305: An Uneasy Peace
18 Dec 2018NPR’s RAD proposal, Microsoft Edge, some very fun domains, and a fond farewell to Apple Music Connect.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- Apple Music sunsets Connect
- Microsoft Edge is coming to macOS
- NPR's Remote Audio Data (RAD) spec
#askatp- What's important for a new TV? (via Kapila Wimalaratne)
- How does one compress a ripped Blu-ray? (via Iván)
- How do I learn the command line? (via Brian Edwards)
Sponsored by:
- Linode: Instantly deploy and manage an SSD server in the Linode Cloud. Use code atp2018 for a $20 credit.
- Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code ATP for 10% off your first order.
- Eero: Finally, Wi-Fi that works. Get $100 off a Wi-Fi system and a year of eero Plus with code ATP.
Chapters
- Holiday party
- Tesla and jerky CEOs
- Avoiding 30:00 video limit
- Bundles in Dropbox
- shortcuts.fun
- Sponsor: Eero (code ATP)
- Apple Music Connect 👋
- Microsoft Edge
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- NPR’s RAD proposal
- Sponsor: Linode (code atp2018)
- #askatp: TV shopping
- #askatp: Blu-ray transcoding
- #askatp: Learning command line
- Ending theme ☃️
- Post-show
Holiday party
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You? So I was taking a sip. I’m well. I have,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as of four seconds ago, started my holiday party. Yeah, you’re starting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John did not bring the bottle like I did.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The critical error I made years ago, which I will not make again, was bringing the bottle with me. I have rationed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey appropriately. I do not have an inappropriate amount. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the only way for me to refill is if I go all the way downstairs. I am learning from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my mistakes. Don’t worry. How’s it going?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I agree, and we have a long night ahead. Oh, my God. Are you having a beer tonight?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not yet. Pacing yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Very boring, but very adult.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, I’m very tired today, so I’m having some caffeinated tea to help keep me nice and alert
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and lucid as much as possible for this podcast. This is like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is busy week. Like this is like for Christmas week, we, you know, in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our family, we tend to basically do nothing for an entire week. And when you have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, a job or something, you know, regular job for the most part, I mean, you know, not everybody, but for the most part,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you take a vacation, you just kind of stop going to the job and other people pick up your slack.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know it’s a little hard for the holidays, but when you’re self-employed, as Casey, you know now, when you’re self-employed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you take a week off, the work doesn’t get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done by other people. It just doesn’t get done. So all you’re doing is moving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the work from your, quote, vacation week. You’re just moving it to different times before and after.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the week before vacation is extra busy, and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which explains why I saw a new test flight beta from overcast fly by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like I don’t know half an hour ago or something yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was like 20 minutes ago because I’m trying to fix all these bugs in time for the App Store Connect holiday
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey which I know what you’re referring I believe it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco begins on the 24th I think which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey is Monday but like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that late it’s something like that but I but I want to like I want to ideally submit this to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco App Store tomorrow and that way it gets approved probably by Thursday
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then if I have to do an emergency fix, I can issue that Thursday or Friday.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a whole thing. So it’s like everything is compressed and it’s a very busy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco week. This is like, this is the same time that I believe it was last year that I started
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using things. Because in the holidays, like in our lead up to our big holiday family
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trip, all the stuff we traditionally do for that, we have a whole bunch of to-do items for that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in addition to just life stuff all catching up, end of the year stuff, tax stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all sorts of things. And it becomes very, very nice as you’re running around doing crazy things to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just be able to yell into your phone, hey thing, add this to my to-do list and things or whatever and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to build up a quick list via Siri and be able to plow through them as you get chances to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m in that kind of mode, like the super busy, doing everything mode, like getting tons of stuff done, juggling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco five different things. But…
Tesla and jerky CEOs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have an important update. I called US Bank this morning to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inquire about my Tesla lease balance. And they said that they had just this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco morning received payment from Tesla and I have a zero balance. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we finally, they’re going to send me a statement that confirms that I have zero balance that I don’t have yet,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they told me verbally that it is done. And this should be the last I hear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of my old Tesla lease that Tesla failed to terminate properly when they offered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let me play this back to make sure my understanding is right. So you had paid
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a bunch of money that you shouldn’t have against that lease that should have been closed, but wasn’t or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey done or what have you, and it wasn’t. So that has or has not been refunded to you, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The pile that I had paid, Tesla sent me a check for that. Okay, and you have received
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it? Yes, and I deposited it and it hasn’t bounced yet, so we’ll see what happens. I don’t know how long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey it takes to check
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to really be totally clear. I think it takes like a week. Sure, sure. I don’t know. But yeah, so hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that doesn’t bounce. If it does, it’ll make for a great segment on the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a way, I kind of want it to. Okay, so you have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that money already, and as far as we can tell, all is on the up and up. only other missing piece
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was to get the bank that held, or whatever the terminology is, that held the lease to agree
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the lease is done. And that sounds like that is also now accomplished.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, because Tesla had to both pay me the money that I had overpaid to them, and they had to pay the bank the rest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the balance, because the bank sent me like a $5,000 bill. So both
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of those things have now been done. And so as far as I can tell, I think I’m done. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think I’m finally out of that. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco taken care of finally, and I can finally get back to enjoying what is really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my favorite car I’ve ever had, and I just want to enjoy it. So now I’m back to enjoying it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Did you read, was it a Wired article, is that right? Yes, this Dr.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Elon and Mr. Musk, Life Inside Tesla’s Production Hell.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I typically don’t read anything like that, because here’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this even before this lease debacle where they totally you know butchered basic administrative
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tasks I knew the company was a mess I knew Elon Musk personally was a mess and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of a horrible person especially to work for and so I knew there was a bunch of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know toxic waste over there and I I love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the car so much I didn’t want I wouldn’t want my view to be tarnished I didn’t want to have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get down into like the dirt of that and get get involved in that. So like, I don’t pay attention to their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drama, their company, their stock, anything like that. I don’t get involved. I just like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the car a lot. And there is no other car I’d rather have. And so whenever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some big toxic whirlwind starts about them, I try to ignore it as much as possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And a lot of them are BS anyway. Some of them are true, but a lot of them are BS anyway. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just kind of nice to stay out of the whole thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Did you read this, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John I read it. I just kept waiting for you to say ignorance is lisp, but I guess you’re off that train. I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey just didn’t think about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. Now I’m never off the train. Let’s not get ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey end. The puns will continue until morale improves.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you hear this by the way? Can you hear this on my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey microphone? It sounded like a printer for a
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. No, sure. People can print while I’m in here. It’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which family member is committing this? That’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John one that’s my daughter because she doesn’t care. You just hear the dulcet tones of
⏹️ ▶️ John my Canon inkjet printer. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah. Yeah. I read this article and then it was a good article, but it’s really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more of the same. Like you don’t need to read any more Elon Musk articles or really that any more Tesla articles.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is a little more detailed than I had read previously, but ultimately it says what we all knew, which is, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, exactly what you were just trying to say, Marco, is that But Elon seems to be kind of a dirtbag,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a loose definition of the term, and the company seems to be a complete disaster. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. But I don’t know. Whatever. But it was interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not saying don’t bother, but it is exactly what you expect it to be. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And it does raise the question, and people have asked me before, how can I support them and this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco horrible person who runs this company, how can I support them by being their customer? And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ve talked about this a little bit before. There’s only so many companies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to buy certain things from. There’s only so many large corporations, large airlines are a big one of these where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an airline can make you really mad, but then sometimes you gotta fly them again in the future anyway, because there’s only like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco five airlines. With cars, there’s a pretty small number of car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco companies out there that make cars that are anything like what I would drive. I don’t know anything about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other ones, really. They could be led by horrible people, too. You typically don’t become
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the CEO of a large corporation, and you especially typically don’t succeed as the CEO
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a large corporation without being able to play the politics game real well, and a lot of that comes kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of dirtily. Is that a word? I know what you’re saying, yeah, yeah. And so, like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most people who run most large corporations have some dirt on them and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are not the nicest or best people in all of their lives. And so it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we typically just don’t hear about most of the other ones. We hear about a few high profile examples
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of these companies, but we don’t hear about most of anything else. And so it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better to just do what you can here and there, but not be super
⏹️ ▶️ Marco religious about it, because chances are, anything you love, somebody can ruin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it by saying, well, you know, this executive who works there was kind of a jerk once. Like, so it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you gotta kinda be willing to look past some degree of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, you know, my dad worked at IBM for a very long time and by virtue of his
⏹️ ▶️ Casey particular role in the company, he would interact with the CEO on a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not completely irregular basis. Like enough that the CEO would recognize who my dad is. Although my dad was nowhere near
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the CEO, you know, it was one of those, like, he sidestepped his way into the CEO’s world, if you will.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, anyway, he worked there under the tenure a few CEOs because he was there for like 30 years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’d asked dad once, this was around the time of the CEO change,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, hey, is Joe Smith or Susie Smith or whatever, you know, is Mr.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or Mrs. Smith, you know, are they kind of mean? And my dad just looked at me and scoffed. He was like, of course they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are. They’re the CEO of IBM. You don’t get to that position by being nice, you know, which is exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what you’re saying. He was kind of almost offended that I’d even asked such a ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey question, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of course they’re a jerk. Yeah, you know, and see also most politicians, right? Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco politicians who start ranking highly, like, you know, once you get to like the national level especially,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you have to be a certain level of dirtbag to be able to succeed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John and to climb the ladder.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, like, very few people make it that far who aren’t just total jerks in some way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, some do, it is possible to, just the odds are against you.
Avoiding 30:00 video limit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so let’s continue since we’ve already started with follow-up and let’s continue. A lot of people,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey helpfully, wrote in to tell us why your camera error happened. Some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people seem to think it was ridiculous we didn’t know this. I will come to your defense, Marco, and say I had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no idea this was a thing, and I think that it’s utterly preposterous. But Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would you like to tell us why your video cut off at just barely shy of 30 minutes?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All of Europe told us about this. there was an EU import
⏹️ ▶️ Marco law that classified video cameras at a different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tax or tariff or import rate, whatever it is, to other types of cameras.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that by the, all like DSLR and mirrorless manufacturers setting their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco limits to just shy of 30 minutes would get them classified not as a video camera, but as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a still camera. And that got them, I guess, a lower import tax or whatever. And so they could be sold for lower prices.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so basically all of those camera makers that make those kind of cameras all limit their cameras to 29, 59 or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever. And apparently we’ve also heard, although I have not yet verified,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ve also heard that that tax regulation is getting relaxed next year. And so maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the camera makers will adjust things. We also have already been told, thank you very much, about various
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like hacked firmware things that we can install on our cameras. That’s nice, I’m glad those exist. I’m not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that. Yeah, no, not a chance. And finally, we absolutely did hear about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco external recorders to basically use HDMI recorders or recording monitors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get around this limit. That is nice. I believe I said this last episode, but cut it out. Those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cost like $800, and that doesn’t seem like a great solution to this problem either.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So my solution instead is going to be I’m going to just not record for more than 30 minutes at once.
