412: Love Batteries
07 Jan 2021A deep dive into Apple’s Feedback system, first impressions of the OWC Thunderbolt Dock, Marco’s other Christmas gift, and the best Liss pun to date.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- Accommodating hearing loss (via “Phredd Phlinstone”)
Settings→Accessibility→Audio/Visual→Headphone Accommodations→Audiogram- Example app from Maciej
- Big Sur Update
- Apple guidance on SMC reset via Tom Bridge
- Nintendo Famicom had a microphone built into the second controller
- PS5 controller weight and “following” games
- The galaxy’s largest black hole
sysdiagnose- Profiles and Logs
- Stack trace
- Casey’s MMS bugs FB8893003, FB8952395
- John’s bug FB8711530
- Accommodating hearing loss (via “Phredd Phlinstone”)
- Marco Equipment Update
- A brief
#askatpinterlude- How does Marco sell his unwanted computers? (via Brian)
- Marco’s other Christmas gift
- Post-show: New Liss
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Chapters
- Audiograms as EQs
- Big Sur update
- Famicom follow-up (?!)
- PS5 follow-up
- Sponsor: Linode
- Apple’s feedback system
- Sponsor: Flatfile
- Thunderbolt dock update 🖼️
- How to sell old gear?
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- The other Christmas gift 🖼️
- Ending theme
- 🐶 🖼️
Audiograms as EQs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is America still here? Because I can’t tell.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is a horrible day in the political slash American world and we’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco glide right past it. Actually, it started out pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey That’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We had a great morning. Yes. It’s been a roller coaster.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, we’re going to glide right past this because you all need a break, I’m sure. And so do we. And so we’re going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have a text like usual.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With that happy thing behind us, let’s start with some follow up. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pered Flintstone, which I believe is actually supposed to be pronounced Fred Flintstone, writes, do you want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to know how to transform 62-year-old ears into 16-year-old ears? Download one of the free hearing test
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iOS apps and then point Settings Audio Visual Headphone Accommodations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Audiogram to the resultant audiogram. I didn’t even know that you could do such a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is extremely cool. Fred Flintstone continues, this EQs the audio output to compensate for frequency loss
⏹️ ▶️ Casey according to the audiogram. with relatively minor hearing loss. This gave the 62
⏹️ ▶️ Casey year old his 16 year old ears back and newfound enjoyment of music. Using the audio gram
⏹️ ▶️ Casey provides personalized and much more nuanced EQ adjustment than the built-in iOS presets. Now, just to be clear, John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you did just have a birthday, but you are not yet 62, is that correct?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, and I think my hearing is actually pretty good, but this is related to someone suggesting that Marco look
⏹️ ▶️ John into the EQ settings for the AirPods Max, said he tried them, they all seem kind of extreme.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apparently this is a pluggable system. So you can, you know, these apps, these
⏹️ ▶️ John hearing test apps, I imagine they’re a plague on the app store. Like I don’t know this for a fact, but I imagine if
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s one of them, there’s probably a thousand tests you’re hearing free. Anyway. I actually made one. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John what they’ll do is make a personalized audiogram for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Whoa, slow down. We’re just gonna let that glide right by? What do you mean you made one?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I never released it. Back when I had my like temporary hearing injury a few years back,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I made a hearing test app so I could tell as I was getting better, if I was getting better, and how. You know, one of those things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that goes, it plays different beeps at different frequencies and different volume levels. You
⏹️ ▶️ John have to raise your hand if you can hear it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Which ear did it come through, yeah. So anyway, that will give you a,
⏹️ ▶️ John basically an equalizer preset tailored to your hearing ability. So it won’t be too
⏹️ ▶️ John extreme for you because it will be made based on measuring. Now, I don’t know which, because I suspect
⏹️ ▶️ John hearing test apps are a terrible plague filled with scams on the App Store. Like so many categories.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve put in a link to one such app that one listener sent and I assume this one is not a scam,
⏹️ ▶️ John but honestly I haven’t tried it. But anyway, check it out if you get a chance and
⏹️ ▶️ John if you think your hearing may be going or you just want to play with an app to see what it says about your hearing.
⏹️ ▶️ John If the results turned out that you’re, you know, have difficulty hearing certain frequencies, you can make your iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John accommodate for that and help you hear that better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It seems to me like this is a opportunity here for apps to just help you generate custom EQ profiles
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the system. Because if that’s what, that’s all this is doing, this is just saying, all right, well, this frequency range boosts this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or even better if it’s parametric, I don’t actually know the format, but if it’s a way to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco supply effectively the inverse of the custom EQ that you want, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any app can generate those files apparently, or possibly, as long as the format is documented
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somewhere. and then you could theoretically have an app that’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all right, what if I wanna boost this frequency range only and no others? You know, like that actually could be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John This sounds like it should be a feature of Overcast buried in the setting somewhere. You already got the code for it, just chuck it in there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, ideally, you know, I mean, people don’t play a lot of music through Overcast, but you know, ideally this would be a system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco setting. Like instead of those like ancient, what is it, 11 EQ profiles from the iPod
⏹️ ▶️ Marco era that are just like fixed, like pop, rock, treble booster or whatever, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead of those, also just offer an EQ with like, you know, maybe make it a 10 band
⏹️ ▶️ Marco EQ, have 10 sliders across, or whatever it is. I mean, you know, I’d go parametric, cause I’m a nerd, but no one else would.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But like, you know, the processing power is trivial. To do EQing, I know, cause I wrote one into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Voice Boost too, like to do EQing is trivial on modern hardware, so it wouldn’t be like a big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deal to do it. It also, like by offering the presets that they have versus offering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it like a custom EQ, There’s no real difference in how complex that is to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco run live. The phone is constantly doing all sorts of operations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are way more complicated than running a basic biquad filter to have an EQ profile.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s actually really not that hard to do with modern hardware without even noticing the overhead.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So they might as well just offer a custom EQ at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, that’s basically what this is. It is system-wide. I mean, it says headphone accommodations, but I’m assuming this just goes into
⏹️ ▶️ John the system audio pathway. And if you install one of these headphone accommodation audiogram
⏹️ ▶️ John things, every sound that your phone makes, I’m assuming, through any of the audio system gets processed through this
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. So I think what Overcast would have to do is basically be a little miniature hearing test app that produces one of these autogram
⏹️ ▶️ John files. And the only question I have is like, okay, well then do you have to make the user like download it and install it? Because I assume
⏹️ ▶️ John Overcast doesn’t have the ability to jam that audiogram into the system preferences thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I would assume there’s probably no API for that. Like that’s probably one of those things where you just have to kind of export
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a file and figure it out yourself. But again, I don’t really see this being something that Overcast has to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Rather, it’s the kind of thing where like, I just need to build in a custom EQ to Overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for people who want that, which is actually a somewhat frequently requested feature. And I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the entire engine to do that is already written, it’s already in Voice Boost 2. It’s been shipping to everybody for like a year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s just no UI to adjust the parameters of the EQ. And that’s what I have to do.
Big Sur update
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on, I thought we’d do a quick Big Sur update. Big Sur! And I’d let you know that Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your favorite thing is happening as we speak, this is being recorded on a mostly untested environment
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I have upgraded to Big Sur. I did that a couple of days ago. I did record analog yesterday.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey However, it has not been edited as yet. That being said, Jim, who does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the editing for analog and many other shows that you all enjoy, has said that he did crack open my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey files and everything seemed all right. But, sorry, Marco, if I make a terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey edit for you. It would not be the first time, and unfortunately, it probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco won’t be the last.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But that actually brings us to the next follow-up item, because my Big Sur upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seems to have been mostly okay until I rebooted. And it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or maybe, actually, I guess it was first boot, and I needed to, I believe, bless the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey audio hijack kernel extension, or whatever it’s called now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And in order to do that, I needed to go into system preferences and unlock the security preference or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is. And I needed to type in my computer password. And so, you know, Audio Hijack,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was either Audio Hijacker or the OS itself knew that I might wanna do this, you know, prompted me to do all these things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And when I got to the preference pane and it asked for my username and password, it was not Casey, which is my username
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the computer, it was Casey Liss. I thought, hmm, I’ve heard about this somewhere. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know what to do. And I think I know what’s about to happen. And sure enough, I typed in my password, no
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dice. I changed Casey list to Casey, typed in my password again, no dice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And as it turns out, what I needed to do was reset my SMC. Does this sound familiar to anyone?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we also got some feedback from Tom Bridge, which is the followup item that this all leads
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into. Tom says, I just had to deal with the same situation as John with regard to the SMC reset. There’s even a tech note
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at Apple for this. Quote, if you can’t unlock settings and system preferences while
⏹️ ▶️ Casey using Big Sur 11.1, your Mac with Apple T2 security chip has an issue that requires
⏹️ ▶️ Casey resetting the SMC. System preferences should accept your password after you reset the SMC. There’s a link
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the show notes to all of this. Comically, do you know how you reset the SMC in an iMac Pro?
⏹️ ▶️ John Unplug it from the wall for five seconds. Fifteen seconds, but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey yes. Fifteen.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then plug it back in and wait five seconds and then press the power button.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, that is correct. That is the official guidance.
⏹️ ▶️ John bunch of other people wrote in to tell us about this. Like the reason why SMC reset has
⏹️ ▶️ John anything to do with this or anything to do with T2 stuff is apparently, you know, any dialogue that asks for authentication
⏹️ ▶️ John that could potentially be tied into Touch ID, because you know how you can use Touch ID to do some
⏹️ ▶️ John password dialogues on the Mac, but not all of them, but any one of them that sort of triggers the subsystem that says, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you had a Mac with Touch ID and that was all registered, we would ask you for your fingerprint. That all goes through the T2.
⏹️ ▶️ John and somehow the Big Sur update hoses something having to do with good old Bridge OS running on the T2.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if it’s hosed, when you shut down your computer, the T2 is still there doing its thing. The only way
⏹️ ▶️ John to sort of reset the T2 is in the case of a desktop computer, to remove power
⏹️ ▶️ John from it and say, guess what T2, now you’re stopped, because you don’t have any electricity.
⏹️ ▶️ John the T2 will start back up and presumably operate correctly. Now, what’s wrong with the T2 after
⏹️ ▶️ John the Big Sur update that it needs to be reset? I don’t know. people have theories about something inside
⏹️ ▶️ John the T2 crashing or whatever. The bottom line is that those auth dialogs tie into the T2 because of
⏹️ ▶️ John touch ID. And if they’re hosed, you must reset the SMC T2
⏹️ ▶️ John subsystem by in the case of a desktop Mac, depriving enough power. It’s why it’s more complicated on laptops
⏹️ ▶️ John because you can’t take the batteries out, right? Cause they’re sealed inside this. You got to do some other dance. That’s why again,
⏹️ ▶️ John look at the tech note, follow the instructions for your specific computer to reset the SMC. Don’t just assume
⏹️ ▶️ John because you have a desktop it’s unplugged because maybe you don’t have a thing with a T2 on. Indeed.
Famicom follow-up (?!)
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can you tell me John about this follow-up with regards to the Famicom?
⏹️ ▶️ John Sure, Andrew Odinger wrote in to tell us that the Nintendo Famicom had a microphone built into the second
⏹️ ▶️ John controller only Famicom is what the We what we know is the Nintendo Entertainment System in the
⏹️ ▶️ John US or the NES first existed as the Famicom Which was short for family computer in Japan
⏹️ ▶️ John and it looked different But the controllers were very similar little, you know, little rectangle the NES
⏹️ ▶️ John with the d-pad and the two buttons
⏹️ ▶️ John it had two controllers with comically short wires in them that you couldn’t remove
⏹️ ▶️ John And the second control had a microphone in it So Andrew says like many of us in the US I first
⏹️ ▶️ John learned of it when playing let the Legend of Zelda with game manual stated that an Irritating enemy the poles voice
⏹️ ▶️ John hated loud sounds. However, the NES had no microphone So everybody in the US made futile attempts to use
⏹️ ▶️ John other weapons to defeat it Usually the recorder or flute in Japan however, one only needed to yell
⏹️ ▶️ John into the microphone, eradicating the Pole’s voice. And we’ll have a link to a YouTube video. I guess they didn’t change the
⏹️ ▶️ John manual, because the manual, back in the old days, video games came with manuals that you could read.
⏹️ ▶️ John I remember those days. Yeah, you read it in the car on the way home. Yeah, exactly right, Marco, exactly right. And if you saw,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, this enemy hates loud sounds, and in the game you find, like, a flute? Or something? You’re like, oh, I know how to beat that enemy.
⏹️ ▶️ John But little did you know that what it expected you to do was yell. But of course, you couldn’t yell in the US one. They
⏹️ ▶️ John changed the game. In the US one you can just shoot them with arrows, but in the Japanese version of the game, you can’t shoot them with
⏹️ ▶️ John arrows, and the only way you can defeat them is by yelling into the controller. So, that is the oldest instance I’ve seen of Nintendo,
⏹️ ▶️ John at least, using microphones in games. You could yell or probably blow, because blowing just sounds like static.
PS5 follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tell me about the PS5 controller’s weight, please. Yeah, I should
⏹️ ▶️ John have taken better notes on my controller comments, because I thought of more things once we were off the air that I forgot to mention. One of them
⏹️ ▶️ John is the PS5 controller is heavier than the PS4 controller, which is mostly just an accessibility
⏹️ ▶️ John issue, because it’s not heavier enough that anyone will notice, but someone like me, who has wrists that have slowly
⏹️ ▶️ John been destroyed by RSI over the years, the weight of the controller actually matters. Like, I’m not holding the controller
⏹️ ▶️ John up in the air when I play. Part of me playing with the console is that I get to rest my, sort of, my arms on my
⏹️ ▶️ John legs, Like the controllers in my lap, right? But even in that instance, it’s like, well, you’re not really holding the controller
⏹️ ▶️ John up It’s still it is a heavy weight in your hand That’s being supported by your fingers and your hands and I feel the difference
⏹️ ▶️ John like a little tiny bit It’s not the end of the world, but I would prefer a lighter controller But the
⏹️ ▶️ John slightly heavier controller is the price you pay for the really cool rumble stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Tell me about the PlayStation 5 UI and following games
⏹️ ▶️ John Terrence was one of many people to write in to give me some advice on how I could make the ps5 UI less sort of ad bannery.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was annoyed that there are things in my face that I didn’t want to see when I turn on the UI, these big tiles that are telling
⏹️ ▶️ John me about new games or whatever. And sometimes they were mostly relevant, but other times it was like, I don’t want to know about
⏹️ ▶️ John that anyway. Um, apparently there’s a mechanism in the PlayStation five UI where you can
⏹️ ▶️ John quote unquote follow like like follow on Twitter, a game. Uh, and
⏹️ ▶️ John I never did that. I never knew about that feature, but basically any game that you own becomes followed by default.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that makes some sense in terms of why am I seeing things about Destiny and stuff because I own Destiny, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ John also if you are a subscriber to PlayStation Plus, you get a lot of free games as part
⏹️ ▶️ John of PlayStation Plus. You know, they’re just, they’re just yours, you know, for paying the monthly fee, which is a great deal actually,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially if you haven’t played those games. Usually they’re good games, but older games. Anyway, I ended up
⏹️ ▶️ John quote unquote following things like God of War or Fortnite and stuff that I don’t play
⏹️ ▶️ John on the PlayStation at all. And so that’s why I’m seeing some, you know, Fortnite thing in my face constantly every time I turn
⏹️ ▶️ John on my computer. It was because I was following Fortnite. So if you go to the game and unfollow it, then you won’t see those tiles
⏹️ ▶️ John anymore. So I did that and it helped, but unfortunately you can’t unfollow as far as
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m aware the PlayStation Store. And I don’t want to see the store telling me about stuff either. So the struggle
⏹️ ▶️ John against the PS5 banner-filled UI continues, but I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John definitely improved thanks this last week.
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Apple’s feedback system
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have to do like a little bit of vocabulary for the next section. So we have a lot of feedback, which is really good,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about feedbacks and radar and cyst diagnosis and things of that nature. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’re going to talk about the galaxy’s largest black hole, and that is Apple’s feedback system. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so we’re going to use several different terms, all probably interchangeably. Feedback
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is what Apple currently calls, to the best of my knowledge, basically a bug report. You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use an app called Feedback Assistant, and you create a feedback. In the olden
⏹️ ▶️ Casey days, and I think still internally within Apple, these were called radars. So radar is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app that Apple uses that they use to track their bugs and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things of that nature. An individual instance, an individual bug or ticket, if you will, was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also often called a radar. is basically, as we discussed before,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just if you have something bad happen, Apple needs to be able to recreate to some degree
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what was going on in your system at the time. And that’s not an unreasonable request. And assist diagnose basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey says when the user does some particular incantation, which varies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey based on OS and device, then the OS will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey write potentially tens of thousands of lines of data and logs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to a very, very large file, usually a couple hundred megs at least, which you can then upload to Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so they can try to piece together what was going on at the time. So that’s just a little vocabulary to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get out. So hopefully we all are on the same page. And if you recall, all of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us were, probably me more than most, were lamenting the fact that if you create a radar with Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you create a bug report with Apple, it just disappears into the ether. It is seriously the galaxy’s largest black hole.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s very frustrating from a user’s perspective, and especially from a developer’s perspective, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you want some amounts of feedback, and typically you get precisely zero. So we had a bunch of different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people, some of whom are at Apple, some of whom are former Apple, write
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in and say, hey, here’s my perspective on this. And what John and Marco and I are going to go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through over the next several minutes is an amalgamation of several different pieces of feedback.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe you mean several different feedbacks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s right, several different feedbacks from several different people. So that’s kind of the stage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we’re standing on, if you will, right now. So with that said, the first piece of feedbacks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we got, again, from either a current or former Apple employee, this individual writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you file a radar and then get a reply saying, quote, attach a sysdiagnose, quote. This can optimistically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be taken as an acknowledgment that someone believes your bug is real, but that they have no idea how to reproduce
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it on demand or fix it. It can also have other meanings though.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that is a very optimistic
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey take. Very optimistic.
