304: Island of Shortcuts
13 Dec 2018A lost video, Shortcuts vs. the command line, fixing a tricky bug, and the debut of the Accidental Trunk Podcast.
Episode Description:
- Marco's lost video
- Casey reviews a product that Marco loves
- Accidental Trunk Podcast
- An update on Marco's Tesla problems
- What is the mystery box in the trunk?
- i3 frunk is not weather-sealed
- Casey's superior cars
- Porsche Panamera
- Audi A7
- BMW 3-series GT
- Porsche Taycan
- An update on Marco's Tesla problems
- The power of macOS
- Virtual output device for simultaneous multi-Bluetooth-headphone listening via Audio MIDI Setup
- Descent and Thrustmaster Joysticks
- Fixing a tricky Overcast crashing bug
- Shortcuts vs. the command line
#askatp- Why not use Dropbox or equivalent for everything? (via Drew Shannon)
- What kind of hardware should one get to run a Plex server? (via Justin Winchester)
- How do we balance work and play? (via Eric Wagner)
- Post show Neutral: Electric cars
Sponsored by:
- Betterment: Outsmart average. Get up to 1 year managed free.
- Linode: Instantly deploy and manage an SSD server in seconds. Use code atp2018 for a $20 credit.
- Casper: Get $50 off select mattresses with code ATP. Terms and conditions apply.
Chapters
- Tech Support Thursday
- Video shenanigans
- Casey’s product review
- Marco’s Tesla update
- Accidental Trunk Podcast
- Sponsor: Casper (code ATP)
- The power of the Mac
- Sponsor: Linode (code atp2018)
- Overcast bug
- Shortcuts vs. command line
- Sponsor: Betterment
- #askatp: All-Dropbox
- #askatp: Plex-server Mac
- #askatp: Work vs. play
- Ending theme
- Neutral: e-tron 🖼️
Tech Support Thursday
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So a couple of days ago, I got afflicted by my IMAX newest virus,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is to say that although it no longer shuts down willy-nilly, it will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey occasionally decide to not play video, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it will instead show a perfectly green screen. I’ve never understood why this is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have never found anything I can kill or force quit or anything to kind of, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, get the engine sputtering again, if you will.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now wait, if you’ll permit me for a second, is it only DRM like iTunes video or is it any video? No,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, no, no, any video. Like stuff I’ve taken with my GoPro, for example.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wonder if it’s like the MPEG decoder failing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Because like, if you’re just seeing green, it’s like this is like a placeholder that’s put here and like the GPU is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco told to render something here, right? But like, it’s just not doing it. So like, I would say you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a GPU issue in all likelihood, but possibly this might be software, maybe.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could be either or. I was also of the impression that it might be a GPU issue, and what will eventually happen is I’ll be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the first one to get a Mac Pro of the three of us, and that’ll really screw everything up. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I had whined about this on Twitter, as one is off to do, and somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who I don’t have in front of me said, hey, have you looked into audio plugins?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so apparently some random stranger on the internet had said, random stranger on the internet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had had a similar issue, but when they removed some audio plugins, it went away.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so the only audio plugins I’m aware of that I had installed are Soundflower, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was using to try to capture a live MuteMath concert that I couldn’t figure out how to download using YouTube DL,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which we’ll talk about later, actually. Soundflower is a mess. Go ahead. It is a mess. It’s an absolute mess.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I also had the audio hijack what is it, ACE or something? Audio Capture Engine, something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I uninstalled ACE and more importantly I uninstalled Soundflower and I’m just trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like shotgun approach figure out if uninstalling any of these audio bits and bobs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will fix my green screen issue.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I gotta say uh TIFF’s iMac Pro is having a weird issue that I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is whether it’s software or not it seems like it probably is when she plays Netflix
⏹️ ▶️ Marco video Sometimes and sometimes logic is running because she’s now a podcast editor and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes it isn’t but logic is installed as far as I know There’s no weird plugins or anything sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the video playback in Netflix in the web browser will Basically run through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the entire episode that she’s watching in like a split second as if it has no time restraint
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So just flies through and there’s all the frames at once and it’s done instantly Sometimes this problem has been fixed by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quitting logic So it does seem like maybe it’s using the sound subsystem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the timing device for the video playback and something is wrong with the sound subsystem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This applies whether you whether she’s using the built-in audio or not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When it’s in this mode, switching audio outputs does fix the problem for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever she switches it to, but when she switches it back to the built-in headphone jack, the problem resumes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sometimes it has happened without without logic running. So something’s up, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have the exact same computer across the exact same room with many of the same things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plugged in, and I’ve never had that problem. But I also, I never watch Netflix in my browser, so maybe there’s something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with browser video where it’s doing something, but like I watch YouTube sometimes, and that never is a problem, so. Have you tried Chrome instead
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Safari? Why would I do that?
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the browser? But Chrome is gross. You’re just watching video. It’s gonna be a video window.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like the first thing I would try is a different browser.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think we actually did try Chrome, and I think it didn’t happen there, but that’s probably because Chrome is doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything using the most CPU possible and ignoring all the hardware. That’s my best guess. Well, it’s plugged into the wall.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I care a little bit about fan noise, performance, efficiency. I mean, there’s some caring.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, Chrome is just gross.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Truth. I hope that part doesn’t make the show because we’re going to get so much email, even though
Video shenanigans
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do have some video follow-up. I lost my first video today.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Did you go to try to find it? So I wanted to do a quick video on how I roast coffee. Just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, quick like here’s how I do it, you know, you can do it if you want. And I set up my,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, my Sony. So I don’t know if I mentioned I got a Sony a7 III to be like my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco video camera. Of course you did. But anyway, well, it’s good. But anyway, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I set it up and I was all ready to go. to go and roasting coffee takes about 25 minutes but I kept
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having to like pause and set up again and everything. So anyway, so I was recording for probably about 40
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minutes or so and I get to the end. Okay, fine. I go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look at the camera to stop the recording and it doesn’t look like it’s recording. Whoops!
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I was like, oh no, I forgot to hit record that whole time 40 minutes later
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after doing an entire coffee roast. So he got to be kidding me. Like how could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have made that mistake? I decided, you know what, let me pull the card out and see if anything’s there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway. I mean, can I save this video? Like, so I plug in the card and there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a 12 gig file. Oh God. That is a few seconds less than 30 minutes exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I thought, hmm. So I looked up, is there a video length limit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Sony A7 series cameras. Turns out, yes there is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s 30 minutes long. What? I did indeed press record, thank you very much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had the first 30 minutes, but since it was like a 40-something minute video, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the last 12 minutes of it are like the end of a coffee roast, I can’t really do that over again very easily without
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing a whole thing over again, and I didn’t have time for that today, then I have to redo this whole video.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because Sony cameras have this fairly poorly documented limit of 30 minutes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a video clip and then it just stops. It doesn’t like start a new one, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it did. It wasn’t hitting like like a file system limit like the way old ones would like with the four gig
⏹️ ▶️ Marco limit. It wasn’t hitting that like it’s just 30 minutes and it just stops without warning.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m annoyed. I know like some people in chat are saying like for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heat reasons on the sensor, We’ve had full frame sensors for a very long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. We’ve had 4K video now for a pretty long time. Like it’s not, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco isn’t like the first camera that can shoot 4K 30. Like this is not a very new thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think we should have limits like this for heat reasons anymore. That seems unreasonable to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But anyway, I’m annoyed, but in the future, I guess I’ll get one of those like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco large kitchen timers that like that you see like stuck to the wall behind people’s stoves and just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco set it to 30 minutes and put it on the front of the camera like facing me. So just every time I hit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco record hit that so I can see and make sure like I’m not actually you know accidentally hitting that buffer but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John very annoying. I suppose I’ll find this out eventually but what exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John are you recording for 30 minutes while coffee beans roast? I mean are
⏹️ ▶️ John you in front of the camera during this 30 minutes? Are you literally pointing your camera at coffee beans inside a contraption
⏹️ ▶️ John that is is making them hot for 30 minutes. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a frame of me with me next to the coffee roaster as it’s running. And my idea was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was shooting a bunch of B roll with my iPhone. And my idea was I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use that track as the master track to sync everything to. But I wouldn’t actually include all 40
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minutes in the finished video. The finished video would be like 10 or 12 minutes probably and I just edit out chunks of it when not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much was happening.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not much is happening the entire time coffee beans are roasting as far as
⏹️ ▶️ John concerned. Yep, they’re still roasting. Let me check again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I use the rest of the time to explain things like why I roast, why you might want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco consider roasting, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what’s going on and what you need to consider, like stuff like that. Like I use the time wisely, thank
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you very much. But
⏹️ ▶️ John all right. I mean, I’m sure I’ll see in the edited video. I just I’m just thinking, you know, roll that beautiful bean footage.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What is that recipe anyway? Does Duke still have it? Anyway, you know, it’s funny to me hearing you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talk about your Sony cameras because having only held
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of these beloved Sony cameras for like five minutes in my life, it seems to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me like, and I can’t think of an analogy that’s just right for this, but it seems to me like the Sony cameras
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are wonderful as long as you get through, you can get past the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey asterisk, the double asterisk, the dagger, double dagger, and the seven other things that make them freaking
⏹️ ▶️ John What are they? What are all the asterisks?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, I have found very few things to complain about, and that’s saying a lot, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this 30-minute limit just bit me in the butt today. But, like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John know, honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of my time using Sony cameras, like, there have been some that have flaws, like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a7R II that that I had was incredibly sluggish to render its files
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to be able to preview what it shot. The RX1, the first generation RX1
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I had, had an absolutely terrible autofocus engine that was very, very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slow, because it was contrast only and everything. So, you know, there were some issues here and there, but the modern ones,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically like the 3 generation, the A7 III and the A7R III, got rid of all the previous issues
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the other ones had and pretty much brought no new ones as far as I’m aware. so they’re just awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wasn’t one of them like you had four shots before the battery ran out or something like that? I mean, I’m obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That was the a7R II and actually the RX1. Yeah, I forgot those had awful battery life, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 3 Series fixed that pretty well too. All
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, so I guess my info’s out of date. I feel like I’ve heard both you and to a lesser
⏹️ ▶️ Casey degree, Steven, say, oh, I love this camera so much, except this, that, and the other thing, but I must be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, look, I mean, if you don’t know the shortcomings of your camera, you’re not using your camera enough. Like every camera has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some kind of shortcoming or thing you wish was different. You know, that’s just the reality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of complex products like this that have complex interfaces, complex needs, where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no two customers’ needs or preferences are the same. You know, you’re never going to be… It’s like to-do lists. You’re never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to be satisfied with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John whatever you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John Sure. I can’t believe Casey didn’t read the manual for you and find out that was a 30-minute video recording.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The difference is that I was going to drive the M5 for at least a small stretch of time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the likelihood that I’m going to be taking more than maybe three pictures with any of Marco’s 16 cameras
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is extremely unlikely.
⏹️ ▶️ John You could just buy, Underscore has the same camera, so you either buy his or Marco’s and the first one that gets bored with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, it’s funny you bring that up. I thought a lot about should I go like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey full frame or something and the immediate answer my question is no, because I’m too cheap.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I wondered exactly that, like when Marco inevitably sells off all of these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey via Twitter, you know, for reasonable prices. Jared Polin, PhD, PhD, PhD Or underscore,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he’s closer. Steven Connell, MD, PhD Or underscore. But the problem is, I don’t, even if I can get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a body for, you know, $500,000, whatever the crap these bodies, I know, I know, knew they were a lot more than that. I’m saying, you know, if I can get a secondhand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one from Marco or underscore for, you know, several hundred to a thousand dollars, I’m still gonna have to to spend thousands of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dollars on lenses, even if I, and I only have two
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I would. $1,000 in lenses, it’d be fine. Yeah, so I actually got with the a7 III,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I have, I still have my Sony lenses, my 35 f2.8 and the 55 1.8. Those are both
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazing primes. I didn’t put either of those on the video camera because I didn’t want to have to like detach them when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wanted to use them with my still camera. So the video camera, they had a deal, It was something like $1,900 if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was body only, but it was like $2,150 or $2,200
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you got it with the kit zoom. And I was like, that’s a pretty cheap price. And the kit zoom
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually reviewed pretty well. It’s not bad. Like, it’s not, you know, it isn’t gonna be the sharpest lens in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the world for like tack sharp photos, but for video, it’s totally fine. And, you know, so for what you’d
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be doing, which would be mostly video with it, you know, the cheap kit zoom
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is fine. and you know I wouldn’t say that easily or lightly, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, it’s totally fine. Again, if you’re shooting photos, I would suggest a better lens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t even say you need to spend thousands. Each of the primes I mentioned is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, a little bit under a thousand, and I wouldn’t say you necessarily need both of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, so for my Micro Four Thirds camera, I actually just upgraded the body, but I kept the same lenses, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have, I don’t remember what they are, but I have a Prime and a Zoom. I can’t remember the details off the top of my head, but each
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of them was like between 700 and $1,000. So I’m like two grand into lenses on this thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And granted I’ve had it for four years, well, the Micro Four Thirds system
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve had for four years now. So I shouldn’t really complain about the money I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spent on these lenses. But if I were to go and get one of these Sonys, I presumably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would want it to be my everything camera in the same way that the Olympus is my everything camera. So I would not only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be using it for video, but also for stills of the family. And one of the places that the Olympus falls down, or at least
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the prior version, I haven’t really tried the new version in this situation yet, but is low light. Low light on my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Micro Four Thirds, it’s okay, but it is by no means anywhere near the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, synthetic light that the Sony just invents somehow by being full frame, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so one of the things I’ve been thinking about is if I were to really just go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all in on a whole new camera setup, should I do, you know, should I pull a Marco slash Steven slash
⏹️ ▶️ Casey underscore and just follow in your footsteps? But I’m too darn cheap for the body to begin with. And even if I got the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey body, I don’t want to spend another two grand on lenses when I have two perfectly good lenses that are for a completely different camera
⏹️ ▶️ Casey system already here. I know that that’s just the way this game is played and I’ll either need to get over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it or not. That’s one of the things that’s hanging me up.