Bundles in Dropbox
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Chris Adamson writes and says, another reason not to use Dropbox for everything. So this was in the context of, why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t I just put pretty much everything in Dropbox or Google Drive or what have you? And so Chris says,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey another reason not to use Dropbox for everything, it cannot store bundle files, such as GarageBand projects.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey An Apple support article notes that while GarageBand for iOS can save files locally or to iCloud, saving via the files
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app won’t work to Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, or Microsoft OneDrive. John, I get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the feeling that you’re twitching because I didn’t appropriately describe what a bundle is. Would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you like to elaborate any, or are you satisfied?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure the summary is right, where it says it can’t store bundle files. The tech note says it can’t store garage band files, which
⏹️ ▶️ John I assume are bundles. Bundles is just a directory full of files, but the directory itself has a
⏹️ ▶️ John dot and a bunch of letters at the end of it. And the OS and applications
⏹️ ▶️ John treat it specially and don’t show you that it’s a directory. They just show it to you as a file unless you do a particular run. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s nothing particularly special about bundles
⏹️ ▶️ John or GarageBand bundles that would prevent Dropbox from storing them correctly. And in fact, I’m pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John sure Dropbox does store, you know, just bundles as a concept, okay. Cause I’m pretty sure I’ve put
⏹️ ▶️ John some bundle files in there and taken them out and they continue to work. But there must be something about either how GarageBand works or
⏹️ ▶️ John how iOS treats them, or maybe there’s some Mac specific metadata that Dropbox doesn’t support. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John important in this case, that Apple has a tech note that says, no, don’t try to save your GarageBand files to cloud
⏹️ ▶️ John storage. You can save them to iCloud Drive, which again shows that it’s not some limitation of cloud drives, it’s just some limitation
⏹️ ▶️ John of these services. So, yeah, that kind of gets back to what I was saying, or I think we talked about this when
⏹️ ▶️ John we were talking about Plex, like not all file systems are created equal
⏹️ ▶️ John when it comes to storing stuff from your Mac, because the rules about file names
⏹️ ▶️ John are different, and in this case, whatever thing is preventing this particular kind of bundle from working
⏹️ ▶️ John and a particular application might have particular requirements. Some applications are cranky about
⏹️ ▶️ John storing stuff on what they perceive to be network volumes, so you have to fool them somehow. We’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John talked about that before. So yeah, the world of file systems is still
⏹️ ▶️ John filled with pitfalls. And if you don’t think about them and just think, oh, like everything is everything and I can
⏹️ ▶️ John just store this file anywhere I want, in a cloud, on a drive, on a fish,
⏹️ ▶️ John in a box with a fox, You actually kind of have to be careful a little bit.
shortcuts.fun
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, there’s another link in the show notes, which I only had a chance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to very quickly glance at because it came in late breaking. I don’t know which one of you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gentlemen added this. I’m guessing, John, but can you tell me about shortcuts.fun, please?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John Greenewald That fun. Yeah. John Greenewald
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey domain name.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is a really good domain. John Greenewald Well, the first thing is that work, my work firewall prevented me from getting to it. I’m assuming
⏹️ ▶️ John just because it has that fun on the name, like, you know what, just don’t allow anyone to go to dot fun from work because
⏹️ ▶️ John they shouldn’t be going there. Anyway, I got to look at it later. So this is a website and a library created by Josh
⏹️ ▶️ John Verant. And the upshot is it lets you make shortcuts by writing
⏹️ ▶️ John JavaScript. Like just open a text field and start writing JavaScript against
⏹️ ▶️ John his library and then it will compile it sort of, or package it into a.shortcut file,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I’m assuming is just like a bundle directory that’s zipped and renamed.shortcut or whatever. You can do it right on the website. You can go to the website,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a text field, you can write stuff there, you can click a button and it will take what you typed in that text field and download
⏹️ ▶️ John in your browser a.shortcut file that you can run on iOS. And so this is like a reverse engineering of the.shortcut
⏹️ ▶️ John file format, which again, I know nothing about, but I assume like so many of Apple’s other formats is just
⏹️ ▶️ John either a zip or a zib file that if you decompress it as a directory full of files, then
⏹️ ▶️ John a particular format, a particular folder structure, and it just runs them. So if you do want to
⏹️ ▶️ John make shortcuts but don’t want to use the UI, This is the thing for you, what Josh wrote
⏹️ ▶️ John on the website, is I built this library out of frustration with Apple Shortcuts app, as I found complex shortcuts were difficult to
⏹️ ▶️ John manage using this drag and drop interface. I wanted to write shortcuts the same way I write code, so I created shortcuts.js,
⏹️ ▶️ John or shortcuts.js. He’s got a big article in Medium where he describes the whole process and the reverse engineering. We’ll put a link
⏹️ ▶️ John to that in the show notes. So that’s cool. I mean, obviously this is a hack and it’s reverse engineered
⏹️ ▶️ John and Apple can change the format at any time, yada, yada, yada like there’s no guarantee this will continue to work,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s nice that it has an option. Of course, one of the links is to an example. I said, what
⏹️ ▶️ John do these things look like? What does it look like when you write a shortcut in JavaScript? Doesn’t quite look maybe the way
⏹️ ▶️ John you would expect it to. So they
⏹️ ▶️ John have a bunch of examples. Like here’s a battery level checker example. And everything
⏹️ ▶️ John is done in terms of what I presume are the underlying either Objective-C or Swift objects or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John So there’s a thing called getBatteryLevel that gives you the getBatteryLevel, right? And the shortcut is,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re writing the shortcut in the shortcuts app, it would be like, okay, we’ll get the result of this action and then compare
⏹️ ▶️ John it with this comparison block and it’s parameterized, so it’s a less than thing. And then when
⏹️ ▶️ John I say it’s 20, it’s like, oh, great, when I get to write this in code, I’ll just be able to do, if getBatteryLevel less than 20. No,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have a function called conditional that takes an object with keys named input
⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s a string, which is the less than sign and then the value, and that’s a number, which is 20.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then an if true key, which gives you an array of
⏹️ ▶️ John just, it’s like, it’s not how you would write it. You don’t, you can’t just use the less than operator in JavaScript.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, this is, you could add this on top of the library, you know, eventually this is like version
⏹️ ▶️ John one, or it just shows that under the covers, all those blocks you’ve seen shortcuts, apparently map directly
⏹️ ▶️ John to silly functions called conditional that take strings and put to,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, it’s just, it’s not the way you would write it in code. I still say this is probably more comfortable
⏹️ ▶️ John for a programmer than using the shortcut UI. Not sure if it helps with debugging. I
⏹️ ▶️ John just, again, I just looked at this this afternoon. I don’t think just because you write it in JavaScript, you can actually
⏹️ ▶️ John debug it in JavaScript because you in the end, you have to package it up as a shortcut file and run it on your phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John At that point, you’re at the mercy of whatever debugging abilities you have there. But if you’re a programmer and you’re interested in
⏹️ ▶️ John playing with shortcuts in something other than a bunch of rounded rectangles on your phone or iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John screen, check out this site, shortcuts.fun. Is that plural? Yeah, plural, shortcuts.fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey DORSEY This is very cool and very impressive, but I agree with you that the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey language of it, and I don’t mean that like JavaScript, but the kind of flow of the way it’s been implemented
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is clunky. This reminds me of, what was it? It was some godawful SharePoint thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did. was it camel, C-A-M-L? It doesn’t matter. Now I’m miserable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just thinking about SharePoint again. But basically a query language where you have to say, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want this thing and then I want a comparison. The particular comparison I want is less than, it’s exactly what you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said before. It’s just so clunky. And it’s probably a lot less clunky
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than dragging stuff around on the screen. I’ve seen some of Federico’s shortcuts and they are masterpieces,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but they are out of control. And so this does seem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like it would help a lot, but we…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’ve done some research while you guys were talking on the dotfund TLD. I was wondering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like what’s available there. I’d never heard of this. I was wondering what’s available and how much do these cost?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it turns out that you can register a lot of keywords there that are like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dictionary words, but they seem to be priced such that the ones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are better and more desirable are way more expensive. So for instance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coffee.fun is $5,600 per year. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that to me suggests coffee is a very fun thing. So I wondered, what can I get that’s less fun
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than coffee? Now, I think podcasts are pretty fun. Podcast.fun
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is only $2,800 per year. So that’s about half the price for podcast.fun compared to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coffee.fun. That does seem to suggest we’re getting less fun though. So then I tried SharePoint.fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh God. That’s only $1,160 per year. So that one has a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less interest in the fun buyers looking for SharePoint. Then I found the bottom of the barrel.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How is that not SharePoint? That is the bottom of the barrel. There are things that are less fun than SharePoint.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tied at just $4 a year each are airportsecurity.fun
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and finally tetanusshot.fun. dot fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nice. This is this is useful podcasting content. I’m glad we’re here.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure this is an efficient market setting these prices.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple is shutting down Apple Music’s rarely used connect feature. So is this the thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where like as an artist you could go up there and like talk about what you’re up to and what tour you’re doing and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do a little behind-the-scenes stuff, is that correct? Was this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the thing that Drake introduced or was this before that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah, yeah, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t remember but yeah, it was basically ping 2.0. It’s like here Let’s build a social
⏹️ ▶️ Marco network inside Apple music so that the artists can post their stuff here and people can follow them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was basically, you know, the world of music promotion is very heavily tied to other networks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like especially like YouTube Twitter Facebook. So like it was basically Apple’s attempt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at trying to capture that world of social promotion of musical stuff and musical bands and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and fans following musicians into their own thing. And it was not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that different from Ping, really. Ping was like follow your friends. This was follow the bands you like.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I don’t think it ever had any traction at all. Even at the very beginning,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they had a few artists on board to start it out and start posting. And I tried following some artists I like, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seemed to pretty much die out and have nobody posting there that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I followed almost immediately afterwards. I think the reason why social networks like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Twitter and Facebook, and to some degree in this area, YouTube, the reason these succeed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is because, artists that you follow tend not to have a lot to say most of the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you go follow your favorite handful of bands on a social network,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if the social network is only them, if you’re not seeing anyone else posting, that’s gonna be a pretty low
⏹️ ▶️ Marco volume social network. Whereas the other ones, you’re going there all the time for other stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for all sorts of different sources and people to follow or communicate with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or post things yourself. There’s tons of reasons to go to social networks other than, whatever this is, not App Store Connect,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not iTunes Connect, what is it, Apple Music Connect, Apple Music Ping, whatever the heck it was called.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s no reason to just keep going to that, to have that be integrated as part of your life that you’re constantly going to. Whereas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other ones have other draws that keep people going back and checking in all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I don’t think this ever really stood a chance, Even when it was introduced, I don’t think anybody was saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is gonna take over the world. I think everyone was basically saying, what are they doing, why are they doing Ping again?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it didn’t work out.
⏹️ ▶️ John This falls under our category of the best time to cancel services after people have forgotten that it exists and this definitely
⏹️ ▶️ John qualifies, because when I read the story, I had forgotten that it exists and I’m like, oh yeah, they did that thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I do think it’s actually very different from Ping for exactly the reason you said. Ping was,
⏹️ ▶️ John see what your friends are doing, like an actual social network that all the participants would both be able to
⏹️ ▶️ John consume the output of other people and produce output for other people in the network. So it was all this many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? And that was fundamentally flawed, because it was based on the assumptions that you and your friends had the same taste
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in music. I guess nobody has a fish friend.
