236: Irresponsible Use of Infinite Terabytes
24 Aug 2017iTunes’ future, huge media collections and NAS backups, and Marco buys some more stuff.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show:
- Follow-Up:
- iTunes U → Apple Podcasts
- Marco's hindquarters
#askatp- OLED vs. LCD
- Mall of Marco
- Have we had RSI issues?
- Casey's Bad News
- CrashPlan sunsets consumer backups
- Ending theme by Jonathan Mann
- Post-show: Marco's security adventures
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- AfterShokz: Headphones powered by bone-conduction technology.
Chapters
- Accidental parenthood intro
- Casey’s announcement
- iTunes not long for this world?
- Can Apple still make great apps?
- Sponsor: Hover
- Follow-up™: Marco’s butt
- #askatp: OLED image quality
- #askatp: Selling used gear
- #askatp: Doctors for RSI
- Sponsor: AfterShokz
- CrashPlan and NASes
- Sponsor: Betterment
- Mac Mini instead of NAS
- Ending theme
- Post-show: Security cameras
Accidental parenthood intro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Live from Wednesday night, it’s a TV.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like if I had watched Saturday Night Live more frequently I would have riffed on that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whole announcer spiel.
⏹️ ▶️ John You would have realized how badly he mangled the The quote and reference live from
⏹️ ▶️ John Wednesday night from Wednesday night
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Live from New York.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re definitely not from Wednesday.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have some pre-show announcements gentlemen Okay. Um, first of all, for the next few minutes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am a single parent, so it is possible that I will need to depart if Declan wakes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up, as he has done recently, although usually at two or three in the morning, explaining
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me that he doesn’t want to be asleep and that he wants to be awake.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Hmm. Been there. So if,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so if I disappear momentarily, uh, that would be why. And before any parents in the, in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the room email me to say, oh, you need a sleep to wake alarm. one. We have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a nice little alarm clock that will turn green when it’s time for him to wake up. And even though
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think of him as a, well, I was going to say reasonably smart kid, but you can’t tell at almost three.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So as a not moronic kid, even with that said, he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seems to forget in the middle of the night that the green light is not yet on and that he needs to go the fuck to sleep,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which by the way, is a great bedtime story.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So we have that same alarm. I have two other parent friends who have that same alarm for their two different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco children. All of the children regard that alarm as simply one input
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey of many. It’s just an advice. Yeah, yeah. It’s advice. The advice that says, hey, it’s green, you might want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. But when it’s not green, it’s like, hey, well, I want to be up now and I want to go bother mom and dad. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, it’s like it is simply one input of many and they will choose to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it whenever they feel like it. It isn’t a matter of your kid being smart or not smart. Your kid is perfectly smart enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kid is as smart as all the other kids who’ve had these same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John alarms and have said, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not green, but I don’t care and it doesn’t really matter. So I’m going to go in there anyway. I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco think it worked
⏹️ ▶️ John on my son. We of course have the same thing, but we didn’t even try it on my daughter because just personality
⏹️ ▶️ John wise, it would be useless. In fact, we had to remove all clocks. We still no clocks in her room. We had to remove all clocks from
⏹️ ▶️ John her room because she would, she would stare at them and be like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, whatever her bedtime was and like five minutes after and I’m still awake. And then, so she’d be there there like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s it’s 134 and I’m still awake. It’s 247 and I’m still she would just stare at it and obsess about
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that she’s still awake. So we had to remove all clocks from her and we haven’t put them back yet. That was years ago. We haven’t put them
⏹️ ▶️ John back yet. Probably we could, but then again, maybe not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so he actually does do a pretty darn good job in the actual morning time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when we really don’t want him to like get fussy or anything like that. Before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s time for him to get up. But in the middle of the night, like Marco said, it seems to be but a recommendation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and nothing more. And so that’s been the festivities of late. But that’s actually not the big
⏹️ ▶️ Casey announcement. The big announcement is we have moved. And by we I mean just me and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean just the office from one room in the house to another. But…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Don’t talk about burying the lead.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sound like garbage, don’t blame Marco. Blame me. I’ve put up some sound deadening material
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the wall directly behind my 27-inch reflective glass, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I may need more. Oh my god, Casey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey god’s sake, get to the… Why did you move? Well, because we need
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a place for a baby.
Casey’s announcement
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yes! Okay! Congratulations!
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s about damn time! You said it on the show!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so guess what? Aaron’s pregnant, and that’s super exciting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco And based on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your recent car purchase, we can conclude she’s having sextuplets? Is that it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly. Exactly right. Now, there’s only one baby in there, as has been confirmed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey numerous times. But anyway, suffice to say I’ve relocated rooms. This room is bigger, potentially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more echoey, maybe less echoey, who knows. Marco maybe really Really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have some fun to do on this edit with what is the the tool chain that that has like the thing that that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey magically Erases John’s air conditioner.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Well, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a number of tools that can do that that I have used in the past Audacity has the most basic one for free.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s basically it’s like a noise profile remover So you like select some of the recording that’s just the noise you want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco remove Like when no one’s talking you just hear the background noise and then you say alright profile this and then you select a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whole recording and say remove that noise from this whole recording. So Audition does it, Audacity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does it. The one I’ve been using most recently is the iZotope RX.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey That’s it, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a number of other tools as well. And that thing is amazing. It is not cheap,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but if you process audio and need to remove annoying background noise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or echo or headphone bleed or hum or so many other things, I have not found
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything better than iZotope RX. It is really something else. Well, congratulations on the reason you moved,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and don’t worry about the audio. We’ll figure it out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so, yeah, thanks. I forgot that we had talked about this in the post-show. I think it was like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the post, post, post, post show last week, and it didn’t even cross my mind that that probably didn’t make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the released recording. So yeah, guess what? Aaron’s pregnant, and so far everything, everything and everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seems healthy, and we’re super excited about it, and we’ll put a link in the show notes with a little bit of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey background information about that, and an adorable picture of Aaron and Declan.
⏹️ ▶️ John And for the people who are just going to listen to the podcast, the gender is
⏹️ ▶️ John sealed in an envelope and Casey and Aaron don’t want to know. Well… Whether
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re going to… Did you open it already since last week?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, we haven’t opened it yet. So yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Did you like see a clue on a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sonogram or something?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well no, but when we were told to turn around so the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey technician can figure out what the gender was, that took suspiciously little time. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That indicates to me that it was a suspiciously short amount of time to prove a negative,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but you never know. So we’ll see what happens. My kind of farmer’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey almanac tale, or my experience, which is 150% anecdotal, and I recognize
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, is that if the woman tends to carry all of the baby in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tummy area and doesn’t seem to get any bigger anywhere else. That seems to generally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John amongst the friends of ours. This sounds not science- Oh, this is completely anti-scientific. No, no, no. Based in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in any way. No, no, no. There’s no science involved. This is all bull. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recognize this is bull.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I admit this is bull. It’s 100% bull. I totally agree. If it was like a full moon
⏹️ ▶️ John when the child was conceived,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey then it’s definitely a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what? That’s relate- no, not really.
⏹️ ▶️ John tell you Kate’s story. So we went in for one, I guess it
⏹️ ▶️ John was the first ultrasound where you can actually find out, and they said, do you want to know? And we said yes, and they said, it’s a girl. And we’re like, great,
⏹️ ▶️ John because we already have a boy. So now I want to each have a girl, okay. And
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco then- Was that how actually you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco okay, now we have one of each. All right,
⏹️ ▶️ John so, and then we were in for another ultrasound, I guess later in the pregnancy, whenever
⏹️ ▶️ John you do the routine second one, or I don’t know. But anyway, later, it was already, we’d like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, you know, picking out girls things and thinking of girls names and stuff like that. We go on for one later and they’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, it looks like it’s a boy. And like, wait,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey wait, wait, wait,
⏹️ ▶️ John wait. How can you say it looks like a boy? They told us it was a girl last time. Like, no, no, it looks like a boy. And then the person
⏹️ ▶️ John looks closer and like, Oh, maybe, yeah, maybe you’re right. Maybe that was just a thumb.
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re like, all right, anyway, everything’s fine. You’re doing like,
⏹️ ▶️ John and so that, you know, let me know that It’s not an exact science, first of all. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John she came out, she was totally a girl. It was fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Not just a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, there was no confusion. But there’s a lot of stuff. You’ve seen the ultrasounds.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a confusing picture. And
⏹️ ▶️ John takes some skill and experience as a technician to interpret that as anything. And a
⏹️ ▶️ John thumb or a toe ends up in the wrong position with the baby all twisted up, people can get confused. But
⏹️ ▶️ John both people on their initial proclamation sounded very, very sure. And the only reason the second
⏹️ ▶️ John person kind of hemmed and hawed after was because we said, wait a second, we’ve had like
⏹️ ▶️ John a month and a half of thinking this is going
⏹️ ▶️ John now you’re telling me boy. Yeah, so you’ll find out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or you’ll have in my situation, it’s like, well, sometimes the baby is resting in such a way in such a position,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you see something that makes it very, very clear. And it couldn’t really be anything else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco technician’s like, well, we’re not really supposed to tell you yet. But I’m like, but yeah, what’s that? And they’re like, well, you know. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So yeah, so we asked the technician, you know, to put it in an envelope, seal it. And we are not the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of people that want to do like a gender reveal party. I understand that’s very popular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and fun and whatever. But it’s not really for us. We just wanted to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be able to change our minds in the future, if we so desire. And so we have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a sealed envelope with the gender in it. And both of us are very, very type A, very anal retentive.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I would say if you wanted to make a bet that it’s likely that we will probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey end up opening it, I’m waiting for somebody to like start an ATP pool to see what day it is we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey open it. But sitting here now, the hope is we will hold out until the baby is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey born and we’ll see what happens. So I don’t know. In any case, so yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t mean to make that the entire pre-show, but yeah, that’s a thing. So. you
iTunes not long for this world?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s start with some follow-up and as it turns out the follow-up is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Marco show today.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John So one of yeah you know if you open the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah if you open the show in so as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco saying oh I should probably open the document by the magic of Google Docs I see a new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John open up the document
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and turns out it’s Marco Arment. So so yeah so it turns out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that iTunes U collections are moving to Apple podcasts and that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got you on I don’t want to call it a rant but kind of a because that implies negativity but kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a you went you got on your soapbox and talked about your thoughts for the future of iTunes so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can you kind of talk us through that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah basically there was this little news article last week that said that iTunes U which is like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of educational course collection things and iTunes that have been around for quite a long time do you remember
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when those launched it was it’s not Not recently, right? Yeah, I don’t think so. Yeah, so anyway, so iTunes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco U content, which is actually wonderful and quite extensive, that’s been announced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s moving into Apple Podcasts. So it will no longer be a separate section. It’s always been like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a section in iTunes, and now that is moving to Apple Podcasts. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I interpret this as, if it was just this by itself, well, that’s kind of a weird thing. But when you combine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it with things like the stopping selling all iPods that aren’t iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just some other little moves we’ve seen here and there, and just the timing in general.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this is just one of many signs that they are preparing for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco abandonment or total deletion of iTunes. Probably abandonment. It’s probably going to sit around forever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the utilities folder for the very few niche use cases that people need it for anymore,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I think iTunes is finally being relegated to the dustbin of history,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as it should have been a very long time ago, and they are, I bet,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the next version of Mac OS. Not the one that’s coming out in a month, but the one that’s coming out probably next year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I bet we’re gonna see finally a split up of iTunes into brand new apps called things like music,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco TV, podcasts, things like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you remember the screenshots for some, that dialog box that’s saying
⏹️ ▶️ John open document in movies or something like that? Do you remember that?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, this just went through not long ago, didn’t it?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, someone had found some dialogue in some version of Mac OS, some beta version
⏹️ ▶️ John of Mac OS that in response to trying to open a video instead of it opening in
⏹️ ▶️ John iTunes or QuickTime Player it said, do you want to open this in movies?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That’s right. Or
⏹️ ▶️ John something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it makes me think, if that’s real, that’s why I wish I could still find it but
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve lost track of it, is this a case where the replacements
⏹️ ▶️ John for iTunes were kind of almost ready but just didn’t quite make the cut? Or is this the case
⏹️ ▶️ John where they’re not going to be ready for a long time, but someone got ahead of the game
⏹️ ▶️ John and did the easy part, which is updating a dialog box or something like I’m always trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to gauge is how close are we to the death of iTunes. It’s one of those things that probably
⏹️ ▶️ John is not people don’t care enough about it for it to leak like iPhone parts. So we’ll probably just kind of find
⏹️ ▶️ John out either when they accidentally post a beta that they’re not supposed to,
⏹️ ▶️ John someone announces it on stage. I mean, at this point, I kind of wonder how
⏹️ ▶️ John many people will even care like based on how many people still use iTunes.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’ll probably be a big deal in the tech press just because tech press is full of old people who remember iTunes, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ John for everyone else, is it going to be a significant moment? And what I’m what I’m worried about is
⏹️ ▶️ John all the boringly named apps, music, what do you think there’s gonna be like music movies
⏹️ ▶️ John what else is gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco TV probably podcasts I would bet
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah maybe anyway if those apps have to travel the same road
⏹️ ▶️ John as the new photos app did I’ll be kind of sad because photos just started
⏹️ ▶️ John off very anemic and weird and janky and it’s a little bit better now
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s getting a little bit better still in High Sierra, but it
⏹️ ▶️ John was like a big regression for my thought in terms of functionality and just polish and everything like it was
⏹️ ▶️ John a super simplified it basically looked like a UI kit application that was somehow ported to the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything was all stripped down and removed and it wasn’t like tiny and
⏹️ ▶️ John quick and lightning fast with that stripping down it was like stripped down but also still sluggish and annoying and I don’t want that
⏹️ ▶️ John like iTunes, you know, we don’t love iTunes, but the functionality
⏹️ ▶️ John that it has for like finding a song and playing it more or less works. And I can just
⏹️ ▶️ John imagine that exact same function of typing in something in a search box and having a narrow list down and having me like
⏹️ ▶️ John double click on a thing to hear it. Adding the photos style lag to every one of
⏹️ ▶️ John those operations, just a few extra milliseconds to make you feel better and remove as many controls
⏹️ ▶️ John as possible. I kind of already removed a lot of controls, but remove all the controls that you’re used do so it’s just like a big empty
⏹️ ▶️ John blank window where everything is a little bit slower than you want it to be with less functionality than I had
⏹️ ▶️ John before I’m hoping that’s not the case I’m hoping these new slim down applications
⏹️ ▶️ John give us the benefits that we want from them being slimmed down not just the lack of confusion about like this is just an app for
⏹️ ▶️ John playing music and you don’t worry about anything else but that the apps themselves are nicer and not
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t just look like hey we took the music app from iOS and we put a Mac title bar on top of it,
