301: I Cut Them Up in the Air
20 Nov 2018Audiophile headphone bumps, the Surface Go, adventures with Google Photos, and an ATP Thanksgiving.
Episode Description:
- Essential's "audiophile" headphone-bump dongle
- Follow-up: Total ATP length so far
- The Surface Go is more interesting than we thought
- An update on
youtube-dland iSH - Google Photos has let Casey down
#askatp- How would we quarterback a x86 → ARM transition? (via Cameron Kerr)
- Can one switch careers into development in one's late-30s?
- How do we slice bagels? (via Dave Altizer)
- Post show: ATP Thanksgiving
Sponsored by:
- RXBAR: Whole food protein bars made with 100% real ingredients. For a limited time, US customers can get 25% off your first order of the best-seller variety pack with code ATP.
- Betterment: Outsmart average. Get up to 1 year managed free.
- Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code ATP for 10% off your first order.
Chapters
- Casey is one of us now
- Audiophile headphone bump 🖼️
- Thanks for the feelings
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- Surface Go 🖼️
- iSH update
- Sponsor: Betterment
- Photo-management journey
- Sponsor: RXBAR (code ATP)
- #askatp: x86-ARM transition
- #askatp: Start coding in 30s
- #askatp: Bagel guillotines 🖼️
- Ending theme
- ATP Thanksgiving 🖼️
Casey is one of us now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was at Wegmans, which is one of our local grocers, this past weekend,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we went to get some lunch and then do just like a spot of shopping to get some essentials
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before we go to my parents for the holiday. But it was Sunday. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was lunchtime on a Sunday. And that was when I realized I am well and truly retired
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I looked around and was truly and utterly disgusted by the amount of people I saw while
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was trying to go grocery shopping. What are all these people doing here? Yeah, I was like, what the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hell? Oh, right, it’s Sunday. Ah, I see. Yep, my transformation is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey complete. I am now the worst.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Welcome to the life.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Officially the worst.
Audiophile headphone bump
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As always, we have to start with some follow-up and we have a headphone bump slash
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dongle that one of us wants to talk about. And oh my, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey large and in charge. This is for, is this the phone that you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey break into components or whatever? No, this is the Andy Rubin phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. It’s hard to keep track of which doomed to failure non-Android, non-Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John phone this is. But that’s not what the point of this thing is. A couple of shows back, we were talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John the thickness of devices and the difficulty fixing the headphone port on the very, very thin
⏹️ ▶️ John new iPad Pros. And I surmised that they should add a headphone bump.
⏹️ ▶️ John There might be Android phones that already do that. So a couple people sent like a Samsung phone that didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John really have much of a bump, but like the phone tapered at the edge, except it tapered
⏹️ ▶️ John severely to come to kind of like a pointy little edge, but the headphone jack was like a little bump on the pointy part. But
⏹️ ▶️ John that bump didn’t actually extend out past the full thickness of the thickest part of the phone. So that doesn’t really
⏹️ ▶️ John count. This thing, however, definitely counts as more of a, I don’t know, headphone tumor,
⏹️ ▶️ John headphone lamprey. It is the Essential Phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John which apparently doesn’t have a headphone jack. I actually don’t even know if it has one, because the sales pitch of this is that it is, quote
⏹️ ▶️ John unquote, audiophile quality headphone jack. So it’s a thing that includes- I have
⏹️ ▶️ John many opinions about that. Feel free. Yeah, it includes an audiophile grade amp
⏹️ ▶️ John that can drive audiophile grade headphones. Bottom line is it puts a headphone jack on your phone and it does
⏹️ ▶️ John so by attaching a thing that is about the same thickness as the phone magnetically to the back
⏹️ ▶️ John of the phone. And then even though the thing that attaches to the phone is the same thickness of the phone, there is
⏹️ ▶️ John above and beyond that, a cylindrical lump coming out of it for the headphone jack.
⏹️ ▶️ John this is one heck of a headphone bump. And oh, and by the way, this
⏹️ ▶️ John device that magnetically attaches to your phone adds a headphone jack costs $115 or starting at $14 a month according to
⏹️ ▶️ John the lovely financing link that’s on the web page. $150 you mean? Yeah, I was gonna say it
⏹️ ▶️ John is not 115, it’s 150.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I said 50, I’m just a mumbler.
⏹️ ▶️ John $115. $115. Oh, okay. Sorry. Yes, $150.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I thought this product was hilarious and it is definitely probably the
⏹️ ▶️ John biggest headphone bump we’re ever going to see on a phone because it more than doubles the thickness of the phone. Steve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey McLaughlin Marco, are you jealous of the limited edition digital audio converter on the Essential phone? Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marconi Nope, not even a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steve McLaughlin But it’s going to deliver one of the best mobile audio experiences available today. Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marconi Good for it. It will fulfill the role that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most, not all, but that most, quote, audiophile gear fulfills,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is it’ll be a wonderful, expensive placebo to people who think they need it and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can hear it. Oh, I
⏹️ ▶️ John people still be able to fit it in their pocket with this thing on it? Because honestly, you really have to look at the pictures of the
⏹️ ▶️ John statue of the phone. You’re imagining, you can’t even imagine. It makes it huge,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s not symmetrical. So it’s just one corner of your phone is now more than twice as thick. So
⏹️ ▶️ John how do you even put that in your pocket without knocking the thing off? because it’s just connected with these two little
⏹️ ▶️ John magnetic pin thingies.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, the only people who are even gonna buy this phone at all are like rich tech jerks who wanna try everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And even most of them won’t. But so you have, you already have like, you know, a high end audience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for this. Because people who actually can only afford to buy like one phone every two years are not gonna take a risk on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this dumb thing. They’re gonna get like a mainstream phone. So this, you know, it’s only gonna be rich people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who buy this. And they’re gonna be plugging in at best, you know, if they use this headphone adapter, you’re gonna be plugging in like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco giant headphones. So it’s already not gonna be used in their pocket when headphones are plugged
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into it. So it’s not really a problem. The
⏹️ ▶️ John styling on this phone, by the way, it is styled like the iPhone 5 and like the new iPad Pro. So if you wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John see a brief glimpse of what next year’s flat edge iPhone is gonna look like, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey this Essential Phone
⏹️ ▶️ John and just close your eyes and don’t look at the giant thing attached to the corner of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, it makes me deeply happy to hear Marco talk about how the entire audiophile
⏹️ ▶️ Casey industry is based on placebos. And-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I didn’t say all of it. I said most of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, okay, fair. You know, I can’t tell if it’s one of those things where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am genuinely ignorant and really just haven’t experienced the difference
⏹️ ▶️ Casey between, and I’m making this up because I know nobody actually thinks that gold-plated, almost nobody
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thinks that gold-plated cables really make a difference. But like- You’d
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco be surprised. Maybe it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I, I know. Maybe it’s the thing where I just haven’t experienced real gold-plated cable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the real environment when it would make a big difference, but so much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of audiophile like culture and in the chase to like chase
⏹️ ▶️ Casey down all of these like little. Teeny incremental improvements that, that I feel like so many of them swear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey makes a world of difference where I am sure if you did a scientific test, none of them would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be able to tell the difference between one and the other, or maybe like, maybe there’s like super heroes in the same way that they’re super tasters
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like John. So maybe there are some that can really hear the difference, but man, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t buy it. My dad, and I think I mentioned this on the show, his stereo is fairly old now. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably 10, 15 years old, but at the time in which he put it together, it was a world-class
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stereo system and it sounds phenomenal, but I am quite confident that the little tweaks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that most audiophiles swear by would make almost no difference. And it just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is hilarious to me the amount of money that audiophiles will willingly light a flame just to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get a per se, a supposed, you know, incremental difference that is almost imperceptible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if not actually imperceptible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s basically it. I mean, there, there are certain things that matter. You know, the biggest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that matter are the source material, like the recording that you are playing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the format it is in, although only to an extent, uh, but like, so the source material,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the transducer, which is either the speaker or the headphone. Those things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco matter a lot. Everything else matters either only a little or not at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all. And, but you know, but people, people are always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like seeking that high. You want to have these amazing experience where you’re just like, oh my God,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this sounds incredible. And you occasionally get those, like the very first time you hear an amazingly recorded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco album or you’re like in your house, like all quiet, and you’re listening on awesome headphones, with like, you know, and you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drinking a beer and listening to amazing music. Like, you can, these experiences do happen, but they don’t happen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every time. And so you’re always thinking, oh, maybe if I just upgrade this thing, upgrade that thing, tweak this thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tweak this thing. This is very susceptible to placebo effect, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people are willing to pay lots of money to get lots of crazy things, to tweak their setup, to try to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, try to basically achieve those highs again. and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no amount of money will ever solve it. Nothing is ever complete. No one ever has their quote, grail that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re done with forever. Like it’s just, it’s a market that like, people will go to obscene
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lanes. And because the placebo effect is so strong, and because this is so hard to measure objectively,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people think that their stuff works. They think they’re hearing a difference. And one could argue,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco therefore it is working for them. You know? Yeah, fair point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, the reality is almost all of the stuff that audiophiles buy or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use or say you need or say they can hear the difference with is BS. Not all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it, but almost all of it.
Thanks for the feelings
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on, I forgot to mention that last episode, which by the way, the feedback on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey last episode was really, really lovely. And I know I speak for the other two guys in saying I really appreciate it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, thank you very much, everyone. We got a lot of kind words congratulating us on 300 episodes and reminiscing about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some good old times and wishing us very well. So thank you very much. That was really cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it was very, very nice of all of you. And I had asked kind of jokingly, but kind of seriously,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hey, I wonder what the total length of ATP is. And I forgot to put this in the show notes, but I just looked up the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first tweet that I had seen about it. And this is Jake Bathman
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Twitter. Do you think he mispronounces that Jake Batman on purpose? You know, just because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s what I would do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway. I would lead into it. I would say like, yeah, I’m the bath man. That’s awesome. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey total ATP length, according to our favorite superhero, is 23 days, 6 hours, and 40 minutes. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe that was inclusive of episode 300. That, of course, also includes ad reads and things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of that nature. But nevertheless, that is a significant amount of time, and I still remain kind of proud
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of us and also kind of appalled as well, because, oh my god, That’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much talking. But anyway, now you know, and knowing’s half the battle.
