹️ ▶️ John browse the web and all sorts of stuff surely overcast is not running anymore because I’ve just thrashed through the memory

⏹️ ▶️ John and so when I get into my car maybe it’s gonna be like oh I should start playing a random playlist right

⏹️ ▶️ John but when overcast is the front most app and I was just listening to it and it starts playing music makes me realize I have no idea what the

⏹️ ▶️ John hell’s going on inside there I’m assuming you have very little control over this as with so many things that seem like

⏹️ ▶️ John OS level things but can you shed some light on what the hell’s going on there

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure I mean I can tell you right now I have zero control over it, but I will tell you roughly what I know is happening.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And a lot of this is conjecture, a lot of this is just figuring it out over time with experience

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and some of this, some, very little of this has been documented before, but not most of it. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the short version is it tries to do whatever you did last, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are some exceptions to when this will happen. So first of all, a lot of times, especially

⏹️ ▶️ Marco recently with the rise of video clips on Twitter, and Facebook,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you did last might not be what you think you did last or you might have forgotten or it might have been something. So for example,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you are you know if if Overcast is paused and you’re looking at Twitter and you view

⏹️ ▶️ Marco some kind of embedded video clip, Twitter has just become the most recently audio-playing app

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and iOS keeps track of whatever the most recently audio-playing app was for this purpose. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lots of things can take it. So anything that plays video, anything that plays audio. If you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco view a video in Safari, for instance, that becomes then the latest,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the last app that played audio. So it could be lots of different things that you don’t even realize are taking it over,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but if you play that quick video and then it stops, it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco give the last audio app status back to what it had before. It just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stays on whatever that was. So much of the time in practice, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the problem is you actually did play audio through something else and either subconsciously

⏹️ ▶️ Marco assumed it would go back to overcast after that or that you just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco forgot or didn’t realize that that’s happening.

⏹️ ▶️ John That makes sense but that’s never the case with me because I’ve never heard it do a tweet and I think I’ve done

⏹️ ▶️ John what you’ve described like played a video on Twitter, played a video on YouTube but I’ve never heard it resume a YouTube video, resume

⏹️ ▶️ John a tweet video, resume I mean, I think it always starts playing seemingly random playlists in my

⏹️ ▶️ John music collection. And I can tell you, I am not listening to music on my iPhone, like

⏹️ ▶️ John ever. Like, because I have a dedicated iPod connected with a USB cable in my car. Like, I don’t even listen

⏹️ ▶️ John to my phone, music on my phone in my car. I have a separate iPod for that, right? And

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s amazing to me. And I know what it’s doing, it’s taking a really long time. It’s amazing to me. I don’t, I don’t know how it

⏹️ ▶️ John picks the playlist because it’s not even like the playlist that I was last, like. If I go into a music app intentionally

⏹️ ▶️ John and play a song and then forget about it, I don’t know what it’s doing. Is it

⏹️ ▶️ John honoring my shuffle? But anyway, it always plays music and it takes forever for it to start playing music because I have never

⏹️ ▶️ John even launched the music app. Right.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there’s other things at play here. So first of all, even if it remembers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco properly the last app you used was Overcast, if Overcast has crashed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the background, it won’t resume. But again, I try to minimize

⏹️ ▶️ Marco background crashes. There are occasional ones that still happen that I’m still trying to track down, but they’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco relatively rare compared to other things. That probably is not doing what you’re doing now, but I can’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell you for sure it isn’t. Other things that are at play here.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If it tries to resume something in a car setting like that, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the last used audio app does not respond in a certain amount of time. I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS defaults to music. There’s also, this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has been a problem for cars for a while that had iPod support, there are these iPod

⏹️ ▶️ Marco control protocols that work over with USB and Bluetooth I think, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if a car has iPod support what will sometimes happen is the car will basically

⏹️ ▶️ Marco invoke that instead of like the generic Bluetooth play thing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and iOS devices when prompted for music support try to do the right thing. They try to show their music

⏹️ ▶️ Marco library to the car and and you said that these is kind of random. So it used to be whenever it would ask for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPod library music stuff it used to be that most of them would default to playing the first

⏹️ ▶️ Marco alphabetical song title. Yeah. So like whatever whatever song you had that began with A and you’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in your in your it would just play that every time.

⏹️ ▶️ John My car does that with the USB connected iPod touch it always goes with the

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco A songs.

⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s the thing, it still takes me like two songs to figure out what it’s doing. I

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco don’t know why I haven’t identified the first song

⏹️ ▶️ John with the second song. Sometimes I’m up to the third song because I kind of like the first two songs. Like oh this is good. Oh and

⏹️ ▶️ John I do use random play. It’s like oh conceivably could have picked the song random. But by the third song I’m like wait a second. These

⏹️ ▶️ John all begin with A and like how many years am I going to do that? I’m dumb.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And just as a note, okay as this episode has been somewhat about I’m not perfect.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I make a lot of mistakes. But as a note to people who implement these kind of audio systems,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco nobody ever wants to play songs alphabetically by their titles. That is never a thing anybody

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever wants. It is never the right idea. That just never, ever, ever do that. And there are so many

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like cars and things that do that, sometimes it’s the only option in certain like views or certain parts

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the UI. Nobody wants alphabetical song playback ever.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just don’t do that. Anyway, it seems like in recent times, Apple has figured out, okay,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco nobody wants to hear all in by stroke nine every single morning when they get in their car. Let’s instead

⏹️ ▶️ Marco play something from Apple Music that they might like. So if you subscribe to Apple Music, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco often get that, where like your car will suddenly start playing just some kind of, some radio station or some playlist

⏹️ ▶️ Marco off of your phone if you can’t figure out what else to do and the car is requesting music. So that’s a thing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco too, and that’s been, I think, in the last two iOS versions, I think since iOS 10 at least.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, you know, there’s lots of things that your car and your phone can negotiate and do.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco What you quickly realize as you dive into this stuff is that this is just an incredibly complex system. And most of it’s complex

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a reason. Like, you know, iOS’s whole concept of the last used, you know, music playing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or audio playing app, that is complex in itself because of all the things I mentioned like videos and Twitter and Facebook

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff like that. You know, embedded stuff in Safari, YouTube videos. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so complex to even just try to keep track in a reasonable way of like, what was the last app that played

⏹️ ▶️ Marco media? And so if the user says play, what should I play? So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t have a good answer for you, except it might be one of those things,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or it might be something else. Nice.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ John like I said, most of the time it works. 85% of the time, 90% of the time, it does what I expect

⏹️ ▶️ John it to do, but it’s the times that it doesn’t. Like, what was your problem this time? what you said about it trying

⏹️ ▶️ John to get it to play, but like it giving up after a short period of time and then going to music

⏹️ ▶️ John rings true for me because it always seems to take longer. I can always tell when, uh-oh, I’m not gonna hear my podcast, I’m gonna hear

⏹️ ▶️ John music, because everything on my car takes a long time in terms of Bluetooth and booting up and everything, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John and so this is counted in seconds. I can say, oh, I know what’s gonna happen next, it’s gonna play

⏹️ ▶️ John music, and it does, but almost all the time it works, so. Anyway, another thing, I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ John I guess that can be solved by Honda updating their in-car

⏹️ ▶️ John infotainment system, which by the way they did. The new Accords have an all-new Android-based, presumably

⏹️ ▶️ John non-disgusting, you know, like what I have now is like pre-Android

⏹️ ▶️ John iOS, like the old world of car infotainment systems,

⏹️ ▶️ John the bad old world, and the new one is just, you know, the modern era. So I’m hoping it’s better

⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m hoping they put faster CPUs in and I’m hoping it will take less time to connect to Bluetooth.

