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

380: Wires Are Great

A live-stream saga, web-development complexity, spending Casey’s money, and the macOS version of DLL hell.

Episode Description:

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

Sponsored by:

  • Basecamp: The all-in-one toolkit for working remotely. Get 10% off your first six months.

MP3 Header

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

Chapters

  1. icecast saga: part 1
  2. New old-style websites
  3. eBay port-scans us
  4. Web-dev learning curve
  5. ATP Store until June 7 🖼️
  6. Clipboard-manager security
  7. Sonnet Fusion Flex J3i
  8. icecast saga: part 2
  9. Casey’s DNS Diversion
  10. icecast saga: finale
  11. Sponsor: Basecamp
  12. Apple TV Channels 🖼️
  13. Follow-up: Joe Rogan
  14. Spending Casey’s Money
  15. Microsoft Fluid
  16. #askatp: Our Wi-Fi setups
  17. #askatp: Moving Xcode profiles
  18. #askatp: Overcast for Mac
  19. Ending theme
  20. Procedure masks, KN95

icecast saga: part 1

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I have fixed the live stream issue from last week, or at least I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have changed the live stream issue from last week. So last week

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the middle of the show, the live stream cut out, and the reason why, it had consumed something like seven or eight gigs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of RAM, and the server has eight, and so it got killed for the out of memory killer. And I restarted

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, and almost everyone was able to rejoin, and it didn’t use nearly as much RAM as it did before.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it didn’t seem related to the number of listeners directly necessarily.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, when I built the new website, I added this listener count thing. That

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was, like, the page periodically just does an AJAX request back to the server. The server checks with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iSCAD server, which runs this private admin interface, and gives us XML file back, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my server parses it, and feeds it back to the user, and updates the page. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my theory is that, like, check the status request, because it was being

⏹️ ▶️ Marco checked every like 15 seconds by every listener on the stream,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if there’s any leak in that, that was a pretty aggressive amount of checking

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so that might have resulted in it. Now over the course of that like the second part of the show after it was killed and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco restarted, it still got all the way up to about 1.7 gigs of RAM where it stayed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco until a half hour ago. So it stayed there all week with no listeners until a half hour ago when I restarted

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it so we’ll see how it goes so far right now we are at a little under

⏹️ ▶️ Marco let’s see we’re at a little under 800 megs that sounds high to me so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe this isn’t solved but we’ll see if it continues to grow anyway the fix that I did was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I implemented caching on that status value so that now my server is caching the results

⏹️ ▶️ Marco gets from the ice cast server for about 30 seconds so instead of every listener hitting it every 15

⏹️ ▶️ Marco seconds it’ll get one or two request every 30 seconds. We will

⏹️ ▶️ Marco see if that actually fixes it. It looks so far like maybe it isn’t, but we’ll find out.

⏹️ ▶️ John I thought you were just going to have your server return like some number in the ballpark with a random offset.

⏹️ ▶️ John That would have solved the memory leak. Did you test the memory leak by just slamming the IceCast

⏹️ ▶️ John server request endpoint a million times to see if you can make it grow?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was going to do that, and then I got busy and forgot. But that was the plan. The plan was to actually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco simulate that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Well, test it live.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah. We’re going to

⏹️ ▶️ John find out tonight what the… The other thing is, the IceCat server returns XML. You had an opportunity

⏹️ ▶️ John to actually use XML HTTP requests to return HTML, and you didn’t take it. You’re having your

⏹️ ▶️ John server parse it, and I’m assuming return like a number.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it returns a very, very tiny JSON dictionary.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, you put the number in JSON. You’re such a modern web dev. Of course. In my day, we’d just return a number

⏹️ ▶️ John as text plain, and we liked it!

New old-style websites

⏹️ ▶️ Marco My favorite thing, I don’t know if we have this on the schedule for this week. I looked

⏹️ ▶️ Marco earlier and we didn’t have it on the question list, but a listener wrote in basically asking like, how

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do I learn to build websites like this?

⏹️ ▶️ John Get a time machine and go back to 1992. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was simultaneously both incredibly encouraging and incredibly sad. The way you build

⏹️ ▶️ Marco websites like this is you don’t use most of the modern crap that people think you need to use.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s it. This is a very small,

⏹️ ▶️ John simple site. Well, you’re using some modern stuff and the modern stuff you’re using is called a modern web browser

⏹️ ▶️ John because if you threw this website at Netscape Navigator 3.1, it would die horribly and it would

⏹️ ▶️ John look like nothing. So you are actually taking advantage of the modern web. You’re just taking advantage of it on the client side,

⏹️ ▶️ John not so much on the thing you write on the server or the source code that it returns. Although

⏹️ ▶️ John inline SVG is pretty fancy. And if you’d try to tell somebody back in the

⏹️ ▶️ John 90s that you’re going to be doing inline SVGs, they’d be like, whoa, is that XML?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. I mean, yeah, because I do benefit a lot by the incredible capabilities of modern browsers, modern

⏹️ ▶️ Marco CSS, modern JavaScript. There’s so much stuff that you used to years ago need

⏹️ ▶️ Marco jQuery and large libraries and large frameworks for, or these tremendous

⏹️ ▶️ Marco piles of horrible CSS hacks to achieve certain effects. I’m going

⏹️ ▶️ John to say web-safe colors. Don’t forget about web-safe colors.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Paul Matzkoff Oh yeah, right, back when it was 256, yeah. And these days, you just don’t have so many of those limitations.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco A lot of us still act like we do and still bloat up everything like crazy, but it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has all become optional now. And even though most people choose to still bloat everything up,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you do have the option not to. And it turns out you could make a site that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco looks presentable and that looks fairly modern-ish garbage

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in it. Like all those stupid effects people do, everything fading in and animating in and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco scroll jacking and having this big rich effect. You don’t need that. Nobody

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really wants that. Like all that is doing is wasting everyone’s time and bandwidth and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco processor power. And if you just don’t do that, everything is better for everyone.

⏹️ ▶️ John As some people pointed out, because the site is so simple in both, you know, organizationally,

⏹️ ▶️ John also in the markup, you can view source on it. Like, it’s the old days, and you can learn by looking at the source. Like, if you view source

⏹️ ▶️ John and you say,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey imagine

⏹️ ▶️ John that, and you’re like, well, then you would see the inline SVGs, then maybe you’d learn where SVGs are. Maybe you see, like,

⏹️ ▶️ John if you learned HTML way back in the day and you view source and you see elements like header and article,

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re like, wait a second, is that, how, what the hell is the article element that you learned about HTML5? And like,

⏹️ ▶️ John you will actually learn some modern web stuff by looking at it, but you’ll also learn, like, that it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John not rocket science to make a reasonable site. I think the site also avoids a lot of complexity

⏹️ ▶️ John by, do you have any media queries in the CSS at all? I forget.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s generally not responsive in the sense of sensing

⏹️ ▶️ John the size of the device that it’s on and rearranging itself. It uses a simple enough layout that

⏹️ ▶️ John it more or less works in every context. And like I said on the store

⏹️ ▶️ John page, which probably won’t be up by the time you listen to this in the far future, I use Flexbox there as

⏹️ ▶️ John a sort of half-assed way to get responsiveness out of it, where things

⏹️ ▶️ John will rearrange on a smaller screen. But beyond that, it’s about as simple as a website can be. And I think

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s instructive, because in the old days you could go to any website and view source and learn a lot about it. And these days, if you go to a website

⏹️ ▶️ John and view source, you’ll run away screaming and you won’t learn anything. So speaking of that, what

⏹️ ▶️ John the hell did I read this on? something.

eBay port-scans us

⏹️ ▶️ John I think it was Twitter. Someone was looking into eBay port scanning people’s computer when they go to it

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco in the web browser.

⏹️ ▶️ John Did you see that story? Wait, what? So, I didn’t dig too

⏹️ ▶️ John far into it to figure out what the deal is entirely, but when

⏹️ ▶️ John you pull up a web page, it can make requests to other URLs through the magic of

⏹️ ▶️ John Ajax we were just talking about. You can also make a request to the loopback address, 127.0.0.1, which is your computer.

⏹️ ▶️ John And you think, why would a web page try to make a request to my

⏹️ ▶️ John computer? What is it trying to do? That’s essentially what a port scan is, because you can put port numbers in the

⏹️ ▶️ John URL, and you can, if you want, make requests to local hosts at various port numbers to

⏹️ ▶️ John look to see if there’s anything listening on them. And that’s what eBay does, and it reports the results

⏹️ ▶️ John back to some other random server. There was a big investigation into this thing, yada yada. But that’s not,

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m setting that aside. I think they’re doing it for browser fingerprinting or to check for malware. So there’s some third party

⏹️ ▶️ John thing that this is part of. The thing that blew my mind was that not only is there JavaScript obfuscated,

⏹️ ▶️ John but the same JavaScript is re-obfuscated on every page request.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like, you know, it doesn’t just have, they don’t just have a minimized version of it. It’s like re-obfuscated to make like debugging

⏹️ ▶️ John across multiple requests more difficult. And it’s got this very janky sort of

⏹️ ▶️ John encryption, but not really encryption, like obfuscation of the data into these strings that are hashed

⏹️ ▶️ John and XORed. And it’s just like, it’s like, you know, it’s like we used to hear Skype used to be like the Skype application,

⏹️ ▶️ John like the executable itself was quote unquote encrypted or scrambled and all sorts of like, all

⏹️ ▶️ John the things you can imagine someone doing in the 80s to try to hide weird stuff from somebody, most

⏹️ ▶️ John of which is not particularly cryptographically secure, but all of which is just that makes it extremely annoying

⏹️ ▶️ John getting back to the point I was trying to make to learn anything from it because the source is indecipherable

⏹️ ▶️ John and it changes on every page request. And there are reasons to minify code and stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John like that. But this is just like, it’s not actually secure. You can decompile

⏹️ ▶️ John it, step through a debugger, do all that stuff. It mostly just makes it impossible to learn from. And I think that’s kind

⏹️ ▶️ John of a shame. That’s become the norm. Good source code that happens to be minified will have a source map in it, and you

⏹️ ▶️ John can un-minify it, and people can actually learn from it and stuff like that, or use a debugger on it. But

⏹️ ▶️ John doing what eBay’s doing really has no excuse.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you want to start with some follow-up?

Web-dev learning curve

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, everything you guys are saying is completely true. And I just, the more I think about,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey particularly with web development, the more I wonder, like, how does somebody get started?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And, you know, when I wrote my blog engine in 2014, like, that was when Node

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was, at least to me, it was relatively new. It probably wasn’t actually that new. And it was still

⏹️ ▶️ Casey relatively easy to figure out, okay, how does one write a server in Node?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And, you know, what package or or packages do you need to do that? And I feel like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey since my version of Node is so old and ancient, if I were to even just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey update my existing blog engine to the most modern version of Node, I bet you I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey would have to rewrite it entirely from scratch because so much has changed. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think at some point I will probably rewrite it and I might even use John Sundell’s,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is it? Splash or something. I forget the name of his engine. put in the show notes, but he has a Swift-based

⏹️ ▶️ Casey engine that’s a static site generator, or I believe it’s a static site generator, and it looks

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really neat. And I haven’t tried it, but it looks really super cool. But anyways, just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey imagining what it would be like for someone who has

⏹️ ▶️ Casey never really done this sort of thing to come up to speed. When I, I mean, I was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a web dev for a large portion of my career, and even for me thinking

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about coming up to speed on all this seems like terrifying. And I ostensibly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey mostly know the broader pieces as to how the web is held together. I just I cannot fathom

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for like a high schooler who is just really trying to figure out how to make heads or tails of all this stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey How does a high schooler do it? Not because high schoolers are dumb, not far from it. It’s just that they don’t have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the 20 years experience that the three or sometimes more that the three of us have in doing this sort of thing. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey just it seems insurmountable to me.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, like I think I mentioned this on a past show. Maybe it was, I don’t remember, it was some AskATP question,

⏹️ ▶️ John but like we are to varying degrees blessed to have

⏹️ ▶️ John gotten in on the ground floor of an emerging technology, but that’s not always the case. Most

⏹️ ▶️ John people in no matter what their career is, enter into a field where the technology

⏹️ ▶️ John is mature and is complicated, right? So if you, like I said, when I first started learning the web,

⏹️ ▶️ John I knew everything about the web because there was so little to know. There was nothing. There was no CSS. There was just HTML.

⏹️ ▶️ John And you could literally learn it all. And you felt like you had seen every website even if you hadn’t.

⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s because it was super young and it matures. People going into civil engineering,

⏹️ ▶️ John they must feel overwhelmed because they’re centuries of knowledge in civil engineering. They’re not getting in on the ground floor.

⏹️ ▶️ John Just to do anything, to literally build a single road going from point A to point B, there’s so much you need to know.

⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s even before you get into all the tools and everything like that. And computers and the web are like that

⏹️ ▶️ John now. You’re not coming into a brand new field where a single

⏹️ ▶️ John person could fit the entire thing into their head. You’re coming into a field that’s well-established, that’s got a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ John history and a lot of technology involved and you can eventually get up to speed. It’s just that viewing

⏹️ ▶️ John the source of a website to learn from it, it’s one of the beauties of the web that the web pages are

⏹️ ▶️ John sent to us and are interpreted by our browsers. And that, for

⏹️ ▶️ John most of the history of the web, has been comprehensible and you can learn from it. And the degree to which that becomes less comprehensible

⏹️ ▶️ John makes it harder to learn, unnecessarily harder to learn, because it’s in the nature of the web that you are sent the source and it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John rendered in a browser. There’s no reason that the advanced technology has to eliminate that. Again, I point

⏹️ ▶️ John out source maps, right? Minification is there for a reason. You can argue whether

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a point to it with gzip over the line. But anyway, source maps let you

⏹️ ▶️ John get the real source back to do debugging and that helps people learn from it and it helps developers develop it, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the way it should be. Yes, there are advances and things get more complicated, but you can still learn from the source.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I think that’s the beauty of the web and we should never lose that by, you know, shipping binaries over the

⏹️ ▶️ John web or shipping Java applets back and forth or like subverting the web, Flash or anything like that. So

⏹️ ▶️ John I think we’re doing okay in general. Like the war for web standards and everything was much

⏹️ ▶️ John more fraught in the early days in the web. It feels like now that the standards-based

⏹️ ▶️ John web is strong enough that it can resist most

⏹️ ▶️ John advances. Yes, it gets more complicated, but it’s not so much in danger, at least right now,

⏹️ ▶️ John of some proprietary thing coming and sweeping away the open web. Bad websites do exist,

⏹️ ▶️ John and bad companies that make bad websites do exist. So we just kind of route around them.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, like Twitter

ATP Store until June 7

Chapter ATP Store until June 7 image.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s start with some follow up. And we should mention again that the ATP store

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is back. We have some new stuff. Uh, it is open until June 7th.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now I make the speech every year and every year somebody says,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I forgot. I forgot. So listeners, if you’re interested in, I don’t know, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Casey an ATP mug, which is brand new, first time we’ve offered them, maybe one of the sweet, sweet ProMax

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Triumph shirts in black or white with or without wheels, or perhaps a logo shirt

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or a hoodie, or my beloved polo is back, or a hat or a pin. If any of these things are

⏹️ ▶️ Casey interesting, don’t delay. If you’re driving right now, that’s weird that you’re leaving the house, but hey, that’s cool.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you’re driving right now, maybe pull over or think about where you’re going and think, Ooh, when I arrive at home,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m going to go straight to my computer and I’m going to buy some ATP merch. So the ATP store

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is back. atp.fm store and there are links to all the different things you can order from Cotton

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Bureau. We have had some questions with regards to the ATP mug. It is 14 ounces, which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is about 400 milliliters. And if that’s not a unit of measure that you care about, then I don’t know what to do. Just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Google it. But the ATP mug seems like it will be extremely nice. I haven’t actually

⏹️ ▶️ Casey held one in hand. The Pro Max Triumph shirts are excellent. Remember, the wheels are a little bit more special, so it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey an extra four bucks. The hoodie is extremely comfortable. The logo shirt, the The classic logo shirt is great. I love the polo for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey back when we went to work and the hat is great. If you ever leave your house for any

⏹️ ▶️ Casey reason, even on a walk. So please, if you’re willing, go to atp.fm slash store

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and get yourself some cool swag, some cool merch. Uh, remember we are going to be launching a membership thing eventually,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but we don’t know when, so just keep that in mind if you are trying to apply your funds

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a specific place. Soon, but not this week. Yes. soon but not this week is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly the correct summary.

⏹️ ▶️ John This is a great year because if you forget, you’re like, oh, I forgot. I wanted to order a shirt but I totally forgot.

⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t worry. You’ll have another opportunity to give us money and not get a shirt.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s just as good, right? It’s just as good. Yeah. So anyway, atp.fm

⏹️ ▶️ Casey slash store. Thank you for listening to me shill for merchandise.

