381: Uncomfortable Truths

04 Jun 2020

Racism and police in the US, then some temporary escapism thanks to something we can always count on: Casey’s overly complex, misbehaving technology.

Episode Description:

• Black Lives Matter
  • 11 Things You Can Do to Help Black Lives Matter End Police Violence
  • How to Safely and Ethically Film Police Misconduct
  • How to Be an Activist When You’re Unable to Attend Protests
  • How to Protest Safely in the Age of Surveillance
  • Books About Race & Racism
  • Podcasts that Talk About Racism
  • Research-Based Solutions to Stop Police Violence by Samuel Sinyangwe
  • Trevor Noah’s Take
  • Obama’s list of resources and and ways to take action
  • Tim Cook’s statement
  • Equal Justice Initiative
  • Talking to your kids about race and racism
    • Talking to Kids About Racism, Early and Often
    • How White Parents Can Talk To Their Kids About Race
  • Some developers:
    • Ish Shabazz
    • Ashley Nelson
    • Kaya Thomas
    • TJ Usiyan
      • Layers 2016 Presentation
    • Lyndsey Scott
    • Tiffany White
  • Some books:
    • How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
    • Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
• Follow-up:
  • Netscape Navigator, Lynx, and atp.fm (via Alex Chan)
  • OpenDoc Parts
  • Windows has a clipboard manager (via Max Nuding)
• LAST CHANCE for the ATP STORE! Preorders end June 7!
• Casey’s TV issues
  • CEC - Consumer Electronics Control
• Android vs. iOS Speech-to-Text Speed
  • Initial demo (via Dave Mark)
  • Follow-up
• Catalina and SMB shares
  
  • The operation can’t be completed because the original item for {RootFolder} can’t be found.
• macOS 10.15: Slow by Design
  • Jeff Johnson’s follow-up about shell scripts
• Gaming MacBook Pro
  • Quinn Nelson’s Video
  • Game Sprockets
  • QuickDraw 3D
• #askatp
  • What view do we use in Finder? (via The Weakest Muscle)
  • How do we clean our screens? (via Stefan)
    • Volvo Genuine Microfiber Polishing Cloth for Digital Displays
  • How do we protect our kids from the internet? (via Peter)
    • YouTube SafeSearch
    • Cloudflare DNS for Families

Sponsored by:

• Linode: Instantly deploy and manage an SSD server in the Linode Cloud. New accounts get a $20 credit with code atp2020.
• Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code ATP for 10% off your first order.
• Tom Bihn: Now offering buy-one give-one Reusable Cloth Face Masks. On Monday, June 8, pre-order the excellent Synik 22 or Synik 30 backpacks.
  • Give a Mask Spreadsheet

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

Chapters

1. Black Lives Matter 🖼️
2. HTTPS sites in ancient browsers
3. OpenDoc follow-up: “parts”
4. Windows has a clipboard manager
5. Last call for merch 🖼️
6. Casey’s TV Trouble
7. Sponsor: Tom Bihn
8. Android dictation speed
9. SMB shares in Finder
10. Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
11. Catalina security slowdowns
12. Shaky gaming-Mac rumor
13. Sponsor: Linode (code atp2020)
14. #askatp: Finder view 🖼️
15. #askatp: Cleaning screens
16. #askatp: Parental controls
17. Ending theme
18. Post-show

Black Lives Matter

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So you two are probably slightly too young to remember this, but when I was a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kid there was tons of stuff like on TV and in books and everything about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster and UFOs. Did you catch the tail end of this craze maybe?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like probably the same books in your school library, but anyway I used to watch these things all the time on TV. It was like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Secrets of the Unknown or that thing hosted by Leonard Nimoy and they would, you know, talk about each

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one show about each one of the things. They’d show that same blurry picture of Bigfoot or they’d show that little like the silhouette of the Loch

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Ness Monsters like one or two famous pictures of that or like the UFO shows They

⏹️ ▶️ ^John would have like that same blurry picture of a hubcap or like these videos of lights going by or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know This blurry black and white photograph of something and I would just watch this stuff for hours Like they could do like an hour-long

⏹️ ▶️ ^John network special with like one photograph and they were just milk that photograph for all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it was worth right And I was fascinated by it because it’s like there’s these secret things in the world that nobody

⏹️ ▶️ ^John knows about but people have seen like they do tons of interviews like I saw the lights in the sky and it came down to the into the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John clearing in the woods and you know plenty of that but then just like the one picture right

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or like the one outline of Loch Ness Monster but all the tales from the people who are around the Loch Ness Monster they heard about it and you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know it’s we still do this I suppose with certain other kind of mystery things where you just stretch out a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tiny bit of content for like you know an hour at a time but if you had told like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know the kid version of me that someday people Like everybody would have a phone in their pocket.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You know, it’s like, we’re gonna get that Loch Ness monster now. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} UFOs will not escape us now. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the only reason we don’t have this footage is because you’re just out in the woods, you know, you’re on a camping trip. Who has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John their camera with them? Or if you have your camera with you, like it’s in your camera bag or something and the UFO goes by and you miss it, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Same thing with Bigfoot. You’re out hiking in the woods, you can’t get your camera out in time or who even has a camera with them. But as soon

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as we, you know, if you told me that everybody’s gonna have a camera, we are gonna have so many

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Bigfoot pictures. We’re gonna have so many UFO pictures. We will have the Loch Ness Monster, it’ll be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John documented in high-def video. It would be amazing. That’s what I would have said,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but of course, here we are today where pretty much everybody does have a phone in their pocket.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And what happened when most of the world got a phone in their pocket in the form of a smartphone,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or a camera, sorry, a camera in their pocket in the form of a smartphone, was we didn’t see

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tons more pictures of UFOs if we didn’t see tons more pictures of Bigfoot or the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Loch Ness Monster. What we did see were tons and tons more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pictures of police beating people up. That’s what we saw.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Not what you would have expected to see, not what the childhood me would have expected to see. And this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is not a new original thought. I’ve heard this many times in the past, but I dwell on it. I think about it from time

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to time because it is a strange facet of technology, right? From

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Rodney King tape, which I think was probably VHS or whatever the heck it was, to today’s smartphone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John videos of police brutality that we see everywhere online, technology has made what has been a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John reality for centuries visible to everybody. And I think most of us don’t like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what we see. This country has a racism problem and it has a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John policing problem. And whatever we’ve done in the past to fix this clearly hasn’t worked. We

⏹️ ▶️ ^John need to try something new.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, and I’m sorry if talking about this offends anyone. It’s not my intention and I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not anywhere near an expert in any of this. So I’m actually very nervous and uncomfortable to talk

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco about this. But that is a good thing right now. You know, a lot of us

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco need to be made a little nervous and uncomfortable right now because silence and complacency

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is worse. So I’m going to start by a quick comment on something that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco very uncomfortable for a lot of us to discuss, and that’s privilege. When I was first accused of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not acknowledging my privilege a few years ago, I didn’t know really what it was. I hadn’t really thought about it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I felt a bit defensive when people started saying that, as if I was being attacked unreasonably for something that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I didn’t even think I did anything. And I also felt that it denied

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the work I’ve done to get to where I am, because I come from a lower-middle class,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco single-parent family, and I’ve worked really hard to earn everything I have.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But a huge degree of privilege was under all of that. You know, I’m a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco white, cisgender, heterosexual male. I was born in the US. I was raised Catholic. I was put through

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco decent schools. Like there’s basically nothing about me that is widely persecuted

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco by any group. I don’t get stereotyped. I don’t get treated unfairly by pretty much any part of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco society. I mean, I’m a nerd. That’s never been great, but you know, that’s even that these days is fairly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco reasonable. And I had it hard growing up in various ways,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and so accusing me of being privileged felt like it denied me of the ways it was hard for me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And if discussions about privilege frustrate or anger you, that’s understandable because it’s uncomfortable.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s a whole uncomfortable truth under everything, but it doesn’t mean it’s not there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And we need to face uncomfortable truths a lot of the time. And privilege doesn’t mean

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that you you don’t have problems or challenges in your life. But it does mean

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that you don’t have certain types of problems and challenges that a lot of other people have.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And you probably don’t even ever need to think about those problems because of some inherent aspect of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco your genes or where you were born or who your parents were. And that is absolutely

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a real thing. Being privileged in certain ways doesn’t mean that your life is easy or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco perfect, and it doesn’t mean that you’re a bad person or that you need to apologize for who you are,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but it is a necessary concept to keep in mind that you have advantages that other

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco people don’t. And that part of your privilege is that you probably never even knew about it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco until someone pointed it out to you, because you never even had to think about it. Now, the flip side to that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is that a lot of people are unfairly disadvantaged in society merely because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of who they are. Now, I don’t need to be afraid

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to wear a hoodie, or go for a jog, or hold an object in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my hand, or be in my own house in my own bed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’ve never had to fear for my life if I saw a police officer. I’ve been pulled over

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a few times earlier in life for minor driving infractions, and I was never terrified

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that my life could be about to end. The last time I was pulled over was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a decade ago or more, and I was let off with just a warning. And now, I’m a white man

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in my late 30s. I am invisible to the police. Part of the immense privilege

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’ve been given is that I don’t need to think about the police at all in my daily life, except

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco occasionally if I see a cop I know, I’ll wave hello and they’ll wave back. Millions

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of people out there are not so lucky. Now, being a police officer,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know, it’s a risky and it’s a hard, it’s a thankless job. You know, they’re just people.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And many cops, possibly even most of them, are good people. I know a few cops myself and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they seem like good ones. They seem like good people. Some of our listeners are even cops, you know, you’ve written in before.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But there’s a lot of cops out there who are assholes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at best, and often violent assholes. Many cops out there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco act more like wannabe military soldiers who are battling against the people they’re ostensibly there to protect

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and serve. Like they’re at war against their own citizens. And even honestly, making an analogy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to soldiers here feels like an insult to actual military soldiers who are usually much better disciplined and probably more

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco accountable to their actions than bad police officers in the US are. And there aren’t just a handful

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of bad police officers in the US. There is something deeply toxic

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in police culture and their attitude and the power and political structures around the police

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that not only seems to prevent bad behavior from being punished or weeded out, but actually cultivates

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and protects bad behavior that’s there. And bad police officers have been

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco unnecessarily assaulting and executing citizens that they’re supposed to be protecting for decades,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco especially black people. And the system of weeding them out or bringing them to justice

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco does not work well enough. And when you think about the effects of an

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco under-accountable and an under-supervised police force. It’s especially damaging because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the police are where you go if someone is hurting or threatening you. So if it’s the police themselves

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco doing it, most people have no realistic recourse available to them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So because of the police’s role and their power, they don’t just need to be held responsibly accountable,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, for like a basic level of accountability, they need to be held to an especially high standard,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco way higher than average people. But instead, in most places in the US, they’re held to a much lower

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco standard than most people are. And nobody

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the US suffers more destruction by militant, violent, unaccountable,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bad police officers than black people. Now, a well-functioning

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco society tries to put everyone on a level playing field. They try

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to neutralize as many unfair sources of privilege as possible so that everybody has the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco same rights and the same opportunities. And I don’t know how anybody can look around the US

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and think that we are anywhere near that. We do not have a well-functioning society. We have a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of work to do in many different areas, especially how the US

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco treats black people. And a few years ago when the phrase Black

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Lives Matter came up, it’s such a simple and elegant and powerful

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco phrase. Black Lives Matter. It’s not about harming anyone. It isn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco about putting anyone else down. It’s a simple, powerful statement of fact that our society

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco unfortunately needs to be reminded of. Black lives matter. And hearing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that made so many people so uncomfortable and so angry

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that they had to immediately counter it with things like all lives matter or the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even worse police glorifying version of blue lives matter. And not only do those completely miss the point,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They actively fight against it. And that’s, you know, in most cases, that’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco people being ignorant. They actually intend to fight against it. Most people who are, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have a problem hearing the phrase Black Lives Matter are refusing to acknowledge that the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco US treats black lives as more expendable or less valuable than white lives. That’s a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hard thing to think about, but the reality, actual data from many sources over many

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco decades supports that. Nobody should have to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco assert that their life matters. But the sad truth is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that black people still do. And that’s awful. Nobody

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco should react negatively or defensively when someone else asserts that their life matters.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And yet that’s how a lot of people react when black people are the ones making that assertion. Our country

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is still extremely racist. We have an overtly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco racist president who empowers and encourages white supremacists

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in 2020. That is completely ridiculous, but it’s true.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We have an incredibly long way to go. Black lives matter.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And if that makes you uncomfortable to hear, you need to take a moment to examine that. You need to really truly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco examine why you have a problem with people fighting to get their society

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to behave as though their lives matter. Imagine if you had to fight to get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco your society to value your life simply because of who you are, and then consider why

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we let our society become and remain so dysfunctional

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that anyone needs to fight for their life to matter. Black

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco lives matter. Now, we have the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco immense privilege of being able to talk about tech stuff for the next couple of hours,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco providing us and you an escape from the really bad realities

