catatp.fm Unofficial Accidental Tech Podcast transcripts (generated by computer, so expect errors).

379: The Everything’s OK Alarm

Our business, the promo-code scammer’s business, Spotify’s business, and Joe Rogan’s business.

Episode Description:

THE ATP STORE IS BACK!! Make your purchases until June 7th.

Sponsored by:

  • Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code ATP for 10% off your first order.
  • Linode: Instantly deploy and manage an SSD server in the Linode Cloud. New accounts get a $20 credit with code atp2020.

MP3 Header

Transcribed using Whisper large_v2 (transcription) + WAV2VEC2_ASR_LARGE_LV60K_960H (alignment) + Pyannote (speaker diaritization).

Chapters

  1. The thing is…
  2. New merch available now! 🖼️
  3. New atp.fm CMS 🖼️
  4. Sponsor: Linode (code atp2020)
  5. Follow-up: MiniDV import
  6. App promo-code scams 🖼️
  7. Destiny Q6tAz63Mophxl2AT
  8. TV news 🖼️
  9. Shared iPad for Business
  10. Casey’s garage security
  11. Spotify vs. podcasting
  12. Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
  13. #askatp: Clipboard managers 🖼️
  14. #askatp: iOS 13 good yet?
  15. #askatp: Drop Boot Camp?
  16. Ending theme
  17. Post-show: Quarantine status

The thing is…

⏹️ ▶️ Casey moments ago, my wrist started vibrating kind of a lot

⏹️ ▶️ Casey over and over and over again. And I was very confused. And then I realized, wait a second, this just happened

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a day or two back. I know what this is. And I have on my Synology,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a downloader app that you can point an RSS feed at, or you can point it to an RSS feed,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it’ll download all the things linked in the in the RSS feed, and I do that for both ATP and analog.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we’re gonna talk a little later, but we have changed the ATP website, and now my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Synology is downloading all of our shows again, which is fine. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what’s interesting about that is I have a push notification sent to me when something downloads, because typically I want to know these sorts

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of things, especially when they’re automated, because otherwise I may not think to check. And so I’m looking

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at 36 notifications on my iPhone lock screen, 37, and it’s still going

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the entirety of the ATP back catalog being downloaded on my 38 being downloaded on my Synology

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as we speak.

⏹️ ▶️ John Your relationship with notifications is different than mine. Yes. You wanna be notified when your background

⏹️ ▶️ John automation downloads a thing, that’s the whole point. I don’t wanna know just that. I have the same automation

⏹️ ▶️ John by the way for my podcast, but the idea of getting a notification, let alone a notification that makes it all the way

⏹️ ▶️ John to my wrist, boy, that’s the opposite of what I want.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, but see, the thing is, I do want to know when it happens. I totally hear your perspective.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You are not at all wrong. I want to hear, I want to know when it happens. I just don’t want to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey be clicking buttons to make it happen.

⏹️ ▶️ John Everything’s okay alarm. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Everything’s okay, everything’s okay. When this alarm is sounding,

⏹️ ▶️ John everything is fine. If that alarm ever stops, boy, look out. How about getting a notification if it fails?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’d be too easy.

⏹️ ▶️ John How about a dead man switch where something just checks to see whether the new episode appears

⏹️ ▶️ John once per week, And if it doesn’t, then you get a notification. There’s all sorts of things you could do that would not result in the current risk

⏹️ ▶️ John shaking that you’ve got going on.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Hey man,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is how I like my life, all right? Don’t shame me,

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t shame my preferences. Do you have the little LED on your nightstand? Should it be on when the garage door is closed

⏹️ ▶️ John and off when it’s not so you can wake up in the middle of the night and look to make sure the light is still shining?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mm-hmm. you

New merch available now!

Chapter New merch available now! image.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so we have to start the show with amazing, amazing news. I could not be happier to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey tell you that you can buy stuff from us now. You can do that thing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Dubai Friday does so well. You can give us your money if you would like. We have the ATP

⏹️ ▶️ Casey store back up and we have new shirts, we have mugs, and we have a bunch of the old crap

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we already had or had in the past. So we have for the very first time the ATP mug.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is a very good looking a black mug with the M style ATP

⏹️ ▶️ Casey logo. And it has a red interior, which looks very cool.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then, John, would you like to take us through the Pro Max Triumph shirts? And then we’ll explain

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the the the kind of advanced version after that, please.

⏹️ ▶️ John Sure. This this would have been our WWDC sale, of course. Sad. You know, we’re not all going to be

⏹️ ▶️ John at WWDC. none of us will be there in fact because it’s happening online for obvious reasons.

⏹️ ▶️ John But every WWDC we try to have some kind of idea for a new shirt

⏹️ ▶️ John in keeping with whatever the theme of the year is or whatever we’re talking about on the show. This

⏹️ ▶️ John year what we decided to do is bring back the,

⏹️ ▶️ John well I don’t know if it ever really left, the Pro Max shirt, the one that’s got the silhouettes of a bunch of different

⏹️ ▶️ John sort of pro level Max throughout Apple’s history. It used to have five silhouettes

⏹️ ▶️ John on it ending with the trash can right and so this year is the Pro Max triumph shirt

⏹️ ▶️ John because with the Return of the Mac Pro the real Mac Pro the one we were all waiting for

⏹️ ▶️ John the one sitting next to me at my desk right now that is the sixth Mac and that happily

⏹️ ▶️ John gives us all six colors of the Typical Apple logo. So the shirt

⏹️ ▶️ John is now complete It looks just like it did before except now there is a sixth Mac at the end

⏹️ ▶️ John the current Mac Pro And Casey had the brilliant idea in keeping with past shirts that we’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John done in this spirit to say, okay Well, you’ve got the the shirts here with the Pro Max on it ending with a

⏹️ ▶️ John new Mac Pro But we should make a version of it with wheels so we did

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco So you can get the shirt with wheels

⏹️ ▶️ John or without without wheels is just the standard feet and with wheels Yeah, and you’ll see it’s got the little

⏹️ ▶️ John wheels in the bottom Of course, the wheels cost a little bit more, right? But you

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco know, how much would you pay

⏹️ ▶️ John for it? What is the quote? I gotta pull it from the website. How much is a perfect wheel worth?

⏹️ ▶️ John It turns out when it comes to T-shirts, the wheels are $4 more, so it’s $1 per wheel. So it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John proportionally scaled to the horrendously expensive computer that’s sitting next to me. You don’t have to pay an extra $400

⏹️ ▶️ John for your wheels. On your shirt, you just gotta pay an extra four bucks. So with wheels or without, in black

⏹️ ▶️ John and in white, in 100% cotton and in tri-blend, many, many options. please go

⏹️ ▶️ John and rep the fully armed and operational line of Pro Max from Apple.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. Yes, we are aware there are only two wheels visible on the shirt. Just go with the joke, please.

⏹️ ▶️ John No, all four are there. They’re just behind them. It’s a silhouette.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m just waiting for everyone to well actually, you John.

⏹️ ▶️ John You think maybe we’re just giving you two wheels and there’s just cinder blocks in the backside that you can’t see them? No. All

⏹️ ▶️ John four wheels are on this shirt. You should read the book Flatline. Actually, don’t. It’s terrible. But

⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll learn about 2D versus 3D.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, so we have mugs, we have the Pro Max shirt, both with and without wheels in black and in white, in men

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and women’s, in tri-blend and in cotton. We also have the original OG ATP logo shirt.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have brought back the ATP hoodie. We have had like three requests for the ATP polo. You’re my people.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Of course, nobody needs a polo to go to work anymore, but that’s neither here nor there. But if you want a polo, if you want a collared shirt, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there as well. We also have the ATP hat and the enamel pins, which let me remind you have a locking pin back.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So all of this stuff, You pre-order it sort of, kind of Kickstarter style,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey same thing we’ve always done. You can order it up until June 7th, and then once they

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have reached a certain threshold, which is very low, then our friends at Cotton Bureau will start printing and fulfilling

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all these orders. Now, one small note, also news for today,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey briefly, we are going to be launching a membership program for ATP, and we’re going to be doing that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sometime soon-ish. So if you have to allocate your

⏹️ ▶️ Casey money in only one place, that’s totally understandable, but please keep in mind that there will be a membership option

⏹️ ▶️ Casey coming up soon. But for shirts, for mugs, for polos, for hoodies, for hats,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for pins, all of those things are available now at atp.fm slash store.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Once again, atp.fm slash store.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I would say on the balance here, if you want this merchandise and it’s nice and it’s cool, buy

⏹️ ▶️ John it, right? But if you only just want to give us money, you may have an opportunity to do that in the future. That’s it.

New atp.fm CMS

Chapter New atp.fm CMS image.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Also of note, which is probably only interesting to the super nerds

⏹️ ▶️ Casey amongst us, we have a new website now. And I would like to take credit for absolutely none of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it because this was pretty much entirely Marco’s work. We are very excited that we have a brand

⏹️ ▶️ Casey new website. That won’t mean too much to most of you, I don’t think, except

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that now all, what, 380-ish episodes of this show are all back in the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey RSS feed. There were very uninteresting reasons why that wasn’t the case before, but there was a technical limitation prior

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Marco making us our bespoke CMS. But now you can get all of the back catalog

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the RSS feed. We have links to all of the best podcast

⏹️ ▶️ Casey apps on iOS and actually podcast on Android as well. And we have a new CMS.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, would you mind taking us on a little nickel tour as to what’s going on here?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, actually, you forgot to also mention the other big news. Neutral also has

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new CMS. So Neutral has also gotten a redesign.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Our long retired podcast, last episode of which was about, what, six years ago? Something like that,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. So for various reasons, you know, we’ve had this site on Squarespace

⏹️ ▶️ Marco since we started. By the way, Squarespace is sponsoring this episode. We’ve now moved it to Linode, another sponsor of this episode.

⏹️ ▶️ John Each sponsor gets seven years to host the site.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, exactly.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think like, you know, like some people might view this as oh no, they left Squarespace. But you know, Squarespace covers a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of needs. And I think it really says something that covered all of our needs for seven years.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s pretty good. All of the needs of three extremely particular, extremely

⏹️ ▶️ Casey annoying nerds. That website did just fine for us for seven years.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Exactly.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is not an indictment at all of Squarespace.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And to replace it, it took me like three weeks of constant work to replace like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a 1% of the functionality that Squarespace offered. Oh, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco theirs is still better. But yeah, we basically, you know, I’ve wanted to do this for a while for lots of reasons.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mainly, it will be supporting the new membership program that we will be launching. And as Casey said, you know, we’re not gonna really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco talk about that yet. Frankly, don’t get too excited. The details aren’t very interesting.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s exactly what you’d expect. From the three of us. Yeah, but yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s nothing interesting. And the things that you get for free, our current plan is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to leave you getting those things for free, so anyway, so don’t worry about anything like that. It’s nothing bad. So yeah, so basically

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanted to write a new CMS, did a couple of super cool custom things. People listening

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the live stream now, notice the live stream now automatically turns itself on and off when we go live and when we don’t go live,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t have to like do this weird like shell script copy into an iframe kind of thing that I was doing before.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It now shows the number of live listeners right there on the page. For the rest of the site, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just a pretty minimal, bare-bones CMS. As Casey mentioned, one of the reasons we wanted

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do this for a while was the RSS feed limit. So now all of our episodes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco will show in every podcast player going all the way back to episode one. Although, man, those

⏹️ ▶️ Marco episodes sound awful. I was going back, testing a few of them, and testing the neutral episodes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as well because they were recorded around that same time span. And, oh boy, our microphones

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are way better now. But yeah, anyway, it’s a podcast website.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It isn’t that interesting otherwise. I built it all on PHP. It’s very minimal,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like CSS and JavaScript usage. There’s no frameworks on the front end at all.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco John tried to convince me to use the JavaScript Fetch API instead of XMLHttpRequest.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I looked at an example of the Fetch API and had all these like asyncs and dot then,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco dot then, dot then, dot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John then. No

⏹️ ▶️ Marco libraries required though, it’s built into the browsers. So that I like, I like that a lot. Because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like this site, there’s no use anywhere as far as I know of jQuery. Now eventually when

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we do the membership, we’ll have to add Stripe’s API to it and that might add some of that stuff. So we’ll see

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how long I can keep that going. But you know, right now it’s all just really vanilla stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco In the version of the site that you all are seeing, there’s almost no JavaScript at all. on the backend version that has

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the editing interface for the post, there’s a little bit, but it’s like, you know, maybe a few hundred lines, it’s not much. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all very, very simple stuff. And it’s funny, like I looked at the fetch API as I was saying, and like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that whole style of like the chaining of the do this dot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco then, do this dot then, dot, dot, it’s all that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey stuff. All right, hold

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on, let me just stop you there. Let me just stop you there and let me simplify for all of us who are not old and boring. Marco

⏹️ ▶️ Casey discovered promises and did not like what he saw.

⏹️ ▶️ John Which is a common reaction, to be fair, but we just all had that same reaction, what, six years ago or whatever? But Marco’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco getting to it now.

⏹️ ▶️ John And he’s having the reaction that I think everybody has upon first encountering Promises and

⏹️ ▶️ John Futures and all that good stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco To me, it looks like AppleScript. Oh, come

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John on. That’s a little harsh.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You look at it and you’re like, okay, this is trying to be minimal

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and readable, but is it writable and is it understandable?

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not that’s that’s the thing. It’s not it’s not a style. It’s not a syntax thing It is a

⏹️ ▶️ John actually a functional thing and they’re trying to find a way to make the functionality palatable and

⏹️ ▶️ John usable but but in the end what it’s trying to accomplish is a functional thing which is

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a functional thing that is not maybe not important to you If you when you’re writing like client-side JavaScript to do a thing that

⏹️ ▶️ John you would normally do synchronously or whatever But anyway, but we don’t have time to go into futures now I’m not here to

⏹️ ▶️ John sell you on it. But all I can say is that- Because you won’t. Yeah, I will eventually if you gave

⏹️ ▶️ John me many months and weeks. But the point is everyone goes through this, they’re weirded

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco out by them, it doesn’t seem to make

⏹️ ▶️ John any sense. You eventually learn how they work, you eventually get used to them, your brain does eventually fit around them, and then you

⏹️ ▶️ John realize there are use cases where they do make sense. You don’t need to travel that path. There’s nothing dragging

⏹️ ▶️ John you down it, but I’m confident that you would travel that path if you had occasion to use

⏹️ ▶️ John them in one of the contexts where they are very nice.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Fair enough. But regardless, my use case for this was very, very simple.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t have been saving a lot of code at all if I actually went to this.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it wasn’t worth learning a whole new thing just to possibly save 10

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lines of code. So I went with the old way and my ready state change handler

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with state four and it was fine. It was totally fine. No big deal.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s funny to me because I had forgotten that conversation that we had. And just today, I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrote my own super streamlined promise class for Swift because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t want to use any of the very good but ultimately kind of bloated promises

⏹️ ▶️ Casey libraries that are available right now. And so I wrote one that’s super small, very Marco style. So on the one side,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I should get a thumbs up from you for doing something like, oh, screw it. I’ll just roll my own. It’ll be fine. I don’t need that much from it. But a thumbs

⏹️ ▶️ Casey down because I was writing my own promise library.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s like a they’re gonna give a thumbs down on that one Casey Casey has gone a little bit That path that

⏹️ ▶️ John is described to you Marco Casey has continued onward Advisedly further into the woods

⏹️ ▶️ John where now everywhere he is He needs to have he needs to not only have those features

⏹️ ▶️ John available But he’s not satisfied with the libraries that offer them or the built-ins the office of the parts of standard life I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John gonna run my own promise library and that’s you’ve gone too far for me. Okay, I I’m sorry.

⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t follow you into I’m going to write my own promise library for Swift. Just async await will come eventually.

⏹️ ▶️ John Just hang in there. Stop.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was seriously like 150 or 200 lines. It was not that much.

⏹️ ▶️ John I know, but I’m just, okay, all right.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey In any case, so we have this fancy, shiny new CMS, and I’m very excited about it. And Marco, I’m very happy

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you spent the time putting this together. So I didn’t have to, and John didn’t have to. And really, ultimately,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the listeners’ perspective, there’s not, I mean, it’s visually different, but functionally, it’s not really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that different outside of the live page. But we are excited about it. And I wanted to publicly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey thank you, Marco, for putting in all that work, because whether or not you enjoyed it, it was still a lot of work. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m very thankful for that.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, one thing I think I mean, again, no one ever goes to the website. But anyway, one thing people can appreciate if they happen to go

⏹️ ▶️ John to it, you might notice that the site loads very fast. And part of that is the you know, the lack of JavaScript,

⏹️ ▶️ John and so forth. But part of that is Marco’s fairly obsessive

⏹️ ▶️ John need to do the fastest thing possible, which is not often the quote unquote best

⏹️ ▶️ John practice for web design, unless your goal is to make the page fast and responsive. So if you view a source,

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re like, all the CSS is inlined? Why is he doing that? Why? Because it’s faster.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And guess what, it is faster.