Clipboard-manager security

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on, we have some follow up. Nick Donnelly wrote, how are you guys not terrified

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to use clipboard managers? How can you be sure that they’re not feeding all the passwords back to some server somewhere,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or changing that Bitcoin address to their own, or doing something else with or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey without the developer’s knowledge? Along with password managers, which are usually made by bigger companies, clipboard managers must be about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the richest target possible for hackers. You really have to trust that app. The only

⏹️ ▶️ Casey remotely secure way for this to work as if it’s built into the OS in Nick’s opinion. In fact, why haven’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple and Microsoft Sherlocked this yet? You know, this is the same sort

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of thing, like same sort of conversation we had last episode or whenever it was, I think it was last episode, we were talking about my raspberry pies.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And for me, there’s only so many things I can stress out and worry

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about in a day. And I don’t know about everyone else, but that cup runneth over these days

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about things I’m willing to stress out about. I’ve got way too much to stress out about. And if somebody

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is going into my clipboard manager and stealing stuff, like that sucks. It sucks a lot, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just, I don’t have the bandwidth or the energy to stress out about that. I don’t know. Marco, tell me I’m crazy and that I need to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey put on my tinfoil hat.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is certainly a big target in the way that, again, yeah, a password manager is also a big target for hacking. I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the things that helps a lot here, first of all, you have just longstanding trust.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You have these clipboard managers are generally made by pretty long-standing developers.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s not that many of them. There’s three or four that everyone knows about, and then a whole bunch of smaller ones that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe might be made by smaller developers, but for the most part, there’s a small handful of them, and they’re used by a lot of people.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, one area that really helps here, the Mac is a platform that has, in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco some ways, less security than iOS, until you get into the really nerdy stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And here, there are people who run things like Little Snitch. Little Snitch is a local firewall-type

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing that anytime an app tries to connect out to the network, you can get an alert,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it will tell you which app is connecting to what, and you can block it or allow it or whatever. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because of the prevalence of tools like that among the super paranoid or super nerdy,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco any popular-ish app that’s gonna be calling home for any kind of regular purpose,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people are gonna notice. One of these apps, like Little Snitch, is going to uncover that, and people will know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’ll talk about it, and they’ll write blog posts and whatever, and it would be a big scandal. And none of these reputable Mac

⏹️ ▶️ Marco developers who have been doing these things for 10 years or more would ever risk their reputation doing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything creepy like that. So as long as you can trust the vendor,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco trust the maker of the software you’re using to be remotely reputable, and if they’ve been around

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a while, and if a lot of people seem to use it, who seem to know what they’re talking about, it’s probably a pretty

⏹️ ▶️ Marco safe bet. Talking about password managers, before we get this feedback from a million people, if they haven’t already emailed us while I was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco talking, Many of the good clipboard managers will also detect whether you’re copying

⏹️ ▶️ Marco something from a password manager and will either not store it at all or will automatically

⏹️ ▶️ Marco reset it after a certain amount of time or they’ll store it as the topmost item but they won’t let it stack down to the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco subsequent item and stuff like that. So there are special considerations that many of the clipboard manager apps

⏹️ ▶️ Marco make for password in particular to make it a little bit more secure and make it so you aren’t accidentally go into

⏹️ ▶️ Marco reveal a password as you display your stack of clipboard history. If somebody’s looking

⏹️ ▶️ Marco over your shoulder or something. Anyway, so that is certainly an area to be concerned about, but fortunately

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Mac, you have such a wonderful, nerdy power user base and tools like Little Snitch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that if such a thing were really happening, we’d probably know about it.

⏹️ ▶️ John In the end, Nick is right that you do have to trust the developer. I mean, it’s kind of the same way of like, the only way to be secure if

⏹️ ▶️ John it was built into the OS, you have to trust the OS vendor. And it’s the same kind of trust. Not that you think so much they’re going to do something

⏹️ ▶️ John malicious, but you have to trust that their security is up to snuff, right? Maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John they got hacked or something like that has happened in the past, where an app like a BitTorrent client gets

⏹️ ▶️ John some malware inserted into it or whatever. And it’s not that the developers put it there. So you trusted the

⏹️ ▶️ John developers, yes, that they weren’t going to do something malicious. But it turns out they fell victim to

⏹️ ▶️ John hacking. And so did you trust that they could defend themselves from hacking? Again, with things like Apple and Microsoft, you trust

⏹️ ▶️ John that A, they’re not going to do something malicious, and B, that they’re probably pretty good at defending themselves, but you never

⏹️ ▶️ John know. In the end, you have to trust a lot of the software that runs on your computer, right? So those things that Marco was

⏹️ ▶️ John talking about, like excluding password manager apps and being smart by not having passwords, that’s what distinguishes

⏹️ ▶️ John a good clipboard manager from just sort of a middle of the road one.

⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s about feature set, it’s not about trust, right? And the things with little snitch, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John we might catch stuff like that, but if it’s substituting a hard-coded Bitcoin address to detect something that looks

⏹️ ▶️ John like a Bitcoin address, you might not be able to catch that. This stuff will probably come out eventually.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s difficult. Casey was saying, you can’t be on top of all this stuff. Like, you’re listening to a nerdy tech podcast, and

⏹️ ▶️ John if something like this came up, you’d probably hear about it on our show. But most people don’t listen to tech podcasts,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? So in the end, you’re at the whim. Yeah. In the end, you’re at the whim of a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ John people who do a lot of things that you can’t control. And the best way to deal with it without

⏹️ ▶️ John driving yourself not just chasing your own tail about all these different threats in the world, let’s

⏹️ ▶️ John try to be sensible. Like use one of the well-known products when it comes to security,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? Keep some amount of your ear to the ground about this stuff. You don’t have to be checking the news every

⏹️ ▶️ John day, but you know, you should be assured that when something happens, you have some

⏹️ ▶️ John way to find out about it or it doesn’t have to be you. It can just be someone in your family or whatever. If you set up your whole

⏹️ ▶️ John family on one password and then one password get hacked, you know, it’s your job as the ATP listener to tell the rest of your family

⏹️ ▶️ John that thing I installed in your computer is a you know, that’s We we get along the way we get along All

⏹️ ▶️ John right So I don’t think clipboard managers are inherently any more scary than any other software that has access to your keystrokes

⏹️ ▶️ John and everything like that and the final bit here is that everything we’re talking about is

⏹️ ▶️ John part of what Apple is trying to Help with it’s the security

⏹️ ▶️ John measures that it’s been adding to Mac OS and a lot of those security measures are difficult and annoying

⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re not a cure-all. Like the thing with the BitTorrent client that got infected with malware, that was a signed

⏹️ ▶️ John application. I forget if it was notarized or not, but they don’t cure everything,

⏹️ ▶️ John but they sure help. It used to be that when you downloaded something, the developer would have a checksum

⏹️ ▶️ John on their website that you could compare it to, but code signing is a much better system for that. Especially notarizing

⏹️ ▶️ John is an even better system for that. In the end, it can’t stop everything, but it helps the chain of trust

⏹️ ▶️ John between you and this developer that you ostensibly trust that what you’re getting from them is what they are giving

⏹️ ▶️ John you. And the Mac App Store helps there as well. And then iOS’s entire end-to-end

⏹️ ▶️ John system of making sure that you’re getting the code that the developer released and so on. All that helps. It doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John prevent it from happening, but it helps. So I hope, Nick, the next time you are annoyed

⏹️ ▶️ John by some security thing or some limitation of the app store, you appreciate that part of that at least

⏹️ ▶️ John is there to help the situation like this where you have to trust an application to do

⏹️ ▶️ John the right thing for you.

Sonnet Fusion Flex J3i

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, I don’t know if I could be more excited about the SONNET Fusion

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Flex J3i mount.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I saw this and thought of you immediately, John, because it looks like somebody has

⏹️ ▶️ Marco now made a better hard drive mount for the Mac Pro’s internal SATA port than the one

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you bought at half the price.

⏹️ ▶️ John I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ John if it’s better. So here’s the reason I put this in here is, you know, if we didn’t, everyone would keep sending us to us forever. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ John part of the reason. True. But it’s fascinating to me what this is. So to refresh everyone’s memory, this is a bent piece

⏹️ ▶️ John of metal that goes inside your expensive Mac Pro that you can stick 3.5 inch hard drives into.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s basically it. It’s not, you know, it is a physical device and then it comes with some cables that connect to SATA

⏹️ ▶️ John connectors, right? And I didn’t want to buy it and eventually I bit the bullet and I bought the one from Promise Technologies

⏹️ ▶️ John for $400, but the $400 thing came with an 8 terabyte hard drive,

⏹️ ▶️ John which is not a $200 value. But either way, it was very expensive, but eventually I just, like, I just got

⏹️ ▶️ John to do this right I gave up waiting for someone to make a cheaper one now this one comes out it’s from Sonnet

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s called the J3i the promise one was the J2i which is weird

⏹️ ▶️ John because as far as I’m aware Sonnet is not the same company as promise but if you look at the product

⏹️ ▶️ John it looks exactly the same as the promise J2i except a couple of minor

⏹️ ▶️ John differences this one has room mounting points for a 2.5 inch drive that you can attach to the USB port

⏹️ ▶️ John inside your Mac right but Otherwise, if you look at the metal that makes up this thing, it looks the

⏹️ ▶️ John same. And it’s like, is there just one, like the company that makes the Promise J2i

⏹️ ▶️ John thing, is it just selling its manufacturing capacity to Sonnet and then Sonnet is taking less of a

⏹️ ▶️ John profit margin and not including the hard drive? Like it’s literally the same thing, like

⏹️ ▶️ John down to the millimeter if you look at it, except for maybe the bottom part where the 2.5 or so. I don’t understand

⏹️ ▶️ John how the supply chain in manufacturing works. Like we all know that like when you buy things,

⏹️ ▶️ John especially electronics, a lot of times multiple companies sell you essentially the same electronics wrapped maybe in a different

⏹️ ▶️ John plastic case. Or maybe it’s literally the same plastic case painted a different color or stamped with a different stamp. That’s just how the world

⏹️ ▶️ John works. But it’s weird to see it in the Mac for such a strange little thing like this. Like you would think that any

⏹️ ▶️ John company like Sonnet or whatever could make their own bent piece of metal and

⏹️ ▶️ John sell it, sell it, sell it for 200 bucks, but make it cheaper or make it plastic, right? We have people

⏹️ ▶️ John 3D printing these things, right? It seems like the technology to make a bracket, essentially for your

⏹️ ▶️ John computer, you could make it, but instead they’re selling the exact same thing, which

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s high quality. Like it’s over-engineered for what it’s supposed to do. It seems like if

⏹️ ▶️ John you, you know, what I was waiting for is someone to sell the $50 one, the $70 one, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m glad I got the fancy one because it looks nice with my computer. And this one has red cables, which I don’t think would go with the interior

⏹️ ▶️ John decor of my computer. But yes, I totally would have bought this one if it had existed

⏹️ ▶️ John at the same time as the $400 one Even though $200 for a bent piece of metal

⏹️ ▶️ John is not that much more attractive than $400 for an 8 terabyte hard drive in a bent Piece of metal

⏹️ ▶️ John still it’s half the price

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and

⏹️ ▶️ John I would have had to probably buy another hard drive to go in there But I can probably get a 8 terabyte

⏹️ ▶️ John hard drive for less than $200. I don’t know. I haven’t even shopped around Anyway, this exists and it’s weird

⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s not exciting for me and it’s not sad for me because I’ve been there, done that, it’s in my computer,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s installed. I’m fine, I’ve moved on.

icecast saga: part 2

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Give me one moment to restart the ice cast over one second.

⏹️ ▶️ John Did it run out of memory again?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes. All right. I just changed a setting that I think will fix it. Well

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has a chance of fixing it. There’s like a per client buffer setting that I had set pretty high.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I brought it now back down to the default value. What was pretty high? So before it was five

⏹️ ▶️ Marco megs per user and I brought it down to the default value of 128 K per user. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay, it’s live. We’re live again.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sorry, everybody.

⏹️ ▶️ John We did it. You all got much smaller buffers, everybody.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, enjoy your small buffers. You don’t each deserve five megs, is what we’ve

⏹️ ▶️ Marco come to. Wow. Yeah, so ever since the beginning of the show, I’ve been kind of just keeping this little, you know, quick little solver calculation

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like basically bytes per listener, and it just keeps going up. So,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there does seem to be some kind of leak-like behavior here. I think by lowering this buffer value, I can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably at least bring it down to a level where it might not be noticeable.

Casey’s DNS Diversion

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let me give you something that you can and probably should clip from the released version of the show.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Controversy. No, no, it’s nothing like that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You like tabs instead of spaces.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Actually, I think tabs are probably the right answer.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John But anyways. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John come on. We’ve had this talk already.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know, I know. Anyways, the point is I typically do ATP related browsing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Chrome. It’s one of the few times I use Chrome and there are reasons for that that are uninteresting. Suffice it to say,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was looking at this Sonic Fusion, you know, link on MacRumors and Chrome. I realized,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey holy crap, there are ads festooned all over this page, but I’m running my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey piehole. Why is that?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John That’s still so

⏹️ ▶️ John funny to me. I deleted those notes from the DOM when I put this thing in the tab because I was annoyed

⏹️ ▶️ John at them blinking at me.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s so bad. So I thought to myself, well, that’s weird. Why isn’t the piehole working? And so while

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you were futzing with the live stream, I went over and looked at the piehole the piehole is working.

⏹️ ▶️ John They’re just proxy through Mac rumors.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, so then I went to Safari, which is the browser that we should use

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that I normally use.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, because Google does it on DNS. Oh, that’s weird. Why?

⏹️ ▶️ John Proxying ads through the same domain is also a thing, though, by the

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey way.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know, I know. However you described it, I don’t know if that’s accurate, but I know that Chrome

⏹️ ▶️ Casey definitely has its own internal DNS cache, And it would certainly appear as though

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it like falls back onto some Google DNS server or something like that. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the 8888. Yeah, or something along those lines when it can’t get a result from

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the local server. Something is going

⏹️ ▶️ John on. It does honor, it doesn’t totally do it because when I was putting in the private IPs for ATP.fm when we were

⏹️ ▶️ John doing the site, like it honors Etsy hosts on my computer. But yeah, it does do its own thing in many other regards.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So maybe, so because PiHolt, does PiHolt give back no result or does it give back a bad result like 127.001.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey understand the question. I don’t recall. I want to say it gives back 0.0.0.0, but I am not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey confident I’m correct about that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because if it gives back no result, then Google might fall back and say, well, if

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the authoritative DNS server on the network is saying it doesn’t know what this is, let me check my servers.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which is not entirely unreasonable.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s still messed up, but it would be at least a little bit more justifiable.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because for a second there, I was like, you know, this isn’t a big deal, but I was like, what the hell? Why isn’t this working right?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then I finally tried loading the exact same URL in Safari and sure enough, it looks great.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Are we all good with the programming now? I guess we all three have.

icecast saga: finale

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have had

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John one.

⏹️ ▶️ John No, IceCast servers are not memory again, sorry.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If it actually kept five megs per user, that would be five gigs when

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we have a thousand listeners. So that would actually get pretty close to what it was using. So that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco could have been the reason.

⏹️ ▶️ John How do we have so many live listeners? Remember we used to have like a hundred people listening live?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not that I’m complaining.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And keep in mind, I think IceCast counts connections pretty aggressively. So these might be just like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people who load the page and didn’t actually hit play yet, or if there’s a certain preload happening by

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the audio embed or whatever. But regardless, I think the regular, like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco common amount of live listeners we have is usually around 400. These seem

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kinda high, but now, see now, it says only 300 listeners. And before it was saying like 900, so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe it was like keeping connections around for a very long time, I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John You

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know what it might have been? Oh, all right, so the setting I changed, Oh, this is,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I just figured it out. The setting I changed is about like letting, like if people’s connections lag behind,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it lets them catch up. It’s called the, let’s see, queue size. It’s documented, it’s the maximum

⏹️ ▶️ Marco size in bytes of the stream queue. A listener may temporarily lag behind due to network congestion. In this case, an internal

⏹️ ▶️ Marco queue is maintained for the listeners. If it goes larger than this value, then it’s truncated, and any

⏹️ ▶️ Marco listeners on it will be kicked off the stream. So, what I bet this is doing is if

⏹️ ▶️ Marco anybody loads that page and goes away, it still counts them as a listener until five megs of audio have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco passed by. And at 64 kilobits per second, that’s a long time. And so that, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cause, oh man, okay, that makes total sense. So by shortening it down, I basically have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, made it reap the resources for dropped off listeners much faster.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the reason, that’s it, okay, now it makes even more sense. I bet the reason why the resident

⏹️ ▶️ Marco set stayed at, you know, 1.7 gigs all week long, is that when I stopped

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the stream, it lost its source, and that cue probably just paused.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it probably just sat there waiting for five more megs of audio to come. For people to drain their cues.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, or for five more megs of audio to come that never came. Yeah. Okay,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m pretty sure I just debugged this app. All right, man, I love being a programmer sometimes. All right, we can get back

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the show. Until the next time

⏹️ ▶️ John it crashes, and you’re like, wait a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco second. Yeah, exactly. So right now, so the listener count is lower. it’s a lot lower. And I remember last week,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I remember it was suspiciously high too. It was like 900, 1000. I was like, what? That’s unusual for,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially now, this is kind of a low news time of the year, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seemed suspiciously high. And so this makes a lot more sense

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if this is the way it’s treating connections and listeners and the queue and everything. And now it’s using 54

⏹️ ▶️ Marco megs of RAM to serve 330 listeners, and it was using two gigs of RAM

⏹️ ▶️ Marco serve like 900 listeners a little while ago. I can go back to a smaller

⏹️ ▶️ John instance now.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s a good point. Okay, that was the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen. This is the programming note that will never end. I look out my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey window and there’s two blue circles rolling down where the road should be because it’s pitch black outside. Apparently,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey some… Did I say blue? I meant purple. Somebody has like purple LED lights around the inside of their

⏹️ ▶️ Casey bike rims. Oh, there it is again. Pretty cool.

