354: Casey's Computer Corner
26 Nov 2019We like computers so much that we need everyone to buy all of them.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: BBEdit to the rescue
- Casey's Computer Corner
- Marco's Office Lighting Follow-out
- MS Office and Catalina
- Follow-up: Amazon's customer support "phone tree"
#askatp- Is AppleScript dead? (via @askdrtuna)
- How do we keep our computers in sync? (via Chris Kast)
- Should we enable iMessage read receipts? (via Ryan Morey)
- Post-show:
- Casey's Car Corner
- Cybertruck
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Chapters
- BBEdit to the rescue
- Casey’s Computer Corner
- Sponsor: Linode (code atp2019)
- The Plex Rathole
- Setting money on fire
- Sponsor: ExpressVPN
- Festival of Light 🖼️
- Catalina tech support
- Follow-up: Amazon chat support
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- #askatp: Learn AppleScript?
- #askatp: Multiple computers
- #askatp: Read receipts
- Ending theme
- Follow-up: Casey’s “accident”
- Tesla Cybertruck 🖼️
BBEdit to the rescue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Did show about crash we only have the Tesla halo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey must have and Man, and I didn’t put on logging on colloquy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this time, so I don’t know if I can easily get to and I’m sorry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casey’s computer corner all right he’s computer corner got a lot of suggestions Wow
⏹️ ▶️ John all right I’ve got all our titles here ready Oh, message is too long
⏹️ ▶️ John and won’t let me paste it. Alright, I’ll do it in Skype chat. Alright. There you
⏹️ ▶️ John go. For the chat room, if you want to be a lead to bbedit hacksaw like me. How did I get all
⏹️ ▶️ John these titles so quickly? Command A, Command C, Command Tab, Command
⏹️ ▶️ John Shift N, Command Shift P, exclamation point S,
⏹️ ▶️ John return. What is that? And then, uh, command
⏹️ ▶️ John F dot slash S or dot star S exclamation point space
⏹️ ▶️ John command equals command A command C command tab
⏹️ ▶️ John command V. Those are all the keyboard commands that I type to get those titles out
⏹️ ▶️ John of the colloquy chat. Uh, remove, uh, everything except for the title suggestions,
⏹️ ▶️ John remove everything except for the titles themselves and then paste them into Slack, all from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would have followed that easier if you were talking about Destiny.
⏹️ ▶️ John If I wanted to do one more, I would do Command Control S to sort, and then I would do
⏹️ ▶️ John Command Shift D return to remove duplicates after they were sorted. Damn.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Case insensitively. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John everything in BBEdit, I have keyboard shortcuts assigned to individual check boxes
⏹️ ▶️ John in BBEdit dialog. So when I do Command Shift D to, or you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John Command F to do the grip thing. Shift Control N toggles
⏹️ ▶️ John case sensitivity, so I don’t have to reach for that checkbox, right? When you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John doing Shift Control combos, you know you’re probably out of key commands, but I do use it. But the thing is about these key commands is
⏹️ ▶️ John if I had to think about it, it’s like Emacs. My fingers just know them, and really if I have to re-recite them,
⏹️ ▶️ John I have to like do them in my mind with my fingers and figure out what modifier keys they’re hitting because they’re so,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, ingrained. The one I was using for getting the things called process lines,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it can do more than just what I had to do, but process lines I was doing, say I have a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of lines selected, I want you to do something with these lines, and my default is usually for every line
⏹️ ▶️ John that matches this expression, put it into a new document window, right? But there’s a million other things that it can
⏹️ ▶️ John do with it. You know, get lines that don’t match, get lines that do, get matching lines into the clipboard.
⏹️ ▶️ John BB edits cool, people. In summary, now I’m closing some windows.
Casey’s Computer Corner
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think everything’s okay. Famous last words.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clarify, it appears that you’re recording for this podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes? It appears that I am recording for this podcast with the emphasis on appears.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco recorder. And the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco echo that you were hearing before is gone. That is correct. So you sound normal to yourself. You sound normal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I sound normal to you. I sound normal to me. Everything hypothetically is copacetic. Oh my God.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know. You love this so much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Let’s start out with Casey’s computer corner. So, Casey, what computer are you recording on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now? I feel like we have to ask this every week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, you really do. This is so bad. So, I decided earlier, well, I decided
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over the weekend, but I didn’t have time to execute. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fact that the response begins with, so, I know it’s going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s going to be a story here. There’s going to be some shenanigans. All right, what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going on? All right. So, over the weekend, I thought to myself, self, what you need to do is you need need to go back to Mojave
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and see if that fixes all your woes. And that will at least give you more time on this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey broken iMac that I really just don’t want to continue to mess with. And so today I finally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had the time to sit down and do that. And it occurred to me that I can’t do,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the best of my knowledge anyway, I can’t do any sort of like internet recovery to get to Mojave. And the only way I can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get Mojave is to use a USB key, which I had built when Mojave was first out,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I didn’t even know if I had that at first. So I find this USB key, I’m very excited, very proud of past Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I go and I boot off the USB key, that works no problem. I delete the existing partitions or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re called in APFS world on the onboard SSD. Everything’s good. I go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to click on, okay, install macOS Mojave or whatever it says in the installer, and I click
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that and then I click continue and continue goes gray. You know, it’s disabled and I wait.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. Five minutes have gone by. 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes. Okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apparently nothing is happening. This is something that Marco, you have been saying a lot lately that I would like to echo.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why can we never get feedback from Apple when something doesn’t go according to plan?
⏹️ ▶️ John Why? Command L, there’s a whole log window on the installer, right? Is there? Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t look at the log window?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t know there was one.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s totally a log window.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t doubt it. I’m not arguing. It’s just, I had no idea.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can get it to show everything or just errors. It’s nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, I believe you. Well, I should have done that. But anyway, one way or another, it just froze as far as I was concerned. And I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know the magical incantation. And this is where somebody’s already tweeting at me, you know, you idiot, if you just go to the view menu, it’s right there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, it is in the menu.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not, I just happened to, I think that’s the command for it, anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I apologize, everyone. I didn’t realize
⏹️ ▶️ John it. It probably just would have shown like some line where it says doing the whatever thing, and then it just would
⏹️ ▶️ John have been on that line for 20 minutes. So
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it doesn’t give you that much more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One way or another, I decide, okay, well, this isn’t working, so what’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey next best thing? I’ll do a fresh install of Catalina and hope for the best, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John And- But you gave
⏹️ ▶️ John up after that, that was it for your Mojave?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I tried it a couple times.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey times. Yeah, did
⏹️ ▶️ John you, how did you erase the disk? How did you delete all the stuff? Because I have a feeling
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s where things went wrong for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I booted using the Mojave USB key,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey went into Disk Utility, and I deleted all the partitions on the hard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John drive, and then I created a new
⏹️ ▶️ John one. Did you reformat like the whole thing and put in a new partition table instead of just
⏹️ ▶️ John removing the? The first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time, no. Second time, yes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that log window probably would have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey helped. I’m not trying to say that it’s not my fault some way, somehow. But what I am trying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to say is I got no actionable feedback. Yes, I understand I should have looked for a log window. I get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. But what I was seeing on screen was nothing. And so eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I said, oh, screw it. All right, I’ll do an internet recovery of Catalina, which I did. And I did that at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about 3 p.m. today, and it is currently 10 past 9 p.m. So, cutting it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by the skin of my teeth, which makes Marco oh so happy. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyway, so I’m on my iMac, I’m on the same iMac I’ve had. But I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I finally made a decision. And I think what I’m going to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is I think tomorrow I’m going to order a custom 16-inch MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro. Which to be clear, To
⏹️ ▶️ Casey clear, I don’t want a 16-inch MacBook Pro, and I do kind of like having a desktop.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the more I think about it, the more I think getting an iMac and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a fantasy 14-inch MacBook Pro is the most right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey answer if I’m willing to set many thousands of dollars aflame. But if I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want the best compromise and the best all things to all people, if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you will, I feel like the best decision right now, leaving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Plex aside, which we’re going to talk about in a minute, leaving Plex aside, the best decision for right now for me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is to get the 16-inch, see how I feel about it. I mean if I really hate it, I can return
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it in two weeks hypothetically. If I at least think it’s passable, then I could always
⏹️ ▶️ Casey resell it. I mean there will be a penalty financially like we had spoken about last episode, but I can always resell it for some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey modicum of money. And so I feel like the 16 and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one or two external displays, and I’m still wrestling with myself what I want to do there, which we can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talk about if you guys are interested at all. But anyway, the 16 with one or two external displays,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think is going to be the best compromise because it’s got mega
⏹️ ▶️ Casey air quotes here, all of the power of the Mac Pro that I would buy, excuse me, the iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro that I would buy. I know that’s not strictly true. I’m just saying for the purposes of this conversation, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think it’s probably good enough. So anyways, it’s got all of the power,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, air quotes of the iMac Pro I would likely buy. It’s got the portability to a degree that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I can always put effectively an iMac monitor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on it. Well, not on it or connect to it, you know, an iMac monitor and end up basically where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am now, except the computer’s actually reliable. Who’d have thought? How desperate is my world that I’m saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, I hope this Apple laptop is more reliable. But things have changed since
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just a week or two ago. So anyway, so I think tomorrow or maybe at the end of the week, people are pointing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out on Black Friday, you know, you might get a gift card or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I might wait till the end of the week, one way or another. I think sometime this week, I will be ordering a 16 inch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MacBook Pro. So I would like to discuss with the two of you the build I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think I want, But before we get there, any commentary, thoughts, input
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from you, Marco? I don’t wanna hear what John has to say. From you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Marco? You already know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what John has to say. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know what John has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to say. What’s your plan for the monitor? So I’m wrestling with three, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess one and a half or two and a half options. So the most obvious option is just get the LG
⏹️ ▶️ Casey UltraFine, whatever it’s called, which is like $1,300 or something like that, which is a lot of money, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when the computer I’m looking at is probably gonna be almost $4,000 as it is. So by getting this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey laptop and a LG, I’m spending the same money as an iMac Pro anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s hard for me to swallow. But the obvious answer is get the LG
⏹️ ▶️ Casey UltraFine 5K, whatever the hell it’s called. What I think I’m going to do is I’m gonna go back to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the days from a couple of years ago when I was rocking two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 22-inch 4K displays displays at my last jobby job.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I actually really like that. It’s not as much real estate on either panel as the 5K, and it might
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even be that it’s not as much in conclusion, what’s the word I’m looking for? In
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco aggregate. Trevor Burrusin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Total. Michael Mann In total, thank you, as the 5K. But it worked out pretty well a couple of years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the monitor that I had, which admittedly was not great, but for my purposes was more than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough. I’ll link it in the show notes, but but it was some like, I think it was an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey L, no, it wasn’t an LG, it doesn’t matter. It was some 4K display that ran just fine. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was sufficient and it’s like 200 or 250 bucks. So I could get two of these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for like 500-ish dollars. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get four of them for the price of the LG or five.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, exactly. So what I think I’m gonna do is I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gonna get the 16, I’m gonna get one of these 4K monitors and start there and see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I think. And then if I feel like I really need more real estate,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m going to go and get an identical second 4K monitor. And at that point, I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey presumably run in clamshell, which Marco, I’d like you to tell me what you told me in Slack the other day in a moment,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but presumably I would run in clamshell at that point and have these two identical monitors side by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey side of my desk. And in theory, everything will be great. And the thing I like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about this is I can spend, quote-unquote only 250 bucks, whatever it is for this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey monitor. And then if I want another one, I just get another one. It’s not that big a deal. Like $250 is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of money, but all told, it’s not an unreasonable amount of money. But you really rocked my world
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the not so excellent way, although useful way, when you told me something in Slack the other day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Troxell Yeah. And by the way, first, before I get to that, we’ve heard from anonymous tipster in the chat that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I forgot about this, that the return policy is longer right now because of the holidays.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anything that you buy after November 15th can be returned until
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t know that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you have a little bit longer on Apple’s standard return policy right now. So that’s good to know. So thank you, anonymous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tipster. That is good to know. So what I said the other day in the chat, well, you were talking about these options
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and going back to this thing you did at work and everything. And we were hearing from different friends and listeners
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who were talking about how they use their laptop as a desktop and it’s just fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I did it for years myself, I talked about it here. Like for years I had my 15 inch laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or my 13 inch MacBook, you know, at certain times, next to a 17 inch to 24 inch monitor.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it was fine for years. The major difference seems to be whether this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco setup works reliably or not. Seems to be whether you use clamshell mode on the laptop. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether you keep the laptop closed and plugged into it or whether you open the laptop and use its screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in addition to the monitor that you had, possibly up on a stand to make it look nicer and get the correct height
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything. So if you use the laptop up on a stand with an external monitor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you never have to operate the laptop closed with external stuff connected to it, it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way more reliable. Clamshell mode where you have it closed and stuff plugged in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has always been flaky and seems there seems to be no end in sight to its flakiness. It seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s it has been flaky, it will be flaky as things were, things will always be like it’s just it will always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be problematic for various reasons. But if you leave a laptop open and use it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as one of your monitors that seems to work a lot better. So even though it’s still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no iMac that I think gets you a lot closer in in various
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know reliability and utility ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah and that’s what I did at work was I did clamshell on the two identical monitors and it actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worked mostly well, but that’s not exactly a ringing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey endorsement by any stretch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Especially like we have to grade on the Casey curve here. Like for you saying something worked mostly well, that’s pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad actually. Because you can be like, well, it only rebooted three times a day. It worked mostly well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really want to argue with you, but I can’t. Real time follow up from me to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The monitor I was talking about, I think I said 22, it’s It’s actually a 24 inch LG monitor. I will link it in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the show notes. 24UD58-B. It’s an LG monitor. Obviously. Obviously. So memorable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right now in Amazon in the US, $250 in free shipping, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a 4K monitor is nothing. Again, I’m not trying to say $250 isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of money, but for what you’re getting, that is not a lot of money. So again, I could get two of these for 500
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bucks. That’s nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is one of those things where like, if you’re willing to accept something that isn’t quite 100% of what everyone else
⏹️ ▶️ Marco considers like greater or like the maximum, you can save a disproportional amount of money. It’s like, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco jumping from four K to five K proportionally is not that different from jumping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from five K to the six K XDR, right? It’s like you can, you can have a five
⏹️ ▶️ Marco K monitor or you can have a six K monitor for about five times the price. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can have a four K monitor or you can have a five K monitor for about five times its price.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if you’re happy with going one step down, you can save a butt ton of money.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is my PlayStation monitor, by the way. This is my Destiny monitor. Oh, I didn’t realize that. You did, because we talked
⏹️ ▶️ John about it when I first got it for my PlayStation. You said you had the same ones at work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, yeah, that’s right, because we were looking at the stickers and all that. I’d forgotten about that.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s such a terrible stand, though. I still don’t like the stand.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, it’s terrible. It’s absolutely terrible. There’s nothing I can do to defend the stand. It doesn’t move in any way, shape,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or form. I think it might tilt slightly, if I remember right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Forget about moving it, it does tilt, but it’s so wobbly, I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have any part of my body touching the desk, because it’ll do a little head wobble.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but was it $1,000? It’s not HDR, not that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco this matters for your
⏹️ ▶️ John purposes, but when I was looking for it, it was difficult to find an IPS
⏹️ ▶️ John 4K PlayStation monitor, essentially, with HDMI input and
⏹️ ▶️ John HDR. Now it is not hard to find it, but this one doesn’t have it, just so you’re clear.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, and it doesn’t have the wide gamut
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John color. It’s not P3. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, exactly. It’s not, yeah. If you do photos on it, they’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Casey look all weird. There are problems with this, for sure. I’m not saying this is perfect, but for the purposes of doing the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey normal things that I do, writing code, goofing off on the internet,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writing blog posts, for all of those sorts of things, this is more than sufficient. And it’s cheap
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough that if I got one and I decide that the 16-inch life isn’t so bad,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like I wouldn’t hate myself if I put this aside and then got the LG
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 5K later on, you know what I mean? Like at $500, if this one monitor was $500, I would wanna just figure it out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey upfront, you know, decide am I getting the LG 5K
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or am I getting this, you know, LG 4K? But since it’s only 250 bucks, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just give it a shot, man. Like try it for a little while. And even if you don’t like it, it’s not gonna be the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey end of the earth. So current plan, I think is 16-inch MacBook Pro. Again, we gotta talk about specs,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but John, I will give you a chance to berate me first. 16-inch MacBook Pro with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an external monitor, maybe two, but probably just one, and just see what I think about it and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see how it goes. And we still have to solve my Plex problems as well, but we’ll get to that in a minute. So John, feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey free to tell me how terrible laptops are one last time.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re gonna spend like 3,800 bucks for a laptop you don’t even want. And then you’re gonna,
⏹️ ▶️ John And then your desktop thing is going to be an ugly, cheap monitor with a bunch of cables snaking out of it. Are you going to buy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey station of any kind? You know, I was looking at that earlier tonight, and I think the answer is yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the problem I’ve run into is based on five minutes of research. So this is not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an exhaustive, you know, deep dive by any means. But based on five minutes of research, I didn’t find any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that looked like they did what I I wanted them to do, which is I would like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to monitor outputs that can each run 4k at 60 frames
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a second, because I would hypothetically plug in two of these LG monitors.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that basically means to display port outputs from the stocking station. And there was one of, I think there was like a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dell that might work with, with Mac OS that would do it. They’re all ugly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It seems like the ones that have the exact port configuration I want are basically made by either
⏹️ ▶️ Casey HP or Dell or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John McLaughlin You’re looking at like the CalDigital Thunderbolt port things, Thunderbolt dock things. Those are expensive, but
⏹️ ▶️ John those seem to be reliable. Jay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Haynes I believe those cost about as much as the monitor.
