417: Sand and Water Interface
11 Feb 2021Beaches, California, resolved Apple drama, SSD wear, Docker, Tesla, Siri’s music-service setting, timers on the Apple Watch, the AR rumor, corporate device management, prized personal media files, app-keyword spam, and puppy training. (Is that all?)
Episode Description:
- Pre-show:
- RIP, Call Recorder
- On re-installing or transferring macOS
- If we had to leave the eastern seaboard, where would we move?
- Follow-up:
- DTKs are worth more now!
- iOS 14.5 Watch unlock
- Trying to
ls ~/.Trash(via Mike Vosseller) - SSD traffic
- Two month old SSD
smartmontoolssmartctl --all /dev/disk0- Casey’s computations
- Marco accidentally invents Docker
- Tesla recall 135,000 vehicles for touchscreen failures
- Mid-reboot turn signals in the Model 3 (via Michael Swindler)
- iOS 14.5 beta lets you specify Spotify/others as Siri’s default music service
- Marco rants about timers on the Apple Watch
- Dan Riccio’s new project
#askatp- Do we let our personal lives bleed onto corporate devices? (via Jordan Cosentino)
- What are our favorite or most obscure media files? (via Doc Davis)
- Is it rude to put another app’s name in your own app’s search keywords?
- Post-show: Pupdate
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Chapters
- Two quick questions
- DTK rebate increased
- Sponsor: ExpressVPN
- 14.5 masked-face unlock
- ~/.Trash follow-up
- SSD wear
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- Please email Casey
- Sponsor: Flatfile
- 14.5 music-service selection
- Timers on Apple Watch 🖼️
- Dan Riccio, in-house displays
- #askatp: Corp. profiles on your iPhone
- #askatp: Most-prized media files 🖼️
- #askatp: App names in your keywords 🖼️
- Ending theme
- Pupdate 🖼️
Two quick questions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, I have two questions for you, deeply unrelated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to each other or to tech,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey deeply unrelated to each other. First of all, how’s your call recorder doing?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s gone, man. I’m on I’m all m one. John, how’s your call recorder?
⏹️ ▶️ John I have a question for Marco about call recorder before I tell you about my call recorder.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, no, this must be quick. Did you,
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco? Did you actually? Did you actually try call recorder?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, yes, because I have have to because the stupid installation that I’m still on that it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco imported from my iMac call recorders on it and so every time I launch Skype it pops up a thing saying hey
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you gotta update me so I try I you know I humor it my guard sure go ahead let’s see what let’s see what you got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s what tries to update and it instantly launches and it’s like oh I can’t do this what am
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I talking about I can’t run this architecture I’ll never run this architecture
⏹️ ▶️ John but see that’s my question like why can’t it like is it a dialogue from the app itself? Why can’t it
⏹️ ▶️ John just run on Rosetta?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know how exactly it hooks into Skype. My best guess is that whatever mechanism
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it uses to hook into Skype has been tightened security-wise on the M1
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Macs and no longer works. And there probably is no good alternative without doing like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kernel extension or something. Which if you had to install any of our friend Rugamiba’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio products, you know that that process is kind of cumbersome in Big Sur on an M1 on Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so I’m guessing that’s the kind of thing they ran into. It’s not that they have some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco x86 assembly code they don’t want to port. It’s much more likely that the mechanism by which it hooks into Skype
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all is somehow broken with this new architecture.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s what I assumed, but I hadn’t actually heard anyone who had tried it. So I guess Merlin asked about that on our last podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ John He’s like, does it just not run at all, or does it run just in Rosetta? And I didn’t know, so it’s good to know that
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not that it’s unsupported. just like it’s a no-go entirely.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It launches presumably using Rosetta to display a dialog box saying this doesn’t work and then quits.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, anyway, yeah, my call recorder’s fine because I’m on Intel and it’ll be fine until I’m not on Intel.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco get rid of this installation. All
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac users unite. Like I’m still on it because I haven’t, there’s never a good time to reinstall
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your OS on your main computer, like that’s never a fun thing. But, and man, I’ve gone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many years using the same installations, Like my entire time using Macs, which is since 2004,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I’ve had a total of three installations of Mac OS on my desktop. Laptops, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thrown away, whatever. But desktop, like my main desktop installations, I bring them forward for a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That seems to be impossible on Catalina forward. Like, they just, Catalina was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco such a garbage fire that like anything that has ever touched Catalina is messy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and has problems, like the weird Chrome is bad Windows Server thing. There’s so many weird things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that seem to be related to Catalina installs rotting and going badly. The same way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old Windows installs used to slowly just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey slow down and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accumulate problems over time. It feels like Windows. It really does. And now this feels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like back when I used to reinstall Windows XP and Windows 2000 every nine months. This feels like that again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It feels like you kind of have to keep things clean. The installation I have on my Mac Mini, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the imported iMac installation, is so much worse and has so many weird problems than the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one I have on my fresh new MacBook Air that was a fresh installation. So I gotta
⏹️ ▶️ Marco move over. But again, there’s never a good time to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John You should, you could try just doing some house cleaning. I mean, I’m using essentially my install that I imported from
⏹️ ▶️ John Catalina, that I imported from whatever, like I’m using my 2008 Mac Pro brought onto this
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac through a migration assistant and then upgraded to Big Sur in place. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I haven’t done any clean installs is what I’m saying. I did spend a little bit of time going through the
⏹️ ▶️ John cruft and cleaning out things that I thought were old. I did that actually before Big Sur. I
⏹️ ▶️ John just did it when it was still in Catalina, using just the normal suite of tools that are
⏹️ ▶️ John available to do that. Actually, I’m gonna give a recommendation for one of these things. What the hell is it called? Hang on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should use a utility, like a mat cleaning utility or a defragger.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, that’s not actually what I want. The application that I like for the type of thing that most people
⏹️ ▶️ John forget about is called Launch Control. And it just, it’s a launch services,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, editing application. And you can, again, you don’t need an app to do this. It’s all a bunch of XML files and
⏹️ ▶️ John you can do it all yourself. But having an app that does it is super convenient. And that’s where you find
⏹️ ▶️ John the real sort of dark matter of stuff that you had no idea was still running on your computer. Now, I will caution
⏹️ ▶️ John you that if you don’t understand what these things are, you can really screw up your computer. So don’t just get it and say, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know where any of this crap is. Delete it all, because you will break everything, right? But if you have some confidence
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can kind of tell what things are, and if you’re super duper sure, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, I’m not running VirtualBox anymore, it’s totally uninstalled and I haven’t used it in 60 years, and yet there is a VirtualBox
⏹️ ▶️ John user agent running, I know I don’t need that. And yes, I’m sure that because it says VirtualBox,
⏹️ ▶️ John it really is VirtualBox, and I’ll double check, and I’ll look, you know, like, then you can clean that out and say, why am I running this?
⏹️ ▶️ John And all these things aren’t running, they’re just available to run on demand in response to certain things. So you kind of also have
⏹️ ▶️ John to understand how launch D works on the Mac and it’s complicated. But anyway, I found tons of old crappy
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff to be able to be cleaned out. And then also just looking for, in your case, you’d be looking for Intel binaries
⏹️ ▶️ John where you’re like, ah, you know, let me just delete that because I don’t plan on using it. If I ever do, I should redownload
⏹️ ▶️ John the M1 version. I did this 64 bit to 32 bit transition. Just
⏹️ ▶️ John general house cleaning of finding stuff that you haven’t used in forever that you don’t want and then really cleaning it off
⏹️ ▶️ John of your system instead of just dragging the icon to the trash.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one thing all of my Adobe stuff is broken.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, how can you tell?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, that’s fair. Like won’t launch broken.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’ve got speaking of that. I just launched a launch control there. One of the user agents is com
⏹️ ▶️ John dot Adobe dot GC dot invoker hyphen one point zero. I have long since refused
⏹️ ▶️ John to let that thing load. So it’s not, you know, you can set it in various different states again. You have to look up the launch documentation
⏹️ ▶️ John to figure this out. So it is unloaded right now. So it’s not running. But I still
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m I’m not sure if I can actually delete it because Adobe stuff puts so many things on your system and I do
⏹️ ▶️ John want to use Photoshop. Like I pay for Photoshop and have it and use it and you
⏹️ ▶️ John have to get the Creative Cloud and all, like that has to be there, otherwise nothing for Adobe will work,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I never know which part of it is like from a decade ago that I can safely delete and which part of it, if I delete that
⏹️ ▶️ John one file, I’ll never be able to update an Adobe app again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I eventually was able to reinstall Creative Cloud and I got Audition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco working. Audition is the only Adobe app that I really don’t have any good other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps that can replace. Like I don’t have anything else that can do what Audition does for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now maybe I’ll start looking a little bit harder because it’s, you know, it’s crazy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me to think that I’m keeping all of this Adobe cruft around and paying this subscription for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically just Photoshop and Audition. And Photoshop, I haven’t gotten to launch on this computer yet. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it turns out I had bought Pixelmator Pro during one of the times it was on sale, like in the last couple years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I just never opened it, because I’m like, oh, I should buy this, I might need it someday. And I always had Photoshop, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was always the easier path to just use the app I knew. But last week, I had to do some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basic manipulation of something, I think for our show art, actually, for whatever I was doing for chapter art and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I did it, I couldn’t launch Photoshop, and it was easier for me to just launch Pixelmator instead of trying to fix Photoshop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I launched Pixelmator Pro and just started hitting the key
⏹️ ▶️ Marco commands that work in Photoshop, and they all work in Pixelmator Pro because a lot of people would face
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this problem, so they’ve accommodated for that. And so I just started doing things the way I would do it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there, and it mostly worked. The icons are in different places and everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looks a little bit different, but most of the functionality that I actually needed, I don’t know about the rest of the app,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which it’s a pretty big app, but most of the functionality that I needed of a basic image editor, Pixelmator Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had it just fine. And so that’s one more Adobe thing off my list. Like I might not need Photoshop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anymore. So maybe I’m just gonna get Audition. And then they actually, I think they have a special subscription
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s just for one app, if you just only need one. Just down to Audition now, I gotta figure out how to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either fix Photoshop or downgrade.
⏹️ ▶️ John I got super into the Affinity suite of products, Affinity Designer, Affinity
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, there’s like three or four apps. It’s like the one that’s Illustrator, the one that’s Photoshop, the, you know, they have a photo
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. I got into them when I was working on the t-shirt stuff because I used to have like a thing of Illustrator
⏹️ ▶️ John but then it was no longer licensed and so I was getting like you said, the one application for one
⏹️ ▶️ John month and you pay like eight bucks and so I would just like pay eight bucks for Illustrator for a month to do a t-shirt for us and then just let it
⏹️ ▶️ John expire. And then you couldn’t do that anymore, I think. And so I was like, let me just get the Affinity Designer and I
⏹️ ▶️ John used that for a bunch of shirts and I liked it. And when I was going through and cleaning stuff out, I think it was maybe the 32 to 64 transition,
⏹️ ▶️ John or maybe a little bit later, I was going through like my serial numbers and all the other stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I realized I bought most of the Affinity Suite twice. I don’t know how they even let me do that,
⏹️ ▶️ John but like I bought it once when it was like, oh, it’s a cheap bundle, get all these apps for a price, and then I also bought the individual three
⏹️ ▶️ John apps that I want. So I really need to pay attention to what the hell I’m buying in software.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so Marco, I said I had two questions for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco My other- Two quick questions, 10 minutes later. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought that the first one was going to be quick. I should have known better. I should have, in retrospect, reversed these. Maybe we’ll do it for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey magic of editing. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my icebreaker slash warm up slash let’s ease into the show, I don’t know, five, 10
⏹️ ▶️ Casey minutes in, is, and I think we’ve discussed this in the past, but I’m curious to hear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your answer now because I think it may have changed quite dramatically. If you had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to pack up and leave New York state, and in fact, leave the entire Eastern
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seaboard, where would you go?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, geez. See, before I discovered the beach and I found my happy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco place, I would say, I don’t care, whatever, it doesn’t matter. But now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I like this place a lot, it’s a little harder of a decision. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like being near the water a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so I think I would with a heavy heart Go to
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, that’s a bad choice. No You want sort of Long Island methadone and Long Island methadone
⏹️ ▶️ John is called like Cape Cod Nantucket Martha’s Vineyard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said the whole Eastern Seaboard. No the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Eastern Seaboard soft limits
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I go to the Gulf maybe but like all right. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John if you look at all I’m saying like the beaches in California are very different agreed than the ones in Long
⏹️ ▶️ John Island And it’s and the land that leads up to the beaches are different.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, I care less about the actual like sand and water interface and more about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just like the like the air and and the sound and the climate that you get when you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at when you’re next to the ocean. Like that is that is what I like much more. I know. But that’s that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s different, too, because it’s a gigantic landmass butting up against the Pacific Ocean with all these
⏹️ ▶️ John weird weather patterns. It’s nothing like where you are. Forget about the water that you say you never even touch the water. Like just the
⏹️ ▶️ John land is different. You need like an island. You’re on a little island. You want island life. Maybe you should go to the Bahamas.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, maybe Caribbean, because there’s no winter there. That would be nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, the answer is probably I would go to some other coast. Maybe even Europe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe Europe seems a little more stable than California in certain ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it has its own issues. So I don’t know. I mean, everywhere has its issues.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So hopefully I wouldn’t have to make that decision. But if I did, I think the most likely outcome would probably end up being California.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey See, I think for me, I would probably stay on the eastern seaboard, but I already declared that’s not allowed. Right. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with that in mind—
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was allowed, I’d just go, yeah, I don’t know, Boston or, you know, the Carolinas or something. Like, there’s lots of other good places
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the eastern seaboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think I speak for all three of us in saying, whether we’re from the north, from the south, or somewhere in between,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think all three of us seem to dramatically prefer the eastern seaboard to anywhere else.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For me, I think if I had to leave the Eastern Seaboard, I would really want to investigate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Pacific Northwest because I’ve never even visited and I’ve heard universally good things, except
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe weather. And so I would want to at least check it out. But I think I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey might end up in Austin because I lived in Austin as a middle schooler and really enjoyed it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I know that’s super trendy to say now, but I was there before it was cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a lot more traffic now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah, a lot more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John traffic as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. I’m not sure how well you’d deal with that. I know Austin seems super cool and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s in the middle of a not super cool area.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aaron Powell Remember where I live today. John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Williams Yeah, exactly. Aaron Powell John, where would you go?
