424: Ethernet Squid

01 Apr 2021

WWDC’s announcement, WatchConnectivity, read-only Twitter apps, Ubiquiti’s trouble, network-switch fashion, and the latest hot news about cryptocurrency.

Episode Description:

• Pre-show:
  • Read-only Tweetbot
  • WatchConnectivity
    • applicationContext
    • userInfo
    • messages
• Follow-up:
  • [More] Tesla wheels of shame
    • Belvedere, CA via Alistair Logie
  • AirPods Max warranty repairs (via Harrison Krebs)
• WWDC 2021 Announced
  • NSRunningApplication Radar Numbers
    • 48190148
    • 25521354
    • 22088473
    • 18980463
    • 21253274
    • 18890642
• New Siri Default Voices
  • Sample Recording
  • Another Sample Recording
• Ubiquiti Breach
  • An aside about cryptocurrency
    • CDO
    • Bitcoin summary
    • But how does Bitcoin actually work?
  • Air gap
  • eero
  • pfSense
    • Their recent “whoopsies”
• John’s Networking Situation
  • Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon
  • AirPort Extreme
  • USW Flex Mini
  • Recurrent laryngeal nerve - Wikipedia
  • Recurrent laryngeal nerve - YouTube
  • Four Nines
• #askatp
  • Should one use a non-administrator user account? (via Michael)
  • How do I mash together 400 video clips into one file? (via Duncan Wilcock)
    • ffmpeg
    • Casey’s primer on ffmpeg
    • In short:
      • Create a file that refers to all 400 file names. Call it, say, files.txt
      • Each line of that file reads file 1.mp4, file 2.mp4, etc. One file per line.
      • Maybe something like this? ffmpeg -f concat -i files.txt -vf scale=4096:2160 three-hour-movie.mp4
  • How does Overcast scrape iTunes? (via Brandon Wees)
    • SOAP
• Post-show:
  • Bell follow-up

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

Chapters

1. WatchConnectivity sucks
2. Read-only Tweetbot
3. WatchConnectivity (still) sucks
4. More Tesla Wheels of Shame 🖼️
5. AirPods Max repair surprise
6. Sponsor: Linode
7. WWDC announced 🖼️
8. Sponsor: HelloFresh (code atp12)
9. Siri voice choice
10. Ubiquiti’s in trouble
11. Cryptocurrency
12. Ubiquiti’s (still) in trouble
13. John’s network switches
14. Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
15. #askatp: Non-admin accounts
16. #askatp: 400 videos into one
17. #askatp: Apple Podcasts API
18. Ending theme
19. Follow-up: 🛎

WatchConnectivity sucks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So Casey, I feel like I should buy you a drink or something because I saw on Twitter earlier

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco today that you are using watch connectivity.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Your new secret app that you haven’t told us about yet.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, W. C. stands for water closet. Yeah, that’s right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Yeah, it does.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It should. It’s that good. So watch activity is the framework with which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you need to use to communicate between a iPhone app and an apple watch app

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and I saw you and James Thompson go going back and forth on Twitter earlier today.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco By the way, I-

Read-only Tweetbot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco This is a good thing to throw in. I’ve actually found a wonderful life hack. The

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco latest version of Tweetbot requires a subscription to fully

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco unlock all of its features. They finally moved from paid up front. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey already know where this is going.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They finally moved from paid up front to like paid once to subscription, which makes total sense. Like it’s it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a I love Tweetbot. It’s a great Twitter app and it makes total sense that they now do have ongoing costs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even more than they did with just you know development, which is its own big thing before. before. So it makes total sense to have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco subscription pricing. I mean, for almost any app these days that doesn’t have any other kind of constant income. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco anyway, so when I installed the new version and it became read only mode

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco until you subscribe and not that I think you shouldn’t subscribe, I think you should. However,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this became an accidental feature for me that now I have by, by

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco inaction, a read only Twitter client on my phone. And I still use it in read

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco right mode paid all the way on my desktop, but on my phone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I have a read only twitter client and it’s kind of amazing. Yeah, I’ll think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, oh, I should I should reply to that and oh well, then I subscribe. I like wait a minute. I’ve been loving

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco read only twitter and so I just haven’t subscribed only because I actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco love being forced not to engage. I’m like, oh, this is actually better for me that I post less

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and react less to things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It’s so funny you say that because I love the TweetBot guys, I love TweetBot, it is one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of my favorite and most used apps and when they went subscription

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and when they, I don’t know if they like turned off subscribing on the beta or something like that, but basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey when I needed to have the real live app.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, that’s how I discovered it. That’s right, because they had the beta and it was like with test

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco flight betas, you can make like test purchases, but they don’t, they’re not actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco real and they expire in a really short time and everything. But I’ve had such bad luck in the past with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco test flight sandbox purchases resulting in some kind of bug where like, I get random

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pop-up dialogues all the time on my phone saying, hey, resubscribe sandbox environment and having to reenter your store

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco password and everything, store gets a buggy mess. And so I’m like, all right, I’m not gonna subscribe to this during the test flight because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t want to mess up my sandbox purchase environment with test purchases. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I just never subscribed. And that’s how I discovered, like, oh, this is actually really nice.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, so what had happened for me was I had subscribed for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey free during the test flight, and then the test flight ended, and I don’t remember if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I went to the release version or if the test flight, like maybe their own servers, like wouldn’t bless a subscription

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or something. One way or another, I wasn’t subscribed then. And at this point, I had not paid them

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey any money. And so that’s fair that I hadn’t been subscribed. But I noticed, wait a second,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I kind of miss being able to fave things because I like to use, you know, hard to fave whatever is like a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey very simple, like, yep, thanks, or I see you, or ha ha, I get it, you know, rather than

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey having to reply to a tweet. And I really miss that. And that was it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So, but I did end up subscribing just like a week or two ago and I don’t know how long

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the new tweet pod has been out. I feel like it’s been at least a month, probably closer to two

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} months. Yeah, something like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that. And I only subscribed like a week ago, and I echo everything you said, Marco. Like, I’m not trying to say you shouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey subscribe. It’s a wonderful, wonderful app. And what got me to subscribe was that I kept

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the official Twitter app on my phone, which is hot garbage. It is not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey meant for me. Like, I shouldn’t say it’s hot garbage. It is not meant for me is a better way of phrasing it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, no, it’s also garbage. Don’t worry. You don’t need to candy coat this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey one. Yeah, por que no los dos, right? But it, it, I would use

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the official Twitter app when I really, really, really wanted to reply to something, but it was more

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the like hearts and, and things like that, that I miss, or like DMS, for example,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that I really wanted tweet bot for then, then it was replying. And now that you say that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I almost wonder if the tweet bot folks could engage some sort of like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey almost read only mode where maybe you could like throw somebody a fave, but that was it, you couldn’t do anything else.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kind of like that it prevents me from, because I’ve also had the same habit, like I’ll throw a fav

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on things as kind of like a acknowledgement or thank you, but most people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco who I interact with or who follow me, I think there’s a higher than average chance they’re using a third party Twitter

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco client, and if you use a third party Twitter client, depending on how you have it set up, but generally speaking, you don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco usually get notified on favs, because third party APIs until very recently

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco didn’t have a good way to like stream those in and be notified all the time. And so I have a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco feeling like my faves don’t really mean what I think they mean and almost no one sees

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco them in practice. And so it’s almost like well if you’re going to actually want

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to give somebody feedback, you should give them real feedback in like with a reply or something. And so I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in practice faves are fairly useless and so you might as well not have the ability

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to leave them because then you feel like you’re leaving feedback when in In many cases, the people will never see it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And that’s completely fair. But it’s so funny hearing you describe this because I went through the exact same adventure

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey myself. And it was my utter disgust with the official Twitter app that got me to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey pay for it. That sounds bad. I really, really love TweetBot. This is not an ad. I don’t think they’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ever, ever, ever paid us to do anything on this show. I really, really do love it. I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey trying to imply anything else. But I do agree that this was a feature, not a bug in a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey lot of ways. So yeah, I totally hear you.

WatchConnectivity (still) sucks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey To come back to the actual point you were trying to make, yes, I am working on something very slowly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I feel like I have like an analog and a half worth of content about how slowly I’ve been

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey working on this app. And I’m actually, we don’t need to pull in this thread right now, but I’m really, really frustrated

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and kind of disgusted with myself at how long it’s been taking me because it’s really not a very complicated app.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And it really has been taking me entirely too long to get it out the door. But nevertheless,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey one of the things I am realizing is that even a very, very, very simple app,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if you want to include a widget, if you want to include a watch app, if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey want to include a watch complication, it’s, and I know this is not something novel or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey new, but it is stunning the amount of stuff you have to manage and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the amount of code you have to write in order to make all of those things happen. And Marco,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you more than probably anyone would know exactly what all this is about. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey even for an app like this, which I don’t particularly want to talk about what it is right now, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s supposed to say it’s very, very, very, very simple. The simplest app I’ve worked on yet. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey nonetheless, I’d like to have a widget, I would like to have a very basic watch app, I would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like to have a watch complication. Even using all the modern stuff, it’s all SwiftUI,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s all combined where appropriate. Even using all the modern stuff, it is still

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey an astronomical amount of work to get all of these moving parts put together. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m really going to try hard not to go on a rant because I’ve done this too often lately, but it is very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey frustrating to go digging through Apple’s documentation, which for watch connectivity

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is at least passable, which for Apple is a big compliment. It’s passable documentation,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but in the case of watch connectivity, which is what they they call sending data back and forth between the watch and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the iOS app, there are several different mechanisms by which you can do it, which in and of itself,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that’s fine. I don’t have a problem with that. And there’s different trade-offs between each of these

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey different mechanisms, which here again, okay, that’s fine. But what they don’t do a particularly great job of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is telling you, well, if you’re doing this sort of thing, this is what you want to use. If you’re doing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that sort of thing, use the other thing. If you’re doing this third thing, you should look over

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey there and they kind of like get a little vaguely in that direction. But in the documentation that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I saw, I never really found a good clear document,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a more high level document as to, when you’re doing this, choose that. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this feels like the sort of thing that has probably been covered in a WWDC session at some point, but- It

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey hasn’t. Okay, nevermind.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} I can tell you the answer though right

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco now. Do you wanna know the answer right now? I would love to. Okay, never use application context,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s unreliable.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, that’s what I was gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} use. Oh, this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is good news,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco okay. You can use the message passing interface

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco where it’s like send message with a dictionary and you can put arbitrary info in the dictionary. That works great.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Now, but slow down though because there’s two different mechanisms for this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} There’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey user info, which is not real time. And then there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what they actually call messages, which is the watch app is actively running as we speak

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and you are actively sending a message back and forth while both the watch and iPhone apps are running. So are you talking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey about that? Or are you talking about this user info thing where it’s, ah, it’ll get there eventually?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, that. And the other method is file transfers, which never work. So basically, you can’t use

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco file transfers because they don’t work reliably. You can’t use application context. It doesn’t work reliably.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The only one that works reliably is when both apps are running, the one where they communicate with dictionaries back

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and forth, user info dictionaries. That being said, there’s size limits to what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can put in there. Underscore found that I think it’s something like 65, 64K, something like that. In that ballpark.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} then the watch app,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when it sends a message to the phone app, the watch app is able to wake up the phone app with one of those messages,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but not vice versa. The

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} phone app can’t wake up

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} watch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco app. Yep, yep, yep. So this is why like this, the entire watch connectivity framework

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and its real world performance and pitfalls and unreliability

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is one of the biggest reasons why I’ve had so many problems developing watch apps for Overcast

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco over the years. And it’s one of the biggest reasons why the current watch app,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which was like recently rewritten, as we discussed, is mostly avoiding

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco watch connectivity and trying to communicate mostly over the internet, over my sync servers instead.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Because anything you can do to avoid watch connectivity will be better for your mental health.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Sorry. So you’re saying, have you played with transfer user info? Because there’s application context,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which you’ve already spoken about. Then there’s user info, which seems to be to be maybe intended to be slightly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey closer to real time question. Oh no, I’m sorry. No, I have that wrong. I think application context is supposed to be closer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to real to see this is what I’m talking about. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} still hard

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco tell. And if you read the documentation, it says like, Oh, use application context as basically like a,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a persistent version of those back and forth really reliable dictionaries so that if one of the apps

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco isn’t running, it’ll pick up the latest

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} application

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco context, which by the way is only one way. It only goes from phone to watch, not vice versa.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco There’s so many little exceptions and gotchas. So yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco try to minimize how much you rely on this framework and the functionality of the phone app talking to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the watch app, because any amount of this that you do, you’re gonna regret.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Super. I knew this was my future, but it’s so frustrating. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey actually, if you, the listener, have had experience with this and have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey anecdata that you would like to share with me, I would be happy to accept it via Twitter. Please don’t clog

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey my email. Via Twitter, at Casey Liss. Don’t bother Marco. Don’t bother John. They didn’t ask for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this. I’m asking for this. I would love to hear your experience because, yeah, I was going to,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey after having spoken to James Thompson in front of the show, I was going to go down the application context route, but if you’re telling