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t expect you to have the same taste, and it doesn’t expect you to be just your friends. But the whole point, it was just regular people to regular
⏹️ ▶️ John people. But Kinect seemed, I don’t know if this is entirely true, but it very much seemed,
⏹️ ▶️ John first of all, It was pitch to creators to get them to come. Like, hey, you famous person who makes music,
⏹️ ▶️ John come to our service. All the things that you think you want to do to communicate to your listeners, we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John make it easy for you to do those things. So it made it attractive to them. And then for everyone else, it was
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you sit back and wait to hear from the famous people. So like you said,
⏹️ ▶️ John your band has an album once every few years, and then they go on tour, and maybe they’ll have some behind the scenes stuff, which takes
⏹️ ▶️ John work to produce. Like that was the whole pitch of the team. Like your fans are hungry to know, like how you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John in the studio working on your album and what did you have for lunch today? And here’s some behind the scenes. Look at our lyrics in progress
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know, whatever. You have to encourage the artist to do that. I mean, Apple probably went so far
⏹️ ▶️ John as to, you know, get the ones that are friendly to them to do it, pay them to do it, whatever. You just got to kickstart
⏹️ ▶️ John the service. And then presumably the fans are sitting there waiting to see something from their
⏹️ ▶️ John band. But that’s, that’s the ghost, like I said, it’s a ghost town because people don’t follow that many artists
⏹️ ▶️ John and artists don’t have that much to say and that much to update. And the artists aren’t going to invest the time and energy
⏹️ ▶️ John to put highly produced content out to an audience of nobody. All the people are not
⏹️ ▶️ John sitting in I don’t know where you would sit in iTunes application in in the music application
⏹️ ▶️ John on your phone, waiting for the once a month thing going, no, you’re going to be someplace else, you’re going to be on YouTube,
⏹️ ▶️ John looking at the millions of videos, you’re going to be on Twitter, you’re gonna be on Facebook, you’re going to be where things are actually happening.
⏹️ ▶️ John So no one’s going to produce for an audience that isn’t there. And it’s like, you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have an audience if there’s nothing for them to do except for wait for messages from on high from the famous
⏹️ ▶️ John people. So I think ping was actually a better, smarter effort than connect, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is saying something because ping was also fundamentally flawed. This is why it’s like, why would people how do you bootstrap
⏹️ ▶️ John this social network when you don’t have anything to offer over the million other social networks that are already much
⏹️ ▶️ John better established and where people already have a place to talk about music that they like, or
⏹️ ▶️ John send each other links to things that they think are cool. Like they do that on every other social network and Ping didn’t have any, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, all these services, especially when they’re tied to iTunes, seem like they were created by an Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John that still thinks it’s the king of digital music, you know, because of the iTunes store and selling people songs for 99 cents.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like that time has passed, but that seems to be the place where Apple thinks they can,
⏹️ ▶️ John they have a lever to bootstrap a social network and they just don’t. They just don’t have one. like
⏹️ ▶️ John you can bootstrap a social network with enough money and effort, but iTunes is not an advantage. In fact, at this point, it
⏹️ ▶️ John is probably a very big disadvantage because no one wants to launch that app and hit the apps on
⏹️ ▶️ John on iOS are not particularly well suited to that or neither is any real music player app.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even something like Spotify, which is doing what Apple wishes they could do where people trade Spotify playlists with each other and create
⏹️ ▶️ John them and like even that Apple is so far behind that that’s the thing that has
⏹️ ▶️ John existed for years. So I kind of feel bad for Apple’s efforts in this area,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, especially since they like, they continue to think that, you know, producing high
⏹️ ▶️ John quality content by famous people is a thing that helps you win. Like I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John understand how you do hasn’t convinced them. That’s not the case. YouTube didn’t win by having high quality content by famous people. YouTube won
⏹️ ▶️ John by having people making videos in their basement showing demonstrations of VCRs. Like that’s how YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ John won. And I can’t imagine Apple producing anything that
⏹️ ▶️ John encourages and fosters and builds on that type of content. But that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John apparently the way you build a social network.
Microsoft Edge
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, moving on. Microsoft Edge, which I guess is a web browser, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really care. But apparently it’s coming to Mac OS. Hooray! Yes, I think?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not what this says. You are missing the story here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now I know that the story is that it’s, they’re, my understanding of the story is that they’re canning their custom rendering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey engine and they’re now forking Chromium, is that right? And using that as a rendering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey engine, which means basically the entire world is going to be WebKit going forward. It’s just a matter of what the particular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey genesis is of your particular flavor.
⏹️ ▶️ John Excuse me, Chromium is not WebKit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, no, it is a descendant of WebKit, is it
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so the family tree is getting
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey complicated. Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John There you go. You mentioned before you didn’t know what Edge was. So Edge is the thing that we all
⏹️ ▶️ John know Internet Explorer. Good old, bad old Internet Explorer that was a big
⏹️ ▶️ John problem for the whole world for a long time. And many generations
⏹️ ▶️ John of web developers will continue to loathe into their retirement. They
⏹️ ▶️ John will tell stories of IE6 forever. I guarantee, I will tell stories of IE6 forever. I guarantee it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Edge was supposed to be the successor to Internet Explorer because Internet Explorer was old and creaky and had to support people’s corporate
⏹️ ▶️ John intranets forever. And as much as Microsoft tried to improve it, they had
⏹️ ▶️ John increasingly Byzantine backward compatibility hacks involving HTML comments and different modes
⏹️ ▶️ John and a mini language inside the headers to basically say, We won’t break your intranet, but if web
⏹️ ▶️ John developers know the right incantations, their standards compliance sites will render almost as good as they
⏹️ ▶️ John do in insert standard compliant browser here. Edge was a successor to that to say clean
⏹️ ▶️ John sheet. This is not compatible with your stupid IE six only intranet. It’s a modern browser
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s fast and they spent a while developing that. Um, and then I don’t know. I wish I knew the
⏹️ ▶️ John exact timeline so I could say the number of years they spent on the edge stuff. But this announcement is all right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Nevermind about the edge thing. We’re going to make a new web browser, and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it’s going to
⏹️ ▶️ John be based on Chromium, which is based on Blink, which was based on WebKit, which
⏹️ ▶️ John was based on KHTML and KJS, which are from the KDE Foundation. And if you know what KDE
⏹️ ▶️ John is, you’re probably very old. So that’s quite a
⏹️ ▶️ John lineage of these browsers, and it’ll be coming to Mac OS. So you’ll be able to run a Microsoft web browser
⏹️ ▶️ John on your Mac if that’s really a thing you want to do. But the
⏹️ ▶️ John main thing that’s got people in a tizzy about this is it kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of reduces the biodiversity of the web browser ecosystem
⏹️ ▶️ John by one, which is a lot when there weren’t, you know, how many browsers out there, how
⏹️ ▶️ John many web browsers exist that you can basically view modern websites
⏹️ ▶️ John with? Not many, you can count them on probably one hand, especially if you
⏹️ ▶️ John coalesce the mobile and desktop variants. And so Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John apparently is not a big enough company and does not have enough money and is not strategically important enough
⏹️ ▶️ John for them to sustain the development of a separate web browser engine so they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna build something on Chromium. Are they gonna fork it? Are they gonna say in the same way that Blink was forked from WebKit, are
⏹️ ▶️ John they going to take Chromium and run with it? I doubt it because if they could support the
⏹️ ▶️ John continued development of a web engine, a web browser engine, they would do that. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think they want Google and the open source community to continue to advance Chromium
⏹️ ▶️ John and they just want to reap the benefits of that. So I think they will release a browser built on Chromium and when
⏹️ ▶️ John Chromium gets updated, they will incorporate those updates into their browser and they will just keep doing that and basically
⏹️ ▶️ John be mostly out of the business of developing a
⏹️ ▶️ John full featured modern web rendering engine engine and instead allow
⏹️ ▶️ John that to happen. Allow someone else to do that because it’s just too much of a pain. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John too much work to do that as a product, which is making me think about, um, you know, it used to be, we talk about
⏹️ ▶️ John how many, how many companies have enough money and technical expertise to, to be a platform.
⏹️ ▶️ John In the old days it was like a desktop PC platform, right? You have to make an operating system and you have to have
⏹️ ▶️ John apis, you have to have a developer program and you have to support them and you have to get hardware vendors to make the hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John you want or you have to make your own hardware and you have to deal with drivers and you just like, it takes a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John time, money and expertise to make a platform and then for that platform to
⏹️ ▶️ John be successful enough in the market to sustain that, it’s very difficult. So there’s not a lot of say, personal computer
⏹️ ▶️ John platforms that exist and are popular today. You’ve got the Mac, you’ve got Windows, you’ve got Linux on a desktop, which is coming anytime
⏹️ ▶️ John soon. And various also brands in the mix there.
⏹️ ▶️ John At this point, web browser engines seem like perhaps even more difficult to keep up with
⏹️ ▶️ John in desktop operating systems from a technical perspective, because the web changes much faster and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a sort of a communal thing where if new web standards come out and those web standards are supported
⏹️ ▶️ John by insert whatever the important browser is that has the most market share and you don’t support
⏹️ ▶️ John it on a reasonable timeline, and websites start using it because the browser
⏹️ ▶️ John that has 80% market share supports it, you will be left behind and people will come to say, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John the site doesn’t work and insert my favorite browser, I have to go to the market leader. That’s what happened with Internet
⏹️ ▶️ John Explorer and Chrome. And right now
⏹️ ▶️ John even Microsoft thinks we can’t keep up with that. It’s just too much, it’s too much, too fast. And actually that’s not our strategic
⏹️ ▶️ John strength. It’s not an important advantage for us to have our own browser engine. So we’ll let someone else do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John If everybody does that though, eventually there’s only one browser engine, hopefully not
⏹️ ▶️ John controlled by some single company. And then we’re back to Internet Explorer again, where Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John and Internet Explorer dictated what could and couldn’t be on the web, because so many people ran Windows
⏹️ ▶️ John and Internet Explorer 6 that even if you made a cool standard compliance site, if it looked like crap in IE6, it
⏹️ ▶️ John was basically invisible to a large portion of the population. So this has a lot of people nervous.
⏹️ ▶️ John I kind of understand why Microsoft bailed on it from an investment perspective,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I do understand exactly how complicated it is to build and sustain a modern web rendering engine, but I just
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t really have a particularly good feeling about this happening.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I already feel like, as you said, Chrome is becoming the de facto standard,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that makes me uncomfortable. Like, I can’t think off the top of my head of that many, or really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything that absolutely requires Chrome, but certainly, you know, Google’s own web properties
⏹️ ▶️ Casey work a lot better in Chrome, which makes sense. But there’s a handful of sites, again, I wish I could think of an example, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just don’t work properly in Safari and do work better in Chrome. And a lot of people seem to really like Chrome.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t particularly care for it. It doesn’t really work for me in a few different ways that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really don’t matter. But I am not keen on the idea
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Chrome kind of getting even more cemented as the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey de facto standard. And yeah, it’s all sort of WebKit behind the scenes. But there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more differences here than I’m comfortable with already. And that just makes me uncomfortable.