⏹️ ▶️ John John Williams Still not the same. I mean, I obviously need to be somewhere near the
⏹️ ▶️ John coast, even though you think I’m not now, but I really am in the grand scheme of things. If you look at the dot on the map, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John near the water. California is such a big place that I’m pretty sure there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John some place in California that that I could probably tolerate. I just haven’t found
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it yet. Probably tolerate.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a big place, right? I haven’t been to all of it. Pacific Northwest, I don’t think I would be able to handle
⏹️ ▶️ John the weather and the vibe.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I don’t know, I always think about
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I mean, this is Canada, but like, you know, some places in Canada, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John I would be happy for two months out of the year.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, that’s the problem. The
⏹️ ▶️ John warm two months? Yeah, I could just live on Prince Edward Island for two months out of the year, and then just
⏹️ ▶️ John blink out of existence for the rest of the year, and then blink back into existence for those two months on Prince Edward Island, I think I’d
⏹️ ▶️ John be pretty happy there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s fair. The Pacific Northwest, whenever I’ve been there, I’ve thought, this is a very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice place for people who are not me. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey it seems like it’s a fantastic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco place for a lot of people, but it’s not for me. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco California, I think I’m with John on that, like, I found a lot of nice places in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco California. I’ve never found the place yet that I would want to live necessarily.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I can tell you one thing, it would not be San Francisco. That is not for me at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the parts of California that I’ve seen that have been like, you know, a little bit outside of San Francisco, the various suburbs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, up north, the Marin area, down south, like between like, basically between like that little beach town
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Santa Cruz, that whole strip, like there’s a lot of very nice places. Half Moon Bay is what I’m thinking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of. Half Moon Bay and Santa Cruz, like that whole area. I’ve liked seeing a lot of that, but again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know enough about it to actually say I would wanna live here. And I’ve actually never seen LA in that whole area, like the whole bottom
⏹️ ▶️ Marco half, I’ve never seen it, so.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like it’s trendy to hate on LA, and you know, insert the letter Kenny, LA right here. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually quite enjoy LA, and in fact, I strongly agree with you that San Francisco’s not for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that having never experienced the Pacific Northwest, I suspect if I went, I would come to a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey similar conclusion. Great place, not for me. But I actually really enjoy Southern California,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve only ever been to the greater LA area. I’ve been to LA proper. I’ve been around LA a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve never been way Southern California, like San Diego, for example. And honestly, I can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only speak for me, but there’s no way I can afford to live in basically anywhere in California. But I actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey prefer LA in that area. Sproul, be darned. I prefer LA over Northern
⏹️ ▶️ Casey California. For me, I’m not saying it’s the same for everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So far, what we’ve learned is that you want to live places with terrible traffic.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I guess, which is funny, because I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t. I mean, you said the same thing, Marco. Like, have you been in those areas of California long enough to actually try
⏹️ ▶️ John getting to that beach on a day when you might want to go to the beach?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Like, the traffic in
⏹️ ▶️ John California is ridiculous. I live on the beach, man. I know, but you don’t have—like, that’s the secret. You don’t have the traffic.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, it’s—to getting away from the people. One of the beautiful and terrible things about Long Island
⏹️ ▶️ John is as you go out on it to the extremities, both man-made and natural
⏹️ ▶️ John forces align to make it very difficult to get there, which is terrible when you’re trying to get there, but good
⏹️ ▶️ John once you’re there. Right. Yeah. You know, so that’s, if you’re, again, California being this
⏹️ ▶️ John massive, you know, place with all of these highways, and you can get right to the water in all of
⏹️ ▶️ John them, it’s very difficult, unless you’re going to go out to one of the islands off the coast of California or something, it’s very difficult to get away
⏹️ ▶️ John from the people, you know, to get to lower population density, essentially. If you want
⏹️ ▶️ John lower population density, it’s really easy if you go to live in the desert or someplace, you know, in the middle of the country that has much
⏹️ ▶️ John lower population density. I feel like that’s one of the things that you’ve always said you appreciate about Fire Island is
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s not, you know, a traffic jam every day and, you know, tons of people like coming and
⏹️ ▶️ John going and all that other stuff. It is you feel like you are. It’s more relaxing because you’re away
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? Yes, but in but in a in a strangely dense place, but it’s just everyone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But almost everyone’s on foot most of the time. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, you’re on you’re on top of each other because you’re on this tiny, tiny little thing. Right. You know, no
⏹️ ▶️ John one is commuting to and from Manhattan from Fire Island every day and there’s a giant traffic jam
⏹️ ▶️ John when you try to go shopping because everyone’s on their way home from work also stopping at the store. That doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s the thing, like when you, I mean so much of your happiness in life
⏹️ ▶️ Marco depends on like your daily grind. Like do you have a bad commute? Do you have a super
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long commute? Is your commute always full of, you know, angering traffic or stuff like that? Like that stuff matters so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much to everyone’s happiness.
⏹️ ▶️ John When you wanna go food shopping, that you dread it because it’s gonna be so packed and you’re gonna be waiting on a checkout line for
⏹️ ▶️ John an hour and you won’t be able to find a parking spot, like that type of stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly, like if doing everyday stuff is hard. Like I remember one of the impressions I had when we lived
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Brooklyn for a year, it was very clear that all of the delivery people, like UPS drivers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the mail people, like everyone who kind of had to work in Brooklyn was always angry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because doing common tasks in the area of Brooklyn we were in is just difficult because there’s just tons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of traffic constantly and everyone’s mad at each other all the time. It’s very tense and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s just tons of friction to a lot of stuff. Whereas here, everyone’s really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chill and happy because there is so little friction to the admittedly limited
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that we have access to, but what we have access to is really great and really easy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to just go do. And so this is a place where people come here and they can just kind of be happy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s like a storybook. You’re like, ride your bike to the grocery store and you’re right home with like a bag in your bike basket
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with like a baguette and a pineapple sticking at the top so that you know it’s from a grocery store. That’s how you indicate that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s just nice. It’s a nice, pleasant thing. And compared to before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where we were living and just I’d have to get in the car, drive across. Oh, of course,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re tearing up the street again to put in more water main work somehow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Somehow this work needs to be done every six months on every street in Westchester.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know, like we joke, there must be like a construction mafia, like that, like there’s some kind of like under the table
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deals where somehow they’re tearing up every main street in Westchester to do water main work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every six months. I don’t know why it still needs to be done so often, more often than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anywhere I’ve ever lived.
⏹️ ▶️ John They should come to my neighborhood because the road in front of my house desperately needs work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s never going to get done. No. And when, you know, when they’re done, they don’t repave the road nicely. They just kind of to patch it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up and so it’s a bumpy mess of patches and those iron plate things. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s so much friction involved in just like, okay, I have to go pick up something at the grocery store or I have to go,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s time to go pick up our kid at school or something. When common tasks have lots of friction,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is a recipe for just stress and anxiety and frustration and anger and just unhappiness.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whereas the more of those everyday things that you can strip that frustration from,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it pays massive dividends in overall happiness. And that’s part of the reason why I love it here, is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of that stuff is just a lot nicer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, it’s interesting to me, I wonder if in the after times I could convince, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you guys to come down to Cape Charles, which in so many ways, having never experienced Fire Island, in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so many ways strikes me as a very similar thing, because there’s this historic district where it’s a grid
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of, you know, not that many streets and not that many avenues, and you can walk to pretty much anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There are cars for sure, but most people don’t bother using them because you really don’t need to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s a very chill laid back vibe, but the difference is it’s not separated from the rest of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the world. Well, it kind of is, but it’s not as dramatically separated from the rest of the world that requires
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a ferry. Like you would still need to drive over a humongous, tremendously long bridge tunnel thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but you don’t need to take a ferry. And so you can get deliveries in less than a week, which is kind of cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I wonder if you would enjoy, not to say it would cause you to move or anything like that because there’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey million and seven reasons why I know you’d want to stay in New York. But just, I think a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the perks, again, not apples to apples, but a lot of the perks from Fire Island you can get, or I can get,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Cape Charles with, in some cases, fewer of the drawbacks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it would never happen.
DTK rebate increased
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alright, gentlemen, your DTKs, they are worth a lot more today than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they were a week ago today, which is super exciting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this is this is great. You know, we talked briefly last week about how Apple had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco offered a very weirdly short time windowed $200 credit for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Silicon DTKs back, and they have heard us
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they agree. being the general community developers who was kind of like, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not very good. So yeah, they are revising their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco offer. No one’s actually gotten this yet because they still haven’t sent like the email that says, all right, now send it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in with this label. They’re just saying that this will happen shortly. But yeah, they’ve revised it. So now instead
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a $200 credit that expires on May 31st, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seemingly can only be used on an M1 Mac, now they’re giving us a $500 credit, which is the entire purchase
⏹️ ▶️ Marco price of the DTK. So, basically giving us 100% refund on having used it, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can use it on any Apple product through the end of the year. So, that’s fantastic. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like… Again, like what I said last week, I still stick with, of like…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Modern Apple is usually pretty stingy about any kind of hardware discounting or giving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco away free hardware. They almost never do it. it. And so like when they said you know you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy this DTK for $500 through this kind of invite only or application-based program,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I figured they’re not going to give us anything for these. So to have even offered us the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco $200 last time, I thought it was weird how many weird limitations there were on it, but it was still more than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the zero I thought we’d get. And to have those limitations be largely lifted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to have the amount also be raised to $500, That’s really nice. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the kind of thing that like, this is gonna cost them almost nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco relative to like the other, like the difference between this for such a small volume program is gonna cost Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like maybe 90 seconds of profit or something like that. It’s gonna cost them like nothing in the grand scheme of things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But this is such a nice gesture and Apple does have this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird habit recently of really reading the room wrong. Like that initial offer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they did last week was really like reading the room wrong. I don’t know why anyone at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple thought that would go over well. When they put their foot in their mouth like that, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice to see them sometimes remove it again and resolve the problem and say, all right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that wasn’t very good, hear something better. And that’s what they’ve done here. And it’s a nice thing. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a nice gesture. They didn’t have to do it, but I’m very glad they did.
⏹️ ▶️ John This move is like the least Apple-like thing I can recall them doing in recent history
⏹️ ▶️ John just because it’s so low stakes. Like the thing that we’re talking about here is a program that only
⏹️ ▶️ John affects a limited number, just a low number of developers, let alone a limited number of customers. It’s a fraction of a fraction.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how many of these do you think are out there? Like how many people do you think actually got DTKs? I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John many more than got the Intel one for sure because it was cheaper and there were just so many more developers, but nothing compared to like
⏹️ ▶️ John their actual customer base. And it’s probably not even like, you know, It’s probably only
⏹️ ▶️ John a single digit percent of their developers, because they have so many developers, and most of whom are not Mac developers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What do you think it is? Like maybe like 50,000? Yeah, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole, the real thing is like, they had a program,
⏹️ ▶️ John and nowhere in that program did it say, oh, and when you send these back, we’re gonna give you a treat.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, we talked about that, because that’s what they did with the Intel thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that was like 15 years ago. Like how many people, of the people who got this DTK,
⏹️ ▶️ John how many of them were Mac developers 15 years ago or whenever the hell the inbred thing was? It’s a very
⏹️ ▶️ John different environment today. There was no reason that anybody should have expected anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then Apple decided to give us something, albeit slightly weird. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like of all the circles that we travel in, the old school Mac developer
⏹️ ▶️ John circle is one of the ones that we are the most deeply entrenched in. We know a lot of old school Mac developers,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? That’s our circle of people. And I did not see like an incredible
⏹️ ▶️ John outpouring of anger. Like we see so much more anger of like everyday app store stuff and all sorts of other things
⏹️ ▶️ John where people are just genuinely pissed and angry. There was some discussion of this, but it was discussion in the context
⏹️ ▶️ John of they did a nice thing, it could have been nice. So like you said, Marco, like, oh, maybe reading the room a little bit wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. But there was also the discussion of like, well, they could have just done nothing and solve this problem too, because they didn’t promise us anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s just like, of all the things to immediately come in and
⏹️ ▶️ John say, oh no, nevermind, we’re totally, we’re gonna double it and you have a longer time. It’s like, A, totally
⏹️ ▶️ John un-Apple-like, because they almost never react that quickly to something so low stakes. And B,
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that it is un-Apple-like is a condemnation of modern Apple, of what Apple-like has come to mean in terms
⏹️ ▶️ John of developer relations, because this is exactly what they should do. You should, you know, if you make a fumble like this,
⏹️ ▶️ John just quickly correct it, it’s no big deal. And the fact that I was so shocked by it made me think,
⏹️ ▶️ John you shouldn’t be shocked by a company essentially having good customer support or good developer relations. Like this is basic
⏹️ ▶️ John table stakes, good developer relations, right? And the other thing I thought was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John boy, inside Apple, I’m sure there’s at least one person somewhere saying, see,
⏹️ ▶️ John I told you we should have just given them the DDK for free and asked for it back for free and paid for shipping. We wouldn’t have had any of these
⏹️ ▶️ John problems. Think of how much more simple that would be. Hey, if you want a DDK, sign up here. We’ll send it to you and then later
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll send you prepaid thing to send it back. Think of how simple that arrangement is $0.
⏹️ ▶️ John It gets people to develop for your platform. No one is angry about it. This
⏹️ ▶️ John instead they did this, give us $500 with this vague potential expectation if
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re a crusty old Mac user that we might give you something back and then we’ll give you something back but not in a satisfying way. But then whoops,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll give you more back. It’s like, this is this is
⏹️ ▶️ John not Apple developer relations finest moment. And it was like, it was
⏹️ ▶️ John like I said, it was a depressing revelation to think that what you would, what you would expect from good developer
⏹️ ▶️ John relations, essentially like, hey, we want, you know, if you’re inside Apple, you’re like, we want people to develop for our platform. We
⏹️ ▶️ John want people to port to the M1. How much can we afford to spend to make that happen?
⏹️ ▶️ John And someone’s like, well, we got to charge them for this Mac mini with an iPad inside it, don’t we? No, you don’t actually. You can,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, they did it with the Apple TV where you got it for a dollar and you got to keep it afterwards. You didn’t even have to send it back. Like, yep.
⏹️ ▶️ John know, anyway, this is fine. Apple did the right thing. I’m all happy about it. I’m especially
⏹️ ▶️ John happy because I have the full year. So now I can just let that $500 sit there until like in a panic in December, I buy
⏹️ ▶️ John something, right? I don’t have to buy a Mac mini or
⏹️ ▶️ John a Mac Book Air. I can wait out the rest of the year where presumably there will be at least one or two more
⏹️ ▶️ John ARM-based Macs to come out during the year. And then I can put this money towards one of those. So I’m very happy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it doesn’t even have to be a Mac. I think it’s just gonna be like an Apple store credit. It says any Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco product, so maybe it wouldn’t work on like, you know, a pair of B&O headphones or something like that, but like, it’s probably gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work on a lot of stuff that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John we’re gonna be buying this year. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John this would pay for like the AppleCare on my monitor or something. Yes, it would. Oh, jeez.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, someone asked about that, did I get AppleCare on my stuff? I think I got AppleCare on all my expensive stuff. You
⏹️ ▶️ John did. Maybe I just blocked it out, but like, I think that AppleCare was not cheap. It was $500. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m very familiar with those. All right. tatttooed
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14.5 masked-face unlock
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iOS 14.5 watch unlock. We’ve been discussing kind of the implementation details as best
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we can figure out for that. And apparently it wants to see a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey masked face first before it offers or investigates the option of using the watch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for unlocking. And one of you probably, John wrote, any masked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey face? Question mark?
⏹️ ▶️ John We talked about this last time. Like, why do you need to see a face first? If you’re you’re gonna let me unlock because of the watch, just let
⏹️ ▶️ John me unlock because of the watch. And a lot of people were discussing this on Twitter and sending feedback like, oh, well it wants
⏹️ ▶️ John to see like the top half of your face. It does like a partial face match because that’s more secure than not looking
⏹️ ▶️ John at your face at all. Which makes some kind of sense, but something in my mind was just itching in me,
⏹️ ▶️ John like I don’t know much about machine learning, but it seems to me that a lot of the machine learning models if they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John trained on your actual face, the whole reason they don’t unlock for your whole face is that they’re just,
⏹️ ▶️ John machine learning is not, you know, where someone just writes a program to recognize a face. It’s different than that. If you could
⏹️ ▶️ John write the program, you wouldn’t need machine learning. The whole point is it’s really hard to write that program. So you sort of let the program write itself by
⏹️ ▶️ John teaching it, by showing the face and you know, it’s complicated. I don’t understand how that’s more or less how it works. What it means
⏹️ ▶️ John is what you end up with, that model that recognizes faces, what you end up with is not
⏹️ ▶️ John a sort of a program that a human could look at and understand. Because if it could, they would have just written it in the first place,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And so just because we conceptually can think of the idea of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, I can recognize your whole face and I could probably recognize the top of your face, but we’re human beings.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just because you have a machine learning model that can recognize the whole face, who’s to say it can make
⏹️ ▶️ John heads or tails of half your face with a mask on it? As far as it’s concerned, it’s like no match. Now, I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know. I don’t know if that’s the case, but either way, that was my thought when I was suspicious that
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not doing a partial face match. And so why look at the face at all? And I have at least
⏹️ ▶️ John one report from someone who has used the iOS 14.5 beta to
⏹️ ▶️ John say that you can take, you can be wearing your watch and take your phone and show your phone
⏹️ ▶️ John anyone’s masked face your wife’s masked face, your child’s masked face just show anyone’s
⏹️ ▶️ John masked face and then your watch will unlock your thing afterwards. So it doesn’t even need to be your
⏹️ ▶️ John masked face. Now, granted this experiment was with people related to the person. So maybe the top of their faces looks
⏹️ ▶️ John enough like theirs that it was able to unlock. But the fact that it worked on a wife a child makes me think that
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe it’s not actually doing a partial face match, or if it is, all it cares about is that it’s a human face
⏹️ ▶️ John with, you know, the same number of eyes as you or something. So, I still don’t quite know how this
⏹️ ▶️ John works, and I still think it’s weird that it wants to see anything first. And by the way, I don’t know if we mentioned this last
⏹️ ▶️ John time, but it does buzz your watch when it unlocks and gives you the option to immediately relock it, right? So it’s trying to do the right
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. No one’s going to secretly unlock your phone without you knowing, because if you have the watch on your wrist and it just unlocked it, it will buzz you
⏹️ ▶️ John and then you’ll look at it and say, hey, someone just unlock your phone and you can just smack it and say lock it because it wasn’t me.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, and it’s opt-in so this is not going to happen to you unless you turn this feature on.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I’m interested to see for the for those of us who have iPhones and watches which is I guess you too,
⏹️ ▶️ John when the 14.5 comes out for real setting aside whatever the betas do, does it need
⏹️ ▶️ John to see a face and does it take any face or does it require your face?
