259: I Hired Myself
01 Feb 2018Casey makes an app and tells a story, Marco makes a gadget to reduce convenience, and all three of us fail to perform our basic duty as Apple podcasters.
Episode Description:
- Who ordered a HomePod?
- Casey orders an Ethernet adapter
- Casey's Mac "app"
- Marco's secret project
#askatp- Long-term file storage
- AAA games for iOS/tvOS (via Lewis Thompson)
- Post-show: Casey on Cars Episode 2: Alfa Romeo Stelvio Ti
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Chapters
- Teaser: Casey’s Amazon Story
- The better friend
- Who ordered a HomePod?
- Sponsor: Hover
- Casey’s Amazon Story
- Sponsor: Fracture (code ATP17)
- Casey wrote a Mac app
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- Marco’s hobby project
- #askatp: Archive storage
- #askatp: AAA games on iOS?
- Ending theme
- Post-show: Casey On Cars Again
Teaser: Casey’s Amazon Story
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The funny thing is, if I cut your Amazon story, we can always refer back to it as, remember Casey’s Amazon story? And nobody will… It’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be like this enigma no one’s ever heard because we won’t tell them Casey’s Amazon story.
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey’s not going to bring it up again the next time he brings something to the lockers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Next time you return a $15 dongle. Exactly. Spending like two hours of your life
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to return this $15 thing. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was not two hours, you bastard. But yes, I understand your point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two hours of our lives.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco That’s true,
The better friend
⏹️ ▶️ John Now everything’s changed and now it’s going to be all screwed up, I blame you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What’s your middle name, Charles? Chester? Casey? No, Craig. No, really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John Craig. Come on. Marco got it. Yes. I didn’t know. I couldn’t tell if you were trolling me and that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was a Federici joke.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know how to pronounce it. I know what the middle name is. Boom. I’m the better friend. Just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey like that. Just like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, now that we’ve got that sorted. No, anyway, John Craig Syracuse, so you need to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey grow up and get a proper microphone like an
⏹️ ▶️ John adult. I don’t even know, man. Levels are all weird. It’s madness over here.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m really loud in my own ears. Who knows what you’re going to get here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The only thing you need to know is, A, are you recording? And B, are you clipping? Those are the only concerns I have.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know. I can’t tell if I’m clipping. I got the little meter thingies and they never reach the top. Does that mean I’m not clipping? Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Good. But can I make them reach the top? Test, test. Do they turn red?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If it clips so which are you talking about the meters that are in audio hijack?
⏹️ ▶️ John Peak slash RMS. It’s the box right next to the input and and I blow
⏹️ ▶️ John white bars are hanging I mean can I get them to go?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I don’t know you hello. I can’t get them
⏹️ ▶️ John Turn red they stay orange the whole time then you’re not clipping But those claps those
⏹️ ▶️ John claps should have pushed it up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up. Does that do? That was me that time. That was me that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John time. And I saw a little red on my physical hardware. You have a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey turn red. This is the best episode ever.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I’m clapping by the microphone. They don’t turn red.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ll just have to keep you nice and calm so your voice doesn’t get raised. We’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see. We’ll see how that goes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Hey, f*** the Mac Pro. Man,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know what? I love maximizing all my windows. At
⏹️ ▶️ Casey least this is the one true way. Actually, I really do think that’s true. But,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, are you a VI or Emax guy? I don’t even remember.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John what? Oh no, he’s
⏹️ ▶️ John being tested. He has my middle name, doesn’t know if I’m.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, yeah, so now wait, I’m gonna try to guess. I’m very disappointed. I’m gonna guess,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because John is old and picky, I’m gonna guess Emax.
⏹️ ▶️ John does that connect with old and picky? Is that right? I’m interested in your reasoning.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why is old and picky equal to Emacs? I mean, it just usually. Like, is Emacs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco older than VI? I don’t think it is. Probably not, but I think its demographic is.
⏹️ ▶️ John was I right? Emacs,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I’ve talked about it in a million podcasts that you’ve all heard. Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And you just don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey never wavering. I actually agree with you. I think it’s Emacs all the way, but I am surprised that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a man of your pickiness thinks that VI is not better. You guys are nuts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think anyone who enjoys VI is a true-to-form animal. Like, what kind of monster would enjoy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t say I enjoy it. I would say I hate it less than I hate Emacs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, we should move on.
Who ordered a HomePod?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Who ordered a HomePod? Because I believe all of us were pretty tepid about it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey weren’t we? So did either of you guys order a HomePod? I will tell you that I did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, we know John probably didn’t, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, John hates spending money, so of course he didn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did not, I didn’t even think about ordering a HomePod. Well, we have now made show history.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco None of the three of us
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the brand new Apple product.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’re terrible at this. I’m really disappointed in us.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, you know, I covered most of it last week, But as the pre-order period passed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and went, and as some people are having those hour-long sample tests with them and PR
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything, it sounds like, okay, they focused on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their strengths, they focused on the audio engineering side, their weaknesses,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like the home assistant area and the low-cost area, they didn’t focus on their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weak sides, which is probably smart, but they ended up making a product that I don’t think I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not only a need for, but I don’t even think I have a place in my house where it could go that would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make sense. It can’t go in my living room because only the TV speakers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco serve that, and it can’t be my TV speakers, and I also don’t want it to be my TV speakers, I have nice TV speakers already.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It can’t go in the kitchen because the assistant part of it is not good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough. You know, frankly, it’s just not good enough. The things we do most often, things like timers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Amazon Echo. You know, the Amazon Echo has really good timers now. You can name them, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have multiple timers running at once, so you can say, hey Amazon thing, set an oven timer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for 14 minutes. Hey Amazon thing, set a rotate the thing in the oven timer for seven minutes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like you can stack them up like that, and you can have like, when you’re cooking, and when you have like multiple things going,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a lifesaver, and then it beeps and tells you, your rotate oven timer is done. Like it’s just, it’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco convenient, and pretty advanced these days, the Siri functionality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the HomePod, if it’s anything like other Siri functionality, it’s not gonna be good at that kind of stuff. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it might be able to do a little bit of it, and I think we know that it can do like one timer. I mean, because the iPhone can’t even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do multiple timers or named timers. Like Siri on the phone can’t even do that, so I don’t expect,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, Siri on the HomePod to be that much better in that regard. So it seems like this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is really just focused on music, But it’s music only with these restrictions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and only for certain environments. And there’s nowhere in my house
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I listen to music that either doesn’t require the more advanced home
⏹️ ▶️ Marco assistant functionality of the Echo in the kitchen or doesn’t have requirements the HomePod can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco satisfy, like in my living room. We don’t listen to music in the bedrooms upstairs. In my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco office, I listen to music mostly on headphones. And when I do use my speakers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s because I need to play music from my computer, which the HomePod can’t do. Even if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had one, I don’t even know where I would put it in my house. So yeah, I passed. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it feels really weird for a major Apple product launch to go by that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not buying and that I’m not really excited about. But this product is just so boxed in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in what it serves and what it’s good at and what it can’t do that it just boxed itself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right out of my life.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it has competitors. If you didn’t have any Amazon stuff, you probably would have
⏹️ ▶️ John bought this because you’d be like, oh, I’ve been meaning to try these cylinder things and here’s an Apple one, so I’ll try it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mm-mm. I don’t have any Amazon stuff. Not you, Marco. I’m just saying. I am that
⏹️ ▶️ John person. Yeah, no, you are anti-cylinder entirely, so you’re just continuing your cylinder
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey boycott. But I’m saying Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John would have bought this if he didn’t already have a product that he liked better because he still would have been at the point
⏹️ ▶️ John of like, I don’t know about these cylinders, whatever, and then eventually Apple would’ve come out with them and he would’ve tried it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I don’t even have the very common excuse of I need this for testing my app, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my app can’t do anything with the HomePod. Like, until Siri has basically like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio app support, which as I mentioned last episode, I’m not expecting that to happen anytime soon, because that would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also enable Spotify and other services like that. And so, you know, it’s possible,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as we mentioned last WBDC, when SiriKit updates came and went and there was no audio thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s possible they just haven’t gotten to it yet and that they do intend to do it at some point later. I would say this summer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this WWDC, is kind of like the do or die point here. If they don’t add
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some kind of music app support this summer, I think it becomes increasingly likely that the explanation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is they don’t want to do it for competitive reasons, which is not good. I really hope that isn’t what’s happening.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But right now, I don’t even have anything meaningful to test with Overcast on the HomePod
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because AirPlay 2 isn’t done yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John You had a bunch of good ideas in Slack. Remind me in Overcast to play the latest ATP.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can make Overcast a to-do app. Can
⏹️ ▶️ John you make Overcast a workout app and a to-do app and a reminder
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco app? Yeah, but like, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That would be funny to attempt that, but it would be not only clumsy, but there’s no way Apple would let that stand for more than a week. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would be a waste. But it’s just like, I just, there’s nothing for me to do with the HomePod. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco suppose it’s healthy for me as a human being to not just buy every product Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco releases. But it just feels weird that there’s this major launch that, and none of
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think I actually have a place in my house where I could put this, because
⏹️ ▶️ John in the living room I have a free Google Home Mini thing that I got, it came free with some other thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is convenient, it makes it so you can ask questions and kids can ask how to spell words
⏹️ ▶️ John or define things and stuff like that, but you can’t play any music on it because it’s the Mini and it sounds like tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John little speaker and I do have my speakers hook up to my TV but there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John way to talk to them and they’re mostly turned off all the time unless someone’s watching TV
⏹️ ▶️ John and really they’re not ideal for music anyway so if I had a nice
⏹️ ▶️ John like speaker thing that could fill the room with sound which is what this
⏹️ ▶️ John thing could do and I could talk to it there is a place for that in my life and I would just
⏹️ ▶️ John you know stick it in my living room and I have an easier way to fill the living room with much better sounding sound
⏹️ ▶️ John Google Home Mini thing can provide. But I, it doesn’t, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t like the idea that it would be tied to my Apple ID and I don’t like the idea that I could talk to it,
⏹️ ▶️ John but not well. And so I’m taking a wait and see, like eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John when the software catches up and it supports multiple people and it can understand who’s talking to it and
⏹️ ▶️ John it can, you know, connect to both my phone and my wife’s phone. like it’s eventually when the software catches up
⏹️ ▶️ John I probably will buy one of these to fill exactly that function to basically fill my
⏹️ ▶️ John living room with better sounding sound I don’t know if it’ll ever get to the point though
⏹️ ▶️ John where I can talk to it and have it play like any song because I subscribe to Google Play Music
⏹️ ▶️ John and I don’t see myself subscribing to Apple Music just to be able to talk to this speaker because I have to subscribe
⏹️ ▶️ John to Google Play Music to get no ads on YouTube because of the way Google structures things if Google ever changes its
⏹️ ▶️ John YouTube red whatever family plan thing that I get so that I don’t have to play for Google Play Music
⏹️ ▶️ John anymore but I can still the whole family can still be ad free on YouTube then I would probably subscribe
⏹️ ▶️ John to Apple Music and try it but for now I’m just kind of stuck in this you know
⏹️ ▶️ John this weirdly carved out problem space of streaming service and ad free YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know and this capabilities of the HomePod.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m a devout Spotify user I admitted have not tried Apple Music since it was brand new.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And as such, I’ve been debating, you know, maybe I should try it again. But two of the playlists that Spotify comes out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with every single week for every single user is, I believe they were called Discover Weekly, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just, hey, given the entirety of Spotify’s library and given what we’ve noticed you listening
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to so far, here’s other music that we think you would enjoy. And that comes out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Mondays. And then on Fridays, there’s Release Radar, which is similar but limited to just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new or new-ish releases. So here’s something that’s brand new that just entered Spotify,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we think you might enjoy. And those two playlists are tremendous, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I love them. And beyond that, Spotify
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a couple of really great apps. It is one of the few apps that is Electron or equivalent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that doesn’t remind me of that every time I use it, unlike Slack. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the iPhone, it’s a really great app. And what’s wonderful about it is if I accidentally, as I often
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do, leave Spotify open everywhere, any Spotify client that is signed in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as the same Spotify user can control any other Spotify client. So I could control my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phone from my computer or vice versa, and that becomes useful if you’re air playing to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something else. Oh, that’s awesome. Yeah, so I could have my phone air playing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to my Apple TV, but control it from my computer, if my computer happens to be right in front of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, whatever the case may be. So, like I said, I have not tried Apple Music in a while, but there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot to love about Spotify. And I’ve been a loyal Spotify user since it came to the United States. And I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey paying for it since it came to the United States. So if the HomePod supported
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Spotify, like if I could say, you know, cylinder play such and such
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Spotify, I think there’s a pretty darn good chance I would be getting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one, what is it, a week from Friday? And I probably would have pre-ordered it. But given that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is tied to Apple Music, and right now I don’t particularly care for Apple Music,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is kind of a non-starter to me. And it’s really unfortunate because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and we’ll talk about it, I think, over the next couple of weeks, because I have a few topics, some of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which we may not get to this week, to discuss this. But I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that whole Google mantra, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from years ago of like, oh, we’re open, we’re open. And we do things because we’re open and you can do whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you want with our stuff because we’re open. Like that’s just, like open for open’s sake is just cheesy and I don’t really care.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, I mean, Google’s case, they’re often using it as a total marketing BS thing. Like it’s actually, there’s open
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then there’s Google and those occasionally intersect a little bit but they’re not usually that intersecting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I completely agree with you, but this is a case where this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sort of gated community really bums me out that, that I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use the music streaming platform that I prefer with the physical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey speaker that I would probably really love. I have been so far, I am so far behind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on podcasts. Like I haven’t listened to, uh, what was it? Query that was on relay that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had Serenity Caldwell Discussing her experience with HomePod. Is that right? I think I have that right? Well, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is. I’ll put a link in the show notes And so I haven’t listened to that yet, but I’m really looking forward to it. Yes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey query number 23. I’ll put in the show notes and Serenity Caldwell was able
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get some hands-on time with the HomePod and Apparently spent basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an hour discussing it on on this episode of query, which is really great podcast with with Stephen Hackett
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I have not a chance to listen to that. All I’ve heard through the grapevine from the little I’ve been paying attention to is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the HomePod really does sound really great. And you know what? That sounds good to me. Pardon the pun, but that sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good. Like I could see me putting this in my living room, even as a redundant set of speakers, just because I could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see screaming across the room. Hey, Cylinder play, you know, the latest album by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Radiohead on Spotify or something like that. And that would be pretty awesome. Like one of my favorite things about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One of the brief window of time I used Apple music was being able to use Siri with it, especially on my phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But because this is, this is a walled garden that, that Spotify
⏹️ ▶️ Casey isn’t allowed in and actually to that end, Overcast isn’t either in, in terms of, of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Siri support, this is, this is a non-starter to me, like I’m just not interested in it. And,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that kind of bums me out because. It was just stupid, right? Like it bums me out that I can’t send some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey faceless corporation another $350 of my money. Like that’s so dumb, but I don’t know, like a few
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years ago I would be excited about this sort of thing and now I’m kind of like, huh, that’s too bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wish I could get excited about this, but I can’t. And I know that there’s like some capitalism, like capitalism sucks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and stuff is evil, et cetera, et cetera. But I don’t know, this is just a silly thing that used to make me happy. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a new Apple thing used to always make me happy. Even when I claimed it wouldn’t, it inevitably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did. But, and maybe that’ll be the case here too. Who knows? But I don’t know, man. and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m just bummed, because I want to be excited about it, and I just can’t bring myself to.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, I’m thinking about this. I guess we’re all on the same page, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess we all don’t like music as much as we like television and movies, because
⏹️ ▶️ John all of us subscribe
⏹️ ▶️ John streaming services, right, for video. We all subscribe to Netflix, right? Yep. How
⏹️ ▶️ John many people subscribe to something else besides Netflix? I have HBO whatever. Right. Casey anything else
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Netflix so recurring subscriptions are Netflix and Spotify and I think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe case is an even footing but Marcos got twice as many video as audio services
⏹️ ▶️ John granted is just two to one I have like seven times as many
⏹️ ▶️ John audio services. Wait.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nope. You’re wrong I subscribe to Apple music and Amazon music whatever on the echo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m tied. But I think it’s different because with streaming services,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you have way lower of a percentage of overlap. If you look at the Venn diagram of each one’s catalogs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco video streaming services, I feel like there’s a lot less overlap between each one. Music streaming services,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the overlap of those Venn diagram circles of what they have is almost identical. It’s almost completely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on top of each other. So you don’t feel like you’re getting anything extra? feels redundant to pay for multiple music
⏹️ ▶️ Marco services whereas it doesn’t feel redundant to pay for multiple streaming services of different content on them
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah I suppose although I would there’s probably lots of exclusive content we
⏹️ ▶️ John just don’t know what it is because you know maybe you’re into classical music and maybe one has like all the classical
⏹️ ▶️ John music and one has crap or
⏹️ ▶️ John foreign music or none of them have fish right but if one of them did that would be a differentiator
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well no I think Spotify has a fair bit of fish doesn’t it not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but not all the live shows actually live fish has their own app and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco streaming service that has all the stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well anyway, what I’m getting at is like why is it I play for Google Play and I won’t play
⏹️ ▶️ John for Apple Music. Part of it might be the overlap, but I don’t have that problem in video. There’s a lot of overlap in the video
⏹️ ▶️ John services, but when I envision the video services, it’s like look, the only reason I’m subscribing to
⏹️ ▶️ John the CBS thing is for the one Star Trek show. In the worst case scenario, it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m literally subscribing for a single show because it’s the only place I can get it. 100% exclusive, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And these video services pay to have exclusive content created for them. That’s what brings
⏹️ ▶️ John me to them. I’m not at this point, I’m no longer subscribed to Netflix to see a bunch of like their back cloud
⏹️ ▶️ John catalog of movies. It’s purely for original Netflix series.