⏹️ ▶️ John Just need a a clothespin and some playing cards and they’ll be all set.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the role of LED technology and largely battery and electric technology now is really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco make bikes a lot more interesting. RGBs the kids call them. Neb in the chat said that’s a homeowner

⏹️ ▶️ Marco violation. their ass Casey.

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Apple TV Channels

Chapter Apple TV Channels image.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Breaking news, HBO has stopped participating in Apple TV channels. Like I can even

⏹️ ▶️ Casey keep track

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco of what Apple TV channels is. No,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wait, honest question. Did either of you know that Apple TV channels had launched? Because I didn’t. Wait,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s different than the app?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, it’s the thing that like when you go, you know how we discussed the reason I put this in here is because

⏹️ ▶️ John we discussed the deal that Apple made with Amazon to get them into this thing where if

⏹️ ▶️ John you go through the Apple TV, Apple TV app, whatever the hell it’s called.

⏹️ ▶️ John So bad. The Ferrari, LaFerrari. Yeah. You could see stuff not just from Apple but from other people and so they

⏹️ ▶️ John got Amazon into there to participate in that, right? So that to be the front door to all your viewing, right? But

⏹️ ▶️ John Netflix wasn’t in there, right? Now HBO is not in there either. So

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, you know, one step forward, two steps back, I don’t know. It depends on how big you think HBO Max is compared

⏹️ ▶️ John to Amazon. But yes, I did know that there’s a bunch of non-Apple stuff in there because every time I go to the Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John TV app Intentionally like manually I’m going there to watch Apple TV plus stuff and I’m annoyed

⏹️ ▶️ John by all the non Apple TV plus stuff It’s clogging up my view and the fact that the app refuses to remember

⏹️ ▶️ John that I was just watching a show last night and let Me resume it so I’m scrolling I’m looking in the channel

⏹️ ▶️ John section and I go to the Apple TV plus channel and then I can Look at the show and find the episode that I was on

⏹️ ▶️ John because the thing doesn’t remember for me for some reason and then anyway I don’t want to complain about it. All this is to say

⏹️ ▶️ John that, yes, I knew channels was a thing. Yes, I knew HBO was in there because I’m a subscriber to HBO and I used

⏹️ ▶️ John to see it in there. And now I guess I won’t anymore, further confusing the jumble of

⏹️ ▶️ John video sources on my Apple TV, the hardware device.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s bad. It’s so tough to describe. I was talking to my brother-in-law

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and, if their wedding that was supposed to be this summer can ever happen, my soon-to-be sister-in-law.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I was trying to describe, you know, some of the shows we’ve been watching during quarantine or before, and I was saying, Oh, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you have Apple TV plus that you may be able to get on your Apple TV if you have one,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or maybe there’s an Apple TV app on your regular TV. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Just, just go watch for all mankind.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s just so bad. There’s like 18 different things, entities that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey use the Apple TV name. And I really, really dislike it a lot.

⏹️ ▶️ John And apparently I got it wrong because apparently the app is different than channels. So

⏹️ ▶️ John HBO is still in the app. Netflix isn’t, but not in the channels thing. Channels

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was that thing that like Amazon launched this a while back and in Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco services event where they announced Apple TV plus and everything, they announced a similar thing where the idea

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was, and I honestly, I had immediately forgotten about this as soon as they announced that I forgot about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. And this is the first I’ve heard anything about The idea is, what Amazon did first, I think,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which was like, you can subscribe to HBO or other premium TV

⏹️ ▶️ Marco channels on their service and you pay, Amazon or Apple, whatever, you pay them

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever, 10 bucks a month for these channels and there is no app for it. Like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s no, when it’s in these channel systems, there is no dedicated app. It is just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like in the Apple TV app, there would just be an HBO channel. Kind of like the way the old Apple TV worked before

⏹️ ▶️ Marco tvOS, the original Apple TVs were like, individual video providers weren’t making their

⏹️ ▶️ Marco own apps. Apple just made one unified interface, and there were basically different channels in it that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they would use all this standardized XML behind the scenes and everything that Apple was writing and managing for them. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the video providers just provided the content, basically, and that was it. And so Amazon launched a service,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was having, I guess, some level of success with it. Apple saw it, like, oh, we can do that too.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Apple added that as part of the TV push for services. And they announced

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it during the event. Oh, so we have TV+, which is our content in our app. Then

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we have channels, which is other people’s content in our app. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s also TV apps by other people. So it’s their content in their apps

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that can integrate with our app as like a launcher, basically, but it’s still

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kicking you out of their app for playback.

⏹️ ▶️ John And the channels aren’t at the top either. Like the things that are at the top are things that I can view in

⏹️ ▶️ John other apps. So it looks for all the world, they’re like, oh, resume this thing you were watching on HBO Max. Like it’s already

⏹️ ▶️ John got the little tag on it or whatever. If you scroll down, eventually you get two channels.

⏹️ ▶️ John And at least one of the channels I see, CBS All Access, still has a separate app

⏹️ ▶️ John that I use and subscribe to through that app. But apparently I could also do it through channels. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John so confusing. And yeah, if I scroll, I can see channels. This one’s for Showtime, Epic, Stars,

⏹️ ▶️ John but I don’t see HBO, and presumably I could have before. I see BritBox, which I subscribe to,

⏹️ ▶️ John but view through the dedicated app. Maybe I should have subscribed through the channels. I don’t even know what I was supposed

⏹️ ▶️ John to have done here. Anyway, it’s a mess, and now HBO

⏹️ ▶️ John Max is no longer in the channels list, but HBO is still showing at the

⏹️ ▶️ John top of the TV app.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s kind of a shame because HBO is a wonderful example of a company that really needs this.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like HBO can’t make a good app to save their lives. You know, see also Hulu. These companies,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like if you could buy the HBO service as a channel and have it just be an Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco alright TV app, the TV app is alright. It could be so much better.

⏹️ ▶️ John I watch a lot of things through apps, not on my actual television, but like on my iPad, and I would like

⏹️ ▶️ John to make an announcement to everyone who’s listening who works on a video application. Uh-oh. I

⏹️ ▶️ John have several announcements. Mm-hmm. Number one, have the

⏹️ ▶️ John button to turn on and off closed captions be top level

⏹️ ▶️ John in your thing. Don’t make me dig through menus and figure out whether your app pauses

⏹️ ▶️ John the video when I’m digging through the menus or not, or whether it auto resumes when I’m done with the menus. Have it be a top level button. You

⏹️ ▶️ John have a huge amount of screen real estate. One tiny button that looks like a little CC or a box,

⏹️ ▶️ John a little speech bubble or whatever. Tap on, tap off. Yes, by all means, let me dig into it and select

⏹️ ▶️ John which language and so on and so forth. Like, there should be options further, but to toggle captions on and off

⏹️ ▶️ John needs to be top level. Number two, have some way to skip forward or back

⏹️ ▶️ John by some small amount. Now maybe I’m the only person who watches video in an environment where there is noise or

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re distracted, but very frequently I want to go back because I missed something or I want to go back and turn on captions.

⏹️ ▶️ John And yes, I know you can dig the Apple TV remote out of the crack in your cushions and try to get it to say,

⏹️ ▶️ John and you can speak into it and say, what did he say? And it will rewind and turn on captions. That’s a cool feature. But

⏹️ ▶️ John I can do that with my fingers if you have those buttons there. I’m amazed that when I see a video app that literally has, like speaking

⏹️ ▶️ John of BritBox, no way on the iPad on BritBox to step back or forward

⏹️ ▶️ John any amount of time. You have to, if you miss something that somebody said, or they said it in a weird accent you

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t understand because they’re British, you have to like grab the little tiny scroll thumb and try to move it like

⏹️ ▶️ John a pixel, retina pixel and a half to get back 30 seconds to hear what they said again. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John and by the way, you couldn’t understand it the second time either, so don’t forget to turn on captions. So now grab that thumb again, move

⏹️ ▶️ John it back a pixel and a half, hit pause quick if you can find it, and then find out where the captions are. Dig through three menus,

⏹️ ▶️ John turn on the captions, close those menus, and resume playback. Basics, very basics

⏹️ ▶️ John of just like play, pause, fast forward, rewind, captions on, off. You’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John got huge expanse of black, especially in like letterbox things, there’s huge amount of space in the screen

⏹️ ▶️ John for this UI to be. For it literally to not exist is inexcusable.

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has this, some of this stuff, it has the fast forward and rewind at least, I think captions are two taps

⏹️ ▶️ John deep, but I use the Plex player, I use the HBO Go player, HBO Max,

⏹️ ▶️ John Netflix, like nobody gets it all right, not even Netflix gets it all right, and it boggles

⏹️ ▶️ John my mind. I don’t understand if any of the people who design these applications to actually watch video

⏹️ ▶️ John using them. But it seems like, you know, it’s one of those things where they have all the features. They don’t have to write any

⏹️ ▶️ John new code, and the UI isn’t that complicated. It’s basically a toolbar with like seven buttons on it,

⏹️ ▶️ John and they still manage to not get it right.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey For what it’s worth in Plex, you just swipe down, and then I think it’s on that very first

⏹️ ▶️ Casey menu, I

⏹️ ▶️ John think. In Plex, it’s tap to get the menu, and then tap for the closed captions you want. And I think after

⏹️ ▶️ John you pick it closes the menu, resumes video. So it’s two taps instead of one. But then you also have to remember

⏹️ ▶️ John to rewind and it does have a step back, although it’s not a configurable step back like it’s it’s harder than it needs to be.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, it’s definitely harder than it needs to be, that’s for sure.

Follow-up: Joe Rogan

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, since you’re all happy and excited about life, why don’t you tell me about Joe Rogan?

⏹️ ▶️ John Last episode, we talked about the Joe Rogan Spotify deal and

⏹️ ▶️ John the impact on podcasting and all that other good stuff. What we didn’t talk about at all last

⏹️ ▶️ John episode was Joe Rogan himself, the person and the show and the content.

⏹️ ▶️ John Part of the reason we didn’t talk about it is I think none of us listen to Joe Rogan. Have either of you ever

⏹️ ▶️ John heard a episode of the Joe Rogan podcast?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think I’ve even heard the Elon Musk episode that everyone in their mother heard. Like I think I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey listened to maybe a minute of it, maybe, and that was it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Did he interview Obama a couple years ago? I listened to that. Whatever famous comedian interviewed Obama on a podcast,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I listened to that, which I think was him. Mark Maron

⏹️ ▶️ John did, I think.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was Mark Maron. That’s it. Never mind. Whoops. Sorry.

⏹️ ▶️ John I would imagine Obama wouldn’t go on Joe Rogan, but I don’t actually know.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I don’t. So yeah, but you’re right. Now that you’re – yeah, I remember now it was Mark Maron. I don’t listen to either

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them. But I listen to that episode.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I’ve never listened to an episode of Joe Rogan Podcast, but I have read about him. And I know enough about

⏹️ ▶️ John him that I should have, and actually meant to, but never got around to it, say something about him. Basically, all

⏹️ ▶️ John this is to say that ATP does not endorse Joe Rogan. We either don’t know anything about him

⏹️ ▶️ John or what we know about him, we don’t like. So I will put a link in the show notes to the

⏹️ ▶️ John one thing that I have read about Joe Rogan, which is why I know he’s not a particularly great character,

⏹️ ▶️ John in the show is not a particularly positive thing in some aspects. It’s from the Atlantic. It’s a couple of years old.

⏹️ ▶️ John I know it’s just from 2019. I encourage you to read it. Lots of people

⏹️ ▶️ John will dislike him. He holds some very bigoted views on certain topics.

⏹️ ▶️ John And, you know, I didn’t want to make it sound like that. We were endorsing him last time. But this brings up an interesting point, sort

⏹️ ▶️ John of a meta point about this, which is how is it that the three of us who are

⏹️ ▶️ John in the podcasting world Uh, don’t know about like the biggest podcaster

⏹️ ▶️ John in the world. Like is it because we just spend time as Marco mentioned last time listening to podcasts that with narrow,

⏹️ ▶️ John very narrow interests and we’re in the corner of the world. Yeah, part of it is that, but also part of it

⏹️ ▶️ John is something that we got called out on by a couple of people last episode is that

⏹️ ▶️ John you can, we have the luxury of not knowing that one of the most popular podcasters

⏹️ ▶️ John in the world is saying things that are hurtful uh… you know to marginalize people

⏹️ ▶️ John on their show because it’s not directly harmful to us so we don’t hear about in our circles

⏹️ ▶️ John and we can be blissfully unaware that there is someone out there talking to millions and millions people saying very harmful things giving

⏹️ ▶️ John platforms to people who say harmful things uh… in fact people that we would all recognize as bad, Alex Jones

⏹️ ▶️ John we all know him right he’s terrible right Joe Rogan has him on the podcast and his

⏹️ ▶️ John buddy old pal with him and got real mad at him at one point but then had him back on the show this is all in the article or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ John Again, I don’t know much about Joe Rogan. I don’t know what his deal is. I don’t know exactly how good

⏹️ ▶️ John or bad he is as a person. But I do know that his show does, it seems to have lots of aspects to it

⏹️ ▶️ John that are extremely harmful, let’s say. And

⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that we didn’t know about it, it just reveals our position of privilege that we can

⏹️ ▶️ John afford to not know about it. And we can afford to do an entire episode of a show where the actual person

⏹️ ▶️ John who has this podcast doesn’t come up at all. And so our ignorance is not necessarily an excuse, but it is

⏹️ ▶️ John a fact. And it is part of the whole thing. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John in the same way that Joe Rogan could have people on the show and be, you know, old buddy, old pal with them, and just

⏹️ ▶️ John hang out and talk like two dudes, because everything they talk about doesn’t impact them in their position,

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the same way that we can manage to talk about the business of podcasting and never actually mention Joe Rogan. So

⏹️ ▶️ John I think we made a mistake to at least not mention that there. And the second thing is, say you’re listening to this

⏹️ ▶️ John now you listen to Joe Rogan and you’re saying, Hey, are you saying I’m a bad person because I listened to Joe Rogan again? I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John know. I don’t listen to his show for all I know. He does good things and bad things. Right. But like I

⏹️ ▶️ John do know that some of the things that he’s done should make you maybe think twice about it. So it doesn’t mean you’re automatically a bad

⏹️ ▶️ John person. Like I mean, Marco and I both listened to Howard Stern, who is at various times done some very terrible things,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? Uh, no person is entirely good or bad, but it does behoove you

⏹️ ▶️ John to, if you’re going to listen to a podcast like Joe Rogan to be aware

⏹️ ▶️ John that some of the things he does and says are harmful to people, maybe not you, but to other people. And in

⏹️ ▶️ John general, say you don’t know anything about somebody, like, well, I don’t even listen to that show. I don’t know anything about him. So I can just I can just wipe

⏹️ ▶️ John my hands of it and say, well, since I never listened to the show, I’m not going to offer any opinion whatsoever on Joe

⏹️ ▶️ John Logan, because because how can I if I don’t listen to the show? Wouldn’t it be unfair of me to say anything about Joe Rogan? Or would it be unfair

⏹️ ▶️ John for me to read this article and somehow believe bad things about Joe Rogan? You don’t even listen to the show.

⏹️ ▶️ John One of the things that I think is useful to keep mind is if there’s someone in the world who is doing something to harm a particular

⏹️ ▶️ John group, and that group tells you, hey, this guy is saying and doing things that hurt

⏹️ ▶️ John us, it’s okay to believe them. It’s okay to say, I don’t, you know, I don’t listen to

⏹️ ▶️ John the show, but these people over here say that this guy is doing and saying things that are harmful to them.