⏹️ ▶️ John So at the very least I can get the wrong thing playing faster. In

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the

⏹️ ▶️ John meantime, I will just, you know, I mean, it’s pretty, pretty high success rate, all things considered, but yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John it does sound complicated. It almost makes me wish that there was a way that I could say, look, all I ever wanted to happen ever,

⏹️ ▶️ John ever, ever when I enter the car is for you to start playing overcast and that’s it. But that doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John seem like it’s in the cards.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So before you get a ton of email, hopefully, uh, you were able to back channel

⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of directly to Apple and say, hey, what’s going on here?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey What do you think would have been your course of action if that wasn’t available to you? Like, aren’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there…

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco DTS ticket would be the next thing. That’s what it is. It’s exactly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I thought. So if you’re not Marco Arment, and yeah, that’s fine for Marco, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you would have opened a DTS ticket and hypothetically, that would have been escalated to an engineer

⏹️ ▶️ Casey who could have helped you, hopefully, maybe.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and the way these works, and forgive me for not having the details right, because I’ve actually never

⏹️ ▶️ Marco filed one, but basically every paid Apple developer membership includes, I believe, two

⏹️ ▶️ Marco developer technical support, that’s DTS, incidents per year. And you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically, you say you want to use one, and you can actually get code level support.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can actually say, okay, look, here’s this code, it is not working here, I can’t figure this out, can you help?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Apple engineers will actually help you with that problem. And so it’s a pretty involved

⏹️ ▶️ Marco process. That’s why they’re limited. So it’s two per year. And I think there’s some

⏹️ ▶️ Marco provision where like if what you found is actually an Apple bug, then I think they don’t like charge you your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ticket for that year. They don’t accumulate. So I would have a lot if they did,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they don’t. But yeah, so there actually is this,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is a way to do this. And while I have no experience with it myself, I’ve heard from people who have used

⏹️ ▶️ Marco them that they’re incredibly helpful. And so this is something that all developers have access to. So that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty cool. MALE SPEAKER 1

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s awesome.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, we good? I mean, I could tell some more long, boring stories if you want.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, we got to figure out an after show because I have something brief, but I don’t know if it’s going to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be worth it. Oh, I know what we should do. All right. Thanks to our three sponsors this week, Betterment, Eero, and Fracture.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we will see you next week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the show notes at atp.fm,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if you’re into

⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them at

⏹️ ▶️ Casey C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey A-N-T Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Syracuse It’s accidental, they

⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t mean

⏹️ ▶️ John to ♪ Are you accidental? ♪ ♪ Accidental! ♪ Why cast

⏹️ ▶️ John so long?

Post-show

Chapter Post-show image.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So John tell us about your mongoose Californian

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Trying to

⏹️ ▶️ John really clear up things in there.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, yeah, we have to set the stage we have to set stage So forever and a day ago at

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the so the very top of our show notes has some sections and then

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Including follow-up and then the topics right? So the very very very top

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like the fifth line down down in sitting in this document for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe a year now is my Mongoose Californian, parenthesis,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey 1984, parenthesis, and two links. And this has been sitting there staring us at the face at the in the face at

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the top of this document for probably a year, maybe two.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John And apparently three years,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey three years. And now is the time that we are going to finally clear this out. Good

⏹️ ▶️ Casey call, Marco.

⏹️ ▶️ John I the thing that we really should be clearing out is like early on someone probably Casey was trying to put sections

⏹️ ▶️ John in the notes. We didn’t have names for things. It’s the naming problem with programming. It hadn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John actually come up with precise names for things. So there’s all sorts of

⏹️ ▶️ John pre, post-show, public post-show, after-show, pre-show. We didn’t have the names for all

⏹️ ▶️ John the different times that we can talk to each other, the times when we’re live, when we’re not live, blah, blah, blah.

⏹️ ▶️ John So this section got anchored up here with public post-show, which now

⏹️ ▶️ John we call the after-show and is lower in the document. And so that’s how old this was. So

⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll be able to delete this entire section when we do this. The problem with this topic is it was a thing

⏹️ ▶️ John I was angry about. I was angry about it in 2014, unfortunately. It’s hard for me to muster

⏹️ ▶️ John that anger again.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, really? Is that so, John? Well, I demand that you do it, because you made me dig up my

⏹️ ▶️ John crash story. You weren’t angry about it.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That was a detective story.

⏹️ ▶️ John The anger should have subsided. you’ve defeated the beast now you can look back on it and it’s more like

⏹️ ▶️ John you know a detective story if like it was this mystery and I solved it and it was weird

⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s like a programming problem so if I had you do it in the middle of it like your app is currently out there and crashing

⏹️ ▶️ John you still can’t figure out what it is and then you talked about it that would be different story but anyway I’ll see what I can do to

⏹️ ▶️ John bring myself back to 2014 this is a precipitated by me being on a podcast that will link

⏹️ ▶️ John in the show notes Storming Mordor where I talked about a whole bunch of things including,

⏹️ ▶️ John in the words of a show that, God help me, Casey must have seen, and please Marco

⏹️ ▶️ John know that at least exists, the best present, the best Christmas present I ever received

⏹️ ▶️ John and ever would receive.

1984 Mongoose Californian

Chapter 1984 Mongoose Californian image.

⏹️ ▶️ John my 1984 Mongoose Californian BMX bike. Casey, do you

⏹️ ▶️ John know what I was referencing?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nope. Please. Not a bit. Come on, guys, come on. What was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John it? Maybe if you tell me. Did

⏹️ ▶️ John I get it wrong? The best Christmas present I ever received and ever

⏹️ ▶️ John would receive? I’m close, I’m really close on that. You’re not close enough for us.

⏹️ ▶️ John A Christmas story, they only play it 24 hours a day. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I’ve only seen it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like once or twice.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, what do you mean you’ve only seen it once or twice? I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve seen it all the

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco way through.

⏹️ ▶️ John They play it literally 24 hours.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, I never pay attention.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly. It’s one of those things, it’s always on, and so you never pay attention.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you had said you’ll shoot your eye out with that thing, I would have known immediately.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Well, at least there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John that. Anyway, that movie, by the way, is a really, really, really good movie. Ignore the fact that

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s played 24 hours. They used to not play it 24 hours. It is a really good movie. The kid in the movie

⏹️ ▶️ John gets a BB gun for Christmas, and he says, the narrator, the older version of it, says the best Christmas

⏹️ ▶️ John present he ever received would receive. That’s my bike for a variety of reasons.

⏹️ ▶️ John Wait,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reference we were supposed to recognize there was not the bike itself, just the best present that you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John part? Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s very near the end of the movie. It’s like the second or third to last line in the movie. Oh, geez. We didn’t stand a

⏹️ ▶️ John chance. Nope. It’s a pretty significant line. It’s a pretty significant sentiment. Anyway, I should

⏹️ ▶️ John get that quote exactly right so I can repeat it with more confidence in the future. Anyway, on this

⏹️ ▶️ John podcast, we talked about a whole bunch of things. I also talked about BMX and around this time I was

⏹️ ▶️ John buying bicycles for my kids of various sizes like like non training wheel bikes

⏹️ ▶️ John like their first like real bikes and I found that experience incredibly frustrating

⏹️ ▶️ John so I I grew up in a bike culture which is like 70s

⏹️ ▶️ John 80s suburban New York Metro area it was a bike culture kids

⏹️ ▶️ John were on bicycles can we tell people that you’re a biker different different thing different context,

⏹️ ▶️ John although we did put playing cards in our spokes with a with a close pin. So your bike sound like motorcycles.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really

⏹️ ▶️ John confused anybody ever. That’s right. It was awesome. So kids kids run bikes all the time.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like if you watch a Steven Spielberg movie showing kids in the 70s racing, they’re riding around on bicycles. If you watch Stranger Things and kids

⏹️ ▶️ John are riding around on bicycles, that was a real thing. That’s all we did. We come home until we get on our bikes. We go all over the place.