~/.Trash follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, moving on. Mike Vossler has some information with regard to listing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your trash. Can you tell me about that, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, last week I was surprised that Marco couldn’t even just list the contents of his .trash directory, his home directory.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I had long since forgotten that it has been my habit ever since whatever OS this was
⏹️ ▶️ John introduced in to give the terminal application full disk access because I find it
⏹️ ▶️ John maddening when I’m asked for permission to do stuff from the command line. So I always just give terminal full disk access.
⏹️ ▶️ John A lot of people reported that if you do give terminal full disk access, then you can go into.trash
⏹️ ▶️ John just fine. Still yet, some people have said, I have terminal with full disk
⏹️ ▶️ John access, but the particular problem Mark was talking about, I had something like that too, where there was some sort of, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John something in my.trash directory that was somehow protected by system integrity protection, I needed to reboot
⏹️ ▶️ John and recovery mode to remove it. So both of those are failure modes that might happen. But if you’re just wondering why terminal
⏹️ ▶️ John is not letting you see things that normally it used to, and you don’t mind opening up a,
⏹️ ▶️ John what we now call a giant security hole, but what we used to just call the way Unix works.
⏹️ ▶️ John the terminal application full disk access, and then when you’re in terminal, it won’t complain. I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, you’re still subject to Unix permissions, obviously. That’s so weird when you say full disk access.
⏹️ ▶️ John What it means is go back to just honoring Unix file system permissions. So you can’t actually
⏹️ ▶️ John see everything, right? But we call this full disk access,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the opposite of that is, Oh, you can’t see anything unless you explicitly ask permission for it. And that is a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, for some actual follow up on this topic on whether it solved my issue. Nope. Sure. Didn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I think there’s there’s the one where you actually have to go into recovery and delete the thing and you probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I didn’t I didn’t attempt that yet because I don’t want to. I’m like to me like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Having my stupid X11 alias stuck in my trash forever is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just kind of like this reminder, like I have to get rid of this installation Mac OS. Like, just, I don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just, I have to get rid of this. That is not the real problem. The real problem is not my X11 alias. The real problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that this installation is broken and I have to get rid of
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re just making me want to dive in there and nurse it back to health. Just get feed it chicken soup and clean out, clean out
⏹️ ▶️ John all of its old launch agents and find all your old corrupt fonts and it just really just
⏹️ ▶️ John shine it up. It’s like, like those car detailing videos where they find the old car in the barn that hasn’t been out in 20 years and then
⏹️ ▶️ John by the end of the thing, it’s all shiny. That’s what I want to do to your Mac OS. you
SSD wear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Excellent. And then this next item in follow-up, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey haven’t a clue what is happening here. So, John, tell me about SSD traffic.
⏹️ ▶️ John Last week, there was an Ask ATP question where someone was saying, if I get the M1 with 8 gigs of
⏹️ ▶️ John RAM, am I going to shorten the life of my SSD just from like swap file usage?
⏹️ ▶️ John And my general answer to that was like, don’t worry about it. It’ll probably be fine. SSDs, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John are fairly sturdy and you’re not going to be swapping that much. And if you are, you’re going to have other problems
⏹️ ▶️ John that you notice way before you wear your SSD, uh, so on and so forth. And there was some
⏹️ ▶️ John thread on Twitter where people were discussing this and saying, well, I got, I’m looking at my M1 Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John and I looked at like the total data written to the SSD over
⏹️ ▶️ John some period of time and I was shocked at how much it was. Um, and so this,
⏹️ ▶️ John the tweet was, uh, this is actually on a, MacBook Air with an M1 and 16 gigs of
⏹️ ▶️ John RAM, so it’s not even an eight gig model. And this person was shocked that two months in,
⏹️ ▶️ John the data written to the SSD was 13.4 terabytes. It was like 15.5 terabytes read, 13.4 terabytes written.
⏹️ ▶️ John And everyone in the throat was like, oh, that seems like a lot, right? Like you’ve only had it for two months. Like boy,
⏹️ ▶️ John at that rate of IO, are you gonna wear out this SSD? And so I was curious. I decided
⏹️ ▶️ John to look at my work laptop, which is an Intel machine, but it also has 16 gigs of RAM and I had it for a really long
⏹️ ▶️ John time. So I figured it would even out. And my work machine is thrashed by
⏹️ ▶️ John corporate malware, right? It’s got so close antivirus that’s constantly scanning things. It’s constantly doing an inventory.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s constantly searching my hard drive for personally identifiable information and running reports on it, right? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John everything you can imagine is just incredibly abused. But I can tell you that the fans
⏹️ ▶️ John run and high a lot of the time, a lot of the time it is swamped by CPU and like I said, disk
⏹️ ▶️ John IO, when it’s just grinding over your whole disk, looking for stuff, not to mention running
⏹️ ▶️ John the Microsoft OneDrive and Dropbox and plus running
⏹️ ▶️ John large VMs on the thing and pushing it into swap. So I really, I feel like this is a heavily
⏹️ ▶️ John used laptop that is slowly wilting under the load that I put it in on top of
⏹️ ▶️ John all the corporate malware. So I’m like, this is gonna be a good test see what you know what the
⏹️ ▶️ John IO is and by the way the way we’re getting these numbers both the Twitter thread and this is
⏹️ ▶️ John using smart utilities I forget what smart stands for it’s probably an acronym for like anyway it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the tools that like measure hard drive health or whatever so we’ll put a link in the show notes too I
⏹️ ▶️ John just searched for it on Google and I found this smartmontools.org website that downloaded the command
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s called smart smart control or smart control and it’s just you know
⏹️ ▶️ John run smart control dash dash all slash dev slash disk 0 for you know built-in SSD
⏹️ ▶️ John probably and the number I got was 246 terabytes
⏹️ ▶️ John written on my internal SSD and that is over the course of the entire
⏹️ ▶️ John life of the 2017 MacBook Pro so I did some math to figure out how many gigs per day of writes I
⏹️ ▶️ John never really care about the reads we’re just worried about writes for like wearing out the SSD how many gigs per day is that
⏹️ ▶️ John the shocking one that was in the Twitter thread that was only two months old on the M1 Mac was 223 gigs
⏹️ ▶️ John written per day. And my, you know, four year old Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Pro was 197 gigs written per day. And I’m shocked that the two numbers are that
⏹️ ▶️ John close to each other because surely the usage patterns are different. Like I don’t think this person has so close to antivirus
⏹️ ▶️ John scaling scanning every single file on their hard drive every single day. But yeah, they’re both in the same
⏹️ ▶️ John ballpark 200 ish gigs per day written. There’s some other stats that that are printed out
⏹️ ▶️ John by this thing that I don’t understand, but I can surmise. One of them is available spare. Remember we talked about over-provisioning,
⏹️ ▶️ John how much extra storage is in there just in case you wear out some part of the SSD, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can use the extra stuff that it keeps in reserve. My available spare is at 100%.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that means it’s all available, I don’t know. There’s a bunch of other fun
⏹️ ▶️ John stats in here if you wanna take a look at what your laptop is doing, but I can tell you that it never crossed my mind to worry about
⏹️ ▶️ John wearing out my SSD on this laptop. I did worry that it was gonna overheat and explode because
⏹️ ▶️ John the fans are running high all the time, but 200 gigs per day of writes seems
⏹️ ▶️ John like a not unreasonable thing for a laptop to be writing to its SSD
⏹️ ▶️ John if it’s used a reasonable amount, whether it’s an M1 Mac or an Intel Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John from many years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So now, hold on. So you are, how are you getting how many days to divide by, by power
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I’m getting that by like the date I know I got the laptop from
⏹️ ▶️ John was new, brand new laptop, fresh out of the box. And then I’m going to start counting from that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, and obviously I don’t use it on weekends for the most part because it’s my work laptop. But, you know, it’s this laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John probably has more. I didn’t run this on my Mac Pro, but this laptop is definitely the hardest
⏹️ ▶️ John used piece of hardware that’s in my house right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OK, because I asked because I have one thousand two hundred ninety five power on hours and a fifty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey four terabytes written. And so computing that out, if you treat it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as, you know, powered on hours, that’s 1,001 gigabytes a day. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, that’s power on hours. So it’s not exactly the same as what you’re computing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But that’s considerably more than what you’re talking about.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it really depends on what you’re doing. Like I said last time, you can wear out an SSD if you’re doing something that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just constantly doing a huge amounts of IO, but most normal loads don’t do that, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John it really depends on the specific things that you’re doing The question was about whether swap would do it I
⏹️ ▶️ John think like if you’re swapping that much you’re gonna be suffering in so many other ways that You’re concerned. It’s not gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ John SSD some other interesting stats here that make me wonder what it’s actually showing power cycles
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m assuming that means like it may be like the OS or the hardware takes power
⏹️ ▶️ John away from the SSD when it doesn’t need to be there or something because my power cycles number is 26,000. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I know I did not turn this off to 26,000 times. Right. So that must mean
⏹️ ▶️ John something else. unsafe shutdowns. I think we all know what that means. 160. I’m like, yeah, that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It’s because the machine
⏹️ ▶️ John did have a tendency to kernel panic for at least the first year or two of its life. It’s settled down a little bit now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Media and data integrity errors, zero, no errors.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, interesting. So I re computed your laptop as per what’s in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the show notes. And I computed it the same way that mine was computed and yours is actually 847.2
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gigabytes a day and I’m still sitting at 1001. I have no idea how. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like those are shockingly in a similar ballparks, right? Yeah. For two machines that are
⏹️ ▶️ John used for entirely different purposes, running entirely different software, like it’s amazing
⏹️ ▶️ John how these are not like double each other or have a huge range. Cause I have no idea how you use your computer,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it can’t be like I use my
⏹️ ▶️ John laptop, which does such weird things. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John running database servers on my work laptop. I feel like it almost doesn’t matter unless you’re doing something
⏹️ ▶️ John that you know is intentionally, not abusive, but intentionally extremely heavy. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John say you’re constantly recording 8K video to the drive 24 hours a day from a security camera. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the type of thing where you expect to see a 10X difference or whatever. But if you just use your laptop like a human,
⏹️ ▶️ John It seems like the numbers sort of regressed to a mean here with our three data points because Marco hasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John downloaded this thing and tried it yet. No. And all his computers are so new that it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, power on hour seven. Three. Soon
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I’ll be leaving Marco’s house.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You just see the number of like battery cycles whenever I sell a laptop. It’s embarrassingly low.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Marco has charged his battery 10 times.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at R2 readouts, your controller busy time is 21,799. Would you like to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey guess what mine is? I don’t even was the units that is that seconds is
⏹️ ▶️ John that minutes? What is no idea? I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey have no idea.
⏹️ ▶️ John But remember, like this is a 2017 laptop. It’s old.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sure. Well, but would you like to guess what mine controller busy time is?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, how old is your computer?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What a year ish something like that a little over a year? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John zero. Yeah, well, I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know what that number means, but. Yeah, me neither. My computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It should move to the beach.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s what it needs to do. Yeah, that’s it. You know, you also have 60 error information log entries
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but I have no data integrity errors, so I’m happy about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, while we’re doing things that are gonna generate tons of email over the next week, thanks a lot guys. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the pile. I would like recommendations from the listeners,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not an overwhelming number of them, maybe, but I would like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John recommendations from people. Listeners
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t control that. They don’t know what other people are doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know. There’s no global knowledge. Organize amongst yourselves to submit, submit one copy of each
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. Oh God. What I, the problem I need to solve here is every time there’s a new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac OS update or something, you know, a new, I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to set up a new computer or the OS changes some policy or, you know, PHP gets updated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or, you know, some stuff like that. it always breaks my local web development stuff. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I want to do is run PHP, Nginx, or any other web server,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but hopefully Nginx with PHP and MySQL locally on my Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have done this for over a decade, just by either using the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco built-in stuff, like back when it was present and reasonably good, which it mostly still is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I think they’re phasing that out, Or I would use Homebrew or similar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco package managing kind of stuff to install a different version or a newer version
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of something like PHP and have that be automated in some big script. And every six months,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever process I did before breaks and whatever installation I had before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either can’t be carried into the new OS or some component of it breaks. Like this is just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the world of package management. And trying to run a package manager on Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS seems like a very hostile environment to try to operate in. It seems like the OS is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco constantly changing and breaking stuff like that in ways that Homebrew tries its best to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get around, but it often doesn’t succeed. And so I’m kind of at my wits end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here. And what I would ideally like, I don’t even know if this necessarily is possible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with what we have so far today. What I would ideally like is a Linux
⏹️ ▶️ Marco VM that I could run, that could just be like a file
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or like a folder on my computer that is mounted into a Linux VM. And that folder,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I could still edit all my code, like in TextMate, all my PHP copies of everything, that could all still be like in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a regular Mac editing app, so mounted natively in the Mac file system. But I want just like a Linux
⏹️ ▶️ Marco VM that I can set up that can actually execute this code. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you should listen to some tech podcasts where they talk about things like Docker, which we’ve talked about in the show many, many
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You realize you just invented Docker.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, so right, so I’ve never used Docker. Is Docker the solution to this? And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco second question, does it work on M1 Macs yet? Now here’s the thing, other qualifications. So number one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has to work on Apple Silicon, which I know most of the virtualization stuff doesn’t yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Number two, I don’t care how fast it is. It doesn’t need to be fast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In fact, if it’s slow, that’s actually kind of a feature, because then I’ll be forced to optimize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my web code if anything is noticeably slow, but it won’t be. I mean, PHP and MySQL, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if it was doing full x86 machine emulation on the M1,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would still not notice the slowness. So performance doesn’t matter at all. What does matter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is it has to work on M1. It can’t have any kernel extensions. It can’t have like the old virtualization methods where you’d
⏹️ ▶️ Marco install texts all over the place. None of that, if that even still works, I don’t think it does. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just want like a container that I can keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco independent of what the OS does, and I don’t care how much overhead it takes to execute the contents
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that container. So it can be very, very slow. It can be full emulation of x86 if it needs to be. It can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be ARM probably, but ideally it would be x86 just because that’s what I’m running on the servers, and it would be nice to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco match like everything exactly to just be able to like install my server, Ubuntu distribution with my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco server install script here locally. So that’s ideally what I want.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m interested to know like what is the best solution to this that actually works on M1 Max in
⏹️ ▶️ John So I mean you have you have three main options here. One, I know you said you didn’t like this but homebrew has been updated
⏹️ ▶️ John for the M1 Max and so if you still want to go that route you actually have that option available to you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Two, you got plain old VMs, lots of options for them and as you noted uh the ones that you since
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have lots of options for them
⏹️ ▶️ John i mean you’re going to have lots of options people
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco are yeah right i’m going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John right now but
⏹️ ▶️ John it could be like by next week right things are happening fast here right but but i’m saying don’t set that aside because
⏹️ ▶️ John traditional plain old vms whether you use you know vmware commercial product or virtualbox or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John you could literally run the same version of linux that your servers run and yes most of them have some way for you to essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John mount through some some folder on your Mac so you can use all your native Mac tools. Like they all do that. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the good thing is on Big Sur with the virtualization framework, they don’t need kicks anymore because the OS supports
⏹️ ▶️ John virtualization itself. So I bet the people at VMware, I mean, I haven’t talked to them, but like I bet they’re excited.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, Oh, thank God. We don’t have to do this part of the whole part of our application that we had to write. That was a pain in the butt to maintain.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now we don’t have to use it anymore. Apple gives us one and we can essentially ship you an app that just runs without
⏹️ ▶️ John asking for weird permissions to install a Kexter or whatever. Like that’s great for them now This
⏹️ ▶️ John is assuming Apple’s virtualization framework actually works well And I’m sure the people who worked in that part of VMware say
⏹️ ▶️ John ours was better and had better features but what I’m saying to you is that don’t be afraid of virtualization because
⏹️ ▶️ John All the things that we complain about on big sir and locking stuff down or whatever it makes things like virtualization
⏹️ ▶️ John Less scary because now they’re not allowed to do that dangerous stuff, and they can’t and
⏹️ ▶️ John the OS supports it natively So look into virtualization, whoever ends up supporting that the best. And then finally,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s Docker, which is probably of all the solutions going to be the weirdest to you.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I also don’t know whether it’s entirely supported in one max yet, but it will be inevitably.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It looks like it’s in it’s in tech preview mode right now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And also, like, I believe it will be able to do X86 stuff for you, which is what you want.