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of what’s going on out there. So we’re gonna try our best to do it and to keep the show going as we’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco done every week for the last seven years. Try to make the world better

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with whatever way you can. Please, try to help. Try to become aware of what’s actually going

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on. Vote when the time comes to vote, and in the meantime, help any

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco way you possibly can.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, I, Marco speaks for all three of us in saying that Black Lives Matter.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I know that all three of us are deeply upset and concerned

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey with what is going on. We’re doing what we can by talking to all of you,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey amongst other things, to try to do our little part in making things better.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t know what to say to someone who finds

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that Black Lives Matter is a controversial statement. Like to me,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this is the way it should be. Everyone should be equal. Everyone is not equal, unfortunately,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but they should be. And I personally, now I will not speak for the three of us, I have no time

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or tolerance for people who feel otherwise. And I just wanted to thank both Marco and John

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for saying so much more eloquently than I could have exactly the things that I am thinking as well.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey To try to pivot this a little bit toward technology, the three of us thought it would be nice to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey read a little bit of a memo that Tim Cook had written to Apple employees about George Floyd

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and kind of what’s been going on. We’re not going to read the whole thing, but I do think there are a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey couple of passages that are really important. And it is coming

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey from a gay man who has certainly put up with his own

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey difficulties growing up and even today, the things that I don’t have to worry

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey about. Just like I don’t have to worry about being right, I don’t have to worry about being white.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I am a heterosexual, cisgendered white dude. It’s pretty easy for me. Life’s pretty easy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey by comparison. So I thought Tim’s memo was very interesting. Let me read a couple of passages.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey To stand together, we must stand up for one another and recognize the fear, hurt, and outrage rightly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey provoked by the senseless killing of George Floyd and a much longer history of racism.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That painful past is still present today, not only in the form

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of violence, but in the everyday experience of deeply rooted discrimination.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And he goes on a little later, to create change, we have to reexamine our own views and actions in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey light of a pain that is deeply felt but too often ignored. Issues of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey human dignity will not abide standing on the sidelines. To our colleagues in the black community,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey we see you. You matter and your lives matter. This is a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey moment when many people may want nothing more than a return to normalcy or to a status quo that is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey only comfortable if we avert our gaze from injustice. As difficult as it may be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to admit that desire is itself a sign of privilege. George Floyd’s death is shocking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and tragic proof that we must aim far higher than a quote unquote normal

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey future and build one that lives up to the highest ideals of equality and justice.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So Tim goes on to say, um, Apple is donating to equal justice initiative among others and offering

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a two to one match for employee donations in June. Uh, especially if you’re an Apple employee, but certainly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey any of you listeners, if you have a couple of bucks to scrape together, I think the equal

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Justice Initiative is a great place to throw a few dollars. And if there’s other ways

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that you can help, I absolutely think that that’s a great thing to do. Now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey John, particularly with a little contribution from Marco and I, has put together a whole

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ton of links in the show notes that all three of us recommend. And you can, as your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey homework, you can go through and look at these links and try to learn a little bit more.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I need to look at some of these links that I have not seen before and I need to learn a little bit more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We all do and by the way about the about the donation thing Like that’s that’s part of if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re listening to this a lot of people are like, oh I care about these things And I agree with you, but I don’t know what to do. That is a I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think that’s a common feeling What do I do? I don’t know what to do. We’re gonna do something like I guess I can tweet a hashtag But like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John honestly, what can I actually do? So that’s kind of what these notes are about and I was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John personally in a similar situation Like one of the things that I know I can do is give money, but the question is okay Oh boy,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I get money too. Paralyzed by choice. Look at all these different places. And it’s like, you just have to give it somewhere, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And what I personally did, not that I necessarily recommend this, I used Apple as a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John proxy to say, well, I bet Apple’s not going to give their own money to some fake fly-by-night

⏹️ ▶️ ^John charity that doesn’t actually do the good work that it claims to do. So I gave money to the Equal Justice Initiative.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Maybe that’s foolish, but like, honestly, it’s better than just being paralyzed by choice and being

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not sure if you’re sending it to the right place or whatever. Apple’s giving it to that. I didn’t get a two to one match unfortunately

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but that’s what I did. And these links in the show notes are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John trying to help answer the question of I don’t know what to do, what should I do?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And how should I do it? Like maybe you don’t want to or can’t give money but you can give time and you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or you can just learn about things or whatever. So there’s going to be a ton of links. It’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there are maybe better ones if you have suggestions you can send them and we can add to the show notes or whatever, or just tweet them to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people. But I think they answer a lot of common questions. I’m just going to go down and read the titles of them. It’ll help

⏹️ ▶️ ^John say what kind of links there are. First one is 11 things you can do to help Black Lives Matter and police violence.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Everyone loves listicles, right? Just

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} give me the list. And it’s not 10, it’s 11.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John How to safely and ethically film policemen misconduct. At the top of the show, we’re talking about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the ubiquity of filming. There are things to know about how to do that safely and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ethically. So there’s an article on it how to be an activist when you’re unable to attend protests

⏹️ ▶️ ^John If you can’t go to a protest you can do other things how to protect safety Protests safely in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the age of surveillance if you are at a protest, how do you protect yourself? We know that there’s tons of ways

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that you know third-party companies and the government can Track

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you and this will help you counteract some of that books about race and racism Here’s a big list

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of books if you want to sit down with a book and read and learn about this There’s a lot to learn and there are a lot of really good books on it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Uh, there are podcasts. Hey, surprise. You like podcasts. There are podcasts that talk about racism.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John 16 podcasts, another listicle. Like there’s a lot of them. Pick one. Uh, listen to a couple episodes, learn something. Uh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there was an interesting Twitter thread by a data scientist who has a bunch of research based solutions

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to stopping police violence, basically saying, let’s look at the data. Let’s look at things that have been tried and measure how effective

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they had been. Uh, it’s a little bit turns out, but there’s a lot of good data in there. Again, he’s a data scientist.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Check out that Twitter thread. And there’s also a big site that Obama put

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up, which is a similar type of, hey, you don’t know what to do, come to this site and we’ll link to a bunch of things. Again, using Obama as a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John proxy for probably linking to, you know, some charity that’s like a scam or a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John front or whatever, probably pretty well-vetted. And lots of links to learn more. And then the final thing I’ll add

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is, one of the other things that I’ve tried to make myself do as a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John benefit to myself and my family, but also to myself, is Find a way to talk to,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you have kids, find a way to talk to your kids in an age appropriate way about this issue.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Because if you don’t talk to them about it, no matter what age they are, like, unless they’re like an actual infant,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they know that something is going on just in the same way that like, if you didn’t talk to your kids about coronavirus, they’re gonna notice

⏹️ ▶️ ^John why aren’t I going to school, right? Kids know, kids know about this stuff. And if you don’t talk about it at all,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I feel like you’re missing an opportunity for both you and your kid

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to come to a better understanding of this, because I know it’s hard to talk to your kids about this. Like I know, I have kids, I try to do it. It’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John easy, but forcing yourself to figure out how to do that, how do you talk to a five-year-old about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this? Forcing yourself to figure out how to do that makes you think about it more. Like just like saying stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on a podcast makes you have to think about it, or writing makes you have to think about it. Even more so, when you’re talking to your own

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kid, you don’t wanna screw it up. Like you’re like, oh, how do I talk to my kid about this so they’re not scared,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and so they’re not like, They don’t have nightmares about it, but I do want them to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know, find a way. Practice between you and your partner,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you have one, to try to figure out what you’re gonna say, practice in your head. But I found

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that an important and valuable exercise. Obviously, it’s a little bit easier when your kids are older, unless they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really ornery teens. But either way, that’s my suggestion.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, and among other things I wanted to call out is in the show notes as well, I’m going to try

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to add, and I will tell the other guys that they will try to add

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey some links to some black developers in our community that you can follow, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey really just having these voices in your world and in your timeline can make your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey perspective shift. And I really recommend adding as many

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as you can, all of them if possible, and definitely patronizing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey their apps and watching their conference talks and so on. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey we will put some links as well in the show notes. There’s a lot here. If I remember, I also put

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey some book recommendations that I cannot vouch for myself, but I’ve been told are good. And I’ve been told by people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey who would know. So I would think that’s much better than an endorsement from me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So really, if there’s ever a time to let us three nerds

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey assign homework, I think now is the time to try to spend a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey few minutes and look through these links and see what you can learn because all of us, myself extremely included,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey have a lot to learn. And I think that although

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this is a terrible, awful situation that we’re in the midst of as we record on the evening of June 3rd,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I really pray and hope that it will be ultimately for the best and that good will come of it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey As far as going forward, this is important to us. We will not be making the show about this,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but it’s important to us and it may come up again. It likely will come up again and we will not shy away from talking about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it if necessary. But that being said, as Marco and John had said earlier,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey we want to provide some amount of release and some amount of entertainment

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for ourselves, for you. So once I give these two guys a chance for closing thoughts,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey we’re going to move on with a more traditional show.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m ready to do tech podcast now, I think.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah.

HTTPS sites in ancient browsers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Alex Chan writes, they were struck by something that John said on the last episode. John

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey said, if you threw the new ATP website, Netscape Navigator 3.1, it would die horribly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and it would look like nothing. Alex tried it and Alex said, it turns out what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey actually happens if you try to view ATP.fm in a very old Netscape Navigator is that it looks like nothing, because the browser gives

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you an error. The error that they got was, Netscape and the server cannot communicate securely because they have no common

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey encryption algorithms, which makes sense but it’s a bummer. That being said, Alex

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey tried the next best thing, which is what I would have tried, which is Links. If you’re not familiar, Links is a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey text-only web browser that is designed for the command line. And Alex

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey writes, but the site does work in Links and is fairly usable, including the flex box on the store page, which it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey looks straight past. All of those paragraph and unordered list tags have paid off.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I just think this is delightful. I don’t have any screenshots, unfortunately, but I do think it’s absolutely delightful.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, the thing I forgot about Netscape is that SSL slash TLS has changed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so much in the years between then and now that they can’t agree, they can’t do an encryption

⏹️ ▶️ ^John handshake between themselves. And so if your site insists on HTTPS, the browser can just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not make a secure connection to modern servers because basically the algorithms and protocols that were used

⏹️ ▶️ ^John back in the day are now all considered insecure and aren’t supported by good websites. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s a bummer,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but yeah. Yeah, it’s one of the weird things that like, it kind of, a lot of old devices

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco now, like a lot of older OSs, older laptops, older, you know, other devices, are just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco rendered fairly useless these days because of this particular issue. Like if you try to boot up an old OS,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it can still run a lot of old software made for it, but anything that involves the internet will probably fail

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because of this exact thing. And there’s usually no possible way to update super old hardware

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to any kind of software that would support, you know, modern SSL standards.

OpenDoc follow-up: “parts”

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey John, what is the component in an OpenDoc thing?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think the chat room might have gotten this in the last episode, and I just didn’t see it. But anyway, I was trying to remember what the heck the name of an OpenDoc

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thingy is that, you know, not the container, but the things that bring tools into the container

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that you can use to edit the document. And apparently the word I was looking for was parts, an OpenDoc part.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John According to, I think this is from Wikipedia, an OpenDoc part can be anything to a normal app that a normal application would offer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John For example, a spreadsheet part, a text part, a database part, and so on. So there you go, OpenDoc parts.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey The world feels better for having known that little piece of trivia.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the world should feel even better about this next one.

Windows has a clipboard manager

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Last episode, this is why I have to write things down. Last episode, when we were talking about clipboard managers,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I made a mental note to myself as we started to talk about it. Make sure you mention that Windows has one. And I didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John write it down. And we got off on, I was listening back to the episode and we got off on some tangent and I just followed that tangent.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You knew? Yeah, we collectively got off on a tangent and then I grabbed the tangent at the end and got off and I’m like, oh, well, I guess we’re done

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with the clipboard thing. And I never mentioned that, yes, Windows, like so many things, has built its own clipboard

⏹️ ▶️ ^John manager. I don’t think it’s enabled by default. I think it’s been there for a while now. But if you have Windows and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you want a clipboard manager that is part of the OS and is made by Microsoft, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there. Consult Google to find out how to enable it. I think maybe it’s just Windows key plus V or something. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’ll put links in the show notes to give more information about that. It’s a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco simple clipboard

⏹️ ▶️ ^John manager,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there. I can’t believe you knew about it, and you could have saved us from a week of getting the same follow-up over and over again.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} And you didn’t say anything. That’s why

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I made a note to myself. I’m like, oh, make sure you mention that, because you don’t want to spend a week getting here. And the reason I know about it, of course, is because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m spending time at Windows, which is basically my destiny launcher on this computer. That’s why I know it’s there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh my goodness, that’s delightful. All right, and then, um…

Last call for merch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I guess it probably falls to me to do this thing that’s slightly uncomfortable this particular week, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the ATP store This is the last week for it This the pre-orders will

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey end on the 7th, which is Sunday I believe in the evening. So if you would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like any of our sweet sweet merch Please feel free to go and throw a few dollars

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that that way

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This is after you’ve given to your favorite Black Lives Matter charity This is after you’ve bought a bunch of books about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John racism that you’re going to read and learn all about after you’ve done all of that. Exactly. If you still also want

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like an ATP mug or something, we’re selling them to the seventh. Don’t wait too long because it’ll be gone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yep. So don’t forget every single time somebody sends a tweet. Oh, is it too late? It’s too late. Isn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it? I forgot. Oh, I forgot.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s too late. The good news is the Black Lives Matter charity and those books. They’re on sale forever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yep. never too late for them.