⏹️ ▶️ John Nobody had helmets. We would fashion jumps out of garbage we found in other people’s trash on trash day

⏹️ ▶️ John in the middle of the street. It’s all very dangerous and scary and we’ve never let our kids do it

⏹️ ▶️ John today but that’s what we did. And because we’re in a bike culture and bikes are so important,

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a hierarchy of what kind of bike you had and all the fancy rich kids had mongoose or redline

⏹️ ▶️ John which were expensive bikes and I wanted a mongoose. I think I thought redlines were more expensive.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t even think they were but that’s what I thought. And I wanted one for Christmas and I thought there’s no way I’m going to get

⏹️ ▶️ John one because they’re really expensive and and they were and my parents totally surprised me with it. Like the present that

⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t think you’re ever gonna get. It’s not even I was like hopeful for it, looking for it. It was just, it wasn’t even, didn’t even enter my mind.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like being a kid and saying, I want a Lamborghini Countach. And you’re like, yeah, but like, whatever, I’m not gonna get one. And then you wake up on Christmas

⏹️ ▶️ John morning, it’s in your garage and it’s yours, right? It was like that basically. And I rode the

⏹️ ▶️ John hell out of that bicycle. I rode it everywhere, jumped it off jumps and dirt bikes and

⏹️ ▶️ John trails that rode up and down highways. This bike has no gears by the way, it’s a BMX bike. Like it’s just straight up,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, took really good care of it, you know, cleaned it and oiled it all the time. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John all the things you can imagine me doing this bike is like my prized possession. I still have this bicycle, it’s still in my house. Oh

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey my word.

⏹️ ▶️ John Wow. In the attic. In the basement. I tried to get my kids to ride the bike, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like the reason I saved it for my kids. And that they couldn’t care less. A, they didn’t care

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and B, they didn’t like it, right? But

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I

⏹️ ▶️ John rode the bike. Here I am 30 something years old on my BMX

⏹️ ▶️ John bike. You know what? still a really good bike. You get on it and you can tell this is,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s not a complicated thing. It’s got pedals and a gear, then a chain that connects to another gear and some

⏹️ ▶️ John handbrakes and tires. And of course the tires have been replaced over the years because, you know, I went through many tires and many

⏹️ ▶️ John inner tubes over the time of owning this, but pretty much everything else on it is original.

⏹️ ▶️ John And to this day, like how old is this bike? It’s a 1984 bike. It rides great.

⏹️ ▶️ John You pedal and it feels like, I don’t know, like, like I’m going to sit for Casey, like a BMW

⏹️ ▶️ John manual transmission, like a Swiss watch for Marco, Swiss watches are still a lot of like precision

⏹️ ▶️ John piece of machinery. There is no slippage, there is no slop, all the bearings

⏹️ ▶️ John in it are smooth, there is very, very little friction. The brakes are a little crap because

⏹️ ▶️ John the pads and the brakes have been replaced many times and they’re kind of hard and crusty from being in the basin. But

⏹️ ▶️ John the pedaling experience on this bike, there are no squeaks and rattles, 100% solid. So when

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m looking for bikes for my kids, I’m like, well, you know, they don’t, whatever, I just need any old bike, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John But, you know, me being the obnoxious,

⏹️ ▶️ John suburban, rich dad trying to buy things that are too expensive for his kids. It’s like, well, let me try

⏹️ ▶️ John to get, you know, I know it’s just a kid’s bike, but let me get a good quality one because I want my kids to have a good quality, but not just some,

⏹️ ▶️ John some cruddy, like Toys R Us made of like some weird, terrible, cheap aluminum

⏹️ ▶️ John alloy that you can bend with your fingers. It’s just going to fall apart or rust or just you know bend

⏹️ ▶️ John if it goes off a little bump in the road. I want to get a good bike right and maybe it’ll have good resale value or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m looking to try to find one a kid’s size you know not an adult bike but a kid’s size

⏹️ ▶️ John bike I’m not going to spend thousands of dollars but I would spend you know a couple hundred bucks on it or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ John that maybe it’s not gonna be as good as my Mongoose but just it’s competent that

⏹️ ▶️ John you know you you pedal and it And it feels like you are pushing yourself forward.

⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t feel the gears in the chain or any other stuff like that. And we went through a couple of bikes

⏹️ ▶️ John and a couple of different ways to get them and a couple of different stores. And I felt like Marco,

⏹️ ▶️ John buying something and then returning it and buying something and then returning it, because they were all just terrible. I heard

⏹️ ▶️ John they

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco were doing

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that.

⏹️ ▶️ John Sometimes the problem was like the shipment, like the shipment would come and the box would be

⏹️ ▶️ John damaged. You could see that it was like crushed and like the gears would have been like jammed

⏹️ ▶️ John against concrete or something because the little teeth on the gears were bent because you could tell that the paint was shaved off. Sometimes you’d get it

⏹️ ▶️ John and, you know, no matter how much you tried to lubricate things in it and get

⏹️ ▶️ John it up and running, it always just, you know, the bike chain would bend and get a kink in it and never straighten

⏹️ ▶️ John out or the chain would jump off. And, you know, I know how to, I have a lot of experience fixing and maintaining bikes over

⏹️ ▶️ John my life, all the way up to 10 speeds and everything when I was older, like, I know what I’m doing. And these bikes were just

⏹️ ▶️ John crap. Every part of them was crap. Their bearings, if they had them at all, were crap. The parts were

⏹️ ▶️ John not precisely manufactured. They were made of crappy metal that I could bend with my fingernails.

⏹️ ▶️ John The paint jobs were terrible. They were heavy, they were ugly, they were slow, they felt terrible. Every

⏹️ ▶️ John one of them was like, I wouldn’t have traded a thousand of them for my Mongoose,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? And I didn’t understand why, you know, what the deal is with bikes. Like, is it

⏹️ ▶️ John only like super adult, multi-thousand dollar, even more obnoxious rich dude bikes

⏹️ ▶️ John that you have to get. Like, is that the only place good quality components are? Even Mongoose, which

⏹️ ▶️ John is a brand that still exists. And I think Redline still exists too. Their bikes are these weird monstrosities that just

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t seem to be the quality they used to. And it got me into the super duper old man, you know, second

⏹️ ▶️ John only to my literal telling children to get off my lawn, of like, they don’t make things like they

⏹️ ▶️ John used to. Wait, do you do that? That was one of my, that’s my favorite tweet I have ever made.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna look

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it up in the

⏹️ ▶️ John show notes. So this is the tweet, I’m gonna try to recite it from memory.