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey me that’s unreliable and buggy, then ugh. And to be fair, the only thing I’m really trying to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey transfer is something itty bitty, which is basically like, how can I describe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this while still being general? You can make one of 15 or 20 choices within the app.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I basically need to know which choice did you make and what numeral is associated with that choice. And gentlemen,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I can tell you about it after the show. But suffice to say, it’s basically a class name

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and an integer, and that’s all I need to send. So in that sense, I’m not worried about data, their size limits or anything like that, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that doesn’t necessarily negate your point that it’s just straight up unreliable to go back and forth. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey unsurprising but frustrating. So yeah, documentation. Some

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey higher level documentation would be really, really nice. Like some flow chart or table.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey If you’re trying to do this at such and such a speed, use this. If you’re trying to transfer a file,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey get screwed because you’re not going to end up anywhere happy. I don’t know, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey frustrating. I just want, all I want at WWDC, which we’ll talk about later, all I want, please, please,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey can we have better documentation, please, please. And yes, in the chat room,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey from everything I’ve gathered, Marco is exactly right, that going through the internet, through

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the internet, is faster than using watch connectivity, and certainly more reliable if

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco faster. Maybe not, well, it can be faster sometimes. The Apple Watch by default

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco tries to transfer as much as possible over Bluetooth instead of Wi-Fi, because Bluetooth is much lower

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco power consuming. Bluetooth though, it is lower power, but it’s also way slower. And that’s why for file

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco transfers, downloading a file directly from the internet, which will usually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco prefer a wifi connection, is faster than transferring the file from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the phone to the watch over the same network. It’s a whole thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But the main reason thing, the big reason is the reliability. Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if the watch tries to talk to the phone, it’s hard to really know whether that communication channel

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is open and reliable and fast and not clogged with junk, as opposed to like the internet, you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just make the connection directly with the same APIs that you make any other connection with from iOS and it just works.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Neat. Although background transfers don’t, background downloads rather, have significantly more restrictions

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on the watch and are even less reliable. That’s a lot of fun too.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, to say that I’m not too worried about for me anyway, but for you, oh, that does not sound fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, there’s basically no way to make an Apple Watch podcast

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco app that downloads episodes locally that works well for everyone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Cool. I’ve tried every way to do it. I’ve seen other apps that do it various different ways. Every

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco single app has a large number of five-star reviews saying this new method works great,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and a large number of one-star reviews saying they changed it and now it doesn’t work for me. and there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all sorts of conditions and problems and it’s just a nightmare. So try

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to avoid making an iOS podcast app for many reasons like competing with me, but also

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco try to avoid needing a watch app local downloads because it’s no fun.

More Tesla Wheels of Shame

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, let’s cheer each other up a little bit. Let’s talk about the Tesla Wheel of Shame stencil

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey edition, and in fact, other editions as well. So we have had

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey listeners from around the world tell us and send us photographic evidence of all the different kinds of Tesla

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey demarcations and graffiti that they found. John, since you’ve been so quiet recently, would you like to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey take us on a tour? Would you prefer me to do that?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Actually, I had some things to say about your Twitter client stuff, but you went on so long we probably shouldn’t belabor it, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’ll just add this. It’s a good thing we have this podcast because Marco would have loved to have told you these things on Twitter,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but he couldn’t reply. You had to get advice from James Thompson

⏹️ ▶️ ^John instead. Yeah, and someone in the chat room, I miss this when it went by

⏹️ ▶️ ^John before, had a good suggestion for your app or a guess of what your app might be. Tweet a view or read

⏹️ ▶️ ^John only Twitter clients so people like Marco can’t mess things up. There you go. Fear gold. All right, those

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are my two Twitter things. But yeah, back to the wheels of shame, the important stuff. I promise this will be the last time. I know we’ve had wheels

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of shame on like three shows in a row, whatever. They’re just funny and they come with pictures, so I find them appealing. And I understand this is a podcast

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and you don’t get to see the pictures except the ones that Marco makes the show art, but we will describe them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for you. So the first one is the aforementioned stencil one. We mentioned it on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the last show, it looks like a neat stencil. This particular one we’re seeing the stencils on, it looks like someone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cut a hole in a piece of cardboard and used a can of spray paint through it. And they’re very, very tiny stencils, just a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John little Tesla T on the spokes. I guess that’s a deterrent. It doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John look as bad as the other sloppy. It looks like someone, like a kid, like if you’re trying to like decorate your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John BMX bike or something, you like spray painted some stencils on it. It’s clear that you were trying to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do something neat, but your skills aren’t really up to it. The next one is from San Francisco. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like the style of this one. It is haphazard red spray paint, but only on half the wheel. And no one would do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that on purpose. So that’s definitely a look people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wouldn’t want on their car.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Something about San Francisco is haphazard.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No. Yeah. Then there’s one from Belvedere, California, where the people who run- This one is great. The people who run this service

⏹️ ▶️ ^John obviously could not deal with the idea of making the wheel ugly. So they tried to do as neat a job

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as possible. And they took like, what is it? Like a 30 degree slight pie wedge out of it. Basically one spoke.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, it’s making the Tesla

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey logo, basically.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s really, I actually like this one a lot. It’s very clever. Me

⏹️ ▶️ ^John too. Yeah. people the style in cars these days is not to have asymmetrical

⏹️ ▶️ ^John coloring on your wheels but this has one spoke and the surrounding area is making a little t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in red and it looks pretty neatly done i don’t know of any car maker that makes wheels like this on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John purpose so i think it would still encourage you to swap it for the real one but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John uh kudos to the person who just couldn’t stand to look sloppy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey no i i love this one so much and this was sent in by alistair logi and and it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the The caption was pizza slice in Belvedere, California, which this is kind of what that looks like.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Not only does it look like a pizza slice, but it looks like the Tesla logo. I love this one. I really think this one’s great.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, it’s very clever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And then finally, we have one from the Bay Area from 2016. This may, does this predate the spray

⏹️ ▶️ ^John paint? When was your first spray paint job, Marko? 2019. All right, so maybe they hadn’t come

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on this spray paint technique. This one does have a tiny little Tesla logo.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It looks like it could even be a sticker on like the inside rim of the wheel. And I think that one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John probably wouldn’t encourage people to return it because it’s just too small and too subtle. But those were

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the before times, before they had the technology of haphazardly spray painting something. So thank

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you everybody from across the world for sending us your ugly Tesla wheels. We will treasure these photos forever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Something like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, we’ll laugh at them for a few minutes. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that’s more accurate. But Marco won’t be sending you any hearts, I can tell you that right now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oh, that was my other

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} comment

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the Twitter client thing. Oh, okay,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} go ahead.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Not to belabor something that I’m sure you all know, but if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John want to not reply to tweets, you can do that for free in any Twitter client. You don’t have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to have a client that literally stops you from doing it. I understand that having the software

⏹️ ▶️ ^John help you is good, but at the point where you’re wishing for a mode in an application that will let you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fave and not reply, that’s the point when I say it’s time for you to invoke some tiny degree of self-control.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Never.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey What is that?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} understand what those

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey words mean.

AirPods Max repair surprise

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh goodness. All right. So Harrison Krebs wrote us this missive with regard to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a genuinely frustrating story about AirPods Max warranty repairs. Generally speaking,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t like to give too much attention to these sorts of things because we are not here to be everyone’s crusaders.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m sorry. However, this is a good public service announcement. So in summary,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Harrison went and did a warranty repair on bricked AirPods Max. But when he got

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey them back, they didn’t include his is ear cushions, which is not desirable at all. So apparently

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s Apple’s policy to remove the ear cushions and not send them back after a repair,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which Harrison didn’t know. And apparently the Apple store employee was supposed to tell Harrison that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and just kind of didn’t. So this is a public service announcement for everyone. If you’re sending in your AirPods

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Max for warranty repairs, hey, guess what? You’re gonna wanna take those ear cups off.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Or at least ask the person at the store about it because who knows if this is a universal policy or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but just FYI, it’s a good thing to know because Apple Store employees are people too. Maybe they forgot

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to tell you, maybe that person didn’t even know they weren’t gonna come back. I actually kind of understand the policy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of not sending you back your things. I think they should come back with brand new ones

⏹️ ▶️ ^John rather than just taking your old ones and giving them back. But either way, since they come off so easily,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if the Apple Store employee had just said, oh, by the way, you’ll wanna take these home because our policy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is not to send them back, that would have solved the problem. and I assume that Harrison contacted

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Apple store again and said, hey, WTF and got new, you know, ear pads to replace it because it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was the store’s fault. They didn’t tell them they would be gone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, and this is actually fairly consistent with Apple’s other repair methods.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Whenever you send anything in to Apple for repair, they don’t want any accessories that go with it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And we don’t think of ear pads as accessories to headphones. You kind of can’t use it without them, but like for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple repair parlance, like if you send a watch in for repair, you remove the strap first or they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco do it for you and they hand it back to you. If you send in a laptop, you don’t send the power cord. It is consistent with that. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s I don’t consider this like this outrageous thing. How dare they, you know, not send your ear cups back. It’s simply like, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the store person messed up and you know that happens, you know, human error. And yeah, as a John said, I’m sure they I’m sure,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, talking to the store people. I’m sure they resolved it. But the policy is something that you might not expect

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because you don’t think of headphone ear pads as an accessory that you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just pop off whenever you want to. But here we are.

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WWDC announced

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right. So I have good news and bad news for everyone, especially the two of you. Uh, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey going to be WWDC this year, which is great, but not in person, which at least for Marco

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and me, I think is bad news. John, I know you’re just devastated that you don’t have to travel to California

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this year for the second consecutive year. Gosh, when was the last time we all saw each other? Was it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey WWDC in 2019? Yeah, maybe.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Anyway, there was no question about the WWDC wasn’t gonna be in person. I think we all knew it was going to be remote,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but it’s been announced. They announced the dates. Interestingly, like, I mean, I guess it doesn’t really matter because whatever, it’s remote.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And it’s, by the way, it’s also free, like it was last year, right? So it’s all online. Anybody can do it, right? And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they announced the dates, but they didn’t do anything else, really. I mean, maybe there’s nothing else to do. Did they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have us register last year? I don’t remember.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} I don’t remember. No,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there was no, like, user input, basically.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah. So it’s just free to everybody. Here it is. It’s here again. The only thing we collectively had to look

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at was the little invitation graphics, which people got a little bit obsessed with as we do. I mean, they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not, it’s not an invitation. It’s just a, you know, I don’t know, PR image. Uh, and this year

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s a bunch of, how does Apple say it? They say Memoji or Memoji. They say Memoji, right? I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco believe it varies by presenter, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yes. And I think it was officially Memoji and I used to jokingly call it Memoji. And And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey then I think Tim at some point said Memoji and I felt like I could claim victory at that point.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah. Anyway, anyway, it’s got a bunch of those faces looking into a laptop

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s slowly opening in the same way that Craig Fitterigi did in the M1 video, like with all those memes of cracking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John open the M1 laptop and having the light shine in his face. And what people got obsessed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with in this thing is the fact that all of the people who are opening the laptop, but it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kind of from the same angle as the Craig thing, they’re all wearing glasses. And everyone’s like, oh, glasses.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John How could they all be wearing glasses? What are the odds of that? Apple glasses, AR glasses, so on and so forth. And then reflected in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John glasses are the images of various iOS-style application icons,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which doesn’t make a lot of sense. But I guess Xcode’s in there, too.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a bunch of application icons reflected in the glasses, which handily explains

⏹️ ▶️ ^John why everybody has glasses, because you can’t have things reflected in people’s glasses without glasses. You could reflect them in their gigantic

⏹️ ▶️ ^John eyeballs, because Memoji have giant eyes because they’re very cartoony.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I feel like what no one was talking about, except for maybe one person I saw on Twitter, had some part of this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The glasses don’t have any. What are they called? Temples, right? Temple sticks,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} sticks, no sticks.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} at least some

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the glasses do not have temples. They virtually float, not touching any part of the person’s face

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because it’s a stylized representation and it’s not literal. So anyway, that’s all we’ve got to go

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on. I don’t think this says anything one way or the other about Apple glasses. We all know they’re working on AR

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stuff. Is this the year they announced it? If it is, I don’t think this image has anything to do with it because all of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John rumors, especially since all the rumors about AR stuff have not been about the imminent release

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of things that look like glasses people would wear. They’ve been more like the semi-imminent in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John next year or two release of a giant VR headset that looks like an Oculus, but weighs a lot less or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Anyway, so I read nothing into this other than the fact that you need glasses to have reflections and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s about it. Every time there’s an Apple event people always try to read into the art and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the and like Usually if if there’s some kind of like obvious pun with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the name of a special event That usually is relevant to the products But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the artwork chosen is almost never relevant and for something like WBDC where

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} no

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s it’s relevant and it’s relevant in an obvious way It’s not relevant in a sneaky way. When the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John art is relevant, it’s relevant in like, like one of them was like the little rotating silver apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that had like a Mac OS behind it or something. And it was because they were going to talk about Mac OS.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And like, like whatever the most obvious, and this one, the most obvious interpretation is, hey, they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John playing on the Craig peeking into the laptop from the M1 meme, right? I would assume