⏹️ ▶️ John We don’t have that in the music space. But anyway, I’m what I’m getting is I’m paying, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John 10s of dollars for all these services every single month, and It doesn’t bother me, but also paying for
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Music just feels like, meh. And I think, mostly for me anyway, it’s because I
⏹️ ▶️ John watch much more television and movies than I listen to music, because there’s a fact, right? I mean, and even
⏹️ ▶️ John in scenarios where I would be listening to music, I’m mostly listening to podcasts, which, you know. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John what does all this say? That I don’t think the cylinder market is uniquely
⏹️ ▶️ John hosed. It is hosed in very similar ways to the sort of the balkanized
⏹️ ▶️ John video market. It’s just that the video market I guess feels better because of the original content. Although it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John feel great. I mean, I resist adding up exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John how much money I’m paying every month for all my video services because I think it’s a pretty big number.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Going back one more minute to what you said a few minutes ago, Casey, about the kind of feeling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of openness that you want or seek from this product that you can’t get.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So for reasons I’ll get into later in the show, I’ve kind of been thinking similar lines recently or having similar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sensibility and you know the the fact that the HomePod
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has no equivalent or to basically a line-in port like maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AirPlay 1 might be that equivalent, but like basically it has no line-in port
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This I feel like limits its lifetime in a way that people who buy speakers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think are gonna be disappointed with this long term. Like, if you look at the iPod Hi-Fi,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the famous flop Apple product, well you know what? The iPod Hi-Fi, for the very few people who spent the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crazy amount of money to buy it, which actually I think was $400, right? So it’s not that different from the price of the HomePod. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly the same price as the HomePod, wasn’t it, $349? I thought maybe, anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was $350, by the way. Okay, yeah, so there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you go. But like, for the few people who bought those or who got them later
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off eBay as a joke, like, you know, like I know Jason Snell and Stephen Hackett both have them, and they both still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use them. Now, the iPod Hi-Fi, the main input was an iPod 30-pin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dot connector on the top, but it also had a line-in port on the back. And so this speaker
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, by all accounts, is actually a pretty decent speaker, is still useful today,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what is it, a decade after it came out, something like that? So like, it’s still useful today, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just a good speaker, and good speakers don’t go out of date. Good speakers are always good speakers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, eventually maybe the cones could rock, but it takes a very long time. Like, a good speaker is useful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way beyond the lifetime of a typical tech gadget. And people who buy good speakers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and who value good speakers know this, because every good speaker they ever bought has been this way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know, Casey, like, you know, your parents and my parents were both, like, you know, super into music
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and hi-fi systems, and you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both grew up listening to speaker systems that were decades old, And many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of those components still work today, decades later.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s exactly true. So my dad’s fancy, fancy, fancy stereo is 15, 20 years old at this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point. And I know he has teal loudspeakers. Now I’m having second thoughts. I’m pretty sure he has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey teal loudspeakers. There’s a second set of speakers, a second stereo in his house that is like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe they’re Dahlquist’s. And I am almost sure he had those in his dorm room
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when he was a kid. and my dad is 60 and change, and he was in college when he was like 20.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So to your point, I think he might’ve had to replace a cone here or there or something like that, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I 150% agree with what you’re driving at, that good speakers can last not literally forever,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but effectively fricking forever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like in the tech world, they last forever, like, you know, relative to other products that we use. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPod Hi-Fi, this speaker that came out forever ago and was a flop,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is still totally functional today for the few people who have them, because it had a line inject,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it had like this escape valve that like this future proofs this thing for a very long time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, and the HomePod, I understand why Apple’s positioning it so much as like a good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speaker, because as I said, like that’s playing to its strengths and trying to position it away from Apple’s weaknesses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this product, that’s good. But a good speaker is expected to last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to be useful. You know, if you’re gonna be spending $350 for a good speaker,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s just for one, by the way, I think a lot of people are going to end up wanting two for the way it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fills larger rooms better. If you’re going to be spending this kind of money on a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speaker, it is convention in the industry that that speaker lasts. And it doesn’t have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last 50 years. I understand there’s complex processors going in there and lots of different tweeters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything like that. So it’s more complex than most speakers. But if this thing is a flop,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s no guarantee that it will be. But I’m just saying, if this thing is a flop and support for it dwindles in the the software over the next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco five, 10 years, whatever. If you have one of these, 10 years from now, if it has a line import,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can still use it. But if the software ecosystem dries up or moves on,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this thing is now useless. And I understand a lot of tech products are this way now. This is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly how much of Sonos has operated. In fact, almost all of Sonos works this way, and that’s one of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reasons why I kind of don’t like it. But it just kind of rubs me the wrong way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that this product is so dependent on its internet connection, the Siri service
⏹️ ▶️ Marco backing it up, and the proprietary AirPlay protocol and things like that, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it makes it really hard to envision this thing being useful in 10 years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and to that end, it’s super surprising to me, like you were saying, that there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just input jack anywhere on here. And I’m looking at the HomePod specs,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it says, where is this? It says, shoot, I just lost it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey La la la la la, audio sources, there we go. It says Apple Music, iTunes Music purchases, iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Music Library with an Apple Music or iTunes Match subscription, which by the way is very cool. I’m glad that iTunes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Match is supported because I do still subscribe to that. Oh, I guess that is another audio service to John’s point earlier.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, Beats One Live Radio, what is it always on worldwide? Podcasts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco That’s still on?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think. podcasts, airplay, worldwide, airplay, other content
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to HomePod from iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Apple TV, and Mac. You’ll note that Bluetooth is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not listed in the audio sources section. However, in the wireless section
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it lists 802.11ac, Wi-Fi with MIMO, direct guest access,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever the crap that means, and Bluetooth 5. So I don’t know if Bluetooth is supported or not. And again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I apologize if I should know this, but I have not had time to read up on any of this stuff lately. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is quite possible that to your point, Marco, AirPlay is the only way to get quote-unquote
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other audio into this thing. And that just severely, and I love AirPlay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like it has its problems, don’t get me wrong, but I love AirPlay, I use AirPlay all the time, oftentimes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey streaming Spotify to my Apple TV because it would be great if Spotify made a friggin’ Apple TV app, but that’s a different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey issue. Anyway, I like AirPlay, I think AirPlay works great, and that seems to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be the only mechanism to get other audio in here, which I agree with you, Marco, is kind of bananas.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because you would think like, at least give us a little, like, what is it? An RCA jack or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a headphone jack? Or you know what I’m thinking of, but what is the…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either an 8-thing stereo headphone in jack or a pair of RCA plugs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, exactly. Like that would dramatically increase the usefulness of this thing, in my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey personal opinion. And here again, like, I think it’s a bit of a stretch for me to say what I’m about to say, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here’s like another quote unquote open issue. Like if this was designed, maybe openness
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a poor choice of words. Maybe flexibility is a better word. If this was designed to be more flexible,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then it may have some mess mechanism of physical audio input.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe it would have more software support for Spotify or frigging Overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or Pocket Cast, whatever. I don’t care if Overcast isn’t your, you know, podcasting platform of choice,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do. Fair. You know what I mean, though? Like anything, it would be—God,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s just so frustrating because I feel like this is right up my alley. As someone who has music playing in the house
⏹️ ▶️ Casey almost always, and I really mean that, like if silence just freaks me out, I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have music playing when I’m in the house, just playing with Declan or whatever. I constantly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have my home theater, if you will, stereo on, playing some sort
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of music. this would be perfect for me if I could get music
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into it from some mechanism other than AirPlay. And I guess maybe the adult answer, if you will,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is well, you’re AirPlaying to your Apple TV a lot of the time anyway, so who cares, grow up. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, it’s just so frustrating that it doesn’t have to be that way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, that’s not a good answer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know what I mean? Exactly, like it doesn’t feel right to me. Like why would I spend $350 to do something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m already doing, you know? It’s just, ugh.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and also AirPlay is limited. You know, as I mentioned last episode, AirPlay has certain latency in different scenarios. Even AirPlay 2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is going to have latency. Apple TV is going to be able to work with it by compensating for that and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco delaying the video stream so it catches up with the audio properly. But any other thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sent into it might not. And so if your answer here is AirPlay, or even Bluetooth, which also has some latency,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that rules out things like using it as TV speakers for a lot of people’s setups. It rules out future audio components
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you might want to connect to it. Honestly, I know this is not something Apple would want to enable, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you really liked the Amazon Echo service and wanted to buy a HomePod for its audio,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it had a line in, you could plug an Echo Dot to it and have it receive audio from the,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s something that I would actually consider that for my kitchen. That’s actually something people could do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I know Apple’s not gonna try to enable it for reasons like that, but they would probably sell more.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s just, again, the audio world, I feel like, And this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is kind of a larger tech problem. Like, you know, Apple talks so much about their environmental responsibility
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything, but they sure make a lot of really limited disposable devices.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re recyclable. You know, I don’t know, since none of us have this, since we failed as a group to buy
⏹️ ▶️ John one. I don’t know if it works as a plain old Bluetooth speaker, but imagine if Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ John ships the Dot with Bluetooth and then the Dot can use the
⏹️ ▶️ John HomePod as a Bluetooth speaker.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, all Amazon Echos can already do that, including the Dots. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as far as we know, the HomePod can’t take Bluetooth input as a speaker. Like the Bluetooth is there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it seems like it’s there just for like its own private use. It does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe for phone calls, perhaps?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually, I bet you’re right. It’s probably for the phone call profile. But like, you know, Bluetooth, it exposes certain profiles. And there’s some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for phone calls, there’s some for being speakers for music. And from what we know so far, it does not expose the A2DP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco protocol for music, or whatever the more modern ones are. So it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t seem, from what we know so far, that it is capable of being a Bluetooth speaker by
⏹️ ▶️ John itself. Seems like you have to buy one to find out. The chat room hasn’t said either way.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No one in the chat room
⏹️ ▶️ John bought one either? We failed as a collective here. Well, nobody has them yet. Yeah, I guess, when are they supposed to come in? The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m pretty sure during the hour-long demo at Apple PR that some people had, they probably didn’t want you to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pair your phone to it to see if it could run as a Bluetooth speaker. Yeah. Oh, let me, I’ll bring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an Echo in You’d see if the echo compared to it. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John point about this is all of us are asking for like line in or RCA or basically
⏹️ ▶️ John a wire connected to the thing. But it could be that the ubiquity of Bluetooth just washes
⏹️ ▶️ John over the entire industry. And having Bluetooth becomes the equivalent
⏹️ ▶️ John of having a line in for most people, like not high-end audio people. Because I would
⏹️ ▶️ John say $350 is expensive, but it’s not high-end audio expensive, right? No, no.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high-end audio in mid-range.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if it’s even mid-range. I guess when you have two of them, maybe it’s mid-range.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, OK. In audio, there’s three prices that everything is. Either nothing, $300, or $50,000.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, that’s roughly the classes here.