⏹️ ▶️ John The school bus stops in front of my house. This morning I found myself literally telling

⏹️ ▶️ John children to get off my lawn. This is a real thing that happened.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Because the school bus stop is in front of my house,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and

⏹️ ▶️ John when the school bus stop, the kids are like, oh, let’s just go on this lawn here and like play ball and like run around and you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, stomp through the planting beds and throw balls so they end up hitting our house. I

⏹️ ▶️ John told the kids to get off my lawn. Like seriously, you think you wouldn’t do this,

⏹️ ▶️ John but just think about it. If you had a bus stop in front of your house and every single morning, a fleet of children

⏹️ ▶️ John are there just running around and stomping on your downspouts and bending them and crushing your bushes and

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey throwing

⏹️ ▶️ John balls and bouncing off their house and the balls hitting your car in your driveway, Casey, you would go out there and you would tell the kids to get

⏹️ ▶️ John off your lawn. So I literally went out and told the kids to get off my lawn.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey The school bus stop is in front of my house, period. I am now literally telling children

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get off my lawn, period.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John 8th of January, 2009. And

⏹️ ▶️ John you would too. You know, that’s the oldest. But the second oldest I ever felt is, I heard my grandfather

⏹️ ▶️ John say this all the time, and I mostly just ignored him and rolled his eyes, but he would show me how they don’t make

⏹️ ▶️ John them like they used to. Like, they don’t make him, with him it was cars, right? And I contend,

⏹️ ▶️ John they do not make bikes for kids like they used to. There is no bike at any price

⏹️ ▶️ John anywhere in the world that is of equal quality to my 1994 Mongoose

⏹️ ▶️ John Californian in terms of the simple machine with bearings and pedals

⏹️ ▶️ John and wheels and chains that takes your leg energy

⏹️ ▶️ John and turns it into forward momentum. That stupid thing in my basement right now hanging from the ceiling

⏹️ ▶️ John is better than anything you can get at any price. And I find that depressing, and

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m assuming it’s just because I don’t know the secret place and the secret brands for today’s good bikes, or maybe kids don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John like bikes at all until they’re adults and, you know, ride grown-up bikes. But

⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, that was depressing, and I ended up getting my kids a series of terrible bikes from like,

⏹️ ▶️ John I think they had a couple from bike stores and a couple from Target, and it’s like, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter how much you spend or where you get

⏹️ ▶️ John them, I just resigned to the fact that they’re all crap. Just you know after in the end times

⏹️ ▶️ John instead of pushing a shopping cart through the ruins of civilization I will be the 50 year old

⏹️ ▶️ John man riding a way too small for him BMX bike. That is awesome

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John I have good news my friend you have successfully mustered up the appropriate amount of anger. I was so

⏹️ ▶️ John I was so much Cuz like, you know, it’s the Marco style anger is like

⏹️ ▶️ John something that money can’t fix what what is wrong with the world? I’m willing to spoil my

⏹️ ▶️ John children and buy them things that they shouldn’t own that they’re not going to appreciate and yet I can’t I’m not allowed to spoil

⏹️ ▶️ John my children.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The thing I want is not available on Amazon.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No

⏹️ ▶️ John I was I was going to bike stores actual bike stores we did actually buy a couple of bikes at bike stores at least we got

⏹️ ▶️ John some that were sturdy from bike stores at tremendous expense mind you but I’m totally willing to support a bike store if it’s going to

⏹️ ▶️ John keep a bike store in business because if you don’t go to a bike store it’s Walmart Target Toys or us

⏹️ ▶️ John and like sporting goods stores none of which know anything about bicycles so if you have a local bike store

⏹️ ▶️ John go there and give them whatever they want because it is better than shopping elsewhere

⏹️ ▶️ John I think you guys have what does Adam have a scoop bike

⏹️ ▶️ Marco he has a balance bike I don’t know if that’s the same thing it’s it’s basically a bike with no pedals

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah those are awesome yeah he and he he has taken like he’s he’s had it now for over

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a year I think maybe even two years and he took to it immediately

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and is really into it it’s it’s almost at the point now where I was thinking about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a few weeks I was thinking about like trying him on a like on a like a real bike to see if he if he can do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it yet I think he might be able to

⏹️ ▶️ John he’s 100% ready I’ve seen video of him doing it he is ready for a bike he is you know that that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John good bike he’s totally mastered he’s yeah my kids never wanted to do the scoot bike of course

⏹️ ▶️ John we bought the scoot bikes oh I understand the theory behind a school bike, it’ll be awesome. My kids were like, nope, no way in hell I’m getting on that. So

⏹️ ▶️ John they took a long time to learn how to ride bikes. But Adam’s gonna be riding a bike tomorrow if you give him a bike with pedals.

⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t even bother with the training wheels, he’s ready.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t ride a bike until like middle school. Took me a long time. Same, cause

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I was like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was really into scooters and just didn’t really, I thought I didn’t need the bike.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You didn’t understand mechanical advantage. Not at all, no.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco so it took me a while. Then

⏹️ ▶️ John you went to middle school and you learned about levers and other simple machines.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and actually, at the beach, it’s like a no cars

⏹️ ▶️ Marco community. There’s no cars anywhere.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Only wagons.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, everyone bikes everywhere. And there were some bikes in the basement of this place. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I took one out in the last couple of times we’d been there and started riding it around. And I haven’t ridden a bike since

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my high school bike, which was never quite adult size. It was like a couple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John inches smaller than a regular.

⏹️ ▶️ John be fair

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey yeah see

⏹️ ▶️ Casey where

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John going yeah I was just gonna say to be fair

⏹️ ▶️ John and hoping you would autocomplete the joke but I had to go a little farther

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah so I started writing and first of all riding a bike when you haven’t ridden one

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in you know probably 20 years

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it’s just like you’re on the bike yeah the old saying

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean yes but not well and it’s terrifying and also like the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bike

⏹️ ▶️ John Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a second. I took a long break riding bikes too, like most people. Like you ride a bike when you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John a kid and then you become an adult and you get a license, you get a car. So I think there was a pretty big gap between riding my bikes. In my

⏹️ ▶️ John experience, it was like riding a bike. No problem. I’m like, of course

⏹️ ▶️ John I know how to do this. Maybe your gap was longer than mine or maybe you didn’t have the hours,

⏹️ ▶️ John the flight hours in the seat of a bike. But I just rode my bike.

⏹️ ▶️ John I rode my bike to pick up my car from the body shop I got a you know scratches fixed in my paint

⏹️ ▶️ John and I had to go pick up the car But of course you can’t drive a car to pick up the car So I had

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco to pick up the

⏹️ ▶️ John car and you know, it was that’s not the first time I ridden a bike a long time But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John my experience it was just like riding a bike and wasn’t terrifying but maybe maybe your gap was longer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, it kind of an exacerbating factor is that the the bike that that was in the basement

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this house is Not only very very old and has a lot of rust and failing parts

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it is an 18 speed mountain bike I don’t know what brand,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think it would be a brand anybody would recognize it, it’s a cheap bike, but it’s also a cheap old bike that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has been around sea air for a long time, so there’s lots of rust, and it’s to the point where the gears,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you shift the big gear by the pedals, if you shift that, the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing falls off, like the thing that moves the gears back and forth, it just falls off, and you have to, it jams

⏹️ ▶️ Marco up in weird ways, and you have to unjam it in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John weird ways.

⏹️ ▶️ John in your chain too?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Something like that yeah but only if you shift the middle gear and then the the back gears like the smaller ones

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are supposed to be like more fine-grained the the gear shifting thing seems

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to just like skip every two or three at a time so it is technically an 18

⏹️ ▶️ Marco speed but I can only actually get it to engage maybe three distinct speeds and they’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very far apart from each other.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I basically keep it in one gear.

