368: A Jacket and Some Pins
05 Mar 2020Fixing Casey’s computer, managing (and backing up) NAS-sized data, and WWDC’s potential cancellation due to COVID-19.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- Feedback & Radar
- Casey's Catalina Catastrophe
- Pegasus J2i
- Certificate revocation
- Ben Thompson and nvALT
- Just Enough Grammar
- How does one back up a Synology?
- WWDC cancellation?
#askatp- What are some of our favorite macOS keyboard shortcuts?
- ⌘ K for VNC/SMB
- ⇧ ⌘ A for Applications
- ⇧ ⌘ 4 for screenshot
- ⌥ ⇧ ⌘ V for Paste and Match Style
- ⎋ during drag
- Drag onto a Finder column heading
- ⌘ Click on the title of a Finder window
- ⌘ ↑ and ⌘ ↓ to go up/down the folder hierarchy
- Xcode
- ⌥ ⌘ / for creating documentation
- ⇧ ⌘ O for quick open
- ⌥ ⇧ ⌘ ⌃ C for Copy Qualified Symbol Name
- Is there a difference between an app's
Open at loginandSystem Preferences→User & Groups→Login Items? (via Jon Mitchell) - If you had to use a co-hosts's machine, whose would it be? (via Nicholas Gaffney)
- What are some of our favorite macOS keyboard shortcuts?
- Post-show Neutral: New BMW logo
Sponsored by:
- Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code ATP for 10% off your first order.
- Away: Whoever you are, and whatever you need to pack, Away has luggage that will help make your next trip more seamless.
- Kolide: User-focused security for teams that Slack.
Chapters
- Introduction
- Radar/Feedback follow-up
- Casey’s Computer Corner
- Pegasus J2i
- SSL follow-up
- Notes follow-up
- Hyphenation follow-up
- Sponsor: Kolide
- Large media backups
- Sponsor: Away
- WWDC to be canceled?
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- #askatp: Mac keyboard shortcuts
- #askatp: Login Items/Open at Login
- #askatp: We swap computers
- Ending theme
- Neutral: New BMW logo 🖼️
Introduction
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Casey, what trackpad are you using?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Look at the show notes, Marco. I saw you using the show notes. There is a time and a place
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me to talk about my computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Casey, what OS are you using?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will say that I did not downgrade, and there are reasons. There are reasons. Most of them came from a,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it was a post-show conversation between the three of us, where I was convinced not to do it yet. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t want to talk about that yet. So
⏹️ ▶️ John who’s going over to kick you?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t know. That’s up to you guys.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hey, give me one moment. I have to go turn the air conditioning on because it’s super hot in here.
⏹️ ▶️ John One sec. Remember when Markos said he was going to hang out above 77 degrees in his beach
⏹️ ▶️ John house? I remember that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I remember that too.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey going to throw on the
⏹️ ▶️ John air conditioning? All right. What the hell temperature is it over there? I just jam my mouse cursor
⏹️ ▶️ John into the lower left corner to try to get dashboard to come up. Aw.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Because I wanted to see what the weather
⏹️ ▶️ John was. It was just instinctive. What temperature is it? Mouse goes into lower left corner. Nothing happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s 46 degrees, but it’s a hot room.
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, you need that AC, you’re right. Get that on. Yeah.
Radar/Feedback follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s start, as we must do, with some follow-up. We had some really genuinely great
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feedback with regard to Radar and Feedback Assistant and my particular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feedback with regard to my Catalina Woes, which we’ll get to in just a moment. According to a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of different people, I believe, feedback or feedbacks, as I guess
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the plural of them, those get turned into radars internally. So Feedback Assistant,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is what the peons, like the three of us would use to file a bug. Those are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their own bucket of things. Those are the feedbacks. And then internal to Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they get turned into radars. And so one of the other things that we had asked about, either on Twitter or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey perhaps here on the show, is I think one of you guys, in fact, brought it up last week. You could do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rdar colon slash slash and then a radar number. And that, on an Apple-owned computer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would give the person a hyperlink directly into radar to that direct ticket.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And according to anonymous people, those links do still work, but the feedback number is different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the radar number. Feedbacks generate a radar when they’re submitted and they get handled internally as the radar.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The feedback number is in a field of the radar, so you can search for or track an issue by feedback
⏹️ ▶️ Casey number or radar number, but if you’re linking to it with rdar colon slash slash, you have to use the radar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey number. And this one particular individual added, I think the idea is that this lets the radar get handled internally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a radar without worrying about confidential information getting transmitted back to the user. I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure about how or when things get transmitted back to Feedback Assistant or the
⏹️ ▶️ John Sounds worse than the old system, or even farther removed from the actual, like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey know, before
⏹️ ▶️ John we threw things into this web thing that went into this bucket that got viewed by a native app, now we’re in
⏹️ ▶️ John this native app that throws things into a bucket that goes into another bucket that gets viewed by the real, and then
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t even know if I do something in radar, how does that propagate back to the customers?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s so disconnected. It’s kind of like a software developer’s relationship with their customers
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Very distant.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love that you’re now one of us. After all this time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I know. It’s like when you got an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone 15 years after the iPhone was released. You finally joined the club. I
⏹️ ▶️ John got an iPod Touch on day one. Same thing, no phone calls. And it was faster,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. It was faster. Yeah, that very first one. It had a slightly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John It did. It was like 10% faster or
⏹️ ▶️ John something. thinner and faster it was obviously better. Who needs to make phone calls?
Casey’s Computer Corner
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so let’s talk about Casey’s Computer Corner. I know that during the main part of the show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I had said that one of you needs to come to Richmond and kick me if I have not yet downgraded to Mojave.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We were discussing before the show, possibly before we went live, who it was that was going to come and kick me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I am still on Catalina. But I have reasons and I have updates. So I will leave it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the two of you to decide who’s going to make the trek down to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Virginia. It sounds like-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John, my finger’s on my nose. It’s John.
⏹️ ▶️ John Mark Osmond had an automatic kicking machine. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey true. Well done. So anyway, so speaking of radars and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feedbacks and things of that nature, we did get an anonymous update on the radar that was created from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the feedback that I had created, complaining and moaning and trying to get fixes for my poor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iMac Pro. And so this anonymous person basically paraphrased,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m now paraphrasing the paraphrase, what they had seen in the radar. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I understand what they said appropriately, and I’m waiting for John to correct me after I make my little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spiel here, it’s that according to Apple, potentially thread
⏹️ ▶️ Casey contention on kernel tasks VM map lock to the point
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the keyboard and mouse events can’t get a lock on this global queue. I’m pretty confident
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I butchered that pretty well. John, can you translate that into something that makes more sense?
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t read the message with that much level of detail. I think you got the gist
⏹️ ▶️ John just lock contention. But why is there so much contention? I feel like that is the, well, two
⏹️ ▶️ John things. Why is there so much contention, first of all? And second of all, why does Catalina handle that contention worse
⏹️ ▶️ John than Mojave, apparently?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, and I have no answers for that. But another thing that was said in the radar, according to this anonymous little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey birdie, is that a bunch of SMB kernel work is to blame. Now, I’m assuming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey SMB in this context is like Samba, like server message block, whatever it’s called, like network shares. And the reason I think that is because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The Apple person noted that MDS and BackupD and more importantly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey CrashPlan Service and Plex were all between them spawning a zillion threads, all doing stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey across the network using what I used to call Samba, basically a Windows-style network shared
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to my Synology. And apparently the Apple person called out CrashPlan as being particularly egregious
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in this department. I’m shocked. And so…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software might be inefficient. Who knew?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s such… It’s so bad. It’s so bad. if you let me, but anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it seemed like that was causing some real problems. Now I agree with you, John, I’m not entirely clear why this is worse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Catalina. Another thing that was mentioned that I didn’t copy to the show notes, now I’m going right off the top of my head, is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that as cores go up, the amount of things that could be asking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for this global lock also goes up. So on an iMac Pro that has, I don’t even know how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey many cores I have, a billion, this iMac Pro, that could actually exacerbate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it and make things even worse which is no bueno. But the reason I didn’t downgrade, other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than some convincing from Marco and John, that again, I don’t think made the released version of the episode,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I decided to take a few different strategies. Now, number one, the thing that everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wanted me to do, which I said I was going to do and then did not do, is try the other track pad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have. I had lamented, mostly jokingly, that it was, oh, it was all the way up in the attic, I need to go get it, blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I went up to the attic, the very moment I stopped recording last week, to get that other trackpad,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that alternate trackpad that came with the iMac Pro. And it was when I got the keyboard and trackpad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey box back downstairs or back into the middle floor, if you will, that I opened it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up and realized, oh wait, I got a mouse with this. I forgot, like a traditional magic mouse.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I completely forgot. Whoops. Right, right. I completely forgot. I didn’t order a new trackpad because why would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I? It seemed like I shouldn’t need it. So the reason I didn’t try it was because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t have an alternate one to try. and I absolutely had planned on and was going to try it. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things, and let me do a little Foley work and knock on my glass desk very loudly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things might be looking up,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think. So you’re still using the old trackpad? Mm-hmm. Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Via Bluetooth, I should add. I’m using it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Did you just simply stop using CrashPlan?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, almost. The first thing, this is terrible, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m also overjoyed that it seems to be getting better. So the first thing I did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was I started turning off CrashPlan kind of strategically. So when I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really sitting down working at the computer, I turned CrashPlan completely off. And there’s a launch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey control command that you can run in the terminal to turn it off. Now, there are settings within CrashPlan to be very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gingerly. You’ll treat the CPU with very soft hands when the user is at the computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I don’t trust their crap software for anything. So I just freaking turned it off. And that helped
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some. All right, listeners, here’s the thing. The other two aren’t listening right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m about to say something that the two of them are gonna have a choice, and they can either beat the crap
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of me for the next 20 minutes, or they can be sympathetic and understanding. So let’s see what happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, so the other thing I did was I took Plex off my computer,
⏹️ ▶️ John much. Why would we complain about that?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because this is my world. My world is my media consumption
⏹️ ▶️ John world. Plex is your world, not running Plex on your Mac. You just have to have Plex running somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can run it on pretty much anything. Yeah. Well, that’s the thing. Oh, did you upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, I want to so badly, but that’s a whole different discussion. I also, we should talk about that later,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but anyways, it occurred to me that I had this Mac mini that was just kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of sitting there that I had gotten from Justin at Mac Stadium.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s old, I don’t even remember exactly what vintage it is, but it is more than enough to run Plex.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it was literally sitting there sleeping in idle, just because I wasn’t doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything with it. I really wanted to have it in the house, just in case, you never really know why, but I wasn’t doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything with it. And it occurred to me, wait a second, why not run Plex on that? And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I did that. Well, I haven’t literally removed it from my iMac Pro, but I have not run it on my iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro in about a week, and I am running it on the Mac mini,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the moment I made that decision, everything started to feel better. That and the combination of Crash
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Plan not running, generally speaking, seems to have almost completely fixed my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey problems, which is both wonderful and deeply depressing.
⏹️ ▶️ John What is Plex doing that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey would relate
⏹️ ▶️ John to contention? Or do you have like, is it in the background making optimized versions? Like how, I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John how it would spawn a bunch of threads. Like Plex is one of the least demanding uses
⏹️ ▶️ John of network and file resources you can imagine. Sequential reading, slow sequential
⏹️ ▶️ John reading of very large files, granted over the network, but it’s not like it’s like CrashPlan where it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John spawning a million threads and trying to read every single file in your file system. It’s doing a targeted thing, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, yes, and I do have Plex looking at my photo library,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I don’t think helps because I don’t think mine is as big as yours. Oh God. I don’t think my photo library is as big as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yours, but I, I am still sure that that doesn’t help
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much. And also I do have it scanning like every 15 minutes for new media or whatever the case may be, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is probably not necessary.
⏹️ ▶️ John The new media, new media scan is nothing but like the photos thing. Tell me, I don’t have a newsplex with photos. What does that
⏹️ ▶️ John entail? Does that, does it crawl in your, your photos library? Like periodically to see if there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is now I still take your point though, John, And I agree with you that it seems odd that moving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Plex away from the iMac Pro has made such a big difference, but it seems like it’s made
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a tremendous, tremendous difference. And so that has worked really well. Now, earlier today, I turned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey CrashPlan on for the first time in a while, and within, I don’t know, a couple of minutes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of that happening, I got a machine gun trackpad. So I think the next step is, and we’re gonna talk about this more later, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the next step is I’m gonna move CrashPlan also onto this Mac mini. Although at that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point, I’m really tempting fate because that Mac Mini is on Catalina, and so maybe I’m just gonna move the problem from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one computer to another, who knows.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t need to use the Mac Mini interactively, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s the other thing, is that who really cares? As long as the thing is functioning,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it doesn’t really matter. So that is probably the medium-term plan. The long-term
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plan, which I’d like to get through the rest of the follow-up before we discuss it, but the long-term plan is I’d really like to just divorce myself of CrashPlan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey entirely and find a different mechanism to back up the Synology, because that’s really what I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after with CrashPlan. After having reloaded to both my laptop and desktop like 44 times in the last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey six months, I’ve gotten to the point that almost everything that’s actually on my computer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is relatively ephemeral. I’m sure there are things that are not, but the majority is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on GitHub, it’s on my Synology, it’s, I don’t know, in iCloud or something like that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it seems like it shouldn’t be a problem to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just get rid of CrashPlan and not have it backing up the iMac at all. And I do have Time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Machine if things really get bad, but in a worst case scenario, screw it. I’ll just reinstall everything on the computer from scratch.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So my question for later, which I really don’t want to get into now, is how do I back up the Synology for less than $100 a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey month? And I’m saying that only slightly facetiously. But in summary,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Mac Mini has saved my bacon. I really appreciate that Justin had sent it my way,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and everything so far seems okay. Now, remind me of that in like 20 minutes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when this thing fails miserably, but sitting here now, it all seems
⏹️ ▶️ John all right. You’re narrowing it down like we talked about by removing things from your computer. It’s just that you’re not removing them temporarily to troubleshoot,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re moving them permanently into another computer that you don’t have to use.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And part of the motivation for moving Plex to the Mac mini was that Plex is the thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is least ephemeral on my iMac Pro. And the reason I say that is because yes, all the media
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is stored on the Synology, literally 100% of it. But the database of what I’ve watched
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and where everything is and all of this metadata and all that other garbage isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stored on the Synology. That was stored on my iMac. And yes, it is backing itself up to the Synology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from time to time, but it’s just a nightmare to, or it would have been a nightmare
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to move Plex to another machine out of like haste or angst, you know what I mean? Like when it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wasn’t on my own terms. And so by having it on this other computer, unless the Mac mini
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blows itself up, that leaves me much more flexibility with the iMac to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey downgrade it or to reinstall Catalina from scratch if I felt like it for some strange reason. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the iMac Pro is much more flexible than it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before. And so yes, you’re right. It’s not a temporary thing with regard to Plex
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyway, but having Plex on its own basically dedicated device has really freed up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of the stress in my world with regard to the iMac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John One more thing about Plex for my troubleshooting with sleep-wake stuff. Plex is
⏹️ ▶️ John not great about, this is a, if you search the web for this you’ll find it’s a bug that they supposedly fixed in the past
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s not great about it. It will grab power assertions that keep your, not only keep your computer
⏹️ ▶️ John from going to sleep but even keep your screen from like going into the screensaver or
⏹️ ▶️ John dimming or switching off, which, you know, it’ll grab them when you ask it to play video,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you ever ask it to play video locally, but then it just will not give them up a lot of the time. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John you won’t be actually playing any video, but because you had previously played video, if you look at PM set, you’ll see that
⏹️ ▶️ John Plex has a power assertion that prevents the screen from even dimming. And it’s the worst because I’ll walk by
⏹️ ▶️ John the downstairs of the house and I’ll say, where’s that light coming from that room? Because all the lights are out. And I’ll look in there and I’ll see that,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the IMAX screen has been on full brightness for the past two hours on the same
⏹️ ▶️ John because something grabbed it power assertion and it’s always Plex so Plex if you’re out there and listening let go
⏹️ ▶️ John of your power assertions when you’re not playing video and people if you have this happening to you Plex may be the culprit
⏹️ ▶️ John the way to fix is just to quit the Plex server and restart it and then it doesn’t have the power assertion anymore but it’s still an annoying
Pegasus J2i
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, tell me, John, about the Pegasus J2i, please.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s my $400 piece of bent metal that holds hard drives that I shoved into my computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John I had it on my desk for a while. I had it on my desk last week. The weekend, I got some time to open up the computer
⏹️ ▶️ John to do it. This is my second time now opening up the computer. I’m still terrible
⏹️ ▶️ John at it. I think this design of getting the internals, once you have the thing off, it’s great
⏹️ ▶️ John because you have access on all sides to the internals. getting it off, not so great.