⏹️ ▶️ John So anyway, it could be that we’re just behind the market. And
⏹️ ▶️ John having the ability to take Bluetooth input is sufficient for everybody. In fact, it’s what people want.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then we’ll just have to find out whether this thing can take Bluetooth input. also getting back to the hardware thing. If it doesn’t take
⏹️ ▶️ John Bluetooth input now, as long as the hardware is there, there’s no reason they can’t change that later. And then you can have your echo
⏹️ ▶️ John dot talking to your own pod scenario in your kitchen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, maybe. I mean, that would be nice to have just to have options like that. Like I know that’s a ridiculous thing. But although I would probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually, I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John like to put a little dot on top of it. Well, that would cover
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up the little screen on it. But yeah, like it just like again, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, Casey mentioned earlier flexibility, I would I would maybe use the word versatility. There
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are so many more scenarios in which the HomePod could be useful or could be compelling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it had just one or two of these walls knocked down a little bit. But yeah, over time, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it will. We’ll see.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want to tell a short story that is really an excuse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to talk about a shopping experience I just had. So I have my MacBook Adorable,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I have a USB-C to Ethernet adapter that also has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey three traditional USB ports on it. And it’s a little bit physically large, but the problem is, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have a MacBook Adorable that only has one port, which usually doesn’t bother me, but occasionally does, let’s say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wanted to do a initial time machine backup, which can take hours, then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would have to make sure that I can do that before my battery depletes because this USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ethernet adapter does not have USB-C in. So I have no mechanism by which I can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey power my laptop while I’m using Ethernet, which normally is not that big a deal, but it’s sometimes frustrating.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right? Well, I also have a knockoff version of the Apple, I forget the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey official term for it, but the Apple adapter that has a HDMI USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in to provide power and a a single USB, what, you know, traditional
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, the $80 middle finger from Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, well, I think I got mine for like 15 or 20 bucks or something like that. I’ll put a link in the show notes. Of course I paid 80 for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, because I think I’d got mine from Monoprice or something like that. Again, I’ll have to dig it up. I don’t remember offhand, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve never had a problem with it. It works great. And it was a heck of a lot less than 80 bucks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it occurred to me, this, you know, HDMI thinger, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again has HDMI, USB-C, and traditional USB, that’s actually a really nice way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to add a single USB port while maintaining power. So you know what I should do? I should get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a USB ethernet adapter. And this way, if I do have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a long running operation, like a time machine backup, I can plug
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the old school USB ethernet adapter into my fancy pants, not 80, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not actually $80 adapter into the MacBook Adorable. So I bought a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like $15 ethernet adapter that runs over USB 3. I get it to the house
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I bought it from Amazon. I get it to the house and I did not do my due diligence and it requires
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a driver. And that should have been enough to stop me, but I was annoyed and I was like, well, screw it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s already here. I don’t want to have to return it. So I’ll just install this driver. So there I go installing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a kernel extension that unequivocally came from China, thinking to myself, this is not a wise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco am. You’re installing a kernel extension for a USB network adapter? Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That would have gone right back in the box for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Well, hold on. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey understand that this was a terrible idea. I don’t need you to write into me, anyone. I understand,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I get it. I understand China might be looking at every bit of network traffic that ever comes through this computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, that’s one problem. Also, just like, your computer’s gonna suck now. Like, you’re gonna have stability issues.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the next OS update is going to probably break it. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey there’s so many reasons why you should not need
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this. I am fully aware of all these things. So I was just frustrated, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the heat of the moment, I just went with it. Well, then I do this kernel extension. I try to install
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this driver. It installs just fine, but I can’t maintain a connection
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for more than like a minute or two. And I decide, you know what? That is definitely not going to work. And even though
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this thing is only $15, I’m going to have to return it. So I go to return
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it to Amazon, which I’ve done like once or twice in the past, but I think it was one of you guys that said this before,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like it takes a lot for me to return anything, even to like a nameless corporation. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s really bad for me to return something to a retail store. I hate doing that, because I just feel like a jerk.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Even if it’s well within my, you know, ability, and that’s not the word I’m looking for, but if it’s well
⏹️ ▶️ Casey within my rights, I guess, for lack of a better word, to return something, I hate doing it. I think, Marco, you’ve talked about this a lot, and I feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly the same way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, honestly, to be fair, like it’s so easy to return stuff to Amazon that I do return stuff to Amazon at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more of a regular person rate than anything else in my life.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There you go. So perfect segue. Thank you. I’ll, I’ll, I’ll send you a dollar later. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey decide to return this thing to Amazon and I start grumbling to myself because I’m like, oh, now I’m gonna have to box
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it up and then I’m gonna have to mail it and this is going to be a royal pain, but one of the options I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had was to return it to an Amazon locker. I thought to myself, you know what? I know there’s at least a couple of lockers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nearby. Don’t be creepy. I’m going to try this. So they say, okay, you can return
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it to an Amazon locker. Here’s what you do. We’ve given you a PDF that has a hilariously large,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like it almost looks like a mailing label, except there was no postage required because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to an Amazon locker. And given that this was a little USB adapter, that was probably the size of a deck of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cards. Like the box of it was roughly the size of a deck of cards. I needed to put it in this like hilariously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey large box just to fit the stupid mailing label on it. But be that as it may, so far so good. So I print
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that out, I find a much larger box than I should really need, I tape
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it all, I put it in the box, I tape it all up, blah, blah, blah, and I go to the Amazon Locker.
⏹️ ▶️ John How much did this thing cost again? Because now you’re overrunning my, like now I need to know a number. How much did this cost?
⏹️ ▶️ John Didn’t you say $15? It was about 15 bucks. That’s way over $15 worth
⏹️ ▶️ John effort you’ve already spent. I feel like I spent $15 worth of effort listening to this story so far.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Well, thanks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like if I had a $15 product that didn’t work, I would probably honestly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just throw it away. Like I don’t think I would go through this. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I would just eat that cost. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey in case he’s trying to work the system
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Normally I would agree. Normally I would not even think about it, especially since my LLC bought this, so it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey free money, except not, but whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco No, that’s not how that works. Yeah, I know, I know. But it’s kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sometimes think about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyways. And you really shouldn’t. I know I shouldn’t. All right, just leave me alone. Okay, just let me finish. So the point
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that I decided to return to this Amazon locker and I agree with you guys. This was a hilarious amount of effort for something that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I should have just thrown in the trash and walked away from, but I was annoyed and I wanted to kind of send this back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and say, screw you. This thing was a piece of garbage. So I drive to the Amazon locker and they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey give you a little code. And so there’s a screen in the middle of the lockers and you type in your like six digit or six
⏹️ ▶️ Casey character code or whatever. And I do that. And then a locker
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just pops open, which isn’t entirely surprising. It was kind of cool to see. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I go to put my hilariously large box in this locker that was about three or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe three inches tall, and this box was easily six or seven inches. And I look
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the box and I look at the locker and I look at the box and I look at the locker and I think, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey crap, this isn’t going to go well. Now I’m like, what do I do?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You throw it in the trash. Did you consider this problem gone? I know,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco If you were a
⏹️ ▶️ John real American, you would have made that box thick. Just shove it in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there, just crunch it up. Wait, why was the box so big for a little USB dongle thing?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because of the stupid mailing label. Like, because the mailing label was easily like six inches wide for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this teeny tiny little…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think what I would have done is just like tape the mailing label around the item
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey itself. I probably should have.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Make the mailing label and tape the box and just make sure the barcode is visible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey somewhere. Well, I was going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say, you’re also supposed to put something in like a different barcode in the box just in case, but I agree with you. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyway, the reason I bring this up though, is because on the screen, there was an option that said, my box
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is too big. I need a bigger locker, please, or whatever. And so I closed the, I closed the locker
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I hit that button, or I think I hit the button, then close the locker. And sure enough, a different one popped open and it fit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just fine. And this was, this all happened yesterday. And so then, That’s the story. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, and then, and then I put my box into the locker. I shut the locker. I waited a day and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they said, they’re going to credit my credit card. How cool is that? I just thought that was such a neat experience. And this is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, this is so cool. You’re excited about the option to say that your box is too big?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. No, the fact that there was a locker to give, like, I’m really not messing with you. I realize
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is hilarious, but, um, I can’t believe it took this long to tell that story. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is so awesome. Come on. So, so here it is like this, this establishment that’s, that’s all in the cloud,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you will, figuratively speaking, it’s all in the cloud. Like there is, there’s no real Amazon brick and mortar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stores except yeah, well actually whatever, whatever. But the point is that they just installed, it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just like a friggin’ Sunoco station that they had this locker at. And I could drive to the Sunoco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey station, don’t be creepy, and I could return my item without having to send anything in the mail,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey without having to worry about postage, without having to worry about whether or not the mail was open.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, you know that when you return something, they give you a prepaid UPS label.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But then I still would have to bring it to a UPS store or a
⏹️ ▶️ John UPS dropbox. Let me tell you, the UPS drop boxes are big enough to accommodate your package. Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes. First of all, there are tons of UPS stores and drop boxes everywhere. Second of all, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also hand it to any UPS driver anywhere. So if you have a UPS driver who comes to your office
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every day, you can just bring it to work and leave it at the front desk and say, hey, can you give this to the UPS guy? Or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you are at home, like I am, and you see the UPS person either come to your house or go to a neighbor’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco house, you can walk outside and be like, here you go. That’s it. It’s so easy.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that the second strategy only works for Marco, where the UPS man comes to his house every single day.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s exactly right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco And he’s home all day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You both go to offices where they definitely come every day. They come to every office every day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, you have a month to return it when you do this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not the Amazon Locker. The Amazon Locker, you have one full business day. Thank you very much. No, but I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to say, if you do the UPS prepaid label, which is the option you should always take,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they give you a month to return it. So it doesn’t matter if the UPS guy doesn’t come your house every day. If somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from UPS comes to your house at least once a month, or you can find a Dropbox or pass the UPS store at least
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once a month, you just do that. It’s so, I, I, I, oh my God, I can’t believe you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey spent that much effort on this. So, well, but the thing, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I brought all this up was because,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, the reason I brought all this up was not about this particular stupid dongle, it was not about, you know, whether or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not this was the most effective way to return this item. This was just my my first experience with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an Amazon locker and I thought it was really freaking cool. And I could see how having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this at like Whole Foods would be really convenient. And I just thought,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I think that this is a company that, that really exists
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only in the ether by most definitions, right? There’s magic wherein,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, I click some buttons on my, on my keyboard and my mouse, then something suddenly shows up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at my house and I have no mechanism wherein I can physically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey take something and return it to them. Like, yes, I understand what you just said, Marco. I get it. It’s called
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey way it got there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I get it. But I understand. But like, I just thought that this was really freaking cool. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes, I understand. Okay. You can nitpick everything. I just said, yes, there’s a local Amazon warehouse, but no, I couldn’t have brought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it there. Yes, I can take it to UPS. That’s true. But I just thought that this was a really neat, like halfway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and a really neat way to give themselves a foothold geographically without having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have a full on brick and mortar store. And if you end up cutting this from the released
⏹️ ▶️ Casey episode, fine. I just feel like it’s really cool. And after all the moaning and complaining we all did about the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey HomePod, I thought we would like a nice story. And this to me was a nice story.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you’re going to try that Amazon key thing next, where you let Amazon open the door to your house and go inside?
⏹️ ▶️ John no. That’s the next step. It could be neat. Just try it. You’re installing kext from China
⏹️ ▶️ John on your laptop. Why not allow Amazon into your house?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, yes, yes. Here we go.