Casey’s product review
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey, so I’d like to do a little bit more follow up. I have a product review mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Marco. I have tried your other most favorite product
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the whole wide world.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m trying to think of what that might be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, not AeroPress. Don’t be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, right. Let’s not get too
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s his other favorite product though. That’s probably accurate. It is not technology related, but it is. But an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AeroPress is close-ish to what I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thinking of. The Patagonia Micro Puff hoodie? No. I tell you, those things are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazing. It’s a consumable as in not. I mean, eventually, it will be consumed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey earth. It is something that I put inside of my body.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Huh? That’s not coffee. No. Hmm. Beemster cheese.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, it is not something.
⏹️ ▶️ John One of those weird skunky beers Marco likes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, it is not something I wanted to put in my body. It was because of necessity, my friends.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. Oh, Fisherman’s friend.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey friend. I have finally tried Fisherman’s friend and I would like to provide a review for you
⏹️ ▶️ John I wouldn’t say that’s Margo’s favorite thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John think if he wasn’t congested, it’s not like he’d be like, you know what I want? Some Fisherman’s friend. Are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we doing some Foley work? I can do that too.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’ve got my Fisherman’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have to tell you, these taste like shit. And the mouth feel is even worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the problem is I grew up on Ludin’s cough candy, which tastes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey delicious but does absolutely nothing to help a sore throat. But Declan has brought home something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that has now infected the entire family and lo, I needed to do something to fix a sore
⏹️ ▶️ Casey throat. And I thought to myself, self, several months ago, you got Fisherman’s Friend because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not only did Marco insist that it’s great, but my real life, well, not that you’re my real life, friend. You know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I mean? My outside of podcasting friend, Ste had recommended it as well. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I thought, oh, I should try Fisherman’s Friend. They do work. They do work,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I am miserable while I’m consuming it.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is not. Do they work by distracting you from your sore throat with a disgusting
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey taste? Maybe that’s what it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe that’s what it is. I’m not sure. But I just thought I’d provide the quick product
⏹️ ▶️ Casey review for you, Marco, that they get the Casey stamp of approval in the sense
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they do what they say they are setting out to do, which is to make your throat not feel like it’s on fire,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but not an enjoyable experience to get to that point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, I mean, first of all, I agree with you. When you first try these,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they do indeed taste horrendous, which I believe I said in my initial review. You probably did. I will say over time, you get used to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Now that I’ve probably consumed like 400 of these things over the last three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco winters of sick children, it does taste horrible, first 200 or 300 that you try. But after
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, you know, you’ll get there. After that, then it’s fine. It’s totally fine. You barely even notice. It just tastes like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a mint. It’s not like fish. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. Oh, yeah, yeah. All right. Oh, yay, yay, all right.
Marco’s Tesla update
⏹️ ▶️ Casey While we’re doing the Casey Marco corner, can you give me an update on your car? Is there an update on your car?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What’s going on there?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is an update is not done yet, but things have happened. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Had two problems that we mentioned last week’s after show Number one was that Tesla had not cancelled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my lease when they offered to renew it early They left the old one going and so I was being billed for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a car. I no longer had that was fun That has been partly resolved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They did indeed send a check that well it hasn’t cleared yet, but they did indeed send
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a check that I deposited yesterday for the parts of the payment that I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco paid already, but not for the like $5,000 bill that I got.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I asked and allegedly they have cleared that bill with the bank and the bank should process it within a week so ask me again next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco week. I called the bank yesterday and they hadn’t yet seen this but oh well. Secondly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they sent a mobile tech out to my house which is literally what it sounds like it is a person who can service the car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a van and so they drive to your house and service it at your house instead of at the very very crowded Tesla
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Service Center. Mobile services existed for a while I know our friend underscore has used it before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had never been offered it but for this problem I was offered it so that was really nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they sent a tech out to replace my yellow ring screen and it is now replaced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is fixed the guy was super nice and that is that problem is gone. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really, you know, I could tell based on some comments that the various people made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that part of the reason that this was being fast-tracked was because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of me complaining on the podcast and on Twitter. Nice! And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel a little mixed about that. Like normally, you know, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fortunate enough to have a large following in these places and so I kind of knew
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I was increasing my chances of getting it fixed by going public with it. And so normally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t do that kind of thing lightly. Like I don’t like to just like complain to companies in public, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in that way. But because I had gone through the official channels for like two months and gotten
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nowhere, I felt like I was like at the end of my rope. And so I was like, all right, fine, I’m going to go public.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m going to push that button. I’m going to use it. And I don’t feel great that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s why it is getting fixed. But the the reality is it is getting fixed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m happy about that. And I just, I can’t, I hope they’re right. I hope the bank thing is done.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And when I called the bank in a, in, you know, five or six days, I really hope they say this is resolved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because then I can finally complete this project. Like I hate having things hanging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over me, you know, like like undone projects. I have like this, this paper on my desk that’s been on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my desk for three months. Like, I mean, it’s like, I just, I want to get this done. I just want to close this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out and be done with it so I can get back to not only enjoying this car that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love, but literally anything else in my life.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is something else. I understand what you’re saying about not wanting to go nuclear and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey leverage both Twitter and the podcast, but I think you did right by them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and gave them more than enough time to resolve these issues as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expediently as possible. They did not take you up on any of your offers to do that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t I I think it’s a good sign that you feel guilty, but you should not feel guilty.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think you’re you’re fine on this.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wouldn’t feel even more. I would feel even angrier if this is the only way a problem got resolved, because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s almost like I would I would prefer it if the the status quo of just like slowly
⏹️ ▶️ John over the course of six months to a year, the problem was fixed. And I would complain that this company is terrible and has bad service. but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s almost worse to me than like, oh, oh, well, there’s some bad PR, oh, now we’ll fix it. Because that shows that they had
⏹️ ▶️ John the ability to fix it before, but
⏹️ ▶️ John enough to, you know what I mean? It’s like worse. The whole time I’d be saying, what about people
⏹️ ▶️ John who don’t have podcasts? Like, this doesn’t help you be a better company. You think this does,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re like, we’re addressing the PR problem. We’re a good service company. See, no, this is the exact opposite.
⏹️ ▶️ John A good service company does not need you to complain about it on a podcast. It just makes me angry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like I shouldn’t have had to do any of this.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they shouldn’t be able to quickly solve your problem because you’re on a podcast. Because it shows that the problem
⏹️ ▶️ John was just like, you know, this could have happened at any point. Obviously, it’s not tremendous
⏹️ ▶️ John cost to them. It’s just, just do it. Just do it when you were asked two months ago. How long can we let this go until
⏹️ ▶️ John we absolutely have to do it? Eh, let’s continue to do nothing and being competent. Let this go for a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aye, aye, aye. All right, and then we also had feedback, since we’re in the Tesla section now, feedback from David
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Griffin about your mystery box in your, is it your frunk or your trunk?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? It’s in the trunk. It’s like, like normally the trunk has, it has like these two like kind of support beams
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that come straight back and then on either side of them, like between them and the actual outer edge of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car on the left and right, there’s like these little cubbies and that you can put stuff in. While on the new car, one of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those cubbies, the right one is just gone. It’s, it’s replaced by this giant enclosure that seems to have no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco openings and I it’s just space that is used by the car for car things and I had speculated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’d asked last time during that big Tesla ran like hey by the way my new car has this thing the old car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t I can’t figure out what it is I’ve searched the internet no one seems to know if anyone knows out there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what this thing is taking up space in my trunk for I’m just curious like just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really just want to know like I have about like you know three square feet less of trunk space
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just kind of want to know why and yeah so apparently it is is a subwoofer or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bass box, whatever that means. Thanks to a listener, Dave Griffin, who has given us lots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of good Tesla info over the years. So yeah, basically, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mentioned one of the reasons that the new ones are more expensive is that premium sound is now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco required. It’s just now bundled in before it was an option, and I didn’t take the option before,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is weird for me, but I mostly listen to podcasts, and so I didn’t think it was worth the couple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thousand dollar upgrade on the last car. but this car, you’re forced to get it because they wanted to drive the prices up,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of very Apple-like. And so apparently I’m forced to both pay more and have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit less trunk space with the new car. Neat, still love the car, but if that was an option,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would have unchecked it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s fair.
Accidental Trunk Podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of frunks, we got a little bit of a follow-up from i3 owners and
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure Marco read through all of it about his potential purchase of an i3 But I read through most of it and the
⏹️ ▶️ John one thing that struck me the one tidbit that struck me I don’t know if this is true. We just heard from one person is that
⏹️ ▶️ John This person mentioned offhand by the way, the frunk on the i3 is not watertight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I actually I saw that in a couple of the video reviews that it basically it’s more like a hood
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in like you know, like if you put like if you open up your hood of your regular car, you might see like leaves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and crap stuck in there. And it’s because most hoods are not watertight either.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, like in extreme cases, stuff can get in there. And so yeah, apparently the frunk of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the I three works the same way that it’s basically like a car hood. And so you can keep stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in it. But there’s not a lot of things you can keep in there because it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can they can get wet or live in California and it
⏹️ ▶️ John never rains or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I mean, could keep like I don’t know, like a first aid kit if it’s like a waterproof
⏹️ ▶️ Marco box or something. I don’t know. There’s stuff you keep in there.
⏹️ ▶️ John It seems terrible. I get the hood of a car. Yeah, that’s where the engine is like and lots of air needs to get in there and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John to cool the engine. Right. If you have a frunk, make it watertight. Like I don’t understand that at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it definitely seems like an odd choice, especially because like this wasn’t a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco retrofit of an old of an of an old gas car that they just kind of made electric Like they made the whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing from scratch, right? Yeah, like it’s a whole new design. So it is kind of weird that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they chose that. I’m sure they had a good reason. Maybe it was for like, you know, like the weight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would seal it up all weird. Who knows what the reason is? But it is an auto mission to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a frunk in a design from scratch electric car that lets water in. So you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t really actually keep a lot of things in there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s not choice. Speaking of trunks, we have more trunk related follow up. It just occurred to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Accidental trunk podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, John, I really enjoyed your tear, I think it was over the weekend, going through the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey differences between your Accord and the brand new Accord. And one of the things you lamented
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was the way in which the Accord trunk, the machinery, if you will,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the mounts that let the trunk open and close, intrude upon the space
⏹️ ▶️ Casey within the trunk cavity. And there are terms for this, which I’ve already forgotten, don’t really care, doesn’t matter. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had pointed out to you that both of my cars are superior
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in that we have shocks on both of our tailgates and they do not impede any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the interior space.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John So I would like you, John, A couple people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would like you, John, to acknowledge that my cars are superior to your piece of crap.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can’t have a gooseneck on a hatchback. Like, it physically doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey work. Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter. It doesn’t make
⏹️ ▶️ John any sense. Yeah, it’s going to be hinged to your roof. No, you do not get any extra points
⏹️ ▶️ John because they’re hatchbacks. Come on dad! This is about trunks, you don’t even have trunks because you don’t own cars.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know I try so hard ladies and
⏹️ ▶️ John Has anyone ever done a gooseneck on a hatchback? I don’t think I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey ever seen one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All kidding aside that would be monstrous and in a not good way.