⏹️ ▶️ John here you go, because that will make me sad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the reason I’m kind of looking forward to this happening, assuming that this is on the table, and I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it probably is, I mean, it does seem like this is the direction they’re moving. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the reasons why I’m interested in this is just on a basic level, I just appreciate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seeing significant effort into the Mac platform, you know, because it’s so it’s so easy to look at the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how Apple has operated over the last few years, and conclude that the Mac is really being neglected.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they’ve done a few things in the very recent past, like basically in the last year, they’ve done a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco few things that suggest that, no, the Mac isn’t being neglected, at least anymore. Maybe it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was for a little bit, but now it isn’t being neglected anymore, and here’s some good stuff that’s happening. So any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sign of significant investment into the Mac platform, which breaking up iTunes and rewriting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all these things as presumably new apps, that’s a big undertaking. You know, it’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a big undertaking at the low-level OS level, but it is a big undertaking for the applications
⏹️ ▶️ Marco teams and the people responsible for all these media apps and their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco backends and everything else. That’s a big undertaking. And so to take that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on when technically you didn’t have to, they could just keep iTunes going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even though it’s terrible, and they could just say, well, it’s not really worth ever fixing iTunes. And that would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be disappointing. That would show that they don’t really care about the Mac anymore. But the fact that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seem like they’re probably going in this direction if they do this, that’s a very good sign for the Mac platform in general.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then secondly, in regards to the actual apps, the answer will really be it depends. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of the roles of some of these apps like podcasts, there has never been a podcast app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Mac from Apple. You know, the iTunes can play podcasts, but that’s, you know, it’s pretty basic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s really not very well designed for it. Similarly, iTunes can also play movies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and TV shows. it pretty much sucks. Like I’ve done it, it’s not very pleasant to play these things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in iTunes. Again, it works, you can do it, but it’s not very good. And then the music
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of iTunes is this weird, whatever the multi-headed thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is at the Hydra? Okay, so it’s like this weird, thanks, reference check.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like this weird Hydra of like, you have like this entire local management thing, along
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with iTunes Match that matches your local music to the cloud and everything. And then you also have this Apple Music thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is really totally separate and works really separate, but tries to integrate into the same interface.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the combination of Apple Music into iTunes with your local music library and things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is a disaster in the UI. It’s so clunky and confusing and opens people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up to weird bugs and accidental data loss and things. It’s really not great at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all. So the idea of making a whole new music app,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, raises the significant question of whether it would be Apple Music only.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think I would prefer if it was. Because to me, if they could remove
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Music from iTunes and just let iTunes be the legacy app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that does your local music library and has nothing to do with Apple Music, then the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Music app could finally have its own coherent design that would be way less confusing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way more lightweight, would solve people’s issues with storage and cloud matching and everything by basically just not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco supporting any of that stuff. That would be so much better. So I hope that’s the direction they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going. I don’t know if it will be. I would give it maybe 50-50 odds if they do this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Are you saying that you wouldn’t be able to have a local music collection in the music app? Would iTunes stay around forever?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. There are lots of ancient Mac OS apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that do basically stay around forever. Many of them are buried in the utilities folder, but they’re all still there. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you wanted iTunes to be your local music player, fine. It can keep being your local music player. Also, it isn’t the only one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that exists in the world. There are other local music players for Mac OS, and if Apple went in this direction
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the official music app, and also iTunes basically died eventually over time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or immediately, then there would be an immediate large market for other people to make these apps. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t worry too much about that. Even though, like, I am a person who uses iTunes almost entirely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for local music, and that’s not going to change anytime soon. But I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recognize also that is like a dying breed. And if Apple Music is able to be its own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app, and basically kick it out of iTunes, that’s way better for both Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Music and local music libraries.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t like that idea. I want the, I think just an app just dedicated to music.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like the solution I think is not to say, oh, it’s confusing because you have iTunes match and local files plus cloud files and it’s all confusing in
⏹️ ▶️ John iTunes. The solution is not to not let people do local, it’s to make a dedicated music app
⏹️ ▶️ John that, makes it not confusing. So is is
⏹️ ▶️ John better about all the things that we can plan but I turns about about not respecting your files
⏹️ ▶️ John on disk about improperly matching them about not respecting your metadata like it has to has to
⏹️ ▶️ John serve the needs of the entire range of music you could have you could have music that you
⏹️ ▶️ John from your own CDs or illegally downloaded or whatever, that you’ve carefully
⏹️ ▶️ John tagged and organized over many, many years, you could have a subscription to Apple Music,
⏹️ ▶️ John these things that could be there and it has to it has to respect them and has to you know, it has to
⏹️ ▶️ John treat them not treat them cavalierly and do a good job backing things up
⏹️ ▶️ John and be reliable and all the things that you get a chance to do when you start from scratch with a new application rather than saying oh
⏹️ ▶️ John this is just going to be an Apple music streaming player and we’ll let you know a third party opportunity
⏹️ ▶️ John to do music because I don’t think there’s enough of a market for there to be
⏹️ ▶️ John you know because I just don’t think that many people have local music collections that they care that much about for there to be a robust
⏹️ ▶️ John third party music player, especially if that third party music player doesn’t support streaming services, who’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John to make that application and say, we’re just going to sell to the diminishing
⏹️ ▶️ John proportion of the user base who have local music that they care
⏹️ ▶️ John about. Like that’s not a winning even without iTunes in the picture at all. Like that’s not a winning formula.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I really hope they don’t do that. I hope they have a music app that does everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I think you underestimate how much both Marco and Stephen Hackett would pay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for this sort of manager standalone music app. But be that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as it may, it’s funny because I feel like my heart agrees with Marco and left
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I were calling the shots, I would want there to be two different apps like let
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iTunes stick around forever, but slim it down to be just managing your local music library and or iTunes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey match. And, and, you know, obviously there’s some nuances there, but let’s simple for the purposes of simplicity, let’s call
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it that. And then have, like Marco said, a brand new, uh, Apple music app, that’s just for Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey music. And, and I think I would like that a lot. And that’s part of the reason why I’ve stuck with Spotify,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even after Apple Apple music became a thing. Part of it was because I didn’t care for much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Apple music in general, but I also actually liked having that separation and continue to like having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that separation of the music that is legitimately mine and then the music that I’m just renting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically. And having Apple Music versus iTunes would satisfy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. But my brain, even though my heart agrees with Marco, my brain agrees with John, and I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the rightest answer to the solution is probably just making iTunes or whatever replaces
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, not crappy and have it more eloquently handle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey remote music versus local music, et cetera. And the other thing I’m really wary of is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even though I really would love to see iTunes either
⏹️ ▶️ Casey die or get revamped such that it’s not all things to all people.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really worry, and John, you were saying this earlier. I really worry that we’re in one of those photos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey scenarios when all of us was calling for, you know, oh, let’s replace photos, photos are so old, nobody’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey paying attention to it, let’s fix it. And then we got the fix and we were all like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is not what we wanted at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John all. Replace iPhotos, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sorry, yes, yes, yes, thank you, replace iPhoto. And obviously it’s gotten a lot better, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it still was not really what we wanted. And look at, what was it, Final Cut X? Is that right? Something like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I don’t really do any video stuff. Thank you, sorry. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I’m sorry everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ John Gray does that, doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey he? I can’t tell if he’s doing it on purpose. It has to be. No, that one,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I mean, I mean, I totally did that on purpose.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Totally did that on purpose.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And anyway, I’m so sorry to everyone. But the point is, when Final Cut Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got redone and everyone, you know, was really perturbed about the things that were dropped, I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saying unfairly, but was perturbed about the things that were dropped, the features that were dropped.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I fear that we’re in a similar situation with iTunes, and I don’t see any way how we couldn’t be, given
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that iTunes is all things to all people, and there’s so much code there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And wasn’t it Joel on software, Joel Spolsky, that wrote a really good post years and years and years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago about how you should never rewrite anything?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Because— Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John we discussed it on the show, and I said it wasn’t that good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like many things, that is a great rule. It’s a great input when you’re making a decision, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like all rules, you have to decide when you know how to break them or not. And if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you say, between this release of our product and next release of our product, we should rewrite the whole thing from scratch. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the product still needing to do the same things? What are you really getting out of that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whereas with this, it’s like this is, the needs of these products have changed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much over time that keeping them around is actually more of a liability a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of ways. And not only from the code, but even from the design of having this all be one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app, you’re not like we’re not suggesting that you rewrite iTunes from scratch. We’re suggesting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you break up this app into like five different other apps, each of which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can be way better at solving the problem that it’s meant to solve, then this one app that tries to solve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all five of these things badly.
⏹️ ▶️ John So here’s my medic concern about this whole thing. And this is always I was trying to think of this while you guys were
⏹️ ▶️ John talking and I can’t come up with something, maybe you can. My question is, does Apple still know how
⏹️ ▶️ John to make really great Mac apps? I’m trying to think of the last really great Mac app
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple made. Maybe, is it maybe Final Cut Pro 10
⏹️ ▶️ John and iMovie, like when they revamped those, because those are pretty good, right? But I’m not sure.
Can Apple still make great apps?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it used to be, you know, Apple makes the best Mac apps. And if you’re a third party developer, try
⏹️ ▶️ John to make your apps as good as them. And it’s slowly shifted to be like, if you want to see the exemplars of great Mac applications,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to look at third parties. Cause all the first party stuff is either not half butted in
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco’s parlance, but like it’s slight. Like for example, when they redid contacts
⏹️ ▶️ John and notes on the Mac, I mean, you know, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John all right. They’re not bad, but they’re pretty slight, right? No one would say this is a tour de force Mac application
⏹️ ▶️ John of the Mac version of notes. Like, it’s all right, you know, it’s there. And now
⏹️ ▶️ John all the great Mac apps, it’s like if you wanna see an amazing Mac application, like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John look at Panic’s, you know, Transmit, right? Or something from Omni, right? Where it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John a full featured, beautifully designed, well thought out, stable, reliable,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like all the things that you want from a great Mac application. The kind of applications, or BbEdit for that
⏹️ ▶️ John matter, of applications to make people love them and be dedicated to them. No one is no one is dedicated to the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac version of notes, right? I mean, the iOS version of notes is, you know, gotten way better. And
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re adding features left and right there. But I’m trying to think of what’s the last great man I suppose Safari Safari
⏹️ ▶️ John is pretty darn good, too. But that’s that’s all like the last great new Mac app Apple’s had
⏹️ ▶️ John in the past few years, it seems like every time they make a new Mac application. It’s all right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like I feel like photos is like the best example. Photos is is the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app that should have been a great demonstration of what the Mac can do. And it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hasn’t been at all. And I would even broaden your question of, can Apple still make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great Mac apps? I would remove the word Mac from that and say, can Apple still make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great apps? Apple is remarkably good these days at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being a platform company. Their OS is amazing, their APIs are amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adding new cool APIs like ARKit, just to add to their other massive pile of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco incredibly sophisticated APIs, Apple is really good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the platforms, the frameworks, the OS. But I really have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not gotten the sense from Apple that they really know how to make great apps anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And to their credit, they haven’t made very many new apps recently. Maybe they realize this too, or maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ve decided not to do that much anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’ve been making good apps I feel like, especially on iOS. I think they’re making good iOS apps. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I think a lot of the iOS ones are exemplars. You could say, hey, you want to make a good iOS app?
⏹️ ▶️ John Look at Apple’s applications and that’s kind of like the baseline. Try to match that. Right,
⏹️ ▶️ John but none of them, I mean, I don’t know on iOS, but on the Mac anyway, I don’t feel like any of them are great.
⏹️ ▶️ John And kind of in the way that iTunes was great in the beginning. Like when iTunes sort of got
⏹️ ▶️ John the ball rolling and it was like you could search for your music so quickly and the interface was so straightforward
⏹️ ▶️ John and intuitive that anyone could figure out how to do it with a three pane browser and, you know, and then integrating
⏹️ ▶️ John the store that all seemed to work like before iTunes became the jack of all trades. I think iTunes
⏹️ ▶️ John is a pretty great application to even though it was just sound jam or whatever reskin to begin with, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sure there is still the talent in the company to make great applications like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what we’re talking about, if they prioritize them, I think they just haven’t prioritized them Like they’ve been doing so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much else. They’ve been launching new platforms and making new services and making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the OSs better and everything. They’ve been doing so much else that it just seems like they don’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put a lot behind their first party apps anymore. And that shows in some big end of life
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like Aperture and also just the kind of languishing nature of a lot of their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other apps along with apps that are revamped into new versions that aren’t necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as good as the old ones like the Photos app, you know, when that replaced iPhoto aperture. I think it is very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clear, I would say, I don’t want to put this entirely on Johnny Ive, because I do that a lot,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but in the big shuffle up when Forrestal was out and Ives
⏹️ ▶️ Marco department became head of software design as well as hardware design, I would say since that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happened, Apple seemed to be in a period of flux with their application design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco skills that have not been good. And even going into iOS 11, we still don’t know what the new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone and this potential notch is going to look like. But if that notch, you know, if basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re looking at the iOS 11 design with these like giant title bars with the big white, you know, bold
⏹️ ▶️ Marco text titles and basically making everything look Apple music, which seems like a terrible idea because if you would have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said after last year, if you would have said after iOS 10, we’re going to make all the apps in the system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look like Apple music. People would have thought you were joking. But now, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now that’s the style, that might make sense in some big grand vision here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we haven’t yet to see the, you know, the final play of when the new phone comes out. It’s also possible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Apple’s just going through like this kind of like design puberty period where like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re in between, you know, two different eras or ages or they’re trying to find their footing or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the case may be. It seems like Apple has been all over the map with software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco design in the last few years and they have not yet found the right place to
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I feel like Final Cut Pro X and the new iMovie that was before it,
⏹️ ▶️ John those were actually I think the only Mac applications that
⏹️ ▶️ John could really be called great. They were after the skeuomorphic
⏹️ ▶️ John age, like GarageBand and stuff like that with the wood paneling. That was an iMovie and the original
⏹️ ▶️ John Digital Hub. There’s a lot of great applications there, but those were all definitely in the forestal
⏹️ ▶️ John skeuomorphic, whatever, even though, you know, whatever that that era, right? And then where we
⏹️ ▶️ John are now is the place where, you know, photos and the
⏹️ ▶️ John revised, you know, contacts and notes and even calendar and
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff on the Mac. They’re kind of, you know, they’re right. They’re very simple. They’re slightly more of the Johnny Ive thing. And I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John in between there was the iMovie design, which was not super skeuomorphic, but was
⏹️ ▶️ John also not like, oh, let’s remove every single control from the interface and make just giant expanses of white, white,
⏹️ ▶️ John or in this case, black. So I think maybe that is, and that’s the last
⏹️ ▶️ John time I can recall seeing one of those. Maybe there’s other applications that I don’t use. People keep bringing up like the iWork suite and everything, but
⏹️ ▶️ John those aren’t new applications. Like they’ve evolved, and I can say those had the same kind of problem
⏹️ ▶️ John with syncing up with the UI kit. and
⏹️ ▶️ John And those were controversial as well.