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Casey wrote a Mac app
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I wrote a Mac app over the last couple of weeks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, last week you told us a little bit, you kind of teased it a little bit, it was for photo management,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s right. So here’s the situation. Quick recap, Dr.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Drang had written a, or maybe he had fixed or otherwise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tweaked a series of scripts. I’m not sure what Genesis was, but he had written or tweaked or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a bunch of Python scripts to do some basic rearranging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of files as after he imports them. So the idea is, and here’s how I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey used it. So the idea is I have a single folder that has a shed load of files be that from the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be that from my Physical camera or but you’ll on my my big camera, whatever, but I want them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all to be filed away in folders that are like, you know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the the root folder slash 2018 slash 0 1 and then the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the file names would be roughly ISO 8601 because this is one of the rare cases where I think I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ISO 8601 makes perfect sense. So the file name would be something along the lines of 2018-01-31.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And in my particular case, I did a space, which I know some people may not agree with, whatever, it doesn’t matter,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then the 24 hour time. So something like 21-53-whatever seconds,.jpg, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So all the script did was it would crack open all of these images. It would look at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the EXIF data to see when was this picture taken? then it would rename that file
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be, you know, the roughly 8601 time and date. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then it would file that away and copy it to the appropriate folder. Does that make sense so far? Is everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with me? Yep. So this was working pretty well, except it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey required like a whole bunch of third-party libraries because Python. And I never had the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey confidence to like really tweak it because I sort of understand Python, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can read it okay, but I’m really, really bad at writing it. So it felt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like an untenable solution. Like I shouldn’t have something that’s this important to me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I can’t really work with. Plus HEVC and more importantly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey HEIC happened. And I wasn’t confident that this script would work with either of those.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It may have for all I know, but I wasn’t confident. And that was just a straw that broke the camel’s back.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I said, you know what, screw it. I’m gonna rewrite this. I’m gonna do it in Swift. I’m going to make a command line app to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I wrote an app. And it’s about 500 lines. And it’s just used via the command line. And what you do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is you say, here’s the source folder where all of these files exist, be it movies or images.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And here’s the target folder. And then it will do basically the same thing as this Python script did. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will open up these images or open up these movies, figure out when they were taken, when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the snapshot happened or when the recording happened, rename them, and then file them appropriately.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It will also be smart enough to, if you took like a burst and you actually kept the burst,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’ll rename it to like, you know, something, something, something A, something, something, something B, something, something,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something C, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so there wouldn’t be any collisions and it will report
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in when something like, when I couldn’t figure out when the picture was taken because sometimes for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey example, with Instagram, when you save a picture or maybe it’s Instagram stories, I forget what, but one way or another,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sometimes there is no exit data. So there’s no reliable way to figure out One was this picture taken and,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I have the option of falling back to like the file creation date, but sometimes that works, sometimes that doesn’t, blah, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blah. So I wrote all this in Swift and it’s roughly 500 lines. It does not use any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sort of third party library. There’s no Carthage. There’s no CocoaPods because I’m not an animal. And also because I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t need anything. Um, and it felt really, really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good. Like I’m really happy with it. It’s not perfect, but you know, this one is mine and it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey works for me. And I have learned some new things during it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For whatever reason, I’d never really had an occasion to use what old people will call NS operation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey queue, what I would call just operation queue. I’d never really had a need for that in the past. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I used one, and I actually found a bug because of it earlier today, but that’s a different story. But nevertheless,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this thing is multi-threaded. So it will spew a whole ton of threads
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and churn through all these files and rename them and move them. well, copy them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so on and so forth. And I really am happy with this. Now, do I plan to release it to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyone? Absolutely not, because I wrote it for me. It works only for me. This is specifically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey designed to work for me. And the code kind of looks like garbage because I’m not showing it to anyone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nor do I really plan on open sourcing it because I don’t really know what good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will come from that other than people laughing at why this is crummy code, because again, I didn’t make it super
⏹️ ▶️ Casey testable, I didn’t make it super robust because it’s just for me, it’s okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I’m really pleased with how it worked out, a couple of small bugs aside,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I just thought it was a really neat learning experience. Maybe the only thing that’s super interesting for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey listeners is to say, sometimes scratching your own itch can really be helpful because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now I can use Operation Queues with confidence in my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey work work. I understand that Operation Queue is in iOS, like I’m fully aware of that, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for whatever reason, I just never really had a need for it. And now, and I’m picking on this only because it’s a silly example
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that many, many iOS developers have used in the past. Marco, I assume you’ve used Operation Q’s at some point or another,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco especially for Overcast. I use many of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them. Yeah, exactly. So maybe it’s kind of weird that I hadn’t had a need
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for one, but for whatever reason I hadn’t, and now I’ve used them. And so now I kind of know something and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s exciting. And so I just thought it was a useful thing to share that, you know, If you’re a developer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even if you’re not learning a new language to do these sorts of things, if you’re not trying to use this as an excuse to teach yourself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Python, for example, sometimes it’s just nice to do something different in the language
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you already know and love. So that’s basically it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s all I got. That’s cool. Yeah, I think this is kind of one of the unspoken benefits of being a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco programmer and also just a computer user. It’s like, if you as a computer user have a problem that you would like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be solved in a better or different way. If it’s something that can be reasonably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easily programmed and you’re a programmer, you can just do it. You can just make something that does this for you. It’s very empowering.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s really amazing. And it’s one of the amazing things about modern computers, like about all computers really,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that give people the power to do that. If they learn the relatively accessible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco skill of programming like then you can do lots of cool things like this. whether it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as simple as like, you know, an Excel macro, all the way down to doing something cool like this with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco switch and operation cues on, you know, on the command line. This is just, it’s one of the great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco satisfactions and advantages of being a programmer is that you can, you know, if you have a problem,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a decent chance you can make a solution to it. If one doesn’t exist out there, that’s exactly what you want.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, exactly right. And I think your point that you just made is very important that this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doesn’t have to be writing a Swift command line app. This can be, just like you said, something in Excel. It can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be something with Automator. It can, if you’re one of those iOS weirdos like Federico and Mike,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then you can do this using Workflow. I mean, it’s all, there’s all sorts of different things you can do,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey um, in, in all different levels of the stack, the, or levels of abstraction.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s just really, really nice and convenient. And yeah, there’s a couple of minor bugs I need to work out. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, it occurred to me earlier tonight that the problem with going multi-threaded is that as multiple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey threads are trying to figure out if there’s name collisions, sometimes one thread will think there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not a name collision and by the time it gets to copying the file, there will be a name collision, which is unwise.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I need to clean that up a little bit and make sure I have some gates in there where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey those sorts of things are being figured out. But nonetheless, the point I’m driving at is, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the level may be, be it in assembly or be it in an Excel macro or anything in between,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s just really, really neat to be able to solve these sorts of problems for yourself. And once I get this thing like really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and truly locked in, which I think I’m pretty darn close, this is going to be perfect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me forever because it was written for me. Like, you know, I, my, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey guess my first contracting assignment for my, for my newfound future, which may or may not ever happen of being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an iOS or Mac contractor. I hired myself.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I wrote this for myself and you know what? I did a pretty great job. It’s perfect,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey short of that one bug. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s this sort of thing. Like, and again, I can’t stress enough, like whatever your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey abilities may be, there’s something like this that you can do. It may even be in workflow.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It may be whatever, but there’s something like this you can do, and it feels so great once it’s done.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Forecast is another great example, actually. That was written entirely for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco you, wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Sidetrack still is. Like Sidetrack is the DriftSync utility. like that’s still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco written just for me in the language I already knew but doing something that was totally new to me like you know similar what you were just saying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it was wonderful and solved a really big problem I had editing podcasts and lining up people’s tracks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it but you know and but like you know like you’re probably gonna get at least two or three people asking you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to like open source this you know I’ve had handfuls of people ask me over the years that side track is now I think like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco four years old you know I’ve given to a few friends here and there but like it’s it’s not releasable like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a lot like it works you know this is one of the advantages of making things for yourself. It works for me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Right, exactly. Exactly. But like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, give it something it doesn’t expect or some kind of condition that I didn’t consider
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or that I never ran into myself, so it’s not really tested. And, you know, it might not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work so well or it might not work at all or it might do weird things. And so, you know, it like making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something releasable and then releasing it is way different and way more work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than making something that works for you. And it’s occasionally worth doing. know some things are worth releasing to the world for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the benefit of the world or maybe for some kind of business reason but but you know there’s nothing wrong with making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that are just for you that you never share with anybody or that you share with only a couple of friends
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it doesn’t have to be a releasable big thing like I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I usually use shell scripts for these kinds of tasks I just like using shell scripts a lot but like I have a giant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shell script that takes the input files from each of the podcasts I do so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco give me the file that john gives me for this show and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t I don’t even have to move them out of Dropbox anymore like it goes and looks in Dropbox for the files where they’re supposed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be mm-hmm moves them into the my project directory decodes them puts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know moves all the channels around decodes the weird call recorder files like you know it does all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this stuff mostly by like calling out to FFmpeg and stuff like that lines them all up and outputs all the right files and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just a big shell script and I made it just for me just to help me with this task I do every week that’s kind of tedious if I do it manually.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s great. And like, just the ability of programmers to do this is just it’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wonderful and productive, like as to be a power user of a computer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then to also be able to do at least a little bit of programming, you can just make the computer work so much better for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you and take and take even more advantage of the massive amount of computational power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is at our fingertips, just waiting for the right software to come along and actually use it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One other final thought on this, which I forgot to mention earlier. I do have a problem with this thing that I’ve written.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the problem that I have is that now I kind of want to make a full-on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac app, like not a command line app, like a full-on GUI Mac app where it’ll basically…
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s my problem with the thing you wrote, the fact that you called it a Mac app and I was all excited. Wow, Casey
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey wrote a Mac app. And you’re like, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John he just wrote a shell script in Swift.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As much as I really want to get angry and argue with you, I think that is actually a a fair characterization.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But now I kind of do want a GUI app.
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco, you should make Overcast for the Mac, but just make it a command line script.
⏹️ ▶️ John command line thing that just hits the web interface endpoints and pulls down the audio that way.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It would just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a shell script. Just pipe it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John to AM play or whatever. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John a really long alias for a curl command. Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But now I do kind of want a GUI app. So rather than just going on faith that this will work, which again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey short of this one bug, has worked pretty well the few times I’ve used it so far. But I’d
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually, I’m thinking about maybe quote unquote upgrading this to be a full on GUI app such that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this way I can kind of stage, okay, here’s what we think this file should be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey named and here’s where it will belong. It kind of like image capture, like I have this vision of something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that aesthetically looks vaguely like image capture, where it’s basically like a big table of,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here’s a little preview of the image, here’s maybe a couple of pieces of data about it. and then here’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where we think it should end up. Do you want to commit all these changes or like tweak a couple things?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then there’ll be basically the big green go button that’ll actually do it. Whereas right now it just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey goes immediately and it’s copying, it’s not moving. So in theory it’s non-destructive, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it would be nice to be able to say, ooh, actually that definitely is not right. Let’s tweak that. You know what I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean? And so who knows, maybe in my copious spare time, I’ll be able to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey write my first Mac GUI app. We’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll tell you one thing that is 10,000 times more work than making like the shell script
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey version. Oh, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, like, I’ve had similar thoughts about, you know, oh, I should really like polish up sidetrack and,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and make a little GUI for us people can like drag in their files and pick like which channel should go where and output this the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, undrifted files or whatever. And it like even that, that’s just like, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like now that I know like from forecast and like, it’s it’s so much work. Like, GUIs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are so much harder to to make and like, and especially like, it’s one thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you just want a GUI, but if you want a good one, that’s very different. Like if you want like a nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac app or even like a passably decent Mac app, like forecast is not a nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac app. It’s, it’s at best like an okay passable Mac app, but that’s fine. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, that’s, you know, I don’t, it’s not worth investing, you know, tons and tons of my time into it to make it like a great Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app. You know what you’re talking about? Like that’s, that’s a pretty dramatic increase in the workload
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, 100%, yeah, yeah, yeah. And especially if you don’t really need the GUI. This one wasn’t, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sidetrack, I don’t need the GUI for Sidetrack. I call it in my giant shell scripts that process my podcasts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Jason Snell uses it, and I believe he made a automator
⏹️ ▶️ Marco workflow to use it, so he can use it kind of in a graphical way at least. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just use it through a shell script, so I don’t need it. So it’s one of those things, like I would love to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it someday, but I’m probably never going to because it’s probably not worth it. You know, this is the kind of thing, like if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t need this GUI, you’re talking about like now taking this nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco small bit, you know, script basically that works great for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now you’re talking about making it into a product. Basically, like you’re talking about the amount of work necessary to make it into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a product for lots of people. And then you have to deal with, you know, do you want to release that? Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once you put in all that much work, you probably might as well release it. Then it’s a big thing. and you gotta support it, or even if it’s not, even if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco free, or even if it’s open source, you still gotta deal with people’s, you know, emails and questions and pull requests if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s open source and everything. Like, it basically dramatically broadens the scope of this project
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from a shell script that works for you to this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco product, basically.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and I agree with you. I think the thing is, though, that even if I GUI-ified
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, if you will, it would be the world’s most ugly user interface because it would be intended
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just for me. And at most, I suspect I would open source it. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not saying I’m going to, but I’m saying with this hypothetical GUI on top of it, maybe I would open source it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think I would ever like properly release it. But to that end, you’re still right. Like I would then feel guilty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about ignoring all the pull requests that I would end up ignoring. And I would feel guilty about ignoring all the issues
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’d be ignoring. No matter how much I said, this is really made just for me. And it’s not intended for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyone else to use it. inevitably somebody else would be like, oh, I should use this, but now I want something new.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, and, and. Or it didn’t work on this one file
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey or whatever else. Right, exactly, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So this is why, and I don’t mean this in like a, I don’t mean to be like an antagonist,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t mean to be antagonistic about it, it’s just, these are all the reasons why I don’t plan to release it, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no matter how much I caveat, no matter how much I say, look, this was written just for me, this code, I know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s garbage, but I was, it was quick and dirty to just get it to work. Like no matter how much you say that, nobody
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever really and truly understands it. And so it’s just a waste of time to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey release this in any capacity, even with a GUI. But on the plus side though, that means it could be the world’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ugliest, world’s worst GUI, and it would be okay because it would be literally just for me.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like GitHub has changed us a little bit and introduced the very important modern developer skill,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is the ability to put source code up on GitHub when you’re under your GitHub account
⏹️ ▶️ John and then feel zero guilt for ignoring it forever because all you’re doing, all the only reason you’re putting it there
⏹️ ▶️ John is to have a convenient storage space. So when you need to get that shell script on some new Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John that you’re setting up, or like basically using GitHub as hosting and as version control for yourself and hosting
⏹️ ▶️ John for yourself. And with no intention of ever looking at the issues or
⏹️ ▶️ John ever answering anyone’s questions about anything or caring how many people fork it, or like, because I see a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of that. People have personal products on GitHub that it’s so clear that they’re just using it as like their
⏹️ ▶️ John Git remote and convenient hosting. That’s it. And maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John you said you’d feel guilty about it or whatever, but I think that getting over that and eventually getting the
⏹️ ▶️ John discipline to reframe the problem in that way can be slightly
⏹️ ▶️ John freeing because I think there is a benefit to not to having that source code like someplace else and to have it hosted
⏹️ ▶️ John even just as a single user. I mean, I know you can just make it private, like a why even make a public, use it, we could have them make a
⏹️ ▶️ John private, But I know this goes against what I just said, but every once in a while, someone
⏹️ ▶️ John will do a convenient pull request or find a bug, and you can just click a button and accept their thing, and your program
⏹️ ▶️ John got better, and you didn’t have to do anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It may be super rare that that happens.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe it’s once every three years, but I don’t know. I just feel like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a good thing to be able to do. Because I feel bad about all of like, because
⏹️ ▶️ John we all have like piles of crap code, like on our local computers for various purposes.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I feel bad about all that. Somehow I think I would feel better if that crap code was like up
⏹️ ▶️ John on a public GitHub page for some poor person to stumble across do with what they want.