⏹️ ▶️ John Believe them like they’re not doing that for the hell of it, right? They’re not. There’s not a vendetta right

⏹️ ▶️ John to out to get Joe Rogan, because this marginalized group, this incredibly powerful marginalized group, you know, the incredibly

⏹️ ▶️ John powerful, like, uh, lobby of this, the, the, you know, the most downtrodden group is out there

⏹️ ▶️ John trying to stop the most powerful podcast in the world. Believe them. So I do believe them. They tell me

⏹️ ▶️ John he’s doing and saying things that are harmful to them, and I don’t think that’s great. And so I think if you listen to Joe Rogan and enjoy it,

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe read this article, think more critically about what you hear, listen to what other people have to say about

⏹️ ▶️ John Joe Rogan. Maybe it will change your opinion. maybe it won’t. We’re not saying you’re automatically a bad person

⏹️ ▶️ John for listening, but it seems like Jorgen might be kind of a bad person.

Spending Casey’s Money

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I thought we could maybe do Marco’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey favorite activity in the entire world tonight. And we can’t, maybe second favorite activity in the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey entire world. First favorite, of course, is spending his own money. Second favorite activity in the entire world is what, Marco?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Spending other people’s money?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco All

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. Let’s configure me a MacBook Pro because I think I might buy one. Because my poor

⏹️ ▶️ Casey adorable, even though it’s mostly stationary these days, It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey too slow. It’s too slow, too few ports. I think I’m convincing myself to get

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a 13-inch MacBook Pro. So if I decide to pull the trigger, let’s go ahead and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco configure one.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And let me tell you that I haven’t looked at any of the configurations in at least last week,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which given my horrible memory means I’ve effectively never looked at them at all. So I thought

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we could go kind of, sort of, John with the Mac Pro style and just go through the configuration page

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and have a small argument about what configuration I should buy. And I feel like I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey should set some ground rules as to what I want out of this computer. But before I do that, any questions

⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the two of you?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Are you going to actually do it? Are you going to waffle for a while and then never do it? And then we’ll

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John talk about it again in six months.

⏹️ ▶️ John Have we skipped over the part where we tell you maybe not to spend money right now? Or

⏹️ ▶️ John is that we’re just skipping that and we’re just saying, look, just that ship is sailed.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It’s going to happen. How? Spend money. No matter

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how destitute you are, nobody deserves to use that 12-inch computer the way you’re using it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know you’re like, okay, well finally now it’s too slow. It has always sucked. You just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco tolerated it because you liked how small it was. Now that’s less important than ever and all the ways that it sucks, it still

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sucks. So you might as well get a better computer for your actual work that you actually do all the time.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and so the genesis for this to more directly answer John’s question is,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, first, yes, you are correct. This is not at all the time for me to be spending money.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can tell listeners because of how many sponsors we have in this particular program today. But that being

⏹️ ▶️ Casey said, there is a chance that I might need to record actually a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey better than halfway decent chance that I might need to record

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the WWDC show from not my house.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my god, you’re getting this computer. There’s no way we’re going to let you do that on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco your 12-inch. No way.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s the thing. Wait, where are you going? I might be

⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to the beach, which is to say I would be in a similar style to what

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco would potentially be doing, which is to say we will take over a home, just the four

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of us. We will not be having any other people into the home. And you’ll be on a beach jam-packed with people.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and that’s the thing,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John actually. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco no potential.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m going to be doing this next week. Oh, well, OK. Well, there you go. But yeah, if the beach is jam-packed,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey then we won’t be going to the beach. But I think it would do all four of us a lot of good to just have a change of scenery.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I feel like if we’re going to do that, this is one of the safest ways to do it. Please don’t email me. I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t want to hear it. Please don’t email me.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And to be clear, what I’m doing next week is going to rent a house in a beach town, not to be in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco crowds.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. That’s exactly the same situation here. And if it ends up—I’m not even sure that we

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are going. First of all, and second of all, if we are, I’m not sure the beach will be open. And third of all, if it is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey open and it’s jam-packed, then we won’t be going to the beach, like not to the physical beach itself. We

⏹️ ▶️ Casey might be in the beach house, but we will not be going to the physical beach itself. So yeah, don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey even get me started on all this because I have had some very tense conversations with both sides of the family about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey social distancing and what that actually means. Anyway, so if I decide

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to buy a 13-inch MacBook Pro sometime before we leave, which would be at the end of next

⏹️ ▶️ Casey month, and I want to make sure it has time to deliver before we leave toward the middle to end

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of next month. And if I want to make sure everything’s squared away, there’s a lead time on getting

⏹️ ▶️ Casey these devices, so I need to pull the trigger this week.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah, let’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy it now.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I don’t know if I’m going to buy it tonight, but I want to, by the end of this episode, hopefully

⏹️ ▶️ Casey quicker rather than longer, I want to be able to at least know what it is I should buy. So what am I going to do with this computer?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So occasionally, well, if it’s getting used at all, it’s more than likely going to be used for Xcode

⏹️ ▶️ Casey development of apps that are not tiny, but are not terribly large either. I mean, this is not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to pick on a big company that’s based here in Richmond or has a huge establishment here in Richmond. It’s not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the capital one app or anything like that. Like, it’s vignette. It’s peak of view. These are not massive apps. They’re probably not even as

⏹️ ▶️ Casey big as Overcast, I would assume. But Are you using SwiftUI? No, I’m not using SwiftUI,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I am using a lot of Swift.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah. Either way, if you’re using a lot of Swift, you’re going to need a lot more processing power than I use.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s, I want to argue with you, but I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco don’t know if I can.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So in any case, I want to be able to do expo development with a reasonable quickness. And I’d

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like to be able to do like, I don’t know, maybe more than one thing at a time that would be kind of neat.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I would like to be able to do that. I would like to be able to use it to do

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like basic, you know, photo or video stuff. Not probably not like Final Cut Pro necessarily, but like basic

⏹️ ▶️ Casey photo or video stuff. say if we’re on vacation, I want to process some photos very lightly. I’m not talking

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like Light Room or Photoshop or anything like that. Just stuff you can do like photos or Acorn

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or Pixel Meter or whatever the case may be. So there’s really not that much

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I need from it, truth be told. I really love my 2018 iPad Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I love my iMac Pro. So this would definitely be the if I can ever leave the house

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do work again machine, and probably not that much else.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, I don’t think I need anything that’s extraordinarily powerful. But that being said,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t change my laptops like they’re my underwear, Marco. And so, I would like to have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey something that lasts a few years, preferably at least two to three years, if not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey more. So that’s kind of the situation at hand.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So unless there are any further questions, and I don’t think I want a MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Air, but maybe we should explore that very briefly to begin. Do I want a MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Air?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco What you’re looking for here, to me, you just gave a whole bunch of justifications

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to try to alleviate, like the truth is, you want a new computer and you can afford it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco What you don’t want is a whole bunch of people criticizing you and you feel bad that you can afford it, you feel bad

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you don’t really need a laptop, but you’re gonna buy one anyway, because you feel a little bit bad about that, but the reality is you’re gonna buy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and you’re gonna love it and that’s that. And you can afford it and it’s fine, so we’re gonna do it. Now the only

⏹️ ▶️ Marco question is then, in your case, what you’re looking for is not to maximize value.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco What you’re looking for is to maximize functionality within a value range.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think that’s probably fair.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because you do care about money to some degree, but you also can spend good money to get a good

⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer if it’s warranted. It’s not about like squeezing every dollar to fit below a certain threshold.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s about like you wanna make sure you’re spending money wisely, right? And then

⏹️ ▶️ Marco secondly, you have the incredible luxury here that this is not your primary

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or only computer. Because it is not your primary or only computer,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can not go super high end on things like getting the absolute largest

⏹️ ▶️ Marco SSD possible, which can be fairly expensive, or getting like the absolute max specs on everything.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You don’t need it to do primary computer duties all the time. You need

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this as a secondary computer that you’re gonna use light to moderately on a light to moderate

⏹️ ▶️ Marco basis probably, but like it’s not gonna be, you’re not gonna be like running Final Cut Pro in codes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as this is your only computer every day, every workday that you’re gonna use it. Like that’s not what you’re doing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco here. You are doing though things where CPU performance matters. and this is why you’re feeling

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the pain of your current awful 12-inch computer.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I love that 12-inch computer.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the reason why, like, the MacBook Air is an exceptional value

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Apple’s lineup right now. It is a very good sweet spot. But one area where it falls

⏹️ ▶️ Marco down is that CPU power is not great. And also, like, when you spec it up

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to try to extract more CPU power out of it, it gets very close in price to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the well-spec 13 inches. And it’s very similar in size and weight. It is a little bit

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lighter, it feels a little bit better because of the teardrop shape and because of the slight lightness, and it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a touch bar, which is nice. I consider not having a touch bar a feature of the Air, not a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco shortcoming. So the Air has a few things going for it, but ultimately, because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re doing things where performance does matter, I think you’d probably be better off with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a 13-inch Pro. Now, among the 13-inch Pro line, There’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing that matters below the 1799 config, the first one that has four ports. All the two-port

⏹️ ▶️ Marco models, skip. If you were gonna get a two-port one, just get an

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Air. It’s a better computer than the two-port ones. So it also has only two ports. It also

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has worse processor performance than the four-port one. So you might as well get the Air if you’re gonna go the two-port

⏹️ ▶️ Marco route, because it’s probably a better value for the money. So what you want,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco though, is probably a four-port one. So let’s go into that. You can go 1799 or 1999. Double the storage on the 1999 one.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, you get

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco terabyte, okay. I’m gonna suggest you get a terabyte. I bought a few back like in the 2012 era. I bought

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a couple that had 256 and I regretted it heavily. That

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was a pain in the butt for any kind of developer work because you’re constantly downloading an Xcode beta, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco now you’re out of space. It was a pain. 512 was where I went for a while

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as like, this is what I should get as a minimum for a laptop. These days,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the price difference between 512 and a terabyte is not huge these days. And a terabyte’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really nice because not only is Xcode and developer stuff and everything just getting larger,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but also in your case, you are gonna have this on family trips and you do tend to bring an entire

⏹️ ▶️ Marco library of video content on trips and stuff like that. So I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you would probably end up using it. Like I think I mentioned last time we talked about this, I, so I’ve been getting one terabyte

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the last couple of years on my many laptops and, uh, and usually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have roughly three or 400 gigs free, which tells me that I’m glad I got

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the terabyte and not the 512. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So the, the adorable that I have is a half terabyte, it’s 512 and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m looking at it right now and it’s about half full. So I’m using just back of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the napkin around 256 gigs and I can’t remember a time outside of maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I was putting a whole bunch of media on it or something like that. I can’t remember a time that I feel like it’s ever been close to exploding.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I feel like I absolutely could get away with 512, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m slightly leaning toward the one terabyte model for most of the reasons you just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey said, and also for longevity, because again, as much as I snark about your laptop buying tendencies,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the truth of the matter is however long you do or do not keep your laptops, I would like to be able to keep this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one for several years. And even once I’m done with it, like for example, this adorable, once I’m done

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with it, it will replace the MacBook Air that Aaron has that’s been underwater 17 times. That

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is still chugging along for the record, but it’s time to replace it. Which is kind of incredible, but it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey time to replace it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And at this point, like, you know, the SSD size, that’s a hard limit. Like if you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco were to have SSD space, you can’t expand that. It’s like, you can fill it up, and then

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at a certain point, like, well, you’re just full now, period, hard wall. If you’re running low on RAM, or if

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re running low on processor power for a task you’re doing, the computer just kind of slows it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco down, and you can still do things. It’s much more of a soft limit. You can still do things, it just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco might be a little bit slower at it. But if you slim into a disk size barrier, you’re just screwed.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s just nothing you can do about that, unless you get into external drives, which suck on laptops. Combine that with the fact

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the 512 to 1TB upgrade is only 200 bucks. To me, that’s a no-brainer. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you look at the specs of this base four-port model, there’s a couple upgrades you can do. You

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can upgrade the CPU for 200 bucks, you can upgrade the RAM for 400, we’ll get to that in a minute, or you can upgrade the SSD for 200.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco To me, no question, if you’re only gonna upgrade one thing on this computer, upgrade the SSD to one terabyte. Because 200

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bucks to give it a lot of headroom for a component that can never be upgraded

⏹️ ▶️ Marco later and that is a hard wall when you hit it, That to me is easy, no-brainer,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that. If you do nothing else, do that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I’m on board with that. John, any thoughts?

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what I was gonna ask you about when I was going through this configurator, is I didn’t know what your storage needs were, but then

⏹️ ▶️ John I saw that one terabyte was 200 bucks extra. It’s like, oh, no-brainer.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s the thing. The value for money is so good that I don’t know why I wouldn’t. So, I’m sorry,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, were you starting from the 1799 or are you starting from the 1999? 1799, so I’m saying

⏹️ ▶️ Marco either way. So, whatever you’re gonna get, you want that one terabyte upgrade. Does

⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything else change between the two? It looks like it’s otherwise the same, right? It’s the same processor,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco same graphics, same RAM. Yeah, everything else is the same. It’s just an extra configuration. What’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco good about that is that because they’re having it as like a dedicated SKU, that’s the same thing,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but just a bigger hard drive, means that stores will stock this configuration. If you wanted to change nothing else

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about this, you can get that 1999 configuration and you could have it like tomorrow or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or in a few days instead of a few weeks. So that actually could be very valuable. Also,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you buy one of these stock configurations like this, you can often get a little bit off by going to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a retailer like B&H or Best Buy or whatever. A lot of times they’ll have maybe 100 or 150 bucks off. So that’s a nice little bonus you can get

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whenever you’re going for a non-customized configuration. And that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco why on my 16-inch, I have the 2799 configuration that I paid like 2450,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, something like that. I got like $300 off because it was just like some sale B&H was having when I had

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to replace it. It was wonderful. So I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco strongly suggest you consider very heavily just stopping right here,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just taking this 1999 configuration, the stock one they have. I like it better in silver

⏹️ ▶️ Marco personally, but you can go space gray if you really want to and calling it a day and getting it in stock somewhere

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you’re done because the only other options for you to upgrade would be if you need more than a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco terabyte, which you don’t.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do not I absolutely do not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or if you want to get a slightly faster processor, but it’s you know It’s we’re talking like 10%

⏹️ ▶️ Marco faster. It’s a like it isn’t that much faster No, or if you want to get 32 gigs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of RAM,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey here’s where we have an argument

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right here. Why the hell would I not do that? Like $400 is not cheap It is not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey cheap at all. But and and I mean the adorable is fine I mean, he says

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with no confidence with 16 gigs of RAM, I think I’m pretty darn sure now I’m curious.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is it 16? Yes. But it seems to me

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like almost all the arguments you made about SSD storage, I could

⏹️ ▶️ Casey also make about RAM. And even though the $400 really does chap my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hindquarters kind of badly, it’s just, especially if I wanted to make this thing last, why

⏹️ ▶️ Casey wouldn’t I check that checkbox?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s not your primary computer, because it’s more of like a task-focused computer,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re not leaving a million things open on this all the time, 24-7. You’re not leaving all your stuff running

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on this. You’re using it to work at a grocery store or whatever, whenever that can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a thing. You’re using this like, I’m going to take out the laptop and use Xcode for a while

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever. It’s a much more refocused device most of the time, right? So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because you’re not doing like heavy long-term multitasking on it, I think you’ll

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be fine with 16. I’ve had 16 on everything until I think, does my

⏹️ ▶️ Marco 16-inch have 16? I don’t even know. I think it has 32, right? What does the 27-inch have? I don’t even remember.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not sure either. But regardless, like you’d be fine with 16. Now is 32

⏹️ ▶️ Marco better? Yes. Oh, real time follow-up, I have 16 and it’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s great. Now, yeah, so more RAM, sure,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would be better. There is a cost to battery life, but I don’t think it’s a massive one. Like, I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you would necessarily notice it most of the time. So what you’re really looking for here is $400 of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco an upgrade fee. That is a significant upgrade fee. That is a very high price for what this is.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Since you don’t necessarily need this, or you don’t know that you need

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, there is a strong argument to be made that you shouldn’t get it. However, you are right, you can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco never upgrade it later. And if it turns out that there’s something you need to do with this that needs 30

⏹️ ▶️ Marco gigs of RAM, yeah, you are just stuck. Like, that is a problem. But I would

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bet there probably isn’t, or that would be rare enough that a little bit of swapping to the SSD in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco those rare cases would be tolerable compared to $400. That being said,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how much do you regret the money you spend after you spend it? Like, right

⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, before you spend it, you’re going to agonize over this $400, right? So, this is a big thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, keep in mind, because you don’t necessarily need to upgrade

⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything else, you’re talking about $400 and three and a half weeks versus

⏹️ ▶️ Marco saving $400 and getting it tomorrow or whatever. And most of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the time you probably won’t notice the difference.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s actually not as great a difference as you said. So, if I order the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of the box 1999 one, I don’t get it until June 4th or June 11th. and as we record,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s May 27. If I tick the 32 gig checkbox, however, that becomes

⏹️ ▶️ Casey June 18th through June 25. Oh, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not too bad. So it’s like an extra week and a half, maybe at most.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. However, that definitely does bump uncomfortably into the it might arrive when I’m already at the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey beach time frame.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the thing is like, it’s $400 plus some extra time, even

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it isn’t that much extra time, still, that’s still some extra time. And are you really gonna need that? Now again, that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco being said, you can never upgrade it. And six months from now, you probably will forget

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you even spent $400 on that upgrade. Like, if you do buy it, six months from now, it’s like that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco long gone and forgotten. You’ve already, you know, you long ago had paid it off or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so you don’t have to think about it anymore. I didn’t think it was worth it for me, and we do very similar work. That being

⏹️ ▶️ Marco said, you’re using a much less efficient language. But. But. But. But. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we do similar work, and I don’t need 32 gigs. And that’s not to say, you know, our listeners out there

⏹️ ▶️ Marco who are, you know, oftentimes developers and, you know, there are a lot of developer workloads that do need lots of RAM,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially if you run like virtual machines and stuff. That makes sense. There are people out there who need it,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I don’t need it. I’m not one of those people. And I don’t think you are either.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I don’t think I need it. It’s just the thing of, I feel like, as you had said,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there is a more than zero chance I will regret not having 32,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but there is an approaching zero chance of regretting having gotten the 32.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so then get

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. So at that point, you know, why not? The only thing is I didn’t realize that I am

⏹️ ▶️ Casey bumping up against it maybe arriving after I really, really need it, which would be hilarious and also deeply

⏹️ ▶️ Casey uncomfortable.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Great, so don’t get it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco So yeah, I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, help me to help you. I mean, no, help you to help me? What should I do? I help

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you to help me.