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Surface Go
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nick Donnelly wrote us an email that I thought was interesting, and I’m going to try to make this quick, but there’s a lot of bullet points.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And what he was writing about was the Surface Go. And so he said, the Surface Go is interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for these reasons that everyone seems to have missed. Wait,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can you summarize quickly? What is the Surface Go? Is that like their iPad convertible tablet,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the newest one or what?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, you know, I understand the question. I think it’s more laptop than iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So obviously a Surface is intended to be both and I’m probably wrong about this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I’m just, I’m out of the Microsoft world now. But, oh, actually I guess I am wrong because I’m looking at the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Surface Go marketing page which is www.microsoft.com slash en hyphen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us slash p slash surface hyphen go slash eight V nine DP four LNK
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and S Z question mark active tab equals pivot percent three a overview tab.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is shown. Yeah, it’s so easy to enter. It appears that this is being marketed at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey least to this picture as more of an iPad thing. I am wrong that it does not have a keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it looks a lot like an iPad pro but with a huge bezel.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, actually fair. But certainly all all snark in in just a side
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the advantages of the Surface is that it can be a true-to-form Windows computer. You can attach
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a mouse, the keyboards have trackpads, and it can do regular Windows-y things. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nick Donnelly wrote us an e-mail, and again, this is a little long, but please bear with me. He said, the Surface Go is interesting for these reasons that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone seems to have missed. Microsoft perfected MagSafe with a thin cord coming from the back as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It has a 10-inch screen, so it’s about iPad size. It has a USB-C port, it has Face ID, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of course called Windows Hello. that works well and is amazing on a laptop or tablet. It runs full
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Windows, which is in contrast to the maybe limitations of iOS. I’m not looking to get into a turf war.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s just roll with it. And it also has a touchscreen. It has an excellent keyboard cover as stable as Apple’s, but with much more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey travel. The keyboard costs $100. Man, that sounds cheap. And it’s backlit. It does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a touchpad, which is kind of cool. The touchpad is very close in quantity to the MacBooks. It has a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kickstand built into the back of the device, so you can stand it up without needing a case at all, which is great. It has a micro SD card
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slot, hi Marco, which you can throw extra memory in if you so desire. So Nick said he put a 256
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gig card in for 60 bucks. Because it has Windows, it has file management, it has a pen that is very close
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in quality to the Apple Pencil as per Nick, and it needs a new battery once a year. The build quality, according to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nick, is exceptional. But here’s the kicker. It starts at $350
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the higher end model with keyboard is about $550.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dollars. Given that I just torched $1,300 for my iPad Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh my god, I could have had almost three of these things for one iPad Pro. I could have had a day
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Surface Go, a night Surface Go, and a weekend Surface Go. It’s too bad it runs Windows, am I right?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s it. That’s not it. It’s also, performance-wise, I’m sure it’s spanked by the iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, probably. I mean, you know, what this looks like is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wonderful low-end iPad Pro-like tablet for office workers who want to run
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Windows and Windows apps and office apps and stuff like that. It doesn’t look like a high end device at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, but that’s fine. A lot of people want that. Like a lot of people want a low end device for their portable because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they don’t need higher than that. Um, and they don’t want to pay for higher than that. Like that’s a totally valid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason. Um, but yeah, I mean the big thing for us is like if this thing can’t run the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS that we want to run, whether it’s iOS or look, I take iOS over windows any day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If I was traveling I could only take one device and I could take either a Windows PC of my choice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or an iPad I’m taking the iPad every time because like I can’t do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything on Windows I can at least you know do a lot on the iPad But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, it’s all about like what? Ecosystem you’re in and what your needs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are This does look like it has a lot of good advantages over the iPad over any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad at any price let alone the pro You know, I wish the iPad was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little more willing to do some of these like ugly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but functional design tweaks, things like the kickstand, which is ugly, and we all made fun of it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s actually really practical in use, and having a few more ports, and having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some memory expansion slots and everything. That would be really nice on the iPad, and Apple would probably never do those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things for various mostly aesthetic or philosophical reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But so yeah, like this thing does look really cool in a number of ways. It does seem like it’s probably a pretty good value,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it doesn’t run the OS we want to run. And that’s a, that’s not a small thing. That isn’t just like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a checkbox feature when you’re making a comparison grid and you’re like, oh, well, you know, this one runs windows. This one runs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS or Mac iOS. And that’s just, that’s just a feature on a bullet list. Like, nope, that makes you break
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the product. Like if you, if you can’t run the OS that you want and or need to run
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a device, that device doesn’t exist to you. It’s dead to you Forgive me if I mentioned this recently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there was an episode of cortex. I think a long time ago now where CGP gray
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made the analogy that like changing operating systems is Even more disruptive to your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco life than like moving to a completely different country that didn’t speak your language
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like he compared like in his example He’s like he’s like he could move to China and it would be less disruptive to his
⏹️ ▶️ Marco life than switching his operating system And that is, to me, that’s not hyperbole.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco To me, I’m like, yeah, that would actually be correct. I would agree with that statement. It really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that different. When you do a lot of work on your computer or your mobile device, you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of apps, you have workflows, you have history, you have documents, you have software investments
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything, changing operating systems is not a small thing. That’s why you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see all the tech nerds who see this cool Microsoft hardware sometimes, they’ll talk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about it, they’ll say, I would love to try that sometime some of them even do try it sometime but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost none of them actually stick with it and the reason why is because Windows it’s not a small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing so I wish Apple would give us cool hardware and cool choices like this choices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they don’t usually give us that’d be awesome and I applaud Microsoft for pushing hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forward in ways that Apple can’t or won’t but ultimately I find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the entire surface line of products mostly irrelevant to me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and also kind of saddening at the things that Apple won’t do that I would like them to try.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But none of that makes me actually want to buy one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t help but wonder if this is if a form
⏹️ ▶️ Casey factor along these lines would be Apple’s way of dipping its toe into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ARM Mac OS, which I doubt like full stop. I don’t think this is the way they would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go, but it is an interesting thought exercise. You know, what if they released basically an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad, but instead of coming with iOS on it, it came with MacOS. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe the keyboard folio cover, whatever they’re calling it these days, had a trackpad on it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in addition to the keys and whatnot. And I feel like that would be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really appealing because one of the things I’ve liked about the iPad Pro is it feels very computery when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have it in landscape with the keyboard out and blah, blah, blah. But whenever I’m done doing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, composition with the keyboard, I can flip the keyboard around back. And I think Mike said this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recently, maybe on Upgrade, that I now have the best fidget, not spinner, but you know, like the best fidget toy in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey world because I can mash on the keyboards while they’re behind, or the keyboard keys while they’re behind the iPad. And I can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use the iPad as an iPad, you know, as a classic iPad, I guess I should say, you know, as a consumption device.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I could see how that would be really, really cool to have Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OS in a form factor like this. So I think Nick is right. I agree with what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you said, Marco, that as it is today, the Surface Go is not terribly interesting to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I can see how, especially if you are already into the Windows ecosystem, this would be tremendous. And I know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey most Windows users that I still converse with. That sounds way worse than I mean it, but you know what I mean.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have Windows friends. Yeah, I do. I have Greenbubble people. No, but most of the Windows people that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with… I really don’t have Windows friends, honestly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well we have a mixed family in the sense that Aaron’s family is all PC and Android
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it makes me sad. But anyway, anytime I speak to any of them, they seem to all love
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their Surfaces, Surf Fi, whatever. And I think I would too. If there was an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple or a Mac equivalent of this, I think I’d be really into it. I don’t know, John, does this like deeply offend you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this thought? I don’t think you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John thinking through your idea of like what you basically described as a terrible Mac laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John You can’t take a Mac laptop And then like get rid of the keyboard and use it
⏹️ ▶️ John as a tablet because Mac OS is not a tablet OS You can’t use Mac OS with your finger. The controls are too small.
⏹️ ▶️ John They requires too much precision in doing stuff It’s just not a touch OS right? So I think
⏹️ ▶️ John that doesn’t work. I Know a lot of people who have things like this
⏹️ ▶️ John at work and they like them and I see them use them and they use them kind of like a
⏹️ ▶️ John Hang on a slightly worse laptop Because if you don’t use ever use this in tablet
⏹️ ▶️ John mode You’d be better off with MacBook one or the equivalent PC notebook if you only ever use it in notebook mode
⏹️ ▶️ John Who wants this folding kickstand floppy credit keyboard just get yourself a laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole idea of this is that that’s why we’re talking about about in the context of an iPad is that this, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, if you had an iPad with a keyboard with a track pad on it or an adjustable kickstand or
⏹️ ▶️ John a thicker version like this that was cheaper and you know, like there are ways, these are all ways to make the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John better and then getting, you know, setting aside the OS issues of what this OS can do that iPad OS can’t because this is
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially Windows and iPad OS is iOS, which is still limited in many ways as
⏹️ ▶️ John compared to desktop. That’s the correct comparison for this. I don’t think there’s any reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ John comparison for Mac stuff because until and unless Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John has much more accommodation for touch, it’s entirely useless in tablet mode.
⏹️ ▶️ John In tablet mode, you need to run iOS. And then in laptop mode, you could, you know, there
⏹️ ▶️ John are trade-offs either way. Yeah, getting back to what Marco was saying about how this is not,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, not a substitute for people who want iOS or macOS, it’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of like the same conversation that we mostly don’t have anymore. that comes up far less frequently than it did,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is, why are you buying insert non-laptop Mac here? I could build a PC
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the price and twice
⏹️ ▶️ John the performance. And we bring it up occasionally in the context of the Mac Pro. Still true, like every one of these quote unquote
⏹️ ▶️ John high-end Macs, from the Mac Mini to the iMac Pro to the Mac Pro, with the exception of the
⏹️ ▶️ John crazy good screen on the iMac Pro and 5K iMac, mostly without exception,
⏹️ ▶️ John you could build a faster PC for half the price. But of course, then it would run Windows,
⏹️ ▶️ John and unless you’re gonna do Hackintosh which has its own, you know, been a problem, we don’t even talk about it. We don’t even say,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh Marco, I heard you got an iMac Pro. Why didn’t you build a PC for half the price? It’s not the same thing, right? But when it comes
⏹️ ▶️ John to iPads, it’s like, well, that’s the same thing, isn’t it? It’s a flat screen that you touch
⏹️ ▶️ John and has a pen. And it’s like, it’s the same differences on the Mac side. Like you either want
⏹️ ▶️ John Windows or you want Mac OS or you need Windows, you need Mac OS. The only time it becomes a factor,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is a topic that’s lower down unless we may or may not get to, and we’ve talked about
⏹️ ▶️ John in the past, the Surface Studio. Like if all you do all day at work is run Lightroom, and Lightroom
⏹️ ▶️ John runs on both platforms, and it already runs some like weird Adobe cross-platform GUI
⏹️ ▶️ John toolkit, and that’s all you ever do is spend all day in that application, then maybe you can switch from one OS to
⏹️ ▶️ John the other because it’s less of a factor in your life because all you do is, you’re basically using it as an appliance,
⏹️ ▶️ John and if you can get a Surface Studio Pro, but you can’t get anything as close to that on the Mac, and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John how you like to do whatever your work is, whether it’s Photoshop or Lightroom or whatever, some cross-platform application,
⏹️ ▶️ John that makes it viable. But for the Surface Go, I don’t think this is really
⏹️ ▶️ John in competition with the iPad among anybody who hasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John already chosen an OS ecosystem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I agree. But I just thought it was an interesting thing to think about. So thanks, Nick.
iSH update
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then final piece to follow up, we talked last week about ISH, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a kind of Linux on iPad, just engineering masterpiece
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as far as I’m concerned. It’s still early on. But anyway, the author of ISH tweeted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at us saying that he had just tuned into the ATPFM podcast and heard about YouTube DL or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey YouTube download not working. The author says, I’m working on Python support and the next test flight build should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have that working. I also noticed that somebody, I think it was Caleb Hicks was complaining,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well not complaining, but had noted that FFmpeg was also not working and there is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now an issue in GitHub for that too. And if you recall, this all stems from me saying that one of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the small list of things that I still would like to have my Mac for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is running YouTube download. And I got a lot of helpful people reminding me that shortcuts will do this sort of thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in certain cases, but YouTube download is actually a poorly named app because it downloads lots of things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from lots of places, not just YouTube. And I use it many times to get like shows off of network
⏹️ ▶️ Casey television websites. And, and it would just be nice to have for occasions when I don’t feel like SSH
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I don’t really expect that either of these would ever really work on an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad, but Hey, sounds like there’s a prayer and that’s pretty cool. So I just wanted to point that out. And if you haven’t tried
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ISH, I mean, it is very early on and not a lot works, But holy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey smokes, I can’t say enough how cool it is. So you should definitely check it out. We’ll put a link in the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ John I was just trying to look up the Geekbench scores for the surface Pro. I
⏹️ ▶️ John Think it’s less than half the the score in both single single and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco multi-core and surface
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go we’re talking about which is even which is Different.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, my server. Yeah. Sorry. I said Microsoft service go I’m seeing like single-core score on the mid 2000s
⏹️ ▶️ John and a multi-core score around the mid 4000s. Oh my god, that’s awful Yeah, what is the iPad?