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s time to return to Marco’s Vinyl Corner. Oh no, I forgot my own joke. Marco’s Vinyl
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Arc. Oh my goodness. So, in the last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco episode of Marco’s Vinyl Arc, where I was discussing getting this turntable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and enjoying it and…
⏹️ ▶️ John You just need one more turntable and you will have finally arrived.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, because I have a microphone?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Mm-hmm. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John all right! Well done, I did not get that at all. Yes. Well
⏹️ ▶️ John done. He may be oversubscribed in the microphone department. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, part of the appeal, what I like about it is that it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of the anti-technology that you just like, you put on, You manually take your hands
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you put a piece of physical media on a player that plays it in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost the most basic analog way possible. Like it’s ridiculous how basic this technology
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really is at heart and how little it’s really doing. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really enjoyed, you know, not only like the anti-tech part of it, of just like being so simple and not relying on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like crappy spotty voice assistants, not relying on Wi-Fi or people’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird, you know, network stuff or, you know, services or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gated communities or whatever else. Just a single-purpose device. You put music
⏹️ ▶️ Marco onto it and it plays. And then you get to listen to the music. And you don’t get to, you don’t get to like mess
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the music. You don’t get to like skip around super easy or change, you know, speak at a, you know, yell a different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco band name across the room to listen to a different band before the song’s even finished yet, like we so often do with the Echo. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to sit and enjoy it slowly and that is… there’s a lot of advantages to that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Builds character you might say. Okay but you know as as John
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rightfully pointed out you know you don’t need a vinyl player to do that you know you can you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use like a CD player or an iPod or a cassette deck or an 8-track
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if those still exist like you can use lots of things that can only play music you know in the more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco modern way. I didn’t want to just buy an iPod because A, that introduces too much choice again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because then it’s like, okay, now… Part of what I like about the vinyl situation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that it forces me to really narrow down what albums I actually want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to buy. Like, what albums are good enough that I actually want this giant square
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sitting in a bookshelf indefinitely? So that’s one angle. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also, when I want to play some music, it’s nice to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have restricted choice. When you have like a cylinder you can speak
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into and you can just name anything in all of music and it will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco start playing. That’s actually, you know, that’s nice in certain contexts. You know, it’s nice to be able to just call up any song if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want to hear it. But if you just want to like put something on in the background
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or put something on to like listen to to you know chill out on the couch for a while or something, I find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I’m I’m almost paralyzed by the choice of that. And I often will just call up the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same things over and over again, because I just can’t think of anything else off the top of my head.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t have that kind of, whatever kind of creativity of the mind lets people call things up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or create new ideas out of nothing. I’ve never really had that. I need a prompt.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I joked on the show a long time ago that I’m not a salad power user. Why don’t you, when you go to one of those trendy salad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco places, I want a list of presets, and I get to choose from the presets, and maybe do some customization
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the sound, but really, I just want presets to choose from. And so one thing I like also about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the vinyl situation is that when I wanna go play something, I can look through the, roughly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I have about 20 albums now, I can look through the 20 albums and just say, which of these do I wanna listen to right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now? By nature, it’s all stuff I like, because we bought them. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not like, I don’t have to look through every artist ever in the history of the world, I’m already looking at stuff I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, and I’d be fine putting on pretty much any of them. And I’ll see one and I’m like, oh yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. But I wouldn’t have thought to call it up if I was just given a prompt by voice, like oh, what do you want to listen to?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. So that part’s nice as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John This system’s gonna fall apart when you’ve purchased your first 7,000 albums and have a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco house dedicated
⏹️ ▶️ John to stacks and stacks of them and now you’ve just recreated your iPod in physical form.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, okay. So anyway. Well that’s the thing, Do you remember record collections when
⏹️ ▶️ John we were, well, when I was a kid, and maybe you remember it well, like people would fill their houses with these things. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, my dad has one. Yeah, in fact, we actually, we didn’t, in my house growing up, we had,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our upstairs was, it was just like the three bedrooms and the bathroom arranged like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically in a giant square with like a little tiny like hexagonal hallway in the middle, it wasn’t even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a long hallway, it was like a little like hexagonal landing, basically, with like a door to each of the rooms and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. And there was nowhere in the house where my mom could store her massive record collection. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in that tiny little hallway were just like four like milk crate type baskets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just filled with records. And so basically my entire childhood growing up, I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the time stub my toe on these giant boxes of vinyl that were sitting in the hallway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to our house that I walked through constantly. You have to just like squeeze between two of them to walk into the door of my bedroom.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, anyway, yeah, big pain in the butt. Anyway, I’m really enjoying the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vinyl. However, there are a couple of limitations. Obviously, one of them, as John mentioned before, is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you get like five minutes of playtime before you have to flip it over, especially on these new audiophile masters where they take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a, they take like one album that’s on, if it’s on CD, it’s on one CD, but if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on vinyl, they split it onto four sides, like two discs, four sides, each one with like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three songs at best. So that’s kind of a pain. And that isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even for length reasons. there’s these giant black gaps in the middle of anyway so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s that’s a minor pain but one of the more you know glaring limitations of this is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this only works for albums that are available on vinyl and not everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and not even just fish not everything is available on vinyl that I want to listen to in this fashion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would like something that I can just you know take some kind of physical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco media that can be in some kind of small collection like what I have with the records and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put it into a player and have it just start playing and to remove all of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco abilities I have with you know a voice assistant to just yell across the room to have a change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make it not that easy to even like skip a song because I actually kind of like being forced to listen to all the songs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I as I mentioned last time like I’ve always been a full album listener like I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t I don’t use shuffle or anything like I always listen to full albums. Obviously one thing I could do is just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get a CD player and just get CDs, because CDs cost nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you go on Amazon and look to buy used CDs, any album you want, you can buy on a used CD
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for like 50 cents plus $4 shipping. So they basically cost nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I also kind of want the ability to make my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco own. Maybe certain albums that aren’t even available on CD or like certain like fish shows I want to like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a whole show or so you know or like a band like the Beatles where I like a lot of Beatles
⏹️ ▶️ Marco songs but I don’t like any of their albums well enough to play them straight through or things like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the two gleam albums by the Ava brothers they’re both EPS I would like to have that be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one long CD that’s the regular length of an album because they’re really good but you know it’s too very short EPS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway so I wanted some degree of customizability physical media and a way to play it where I could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco literally just put it in, not navigate any menus of anything, not even have like the TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on in living room, just put it in and it can start playing and I can walk away.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So again CDs I think are the most obvious solution to this. These days any CD player that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can find that’s at all reasonable will also be able to play mp3 CDs and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that that blows through any kind of length limit you might be worried about with single discs. The The downside of CDs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that then I would have to have a CD burner on my computer all the time. I’d have to get a CD burner
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of my closet and plug it in and deal with that whenever I wanted to create a new one of these.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I wanted to see if I could do better. In the last segment that we talked about this a few weeks ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I jokingly said, why don’t I just get something that can play songs off of an SD card? Wouldn’t it be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cool to have a little box full of SD cards?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you can make them like tiny little record albums. Like you could, and I, and so basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I decided, let me try to actually make something that does this. There’s this entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco world out there that I have not yet taken part in of really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco small, really inexpensive hobbyist computer gear led by things like the Arduino and Raspberry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pi projects. And the more basic stuff like the Arduino based stuff, I haven’t used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any of it before. But like, once you get into things like wiring things on breadboards, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco beyond my level of expertise and my level of interest, honestly. I don’t really want to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into the hardware manipulation side of things for the most part. Like, anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that involves putting resistors on, soldering anything, or using those little waffle board breadboard things,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s not for me right now. Raspberry Pi, on the other hand, has a bunch of really interesting stuff that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until I started looking at this I really didn’t realize quite how much stuff there was, quite how easy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was to use, and quite how little it all cost. Again, like I’ve mentioned before, like in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple ecosystem it’s kind of… like if we spend too much time in Apple world it’s easy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to miss or to not be aware of quite how cheap everything else is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everywhere else. Like what you can get for like under $50
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for almost any type of category that’s not by Apple, like it’s It’s pretty remarkable. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I decided I’m gonna get a Raspberry Pi and I’m gonna try to build an SD card audio player. I ordered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Raspberry Pi. I got like the, I mean, and again, there’s tons of different ones. The smallest one is like $10.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it’s ridiculous what you can get. I got like the kind of regular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one which the board is about, I think $35 and I got a little plastic case for it for like another 10
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a little USB power supply for another five or 10 or whatever. And it’s just a Linux
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer. like it’s a little tiny Linux computer with a remarkable amount of hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and power. Like it has four USB ports, HDMI out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio out, and like composite video if you need that for some reason, and Wi-Fi and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ethernet. All of that, and one gig of RAM and a pretty decent ARM processor.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All with, oh, with an SD card that came with it in this bundle package, with a micro SD
⏹️ ▶️ Marco card that has a pre-loaded installation of Raspbian,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like the Debian variant, I think, for Raspberry Pi. You plug it in, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plugged it into this little tiny HDMI monitor I got for my failed video career, and you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plug in any keyboard, mouse, and HDMI monitor, and it comes pre-configured.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The SD card has, you launch it the first time, and it shows you a GUI. You can navigate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the mouse you plugged into it, and it’s like, all right, pick your distribution, and we’ll install it for you. you pick whatever it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is you plug into the network and it downloads the distribution with your settings you give it your wi-fi
⏹️ ▶️ Marco password during setup and then it overwrites itself with the distribution that you just picked with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the wi-fi pre-configured like it’s it’s shocking like how good this is and how really relatively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easy it is to use uh and then i had a linux computer that was ready to go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and read you know with built-in audio built-in networking built-in usb uh for me to do do whatever I wanted with.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I poked around. One of the things with audio playback that is important to me is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gapless playback. So I can’t just do a shell script that just calls like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco terminal thing that just plays audio synchronously and then stops and then goes to the next track. I want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a gapless playback between tracks because a lot of the albums that I listen to are live albums or they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have transitions between songs. And so a gap between everything is you know just kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s jarring and it’s kind of you know inelegant and so I wanted Gapless and it turns out there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this great music player that’s been around forever that of course I never knew about because I’ve been in Apple land called MPD
⏹️ ▶️ Marco music player demon and it does Gapless like with almost with no effort
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like this stuff like this software is really advanced I had no idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it the the Raspberry Pi has an SD micro SD slot but That’s for its disk.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can’t really use it for anything else. It has to boot off of that. So I had to add my own card
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reader, but I had like a drawer full of card readers. And I made a shell script that would respond to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the card being inserted via Udev. It copies any audio files
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off of that card into a temp directory. And as it’s copying, it starts playing the first one. So it’s a fast response
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. And then it unmounts the card. And if you remove the card,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it stops. I gotta say, it took not that much effort, and it pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much works. And there’s a couple of things I did with it that I do wanna touch on, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s kind of awesome. I wish I had, now I’m just brainstorming,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wish I had more things that I needed raspberry pies for, because I can’t believe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how good and how easy it is to use this stuff, and how cheap it all was.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it kind of ignited in me this satisfaction and happiness
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that like, oh my God, I just made this awesome little computer to do this crazy, cool thing that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanted. You know, it’s similar to, you know, we mentioned earlier, like the satisfaction of being a programmer and being able
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have a computer solve a problem for you by writing a script or something to do it. This was like the hardware version of that. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wanted a little SD card player to play audio and in a very simple way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I just made one. And it wasn’t that hard, because I already know how to use Linux. and it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was really so satisfying. And such a fun little project.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, we don’t get a lot of fun in the Apple world. Like, we get some cool stuff, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re not so big on fun. This was just like a fun little thing, and it was really nice to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Very satisfying, and I’m just so thankful to the world of Linux and open source
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software, and these amazing hobbyist things like Raspberry Pi, And I even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco later spent another $30 to upgrade the audio interface in it with this company
⏹️ ▶️ Marco called HiFiBerry that just makes a variety of audio I.O. boards that just stick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right on top of the Raspberry Pi using the big I.O. header that’s on it. And they sell their own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little cases that are a little bit taller that fit it. It’s amazing! And so I made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this awesome player. Now there are certain things that didn’t go so well. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco idea of automatically detecting an SD card being inserted or removed does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco indeed work from UDEV, but doesn’t work all the time. Occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it gets into a state where it stops sending add and remove events,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it only sends change events. So I have a little bit of a tweak that I need to do there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That also seems to vary with which card reader I’m using. One of them seems to work more reliably than the others in this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco regard, so I’m just sticking with that one. It’s fine. Also, the, uh… I guess that’s really the only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco major problem. Oh, the other problem is, like, I assumed that it would be really easy to, like, go on eBay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and buy large lots of used, low-capacity SD cards for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very little money. Because, you know, if you have, like, to copy over an album for,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or, like, even if you encode it with, like, ALAC or some kind of, like, large, you know, FLAC, some kind of large codec,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s still only gonna be like 300 megs maybe and so if you have like a card that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a gig or 512 megs that’s enough for this purpose. You don’t need larger cards than that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I assumed it’d be really easy to just go online and get like you know lots of used 1 gig SD cards for like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a dollar each or something or less it turns out it’s not so easy. I don’t know where these all are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they’re not being sold very very often so the best I could do is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a couple of vendors that sell 10 packs of 16 gig cheap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cards for about $5 each. That’s insane.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my gosh, that’s cheap. Yeah, exactly. I understand it’s more than you need. Like I totally get what you’re driving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at, but man, that’s cheap.