⏹️ ▶️ John The JavaScript engines are totally separate because Chrome has the V8
⏹️ ▶️ John engine and Apple has what the hell’s they’re called?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is it Nitro? Is that a thing?
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a bunch of codenames for the faster versions. But anyway, they have their own and they’re separate from each other. JavaScript core is, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think, the framework. Anyway, someone posted in the chat room an article I read earlier today, an
⏹️ ▶️ John article, a hacker news comment that shows just how fraught the world of
⏹️ ▶️ John browser Development is so this is you know Microsoft back when they were doing their edge thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re having a problem where YouTube if you tried to go to YouTube and play a video at
⏹️ ▶️ John edge All of a sudden the sort of hardware accelerated efficient
⏹️ ▶️ John GPU driven video path that it was nicest to your battery stopped working in edge
⏹️ ▶️ John and When Microsoft’s browser team investigated they found there was like an invisible div like a div
⏹️ ▶️ John with some transparency or a hidden div or whatever covering the video and their
⏹️ ▶️ John acceleration framework thought that it couldn’t accelerate that because there was an element in front of it like it thought that it couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do use the fast path so it fell back to like the less efficient rendering mode
⏹️ ▶️ John and but I didn’t happen in Chrome Chrome was apparently smart enough to know that oh yeah there’s something in front of it but
⏹️ ▶️ John use the accelerated path anyway but because the thing in front of it is invisible or is you know zero percent or opacity or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the nefarious interpretation of this is that, aha, Google is intentionally making changes to YouTube,
⏹️ ▶️ John which Google owns, to make Microsoft’s browsers worse. Because Google was touting
⏹️ ▶️ John how battery efficient Chrome is. Look at us, when we, which is ironic, considering
⏹️ ▶️ John Chrome is a battery pig compared to Safari, but everything’s relative. So if you have
⏹️ ▶️ John a PC and you’re not running a Mac and you’re trying to watch YouTube video, you do it in Chrome, it
⏹️ ▶️ John hurts your battery much less than if you did it in edge. And so they’re like, look at this Chrome,
⏹️ ▶️ John Google taking advantage of the fact that they own YouTube to crap on someone else’s browser to make Chrome
⏹️ ▶️ John more dominant. And that could be what happens. That’s the thing that happens in technology all the time, doing stuff to
⏹️ ▶️ John make your competitor’s product look bad. But a more benign explanation is that
⏹️ ▶️ John YouTube and many other web properties have to do all sorts of things to either defeat ad blocking or
⏹️ ▶️ John defeat bots or both, like all sorts of obfuscation techniques, because the web is a very
⏹️ ▶️ John adversarial environment, and Google knows this, but people are constantly trying to game Google, people
⏹️ ▶️ John are, you know, lots of things are coming by trying to scrape content or be automated, and sometimes you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John do stuff in the markup that doesn’t make any sense because it breaks some other adversary, and it
⏹️ ▶️ John might have also broken Edge HTML at the same time because its optimization didn’t understand that that thing
⏹️ ▶️ John was invisible. So there are also plausible, and again, I’m not saying this is what happened, but plausible, benign
⏹️ ▶️ John explanations. So the bottom line is, if you are Microsoft making Edge HTML, you don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t really matter whether it was, they’re trying to mess up your browser or they’re trying to fight bots
⏹️ ▶️ John or something. You have to be aware at all times, how is our browser doing with the latest version
⏹️ ▶️ John of insert popular site that we don’t control? Oh, it looks like it used to work great on that site, but now it doesn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John Quickly figure out why it doesn’t work and fix our rendering engine so it does. And that’s what it means to
⏹️ ▶️ John make a web browser. Like if your web browser works worse in YouTube, You can’t ignore that.
⏹️ ▶️ John You have to have people, a very large engineering team, forget about adding features, just all the time making sure
⏹️ ▶️ John that all the popular websites that must work and must work well continue to work and continue to work
⏹️ ▶️ John well. And those websites are changing all the time and they’re not consulting you when they change and they’re making the changes they need to make,
⏹️ ▶️ John whether they’re trying to intentionally mess you up or they’re just doing something totally unrelated that incidentally messes you up
⏹️ ▶️ John because what they’re doing seems inexplicable. But again, many inexplicable things happen on the web for purposes
⏹️ ▶️ John other than screwing other web browser vendors. That’s just a tiny glimpse of what it would take to
⏹️ ▶️ John maintain a web browser engine. And if you don’t think it’s strategically important for you to do that,
⏹️ ▶️ John why would you waste all that money? Thus far, Apple continues to think it’s strategically important for them to have their own web browser engine.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think they’re ever going to change their mind about that because it seems like that battle was won a long time ago, and now
⏹️ ▶️ John that they have their own browser engine, they can be much more battery efficient with it on all of their portable devices,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is super important to Apple biggest phones is their whole biz and other portable products. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John they like the control and yada yada. And you can see Google and Apple and Firefox, the Mozilla
⏹️ ▶️ John Foundation, whatever, duking it out over standards, both inside and outside the formal standards process.
⏹️ ▶️ John So they’re all and Microsoft’s in that mix too. So everyone still has a stake in this, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, Microsoft sort of bowing out and not getting behind the Google side of things,
⏹️ ▶️ John but saying of all the because they could have just picked WebKit, right? They They could have picked WebKit and
⏹️ ▶️ John JavaScript core or whatever, but they didn’t. And just basically saying, we’ll use what you do. You just
⏹️ ▶️ John do what you do and I’m assuming Microsoft will continue to participate in W3C standardization process and
⏹️ ▶️ John put their two cents in. But they’re just going to take Google’s work.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so now it is Google, which already had by far the dominant market share
⏹️ ▶️ John of web browsing across the entire world. And then in a tiny little corner off to the side,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple with its whatever it is, 20% worldwide market share, but a much larger percentage
⏹️ ▶️ John of people who buy things through the web browser. So they still have that power base to work from. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m a little nervous about this. I’ll try Edge when it’s on the Mac, but
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like Firefox, I don’t think that’s a change that’s going to stick unless it does something pretty amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I got to tell you, I do not miss doing web development. No, it was fun for a while, but I do not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, every field of development, you have to deal with somebody’s BS, but it feels like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with web development, you had to deal with a lot of people’s BS, and it never really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ended. In fact, it only seemed to increase over time. We thought, okay, once IE6 is out of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco picture, everything will be easier. And instead, it just got harder in different ways. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, modern web development is, But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in general, the entire field as a whole has not gotten easier. It’s just way more complicated,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s so much more that you, quote, have to do and use and know about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and learn, and it seems like it’s accelerating, like how quickly things change and how much stuff you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to know to be a working web programmer in most of the industry.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s kind of like programming in the early days where you’re just writing some kind of batch job and
⏹️ ▶️ John Fortran or something that, you know, on a high performance computer that just does some operations on a bunch of numbers.
⏹️ ▶️ John And today to be an iOS developer, you need to know so much more than they needed to know, they needed to know how to write to one machine.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they needed to know some basics and the API was small. And you can do it now to be an iOS developer, you have to know all this stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John about using the ID and the million API’s and everything about design and layout is just so much harder.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s because we make better programs, we make more complicated programs on web development. Things are better
⏹️ ▶️ John if what you wanted to make was a website that you could have made in in 1993, you can make that today
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco much better with
⏹️ ▶️ John so much less work. But you don’t want to make a 1993 website. You want to make a modern website. And modern websites, guess what?
⏹️ ▶️ John Have way more features and do way more things. And so you have to learn more APIs. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just scaled up. So I think the standards war to get IE6 out of there and to
⏹️ ▶️ John basically try to get everyone on some semblance of the same page and get basic support for things
⏹️ ▶️ John that everyone knows are good, but that Microsoft was preventing us from using for years, like basic
⏹️ ▶️ John CSS. That’s so boring, no one even talks about it anymore. We’re like 17
⏹️ ▶️ John battles on from that. But the stuff that we fought the battles over and won, you can use that right now, and it
⏹️ ▶️ John is very pleasant to use. But just, you know, the table stakes have
⏹️ ▶️ John been raised. You can’t even participate in the web at the highest level if you don’t know how
⏹️ ▶️ John to use all these other things. And that’s where everyone’s fighting and working, at the bleeding
⏹️ ▶️ John edge, to have the coolest, most advanced website. The nice thing is that if you don’t wanna have a cool,
⏹️ ▶️ John advanced website, but you just wanna have a bunch of static pages with words on them and pictures
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff, it’s so much more pleasant now to do something like that. There is a little bit more you need to
⏹️ ▶️ John know, but you don’t have to worry about responsive back in the day because what did that mean? Who’s gonna be able, you look at a website on your phones, you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have to worry about that. And you just gotta make sure you support the smallest computer screen at 640 pixels wide or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever the hell, which ironically is narrower than most phones these days. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if you just want to do a simple website, the web is incredibly pleasant today. But yeah, if you want to
⏹️ ▶️ John make YouTube or Gmail or whatever, It’s incredibly complicated.