⏹️ ▶️ John A, I’m bad at it, but B, it is harder. It is way harder than popping the side off of an old cheese grater.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s harder than opening the door on a Yosemite or El Cap plastic tower
⏹️ ▶️ John case. It is a physically difficult thing
⏹️ ▶️ John to do because there’s a lot of friction pulling the thing off, and if you are not pulling exactly straight,
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t come up. And it’s especially difficult because mine is on this little table thingy
⏹️ ▶️ John that is lower than a desk, but higher than the floor. So there is a little bit of awkwardness of trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to lift the thing up. But anyway, that aside, it was all ready to install the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And my first problem was that somehow I don’t have a T8 Torx
⏹️ ▶️ John driver in the house. I have T6, you know, and all the sizes are rounded.
⏹️ ▶️ John T3, it just, I didn’t have a T8, so I had to go out and get another tool, which was kind of annoying.
⏹️ ▶️ John Beyond that, installation went fairly well. My only real complaint is
⏹️ ▶️ John that they give you like a cable to connect to the power and the
⏹️ ▶️ John two SATA ports. You know, on the motherboard there’s a power connector and then two SATA ports and then there’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John big SATA cables that go to the actual drives. And they make a single bundle
⏹️ ▶️ John of ribbon cables that, you know, supposed to fulfill that role.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they tape, it’s like this bundle of interleaved ribbon cables, they tape them together,
⏹️ ▶️ John right, and you would think, great, they know exactly which computer this is going in. They know where all the
⏹️ ▶️ John parts are on the motherboard. They know where the ports are gonna be on the hard drives. This cable should be an exact fit.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it is not. It is not an exact fit. It, like, for starters,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you look at the parts that plug into the drive, they are exactly level with each other. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John the drives are top and bottom. They’re not side by side. you can’t have these things be exactly level.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, it doesn’t make any sense. One of the drives is gonna be higher than the other, therefore one of the connectors has to have a longer
⏹️ ▶️ John ribbon cable on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Otherwise, either
⏹️ ▶️ John one’s not gonna reach or one’s gonna be buckled. Second, the connectors on the motherboard are horizontal.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, it’s the two SATA connectors and the power connector, they’re in a line horizontally. But the
⏹️ ▶️ John little, the things that plug in there are not three different lengths to go into things that are three different
⏹️ ▶️ John distances. They’re all the same length. So I had to untape some of the tape that they had used to tape together
⏹️ ▶️ John this bundle of wires just to try to get it So the things would plug in without kinking too much. I talked to Stephen
⏹️ ▶️ John Hackett He said yeah, I did the same thing He had to remove the tape So, you know, I guess you get what you pay for for only $400 for
⏹️ ▶️ John a bent piece of metal, you know They can’t bother making the ribbon cable be the right length. Oh, and by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s you know, $400 for a bent piece of metal I say that because that’s all I wanted was the bent piece of metal, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it did come with an 8 terabyte hard drive So that’s where some of the cost is. An 8 terabyte hard drive retail
⏹️ ▶️ John value $134 or whatever the hell it is. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John now I’ve got a big hard drive in my computer. I ordered another hard drive to fill the other bay
⏹️ ▶️ John just because I want to one a little bit bigger than the other ones I have laying around. So I’m doing
⏹️ ▶️ John that. I don’t like having a big noisy spinning hard drive inside my otherwise
⏹️ ▶️ John quiet computer, so I keep it unmounted and spun down. Those two things are not synonymous
⏹️ ▶️ John with this computer and Catalina, perhaps surprisingly. When
⏹️ ▶️ John I wake my computer from sleep, the hard drive spins up, even if it’s not mounted,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco stays spinning,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey even though it continues.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even though it continues to be not mounted, it’s an easy fix. You can just mount it and then unmount it,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then it spins down. And all this is to say is I can definitely hear when the hard drive is spinning. Forget about accessing,
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing is accessing it. drive is unmounted. There is no, you know, hard drive heads moving back and forth.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s spinning and I can hear that. The solution to that, or one of the solutions that I came up with,
⏹️ ▶️ John is this handy application called Mountain, which I’ve had for ages. I used to use to mount and unmount my,
⏹️ ▶️ John at one time, four internal drives on my old cheese grater. And one of the features that Mountain
⏹️ ▶️ John has, it’s on the Mac App Store, but I bought it from the website because anything that deals with hardware, I figure, there’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be some feature they can’t implement it’ll be in the Mac App Store version. So, buy direct, gives the developer more money and potentially
⏹️ ▶️ John has more features. Anyway, there is a setting, that there are many settings in Mountain.
⏹️ ▶️ John One of which is, hey, when this drive is unmounted, spin it down. Or when
⏹️ ▶️ John I wake from sleep and it’s not mounted, spin it down. Like there’s a whole bunch of options about what you should do when you eject it,
⏹️ ▶️ John what you should do when you wake from sleep. And lo and behold, just put that setting and now when I wake my computer
⏹️ ▶️ John up, the hard drive spins up, reminding me of my old 10 year old cheese grater making
⏹️ ▶️ John some noises of things spinning up and then immediately spins down back to blessed not
⏹️ ▶️ John quite silence so mostly thumbs up on the ridiculously
⏹️ ▶️ John expensive Pegasus J2i big thumbs up for mountain although I don’t like the menu bar icon
⏹️ ▶️ John it could be better but anyway other than that I am headed towards
⏹️ ▶️ John having many many terabytes of internal storage and soon I will be very happy.
SSL follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Darren Rogers had some feedback with regard to shorter certificate expiration,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which we had talked about last week. Darren writes, the shorter expirations also helps ensure that everyone,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a reasonable value of the term, is using the latest standards and best practices for their certificates. A concrete
⏹️ ▶️ Casey example would be the Certificate Transparency and SCT, Signed Certificate Timestamp.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Any cert you get today should have an SCT, but that hasn’t always been true, so there are many websites without them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The very nature of SCTs is such that they will mostly be useful when everyone has them and browsers can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey start requiring them. Until then, they are of nominal value. So this shorter expiration kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey forces everyone to embrace the latest and greatest quicker than it would otherwise.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Additionally, Chris Thompson writes, you’re right about certificate revocation not being very effective currently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that an attacker having a year to use a compromised cert is still bad. That said, browsers still do use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bundled revocation lists to cache a set of verifications. By constraining the max certificate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lifetime, that means you can potentially clear out the expired certificates and this will take up less bandwidth, storage,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey memory, etc. Secondly, with long-lived certs, it becomes very hard to make important security changes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to TLS certificates. For example, in SHA-1, signature support was removed in browsers after
⏹️ ▶️ Casey increasing evidence that collisions were feasible. But if certs last up to five years, you can’t just turn it off
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or set a reasonable cutoff point. Instead, browsers are stuck with a potentially half a decade long deprecation window
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to avoid breaking the web, which is no fun.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, by the way, if any developers are listening who don’t read any security things, SHA-1 is super duper broken.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t use it for anything remotely related to security.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, pretty much any hash that you would have worked with in 2006 in PHP or whatever is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably broken at this
⏹️ ▶️ John point. MD5, if you don’t know it for many, many years, has been broken in this way. SHA-1,
⏹️ ▶️ John in the past couple of years, has been super duper broken in this way. So there you have it.
Notes follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then a friend of the show, Ben Thompson of Stratechery, wrote with regard to,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it was an Ask ATP question, when do you go to Apple Notes, when do you go to a flat file, et cetera, et cetera.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And Ben wrote, there’s absolutely middle ground between Notes, store everything in an inaccessible database, but it syncs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in plain text files. Ben writes, I use Notational Velocity on the desktop, or more accurately, in V-Alt,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which has a setting to store notes as plain text files in the location of your choice. At the same time, in V-Alt, use a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey simple note as a syncing service, which gets me all of my notes on the web or on iOS. So I have the best of both worlds,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sync and plain text access slash backup. I do at times wish for Notes app-rich functionality, particularly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in terms of embedding photos and whatnot, but I consider easy access to my data and availability on any computing platform to be table stakes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for any data that I want on a permanent basis. We don’t have it in the show notes, but Ben had said something about how,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he understands the trade-off with regard to using SimpleNote as the syncing service, so he doesn’t put anything like super
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sensitive private or whatever into any of these notes. But it was an interesting approach to get in the middle of the road,
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, there was another story that flew by recently, although I think it was a repeat of the same story from maybe a year
⏹️ ▶️ John or so ago, about the security of quote-unquote encrypted notes in the Apple Notes app.
⏹️ ▶️ John It uses a database behind the scenes, and apparently, you know how like when you’re looking through your notes, the notes
⏹️ ▶️ John are represented in the list by basically the first line in the note? And when you encrypt a note,
⏹️ ▶️ John apparently that first line is still visible in some data store or somewhere. Anyway, if you’re relying
⏹️ ▶️ John on the security of your notes such that no one, if you take a
⏹️ ▶️ John note and then encrypt it, and then someone grabs your Mac and runs a bunch of forensic tools and finds a SQLite database
⏹️ ▶️ John and rummages through it, you may be able to find snippets of unencrypted data from that note, which is kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of bad, but probably not the end of the world. All I’ll just say is, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John have something that you really care about the security of, it’s best to actually use a security-focused
⏹️ ▶️ John application to store it rather than just an app that is like a notes app, but also happens to have an
Hyphenation follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then finally, Satheesh Paulio writes, I really enjoyed the segment where you talked about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey using hyphenated words. It made me realize how much more I need to learn about the English language. I found this helpful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and wanted to pass it along. And this is a link to developers.google.com,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is a post called Just Enough Grammar.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, these things are great. They’re not trying to teach you everything. I mean, English language
⏹️ ▶️ John is ridiculous and huge and has all sorts of strange things. But you just need a little bit. You just need
⏹️ ▶️ John enough to know what you don’t know, because then on a case by case basis when you’re writing, if you’re aware
⏹️ ▶️ John of sort of the lay of the land, like you come across some construct in your writing, you’re like, I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John what to write here, but I know this is an area of frequent problems, or there’s an issue
⏹️ ▶️ John here, or that this is something I should pay attention to. At that point, you’re armed with enough knowledge
⏹️ ▶️ John to just go Google the answer. Okay, in this exact sentence structure, with this exact word, what am I supposed to do? If you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know that, if you don’t have that just enough grammar baseline, and you won’t even know that there’s a thing to know there. And you’ll just, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, if you don’t know hyphens exist or what they might be used for, you will just never, you’ll just never think about them. If you know they’re used
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of in this context for this reason, when you’re writing, you may come across something and be like, wait a second, is that
⏹️ ▶️ John one of those places I use hyphens? You’re not gonna know the answer. You know, it’s always gonna be tricky. There’s all sorts of special cases and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ John but at least you know that it’s a thing. So this Just Enough Grammar page
⏹️ ▶️ John and similar sort of crash courses for the basics of grammar, very often focused on like tech writing,
⏹️ ▶️ John just so you can like write sensible, coherent documentation for your code
⏹️ ▶️ John even. It’s well worth the effort to just, you know, get just enough
⏹️ ▶️ John knowledge to be dangerous. I would say just enough knowledge to know what to Google, because that’s all you need. No one really knows all these
⏹️ ▶️ John answers, except for, you know, some, you know, very obscure
⏹️ ▶️ John book editor who’s been doing it a million years. All you gotta know is what to Google.
Sponsor: Kolide
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Collide. This is a wonderful software as a service startup
⏹️ ▶️ Marco called Collide, K-O-L-I-D-E, and it’s working to solve security challenges
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for tech companies that run large Mac fleets and use Slack. So I bet this is some of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our listeners out there. So in the world of Mac management, the current accepted practice is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to buy an MDM and then use it to lock down everyone’s devices. So users can only do quote safe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things. And the result of this is that your users become frustrated. They don’t understand why you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trust them. They don’t understand why the device’s features and capabilities are turned off. It’s really annoying. Do this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco often enough and they’ll start just using their personal devices to actually get their work done because they don’t get in the way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Collide is different. Collide believes that end user education about device security
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the top priority. So instead of locking down the devices, Collide allows you to monitor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them continuously to see if they’re compliant with your security policy. And if any device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco isn’t, Collide can message that employee via Slack and walk them through the policy,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why it’s important, and give them precise instructions on how to fix the issue themselves. And they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can even message the user the instant they fix the problem so the user knows they did it right. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they do all this by using an endpoint agent called OSQuery, which is 100% open
⏹️ ▶️ Marco source, doesn’t degrade the performance of your Macs, and provides important information to security analysts
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Large media backups
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco for sponsoring our show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How do you back up a Synology? And the reason I ask is we had talked just a little while ago about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey CrashPlan and how I really, really don’t like it. But the advantage of CrashPlan is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is $10 a month for one computer for whatever plan I’m on right now. $10 a month for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me to back up, I think my backup set is something like 13 terabytes right now. Now, admittedly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that backup set includes the iMac Pro. Admittedly, that backup includes a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff on the Synology that I could probably pare down and weed out. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I looked before the show, I was doing a little preparation because I’m allowed, because I’m not John, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it turns out my media folder on my Synology, which is the thing I care most about, or at least the thing I think I care most about,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is 8 terabytes of the 13 terabytes. So I was looking at, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, what are my options for backing up the Synology? And the most obvious one, the one that everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recommends, and for good reason, because everything I’ve read is that it’s excellent, is Backblaze
⏹️ ▶️ Casey B2. So this is their, you know, bigger, longer term, if I understand it right, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, storage that’s really for this kind of a use. You know, it’s designed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to compete with a bunch of stuff that’s of similar vein, right? You know, you’re just gonna put something away for a long time and probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not need to restore anything from it, if ever, or not frequently, you know, if you do at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John And I was looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at it, well, and the thing of it is, is that Backblaze B2 is $70 a month for 13 terabytes. A month, it’s $40 a month for eight terabytes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And these are all, you know, rough estimations, or, you know, give or take a bit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But that means it would take me like three and a half years of B2
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to break even with just buying a whole new Synology, filling it with drives, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey moving this one to like my dad’s house or something like that, which is, you know, far enough away that it’s, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, not anywhere close, and just mirroring the darn Synology from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here to there. And this is kind of a call for recommendations from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the listeners and from the two of you. Yeah, what about us? Yeah. What is one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do with this? Like, and the other thing I’ve heard decent about is Glacier, I think it’s called
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from Amazon. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Okay, okay, well, this is what I wanna know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco And the other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing is- Oh, Glacier’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey terrible. So the other priority I have is I want something that’s as close to turnkey as possible. And that B2 very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much counts as, because B2 is built into the Synology software. And I can just say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hey, please back yourself up to B2 now. And if I’m willing to throw money at this problem, which I’m getting ever more willing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do, then that is an acceptable answer and a very easy answer. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what am I not considering? Like, should I just pony up literally $3,000 to bring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a new version of my current Synology into my house and move this one to dad’s house? Or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is there something else I’m just not thinking of?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, we had this long discussion last time about how maybe you don’t need all that media.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey You don’t need to be storing all that. You might
⏹️ ▶️ John be able to access through streaming services and and so on and so forth. Like I feel like I really feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John especially you mentioned like this is the media I think I care about the most, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not really. I know you spent a long time organizing everything and it’s good to have a collection, but you care so much more about your family photos
⏹️ ▶️ John than you do about any of that media, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s a subset of that eight terabytes. But yes, what you just said is
⏹️ ▶️ John accurate, but it’s a tiny amount. It’s less than less than a terabyte of that is photos.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s about a terabyte, but still I’m quibbling over minor things. Your point is is still completely fair.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so one way to save money is to-
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t not back it up, but like, decide what part of
⏹️ ▶️ John it you really want to back up, right? So I feel like the most important thing is
⏹️ ▶️ John the metadata in the database, the Plex database, which is tiny, right? That, you know, any organization you’ve done, any custom poster
⏹️ ▶️ John images you’ve done, maybe your like, your watch counts or your progress, or like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John that is the stuff that you’ve invested time in dealing with, right? The actual media files behind
⏹️ ▶️ John the scenes, if they disappeared, you can probably replace them, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Many of them at
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey least. Some of it, yeah, but not all of it. And so what I
⏹️ ▶️ John would do is I would choose what subset of that you actually want to back up. If you want to
⏹️ ▶️ John save money, I feel like you could cut your storage in half just by being judicious about
⏹️ ▶️ John which media do I want to back up versus which media do I not want to back up. and that would involve having to categorize things
⏹️ ▶️ John in some way or like, I know it’s annoying, but like that’s a lot of data. And if you’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John have somebody who’s not you store 13 terabytes of data
⏹️ ▶️ John for you, there’s no way around that being expensive or a hassle or both. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no magic solution that’s gonna be like, I have a way for you to do that for 3 cents
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey or $5 a month, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not gonna happen. Like you’re already doing that. I have a way to do it. You’re taking advantage of it the best you can with the crash plan
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. Or if you did like iSCSI with Backblaze, that is the cheapest way to do it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John both of those things are sort of not using the services for their intended purposes and really
⏹️ ▶️ John pushing the limits.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco So- Yeah, I hear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you. There’s a simpler solution.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I do wanna, I very much wanna hear Marco’s answer, but just to address a couple of things you said. Your point
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is overall very fair, but the thing I just really, I really don’t wanna lose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any of this media. And I think the reason I’m harping on this so much is because for the stuff that’s on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Synology, that is the only place, well, with the exception of pictures, that is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only place that exists. So like all of my TV shows and movies and things like that, well, some of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them actually I do have Blu-ray sitting downstairs, but for the purposes of this discussion, that’s the only place that exists.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s there and CrashPlan. And so I’m so scared that if this Synology just fries
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I can’t salvage the drives for some crazy reason, that all of that media just goes up in a puff of smoke.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Again, the pictures are different,
⏹️ ▶️ John The other good thing about the media stuff is it’s basically immutable. Like the media
⏹️ ▶️ John files themselves, once they’re there, don’t change, right? So you can, if you want to
⏹️ ▶️ John pinch more pennies, I know Marco was making groaning noises about Glacier, but there
⏹️ ▶️ John are various temperature storage options in S3 that can let you
⏹️ ▶️ John hold a bunch of data that you don’t need access to and it’s not going to change for less money
⏹️ ▶️ John than B2 maybe. I mean, you have to look at the pricing. which I’m way sure is a pain in the butt because to get anything out of it is like pulling teeth.