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Follow-up™: Marco’s butt
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have what is possibly my favorite line item that has ever appeared
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in follow-up ever. And I will read it verbatim for the listeners. The topic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we are apparently about to discuss
⏹️ ▶️ John not a topic, it’s a follow-up item.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Whatever. Good grief. The follow up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey item, copyright 2011, John C. Hughes said that we are about to discuss is as follows, quote, advice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Marcos sensitive Tushy, end quote. Would one of us,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m assuming John, like to tell us what his advice would be for Marcos sensitive
⏹️ ▶️ John Tushy? My advice, it’s listeners advice. Last week, we talked about
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Marcos sensitive Tushy and now his His bicycle seat hurt his
⏹️ ▶️ John bum. And people had advice for what he could do to make
⏹️ ▶️ John his bum feel better. One piece of advice was to buy shorts
⏹️ ▶️ John with a pad in the butt, especially made for people who ride bikes, made for mountain bikers.
⏹️ ▶️ John So apparently that’s a thing that you can get, and someone suggested that. But the other suggestion that I think that is
⏹️ ▶️ John even better is bicycle riders saying, don’t put all your weight on your butt when you’re riding your
⏹️ ▶️ John bike. put some of your weight on the pedals and some of your weight in the handlebars and some of the weight on your butt and then you won’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John your entire weight on the very hard seat and if you do that it will
⏹️ ▶️ John make any seat feel more comfortable for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would say the latter option of changing my biking technique to put less weight on my butt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is a good idea if I was a professional bike-ist but I’m not.
⏹️ ▶️ John to be a professional bike-ist in your words to do that you can you can you you can change the way you bike
⏹️ ▶️ John and not be paid to be a bicycle rider.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, that’s something I will slowly work towards, but that’s like, you know, a gradual technique thing. Also, like a lot of the writing I’m doing around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here is very slowly because I’m writing with my kid who is now very well riding a bike
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that took no time. Thank you, John. You were right. Um, and it’s awesome. So we’re running around, but it’s running on a very slowly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So like, it’s kind of hard to like hold yourself up all that time and you’re going like two miles an hour. Um, secondly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the bike shorts with built in butt padding, I don’t really see the point of that, honestly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Again, maybe this is something that professional bike guests have some good reason for, but if they’re saying the seat shouldn’t be padded,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your shorts should be padded.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well… I think they’re both padded, like you’re doubling up the padding. I
⏹️ ▶️ John Then you get to look like stupid, sexy Flanders.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I appreciate these two options written in by the professional bike guests. I am not going to take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either of them. Instead, I did what I said I was gonna do last week, and I just went on Amazon and spent $18
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a really soft, cushy seat. And that’s great. and it fixed it pretty much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as well as anything besides new tires could. So, done.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, Stupid Sexy Flanders was skiing, not biking. Wasn’t there a Simpsons episode where Flanders had bike shorts too? Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John bike shorts, you can kind of be an homage to Stupid Sexy Flanders.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is this the first time I’ve ever had a podcast topic about my butt? I think it might be. Not the last.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Probably not. And just to do a quick status
⏹️ ▶️ Casey check, how many bikes did you buy in the last week?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, how do I measure?
⏹️ ▶️ John how many bikes did you return? How many, what is the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey net bike flow? Oh my God. In the Farmer’s Household. Well, technically.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was asking to be funny, and now you’re giving me a legitimate friggin’ answer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Technically two,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but one was a replacement for a defect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. Oh my God. Yeah, the other one was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sand bike. It’s amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought you weren’t getting one. I thought you borrowed the neighbors, and you were like, oh, that’s saved me a lot of money. Now I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna buy the thing, because I know that it’s hard work. Yep, and then I bought it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a lot of fun. It’s a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey fun. How do we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do this, John? John, how do we do it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John You get a sand bike for Adam.
⏹️ ▶️ John He’s got unlimited energy. He could just be whirring away on those pedals forever. He’s riding
⏹️ ▶️ John nine miles a day. Just get him a sand bike. He’ll be down to like, you know, four and a half, the same amount of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco effort. It’s actually a lot easier to follow him in a sand bike because it’s like, you can go, first of all, you can go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slowly more easily because the tires are so big. It has five inch tires. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then the other thing is that when he, you know, as you’re going down, you know, some of the boring parts of the ride,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re on the sand bike, you can go in like the sand berm on the side of the sidewalk and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have more fun and jump over the various things there and, you know, it makes it a little more fun. The regular bike
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the firm ride is the way more practical one. That is the one I should have and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one I still ride a lot of the time. The sand bike is the fun one. That’s the one that makes me smile.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t believe you had a serious answer for that question. I should have known better. I
⏹️ ▶️ John should have known. Just wait until he starts using the sand bike in the snow. Bring it back home for the winter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually was thinking about trying that. Oh my God. Mm-hmm.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Oh my God. Well, I have it now. I might
⏹️ ▶️ John as well. You’re gonna attach jet engines to the side and put skis into the wheels?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I need a drink.
#askatp: OLED image quality
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, let’s just move on to Ask ATP. Robert Prejiz, I’m so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sorry, Robert, asks OLED or LCD for future iPhone? In my experience,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OLED is inferior, burns out. White is never white, but rather pinkish or greenish.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t have very many thoughts on this other than to say the only OLED screen that I’m aware
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of that I have is my Apple Watch, because that’s OLED, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t noticed any of these issues personally. That doesn’t mean he’s wrong by any means. I just,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it just means I haven’t noticed them.
⏹️ ▶️ John So Android’s been, a lot of Android’s always been OLED for a long time. And we were like, why, why does Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John still have LCD? The, one of the theories is that Apple’s standards
⏹️ ▶️ John for color reproduction and like just general
⏹️ ▶️ John image quality have not been able to be met by OLED screens. So we’re,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, practically speaking, like, if you, oh, that are LCD future for iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the new iPhones coming out are going to be OLED, certainly the pro one, maybe the other ones as well, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s that practical thing of like, hey, the next new iPhones, you’re going to get some OLEDs on. Long-term,
⏹️ ▶️ John does that mean like all phones are going to be OLED going forward? If Apple puts an
⏹️ ▶️ John OLED in their fancy new phone, it probably means they were able to get the quality
⏹️ ▶️ John up to their standard. So it’s as good as, and certainly better in black levels than the LCDs
⏹️ ▶️ John ones to replace them. So Apple has waited a long time to jump from LCD to OLED, but they’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ John it now, which probably means they’re gonna be good. And if they are good, the potential power saving
⏹️ ▶️ John advantages of them mean that there’s no reason for them to go back to LCD and the
⏹️ ▶️ John black level improvements on them. So I think that the future of the iPhone line
⏹️ ▶️ John is all OLED as soon as Apple can swing that in terms of cost. Maybe right now their fancy
⏹️ ▶️ John OLED screen and then the volumes they can get produced and mean that they’ll have to keep shipping LCD
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhones for a long time. And certainly the step-down models are all gonna be LCD for their lives until they get replaced by
⏹️ ▶️ John step-down OLED models. For burn-in, you know, image retention, whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John LCD still has that. OLED is supposedly worse. We’ll find out how much worse, but you know, we’ve seen
⏹️ ▶️ John LCDs with really bad image retention and LCDs with not so bad image retention, presumably the same
⏹️ ▶️ John is true, as we’ll find out. And white being never white or pinkish, that goes back to quality, like
⏹️ ▶️ John presumably the screens that Apple’s got don’t suffer from that problem. So short answer,
#askatp: Selling used gear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Josh Steger writes, what is Marco’s process for reselling his myriad of machines?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Would this work for someone without 100,000 Twitter followers?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So basically my process is when I want to sell something, whether it’s a laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something else, when I want to sell something that I think anybody on Twitter might want, it moves fast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The reason it moves fast, yes, part of it is that I have a lot of followers, so I kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of have an unfair advantage there. Part of it is that I know how much it costs me to sell something on eBay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you sell something on eBay, you’re going to lose roughly 15% in various fees
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything. So eBay is great if you search completed items and more specifically sold items.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s great to tell you kind of what something is worth. And I know that if I sell it on eBay, I’m only going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to net 15% or 20% under that price. So then I just post it on Twitter saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hey, I’ll sell this for 20% under eBay’s price whatever, and it moves fast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s both being shown to a lot of people and it’s also a really good deal. I value
⏹️ ▶️ Marco simplicity and speed of the deal over getting the absolute maximum price for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. So if you want to sell things, you have two tools at your disposal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can either go for a big audience or, if you don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of Twitter followers or followers elsewhere, eBay is your best chance there, or you can just sell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it for a very, very attractive price if you just want to move fast. I choose to do both of those things.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think it’s really the follower count that is as big a deal. I mean, certainly that helps, but obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John you need to be above some threshold to have any idea of selling. But the key factor for
⏹️ ▶️ John why once you get above a certain number of followers, why Marco in particular
⏹️ ▶️ John has success selling things in addition to the pricing that you just talked about is that lots of people
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like they know Marco from all the things that he does in public. And so there’s a certain level of trust
⏹️ ▶️ John that is implicit, trust that he’s not just some random scammer and not just trust like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John he seems nice on podcasts, so I think he’s a nice person. It’s sort of a mutually assured destruction thing. If you are a
⏹️ ▶️ John quote unquote public figure, right? If you have a public reputation and something to lose,
⏹️ ▶️ John chances are good that you’re not going to be like, you know, an internet famous nerd person with 100,000
⏹️ ▶️ John followers and then scam someone by taking their money and never shipping the machine to them, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ John you wouldn’t do that because that person’s gonna be like, hey, they’ll write a blog post that’ll be like, I tried
⏹️ ▶️ John to buy Marco Armin’s computer and he took my money and never sent me the computer. And that would get a bazillion
⏹️ ▶️ John hits and it would be all over the internet. Like, Marco has something to lose, his reputation. And people would
⏹️ ▶️ John care about that story. People would listen to that person’s story if it’s like, oh, famous person doesn’t mean thing. Whereas
⏹️ ▶️ John random scammer takes your money and doesn’t send you the thing on eBay and you write a blog post about it, no one’s going to post
⏹️ ▶️ John that on Hacker News. No one’s going to, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John not going to be on TechCrunch front page. It’s not going to be in TechMeme. No one cares. It’d be like, oh, so you got scammed by someone on the Internet.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s great, right? So I think the combination of people understanding that Marco has something to lose
⏹️ ▶️ John and people generally think feeling like they know him from all of his podcasts and his work say that he’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ John really got this computer. He’s not lying about it. He’s going to ship it to me like he says he’s going to. And that
⏹️ ▶️ John peace of mind does not exist on eBay, whether buying or selling or Craigslist or anything like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, I don’t know these people. This could not be a person at all. This could be a bot somewhere,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, in Lithuania, I have no idea about any of this. Whereas it’s kind of like it’s not like buying it
⏹️ ▶️ John from a friend because they don’t know Marco know him. But the combination of mutually assured destruction,
⏹️ ▶️ John public figure thing, and the general nice feelings people have for people that they read their blog
⏹️ ▶️ John posts and listen to their podcasts. That is super important on top of the the large number of followers.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, does that mean all this advice is completely useless for everybody? I think Marco’s advice is the most useful, like price it to
⏹️ ▶️ John move and it’ll move, but you still have to find some venue for putting your offer in front of people.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then you have to, Marco’s got this on his side, you have to deal with the person who makes the offer,
⏹️ ▶️ John you write the thing on Twitter, hopefully, you’re narrowing down to people who follow you on Twitter and know to find your stuff there
⏹️ ▶️ John as it’s not just a bunch of random individuals. But you still have to deal with that person
⏹️ ▶️ John and hope that they you know, you get the money from them, you’re going to send them a thing and all that stuff like that. So I don’t think there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John any easy answers here. Uh, but if you can, if you can at all,
⏹️ ▶️ John get yourself a hundred thousand Twitter followers and have a public reputation on the internet for
⏹️ ▶️ John a decade or two, that really helps with selling stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’d also like to add that, uh, if, if you’re willing to trade a little bit of,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of lost money, so to speak for convenience, um, gazelle, who I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey honestly don’t remember if they were a past sponsor of the show. They probably were, but I’ve used them by choice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And there are other equivalent people as well, but Gazelle is super nice for technology related