⏹️ ▶️ John Physically maybe you could pull it off, I don’t think the roof is like structural enough to,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it would be madness.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I gotta say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m a hatchback convert. Like now that I’ve had the S for a couple years, like man, I just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love it. Like when I was all mad at Tesla, I was thinking like, what if I just like drive this car back up to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot and say, screw you, I’m out. Fix this yourself and just like leave, right? And what would I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get instead of this? And I was thinking, I was looking through the options and I’m like, you know, I don’t want, like you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, in Jon Prollins, I want a car shaped car. That eliminates everything now. Right, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like, yeah, I don’t want like a mini SUV. I don’t want a regular SUV. I don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a hot hatch shaped car like Casey’s, and I don’t want a wagon. And so I want basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a sedan that works like a hatchback. And there are a few. A Panamera. Yeah, there’s a Panamera.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s the A7. A7. But that’s about it. There’s not a lot of other ones. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did think, I was like, I guess I would probably look at the A7 first. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not nearly as big. It doesn’t have nearly as much space. I have seen one before. I haven’t driven one, but I have seen them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a showroom. And I’m like, I just, everything else, like going back to a regular trunk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would feel like going back in time. It would feel like a step back. Like, I’m so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spoiled by how awesome my giant hatchback is with all of its cargo capacity, without
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking like a shape vehicle I don’t want, that I’m kind of spoiled by it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, we’re going to get feedback about people who are grumpy, from people who are grumpy that this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not in the aftershow, but you know what? Tough noogies.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love that CMF just point just point out in the chat the BMW GT series which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco literally TIF owns one It’s parked next to my car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John every day I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s our second one Yeah It’s your energy second one and I for some reason I didn’t think of that in the list
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of car-shaped cars that have hatchbacks Well, it’s because it’s ugly as sin.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey think the Tesla’s a lot nicer. Yes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great. Oh man, that is funny. The five is way worse than the three. Yes, that’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like what’s what’s really nice about the three GT is that it’s based on the three long wheelbase
⏹️ ▶️ Marco platform. And so you get this massive amount of rear leg room like you get, I think even a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more rear leg room that you do like in a five series, but without having the width of the five series.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it still feels like you know the narrow three series width, but you have a surprising amount of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco space back there. So it’s it’s honestly it’s a pretty nice car. It’s not for me and it doesn’t come any transmission.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would tolerate, but it is a nice car. Actually, neither does the A seven. So there
⏹️ ▶️ John whoops. I don’t know we’re talking about this. Anyway, I know these are electric, so it’s like Mark was going to buy them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m spoiled like and because now I want a car shaped hatchback that is also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fully electric. Are there any others like I guess the Porsche not the e tron?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What’s the That’s the portion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John the Tamarack electric, cheap lenges, the electric pan, take hand that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah yes that if that ever comes up by the way we heard from people who like you know I was having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my problems with Tesla and their administration. We heard from a few people who tried to order the Porsche take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an formally the mission e and it sounds like it is a total
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crap show of like trying to place a deposit trying to place an order You have to go through dealers to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get them. And it sounds like it’s a way bigger mess than my dealings with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tesla have been. So I’m not sure that would actually be an improvement.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that car doesn’t exist yet. That’s all just people trying to get in line to get the first of a car that is even out. Like those aren’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No, they’re like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco placing deposits to place orders. And like they’re saying like, it’s basically impossible. Yeah, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s like the Model 3 thing where they’ll take a bunch of money for cars that haven’t been built yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, basically. But yeah, so it sounds like If you want a car shaped hatchback electric car,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Tesla Model S is actually the least hassle option to get it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even if Tesla screws up the way they did with me, it seems like it’s better than what’s going on with Porsche right now with the take-hand.
⏹️ ▶️ John The Tesla story that stood out the most to me was someone saying that there was an accident at like a Tesla dealership
⏹️ ▶️ John where one car like scraped into five other
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco cars. Oh yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then all of them were off the road for like six months and counting because like none of them can be repaired.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because the part to repair them all was backordered. And so that was
⏹️ ▶️ John they all have loaner cars while they wait. And speaking of loaner cars, I know we’re stuck in a lot of pre-show
⏹️ ▶️ John NutriHill, but another bit of i3 feedback was that if you
⏹️ ▶️ John have some sort of deal where if you get an i3, they’ll also give you a deal where if you ever need to go
⏹️ ▶️ John somewhere where the i3 doesn’t have the range or you don’t want to deal with the range issues,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll give you a loaner gas car for free anytime you
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that was really interesting. Which is kind of like, kind of an admission that maybe your electric car doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have enough range. You know, cause the i3 is not like the Model S. Like, I don’t know what the range is, but I think it’s like half, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John less. Yeah, but anytime you want a gasoline car, you know, BMW makes those too,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’ll loan you one and you can use it for your trip.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey What can you tell me about multi output MIDI devices
⏹️ ▶️ John This is about Marco on the plane trying to watch a single laptop with two people with Bluetooth
⏹️ ▶️ John headphones Couldn’t get the Mac to output to Bluetooth to two different sources And apparently I haven’t tried
⏹️ ▶️ John this but many readers or listeners as Bernard tell us, if you go to the Max
⏹️ ▶️ John Audio MIDI control panel, which is probably some place that people who don’t do anything with musical instruments
⏹️ ▶️ John ever go, you can apparently make a new output device and make it multi-output and let
⏹️ ▶️ John two people with Bluetooth headphones watch the same video. That’s what we’re told. I haven’t actually
⏹️ ▶️ John tried it, but if I was stuck on a plane and trying to pull this off, I’d open that control
⏹️ ▶️ John panel. I’d open that preference pane and give it a go.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there was a thing where you have to have one of them be the drift master.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You have to correct the drift somehow and one of them gets to be the master. So yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are a lot of issues that don’t come up when you’re using an analog headphone cable splitter. It sounds like it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might work, but it’s so much more complicated than just a headphone splitter that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I worry that it might not.
⏹️ ▶️ John Make the new audio device and then just select it as one of your output sources. The main thing I thought about when I read it was like, this is yet another
⏹️ ▶️ John place where iOS devices have a long way to go to catch up with the Mac. It’s just like
⏹️ ▶️ John with the Mac, no, it doesn’t do everything, but the chances of you being able to find some kind of weird hacky
⏹️ ▶️ John solution are much greater. It’s just like if iOS doesn’t support this, guess what it doesn’t support. You either jailbreak and hack something
⏹️ ▶️ John in or you’re out of luck. And in the Mac, there’s a chance that there’s some weird actual GUI
⏹️ ▶️ John buried somewhere that you haven’t seen or like a command line utility or something that will let you do this. You
⏹️ ▶️ John know, like, you know, kind of stuff with disk images and disk repair. Another example of the flexibility of the Mac, Like
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s functionality you probably don’t even know about and you can add to it pretty easily. And you know, the command
⏹️ ▶️ John line stuff. Like so lots of times the GUIs that Apple gives you, like their utility folders GUIs, will do
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff that you’ve never thought of doing. But also if the GUI app doesn’t do anything, a lot of them are just built
⏹️ ▶️ John on frameworks that are also fronted by command line equivalents that will do even more stuff. Like I don’t know how much I use
⏹️ ▶️ John TMutil, right? Or HDIutil for disk images and stuff. Some of it is working
⏹️ ▶️ John around Apple’s utility applications that they don’t update very frequently. But the actual capability of the systems
⏹️ ▶️ John are much greater, and you have access to those capabilities if you know where to look and can take the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s one thing, like, as the iPad gains in popularity and as we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all try to use it for more things because the hardware is so cool, that is one thing I run into a lot of,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, there’s this one behavior that I do on the Mac or that I depend on or this feature I want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or this functionality that I need that on the Mac, it relies on the existence of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the Mac’s many advanced features. Like there’s so much advanced functionality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco built into Mac OS of things you can tweak, things you can do that on the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either are very cumbersome or very roundabout ways that you need to do them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or are just simply not possible. And I do find like I hit those a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on iOS. Like a simple thing, like for instance, on the Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I remap a couple of keyboard shortcuts that are pretty common to be more comfortable keyboard commands
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me to use with my actual hands. One of those is the screenshot, the Command Shift 4.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I put it on Command Shift 1, because that’s what I use the most and it’s just faster that way. The other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one is I archive my mail messages using a different shortcut for archive than what the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system one is. Again, just common action, I want it to be more easily done.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And on iOS, you can’t do that. Like you have to just do whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keyboard shortcuts there are and there aren’t enough. you can’t remap them. You have to just take whatever they are.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And everyone has a feature like this. Like there’s no services menu, there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scriptability, there’s no terminal to do a lot of terminal stuff. And this is why,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think, if you’re like a real Mac power user,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t see the iPad replacing the Mac for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you. Whereas if you’re just like a regular Mac user, like a more typical one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you leave most things the defaults and you don’t really get into those areas of like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, deep customization of the OS and its behavior, it’s an easier transition for those people. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m unfortunately not one of those people. And so I think the iPad will remain for me a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco secondary platform that I do some stuff on and I enjoy it, but I don’t see it taking over.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even if it adds things like Xcode and everything else, like there’s just, there’s so much amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flexibility in Mac OS that I would simply miss too much.
⏹️ ▶️ John Real time follow up, I think I referred to the MIDI thing as a preference pane. First I was gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John refer to it as a control panel because I’m old and then I said preference pane, neither one of those is correct. It’s in application slash
⏹️ ▶️ John utility slash audio MIDI setup. So if you’re looking for it, that’s where it is. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John as for the keyboard shortcut that’s not comfortable, you know, Command Shift 4, you change it to Command Shift 1.
⏹️ ▶️ John When you said that it made me remember the, and I hope I’m right about this, the origins of those, Why
⏹️ ▶️ John the hell is it command shift four, right? Well, it used to be command shift three, which still does screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the screenshot. When they added the capabilities of being able to do the crosshairs and the space bar to capture
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole window, they said, well, command shift three is already taken with the just take a screenshot of the screen, so let’s do four, which is the
⏹️ ▶️ John next one up. Why didn’t they use one and two, you may ask? One and two, command shift one ejects the
⏹️ ▶️ John first floppy disk, command shift two ejects your second floppy disk. Ha ha! Ha ha! And they’ve never
⏹️ ▶️ John gone back and taken those commands, because what if you, you know, I remember those were very important commands and I always thought it was
⏹️ ▶️ John cool that like command shift one would eject the floppy, but if you connected your $450 1980-something
⏹️ ▶️ John money external 800k floppy disk that you paid for half of as your combination of Christmas and birthday present,
⏹️ ▶️ John it would eject the second
⏹️ ▶️ Casey While we’re going down this nostalgia trip, this episode is all over the place. Hearing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the talk of Driftmaster reminded me of when I was young,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we had a – I think I’ve told you this story once before, but it was years ago. We had a Thrustmaster joystick.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I couldn’t tell you what model it was.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That was the best brand name of anything ever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So good. But my dad would buy video game stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey periodically just for fun and then never ever use it, which was great for me, but I don’t know what possessed him
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco anyway. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s literally like I buy a whole bunch of iOS games and never ever play them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, there you go. So in any case, he bought this Thrustmaster. And I remember
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was during the time of the PS2 keyboard connection, so I don’t know what that makes us, like mid-90s or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something like that, but the Thrustmaster needed the old, humongous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey keyboard connection that were from the original IBM PCs, you know what I’m talking about? Nice! Yeah, like the big DIN something.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah. So what happened was, the Thrustmaster, you would plug the keyboard into the Thrustmaster
⏹️ ▶️ Casey joystick, then using a converter to go from PS2 to whatever the hell this other thing was called. Then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you would plug the Thrustmaster in not only the special joystick ports, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey might have been on your sound card actually, if memory serves, but nevertheless. Yes, it was. You would also plug
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it in to the keyboard on your computer because the Thrustmaster had a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app or program that you could do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey key combinations or mimic keyboard presses with all of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these different buttons on the joystick. The joystick had like 8,000 buttons on it. And so this never
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really seemed like that useful to me until I started playing Descent, which is one of the many games
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that John could never play because he had a Mac. And I played Descent. There
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What are you talking about? Oh, I was hoping. I had a 50-50
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John shot. I also played it
⏹️ ▶️ John on a PC before there was a Mac version, but.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, man, that’s disappointing. I was going out on a limb there, but that’s right. So anyways, so I was playing, I would play Descent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and, you know, when I gripped the joystick, like your thumb was on a, I don’t know what the technical term for it is, but like a little four-way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing so you go up, down, left, right. And so I remember that I had had the keyboard mapping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so that when I pushed my little thumb thing forward, the ship would fly forward. When I pushed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back, the ship would fly back. And I believe I used left and right for strafe. And oh my word, was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that amazing with Descent. Descent in general was amazing. And if you’re not familiar with it, you should look up the Wikipedia article
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever, because it was a truly phenomenal game. But using the Thrustmaster joystick with this ridiculous,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like not really daisy-chained but almost like daisy-chained like that was Dongletown before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dongletown to some degree because you needed to get all those
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stupid converters. It was the predecessor to Dongletown but so I guess that makes it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dongletown England and now we’re in New Dongletown America I don’t know whatever. Anyway the point is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that it was this most ridiculous setup in the world with clearly like mid 90s technology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it was phenomenal. I I kind of miss it.
⏹️ ▶️ John The scent was like an old school QWOP. You know that
⏹️ ▶️ John Q-W-O-P. Am I getting the name right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nope. Well, you might be getting the name right, but it means zero to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John The game where it’s like the side view of a runner, and you use the keys on the keyboard,
⏹️ ▶️ John Q-W-O-P, to control the runner’s like leg joints. Hmm. What? Like all independently
⏹️ ▶️ John of each other, and the goal is just to be able to run, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Right? So you have to carefully orchestrate the limbs
⏹️ ▶️ John and basically the person just falls to the ground. The descent was true six degrees of freedom.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like that was the gimmick of the game. There’s no up, no down, no left, no right. You’re floating in free space. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John without a Thrustmaster setup, you had lots of keys on the keyboard to control all the different axes of rotation and thrust.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it was very difficult to get a handle on. You maybe used like first person shooters. Oh, I can do this great. I’m really good at Doom.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that like constrained you to a plane and then you would just, you know, left and right and strafe. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John imagine you had left, right, straight, but in like two more axes. It was really fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, Doom was actually an interesting case of it. Doom was like, Doom was actually a 2D game.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like- 2.5D, they call it. Yeah, like it was, everything was rendered in 3D.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it looked 3D, but everything, like the maps were 2D. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco projectiles all moved only in 2D. Like basically like the Z axis, the up and down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco axis was only visual. You could never be like, there was never a room above
⏹️ ▶️ Marco another room on the map. There was like, there were enemies that were above you, but you wouldn’t aim up or down. You would just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shoot straight ahead and your thing would hit the ones that are up above you and they were shooting down at you. It was a very,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very clever use of, you know, not quite being ready for full 3D yet, until Quake, I think. The
⏹️ ▶️ John Colony had shooting vertically. The Colony was also ray casting, but you did shoot with the mouse.