⏹️ ▶️ John And maybe that’s acceptable if you really just like, you know, again, if it’s a super duper emergency
⏹️ ▶️ John backup type thing, but that’s, you know, paring down the data you’re backing up is one way and then
⏹️ ▶️ John using slower storage with the knowledge that you don’t need to access that. It’s like write once and
⏹️ ▶️ John read never, right? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John That it doesn’t change. Now, the difficulty is trying to use backup software. A lot of backup
⏹️ ▶️ John software doesn’t expect that scenario. It expects to be able to sort of crawl your data and then confirm
⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s backed up and diff the two things. And doing that with Glacier is gonna be unfriendly probably
⏹️ ▶️ John because it doesn’t expect that type of thing. But we know that the nature of your backup is, I’m gonna back up these terabytes of data
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re never gonna change in the backup. They’re just gonna sit there unmodified for years and years, never being
⏹️ ▶️ John updated. And so those can be fairly distant, you know, access time wise.
⏹️ ▶️ John You just need a piece of software that understands that. But this is all like all the ways to pinch pennies, Can
⏹️ ▶️ John I get my bill down to 50%? Like that’s the best case scenario and you’re still paying $30 a month. Yeah, I agree.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I promise, Marco, I’m gonna give you a chance. I promise. But the other thing that occurred to me as I was talking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to you guys is one of the backup strategies that I have is that a super duper clone of the iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on a physical hard drive, one of the portable USB drives, and a physical clone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of my entire photo library on a separate physical hard drive, a USB drive,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That gets, you hand it, yes, I see my parents at least once a month, usually twice a month. That gets
⏹️ ▶️ Casey handed to mom and dad at sometime after the beginning of the month, and then they bring it back right around
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the end of the month. I’ll update
⏹️ ▶️ John But why do they need to bring it back? All you’re ever doing is adding to it. You know what I’m saying? Like, you need to implement
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey your own system
⏹️ ▶️ John of write-only media, where you write a bunch of stuff to it, and then it gets stored,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then, you know, anyway. Marco’s solution is gonna be to get a 14 terabyte hard drive. But
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey anyway. Well, and that’s exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I’m trying, that’s exactly what I was gonna say, is that it occurred to me as I’m talking to you guys that I’m filling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my Synology. Well, let me back up a half step. Several of the drives in my Synology, which are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Western Digital, whatever the NAS, Reds, I think Western Digital Reds, which are whatever it came with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey literally six years ago, almost seven. About half of the drives in there are the six-ish
⏹️ ▶️ Casey year old drives. I have been replacing them bit by bit, but it occurred to me that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am really playing with fire. I think I have three six-year-old drives in there right now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I really, really should try to get those
⏹️ ▶️ Casey replaced sooner rather than later. As I’m replacing them, I’m putting more pressure on every drive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that remains, and so I’m really, really, really playing with fire. But it occurred to me as I’m replacing them, I’m swapping from three terabytes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to 10 terabyte. I just told you my entire backup set is like 13 terabytes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So presumably, I could get one of these humongous, What are these, two and a half inch drives?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It doesn’t matter. One of these humongous physical platter drives.
⏹️ ▶️ John Three and a half inch. They have 14 terabyte, three and a half inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drives. They have 16 terabyte drives now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you see where this is going is I could add that to the physical package that I’m transferring back and forth to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dad, you know, and just give that to mom and dad once a month and have them bring it back. And I do a quick
⏹️ ▶️ Casey update and then send it back to their house. And that’s, honestly, that’s probably going to be the best solution. All right,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so Marco, with all this in mind, tell me what I need to be doing because I have not hit the right answer, apparently.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, so this all goes back to the problem you have is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CrashPlan is the only online backup service that will back up unlimited space, including
⏹️ ▶️ Marco network shares, for a low price. And most of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your data lives on a Synology. So the only computer that you have where that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco data is local, on local disks, is the Synology. I get around this with my stupid iSCSI setup,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which I would not recommend to anybody, and as soon as any part of it breaks, I’m not replacing it. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the real solution here is to take advantage of the other backup service
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has way better software, is a frequent sponsor of our show, and that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will backup any drive connected to your computer locally, which is Backblaze.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the way you switch to Backblaze is by making this data local to a computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that runs an OS that Backblaze clients will run on. You already have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, we already mentioned it. It’s the Mac mini that you just turned on. So the way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to fix this problem, the simplest way possible, is to buy a giant hard drive. Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they come up to 16 terabytes now. Buy a giant hard drive or two,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco connect them as local disks to the Mac mini, have the Mac mini share them on the network
⏹️ ▶️ Marco itself if it wants to, and have Backblaze back them up. And then you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to do this craziness with your parents. You have online backup. You can even just, you can even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put two of them in RAID zero. You have online backup and drives last pretty long these days.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like you could literally just do two external drives or one giant external drive,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plug it into your Mac mini and have Backblaze back it up for the five bucks or six bucks a month that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is. That’s it. And it’s the very same. And you know what,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know that you no longer drive a white BMW.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that your identity is being challenged here. I’m not going to tell you to give up Plex. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not going to tell you to cut back your library. But I will tell you, retire the Synology at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because it is old. It is not providing you the computing power that you want for things like Plex.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because, you know, it’s old hardware. And it was made right before they did a whole bunch of those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transcoding acceleration stuff. So like, you know, it’s old, it’s full of, by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco today’s standards, small hard drives. It’s probably costing you a decent amount in just electricity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every month. So like, just plug in an external hard drive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the Mac Mini because you have six wonderful years of incredible hard drive capacity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expansion you can take advantage of now. Like the technology has gotten better for spinning disk. They’re way bigger now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’re, you know, not that much money for very giant ones. So just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that. And it’s like, I think that right there is your solution. Just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco switch to a local disk connected to that Mac Mini, make that Mac Mini run all the software that your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Synology was previously running. Like just use the Mac clients of these things. Use MacPlex, use the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac sharing stuff, whatever it is. You might give up a few things that your Synology was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing that were kind of cool that you occasionally used. But overall, I think this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a better solution and it is way simpler. And while it requires a bit of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco investment up front, first of all, it’s way cheaper than if you wanted to replace your Synology. It’s way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey if you need to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco replace a bunch of the drives in your Synology. And it’s probably cheaper to operate,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, with electricity and stuff. And it’s definitely way better on the backup front because then you can simply
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use any Mac backup software. So you can use Backblaze for their flat fee.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can do what I do and use Arc, which is fantastic. And I actually, I use Arc backing up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Backblaze B2 storage. I just kind of prefer the Arc UI for certain things. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you have so many more options then because you’re running what appears to backup software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be a regular consumer operating system on a regular PC slash Mac, you know. But then you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have options then. And you have this one great option which is Backblaze Unlimited. And that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think solved your problem in a pretty simple, elegant way. And you can retire Synology.
⏹️ ▶️ John I do wonder how long Backblaze is gonna allow these type of things to go on. I saw
⏹️ ▶️ John recently a tweet where Backblaze was sad that someone was using
⏹️ ▶️ John their service to back up many large numbers of terabytes directly connected to their computer. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know if they’re using the iSCSI trick that you’re using, but similarly, it’s meant to be a single computer thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you’re backing up 13 terabytes, I know hard drive sizes are increasing, but still it’s kind of like an outlier.
⏹️ ▶️ John So Casey may be ruining it for everybody if someday backblaze says, you know what? It used to be
⏹️ ▶️ John unlimited, but a few people have been abusing that privilege, so now there’s a cap of 10 terabytes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even then, what’s great about this solution is that you can do it right now, it’s very simple,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and simple in this case is a big benefit here. Making this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a convoluted, complicated, fragile setup. Just make it a very simple thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And right now it works. In the future, who knows? but right now it will work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And in the future, if you have to spend a bit more on backing up all your media files, oh well. You can also, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of do the exercise of like, all right, so of all those eight terabytes of, what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably what, like movies and TV shows mostly, right, so like of all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what percentage of that can you just re-rip if you lose it all? And then whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco percentage of it that, you know, fell off trucks or was not available in the US or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the case may be, like, how hard would it be to either re-download it from somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or buy it all legally? And what would that cost versus what it will cost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you have to pay somebody per gigabyte to back this up for indefinitely? Like, what are you paying over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time for that, if you have to pay one of those $70 a month fees, what is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco costing you over time versus what would it cost to actually just replace all this if you lost it? So do that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco math if that comes up, but honestly, you can avoid all that entirely right now by just plugging in a giant hard drive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to your Mac mini using Backblaze.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I am not in a position that I’m willing to give up my beloved Synology. And I agree with everything you said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on paper, but it also does some things that I know I could do on my Mac mini, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like the way the Synology works. I have a very good workflow for it. I don’t wanna mess with that. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I take your point, and I agree with you, that getting one of these like 400 or $500, 16 terabyte drives, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just physically hooking it up to the Mac mini, even if I just run like an R-Sync or equivalent,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and pull everything off of the Synology onto that drive and then Backblaze is now backing that up as a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey regular old computer. That is far and away a much better answer than anything else I’ve come up with so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey far. So I already like where this is going.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why are you pulling it off the Synology? Why don’t you just leave it on, put it on the hard drive as your primary location?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, or you can do things like move the eight terabytes of Plex data to the Mac mini,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, giant hard drive option and leave other stuff on the Synology, which would be way smaller. Stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John care about data redundancy so you can redo your raid scheme to add more
⏹️ ▶️ John redundancy on the Synology and put your photos on there so you have protection against double drive failures or something, you know what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean? Yeah, I hear you. I think what I’m looking for now is the least disruptive way to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey improve my world. And I think, Marco, you hit it, that just getting a big friggin’ drive,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least for now, anyway. Yeah, because they’re really big these days. Yeah, I mean, and I don’t know that would work forever,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but certainly for now, I mean, if I got a 16 terabyte drive, I am well over, or well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have at least three terabytes of headroom. And so as much as I am slowly filling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up this, this synology over time, first of all, there’s certainly stuff I can get rid of and call absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey without a shadow of a doubt. And secondly, you know, that, that, that’s plenty of extra space or plenty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of headroom that I wouldn’t have to worry about it anytime soon. And presumably there’s no reason I couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just attach another one if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco necessary. So.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like once you get into this habit, like if you get like a fancy external drive enclosure that has like built-in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco RAID or like, you know, these giant metal boxes with multiple connectors, those get expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or a power supply that doesn’t fail. Well, yeah, but like, you know, single drive enclosures are basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco free. Like they’re really cheap. They’re really cheap, but they’re also kind of garbagy. All right, well, anyway, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you want, you can invest in a nice big one, but like, you know, if you keep it relatively simple,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can buy a 12 or 16 terabyte drive and say, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the most I’m going to keep. And when you need space on it, you force yourself to go delete
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something that you’re not gonna need anymore. You know, that’s another option. That’s honestly not a bad solution because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you probably don’t need to keep more than 16 terabytes of various media files that are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly like movies and TV shows. You probably can get rid of a lot of that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe capping it at a certain size that is one drive, which keeps everything a lot simpler, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s all for the best.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I was talking about potentially abusing Backblaze by backing up so much, but it occurs to me that when my
⏹️ ▶️ John additional hard drive arrives, I’ll have 16 terabytes inside my Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey So they can’t really complain I’m abusing it by,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re supposed to just back up one system, it is one system, but these are all inside the computer. And I can fit eight more drives in there,
⏹️ ▶️ John so watch out Backblaze.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey To get ahead of the email that we will receive and to answer JStretch in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the chat, Just off the top of my head, things that I want to keep on my Synology. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey absolutely acknowledge and believe that a lot of this, if not all of it, could be done on the Mac Mini. I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not debating that. I like it on the Synology. I want to keep it on the Synology. It makes me happy being on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Synology. And I wrote a post about this. I’ll link in the show notes. It talks about a lot of this stuff. But things like VPN server,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Docker container for Homebridge, obviously I can do that on the Mac Mini. I like it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the Synology. I like it over there, off by its lonesome. of some of the downloading,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, you know, torrents, if I ever do that or stuff from news groups, if I were to ever do that, which obviously I wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John know your Dropbox replacement thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My Dropbox replacement is the biggest one of all, because for those who haven’t been keeping up, I am almost
⏹️ ▶️ Casey entirely off of Dropbox and I use Synology drive as a replacement. I’m sure there’s something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could put on the Mac or on the Mac mini that would be an equivalent. But again, I’m not looking to disrupt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my entire world. I am looking to disrupt my backup strategy. And I think, Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if it’s that I just sneaker net a 16-terabyte hard drive to my dad,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco that I put it on the MacBook— No, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John saying even stop that. Use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco R1 backup. No, I agree. I agree. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what it’s for. No, no, I agree. I’m just saying that even if I did that, which I agree with you is not the best answer, my point is that that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still a much better answer than paying $500 a year to back Blaze B2, or at least it’s a better answer for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. But again, I couldn’t agree more that I think the best-est
⏹️ ▶️ Casey answer is to just stick a big fat hard drive on the Mac Mini. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just kind of like having the Synology being the one source of truth for my data. That just makes me happy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I know it’s all right there. It makes me happy in no small reason because if, God forbid, the house went on fire,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would know. Just grab the Synology after the kids. Grab the Synology and it has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the stuff I need, which is silly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know what’s a lot smaller? A single hard drive.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco That’s true. The Synology
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like a mid-tower computer full of hard drives. It’s heavy and huge.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I understand. No, I’m with you. But my point is that I like having the Synology be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the center of my storage world. It makes me happy. It doesn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John to make sense to you, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey listener, or you, Marco Arment. But it just makes me happy. And that’s the way I would like to keep it. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be it a sneaker net, be it just connecting it to the Mac Mini, which, again, I think is the bestest answer. One
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way or another, just putting a big, fat hard drive somewhere and duplicating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all my data on it. And that’s the difference between what I’m saying, what you’re saying. I would want that to be a redundant copy of all this data.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re saying just make it the canonical data.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco And again, you’re probably right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, you’re probably right. And on paper, I think you are right. And if I was a sane individual, I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do what you’re saying. But because I’m just weird like this, I think I would have that as a redundant copy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then yeah, if that gets sent up to the cloud, that’s the best of all answers. If for some reason I don’t do that or that doesn’t work,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I don’t know why it wouldn’t, then I could sneaker net it to dad and it’s still an improvement over the world I have today where I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey relying on crash plan, which I frigging hate. So I hope this isn’t a waste of time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for everyone else listening, but I’m glad we talked about it because this is a much better plan of action than I had before.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And just to reiterate, if I were to replace the Synology, I would want to take
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the one I have and stick it at Dad’s. And so I can’t take the drives out of this one and put it in the new one, because I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want, again, I would want a redundant Synology. And to do that the way I would want to, which again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is all my own choices, is over $3,000. That is a lot more money than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a $500 16 terabyte hard drive. So I think, Marco, you hit the nail on the head. Over time, the threshold for like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do you need a giant NAS box, goes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up with like, you know, how high your storage needs are. Like over time, that threshold goes up because hard drives get bigger.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know, like you would never recommend in 2020 that somebody who needs to store four terabytes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of data get a NAS. because hard drives or SSDs can store that locally really easily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so like for just, if it’s just gonna be a few terabytes, there’s no need to have a giant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drive enclosure and a whole second thing to maintain and update and everything else. And I think for you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you first got the Synology, you were within the range of like, okay, you have enough data, it’s reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to need like a big multi-drive thing. But since then, the drives have gotten
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so big and the backup situation has become more important and a few things have changed about it And so like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now I think you’re at the point now where if you were starting from scratch today, we would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never say you should get a NAS. Because while there are people who still need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco NAS boxes because they have massive storage needs, your storage needs no longer qualify.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You are no longer one of those people. And this is why like I don’t think almost anybody should get a NAS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the time for them is mostly behind us and most people don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the number of people who need them is going down over time.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think 13 terabytes is still close to that territory. For Casey, I don’t know, because he has this incredible
⏹️ ▶️ John tolerance for terrible noise very close to him. But for me, the biggest advantage to
⏹️ ▶️ John the NAS is it’s in the basement. I don’t hear it. And if I had 13
⏹️ ▶️ John terabytes of media, like I was just talking about keeping my hard drive spun down inside my big
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro, I can have 16 terabytes of storage in there, but the storage that is not on
⏹️ ▶️ John an SSD, I do not want spinning. I want them not spinning and unmounted.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can’t do that if you actually need that data. Like if my photo collection was on spinning media,
⏹️ ▶️ John it would not be tenable. I don’t have to mount it every time I launch photos. My photos are on my SSDs, I don’t have to deal with that. But if you
⏹️ ▶️ John have 13 terabytes of data that you need online all the time, you better be
⏹️ ▶️ John ready to deal with the sound of spinning disks fairly close to you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and again, I love my Synology so darn much. I love it. It’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sort of thing I would have never spent the money on at the time. And now that it’s a part of my world, I cannot, today anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t get rid of it. And I’m not arguing with you, Marco. You’re so right in so many ways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it just, it has become the center of my computing world and I like it there because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it makes me happy. It is not knock on glass. It has never failed me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It has always worked. It has never caused me problems. More, it’s done better than my iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro has. And I’ve had this technology for six years. I’ve had the iMac Pro for six weeks. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nevertheless, your point is, again, is certainly very fair, if not correct, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a normal person, this is not necessary. But it’s, there are many like it, but this one is mine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s a reference
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you wanna throw money at the problem and you have a Mac Pro, you can get one of those cards that you can put four or four
⏹️ ▶️ John terabyte SSDs on, or four or two terabyte SSDs, and you can get two of those cards. Like you can have 16 terabytes
⏹️ ▶️ John of internal solid state storage, then you solve the noise problem, and the access problem, and the storage space problem,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it only costs you probably what, 20, 30, 40 grand?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the back plays, and back plays will back it up. Yeah. You say, look, it’s one computer. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you spend 40 grand once, and you can save 70 bucks a month. Woo! Woo! Bye.