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things. So like old computers, old phones, et cetera. And basically you just tell them, Hey, I’ve got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey such and such device. It’s of approximately this quantity, a quality, uh, and they mail you a box.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You put your device in the box, you mail it to them and they will give you, I think it used to be, I don’t know if it’s still true,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, like an Amazon gift card or a, I think like a check or something like that, uh, in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey typically these These prices are not as good as they would be if you did an eBay or something like that, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re not terrible. If you’re willing to trade a little bit of money for supreme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey convenience, and you don’t have 100,000 Twitter followers, I definitely recommend
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looking into one of these places like Gazelle. I’ve heard very good things about some sort of quasi-equivalent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing, or maybe it’s more like eBay than Amazon does. I don’t know anything about it really, but I’ve heard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good things. But there are ways you can do this, is what I’m driving at. There are ways you can do this without having 100,000
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Twitter followers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would also say, if what you are selling is an Apple product, if you’re going to go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that route, check out Mac Me an Offer. This is something I learned from Paul Haddad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of TweetBot. I got a great deal on one of my MacBook Pros that I sold last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year by just selling it to them instead. There’s a bunch of these sites that buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this stuff. Most of the time the deals that you get are awful. A big site like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Gazelle, the prices you get are hideously bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You only sell to them if you really, really don’t want to go to eBay or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sometimes it doesn’t work out. Sometimes one of the things I’ve found is when you’re selling something that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not that old but not that popular or not selling very well. For instance, when I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sold my 15-inch Touch Bar last year, or when I sold the 12.9-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad Pro, those were things that, because I guess they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weren’t selling that well, Apple was discounting them pretty deeply in both their refurb store and through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco partners like Best Buy and Target that are like Apple’s official retailers, but that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things go on sale there mysteriously when Apple needs to move more of them, even when Apple themselves never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco puts anything on sale. So if the thing you’re selling is one of those things, you might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be stuck with something that’s not worth nearly what you paid for it or what you think it should be worth. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you go to one of these sites, you can usually get a bunch of offers and pick whatever one is easiest
#askatp: Doctors for RSI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, the final Ask ATP for this week. T.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Delm writes, have any of you ever seen a doctor or physical therapist because of RSI? I will start
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I have a boring answer, which is no, I haven’t. Every great once in a while, one of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my wrists will hurt ever so slightly and I’ll adjust my positioning or whatever the case may be, and I’ve been lucky enough that it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tends to go away very quickly. This is where the entire internet writes in to say, oh, you’ve already got it, it’s too late.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s probably true and that’s okay. I will try to do this in order of severity of RSI problems,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I will move on now to Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think I’ve ever seen a doctor for RSI. I did have a major back issue that put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me into physical therapy for a little while, about ten years ago. But that was, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I asked a few RSI-related questions during that whole process, but I made a few changes that happened to be similar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it was about like sitting too much and stuff. But otherwise, the answer is generally no.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve only had very minor RSI problems and I have solved them mostly by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reading a few books and articles and making changes to like, you know, make sure my desk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the right height, make sure I have an appropriate chair, and I switched to a natural keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the split layout. And those things were basically enough for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me to solve my minor issues so far.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, I’m buckled in. Let’s hear the story.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I have gone to a doctor. My first really bad flare up was back when I lived in Georgia shortly after graduating
⏹️ ▶️ John college. And I went to a general practitioner
⏹️ ▶️ John and got referred and nothing really came of that. And then, you know, it didn’t, everything
⏹️ ▶️ John they recommended was not useful. I eventually came up to move back up to Massachusetts
⏹️ ▶️ John and same deal. Went to a general practitioner, got referred, eventually found a physical
⏹️ ▶️ John therapist who actually helped me and kept going to see that person
⏹️ ▶️ John for a while and did a bunch of adjustments and life changes and stuff like that. And now I’m basically
⏹️ ▶️ John managing it. The difficulty with this is it’s basically it’s hard to find
⏹️ ▶️ John doctors or specialists or GPs who understand
⏹️ ▶️ John RSI like at all. Right. A lot of doctors have a vague
⏹️ ▶️ John surface level understanding. It’s basically at the same level of the average person where I think RSI
⏹️ ▶️ John is synonymous with carpal tunnel and don’t really know about any of the details and give you dumb advice or
⏹️ ▶️ John tell you to take Advil, all which is useless. If you do
⏹️ ▶️ John find someone who actually understands RSI and treats RSI and
⏹️ ▶️ John takes it seriously and actually knows what will help people
⏹️ ▶️ John because they have lots of patients that do this, that’s That’s great, but it takes a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John tries to get there. I don’t think anyone ever needs their
⏹️ ▶️ John general practitioner to do anything for them. Mostly you need to find some kind of specialist, whether it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a specialist doctor or occupational therapist or physical therapist or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever it may be. I always tell people
⏹️ ▶️ John that they, I would tell Casey, see a doctor, but it’s good
⏹️ ▶️ John advice This is something they should do but it’s bad advice because I know if I tell them that and they go see their doctor Their doctor is almost certainly
⏹️ ▶️ John not gonna help them at all But you have to keep going and like finding you have to like, you know Use
⏹️ ▶️ John the internet find other people in your area who have RSI and as I think everyone has learned now in this age
⏹️ ▶️ John where everybody Sits in front of something and types for long periods of time That you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John if if you’re certainly in our tech nerd program recircles, right, but I think just in general So
⏹️ ▶️ John the number of people that we all know that have RSI is way bigger than people think. Some people just don’t talk
⏹️ ▶️ John about it, but just think about it. Who do we know that has had RSI? You both know me. Marco’s had it a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ John We know Mike Hurley. We just go through all the relay family. Gray has RSI problems. A
⏹️ ▶️ John lot of people have it. And so there is a market for helping these people. So
⏹️ ▶️ John you should be able to find. It’ll be difficult. I admit it will be difficult. It will not be easy. to find
⏹️ ▶️ John someone who can help you in your area. And what will help you,
⏹️ ▶️ John what kind of doctor will help you, what kind of treatment will help you, I don’t know. But you should,
⏹️ ▶️ John the worst thing you can do is ignore it. So you have to go through that annoying, terrible US healthcare system
⏹️ ▶️ John rigamarole of doing whatever you have to do to get whatever referrals you
⏹️ ▶️ John need to have. And if a referral’s crappy, go back to your GP if you still need a referral and say, I would like you to refer
⏹️ ▶️ John me to this person. Or sometimes you just can’t, you know, this person is out of network and you have to pay out of pocket.
⏹️ ▶️ John You have to do what you have to do, but ignoring is the worst thing you do. So short answer to that question. Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John some of us have seen a doctor such physical therapist. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John We should answer this. The next yes or no question we get, we should just ask her, you know, each of us give a yes or no answer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Okay. I’m not sure I’m capable of that. And with respect, I am positive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you two are not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do it. No, you’re wrong sir.
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CrashPlan and NASes
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey I got two pieces of bad news this week. I’m going to start with the easy one because that’s not a topic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s just sad and if people have workarounds I want to hear it. Apparently there’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new version of the Google Photos uploader and in that new version
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m being told by a friend of mine it does not recognize network,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or perhaps there’s just no place to add a network share. I have not yet updated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and now I fear it, but there will probably come a time that I will need to update, and I don’t know what I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to do because I currently have it pointed at a folder on my Synology that has all of our pictures
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because now that we have a child, there is an insurmountable, just indescribable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey amount of photos, and I need the disk space on the Synology to hold them. That was bad news number
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one. Bad news number two.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The M5 only comes in automatic now.
⏹️ ▶️ John tell both of you this like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco four weeks ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t want to believe you. I didn’t either.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was not a rumor. It was like, it’s the real news. Anyway, go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ahead. Well, so that was bad news number two. And not only that, but I would like to publicly concede to Marco that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe you and I had an argument. I don’t remember if it was public or not. I don’t remember if this was neutral time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or not, but you were adamant that the next M5 would have all wheel drive.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t think I was adamantly opposed, but I was definitely very opposed. And you were correct, sir,
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t believe you’re conceding this now, because I also believe on this very show, like a year ago, I said, hey, guess what? Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John was right. It’s coming in all-wheel drive. Like, and again, I wasn’t relaying to you a rumor. I was telling you a fact,
⏹️ ▶️ John but apparently only
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey is announced to the public, you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, wow, it’s real.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was holding out hope.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John No, like when I told you it
⏹️ ▶️ John was like, this was a done deal. Done. You
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey guys don’t listen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. Well why would we? What do you know about anything? Anyway, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actual piece of bad news that I’m meandering toward that I really wanted to talk about now is that my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey backup provider, I don’t know if I would even say of choice, I feel like this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was kind of a, I have no other options that I cared for so this was the only option
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had, which was CrashPlan, has decided to sunset their consumer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey business. So the reason I chose CrashPlan is because you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have it back up a network drive and it’s considered to be part of your computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And thus, I honestly don’t remember what I was paying CrashPlan a year, but it was something somewhere between five and ten bucks a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey month. And you could have it back up for, in my case,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for example, the Synology, and it is just part of my ten bucks a month or whatever the number may have been.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And perhaps in part because of people like me, they’ve decided, okay, we’re not going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do the consumer side anymore. We’re only going to do small business and enterprise.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s not going away for, I think, over a year. And so I have plenty of time to figure out the answer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I’ve already been wanting to move away from CrashPlan because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they have the world’s worst native app, which isn’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that terribly native. a god awful Java app. Is Java god awful and Java redundant?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it is. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John thought they had a real native app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now. I believe they promised native apps, basically, every three months for the last two years,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and never actually delivered them.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I think they have one, but it might only be for the business customers and not for the consumer ones.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s exactly it. So that the thing of being told, I’ve been told, and again, I don’t know if this is true or not, is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it is only for the business side. So one of the options that I have as a CrashPlan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey user is I could change to a business plan. And I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think I wanted to do that on account of the fact that I didn’t want their god-awful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Java-based client app. But as we just established, perhaps the business
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app or the business side wouldn’t be so bad. But I haven’t had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an overwhelmingly positive experience with CrashPlan. It just hasn’t been negative enough for me to do anything about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So at this point I’m starting to explore, okay, what are my other options? And not only because they’ve sponsored the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show and so they’ve given us some money in the past and I’m kind of endeared to them for that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but because everyone I know genuinely has said that Backblaze
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is phenomenal, I’ve been looking at Backblaze. But the problem with Backblaze is you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do a network share and have that as part of a regular home Backblaze
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plan, which is, if I’m not mistaken, why Marco is running iSchool. Scuzzy or was at the very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey least running iScuzzy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Synology, there you go, because then it’s treated as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sort of kind of a local drive as far as back ways is concerned and so you can upload your Synology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and still have a regular consumer plan. So I could go iScuzzy, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve heard Marco say in the past a lot of terrible things about it and justifiably, like given what you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey told me about your experience, I am fearful of going down that road. Yeah, nobody should do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So there you go. So I’ve heard some stories about well, and somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saying in the chat right now, well, you can mount it as an yo via NFS and yo do some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Unix II things. And maybe that would work. Okay, maybe. I’ve had a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recommend using backblaze be to hold on john. I’m almost done. I promise.