⏹️ ▶️ John The site loads really fast. If you go to one of those like, test this site to see how fast it is, how could you make this

⏹️ ▶️ John site faster? They have like no advice. Because they’re like, yep, you pretty much did it all.

⏹️ ▶️ John Again, this is a simple website. It’s not a big deal. When doing projects like this, I find it

⏹️ ▶️ John amusing to set a goal for yourself that really doesn’t have any particular, you

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t need to do this, but it’s a fun thing to do. I don’t know if this is what Marco did, but I appreciated that about the site,

⏹️ ▶️ John that it is way higher performance than it needs to be for any reason.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, for me, whenever I do something new like this, I try to make some kind of political statement.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco With the way I- You? with like the way that I make certain decisions,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way I build things. And with this, one of my statements, as John said, was like, everything’s inlined.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It isn’t that way in the source tree. In the source tree, it’s all neatly separated into files with different roles. But upon render,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just read those files in and inline them all because it’s faster and it keeps things simpler.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The images are all SVG files and they’re really tiny. I was tempted to even inline

⏹️ ▶️ Marco those. You can do that. I haven’t yet. Don’t tempt me.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I might do that next. And there’s very few images. It’s mostly just like, you know, podcast icons for subscriptions.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a couple little CSS tricks, but not like super, you know, crazy stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s fairly minimal. And there’s also no custom font. There’s no web font. This is just using,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wherever possible, it’s using the system font. So it’s using San Francisco on Mac. Yeah, so it’s like very just fast, simple,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bare bones. The built-in audio player is not a custom audio player. It’s just whatever

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the browser provides for the audio tag by default with controls on. That’s it. And it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit less nice than a custom player and maybe in the future I’ll make a custom player for it, but it doesn’t seem

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that necessary, so I’m probably not gonna do it. And yeah, simple, just keeping everything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as like simple, fast, bare bones as possible. And it is running on my PHP

⏹️ ▶️ Marco framework, my like custom framework that runs Overcast as well. It is running on that on the backend.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not for a ton of reasons, except that it just makes it faster for me to build. and I know how

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it works, I know how it performs. And it’s all running on a $40 a month Linode

⏹️ ▶️ Marco box with a couple other sites that are gonna be on it as well, including my own, markers.org is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna move there at some point, and the very high traffic, neutral.fm is also there, as I mentioned

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John earlier.

⏹️ ▶️ John Leave it to us to get off into the weeds of implementation of the site. The point is,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco find mugs and t-shirts. It’s a tech show.

⏹️ ▶️ John Unless you’re saving your money for your membership and which you don’t. But anyway, I’ll just say,

⏹️ ▶️ John the final note is my contribution to this website was to add a little bit of modern web dev pee

⏹️ ▶️ John to Marco’s pool by using Flexbox on a store page. You’re welcome.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, that’s how you did that. I haven’t actually looked at your code for that yet. It’s modern stuff. Don’t look, Marco. It will burn you. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. Seriously, stay back. Stay back. It looks very nice. I don’t have any tables except for the actual list of episodes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the editing side, but that’s fine. I do have a couple of floats here and there.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my word. Sorry.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Linode Cloud Hosting, my favorite place to run

⏹️ ▶️ Marco virtual servers. Whether you’re working on a personal project or managing your enterprise’s infrastructure,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Linode Cloud Hosting has the pricing, support, and scale you need to take your project to the next

⏹️ ▶️ Marco level. With 11 data centers worldwide, enterprise-grade hardware, and their next-generation network,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Linode Cloud Hosting delivers the server performance you expect at prices that you might not expect. I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ Marco been a customer there for about eight years now, and they are consistently the best value

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the business. They are always incredibly competitive on price and performance and specs and everything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco else. And then whenever technology gets better and it allows them to offer you more for less money, they do.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they will offer you to upgrade your plan for like a one-click thing. It’s wonderful. I love being a Linode

⏹️ ▶️ Marco customer because it’s fast, it’s inexpensive, and it’s well-supported. And they have everything I need

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. You can see for yourself at linode.com slash ATP, promo code ATP 2020

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get a $20 credit and their lowest plans for just five bucks a month. So that could be four

⏹️ ▶️ Marco months free. Current customers and new customers can get a free three month trial of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco their new object storage system. This is an s3 compatible, redundant, highly available storage

⏹️ ▶️ Marco option, perfect for storing critical data. Just log into the cloud manager, you’ll see it there. It’s wonderful.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Linode is a great host all around. I’ve used their support lots of times and if I have any questions or issues,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re wonderful support. They have native SSDs, 40 gigabit network behind

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it all, very fast CPUs, they have a great cloud manager, great control panel, very capable

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of full-blown API and CLI tools if you want to automate things, I use those and they’re wonderful.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They just have amazing stuff over at Linode. If you’re looking for servers to host things like web

⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps or game servers, maybe like a lamp stack, you can do all that and so much more

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at Linode. See for yourself at linode.com slash ATP or if you want

⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe if you know they’re hiring if you want a job you can go to linode.com slash careers to find out more about that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, everyone else linode.com slash ATP promo code ATP 2020

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a $20 credit. Thank you so much to Linode for hosting all my stuff and sponsoring our show.

Follow-up: MiniDV import

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on, let’s actually get the show properly started with some follow-up. And John, a lot of people were very

⏹️ ▶️ Casey interested in your miniDV import and more technical details as to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey how you did that and what you did. So can you take us on a little bit of a journey through how you completed all

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, many more people than I thought. Apparently I also have shoeboxes full of miniDV tapes and they wanted to know

⏹️ ▶️ John more detail about how I did it. I didn’t include most detail because I thought it was boring, but I guess people wanted to know

⏹️ ▶️ John that you know enough information they feel like they can do it themselves. So first question is how did you import

⏹️ ▶️ John the movies? So I have my still have my original camcorder that I took all the movies on

⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s how you know you traditionally imported you to connect the camera to your computer and

⏹️ ▶️ John applications on the computer can actually control the camera and make it rewind and fast forward and play and you play it and

⏹️ ▶️ John then the computer records it that’s exactly what I did. The application I used to do that was I movie the you know

⏹️ ▶️ John I was as surprised as anyone. The modern, most recent version of iMovie, when you plug in a camcorder

⏹️ ▶️ John and go to import, a UI that I didn’t even know existed still exists with the fast forward, rewind,

⏹️ ▶️ John play, record, all those controls are still there, and you can import. People wanna know what settings I imported at?

⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t change anything. I plugged in my camcorder, I selected import, I rewound, and then

⏹️ ▶️ John I clicked whatever the import button is, and that’s it. Whatever it’s doing by default, that’s what I did, and it

⏹️ ▶️ John seemed fine. After that, things, as you might expect, go a little bit off the rails. Oh, people

⏹️ ▶️ John also wanted to know, how did you connect your camcorder to your crazy Mac Pro? I managed to do it in three dongles.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like I can name that tune in three notes. More dongles would be more traditional, but I managed to find,

⏹️ ▶️ John my one dongle I managed to find is the one I connected directly to the camcorder. So the camcorder’s got one of those little FireWire 400

⏹️ ▶️ John ports on it, like the ones that look like a rectangle with a notch taken out of the long side, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s FireWire 400 to 800 is the first dongle that’s connected to the camcorder. Then I go with the second dongle

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s FireWire 800 to Thunderbolt 2. And the Thunderbolt 2 is the one that looks like Mini DisplayPort, but

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s Thunderbolt 2. And then the third dongle is Thunderbolt 2 to Thunderbolt 3. And believe it or

⏹️ ▶️ John not, this actually works. Like, I don’t, you know, somehow, someway, you go from FireWire 400 to Thunderbolt 3

⏹️ ▶️ John and you plug it into your computer and your computer’s like, sure, yeah, whatever, fine.

⏹️ ▶️ John That works, right? After I do the iMovie import, what I end up with is, like I made a new

⏹️ ▶️ John iMovie library, I end up with like a bunch of files in an iMovie library. But I do all the imports, takes forever, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Then just quit iMovie, just done. You know, I’m no longer gonna touch iMovie. Now I have this iMovie library, and

⏹️ ▶️ John on disk it’s like a package file that’s actually a directory. You go into the directory, you’ll find a bunch of folders.

⏹️ ▶️ John In there, you’ll eventually find the actual digital video files. I think they’re.db files, but honestly

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t remember anymore. But anyway, you’ll see them. They’re the ones that are a couple hundred megabytes or gigabytes or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John One for each clip, because when you import an iMovie, it will make separate files for each clip. A clip

⏹️ ▶️ John is like you hit record and then you hit stop, then you hit record and you hit stop. iMovie finds those cuts, so you end up with many,

⏹️ ▶️ John many files per tape, depending on how many times you stopped recording and started recording again.

⏹️ ▶️ John What I did with those is I encoded those as H.265, and I wanted

⏹️ ▶️ John to use Handbrake to do it, like the GUI Mac thing or whatever, but I couldn’t figure out a way in

⏹️ ▶️ John Handbrake to like, you know, I made a set of settings in Handbrake. You can make a save preset, and I picked what I wanted, and

⏹️ ▶️ John all the different settings, which I’ll go over in a moment. And I’m like, great, I have all these settings. Now I ought to be able to select all

⏹️ ▶️ John on all those files and just drag them in here and say, just encode all these like this. If there’s a way to do that

⏹️ ▶️ John in Handbrake, I couldn’t figure it out. But Handbrake has a command line tool. I’m like, all right, well, that suits me just

⏹️ ▶️ John fine. And handily, the command line tool, creatively named Handbrake CLI,

⏹️ ▶️ John one of the arguments you can give it is, tell me the name of the preset that you made

⏹️ ▶️ John in the GUI. The GUI preset thing, save that to a JSON file, and you can just point it to that JSON file and say, look

⏹️ ▶️ John at this JSON file and use the settings that I called i, you know, miniDV import or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John Right? And so the command line arguments are not horrendous, as they surely would be if I had used Casey’s favorite

⏹️ ▶️ John FFmpeg. It’s just like, you know, handbrake CLI, settings file this,

⏹️ ▶️ John use the setting, iMovie import, giant list of files. Of course, I didn’t do it from the command

⏹️ ▶️ John line. What I did instead was wrote a script to do it, because, you know, again, just like Marco’s I was writing the new site

⏹️ ▶️ John in PHP. I’m writing the script in Perl, just because it’s the tool I know best and I don’t have to bother thinking about it.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I wrote a Perl script and I tried to do what I thought would be useful. It turned out to be totally not useful, which is, all

⏹️ ▶️ John right, write a Perl script, find all the files, run handbrake CLI on them with the proper arguments,

⏹️ ▶️ John all that other stuff, right? Do proper error checking, which is a, you know, a little,

⏹️ ▶️ John what is it, pet peeve of mine. And then also set the file dates

⏹️ ▶️ John based on the, because when iMovie imports them, it imports them with like the file, clip file names that are based on the

⏹️ ▶️ John date range of the clip or whatever. So I can pull from the file names and then set the files on disk to be those dates

⏹️ ▶️ John as well. So everything, you know, what I end up with is a bunch of video files that are compressed

⏹️ ▶️ John that all have the right dates. You know, they’re from, you know, 2002 or whatever. Whenever

⏹️ ▶️ John all these videos were taken.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, wait, so hold on. So how does the computer know when they were taken? That metadata was readable

⏹️ ▶️ Casey by the computer on that mini DV tape?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s got to be in the tape, because I think you can display the date or whatever. The MiniDV tape has that

⏹️ ▶️ John information. And when iMovie made the clips, it put in the file names. Like, I didn’t ask it to do this. It’s just what it did.

⏹️ ▶️ John It put in the file names the, you’ll see in a second this is all pointless, but it did this.

⏹️ ▶️ John And so I just parsed the dates out of the file names and set the dates in the file, right? The settings I used, I used H.265.

⏹️ ▶️ John I used the video toolbox setting in Handbrake, which is the one that uses the fast H.265 thing

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s in Intel CPUs. I don’t think it uses a GPU. I think it just uses the CPU thing. I think it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John also lower quality than like the fancy software one, but I didn’t care. I just wanted to do the one that was fast because I had a lot of video to go

⏹️ ▶️ John through. I think I did like 6,000 kilobits per second average. I did AAC

⏹️ ▶️ John encoding of the audio, probably at too high a bit rate because I think it’s like 96 kilobits

⏹️ ▶️ John off the mini DV and I think I actually encoded it higher than that, but whatever, it’s not a big deal. And

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, I just had it run all those imports. I wrote a second script to confirm that

⏹️ ▶️ John I’d got them all just because they’re spread all over the place and there’s a lot of files and I made my own bespoke

⏹️ ▶️ John diffing script to make sure everything’s been converted.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I chose

⏹️ ▶️ John the MP4 container format just because I hoped that would stand the test of time as

⏹️ ▶️ John an international standard yada yada. So H.265 as the algorithm, because

⏹️ ▶️ John you can play MP2 video today, right? So I’m hoping an MP4 container,

⏹️ ▶️ John anyway I can just always change the container at some point in the future. The final bit was, okay, I’ve got

⏹️ ▶️ John all these files now. The total file size was only like 50 gigs, which is way smaller than

⏹️ ▶️ John the files as I imported them. And then I’m like, my final step is I’m gonna drag them into

⏹️ ▶️ John my Apple Photos library, which is what I always wanted to do with them. And being the

⏹️ ▶️ John wise person that I am, I didn’t just drag them all in there, I dragged one first. And I dragged it in,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, this movie is from 2020. I’m like, no, it’s not. Why do you think it’s from 2020? The

⏹️ ▶️ John dates in the file name, the creation and modification data of the file on disk are

⏹️ ▶️ John a decade ago. This is not a thing from 2020. I move photos, Apple photos. Why can’t

⏹️ ▶️ John I convince you that this is an old file? Is it in the EXIF data? Yes, it’s in the EXIF data.

⏹️ ▶️ John I got it. Well, you look at the show notes. If you knew the show notes, you’d be dead.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey No, I didn’t.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You never looked at the show notes.

⏹️ ▶️ John Of course you didn’t look at the show notes. There is metadata inside the file. There’s track-specific metadata

⏹️ ▶️ John on each track that determines the dates. And for whatever reason, because Handbrake made these, when Handbrake wrote out the file, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John like, I’m making this movie and it’s brand new as of 2020, you know? And so I had to use

⏹️ ▶️ John one final tool, Exif tool, to modify all of the relevant dates on each individual

⏹️ ▶️ John media track. Which was tricky because now I’m making, like the way Exif tool, at least the way I was

⏹️ ▶️ John running it, it doesn’t modify them in place, it makes a second copy. So now I gotta make sure I do this for all the things and it works and I have all the second

⏹️ ▶️ John copies and distinguish them from the first and rename everything and yada yada yada, pearl pearl pearl.

⏹️ ▶️ John Eventually, I ended up with, you know, several

⏹️ ▶️ John dozen files. Actually, it was like 20 tapes worth of files. Each tape was

⏹️ ▶️ John like 20, I don’t know, they varied in how

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco many.

⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, a lot of files. Eventually, I got it to work, threw them into Apple Photos, and you know, after doing one test, one and seeing

⏹️ ▶️ John that it correctly filed it, you know, 10, 12 years ago, I threw them all in. So that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John how it works. We’ll put the links in the show notes to Handbrake CLI and Exif tool,

⏹️ ▶️ John iMovie, you can get for free from the App Store, I think, and the dongles.

⏹️ ▶️ John I had most of these. The Thunderbolt 2 to 3 was an Apple one, the FireWire 800

⏹️ ▶️ John to Thunderbolt 2 was also an Apple one, the 400 to 800, I don’t even remember where I got it. It didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John have it in the house, I had to actually buy it, I think I just searched Amazon for it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I’m impressed. That is a lot of work, but I am sure that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have quite a bit of peace of mind knowing that all that stuff is now safely in 34 different locations and three

⏹️ ▶️ Casey different cloud services.

⏹️ ▶️ John Slowly bit rotting, yeah. It’s great.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey spreading everywhere.

App promo-code scams

Chapter App promo-code scams image.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, would one of you like to tell me about other reasons why people might ask for app promo codes?