⏹️ ▶️ John Even as configured as we’ve both been suggesting, because I agree, go with 32,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s still not that expensive. I mean, in the grand scheme of things. As for getting it late,

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, that’s your fault. You could have ordered this weeks ago. You’re waiting so long. But honestly, I think you’ll,

⏹️ ▶️ John podcasting from whatever device you bring with you will probably be fine either

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey way.

⏹️ ▶️ John Just get the computer you want to get. You wanted the 13 inch, right? That’s the one you’ve always

⏹️ ▶️ John wanted.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t want a 16. I’ve done the 15 life. It’s not for me.

⏹️ ▶️ John This is it. Just 32 gigs, one terabyte. Get the slower CPU to save 200 bucks, you’ll feel a

⏹️ ▶️ John little bit better about it. It’s like 2,400 bucks and just don’t drop it and don’t drop anything

⏹️ ▶️ John into it and you’ll be fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I think I will probably get AppleCare on this. I never used to be an AppleCare person, but when I spent $95,000,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, actually that was you. When I spent an obscene amount of money though on the iMac Pro, I did get AppleCare

⏹️ ▶️ Casey because why wouldn’t I? It’s a percentage, it’s like free. And I was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey thinking I would probably do it for this as well, which is something like 250 bucks, which is not cheap, but especially on something

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that moves, it seems like it’s probably a wise idea to do it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t do it, but you should. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, that’s the thing, like, the Adorable has like a line, a small line of dead pixels on it that I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey know how it happened. Like it’s never been dropped or anything like that. I guess it was in a bag or pushed

⏹️ ▶️ Casey up against something in such a way that it caused a line of dead pixels, which if I had AppleCare, I would probably

⏹️ ▶️ Casey go about replacing, but I don’t. I feel like there’s, oh, and the sticky keys that have happened all the time

⏹️ ▶️ Casey because Butterfly. It seems to me like, especially with my track record,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey why wouldn’t I get AppleCare? So yeah, I hear you, I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It seems, it’s also unfortunate because I don’t think you can do the expedited delivery. Remember it was like eight bucks to do expedited delivery

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the iMac Pro or something like that, and it does not seem like that’s an option right now, which is really a bummer.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But yeah, so maybe I’ll pull the trigger on this tomorrow.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think you should. I mean, honestly, whether you get the RAM or not, that’s up to you, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s not gonna be a better time to buy this because it just got updated, it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has all the good stuff, it has the good keyboard and everything. Yeah, it has a touch bar, that sucks, but otherwise it has everything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco else that you want that you’ve been waiting years for using that awful 12-inch all this time

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as it keeps breaking further from its initial mediocre state to begin with. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, it’s time. You need a computer like this and you might as well just buy it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Thank you, gentlemen. I will probably do that tomorrow and then weep over having spent so much money

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on this, but I think it needs to happen, especially if the thing I – the reason I hadn’t bought it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was because I felt like it was a frivolous and silly thing to do until I realized

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could legitimately need this for my work and not even in the ha-ha funny way, but like legitimately I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey might need this for my work and that’s not comfortable. You know, what with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all my Synology problems as of late, it seems like having only the iMac

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro, which by the way, seems to be pretty good right now, knock on glass, but having only

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the iMac Pro and not being terribly confident in its backup does not feel like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a great place for me to be right now. Especially since I can’t just walk, or well, drive and then walk into the Apple Store

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and get service. You know, that’s not a thing right now. The Virginia Apple stores are not open right now and I don’t know when they’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey gonna open. So I feel like two is one, one is none, and right now I have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one. I mean, one and change, so that’s effectively none. So it seems like,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey even though this is a terrible time for me personally to be spending a couple thousand dollars on

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a laptop, I do think it is, I have convinced myself in the way only Marco

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or perhaps me could that it seems like a worthwhile expenditure of money.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this is an important part of your job. Don’t feel bad about it. need this, just do it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, if your recording dies because you use the 12-inch on our show during WBC

⏹️ ▶️ Marco week, I will kill you. So you might as well just avoid that outcome by getting

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey now. Yeah, but you’d have to get very physically close to me to kill me, and that would be be a poor

⏹️ ▶️ Casey choice in this particular day and age.

Microsoft Fluid

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, tell me about Microsoft’s new Fluid Office document and why it’s not the same as

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that garbage that Apple tried to do 10 years, 20 years ago.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco OLE that Microsoft tried to do before that, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Mm-hmm.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I’ve read a whole bunch of articles about this Microsoft Fluid Office thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I mean, I keep reading them and then I reread them and I think I understand it,

⏹️ ▶️ John but then I don’t quite. So forgive me if I get a lot of these details wrong, but I think we can talk about it in in the

⏹️ ▶️ John historical context that Marco just mentioned to maybe make some sense out of it. So

⏹️ ▶️ John here’s what I understand about it and feel free to send me corrections.

⏹️ ▶️ John This is another play by Microsoft to move more of its functionality sort of online

⏹️ ▶️ John and to the web. So these are bits of content that you can imagine being created by

⏹️ ▶️ John the various Microsoft Office applications, a graph from Excel, a block of text

⏹️ ▶️ John from Word, you know, an email thing from Outlook. I don’t know if these details are correct, but anyway, like

⏹️ ▶️ John they have a bunch of apps that can make things. Imagine if you could take chunks of that content and have them live

⏹️ ▶️ John on the web. So it’s not like you’re saving a Word document to your disk. It’s not like you’re saving an Excel spreadsheet to your disk.

⏹️ ▶️ John Instead, these bits of content are saved to a server somewhere, a Microsoft

⏹️ ▶️ John server somewhere. And then you can embed that content

⏹️ ▶️ John in any other context than any other Microsoft application. So if you want to send somebody an email on Outlook and

⏹️ ▶️ John have an Excel spreadsheet in it, you don’t have to attach a.xlsx, whatever the hell the extension

⏹️ ▶️ John is, you don’t have to attach a spreadsheet file. You can put right in the email a little bounding box

⏹️ ▶️ John that says here is this bit of content that I made that actually lives on the web. And when the person gets the email,

⏹️ ▶️ John it will load the email and it will also load that Excel spreadsheet from where it lives on the web and have it appear

⏹️ ▶️ John in your email. And like OLE, object linking and embedding,

⏹️ ▶️ John from way back in the day, it’s not just an image or a snapshot or a copy of a file. It

⏹️ ▶️ John is the live actual content. So if someone has been changing that content, you will

⏹️ ▶️ John see the changed content in your email. So it’s basically like content that lives in the web

⏹️ ▶️ John that can be embedded anywhere. And you’re not stuck within each application. So within a Word document, you can have an Excel

⏹️ ▶️ John spreadsheet and vice versa. And within an email, you can have that content. So it’s trying to, the reason it

⏹️ ▶️ John comes up in the context of OpenDoc, which I’ll talk about in a second, is that it’s trying to sort of invert the paradigm of

⏹️ ▶️ John first choose your application, Microsoft Word, Excel, whatever, and then once you’re in that application,

⏹️ ▶️ John make some stuff with it. So you’d have to first choose, I’m going to do a spreadsheet. Then you’d launch

⏹️ ▶️ John Excel, and when you’re in Excel, you’re doing spreadsheet things only. And then if you decided

⏹️ ▶️ John in a Word document you want a graph from your spreadsheet to appear, you could export that graph as a graphic or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John Object linking and embedding was a way locally on your PC to embed a graph and an Excel spreadsheet

⏹️ ▶️ John inside a Word document, but there was no web involved there. I don’t even know how well he worked under the covers

⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of if you emailed that document to somebody. It was mostly in a pre-internet

⏹️ ▶️ John tidal wave era, if not chronologically, then at least psychologically.

⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s always fraught. People on the other end would have to have the application and so on and so forth. And this is more web world,

⏹️ ▶️ John where Office 365 or Microsoft 365, whatever it’s called now, can all be online.

⏹️ ▶️ John content lives in the web, and the content is wherever you need it to be in any combination

⏹️ ▶️ John that you need it to be with access to all the tools that all the tools that you would expect from Microsoft

⏹️ ▶️ John Office to be able to modify that and look at it and so on and so forth. And it’s more complicated than that in terms of sharing

⏹️ ▶️ John and identities and I’m sure they want you to have an Office 365 subscription to do all this and yada yada

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s the business model side of it so on and so forth but technologically speaking it is a modern way

⏹️ ▶️ John to make the application less important and make it easier to

⏹️ ▶️ John mix and match content that you can make with Microsoft’s applications. It seems like it’s also like

⏹️ ▶️ John an open standard that third party people can make to put content from their application and mix it all together. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John know if it only gets mixed within Office documents or if people can make their own things as well. But

⏹️ ▶️ John the reason it’s, you know, in my scrambled explanation of what I think Fluid

⏹️ ▶️ John is, the The reason I put this in here is because it reminds me so much of OpenDoc in some ways

⏹️ ▶️ John and in other important ways it’s different. So OpenDoc is something I know a little bit more about and I think it’s interesting to compare the approaches

⏹️ ▶️ John here. OLE I know less about, maybe Marco can talk about that and if he knows more about it than I do, tell

⏹️ ▶️ John me how this compares. OpenDoc was around the same time as OLE. I forget,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, I’m not good with dates, but OpenDoc was a long time ago, like 90s maybe? It was

⏹️ ▶️ John another one of those ambitious technologies from the 90s Apple that didn’t really go anywhere. It had a bunch of good

⏹️ ▶️ John ideas. Implementation was so-so. Steve Jobs came back and killed it and people were mad.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco There’s a whole

⏹️ ▶️ John bunch of things in that bucket. But OpenDoc is one of them. And the paradigm of

⏹️ ▶️ John OpenDoc was that, again, rather than starting with an application, instead

⏹️ ▶️ John it would be a document-centric model where you would start a document.

⏹️ ▶️ John And if that document needed to have text, you would use an OpenDoc component

⏹️ ▶️ John of a word processor and you could write text in the document. And if that document needed to have graphics, you could

⏹️ ▶️ John use the Adobe Photoshop. I’m not getting the terms right, but like, I don’t know what they were called, OpenDoc components.

⏹️ ▶️ John I know the OpenDoc document thing was like a container. I forget what the other things were called. Anyway, you can look it up.

⏹️ ▶️ John But you would pull in tools and people would make these tools and you’d just be working on this one rich document and you’d

⏹️ ▶️ John be able to select the best graphics editor, the best graphing tool, the Bex word processor or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ John and pull in their capabilities into the document you’re working on. The document you’re working on would be

⏹️ ▶️ John filled with content created by these other tools that are made by a selection of vendors and the vendors would

⏹️ ▶️ John compete against each other to provide the best drawing tool that you would use. So again, rather than having to start with

⏹️ ▶️ John the application and work there and then export portions of it and import it into another application, you’d

⏹️ ▶️ John always be working in your document and the functionality was sort of gather around it

⏹️ ▶️ John on the outside. And there are a lot of reasons that OpenDoc failed. Part of it has to do with the fate of Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John and it was overextended and it was almost going out of business and they needed to simplify and so on and so forth. But even

⏹️ ▶️ John if none of that had been true, I think the biggest reason OpenDoc was doomed to failure was that

⏹️ ▶️ John it was a model that made potentially some sense from the user’s

⏹️ ▶️ John perspective that hadn’t been proved out. But in theory, you could say, I can see how this would be better for users because, you know, being Solid

⏹️ ▶️ John into applications is annoying, right? But it didn’t make any sense for the software

⏹️ ▶️ John makers of the day. If you are Adobe, you don’t want Photoshop’s functionality

⏹️ ▶️ John to be just another competing tool surrounding this OpenDoc container, and you have

⏹️ ▶️ John to compete with other vendors doing similar things. You want to control the horizontal and the vertical and be Adobe

⏹️ ▶️ John Photoshop, an application where you go to get all your stuff done and that you pay through the nose for, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John And same thing for every other vendor. it was to their advantage to sell you an application.

⏹️ ▶️ John They didn’t want to have to compete, they didn’t want each one of their little components, their vector drawing tool, their

⏹️ ▶️ John bitmap drawing tool, their smart erase tool, like whatever functionality that their app

⏹️ ▶️ John exposed, they didn’t want to have to compete, have that functionality compete with,

⏹️ ▶️ John say a dedicated company that just does in modern terms, like machine learning erasing of people from photos,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? Photoshop has that feature within it, but they didn’t wanna have to compete one-to-one

⏹️ ▶️ John with a three-person company, and the only thing they make is the world’s best machine learning eraser person

⏹️ ▶️ John from a photo tool. That doesn’t help Adobe. They want to get you into Photoshop and say, well,

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe not every single one of the tools in Photoshop is best in class, but taken as a whole, Photoshop

⏹️ ▶️ John is best in class for image editing. Therefore, pay us lots of money, right? And that, I never

⏹️ ▶️ John heard a convincing explanation from Apple, not in the 90s when I was following all this stuff, and not in the future of how

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple was going to sell the rest of the industry on this idea. Maybe you could say it would help like the little,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the small developer. You look, you’re never gonna make a Photoshop competitor, but you might be able to make

⏹️ ▶️ John a special purpose tool that just has the drawing tools that people need in this context. And in this context

⏹️ ▶️ John of OpenDoc, you can compete against that tiny fraction of Adobe’s functionality. But

⏹️ ▶️ John in the end, it was building on top of what was then a single platform thing for a minority platform.

⏹️ ▶️ John And you would never get the big players on board. It’s the same reason, you know, Next didn’t fly. It’s the same reason,

⏹️ ▶️ John well, one of the reasons Macs didn’t fly, and the same reason that the original Mac OS X, Mac OS X server

⏹️ ▶️ John initiative, like basically the Rhapsody initiative, actually before that, they couldn’t get people on board. Adobe

⏹️ ▶️ John wasn’t gonna port Photoshop to Cocoa. Microsoft wasn’t gonna make Office for Cocoa. And so

⏹️ ▶️ John they had to do the Mac OS X initiative with Carbon that allowed them to port their existing code without having to rewrite it all.

⏹️ ▶️ John And that was a fairly minor thing compared to, hey, Adobe, stop making Photoshop

⏹️ ▶️ John and instead make, God, I wish I knew the term for this chat room. Can someone tell me what the hell the things were called in OpenDoc that weren’t the containers?

⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, instead of making Adobe Photoshop application, make this OpenDoc component thingy,

⏹️ ▶️ John and then you’ll be one of a rich ecosystem of things that compete for our attention

⏹️ ▶️ John to work on our documents. Again, as the user, it might seem attractive, but it never fit with the industry. So bringing

⏹️ ▶️ John this back around to Fluid, it’s slightly different in the stuff lives on the web,

⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s slightly different in that it’s basically Microsoft. In the beginning, it’s Microsoft making, trying to make Office better,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? Having

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco these

⏹️ ▶️ John silos of Excel, Word, PowerPoint, so on and so forth is annoying, but practically speaking,

⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft owns all the silos. And so it’s kind of like, well, we’re competing with ourself

⏹️ ▶️ John here. If we could make one master Office application that does everything, we would do that, but

⏹️ ▶️ John that would be too bloated and too complicated. So instead, let’s try to componentize the content and allow us to mix and match more easily.