⏹️ ▶️ John In the example that I gave, they believe your bug is real, but they have no idea how to reproduce it. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John I attached a sample project that you can build. The only thing this project does is reproduce the bug.
⏹️ ▶️ John And plus there was instructions on how to use the sample product to reproduce the bug. So that’s not why they
⏹️ ▶️ John asked me for a cyst diagnose. I can understand, like Casey said, in the vocabulary section,
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s why they want us to diagnose. But as we’ll see in a little bit, even that is not explained well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. And just in case it wasn’t clear, like John said, a sample project means it’s something that you can run,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that an Apple person could run on their device that will specifically tickle the particular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bug in question. So hypothetically, there should be no need for anything else because you run this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little app, be that for your Mac or for your iOS device or whatever, and perform whatever thing that the developer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wants you to perform. And hypothetically, if everything goes according to plan, it will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make that bug happen. And so you really shouldn’t need anything else. And actually, it’s probably the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey best thing that a developer can give
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the gold standard of bug rebug. Just to be clear, we keep saying sample project. When we say project, we mean an Xcode
⏹️ ▶️ John project. We give them the source code. It says, here is the source code for my Xcode project. Not only do they have
⏹️ ▶️ John an app that they can run after they build it, they have the full source code to your app, which hopefully is like 20 lines long.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m reproducing the bug. Sometimes there have to be instructions, because like launch the app, then do this, then do that. And here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John my expected behavior, and here’s the actual behavior. So we’re giving them an explicit way to reproduce it. We’ve already
⏹️ ▶️ John narrowed the bug down to the smallest possible case, and they have the source code. Like this is what
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody wants for any bug report. And yeah, so it’s all the more frustrating when you take
⏹️ ▶️ John the time to make a new Xcode project, narrow the bug down yourself, get it to the point where you have
⏹️ ▶️ John the minimal set of code that reproduces the problem, and still nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. And to use a really crummy analogy, imagine you’re making like some 50-step
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recipe and you realize that, oh, I used a bad ingredient somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I can tell it tastes like garbage. Well, then you need to go through this recipe and like do it all over again in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey order to figure out, okay, which specific one of these ingredients was wrong. And that’s kind of what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of times happens is, you know, you have a fully functioning app, like take Overcast, for example. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey remember, Marco, if you know off the top of your head how big Overcast is, but I’d assume it’s, you know, several thousand, if not tens of thousands of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sounds about right. I think it’s like 80,000 or something. There
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you go. So there’s effectively 80,000 ingredients in this casserole, if you will. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in order to find the one or two or 10 things that are really causing the problem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can be hours upon hours of work. So imagine how frustrating it is for us on this side of the table
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when And we put in the work to give Apple this just perfect present
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they can just run immediately and see exactly what’s going on. And then the response we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get in return is, oh, can I have a cyst diagnose? No. No, you can’t have a cyst diagnose. You’ve already got what you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey need. No, you can’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so frustrating. So anyway, moving on from the Apple people. Time of bug is important when you take a cyst diagnose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because, as you can see in the console app, there are often thousands, if not tens of thousands, of logs per second,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this individual writes. I used to be a screener for Apple search bugs, and you wouldn’t believe the variation in times
⏹️ ▶️ Casey between when people experience bugs and when they launch a sysdiagnose. The tools for analyzing sysdiagnose logs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also suck hard. That’s the Apple person’s quote, by the way. The amounts of effort it takes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to write down the time you saw a bug is much smaller than the effort it takes to find the bug you’re describing in a
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, so that’s the explanation. Now, here’s how Apple asks for a sysdiagnose in the feedbacks that I have.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is directly quoting from one of my feedbacks. and I’m not omitting anything. Please capture
⏹️ ▶️ John a CIS diagnose immediately after the issue reproduces. Additionally, please note
⏹️ ▶️ John the exact time, ex colon one slash one slash one nine space 12 colon 51 space PM.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, all right, this is another tidbit from someone else, according from another
⏹️ ▶️ John piece of feedback on feedbacks. If someone asked you when it was taken, that’s really interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John because that means someone dramatically misunderstood the directions. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey so the directions say, capture a cis
⏹️ ▶️ John diagnose immediately after the issue reproduces. Now here’s, God, there are so many
⏹️ ▶️ John problems here in terms of this communication, right? Certainly wasn’t clear to me, although
⏹️ ▶️ John it is now clear from listening to all these feedback things. Like capturing a cis diagnose, like you invoke
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing. There’s different ways to invoke it, as Casey said, but you invoke a thing. I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John since cis diagnose is such a common thing that they’re asking for,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s worth the people who work in whatever this department is to have essentially a text expander
⏹️ ▶️ John shortcut or a standard link to a webpage that
⏹️ ▶️ John explains, here’s what a sysdiagnose is. A sysdiagnose, what happens
⏹️ ▶️ John is you trigger this thing and unbeknownst to you, while you’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ John using the system, we’ve been collecting data, and when you trigger a sysdiagnose, it dumps the data that has been collected
⏹️ ▶️ John that whole time, right? That wasn’t clear to me because from my perspective, especially the first few times I did this, I’m like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John I invoke a sysdiagnose. And as soon as I invoke it, it must be taking stock of
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole system and say, I’m just gonna dump the current state of the system to a big file or something like that, right? But apparently
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not what sysdiagnose does. What sysdiagnose does is take all the data that we’ve been gathering in the background, or we’re always
⏹️ ▶️ John gathering in the background, and dump that for some period of time in the past. But either way,
⏹️ ▶️ John when you’re trying to explain what you want the user to do and why, especially with this whole, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, do it immediately after the issue reproduces and tell us the exact time. There is
⏹️ ▶️ John like a fundamental, you know, knowledge gap between like, well, what am I doing here? And what time
⏹️ ▶️ John am I noting? Like down to the point of like, you’re supposed to be noting the time that the bug happened, not the time you did the
⏹️ ▶️ John cyst diagnose, right? This is captured immediately after the issue reproduces.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that means the time of the cyst diagnose would also essentially be the time of the bug because they’re telling me to capture it immediately after that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not really cool. and others saying sometimes the bug was reproduced, you know, there’s a big time gap between when the
⏹️ ▶️ John bug was reproduced and when they launched sysdiagnose, right? This is the perfect opportunity
⏹️ ▶️ John to do this once, have a couple people sit down at a table and say, we’re gonna ask
⏹️ ▶️ John millions of people for sysdiagnoses. Can we have a web page that explains what a sysdiagnose is? And
⏹️ ▶️ John then have this text expander snippet that says, you just type these two keystrokes and it says, we need a sysdiagnose,
⏹️ ▶️ John sysdiagnose is X, Y, and Z, and then use like the magic of hypertext to link one of those words or say, if you want more
⏹️ ▶️ John information on what a diagnosis and how to trigger it, please go to this webpage. Oh, you can’t get those, no hypertext in
⏹️ ▶️ John the feedback system as far as I can tell. But either way, it’s done so often, don’t leave it to the discretion of
⏹️ ▶️ John the person sending the thing to say something like this. Like, please note the exact time. And the exact time example they
⏹️ ▶️ John give is, you know, month, day, year, hour, minute.
⏹️ ▶️ John In 60 seconds, there’s thousands and thousands of logs. And if you’re expecting me to note down
⏹️ ▶️ John to the second when something happens, the clock in the menu bar doesn’t show seconds by default. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if I’m gonna check on my other device, they’re not necessarily synchronized. It’s like, well, why do you wanna know
⏹️ ▶️ John this? What are you trying to get at? It’s so maddening, the sort of failure to communicate.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s no meeting of the, we’re not communicating here. You have a need, but you’re not able to communicate
⏹️ ▶️ John that need to me in a way that I can do what you want. Everyone is just frustrated.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So building on that, you said there’s no thing that explains this diagnosis. That’s half true. There is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a page on the Apple Developer website that’s bug reporting. And it lists,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and this is about profiles and logs, and it lists probably 100, maybe even more, different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things that you can collect bug reports or sysdiagnosis or whatever for.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now included in that is different entries for sysdiagnose, for iOS, for macOS,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey et cetera. The super cool part is though, if you want instructions on how to do this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey guess what the Apple developer site wants you to do? Search for it? Log
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in. So you need to have an Apple developer account just to see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the instructions on how to create a cyst diagnose.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I’m glad that they have this page somewhere, but like you gotta connect the dots.
⏹️ ▶️ John When you ask, that’s why I’m saying text expander, when you ask for it, that’s the perfect opportunity
⏹️ ▶️ John to link people to more information so they can have background and context. And you can’t link to all of it. You have to
⏹️ ▶️ John put like one or two sentences minimum in line so that if someone doesn’t bother following that link,
⏹️ ▶️ John they at least know why you’re asking for this and they have the context. Things that I think they should communicate is
⏹️ ▶️ John when you do this, it’s going to dump information that has been collecting in the past. So like this is an ending
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. Like it’s not a start thing, it’s an ending thing. And the second is, by the way, if we’re gonna ask you for
⏹️ ▶️ John something additional like the time, the reason we’re asking that for you is because maybe the bug happened five minutes ago and we need
⏹️ ▶️ John to know that, right? That needs to be communicated in line And then you link to the webpage
⏹️ ▶️ John you said, and then make people not have to be logged in to read it. Although honestly, that is a minor concern
⏹️ ▶️ John because you gotta be logged in to do feedback anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey On two-way communication. So Apple screeners don’t have direct access to your feedbacks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They go through a middle party that, especially with the betas, attempts to consolidate similar feedbacks into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one bug. When developers wanna ask questions of originators or request more logs, we have to go through
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that middle party. It’s a really clunky setup that makes it feel like there’s a lot of time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going by without anything happening. So to kind of translate that a little bit, so if I’m an Apple engineer, and John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has filed a bug that lands on my desk, and I don’t know it’s John because of this intermediary
⏹️ ▶️ Casey layer. If I wanna get more information from this anonymous source of this bug, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can go to this other intermediary team, which might be DevRelations,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not sure, and then they can go to John and say, oh hey, can you provide us a cyst diagnosis or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey God help us, whatever it is that me, the developer, the Apple developer wanted.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But because there’s this middle layer, the guy that talks to the engineers, I talk to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey engineers, because there’s this middle layer, it makes everything clunkier. So that’s just, I understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to a degree why that’s there, but…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, developer relations is not a good middle layer for any kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasonable general purpose solution. because developer relations at Apple does not scale.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Most people have no idea who, if anybody inside, might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be their relevant developer relations person for a certain thing. Most people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have no clue. I’ve gone through years of my career not having one, then I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have somebody who seemed to be my dev relations person. And the funny thing is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you have one of these people and they eventually contact you about something or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco God knows if you have to ask somebody inside, they act so surprised that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had no idea that you had a relevant person to contact. And it’s like, you never tell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us. And most developers don’t have any contacts inside. So any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solution that relies on like, oh, well, the real process for this is you contact this person and they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco contact the real person inside. That’s not accessible to most developers most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the time. Again, it’s one of those areas where it seems like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco impression that people inside Apple have of what it’s like to be outside is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco incomplete or incorrect. They seem to have no idea quite how little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco visibility and access we have on the outside into the inside.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m lucky that like, because of my big loud mouth, I have a little bit more access than most people. Most developers have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco zero, absolutely. There’s no one they know inside the company that they could like email or somebody you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Twitter, you could DM or anything like that’s, that’s very unusual for most developers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The impression I’ve gotten over the years is that Apple kind of intentionally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keeps it fairly inaccessible because they don’t have the developer relations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco staff size to actually provide like full service
⏹️ ▶️ Marco access to all their developers. There’s too many of them. But I don’t think the solution to that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, you know, know the secret password and you know, whisper at people in bars in California sometimes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and maybe occasionally get an email address. Like, that’s not a great solution to this problem. I know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why they do it, but I wish they would instead scale
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the staff in such a way that, I know that’s easier said than done, but like, scale
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that division so that they can provide real developer support to a bigger level to more people.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, it’s not even clear to me, because given how little experience I have actually being a real developer for Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John Platforms, that this, the middle party referred to in this feedback is in fact their relations. Probably
⏹️ ▶️ John it is, I mean, if that’s your guess, then that’s probably a better guess than anything I would have. But the fact
⏹️ ▶️ John that there is a middle party between there, like it makes some sense organizationally in that you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want your rank and file developers communicating directly with customers because they might say something they’re not supposed to,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So have a buffer in between there. But as this last bit to be read said,
⏹️ ▶️ John it can, you know, it’s a clunky setup, it makes you feel like there’s not, there’s a lot of time going by without anything
⏹️ ▶️ John happening because what’s actually happening is, you know, the person inside Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John responsible for the bug has a clarifying question and they ask the middle party and the middle party eventually sees that
⏹️ ▶️ John question and then asks it of you and then you see it and then it goes back and so this is all bouncing back and forth. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is another example of where, like I said, last week’s show, over communication can help, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re not privy to these internal conversations but how about in the bug to say, here’s what happened?
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, you know, your, the, the middle party has seen your bug. The middle
⏹️ ▶️ John party has passed your bug down to the responsible team. The responsible team has passed a, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John a, you know, a response back up to the middle party. Then the middle party has sent you a response. And that would mean you’d have like six
⏹️ ▶️ John updates or whatever, where previously you had zero and none of them reveal any secret stuff about going inside an
⏹️ ▶️ John apple. Just, you know, something is happening with your bug and that’s reassuring. Communicate over communicate.
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t mean you need to reveal secrets, but let people know something is happening.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. So continuing from the Apple people, it’s also a bit like a game of telephone. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the middle party just copies and pastes between the internal and external bug reports, so what you see is literally comments and questions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the person looking at the issue. Or maybe the middle party is paraphrasing what the engineer is saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and maybe something gets lost in translation.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, this is a downside of having the middle party, and it was mentioned, like, especially in beta, is that part of the responsibility of the middle
⏹️ ▶️ John party is to condense. So if there’s like 50 people asking about the same thing, rather than dumping 50 of those on on the dev team that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John presently busy working on the thing that’s in beta, condense it down into one. So now this middle
⏹️ ▶️ John party is responsible for summarizing, paraphrasing, passing on, which is how you get things
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, capture assist diagnose immediately after the issue reproduces and add the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John You get that because maybe the middle party doesn’t understand why this being asked for. And like in the game of telephone, it starts
⏹️ ▶️ John to warp over time and maybe they make their own personal text expander snippet that says subtly the wrong thing to
⏹️ ▶️ John make people, A, angry that they’re being asked to know the time and B, not understand why they’re being asked at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With regard to bugs that linger forever without updates, if you file a bug during the run-up to shipping a new version, it’s very possible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that your bug will be assigned to the next version, which typically means the perceived risk-reward dynamic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doesn’t favor fixing this bug in the version we’re trying to get out the door right now. Okay, so far so good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If a bug is still in the books, when a team gets to the final run-up before shipping a new version, eventually someone on a bug review board will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ask the room, would we block the shipment of this version because of this bug? The powers that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be will debate the relative merits and risks and come up with an answer to that question. If that answer is no, then the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bug will likely be moved out of this version’s backlog and into the next version. Again, so far so good. If
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this bug ever happens to come up for review again, the answer to, would we block the shipment of the software
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because of this bug, will almost certainly continue to be no based on the justification that, well, we didn’t block it last time,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why should we do it this time? Debates about the logic of this aside, the reality is that a bug
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s ever been deemed to not block shipping is exceedingly likely to never block
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shipping. And this Apple person says, I might go so far as to say that unless
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there is a specific champion for fixing that bug on the specific team empowered to fix it, it is very likely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to remain in this purgatory indefinitely. Cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Isn’t this like priority queue starvation?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, this is such a familiar dynamic of software development in large companies. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it comes down to this basic truth. Feature work is
⏹️ ▶️ John always valued internally over tech debt or fixing bugs or whatever, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Feature work is, you know, I’m working on a product that does X now and I wanted to do
⏹️ ▶️ John X and also do Y, right? Whatever that feature is, because customers have requests for features, features, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John come up with ideas for features internally, they can give you a competitive advantage. Feature work is where it’s at.
⏹️ ▶️ John So when you have to plan your releases and plan what you’re gonna work on next or whatever, feature work is where
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s at, right? Everybody has boat queues and this whole system of like, well, this doesn’t block shipping.
⏹️ ▶️ John And, you know, so we’ll just put it in the backlog. And then, you know, it comes up again, it’s like, well, it didn’t block shipping
⏹️ ▶️ John last time, so it probably won’t this time and just eternally gets there. And the reason it looks like a queue prioritization thing to Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John is because in, you know, in computer parlance, that the idea of like having a low priority task gets starved because it’s always something
⏹️ ▶️ John more high priority happens, but it’s an organizational problem because
⏹️ ▶️ John unlike a queue that has a simple set of rules, Organizations have values that are embodied by their plans.