⏹️ ▶️ John Steve McLaughlin They do, first of all. Jay Haynes And well, that’s what I was getting at when I was saying $3,800 for a laptop you don’t want and
⏹️ ▶️ John also probably a docking station. And if you want a good one, that’s really expensive too. So now you’re spending a whole lot of money for this giant
⏹️ ▶️ John octopus Hydra Frankenstein thing that you think is going to be more reliable than your single computer that you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey McLaughlin Well, yes, everything you just said is accurate. The CalDigit TS3 Plus is Wirecutter’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pick, and the problem with that is, it only has one display port out, and I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want two of them. I don’t know if that’s possible.
⏹️ ▶️ John The monitor has HDMI in, too, so you might be able to put one display port in one HDMI. If you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hertz out of it, though.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s the thing, though, is when I tried this at work, admittedly a couple of years ago, when I ran
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with HDMI, it’s exactly what Marco said, it was only 30 hertz, which for four and a half seconds,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was like, oh, that’ll be, oh, God, no. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey no, you can’t do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John that. The HDMI does support 60 hertz,
⏹️ ▶️ John just maybe not on the standard of these things. But I don’t know. You have to look into it to see. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John all I’m saying is that this dock thing is another place where the
⏹️ ▶️ John aggregate reliability of your system can really fall down. And if you don’t do it, you can plug 17 cables. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John not 17, but four cables. You got one for power, one for one monitor, one for the other monitor, and then you got one port
⏹️ ▶️ John left for any other thing you need to do. And that will work, but have fun plugging and unplugging that every time you sit down at your desk.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. No, I agree. And so that’s why suddenly the LG, it’s still a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more money, but the fact that it works as a semi-docking station is extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey appealing. And I think the biggest problem I have with the LG is that in order to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get the LG and the $3,800 computer is the same money I would spend on the damn iMac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the thing of it is, I can’t bring the damn iMac Pro over to the library unless I’m Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can, I can recommend a case. Yes, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But you take my point, is that this, in my fantasy world,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gets me two computers for the price of one. I know that’s not really true, don’t jump all over me, just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hear out the spirit of my argument here. It gets me two computers for the price of one, whereas the iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro only solves the at-home situation, it does not solve the library slash
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wegmans grocery store situation.
⏹️ ▶️ John You solve that one when the new 13-inch slash 14-inch comes out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can, but I’m so sick of using the Adorable with its tiny little screen and its awful processor.
⏹️ ▶️ John bought that computer anyway?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know. But at the time, I didn’t think I would be using it to do these sorts of things.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s your own computer that still works. Why don’t you stop complaining about it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, actually, funny you bring that up. Earlier today, my H key was getting sticky, so I took compressed air to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. And now, hours later, my left Shift key is sticking, and I can’t get it to work reliably.
⏹️ ▶️ John Should have held it out the window longer on that car trip.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So surprised your butterfly keyboard isn’t reliable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know. I imagine that.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Haven’t heard that
⏹️ ▶️ John You must be one of the small percentage of customers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, right. I think what is most likely to happen here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is you’re going to spend a lot of money on a laptop setup. You’re gonna spend so much on it that you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not going to want to ever buy a desktop during its lifetime. But really what you probably should do is have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both. But I don’t know, I mean, the kind of BS and flakiness
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that John and I find with using laptops as desktops is also the kind of stuff that you tend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to not mind and ignore. In a way, I think I’m talking myself into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, like, for you.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, we’re trying to give him a better life. We’re not trying to allow him to wallow in his continued misery.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, I think the idea of buying something where you get the $200 gift card, like, I don’t know if that counts with
⏹️ ▶️ John a refurb thing or whatever, but if you can get some kind of good deal on a two year old iMac Pro with a $200 gift card, you’d
⏹️ ▶️ John feel a lot better about that purchase, and you could feel better waiting patiently for the
⏹️ ▶️ John smaller laptop that you actually want.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco isn’t that far off. You know, I have tried the lifestyle of speccing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up a 15 inch to try to replace a desktop. I’ve been there, only a few years ago I tried that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was a very expensive mistake, basically. I spent a lot of money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a well-specced 15 inch that worked as a kind of crappy desktop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And eventually I’m like, this was stupid, I’m buying a case to bring the desktop to the beach. And I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much happier doing that. That being said, I care less about money and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more about desktops working really awesomely than you do. So this is probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the right thing for you. I really hate to say it. I would only say, try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not to spend too much money on this setup. Because down the road, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco decide, you know what, you’d rather have a desktop, you will not want to make that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco jump if you’ve sunk a lot of money into this setup. laptops are best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when they are kept on the lower end of the price spectrum, replaced more frequently as opposed to, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like kept forever, like, you know, replaced every couple of years, maybe two, you know, two to three years I’d say is like the ideal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way to have a laptop if you can. And when you’re not trying to make it a desktop, like I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love using my laptop as a laptop when I have to, because I’m not trying to make it a desktop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When I try to make it a desktop is when I start getting miserable with like, oh, I can hear the fan, oh God,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or oh, this monitor didn’t turn on or whatever. There’s issues like that, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or like, hey, the ethernet doesn’t work reliably out through this dongle, and I wish I had a desktop that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then I wouldn’t need a dongle, it’s just built in. Stuff like that. You will run into all those issues.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the question is whether you care more than you care to keep a few thousand more dollars.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s cheaper for him to buy a, you know, an inexpensive refurb
⏹️ ▶️ John iMac Pro with a $200 gift card now and wait for the 13 inch that he wants, his total aggregate cost
⏹️ ▶️ John is gonna be less than trying to control costs on a weird, you know, Frankenstein
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Pro 16 inch setup now that he may need to sell parts of and also going down this rabbit
⏹️ ▶️ John hole of like, how am I gonna deal with my Plex situation and then still buying the 13 inch when it comes out
⏹️ ▶️ John and trying to figure out how to transform this all into a desktop. It is cheaper to do, to get the
⏹️ ▶️ John desktop that you want for as cheap a price you can get on Black Friday, and then waiting a few months and getting the 13-inch
⏹️ ▶️ John you want, maybe not spec’d up as much because now the iMac Pro handles your heavy duty needs, and then you’re done. And there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no like fidgeting with that setup. I think that will be less money than what you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. Because, and we’ll get into spec in a second. If you can get away with one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the base models, you can save a lot of money, because not only are the upgrades grossly overpriced,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generally speaking. And you get a killer reset value on the upgrades, as we mentioned last week. But also, the base
⏹️ ▶️ Marco models are often discounted during various sales, things like Black Friday, or deals with certain retailers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where you go to like B&H, your best buy on a random day, and it’ll be like $150 off one of the two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco base configurations for no particular reason. You can get really good deals on those base models, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re a good deal to begin with compared to upgrades. So if you can bring the cost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of your laptop option down by offloading that heavy work to a desktop,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over time, that’s an easier solution. That’s why you’ve been able to get away with, well, sort of get away
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with having the world’s crappiest laptop as your laptop these last few years, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have a desktop for your heavy lifting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, and that’s the thing is, you know, sitting here now, the specs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I think I want are on the assumption that this is not the satellite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey computer, this is the all-the-time computer. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my argument is, make it the satellite computer. I would rather use a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco four-year-old iMac as my primary computer than a brand new, top-of-the-line laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey See, and I don’t know if I feel the same way. And it would be different if this iMac wasn’t such a pile of garbage
⏹️ ▶️ John You still get to buy something on Black Friday, and it’ll be cool and shiny. And don’t just try to
⏹️ ▶️ John forget that it’s two years old. Get a good deal on it, get your gift card, buy something on Black Friday, feel good about it,
⏹️ ▶️ John and set that thing up and get everything all settled so you have a reliable podcasting setup and all
⏹️ ▶️ John your Plex stuff is dealt with and then just wait patiently on this program and every week we’ll check to see if the new small laptops
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that would give you the most overall happiness. The only downside
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that you can’t do it all yet because that laptop doesn’t exist yet. That’s the only downside. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you can just make it until the spring, I think you’d be better off. That being said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you don’t care that much about the additional size, as I mentioned last week, I think the 16-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco base model is going to be a significantly good value compared to a similarly specced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up 13-inch or 14-inch, whatever it ends up being. And so if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t mind the size of the 16 and you want this extra six months of using it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make the 16 that computer for you. just don’t spec it up and make it too expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Get one of those two base models, and you’re done, and you can get probably a really good deal on it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s it. And it’s not gonna be that much more than a 13, and you have it now. But also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a desktop in the mix, because that will be the best overall setup. And whether you keep your current
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iMac for a little while longer and tolerate it and just use laptop temporarily as your primary without
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going and buying a bunch of stuff, actually just using it, like, using its screen as your screen. Like you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to set it up as a desktop if it’s only temporary. Lots of people use laptops as desktops full time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, you shouldn’t without like a standard external keyboard and everything, but you can. A lot of people do. So like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if the idea is the setup that you want is not great right now and you wanna wait for a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while, then you can do that too. That being said, there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is no reason to wait for a desktop. So I think just spend the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seven grand or whatever it would be to get both of these things right now and be done with it because you’re a professional,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is a critical part of your job, you know, like you’re not like a broke 19
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year old college kid. You have jobs that require these things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I feel like you’re so stuck on this idea like I don’t want to spend $7,000 at the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same time basically. What’s the difference if you spend some of it now and some of it in six months?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What’s the difference? Who cares when you have to spend it. These are computers that you buy every like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, two to four years. They happen to coincide right now at the same time.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you buy both systems now, you might be able to get two $200 gift cards. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right. Like, seriously, like it doesn’t, it’s an irrational thing to say like, I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t like the idea of, you know, and look, a lot of pricing and buying decisions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are irrational. I’m not blaming you for it being irrational, but it is irrational. You’re saying like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want to spend all this money right now. Why? You need two computers right now basically. You have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a desktop that’s breaking constantly and you have a laptop that’s woefully underpowered for the things you want to do with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and also by the way the keyboard is going to die constantly. So like you have two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computers that are not satisfying your needs. Your lifestyle does seem to need two computers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically or at least two setups a portable one and a stationary one and you make good money with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this job just Just do it. Just get them both now and solve this problem. And then we can talk about other things next
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I shouldn’t have brought this up with you too, because I was so confident in my decision to go 16 and you’re ruining everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My solution, buy everything. John’s solution, buy nothing. What a surprise.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was willing to bargain down to buy the iMac now to get the good Black Friday deal because $200 gift
⏹️ ▶️ John card is basically $200 off for someone like Casey who’s guaranteed to spend money and Apple stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not like he’s gonna let that go to waste, right? So that’s a good deal. And if he can get a really good deal on an iMac Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s good, and him buying one will trigger them to update that model, so that’s good for everybody else. Yeah, right.