⏹️ ▶️ John The new iPads are, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John around $5,000, so double that for single core, and $16,000. It’s approximately half the speed
⏹️ ▶️ John of the iPad Pro. It is less than half the price, to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fair. Yes. Yeah, like it costs about as much as if you buy a keyboard and a pencil for
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, right. you buy lots of
⏹️ ▶️ John or you can get an entire service go.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’ve been on a similar journey as the folks from Connected, where I’ve been going through photo management
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apps like it’s my job. And I started, I believe, with EverPix, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Picture Life, maybe I got that backwards, doesn’t matter, and eventually I settled on Google Photos,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I fell head over heels in love with. And this is where all the real
⏹️ ▶️ Casey big Apple fans say, how can you give all your information to Google? What is wrong with you? Blah, blah, blah. I understand the trade-offs,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but at the time, and I mostly stand by it to this day, I am willing to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make those trade-offs to get the unbelievable search that Google offers and some of the neat things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it does, like going through pictures and taking out the color in the backgrounds and making a stylized
⏹️ ▶️ Casey photo, as they call it. It just does really cool stuff, and I really like Google Photos. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hate the new, what is it, Google Drive uploader? Backup and sync from Google
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is what it’s called on my Mac. And it is a piece of monkey crap.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You see, a few months ago, up until a few months
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago, there was a Google Photos uploader that you could run, or Google Photos backup, I’m sorry, that you could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey run on your Mac, and it would happily backup files from your file system and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey throw them onto Google Photos. And if you’re somebody like me who treats his file system as the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one true and ultimate canonical source of all his photos, that was perfect. Also, that file
⏹️ ▶️ Casey system, it should be noted, which will become important in a little while, is on my Synology. The Synology gets backed up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey several different places. The photos specifically get backed up and onto a physical hard drive that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey moved off site. I have plenty of backups. I like having them on the Synology though because I can get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to those files anywhere easily And it is the only place where I’m willing to sacrifice about 600
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gigs or whatever my photo library is now. It’s really big. It’s the only place I’m willing to sacrifice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that much space. So a few months ago, Google Photos Uploader, whatever I just told you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was, became backup and sync from Google. And that thing is a piece of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey garbage. It hates the fact that I have a network share for where all of my photos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are. It’s constantly losing connection to it, Even though like the, the, the mount on the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is fine on my iMac. It’s fine. The mount is there. I can access it. No problem. But Google, Google’s piece of garbage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app gets confused constantly. I’ve also noticed that it was continually creating, and I’m pretty sure I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey narrowed it down to Google, continually creating additional folders in my file structure. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my file structure is a folder for each year in each year, a folder for each month, and then in each
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of those folders is all my pictures and it was continually making duplicates for some reason. So I would have in my 2018
⏹️ ▶️ Casey folder, I would have one. One space, open paren, one, close paren. One space,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey open paren, two, close paren. And I’m almost positive that this is Google Photos. Because I- Does it run Discovery,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey D? Yeah, it may as well at this point. It is such a piece of garbage.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And because of that, I am looking to get off of Google Photos, expressly because of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this native app uploader thing. So, I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey aware that if you are in an all iOS world, I don’t even need this thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it will suck them directly off my phone and upload them and that’s fine. However, I am not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey living in an all iOS world. I have a big camera and that’s where I take most of my best pictures.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I thought to myself, you know what, at this point, it may just be time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to bite the bullet and look at iCloud or what is it, iCloud Photo Library?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because I’ve heard a lot of people that I respect and that I trust say, you know what? I swear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s good. And so I started down the path of, okay, what do I need to do in order to get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iCloud Photos working? Which means I need to embrace the Photos app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on my Mac, which I used to use years ago and I haven’t used in a long time because I was always using EverPix or PictureLake for Google
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Photos or what have you. Well, it turns out that the Photos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app, to the best of my understanding, and I would be overjoyed if this ends up being user error. But to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the best of my understanding, the photos app will only really operate the way I want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if all of the photos are in a, are on a drive that is physically connected to your computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because I looked at the preferences for photos on my Mac and there’s importing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey checkbox, copy items to the photos library. And that’s in, this is in the context of iCloud photo library.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Under that it says only items copied to the library will upload to iCloud, to iCloud photos. And so what ends
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up happening is if I’m understanding everything properly, the only way for me to get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things in to iCloud from my Mac is if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have, if I now string an external hard drive to my Mac and stick
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all my photos there, despite the fact that they’re sitting two and a half feet to my left
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on my Synology. But because that’s a network share, it’s not good enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What do I do guys? What do I do?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, how big is your photo library? Like six or 700 gigs. How
⏹️ ▶️ John big is your hard drive, your internal hard drive? One terabyte. And you can’t fit the six or 700 gigs?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t want to even… Somebody in the chat just said, apple.com slash Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mini. Well done. But no, I don’t want to sacrifice three quarters
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of my onboard drive just for photos. Like that’s the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John What are you saving it? What are you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saving all that space for? I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know. I don’t think I even have that much free space at the moment. more important than photos that you’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey fill 700 gigs. I see how it is. I was
⏹️ ▶️ John like, if you’ve got other stuff, you’ve got other stuff. But if it’s a free space and you’re just trying to save it for the future.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do not have enough space. I have half of that space available.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What John is saying is you don’t love your children enough. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey what he’s saying. That
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John is exactly what he’s saying. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John so I was in a similar situation. I explained this to you already in Slack, but for the people on the podcast, I was in a similar
⏹️ ▶️ John situation in that I had my photo library on the internal drive. My internal drive was a terabyte.
⏹️ ▶️ John and my library’s getting bigger and bigger, and there were other things on the drive. Eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John I ran out of room, and I had to take my library and move it elsewhere. Now, the fact that you keep your library in the
⏹️ ▶️ John Synology, I know you like that because the Synology’s got lots of space, but that’s not really the
⏹️ ▶️ John best place for your photo library for a couple of reasons. One, unless you’ve replaced all the spinning disks in your Synology with
⏹️ ▶️ John SSDs, your Synology is slow as compared to an SSD, internal or like attached or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. And two, the fact that your Synology is big a lot of disk space
⏹️ ▶️ John makes it an ideal place to have a second copy of your photos in your house.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think your photos should be either on your internal hard drive attached to your Mac or on
⏹️ ▶️ John a drive attached to a Mac and they should be backed up to your Synology which is also in your house
⏹️ ▶️ John as a second local backup. So what I did when my, you know, internal drive filled up is
⏹️ ▶️ John I bought an external SSD, it’s bus powered, it’s a little USB thingy,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s where I move my photo library to. It’s connected to the back of
⏹️ ▶️ John iMac, it’s very small, I don’t have to plug it into anything except for the iMac with a very short cable, it’s not a big deal.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s where my photo library is. And I use the Photos application. Eventually, if I fill that drive, I can replace it
⏹️ ▶️ John with a bigger drive or more likely replace it with an iMac with like a four terabyte internal drive and I go back to internal.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because having an internal is great because the internal drives are really fast. I mean, maybe not on your iMac,
⏹️ ▶️ John but certainly on the iMac Pro, they’re really, really fast. And there’s nothing better than, You know, my photos library has like
⏹️ ▶️ John over a hundred thousand photos now. It’s nice to be able to have that direct
⏹️ ▶️ John attached or even better internal drive. It reduces load times and helps scrolling through. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you should do. And that’s actually exactly what my plan is. I just wish it didn’t have to be the case.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And what I’ve put into my Amazon wishlist since it’s holiday time is, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, some sort of external SSD. I basically thought, well, I need about three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quarters of a terabyte now. I have two children that I take too many pictures of, so I have a, and maybe this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey isn’t the best one in the world, but I arbitrarily landed on a Samsung T5 portable SSD, two terabytes for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about 400 bucks on Amazon. And I figure if nobody is feeling extraordinarily generous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey during the holiday season, hey Santa, then I will just buy that as soon as the holiday season is over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I will do exactly what you said. I just, it bums me out that Google photos,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, that the uploader changed And OC is saying in the chat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that anything Google Drive related is apparently a piece of garbage, which is really unfortunate. But yeah, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey backup and sync from Google is just a straight dumpster fire. And it bums me out because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey otherwise I really love Google Photos. And it just bums me out that Apple is very particular about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the way in which you store the photos. Like we were talking in Slack about how I believe the drive that the photos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are on need to be like HFS Plus or God knows what other file systems. I ultimately-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, it doesn’t really matter to me one way or the other, but the point is it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hyper-specific the scenario you need to be in. So if you’re not storing it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the internal drive on your computer, it gets very picky very quickly. And that really bums
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me out. So I think the answer, like you said, is an external SSD
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and just grow up and deal with it. But man, why can’t I have my cake and eat it too? Is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that so much to ask?
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re getting a new iMac with a bigger internal drive. You can have your cake and eat it too and everyone will be happy again.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I understand the
⏹️ ▶️ John problem you’re having with the Google uploader because I’m using that same Google uploader and granted, I don’t have my photos
⏹️ ▶️ John in like a hand arranged directory. So if it’s making weird stuff in there, I don’t know, but I just, I point the Google backup
⏹️ ▶️ John thing at my photo library and I’ve run it that way for, you know, in the old version, I ran
⏹️ ▶️ John it that way. And then the new one, I run it that way. Um, I, I don’t, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it may be missing some photos and maybe doing weird stuff, but I’m pretty sure that it isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John messing up the photos application. Right. So first do no harm if it’s doing weird stuff inside
⏹️ ▶️ John there the photos application doesn’t notice their care Right and every time I look in Google photos,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m looking for a particular photo I find it like if it’s missing photos, or if it’s doing something weird.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know it’s not crashing my computer It’s not causing huge amounts of CPU to be taken up like
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean Maybe it’d be different if I was using on a laptop or something this is plugged in all the time So I am using that backup
⏹️ ▶️ John utility, and I think it is about the same as the old one was both of them love to tell me
⏹️ ▶️ John that they can’t make heads or tails of my RAWs, so they say, these 2,000 items
⏹️ ▶️ John couldn’t be like uploaded into Google Photos, or no, it says something like they couldn’t be imported
⏹️ ▶️ John into Google Photos, but they’ve been stored in Google Drive. What it’s trying to tell me is that it has transferred the bits related to those,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that if you go to the Google Photos web interface, you won’t see them as photos because it doesn’t understand the RAWs.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they’re just like the Sony RAWs. I don’t have that many RAWs, but I have enough that it loves to tell me about
⏹️ ▶️ John them. So I don’t put too much stock in it. It’s like my third or fourth level
⏹️ ▶️ John cloud backup. And I’m just, you know, as I said before, I put so much metadata
⏹️ ▶️ John into the Apple Photos application that iCloud photo library is my real first line of defense
⏹️ ▶️ John because that preserves all that metadata. So I hope
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Photos works out for you. I still suggest you back up all those photos from
⏹️ ▶️ John your local Mac two feet away to your, I can’t believe you have your Synology two feet away. I wouldn’t be able to stand that noise.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco two feet away to the Synology. It’s not quiet.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Mine’s in the basement. I never hear it. It’s very far away from
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, mine’s in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go. There’s a very thick layer of cinder blocks and insulation between me and mine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey See, you know, ladies and gentlemen, this is why it is sometimes good to be me, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I respect the fact that the two of you can be so deeply bothered by fan noise and things of that nature,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I just don’t care and it is
⏹️ ▶️ John wonderful. It’s so, it’s not just fan noise. Like the Synology, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John at least mine anyway, at this point, you can hear the fans and also because it has so many spinning
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey drives in it. Oh yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can absolutely hear that. Plus the fans, it’s got basically like buzz, like you know, body cladding buzz from, again,
⏹️ ▶️ John I was just analogy of a car with a stereo that’s too loud for it, that it’s starting to shake
⏹️ ▶️ John the body panels. But I don’t care, it’s in the basement. I don’t know, I hear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, it’s completely silent from here. No, you’re absolutely right. But I don’t know, I think part of the problem is I don’t feel like wiring a cable all the way down,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because my garage is on the opposite side of the house and the floor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John below it. Yeah, I
⏹️ ▶️ John know. My basement, it is on the opposite side, the complete opposite side of my basement, but I ran
⏹️ ▶️ John that cable. I fished it up into this room, and I strung it around the outside of the room underneath the baseboard,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it comes right back up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re a better man than I. Anyway, in the grand scheme of things, this is not a very big problem,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and things could be so much worse, but it just really bummed me out, in no small part because I really love Google Photos.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And what you were saying about metadata, I don’t have very much metadata in no small part, because I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going through these services like water, but I did take the time to make a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these, a lot of like albums in Google photos. And it’s really going to make me sad when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I inevitably give up on that. And I don’t know what’s wrong with my Google photos upload or whatever it’s called
⏹️ ▶️ Casey backup and sync from Google. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong, except other, except perhaps that it’s on a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey network share and that’s, what’s making it so angry, but one way or another.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s really making me sad that Google Photos doesn’t seem to be doing what I needed to do anymore. And I really, really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey truly in my heart, believe it comes down to this god-awful uploader. And I tried running the old one a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey longer, even though they said it was, you know, sunset or end of life to whatever ridiculous Californianism they said, and it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t seem to be working anymore. Again, maybe it was user error. I’m not trying to say it was not me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it just didn’t seem right. It didn’t seem like it was uploading anything. And I’m just,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sad you guys. I want my Google
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Photos to work again. I have
⏹️ ▶️ John a couple of Google Drive related stories that are relevant to the photos thing. So when
⏹️ ▶️ John I had to do that switch of like, oh, you filled up your internal drive, now I gotta move photos to my external drive. So I bought an external SSD.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just brought a one terabyte. I’m continuing to live on the edge. Like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John just, I’m figuring we’ll get a new iMac before I actually fill this one at the rate of expansion. But if not, I’ll just buy
⏹️ ▶️ John another one. Anyway, I moved, you know, I copied the photos library there, and I had, for a while,
⏹️ ▶️ John I left it on the internal drive, but, you know, repoint, made the system, This is the thing you have to do in photos like
⏹️ ▶️ John you hold down the option key and you can select the library you want And you have to designate one the quote-unquote system library
⏹️ ▶️ John So I made the system library the system photo library the one on the external drive and I use it that
⏹️ ▶️ John way for a while Without getting rid of the one on the internal drive just to make sure everything was okay.