⏹️ ▶️ John Feature work is prioritized because feature work is what gets you raises and bonuses and recognition
⏹️ ▶️ John and glory. And you can brag about on a slide and like everybody in the entire organization is
⏹️ ▶️ John incentivized to work on feature work. Tech debt gets a lot of lip
⏹️ ▶️ John service, but it looks, it’s never an impound first of all. And second of all, when you put up
⏹️ ▶️ John on the slide, we reduced our tech debt by 5% this release. it’s not as
⏹️ ▶️ John exciting for everybody. And the only time it becomes exciting is when the mountain of tech
⏹️ ▶️ John debt becomes almost company destroying. And then finally the organization wakes up to the idea of,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, we’re living in a house of cards. This is a serious problem, we all need to buckle down. Everybody carve
⏹️ ▶️ John out 20% of your schedule for tech debt from now on into the future, like that will overhaul. And we’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John do this big release where we’re gonna burn down tech debt and everybody’s new OKRs are,
⏹️ ▶️ John you must burn down X percent of your tech debt. And then at the end of that release, everybody gets to go up there and say proud, and say, we
⏹️ ▶️ John have this much tech debt, and we burned it down, and here’s how much better we did. And then you forget about tech debt for two more years,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And this ties into the customer sat thing, where the only time that
⏹️ ▶️ John ever comes to a head is let’s work like this, where we prioritize feature work over tech debt, essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John forever until the accumulation of crap starts to affect
⏹️ ▶️ John our customer satisfaction. Hey, random stuff that used to be reliable isn’t reliable anymore, and it’s never
⏹️ ▶️ John getting fixed. Have you heard that on this program before? I think we talk about it sometimes. I think Marco’s written blog posts about it, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And obviously we’re more sensitive to this and we’re in the tech world, so we’re constantly thinking about this stuff. But eventually,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you neglect this stuff too long, organizationally, eventually even your regular customers will start
⏹️ ▶️ John to get a feel for maybe your stuff isn’t as reliable as it used to be, isn’t as nice. Like it
⏹️ ▶️ John will eventually bubble up. But internally, it’s so hard to, like the things that they described
⏹️ ▶️ John here when Casey was going through it, okay, this makes sense, makes sense, all logical, right? Combine that
⏹️ ▶️ John with the internal incentives for advancement and promotion and recognition,
⏹️ ▶️ John it makes it almost impossible to essentially quote unquote do the right thing. That’s why these
⏹️ ▶️ John people are responding like if your bug has a champion inside, like if there’s someone inside the
⏹️ ▶️ John organization who knows it’s the right thing to do to fix this stupid bug, and they’re willing to
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially forego the time they could spend doing something that is more likely to get them a
⏹️ ▶️ John razor or promotion or a good review to do this because they know it’s the right thing to do, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John one way things get fixed. And this is a sign of an unhealthy organization. And this dynamic I described plays out in
⏹️ ▶️ John every software company forever. It will always happen, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the job of the organization to figure out how to counteract that. It’s a natural force for that to happen. So
⏹️ ▶️ John organizations try to have cultures that have countervailing forces, that try to
⏹️ ▶️ John systemically oppose this inevitable force because left to people’s own devices, they will
⏹️ ▶️ John always do the wrong thing in this case.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So building on that, back to the Apple people, the converse of the quote, once a blocker, never a blocker quote problem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the phenomenon of once noticed by Steve or Tim or someone important, this bug must be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fixed no matter how risky or challenging fix it now.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the shortcut to organizational incentives. Oh, the organizational incentives is to have a cool feature, whatever. Well, guess what?
⏹️ ▶️ John your boss or your boss’s boss or the super duper big boss suddenly notices something, all suddenly
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re now incentivized because now fixing this stupid bug gets me recognition with the big guy.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s why you know, I’m going to get a promotion now because it’s right and that’s that is a not a scalable system
⏹️ ▶️ John be a terrible system in general. And see, you can’t rely on that. You can’t rely on someone
⏹️ ▶️ John important noticing your book like you can’t, it’s not great to rely on champion developers
⏹️ ▶️ John helping as well. But And that’s why, you know, running to the press never helps or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John in the app store, that’s why when something gets big on Twitter or something, somehow it magically gets fixed because
⏹️ ▶️ John someone who’s important suddenly picks their head up from their spreadsheets and says, what is everyone talking about? They’re talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about what, what? And they’re like, hey, what is this thing with name recognition and people getting numbers after their devices
⏹️ ▶️ John in their home? And then someone has to explain, oh, well, we just replaced a, let me explain what
⏹️ ▶️ John DNS is, and we replaced this part of the system that does naming, and it used to be called MDNS, and now it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a new thing called DiscoveryD. And by the time you’re done explaining it, someone hopefully says, well, if the old thing was working, the new
⏹️ ▶️ John thing isn’t, put back the old thing, right? And then they go back to what they were doing for a few years, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So- Wait, wasn’t that Bono complaining to Tim Cook to get that one done?
⏹️ ▶️ John it Bono? I don’t remember.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some big celebrity complaining about DiscoveryD problems to, I think, directly to Tim Cook, and that’s how that
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and this sounds so dumb, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ John companies, you know, Companies in a capitalist system are much more
⏹️ ▶️ John like monarchies or dictatorships than they are like democracies, right? Which is fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re not systems of government. You’re just trying to find a way to make computer products and sell them to people. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John a human rights issue or anything like that. But it does mean that a lot of important
⏹️ ▶️ John decision-making is concentrated in the top of that org chart, in the top of that pyramid.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can shortcut the whole thing by making Tim Cook notice literally anything that’s annoying
⏹️ ▶️ John you. Like I imagine Tim Cook’s, you know, like, or any high executives, like the people
⏹️ ▶️ John in their life, like their, you know, spouses or relatives or children should like take advantage of this
⏹️ ▶️ John and say, this bug is annoying me. And then like bug their parents or uncle
⏹️ ▶️ John or something, or, you know, aunt about it until their aunt goes back to work and says, I keep getting bugged about this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can we just fix this? And again, not a scalable system, but in reality, lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of things happen that way. And it is at once embarrassing for like the org. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, if we had a functioning org that really did handle these things in a systemic way, this should never
⏹️ ▶️ John have to happen. But on the outside, you’re like, I’m just glad it’s fixed. So true.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so with regard to getting in your feedback, can you see if this reprose in the latest version?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can you reproduce this in the latest version of Mac OS, iOS, whatever? The Apple people write,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is something that’s sometimes done in mass after release to all bugs that have been hunted out of that version,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey possibly into next version. It’s an attempt to get the bug off the books or otherwise find a reason to close it. If you don’t reply
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a timely manner, saying that it still happens with a new sysdiagnosis attached,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was created on the very newest version of the OS and software, the assumption will be that it was a side effect fix or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was obviated by something else and it is very likely to be closed, never looked at again. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the person stopped whining, woohoo, it’s done, the system works. So the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey person writes, if the bug isn’t fixed and you care about it ever getting fixed, you should reply to these queries.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is a typical bad, like, it should be opt-in versus opt-out system, where it’s like, if we don’t hear for you, we’ll assume
⏹️ ▶️ John everything’s fine. Like, why would you assume everything’s fine? Like, you didn’t even check whether you fixed it. You’re just like, fingers crossed,
⏹️ ▶️ John we made a bunch of other changes. Maybe we fixed your bug too. I don’t know, why don’t you check for us and tell us? And
⏹️ ▶️ John this is what I referred to last time as like a, you know, human resources problem,
⏹️ ▶️ John where apparently they don’t have enough people. Like, oh, every time we do a release, we got to go through the entire outstanding bug
⏹️ ▶️ John backlog and see if we’ve accidentally closed some of these bugs by stuff that we did. I mean, no, I
⏹️ ▶️ John suppose you don’t have to, but you also shouldn’t because like, this person writes and
⏹️ ▶️ John said, it’s an attempt to get the bug off the books, right? This is more organizational and process dysfunction.
⏹️ ▶️ John Surely one of the metrics that the people in this part of the org are measured on is how many outstanding bugs there are. How big is the bug
⏹️ ▶️ John backlog? How much have you burned it down? How many bugs have you closed? And so there are massive incentives
⏹️ ▶️ John to close bugs. So something like this internally makes perfect sense. You know what, after we do a release, And we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have the ability to check every single one of these bugs, but I bet some of them we fix like by accident because we just change stuff around
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. So I’ve got an idea. The system will be just ask everybody, hey, is this still a problem? If they don’t answer,
⏹️ ▶️ John assume it’s fixed and then close them. And that’ll really increase our metrics for bug closures. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a bad system. It’s good if your goal is to get as many bugs closed as possible. It’s bad if your goal is to
⏹️ ▶️ John make the software quality as good as possible. And unfortunately, software quality is usually measured by number of outstanding
⏹️ ▶️ John bugs. so you see the problem with the system.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, another reason that your bug might be closed without being fixed is that someone in a bug review says, there’s a bug here, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey knowing what I know about the product, I believe the real bug is fundamentally different from what’s being described in this report.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this report is more likely to create confusion than lead to a solution. So write a new better one and close this bug.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is another example of how bugs filed by outsiders can disappear behind the wall forever. I imagine it’s frustrating to the person who filed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the original and loses visibility into the fix.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, there’s another communication thing. tons of bug reports are gonna be bad. Most of them are gonna be bad. It is an important
⏹️ ▶️ John function of this part of the org to consolidate, rationalize, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John to know this, to say, I see what these, you know, 700 people are all saying, and they’re not really getting at the real
⏹️ ▶️ John bug, but I think I know what the real bug is, so I’m gonna consolidate these. That’s great, fine, do that, it’s awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just communicate back and say, here’s what happened to your bug. Just like that paragraph that was just written.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is like, what you’re describing is one part of this giant elephant that is
⏹️ ▶️ John this bug. And so we’ve consolidated them all down to this bug, which unfortunately, because we’re Apple, you can’t really keep track
⏹️ ▶️ John of. But just so you know, we didn’t just ignore your bug forever. What happened is it got folded into
⏹️ ▶️ John this larger bug number. And then if you’re nice, Apple, maybe communicate, hey, if you wanna know what’s happening with this larger bug, you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have visibility into it, but I’ll tell you when the bug is being passed down to a dev team, when they’re looking
⏹️ ▶️ John at it, what state it’s in, and when they close it. Again, these are all communication things that you can do
⏹️ ▶️ John without revealing anything about, no secrets, no showing other people’s source code, all the things they
⏹️ ▶️ John say are the reason why we can’t know what’s happening with bugs, just communicate where it is in the state machine and what happened to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So another thing that developers especially are told a lot is if you want a change made,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey file radar, you know, make a feedback. And even if you know that other people are doing the same thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do it anyway. Because apparently it may or may not be a system
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of voting within Apple. So if Apple sees that 100 people or a thousand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or 100,000 people have all filed the same feedback. Like, for example, if 100,000 people all wanted to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey auto-correct to stop correcting f***ing to ducking, then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe if there’s 100,000 people filing that radar, eventually they will fix it. Not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that that annoys me at all. Anyway, with regard to that, the Apple people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey write, some groups use this bug voting thing by duplicate count. So by figuring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out how many duplicates of the same bug there are. Some groups use this to inform their decisions, but other groups don’t. It varies wildly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s mostly true for radars with incredibly large dupe counts, as in the tens of thousands.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And those really only happen when they can be automatically duped, which brings this individual to auto-duping.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple has systems that look at stack traces, and, okay, so sorry, another piece of vocab. So stack traces,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here’s what the system was doing at the time, or what the program, a specific program
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or app was doing at the time, and here’s how it got to where it was. You know, like a few minutes ago it had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey done this, and now it’s trying this, and then it’s about to try that. And so that’s a very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of high-level way of thinking of a stack trace. So coming back to this, Apple systems will look at stack traces and sys-diagnosis
⏹️ ▶️ Casey attached to radars and automatically dupe radars based on that info. This is the most likely way for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any given radar to accumulate a notably high dupe count.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is another gap in human power versus automation. This type of automation sounds great. Again, if your
⏹️ ▶️ John goal is like, oh, we’re getting all these feedbacks and radars, we need a way to deal with this flood.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like how do we rationalize this? How do we lump them together? How do we sort of sort through them and find out
⏹️ ▶️ John which ones are valid, which ones are spam? Which, you know, like you need to look at them all but there’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John so many of them and it takes expertise to know how to put them together. So any way you can automate that is great.
⏹️ ▶️ John And automating by saying, let’s have my automated tool look at the stack traces and the sys diagnosis and
⏹️ ▶️ John look for similarities and lump them together. If that’s the only way you can get a high dupe count that means they
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have enough people looking at them to notice that, all right, let’s say there’s a bug where the
⏹️ ▶️ John stack trace and the sysdiagnose show no similarities because the bug is not straightforward.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is a weird second or third order effect that is perhaps entirely reproducible. Maybe 50
⏹️ ▶️ John of those people put in sample projects or great instructions on how to reproduce it, but you can’t lump
⏹️ ▶️ John them together in an automated way because the stack traces vary, because it happens when people use different
⏹️ ▶️ John programs or it happens in different times. Like there’s no way to do it in an automated way. If duping only
⏹️ ▶️ John works or only works well, when you’re lucky enough that the problem is straightforward enough
⏹️ ▶️ John to have a sort of an identifiable fingerprint and this is diagnosed in the stack trace, that’s bad. And that
⏹️ ▶️ John shows that we need, I mean, having automation is great, definitely do that, but then you need more human power
⏹️ ▶️ John to help that work because otherwise you could get a very important and terrible bug that
⏹️ ▶️ John has actually been duped perhaps thousands of times, but you don’t know that because
⏹️ ▶️ John your automated system doesn’t know how to lump them together. So now you need an actual human to look at them and do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s another plausible reason why you’d get the attach assist diagnose response so often. The most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey favorable way to interpret that request is that they need more info to diagnose your problem. The less favorable way to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interpret that is that it’s a request for you to provide information that may automatically reveal the bug
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be a dupe. That’s such a
⏹️ ▶️ John desperation ploy. It’s like, look, just, I need you to like, include
⏹️ ▶️ John more information in the hopes that are automated tools will somehow get you into the fast lane of being fixed. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John I as a human don’t have the ability to do that, but maybe if you’re lucky, your sixth diagnosis will put you into
⏹️ ▶️ John a bucket with a thousand other things and someone will finally look at this bug.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed, so a couple of thoughts from the Apple people on my specific bugs, which again, the feedback numbers will be in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show notes, hint, hint. The Apple people write, I don’t doubt that this bug happens or that it’s extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey annoying, but I’m pretty confident that it’s not that widespread. Here’s why, there are almost a billion iPhones in active use today.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if even 1% of those users experience this bug, and then 1% of those users that experienced the bug
⏹️ ▶️ Casey file a radar, it would still be 100,000 radars. And 100,000 radars would definitely get someone’s attention. But based on your recounting,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not getting enough people’s attention, which tells me it’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not as pervasive as it might seem to you. Okay, first of all, that’s certainly possible. Second of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even if it’s only for me, it is infuriating that my internet communicator can’t friggin’ communicate.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like, this isn’t like a, oh, I’m annoyed at the way this looks, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, the dialogues in Big Sur are trash, which they are. It’s something that’s fundamentally breaking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my ability to use this device, which I think I would hope would, if any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey human ever looks at these bugs, which I know they have, I would hope that someone would have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bubbled this up as a big fricking problem. Additionally, to think that even 1% of,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 1% of 1% people file radars is preposterous. Nobody files radars.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t usually file radars because I’ve been trained not to because they’re black f***ing holes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s why I don’t do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway. Also, that number of, we would notice 100,000 radars, only if they’re properly categorized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Like, they would have to make it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through all those filters first, which most of them, the vast majority of them, wouldn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John Exactly. My bit of feedback on this particular thing is, it was noticed.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, there was an iOS release where in the fairly terse- Excuse me, two iOS releases,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey thank you very much.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not like Apple gives very extensive release notes. So anything that makes it into release notes
⏹️ ▶️ John had to be serious enough that they thought to mention it. So they mentioned it, they know about
⏹️ ▶️ John it, and they’re trying to fix it. So it’s not, you know, the idea is like, oh, I guess not enough people
⏹️ ▶️ John did this, so they didn’t know about it. Apple absolutely knows about it. They’ve tried to fix it. They just haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ John succeeded yet. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it’s very frustrating for anyone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think the thing that’s most frustrating to me, and John, I think you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had said this earlier, right at the beginning of this conversation, is that if you take any of these pieces
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in and of themselves, they’re justifiable and make reasonable amount of sense. Like, obviously, there are problems,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that’s what you’ve been enumerating this whole time. But if you take them at face value, none of these things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is necessarily bad. Like using a dupe count as a kind of ad hoc voting system, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can understand how someone would get to that point of view or get to that conclusion. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I don’t think your average Apple person understands is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even though radar, from what I gather, is actually pretty good on the internal side,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is so incredibly, indescribably, impossibly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey user hostile user hostile in pretty much every measurable way. And yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I understand for you, the Apple rank and file engineer, it’s not so bad. And yes, I understand that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you are a special rank and file engineer that knows that it’s probably not great for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey outsiders. But I don’t think most rank and file engineers, and I know a handful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of them, and I’ve talked to them about this a little bit. Most of them, I don’t think really and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey truly understand how awful radar is and how offensive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is for Apple to say, give us a sample project, please. And then you spend
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hours of your time building that sample project, attaching that sample project,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey putting that sample project on radar, and then just disappears into a black hole. It is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey broken. It is fundamentally broken. And for Apple to shrug
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it off because it works for them internally is also fundamentally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey broken. If you’re an Apple person listening to this and you think I’m bananas, then I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey encourage you to look at it from my perspective for a half second, because I see it from your perspective as best
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can. And yeah, it doesn’t seem that bad from your perspective. It seems actually probably pretty decent. But from our perspective,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s trash, it’s offensive. And it’s so frustrating in the same way that I’m so fired
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up about the God darned piss poor documentation that Apple’s been putting out lately lack of documentation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they’ve been putting out lately. It’s offensive and the fact that nobody cares enough to fix
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, it’s a problem to me. It’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco problem. No, it’s worse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. Thank you. That’s an excellent point. They excuse it and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why I’ve got to burr up my butt about it. They excuse it and it makes me so angry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And granted, I’m a little on edge given what’s going on this particular Wednesday, but nevertheless,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s just so So frustrating and yes, I’m glad you made that point, Marco. I’m glad you jumped in because that’s exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. It’s excused within Apple. Oh well, it’s the best we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got and you know, it works for us internally so whatever. No, that’s not good enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you want to be the Apple that you think you are, where you can do no, well not that you can do no wrong, but that you’re better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than everyone else, then you need to do better at this. I’ve seen people paste,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or they link me to Android bug reports, where you can see almost all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the internal communication. I understand that’s never going to happen with Apple. I get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. But this is what John was talking about earlier. This is exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. Like, there’s got to be an amount of communication between all of it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and zero. And I got to figure out that, I got to believe that there’s some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way that Apple can figure this out. You’re smart people, figure it out.