⏹️ ▶️ John And basically, it’s giving him a way to satisfy his insatiable need to buy something immediately, and
⏹️ ▶️ John then you, of course, say, well, why don’t you just buy everything? But I’m willing to say, buy half the things on Black Friday. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a reasonable expenditure, and then just wait for the laptop. But I also mostly endorse
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco’s deal. I’ll put it this way, my least favorite thing, idea, is spending a huge amount of money on a crazy laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John setup. That is my least favorite by far. You don’t say. Yeah. And then, really,
⏹️ ▶️ John because I know we have this notes here, and we really do have to move on, because otherwise this whole show is just going to be about Casey and his computer,
⏹️ ▶️ John is you still have the Plex problem and that whole other rat hole. And if you can get the iMac,
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t have that problem anymore. It’s like, oh, I’ll just run it on my iMac, and it’ll be fine, because I don’t want to talk about the 8,000 options for Plex
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So let me touch on that very, very, very briefly. First of all, with regard to the iMac, I did want to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bring up that I didn’t last week, that it does seem like, or I don’t think I said this last week, it does seem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like the stuttering with the mouse is considerably worse when the trackpad is not plugged in. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when it’s operating over Bluetooth, really bad. When it’s operating via the lightning to USB connector,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s actually not nearly as bad. And I don’t know what that means really, other than weirdness.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco But it’s still not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I don’t know how this new Catalina build is going so far. I mean, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey haven’t crashed in the last three hours, so that’s good. But,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey we’ll see how the case
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey So with regard to Plex, a lot of people wrote in a few different things, which are very, very reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey questions that I should have gotten in front of because I’ve had to answer them about 400 times each. Very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quickly, number one, why don’t I use the Synology? because it’s too darn slow. I actually just restarted,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you will, Plex on my Synology to confirm to myself how slow it is. And even just browsing my library,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is not that unreasonably large, is slow. But the real issue is if I ever need to transcode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything, it’s just not quick enough, because my Synology is six years old now. And people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey often very smartly said, well, just transcode when you ingest things. So if you could get some sort
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of weird MKV with like WebM or something, just put that in H.264 and put it in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an MP4 and be done with it. Yes, that’s true. And that works when I’m in the house. But what happens when I’m at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Disney world and the network connection is God awful and it needs to transcode down to like 480 for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me to be able to watch this, you two don’t jump on me about watching 480 stuff that’s irrelevant. Um, so the point
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is if I ever want to watch something from outside the house or, you know, maybe on the phone where I want it to be not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quite so high quality, then the Synology falls on its face and newer Synologies do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey support doing transcoding, particularly the Intel ones. But the problem with that is that’s like iMac Pro money.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, you say Intel? He’s working on Affluent. Give him
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, I know. Come on. Give me one second. One more at a time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, point is, the doo-doo-doo-doo powered ones,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey those are capable of doing transcoding on the fly. But the problem is, if I were to upgrade my Synology, I would want to get a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whole new setup and use the existing one as offsite backup for reasons I don’t want to get into. So that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like iMac Pro money as well, just to solve a problem that actually is about the only thing in my life
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that isn’t currently a problem, I say as I knock on my glass top desk.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway. That must have hurt. No, actually it wasn’t that bad. A lot of people recommended
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Infuse. I don’t know how to pronounce it. I don’t know if the emphasis is on the right syllable or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco what. But anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s pronounced Infuse.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Infuse. I don’t know. A lot of people… Must be Italian. A reference acknowledged.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A lot of people say, you know, use Infuse, but that doesn’t work if I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to share with my family or if I want to use that from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey outside the house. So what I’ve come up with is two different options if I do want to solve this with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something other than iMac Pro. Number one, I’ve heard the NVIDIA Shield for most people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey works pretty well as a Plex server. We actually have a mutual friend who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is sending me one. So because he doesn’t need it anymore, which is very kind of him, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will eventually plug his stuff if this ends up working out. And he says that’s okay because I don’t know if he wanted to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this anonymously or not. Anyway, so I’m going to try that, just see how it works. Can’t hurt to try, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the second thing is the actual right-ist answer, but because I’m a petulant child, I refuse to listen to reason.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s to get an Intel NUC. I don’t know what that stands for, but one of those little tiny computers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Next unit of computing, I believe?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Something like that. Anyways, to get a NUC and put Ubuntu or something on it and run
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Plex on there and just be done with it. But I have no interest in administering a Linux
⏹️ ▶️ Casey machine. This is the same reason that I have my website on Heroku. I just don’t want to deal with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so a NUC is the right answer, but because I’m a petulant child, I don’t want to listen to reason.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’m going to try the NVIDIA Shield, assuming that I don’t have an iMac Pro here in the next
⏹️ ▶️ Casey week or two. I’m going to try the Nvidia Shield, see how that works out and take it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from there. So yeah, that’s the end of Casey’s Computer Corner, unless you guys have other things to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would like to challenge your entire identity on one other point, actually.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh, God. Okay. All
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right. So you put a lot into this Plex
⏹️ ▶️ Marco setup. Is this all worth it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve had that thought over the last couple of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco days. Because like, what if instead of using Plex for all these things,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what if instead, every time you wanted to watch some TV show or movie, you just bought it or streamed it on a service
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just paid for it? And if you added up all that money that you would spend over time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would it actually be more than what you’re spending on all these hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drives, the computer that’s going to run the Plex server, or the power that keeps them all on?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you actually coming out meaningfully ahead to make it worth all this trouble?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think there’s stuff that he just can’t find anywhere. Like all those top gears that you have and everything. I can’t even buy them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anywhere. I don’t think so, but I haven’t had a need to look cause I’ve already had them. I think you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hit the nail on the head though, that Plex does satisfy needs that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know that anything else can scratch most, especially like there is some, I get in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a kind of unreasonable amount of pleasure in collecting these And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so, like, take an example, um, Declan really likes the show, Paw Patrol, and Nick Jr.,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, every week will put up, like, another episode of Paw Patrol that you can stream for free. You know, you don’t have to log
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into anything, it’s just there. And I will capture those episodes and stuff them in Plex.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I feel like that’s okay. It’s probably not, strictly speaking, but I feel like it’s okay because I’m not logging into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything. It’s just free on the internet. And it just so happens that I’ve saved it off.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’ve provided them an off-site backup of their content.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey content. You know, thank you, Marco. That’s exactly what I’m doing. I’m providing them a service. Really, they should be paying me. So anyway, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve saved all these off. And so now I have almost the entire run of Paw Patrol. This is so dumb. Like, I hear the words
⏹️ ▶️ Casey coming out of my mouth. It’s so dumb. But I get some amount of pleasure over the collecting and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey assembling of all of this stuff. Like Top Gear, like as silly as it sounds, like Paw Patrol. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it does scratch a itch that money cannot, you know, that’s a It’s a problem money can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fix. But you’re not asking unreasonable questions. I think in the world
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where I’m Marco and my job is to set money aflame, what I would probably do is I would get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an iMac Pro, I would probably get 16 until the 14 exists, and then I would probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey upgrade the Synology and get a new Synology as well and just solve all of my computing problems at once. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is literally $10,000 plus worth of computing devices, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco To be fair, I’m not suggesting you do that, but also, and I’m not saying that I don’t see any value in Plex. I run
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Plex server too. I just run a super simple one, and I have an ancient Mac mini that runs it just fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the things that you’re doing with Plex, these do have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco costs. As I said, you’re paying for the hardware to run it, you’re paying for all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drives, you’re paying for the power, and if you back anything up, you’re paying for more copies of it, and more power, and all this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you’re paying in complexity. you have to run this Plex server somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in your network. I’m sure it occasionally needs something from you, an update or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Something about it doesn’t work right. I know, because I’ve tried to place it off of your Plex server and it hasn’t always worked. So I know it doesn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, you always choose to do that at the times when my iMac is dying.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco But yes, your point
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is still fair. Well, that’s also true. No, your point is still fair.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and so all this stuff has a cost. And so part of my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transition into various stages of adulthood has often been like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, can I just apply a little bit of money to make this problem go away? Because this is something like, you know, I come
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from a very modest background. Despite all the jokes about setting money on fire, this has been a very alien thing to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me with the, you know, with the environment I grew up in. And it’s only been fairly recently that I’ve become
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay with setting money on fire to make my life better. I, you know, I’ve been, for years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would conserve money or do things myself in ways that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really were not worth it at all and that I shouldn’t have been doing and that were actually hurting me more that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hadn’t realized I was so obsessed with like not wanting to spend the money on something that it wasn’t strictly necessary. This is one of those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco areas where like you know if you look at people have done similar things with their music collections a lot a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maintained huge you know iTunes libraries and then therefore had to get like big hard drives
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and have to pay for lots of storage in their computers and their phones and everything over time and then as streaming services became
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so compelling and so capable and and so inexpensive, a lot of people are no longer keeping music collections because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they feel like it’s no longer worth it, they have all the music in the world and the streaming services, the world doesn’t seem to be moving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco away from streaming services anytime soon. Like, it seems like it’s a pretty safe bet for most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people, they don’t need to keep music collection anymore, they can just do streaming services and be fine. And so they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get to save all that disk space, all the hassle of like, getting files that were the wrong,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, name or whatever, and yeah, a lot of them were pirated, a lot of them weren’t, but like, streaming kind of made it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all irrelevant. And I feel like we’re in a similar age now for lots of movie and TV content, where like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many of us have kept local libraries and there is value to that, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also such a pain in the butt and it’s so costly to keep those local libraries that for most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people, I don’t think it’s worth it anymore. I think it’s only worth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it for the biggest enthusiasts. And you are one of those, I think, in this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way. You know, you are, I think, one of the biggest, if not the biggest Plex enthusiast I’ve ever met,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but if most of what you’re doing with it most of the time is watching stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is available on streaming services, it certainly does raise the question of, do you really need to be keeping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this stuff anymore? And then secondly, if you decide you need to be keeping it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do you need to be keeping it at the same level of flexibility that requires all this advanced hardware? So for instance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do you need transcoding? Or can you keep the Plex stuff for your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco house, in which case you don’t even use transcoding, or at least you shouldn’t be using transcoding, within your own house.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or, and then when you happen to be traveling, make other plans. You know, if you happen to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco traveling the like four times a year that you’re traveling and you wanna watch Paw Patrol, watch something else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or buy something, you know, buy like an iTunes movie rental in the hotel or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco treat the kids to a fun new movie rental for $4 and not have to maintain a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco beefy Plex server for transcoding. Like, how often are you using the super advanced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco functionality for things that you can’t stream and in those cases, could you just buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something else or watch something else?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, I take your point, but I think what it comes down to is I am, I’m just a pack rat when it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey comes to this stuff and that’s something I’m okay with. And this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey particular moment aside, If my iMac, which is my Plex server, wasn’t falling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apart, I would have zero complaints about Plex. Everything would be peachy keen. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really have to do very much maintenance to keep it running. I don’t really have to do much to keep it happy,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if anything at all. The enjoyment, I get immense amounts of enjoyment, not only from the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hoarding aspects of getting stuff into it, but also the way in which it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has fit into not only my life, but my entire family’s life. and it’s so easy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for any of us to get what we want quickly and easily. It’s my own personal Netflix,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the sense that it is a curated list of things that I can stream anywhere I want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the world if the network connection and Transcoder supports it, at really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey incredible resolution and whatnot. So if it wasn’t for the fact
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I’m taking the server away from my whole Plex world, I would have zero
⏹️ ▶️ Casey complaints about it and I don’t see it a problem to be fixed. It’s in this scenario where I ditch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a desktop that this all falls apart. And God help me, you guys are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey starting to convince me to get that iMac Pro again, which I really wasn’t planning on.
Setting money on fire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What’s great about the iMac Pro option is that it sets this problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on fire. It just blows away the problem. You have this big problem that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is costing you… I mean, look at the time this is costing you. How much time have you wasted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco messing with the iMac Pro? And you’ve been…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or sorry, the iMac. You’ve messed with the iMac for so much time trying to get things to work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The time that you’ve been spraying canned air into your MacBook. This time matters. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time adds up. This is time that you could be doing anything else or nothing. You could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take a nap. You could hang out and watch TV off your Plex server. You could be doing anything else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You could hang out with your family. You could go drive in circles and do donuts in your car. I don’t know. Whatever you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to do, right? You could be doing anything else. Instead, you’re reinstalling Mac OS on a broken
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer again. stuff matters. This is like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, some of the calculus that I try to do when I’m thinking about, you know, is it worth spending
⏹️ ▶️ Marco money on a problem? Like, I often think like, what would CGP Grey do?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, he’s really good at like, at figuring this out analytically and being like, can I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco throw money at this and make the problem go away because it’s worth it to me? Like that’s, and I often think like, okay, what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would Grey do to fix this problem? Whenever I have gone with the option I think he would go with, which is usually blowing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco money away. I have always been actually pretty happily. Okay, this problem is now gone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can get back to my work. What he would do if his iMac flaked out as much as yours did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is he would take it off his desk, put it God knows where and have a new one there delivered that day and get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on with his work because his work is important, right? Your work is important. Your time is valuable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why not do the same thing?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because I don’t want to spend that much money. I don’t want to spend $8,000 on computers. But why? I would
⏹️ ▶️ John generally advise against using Marco or CTP Grey as your thought model for when you should
⏹️ ▶️ John But you know, all that said, what Marco was saying, I think, putting Gacy aside for a second, because
⏹️ ▶️ John he’s a weirdo like all of us. For you listeners out there thinking this doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John actually apply to you, Marco’s advice is good, I think, for the listeners in general, for
⏹️ ▶️ John the statistical average listener that is out there. Very often, if you’re listening to a tech podcast, You probably
⏹️ ▶️ John have lots of technology in your life. And there are points when technology in your life sort of ages out, where it is
⏹️ ▶️ John no longer the correct choice to keep doing whatever it is. Marco had a great example of keeping MP3
⏹️ ▶️ John collections or whatever. I was saying keeping CD collections is a thing, keeping record collections. And at various points, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John time to reconsider those. You have to decide, am I the type of person who’s going to have a record collection for my entire
⏹️ ▶️ John life? Maybe you are, go for it, awesome, cool hobby, right? But for most people, the answer to that question
⏹️ ▶️ John was no. You have to let the records go and go on to the next thing. and eventually your CD collection. It’s like, okay, I’ve been hauling
⏹️ ▶️ John this CD collection around in these giant case logic boxes from dorm room to dorm room. At a certain point, you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John is this still tenable or is there a better solution? And so you end up with an mp3 collection.
⏹️ ▶️ John And again, and it goes to the streaming music, right? I think having a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John movies on a server or having a bunch of video CDs, if anyone’s old enough to remember that, like there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John all sorts of things that we do that are good ideas at the time that we need to reevaluate. Now that I think is the
⏹️ ▶️ John good advice for the listener to look at your life and think, is there something like that in your life where you’re spending a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of time and energy and money maintaining a thing where right now you could do it for much
⏹️ ▶️ John less hassle and actually much less time and also much less money by just buying,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, renting a movie from iTunes every you want, every time you want to do it or buying it from Amazon, whatever thing you want to do. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it, it wins in all regards, better availability, better quality, better convenience
⏹️ ▶️ John and less cost and less time. And it’s, if you’re a tech nerd, it’s easy not to see those types
⏹️ ▶️ John of solutions because you’re just into the tech. In Casey’s case, and in many people’s case, in the sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of the non-average case, the outlier case, it’s your hobby and you want to deal with the tech, like more power
⏹️ ▶️ John to you. I feel like this is Casey’s hobby. He’s also the person I know who’s most into Plex
⏹️ ▶️ John and I have a Plex server and I’m kind of into it too. And I would be hesitant to give it up as I got weird stuff in there. you
⏹️ ▶️ John know weird anime things and like trailers for stuff and things that were never released anywhere
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can only see in some place but someone did a pirate a copy of and like there’s all sorts of You
⏹️ ▶️ John know cool stuff that I have in there and I have stuff organized the way I wanted I control cost and
⏹️ ▶️ John hassle mostly by keeping the collection small and if I’ve watched a movie I’m honest with myself or whether
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m ever gonna watch again I deleted it if I’m not like so I don’t have this ever-expanding collection It it stays more
⏹️ ▶️ John or less the same size with sort of this rotating buffer of things that I think I want on it And in Casey’s
⏹️ ▶️ John case, I don’t, you know, an iMac will do it. It might surprise you
⏹️ ▶️ John to hear that if I was in your situation, I didn’t have an iMac to run the thing on, I would buy a NUC. I would deal,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would just like, it can’t be that hard to set up, but I would just get something that’s non-Apple hardware,
⏹️ ▶️ John because the Mac mini is so expensive, such an expensive way to do it, is get the cheapest non-Apple hardware that
⏹️ ▶️ John will do the transcoding that you need with some headroom, and just shove it in a closet and be done with it. But you don’t have to do that because you
⏹️ ▶️ John can get an iMac Pro Black Friday and you won’t have to worry about this problem.