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WWDC to be canceled?
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey As we record this, it is the evening of March 4th and WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is still a thing in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco theory. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it hasn’t been announced
⏹️ ▶️ John yet. All right, WWDC is never a thing until it is announced. Previous WWDC was announced,
⏹️ ▶️ John we attended, and then it ended. And at that point,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey WWDC ceases to exist until
⏹️ ▶️ John there is a future announcement that says, hey, guess what? We’re
⏹️ ▶️ John WWDC and here are the dates. So right now we’re in the in-between time when WWDC does not exist. It only
⏹️ ▶️ John exists as a thing that happened in the past.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s like doing a show with two lawyers, I tell you what.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Everyone loves lawyers.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re right, you are right. I’m just saying, like, it’s just the, you know, the unknown, like, what I’m saying
⏹️ ▶️ John is that the current period we’re in is not that dissimilar from
⏹️ ▶️ John years past where we are waiting to find out when WWDC will be. The difference this
⏹️ ▶️ John year is, one of the prominent options is not this year.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, and so the reason this is potentially gonna be a thing is because of the coronavirus or whatever the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey correct term for it is. Yeah, COVID-19. Thank you, it is certainly going around the world, it’s going around
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the US now. It sounds like Seattle in particular, a lot of things are happening out there,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that’s a lot closer to California than say, Mark and John and I are. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of other conferences have also said they’re cancelling. The Geneva auto show got cancelled.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Google IO got cancelled. That usually happens about a month before dub dub. There’s a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of smoke saying that WWDC is probably going to be cancelled. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I noticed, but I have not yet had a chance to listen that on under the radar, you and in front of the show, David
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Smith covered this and kind of alternatives and, and so I don’t know if you want to rehash briefly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some of that, But I guess let me start by asking, starting with Marco, do you suspect that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey WWDC will happen in person this year? And let’s leave aside like a press event. I’m talking about like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the regular people, you know, the thing that we’re allowed to go to, the regular people, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, Worldwide Developer Conference. Do you suspect that that will happen in person in California this year, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Almost certainly not. I’m like 90% sure it’s gonna be canceled.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They just haven’t announced it yet. Like my, and I tweeted this the fact of the day, Like my theory is basically that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m pretty sure they’ve already made the decision internally to cancel it. And they’re just trying to make alternative
⏹️ ▶️ Marco arrangements for things like online sessions and whatever else so that they can announce at the same time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like instead of just saying no WWDC this year, I’m guessing they want to do an announcement that says,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, WWDC will be online only this year. And here’s all the great things we’re going to have to offer like something, you know, a little more upbeat.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That I think is much more likely to happen. And yeah, and I did talk about this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the entire Under the Radar episode with our friend under the code David Smith. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco check out Under the Radar from today. I’ll link to it in the show notes. That is certainly worth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco listening to if you want to hear us talk for almost exactly 30 minutes about this exact topic and kind of what it means
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and kind of what Apple could do instead. And we’re going to recover some of that here, of course, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certainly check that if you are interested And the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chances of Apple holding this conference are extremely low because, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is a significant virus that’s going around the world. It is, you know, it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco causing deaths and it’s not like, you know, it’s not killing everybody who gets it, but it is a serious problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s not something that can be taken lightly. It’s something that everybody needs to be very cautious about. And Apple is a cautious
⏹️ ▶️ Marco company and Apple is a company that tries to avoid bad press whenever possible. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no company wants to put on an event that, you know, at the event,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exposes people to this virus, and one of them dies. Like that’s horrible. Nobody wants
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to risk that, understandably. And so there is no way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I think Apple’s going to put this conference on. I think they are way too smart to do that. And anybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who’s running a big event right now for a high-profile thing, like, if they’re not cancelling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that event, they’re not thinking right. Because, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a big enough problem. Like, the virus is a pretty big problem. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco effects are still largely unknown. The gestation period is long,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so you don’t really realize how bad it is for a couple of weeks after it has gotten
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that bad. And these are all events that have to be planned months ahead of time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are gathering a whole bunch of people from all over the world in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco confined spaces. It’s just ludicrous to think that any of these major events
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are going to happen, or at least that they should happen. There
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are some conferences that are happening in the near future that are still going to go on, allegedly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I think that’s a mistake for those conferences, and I think they’re hearing from it. Major
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sponsors and participants are pulling out of these conferences, companies are restricting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their employees’ travel, they’re saying they’re not allowing their employees to travel to conferences anymore for a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of things like this. It’s a big deal. And Apple’s not gonna take any risks. Apple’s not stupid.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re a conservative, smart company. There’s no way this conference goes on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, what do you think?
⏹️ ▶️ John I was thinking about, you know, I haven’t heard the end of the radar, but like various options you can do. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John WC has been streaming live online for the past couple of years. Not only do you get the sessions, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you can like watch them at the same time as the people in the room, maybe with a seven second delay or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then they have the recordings of the video and you know, all sorts of things that they could do over
⏹️ ▶️ John the internet. And of course, obviously the press only keynote that you could do the same way they do all the
⏹️ ▶️ John other press only keynotes. But the thing that occurred to me is, it’s a very
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple move to also find some way to charge quote unquote attendees $1,600 to attend it online. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, what would be the distinction between the people who pay $1,600 and the people who don’t? Because already,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you pay nothing, you can stream the sessions live for free. What would you be getting? Would they
⏹️ ▶️ John mail you a jacket and some pins? They mail you some terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think the ticket price comes close to paying for the massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cost that Apple endures for this conference. Like, when you combine all the various factors,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ticket price probably pays for the venue and your box lunches.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, if they add in our hotel fees, it pays for everything. But Apple doesn’t get the hotel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and it probably doesn’t. I’m sure to Apple, from their point of view, the most expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of this conference every year is probably the massive amount of time it takes to prepare for all the employees,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the engineers that have to go there and prepare presentations and be there for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco labs. That’s a massive amount of labor that goes into that. that is probably way more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expensive to Apple than the actual nuts and bolts of like, the conference center costs this much, the lunches cost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this much. And that’s why, assuming they don’t hold this conference, I think what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are most likely to do is to just do a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of online sessions, just like they’ve been doing. As you said, they’ve been live streaming. I think they’re just gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco release a bunch of session videos and have a small media event where they live stream a keynote.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think that’s gonna be it. Now, I would like to see them do more this is what we talked about on Under the Radar, this part of it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would love to see them invest more heavily in things like documentation,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sample code, and possibly, this is a bit of a reach, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possibly staff up DTS and expand some kind of form of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco labs to be online and public where you get to actually talk to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple engineers about specific questions and problems you have and they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look at it and they’ll like, similar to what DTS incidents do when you have a developer account, but free and easier.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco DTS is famously a very, very, very, very, very small staff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I would love to see them staff it up. I would love to see them take the resources they are saving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by presumably not having this conference and use that to really beef up the documentation,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the sample code, and really beef up DTS, and just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco give more developers more access to stuff without having them fly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco across the world to stay in a very expensive hotel and go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to this one thing in person for these few days a year. Because if you think about it, that whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system is incredibly inefficient and incredibly exclusionary.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developers that can actually go to the conference is such a tiny percentage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all the Apple developers out there on the world. It’s a few thousand people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of hundreds of thousands or millions of iOS developers around the world. We’re talking a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of people here. It’s a very big field. And so anything they can do to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make that more accessible to more people has way more value
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and how it is for local attendees. And I like the conference. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been fortunate enough to be able to go to every one of them since 2009. And I consider
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that a privilege. And yet, I also look at it as,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every year I kind of think, wow, this is kind of wasteful. This is very expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s one of the reasons why I stopped getting badges a couple years ago, too. Because I’m going mostly for the community events
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and ask one question to a lab person, but otherwise I’m mostly going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the community events and everything. But they would have so much more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco value to more people if they beefed up all of the online resources.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if they’re not gonna have a conference this year, I think that is a good, like if you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco find a silver lining in them canceling this conference, that’s it. They should redirect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that energy and that time to making things that everybody can use, making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all that stuff better. The documentation’s in a terrible state. Sample code has been decimated by all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco changes in Swift. Like, most sample code doesn’t work anymore. Like, it’s just, they really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need, they need a lot of help in documentation and all that supporting stuff. And they,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just, it needs help. And I hope it gets it. That being said, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t think most of that is likely to happen. I think what’s most likely to happen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the conference gets canceled, and we just get videos and a keynote from a media event,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s it, and no other changes. That’s much more likely, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, about the videos, though, you mentioned the cost of putting on WWDC. The
⏹️ ▶️ John cost to the engineering org is the engineer’s time that they take out to prepare and perform
⏹️ ▶️ John the presentations, and that time doesn’t probably shrink at all for
⏹️ ▶️ John them doing it on a stage versus not. If anything, maybe they have to do more takes in
⏹️ ▶️ John front of a camera, right? Cause they still have to prepare the presentations. They still have to make sure they have slides and sample code
⏹️ ▶️ John and a rehearsed presentation that it has corrects, you know, all the art on it is correct and all the information
⏹️ ▶️ John is correct and it matches up with the WWDC build. And like that engineering time
⏹️ ▶️ John is absorbed whether we’re there or not. All the people whose time gets back are the people who plan
⏹️ ▶️ John the event, deal with the venue, deal with meals, deal with security. Those people don’t have to do anything. Like they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John freed up, but they’re not going to suddenly hop on to making the documentation better. Right? So it is still
⏹️ ▶️ John a fairly large cost to Apple’s engineering org. The part they say for the engineers is, you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have to be in this building for a couple of days or the entire week. You know, you don’t have to actually physically
⏹️ ▶️ John be there. Once you’re done with your video, you can resume your regular work and then the videos go
⏹️ ▶️ John out to the world, right? And then as for like labs and remote labs, I think it was making me, when you were saying that,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was making me think about, do you remember when iChat video conferencing first came out?
⏹️ ▶️ John One of the features it had is you could sort of share a document, like you could see the little faces
⏹️ ▶️ John on these screens in this little 3D kind of view, and then you could also share a document, and then your two little faces would be looking
⏹️ ▶️ John at the document, do you remember that? No. So they had multi-person conferencing,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And the way they did it was, instead of just seeing, instead of in the window just seeing the other person,
⏹️ ▶️ John you would see, the other person would become like a little tile that would sort of move
⏹️ ▶️ John back into the screen, kind of like a bunch of picture frames sitting on a table or whatever, And then when you shared
⏹️ ▶️ John a document, that document would be another little picture in this sort of setting, like a cover flow type setting.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, the point is, it would let two people, you know, let you see the other person’s face and
⏹️ ▶️ John a document that they can also see on their screen. And I can’t tell you how many times I’m usually doing stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John with my parents on FaceTime or whatever. And we essentially want to share a
⏹️ ▶️ John document. Let’s all look at the whatever thing together, like in this context, not,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, I’m gonna open up another window and I’m gonna look at this document and you look at it too. And like, so we could both be looking at it together.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know with like Google Docs or whatever, you interactively see each other’s cursors and both be looking at the same document. But it’s just, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John so much easier if you can just say here, in this multi-person FaceTime chat with the
⏹️ ▶️ John whole family, let’s look at this thing or let’s look at a bunch of pictures together. I have a slideshow to show
⏹️ ▶️ John you. Let’s go through it. Oh, look at all the pictures. And you can see the pictures and the people’s reaction to them. Something
⏹️ ▶️ John like that would go a long way towards making things like labs possible, right? interactively
⏹️ ▶️ John over some Apple product or communication protocol that Apple feels is secure and you’re all happy with or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s all be sort of collaboratively working on a thing. Something better than, oh, I’m gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John let Apple control my screen with screen sharing or I’m gonna let Apple view my whole desktop with screen sharing. Just a selectively
⏹️ ▶️ John shared documents or a single window or to be, you know, tools
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple’s generally not good at. As a company that tends to frown upon people telecommuting, they like things
⏹️ ▶️ John to be in person and they don’t have a lot of collaborative tools to be able to have a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of people working on something together. As terrible as things like WebEx and Zoom and
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft Teams and Slack and all these other things are, almost all of those tools have as table stakes, a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of people can communicate through audio and video and also can all be looking at a single
⏹️ ▶️ John document or a screen at the same time. And if you’re gonna do anything remotely like labs,
⏹️ ▶️ John when people aren’t in person, you need something like that. And Apple has nothing like that. I can’t really imagine Apple instructing
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone to download Zoom or WebEx. So remote labs, unless it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John all gonna be over like, we do what I do with my parents, which is we’re all on FaceTime, and then I like
⏹️ ▶️ John hold up like a phone or a laptop screen in front of the camera so they can see. It’s just, I don’t know, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t see that working. Whereas in the labs, you’re both hunched over the same laptop and everything works out.