⏹️ ▶️ John So those three options should cover all of the possibilities. And I think you should try all three
⏹️ ▶️ John of them when you can. Right. So like you can try homebrew now and get angry at it all over again. Yeah, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then like, as soon as VMware, you know, is or something like that is out, try that
⏹️ ▶️ John and then try Docker. Docker is free for you to just run locally. And my experience with the Mac version of Docker has actually been pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John good. Obviously not on the M1, but like the Mac version of Docker has like, it’s not super
⏹️ ▶️ John duper Mac like, but it’s way more Mac like than you would think. Something like Docker would be. You
⏹️ ▶️ John do probably do have to learn a little bit about Docker. And you’re not going to like what you learn because it’s weird. But
⏹️ ▶️ John learn a little bit about docker to do the thing that you want where you want to sort of mount through the directory And have it visible and stuff You’ll have to
⏹️ ▶️ John mess with that in some ways that are gonna be a little bit scary and more complicated to you Then you know VMware is
⏹️ ▶️ John like you can practically like drag a folder over and make a shared thing It’s really easy and like VMware right
⏹️ ▶️ John but of those three options Surely one of them will work for you better than your current setup
⏹️ ▶️ John And I guess the fourth option is what I do which is a compile everything from source and just deal with it But it seems like you’re not doing that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it’s the best though No, no, the best for what in what way is it the best? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the worst. It’s the best in that you have to you should love it. It’s the Marco solution that you have total control. You’re such a control
⏹️ ▶️ John freak about so many parts of your tech life, but not this one. And I like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John because this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is an environment that like this is to me a tool like I don’t I don’t want to build like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my text editor from source. I just want this to be a package that I download as a complete
⏹️ ▶️ Marco polished thing that is easy because this is an area of my toolkit that I don’t want to become a power user and nerd
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about. This is something that I currently am forced to be a power user and nerd in trying to keep all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco native homebrew kind of stuff working throughout installations. And I just, to me, any time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I spend maintaining that is a waste of my time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Any time I spend on that is like, I’m not working on my app, I’m not doing anything I like, I’m not doing something productive,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco customers won’t see or care about any of this. That to me is burned time. And So that’s exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the kind of context where I would pay. If VMware worked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco perfectly the way I want to and was out today and was $300, I would buy it. I’d be like, great, I can throw
⏹️ ▶️ Marco money at this problem and get all this time back to not have to deal with this.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it might already be out. I might just be thinking of the Big Sur update, not the M1 update. But it’s so much like your
⏹️ ▶️ John other situations in that when it breaks, you get frustrated if you don’t know exactly what’s going on because it’s using some third
⏹️ ▶️ John party thing. And so let me just write my own library to do this thing, right? So that way I know the code from top to bottom.
⏹️ ▶️ John Every time your homebrew stuff breaks or whatever, you’re like, and you don’t control homebrew and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not your thing and it’s big and it’s complicated and it’s like, ugh. So I can imagine you would derive some
⏹️ ▶️ John satisfaction for understanding how your local setup works from
⏹️ ▶️ John top to bottom in the same way that you do with code instead of dealing with, oh, well, why did you use a third-party library that does
⏹️ ▶️ John that? It does it for you. And it’s like, but I don’t want the whole third-party library and it’s complicated and when it breaks, I don’t understand
⏹️ ▶️ John why. So I feel like that the compiling from source, as ridiculous as it sounds to you,
⏹️ ▶️ John actually does fit with some of your other tech habits in the vein of, I know exactly how it works
⏹️ ▶️ John and it does just what I need it to do and only that. And when it breaks, I understand and can fix it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m still not doing it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know no one is, just me, but I enjoy it.
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Please email Casey
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alright, moving on. Oh God, we’re gonna get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so much email this week. Tesla is if we didn’t have enough email
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John coming away.
⏹️ ▶️ John You put this in here, Casey. This is all you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, this is my fault. Everyone. Everyone has a reason for email. Apparently, we had discussed,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think, a couple of weeks ago how Marco has to periodically reboot half of his
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car as he’s hurtling down the road because that’s totally safe. And don’t worry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Don’t worry. Elon will fix it, I’m sure. Well, apparently he is fixing it because they are basically, they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically been forced to do a recall for touchscreen failures. And so NHTSA
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has all but compelled Tesla, and I guess this is normal that NHTSA will basically say, hey, we’re going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to make you do a recall if you don’t voluntarily do it. And then the car manufacturer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not just Tesla, will fight it for a little while. And then they’re like, no, really, this is gonna happen. And the car manufacturer says, no, no, no, no, no,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ll do it voluntarily. No need for a recall. It’s cool, it’s cool, it’s cool, it’s cool, it’s cool. So anyway, we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will put a link in the show notes. And from that link, NHTSA, the National Highway
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Traffic Safety Administration, something like that?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. All right, go team. The agency said touchscreen failures posed significant safety issues, including the loss
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of rear viewer backup camera images, exterior turn signal lighting. We were wondering about that when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we were discussing it. And windshield defogging and defrosting systems. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco have to defrag
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your windshield, you have other problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s a big worry. That quote, may decrease the driver’s visibility in inclement weather.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Quote. And it’s a said last month that quote, during our review of the data, Tesla provided confirmation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that all units will inevitably fail, given the memory devices finite storage capacity.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Quote. Are you kidding me? I guess they’re just vomiting up like log files or something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey until kingdom come.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t. The way I interpreted it was not about that. It was actually about flash wear. That’s how I interpreted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this. Ah, okay. Okay. That’s fair. Whoever
⏹️ ▶️ John wrote this, and it doesn’t understand the tech involved, but that’s my understanding too that it is actually a case of wearing
⏹️ ▶️ John out flash memory. So it’s actually topical for this week’s show. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, but who’s going to think when designing a car system that the cars will be running for a long time?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, why would you think that?
⏹️ ▶️ John Such a Tesla move where they’re just like, we don’t need to do things the car way. Let’s just do things the fast
⏹️ ▶️ John and nimble way. Why would we spend all this money for this really enterprise-grade,
⏹️ ▶️ John over-provisioned car industry flash module that costs a bazillion dollars? I can just buy a bunch of these on Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ John and stick them in the cars and oh, now they’re all wearing out. Whoopsies. But we need to do all that logging to find out
⏹️ ▶️ John why things are broken.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey-oh! Oh, God, we’re going to get so many emails. But you’re so
⏹️ ▶️ John right. Yeah, this is a super old story. I guess it’s finally getting around to recalling it or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I remember reading about this particular problem years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It isn’t on any of their recent cars. I think the latest affected cars are probably from like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three years ago, right? It’s not super
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s the type of thing that happens after, over time, right? So if it is happening on the current cars, we wouldn’t know it
⏹️ ▶️ John for years. That’s true. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, with all that said, Michael Swindler wrote in to say, in my Model 3, I had to reboot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey while driving recently. Why is this such a thing? Why are people okay with this? Oh my God. It happened
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be at night, so I could see that the turn signal did still work, just no sound. Oh, that’s reassuring.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey So that’s a model three,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is a newer car. So I’ll say.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s what I hoped was happening, but yeah, I don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s still not a good thing to have to reboot your car while driving it. And also like, it just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shows like anytime people, we keep getting email from people who are like, you guys don’t understand the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new model S. It’s all about self-driving. They’re going all in on full self-driving. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they don’t need a steering wheel. They’re just designing it so you don’t need to drive it. It’s like, yeah, that’s wonderful.
⏹️ ▶️ John Full self-driving’s coming out in 2018, Marco. Yeah, right. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the, you don’t buy a car or design a car for promises
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of future software capabilities, especially things that seem really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard for anybody to actually achieve. If you ship a car and it turns
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out that in one year you have amazing full self-driving capability somehow magically, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it turned out that the steering wheels you put on the car for that whole year were redundant.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh well, you got some redundant steering wheels, no big deal. If you bet wrong,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you have, like you design a car for a software future that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t ship on time, or never maybe makes it in the lifetime of that car,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and now you just have a badly designed car that could get people killed, I’d say that you made the wrong
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bet, and that’s a bad design.
⏹️ ▶️ John And also, I mean, I know we discussed this a little bit tangentially, the whole split between like
⏹️ ▶️ John the car computer and the sort of infotainment computer and whether they were merged or whatever. But
⏹️ ▶️ John just in general, the idea that rebooting your car while you’re driving it is in any way a
⏹️ ▶️ John common thing, even if it’s just like the non-driving computer, does not make me particularly
⏹️ ▶️ John confident about any kind of self-driving future, which by the way, I’m super, I continue to be, see years ago
⏹️ ▶️ John episodes, super pessimistic that We will ever see anything like that in our lifetime. But regardless,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you have to reboot your car while driving it, the one thing that probably won’t work, if you’re,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, forget about turn signals, the part where the car drives itself, yeah, I’d worry more about that. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t have a steering wheel and the car, the driving part of the car reboots and
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re going 70 miles an hour, that’s a bad situation. So add yet one more
⏹️ ▶️ John pebble to the giant pile of reasons why full self-driving continues to be a fantasy
⏹️ ▶️ John in the way that most people envision it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s the thing, like I’m so happy and I’m so fortunate that my entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco career has been spent writing software that in the grand scheme of things doesn’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have any major stakes. Doesn’t really matter if like if I write something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has a bug or if I mess up a server and something crashes, no one dies.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t have any kind of heavy stakes on what I do. I’ve made an entire career
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically out of helping people waste time in various ways. And it’s kind of wonderful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the sense that I don’t have all that stress, you know, that like I might, you know, mess up somehow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and really get somebody hurt or killed, but I also then don’t tackle problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with this skill set that might result in heavier stakes. Tesla,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way their software quality of their cars is granted,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better than anything I could write. And you look at all the miles driven and autopilot and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything, and they are largely pretty good. But to take on something like full
⏹️ ▶️ Marco self-driving requires a level of rigor and perfection
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and conservatism in development methodology and things like that. You have to be so careful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so rigorous and so slow-moving and well-tested.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s just not how Tesla does almost anything. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see them having a wonderful present and future in doing stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like autopilot on the highway, which is like, this is a smaller problem set, we can do a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good job of it that works almost all the time and is a nice convenience feature and maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco improves average safety of our cars per highway mile driven, compared to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco humans doing their own cruise control stuff. That is a narrower problem domain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they have proven to be pretty good at. And as a five-year Tesla owner,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can say that has worked great so far. Not 100% of the time. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still a lot of conditions in which it doesn’t work, but it is a wonderful convenience feature.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When you design convenience features, though, that’s a whole different ballgame compared to full self-driving,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what that actually means, not whatever Tesla’s package of options calls that. What full self-driving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually means is such a different ballgame, requires such incredibly different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and much more advanced and much higher quality control in that software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco development. I don’t see that just magically coming out next year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco based on what Tesla has delivered so far. And I don’t even see Tesla being a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco company that’s gonna be the world leader in that if and when it ever comes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t see them making, I don’t see them being that kind of software organization to have that kind of engineering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco discipline and quality control, frankly. I see them making really great cars that are driven
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly in the traditional way, that have occasional convenience features like autopilot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That they’re very good at, and I’m very happy using their cars that way. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they seem to be wanting to push the cars into a direction that I don’t think they can do very well, and I’m worried about
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, if you look at the industries that are tackling similar problems, they’ve gone through and continue
⏹️ ▶️ John to go through all the things we always talk about with Tesla, like aviation, for example. Planes that essentially fly themselves,
⏹️ ▶️ John they have the exact same problem of like, well, if the plane almost flies itself, it can train the pilot into assuming
⏹️ ▶️ John that the plane knows what it’s doing, but then at the times when it gets it wrong, then the pilot’s not ready to intervene at the right moment, and lots of crashes
⏹️ ▶️ John are about, you know, if it was just the human, the human error causes crashes.
⏹️ ▶️ John If it’s just the computer, computer error can cause crashes. And if it’s the human and the computer, they can collaborate to get a whole
⏹️ ▶️ John new series of crashes that would not happen if either one of them was solely in control, right? Like even just like the, what
⏹️ ▶️ John do you call it, 737 Max thing of like how the plane behaves slightly differently and the control
⏹️ ▶️ John program was trying to do something safe, but the pilot didn’t know and they’re fighting each other, right? That anti-pattern
⏹️ ▶️ John of like, well, it’s not, the human needs to be there and needs to be aware and might
⏹️ ▶️ John need to intervene in a moment’s notice, but most of the time the computer does it and it makes the humans not
⏹️ ▶️ John be able to be vigilant for that amount of time. So aviation is constantly struggling with that. Yes, we do want these safety
⏹️ ▶️ John features because the plane can know and do things by itself and eliminate human errors from many
⏹️ ▶️ John areas, but we can’t disengage the pilot. The pilot still needs to be there. It’s super important that
⏹️ ▶️ John the pilot be there because we know for a fact that there’s no such thing as full self-flying. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you need to have a pilot with controls and the human, it’s super important that the human is there because sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s super important that the human take over, right? And you have to manage that relationship
⏹️ ▶️ John so that the human is not expected to do things that no human should be expected to do, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And making that interface, making it help, but not help too much, but not help too little, but not, you know, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s super hard. And aviation is, like Marco was saying, the opposite of how Tesla does
⏹️ ▶️ John things. Everything in aviation has so many regulations and so, you know, they’re so careful and such
⏹️ ▶️ John a long history that’s respected about what works and so conservative in every possible way.
⏹️ ▶️ John Every time they push the envelope a little bit, like the 737 MAX, like, oh, with software, we can do this, and
⏹️ ▶️ John do this advance and save money for the shareholders if we just reuse some of this, but just modify the plane in this
⏹️ ▶️ John way, and just like, just the littlest nudge in the direction of trying to be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John move fast and break things, and hundreds of people die, right? So, I, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m setting aside Tesla when I’m pessimistic about self-driving. I’m self-pessimistic about it just in general. Someone asked in the chat
⏹️ ▶️ John what episode we talked about that last. I think it was 165. We’ll put it in the show notes if you want to relisten
⏹️ ▶️ John to that episode and hear what we had to say years ago about self-driving. But my attitude towards it hasn’t changed.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, to Marco’s point, Tesla is the company that I least trust to do
⏹️ ▶️ John the default safe thing when it comes to self-driving, even if they happen to be the company that actually has the most
⏹️ ▶️ John expertise in the area right now, which is not a great combination. Lots of expertise, but not
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of wisdom, let’s say.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, in the defense of Tesla, which I can’t believe I’m the one saying this. I remember when I was working
⏹️ ▶️ Casey government contracting that a lot of the stuff we did was like C++ and C Sharp, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I vividly remember that one of my coworkers had to learn, I think it was Ada,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I’m not mistaken, and there was a completely different programming language that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the government had basically compelled us to use. And I probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have the details wrong and it doesn’t really matter, but I remember being told something along
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the lines of with Ada, every entrance and exit from every function has to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be defined or something like that. That sounds wrong. But it was extremely explicit about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything that happened in every piece of the program. And so because of that, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey knew with increased confidence, if not perfect confidence, that what you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were writing, you have covered every possible case involved,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey outside of the envelope case, inside the envelope case, happy path, unhappy path, and everything else.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s why they used it for some like more embedded style systems at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the place in which I was working for government contracting stuff. And it wouldn’t surprise me, I bring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this up because it wouldn’t surprise me if the car control computers are using something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey along the lines of Ada, you know, maybe not Ada exactly, but something along those lines. Even if the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey infotainment is running on like Java or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, like, I mean, that’s one of the reasons why they’re totally separate computers. Like the infotainment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system should have nothing to do with driving. And from my understanding, it doesn’t now, which is good.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, whatever system has to do with the turn signals, at least on your car, potentially
⏹️ ▶️ John is the system that needs to be rebooted. So that’s not great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it’s the display or the sound of the turn signals is different from the operation of the turn signals.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, well, think of the recall, though. The recall was about like, oh, well, climate control won’t work and you can’t turn on the defroster.