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, they can sniff plain unencrypted HTTP requests, and yeah, there aren’t as many of those as there used to be, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know what? I still don’t think that 100% of all the data that goes
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco I always want to use a VPN when I’m using some kind of untrusted public Wi-Fi. Even as
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steve McLaughlin Marco, tell me about your office furniture. Or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco not office, just furniture. John Waller Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is office furniture. So on the Upgrade podcast this week, they started out with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using their term, follow-out, which is when they basically do follow-up on someone else’s podcast. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they were mad at John for being able to talk all of last week’s After Show after show about his office furniture
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically and various things like that and that they never thought to talk about furniture and they talked a little bit about theirs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it made me realize I have had a dilemma that I want I want to now do some some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco refollow out or some follow out out or some whatever it would be to loop back around here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want to talk about my office furniture because I have an office furniture problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco just buy a new house that’ll get rid of this problem in one shot you’ll be done with it.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You won’t have to worry about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anymore. I just have to evaluate. Do I really need an office?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, God. I hate you guys. I hate winter. One of the reasons I hate winter is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it’s just so dark and depressing all the time. Meanwhile, I have a home office. It’s wonderful.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s no… The only lighting in the room are these two lights in the ceiling that each can take three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bulbs, but they’re enclosed fixtures. And so, if you put any LED bulbs in there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they overheat and die within a few months. So, and I use them, I use LEDs in there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway, just to get more light out of them than like the 60 watts they’re rated for, but still,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, those things burn through lights like crazy, they’re mostly burnt out most of the time. I just want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more light to help me feel better in the winter, to help my office get brighter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and make me feel less depressed when the sun sets at 4 o’clock, right? Which it’s currently doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So normally I augment the dim lighting on the ceiling. Oh, and I should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also clarify also, the walls are dark red and behind my computer is dark gray sound foam.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m not doing any favors here with like light reflection off the walls. It’s still, it’s a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dark room by default. So I’ve had in the corner, right next to my desk forever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of those Ikea knot lamps. Like this is like the, Ikea’s been selling the same lamp for like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a decade or more. It’s the basic like pole lamp. It’s a base, a pole that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like five or six feet tall, and a little like bowl on top, the middle of which has a light bulb in it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’ve seen these lamps. Ikea sells them for about $10, and they’re everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know, this is a common form factor, like other people make pole lamps as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My solution has been over time, and fortunately with the advent of LED light bulbs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to slowly add brighter and brighter bulbs to this pole lamp next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to my desk try to make my office brighter so I’m happier here and I’ve reached
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a limit of that because it’s like even you can put like you know like one of those like you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know 150 watt equivalent LED bulbs in there but at some point they get so big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they stick up past the globe and you don’t want to be able to look straight at them because that’s too harsh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to look at so you have to keep the size low now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a while ago I discovered these multi bulb splitters you can basically get these little like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plastic things that screw into the light socket and split into like three different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or four different bulbs and they can turn them on their side so you can kind of rotate the bulbs 90
⏹️ ▶️ Marco degrees and have like a little like radial arrangement of bulbs or like a circular arrangement
⏹️ ▶️ Marco within that globe so my at first I thought let me get as many lights as possible into this one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco IKEA not lamp it’s a try to like you know one bulb isn’t doing it for me anymore I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want three bulbs or four bulbs so I finally I figured that out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’ve reached the wattage limit of that it’s not enough light so I recently bought myself a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco second not lamp and put it on the other side of my desk now I have two floor lamps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem is they’ve made the globe on top of the lamp they’ve made it smaller it doesn’t it isn’t as tall anymore
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so now my bulbs are sticking out more easily so right now I currently have I have, let me see, I got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco four in that one. So I currently have seven light bulbs that are about, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know, 75 to 100 watt equivalents each. And this is a good amount of light.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the ones that are in the left one, again, with one of those like multi-bulb splitters, are sticking out the top.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they’re also non-dimmable. Oh, I should also mention my preferred temperature is 4,000K, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no one makes bulbs that are 4,000K, except for like two companies. So, so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I’m looking for, and that I have been not able to find is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some kind of like pole lamp that I can put on one or both sides of my desk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that natively is designed to have like three or four bulbs in it that then I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put, you know, huge bulbs into each one of those sockets and just totally blast myself out with just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a complete sh** ton of light. That’s what I want here, just a sh** ton of light into my eyes all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco winter long to try to make me forget that it’s winter. I could get the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco office renovated and just put more lights in the ceiling. That’s the option I should do,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that’s incredibly expensive and disruptive and destructive. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want to lose the use of my office for any amount of time to do that. You know, a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of pole lamps cost, what, 20 bucks? Like, it’s not, you know, not the end of the world there. So…
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, no, hold on. If I have to buy a $5,000 computer, you have to renovate your f***ing office.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not a renovation to put new lights in. Like, that’s not, you already have two… You have to open up
⏹️ ▶️ John the ceiling. Right, but it’s not, you already have two fixtures up there, right? Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that means you have two power sources. You can get very large, very wide, huge illuminated
⏹️ ▶️ John fixtures from those two existing holes in your ceiling. I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think about that. Yeah, just have them span
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John out from those?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what I did in this room. The room I’m sitting in has only one light in the room. Dead center of
⏹️ ▶️ John this place is a little wire coming out of the ceiling, light there and for years I had like these circular lights that
⏹️ ▶️ John are, I don’t know, it’s kind of like, you’ve seen them, little round circular things that just sort of stick up on your ceiling,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Yeah, like every light fixture is. Just like a dome, like a dome light, you know
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, yeah. Right, and there’s a million of them in Home Depot. I used to have to shop for the one that were the lowest profile
⏹️ ▶️ John because my ceilings are very low in this thing. And that’s what I would get. And like you, you’d
⏹️ ▶️ John be limited in how much light can you get out of a dome thing? You don’t want it to be harsh, so it has to be like frosted.
⏹️ ▶️ John and you want it to go in all directions, but it’s just a dome light, and you’re limited by the amount of light output you can
⏹️ ▶️ John get from that. Eventually, after seeing those things die and replacing
⏹️ ▶️ John the lamps in them, and then replacing the entire fixture when it dies,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I went through that several times, I said, well, all right, so there’s one tiny little hole in my ceiling, but you can put a way bigger light
⏹️ ▶️ John than that one tiny hole. And so what I got was, this was years ago, but what I got was a
⏹️ ▶️ John fairly huge, like five foot long fluorescent light fixture that instead of having
⏹️ ▶️ John light from one little dome thing, now I have five foot by one foot strip of light with
⏹️ ▶️ John multiple fluorescent bulbs in it that puts out way more light than any dome light that I’ve ever had.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, you probably don’t want fluorescents.
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t. And you have more than one place, but the thing is, I didn’t need to make any new holes in the ceiling. There was no renovation.
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting. I just used the existing hole that was in my ceiling and screwed this thing up into
⏹️ ▶️ John the studs in the ceiling and it was fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t think about that
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not saying you do this yourself, but you could look at how far apart your light things are and see if you can
⏹️ ▶️ John get one of those things that’s like a giant carpet of lights inside a frosted type thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s just like a giant glowing thing. What you want is like the equivalent of when you get bigger
⏹️ ▶️ John fans inside your PC case instead of what you have now is a tiny fan. You’re trying to spin it faster and faster RPM.
⏹️ ▶️ John You need a big fan, big, lazy, slow moving fan of light. That’s what you need. So I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know what kind of fixture that is. It’s probably some fancy designer fixture or whatever, but you don’t care. So if you can find
⏹️ ▶️ John something that’s like a giant lily pad of light that puts out like 700 watts and get two of them,
⏹️ ▶️ John you will have, and they’re dimmable and adjustable color temperature because these RGB LEDs, like that’s it. You’re all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco set. Well, and that’s, and that’s the other thing too. Like I’ve, I’ve learned, I’m actually like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco light nerd. What I really would prefer to avoid is anything that has its
⏹️ ▶️ Marco own custom like LED thing inside. I want something that has a regular light
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bulb socket so I can pick my own bulbs and ideally lots of them
⏹️ ▶️ John because. But if it has the LED one that’s color adjustable, like and those things last forever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but yeah, first of all, they’re not always color adjustable. They also a lot of times they have weird like CRI, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco color rendering index. Um, many of them are not dimmable. And like I just, I want to be able to adapt to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as LEDs and various lighting technology gets better over time. I want to be able to just like buy new bulbs every few years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stick them in because they’re better. Like, and when you have something that has like a fixed built-in thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco permanently, you can never do that. You’re stuck with it forever.
⏹️ ▶️ John You might still be able to find a thing like that that’s basically like a giant sheet with a frosted cover
⏹️ ▶️ John on it, maybe even vents on the side for LEDs, and then inside it has a bunch of LED bulbs. Like the world of lighting is
⏹️ ▶️ John very diverse. So I feel like if you go to like a lighting specialist and say, and show them your room and say, I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t want to tear anything up. I’ve got two places where electricity comes out of my ceiling. I want megawatts of adjustable
⏹️ ▶️ John lights with adjustable bulbs. I’m sure they can find something that will fit. And your ceilings aren’t low, so you don’t have that problem either.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like you have options.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, maybe. I don’t know. I have a hard time envisioning how I can get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more light out of just the ceiling fixtures. Like even if I put new ones in,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John there goes like-
⏹️ ▶️ John No, you definitely can. Cause that’s, I mean, I’m not saying that’s the total solution because the lighting person will say, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re gonna have your ceiling lights and also you’re gonna have floor lamps. So what you’re trying to do now is like, you’re asking too much of your
⏹️ ▶️ John floor lamps. And floor lamps are annoying anyway, cause they take up room and they’re just a hassle. Like, you know, they shine.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re not gonna bounce light off your red walls or your black behind things, so they’re just bouncing it off the ceiling. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think you’re asking too much of your floor lamps. I think you get better ceiling lights that maybe don’t do the whole job and
⏹️ ▶️ John then reasonable floor lamps that you’re not obsessed with turbocharging and you’ll be much better off.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess. Well, my other option, if anybody knows of a floor lamp that has just a truly tremendous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dome up top that can fit multiple bulbs with one of these adapters, let me know. But I have been unable
⏹️ ▶️ John Let me show you my floor lamp. I had a floor lamps on my other room too. These are the lamps that I’ve hooked up to
⏹️ ▶️ John my voice thing because it was a pain in the butt to keep turning on and off floor lamps because they’re on ones on one side of the room, ones on the other.