⏹️ ▶️ John So yeah, I’m not optimistic about that. But getting back to my earlier point about custom, I’m also not optimistic
⏹️ ▶️ John about the idea that once there’s no longer a conference, suddenly engineers will have a bunch of time to sharp their docs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now it could be that one of the announcements of WWDC is since last WWDC, we’ve had a concerted
⏹️ ▶️ John effort to improve our documentation and it’s all rolling out this week. And that’s like revealing work that they had
⏹️ ▶️ John done over six months or a year. That, if that’s what they had done, that happens whether or
⏹️ ▶️ John not they have WWDC. It doesn’t have nothing to do with freeing up engineers time, it has to do with the thing they already did in the past. And I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John hoping that’s the case. I’m hoping the reveal is we made a big effort to improve this aspects
⏹️ ▶️ John of the developer experience and we are revealing it at WWDC, not doing it
⏹️ ▶️ John while you’re watching a bunch of prerecorded videos. Yeah, I wouldn’t hold my breath on that. Nope. Never know.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, even if they don’t really do it, do it, they tend to make announcements like that. If they know it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that people want, they’ll wanna have an announcement that says, we’ve heard your complaints about documentation and we’ve improved
⏹️ ▶️ John documentation in X, Y, and Z way, whether or not is it a significant improvement or
⏹️ ▶️ John they make it sound better than it is, very often there’s some effort
⏹️ ▶️ John to help with that. Even if they don’t come out and say it, they’ll just say, here’s a new framework and
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re really proud of the documentation. There’s lots of different ways they could spin it to try to sort of address the issue in some
⏹️ ▶️ John way. And I think that might happen. I don’t know, it’s so hard to predict
⏹️ ▶️ John WWC because very often there’s something big and shiny that they can throw out and it will just distract
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody from any issues, Any boring issues like documentation and sample code. Like I say, an arm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can you imagine if this was the year for the arm transition? That would be, that would be brutal. I don’t know, I just want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to reiterate though what Marco had said earlier on that, you know, for the three of us,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, this is our job. Well, I think, especially for me and Marco, maybe for John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s our job to go to the conference or at least to go to the event, I should say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and be there for it and make an appearance. And I think to some degree it is kind of a responsibility for the three of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us to have a live show there when it happens. But it is extremely expensive. Not only is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ticket $1,600, but any even slightly reasonable hotel is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey easily another $1,600, if not $2,000 plus. And I will never forget, I don’t remember
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who said it to me, but I will never forget when it started to get really and truly expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when it was still in San Francisco proper. Somebody looked at me, and I think it was the year that the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Watch had just been released or announced or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe this was underscore who said it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Was it underscore? Wouldn’t surprise me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, underscore looked at me and said, you realize that this $400 a night
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hotel is you buying an Apple watch every single night and then throwing it away.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And my mind exploded and I just couldn’t believe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. And I was like, no, no, no. Oh God. Oh, Oh God, you’re right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s not good. I mean, that is preposterous. That is utterly preposterous. I mean, I could go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on a three-hour tear about how obnoxiously expensive everything in the valley is and I don’t understand how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyone can afford to live there, but be that as it may, to go to this conference as someone who lives in the United
⏹️ ▶️ Casey States, you’re probably going to need to get on a plane, so that’s between $500 and $1,000 in most cases.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you want a ticket to the event, that’s $1,600, so call that an even $2,000. you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to sleep somewhere and preferably somewhere that has all the walls, this floor and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the ceiling, so that’s probably another $2,000. So you’re looking at $4,000, you haven’t eaten anything,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you haven’t drank anything, and I’m not even talking booze, just in general, you haven’t eaten or drank anything. You do get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey those sweet, sweet, sweet boxed lunches for quote unquote free, but you haven’t had breakfast. I guess you could have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their crap circular bagel-like things at the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey conference, but you certainly haven’t had dinner. I mean, you’re looking at between $4,000 and $5,000 for a week, and it’s just insane.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s just bananas that it’s that expensive. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somebody in the chat is saying, well, that’s just what hotels cost. Absolutely not. It is like $100 a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey night to get a really decent room where I am.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah. And these aren’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey They’re like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really mediocre hotels that if they were anywhere else in the country, it would be like $150 a night. and instead there are 400.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey It’s preposterous.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so as we have said, I love WWDC. I really do. I love
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco the event, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey conference. I love the actual conference that takes place in the convention center. I love, love,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey love, love, love all the superfluous and other things that happen around it. When I had the chance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to go to Layers, I loved that. There’s so much good to be said about this, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also feel like we have been, there’s been some tension building over the last several years as things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are just getting insurmountably expensive and to the point that the only people who can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey afford it are people who are billing their employer. Maybe that’s okay with Apple, I don’t know. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for someone like the three of us, it’s tough, it’s hard, it’s frustrating.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would love to see it, as much as I would hate to see it go away on a more permanent basis, although it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seems like we all agree that maybe this year we should sit this one As much as I would hate to see it go away
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on a permanent basis, I would love to see a lot of things change,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m really looking forward to listening to that under the radar to hear what you and David had to say about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would even go a little bit further. I would push a little harder on the angle of like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making that this is kind of ridiculous now. If you look at the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco landscape of tech conferences as a whole, there was a period,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of a golden era of tech conferences that were mostly smaller conferences. Started
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about 10 years ago, and ran until probably about three or four years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this was an era when there were lots of conferences, big and small, at all different price points,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all around the world, and they were due pretty well. Like, you know, it was always a lot of work to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put them on. A few of our friends put them on. And, you know, it’s kind of like throwing a wedding, but every year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it was certainly, you know, work, but like, it was, it was a fun little community. It was a fun, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing to do for the group of people who was lucky enough to be able to do it basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and travel all over the world and go to the go to these fun things or hope that one was came up near you and it made things a lot more accessible to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more, you know, localities. But something changed a few years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ago, and it started to become increasingly difficult to sell conference
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tickets. it started to become increasingly difficult to run a conference and break even and not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just lose all your money. And not to mention all the work you put into it. Like running conferences is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a terrible way to make money. And so it’s even worse than writing books.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it became, like kind of the market for conferences seemed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to really crumble apart a few years ago. And most of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco conferences that were going strong five years ago are gone now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there are very few that seem to be left. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wonder, my theory at the time for the most part has been like, it used to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you could get somebody like John Gruber to speak at a conference and that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would sell tickets, that you could go and if you wanted to hear John Gruber talk about something, you could go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the conference, pay whatever the ticket fee is and travel there and you could see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people that you liked online, you could see them talk and it was interesting and you could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco meet them afterwards maybe or hang out or have this little community of other people who were there and hang out with them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that was great for a while. And then everybody got a podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Or everybody got a YouTube channel.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And now you can hear the people who you’re interested in. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can hear their thoughts for free
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the time all the time in podcasts or on YouTube channels, and you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no longer need to go to conferences to hear what these people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sound like in real life or to see like what, you know, to kind of get an idea of their personality beyond like just their words
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they write on a site somewhere. You can actually just listen to their podcast or watch a YouTube channel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for free and everybody can do it. And preparing conference talks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the presenter, That format has a certain expectation of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco formality and preparation that makes it a very time-intensive thing to make.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Preparing conference talk is a ton of work. Making good slides, rehearsing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the talk, giving it a nice story arc and everything, it’s a ton of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work for the presenter. And you do all that work, and all you get out of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is at the end, maybe a hundred people or a couple hundred people see it. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re lucky there’ll be a good video and it’ll live on for a while outside of the conference, but usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that didn’t happen. Usually you’re giving it to the room and that’s it. Or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can do a podcast or a YouTube video, which is usually unscripted or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less scripted. There’s not the big expectation of the formal slides
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and nicely designed everything. You have the opportunity to edit if you want to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s just a different format. it’s a much lower work to output format
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than a conference talk. So you have all of us who used to go to conferences
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and speak, we now do other things because frankly it’s less work. And we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reach way more people with way less effort. And so you have that side of the market.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Then on the other side, you have people just not seeing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the need to pay hundreds or thousands usually of dollars to go to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco conferences to see people when they can just listen to podcasts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I think the market for conferences in general has mostly evaporated for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that kind of community, small kind of thing. What’s left are these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mega conferences that usually the platform owners run for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people on their platform. So things like WBDC, Google I.O.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talking about conventions like Comic Con, that’s a separate thing. I’m not in that world.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know anything about that world. But I’m talking about like conferences of like, it’s like instructional
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talks to people or you know, here’s my origin story, that kind of thing. That’s mostly what I’m talking about.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The market for that is really hard now. It like the small conferences are mostly gone. You’re mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking at just the big platform vendors and people go to these things like basically just to hear about the new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco APIs and go to the labs and try to get time with developers. That’s mostly what these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big things are for now. And so the more of that I think that we can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco remove the need for, the better everybody will be because the way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the smaller conference has died has resulted in way more availability
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of these people’s wonderful content available to everyone all around the world, anytime for free.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So how much can we do to make WWDC and conferences like it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more like that? How much can we do to reduce the need for these to make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their value available to more people all the time everywhere for free?
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like the kind of conference you’re talking about it definitely is undercut by podcast but there is
⏹️ ▶️ John another kind of conference that lives on and in fact has sort of blossomed
⏹️ ▶️ John in the shadow of the other kinds of conferences for good and for ill. And that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John more instructive sort of like classroom type of thing where
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like a little miniature school. So it’s, you can’t replace it with like a one-way
⏹️ ▶️ John communication because it’s interactive, like a classroom where there’s a room full of students and a teacher and you’re going through some curriculum
⏹️ ▶️ John and you get to ask questions and stuff and that doesn’t happen in a podcast or YouTube setting.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s educationally focused so people and or companies are willing to pay for it as a form of training.
⏹️ ▶️ John And these ones tend to be, I mean, they’re also the big ones, but the big ones tend to be less instructional. The smaller ones
⏹️ ▶️ John can get away with being more instructional. It’s because we’re not a platform owner. In fact, our business is teaching you how to
⏹️ ▶️ John use insert technology and or product here so that you can be
⏹️ ▶️ John trained up and get these skills to either get a job or improve at your current job. And companies will pay for you to go this type of training.
⏹️ ▶️ John There are a couple of big to medium shows in this area, like event apart and event apart for
⏹️ ▶️ John web technologies, which is a longstanding conference, but even like little things where it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, one form of it is someone will come into your company and teach a bunch of people a thing, but there are ones that you go
⏹️ ▶️ John to and at a particular location and to learn about stuff. There are some scammy ones that are, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John come to this 10 day bootcamp and we’ll turn you into or whatever and you pay all this money. And it’s like, I could have just learned this online, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like that type of, that interactive nature lends itself
⏹️ ▶️ John to an in-person room full of people. It’s where the math starts to make sense of like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John why would I spend all this time polishing this message to tell it to a room of 100 people? But you wouldn’t have that
⏹️ ▶️ John same question about why would a room of 50 people and one or two teachers
⏹️ ▶️ John spend their time narrow casting to each other? It’s like, well, it’s interactive, it’s a classroom. You don’t want a million people
⏹️ ▶️ John in a classroom. A million people in a classroom can’t learn that way. You need some sort of give and take, some sort of question and answer. Why
⏹️ ▶️ John education tends to work that way and has not turned over entirely to just a one-way blast of
⏹️ ▶️ John a YouTube channel that teaches you math or something. Although there’s a place for that as well. So I think that
⏹️ ▶️ John type of conference is more durable and maybe has a better business model because you feel like you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John getting value out of it. I mean, certainly the business model of people paying money for education is well-established.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m thinking that that’s gonna be harder to go away. But you’re right that the consolidation in the other kind of conference
⏹️ ▶️ John has not left a lot of room for the small things that you’re describing. And then if you think about what’s left,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, F8, AWS, reInvent, whatever the hell that thing is called.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they’re still doing that giant Oracle thing. There’s a giant Salesforce conference, WWDC. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just all, it’s all the big giant platform owners. And the networking,
⏹️ ▶️ John the sort of in-person networking is still definitely a real thing. I think that same networking happens at those educational
⏹️ ▶️ John things as well, but certainly happens much more let’s say the Salesforce conference or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that is, well, I don’t know. I’m saying this as someone who doesn’t like to, as an introvert,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can do a surprising amount of networking online, but I think as we all know, like it’s easy to say
⏹️ ▶️ John these in-person conferences have been replaced by podcasts after we have all gone through a phase where we went to a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of them and met a bunch of people who are now our friends. Like that type of in-person networking is really valuable.
⏹️ ▶️ John And just because we’ve established a friend group in our industry already doesn’t mean
⏹️ ▶️ John that now we no longer need those conferences because we don’t need them. Therefore, nobody should have them. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John first time WWDC attendees come away with connections that are super important for the future
⏹️ ▶️ John of their career. And it’ll be a shame in particular in the Apple community to lose that because.
⏹️ ▶️ John Without, I mean, just think about it. How did I, how did I meet Casey? How did I meet you in person at the WWDC? Would
⏹️ ▶️ John we ever have met if, if WWDC didn’t exist and we weren’t there in person?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, you don’t go anywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John Exactly. And I knew of Marco online for a long time before that, but we had never interacted until we had occasion to
⏹️ ▶️ John be in the same place at the same time. It’s, it’s the way that works. So in some ways, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John we have the problem of scale here where it’s like, well, that’s great. When Apple is a smaller company that made sense. But your, your point earlier
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco was totally true. There are so many developers that the fraction of them that gets the WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ John just keeps going down and down. And so, you know, me saying that there
⏹️ ▶️ John should still be WWDC because other people need to have the the same opportunity to network that we had is true,
⏹️ ▶️ John but their opportunity is so slim because they have to enter a lottery to get
⏹️ ▶️ John a ticket for Crying Out Loud. It used to be that Apple would call you and say, hey, you have a free WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ John ticket that comes with your ADC Premier membership.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Do you wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John use that? And people would go,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey eh, nah. Like Apple would nag you
⏹️ ▶️ John to try to cajole you into using your free ticket as part of your thousand
⏹️ ▶️ John something dollar ADC Premier. Times have changed. There is a lot of demand, there is very
⏹️ ▶️ John little supply, but I still think for developers,
⏹️ ▶️ John for new developers, or developers new to the Apple community, that in-person contact with
⏹️ ▶️ John the group of other Apple developers is actually really valuable. It would actually be great if they could expand that rather
⏹️ ▶️ John than contracting it. You probably talked about this on another Radar, but the whole Tech Talks thing, where Apple would come to your
⏹️ ▶️ John city with a smaller crew and do a bunch of presentations to a limited subset. Before I ever went to
⏹️ ▶️ John WWDC, I went to a Boston area tech talk thing and didn’t meet anybody because I don’t like people.