⏹️ ▶️ John And because we’re in the internet age, rather than using object linking, embedding, and files, and

⏹️ ▶️ John embedded content off of a single thing. Have it all live on the web, because we’ve got this big push for the web anyway, where you

⏹️ ▶️ John can edit on the web, you can edit it locally, you can use the applications that we offer. And also, by the

⏹️ ▶️ John way, have a third-party story, which lets other companies participate in this ecosystem. But

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think Microsoft is afraid that someone’s gonna come in and replace Word or PowerPoint with their little tools that they do. They

⏹️ ▶️ John just want, you know, whatever, Lucidchart, or whatever, some small company, to be able to make their tool that factors in,

⏹️ ▶️ John although that’s a visual competitor. But anyway, I don’t think Microsoft is afraid of getting kicked out of

⏹️ ▶️ John its little thing because it controls everything about this experience. It controls the whole fluid platform. It controls all the hosting presumably,

⏹️ ▶️ John all the components, it controls the API, and it’s got all the best tools. So there is a third party story here,

⏹️ ▶️ John but Microsoft in the world of Office applications is still very close to a monopoly. So I don’t think they’re, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, the business model is something that I don’t have to explain to people. It just has to be useful for users.

⏹️ ▶️ John Assuming I get any of this remotely right, the final thing I’m gonna add is that my experience with Microsoft’s tools

⏹️ ▶️ John is that they always strike me as, oh, here’s a little miniature version of

⏹️ ▶️ John Word in this context. So, you know, Word documents and Excel documents can be viewed in a web browser now, but you can also open it in

⏹️ ▶️ John the native application. And every time I use like Word or

⏹️ ▶️ John Excel or PowerPoint point in its web incarnation, it feels heavy

⏹️ ▶️ John and slow compared to the sort of more web native born on the web, let’s say Google Docs

⏹️ ▶️ John alternatives. Granted, Excel may have more features than Google Sheets, and Google

⏹️ ▶️ John Docs certainly has fewer features than Microsoft Word, but Google Docs feels

⏹️ ▶️ John more responsive, better with multiple editors, more collaborative, faster, lighter,

⏹️ ▶️ John like everything about it. I don’t like the feeling of, here comes Microsoft Word, plop,

⏹️ ▶️ John right into your document.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, I get

⏹️ ▶️ John all the tools of Microsoft Word, all the quote unquote power of Microsoft Word, and everything is so slow

⏹️ ▶️ John and just difficult and takes a long time to draw and scrolling is slow and

⏹️ ▶️ John it just feels heavy.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s what OLE was, by the way. Like, that’s what, like in the 90s with OLE, like, that’s how it felt. Especially

⏹️ ▶️ Marco back then, that was the era of no RAM and constant hard drive grinding for everything. So I remember

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the very few times that I tried, like, I can embed a spreadsheet into my Word document.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, it would ground everything to a halt, and things would crash, and it was a mess.

⏹️ ▶️ John And we have more resources now, but it just feels heavy. Like, the thing is, Microsoft has

⏹️ ▶️ John some assets. It has these applications. It has the tools and features that the world

⏹️ ▶️ John values. They want powerful applications to do these individual tasks. But every time they try to mix

⏹️ ▶️ John them together, It’s not free to get all of Word’s functionality suddenly appearing in

⏹️ ▶️ John Outlook. There’s a reason Outlook for years and years has had this little miniature text editing environment that

⏹️ ▶️ John is not the full-fledged Microsoft Word. And when you bring in the full-fledged Microsoft Word, even if it’s through

⏹️ ▶️ John this little square that stuff is hosted on the web, and it just feels heavy.

⏹️ ▶️ John And mixing more of those things together does not make the experience lighter. It only makes it heavier.

⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe it doesn’t make it as heavy as OLA, but it just feels sort of slow

⏹️ ▶️ John and clunky and heavyweight. It doesn’t encourage me to use it. Unlike, for example, the experience

⏹️ ▶️ John of using Google Docs, especially in the beginning. Oh, there’s this document, and we can all be in at the same time.

⏹️ ▶️ John Hey, I can see you typing, and I’m typing at the same time. Look at us, we’re typing together. I mean, Sadiq did that ages ago,

⏹️ ▶️ John but like the web version of that. That is the key experience. That little game loop is the key

⏹️ ▶️ John experience of Google Docs, and the fact that you can add comments, and you can share and it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John a reasonable, basic featured text, word processing application.

⏹️ ▶️ John And you can embed things from, you know, Microsoft, there’s a little

⏹️ ▶️ John drawing thing and you can embed lucid charts, like I mentioned, because these are the things I use at work, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John It does feel heavier when you start adding other stuff, but at no point has it ever felt as heavy as

⏹️ ▶️ John merely using a Microsoft Word document on the web, let alone embedding it in other things. Now maybe this fluid

⏹️ ▶️ John stuff is faster. It’s a new architecture for multiple edits and syncing changes and all that other

⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. But based on what I’ve seen pre-fluid of how Microsoft handles

⏹️ ▶️ John simultaneous edits, of how they handle comments, of how they handle tracking changes,

⏹️ ▶️ John every aspect of the Microsoft experience, though it may have more features than the Google experience, it always

⏹️ ▶️ John feels heavier and slower. And I think that is a big problem for a Microsoft to tackle. So I really hope

⏹️ ▶️ John this fluid approach lets them lighten up their applications and improve the

⏹️ ▶️ John protocols that previously they couldn’t. Because this in some ways is a little bit of a clean break, because I

⏹️ ▶️ John think the fluid stuff, starting off with very limited functionality and limited context, and will expand out from there.

⏹️ ▶️ John And if they can implement that in an efficient way, it will actually make everybody’s

⏹️ ▶️ John life easier, including my life at work. So I hope they succeed, but I’m not particularly optimistic.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So a couple of interesting things about OpenDoc that I didn’t know. First of all, one of the code

⏹️ ▶️ Casey names was apparently Amber, which is funny because that’s the code name for SwiftUI.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And additionally, the OpenDocs subsystem was initially released to run on System 7.5 and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey later on, on OS2 Warp 4. Hell yeah. Nice. I always like a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey good OS2 Warp reference. Always makes me

⏹️ ▶️ Marco happy. You were one of its only users.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it was me and Guy English. We were the only ones.

⏹️ ▶️ John They were called components, I guess. I’m looking at the Wikipedia page. OpenDoc components, containers and components, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Either of you two ever use CyberDog? Nope.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like I recognize the name, but I don’t recall what it was.

⏹️ ▶️ John It was a web browser, an OpenDoc based web browser. Apple made a bunch of OpenDoc,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if they were components or containers, OpenDoc things they made to demonstrate the technology, and one of them was a web browser.

⏹️ ▶️ John This is back in the day when the idea of making a web browser wasn’t a Herculean

⏹️ ▶️ John undertaking that you can’t imagine. It’s like making simple text. or like a basic text editor.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, that’ll be a good example application. Can you imagine doing a web browser as an example application for

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco literally anything? It’s like

⏹️ ▶️ John the most complicated application I ever have on our computer, basically, in terms of features and legacy. But

⏹️ ▶️ John they did, the web was simpler then. Cyber Dog, not a great name for a web browser. It was also

⏹️ ▶️ John not a great, even by the standards of the day, it wasn’t a great web browser. Like, no one was gonna use Cyber Dog instead of Netscape

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever the contemporary actual thing was. I think it was the time when they thought the web was

⏹️ ▶️ John simple. it’s like, oh, HTML, paragraph tags, bold, italic, I’m done, right? Oh, images, now

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m really done, right? Maybe not, CyberDog, sorry. But it did have a cute dog,

⏹️ ▶️ John Gravik, and a silly name.

#askatp: Our Wi-Fi setups

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, I’m gonna do some ask ATP. Let’s do it. Okay, Benjamin Sharbo

⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes. I recently bought my family’s first house and I’m doing well Congratulations, and I’m doing research to figure

⏹️ ▶️ Casey out the best Wi-Fi and networking setup I know that you’ve talked about liking euro in the past But with Wi-Fi 6 becoming more

⏹️ ▶️ Casey mainstream countless new mesh networks available and ISP speeds increasing I was curious what you three were

⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing for your home networking these days how much bandwidth what routers etc for me I got comped

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in euro system when they were sponsoring originally and And I’ve been using

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that ever since, and it works really well. I mean, they didn’t sponsor this episode,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but they have sponsored in the past. But the truth of matter is, it really does work really, really well. And I really do like it quite

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a bit. I can never get their naming right though. I’m trying to figure out exactly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I have. So I have one Eero Pro and two

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Eero Beacons. And my house is something like 2,200 square feet. And I probably

⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t need both beacons. I might not even need any of the beacons, but it came as a pack at

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the time. And it works really, really, really well. I like the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey app. I have no particular complaints about the app. I have gigabit, a symmetric gigabit service to the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey house. And especially via ethernet, I can never say that I have any particular

⏹️ ▶️ Casey qualms about it. Via wifi, it’s more than sufficient as well. So it’s been

⏹️ ▶️ Casey going really well for me. I’d like to save Marco for last. John, what are you doing for internet

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in your house?

⏹️ ▶️ John So the question is, part of the context of this question is like emerging standards, the new Wi-Fi standards.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Ah, yes, yes,

⏹️ ▶️ John yes. The mesh networks and stuff like that. But like the most important thing for me

⏹️ ▶️ John in my house related to networking is that it be reliable. I have wired networking

⏹️ ▶️ John to basically everything where I care about speed. All of my desktop computers are wired. All my game

⏹️ ▶️ John consoles are wired. My television is wired. like have actual ethernet running to all those things. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John only a gigabit, right? Because I just have gigabit switches and cat six

⏹️ ▶️ John cable everywhere or whatever. So it’s not 10 gig, you know, whatever. Someday maybe that upgrade will come.

⏹️ ▶️ John But my internet connection is a gigabit and my internal house network is a gigabit. So it all basically works out. And then

⏹️ ▶️ John wifi is just, you know, for people walking around the house. I have, since

⏹️ ▶️ John I think I got the free Euro thing when they first sponsored as well. But since then I think I’ve purchased two complete

⏹️ ▶️ John Euro sets So I’m on whatever the most current model is. Mostly because I gave them away to family

⏹️ ▶️ John and I just kept upgrading my setup. But I have whatever the Euro Current product is. It’s three things.

⏹️ ▶️ John The one thing that the ethernet cable plugs into and two other things that I have plugged in elsewhere in the house. And that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John basically enough to cover my house. It’s not as fast as the latest standards are gonna be. I bet I could get

⏹️ ▶️ John even faster signals if I put in more of the base stations just because the

⏹️ ▶️ John way my house is set up and the lead that is in my walls apparently, I don’t know, I got an old house. It’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John great for wifi signal. But it’s good enough. Like occasionally, just the other day, I was

⏹️ ▶️ John watching video on my iPad in my bedroom and it was Netflix and it was breaking

⏹️ ▶️ John up. I’m like,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco what the

⏹️ ▶️ John hell? And I stop and I relaunch and it was just terrible quality. So I did a speed test and it was like 150

⏹️ ▶️ John megabits. So like, nope, it’s not my internet connection. Like my wifi is

⏹️ ▶️ John fine. It was some internet weather related thing. Since reliability is

⏹️ ▶️ John the biggest concern for me, I don’t anticipate upgrading anything until I have

⏹️ ▶️ John a reason to do it. Like, so eventually when Wi-Fi 6 becomes mature

⏹️ ▶️ John and all the products roll out or whatever, I will probably replace my Eero with another Eero system

⏹️ ▶️ John that supports the newer standards and has faster Wi-Fi. But I’m in no hurry to do that. Like, I basically just want

⏹️ ▶️ John it to work and have sufficient speeds for my needs, which is basically can I stream Netflix

⏹️ ▶️ John from any room in the house? Do my kids not complain about watching YouTube in their bedroom?

⏹️ ▶️ John If everything on that level is fine, I’m not looking to upgrade it. So my

⏹️ ▶️ John suggestion for dealing with the house is wire everything that you can wire, because wires are great,

⏹️ ▶️ John and then get a setup that works and don’t mess with it until and unless there’s a sort of

⏹️ ▶️ John a step change in speeds or until your kids can start complaining.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh goodness. Apparently they still do sell the pack that I got, which is one Eero Pro and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey two Eero Beacons for $400. Although apparently on sale three Eero Pros

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for also $400. The Beacons are super nice because you can just put them on a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey power outlet and it all just kind of figures itself out from there. But if you have, you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, ethernet throughout your house, you could do multiple Eero Pros, which is probably

⏹️ ▶️ Casey an even more robust solution. All that being said, Marco, you have some completely

⏹️ ▶️ Casey bananas set up if I’m not mistaken. So why don’t you tell us about that?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have the new nerd standard, well not even not new, the modern nerd standard of if you’re a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco super nerd about this stuff, you generally get Ubiquiti gear. And that’s what I have. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have Ubiquiti’s, and not their new easy consumer mesh thing, I believe

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they call it Amplify, not that. The other, like the Unify gear, where you have to buy all the components separately.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you have the security gateway or edge router as the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco actual router, which is only like a wires only device and then you plug that into a switch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you plug that into your wireless access point or a points, you can have multiple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco access points. You kind of assemble everything from components. And the total cost

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a Ubiquiti system is, you know, it’s up there, you know, you’re looking at

⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably $400 as a minimum to get like a nice, decent full home setup. It’s certainly not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco inexpensive. And it’s also fairly complex to set up. Now it has gotten a lot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco easier to set up in recent years. There’s, they now have much better like setup wizards and things,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you almost never have to go into super advanced settings for most people’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco home needs. But if you have specialized needs, that’s there if you need it. Like if you want

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to like jump into a command line and SSH into your Switch and change a certain thing, you can do that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been running Ubiquiti gear at my house. I did one big upgrade this past fall

⏹️ ▶️ Marco where I basically replaced everything with like a faster version of everything. Before

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I’d been running the same setup for a number of years and in both cases, the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco new setup and the old setup, I’ve had no problems. I’ve never had to reboot the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco router unless I had like a power outage and it rebooted incidentally as a result of that. But like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve never had a problem with my Ubiquiti setup that was solved by having to reboot the router.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That has never happened. And with almost anything else I’ve ever used, with the exception of Eero,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which I’ve used Eero at the beach, and I also use it, I set up my in-laws

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with Eero, and I’ve used it a couple, I think one or two more times besides that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that was fine, but I didn’t really, I didn’t use it for so long that I could honestly say like, oh this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco never has problems, because I wasn’t using it for like months and years at a time. But I can say

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the Ubiquiti gear, I can say that, I can say like I’ve I’ve used this for so long, it is rock solid,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I love it. That being said, if you aren’t a super nerd, you should probably just get something

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like an Aero, or whatever the, you know, I don’t follow the mesh router business that closely, so if the review

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sites all say something else is better this month, fine, consider that too. I can’t tell you one way or the other

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that, but if you are a super nerd, the Ubiquiti stuff is really cool. And one thing that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice about it, in regards to upgradability, is if some

⏹️ ▶️ Marco new standard for Wi-Fi comes out, Ubiquiti is usually not one of the first people to adopt it because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they mostly sell to enterprises and enterprises usually don’t care about that. They have different needs that are more about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco reliability and massive amounts of clients being supported on one AP and stuff like that. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when Ubiquiti does release access points that use the new standards, you can just replace your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco access points and not replace your entire router setup and everything. And so that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a pretty nice thing to have where you have it componentized. Similar to how,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for right now, like I have some issues with my iMac and it kinda sucks that it’s all in one and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t just replace a part of it. I have to bring the entire thing to the beach, et cetera. And if I had a Mac Pro,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would lose all my money, but I would have a more modularized setup, right? Ubiquity

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff is basically the Mac Pro of networking gear. It’s a modularized, high-end thing that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a little hard to figure out even what you have to buy. they’re making some advances there,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but like, it’s, it’s a very complex thing to get into. But once you’re into it,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is so rock solid that like you will never think about your network. Um, all that being said

⏹️ ▶️ Marco though, again, when it comes to new standards, I’m, I’m more with John on this. Like I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really usually care that much about when new wifi stuff comes out. I’m certainly not usually living,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco living on the cutting edge of it because almost all of my high bandwidth devices

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are wired. I too have gigabit networking wires run throughout different parts of my house.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anything that can be wired reasonably is wired. The actual wireless use

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on my network is usually not things like large file transfers. Like if I’m doing like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I need to move this folder, this 20 gig folder between my desktop and my Mac Mini

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for storage or for archival, like that’s going over wires so the Wi-Fi doesn’t help me

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. Where Wi-Fi does help is when you’re using phones and laptops and iPads and stuff

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that. But for all those things I don’t really need cutting-edge speed almost ever

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they don’t usually support it. What’s much more important to me is range and reliability.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If there’s some big advance that comes out that can dramatically improve range and reliability I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. But if it’s just about getting like you know peak transfer speeds higher

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you’re in ideal conditions, which I never am, then I don’t really care about that kind of stuff. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco haven’t looked too much into Wi-Fi 6 to see like, you know, what it’s actually making better,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I’m not really itching for meaningful changes in this area because everything’s pretty

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fast and reliable for me already with my current setup. It’s all, you know, I guess based on AC,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe in a few years once Wi-Fi 6 gear is really boring and mature, maybe I’ll upgrade to it then.

⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of componentized things, I actually do have one other component that I neglected to mention,

⏹️ ▶️ John mostly for laziness, but also because it’s a weighted component. So I have a Eero, and I use that for

⏹️ ▶️ John my Wi-Fi. But I also have the old Airport Extreme that Marco sent me, the tall refrigerator

⏹️ ▶️ John proportion one. No hard drive inside it, but that thing. And that replaced my previous Airport

⏹️ ▶️ John Extreme, which was the flat pancake Mac mini-looking white thing. And

⏹️ ▶️ John the reason I’d been using the Airport Extreme before the days of mesh network is because it was reliable and it was Apple-ish and yada, yada, yada.

⏹️ ▶️ John making it, the reason I wanted Marcos was because I didn’t want to have to set up all my

⏹️ ▶️ John networking stuff again. I used to be stupid and have all sorts of MAC address validation. I eventually stopped

⏹️ ▶️ John doing that, but I still do have IP reservations so I know the IP addresses of things in my house. And you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John I did have a surprising number of devices set up. And I didn’t want to have to reproduce that on the Eero. I

⏹️ ▶️ John could have. It has all the same features. It’s not rocket science. I just didn’t want to bother, right? So my

⏹️ ▶️ John quote unquote router is still my Apple, or the thing that Marco gave me, the Apple Airport

⏹️ ▶️ John Extreme that I imported my rules from my old Airport Extreme. That’s the thing that hands out the IP addresses. That’s the thing

⏹️ ▶️ John that connects to my Fios, you know, all that stuff. And then the Eero attaches to that,

⏹️ ▶️ John acting purely as in whatever they call it, bridge mode or whatever, as Wi-Fi, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John So I have my own little cobbled together ubiquity system here of like, yo, I have a separate router and I have separate access

⏹️ ▶️ John points. And it’s kind of dumb. And eventually if one of those components dies, like the Eero can totally take over. I just don’t want to

⏹️ ▶️ John re-enter all of those rules. So all this is to say that you can, you know, if you’re cobbling together

⏹️ ▶️ John your home networking out of just stuff you happen to have hanging around, you can do that. Like, and

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, networking standards as such as they are, like this Apple thing didn’t know anything about Eero or vice versa,

⏹️ ▶️ John but they all speak protocols. And I haven’t had a single problem with this setup. Like the only thing is

⏹️ ▶️ John occasionally there’s some new feature that Eero rolls out that I can’t use because I’m in bridge mode. Like I feel like Eero is

⏹️ ▶️ John indignant that I’m using it in bridge mode, but I am. And it’s fine. It works fine. Like I have zero

⏹️ ▶️ John problems with that. I don’t even know enough about networking to know exactly how it works. I just said, Eero, you don’t hand

⏹️ ▶️ John out IP addresses. Let the airport do that. And then everyone just shakes hands, and everything works fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, tell me again. It’s the Amplify line that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco you’re using?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it’s the other stuff. It’s Unify. So Amplify is basically like their version of Eero.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like how all the network manufacturers now have basically Eero clones of like, it’s some kind of, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco easy home mesh system. It’s not that, I’m using their Unify line, which is like, you know, the businessy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Got you, okay, I was trying to tell them apart and I was looking at the Amplify stuff and aesthetically

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it did not look like your aesthetic, but I was gonna go with it, so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco it turns out.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It might be good, I don’t, like, when I bought my setup initially, that was before they existed, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I upgraded, I basically wanted to upgrade within the same family of stuff, so, because I knew what it worked. The hardest thing with Ubiquiti

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is learning what you have to buy. Like, when you look at their components, you’re like, okay, well,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what is this thing? What’s the security gateway? What’s the cloud key? What’s, do it like, it’s very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard as a newbie to the product line to identify like, what exactly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do I need to have like a regular wireless router setup?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s not trivial. The answer, the answer is non-trivial. The new Dream Machine line makes significant

⏹️ ▶️ Marco improvements in that area. But before that, it was substantially more complicated.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t necessarily want to go into all that on the show, but would it be fair to say that you’ll put links

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to perhaps the bare-bones Marco-recommended products

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the show notes? Is that a reasonable compromise?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The only thing is that I haven’t used a Dream Machine yet.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know if it’s any good, but if it’s good, and it’s still a little young to tell, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even the home version, like the non-rack-mounted version, has a fan, which

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t love, but if the dream machine is good, then

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s going to be the new recommendation of like just get that and then maybe an access point or two

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to add you know coverage to your house, because it has a built-in access point, but you can you know you can have multiple access points,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just like euro and everything so like the recommended setup is probably going to be a dream machine

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and one or two additional access points, but it’s It’s just too young of a product for me to really know that yet.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Cool.

#askatp: Moving Xcode profiles

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jeffrey Wilkinson writes, I finally bought a new 16-inch MacBook Pro. That sounds familiar. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have had a heck of a time moving my development profile over. It’s horrible. Confusing crypto signing keys,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying to export my profile, and even moving over my favorite theme is terrible. Any advice on moving development machines? I ran into

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so much trouble that I revoked all my certificates and regenerated them. Things seem to work at the moment, but I’m rattled.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t done this because I’ve let Xcode manage my certificates and all that for both

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my apps. I remember going through this at work and I still have some

⏹️ ▶️ Casey scars from it. I don’t have anything constructive to recommend. And Marco,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are you doing all automatic signing on Xcode or are you doing your own manual stuff?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wish I could do automatic. Oh, you have CarPlay and things, don’t you? That’s it. It’s CarPlay.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I don’t know if they’ve changed this since last year. Last year at WWDC, when I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco definitely didn’t abuse my press pass to go to a lab a couple of times, I definitely wouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have asked somebody there, like this one issue of like, I wish that when

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have the CarPlay entitlement that you can use Xcode automatic signing. But as

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of last summer, I haven’t checked since then, I don’t know if it’s changed but it probably hasn’t, as of last summer,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you had CarPlay you could not use automatic provisioning. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was still doing everything the old way. And that’s increasingly hard. Like it’s funny, like you know now when you have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco an app that has say, you know, an extension for watch and an intense extension

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Siri and it’s a day widget or whatever they’re called and you like you have all these extensions well

⏹️ ▶️ Marco every single one of those extensions have its own provisioning profile so when you have to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco go create like a build of your app or when you have to renew certificates I have to generate like 11

⏹️ ▶️ Marco provisioning profiles for all these different parts of my app and I have to do all this every year

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because of course they expire after a year. So every year I have to do the whole thing again.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And sometimes, as Jeffrey wrote, sometimes if I have to install to a new computer,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes it doesn’t come over correctly. So Xcode has this feature. So basically, anybody who doesn’t know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you’re developing iOS apps, there’s all these signatures and public and private keys and certificates and everything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you generate and you work out with Apple so that they can verify that you are the one who made this app

⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually stored is in a series of keys and certificates in your in your max local keychain.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so if you want to move that or export that ability to be able to do write applications and sign

⏹️ ▶️ Marco them correctly from another computer, you have to export that stuff. And in the early days of doing this,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you just had to do it all yourself and it hardly ever worked and it was horrible. In later days, a few years into the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco App Store, they added this feature to Xcode that you could export developer profile and import

⏹️ ▶️ Marco developer profile. It would basically export all that stuff out of your keychain into like a package file that you could

⏹️ ▶️ Marco secure with a password and then you could move that one file to another computer, open it up,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco enter the password, and import all that stuff into your keychain. And that works much of the time,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but as with everything with Xcode and signing stuff, not all the time.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I have had to do exactly what Jeffrey said, which was sometimes you just can’t get it to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco work right and you just have to blow it away and revoke all your certificates and start over and make all new make

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it all fresh. If Xcode is configured to work automatically, I have found

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the few contexts in which I can do that, like I just did a forecast update, which I’ll talk about some other time. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a simple enough app that I could use the automatic stuff and it’s glorious. I love whatever

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can use that I’m like, Oh, just check a box and it just worked. It just fixed everything. That’s wonderful.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But there are still cases like CarPlay apps and like a few other exceptions where

⏹️ ▶️ Marco certain apps just can’t use it. And when you tell this to Apple people, when you’re, when you’ve snuck into WDC

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with your press pass, when you tell us to the Apple people that like you can’t use it, it kind of blows their minds. Like they’re like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh wait, what? Really? You can’t use it. And then they go ask somebody else. Oh, Oh yeah, I guess

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can’t. Wow. It’s like they don’t realize the pain we’re going through necessarily because they don’t deal with these things

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same way we do. Like they don’t, they don’t use the tools in these, in these same ways. It’s really a pain to not be able

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use the automatic stuff. And even the automatic stuff does occasionally fail, or it might,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s often problems where if you have two private keys that have the same name or similar

⏹️ ▶️ Marco names, or you’ve generated two keys on the same machine, two certificates on the same machine for the same company ID,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that could be a problem. Or if it picks the wrong company, that could be a problem. There’s all sorts of ways that can go wrong,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you have to just blow it away and recreate everything from scratch. And I wish I had a better answer, and I wish

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t have to do that, but that’s the answer.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, any other thoughts?

⏹️ ▶️ John I have no idea how any of this stuff works, and I’m terrified of it not

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey working.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I feel like my Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John Pro is like a Nintendo Switch back before the Nintendo Online Service, where your Zelda save game was associated

⏹️ ▶️ John with that switch. And if you dropped that switch in the ocean, you lost your save. That’s how I feel like my dev environment is.

⏹️ ▶️ John So multiple things. First of all, before I made my Mac apps, I had a bunch of Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John developer stuff. I’ve had an Apple developer account for years and years, decades, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John And I have development certificates for doing stuff. Like I made that Safari extension, and they changed

⏹️ ▶️ John the way Safari extensions were made at least once. So I have a bunch of residue of like my web developer

⏹️ ▶️ John certificate and my various accounts that I had various paid levels

⏹️ ▶️ John at different times. And then there was a Mac development versus iOS development. All that stuff is in there.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then I go make a Mac app and I’m like, so what do I need to do?

⏹️ ▶️ John Like I already have, I keep wanting to say ADC account. I already have my Apple developer account and I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John using the same one. There’s tons of stuff in my key chain. I don’t know what any of it is.

⏹️ ▶️ John I look at Xcode and I can see, part of it is because I know from watching

⏹️ ▶️ John WWDC for many, many years, but part of it is just the sense, you see the sediments of

⏹️ ▶️ John how it used to be way harder to deal with signing and that Xcode has slowly made

⏹️ ▶️ John it easier by adding more management screens and more things that are automated, but still

⏹️ ▶️ John at the edges like where Marco is, you can tell A, the manual way to do it is still there, and B,

⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes you need to fall back to that. I have no idea how the manual way works. The automatic way,

⏹️ ▶️ John so far, fingers crossed, has always worked for me, but I got an email recently that said, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John some of your certificates are going to expire. I’m like, please have a link that I click and it makes it, like,

⏹️ ▶️ John renews them or whatever, and it didn’t. I’m like, no, why can’t there be just, like, your thing is about to expire.

⏹️ ▶️ John great, make, do a new one, renew, like I don’t know, do the thing. So

⏹️ ▶️ John that, and I don’t even know what the consequences are of it not working, like if I let them

⏹️ ▶️ John expire, do my apps stop working in everyone’s machine? Can I just not make new applications? Can I not build? I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John even know anything.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The good thing is that like if everything expires or if you have to recreate new ones and you go and revoke your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco old ones from the Dev Center, the apps that are out there don’t stop working. They don’t break. but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can’t submit new builds until you work that out. So the good thing is, in that worst case

⏹️ ▶️ Marco scenario, if you have to nuke everything and start over, you’re not affecting your customers by doing that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All you’re doing is, okay, it’s gonna take me an extra half hour to get this set up today before I can actually submit a build.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Half hour optimistic.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, right.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, it’s not even clear to me when I’m doing it that that’s the case. I hope that’s the case. Intellectually,

⏹️ ▶️ John I can imagine it being the case, but I don’t actually know, so every step of the way is terrifying. And

⏹️ ▶️ John when I got that thing about certificates expiring, I don’t know why they were expiring. It’s not at the same cadence as

⏹️ ▶️ John my developer account, it’s some other cadence, because I had generated certificates at some other time, and I generated them like,

⏹️ ▶️ John where are they, are they in my keychain, are they in Xcode? When I go on Xcode, I see a bunch of crap in there, including

⏹️ ▶️ John identities of other people’s Xcode products that I’ve opened locally on my computer, and I always have to go in and change the team

⏹️ ▶️ John to my team, and then I, of course, they did the thing where I changed from my name to my LLC name,

⏹️ ▶️ John and there’s a bunch of residue of that lurking around. God, I have no idea how it works. So the

⏹️ ▶️ John idea of having to do dev on another machine, like this is the first I heard about that

⏹️ ▶️ John identity export thing. So that’s great. Now that I know that exists, I would try that and I would hope it

⏹️ ▶️ John would work. So all this is to say is that it’s clear that Apple has made this a lot easier and I’m glad they have

⏹️ ▶️ John made it easy as they have, but it is still, for me, one of the scariest parts of doing

⏹️ ▶️ John development just because it seems so much less like programming and so much more like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. Like it’s SSL certificates, the thing I at least know a little bit more about is just as annoying.

⏹️ ▶️ John Mostly because it’s like, if you’re doing SSL certificates all yourself, at least for me as a web developer, fine,

⏹️ ▶️ John like I can do it. But me trying to do SSL certificates through my like shared hosting plan ISP

⏹️ ▶️ John through their weird interface, it’s too mediated. And I feel like Xcode came from that place

⏹️ ▶️ John where you have to do a bunch of signing stuff, but it’s mediated through tools and servers and systems that you don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John control. So it’s all about playing by the rules of whatever system they set up. Like you

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t actually control everything from top to bottom, right? And if you make that system good, and the

⏹️ ▶️ John Xcode system is apparently, you know, is getting much better, it’s okay. But if that system is creaking in any

⏹️ ▶️ John way, or it breaks and you can’t understand why, the whole delete everything and start over,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, starts to become your only option. And honestly, I don’t even know how I would do that. Like I suppose

⏹️ ▶️ John if I just deleted everything, delete, delete, then I would just start at the Apple developer website and just start recreating

⏹️ ▶️ John things. but there’s so many different certificates now, like Mac installation, Mac distribution,

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple developer, like it’s very confusing. Again, I don’t wanna slam

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple for this being confusing because it is inherently confusing and I think they have made tremendous strides in making it easier,

⏹️ ▶️ John but there’s still a ways

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to go. Yeah, and I think, this might be an unpopular opinion, but I think this is made so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco much worse by the heavy use of keychain in this process.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there’s also, there’s two different levels of centralized repositories that are in use here.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Your signing keys and certificates are stored in Keychain, they have to be.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Your provisioning profiles are stored in this hidden Xcode directory.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like you double-click them to add them to Xcode and then they just disappear, they’re somewhere. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can find it at some buried deep within library directory if you need to find it, but it’s abstracted away

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from you. So these two different sources of centralized repositories on your computer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you can’t easily see where it went or how to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco change it or how to edit it. If you go into Keychain or that random provisioning profile

⏹️ ▶️ Marco directory, everything’s just a jumbled mess. You can’t see like what belongs to what project, what

⏹️ ▶️ Marco belongs to what app. It’s very hard to tell sometimes. I think that Keychain

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is basically the max registry. And I’m sorry

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John for all the people who this is offending.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Keychain is this centralized repository in the system

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that stuff gets added to and rarely taken out of. Things can have conflicts, things can have duplicates.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So many bugs and weird behaviors are related to keychain.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have so many problems that are keychain problems at the end of the day.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Windows registry has been widely criticized for decades, ever since it existed I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Windows 95 and above. been criticized because it was this centralized place before

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you were criticized for DLL hell and a similar thing of like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco these DLLs would be these centrally shared libraries and yeah you could it turns out

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you could have conflicts when that happens and you can have duplicates and clutter and all this stuff the registry has the same

⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem and keychain has the same problem and what I wish for Xcode went the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco way it does all that stuff I wish it could just you could just have a file

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that had your certificates in it. Like the way when you’re setting up a web server with SSL, like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you just have those certificates and files, and you just point the web server, say, use this, here’s the certificate file, here’s the key

⏹️ ▶️ Marco file, if it has a password, here’s how you can get that, or here’s, whatever it is, like, there are files

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the file system, and you can just point to it and say, here, do this. Because one of the ways the Xcode system falls down

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so hard with this is when you have multiple projects, or multiple companies, or you’re a consultancy,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you have a lot of different companies you create stuff under or in the context of this question, if you want to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco move it to a new computer, it causes problems, things break, things go wrong, you can’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have it like source control or whatever. It’s hard and it’s complicated because you’re dealing with these centralized

⏹️ ▶️ Marco registries of keychain and the provisioning, you know, directory and Xcode.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If that was separated out and it just was a file and the Xcode project could

⏹️ ▶️ Marco contain this file and Yeah, you know what, for security reasons, encrypt it the same way the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco export developer profile files are encrypted, and prompt the developer for the password on first

⏹️ ▶️ Marco use, and store the password in the keychain. And for every other use, you’re referring

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to that file instead of the centralized registry

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that for some reason we think is okay because Apple made it, but it has many of the exact same problems as the Windows registry

⏹️ ▶️ Marco does, and I don’t know any Mac power users who have I’ve never had a problem

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with Keychain. So many of my problems with Xcode and Signing are about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco using the centralized repository and picking the wrong identity from it. Because it’s trying to do some kind of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco automated magic from the centralized list of things that might have two or three certificates in it that might be similar but slightly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco different that were at a different time in different programs. It’s a mess. If they could decentralize

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that and just make that a part of the project,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you could still have all the same security by using that like, you know, local file encryption and then just storing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the password in Keychain. You’d have all the same security, but it would be a lifesaver

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for all the people who have to work with multiple computers or multiple companies or multiple projects.