⏹️ ▶️ John People saying maybe that will work. It does work. People do do this. It is the thing you have to to fuss about it, but it absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ John is a thing that works with backblaze. You can trick backblaze into backing up your network share either by using iSCSI like Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ John which no one should do, or by using the various means to mount your thing through
⏹️ ▶️ John NFS or office or whatever. And that will work as well, but that’s also annoying.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. And that’s the thing is I want something that’s not fiddly because for all the bad things I have to say about crash plan, it was not fiddly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is good. So what was my final option? Oh, a backblaze B2.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s what it was. One of the things that Backblaze is offering is instead of doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the traditional Backblaze home offering You can do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Backblaze B2 and I’m not entirely clear on the delineation between the two But for the purposes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the conversation so far Anyway, it’s basically a different kind of storage plan a different kind of setup where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s half a cent a gigabyte per month In order to back up to there and if you were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to download more than just a pittance then there’s a charge for that. But that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would hypothetically work for the Synology. And in fact, they either they have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey software or I think it’s actually the Synology itself has a front end that can upload directly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to B2, such that it would be very not fiddly. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have personally between four and five terabytes of stuff on the Synology that I think is worth backing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up. Now, Now a lot of that is, say, ripped copies of Blu-rays that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still own, before anyone starts calling the RIAA. And, uh… MPAA? That
⏹️ ▶️ Casey too, thank you. My bad. Wrong
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyway, yeah, I realized that after you said it. But the point being, like, you know, I’m not even talking about things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that have fallen off of trucks. A lot of this stuff is stuff that I have in Plex for convenience, if nothing else. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I recognize that I could rebuild it, and I could perhaps exclude that from the backup. But here
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, my preference is I am willing to throw some modicum of money at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this problem in order to make my life easier. This probably sounds familiar given our conversation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about Marco selling things. So if I wanted to go to B2, which is my current theory,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it equates to roughly $20 a month, which is a far cry
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from I think the $60-ish a year that I was giving to crash plans. So I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the two most appealing options for me, and then I’m going to stop talking, is go to the crash plan small business
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plan, which is probably approximately the same money I was paying, and it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey should in theory capture the Synology like it used to. And there’s a lot of me that’s thinking that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey may be the right answer. Or finally use this as the excuse to divorce from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey crash plan and just use a combination of B2 for the Synology and regular Backblaze
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for my iMac and just do it that way. So that is a lot of—I know that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was not a very brief summary, but there’s a lot here. So let me, I guess, start by saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, what are your thoughts on iSCSI? And then John, I think you’re in a similar scenario to me, so I’d
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like to hear your thoughts on a more general level after Marco’s.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, first, let me step back a little bit. Let me say my opening statement, because I know John’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to give his, so I have my chance. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do think it’s worth considering how much giant storage you actually need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to keep and back up and everything. We as nerds and as computer power users
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have, for years, many of us have kept these giant media libraries, giant media
⏹️ ▶️ Marco collections. And for some people, if you actually go and watch those things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a regular basis, maybe it’s worth keeping those things. But a lot of us, I think, rip them from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this artificial scarcity, like when we were growing up and bandwidth wasn’t a thing really,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and computer media was hard and rare. You know, it’s like Depression era
⏹️ ▶️ Marco grandparents. Like, you know, you grew up like hoarding this stuff. So now we have these giant hard drives,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco giant bandwidth, you know, media that’s easy to rip off these giant disks. Like, now we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to hoard it all, right? But the fact is, like, if you actually want to like, finally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go back and rewatch something that you’ve been saving all this time, Like, is it really worth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having paid all the money in the meantime on discs, on backups
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of those discs, on electricity to power these things in your house that are on all the time? Suppose you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanna watch like one movie a month from your collection. You can just pay like five or 10 bucks to buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it or whatever each time you watch it. You know, the very few times
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you actually wanna watch something out of that giant library and you might very well come out ahead.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you also gotta think like in that scenario where suppose you don’t store all these files and you occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to rebuy something to watch it again. Might you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even not even have to buy it? Will it probably be available from Netflix or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Amazon Video or HBO or some other service that you might already be paying for?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Many of the things that I’ve ripped, I’ve ended up never watching because, oh, I can just get them on Netflix.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, then you have to deal with, suppose you have this library of ripped movies.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, suppose you rip them as DVDs, then HD comes out, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Blu-rays come out, then 4K comes out, then 4K HDR comes out. Like, by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the time you actually wanna go back and watch the thing, is your version of it even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still the best quality? Or can you go on like Netflix, the Netflix
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app on your TV that comes with your TV for free and watch like the same thing in 4K
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now? You know, so like, I highly suggest that anybody who’s dealing with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this problem of, how do I back up a massive collection of media, really do some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco introspection here, as like, do I really need to be storing all this stuff? And if I am storing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all this stuff, do I really need to be backing it up as much as I’m backing up like, my family
⏹️ ▶️ Marco photos? Or, is this a lot less important? And can I either delete it and stop worrying about all this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or not be backing it up in so many different places? So, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being said, if you are going to back up stuff like this, you know, we have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these network attack storage devices from Synology that they sent us a long time ago. It was very nice of them. Network
⏹️ ▶️ Marco attack storage devices are very complicated. They’re a huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solution to what might be a small problem. If your problem is I need more disk space,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a NAS is massive overkill for that problem because they are big, they’re expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They are entire other computers that you need to manage, you need to run separate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software updates because they have their own software, usually they’re Linux based or something, and because they’re kind of their own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computers, their own kind of servers, but they don’t quite run Mac OS or Windows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or anything that you’re used to using on a regular computer, they have their own special applications,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they can’t run the applications that you might want, the processors they run are usually very low end, so certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like Plex transcoding are very limited or you need certain models with certain accelerators or whatever else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Running a NAS, they’re very powerful because they are their little app platforms, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if your main problem is I want more disk space for apps that run on a Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would say a NAS is really quite overkill. In the years since we’ve all gotten
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these network tech storage NAS things, is it okay to say NAS? I never quite know. Is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey saying NAS or is it Like, is it actually acceptable?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s acceptable, unlike nitrous socks. No, not, whatever the nitrous is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco that Porsche uses. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is why our car show was never good. Anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so also in the time since we’ve gotten these NAS devices, hard drives have gotten way bigger.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, we got these when the biggest disk you could buy at the time was four terabytes. Now you can get 10 terabyte
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drives. And while the 10 terabyte ones are kind of expensive, they’re like about $500, 8
⏹️ ▶️ Marco terabyte ones, which are barely smaller, are like 300 bucks now. Like these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are really, like hard drives are massive. They’re way bigger than they were, even just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few years ago. And they cost very little per terabyte. The amount of stuff that we need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to store, it seems like if you’re able to use full-size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three and a half inch hard drives, the hard drive capacity has dramatically outpaced our needs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for, you know, most of the things we’re storing. Like you’re storing, you said about five terabytes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on my Synology, which I have something like 16 terabytes of usable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco space with the way I’ve arranged all the drives with RAID and everything. I’ve used, out of the 16 terabytes, I’ve used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about 10 or eight, but I’ve used it very irresponsibly. Just like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I knew I had like infinite space. So I’m just like throwing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all over it. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tons of duplication, movies that I will probably never watch, stuff like that. Like I just use it incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco irresponsibly. But now, if I wanted to store my incredibly irresponsible roughly 10 terabytes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of stuff, I could get two 10 terabyte hard drives and put them in RAID 1 and be done. So a NAS,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first of all, I don’t think the complexity of a NAS makes sense if you’re going to have fewer than about 5 or even 8 disks. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re going to have it, you know, it’s this massive thing. So like, if you’re going to have a NAS at all, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think you need to have a really good reason for why specifically that’s the right approach for you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as opposed to any other option that’s simpler, that’s maybe more local to a computer?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I understand and mostly agree with everything you’ve said. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I would be remiss to not mention that there are a lot of things that MySynology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does that I am glad I have the Synology to do it. So as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an example, I really like that I can have MySynology act as a VPN
⏹️ ▶️ Casey endpoint. I really like that I can have my Synology act as a downloader
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for, you know, torrents such as Linux distros and other legal things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or you know, if I wanted to download some sort of binary from a news group, again, nothing but legal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things, then I can do that sort of thing. Now, to be fair, all of those can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be done on my iMac. That is also usually on 24-7. But I do like that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there is something off to the side that handles these sorts of things. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I agree with you that if all you’re looking for is a big hard drive, there are better ways to solve this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey problem. But in a lot of cases, you may want just an absurdly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey large hard drive, which this functions as, and that allows you to treat it as infinite storage, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve done the exact same thing you’ve done. Or maybe you want to actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey leverage some of the features of this computer that’s always on on your network.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So there’s something to be said for that, too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, absolutely. And there are other options for that too. So like, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so before I forget to cover the iSCSI topic, because I want to then move on to just attaching
⏹️ ▶️ Marco disks to a Mac, but before I forget to cover iSCSI. So for those unfamiliar,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way iSCSI works in a NAS situation like this is basically the NAS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco treats a disk partition. Usually, you know, you say like, all right, these four disks, whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make these into like a RAID 5 or RAID 10 set. this is now an iSCSI volume. And then you need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get iSCSI software called an iSCSI Initiator for some reason. Not a driver, not software,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not an app, it’s called an Initiator, don’t know why, don’t care. Please don’t email me about that. So you get the iSCSI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Initiator, which is $200 or so on the Mac because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not built into Mac OS. And that allows the Mac to mount that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco giant block of storage on the NAS as a local disk. And it treats
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it like a local disk. The applications of the Mac all see it as a local disk, including
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Backblaze, which is why this works. And the Mac, you actually format this virtual drive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the Mac’s file system. Like you format it as HFS+, or I hope eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco APFS. And then as far as Mac is concerned, that’s a hard drive put into it, except
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it happens to be over your network and being hosted physically by the NAS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This has a number of advantages. it does allow things like Backblaze to work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It also lets the Mac think the drive is native. So like, if you’re only using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco network share drives in the regular NAS way, where the NAS just opens up shares
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over NFS or SMB or whatever, you know, whatever protocols it’s using. Certain things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Mac don’t work very well, like because it’s a network share, so it doesn’t auto-mount for one, usually. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like Spotlight don’t work very well, like searching a network share doesn’t work very well. certain applications don’t like running
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on network shares or operating on files on network shares, stuff like that. An iSCSI volume, because it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just like dumb block storage over the network, there is no sharing of it. Like only one thing can be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco connected to it at a time. Like that is its disk. Whatever computer is running the initiator, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s the one that’s using it. There’s no sharing. You can share it from that computer as like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac share, which I actually do on mine. But then all the NASA’s built-in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco applications, If there’s like a media server application or a Plex on the NAS or whatever else, all those applications
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t see this data anymore. Because as far as the NAS is concerned, this is just a big block of bits.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It cannot see the file system that’s running on it, it is not interacting with it at all. So it’s really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a pretty big waste of a NAS’s capabilities to use iSCSI.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also iSCSI is fragile. You know, because you’re treating the network like a local disk, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco must be on a wiry connection. If that connection drops for a second, it unmounts and that could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be damaging your data or whatever else if it comes at the wrong time or whatever else happens. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s certainly inconvenient if it unmounts. And in general, I don’t recommend iSCSI to anybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because you are wasting the NASA’s abilities as an application platform.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You are needing to have another computer be an always-on computer on the network. You know, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my case, it’s a Mac Mini. And this Mac Mini does a few different things for me and it hosts this giant iSCSI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco volume off the Synology. So you’re already using a computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s on all the time anyway, but using a NAS as basically a giant hard drive enclosure. Which is fine if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you already have one, but I would never in a million years recommend that anybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who’s starting fresh and doesn’t already own a NAS do this. It is a terrible idea and nobody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever should do this. All
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, John, you’ve been very patient. I appreciate it. Tell us your thoughts.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I was gonna talk about alternatives to crash plan, but now apparently I have to defend
⏹️ ▶️ John the concept of a NAS. And also the idea of keeping movies
⏹️ ▶️ John on them. So, the one area that I think didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John get mentioned by Marco and one of the main reasons that I use a NAS, aside from the things Casey was talking about, like having a little computer
⏹️ ▶️ John and all the applications, which I do use and enjoy, is that, you know, so the hard drives, these hard drives
⏹️ ▶️ John are big and cheap, eight terabyte hard drives, 10 terabyte hard drives, whatever. That whole discussion
⏹️ ▶️ John was about spinning disks. These are all spinning disks. They’re, you know, eight terabyte SSDs are not cheap.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, right? You can buy them, not cheap, right? So these are all spinning disks. Spinning disks
⏹️ ▶️ John are big, noisy, and hot. I like big, cheap storage, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John for stuff like movies where it’s just sequential reads and stuff like that. I do not like spinning disks
⏹️ ▶️ John anywhere near me. So I like the idea of bunch of big, cheap,
⏹️ ▶️ John hot, noisy, expensive disks far, far away from me Far, far away
⏹️ ▶️ John means network, means network attached storage. So even if I just wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John the cheapest bucket of drives to throw crap into, and even if a NAS had
⏹️ ▶️ John no applications, I would still want a NAS just to get those disks far away from me. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I would only be using them not for like primary storage, but for very large files that will
⏹️ ▶️ John mostly be read sequentially. So I wouldn’t put my photo library on a NAS. Don’t do that. You’ll probably be sad. Right?
⏹️ ▶️ John there or anything like that. But big data files there. And of course, an
⏹️ ▶️ John ass doesn’t just give me a big bucket of stuff because nearly all the things so that’s that’s why I think about this a lot. I look at my sonology down there.
⏹️ ▶️ John And sometimes I think about if I ripped out all those drives and replace them all with eight terabytes, how much space would I have? By the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John unlike the two of you? I don’t know. I kind of do know. I know how this happened. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m I have not been using my we have the same amount of storage. I’ve not been using my storage for Leslie. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John been using it carefully. Like I delete I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey delete movies after I watch them, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like if I watch a movie and it was crap, immediately, you know, deleted. If I rip
⏹️ ▶️ John a movie but then a new version comes out, I delete that and rip the new version, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John I have been using it frivolously and yet my Synology has been basically
⏹️ ▶️ John on the verge of being full, meaning like only a few hundred gigabytes available on various volumes
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey for almost its entire life.
⏹️ ▶️ John The main reason is I do time machine backups to it. If you have a couple
⏹️ ▶️ John of machines with a terabyte internal hard drives plus some external drives, both
⏹️ ▶️ John time machine backing up to your Synology, your backups get pretty big pretty fast. So I’ve allocated
⏹️ ▶️ John a chunk of it for backups for my two Macs, right? That’s two
⏹️ ▶️ John terabytes just for their internal drives plus the three other internal drives that are on the Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John and the external drives that are attached to my wife’s iMac. So that’s a couple of terabytes there.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I have that on a RAID set with some redundancy protection.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not RAID 0, right? So there’s more drives being used up. So a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey lot of… Slow down,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slow down, slow down. You have your time machine volume with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, see, I’m not going to say you’re wrong there. But when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was asking Marco, because I think Marco had either gotten his Synology before me or maybe just set it up before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. I’d ask Marco, you know, how did you do this? And we have eight bay Synologies.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And what Marco recommended, which I think was a good call was do, what was it? Read
⏹️ ▶️ Casey zero for two of the physical drives. So basically you’re making one large hard drive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of two physical hard drives, but having absolutely no redundancy. And the only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing that goes on that volume is my time machine backup. So if I drop one, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lose my Time Machine backups. I cannot tell you the last time I’ve needed a Time Machine backup.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I still use it because I want it to be there, but I haven’t used one in forever. And yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is where everyone writes us and says, oh, RAID 0, you should never use that, blah, blah, blah. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Time Machine. That’s it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Also, I should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco follow up that I think, I can’t tell from here, but I think I actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco switched it over to RAID 1 when I upgraded its storage capacity a few years later, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I would also say also like, you know, it also only makes sense to do raids here on time machine if time machine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not your primary backup, you know, which for us it isn’t like I have a super duper clone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s local to the computer. It’s like a little local SSD that I tape under the desk. And and so like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is my primary backup for my main drive. Time machine is a convenience historical backup
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only. I also have cloud backup like there’s the you know, we have multiple things. So if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time machine is one of multiple things and you want to not waste
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too much hard drive space on it, that’s when I recommend using RAID 0 if you’re going to do something like this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even today, a lot of this made sense back when we were doing it, when we were setting this up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like 3 years ago, but these days with the hard drives
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just so big, it really removes a lot of the need to use RAID much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all. if you’re going to use raid now, you can much more often just use raid one, which is a straight mirroring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the loss of the disk space doesn’t really matter as much.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s less space efficient than the other raid schemes that let you use more of the space. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m more inclined to use raid zero. I don’t do this now, but I’d be more inclined to use raid zero for my media because media has
⏹️ ▶️ John less churn and there’s less versions you know, the whole I have super duper clones too, right? But super duper
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t save all versions. I want to save as many old versions as possible. And if if I had
⏹️ ▶️ John raid zero and one of the discs died, I’ve lost all versions of Time Machine backups for two entire
⏹️ ▶️ John Macs. Right now I have other Time Machine backups too. But anyway, I have a little bit, I understand I have a little bit of redundancy, but
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, that, that burns a lot of discs. And then of course I have my media. I don’t have a lot,
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of media and I do delete stuff from it, but it adds up because I also have stuff in there like every WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Apple has ever released in the
⏹️ ▶️ John highest definition, right? That’s the perfect thing for that. Right. And it’s like, Oh, are you ever going to watch
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m archiving it. I can’t easily get that stuff again. I have lots of crap like that. And
⏹️ ▶️ John so that’s my Synology basically filled up. So anyway, I like it. I like having an ass. I like the
⏹️ ▶️ John big spinning noise. It’s far away from me. And despite how huge it is,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would even want more of it. And like Casey said before, that’s why I’m using CrashPlan and not Backblaze.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s because on my Mac, I use Backblaze. On my wife’s Mac, I use CrashPlan. And
⏹️ ▶️ John on her Mac, I mount the Synology and I have CrashPlan back up
⏹️ ▶️ John the Synology volumes just like any other thing because it does network backups. Now CrashPlan, like Backblaze,
⏹️ ▶️ John is a flat fee for unlimited data. And like Casey, I take advantage of that and I have
⏹️ ▶️ John about five terabytes pushed up to CrashPlan. It’s like you said, you know, you said it as many times as you want. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I did. That’s just for Jason Snell. I probably blew the quote. Sorry, Jason. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, so it was a great deal. Right. not offering it anymore. It was like, we can’t afford to do that, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m in the same situation as Casey where they’re sun setting their consumer product
⏹️ ▶️ John and I have to figure out what I’m gonna do about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I forget how much I’m paying for a crash plan per year but it’s super cheap, especially for the amount of data I’m putting on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John The offer they have for the small business thing, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John at least twice as expensive as the consumer one but still only like $10 a
⏹️ ▶️ John month per device. For people with multiple devices, that’s a problem, but I’ve only got one device, it’s my
⏹️ ▶️ John wife’s Mac that I’m doing that with. So I don’t mind that much. The small business thing, we’ll have a link to
⏹️ ▶️ John the crash plan fact. One of the questions on the fact is, can I still move to crash
⏹️ ▶️ John plan for small business even if I’m not a small business? The answer, yes, you can. Anyone can
⏹️ ▶️ John migrate. Like, why is it, it’s just called small business. You don’t have to be a small business, although annoyingly,
⏹️ ▶️ John they make you enter a company name, so I entered some bogus thing or whatever, but you do not have to be a small
⏹️ ▶️ John business to use a small business. And it’s $10 per month per device, but if you’re a current CrashPlan
⏹️ ▶️ John subscriber, there’s an apology price for one year that is 75% off. So it’s $2.50 a month
⏹️ ▶️ John to upload unlimited data
⏹️ ▶️ John to CrashPlan. And if you already have a CrashPlan thing, you don’t have to re-upload your five terabytes. It will
⏹️ ▶️ John migrate your existing five terabyte backup and you’ll just continue as normal. That deal
⏹️ ▶️ John was too good for me to pass up. $2.50 a month for a year, starting at the
⏹️ ▶️ John end of my current subscription that was extended for 60 days for unlimited backup? Yes, please,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Even when it goes up to $10 a month, I might keep paying it just for the convenience. I’m pretty sure I’m still running
⏹️ ▶️ John the Java application, and no, it’s not the most efficient thing in the world, and it fills my disk with big files
⏹️ ▶️ John and takes a lot of memory and does stuff, but in general, I have enough control to make it lay off when I’m using the computer and only run when I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not using it. And for the most part, it’s done its job. They do, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it does a pretty good job of finding the files and backing them up. And I just can’t beat that pricing,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And so after, at the end of 2018, when
⏹️ ▶️ John my gravy train ends and I have to decide whether I want to start paying $10 a month
⏹️ ▶️ John for my five terabyte backup, that I might be like, okay, that’s, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, I’ll just unsubscribe from Hulu or whatever the hell streaming service that I haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey used in a long time,
⏹️ ▶️ John take that money and put it towards this. Or I might use one of the alternatives he relisted,
⏹️ ▶️ John but for now, the sort of, what’s the least I can do to not have to think about this problem until the
⏹️ ▶️ John end of 2018? It was do the small business migration. A lot of people are mad at CrashPlan,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, I’m never giving them business, blah, blah, blah. They should have handled the transition better. Arguably,
⏹️ ▶️ John the 60-day extension could have been like a one-year extension or whatever, but there’s no real easy way
⏹️ ▶️ John to do this. I made a plea to Backblaze, which I use and enjoy, but that doesn’t do network volumes,
⏹️ ▶️ John on Twitter, which is where you interact with brands, in case you didn’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Sorry, where you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco engage with brands.