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} so, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And that’s true. That’s absolutely true. That’s what they’re doing, right? But you don’t need to go hunting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John then. Okay, well, that seems too obvious. What else could it be? Right? So,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know. And that’s not to say they’re not gonna do the AR thing because that AR like goggle thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John seems like it’s actually getting close to being a product. If they decide to release it at all, it seems like the tech might be ready

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not to release the product, but to at your developer conference, tell everybody, hey, in eight months,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’re gonna potentially release this thing. So start developing now, here are all the new APIs. Like that could happen.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But if that happens, this advertising campaign has probably nothing to do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with it. And if it has anything to do with it, it is the most tangential sly nod.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John There’s even the possibility that if the AR thing is not coming out until three years from now, they would still put glasses on everybody because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’ve been working on this glasses stuff internally for ages. So it’s kind of cheeky to say, I know that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know that we’ve been working on glasses. So here, everyone has glasses. But anyway, here are our announcements for this year.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, and the only thing that they’ve kind of announced, at least obliquely, is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey they said, this year’s conference will include announcements from the keynote and State of the Union stages, online sessions, one-to-one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey labs offering technical guidance, and new ways for developers to interact with Apple engineers and designers to learn about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the latest frameworks and technologies. That is all we know. It could be something totally

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey silly and lame, but maybe it isn’t, and I’m curious to see what that means.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I forgot about that. That was the, you know, I think it was what I was getting at with the announcement is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no one was forcing them to announce this now since no one’s gonna be traveling. It’s not like you need to make plans and you don’t need to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John register and you don’t need to do anything else. But then why have an announcement without concrete

⏹️ ▶️ ^John information about certain things? Like they still wanna have a tease aspect of it. So it’s like, we’ve come up with a new way

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for you to do stuff with us somehow, but we’re not gonna tell you yet. Maybe they haven’t figured

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it out yet, but plenty of time to figure it out. But I think it is important

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if Apple continues to do these this way to try to recapture some of the things that are good

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about being there in person. Maybe they’ll have a clubhouse. Or everyone will just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John join.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco As if we’ll still care about clubhouse by June.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Didn’t they do last, it wasn’t last WEC, didn’t they do WebEx? I thought so for labs,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yeah. And that is so reflective of Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John non-hipness when it comes to internet stuff that they would use. It’s not, is it the bottom of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John barrel corporate teleconferencing software? Probably close. I think I’ve used them all.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Maybe Link, L-Y-N-C is the bottom of the barrel. I don’t know if that’s still made, that Microsoft

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} product. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not just sucked into Skype now or no?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Yeah, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t know. But anyway, WebEx is not. It certainly is sucked. WebEx is not cool.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John WebEx isn’t cool, WebEx isn’t hip, WebEx is a bad app. WebEx destroys your laptop’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John battery. Presumably the only reason Apple’s using it is because Apple has no replacement

⏹️ ▶️ ^John themselves because they have, remember when it was like iChat where you do iChat with multiple people and share a document? They don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have that anymore. And because presumably it’s what they use internally

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for Apple corporate stuff, but boy, what a shame. That is a terrible application, and it’s in general

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a terrible experience to do labs through WebEx. If Apple had

⏹️ ▶️ ^John its own cool application that does the type of thing that WebEx

⏹️ ▶️ ^John does and Skype does and Slack does and Teams does and I don’t know, name every

⏹️ ▶️ ^John other app that lets you do multi-person teleconferences. I’m sure they would use it instead, but they don’t.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So it’s WebEx. So that makes me wonder what like, oh, we have a cool new way for you to interact with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John engineers. Is it still WebEx? Like, now we’re using Microsoft Teams.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s a cool new way. Anyway, I look forward to see what it is.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, and before everyone writes us, yes, we are aware that FaceTime video exists, but to the best of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey my knowledge, you can’t do like screen sharing or anything like that on FaceTime. So that doesn’t really work for this particular

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey context.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Count yourself lucky if you don’t know what problem these apps are solving, because they solve a problem

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that most individual people don’t have. But if you work for a business and have been working from home, especially in a company

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that normally doesn’t work from home, you know the problem they solve, which is essentially, how do I have meetings

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when not in person? And meetings don’t just involve people talking to each other and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John seeing each other. meetings always involve presenting things and sharing documents and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all that good stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, I mean, I’m excited to see what’s announced. I’m excited to see what a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey second cut at an online conference is. I’m really sad.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Okay, so COVID notwithstanding, there’s no freaking chance if it was in person that I would be going this year. But leaving that aside,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m sad not to be seeing you guys. I’m sad not to be seeing, you know, other friends that typically went,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m sad not to be doing a live show. I know that the John really, COVID-19 is John’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey fault because this is the length that John is willing to go to, to avoid doing a live WWDC. It was all down to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey him. It wasn’t anything from, from overseas. It wasn’t a bat. It wasn’t a lab. It was John

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Syracuse. It was his fault. So you can blame him, uh, all because he doesn’t like ATP live shows. Um,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but nevertheless, I am sad to be missing out on that. I, I really hope

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that next year, if it’s safe, that they bring everyone back in. I am

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey super skeptical. I think, I think honestly, if they were to do an in-person

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey anything for WWDC, I think they would bring press in for like the keynote and then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey maybe that would be it. I would love for them to do an old school style WWDC. And certainly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I just noticed as we were talking that at the tail end of their announcement they said to support the local economy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey even while WWDC 21 is hosted online and as part of its 100 million dollar racial equity

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and justice initiative Apple is also committing 1 million dollars to SJ Aspires an education equity initiative

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey launched by the city of San Jose. So they’re still pouring some amount of money into San Jose

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which implies to me that they hope one day it’ll come back but I don’t know we’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey see. Marco 2022 what’s what do you think is gonna happen you think it’ll be in person somewhat

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in person not all in person, what’s your guess?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s a good question. I mean, this year, yeah, I had no doubt this year would be remote as well, because even

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco though the U.S. is doing a pretty impressive job at the speed of our

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco vaccinations being deployed out, it is, after all, a worldwide conference, not a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco U.S.-only conference. Many people come from other countries, and the rate of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco vaccinations worldwide is not as fast as it’s happening in the U.S., unfortunately, for lots of

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} reasons.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Or is there other countries that don’t have the problem that we have at all and wouldn’t want to come to the US because they have zero

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cases?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, very true. So anyway, so it makes total sense this year. I have a feeling that next

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco year, live events like this will be happening on a regular basis and it won’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, you know, there’s some question, you know, you know, when we will get quote back to normal

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in most ways. And I think we’re gonna see a lot of that this summer and fall. But I think by

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco next summer, it’s going to be, we’re going to be pretty back to normal. I don’t think that’s a that’s an unreasonable

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bet to make at this point.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John An interesting thing about what they’ve done with the live thing last year is that they in the lead up to that and all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the you know, the quote unquote normal years before COVID, they slowly essentially made

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the free real time online for everybody version of WWDC by simply

⏹️ ▶️ ^John broadcasting the sessions as they air live to everybody for free without needing to register. Right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That, you know, obviously, when they, you know, last year, they recorded them ahead of time. And there’s a very

⏹️ ▶️ ^John different vibe from a recorded ahead of time produced video than a live one. But practically speaking, if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just want the information and you don’t want to pay anything and you don’t want to travel, Apple was already there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So if they go back to in person, which again, you know, I buy the deal that giving money to San Jose,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like what is Apple just going to perpetually give money to San Jose every year just out of, you know, good memories? It seems like they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John still want to have a relationship with the city, which probably means they’re gonna go back to in person,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and they’ll go back to, you know, it’s like, well, why not keep the online thing for everybody? Well, they were already

⏹️ ▶️ ^John doing that, essentially. The only difference is there’s no way for online people to get on a WebEx with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an Apple engineer. And in that respect, like, whatever the capacity is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for Apple to, for Apple engineers to interact with people, if that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John capacity is saturated by the in-person people pay money and go to San

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Jose, maybe there’s none left for WebEx meetings. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I wouldn’t say that you should take time away from the people who paid to be there because they pay all that money and traveled and so they should

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get something for that. But it does seem more equitable to essentially

⏹️ ▶️ ^John raffle off lottery worldwide for anybody who attends for free like they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John were doing like they did last year. It

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} wasn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wasn’t it some kind of like slots are open and it’s just a lottery and you just if you want help you file in. There was no preferential

⏹️ ▶️ ^John system, right? For admission? For labs? For labs,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey yeah. Oh, for labs. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco don’t know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I didn’t do any. Uh, yeah, I, no, did I do, I don’t think I did any last year. I’m not sure, to be honest with

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} you.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But anyway, like, that’s the tension that Apple has here. There’s a limited capacity, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John only so many Apple engineers, right? And so there’s a limited capacity of help they can give. Who should they give that help

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to? Should it be a random distribution of all developers with no barriers to entry other than having an internet connection like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it was last year? Or should it be for the people who could afford to pay the high entrance fee

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and travel to WWDC to get that help, right? I don’t know. It’s not a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John clear-cut answer there. Maybe you could say the people who are there in person, some portion

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the help will go to the people who are there in person. And when you do get one in person, you get the benefit of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John person-to-person interaction instead of doing it through WebEx. But some portion should be given to people who couldn’t attend

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because otherwise it’s not a particularly equitable distribution of Apple’s limited amount of help.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I thought I had heard rumblings last year, the first virtual year, that they actually had way more

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey labs bandwidth, and poor choice of words, way more labs availability than they did takers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on people who wanted to go to the labs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I saw that. I remember at the end of last year, they’re like, hey, we’ve got labs open if anybody wants them. I mean, maybe it’s like that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in person too, towards the tail end of the week. I don’t partake of the labs, so I don’t know what the experience

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is like, but if there is excess capacity, that argues even more strongly for like, give all the access

⏹️ ▶️ ^John capacity to people online, right? So have people there in person, and if there’s no person takers,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John certainly, you know, it’s like, everything is like COVID vaccines. So you’ve got leftover vaccines, just give them to whoever wants them,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? Tell, just call Casey up so he can yell at you about documentation for an hour.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, that sounds perfect. Sign me up. I will yell at anyone at Apple about documentation.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You’re yelling at the wrong people. Don’t yell at the developers. That’s true. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco well, sometimes you yell at the developers, not for documentation, But there is a lot of value in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco going to the labs and finding the one engineer who’s there for your kind of obscure API.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And if you have some kind of question or request, you can actually just tell them. And it actually can get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you somewhere.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} I would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John actually love to do that. I would love to find the, this is the problem. This is the problem

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in my real company, in my real job, and I imagine in many jobs, and also

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the case of the one thing that I would want to talk to Apple engineers about. Ownership. Who

⏹️ ▶️ ^John owns this part of the thingy? Who owns this API? Who owns this framework? Who owns this application? And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John very often the depressing answer in large corporations is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} I don’t know. Oh no, that’s not true at

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Apple. That’s a bad situation. That’s not true at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple. Apple has different failure modes. Like, nobody right now is. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} what I’m saying.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s what I mean by I don’t know. Not like, oh, just this person doesn’t have the knowledge. That the company collectively

⏹️ ▶️ ^John does not know. Yes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Because if the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John application, If the application or framework is not broken, and it’s an older thing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it’s in between the purview of two possible groups, right? Now you think, of course they have to know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John What about when someone files a bug? Whose queue does that go into? Obviously, every company knows who owns everything. I can tell you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from experience, that is not true. What happens is, there may be a queue for those

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things, but then different parts of the organization fight over who really owns it, because nobody wants that crap in their queue for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John real, so it just ends up being like a shoving contest of like, I’m not taking this bug. Oh, it’s not my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing. Well, it’s not your thing, but let’s not look at, look at this. This is my charter of my scrum team. I don’t know. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just, it is never ending, right? So for parts of the OS, like the one or two APIs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that I need to work for Switch Glass and front and center that apparently nobody owns and nobody cares about because they don’t work reliably.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Who owns that? That probably hasn’t changed in like literally a decade. Try to find the group. Oh, it’s probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^John CoreOS, the catch all group. And then CoreOS is like, uh-uh, don’t try to hoist that on us. We don’t do anything with that. We haven’t touched that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in years. It’s fine. There’s no showstopper bugs. ones get that out of my face. Anyway, I just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John want like two API’s to work reliably. Because like the only two API’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my simple little apps use, and they don’t and I’m sad.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} I’m so sorry, John.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So my understanding of how Apple works internally, which granted is, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey hearsay upon hearsay, but for things that matter, and I think this is maybe where the differences between

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you and me for things that matter. There is and it’s so funny talking to to people at Apple because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey just like in government contracting, everything is just acronym soup. There’s the ABC and the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey QRS and the TUV and the WIZ and half the time if I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} talking to somebody- DRI, you’re looking for the DRI. Exactly right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So that’s exactly what I was driving toward is there’s the DRI, the directly responsible individual. And my understanding,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey again, hearsay, is that there is one person that may be an engineer,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey may be a product or project manager or project owner. I forget what the term is they use internally, but basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey one person that the buck stops there. And for anything that matters, my understanding is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey there really is a directly responsible individual for anything that they care about. But, John,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to your point a moment ago, perhaps the things that you care about are not the things that they care