⏹️ ▶️ John I continue to try to talk Casey down off his ledge to say, Apple does know about your bug and they’re trying to fix it. And your bug,
⏹️ ▶️ John would say, is surely one of the harder kind of bugs to fix because it
⏹️ ▶️ John has to do with interfacing with a third party thing. So I think in this case, you’re not actually being ignored. It’s super
⏹️ ▶️ John frustrating because it is a fundamental function of the device and it’s not something off to the side is the point you made.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I do think they know about it and are trying to fix it or having problems. So even though this particular bug has got to be up
⏹️ ▶️ John your butt, I don’t think it’s actually emblematic of the larger problem. The larger problem,
⏹️ ▶️ John what made me think of it again, what made me actually decide to put in this giant follow-up, aside from all the feedback
⏹️ ▶️ John we got about it, was that, spoiler alert for upcoming year in
⏹️ ▶️ John review things, but we have some friends who do some year in review type things on their websites
⏹️ ▶️ John of the questions they ask is to rate Apple’s software quality.
⏹️ ▶️ John And every year, there’s a question, how would you rate the software quality? Whatever it is, one to 10 or, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey one to five. Yeah, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John it is. It should be one through six, hint, hint.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s a thing, like this kind of report card is exactly what I was talking about before, about like the incentives
⏹️ ▶️ John inside the organization that, you know, feature work gets prioritized, but there also, there’s the customer sat and
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s the idea of software quality. And software quality, like just like in this questionnaire,
⏹️ ▶️ John I was like, well, how do I measure software quality for an entire company? They make so many things, right? That
⏹️ ▶️ John is the big question. And the small question is, well, how do I measure software quality on the level of an individual project, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And that gets into all of these sort of systems with metrics and things that are games and
⏹️ ▶️ John perverse incentives. You have to come up with some way to measure this because you can’t measure it, you can’t do anything
⏹️ ▶️ John about it. If you have no idea what your software quality is, like what are you ever gonna do? But almost every system to
⏹️ ▶️ John measure software quality, especially ones that are internally focused, like how many bugs there are or whatever, like
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s just so many ways to intentionally or unintentionally game that type of system. In the
⏹️ ▶️ John end, what actually matters is, do customers feel like you’re putting out a quality product? Does your product
⏹️ ▶️ John do what you say it’s supposed to
⏹️ ▶️ John If someone got an iPhone and they’re trying to talk to their family on SMS and they’re missing messages, as far as they’re concerned, this product
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t do one of the basic things that it’s supposed to do. And they’re gonna rate your software quality low.
⏹️ ▶️ John But on the flip side of that is, if someone gets one of your products and it more or less does what it’s supposed to, but there’s tons
⏹️ ▶️ John of annoying little minor bugs that make them think maybe they’re using the computer wrong or why does this thing look like this or why
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t this thing work but then I click on it the first time and the second time it does. Those things accumulate too and
⏹️ ▶️ John that is the hardest thing to measure. Like do customers feel like when I get your thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just, you know, I won’t have to think about this stuff or do they feel like they’re being gaslit by your software? It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, well, I can drag this, but I can’t drag that. And when I click that, it highlights sometimes and sometimes it doesn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John And sometimes it pauses for a brief time And sometimes, obviously things like crashes and stuff like that are
⏹️ ▶️ John easy to measure, but it’s the things that are hard to measure that get you. And every time I answer the software quality
⏹️ ▶️ John question on this annual survey of Apple things, I think about it mostly in terms of,
⏹️ ▶️ John like how many questions have I had to field from relatives about why is my computer doing a weird thing? How many times have I
⏹️ ▶️ John seen a bug that’s not a crasher, not a data loss bug, not something that’s gonna show up on the
⏹️ ▶️ John metrics, but it’s an annoying little thing. How many of them are there? There’s always gonna be some, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ John if they build up to a certain level, you know, a critical mass of sort of malaise
⏹️ ▶️ John of software, all of a sudden people start to get cranky and have these big long rants on podcasts and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right? That’s what Apple has to manage. That sort of dark matter of, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John dissatisfaction with software quality. And I understand that it’s hard to measure.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve been working in software my entire life. It is not easy to get this right. That’s the challenge. That’s why
⏹️ ▶️ John they get all the big books. I feel like Apple, I mean, there’s a separate question about hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John quality and in general, I think they do a better job of that, butterfly keyboard aside, but on software quality, I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has had quite a rollercoaster over these past few decades on software quality.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s difficult for me to connect the software quality that Apple puts out
⏹️ ▶️ John with anything that’s visible externally. Hardware quality, design, the products
⏹️ ▶️ John they choose to make and don’t choose to make are much easier to connect with the larger environment of the industry
⏹️ ▶️ John and what people say on earnings calls, we wanna be in this space, we don’t wanna do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re gonna stop making printers, we’re gonna start making cars, we think AR is the next big thing, all that makes sense. But software
⏹️ ▶️ John quality is like, what’s affecting that? Like they’ve been making Mac OS for a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s basically been the same thing, a personal computer operating system that has a bunch of windows on the
⏹️ ▶️ John screen and a menu bar and a pointer and like runs programs. And it hasn’t changed that much, but the software quality is
⏹️ ▶️ John all over the place. And I just wish they could get a handle
⏹️ ▶️ John on this in the way that I think they have a handle, to give an example, on their hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John quality. They’ve been making iPhones for a long time and the hardware quality of iPhones has been amazingly
⏹️ ▶️ John consistent. When there’s problems, they address them quickly and they don’t repeat the same mistakes,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And in general, every year the iPhone is a good piece of hardware. In
⏹️ ▶️ John many ways, I think we’ve talked about this in past shows, hardware quality is a little bit easier to do in software quality, you know, the hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John people will disagree, but software is way more complicated than hardware. And hardware is it’s you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John more able to ratchet up the knowledge curve. We’ve never worked with aluminum before. So it’s weird. Oh, now we’ve worked with aluminum
⏹️ ▶️ John for many, many years, right? And now we know a lot about working with aluminum. And in fact, all our products made out of machined aluminum, you can get better
⏹️ ▶️ John at it and ratchet your way up. Whereas no matter how long you’re doing software, you never get to the part where like
⏹️ ▶️ John software, that’s easy, it’s always going to be hard. But there’s these big wild swings that I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John have to be related to some internal organizational malfunctions that
⏹️ ▶️ John crop up, become fires, and get extinguished, smolder for a while, then flare up again. Much
⏹️ ▶️ John like the wildfires in California. Let’s make a lovely analogy there. I don’t know. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s frustrating on the outside. And I think it’s one of the most important things
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple needs to address because they do almost everything else pretty good if
⏹️ ▶️ John not great, but software quality, they just do not have a handle on.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not the end of the world. It’s not Functional High Ground, Marco, Blogpost, or whatever year that was from.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I feel like because they’re so close to being great and because like the M1 hardware is
⏹️ ▶️ John amazing and everything, you just feel like, oh, if you could just spend one release just knocking down bugs,
⏹️ ▶️ John you would fall back down below that threshold of annoyance and say, okay, now we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John back to the regular number of bugs instead of like everywhere you look, there’s something that doesn’t work
⏹️ ▶️ John right or doesn’t work consistently. And Casey, what you’re doing with this, with this thing, with your messaging
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, I kind of wish you didn’t have this problem because you keep putting your bug number and your feedback number and the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes, your problem is so much worse than mine, but I want mine to be fixed too. I’ll put one in for you. Don’t worry about my feedback
⏹️ ▶️ John number. It’s a cosmetic bug. I feel bad. It’s a cosmetic bug, but I, but it’s a cosmetic bug that affects
⏹️ ▶️ John like one of my two apps. And I feel like it would be easy to fix if someone who knew something
⏹️ ▶️ John about relevant frameworks looked at it even like i said in the past show maybe i’m doing something wrong i would love to know
⏹️ ▶️ John that too just after you fix casey’s bug which is way more important someone Someone please look at my cosmetic bug.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s got a sample project.
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Thunderbolt dock update
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on, can we hopefully find something a little more awesome to talk about? Marco, let me live vicariously through you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s nothing that retail therapy cannot fix, am I right? So what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going on with your equipment, your setup, your working world? How’s things looking?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually don’t have a ton to report on that front at the moment. I do have the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new OWC Thunderbolt 4, Thunderbolt 3, whatever the dock is, the new OWC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco docking station thing that has the three upstream, or I guess downstream, Thunderbolt 3
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ports. This is the Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hub, is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, the Hub is like the smaller one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Ah, okay. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dock, even though I would still call this a hub, but the dock people call it a dock,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so whatever. Anyway, comparing it to the CalDigit, it’s a little earlier to say, I’ve only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been using it for about three days. So far it’s kind of a mixed bag. So I have this weird…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco First of all, the good and the bad. It is a nicer shape, it has more bandwidth on certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ports. It’s basically the CalDigit in a reasonable competitor,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unless you really need that massive Thunderbolt pass-through, which I don’t so far.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m very curious right now. I’m keeping them both for now because I’m curious when my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco XDR arrives, if I can actually pass it through either of them, or if I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to plug it in directly to the MacBook Air. I would love it if I could pass it through it, and I’ve heard mixed reports
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from people. Some people say you can’t really pass the XDR through anything. Some people say they have an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco XDR and they’re passing it through theirs just fine. So like everything else with Thunderbolt, once
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you get to the high end of things, it It probably comes down to things like what cables you have and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff like that. So I’ll see how that goes. I’m very curious to see when that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco arrives. The XDR by the way is not supposed to arrive until early next week so I might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have it in time for next week’s show. I hope I do but I might not. Anyway, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the LG passed it through this thing just fine. The OWC thing, because it requires,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I mentioned, because it requires Big Sur 11.1 to be supported at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a couple of odd things about it. So like one thing this morning I was restoring the old Intel Mac Mini
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I could send it back for trade-in. If it booted normally the boot screen would be fine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on it but the restore I guess app whatever the restore environment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is called when you do a Mac OS system restore by holding down command R at startup that environment doesn’t support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it yet. And so I like I had to stop using it for that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco environment and plug my my monitor directly into my Mac, the Mac Mini that I was restoring,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rather than going through this dock. Because like, again, like certain things support it, but it’s very new and certain things don’t support it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Doesn’t that dock only work with Big Sur 11.1? Yes. We mentioned that last time, so maybe your recovery
⏹️ ▶️ John environment is not Big Sur 11.1.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, so like, and I don’t know what, if anything ever updates the recovery environment on a system, but yeah, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like weird stuff like that that happens with it so far, but I also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seemed, I had like, you know, after I said clamshell mode has been 100% perfect for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh no. The very first day I was using this, which was I think Monday, it was a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit buggy. Like weird stuff happened when I plugged and unplugged like for a few hours and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then it was fine. Now I had zero such bugs of that type on the CalDigit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’ve had a couple on this one on that first day. So I don’t know if it’s just coincidence. Maybe I would have had it either way. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s something else. The other weirdness I’m having with this, remember, if you remember correctly, the issue I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the CalDigit, it seemed fine in most ways, except that I couldn’t get the built-in Ethernet port
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to connect at more than 100 megabits. And if you just told it to auto configure, it wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco connect at all. Like you could force it to 100 and it would connect. If you forced it to gigabit or auto connect, it wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco connect at all. This, the OWC Thunderbolt dock,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also has an Ethernet port on it, and its Ethernet port also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco won’t connect at at gigabit. But its problems are different.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it will auto connect like if it auto senses it will auto connect, it will connect to only 100
⏹️ ▶️ Marco megabits. If I try to configure it manually to gigabit,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it will say okay and it will report that it is connected via gigabit through the system preferences hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pane. But if I look on the switches control panel like the ubiquity switch I’m plugging it into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the switch says nope this ports 100 megabits right now. I don’t know enough about that to know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what could cause that, the disagreement between the device and the switch as to what speed it’s running at,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that’s interesting. When I was home, I brought back with me two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco useful diagnostic things. I have the original Belkin USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ethernet adapter that Apple started selling in 2016 when they went all USB-C on their laptops, so I have this Ethernet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adapter. I also have the old Thunderbolt, I think Thunderbolt 1,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ethernet adapter that Apple started selling back in roughly 2012-ish, I guess? Whenever the laptop,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, 2012 was when the first Retina MacBook Pro came out, and that is when they dropped Ethernet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off the high-end laptops. And so they started selling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Thunderbolt 1, I believe, a Thunderbolt Ethernet adapter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also have the Thunderbolt 2 to 3 adapter. So I brought back with me that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thunderbolt adapter because what I had heard is when the little USB-C one came out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in 2016, I heard that it was kinda crappy and that it was slower in practice than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the old Thunderbolt ethernet adapter and that if you have a Thunderbolt 3 slash USB-C Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that if you actually connected the old Thunderbolt ethernet adapter through the two to three adapter,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was faster than using the native USB-C adapter. I did actually try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of these things And the Thunderbolt 1 adapter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plugged in through the, the, you know, the Thunderbolt 2 to 3 dongle works
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fantastically when plugged directly into my MacBook Air. I plug
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it directly in, it loads up instantly, and it connects at full gigabit speed. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this tells me it’s not the cable, it’s not the jack, it connects at full gigabit speed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, when I plugged it into the Mac Mini, between its built-in ethernet port, Full speed, gigabit,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no problem, both sides recognize it, full speed. My old iMac Pro, same thing, it works
⏹️ ▶️ Marco full speed every time. So I know it’s not like, the problem’s not outside of the computer. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the cable is fine, the switch is fine, the wiring that runs through the wall is fine, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all that should be fine because many things can connect via gigabit and transfer just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine, and you know, running a speed test gets me right up approaching gigabit speed, so. I know the rest of it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay. The CalDigit can’t do gigabit, and the OWC Thunderbolt Hub
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t do gigabit on its own built-in port. So I don’t know what’s going on with Ethernet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going over these Thunderbolt dock things. Something’s up. I’ve tried all the things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the CalDigit where they tell you like, oh, if you just reboot and reconfigure your Ethernet things with the Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bridge port 1 and 2 or port 0 and 1, and then if you reset your SMC, then it will all of a sudden start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco working. And first of all, I did all that and it didn’t start working. But second of all, Even if that would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever work, that’s not a solution for me. Because the whole reason I want an Ethernet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco connection is because Ethernet is supposed to work every single time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco without hassle. And when I plug it directly into a computer with an Ethernet port, it does work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco perfectly and reliably. I don’t know what it is with these, with the, you know, the things that are built into these Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco docks, but I can’t get it to work through them reliably. And that, to me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a pretty big value loss for these docks. So, I’m a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco disappointed in the Ethernet situation on all these Thunderbolt products so far, but I am making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it work just fine. And the reality is, my computer, where it usually sits, is about,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, nine feet from the WiFi router. Granted, there’s a wall between them, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s so close that, really, when I’m on WiFi, it’s pretty rock solid.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this may all be moot. Obviously when I have a desktop here, like when I have the Mac mini
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here, I will wire it because it’s best to wire stuff if you can, if it’s convenient to do so, just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get it not only more reliable and usually a little bit faster, but also just gets it off the wireless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco network to free up the radio bandwidth for other devices. In the meantime,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it ends up this wifi situation or the ethernet situation is too finicky through these docks and I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use wifi when I’m using the laptop, that’s fine too.