Casey’s TV Trouble

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey One of my favorite things to do is to tell you guys

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey about why I’m a moron. And this is Casey’s Nitty-It Corner, episode number 379.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You don’t need to tell us,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Casey.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oh, oh no. Sick

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} burn, sick burn.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You can take that a lot of different ways. The fact that you chose to take it as an insult is just, I find insulting personally.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh God, this is going nowhere good. Okay, so we got a new TV

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on Cyber Monday this past year. So we got an LG OLED

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey 55C9AUA, which is basically the 55-inch 4K HDR OLED. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I really like that TV. I really do. It’s been really good to us. It works really well.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And after having it had it for, I don’t know, maybe a month, I finally got around

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to putting it on our Apple HomeKit Home. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey sometime shortly thereafter, although I don’t know exactly when it was, we noticed this thing would just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey periodically turn itself off. Which was really frustrating.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John JS Can I offer the, can I shortcut your story or do you not want me to spoil it?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey MR. CARRINGTON You always do this to me, but fine, John, shortcut my story.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John JS I don’t want to spoil it entirely. I’ll give you a second one, right? So I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^John actually had people ask me about this very thing. They say, hey, this is slightly different. Hey, when you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John turn off your TV, does it turn back on in a couple of seconds? It’s kind of the opposite of your problem,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? MR. CARRINGTON Weird. I do have that happen. And your story,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m not gonna spoil it, but I had the same thing happen with my receiver, where I’d just be watching TV with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my receiver, and then it would just turn off, like in the middle of watching a movie. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, of course, the receiver turns off, and eventually, like, just everything reroutes, and the sound starts coming out of the TV

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or whatever. And at first, I was like, I’m gonna have to return. There’s something wrong with it. Like, it overheats or something. Or anyway, I don’t wanna spoil it. Continue

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with your story. It will all be revealed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Uh-oh. Thank you. I appreciate your incredible self-control. So eventually,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey both of us, but particularly Erin, has had enough of this because she’s a normal human and doesn’t want to put up with my bull

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey crap. And so at some point she basically said to me, look, we either need to get this thing serviced

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or returned or what have you, or you need to find a way to fix this. So of course my natural inclination is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I was always an HDMI CEC unicorn. I guess my time

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey has ended and I no longer have my single horn on my head. I am no longer a CEC

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey unicorn. I’m a CEC everyman, and that’s the problem. Now, HDMI and CEC,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if you recall, is this thing. I forget exactly what it stands for. It doesn’t matter. But it lets various different devices

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey power on and off other devices. And for the longest time, even on my last TV, my 1080 TV,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it always worked. I never had a problem. So I decide, you know what? I’m going to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey go nuclear, and I’m going to turn off anything that even smells like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s something that would automatically turn the TV off. I’m going to turn, I’m going to turn off the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey auto like sleep thing, which I know is probably driving, driving John up a wall, just thinking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey about it. But I’m going to turn that off. HD by CEC is off. Everything’s off. Gets taken out of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Apple home kit home. Um, I forget what else I flipped off, but I flipped everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey off. And sure enough, it doesn’t turn itself off anymore. Now this is good

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey because that means it’s a, and I’m doing major air quotes here, software problem in the sense

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that, you know, some setting somewhere has screwed this up. I don’t know what it is, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey something somewhere screwed it up. So over time, I’ve been a little, I’ve been trying to perform a little more science

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and I’ve been slowly re-adding different things like the auto power off if you leave it on for a long time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And like, you know, idle. Um, I eventually added HDMI CEC and waited like a month

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and that wasn’t an issue. And it was the weirdest thing. I realized

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that only when the garage door raspberry pie was on the network. No, I’m just kidding.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That would have been kind of hilarious, but no, that’s not it at all. So anyway, so about a week ago, I finally

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey re-added it after having been off our Apple home for a long time. I finally

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey re-added it to our HomeKit home. And sure enough, just a day or two back,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it turned itself off.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Remind me again, I know I asked this when you first brought this up many shows ago, remind me again why you want it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on your, your, a home kit home thing?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would like to integrate it with something that mostly works most of the time and make it less reliable.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} he

⏹️ ▶️ ^John had a reason, was it just so you could like turn it off by voice? What was the reason?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, basically, so I could turn off by voice. Like there are occasions that I do not have a remote handy that can turn the TV

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey off. To be clear, it’s very unlikely and I can get off my lazy hindquarters and just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey go walk across the room and get the remote

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or get the clapper.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I should get the clapper. You’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey In any case, I mean, I part of the reason I got this TV is because I wanted something that had home kit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey just because I thought it would be like future proofing the same way I’ve made the speech many times. I would only buy cars that had car play

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey now. I have Marco because I want a future proof. I only want to buy a TV

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or perhaps future, you know, home electronics where relevant that have HomeKit support.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And you’re right, like your implied statement here is that I don’t need HomeKit. Yeah, correct.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey No argument, but I wanted it. And so it turned itself off the other day

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as we were watching it. And I was upset and Aaron, of course, bounces all over me. Look, see, see,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I told you. And, and, but I said, well, wait, hold on. This is the first time it’s happened.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I don’t know what it was about this particular moment, But it occurred to me,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey wait a second, it is exactly 6.40 PM, which to any

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey other family on the planet means nothing, but to the List family means something. Because at exactly 6.40

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey PM, HomeKit runs our nighttime automation.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t recall ever having added

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey RTV to that automation, but sure enough, when I went into whichever one of the 17

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey different places you can find a home kit automation and found the good night or go to bed or whatever it was called automation.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Sure enough, guess what was there? Turn the TV off. And so finally,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think I’ve solved my problem. And the TV, since I’ve done that just a few days ago, has not just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey randomly turned itself off for no reason. And I bring all this up because I was really scared to ask Federico,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey who I think has the same TV, Marco, I think you have the same TV. I didn’t want to ask anyone, do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you have this problem? Because because I really had this creeping suspicion that it was something dumb I had

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey done. Now, in my defense, like I said, I don’t think I knowingly or willingly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey added it to the goodnight automation, but I do think I am using the canned

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey goodnight automation, and it is very possible, I don’t know this for sure, but it is possible that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey adding a TV to your home automatically sucks it into the goodnight automation

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and tells it to turn itself off. If that’s not true, it’s okay. But I wanted to bring this up as kind of a PSA.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey If you are also having random issues like this with one of your devices, hey,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey maybe check out your HomeKit automations. It might be there. In summary, I’m an idiot.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, well, so the heading of this item says, “‘Casey is a moron,’ so I thought for sure it was just the sleep timer, which is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a feature that like every TV has had forever. Basically, you can tell it to turn itself off after

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a certain period of time or at a certain time. Like televisions have had this for decades,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? why my receiver has something similar where it’s like, it’s basically like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a timer. Like once you turn the receiver on, after X number of minutes, it will turn itself off. As a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John way to prevent it from just being on all night, if you just go to sleep and forget about it, it’ll turn itself off.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But I never set this timer, and out of the box it was set for like three hours. And if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John watching some TV and then you put on a movie, depending on how much TV had been watched before that, you could

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be in the middle or towards the end of the movie and it will just shut off. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John terrible default.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t understand why that was the, I mean, I think it was pretty long. Maybe it was like three hours or whatever, but you know, back before the kids

⏹️ ▶️ ^John were totally addicted to their iPads, they actually used to sit in front of the television and watch stuff, and then you’d come over and you’d watch stuff after they go to bed, and it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John totally plausible the television, you know, the receiver at least, could be on during that whole time. Anyway, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just fixing that timer was like one of the things I did in the first month I had it, which was refreshing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The, as for the thing I mentioned before, of like, hey, when you turn your television off for the remote, sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John does it turn right back on? I have a theory on that. I don’t know what’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John causing it, but I’m using my TiVo remote to turn my television on and off. You can train the TiVo remote

⏹️ ▶️ ^John either by entering a code or like it has a learning feature. Anyway, you can use the TiVo remote to control features

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of your television pretty much no matter what brand it is. And the TiVo remote has a power button on it. And what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I always assume is happening is I press the power button and the TiVo remote

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sprays out a bunch of IR stuff. It’s like, all right, any Panasonic TV anywhere in my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John vicinity, turn off now. And the first little bit of that spray turns

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my TV off. And then like I put the remote down on the end table and the last little bit of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the spray turns it on. That’s my theory. I can’t prove it. And I don’t know, like if I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like put my hand over the IR part right after the TV turns off, does it not happen? And it doesn’t happen every time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It happens like once every three months and you start thinking you’re crazy. So I don’t have a solution to that one, but it’s not a sleep

⏹️ ▶️ ^John timer. And then the great thing is, if you pick up the remote and press the button again, it just turns off and stays

⏹️ ▶️ ^John off. Like, it’s like, I just did that. Am I holding the button down too long? It’s very mysterious.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And no, it is not CEC because there’s no CEC in my household.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Have we forgotten to ask Casey why he goes to bed at 6.40 p.m.?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} He’s got young kids.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Don’t you remember? He’s not going to bed. He’s hoping.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} He’s hoping

⏹️ ▶️ ^John against hope because he is in denial, like all children, like all parents of young children, in denial that they’re gonna keep going

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to bed around that time. And it’s like, guess what, Casey? time of your life is rapidly ending. So, so much for we’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have the evening to ourselves because we’ll put the kids down and they’ll be down by 7 15 and the whole evening will stretch

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out before us. Those days are ending. Don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey even don’t tell me these things because I know that you’re right. I know you’re right, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} I am. Has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Declan stopped napping yet?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yes, but he has an hour of rest time every

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} day.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I remember the rest time years. Yeah, that’s that’s more that’s like bargaining. How about you just have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John quiet time? It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like we We just need a break. Yep, that’s exactly right. And so far, he seems mostly okay with it. He just basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey has the run of the house, do whatever he wants. What’s deeply alarming is that I think Michaela’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey starting to drop her nap and that, oh, I just don’t even want to think about

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s only a matter of time before they’re trying to figure out how to do donuts with your front-wheel drive hatchback.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Excuse me, sir. Excuse me, sir. How dare you blaspheme

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey my car like that? It is a Haldex all-wheel drive system that is extremely front biased,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} but it can, thank

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you very much, push torque to the rear wheels.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You jerk. So you’ve got the best of both worlds. You’ve got torque steer and the inability to do easy donuts.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, stop it, you. It’s not torque steer. The inability to do easy donuts, that is correct.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John If you just go reverse, tell Declan. I was

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} about to say,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at least I’m not doing reverse donuts like you are. Your car doesn’t even have a locking front

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey diff, does it? I don’t think it does. No. Of course not. You can do that single burnout.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You can’t leave 11s’s, you leave ones’s.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oh God. I put the power to the road, Casey. It’s all about efficiency.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh God, I can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} even. I cannot even right now. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John want to waste that power destroying my tires.

Sponsor: Tom Bihn

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey We are sponsored tonight by Tombin. Let me tell you, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like my Apple stuff a lot, but I love my Tombin stuff. I have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey their cadet kind of briefcase laptop bag. I have their co-pilot carry on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey kind of laptop bag, two of their parental unit diaper bags, and I also

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey have two of their reusable cloth face masks. Because for the last couple of months, Tombin has been making

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey guess what reusable cloth face masks. Each of these masks is $13, and for everyone that’s purchased, they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey donate one. These masks have comfortable, stretched, non-elastic ear loops. They have a customizable,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey conforming nose bridge, so you can get it nice and tight around your nose. They have two sizes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and over the past two months, they’ve made 160,000 of these things for hospitals, government

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey agencies, businesses, et cetera, and they’ve donated 55,000 so far to tribal nations,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey healthcare workers, homeless shelters, and more. What’s even better is they have a public Google sheet

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey where you can see exactly how many have been donated, how many are queued up to be donated, where they’ve been donated to, etc.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey If you already have a mask or don’t want Tom Bihn’s excellent mask, let me tell you what. They also

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey are offering, starting this coming Monday at 9 a.m. Pacific, they’re going to be offering their

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Cynic 22 and Cynic 30 backpacks for pre-order because they’re finally getting to the point that they can start

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey making bags again instead of just masks. I do not have a Tom Bihn backpack

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and I tell you what, I want one because these things look awesome. And I know a lot of people who have cynics

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and they all say that these things are phenomenal. Go to TomBihn.com, T-O-M-B-I-H-N.com

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and check out all the different travel equipment and accessories that they have. Check out their reusable

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey face masks. Everything there is excellent. I love Tom Bihn. They

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey can pay me to talk about Tom Bihn. they can’t pay me to say, I love Tom Bihn, and I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey do. So thank you so much to Tombin, T-O-M-B-I-H-N.com for sponsoring

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the show.