⏹️ ▶️ John But they were there
⏹️ ▶️ John wanted to. I could have talked to Paul Kefasis, but I didn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You were near the people, at
⏹️ ▶️ John least. I was. I was near them. So that type of thing where, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John in a post-coronavirus world, providing a place where people can actually meet each other physically
⏹️ ▶️ John does still serve a purpose, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but I do want to touch on one aspect of the whole networking and meeting people angle here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I spent a large part of my coming of age years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the internet on discussion forums. You know, old like Ultimate Bolt and Board, PHP BB, like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of forums. And it became clear to me over time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that forums have a certain ideal size. And that if you are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco below that size, it’s just kind of too low traffic and there’s not much reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for anybody to go check it regularly because there’s not enough new stuff. And then when you’re in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certain size band it’s great because you know there’s like there’s good traffic and there’s you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can you can visit the forum throughout the day and see new stuff and people can play off each other and get responses fairly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fast and it’s really nice. But if it grows too large there’s also an upper bound
⏹️ ▶️ Marco beyond which it’s just too much and it’s actually it doesn’t function very well as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a community anymore. It doesn’t feel very community like. The community mechanics start to break
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down. It becomes just more hectic and too much volume
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the entire forum mechanic just has this upper bound where it just kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco falls apart and isn’t very good anymore. Conferences have that too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I actually don’t think there is a minimum size below which conferences suck.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been to conferences that have 50 people I wouldn’t say the 50 people ones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were bad. In fact, they were some of the best ones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the value of networking and meeting people at a conference
⏹️ ▶️ Marco goes down as the number of attendees goes up because it becomes harder
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for people who don’t already have their friend groups to actually find and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco meet the people they wanna meet. Or to find and meet even just like-minded other people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who even if they weren’t like, you know, people they knew before, like, the percent, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the number of conference attendees goes up, and especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as you don’t get as many, like, repeat visitors every year, because the number of people trying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get in is so high, that like, they try to give a lot of first time tickets, so like, it’s hard to get a ticket multiple years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a row. So like, the odds of like, building up community,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, that actually is meaningful, and networking that’s meaningful over a year or two, or whatever else,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel like that gets harder as the conference gets bigger. And I think WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these last few years has crossed that threshold where it’s actually pretty difficult
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to network with people because it’s almost like there’s just too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many people there. It’s like a little bit too big. And I don’t think the move to San Jose has actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco helped that much. Although I don’t know if it’s really hurt it, But it just, it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the conference is so big now that even that aspect that’s supposed to be really good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about conferences is harder now. It’s harder to get value out of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey See, I disagree with you slightly. I think networking is just as good,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if not better, because you’re getting a new batch of people, well, you know, largely new batch of people every year. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the thing that I struggle with and the thing that was so great about early WWDC,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I started going in 2011. Uh, the thing that was so great about that is, you know, in 2011, I met, you know, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey five or 10 people that I really hit it off with John included. Um, and then in 2012, I met another couple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of people and over the years, I’ve met more and more people and I’ve made more lasting relationships
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that I think you’re absolutely right. It is harder to, to, to build a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lasting and meaningful relationship. Across several WWDCs because a, it’s unlikely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you yourself will go to several in a row, like you said, and B, even if you dedicate yourself to going, maybe you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to layers, if not the big show, or maybe you’re just hanging out, then, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Joe Smith or, or Mary Smith or whomever that you met last year, maybe they didn’t make it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this year. And that makes that sort of thing different. But if you just want to meet a whole bunch of people at random places,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, in the traditional business-y way of networking, I don’t think that’s really any worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I do find for me, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very hard to effectively and appropriately manage my time because – and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. Maybe this is inside baseball. Maybe this is first world problems and if it’s really terrible, Mark will just cut
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. Hooray. But for me, it’s very hard because I want to spend time with you and John, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Mike, my co-hosts across my shows. I want to spend a lot of time with you guys because I don’t get to spend
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time with you guys in person really ever, except in June. But I also want to spend time with people that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t see often. And so like on the occasions that Jelly is in town, I mean, he’s coming from the future.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey He’s coming from Australia. So it is not easy to get him and I in the same spot. And I want to spend time with Jelly. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then at the same time, I want to spend time with Apple engineers that I’m friendly with, sometimes just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as friendly with that I don’t get to see very often. So I want to make time for them. And then while I’m there, I also want to make time for people I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, and try to be available for people who are strangers to me, but maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve been in their ears for the last five years. And I want to make time for them. And so what ends up happening is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me, I’m always saying to somebody, oh, I can meet with you for 20 minutes. Oh, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’d love to hang out, but I got to go. Or, oh, I didn’t realize what time was. I’m sorry, we’re in the middle of a very deep
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and important conversation. I really got to go. And that sort of thing has also become very hard. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of that is because I’ve come to know a bunch of people over the years. But I don’t think that’s unique to being a podcaster.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s just unique to having gone several years in a row. And it’s just, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, it’s all really tough. And, and I would like to see a change, but darned if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know what to recommend. And, you know, I don’t know how to, how to backseat drive this
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it’s part of the reason I think that Apple’s kept WWDC relatively small. Like WWDC hasn’t like, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John gotten bigger in that more people want to go, which means there’s more turnover from year to year, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John to your earlier point, Like even if you don’t see any of the same people, very often
⏹️ ▶️ John you may be your first or your second year, you meet a particular group of people and then you kind of, that becomes your friend
⏹️ ▶️ John group after the thing. You don’t need to see them again the next year at WWDC for that to stick. I mean, I think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John been true of a lot of first time or second time attendees. Certain people you meet there, you
⏹️ ▶️ John still know and are friends with, and it’s not because you saw them again the second year, although maybe that helps
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. But for WWDC being 5,000 ish people, And by the way, when you
⏹️ ▶️ John said early WWDCs in reference 2011, I’m sure lots of people were rolling their eyes because that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John another reason that WWDC is gonna be a big change is Apple’s been running it for a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is gonna be the first year they skipped since the 80s, 90s. I have a VHS tape
⏹️ ▶️ John of WWDC upstairs. But yeah, so like it is possible
⏹️ ▶️ John to have, and most of these big conferences, platform conferences, 10 times as many people as
⏹️ ▶️ John WWDC. And I think if you were to ask somebody at the 60,000 person Salesforce conference, do you find it difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John to network because there are 60,000 people? I think, I mean, granted it’s a different group of people. I think they’re going to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, it’s great. Tons of people. I mean, love meeting the people and doing all the networking and so on and so forth. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John smaller conferences are more intimate and you’re able to connect, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John in a sort of a more reliable fashion with a smaller group of people with less effort, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think 5,000 is too big and even though the demand is so great that there’s turnover,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s still, I mean, I think you’d have to look at it from the eyes of a first time attendee, like not from a
⏹️ ▶️ John multi-year attendee who has a bunch of people they know and whose time is in such demand, like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John ours or Casey’s or whatever. Like, it’s just, it, if you’re, if you’re maybe first
⏹️ ▶️ John or second year attendee and you’re just overwhelmed by the sessions and you go to labs and you meet one or two other people,
⏹️ ▶️ John doing that just once can be incredibly valuable, uh, to just sort of get
⏹️ ▶️ John you started on your career, which is why, you know, I’m not saying that I think WDC
⏹️ ▶️ John needs to continue exactly the way it is, but I think there needs to be some kind of, it would be a shame for
⏹️ ▶️ John that to go away without any kind of replacement. And I’m not sure what could possibly replace
⏹️ ▶️ John it, but I think it’s been valuable in my career in life. And I hear
⏹️ ▶️ John from people who have attended for the first or second or third time that they also find it valuable,
⏹️ ▶️ John even for people who say, I don’t go anymore, but I’m so glad I went that one a few times because it really
⏹️ ▶️ John set me on my path. As much as I don’t like going out into the world,
⏹️ ▶️ John being face-to-face with people is extremely valuable. Again, would we be doing this podcast had we not
⏹️ ▶️ John met face-to-face, despite the fact that we, at least Marco knew of me and I knew of him online,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it never led us to start a podcast together, right? And nobody knew Casey, so. Who
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey hell is that guy anyway?
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like meeting in person was an essential catalyst and it’s very difficult for me to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John but we don’t need that anymore because it’s too big and it doesn’t work. Like there are limits, but I feel like WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ John is, one of the things Apple has done with WWDC is tried to keep it from getting big. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John if they wanted to make WWDC a 50,000 person conference, they could probably do it, but they haven’t and
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t. And 5,000 may be a little bit crowded, but I still feel like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John tenable. I see the people who are there, and you know, are first time people hanging out and maybe they’re starting
⏹️ ▶️ John off in a group with the people from their company, but then they talk to some other group. Like, I think it still works at that level.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I couldn’t agree with you more. It has been such a valuable, you know, portion of my life and career that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would, I would hate to have somebody else miss out on that since it made such a big difference for me.
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#askatp: Mac keyboard shortcuts
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alright, let’s do some ask ATP. And roar locar writes kind of paraphrase,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the command option click dock shortcut to open a Finder window is amazing. What are some of your favorite macOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shortcuts. I think I have a ton, but I can only think of a handful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off the top of my head. So I have three for Finder and two for Xcode. First of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Finder, Command-K to get to a window that will let you open a VNC session, which has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been very critical now that I’m using the Mac Mini remotely a lot, or an SMB or a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey network share to, say, your Synology. Shift-Command-A for applications,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is to say to go into the applications folder. Shift command 4 to take a screenshot or shift command 4 space
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to take a screenshot of a specific window. And then for Xcode, option command
⏹️ ▶️ Casey forward slash for creating documentation. So, you know, the method summary parameters,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey et cetera, et cetera. And shift command O for quick open. So, to open a file very quickly by typing the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey file name. I really like those. I should steal one or two of Marco’s that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I also agree with. But I will let you actually have your own moment in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you. So, one of my favorites that I use all the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is paste and match style. This gets you around the problem of if you copy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rich text and you’re pasting it somewhere where you don’t want to paste its formatting that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it came with, you want it to match the formatting of what you’re pasting it into, which is usually no formatting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So paste and match style does that. In my opinion, this should actually be the default behavior on both
⏹️ ▶️ Marco platforms. It’s not. On the Mac, you have to do the special shortcut. On iOS,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is no built-in method of paste and match style. Actually, on iOS, I use an app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco called, I believe, Copy Plain Text, and it simply offers a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco share extension that copies what you have selected only as plain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco text. So that way, you can go paste it effectively unformatted. Oh yeah, so the app is simply
⏹️ ▶️ Marco called Plain Text. I’m sure that’ll be easy to find. I’ll link to it in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show notes. Anyway, so on iOS you gotta do some crazy thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco On the Mac, the way to do paste and match style, it’s a menu item, you can see it under the edit menu if you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanna remember this. But you basically hold down Command, Option, Shift,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco V? Yeah, so Command V is paste, and then Command, Option, Shift V is paste and match style.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would also, I love, one of the things I turn on on every Mac I use is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you go into the accessibility preference pane, you go to zoom, and you check the box
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that says use scroll gesture with modifier keys to zoom, and I use the control key.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What this lets me do is hold down the control key and do either a mouse wheel scroll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever the scroll gesture is on your mouse or track pad, and that allows you to zoom in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and see the entire screen zoom in and out simply by holding down control and scrolling.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this can be very useful to simply very quickly make something big or to check. Like if you’re a developer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco working or a designer working on pixel stuff, you can like check like alignment a little bit more easily this way. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so fast. You just hold down control, zoom in, zoom out. It’s awesome. And finally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uh, one of the most common awesome power user things to do on the Mac is take screenshots really quickly with, as Casey mentioned,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the, uh, command shift 4 thing and there’s all the different variations of that that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can use to either copy to you know copy a selected region or output
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it directly to a file whatever else any of those including number 4 any of those that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make you select a region first where you drag out the box to select if instead
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you hover over a window with your mouse and you hit the spacebar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it it turns the cursor into a little camera, and if you click, it will capture
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just that window, it’ll capture an image of just that window with a drop shadow behind it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and nothing else. And there’s actually some weird prefs that you can do to disable the drop shadow if you want to look it up. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s really, really nice if you wanna take a screenshot of just a window to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hit Command Shift 4, whatever it is, hit Spacebar, click the window.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s what I usually do. There is a command shift five now that I think is new in Catalina that lets
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you do some even more advanced stuff, but I always forget it exists and it’s become just such muscle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey memory for me to do command shift four space. I also was thinking as you were talking, there’s another
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one that we talked about very recently that is specific to Xcode. It is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let me get this right. It is shift command option, control
⏹️ ▶️ Casey C, which what is it called in the menu, it is called Copy Qualified
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Symbol Name. And what that lets you do is, if you have a function or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a message or whatever, it will copy basically the type that it’s a part
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of, the name of the function, and then the parameters to that function. So let’s say you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey putting something in, I don’t know, like a GitHub PR or something like that, or a GitHub issue. You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can say, oh, foo class dot do stuff, parenthesis stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey colon or whatever. It’s a terrible example. This is an audio show. it’s very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John hard to describe, you get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my point. It’s a really, even though it’s like the claw, I think that’s when we were talking about it for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever it was, claw, the save for web claw or whatever it is, it’s a very similar motion, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, really convenient to get a summarized version of a method that you’re working in.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I also want to double down on the control mouse wheel for Zoom. I always turn that on almost immediately and it comes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in handy every single day. John, do we have enough time to go through your list? Could you perhaps bring it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey down to about a hundred entries if possible?
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t even prepare a list. I’ll just go off the top of my head. Well, first I’ll amend some
⏹️ ▶️ John of your lists. So you listed the Command Shift 4 under Finder. That’s not a Finder shortcut.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can quit the Finder and I’m pretty sure that still
⏹️ ▶️ John fair. Just to be clear on the screenshots, Command Shift 3 is the whole screen. Command Shift 4 is select a region
⏹️ ▶️ John or space bar to get a window. Command Shift 5 gives you the menu with all the options in particular.
⏹️ ▶️ John One of the options you might be interested in if you’re taking screenshots is the Command Shift 5 thing has a little options menu
⏹️ ▶️ John that lets you set it whether you want the cursor to be visible or not. Sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t want the cursor to be visible, which I think is the default, but occasionally you do if say you’re making a screenshot for the
⏹️ ▶️ John app store and you’re pulling down a menu. If you don’t have the cursor visible, it looks like a disembodied menu coming down with
⏹️ ▶️ John on it. Oh, that’s cool, I didn’t know that. There used to be a utility, it might still be there, called Grab that would give timed screenshots,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I think you can also do that from the Command Shift 5 thing now too. The reason why you’d want timed is because you want to like
⏹️ ▶️ John manipulate the UI and get it into a state where if you were to hit a keystroke, it would screw up the state, so
⏹️ ▶️ John you have a timer countdown. Anyway, lots of options for screenshotting. Paste and match style.
⏹️ ▶️ John There are a couple of apps, I think it might have been Microsoft apps, I don’t wanna blame them about checking, but I ran across
⏹️ ▶️ John a couple of apps or a suite of apps that didn’t use the normal paste and match style keyboard shortcut,
⏹️ ▶️ John they did command shift V, I’m like, what the hell? Like, as I kept trying to do paste and match style, nothing would happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know a lot of people who, you know, are just sick of it working this way. Remap
⏹️ ▶️ John paste and match style to command V. If you do that, it actually covers a surprising amount of cases.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like if you, you know, so in system preferences in the keyboard preference pane, believe it or not, there’s a shortcuts area
⏹️ ▶️ John where you can set keyboard shortcuts to a corresponding menu command in any application.
⏹️ ▶️ John You just type exactly the keyboard command as it appears. Even if it’s buried 20 levels deep, you just type
⏹️ ▶️ John the name, exactly the name of the thing, which means you’ll have to learn how to type an ellipsis. It’s commands, but a semi-colon.
⏹️ ▶️ John You may have learned to type in allelipsis. Exactly match that text and you can set a keyboard grant. So if you do
⏹️ ▶️ John paste and match style with the same case and spacing and everything and
⏹️ ▶️ John assigned it to command V and unassigned it from paste, every time you hit command V in an application
⏹️ ▶️ John that supports paste and match file, it will paste and match style. I don’t go that far. I’m so used to doing the big, you know, multi-key
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that I don’t bother with, but some people do. Shortcuts that I enjoy, let’s see.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m trying to think of things that people might not know because they’re old. Because those are things people
⏹️ ▶️ John tend not to think about. Some of these are less reliable over time, but they still mostly work. One of them is,
⏹️ ▶️ John since the days of classic Mac OS, if you begin a drag, in theory in any application,
⏹️ ▶️ John but in practice this is less and less reliable. If you begin dragging something from somewhere to somewhere,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can drag things from applications, you can drag things in the finder, anytime you’re doing a drag thing. Poor drag.