⏹️ ▶️ John is another reason why we always talk about Apple being beneficial for
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple to make a set of products that constitute a complete ecosystem. We talk about it in the context
⏹️ ▶️ John of wifi docks usually, but things like this, if you’re gonna make all your laptops have all
⏹️ ▶️ John the same shape ports on them because you’re like, well, you can connect anything to a Thunderbolt dock. All
⏹️ ▶️ John right, well, Barco so far has boughten two of the most commonly recommended, most
⏹️ ▶️ John expensive things that ostensibly plug into one of those cool ports. and ostensibly do a
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, and he’s having trouble making both of them do a thing. And you would imagine that if Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John sold anything like this, something that you could connect a Mac laptop to that offers a bunch of ports, that
⏹️ ▶️ John their thing would work, that the ethernet would work without being configured because they’re Apple, right? The benefit
⏹️ ▶️ John of Apple making the whole thing, we talked about in the context of the M1, the great benefits of when you control the entire
⏹️ ▶️ John stack from top to bottom, we’re not getting that benefit for laptops. In theory, they
⏹️ ▶️ John let you connect anything to it, but in practice, you have to find one that you can buy So you just buy and try and know it’s got a problem to buy another
⏹️ ▶️ John one and try I know it’s got a problem and most people Aren’t Marco and don’t just keep buying products until they find one that works
⏹️ ▶️ John Usually what happens is you buy one you grit your teeth and buy a hundred or two hundred dollar Thunderbolt thing
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s supposed to do what it says on the box and you can’t get it to work and you Google and you get frustrated And maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re like, oh am I gonna go through the hassle trying to return this and get my money back and go through their tech Support and just
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not the experience people want to deal with if Wi-Fi was like that Luckily, it’s not luckily you
⏹️ ▶️ John can buy third-party Wi-Fi things that Mac work with without much of a problem But you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess the Ethernet is more narrow now that everyone uses Wi-Fi but I feel like the promise of
⏹️ ▶️ John these laptops hinges on the product the promise of the things you connect to them and For
⏹️ ▶️ John many years and many generations now finding things that you can connect to them That forget about aesthetics
⏹️ ▶️ John forget about price forget about price performance. They just simply do the job they’re supposed to do reliably
⏹️ ▶️ John all the time has been a problem. And so this is something that Apple should address
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually, because, you know, if you see them talk on stage about it or if you talk to them in person, it’s like, well, we’ve got
⏹️ ▶️ John these great Thunderbolt ports. What are you complaining about? This is what we’re complaining about. He’s just trying to get Ethernet to work. It
⏹️ ▶️ John shouldn’t be rocket science.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And I shouldn’t I shouldn’t need to be an expert in any of these areas. Like I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shouldn’t need to know about, well, oh, well, this one this one won’t negotiate to give it speeds or maybe I have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reset I set my SMC three times every time I want it to work. Like, no, that’s not a solution. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not, yeah. The whole point of having, and this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is why ultimately, this is why I complain about having like multiple, having too few ports on the laptops. This is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why I like desktops whenever I have like a stationary workstation. They tend to work better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like when you don’t need these extra adapters and peripherals and docks and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hubs and dongles, things tend to work better. many people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are totally fine and they’re like, hey, what’s the big deal? I do this, I use these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of things and they work most of the time. And to me there’s a massive difference
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between something that works most of the time and something that works all the time. And I don’t have a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of tolerance in my life for things that work most of the time when there are options
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that work all the time in that same solution, like in that same role. That there is something I can do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get full working Ethernet with no tricks and no jumping through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hoops and working at full speed every time. So I know it’s possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve had it for years. And so when something like this comes out, and it’s like, oh, well, it’s fine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as long as you jump through hoops every so often. Like, no, that’s not a solution.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, I do wanna derail the show slightly. I’m going to go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rogue and insert a rogue Ask ATP question right here on the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, this is John’s favorite. Carry
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ve got a lot of Ask ATP backlogs, so I’m actually happy for you to pull one of them out of there. Great. reduce the
How to sell old gear?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this came in from listener Brian a few days back. Brian asks, how does Marco sell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco his unwanted computers? He’s mentioned in a few episodes that he sells them, and I’m wondering if he uses something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like eBay, Craigslist, or some other networking tool to find buyers. Is it just word of mouth, and people Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Marco personally knows who are in the market? I’m asking because I have a bunch of computers and related equipment I’d like to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rid of, but I’m tired of being scammed by bad buyers on eBay, and don’t really want to go to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the hassle of selling on Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace. thanks. So I wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to address this because I just sold stuff and I have a lot more stuff I want to sell.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And a lot of people are going through this of like, oh crap, the new M1 Macs are out and they’re awesome, how do I sell my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old Intel stuff and that way I can buy the new M1 stuff. And so I get this question
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot because people see me like saying on Twitter, hey anybody want this? And then it’s gone in like 10 minutes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I figured I’d share what I could here. This is a very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco common problem of not wanting to deal with eBay or Craigslist or Facebook.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Those are all incredibly messy. It is by far the messiest way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to sell stuff, but the good thing about going through something like eBay is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you have something that’s somewhat specialized, like you’ve seen me me on Twitter sell computers just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine. Like I can sell Apple laptops to Apple fans
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that follow me fairly easily. I’ll tell you how in a second, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s the easy part. What you don’t see is me selling more obscure things. Or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll try and I usually fail. So something like, I wanted to sell a while back, I had this pair
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Rode wireless lavalier microphones with the little wireless belt packs and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the wireless receivers and everything. And I tried to sell it and I just never got any takers on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it because it’s specialized gear. And even though I have a decent number of followers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Twitter where I was trying to sell it, I don’t have enough people who are looking for that kind of specialized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gear. And so you can kind of tailor how you’re selling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things, where you’re trying to go based on how specialized, how niche
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is what I’m trying to sell. And if it’s something that’s fairly specialized, eBay is basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the only game in town because eBay will get you the highest chance to sell the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most obscure or specialized or relatively unwanted things. Like somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will buy it on eBay. And then as you, if you have access to more people and if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something is more broadly applicable, then you have more options on how to sell that. So what I usually do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, my main interest is in getting something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sold as easily to me as possible. I don’t wanna deal with anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t wanna deal with people like, eBay’s the worst. People do get, sellers get ripped
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off on eBay all the time. And if you are going to eBay to sell a laptop,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are taking a risk. Like the buyer could rip you off in various ways. There’s lots of scam
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buyers, especially for things like laptops on eBay. And so it’s very, very risky.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would suggest if you want to sell something like a laptop,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco consider instead doing either Apple Trade-In or something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a MacBee and Offer or like one of those various sites that buys
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used Apple computers as their business. Because what’s great about that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you will never get the best price doing that, at least not usually.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, and by the way, to judge what something’s actually worth, this is another use of eBay. Go to eBay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look at completed items, but look at sold completed items. There’s a separate checkbox on the search page
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for sold items, because what you want to see is what has this thing actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sold for recently? What I usually do when I’m trying to sell something is either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go through one of those brokers like Apple or MacMainOffer or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just accept that they’re going to be a a pretty low price, or see whatever things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re going for on eBay and offer it on Twitter for like 20% less than that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And usually people will jump on that soon enough if there’s a market for it at all. Now granted,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is not available to most people, like the Twitter option is not available to most people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And honestly, you’re not missing out on a whole bunch, Twitter is awful. But,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the other options are, again, Like, either less money for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing like the, basically like they trade it into the dealer route. Like, these are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same problems when you have to deal with, when you have to sell a car. Like, if you ever sold a used car, it’s exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same trade-offs. Like, you can trade it into a dealer or like a bulk buying company, and they won’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco give you a very good price. But the advantage of those things is, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost no hassle, there’s almost no risk, and it’s really easy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like right now, I sold this Mac Mini back to Apple. I probably could have gotten maybe a few hundred dollars
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more if I would have sold it privately. But it would take much more work, and I’d be taking a risk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the buyer might scam me. So I actually might not make that much more.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or the amount of time that I would have to spend dealing with that, like putting it up for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sale, dealing with any inquiries, shipping it, packing it, all that stuff, that time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is all valuable to me. And so in many cases, I might actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just choose the cheaper trade-in price from Apple or whatever, because it just saves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you the trouble. Again, it’s just like when you have a car, when you trade it into the dealer, because you don’t want to deal with people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You make less off it, but it is often better in the long run for you. And finally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better than selling it at all is if you don’t need the money for it that much,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if there’s someone in your family who needs a computer or a phone or whatever, just give it to them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you can be the person in your family who gives gently used computers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to people who really need new ones but never buy them themselves. So I do that with a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of my stuff. My family is a family of hand-me-downs. Not Tiff, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco she wouldn’t let that fly, but it’s a family, extended family. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is kind of a rambling way of saying there’s lots of different ways to sell stuff. eBay is best if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want the highest price but are willing to take the most risk and do the most work, or if you have very specialized stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco selling it to people you know is generally not recommended, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco giving it away to people you know is okay. And if you want something very low effort and low risk,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’ll also give you kind of a low price, that’s when you do things like trading into Apple or the various
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other sites that buy stuff or let you trade stuff in.
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The other Christmas gift
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I mentioned last week that I had two Christmas gifts I wanted to talk about. One of them was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the VR headset, the Oculus Quest 2 that I got for the family.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I now want to talk about a gift that my wonderful wife got for me. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, I would never, if you would have gone back and told
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me of five years ago that this is actually a gift that I would want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that somebody would get for me not as a joke and that I would actually love and use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would be shocked but here we are Tiff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got for me for Christmas a gaming PC
⏹️ ▶️ John god sounds like one of those gifts that you get for someone that’s really kind of a gift
⏹️ ▶️ Casey She got you a bowling ball.
⏹️ ▶️ John She did. She got you a bowling ball.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s his home run. So a couple years back, maybe a year, year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a half ago, Tiff got a gaming PC. You know, she was getting into certain PC games.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And, and, you know, as you know, John, playing games on Macs is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco painful. So so when Tiffany did a gaming PC, she went and got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a real gaming PC and notably chose to get a laptop, a gaming laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the wonderful Razer with a Z company. Razer. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco she got a Razer gaming laptop, a 15-inch, whatever the Razer gaming laptop that 15
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inches is called that was for sale about a year ago. And I made fun of her relentlessly because of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the all the crazy like RGB keyboard lighting things that it could do. It’s it does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of ridiculous stuff. It’s like totally over the top with like RGB and everything but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But Razer is actually, from what I understand, and from our experiences with it, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually a pretty decent PC maker, and they seem to do things with a,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the RGB stuff aside, with a higher degree of taste than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I usually see from PC gaming hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is not what I would have thought. I mean, I guess everything’s relative, but I would not say that
⏹️ ▶️ John Razer is a conservative brand when it comes to stylized
⏹️ ▶️ John gamer type stuff. It’s not the most extreme, but it is also not very
⏹️ ▶️ John tame. There’s lots of black and neon colors and jagged edges and a lot of razor mice that look like
⏹️ ▶️ John someone took a lump of coal and shattered it and said, here’s your mouse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not, but see, that style doesn’t really carry into the laptops though. The laptops are actually pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco boring black slabs for the most part, and they’re pretty nicely made.
⏹️ ▶️ John With neon lights that come through the keyboard and a green logo on the cover
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, yeah. So anyway, so Tiff’s had this gaming PC and when the family started playing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Minecraft a lot, which started really in full-blown strength
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this past spring, Tiff played mostly on the Nintendo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Switch, Adam played mostly on his iPad, and at some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco point in the spring, I decided I need to play Minecraft because this is what my family is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing, this is what my son’s really into, I wanna be able to relate to my son and know what he’s talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and spend time with him. And other parents, they maybe throw
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a ball with their kid or whatever their kid wants to do, the parent tries to do it with them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, my kid wants to play Minecraft all day, so damn it, I’m gonna play Minecraft all day. So I learn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how to play. And Tiff and Adam vowed to teach me. The device that was left
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me to play on was TIFF’s gaming PC. And she let me use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it because she also knew that I was comfortable with keyboard and mouse for that kind of open world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and crafty kind of game. She knew I was comfortable with that. And so I said, great. I would love to learn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that. That became basically my family Minecraft device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all year. The entire year, every single time that PC woke up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it said, hey, where’s TIFF? And it’s looking around for TIFF using the Windows Face ID and looking around, saying, hey, Tiff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where are you, Tiff? And every time it was me, and I had to type in the password manually, and I never changed it over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to mine. It’s still hers. She would gracefully let me do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But Tiff wants her gaming PC back. And so that entire time I was using it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was being used. And that’s nice. I was getting used to it. I was really enjoying playing Minecraft
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the family and occasionally by myself. And I started thinking, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe I want to try the new flight simulator, or maybe I want to play whatever new SimCities
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or Cities Skylines, you know, like maybe I want to try some of these other games. Maybe I want to try installing some of my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old games I used to like. And I didn’t really want to do it because it wasn’t my computer. Tiff, sensing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this and wanting her gaming PC back, decided as a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Christmas gift, she was going to get me a gaming PC. And she kind of hinted like, well, if you were going to get one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what would you get? And I looked at the options. The funny thing is, like, the laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware world has not really changed much since she bought hers. So, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one I got is almost identical to hers. The main difference is, when I looked at the specs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I saw that there was a slightly higher-end trim level that came with an OLED
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 4K touchscreen. Oh. And I thought, okay, 4K on a laptop,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a PC laptop, I don’t really need. A touchscreen, I’m a little curious about, that I probably wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use, but OLED, that’s interesting. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we frequently play in a room that has a lot of sunlight coming into it during the day,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that makes it hard for me to do anything in dark areas in the game on TIFF’s LCD gaming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco PC. Because, I mean, look, it’s not the best LCD in the world. These aren’t Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quality laptop displays that everybody’s using on their LCDs. So, you know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not great for, you know, like dark scene detail in a sunny room.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would have to like not do my quest in the nether in Minecraft until nighttime because I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco couldn’t see it during the day. And I thought, well, OLED could be better for that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because OLED’s really good at, you know, dark detail and being super bright in the day and stuff. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let me try that. Let me see, like, you know, hey, if there’s an OLED option, I want to try that.
⏹️ ▶️ John OLED is actually the opposite when it comes to television because it can’t get as bright. So the advice for TVs is if you have
⏹️ ▶️ John a sunny room, get an LED backlit LCD television because OLED can’t become bright enough
⏹️ ▶️ John to overwhelm it. But it sounds like what your problem was is, especially on like cheap LCDs where
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not like you couldn’t make the bright parts bright enough. It’s that the dark parts you get like, I’m assuming you get like glare on the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John and their screen looks like it’s gray because the sort of matte finish on the screen or whatever the
⏹️ ▶️ John light is reflecting off of it. And so you have two problems. One is, can I
⏹️ ▶️ John see the bright parts? But two is, do the black parts suddenly look really light gray because it’s catching light?
⏹️ ▶️ John So the OLED with its actual black blacks is gonna help there. And hopefully on what I assume is
⏹️ ▶️ John a small laptop screen size like it’s not a 40 inch laptop, hopefully at a small screen size,
⏹️ ▶️ John the OLED can get bright enough to compete
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the sunlight. And the reason I wasn’t looking, I wasn’t considering desktop options
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here for lots of reasons. I mean, number one is like, Like when Tufa
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got hers, I first initially thought, it’s gonna be a laptop, a laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco GPU, how good could that really be for PC gaming? And the answer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was, pretty damn good. Like it could do a lot. Especially, we’re not playing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco incredibly demanding games here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John You’re playing
⏹️ ▶️ John Minecraft, try Microsoft Flight Simulator on it in 4K, you’ll bring it to its knees.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well, hold on, sir, I’ll get there. But, so, I figured,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we don’t need the massive, you know, desktop cards. Also, trying to buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a high-end desktop GPU right now is not so easy. Also, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a desktop is a much bigger ordeal. Not only is it much larger physically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but then you need a monitor that you can plug into it. And I don’t have a spare,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not gonna plug the LG into it. I’m not gonna, like, I don’t have, like, you know, extra monitors lying around.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want to set up a whole desk station for a desktop because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is not something that I’m doing like super seriously all the time. This is something that I do sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for fun with my family. A laptop is actually perfect for this if it can be anywhere near
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good enough. And these laptops, so they both, so they’re 15 inch models.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They both have the, I guess, laptop version of the 2080, Max-Q,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever, it’s whatever the best 2080 is that Razer offers, like that’s what I have. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s actually really good. I don’t know what a desktop could get me, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m guessing this is getting me at least 50% of what a desktop is getting me, like in high-end GPU frame rate stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the highest settings and everything. And that’s great for me, for a laptop. Like, it’s fantastic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am extremely happy with the performance this gets for my needs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and considering that it’s in a laptop. And not a particularly large laptop, but you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a 15 inch, it’s a little heavy, it’s not too thick, it’s a 15 inch laptop, it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel too ridiculous for that size class. The fan is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not super loud, like you know, it spins up, you hear it when you’re playing games, but it’s not like a jet engine or anything, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not like disturbing. So it’s actually a really good balance, and this is why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when Tiff kind of floated the idea of whether I wanted mine, I basically said like, yeah, get me yours but with the OLED screen,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I’ve been playing on it for a year, And it’s been totally great as a laptop. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it really does shock me how good it is. And that’s mostly what we need. I use an external mouse. I use the Razer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mamba Wireless. These names. And it’s just a basically, you know, two button thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I could even use a more basic one. I already killed one by right clicking too much, I guess. Or too hard,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey know. Oh, neat.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so I killed a mouse over about eight months of Minecraft. I killed the right mouse button.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, anyway. And I know, as these things go, I could have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gotten better bang for the buck if I built a desktop myself. I could have gotten higher frame rates or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lower temperatures or whatever if I built a whole desktop. And I used to build desktops! I know that!