Android dictation speed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Android versus iOS text-to-speech speed. So this came onto my radar probably because of one of you,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and in turn because of Dave Mark from The Loop, who had found a video

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey from James Cham who said, I don’t think that people appreciate how different the voice-to-text experience

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on a Pixel is from an iPhone. So here’s a little head-to-head example. The Pixel is so responsive, it feels like it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey reading my mind. And so sure enough, James has a Pixel and an iPhone next to other

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and they engage the text-to-speech thing, and it is quite obviously like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey night and day different. It’s preposterous. And this is really surprising from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Apple because Apple is the self-proclaimed king and queens of accessibility,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and this is very much an accessibility feature in my mind. And it’s not only an accessibility feature, but it is very much

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey an accessibility feature. And so I was really surprised by this, and it wasn’t until I looked at the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey show notes earlier today that I realized somebody, probably John, has put in a follow-up tweet from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Dave where Dave said, so I turned on airplane mode and the iPhone text-to-speech

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is every bit as fast as the Android text-to-speech. If I turn airplane mode

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey off, the lag returns. Try it yourself. Not at all sure why this lag is necessary. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I have theories, but since I didn’t put this in the show notes, I will leave it up to you, John, question mark, to tell me

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what your thoughts are.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, my thoughts when I first saw this, well, the performance comparison is kind of beautiful

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because you can just put both phones in front of you and they’re both listening to you at the same time. So it’s a very fair test. Like you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not speaking to one and speaking to the other, you’re speaking to both of them at the same time and you can really see the difference. So check out that video.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And it brought to mind a question we didn’t actually do it on Ask ATP, but I remembered flying by and the many hundreds

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of questions that we get. It was like, you keep talking about on the show, this is what the listener was saying about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how much faster Apple’s system-on-a-chips are in their phone than the competition, but how does that speed manifest

⏹️ ▶️ ^John itself? Like, yeah, it’s faster in all these benchmarks that everyone says is faster, but like, what does that do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for me? What has the speed done for me lately? I could answer that in a whole bunch of different

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ways. Like, for example, JavaScript benchmarks are very relevant to people who try to load complex webpages on your phone,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and obviously performance in games and other things where you really need every ounce of CPU,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and arguably also in battery life, because you can get more done in a shorter amount of time and go back to sleep faster

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or whatever. But this is an example where no matter how much faster your system on a chip is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John algorithms win in the end. So for something complicated like speech to text is not a simple thing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not even as straightforward as like rendering in a game engine or something. It is very complicated, it’s got machine learning and it also

⏹️ ▶️ ^John may have a server side component to it. And in this performance comparison, the massive

⏹️ ▶️ ^John speed difference in the Apple system on a chip is not helping Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do well on this test, because it’s more than just your CPU speed. It’s your algorithms,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it’s the speed, if you’re doing server-side stuff, it’s the responsiveness of your service that is processing the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John text and sending it back. And when you put the iPhone into airplane mode, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the performance of the on-chip implementation versus the one that’s over the network. Now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the interesting thing about the follow-up to this is like, oh, I put it in airplane mode, and they’re both just as fast. Try it yourself.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I did, I tried it myself. Like, I didn’t have an Android phone here to test with, although I actually do have one in the house, I should have tried that, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s like a $50 Android phone, so I don’t think it would be a fair comparison. But anyway, I tried

⏹️ ▶️ ^John speech to text with everything connected, and then also in airplane mode with everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John disconnected. And they were exactly the same speed to me, and that speed was slowish. Like, it wasn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as fast as the Android phone in this video. Maybe it wasn’t as slow as the really slow phone, but it was, I didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John see any speed difference whatsoever. So I don’t know what that means. Is mine configured in a way where it’s not sending

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to the server? I don’t know. A lot of the people responded to this thread saying that when they were offline

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and did it like the local on device one seemed less accurate, but it’s very difficult to AB test that because you might’ve spoken

⏹️ ▶️ ^John differently or whatever. So all this is to say that areas like this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are sort of, you know, I mean, we, we beg on Siri all the time, right? But this is, and,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and, you know, this is arguably not Siri. It’s like, well, that’s not Siri. That’s not answering a question for me. That’s a speech

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to text. It’s totally different, but we all kind of put it under the same umbrella. I feel like stuff like this makes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the on paper very, very fast iPhone feel slow. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can’t tell from this testing if the problem is that Apple’s algorithms

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and machine learning stuff and their model or whatever, they’re doing this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is worse than Google’s or if it’s because Apple’s server side implementation is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John slower, less responsive, more laggy or Or does things in bigger chunks? Or if it’s a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John combination of all of that. But anybody who looks at this video can see there’s a gap

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and that gap really ought to be closed. Because, you know, FaceTime is great and FaceTime is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fast and all these things and all the camera stuff like there’s, again, measurable advantages

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to having a high performance system on a chip. I think speech to text would be one of those things. And, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know, in addition to lagging behind on how smart Siri is about answering questions like getting directions to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John London or whatever that was. The last one that went around, that was an embarrassment for Apple where it kept trying to send you to London, Ontario

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or something. Or no, what time is it in London? Wasn’t that it that Gruber was posting about? Yeah, something like that. And it was telling you the time in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like London, somewhere in Canada, which is probably not what you mean. Stuff like that and straightforward

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stuff like this. You know, speech to text. I use speech to text a surprising amount.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John My mother uses it like crazy because she can’t stand typing on that tiny little keyboard and I don’t blame her. And her

⏹️ ▶️ ^John vision is really bad. And boy, if you, you know, if you’ve done that in a responsive

⏹️ ▶️ ^John system versus one that lags, it really makes a big difference. So I hope in iOS 13

⏹️ ▶️ ^John plus n, Apple gets their act together on this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I hope they do. But honestly, I’m not thinking that’s actually gonna happen because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ultimately, like, this, this is just a problem with almost everything about Siri.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And it always has been. Siri has always been a little dumb,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a little unreliable, and a little slow compared to its competitors. You know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we’ve seen Apple, Apple’s like done a little bit of hiring here or there. We’ve heard like, oh, they’re revamping the Siri,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, team or infrastructure or whatever. I really, really hope that Apple realizes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco how important the quality of Siri is and despite what they say in public, how it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not there yet. Because performance is a feature, However, as is consistency,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as is actual intelligence of things like the London query, if you use Google

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Assistant or I don’t have any experience with Cortana or if you use Alexa,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it is significantly more consistent and it is usually faster

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to respond. Siri needs to get there and I really, really hope Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has just been working on this for a long time behind the scenes and isn’t ready to release it yet because so far

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it has seemed to date from just, you know, what gets out there and how things behave in the real world, it has seemed to date that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple is incapable or unwilling to make Siri actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fast and consistent and clearly it’s possible because all their competitors have done it. So really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what I want from Siri more than anything and like this is true, you know, as somebody who like I regularly use

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a HomePod and an Amazon Echo and the Amazon Echo responds to things much

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco faster. The HomePod hears me better. The HomePod music sounds better. The HomePod also randomly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco butts into conversations a lot more that it thinks I hailed it and it didn’t. And it’s just slow

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when I ask it something. Even simple things like, hey Dingus, play, or hey Dingus, pause.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It takes so long to respond that you question whether it is going to respond at all.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And it hears me immediately and it ducks the volume down on the music. If I’m saying,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hey Dingus, pause, it’ll hear that immediately and duck the volume and then wait,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wait, wait. And then it gets paused. And that’s consistently almost every time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like simple stuff like that is just not fast. And it should be, and the competitors can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco do it quickly. So Apple needs to really prioritize Siri quality

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and performance and consistency way more than they ever have before.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so far we don’t see any evidence that that’s actually happening. So again, I hope we’re just not seeing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it and it’s just not out yet. Because what’s out there now from them is not good enough.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, I’m, I don’t know, it’s so, so easy to bag on Siri that it’s just, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey boring. It’s boring to back on Siri yet again.

SMB shares in Finder

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So instead, can I bag on Catalina?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} What now? Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I have another thing that I haven’t yet publicly shared and complained and whined

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey about that I’d like to quickly throw out. It’ll only take a moment. Do you guys use

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey SMB shares at all? These are like Windows-style shares, perhaps with your Synologies

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or perhaps with other laptops or computers in your world. Do you ever really use SMB?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the default for all file sharing. If you don’t specify a protocol and don’t say how you want to connect to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a file share, it’s SMB by default since a couple of versions ago in Mac OS.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Oh, OK. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} there you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco go. Yeah. I use it for my Synology archive share.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah. So I use it for my Synology. And anything is possible. The following

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey could be true because of something weird on the Synology, although I find it hard to believe. Because I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey don’t recall this ever being a problem with Mojave. That could be the summary of the last year of this show. I don’t remember this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey being a problem in Mojave. Anyways, I have noticed that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on any situation wherein my computer, and this is true of my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Adorable or my iMac Pro, any situation where my computer loses

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the connection to the Synology, now maybe it’s something completely reasonable, like I’ve closed the lid or it’s suspended itself

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or something like that. Some way, somehow it’s lost the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} connection.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Your HomeKit has decided to turn it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey off. Or HomeKit has decided to turn it off. Too soon. Anyway, so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey when I come back, it will more often than not look like the Synology is still

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey mounted. But when I go to actually drill into it in Finder, I see the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey following error. I see the operation can’t be completed because the original item for quote,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in my case, archive, because that’s what the root folder is, but whatever your root folder is, can’t be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey found. If I go back in and try it again, doesn’t work. If I kill

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey all Finder and try it again immediately, everything works, no problem. Oh, it’s great. Everything’s great. What do you mean? There’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey no problem. Nothing to see here. This is driving me frigging insane. Not to mention that my,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey my machine gun track pad that I’ve been bemoaning for the last couple of months now, that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey seemed to be deeply exacerbated by a tremendous amount of network activity

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey specifically over a network share. So like going and downloading something from the internet, not that big a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey deal. Throwing a bunch of stuff on and off the Synology would just bring my machine to a screeching

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey halt and especially my trackpad. Has something, this is a rhetorical question or mostly rhetorical

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey question, has something happened with SMB in Catalina or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey something around SMB in Catalina? Because this is driving me freaking crazy and I just want it fixed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Please, please, Apple, please, you fix this for your pal Casey. That’d be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John great. There’s been big complaints about Apple’s SMB implementation for years and they have improved it a lot by grabbing more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John better open-source SMB implementations for the client. On the Synology, if you’re not aware

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of this, there are a bunch of settings. I don’t know if it’s on a per share basis or on the whole machine basis,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but there are settings to tell the Synology what versions of SMB to support, what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John features to support. I don’t know what the right settings are there, but over

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the years, I have slowly turned them all on, like maximum support all the things, support all the extensions,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John support the highest versions, because you can just say, turn them all on. I haven’t noticed any change in performance.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I wasn’t having any problems before and I’m not having any problems now, but just FYI, maybe if that will help solve your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John problem. So you could try that. Machine gun trackpad, I thought, I would totally subscribe to the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John theory that people would put out, there’s like a kernel contention thing with like the USB interface and some kernel

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} lock. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that totally made sense to me. But now that you don’t have that, now that like your backup is somewhere else and you know, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that has been eliminated, you’re in a similar situation to what I am, which is you have a computer, it’s connected

⏹️ ▶️ ^John over ethernet to your Synology and you copy big files back and forth. And I do that and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t have any of the problems you’re saying, I don’t have the unmounting problem or whatever that’s going on there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t have the stuttering problem. Everything copies at the speed I expect it to copy.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So I don’t know what to tell you.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey To be fair, once I moved all backing up, like all network backups

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey off of the iMac, so now it’s being taken care of by the Mac mini, I haven’t had a machine gun

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey trackpad in a while. it has gotten way, way, way better. And it is certainly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey possible. I’m not saying it’s definitely not a Synology problem in the same way that I was saying that my machine

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey contract bed is definitely a software problem. I could believe that it’s a Synology issue and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if you, if you are the kind of person that knows this stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That actually like does this sort of thing for a living and you would like to throw some ideas at me with regard to Synology settings

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or something like that, I’m all ears. If you’re just someone who says, Oh, it works for me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Here’s what I’ve got. It’s okay. I appreciate it, but don’t worry about it. But I would love to see this fixed. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey have a feedback entry for radar, whatever it’s called now, feedback assistant thing. I don’t have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey one for this because I don’t even know what to say. What I’ve got is not actionable. I don’t have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey any really good way to report this. But if someone from Apple would like to reach out

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to me, you know where to find me, I’m happy to do whatever you would like me to do. I’ll cisdiagnose until your heart’s content, if that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what it takes. But yeah, people are saying this is more of a Finder problem.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey People are saying turn off AFP. I’ll try that. I don’t know if that’s going to make a difference, but I’ll try it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But yeah, if you know what this is about, please let me know, because it’s driving me crazy.

Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We are sponsored this week by Squarespace. Start building your website today at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco squarespace.com slash ATP. Enter offer code ATP at checkout to get 10% off.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Make your next move with Squarespace. Squarespace makes it super easy to make

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco amazing looking websites in almost no time and with no particular skills

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in coding or web development or design or anything like that. No matter what your skill level is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from zero to expert, you can make a site on Squarespace. It’ll look great,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’ll look professional, it’ll work well, it’ll scale to all sorts of different device sizes, it’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be easy to update, and you won’t have to manually install software or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco configure servers or edit CSS or write JavaScript or HTML or do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco anything about keeping the server running. You won’t have to worry about software updates or patches

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or security issues. You won’t have to worry about server maintenance and load and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco being overloaded if you get a link from a popular website or something like that. You don’t have to worry about any of that with Squarespace.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You just use their simple, intuitive, easy visual tools to make your site, customize

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it to your heart’s content. If you need any help with any of it, they have wonderful support available built in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with every plan. And you can do simple sites, you know, a few pages of info maybe, all the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco way up to complicated things like storefronts or podcast hosting or lots of dynamic functionality

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like galleries and calendars and stuff like that all built into Squarespace and it’s really easy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to do all of it. See for yourself by starting a free trial. There’s no credit card required

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and pretty much no limits. You can do you can build a whole site with Squarespace’s free trial and you can see

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco how it works. You can see if you like it. When you decide to sign up, go to squarespace.com slash

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ATP and use offer code ATP to get 10% off your first purchase. Once

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco again, go to squarespace.com slash ATP. Use offer code ATP to get 10% off your first

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco purchase. Make your next move with a beautiful website from Squarespace.

Catalina security slowdowns

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey A couple of weeks ago, we had a post from Alan Odgard called Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey OS 1015, Slow by Design. John, do you want to tell us about this?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John First of all, that’s the guy who made TextMate, right? Yes. Yeah, I thought I recognized the name. Anyway, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a big post about slowness related to the design of Mac OS.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John He listed as a Mac OS 1015 Catalina issue. I’m not sure how much is new in Catalina versus

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what has been existing, but what it boils down to are things that are slow

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because there’s some kind of security check happening before the computer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John does the thing. And you know, in the thread

⏹️ ▶️ ^John around the internet that have been discussing this, people are like, oh, if you turn off system integrity protection, this goes away. And then people are like, oh, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John want to turn off system integrity protection. It exists for a reason. Why should I have to disable all the security to get good performance

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and back and forth. There’s a bunch of stuff listed having to do with spawning a process and getting access to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John privileged file system locations and keychain access and the context API and And an

⏹️ ▶️ ^John app launch and all these other things I Thought was and by the way is another follow-up

⏹️ ▶️ ^John post by Jeff Johnson LabCat software talking about the same thing and how like Random

⏹️ ▶️ ^John shell scripts that you make are also now checked to see that their malware essentially by contacting Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John service and saying hey someone’s about to run this shell script that they just wrote, does this have the same

⏹️ ▶️ ^John signature as malware if it doesn’t let it launch, but if it does launch it, and it only

⏹️ ▶️ ^John does it on the first try and it caches the answer and it’s tricky to test because people are like, well, I just tried,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I wrote a test.sh script and it was fast every single time. I don’t know what’s wrong with your system. And it’s like, well, you have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to give the thing a different name every time and different contents, otherwise it short circuits and it thinks it’s the same as the previous

⏹️ ▶️ ^John script. And it’s tricky to test when we don’t really know the implementation, but I thought it was an interesting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John story because again, it’s another security versus X trade-off, security versus convenience,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John security versus effectiveness, security in this case, security versus performance. And this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John reminded me of a strain of performance

⏹️ ▶️ ^John issue. I always associate it with Unix because that’s where I always see it and it’s the OS that I know the most

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about under the covers, but obviously it could be in any OS where if you take an operating system

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that has some operation that is and has always been synchronous.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Synchronous means you ask it to do a thing, and then you sit there with your arms crossed waiting and saying,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John okay, are you done? And then eventually it finishes and it comes back. And while you’re waiting for it to do that thing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all you can do is just sit there and wait. That’s synchronous. Like asynchronous is you tell it to do a thing, and then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you go on with your day. And then eventually at some point later in the day, the thing goes back, oh, by the way, the thing you told me to do, I’m done with it now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s asynchronous. There are lots of synchronous operations and operating systems in general

⏹️ ▶️ ^John operations that are synchronous tend to be ones that the original designers expected to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Very fast or like or there is no useful thing that you could be doing in this process

⏹️ ▶️ ^John While you’re waiting for it anyway, so you know what’s the point right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John An example of that are a lot of the file system Api’s like the Unix file system Maybe I tend to be synchronous read from this file right to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that file open that file close that file each one of those individual read, write, open, close calls is synchronous

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the Unix file IO API. Cause like, what are you going to do? Like if you’re about to open a file,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can’t go to the next line where you’re going to try to read from the file until you’re done opening it. So you’re just going to wait until the operating system finishes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John opening it, and then you get to your read and same thing. I’m going to read from the file. Well, you can’t do anything with the contents until you get them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So that read call is synchronous. Dumpty dumpty dum, read, and then you get your thing back. And yes, Unix does have async

⏹️ ▶️ ^John IO operations and everything like that. But anyway, there are a lot of synchronous APIs. if you take a synchronous

⏹️ ▶️ ^John API, no matter what it may be, reading from a file, reading from the network, anything that has a synchronous

⏹️ ▶️ ^John API, and you decide because of, let’s say security or whatever, that you want to do something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John else there, like, ah, ah, ah, before you exec CVP, whatever, that file,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m gonna add a check that says, oh, before we let exec run, make sure it’s not malware,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right, and do it in a smart way, like have a cache locally on the system that we keep track of, oh, I already

⏹️ ▶️ ^John checked that already, it’s totally not malware, it’s fine. And make that check be really fast. But the very first

⏹️ ▶️ ^John time you run a thing that we’ve never seen before, we have to contact Apple server and get the updated list of malware signatures and blah, blah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John blah, blah, blah. And then after we decide that it’s okay, we execute that synchronous thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And that is a formula for things that are terribly slow because everything that’s built on top of that API, the whole

⏹️ ▶️ ^John big stack of software all the way up to like the Finder or whatever else you’re doing, expects that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whole chain, that whole synchronous chain to execute quickly. It’s a synchronous API. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s like, oh yeah, it’s synchronous, but it’s always really fast. It’s just, I’m trying to do a very simple operation and I can’t do anything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John until it’s done anyway. And if that took like, you know, 25 nanoseconds

⏹️ ▶️ ^John before and suddenly it takes a second and a half, no application design can withstand

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that kind of inflation in the time taken for an operation. Like, oh, this entire thing was built

⏹️ ▶️ ^John around the expectation that this thing will take nanoseconds. and now it’s taking a second?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And we do a thousand of those operations when you open a folder or do whatever it is you may be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John doing that will destroy your performance. Another great example of this, I always attribute to this, I’m not sure if it’s entirely the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John case, but back in the day, the Finder had a WebDAV interface. This is like classic Mac OS, and I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think Mac OS X did as well. And WebDAV basically made synchronous file IO

⏹️ ▶️ ^John live on top of HTTP. Your program thought it was doing synchronous file IO,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but under the covers, all your IO operations were HTTP calls. And this was like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John 90s when I was dealing with this. And so those were slow HTTP calls to slow servers across a slow internet connection. And it would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John destroy the finder. Like, you know, I don’t think we even had beach balls back in, you know, the equivalent,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the little watch cursor, the equivalent of it would just freeze. Like, cause it would, it would be doing something that should take like fractions

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of a second. And it would take two seconds because it’s talking to like some web server running on a 80

⏹️ ▶️ ^John megahertz, you know, sun one you box in some university somewhere and it’s taking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John forever. Uh, and it’s just a shame to see that same, what I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John imagined would be that same pattern replaying itself here. Now I, I endorse all these security

⏹️ ▶️ ^John features. I understand why they’re there. There’s not really a better way to do them because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the end for, especially for security, you can’t like, Oh, we’ll just add them on the async IO operations.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John A because pretty much every part of the system uses synchronous ones most of the of the time and B, if you only do it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on one kind of file access, that’s not much security because anything they wanted to get around it would just use

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the other APIs, right? And you can’t do it asynchronously really because the whole point is you want to prevent

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them from running the malware. You can’t let them launch the malware and then a second and a half later say, wait, I just found out that’s malware. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like too late, you’re ruined, right? So I feel for Apple and I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think they’re mostly doing the right thing, I understand how it can make it seem like quote unquote Macs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are slow because if you run it, If I run it on another Unix, like I run on Linux, everything is fast, there’s no problem. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Linux has good security too and yada yada, but I feel like Apple is hardening

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Mac in the same way they’ve hardened the iPhone to survive in a very hostile

⏹️ ▶️ ^John environment. More hostile, let’s say, than a Linux server in a data center, which wants to have good security, wants to lock

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things down, but also doesn’t have to run every app that a random person can throw at it and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John isn’t subject to the whims of a just regular consumer or computer user who just wants to do whatever the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hell they want. And you know, it doesn’t really have a, it’s not a fixed workload. It

⏹️ ▶️ ^John needs to be a general purpose machine willing to withstand, withstand use by humans.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And humans are inscrutable. So I’m not sure what the solution to here is.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Again, the reason it’s related to the other one is like, well, if Apple’s service that tells me whether it’s malware was way faster,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or if it did a better job of caching the answers locally, or, you know, like there are ways to help,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, mitigate this, to be even smarter, but mostly just to be faster. Because I think the people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who have, like other people testing, say, well, you know, it’s slow the first time, but it’s not that slow. It’s like, well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maybe this person has a bad route to whatever host that they need to contact at Apple,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? Maybe their interconnect connection is flaky. Maybe their local server for this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is slower than the one that you’re on, because you’re in California right next to Apple’s headquarters, and you go right to their, I don’t even know if they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have a data center in California, but I assume they do. Anyway, there are lots of factors that can add into this. It’s kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of frustrating. I can’t say I’ve experienced it myself. I write plenty of shell scripts and Perl scripts, and if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Catalina is checking them against their notarization server, I have not noticed that delay because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m not benchmarking them, and it still seems to be fractions of a second. But then I do have a good internet

⏹️ ▶️ ^John connection, and I’m not specifically trying to thwart it. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m not quite sure what the solution is here, except that this seems like another one of those things that we just may have to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John learn as a part of modern computing. that disabling system integrity protection is not the right

⏹️ ▶️ ^John answer for most people, and that having to check

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an unknown executable before it runs is just gonna be a fact of life. Again, except for in a controlled

⏹️ ▶️ ^John scenario where you’re running in a data center and the whole machine is locked down and you’re not,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John new arbitrary programs aren’t arriving on it willy nilly. Like in that case, yeah, you can just run whatever’s there as fast

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as possible. But in the general case, kind of like having to contact a server to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do sophisticated text-to-speech because the server and data center has better machine learning

⏹️ ▶️ ^John algorithms than your phone does or whatever, or a larger data set in memory. The roles are all just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John probably facts of life. I don’t know, have you two experienced any of the slowness

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that is described in these articles, or do you just not even know it was happening?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean, I think, I haven’t noticed the executable checking slowness. What I noticed is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what I was originally complaining about a few weeks ago, when I think we should also prompted this blog post was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like open save dialogues take a little a few extra seconds to show up a lot of the time and that just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that makes the whole system feel slow to me the actual like executable thing being talked about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco here I don’t think I’ve noticed it the open save

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one doesn’t seem like it would be a security thing but you really don’t know like you know this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is well it could be because like I don’t know too much about how the system is architected but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think the like the trust demon that runs in the background like that I think it’s TCC or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one of those, like one of the sandboxing things on Mac OS, like one of the background processes that manages

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the whole thing, is called in reaction to open save dialogues to see if the app

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has access to whatever path is being opened or saved to. So that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is probably related. Like I’m guessing it’s, you know, it just feels like either it’s that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or it’s something about iCloud that has changed. Oh yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the PowerBox process, whatever is the PowerBox thing that

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} actually like, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like your app doesn’t, I don’t know under what circumstances that’s used versus when it’s not. But yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I remember when that was introduced, it was like, hey, it used to be that when your app threw up an open save dialog box,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like your app would call into whatever framework, AppKit or Carbon or whatever, and that would put an open save dialog box on your screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and you would tell it how to configure it and then you’d get the result, right? But that would be, that would A, all happen

⏹️ ▶️ ^John inside your process and B, that would literally be a window in your program, like that if you wanted to, you could walk

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your own window list and you would find that window. But the security thing that they added many years ago