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll tell you because I brought it up in the last show. It was like, oh, you get these automated emails. If you have an app in the App Store

⏹️ ▶️ John and people ask for promo codes, why are they asking, blah, blah, blah. We didn’t touch on what

⏹️ ▶️ John seems like the most obvious but also sort of the most cynical and sad reason. It’s because they

⏹️ ▶️ John want to resell them. They want to get a thing for you for free and they want to charge somebody money for

⏹️ ▶️ John the thing they got for free. And if you do that at scale and you send out thousands and thousands and thousands of automated

⏹️ ▶️ John emails and some small percentage gives you a thing for free and then you sell all those three things for a dollar, you just made a dollar

⏹️ ▶️ John profit on all of that. So that could be a good business. And then the final one, which is a similar thing,

⏹️ ▶️ John is to populate pirate app stores. So if you can get an illegitimate app and somehow crack

⏹️ ▶️ John it or strip it or whatever, then you can put it up on a store and resell that same copy over and over again

⏹️ ▶️ John through for people who have jailbroken phones. I’m not quite sure how that works, but I’m just speculating that,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s basically just a way to get a thing for free and either sell it once or sell it multiple times to

⏹️ ▶️ John make money. So that’s a bummer, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. Yeah, I was very surprised that, first of all, that we didn’t think about this.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, of course, you know, it’s some kind of stupid arbitrage scam. Like, again, we just,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we don’t think this way because we’re not scammers, but- Well,

⏹️ ▶️ John I thought the people who had the fake app store apps, Like, I mean, this is maybe being silly. I was

⏹️ ▶️ John like, well, surely they have, they wouldn’t, why would they be begging for copies of the software

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re gonna sell on their illegal site? Surely they have other ways to get them. Like, I guess someone’s gotta get it first,

⏹️ ▶️ John but the apps they’re gonna sell, and like, it’s like trying to find an illegal copy of Photoshop in the 90s.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like, you don’t go asking Adobe for it, you just go find it online and download it. But I guess, you know, with the App Store

⏹️ ▶️ John scale, that it becomes more difficult, and maybe this mass emailing works. Like, I didn’t think that this was the source.

⏹️ ▶️ John the source was mass emails to developers. I always just thought it was like, oh, they find a copy online.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I was more surprised about the like, reselling promo codes for less

⏹️ ▶️ Marco than their list price as a thing. Like that is kind of an ingenious, horrible scam.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would never have thought to do that. And it is totally unethical, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is kind of like, that makes a lot more sense. Why you get a bulk email, why you never hear

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the people again. It’s just like, just give me codes, give me codes, give me codes. And then if one person says

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes, great, then go sell that code for half of what that app sells for in the store, and eventually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco somebody might buy it, right? And it costs you nothing, so even if no one ever buys your code, you’re still

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine. You need to store eight characters in a database somewhere. That’s your only cost,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? So- And you can automate it. This can just run in the background while you’re sitting on the beach. Like, there’s nothing, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John zero touch. It just runs, it sends the emails. When it gets the response, it looks for a promo code, it puts into a database,

⏹️ ▶️ John it shows up on a store. Like it all just runs by itself.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, you really, again, like I said last week, whenever you have some kind of large ecosystem

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like this where any kind of scam or grift is even possible, even if it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco seem like it would make that much money or even if it seemed like it would be a lot of work to get into, someone,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are people out there for whom it’s worth it. And someone out there will do it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If there is a scam to be had, people will do it. And that’s why, like, you know, Whenever

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you think about App Store policy or Apple’s physical policies

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about their devices, things like repair policy, warranty repairs, how they deal with serial

⏹️ ▶️ Marco numbers and locked devices, stuff like that, so much of this, you gotta think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the angle of what would scammers do with this, given a lot of time and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco no ethics? And possibly, and a lot of scammers are in, they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco live in places where the cost of living and the expenses of daily life are much

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lower than ours, and so it might be worth it for them to run a scam

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that might not be worth it for us, because if it isn’t making huge amounts of money, but it’s making small amounts of money,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s worth it to somebody. And so anything Apple does, they’re at such a large

⏹️ ▶️ Marco scale, their customer base is at such a large scale, and there’s so much potential money to be made

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in unethical or illegal ways, people will do it, and you kind of have to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco give them the benefit of the doubt when they make some kind of weird or inconvenient

⏹️ ▶️ Marco change to one of their policies around something like this. A lot of times it’s like, oh actually, yeah, people were scamming

⏹️ ▶️ Marco them, or us, as developers. People were scamming for millions of dollars over time and this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco change was necessary to reduce that or something like that.

⏹️ ▶️ John As a software person, there is a kind of a beauty to this type of scam. Because we always hear about, oh, someone goes and buys a dozen

⏹️ ▶️ John iPhones and sells them when they’re in high demand. And it’s like, in some respects, people are out there

⏹️ ▶️ John waiting in lines, and there’s physical goods, and it’s real hard work, and it’s hard to make money. But this is

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco one of those beautiful- No, they pay other people to wait in lines for the job. You know what I mean, yes, yes.

⏹️ ▶️ John But eventually, there’s labor involved. Whereas this one is like, an individual person without much programming

⏹️ ▶️ John knowledge can write this little machine and just run it indefinitely. And because the

⏹️ ▶️ John scale of the App Store is so huge, They’re, you know, the success rate, the response rate

⏹️ ▶️ John of people giving free codes can be very tiny. And I can imagine making a large amount of money despite

⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that it’s a probably illegal and against Apple’s terms of service or whatever and be certainly unethical.

⏹️ ▶️ John There is a certain beauty to it. And I can imagine that person sitting on the beach and thinking people are in line to try

⏹️ ▶️ John to get iPhones. They have to carry around these physical goods and they can get

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re just like, you know, slowly, ambiently getting this trickle of

⏹️ ▶️ John income that keeps the pina coladas coming. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco pretty

⏹️ ▶️ John sure that’s not, that is not the, the person who’s doing this is not probably sipping pina coladas on the beach,

⏹️ ▶️ John but there is a certain beauty to these kind of sort of pure software scams. You think

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like those like Bud Light, like Lime Arita things, whatever, whatever those are.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. I mean, this is the Superman rounding error

⏹️ ▶️ John banking scam for the modern age. You don’t know that, that’s Superman 3.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the thing that’s referenced in Office Space? Yep, yep, yep,

⏹️ ▶️ John yep. Exactly, yeah, I can get you one reference away, yeah. Office Space

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco referenced the

⏹️ ▶️ John thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t tell you what the Superman was, because I didn’t see that, but I saw Office Space a lot.

⏹️ ▶️ John I had Richard Pryor and I had a scene where a bunch of wires wrap around people to scare me when I was little.

Destiny Q6tAz63Mophxl2AT

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, I’m assuming that it was Marco that put in this Destiny entry in the show notes.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Marco Why don’t you tell me about destiny and cursors?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It turns out they have cursors and destiny, but they don’t call them that they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Try to fake it what’s your next line in the joke? I can’t I can’t even make one up I you can’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just cat dev you random like that’s what they call it that

⏹️ ▶️ John mm-hmm All right. So last episode I think I think we’re

⏹️ ▶️ John talking about Craig Federighi’s interview with Federico Vittici, where they talked about the

⏹️ ▶️ John cursor design on iPad OS, and I was comparing it to,

⏹️ ▶️ John some of the things they talked about was comparing to certain aspects of the aim assist feature, not amethyst,

⏹️ ▶️ John but aim assist feature in Destiny. It turns

⏹️ ▶️ John out that what I should have been talking about, silly me, was also the fact that Destiny

⏹️ ▶️ John itself has a cursor in it. And many reasons

⏹️ ▶️ John this strange didn’t occur to me. I was talking about the, inside the game there’s an aiming reticle that you use to aim at

⏹️ ▶️ John and shoot people, and that’s the main gameplay. But it has a menu system too, and it has a cursor, and it’s controlled by thumbsticks.

⏹️ ▶️ John And guess what? That cursor looks like a ghost finger. It is and has been since 2014,

⏹️ ▶️ John a circular blob that’s on the screen, and you use it to select menus and buttons and do all sorts of stuff like that. Now,

⏹️ ▶️ John the problem space is very different. The reason I was comparing the iPad OS one with the shooting mechanics,

⏹️ ▶️ John is it because it’s slightly more analogous than this because on iPadOS you’re not controlling

⏹️ ▶️ John the cursor with a tiny joystick you have a touchpad which is a very different interface which is not quite… or a mouse

⏹️ ▶️ John you know but a joystick is a very different problem set uh… so uh… I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John fell into a pretty deep uh… rabbit hole of game developer conference videos, GDC

⏹️ ▶️ John videos on YouTube uh… there was a couple ones that I’ve already seen about Destiny and there was the couple ones that I

⏹️ ▶️ John reviewed for the thing we talked about last week And then there’s this one, it’s called Destiny’s Tenacious

⏹️ ▶️ John Design and Interface. If you’ve, even if you’ve never used Destiny, it’s a really interesting video to

⏹️ ▶️ John watch someone explain how they tackled the design problem of letting people use a cursor

⏹️ ▶️ John with a game controller. If you’ve ever had a game that tried to do this, you know how badly it can go.

⏹️ ▶️ John Because a tiny thumbstick with like, you know, three quarters of an inch of travel is

⏹️ ▶️ John not the ideal way to control a cursor on a screen. So how do you, how do you do that? How do

⏹️ ▶️ John you even make that interface so people don’t want to tear their hair out? Because people are going to be using it a lot

⏹️ ▶️ John in Destiny. I think most Destiny players take it for granted as essentially the first

⏹️ ▶️ John decent interface where you have a cursor on the screen. Like most games we don’t even have a cursor, they just say, oh, you use a

⏹️ ▶️ John D-pad, up, up, down, down, right, right, left, left, but that gets tedious as well, but at least it works. People know how that works, like

⏹️ ▶️ John in an RPG, Final Fantasy, or whatever, you got a menu system, you just get used to it. You just, you know, it’s fast, it’s responsive,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a game console, but at a certain point When your interface becomes very expansive,

⏹️ ▶️ John that itself becomes way too tedious. You want to have essentially a mouse cursor. How do you do that

⏹️ ▶️ John on a game console? And in the case of the original Destiny, they were also, this boggled

⏹️ ▶️ John my mind because I’d totally forgotten about it, but the original Destiny also had to run on consoles that supported four

⏹️ ▶️ John by three televisions, like non-HD TVs. Like you could hook up a PlayStation 3 to a

⏹️ ▶️ John non-HD CRT and games had to work on it. So if you’ve looked at a Destiny screenshot and you ever wondered

⏹️ ▶️ John why there’s nothing in the sort of the sides of the 16 by 9 box, it’s because they had to keep everything so that

⏹️ ▶️ John it would work on a four by three TV and they didn’t want to lay out every screen twice. Anyway, I put the link in the show notes.

⏹️ ▶️ John I said, even if you don’t even like games, don’t even know what Destiny is, and in the beginning

⏹️ ▶️ John of the video maybe it’s a little bit boring, stay with it and watch to the point where they start showing you how

⏹️ ▶️ John they approach this design. You will see some things that are similar to iPadOS but other things that are just totally

⏹️ ▶️ John alien in terms of counter scrolling the screen and finding ways to fit in localized

⏹️ ▶️ John text in these boxes and all the things that if you do UI design, some of them you recognize,

⏹️ ▶️ John but the unique aspects of it that only apply to games are really interesting. And you will also see in some of the screenshots,

⏹️ ▶️ John icons for our friends at the Icon Factory in prototypes of the game before there’s any artwork. They just need

⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of icons to put on screen for their sort of, to test the interface. And there’s a whole bunch of Icon Factory

⏹️ ▶️ John icons in there, which I thought was pretty neat.

TV news

Chapter TV news image.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a related slight tangent update. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco first of all, you conflate 4x3 TVs with standard def TVs.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And as I mentioned before, I owned a 4x3 1080i HD TV.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John did exist.

⏹️ ▶️ John Are you sure about that? Yes. I know high definition CRTs existed, but

⏹️ ▶️ John I thought they were 16x9. No? I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, maybe those also existed, but I had a 4x3, I think it was a Magnavox or something.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John a 4x3 HDTV

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was a CRT that had component input and supported 1080i.

⏹️ ▶️ John You need to look up this device, because I need to see this.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Trust me, lots of these existed, well, maybe not lots, they existed for a short time,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like when HDTVs were coming out, but people still wanted inexpensive ones.

⏹️ ▶️ John Chatroom says yes, and chatroom is never wrong. Wow, 4x3 HD, so it just had, it was just letterboxed,

⏹️ ▶️ John I guess?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, yeah, well, you could choose, but yeah, that’s usually how you would set it, because nothing supported

⏹️ ▶️ Marco actual 4x3 HD content. So it was similar, you could letterbox

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it or you could crop off the ends and I usually just letterbox it. It was very strange.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s terrible. I would never want that TV. I would hold out for the 16x9 CRTs.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it wouldn’t have had the problem having that with my TV.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, your big

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fancy TV? Yep, my big fancy LG OLED. So I still have my hot blue Pixel

⏹️ ▶️ Marco near the top edge.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Hot pixel. Hot pixel. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have sometimes stopped noticing it, but not regularly stopped noticing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. And the other day, Tiff was playing Animal Crossing and going across a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco light beach area. Oh no. And along the bottom

⏹️ ▶️ Marco quarter of the screen, we saw a very familiar outline

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of about 10 hearts, ten hearts, about ten meat-shaped

⏹️ ▶️ Marco logs, and then

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco eight or ten squares that form some kind of quick action bar. I told you never

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to look, I told you. I didn’t look for it, but this

⏹️ ▶️ John was clear as day. Before I thought like Zelda would burn in, but apparently you just didn’t play enough hours of Zelda, but Minecraft,

⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve played enough hours of Minecraft.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I don’t play on the TV, but Tiff does. Like when

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John we play our- Oh, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco your fault now.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, like when we play,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so we play either on the Dubai Friday server, which is Java, in which case we’re all on PCs, you know, Macs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever. Or we play in our family game, which is just like a private thing that we have just for our family,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s the Bedrock Edition. And for that, Tiff plays on the Switch. We played so much of that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco recently that now there is the Minecraft HUD burned into the bottom of our TV. Now fortunately,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is not burned in enough that we notice it most of the time. It was only like when Tiff was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco walking across this certain light to medium shade, flat colored beach

⏹️ ▶️ Marco area, we saw it very clearly there. But during watching regular TV content,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like where stuff’s actually moving all the time, we don’t really notice it yet. But I’m hoping it doesn’t get any worse than that.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you know the solution. The solution is do not play Minecraft on that TV anymore and then wait a year.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is that, yeah, I was curious, is it permanent? I mean, I know my Hot Pixel is permanent and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco therefore this TV is dead to me, even though it’s.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know if the Hot Pixel is permanent. sometimes those things come back to life too, weirdly.

⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, I don’t have experience with OLEDs. My only experience is with the plasma, and with the plasma, no, it wasn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John permanent, but it did take a full calendar year for me to stop being able to see my Destiny HUD.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco As soon as I saw that, combined with my dead pixel, I said, you know what, I wish I had just kept my plasma.

⏹️ ▶️ John Plasmas have burn-in too, you’d have the plasma Minecraft burn-in too.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Does it burn at the same rate? I don’t know. Plasma, I still,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know OLED is a lot more elegant in a lot of ways. It’s certainly a lot more efficient, and it’s thinner,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the bezels are thinner, and it has 4K, which plasma’s as far as I know never went 4K.