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, I used to really enjoy that. But right now I’m at a point in my life where I wouldn’t really enjoy that. And I’m very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happy to have the self-contained, complete thing of a laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and not have to deal with a whole bunch of stuff. So anyway, all that aside, yeah, I’m very happy with this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware. So actually using Windows and having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to set it up and make my own user account and sign into the Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Store and all this crazy stuff, that was actually a really interesting experience because I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have not used Windows really much at all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco since Windows XP. That was the last version I really used for more than trivial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things here or there. And so a lot of this stuff is pretty new to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For the most part, I was pretty happy with the Windows setup process.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This was running, I guess, what is it, Windows 10 is the latest version? Whatever it is, it wasn’t as bad as I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thought it would be. Certain things have gotten better. Certain things haven’t. Certain things are just papered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over from the olden days, and they’re worse. They’re just covered up. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it really wasn’t that bad. It was totally, so, you know, it was interesting because I was basically approaching it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost the way like a regular non-technical person would approach it, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know anything about Windows anymore. Again, like the last version I used was like, you know, 15, 20 years old.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, you know, it’s been a while, and the way things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are done now is a little bit different. I actually did have to kind of just like plow through and figure stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out, and it really gave me some, I think, useful perspective that I haven’t had in a long time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like, you know, what is Windows like? What is it like to use it? What is it like to try to get stuff done in Windows?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One thing that made it very, very easy to get set up there is that Dropbox,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of course, runs on Windows, but also so does 1Password. That made it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much easier to set up my stuff there. Because, you know, I didn’t, obviously I’m not gonna move like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my entire computing life onto Windows. Not only would most of it not be compatible, but, you know, this is a gaming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco PC. That’s what it’s for. So I’m not gonna move over a bunch of stuff, but it was nice to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be able to like, set up one password in Dropbox and be able to transfer stuff back and forth,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, be able to log into the right accounts at the right times with, you know, all the nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big long secure passwords, stuff like that. It was actually really nice and surprisingly easy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get those things running and working. One of the biggest things that I hit was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really missed Airdrop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey the old PC,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had Tiff’s PC, and there were a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Minecraft data files that I wanted to move from Tiff’s PC to my new PC.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m like, all right, I have a laptop here, four inches away, I have another laptop almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just like it. How do I move files from this to that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I could not figure out, I assumed there was some kind of network way to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just use SCP. Windows, you may not know this, but Windows has
⏹️ ▶️ John a Linux subsystem now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can use SMB or, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s- Type command K in the finder, right? Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wasn’t, isn’t SMB a Microsoft protocol?
⏹️ ▶️ John yes. It’s, yeah, I was just thinking that like you were using Dropbox to sync files. It’s so strange that
⏹️ ▶️ John you have these two computers that are in the same house on the same network and the way you’re transferring files is by passing them to a third
⏹️ ▶️ John party company that stores them in a data center somewhere,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey and then they come back
⏹️ ▶️ John to the other computer. Rather than, and they both speak SMB, it’s the default in Mac OS, and it’s what Windows
⏹️ ▶️ John has used forever. If you knew the right incantations, you could simply network the two together via
⏹️ ▶️ John SMB and transfer files, but because you didn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, yeah. Windows is like FFmpeg. If you know the right incantation, it can do a lot. Wow.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I bet you can do it in my computer somewhere, or whatever the hell, but I don’t know either, because my computer
⏹️ ▶️ John that I use Windows on is the same, is my computer. So I never have to transfer the files anywhere. They’re all
⏹️ ▶️ John either there or they’re not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so I ended up, like, I couldn’t figure out how to do it in any reasonable way. And so I ended
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up doing it like the most basic way possible. I had an SD
⏹️ ▶️ Marco card. And meanwhile, Tiff’s computer doesn’t have an SD card
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slot. Mine does. And so I had to use my MacBook USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SD card dongle, plug in the SD card into the old computer, copy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the files onto it like a giant floppy disk, unplug it, plug it into mine, copy them all.
⏹️ ▶️ John You didn’t have a USB thumb drive? No, what year is this? You gotta have thumb drives. Everyone’s got thumb
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was never a thumb drive person. I’ve had them here and there that were given to me by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco freebies from conferences and stuff, but I never used them. I never got into that lifestyle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because when they first were coming around, I was very much still a CD-burning person. And then in their later days,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would just use the internet to transfer stuff everywhere. And then eventually, SD cards got so cheap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that that became a reasonable way to do it as well. But anyway, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after I eventually got my file transfer over, I did get to play games. And I learned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why PC gamers don’t like 4K screens.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh no, it’s a lot of pixels.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so first of all, the OLED is amazing looking.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is so, it looks so awesome. I was just blown
⏹️ ▶️ Marco away how much better the games look on the OLED compared
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to on the fairly mediocre LCD that the other one has. It’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco massive upgrade in like just color, contrast, brightness.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It has the glossy finish instead of, because it’s a touchscreen, has the glossy finish instead of the like matte thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it looks, you know, just sharper and brighter. It looks amazing. And when you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco run the games at 4K, they look amazing too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like upgrading to Retina, you know? And even in my blocky world of Minecraft,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the edges are all really sharp now. You know, every cube has a bunch of edges.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It looks amazing. And I’m very happy with it. However, when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re running games at 4K, it makes it harder for the GPU to drive them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quite a bit harder actually. The issue I had was when I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco started playing Minecraft you know it looked fantastic but I noticed that when I would move the mouse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to move myself or to look it would like lag severely to the point it was like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco delayed input almost to the point where it almost gave me motion sickness just like because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was like you know I would move the mouse and it would kind of and then go over. I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to dive into the world of trying to debug Minecraft
⏹️ ▶️ Marco issues on Windows via web search.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you live to tell the tale.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do not recommend going into this world. It’s everything you think it would be. It’s a whole bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like, you know, forum posts from eight years ago from total
⏹️ ▶️ Marco idiots who don’t know what they’re talking about, or at least their information is extremely outdated. a whole bunch of YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ Marco videos that are the only information about Minecraft that’s any good that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you would watch and it’s, you know, Hey guys, so if you’re having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco performance problems on Minecraft, you know, it’s just like, oh God, just get to the point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was awful trying to figure this out. And what they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recommended once I got through all the, hey guys, was, you know, your Windows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gamer greatest hits. So first, upgrade your video drivers. Okay, how do I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that? I knew how to do it 15 years ago, how do I do it now? I have this Nvidia control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco panel that I have to log into because downloading video drivers now requires
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a name and an email address and a whole account. Like I had this hell of a video of what my birthday was. I’m like, you gotta be
⏹️ ▶️ John So those are the best. The video card manufacturers install so much software on Windows. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John we need an entire, I know there’s a whole bunch of screens in Windows the control panels and the display
⏹️ ▶️ John settings where you think you can control your video card, but you have no idea. Here is an entire
⏹️ ▶️ John AMD, ATI, NVIDIA app that includes screen capture ability and the ability
⏹️ ▶️ John to change features on your video card with scary warnings next to them telling you you can destroy your screen if you do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, what? What? I just want to change the resolution. It’s just, it’s terrifying.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was a little concerned about, and I might still be concerned about OLED burn-in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a PC. Like, you know, for games, that’s obviously a pretty big concern. My OLED TV back home is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco indeed permanently burned in with the Minecraft heart bar, because Tiff was playing it on the Switch,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that TV for the entire quarantine. So, you know, that burn-in’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still there. We saw it last week, it’s still there. And so I was worried about that, but, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco noticed one thing that, that I assumed the built-in Razer software that came pre-installed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on this, or something that is pre-installed on this, I noticed that no matter what I set it to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you set the start bar to auto hide and show, like auto raise and lower, when you just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dock auto hiding, if you set it to not auto hide and to always be there, sometime
⏹️ ▶️ Marco later that day, it will reset itself to auto hide. Neat. So I assume
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that some kind of stock software is permanently just gonna overwrite that setting over and over again
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to avoid burning in the start bar to the screen. So anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So back to my, you know, my Minecraft thing. So I’m like looking at I upgrade the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco graphics drivers and I try and everyone’s like, oh, well, actually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you have to, you know, enable V sync or disable V sync and just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all this crap and it didn’t make sense to me. Like, why would I like, why would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want to turn V sync off to fix a performance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem? That seems like a bad idea.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because then it doesn’t hold your frame, it starts drawing as soon as it’s ready, even if the bottom half of the screen is still a previous
⏹️ ▶️ John frame. So PC gamers love to say, tearing, I don’t mind tearing, just give
⏹️ ▶️ John me that next frame as soon as it’s ready. And I think it’s ridiculous too, I always turn on V-Sync. But if you want the absolute maximum,
⏹️ ▶️ John PC gamers just want to see the FPS number go up. So if you want the absolute maximum FPS number,
⏹️ ▶️ John screen tearing, who cares? And that’s solved by later technologies. But if you’re watching older videos and
⏹️ ▶️ John you see these PC gamers saying, I always turn off Vsync, it gives you one more frame per second. I just can’t get on that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so anyway, I did eventually fix it. The fix was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to not only, it was basically do the opposite of what everybody said, not only force
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Vsync on in the NVIDIA control utility thing, because the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other problem is like Minecraft, we mostly play the Bedrock Edition, that way we can play with the Switch and the iPad and the family,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the Bedrock Edition doesn’t have a lot of graphical controls. It runs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco itself at whatever resolution Windows is currently running at, so the full 4K.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it doesn’t have any built-in, like, you know, disable VSync or anything like that. But NVIDIA’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco giant, bloated control panel utility thing does have a way to say, either for specific
⏹️ ▶️ Marco games or for everything, force these settings to override whatever the game says.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I was able to force VSync on in that way, And then I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also, some forum post recommended that you limit the frame rate,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you actually impose a frame rate limit to 60, because the screen refresh rate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway. And doing those two things, 60 frames a second lock and VSync forced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on, fixed the problem. Because the GPU was trying to render a billion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frames a second, and it was doing, it was overloading something or other, and it was causing input lag basically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that instantly fixed the problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you’re really sacrificing your responsiveness in Minecraft PVP by locking to 60.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just want you to know that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, right, because for a 38-year-old dad playing Minecraft, the real limitation is that extra,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what is it, 16 milliseconds of my reaction
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s right, what you want is the game to be computing slightly faster
⏹️ ▶️ John than your refresh, because that will help reduce your input lag, and the peaker’s
⏹️ ▶️ John important to you in Minecraft, I’m sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, oh yeah, totally. So anyway, I got it working, it was great, it looks incredible,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was just playing it yesterday with Adam, and it’s just, I’m having so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much fun with it. I thought it was funny that within an hour of setting up my gaming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco PC, I hit a problem that required diving into video drivers and tweaking my GPU
⏹️ ▶️ Marco settings. You gotta be kidding me. It’s still Windows, it’s still gaming,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s still like all the crap that you have to put up with lots of it’s all still there. I, you know, that stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was all there 20 years ago. I thought maybe by now we would have gotten past some of it and no, we haven’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Other, otherwise I tried the cool RTX ray tracing mode of Minecraft,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which I thought it would be like just a setting you turn on and ends up, you can only do it like on certain maps that Nvidia made.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I assume maybe they like baked in the light textures or whatever, because like whatever sun
⏹️ ▶️ Marco position the map starts in, it just stays there forever. Like the sun, you don’t have the day night cycle that you usually do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So like, I’m playing one where it’s like a sunset map, and it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at dusk, and it looks really cool! And the whole idea that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this computer can do real-time ray tracing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, as a casual observer to this world, but as enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a geek to know what ray tracing is, I’m sure they’re doing all sorts of hacks to reduce the amount of work they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do, but my god that’s incredible because I remember like back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my first computer it was a 486 and I downloaded some you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know ray tracing renderer program and I remember like setting up a scene and hitting render
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to let it go like overnight to render a frame one just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to render a still picture with ray tracing lighting this program
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we had to run all night long for one picture and And the idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I can play this full 3D game with live
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ray tracing and again, I’m sure there’s tricks and hacks and work reductions in place here. It is very
⏹️ ▶️ John asterisk on that, yes. It’s not, it’s a little bit of extra ray tracing special sauce
⏹️ ▶️ John thrown on top of a raster engine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Still, it looked amazing and to see all those real time lighting effects and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My God, even though playing it as Minecraft that way is really weird because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like torches don’t really work, because they generate shadows. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so you need way more torches than before. So as a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fun game playing thing, it’s not so fun because it makes a lot of things about the game
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not work as well because the game wasn’t designed for that. But as a amazing tech demo,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was so happy to see it. It made me almost giddy. Just like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wow, I can’t believe hardware is so advanced that it can do this these days. It really was incredible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also, in addition to playing a 10-year-old game, I tried to play a whole bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 20-year-old games. Of course. And by the way, yes, I know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everybody, I know there’s a whole bunch of new games I should be playing, and I’ll get there in time. Really, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will, maybe, maybe not. But, um, ultimately, if all I ever play on this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Minecraft, it’s worth it, because we play that much Minecraft as a family, um, and I get that much enjoyment out of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But, anyway, I also thought, hey, there’s all these old games from, you know, my old PC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco days that I would love to play. Let’s see how many of them work. It was not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as many as I would have guessed. And the great thing is, you know, you can go on Steam or GOG and,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uh, download a lot of these old games for, like, $2. Like, they, uh, totally legally. They’re just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really cheap because they’re so old. But it was, I had a lot of issues. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I couldn’t get Total Annihilation, which is my favorite game of all time back then. I couldn’t get Total Annihilation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to work correctly. Like it works a little, but it has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some issues that make it pretty hard to play.
⏹️ ▶️ John The best way to play old games like that is the same way you play them on a Mac, or an Intel Mac. VMs,
⏹️ ▶️ John virtual machines, like that’s. Yeah, I was gonna ask about that. Once you get to a certain age and there’s no, like
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no Steam version or the GOG version is weird. Like just do the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like get a VM, put Windows 95 on it and go to town and that will work and you won’t have any performance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think I might do that because like, it seemed like they were not working for, you know, just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software glitchy reasons. You know, these games that were, like it’s funny, the ones that, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, in the concept of like, you know, the game rendering engine thing, If the game uses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what used to be called a full screen mode, the game takes over the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen and sets the screen to whatever resolution the game wants to set it to. Anything that works
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that way mostly worked fine still. The problem is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco games that would render basically as a window and let
⏹️ ▶️ Marco windows render over them sometimes or just take whatever resolution the PC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ran at, those games often seem to not work as well. Also, just certain games that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were just even very, like, kind of extra old. Like, I tried running the very first version
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Worms, which is a DOS game, but I like it better than many of the newer ones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, Worms, man, what- talk about, like, losing the franchise, like.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Worms started out so good, and I’d say after about Worms World
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Party or so, really lost its way. Like, once it went, it went 3D,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which was terrible. And then after 3D, it came back to 2D and just had all this like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mania on screen constantly. It was, it was, it’s not a good scene, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Old Worms was really fun. So I wanted to play some of those old games and couldn’t get a lot of those to work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As I mentioned, TA had issues. SimCity 3000 and 4 both work great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t really enjoy 4 that much, but I do enjoy SimCity 3000, so that was kind of fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As Casey knows, I was always a big fan, as he was, of Transport Tycoon, and of course, there it is, of course,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OpenTTD works great, but it also works great on Macs and Linux. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did play a little bit of Transport Tycoon, but again, I could have done that on my Mac. One thing that was a nice surprise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is this wonderful game that I love a lot, that I believe was once named the best game
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nobody played of 2002, Moonbase Commander. This is, it’s exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what the award sounds like. It’s a game that was like pretty under the radar, didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sell a lot of copies. My friend found it in a discount bin at like a software store back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when those were a thing for like five bucks. And we played it and it’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a really good game. It’s a turn-based kind of top-down artillery game.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s, I love that game, it’s so much fun. I installed that, I played a little bit. Adam saw
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me play that. He got super into it, and then the whole rest of the trip, you know, in the same way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I had taken over Tips Gaming PC the year before, Adam had taken over my gaming PC to play Moonbase Commander.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was a wonderful experience to have, you know, all this old nostalgia that was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so readily available, ran so well, obviously, you know, Moonbase Commander is a DirectX 8 game,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and even that was a stretch only to make, like, the little ripple effect with a pixel shader. Anyway, so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had a lot of fun. It was a wonderful present. It was a wonderful diversion. I think Christmas is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a great time for video gaming, for people who don’t play a lot of games the rest of the year. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t have a lot else to do. Everyone’s kind of home. You get your family together. It could be a fun thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I had a lot of fun. And haven’t done a lot of the old games since I got back,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but we have played Minecraft on it. And it runs it perfectly. And again, the screen is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco awesome. Haven’t touched the touch screen once. at least not as an input method.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have found that whenever I wanna brush a piece of dust off the screen,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it interprets that as a touch. So I think Gruber might be right about touch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screens. Now that I have one, I’m like, oh, yeah, I don’t. I mean, granted,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not using it to get any work done, so I’m not browsing documents or anything, but I guess I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really actually need touch screens on my laptop, it turns out. Otherwise, it’s a fantastic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco piece of hardware. It is exactly what I want and need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for my very specific and limited and casual gaming needs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s great, and it’s a great gift, and I never would have guessed in a million years that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would have a gaming laptop, but here we are. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m really happy with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If it makes you happy, it makes you happy.
⏹️ ▶️ John What about Flight Simulator?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, I haven’t actually installed it yet, but that’s next on my list, the new one where you can fly around the real world maps.