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey about, and maybe there isn’t a DRI for that sort of thing. Or alternatively, there’s a DRI, but they really just could not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey care less about your particular problem.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s probably what it is. And speaking of that, I should just clear this out, because it’s been in our potential

⏹️ ▶️ ^John after show topics in ages, so I’ll just finish clearing this out. So the one of the APIs that I’m talking about,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maybe I’ll leave some more infield, but one of them is the API for NS running applications,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which is a very old API that probably is from the next days that in theory tells you information about all the applications that are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John running. And you can imagine I would need that information for switch glass and potentially also for front and center, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And this application was described by a very well known and experienced

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mac platform developer as the worst API on the Mac. And I was told this before I began my work

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and after I started working on those apps, I think that person may be right. And this is a person who has been working on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Mac for literal decades. So when they say the worst API on the Mac, they’re not just like a new developer who tried something.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t want to name names because this person didn’t tell me, but anyway, this is a very experienced Mac developer calling us the worst API

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the Mac. And I will put in the show notes, the radar numbers, the one, two, three, four, five,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John six radar numbers I got thrown at me from this person when this person was telling me about the API, to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John say, this is the worst API I’ve been filing. These are radars, not feedbacks, because it was before the feedbacker.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John These bugs have been there for who knows how many years. They’re never getting fixed. And all the bugs that I was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John finding with it, I doubt they’re ever gonna fix too. So if you are inside Apple and you think you know who owns

⏹️ ▶️ ^John NS running application and API that no one cares about and that it works well enough that no one needs to care about,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John here’s six radar numbers, none of which are from me. Six radar numbers that you can look at And then you can decide

⏹️ ▶️ ^John once again that they’re not important enough to fix.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m so sorry, John. I really honestly am. I really, really honestly am. I don’t know what’s worse

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey actually. And I go back and forth. Is it worse to have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey something that a lot of people rely on like watch connectivity

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} that they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey just really don’t care to fix or is it worse to have something that nobody

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey else cares about? So you care that much more, but they still don’t care to

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} fix.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And actually, let me throw in my thing here, too, because I think that is an interesting example

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of what you just described. The one API that I want to work, well, there’s a bunch of APIs that do this. But the thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I want to accomplish on the Mac that is currently impossible to accomplish in a reliable way

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is to tell an application to bring all of its windows forward. It seems like an important feature

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the two applications that I make. and there are multiple APIs to do that. I haven’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tried the accessibility APIs because you have to ask for accessibility permission to do that, and maybe I could do it manually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that way, but this is another thing about sandboxing the Mac App Store. I haven’t been willing to go

⏹️ ▶️ ^John over the hurdle to say, I’m going to request accessibility access because it’s like, you want to let this app

⏹️ ▶️ ^John read all your keystrokes and record your screen and people flip out, and rightly so, right? I don’t want that access.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I just want to say one thing, hey app, bring all your windows to the front. And again, there are multiple APIs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do that, and zero of them work reliably. They work about 98, 99% of the time, but then they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just stop working, and there’s no error conditioning, there’s no log messages, and the only recourse is to quit the app

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or sometimes restart your computer. And what do my dinky little

⏹️ ▶️ ^John apps do? One really important thing they do is ask applications to bring all their windows to the front, and when that stops

⏹️ ▶️ ^John working, it’s sad. I even hacked in a little thing where you can switch

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which API my app is using to do that. Like you can like cycle through them,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John say, did that API work? Try this one, try that one, try that one. None of them work. When it stops working, it stops working for good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I feel like even though that’s a bug that no one cares about, if you’re going to hit any APIs on the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that say, hey app, bring all your windows to the front, I don’t understand how

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that can ever stop working or be unreliable. Cause I feel like the window server should

⏹️ ▶️ ^John own the window layering policy to some degree. It should be able to say, look app, I don’t care

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what you’re doing. I don’t need any interaction with you whatsoever. I, the Windows server, own your windows

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and I put them on the screen and I composite them and everything. So I’m simply going to bring as the Windows server all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your windows to the front. You don’t even need to be running. You could be hung in an infinite loop because this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is Mac OS X and not classic Mac OS. I don’t care if you’re hung app, I’m bringing all your windows to the front.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But no, no API does that reliably. It makes me very sad.

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Siri voice choice

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So we heard some breaking news earlier today, I believe, that Apple has added

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey two brand new Siri voices that will no longer default to a female voice in the latest version of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey iOS, which is now in beta. This is, I think, from TechCrunch. I’m not really sure what the source

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is here, but Apple is adding two new voices to Siri’s English offerings and eliminating the default, quote, female voice, quote, selection

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in the latest beta version of iOS. This means that every person setting up Siri will choose a voice for themselves and it will no longer default

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to the voice assistant being female. Seems good. I haven’t heard it yet. I think there’s a sample

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey out there, but I just haven’t had a chance to hear it. But it sounds good to me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, like what’s nice about this is, you know, like throughout

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco our history as a society of trying to give people more rights, equal treatment, trying to,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, clamp down on stereotypes and, you know, misogyny and stuff like that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the more weird old assumptions that we can break,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco generally the better things are. Culturally in America, most robot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco voice assistant things, whether you’re hearing it on a phone menu or something like that, have been female.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And that assumption isn’t true everywhere. In the UK, they’re usually male. It’s just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco different in different places. But it’s this assumption that we’ve had for forever in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco our society. like, oh, like the assistant voice should be female. And that’s based

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on some pretty terrible assumptions of general reversals and everything over time. And so what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple’s doing here is effectively breaking that assumption and making you choose which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco style of voice you want to hear as your Siri assistant, not just assuming and making a default

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco saying, okay, in America, it’s always gonna be a female voice, in the UK, it’s always gonna be a male voice, like breaking that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco assumption now. And that’s generally a good thing, I think.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, and there’s a, I don’t know if this was Siri related, but there was a couple of links going around a few weeks ago about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, why do computer voice assistants have to be gendered at all or binary

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gendered at all? Like a computer doesn’t have, like all this is just to make people feel more comfortable, right? Oh, it’s a little person inside

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a computer. Well, of course we know it’s not actually a person, but it makes us feel comfortable and interact with something that sounds like a person.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But there’s no reason that you need to just pick, oh, it’s male-ish sounding, meaning a deeper voice or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John female-ish sounding. And so there was a bunch of voice assistants demos, maybe it was from Microsoft, I don’t know, someone will

⏹️ ▶️ ^John probably find the link, if not this week, then by next week, showing essentially, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John non-binary gendered voices. And I thought they were pretty amazing. Like, why shouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your computer sound like that? And the idea of giving

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you a choice and making you select, now, people may just end up selecting according to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the stew, the cultural stew that they’ve brought up in, and maybe most Americans will pick female for exactly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the same reason that the default was unthinkingly female, or you know what I mean? It’s just like, again, the culture of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John traditional gender roles in your particular country. And what Apple’s trying to do is not perpetuate

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that by just saying, oh, yeah, no, we’re just going to pick the thing that we think you’re comfortable with already, right? They’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not stopping you from picking whatever you’re comfortable with. And maybe the ratio of people picking one or the other will be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John exactly the same. And you could even get down to the point of like, OK, well, what order are the options going to be in? because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the sort of cultural hegemony of the assistant is female

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the assistant is subservient to, is the service worker or whatever, is so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John big in this country and probably in the world that if they put the female option first,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that will cause it to be selected even more because that’s what people expect. So it seems to me that they should actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have to randomize the options to give all of us a fighting chance to not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John succumb to our default programming. This is like the version of the tyranny of the defaults we talk about, where

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like in your application, whatever you set as the default for some preference, almost everyone’s going

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to go with that because most people don’t care enough about that option or aren’t even aware that it could be in an option

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to dig into your preferences and find the setting for it. In fact, they might complain that your program doesn’t do this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing that it does. That’s the tyranny of the defaults. And tyranny of defaults has an analog in real

⏹️ ▶️ ^John life, which is just like society and culture. And when you grow up in it, you don’t think that there, You might not even

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think that there is a child. Well, that’s just the way things are. Secretaries are women. How do I know that? Everybody knows that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Haven’t you seen TV and movies and the entire culture of the entire world that I’ve spent my entire life in? Of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John course secretaries are women. And nurses are women and doctors are men. And like, you know, unthinkingly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John adhering to these stereotypes. And so when some people see this, they’re like, oh, changing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the voice on Siri. Congratulations. I’m sure that will help women everywhere. Every little bit, Every

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one of these things is one tiny, you know, one tiny pebble

⏹️ ▶️ ^John taken off a pile. It doesn’t fix the world, but if you don’t do this, then everyone will just continue

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to assume, oh, well, my assistant has to be female because assistants are females just like secretaries and nurses, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So I applaud this move. I don’t quite know why it took so long. I also don’t understand

⏹️ ▶️ ^John why the default was male in the UK and female in the US for so long because it seems like there was some

⏹️ ▶️ ^John understanding within Apple that these cultural differences mean things,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but like, why not take the next step and say, but yeah, should we, should it be our position at Apple to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John unthinkingly perpetuate them or to serve them? Or should we instead do what we can to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John try to make things again, more equitable by just letting the user pick

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from a randomly ordered selection of choices. And I’ll be excited if they throw in a few non-binary

⏹️ ▶️ ^John choices there too, because I think they sound cool.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yep, agreed. And I found a couple of examples, mostly thanks to the chat room, of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey recordings of these that you can listen to after the fact. All right.

Ubiquiti’s in trouble

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Last week we had an Ask ATP with regard to how we would set up networking in a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey fantasy, you know, new house or something like that. And Marco, as you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey want to do, recommended something that you really like. And you had some caveats and some gotchas about it, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you had said in the past, up until about a year ago, Ubiquiti, which is a manufacturer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of Unify stuff, you’ve had really, you have had really good experiences with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey them up until semi recently. And then you had kind of self backpedaled, if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey will, a little bit last week to say, well, it used to be much better than it is now. I’m not so sure.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Is that fair? So far?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, basically, you know, I’ve been using ubiquity stuff for many, many years for my home networking.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And it’s been rock solid for the most part, for I mean, geez, I’m maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco six, seven years, I’ve been using it for a long time. But that the the latest

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hardware from them bit the the ubiquity dream machine router series. It seems like the Wi-Fi

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco access points are all still fine, but the Dream Machine router and the software that goes with it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco seems unreliable and they keep moving the software forward in very aggressive ways.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And in ways that they seem to have adopted a move fast and break things attitude,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which is not generally what you want from your router. You kind of want your router to be old

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and boring and you know, just work well and not break anything for reasons.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So that culture might have come back to bite them slightly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, so there was a breach that happened, I guess, late last year,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and Ubiquity seems to have admitted to it to a degree. I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey they said some third-party cloud provider had had a breach that’s associated with them. And I believe that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey pretty much all they said. Well, there was an article that we’ll put in the show notes a whistleblower reached

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey out to them and they called the whistleblower Adam.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And the whistleblower said it was considerably bigger than Ubiquiti’s leading on. So I’m gonna try

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to grab just a few quotes from here. In reality, this is from the article, in reality, Adam said the attackers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey had gained administrative access to Ubiquiti servers at Amazon’s cloud service, which secures the underlying server

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey hardware and software that requires the cloud tenant or client to secure access to any data stored there. Adam says

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that the attackers had gained access to privileged credentials that were previously stored in the last pass account of a Ubiquiti

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey IT employee and gained root administrator access to all Ubiquiti AWS accounts,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey including all S3 data buckets, all application logs, all databases, all user database credentials

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and secrets required to forge single sign-on cookies. I could go on and on actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey about this. Supposedly they were threatened, they were threatened, the attackers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey wanted $2.8 million in order to keep quiet. And so they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey actually wanted it, of course, in Bitcoin. And I had assumed, oh, that must be like 1,000 Bitcoin. Oh, no. $2.8 million apparently

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at the time of writing was 50 Bitcoin, which is just preposterous to me. Please

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey don’t email me. I don’t care about Bitcoin. But anyway, I just thought that was fun.