⏹️ ▶️ John This was when Max had mice and PCs didn’t. You did shoot with the mouse and because you could shoot anywhere on the screen, could actually
⏹️ ▶️ John aim above and below the dead center axis but you’ve never heard of the colony but it was a good game.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was, it totally was.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It might have been on Mars.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s an awesome video of like the person who made the colony, like one person because this is back when single
⏹️ ▶️ John people made games, a YouTube video of him going through the colony explaining
⏹️ ▶️ John what he was thinking when he made the game. It’s amazing. Normally you can’t even find like has anyone even heard of this game
⏹️ ▶️ John can I even find a screenshot you can go on YouTube and watch the creator of the game walk through the game with you
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s really cool see if I can find that video for the show notes for the five other people listening to this who remember the colony
⏹️ ▶️ John guess who made the colony by the way the guy who you saw on YouTube or whatever what was it David
⏹️ ▶️ John mean it is kind of a common name
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fair enough I don’t see any punctuation in his though so it’s clearly inferior yeah and he goes by David a Smith
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s a little over pretentious he’s an imitation David Smith.
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Overcast bug
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you want to talk about Marco, what’s going on with Overcast these days? Because it sounds like you had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a really, really, really crummy bug. And crummy in the sense that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it would be hard to reproduce and kind of figure out what’s going on. So maybe this is not that interesting,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I’d love to kind of hear you walk us through what was the bug
⏹️ ▶️ Casey report? And how did you go about trying to figure this out?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’ve had reports for a little while now, that they would be playing a podcast and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few minutes into playing it, it would just get killed in the background for using too much CPU usage.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I couldn’t figure it out for a while I thought it was watch trans codes. And so I I adjusted the throttling of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the WatchTranscode engine to make sure it definitely wouldn’t go past the limit of, if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the background, the limit is something like 80% over 60 seconds, something like that. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forget the exact number, but it’s in that ballpark. I kept having these crash logs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these reports, and when you get killed for energy usage or one of those resource limits, the crash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco logs you get are not very useful. There’s not a lot of info in them. You kind of have to blindly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco figure out why might you have used that much CPU usage because the logs you get usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco won’t tell you. So I was trying to figure this out, and again, I blamed the watch thing for a while,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I throttled that back, but I was still getting some reports of this. I was at my wits, and I could not figure it out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I pored through the reports, couldn’t get any useful information out of the reports I had. So I finally went to Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the Overcast, kind of like, hey, I’m getting these reports of crashing in the background during
⏹️ ▶️ Marco playback. I cannot figure this out. Can anybody tell me steps that reproduce
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the problem, do it every time. A few people actually did and and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one and by the way I should I should clarify right up front I don’t know if this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the only reason Overcast gets killed in the background for too much CPU usage but one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the reasons it could do this I have now identified and fixed and it’s in it’s in the test flight beta
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as of today I’m hoping to see if that does fix it after a few days of crash logs from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco test flight but I don’t know yet anyway so the problem was because all right let
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me I’m trying to think like how much explanation should I give here because it could get really long and boring so I’m gonna try to like pare it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back and summarize it basically the one of the conditions that could cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this was if you are in a streaming mode where you are downloading the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pot the podcast as it’s playing and it’s not fully downloaded yet and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the app is in the background so I suppose you hit play it starts playing you put the phone in your pocket to the apps in the background.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you pause playback, iOS will suspend the app in the background
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after a few seconds of no audio playing from it. So as the download was happening, if you paused
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and the download wasn’t going to finish in that time, iOS killed the app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which kills the download. It stops the network transfer. When you would go to press play
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after that, it would resume playback, but the part of the file
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that wasn’t downloaded Overcast would basically get into an infinite loop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a background thread, trying really really hard as like a busy weight saying, are you done yet? Are you done? Are you done
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet? And it was like looping over and over and over again, rather than doing like a throttled like check now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know check back later kind of kind of approach. And so there was basically a way for it to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after a failed transfer in the background, it was not properly interpreting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that failure, and was instead doing this infinite loop thing, which was making one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thread max out. So the symptom would be if you resumed a podcast under these conditions,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you resume playback, about 48 seconds in the app would get killed and playback would stop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you hit play again it would relaunch in the background and start playing again. So you it seemed to you the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco user as if you know it just stopped it stops playing after a minute or two for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some reason. But that was a that was the actual cause that I could finally reproduced. Thank you very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much to the people who reported that. Again, I don’t know if there’s any other ones. I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if this topic is even interesting enough to keep in the show, but that’s what happened.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, so hold on. So how did you figure out the technical bits
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that were going on? Because all you really had to go on was just that, oh, I backgrounded the app,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was streaming, and then bad things happened. So how did you dive into finding the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It never showed up for me in my own usage of the app. And there’s a number of reasons for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. I mean, one is which I don’t use streaming. I download everything. So the only time I ever stream
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a podcast in normal use, unless I’m testing some streaming feature, the only time I ever stream a podcast is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I wanna start playing something immediately that I hadn’t yet downloaded. Like if I heard of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a new episode of a new show, I just wanna start playing it right now. So I go hit play and it’ll stream it. The other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing is usually I have pretty good connectivity. Usually, at home I have really fast Wi-Fi. When I’m out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I live in a nice suburban area, so there’s usually strong cell signal and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So normally I wouldn’t even hit the problem where the partial download
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hasn’t completed yet when you pause it for a little while. And so I wasn’t seeing this problem at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When I finally got these reproduction steps, it allowed me to, so first of all, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tried it and I realized, oh, this is not happening when I do it on my regular Wi-Fi.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But there’s this wonderful utility that used to be just on the Mac and now is also in the iOS developer menu
⏹️ ▶️ Marco called Network Link Conditioner. Apple supplies this. It’s a pref paid on Mac OS, although
⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly I couldn’t get the Mac OS version to work under Mojave, maybe I have to update it, I don’t know. But on iOS,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you go into the developer menu and settings, there’s a Network Link Conditioner and you can basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco artificially throttle your own network connection for all apps on the device in order to test
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how your app behaves in, you know, under slow networks or intermittent connectivity or heavy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco packet loss or other kind of like crappy network connectivity. It’s a wonderful tool. And without that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would have had a much harder time testing this. I would have had to do some kind of like router hack maybe or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco throttle it in the app somehow it would have been much harder. So anyway, thank you very much random apple employee who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes network link conditioner. Anyway, I was able to slow down my connection
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to like three G speeds, which would give it enough time to get the app suspended into the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco background without the file being fully downloaded. Then I was able to read
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to relaunch it. And then I saw finally I could see this happening on my own phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where I saw the CPU spike to 100% and then eventually get killed. Now once you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can read this is the why like you know, developers always love a reproducible list of steps that like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do this, this and this and it will make the problem happen every time. because then we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can plug in our developer tools and we can profile the app and so I ran it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in instruments which is a tool that comes comes with the X code bundle and instruments can tell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you if you if you run a session of your app under instruments it will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell you what parts of the app are using the most CPU usage and this is you know for any you know any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developers who use it I know this is a gross oversimplification it can actually do a lot more than that but But the most common
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing that I do with instruments is measure where in my app is using the most CPU time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where, you know, what is using the most processor, processor resources. And so when I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco able to run this, finally, in a reproducible way, I could run it with instruments running. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I saw when it when the CPU spike to 100%, I was able to profile what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was actually doing in that. And that’s when I saw, oh, it’s calling this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco render method over and over and over and over again, it definitely should not be calling this this much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what’s going on. Basically, the root issue was that at some point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m returning zero audio samples when the rest of the audio engine expects there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be some, whether it’s, you know, a block of silence or not. But I was returning zero
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio samples. So it would just call it again until it had enough to fill its buffer, which it never did.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The reason And the reason why I was so surprised when I found this out, when I found out why it was doing this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is it’s been that way for a while. And I wondered,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, why is this only a problem now? Looking at this code, like, this should never have worked.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And while I was in there, I also decided to fix a couple of other things. Like, basically, the fix was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the app needed better detection of whether it was in, like, a buffering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of state or not. Like, is it waiting for more data, or is it not waiting for more data? Fixing that required
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a whole bunch of, actually, surprisingly deep changes, which is why I’m gonna do a big beta of this before I release
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. But it’s one of those things where it’s like, how did this ever work? And like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the UI for buffering was totally broken before. Like, it would show an activity spinner
⏹️ ▶️ Marco beneath the pause button. Like, partially overlapped by the pause button. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I kind of an embarrassed that I ever shipped that, honestly, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway, so the app had pretty poor detection before of whether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was buffering or not. So I fixed that as well, and so which was kind of required
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to fix the real issue. So anyway, so I think I fixed it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was all because I finally had reproduction steps. And so for anybody out there who’s following bug reports,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you can come up with reproducible steps, And I know it’s hard. I know it’s impossible to do for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bugs that just seem to happen intermittently. But man, if you have reproduction steps that reproduce the problem every single
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time, that is invaluable for a developer. And that can help get a problem solved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I find this really fascinating. Out of curiosity, and I’ve been messing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey around with something that I don’t think I’m ever going to release, but I wrote myself an iPad app, since
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually we last spoke in order
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John to help with…
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John what? Back up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I… When I do what I call the edit for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Analog, which is not actually an edit at all, and it’s what I used to do for ATP in the first couple of years of ATP, and then Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of took over in a good way, and so I don’t have to do it for ATP anymore. But for Analog…
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I stole the edit from you. I appreciate what you’re saying, but I don’t think that’s the case
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at all. I think it just… It was better for everyone this way, and you were able to dedicate the extra time to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But be that, all that aside. It’s not you, it’s me. So the flow with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey analog is we record and then I listen to the recorded version, you know, straight
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off the mics. And I say, oh, at, you know, 15 seconds, I coughed at five minutes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and 42 seconds. Uh, you know, we, we cross talked real bad and so on and so forth. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey generate this list of edit points that Mike is the one who does the actual work. I used
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do this by just having a text edit window open on my Mac. and listening to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the show. And when I heard something, I would not have the window open
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I’m usually multitasking. And so then I would have to find the space that has the player
⏹️ ▶️ Casey window and then back up a few seconds to get the correct time stamp and so on and so forth. And I thought to myself, there’s got to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be a better way to do this. And it would be kind of neat to be able to do this on the iPad. And so I built this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little app that will let me ingest a file
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from, say, the Files app, which really means like Dropbox or iCloud Drive, load it up,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and let me play it. And then I have a humongous, like literally a quarter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the screen is a button that reads new edit. And when I do when I tap that button, it’ll pause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey playback, take note of the timestamp, and throw up a little popover where I can say, Oh, I want there to be a chapter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey start here. I want there to be like a sponsor read here, but there is a sponsor read here, or you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I coughed or whatever the case may I bring all this up to ask, I’m curious,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, what do you do, and I feel like I’ve asked this before, but I don’t remember your answer. What do you do for like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bug tracking issue management and stuff like that? Because I have this right now in a private, I’m trying
⏹️ ▶️ John you. You’re asking the person who doesn’t run any tests what he uses for bug tracking,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey okay. Well, I’m trying to be gentle here. And before you answer, Marco, the reason I ask is because I’ve been using GitHub
⏹️ ▶️ Casey issues, which are not perfect, but it’s just me. And it’s not something that’s actually that serious, But I find
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I often have a thought of something I would like to do,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I’m not in a position to actually code it, even if it’s something very quick. And so I’ll make myself a little GitHub issue
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to just remind myself later on that I want to do that thing. And I haven’t actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey used this app for an analog edit because this is an off week. And I literally wrote the guts of it in about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two consecutive mornings. And we won’t record analog again
⏹️ ▶️ Casey until this upcoming week. and then we’ll see if it works and what’ll happen. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, do you use any sort, I think you had said you use some text file or Todoist,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, not Todoist, like task paper or something like that? What do you do to manage bugs and planning and that sort
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, for a while I used task paper as my master to-do list for Overcast. When I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my to-do list renaissance about a year ago, and I switched to Things for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all my management on all devices, now I just have a Things project that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overcast. And under it, I have all these headings for different version milestones I want to do. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know I’m not using it right, but I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever. And I have a list in there of bugs to fix for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the next version. And whenever something comes up, I put it in there, and then I try to fix it. got you.
Shortcuts vs. command line
⏹️ ▶️ John So you wrote an iPad app and the app you wrote isn’t a thin wrapper on YouTube DL?