⏹️ ▶️ John These are not great, but they’re better than all the alternatives I had. They’re what you talked
⏹️ ▶️ John about, like there’s no replaceable bulb, they’re LED, they’re color adjustable, they’re dimmable, they’re aimable,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they don’t put up that much light, but I have two of them and I don’t need them to be super bright, but these are so much better than the
⏹️ ▶️ John long series of floor lamps that I had before this. Oh, that’s pretty cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re also surprisingly short. I don’t particularly recommend them for your needs. They’re not powerful enough to do what you want.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it was a nice solution that I was happy to find.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, if I just line the whole wall with these, if I get like eight of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, they do put out a lot of heat. These are part of the things that are peeling the paint off of my house. You can see where all these lamps
⏹️ ▶️ John are. They’re shining up on like the trim around my ceiling. And you can see all the paint peeling off
⏹️ ▶️ John from where the lights are. It’s just from the heat. From the heat and maybe the UV from when it used to be like halogen
⏹️ ▶️ John and incandescent and fluorescent, now we’re onto LED. I don’t, I just put these
⏹️ ▶️ John in there for your curiosity, but just to see where the sort of cheap dorm room floor lamp has
⏹️ ▶️ John moved on from. This I think is a superior version of that Ikea lamp, albeit
⏹️ ▶️ John at like three times the price.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And without replaceable bulbs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, yeah, but these things are gonna last forever. Like they’re, the LEDs in there are not, it’s not bulbs, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s part of the fixture. And it’s, you can see the sort of venting around it. It gets hot and everything, but I have faith that these
⏹️ ▶️ John will last a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, maybe I’ll look into some of these. But yeah, I mean, I just, I have a hard time thinking that anything is gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be better than getting new ceiling fixtures. But I thought that would be only invasive.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but you do need to do both. Like any lighting person’s gonna tell you, you probably can’t get away with just floor lamps or
⏹️ ▶️ John just ceiling fixtures or just desk lamps. It’s always some combination of things, right? So if you get a combination,
⏹️ ▶️ John it lets you balance it and not have to go nuts on any one fixture.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, so a few people in the chat are suggesting that I look into the Philips Hue line of things. I have, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually, we have a couple of Philips Hue bulbs. One of the steps I took when I was multiplying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the number of light bulbs in my pole lamp was, I at one time had four
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Philips Hue Ambience, the white ambience bulbs in there. Because another one of my harebrained ideas that I had in this area
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was I thought, wouldn’t it be nice if I had like adjustable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco white temperature bulbs, basically, that would automatically adjust with time of day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So in the morning and the evening, they could be a little bit on the warmer side. In the middle of the day, they could be on the cooler
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and brighter side, and they would automatically adjust with the sun. What a great idea. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it turns out that doesn’t work. No one makes that work correctly. I don’t care. Please don’t email me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whatever you try. So the Phillips Hue way to do that was not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great, and I never got it to work well. Also, Phillips Hue has a massive issue, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is they just don’t make bright bulbs. And I don’t really know why. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, Phillips Hue has made only up to like 60 watt equivalent bulbs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the entire time they’ve existed. They’ve been around for a number of years now. They don’t make brighter bulbs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than that. Why? Surely by now, you have the technology. I know it would have to be a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bigger, but like lots of other brands are making lots of other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco LED light bulbs that are way brighter than that. surely Philips can make brighter than 60
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watt equivalent bulbs because that’s just not enough light for almost anything. So I didn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that didn’t last long. I then decided to try the LIFX bulbs because LIFX
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not only has brighter bulbs but also has a built-in feature in their app to do exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that thing with the sunlight timing of the of the color temperature of the light. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have never had a set of less reliable home automation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smart home things than LIFX bulbs. They were so bad and so unreliable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that a few weeks ago I just threw them away. I deleted the app off my phone and just threw
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the bulbs in the trash can. Like I just was so frustrated with them never working right, staying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on constantly, or not responding and staying off, or like three of the four bulbs in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fixture would turn on and one wouldn’t randomly. Like just they were so unreliable I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing but bad experiences with LIFX and Philips Hue is just disappointing like I we have them in a couple of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lamps at the on end tables in rooms that don’t need much light and that’s the only thing I found that I use for them for.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have very good luck with using regular light bulbs that I can replace in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smart switched outlets like I have I use Belkin Wemo switches there’s a bunch of other ones too they work fine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like switched outlets work very reliably for me so I’m happy with that leave it at that leave the light bulbs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dumb and leave the outlets smart. All that is to say I think I’m kind of stuck
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here except I guess I should just do what John says and change the ceiling fixtures but possibly not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a way that destroys my ceiling.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you should be very used to dealing with people for
⏹️ ▶️ John design considerations for home stuff and I’m not saying you’re gonna use the same people but talk
⏹️ ▶️ John to a lighting person like again you’re Mr. throw money to the thing to solve it. Get someone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like you know, we’ve we’ve done home renovation stuff. I got I we have people we can call for this, but like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t it’s just it’s going to be sort of structure because like if you have to do anything if they do have to cut into the ceiling to install more fixtures,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which I think would be ultimately the best solution would just be like to install a bunch of can lights, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John if they have to do that can lights. No, why not? There’s a reason why people do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can set parameters on them. You can say we don’t want you to wreck the room. We have two
⏹️ ▶️ John places where power comes out of the ceiling. What can you do with two fixtures? assuming those two fixtures aren’t right on top of each other and they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John widely spaced in the room, you have a lot of options. You have a lot of options what you can do there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The room is a big rectangle and the fixtures are two fixtures that are like in the middle, you know, offset. Like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where you would put, if you only had two fixtures in a big rectangle, it’s where you’d put
⏹️ ▶️ John them. Yeah, so I feel like you have a lot of options just with those two things. They,
⏹️ ▶️ John all you would need to do is, you know, attach more things to your ceiling, but you wouldn’t need to repaint anything. You wouldn’t need to cut
⏹️ ▶️ John into anything. Like there’s, the power is already there. The switching is already there. And then it would just be like that,
⏹️ ▶️ John and where do I put the accent lights, and how do I arrange things? And I feel like you can come up with a reasonable solution,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, just set the parameters. So yes, I know you could destroy this whole room and come up with this whole new lighting scheme, but let’s say we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna leave everything where it is, because I think two outlets in a room that size plus four lamps is plenty.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, suddenly I’m feeling better about my $5,000 iMac Pro and $2,000 laptop,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco because I don’t have to destroy my entire office
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to fix the problem. He doesn’t have to destroy it either,
⏹️ ▶️ John recommended a $20, $22 floor lamp, and I recommended a $60 floor lamp. So we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John still in the realm of still cheaper than your box that would connect
⏹️ ▶️ John your terrible laptop to its two terrible monitors. Oh my god.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Right, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I shouldn’t have brought this back up.
Catalina tech support
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, John, tell me about Microsoft Office’s Open and Save dialog in Catalina, please.
⏹️ ▶️ John This was my most recent family tech support adventure and it reminded me
⏹️ ▶️ John of how many problems people have with Catalina
⏹️ ▶️ John and how people who aren’t into this type of stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John are going to be kind of out to sea. So this was my parents telling me that they had gotten
⏹️ ▶️ John it. So let’s start from step zero. It upgraded to Catalina. They don’t know what Catalina
⏹️ ▶️ John is. I had to surmise that they’d upgraded to it, but it happened. Like without me, without my participation
⏹️ ▶️ John intervention, it just goes to show that Apple pushing updates on regular people is having a real effect.
⏹️ ▶️ John Somehow, somewhat, like if you had asked them if they wanted to upgrade the OS, there’s no way they would say
⏹️ ▶️ John yes, but somehow it happened to them.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Like, like white
⏹️ ▶️ John BMWs, it just happened to them. You know, so I’m surprised, you know, who knows how long they’ve been running
⏹️ ▶️ John it, but I start talking to them and it becomes totally clear that they have running Catalina, whether they know it or not, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And of course, once they were in Catalina, it told them that a bunch of their old software is no good, so they got a new version
⏹️ ▶️ John of Microsoft Office. So good for them, they bought software, even though software like batteries to people of
⏹️ ▶️ John that generation should be free. You know, who buys software? I can’t even get
⏹️ ▶️ John to, I struggle to try to get them to buy like more iCloud storage so I could stop seeing the messages for their five
⏹️ ▶️ John gig, you know, anyway, somehow, some way, they bought Office. Because I guess they consider that real software because they
⏹️ ▶️ John were in like the workforce long enough for like Microsoft Office, well that’s real software, I’ll pay for that, anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John they paid for a new version of Office. So they’re Catalina and the new version of Office.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they don’t know how to use any of this stuff because the new version of Office is different, Catalina is weird and so on and so forth. And my
⏹️ ▶️ John father was in a panic because he had tried to get some Excel document and he had tried
⏹️ ▶️ John to email it to somebody but he accidentally emailed the wrong thing and he couldn’t find the Excel document that he just worked
⏹️ ▶️ John on. He’s like, I know it’s there somewhere but I don’t see it anywhere on my hard drive, where is it? He said something about
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like in a cloud or no, it’s in a drive or something. So I gotta, you know, parachute
⏹️ ▶️ John in for tech support and figure out what’s going on. I mean, my best guess was
⏹️ ▶️ John I know the new version of Office pushes OneDrive pretty heavily. And from the words they were saying, I think they were reaching
⏹️ ▶️ John for like OneDrive and that could explain why they don’t see it on their computer, because it saved them OneDrive or whatever. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John and pro tip for people who haven’t done tech support for anyone in their family recently,
⏹️ ▶️ John or and or are doing it the old fashioned way, you gotta take control of their screen. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t, texting, them on the phone, like email, you just shoot yourself in the head.
⏹️ ▶️ John You have to take control of their screen. It’s pretty easy with messages. If you have an Apple computer and they have an Apple computer,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can say ask to share their screen, have them say yes. It’s such a relief, oh my God. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I share their screen, see what the deal is. And you know, at that point, and you can hear them talking, so it’s like you
⏹️ ▶️ John have real-time audio communication, you’re both looking at the same screen and you are controlling the cursor. That’s the way to get
⏹️ ▶️ John it done. So we go and he’s like, here’s my thing, but I don’t know where it is and blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it turns out, you know, when you go to the open save dialog box in Office and Catalina,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was showing like OneDrive. Like the left sidebar was like, this is your OneDrive. It didn’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John list like Dropbox. It was like, here’s your OneDrive and your various folders in OneDrive and so on and so forth.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we could find the spreadsheet that they were talking about in OneDrive and open it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m like, this is the spreadsheet you’re talking about. Right? I’m like, okay, great. well, I’m just gonna save this on your computer. So I go to save and
⏹️ ▶️ John you get the save dialog and the save dialog box also shows OneDrive. And so I’m looking for the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John to say, I don’t wanna see OneDrive, I wanna see my computer. In OpenSave dialog boxes over the decades,
⏹️ ▶️ John there were many ways that applications can extend the OpenSave dialog box on macOS,
⏹️ ▶️ John some official, some unofficial. Most of the ones you’ll see these days, like the
⏹️ ▶️ John bottom portion of the OpenSave dialog, you can put some UI there. So in this case, there was a kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John ungainly UI that Office was putting there. There was a button on the left that said, on my Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John or something, or go to my Mac, or save on my Mac or something. It was a weird button, like it wasn’t worded
⏹️ ▶️ John very well, but it was clear that this button, if you click this button, it would stop showing OneDrive
⏹️ ▶️ John and start showing your hard drive, right? And I have that same version of Office, which I preemptively
⏹️ ▶️ John bought because I’m gonna eventually someday upgrade Catalina too. So I needed a version that
⏹️ ▶️ John was all up to date. I didn’t recall seeing that button. I don’t think it was the default, but somehow
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe they clicked that button and got confused. So I see that button, it says on my Mac or whatever, and I click it,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the OpenSave dialog box goes away. Just slides
⏹️ ▶️ John back up. It’s like, boop, goodbye. What? Okay. And so the document is still
⏹️ ▶️ John open, but it’s open in OneDrive or whatever, and I could just install OneDrive or mount it and take the thing off, but
⏹️ ▶️ John now I want to figure out what the hell’s going on here. The button says like on my Mac or whatever, and it’s weird
⏹️ ▶️ John for a button to be a toggle, you know what I mean? Like imagine clicking a button in a dialog and the dialog box changes,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like a radio button kind of thing. It’s like the wrong control for this. But anyway, it’s a button and I know you’re limited in how you can enhance
⏹️ ▶️ John the open save dialog boxes, but I’m pretty sure this is the right button. I do it like five more times, same thing happens. You click the button,
⏹️ ▶️ John dialog goes whoop, and it’s gone. Nothing has happened, nothing has been saved, nothing. So
⏹️ ▶️ John then I Google to make sure that that’s what this button is supposed to do. And sure enough, yep, if you click
⏹️ ▶️ John that button, it’s supposed to switch the open and save dialog box to show your hard drive and all
⏹️ ▶️ John be like normal. And at the bottom, the button says like in the cloud or something like that. And you can switch to the other version.
⏹️ ▶️ John And as soon as I found out that’s how the thing’s supposed to work, you know, I put two and two
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey because- Oh, is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this one of the permissions
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, of course. It’s a permission thing. Cause your application has to ask permission to do stuff. And maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John the open save dialog was defaulting to a directory like desktop or documents folder they didn’t have permissions for.
⏹️ ▶️ John And in theory, Catalina should have thrown up a dialog box that says, do you want Microsoft Excel to have access to your desktop? And I would
⏹️ ▶️ John say yes, but it never did throw up that dialog. Now, if you don’t know what Catalina is
⏹️ ▶️ John doing to the permission model, which regular users should not need to know, you would never guess
⏹️ ▶️ John this in a million years, because nothing in your prior history of decades of using the Mac, have
⏹️ ▶️ John you ever had to give Excel permission to view the desktop. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that Office was just eating this error and just being like, I’m out, no access, and not
⏹️ ▶️ John throwing up a Catalina dialogue asking me for permission, like they would never have figured
⏹️ ▶️ John this out. They would have just been like, and they would have thought it was a Microsoft Office bug, and for all I know it is. Maybe it is an
⏹️ ▶️ John Office bug, but it’s a combination of Office and Catalina. So there is probably a way to get
⏹️ ▶️ John Excel to have access to the desktop folder and document, but me being me, I immediately
⏹️ ▶️ John added all of the Office applications to full disk access in the permissions dialog
⏹️ ▶️ John box, because I don’t want to get any more of these calls. And lo and behold, if I put all those apps, give them full disk
⏹️ ▶️ John access in the Catalina permissions dialogue, hey, it worked. You click that button, the dialogue switches, and now you can see their
⏹️ ▶️ John hard drive. And I showed them how to switch back and forth and so on and so forth. So here’s an example of
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft and or Apple really falling down on the new Catalina security model, which I mostly
⏹️ ▶️ John endorse, but it has to work. Situations like that, no regular user is ever going to figure
⏹️ ▶️ John out, unless lots of other people run into it and that’s potentially Googleable. But I don’t even know if they would know the
⏹️ ▶️ John right thing to Google for and my quote-unquote Solution of getting full disk access isn’t really the right solution
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s the type of thing where it’s like I don’t I don’t want to have to deal with this again I just wanted to you know, sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of go back to the old way. I’m not gonna turn off you know system integrity protection or go over that far, but
⏹️ ▶️ John Problems like that frustrating and not encouraging so I guess I guess it is encouraging that
⏹️ ▶️ John they were able to see as I sway up to it Catalina themselves and and didn’t have any particular complaints about the OS,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it turns out the main problem they were having with this application was partially because of Catalina.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s not great. And at least it’s one problem that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s the only one. The only one, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John Have either one of you in your Catalina installs resorted to giving applications full disk access besides,
⏹️ ▶️ John I suppose, terminal, which it’s reasonable to give that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think so. A crash plan, but.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John reasonable too, right? That’s expected, but like, I think most applications expect you to say, oh, just give
⏹️ ▶️ John me access to your desktop. Oh, just give me access to your documents folder. And that’s all I’m ever gonna need and you’re fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure I’ll find this a lot when I actually do upgrade to Catalina, but for now I am avoiding it and I
⏹️ ▶️ John think that is still wise.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I still, I mean, I’m running on my laptop simply because it came with it, but I am not running on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my desktop yet. And I, it’s just, I don’t even think about it most of the time because I don’t feel like I’m missing out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on anything cool by not having upgraded yet. There’s no big features that I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking forward to. There’s nothing, I’m like, oh, I wish I would just upgrade so I could then do X,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I don’t want to because it would cost me time and bugs. Nope, there is nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that. There’s no motivating factors. There’s just nothing yet. I thought Catalyst would be that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I’m still pretty far from being able to do anything with that. And so, no, it’s just nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have no motivation to upgrade on my desktop. use Mojave indefinitely.
⏹️ ▶️ John to use the new Photos app, and I think I would like the TV app, but on the other hand, I don’t want to say goodbye to iTunes
⏹️ ▶️ John for the Music app, so I’m kind of torn. Most of the reason I haven’t upgraded is because I’m terrified
⏹️ ▶️ John of the upgrade process of Photos, which I’ve heard bad stories about, right? But I do want to, I’m always
⏹️ ▶️ John looking for new features in Photos. Any change in Photos whatsoever, presumably a change for the
⏹️ ▶️ John better, so that’s my main draw, but I’m currently able to resist pretty easily.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, yeah, and like I don’t like I had like the music app. Honestly, I think that’s I think it’s a huge step back.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I use it on my laptop. I really don’t like it. There’s there’s significant regressions from iTunes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know what they were thinking with that. I don’t know why they had to mess with it so much, honestly, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever reasons they had, I hope they bring it back soon. I heard there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the column browser and the newest beta or something. If that’s true, that’s great, because that’s the way I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco browse my music and it has sucked on my laptop not having that for so long. But everything about it, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems like it’s either like a wash or a loss in some way, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a risk in some way. And this just doesn’t sound appealing at all to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I got no good thoughts about Catalina, so I’m just gonna keep my mouth shut.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hey, you know what? If you don’t wait for an iMac Pro update, you can buy the current
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iMac Pro and you can install Mojave on it. No matter what it comes with, you can install Mojave on it because it’s compatible. That’s true,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey that’s a good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco point. But if you wait for the next iMac update, you will be forced to have Catalina on it. And if you have a desktop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a laptop, you can have a machine that you use most of the time that doesn’t have Catalina on it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You really are intent on me setting all of my money aflame.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just don’t want to tear my office ceiling apart.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s like I haven’t known you for 20 years or
⏹️ ▶️ John money though. Remember, it’s less. It’s less overall than everything you would have to buy on this long, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John string of computer purchases you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco going to get. That’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Who cares whether you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey now or six months from now? You’re still…
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who cares? It doesn’t matter. It’s true. It doesn’t matter because we’ve talked about it too much.