⏹️ ▶️ John 16 gigs and you’re gonna put an album’s worth of MP3s on them? You need smaller
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cards. I know, I can’t find smaller cards, or at least, or like the smaller ones are also $5 each. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, well, I might as well get the 16 gig ones then for the same price.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I continue to think that you need to take this one step farther and put all of your music on the
⏹️ ▶️ John internal very large SD card that’s part of the Raspberry Pi and have the thing that you insert
⏹️ ▶️ John basically be an Amiibo, like a QR code or an NFC
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just a series of these little chips. They don’t even have to have electronics in them. They just need to have some sort of little code
⏹️ ▶️ John that says, please play this track that you already have on your internal SD card. That’s what you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need. Well, I’d bring it to other options. So one option would be, I think one of the coolest options would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you get one of the little camera modules for it, and you just show it a little card. No,
⏹️ ▶️ John show it your album. Hold up the vinyl album
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to it. But a lot of these things are things that aren’t available on vinyl. So I’m thinking you basically have a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco card file of index cards that are just printed album art, and just hold it up and have it recognize
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, wait, I’ve got an idea. How about you just hook up a microphone, and then you could say what song you wanted to play,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it would play it. Wow. ruin it. Yeah, a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean I’m glad you’re having a good time with this hobby thing but like I just keep thinking of these little cards.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean the other angle of little cards I feel like you should maybe get some of that spray that Nintendo uses
⏹️ ▶️ John for the Switch cartridges to make sure like no small children in your house eat your music.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just think of what else you could do with that spray. I mean I know hops isn’t a chewer but you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. No he’s not. Also and I also considered other words so one thing I considered when I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco battling Udev for reliability and I was thinking like okay maybe you know if the problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that the SD card readers aren’t reliably telling Udev sometimes when things are added and removed maybe the solution
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is to either use compact flashcards which I didn’t go I didn’t go down that path
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least not yet because eventually you’d have calmed down but I also thought like what about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cheap little USB sticks like you know your thumb drives and because those are their own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complete USB devices so they should be more reliable at telling
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but then you have to try to put them in three times every time you want to listen to music. Exactly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, that’s that’s one problem. And also they’re just kind of ugly and clunky, but I did look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they have about the same pricing. You can get like those kind that you get at every conference
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever that have like the big flip around metal cover. Like the like swivels around,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey the plastic insert, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone’s seen these and you can get them printed with your logo and everything. Those cost about the same like a few dollars
⏹️ ▶️ Marco each is roughly what those cost. So like These are fine solutions, and it depends on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how many of these cards or things I intend to have. But they’re fun. I’m probably not going to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a whole lot. The other downside I found with the SD cards is, I had this great image in my mind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of having these wonderful little labels that I could print the album art onto
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a label that fits the SD card, and I’d be able to flip through my little box of SD cards,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and be able to look at tiny little versions of what the record would look like if it was tiny and rectangular. And I even got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the right size labels. They’re.75 by one inch. They come in sheets by Avery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’re printable. But the print quality on them is so bad. Like I tried,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have an inkjet and a laser and I tried them both and they both look horrendous. Like I went printing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on these and they’re really hard to align. And also when you put a label on an SD card and then put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it into an SD card reader, it doesn’t fit as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John So. Just to be in keeping with the rest of this project, I feel like you should hire some sort of artisan
⏹️ ▶️ John who lives in Portland to use a single hairbrush to hand paint
⏹️ ▶️ John each one of your things onto the SD card.
⏹️ ▶️ John see people do these sculptures with graphite from a pencil? Oh yeah, absolutely, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Dang, get one of those people to do it. They’ll do it for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, anyway, this has been a fun project. Ultimately, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think the better solution to all of this is probably just a CD
⏹️ ▶️ Marco burner, honestly. So I’m really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco glad I did it. And it’ll work sometimes, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think a CD burner is actually the better solution to this problem because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can put it right into my Blu-ray player and it just starts playing and I don’t need to turn the TV on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That problem gets solved that way, but the downside is I have to have a CD burner somewhere on my desk.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But this is the same thing that I just went through in a much different scale. Like the easiest answer for me to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey return that stupid dongle would be to throw it away. The second easiest answer would have been to give it to UPS, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wanted to try something different. And I’m actually really jealous of this, even though I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think this is a truly preposterous reason to get into the Raspberry Pi, I have been searching
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a reason to teach myself what the hell the Raspberry Pi and Arduino are all about,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’ve yet to come up with a good reason to do it. And so in that sense, I’m super jealous of what you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey done because you now know a whole bunch about this world that I know absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nothing about and I want to know about. And so I applaud this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I mean, I’ll tell you what, though. I think you’re overestimating what you need to know. Like, I was shocked how little I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco needed to do. Like this entire project, I’ve been keeping it basically in one shell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco script on my desktop, like one text file that right now, let me see, it’s 90 lines to set
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up this entire thing. That’s all it’s very basic because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all I’m doing is like responding to a system demon with a shell script when when things are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inserted and removed and sending really simple commands to oh I gotta get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into the control aspect of it as well the regularly you know insert the card it plays
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take out the card it stops that’s that’s done it requires no external control or anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I did think you know it would be nice to at least have a play pause button
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s a number of different ways to do this you can get for instance you can get buttons like actual physical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buttons that have little wires on them that you can that have little connect on that plug right into the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that big I oh header on the Raspberry Pi the GPIO header and you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco run a little Python service that responds to button presses on those buttons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really simply like that’s and And I actually got a little pair of buttons. I ended up not using them for, you know, I’ll get into it in a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minute, but that’s a thing you can do. And again, and a pair of buttons is like six bucks. Like, again, I just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s so wonderful how inexpensive and affordable all this stuff is. You know, I’ve heard a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talking about how they’re used in schools, where you can, like, at these prices, if you can get a little computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco board for $35 or less, you can get like one of the $10 ones, you know, you can outfit a whole classroom with these things and have students
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing projects with these things. That’s incredible. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have just the amount of computing power and flexibility and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware that you can get, like it’s a whole computer. You can, a Raspberry Pi could be a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Linux computer. Like it could be a desktop. You can plug a monitor and keyboard and mouse into it and use it as a desktop. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it wouldn’t be the fastest desktop in the world, but you could still do it, and some people do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. It’s just incredible what you can do with these things. Like I saw Steve Trout and Smith,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He recently made himself a HomeKit camera by using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Raspberry Pi, one of the tiny ones, with the camera module that’s available for them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a little tiny case. And it’s like a security camera for his house that’s HomeKit compatible through God
⏹️ ▶️ Marco knows what. And he made it out of a Raspberry Pi for probably under $50. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just incredible. To have this kind of power available to people, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really is game changing. And I know this is not a sudden thing. I know this didn’t just begin yesterday.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m just discovering it. I’m late to it. And it just blows my mind what’s available
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here. And it’s so inspiring to make me want to do more projects with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And for me, and this kind of played into earlier what I was saying about I wish the HomePod had a line in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As I’m dipping my toe in this world just for five seconds, it’s really obvious to me, I really do like things being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco open. and I really do, I see the value in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco openness and free software and just this whole world,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco open hardware, open software, the power that the technology we have today can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco offer to us if some of these walls are knocked down or not there in the first place.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, one more quick thing. I did decide, let me play with remote
⏹️ ▶️ Marco control options. I actually had, do you guys know Samuel Clay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the News Blur product that he makes? Well, he did a Kickstarter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about, I don’t know, maybe a year ago for a little wooden like Internet of Things type remote
⏹️ ▶️ Marco called TurnTouch. And I backed it and I got two of them. And it’s this little,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco beautiful little square wooden remote with four buttons on it. It interfaces with either, I think, an iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco device or in my case, I’m using my Mac mini server to be like the host receiver for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you can map these buttons to do whatever you want. I made a little interface, again using Bash shell scripting,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I made a little interface on the SD card player that just uses Netcat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as like a simple command interface that to listen for the commands, just listen for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the strings, play, pause, next and previous. And on the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s hosting the TurnTouch app, I mapped it to send
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using Netcat shell scripts to just set each of the buttons just sends, you know, play, pause, previous, next,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, stop. It was again, like a half hour, maybe to get the setup. I never even had used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco netcat before, but I didn’t even know it existed. But it did. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was super easy to wait two seconds to make a bash script that was a network service
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a command response. And it’s just incredible what you can do with this stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you if you have like the the Linux chops or the shell stripping shops, I I guess. And so now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have this little remote that sends basic commands through, you know, through MPC to MPD
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and is play, pause, and next track, previous track. It’s just amazing. I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do like this world. I don’t immediately have any ideas for what else I can do with it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I’m gonna keep trying to come up with some because it’s just so fun as a nerd to play with this stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, this is super cool. I’m super jealous that you’ve come up with all this.
⏹️ ▶️ John 2018, year of the shell script, Even if it’s written in Swift. at Yeah.
#askatp: Archive storage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So we should do Ask ATP. Let’s see. We’re starting with, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will let you pronounce this, John, since you put this in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m going to go with Hans Scheulein. Wow, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well done, John. John put this in the show notes. And the question is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want to remove clutter and unused old files from my system. However, not delete them. A
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot are like the entire Unity or Blender projects I did a few years ago that I don’t really need anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey However, I don’t want to just delete them because too frequently I deleted something ancient and needed it half a year later because of something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really specific I did there. What should I do? Connect a disk drive every time I want to quote unquote offload something, burn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey crap loads of CDs or DVDs and pile them in a corner, buy a server and put it on an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey FTP server somewhere where I dump all those files, get a NAS. I’m looking for a reliable solution that I will still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have access to in 20 years. I really think just get a NAS is the easy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey answer this question, but I’m assuming that that you guys have other thoughts. So since John wrote this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into the show notes, Marco, do you have any immediate thoughts? Then we’ll let John give us the real answer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco To me, like I’ve actually recently gone through this a little bit. I mean, first of all, I just told you a reason why I might be having a CD burner on my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco desk, but I used to burn first DVD-Rs and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then I got the bright idea in my head a while ago that I should get a Blu-ray burner because that was the next thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after DVDs and I I decided, oh, 25 gigs per disc, and then later even more,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would be great. I can burn archive discs of all my important files and have this master set of backups
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this big CD box in the closet or whatever else. And I started
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, I did that for a little while, but it turns out 25 gigs isn’t that much anymore, and even when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the fancier multi-layer discs came out a couple years back, even they,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re still not really enough to be useful, and it turns out Blu-ray burners are finicky and they’re a pain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’re unreliable. And the world of Blu-ray burning discs is unreliable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s lots of different formats. The burners don’t always burn them all similarly or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are compatible with them. So you basically have this array of what’s really quite obscure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco formats. The idea of being able to read them in 20 years has a number of problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whatever disc format you’re writing is not a Blu-ray movie. It’s not a Blu-ray disc.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s very possible that any drive you can find in 20 years might not actually read that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco physical format. The second problem you’re gonna have is that optical disks deteriorate.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They are all based on organic dyes and certain assumptions that over time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have proven to not always be the case. If you have, like even today, like we’re a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good 15 years past the heyday of CDRs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you still have CDRs like in your closet somewhere, you might not be able to read them anymore. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they actually might have deteriorated to the point where you can’t read them. Same thing with most DVDs. DVDs were a little better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they sandwiched the organic layer between two pieces of plastic instead of just having it on the top the way CDs did.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So they had a little more protection. There’s still like deterioration of the dyes and layers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that happens. And so it’s very light. Like the initial estimates of how long recordable media
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was supposed to last, many of them have not been achieved. And they’ve had to revise those estimates to be like, oh, actually these don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last 50 or 100 years or 1,000 years, they actually might last like five years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so you have reliability issues there. There actually was, there’s one type of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Blu-ray disc called M-Disc that was supposed to last for a millennium, supposed to last 1,000 years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I actually bought it, I still have a spindle in my closet that I bought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco aspirationally thinking I would use them and I never did. Still unopened, I almost threw it away last week.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s supposedly supposed to solve this problem. But optical discs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are not as reliable and long-lasting as we think they are. They have proven that so far. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even this M disc that’s supposed to last forever and be for archival purposes, they’re brand new,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco relatively speaking. And so we don’t actually know. Like everyone thought that recordable CDs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and DVDs would last a long time too, and they didn’t. So you can try to simulate some things here and there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s not always dependable. And then the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other thing is, again, are you gonna be able to find a drive in 20 years that can read these discs? I think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fairly unlikely. You might be able to find a drive that reads Blu-rays, but it might not read
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these Blu-rays or whatever else. I think your options are going to be fairly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weak there. Your best option here is to use hard drives. and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every few years when you get larger ones, move the stuff to the larger ones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because the only way to keep data like this really preserved long-term is to take it with you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to move it periodically to the new setup. If you don’t do that, you are reliant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on certain technologies being very long-lasting and being able to be read
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forever, and that’s just unlikely to be true. Meanwhile,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard drives are huge and relatively cost nothing for the amount of storage you get.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can get such large drives now that if you are offloading what used to be considered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco large files five, 10 years ago, today you can get one hard drive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for $200 or less that can hold all of them, probably plus a lot of extra space.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s my recommended solution is use hard drives somehow, whether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s in a NAS or whether that’s just external disks that you plug in once a year to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco check them and move them onto new ones. And also, by the way, have some redundancy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here. Like one external drive, having your only copy of something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is still just one disk, and that disk can fail and you can lose everything. So have things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on multiple disks. But the overarching answer to this question
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is don’t just leave them in a box for 20 years. Keep them moving with you as technology moves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on, as drives get bigger, as your setups change, and then down the road, maybe just moving to cloud
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that pretty much covers it. The only thing I would add is, if you really wanna go for, like, how do I do that? How
⏹️ ▶️ John do I keep the data moving in my large current set while making sure I have redundancy?