⏹️ ▶️ John With shortcut support or something?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey No, no, no. So
⏹️ ▶️ John you could just say, hey dingus, download this video?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, and actually I should bring up, this actually probably should have been follow up, but a lot of people wrote in and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said in various degrees of politeness, why don’t you use shortcuts to do this? And it’s a fair question.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And there are two answers, neither of which will be satisfying to the people who have suggested this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One, it is not only YouTube that I do this sort of thing for. As an example, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a particular show on terrestrial television that you enjoy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you would like to persist a copy of them for the future, you can very easily use YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ Casey download to grab an NBC show or CBS or whatever the case may be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As another example, we like to play a lot of holiday specials, holiday
⏹️ ▶️ Casey music specials on endless repeat throughout the List household for the month of December, which is why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nobody ever visits us in the month of December. But anyway, as an example, just a night or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two ago, Pentatonix, who is an acapella group, did an extremely cheesy yet delightful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Christmas special that was aired on NBC and I wanted to keep it so I could watch it in the future and so I YouTube DL’d it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it worked no problem. And maybe shortcuts would work with these sorts of things too.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not sure. And given what shortcuts is capable of, I’m sure there is a way that it could be done.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I use YouTube DL for a lot more than just YouTube. And additionally, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey real honest answer to the question of why not use shortcuts or SSH or something like that, or torrent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them. Why torrent them when I can go to the actual source? But anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why not just like do something, anything else other than this ridiculous ISH thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is because I’m used to doing this on the command line. It’s just momentum, man. I’m used to doing this on the command line. I know YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ Casey DL and FFmpeg alarmingly well now, which is not something I probably should be proud of.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it’s just what I’m used to, and it’s what I’m quickest with. And I like when I can use the tools I’m used to because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m quick with them. And so that’s why.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the reasons why, you know, going back to my iPad, you know, advanced options from the Mac thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco earlier, one of the reasons why I find it difficult to become an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS power user with shortcuts and formerly workflow is like the things you can do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with it. Really like this. It’s like this. It’s a whole layer of power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and advanced features and automation that you can achieve. Well, we’ve had that for a while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in on other platforms. And for many of us, a lot of people going back decades,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s the terminal. It’s, you know, a shell like bash and it’s, you know, shell scripting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and tools like this command line tools. And one of the great things about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco learning the terminal is that once you know one of the common things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like like bash and basic command line usage, first of all, you can use it on a whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bunch of different platforms, Mac OS, even windows now with the WSL thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can use it on Linux servers. And it doesn’t really change that much over time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like you You can learn a lot of these skills once, and then you can use those skills for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco literally decades, like 20, 30 years easily, and a lot of the stuff doesn’t change.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or at least the foundation you built 30 years ago can still be used today. Honestly, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think workflow and shortcuts, I think these actually are very much like the command line
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the sense that they enable advanced users to learn some more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complex things if they’re willing to learn in order to get a lot of power in order to you know get new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things done get things done faster have more customized behavior more advanced behavior the difference
⏹️ ▶️ Marco though is that like workflow and or sorry shortcuts is not the command line it’s totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different and that’s fine I would say shortcuts is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that much easier to use than learning the command line is in the sense that like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you still need to learn how it what it works, what it expects, what it does and doesn’t do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You still need to learn its limitations, how it expects you to talk to it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and use it, and you still need to learn the library of things it can do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there’s a learning curve to both things. And the reason why people like me and Casey
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want so badly a terminal on the iPad is because we’ve already done that learning curve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like 20 years ago or whatever, and we just want to be able to use it now we can use it everywhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else. Like, that’s why it’s so awesome that the Mac is under the hood, like this Unix subsystem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s why Microsoft was so pressured to create the Windows subsystem for Linux thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, because once you’re in that system, it’s great because you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can have like this long running expertise in this different language of how you can make your computer do amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things. And you know the syntax and you know the tools that you have at your disposal. and you can use the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco knowledge and expertise and tools even on all the different platforms you use. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really awesome. So as awesome as shortcuts is for the people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who use it, that doesn’t apply to shortcuts. You can’t use shortcuts anywhere except iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so while it is awesome, it’s not the same kind of thing and it doesn’t have the same long-term
⏹️ ▶️ Marco value of investing your expertise in and investing your tools and your script and your time into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as learning shell scripting does on any other platform. And so I kind of wish there was something like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, some kind of power user layer like this, whether it’s, you know, something like shortcuts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something like a terminal, that you can use on all of your devices. And right now there isn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you could get a terminal on the iPad that was pretty good, you would have that if you were a terminal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco person. And so that’s why we want this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Additionally, you know, it used to be, I don’t know if this is still the case, but it used to be years ago that you could jailbreak your phone and get like SSH
⏹️ ▶️ Casey access or even straight up terminal access and all sorts of stuff. So it feels as though
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is just a completely synthetic like a gate that Apple won’t let us walk through. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t wanna speak for you, but that really chaps my hind quarters that it’s all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re waiting for us. We just aren’t allowed. And that’s so frustrating.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and like, and I’m not even saying that I want to be able to go in and edit system config files.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I don’t care about that. make me a sandbox like the apps run in sandboxes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco literally like let me run and this is actually what ish kind of does like let me run
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a terminal where I can install packages from like a package manager like whatever it might be brew yum
⏹️ ▶️ Marco switch thing whatever it is I don’t care some package manager let me install things like ffmpeg and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any other tool I might want that might be in a repository like that and compile stuff from source if I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to like you know give me the tools to do that and give me a sandbox that I can put that I can put files
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in and then I can open them in other apps. So I think the reason,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, I think one of the reasons why we don’t have terminal for iPads yet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that nothing on the iPad really works that way with a common file
⏹️ ▶️ Marco area. There is the Files app, but as our iPad Power user friends always talk about,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s very limited. It’s hard to get to those files from a lot of apps. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very limited in what you can and can’t do there. you don’t really live in the files the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way you do like on a Mac where like your files are like all over your desktop and you’re like living in your files all the time. On the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s this buried kind of like little back zone that they don’t really want you going near
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and not a lot of stuff supports. So like that I think, I think they need to address that first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and make like the local file system more of a thing in iOS before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they would go into something like considering a terminal.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think there are some more fundamental issues they have to address in the core of iOS. I’m not aware of all the details, but I’m pretty sure
⏹️ ▶️ John the way the processes are managed is, like, it’s one of the reasons you don’t have multiple users for iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John devices already is that it’s not like it’s not a multi-user system because it is, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not as cleanly separated as a Mac is, which is, you know, based on the next operating system, which was multi-user
⏹️ ▶️ John from day one, where the entire file system is cordoned off into sections for
⏹️ ▶️ John each user’s stuff and processes run as the logged in user with the exception of system processes.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think iOS has always played a little fast and loose with all that stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think if iOS continues along its current trajectory, especially if iPads keep getting bigger
⏹️ ▶️ John and more powerful and Apple eventually does like a Surface Studio type thing, it’s inevitable that it will have a terminal
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can get around the whole file sandboxing thing. It’s like, yeah, of course it would be sandboxed
⏹️ ▶️ John but you can basically mount in, you know, using, not mounting, but you know, a similar technology
⏹️ ▶️ John where from within your sandbox, you have visibility into the same
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of sections of the iCloud file system and the local file system that you own only
⏹️ ▶️ John through like a, you know, there’s lots of existing Unix security features that act like this,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s lots of existing iOS features that would help them implement this. Like it’s technically possible, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that there are, iOS wasn’t designed to do this from day one. So there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of rejiggering they would have to do, and they’re not going to disturb their
⏹️ ▶️ John flagship operating system for such an esoteric feature until they’ve really gotten down
⏹️ ▶️ John to the bottom of the barrel in terms of features they need to add. Because if it was easy to add multi-user, I think they would have done it already for iPads.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, just look at what they did with the iPad for school thing with the multi-user support
⏹️ ▶️ John that basically reboots the entire user space. They didn’t do that for the hell of it. It’s like that was their best option
⏹️ ▶️ John at the time because it’s just not set up for a login and logout like our Macs are. So
⏹️ ▶️ John you might be waiting a little while for that. On the command line and shortcuts issue, this is a good time for me to hoist up a
⏹️ ▶️ John topic that I had in the notes forever, which is related to this. I was thinking, when I wrote this in the notes, I was
⏹️ ▶️ John thinking about shortcuts and how we all know a bunch of people are super into them and they’re doing really cool things with them. And I’ve been downloading
⏹️ ▶️ John shortcuts and messing with them. But like you guys, I haven’t really gotten
⏹️ ▶️ John that into them. And I know why I haven’t gotten that into them because I feel like I’ve, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John been down this road before with these types of things. Like, it’s, and it doesn’t mean that they’re bad. I think they’re great.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the people who are using them are excited to use them. But if you are a programmer, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John far, far less appealing. In fact, it’s kind of a turnoff to be asked to essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John write a little program with a bunch of GUI bubbles in
⏹️ ▶️ John a big, long, linear list from top to bottom with a limited level of indenting, with
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco or libraries, like it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John with no debugger. I mean, it’s like, yeah, I could do it, but why would I
⏹️ ▶️ John put myself through that? So when you, Margaret, when you’re describing like the things you can do with the terminal, one of the most important things that you
⏹️ ▶️ John can do with the terminal is write programs. And most of the programs that you can write in the terminal are in some
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of language that has a debugger and like just the basics of programming, right? So if you’re a programmer, none of that
⏹️ ▶️ John scares you. You want to program. And that’s what I was thinking about shortcuts is like the different levels of essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John programming on computers, right? So you’ve got the applications that just do what they do, that
⏹️ ▶️ John someone else wrote them, but you’re just the user, right? So that’s like the bottom level. You’re not doing any programming, you’re just using an application,
⏹️ ▶️ John tapping around, blah, blah, blah, right? You’ve got something like shortcuts where now you have a series of things that
⏹️ ▶️ John it can do, and you’ve got conditionals, and you’ve got loops, and it’s like go crazy, but you’re not actually writing any code.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I saw a lot of people asking for, in shortcuts, I don’t know if this already exists, it maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John does, but I see this in a lot of similar applications where there’s one particular thing that you
⏹️ ▶️ John can do in this GUI sort of programming environment is do a thing here. And
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the ways you parameterize this thing is, oh, here’s a text box. In the text box, you then
⏹️ ▶️ John finally get to write some kind of code. So it’s like operation, conditional,
⏹️ ▶️ John loop, whatever, and then operation, oh, and arbitrary code. So finally, within
⏹️ ▶️ John this application where you’re dragging blocks of stuff around, you get a text box. And you get to finally write code just for
⏹️ ▶️ John this little tiny corner of your application. But for programmers,
⏹️ ▶️ John we want the whole thing to just be the code that we write. And it amazes me. I was messing
⏹️ ▶️ John with this today. Some friends were talking on Slack about some AppleScript thing. And they were using JavaScript
⏹️ ▶️ John and AppleScript. I opened up Script Debugger. Not Script Debugger. I sort of jumped to the end there. I opened
⏹️ ▶️ John up Script Editor. And I’m like, oh yeah, people write AppleScript, and there’s no debugger. That’s why an application called
⏹️ ▶️ John Script Debugger exists. How do you write any code without a debugger? You can
⏹️ ▶️ John be a PHP programmer. It’s like everyone’s caught in the Stone Age, right? The JavaScript way was you debug it
⏹️ ▶️ John in Safari, right? So you can write the JavaScript that actually translates to the same stuff as AppleScript does,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you debug it in Safari. It’s just, it’s not attractive to, you know, all the things that
⏹️ ▶️ John you guys said about shortcuts is true, and, you know, limited to single platform, and not general, whatever, but also,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is a total turnoff to anyone who’s actually a programmer. Which, granted, that’s not what this is for. If you’re a programmer, fine,
⏹️ ▶️ John write programs. If this is for people who aren’t programmers, to give them the ability to do things that programmers can do. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it is kind of like a ladder that you climb. I look at these giant things that Viteechi’s putting together, I’m like, well, he’s essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John graduated now. He’s graduated out of shortcuts. He is ready now, more
⏹️ ▶️ John or less, to start writing actual programs. Because I mean, really, some of these shortcuts are like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think he saw one of those in hundreds of commands. Maybe one was up into the thousands. And this is just one giant
⏹️ ▶️ John linear list from top to bottom with everything just inline. And it’s like how you write programs before you know how
⏹️ ▶️ John to write programs. and only you didn’t write any of it, it’s just a bunch of blocks. And then how do you debug it and just,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t, it’s not attractive to me at all. And there’s an analog to this
⏹️ ▶️ John having to do with the eternal debate that we are all having collectively
⏹️ ▶️ John in the Apple community about iOS versus the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just the operating systems in terms of how they deal with doing more than one thing
⏹️ ▶️ John at the same time. Multitasking is a simple way to put it, but Windows is another way to put it in the menu
⏹️ ▶️ John bar and all that stuff is discussions we have. I think there is a direct analog to the way
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve been discussing like the sort of, the way the Unix command line works and sort of the
⏹️ ▶️ John building blocks that it’s based on and contrasting that with shortcuts, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is this very regimented, simplified environment.