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was that’s not even going to be your window. You’re going to call the same API in AppKit, or Carbon probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wasn’t around by then. You’re going to call the same API to make an OpenSave dialog box. And then what’s going to happen is using XPC,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’re going to tell some other demon on the system, hey, this app wants an OpenSave dialog box. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that demon is going to display the OpenSave dialog box. If you did PS on it, or you did a process tree, you’d see that that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John window that’s an OpenSave dialog box doesn’t even belong to your app. Like, it’s not even the parent process. The parent process

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is, you know, whatever, a TCC thing, or PowerBox D or whatever the hell it’s called. And that would present

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the open save and that would run in a sandbox and be all locked down and only have the permissions that it’s allowed to have based on what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your app does and yada yada. And the user would use that open save dialog box to find the file that it wanted

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and pick check all the check boxes or whatever and then hit open or cancel. And then it would return again through XPC

⏹️ ▶️ ^John back to your application. Oh, here’s what they did with the open save dialog box. So in that scenario, I can imagine

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, oh, I’m trying to do XPC to the PowerBox Demon or whatever the hell. it’s asleep

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or it’s swapped out or there’s a bug in it where it gets real confused about whether you have permission to do something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or not, or it’s talking to the lower layer database to try to figure out if you have permissions.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I can see how that could slow things down. But I haven’t, like I said, I haven’t seen that one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So I don’t know. Like, this is the weird thing about Catalina. Everyone has their own little

⏹️ ▶️ ^John variety of bugs. I was just gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} say that. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if this is a problem, wouldn’t it be happening to everybody? But it’s, you know, everyone doesn’t have the same thing. It’s not like there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John some systemic thing that all the open save dog boxes are super slow, right? I mean just you know here

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Bb at it now Commando and the window came up pretty much instantly like I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t know like it doesn’t make any sense Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s super

⏹️ ▶️ ^John weird. That’s and this by the way I mean, I’m assuming a surprise that Marco hasn’t filed a feedback

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on that but I feel the same way as Casey did when I think of these surprise the issues that I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have that like I I would feel bad filing it because it’s, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know, because if you’re a developer, you know how your heart sinks when you get a report like this and it’s like, what am I supposed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do with this? You had a weird thing happen once on your computer. Like, great, thanks for telling me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s not actionable. I don’t know what to do with that. I suppose they would say, oh, file it anyway, because if we get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a thousand of those, then we’ll know it’s actually a problem. But I think the issue is that, A, most people don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how to send a feedback at all, and B, the people who do are mostly programmers and they feel the same way and they intentionally self-censor.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John by not sending them. And so Apple thinks that this is not a problem. But honestly, even if 1,000 people told them,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hey, sometimes there’s a delay, it’s still unactionable. It’s like, well, I don’t know. What do I do about that? I try

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do it every time I hit Commando. It works fine on my system. Works for me. It’s frustrating as

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a developer to not be able to reproduce it. I mean, I suppose we could all do a sysdiagnose.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know. I always wonder if that’s just a Bitcoin miner. You ever think about that? I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just a deflection, honestly. It’s like, hey, this didn’t have a six-diagnose, so I guess we can demand it and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco then probably close it a few weeks later when they don’t do it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, especially for a non-actionable problem, you’re like, I don’t know, maybe if I can see what kernel

⏹️ ▶️ ^John extensions they’re running. And then if you get 1,000 of them, and all 1,000 of them are running the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John carbon black kernel extension, be glad you don’t know what that is, then maybe you say, ah, that might be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it. But yeah. Sorry, Apple. I mean, we want this to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be fixed, but we don’t know how to help you. Help

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco us help you. And it isn’t our job to fix it. Like, it’s theirs. It’s their product,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s their job. They have plenty of resources. They should be able to fix it themselves without us doing a CIS

⏹️ ▶️ ^John diagnosis. I do want them to know it exists. Hi, Apple, these things exist. I just don’t know how to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John help get them fixed. Again, it’s not our job, but I want them to be fixed as a user. And so if I could help in that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I would. I just don’t know how.

Shaky gaming-Mac rumor

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So John, I hear that, uh, come around WWDC time, which is approaching, you’re going to be getting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey yourself a sweet, sweet gaming MacBook pro.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This, this story has been in here for a

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} while and we kept avoiding

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it because it’s, it’s a sketchy rumor, um, and it’s old. Um, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what prompted me to, to push up in the show notes was, uh, Quinn Nelson’s,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John uh, video he did on YouTube video he did about it, which was, which has a click baby title, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, hey, it’s YouTube. What can you do? Which is called Apple’s Next Failure. And he talks about

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} the prospects.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oh, God. Yeah, well, he talks about the prospects of Apple making a gaming anything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like the rumor is that they’re going to announce high-end gaming MacBook or iMac. I love these rumors. They’re like, it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John could be a laptop or an iMac. We’re not sure.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} That’s kind of broad. Right,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yeah. Here’s the quote, Apple plans to release high-end gaming computer at its Daniel W. Deucey Developers Conference. This is how old the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John story is. when it’s saying Apple plans to release it at 2020. I think this is pre-cancellation, pre-COVID, everything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John According to a questionable and as yet unsubstantiated report from Taiwan’s Economic Daily News, details are slim, but the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John report claims the computer may be a large screen laptop or an all-in-one desktop with a price

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tag of up to $5,000, suggesting that it could be either a MacBook Pro or an iMac Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This computer would supposedly be tailored toward e-sports, aka competitive video gaming.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Right, so I think the reason everyone has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ignored the story aside from the sketchy sourcing and aside from the fact that can’t even decide if it’s going to be a laptop or a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mac. Like I look at this and I think, look, if there’s any shred of truth in here,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think what it would be is that Apple has computers in the pipeline

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that have less embarrassing GPUs in them. Like, and you could imagine someone determining

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that and saying, aha, that must mean they’re making a gaming thing, because Apple usually uses fairly embarrassing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John GPUs and now there’s some model supposedly in some pipeline somewhere that’s using like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an actual good GPU and it’s expensive like the whole computer is expensive although

⏹️ ▶️ ^John obviously how the hell would they know that like anything with pricing is not probably not gonna be in the parts supply chain anyway

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I can imagine a story spinning out of some piece of information that says basically like Apple’s using good GPUs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John some of Apple’s GPUs are actually pretty good like the the Vega 64 when it was introduced in the iMac Pro, that’s pretty

⏹️ ▶️ ^John good GPU for a computer that doesn’t have cards and is an all-in-one, right? Does

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it make it a gaming PC? No, not by any stretch of the imagination. And not to mention that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the thing that makes a computer, like, tailored towards eSports or competitive video gaming is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John its ability to play games that are played competitively and no Macs really have that unless they boot into

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Windows, and that’s a whole other story. But that’s what the video is about, Quinn’s video

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about the prospect of Apple making a gaming PC. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John enjoyed watching it because he starts off saying like, this is not going to happen, Apple doesn’t get gaming,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John here are all the reasons why this is a terrible idea and wouldn’t work and he mostly gets most of those.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s funny when I watch his videos, I forget, one of the things about being old is you forget

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that you’re old and you look at people and you’re like, that person’s probably my age. is not my age.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John He’s like half my age. I don’t want to think about it. But like I watch him do the video. I’m like, look, there’s a dude

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, Hey, yeah, I’m a dude. He’s a dude. We’re practically the same age. Um, but when, when I see when

⏹️ ▶️ ^John he’s talking about like Mac and gaming and he’s talking about stuff, that’s like practically feels like current events to me,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but literally haven’t been like either before he was born or when he was a toddler, it’s clear that he wasn’t actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there. And it’s like, it’s like the history effect of like, if you weren’t there and you just have to sort of research

⏹️ ▶️ ^John something for a video, It’s not always easy to get the straight story on things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So at one point he says, and I don’t want to pick on Quinn because this can happen for anybody if I had to do research on something that happened when

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my parents were kids I would get it wrong too and they would correct me, right? Because if you weren’t there it’s hard to know. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s a quote that says, the Mac was actually viewed as a viable alternative to Windows gaming PCs. This is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John around the time of Marathon. That was never true.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} No. That has never been true. Like literally

⏹️ ▶️ ^John never. Mac fans, of which I was one, we love Marathon because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s like, the Mac finally has a good game. A game that might make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John PC people jealous because you don’t have this game and this game is really good. And there was the whole classic

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mac gaming scene where I’d argue there were tons of games that were really good and only on the Mac. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at no point was a Mac actually viewed as a viable alternative to Windows

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Gaming PC. Never, literally never. Even when the Mac, I would argue, had overall better games

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like back in the DOS days before like games got good graphics, the Mac, I think, had a pretty good

⏹️ ▶️ ^John crop of games. It was never a viable alternative to gaming PCs. Right, and that’s like the rose

⏹️ ▶️ ^John colored glasses of like, well, the Mac used to be a contender of games, but now not, it never was. And the reason

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it never was is mostly not having to do with hardware. And again, Quinn goes in the video back and forth between what’s, you know, hardware

⏹️ ▶️ ^John isn’t really the hard thing, except actually it is kind of hard. If you don’t try to do it, you’re gonna have crappy hardware. Witness all the GPUs that Apple has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in its computers now. But the real problem is, what games are you gonna run on it? How are you gonna get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John any software? You have to court game developers, you have to support gaming APIs, you have to compete with Microsoft, which has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John its own proprietary gaming API that works on Xbox and PCs, but does not work on Macs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And, you know, or you can build a shim layer to it, like they do in Linux, where this is Linux front end that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John emulates DirectX or translates DirectX calls into whatever OpenGL thing that Linux supports.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s super complicated. And Quinn also goes into this video, I thought it’s interesting.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The fact that mobile gaming revenue is bigger than console and PC gaming combined in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John current days, he has stats from 2019. We all kind of know that intuitively, like yeah, most

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people play mobile games because most people are not quote unquote gamers. And what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do people who aren’t gamers play? Everybody plays games, well they just play mobile games. We call them casual games, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But there are more of them than there are gamers, right? Mobile gaming market is really big.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And unlike the console and PC, well, certainly unlike the PC gaming market, in the mobile market on Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John platforms, Apple gets 30% of all those sales.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Microsoft does not get 30% of all Windows game sales. They would love to get 30% of all Windows game sales. They do not.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I don’t know what the cuts are for the console makers, but it’s probably better than PC game platforms,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? And then he also goes into, of course, Apple Arcade is another way for Apple to try to get money out

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the gaming world. But none of those things have anything to do with what we think of as quote unquote real games,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John eSports, competitive gaming, powerful GPUs. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I encourage you to check out this video other than disregarding the slightly rose-colored view of the past of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Mac. It’s interesting to explore in entertaining ways, videos are always entertaining,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what the possibilities are for a gaming Mac. I would love

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to see Apple rededicate itself to gaming. Stranger things have happened. Another

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing that might have come up in Quinn’s research and might have not made the cut for the video was that at one point

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the fairly recent in this old man’s memory, timeframe was Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John had a push into gaming. They had a bunch of APIs,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, fancifully called sprockets, input sprockets. What was it like gaming sprockets?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like there was a bunch of libraries essentially for interacting with game controllers,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for drawing things on the screen. Apple had its own 3D drawing API called, what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was it, Quick Draw, 3D Rave. I’m getting it screwed up. We’ll find links to the show notes. But for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a while, they had an actual team in Apple who was basically doing the equivalent of what the team at Microsoft did in writing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John DirectX. We’re gonna make APIs for the Mac platform whose sole purpose

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is to write games. Even today, Apple has SpriteKit, arguably SceneKit, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s always WWDC sessions about how to build a game. But in reality,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when people build games, They build them on the big cross-platform engines like Unity or Unreal or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They use DirectX, they use OpenGL. Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} no

⏹️ ▶️ ^John longer supports OpenGL. We’ll probably remove it from the system sometime soon. Apple has Metal, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is great, but Metal only runs on Apple platforms and does not help you target consoles

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or Windows PCs. Apple tends to ship weaker GPUs. The only machine

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple sells with an upgradable GPU is this incredibly expensive monstrosity next to me,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which I thank you for, Apple, but no one else is buying that computer. So if Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John decided, you know, like it did back in the Sprocket days, if Apple decided we’re gonna get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hardcore into gaming, boy, they have an uphill road. Like I don’t think they would do what they did with Sprockets

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and say we’re gonna do it all ourselves and make it proprietary stuff, but that’s just what they did with Metal, which granted,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, just Apple means Mac, iOS, Apple TV, iPadOS,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what am I forgetting? HomePod, I don’t know. Metal is an important

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing for Apple. Metal is great. Metal is better than their poorly supported OpenGL was.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But nobody is writing games on top of Metal, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John big cross-platform games. The good thing is that the engines support Metal, like Unity and Unreal can support

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Metal and people can build their games on top of that, which helps, but it’s still kind of an uphill battle and it’s still very difficult

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to say, like, oh, here’s a game that was made for the PC and it uses DirectX and it’s available on the Xbox and on Windows.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John How do we get that game on the Mac? It’s like, well, reboot your Mac into Windows because there’s no way in hell you’d

⏹️ ▶️ ^John run that on the Mac. If Apple developed its own DirectX translation layer for those games