⏹️ ▶️ John So you want it to be your currently active pile of data. You want
⏹️ ▶️ John that currently active pile of data to be backed up, and you want it to be stored on
⏹️ ▶️ John some kind of thing that has like checksumming, right? whether that’s a file system or a device or some other
⏹️ ▶️ John facility to prevent bit rot, because that’s your only remaining enemy. Once you have the data with
⏹️ ▶️ John you active, constantly moving to bigger and bigger storage, just gotta always keep it moving,
⏹️ ▶️ John bit rot is your enemy, because you’re just moving it over the course of a decade, and the bits are slowly rotting. By the time you go to pull something
⏹️ ▶️ John out, it could be corrupted, especially if it’s something, you know, like some particular file format
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever that’s sensitive to a bit flipped here or there. So yeah, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s difficult to do, But that’s, you know, I wish there was an easier answer like Marco’s special magic Blu-ray
⏹️ ▶️ John discs, but there’s not. You just gotta have it all in your currently active set of data
⏹️ ▶️ John and it has to be backed up and redundant and you have to keep it moving.
#askatp: AAA games on iOS?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, Lewis Thompson writes, the Switch has shown that people are willing to pay for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey full-blown console games on the go. Why are there no AAA games for iOS or tvOS?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is it just down to lack of bundled controllers or docks? Maybe, but to me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the obvious answer to this question is nobody wants to pay a dollar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco anything on iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why would somebody want to pay 60 of their dollars for something on iOS? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is there more to this than that, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, there’s lots of different factors. The controller thing is definitely a big one.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think the pricing is that big a deal. Like, didn’t Civilization come out for iPad and it was like $60? Like, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John like you can’t put them at that price. It’s just a question of, do the people who want to play that much money
⏹️ ▶️ John for, I mean, this person says AAA games, but what they mean are AAA games as they have existed
⏹️ ▶️ John on PC and consoles, which I think is a more, it’s a different definition than just saying AAA
⏹️ ▶️ John games, you might think, well, that just means good games. There are tons of good games on iOS. And you could say
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe they’re not as expensive because they have to be sold for two dollars or something like that. But I think they’re very good games. I don’t think length
⏹️ ▶️ John determines the value of a game, but they mean AAA games in the PC console sense,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is implies a certain amount of production value, a certain amount of content.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the people who want to play those games aren’t on iOS and TVOS waiting
⏹️ ▶️ John patiently to pay you $60 for that. They have consoles, they have PCs, that’s where they are. That’s where
⏹️ ▶️ John they want to play their games. So making a $60 game and putting it on iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John or tvOS is not going to get people to buy that game. Not because it’s a bad game
⏹️ ▶️ John or people don’t want to pay $60. Take that exact same game and offer it on a console and or PC
⏹️ ▶️ John and or Steam or whatever and it will sell. It’s the same game in both places and there’s nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John other than the lack of controller and you know, the lack of Apple according game developers in the same way that console makers
⏹️ ▶️ John do and Microsoft does, right? There’s nothing preventing that game from
⏹️ ▶️ John working fine on those platforms. I mean, most of Apple stuff is probably more powerful than the Switch.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just a question of where the people are. And the hardware definitely has something to do with it, but it also
⏹️ ▶️ John has to do with just habits and where people want to play their games. It takes a long time to dislodge somebody. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re a PC gamer, what’s going to get you off that PC? If you’re a console gamer, what’s going to get you off that console?
⏹️ ▶️ John on to TV OS, a thing that doesn’t ship with a controller, that doesn’t have a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of games. Like a lot of it is just plain inertia. So, it’s not that Apple couldn’t go for it. I mean, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John could have made something like the Switch long ago, or could turn TV OS into something like
⏹️ ▶️ John a television-stranded Switch, in that it is like a not-too-powerful console
⏹️ ▶️ John that is small and doesn’t require, you know, humongous fans and a giant embedded hard drive
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? The iPad could have been the Switch.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, yeah, less so because it’s less natural pairing with a controller, but Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John just didn’t pursue that strategy, which is fine. Like they’ll Apple Apple happily sell millions and
⏹️ ▶️ John millions of 99 cent games are free to play games that that fleece a bunch of people for $20,000 until they go bankrupt and lose their house.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s I’m I don’t want to say it’s it’s mostly cultural, but like Like that’s what I feel about like the technological
⏹️ ▶️ John questions and even like the consumer questions are not where it’s at. It’s about it’s about like the culture
⏹️ ▶️ John and the platform owners have to be motivated to change the culture. And honestly, I’m not sure
⏹️ ▶️ John if Apple if it would be a good move for Apple to do that. We always say, you know, the gaming market is there for Apple to take
⏹️ ▶️ John it, but they’re taking a different slice of the gaming market. And who’s to say that Apple, you know, we put all the stock
⏹️ ▶️ John in like, oh, triple A games as they exist on PC and consoles. But that’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John where we’re coming from culturally, that we think those are the big games. But are those companies more
⏹️ ▶️ John successful in making more money than Apple is currently making selling $1 games? It really depends on what you
⏹️ ▶️ John value. I continue to think Apple doesn’t understand games and doesn’t really care about them. And
⏹️ ▶️ John so I think it’s perfectly natural for the games and the game customers to go elsewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think you pretty much covered it. I would just add that I do think there’s a lot of value in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the limited number of games that’s available on a game console. Like if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you buy a Switch and you want to play some games on it, well, you don’t have 10
⏹️ ▶️ Marco billion games available for free to a dollar to choose from there. You have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a vastly smaller number, even when there’s a lot of games for a console, it’s still like a vastly smaller number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compared to like you have on iOS. And those games have been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vetted to a much larger degree. Like the quality standards that are enforced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by a company like Nintendo or Sony or Microsoft for their consoles are way higher
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and way more strict than what Apple enforces in the App Store. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a certain minimum barrier there. And even, you know, and honestly, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so great for like, you know, inclusion and diversity of game makers, but it’s also usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more expensive to develop these platforms, or at least there’s barriers in place. It’s not as easy as signing up for an Apple developer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco membership, and it’s sometimes it’s more expensive as well. So there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are these barriers in place to getting the games onto these platforms. There are much higher restrictions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put in place by the vendors of these platforms, and all the games on these platforms are,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, by by iOS standards, extraordinarily expensive, by being like $15 and up, basically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A good AAA game is 50 or 60 bucks. And even the indie games, like Stardew Valley,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or even some of the smaller ones, they’re like $10, $15, et cetera. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John bringing up Stardew Valley, that’s a good point, because on the PC, that has all the advantages of iOS. Anyone can make
⏹️ ▶️ John one. It’s much more open. You don’t have to get an SDK from Nintendo or Sony or Microsoft.
⏹️ ▶️ John As you pointed out when you talked about started value is made by one person. No one was stopping him from doing that. He didn’t get to have to get app store
⏹️ ▶️ John approval to make it. He did have to get on steam, which is kind of app story, but there’s no reason he couldn’t have just sold that on his own
⏹️ ▶️ John website with Stripe or PayPal or whatever. Um, so it has all, almost
⏹️ ▶️ John all the advantages of iOS in terms of openness, depending on where you go, but you know, as the console side, very curated,
⏹️ ▶️ John very, very narrow, very simple to choose from. And console gamers are the people who go in that direction.
⏹️ ▶️ John And PC gamers are the people who say, yeah, but I want all the choice of Steam including all the crap weird games
⏹️ ▶️ John for the chance to be the first person to play Stardew Valley because I’m assuming the PC version came out first
⏹️ ▶️ John just because that’s the easiest platform to develop for if you’re a single developer you’re not gonna be dealing with
⏹️ ▶️ John Sony or Microsoft or Nintendo’s BS to get your game off the ground.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah and also like you know because the the game the game consoles
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have so many fewer games and because the standard is so much higher and because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s all these, there’s basically a much smaller number of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generally much better games on the consoles than you have on iOS, that also means that the promotion is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very different. The storefront is very different. You don’t have, in the App Store on iOS,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re competing against everything in the world. Whereas if you go on a Switch and you go to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eShop on Switch, your only choices are premium priced games.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whether that’s $15 or $60, dollars like those your only choices and because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the standards are higher the whole market behaves differently first of all you can go to reviews and you can see how good they are but you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can also probably just buy a game that like like when Mario Odyssey came out we just bought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it because we knew like chances are this is going to be a very good game because of reputation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Nintendo and what we heard about it and that and iOS you just don’t really have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that as much and and you’re battling with everything else, and consumers, if you go to the App Store and a game is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco priced at $40 or more, you’re never gonna drop that on an iOS game because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your expectations of whether that’s gonna be worth it or good or not are, by necessity,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way lower. The reality is the App Store ecosystem on all sides
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is set up to incentivize and reward certain types
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of behavior. And it culminates in these free-to-play
⏹️ ▶️ Marco social manipulation games. And that’s what the App Store encourages. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what it gets. Like, it’s simple as that. The entire store is set up in a way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that encourages, promotes, and rewards abusive, in-app-purchase free games.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so that’s what they’re gonna get tons of. And that’s what’s going to succeed. That’s what Apple’s going to promote because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it sells more of their devices all these free, allegedly, games and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a vicious cycle. I don’t see how they break out of that. I also would not discount the controller
⏹️ ▶️ Marco question too much because there’s a lot of game types that gamers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who are willing to pay 60 bucks for a game enjoy playing that either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are unplayable or really inferior on a touch screen. Now granted, there’s also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco types of games that work on a touch screen that would suck on a console, But the fact remains that there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of very popular, established, AAA game types that are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very cumbersome to play on a touchscreen without some other kind of controller or mouse or something. And so I think that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also plays into it to a lesser degree. But I think that the bigger problem is simply that difference in the marketplace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the styles of how you buy games, what games are available to buy, how you find them, how they’re promoted,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what your other options are on those platforms, et cetera. You know, if I don’t buy a $60 game on my Switch,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s not much more I can do with the Switch. You know, but like, if I don’t buy,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, a $60 game on the iPad, I have 10 billion free games to choose from instead. And so like, there’s a reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why the market goes the way that it goes.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the cultural difference is even, even comes up in the controller thing, right? So,
⏹️ ▶️ John Nintendo, when they made their new console, they put a touchscreen on it. Because they recognize
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a bunch of games that benefit from touchscreens and even just the non-game stuff, like it’s nice to have a touchscreen and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John got a controller. On the flip side, Apple said, oh yeah, we’ll have a way you can use controllers
⏹️ ▶️ John with their Apple TVs, but we’re not gonna build one. Like it’s a misunderstanding of games. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re making a game thing, you’re like, we should put a touchscreen on it just in case someone wants to make a touchscreen.