⏹️ ▶️ John When I rode to get my car I was using of you know some ancient like it was like a

⏹️ ▶️ John given to us by a friend who was gonna throw it in the garbage and the same same problem is like a mountain bike with a whole bunch of gears and in

⏹️ ▶️ John theory you have a whole bunch of them but in practice it jumps over all the gears and the worst part for me is because I

⏹️ ▶️ John have kinks in the chain if you try to pedal hard the chain pops off the teeth

⏹️ ▶️ John oh jeez and then and then it catches again like seven notches later and that is the worst thing when you’re trying

⏹️ ▶️ John to pedal it’s like I just I mean I don’t blame that bike I know there are available good mountain bikes if I was willing

⏹️ ▶️ John to buy the home recently hand me down bike but riding a bad bike feels

⏹️ ▶️ Marco gross the other problem is this bike is way too tall for me like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s first of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John all not comfortable

⏹️ ▶️ John your tippy toes to reach the pedal

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have to almost jump onto it like that’s that’s how it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco way

⏹️ ▶️ John too tall we need some video of this what is what is tip periscoping if not

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey right

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you took the words right out of my mouth like of all the stuff that you’ve periscope

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the seat the seat is at the bottom like it can’t be adjusted any further down than where it is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco now and it’s just it’s just too big for me

⏹️ ▶️ John we get you to do a running start and get that on periscope you can do the running start and jump on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah it’s so it’s it’s quite terrifying like if I if I have to slow down let’s go around some

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people on the sidewalk I just have to just just stop and put my feet down just I’ll just wait for them to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pass

⏹️ ▶️ John well these like and put your feet down if it when the seats are really high like when I first got a couple of my 10 speeds or when I’d ride my dad

⏹️ ▶️ John tends to be I couldn’t read my feet couldn’t reach the ground. I would have to jump off of the seat and even when it was on the bar, I’d be like

⏹️ ▶️ John resting on my balls, tilted over so one foot could be on the ground.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, yeah, I’m only putting one foot down. I don’t quite have your bar issue, but it’s not that far off. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s really… So yeah, I and I… So actually, this was interesting. This is the second

⏹️ ▶️ Marco time I’m looking at bikes online today. Earlier today, I thought, you know, I would like to get,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, obviously a bike that fits me for this place because I’m about to go be there

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a long time for my big summer vacation. So I would like to maybe get my own bike

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that actually fits me. That would be less terrifying to ride and maybe has gears that work.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I thought maybe I should look at bikes. And I thought, you know, if there’s one bike that I would really want to have.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, John, you know the decade that we grew up in. Can you guess what bike

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want?

⏹️ ▶️ John I do know the decade you grew up in, but I didn’t grow up on that decade. I know that what the answer would

⏹️ ▶️ John be if you were my age, but I’m assuming because you’re 90s children that you want some kind

⏹️ ▶️ John of gross mountain bikey thing with suspension.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casey, can you guess the one bike I might want from our childhood?

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, the Pee Wee Herman bike? Yep, there you go. That’s closer to my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey generation. Oh my word, I should have known. I should

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John have known. Well, that’s better

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco than a gross mountain

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bikey thing. I want the bike from Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, right? And it turns out that there

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a community of people who make replicas of these bikes. But they only make them for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco themselves as projects. They basically never go for sale

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John anywhere.

⏹️ ▶️ John There’s no gears on the Pee Wee bike, you don’t want that. Well, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually for the place that I’m staying at, there’s no hills and you can’t go that fast

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because you’re on sidewalks with people on them. But it could be too

⏹️ ▶️ John tall geared and then it’s hard to go slow.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s, I guess it’s true. I imagine there would be some way to maybe swap out one, like the front gear or something to fix

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that in some way, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. But I would think you could get get me a Pee Wee Herman replica bike because I’m Marco

⏹️ ▶️ John But also give it to me with like five speeds or something

⏹️ ▶️ Marco look I mean, it’s a whole custom build anyway, so like I’m sure I can get them to make one It’s actually my size and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe give me three speeds. You know maybe like I don’t need

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John a lot of speed

⏹️ ▶️ John I would not have it would not have occurred to me like I’m thinking like well He’s gonna get one of those expensive like you know carbon

⏹️ ▶️ John fiber racing bike That’s what you know that type of thing and like those are gonna cost a lot of money No Marco wants someone to build

⏹️ ▶️ John him a bike some ridiculous bike from a movie

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of them that was actually in the movie like one of the actual prop bikes sold on eBay in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco 2014 for thirty six thousand dollars

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John yeah

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So yeah, well, I’m not gonna get that also. I wouldn’t want to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John ride that that was not gonna ride I’m gonna ride good. Yeah, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and apparently like in order to build this bike you have to get like a frame From I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a schwin. It’s it’s some kind of like good bike frame from the 40s like the 1940s like that’s it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like find one of these frames and then get all this custom stuff to go around it like it’s it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco totally crazy

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco so

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m all for these bikes as long as if I get on them and I pedal the pedals I

⏹️ ▶️ John feel an efficient transfer of my leg force to

⏹️ ▶️ John forward momentum I don’t want to feel the gears or the chains or friction of the parts moving

⏹️ ▶️ John I want to feel like like my legs are magically attached to like forward momentum and

⏹️ ▶️ John I swear to you like no no no children’s bike that I’ve sat on is like 1

⏹️ ▶️ John 8th as efficient as the model so you’re gonna spend all this money in the fancy bike looks like the pb herman bike also make

⏹️ ▶️ John sure that when you pedal it it feels like a hundred times better than those crap bicycles you’re trying to ride now you’re like wow

⏹️ ▶️ John suddenly biking is easier because all the friction has been taken out of this mechanical system

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the other thing is like if I actually want to bike a lot in this beach place

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are parts of it like I can only go so far unless I’m willing to go on sand for some

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John port

⏹️ ▶️ John then you end up in the ocean of the day I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know no I mean it’s it’s a long space island but there’s at some point

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like there are certain parts of like there’s just private property for the whole width down so like you actually can’t progress

⏹️ ▶️ John or then then the the ticks get you you can’t go any further the tech

⏹️ ▶️ Marco well you can if you’re willing to drive in the sand for a little bit so I actually so they have like there are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people around there who have those like giant sand cruiser tire bikes like the ones that have like the five inch tires like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I actually and there’s a rental place there so I think I think about renting one while I’m there

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just for a day and just try it and see if I imagine I’m going to hate trying to bike on sand it’s probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ridiculously

⏹️ ▶️ John hard those yeah those tires don’t make it that much easier

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco yeah right

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s still biking on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sand the other up so so basically I’m looking at I’m considering two options the other option is an e-bike

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is is the very, this would be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey the high-end option. So if

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you’re willing to spend like two

⏹️ ▶️ Marco grand, at least, on a bike, you can get one that has an electric

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey motor assist. Why do you even say

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if? And so, well, but listen, I’ll address that in a second. You can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco get one that has an electric motor assist and a small lithium battery in it, and those would be nice

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when going on the sand to just assist you through the sand and you can get back on the pavement and turn the assist off.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s one thing. However, one thing I really hate about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the practicality of using a bike in a place like this is that you have to lock it. Locking a bike

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sucks, and bikes, you always have to worry so much about theft because they’re stolen so often,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and even if you get the most ridiculous locks, then they’ll just steal all the parts or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Are

⏹️ ▶️ John they gonna be stolen where you are? Because there is a physical reason

⏹️ ▶️ John why bike thieves would have more difficulty. Like, unless it’s gonna be stolen by your neighbor.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, yeah, it’s like, because where are you gonna take the bike?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Are you gonna get on the ferry? Where

⏹️ ▶️ John are you gonna go? Yeah, exactly. But. You have time to catch them, there’s a bottleneck. You can just show up at the ferry with some goons and be like, where

⏹️ ▶️ John are you gonna go? Drive it off into the ocean? No, I know where you’re going.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I feel like there are two approaches here that would make sense. Number one, get a nice bike.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Get a Pee Wee Herman bike or something that, something that is of that style that I can really be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco proud of. Get a nice Schwinn, a nice brand, and give it some gears, make it a really nice bike.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s probably gonna be about a thousand bucks. Or you go the crazy e-bike route, but I don’t think that’s really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco necessary or practical or worth the cost necessarily.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s- None of those things have ever bothered you before ever.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco True. Or just get the cheapest bike you can possibly find and just don’t lock

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Like, who cares? Like if

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you steal it-

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’ll still steal it. They will still steal it, but if it’s like a $60 Walmart bike, then

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like, it’s a lot less of a loss, you know?

⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t wanna ride that. You’re gonna be spending all your muscle strength will be going to friction. Those things is just

⏹️ ▶️ John not an enjoyable experience. It’s terrible. Don’t do it. I mean, you don’t have to spend, there’s something in between $2,000

⏹️ ▶️ John and $60. You can buy a $200 bike, don’t lock it, resign yourself that it’s gonna get stolen every 1.5 years and just go.