⏹️ ▶️ John Hey! And you find yourself in the middle of the drag operation and you’re like, I need to
⏹️ ▶️ John bail out of this. Like I’ve, you know, I’ve spring loaded my way into a bunch of folders or I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John command tabbed while I’ve been dragging and there’s, you know, that’s another thing you can do by the way. If you hit command tab
⏹️ ▶️ John while you’re in the middle of a drag, you can actually drag the thing you’re dragging over the icon of the app you want to switch
⏹️ ▶️ John to in the command tab switcher.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey There’s a whole bunch of,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, there’s a whole bunch of command. It always, this is the thing about this. I don’t want to be like, I can’t believe people
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know this. feigned surprise, like, oh, why does everybody not know all these shortcuts? But it really does surprise me, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the subset of things that each person uses, right? So like the things that you use every day
⏹️ ▶️ John that you think everybody knows about, but then you see somebody else using a Mac and they’re using none of your things, but they’re using a whole
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey set of things that you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know. You know, anyway, to finish my point about the drag,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you want to bail on that drag, it’s very sometimes difficult to say, what do I do? I’m holding, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John basically holding this thing in my mouse cursor and I can’t get back, easily get
⏹️ ▶️ John back to where it was, like it’s a file or something, you wanna like put it back exactly where
⏹️ ▶️ John it was, but if you don’t find exactly where and you release, like it’ll land on your desktop or something and you don’t wanna move it to your desktop
⏹️ ▶️ John and the Finder has undo and all sorts of other things. But anyway, trying to find a safe
⏹️ ▶️ John place to let go of a thing that you’re dragging can be somewhat fraught. This happens on, we talked
⏹️ ▶️ John about this on iOS, like you begin a multi-finger drag or something and you’re in the middle of it, and it’s like, what do I do? If I release,
⏹️ ▶️ John that performs an action, but there’s no safe area in the screen for me to release
⏹️ ▶️ John and say, but just don’t do what I was doing. Just abort, abort. Well, on the Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you hit the escape key while you were dragging, in theory, in a well-behaved Mac application,
⏹️ ▶️ John it will do exactly what you want. You’re still dragging, you’re still holding down the mouse button, hit escape, and it’ll just be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, nevermind. Whatever it is you were doing, I’m going to stop doing it. You don’t have to find a safe region
⏹️ ▶️ John to dump things. If you are, by the way, looking for a safe region and Escape is not supported, you can very often drag it onto the
⏹️ ▶️ John menu bar and that will be a safe place to get rid of things. Another shortcut,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, works spottily, but I used it for many, many years and still do. If you’re in a Finder window
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s in ListView, or you have a ListView Finder window,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s filled with a bunch of folders, some of which are disclosed, some of which aren’t, you know, like it’s just a giant
⏹️ ▶️ John forest of folders, and you want to drag something into that folder. But
⏹️ ▶️ John anytime you drag it over the window, it starts like highlighting one of the folders. You’re like, no, I don’t, I don’t want it to be
⏹️ ▶️ John in one of the folders that’s inside this folder. I want it to be a sibling to all of those folders. I want it to just be
⏹️ ▶️ John in this window, but it’s just too filled with too many folders. How do I get this thing that I’m dragging
⏹️ ▶️ John into this list view finder window, but just in, in the folder that that window represents, not in any of the
⏹️ ▶️ John nested ones, when every single pixel that I can drag it over would have it ending up inside
⏹️ ▶️ John some other folder that’s see this disclosed or not disclosed. If you drag the item
⏹️ ▶️ John onto the column headings, like name, date modified, or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John again in well-behaved variants of the Finder and well-behaved views in situations,
⏹️ ▶️ John that has historically been a way to drag something safely, like a safe drop
⏹️ ▶️ John region, and it will say, oh I see you want this to be in this folder, and you’re not hovering over one of the
⏹️ ▶️ John other folders that are in it, but you are within the realm of the window. So just Just drag it onto the name column or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John and it will go into that window. Let’s see, are there any other good ones I can think of?
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a bunch of stuff with the option key that I do without thinking about it. In Switch Glass
⏹️ ▶️ John and Front and Center I have all these, you know, if you go to the websites for them you can see all the different key combinations. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is very difficult to convey in the app. I don’t have an overlay that tells you about them, but
⏹️ ▶️ John basically there’s tons of modifier keys that you can hit when switching windows
⏹️ ▶️ John and when clicking on things in Switch Glass. almost all those are copied from things that are already in the OS. So for example,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you hold on the option key and click on a window belonging to another application, it will hide
⏹️ ▶️ John the previous window or application behind you. Like as you leave, the thing you just left will just,
⏹️ ▶️ John will, will hide. And the thing you’re going to will appear. That’s, you know, you can do two things in
⏹️ ▶️ John one motion that way, right? Again, combined with my applications, you know, modifies that behavior,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that’s extremely handy. There’s all the keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John commands for doing window hiding and showing in the window menu. If you look at the window menu in most
⏹️ ▶️ John applications, they’ll have like hide and hide others, command H command option H, very
⏹️ ▶️ John handy. Again, if you don’t know those commands exist, it can sometimes be frustrating to have so many different windows, but there
⏹️ ▶️ John are commands you can type to make windows appear and disappear.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, it really blew my mind that hearing you talk about Finder made me think of what is the icon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the top of a window? Is it the proxy icon? Is that the right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John term for it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if you’re looking at a Finder window, and this is not unique to Finder, but let’s pick on Finder for a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So. It’s any standard document window in Mac OS.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, there you go. So again, I’ll pick on Finder just because it’s generic and everyone has it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m looking at a folder and it happens to be called Development. And so at the top of the Finder window, there’s a little blue
⏹️ ▶️ Casey folder. Next to it, there’s the word Development. If you click and hold and then eventually drag that folder,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you are clicking, holding, and dragging that development folder or whatever it happens to be called.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you can do things with it. And like Marco said, you know, that’s also true of like a Word document
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or a Pages document and a whole bunch of other things. And that, I forget that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that exists a lot of the time, but every time I remember it ends up saving my bacon or making something a lot easier
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than it would have been otherwise.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I saw some, you know, this is me being, doing exactly what I said before,
⏹️ ▶️ John being shocked at things that people don’t know. But there was some article, I think it was actually talking about non-obvious things in iPadOS, and they were
⏹️ ▶️ John like, yeah, well, there’s a bunch of non-obvious stuff on the Mac, too. Like, I just found out recently that you can
⏹️ ▶️ John hold down the Command key and click on the title of a Finder window and get a pop-up menu that shows the hierarchy, and it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, aren’t people born knowing that? And the answer is no, they’re not born knowing that. The only reason you notice, because you’ve been doing
⏹️ ▶️ John it on a Mac for umpteen million years, but if you don’t already know that,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not discoverable, and it’s this thing that I rarely see people do, but old
⏹️ ▶️ John school Mac users take it for granted that you can do it. Now, this was in the context of an article saying like there was some feature
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I forget, I think Ruber couldn’t find like, or thought ListView didn’t exist or something on the Files app on
⏹️ ▶️ John iPadOS, and like, oh, if you swipe down from the top of the screen, it shows a toolbar where you can pick the view. And he’s like, how would I discover
⏹️ ▶️ John that? There’s nothing on the screen indicating that I could do that. And so someone was throwing this command click
⏹️ ▶️ John on Finder title bar thing back at it. But the thing is, you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t need to know that shortcut to perform that operation in the Finder. just by clicking with a single mouse button,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can navigate around and selecting from the menu command to go to
⏹️ ▶️ John the computer item and drill down. Like there, it’s not the primary way to navigate in the Finder. You can
⏹️ ▶️ John never know that that command click menu is in the Finder and still successfully use the Finder and use all
⏹️ ▶️ John its different views. Whereas the Files app and iPadOS, if you don’t know to swipe down
⏹️ ▶️ John from the top of the screen to pull down a toolbar, you will think the app literally doesn’t have a list view feature. Again, getting back to
⏹️ ▶️ John what we were talking about many times in the past, the menu bar as a place to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what this app can do. Let me look at some of the things that it can do. And you just go through all the menus and you’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John see a menu called view, which you might have, you know, might be able to change the way windows look. And you’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John see in view, a bunch of options for different, you know, list view, icon view. And that’s how you’ll discover
⏹️ ▶️ John it. It totally is discoverable. The fact that, you know, there are shortcuts and by the way, it’s discoverable with the shortcuts,
⏹️ ▶️ John of course, because when you see the, you know, in the view menu, you’ll see, oh, look, There’s as
⏹️ ▶️ John icons, as lists, as columns, and they all have command keys. Command one, command two, command three. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John not only do you learn those features exist, but you also learn the shortcuts. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I just spent all day on just some Finder ones. Command up and down arrow for navigating the hierarchy, command option up and down arrow
⏹️ ▶️ John to hide the thing behind you, holding the option key when you double click a folder to again, close the previous
⏹️ ▶️ John window behind you. This is all old school way of navigating. I know everybody uses browser mode. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll stop myself. I could go on for ages. but there are tons and tons of shortcuts in Mac OS. The help
⏹️ ▶️ John in Mac OS, there’s some kind of help document in the built-in help that comes with the OS that is just
⏹️ ▶️ John two pages of shortcuts. I highly recommend people hunt that down and just read it because you’ll probably
#askatp: Login Items/Open at Login
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John Mitchell writes, is there a difference between using a Mac apps open whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at login setting and its preferences versus adding it to system preferences, user and groups
⏹️ ▶️ Casey login items? I feel like I’m fighting against the tide by wanting them all in one place, preferably in login items.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would assume that the open, you know, the apps own open at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey login setting does not necessarily need to go in login items, but I don’t know of any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey specific differences here. So perhaps one of you guys do, maybe John.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is a little miniature war story because both of my applications, I wanted to have that little checkbox that
⏹️ ▶️ John says launch on login or open when I log in or whatever, because they’re both the kind of application where you’d want
⏹️ ▶️ John to do that. And everyone knows login items or everyone, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey A lot of people know login
⏹️ ▶️ John items. If you go to system preferences and the user and groups thing, like and you go to your user, there’s a little login items tab.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there’s a list of things that are going to launch when you you log in and you can drag things into it and the little plus minus keys, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But sometime a couple years ago, you start to see applications,
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac applications, they would have a little checkbox in their preference that said launch on login. But then if you went
⏹️ ▶️ John to your login items, you wouldn’t see it there. It’d be like, huh? Why is that not showing
⏹️ ▶️ John up there? It does launch on login. The checkbox works, but I don’t see it in that thing. So when it came time
⏹️ ▶️ John for me to add launch on login to my apps, my first app, front and center, I looked it up, hey, how do you do launch on login?
⏹️ ▶️ John And you find a bunch of older answers that say, oh, here’s how you do it. You just, here’s how you add it to the login
⏹️ ▶️ John items list. It’s just a plist, you just add your thing to it and you go to system preferences, there’ll be your little
⏹️ ▶️ John app icon and it’ll launch on login. Like so many things having to do with the Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John the reason this changed is good old sandboxing. In a sandboxing world,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not a situation where all these random Mac applications can access this plist that is not
⏹️ ▶️ John in their containers. The login items plist doesn’t belong to any one application. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John community owned. And if you wanted to get at that plist and wanted to have permission to edit, you’d have to throw up a
⏹️ ▶️ John permission dialogue or have full disk access or do all sorts of things that sandboxing makes much
⏹️ ▶️ John more difficult. So to get around that, Apple came up with a new way
⏹️ ▶️ John for you to make your application launch on login. And it’s an API that you can call.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s not as simple as like, I’ll just call this API and my app will be launched on login.
⏹️ ▶️ John The API that you call, the app that you’re calling it from, you cannot
⏹️ ▶️ John call that API to make the app that you’re calling it from launch on login. You
⏹️ ▶️ John can only call that API to make some other app launch on login.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I’m sure there’s some security.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why? I’m sure there’s some kind of security reason for this. Like, I don’t, honestly, I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t understand it. like I’m 100% cargo culting this. I’m Googling for the answer to my question. I’m finding it. The actual
⏹️ ▶️ John answer is you have to make another target in your application. It will be a launcher
⏹️ ▶️ John application whose sole job is to launch your actual application. And you embed
⏹️ ▶️ John that inside your app bundle. So if you look inside front and center or you look inside SwitchGlass, you will find a tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John application inside both of them called front and center launcher or SwitchGlass launcher. And the only
⏹️ ▶️ John thing in the code of that application is code that will launch the real application. So you’ve actually
⏹️ ▶️ John made four apps. Yeah, exactly, I totally did. And then kill itself. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John from the main application, you tell the other application to tell it that it should launch
⏹️ ▶️ John your application. Tell it, for the main application, you tell it to launch the launcher application on login.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the thing that’s actually launching on login is not my application, it’s the launcher application. And the launcher application launches, and then it launches
⏹️ ▶️ John my real application, and then my real application kills the launcher. Oh my goodness. a hell of a,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, this was like, I’m gonna add this one little feature, right? This is why this is a miniature war story. I’m just gonna add that
⏹️ ▶️ John checkbox, really easy to do. Okay, now I just gotta call whatever API to launch on login. It’s like, I have to make an embedded
⏹️ ▶️ John target? What? And then how do I make sure the signing works? And then, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the many rookie mistakes I made was the deployment target for my
⏹️ ▶️ John embedded launcher was different from my application, right? I hadn’t decided on the deployment targets or whatever. So
⏹️ ▶️ John like the deployment target was the default, which is like 10.15 on front and center. So front and center’s the minimum
⏹️ ▶️ John version is like 10.12. So front and center can run on 10.12, but the launcher could only run on 10.15.
⏹️ ▶️ John So anyone who was running on earlier than 10.15, like I clicked the launch on login
⏹️ ▶️ John and it never launches because the launcher would start to run and it would be like, oh, your version of the OS is too
⏹️ ▶️ John old, I won’t run. Anyway, all this is to say, the current system
⏹️ ▶️ John is bad. Having everybody group edit a random shared plist is also
⏹️ ▶️ John bad, I just hope they come up with a better system that, you know, because
⏹️ ▶️ John what you want is, you want it to be secure in whatever ways they need it to be secure. You don’t want to have to write an embedded launcher application,
⏹️ ▶️ John but also it would be nice to, to this person’s point, to be able to look at login items or a single
⏹️ ▶️ John place in the GUI and see, here’s all the things that are gonna launch on login. Because now it’s like dark matter. You have no
⏹️ ▶️ John idea other than by going to the application and seeing that checkbox. I don’t know where to find a list of things that are configured
⏹️ ▶️ John to launch on login, but not using login items. So that is, let’s say, in a transitional period, and I hope
#askatp: We swap computers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And finally, and this is either going to take three seconds or another hour,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nicholas Gaffney writes, you have to use one of your co-hosts main work machines for a week with minimal changes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to preferences, apps, et cetera. Who do you choose? Bonus, which host
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would you trust more to use your main Mac for a week? I will start.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will get everyone angry at me first. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would want to use Marco’s iMac Pro because I think it’s going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be most similar to my own setup. Now I saw John unmute,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I have a feeling he’s about to argue with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John me. How dare you? How dare you?
⏹️ ▶️ John screen is bigger and brighter. Yes. I
⏹️ ▶️ John more internal storage. I have more cores. You have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more RAM. Yeah, and you have more RAM. I’m too scared of your setup though, John. Like look, why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do you have a second dock in the corner of your screen? There’s no need for that. You don’t need that, John. You don’t need it.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t need to see the screen so big, it’ll be in your peripheral vision. That’s a fair point.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey auto-hide. Yeah, that’s also true. So I think it is most likely, cause it’s been a long time,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I’ve seen Marco’s computer and I’ve seen him use it very, very briefly. And it looked like a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reasonably vanilla macOS installation. to the point that I feel like I could work with it. Whereas
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think John is probably customizing his setup
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the ends of the earth and back and it scares me. And more important than anything else, I think John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would be a lot less forgiving to me changing anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on his computer. Whereas not to say Marco would be excellent about this, but I think Marco, you would be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more forgiving about me changing things if necessary. Who would I trust most to use my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey main Mac for a week? I am actually going to continue to pick on John and say I would trust Marco because I think John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John able to control himself. I would fix it is what I would do. That’s the thing. John would not be able to
⏹️ ▶️ John control himself. But it would be fixed
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco when I was done.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, by whose definition of
⏹️ ▶️ John As in you’d be able to use it to record podcasts without it screwing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up in the morning.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Oh, sick burn,
⏹️ ▶️ John sick burn. That’s what I mean. I’m not meaning I would change your settings. I mean I would debug your problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, if that’s the case, if that’s the deal, then I’ll switch my answer to John. But in general,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m too scared that, and I think Marco knows exactly where I’m coming from, I’m too scared that you would fix it for the definition
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of now I’m running front and center and switch glass and I’ve got all sorts of things. I’ve got Pearl
⏹️ ▶️ John installed. I would change your scroll direction
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey to the proper one. Oh no, you monster.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it says minimal changes to settings. I think we’re allowed to change the scroll direction if any
⏹️ ▶️ John of us are using the terrible, quote unquote, natural
⏹️ ▶️ Casey direction. You mean the correct direction, which is natural. Anyway, that is my answer. All right, Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s your turn to get picked on. what would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you do? I was basically gonna say you for both of those exact same reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you using my computer and me using your computer for the exact same reasons of like, you know, A,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do run a fairly vanilla setup and I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John runs a much more customized one than either of us. And so I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both want my setup to be altered as little as possible and I think if John was using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my computer, I think he would have a lot more complaints, and that would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey result in him
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John fixing my computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And secondly, I wouldn’t want to use his, because I’d be afraid of messing
⏹️ ▶️ John it up. Yep. You’d both be on guest accounts. It’s not like you’d be on my account.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it says, it doesn’t specify, but I’m assuming it means like you’re not using that person’s account. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John you’d have your own
⏹️ ▶️ Casey account. No, I took it as, obviously, we would never want to share passwords or whatever. But in this hypothetical scenario,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am sitting down on the Marco user on Marco’s computer or the John user on John’s computer, whatever the case may
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be. And so I am literally using your setup.