⏹️ ▶️ John I Also then had to tell the Google backup and sync thing Stop backing up
⏹️ ▶️ John the photos library on the internal drive, which wasn’t changing anymore. I was no longer touching that library It was like my
⏹️ ▶️ John umpteenth local backup, just like, you just stay there, I’m never gonna touch you again. And Google
⏹️ ▶️ John backup thing, start backing up the thing on the external drive. And as far as Google backup’s concerned,
⏹️ ▶️ John it had never seen those files before. So it was like, oh, here is 100,000 photos that I’d never seen that
⏹️ ▶️ John I need to upload. And so it went along uploading those things. Okay, what that means also is that
⏹️ ▶️ John now on my Google Drive, I had two entire photo libraries.
⏹️ ▶️ John One that was the old one and one that was the new one. Now, Google Photos, to its credit, understands that the photos are duplicates.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I didn’t suddenly have two of every kind of photo because it understands photos. So it’s not like I’m not going to show you two of things.
⏹️ ▶️ John But Google Drive, when you look at it, this is difficult to do in the Google web interface. But you can find the drive
⏹️ ▶️ John view of things. You can see the files
⏹️ ▶️ John that are associated with Google Photos in the drive. And it would show me photos.ifotolibrary, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John the hell the filename extension is for the ifotolibrary. show me two of those. One of them was the old
⏹️ ▶️ John one that hadn’t been modified in a while and one of them was the new one. So I’m like, okay, well now I have double double
⏹️ ▶️ John backups. I have to, by the way, expand my Google Drive to be like two terabytes to fit all this, but anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John So when I was satisfied after a month or two, like the new library and the external drive
⏹️ ▶️ John is working, everything’s great, it looks good, I could finally ditch the internal one. So on my Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John drag that photos library thing on my internal drive to the trash. And if you’re a
⏹️ ▶️ John sucker, hit empty trash because that will take a year and a day. If you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John a sucker, go to the command line and you know, rm minus rf, tilde slash dot trashes
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey library, whatever. Like I just let rm
⏹️ ▶️ John delete that thing. Still took a while. And suddenly I had 700 gigs free on my internal drive. Yay,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, like it’s great. And then I said I should get rid of that space
⏹️ ▶️ John on my Google Drive as well. So I went to Google Drive’s weird file viewer interface of your photos and I
⏹️ ▶️ John checked off like a check box next to the photo library that I’m sure was the one that I didn’t want based on the modification
⏹️ ▶️ John dates and I hit the little trash can icon and it disappeared but of course putting
⏹️ ▶️ John it in the trash doesn’t actually delete it just puts it like like on the Mac in your trash so you can view your trash
⏹️ ▶️ John in Google Drive so I went to the trash for you and at the top of trash for you it has well you can select
⏹️ ▶️ John individual items and delete them individually like permanently but you can also at the top if you find somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ John in one of these menus is an item called empty trash, like good empty trash room and I go to empty trash
⏹️ ▶️ John and it spins a little bit and throws up an error. And then like nothing disappears from the view and I go empty trash
⏹️ ▶️ John and it spins and throws an error and nothing disappears. Then I’m like, Oh, let me try this. Let me try checking a bunch of check boxes
⏹️ ▶️ John and then then say permanently delete these ones I’ve checked and it says, okay, I’ll do that. And they disappear for a second and then
⏹️ ▶️ John half of them reappear. And there’s like 100,000 files that I need to get rid of.
⏹️ ▶️ John I spent a while trying to figure out if I could get Google Drive to empty my trash of these
⏹️ ▶️ John items. And every time I would tell it to either empty the entire trash or select several hundred checkboxes
⏹️ ▶️ John and tell it to, you know, delete, permanently delete those items, it would appear to do so. They would
⏹️ ▶️ John disappear from the screen, but then they would reappear.
⏹️ ▶️ John I, you know, I emailed Google support about this and they’re like, well, sometimes when you tell us to empty
⏹️ ▶️ John the trash, the files don’t actually get deleted for 48 hours or yada, yada, yada, like some, some
⏹️ ▶️ John weird story about, you know, eventually consistent blah, blah. They didn’t say these words, but that’s what I’m thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John in my head. You know, our backend might not reflect the changes. So even though it keeps showing you the files
⏹️ ▶️ John are there, they’re not. So come back in 48 hours. And of course, then I forgot about it for two weeks. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then I came back two weeks later and I said, Oh yeah, they wanted me to check back in. I checked back in and guess what? Like the files were
⏹️ ▶️ John still there. So I emailed them back and said, the files are still there. But then by this point I given up
⏹️ ▶️ John ever getting this to work because I googled around and tons of people had similar problems and I just went through basically
⏹️ ▶️ John like a hundred items at a time and manually deleted them until I actually did drain
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing because you delete them and half of them reappear and then I just like more and delete them half of them reappear and luckily
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a hundred thousand items but they’re in a hierarchy of whatever the weird hierarchy the Google Photos thing does with this
⏹️ ▶️ John you know weird folder name so I didn’t actually have to check off a hundred thousand check boxes I did
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually drain it to the point where the trash was empty. But at no point did the actual
⏹️ ▶️ John empty everything from the trash button work. So I think Google Drive is not prepared to handle the volumes of
⏹️ ▶️ John files that I was throwing at it. I would call that a bug. I’m sure they closed my
⏹️ ▶️ John case as resolved because they said, do you still have a problem? I’m like, no, I manually selected check boxes for an hour and got
⏹️ ▶️ John rid of them all myself. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John great, problem solved. How was your support experience? Like fix your damn thing. When there’s a button that says empty trash,
⏹️ ▶️ John just make a note of a job and the job should be everything that’s in the trash you go
⏹️ ▶️ John delete it eventually. I don’t care how long it takes. I don’t care how long it takes for it to be consistent across all of your replicas and blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just do it. Don’t make me be the job that, anyway. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then eventually I got my free space back. So I’m back into a steady state with my Photos library and external drive,
⏹️ ▶️ John which honestly is a state I was in for a long time before. And so I’m kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of used to that. Only now the drive is really, really tiny and silent and much, much faster.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think your world is my future. It’s just a matter of time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s another advantage, by the way, that I think about with this. If the house is on fire, and really you should get
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody out, but if you’re gonna grab one thing, grab the tiny little SSD, just yank it right off the cable,
⏹️ ▶️ John and now you’ve got your family photos. All your entire photo library on one easy to grab thing. I can’t carry that iMac
⏹️ ▶️ John out. I’m not like Marco with his case or anything. But I can perhaps grab one tiny little
⏹️ ▶️ John SSD and yank it off the computer and leave the house. you wouldn’t stop to safely
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, living dangerously.
⏹️ ▶️ John And all that kind of time, the house
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is on fire, literally. You know, it’s funny you say that. I have thought a lot about how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if our house, God forbid, was aflame, that I would definitely make sure that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aaron and the kids were fine. And if I had even a second to do anything else, I would rip
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Synology right out. Well, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John in the wall. It’s too big, you can’t take
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Don’t take the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco absolutely would. would like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unplug operating hard drives and just like pick it up while I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey still like spinning.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I absolutely would because given the alternative of guaranteed loss, I will take
⏹️ ▶️ Casey possible loss. And my life is on that box. I mean, again, it’s backed up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey many different places. And so it wouldn’t be catastrophic, I hope, knock on wood,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, you know, if it did break. But if I had the the choice between grabbing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that thing and hopefully saving myself hours upon hours upon hours of angst and frustration.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Even if I lost a drive, you know, hypothetically I would still be okay. Um, I w I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey absolutely just yank the darn thing out of the wall and run downstairs with it. I’ve thought about that a lot. And I agree with you, John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that in a perfect world, you know, there’s a lot in that synology I would be sad to lose quite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot actually. And it’s, and it’s all backed up, but you’re absolutely right. that the number
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one thing I would be devastated to lose would be the photos. And that’s why every month I make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an exact duplicate of all of the photos on that drive onto a external little two and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a half inch spinny disk drive. And then I send that to, I send that with my parents,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, cause they usually visit once a week. I’ll send that with my parents to their house to keep for the remaining three weeks of the month
⏹️ ▶️ Casey until it’s the beginning of the month again, when I make another duplicate of the, of all those photos. So hypothetically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a worst case scenario, I would lose a couple of weeks of pictures and no more. But it that that that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the sort of thing that keeps my weird nerdy brain up at night is, you know, what would I what would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I lose if this house goes up in flame? What files am I losing?