⏹️ ▶️ John Right,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly, like I think I would rather have that than like a fancy expensive bike that I would worry

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about getting stolen all the time.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and $2,000 by the way is low. Like if you were to buy like a racing bike, like a road bike,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, 10 speed is, you know, dated lingo or whatever, you can go up 10 grand easy on those, like

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not like watches, but it is like max.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You can keep going and well into the five digits and just

⏹️ ▶️ John keep going and keep going and it’s insane. And also those, like that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the type of bike

⏹️ ▶️ John where

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John like, yeah, yeah, easy. You

⏹️ ▶️ Marco get a whole, wow. I mean, I guess, yeah, once you can start getting to like

⏹️ ▶️ John carbon fiber and stuff, I guess the sky’s the limit, right? And there’s the, and like max, there is the premium above and beyond

⏹️ ▶️ John the, yes, this is made of fancy materials engineering but also we know that you know you are you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John the pro users and your actual racers and yeah it’s it can get very expensive very fast

⏹️ ▶️ Marco man who knew it’s better than a watch actually this this people in the chat

⏹️ ▶️ Marco suggested the Schwinn cruisers line

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco actually

⏹️ ▶️ John looks pretty nice yeah they’re like that’s the in-between anything they look like Peewee Herman style but they’re just you know

⏹️ ▶️ John playing up the middle bikes couple hundred bucks I’ve never been on one but I assume they pedal okay

⏹️ ▶️ Marco available exclusively at Schwinn signature independent bike shops.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh wow 800 bucks I guessed too low.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah the high end ones are 800 bucks the lower ones are more like in the four to five range but

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. Well that’s the thing I don’t know at what point in this price range pedaling becomes just

⏹️ ▶️ John like grinding a bunch of metal gears through sand at what point does it become like you know sliding

⏹️ ▶️ John the bolt on a well-oiled rifle that’s that’s the bike you want. You can borrow my Mongoose it might

⏹️ ▶️ John be the the right size. Actually no I would not let you borrow my mongoose.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No you wouldn’t.

⏹️ ▶️ John Even though it was the best Christmas present I ever received, never would have received, it is still one of my prized

⏹️ ▶️ John possessions. So that’s why I still

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have it. I would not want to borrow your mongoose because I’d be too afraid of damaging it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh yeah I did a pretty good job on it.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Like

⏹️ ▶️ John this is one of, this tells you how different I was as a child and how it took me a long time to become the thing that

⏹️ ▶️ John you see before you today. At one point I wanted to make sure

⏹️ ▶️ John that I had fear of my bike being stolen because uh the mongoose and red lines were highly coveted

⏹️ ▶️ John uh in the neighborhood and I wanted to make sure that I could identify my mongoose and the way

⏹️ ▶️ John my nine-year-old brain decided to do this was there was like a sticker

⏹️ ▶️ John on the front like a little tube that connects the handlebars down to the front fork right and there’s a sticker on the front

⏹️ ▶️ John I decided to take one one of my dad’s razor blades from like his little tool area

⏹️ ▶️ John and cut a big line down the middle of the stick, like cut like a valley and not even like a straight one, but it’s like this big

⏹️ ▶️ John jagged, you know, as if you had taken something and just scraped the front of the thing. So like

⏹️ ▶️ John now I can always identify my bike. And that’s what I did. Does that sound insane to you? Like what? No version

⏹️ ▶️ John of my brain as exists today would consider like, like I literally damaged my own bike to identify

⏹️ ▶️ John it. And so there it is down in the basement with a big giant gash there. me looking at it and saying, what were

⏹️ ▶️ John you thinking, nine-year-old me? Wow.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, my word. Now we just need to get Casey a bike and we’ll be ready to go.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wanted not the Mongoose Californian. I want to say it was the Huffy White Heat,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John like…

⏹️ ▶️ John Huffy is crap.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not saying it was good. I’m not saying it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John was good, John.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh my God, I love

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco coffee is like the

⏹️ ▶️ John bottom of the was the bottom of the neighborhood Ladder I

⏹️ ▶️ John because there was nothing below that there was no like Walmart brand by Huffy. That was the bottom. Oh my god

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are you done?

⏹️ ▶️ John Mm-hmm. Just saying

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t want to tell the story. I’m done.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Go ahead

⏹️ ▶️ John Like now it’s the Huffy what

⏹️ ▶️ Casey white heat I was looking for a picture earlier. I never found a terribly great

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John it auto completed. It must be a popular bike.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I Don’t know. I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I think I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey wanted it because if memory serves it had a pretty serious like marketing push

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I think it had like little Like guards in front of the handlebars,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I thought was super

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John cool.

⏹️ ▶️ John It totally did. It’s a mountain bike not a BMX

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey bike Yeah, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and it was like neon green as you do in the late 80s early

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John yep, and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just wanted it so hard and I eventually Did I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John get it? I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t remember now.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Looks pretty fancy. I’m assuming it

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey was

⏹️ ▶️ John still a crap bike because, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Huffy.

⏹️ ▶️ John Sure it was. Wow. I mean, these days Huffy is probably

⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, it’s a name brand. It’s above like the whatever the random Walmart brands

⏹️ ▶️ John are. So it actually probably is probably the same quality as Mongoose and Redline these days. But when I was a kid,

⏹️ ▶️ John Huffy was, you just, Oh, he just got a Huffy. It was a very materialistic

⏹️ ▶️ John go-go 80s money equals status

⏹️ ▶️ John environment for the single-digit year old boys

⏹️ ▶️ John in suburban New York neighborhoods. 100%. Huffy’s a funny name. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking at this cool Schwinn bike. The only thing is, it’s like, what’s, I doubt

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m a 26 inch, I’m pretty sure that’s like…

⏹️ ▶️ John Do they have a bike store there near you?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is a bike store in my town. It is not, whatever kind of dealer Schwinn says these are exclusively sold within,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is not showing up on their map.

⏹️ ▶️ John Cause you do want to, well you can probably fit a bike in your Tesla easy, but you want to do is ride

⏹️ ▶️ John it, like go to a bike store to buy it first of all, even though you’re gonna pay way more, and then they’ll let you ride it, like try it out, see how

⏹️ ▶️ John it feels, then you’ll know what size, and then you’ll be able to distinguish the crap bikes from the good ones, if you ride them back to back,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s well worth it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that is how I would do it, because I especially because I don’t know what I’m doing. So I would want

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the expertise of a local shop. This is exactly what local shops are good at. Yep. Should I get

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Mongoose Californian from 1984 for Adam’s first bike?