Cryptocurrency

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, can we pause on that for one moment? People occasionally request that we talk

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco about the world of cryptocurrency. I could not possibly care less about the world of cryptocurrency.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I have very little knowledge of it, but it’s mainly I just have no interest. And there seems to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be, like, there’s a lot of people out there who absolutely are super into it, super involved,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco super interested. I almost feel like it’s a different world of tech than the world that we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco live in. And while there might be a very small amount of overlap, I don’t think it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco much more than that. And it’s like people who are super into stock trading and stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like it’s a different form of financial gambling and instruments and everything. And I just couldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco care less about that stuff. I have no interest in it. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it seems like there’s so much there to know that if you’re gonna be into it, you gotta be really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco into it. Or you have to not be into all the stuff I’m into in order to even have time to keep up with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it and to do it correctly and well and everything. And so all of you out

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there, if whatever portion of our audience is interested in that, I’m sorry,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m really not. And so I’m never gonna wanna talk about it. And that’s just, there’s a lot that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we don’t cover on the show because tech is a very big world. And for me, it’s gotta be,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the whole world of cryptocurrency is part of that. I just have no knowledge and no interest

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco about it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, kind of like the financial instruments that you mentioned before, despite the fact that you have no

⏹️ ▶️ ^John interest in it, unfortunately, like the stock market and various financial instruments, it does potentially

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have an effect on your life, if you remember 2008, for example. So lots of times, things that we don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have any interest in, it just seemed like there were a bunch of people playing in a world that doesn’t affect us, when

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it starts to get into the financial system, when they mess up real bad, it can affect us. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s one of those things where even if you don’t actually know anything about it, it would behoove you to know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John enough about it to know what side you’re on and what you want to lobby for and who you might want

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to vote for in elections and so on and so forth, respect to cryptocurrency, just like the financial system, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’d have no interest in whatsoever, but has in my very short lifetime affected me in very profound ways already

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and all of us. So we can’t just let the people over there play

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with their stocks and collateralized debt obligations and everything. reason I even know what a collateralized

⏹️ ▶️ ^John debt obligation is, is because of the 2008 financial crash, right? I didn’t know about what any of those things are, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John boy, eventually we all had to know, kind of like we all had to know about like viruses and stuff and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with the COVID thing. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not that having some foundational baseline knowledge of cryptocurrency is probably going to save us, but it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John probably better to know something a little sooner rather than to just read about it after

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the world is totally destroyed by people mining for Bitcoin

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, and the small amount of opinion I do have about it is not positive,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because I am familiar with the general idea of how it works. I am also familiar

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with the immense amount of energy consumption it’s causing around the world.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s all free energy that no one was using, Marco.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it was going to waste. if it wasn’t for bit coin, that energy would just be falling on the floor and rotting. Do you not want people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to use that energy?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco God anyway before we get it, I mean believe me, you think tesla people are bad, but the email

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} this now crypto

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cards of you don’t listen to the show

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} anyway. No, it’s so sure

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s a yes like to me like that whole world. It’s like like I love computers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for what we used to use computers for like what used to be the only thing we use computers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for is like messing around like making documents and images and audio and video and and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, sending things back and forth, communicating back and forth with each other. And this seems like, hey,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what if we used computers to generate this entire financial world of complex financial instruments? And I’m like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco okay, I you’ve lost me now. You’re what you’re really talking about is finance

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it doesn’t have that much to do with the computers anymore. And that’s that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that goes well beyond my interest or knowledge. And again, and the little bit I do know about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it really rubs me the wrong way, from lots of reasons. From the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco attitude of a lot of the people in that world, which it does seem like a lot of them come from the world of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco finance and stuff like that, which is not my scene at all, as well as the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco environmental issues it causes. And it just seems, and just the attitude

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of like, the presumption that this is going to take over everything and that all of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco us simpletons using fiat currency are somehow like wrong

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} or old dinosaurs. And it’s like-

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You know enough of the vocabulary to know the terms that you wouldn’t otherwise have any reason

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to know. So it’s getting to you.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean, literally everything about it that I know rubs me the wrong way with the sole exception that I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco think the technological concept of how it works is interesting technologically,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but that’s where my, Like that’s where the positive feelings I have about it end.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I predict we will talk about it, yes, even more than we are now. In a future episode, at some point

⏹️ ▶️ ^John related to the NFT stuff, but not

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} this week. Are we still talking about those? And I wish

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not this week. And I wish I could find, we should end by saying me trying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to find the originator of this amazing tweet that I still, this is the problem with the internet. I can’t tell who originated

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this tweet because people could just be copying and pasting it or whatever. It was the explanation of Bitcoin from 2018, potentially

⏹️ ▶️ ^John by the person who will link in the show notes that says, you all know what Bitcoin is? Imagine if keeping your car

⏹️ ▶️ ^John idling 24-7 produced solve-sudokus you could trade for heroin.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} I know, I’ve said that before. It’s pretty good. You have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to know a lot of Bitcoin to understand how every part of that sentence makes sense. But it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John also depressingly accurate.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, and you know, I haven’t had a chance to weigh in. I’ll be very brief. I agree with almost everything Marco

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey said. If it wasn’t for the fact that this is accelerating the heat death of the universe, I would probably be far

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey more interested in it. Just a month or so ago, I went, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey didn’t do a deep dive, but I started looking into, because I did not understand how it worked at all. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey there was a really good video on YouTube that’s almost half an hour, but it’s excellent. And it’s by 3Blue1Brown,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and I’d never heard of this channel before. We’ll link it in the show notes. If you want to know from a nerd’s perspective,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but yet approachable from a non-nerd’s perspective, how does this actually work? I really, really recommend it because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it helped me understand, even after having read many, many things about it, it wasn’t until I watched this video that I was like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey oh, okay, I got it. And yeah, I agree with you, Marco. Like, not only is the scene not for me,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and not only does everyone seem to think much in the same way of Tesla people, that they are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the one true people that really understand, and all you sheeple just don’t get it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey blah, blah, blah. It’s exactly. It’s just like Tesla people. Oh, you idiots

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey with your internal combustion engines, blowing up dinosaurs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oh, let’s say more, more charitably, when people are tech enthusiasts, as we are, it’s easy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to get excited about a new technology. We are often excited about new technologies. I certainly am,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? It just so happens that sometimes some of those new technologies that people get excited about and form communities

⏹️ ▶️ ^John around have, let’s say, externalities that turn other people off.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Even Tesla, which is doing a good thing. Electric cars, yay, right? That’s good, right? And yeah, it is.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But maybe when the fans get a little bit too enthusiastic and too excited about defending

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the thing that they are a fan of, that gets a little bit toxic. But in the case of things like Bitcoin or other,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, anything where there is exciting technology, and like you said,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Casey, some of the ideas behind Bitcoin are very clever and interesting and worth pursuing, kind of get overshadowed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John by the reality of, okay, but then what changes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is this actually causing to happen in the world, and how do I feel about those changes as someone who isn’t enthusiastic about this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John technology. And that’s where people end up getting conflict.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah. So anyway, it is worth checking out. If you listen to the show, if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you enjoy the show, it is likely that you have enough of a nerd’s brain, and I mean that in a complimentary way,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that you would enjoy reading up on this and learning about it. And like I said, this 26 minute and 20

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey second video really helped me anyway understand how it works. All right, all that behind us at least for now.

Ubiquiti’s (still) in trouble

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So yeah, apparently Ubiquiti really kind of screwed up. Back

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to Ubiquiti. Yeah, back to Ubiquiti. Speaking of screw-ups,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} hey-o!

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Are they using all of our routers to mine for Bitcoin? What’s going

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} on? Maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that’s it! It all comes full circle, guys. It all comes full circle.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You don’t need to start that rumor on the show. That is not true.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, yeah, God, please no. But no, all kidding and snark aside, this is some stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Like, this seems to me, and gosh, it’s been a long time since I’ve really run anything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey server-side. So Marco, jump in on, or actually both of you jump in and correct me, but it seems to me like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a lot of this stuff was kind of amateur hour and that they really should have known better than to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey make a lot of these mistakes. And golly, if you’re already in a position where some of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey your most, you know, diehard supporters like Marco, and again, and I mean that in a complimentary way,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you know, you had said for years, Marco, this stuff is the best. Yeah, it’s expensive, but it’s the best. It’s so good, blah, blah, blah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And you had already been backpedaling some as of literally a week ago, and now, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey yikes, I don’t know if I wanna go anywhere near this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean, here’s the thing, I mean, we don’t know that much about this yet, and honestly, I don’t follow

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this world very closely normally. So, it’s hard to expect

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco any company to be perfect all the time. Sure. Something like, you know, Ubiquiti, they mostly serve,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or they mostly sell, like, networking gear to companies. So they have to be expected

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to have pretty good security, because their devices are kind of assumed to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have good security themselves because they’re being brought into serious businesses and places where there’s high stakes if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco their devices are compromised. So it is important, it’s like a server vendor,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it is important that they are trustworthy and that they are viewed as following pretty good security

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco practices. It is also important that they communicate

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco clearly when there is a problem or when there is a breach. And in this case,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can argue whether they should’ve had this breach at all. And I don’t know enough about it to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know what was involved, how, if they were practicing reasonably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco secure and responsible practices beforehand, I don’t know. What I do know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is that if this accusation is true, again, that’s a big if,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because you have to wonder, could this be some kind of stock manipulation

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco scheme? They’re a public company, I think, right? Oh yeah, they are, right? Yeah, so like, it could be some kind of weird thing like that, we don’t actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know if this accusation is true or not, but if it is true, what it points

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to is, I don’t think anything like super damning about their security practices,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but it does point to a pretty big problem that they might have like underrepresented

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or lied about a pretty substantial breach. That is worrisome if that is true.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But that being said, what this means for me And for people out there who have Ubiquiti gear,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s one of those moments that gives you pause about some of the features that we have enabled on these

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco routers and stuff, and some of the abilities they have, and whether we should enable them or not. So for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco instance, on my Ubiquiti stuff, I have auto updates turned on. I have it, whenever

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there’s a software update, I have it installed at a certain time and automatically reboot if it has to at a certain time that won’t disrupt things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know, when something like this happens, you realize, oh, maybe I shouldn’t have auto update on, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if somebody compromises their update channel and has the ability to arbitrarily

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sign any updates they want as valid and push them out to all customers, well, that could be pretty

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bad for me. On the other hand, maybe I do want automatic updates because that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco lets them patch security holes faster as they’re found, right? So there’s stuff to consider there. There’s also

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the entire model of Ubiquiti’s routers and stuff, I don’t know if people who don’t have them,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they probably don’t know about this kind of stuff. There’s a whole bunch of remote management

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and cloud-based features of Ubiquiti stuff. So you don’t just have a router

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco running in your house that you log into at like 192.168.1.1 anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That is there still, but you can sign into it from anywhere if you have that enabled and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can manage things centrally with like your central Ubiquiti account where you’re actually not just signing into your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco router, you’re signing into like Ubiquiti as their single sign-on thing for like their service and then you can access

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco your stuff through their service from anywhere. You can have all this cloud-based everything about your local network and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco its management. So maybe we don’t need to enable those features as home users. Maybe like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’ve been using that because it’s convenient sometimes, but something like this makes me question,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco do I really need that? Maybe I should be like just setting it up once and then just turning off

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco auto updates and turning off remote stuff and only updating it manually like once a year

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when I think about it and when I feel like it and then going to check, you know. Maybe I should go back to a system like that, which used to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the way I would always do things on routers because it didn’t really matter most of the time. You know, I don’t usually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco enable remote management of anything on my home network because I don’t usually need it. So maybe I should

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco go back to something like that. And I think this kind of breach should make all Ubiquiti customers ask these questions of themselves.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And then finally, if you’re able to, this probably also should remind you to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco maybe, maybe not assume that your internal network is secure

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco by default. And that might change like what kind of services you offer locally inside your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco network. Uh, whether you, whether you have passwords on things like file shares or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not, I’ve always just had passwords on stuff because I’ve always kind of assumed like, well, if you know, if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco some, you know, kid comes over with their weird, you know, Nissan switch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or iPad or whatever, and I give them our wifi password, I don’t have a VLAN set up or anything like that. I’m, I don’t get that complicated.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like what if their device gets hacked or they share the password and then other people can get on my Wi-Fi

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco network, you know, I don’t need to know that every single device on my network is always going to be trusted and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco secured because all the things I run inside my network. I assume to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco requiring some base level of security requiring passwords and user accounts and stuff like that, you know, so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it would be a good idea to also revisit those kind of assumptions for people who are looking at this and getting worried. like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if somebody has access to something running on your network, what do they have access to?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And if you can minimize that, that’s probably a good idea because even if you run

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco some other router and this problem doesn’t apply to you, we live in a world full of like internet

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of things, crap devices and everything. And it’s only a matter of time before something

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on your network gets hacked by somebody and has some kind of vulnerability that doesn’t get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco patched or whatever. And so something, something hostile will be on your Wi-Fi network eventually. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this is this is a good way to kind of like think about what the risks there are and think about how

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you want how you want to manage those. And then again going back to Ubiquiti thinking about with with Ubiquiti stuff like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco do you want to enable auto updating and do you want remote access? And I think the answer here

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is going to for a lot of people is now going to be maybe not.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think this gets to the heart of what you were saying before about communication from the company because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know like I said that people get hacked all the time. It’s a thing that happens,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, like it’s essentially unavoidable. If someone wants to target you and wants

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to get in, they probably will get in. Like I think history has shown that there is no such thing as an invulnerable,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John completely secure anything that is on any kind of network, right? Which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is why real security, you know, requests as they say air gap, although there’s all sorts of crazy academic

⏹️ ▶️ ^John papers that will show you that even an air gap isn’t sufficient to protect you. But anyway, the whole point is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stuff happens, as they say. But in that kind of environment,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of course you wanna have auto updates on because that is your best defense against exploits

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because exploits are discovered and then they are patched. Then their new ones are discovered and then those are patched then other new ones are discovered and they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John patched. And if you opt out of that patching cycle or do it at a much less frequent