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and found some way to run it just like Valve did with its Linux, you know, gaming thing that I forgot the name of that is talked about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in this video, that could kind of happen. But boy, it would take a hell, it would take an effort,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John let’s put it this way, it would take an effort bigger than their effort to rededicate themselves to the Mac, which we’ve talked

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about a lot on the show. It’s like, oh, the Mac has been neglected. Let’s have this big round table. We hear you pro

⏹️ ▶️ ^John users. You want better Macs. We’re going to make a better Mac about four years from now. We’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fix the keyboard and then also we’ll eventually make a Mac pro and John will buy it and it will be great. And like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that was a big effort and it took them a long time and they but they did it right. It was like this thing that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they had neglected and they announced they’re going to rededicate themselves to it and they have like we had a couple shows ago we’re like hey guess

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what all the Macs are good now. Apple fulfilled its promise to rededicate itself to the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and fix the Mac line from being crappy to being good. Trying to make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a quote unquote gaming Mac and makes Macs viable in the gaming world would take a much

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bigger effort than what they did for the Mac. And you know again

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if mobile gaming is bigger than console PC gaming combined and Apple already gets a 30% cut of that entire market

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on its platforms for the most part. Boy, that’d be tough sell inside Apple to say we’re going to dedicate

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even more resources than we did to the Mac resurgence. And what we’re going to do, we’re gonna do it about gaming. The only thing that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John makes me gives me a little twitch about this is like, well, Apple is doing a lot with AR. And yeah, there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are uses for AR other than gaming. Maybe the primary uses are other than gaming, but they just bought a VR

⏹️ ▶️ ^John company. And you know, they at one point they were considering building a car. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s really hard to count Apple out on anything. Obviously, I would love for them to rededicate

⏹️ ▶️ ^John themselves to gaming. I would love for them to finally get gaming to court game developers, to do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what Microsoft did. Like, I’m as big a Microsoft curmudgeon as anybody, but when Microsoft

⏹️ ▶️ ^John said, we’re going to get into the console gaming market, they did, they did it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They dedicated years and billions of dollars, and they are now a player in that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John market, and they learned how to deal with game developers, They learned how to make good games and learned how to buy and support good

⏹️ ▶️ ^John game companies. Hell, they bought Bungie out from under all us Mac users, even though they kind of, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know, split off after that. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Microsoft did it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Not that you’re upset. What year was when they bought Bungie?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, just you’re not upset about that to this day. Not a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bit. Yeah, 2000 or something. Anyway, yeah, Microsoft proves that it’s possible.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like if, you know, again, Microsoft was already in gaming, but they decided to get into console gaming and they did it. It’s possible.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can do. And Apple certainly has enough money and talent to do it, but I’m not sure if the upside will

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ever, uh, you know, justify that kind of investment. So until then,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I just have these sketchy rumors and a Snazzy Labs video to comfort

⏹️ ▶️ ^John me in the night.

Sponsor: Linode (code atp2020)

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We are sponsored this week by Linode, my favorite cloud host.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Whether you’re working on a personal project or managing your entire company’s infrastructure, Linode Cloud

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Hosting has the pricing, support, and scale you need to take your project to the next 11.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They have 11 data centers worldwide so far, and they always add more. They all run enterprise-grade

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hardware, the next generation Linode network. So Linode Cloud Hosting delivers the server performance you expect

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at prices that honestly might surprise you. I’ve been a Linode customer myself for about eight years now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco since way before they were a sponsor of our show, and I just love them. I’ve been a very, very happy customer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I host my blog server there. I host the server for ATP’s website that we’ve been talking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco about. That’s hosted at Linode. And I host all of Overcast. I run, I think, almost 30 instances

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at Linode now, and it’s just a breeze. I love them. They’re incredibly fast. Their support

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is great when you need it, and they are a great value. And they’ve been a great value the entire time I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco been their customer. Whenever technology allows them to offer more for the same money or for less, they do.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You can do like a one-click upgrade to get all the all the new plans, or you know more RAM or more storage, whenever they can do it for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you. It’s wonderful being a Linode customer. Of course you have root access to your server,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can use an API to automate things, there’s a CLI tool to make things easier as you’re building things,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they offer one-click installs if you want of popular apps, things like WordPress or or LAMP stacks, game

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco servers, and they have plans starting at just $5 a month. And they scale all the way

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco up depending on what your needs are. They have specialties like dedicated CPU plans, GPU plans, et cetera.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So go to linode.com slash ATP to learn more and use promo

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco code ATP2020 when creating a new account and get a $20 credit towards your next

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco project. They’re also hiring, if that interests you, linode.com slash careers. Otherwise, once again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco linode.com slash ATP, promo code ATP 2020 for a $20 credit on new accounts.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Thank you so much to Linode for hosting all my servers sponsoring our show.

#askatp: Finder view

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Okay, let’s do some Ask ATP. And we begin this week

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey with the weakest muscle. Right? What type of view do you guys

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey use in the Finder? I don’t even know the names for these things. Generally speaking, I use just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the list view, which is of the four boxes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It is the second And occasionally, and I find I typically do this when I’m digging through like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey TV stuff that’s loaded into Plex, but I’m looking at the files on the Synology, I’ll use the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey thing that, it looks like a CoverFlow icon, but it’s not CoverFlow. It’s like the multi-pane view,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you know what I’m talking about, which is the third of the four icons. Well, no, actually the CoverFlow is

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} literally the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fourth. Go to the menu bar, please, Casey. You kill me

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} with this toolbar. You’re killing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John John here. Stop, first of all, don’t show the toolbar on the Viner, and second of all, go to the view menu,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John please.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Sorry,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as list or as, you can tell how often I use the view menu. Anyway, I use the list

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey view, which I should now from now on call the list view or the occasionally the columns

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey view. I pretty much never use the gallery view, even when I’m looking at photos. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I very rarely use the icons view. That is my answer. Marco,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what do you use? And then John, after that, you can tell us the correct answer, please.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I use a list view for almost everything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} I think the only list

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco view. Yeah. Yeah. I think the only time that I don’t use list view is when finder

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco forgets my preferences and resets it. Uh, but otherwise let’s do all the way.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I like that Marco correctly called the list view. I think we messed up Casey about making him look at the view menu

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and you know, I also don’t go to the menu, but at some point in the past 16 years Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John OS 10 put in that menu, it says view. And this is weird because it would be hard to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John find this in Apple’s human of these guidelines, but the top items are as icons as list as columns

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and as gallery. And the as is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco lowercase. Yeah, are there any other places where a menu item appears as a lowercase

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} letter?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Because because they’re trying to is trying to be a continuation is trying to as if the title is view as icons, view as

⏹️ ▶️ ^John list view as columns. And if you were doing that, it’d be view and then lowercase as then icons, I suppose.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s weird. Anyway, back in the day, I’m pretty sure the view menu said

⏹️ ▶️ ^John icon list, you know, stuff. I didn’t have calm anyway. Um, so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all this is to say, don’t call it icons view Casey. It’s icon view.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} It’s,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yeah, it’s, it’s weird that it’s view as list instead of us lists because yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t, I don’t like looking at this menu. I’m closing this menu. Anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Um, I mean, honestly, I, I think it should be called view as hamburger because we, we are taught that that icon

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that toggles it it on is the hamburger icon, right? For hamburger menus? So this should be hamburger view.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Stop looking at the toolbar. It’s so alien to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John me to think that people use the Finder with the toolbar visible all the time. And I banish, as we know, banish the toolbar

⏹️ ▶️ ^John entirely because I’m trying to recreate the Finder of my youth and failing because the Finder fights me every step of the way.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I use primarily ListView in a Finder window that has no sidebar and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no toolbar. Thank you very much. It just has a title bar. and then it has a little strip where it says how many

⏹️ ▶️ ^John items and how much space is available and then it has a bunch of columns and that’s it. That’s my main view. If you look at

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my Finder windows right now, they are all in this view except for one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I used to be big on Icon View back in the day, back when the Finder was spatial and I could arrange my icons to look beautiful

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and I could arrange my windows to look beautiful and everything was just arranged just so and it stayed that way literally forever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and never moved. Then I used Icon View a lot. And of course I had less stuff on your computer because the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hard drive was 10 megabytes or whatever the hell it was.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Right, I had

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like a top level set of folders and then I had applications folders and there were subfolders for games and they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all tiled beautifully and all my icons were arranged based on what was my favorites. You know how people arrange their

⏹️ ▶️ ^John home screens on their phones now? And all the obsession they have about getting their home scenes set up just right and arranging

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them by color and putting the apps where they’re in easy reach and your comment, you know all that crap? That was how the Finder

⏹️ ▶️ ^John worked. This is the best way to explain to like modern people why people would spend time

⏹️ ▶️ ^John arranging stuff in the Finder and getting custom icons from IconFactory and putting, this is all classic Mac OS,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mind you, right? We would do it for the same reason people would arrange their home screens, because you were looking at it every day

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and you wanted to make a nice little place and like Springboard on your iPhone, it would remember.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You wouldn’t turn on your phone one day and like everything’s all scrambled up. It’s like, oh, like you would never arrange your home screen if that happened, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So the Mac OS X Finder has never really been nice in that way. But the one window that I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fight constantly to keep arranged in some way is the applications folder.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And the applications folder is in a specific position and proportion on my screen. I view it as

⏹️ ▶️ ^John icons so I can see my beautiful app icons. I don’t bother trying to arrange them because that is way too much task

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the Mac OS Finder. I just have them sorted by name and that lets me not deal with that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I adjust the grid size to be just so, so not too many names wrap too much, but they’re not truncated either.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And it’s like, my current one on my giant screen is six icons across and 10

⏹️ ▶️ ^John down, right? And that’s my main icon view. And there are other ones too. I have a bunch of photos,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things that are an icon view with big previews at a very large size. So I can see the thumbnails and all sorts of stuff like that. Like it varies,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but in general, it’s all this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m glad we settled that.

#askatp: Cleaning screens

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Stefan writes, as a long and loyal listener from Germany, I have a question. I love my 16-inch MacBook Pro, but I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey can’t always protect the display from the curious little hands of other young family members.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey How do you clean your display? You know, I don’t have a good answer for this, and I think, John, you have a bespoke

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey cloth, or is that only for the super-duper, duper-duper fancy version of your display?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s not just for the super-duper. I did get the cloth. I mean, the super-duper one is like you can’t use anything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but the cloth, but they all come with the cloth,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} so I do have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} cloth. Gotcha,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gotcha. for cleaning displays like kids have their grimy hands on which I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can totally relate to because our laptop screen looks like a disaster. A because kids are pigs but B because the kids

⏹️ ▶️ ^John still pick the laptop up by the screen which is just

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} ugh. Oh god that’s painful.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They don’t know how to treat things nicely. Anyway, my suggestion

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and this is going to sound dumb and also slightly dangerous Casey is just use water.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t use any cleaning solutions whatsoever. Water, the good old universal solvent, it will not cut grease

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as well as any kind of cleaner or alcohol or anything will, but at various

⏹️ ▶️ ^John times Apple has more or less strangely suggested just use water. Eventually the finger

⏹️ ▶️ ^John grease will come off. A mildly damp, soft cloth that seems like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s not even damp enough to do the job because if you make it real damp and then you try to rub and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the fingerprint doesn’t come out and you rub harder and then you squeeze out a drop of water and it slides down your your screen into your keyboard and now you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Casey. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} like. Oh thanks Noah. A mildly. Tough crowd today, tough crowd. A

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mildly damp, soft cloth, and then you just have to go over the same spot lots

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of times, rinse the grease off of it, rinse the rag out again. Just plain water will

⏹️ ▶️ ^John actually get your screen clean unless like your kids took a sharpie to it or something, in which case, sorry about that. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just for finger grease, just plain water will do it. That’s my advice. Not too much, water not too

⏹️ ▶️ ^John much, mostly plants. That’s my advice. As for my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fancy screen, like my television, although this streak has ended, I think,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for my TV, but like my television for many years, my Pro

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Display XDR screen has never been touched by human hands, like after coming from the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} factory. The

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} front

⏹️ ▶️ ^John screen of my Pro Display XDR has literally never been touched by human, I peeled off the big, gigantic,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sticky, static thing that covers it, carefully peeled it off by the big handle and put it on my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John desk, and I’ve touched the side of the display, and I’ve touched the stand, and I’ve touched the bottom, but I have never touched the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John front, and neither have any of my children. And for the longest time, my TV was like that, because I raised my children

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to be terrified of going

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} anywhere near

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the TV. It’s like, ah, A, because it could fall on them and kill them, but B, also, don’t touch daddy’s TV.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Pretty sh- and my TV screen has never been cleaned by anything,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? Unlike a CRT, it doesn’t attract dust. Remember that? I was always a nightmare with CRTs, like it would detract dust to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them with like static electricity or whatever the hell they charge right that doesn’t happen with plasmas anyway so there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no dust on it right I’ve dusted the top and the sides and everything but I’ve never dusted the screen and there are no fingerprints