⏹️ ▶️ John That would be amazing. If you could find one in a good condition, and if he fits on the bike,

⏹️ ▶️ John yes, absolutely.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco How old of a kid do you have to be to fit on it? I think he’s

⏹️ ▶️ John too small. He would have to be much bigger than he is. But if your kid was tall enough

⏹️ ▶️ John for it at the time that he wanted his first bike, yes, if you could find one. because judging by the condition mine is in,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if they’re expensive to get in good condition,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco but yeah. Let’s see,

⏹️ ▶️ John have you actually looked? I have looked at it, I was looking for pictures of other people. The problem is a lot

⏹️ ▶️ John of them, they seem to be modified a lot. It’s like trying to find a 1990s Honda Civic with no modifications

⏹️ ▶️ John in good condition, it’s like basically impossible.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can get just the fork for $400, yikes.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Here’s, there’s one on eBay for 600. Oh my God, these are much

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more than I expected.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a popular bike. The ones that have the plastic wheels, no. You want the ones with the wire spoke wheels.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like those plastic wheels are either an option or aftermarket and just say, no, let me find you a picture

⏹️ ▶️ John of my actual bike as close as I can find.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, it looks like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the going rate for these is generally, looks like it’s around 500 bucks.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you look at like eBay sold items.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s probably close to what they’re, oh, look at this, yeah. Every single one I find is modified. So this picture I’m going to

⏹️ ▶️ John put in the chat room now, it’s close to mine. Mine does not have the bent back seat. My seat

⏹️ ▶️ John pole is straight. The stock seat poles were straight. And also those pedals are weird. But

⏹️ ▶️ John that is very, very close. And you can see the sticker I put the scratch in right in the little tube there. This is very close to

⏹️ ▶️ John it. It’s also probably in better condition than mine. But it’s very close to mine.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You should do a scratch technique with your

⏹️ ▶️ John jet black

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I always wonder what it looks like. Sometimes I forget I have a jet black phone because it’s in the case. And I think about what it might look like. The best thing

⏹️ ▶️ John about the 84 Californian is like Power Rangers. It came in colors, black, red,

⏹️ ▶️ John blue. What was the color? But anyway, it was, you know, you can see if you do a Google

⏹️ ▶️ John search for 1984 among those California, you can see the red and the blue ones and the black ones. I got the black one, obviously, because it’s the coolest.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey But

⏹️ ▶️ John but they were like the wheels on the red one or red, which was pretty cool. The wheels in the blue one or blue,

⏹️ ▶️ John total Power Rangers vibe and the colors looked awesome. They were they They were like the candy-colored IMAX before they were

⏹️ ▶️ John a thing. The point I would like to have, if I could get mint condition,

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m trying to think if there was a color other than red, blue, and black. But if I could get mint condition versions of all those with all the original

⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, like that would be. That would be right next to my LaFerrari and my Fantasy

⏹️ ▶️ John Unlimited Money Mansion.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, if you could get a mint condition what now? All three of these colors. Oh. Of these

⏹️ ▶️ John bikes.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco What is a two-speed kickback drivetrain? What is that? Is that the one when you pedal backwards to brake?

⏹️ ▶️ John I

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ John Never heard that term. It’s the newfangled technologies. When I was a kid, bikes

⏹️ ▶️ John were simpler. They didn’t have these weird… They had these things to make changing gears easier, like you

⏹️ ▶️ John just… Like making it binary, like, click this little wheel, and it clicks to the next number, you’ve changed gears. Whereas I come from the

⏹️ ▶️ John generation where you pull a lever that pulls a cord, and you have to pull it the right amount

⏹️ ▶️ John to get the thing onto the gear, right? So it was all, you know, completely analog adjustment of knowing just where

⏹️ ▶️ John to put it. Now they try to make it mechanical. All these things have some sort of ratcheting mechanism where it’s like, click, click, and it’s exactly

⏹️ ▶️ John on the gear, or it’s not. And there’s nothing you can do about it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the people in the chat are saying what this means is that you pedal backwards really hard

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to shift gears. That’s terrible. What? It’s a two-speed that you just like pedal backwards to shift between,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I guess it probably still has some kind of like, you know, handle brake. Here, I’ll place this link in the chat room. This bike, for some

⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason, has a built-in cup holder and bottle opener?

⏹️ ▶️ John Seems like a bad idea. That’s a high performance machine right there. You know it’s got

⏹️ ▶️ John a holder and bottle opener. Yeah, I guess maybe it’s a way to

⏹️ ▶️ John have gears on a bike that doesn’t have a derailleur. Like it’s, I’ve never heard of

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it probably just keeps the handlebar area simpler. Like you don’t have the big cables running up to do the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco gear shifting.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it also has some kind of suspension. That’s a popular thing now for old people’s delicate butts. Like lots

⏹️ ▶️ John of bikes have suspension.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, yeah, yeah, you’d expect that. I wouldn’t expect that. Well, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco expect that, excuse me. Expect a cushion for your bum. You say bum? You’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of those people?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No. You’re a bum person?

⏹️ ▶️ John No, it’s like you’re a poshest cushion, so you got to say bum.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, see, the cool one I’m looking at here, this big classic one, this one has a cruiser springer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fork. Does that mean it’s like a little spring suspension in there? What does that

⏹️ ▶️ John mean? Maybe. I mean, like I said, almost every bike for grownups has some form of suspension because grownups don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John like going over the pothole ridden infrastructure on our crumbling nation.

⏹️ ▶️ John And realizing those shocks transfer directly through to you, it’s unpleasant. Whereas as a kid, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John remember being bothered by this at all, but as an adult, as a much heavier, larger adult, I can tell you it is jarring to

⏹️ ▶️ John have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco those jolts come through. This one is totally awesome. If I can somehow try this in person somewhere and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it actually fits me, I would seriously consider this.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s pretty styling. The other one was much more kind of like black and ugly.

⏹️ ▶️ John This looks

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like it. This

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one looks awesome. This is like total 50’s throwback. It has a built in headlight and a horn.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John gotta

⏹️ ▶️ John get a place to put a basket so you can put groceries and stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco in. It has the big back rack thing. Can you just hang stuff

⏹️ ▶️ Marco off of that?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you can get panniers or something for the back on the sides of the wheels.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that what you call the little side

⏹️ ▶️ John things? Yeah, or you can just get a big, you should ask the Portland people. They’re all riding their bikes.

⏹️ ▶️ John They have these giant wheelbarrows that you put your kids in that you push in front of your bike. They’re doing everything on bikes

⏹️ ▶️ John over there, which I don’t understand, because it isn’t always raining there,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but. It is always raining here, or there. And also, so one of the reasons I don’t have a bike here at home

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is because I live in a very hilly town, and biking on hills sucks. But,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the beach, it’s totally flat. Like, there’s no hills, and because you’re riding on sidewalks

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are shared with people, you can’t go that fast anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ John You’re riding the bike on the side, I guess there is no streets, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, they’re like broadwalks. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re big, like. So like, alleys.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re yeah, well, they’re they’re they’re basically like double wide sidewalks. Those are the streets

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But there’s a lot of people around like during peak weekend and stuff So like you do have to be cautious of people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know as you’re walking you hear like the bike bells behind you ding-ding And you gotta like move over and yeah, so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s that kind of but like so I’m never going that fast I’m never going uphill That’s why I can get a ridiculous

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bike like a big cruise like this and it’s not really impractical at all With the exception of you know having to lock

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it up and not worry about getting

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John stolen

⏹️ ▶️ John The only thing I worry about with these bikes is because there are like 50 style bikes like the reason they don’t make bikes like this Anymore is they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John heavy like all that all that metal stuff for the guards to like oh So the rain doesn’t splash back up on you You’re not gonna

⏹️ ▶️ John be riding it in the rain like all that Everything about it that the metal cover for the chain and the big tube thing

⏹️ ▶️ John like this is a heavy bike and heavy bike equals Harder to pedal and you know like not good. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John well the bike you want the bike to be light

⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually So actually for my purposes here. I actually want

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Basically, I’ve been enjoying biking there for exercise and kind of sightseeing,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but exercise is one of the primary goals. Because I do a lot of dog walks, but my dog is fairly small,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and he can only take so much. So if I wanna keep going with the exercise for the day, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco gotta go out on a bike and get some more distance that way. But for my purposes, it’s actually better if the bike is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco less efficient.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the truth. You’re just saying that you didn’t wanna ride bikes where there were hills. You gotta make up your mind. Do you want exercise, or do you not want exercise?

⏹️ ▶️ John I want some

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco exercise.