Follow-up: Amazon chat support
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wants us to know about Amazon’s customer support, quote unquote, text
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tree. Tell me about this.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was in the phone tree thing with text where you’re like, you know, do you want to do this? Do you want to do that? And I was complaining that
⏹️ ▶️ John you have limited options and then eventually you just did ends. I actually have two pieces on this. One, on every product
⏹️ ▶️ John page in Amazon, there on the detail page, there is a link somewhere that says, do you have a problem with this listing? And you
⏹️ ▶️ John can just click that and you immediately get to the thing that you can say, something’s wrong with it, the image is wrong, and you just type a text message.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is a faster way to do this rather than going through the support chat
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that I did. But two, according to Adam, if you’re in that chat thing, just type agent
⏹️ ▶️ John as your text string when you get a chance to type something. Type agent once or twice, and you will eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John get connected with a human in theory. So next time I’m gonna try that. Agent, agent, agent.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you think that actually works because you’re typing agent? Or do you think it’s like this person
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is typing something we don’t recognize three times in a row, we’ll just kick him to a human?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think agent probably. It’s like when you yell obscenities into the phone tree and the thing, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the basic AI recognizes angry customer noises. Or if
⏹️ ▶️ John you just hold down star or hold down zero, there’s all sorts of things that are reasonable signals
⏹️ ▶️ John that you want a human being. And there’s those websites like gethuman.com which tells you how to
⏹️ ▶️ John get a human. Like the thing about gethuman and stuff is usually for phones, I don’t know if they’ve upgraded for text, but this type of thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you used to be fairly assured that if you were typing text chat back and forth,
⏹️ ▶️ John you were probably talking to one poor overworked human who’s chatting simultaneously
⏹️ ▶️ John with 97 people and who’s mostly copying and pasting or using macros to fill in the things. But still,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s human triggering the macros, right? Just to figure out which thing to be triggered. But these days,
⏹️ ▶️ John with advancements in very basic, 70s text adventure
⏹️ ▶️ John level AI and the continued need to drive costs down,
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re not talking to a human. You’re just talking to a text version of a phone tree or
⏹️ ▶️ John some very simple AI. And you really do want to go star, zero, agent,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, to get to the actual human.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What do we want to do from
⏹️ ▶️ John here? I feel like- It’s time for Ask ATP. Yeah. You spend a lot of time on your computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know, I feel like it’s due by Friday where I just wanted to start this whole thing over and apologize profusely for this whole episode.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, you don’t have that option and neither do they.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hey, you know what our listeners do? They buy computers. This is relevant. This is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess. I don’t know. I should have been paying more attention to the clock. But because it’s about me, I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, god. I’m so sorry for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything. It’s fine. Just buy all the computers. It’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, yeah. That’s what I have to do to repent.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want you to do it. They want you to do it. You want you to do it. The only people who don’t want you to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do this are John and half of you.
⏹️ ▶️ John I had a plan that allowed him to buy things, too. I had an acceptable to me plan that allowed him to buy things on
⏹️ ▶️ John Black Friday and get cool new computers.
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#askatp: Learn AppleScript?
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey The amusingly named Ask Dr. Tuna writes, my grandson who is 11 is obsessed with Apple. I gave
⏹️ ▶️ Casey him my old MacBook Pro. Should I encourage him to learn AppleScript or is AppleScript not long for this world?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t have terribly positive thoughts about AppleScript. I find it, because I’m a developer, I suppose,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I find it to be completely inscrutable and not like anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey else, and that’s not a compliment. So I would not encourage AppleScript personally, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s just my two cents. Marco, I’d be curious to hear your two cents, and then we will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let the resident old man round us out and to help tell us what he thinks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love the idea of letting power users automate things on their computers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t love AppleScript as an implementation of that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey idea. Paul Krugman
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Agreed. It is a very difficult language to understand and to write.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It reads really easily. You can look at it and you’re like, wow, it’s so magical. Then you try to write it and it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how do I even know what to say? And then you try things and it’s wrong. I don’t think AppleScript
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a great language at all. I think it’s actually very hostile to try to learn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And furthermore, I think it’s already dead. Like not only is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, does not have a bright future, I think it doesn’t even have a bright present. And it doesn’t, even the past
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has not been kind to it. AppleScript, I think is totally, totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dead. Now, as again, I love the idea of automation, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think there are, I think it’s not the right way anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like there’s some attraction to AppleScript because you might hear
⏹️ ▶️ John that scripting is a sort of an easier, friendlier version of programming
⏹️ ▶️ John and someone’s into Apple, so surely AppleScript is the thing they want, but kind of like JavaScript, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John you might be misled by the name. So no, you should not encourage your 11-year-old grandson
⏹️ ▶️ John to learn AppleScript. On the second half of this question, do you think it’s not long for this world?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it is probably gonna stick around for longer than we all think it should. I mean, it kind of already has.
⏹️ ▶️ John That doesn’t change things. No, your son should not learn AppleScript. No, your grandson should not learn AppleScript. What should
⏹️ ▶️ John he learn at 11? I don’t know. I didn’t do a very good job of
⏹️ ▶️ John getting either of my children interested in programming when they were that age, but eventually my son eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John came around on his own and is learning Swift in his high school class. So I feel like the kids have
⏹️ ▶️ John to show an interest on their own. If they’re into programming, there’s lots of
⏹️ ▶️ John good apps on the App Store that are programming like, I forget what the
⏹️ ▶️ John names are, like Hopscotch and Scratch, and there’s the Swift Playgrounds thing. There’s all sorts of
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. Like, it doesn’t really matter. It’s just that they have to show an interest in it. If and when eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John he wants to get serious about programming for Apple platforms, then yeah, he can start learning Swift
⏹️ ▶️ John and Swift Playgrounds and all that stuff. But it’s a long road and it really,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, there’s, I don’t know, like, encourage him to learn AppleScript. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John like encouraging somebody to be into the accordion.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Like I suppose you can do it,
⏹️ ▶️ John but like they really have to take an interest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco themselves. Now we’re going to hear from all the accordion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John player. I don’t know. Yeah, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not a good, I was trying to think of something like that. You can’t like the,
⏹️ ▶️ John the person has to have an interest in themselves. Like programming is like that. You can’t like lead
⏹️ ▶️ John someone to programming. Like they just, they have to take to it, right? You can put it in front of them. You can
⏹️ ▶️ John say, you can present it and say, here’s the thing you might be into. But if they go, nah, then they’re not into it. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John same thing. put a musical instrument in front of them, see if they’re into it, put a different musical instrument. Like it’s part of being what a parent is.
⏹️ ▶️ John Present the kids with options. But you know, this is the trope that we hopefully are all familiar with
⏹️ ▶️ John from all the media we’ve ever consumed in our entire life. If you push your kid into literally anything,
⏹️ ▶️ John even if they would otherwise like it, they will probably like it less and probably also
⏹️ ▶️ John resent you. So don’t do that.
#askatp: Multiple computers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Chris Cast writes, you guys, specifically Marco Armin, talk a lot about bouncing back and forth between laptops
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and desktops. What the hell, Chris? Where am I on this one? I feel like the last like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey three episodes have been all… Whatever. Anyway, Chris writes, how do you keep all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of your configs, preferences, etc. in sync? Or do you use specific machines for specific purposes?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I guess I don’t need to answer this one, do I, Chris? So Marco, tell me what’s up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mostly just do manual things. Like if I change a preference on one, I’ll change a preference on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other. But overall, my general theme to this is outside
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a few exceptions, like I have like my text mate preferences and I just put those in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Dropbox and whenever I set up a new laptop, I just copy them into the text mates folder and that’s it, you know. And I’ll use Dropbox
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for anything that can be synced easily through Dropbox automatically, but that’s about the extent of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ultimately, what I try to do is try to run as stock of a setup
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as possible, such that I can set up a totally clean install with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way I like to do things within like a couple hours. So it’s not a huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deal. So I actually don’t use a lot of power user tools and workflow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tools, automation stuff. Like the way a lot of people will use things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hazel to automate a whole bunch of stuff moving around, text expander, keyboard maestro,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A lot of these tools that a lot of our friends use that are super powerful, I’ve just not gotten into. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I recently, um, I, uh, on, on years of recommendations, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tried better touch tool on the new laptop to try to customize the touch bar and better touch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tool is just a massive arsenal of power tools.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I ran it for like one night and I’m like, this is too much. I don’t want this. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s, it looked amazing. And if you’re the kind of person who likes that kind of stuff, that’s amazing! But it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so not for me, I very quickly realized, like, oh, this is… this is not what I’m looking for.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, and that was it. Uh, I like to keep things fairly minimally customized. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way, you know, A, I can sit down in front of any computer and get things reasonably, you know, reasonably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done. And B, when I do want to get a new computer or when I’m using multiple computers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s not that much to keep in sync between them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mostly feel the same way. I have gotten very quick at setting up a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new computer these days. So that’s good. I do use Synology Drive. I’ve mostly divorced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey myself from Dropbox. Synology Drive is not perfect. It’s kind of their faux Dropbox,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s not actively trying to be awful, which is an improvement over Dropbox. So that’s good. They’re trying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bust their hearts. It’s not as good as Dropbox. But anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like you said, Marco, I try to stay as stock as I can. And for the things I can’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just synchronize that stuff manually by clicking around in system preferences, for example.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And plus, almost everything I do, all of the stuff that I do is all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in GitHub or some other repository online. So there’s very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little, like in the days of your which we’ve talked about many times on the show like using micro well not john
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but you and i used briefcases on windows which i don’t know if that’s even still a thing but um that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was their like faux r sync um that’s what those did yeah my briefcase i remember
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that yeah yeah i i used them very successfully uh way back in the day when i had a tower and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a laptop and it was i mean it was windows so it was wonky and fiddly but it actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worked pretty well Anyways, I don’t have the, I bring those up to say I don’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a lot of that anymore. And what little I have is stored in Synology Drive or Dropbox
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever your equivalent may be. So it’s not really a problem for me. John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I presume you have like some sort of figurative and or literal firewall between your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey work computer and your Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, like my thing is I don’t actually want the same settings on all of my computers, especially if one of them is a desktop,
⏹️ ▶️ John one of them is a laptop. I don’t have any sort of comprehensive syncing thing. Like Marco, I do keep like my
⏹️ ▶️ John most extensive settings in Dropbox. So BBEdit, I have tons of settings. Honestly, I don’t even know what they all
⏹️ ▶️ John are anymore. All I know is that if I launch BBEdit on a system without my settings, I’m like, what the hell is this? I don’t recognize
⏹️ ▶️ John this text editor. So apparently
⏹️ ▶️ John customizing it a lot. But like BBEdit has native within the application ability to
⏹️ ▶️ John understand and sync through Dropbox. So my entire BBEdit application support folder is in Dropbox. That
⏹️ ▶️ John includes not just all my settings, but all of my like scripts and key bindings and just
⏹️ ▶️ John sample templates and preview CSS files and everything. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s my most important and extensive settings. My browser settings and
⏹️ ▶️ John preferences like that, when setting up a new machine, I will just manually,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m so used to manually dragging preference files in or plist files these days or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll do that. And of course, as you both know, that’s not such a big hassle, even though it sounds
⏹️ ▶️ John like, because how often do I set up a new computer? It’s not that often.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco So when I get
⏹️ ▶️ John my new Mac Pro, guess what? I’m gonna be doing it, I’m gonna use migration assistance, which gets almost all of it
⏹️ ▶️ John done for me, and then on an ongoing basis, synchronizing settings between my laptop at work and
⏹️ ▶️ John my desktop. If there’s a setting that is a new, like they’re both
⏹️ ▶️ John already set up. If there’s a new setting in a new version of OS, I’ll just set it in both places. But
⏹️ ▶️ John my settings on my laptop are very different than my settings on my desktop. Everything you go to in system preferences is different.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m perfectly content to have two different set of settings, even for applications things are different
⏹️ ▶️ John because my work laptop, first of all, for people who don’t work, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John jobs in techno corporate overlord situations, they override
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of settings on your laptop, whether you like it or not. So whatever my preferences are, they have the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John lock set to activate after X number of minutes for security reasons and you know, all sorts of stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I got to deal with that. And then on top of that, I just manually do whatever settings I want.
#askatp: Read receipts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of things I cannot pronounce correctly, is this iMessage Read or Read
⏹️ ▶️ Casey receipts? I always say Read. Okay. All right. So iMessage Read receipts, on or off?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For me, on and about three or four times a year. I wonder if that’s the right answer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s been on pretty much ever since it was a thing. John, let’s start with you. On or off?
⏹️ ▶️ John Off. Always off. The main—and I think everyone should have them off, not just me.
⏹️ ▶️ John The thing that I find most attractive about iMessage and Slack and things like that is that it’s asynchronous
⏹️ ▶️ John messaging. It may seem like it’s synchronous, like you’re in a conversation, but it’s not. The social obligation as far as
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m concerned is that it’s asynchronous. It’s better than getting someone on the phone because if they’re in the middle
⏹️ ▶️ John of something, they’re driving or they’re talking to somebody else, they’re taking a dump, whatever it is that they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John doing, synchronous would mean you need their attention right now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Asynchronous, like iMessage or Slack or any other thing is, you send the message
⏹️ ▶️ John and maybe their phone buzzes or bloops or vibrates or maybe it’s set to totally silent
⏹️ ▶️ John and maybe it’s in another room. But eventually, they’ll see the notification or whatever and see that you
⏹️ ▶️ John got a message. And then at that point, it also doesn’t mean that they then have to respond
⏹️ ▶️ John to you. That’s what a red receipt would make you think, oh, they read my message, why aren’t they responding? It’s better to not
⏹️ ▶️ John know when they read your message. So then you can just think, obviously they haven’t read my message yet. And then so
⏹️ ▶️ John every time a message comes in, you can be like, oh, they just read my message and immediately reply if that makes you feel better.