⏹️ ▶️ John Okay, so now climate control, which I would argue is part of, and Nitza would argue as well, is part of the safety
⏹️ ▶️ John features of the car. If the computer is the only thing in the car that can turn on the defroster, if
⏹️ ▶️ John that one has to reboot, I’d say let’s move that out of wherever it is now and into this computer that supposedly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and to be fair, that is true. The climate control is controlled by the navigation and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco media computer. But, and that’s yet another reason why physical controls can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco win out. Because anything that is on the touch screen, this is why this came up in the first place, like two episodes ago, anything on the touch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen, you might occasionally have to go without for a few minutes while the system reboots.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, you know, that could be a problem if it’s, you know, if it’s just, you know, you don’t have to worry about the car suddenly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like stopping and flying off the road, but you might have to worry about the defroster not being accessible or,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, not knowing whether your turn signal is on or not, or not being able to control your drive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco direction in the new one if the car guesses wrong. So
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, that’s… Well, you do have to worry about it flying off the road, but just you’re supposed to take over control immediately when you see that
⏹️ ▶️ John happening. Just FYI. Oh, right. Or you die like that guy who, that poor guy who died commuting to
⏹️ ▶️ John work at the same place his car had veered towards the barrier multiple times. And then the one day he was just too sleepy
⏹️ ▶️ John to catch it and he died. That’s just so terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John it really is. I mean, granted, people die every single day in cars from their own mistakes, but it’s like I said last week, somehow,
⏹️ ▶️ John because humans are weird, somehow it feels more fair when you screw up yourself and die. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John just as dead and you’re dead maybe even more often than you would be if the car was helping you drive, But it
⏹️ ▶️ John just feels worse when it’s like, hey, like I, you know, car, you, you
⏹️ ▶️ John turned toward that tree. And yeah, I was too slow and yanking the wheel back. But honestly, car, you turn
⏹️ ▶️ John towards that tree. And I feel worse about that than me just not paying attention and
⏹️ ▶️ John hitting the tree myself.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. It’s just, it’s so wild to me listening again to you describing this operation, Marco, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco the rebooting while
⏹️ ▶️ Casey driving rebooting operation. Yeah. the same man who refused to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use a monitor that was slightly wobbly and occasionally didn’t work perfectly. And yet his 4,500,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever pound automobile, he can occasionally reboot the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey infotainment and just shrug it off as, Oh, no big deal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, it makes me angry every time, but I just liked the car so much. And every other, like, I,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love this car. I really do. And, and, and, I mean, we’ll see, you know, my, my,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my living situation here is going to make it difficult to decide what to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this fall when my lease is up. But if I end up not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keeping a car like this, I’m going to be very upset and I’m going to very much miss it because I love this car
Sponsor: Flatfile
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14.5 music-service selection
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, so moving on to topics, this is actually really exciting. This is the second exciting thing I’ve seen from iOS 14.5.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not running it yet, so I’m just looking at reports, but supposedly iOS 14.5 lets you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey set Spotify or others as series default music service. How cool
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that? So it used to be, even today in the release versions of the OS, you can say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hey, Dingus, Spotify, play the most recent album by MuteMath or something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that. And it would work usually, but now it appears from what I’ve read that you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just say, hey Dingus, play the most recent album by MuteMath and it’ll just go and do it using Spotify
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever your service may be, which is super great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah and this seems like it’s super early still, like I mean granted this is this reporting a feature that’s still in a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco relatively early beta, beta series of iOS, but even its implementation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the beta seems a little bit flaky so far, so So we’ll see if this ships with 14.5. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would not recommend that anybody install the beta right now just for this feature because it is still a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iffy. But this is one of those things that we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of never expected Apple to do. And maybe they’re only doing it because of potential antitrust
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and regulatory pressure. I’m sure that plays a significant role in their decision to do this now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the reality is they’re doing it and that’s great. This is a feature that the Alexa
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ecosystem has had forever. Like, you know, if you buy an Amazon Echo, you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been able to go into the app and select any of their supported music services as the default
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for years. I don’t know if it was there since day one, but it’s at least been there for years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so to have this feature here, it’s wonderful, because then, as Casey said, like instead of having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to say on every single request, like, hey, play ATP in Overcast,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, you can just set a certain thing as your default. For most people, it’s probably gonna be Spotify in this context,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you can set a certain thing. You can say, all right, play Green Day in Spotify. Have you heard, Green Day doesn’t really hold up anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Have you heard Green Day recently?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I was never that into them. I didn’t actively dislike them or anything, but it never really did that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much for me, and I have not heard it recently.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a whole section of angry 90s music that if you listen to it, at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the time, it didn’t seem like, it seemed totally normal, But if you listen to it now, like with modern
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sensibilities, and it kind of doesn’t hold up, it’s kind of uncomfortable to listen to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of it. Anyway, they’re one of those bands. So suppose you played something better, like, you know, I don’t know, Weezer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They seem relatively inoffensive most of the time. Before, you’d have to say on every single request, you know, play the latest Weezer album
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Spotify, if you were a Spotify user. And now you could set Spotify as your default
⏹️ ▶️ Marco music app. And it looks like they’re also possibly doing podcast apps that are built into this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco At the API level, the way this works is, there’s a whole Siri, IAM Play
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Media Intent series of APIs. They launched a very basic version of it when they launched
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Siri Shortcuts, which, was that iOS 12? It was either 11 or 12. Anyway, when they did that, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did a very basic version of it that could do almost nothing. Like, the commands weren’t parameterized. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an app, you could like, vend to the system a shortcut that played a particular artist or playlist
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever, but you couldn’t just accept any input. Like, people would have to create one of those shortcuts for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every single artist or playlist they wanted to be able to call up. And that changed in iOS 13. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco finally let it basically accept parameters. And so you could just respond to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generic Play Media intent, and you could even provide the Siri system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a vocabulary of things like the names of the user’s playlists. So that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way it would be able to recognize that a little bit better. Or you could provide it like a list of artists that the user has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in their library. And this API is structured. The data formats are structured. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can say, for instance, like, all right, this thing I’m telling you is a playlist, or the thing I’m telling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you is a band, or an album, or a podcast. And all those things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are separately structured in the API. So the API support is 100% there for them to actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have podcasts be a separate thing and to be able to say, all right, this is my podcast app. This is my music
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app. So I’m actually looking forward to that. And Overcast in the current
⏹️ ▶️ Marco App Store version does not support that kind of thing, but the current beta does. And I’m hoping to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it out in the store possibly in like a week or two. So anyway, Overcast will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco someday support this list. And I’ll be very happy when that happens. And I hope they do podcasting separately. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t expect most people to set Overcast as their default music app. But if they have a way to set a podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app, which the API support is totally there for, then this could be really cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, this is very cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like we’re really starved for these features. the default apps thing. What did we get in the recent OS? We could
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Mail and browser.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And then the music one, looking at the story, the fact that the way you do it is not
⏹️ ▶️ John remotely the same way you do it for mail and stuff. It’s like, oh, well, if you talk to,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, Dingus, you can interrogate it about, it will say, hey, what do you want me to use to play
⏹️ ▶️ John music for you? Which is nice and everything and convenient. That should totally be there. But again, I go back to,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, general girl, general purpose, personal computers. We had this super secret technology, which
⏹️ ▶️ John was to define default apps for different protocols, for different URL schemes, for different functions
⏹️ ▶️ John in the system. Back in classic Mac OS, it’s not rocket science. I mean, it changes with the times.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, you know, URL schemes is not probably the way you wanna do it, but like iOS clearly
⏹️ ▶️ John has a notion of a thing that it uses to send mail, a thing that it uses to play music, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John A thing that uses to open web pages, right? That’s already baked into the OS. just
⏹️ ▶️ John make it generically configurable instead of this weird piecemeal like doling out of just the minimum we
⏹️ ▶️ John think we can do to avoid antitrust, you know, condemnation from the US government, which
⏹️ ▶️ John honestly, seeing this happen at this point is like just everything they do from now on right or wrong makes us think, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John you only reason you’re doing this is to try not to get, you know, sued into oblivion because of
⏹️ ▶️ John antitrust stuff, right? And really, I just wish they would allow the incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ John powerful computers in our pockets to sort of blossom and just be be like a Mac from the 90s and just
⏹️ ▶️ John let me configure my default newsreader my default like just just let me do it in a straightforward
⏹️ ▶️ John way and I think the way they did it for mail everything is great like that there are there are things that you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John qualifications things you have to fulfill to be to be eligible to be the default email
⏹️ ▶️ John application and as as I said ages ago and as people have proven they’ll They’ll do it, people
⏹️ ▶️ John will do it. Gmail has configured itself to be the default app, like Chrome
⏹️ ▶️ John to be the default browser, like nevermind, Chrome isn’t really Chrome on iOS, which is a whole other thing, but I just
⏹️ ▶️ John wish they wouldn’t stop dribbling out these little Chrome’s piecemeal and just go whole
⏹️ ▶️ John hog and say we have a generic system for defining the default application for all common
⏹️ ▶️ John functions on the phone and a system for you to be able to qualify to be one of those applications and let the user
⏹️ ▶️ John control which one of those applications they wanna use and then Apple’s apps have to compete on their merits and not just get by
⏹️ ▶️ John by being the default one, which granted is a huge advantage just because it’s pre installed. If
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not enough advantage for Apple, and they still also have to say, Oh, and by the way, it’s super inconvenient to use anything else. That’s terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just all we’re asking for is a little bit more competition and a little bit more flexibility for people who
⏹️ ▶️ John want to configure their phones the way they want.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I think in all fairness, almost every year at WWDC, we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talk about like some new API that they have offered or some new capability they’ve changed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that something that was previously locked down to only Apple’s stuff or only them being able to do certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things is then now opened to third parties. And they have been knocking down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of these walls over time. They’re just, they were just starting from a place where there were a million walls and they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco knocking them down pretty slowly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And sometimes they just knock down a couple of bricks in one of the walls and then say they think that the job is done and it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, I can see through the wall and I can reach one arm through it, but it’s not really the same as if they’re not being a wall.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or they give you a ladder to go over the wall, but it doesn’t actually work. And they don’t have to use that ladder. They don’t even realize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how badly it works. And you try to use it, and you keep falling off, and the rungs keep breaking. This is
⏹️ ▶️ John thinking like custom keyboard support, which
⏹️ ▶️ John and we were all shocked. But if they don’t maintain that and test all their stuff, it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, it’s there, and it’s available for you, but a whole bunch of bugs happen with And when you report the bug, it’s like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John just use the regular keyboard and that bug won’t happen. I was like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, exactly. Like, and-
Timers on Apple Watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, there’s, I mean, God, there’s nowhere that I want to break down the walls more than the watch. Oh my God,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the watch is… But that’s a story for another day.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can’t… I can’t… He couldn’t help himself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He couldn’t help himself. All right. As I said, I’ve been wearing the Apple Watch full time for the last few months for reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And every night, Adam’s in bed, we sit down and we watch a little bit of TV and we have some tea.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I pour the tea water into the tea cups. I pick up my watch to my face and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I say, set a five minute timer. Most of the time it sets the five minute timer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Fine, okay, that’s story for another day. But most of the time it works. It pops
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up a thing and it says, get your timer counting down, and there’s a button on there that says open timer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, no matter what I do from this point, here’s what I want. I want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my watch that is a computer that is smart to show a timer on the face
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when one is running. And then for that timer, when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s no longer running, to not be shown on the face. The iPhone does this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The iPhone has done this for over a decade, actually, on the lock screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s smart. It has this concept that this area on the lock screen that’s by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the clock and that little area can be used to display high importance things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a conservative way, you know, sometimes, but like that’s a valuable thing that is useful to display that information.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco On the watch, a timekeeping device, these timing functions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of things like timers do not display on the watch face by any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasonable way. The only way you can make it display on the watch face is either to leave the timer app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the watch open as the active app, which I’ll get to in a second, or to have it as as a complication
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on your watch face, which means all the entire rest of the day that you’re not running a timer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have this complication spot wasted and sometimes it even, depending on the type, it might even say things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco set or whatever. So it’s not doing a great job
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at integrating this temporary high importance thing into the watch face.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Secondly, we have an always-on screen for the last year and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a half. This is a wonderful feature. This has changed the Apple Watch so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much. One of the biggest reasons I am now able to tolerate wearing it full-time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that it has that always on screen. But when the always on screen launched,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it had this weird behavior that, okay, when you’re on, you know, a watch face, when that’s what’s showing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the screen kind of goes to its half sleep mode where the screen is still on but it goes to like a less
⏹️ ▶️ Marco information display mode and doesn’t activate as much and everything. You know, when it’s in like its sleep mode,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you see just a dimmed kind of version of the watch face. It’s simplified certain things, you know, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco animate, but it’s, it’s, you’re still seeing the watch face and any, any data that’s on the watch face, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, your complications, the date, whatever, that’s all still displayed. If however,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you had an app open at the time that the screen went to sleep, it simply displays a blurred
⏹️ ▶️ Marco version of that app behind a digital clock face. Yet another way I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was able to tolerate the Apple Watch full-time now is that I just use the solar face which is digital so that the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always looks the same no matter what state my watch is in. I don’t have to keep bouncing between their bad analog displays
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and their digital displays. Sorry, it’s just always digital. Fine. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you have a timer running, you either have to go back to your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco home screen watch face, which probably doesn’t have a timer complication on it, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can leave the timer app open, in which case when the screen goes to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sleep and blurs, it just shows a blurry version of whatever time amount
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was left when the screen went to sleep, and it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey leaves that there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco indefinitely until you wake it up and then you see the actual timer remaining
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pop in after a second. The screen is always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on. When this was a brand new feature a year and a half ago maybe they didn’t have time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to really integrate like all the features of the watch into this new hardware capability
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the always on screen. That was a year and a half ago though. Now today
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would expect a timer to be able to display live
⏹️ ▶️ Marco countdown time once per second like all the other screens, like the workout screen can do once per second updates
⏹️ ▶️ Marco full time. Why can’t the timer do that? Why does it instead show this blurry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco card of the old time under it? Am I the only person who uses timers on a watch? Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t possibly be, right? Does anybody
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use this stuff? So I do, but and I do it a lot and I always
⏹️ ▶️ Casey almost always start a timer using you know the call word you know hey dingus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey start a timer for five minutes. But honest to goodness the The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey amount of times that I’m looking to see the state of the timer is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey near as makes no difference to zero. I do not care how much time is left. I just care that it has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or has not happened. And because of that, none of what you’re saying bothers me. I don’t disagree
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with anything you’ve said. I think you’re correct. I think it should work differently and I think it should work as you describe.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But for me, I’m never like, oh, it’s 30 seconds left or oh, how much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time is left? And if so, it’s so unusual that I’ll just tap the watch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and go to the timer app or whatever the case may be, which is frustrating, but it’s so rare that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do it that it doesn’t really bother me that much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The problem is the way that all the other apps besides Workout, the way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they just blur under whatever the digital time is, it’s as though
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same company didn’t make the watch and the timer app. It feels as though
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is a bunch of third party apps working on this platform that has no idea about them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and doesn’t treat any of them as first class citizens on the platform, except the workout app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there’s a lot of value. Like when I’m doing a workout, I love what the workout
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app has because then I literally can see everything all the time. That’s fantastic. Why can’t that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be applied to a few other things that would be really useful on a watch?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And, you know what, if you can’t support third-party apps that way yet because you’re not ready to give them that kind of power budget,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay, I understand. But your own apps, like the built-in timer and stopwatch, like why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t they do that? That’s… it just, it seems like… Everything with the Apple Watch,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it just seems like they have like two interns working on it. Like where, where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the movement happening here? Like why, why is this smart computer watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so dumb? dumb. Why does it not take advantage more of the fact that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is a computer and it has a dynamic screen, it can show whatever it wants to all the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. Why are the apps all still so dumb?