⏹️ ▶️ John But then if we don’t have each other’s passwords,
⏹️ ▶️ John how would we update our Apple ID settings, which would be prompted for at least once or twice during the week. Oh, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey a good point. I guess, I guess- Are
⏹️ ▶️ John you both getting that prompt or is that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey just me? Just
⏹️ ▶️ John comes up occasionally. You know what I’m talking about, right? Oh yeah. It’ll be like a notification
⏹️ ▶️ John that says your Apple ID settings need to be updated and
⏹️ ▶️ John click on it, it will launch system preferences and it will go to the Apple ID thing and there’ll be a thing that says you need to
⏹️ ▶️ John update your thing and then it’ll make you enter your Apple ID password and then you wait a little bit and then it’ll make you enter your Mac password
⏹️ ▶️ John and you wait a little bit and then it goes away.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have had that happen for sure, but it doesn’t happen as frequently as it sounds like yours
⏹️ ▶️ John does. I got many to ask about this on Twitter, but I’ll do it now on the podcast. If you work for Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John on iCloud and you know what the hell that thing is, please tell us because I do it every
⏹️ ▶️ John few weeks And every time I do it, I’m like, what are you doing thing?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I haven’t changed
⏹️ ▶️ John anything related to my Apple ID. I don’t know what you’re prompting me for. I mean, okay, I’ll enter my
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple ID password and then I’ll enter my Mac password and then you’ll go away. But I don’t know why you were ever here.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it makes me think it’s server related because I think like when Catalina first came out, there was a day where everyone was getting
⏹️ ▶️ John prompted for it like a hundred times a day. Like you do it and then it would come back five minutes later, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m like, this has got to be a server side thing because this is not client side. Anyway, so if you know what that is definitively
⏹️ ▶️ John and can tell us, and as an extra credit, can tell us if there’s anything we can do about stopping
⏹️ ▶️ John it, although I assume there isn’t, because I assume it’s a server-side thing, please tell us.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, so who’s getting in trouble?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I think this is what’s going on set, but I’ll say it, no one wants to use Casey’s computer, because it’s broken all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Aw. No one has
⏹️ ▶️ John picked your computer yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I know it’s just Marker’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going on, but I’m also not gonna, it’s just three of us, so there’s limited choices. I can’t pick my own
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey computer, and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John sure as hell not gonna pick yours because nothing works. Like, the OS constantly has to be reinstalled
⏹️ ▶️ John and the trackpad is stuttering and you can’t record podcasts on it. Who wants to use, and then when it was
⏹️ ▶️ John working, you can’t do SwiftUI with a live preview because it’s a hobby. Like, no one wants to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey use that thing. Oh, come on, man.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, that’s true. Like, and I was assuming we would be on our own account. So I’d have to say I’d be on Margo’s. And like, honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t customize my computer. You know, like there’s, I have fewer menu bar icons than you do, Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that, right? I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, what am I, If I look at my menu bar right now, I’ve got Mountain, Pastebot,
⏹️ ▶️ John my two apps, Twitterific and the stupid Skype thing that I can’t get rid of. And then I have a time machine,
⏹️ ▶️ John wifi, sound, and then the sidecar
⏹️ ▶️ John thing with Bobber Plus. My name and the date, I’m not running any kind of system extensions
⏹️ ▶️ John other than I think I’m running Typenator
⏹️ ▶️ John as my autocomplete thingy. Is there anything else?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I mentioned pastebot, that’s it. I customized new folder to command N in the
⏹️ ▶️ John finder because I’m a sane person and I have the proper scroll direction.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Like that’s the extent of
⏹️ ▶️ John my customization. Like it’s not that weird. Anyway, I’d pick Marcos. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John used Marcos’ computer briefly. I would really dislike his mouse, but
⏹️ ▶️ John what can you do? And his weird keyboard, I can’t type on split keyboards, but I would survive.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I have some confidence that it would stay up be reliable during the time that I was forced to use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. They’re so mean to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Hey, this computer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hasn’t barfed yet in the last two hours, 10 minutes, and 24
⏹️ ▶️ John You may have solved the problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John problem. Yeah, right. Yeah, I feel like this question is limiting, because there’s only three of us. So you only
⏹️ ▶️ John have the choice of two other things, and one of them is Casey’s computer, and our case. Wow.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just can’t believe neither one of you picked this thing, because it is a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey champion. It’s because of you, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John you. Well, you use a guest account. There’s limited damage you can do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, the other problem that using your computer, John, is that I might get used to the six K and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have to buy one and I really don’t want that to happen. No, you’ll totally
⏹️ ▶️ John get used to it. Like I mentioned the day that I got it was like it’s so big, I don’t know where to look and then it just becomes normal
⏹️ ▶️ John so fast. And then I go to my wife’s iMac. I’m like, What is this little 12 inch computer?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not that much smaller, but I go over to it. It looks it looks smaller, like the chin looks bigger, the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John looks smaller. It’s so, you know, depressing how instantly you get
⏹️ ▶️ John used to even a slightly bigger screen. You know, I do wonder what the limits are though. Like I feel like if,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, 42 inches at this distance, would that be outside my peripheral vision?
⏹️ ▶️ John I could use more height.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Collide, and Away. And we will talk to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you you next time.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t even mean to begin, cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental. John didn’t do
⏹️ ▶️ John any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him, cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. And you can find the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ 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
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse, uh, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental They didn’t mean to, accidental, tech podcast so long.
Neutral: New BMW logo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So in the last 24, 48 hours, there has been a discovery,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe an announcement about a new BMW logo. Now it is not clear to me, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s clear to others that is this just for their new i4, which is like their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new electric car, or is this going to be embraced across the line? I’m not sure. Sure. If you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey look at the image, we’ll put a link in the show notes. If you look at the image as presented next to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the current logo, it looks like garbage. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when you’ll see it on the hood of a car, I don’t think it looks bad. And I seem to be in the minority. I think pretty much everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hates it, but I think it’s pretty good. I like it a lot more than I like the flattened Volkswagen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey logo, which just does not look right to me. John, how do you feel about this?
⏹️ ▶️ John So, it is, first of all, I think it is official everywhere. If you go to the actual BMW page and not the
⏹️ ▶️ John umpteenth stories about it, you’ll see their explanation presumably translated from German.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they show the history of their logo. Here’s the good. The good is, the BMW logo has not
⏹️ ▶️ John changed much over the years. It’s always been a little circle with the propeller thing in it. It’s got the letters BMW.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, it’s basically been the same. They’ve changed the details of like, are there
⏹️ ▶️ John little rings around the rings and what color are the letters and how dark blue are the little propeller
⏹️ ▶️ John things on the inside, but it hasn’t changed that much. The new one,
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly the same shape, letters BMW, the propeller thing, right? The
⏹️ ▶️ John difference is that, and they don’t say this in the thing, but I can see in the application
⏹️ ▶️ John of the logo, the outer ring that says BMW is basically now transparent,
⏹️ ▶️ John like a transparent ping. Whatever the background is, shows through. the ring around the outside is
⏹️ ▶️ John white and the letters are white and the propeller is still blue and white and then everything else is transparent. So when they put it on the car,
⏹️ ▶️ John you see body color through the ring. But when you see it and their little logo thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John it shows it next to a bunch of other logos where that ring used to be black and they put it on a gray
⏹️ ▶️ John background. So what you see is a gray ring with white letters and then the propeller
⏹️ ▶️ John in the middle. And I think that looks bad. Not super bad because it’s still
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s basically the same logo. It’s not like they stylized it and made it all 90s and added drop shadows or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s fairly straightforward, but it’s it’s weaker It has lower contrast it has less personality
⏹️ ▶️ John and it looks somewhat incomplete when you see it on a car and the body color shows Through it can kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of look cool Depending on the body color now suddenly the body color you choose for your car
⏹️ ▶️ John Influences how the logo looks in context on the car thing still think it looks mostly Okay, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John like did you see the new iLogo? They have a new logo for the eye
⏹️ ▶️ John know. A series of cars. It’s a nice match up for that. It’s all very 2D and flat. Like if you look at the last
⏹️ ▶️ John logo revision they did in 1997, it’s filled with 3D shading and all sorts of sort of, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John people would say skeuomorphic details, but they don’t know what the word skeuomorphic means, but it looks like iOS six. Let’s put it that
⏹️ ▶️ John way. The 1997 logo looks like iOS six and the new logo doesn’t look like iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John seven, but it’s closer. Everything is flat. There is no shading. Everything is solid color. I am not
⏹️ ▶️ John sold on the transparency. I think someone came up with that idea and thought it was interesting and clever and
⏹️ ▶️ John convinced people it was a good idea. I am not convinced it’s a good idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because you mentioned how this logo, you know, progress
⏹️ ▶️ Marco image here is showing it against a gray background and it doesn’t look good against gray. You know what’s a really common
⏹️ ▶️ Marco color for cars? So true. Shades of gray. Well, what is it gonna look like on white?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and I think it’s going to, I think it has a pretty good chance of looking good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on black because that will most of most closely approximate the way it’s looked forever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’ll be weird, though, because the black will be sunken because that’ll be like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like I think it’ll look OK on black and very dark colors. It might look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OK on straight white, but it won’t probably won’t look good on any silver
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or medium gray, which they sell a lot of. And I don’t know. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I see this. and I think this is an interesting idea to change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the logo, to modernize it, but this isn’t how I would have done it. And I don’t think it works.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think it’s successful. I don’t think it looks good. The good news is that when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you see it on the i4, the rest of the i4 is so hideous looking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you immediately forget about the logo. Oh, that’s not so bad. It’s all right.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It looks better than the i3.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, the grill is truly and utterly terrible. Like the grill,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not quite Lexus bad, but it is right
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey edge of Lexus
⏹️ ▶️ John bad. But in the grand scheme of ugly grills, have you seen like the new Genesis grills? And like there’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John whole bunch of just really awful grills that are coming out. The i4 is not great, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John of all of the usually awful BMW concept car treatments of the
⏹️ ▶️ John kidney grill, this one is about middle of the road. Cause I’ve seen some worse ones, but
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, this is big trend and I don’t understand it because like in the i4, the actual
⏹️ ▶️ John physical trend is you don’t need air coming in when you have electric cars, so why do you need a big gaping hole in the front? And yet people
⏹️ ▶️ John still wanna put a big gaping hole and they plug it, like the first Tesla Model S, with this
⏹️ ▶️ John big black thing that says, yeah, there’s a hole here, but we don’t need the hole, so let’s put a plug in it. Tesla figured
⏹️ ▶️ John that out at least fairly quickly and said, no, we’re not gonna do that. But all these other companies, they’re like
⏹️ ▶️ John their signature is the front grill or they want it to be the front grill. Like Lexus, their new design
⏹️ ▶️ John trend of having this massive gaping mesh thing in the front. Genesis with the
⏹️ ▶️ John similar style where they’re trying to define their style by this massive gaping grill. This is not the time to have
⏹️ ▶️ John a huge grill. You know when you go electric, it’s gonna be pointless. Don’t make that your brand identity.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I’m watching, this is now on the BMW Concept i4 page. There’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 30-second video. I didn’t realize that in the ridiculously huge grill,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It says I-4 within it, which is whatever, fine. It lights up like the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco god-awful, terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Mercedes logos that
⏹️ ▶️ John light up. I’m seeing that now. Oh, that’s bad. I mean, yeah, this is not the actual car. This is a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey concept car. I know, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John know. But yeah, they better not ship that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, the Mercedes logo is so bad when it’s illuminated. Like the regular Mercedes logo, as is fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s good, I like it. But illuminating it is just a, look at me and my fancy-ass
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Mercedes. Aren’t I
⏹️ ▶️ John cool? I feel like Mercedes has the, I mean, BMW has the wisdom to not change their logo radically,
⏹️ ▶️ John but even now I feel like they’re giving in a little bit. Mercedes understands. You can do lots of different treatments
⏹️ ▶️ John with the three-pointed star, but don’t one day say, you know what, we’re adding a fourth point, or we’re making
⏹️ ▶️ John the star fatter, or whatever. It’s more or less, I bet if you saw the Mercedes
⏹️ ▶️ John three-prong logo, it would look like the BMW thing. And over the years, it more or less stays
⏹️ ▶️ John the same. But if you look at any individual Mercedes, those wide variations in how they treat that logo.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I feel like BMW had the same advantage in that they had lots of, you know, their
⏹️ ▶️ John logo was a little circle that was basically a neutral colored black circle with letters
⏹️ ▶️ John BMW and a slight accent of blue in the middle. And that was fine and
⏹️ ▶️ John it matched everything and it looked good. Like it was not broken. It did not need to be fixed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. It says BMW Concept i4. It is lit up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the grill. It has lit up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John the word BMW concept car. I’m thinking that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to ship. I hope not. But I mean, would you want to drive a billboard? I mean, the illuminated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mercedes logo makes me so angry. But this is so much
⏹️ ▶️ John worse. Well, a lot of cars have shipped with the thing where you open the door and it projects like the name of the car company
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey or the model on the ground. Have you seen those?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, god. Cars shipped with that. That’s not just a concept car thing. But if you look at this concept car, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of those things in this car that are not shipping for sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, I hope
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not. It’s also too bad to me because one of the things that I always admired BMW for, which is silly, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really thought their Angel Eyes were amazing. So if you’re not familiar, um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey early on, it was maybe late nineties or something like that, I don’t remember exactly when, but, uh, BMW
⏹️ ▶️ Casey headlights, they were all, they were for a long time were four circles. And what they did is they had like a ring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey around the outside of each of the headlights that would light up and that was their daytime running lights. And they called them Angel Eyes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And they were to my recollection anyway, the first manufacturer to do a treatment of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their lights, particularly daytime running lights, that was a signature thing, right? So you saw
⏹️ ▶️ Casey those four circles coming at you. You knew that that was a BMW, and it was within five or ten years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that basically every other auto manufacturer in the world started doing the same thing. But they seem to have given up on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey four circles, and I suppose that probably makes sense from a technological point of view, but to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, I actually almost feel like, especially in the age of electric cars, coming back to what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you were saying, John, like, can the the kidney grill? Like, yes, I know that’s blasphemous, but can the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kidney grill and keep the angel eyes? But now they’ve got lights that don’t look too dissimilar from
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. They still do the four lights. Like, that’s still their signature is the four
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey lights. Not the fact that they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John circular. I mean, just look at the i4. Like, when you see headlights on a BMW, it’s always each headlight has
⏹️ ▶️ John two major distinct things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, but to me, it was so cool. I’m with you, Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, I think they, like, here we are talking about they changed the logo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and yet they kept this giant kidney grill that is totally unnecessary on this car. By the way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has an air intake. It’s below the kidney grill. It’s like in that little slot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is an air intake there, but the grill isn’t it, which is even more ridiculous that they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this ridiculous styling element here. I think if they’re gonna change something that’s been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this long-standing icon of their brand, drop the kidney grill from electric cars that don’t need
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re both fired. They can’t drop the That’s the defining styling element of the entire
⏹️ ▶️ John brand. You cannot drop that. You can make it, you can decide to minimize it instead of maximizing it,
⏹️ ▶️ John instead of in every model, make it bigger instead of small. That’s what I was getting at before, but I don’t think you need to drop it. Especially
⏹️ ▶️ John since at various times, if you look at the 850, you can make the kidneys really small, smaller
⏹️ ▶️ John than the openings that are smaller than a little T in the Model S and the current Tesla even. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not a problem for like, you can’t use the kidneys if you have an electric car. All I’m saying is that you know, you’re not gonna need
⏹️ ▶️ John air intake. Don’t keep making those kidneys bigger and bigger because that’s dumb and it doesn’t look good. That’s the whole point, it doesn’t look good.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s perfectly fine to keep the kidneys just, you know, find a way to make them look nice. Because now that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John all they have to do is look nice. They have to look nice and not add too much drag. I
⏹️ ▶️ John like it, I actually like the headlights on this i4 concept. You know, they’re not, they’re like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey eye, little hues, shapes or whatever. Angel
⏹️ ▶️ John bags under the eyes. I think that’s actually a fairly, You know, I don’t, again,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think that’s going to ship as is, but it’s a fairly nice, aggressive looking headlight that
⏹️ ▶️ John still looks like BMW to me. If I could just blank out the giant schnoz in the middle there, if I could blank out that
⏹️ ▶️ John kidney or replace it with a smaller kidney, I like the way the front of this car looks. The back, much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, the grill is just
⏹️ ▶️ John bad. And we have a concept car, you’re going to pick brown? That’s the color? I know they’re going to call it gold, but this
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco They call it like