⏹️ ▶️ John It has

⏹️ ▶️ Marco better

⏹️ ▶️ John color reproduction,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has

⏹️ ▶️ John more

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pixels. Plasmas are way better at motion, and they are significantly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco better in a lot of these areas of retention and dead pixels and everything, in my experience. Maybe I just got lucky, I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if they’re better. I don’t think they’re worse than OLEDs. Some OLEDs may be worse than

⏹️ ▶️ John others, but Plasma was the previous champion of image retention. And OLED is just kind

⏹️ ▶️ John of like, I feel like OLED is tying it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, well, anyway, I am, I so far, you know, I have, I did what everyone

⏹️ ▶️ Marco else does a couple years ago and I wanted to buy a 4K OLED TV and I went to the review sites and I bought the one

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that everyone buys, the LG C whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John You

⏹️ ▶️ John got the right one.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have the C7, I think, yeah. I got the right TV, I did all the research. A lot of people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have these TVs. I have friends who have these TVs. I am not very happy with it. I gotta say,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco after three years, or almost three years of having it, to have two significant image-related problems,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not thrilled with that purchase right now. Especially because it costs like $2,200 or something. Like, it wasn’t a cheap TV. So you got the extended warranty.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, I think for whatever I buy next, if

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this thing ever dies and actually forces me to buy something new, I would probably do one of those stupid, like best buy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco warranties.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what I did with my plasma. I bought the extended warranty despite how ridiculous it was because I knew plasmas have problems

⏹️ ▶️ John and I always wanted the option to be like, if this thing goes terribly wrong, like the thing that goes wrong with plasmas a lot

⏹️ ▶️ John is, aside from the image retention, is because they use so much power, they have like a, you know, I don’t know,

⏹️ ▶️ John some sort of analog circuit that actually vibrates in use and that eventually it can crack its housing,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? And make a terrible noise just from the vibration of the high power. You can always hear a plasma. If

⏹️ ▶️ John you put a full white screen on a plasma and you have young enough years, you can hear it going, like that kind of

⏹️ ▶️ John electrical buzzing noise. But if that thing cracks, it becomes incredibly loud. And you don’t want that to happen like

⏹️ ▶️ John one year after your warranty is out and the warranties are very short. So extended warranty for sure. OLEDs

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t use nearly as much power as these plasmas and don’t have that buzzing problem, but you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John things can go wrong with any kind of screen, especially, you know, a 4K screen.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like normally those extended warranties on most things are total ripoffs. And I would never recommend buying them

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on pretty much anything, but I do admit, like I’m jealous when whenever I, if I mentioned

⏹️ ▶️ Marco something about like this TV, you always hear from people who are like, yeah, well, you know, it happened to me once and I had

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the genius squad come over and they just took it right out and swapped it with a new one, no questions asked, because I had one

⏹️ ▶️ Marco dead pixel, and I’m like, oh God.

⏹️ ▶️ John But you know, your previous reasoning about why you don’t do that still holds. Like the idea is, okay, every three years you buy a new $2,000 TV and

⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t have this problem, or you buy the extended warranty, which one costs more money in the long run.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess that’s true, but like, yeah, because a warranty on something like that’s gonna be, what, like three or 400 bucks? Yeah, that

⏹️ ▶️ John was multi-hundred dollars for my plasma, although I used my plasma for like 10 years.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, right, I mean, I’ve only ever owned three TVs in my adult life. The first one was the CRT, the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco HD CRT. The second one was my 42-inch plasma, and this is the

⏹️ ▶️ John third. Yeah, if you had played Minecraft on this plasma, though, you would have burned in the Minecraft bar at the bottom of the plasma.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just a matter of like, when did your Minecraft time of life begin? So it’s basically, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco on

⏹️ ▶️ John Adam. Adam came of age, he came of Minecraft age, And that sentenced

⏹️ ▶️ John your television to death, essentially. Wow. Because the blue pixel, I feel like, yeah, it’s annoying, but you probably could have

⏹️ ▶️ John lived with it. But the burn-in is more of an issue. Like, it will show up any time there’s kind of

⏹️ ▶️ John gray in that area. You’ll see it. Oh, geez.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, goodness. All right.

Shared iPad for Business

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’ll move on and Sir Kathy wrote in to point out something that I missed

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But we were talking about multi-user iPads in the last couple of episodes and in iOS 13.4

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apparently shared iPad for business was a thing or became a thing This is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey apparently a business version of the Apple classroom shared iPad thing So shared iPad for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey businesses is from 9 to 5 Mac shared iPad for business enables businesses to share devices between

⏹️ ▶️ Casey multiple employees while still providing a personalized experience. Employees sign in with a managed Apple ID to begin loading

⏹️ ▶️ Casey their data. The user then has their own mail accounts, their own files, iCloud photo library, app data, and more. The

⏹️ ▶️ Casey data for the employees is stored in iCloud, so employees can sign in from any shared iPad that belongs to the organization.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had no idea this was a thing. I totally missed this. So I just thought I would call it out.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think that makes sense from, you know, just like schools have a use case for this, so do businesses that want

⏹️ ▶️ John to have a fleet of iPads and a bunch of employees, and you just sort of check out an iPad and your stuff is there,

⏹️ ▶️ John and then you put it away, rather than buying one iPad for every single employee. You would think

⏹️ ▶️ John that this would mean, oh, this other use case means that Apple is even more motivated to make the system better. But because this

⏹️ ▶️ John is essentially enterprise software, there is a high tolerance for, let’s say, inconvenient software

⏹️ ▶️ John experiences in that market. So I’m not sure this actually changes the motivation one way or the other. but it is interesting to know they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John using it someplace other than education.

Casey’s garage security

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do we have to do this last follow-up item? I really don’t want to do this last follow-up item. We have to.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, we don’t have to. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I don’t want to.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll help you, Casey. You have nothing to be ashamed of, probably.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John All

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. So John Inger, thank you, John, writes, Hey, Casey, I’m 25 minutes into episode 377

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m enjoying your Raspberry Pi garage door opening adventures. As a security professional, oh God,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a security professional, though, I’m having nervous twitches. Are your Pi zeros hardened? Do you use an encrypted connection between them?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey When you connect these to the actual garage doors, will it be trivially easy for a man with a laptop to break into your garage? Irritating

⏹️ ▶️ Casey details like this are why I prefer HomeKit over the Alexa ecosystem. For anything HomeGadgetry related, extra cost be darned.”

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am sure that the answers I’m about to give will be unsatisfactory to somebody. And that’s okay.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s okay. It’s fine for me. The Raspberry Pi has no incoming

⏹️ ▶️ Casey connection to the internet. It is outgoing only. Additionally, the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey only control for the garage door, well, I had intended to add control

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the garage door via HomeKit and HomeKit only. I tried putting a relay on it and for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey uninteresting reasons that didn’t work, which might be user error, so I got to look at that again. But I tried that earlier today and it didn’t work.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But yeah, there’s no mechanism other than HomeKit to control the garage door. And even then

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s actually right now no control at all. And yeah, there’s no incoming

⏹️ ▶️ Casey connection to these Raspberry Pis. And they only talk locally within the network. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s fine. And it’s fine enough for my use. But I’m sure all of you are going to write in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and tell me how I am inviting people to open my garage door.

⏹️ ▶️ John Are you using HTTPS? If you’re using? Are all the network

⏹️ ▶️ John connections using some encrypted protocol?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, but they’re all internal to my own

⏹️ ▶️ John network. Hmm. Yeah. Maybe reconsider

⏹️ ▶️ John that?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey First of all, I’m really not interested in having a debate about whether or not this is hard enough. I don’t mean to be a jerk.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just, I don’t care.

⏹️ ▶️ John I know, but this is the type of thing where it’s like, it probably helps a little bit and it’s usually easy to do. It’s not like

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re writing these protocols if you just change the URL from HTTP to HTTPS and install a certificate

⏹️ ▶️ John of some, you know, or use SSH or, you know, it’s usually like, it’s not like something you have to program or do or worry about.

⏹️ ▶️ John often you have an option. Like our Synologies, for example, like there are apps that Synology gives you for iOS, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John And when you use one of them, it asks you to sign in to Synology and has like a checkbox that says, use HTTPS

⏹️ ▶️ John or not. You just check the checkbox.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s what I do on the Synology because that is exposed to the internet from an incoming, like the internet can get to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Synology if you know where to go. These pies, they are

⏹️ ▶️ Casey outbound connections to the internet but not inbound. And the thing of it is, is that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey If something was able to hack into these Raspberry Pis, that means that my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey entire network at that point has been compromised. Because again, there

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is no port forwarding or anything like that available to these Raspberry Pis

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to allow somebody from outside my network into them. So if something has gotten

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in from outside, that means my entire network is compromised and I have much bigger worries than these little $10 computers.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’m not upset at John for asking the question. I know it was in good spirit. I know he’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not trying to be difficult, but I mean, I don’t feel like I’m putting

⏹️ ▶️ Casey myself, well, first of all, there is no control via the Raspberry Pi, like I said. I do want there to be, but there isn’t any. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey just a sensor and nothing else. But even if there is control, there is no way to get into

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Raspberry Pi from outside my home. There’s not. And so, I mean, short of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey something just catastrophically bad affecting Linux installations everywhere. And I’m sure

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you, the listener, can write in and tell me about, oh, this one crazy hack that happened.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like, okay, if you really wanna get into my garage that bad, fine, fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Since there’s no inbound port acceptance on it, I think you’re right, that the attack surface on this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the outside should be pretty much zero. And yeah, if it’s not,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have many other problems, and your computers and other devices will have many other problems. So that’s good. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a friend of mine asked me the other day, now that we’re working from home a lot more,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what can we do, what should we be doing security-wise to just best practices for home network

⏹️ ▶️ Marco security? And what I told him was basically, A, make sure your Wi-Fi

⏹️ ▶️ Marco password is reasonable, using whatever modern standards exist for Wi-Fi

⏹️ ▶️ Marco passwords and it’s reasonably long and not easily guessable. That’s like the best thing, just keep people off your network.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And beyond that, the one thing I said to him was, make sure you’re not using any kind of weird, like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cheap or no-name or unnecessary smart home products. Because smart

⏹️ ▶️ Marco home products so often are attack vectors in people’s networks when they’re running

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad software or when they’re made by no-name vendors who have no interest in supporting them

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and have possibly no ability to write secure software in the first place even. If you’re staying with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco big brand stuff and sticking within the well-known Amazon or home kit ecosystems, you’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty much good as long as you’re not getting too crappy of devices

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that have too crappy of software on them. But smart home stuff is a significant vector, but that’s because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many smart home devices open up ports to the internet and run local services to the outside world. So if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not doing that from the pie, which you’re not, then you’re pretty good there. The other

⏹️ ▶️ Marco angle to consider here is the attack surface, or the attack target of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the inside of your garage. If somebody really wants to get into your garage, the ability

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to remotely open it isn’t particularly useful. They probably want to be somewhere nearby so they can walk

⏹️ ▶️ Marco into your garage after they open it and, I don’t know, pick up your car and walk away with it somehow.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s problem number one. Problem number two is if they are willing to sit near

⏹️ ▶️ Marco your garage to break into it and possibly get on your Wi-Fi somehow or something,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, they can also just like sniff the over-the-air signals that your garage door opener sends it when you drive

⏹️ ▶️ Marco up to it. And if it’s not a pretty modern, secure garage door,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they can probably just repeat the code that’s transmitted and reopen it whenever they want to. Like there are like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco different standards of garage door opener over-the-air protocols, and some of them, especially like the old ones, are really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco insecure. They just like transmit a certain pattern once, and that’s it. And you can just repeat that pattern over and over again, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’ll just keep working forever. You know, the more modern ones have some kind of like rotating code system or like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a single use kind of thing. I haven’t looked too much into it, so forgive me if I’m getting some of this wrong, but like if somebody

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wants to actually get into your garage that badly and they’re local, cause why else would they want to get into their garage?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There are so many other ways to do it than hacking your smart garage door opener, which by the way

⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t open your garage door. It just tells you whether it is open or not. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey today, today I do want it to be able to, but today that is correct.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. But like, so the point is like, This is a pretty small attack surface to begin with,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then once you look at, well, what’s the actual target here? Your Raspberry Pi is not the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco security hole in this setup. Your garage door opener is the security hole in this setup.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, most garage doors, those garage door openers are not pulling

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thousands of pounds of wood up. They’re counter-weighted, or they have counter springs on them.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can lift them by hand if you have to. So unless you’re actually going there every night

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and turning the big metal locking thing that sticks the bars out to lock it against the doors, which no one ever

⏹️ ▶️ Marco does, somebody who wants to go into your garage door can probably just walk up to it and lift it up with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco their hands. So again, not a significant surface to worry about for a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco taxi driver.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s how my garage door locks, with those metal things. I do that every day. Because I don’t have an opener.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was about to say, you don’t have a garage door opener, do you?

⏹️ ▶️ John I think, I mean, the takeaway is I was saying, if you’re setting up something like this, It is a good thing to think about, especially if you go whole

⏹️ ▶️ John hog into home automation, because if you don’t think about it at all, you could find yourself, especially if you’re tinkering in a situation

⏹️ ▶️ John where anyone sitting in a car outside your house has complete control over all your appliances.

⏹️ ▶️ John Although that’s not particularly dangerous, it could be annoying. And the second thing that occurred to me is kind of what Marco was

⏹️ ▶️ John getting at. You could be in a smoke alarm-like situation where I had installed, many years ago,

⏹️ ▶️ John as described on a Hypercritical episode whose number I can’t remember, I installed

⏹️ ▶️ John a smoke detector that had an IR interface. Like if you have like a really high ceiling in your house

⏹️ ▶️ John and the smoke detector goes off, like you have like a little remote that you could point at the smoke detector and tell it to stop

⏹️ ▶️ John beeping because you know you took the burning steak off your stove and now you just want it to be quiet, right? So they have

⏹️ ▶️ John IR sensors in them. And my smoke detector kept going off and I couldn’t figure it out.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it turns out that it was somehow getting IR signals like while we were all sleeping from like the neighbor watching

⏹️ ▶️ John their TV in their house. Like they would point their remote at the television. This is my theory

⏹️ ▶️ John because I mean everyone in our house is asleep. It’s like the middle of the night, but it was on the second floor

⏹️ ▶️ John and it did have sort of line of sight to a neighbor’s window like their bedroom. And I can imagine them sitting on their bed,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, changing channels on their TV with their remote and turning off our smoke detector. And experiments back

⏹️ ▶️ John this up. When I use the super secret as, you know, searched on the internet sequence

⏹️ ▶️ John of button presses that you could tell it to disable its IR sensor never happened again.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m thinking like, oh, it’s not a security problem, but it could be annoying if you had something

⏹️ ▶️ John set up. Or, you know, I guess in Margo’s case, it’s probably more likely it’s just the actual remote and not your Raspberry

⏹️ ▶️ John Pi, but like a situation where someone’s not trying to mess with you, but through some confluence of wireless

⏹️ ▶️ John signaling and events and and strange hacks that you’d set up, something happens that causes the

⏹️ ▶️ John garage door to open in the middle of the night and you keep waking up and you’re like, I checked before I went to sleep and it was closed why is it open now

⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s you know it’s not a person messing with you it’s just like your neighbor opening their garage door or and it turns

⏹️ ▶️ John out it’s opening yours too.

Spotify vs. podcasting

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, an hour in, let’s be done with follow-up. And there

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is an interesting story that broke yesterday, I believe, as we record this.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t think I dig it. Joe Rogan has

⏹️ ▶️ Casey announced that he is going to be taking his show to Spotify. Now Joe Rogan, he was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Fear Factor guy, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Joe Rogan It was. He was the Fear Factor guy. He was less puffy then, but yeah, that’s him.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I guess he’s ostensibly a comedian. Like I’ve not listened to any of his podcasts, but, but,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it seems that by almost anyone’s measure, he is literally the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey most popular podcast in the world. Something to the order of like a hundred ninety two

⏹️ ▶️ Casey million listeners and also like three to five million YouTube viewers for each episode.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And supposedly Spotify brought a one hundred million dollar,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, pile of cash to Joe and said, please come to Spotify at the end of the year.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if that’s a real amount. That’s just the last number I saw being thrown around. So don’t take these numbers as

⏹️ ▶️ John as written. I was trying to find a link for the story and it’s very difficult to find a good definitive report that’s not filled with a bunch of

⏹️ ▶️ John garbage. But anyway, this is as of recording. This is the number we heard.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Joe Rogan has gone to Spotify and he is taking presumably a large

⏹️ ▶️ Casey chunk of these almost 200 million listeners to Spotify with him. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that really bums me out. And I’d like to get out of the way first,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so we can just move on. If Spotify would like to offer the three of us $100 million

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to go to Spotify, I don’t know if I speak for my co-hosts, but I would absolutely go to Spotify for $100

⏹️ ▶️ Casey million.

⏹️ ▶️ John You should explain what go to Spotify means in this context though, because that’s one of the nuances.