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NPR’s RAD proposal
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Over the last week or two, there has been a pitch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from NPR for something that’s rad. It’s called remote
⏹️ ▶️ Casey audio data. And this is the pitch directly from rad.npr.org.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Remote audio data measures podcast listening across a range of participating clients and platforms, aggregating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the data in publishers’ analytics endpoint. No thanks. I mean, what is this about?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, tell me about this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this is, I mean, I guess I should be careful here because I’m in this field and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s involving other people who were in this field and everything else. So I don’t want to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rude or anything, but this is a spec that NPR developed to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more analytics in podcasts. And I honestly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t think we’re going to hear about it at all past about this week or so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the simple reason, and again, I’m not saying this to be mean, for the simple reason that there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is absolutely no reason for podcast app developers to implement this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all. The only support I think I expected to get client side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is from NPR One, which is their own app, and maybe down the road Pocket Cast,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which they, through a consortium of something complicated, they do own it, but Pocket Cast has said
⏹️ ▶️ Marco publicly they’re not planning on adding support to it. So I don’t see any reason why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app makers, including Apple, which is the big one that matters the most, would implement
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this. So here’s what RAD is. So the fundamental problem that they’re trying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to solve, right now in podcasting, the only way you can really measure your audience is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either by number of hits to the RSS feed, which is incredibly unreliable and not very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco relevant for podcasts. But the bigger one that people usually use is number of downloads that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an average episode gets or some of the bigger shows will say number of monthly downloads that the show tends
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get total, including all of its archive downloads. And so that’s kind of how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you sell your ads based on, you know, like, well, we, our show tends to get X downloads per
⏹️ ▶️ Marco episode. And so if you buy an ad for this episode, you are likely to get about X downloads. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a number of problems with this and limitations of this. First of all, measuring a download
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is itself a little tricky. And there’s all sorts of efforts that have been made over the years to try to standardize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what that means or, you know, what counts, what doesn’t count. been lots of complexity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the real world that have made it harder. So for instance, a download is not just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a quote hit or request to the file because even since like forever ago, like since like desktop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iTunes, sometimes clients would make multiple requests for the same file taking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different ranges of the file for each request to basically run like four download segments in parallel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to speed up the download. So you kind of have to, like if you see multiple download
⏹️ ▶️ Marco attempts from the same IP address, if they’re for different ranges of the file,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you might have to conclude, well, that’s one download, really. But there’s lots of situations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where multiple people are sharing one IP address. So you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just say that one IP has, at most, one download that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco attributed to it. Also, in the modern world, people download from their mobile phones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so they can roam between cell networks and have different IPs at different times of the day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you might have 10 people behind one IP, or you might have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one person who’s roaming between four different IPs throughout the same day, trying to stream the same podcast bit by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit. So it’s actually not incredibly accurate to measure downloads.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then the other problem with downloads is that you don’t know if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they actually listen to the podcast. all you know is that these people who you can sort
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of measure, download the podcast for the most part we think. And then you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can assume based on that, well, it seems like most of them listen to it, I guess, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and, and for a while like that was pretty much the only information we had is like, we can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see people are downloading it and our advertisers who advertise with us, you know, they’ll put in like coupon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco codes or special links that we read out and people are using those codes, so it seems like people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are hearing the ads. So it seems like we have an audience. Or, you know, people write in, they say they listen to the show. You know, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can have people try to take a survey, but that never works. So everything is based in podcast metrics.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everything is based on estimations. Now a big thing happened a few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco months back after years of big podcast producers kind of campaigning Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They convinced Apple Podcasts to open up something called Podcast Analytics. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple has the iTunes directory and Apple also has the biggest podcast player in the Apple Podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app, which has something like 60 to 70% market share depending on who you ask. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the big dog. It is the only big player that matters in podcasting. Everything else is way smaller by comparison.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, like Spotify matters a lot. They’re estimated to have like five to 7%, something like that. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple has like 60 to 70. It’s a big deal. Apple finally agreed with podcasters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few months back and they introduced podcast analytics, which in typical Apple fashion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not like, you know, personal creepy level type stuff. It’s very like privacy respectful,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, aggregate stats and only for people who opt in with Apple’s global like opt-in thing during
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iOS setup thing. It’s very anonymous what you get from them, but you are able to see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basic trends like how many people who download the app, first of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how many people download it, how many of those people actually listen to it, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how far into each episode they listen, and you can see what parts they skip over. My position
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically is that’s plenty. That’s more data, that’s way more data than we had before.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And what it showed us, honestly, was that all of our assumptions have basically been true. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most people who download it listen to it, most people who listen to it listen most of the way through,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and most people don’t skip ads. That’s kind of what we’ve figured out over the years based on how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ads performed and everything, And so that seemed to be the case. And now we have really good data from the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco biggest podcast app by far in the world that supports that theory that, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know what, podcasts are fine. The downloads are mostly being measured accurately,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re mostly counting, people are hearing the ads, et cetera. But there’s a lot of big publishers now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of podcasts, and they really want to have their own, first of all, they want more, they want much more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco data. And then they also want more control over that data, and they have all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these backend systems, that there’s all these ad platforms. There are things like dynamic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ad insertion, which we’ve talked about before, where they inject ads at certain timestamps of the file
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at download time for each user. That can be locally tailored or whatever. That’s why if you listen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to big popular podcasts, you might hear a local car ad or something like that. That’s why that’s happening. When you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco injecting ads at download time, and those ads might be different lengths, a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bunch of stuff breaks. Things like sync in a podcast app between multiple devices. Things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sharing timestamps that all of a sudden can’t be guaranteed to be pointed to the same part of the file because the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ad that came before them might be different durations based on when you downloaded it. Things like range
⏹️ ▶️ Marco requests and resuming downloads break because subsequent requests to the same URL can get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different durations. And so you might make a request for the first chunk of a file,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then get interrupted. You go into a subway tunnel or something. You come out of the tunnel, it makes a second request second half of the file
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s and you have like a little gap in the middle of the file or you have a part that gets repeated because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being served different duration file and these all these platforms are out there that try to do this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco none of them do a great technical job of actually inserting the ads they usually ignore
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basic HTTP caching and eTag types of directives and they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco typically violate the mp3 standard in a number of ways so lots of weird stuff happens with podcast app seeking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything else it’s a mess but But anyway, the bigger problem with dynamic ad insertion in the context of this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco conversation is that it breaks the relevance of Apple Analytics. If the podcasters want to know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how many people listen to a particular ad, Apple’s aggregate stats of all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people who downloaded that episode aren’t going to really give them that information because that particular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ad wasn’t necessarily served at the same timestamp every time and wasn’t served for all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco downloads of that same file because they might run like an ad for two days and then the rest of the week they put a different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ad that spot or whatever. So what the big podcasters want is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a system that they control completely that they can have individual tracking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of everything integrated with their ad servers so that they can tell exactly how many people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco listen to a podcast through certain timestamps through certain ranges of time and you know what they want to know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether they made it to the end where they made it most of the way to the end and of course they really want to know how many people heard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how many ads and exactly which ads and when. Now this This introduces a number of privacy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco concerns. So in the old system, the system that we are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all still operating in, the only information they have on you is your IP address. When you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fetch the file, they see your IP because that’s how internet transfers work. You make a request
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to their server, they see your IP. Simple as that. And the reality is there are services
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out there and ad networks out there where they they on the back end can submit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your IP to a web service and learn everything about you. No, this is true. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like already, like the publishers that want to be gross about your privacy are being gross
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about your privacy. They’re already able to with your IP address. They’re able to, with reasonable certainty,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco correlate your IP address with other data sources and services out there to figure out exactly who you are if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they want to. And use that for advertising purposes. They absolutely do that. They will try their hardest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do that. That’s the reality of big publishing businesses.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So to some degree, the cat’s out of the bag, right? And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but just because they can do that doesn’t mean that I want to make it easy on them to do anything else. I have been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very adamant in Overcast, and just as a podcast listener, against any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other attempts to track any more data. I think on a number of levels it would be bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s the personal privacy level, where it’s just kind of gross, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think listeners don’t need that and don’t want that. There is the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of infrastructure level of like I don’t want other entities being, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, telling me what to do in my app and what I need to support in my app. You know, because podcasting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now is wonderful. It’s open, it’s an RSS feed with MP3s in it. Like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty basic. You download those MP3s and you can do whatever you want with them. You can play them, you can not play them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can do whatever you want with them as the player and as a listener. And there’s no, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the contract basically ends between like the podcast maker and you at the point of download. Like once you download
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, that’s, you know, you have full control and they can’t have no visibility
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I like to keep it that way. But anyway, so that’s not what the big publishers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want. And I should clarify too, while it is true that many of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco publishers of the largest podcasts in the world want things like this? Most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the podcasts that you, dear listener, probably listen to, like if you listen to this show,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you probably listen to other tech shows, you probably listen to other indie shows, you know, smaller shows that are produced by people and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not big corporations. Chances are, the people who make the shows you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco listen to don’t want any of this. Like, we don’t want any of this. Our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco friends over at Relay and 5x5 and all these other networks, they don’t want any of this either. Like indie podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makers don’t want any more tracking and dynamic ad insertion and other BS. We don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want that. We don’t need it. Our ads sell fine, our podcast does fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are very satisfied with the status quo. We don’t need any of this garbage. So this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only a request from like the biggest, biggest, biggest podcast makers because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s what they do. When it gets to a certain size, you can start thinking that way and you start getting data people on board and growth people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this kind of stuff happens. So anyway, what the RAD standard is at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a technical level is simply an ID3 tag that includes a JSON
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bundle, you know, JSON dictionary inside of it. And it’s basically a series of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco timestamps and URLs to hit with arbitrary dictionary, you know, key value pairs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to hit those URLs with when a user hits those timestamps in the file. So what you’re supposed to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you implement RAD on the client side is when you hit certain timestamps given in the file, make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an outbound network request to the URL that is provided by the podcaster. Once
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have that, you have user-level tracking. You have individual tracking. It’s as simple as that. The spec has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certain privacy promises that aren’t actually fulfillable in practice. The spec
⏹️ ▶️ Marco requires apps to make outbound requests to arbitrary URLs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are specified in an ID3 tag in the file that was downloaded. So even if the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco player doesn’t provide like a user identifier, the download server already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has your IP and it can serve you a dynamically generated file.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it can serve you a file that has dynamically inserted a unique set of URLs just for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you to be called back to. So it can track you through multiple IPs as you’ve run throughout the day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It can see exactly how far you, you know, user that started out at this IP address they might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be able to resolve to you, you know, Casey lists, they like that’s all trackable them once
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have once you know, which copy of that file you serve to which user
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which you can do by ingesting dynamic URLs, then you can track a user from start to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco finish, you can see exactly what they do. And you can build a network of knowledge of what IPs they tend to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use, and what times they tend to use them. And then you can track users between shows over time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, the privacy angle of this is pretty rough.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s pretty much no privacy guarantee here. And the fact is, even if a publisher
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now says, oh, well we won’t do that, the fact is, it’s ad tech,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people will do it eventually. If you won’t do it, someone else will. It’ll happen. So, the only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco protection against ad tech is to block it completely. And so on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco privacy front and on the feature front, I see no reason at all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why podcast apps would implement this. And the good news about the world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of podcasts is that what are they gonna do about it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, like right now, like if I implement it, so suppose I say, no, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never implementing this, which I did because I won’t. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco suppose a podcast app says that. A podcast publisher, like a big publisher, cannot then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco block Overcast from downloading those files. Because a podcast is beautifully an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco RSS feed full of MP3 files, or links to MP3 files.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if they somehow try to lock that down any further than that, Apple Podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t play it. And they lose their entire market. So as long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as Apple doesn’t do stuff like this, then we’re pretty safe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I cannot possibly see Apple implementing this for all the privacy reasons. There’s no way. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s nothing in it for them. So there’s basically no incentive that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anybody could provide that would make this worth implementing on a player side. Unless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they back up a truckload of money into my driveway I don’t think there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any path to this on the client side. There’s no reason for clients to do it, and there’s lots of reasons for clients not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do it. You know, number one, being creepy. Number two, GDPR liabilities.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, there’s huge liabilities. Like, if I am taking your behavioral
⏹️ ▶️ Marco data and sending it, basically phoning home and telling any arbitrary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco URL what you are doing as you’re listening, that’s a pretty huge security violation or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco privacy violation I should say. And while it technically might not be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco personally identifiable information, you know, by the GDPR definition, it’s still real creepy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s still a liability and it’s still something that like, if your users found out that you were doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, I bet they’d be upset about that. I bet that’s the kind of thing you would want your users not to know about.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And typically, it’s a good idea to minimize those kinds of things in your business. If you have a lot of those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things, you’re doing things wrong. So I see the problem they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to solve with RAD. I don’t think it’s as big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a problem as they seem to think it is. This is not a problem that most podcasters that I listen to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or know have. And the solution they’ve come up with,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I fail to see why any app would ever integrate that. And there’s a lot of reasons why we shouldn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I have a couple of thoughts about this. I guess starting with what you just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said, I don’t understand what,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why would you do this?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is in it for anyone other than NPR? You know, like why does anyone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a podcast app, as a podcast client developer, why would you spend the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time to do this? What’s in it for you? I just don’t understand. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s… Paul Matzko, MD, PhD The NPR website has answers to all your questions.