⏹️ ▶️ John When in reality, they might’ve read your message two hours ago and known that they can’t deal with this right now because they’re in the middle
⏹️ ▶️ John of making dinner or whatever and they’ll deal with it later. So that is the beauty, that is the social pact
⏹️ ▶️ John of asynchronous messaging is that you don’t have to respond as soon as you get a message,
⏹️ ▶️ John you shouldn’t expect it from other people and if we all turn off rhetoric seats, if you’re the type of person who
⏹️ ▶️ John wants to believe that people respond as soon as they read your message, you can believe that and everything will be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John As soon as one person turns on red receipts, then it’s all, the whole system breaks down and now our own
⏹️ ▶️ John habits are actually revealed and everyone just feels bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wow. Now you don’t have Tina set to be on and everyone else off because that
⏹️ ▶️ John No, off for everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey If you really
⏹️ ▶️ John do need to reach somebody, if I need to reach my wife, I can call her on the phone. Like if I need
⏹️ ▶️ John synchronous messaging, that is available to me. I feel perfectly comfortable doing that.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s not the deal with text messages. No red receipts. Sorry,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Dad. Marco. Yeah, I’m totally with you on that. I think that it breaks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the expectation. As John said, it’s like the social
⏹️ ▶️ Marco construct, and it’s like how you expect these communication mechanisms to respond. I don’t expect,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I get a message on my phone and I look at it now or I look at it later,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t expect there to be a difference of something happening as a result of me having looked at it now in a certain way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or not. Like if I, and like, like people talk about like, you know, if you, you can like force touch preview
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a message to not send the red receiver. And there’s all these different things. Just, just disable them because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me, like you sent me that message. It is none of your business when I’ve read it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or even what that means. Like, like what does it mean that I’ve read it? Does it mean that my phone displayed it fully? Does it mean I’ve actually seen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it? Does it mean I’m actually going to respond to it? Who knows? Right. you sent the message, at some point I can respond,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is none of your business when I do that, or if I’ve seen it or anything. Like same reason like on emails,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I disable the loading third party images by default. Because that shouldn’t be enabled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by default. I feel like, because that enables the same kind of thing. It enables through various like douchey email apps, it enables
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people to have red pixels on their emails to you. And the same thing, I think that’s grossly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inappropriate. I know like, you know, certain employers set this up and require this for their employees,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I think that’s gross. It’s like, I don’t look at my wife’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone because I consider that like an invasion of privacy. It’s like, that’s like her brain. Then that would feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird. Like I don’t poke around. I don’t look at her messages. Like that would feel gross
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and like a weird overreach. I think red receipts are that same level of thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s that same level of like, that’s too much. That’s too far. That’s too much like surveillance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of my behavior. And you, the sender of this message, don’t deserve that information
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from me. That’s creepy. And you don’t need this information, and you shouldn’t want it, and you shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And it’ll make you feel better not to have it, because then you can choose to believe whatever you want to choose to believe
⏹️ ▶️ John about Marco’s interaction with your text message. And I think most people will want to choose to believe he
⏹️ ▶️ John must not have seen it until the moment before he replied. You can happily believe that, and Marco will allow you to continue to have
⏹️ ▶️ John that fiction if it makes you feel better. Exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I have them on. I think I’ve always had them on. I can’t recall that ever having knowingly been a problem,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but you do make, you both make a very compelling argument. So. You’re a giver, Casey. That’s me, I’m a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey giver. All right, I think that might do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, ExpressVPN, and Linode, and we will talk to you next
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Margo and
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey wouldn’t let him, cause it was accidental, oh it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was accidental. It was accidental And you can
⏹️ ▶️ John find the show notes at atp.fm And if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M The anti-Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A It’s accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, accidental, tech podcast so long.
Follow-up: Casey’s “accident”
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we didn’t talk about during follow up the legal question
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had from last week in my story about my car getting bumped and what happened with that. The car is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back. It’s been repaired. It looks great. I am very thankful for that. I got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of flack on Twitter and a little bit over email about the way I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had handled the situation and what I had talked about on the podcast. And what I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I said on the podcast was, geez, it seems weird to me that this person
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t get some sort of citation or infraction for impacting their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey automobile into my automobile, which seems to me to be something that really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey should not happen. What was it you said on Neutral, John? Cars shouldn’t bump, something like that?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey touch. Don’t let them touch, right. That’s right. I got a lot of flack for this and I wanted to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very quickly address the flack that I received and then talk about the actual question.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But to start with the flack, I think even though almost everyone who said something said it extraordinarily
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco so thank you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone, I do think that there was actually some amount of truth to what was being said, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a white guy calling the cops for something that is admittedly minor is kind of the definition of privilege. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think I had appropriately recognized that at the time in which we spoke last week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I am sorry for that. I really am. I think I should have been more self-aware than the way I acted last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey week. That being said, the reason I called the police was because what I didn’t mention on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the show last week – and I’d love to blame this on Marco having had too heavy a hand with the editing knife, but it wasn’t him
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at all. I just didn’t bring it up. This time. This time. On two separate occasions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my past. I have had minor bumps or something like something roughly equivalent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to what happened. And at the time of the issue, the other person said, this was my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fault. Here’s my insurance, blah, blah, blah. And I did not call the cops and I thought everything was copacetic or everyone agrees.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’re all happy. We’re going to go our separate ways and we will handle this like adults. And in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey both of those occasions, the other person said, oh no, that wasn’t me or oh no, I didn’t do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything wrong and fought us on it. And I can give you the whole details,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s ultimately irrelevant. The point is we got burned twice where we tried to just handle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it like adults and it didn’t get handled and we ended up either footing the bill or our
⏹️ ▶️ Casey insurance had to deal with it because their insurance wouldn’t pay because their person said they didn’t do it, blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So the reason that I called the cops in the first place was because I will never make that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mistake again. Now, some people said you should never do that over a bumper. That’s fine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you are able to roll with it like that That’s fine And I don’t mean this to be a jerk if your car doesn’t matter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to you that much or if your paint doesn’t have to Be pristine. That’s awesome. I kind of wish I was like that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but that’s not me. I want my car to look pristine I’m proud of my car looking pristine. I wash it as often
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as I can because I want it to look pristine That’s the way I am. So that’s why I called the cops. I do think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was a bit unreasonable that I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel like I was seeking a citation, but it is unreasonable if I was. And if I came across that way, then that’s my fault
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m sorry. Now to answer the actual question, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had a couple of different thoughts. First of all, what I didn’t reasonably appreciate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey last week, which I did since think about and do appreciate now, is that there is some amount of subjective
⏹️ ▶️ Casey application of the law. And I don’t remember if somebody said this to me or if I had an epiphany, maybe an apostrophe, that’s a reference.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyway, I had an epiphany that if I get a speeding ticket, I will want that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey officer to be as lenient as they possibly can be and give me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as low of a speeding ticket as they possibly can. If that’s OK, then it should be OK for this person
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who ran into me to also get let off. I don’t think I appropriately appreciated that last week. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to answer the question, Chris, who is either current or former law enforcement officer from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oklahoma wrote in and said, when I go to collisions that I know I won’t work, for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey example, private property collisions with no injuries, I use my body camera and still get statements from both parties. I then explain that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I won’t be working the collision, but their statements will be recorded if there’s any dispute. The insurance companies can then subpoena my body
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cam footage if needed. For potential laws that are broken, you guys started to hit on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right things. There is, of course, falling too closely or failure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to devote full time and attention, for example, looking at a cell phone. But now, if we have something like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, my foot slipped off the brake, or, oh, the light turned green. I thought the car in front of me was going, but they didn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They have an ordinance in Christmas City, which is called careless driving. And it’s kind of a catch-all that basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just states you drove in a way that caused damage to someone else’s car. And I thought that was a pretty succinct
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and interesting answer to our question of, how could they have been cited, whether
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or not it was necessary, how could it have happened? And there’s your answer.
⏹️ ▶️ John To touch on a few more aspects of this, I think you, uh, your thing about, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John getting into a situation and not involving the authorities and then getting, uh, burned on a later, because then it’s just your word against
⏹️ ▶️ John theirs. And there’s no sort of third party and there’s, you know, no one taking statements in the moment and so on and so forth. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s advice that is handed out often. Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John some, some or all of us may have gotten that advice from parents or other adults in our lives saying, if you ever do get into
⏹️ ▶️ John an accident, even though it seems like you and the other person are in agreement about what happened,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a good idea to call the police to report it and get a statement in the
⏹️ ▶️ John moment and get witnesses and all sorts of other things, because if you don’t, this bad thing could happen
⏹️ ▶️ John to you. I think that actual advice is another example of what you were getting at before with privilege.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you are at the top of the food chain in terms of privilege in
⏹️ ▶️ John this country, of course, it’s natural for you to call on the authorities because it’s all upside for you. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John Nothing bad is going to happen to me. And they are going to come in, and they’re going to protect my rights, and
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re going to protect me. That’s the expectation. By calling in the authorities, I’m calling them
⏹️ ▶️ John to come and protect me. The thought doesn’t enter your head that I’m going to call in the authorities, I’m going to be dead in an
⏹️ ▶️ John hour and a half. That doesn’t enter your mind if this is the type of advice you’re getting. And similarly, if your parents are
⏹️ ▶️ John giving you this advice, that the first thing you should always do in any situation like this is call the authorities, chances are you’re probably
⏹️ ▶️ John white. And if you’re not,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey your parents might be
⏹️ ▶️ John giving you very different advice. And that’s something that we
⏹️ ▶️ John tend not to think about. And that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad advice because Casey’s examples,
⏹️ ▶️ John in accidents, it is a good idea to not just trust the other person to say exactly the
⏹️ ▶️ John same thing as I said before. It is a good idea to sort of get down what happened. Like it’s a difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John situation because we should, I mean, we would like to live in a world, in
⏹️ ▶️ John a society where it was a level playing field, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m honestly, I’ve been in a lot of these situations. I was discussing this with my wife. I’ve been in a
⏹️ ▶️ John minor, you know, someone bumps into my car when I’m parked or something and I see it
⏹️ ▶️ John happen, you know, or like we’re stopped at a stoplight and someone touches my bumper or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’ve, sometimes that situation, I won’t even get out of the car because I’m driving
⏹️ ▶️ John an old beater and it’s already got dents all over the bumper. And it was like the world’s smallest
⏹️ ▶️ John bump. And I just give him a dirty look and you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John And we just all go on our way because, like, you just can’t even deal with it. Right. But in other situations,
⏹️ ▶️ John if there’s actual car damage, it is actually important to get things under control. And you do have to take an assessment. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John this is one of the other things that you were getting yelled at. Casey is like the idea that, uh, another, another aspect
⏹️ ▶️ John of your potential privilege, I don’t think people just made this assumption because they made this assumption, but potentially it’s like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey is, you know, comfortable in his life and is able to absorb the cost of this bumper. whereas
⏹️ ▶️ John the poor defenseless person that hit them, obviously, is on their last penny
⏹️ ▶️ John and can’t afford anything. And so how dare you extract money for this thing in any sort of exchange
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. That may be true. It may be this person was, you know, this was their on their
⏹️ ▶️ John last penny and they’re driving to a job interview that they need to keep their rent or a Zara Logan and die. Like this,
⏹️ ▶️ John that could be true. And that is a reasonable thing to take into account when deciding
⏹️ ▶️ John how you are going to handle a situation like this in an accident. But Casey didn’t say anything about whether
⏹️ ▶️ John this person was driving a Bentley or not. For all you know, they were driving their parents
⏹️ ▶️ John Lamborghini SUV. Does that change your opinion about whether they should buy the $500? Like people’s sense
⏹️ ▶️ John of justice, right or wrong depends a lot on
⏹️ ▶️ John like the relative power and financial positions of the people involved
⏹️ ▶️ John in the minor fender bender. So I think and again, Casey didn’t say anything. He he just said this person
⏹️ ▶️ John was young. Now, just saying you’re young, we say, well, obviously young people have less money than older people. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John true too. So that may have been the situation. And I think it is good to take that into account. I just think there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not, without all the details, it’s very difficult to say what the quote unquote right thing to do is. And another
⏹️ ▶️ John point related to that a lot of people brought up is sometimes you just do a nice thing by just eating
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And Casey, willingly or not, did that in these two other times that he talked about
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco where he just ended up
⏹️ ▶️ John eating it. And someone else got something nicer and he didn’t particularly do it willingly,
⏹️ ▶️ John but sometimes, like, I kind of feel like that’s sort of what, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John can happen if, like, in this situation where I don’t even get out of my car. But on the other hand, it’s like, I’m also saving
⏹️ ▶️ John myself the hassle of dealing with it at all and just be willing to say in that moment, my bumper
⏹️ ▶️ John is already destroyed. I know this didn’t make it any worse. I’m just gonna, like, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John actually easier for everybody, including me, involved to not worry about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But on the other hand, if it’s a serious accident, or it’s a brand new car, or someone bumps into the
⏹️ ▶️ John bumper of my Ferrari someday, I’m probably going to get out of the car. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John will probably exercise my privilege and get the police involved, as long as I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like by doing that I am not putting anyone else in danger. As in,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s another rich white dude who bumped me into the bumper. I think that’s the correct level playing field.
⏹️ ▶️ John They bumped me with their Ferrari. I feel like that’s that is a reasonable thing to do
⏹️ ▶️ John and if your main concern is not getting screwed over by someone changing their story and everything
⏹️ ▶️ John seems to be you know on the level with respect to putting people in danger
⏹️ ▶️ John then I think that is also a reasonable thing to do. I don’t know if Casey wants to talk about details of what kind of car
⏹️ ▶️ John hit them or how old the person was or you know anything else about them that might change your opinion of whether he
⏹️ ▶️ John should or shouldn’t have called the police but the bottom line is that he didn’t seem to work out okay, so I think,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, he probably didn’t act in an unreasonable manner.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I appreciate it. No, I think I did say last episode it was a reasonably modern Jeep Compass.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if that made the final edit, but I don’t know, I would say it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey five, maybe ten years old and it seemed to be in good repair. You know, it wasn’t like the bumper was falling off
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or anything like that. I’ll also say that if the impact resulted in just like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a scratch or something, or like a little bit of paint that maybe I could have gotten out with like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey compound or something, I would have just driven off and called it a day. But there was a clear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey issue with the car. Now maybe to you, listener, the issue was not enough to get your junk in a wad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over, but it was enough to get my junk in a wad. And so that’s why I acted the way I did. But I got enough
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very angry people yelling at me on Twitter and via email that I wanted to just quickly address
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. And since we haven’t gone long enough talking about everything under the sun.