⏹️ ▶️ John I engaged with a brand on Twitter, and I said, hey, I would love it if you could back
⏹️ ▶️ John up network shares. And the disembodied voice of Backblaze, the corporation, said on Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ John unfortunately, they left out a comma, our business model would need a lot of reworking for
⏹️ ▶️ John us to offer for a NAS slash server for a fixed rate. So basically it’s saying like we don’t, you know, and
⏹️ ▶️ John what I said to them back, cause like, you know, so obviously they can’t, they need, they would need to figure out how they can pay for that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I said, well, you don’t need to do what CrashPlan did, which is whatever the thing was, like $60 a year for
⏹️ ▶️ John unlimited. All you need to do is match CrashPlan small business because CrashPlan for home is
⏹️ ▶️ John gone. You don’t have to match their price anymore. Like apparently that was an unsustainable model, right? Presumably
⏹️ ▶️ John CrashPlan for small business is a sustainable model at $10 per month per device.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I would love it if Backblaze did that. Even if they put a limit on it, they said like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John five terabytes for $10 a month per device, including network
⏹️ ▶️ John things, you know, like I would try that, right? So I don’t know what they’re gonna do there. I think B2 is their
⏹️ ▶️ John preferred solution for that, which is not really a service. It’s a play on S3. It’s just like
⏹️ ▶️ John a storage backend, but it has, I think the cheapest rates,
⏹️ ▶️ John let me look at, I have their pricing page up, anyone else
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John have it already?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s the cheapest, like large online block storage thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so it’s a.005 cents per gigabyte per month for storage
⏹️ ▶️ John and.02, oh no, it’s not, I, the damn
⏹️ ▶️ John dollar sign in front, I’m sorry. I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gonna say, my calculations are all
⏹️ ▶️ John One half a cent for storage and two cents per
⏹️ ▶️ John gigabyte for download. And it is less than S3 and Azure and Google Cloud, which are
⏹️ ▶️ John the ones they put in here. They also have a price calculator at the bottom where you can say, here’s what my initial upload is, here’s what my
⏹️ ▶️ John monthly upload is, here’s my monthly delete and my monthly download, and it will price it out for you. And it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John that bad. For my data, for reasonable values, it comes out to like 20 or $30 a month. But that’s still
⏹️ ▶️ John three times what $10 a month is. But that’s just storage. And Synology can back up directly
⏹️ ▶️ John to B2, so I could do that. But when I asked on Twitter, as soon as this announcement
⏹️ ▶️ John was made, okay, what’s everybody’s favorite thing that will back up a Mac, including a NAS?
⏹️ ▶️ John And in that tweet, just to try to save myself a little time, I said, what’s the best thing on
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac that backs up to a NAS, or that backs up network-attached drives?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is it ARC, or is it something else? Because I knew
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey everyone was going to say ARC.
⏹️ ▶️ John know about Arc, and I wanted to preempt them by saying, yes, I’m aware of Arc. I’m checking in with everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John to see, is there something else out there that’s better? And some people did get alternate suggestions that I looked at, but then a thousand people
⏹️ ▶️ John replied, you should try Arc. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Arc is a Mac application,
⏹️ ▶️ John a third-party Mac application that will back up your Mac. It’s been in development for a long time now.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s sort of novel thing is that you choose and pay for whatever storage
⏹️ ▶️ John backend you want. So if you want to pay for Amazon Glacier or Amazon Drive
⏹️ ▶️ John or S3 or B2, Arc will back up to any of them. Arc is a backup program. It
⏹️ ▶️ John just says, just point me at your place where you want me to put the data and it will put its data
⏹️ ▶️ John there in its format or whatever it does, blah, blah, blah. But you have to choose the storage thing
⏹️ ▶️ John and you pay for the storage thing. So, and you could change, like you could, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John stop paying for B2 and switch to Amazon Drive or something, presumably, you’d have to, you know, transfer your backup over there, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s a nice divorce from the backup program and the storage backend. And a lot of people use
⏹️ ▶️ John that and they enjoy it and they’ve been successful with it. But given the storage backend pricing,
⏹️ ▶️ John none of these come close to matching crash plans pricing or backblazes pricing for that matter if you’re not doing network
⏹️ ▶️ John attached storage. So it seems like Arc is sort of the power user fancy thing where you
⏹️ ▶️ John get to pick the components and assemble it. But if you have a huge amount of data like I do,
⏹️ ▶️ John it just can’t match the price of one of these all you can eat things. And the all that you can eat things, I’m being subsidized by people who back up like 100
⏹️ ▶️ John megs. That’s how they can be so cheap, is because I’m paying the same amount per month for
⏹️ ▶️ John Backblazer for CrashPlan as somebody who backs up their 100 megabyte little folder of stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so that’s how Amazon can, that’s how these services can afford to give you the flat rate. Because most
⏹️ ▶️ John people don’t upload five terabytes. It’s just the stinkers like me and Casey that are ruining
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it for everybody else.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s how they have to figure out their histogram of how much people upload
⏹️ ▶️ John and make all the math work out. Whereas things like S3 and B2, where they’re just selling you
⏹️ ▶️ John storage, they just charge you for the storage. Like it’s all completely chunked out. It’s like, well, we’re just a storage
⏹️ ▶️ John backend and you don’t get to pass less for your storage just
⏹️ ▶️ John because someone else stores a little bit less than our thing, right? It’s a exactly dollars per
⏹️ ▶️ John gigabyte, very granular service that doesn’t care what you’re doing with the storage, you just pay for what you use.
⏹️ ▶️ John And plus the paying for transfers is another thing that really bites you depending on how much
⏹️ ▶️ John transfers you do. So that was my choice for now, is that basically I’m punting it down the road,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna continue using CrashPlan for as long as I can. Also because I don’t wanna upload five terabytes
⏹️ ▶️ John anyplace else again. I mean, I have a fast connection, but that would take a long time, and during that time I would have
⏹️ ▶️ John no cloud backups of my thingies. Now, to get back to Marco’s point about not backing up,
⏹️ ▶️ John not even having stuff on there in the first place for like ripped movies that you’re never gonna watch and other big stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John like that. You could just, you know, pay $5 to get it online or stream it from
⏹️ ▶️ John Netflix or whatever. That only works for the people who aren’t using a NAS
⏹️ ▶️ John like Casey was just describing where they’re, or like I have tried to do, but had to bail on
⏹️ ▶️ John and may try again. Ripping Blu-rays without recompressing them,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Because there is nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m recompressing them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I’m not a complete animal like
⏹️ ▶️ John are. All right. Well, anyway, a lot of people rip them and don’t recompress them just so they don’t have to deal with Blu-ray discs,
⏹️ ▶️ John which as has been established on the show are terrible, right? So you just get rid of everything except the movie, the actual movie
⏹️ ▶️ John file, you hit play and it starts playing the movie, right? That actually is not a bad idea at all. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the thing is, they’re humongous. And, you know, even if you watch them rarely, it’s like, oh, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John easier just to buy it on iTunes. You can’t get a, you know, a
⏹️ ▶️ John 4K, You know, if you have a 4K Blu-ray thing, a UHD Blu-ray, and you rip that losslessly,
⏹️ ▶️ John there is nothing you can get online streaming that can match that quality. There’s just nothing. Like, it’s not even close. Even, like, 4K
⏹️ ▶️ John Netflix is just so massively compressed compared to what you get off of that plastic disc. So, if you care about that,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you have some giant NAS somewhere with all these 50 to 100 gigabyte rips of these things,
⏹️ ▶️ John right, there is no, like, oh, I’ll just get it online. If you don’t care about that, well, then why
⏹️ ▶️ John are you ripping a bunch of movies to, you know, I guess, to get rid of the menus, whatever. But then the marco system starts to look better and better
⏹️ ▶️ John the less you care about the quality of your stuff. Right? Um, I’m kind of in the middle where I do
⏹️ ▶️ John care about it, but I don’t have any way to play things like that on there. So sometimes I have
⏹️ ▶️ John like versions of things for kids on there with like English dubs and other
⏹️ ▶️ John more rare materials. Sometimes I’ve transferred things from my Tevo to there to free up space on my Tevo,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is terrible because the compression is anyway, it’s bad. I don’t do that. It’s dumb.
⏹️ ▶️ John happened. So there’s a lot of churn in it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not always the case that you can or even if it’s something like home movies, like I have all of my,
⏹️ ▶️ John all of my home movies taken with my camcorder because I’m old and my kids are old now and
⏹️ ▶️ John camcorder, right? I need to get that the video off of the camcorder was DV
⏹️ ▶️ John at least it’s not analog off of the camcorder and someplace else. It’s all ripped to
⏹️ ▶️ John the Synology and then all gets backed up. So if I had to do sort of like a trimming and say you can’t back up 5
⏹️ ▶️ John terabytes anymore, deal with it. I would try to stop backing up
⏹️ ▶️ John all of my media that is replaceable, but I would still back up like all my Apple videos.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would still back up all my kids videos and stuff like that. And that’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ John like half of the stuff because I don’t have that many movies. I mean, I think I’ve shared my Plex thing with with both
⏹️ ▶️ John of you guys. Like there’s not that many movies in there. Like my movie collection is mostly on shelves on plastic
⏹️ ▶️ John discs and I still take them out of the containers and put them in. I just did it this weekend. I took a thing out of a
⏹️ ▶️ John plastic disc out of a case and put it into a slot and watched a movie. It’s a thing I still do. It was a…
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco animal. Yeah, really. It
⏹️ ▶️ John was Blu-ray, it was Criterion Collection and it was, it looked really good. Not 4K
⏹️ ▶️ John though, but soon, like Marco said, I’ll have to be getting the 4K versions of all of my favorite movies, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John fine. I’m fine with it. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, so crash plan, sad. Don’t poo-poo the small business thing, take a look at it. ARK seems
⏹️ ▶️ John to be the consensus for other things that you might wanna try. And if you don’t have network attached disks, backblaze.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think you’ve convinced me that I should just bite the bullet and move to small business because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is definitely the price performer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t use to tweet earlier, Casey, about there was a five terabyte limit on it. No, I don’t think so.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I checked, it’s unlimited. Okay, so then if it’s basically the same thing you were getting before, just now it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to be 10 bucks a month after the apology period instead of five, that’s, you know, yeah, bite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the bullet. That’s still a pretty good deal for unlimited space with network volumes. Like Backblaze beats
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it by, I think about half, um, for local files, but for net to include network files
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in that, um, that’s yeah, just, just pay it. That’s fine. Like they’re, they’re,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re really showing you a price hike here, but that’s totally fine. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, your other alternatives are all going to be more disruptive and probably more expensive.