⏹️ ▶️ John And to be clear, I have like seven cloud backups of all this
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not like I’m worried about losing only copies, just that that copy that’s attached to the external drive is the has
⏹️ ▶️ John all the metadata is the canonical copy. And that because it’s formatted as a PFS, it has periodic
⏹️ ▶️ John snapshots that are being taken place on it so I can just yank it out, content that even if I have hosed some part of the
⏹️ ▶️ John file system, one of the snapshots from like an hour ago is internally inconsistent and I’m fine. Magic
⏹️ ▶️ John of file systems. And honestly, yes, and before we get all his emails saying, never take anything, just leave the house, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John assuming a scenario where like an upstairs bedroom is on fire and smoke hasn’t even entered the downstairs and everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John is safely out of the house, I would take the drive with me on my way out the door. Not when like I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John fighting my way through flames to get it, do not reenter a burning house to get anything out of it ever, unless it is like a child
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know why you guys worry so much about your data in your house. Because honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have so much online backup that I would not worry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about that at all. Yeah, if I had a lot of time to go back into the house if it’s burning and everyone’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out and safe, the whole family, the dog, everyone’s out and safe,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I have enough time to go back in and get stuff. I think the first thing I’d get would be like, you know, jewelry. Second
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing would be like my like important documents, like my passport and everything that are just like a pain to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John replace. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John come on. No, you don’t get that stuff. I would never personal never go back in and we’re saying on
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the way out. No, we’re saying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no, but we’re saying like if we have time to go back in and you know, it’s still you think
⏹️ ▶️ John you think you have time, but you don’t know you have time. The ceiling could collapse.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You think you know, but you have no idea. This is
⏹️ ▶️ John would not I would not save passports or jewelry or anything like that. I don’t have anything nice. So that
⏹️ ▶️ John that solves that problem. The only yeah, like it’s just because you’re you’re on the way out the door and you
⏹️ ▶️ John only have one second to grab one thing completely thoughtlessly. It can’t be a heavy thing. Casey, like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey this analogy has to be
⏹️ ▶️ John something the size of a deck of cards that you can yank off in two seconds on your way out the door. And the only reason I’d
⏹️ ▶️ John be doing it is because I know how much time it would save because I don’t I don’t have my
⏹️ ▶️ John photos metadata. Well, don’t I see do I have it? Yeah, I guess I have the photo library. All right, I do
⏹️ ▶️ John fine. Multiple online backups of the photos metadata. But the drive would be really
⏹️ ▶️ John convenient. Because if I have to restore 700 gigabytes from the backup service of my choice, it’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John to be really slow. So that’s it. That’s that’s all I would do. I don’t even need to take my wedding
⏹️ ▶️ John album or anything anymore because we digitize those negatives. So I’m all set. Oh, you’re old negatives. That’s right. We got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would say also like, you know, going back a little bit, you know, a little bit closer to the ground now to this topic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Generally, I find a good rule of computing happiness
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is to do as much as you can with the stuff built into the platform that you’re on. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this case, one of the reasons I don’t use Google Photos, and I know people like it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s good, good for you. One of the reasons I don’t use it is because it requires this weird app to be installed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to upload all my photos on my Mac, and I just don’t wanna do that. My experience with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps like that is that they don’t care about the platform enough to make a good app. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want that running on my main computer. Now, I do have an advantage that Casey, you should probably consider
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because you like buying new Apple stuff and rationalizing it, so I’ll help you out here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This would be a good case for a Mac mini to basically replace your Synology or at least replace this role of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. And you have basically have the Mac mini have the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco photo library on it and run Google’s awful uploader on it, so it’s working on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a local disk. And then you on your iMac only have the optimized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco version that doesn’t have the full-size versions of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco photos on it. Because then, that’s one of the things I use my Mac Mini
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for, is I put software on it that I need to be running all the time for something. That includes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like my dumb iSCSI initiator, which I don’t recommend to anybody ever, but I’m running it and that’s how I use my Synology
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a useful way. It also includes things like my Fujitsu ScanSnap software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that like it’s just this ugly icon that has to always be running in your dock. And I had it running on my dock on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my main computer for years and I always hated it. And so like I can now put this on this computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s kind of isolated from software updates breaking it because that computer is still running
⏹️ ▶️ Marco low Sierra. So like, and there’s no reason for me to upgrade it. That’s kind of like the computer, It’s kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how I use Chrome on my main computer as like my Google and Facebook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sandbox that is isolated from my computer. Like the Mac mini is just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bigger version of it. It is like my Mac OS isolated sandbox that things that need to run
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a Mac, but don’t necessarily need to run on my Mac, and that I don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to run on my Mac. So that’s a perfect place for this kind of thing. So if it will work well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the local disk, and you don’t want to run on your main Mac, which I totally would understand and would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco support. A Mac mini server might be a good option. It could also be a way better Plex server than Synology could be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And generally speaking, I have just found software from Google
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is awful. Google’s really good at server stuff and web stuff. They’re terrible at local
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software. Same thing with Amazon. For a while I tried Amazon’s music store, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Amazon version of iTunes Match was called, which I think is recently discontinued. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything with that Sonos software is also awful. Like any company that I need to like run their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco server software or their uploader on my Mac has a really bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco track record. And I would rather just not use those services than have to run this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco horrible software all the time and depend on them making a really good Mac client. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the most part, these big companies just can’t and won’t do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think you’re exactly right that Google’s bread and butter absolutely server-side stuff and web stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And certainly Google photos, the parts of it that are great, that’s because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the server-side stuff and the web stuff. That makes perfect sense. But yeah, you’re exactly right. That these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey native apps, even the one that I loved that worked well, was a piece of garbage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a native app. And this new one that doesn’t work is also a piece of garbage.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like you can tell that it’s using some sort of God awful cross platform UI framework. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bad. And I don’t know. I don’t necessarily agree that a Mac mini is, well, not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to say that it’s necessary. I shouldn’t put words in your mouth, but I don’t know that it’s really the right answer because that’s a, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a solution that starts at. $800 more than the $400 I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey already going to spend because I need the $400 hard drive no matter what. And then adding $800
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worth of Mac mini on it just for funsies seems unnecessary. But I also agree with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you that rather than leaving my iMac on 24-7, which is what I do, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would be way nicer to just have that little Mac mini over in the corner somewhere, being my Plex
⏹️ ▶️ Casey server, being my Photos server, so to speak, or whatever the case may be. So yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I somehow stumble onto, you know, a thousand bucks, whatever the case may be, if I hadn’t already, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, lit $1,500 on fire on this iPad, maybe I would do that. But yeah, for now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think it’s necessary, even though it would be nice and convenient. And so, like I said, I think I’ll just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get that two gig, or just, I’m sorry, two terabyte SSD whenever the
⏹️ ▶️ John Why are you gonna banish that Mac Mini to the corner? You know, you just put it on your head as a hat, The
⏹️ ▶️ John sound won’t bother you.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and it’s time for Ask ATP. And we start with Cameron Kerr writing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what would you like Apple to change this time around with the x86 to ARM transition?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe timelines, layer, excuse me, translation layers, developer hardware, etc.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Was there anything from the PowerPC to Intel transition that could have been done better? I wasn’t around for that in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sense that I wasn’t a Mac user at the time. So, Shrug? I have no idea. And I think, Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re in the same boat. Is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I was indeed around for that. My first Mac, my first Mac was right before that. It was, it was a PowerBook G4
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad. In like 2004. And that this transition happened in 2006.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, so yeah, I was actually around for that. My second Mac was the first generation of white
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plastic Intel MacBook, which was, you know, had some minor issues with like the case, but overall was an amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco machine that was an amazing value and amazing performance for the time. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I actually think the PowerPC to Intel transition from my point of view, just as a user at the time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was not an Apple developer. I’m still not really much of a Mac developer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But, you know, at At the time I was even less of one. And so I don’t really, I didn’t see the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developer story side of it. I just know that the customer side of it. And if the customer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco side, it was pretty good. Like there was such a big performance gain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the transition that Rosetta actually was not too bad. Like, so Rosetta for anybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who wasn’t around or is too young to have remembered, Rosetta was the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco translation layer. It was basically an X80, it was basically a PowerPC emulator
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that ran your old PowerPC apps. And technically, I don’t think it was actually an emulator. It was some kind of translation thing, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically it let you run PowerPC apps on Intel. Not that slowly, like not as slowly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as like full blown emulation. And so it was actually a pretty reasonable compatibility layer. It worked pretty well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think there were any apps I had that like didn’t work in it that needed it, but ultimately there weren’t that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many that needed it. Like most apps updated fairly quickly or, you know, within a year and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was fine. So the transition then was going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to way faster hardware with really good value
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac options available and software that caught up pretty quickly. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was actually in my opinion from my point of views as the customers again I thought it was a really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easy and well done transition like I think it didn’t seem to have any downside. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there isn’t much I would change if they’re doing the same And again, the only thing is like, we’re in a different world now. Like that was 12 years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like things are very different now. Like any transition to ARM that happens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the foreseeable future probably would not have a massive performance gain over the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco equivalent Intel chips at the time. Intel’s having problems, but their chips are still really fast at the high
⏹️ ▶️ Marco end. Um, and, and fairly decent, but maybe getting less decent at the low
⏹️ ▶️ Marco end. I don’t think, I don’t think an ARM transition is going to bring I think it sucks you massively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in performance that a translation or emulation layer like Rosetta would make sense
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be able to run x86 apps on ARM at any reasonable speed. I think maybe they would enable it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it probably would be pretty slow. Probably wouldn’t want to really do it for much. So assuming that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not as present, it would rely heavily on apps being updated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty soon after it was unveiled. And that’s a really tricky thing right now, because 12
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years later, Mac apps aren’t getting everyone’s full attention anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Both Apple and the developers of the apps that we were using back then and that we’re using now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Mac have split attention between the Mac and iOS. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac usually loses that battle for most of those developers. Usually, if you have to prioritize which one you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spend time on and you code on, usually iOS wins, because the market is bigger.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I do worry how long it would take Mac apps to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco update for a new architecture, even if it was relatively easy. Like I wouldn’t expect it to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a big technical cost to most apps. Like most apps probably in the last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transition probably removed any assumptions about like byte order and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any like processor architecture specific things in their code. Like most people are coding at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a higher level than that kind of stuff now anyway and have made any necessary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco changes in previous transitions or in having like across iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Mac OS code base. Like so the actual work for the developer who is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco updating an app is probably gonna be pretty small, but that still relies on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developer updating the app and recompiling it and resubmitting it to the App Store if it’s an App Store app or republishing it to their site
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it’s not. And that I just think is gonna take a while because Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps are such a low priority for so many developers now, and so many of them have been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco abandoned, or almost abandoned.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’ve been through all the transitions Apple has done, and one of the reasons I put this question in here is
⏹️ ▶️ John because when thinking about it, I couldn’t think of any
⏹️ ▶️ John terrible things that happened during the previous two transitions. And so I think
⏹️ ▶️ John the situation Apple is in is that it should be shooting for
⏹️ ▶️ John the performance that it’s already done twice. Like that’s its goal. Do as well as you did in 68K
⏹️ ▶️ John to PowerPC and PowerPC to Intel. Now arguably in 68K to PowerPC, there were some things that you could
⏹️ ▶️ John say that they might have done better. In particular, they basically
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t port their operating system in its entirety for a really, really long time. They were kind of a victim of their own success.
⏹️ ▶️ John They had such a good system for fat binaries that had both kinds of things in them, and for the ability
⏹️ ▶️ John to mix and match code from the different architectures, that they use that ability in the operating system to avoid
⏹️ ▶️ John having to rewrite crusty parts of their operating system. I mean, there’s probably 68K assembler still lurking around in there at
⏹️ ▶️ John the time of the transition. For a really long time, tons of parts of the operating system were still
⏹️ ▶️ John 68K code, and they got away with it because they made the transition so easy for everyone even including
⏹️ ▶️ John themselves, right? In the Intel transition, they were better, right? They didn’t have this thing where they,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, parts of the operating system are running in Rosetta for long periods of time. People did port their apps. They,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, they, they did it even better the second time around. Um, the third time around if they
⏹️ ▶️ John do another transition, I’m not quite as down in Marco on the ability to do emulation. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think, uh, that especially if Intel can’t get onto his 10 nanometer process, that
⏹️ ▶️ John they could have enough of an edge to make, uh, you know, emulation or binary translation
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, not have horrendous performance. and that could get us along for a little while. But as you saw
⏹️ ▶️ John with the, this wasn’t an architecture transition, but like the
⏹️ ▶️ John classic Mac OS to Mac OS 10 transition where they had a place where your old apps could run for a while, but they were pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John good about eventually getting rid of that. And we lost a bunch of applications there, but it’s like, well, this is the new world and
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve, you know, bring your apps along or you’re gonna left behind. And as Marco pointed out, that was a different world
⏹️ ▶️ John where there was a lot more effort being put into Mac applications. But
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the point still stands that Apple has set the bar for itself. They,
⏹️ ▶️ John to their credit, they, they are the only company, I think, that has ever done anything like this kind of transition
⏹️ ▶️ John in the same type of platform. Arguably, game consoles do this type of transition all the time. But game consoles, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John historically, have not been like PC platforms with backward compatibility being so important. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just a different market, right? So I would almost not count those transitions, even though in the modern era, they’re becoming much more
⏹️ ▶️ John like that. And backward compatibility is more of a selling point for the back catalog. and they do all this crazy emulation stuff or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But there’s no like Apple is the best in the world at these type of transitions. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s done, you know, granted only two times. But that’s a lot in the grand scheme of things, considering Microsoft has
⏹️ ▶️ John never done it despite Arm on Windows. Right. They’ve never like turned over their whole user base. And now
⏹️ ▶️ John no one ever runs Windows and X86 anymore. Whatever. Like no one is running Mac OS on power
⏹️ ▶️ John PC or 68 K because it doesn’t run it only runs on Intel. The current version of Macros only
⏹️ ▶️ John runs an Intel only Apple, as Tim Cook would say, has done this. So Apple’s got
⏹️ ▶️ John its work cut out for it. There is nothing about past transitions that they should be, you know, that they should think about
⏹️ ▶️ John and do better. They should just think about, can we do as well as we did last time? If they could match the
⏹️ ▶️ John Intel transition, it would be a smashing success. So that should be their goal.