Tesla Cybertruck
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s talk about the abomination that is the Cybertruck because, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, it’s not that bad. It’s bad. You’re getting clouded by your fanboyism. It’s so bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I guess, I mean, part of my, yeah, it’s hard for me to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accurately and usefully judge the Cybertruck because I am not a truck person. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am a Tesla person, but I am not a truck person. and truck people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are such their own thing that I feel totally unqualified
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to talk about it. All I can say is it looks pretty cool and Tesla
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is doing their usual things of like making a mostly pretty cool vehicle with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few things that are incredibly over-engineered about it that will probably cause production
⏹️ ▶️ Marco delays and problems like they always do. But it does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look pretty cool. I like that they didn’t just do something really pedestrian.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whether it proved useful or not, that’s up to people who know more about trucks than I do. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it looks really weird, but in kind of a good way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sometimes you need that in industries that are kind of stodgy. And the pickup
⏹️ ▶️ Marco truck industry has been stuck for quite a while in making things that look pretty much the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same all the time. And there are good reasons for some of those decisions, but not for all of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so this is, it looks pretty cool. And you know what, you gotta give Tesla credit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They announce a bunch of really weird stuff and stuff that seems really out there and really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ambitious. They actually do most of it. They actually end up shipping most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the things they announce. And it might take longer and it might have some problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at first, but they do usually ship the things they announce like this. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I gotta give them credit. Like, they’re doing more crazy stuff, and it seems to be working, and no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one else is doing the stuff they’re doing. So, cool. Michael-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I quit the show. Geoff-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But, I’m not saying I’m buying one, or you should, but like-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Michael- Oh, no, it’s so- No, just no, Michael. The only thing I agree with in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what you just said was that it is cool that they’re doing something different. That,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Geoff- Hey, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know what? Since we already spent all of my money and your money on this show, maybe John can buy the Cybertruck.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Michael- John! John, it’s your time to shine. Now, I feel like if Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did the computing equivalent of this announcement, I didn’t even watch the presentation because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone I know, even the Tesla fans said it was a disaster so I didn’t feel like I needed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to. Well, I didn’t watch the presentation either. I know the whole window breaking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing. Right. If Microsoft did whatever the computing equivalent is of this announcement,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you and me and John would be beating the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco snot out of them. Probably.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Elon and because it’s Tesla, oh, everything’s okay. Don’t worry. I think this thing is ugly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from what little I know of trucks and how they work and what’s important and useful to them. It doesn’t strike me as a particularly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good pickup truck. Yes, it’s very strong, but other than that, like it’s not, it’s not a very good utility
⏹️ ▶️ Casey vehicle. I, it, it, no, it just, it looks stupid. It doesn’t have side mirrors.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It doesn’t have windshield wipers right now. It’s a frigging triangle. Like everything about this almost
⏹️ ▶️ Casey offends me, which makes me wonder if this is old man shouting at cloud. So I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I, this just, I feel like there’s so much that I can applaud
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about what Tesla’s done, even in the cars that I have issues with. Like I really dislike the model
⏹️ ▶️ Casey three’s a single screen in the center thing. I really wish
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it had an instrument cluster, for example, but I can get behind that that is something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different and isn’t necessarily just for differences sake. Whereas this just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seems like nobody said no to Elon and it just doesn’t seem useful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me. I haven’t heard Connected, so I don’t know if they had a chance to talk about it, but I have spoken to Stephen Hackett
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little bit privately, or we have spoken to him privately, and he, from what I gathered, did not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seem overly impressed with it either. I don’t know. John, what’s your thoughts?
⏹️ ▶️ John This product, I feel like, might… I, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John hard to think of it as like, is this a good car? Is this a good product for Tesla to make? Who is this gonna satisfy?
⏹️ ▶️ John The thing about trucks in general in the United States is most of them are not used as trucks. Just like most SUVs
⏹️ ▶️ John are not taken off road, most trucks are not used as trucks. And that’s why you get all
⏹️ ▶️ John these trucks that, you know, if you start looking at them and seeing how much they cost and what they have, and they have four doors
⏹️ ▶️ John in them, and they have these weird interiors, and they have these like, posh chrome bed liners, I’m just making things
⏹️ ▶️ John up, but like they’re, they’re very fancy trucks. They’re mostly not used as trucks. So whatever, like who am I
⏹️ ▶️ John to say that if you, someone wants a big snarling, giant, ridiculous pickup truck that they never use as a truck,
⏹️ ▶️ John except for like one or two times every few years to like move someone’s couch, fine, let them have it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. That is actually, I think the biggest market for trucks in the United States,
⏹️ ▶️ John the cyber truck, it may actually fill a
⏹️ ▶️ John need in that market for a pickup truck that’s not used as a truck
⏹️ ▶️ John that looks different than all the other pickup trucks not used as trucks. It has to look, it has to fulfill
⏹️ ▶️ John the requirements of that category. It has to be beefy and tough looking and
⏹️ ▶️ John actually tough and intimidating and deadly to pedestrians in a terrifying
⏹️ ▶️ John way that should be illegal. I think it might hit all
⏹️ ▶️ John of those markers. Even the styling, like it’s part of it, the dramatically different
⏹️ ▶️ John styling than other pickup trucks, that might be good for it as a product. Yes, even if
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s ugly, because it stands out, right? The
⏹️ ▶️ John styling itself, like I give them, certainly give them points for doing something that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John different than all the other pickup trucks. I subtract points for essentially, instead
⏹️ ▶️ John of coming up with a new styling, just taking the styling from the, it’s like retro future.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like straight out of the 80s. You could put this thing on a video game box from the 80s
⏹️ ▶️ John or in a movie from the 80s. And it’s like, yeah, no, that’s that. Like it’s not even an homage
⏹️ ▶️ John to that styling. It is literally that styling. So it’s not particularly original because
⏹️ ▶️ John I lived through the 80s and it’s like, yeah, no, that’s the thing. But they’re making it a real car, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So fine, right? I think it’s pretty ugly and ungainly, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John understand the vibe they’re going for and I give them full points for making a weird car.
⏹️ ▶️ John All of that said, I think it’s a terrible truck for people who want trucks. Like it is not
⏹️ ▶️ John a successful, like they haven’t, unlike for example, the Model S, which is a great thing to compare it for.
⏹️ ▶️ John The Model S like is so practical in terms of like a car
⏹️ ▶️ John that has four doors that stand shape, How can we make this the most useful car that’s four
⏹️ ▶️ John doors and standard shape? Because it’s electric, we can do all sorts of things with other four doors cars. So it’s big on the inside. It has
⏹️ ▶️ John big trunks. It has a hatchback. It has the seats in the back. It’s like it does everything that
⏹️ ▶️ John it can to be useful as a sedan. This truck does
⏹️ ▶️ John not do everything it can to be useful as a truck at all. Like everything about it
⏹️ ▶️ John is, it’s the Johnny Ives school, the bad Johnny Absco of like
⏹️ ▶️ John form over function, right? It looks cool to have a giant long slanting windshield, but that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not great for visibility with those A pillars stretching out for a mile. It’s certainly probably not great for water clearance
⏹️ ▶️ John off the windshield and whatever they’re gonna have to do to put a wiper in that thing. The C pillars, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John good for the bed to have those weird slanty things. It’s terrible for your visibility. Like one of the
⏹️ ▶️ John good things that you can have a pickup truck is if the cab pokes out above a flat bed and you got good all-around visibility. Not on the Cybertruck,
⏹️ ▶️ John you got these little tank-like slits. It is not and the bed how big is the bed compared
⏹️ ▶️ John to the rest of the truck? How low does the bed because the battery is under there and all these other things like? How good is electric
⏹️ ▶️ John for towing heavy things like this first of all this thing doesn’t have the towing capacity of like a giant
⏹️ ▶️ John heavy Duty like Ford f-350 or something. It’s not even in that category and even in the f-150 category
⏹️ ▶️ John It remains to be seen how wise it is and how much your range gets destroyed if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John at maximum towing capacity capacity because unlike one of those big trucks you can’t just add more gallons to your gas tank and
⏹️ ▶️ John get more range for you know incredibly cheaply if you want more range and other thing yet I’m more heavy batteries
⏹️ ▶️ John and it cuts into it so I don’t think this is a good truck I said before it doesn’t matter that
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s probably not a good truck but all I’m saying is this thing is not like a it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John a good design design is how it works this does not work well as a truck if how it works
⏹️ ▶️ John is being attractive to non truck buyers then it’s probably a good design. Like it all depends on what your works
⏹️ ▶️ John is. Like, and I think it is reasonable to say what works
⏹️ ▶️ John for the segment is not to be a good pickup truck. There’s plenty of good pickup trucks. We’re not making a good pickup truck.
⏹️ ▶️ John What works in this segment is to be the most appealing thing to someone with $65,000 who
⏹️ ▶️ John wants a big macho truck. And in that case, maybe this design does quote unquote work. I still think it’s a bad
⏹️ ▶️ John car because having bad visibility out of your car is not an advantage. Like no matter what kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of car you make, There’s no car where you’re like, I want the visibility to be as bad as possible. Sometimes it is
⏹️ ▶️ John a side effect. Like in lots of exotic cars, the visibility is terrible. But I think
⏹️ ▶️ John good supercar designs, like the ones from McLaren or like the NSX in particular, focus
⏹️ ▶️ John on outward visibility and say, I know it’s a mid-engine car and you’re going to have a tough view out the rear because the engine is back
⏹️ ▶️ John there. But what can we do? Can we make kind of a glass bubble cockpit? Can we put more visibility in?
⏹️ ▶️ John Can we make it so that the A pillars aren’t blocking half of your field of view just for us will be outside
⏹️ ▶️ John design. Like, at least try. And the Cybertruck’s like, nope, all we care about is this thing looks like a Matchbox car
⏹️ ▶️ John or a kid’s notebook from middle school, and usability be damned. So, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it is an incredibly impractical, unsuccessful truck, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I also think that probably doesn’t matter because that’s not the market they’re going for.
⏹️ ▶️ John I still have disdain for the product, though. Kind of like, you know, like, Like, in a way that I don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John for people who buy fancy, like a Ford 150s, like those are still okay trucks.
⏹️ ▶️ John And maybe you’re over-optioning it and getting leather seats and it’s silly and it’s all polished and you’re never gonna, but at least
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s still, it is still a competent, practical truck. This is, this is not that.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is, if you see someone with this, you know they didn’t buy it because they’re just constantly hauling things
⏹️ ▶️ John back and forth. That’s not why they bought the Cybertruck. And if they did try to buy it for that purpose, they’re gonna be very sad they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John going to break their truck.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I take your point about the Cybertruck maybe not being for truck people,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I have to slightly disagree with you. I think that most pickup
⏹️ ▶️ Casey owners do use their pickups as pickups. I think they do it more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey often than you think. I do ultimately agree with you, though, that in my world,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the amount of times that I would want to pick up, I think that they’re silly and wasteful. But that’s me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of people, they couldn’t use any other car nearly as easily. Take
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Stephen, for example, he puts his bike or bikes in the bed of his pickup a couple times
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a week, if not more. And yes, you could do that in the back of Aaron’s monstrosity. You could even probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put a rack on the back of your Accord, John, but it is easiest to do that in a pickup. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think that, unlike SUV drivers, Aaron’s never going to take her Volvo off a road, But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do think that pickups do get used more often than SUVs for their allegedly intended purpose.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That being said, I do think that this is a terrible pickup truck and just a silly, silly
⏹️ ▶️ John car. Just putting something in the bed is like saying, because you put something in your trunk to use your car as a pickup
⏹️ ▶️ John truck. Yes, you will put things in the bed. There’s no place else to put things, although people do buy those little, you know, container,
⏹️ ▶️ John what are the hell those things called? I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey know what you’re thinking of. Backup pickup truck.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, yeah, yeah. Covered containers, you know. Yeah. And you’ll put bikes back there or whatever. all well and good, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John that, you know, you’re not concerned about the towing capacity or like how much
⏹️ ▶️ John it can hold 2500 pounds in the bed. If you’re putting a 98 pound bicycle back there, like you could
⏹️ ▶️ John put a bike rack on the back of your golf and have the same flexibility. Like that’s not just because you put something in the bed doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John mean using it as a truck. I think my bar is a little bit higher there as in you are a painting
⏹️ ▶️ John contractor and you bring your supplies to and from the job site every day with your pickup truck or
⏹️ ▶️ John landscaping or whatever, like you actually use it as a pickup truck where you, a Volkswagen Golf with a bike rack
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hear you. I don’t know. It’s just one way or another. I really feel like the Tesla people,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey including potentially even Marco from the sounds of it, are grading this real heavily on a curve.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John And I mean, that’s fine,
⏹️ ▶️ John But, but, but I mean, I feel like that’s like, I, I was angry that it’s a bad truck, but honestly, like
⏹️ ▶️ John if your goal is to sell to to Tesla fans, a futuristic looking vehicle that
⏹️ ▶️ John is truckier than any of the other Teslas, that no one’s gonna really use as a truck, then this is maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John a successful, viable product. I feel like you can do all of that. You can
⏹️ ▶️ John make a daring, cool looking thing with innovative styling that isn’t particularly a good truck, and also,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the thing that Spellings likes is visibility, because I hate cars with bad visibility
⏹️ ▶️ John for styling purposes, because you’re trying sell more than a thousand of these a year. So don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John like I’m willing to to accept terrible visibility on your exotic hypercar that you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna make more than 500 of. Not willing to accept it on a pickup truck. And then the
⏹️ ▶️ John the giant C pillars that that you know make the bed sides not flat and
⏹️ ▶️ John just sort of compromise the entire utility of a pickup truck of like a flat bed but also flat
⏹️ ▶️ John sides because if you’re gonna try to put anything in there having to deal with those angles and being not being able to get
⏹️ ▶️ John at things from the like these are common activities for pickup trucks like it just you know, there’s kind of a
⏹️ ▶️ John reason that the Subaru brat and the the original Honda Ridgeline like that whole,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know flying buttress C pillar thing It’s not it’s not practical for pickup trucks. So
⏹️ ▶️ John It almost would have been better, you know Well the memes they’re putting out if they just you know If they just put out the halo warthog and said
⏹️ ▶️ John look this is what you want. Like it’s not practical. It’s cool-looking It’s futuristic. It looks like a big
⏹️ ▶️ John Tonka toy matchbox car. It’s the halo warthog The Tesla halo warthog
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s and I think it’s fine to have that product for people who want that type of thing I just
⏹️ ▶️ John hope they don’t drive it on my roads because again, they’re gonna kill more pedestrians with it or whatever, but Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s it’s not for me. It may be for a bunch of Tesla fires, but it’s a bad truck
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s a bad name because what’s cyber about it really that’s not their naming scheme Tesla model this
⏹️ ▶️ John Tesla model that cyber Cyber? Cyber? I mean I guess it fits with the 80s styling? Cyber?