Sponsor: Betterment
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s Betterment.com.
Mac Mini instead of NAS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Betterment, rethink what your money can do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I already had an ass full of big disks. And I’m like, well, I already have all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this hardware, might as well use it. What I would do today if I was starting fresh, I already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a Mac mini server in my home. I would just get a small number,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably either two or four, eight terabyte or 10 terabyte disks,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put them into very basic enclosures that have pretty much no intelligence to them whatsoever, and plug them into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac mini. And have it be in the basement or garage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever else so the noise doesn’t bother me, or just in the closet, and just run either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no RAID whatsoever, or the built-in Mac OS X RAID, or there’s an app called SoftRAID
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is almost certainly the best option for any kind of advanced use as software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco RAID on the Mac. It’s kind of expensive, it’s 180 bucks for the full-length RAID 5,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or if you just need RAID 1 or 0, it’s 50 bucks. And again, these days, you can get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two 8-terabyte drives for a total of 600 bucks. You get Soft Raid Light Edition for 50 bucks,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put them in Raid 1, and you have really safe eight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco terabytes of storage for under $1,000.
⏹️ ▶️ John You just built a Mac OS NAS, you realize.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That’s why I’m saying. Yes, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. So basically, here’s where this benefits. Well, the downside,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, is obvious, that you have to then run on a Mac OS. You won’t get some of the advanced Raid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco features. Most NASA’s these days, including the technologies we have, have some kind of system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to automatically expand, or at least somewhat gracefully, expand capacity down the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco road without having to blow away your whole volume. This is a system similar to what Drobo has offered for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years. Drobo made it famous, but Drobo is terrible. Nobody should ever use Drobos. They are incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unreliable. If you ask around, you will see so many horror stories from people who have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trusted Drobo and have had that trust be violated. So I would not recommend Drobo. And,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, so other NASs offer features like that, where you can expand volumes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over time by replacing a small hard drive with a big one and then letting the thing rebuild. And then eventually you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can replace the next drive with another big one, let that rebuild and everything. It’s a slow process, but it does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco indeed work. You can’t do that with iSCSI, unfortunately, because iSCSI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has to be that one big block and can’t resize a file system that it doesn’t know about. You also, as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far as I know, can’t do that if you do a direct attached MAC method, like what I’m saying here,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just get some drivers, plug them into a Mac. As far as I know, you can’t do that in any way on the Mac that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all reasonable, except if you use a Drobo, which again, you should not do. Other than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco losing dynamic expansion though, a lot of the other stuff I actually find to either be a wash on the Mac or to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be better. So, software-wise, if you think about all the stuff Casey, you run on your Synology,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you run Plex, you run a VPN server, you run photo hosting. I honestly don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know what VPN server options exist for Mac OS, but I’m sure they exist.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh, definitely. You can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco definitely run Plex because I do. And so I know that works. It’s even better because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have more processing power, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. To quickly interrupt and to be absolutely clear, the particular NAS that we have, it is not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey powerful enough to be the Plex host. So really, my Plex
⏹️ ▶️ Casey host is the iMac. It’s simply serving the content off of the Synology.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It’s totally
⏹️ ▶️ John powerfully enough. I use my Synology as my primary Plex server. Only when I have a rare
⏹️ ▶️ John case where it can’t transcode, I switch to the iMac Plex server.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you know, this is an aside that I wouldn’t have interrupted had I realized we were going down but since
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve interrupted, here we are. What I noticed was when I first started using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Synology with Plex being served on the Synology,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it could not keep up with the media I was looking at at the time. However, I have been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey extremely diligent for literally years that anytime I add
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something to the Synology, I make sure I convert it to MP4. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hopefully it can send that natively to whatever Apple based client I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey viewing it upon, and it’s rare I use anything to look at Plex other than an iPad or an Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something like that. So I wonder if it actually isn’t that bad. if as long as I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing like an MKV or something like that, which sometimes is already in H.264 anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I guess that’s a roundabout way of saying, I should probably try that again.
⏹️ ▶️ John And mess with the settings, like go to original quality so it allows it to do it not transcoding. And it doesn’t have to be
⏹️ ▶️ John M4V or MP4, it can be MKV. Like I’ve had a lot of success, but obviously H.265, forget
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Like if anything’s H.265, I worry that my
⏹️ ▶️ John iMac is not gonna be able to do it until you know, High Sierra or whatever, the Synology can’t do it. But I just
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s my go to like that’s this when I have the big choice of which Plex thing do you want to pick?
⏹️ ▶️ John Synology is the one I pick only after I try it first and it fails. Actually, if I try it first and it fails, the next
⏹️ ▶️ John thing I usually try is infuse on my Apple TV, where it does the supposedly does the decoding on the
⏹️ ▶️ John And then my third choice is Plex on the iMac. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And well, so the reason I brought all this up, and I’m sorry for interrupting, Mark, but the reason I brought this up is to say you’re right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I’m using my iMac to serve Plex, and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically what you’re talking about doing as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mark Miller Yeah, exactly. If you have basically a headless Mac that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco running as a server in your house, and it doesn’t have to be a Mac Mini. It can be just like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an old laptop or something. It can be anything. I think it’s important, though, that it’s serving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco literally a server role, that it is not used for anything else and you can put it somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it’s out of the way so you don’t have to deal with hard drive noise like what John hates if you don’t like the false
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard drives. And you can dedicate it to roles. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not only can you do things like we were talking about, Plex and stuff, you can also do things that are exclusive to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple platforms. Like I mentioned last week, or two weeks ago, that I actually have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my server Mac Mini logged into iCloud Photos and the Photos app downloads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco originals to that Mac Mini. And then Backblaze backs up those originals from that Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mini, even though in addition to the ones that I have on my main computer, because that’s one more place you can have your originals.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then maybe you can have a laptop that doesn’t have a hard drive big enough to store your originals,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you know you have your originals on this other computer in your house that is being backed up to a cloud backup service.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also because it’s a Mac, you can use any of the cloud backup services. You can use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Arc, you can use Backblaze, you can use Crashplan, anything else, if it runs on the Mac, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can run it on this. Unlike, you know, on a NAS, you’re limited to whatever handful of services have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clients for that NAS. But on a Mac, you can use any of them, right? And you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also do things, you know, you can do Network Time Machine, you know, again, NAS can do that too. But you can do things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Xcode bots that NASs can’t do. You can run other Mac software, like I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner, and the ScanSnap software is hideous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and requires the ugliest icon I’ve ever seen to be running on your dock all the time. So I’ve run them on the Mac Mini, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t have to have it on my main computer. You can also, you know, there’s also occasional other server
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that some people need in their house, you know, media related things, development related things. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco run my Ubiquiti Unify controller app on there. You know, just like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff that you have to run on a Mac all the time for some reason for your home. a Mac server is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this isn’t for everybody of course, I would say it’s a luxury,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but compared to a NAS, I think just a Mac server with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a small number of giant hard drives plugged into it is actually more competitive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco today for what most people need than getting some big NAS like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Synology. The only other thing I will add to this is, I would say, if you run
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Mac Mini headless, which means with no display put into it, you have probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had weird little issues with the video. Whether it doesn’t wake from sleep, screen sharing doesn’t come up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right, or it comes up all black, or the performance just sucks. OS X does weird things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when there’s no display plugged in. Amazon you can get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a $10 HDMI display emulator. It’s a little black
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dongle that plugs into the HDMI port on the back of a Mac Mini or the side of any old laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it emulates a display with just a couple of resistors inside. That’s what I call it. It’s $10, a little plug
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. It makes the Mac think that a 4K display is connected to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it will run at 4K resolution through the screen sharing thing that you’re using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or any resolution between zero and 4K. And it fixes all those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems. It wakes from sleep immediately with any kind of screen sharing. It’s fast, the animations are all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smooth. It makes it rock solid. I ran a Mac Mini Headless for a few years without
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of these, then I learned about this and got one, it makes a massive difference. I highly recommend anybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco running a Mac Mini Headless. Go on Amazon, get this here. We’ll put the link in the show notes. It is called
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the CompuLab 4K Display Emulator. It’s 10 bucks. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco completely changes running a Mac Mini Headless.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, sad times with CrashPlan, but sounds like we might have a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey solution. And the solution is more CrashPlan. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right. Sad times with CrashPlan. The solution is pay them more money.
⏹️ ▶️ John Wee! Or pay them less money. It’s actually half the price we were paying for for the next year because,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, $250 a month. Can’t be $250 a month for unlimited backup with
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco network backup stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s true. So, you got a whole year grace period to evaluate ARC and decide what you’re doing and so on and
⏹️ ▶️ John so forth. That’s why, by the way, for you mentioned Marco about like things that you care the most
⏹️ ▶️ John about, like you should be backing up your photos way more carefully than you’re backing up like you’re ripped movies
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff like that. And I totally am. And that’s why I like having and paying for
⏹️ ▶️ John all these other things that aren’t technically backup things like paying for a terabyte of Google Drive
⏹️ ▶️ John space and using the Google backup app to back up my photos. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not doesn’t think it’s backing them up. It thinks, oh, using Google Photos. Look, you have like 90,000 photos of Google Photos. You
⏹️ ▶️ John must be using it. It’s like, no, I’m using you as a backup. You are just another backup of just my photos,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And you don’t know you’re another backup. And I like it that way. And you have redundant copies
⏹️ ▶️ John of pictures and you somehow slurp down the edits of my photos in addition to the originals like I don’t care. Like your purpose
⏹️ ▶️ John is to be one more backup. And you know, a terabyte of Google Drive space
⏹️ ▶️ John is more expensive than I’m paying for crash plan. It was just like, you know, ecosystem variety.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t rely on one thing. Don’t rely on one company on one service on one technique on one kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of backup even got incremental backups, we got clone backups, we’ve got I don’t even know I’m a backup.
⏹️ ▶️ John All I do know is I’m getting a bunch of photos uploaded to me backups. That’s what you need. And you know, all the other
⏹️ ▶️ John hard drive backups and time machine and everything else. And that’s, that’s what helps me sleep at night with my backups
⏹️ ▶️ John is having a lot of them and having them all be very different in both corporation and even type
⏹️ ▶️ John and so crash plan not being perfect and being weird and having problems I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John able to deal with that because it’s like oh I wasn’t crash mine is not my only off-site backup of the things I care about most
⏹️ ▶️ John in the world not by a long shot like I’ve got you know photos in the cloud from Apple as well so my photos are in
⏹️ ▶️ John three cloud locations three and a half because I do back up some of them from my Mac with backblaze
⏹️ ▶️ John too. But anyway, I’m hoping that my drive sizes will get
⏹️ ▶️ John bumped up and I guess that will probably cause me to pay even more for cloud storage. But
⏹️ ▶️ John as you know, as the spin hard drive prices and come down, SSD prices have come down, you can get two terabyte
⏹️ ▶️ John SSDs for about the same price as I got my one terabyte SSD. So things are going in the right direction. I’m just hoping cloud
⏹️ ▶️ John storage starts dropping as well because I don’t want my hard drives to be creeping up but cloud
⏹️ ▶️ John storage to be about the same price for the the next five years, because that will make me sad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, my one final tip, do not use Amazon Glacier for anything, it is awful. Even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with ARK, ARK tries its best, it puts in a valiant effort, but Amazon Glacier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the worst, do not use it. If you need really cheap storage, use Backblaze B2. Anyway, thanks to our three sponsors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this week, Betterment, Hover, and Aftershocks, and mysteriously not Backblaze, for sponsoring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this show this week, and we’ll see you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to begin, Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh it was accidental. John didn’t do any research, Margo
⏹️ ▶️ John and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental. And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into Twitter, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and T. Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t mean to.
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, check my cast so long
Post-show: Security cameras
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Marco, tell me about your home security experiences of late.