⏹️ ▶️ John I had to read several stories before I mostly gathered this. When we say go to Spotify in this

⏹️ ▶️ John case, what we mean is, you know, Joe Rogan’s got a podcast and you can just go to his feed right now and download

⏹️ ▶️ John it and just listen for free and it’s got ads on it, right? Surprise, it’s a podcast, okay? Going to Spotify

⏹️ ▶️ John means his podcast will still be free to download and listen

⏹️ ▶️ John to and it will still have ads in it. The only difference is you can’t listen to it unless

⏹️ ▶️ John you sign up for Spotify, which is a thing that you can do for pay, but also for free. you can

⏹️ ▶️ John sign up as a user for Spotify and not give them any money and download the Spotify app to whatever

⏹️ ▶️ John device you have and then search for the Joe Rogan podcast and hit play and listen to it and that podcast will

⏹️ ▶️ John have ads on it. So from your perspective as a listener, the only thing that’s changed

⏹️ ▶️ John is now you previously were listening to it on whatever your podcast app was and now you can’t, you have to listen to it through Spotify

⏹️ ▶️ John because that’s the only place you can get it. It basically stops being a podcast and starts being a thing you can get in Spotify

⏹️ ▶️ John because the podcast kind of by definition is a thing that’s available on an RSS feed that can be played by a podcast client.

⏹️ ▶️ John So yeah, he’s not gonna really have a podcast anymore, he’s gonna have a Spotify thing, and people will have

⏹️ ▶️ John to sign up for Spotify if they haven’t already and listen to it in the app. But

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not like you have to now pay money to listen to Joe Rogan, and it’s also not like

⏹️ ▶️ John his show won’t have ads anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and there’s a lot of complicating factors here that are worth knowing. You

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, Spotify bought Gimlet this past year, of which I was investor, disclosure, so I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco made money from that deal. So Spotify has been making large podcast acquisitions

⏹️ ▶️ Marco recently. And when you think about it from Spotify’s point of view, it makes total sense because they are, as I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco said back then, and I won’t go into it too much, but they’re a music streaming service. For every

⏹️ ▶️ Marco minute that you spend listening to music on Spotify, they have to pay a royalty to whatever you play. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, if they can suck away some of that time that you would have otherwise listened to music

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and make you listen to podcasts instead, they don’t pay per listen. They don’t pay per stream

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for podcasts. They run their own podcast directory. Many podcasts

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are in it, I think including ours, although no one listens to it there, which for a reason I’ll get into in a few minutes. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly, we might not keep it there forever. But we’ll see. Anyway, people can listen to podcasts

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there for free, and the podcast creators don’t get paid by Spotify. Spotify

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is almost certainly working on, I think they’ve even said they’re working on some kind of big ad platform for podcasters.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But for the most part, they have their own kind of copy of the podcasting world. You have to opt into it because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they do a whole bunch of weird crap with your show that if you opt in, you have your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco show on Spotify. But Spotify is not, again, they’re not paying per listen. So it makes a ton of sense for Spotify,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco who has always had pretty shaky financials, because they have to pay a lot of money to the record companies,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get as many people as possible listening to podcasts instead of music. because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they will make more money from those people than they will with the music people because they’re not paying royalties for every listen

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for podcasts. So they have a huge financial incentive to do this. Additionally, they are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco building in a huge distribution front end for this medium

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’re building their own ad network for it. And so they will be able to have podcasters

⏹️ ▶️ Marco go put their show on Spotify, opt into Spotify’s automatic monetization,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco similar to like Google AdSense on webpages where you’re just like, all right, well look, I have a show, I don’t have a lot of listeners, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, I can’t get big sponsors, but if I have Spotify auto-insert ads for me, maybe I can make 12

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bucks a month, right? It’ll be that kind of thing. And do enough of that, you can get pretty big as the platform

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there, and you can make additional revenue that way. So there’s tons of business reasons why Spotify wants to do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this. And the people who run Spotify seem pretty smart and they really know their stuff about music,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the people who run Spotify and who are doing all these deals don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco seem like they really get podcasts. They don’t seem, they’re certainly not podcast enthusiasts.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re certainly not listening to shows like this or anything even in our world. They’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not listening to independently produced small shows like this.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re listening to Joe Rogan. They’re listening to, if you go to like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the top 10 podcasts in Apple Podcasts, they’re listening to those.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they think that’s the podcasting market and they’re making a player successfully and gaining a lot of market

⏹️ ▶️ Marco share successfully for other people like that. Spotify

⏹️ ▶️ Marco launched their podcast thing, I think about a year and a half ago, something like that. And they got a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of market share really fast. But it’s been mostly additive market share. There’s almost no people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco who are leaving their current podcast app and going to Spotify instead. most

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the market share they’ve gotten has been additive. They have quickly amassed a substantial market share,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think about something like a fifth the size of Apple, maybe a quarter the size of Apple in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the podcast space. But those were people who just came out of nowhere. Like they didn’t move

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from Apple and Overcast and everything else. So if you look at their demographics

⏹️ ▶️ Marco also, the kinds of shows that do well on Spotify are those

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really big, big name, mass audience shows. It’s not the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco specialized shows that are like, you know, made by, made more casually like ours,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco made for like more specialized interests like tech or whatever, like, it’s not that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s those big like general interest public radio style shows of, hey, this thing’s interesting, ha ha ha, like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, here’s a bunch of production and a lot of overhead for our format so we can fit seven minutes of content into a 30 minute

⏹️ ▶️ Marco show. It’s that kind of stuff. And that entire

⏹️ ▶️ Marco market is huge. It’s a massive part of podcast listenership.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s not us. It’s not you listening to this show.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not me and John and Casey producing this show. It’s not me as the maker of Overcast.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We operate in a whole different world over here. It happens to use the same technology

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and most of the same apps, But it might as well be a different medium, functionally.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like for, you know, when you look at the business, like, we are so completely separate. So I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ran, I looked at some stats and Joe Rogan is Overcast’s number one podcast.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then I looked at the top 100 podcasts in Overcast. And you know, the top 20

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or so match pretty well for, you know, if you look at Apple’s top and, you know, Pocket Cast and all the other

⏹️ ▶️ Marco big players, like the top 20 is pretty much the same across all of us, which is good. means like we have you know significant

⏹️ ▶️ Marco market share enough that like the average people you know work their way in and and we

⏹️ ▶️ Marco see the same route you know same rough stats basically and I looked at the top 100 list

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the only shows in the top 100 that I listen to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are this the talk show relay shows and hello

⏹️ ▶️ Marco internet so it’s all of which are shows by people I know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s and And those shows are big on Overcast, disproportionately to how big

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are in real life. Like, ATP on Overcast is, I think it’s like number 22 or 21, something like that. It

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is by far not the number 21 most popular podcast in the world. It just happens

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be like, Overcast users are overrepresented on Overcast because I make it. Anyway, the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco world of podcasting is, like, it started out with us, nerds,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hobbyists, And then it grew way past us. In the first wave,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it grew past us with like This American Life and the first wave of public radio style shows. More recently, it’s grown

⏹️ ▶️ Marco way past even that to the massive productions, you know, first with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco big comedians, celebrities, and now it is that. You know, Joe Rogan is big,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was big. It’s way beyond the initial hobbyist level stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that hobbyist level stuff is itself a great place to be and a great business to be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in. And that’s what we’re in. And so to some extent,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we should be concerned that Spotify is not only trying, but succeeding

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in locking down large parts of this open ecosystem into their own proprietary

⏹️ ▶️ Marco walled garden. And they’re going to mess with it. You better believe they’re gonna mess with it. One of the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways you can tell how little they understand podcasting or care about it and how little

⏹️ ▶️ Marco their audience understands and cares about podcasting really, is how crappy of an experience it is listening

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to podcasts on Spotify. It’s a terrible podcast player, but they don’t care, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t matter, it won’t affect them at all. Because the people listening to podcasts on Spotify are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly casual users listening to those big name shows who are not like podcast power users, they’re not like podcast

⏹️ ▶️ Marco nerds who want all the different controls and options and features that a modern podcast app would

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have. So to some extent, we should be concerned.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Shows are moving there, and that is going to hurt our ecosystem to some degree.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think we know to what degree, though. It could hurt us a lot. It could especially hurt us badly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the money department. It could be really, really bad if a huge portion

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of sponsorship and ways to monetize your show like that become

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to put it on Spotify and use their ads because that’s where all the money’s going. That would be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really damaging to a lot of people. Although keep in mind that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the vast majority of podcasts out there don’t have ads on them at all. It’s a huge long

⏹️ ▶️ Marco tail and while like the top handful of percentage of podcasts

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have ads, there’s a massive amount that don’t that either are not monetized

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all because people just do them because they like to do them. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or they’re monetized in different ways. Maybe they sell merchandise instead. Maybe they have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Patreon or a membership program instead. Maybe they sell a book and they’re using the podcast to promote their book,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff like that. There’s all sorts of other ways people use podcasts to make money that are not just having ads in them.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But certainly having ads in them is the way that almost every big show makes money and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is a way that most of the money is made, period. So anything that affects

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that and could potentially lock that down into one ecosystem is very damaging. So that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we do have to be worried about. However, because this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is an open ecosystem, because like what Spotify does doesn’t directly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco affect my ability to make a general purpose app that reads public RSS feeds. It

⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t affect your ability as a customer to read those feeds and to play the audiophiles in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco those feeds. Like, we have our own separated islands out here in geek land,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s fine. That’s the beauty of the open ecosystem. It’s all decentralized, for the most part, mostly decentralized.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They can’t really do anything that would really kill us. So we will

⏹️ ▶️ Marco largely be fine as long as people stick around to listen.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think that’s likely to happen, at least for shows like this. Now, if

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was an investor in like big podcast content right now, like you know, some major

⏹️ ▶️ Marco show or, you know, trying to get some kind of like big celebrities, like I’d be nervous about Spotify

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a competitor there. But in the area that we are operating in as, as both,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, us being the host of the show and me being the owner of overcast, I think we’ll be all right,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s going to be different if Spotify succeeds at what they, what they intend to be doing. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they, they probably will honestly, Like, they are buying a lot of big content.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They are locking stuff down into their platform. They are gonna be working on, or already are working on,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco some pretty major monetization things that will definitely threaten everything in our ecosystem,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the money side especially. But as long as people keep listening to shows like this,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and keep supporting independent shows by listening, if they have sponsorships, do that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If they have memberships, like we’re about to do that. whatever you, however you choose to support them and listen to them,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can be okay if the people are also willing to listen here. So if

⏹️ ▶️ Marco someone goes to Spotify to listen to one show a week or two shows or five shows a week, I don’t care.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they also still listen to shows like this in whatever app they want.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’re still fine. Obviously, I hope Spotify has less of an impact

⏹️ ▶️ Marco than that, but they might not. And that’s okay. if Spotify

⏹️ ▶️ Marco captures all of the people somehow, all of the people who listen to big shows

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Joe Rogan, who don’t listen to tech shows at all mostly, or don’t listen to our show at

⏹️ ▶️ Marco least, or any show that I’ve ever heard, that I listen to, that doesn’t necessarily need to impact

⏹️ ▶️ Marco us. And as I mentioned earlier, it does kind of feel like the podcast market is like two different

⏹️ ▶️ Marco things. It’s the thing it used to be, which is what we are. Smaller, independently

⏹️ ▶️ Marco produced shows for the most part, all on their own sites and networks with their own RSS feeds, playing all these different

⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps. And then there’s like the celebrity podcasts, the big mass market

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones. Those co-existed in the same ecosystem for a while, but they don’t have to.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like there’s no guarantee that because they were unified into one ecosystem for so long, that they will continue

⏹️ ▶️ Marco giving, you know, being in the same ecosystem. If they split off and they go to their own like Netflix

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of thing, or you know, if they go off to Spotify and all the regular quote regular people out there listen to their

⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcasts on Spotify, and then all the nerds like us listen in podcast players that actually are good,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s not that bad of a thing. As long as the money part doesn’t get too messed up by their moves

⏹️ ▶️ Marco into the ad system, as long as they don’t destroy the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ability for other shows to sell ads and make money, I think we’ll be mostly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay. Complicating factors, which we’ll get to once we talk about membership

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a future episode, Um, there are other things that can destroy that sponsorship

⏹️ ▶️ Marco environment also, some of which are starting to happen. Our world of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcasts that, you know, we, we deal either directly or very close to directly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with sponsors most of the time and you listen and we give them your download numbers and they, they buy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ads and stuff. That system might be going away over the next couple of years for other reasons,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not Spotify. And if that happens, we’re all going to have to figure something else out anyway. but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Spotify’s moves in particular are unlikely to affect shows like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ours. They definitely will affect bigger shows, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as long as people like you keep listening to shows like this in apps like whatever you’re listening to this on,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can keep having fun. We can keep doing this. We can keep our business going regardless of what the like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco big podcasters do with their business.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s interesting in these sort of battles that we’ve had in the past between open

⏹️ ▶️ John ecosystems, systems built on protocols and technologies that are not owned by

⏹️ ▶️ John any single commercial entity versus proprietary systems.

⏹️ ▶️ John In general, open has proved very resilient in the scenarios

⏹️ ▶️ John where it has grown enough to live, whereas if it’s reached viability, it’s very difficult to kill

⏹️ ▶️ John it. One example I bring up all the time is email. Email is terrible and

⏹️ ▶️ John crappy from a technical perspective, but it got critical mass before anyone could come in and try to get rid of it.

⏹️ ▶️ John And despite many, many people trying, plain old regular email continues

⏹️ ▶️ John to cling to life because no one is able to sort of get critical mass.

⏹️ ▶️ John Not Hotmail, not Gmail, not AOL. Nobody is able to get everybody into a thing and say,

⏹️ ▶️ John email, whatever, like you’re all an AOL email now or now Hotmail is email and

⏹️ ▶️ John regular old email, we don’t support that anymore. No one’s been able to capture it all and say, proprietary,

⏹️ ▶️ John we own you all now, we have everyone’s email address because email is protocol, there’s a bunch

⏹️ ▶️ John of them, they’re open, anyone can implement them, you can make an email client and an email server. It doesn’t mean there hasn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John been consolidation. Most people’s email address probably are Hotmail or Gmail or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? But email itself, the protocol, is why you can still have things like

⏹️ ▶️ John Basecamp’s upcoming Hey.com email client.

⏹️ ▶️ John The only reason they’re able to do that is because guess what? Email is still an open system. They don’t have to sign an agreement

⏹️ ▶️ John with Google to be able to send email to Gmail users or vice versa. It’s an open protocol.

⏹️ ▶️ John Everybody can exchange email. It has proved resilient. The web is another example.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the platform that nobody owns. Many companies have tried to embrace and extend it, Microsoft

⏹️ ▶️ John with Internet Explorer, putting proprietary stuff in there like the ActiveX controls back

⏹️ ▶️ John when they had platform dominance, can we make that happen and turn the web browser into just a fancy container for running Win32 applications?

⏹️ ▶️ John People have tried. There’s been lots of junk in the browser, Flash in more recent memory,

⏹️ ▶️ John but all that stuff comes and goes and the web and HTTP and the standards that underlie it

⏹️ ▶️ John continue to exist and evolve and nobody can stop you from

⏹️ ▶️ John putting up a website. There’s lots of companies you can do it with. Hey, Squarespace, sponsor of the show, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Most people’s websites probably do use one of those types of services because who wants to

⏹️ ▶️ John besides Marco do it all yourself. But the web as an

⏹️ ▶️ John entity has been resistant to all those people. We didn’t all get owned by GeoCities. Even Facebook,

⏹️ ▶️ John which owns like the entire planet, could not destroy the web. they sort of circumvented

⏹️ ▶️ John it and live off of it and, you know, use it to feed their giant evil machine. But

⏹️ ▶️ John the web continues to exist. Podcasts are very much like that in that it’s an

⏹️ ▶️ John open protocol built on top of the web and RSS and all that other stuff. There’s very little anything you

⏹️ ▶️ John can do to kill that technology once it reached critical mass. And I think it has,

⏹️ ▶️ John but just like all the other things I mentioned, email, web or whatever, you can kill individual websites.