⏹️ ▶️ ^John time interval, like a month or a year, instead of as soon as the patch is available, you are vulnerable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for longer. But then we run into the ubiquity problem, which is not so much that, oh, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the signing certificates got stolen and someone can put an update as them, it’s that we don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Because ubiquity, according to the story, has not been upfront about it. What you want is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John truthful communication from the company to tell you, if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they had told you, hey, our stuff was stolen and people can sign things as us, everybody turn off your auto updates

⏹️ ▶️ ^John now. And then the company would later tell you, okay, we’ve issued new certificates Redone everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John now apply this patch manually and re-enable That’s what you’re looking for like the trust

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the company is the is the thing that is damaged here Not so much again assuming it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John true Not so much the breach itself because if you have trust in the company You would know which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John actions to take because you would just ask the company. Hey, what should I do? Should I have auto it’s on or not? But now Marco’s in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a situation of like well I don’t know whether I should have them on or not because I don’t even know if this is the thing that happened or or not,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because if the story is true, then ubiquity is withholding information. That’s making me not trust them. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if I don’t trust them, should I turn on auto-updates or should I not turn them on? I don’t know what to do. And that like, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know, it’s probably some business one-on-one lesson or whatever. Like, again, stuff is going to happen in your business that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bad. It’s how you handle it that, you know, within reason, obviously if you’re running

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a store and it burns to the ground and you have no insurance, how you handle it isn’t that important. But in situations

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like this, How you handle it is a big factor in how your company comes out of this. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I really hope either parts of this story are true or Ubiquiti at least comes clean at this point.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So its customers know what they should do going forward, including knowing whether they should just buy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John new networking equipment.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, and to answer everyone’s questions about like, what do I recommend now that Ubiquiti has a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco problem? The answer is, I don’t know. I haven’t, you know, we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have things like, you know, previous sponsor, Eero. I’ve used those before, like in vacation situations,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stuff like that, and they’ve been fine. But this kind of world, like almost

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco everything has downsides somewhere in the chain or like parties

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that you have to trust if you’re gonna use it. You can go the kind of home brewed route and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco set up like, you know, like one of those, like PF Sense things, but those sometimes have problems too. Like did,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think they just had a problem recently. So like there’s all sorts of gotchas with a lot of this stuff. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think, again, a reasonable way to approach it is probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to keep things pretty simple. And if you wanna be conservative about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the security and stuff on your network, don’t do things that have remote

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco access. Don’t do things that are based on web services. Have things that are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more local and local only, where you are taking a more active role in their management,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or there isn’t much to manage because they’re so simple and local. I think that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the general way to go. And that’s probably where I’m gonna be heading with my stuff as well.

John’s network switches

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So, interestingly and totally unrelated to this ubiquity thing, I have been

⏹️ ▶️ ^John doing some thinking and purchasing related to my home network because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in this year, I’m not going to say this year of working from home because honestly I was working from home a lot even before the COVID

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stuff, but in this last year I’ve had much more occasion to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be on, you know, Teams, basically Microsoft Teams, teleconference meetings

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all day long, right? And every once in a while,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it always seemed to be during like an important teams meeting, right? With

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where I’m either I’m giving an important presentation or I’m talking with my bosses or whatever. Uh, I would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lose internet briefly and then it would come back and it happened like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it happened one particularly memorable time. And I was like, if this happens again, I’m, I’m fixing everything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} And of course it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John didn’t happen again for months. I’m like, oh, well, whatever that was, you don’t have to worry about it. But then and it happened again and I’m like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John okay, this might, maybe this happens all the time and I just only notice when I’m in the middle

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of an important meeting, like, cause it, you know, it just goes out briefly but then comes back, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And what it looks like from my networking perspective is it looked the same as back in the bad old days when my ISP

⏹️ ▶️ ^John would like, you know, go down for a second or lose an IP address, but it also might

⏹️ ▶️ ^John look similar to a router rebooting itself because it crashed. I have no way to tell because one of the routers I’m using,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I can’t figure out how to get the logs from it unless I do like SNMP or whatever and I don’t wanna deal with that. But the whole point

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is, is one of these problems that’s, it’s like testing my resolve by saying,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m only gonna happen, I’m gonna happen in an infuriating time, but then it won’t happen again for months, but then it’ll happen again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but then it won’t happen again for months. But now it happened again today and I’m like, you know what, this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is not just whatever it’s called, like a selection effect, not selection effect, what is it when someone mentions something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and then you start seeing it everywhere?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh yes, yes, yes, I can’t think of it then.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Merlin is yelling it right now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, exactly. Whatever that phenomenon is. I’m like, it’s not just that. Because yes, there was one

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} particularly very,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Bader-Meinhof. Oh, there it is. There it is. Anyway. It was one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John particular really bad time it happened, but then like nothing for a while. But now, normally what I should do is start logging

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it. Let me just write down what happens to prove to myself that it’s not just my, but I’m past that. It happened today. I’m like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all right, you’re over your limit for the year, which is like three or four. And so I want

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to redo some things in particular. I think I’m going to finally retire the Apple Airport Express

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that Marco gave me that I’ve been using for ages. And just start, basically what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m going to start doing is eliminating components to narrow it down. Because if it’s that Apple thing, which is the oldest component in my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing, and honestly the thing I have the least faith in, let me just remove that from the network. Because I don’t need it technically.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s redundant with the rest of my network. And then I’ll just start going component by component and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John taking things out of the loop. And now the problem is I have to take one of these variables

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and they have to wait a few months. And then, you know, if it happens again, they gotta take another one out and wait a few months.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like the iteration cycle is gonna be low. But anyway, all this to say is I’m taking that thing out and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when I take that out, it turns out that I will actually need a few more ethernet ports because the Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Airport Express doesn’t just have like a WAN port and a LAN port. It has like four ports on the back of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it. And I’m using every single one of them for a device that I care about. So I can’t just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John remove that from the network because

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} then I gotta budget. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey slow down, slow down. Before we get a bunch of email, Airport Extreme, not an Airport Express, right? Express, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yes, sorry, not an Airport Express. I forget the name. Airport Extreme, it’s the one that’s vertical that some of them have a hard drive

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in, but this one doesn’t. Yes, Airport Extreme, sorry. I forgot how extreme it was in the 90s.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, Airport Express was the thing that did like airplay

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} music

⏹️ ▶️ ^John transmission. All right, if I take that out of the network, I just have a bunch of loose ethernet

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cables that have no place to plug. So everyone knows what you need here. You just need

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an unmanaged, as in not exploitable through ubiquity hacks, an unmanaged

⏹️ ▶️ ^John switch. That’s the simplest device you could possibly imagine. There’s nothing to configure.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John There’s no software. It is an unmanaged switch, ethernet switch, a gigabit ethernet switch. It has a bunch of ports

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the back and a place where you give it power and you just plug in your ethernet cables. And it doesn’t matter where you plug them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in for the most part, because they’re all auto switching and auto magical. And it just, essentially it’s like a USB hub.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That used to be back in the day when we had those. where you have one ethernet port and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you need more than one ethernet port. And it is the simplest and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John most straightforward and least complicated way you can get more ethernet ports. And yes, there are caveats compared to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a managed port and you can get fancier and fancier, but I literally just need one or two or three extra new ports here, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So I simply needed to get an unmanaged gigabit ethernet switch. I’ve purchased

⏹️ ▶️ ^John many, many unmanaged gigabit ethernet switches in my life. many 10-100 unmanaged

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ethernet switches in my life, right? Hell, I’ve purchased ethernet hubs. I’ve done it all, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It seems like such an easy thing to buy, but kind of like toasters, not that I wanna go on that rant again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like toaster ovens, it’s becoming, and I guess USB hubs for that matter, it’s becoming

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really, really hard to find an unmanaged

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ethernet switch that doesn’t have thousands of angry people on the internet

⏹️ ▶️ ^John telling you how it’s a complete piece of garbage and doesn’t work.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m looking at one right now and it’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Every, I know, I have a bunch of my house. I have like, there’s like four in my house, right? They’re all different, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John What I wish is that I could take one of the four that I have in my house and buy another one just like it. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of course all the ones in my house were purchased years and years ago because Ethernet doesn’t change that much and they’re all totally discontinued, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And so name the brand, D-Link, Linksys, TP-Link, Netgear, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Cisco, like just whatever brand you think, go find a consumer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John priced unmanaged ethernet switch from them and then find

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how many hateful reviews of people saying, this doesn’t work, nothing worked on my network until I took it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John off. It worked for six months and then died. I hate company X, you should try company

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Y. And then you go to company Y and it’s just a giant circle and you would just go around and around and around in circles.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Because, and in the end, probably the actual contents of all of these devices are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John made by one or two companies and they’re all just packaging in a different plastic container. And then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you say, okay, well, why don’t you just go for the business ones? The problem with the business,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John unmanaged ethernet switches is they are made for a business context. And in one particular

⏹️ ▶️ ^John way, this is gonna sound stupid, but this is, I just want it the way I want it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as they say. The thing in a business context seemed to be to have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the power on the opposite side of all the ethernet cables. And the way I have everything arranged and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the way this thing is gonna be, that’s no good for me. I want all the ethernet ports

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the power all on the same side so that all those cables can run off the side or the back of my desk.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That used to be how almost every consumer ethernet switch was made. Somehow

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the past 10 years, someone decided, you know what, businesses, I understand the business one, The business ones, they’re in like a rack

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and you can see the ports and in the back is the power. Like I understand that for the business ones, but that’s not my context.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And honestly, business ones usually have more ports than eight or four or whatever I need for my thing. But then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for the consumer ones, someone decided that the power should come in the side for a lot of brands. The side?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The side. I don’t understand. I mean, they’re just cheap plastic consumery things, but someone decided,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and not only does it come in the side, but it doesn’t come in with like a right angle, you know, like a little DC right angle connector.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No, it comes straight out of the side. You got your ethernet cables coming out one side. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just surprised there aren’t brands that don’t have ethernet ports in like a circle around them,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} like a big

⏹️ ▶️ ^John spider. Because that’s about how much, how much. An ethernet squid. Exactly, that’s like how

⏹️ ▶️ ^John much. No, a squid would be better. How much acknowledgement these companies have of how people actually use it. Like you’re making

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a consumer thing, you’re making it pretty. Don’t you think people have desks? Don’t you think they want the cables running off

⏹️ ▶️ ^John their desk and not like one cable running towards them and the rest running away? So,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, of the ones that have all the ports and the power in the back, and there are a bunch of models you can find, every one of the reviews

⏹️ ▶️ ^John says they’re all pieces of garbage. Like every brand just, no, obviously, again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John reviews, like 99.9%, they’re great, right? But these things have like thousands of reviews on many

⏹️ ▶️ ^John different sites. And so there’s hundreds of people saying, you should never buy Netgear, you should only buy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Linksys. And then you go to Linksys, and you should never buy Linksys, you should always buy TP-Link. Oh, don’t buy TP-Link,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re the cheapest ones and they’re garbage, You should buy Netgear. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} oh my God,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it goes around and around. All I’m looking for is just a straightforward,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like I’m willing to pay more because these things cost like 20 bucks, right? I’ll pay 40 bucks. I’ll pay $50. Big

⏹️ ▶️ ^John spenders. Just find me the one that’s like, everyone agrees is 100%

⏹️ ▶️ ^John reliable and has ethernet ports and the power. And that just doesn’t exist. Even in the chat room, people are saying, everyone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John knows TP-Link is good. They’re well regarded by almost everyone. Almost, but not quite.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Not quite everybody, in fact, they have the exact same number of people telling you they’re pieces of garbage as every other brand.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So I made a random choice, I picked one, I ordered it, it’s on its way,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and then I went to Monoprice and bought some ethernet cables for two bucks and felt better about myself. Using my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John newfound knowledge of ethernet cables from our vast

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} research on this

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} topic

⏹️ ▶️ ^John across weeks and weeks of shows, learned more about, you know, I didn’t have to say like, what’s the difference

⏹️ ▶️ ^John between Cat6 and Cat6a again? I already knew that was nice and they were cheap.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So I’m going to excise the Airport Extreme from my network.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But the reason I put this in here, I’m thinking about Marco with his setup, was there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John never a good time, especially in these COVID times, for me to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John knock everyone in the house off the internet, which is what I would have to do to remove this essential component,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because the Apple Airport Extreme is in fact the thing that pulls an IP address from my Fios RNT,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? My Fios thing has an ethernet cable coming out of it. It goes into the Apple thing. The Apple thing gets my like public

⏹️ ▶️ ^John IP address that I get through Fios and distributes IP addresses to everything else. Then I have a eero for all my wifi, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that is the lynchpin. So when I unplug that, everything in this house goes offline. And I was thinking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about telling my family, hey, I need to do an upgrade, whatever, blah, blah, blah. But you know how these things go. Sometimes it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John doesn’t go as quick as you want. I can’t do that in the middle of the day. The kids have remote school and people are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John watching stream and video at night. So I feel like I’m back at work again. I have to wait till like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John off hours, like 2 a.m. when everyone’s asleep, I gotta sneak down and redo the network in the house so that when everyone wakes up,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John allowing for the hour and a half of when something’s gonna be screwed up or the files thing is gonna refuse to give a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John new IP to my router or whatever. I have to allow for that and have it built in. Plus the possibility