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like this is one area where I can map onto the departure of Johnny Ive and say hopefully all the people
⏹️ ▶️ John who are super precious about watches have mostly exited the building or don’t have or aren’t
⏹️ ▶️ John in control and we can finally get things like watch faces that don’t feel
⏹️ ▶️ John as much need to imitate what a physical watch face could do and instead just
⏹️ ▶️ John fully embrace being computers and then we can get third party watch faces and all that good stuff so I’m hopeful that will come down
⏹️ ▶️ John the road because it always seemed to me that especially the beginning of the Apple watch that Apple was very tied to the
⏹️ ▶️ John idea of it as a as something is just as not only just as valid
⏹️ ▶️ John as a mechanical watch but also gaining that validity by imitating
⏹️ ▶️ John the limitations of that form and that is, it is and probably has always been
⏹️ ▶️ John the wrong choice for the watch and we continue to lobby for it to be more like the little computer that it actually
Dan Riccio, in-house displays
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, finally for today, before we get to ask ATP, maybe,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we have a story that broke in the last few days. So Dan Riccio, we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were wondering to some degree where he’s ending up. And according
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Bloomberg, his new project is, as we kind of thought maybe,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey overseeing Apple’s VR and AR headsets. And And Apple has shifted its team to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey develop in-house screens and its team to develop camera technology to its
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chip chief. So reading from this Bloomberg article, Dan Riccio is focusing on the company’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey upcoming virtual and augmented reality devices after he shed his role as the head of hardware engineering, according to People with Knowledge of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Move. Apple has also told staff it is moving the group working on in-house displays
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and camera technology to Johnny Sruji, the executive in charge of processors and cellular modems.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The move suggests the company is getting closer to shipping its first devices with fully custom displays, replacing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey those from outside suppliers. Apple is a facility near its Silicon Valley headquarters that’s developing micro
⏹️ ▶️ John So a reminder, micro LED screens are the super cool ones where every little tiny element in the pixels, the
⏹️ ▶️ John little red dot, the little green dot, and the little blue dot, each one of those little tiny LED that
⏹️ ▶️ John No backlight and no organic. These are not organic LEDs, so it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John an OLED screen, it’s micro LED. At least I think they’re not organic. Anyway, micro LED is cool, and I’ll be excited
⏹️ ▶️ John to see that. Confirmation that, or confirmation,
⏹️ ▶️ John a rumor in support of the idea that Dan Ruggios is doing the VR headset. Makes perfect sense.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then moving the display and camera stuff under Johnny Sruji,
⏹️ ▶️ John the chip guy. I mean, being the big chip guy at Apple right now, it’s a pretty good
⏹️ ▶️ John place to be. It reminds me of that funny Intel ad where like the guy who invented USB is like the big star of
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey right? Everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John loves him. Nevermind they should be throwing food at him for approving the USB-A connector. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re the chip guy at Apple right now, you feel pretty good. You feel pretty good about your job performance, I have to say.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not that you shouldn’t have been before because the iPhone chips are phenomenal, right? But just chips at Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John doing good. And so taking something like displays and camera and putting it under the chip guy, that’s gotta be good.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not that Apple’s been a slouch in the displays and camera area, but mostly like they buy
⏹️ ▶️ John sensors from Sony and they buy displays from LG, right? And the whole Apple’s in-house
⏹️ ▶️ John display stuff, we heard the rumors of micro LED. I think in fact, that’s the first time I even heard micro
⏹️ ▶️ John LED years ago was that Apple was investigating it and then they bailed on it because it wasn’t ready enough but they continue
⏹️ ▶️ John to dig away at that. And I have to think, at least for some of these rumors,
⏹️ ▶️ John the screen, the first sort of Apple made display that we might have some hope of seeing would be in the
⏹️ ▶️ John glasses, right? But there have been rumors for years about, oh, we’re gonna get laptops with mini
⏹️ ▶️ John LED screens or like different kinds of display technology on laptops, maybe an OLED laptop, all sorts of things.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I always just assume Apple would buy those from third-party vendors. But from the rumors, it seems like whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re putting in these AR, VR thingies may actually be some displays that you can’t just buy off
⏹️ ▶️ John the shelf from somewhere. And possibly Apple’s in-house stuff is going that direction. And we’ve talked in the past
⏹️ ▶️ John for a long time about Apple doing its own cell modems. They’re getting there, it takes a long time. They’ll eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John do it. But I am actually excited about the prospect of Apple either doing its own cameras,
⏹️ ▶️ John as in their own sensors, and or doing their own displays. Because both of those areas
⏹️ ▶️ John are places, with the Tim Cook doctrine or whatever, to own and control all the primary technologies.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a limit to that. Like Apple doesn’t want to own maybe the mines where
⏹️ ▶️ John the aluminum come from, right? But they do
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, Making your own displays, like they buy parts from lots of people and they love being able to
⏹️ ▶️ John buy parts from lots of people because then you can set one vendor against the other and be super demanding and get good prices and so on. But
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes you do wanna try to do it yourself, like the chips. Great move, Apple, doing that yourself. That turned out to be a super
⏹️ ▶️ John great idea. So good, they did it across their whole line, right? I think making your own displays
⏹️ ▶️ John is maybe borderline because displays is a tough gig and they’re kind of a commodity.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think Apple has done pretty well Essentially buying off-the-shelf
⏹️ ▶️ John displays or specifying displays like LG Can you please make us a 5k iMac display and you’ll be able to put it in your own
⏹️ ▶️ John credit monitor, too Right, but I am excited about Apple trying to make its own displays
⏹️ ▶️ John even if they’re like special-purpose displays for the goggles or whatever just because Apple’s got a lot of money
⏹️ ▶️ John and why not try your hand at that because it is definitely a value add especially for things like VR glasses where the
⏹️ ▶️ John display and the specifics of the display are You know a it’s a different kind of display
⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of what features make it good and bad like when it’s an instrument your eyeballs and you’re only looking at a portion of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And B, no one has really cracked that nut. Like the current set of VR goggles,
⏹️ ▶️ John the displays are, you know, good, but most people look at them and say, I could see
⏹️ ▶️ John how this display could be better, right? And so I would love for Apple to innovate in that area. Cameras, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John less optimistic that Apple’s going to come out with something that is amazing sensor wise, because it seems like Apple’s strengths with the cameras
⏹️ ▶️ John are not maybe the sensor or even the lenses, they’re more about the processing, But who knows, like
⏹️ ▶️ John vertical integration, I think it can work out well in both of those areas. So I think this is all
⏹️ ▶️ John good news for things going on inside Apple. And I will be super excited if anything,
⏹️ ▶️ John micro LED comes out of Apple anytime soon.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I got dibs on your $7,000 monitor when you resell it.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re not gonna come out with a 32 inch micro LED screen, I don’t think. Or if they did, it would cost a
⏹️ ▶️ John lot more than this one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John on an infinite time scale,
⏹️ ▶️ John anything is possible. Eventually, well, that’s the problem with display technology is like, God, the alphabet
⏹️ ▶️ John soup of display technology is really getting confusing up to the point now where I think someone, one of the,
⏹️ ▶️ John I wish I could remember these details when I’m just going off topic. One of the TV manufacturers tried to like trademark
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the alphabet soup acronyms, but someone, another TV manufacturer
⏹️ ▶️ John already did the actual thing that’s that. I think it was QNED. It’s very confusing,
⏹️ ▶️ John but like these things mean something. Like they make up an acronym for a thing. And one company that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John doing that Decided they’re gonna use the same acronym and and trademark it and it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John but but your screen isn’t a Q net I forget if it was Q net but your screen isn’t a Q net So why would you
⏹️ ▶️ John try to trademark Q net for your non Q net screen? And it’s just it’s so I don’t know how consumers try to
⏹️ ▶️ John make heads or tails But I have to remind myself three times every time I look at this, you know all the different
⏹️ ▶️ John quantum dot come combined with inorganic or organic LEDs just
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a mess But all that is to say that it’s not clear what the next great
⏹️ ▶️ John display technology will be we may skip over Some of these ones that we keep trying to get to
⏹️ ▶️ John work and they don’t seem to ship, you know right now you can get a Micro LED
⏹️ ▶️ John display for a hundred grand that fills the wall of your house But we may just skip over
⏹️ ▶️ John micro LED if it turns out one of the other more promising technologies that has even better attributes ends up becoming
⏹️ ▶️ John at a reasonable price first.
#askatp: Corp. profiles on your iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s try to power through some Ask ATP. Jordan Cosentino writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what are your thoughts on corporate device management profiles on personal use devices? I know that Casey and Marco no longer have jobby
⏹️ ▶️ Casey jobs, but I was curious how you felt about this policy when you did, or how John feels. My company requires that we have MS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Teams, Outlook, et cetera, installed in our phones, which must then be managed by a corporate profile.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They will grant a small monthly subsidy for your cellular plan, but it’s not generous. I talked to IT, and while they claim
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s primarily to give the company remote erase functionality, they said they would only web traffic related to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quote, client information quote, which really feels like a gross situation. I could of course buy a cheap side
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phone just for this, but the subsidy would not cover a full separate plan. So it would end up costing me monthly. And then I would have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to carry another device around with me. I don’t like either option, but companies forcing management device
⏹️ ▶️ Casey policies through bring your own device really feels aggressive to me. Yeah, I agree.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey When I most recently had a jobby job, I knew the IT
⏹️ ▶️ Casey guy really, really well. And I really browbeat him about this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was like, what is this about? What am I really signing up for here? And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what he parodied to me anyway, and what I believe to be true, was that no, really, it was just about remote
⏹️ ▶️ Casey destruction if necessary. Like, if I lose my device, they will fire off a remote wipe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just to make sure that nothing private or no corporate secrets get out. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I knew the IT guy and because I trusted him, I went with it. and it was fine for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. If I was in Jordan’s situation where it’s like, no, no, no, they’re gonna be sniffing your web traffic and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it seems like they’re willing to reach a little further. Honestly, what I would probably do is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey try to use some sort of like web-based Gmail client, or I said Gmail, web-based email client,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if possible, or just not check my email on my phone. Like if this is the way you wanna be, then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s fine, but I’m just not gonna have my email on my phone. And I understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that that’s something that can be a very hard thing to sell. But hey, listen, if you want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me to have a device so I can check my email anytime, give me a device. And if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you want to take over my device, it should be my option to say thanks, but no thanks. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know, John, what are you doing about this?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I feel like this is one of those things that you should think about and potentially talk about when
⏹️ ▶️ John deciding which job you’re going to take. Like if the company requires you to have a
⏹️ ▶️ John phone, but also won’t give you a phone, but then requires that they install this profile, maybe if you
⏹️ ▶️ John talk to the IT person like Casey did and you believe them, you can say, oh no, we’re not doing anything bad. But once they get
⏹️ ▶️ John that profile in there, that enterprise profile thing, they can man in the middle all of
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey your traffic.
⏹️ ▶️ John They can do everything they could possibly imagine, right? So you should know that. If this type of thing, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John have any concern about this whatsoever, you should know and ask about, are you gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John do this to me? I think that’s the worst scenarios, like this, this bring your own device. Hey, you get to use your own phone. Isn’t that great? Yeah, it’s great
⏹️ ▶️ John for the company. You don’t have to buy me a phone then. Oh, but by the way, we have to install this profile on it because you have to be accessible
⏹️ ▶️ John by smartphone because of these job requirements, right? Talk about that. Find out about it before you accept
⏹️ ▶️ John the job offer. And it’s not like you’re going to change corporate policy by demanding it because it’ll just be like, all right, see, that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John way this company works. But you should know that that’s what you’re signing up for and decide not to sign up for it if it bothers
⏹️ ▶️ John you. I’ve been lucky enough at the jobs that I’ve worked where they will,
⏹️ ▶️ John they insist on having all their crap on your device if it’s a device that they give you and pay for.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right? Um, but if you, if they don’t give you a device and pay for it, then
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t insist that they put crap on your phone. So my personal policy is it wouldn’t probably be a
⏹️ ▶️ John deal breaker cause I, you know, anyone who has had a jobby job for any amount of time knows that there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a surprising amount of crap that you’ll tolerate. I just talked about all the, the, you know, antivirus crap. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John all over my Mac, right? I’ll tolerate a lot. You know, I’ve had a corporate job for 20 plus
⏹️ ▶️ John years, right? You just, you learn to tolerate it. But I really, really prefer to not
⏹️ ▶️ John have any stuff on my phone. I could do more from my phone if I allowed them to install
⏹️ ▶️ John the enterprise profile, but I won’t. And so I just simply can’t check my work email from my phone and it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco know, I have
⏹️ ▶️ John a work laptop that I can check it from. I could tether it to my phone for internet access if I really needed to,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But my phone, my preference is to, to essentially have a personal phone that has
⏹️ ▶️ John absolutely nothing related to work on it. The only thing work related I have in here is like, you know, some two factor apps that
⏹️ ▶️ John I can run on my phone that you just download from the app store and they work fine. I think if
⏹️ ▶️ John the two factor apps didn’t work because I actually do need those apps for my work, I don’t know what I would do. Would I buy a second
⏹️ ▶️ John phone? It’s, most people don’t have the luxury to be able to, the luxury to be able
⏹️ ▶️ John to reject the job because they don’t like some, you know, nuance of corporate IT policy, or the luxury
⏹️ ▶️ John to just have two phones, their day phone and their night phone or whatever. But I would just suggest thinking about this when you
⏹️ ▶️ John go in and if given the choice at all, keep all work stuff away from your
⏹️ ▶️ John phone if you can. Like if they’ll buy you a phone and pay for it, just make that your work phone and then just
⏹️ ▶️ John have it be separate from your personal phone. I know that seems like it’s cumbersome, but it’s actually not that bad and you’ll have a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John more peace of mind and a lot less terrible corporate malware on the device that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, because like your phone is one of your computers. In many people’s cases, it’s their only computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with their primary computer. Listeners to this show, it’s probably not your only, but I bet it’s an important computer of yours.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so reframe the same question as if it were about your computer. Like, would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you tolerate your employer forcing you to have certain software installed on your home
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer? Probably not, right? And many people, the only computer they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is their work computer. And, you know, they make that work somehow. But for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, the more overbearing your workplace is going to be about it. You know, obviously people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco listening to this show care a lot about their computers probably, and so you would probably not want your workplace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to control your home computer that much if they were gonna have this level of control over it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your phone should be the same way. Your phone is another one of your computers, and you should treat it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the same kind of separation and reverence and care that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you would treat your home computer. And so I would never, I mean, granted, nobody cares what I think about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, but I would never in a million years let my employer install a controlling profile
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on my home computer, and in the same way, I wouldn’t let them install it on my only phone. And as John
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said, if they are buying me a phone for work purposes, then I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they’re paying for it, they have the right to control it, as long as they disclose to you that they’re doing that, I think then that’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But then in that case, I would also choose to carry my own phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think we all agree.