⏹️ ▶️ John because that’s the new PC gaming crusher in terms of like, no matter how big
⏹️ ▶️ John a gaming PC you have, you can turn the settings up high enough to make your computer cry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and look, I don’t care. Like, I know I’m not gonna be able to run everything at max. I don’t care. I actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t care about flight simulation at all. I just think it would be cool to fly through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these real places in the world with that map data. Like, that’s what I wanna do. It’s not about like, I don’t care about
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s all about the weather effects. The plane models are amazing, and I think you’ll be impressed by, especially the interior, but
⏹️ ▶️ John also the exterior of the planes. They do look amazing, but the weather effects they put into this game, which I think are also driven
⏹️ ▶️ John by real-time stuff, but they look amazing. So you’ll be able to appreciate that at least,
⏹️ ▶️ John even if it’s at a slower frame rate.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I almost bought it, but it’s like there’s like six different editions and I’m like, I don’t know what edition I need.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I just gave up and didn’t buy anything. I figured I’d research it later.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can get Destiny for that game in GDC, just FYI. Oh God. Or I could not. There
⏹️ ▶️ John it is. You can use your fancy Razer gaming mouse for a game where it might actually have some actual influence.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, see this is the thing, everyone who’s gonna recommend that I check out certain games, I really appreciate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. Here’s the thing though, I really have no interest in first person shooters. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t. I know, but you will. As soon as Adam switches from Minecraft to Fortnite, which is coming sooner than
⏹️ ▶️ John you think, you better start honing those skills if you wanna keep playing with them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have political opinions about it being kind of a poor taste to play shooting games,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I just, I don’t care. Like I did, like when I was a teenager
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a young adult, I did play lots of first person shooters. And yes, you know, it didn’t make me a violent person or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but still like, I played a lot of them back then and I turned out, well, I turned out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like this. I don’t know if I turned out, okay. I turned out like this, but I just now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do not have any desire to play games where I’m shooting people. I just don’t. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if it’s like, oh, it’s a fun way to shoot people. I don’t, it’s not for me. If it’s for you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine, it’s not for me.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s gonna be for Adam, I’m saying, if you wanna keep playing with him.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, someday I’m going to lose him into that world. I know, you know, he’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco video game kid, like it’s gonna happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s coming sooner than you think, because he’s so acclimated to video games, his Fortnite transition will happen earlier than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, I know. It’s like puberty, like you don’t want, like, you know, he still has his cute kid games,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wanna keep it at that as
⏹️ ▶️ John He doesn’t play PvP and Minecraft?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He tells me what I want to hear. Because we’ve expressed to him
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our sense that we really don’t want him playing games where he’s killing other players. Like if he’s competing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in other ways or building co-op stuff, that’s great. We really don’t want him playing games where he’s killing other players and they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco killing him. You should think
⏹️ ▶️ John back to your childhood playing first person shooters and how you would have reacted if your parents said that to you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. I mean, and I know that he does kind of secretly do that when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we aren’t looking. I know. I know he’s playing on servers with that and and whenever we ask him like hey
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you killing players They’ll be like well not exactly you know He’ll kind of like soften it because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he knows we don’t really want him to be doing that But we also don’t feel so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco strongly about that we would actually police that and actually enforce that so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we all kind of have like a like a we’re gonna pretend like you’re not doing that too much and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re gonna pretend like when you are doing it that you’re not and the result is you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t like it and you don’t do it that often and so that’s kind of a good result for me
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think I do worry about too much like it’s what I would have told my parents if they had to complain about this when I was a kid is that
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s I Know it manifests itself in a way that
⏹️ ▶️ John looks like it has some connection to the real world But the closest analogy is to like freeze tag Because
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no consequences and it is just a competitive way to run around and essentially tag your red only
⏹️ ▶️ John the tags are projectiles that may or may not look like bullets.
⏹️ ▶️ John distasteful the realistic sort of military simulation where it’s actual
⏹️ ▶️ John guns from the real world and that’s part of the whole thing or whatever. But in the end, all those competitive online games
⏹️ ▶️ John are are much more analogous to sports than they are having to do anything with actual
⏹️ ▶️ John guns. And honestly, I would rather someone play with virtual photorealistic guns
⏹️ ▶️ John than real ones any day. So I’m sure you don’t have anything to worry about. But you know, kids like
⏹️ ▶️ John probably less so than most adults do like the competitive aspect of it. Just like the same reason kids like to play freeze tag
⏹️ ▶️ John and tag your it and run away from each other and have competitions. It’s just part of it’s just natural part of play only it’s happening
⏹️ ▶️ John on the computer. So you know, I think you should dive into that with him if only
⏹️ ▶️ John so he can beat you and you can feel the pride slash shame of your own offspring being better at something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s I know that time is coming, but yeah, and I also I also do recognize that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the that video game violence is kind of a continuum. And, you know, there’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s over over on one side, there’s like the Call of Duty or like, and I’m not I’m super not into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that either for myself or for him. And fortunately, he’s not he’s not been exposed to that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s gonna be a while before before
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s permitted. I mean, Fortnite is pretty cartoony, like in that spectrum, you know, there are avatars
⏹️ ▶️ John that do funny dances and have costumes. And yes, they use semi-realistic looking guns, but the entire game looks like a cell shaded cartoon
⏹️ ▶️ John and is on its face very ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually didn’t know that. I don’t know anything about Fortnite, so that’s actually good to know. Because I, again, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know the time is coming soon. Like he already has some of his some of his classmates in school
⏹️ ▶️ Marco play it already in third grade. So I know the time is coming.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But again, there is that continuum and the realistic military shooters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with real guns, that I’m super not into. And then if it’s more, and then on the other side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like Splatoon.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or Battle Tetris. Right. You ever seen Competitive Tetris where you replay that?
⏹️ ▶️ John Remember those, the two-player versions?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did it on my graphing calculator in high school. Like I would run the little headphone
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, if you get a line on your side, it puts junk on the other person’s side. It’s basically, it’s Competitive Two-Player Tetris.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s yeah, we’re hitting people with bullets. Anyway, yeah, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I Again, I know that time is coming I’m just trying to last as long as possible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the wonderful world of like let’s build things You know or the things that you kill they’re like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Square ghosts like that’s fine. Like I don’t care too much about that You know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got to take what you can get
⏹️ ▶️ John and meanwhile Tiff is over on the the giant television screen slicing people’s necks open I supposedly when he’s not awake.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no Oh yeah, like she couldn’t play that, the last of us, she could not play that game. She would do it while he was at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco school. Which was its own adventure in like dark scenes in a light
⏹️ ▶️ John had to play it downstairs just to. She needs to come over to the gaming monitor
⏹️ ▶️ John lifestyle where my console was connected to a monitor just like my computer in a much more
⏹️ ▶️ John controlled environment than my television. Has many advantages.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, maybe. I guess maybe we’ll have some PC monitors in the house pretty soon. She can use the LG 5K after
⏹️ ▶️ Marco next week. Anyway, thanks to our sponsors this week,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Flatfile, Linode, and Squarespace. And thank you to our members who support us directly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You too can become one of these members at http.fm.join. Thank you everybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we will talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey begin Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco N-T Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ John to Accidental, accidental, tech podcast
🐶
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so I have news. Let me tell you my news by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey telling a story. When I went to college at Virginia Tech, and this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was in the fall of 2000, and one day, I don’t know, a few weeks after
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I arrived, I got an email from my dad, which was not unusual. And the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey subject line was new lists, which was unusual. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey opened this email, I’ll never forget this, I opened and I I open this email, there’s a picture of a dog.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then that’s it. That’s the email. It’s a picture of a standard poodle and the subject line is new list.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So naturally I call my dad and say, what’s going on here? And in so many words, he basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said, well, we’ve replaced you with a dog. Meet Molly. Okay. Then.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, at least it’s less jarring than like, if it was actually like you have a new baby brother.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s true. That’s very
⏹️ ▶️ John true. Your dad didn’t say new dog, who lists.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That was a bit before that was a popular thing, given that this was the fall of 2000, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still, well done. I still award you full points. So we have a new dog. We have a new list.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Early, I don’t know, early-ish in quarantine, Aaron started needling me about,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hey, you know, we should get a dog. We’re going to be home all the time for forever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’re actually, truth be told, we’re home all the time anyway. So we should get a dog. And I said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to her, absolutely not. And then after months and months and months of this, I said, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fine. Okay. If we can get a dog that doesn’t shed,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is going to be small-ish. I’m thinking maybe a little bit bigger than hops, but like not, not necessarily a full on daisy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey size. Um, small-ish, doesn’t shed. And I don’t want a fricking puppy. I don’t want to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the housebreaking thing. I’m over it. Don’t want to, I don’t, I, you know, even though Erin did most of the work for both
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the kids. We just, you know, uh, almost at house broke. He just body trained,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, Michaela this past March. I don’t do it again. So let’s do not a puppy. Doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shed not too big. We have adopted and we have adopted a rescue who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a puppy. She is what, like 10 weeks old now. Uh, she’ll probably be anywhere between 40
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and 75 pounds. And she is a Sharpay lab mix that will almost certainly shed. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have failed in every measure on my three requirements. But
⏹️ ▶️ John here we are. As I said to Casey when this was going on slash when it already happened, this is a political lesson
⏹️ ▶️ John here, which is that you have to engage with the process. Because if your only position is no dog, no dog, no dog, the
⏹️ ▶️ John process happens without you. And it seems like the process did happen without you. The process of selecting a dog, finding out where you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna get it from, deciding that a dog is super cute and you need to get that one, that happened all while you were saying no
⏹️ ▶️ John dog. And so by the time the decision was made, you no longer had time to put
⏹️ ▶️ John an input. So you should recognize earlier on when your family is going to get a dog, whether you like it or not,
⏹️ ▶️ John and work within the system to try to get a dog that fulfills your criteria. Maybe next dog you can do that with. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey please no. So yeah, so the backstory, which I will try to make brief, Erin’s best friend from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey college, her name is Dorothy and Dorothy’s husband, Daniel, they foster dogs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this particular dog whom we’ve named Penny, Penny was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey part of a litter where both the parents passed away right after Penny was born.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so our friends, Dorothy and Daniel, they literally nursed Penny, and I think she had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey three sisters, if I’m not mistaken, Penny and her sisters back to health, or not even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back to health, but- Two health. Two health, yeah, exactly. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as this is happening, Dorothy and Daniel, particularly Dorothy, were saying to us, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, this is a good dog. I’m telling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you, this is a good dog, which probably sounds preposterous. And I can see that it probably sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it’s just one of those things like you expect that they would always, like it’s all highway miles. You’d expect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they would always
⏹️ ▶️ John say that to everybody. Exactly. Or what are they going to say? That this adorable puppy is bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s very different. Usually you don’t find, this puppy’s a bad seed.
⏹️ ▶️ John It came out and immediately I could see it was a terrible dog. all puppies are precious and beautiful.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, exactly. So, but I think what the readings from the lines, what they were saying was, you know, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a pretty well-tempered dog who seems to be pretty chill and isn’t exceedingly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hyper. And I’m not saying that hyper dogs are bad. I am saying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hyper dogs are not for the Casey List family. That’s just not our speed. I think something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more in the vicinity of a hops is closer to our speed. And I don’t mean that in a disparaging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way at all, obviously. I think that, you know, having, having a dog that doesn’t need to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey walked for, you know, five hours a day is definitely more our speed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah. Like the general like advice on this point is like to get a dog that matches your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco energy level and activity level. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for, that’s different for everybody, you know, like some people have, you know, a small apartment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they can’t, they don’t, they don’t have like a lot of time to go out on big walks and everything. And so like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you should probably get a low energy dog in that context and probably a smaller one or, and you know, some people have like a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of land and they’re on a farm and they need like a working dog. Probably shouldn’t get hops for that one. Like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a good match. And, and so, you know, get a dog that matches your energy level, whether it is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, a border collie to run around a farm all day or a hops to sit on a rug and be a rug
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. And I mean, obviously it’s a bit early to know where Penny will end up, but, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Based on our friends who have fostered many dogs, they had four
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and ended up adopting—what do they call it? They foster failed. They
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are adopting one of Penny’s sisters, so they will have five dogs now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I trust their judgment. We talked about this on the as-yet-released analog that will be coming out this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sunday. Mike and I talked about this. And if you’ll permit me another quick sidetrack, when Declan was born,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our OB did not deliver I mean, it was the middle of the night and she was, you know, off duty and asleep or whatever. When she came in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the following morning and Declan was like six months old and or six months, geez, six hours old.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, so she comes in, she picks him up and she’s holding him for a minute. And she goes, wow, this is a chill baby.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I looked at her. I’m like, are you freaking crazy lady? Like, what do you mean? Ah, there I did it again. Hi Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I looked at her and I was like, are you bananas lady? Like, what do you mean this is a chill baby?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey He’s six hours old. What is that? What? But as it turns out, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not every kid is exactly the same and Declan definitely has his un-chill moments, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he’s a relatively chill kid. And so based on that one piece
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of anecdata, I’ve now decided that sometimes you can tell a person or animal’s disposition
⏹️ ▶️ Casey based on how they are as infants. That’s probably wrong, but that’s what I’m telling myself. It’s not. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, Dorothy and Daniel are saying, this is a really chill dog and I think it’s a good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fit for you guys.” And then they start sending pictures and oh god it was all downhill from there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so next thing I know I’m driving to Bethesda making a day trip up and back to pick up this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dog. And we brought her home and so far mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so good. As it turns out she’s a little bit ill.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey She was on some antibiotics for some things and we thought that was already licked by the time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we picked her up but it turns out not so much. So she’s still on some meds and that’s made for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey increased amount of accidents inside. She’s done very well with what I keep calling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey potty training, but I really mean housebreaking. And she’s gotten to the point that normally, but not always,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey she’ll sit by the particular door we use to take her out to pee. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey she seems to be self-aware enough to say, I need to pee, and I’m going to sit at the door that you will take me to pee,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is great. But obviously, accidents are still happening. And one of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things with her sick because she has a urinary tract infection. And so that obviously makes her have difficulty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with it and need to go more often and so on and so forth. So that’s been going okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Turns out puppies like to nip and bite a lot, which is fine for an adult, but harder to explain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to a kindergartner and a toddler. But we’re trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey curb that as best we can. And it’s been wonderful, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey today, as I’m listening to our country falling apart,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having this nice little bundle of fluff on my lap did make things a little more palatable, which was great. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ve got that going for us. And the kids all in all are completely in love. Erin and I are completely in love.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s also been funny watching Penny, watching Penny establish
⏹️ ▶️ Casey her own roles for us. So what I mean by that is when she’s interested in like playtime,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey she’ll come over to me. But if she’s interested in rest time, she’s going to Erin’s lap.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And oftentimes, like if she’s on my lap out of desperation because Aaron isn’t around, you know, she’s in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a different room or whatever, and then Aaron shows up, she is running right over to mama so she can sleep
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Aaron’s lap, which is both adorable and very frustrating.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John But- I was gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John tell you, that’s one of the best things you can do with a puppy, and you may be a mental, so this is based on your
⏹️ ▶️ John Sleepy Shirt productions, to start having a nap time. Because puppies love to sleep
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot, because they’re like little babies, right? Right. And I remember when I first got Daisy, and she was a puppy, and I was
⏹️ ▶️ John on sabbatical from work, we would have nap time every day where I would lay down and put Daisy
⏹️ ▶️ John on my chest and we would just sleep for a certain period of time. And if you can get into that routine, you get to have a
⏹️ ▶️ John nap and the dog gets to have a nap and you get to have a nap with a dog in your chest. And it’s highly recommended.