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that I’m gonna be up all night and by the time they wake up I need to go to school, I haven’t fixed the network and now it’s just permanently broken.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So there’s always that possibility. So it’s feeling more and more fraught of how to essentially

⏹️ ▶️ ^John change or update your home network in a way that doesn’t cause the disruptions. And I thought this would be a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John good opportunity to ask Marco how he has handled this in his household, which granted in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pre-COVID times when you did your various network redesigns, probably wasn’t as fraught, but what are your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John plans now? Like say, oh, I’m gonna get rid of my Ubiquiti and replace it with something else. How do you plan to do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that? Or is it just like you just wait for Adam to go to school and just tell Tiff tough luck and then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John take

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John offline?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I basically wait until no one’s using it. And I actually do have a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco few chances a week where that happens like in the middle of the day. And so I can do that. But getting back

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a minute to your switch issue. I found it amusing, I looked up

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the switch that runs most of my house here is, well was until very recently

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when I upgraded, quote, upgraded to Ubiquiti stuff. an HP 18

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or 24 port HP rack mount switch. And this is something I bought in 2012 for $274

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and has been bulletproof. Totally rock solid

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco until I took it offline and upgraded to the Ubiquiti stuff like last year sometime.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So it worked for like probably nine years or eight years at least and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was totally rock solid, never had a problem. And at some point I needed an eight port

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco switch in one of my TV stations. And I just got the HP

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ProCurve, it’s the HP ProCurve 1810G line. And I just got the eight port

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco version of that, which is smaller and got that. And that was also

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco totally reliable, bulletproof the entire time. So I can suggest if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco willing to go with things that are a little bit larger and might have the power port on the opposite side as the network ports.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And a fan potentially.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t think these have fans, I’ll double check.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, I can stop you, don’t suggest any rack mount stuff. Like obviously I know, if I wanted to just buy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like business equipment, yeah, it would be fine, right? But these are, for better or for worse, this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John networking stuff is happening like on a desk, up where people are. So rack mount

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stuff is-

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the A-port version, yeah, the A-port version is not a rack mount, or at least it’s one of those like half wide things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I mean, but that’s why I start to get into fashion. Like for example, the-

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The fashion of network switches?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, so the one I have on my Synology… John,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} you’re going

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to have like five network cables coming out of it. Where’s the fashion? There isn’t like… I don’t want an ugly box.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t want an ugly box sitting on my desk. That’s what it comes down to.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} It

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco shouldn’t be on your desk. It’s covered in wires. If you’re concerned about the appearance of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco something that’s inherently going to be covered in wires… Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can’t even see the wires. They all disappear behind the desk.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Oh my God. Yeah, so anyway, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one I have attached to my Synology is sort of the spiritual successor of the good

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one that I like. The good one that I like is the one that my Mac Pro is connected to. It’s an eight port switch.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} I think I bought it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in like 2002 or something. I don’t even know how old it is, right? But it looks nice. It looks

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like a rectangle. It’s black. It has lights on the front with colors that mean something,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? And it has power that comes out the back, right? You can’t buy that anymore, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The company that makes it makes a new model that’s ugly. I bought one of those ugly ones and that’s what my Synologies

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are on. but I don’t care, it’s in the basement, I don’t see it. But I need something up here that is tasteful

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and discreet and not ugly and, you know, reasonable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John quality and has the ports on the back and the plug in the back. If you think about the AirPort Extreme, that qualifies.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It is tasteful. Yes, it has cables all plugged into the back of it, but they’re all in the back, you can’t see them because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can’t walk around the back of this desk, it’s against the wall. It fulfills the goal. It is a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John reasonable looking, nice thing that has been reliable as far

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as we know, but that I’m deciding to take out of the networking equation just because it’s the oldest thing. You know, and again, I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John necessarily blaming this particular device, but it’s the first variable that I’m going to eliminate

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and I’m going to replace it with something else. So the one I got is a black rectangular box with all the ports in the back of it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s from a brand I have not tried before, so wish me luck, but you know, it’s a $20 purchase, so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if it’s garbage, I’ll just try another brand. It’s not the end of the world. And in fact, I think I have a spare one of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ugly ones up in the attic because I got a lot of, I always have, this is a good thing to go. When you’re buying something like this,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like networking switches or whatever, especially if your house is set up like mine where

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you essentially use all the ports. Like there’s no networking switch in my house that has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an abundance of free ports. I’m tempted to say that there are zero free ports, but I think I have one in this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John room as my sort of go-to spare port, right? But anyway, if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John something goes wrong and you’re wired networking and you’d like a box dies because you’ve been using

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it for 15 years and you don’t have a replacement, it can be frustrating when things go

⏹️ ▶️ ^John offline and kids can’t get wifi anymore because you had some, you know, the wire that goes to the satellite thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John doesn’t work and you’re like, well, sorry, I’m all out of ports, right? It’s a good idea to have spares. And so I do have a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John couple of spare switches, but they’re ugly. So I’m hoping the one I bought that is less

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ugly works well, but if it doesn’t and it’s an emergency, I can swap in one of the Ego boxes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Do you want to be really frustrated? I actually have this problem very well solved in my house

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because you know who makes a really nice little switch?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Ubiquity. Ubiquity.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco managed. Exactly and you need to be running their management software

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to activate the switch. But they make this one called the USW Flex Mini.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s a managed five port switch that’s very, very small. They sell it in like, I think I bought a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco four pack for a hundred bucks.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, they do sell them in multi packs. I noticed that too. I’m like, why is this so expensive? Oh, it comes with four of them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, and it can be powered either via USB-C, Oh

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my gosh. which is on the wrong side of it, or it can be powered by a power over

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ethernet feed in. That’s also the uplink. So, and one of the coolest things I ever did

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for my network was I upgraded my main switch to be a power over ethernet switch on all of its ports.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And that way I can plug any PoE thing into any ethernet port around my house, and it gets powered.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And what’s great about this is that, if I need a switch somewhere, I can plug this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in to the wall jack, it gets powered, and then I don’t have to separately

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco run a power cable to it, and I can plug whatever I want into its other ports. And so it is a very, very nice

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco system. Unfortunately, it requires you to have like a PoE infrastructure, or USB-C

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco power, but on the wrong side, or either way, it still requires you to have a Ubiquiti

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco management system setup. But it is a really nice looking, very small

⏹️ ▶️ ^John switch. No, it is. I looked at it, in my tour of every networking vendor on the planet, I looked

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at it. I was looking at vendors that sell, essentially, this product, an ethernet lowering switch,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for use in factories, like to build things. Oh my gosh. Right? Because there are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John vendors that specialize in like, so on the factory floor of your metal machining

⏹️ ▶️ ^John shop or whatever, you might need ethernet for your CNC machines or whatever. and the things they sell, they’re hilarious.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like they have their own fashion. They look like Milwaukee Power Tools or whatever. They have that kind of macho,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I belong in a factory vibe, which is not the look I’m looking for. And they’re also like seven times more expensive

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than even this Ubiquiti thing. So you want a four port factory router? That’s $300, please.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know what’s factory about them other than the fact that they seem to have metal cases and ridiculous flanges and stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But yeah, no, I did look at Ubiquiti. I looked at a lot of the other managed stuff I don’t want and can’t support

⏹️ ▶️ ^John any managed stuff. Some of the more expensive consumer ones are all about like, hey, this one has all power ethernet ports,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but that doesn’t help me because I’m pretty sure, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know if the Cat6 cable that’s going from my Fios thing supports power ethernet. Do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all cables support it? This is another thing in my research. Like I don’t have any power ethernet infrastructure, as you were

⏹️ ▶️ ^John saying. Like there’s zero power ethernet things in my house and applying it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John after the fact, and this is what people are gonna tell me and they’re probably kind of right. you should just get a server rack

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and put it in your base mix to all your Synology stuff. Yes. That probably will happen someday

⏹️ ▶️ ^John eventually. Unfortunately, the other part of my home networking, as we talked about before, like the part where

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you have to get wires to go from point A to point B in your house, that is the most

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sneaky, janky, ridiculous, so you didn’t really wanna do this the right way situation, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I ran all these wires myself. I am not an electrician, and I did it by essentially

⏹️ ▶️ ^John being sneaky. Like I didn’t do anything the right way. No, it’s all about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, where can I hide a wire where no one will notice it? And I go from the far corner of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my house to the other far corner. And it’s this ridiculous, if you saw the network topology, it’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John oh God, I wish I could find this. It’s probably in YouTube somewhere. You ever seen the thing explaining why a particular

⏹️ ▶️ ^John nerve in the human body, like it’s start, I figured where it starts. Like starts in one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John place, then goes down half your body. that makes a U-turn and comes back up half your body and connects to something that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like an inch from where it started. And it’s like, the most, it’s like, why would, if you need,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if this part of your, if this brain, you know, you go from brain to this nerve to the thing, it’s like two inches away.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Why are you going down to my stomach and back up again? And there’s a really good explanation of like, well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this is you with your stupid nerve, right? Rewind, evolutionarily speaking, and look, here

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is a fish, and here’s how the fish biology is set up. And here how the transitional,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, the various species that are between fish and us, and you watch as that nerve gets longer and longer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and slowly bends into a crazy U shape until we get to primates, and now you say, oh, I see,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it just kinda ended up that way. That’s my home network. My home network has cable runs that go

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from the source, they go all the other side of the house, then all the way back, then back again in this direction.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You would never make a network this way. But it’s entirely designed, or like where and how I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can hide the wires without actually running them through any of my walls, which are all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John made of like horsehair plaster and lath and everything. I don’t wanna touch it. Right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So I’m slightly constrained on the networking. In general though, I have everything that I need. It’s just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that, you know, if I want to replace a thing that has four ethernet ports on it, I need something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John else that has at least four ethernet ports on it. If I wanna replace everything, I have to rerun all new wires and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sort of home run them down to my big non-existent, you know, networking rack in the basement.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That maybe is a project for another decade, but for now, I just wanna find the culprit. Oh, and by the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John way, on the culprit of what the networking thing is, I really do think, anecdotally speaking, as far as

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my networking can tell, it mostly happens when I’m in meetings with the Teams app. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, how could that be? What is it about using Teams? It’s not particularly network constrained.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s not like we’re sharing video. Half the time, everyone has their video turned off and we’re all staring at one document,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and I do huge downloads and uploads all the time, putting gigs of photos

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and everything else on my backblaze stuff going up for multiple computers. Like what is it about and being

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in a team’s meeting that causes this problem to happen? I don’t have an answer. I don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John why I’m blaming the Apple thing just because it’s old, but it’s the first thing I’m trying. So we’ll check back in in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John three months or maybe I’ll check back in the next episode and I’ll tell you how nice my black box looks on the desk.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And then after that three months, I’ll tell you if I’ve actually solved my problem.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I just love that you’ve been stressing about how many nines you’ve implicitly provided

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey your family. I don’t think you knew it, but you’re apparently in four to five nine territory.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No, actually, the thing is, they’re not around, or at least they don’t, no one has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ever come to me and said, hey, is the network out? Because it goes down for a second, but if you’re in the middle of giving a presentation,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s a problem, right? So as far as they’re concerned, it’s 100% uptime, and I figure

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I want to maintain it, mostly because if I was to just right now kill the network connection, every person in my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John house would come be knocking at this door and saying what’s going on. Because there are, I guarantee you, they’re all on the internet right now

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in some form, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh John, I’m sorry.