#askatp: Most-prized media files
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Doc Davis writes, I actually really, really like this question a lot. What is your favorite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or most obscure media file that you are proud to have and or enjoy the most?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve mentioned this a few times in the past. The first, I’m going to mention three really quickly. The first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the concert for Charlottesville. So in 2016, after the god awful things happened in Charlottesville,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dave Matthews amongst others put together a concert with many, many, many different artists. And it was something like six
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hours. And it happened in UVA’s football stadium and it was free for those who attended, if I’m not mistaken.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it was simulcast online and, you know, using my beloved YouTube DL, I recorded it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And to my knowledge, last I looked, my recording is the only one that I’m aware of,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe not the only one in actuality, that is the entire concert start to finish.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I have hemmed and hawed quite a bit about, you know, should I upload this somewhere? And I’m currently sitting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the conclusion of no, because I don’t want to get yelled that for DMCA stuff and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, but this concert is a phenomenal concert and much of my favorite,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey most of my favorite parts of the concert have nothing to do with Dave Matthews at all. Uh, it is a phenomenal, phenomenal concert
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, uh, I don’t think exists anywhere else and it’s really too bad, it’s really quite unfortunate that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it doesn’t exist anywhere else because this is something that I think should be viewable and potentially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for free or for donation to, you know, a worthwhile charity or something. Very quickly, when I was in college,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was really into Vertical Horizon, who if you’ve heard of them at all, you know their song, Everything You Want.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They actually started not as a rock band, but as a kind of folksy acoustic duo.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And some of their early stuff in particular is really phenomenal. And when I was in college,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the early aughts, and this was around the time that Napster was coming out, but oftentimes if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you wanted a big collection of media, particularly by by the same artist, you would scour
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the internet for credentials to an FTP server that was public. And in certain cases,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people would put up FTP servers where you could just go and leech or basically download all the stuff on that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey server. And I did that with some god-awful terrible sound quality but extremely rare Vertical Horizon concerts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I have what is probably hundreds of megs of MP3s, which for the time was an obscene
⏹️ ▶️ Casey amount of content of a very, very early on Vertical Horizon concerts, which I’m sure most of you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are thinking, oh my God, you would, but you know what? I like it, so piss off. And then finally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my granddad, my dad’s dad, who passed a couple of years back, when he was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey younger, he would occasionally have New York area jazz
⏹️ ▶️ Casey musicians come into his house or later apartment and play
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sets. And so dad, who was probably about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my age, my age, maybe a little younger than me at the time, he would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey record these concerts on reel-to-reel because this was like late 70s, early 80s.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And just recently my dad has rediscovered, I think he has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the reel-to-reel tapes, but he had also at some point in the past had them put on cassette
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and even has a video of one of the sets. And so he’s in the process right now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of digitizing some of these old jazz sets with like, I think, uh, Milton Hinton, Milton was there. I think, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Zoot Sims, apparently Zoot Sims was like my best friend when I was two or something like that. Um, so anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey um, so I, and maybe I got these names wrong, but the point being these are concerts that maybe 10
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or 15 or 20 people saw ever, and from artists that are mostly dead at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so dad is trying to digitize them and granted the audio quality is meh at best, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better than nothing. And so dad’s digitizing them and I have already started pitching to him,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hey, you really got to put these on like archive.org or something like that when they’re all said and done.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if that’s what’s going to happen because it’s his as far as I’m concerned. He may not be interested in it, but I will say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have channeled my inner Marco Arment and have convinced him to record off of the cassettes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to FLAC and then, you know, compress those to MP3 or do whatever he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wants with them. So, uh, that, that is my inner Marco Arment slash my old school, Dave Matthews coming out of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. Uh, but all of this stuff, like all of this stuff I think is worth sharing and it bums me out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that there’s no obviously safe way to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey share all of these things, because especially with the concert for Charlottesville,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these are all modern artists who are still touring and record. Well, you know, all things not being equal,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, they’re touring and recording and whatnot. not, and I’m sure that I would get hit with DMCA takedown
⏹️ ▶️ Casey requests or something like that. And it sucks, because I would love to share this, but I can’t, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it bums me out. So I’ve totally railroaded this question. I apologize.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what do you have other than 94 terabytes of fish?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, yeah, there’s a lot of fish. And I definitely consider my fish
⏹️ ▶️ Marco collection to be my most important music that I have. It’s certainly what I listen to the most,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s not really obscure. though allegedly no one likes them, they’re selling out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey So, anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and all of these, this is all like, you know, concerts that I downloaded from them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like legally, officially, that are almost all still available, if not all. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not like super rare. You know, I have the collection of like, you know, the various,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, older, usually deceased relatives, you know, videos of grandparents here and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. Even my dad, you know, my dad died in 1984. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was two. I barely remember him. And when you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco die in 1984, there’s not a lot of like media captured from you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, I mean, all I have of him is like a few pictures, and I think there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there was like a two or three second, he’s in the background of like one video, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this whole side of the family had like one video taken at like some big party once
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that was it. I have no idea anything about like what he was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, like the way, like if you see somebody like in a video, you could see like the kind of person they are, you could see a little bit of their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco personality, I don’t really have that with him. What I do have though is one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tape of one concert concert that he, on the side, he was a musician, and he played
⏹️ ▶️ Marco guitar and sang with people, and nothing that anybody would have heard of,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing big, he just kind of played some local stuff, mostly cover songs and stuff, but I have one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cassette tape of him singing. And he isn’t even on every song, it’s like him and two other guys,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but he’s on like four songs. And a while back I finally got to digitize that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a pretty reasonable way, and it’s a terrible, I mean it’s just like, this was not recorded professional gear. This was recorded on like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a cassette recorder that was stuck like probably on the at the foot of the stage of the bar they were singing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in. Like if this was not a professional deal at all and the tape was then kept like in a dusty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shelf for the next 20 years until I could finally get it and digitize it. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a capture of that. Not even again not a good capture but I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have that and it’s all warped and warbly and everything but I have something and And that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, considering how little I have of him, that’s significant.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey That’s so cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then besides the, you know, family and sentimental stuff and the massive amount of fish as we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just mentioned, the other category of kind of like precious media files I have are things that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are not available at all anymore. And a lot of this is just due to like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crappy like DRM or rights changes over time. So like one example is I have this cool,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this fun like crash test dummies live performance that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, I mean, geez, I, I must’ve bought it in 2006 from the iTunes music
⏹️ ▶️ Marco store. And every time the iTunes music store would advance in some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way, it would like, you know, drop DRM or it would, you know, add things like iTunes match.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This album was never eligible for it. And so it’s still DRM’d,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco locked down. It’s no longer even in the iTunes store to even go look for it to rebuy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it or anything like that. Like it’s you can’t you can’t stream it. You can’t iTunes match it. And I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I think like three or four albums that have this kind of status in my collection of of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just like through whatever rights changes over time have happened. No one seems to have the rights
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to sell or give this to me anymore. And so my one copy that is DRM
⏹️ ▶️ Marco locked to like iTunes is old DRM system is all I have of it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, there are a few things like that that are just kind of, you know, these weird
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little relics of DRM past.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, you know, it’s funny you bring that up. I don’t think I told this story on the show. Maybe I didn’t. I apologize.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But this past Christmas, I had a real hankering for my Guilty Pleasure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Christmas album, which was recommended to me actually from a friend that I made on Tumblr
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of all places. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of that website, Marco, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco it’s really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cool. A little bit, yeah. And anyway, it’s a Family Force 5 Christmas pageant, which by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any reasonable metric is a truly terrible Christmas album, but I just have such an affinity for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it and I love it just so darn much and I was looking everywhere for it because it fell off of Spotify
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a few years ago, it fell off of the iTunes store if I’m not mistaken, I might have that wrong, but I think that’s correct.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I was looking everywhere for it. I ended up reaching out to the friend that, that pointed me to this originally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and asked him like, Hey, would you mind just like sending it to me? because I couldn’t buy it anywhere. Like I, even physical media
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was, I couldn’t find any, it was ridiculous. And as it turns out, I had a copy of it in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iTunes match. So of all the places I thought to look, my own fricking music library,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t look in and it was there all along. And I think I’d bought it off iTunes when it was available
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then. And I just never, I never did anything with her. I never
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thought to look there and I feel so stupid because of it. But anyway, that’s another great example of something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I can’t, I mean, I could get back, I’m sure, and I mean, I kind of did by asking a friend, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t really get that back, and that’s another great example, like your Crash Test Dummies album that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really love, and it really bummed me out that I hadn’t been able to hear it for the last couple of years since it fell off Spotify.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, what do you have?
⏹️ ▶️ John All your stories of like digitizing like family tapes and stuff and making you feel guilty, because I have a bunch of tapes that
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m supposed to be digitizing,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and they’re just sitting in a pile somewhere waiting for me to get around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. I will say, by the way, if they’re videotapes, just send them to one of the dedicated services.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s so much easier and better than what you can do yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and I’ve done a bunch of that stuff in the past and have used services for it. The ones I’m talking about now are actually
⏹️ ▶️ John just audiotapes. My mother did this thing where she would like,
⏹️ ▶️ John had, you know the cassette recorder, the long skinny one with the buttons on the front and the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco course. You know
⏹️ ▶️ John talking about? Yep, anyway, she had one of those and she would record, she would
⏹️ ▶️ John start recording and just talk to us kids when we were like, you know, and then just record
⏹️ ▶️ John what it was that we said. And so it’s a bunch of stuff like that. The one, the only one I remember, cause I’d heard a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John times was when she was telling my sister and I that we were going to have a new baby brother. She recorded that
⏹️ ▶️ John whole conversation.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, that’s so delightful.
⏹️ ▶️ John Wow. So that is one of the tapes. I’d have no idea what’s on all the other ones, but anyway, I should digitize those,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that’s not really what this question is about. I think it’s more about like the, you know, obscure media as in like things that are not recordings
⏹️ ▶️ John of your own family or like your family pictures, which of course I have a bazillion of and are very precious.
⏹️ ▶️ John For obscure media, thankfully, most of the stuff that
⏹️ ▶️ John I would have answered this question about is no longer that obscure. For years and years,
⏹️ ▶️ John for example, lots of the extremely famous, the most well-regarded
⏹️ ▶️ John anime movies, like the Miyazaki movies, were actually really hard to get anywhere except on a plastic disc.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that was a shame. Luckily, we don’t live in those days anymore. So back when I had
⏹️ ▶️ John all of them, because I had all the plastic discs and I had ripped all the plastic discs, it was kind of cool to have a
⏹️ ▶️ John digital collection of Studio Ghibli movies. But guess what? Now they’re on streaming services, so you don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John to worry about it, and it’s much better for them to be on streaming services, right? So I’m glad that those things are no longer
⏹️ ▶️ John obscure. Ditto for all the other anime series and stuff. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John so commercial that finally the people who own the rights to them said, you know what? We should just, we can license these to Netflix
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever and don’t just make them available on plastic disc. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the same thing for like, like when I first went to college, I was super excited to be in the city of Boston
⏹️ ▶️ John to be able to go to for the very first time a store that would sell, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John YouTube music that was not actually ever released. Like it’s like fish, but not officially
⏹️ ▶️ John released by YouTube at all. Instead, it’s just recorded from the soundboard somehow and smuggled onto a CDR and you can buy
⏹️ ▶️ John it, right? So I have a bunch of YouTube bootlegs which was super exciting for me to
⏹️ ▶️ John have and would blow people’s mind but like I could pull out different concerts and different live versions of things and tracks that
⏹️ ▶️ John were never released but YouTube is a pretty popular band and that stuff is really easy to find now
⏹️ ▶️ John so it’s not particularly obscure. I think the only thing that still qualifies obscure is the things
⏹️ ▶️ John that aren’t super popular right so I have a lot of video game music in my collection
⏹️ ▶️ John and the video games the music is about or inspired by are not rare at all,
⏹️ ▶️ John but video game music, even in the big music stores, even on the big streaming services, you’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John find 50 versions of a song, but not the one version I have. And I don’t even know where it came from. It was like
⏹️ ▶️ John an MP3 I downloaded in the Napster days from some obscure thing that just went out of print and no one ever bothered.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like again, who knows what the rights are? Maybe they didn’t even license it from Nintendo when they did it, or maybe it was like a
⏹️ ▶️ John college orchestra that did a version of a song. And that’s why I still use iTunes
⏹️ ▶️ John Match because they can’t match that stuff. like, you know, I upload it
⏹️ ▶️ John to the cloud, hopefully they don’t destroy it. And I keep, you know, we talked about keeping your installation
⏹️ ▶️ John going. My iTunes library installation for the most part, the like the official one,
⏹️ ▶️ John if iTunes mismatched something, hopefully they didn’t overwrite the local files. And especially for these obscure
⏹️ ▶️ John ones where iTunes match has no idea what it is. Those are just the original MP3 files from
⏹️ ▶️ John when I got them. And as far as I’m aware, that is the only copy of that song. and I have no idea where I would get
⏹️ ▶️ John a replacement for it. And a lot of them are like, oh, I can find you 20 versions of that song. You can,
⏹️ ▶️ John but not this version. I don’t even know where it’s from because the ID3 tags are screwed up because they probably got it from LimeWire
⏹️ ▶️ John or something. So those are probably my most obscure, most precious files.
⏹️ ▶️ John And although, speaking of iTunes match, the other thing that is annoying me is the one where iTunes does think
⏹️ ▶️ John it can match it. Remember the bad old days when they’re like, oh yeah, I know, I totally have that song. It’s real popular. And it’s like, no, no, you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John got the radio version.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It’s different.
⏹️ ▶️ John That drives me nuts, especially when I find out about it later, playing the song. I’m like, wait, that verse doesn’t sound right. What version
⏹️ ▶️ John of this file is this? Like, even with things like U2 album, like I have all the U2
⏹️ ▶️ John albums on CD, right? Sometimes the digital files, I don’t know, like it’s either the single
⏹️ ▶️ John version or like they did a different version in digital. I’m like, that’s not right. I remember that happened with like Mysterious Ways
⏹️ ▶️ John or something from Octone Baby. I’m like, this file, this digital store sold me this
⏹️ ▶️ John copy of this file. it’s not right. Like they changed the timing of this verse or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John just to make sure I wasn’t crazy. Pull out the CD and put it in back when the Mac had a CD player and a CD player
⏹️ ▶️ John app. And I would play it, I’m like, yeah, it’s different. And then I would re-rip it and put it in there and then fight with iTunes Match about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John So obscurity is some protection of that. And iTunes Match I think is
⏹️ ▶️ John better behaved about that bad stuff now. But it does, speaking of obscure media files I’m glad to have,
⏹️ ▶️ John I actually am kind of glad that I have all those plastic discs. And unlike all my CD-Rs, I hope the
⏹️ ▶️ John actual CDs that were stamped with little pits in them are still readable. So worst case scenario,
⏹️ ▶️ John I could spend a month re-ripping everything because I do actually have all this crap on plastic disc. Except for the obscure
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff that I downloaded from LimeWire. So that needs to not be destroyed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But even all the obscure music piracy stuff from those early Napster, et cetera, days,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have so many great things from those days that were never actually released. And this is one of the problems with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco modern streaming music environments, that you can get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything that’s ever been released, but only everything that’s ever been released. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s not everything. I have so many awesome Weezer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco promos and stuff that were trickling around the early music piracy scene, like when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was in college. That’s how I met my wife, is I offered to give her a CDR full of all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Weezer stuff I had found. It was, you know, that was such a,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There were so many great gems that were passed around that way, and on modern streaming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco services, maybe half of them might be there because the band actually released them, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much of it is not. And so if you happen to have anything like that, or, I mean, heck, my whole world of fish,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of the reason why I don’t use Spotify is that using Spotify as a live fish listener
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is terrible because you have to either try to do, like, I think they do have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feature where you can upload your own stuff, but it sucks. so no one really does.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whereas with Apple Music, it integrates my iTunes library in with the luxuries
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a streaming service with Cloud Sync and everything like that. So that’s one of the reasons why I’m an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Music person. Even I recognize that actually for most music it’s worse. That’s Spotify. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for my particular needs of having this massive collection of songs that are mostly not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco released through major labels, then that actually works a lot better for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just remember the days, I know I’ve told the story a thousand times, but I remember the days sitting in my dorm at Virginia Tech
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and seeing I was downloading an MP3 from somebody else at about a megabyte a second and being like, nope, they’re on campus.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s the good stuff right there. And if I remember right, it’s been so damn long, but if I remember right, then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you could like drill into that particular user’s library and so you could just go like basically leeching
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the stuff you liked from them because it was so darn fast because they were somewhere nearby. Ah, that was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so delightful. All right.
#askatp: App names in your keywords
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then finally, Anonymous writes, is it rude to put another app’s name in your own app search keywords?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Asking for a friend.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to steal your thunder, Marco. I read this Ask ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shortly after I listened to Under the Raider 210, Thinking Like a Business, which I thought covered these sorts of things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really well. But would you like to kind of give your short, short version of this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So putting other apps’ names in your app’s search keywords is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco officially against the rules in the App Store. and it’s kind of a gross thing to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That being said, lots of apps do it, and most of them don’t ever get busted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for it. Because you, as the external viewer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or as the owner of those apps’ names, you can’t necessarily tell for sure what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco search keywords another app has listed. You can search for those keywords and see what turns up, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes you can deduce based on certain operations, like, well, this sure looks like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it probably has my app’s name and its keywords or whatever. But you mostly can’t tell.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s mostly just left to that developer, it’s like between them and Apple, what’s in those keywords.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Apple doesn’t look very consistently. So the result is many apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will put stuff like that, they’ll put all their competitors’ names in their keywords. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not great. Many of the other ones, even if they can’t get in the keywords,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they… I’m sorry, I’ve been sitting on this for so long.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know it’s not nice to talk about your competitors, but I just want, just keep it between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us, you listeners and me here, just don’t tell anybody. Just if you’re an Overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco user, I want you to get the same joy and amusement I have gotten out of reading
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the description for CastBox. I want you to go look up CastBox in the App Store
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and expand that full text description and look at the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bottom two-thirds of what’s in that description and how creatively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have managed to spam the names of all of their competitors and every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco popular search term somebody might be searching for in the App Store into their description in an incredibly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like totally fraudulent way. So this claims to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcasts such as the Overcast by the Seattle Times,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sports podcasts such as MLB Network, the Chicago Audible, the Overcast podcast,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Google Cloud Platform podcasts, the book from Stitcher, Ted and Audible,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Luminary from Luminary.fm, these are Waze and Waze Out Radio, Sirius XM Entertainment.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco These are all allegedly popular podcasts that are available in this app.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is something like this is this is so unabashedly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bad. It’s actually somewhat beautiful and it’s in its badness like oh my gosh
⏹️ ▶️ John me wonder why they didn’t just say this app is a lot like these other popular apps that you may have heard of and then just listed
⏹️ ▶️ John the apps because that at least would be a true it’s like those apps the you know it’s like the
⏹️ ▶️ John related and be just straightforward like I’m sure there are lots of podcasts with the word
⏹️ ▶️ John stitcher and overcast in the titles but you’re You’re not fooling anybody with that litany of podcasts.
⏹️ ▶️ John So just say it. This app is a lot like these other apps
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you may have seen,
⏹️ ▶️ John colon, overcast, Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Audible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I suspect that AppReview would stomp on them for that, but AppReview
⏹️ ▶️ Casey isn’t going to stomp on them for this thinly veiled-
⏹️ ▶️ John But why would, because you’re not putting it in the keywords, you’re just describing your app. And in the course of describing your app,
⏹️ ▶️ John you could say, this app is a lot like these other apps you may have also heard of, which
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. Who knows what the actual rules are? And did you bring this up, Mark, and you say it’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ John against the app store rules? I had no idea it was against the app store rules. Now I’m super mad about, you know. So I have two
⏹️ ▶️ John tiny apps on the Mac app store that sell essentially zero copies. And yet
⏹️ ▶️ John my one or two competitors slash clone apps, not only do they
⏹️ ▶️ John put my app’s name in their keywords or description somewhere, they put my name.