#askatp: Start coding in 30s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anonymous writes, I’m in my late 30s and have been a geek since childhood.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve been discovering programming on my 286 and GW Basic and Pascal on the DOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nice. And with a multitude of hobbies, I never ended up pursuing a career in programming. My experience is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey elsewhere, primarily with servicing technology, customer service, and software quality assurance. I absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey love quality assurance for my ability, for the ability to break things down, but can’t do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much more in this field without a programming background. Hearing you guys speaking about how programming suits the character made me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to seek career advice from three developers. Do you guys think it’s too late to switch this career? Would you recommend schooling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or self-paced lessons? And lastly, what language should I begin if I were to choose the to be best suited
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the new career? I’m going to take this one by one and I’ll let us round table each of them. Do you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey guys think it’s too late to switch this career? I don’t think so, but that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey easy for me to say, cause I never made the switch and I’ve been in it since I was in college. you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my first real job was a development job. I think it is generally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little bit harder to get a job in development, especially an entry-level job when you’re older, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey typically older developers are, well, first of all, not usually developing anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Usually they’re managing and B, it’s just not something you see very often, but I wouldn’t say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s a bad idea. I just think that the odds are stacked slightly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey against you. But I don’t know. Marco, what do you think about that one piece of this question? Then, like I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said, I’ll go through the other pieces in a moment.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I’m also in my quote late 30s, so I can see this as like somebody who’s my age.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I too, like Casey, have not had the experience of migrating into this field
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after school and everything because I started when I was a teenager basically and I went to school
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for computer science and was working in the field right up since right after college. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do think that of all the many different fields that you can possibly work in,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being a programmer is possibly one of the easiest ones to get into at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a quote later age even though I know we aren’t that old in grand scheme of things. But like yeah, it’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot easier than a lot of fields because there’s no required certifications, there’s no required schooling.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s the kind of thing that you can self-teach, which just sounds like this person actually has self-taught to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some degree, at least in the past. So you can self-teach. There’s lots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of resources to learn how to do it. You can do it with the computer and tools and everything you already own without
⏹️ ▶️ Marco massive new investments of anything. There is no degree that you need to get. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no certification you need to buy or get, no test you have to take.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And most importantly, the people who hire programmers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of them care whether you went to school for it and whether you have lots of experience behind you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But from what I’ve seen, most don’t. You know, most employers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of programmers care about one thing, can you do it? And maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco secondarily, what have you done? Now the second one is going to be a problem for you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you don’t have a lot that you can show that you’ve done in programming. But the first one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will help you get there. You know, like you couldn’t, if you can just show that you can do it and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you were able to self teach on your two eighty six with GW basic, you can do it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because that was not easy back then. Uh, there was no stack overflow back then. Uh, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so if you could do that, you know, you, you can self teach. And so I think, I think you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it. you won’t be able to necessarily land any job you want. You’re gonna have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take what you can get at first. Take whoever will hire you as an entry-level position
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because you won’t have a lot of experience doing this. But if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can learn programming on your own, which you totally can, and it seems like you have, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can get a job in it. It’s one of the best fields for that. In fact, of all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco programmers that I’ve worked with or met or even know currently, I would say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of them don’t have a degree in computer science. Most of them went to school for something else
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and came to computer science later. And maybe not, you know, in their 30s, maybe it was in their 20s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, some came in their 30s. You know, it’s a pretty open and welcoming field
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you can actually do the work. You know, what your past is and what your experience is matters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot less than can you do it or not. So I think you can do it. As for what language you can pick,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t matter. Pick whatever you want. Language has changed, really, every few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years. If you can learn one, you can learn them
⏹️ ▶️ John Sorensen Marco can’t follow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey instructions. Aaron Powell I know. He can’t even follow instructions on his own podcast, let alone when I try to get him to follow instructions.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, let’s concentrate for a moment on, is it too late?
⏹️ ▶️ John John Sorensen No, it’s definitely not too late. I think Marco covered most of the points. So the one I would to add is that
⏹️ ▶️ John even an entry level programming job pays pretty well, right? So unlike other fields where the
⏹️ ▶️ John entry level jobs pay crap and you have to work your way up, if you essentially have,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, basically zero practical experience, but you have a skill and you know, you’ve, you’ve, you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John learned a language and can demonstrate some proficiency and you get the bottom rung entry level programming job.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s still pretty good pay compared to the bottom rung entry level, like, you know, copy editing job or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, like, like so many other industries, the entry level job. This is where the problem is going into
⏹️ ▶️ John a new career when you’re older. If the entry level job doesn’t pay enough to support whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John life you’ve built for yourself at the age of 3040 or 50 or whatever, maybe you have a mortgage or obligations or kids
⏹️ ▶️ John in college and you can’t afford to change careers because you’d be taking a downgrade and pay from you know, 10
⏹️ ▶️ John years or 20 years experience in field a and then you change it to feel being you got to start back over again, the entry
⏹️ ▶️ John level salary is enough to support you. That’s not true in programming, even the entry level jobs pay. Usually
⏹️ ▶️ John at an amount of money given exactly how valuable entry level programmers
⏹️ ▶️ John are to companies sometimes. So yeah, you can totally learn it. You can totally
⏹️ ▶️ John switch to it in your advanced age of late 30s. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not coal mining. It’s not like you’re going to be, oh, my arthritis in my late 30s means I can’t pick up these large
⏹️ ▶️ John bales of hay or whatever manual labor. That’s a weird coal mine. You’ll be be okay.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was switching to farming. I was trying to think of like a job where
⏹️ ▶️ John you need even something like a contractor or like construction, like where you, where your,
⏹️ ▶️ John your physical age and abilities is a factor in the job programming. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not as big a factor. You’re typing on a keyboard. It’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Doug Blount I agree. Would you recommend schooling or self-paced lessons? I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it really matters as long as you can. And this is what I think Marco especially was saying earlier,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as long as you can prove that you know what you’re doing. And I’ve heard mixed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things about those like code boot camps. I don’t particularly have any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey horse in that race, but I can tell you that I went to a four-year
⏹️ ▶️ Casey school for computer engineering, and I feel like I learned more about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what it’s like to be a professional engineer in the first three months of my first real job
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than I did in the four years prior. And so that’s why I would say schooling isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey necessarily compulsory, but it is a pretty reliable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and consistent way to say, here is a document that says I have learned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey X. So in the case of me, I have a document that says I have learned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a fair bit about computer science and electrical engineering because of my personal estimation. That’s what computer engineering really is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And for Marco, he has a document that says, I’ve learned a lot about computer science. And that can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be kind of an equalizer to some degree. But ultimately, I don’t think schooling is necessary.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s just something you’re going to want to be able to point to something that indicates
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and proves that you can do it. So it could be an app in the App Store. It could be a website. It could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be GitHub profile. Actually one of my favorite things to see from the role of an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interviewer is somebody with a decent GitHub profile where I can look at their code
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and see what they actually do to write code. So any of those things are fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, any other thoughts on schooling or self-paced lessons?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Reus Oh yeah, I would add, I think, you know, formal schooling like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting a computer science degree, if you’re already in your 30s, I would say that’s not going to be a good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco return on your investment. Like that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think that’s something that it’s fine to do when you’re like, you know, 18 and you get qualified, you get your first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco job. I don’t think it’s, like, in this field, I don’t think you need it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I said earlier. Like, I know very few working programmers who have a computer science degree. And I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say, you know, once you’re already established in the job market, you’re in your 30s and everything, I don’t think it’s a good use of your time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or money. Maybe something more trade-oriented, like what you said about like bootcamps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I, again, I’ve never experienced these things. There’s probably a lot of them out there that aren’t very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good, that are kind of just scamming, scamily taking your money. So I would maybe do some research on those to see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if those help, or even if you need them. You might not need them. But I would also say, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are applying for a job, almost anywhere, and you show up as the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 36-year-old who doesn’t have a lot of programming experience at all, but just knows a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot about tech stuff and wants to get into it and maybe is self-taught, you won’t be the only person applying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for that job who is exactly like that. It’s easy to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overrate everyone else’s skills when you just pay attention to the stories you hear online,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or to what people say, and to what companies say. We hire the best of the best, and you look at the requirements
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s like, we require 10 years of experience and this language is only five years old.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s easy to talk yourself out of even applying or even trying, because you think, I can’t get that job.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The reality is, most people applying for that job even the person
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who ends up getting hired for it has a pretty low chance of actually satisfying all the quote requirements on the job
⏹️ ▶️ Marco posting. So don’t let that talk you down or discourage you. Also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t think that every employer for a programming job is gonna give you a Google
⏹️ ▶️ Marco style interview full of coding on a whiteboard and solving algorithms and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re not. Most of them don’t do that. Most of them are like, we need somebody like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yesterday. Can you start right now, please? we’re desperate, we are overwhelmed with work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something, or we’re in some kind of mess, we need to add some programmation to this project, you seem competent, can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you show up on time and code? Yes, okay, you have a job. Like that’s most of the actual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco jobs in the industry. It’s not like, you’re not solving problems of going to Mars and needing a PhD
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and having a crazy Google brain teaser interview. Like, but it’s easy to think that’s the whole industry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I would say, you know, just try to jump in and try applying for jobs that you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not quite qualified for and just see how far you get. You can learn on the job, you’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be fine, and you won’t be the worst programmer there, I bet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and to build on what Marco was just saying, you know, it was just a few months ago that I was interviewing people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to join the team that I was the technical lead on. And in my personal opinion, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think I’m the only one who thinks this, I would much rather have someone who knows enough
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to sort of kind of get their job done, but is really enthusiastic about it and is really enthusiastic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about learning, rather than the hotshot coming out of school that knows everything about everything. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that hotshot coming out of school is going to be opinionated, but also ignorant and in all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, well, obviously I’m, uh, stereotyping a bit, but you know, opinionated, ignorant,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and also unaware of their own ignorance. And that’s the problem. And so I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much, much, much rather have someone who is enthusiastic and knows that they don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot, then someone who knows a whole ton, but it’s just kind of like, yeah, well, this is my first job of 30.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So whatever I’ll do my two years and get the hell out of here.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve lost track of where we are on this question. Is it like, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey schooling, schooling or lessons? No, I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t, I don’t think, I don’t think you need the schooling. The thing about the, uh, the schooling or the lessons
⏹️ ▶️ John is, uh, I think one of the most important questions you have to answer if you find yourself in this situation
⏹️ ▶️ John is, is programming a thing that I actually enjoy and I’m good at?
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re at the phase of thinking, well, I always wanted to get back into it and to get advanced in my career, I’d need programming
⏹️ ▶️ John skills, you know, should I do it? You have to find out whether you like programming
⏹️ ▶️ John as a career and whether you’re good at it. And you could find that out in school, which would be an expensive,
⏹️ ▶️ John time-consuming way to find out. Or you could find that out by trying to do some kind of programming
⏹️ ▶️ John project on your own. Like, you You need to have some, in most cases, you need to have some kind of skills going in. You don’t have any
⏹️ ▶️ John previous job experience, maybe you don’t even have any projects that you’ve done, maybe you haven’t contributed to open source, but you need
⏹️ ▶️ John to do something with yourself to say, oh, I can, I can program,
⏹️ ▶️ John I can do this and I find it fun. Because once you’ve crossed that hurdle, then it’s just a matter of finding someone who’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going to give you a chance. But if you don’t do that, and you find someone who’s willing to hire you, and then
⏹️ ▶️ John you get in there and you realize, oh, I actually don’t like programming, it’s kind of annoying, like program might not be what you think it is like so many
⏹️ ▶️ John careers until you’re actually doing it, you’re not entirely sure. Like you make it like the idea of programming with the reality might turn you
⏹️ ▶️ John off. So find that out ahead of time. And I, you know, I don’t think you need to go to school to find that I think you
⏹️ ▶️ John probably much more efficient to find that out on your own. And the last place is this question
⏹️ ▶️ John is going along what language should I begin with doesn’t matter language doesn’t matter. I mean, you can, if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John if you want to become an expert in a language and learn a language, you can choose one based on where you think you want to apply based on the companies
⏹️ ▶️ John that are nearby or whatever. But in terms of learning to be a programmer, it absolutely doesn’t matter. Like when you’re when you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John learning to be a programmer, you’re just learning generic skills that are going to apply to any language.
⏹️ ▶️ John When it when it comes to choosing languages, if you have a target company in mind, and that company does entirely like
⏹️ ▶️ John server side software in Java, and that’s where you’ve got your heart set on or there’s five companies like that, then yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John learn Java, but you’re not doing that to learn programming that you’re learning that you’re doing that to land a job. And,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, some companies will hire you even if you don’t know the language, it’s like, oh, you can learn the language on the job. It’s assumed that someone who is a programmer,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially an experienced programmer can learn any language on the job. And sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll hire people, you know, say somebody, some companies working in a very obscure language, they’ll hire people, and they
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have any expectation that anybody knows this language because it’s like mumps or something. And they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John Pearl. Yeah, no, there’s more people know Pearl than mumps.