⏹️ ▶️ John so what’s the answer? Yeah, so to their credit, they did put up a page, basically like a fact to explain
⏹️ ▶️ John this. But you know, this is their best chance. They write this website. It’s their best chance
⏹️ ▶️ John to present their best case. And so they address everybody. So you know, what does
⏹️ ▶️ John RAD mean to me? If you are an app developer, why should you implement this spec?
⏹️ ▶️ John Which is, that’s one constituency. They spend one short paragraph,
⏹️ ▶️ John and basically say, RAD will allow publishers to receive you’ve organized enhanced listening metrics and editorial blah, blah, blah, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m an app implementer, you’ve told me that Rad will allow publishers to receive
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of new information. Okay, I’m still waiting for the part where I’m an app developer and it’s appealing to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John It reduces the need for each platform to have a detailed analytics dashboard.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco platform? Do I have
⏹️ ▶️ John a detailed? Not our problem. Do I have a detailed analytics dashboard? I just have an app that plays
⏹️ ▶️ John podcasts. I don’t have a detailed, I don’t want a detailed analytic patch. It allows for
⏹️ ▶️ John information to be aggregated in a third-party location. Do I care about aggregating this information?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And why is that an advantage? That’s not necessarily an advantage.
⏹️ ▶️ John RAD does not track specific user behavior. Instead, RAD uses a session ID, blah, blah, blah. The SDA created
⏹️ ▶️ John to be lightweight, blah, blah, blah. So they say it’ll be easy to integrate into your application. So they have an entire paragraph, which as far as I can
⏹️ ▶️ John tell, doesn’t contain any piece of information that would say why I should implement this spec, Unless I
⏹️ ▶️ John really, really want to have a detailed analytics dashboard, but I don’t want to implement
⏹️ ▶️ John it myself. I want to have a third party one, like it’s an industry standard or whatever. So speculatively,
⏹️ ▶️ John in some future where everyone implemented RAD, there could be this dashboard that lets you look at your RAD
⏹️ ▶️ John reported information or provide the server side for whatever. And it allows publishers
⏹️ ▶️ John to receive organized enhanced listening metrics. And I suppose if you are a publisher and you want organized
⏹️ ▶️ John enhanced listening metrics and you have your own app, maybe you would do that. Then it says, what if you’re a podcast creator?
⏹️ ▶️ John What if you, you know, you make podcasts? Why should you use RAD? So, and this is an even
⏹️ ▶️ John shorter paragraph, and I think probably an even less power, because that was their best case
⏹️ ▶️ John right there. If you’re like an app developer, like they go to the publishing thing or whatever. Anyway, why should you use RAD if you’re a podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John creator? The metrics will help you better understand your audience across a range of
⏹️ ▶️ John platforms. You’ll be able to produce more informed, engaging content, and over time develop improved
⏹️ ▶️ John data for your sponsors and advertisers. So basically it’s saying, if you knew more about exactly what your listeners were doing,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’d be able to make better content. Because if you know, okay, this is the point where they
⏹️ ▶️ John hit pause and a whole bunch of people hit pause here, or a whole bunch of people stop listening at this point. I’ll know whatever we did there,
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s do something different. Like you can just get inside the heads of your audience and use that as a direct feedback loop to produce
⏹️ ▶️ John better content. And also develop improved data for your sponsors and advertisers.
⏹️ ▶️ John again saying sponsors and advertisers want this and if you give it to them, it will be better data for them.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s their whole pitch, that if you know more about your audience, you can make a better podcast. Which on its face
⏹️ ▶️ John seems like, okay, well maybe that makes some kind of sense, but on the other hand, you think about it like, well, but does it? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John is the information I’m gonna get about people, you know, in terms of what timestamps and everything, really going
⏹️ ▶️ John to help me? Like, is that the best way to create good, you know, content, good
⏹️ ▶️ John entertainment, right? To be able, it’s kind of like those things they they parody on the Simpsons
⏹️ ▶️ John was an episode that you guys might have seen. But like, and based on a real thing where they would show
⏹️ ▶️ John like test audiences something, a movie or a television show, and the members
⏹️ ▶️ John of the test audience would have some kind of device or feedback, real time feedback, like a dial that they can turn
⏹️ ▶️ John to say, you like this, you don’t like it or whatever. Some some sort of way to give real time feedback
⏹️ ▶️ John about how they’re feeling, about what it is that they’re watching. And it would all be like the it would be aggregated into a graph.
⏹️ ▶️ John So like a boring part of the Oscars would come on all the lines would dip down And then like a cool part would come on
⏹️ ▶️ John all the lines would go back up you ever see that type of thing Mm-hmm Right and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like as if they expect Either in real time for you to be reacting to this
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh all the dials went down everybody be funnier or like next time we do the Oscars We won’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do a segment like that because nobody liked it like it’s it seems to make sense But if that’s Merlin talks about
⏹️ ▶️ John this a lot on his various podcasts That’s not really the best way to improve the quality
⏹️ ▶️ John of your content is to micromanage the psyche of every person consuming it because there’s too many assumptions.
⏹️ ▶️ John The main one being that the people who are currently listening and giving you feedback are the audience that you want or that represent
⏹️ ▶️ John the only audience that could ever exist for whatever it is you’re doing. Never mind that this is not like that little
⏹️ ▶️ John dial of happy and sad. It’s merely like when did they hit each timestamp or whatever. It’s really geared towards
⏹️ ▶️ John did they hear the ad or not, which has some relevance to you is a podcast creator but probably won’t help you
⏹️ ▶️ John make your actual podcast better unless your podcast is 100% ads in which case maybe it will help you.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then finally if you are a brand slash sponsor slash advertiser what does rad provide
⏹️ ▶️ John access to and you know all
⏹️ ▶️ John information they want about download stop starts ad listens so on and so forth. So this
⏹️ ▶️ John page where they explain why you would want to, why
⏹️ ▶️ John rad, where does rad fit into your life? If you’re making a podcast play rap why would you do it?
⏹️ ▶️ John If you make your own podcast, why would you want it? And if you’re a listener of podcasts, why would you want it? And
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not a really particularly compelling case. And so, yeah, I don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s one of those things where the way stuff like this actually comes to pass
⏹️ ▶️ John is not because the case is made successfully to all constituencies. It’s because one particular constituency has all
⏹️ ▶️ John the power and they also reap all the benefits and they just do it. So
⏹️ ▶️ John if Apple were an advertising company like Google and they were the dominant podcast platform,
⏹️ ▶️ John they would do this immediately and it would become the de facto standard because the person who could benefit most from it
⏹️ ▶️ John has the most power and they just do it and it wouldn’t really matter whether app developers want to do it or whether podcast creators want to do it or whether
⏹️ ▶️ John listeners want to have it happen. It would just happen again getting back to web browsers. If you know
⏹️ ▶️ John every web browser influence that W3C DRM scheme doesn’t really matter
⏹️ ▶️ John whether as a web browser user care about that, you’re getting it whether you
⏹️ ▶️ John like it or not, which is why it’s bad to concentrate power
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think we’ve talked about it before how we’ve basically been saved by Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John at one point benevolent neglect and now just general benevolence of
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco podcasts. The
⏹️ ▶️ John fact that they’re not an advertising driven company, they don’t care that much about podcasts,
⏹️ ▶️ John so they’re going to be careful about privacy and they’re not going to screw it up. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John an uneasy piece we have right now with podcasts and we just better hope that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t turn into an advertising company or doesn’t lose its dominant position in podcasts because
⏹️ ▶️ John that’ll be bad for everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So the other thing I wanted to say about this is I’m going to put a little bit of words in Marco’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mouth and you know what, he’s the editor so he can always cut this later. But I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel like this is an example of why Marco is so fiercely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey independent and why, Marco, you went for market share a year
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or two ago or whatever it’s been. Marc Thiessen For? Steven Connelly Is that, for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John good grief, God. We’re getting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey old. Marc Thiessen That’s all right. Steven Connelly Anyway, the point I’m driving at is that if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have a lot of market share, if you have some amount of influence or perhaps leverage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the community or over the market if you will, then you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say no to RAD or things like it, and that may
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be enough. Now, I don’t know if you’re at that point and honestly, it doesn’t really matter one way or the other, but for those of you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who heard Marco say four years ago, oh, I’m going for market share because podcasting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is important to me and I want to try to steer it in the way that I think is best.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, now the fruits of your labor are coming to fruition because now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by you not implementing this, I don’t know if it would be enough to kill Rad. I think you’re right that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple is the one who will really put the nail on the coffin. But by you and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey PocketCast and I don’t know if Castro has made a statement about this one way or the other but … I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possibly see them doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this. Yeah, exactly. And we know the Castro guys and they’re great, great people and I agree.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t expect them to do it. So by you guys as a collective and you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as an individual, angling for market share and refusing to do this sort of invasive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff, that, if not you individually, but that in aggregate could be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough to really make this go away. And as both a podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey consumer and a podcast creator, that’s really darn important to me. And I’m thankful for you and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Castro and Pocket Cast, at least so far, for you know, standing your ground and not caving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to this. And so if you scratched your head and thought Marco was being, you know, ridiculous and getting on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey his high horse for no good reason, well, maybe it was for good reason. It just took four years for us to get there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, ultimately what I want and, you know, what I’ve wanted this whole time is I want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the podcast client side ecosystem, the player ecosystem to be so diverse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that nobody accumulates enough power to dictate things like this to the market.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Apple already has that much power, but due to the aforementioned benevolent neglect they’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly doing with podcasts, they’re basically this giant unmovable force, but that mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is good to us. That mostly doesn’t make waves, and doesn’t ruin things, and doesn’t lock things down.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s really nice. That has allowed podcasting to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flourish and to be what it is today. If Apple tried to lock this down for themselves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 10 years ago, five years ago, they could have. and apps like mine wouldn’t be able to really have a market.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But they didn’t, and that’s really nice. But beyond Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other 30 to 40% of the market, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does have the potential for significant consolidation of power if it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco remain diverse. Like right now, it’s nicely diverse. Spotify’s a bit of a concern to me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you can’t get 40% of the market right now, because it’s so many different players,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to all agree on a new standard to implement. You’re never going to get all of us to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that. And that’s actually really good, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco besides Apple, which is not moving, there is no other consolidated source of power in this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco business that has enough power to really matter that much. And as a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco result, the medium can’t move forward quote forward in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way that people want it to. But I consider that a good thing, because right now where the medium already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, is great. It’s thriving, it’s flourishing, it’s booming. People are making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tons of money. It’s very, very healthy. And it’s wonderful for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco listeners too. It’s not, you know, you don’t have people making tons of money at the top and then listeners
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having their privacy all crazily, horribly invaded on the other end. It’s just really good, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice. It’s a great market. And the last thing I want is for that to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ruined. And when people say, like the people who argue for things like this, like I was talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it on Twitter the other day and I got a bunch of responses of people. Most really were in support of my position,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but a few were opposed to me saying like they need this. And be careful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you hear somebody describe anything as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the future or as moving forward. Because that implies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a certain level of inevitability that like podcasting is by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco staying where it is by not implementing things like this they’re they’re trying to position
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the future they want as the future period and the future
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they want as the way forward. But that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a foregone conclusion. The future of podcasting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hasn’t been written yet because it’s the future. You know, we can make it whatever we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want and you know based on certain power structures and dynamics in the market now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are certain outcomes that are more likely than others and I think an outcome where everyone’s doing tons more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tracking on the client side is pretty unlikely because of the way this power structure is set up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I would absolutely argue that it is not a foregone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco conclusion that the way forward is more ad tracking because that presumes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we have a problem today that like ads are terrible today and people can’t build real businesses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever and that’s totally bogus. The only people trying to make that argument are the biggest companies of podcasting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who by the way tend to make like millions of dollars a year in ad revenue. We don’t need things like this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The only people pushing for this are people who want even more, even more, even more. And you know, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what big companies do. I understand the urge to do that. But the rest of the podcasting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ecosystem out here doesn’t want or need any of this. And I would strongly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco argue that the future of podcasting is not going to be what these handful of big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco publishers want it to be.