⏹️ ▶️ John What? My last name. If you search for Syracuse, you will find my apps because I’m the developer of them,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’ll also find my quote unquote competitors apps. And I feel like, all right, putting your
⏹️ ▶️ John other apps names in your keywords or description, I thought it was within the
⏹️ ▶️ John rules, but if it’s against the rules, they shouldn’t do that because it’s against the rules. But secondarily, forgetting the rules,
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like I’ll use this word again. I think the last time I used it was when we were talking about Samsung. It is dishonorable,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Yeah, it may not be against the rules. It may be against the world. It may be wise. It may not be wise. It may be smart. It may not
⏹️ ▶️ John be smart, as hell is dishonorable. But at least it’s the app.
⏹️ ▶️ John When you put the author’s name in your keywords, now some person who is searching,
⏹️ ▶️ John I want to go find John’s apps, and they type Syracuse into the search field, you know they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not looking for a generic app that does this function. They’re looking specifically for my
⏹️ ▶️ John apps. And so I feel like you should not put that in the keywords. If they’re just searching for my app because they want an
⏹️ ▶️ John that does what my app does, sure, by all means, do your dishonorable thing and get your
⏹️ ▶️ John app in the mix because how else would they find your app because it’s not a common function. But my last name being in the keywords
⏹️ ▶️ John really burns me up. And for a while, I thought they weren’t gonna let me put my last name in my keywords, but
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the handful of people, thank you very much, who found and bought my apps. They probably found it by searching
⏹️ ▶️ John for my last name rather than searching for my poorly named actual apps.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Which are? I wish,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, you put the links in the show notes. That’s how people buy things. Switch glass and front and center, but just
⏹️ ▶️ John search for Syracuse on the Mac App Store. There’s only two apps. Buy them both, they’re great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I feel like this whole category of dishonorable, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possibly advantageous app store optimization, ASO, which is a term
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that angers me just as much as the web. What was the web version again?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, that’s right. Yeah, it’s the same thing as SEO. There’s a few things that are just good ideas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a bunch of weird tricks that are dishonorable, and hacky and possibly against the rules.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so you should do the things that are the good ideas, but the ones that are in the vague area, you probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shouldn’t do. And this is one area where I don’t care if it gets me 5%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more downloads or whatever. I wanna know that I can sleep at night, and I want there to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be no reason for anyone to ever look at anything I’m doing and say that’s unfair, or that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco against the rules, or they’re getting away with something they shouldn’t get away with. I want no reason for Apple to ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reject my app for anything that’s stupid little stuff like that. I don’t wanna give anybody any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ammo to use against me. I wanna know that I’m doing everything on the up and up and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not having to hide anything, not hoping Apple doesn’t notice something or someone else doesn’t notice something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Stay on the honorable side of things and don’t do this stuff. The reality is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this problem though is never going to actually really be solved unless Apple decides to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dramatically shift its enforcement abilities or the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sophistication of its search engine. And I don’t see those things happening anytime soon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, ExpressVPN, and Flatfile.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join at https://http://http.fm/. Thanks everybody.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John 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 it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into Twitter, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and T. Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, tech podcast so long.
Pupdate
⏹️ ▶️ John I have a question. Shoot. No, it’s not time for your question. Do the one before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t want to talk about that right now. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John very down on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just, it’s just, just do it. It’s not going to be long. We just want, say it with me,
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody, a pup date. Oh yeah. Give us a pup date. What’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t, I don’t want to do a pup date. I’m not feeling good about the pup right now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, come on. What’s, what’s going on? You and Faith are killing me with the puppy sadness. is in the world is going on with
⏹️ ▶️ John both of you? I mean you have less than excuses. You have two kids. You’ve you’ve done this before.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’ve you’ve not with a freaking
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey dog. You’ve been in
⏹️ ▶️ John the sh**, you know? Literally. Yeah, you’re in it now. I mean Faith, I can understand
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’ve never had a kid before and you get a puppy you may not know what you’re in for but you should have known what you’re in for
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and honestly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my god, I love Faith’s dog. It’s so cute. It looks like it looks like Hopster when he was little.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, uh no the pop date is like everything’s fine-ish.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let me put it to you this way. We have started the process of talking to a dog
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trainer that will train us how to train the dog. So, things were going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reasonably okay, and then there were some developments. They were going reasonably okay in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sense of housebreaking because she had been doing really well with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey smacking some bells that we had put on the door that we used to take her out. I don’t recall if I’d
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said this on the show or not. And she’d been doing pretty well with that. And she would maybe have like one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey small accident every day, every other day, something like that, probably every day. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the most part, she would be asking to be let out and she would do her thing and that was that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Over the last week or so, she seems to be less interested
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in bothering to go outside to pee. Thankfully, we have not yet had a number two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inside, but she like was, she looked at me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as she was in the hallway, nowhere near the door where we go out, and I was standing next to her, and she looked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at me, squatted down, and was basically with her face, you could tell she was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just thinking to herself, and now what, asshole? What you got?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John That’s not what she’s thinking. Stop
⏹️ ▶️ John personifying dogs. I guarantee you that’s not what the dog was thinking. Dogs are not little people. They’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John taking revenge on you. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey just like little babies. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know. Like intellectually, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco know that. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chances are, like usually when you’re like in this kind of like, you know, adolescent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phase of housebreaking, most accidents are not the result of willful disobedience. They’re usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the result of confusion.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s not like you have a cat. No, yeah, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco cats would do it willfully. Yeah, yeah. Cats will poop in your shoes because they’re mad at you. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re the worst. But, you know, chances are like she probably is simply just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco confused about where the right places and times are to go. Like that’s, and that’s… But she shouldn’t be because she’s so
⏹️ ▶️ John clearly got it. Or she’s in or she’s in distress. And the bell thing, I’m going to caution you that there’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John lot of anti bell wisdom out there, and I mostly agree with it. But like
⏹️ ▶️ John it just there’s no there’s no super secret trick to training. It’s all about consistency
⏹️ ▶️ John above and beyond the level that a human should be expected to be consistent. Like, that’s what it is. That is the work
⏹️ ▶️ John of how straining your dog is relentless, dispassionate
⏹️ ▶️ John consistency to a degree, to even more of a degree than you had to do with your kids because your kids are smarter
⏹️ ▶️ John than the dog, right? And so
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey they have a little
⏹️ ▶️ John brain and you can eventually like communicate with them and reason that will never happen with a dog. It will never learn
⏹️ ▶️ John to talk, right? So you always have to operate at this level where it’s like, but I don’t want to take
⏹️ ▶️ John it out now. And it just went out and does it really need to go out? And you need to become like hyper attuned
⏹️ ▶️ John to the dog’s needs and schedule, subsuming everything that you want to do in your life to an
⏹️ ▶️ John even greater degree than you did with your kids to super consistently do
⏹️ ▶️ John this thing and power through the years of the dog’s life when it actually can’t physically control
⏹️ ▶️ John this to the degree that you want to get to the other side of it, which honestly isn’t that far. It’s like 18
⏹️ ▶️ John months or 12 months or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey God, don’t tell me
⏹️ ▶️ John that. Probably less. You will get to the other side of it if you’ve been super consistent
⏹️ ▶️ John during that time, you will get to the other side and you’re set for the rest of that dog’s life.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and so to that end, like there was definitely an accident that was my fault. Like she had just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John a big bite. They’re all your fault. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey okay, no, no, no, that’s fair. That’s fair, that’s fair. But
⏹️ ▶️ John you know what I mean. They’re at least all your problem. They’re also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all your fault, because it’s a dog. No, you’re right. I think they are all my fault. But like one particularly egregious time when she had just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey taken like a big nap and she had woken up and I was in the middle of something, Aaron was in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey middle of something, and I thought to myself, you should probably take her out. And I didn’t. Every time I wake
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up from a nap, yep. Wake up or eat. Yep, and so I didn’t. And then she rang the bell And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then I went to walk over to her to take her out. And in the time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was walking the 10 paces over to her, she squatted and peed everywhere. And that was clearly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my fault. Again, like, yes, I know everything’s my fault, but like particularly that time, because she clearly should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have gone out immediately. And I had waited a few minutes to try to test like, oh, let’s see if she’ll tell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us, which took her credit, she did, but she didn’t do it with enough time to actually get her out the
⏹️ ▶️ John No, don’t test your dog and say, let’s see if she’ll tell us. It’s not that it is not what
⏹️ ▶️ John you want to be doing. It’s just relentless consistency of serving the dog’s needs, rewarding for doing what you
⏹️ ▶️ John want, which is they go outside, they get a treat, they come back in just over and over again. To
⏹️ ▶️ John it, it feels it feels maddening. It feels like you’re living your life for your dog. And like I said, even
⏹️ ▶️ John in even more of a way than you did with your infant, which seems impossible if you have kids, it’s like, how could I ever
⏹️ ▶️ John pay more attention? But it’s more of like a mindless, you know, just serving the needs of the dog
⏹️ ▶️ John because the dog cannot serve its own needs. And the reward of that relentless consistency
⏹️ ▶️ John is the dog goes all set. The reward for doing it with your kids is they become rebellious teenagers and hate you. So that’s great. But
⏹️ ▶️ John they do eventually leave the house and get a job and stuff. So it’s pluses and minuses.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and remember, at the end of the day, dogs are tubes. Stuff goes in one end.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It eventually comes out the other end. There’s only so much control that they have over that process, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when they’re this young.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because they don’t choose when they eat, right? And they can’t choose how well they can hold it in when they’re very young
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey So you just have
⏹️ ▶️ John to be taking them out way more than you think and rewarding when they do it and just
⏹️ ▶️ John consistency. And you’re gonna mess up a few times. Not like if you mess up once you’ve ruined it, right? That’s what I wanna say to people. They’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, it’s just like, if you have like, one accident a day is too much. Like you should work on that. But if you, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I remember I put in my Google Calendar, but I could go back and find it. I would put pee events
⏹️ ▶️ John in my Google Calendar at a certain point because when I was, you know, house training Daisy, because I
⏹️ ▶️ John was at the point where I’m like, we’ve been doing this, you know, I was on sabbatical, right? I’ve been dedicated, I was dedicating my whole life to this dog.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like we should be getting on the other side of it. And it would see, we’d go days and days and everything would be fine. And then we’d have
⏹️ ▶️ John a pee accident. And I was, it was so disheartening. And so I started putting events in my calendar just so I could see,
⏹️ ▶️ John is the gap between pee accidents increasing? And guess what? Eventually there was just no more pee accidents ever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that was like years ago, right? So you will get on the other side of it, but it’s disheartening, but it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John consistency, learning what to do. Don’t do things like testing the dog and like, let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John see if they’ll tell me how to get out. Or, you know, the dog needs to learn how to hold it. These are not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s not, I shouldn’t have phrased it that way. What I was trying to figure out is like, is she
⏹️ ▶️ Casey putting this together at all? And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John because I- Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not how the dogs work though. It’s not, there’s not gonna be a light bulb moment where the dog just suddenly figures it out. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just gonna be, it’s just routine. It’s just, they’re just little, they’re just little love machines.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey They just do
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing and you’re gonna program them through repetition. I’m trying to think of it’s like computer stuff where you would like program
⏹️ ▶️ John it by repeatedly doing a thing and like wearing a groove in. That’s what you’re doing with your dog.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and so like that, like the accidents are disheartening and like Aaron said to me just before I came up to record,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the thing that’s frustrating is I felt like we were making progress and then we’ve either plateaued
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or regressed and that’s extremely disheartening. And I probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have unfair and unreasonable expectations, which is part of the reason why we are trying to engage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a dog trainer, which by that I really mean a people trainer. But nevertheless, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very disheartening when I feel like we were making some pretty solid progress, and then all of a sudden
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ve just hit a wall, and that’s too bad. But the real issue that’s really starting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to frustrate me is that it’s like when the kid starts crawling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and suddenly the world is bigger and that’s bad because there’s more world to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screw up. Penny has very consistently learned that she’s capable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of jumping on the couches and we don’t want her to for various reasons. And yes, I know we’re gonna lose that fight,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but she knows full well she’s not supposed to be up there. Like I’m absolutely convinced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey she knows she’s not supposed to be up there, but she does it anyway. which in and of itself is okay, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John You think she knows she’s not supposed to be up there, but what she probably knows is, hey, if you wanna play a fun game where the human chases
⏹️ ▶️ John you, a good way to get that started is to jump on the couch. That’s more likely what the dog knows than,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, I’m not supposed to be on the couch, because the concept of a place where you’re not supposed to go is not communicated
⏹️ ▶️ John in the ways you think it is to a dog.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, there’s the overriding factor, maybe she knows that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco she’s not really supposed to be up there, but then you sit down on the couch, and she really wants to be with you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I totally understand that, but it’s like we clearly prevent her from getting up there when we’re up there, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey she loves to be up there when we are not there.
⏹️ ▶️ John Couches are comfortable.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, they really are. They’re very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey comfortable, yeah. And John, I think your point about getting attention is possibly fair, but we’re certainly not showering good attention
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on her. Not that we’re cursing her out or anything, but it’s clear that this is not,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, it’s clear to a fellow human that’s not what we want. Perhaps it’s not clear to her. Again, engaging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a dog trainer. by that. I mean
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco people trainer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The clarity of communication is so important because like you might be thinking that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are communicating like if she jumps on the couch and you like shoo her off you might think she’s learning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you aren’t allowed on this couch. What she might actually be interpreting from that is they’re mad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at me for some reason. Let me jump up here and visit them and see if I can, like I want to be with them. Let me jump up there. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re mad at me for some
⏹️ ▶️ John more likely this is the best game ever. I want to play this as much as I possibly can. Right, exactly. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John puppies love to play and you know, so that that’s like how it’s distinguished from play
⏹️ ▶️ John in your mind is a distinguished from play in her mind. And on the dog trainer thing like I never actually engaged
⏹️ ▶️ John a dog trainer, but we did a lot of research about it just to tell you that we were it’s kind of like, you know, most of your kids
⏹️ ▶️ John seem like they were better than my hell children, but like at a certain at a certain point
⏹️ ▶️ John at a certain point you start being like is there something wrong with my child slash dog? I need to engage a professional
⏹️ ▶️ John and we did so much research or I did so much research on dog trainers, because we’re in the exact same dark hole that you’re in. It’s like, it
⏹️ ▶️ John seems like it’s never going to work and I’m out of doing wrong. Yep. And it’s, and it’s hard to find
⏹️ ▶️ John good dog trainers because especially with dogs, also with children, but especially with dogs, you will find lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of dog trainers that tell you that you’re essentially need to punish your dog and physically abuse them to maintain
⏹️ ▶️ John dominance and all this other crap. And basically it’s actually hard to find dog trainers that don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John some aspect of that. So if your dog trainer tells you at any point to start choking your dog with something, get a different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dog trainer. No, that’s fair.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Or any of those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird noise things. Yeah, there’s a whole lot of bad advice out there.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, anything that punishes the dog will not work out for you. I sent
⏹️ ▶️ John you the YouTube video Kikopup. That lady does some great dog
⏹️ ▶️ John training stuff and there’s a bunch of other people who do, I forget what they call it, but like positive only training or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John I always show people Kikopup because her dogs essentially will make tea for you. They are the best
⏹️ ▶️ John trained dogs you’ve ever seen in your entire life. the things she has, she’s like does them in competitions and everything like you have
⏹️ ▶️ John like these dogs do things that boggle your mind. And she did every ounce of that training without
⏹️ ▶️ John punishing any of those dogs once. She’s got dogs of all shapes and sizes and all different breeds. So anyone
⏹️ ▶️ John thinks like, well, if you really want to train your dog to behave, you’re going to have to, you know, choke it out sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John like no, you actually don’t and let me show you the best trained dogs the best trained five dogs you’ve ever seen
⏹️ ▶️ John in your entire life doing things that will make your brain explode. Like sitting quietly
⏹️ ▶️ John three feet from the side while another dog is trained and given treats and they don’t move an inch the entire time and
⏹️ ▶️ John standing up on their hind legs and twirling in circles and going between people’s legs. And if that’s all possible
⏹️ ▶️ John with everything from a chihuahua to a sheep dog without any kind of punishing
⏹️ ▶️ John the dog whatsoever, there is no excuse whatsoever except for machismo and
⏹️ ▶️ John toxic masculinity and just general venting of frustration for you to engage in any kind of training
⏹️ ▶️ John that involves, you know, menacing your dog or physically dominating your dog or choking your
⏹️ ▶️ John dog or playing a loud sound that your dog hates or doing anything like that. Just say no.