⏹️ ▶️ John I like the idea of it being centralized to defend Keychain for a little bit. Like, I like the idea of there just being

⏹️ ▶️ John one implementation of this thing. Granted, you could say, well, it should only security sensitive stuff should be in there, not like the public

⏹️ ▶️ John certs or or whatever, but I like the idea that it’s all in one place. The problem of garbage filling it up is there, but

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t blame Keychain for that. Like, I don’t want each individual app to implement its own bespoke

⏹️ ▶️ John way to make like a package file full of stuff, some of which is secure and then encrypted. I want Keychain to

⏹️ ▶️ John exist for that reason, right? I just want, like, it’s up to the applications to use this

⏹️ ▶️ John sort of secure data store in an intelligent way. So if things are,

⏹️ ▶️ John if Xcode, for example, is putting things into the Keychain, but then pulling them out later based on heuristics, That’s Xcode’s fault,

⏹️ ▶️ John not Keychain’s fault. Like I understand Keychain gets the blame because you gotta go in and like, oh, I gotta delete this old certificate

⏹️ ▶️ John or I gotta, you know, import this thing that wasn’t imported. I didn’t realize I had half of this and didn’t have half

⏹️ ▶️ John of that. But I don’t blame Keychain for that. Keychain is just a dumb bucket for things and I want

⏹️ ▶️ John there to be a single one of those that presumably is implemented well on the system. And I don’t mind

⏹️ ▶️ John even if stuff in there that’s not security related is in there as long as it’s associated with a security thing. You could say there

⏹️ ▶️ John could be more features for more hierarchy in it, like keychain could use a little bit of attention. But when it comes to

⏹️ ▶️ John security focused repositories like that, adding features is tricky and you have to do it cautiously.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like, oh, shouldn’t there be relationship? And so I can see what’s linked to what and you can have metadata and there could be a hierarchy.

⏹️ ▶️ John But that complicates the system a lot. And keychain might be, you know, kind of old creaky code

⏹️ ▶️ John at this point or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So. It might be. It’s definitely old and creaky code at this point.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, I think it could definitely be improved, But I think

⏹️ ▶️ John Xcode’s use of it is the root of the problem. And the idea of splitting up,

⏹️ ▶️ John like splitting up the data is part of the problem that you just talked about. Like that Xcode stores some stuff in one place, but then Keychain stores the other

⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. If it was all in Keychain and it was all well managed, that would work well. Like the

⏹️ ▶️ John thing that mixes in here to make it even more confusing is this iCloud Keychain, which in theory makes your Keychain

⏹️ ▶️ John appear in multiple places. But as with anything related to iCloud and syncing that’s not extremely

⏹️ ▶️ John new, which this isn’t, and especially for things that are secure related. iCloud Keychain,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, to give an example, this is not a perfect analogy, but

⏹️ ▶️ John my son was dealing with his Xcode stuff and he wanted to continue working on his Xcode thing somewhere else.

⏹️ ▶️ John Thankfully, I don’t think there’s any signing involved because he’s not doing stuff up to a store or whatever, but he just wanted the same stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John on his other computer. And he had, unbeknownst to me, like his account had been created. I think I chose to do this when

⏹️ ▶️ John I set up his account. I turned on iCloud desktop and documents syncing,

⏹️ ▶️ John because I figured, oh, well, this will just let him see the same things he sees on the iMac as he does

⏹️ ▶️ John on the MacBook Air, right? He doesn’t have any important stuff. It’s just like some screenshots he’s got on the desktop, and

⏹️ ▶️ John it’ll be nice if screenshots is on the desktop in both places. So I turned that on, right? Then he started making

⏹️ ▶️ John Xcode projects and storing them on his desktop. So then he goes over to the other machine, and

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, is the Xcode

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco project over there?

⏹️ ▶️ John Because he doesn’t know what version control is. And I think we had the conversation

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco before.

⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, I’m like, that’s, yeah, I know you see it in both

⏹️ ▶️ John places, but don’t. That’s not how you share source code across machines.

⏹️ ▶️ John You use version control. And I feel kind of the same way about iCloud Keychain.

⏹️ ▶️ John Where it’s like, yeah, I know you wanna do development over here on this other machine, but some of the

⏹️ ▶️ John stuff is in that library directory that Xcode put there, but then some of the stuff is in Keychain because technically

⏹️ ▶️ John iCloud Keychain does sync it if you have it enabled.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like the stuff that Mark was talking about, like, oh, it’s great when Xcode handles it for me.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what I want. I just want smarter tooling to say, I can get the lay of the land. You don’t have to worry about,

⏹️ ▶️ John for whatever legacy reasons, Xcode might be storing some stuff here and some stuff might be in Keychain, but

⏹️ ▶️ John just give me like, you know, there is like a management window inside Xcode that says,

⏹️ ▶️ John here’s all your stuff. You’ve got seven Apple developer accounts, you’ve got 20 identities and provisioning

⏹️ ▶️ John profiles, and here they all are. I know where all the stuff is, and if some of it’s broken, I can fix it for you,

⏹️ ▶️ John and you can pick among them for each project, and just store it all, and I don’t care. I

⏹️ ▶️ John just want an interface that manages it for me. When that works, it’s great.

⏹️ ▶️ John When it doesn’t work, then I have to go dig in and say, okay, which thing is here, and which thing is there, and what do I do? I don’t ever want

⏹️ ▶️ John to have to do that, and I think Apple has shown that it is possible to get to that place

⏹️ ▶️ John where you just don’t have to worry about it for the simple to medium cases. They just need to go a little bit farther

⏹️ ▶️ John and then maybe revisit some of the implementation details. Like the idea of packaging

⏹️ ▶️ John up all that information in some kind of library or whatever, like they’ve done with the export, or

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe just the non-security related stuff, or maybe just even a bunch of pointers that say, here’s how it should be

⏹️ ▶️ John set up, go fetch this stuff from the secure places. And if it’s not there, sync it with iCloud Keychain. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want to make it sound like we’re slamming things. I just see the light at the end of the tunnel. Like, I feel like we’re almost there. We’re like 85% of the

⏹️ ▶️ John way there. We just need to do the second 85% or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ John the mangling of that saying is.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh goodness.

#askatp: Overcast for Mac

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, finally from Chris and Jay Niles, for Marco, does the increase in people

⏹️ ▶️ Casey working from home change the math around a Mac version of Overcast? While I still don’t listen on my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad, I’d love to have it on my Mac so I wouldn’t have to change my AirPods pairing for podcast listening versus video

⏹️ ▶️ Casey calls. Don’t distract him. He’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing a membership program. And I have a lot of more pressing Overcast problems to deal with as well.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, it changes it slightly, but not enough to really accelerate plans.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what’s holding back Overcash for the Mac right now is a combination of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco generally low demand, which this could be changing slightly, and the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco high amount of effort that it will currently take to make a decent Catalyst app, or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the even higher amount that it would take to not use Catalyst and make a direct-to-AppKit version of it,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco neither of which I’m super excited about right now. The first version of Catalyst proved to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be less capable and harder to make a good app with,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco than we had thought. And at this point of the year, we’re so close to WWDC

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and presumably better versions of Catalyst coming out, probably, that it doesn’t make

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of sense for me to start investing heavily in a Mac port

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in March or April or May of this year, instead of just waiting until June for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new updates and then making a better, more informed decision once we get to play

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the new tools and to see like, okay, how is Catalyst version 2? And if Catalyst

⏹️ ▶️ Marco version 2 is still terrible, that could inform things in a different way. If Catalyst version 2

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a heck of a lot better and easier to get certain things that are, you know, like of nicer usability

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and nicer quality and things like that, then I will be very glad that I waited. The reality is that’s only a few

⏹️ ▶️ Marco weeks away, really. It’s, you know, we’re talking about three, four weeks from now that we’re gonna hear all this new stuff and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be able to start playing with the new betas and everything, so we aren’t that far off. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco while it would be nice to be able to say, okay, hey, now, like, it would’ve been nice if in mid-March,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when all the quarantining really started in mass in the countries that use Overcast the most,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would’ve been nice if I would’ve said, oh, I should make the Mac version right now and have it out for this period. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that takes a long time. Like, I can’t do a whole Mac version from zero, which is where I am so far

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that front. I can’t do a whole Mac version that’s any good in a matter of weeks to be able

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get it out in time for people to actually use during the mass quarantine. I’m not gonna let a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco temporary world condition dramatically change

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my plans for a major effort to the app. Because even if I decided today, all right,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m gonna go all in on this, by the time I’m done with it, quarantining might be over, right? So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would be back where I started of like, while I just made this app for the very small percentage of people who want

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it under more normal circumstances. So basically I haven’t changed my plans yet because we’re so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco close to June and because demand is still relatively low even during this and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s such a high effort to get something good that it doesn’t change the calculus enough.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, thanks to our sponsor this week, Basecamp, and we will talk to you next week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause

⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. John didn’t do any research, Marco

⏹️ ▶️ John and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. And you can find the show

⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into

⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and T. Marco Armin,

⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t mean to.

⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, accidental, tech podcast

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so long.

Procedure masks, KN95

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t wait to go to the beach. I know I’m actually going to the beach like the way people think about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it like I can’t wait to go to the beach town. If I’m gonna be stuck in a house somewhere I’d rather be stuck

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a house there than here. Those houses are kind of close together.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Have you seen where I live? Like all the house like we’re not we’re not in like you know big spread

⏹️ ▶️ Marco out suburbs here.

⏹️ ▶️ John I know it’s cramped I’m just saying keep away from people you don’t have any streets even.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John There

⏹️ ▶️ Marco aren’t that many people there really so So this is one of the reasons we’re going in for June in particular because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just a lot. It’s kind of easier to quarantine there safely than it is here

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s much more pleasant to be there. It’s starting to get very hot here and walking

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with masks, like walking the dog with a mask is getting fairly unpleasant.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m still going to wear the mask because I’m not going to be a jerk. But if I can be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco somewhere that has a more mild climate with more fresh air and bigger expanses

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of open space, like when we go on the beach in the morning and late night, it’s for the dog walks when we’re technically

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not even allowed to be there with dogs, but nobody cares after a certain time. There’s no one around. I can get

⏹️ ▶️ Marco way more distance on an off-hours beach in June

⏹️ ▶️ Marco than I can get walking my dog here in my suburb here. And all the grocery

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stores there all deliver, and it’s easier to get delivery slots there than here because it’s a much smaller community and everything. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if for actual like responsible quarantine it will actually be in most ways easier to be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco responsible there than here.

⏹️ ▶️ John I found a lot of variability and especially in homemade masks in terms of how comfortable they are

⏹️ ▶️ John to wear and breathe through. We actually I think we got we got a Tom

⏹️ ▶️ John Bihn mask. We have a bunch of like commercial masks and ones that we made ourselves.

⏹️ ▶️ John And the Tom Bihn one was particularly not breathable and sweaty, which was strange. But yeah, if

⏹️ ▶️ John you have a mask that you’re finding increasingly uncomfortable in hot weather, there are other options, like

⏹️ ▶️ John just shop around or try different materials when you’re making them yourself. Again, we’re not trying to

⏹️ ▶️ John make something that is actually going to protect you 100% from anything. We’re just trying to do better than totally

⏹️ ▶️ John unmasked. And so if you can do better than totally unmasked with a material that does not feel like you’re suffocating

⏹️ ▶️ John in 90 degree weather, go with that because you’ll be more likely to wear

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Yeah, I have two recommendations. So number one, I agree with you. We

⏹️ ▶️ Marco also have the Tom Bihn masks. They are very nice, but they are pretty warm. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of the nice cloth masks are pretty warm. The good thing is that like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the medical industry figured out a long time ago how to make masks that are tolerable in all conditions.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you can, now you can actually start getting in reasonable quantities with reasonable

⏹️ ▶️ Marco shipping times, regular medical procedure masks. Those are the ones that are like square and they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have like the ripples on them. They’re not as protective as N95 masks,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you shouldn’t be buying those anyway, although there’s an asterisk on that, I’ll get to in a moment. But they’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, they’re kind of like a dental hygienist wears when they’re cleaning your mouth. They’re made to block spit

⏹️ ▶️ Marco particles, basically. The good thing is they’re much easier to get and you don’t have to feel so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad buying packs of procedure masks that you’re like denying them from a hospital worker, for instance,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they’re in very widespread supply now. So I would guess that it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco better for most people to get those. Those procedure masks are much more comfortable than cloth masks because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re thinner and they’re not as hot, but they’re also way more effective because they’re actually made to be medical masks.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They have the metal nose piece and everything. So those are great. Another option that you can do, which

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know if this is controversial, I apologize if it is, what

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I recently got in stock from a place was the KN95 mask type.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, again, I’m so sorry if I’m getting any of this wrong or if this is highly offensive to anybody. The gist, as far as I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, the gist of this is that KN95 is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco China’s version of the same certification functionally as N95. Different countries

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have different versions of this. There’s like a European one. N95 is the US’s certification. I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco healthcare workers in the US were actually not allowed to use KN95. they had to use N95, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re in very short supply, of course, as you’ve all heard. KN95, because it’s the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco China standard, I think the FDA wasn’t allowing it or whatever here, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a very good quality mask in general, like in absolute terms. Maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Marco US doctors aren’t allowed to or don’t want to use them, but as a home user, if you can get

⏹️ ▶️ Marco those, that’s probably going to be significantly more protective than a cloth mask. And because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re made for medical use and they’re made out of whatever the foam and cloth stuff, instead of just like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, stuff you make a t-shirt out of, like what you get from the cloth masks. They’re generally much

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more pleasant in hot weather. So I actually just got a pack of K95 masks the other day,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’ve only worn one once, because I had to go into a medical facility to get an allergy shot finally. So I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco figured maximum protection. If I’m going into a medical center, I want maximum protection right now. So I wore

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it then, and it was fine, and it was very comfortable, and it’s probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco way, you know, whatever you think of them for like doctors to use, I’m sure they’re way safer than cloth

⏹️ ▶️ Marco masks are for your people walking around. So again, I don’t know if

⏹️ ▶️ Marco medical workers are even allowed to use them here. So I don’t know if I’m like taking it from somebody who could

⏹️ ▶️ Marco use it in greater need than what I have by buying them, like the way you’re not supposed to buy,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the N95s, because those are in short supply, people need them. I don’t think that same thing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco applies to the KN95 ones. So I don’t know, anyway, that’s something to look into. Either get the procedure

⏹️ ▶️ Marco masks, like the big, the square ones with the ripples, or the K95 respirators, or not respirators,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just masks. Those are gonna be generally much better and more comfortable to use in hot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco weather than any of the cloth ones that you’ll find from anybody.

⏹️ ▶️ John My wife made some masks out of some old bedsheets that we had that we weren’t using anymore, that had just been

⏹️ ▶️ John stored in a box. It was one of the cheap sources of material, we used some old bedsheets.

⏹️ ▶️ John But the downside to that is old bed sheets that have been in a box in the attic for a long time have

⏹️ ▶️ John a tendency to smell kind of

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco musty.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I really don’t want to put that next to my face. The good thing is it lets me know

⏹️ ▶️ John that one of the symptoms of infection is that you lose your sense of smell. I’m like, well, at least I know I’m not infected because

⏹️ ▶️ John I can definitely smell these musty bed sheets and I think I’ll pass on this mask.

⏹️ ▶️ John We’ve made a lot of masks here, a lot of trial and error. And you couldn’t buy anything anywhere.

⏹️ ▶️ John It was a large mask-making spree.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And also don’t forget the eyewear component as well. This is an area that I keep forgetting to actually get

⏹️ ▶️ Marco some kind of safety goggles that I can wear if I have to go to a medical facility or something.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wore sunglasses indoors.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wear my sunglasses

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco at

⏹️ ▶️ Marco night. I apologize to every staff member. I’m like, I’m so sorry. These are the only glasses

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have. They all laughed, like, because I just, I look like such an

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ass. You’re too cool for your allergy shot.