⏹️ ▶️ John Very similar to the way the Mac GUI works versus the way the iOS GUI works.
⏹️ ▶️ John haven’t, I keep, it’s one of those things, you know what, on this show where I make up like stupid analogies on the fly,
⏹️ ▶️ John I keep making up stupid analogies in my head on the fly about this, about how to correctly articulate the
⏹️ ▶️ John difference between these two things, and they’re all really bad. So I’m holding it in for now, we’ll save it for
⏹️ ▶️ John podcast, for another episode. If I ever come up with a good analogy, I have a bunch of ones that sound
⏹️ ▶️ John good, but then you think about them a little bit more and they’re not really that great. But I’m just gonna leave it for now. But I
⏹️ ▶️ John think it is very similar to the idea of like, If you learn the basics of
⏹️ ▶️ John the Unix shell and the way processes work in Unix and the basics
⏹️ ▶️ John of input output redirection and the basics of one or two simple programming languages,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can use those building blocks to do whatever you want more or less and
⏹️ ▶️ John be comfortable and efficient. If you learn Able Shortcuts, best case scenario, you pull
⏹️ ▶️ John the teachee and you very quickly graduate from the Shortcuts program, which is great. like, again, I’m not slamming shortcuts
⏹️ ▶️ John or saying everything should be a program, right? It shouldn’t there is absolutely a place for shortcuts. And it’s great that it exists. And most people will
⏹️ ▶️ John never graduate from it. Like most people will find shortcuts itself too inscrutable to use, right? We have a long way to go to
⏹️ ▶️ John make that kind of power accessible to people. But if you do actually climb all the way up that ladder,
⏹️ ▶️ John we need there to be a next step on iOS. And right now there isn’t the next step is basically get out Xcode and you can write your own app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. You know, a lot of times people will, a lot of to developers who will say like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we need something easy for everyone to use. But like, there’s an inherent level of complexity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in shortcuts that, you know, because it is kind of like a programming environment, no matter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what the syntax is, no matter, you know, whether you’re typing code or dragging together blocks, the fact
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, it requires like logic and, you know, snapping together different pieces
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of functionality to do different things. And that itself is complexity that is beyond a lot of people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, like whenever programmers is try to simplify things for other people who aren’t them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ve been trying to do that for like 40 years and we largely haven’t succeeded very well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Certain things break through, but for the most part they haven’t. I would also say that Apple has said
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a number of occasions recently that developers are their largest segment of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pro users. So when you’re pushing the iPad into pro territory,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco marketing-wise and hardware-wise, it does make sense to have it be a little bit more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco suitable for developers to use and to consider features that maybe only developers would ever use.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that’s not a bad thing. Developers is not a bad word. We are users too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We buy a lot of Apple products that end in the word pro. It is not unreasonable to say like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know what, this environment that I’m asking for, like basically a terminal app for the iPad, like that isn’t that crazy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of an idea for Apple to actually prioritize for their new pro platform that they wanna jack up the prices for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and charge as much as a laptop. And secondly, I know I said this already, I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really want to reiterate how awesome it is to teach yourself the command line
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because of the incredible breadth and longevity of that skill.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like even today, you hear about somebody like Federico saying how awesome Homebridge is on a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Raspberry Pi. You can run Homebridge on a Raspberry Pi, that’s great. Raspberry Pis cost like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between 10 and $30. They’re amazing little computers. They are Linux computers. And if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know command line basics, you can very easily run a Raspberry Pi and have it do all sorts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of fun things. You can run, in this episode we were sponsored by Linode, you can get five bucks a month, you can go buy a Linode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco server and have a server in the cloud that runs YouTube DL for you. And you can do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all sorts of other stuff. All it takes is a little bit of command line knowledge. And the command
⏹️ ▶️ Marco line knowledge that I have, I learned in college, in like 2001.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I used it for my very first job in 2004, through the present day,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and probably well into the future. There are very few things that programmers can say that they learned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in college that they still use. Usually, you know, languages change, technologies change, the whole market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco changes, but that’s something. We know that. Like, shell scripting and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basic command line usage and some of the, you know, Unix simple command line tools that are available,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you learn that, it has such long-term value, not only as a programmer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but even just as a power user of a computer. The value of having that on a platform you use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is very, very high. And the selling proposition of a platform that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you use a lot, but that doesn’t support that entire world of things, it’s a really tough sell to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make that a high-end or a high work-getting-done
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s worth noting though that we are three old dudes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who are lamenting who are lamenting the fact that our old technologies aren’t available to us on this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unbelievably cool new platform. And I stand by everything I’ve said, don’t get me wrong. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is, it is a bunch of old dudes whining about old stuff not being
⏹️ ▶️ John there. It’s not about olding, because like, everything old is new again, like the shortcuts thing is not old. Like I did, I did hyper talk
⏹️ ▶️ John and hyper card, and I’ve done file maker databases, and I’ve done all sorts of GUI type environments, sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of, you know, simplifying programming. And like, there’s, like I said, there’s, there’s definitely a place for them.
⏹️ ▶️ John And in fact, should be more and even easier solutions because even shortcuts I think as Marco Bono is too complicated
⏹️ ▶️ John for most people. But none of those things like at a certain point those things are harder
⏹️ ▶️ John than actually writing a program like I would I would much rather debug you know
⏹️ ▶️ John a page or two of actual code than a 2000 instruction shortcut because
⏹️ ▶️ John a page or two of regular code I would get to use a code editor and you know an actual debugger
⏹️ ▶️ John and it would make sense and I I would know, I would be able to understand
⏹️ ▶️ John what the language can do. And also, you know, like it would be documented. Like Shortcuts is an application that
⏹️ ▶️ John you use, and it’s like a little game you can play inside Shortcuts. And you can do amazing stuff. But at a certain point, I don’t wanna,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s harder to hold a 2000 quote unquote instruction shortcut in your mind and reason
⏹️ ▶️ John about it and debug it and work on it and repeatedly run it and test it and just,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not, that’s not the way, it’s harder to do that than to write an actual program. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s true, whether it’s new or old, that’s true whether you’re trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to write a game in HyperTalk or whether you’re trying to make an Excel spreadsheet,
⏹️ ▶️ John play Tetris. Like, lots of things are possible, and you’re like, wow, the Excel spreadsheet can play Tetris, that’s amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you wanna write Tetris, don’t use Excel, right? So some of these things I see that the shortcuts are doing,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not because we’re old and it’s not because we like UNIX or whatever, they’re just, their
⏹️ ▶️ John utility is in their ease of use and the ability to do
⏹️ ▶️ John simple things fairly easily, but hard things are barely possible.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you are super into it, you will quickly reach the limit
⏹️ ▶️ John of where you should not be using shortcuts anymore. And there is a huge chasm between shortcuts and
⏹️ ▶️ John Xcode. And so that’s the place where the command line might come in where you’re not ready to dive in and write an app in
⏹️ ▶️ John Xcode, But maybe you’re ready to learn some basic command line stuff, download some open source packages
⏹️ ▶️ John in a safe sandbox type environment, and say, run YouTube DL to download
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something. And you can have a programming environment there. You can run things like PHP and Python
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Ruby. You can have all that running locally.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s a good place to learn. They have that now with the Xcode Playgrounds and stuff like that. But
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, Playgrounds is actually getting close to that type of environment. But
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re still kind of contained in the walls of the application. In this topic, which I just hoisted up to the top of the show notes, I
⏹️ ▶️ John had a bunch of other stuff in there with like, apps versus apps that have loadable bundles, versus code as
⏹️ ▶️ John data, which is the part where like, well, you’re not writing code, but at some point, this application will present you
⏹️ ▶️ John with a text box and you can paste code into that text box. So it’s like a little escape hatch from the thing you’re doing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then shortcuts, and then writing actual code. So yeah, if you have, obviously you have a Unix environment,
⏹️ ▶️ John you could run Node right in there and just be off to the races and start, you know, running and debugging stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John but there are quote unquote IDs, command line IDs
⏹️ ▶️ John and wait command line debuggers. Like I’m very comfortable using those things. That’s more of an old man thing, but stuff like
⏹️ ▶️ John shortcuts, that type of GUI programming environment, it has its limits regardless
⏹️ ▶️ John of when it, you know, whether it’s new technology, old technology, it’s not because we’re old
⏹️ ▶️ John men. It’s because A, it’s because we’re programmers and B, it’s because there is a huge gap between
⏹️ ▶️ John a GUI thing where you can make programs and programming in Xcode. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think it’s up to Apple to bridge that gap. That was the old 70s view of technology. Eventually, everyone who uses a computer will be a
⏹️ ▶️ John programmer. That’s not true. Everyone who drives a car won’t be a mechanic. Everyone who uses a computer won’t be a programmer. That will never
⏹️ ▶️ John happen. That was a wrong-headed way to think about things. The reason I think people thought that in the 70s
⏹️ ▶️ John is because the people saying that were programmers, and they realized the incredible power
⏹️ ▶️ John of being a programmer. It’s like if you’re a programmer and you have easy access to a computer,
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially a computer of your very own in your own house, you can do amazing things. And they’re like, wouldn’t it be great? If
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody had this power? Yeah, it would, but they’re not going to, like it’s not a thing that everyone will do. Like it would be great
⏹️ ▶️ John if everyone had the ability to fashion their own furniture out of wood, but they don’t and they won’t. And it will never
⏹️ ▶️ John ever happen as cool as it might, you might think it would be. So that dream has definitely
⏹️ ▶️ John died. But I, you know, What we’re talking about is I can think of a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that my device can do. I just need to, like, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John capable of doing it. It just, I want it to do it like all at once. Like I want to give it a series of instructions
⏹️ ▶️ John and maybe with some conditions. And I want it to do that so I don’t have to manually do it. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, sort of my first program. Can you give me a way to do that? That’s why they call it
⏹️ ▶️ John automation. Like I’m not actually programming. I’m just telling the computer a series of things to do, maybe with some conditionals in there.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s automation, it’s not programming. But it’s the exact same thing. It’s just a continuum from, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do anything except press buttons at a program someone else wrote, to I write my program. And in that continuum, there
⏹️ ▶️ John are huge gaps. There’s the gap way at the beginning between nothing and shortcuts. Then there’s this little island
⏹️ ▶️ John of shortcuts, and then that peters off into the ocean, and there’s a giant ocean, and then there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Xcode way out on the right-hand side. And even in Xcode, you’re like, well, but it’s not jailbroken. On the other side of
⏹️ ▶️ John Xcode is like, jailbroken iPhone, and now you’re writing the operating system and stuff like
⏹️ ▶️ John that. So I’m still working, I’m still working on the analogy slash metaphor for my gooey thoughts.
⏹️ ▶️ John I really hope someone doesn’t write like a blog post that says exactly what I’ve been wanting to say for like six months, but
⏹️ ▶️ John they probably inevitably will as I, as I, as I ruminate on the perfect analogy.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Drew Shannon writes, Hey, for most quote unquote normal macOS usage, what are the pros
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and cons of using something like Dropbox or Google Drive as a primary storage solution? So nothing is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exclusively saved locally. Seems like a no-brainer for portability and backups, but what am I missing?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. That just seems like it wouldn’t be wise because it would be so chatty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over the network. Maybe? I mean, I guess on the surface, there’s nothing that strikes me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as, oh, this is a terrible decision, but it is not something I’ve ever thought to myself. Ooh, I want this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my life. So I don’t know. Let’s leave John, Mr. File Systems for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the end. Marco, any thoughts on this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I would say one of the obvious ones is privacy of that data. I mean, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey a big thing. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as John will probably point out, certain jobs and professions,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you actually either shouldn’t or legally can’t store your primary documents
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or a lot of your documents in public storage places like this. You also are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stressing that process, the sync process, the system for doing it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco poor performance of that process if you have a whole lot of files there. And then finally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are, you’re basically having a giant single point of failure. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think it matters that much in in if you have other systems in place.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So for instance, you know, Dropbox, I don’t honestly, I don’t know how Google Drive works. Dropbox is just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a folder on your file system. And there’s a background process that syncs to and from it basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into their cloud thing. And so you can do things like run time machine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or run internet backup like backblaze or things like that that will that will include
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those files because they’re just files sitting there on your disk. So you can have like different levels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of backup and you definitely should if that’s like your primary storage because yes Dropbox is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wonderful and yes it has like version support but what if it breaks? What if your account gets suspended?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What if they have a problem? What if you know what if it what if you go to restore a file and and it just says, oh, sorry, server error, can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it. It’s always nice to have your own backups in some other form in addition to whatever they’re doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I would say it can be a single point of failure that you want to avoid,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it doesn’t need to be. In addition to that, having your primary thing be something that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco synced introduces the potential for sync bugs to wipe it out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you could log in one day files
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in your Dropbox because some sync problem has happened or maybe your account was hacked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but chances are you know I think a bug is more likely you know something has happened and it’s blowing away all your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco files and you might notice you might not notice in time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it might blow away some of your files and then you don’t notice until it is too late
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s not and then the things that were blown away are no longer in any of your backups or their version control system. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s kind of shaky in a few areas, but if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a secondary computer, like a laptop, then the calculus changes. Like if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have like a primary desktop or something at home, and you have like a MacBook One or something,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you’re trying to like just have a few things on this and just have that thing be expendable, that’s a different story.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it depends on how you’re using it, but there are definitely some pitfalls that you might want to consider
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you guys covered most of it. The philosophical problems
⏹️ ▶️ John with it is starting to think that because you use one of these cloud drive services that
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t need a backup, that this constitutes your backup. Well, Dropbox saves old versions. Even if I accidentally delete
⏹️ ▶️ John the file, I can get it back. None of these things are backup solutions. Don’t trust them for that.