⏹️ ▶️ John Eventually, like kids, they kind of grow out of that nap or if they’re 75 pounds, you’re not gonna want a 75 pound dog
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, that’s very true. The only problem with that though is that we are currently a no dog
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the bed family We are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco also currently in no dog
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco family. I think we’ll stick with the no,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I think we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to stick with no dog on the bed. I don’t think we’re going to stick with no, no dog on the couch.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s what I recommend for the bed stuff. I held the line on the bed thing for a long time. For my first dog, I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John hold the line at all. There was dogs in the bed. And that taught me that this is a line potentially
⏹️ ▶️ John worth holding. I couldn’t hold it for that long. We lasted like three years with Daisy, but here’s where
⏹️ ▶️ John I draw the line. Dog can be on the bed. But because I held the line with Daisy from the time
⏹️ ▶️ John that she was a puppy until she was about three, dog doesn’t sleep the night on
⏹️ ▶️ John the bed. There’s a difference, right? So if the dog thinks this is where I sleep for the night,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve got problems. But if you have a dog bed, eventually you get a place where the dog goes, make that the dog’s bed.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now we are in the best of both worlds, which is we invite Daisy up on the bed and she hangs out with us
⏹️ ▶️ John all night. But then when it comes time for us to go to sleep, she goes to her dog bed and we are in our people
⏹️ ▶️ John bed and I don’t have to be kicked in the ribs by a sideways 40 pound dog all night long.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly, and that’s why I think, I really think, and we’ll come back to this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in somewhere between a couple of months and a couple of years, I really think we’re gonna hold strong on the no bed thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You won’t, it’ll be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am extremely, extremely not confident that we are going to hold strong on the no couch thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think we’re probably going to cave within weeks.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the couch thing, I mean, you can have a dog couch and a people couch is one way to deal with that, and then the people
⏹️ ▶️ John just end up on the dog couch. If you have nice furniture and you have a dog, it’s kind of like having nice furniture
⏹️ ▶️ John and having kids. It’s like, okay, well, you know, there is a, it’s like the severe weather
⏹️ ▶️ John maintenance guide for your car if you live in New England or whatever. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John kids and or pets change the lifetime of your furniture, let’s say.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Even if you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey let them on it, right? So just
⏹️ ▶️ John accept that and, you know, be okay with the idea that when the next time you buy a sofa, you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, should we get the super expensive sofa knowing that there’s gonna be a dog on it?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the benefits of snuggling with a dog, especially in the wintertime, on a sofa outweigh the
⏹️ ▶️ John downsides of your dog slowly destroying your sofa.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, I mean, the whole point of having a dog is to sit there and pet the dog all day. That’s fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you have this little buddy that you can go on walks with and they can keep you company.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re basically like little love batteries. You fill them with love, they give it back. It’s wonderful.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So are they love capacitors then?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, maybe. Well, you got to charge a battery.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, fair enough. Fair enough. In any case, so yeah, I don’t think we’re going to hold strong on the couch. And it’s not that we have particularly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nice couches. In fact, our couches are falling apart because we’ve had them for like 10 plus years and now two children
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they’re just old and I think we’ll replace them sometime in the next couple of years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it’s not because we have fancy, nice couches. It’s just that I have a feeling,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I learned this with Declan, Like what mom and dad think is a one-time thing, like sure, Declan,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll let you have this french fry just once. It’s never just a one-time thing with the kids, and I’m assuming the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco will be the same way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the number one piece of advice I can give you, is to try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to avoid the begging behaviors by realizing that just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never let the dog’s begging result in food or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a food reward. from any place that you don’t want to forever be doing that. So like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what most people, like right before we got our dog, we had a dog elsewhere in the family
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was pretty annoying at begging at the table. And so we made a rule with Hops, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not only are we never going to feed him from the table, but no one else is ever gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feed him from a table either. That’s no one, like it’s never gonna be a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And as a result, Hops doesn’t beg at the table and it’s wonderful. Meanwhile, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things, a few things that have resulted in him getting food, if I stand near
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the fridge, yeah, he’s gonna start poking my leg. It’s really cute. He doesn’t make any noise. He just pokes his nose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco onto my leg as if he’s tapping me, tap, tap, tap. It’s so cute. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes I give him carrots out of the fridge, and therefore, it’s just a thing. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a thing that happens. We have some other family members who,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for their dogs, they basically come over and beg at the table. Then the person,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to avoid giving the dog food from the table, gets up, walk to the kitchen, and hands them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco food. And it’s like, okay, well that whole charade doesn’t matter. All that matters is cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and effect. And the whole time they’re saying, now this isn’t from the table, and they’re trying to explain to the dog with words.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, now don’t expect this every time. the reality is dogs don’t care about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your words. They don’t understand most of them and any cause and effect they’ll remember. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so if them begging at the table resulted in them getting food, even if it’s through a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of indirect steps, that doesn’t matter. They’re just gonna keep doing it because it still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco resulted in the right result. And so like, and yeah, this does apply to kids as well, by the way, as you noted. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so like just keep that in mind. Like whatever, whatever results in the reward, they will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco remember and they will, and it will be reinforced in their mind the more you do it. And then like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those habits are incredibly easy to accidentally develop and incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard to ever break once they’re developed.
⏹️ ▶️ John The corollary to this though is even if there’s something you never do, like, oh, we never let the dog
⏹️ ▶️ John on the couch. Well, do you ever leave the house? Because unlike being in bed, being on the couch
⏹️ ▶️ John is something the dog can do by itself. So if a security camera is, that’s one of the things you can see, it’s like, we never let the
⏹️ ▶️ John dog on the couch. All right, so leave the house for a few hours and look in security camera, find out where the dog is. Guess what?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I mean, you’re going to lose the couch thing instantly. It’s just accept it now. Because, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also, you don’t want to send the wrong message. It’s their house too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They live there too. And all they want to do is be with you. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you start sending confusing messages, like, well, you can be with me, except when I’m sitting on this thing, which you desperately want to jump up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and sit next to me, but you aren’t allowed for arbitrary reasons. they don’t, you can’t explain to them why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something is the way it is. So it’s easier to just be, to have things be much more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco consistent and simple for them in the rules. And by the way, man, I wonder if we’re going to get horrible feedback about all this like dog advice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh boy. Um, but anyway, on, as for the bed, my solution is much simpler than, than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John’s. I don’t know if it will work for a larger dog. Um, but my solution is to just overheat my dog until he
⏹️ ▶️ Marco leaves. If I want the bed to myself. And so, you know, because he always starts out in the bed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and he has a dog bed that he loves. And most nights he starts out in the bed and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco within the first half hour of us being there, he will usually jump down into the dog bed because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will start petting him with my feet and putting my leg up against his back.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it makes him all hot and eventually gets up and leaves.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it depends on the dog. What you really don’t want, the reason you don’t want the dog in the bed is not because you’re mean, it’s because, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John if you have a larger dog, it’s uncomfortable for everybody because dogs are not polite. They just, they
⏹️ ▶️ John will lay sideways between the two people and be in the most awkward position and
⏹️ ▶️ John just be annoying. And you would think some dogs like, you know, like hops apparently, oh, if you poke them with your feet or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re like, well, forget this. I’m not, I’m tired of being poked by these feet. I’m out of here. Or they’ll get too hot or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But really what you want is for the bed situation is to make them want to be in their bed as their
⏹️ ▶️ John most secure place to sleep. Cause it’s more comfortable for them too. And I don’t know, this is just what we did
⏹️ ▶️ John with Daisy. I don’t know if this is what you have to do, but we didn’t let her on the bed at all for years. And then when we finally did
⏹️ ▶️ John let her up, it’s just exciting snuggle time before bed. But when it’s like, okay, lights out, everyone goes to bed.
⏹️ ▶️ John She goes right to her dog bed. She doesn’t want to be on there. She’s like, well, if it’s bedtime, I’m going to my dog bed. Even if she’s been
⏹️ ▶️ John snoozing with us on the bed while we’ve just been looking at our iPads or watching a TV show for like hours. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like when it’s bedtime, she goes to her bed. And that’s the best of all possible worlds because we get to snuggle with
⏹️ ▶️ John the dog, especially in the winter months when it’s cold, we get all the dog snuggling we want, And then we need to go to bed.
⏹️ ▶️ John She goes to her bed and we stay in ours.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m surprised there’s enough room in your bed for you, Tina, the dog,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and your 35 layers of pajamas during the
⏹️ ▶️ John wintertime. Yeah, and my big down comforter, and one or more of my children who
⏹️ ▶️ John may be flopping on the bed at that time, usually to try to pet the dog that’s also on the bed. You know.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, my word. It’s a crowd.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s a crowd. So anyway, so it is going pretty well so far. Like, um, I’m obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very sad for her that she’s ill. Um, but we’re, we have her on meds. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey coincidentally she’s on, uh, what smells and appears to be, it isn’t amoxicillin, but it smells and appears
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be what I would use to call bubble gum medicine and turns out maybe you two knew this, but I didn’t know this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It turns out when that prescription was called in, it was called into a human pharmacy because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did not expect that. And I, again, maybe it’s, this is obvious to any dog owner, but I’ve never owned a dog before. We had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dogs when we were kids, but they weren’t my dogs, they were the family dogs, which means they were mom and dad’s dogs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I was talking to the vet and she said, oh yeah, I’m gonna have to call in such and such prescription to help with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Penny’s issue. Where’s your pharmacy? And I’m like, well, what do you mean?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like for people? And she said, yeah, yeah. What? And it turns out that’s a thing. Who knew?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because a lot of dog medicines are the same as human medicines, just like different doses, or different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco packaging around them, or different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they take. but things like antibiotics and steroids and stuff like that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey commonly prescribed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things for dogs, it’s usually, a lot of times it’s very similar to what humans
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get. Although I’ve never had that in particular, like a human, because my vet is also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a pharmacy. I don’t know if that’s like a-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey See, that’s what I had thought was going to happen, and apparently the particular vet we ended up choosing, I guess that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doesn’t happen. They had given us, they didn’t know what the particular issue was at first, and they had given us amoxicillin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at first, and that they just grabbed from their fridge. And so I assume they have like the basic array
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of things there, but whatever this, it, it isn’t a moxisome, but it’s something vaguely similar that, that got prescribed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t remember what it was. And that I had to go to a Walgreens for, which, which is funny. It was especially funny when the,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the gentleman on the other side of the drive-thru window says this is for Penny Casey lists
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because that had put in Penny hyphen Casey lists. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean, while I’m at this topic, by the way, um, you do not have to, although I’m sure you already have, you do not have to email me and point out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that her name is Penny list. She’s a dog. We didn’t name Mikaela Penniless, even though,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, my surname accepted. I really wanted to, because I think Penny’s a really lovely name. So we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chose it for the dog, and the dog is indeed Penniless. So it was not a deliberate pun, even though I do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey love a pun, especially with my last name. It was not a deliberate pun, but it was the best and only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey name we could come up with. So here we are.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s totally reasonable, because, like, first of all, yeah, like, Penniless for a human is kind of, you know, a negative
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing, but Penniless for a dog is adorable. And also Also, no one calls dogs by their last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco name. So your dog’s name isn’t Penny List, your dog’s name is Penny.
⏹️ ▶️ John Except for sometimes at the vet. And also, she’s Penny-colored, so it kind of fits.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Exactly. Do you
⏹️ ▶️ John want to, by the way, promote her social media?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ah, yeah. So this is a family issue here. She has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have more followers than just hops.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, so one of us in the family is of the opinion that your Instagram
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is your entire and if you get a dog and want to post nonstop dog pictures, well that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey part of your person. Put it on your main Instagram. Others of us who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey may have somewhat more Instagram followers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel like you should opt in to the incessant dog photos. And I think part of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey problem is those of us who think you don’t need a separate Instagram are willing to, are incapable of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having the self-control to not post dog photos every five minutes. Those of us who may have already created
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this second Instagram specifically for Penny, don’t have that self-control and all they want to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is just post dog photos all the time. And there’s a bit of a familial disagreement.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So far, we’re each accepting that we’re disagreeing about it and the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Instagram account has not folded. We’ll see what ends up happening in the long term. But at least for now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can find Penny on Instagram. Well, certainly I’ll put a link to the announcement Instagram post
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the show notes and I’ll I’ll put a link to Penny’s Instagram as well. If you are so inclined to look at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dog pictures, probably daily, at least for the next few weeks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, you have to, when you have a dog Instagram, that’s totally a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine thing to do, but you can do both. Right now, Instagram, your personal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Instagram account, ostensibly, is about things going on in your life. Right now, you just got a dog, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a big deal. And so you’re gonna have a lot of dog pictures because you just got one, and she’s your dog. So that makes total
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sense. down the road, the dog pictures will become less of the,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, they’ll be less dominating of your main feed. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s when you can start posting, like, you know, if you still wanna post every day or two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on her account, you still can, but then maybe you post things to her account
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you wouldn’t necessarily post to your own because they aren’t as interesting for your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John main account.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it makes total sense to have those be separate things. Also, there’s this whole community of dogs follow each other on Instagram and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s adorable. Like, Hops follows a bunch of other dogs and then like me and Tiff and Adam. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hops doesn’t follow other people because he doesn’t know other people, but I think it’s funny to think of like Hops following a bunch of dogs and Tiff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco runs that whole account anyway, so like whatever happens to it, it’s like always a cute surprise for me to see it because I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it. Like, aw, Hops posted a new photo. He looks so good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I haven’t yet gone down that road of following other dog accounts. I’m sure as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things, it’s coming. It’s only a matter of time. But yeah, so far it’s been really good. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey super stressful in the sense that it is, so far,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a lot of ways, not that dissimilar from parenting children, like human children.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But yet, it is very, very different in ways. I know it’s hard for me to put my finger on what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different about it, other than you can’t really talk to it. Because you can’t really talk to an infant baby either.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it’s just a little bit different in that regard. But I am enjoying it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think we are very lucky insofar as Penny does seem to be, generally speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty agreeable. For example, we’ve decided to put her in a crate only in the evenings.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think people tend to have somewhat strong feelings about this, but she took
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to it immediately. Like when we put her in, we had put her in there on and off during the first day,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but we got home at, shoot, I don’t know, like two or three o’clock in the afternoon, and we tried to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get her to go to bed at 10 or 11 at night and you know, she had only seen the crate for a few hours
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at that point. And I think she cried for like a minute and then was like, screw it. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to sleep, which was awesome. And generally speaking, that’s been the case. Like she’s been super
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fine with the crate, which is very, very good. Um, overnight I’ve, I’ve been waking her
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up more than she’s been waking me up in terms of like, um, taking her out to pee.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, Aaron, Aaron, very, Aaron, very gently in, in one of those like jokey, but no really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ways explained to me that I would be the one handling the overnight issues with this child because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey she did it for the other two. And I think that’s a pretty fair trade.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yep. That’s reasonable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’ve been the one taking her out now, Erin, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey she’s the best and, and refuses to listen to me. Uh, she’s been like making sure that, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Penny hasn’t peed the bed when we weren’t aware of it or anything like that, and oftentimes coming down to like grab her from me once I come inside.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I can take off my coat and wash my hands and so on. Um, but all, but all told it’s been like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve set alarms on my watch to quietly wake myself up and then take Penny out. And, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey depending on when we go to sleep, if we go to bed, normal time, we’ll do it like twice overnight. And if we stay up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey late enough, like to the, to the extreme end of our early to bed capabilities.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if like, if we stay up late till like 11 or midnight, uh, we can, we can stretch her to like just one,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, overnight pee and so far knock on wood. As I jinx everything for tonight.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey She hasn’t had any accidents in the crate overnight, which is great. And we’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing like three and three-quarter hours. We could probably bumper up to four and it would probably be okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey especially since she has woken us up a couple times in the past and cried and basically said, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey need to go. Which again, like if this is how potty training a dog is, I’m the best potty training,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I said potty training again, if this is what housebreaking a dog is, I’m the best housebreaker in the world because basically Penny’s been doing everything for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. So far, so good. Remind me of this in like three weeks when I tell you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know what to do. She’s a monster and I can’t get her to do anything I want her to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’ll be fine. It’ll work out. Dogs are great. Enjoy and congratulations.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, thank you. Yeah. And we’re really pleased and the kids by and large really, really like her and have been really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey adorable with her. And, you know, both our kids have been a little reluctant or perhaps cautious
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with dogs. In Aaron’s side of the family, there’s a German shepherd who for the first couple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of years of his life, I think was excused for behaviors that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he shouldn’t have been because even at age two, apparently he was still a puppy. Um, and that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eventually has come around, uh, which is good. And the German shepherd is pretty well behaved now, but he’s still a German shepherd,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so he’s like, you know, 90, a hundred pounds or something like that with the bark of like a 300 pound dog. And he’s scary.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like he’s, he’s nice, but he’s scary. Um, and, and that’s one of the dogs that they were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exposed to regularly. And then there’s another dog in the family that’s a mutt, uh, who is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who is had, had like a really crummy first year of life before, you know, our family, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our extended family got him. Um, and so he’s like a very skittish, very nervous dog and about like 40, 50
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pounds. And so, uh, he’s well behaved, but he’s nervous and skittish and, and, and, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, both the kids, this is like their dog experience. So they’ve always been kind of cautious and nervous around dogs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think Penny, I think, and hope Penny is going to kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fix that maybe, or at least make it less, less egregious for the both
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah. Cause like people’s comfort level with dogs is so tied to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their own experience level with dogs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, like when, when you don’t have a dog in your family yourself, then your only experience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is everyone else’s dogs and everyone else sucks at raising dogs and doesn’t train them right. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s very common for people to be exposed to a poorly trained or poorly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco handled dog in the real world once or twice. And so, if that’s the only dog experience they ever have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of course they’re gonna be a little afraid of dogs. Like, that makes total sense. But because you now have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dog in your house who lives there all the time, the kids will become
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accustomed to her and will generally be more comfortable dealing with dogs as a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco general result as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we’re really happy. I’m scared, I’m nervous, I’m worried that I’m teaching bad things,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even though I’m trying my darndest not to. I’m worried that I’m establishing bad habits some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way, somehow. It’s all the same stuff with parenting a person.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s not really any different. I think I’m just, maybe part of the reason
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m almost more worried about the dog is because I feel like, and maybe I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrong, but I feel like you can work through with a person a bad habit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you get more than one chance. You know, despite what I said earlier about, oh sure, you can have this French fry just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey once. You get, I feel like you get more than one chance to, to, to screw up. You can,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can screw up a person and undo it. And I’m sure you can do that with a dog, but again, never having experience with it. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worried that like one time something is going to fall off the table and she’s going to get it and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s going to be like, that’s it forever. And intellectually, I know that’s probably not the case. But it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey freaks me out that we’re going to make one misstep, and then it’s going to be committed in Penny’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little brain, and that’s going to be it forevermore. And I really hope that’s not the case. It’s probably not. But that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey scares the piss out of me. And so I’m trying my darndest to be vigilant, to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey loving, and to just teach the right things to not only her, but to me and to the rest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of us, and just try to do right by her.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you should be worried more about messing up your kids. dogs in general run simpler software.
⏹️ ▶️ John people can be messed up in so many ways.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, sure. Some
⏹️ ▶️ John of which may be your fault, some of which may be not be, but there’s so much more complicated that can go so much worse with
⏹️ ▶️ John people. Whereas dogs, it’s much more straightforward. Not that I’m saying you shouldn’t be worried about it. Try
⏹️ ▶️ John to do all the right things, but in general, a simpler set of rules can consistently lead
⏹️ ▶️ John you to success. Whereas there
⏹️ ▶️ John simple set of rules that can lead you to consistent success raising children because, boy, children are complicated.