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’ll hire you and say, if you know a language that’s similar, but I haven’t seen jobs like that. Like if
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like Ruby, Python, or whatever, and you’re like, well, what do you use? Like, it doesn’t matter if you know any of those languages, you’re fine,
⏹️ ▶️ John because that’s kind of the kind of language we do here. So don’t get hung up on the language thing that is like the least important
⏹️ ▶️ John sub question in this question.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, agreed. The only thing I would I would build on that to say is, if you’re trying to learn programming,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then you should definitely have a task that you’re trying to complete in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the language that you’re you’re using. So for example, when I wanted to learn node, I wanted to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey build a blog engine and that gave me a specific thing to concentrate on to, to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey help me learn node rather than just being like, Hey man, it would be cool
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to like, I don’t know, learn node and stuff. And that that’s really too open-ended for most people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I know. So having a specific task, it’s maybe it’s, you want to see something on your own iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You want to see something on your Mac. You want to see something on the web somewhere. Having a specific task
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is very, very helpful and agree. And I agree that if you have a company
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in mind or what have you, then try to follow whatever stack they use. But John’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ultimately, the language is irrelevant. It’s just that you can do these sorts of things.
⏹️ ▶️ John You just proved that point about learning Node because if you had learned Node with
⏹️ ▶️ John the idea that it’s going to be important for a job that you’re going to have, you don’t know that anymore because Node changes every two weeks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s true. I don’t know anything about
⏹️ ▶️ John anymore. Node didn’t even have async await when you were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey learning. Nope. Sure didn’t. Yeah, one of the things I’d like to do one of these days is actually rewrite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my engine in a modern version of Node to teach me a modern version of Node because I’m so behind
⏹️ ▶️ John now. And then it’ll change two weeks later and you’re knowledgeably worthless again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. Marco, any final thoughts on this one particular question?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Node sounds awful.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s, you know, it was fun at the time. This was four years ago or something like that. It was fun. I think John’s done a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot more of it a lot more recently, which I think is in the topic list for, I don’t know, 15 years from now. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I like it. I also don’t have the visceral hatred of JavaScript that most people do,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably because I just haven’t been burned by it like most people have. But I think it’s fun. I don’t know. John, any quick
⏹️ ▶️ John It does change really fast, but the good thing is that most of the changes are for the better. The bad thing is you’re starting
⏹️ ▶️ John out from JavaScript, so there’s only so far you can go. JavaScript
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey There we go. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it makes me sad, but the performance is really good. And the fact that it changes like it’s double-edged
⏹️ ▶️ John sword, it is frustrating. But going from like, I’ve only been doing Node
⏹️ ▶️ John for a couple of years now, and going from like month to month and seeing, again, they added async await in this version?
⏹️ ▶️ John What? Like, this changes everything. Throw out all
⏹️ ▶️ John that crappy code, change it all. Things like that happen frequently, and it’s kind of exciting and fun,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is why everybody keeps writing these, people who can’t program keep writing these crappy packages and uploading them to
⏹️ ▶️ John poisoning the world with their bad software. But that’s a separate, separate topic.
#askatp: Bagel guillotines
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. And our final ask ATP, uh, Dave Altizer, Altizer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dave A writes, do you, any of you use bagel slicers? If so, do you recommend that guillotine kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or one of those slicer holders? Any particular brands you recommend? Uh, I have used
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the bagel guillotine thing. I don’t know if that’s the official name or not, but whatever. Uh, I hated it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It always just smushed the bagels. I thought it was a piece of trash. I would say just get a very long,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very sharp, like bread knife. knife. We have one from Cutco, I believe, that I think we were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sold when Aaron’s little brother was briefly doing that in college, as most college kids do. Marc Thiessen As most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Steve Lee Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly. And it works great. And just make sure you don’t cut into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your hand, you know, flip the bagel when you’re about halfway through it. And other than that, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all you need. Marc Thiessen Oh my God, you cut it that way? Steve Lee
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh yeah. Marc Thiessen Oh my. Steve Lee I haven’t cut myself yet. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey haven’t cut myself yet. Marc Thiessen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, geez. Steve Lee Anyway, what do you do, Marco? Okay, so if you don’t want to deal with the knife question, bagel guillotines
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are fine provided your bagel is not too stale or underbaked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If it’s either stale or underbaked it will squish when you push down with the guillotine instead of being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cut also You know it probably helps that the guillotine is relatively modern and sharp It’s supposed to sound like 30 year old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one that you find The guillotines have different shapes in them some of them have like the single slanted blade
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like an old guillotine would have have. The better ones come to a point, like a little triangle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Those are better if you get those. To avoid crushing the bagel down into the guillotine,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the best technique for those is to push down really hard and really fast so that it doesn’t have a chance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to compress. It just punctures it really fast. And those kind of slicers, you know, the guillotine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of slicers are totally fine. There’s no shame in using them. There’s some advantages to using them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead of cutting, which I’ll get to in a second. I am a cutter though, And the reason why is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I’ve mentioned somewhere before, I had a job at a bagel shop in high school
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I cut a lot of bagels working the line at a bagel shop and cutting bagels for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everybody who would order a dozen or order a sandwich or whatever else. So I’ve cut many more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bagels than I’d say the average person. Bagel shops don’t use bagel guillotines because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can do it with a knife really well and really easily. So Casey’s right, the best kind of bagel cutting knife
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a long, straight, serrated bread knife. It should look ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It should be pretty long. I’m not talking about a serrated steak knife, a bread knife, a real
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bread knife. Whether it has the pokey thing on the end doesn’t really matter because you’re only using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the side. The correct technique to slice a bagel safely is to lay it flat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the cutting surface, your hand on top of it flat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cut diagonal and cut like you know right to left or whatever like cut straight across as you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are holding the bagel flat so your holding hand never has to move. If the knife keeps going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco straight through you just cut the bagel faster you don’t get cut. That’s how to cut a bagel.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The only downside to that is if you have a bagel that’s covered in seeds some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of those will be transferred to your hand. There’s some mitigating things you can do you can flip it over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and hold the bottom which tends to have fewer to no seeds. You can put an insulating paper towel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between you and the bagel if you want to do it that way. And that is the one area where the guillotine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is better. The guillotine will lose fewer seeds off of a seeded bagel, typically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than any kind of handheld cutting option.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steve McLaughlin I agree that bagel on counter, hand on bagel is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey best way to do it. But I don’t know, man. As long as you’re not an idiot, you can do it in your hands. John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what do you think?
⏹️ ▶️ John Bagel guillotines are guillotines. Sorry, are ridiculous. I don’t think I’ve ever even seen
⏹️ ▶️ John one in real life use a long bread knife for the squishing on the counter thing. I think that
⏹️ ▶️ John makes more sense in a situation where speed is more and
⏹️ ▶️ John and where you’re where you’re being asked to cut many, many bagels under time pressure, like if you
⏹️ ▶️ John work in a bagel shop. But at home, I do it the artisanal way that Casey described. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John lose any I don’t squish my bagel against the counter. I cut them up in the air and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John able to carefully make sure that each half is exactly the right size and one isn’t bigger than the other and I don’t actually
⏹️ ▶️ John go slowly on an angle because I take my time and I do it carefully and slowly with a long
⏹️ ▶️ John bread knife. Don’t do not buy bagel guillotines. I wouldn’t buy it under any circumstance.
⏹️ ▶️ John Get a bread knife, learn how to use it, you’ll be fine. You’re not under time pressure, it’s not a race.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, RXbar, and Betterment, and we’ll see you next
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John oh it was accidental. John didn’t do any research, Margo
⏹️ ▶️ John and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. And you can find
⏹️ ▶️ John the show notes at atp.fm And if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t mean to Accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ John tech podcasts so long.
ATP Thanksgiving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do we could talk about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanksgiving. Yeah, so I am so we did a top
⏹️ ▶️ Marco four Thanksgiving side dishes I think a few a couple years ago and you guys
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have any have any different opinions on Thanksgiving.
⏹️ ▶️ John I remember what your terrible opinions were on that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey episode. I could not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey agree. I could not agree with that description more. I cannot remember what your terrible opinions were on that episode.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But no, actually Aaron and I were talking about this because we are doing my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey family Thanksgiving this year. alternate back and forth. And my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mom and dad are lovely people, but chefs, they are not. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think actually Wegmans is doing our Thanksgiving dinner, if I’m not mistaken. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey um, Aaron and I were talking about, you know, the sorts of things that we would want to see and would miss that probably won’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be there. Um, I, I actually prefer ham even in Thanksgiving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over Turkey. I know most people find that to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John be blasphemous. Talk about
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco’s terrible opinions. What are you doing? We’re talking about Thanksgiving food and you start
⏹️ ▶️ John with I prefer ham to turkey. This podcast is over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t really like to we made it 301. I
⏹️ ▶️ John really like turkey. I really keep it to yourself on Thanksgiving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, but a lot of times there’s ham anyway, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve eaten a lot of bad turkey in my life But I would never substitute it out for ham.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s Thanksgiving Even if the turkey is bad and dry is the one day year you’re eating turkey
⏹️ ▶️ John to not be the person’s like, you know know what I prefer ham.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Let’s make ham for thanksgiving. No
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t make don’t make him for
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco thanksgiving.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Don’t you like so many other holidays you make ham
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah that that’s what’s great about him. It works
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyway. It ultimately that doesn’t matter, but the point I was trying to get to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that we were trying to figure out yeah. What would my mom probably not but which really I mean Wegmans, what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would she not bother with and ham one thing I know she’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have him. What will wagons not make you for thanksgiving? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean maybe you’re right. I she said she’s going to have ham, but you might be right. But the thing that Aaron and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I are most sad that we’re pretty sure we’re going to miss out on is green bean
⏹️ ▶️ Casey casserole. So, you know, green beans with like, I don’t know, what is it like? – I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John going to get out that big map of the most disproportionately represented Thanksgiving side
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey dishes. – Oh, yep, yep, yep. I know what
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re thinking. – Green bean casserole was on the list, but guess what region it was?
⏹️ ▶️ John near you. – I’m going to guess south. The south.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bean casserole’s good. Yeah, it’s great. And especially when you put the little French’s fried onions on top.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So one of the best reasons to make green bean casserole is because you need to then buy a little can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of those French’s fried onions, but you don’t need the whole can. Preach. So then for the next like two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weeks, you can like open the cabinet and just like grab a little handful.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Super good. You get me. You get me so hard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why can you have such good taste on that and yet on so many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John other things? This
⏹️ ▶️ John is the southerner and the Ohio boy bonding over green bean
⏹️ ▶️ John Actually, no, it’s the Midwest, the green bean casserole. The South was mac and cheese.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, yeah, mac and cheese is required. Are you kidding?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I don’t think I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever seen mac and cheese at Thanksgiving.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, you’re missing out. You’ve got to go blow the Mason-Dixon line. No, this, I mean, it’s common, like, this map, we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John put a link in the show notes, it’s 538. It’s which side dish is most disproportionately represented.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s like these side dishes are had everywhere, but it’s like, who has green bean casserole
⏹️ ▶️ John at a higher percentage than everyone else in the country? And it’s the Midwest. Guess what the entire Western half of the
⏹️ ▶️ John country, their disproportionate Thanksgiving side dishes, can you guess? A burrito with avocados in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it? Wasn’t it salad? I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John never have guessed it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Salad, yes. Salad.
⏹️ ▶️ John Salad. That’s just- That’s like everything from the Midwest on. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like salad, but I would never waste stomach space on Thanksgiving on salad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right? I will admit, maybe not concur, but I will admit that my preference for him
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a little bit barbaric for Thanksgiving, but can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John we all agree
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that salad is just wrong? I mean, that’s just not
⏹️ ▶️ John right. You can have a salad with Thanksgiving dinner as one of the dishes, but the fact that it’s disproportionately represented
⏹️ ▶️ John in it, like it’s on more people’s table than in the rest of the country, which shows they just love salad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over there. You can have a salad for breakfast on Thanksgiving and then you’re fine for the day. No, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John going to tell you your solution to your Thanksgiving problems, Casey. Okay, here we go. You are,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, yeah, you are now a somewhat unemployed, but still an adult with two children
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’re married and you have a house and multiple cars and sometimes a drone.