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had that that was anywhere else to Linode. And now I’m 100% hosted by Linode. I love it. Their
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#askatp: TV shopping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Linode.com slash ATP and with promo code ATP 2018 you can get a $20 credit. Thank you so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much to Linode for sponsoring our show. I’m going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey try this. I apologize in advance. So Kapila Wimalaratne.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that right. We’ve done
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey You’ve read this name before.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John yeah, totally. I totally knew that was
⏹️ ▶️ John correct. did better the second time or the first time rather.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, women are ready. I’m sorry. So capilla writes, researching a TV purchase for next
⏹️ ▶️ Casey year, something I’m finding weird. I’m not concerned about picture quality, since anything 4k over 40 inches will be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey far superior to our current TV. The criteria have narrowed down so far built in Chromecast. So I don’t need to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey switch HDMI inputs to cast from Google Home or Pixel three hard buttons on the remote to jump straight to a given
⏹️ ▶️ Casey HDMI input when using PS4, etc. A built in webcam question So my son could video chat with his
⏹️ ▶️ Casey friends while online gaming and that’s it. Is there something important missing from my list? What is your criteria list for buying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a new TV? As I’ve stated in the past I haven’t bought a TV in forever in a day. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am useless when it comes to this I have a feeling that John will have the most thoughts about this. So Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let’s start with you any immediate thoughts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I Don’t know how to shop for a TV for someone who says they’re not concerned about picture quality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s not my style. And so I really can’t help on that. I I also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would highly question the feature request of a built-in webcam because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco TV manufacturers are not known for their incredible privacy respect or their ability
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to deliver really secure software. I honestly don’t think you should be plugging your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco TV into a network at all or ever giving it your Wi-Fi password but that’s just me maybe I’m being overly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cautious there. But however the the feature request for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard buttons on the remote to jump straight to a certain HDMI input, I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love that. I hate going to the input menu and going down and hitting enter or having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to hit the input switch button and going through one by one. I would love to just have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look, there’s only four HDMI inputs, just have HDMI one, two, three, and four buttons on the remote. That would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazing. My TV doesn’t have that, so I can’t recommend it, I guess, but that is a feature
⏹️ ▶️ Marco request that I wouldn’t have thought to make, but wow, does that sound great. I wish I had made that feature request.
⏹️ ▶️ John Built-in Chromecast.
⏹️ ▶️ John features, I’m in Margo’s camp where picture quality is the thing that I care about the most, but you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, there’s something important missing from my list. Like, yeah, webcam
⏹️ ▶️ John thing covered. Luckily, I don’t think you’ll even be able to find many TVs with webcams. Mine has one, by the way, because that used
⏹️ ▶️ John to be a thing that people did, but it’s not very popular anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John The thing about the built-in Chromecast, The Chromecast is not expensive or
⏹️ ▶️ John big. Like you can add it to any television. Like I wouldn’t reject a television because it doesn’t have built-in Chromecast.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can add Chromecast very, very easily and cheaply. It’s not a thing that you have to get a TV
⏹️ ▶️ John where it’s built in. In fact, it may be better for it not to be built in because if Chromecast gets better or there’s a new
⏹️ ▶️ John Chromecast that comes out, you could upgrade it, whereas if it’s built in, you can’t. The hard buttons on the remote thing for jumping
⏹️ ▶️ John to inputs, setting aside the most television remotes are terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you just get a receiver, like you have that, receivers have buttons for not only switching inputs but switching
⏹️ ▶️ John to like whatever they might call them scenes or presets or whatever which is a combination of input and a bunch of other settings
⏹️ ▶️ John so my receiver remote has I think at least four probably more buttons that let me switch
⏹️ ▶️ John to different scenes and also direct buttons to go to each of the inputs which it’s more than four inputs you can
⏹️ ▶️ John go to the television is only you know if you have this setup is only ever
⏹️ ▶️ John on one input it’s only ever on the input that’s coming out of the your receiver. So there are better solutions
⏹️ ▶️ John to that. Um, and even if you don’t have direct input switching, if you have the,
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing that works 50% of the time, what the hell is it called? HEC or CEC? CEC.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. If you’re a, if you’re a CEC unicorn and you get a television setup, where that works all the
⏹️ ▶️ John time, you don’t have to switch inputs either because it’ll auto switch based on which one is giving the output. So this feature list looks really
⏹️ ▶️ John weird to me. And I think this feature list, say this is kind of like, I’m trying to suss out like, what
⏹️ ▶️ John are you looking for in a TV based on the things you listed? There’s a bunch of things you probably haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ John thought about that may be important, like how long does it take from the time you hit the power button on the television to the time you can
⏹️ ▶️ John start watching television, like sort of the
⏹️ ▶️ John How sluggish are the menus? Where on the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John is the volume up and down thing if you use the volume on television, which you shouldn’t because you
⏹️ ▶️ John should have a receiver and it should be invisible on the TV. and how ugly is it? Samsung has incredibly ugly
⏹️ ▶️ John overlays for their volume thing, showing like an ugly speaker cone with a glow around it and crap like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Things like that you’ll never think about in your sort of criteria, but once you get a TV, you’ll be like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John every time I change the volume on the TV, I see, you know, an animated frog jumps across my screen
⏹️ ▶️ John and says, ribbit, right? And then the overlay stays on the screen for seven seconds after I stop hitting the volume
⏹️ ▶️ John button. Stuff like that will probably have a bigger effect on
⏹️ ▶️ John your enjoyment of your television than whether it has a built-in Chromecast. But all
⏹️ ▶️ John of this said, everyone’s got their own criteria. My criteria are almost
⏹️ ▶️ John entirely about picture quality, and then I live with all the other things that are inevitably going to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco annoy me about the television,
⏹️ ▶️ John because most of the time I’m using my television, I’m not touching the remote, and there’s nothing on the screen except
⏹️ ▶️ John for the picture I’m displaying. So that’s why I feel like picture quality is my biggest criteria. But as for what you’re missing,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess you’ll find out after you buy your Chromecast TV with a webcam.
#askatp: Blu-ray transcoding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Ivan writes, I have a few Blu-rays that I’ve converted with Make MKV,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but my Mac Mini Plex server has a hard time live encoding 30 gigabyte MKV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey movies. So which settings do you use to compress those large MKVs?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Handbrake has so many options and the internet has too many opinions. This is why you trust
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somebody else to do it. So we’ve made mention of this many times in the past, but Don Melton,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who among other things was instrumental in getting Safari onto
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac computers. He, in his retirement, has decided to do the community
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a tremendous service and create a series of scripts that you can use to transcode videos.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I have a less discerning eye, certainly than John and probably than Marco in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this context. And so for me, I am more than happy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the output of Don Melton’s scripts. And you do have have to be able to use command line, but it is very straightforward.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, it’s easy for me to say that because I’m used to the command line, but I find it to be very straightforward and easy to use.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And basically it will take those 30 gig MKVs down to like anywhere between 5
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and 10 gigs depending on the particular film. And you can use it without… he has a bunch of options that you can give
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to his scripts in order to tweak this, that, or the other thing. But really I just use them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the default settings. The only real option I give the script just to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tell it to output an MP4 rather than a compressed MKV. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more than enough for me. And that’s what I recommend. So, John, thoughts about that?
⏹️ ▶️ John So the business about real time live encoding a 30 gigabyte MKV
⏹️ ▶️ John movie, depending on the compression codec used on Blu-rays, I think they have two options, like there’s the VP
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever thing. And I think the other option is probably some MPEG thing. If you have a player
⏹️ ▶️ John that can natively play whatever codec is used on the Blu-ray that you’re showing, there
⏹️ ▶️ John is no sort of recompression step or transcoding step that has to take place. It can
⏹️ ▶️ John just take that 30 gigabyte, you know, data that it pulled right off the Blu-ray disc and didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John transcode or change in any way and just send it to the decoder that will decode that image and put it on
⏹️ ▶️ John your screen. That’s the benefit of using it and make MKV to just pull the data off a Blu-ray without
⏹️ ▶️ John changing it in any way. Just take the bits that are on the disc and put those bits in a file, in a container, blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s conceivable, that’s a thing that you can do. In fact, I think Infuse
⏹️ ▶️ John on Apple TV will natively play without any transcoding or recompressing
⏹️ ▶️ John at least one of the formats that it’s commonly used on Blu-rays. But that’s something you might wanna look
⏹️ ▶️ John into. If you’re worried about quality and you don’t care about disk space, which apparently you don’t because
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re pulling 30 gigs off of Blu-rays, look into that, because then you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have to worry about recompressing and what format should I compress and whatever. I, as Casey surmised,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t particularly like the idea of taking compressed video and then compressing it again.
⏹️ ▶️ John No matter how many options and settings there are, it’s a lossy process. You are
⏹️ ▶️ John losing quality. It’s why I buy Blu-ray discs and why I play Blu-ray discs because it’s already
⏹️ ▶️ John lossy compressed. I’ll just take it the best I can get it straight
⏹️ ▶️ John off the disc, decode the image, decode the sound, put it to the outputs.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the last time I looked into doing that with my setup, I couldn’t get the 24 frame per second cadence but now presumably with the new
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple DVI I could, but I haven’t actually revisited it because disk space is still an issue.
⏹️ ▶️ John Blu-rays are very big and I’m still just putting plastic disks into a drive and dealing with it like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, if you are going to recompress either mountain scripts or honestly, Handbrake
⏹️ ▶️ John has a bunch of options, but it also has presets. A whole bunch of presets come with Handbrake.