⏹️ ▶️ John but not that much. Yeah, exactly. Anyway, I think in the grand scheme of things, you want a bike

⏹️ ▶️ John that is efficient, that doesn’t have a lot of friction losses, and that is not too heavy, because it is

⏹️ ▶️ John much more satisfying to ride an efficient bike for longer distances or faster

⏹️ ▶️ John than to ride a heavier bike for shorter distances. Like, it’s the same amount of exercise work, but it feels worse

⏹️ ▶️ John to do the heavy bike for shorter distances. That makes sense. So you want to feel like, because the whole point

⏹️ ▶️ John of the bike is mechanical management, like, look how fast I can go with just this much effort. If I put this much effort into walking, I’d

⏹️ ▶️ John be going slowly. Same amount of effort into a bike, and I’m flying, because going fast is fun, and wind on you, and it’s,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, making the sweat evaporate and cooling you off. You want the efficient bike. Fine.

⏹️ ▶️ John And Tiff has to periscope this. Give her her assignment.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, yes.

⏹️ ▶️ John Absolutely. Yeah. What I also want to periscope, though, when I see you renting the sand bike and trying

⏹️ ▶️ John to make, I’ve never tried one of those things either. Like, I see them riding on the street, you can hear them coming from a mile

⏹️ ▶️ John away like your M5, because the stupid tires, the giant knobby tires on the asphalt make this terrible droning noise.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yep. Right? I’ve never seen one riding on sand and I’ve never tried it, but it seems like it would be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco terrible. Yeah, that’s why, yeah, I’m not in a huge rush to do that because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I suspect, you’re right, I suspect it will be just awful. So that’s one of the reasons why like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been going there a lot this summer and I still haven’t done it. I keep putting this off. I still haven’t done it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So probably not going to, but.

⏹️ ▶️ John Casey, here’s what huffy meant in my time. Take a look at that. That’s hideous. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ John a hell of a thing, huh? 1970s huffy.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And

⏹️ ▶️ John that seat you see there? It’s not a banana seat because banana seats are for girls, or so we thought when we

⏹️ ▶️ John were stupid kids in the 70s. It’s like a manly banana seat. See how much thicker it is? It’s a

⏹️ ▶️ John bro-nana seat.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah. And I had, before my

⏹️ ▶️ John mongoose, I had basically an off-brand huffy. It’s like it wasn’t even good enough to be a huffy. It was like generic

⏹️ ▶️ John Terrible bicycle and had one of those seats on and I hated it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a question this bike I’m looking at this this big Schwinn 50s thing It doesn’t appear to have brakes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the in the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John list of brakes. Yeah, it says brakes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco coaster

⏹️ ▶️ John coaster brakes are terrible They’re stupid. They’re from the 50s, but that’s what you’re getting

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Is that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you pedal backwards in it stop?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yes.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yep You pedal backwards and it tries feebly to stop there’s a reason every real

⏹️ ▶️ John modern bike has handbrakes because coaster brakes suck but you’re not going to be going fast so you’ll probably

⏹️ ▶️ John be fine yeah i’m just looking just don’t just don’t get up to speed going down a big long hill and think you’re going to

⏹️ ▶️ John be able to jam on the brakes because you won’t because coaster brakes but there is there are no hills and they only break the back wheels

⏹️ ▶️ John so all it’s going to do if you did ever start going fast and you tried to stop all you do is if you were able

⏹️ ▶️ John to with the coaster brakes if you’re even able to is lock up the back wheel and then your bike would continue to slide

⏹️ ▶️ John and slide and yeah i just spin out at that point no you don’t spin out you continue to go the direction you were going you you just

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t stop. It’s like locking up. Imagine if you could just lock up the back wheels on a car. It would stop eventually,

⏹️ ▶️ John and you could still steer during that time, but you wouldn’t stop as fast. So with the bike, you want to have front and back brakes that

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re able to modulate so that you can stop faster. If you lock up both

⏹️ ▶️ John wheels, obviously, you get double the friction. You stop even faster. But usually, it doesn’t come to that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Have they not figured out analog brakes for bikes yet?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Those are

⏹️ ▶️ John analog, yeah. You’re pressing the levers. When I was out, I rode my bike. first time I’ve ridden my bike like amongst

⏹️ ▶️ John the cars in a long time because normally you’re riding it recreationally now is right to actually go somewhere uh

⏹️ ▶️ John and I don’t know if things have gotten worse since I was a kid but people in cars want to kill people

⏹️ ▶️ John on bicycles like I was using all of my defensive bicycle driving

⏹️ ▶️ John skills honed over many years of riding on like actual major highways before I had my license with my

⏹️ ▶️ John you know 10 speed bike and everything just to stay alive I I was shocked at exactly

⏹️ ▶️ John how aggressively people in cars wanted to kill bicycles.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I have zero temptation to ride a bike on roads.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, up here in the suburbs, it would probably be less horrible, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still don’t think it would be great. Because I feel like people, like drivers,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really hate bikers. I don’t know, like I’m a driver, I don’t care about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John bikers.

⏹️ ▶️ John Or they’re oblivious, even when there’s bike

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco lanes,

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t care they’re a bike, we have actual painted on the ground bike lanes with little pictures of bicycles and dedicated

⏹️ ▶️ John lanes and cars are like this is my lane bicycle go away I’m going to run you off the road with my

⏹️ ▶️ John giant Tesla Model X it’s like save me you know like it just it was

⏹️ ▶️ John scary.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So looking at the reviews of this bike it’s apparently 67 pounds that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John a pretty heavy bike. That seems like a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot.

⏹️ ▶️ John It is a lot it’s made out of 50s metal and they have metal places where you don’t need it why is there need to be a metal chain

⏹️ ▶️ John guard why does it need to be a chain guard or why cuz that’s what I did in the 50s cuz they were dumb and

⏹️ ▶️ John all they had was metal leftover from the war

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they can’t like for this price they can’t throw in like some aluminum maybe like

⏹️ ▶️ John there are lighter metals I think it is probably is aluminum there’s just so much of it I mean so that you

⏹️ ▶️ John need something structural like structural steel or like very strong aluminum for

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the frame but all the decoration pieces that can yeah

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that could be carbon fiber

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it’s not though I know metal and

⏹️ ▶️ John it adds up it maybe it’s the whole thing is steel that would explain 67 pounds but yeah yeah

⏹️ ▶️ John check out the weight for the Mongoose California it is probably lower

⏹️ ▶️ Marco well yeah because there’s not there’s like no bike there practically 25

⏹️ ▶️ John pounds for the Californian

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I can fit almost three of them in the weight of this bike apparently

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does have excellent reviews out there viewers all say basically what you’d expect is like This is an awesome bike.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s beautiful. It’s smooth. It looks awesome. It’s great. It’s fun to ride. However, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco heavy and the brake is not sufficient enough for its weight. Coaster

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John brakes.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everything you’d expect.

⏹️ ▶️ John Now I’m on eBay looking at these bikes. This is not good.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I told you. Yeah. It looks like they go in pretty reasonable quantity.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you look at sold items, there’s a good number of them there. They seem to be approximately $500

⏹️ ▶️ Marco range for non-original.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like they’re not even, I can look at them, I can say these are not original parts, all sorts of aftermarket stuff and still 500. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ John lots of people with fond memories of this bike, I think people my age, with money they want to spend.

⏹️ ▶️ John Crow Molly, that’s what the frame is made out of. What is Crow Molly? The world may never know.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’ve never even heard of that. That was, it’s a big selling point in the 80s, like blast processing.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Right, yeah, exactly.

⏹️ ▶️ John Discussed amongst the kids in like the lunchroom,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco chromoly

⏹️ ▶️ John was discussed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco does your bike have chromoly

⏹️ ▶️ John no it’s a chrome all it’s a chrome all a frame well the chrome part of what you can get because it’s shiny like

⏹️ ▶️ John the outside looks like it’s shiny and chrome what was it made about me I’m assuming it was some sort of aluminum thing or

⏹️ ▶️ John whatever but blast processing in Chrome Molly. That’s it.