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the screen recently I did find a smudge of something on the screen and I have to deal with that I don’t know where it came from maybe some

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kids sneezed or I don’t know what the hell it was so the streak is over for my TV after however many years but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as far as I’m aware my Pro Display XDR has literally never been touched if someone did touch it I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wouldn’t use the soft cloth that came with it because that’s packed away and pristine in the original packaging up on attic somewhere,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I would just get a soft damp cloth and very gently, slowly remove the finger grease

⏹️ ▶️ ^John using only water. And actually, I don’t have to be that careful because if I make a big bead of water and it drips down, it would just land on my desk

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and not go into my keyboard.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You didn’t even give me a chance to finish. I asked you a question, then you decided to go on a monologue. It’s a tough crowd today,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey guys. Tough crowd.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You can talk now. What else do you have

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} to say about screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey spraying? Oh, thank you, dad. I would love to. Oh my God. I have an extremely useful solution for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this, so I hope you’re happy that you delayed me telling you. Spill a cup of water on your screen, is that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it? No, you’re the one who’s saying to put water on the screen. Just a little bit. Here’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what you need to do. You need to buy yourself a Volvo XC90. And when you buy that Volvo XC90,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it comes with this absurdly overpriced microfiber cleaning cloth, which you can actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey buy on Amazon for $17. And that works just delightfully. And so if I ever decide

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I need to clean the screen, just use that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, my solution is almost as bad as Casey’s. I just, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco microfiber cloths are amazing. Uh, usually you don’t even need

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco any liquid. If you can just like, you know, rub it gently with a microfiber cloth for, you know, five seconds, you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco get almost anything off of the screen. Uh, in the rare cases that you got some, you know, real sticky,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, sneeze blob on there or something that is, you really need like, you know, help with a very,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as John said, very slightly damp microfiber cloth can get off pretty much anything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If you need to go past that, which you probably don’t, but if you need to go past that, there are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a whole bunch of various solutions sold by like, you know, office stores and Amazon of like screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cleaning spray or something like that. Screen cleaning wipes are a thing. I’ve used those before in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the past. They seem fine. That being said, I’m a little concerned

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that like you don’t, you don’t really know what the chemical is they’re using. It might be harmful to your screens

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco coating, it might not. It’s kind of, you’re kind of, you know, rolling the dice with that. So it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not a great solution to rely on most of the time, especially, you know, modern days. Back in the olden days when

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it was just like, you know, a basic, you know, matte plastic covering or a basic piece of glass,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it was easier to recommend some kind of like spray solution. But nowadays

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the screens have so many like specialty coatings on them to reduce glare and stuff like that, that that you don’t really know what’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco gonna damage that coating and what’s not. So ideally, trying to use chemicals and try to just stick with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco microfiber cloths and water basically, and that gets almost anything out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, the reason people always suggest microfiber is they don’t want you to scratch it, and you would think that if you use something like say

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a paper towel or a tissue, it’s like, oh, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} not gonna scratch it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} do that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oh, don’t do that. Right, because people think like, oh, it’s a paper towel, look how soft it is. I can squish it up in my hand or whatever. But those, lots of paper

⏹️ ▶️ ^John products, unbeknownst to you, have tiny abrasive things in them, which is why people say microfiber. Now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all that said, it doesn’t have to be a beautiful bespoke microfiber. There are lots of sort of soft cleaning cloths.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John There are like the velvety ones that you use for camera lenses or whatever. Like, all you’re looking for is not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a textile that has abrasive elements in it. I don’t know what it is that’s abrasive, but little pieces of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John paper, pulp, or whatever the hell it is. Something, like, don’t judge soft, what I’m saying is don’t judge

⏹️ ▶️ ^John softness by like, I feel it in my hand and it feels soft. That’s not a great way to judge softness. But mostly you’ll probably be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John okay because especially with Apple’s glass things, you’re not gonna scratch it. you’re not even gonna scratch the oleophobic coating probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with like a soft tissue that’s damp or whatever. But if you’re gonna be there like rubbing away at some greasy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fingerprint, get a screen cleaning cloth. And the thing about screen cleaning cloths is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they don’t last infinitely, they will slowly fill with finger spoo. Like it’s just the nature. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you’re getting it off your screen, where do you think it’s going? Yeah, when you throw something away, where is it away? It’s going on the cloth,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? So you do have to actually wash those cloths to clean them or get a new cloth at a certain point too. That’s another

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing to keep in mind if you have a seriously gross screen situation.

#askatp: Parental controls

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Finally, Peter wants to know, do you use any tools to protect your kids on the internet? For example,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to restrict searches they can do on Google or YouTube. I know about YouTube Safe Search and Cloudflare’s DNS for Families,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but I was wondering if there are tools for Apple Mail or iMessage. I don’t really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey have to worry about this yet because my kids are way too little. So I’m going to get out of the way and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey let’s start with the younger kids. Marco, what do you do?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Pretty simple, really. We don’t do much yet. We have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the parental controls on our kid’s iPad enabled, but that’s mostly just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for the screen time limits of limiting what hours in which it can be used and total

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco time and everything. Other than that, the thing is, it’s hard to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco use technological measures to really 100%

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco restrict what your kids can see online. Because not only do most of the measures not actually work 100%, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not only do kids find ways around them way more than you might think and spread those ways amongst themselves and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know they’re smarter than you think and they figure it out. But also it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kind of a game of whack-a-mole like you never really can get it all right you’re never gonna protect your kids from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco seeing something that you know is adult or inappropriate in nature

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if they’re looking for that. So there’s really no, in my opinion, there’s no

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco substitute for just parenting of just monitoring what they’re doing, of like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco periodically going over and looking at what they’re watching or what they’re browsing or whatever and talking to them about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, hey, here’s the kind of thing you might run into if you go looking for it or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or like, you know, tell them actual risks. As you can say, like, you know, there’s some stuff out there that isn’t appropriate for kids.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like if they’re super young, you know, you don’t have to be, you know, gory and detailed about it, but you can just say like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, you might find things of people swearing or, you know, other stuff, God knows what else they might

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco find. I think you just have to have some idea what your kid is actually looking at, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s by simply being there and monitoring what they’re looking at. And when

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I say monitoring, I’m not talking about looking through their search history or installing some kind of creepy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco proxy. I’m saying actually walk into the room and just check on them. You

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco should have some idea the kinds of stuff they’re watching or consuming or looking at online.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think that’s just basic modern parenting. And that’s going to be better than any kind of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco technological barrier you put in place, which is mostly just going to be a thing that’s going to annoy them when they try to do something legitimate and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they’re going to try to get around. And then just, as much as you can, prepare your children

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for the realities of what’s in the world. And that takes various forms. It’s up to you what that means

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to you. But the world is a big place with a lot of stuff going on, a lot of stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on the internet. And it’s out there. They’re going to run into it. So if you can prepare them for how to deal with it when they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco do run into it, I think you’ll be better off than trying to prevent it from ever happening.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Every parent can kind of draw their own line of how much of their kid’s privacy they want to invade versus safety. But I will just say

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that looking at a very young kid’s search history is hilarious. Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} they’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John type in like how to fly, how to fly person, how person fly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Like it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just once they learn how to write, they’ll search for the most ridiculous things and they will not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John give up. Because they won’t get the results they expect because they don’t know how to formulate search queries or because they’re asking a really weird

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} question and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’ll just keep trying. It’s awesome. Anyway, when my kids were

⏹️ ▶️ ^John younger, most of the major things that are gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be interested in the OS itself, the YouTube app, Safari, whatever things that they’re using,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John most of those have some kind of extremely weak sort of advisory level restrictions.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I’ve always used those, just because I’m not trying to stop my kids from things they’re seeking out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John What I’m trying to do is reduce the possibility that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John unintentionally they will run across something. So if there’s an age restriction on like music

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or YouTube says restrict content or you know, I don’t know, it’s 20 settings, like the OS has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one as well, or restrict content for under 17 or eight, just turn all that stuff on. because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John practically speaking, my experience has been it doesn’t stop the kids from getting, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they don’t even know what’s on it. It doesn’t stop them from getting to anything that they want to get to. It also doesn’t stop them from seeking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out things that they shouldn’t be seeing anyway, but what it does stop them from is like they’re looking for Daniel Tiger and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they end up with something entirely different because of some unfortunate coincidence of search terms.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Those features are ubiquitous and you should totally use them. In fact, even though my kids are both teens now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I still have those, you know, restrict to 17 plus settings on, on basically everything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Cause A, well A, they’re not 17, not that I really care about those age things, but B, it doesn’t stop them from seeing anything really. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I watch rated R movies with them when I think they’re appropriate, but I rent those myself and,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, they can get to anything on YouTube they want to anyway. Like I’m not actually stopping them if they really want to seek out

⏹️ ▶️ ^John something that’s quote unquote not age appropriate, they’re totally going to get to it. But I feel like, kind of like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how I pay for whatever this service that takes the ads off YouTube. I’m just trying to make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the sort of default… I’m trying to make the neutral game… God, I keep doing Destiny

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things you guys don’t understand. Anyway, I’m trying to make the default environment… Trying to… Trying to give them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a better neutral game. Trying to make the default environment without any super… Oh, it’s not even working.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Anyway, I’m trying to make it so that if they just act normally,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John then everything will be normal and they won’t suddenly have like, you know, animal mutilation or porn

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thrown in their face. If any of them come to me and say, I’ve got to see something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for school and this is restricted, I’ll just turn it off. Like, I don’t, you know, I don’t care. You know, they’re old enough now, but I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think that that really helped. It really helped me not have to be over their shoulder every second, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a kid with unrestricted access to the Internet is going to land on things that they didn’t want to see

⏹️ ▶️ ^John by accident. And like I said, most of the things like YouTube and Apple’s OS and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things that let you buy and see apps and buy and see TV shows or whatever, those restrictions and age ratings,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they work really well, especially for younger kids to just cut out most of the stuff that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John egregious. So that’s what I suggest. And what it requires is everything that your kids are gonna be using,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like if you use parental controls only, if you use three apps or whatever, you have to look in every single one of those apps. Find

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out, does this service have parental controls? How does it work? Can I make an account for my kid? Is it a sub-account

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of mine? How do I put restrictions on them? How do, you know, Apple’s good about this, you know. You can make it so your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kid’s account, put it, make a family, you know, the Apple family thing and make your kids, your kids in that family

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and make them have to ask you for approval to quote unquote buy applications, even free ones.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And then you’ll always know every single app they download because you’ll get a notification on your phone that says, you know, little

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Timmy wants to buy this app, approve or reject. And you can look at the app in the app store and it’s gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be something, you know, if it turns out that’s one of those exploitive free to play

⏹️ ▶️ ^John games, that’s a perfect opportunity to go talk to Little Timmy about how this thing works. And they might still want

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it anyway, and you might be able to give it to them. And then you get a notification five minutes later that says Little Timmy wants to do an in-app purchase for 500

⏹️ ▶️ ^John coins or something inside the game. And then you can have a different conversation with them. Those are the type

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of tools I’m talking about here. They’re not stopping anything. They’re facilitating

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a dialogue and sort of filtering out the worst of the worst. But you do have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to, like Margo said, still be engaged. As your kids get older,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re going to seek out things that they’re quote unquote not supposed to see. I’m not sure everyone remembers, but we were all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kids once too. Like, that’s what kids do. I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s any avoiding that. I don’t think it’s healthy to avoid that. Hopefully by that point, you have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John done well enough in raising your child that, like, things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John aren’t gonna go totally off the rails. Sometimes it’s out of your control. We’re all doing the best we can.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Thanks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Linode, and Tom Bihn, and we will see

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you next week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Now the show is over, they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco didn’t even mean to begin, Cause it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey oh it was accidental. John didn’t do any research, Marco

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and Casey wouldn’t let him,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Cause it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey oh it was accidental. And you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can find the show notes at atp.fm And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you’re into Twitter, you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco D-N-T, Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Syracuse It’s accidental, they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John didn’t mean to Accidental Tech Podcasts

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’ve kept you so long

Post-show

⏹️ ▶️ ^John On to show notes this week.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh wait, let me save, just to make sure. So, well, are you doing it

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John am I? You are, I don’t want to mess with your. Okay. I wait until you’re done and then I mess with it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John All right. That’s my system. I also don’t edit in web text fields,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Casey. Oh my God, please leave me alone. I do not

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} have time. Why are you so mean? Nobody edits it!

⏹️ ▶️ ^John How many times have we talked about this? Do not edit text in web

⏹️ ▶️ ^John text fields. Never edit text in web text fields. What? I don’t know how long you have to, what is it gonna take for people to learn that?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Never.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Especially a web text field with no features, like something I’ve built.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It doesn’t matter how many features it has, it’s just not a thing that you ever do. I’ve been burned by that so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John many times. So many web BBSs, you’d be writing an awesome post and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John then you’d accidentally close the tab or the thing would crash or it would be gone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and you’d be like, oh, I have to write that again. It was right there. And I couldn’t search all RAM because of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stupid protected memory. No.