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#askatp: Non-admin accounts

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco All

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey right, Michael writes, a long time ago I read that it was best to have an admin account in your user account and your user account shouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey be an admin for security purposes. Is that still best practice? Some commands slash installs require sudo,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which my user doesn’t have. This is a great question. I think I might have done this once in the Windows era

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like 49 years ago. I never have really done this regularly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So John, what’s the right practice here?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This is another question we get occasionally, and I think we’re up as like the two or three year rotation where we need

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to answer it again. The trade-off is exactly how people think. There

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is no secret thing you’re probably not thinking of, right? It is safer not to have an admin

⏹️ ▶️ ^John account because then you can actually do something to hold yourself, but it’s also annoying because sometimes you want to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do something as admin, and if your account doesn’t have it, then you have to have to switch one that does, which you can do, but it’s a hassle.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So it’s that old security versus convenience trade-off. What I would say is if you’re listening

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to this podcast and more or less trust yourself to not do something phenomenally stupid with your computer,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John having an admin account is so much more convenient that I think it is worth the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John slightly higher chance that you will hose yourself and or be exploited by some program that takes advantage of the fact that you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John elevate privileges. That said, if you want to make the opposite choice, that’s fine too. It’s not that fraught.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like just decide what your risk, you know, your risk tolerances. I personally make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my accounts admin accounts. I made all my children’s accounts non-admin accounts and I even went back on that because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it was too annoying when I was on their account trying to fix something that I couldn’t essentially do admin stuff, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Sometimes when you’re prompted for admin stuff you can enter an admin username and password. So if I was on their account

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and I needed to give some app access to the microphone or whatever, I could enter my username and password

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but then I couldn’t use Touch ID because their laptops had Touch ID with their finger in it. Anyway, I have now gone to,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the entire family has admin accounts just because I am annoyed by the hassle of not being able to elevate

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to admin privileges with the current user’s password in every situation. Your mileage may vary.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It is, in fact, safer not to do that, but not to a degree that I would have a problem with recommending

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that people just make admin accounts. Just be careful out there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I disagree a little bit. I err on the side of just make everybody admin, because,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco first of all, it depends on where the risk is coming from as to whether this makes any difference at all.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Sandboxed apps, for instance, on the Mac, you don’t need to separate these privileges out because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they are already restricted in what they can access and things like that. And so sandbox apps are already kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of implicitly locked down for the most part. Un-sandboxed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco apps, if you’re not an admin, still have access to all of your files.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And that’s pretty important. Like they have so much access to things that matter to you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that whether or not they can modify like system files or the files of other users on the system,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco might not matter if they still have access to all of your documents, all of your files. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from that point of view, I think you’re thinking there’s more security in making that a registered

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco account than what there actually might be.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, the context of my household is that every person has an account on every single computer. So even

⏹️ ▶️ ^John though it seems silly, like, well, it’s got all access to your stuff, well, it doesn’t have access, for example, to my wife’s stuff if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s not an admin account. So I can hose

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} mine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s more relevant for kids. If a kid didn’t have an admin account, they could erase all their crap, but they couldn’t erase

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my crap, or my wife’s crap, or whatever, right? But in the end, you know, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s, like, how much, how much are you trusting your kids to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John operate the computer in a safe way? Like, it’s a trade-off.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, but also, if you run non-admin accounts, lots of weird stuff breaks.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That being said, I mean, I’ve had many problems with multi-user support

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in Big Sur and recent releases. Every time we have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to log out of my user account and like Tiff logs in to record a podcast or something,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco after that, the computer is basically broken until I reboot it. Like mail search doesn’t work,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco touch ID doesn’t work, watch unlock doesn’t work, any kind of spotlight, anything based on the spotlight index

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco doesn’t work. It’s frankly baffling to me that Big Sur has gotten as far as it has in the release cycle

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and multi-user support is still completely broken in this way?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t think it’s broken for everyone though, because I’m running Big Sur on all our computers and we perpetually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have multiple people logged into them, switching accounts all day long and don’t experience any of this. Now, to be fair, we don’t use

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple Mail at all, period, across the entire family. There you go. But we do use things like Spotlight

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and like nothing else seems broken, because if it did, nothing in our house would function, that would have downgraded everybody, right? So Mail

⏹️ ▶️ ^John may absolutely be broken, but I mean, I’m not saying it’s not happening to you, but whatever it is causing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it must be something that we either we don’t have or that we aren’t doing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, mail search breaks, watch unlock breaks, and lots of things based on Spotlight break. It seems, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you are on Big Sur and you switch users, switch back, it will be broken

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco until you reboot. And that’s been persistent through

⏹️ ▶️ ^John every software update. But not Spotlight, because Spotlight still does work for us. We don’t use watch unlock and we don’t use

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple Mail. So I do wonder what

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} is the deal. Well, you can’t.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You couldn’t use them if you wanted to because they would break in your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John setup. Although actually, wait a second, I do use Apple Mail to download my Gmail, it’s just periodically,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but I never do searches for it. Right,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco anyway, so multi-user mode is buggy, and there’s lots of weird stuff that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco breaks. So anyway, going back to the question, like if you wanna have like separate accounts for admin versus non-admin,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you have to give up a lot of convenience and a lot of things working correctly all the time. And what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you get from that is this theoretical security benefit I think in practice,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you’re not really benefiting from most cases. If it’s a single user computer, you’re not really benefiting much at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all. And then secondly, you think about the practice of what happens when you have one of these,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, non admin accounts, you get asked a lot to authorize with admin privileges,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or you have to run a lot of things as sudo or enter the root password or whatever. If you’re doing this on a regular

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco basis, anyway, you are regularly poking holes in that shield out of necessity or convenience,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it kind of reduces the security that you’re actually getting in practice. Because if you’re constantly authorizing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things to run with root privileges here and there as needed, are you really being that secure

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco by having this account be in this mode in the first place? Like I feel like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the real world security benefit of that in most setups is not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco high, whereas the inconvenience and potential bug

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco exposure and annoyance is high. So I don’t think it’s worth it for most people to do that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, I tend to agree.

#askatp: 400 videos into one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Duncan Wilcock writes, I have about 400 video clips of my son and I want to join them

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey into one three hour movie. I want 4K and 60 frames per second, original Kodak. Recommend a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey good tool, please. Hi, have you never heard of FFmpeg? How long have you been listening

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to the show that you’ve never heard of FFmpeg? I mean, come on, man. That’s probably not the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey best solution to this problem, but it is a solution. Also it gets a little dodgy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if, I’m not entirely sure what Duncan is saying. I want 4K and 60 frames per second original

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey codec. I’m assuming that these are 400 video clips coming from various

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey different pieces of hardware across presumably years where not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey everything started in 4K. And this is all stuff that can be handled by FFmpeg, but it does get dodgy kind of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey quickly. Duncan writes that apparently a Photos app slideshow is 1080p max

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and iMovie doesn’t preserve date order if exported with edits. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this is not gonna be easy with anything I know how to do. You can do it with FFmpeg, but it would be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey semi-manual. Do one of you have a better answer or do we have to tell Duncan to, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey know, ask me to help them out?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This question was totally for you just so you can say FFmpeg again.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Okay. Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yeah, this is one of those situations where once you get into this type of question where you’re like, look, I’ve got

⏹️ ▶️ ^John video, I don’t wanna do a thing to it, but I wanna do exactly this thing in exactly this way, you’re basically singing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an FFMPEG song. And yeah, it’s a painful song.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there may be other better tools, I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} The

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lyrics make no sense. I’m just familiar with FFMPEG because it’s a very common tool

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and Casey talks about it all the time. But I’m sure professional video editors

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or people who are familiar with different kinds of tools have better ways to do this. But if you don’t wanna spend

⏹️ ▶️ ^John any money but just wanna get this job done and you’re willing to Google for a while, FFMPEG will probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^John eventually do what you want once you figure out how to make it work.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And by Google for a while, he means a while. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, you’ll try a bunch of things that don’t work first. Here’s what I would recommend. I mean, I don’t know if Casey does a similar thing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but every time I tried to mess with a Venn peg, I have like test files that are very small.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I do all my testing on them. They’re representative, they’re the same as the files that I wanna deal with, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maybe the file I wanna deal with is like some like eight gig movie or something. Don’t do all your testing on that, it’ll take a long

⏹️ ▶️ ^John time. Test with small files first. And then when you finally get a working file that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it has the characteristics that you want and have figured out the mile long command line incantation,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John then do it on your real files.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s smart.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, that’s true. Another thing I do is oftentimes I just wanna test something, I’ll trim it to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey be, it’s dash T, I believe, where you can say only output like 10 seconds or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey something like that. So you can still use your eight gigabyte input, but it’s only gonna output 10 seconds and it’s gonna quit.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But yeah, I mean, you can do this with FFmpeg for sure. It’s actually not that complicated an incantation.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey The complicated thing would be that the way I know how to do this is that you would need

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a plain text file that lists the names of all 400 videos

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that you’re looking to input. And if you can get that, even if you do it by hand, it’s actually a very straightforward incantation

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that I’ll put in the show notes. But that would require, again, a file that reads

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey its plain text and it reads file space and then a file name, new line, file space, next file

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey name, new line. And then you can have FFmpeg concatenate all of those

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey videos. You would probably need to specify by hand like output resolution and stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like that. So it’s not, I guess it’s not quite as easy as I thought, but the idea of mashing 400 video

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey clips together is actually very straightforward if you’re willing to generate a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey file that has four, a plain text file that has 400 lines in it That is the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey names of all the files you’re trying to input. So this is doable for sure. And FFmpeg

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey will do it. I don’t know if Handbrake will do this sort of thing. Of course, anytime I say FFmpeg, everyone else

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey starts saying Handbrake because Handbrake is in many respects just a user interface, a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey GUI front end to FFmpeg. Again, it’s been a long time since I’ve played with Handbrake

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and it might do this sort of thing. And there is a Handbrake CLI for doing it on the command line which maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey would do this sort of thing. But yeah, certainly FFmpeg will do it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And it’s not that inherently difficult. It is workable. And building

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on what John was saying about how do you get to be decent at FFmpeg? Yeah, I think I mentioned this before, but in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Apple Notes, which is now my repository of random information, just like Evernote once

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was. Have you heard about WorkChat? Well, in Apple Notes, I have a folder that is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey FFmpeg, and it’s just examples of different incantations that I’ve thought I, that well, that I have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey used and that I thought I would come back to at some point. And this one of them is concatenating files.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I can remember how to do it off the top of my head now, but for the first 10, 15 times I did it, I was like, wait,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what do I need to do? And what does that plain text thing look like? And how does that work? And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so having that sort of thing handy is very, very useful. And also, if you’re not really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey familiar with FFmpeg, I’ll put my primer that I wrote, I don’t know, what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey three, four years ago now it looks like. I’ll put that in the show notes for you to look at.

#askatp: Apple Podcasts API

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Moving right along, Brandon Weese writes, How does Overcast scrape iTunes? Does it use the iTunes Search

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey API or does it scrape it from webpages?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It uses the iTunes Search API. It’s a very simple answer. It’s not that interesting. But yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s it. I use the iTunes Search API. It’s been around forever. Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco seems to be okay with people using it in this way. And they have been for some time. It has

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco basically never changed. I would not want to build something

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco based around scraping web pages that I was actually making into a product for other people to use. Because scraping

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco web pages is both hard to maintain and unreliable and can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco possibly get you into legal issues with the people you are scraping them from. And it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco worth doing anything that requires that if you’re intending to make it a serious effort that you’re giving

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco people. So yeah, I use the API the way I’m allowed to and that’s it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The API is so old, is it like a soap API? Like when does it return?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It returns JSON, actually.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Wow, it’s pretty modern and fancy.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, it’s super easy to use. It’s one of those things like, it’s kind of like Usenet,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like just don’t talk about it because it seems too good to be true

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} and we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco don’t want somebody to realize this exists and shut it down. So like, we just, we don’t talk about it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Anyway, thank you to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, HelloFresh, and Linode, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thank you to our members who support us directly. You can join atp.fm slash join. You

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can use our new annual or monthly options in your currency of choice. If your choice

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco happens to be US dollars, Euro, or Great British pounds. Thank you, everybody, and we will talk to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you next week.

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, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco oh

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it was accidental And you can find the show

⏹️ ▶️ ^John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Twitter,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s accidental, they didn’t mean

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to Accidental, check podcast so long.

Follow-up: 🛎

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I have some bell follow-up.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Some bell follow-up? I did not see that coming. All

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} right, tell me more.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Did

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you break another bell?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, I fixed the original bell.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Whoa.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, excellent.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I pulled it out of the closet today because I had a theory. I had heard on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one of the recent Merlin podcasts, I forget which one, I’ll probably do it by Friday, he was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco playing with a magnet with his bell. Now, these are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco metal bells, and I thought, oh, wait a minute, maybe the reason mine was getting all rattly was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that the metal got magnetized in transit. Because if it gets magnetized, maybe like the little

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hammer thing in there that hits it doesn’t pull back correctly and like sticks to it a little too long and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or you know, makes it like rattle weirdly. So I thought I, from the world of watches, I have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a demagnetizer. So I thought maybe I can fix my original bell. Maybe it got magnetized

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco by you know, being transported next to an iPad smart cover or something. And great,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I can just run my demagnetizer around. I took it out and I waved it over my compass to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco test whether it was magnetized or not, and it wasn’t. And I thought, okay, well, there goes that theory.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But then I took out the working bell and I held them side by side and compared them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I realized that the old broken bell, the dome

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the main bell-shaped part of the bell, it was not resting level

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on the broken one. it was tilted and it was touching the bottom bass part.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Whereas the functioning bell had a perfectly even air gap between those two parts.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Your Berga one was muting itself, like you mute strings on a guitar.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco A little bit, yeah, except rattling itself instead. I thought, well, let me see if I can fix that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco This is just, you know, metal. Maybe I can bend it back into place. And sure enough,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a like $10 bell is not made of very high quality or thick metal.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I could just bend it back with my hands, and now I have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the original bell back to its former glory. It works fine. I could just, at some

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco point in its various trips to WBC or the beach or whatever, it probably just got compressed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in a bag and it bent down slightly and bent the metal. Now I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have repaired my bell. I believe in repairability. And reuse,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco before I recycle things, I have my original bell back in service.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Before you order 50 other bells in an attempt to get a new one of

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} the original bell. Which I’ll never

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be able to

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco again.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, it’s a good thing, like my broken cheese graters. I keep them around too for parts. It’s a good thing you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kept the original bell around.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yup, yup. So here we are, I’m back on the original bell.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I can tell it has a warmer sound. Beep, beep, beep.