⏹️ ▶️ John The main difference between a backup solution and these things, like Mark pointed out, These things are not, you
⏹️ ▶️ John do stuff in a local file system and it puts them into the cloud. It’s two-dire, it’s bi-directional, it’s sync,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Which has bugs and problems, but the main difference between it and a cloud backup service
⏹️ ▶️ John is that a cloud backup service never deletes anything off your drive. It just takes things off your drive
⏹️ ▶️ John and puts them into the cloud. At no point does, you know, Backblaze, frequent sponsor of the show, decide,
⏹️ ▶️ John see that file on your hard drive? That shouldn’t be there, let me delete it. That will never happen. It’s not the job of Dropbox
⏹️ ▶️ John to delete stuff. It’s the job of Dropbox to see what’s there and stick it up in the cloud. One
⏹️ ▶️ John direction only. If you want to do a restore from Dropbox, that’s a whole other process that you have to manually
⏹️ ▶️ John initiate. It’s not going to randomly happen. And then practically speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ John depending on what you’re doing, and Marco pointed out the performance things, like if you, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I wouldn’t put a Git repository on Dropbox or Google Drive. I know from experience that if you do NPM install
⏹️ ▶️ John on Dropbox or Google Drive, you’re doing no development. It will just,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it will catch up eventually with what you’re doing, but it becomes so far from real time and just
⏹️ ▶️ John slaughters your computer that you end up having to say, well, let me turn off Dropbox or Google Drive,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you can. You can’t turn off iCloud Drive. Let me turn it off, do my development, and then turn it back on later
⏹️ ▶️ John and let it sync. And at that point, you’re now doing this manual system, you’re gonna forget to turn it back on, or you’re gonna accidentally delete
⏹️ ▶️ John something, you don’t realize it was synced, and it’s like you are eliminating the benefits. So you really, given
⏹️ ▶️ John the technological limitations, there is no sort of automatic transparent, oh, I do stuff locally and it just magically goes
⏹️ ▶️ John up to the cloud. The best we have is sort of an asynchronous way to make that happen eventually.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the safest way to do that is to just do your development locally. You can put some things in Dropbox or Google Drive,
⏹️ ▶️ John but have a backup system that takes your entire drive and puts it one direction from your Mac up into the
⏹️ ▶️ John cloud and have that be your safety net. So we’re stuck saying some files have
⏹️ ▶️ John to be local, Some files can be in Google Drive or Dropbox, and you have to run a backup utility, and you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John be conscious of which things are in which locations. It’s cruddy, but that’s life.
#askatp: Plex-server Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Justin Winchester writes, I’ve just over 5,000 movies and TV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show episodes all stored on a Drobo. I run Plex on a 5K iMac. That sounds familiar.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I’m looking at getting a dedicated computer to just run my Plex server. I thought an old Mac mini would be good for this and I found
⏹️ ▶️ Casey several on Craigslist, but I’ve also found some 2010 era Mac Pros. Would it be beneficial to get a Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over a mini for basically the same price? And then there’s some details that he provides about his Strobo,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then he continues. So should I even consider the older Macs? All my videos are MKV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or M4V, so I don’t believe the Mac has to do any transcoding as I believe my devices can play those files natively.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what should I do? Well, I actually exchanged a couple emails with Justin,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I was not the one who put this on the show notes. I presume one of you has some thoughts on this, but what I had initially recommended
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was actually an NVIDIA Shield. And to be fair, I don’t know very much about this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at all. But a friend of the show, Bradley Chambers, has used these in the past and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey says that they’re really, really good. And you can actually, to the best of my knowledge, check my math on this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can actually run a Plex server on the NVIDIA Shield. And as far as I understand,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Justin actually did some research on this. And according to him, it can only do like two or three simultaneous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey streams, either because of the constraints of the processor or because of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some sort of artificial limitation. Again, check my math on this. But I guess Justin,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he said privately to me, often has many people all streaming from him simultaneously.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that probably wouldn’t work for him. And if that’s the case, I would say just get a new Mac mini. You’ll be surprised
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what else you can do with it. And I have not spoken to him much, but I understand that other friend of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the show, Mike Hurley, has just gotten himself a Mac mini. So I’m basically one step away from flying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to London and installing Plex on that mini for him. So I would say if you have light uses,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey take a look at Nvidia Shield. If you’re more like Justin and running a mini Netflix out of your house, then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something like a Mac mini. Either of you guys, other
⏹️ ▶️ John thoughts? Justin may be the only person cross shopping a Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey tower and a Mac mini.
⏹️ ▶️ John They seem so similar. I can’t decide, they’re the same price. One of them is the size of a house. You could fit like 20 Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John minis inside a Mac Pro case, It’s like stacked on top of each other. They’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John comparable in any way. I mean, I guess he’s got some place where he can tuck them away, but like the power that the Mac Pro would
⏹️ ▶️ John use, please don’t buy a 2010 Mac Pro to be your Plex server. That is the wrong, it’s like, I’m not even
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna say it’s overkill because it’s slower than the Mac Mini. It’s just giant and it’s ridiculous, don’t do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John The other question that you glossed over in the middle, and one of the reasons I put this in here was worried about like, oh, I have a Drobo
⏹️ ▶️ John and has USB 3, but if I got a 2010 Mac Pro, it wouldn’t have USB 3. Again, don’t get a Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John tower, it’s ridiculous. But for the transfer speeds,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think any modern computer, it doesn’t really matter how many streams, sequential data reading, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John from SSDs, but even from spinning disks, especially for compressed media files, should be adequate to serve
⏹️ ▶️ John tons of streams of almost anything. Like it shouldn’t worry too much about the I.O. I
⏹️ ▶️ John suppose if you have a 2010 machine, maybe worry a little, but don’t get a 2010 machine. Get a recent thing, whether it’s a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Mini or I don’t know what the Nvidia Shield’s I.O. is like, or whatever, but unless you are serving like an
⏹️ ▶️ John entire town streaming from your thing, which you probably shouldn’t be anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John even if it’s your entire immediate and extended family streaming from your Plex, any modern small computer will
⏹️ ▶️ John do just fine. So please don’t buy a Mac Pro. The Shield thing, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know. I mean, you can check it out, it’s cheap. It might be fun to get into, but a Mac Mini would totally crush this task and
⏹️ ▶️ John would be awesome if I had $800 to spend on a Plex server and wanted to get a Mac, that’s what I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Same. Marco, any other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thoughts? Yeah, pretty much. I was going to point out the power usage difference if John didn’t like, you know, if they’re the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy in price now, but for a computer that you run 24 seven power consumption will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually probably add up to real money. And so the Mac Pro will definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use more power. I would also, you know, remind everybody as as you touched on that, you know, you’d be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting, you know, USB 2.0 only people don’t realize how old the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tower Mac Pros are until you point out the fastest IO they have is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Firewire 800. My word. They are pre USB 3 and pre Thunderbolt.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thunderbolt 1, like they don’t have Thunderbolt 1 or USB 3. I would also say that regarding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Nvidia Shield, I know Federico Vatici, if we didn’t make his head explode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough with all the iPad and shortcuts talk, I’m pretty sure he
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had an Nvidia Shield. I think he had something like that. I think that was it. to do exactly this to be a Plex server.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And he has since moved on to a different setup because it didn’t work out. And I forget the details of why it didn’t work out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I’m pretty sure it was not a favorable review of that setup. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think, I wouldn’t recommend that. You know, look, if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna be, if you’re considering two Macs, like yeah, just get a Mac and the Mac to get for this purpose is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco definitely the Mac Mini. And you don’t even need to spec it up. Like if you’re using external
⏹️ ▶️ Marco storage for all your stuff, you can get the base model. Like you don’t need more than the i3 is likely to deliver, like processor-wise.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The GPU is gonna be the same awful GPU in all of them, so there’s no upgrade to have there. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think this is a very RAM-heavy workload, so you don’t need to upgrade the RAM either. I think get the base
⏹️ ▶️ Marco model Mac mini and enjoy the energy savings and much smaller size and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ability to use I-O that was invented in this decade.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And actually, real-time follow-up from XMN in the chat, there’s apparently a Plex equivalent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of a KBase article specifically enumerating some of the limitations of running a Plex server on the Shield.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So again, it’s probably the cheapest and easiest way to fix this problem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you don’t have the needs that Justin appears to have. But it’s worth checking out. We’ll put a link in the show notes.
#askatp: Work vs. play
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. And then finally, Eric Wagner writes, I was wondering if you guys ever had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an issue balancing work and play? If so, what do you do to solve this issue? For example, I’m a computer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey science major and a lot of my work is on the computer, but I also enjoy playing video games on said computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then there’s video game talk, whatever. I’ve been playing this tug of war with should I do homework
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or should I do my daily missions? Unfortunately, the latter has been winning out more often than it probably should be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How do you suggest I resist this relentless urge?
⏹️ ▶️ John Daily missions in what, Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ John care. What does that mean, daily
⏹️ ▶️ Casey missions? I don’t care. It’s in some stupid game.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was going to ask about this. This is definitely like, you know, when I was a kid in college
⏹️ ▶️ Marco learning computer science with a computer full of games and trying to balance it, games were so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much less exploitive and addictive and constantly
⏹️ ▶️ John Total annihilation? I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John play. Network play is the ultimate time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sink. Yep, that was Counter-Strike for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me. for me. Yeah, you know, I didn’t have any daily missions. Yeah, for me it was, it was TA, it was counter-strike,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was later a return to Castle Wolfenstein, stuff like that. But like I never had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that big of a problem in part because my college had awful internet connectivity and so the ping times were too high to play most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of those games reasonably. Um, but I, I think, you know, the games now, there’s, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much more, um, addictive and immersive and they, they like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take over your life to a greater degree for more people than they did back then. So it’s a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard to answer. But my actual answer to this really is get a Mac. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey you won’t be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco able to play any games. Gaming on a Mac is so painful and punitive, you won’t want to do it. And you can still do all your computer science
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on it. It’s interesting. Interesting answer. I did not expect to be honest with you. I don’t have good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey advice on this. And it’s definitely do as I say, not as I do, because I was a terrible student in college.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it wasn’t specifically because of video games, although it was part of it. We were also, Marco and I were in school
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when EverQuest was a thing. And I remember there were literally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey many kids who dropped out of college because they spent so much time on EverQuest, which was one of the earlier massively
⏹️ ▶️ Casey multiplayer online games. I’m sure it wasn’t the first, but it was one of the first ones that was popular enough that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had heard about it. And this is, to my knowledge, before World of Warcraft was a thing. And so, yeah, there were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of kids that lost their college careers to EverQuest. But the best advice I can give is that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey look, hopefully this is four years of your life, which seems like a heck of a long
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time, especially if you’re 18, but in actuality is not that long.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if you can just build the skill by force, by reward, by punishment,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any way you can of doing what you need to do and getting that over with as quickly as possible, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can go and play games until you, you know, keel over. That is a skill that will be useful forever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if you can do it at least for these four years, then hopefully you will find a decent enough paying job
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you can basically slack off anytime you’re not at work for pretty much the rest of your life.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s a pretty good trade. Four years for the rest of your life, I would make that trade. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know that’s not really the most concrete advice or actionable advice, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just suck it up for four years, man. You could do it. I have faith in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you. I do love your philosophy of just work now so you can be a slacker forever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seriously. That’s the idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco That’s fantastic.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if we could only all be so lucky. John, what’s some actually useful advice?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the suggestion to get a Mac isn’t really gonna help because there are network games on the Mac too. And even
⏹️ ▶️ John though there aren’t that many of them and they’re not as good in general, there, it just takes one. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the problem. It only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. All right, modified statement, get a MacBook Air.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Or a MacBook.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The GPU is so bad that it’s fast enough. Actually, no, even better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco idea, get one of the new Mac minis. because it’s the worst GPU in the lineup,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s totally a great system for development. So you can do your homework,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, whatever you need on, you can do it on the Mac mini, but the GPU is so awful that probably every game
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be nearly unplayable. So yeah, get a Mac mini and get the biggest monitor you can so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that GPU is really working hard.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re forgetting about streaming games. Oh, is that
⏹️ ▶️ John Or it doesn’t run locally, runs in the cloud and you can play your MMO because you don’t care about lag because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not like a real time combat game. Like there’s no escape. That’s the thing about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Wait, no, now there is. I got it. Mac mini plus the aforementioned network
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey link conditioner. Network link conditioner.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Simulate my college connection, you’ll have no problem at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, there’s no escape from this. Like this is a thing you’re gonna have to deal with for your whole life of things that you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John do versus things that you wanna do. Often in college, it’s when people are first faced with that because
⏹️ ▶️ John before college, like if you’re living at home with some authority figure who tells you what you have
⏹️ ▶️ John to do versus what you wanna do, And then when you’re off in college, it’s just you telling yourself that this is a life
⏹️ ▶️ John skill. You’re just going to have to figure out. All right. And so, you know, this
⏹️ ▶️ John if you have to go cold turkey off something, I know some people who, you know, got into MMOs and or
⏹️ ▶️ John or muds or mushes or other things that predate that, like basically anything with network
⏹️ ▶️ John effects, the network based game. If you have to go cold turkey off it to get your to get yourself
⏹️ ▶️ John to do what you have to do, then that’s what you have to do. If you can learn to moderate it fine, but it’s not going to go away. Like that your
⏹️ ▶️ John your parents aren’t going to come back and start running your life again. You’re going to go off on your own. You’re going to face the same problem. Do
⏹️ ▶️ John I, you know, do what I have to do? Do I do I go shopping and do my laundry or do I play video games like
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t work out well if you can’t get this balance. So take this time in college to figure out how to get that balance
⏹️ ▶️ John for yourself. Hopefully you don’t have to go cold turkey and everything, but if that’s what it takes, that’s what it
⏹️ ▶️ John takes. Don’t be one of those people. Casey described that actually fails out of college before it, because it doesn’t get easier
⏹️ ▶️ John after that. It’s not like, well, my college experiment failed, but it’s smooth sailing from here. Nope.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You’ll still
⏹️ ▶️ John have to get a job and support yourself and, you know, do your laundry and
⏹️ ▶️ John make yourself food and bathe and find some way to support yourself like it doesn’t go away. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess I don’t have any great advice on how to do it. Just that it’s not a problem that’s unique to college.