⏹️ ▶️ John You can kill individual email providers like you can kill those things pretty easily you can you can really mess

⏹️ ▶️ John with that entire ecosystem And the example that I hope you’re all thinking of right now when I mention all these different words is hey

⏹️ ▶️ John What about RSS? Didn’t didn’t Google Reader basically kill RSS by taking an open protocol

⏹️ ▶️ John and bringing most of the users into Google Reader and then discontinuing it and then and then you know

⏹️ ▶️ John News readers quote-unquote news readers fizzled That is you know the type of scenario where

⏹️ ▶️ John they didn’t kill it outright You can download that news about it today and it works great, works better than ever, and you can read feeds with it and sites still

⏹️ ▶️ John have RSS feeds. But they did put a significant dent in it. They didn’t get everyone into it and

⏹️ ▶️ John change the protocol and suddenly no one has RSS and RSS doesn’t exist anymore. And even when Google Reader

⏹️ ▶️ John existed, you continue to use a thing that was not Google Reader to read news like

⏹️ ▶️ John they didn’t actually embrace and extend or make proprietary news, but they did get

⏹️ ▶️ John enough users into it such that when it went away, a lot of people thought, Oh, well if that you know basically

⏹️ ▶️ John what they thought was Google reader equals news Google reader goes away. That means news reading goes away

⏹️ ▶️ John Spot if Spotify ever got to the point where people think podcast equals Spotify and you

⏹️ ▶️ John know Let’s say Spotify goes out of business or stops doing podcasts or whatever. I don’t see why they would

⏹️ ▶️ John For the older reasons Marco mentioned people say oh well now that Spotify is gone I guess podcasts are over too because

⏹️ ▶️ John podcasts podcasts equals Spotify That’s not true and never will be true,

⏹️ ▶️ John just the same way the Google Reader is an RSS. But if people ever get into that mindset, if Spotify ever gets

⏹️ ▶️ John that kind of critical mass, that could be people’s thinking and it could really hurt the ecosystem.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s taken a while for news reading to sort of regain its footing. And by the way,

⏹️ ▶️ John podcasts are essentially news feeds. They use the same standard as the quote unquote news readers. You can look

⏹️ ▶️ John at podcasts in an RSS reader. In the end, it’s an RSS feed with a bunch

⏹️ ▶️ John of audio attachments, right? So it’s all kind of wrapped up in the same thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John But in these battles between open and proprietary, despite the fact that it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John difficult for proprietary to actually outright win, they can really screw things

⏹️ ▶️ John up. And you can definitely rock the boat. And as Marco mentioned, ecosystems built on open platforms,

⏹️ ▶️ John they can have their own sort of earthquakes and tremors totally unrelated to anybody trying to do something.

⏹️ ▶️ John And the final factor I’ll mention here is the industry does learn

⏹️ ▶️ John from the past in a weird way. There is sort of institutional memory of the people and companies involved.

⏹️ ▶️ John The best example I can think of is when Apple came in with the iTunes store and convinced all

⏹️ ▶️ John the record companies, I love that we still call them record companies,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco music

⏹️ ▶️ John companies, whatever, to sign up with iTunes and Apple became like the middleman

⏹️ ▶️ John for the entire digital music industry back when people were downloading mp3s right

⏹️ ▶️ John and in the beginning they signed up for like sure Apple whatever you can do this thing we’re making a bazillion dollar off CDs you

⏹️ ▶️ John want to sell a bunch of files I don’t even understand what you’re talking about go ahead here here’s our music good luck you

⏹️ ▶️ John make sure you give us 70 cents out of every dollar right whatever and

⏹️ ▶️ John it turned out the digital mute selling mp3s the internet turned out to be a really good business and Apple very quickly dominated

⏹️ ▶️ John that business and the record companies didn’t like it. Like why, why

⏹️ ▶️ John are we going through this middleman that’s not even us? Suddenly the majority of our revenue is coming through Apple?

⏹️ ▶️ John Who the hell is Apple? Why aren’t we making that money? I don’t, I don’t like this at all. And

⏹️ ▶️ John when other parts of the industry went through similar transitions, oh, people are going

⏹️ ▶️ John to watch movies digitally somehow now? The movie companies, sometimes the same companies as the, as the quote unquote

⏹️ ▶️ John record companies, from the past and said, let’s not put all of our eggs in the

⏹️ ▶️ John same basket, right? Even within the music industry, going from going from downloads to streaming or,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, playing Amazon against Apple, they all looked around and said, we don’t want to happen to us.

⏹️ ▶️ John What happened to the record companies when Apple came in? Right. So let’s kind of, you know, if

⏹️ ▶️ John we have the content, let’s kind of spread it around a little bit. Right. I’m not sure if there is any

⏹️ ▶️ John large, powerful entity, any set of large power entities in the world of podcasting that contain

⏹️ ▶️ John that collective wisdom. But I’m hoping that either a Spotify just literally doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John have enough money to buy its way to that much market share, or be the content, the

⏹️ ▶️ John things that these people need, they need the content, the people who own the content start to think at some point,

⏹️ ▶️ John is it really a good idea for all of us to put in with Spotify? Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, especially if they’re out there in the world, there’s some big, huge popular show like Serial or whatever and

⏹️ ▶️ John eventually Spotify comes to them and says, hey Serial or whoever owns you, wouldn’t you like to become

⏹️ ▶️ John a Spotify exclusive and only be available on Spotify and we’ll give you umpteen bajillion dollars?

⏹️ ▶️ John I hope someone involved in that says, Spotify has really been

⏹️ ▶️ John cranking up in market share and lots of people are listening and people are starting to equate Spotify

⏹️ ▶️ John with podcasts. Should we do this or should we, In the same

⏹️ ▶️ John way, like, the, you know, movie companies, whoever said, well, we’d like our movies not just to be in iTunes. We want them on

⏹️ ▶️ John other services too, right? Because we don’t want to give Apple all this power. Like it’s a bad idea

⏹️ ▶️ John for content creators to give a single platform a huge amount of power.

⏹️ ▶️ John Witness YouTube, which also factors into the Joe Rogan thing. That’s not a great situation for creators. Yes,

⏹️ ▶️ John everyone loves the fact that YouTube lets them distribute their stuff worldwide and it made billionaires out of big stars

⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s a great platform to get your start But in the end when you look around you realize kind of like the App Store

⏹️ ▶️ John or anything else YouTube owns us YouTube owns the entire online video space and I am

⏹️ ▶️ John at their whim If they decide they don’t want to let me monetize something or want to

⏹️ ▶️ John kick me off their platform or whatever That’s career ending for me as it’s how the career is called quote-unquote

⏹️ ▶️ John YouTuber that’s a bad situation to be in if if your profession is named after

⏹️ ▶️ John a company that company like owns you practically Right? And so I really hope that I mean this doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John apply to us But this applies to like those big shows those top 20 shows those shows with millions and millions

⏹️ ▶️ John of listeners Spotify can keep buying them starting with the number one and the number two and the number three But when they start

⏹️ ▶️ John going down the top 20 and hoping at some point somebody says This is not good

⏹️ ▶️ John to for all of us to go to Spotify We need to play Spotify off against whoever that competitor

⏹️ ▶️ John might be some people suggested Apple doing this I really hope they don’t because I like their current hands-off attitude, but

⏹️ ▶️ John I I think there is sort of a an immune response of the industry

⏹️ ▶️ John to this getting really out of hand for big shows. This again is

⏹️ ▶️ John not probably not relevant to us because we may we may die in an earthquake unrelated

⏹️ ▶️ John to Spotify in the industry you know related to ad sales or whatever but we won’t.

⏹️ ▶️ John As a listener of shows you know I’ve seen some big shows too like I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John listen I’ll listen listen to a, I was going to say a reply all, but a heavyweight,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if that’s such a big show. I guess most of my shows are kind of obscure. What’s the most mass market show I listen

⏹️ ▶️ John to? I listen

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to 99 PI and I actually really, really like it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, there you go. 99% Invisible. What’s the one that I’m not managing to think of? I’m so bad. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John This American Life, duh. Yeah, I’ll listen to This American Life. I’m not an animal, but I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John want Spotify to own all those shows. I really don’t. I

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t. I don’t want Spotify to become the Google reader of podcasts.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want them to become the iTunes music store. I don’t, I certainly

⏹️ ▶️ John sure as hell don’t want them to become the YouTube of podcasts. That is like the nightmare scenario for everybody, for consumers

⏹️ ▶️ John and creators alike. I know everyone thinks they love YouTube, like, oh, YouTube is the place I go and there’s great videos there or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ John but there are things that you are not seeing and are never going to see because YouTube

⏹️ ▶️ John owns that platform. They may be things from creators that you already like, quote unquote YouTubers

⏹️ ▶️ John who want to do a thing or make a thing, but they can’t because of some YouTube policy or because

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not monetizable in the same way or because YouTube’s algorithm herds them

⏹️ ▶️ John toward, we hear this from YouTube creators all the time, that there’s what they would like to make and there’s what they have to make

⏹️ ▶️ John to continue to make a living on top of YouTube’s algorithm because YouTube’s algorithm

⏹️ ▶️ John favors certain things and doesn’t favor other things. And if you want your video to be seen, you have to sort of fit into that mold

⏹️ ▶️ John and that shapes content. And I mean it was bad enough when there was three TV network when I was a kid. Imagine if there was just one

⏹️ ▶️ John and it was a private company on not beholden to anybody. I didn’t want to turn this into a YouTube slamming

⏹️ ▶️ John fest, but anyway, that that’s what comes to mind. So the Spotify situation, like someone asked earlier

⏹️ ▶️ John in the chat, is there some article I can point to to show people who don’t care about the podcast ecosystem,

⏹️ ▶️ John why they should be sad about Spotify? I don’t have an article like that. And honestly, it’s the type of thing

⏹️ ▶️ John that the average person shouldn’t ever need to know, just like they never knew. Just like nobody, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, nobody who’s not in close enough his industry knows that YouTube is seen as a potential bad

⏹️ ▶️ John actor by people who make their living on the platform. Like that’s all inside baseball. Nobody knows or cares about that, just like nobody

⏹️ ▶️ John knows or cares about the various battles between the big three networks. When I was a kid, like it’s it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John the solution. This problem is not going to be get everyone, you know, to understand that Spotify is bad for podcasting.

⏹️ ▶️ John The solution is, you know, what Marco always alludes to, and it sounds terrible, but it’s the truth. It’s like, if

⏹️ ▶️ John you want to continue seeing a thing in your life, support that thing to

⏹️ ▶️ John the best of your ability. And because podcasting is built on open protocols, that’s it, you don’t have to do anything

⏹️ ▶️ John else. Like, there’s no other company you have to give money to, unless you actually own

⏹️ ▶️ John this American life. You don’t have to worry about decisions about selling to Spotify. Like, you as a consumer, just,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, Use your ears and your wallets to support the things

⏹️ ▶️ John you want to see and continue to exist, and they will continue to exist. It could,

⏹️ ▶️ John meanwhile, there could be a big calamity happening over there in the rest of the network, and you may be sad if suddenly you have to listen

⏹️ ▶️ John to This American Life with annoying, dynamically inserted ads that creep you out, but

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s not much you can do about that. If I had a good article that did explain this, I would put it in the show notes,

⏹️ ▶️ John but I don’t have one. If anyone has suggestions, maybe we’ll put it in the next episode. But in the meantime,

⏹️ ▶️ John I guess just, you know, keep supporting and listening to the things that you like and

⏹️ ▶️ John mostly hope for the best unless you have the ear of people who own one of the top 20 podcasts.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and just a few other like little, you know, addendums to that, like addenda, addendi? Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, you’re right about, you know, how YouTube really has dominated that medium. And I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know any big players on YouTube who are incredibly happy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with YouTube. Like, I don’t know any, because like that company, I mean they have a lot of their own problems, but like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not good to have someone get in the way between you and your audience and or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you and your money. And when you get big enough, you know those problems get pretty big and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the risk goes up. And big companies don’t want to be beholden to some random, you know, platform

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that doesn’t have their best interest in mind necessarily or maybe doesn’t care who they are.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so nobody wants Spotify to get between them and their customers or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco them and their money. If Spotify does do some kind of big ad thing, which again, they are working on,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so if Spotify succeeds in some kind of big ad thing, like a way to monetize podcasts, it gets a lot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of people to go sign up for Spotify, possibly exclusively, I don’t know if it would work that way but possibly,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco then I don’t see big shows like This American Life, I don’t see them

⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to that. They have their own way to make money. They have their own platforms, they have their own dynamic

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ad insertion and automatic sales and large scale deals and all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco their own data analysis. They don’t need Spotify to do that for them. They do that themselves. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they don’t want Spotify doing that for them because they don’t want some other company getting between them and their money and them and their

⏹️ ▶️ Marco customers. And so I don’t think most of the large shows would

⏹️ ▶️ Marco make deals like that which would be exclusive. Also, if you become exclusive

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to any one platform, Whether it’s paid or not, as you mentioned, Spotify has a free plan,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which it seems like most of its users use. So we’re not talking about having to pay

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a special service to go listen to Joe Rogan now, we’re talking about having to use a certain app. Instead of using

⏹️ ▶️ Marco any podcast app, now you have to use this particular app to listen to this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John podcast.

⏹️ ▶️ John Which you’re likely to have already installed because they have hundreds of millions of users of Spotify already.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco What it means though is some percentage of your audience will get lost in that transition.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Granted, with Spotify, it’s not gonna be as much of a percentage as it was something like Luminary, where

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they were asking people to pay, first of all, to pay a period, no matter what, and then

⏹️ ▶️ Marco also to listen in this app that nobody already had. So it was like starting from zero, right? And that went nowhere, and they burned through $200

⏹️ ▶️ Marco million and somehow got a little bit more, but they’re gonna burn through that too. It’s not gonna work. Spotify will work

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot better, because it is free, and because so many people already have it. But there are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco still a lot of people they’re going to lose. Joe Rogan is going to have a smaller audience there

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least to start and probably for a few years. I don’t know how long his deal is for but probably for a few years he can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a smaller audience there than he has currently because a lot of people will

⏹️ ▶️ Marco move to Spotify to listen to him but not all of them. He might go down by a third or half you know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it could be a big loss. I don’t know any of the big shows who would take on that kind of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco listener loss unless they were getting paid absurd amounts of money like what that he reportedly is getting,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but Spotify can’t afford to do that for all the big shows. They can afford to do it for one

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or two. They’re not gonna do it for all of them, they can’t, even if the big shows were game, which they aren’t.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because problem number two is the big shows are already making really good money doing what they’re doing on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco their own. So, and so was Joe Rogan. Like he had ads in his show.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco He was probably, people are saying he might have made $100 million off this deal. By a lot of estimates,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco he was probably making somewhere near that already with ads every year. Like he

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a really big show. He sells a lot of ads to a lot of people.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So regardless, the big companies are already doing their own thing. They have all their own stuff set

⏹️ ▶️ Marco up. They have their own servers. They have their own analytics. They have their own ad platforms. They have their own ad sales.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they make that money directly. They don’t have middlemen getting in the way and taking some percentage

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it. And they’re not losing their audience in large chunks because they’re locking it down to certain apps.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If they could do that, they could do it with their own apps. Like they could make their own apps, some of them have.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they could lock people in that way and say, well now we get 100% of your attention and data and everything. They don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s better for their businesses overall. They make more money overall and reach way more people overall by staying in the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco open ecosystem. So I don’t actually see a lot of them moving over and becoming Spotify

⏹️ ▶️ Marco exclusive. Instead, if Spotify is gonna do some kind of major move into

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ad monetization for podcasts, it’s gonna be trying to capture small podcasts. This is why they bought Anchor. Like when they bought

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Gimlet, they bought Anchor at the same time. And the reason why I think, I wasn’t in any of these conversations

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or anything, but the reason why I assume they bought Anchor is to have some kind of like basis

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with which to make an all-in-one thing. Like all right, you wanna start a podcast? Start it here.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That way, you know, they immediately get rights to it because that’s probably built into Anchor.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they can also then immediately have you hook into their ad system and have you start making 40

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cents a month using their ad system. And do that enough times, or have some of those podcasts get kind

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of medium-sized, and they can make real money there. So I think that’s their long-term plan here. But to do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all that, they just need a lot of people using Spotify for podcasts, and they need, if they keep calling

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it Anchor, or whether they eventually just call it Spotify Podcasts, they need people making podcasts on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there and signing up for their monetization platform. But again, I think if we

⏹️ ▶️ Marco continue to just run our own thing out here in the wilderness,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ll be fine as long as our listeners stay here. And so far, we’ve

⏹️ ▶️ Marco had our show on Spotify for a few months at least, and it has effectively

⏹️ ▶️ Marco zero listeners. No one listens to it there because the type of people who listen

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to this type of show don’t listen on Spotify and seem to not want to. And I’m sure many of our listeners

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have Spotify memberships and use it for music, but they don’t want to listen to podcasts there because they’re nerds like us

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they want their own, they want better controls and they want all the stuff in a podcast app and everything else. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we will probably be fine, but there is definitely potential for the industry as a whole to have some

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty significant ripples from this.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So are you nervous? Are you scared? Do you think it’ll be all right?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m curious what it does to podcasting as a whole. But again, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think for the things that both, that I listen to and that I make,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they’ll be fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if Spotify backs a $100 million pile of cash

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to your house, are you gonna say yes?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Of course. Look, everyone has a price and everyone’s price is generally under $100 million. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John people could be asking that, but it’s such an absurd question. It’s like, what if someone offered you a hundred million

⏹️ ▶️ John dollars for your car. Everyone would do it. Like, but no one’s going to offer you that because your car