⏹️ ▶️ John Try a couple of the presets. To Casey’s point, if you find a preset that makes files that are
⏹️ ▶️ John about the size that you want and they look okay to you, you’re done. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it may not be the best thing in the world, but if you can’t tell the difference and you’re happy with them and they can press down to a size that
⏹️ ▶️ John you like, just keep using that preset. You’ll probably be fine. The only places where you might
⏹️ ▶️ John get a little bit messed up are if it’s messing with the frame rate, which can be a little bit tricky to mess with.
⏹️ ▶️ John you probably shouldn’t change the frame rate of the video at all because then it’ll interpolate and you’re basically just embedding
⏹️ ▶️ John motion smoothing into your videos, which will make somebody sad, but hey, maybe you can’t tell. And also if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a particularly strange movie, like if it’s animation versus live action, sometimes artifacts that aren’t visible in live
⏹️ ▶️ John action become visible in animation due to the large regions of uninterrupted color and other things that are
⏹️ ▶️ John unique in animation. And if you just don’t wanna deal with any of this
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’re compressing video anyway, You can just buy it from iTunes or some other video service and then, you know, hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ John play that natively on the player of choice. And instead of buying giant videos on Blu-ray
⏹️ ▶️ John and then figuring out a way to get them off the disc and compress them.
#askatp: Learning command line
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Brian Edwards writes, what would you recommend for somebody who wants to learn their way around a command line interface?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t have any particularly good suggestions for this. As always, in the same way that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I say this about learning to write code, really you need a specific tasks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in mind, at least that’s what works best for me, is having a specific task in mind and looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a solution for that task. But one of you added a link to a book in the show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey notes. So who was that? I’ll give
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one guess. Yeah, I had a feeling, but you never know. You never know.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is actually a difficult question, because as I think I’ve recounted before, this is another situation
⏹️ ▶️ John where people ask, what’s a good way for me to get started learning
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever subject? And they ask someone who has experience in whatever the field of the subject is.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the way that that person learned so many years
⏹️ ▶️ John ago is almost never the best way to to learn right now. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John almost certainly true about this. The best way to learn your way around the command line is probably some
⏹️ ▶️ John online course or tutorial or something that I don’t know about because that’s not how I learned because when I learned
⏹️ ▶️ John it, the web didn’t exist, right? So,
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, the answer is really, I don’t know, there’s probably a really good way to learn it
⏹️ ▶️ John and I don’t know what it is and you can go and find it. But if you’re asking how I learned it And
⏹️ ▶️ John also, I think this is a way you could learn it. There are a
⏹️ ▶️ John bunch of old books and other things that I read. And then actually, the main way I learned the command line stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John is by printing man pages on the printer at my college.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you could just do like man command pipe LPR, and it will just print the
⏹️ ▶️ John man pages. And then it’d take the man pages on paper back to my dorm room and read them. I do
⏹️ ▶️ John not recommend it. That is special. It will take you a long time. Man
⏹️ ▶️ John pages are, some of them are well-written, but most of them are not. But there is a book that I read. I read many, many books when
⏹️ ▶️ John I was undergrad in college, many books about Unix. And the book I’m going to
⏹️ ▶️ John recommend is not the first book I read. And it’s not like the title, as the title suggests, not like
⏹️ ▶️ John a teach me the basics type thing. But I’m still going to recommend it, and I’ll explain why. The book is called Unix Power Tools.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s basically saying, oh, so you know the basics of Unix. Well, here’s some power tools. It’s an older
⏹️ ▶️ John book. It’s in like third edition, but the third edition is like 10 years
⏹️ ▶️ John old, right? It contains a bunch of information that is basically not relevant
⏹️ ▶️ John to modern Unix or Linux or anything like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re selling it well. Right, but what it shows you is the mindset of,
⏹️ ▶️ John so you’ve got some basic knowledge about how to use command line stuff. What can you do with these tools? And it
⏹️ ▶️ John strings them together in different combinations that I think will be mind expanding and eye
⏹️ ▶️ John opening both to learn what it is that you can do, like how an operating system works, how Unix
⏹️ ▶️ John works, even if your particular Linux doesn’t work like this, or your Unix doesn’t look like this, that the things they described, the details
⏹️ ▶️ John are no longer relevant, but the concepts are and to say, alright, so you’ve got a Unix operating system
⏹️ ▶️ John that works like this. And you’ve got this bucket of tools, this toolbox over there, what can you do?
⏹️ ▶️ John And it will, it’s kind of like getting back to the shortcuts we were talking about the other day, seeing someone build a shortcut
⏹️ ▶️ John and make it do something you didn’t think shortcuts could do by just stringing together a bunch of pieces in a novel way
⏹️ ▶️ John is mind expanding. So Unix Power Tools is a huge book and it’s kind of like jumping into
⏹️ ▶️ John the deep end because it assumes some base knowledge that you may or may not have. But I guarantee you, if you read Unix Power Tools from cover
⏹️ ▶️ John to cover and start with zero knowledge by the end of it, you will grok, as we
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco will understand
⏹️ ▶️ John the Unix command line way better than someone who just did a basic tutorial of like
⏹️ ▶️ John here are the basics, how to use the command line. I think it actually is a very valuable tool for
⏹️ ▶️ John understanding the mindset of Unix and seeing just how deep the rabbit hole goes. Even
⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t understand every single thing that’s described in it, and even if you don’t know which parts are relevant or which parts aren’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll be in a better place when you come out the other side of this phone book sized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would go with a little bit simpler solution. I would say, you know, as the old saying goes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco necessity is the mother of all command line experience. I would say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try to do something with a Linux server. So we have sponsored this episode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Linode, you can get one for five bucks a month, get a Linux server for whatever level of resources you need,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is probably five bucks a month and try to set up something on it whether it’s like a VPN
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or you know a small simple web app or some kind of you know other server role
⏹️ ▶️ Marco setting up a Linux server requires you to do everything remotely via the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco command line and that will teach you a ton of basics and as I said last episode during this discussion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the basics you learn on Linux server much of that will apply also to Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS like a lot of the basics of using the command will apply to Mac OS as well. Not every single
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tool is the same, but they’re all pretty similar, or they’re very close. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having to do something will basically force you at every step, like, okay, I’m getting this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird error, or I’m stuck in VI, how do I get out? Like, there’s gonna be something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s gonna make you, like, do a bunch of web searches to save your butt every single time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that process will build expertise, and you will learn it, and you will have the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco goal in mind and the motivating force of whatever you want this server to do for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you will hopefully then at the end of it have something useful.
⏹️ ▶️ John The chat room is commenting on my description of this as a phone book size book. It is actually 1,200
⏹️ ▶️ John pages in paper form, the third edition. So it
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, God. And yes, I did read it from cover to cover. In fact, it’s sitting within arm’s reach right now. I can touch
⏹️ ▶️ John the spine of the book and I was looking at it to see, do I have the first edition? I’m pretty sure I do have the first edition because I got it a long time ago.
⏹️ ▶️ John And back then, O’Reilly, which was then the king of the technical books for
⏹️ ▶️ John budding computer, slicer, internet nerds, they had a brand for their various
⏹️ ▶️ John books, which was like the Nutshell series. It would be like, learn whatever in a nutshell. Like it was
⏹️ ▶️ John just one book that would tell you everything you need to know about Sendmail or whatever. So the Unix Power Tools has the
⏹️ ▶️ John Nutshell logo on it. Yeah, Unix Power Tools in a nutshell.
⏹️ ▶️ John a nutshell, it’s 1,200 pages. kind of subverting the brand there. But the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing is, it doesn’t tell you everything you ever could know about
⏹️ ▶️ John using Unix because there’s just too much to know. So in some respects it is in a nutshell, but in other respects it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not at all. But yeah, I think it’s incredibly valuable
⏹️ ▶️ John to read that book and this is another advantage you get from listening to ATP. No one else is gonna tell you to
⏹️ ▶️ John read that big book. No one else
⏹️ ▶️ John have read it. You, by reading it, will know secret things that no one else knows.
⏹️ ▶️ John You probably know more than me and Casey. Yeah. Definitely, for sure. You will know incredibly obscure
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff will probably never become useful. But actually I think it will make lots of the weird, Unix is weird in that
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s lots of like, residue or layers, it’s like an archeological dig. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John why does this command have these flags? Or what is the mnemonic behind this? What is that
⏹️ ▶️ John command even supposed to mean? Or why do these two commands exist for this third command? It seems like a combination of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you learn the history behind it, It helps you, it’s kind of like a story you tell yourself. It helps you remember how
⏹️ ▶️ John things fit together. You’re not just remembering arbitrary stuff. You kind of see how things evolved.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if this is the same
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re in the same category. Last show where I said like Command Shift One was eject the first floppy drive
⏹️ ▶️ John and Command Shift Two was eject the second. Now you know why Command Shift Three is over there. Maybe it helps you remember what
⏹️ ▶️ John the screenshot keyboard command is because now there’s a story to go along with it. You know it’s three because
⏹️ ▶️ John one and two are floppy drives. Maybe that’s a bad analogy, but I always feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John knowing the reasons behind things helps you to internalize them better than just memorizing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, oh, I just have to know this flag is like that, and capital letters do this, and
⏹️ ▶️ John this command is called that for these reasons. And this is why the variant of that command is called something different.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, check it out. It’s a big, giant paper book. It’s cool. You should read it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Eero, and Linode, and we’ll talk to you next week.
Ending theme ☃️
⏹️ ▶️ John And now the snow is falling, their kids
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are building snowmen. It’s accidental, accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ John fun time, holiday fun time. John’s gonna make snow angels,
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco and Casey are gonna let him.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s accidental, accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse Angels, holiday fun time. You can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes deep in Santa’s beard And follow
⏹️ ▶️ John them on Twitter for holiday
⏹️ ▶️ John S-E-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S K-C-L-S-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-G
⏹️ ▶️ John Mongo, Armin, S-I-R-A-C
⏹️ ▶️ John USA Syracuse It’s an accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental snowball fight It’s an
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Marco holiday tech podcast.
Post-show
⏹️ ▶️ John You should get Unix Power Tools, a great gift idea.
⏹️ ▶️ John Look for it in your stocking. If you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need a last minute Christmas gift, that one probably won’t be out of stock.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, actually, I went on the, I always wonder how popular these books are. I wanted to see if
⏹️ ▶️ John it was still even in print, but on the Amazon page, they linked it. It was like, hurry, only three more in stock
⏹️ ▶️ John and available from other sellers. You can buy it directly from O’Reilly too. There’s also a Kindle version. I feel like you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John missing out if you don’t get to see the cool fonts and everything for all the command line stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John True. Courier. O’Reilly
⏹️ ▶️ John you guys read O’Reilly books when you were learning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff? Yes, but it’s been a long time. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, yeah. So they look like they were laid out using,
⏹️ ▶️ John what the hell is it? the typesetting thing, LaTeX, or
⏹️ ▶️ John LaTeX, or however you want to pronounce it. They look like they were laid out using that, whether they were. It’s pronounced ricotta.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, yeah. Whether they
⏹️ ▶️ John were or not, because they use a similar font. And just sort of the style, like what do I
⏹️ ▶️ John use for my monospace font? What’s my proportional font? How do I set out the code examples? Just has a certain
⏹️ ▶️ John historic flavor that I appreciate, I guess it reminds me of all those books from