⏹️ ▶️ John But they won’t be able to use it when it’s hooked up to their TV. Yeah, but we’re still putting it on there. Like we should just do it because we care
⏹️ ▶️ John about games and maybe there’s some awesome game that we don’t wanna miss out on by not having a touchscreen, even though
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t use it when it’s hooked to the TV and we’re making this console, it can go in both places. Just put the touchscreen in. Whereas Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t even bring themselves to sell, to make their own controller, let alone bundle a third-party controller
⏹️ ▶️ John with it. They’re just like, but we’ll sell third-party controllers in our stores. And if someone wants one, they can get it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, they flip flopped on whether it’s, you’re allowed to require it in games and stuff. It just shows that Apple’s, you know, just not
⏹️ ▶️ John that into games and just doesn’t have the mindset that a real game maker would have, which is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John can we conceive of a cool game being made I’ll look at all these touch games on
⏹️ ▶️ John those platforms. We should make sure we’re not excluded from that. So please put a touch screen on the switch.” And they did.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. Thanks to our sponsors this week, Hover, Squarespace, and Fracture. and we will see you next.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him, cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental. It’s accidental And you can
⏹️ ▶️ John find the show notes at atp.fm And if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John into Twitter, you can follow them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M The anti-Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse, it’s accidental Accidental They
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t mean to Accidental Tech Podcasts, so long
Post-show: Casey On Cars Again
⏹️ ▶️ John So apparently if you really want to get things done, you should have a baby
⏹️ ▶️ John because as soon as you have a baby, you’ll write a Mac application and do a
⏹️ ▶️ John knows what Casey will be doing next. He’s just got all this free time. He just needs to fill with new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hobbies. Yeah. So tell us about this. So you reviewed an SUV somehow?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We actually talked about this on the forthcoming episode of Analog, which as we talked tonight is not released
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and will probably be released after this episode of ATP is because that’s the schedule we’re on. But,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey um, I had the car, was it last week, I believe? Um, and, uh, Alfa
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Romeo Stelvio, which is their new, more reasonably new SUV. And they were like, Hey, we can give it to you mid-January.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I was like, Ooh, uh, sure. I guess, cause I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know I’m going to be home, but that’s going to be a busy time. So I’ll just see what I can do. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in short, it was actually a really nice truck. Like trucks are not my thing. Just in somebody pointed out via Twitter, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m saying that despite saying, Oh, I’m probably going to buy a Wrangler soon, but generally speaking, trucks are not my thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but this thing, and actually a lot of people wouldn’t even call it a truck, but that’s neither here nor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. But whatever a tall car is not usually my thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but this was actually really nice. There’s some problems with it, but all told it was reasonably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quick, Handled stunningly well for a for a car. That’s that tall and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really liked it Like I don’t know if this would be what I would choose if I were to buy a car But I can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see how one could end up with this over like an x3 or an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Audi q5 or something like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cool. Well, I really enjoyed your video. I don’t really have any opinion about the car But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you continue to be like frustratingly improving quickly at making videos like you started out way better than I thought you would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but no offense, I just thought it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem. And then video two is even better. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, pretty cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, thanks. Yeah, I mean, I’m pretty proud of the video. There’s definitely problems, don’t get me wrong. It is not flawless by any means, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am pretty pleased with how it turned out. And I feel like I’ve made a lot of positive steps.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And again, there’s gonna be a fairly in-depth discussion about this on Analog.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’ll talk about it, or I mean, I’ll link it in the show notes, But if you’re listening to this, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey may or may not be able to click that link and get to anything because the analog episode isn’t out yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But no, I’m pretty pleased with the video. It was shorter, which I think was good. I probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still could have cut something from it. And there were probably some places where I could have tightened it up a little bit. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all told, I’m pretty darn pleased with how it came out. I think the biggest issues with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the prior video, with the Julia, were that I was not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not particularly effusive or maybe not effusive, but I wasn’t particularly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interesting, I guess you could say. I was kind of monotone and kind of just there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And additionally, the audio was just garbage, as we talked about ad nauseum previously. Now the audio, excepting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one section, I think was pretty darn good. I definitely clipped in a few spots, which was unfortunate, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all told, it was pretty good. And I think I was a much more interesting person
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to watch this time, which is also good. But there’s still plenty of room to be improved.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You could see me in the reflection of the car in a bunch of spots, which in a perfect world wouldn’t have happened. There was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some video I shot before I had a chance to very, very quickly wash the car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it had rained the day after I got it or something like that. So it was dirty in a few of the shots,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which in a perfect world I wouldn’t have done. In one of the shots, I didn’t realize that my bucket
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of equipment was in the background, which I regret, but I mean, I’m not going to sit there and like Photoshop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it out or anything like that. So, all told, I’m really pleased with the video.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The car was very, very nice. If you wanted something that’s more interesting than like an X3,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s a very reasonable choice. This This particular car was mildly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey optioned and it priced at about $55,000. Um, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there are some things that I really wish it had, like I wish it had a little bit of autonomous driving capability.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I very much wish it had car play. And I think there is either an option package
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where it could have had car play or it’s coming soon. I’m not entirely clear based on Alfa Romeo’s website,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I couldn’t figure out a way to turn it on on this particular car, you know, all told, it was a very, very nice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car that if you wanted something more interesting than just another x3, I could see going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for this. Cool. Any other thoughts? John, I’m surprised you’re so quiet. You haven’t told me how
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s I think it actually is less ugly than
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Julia. Oh, really?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because it’s an SUV. But when I compare it to its contemporaries and not compare it to actual cars,
⏹️ ▶️ John the x3 is just gross. All Volvo’s little luxury sport utility vehicles
⏹️ ▶️ John are mostly gross. The Audi ones are okay. Infiniti ones are horrendous. Anyway, I was surprised
⏹️ ▶️ John you didn’t compare it to the Volvo. I mean, I know you haven’t done the Volvo video yet, but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it’s the other
⏹️ ▶️ John SUV thing that you have the most experience with, and it’s a similar price range. So I mean, you kind of alluded to it like,
⏹️ ▶️ John look, if I spent this much money, I would want it to be nicer inside. Probably I’m thinking like, well, the
⏹️ ▶️ John Volvo is probably nicer inside
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey than this thing, right? Oh, very
⏹️ ▶️ John much so. Yeah, and it’s similar price and also bigger, and so you’re trading a lot. It seemed like
⏹️ ▶️ John downmarket in exchange for sportiness. I was surprised at how much headroom it seemed to have. That does look
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty nice. But even with the sunroof thing, it seemed like you had enough room to put a helmet on in there. You could fit your tall hair.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I do have tall hair. But I mean, again, I’ve never really had an interference fit with my head
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a sunroof. So I can’t say that I’m surprised by that. I don’t think I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a good judge of these things. In some of the footage that I filmed, I did make direct comparisons to Aaron’s car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But part of the reason I left that out, well, a lot of it was that was early on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And basically I’d never come up with like a formal script for anything I record. I do have some like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey broad talking points that I think through when I’m recording, but I don’t have a script or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything like that. And so footage that I filmed early in the week, I made a lot of comparisons
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Aaron’s Car, but it just seemed like that wasn’t terribly relevant
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because as you said, John, like I haven’t formally reviewed Aaron’s Car. And so I think when I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do the video review of Aaron’s car, I will probably make some comparisons to the Stelvio, but I think to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do that in the reverse order would have been ill-suited. But, yeah, I think you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hit the nail on the head. Aaron’s car is not particularly sporty. Given that it’s a freaking whale,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aaron’s car moves pretty well, but it’s not fast. This thing felt actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reasonably quick and moved and handled really well, all told.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was very, very surprised by that. And so I think you’re right in saying that you would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey give up some luxury in moving from a Volvo XC90 or perhaps an XC60, which is a more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey direct competitor to this, you would give up a little bit of luxury, but you would gain a lot of sportiness. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t tried the XC60, the brand new XC60, cause that just got revamped this year to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically a mini version of Aaron’s car. But another part of the reason why I didn’t think it was a fair comparison is because this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is more X3, whereas the XC90 that we have is more like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an X5 or even a quote unquote X7, if you will, because ours is three row, whereas
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think you can get an X5 with a third row, and even if you can, it’s not really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a direct competitor in my personal opinion, even though maybe like officially speaking it is. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t think a lot of direct comparisons would make sense, but yes, very much, Aaron’s car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is very much more luxurious. this car is very much more sporty.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this whole class of car, the sporty small, medium small SUV is incredibly stupid.
⏹️ ▶️ John Most adequately pointed out in your video by the tiny slit of a back window.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It’s like, come
⏹️ ▶️ John on. It’s already big. You could have just made a wagon
⏹️ ▶️ John or a car, but instead you made this big shoe thing and then it has bad visibility out the back and no
⏹️ ▶️ John luggage space. And it’s just like, what are you even doing? It’s like, you just take a regular car that has, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you just had regular car proportions The trunk will be bigger, the visibility will be better, the handling will be better. What would you be losing?
⏹️ ▶️ John Off-road ability? Would you be losing that? Forget it. It’s ridiculous. They just make cars uglier and worse for no
⏹️ ▶️ John reason, and people like to buy them because they set up high. So I’m just angry about that whole class of cars.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s the continued ridiculous contortions Americans will do to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Yeah, it’s true. But anyway, I don’t know. I’m pretty pleased with the video. Again, I’m not saying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s perfect. By no means am I saying it’s perfect. There are plenty of things I would change about it if I had infinite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time and infinite budget and so on and so forth. But I am pretty proud of it. I am very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey glad to have had the car. I think it’s a neat car,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even though it’s not for me. And the question I’m trying to figure out, or the thing I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying to answer is, how can I get something other than an Alfa Romeo to play with? And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes, some listeners have offered their cars, but I had this thing for a week And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I barely had enough time to film and photograph what I wanted. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even though there are some people, even locally. You have a newborn. Well, yeah, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco it’s not just to having a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey newborn. There’s good reasons. But even so, like even so, like with the Julia, well, granted I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey working at that point, but I don’t think I would have the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time or ability to pull a Doug DeMuro, which from what I understand, like he shows up, he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uses a car for a couple hours or something like that, records and disappears. Like I am nowhere
⏹️ ▶️ Casey near that. And so in order for me to be able to do another car, I need to have something that I’ll have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like significant amounts of time with. So some listeners have been on just kind enough to offer me, Hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, if I’m ever in Richmond, I’ll let you know, which yes, please do. Or, um, you know, Hey, if you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you want to borrow the car for a couple hours, feel free, which is super kind of these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people, but it’s not enough for me. Like it should be enough, but it isn’t. And so I’m trying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to figure out, like, what’s the next step? I did email the Tesla PR people and have gotten no response,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is completely expected, asking them to give me anything that they would be willing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to give me. But even like if Underscore drove his car down
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a day, like I would need more than, I think, just a weekend with his car to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey able to get what I wanted out of it. And to really understand it from the perspective of a driver
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rather than a a passenger. So it’s, I don’t know what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the mechanism is to branch out other than just using cars that are in my life, like Aaron’s car,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like potentially my car, like my dad’s Corvette if he’ll ever give me the keys ever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But we’ll see what happens. It’s a tough nut to crack. But no matter what, and we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talked about this a lot on Analog, it’s still fun. And I’m not making money off of it at this point,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that’s unfortunate, but okay. And To be honest, I wouldn’t really be making more than like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Panera Bread meal worth of money off of this level of viewership anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’m not really losing, if you will, much of anything. But it’s been fun. And I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey scratching a creative itch that I’ve never scratched before. So that feels real good too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, keep in mind, like, you know, if I mean, you know, the reason why somebody like this Demir character can do this is like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he’s been doing this so long that like, he knows how to get what he needs quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey for the shots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything. So by doing this more, you will take less time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the future. As you get better at this, you’ll also get faster
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at it. Oh yeah, the turnaround on this was way quicker because I had the video done within a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of days. I think it was the day after, was it? No, it was the day I gave the car back, I think, because it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wasn’t yesterday. It was the day before, right? No, no, no, it was yesterday actually. It was yesterday morning. It was the Tuesday morning.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So within a day of the car going back, I had the video done. Whereas with the Giulia, it was like two weeks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey later or something like that. It was maybe even more than that. It was quite a while later. So yes, you’re absolutely right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I’m getting quicker, and I like to think I’m getting better at it, but I’m still not at the point
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I could have, let’s say for the sake of discussion, underscore come down on a Saturday morning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and run around with me all day, and I would have enough footage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and thoughts completed in order to have what I needed in the span of that one day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you know what I mean? Like, well, but you know, so the cars that you can get for a few days
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from your family and yourself and everything, like, how many videos do you think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’d have to make before you might be at that point where you can get what you need in a day?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That answer might be the number of cars that you actually have pretty long access to. Like, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually would do videos for your car, Aaron’s car, one of your dad’s cars at least, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s three more videos, you might actually be fast enough then to be able to borrow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Tesla from a friend for a day and get what you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey need. Perhaps, yeah. And it’s also, you know, it’s really squishy. Like, even if I get to the point
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I’m quick enough to do it like that, it’s still an odd thing taking like a random
⏹️ ▶️ Casey person’s car. Because even if it’s a listener who knows me and likes me enough to hand me the keys
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to their car, like, that becomes really squishy because what happens if I get in like a humongous car accident while driving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their car? Like, what is that about? Because this is sort of kind of a business thing that I’m doing, yet it’s not really.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, so like, do I need business insurance? Like, how does that work? And I’m not really looking to answer this question
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right now, but there’s a whole lot of like squishiness involved when it’s not a personal friend
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or family member and, and that’s what makes it a little weird and difficult. And, you know, I’ve exchanged a couple of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tweets with DeMuro, so I’m, maybe I could ask him like, how does this work? And he would probably tell me, well, it’s part of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey his job. And so, you know, what is it, auto trader that he works for? So it would, you know, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey auto trader foots and insurance plan or writer policy, whatever the terminology is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in order to let this happen. I don’t know. I’m talking about step 304. I’m on step three. So all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m trying to say is I’m having fun. And even if even if nothing comes of this, it’s been an enjoyable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey experience that I don’t regret yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have some concerns about you looking at the camera while you’re driving. Keep your eyes on the road.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John camera. Come on.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just look at the road.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Watch the road. Every time you
⏹️ ▶️ John look at the camera, look back forward, look back forward, look back forward. Like it’s the nervousness I don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John and when I’m watching TV or movies, because I know that they’re on a trailer or it’s all CG or whatever, but I know you’re on an actual road
⏹️ ▶️ John and there’s nothing being fixed. So look at the road.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All I really wanted in the grand scheme of things is to just make positive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey improvements, right? Like I just want to, I want it to be clear to me and to a viewer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I am, I am trending upwards, I guess, or you know, that I’m, that I’m making
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, that things are getting better with each video. And that’s all I can really hope and ask for. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so far I think I’ve achieved it. So, you know, that’s a success.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Awesome. Well, congratulations. And I agree. I think you have achieved that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, good luck with the next one. Hope
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comes. I mean, you have to have another kid to make another one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey How’s this going to work? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I have no idea. I don’t know how that’s going to work. But one way or another, there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will be another one. I think part of the problem, and again, this is discussed on analog, but I really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey need that time constraint. Like when I only have a week to get all the footage I need, I really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey need to make it count. And the problem with Aaron’s car is that it’s always here and I need
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to just set myself a schedule or a due date or something for her video or, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the video of her car so that that compels me to get off my, my lazy took us and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually record some footage for that. because if I don’t have that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing chasing me, it’s never going to get done.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But we’ll see. How long ago was your first video? Like five or six
⏹️ ▶️ Casey weeks? Yeah, something like that. It was end of November, I believe, that it was released. I think it was like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the 22nd of November. So yeah, it was like a couple of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco months. All right. So set yourself a calendar reminder for four weeks from now and say it has to be done
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by then. Yeah. And that’s really what I should do, especially since right after that is when I’m going back to work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco But there you go. We’ll see. That’s your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deadline. Yeah, I know, I know, I know. And now, the only way to procrastinate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is by not going back to work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I see where this is going. If only I could pay myself as much as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want to to hire myself to do the stupid work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m doing. If only there was a way for other people to pay you to do work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey for them. Ah, can you imagine?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. It’s this crazy new business idea called working as maybe, I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how about a consultist?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A consultist. I like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, I like it. That’s a little awkward. How about consultant? Is that a better version of that word?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey go with consultant.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, something like that. If only that existed as a thing you could do. or if only.