⏹️ ▶️ John is not worth a hundred million

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco dollars. So it’s an absurd question. What

⏹️ ▶️ John if I offered you a hundred million dollars to raise your right hand? Would you raise your right hand? Oh, but I thought you were opposed

⏹️ ▶️ John to it. What if they offered you a hundred million dollars to eat fish, but you don’t like fish? Yeah, there are things you

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t do, but no one’s ever going to offer you that because it’s not worth that. So you don’t have to worry about it. No

⏹️ ▶️ John one is going to offer us that much money for our show because our show is not worth that much.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But

⏹️ ▶️ John if

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco they did

⏹️ ▶️ John in this absurd scenario, But yes, of course, right? So that’s why I feel like it’s not, and

⏹️ ▶️ John honestly, you said, well, wouldn’t that be a breach of your ethics or whatever? No, because our show wouldn’t help us, Spotify,

⏹️ ▶️ John gain any dominance in the industry. We would be taking their free money, essentially, and giving them nothing in return, which

⏹️ ▶️ John is why they would never offer us that much money. So I think it’s kind of a silly scenario, but anyway, Spotify,

⏹️ ▶️ John call us, we’re ready. For $100 million, we’re ready. Exactly, that’s our price. We could be argued out

⏹️ ▶️ John to 99, right? Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Squarespace. Start building your website today at squarespace.com slash

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ATP. Enter offer code ATP at checkout to get 10% off. Make your next move

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with Squarespace. Squarespace makes it incredibly easy to make beautiful, highly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco functional websites that take almost no time to make. You’d be shocked how fast you can get things done

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they look like you’ve paid professional designers a hundred grand to make you a site. Like it’s so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco great the way Squarespace sites look and work with so little cost and effort to you. Your sites look

⏹️ ▶️ Marco professionally designed because they are professionally designed. Squarespace hires incredible world-class designers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make their templates and then you can customize them to your heart’s content to be whatever your preferences,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco your branding, or whatever require. So the sites don’t all look the same with Squarespace

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they add new templates over time. So if you’ve had a site there for a long time and you want

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to maybe freshen it up, make it look a little bit more modern, you can go into their preview editor and you can preview

⏹️ ▶️ Marco any of their new themes with one click without committing to it and see how your site would look in it. And you can have like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a quick little upgrade if you want to. And your site looks like it was redesigned with this big effort. And in fact, it took you like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco two clicks. All Squarespace’s sites are incredibly easy to build with intuitive,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco easy to use tools. There’s no coding required. You don’t have to know HTML or JavaScript

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or CSS or anything like that. Once you have your site up and running, Squarespace supports it. You don’t have to worry about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco software upgrades or patches or upgrading your version of Linux. You don’t have to worry about any of that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because Squarespace takes care of all of that on their end. It’s incredibly nice to be a Squarespace customer. It’s just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so low effort. You focus on the content and what you’re building the site for, they take care of the rest. You

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can see for yourself with a free trial at squarespace.com slash ATP. When you decide

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to sign up for Squarespace, make sure to head back there, squarespace.com slash ATP and use offer code ATP

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase. squarespace.com slash ATP

⏹️ ▶️ Marco code ATP for 10% off your first purchase. Thank you so much to Squarespace. Make your next move

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a beautiful website from Square.

#askatp: Clipboard managers

Chapter #askatp: Clipboard managers image.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco space. All

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s do some Ask ATP. PlayMyJam wants to know, and I also heard this on Upgrade as

⏹️ ▶️ Casey well. I don’t know if this was the same question or not, but PlayMyJam wants to know, what clipboard managers do we use?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey For me, I use Alfred as my launcher, and it has a basic clipboard manager within that, and that’s all I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever really needed. John, are you using clipboard manager?

⏹️ ▶️ John I could swear we had this question before, but yeah, I am using one. I’m using PasteBot. I use some

⏹️ ▶️ John free open source one for a long time, but I like the TapBots folks, and so I wanted to try a commercial product,

⏹️ ▶️ John and I installed PasteBot, and I’ve been using it ever since, and I’m fine with it. One thing I learned recently,

⏹️ ▶️ John this actually ties into one of my old semi-war stories about my Mac apps.

⏹️ ▶️ John I couldn’t figure out for the longest time why when I logged in, PasteBot

⏹️ ▶️ John would throw up its user interface. Like there’s like a little window, like a preferences style

⏹️ ▶️ John window or whatever, It would pop that up and I would just close it. I was like, why does it do that every login? It’s so weird.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like, I do want it to launch on login. Like I’d want that because I just always wanted to be running it, but why does it put the

⏹️ ▶️ John UI and always makes me dismiss that window? I thought it was like a weird bug or I’m like, maybe my preferences are screwed up or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John I must’ve run PaySpot like this for over a year before my little monkey brain said, hey dummy,

⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t you just spend, you know, 20 minutes on a podcast explaining how there’s two different ways that you can launch applications

⏹️ ▶️ John on login due to weird historical sandboxing things? Do you remember that show? that was you,

⏹️ ▶️ John Payspot probably is doing the same thing. And there are two different ways to launch on login. You being

⏹️ ▶️ John an old school Mac OS X troglodyte, drag it into login items and system

⏹️ ▶️ John preferences thinking this is how we’re gonna make Payspot launch at login, I’ll put it in login items. But you also

⏹️ ▶️ John have the checkbox checked in the Payspot preferences that says launch on login and that’s using the new system that doesn’t use

⏹️ ▶️ John login items. So essentially, it was launching on login through like the

⏹️ ▶️ John new quote unquote modern weird ass sandbox system. And then the login items would run or vice

⏹️ ▶️ John versa. Doesn’t really matter which goes first. And it would say, please open this app. And if you open an app, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John already open. You basically get a reopen event in your application. Another thing I learned writing my application

⏹️ ▶️ John and that usually you can applications can respond any way they want to reopen event. But usually what they do

⏹️ ▶️ John is they if they don’t have any open windows and they’re already launched and they reopen event, they just show like their

⏹️ ▶️ John main window. That’s exactly what they thought was doing. So over a year later, I go into login

⏹️ ▶️ John items, select Payspot, hit the minus button, remove it, and guess what, now I log in and Payspot does

⏹️ ▶️ John not open its window in my face and I’m a big dummy. So here’s your free tip. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John Payspot, it’s a for-pay app. I forget how much it is, it’s cheap. I think

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s in the Mac App Store and also not. I tend to buy things outside the Mac App Store if I can

⏹️ ▶️ John because A, they usually have more capabilities and B, more money goes to the developer. But do whatever you want, that’s the one I recommend,

⏹️ ▶️ John check it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco out. and I use LaunchBar. There’s lots of apps that do this. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like LaunchBar, both as a launcher and as a clipboard manager, because it’s the one I, like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco LaunchBar is the launcher I happen to be using when I started using the clipboard manager. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so, it’s the one that I developed muscle memory and visual preference for. So, I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ Marco tried other ones since then, and they didn’t work the way I wanted to with muscle memory, and they didn’t look the way that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wanted them to look, because they didn’t look like LaunchBar. So this is a wonderful area

⏹️ ▶️ Marco where whatever, however you want this to look and feel, you can probably find something that looks and feels

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way you want it to. And yeah, launch bar is that thing for me. I absolutely love it. And it’s the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one thing that like if I’m setting up a new computer and I don’t have that installed yet, I, it,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it hurts. It hurts so much. Cause you know, first you hit command space and you get spotlight search, which is like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco spotlight search is almost a good launcher. Like it’s, It’s like an 85%

⏹️ ▶️ Marco good launcher. You can use it that way. It works roughly most of the time It’s mostly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fast. It has many capabilities. It’s fine But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not having clipboard history kills me. It makes it so hard for me to work because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m so used to it now this is also one of the reasons why I Am

⏹️ ▶️ Marco skeptical of like any kind of heavy work on iOS from my preferences

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because iOS doesn’t have anything like this that actually works and continuously runs and everything. It can’t,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco unless it’s not at the system level, which Apple probably would never do. So I love clipboard history,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and both with programming and with just other kinds of general text stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco images even, it works, it’s so good. And once you get used to clipboard history,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not having it is like not having a clipboard. Like it feels, your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer feels so broken and so hobbled by not having it once you’re accustomed to it, you really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco start to appreciate what it does for you. It’s like a data

⏹️ ▶️ John loss bug. Yeah. Because if I go on a computer that doesn’t have clipboard history,

⏹️ ▶️ John I will literally lose data, because I will just assume I can copy and copy and copy, and then I can just paste them out

⏹️ ▶️ John later, and the thing I copied three copies ago is gone now. And I’m like, oh, well, don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John worry, it’s in the clipboard history. Oh, no!

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It’s a

⏹️ ▶️ John data loss bug. You get so used to it that it is destructive. It’s not like, oh, you just want

⏹️ ▶️ John the thing that you’re kind of used to and it’s a habit that you have to change. No, it will actually cause you to make

⏹️ ▶️ John mistakes that you can’t recover from because the data is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco gone. Yeah, imagine if before you set your computer up the right way or if you were

⏹️ ▶️ Marco using someone else’s computer, imagine if cut was just a synonym for delete.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, I’m gonna cut this thing, I’m gonna go paste it over here. Wait, it’s not there. That’s how it feels

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as you’re saying.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it was a paragraph of text you just wrote in an email and you cut it and it just deleted it and sent it into nowhere. And then you

⏹️ ▶️ John went to paste it, and it wasn’t there. And you’re like, well, can I get that back? It’s like, no. It’s gone now.

⏹️ ▶️ John Sorry.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, clipboard history, I strongly recommend you use it. I don’t care what app you use, everyone,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just use it. Use this feature somehow.

⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of data being gone now, here’s a story, an old man story from Classic Mac OS, right? Classic

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS did not have clipboard history built into the OS. If there were third party tools for it, I don’t really recall any of them.

⏹️ ▶️ John But I know that I didn’t run them for most of the history of the operating system. And I’d find myself in situations

⏹️ ▶️ John like that, where I will have cut something from some application and then

⏹️ ▶️ John not really been aware of it in my mental buffer and then cut something else and realize,

⏹️ ▶️ John oh no. The thing I had cut before was like a page of text that I wrote for like

⏹️ ▶️ John a school report. And it’s like, you know, that’s thinking to me like, do I have to write that whole

⏹️ ▶️ John page of that report again? Can I write it again? You just feel like you just want to crawl in a hole and die, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John But if you are a nerd and you’re on classic Mac OS and you have found yourself in the situation

⏹️ ▶️ John before because you’re a young and foolish child, right? Because all this was true for me.

⏹️ ▶️ John Classic Mac OS did not have what it did not have everyone say it with me. Protected

⏹️ ▶️ John memory. Oh no. So that people sold shareware utilities

⏹️ ▶️ John that when you did that you would launch them and cross your fingers and

⏹️ ▶️ John tell it what string you’re looking for if it was text and it would search all RAM to try

⏹️ ▶️ John to find

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the thing

⏹️ ▶️ John that you had cut and it would find it. Let me tell you it would find it and you’d be

⏹️ ▶️ John like, yes, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco my page of my

⏹️ ▶️ John report. And maybe the encoding would be screwed up and then maybe you’d have like rich text stuff, but you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco just so

⏹️ ▶️ John happy to have it back. And then you would

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco copy it out of

⏹️ ▶️ John this app and paste it into a teach text document and save it and you’d be like, you’d feel like

⏹️ ▶️ John a king of the universe. Protected memory, it sucks. You should have complete access

⏹️ ▶️ John to the memory space. Technically, you could do that on Mac OS too with, if you had a system integrity protection turned off

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever and did something as root. But with 96 gigs of RAM, it would probably take a lot longer. And anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John I still remember the good feeling. It’s like undeleting files on DOS, which maybe to give you UPC troglodytes

⏹️ ▶️ John to use troglodytes for a second time this episode. Another thing to relate to. Do you remember undelete in DOS?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Well, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because this also works very similarly to how if you have an SD card

⏹️ ▶️ Marco recovery utility, which are still a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey thing,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it works similarly to that. Because you can just read the whole card and read the raw sectors and just pull out whatever data you can.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, in DOS, the way files would be deleted in DOS was they would overwrite

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the first character of the file name with either a null or a question mark or something like that. It would show up as a question mark

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the undelete utilities. And until those blocks of the disk were written over by something else,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the data was still there. And so you could just like, like the underly utilities

⏹️ ▶️ Marco would just scan the disk for these like abandoned files that were no longer listed in the file system listings,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they were still on disk until something overwrote them and they could recover them. And this is exactly how

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all those SD card, uh, recovery things work today, where like they will scan the SD card

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for whatever data happens to be in the, in the sections that are like marked

⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the housekeeping as available, but there is still data there from whatever was written to them last.

⏹️ ▶️ John The moral of the story is, use clipboard history.

#askatp: iOS 13 good yet?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. All right. Luke Arthur writes, from its release, iOS 13 has received negative commentary regarding

⏹️ ▶️ Casey its instability and lack of readiness for prime time. Given such bad reports, I indefinitely postponed upgrading my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey devices. Now with the added features like mouse support on iPad and the upcoming COVID tracking API,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which actually just landed today, if I’m not mistaken, I am finally seeing compelling reasons to upgrade, but I haven’t heard

⏹️ ▶️ Casey much lately about the issues that early adopters were having. So how are you three feeling about the OS today?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Has it matured and stabilized yet, or are there still downsides to consider? For me, I ran 13

⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty early, and I think relatively early on, within the first couple of months, it was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey fine for me anyway. I would still say that if you’re not hurting for Catalina,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t touch it. I genuinely think that Catalina is still not ready, which is really uncomfortable given that we’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey getting the next release next month in theory, or at least a preview of it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But yeah, iOS 13, I think you’re fine. Catalina, stay away if you can help it. Marco, what are you doing?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I’m roughly in the same boat. I’ve been running 13 for so long now that I kind of forgot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how good 12 was in comparison, if it was even

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really good. So at this point, I don’t know. I will say that the bug I’m having

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with where mail does not show, it doesn’t correctly insert new messages. So like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the symptom is on a mail mailbox in Apple’s built-in mail app, you might have new mail

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it doesn’t show up there. And what’s actually happening is it’s being inserted at the bottom of the list.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But you can’t see that from your position at the top of the list. And you can only fix it by hitting the back

⏹️ ▶️ Marco button, going to the root folder list screen, and then going back into your inbox, and then they’re there, because it gets resorted.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s basically like a temporary mail data loss in the sense that you’re getting new mail and you don’t know it,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is a horrible bug, and it’s still there in 13.5. It’s been there since

⏹️ ▶️ Marco last July or whatever. It’s still there. I cannot believe they haven’t fixed it yet.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But other than that, I don’t have any major problems with iOS 13. However, I agree with you,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Catalina is still really just, it’s just sloppy. Like the things I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thought would be annoying about it, like all those, all like the permissions dialogues,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco those have proven to be only mildly annoying with things I do. You have an annoying first few

⏹️ ▶️ Marco days as you have to approve everything for the first time it launches, and then it’s mostly fine after that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like you don’t see a lot of those boxes too often, things don’t get in your way too often. What annoys

⏹️ ▶️ Marco me about it is really common tasks now

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes just lag for no particular reason, especially around open save dialogues.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know what this is. I don’t know if it’s like some weird new iCloud thing or what, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco open save dialogues are just slow. Hiding and showing apps sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just slow. Like there’s like a little half second lag when you try to hide or show something or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco little half-second lag when you display an open save dialogue that wasn’t there before, under,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what was the last one, Mojave? Whatever it was. And that’s, like, it feels stupid

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have these amazing, powerful computers these days and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have an open save dialogue get noticeably slower between one release and the next.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why? This is a basic thing. It just seems like they’re incapable of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco shipping new versions of macOS without significant regressions that often just kind of never get

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fixed because they don’t care about Mac OS enough to really invest heavily into this kind of stuff and into QA

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to really avoid these bugs and fix them when they come up. Please Apple, stop touching it. Like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stop for the love of God. Like I’m hoping, although this is probably not going to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco happen, I’m hoping this summer given all the quarantine stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was hoping maybe they would take this opportunity to say, you know what, we’re gonna do another refinement year and push

⏹️ ▶️ Marco off some of the big changes till next year or whatever. They’re probably not gonna do that, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I kinda hope they do because they really need to fix a lot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the little paper cut quality issues in Mac OS. I don’t know any Mac power

⏹️ ▶️ Marco user who’s excited about getting each new OS anymore. Like if Apple,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever they wanna do with iOS, we don’t care. If Apple goes up there on their virtual

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stage, or whatever it is, and they say, we’re not gonna do any new features on Mac OS this year. We’re just gonna

⏹️ ▶️ Marco improve quality, et cetera. Not even bump the version number, make it Catalina.6 or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They would get so many people at home cheering at that because it just needs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Mac OS does not need rapid pace change. It needs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco quality first and performance first, and it doesn’t have that. Catalina is,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it made a lot of things worse. And the releases before Catalina weren’t that great themselves.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It needs some love. There’s no reason for the regressions it has. There’s no reason, there’s no good

⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason why like open save dialogues and hiding and showing apps should be slow.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And noticeably slower than they were one version ago. That’s like amateur

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hour and they need to fix that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So John, tell me about iOS 13.