⏹️ ▶️ John You better learn how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to deal with it. And also just like, you know, to conclude like philosophically, as one slacker
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to another, I can tell you that you’re never going to… If you’re having these issues like this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re probably a slacker like me. You’re probably never going to have an amazing work ethic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But what you do need to learn, and college is pretty good for this, is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco learning how to tell what you do and don’t have to really do. Because in most college
⏹️ ▶️ Marco curricula curricula curriculums, I don’t know, in most plural college curriculum,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s pretty much impossible for one person in a single day to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of the work that was assigned or recommended to them in all their classes. So you kind of have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to develop these skills for knowing how to tell what you don’t have to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and prioritizing things. And as I was saying, like, you know, figuring out how to balance things you want to do versus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things you have to do. But learning how to tell what you don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do is possibly the most valuable skill you can possibly learn in your entire academic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco career. It’s a skill that not everybody does learn. But it’s, you know, for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everybody, not just slackers like us, but for everybody, that’s a very, very important skill to learn. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, there isn’t enough time in the day to do everything. But you also can’t do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing and just play games all day. Like you have to get somewhere in the middle there and that is a skill
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that as John has said much better than this. College is a pretty opportune time to learn that skill
⏹️ ▶️ John and for destiny. That’s the game by the way. Obviously he was talking about destiny specifically as someone who can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John play destiny all the time because there’s stuff I have to do. It is possible to play and
⏹️ ▶️ John enjoy destiny at a slower pace. I you know some you can play
⏹️ ▶️ John one night a week and still make reasonable progress in the game. Bungie has done a pretty good job of making a game that
⏹️ ▶️ John you can play obsessively all day, every day if you’re a professional, you know, Twitch streamer. And you can also play once
⏹️ ▶️ John a week and the once a week people will progress more slowly, but you can still play and enjoy
⏹️ ▶️ John the game at a reasonable pace. Usually by the time a season is over in Destiny, I have
⏹️ ▶️ John just hit the light level cap and I’ve more or less done all the major things that were in that
⏹️ ▶️ John content. It’s what everybody did who’s a Twitch streamer. the first week it came out the first week the expansion
⏹️ ▶️ John came out it takes me an entire season to do it but i do get to all the content so don’t feel like you’re gonna miss
⏹️ ▶️ John it so if you have to make a schedule say look i get four and a half hours to play destiny on saturday
⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s all the only time i ever play destiny and you will not miss out on any content you’ll just progress more slowly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all right thanks to our sponsors this week casper betterment and lino and we will talk Talk to you next week!
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any
⏹️ ▶️ John research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him, cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them At
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M
⏹️ ▶️ Marco N-T Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse, it’s accidental They
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t mean to, accidental Tech Podcasts, it’s so long!
Neutral: e-tron
⏹️ ▶️ John I have this e-tron GT concept which shows that Audi is really
⏹️ ▶️ John committed to this e-tron brand but it also shows that potentially they’re going to make something other than a squashed SUV. So maybe when
⏹️ ▶️ John Margo’s lease is up. This looks good. I mean this is a coupe obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John like what it means is that this is probably the same platform and so obviously the squished SUV is the first one because that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John car that everybody’s going to buy because only people only buy SUVs but seems like they might actually make a sedan
⏹️ ▶️ John and this coupe thing eventually.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is pretty. that they’re definitely like taking a lot of cues from the BWI series. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, in this like they’re using like the sustainable interior. Everything’s vegan. They have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they using a vowel as their branding thing. I do think that the BWI series is way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better branding than
⏹️ ▶️ John e-tron. Yeah, no, e-tron is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good name. Like e-tron sounds like one of the Lego sets I would have played with in the 90s and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not like a car in 2018 that’s supposed to be like a forward looking thing, like it sounds
⏹️ ▶️ John the hell is that? I think Volvo has one too. I keep wanting to say Polaris, but I’m thinking of Polaris Lancer
⏹️ ▶️ John and Destiny because I just talked about it. Thought they had, they have like a premium brand and I thought their premium
⏹️ ▶️ John Polestar maybe. Let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John performance stuff. That’s hybrid, oh nevermind. Anyway, Volvo’s styling, Volvo’s really been
⏹️ ▶️ John on a tear with the style lately. So if they ever make a
⏹️ ▶️ John full electric car, I bet it’ll look nice. I think this Audi GT looks really nice, but this is just a concept car, so
⏹️ ▶️ John who the hell knows what they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually gonna make. It actually does look nice. I mean, I don’t have a lot of use for a two-seater.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, it’s just a matter, like it’s the same platform. I’m sure this is all whatever their mid-size electric car
⏹️ ▶️ John platform is. Like it’s exactly what’s underneath the e-tron. Just imagine a four-door version of that with reasonable proportions, because
⏹️ ▶️ John Audis all tend to look the same anyway. So you can very quickly visualize, oh, I can see what a four-door version of that would look like
⏹️ ▶️ John with reasonable wheels
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on it. Why is there e-tron on the front gaping
⏹️ ▶️ John mouth? Because they’re, as Marco pointed out, they’re very bad at branding. Like, the worst thing about e-tron
⏹️ ▶️ John is that it highlights the fact that it’s their electric car, which is gonna look more and more ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ John as every car is electric. It’s like naming your gasoline car, like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the cylinder masher, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know. The fuel injector.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, or like, yeah, just doesn’t, the piston pumper. Like, it doesn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco a certain point it’s like, What
⏹️ ▶️ John is his name supposed to highlight to me? That it has an internal combustion engine? Okay, great, good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I feel like these car companies like Audi and to some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco degree BMW and definitely Honda and Toyota, like that kind of company, I feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like relegating the electric efforts to a sub-brand is probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bad idea. Like, they already have these amazing, successful, long-running
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car platforms and models and brands. they should just do, what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everybody wants is just make those electric. Like give an option for,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make an electric Accord option. Make an electric Camry.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I think that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone’s gonna do eventually, but this is like the dipping the toe in the water. I mean, like Volkswagen just came out and said they’re not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John make internal but combustion engines anymore, period, after the upcoming generation
⏹️ ▶️ John of platforms that they build on. So it’s still a slightly longer timeline, but yeah, they’re gonna convert everything. And even
⏹️ ▶️ John Honda, I think, has mostly learned the lesson of don’t make dedicated models. The Honda doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do any EV, because like I said, they’re really slow. But just take hybrids. Don’t have dedicated models for hybrids.
⏹️ ▶️ John And also don’t make your hybrids look weird. Like that was the thing in the beginning. Oh, your hybrid
⏹️ ▶️ John has to look like a Prius. It has to look like a little snail turd or whatever. If you look at what they did with the new Insight,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Insight just looks like a Honda now. They stopped, for the most part, they’re still hanging on a little bit, but they stopped
⏹️ ▶️ John making them all look weird or Nissan leafy or whatever. It’s like, just make a normal Honda car and then have a discreet
⏹️ ▶️ John little hybrid bed. and of course there is a hybrid Accord, there is a Civic Accord, and those look exactly like a…er…er…er…a…er…a…er…a
⏹️ ▶️ John hybrid Civic, rather. Those look exactly like Civics and Accords, they just have a little badge and uglier wheels usually,
⏹️ ▶️ John and a slightly uglier grille, but otherwise, they’re…they’re exactly the same cars! Uh…yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Someone in the chat room pointed out that, uh, Honda’s…hydrogen efforts. Yeah, Honda’s often the
⏹️ ▶️ John weeds on this whole topic. But yeah, everyone will eventually just have all of their cars just be normal, but, in the beginning
⏹️ ▶️ John there is some advantage to making a bit of a splash by naming your thing E-tron or making your
⏹️ ▶️ John i3 look like this weird refrigerator on wheels like and making everything out of wood sustainably
⏹️ ▶️ John and having a little flower growing out of the dashboard like that’s how you get into the market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but well but that’s how that’s how you get into the market like five years ago I feel like now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this kind of stuff now it’s a little late for that like it’d be like if somebody came out now with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a brand new hybrid line and they really touted and sub-branded. And it’s like, no,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s old now. When the very first hybrids came out, the very first Prius and Honda,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was it the Insight? The very first consumer hybrids. When those came out, that was the time to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crazy styling and really call attention to the fact that it’s a hybrid. But I feel like with electric cars,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we are already at the phasing out part of the adoption curve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here, where we’re already at the point where you should reduce
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the amount that you call attention to the fact that it’s electric and just make a really good electric car. You are
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, we’re not at that point
⏹️ ▶️ John first of all, but look at the styling on this. This just looks like an Audi. Like the styling of this Audi says nothing about it. The only thing it says,
⏹️ ▶️ John electric is the stupid name and the fact that they put the name on the front. But otherwise, it looks like a straight up Audi. And the
⏹️ ▶️ John same thing with the Jaguar looks like a squished SUV, like all their other squished SUVs. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John the styling era is already over before these people have even made their first electric car. But we are still in early days of
⏹️ ▶️ John electric cars, period.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will agree that this is that this the e-tron GT concept thing is actually a very nice-looking car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And yes, you’re right. It doesn’t with the exception of the stupid thing on the intake non grille
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It doesn’t is that even it’s just it’s a fake intake grill,
⏹️ ▶️ John isn’t it? Yeah, it’s blocked off Why would you need air to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go in there? Right? Yeah, so it’s so the the giant e-tron branding on the fake intake
⏹️ ▶️ Marco grill I think is a mistake. But other than that, like if they if they just deleted that and the grill
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if you take that out, it actually does look very, very nice. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it looks like a very nice version of a car I don’t need.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think the problem that you’re running into, Marco, with regard to where we are in the timeline of electric
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cars is that you’ve lived with one for three years now. But to any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey regular—I don’t mean this to sound dismissive and I apologize—but to any regular person with regular cars,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they still seem like a foreign concept. Like I’ve probably spent more time driving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an electric car than many, given that I don’t own one. You know, I’ve driven,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve driven underscores cars plenty of times. I don’t recall if I’ve actually driven yours, but it ultimately doesn’t matter. The point is I’ve spent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a fair bit of time behind the wheel of a Tesla and I am pretty familiar with what they are and how they work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But most people I know like have never really even been in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an electric car, much less owned one or driven one or owned one. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think we’re far earlier in the adoption than I think you’re giving them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for. Well, I’m not saying they’re like every day, but the time that it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was really crazy unique for an electric car to be an electric car is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fading already. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey we’re already,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so if you are debuting a new model in the next two to four years, and you’re planning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on starting this big sub-brand of your company for electric, I think the time for that has passed. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is still novel and you’re right, most people don’t have them yet, but like, I mean, geez, like look at the number of Model
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 3s Tesla has shipped. Like look at like, it’s getting pretty mass market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at a pretty accelerating pace. And if Tesla wasn’t such a, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crazy, poorly run company for operations, I think there’d be even more of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it’s only a matter of time before other companies come in and have products that are as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compelling as the Model 3 and Model S and sell in similar volumes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we only need one or two more of those before this becomes very common for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of people. Whether they own one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John or not is a different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco story. But they have to get cheaper still. Yeah, they do. But it’s gonna become as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco boring as owning a BMW. Most people don’t own BMWs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but most people also don’t care that much about them. They aren’t that novel anymore. They might have been novel 40
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years ago, but they’re not very novel now. That’s why I think we’re getting there with electrics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco faster than a lot of these car companies seem to think, where it’s no longer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna be like, hey, look at us, give us a big hand for going all electric. If
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you go all electric in 10 years, no one’s gonna give you a big hand. That’s just table sticks at that point.