⏹️ ▶️ John A lot of bike thieves are stalking his house these days. This guy gets a new bike every day.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a honeypot for bike thieves.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My goodness. Well, if you would have asked me before I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this experience, which company is best at AI type problems?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would have said, you know, Apple is not so good at AI type problems, you know, and Google is the best,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? or something like that, probably Google would be the best. It’s the turn of Logitech is the best. We were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco leaving our home for an extended time and we had the bright idea, you know what, let’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put up some security cameras so that we can see if anybody breaks into our house
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever, or we could just check on things, make sure that like, you know, see if there’s like a tree
⏹️ ▶️ Marco branch that lands in our front yard or anything weird like that. Let’s just put up a couple of cameras
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and give us peace of mind while we are away for a while. I did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some research and it did appear from my research, and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco world of home security cameras, or just, yeah, just home
⏹️ ▶️ Marco video cameras or security cameras at all, it leads into this community of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ultra-paranoid crazy gun people pretty quickly. Neat. So this is a world that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have avoided for some time because it starts getting into this weird paranoia
⏹️ ▶️ Marco community of craziness that I don’t respond well to or want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a part of. So I didn’t want something that was going to be too crazy,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too complicated. I could host things myself in my own house
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using my crazy NAS and have IP cameras that recorded to it using all sorts of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crazy, hideous software packages that can do this thing for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or you can just buy one of the cameras that comes with some kind of online retain service
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the archives that basically streams all the video to their web hosting thing and you pay per month to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a certain amount of retention of video there, like 10 days or a week or whatever else. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it pretty much led me to the best ones were the Nest Cams, formerly the Drop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cams, now it’s Nest Cams, which is owned by Google or Alphabet. I don’t even, can’t even keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco track anymore, but who cares, it’s owned by Google. And Nest Cams have these wonderful features, like being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco able to recognize people in the frame and be able to only alert you when it sees
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a person in the frame and not just like a leaf blowing by or a moth or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And in addition to all the AI stuff, everyone pretty much agreed that the Nest cameras had the best video quality of pretty much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything out there and they could see better in the dark and stuff like that. So I thought, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if the only downside of the Nest Cams seems to be the cost. Well, I’ll pay more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up front for something good if it really is better. So, let’s give them a try. So, I got two of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the advanced ones for inside, the new crazy IQ ones, where the first review is Merlin telling you that you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rotate the image, and I completely agree with him, by the way, that is BS. And then I got two of the regular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco outdoor, Nest Cam outdoor ones for the outside.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t know this yet, but on an upcoming rec diffs I talk about my purchase of the self same
⏹️ ▶️ John argue with Mullen about his review of it so I won’t go over it all here but anyway I actually have one of these as well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay I cannot believe how incredibly crappy these cameras
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are the picture quality is not great I can’t believe this is the best that we can do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every phone in the world it does better than these cameras for video quality so I can’t believe this is really the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco best we can do. The online streaming of these videos from Google,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like from Nest, this is a Google company, the online streaming is laggy and crappy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The interface to browsing the videos is horrendously clunky and crappy.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re talking about it from the from the web or from the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app? Both. They’re both, they’re horrendous and clunky in different ways, but they’re both horrendous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and clunky. The, yeah, the app, you know, typical of Nest, you know, the, I’ve had Nest thermostats for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a It’s one of the reasons I decided to do this. It’s like, well, I already have a Nest account. I already have Nest devices.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I already have the Nest app set up on my phone and my wife’s phone, so it would be trivial to add this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then I don’t have to deal with anyone else’s crappy app. So at least, you know, the devil you know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Getting it all set up, it was fine. I was disappointed by all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quality, the apps and everything. Then it came time for them to actually do their job and alert
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me when they saw people in certain spots in the frame. These things are the stupidest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things I’ve ever seen. There have been apps for the Mac forever that you can use the built-in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco webcam on the Mac to do similar things like this, to be like a little security camera and stuff. I’m pretty sure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those apps that I used 10 years ago to try that out were better and more advanced than Google with their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco advanced AI and everything, and Nest. It is so crappy at trying to recognize what is a person and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what isn’t, even with their highest end camera, even with their highest end IQ
⏹️ ▶️ Marco service that you’re paying every month for, they’re terrible. It thinks everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a person. I guess no one at Google tested the fact that maybe sun might be in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the frame sometimes. Like maybe you might have windows that let some sun in, and so throughout
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the day, the pattern of light on the floor will slowly move. That, they think is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a person every time. They think no motion at all is a person. I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one that includes a view of the street in front of my house in the corner of the frame. Every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco single time a car passes by it says, your front yard camera thinks it saw a person.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They are horrendous. It is totally useless. Because I have to turn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down all the alert thresholds. Because everything it sees, every bit of motion, every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco leaf that blows by, every time the sun slightly moves as it does every day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Every single thing it sees, it thinks is a person. I am stunned at how bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these are, and I can’t like, I expected so much more from Google, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re supposed to be good at this stuff. They’re supposed to be like the leaders of the world in image recognition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and intelligence in these kinds of ways. And the fact that it works so horrendously,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’ll even help it out. I’ll be like, all right, fine. I don’t care if there’s a person in my front yard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ll leave that alone. How about just tell me if there’s a person on my front porch? Here’s the little rectangle. I’ll draw, I’ll draw
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you the porch. You can tell where it is. Tell me if you see a person in this area. Nope. Still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every time, like, you know, a leaf blows by, Oh, we think we saw a person. You know, the sun moves. Here’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a person. Nope. Nope. It’s never a person. I give Apple full credit. Now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought all these years Apple needs to catch up to Google with image recognition. Turns out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Google image recognition is total garbage. And I now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apologize to Apple for ever insulting their efforts, because my god, the rest of the industry
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is Nest, not Google. I don’t know whose image recognition is at fault there. But anyway, I have the same thing, and my expectations
⏹️ ▶️ John were much lower than yours, I think, because I assumed all the security cameras were crap. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John was pleasantly surprised. Mine detected all the faces, and I went through the app and told them all the faces
⏹️ ▶️ John that it recognize and it never alerts me again about any of the faces that it already knows.
⏹️ ▶️ John It tells me when there is a legit person or legit motion which is my dog that’s why I have the camera I’m watching
⏹️ ▶️ John It has never sent me a false alert at all. Now granted it’s pointed an internal
⏹️ ▶️ John room and not at a window but the Sun does move and the Sun does move across the room during the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I agree with you the image quality is not great but people say that this is the best of the security cameras whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John but the fact that I can have it on and have it not send me alerts when anybody in my family walks
⏹️ ▶️ John through the room, but do send me alert like when the dog walker walks in the room because I haven’t had the dog walkers face.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s exactly what I wanted for and it does it exactly as advertised. I’ve gotten no false
⏹️ ▶️ John alarms. Maybe it’s missing the cat burglars that are coming into my house and and it’s doing
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey a crappy job there. And obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ John the apps aren’t great. And I wish they had more control, especially as scheduling interacts with the
⏹️ ▶️ John Geofence alerting, but the Geofence alerting works too. When I leave the house with my phone, it automatically turns the camera
⏹️ ▶️ John on because I’m away. Like I was pleasantly surprised, because I expected the worst, because you read all the reviews of all these
⏹️ ▶️ John things and they’re all terrible. And I was pleasantly surprised that the IQ features that I thought were probably going to be stupid
⏹️ ▶️ John actually make the thing useful for me. Now I don’t have it pointed outside where there’s a lot more motion, and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not trying to look for like people on my porch, I’m just pointing it at my dog during the day, so it is a more limited use
⏹️ ▶️ John case. But for that limited use case, I think it’s fine. overpriced and you’re right about the camera
⏹️ ▶️ John being not as good as it should be for that price but it’s it’s doing the job i wanted it to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so i’m a little surprised marco that you didn’t dive into the world of um
⏹️ ▶️ Casey i think it’s ip cameras i don’t know if that’s the right terminology but my dad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh he has a different sonology a much smaller one i think it’s a 214 play if i’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mistaken. Well, anyways, he wanted to have a view of his driveway
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because there’s not a lot of windows in the house that can show him a view of the driveway. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he put in an IP camera of some designation, I’m not entirely clear what it was,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and wired ethernet from that camera through the house, which admittedly is a pain. I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying to just fluff over that, but he wired it into a power over ethernet hub or switch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever. Again, I’m talking a little outside my comfort it’s on here. And then coincidentally, bringing this back around,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, it is now that that camera is plugged into in a, in a figurative sense, plugged into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Synology. So the Synology is watching the camera and taking, taking recordings of the camera, et cetera, et
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cetera. And there’s software on the Synology that is built exactly for this. And so since you have the Synology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sitting in the house, I’m a little bit surprised you didn’t go that route because I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see the IQ part in the head camera. You know, it’s just a camera and nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more. So like John, for you, it certainly would not have worked. But if you’re just pointing it at the outside world,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it might have solved the problem pretty well if, and this is a big if, you’re willing to get an ethernet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and I mean, the main reason I didn’t look at solutions like that, I mean, in the past when I’ve had like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the duck camera in the background and stuff, I actually have a few. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey have like two IP cameras.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I know this world slightly. And by trying to do this world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with those, That turned me off so much to that world that when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it came time we wanted to do this, first of all, we had this idea to do this like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few days before we were gonna leave, or like a week before, it’s like I didn’t have a lot of time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m like, all right, you know, I can’t, it was just kind of a blessing. Like I can’t spend a lot of time on the solution
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to this problem. If we’re going to do this, I have to do something simple. I have to just like throw some money at it and make the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem go away, hopefully. And that’s what we did. In retrospect,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the correct solution to the problem was something we came up with a few days after that, which was, why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t we just get a safe deposit box at the bank and put expensive stuff in that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it costs way less. Because the problem is, here’s the problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What if somebody breaks into my house and I have a video of that? What do I do with that exactly?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The video that I’m gonna have is gonna be pretty low quality. It might be in the dark, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it might just be with the IR camera. And it’s going to be a video of some, you know, burglar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whose face is going to be like 16 pixels total in this video. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m going to give it to the police and they’re going to do what exactly with that? Like, it’s not, it’s, it’s not like I’m going to be dealing with like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco FBI with top notch national databases of criminals and they’re going to be able to swivel their face around like CSI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and see, Ooh, this is this criminal. No, it’s going to be like some, some, you know, crazy desperate person. Like it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to be like, I’m not gonna be able to like get my stuff back with this. It’s totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco useless like I’m buying this with the idea that this will somehow keep my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff safer Or I’ll have some recourse if someone steals all my stuff, but that’s really probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not true in practice
⏹️ ▶️ John like It’s fine doing it to find out if your house is flooding or if a tree
⏹️ ▶️ John branch found something or if a raccoon has somehow Penetrated your home and is busily shredding every one of your cereal boxes
⏹️ ▶️ John where you can have a
⏹️ ▶️ John and shoot out of the house with a broom. I don’t think it’s so much, I mean, for theft, I know they might be called security camera.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, obviously I’m using mine to look at my dog to make sure my dog hasn’t escaped its pen and, you know, isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John freaking out and peeing and pooping all over the house. Like, you know, peace of mind, but definitely not for
⏹️ ▶️ John theft. Although I do have the, uh, the ring, uh, stick up cam, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the ring non doorbell camera. I’ve been using that to, because someone did steal
⏹️ ▶️ John one of my, I think it was my second gen iPod touch, which is kind of a shame. They stole that out of
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey my car. Oh yeah, I remember that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so now I have a camera on that zone, and of course that means nothing will ever happen again.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that one’s pretty good with the alerts too. It sends me an alert at work when the
⏹️ ▶️ John FedEx guy comes, because I use the FedEx app to tell them for one delivery to deliver my
⏹️ ▶️ John packages to a different location than my front door, and now for every FedEx package they deliver it
⏹️ ▶️ John to a location that is not
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey my front door.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so every time they walk by that camera, Oh, a package is arriving and there’s the person and
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, you see the landscapers and other stuff like that. So it works okay, like, but I have no illusions about
⏹️ ▶️ John security. It’s more like knowing, oh, hey, did that package come or not? Like, I don’t think I even have notifications on for it. I can just go
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, did that package come today? Scroll, scroll. Oh, yep, there’s the guy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is the only use I found for these so far. It’s not about security. It’s about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically showing me things are okay. I can see that my staff hasn’t been broken into as far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I know. I can see that like there isn’t a package sitting on my porch for two weeks or
⏹️ ▶️ John like that’s just a model of the inside of your house like an Ocean’s Eleven spoilers right yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually did see that one like it’s mostly for that or you know oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look my house is like not flooded or on fire like that that’s basically what I want to know is like stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that but that’s pretty much all it’s good for and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m quite disappointed in the in the usefulness of the rest of the system and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accuracy of things like the face recognition and people recognition and everything was like, I probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could have gotten by with a much simpler setup like an iPhone with like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco timer that would capture a picture every day and send it up to Dropbox or something like that, like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would have probably been just as useful, it would have cost way less.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s another uses to like my wife was looking at and she said, asked if my daughter had left her bathing suit at home
⏹️ ▶️ John but she could see it like on the counter like after she after everyone was gone and we were all at work the kids were all at camp
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like did she leave her bathing suit because I see it there I’m like zoom in zoom in enhance
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey bathing suit bottom
⏹️ ▶️ John she forgot to pack it you know it’s I mean I’m glad I only have one of them like and if
⏹️ ▶️ John we didn’t have for the dog I wouldn’t want it I don’t like the idea of you know recording devices
⏹️ ▶️ John recording the inside of her house and uploading it to the internet in general because I don’t trust that you know which is why for
⏹️ ▶️ John the of the time I have it off like we have it off from our home which seems silly it’s like oh you’re home upstairs asleep don’t you want to catch the cat burglars
⏹️ ▶️ John but I mean probably not like I just don’t want video of the inside of my
⏹️ ▶️ John house being uploaded anywhere ever so it’s mostly only on when there is nobody in the house
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah during during like the week that we were there before we actually left and we had these things set up we would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I kept the indoor ones off until we actually left like only the outdoor ones I kept running thinking the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same thing what if someone breaks into the house but it’s like we’ve lived there for like 10 years and no one’s broken into the house ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like my rule is if anybody ever breaks into my house we’re gonna move like I can’t live with that stress if that if we’re in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a place where that’s a real thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a real thing everywhere though like there is no place you can move except for an island tropical island where
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re the only resident and there are no boats like because where are you gonna go like oh we’re in a high crime
⏹️ ▶️ John area there is no like the lowest crime area you go to is like you get richer and richer people and those
⏹️ ▶️ John are prime targets for theft there’s not a lot of them but but they are prime targets, right? So you can’t, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no place you can go where you guarantee no one will ever break in or attempt to break into your house. And in
⏹️ ▶️ John a certain respect, as you get farther and farther away from the rest of the population and closer
⏹️ ▶️ John and closer into giant compounds that are walled off from everybody, the more tempting you are as a target
⏹️ ▶️ John and the more likely you will have a sophisticated attacker for that one robbery in your entire life rather than just
⏹️ ▶️ John a random smash and grab person. But most likely you won’t have that in any place because every place we
⏹️ ▶️ John all live is low crime. So I wouldn’t move if something happened to you. You just lost
⏹️ ▶️ John the lottery in that case, or won the lottery. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey You had a rare event actually occur to you,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it doesn’t change the statistical likelihood in our ritzy, low-crime neighborhoods.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, you should look at the crime statistics for where you live. I bet they’re ridiculously low.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As usual, you’re frustratingly rational.
⏹️ ▶️ John But please, I didn’t like it when someone stole the iPod out of my car, so don’t do that. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John they didn’t take anything else. There’s nothing else of value. I guess they could have taken my tire pressure sensor.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just, I love the idea. Like what if someone does break in and steal your iPod again? Like what are you going to do with that video?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you think you’re actually going to be able to tell who it is on the video?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, what I would do with the video, I would give it to the police. I mean, they wouldn’t do anything with it,
⏹️ ▶️ John mostly I want to know, look, is it, is it teenage kids who are down the block? Cause then I can go tell their parents and get
⏹️ ▶️ John them in trouble. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Or is it just I’ve never
⏹️ ▶️ John seen before. You’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco go tell their parents. Yeah, because
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I mean, with stuff like this, you always wonder like, you know, it looks like this is something that kids would do. Because what
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of person successfully breaks into my car without breaking a window and the only thing they take
⏹️ ▶️ John is a second generation iPod touch? That’s a dumb kid, right? No, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John a someone who was there for thieving would have taken everything in value out of the car, at least would have opened up every compartment
⏹️ ▶️ John and pulled everything out like that. And even didn’t even get like the loose change that was in the car, like the quarters for parking meters.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like no real car thief leaves that stuff, but a stupid teenager would. So that’s