⏹️ ▶️ John it may be time for you to start hosting Thanksgiving and letting your poor parents come to your house
⏹️ ▶️ John and then you can make whatever you want.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is a good point. That is a good point. But the thing is, every
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco other year-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All Velveeta all the time. Oh, nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey but Velveeta.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you host Thanksgiving, you have the leeway to do that. And then you’re not in the position where you’re complaining
⏹️ ▶️ John about how your parents aren’t cooking the things that you want, because you’re a grown man now, and you should cook them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thanksgiving. That is true. However, my parents much prefer being in their own domicile
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than anyone else’s.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Newsflash, everyone’s parents prefer to stay in their house for Thanksgiving. That’s how parents work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you’ve got to convince them to come. No,
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually, parents don’t want to cook for a crowd of people. That’s what they don’t want to do. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, see, I don’t think Marco and I are at that point, I should say our
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco parents aren’t to that point quite yet. No, not at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But in any case, the nice thing with Erin and I is that her mom
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the very traditional green bean casserole,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mashed potatoes, which are about half butter and half potato. What is it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sweet potato casserole, whatever it is. I guess that’s not what it’s called. But the sweet potato thing that has like, you know, mush…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. It’s like canned yams and marshmallows
⏹️ ▶️ Casey top. Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking of. Yeah, yeah. We’re saying the same thing. Anyway, so in Turkey, and I think she usually does ham because half
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of her family also wants to have ham as well, because I’m not that crazy. Thank you very much. Um, but anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the stereotypical stuff is always, always, always, always at, at Aaron’s families.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so every other year we get the completely fulfilling Thanksgiving and on the off
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years we get the lovely, but maybe not every single thing we wish we had Thanksgiving.
⏹️ ▶️ John Another reason you should start practicing is that someday all of your your parents will be dead and you will have to make yourself Thanksgiving.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, then I’ll just call Wegmans. Isn’t that what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John we learned? It’ll be like, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco exactly how you remember
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One strategy that we developed when we were going through Thanksgiving drama with parents
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything is you don’t have like it. So if you have to have Thanksgiving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at a certain house that is maybe not the better of the two, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, yes, we all love our parents equally, but yeah, we love some of them more on Thanksgiving. And so on the off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years, you don’t necessarily have to have only one Thanksgiving meal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can have a good Thanksgiving meal like the previous weekend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the next weekend at the other house and have all the things you would have made for that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you just have, you know, you have your good Thanksgiving meal on a different day.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I was remiss earlier, I forgot to mention that one of the requirements Thanksgiving is an Aaron apple pie
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and she is cooking that or baking that I should say this year. That was my mom’s request. In fact, when Aaron asked,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what can we bring? And mom immediately said apple pie. So yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aaron’s extremely tasty apple pie is also going to be on the menu. And I’m very excited about that. John, what do you consider to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let’s channel robot or not? What are what is your canonical Thanksgiving Day feast?
⏹️ ▶️ John My overall my stuff is weirded up by the fact that my whole family is Italian,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So we We still have all the traditional Thanksgiving stuff. We don’t have ham for crying out loud, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John we have antipasta in front of every family Thanksgiving family meal, period. Like we just do. So we have
⏹️ ▶️ John antipasta and then we have like, you know, minestrone soup and then we have a full turkey dinner. Why
⏹️ ▶️ John do we have that? Because because we just do like when we used to have at my grandparents house, even when my parents did it,
⏹️ ▶️ John we would do the fruit and nut course before dessert. Like it doesn’t matter what the meal was.
⏹️ ▶️ John It would be bracketed by all this Italian American food. And we still do that. So it seems weird. If it
⏹️ ▶️ John seems weird to you to have antipasto before your Thanksgiving dinner, it’s because you’re not in my family. But that’s the only oddity.
⏹️ ▶️ John Our Thanksgiving dinners are straight up the middle. Thanksgiving stuffing.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, stuffing. Oh, how could I forget stuffing?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just plain old Thanksgiving.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, are you a stuffing fan?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey See, here again, you get me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The great thing about stuffing and let me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Oh no, we’re in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here, Marco. Let me translate. I’m talking to, for the Midwesterners, I’m talking about dressing. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ John God. No, that’s not the dangerous territory I’m talking about. I have the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fear now. Keep going. The great thing about stuffing is that you can basically use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it as a vehicle for a ton of really awesome and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually otherwise maybe unhealthy flavors to come together in a wonderful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco medley. The stuffings that I like are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very, you know, butter heavy. They usually involve, they always involve some kind of meat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flavoring, usually a fatty meat like a sausage, maybe being ground up in there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sometimes it involves, you know, like savory vegetables, slow cooked things, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, there’s so there’s, there’s a lot you can do with stuffing. And I’ve had lots of different stuffings. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had the ones that have like fancy bread as the bread chunks, or the ones that just use the bag
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mix. I’ll tell you what, it’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John same. You know, you’ve entered the territory. This is what my fear was when we started talking about stuffing, that Casey
⏹️ ▶️ John would say, man, I love stovetop and I would die.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I’m not saying stovetop. And now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you did it. No, no, no. The bag mix, the what?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bag mix of like the bread. No. No, like the bread cubes that you, that form your base.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John N-O. You don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need, if the freshness of the bread matters in your stuffing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you aren’t putting enough other stuff in your stuffing.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco no. Thanksgiving is the
⏹️ ▶️ John one time that you just make yourself stuffing on Thanksgiving. Do not use any mix.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that hard. I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talking, I’m not saying a whole mix. I’m saying like the bread cubes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John That you can buy in the bag.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know how you get bread cubes? You take bread, you cut it into cubes
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco with the same long bread knife you got from your bagels.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’ve already got the long bread knife. It’s there already. It’s really easy to cut it into. Oh my God.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just recently had, I had the thought technology introduced to me of sausage and stuffing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the last couple of years and oh man, that changed my world. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good. is breakfast sausage in general in life. But like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most good brands of breakfast sausage, you can buy like the loose sausage, either without a casing or like in one giant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco casing. Do you have a good
⏹️ ▶️ John brand for that, by the way? I’m also a big breakfast sausage person. I heard you mentioned that you had like frozen breakfast sausage patties. You just
⏹️ ▶️ John send me whatever brand you’re getting for that because I’ve been looking for that. Frozen, they’re frozen,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? Yeah, and it’s Jones. Jones sausage. Yeah, I got to look for that. And yeah, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use the, here I’ll send you the link here. So it’s Jones sausage. They come in in the freezer, I assume they’re available
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everywhere, or close to everywhere. I get the one in the red box, which is the mild all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pork sausage ones. They come in either links or discs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I prefer the links, but if you’re making sausage, I would probably just get the discs and chop them up. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is my preferred sausage, my preferred breakfast sausage of choice. It’s really wonderful. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, breakfast sausage actually works really well as the sausage to put into Thanksgiving stuffing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just because of like, you know, The seasoning mix is a little bit different than like a dinner sausage would be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It just works really well with it for some reason.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Trevor Burrus I just don’t understand people who don’t like stuffing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Chris Bounds Do you have a—I mean, this is another southern, not entirely southern thing, but part southern—cornbread stuffing? Are
⏹️ ▶️ John you into that, Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Casey McElroy I’ve only had it a couple times, and I do like it. I love cornbread, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as paired with barbecue. Which actually, let’s go on quick tangent here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Little chunks of corn with like little corn kernels in the cornbread,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marcus Stein, Ph.D.: No. That would be weird texturally. Corey
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Peck, PhD.: Thank you. I agree. John, what do you think?
⏹️ ▶️ John John Mascott, PhD.: I find it acceptable, but I do not prefer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. Corey Peck, PhD.: Okay. Because there’s – actually, I think coincidentally, I think it was Wegmans that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we got. Wow, Wegmans is really powering my life. We got some cornbread made
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for, like several batches of cornbread made for Declan’s birthday party because we went to a local barbecue restaurant that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really love. And the particular catering setup wouldn’t give us
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cornbread, or they couldn’t do cornbread for it. And so we got some Wegmans cornbread made and the taste
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the cornbread was great, but Marco hit the nail on the head. Having those little particles, those little kernels of corn in there,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very texturally peculiar, and I do not care for it. I’m glad we also agree on that in that regard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also I agree that cornbread is delicious and and I I have never had cornbread stuffing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and now I really want to try that Because I love cornbread and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey love stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I love stuffing
⏹️ ▶️ John Different like cuz it’s not I mean, I love cornbread too But like it’s it’s not the kind of stuffing that I prefer But it definitely
⏹️ ▶️ John it definitely takes something getting used to kind of like if you haven’t had sausage and stuffing before like it’s like ooh I didn’t expect
⏹️ ▶️ John this. I I wouldn’t if I had to pick my Thanksgiving dinner. I wouldn’t pick cornbread stuffing. I like it fine
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s good. It’s tasty, but I wouldn’t pick it. Same thing with the sausage stuffing, which I like, but I would never pick it.
⏹️ ▶️ John My Thanksgiving dinner, aside from the Italian bracketing, is straight up the middle,
⏹️ ▶️ John like just the most sort of— Like 70s cookbook?
⏹️ ▶️ John Exactly. Traditional Thanksgiving. That’s what I want. It’s a little bit—I mean, we put pine nuts in the stuffing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess that’s a little bit of an
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Italian twist. Oh, that’s weird. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s something. But, you know, other than that, it’s very straightforward. Like, you know, cranberry
⏹️ ▶️ John from the can but the one with the chunks like it’s not you know we’ve done the fresh cranberry
⏹️ ▶️ John and I like the one in the can with the chunks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better. Yeah I’m with you on that actually I’ve had fresh made cranberry sauce
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s fine but the can stuff I think is just better.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean it’s more it’s more junk foodie and it’s filled with more sugar which is why it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better. Well but like I even I even like the the non-chunky one like I like the one that you that that comes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out the shape of the can.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco The gelatinous. And you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to like slice a can-shaped disc for yourself. I kinda, I like that because like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re using it either as a flavor accent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco layer in a leftover sandwich, which you should be doing, or even if you’re using it on, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, in the dinner itself and you are using it to dip the, you know, you’re probably too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dry turkey into for flavor, you want like a nice consistent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco consistency throughout it so it can be used easily as a dip or as a spread
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever else. Like so I actually don’t want a lot of big chunks in there if I can help it. But chunky
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or not, I do prefer the canned stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t like the cranberry. Not
⏹️ ▶️ John a fan. You’re missing out. That’s a big, it’s a big important tangy flavor component to the overall
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. Yeah, because like what you want, so one of the reasons why the IKEA
⏹️ ▶️ Marco meatballs thing is so good is because it has very similar flavor components. You have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a meat, you have a gravy, and you have a like tart berry jelly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh no, I do know what you’re talking about. And I actually do like that. That’s interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s Swedish meatballs with like, you know, a light brownish gravy of God knows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what and lingonberry jelly. That’s the IKEA version. Well, you can really approximate a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very similar flavor profile with Thanksgiving turkey with gravy, because you should have gravy from something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and with a little bit of cranberry sauce. You get that same combination of like types of flavors and it’s really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it is pretty good. Maybe I should try the cranberry again. God, I wish I had an Ikea closer to us. The nearest one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is like an hour, hour and a half and man, that bums me out.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t even know where the nearest one is. There’s gotta be one around here, but you know. It’s a good time to bring
⏹️ ▶️ John up that I have never purchased a couch in my life. Wait, what? Nope, I am 40 something
⏹️ ▶️ John years old and I still have not ever purchased a couch.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Still rolling the hand-me-downs. Good for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John you. They’re too heavy to leave the house.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them anymore. How old is your current couch?
⏹️ ▶️ John Both of my current couches came from my grandparents, who are both deceased.
⏹️ ▶️ John And when did they buy them? I don’t know. Sometime substantially before
⏹️ ▶️ John they passed away. How long has it been? Couple decades since we got
⏹️ ▶️ John These are both convertible sofas that change into beds, and they weigh as much as a car.
⏹️ ▶️ John sure knowing my grandparents, they were purchased from some expensive department store. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John So obviously, they’re high quality and that my kids haven’t completely destroyed them yet. And I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John already established their incredible weight. We went couch shopping
⏹️ ▶️ John last year sometime. We went to the local giant furniture super basically
⏹️ ▶️ John the IKEA of New England furniture, which is a similar quality, but much more
⏹️ ▶️ John expensive. Anyway, and we looked at, I think, literally every single couch there. And it
⏹️ ▶️ John was dozens and dozens of couches and couldn’t find one that we like. We had when you were when you were
⏹️ ▶️ John touting your couch online, you said, here, it’s linked to it. We found it and it was still for sale. And I looked at that one again.
⏹️ ▶️ John But like, it’s no good for us because it’s not flat or whatever. Like we have particular demands of how our couches need to
⏹️ ▶️ John fit into our room and how they have to work. And we couldn’t find one that we like better. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not like we’re not against the couch. we would like to buy at least one new couch and potentially
⏹️ ▶️ John replace the other couch with a smaller couch or love seats or something or who knows but so far we haven’t done