⏹️ ▶️ John Poor Luke asked a question about iOS 13 and has to hear about Catalina for an hour. Sorry Luke. iOS 13,

⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s perfectly safe now. I’ve upgraded all my devices long ago. I don’t have any particular problems. Marco’s

⏹️ ▶️ John point about the Mail app being screwed up, I’m sure there’s other little apps that have those problems, but in general for

⏹️ ▶️ John the OS I wouldn’t hesitate to tell someone to upgrade to it. Catalina,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, obviously I have to run it on my Mac Pro. I really haven’t had any problems with it on my Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John Pro. is with one exception, for a while my Mac Pro was a little bit

⏹️ ▶️ John creaky about shutting down. You’d shut it down or restart it and it would shut down or restart, but it would take

⏹️ ▶️ John a long time. And then when I would reboot, it would bring up like the, your

⏹️ ▶️ John thing crashed and it would give you a crash report. And basically it was like some job that’s waiting for like the last thing to die

⏹️ ▶️ John on the system after everything else has exited and it just wasn’t dying and it was timing out. And I just kept sending

⏹️ ▶️ John those reports to Apple because You know, you have the send Apple button and the explanation was, this seems to happen every

⏹️ ▶️ John time I shut down or restart. But I eventually got annoyed enough by it to, you know, exert the force

⏹️ ▶️ John of Google on it and just search for a while and figure out other people having the problems. And an SMC reset seemed

⏹️ ▶️ John to fix it. So I haven’t seen it in a while. But all the performance problems you just mentioned or all those

⏹️ ▶️ John weird bugs or whatever, I don’t see any of that. But this is not the only machine you’re running Catalina on. I run Catalina on my work

⏹️ ▶️ John laptop too, which is a 2017 MacBook Pro. And there I see all the things that Marco mentioned,

⏹️ ▶️ John the stalls, the slowdowns, the inexplicable things. Today, it’s actually impacting

⏹️ ▶️ John the functionality of the computer. Today I was in, surprise, a video conference because we all are, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John And I had the thing zoomed to full screen because it’s a small laptop screen and I needed to see a document someone was sharing

⏹️ ▶️ John in some blurry little thing. So zooming the app to full screen was the way to quickly get the document, right? And

⏹️ ▶️ John I knew I was gonna be up next to talk about a thing and I went to

⏹️ ▶️ John minimize the full screen window so I could see some other document that was behind it that I needed to reference when I was talking about what

⏹️ ▶️ John I was gonna talk about. And so I went up to the top and I hit the cursor against the top of the screen and

⏹️ ▶️ John the little title bar came down and I hit the little green widget to un-fullscreen the

⏹️ ▶️ John window. And I should have known, because it’s been like this forever, but Catalina, for whatever reason, after I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John been running it for a while, takes like 30 seconds to be

⏹️ ▶️ John responsive after I hit that button. I hit the button and then you just sit back and wait and just look at a stopwatch.

⏹️ ▶️ John 30 seconds, 60 seconds. While this is happening, everything is working. People on the conference call are saying,

⏹️ ▶️ John John, are you there? Are you talking into the mute or whatever? And there’s literally nothing I can do. I can’t

⏹️ ▶️ John click on anything on the screen. The computer is totally unresponsive. There is nothing happening on the screen. I just got to wait it out.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I had to sit there like a chump, waiting for my window to go out of full screen mode for

⏹️ ▶️ John a long time. 30 seconds is not an exaggeration. They thought I had fallen off the call or I was talking

⏹️ ▶️ John into mute or had left the room or something, But no, I’m sitting there impotently staring at my screen, waiting

⏹️ ▶️ John for the computer to become responsive again. And as soon as, oh, finally, the screen changed and my Windows minimized, I immediately hit

⏹️ ▶️ John unmute and had to try to briefly explain what the hell just happened. That didn’t happen to Mojave.

⏹️ ▶️ John All that sort of slowness and pausing for inexplicable reasons and the open save stuff and

⏹️ ▶️ John the moving files in the finder, throwing up a beach ball, which I did see a couple of times on my Mac Pro but haven’t

⏹️ ▶️ John seen recently, that’s all happening in spades on my Mac Pro. So, sorry Luke, you just

⏹️ ▶️ John asked about iOS 13, it’s fine. But Catalina, I would say, hold off, not just because of all that stuff, but because

⏹️ ▶️ John if there’s any downsides to the current version of macOS, because the new one

⏹️ ▶️ John is ostensibly coming in less than a month, like, you know, don’t upgrade. My wife’s

⏹️ ▶️ John iMac has never had Catalina on it, and at this point probably never will. I’m gonna skip right over it, because I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John not going to voluntarily do that upgrade, because her computer is working fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It also, it seems to bring no benefit. Like it seems like you go to Catalina for what exactly?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whatever you’re going to it for, if there’s any good reason, I haven’t

⏹️ ▶️ John found it. I mean, the new version of Photos has some features that I like, but now that the photo library is on my iMac,

⏹️ ▶️ John problem solved, so I don’t need to upgrade my wife’s iMac. Yeah, it’s on my Mac Pro, sorry.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what’s happening either way.

#askatp: Drop Boot Camp?

⏹️ ▶️ John words today.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steve McLaughlin Finally, somebody with a mildly inappropriate name on Twitter wrote, what kind of backlash

⏹️ ▶️ Casey do you think there will be if Apple has to drop boot camp compatibility in order to transition the Mac to their own

⏹️ ▶️ Casey processors? You know, this was interesting for me because my initial reaction is nobody’s going to care.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nobody runs boot camp. But I can’t tell if that’s actually my own biases, because I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey think I’ve ever run boot camp. I have run VMs, like I used to run VMware

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fusion all day, every day, when I was doing work in Windows. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like less speedy virtual machines are potentially a bigger deal

⏹️ ▶️ Casey than not having boot camp. But that being said, I wonder if it’s my own bias. And just because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t use boot camp, I assume nobody uses boot camp. So in my opinion, I actually don’t think the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey backlash will be that bad about boot camp. I think it’ll be worse about, you know, really dramatically slowing down

⏹️ ▶️ Casey VMs. But perhaps, perhaps I’m being a little myopic. Marco,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey how do you feel about this as someone who probably does not a lot of either except for maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Minecraft from time to time?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I have used Boot Camp in the past. I don’t currently use it because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it just wasn’t that interesting to me. But you know, people do use it. It’s a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing, you know. I don’t think it’s a common thing. I think the need for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people to virtualize Windows has decreased significantly over time, And the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people who still do need to do it are probably largely doing it as virtualization, not necessarily

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a bootcamp partition. Now there are still a lot of people who do that for games, and for gamers,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other solutions like virtualization are probably never going to be that great. You know, running it unvirtualized,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco straight up on bootcamp, directly against the hardware is going to always be better for games. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that market, they would have a problem with it. I mean, I don’t think there’s any way in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hell that Boot Camp makes it through a transition. If Apple goes to ARM on the Mac, Boot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Camp is not going with it. There is no way. So that will be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a casualty of this transition, however and whenever it happens. And I think Apple, they’re just going to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco absorb that. They’re just going to say, you know what, we’re no longer catering to that market that wants to run

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Windows and PC games on their Macs. I don’t think it’s that big of a market to begin

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with, and I think most of those people, with the exception of John Syracusa, are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just getting gaming PCs.

⏹️ ▶️ John Okay, he’s like, I don’t know anybody who does that. Nobody runs Boot Camp.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I’m right here.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I

⏹️ ▶️ John spent all that time getting Windows onto the external

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey drive.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, obviously I would be sad, but the sadness mostly doesn’t come from like Boot Camp is gone. That’s a

⏹️ ▶️ John secondary effect of them getting off x86. All that said, Windows runs on ARM.

⏹️ ▶️ John I know that doesn’t help anybody because who runs Windows on ARM? That’s a wacky thing to do, but

⏹️ ▶️ John that may be true today, not necessarily true in the future, depending on how Intel’s fortunes go.

⏹️ ▶️ John And depending on how AMD’s fortunes go, like things could, things can change in, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John a decade or two, right? The idea of booting into Windows

⏹️ ▶️ John natively on an ARM, you know, Apple ARM derived custom chip

⏹️ ▶️ John is not ridiculous. So while it is likely that bootcamp as we know it today

⏹️ ▶️ John won’t immediately make it through the ARM transition, not impossible by the way because they can make bootcamp and make it boot windows

⏹️ ▶️ John and arm like they could totally do that, it’s probably not that difficult

⏹️ ▶️ John in the grand scheme of things just not very useful, but say they didn’t do that there’s no reason bootcamp

⏹️ ▶️ John can’t come back in the future when suddenly the entire personal computer industry has transitioned to into ARM-based CPUs,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? Like, if that happens, it is an option. It’s an architecture. It’s not a question

⏹️ ▶️ John of, you know, bootcamp itself. I would be very upset if Apple, I’d be more upset if Apple stopped supporting

⏹️ ▶️ John bootcamp while still shipping x86 Macs. That would cause quite a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ John uproar because I think, like, the fact that it exists at all is really important to,

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, granted a small subset of people, but it’s like, there’s no reason for you to drop this. You’re still shipping x86 Macs.

⏹️ ▶️ John If you ship ARM ones, everyone kind of knows, all right, well, you know, what can you do? But I wouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John be surprised to see it make a comeback because the ability to buy Apple hardware, and even if briefly

⏹️ ▶️ John or in special circumstances boot a different operating system is a useful thing. And I think Apple recognizes that, which

⏹️ ▶️ John is why boot camp continues to exist and be supported as far as it is,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? Like they barely support it, but they do support it. It does drive my

⏹️ ▶️ John Pro Display XDR. It does understand how to boot my weird, you know, Mac Pro that

⏹️ ▶️ John wasn’t a glimmer in anybody’s eye when Boot Camp was created. So I’m mostly that they continue to minimally

⏹️ ▶️ John support it. And if and when it goes away with some switch to ARM, I

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think there’ll be outrage. If there’s outrage, it’ll be about switch to ARM, not about Boot Camp.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, thanks for our sponsors this week, Squarespace and Linode and we will talk to you next time.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ Marco next week.

⏹️ ▶️ John If you’re into Twitter, you can follow them at

⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and T. Marco Armin S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to

⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, check podcast so long

Post-show: Quarantine status

⏹️ ▶️ John How’s everybody holding

⏹️ ▶️ Casey up? Mostly fine. Tomorrow is Declan’s preschool graduation

⏹️ ▶️ Casey parade where all the children and parents are in cars

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John driving

⏹️ ▶️ Casey through the preschool parking lot waving at the teachers. And not to completely end

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the show on a depressing note, but it really bums me out, something awful that this is the end

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of his preschool experience. Because I mean, ultimately, preschool doesn’t friggin’ matter. But to him, it’s the only thing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that matters. And it really It really bums me out that it was like one day he left preschool thinking

⏹️ ▶️ Casey he would be back in a week or two and in retrospect it was obvious he wasn’t coming back, but at the time we didn’t know it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so he just walked out of preschool and never walked back in and that’s it for him. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey literally tonight, Aaron registered him for kindergarten online, which classically in the area we live, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey done in person and there’s like this big hoopla about it. And I think you like, I believe having

⏹️ ▶️ Casey never done this, you like get to go through the school and probably meet the kindergarten teachers and it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this whole big grand thing. And that didn’t get to happen. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey extremely skeptical that he’ll even go to kindergarten in the fall, which also really,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really bums me out. I don’t know. Like on the surface, we’re fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We still have a roof over our heads. Everyone’s still healthy. We mostly still like like each other,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but, oh man, it’s just some of the, I feel like I’m seeing what’s coming and I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey seeing it be more of the same and it’s really bumming me out a lot.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I don’t, I mean, I’m mostly doing okay, but I’m with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you in the sense that like, I don’t really know how long this is going to last. I think everyone is going to try

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get back to normal a little too quickly and it’s gonna bite us in the ass

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we’re gonna have to, you know, go back into our holes for a while until

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we have probably widespread vaccination, which is not imminent. So I don’t know how

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is gonna go, but I personally am doing mostly okay.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do miss people. You know, like I’m a people person. I actually like being around other people.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m mostly an extrovert. I love going out to restaurants and stuff and just like seeing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people, talking to people. That’s one of the reasons why I’m the shopper, the grocery shopper

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the family. Partly because I just like going out and doing stuff. I just like it. I like driving around

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a handful of stores and getting stuff and saying hi to the beer guy in the good store and everything. I like that stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And to not have that hurts. But relative to other people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco who have a much harder situation, it’s hard to complain about my situation.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly. That isn’t to say that I like everything about my situation. It’s just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the grand scheme of things, I’m fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Trevor Burrus John, how about you?

⏹️ ▶️ John John Wall I’m very well equipped to live this kind of life. I’m an introvert

⏹️ ▶️ John for sure, all right? But it’s more difficult than I would have predicted, not because

⏹️ ▶️ John of me personally, but it’s the stuff that you just mentioned, Casey. So I’m an introvert. I have no problem being in the house all day or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? But the idea that everyone else in my family will also be forced to do the thing

⏹️ ▶️ John that they may not be inclined to do, that’s bad. Like it’s bad because I feel bad for them missing

⏹️ ▶️ John out on experiences. I worry about what their next school year is going to be like. I worry about are they getting what they

⏹️ ▶️ John should be getting out of whatever developmental stages they’re in. Like all that stuff and that affects me. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John even – it’s like it’s fine for me to be okay with it but I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ John in this alone and so I spend a lot of time worrying about all that type of stuff. Then of

⏹️ ▶️ John course if they’re – for the people who aren’t accustomed to that or having

⏹️ ▶️ John problems with it, we’re all in the same house, then people get grumpy and it’s just like, go a little stir crazy and

⏹️ ▶️ John then people want to, yeah, you know, rebel against the strictures, which is also not a good thing,

⏹️ ▶️ John so you gotta talk people off those ledges and it’s just, you know, it is a more fraught situation. And then

⏹️ ▶️ John during all this time, and I mentioned this on whenever I talked about it last, like, during all this time,

⏹️ ▶️ John I am fortunate enough to continue to be employed, which is excellent, I endorse the idea of continuing

⏹️ ▶️ John to have an income. But it means that I haven’t had a day off, I’ve just been working, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John And so all the other things that I mentioned, boo hoo me, you still get a job, but

⏹️ ▶️ John it means I do have to continue working. And so I actually, I put in today for vacation,

⏹️ ▶️ John which was like, cause normally, you know, summer I have a bunch of vacation schedules. I’d, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John I save all my vacation days during the year to spend them in the summer mostly, cause that’s when I like to be out and about.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But

⏹️ ▶️ John all my vacation got canceled. And so I didn’t, you know, I didn’t have any things. And it occurred to me

⏹️ ▶️ John like last week, like I should take a vacation which I don’t understand what that would even be it mostly

⏹️ ▶️ John just means not quote-unquote going to work which means not you know logging on

⏹️ ▶️ John to work and working remotely but I feel like I need a vacation

⏹️ ▶️ John I know you know it’s nice to be able to be in that situation but anyway I put her a vacation I am

⏹️ ▶️ John taking a vacation on WDDC week as I always do even though I’m not actually going to WDC but you know what

⏹️ ▶️ John not having to work and just being able to veg out in front of a live stream over

⏹️ ▶️ John what the heck Apple’s going to do and then talk about it on a podcast, that’s going to be my vacation. So

⏹️ ▶️ John one of the things I’ve seen a lot of people mention is like, what are we even looking forward to? Now

⏹️ ▶️ John I personally have something to look forward to along with all my fretting about next school year and kids going

⏹️ ▶️ John stir crazy in the summer and all their camps being canceled and everything. I’m looking forward to my vacation

⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m looking forward to WWDC and it’ll be weird and we’ll still have all the kind of same stresses that we have but

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m hoping that we’ll get fun announcements and I’ll get to watch them on my

⏹️ ▶️ John big fancy Mac Pro.